I think the GBA is a far better console than many people give it credit for. It's small, durable, powerful enough for most mobile games, has near zero loading times and an absolutely enormous catalogue of great games. I've certainly spent more hours playing on my GBA SP than on either my Gamecube or my PS2. It's not just Pokemon, either. There's Omega boy, the Sonic games, the Mario games, Puyo Pop, Advance Wars, Warioware, the Final Fantasy games - the list of excellent, big-selling games is vast.
Just how small does the screen appear? I think the SP's screen is pretty good, although I have to sit with it quite close to my face. Does the brightness of the Micro's screen make up for the size a little?
Because it's much slower, uglier and lacks polish in many areas. It is also, in my experience, buggier than recent versions of Office.
Don't get me wrong - I use OO.org on my Linux systems: it's amazing given the price and has some many good features. I've lost my fair share of work to MS Word pre-2000 as well. But I certainly would not recommend 1.1.x to any Windows/Mac user as an alternative to Office yet.
Precisely. I operate about 18 months or more behind on games, so I pick them up second hand or on sale for about 30-50% of the new price. It's not like I lose anything by not buying a game on its release date - I still have loads of games to play.
The main improvement I can see in the next gen consoles is the increased RAM available, which should give developers scope for more open-ended, persistent game worlds.
The aim these days seems to be to sell what would once have been considered an expansion or map-pack as a new game, so I don't know why everyone is quite so excited. Bah humbug.
I would think (hope?) that won't happen. I think the ability to format-shift recordings is assumed as a right by consumers, from the days of copying records to tape for playing on a Walkman through to ripping CDs to MP3.
Admittedly, this DRM is so easily circumvented I wonder why Sony bothers with it. But if a CD has more effective protection (I believe there are many with added errors that won't play on a computer) then I effectively can't listen to it anyway. I don't have a CD player near me most of the time and I don't want to have to lug a discman around. If I want to listen to music on my stereo, I plug my iPod into the inputs where the tape player used to go.
Why would anyone buy music that they can't listen to? Walking around town these days, I hardly see any portable CD players - everyone has some kind of mp3 player. Copy protection effectively eliminates these people from the record company's market
I have seen at least one copy-protected 'CD' recently that didn't have the CD audio logo on the casing. Not that anyone notices apart from geeks like me.
Something like 90% of my music listening is on my iPod: if I can't rip your music to my iPod in one easy step, I'm not going to buy your album. It's as simple as that.
I'm sure that is true for a large number of people these days, most of whom are 18-35 with a reasonable disposable income: ie. exactly the kind of people that buy large numbers of CDs. It's amazing how companies can be so incredibly short sighted.
I think the point is that the motion sensor can replace several functions. For example, holding a trigger on the analog stick could bring up an semi-transparent inventory screen, allowing you to select items by pointing with the main controller.
This looks to be a seriously good controller, assuming the motion sensors are as accurate as the article claims. Current game controllers really are not much good, but we put up with them because they are the best we have. What is needed is a complete change, an acceptance that just adding more buttons is not the best way to control more complex games. Why have a seperate button for picking up an item when you can just point at it and pull up?
I bet there will be a lot of resistance to the Revolution controller from hardcore gamers who have melded with their Dual Shocks, but I think it will be a really positive thing for the industry.
If so why does it not seem to have the mind share that Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva and [K]ubuntu appear to enjoy?
If my experiment with Slackware 10.0 a while back was representative, it's because of : lack of good automatic package management, lack of newbie-friendly administration tools, lack of all the advanced stuff like Project Utopia etc. and the relatively small selection of official packages
Of course, Slackers would probably say that all those things are the reasons they use Slack, which I don't understand.
Just how stupid are the CNet guys? So if we ignore the major costs associated with chip manufacture, and then compare the average manufacturing cost of a chip with the maximum sale price of a high end chip, Intel has a high profit margin.
How many of the chips sold are $637? A 2.13Ghz celeron-D is $59 on newegg, and I bet Intel sells far more low end chips like that than the $600 chips.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital determined that listening to a portable music player with headphones at 60 percent of its potential volume for one hour a day is relatively safe.
60%! I would have thought it was bloody obvious that going over 60% of an iPod's volume was a danger area. I just tried mine at around that volume with the normal headphones and found it uncomfortably loud. Apart from anything else, I could tell which song was playing from the other side of the room, so anyone listening that loud on public transport deserves to go deaf.
I had always assumed that the only reason it went so loud was for powering external speakers etc.
Is there any information on reliability, though? Saving a few seconds copying files is great, but if I end up losing data after a power failure it's not much use. Personally, I've found ext3 to survive crashes the best: xfs, jfs and reiser have all lost me data.
Something a little smaller than my P910i would be great by me. The 910 is a nice enough phone, but it could be much beter. I also have a Nokia 9500, which is roughly early-1990s phone sized, but the processor isn't powerful enough for anything serious, given how big it is.
I never found GTA3 that much fun. Once the novelty of being a criminal wears off, it's just a bad driving simulator with some repetitive missions thrown in. I had high hopes for it (I only just bought a PS2+GTA3:vice city) but it's now sitting unplayed on my shelf after maybe five hours total gaming.
Please, please, please, stop mucking about with castrated hybrid iPod phones and just move into the smartphone market proper. Partner with Motorola or whoever, but please make me a smartphone with an interface that doesn't suck, a decent processor and that doesn't look like an industrial designer threw up on it.
Nobody is proposing not arresting terrorists. They are proposing that sacrificing the hard-won human rights that are the foundation of Western society in order to fight a fairly small threat is not a good idea. Terrorists are not going to destroy our free society - hysteria might.
Say, to carry on your example, somebody proposed that in order to protect children from cannibals, the police should be allowed to arrest and detain indefinitely anyone they think might be a cannibal.
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I think the GBA is a far better console than many people give it credit for. It's small, durable, powerful enough for most mobile games, has near zero loading times and an absolutely enormous catalogue of great games. I've certainly spent more hours playing on my GBA SP than on either my Gamecube or my PS2.
It's not just Pokemon, either. There's Omega boy, the Sonic games, the Mario games, Puyo Pop, Advance Wars, Warioware, the Final Fantasy games - the list of excellent, big-selling games is vast.
Just how small does the screen appear? I think the SP's screen is pretty good, although I have to sit with it quite close to my face. Does the brightness of the Micro's screen make up for the size a little?
Obligatory Penny Arcade comic.
Because it's much slower, uglier and lacks polish in many areas. It is also, in my experience, buggier than recent versions of Office.
Don't get me wrong - I use OO.org on my Linux systems: it's amazing given the price and has some many good features. I've lost my fair share of work to MS Word pre-2000 as well. But I certainly would not recommend 1.1.x to any Windows/Mac user as an alternative to Office yet.
The latest milestone from openoffice.org is 130 , the version in Ubuntu is 129 at the moment
Precisely. I operate about 18 months or more behind on games, so I pick them up second hand or on sale for about 30-50% of the new price. It's not like I lose anything by not buying a game on its release date - I still have loads of games to play.
The main improvement I can see in the next gen consoles is the increased RAM available, which should give developers scope for more open-ended, persistent game worlds.
The aim these days seems to be to sell what would once have been considered an expansion or map-pack as a new game, so I don't know why everyone is quite so excited. Bah humbug.
And GTA. Am I the only one who's sick of this game?
No, you're not the only one. I lasted about 3 hours total before realising "this game is crap and it's not getting any better".
I would think (hope?) that won't happen. I think the ability to format-shift recordings is assumed as a right by consumers, from the days of copying records to tape for playing on a Walkman through to ripping CDs to MP3.
No, it comes in black too now.
Admittedly, this DRM is so easily circumvented I wonder why Sony bothers with it. But if a CD has more effective protection (I believe there are many with added errors that won't play on a computer) then I effectively can't listen to it anyway. I don't have a CD player near me most of the time and I don't want to have to lug a discman around. If I want to listen to music on my stereo, I plug my iPod into the inputs where the tape player used to go.
Why would anyone buy music that they can't listen to? Walking around town these days, I hardly see any portable CD players - everyone has some kind of mp3 player. Copy protection effectively eliminates these people from the record company's market
I have seen at least one copy-protected 'CD' recently that didn't have the CD audio logo on the casing. Not that anyone notices apart from geeks like me.
Something like 90% of my music listening is on my iPod: if I can't rip your music to my iPod in one easy step, I'm not going to buy your album. It's as simple as that.
I'm sure that is true for a large number of people these days, most of whom are 18-35 with a reasonable disposable income: ie. exactly the kind of people that buy large numbers of CDs. It's amazing how companies can be so incredibly short sighted.
I think the point is that the motion sensor can replace several functions. For example, holding a trigger on the analog stick could bring up an semi-transparent inventory screen, allowing you to select items by pointing with the main controller.
What does the display technology have to do with the accelerometer-based and postion-sensor based controller?
This looks to be a seriously good controller, assuming the motion sensors are as accurate as the article claims. Current game controllers really are not much good, but we put up with them because they are the best we have. What is needed is a complete change, an acceptance that just adding more buttons is not the best way to control more complex games. Why have a seperate button for picking up an item when you can just point at it and pull up?
I bet there will be a lot of resistance to the Revolution controller from hardcore gamers who have melded with their Dual Shocks, but I think it will be a really positive thing for the industry.
If so why does it not seem to have the mind share that Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva and [K]ubuntu appear to enjoy?
If my experiment with Slackware 10.0 a while back was representative, it's because of : lack of good automatic package management, lack of newbie-friendly administration tools, lack of all the advanced stuff like Project Utopia etc. and the relatively small selection of official packages
Of course, Slackers would probably say that all those things are the reasons they use Slack, which I don't understand.
Just how stupid are the CNet guys? So if we ignore the major costs associated with chip manufacture, and then compare the average manufacturing cost of a chip with the maximum sale price of a high end chip, Intel has a high profit margin.
How many of the chips sold are $637? A 2.13Ghz celeron-D is $59 on newegg, and I bet Intel sells far more low end chips like that than the $600 chips.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital determined that listening to a portable music player with headphones at 60 percent of its potential volume for one hour a day is relatively safe.
60%! I would have thought it was bloody obvious that going over 60% of an iPod's volume was a danger area. I just tried mine at around that volume with the normal headphones and found it uncomfortably loud. Apart from anything else, I could tell which song was playing from the other side of the room, so anyone listening that loud on public transport deserves to go deaf.
I had always assumed that the only reason it went so loud was for powering external speakers etc.
Is there any information on reliability, though? Saving a few seconds copying files is great, but if I end up losing data after a power failure it's not much use.
Personally, I've found ext3 to survive crashes the best: xfs, jfs and reiser have all lost me data.
Something a little smaller than my P910i would be great by me. The 910 is a nice enough phone, but it could be much beter. I also have a Nokia 9500, which is roughly early-1990s phone sized, but the processor isn't powerful enough for anything serious, given how big it is.
I think many phones with significant non-phone functionality have a "Flight Mode" which turns the radio part off but leaves the phone on.
I never found GTA3 that much fun. Once the novelty of being a criminal wears off, it's just a bad driving simulator with some repetitive missions thrown in. I had high hopes for it (I only just bought a PS2+GTA3:vice city) but it's now sitting unplayed on my shelf after maybe five hours total gaming.
Please, please, please, stop mucking about with castrated hybrid iPod phones and just move into the smartphone market proper. Partner with Motorola or whoever, but please make me a smartphone with an interface that doesn't suck, a decent processor and that doesn't look like an industrial designer threw up on it.
Nice straw man.
Nobody is proposing not arresting terrorists. They are proposing that sacrificing the hard-won human rights that are the foundation of Western society in order to fight a fairly small threat is not a good idea. Terrorists are not going to destroy our free society - hysteria might.
Say, to carry on your example, somebody proposed that in order to protect children from cannibals, the police should be allowed to arrest and detain indefinitely anyone they think might be a cannibal.