At some point your existing architecture gets so crufty that you need to throw it out in order to continue. The method of throwing it out in the past has been to release sequals, which the designers hoped would replace the original. As you point out, AC1 still has more players than AC2 by a pretty healthy margin, and in fact is getting another expansion pack.
Nobody designs content with an upwards migration path in mind... How would a designer 7 years ago know that they needed to include a blank normal map in all models? Besides, a lot of what goes into a sequal is removing the content and design ideas that didn't work. These make more direct transitions difficult... It's tought to make old content work with a brand spanking new engine, especially when the old programmers have already left.
I agree with the sentiment, though, and I'd agree with the rule. Don't release a sequal to a popular MMPORPG. Update it. Expand it. Hell, massively rework it, and jimmy your existing subscribers to your revamped universe. But don't release a sequal.
At least in America there is/CHOICE/ in the affordable broadband market sector.
Generally, this isn't true. Your choice is DSL or cable. We have a government mandated one cable carrier per area, so you have no choice in cable. DSL regions are generally serviced by one company, so IF you're close enough to a station (and only one person I've ever known is) you can get broadband from one company. Sure, many companies sell DSL, but it's all remarketed from the same provider.
Additionally, nobody LIKES this one carrier, who up until just recently were actually charging their wholesale customers (ISPs who lease DSLAM ports via PPPoA/L2TP) more per connection than their retail customers.
They do that here too. While the bells are required by law to open up their last mile lines to resellers, they're not required to charge their resellers less for that mile than they charge the customers for the entire distance, and in fact do charge more.
Underpricing is more important for commodities and less so for something like an MMORPG. I don't think that (say) a game with a monthly fee of $5 less than WoW's would entice anyone to switch to them. There's also the matter of perception-of-quality -- I would guess that most people, upon seeing a $4.95/mo MMORPG would turn their noses up at it.
There is also the existence of the monthly cost at all which is a cost. It's a difficult choice for someone to whip out their wallet and put in their credit card. If you were going to charge 4.95 with an expectation of 10 months of usage, why not just charge 50 bucks for the game and be done with it?
I'll try and post news here from time to time if it seems like it might interest people - for instance, it looks as if the HHGG movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years.
I have to ask, but if the data is valuable to real estate agents, home developers, etc, why would you keep it away from people? Why not put it squarely in the public domain so that everyone can have a level playing field? Maybe there are underdeveloped regions which could provide additional housing in a crowded city. Maybe he just wants to put up a McDonalds where it will be most used, instead of peppering three or four around an area.
It's not like this data will let the person steal money from homeowners, just let him run his business more efficiently. What's wrong with that? While it is possible that he would be looking for dishevled houses to offer predatory loans to, we have laws against that kind of behavior anyway.
If I'd shelled out 10,000,000.00 for something, I'd want it to be used as much as possible.
Not to trot out a dead pony, but BSD was publically developed and is free to everyone, which means that many people and business are free to exploit the stability and power of that OS without paying. What is the difference between a software application and publically collected information? If Microsoft wants to run their e-mail service from BSD, they are free to do so with everyone's blessings. If Starbucks wants those maps to decide where to offer drive-through Lattes, they should be free to do so. If I want to use those maps to find a house in a low-crime neighborhood, I should be free to do so. In all cases, everyone benefits to some degree.
While one may find the optimal pathfinding route algorithim, most game software is a balancing act between competing resources and is therefore an art. If you look at the Quake 3 engine code, there are a lot of tradeoffs between accuracy (surprisingly innacurate, actually), speed, and memory. And then there are questions like how one will spend their processor cycles... in a complicated rendering engine or raw polys? Character focused or world focused? Do you spend more Ram on Precaching or go for dynamic texture loading?
That having been said, the reason why you can't put game artists, texturers, and musicians in the same class as game programmers is because they generally refuse to work for free. While a programmer may find personal expression through a game, rare is the artist or musician who feels the same way. You can get ones who will work to make a name for themselves, or work because they like the game, but generally you don't find musicians who work on games like they compose their own songs. While working on games is personal for a programmer, it isn't so much for artists / musicians. Why do it then?
And there is no such thing as an optimal software algorithm. There are ones well suited for a task and ones that are not, but there are no software algorithims that are best in all ways.
I don't mind a ratings system either, although it informs more design decisions and headaches than you may know. (Games are frequently altered to fit into a lighter ratings bracket) However, I also don't mind the idea that if a 10 year old wants to buy Manhunt, or the Playboy Mansion game, they will need their parent with them. It's not parenting for them unless the state refuses to sell the games to parents for their children's use. 16 is probably old enough to make informed decisions for themselves and not become too disturbed or warped by what they see, but 8? 11? If we are going to have videogames that run the gamut of human experience from simple hero tales about bands of friends saving the world to more complex adult fare about the psychology of interior and exterior spaces (Silent Hill 4) and games about sadomasochistic mass murderers, there will need to be some way to make sure the parent has approved. Forbidding sales to minors under a certain ratings system without parental permission seems like a relatively painless way to do that.
Making a world child-safe is a bad idea in general... The kids who grow up in a perfectly safe environment don't survive for very long in a world of drugs and sex and bill collectors and food that isn't cooked right. You would not making the world child-safe. You would be making one portion of the world require parental oversight. I don't have a problem with this.
Idle speculation about "gateway" theories aside (like minors being arrested for attempting to purchase adult games... where did the author get that?), requiring parental involvement to buy videogames that kids may not be mature enough to understand ( or jaded enough to write off ) sounds perfectly reasonable.
Nobody should assume a single mail message sent out into the ether constitutes a final and iron-clad communication. While it is bad to miss an e-mail message from a client or another person, if the chance of losing a message is slim and the amount of time you aren't dealing with your clients' needs due to spam bloated inbox is large, you should filter. There are many ways to lose e-mails. It can get lost in transit (actually does happen). It can get mistaken for spam by the person looking at the inbox and thrown out. It can be forgotten. The person can send it to the wrong address. The person's ISP could have an overloaded mailserver. Having a healthy e-mail ecology means having less spam, and by having less spam more real messages will get through.
There is no such thing as a perfect filter. But there is also no such thing as a perfect e-mail system. By the post office's own estimates %10 of their mail gets lost, yet we routinely rely upon that for business purposes, with the addition of redundant communication in case there is an error. There are tradeoffs involved, but if the benefit outweighs the drawbacks, and for a lot of us it does, filter your inbox.
On the other hand, Bayenesian filtering is not the be-all-end-all technology it has been propped up to be, but it is relatively good.
(5) I'd like to teach him to program like my father did for me. Logo, basic, and games with programmable parts.
Don't forget Lego Mindstorms. The creative freedom of Legos with the intellectual benefits of programming, for only twice the already inflated cost. Still, it's worth it.
Just a quick aside here, people who specialize in any given OS are far more likely to see the deep, advanced benefits of that system and compare that to what little they can discern about a competing OS in the week that they have used it.
For example Mac OS7 had an incredible file system which had abstracted out all file positioning activities away from the actual position on the drive or even the system's perception of the file position on the drive. Searches were instantaneous, as things were indexed in the background. In addition, one's applications never needed to explicitly define a file path, they could do everything symbolically (this folder, the mac folder, etc), by name, by ID, by handle, etc, with no performance hit. The end-user can rename almost anything, and move almost anything anywhere, and all applications will keep running happily. I knew this pretty intimately, and came to rely upon that sort of advanced knowledge. When using Windows or Linux for the first time, this is what I was comparing them to, and they felt backwards and half-assed. Why Can't I just move photoshop to a folder called "Graphics Applications" and not have everything just work? What does any of those millions of extra files lying around in Linux DO? On the other hand, now that I'm a more experienced Windows user, I look back on OS7's memory management scheme and cringe. From a Linux perspective I look at file permissions systems as a tremendously powerful defensive line as opposed to the silly holdover inconvienience it once struck me as.
Any "switch" stories you hear will be colored by these perceptions. "What do you mean I have only one interface choice?" "Where is my ActiveX scripting on BeOS?" "I see type, but how does Debian know the creator app?" That's why these OS debates usually degrade so quickly: Person A is comparing a high-level knowledge of OS 1 to a superficial knowledge of OS 2, and person B is comparing a very high-level knowledge of OS 2 to a superficial knowledge of OS 1.
That doesn't mean that such comparisons are impossible, that just means that you need an intimate knowledge and years of use on multiple systems including the ones in question before you're qualified to do a comparison. "Switch" stories and grandstanding from people with a favorite OS fall down for this reason.
Hopefully it will change soon with the uprising of linux and osx.
I just knew those BSD demons were going to form skynet and take over the world! Did you think that one of the military's most advanced weapons programs and the world's most popular webserver share the same name for no reason?
HDTV is also up there. Apparently, the ability to watch television at %50 higher resolution trumps things like desktop publishing / personal printers. 6,000 dollar flat-panel plasma displays are also a great innovation, trumping MP3's in terms of consumer awareness and usage. And while MEMS is a great technology, I did have to google it to know what the heck they were talking about. VCR's didn't make the list, neither did CDs/optical media. e-ticketing. Anti-Lock breaks. They list "display panels," but that's such a broad category that it includes the oscilloscope as well as several of the other things on their list.
Now, it is arguable that older technologys would be unfairly represented because they have had the largest time to make the biggest impact, but Plasma-screens? That's one of dozens of competing technologies, one with major shortcomings, and whose claim to fame is that it makes a slightly better television watching experience. If anything TIVO deserves that slot.
In other words, yes, the list is broken. It's CNN. What do you expect, a thorough investigation?
We would be living in a far more advanced world if everyone knew how to script with the same intimacy that everyone knows how to talk.
Why do you say that? "Advanced" by what measure?
Advanced by the measure of ability to use tools to get things done. If everyone could script, large time-consuming activities could be quickly automated on an individual basis. Remember, computer applications are tools, and the computer is a tool to both run and make tools. Only a small subset of people have gotten to that point, but that is more because the current generation of people weren't exposed to computing while they were still young enough to absorb it on the low-level necessary.
While they may not have the background in mathematics to create a program which calculates PI to arbitrary precision, it isn't hard to code up something that makes a star dance under the pointer. Or to make a birthday announce website for their friends.
That could also make a birthday announce poster for their friends using paper, markers, and glue. That has the advantage of allowing your child to develop their fine motor skills. Explain how having your child make a website would be better.
Because the ability to abstract from coding to execution comes up in all aspects of life, from planning business developments to writing storyboards. This is a skill that should be taught, and if they can get that abstraction early on they will be ahead of a lot of other kids in terms of their mental development. The ability to use hands carefully across a broad range of expressive crafts is also important, but you should be doing that anyway.
If there is something that can be done without a computer, than why use one?
In most ways and with adults I agree with this sentiment... Senseless automation and computerization has added a ton of useless busywork to the world. However, the point is to teach your child about how to control a computer (as opposed to just using one). Even if it isn't the best tool for the job, the point is learning the tool.
This wasn't a prescription for how to raise your child. Just ideas for how to start one path of their mental development.
There are certain aspects of technology and programming that are akin to natural languages, and a person's ability to pick up languages is at its peak around at around 4 years of age. I'd say teach them as much about controlling / programming computers as you can.
While I would love to emphasize the printed word for research purposes, let's be honest: they're never going to use the dewey decimal card box system. Yes, give them books. Even more important than that, read to them and with them. Take them to the theater, the park, the zoo, the library, and on trips. Teach them to assemble and dissasemble electronics, wood, etc. Teach them to sew. But definitely teach them to program. We would be living in a far more advanced world if everyone knew how to script with the same intimacy that everyone knows how to talk. While they may not have the background in mathematics to create a program which calculates PI to arbitrary precision, it isn't hard to code up something that makes a star dance under the pointer. Or to make a birthday announce website for their friends. Or a script which runs when they login that blows up the screen. Use external librarys for the difficult stuff.
Keep them the hell away from television. They'll get enough of that through other sources anyway. As for games, be very choosey. If you aren't a gaming guru, try to find one with an background in educational gaming. Might I suggest MindRover? Sim City is also great, and will pay for itself a thousand times over when your kids go to college and get credit cards.
I would like to point out, that these are only US sales numbers. In Japan, the Game Cube is #2, and the XBox is out of the #1 spot by a ratio of 50 to 1.
You can do some really nifty things in Mozilla or Konqueror or Opera or Safari with the alpha channel in PNGs.
Do I sound bitter enough? Here, let my try to make years of seething annoyance show through.
Man, you REALLY can do some NIFTY things with the PNG alpha channel in that EXCELLENTLY WRITTEN I.E. I'm sooooooo glad Microsoft promised that I.E. 4 would fully support PNG, and boy did they deliver in TRUE Microsoft style. These past SEVEN FRICKIN' YEARS have just flown by, with unnecessarily labor-intensive GIF background fudging a thing of the past.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point your existing architecture gets so crufty that you need to throw it out in order to continue. The method of throwing it out in the past has been to release sequals, which the designers hoped would replace the original. As you point out, AC1 still has more players than AC2 by a pretty healthy margin, and in fact is getting another expansion pack.
Nobody designs content with an upwards migration path in mind... How would a designer 7 years ago know that they needed to include a blank normal map in all models? Besides, a lot of what goes into a sequal is removing the content and design ideas that didn't work. These make more direct transitions difficult... It's tought to make old content work with a brand spanking new engine, especially when the old programmers have already left.
I agree with the sentiment, though, and I'd agree with the rule. Don't release a sequal to a popular MMPORPG. Update it. Expand it. Hell, massively rework it, and jimmy your existing subscribers to your revamped universe. But don't release a sequal.
In 7 years Blizzard will prove me wrong, I hope.
At least in America there is /CHOICE/ in the affordable broadband market sector.
Generally, this isn't true. Your choice is DSL or cable. We have a government mandated one cable carrier per area, so you have no choice in cable. DSL regions are generally serviced by one company, so IF you're close enough to a station (and only one person I've ever known is) you can get broadband from one company. Sure, many companies sell DSL, but it's all remarketed from the same provider.
Additionally, nobody LIKES this one carrier, who up until just recently were actually charging their wholesale customers (ISPs who lease DSLAM ports via PPPoA/L2TP) more per connection than their retail customers.
They do that here too. While the bells are required by law to open up their last mile lines to resellers, they're not required to charge their resellers less for that mile than they charge the customers for the entire distance, and in fact do charge more.
Underpricing is more important for commodities and less so for something like an MMORPG. I don't think that (say) a game with a monthly fee of $5 less than WoW's would entice anyone to switch to them. There's also the matter of perception-of-quality -- I would guess that most people, upon seeing a $4.95/mo MMORPG would turn their noses up at it.
There is also the existence of the monthly cost at all which is a cost. It's a difficult choice for someone to whip out their wallet and put in their credit card. If you were going to charge 4.95 with an expectation of 10 months of usage, why not just charge 50 bucks for the game and be done with it?
I'll try and post news here from time to time if it
seems like it might interest people - for instance, it looks as if the HHGG
movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years.
This post was made in 1993.
The videogame business has always been based on the fact that 90% of all games released fails. Why would MMO's be any different?
I have to ask, but if the data is valuable to real estate agents, home developers, etc, why would you keep it away from people? Why not put it squarely in the public domain so that everyone can have a level playing field? Maybe there are underdeveloped regions which could provide additional housing in a crowded city. Maybe he just wants to put up a McDonalds where it will be most used, instead of peppering three or four around an area.
It's not like this data will let the person steal money from homeowners, just let him run his business more efficiently. What's wrong with that? While it is possible that he would be looking for dishevled houses to offer predatory loans to, we have laws against that kind of behavior anyway.
If I'd shelled out 10,000,000.00 for something, I'd want it to be used as much as possible.
Not to trot out a dead pony, but BSD was publically developed and is free to everyone, which means that many people and business are free to exploit the stability and power of that OS without paying. What is the difference between a software application and publically collected information? If Microsoft wants to run their e-mail service from BSD, they are free to do so with everyone's blessings. If Starbucks wants those maps to decide where to offer drive-through Lattes, they should be free to do so. If I want to use those maps to find a house in a low-crime neighborhood, I should be free to do so. In all cases, everyone benefits to some degree.
Which has recently been renamed AVG Free Edition
While one may find the optimal pathfinding route algorithim, most game software is a balancing act between competing resources and is therefore an art. If you look at the Quake 3 engine code, there are a lot of tradeoffs between accuracy (surprisingly innacurate, actually), speed, and memory. And then there are questions like how one will spend their processor cycles... in a complicated rendering engine or raw polys? Character focused or world focused? Do you spend more Ram on Precaching or go for dynamic texture loading?
That having been said, the reason why you can't put game artists, texturers, and musicians in the same class as game programmers is because they generally refuse to work for free. While a programmer may find personal expression through a game, rare is the artist or musician who feels the same way. You can get ones who will work to make a name for themselves, or work because they like the game, but generally you don't find musicians who work on games like they compose their own songs. While working on games is personal for a programmer, it isn't so much for artists / musicians. Why do it then?
And there is no such thing as an optimal software algorithm. There are ones well suited for a task and ones that are not, but there are no software algorithims that are best in all ways.
TFA is DOA, BTW.
a little car shop
Not entirely sure what this is
Japanese fish store
I don't mind a ratings system either, although it informs more design decisions and headaches than you may know. (Games are frequently altered to fit into a lighter ratings bracket) However, I also don't mind the idea that if a 10 year old wants to buy Manhunt, or the Playboy Mansion game, they will need their parent with them. It's not parenting for them unless the state refuses to sell the games to parents for their children's use. 16 is probably old enough to make informed decisions for themselves and not become too disturbed or warped by what they see, but 8? 11? If we are going to have videogames that run the gamut of human experience from simple hero tales about bands of friends saving the world to more complex adult fare about the psychology of interior and exterior spaces (Silent Hill 4) and games about sadomasochistic mass murderers, there will need to be some way to make sure the parent has approved. Forbidding sales to minors under a certain ratings system without parental permission seems like a relatively painless way to do that.
Making a world child-safe is a bad idea in general... The kids who grow up in a perfectly safe environment don't survive for very long in a world of drugs and sex and bill collectors and food that isn't cooked right. You would not making the world child-safe. You would be making one portion of the world require parental oversight. I don't have a problem with this.
Idle speculation about "gateway" theories aside (like minors being arrested for attempting to purchase adult games... where did the author get that?), requiring parental involvement to buy videogames that kids may not be mature enough to understand ( or jaded enough to write off ) sounds perfectly reasonable.
Nobody should assume a single mail message sent out into the ether constitutes a final and iron-clad communication. While it is bad to miss an e-mail message from a client or another person, if the chance of losing a message is slim and the amount of time you aren't dealing with your clients' needs due to spam bloated inbox is large, you should filter. There are many ways to lose e-mails. It can get lost in transit (actually does happen). It can get mistaken for spam by the person looking at the inbox and thrown out. It can be forgotten. The person can send it to the wrong address. The person's ISP could have an overloaded mailserver. Having a healthy e-mail ecology means having less spam, and by having less spam more real messages will get through.
There is no such thing as a perfect filter. But there is also no such thing as a perfect e-mail system. By the post office's own estimates %10 of their mail gets lost, yet we routinely rely upon that for business purposes, with the addition of redundant communication in case there is an error. There are tradeoffs involved, but if the benefit outweighs the drawbacks, and for a lot of us it does, filter your inbox.
On the other hand, Bayenesian filtering is not the be-all-end-all technology it has been propped up to be, but it is relatively good.
(5) I'd like to teach him to program like my father did for me. Logo, basic, and games with programmable parts.
Don't forget Lego Mindstorms. The creative freedom of Legos with the intellectual benefits of programming, for only twice the already inflated cost. Still, it's worth it.
Are you suggesting putting ads on the windows reboot screen?
That's the most genious business model I've heard of in a long time.
Just a quick aside here, people who specialize in any given OS are far more likely to see the deep, advanced benefits of that system and compare that to what little they can discern about a competing OS in the week that they have used it.
For example Mac OS7 had an incredible file system which had abstracted out all file positioning activities away from the actual position on the drive or even the system's perception of the file position on the drive. Searches were instantaneous, as things were indexed in the background. In addition, one's applications never needed to explicitly define a file path, they could do everything symbolically (this folder, the mac folder, etc), by name, by ID, by handle, etc, with no performance hit. The end-user can rename almost anything, and move almost anything anywhere, and all applications will keep running happily. I knew this pretty intimately, and came to rely upon that sort of advanced knowledge. When using Windows or Linux for the first time, this is what I was comparing them to, and they felt backwards and half-assed. Why Can't I just move photoshop to a folder called "Graphics Applications" and not have everything just work? What does any of those millions of extra files lying around in Linux DO? On the other hand, now that I'm a more experienced Windows user, I look back on OS7's memory management scheme and cringe. From a Linux perspective I look at file permissions systems as a tremendously powerful defensive line as opposed to the silly holdover inconvienience it once struck me as.
Any "switch" stories you hear will be colored by these perceptions. "What do you mean I have only one interface choice?" "Where is my ActiveX scripting on BeOS?" "I see type, but how does Debian know the creator app?" That's why these OS debates usually degrade so quickly: Person A is comparing a high-level knowledge of OS 1 to a superficial knowledge of OS 2, and person B is comparing a very high-level knowledge of OS 2 to a superficial knowledge of OS 1.
That doesn't mean that such comparisons are impossible, that just means that you need an intimate knowledge and years of use on multiple systems including the ones in question before you're qualified to do a comparison. "Switch" stories and grandstanding from people with a favorite OS fall down for this reason.
Hopefully it will change soon with the uprising of linux and osx.
I just knew those BSD demons were going to form skynet and take over the world! Did you think that one of the military's most advanced weapons programs and the world's most popular webserver share the same name for no reason?
Didn't you realize that Microsoft's new buzzword was software as Service?
HDTV is also up there. Apparently, the ability to watch television at %50 higher resolution trumps things like desktop publishing / personal printers. 6,000 dollar flat-panel plasma displays are also a great innovation, trumping MP3's in terms of consumer awareness and usage. And while MEMS is a great technology, I did have to google it to know what the heck they were talking about. VCR's didn't make the list, neither did CDs/optical media. e-ticketing. Anti-Lock breaks. They list "display panels," but that's such a broad category that it includes the oscilloscope as well as several of the other things on their list.
Now, it is arguable that older technologys would be unfairly represented because they have had the largest time to make the biggest impact, but Plasma-screens? That's one of dozens of competing technologies, one with major shortcomings, and whose claim to fame is that it makes a slightly better television watching experience. If anything TIVO deserves that slot.
In other words, yes, the list is broken. It's CNN. What do you expect, a thorough investigation?
We would be living in a far more advanced world if everyone knew how to script with the same intimacy that everyone knows how to talk.
Why do you say that? "Advanced" by what measure?
Advanced by the measure of ability to use tools to get things done. If everyone could script, large time-consuming activities could be quickly automated on an individual basis. Remember, computer applications are tools, and the computer is a tool to both run and make tools. Only a small subset of people have gotten to that point, but that is more because the current generation of people weren't exposed to computing while they were still young enough to absorb it on the low-level necessary.
While they may not have the background in mathematics to create a program which calculates PI to arbitrary precision, it isn't hard to code up something that makes a star dance under the pointer. Or to make a birthday announce website for their friends.
That could also make a birthday announce poster for their friends using paper, markers, and glue. That has the advantage of allowing your child to develop their fine motor skills. Explain how having your child make a website would be better.
Because the ability to abstract from coding to execution comes up in all aspects of life, from planning business developments to writing storyboards. This is a skill that should be taught, and if they can get that abstraction early on they will be ahead of a lot of other kids in terms of their mental development. The ability to use hands carefully across a broad range of expressive crafts is also important, but you should be doing that anyway.
If there is something that can be done without a computer, than why use one?
In most ways and with adults I agree with this sentiment... Senseless automation and computerization has added a ton of useless busywork to the world. However, the point is to teach your child about how to control a computer (as opposed to just using one). Even if it isn't the best tool for the job, the point is learning the tool.
This wasn't a prescription for how to raise your child. Just ideas for how to start one path of their mental development.
There are certain aspects of technology and programming that are akin to natural languages, and a person's ability to pick up languages is at its peak around at around 4 years of age. I'd say teach them as much about controlling / programming computers as you can.
While I would love to emphasize the printed word for research purposes, let's be honest: they're never going to use the dewey decimal card box system. Yes, give them books. Even more important than that, read to them and with them. Take them to the theater, the park, the zoo, the library, and on trips. Teach them to assemble and dissasemble electronics, wood, etc. Teach them to sew. But definitely teach them to program. We would be living in a far more advanced world if everyone knew how to script with the same intimacy that everyone knows how to talk. While they may not have the background in mathematics to create a program which calculates PI to arbitrary precision, it isn't hard to code up something that makes a star dance under the pointer. Or to make a birthday announce website for their friends. Or a script which runs when they login that blows up the screen. Use external librarys for the difficult stuff.
Keep them the hell away from television. They'll get enough of that through other sources anyway. As for games, be very choosey. If you aren't a gaming guru, try to find one with an background in educational gaming. Might I suggest MindRover? Sim City is also great, and will pay for itself a thousand times over when your kids go to college and get credit cards.
I bet they cost an arm and a leg.
I would like to point out, that these are only US sales numbers. In Japan, the Game Cube is #2, and the XBox is out of the #1 spot by a ratio of 50 to 1.
"We aim to reduce production costs to the levels in China," the daily quoted an unnamed company official as saying.
That cheap? Are the robots being made in China?
It's also odd in that most manufacturing robots are basically an arm. Wouldn't a two-armed robot just be two robots?
Opera now spoofs as I.E. by default, and has for about two years.
You can do some really nifty things in Mozilla or Konqueror or Opera or Safari with the alpha channel in PNGs.
Do I sound bitter enough? Here, let my try to make years of seething annoyance show through.
Man, you REALLY can do some NIFTY things with the PNG alpha channel in that EXCELLENTLY WRITTEN I.E. I'm sooooooo glad Microsoft promised that I.E. 4 would fully support PNG, and boy did they deliver in TRUE Microsoft style. These past SEVEN FRICKIN' YEARS have just flown by, with unnecessarily labor-intensive GIF background fudging a thing of the past.
Bitter enough? Okay. You cry now.