OK, I'm not in America, I'm in Australia, but we have a lot of the same problems with our news coverage.
Give me some examples of good tv journalism, not websites that you have to wade through or the like, but national tv journalism that the majority of the US can sit down to catch up on some real news pertaining to your country... without huge wallops of bias or pandering.
Exactly... I walk to the train station every day, a good couple of kilometres (about a mile), and some days back too... so I get a nice 15 minute walk.
Then at lunch I quite often have a bit of a walk around the city (yeah, to go to stores to look at techy stuff... but the walk is another 1 or 2 miles).
I enjoy working in the garden, building things with my hands, and when time permits again (like, when the kids are older), riding bikes...
I don't down large quantities of soft drink (in fact, hardly ever have any) I don't have much fast food I eat my greens
A lot of other 'geeks' I know are the same, if not more healthy (a friend cycles about 30kms to work every day)
I have actually grown to like Dell over the years since they came to Australia. They provide great priced computers if you're after a completely built machine (it's still cheaper to build yourself...), and their build quality has been really nice. My company has bought a few and I have opened them up and been very happy with their internal layouts and airflow ports and the like... plus they are very quiet.
So much so, that when I had the opportunity to get a laptop with company money as part of my package, I chose a Dell... and it's a great machine.
And it has 3 years warranty including theft and accidental damage... none too shabby!
Won't this be used as a game compatibility score? Rather than the game specs having to say 'At least a xx core graphics card with xxxMb Ram, a YYMhz processor' etc. etc. The box will just be able to say "You're machine must have a Windows Super Dooper score of 5 or above to play".
That's what I thought it would be used for... and I think that's a great idea... as long as it's handled correctly, which would be very hard... like maybe you actually can play game Y perfectly well, but because the score unfairly rates some component of your machine against your score too much it might suggest you can't.
If it works, it'll be a big boon for simplicity for PC games.
What, like how heavy it is, how it bounces when you drop it? How does a physics demo show anything about the 'physics of the console'... it's just using processing power to drive its own physics system... it's not the physics of the system it's the physics of the coders...
Sure, the processing power of the system allows more physics to be used without a performance hit, but I'm sure the same could be shown on the XBOX 360... or maybe even the revolution.
You mean something crazy like... like... a shared network drive? Or a version control system?
Except neither of those work very well when your team is spread over a number of client sites with varying levels of access to the outside world. Really the only solution is a good, easy to use web based team access area... which is what those listed programs are good for.
Funnily, I just had a co-worker email about a solution to a problem he'd been having with some web programming stuff that took him a while to nut out. It's being implemented in a client's internal web-app, but the solution is something we will probably want to know about in the future... It's not an area I'm working on at present, so have no interest in looking at the solution now and diverting my attentions, but I just know it'll be something I will wish I had easy access to down the track.
So while what I said above holds for finding out the information in the first place, it would be great to have a company internal storage area for things that will be useful in more than one project. To that end we've actually been looking at various apps out there like NetOfficemore.groupware, Sugar CRM etc.
Now when we were looking at these products it was from a sales, support and development standpoint... so there are features geared to sales teams and the like... but they all have file management, meeting management etc.
We'll be implementing a system like one of those soon, and I think it's going to help enormously for our team communication as we are situated on a number of sites.
It's completely dependent on what language I'm coding in.
When I was coding in PHP... php.net was an absolute godsend of being both a reference to all the functions and objects and a repository of user's experiences and tips for the items... almost all of my php issues were solved via that site.
When I've been doing Javascript code (which isn't a huge amount I'll admit), then I've found W3School's reference pages to be invaluable.
Now that I'm doing my coding in the open source language Laszlo I've found their included documentation that comes with the developer install (web based and with live examples to tinker with), and the community coding forums to be an enormous help, and have made learning and getting a lot out of this language really not that hard.
I really think that trying to localise coding support isn't going to work... the coders should just make use of the best forums and resources for the language they're using. Each time I have to use a new language I have a new folder in my bookmarks for reference pages and forums for that language that I find on the web... you find almost everything you need that way really.
But virtualizing it has the hit that it's an emulation and has the overhead of the other system running behind it... hell, virtulising the SAME operating system within itself is slow as crap.
By dual booting you have ALL the resources available, which is definitely what you WANT for games
Hang on... but the current treatments and cures etc. have all been trialled on animals, so if you're happy to have them, then you're condoning the testing in the first place. And my suggestion of loved ones is more to children that are too young to make the decision themselves.
You never have the option of 'Hey, so your son has a terminal heart condition that we don't know how to cure, but if you allow us to we'll do some tests on mice that will lead us to an answer as to how to fix it'.
It's a kinda all or nothing thing, you can't really say 'ok in this instance it was ok that testing on pigs was done to develop this treatment for my son, but no, not happy about testing being done on animals for some other treatment'.
You're either against it, and thus must refuse all treatments that had animal testing as part of their development, or accept that it's how it gets done. Saying 'well it's already here, I'll ignore that that is how it was done'.
I hate the thought of animals being used for research like this, but I also know that I am very thankful for the advances in heart treatments and surgery techniques, so that my son has a pretty good long term prognosis for a good life now. (yes, I have a son with serious heart conditions)
All well and good to say that in a purely theoretical sense 'Let natural selection weed out the weak'... however if you or a loved one is dying from a treatable heart condition would you just let yourself/them die... you know... for population control?
Did the line "marketing in the traditional mp3 sort of sense." make anyone else feel old? That MP3s can be considered traditional makes me feel old... my first bought recording was a 12" LP for god's sake!
That is excellent to hear... myself being an enormous fan of all things Lucasarts and Sierra in the world of Adventure gaming... and to hear that they are ex Lucasarts and talented people doing a top job makes me very excited for future games they will release... I am currently downloading the Bone demo to see what it's all like!
Thanks for the feedback, and good luck with the future of your excellent looking studio.
As someone who is working with the team, are your impressions that they are a high quality outfit with a lot of creative potential who just maybe will be able to give us waiting fans the Sam & Max game we've always wanted... or do they seem perhaps a little over their heads?
One of the big things is also the NAMES of these apps... I'm sure the developers thought they were being very funny or smart when they came up with names like the GIMP, Xmms, Noatun, TiMidity++ etc. etc.
Aside from names like the Gimp being ones that most older people wouldn't WANT on their desktop, the rest are just confusing as hell as to what they really are.
At least with Windows and the Mac you know what applications are by what they're called in most cases:
Photoshop - Hmm, probably has something to do with photos I'm guessing Word - oooh, it's a toughy Excel - Ok, a bit odd actually Media Player - Wait... I can work this one out
etc. etc.
Names are important... just because they're in a user friendly folder called 'Audio' or 'Office' etc. doesn't mean you can get away with having app names that are incomprehensible or just plane offensive to most.
Now that was a cool game... burning around the desert in a 1970s hotted up car with guns... fun times... the car driving model was great too, you really felt like the thing was rocking and rolling on its springs... great stuff.
A new sequel to that would be great... actually, a prequel would be excellent, 1960s cars... nice... or actually 1940s would be pretty cool too... real gangster style car chases with tommy guns.
Agreed... actually, I don't think they have a single artist amongst them. I have the E398 and while by and large I'm happy with it, especially after downloading tools to allow me to unload and upload anything I want onto it (including removing the ridiculously crap games that came with it and put on some proper ones)... its interface is indeed horrible.
I don't think artists had anything to do with it... Sony Ericson, now they have interfaces that are attractive, obvious and easy to use... this thing has one of the most ugly, slow and counter productive interfaces I've come across in a phone.
Yes it has a lot of features, and at a price that was supurb when I got it, but man... next time I think I'm heading over to the SE side!
I didn't say I didn't have a problem with that... I do... but hey, I DO need windows to run one of the bigs things I have that machine for.... Games. There's no getting away from that, I like playing games, and so Windows it is. Simple.
I'm sorry... but I will laugh if one day your pc is taken down by a virus... Why not run a free one like AVG? It'll make you feel all warm and cosy inside... if just for the fact that it comes up clean in its checks.
Ok... I don't really get spyware on my pcs... neither my wife or I go to porn sites (ok... in my youth I did...:/ ), I've made firefox the default browser on all my pcs, we have AVG free virus protection, Sygate Personal firewall... although, bugger... I just noticed they've discontinued that... will have to switch to ZoneAlarm now I suppose... humph. And we run Ad-Aware
and SpyBot Search and Destroy every now and again...
But just recently I've had to clean my father-in-law's pc, and a friends one too.
Now the father-in-law's one was pretty bad, popups would launch with IE, and there was a lot of CPU activity etc. that was not accounted for... nasty stuff... but a clean with Adaware, Spybot, using Add/Remove to kill anything that looked suspect, putting firefox on etc. and we have a clean computer.
The other computer though... my GOD! On startup it would immediately go to 100% CPU usage... and once you could finally get Task Manager up it was iexplore.exe that was doing the damage... a few minutes later when it'd actually respond to a kill process and the work of cleaning it could finally take place... well... hours later and using all tools I think it's clean now... but it required all of them to get it all... with HiJack This being the final saviour to remove the last of the damage...
And what were the biggest damage makers? The damn programs that these people downloaded that claimed they were 'Spyware cleaners'... but really were spyware themselves.
EVIL
FUCKERS
they prey on people who already have pcs loaded up with spyware... and put more on.
Of course the second of the two pcs was infected so damn badly (Spybot found over 3 thousand items) due to porn surfing... almost always the cause of these things.
I don't know how the makers of these programs live with themselves... there's nothing redeeming about what they do... AT ALL.
I completely agree... it's because myself and my wife use the other networks as well, and I like to keep things simple for my wife (and me)... there's no need to switch from one to the other, you can be getting torrents and other files from the other networks at the same time without trying to juggle bandwidth between two apps... it really is quite handy.
And our torrents seem to come down in perfectly reasonable times for us... so... all is good.
It doesn't stop me from having Azureus on there for when I absolutely, positively need a torrent overnight!:P
Slashdot Mirror
you want hard journalism, go find it
OK, I'm not in America, I'm in Australia, but we have a lot of the same problems with our news coverage.
Give me some examples of good tv journalism, not websites that you have to wade through or the like, but national tv journalism that the majority of the US can sit down to catch up on some real news pertaining to your country... without huge wallops of bias or pandering.
Exactly... I walk to the train station every day, a good couple of kilometres (about a mile), and some days back too... so I get a nice 15 minute walk.
Then at lunch I quite often have a bit of a walk around the city (yeah, to go to stores to look at techy stuff... but the walk is another 1 or 2 miles).
I enjoy working in the garden, building things with my hands, and when time permits again (like, when the kids are older), riding bikes...
I don't down large quantities of soft drink (in fact, hardly ever have any)
I don't have much fast food
I eat my greens
A lot of other 'geeks' I know are the same, if not more healthy (a friend cycles about 30kms to work every day)
We're not all fat slobs!
I have actually grown to like Dell over the years since they came to Australia. They provide great priced computers if you're after a completely built machine (it's still cheaper to build yourself...), and their build quality has been really nice. My company has bought a few and I have opened them up and been very happy with their internal layouts and airflow ports and the like... plus they are very quiet.
So much so, that when I had the opportunity to get a laptop with company money as part of my package, I chose a Dell... and it's a great machine.
And it has 3 years warranty including theft and accidental damage... none too shabby!
Won't this be used as a game compatibility score? Rather than the game specs having to say 'At least a xx core graphics card with xxxMb Ram, a YYMhz processor' etc. etc. The box will just be able to say "You're machine must have a Windows Super Dooper score of 5 or above to play".
That's what I thought it would be used for... and I think that's a great idea... as long as it's handled correctly, which would be very hard... like maybe you actually can play game Y perfectly well, but because the score unfairly rates some component of your machine against your score too much it might suggest you can't.
If it works, it'll be a big boon for simplicity for PC games.
but speaks well to the physics of the console
What, like how heavy it is, how it bounces when you drop it? How does a physics demo show anything about the 'physics of the console'... it's just using processing power to drive its own physics system... it's not the physics of the system it's the physics of the coders...
Sure, the processing power of the system allows more physics to be used without a performance hit, but I'm sure the same could be shown on the XBOX 360... or maybe even the revolution.
You mean something crazy like... like ... a shared network drive? Or a version control system?
Except neither of those work very well when your team is spread over a number of client sites with varying levels of access to the outside world. Really the only solution is a good, easy to use web based team access area... which is what those listed programs are good for.
Funnily, I just had a co-worker email about a solution to a problem he'd been having with some web programming stuff that took him a while to nut out. It's being implemented in a client's internal web-app, but the solution is something we will probably want to know about in the future... It's not an area I'm working on at present, so have no interest in looking at the solution now and diverting my attentions, but I just know it'll be something I will wish I had easy access to down the track.
So while what I said above holds for finding out the information in the first place, it would be great to have a company internal storage area for things that will be useful in more than one project. To that end we've actually been looking at various apps out there like NetOffice more.groupware, Sugar CRM etc.
Now when we were looking at these products it was from a sales, support and development standpoint... so there are features geared to sales teams and the like... but they all have file management, meeting management etc.
We'll be implementing a system like one of those soon, and I think it's going to help enormously for our team communication as we are situated on a number of sites.
It's completely dependent on what language I'm coding in.
When I was coding in PHP... php.net was an absolute godsend of being both a reference to all the functions and objects and a repository of user's experiences and tips for the items... almost all of my php issues were solved via that site.
When I've been doing Javascript code (which isn't a huge amount I'll admit), then I've found W3School's reference pages to be invaluable.
Now that I'm doing my coding in the open source language Laszlo I've found their included documentation that comes with the developer install (web based and with live examples to tinker with), and the community coding forums to be an enormous help, and have made learning and getting a lot out of this language really not that hard.
I really think that trying to localise coding support isn't going to work... the coders should just make use of the best forums and resources for the language they're using. Each time I have to use a new language I have a new folder in my bookmarks for reference pages and forums for that language that I find on the web... you find almost everything you need that way really.
And know how to use Google damn well!
But virtualizing it has the hit that it's an emulation and has the overhead of the other system running behind it... hell, virtulising the SAME operating system within itself is slow as crap.
By dual booting you have ALL the resources available, which is definitely what you WANT for games
Hang on... but the current treatments and cures etc. have all been trialled on animals, so if you're happy to have them, then you're condoning the testing in the first place. And my suggestion of loved ones is more to children that are too young to make the decision themselves.
You never have the option of 'Hey, so your son has a terminal heart condition that we don't know how to cure, but if you allow us to we'll do some tests on mice that will lead us to an answer as to how to fix it'.
It's a kinda all or nothing thing, you can't really say 'ok in this instance it was ok that testing on pigs was done to develop this treatment for my son, but no, not happy about testing being done on animals for some other treatment'.
You're either against it, and thus must refuse all treatments that had animal testing as part of their development, or accept that it's how it gets done. Saying 'well it's already here, I'll ignore that that is how it was done'.
I hate the thought of animals being used for research like this, but I also know that I am very thankful for the advances in heart treatments and surgery techniques, so that my son has a pretty good long term prognosis for a good life now. (yes, I have a son with serious heart conditions)
All well and good to say that in a purely theoretical sense 'Let natural selection weed out the weak'... however if you or a loved one is dying from a treatable heart condition would you just let yourself/them die... you know... for population control?
Did the line "marketing in the traditional mp3 sort of sense." make anyone else feel old? That MP3s can be considered traditional makes me feel old... my first bought recording was a 12" LP for god's sake!
"Everyone knows the alternating vs. direct current wars ended with Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla."
Yeah, hell everyone knows that...
Erm, I didn't... and I studied Electrical Engineering in University...
People who use the term 'Everyone knows...' really annoy me no end, as there are very, very few cases where it can be true... if any.
That is excellent to hear... myself being an enormous fan of all things Lucasarts and Sierra in the world of Adventure gaming... and to hear that they are ex Lucasarts and talented people doing a top job makes me very excited for future games they will release... I am currently downloading the Bone demo to see what it's all like!
Thanks for the feedback, and good luck with the future of your excellent looking studio.
As someone who is working with the team, are your impressions that they are a high quality outfit with a lot of creative potential who just maybe will be able to give us waiting fans the Sam & Max game we've always wanted... or do they seem perhaps a little over their heads?
One of the big things is also the NAMES of these apps... I'm sure the developers thought they were being very funny or smart when they came up with names like the GIMP, Xmms, Noatun, TiMidity++ etc. etc.
Aside from names like the Gimp being ones that most older people wouldn't WANT on their desktop, the rest are just confusing as hell as to what they really are.
At least with Windows and the Mac you know what applications are by what they're called in most cases:
Photoshop - Hmm, probably has something to do with photos I'm guessing
Word - oooh, it's a toughy
Excel - Ok, a bit odd actually
Media Player - Wait... I can work this one out
etc. etc.
Names are important... just because they're in a user friendly folder called 'Audio' or 'Office' etc. doesn't mean you can get away with having app names that are incomprehensible or just plane offensive to most.
Now that was a cool game... burning around the desert in a 1970s hotted up car with guns... fun times... the car driving model was great too, you really felt like the thing was rocking and rolling on its springs... great stuff.
A new sequel to that would be great... actually, a prequel would be excellent, 1960s cars... nice... or actually 1940s would be pretty cool too... real gangster style car chases with tommy guns.
Agreed... actually, I don't think they have a single artist amongst them. I have the E398 and while by and large I'm happy with it, especially after downloading tools to allow me to unload and upload anything I want onto it (including removing the ridiculously crap games that came with it and put on some proper ones)... its interface is indeed horrible.
I don't think artists had anything to do with it... Sony Ericson, now they have interfaces that are attractive, obvious and easy to use... this thing has one of the most ugly, slow and counter productive interfaces I've come across in a phone.
Yes it has a lot of features, and at a price that was supurb when I got it, but man... next time I think I'm heading over to the SE side!
Indeed you are correct sir... "with IE".
I didn't say I didn't have a problem with that... I do... but hey, I DO need windows to run one of the bigs things I have that machine for.... Games. There's no getting away from that, I like playing games, and so Windows it is. Simple.
But yes, it sucks a lot.
Gee, that was productive... thanks.
I just write that way, and I've never had any issues with it in the past, so perhaps a polite 'fuck off' would be in order.
Looks good, shall have to try that one! :)
I don't run a virus scanner
I'm sorry... but I will laugh if one day your pc is taken down by a virus... Why not run a free one like AVG? It'll make you feel all warm and cosy inside... if just for the fact that it comes up clean in its checks.
Ok... I don't really get spyware on my pcs... neither my wife or I go to porn sites (ok... in my youth I did... :/ ), I've made firefox the default browser on all my pcs, we have AVG free virus protection, Sygate Personal firewall... although, bugger... I just noticed they've discontinued that... will have to switch to ZoneAlarm now I suppose... humph. And we run Ad-Aware
and SpyBot Search and Destroy every now and again...
But just recently I've had to clean my father-in-law's pc, and a friends one too.
Now the father-in-law's one was pretty bad, popups would launch with IE, and there was a lot of CPU activity etc. that was not accounted for... nasty stuff... but a clean with Adaware, Spybot, using Add/Remove to kill anything that looked suspect, putting firefox on etc. and we have a clean computer.
The other computer though... my GOD! On startup it would immediately go to 100% CPU usage... and once you could finally get Task Manager up it was iexplore.exe that was doing the damage... a few minutes later when it'd actually respond to a kill process and the work of cleaning it could finally take place... well... hours later and using all tools I think it's clean now... but it required all of them to get it all... with HiJack This being the final saviour to remove the last of the damage...
And what were the biggest damage makers? The damn programs that these people downloaded that claimed they were 'Spyware cleaners'... but really were spyware themselves.
EVIL
FUCKERS
they prey on people who already have pcs loaded up with spyware... and put more on.
Of course the second of the two pcs was infected so damn badly (Spybot found over 3 thousand items) due to porn surfing... almost always the cause of these things.
I don't know how the makers of these programs live with themselves... there's nothing redeeming about what they do... AT ALL.
I completely agree... it's because myself and my wife use the other networks as well, and I like to keep things simple for my wife (and me)... there's no need to switch from one to the other, you can be getting torrents and other files from the other networks at the same time without trying to juggle bandwidth between two apps... it really is quite handy.
:P
And our torrents seem to come down in perfectly reasonable times for us... so... all is good.
It doesn't stop me from having Azureus on there for when I absolutely, positively need a torrent overnight!