Attach about 30 of them to two gloves, and go dancing.
Attach an AC adapter and mount a row of them above the front door, aiming down.
Give them away at a local school. The teachers would love that.
Drill holes into a thick wooden board, mounting the pointers upwards under a sheet of transparent plastic or glass. Sacrifice an audio LED controller or two to synchronize the beams to music. Learn to dance.
Attach them all to a single trigger, and mount them together with a large amount of tape. Keep in your glovebox. When someone cuts you off, aim at their rear-view mirror.
Please, Please setup robots to play online games in some significant fashion that disrupts their economy. Perhaps then designers will create games that don't consider
Despite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently, she did.
She said, in essence, that HP will help you automate everything, and will do so in such a way that you can still change things. She cited a real-world reason to do so, and how it saved money.
Is it revolutionary? No... And she did back off from admitting as such. But it is useful, and it is how IT is supposed to be done. She might not know exactly how the technology is implemented, but she knows what it does.
I'd be curious to see how well an array of 1,000 of the fastest desktop computers would play against an array of 1,000 of the world's grandmasters. Furthermore, we should limit those machines to communicating at the speed of the humans, and feed everything through an interpreter, thereby crippling their processing power.
My guess is that both sides would start passing resolutions and decide to bomb Iran.
Retired PC's generally consume less power than modern ones... P3's under 800 Mhz can be run fanless in winter months. Fileservers are generally built on the latest and greatest computing platform and have little respect for noise. Ever walk into a room populated by rack-mount servers? As for webservers? Unless you are going to co-lo a machine, that is the proper solution.
A CRT iMac may or may not fit in a kitchen, depending upon the configuration. My apartment in the city, for example, would be hard pressed to fit one. However, my mother's house in the suburbs has plenty of counter space... and she would love the ability to catch up on the news while cooking (with a capture card, not included). I'd hardly consider any kitchen with adequate ventilation to be a "harsh environment." Grain milling plants are a harsh environment. Africa is a harsh environment. 6' away from a flame the size of your pinkey is within operating parameters.
A PDA in a cradle won't consume much more power than an alarm clock, and will do so without creating the toxic waste of AA batteries. It will also allow you to set alarms based upon your full day's schedule, can be synchronized with your "real" palm pilot automatically, control your PC to play music remotely, and can program in your own varying alarm sounds (my alarm is loud enough to wake me up, but quiet enough that my girlfriend stays asleep.)
Keeping a machine out of a landfill is a good reason. Serving a purpose in your life that wouldn't be economical through the traditional consumer means is a good reason. As I mentioned, we have retired 2 NeXT slabs, a NeXT cube, and a Sparc Station because they didn't make sense in terms of money, time, noise, or power requirements. However, many old machines can still eek out a profitable life somewhere if you break out of the "throw it in three" mentality. An old P2 Laptop is a perfect e-mail machine for my mother, for example. My work keeps an old Dell around so that guests can surf / check their mail while waiting.
Don't look for ways that old machines can replace other old machines... If all you want is the exact functionality provided by a traditional alarm clock you're welcome to it. Look for ways that old machines can improve your situation. Thinking of spending $400 dollars + $10 per month on a tivo? Buy a huge HDD and a video capture card for your old machine and roll your own for $200. That's economical, easy, and makes the world a cleaner place.
We have an old 603e powerbook here used as a web and chat terminal for our exchange students.
There is a win 95 laptop upgraded to Win 98 in the dining room as an MP3 stream player for breakfast music (and settling dinnertable discussions).
A headless P3 functions as a household fileserver.
A shiny new Athalon 2.4 runs the bulk of our recreational programs, with a mobile P4 laptop for work.
I'm looking forward to replacing some of our static picture frames with the old Win 98 laptop when we finally have a replacement for it.
What do you do with old hardware? You keep using it. PDA too slow for anything modern? They make awesome alarm clocks... And great remote controls. An ancient I-mac sitting around? Throw on OS9 and a copy of Icab, use it in the kitchen for finding recipes. Old Laptop doing nothing? Replace that magazine bin in your bathroom.
The only old hardware that is obsolete is the kind that never functioned in the first place. The old Sparc Station sitting in the closet never did much beyond being a mailserver, and those NeXT boxs never got far beyond the industrial appliance phase. But whatever you buy now will continue to function in the future, doing what it does now, or other useful little tasks.
It may not be worth $1,000 to have an MP3 streaming station for your apartment, but it would certainly be worthwhile if you had a spare box lying around.
BTW, don't expect that "investment" in a monitor to retain its value any better than that computer. 21" CRT's can be had used for $100 without much effort, and by the time this Imac is "obsolete" a used 20" LCD will probably be worth about as much... if not less. While I respect Apple's choice of suppliers, at this point of the technology curve LCD's aren't very long lived and don't have as good an image quality as they will in the future. Welding it to a computer might be more of a problem of hobbling the CPU when the LCD finally dies rather than vice versa.
Many readers won't go past the initial two paragraphs in an article. Many Game sites have the annoying habit of starting an article by reprinting the publisher's press release, without even bothering to strip out the obvious factual mistakes... like declaring Grand Theft Auto 3 "Only for the XBox!"
Once you get past that, they're excited about the new hyper-realtime plasma chain-combo burst processed fighting style, which means absolutely nothing except it has a nifty (but forced) combo system. They parrot much of the official publisher line, they love all of new features... They don't yet know how anything actually works after only 3 hours of play, but the guy that gave them the disk said everything was perfect, right?
Games are reviewed by people who want to review games. If someone on your staff is a football fan, you're going to give them NFL 2K4 to review. If they love FPS games, they get the new Half-Life. Neither of these reviews will reflect the opinion of the person sitting on the fence wondering what to buy. How will that guy who has played every other Legacy of Kain game to death feel about the new one? Why, he'll love it, and give it a 9.7. Greatest Game Ever. This, of course, doesn't really help anyone.
If sites are going to be consumer reports, where are the side-by-side comparisons? How does one decide between Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne, Age of Mythology: Titans, and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World? What does one invest their time and money into? If sites are trying to be the next Siskel and Ebert, where are the deep, probing social correlations? Where does Max Payne 2 fit into our societal consciousness? Right now we're still at the level of "This game ROXX!!!!" or "This game SUXX!!!!"
Part of the problem is definitely the quality of writing in online gaming journalism. People grew up expounding on the quality of one game or another, and carry that style into their professional lives. "How did you like such-and-such a game?" "I loaded it up with anticipation, but it sucked. 7.9" Certainly this personal style can be interesting and easy to read, but it leads to a superficial understanding of the situation. Furthermore, it leads to juvenile descriptions of what the reviewers would like to do with the female character's breasts, long-winded sidetracks onto subjects which have little to do with the matter at hand, logorrhea, and plain old fashioned bad grammar.
The most useful part of any magazine was the section where 4 reviewers were constrained to one paragraph and a score, combining directness, succinctness, and judgement. Losing your audience was not an option, as you had very little space within which to formulate an opinion on a game. And no matter how many people you had on staff, you were unlikely to have 4 that happened to be huge soccer game fans. Hype was often balanced by objectivity or downright dourness, and overall the impression left behind of the game was pretty solid.
Sadly, such varied formats have been whitewashed by the world wide web, where page constraints have disappeared. In gaming publication's heyday, there would be a special hype 4-page section for upcoming buzzworthy games, a 1 page section for upcoming games that may or may not be cool, a "quick clips" page for small releases, 1 or 2 page reviews of released games, the 1 paragraph condensed review galleria, a 1 page perspective piece on the industry, a rumors page, letters, and an in-depth strategy guide. Now sites have 4 page reviews, a "news" section that they haven't really focused on since 2000, and strategy guides for subscribers. Only the games that everyone already knows about make it to the front page (Legacy of Kain has been sitting on Gamespot's front page for about a month now), and smaller titles get lost in the shuffle. So much text is generated that the signal is lost in the noise.
If online 'zines are to be relevant again, they need to re-think their formula. Condensed information, available now, from passably elo
Final Fantasy XII takes place in a magical fantasy world, where humans co-exist with beasts. Mysterious rocks will power spells, summon monstrous beasts, and boost either HP or SP.
The Hero is a young man, just heading out into the world with nothing to his name but a sword and a bad haircut. Soon, he will discover the truth of his origins and the love of a childhood friend. He will form a rag-tag band including a fighter, a healing spellcaster, a criminal with a heart of gold, and a cute, semi-coherent, bumbling creature. But the forces of the Dark Empire are looming, and must be stopped from destroying the planet in their mad quest for non-ecofriendly power.
In their quest players will join the rebellion, ride on Chocobos, and fly in Airships. They must defeat the underworld people, release the spirits on a haunted boat, visit the tree of Mana, and discover the power of love.
The game is roughly 40-50 hours long, though much longer if you want to complete all of the side quests. I don't want to give away too much here, but lots of mini-games will be involved.
All in all, another revolutionary game from the greatest game company that ever lived. The only problem is that those random enemy encounters are just too frequent, but that will probably be fixed for the American release. 9.5 out of 10.
Let's see... Time to rewrite the firmware... 100 hours by a seasoned professional. Pay for a seasoned professional, 50 dollars per hour. Quality of the pictures you can take with the camera: Junk.
Judging by the quality of the pictures the thing takes, 10 dollars is about the right price. I've seen $40 webcams with better image quality. They're not subsidizing an awesome camera to get you to pay for processing, they're selling a crappy camera at cost to get you to pay for processing. It hardly seems worth the effort.
Of course, that same jaded logic didn't stop the original person from extending the functionality of the thing.
Nintendo is known for spreading more pre-launch hype than any other console company. They hyped Project Reality (PR) years before it was ready, they hyped the Dolphin from day one... Just about the only thing they didn't grossly overhype was the Game Boy Advance, and that was because their stopgap Game Boy Color was so popular they felt they would alienate part of the market if they did.
The hypemeter around this is low, so the likelihood of a next-generation console is quite slim. More likely, they will announce a GameCube compatible DVD player from a 3rd party company, or possibly (and this is the one I'm hoping for) a GBA built into a proper Game Cube controller.
Until they start trotting around Miyamoto shouting about the second coming of Mario, they're not launching the next console yet. Until they have hardware in the hands of developers, they're not ready to launch.
I doubt anyone knew about X3D goggles before this, and the likelihood of commentators mentioning them in a positive light are extremely slim. They cost 60 bucks online, they're cheap, and they use LCD technology that first saw commercial release on the SEGA Mastersystem in '83, possibly earlier. This is not a form of advanced TFT display device, these are little left-right blinking glasses that also blink your display.
In that sense, any kind of publicity is good publicity for them. It certainly won't cause anyone to underestimate their product.
The same risk level? At 15-20 MPH it has a *much* lower risk level... about equivalent to that of a bicycle with really old brakes. So long as you learn to roll properly, you should be able to get out of a crash with only superficial injuries at top speed, even on cement (assuming you aren't run over). On a motorcycle, however, with full safety equipment a full-speed crash that only results in a week's stay in the hospital is a good crash.
Cool little product. Thanks for posting it!
Re:This does have one primary flaw...
on
Bombardier's Hot Wheel
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wouldn't like to be caught on an ice patch, a slick roadway, or an unsure trail off the road.
If there is a gyroscope and a rapidly spinning wheel for stability, I can't imagine hitting a slick spot on the ice would throw you off... You're not relying on your contact patch for orientation. Likewise this is definitely not an offroad vehicle. Just look at it. Want to guess how much active suspension it has?
What I would be more afraid of is, as another poster pointed out, a system failure. What happens when the bike gets old and a wire breaks? What happens to the stability of the gyroscope when you drop the bike? What happens when you get a flat?
It's a cool concept, and I look forward to riding one... in 2025, when they have all of the safety issues ironed out.
We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes. If its not computerized, someone has to count them all up... We want what we want, and we want it now!
In the presidential race, why not just give everyone a ballot which they can mark and place into a box for their preferred candidate? At the end of the day the minimum wage workers can weigh the ballots, and return that result. Adding up the various weights wouldn't be too difficult, and there would be an unambiguous result.
Anyone voting in a non-presidential election is guaranteed to be at least semi-literate, and won't require such measures. SAT bubble sheets would work just fine there.
If Nokia is like every other console company, they take a cut of sales of the cartridges. Sure, most make a little bit on hardware too, but Nokia has really lost that battle. Getting a cut of games released that will play on someone else's platform would be ideal. Think about how much money IBM would have made if they had some way to require licenses to release games on any hardware compatible with their system.
As they don't control the hardware it isn't a viable long-term solution, but if Nokia was smart (tacophone aside) they would release their own attachments to other phones to facilitate N-Gage playing. That way, at least, they could bow out gracefully and make a little money along the way.
As long as what they report is the truth ( or with a disclaimer that its opinion and not fact ) then they are within their rights to do what ever they want with THEIR data...
But there is a vested public interest in historical records of our time. In the previous generation of publishing, printed copies of a magazine couldn't be retracted... They could only stop the presses. Copies in the wild were free to be archived by libraries, schools, think-tanks, and the general population. The laws of the time reflected the media of the time.
Now, however, copying a Time Online article is illegal, and there are no backup copies (wayback machine not withstanding). If there is no law saying that such important information doesn't need to be backed up, it is only because the laws haven't caught up with the times.
A significant part of keeping our political process honest is having an accurate archive of the statements and claims that politicians have made to the public. Without this public record, accountability would be lost and no claim made by an elected official would carry any weight. Likewise, the view of American history would be even more skewed, leading to further gross miscarriages of justice. Even now you see people comparing Iraq to the "good works" we did in Vietnam...
Data is NOT owned by the paper. Data is not owned by anybody. Data has no protection under the law in the US, and can not have an owner. Copyright is given to the producers and distributors of data in order to further the creation and dissemination of creative media, but copyright only covers the expressive portion of the work.
If Time removed this one article out of many stored on their server, It was out of political interests and not merely financial routine. Either they were bowing to pressure from a particular Pennsylvania Avenue resident, or they were attempting to support a particular political candidate. Both options are reprehensible... As a news magazine Time should be held to certain journalistic standards that other corporations may not be. As such, Time shouldn't be attempting to revise history, and shouldn't be bowing to pressure to do so without, at bare minimum, a court order.
Information is a cornerstone of a democratic society. Undermining its already perilous foundation should be considered reprehensible, if not treasonous.
Companies do have to keep honest, and news organizations have to keep honest more than most. This means both that they have to tell the truth when they speak, and they can't censor the truths that they find displeasurable.
Ahem. AlwaysOnNetwork was the name of the Slashdotted website the article was referring to. Nobody would argue that Network Administrators who are always on call are underpaid... Mainly because they would stop buying us sushi if we did.
Amusingly enough, the opposite proved true. (can't tell if you were being sarcastic)
Sony's specialized parts ensured that Sony owned all of the rights. Sony's intimate knowledge of the parts and the manufacturing has allowed them to combine silicon, cutting down on overall size and costs. Likewise, the only profittaking is from Sony, and with fewer hands in the pot the margins can be shrunk. Unfortunately for Microsoft, using off-the-shelf parts from different manufacturers ensured that they needed the cooperation (and credits) from different companies. Nvidia, for example, gets a cut on the sales of the hardware, not from the software like ATI gets from Nintendo. Microsoft similarly needs to use faster hardware in their machines as they aren't exactly console-optimized. The 'Cube, again, can get away with running on much slower (read, cheaper) hardware, because it would be a terrible webserver. Say what you will about the XBox OS, it's hardware and interfaces were not originally developed with gaming in mind.
On the other hand, the success of the PS2 can probably be traced to GT3, GTA, Square, Metal Gear Solid 2, Onimusha, and a host of must-have games that were released before the Xbox hit its stride. People buy games and hardware to play those games, not hardware and games to play on that hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy (used) a TI-85 and an LCD projection filter. Make a 12 x 20 array of closely-packed Lazer pointers.
Play tetris on the nearest available building.
Your definition of instant and my definition of instant must be a bit out of synch.
The woman in your life would really like one of these.
Attach about 30 of them to two gloves, and go dancing.
Attach an AC adapter and mount a row of them above the front door, aiming down.
Give them away at a local school. The teachers would love that.
Drill holes into a thick wooden board, mounting the pointers upwards under a sheet of transparent plastic or glass. Sacrifice an audio LED controller or two to synchronize the beams to music. Learn to dance.
Attach them all to a single trigger, and mount them together with a large amount of tape. Keep in your glovebox. When someone cuts you off, aim at their rear-view mirror.
Build your own really inefficient 3D scanner.
Can you say, Flash Mob?
Please, Please setup robots to play online games in some significant fashion that disrupts their economy. Perhaps then designers will create games that don't consider
10 Dig for an hour
20 Rest for an hour
30 Goto 10
a winning formula for gameplay.
Why not? They have as much evidence against Apple as they do against IBM.
Despite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently, she did.
She said, in essence, that HP will help you automate everything, and will do so in such a way that you can still change things. She cited a real-world reason to do so, and how it saved money.
Is it revolutionary? No... And she did back off from admitting as such. But it is useful, and it is how IT is supposed to be done. She might not know exactly how the technology is implemented, but she knows what it does.
Good show. Do that more often.
I'd be curious to see how well an array of 1,000 of the fastest desktop computers would play against an array of 1,000 of the world's grandmasters. Furthermore, we should limit those machines to communicating at the speed of the humans, and feed everything through an interpreter, thereby crippling their processing power.
My guess is that both sides would start passing resolutions and decide to bomb Iran.
Retired PC's generally consume less power than modern ones... P3's under 800 Mhz can be run fanless in winter months. Fileservers are generally built on the latest and greatest computing platform and have little respect for noise. Ever walk into a room populated by rack-mount servers? As for webservers? Unless you are going to co-lo a machine, that is the proper solution.
A CRT iMac may or may not fit in a kitchen, depending upon the configuration. My apartment in the city, for example, would be hard pressed to fit one. However, my mother's house in the suburbs has plenty of counter space... and she would love the ability to catch up on the news while cooking (with a capture card, not included). I'd hardly consider any kitchen with adequate ventilation to be a "harsh environment." Grain milling plants are a harsh environment. Africa is a harsh environment. 6' away from a flame the size of your pinkey is within operating parameters.
A PDA in a cradle won't consume much more power than an alarm clock, and will do so without creating the toxic waste of AA batteries. It will also allow you to set alarms based upon your full day's schedule, can be synchronized with your "real" palm pilot automatically, control your PC to play music remotely, and can program in your own varying alarm sounds (my alarm is loud enough to wake me up, but quiet enough that my girlfriend stays asleep.)
Keeping a machine out of a landfill is a good reason. Serving a purpose in your life that wouldn't be economical through the traditional consumer means is a good reason. As I mentioned, we have retired 2 NeXT slabs, a NeXT cube, and a Sparc Station because they didn't make sense in terms of money, time, noise, or power requirements. However, many old machines can still eek out a profitable life somewhere if you break out of the "throw it in three" mentality. An old P2 Laptop is a perfect e-mail machine for my mother, for example. My work keeps an old Dell around so that guests can surf / check their mail while waiting.
Don't look for ways that old machines can replace other old machines... If all you want is the exact functionality provided by a traditional alarm clock you're welcome to it. Look for ways that old machines can improve your situation. Thinking of spending $400 dollars + $10 per month on a tivo? Buy a huge HDD and a video capture card for your old machine and roll your own for $200. That's economical, easy, and makes the world a cleaner place.
Ahh... The way computing should be...
We have an old 603e powerbook here used as a web and chat terminal for our exchange students.
There is a win 95 laptop upgraded to Win 98 in the dining room as an MP3 stream player for breakfast music (and settling dinnertable discussions).
A headless P3 functions as a household fileserver.
A shiny new Athalon 2.4 runs the bulk of our recreational programs, with a mobile P4 laptop for work.
I'm looking forward to replacing some of our static picture frames with the old Win 98 laptop when we finally have a replacement for it.
What do you do with old hardware? You keep using it. PDA too slow for anything modern? They make awesome alarm clocks... And great remote controls. An ancient I-mac sitting around? Throw on OS9 and a copy of Icab, use it in the kitchen for finding recipes. Old Laptop doing nothing? Replace that magazine bin in your bathroom.
The only old hardware that is obsolete is the kind that never functioned in the first place. The old Sparc Station sitting in the closet never did much beyond being a mailserver, and those NeXT boxs never got far beyond the industrial appliance phase. But whatever you buy now will continue to function in the future, doing what it does now, or other useful little tasks.
It may not be worth $1,000 to have an MP3 streaming station for your apartment, but it would certainly be worthwhile if you had a spare box lying around.
BTW, don't expect that "investment" in a monitor to retain its value any better than that computer. 21" CRT's can be had used for $100 without much effort, and by the time this Imac is "obsolete" a used 20" LCD will probably be worth about as much... if not less. While I respect Apple's choice of suppliers, at this point of the technology curve LCD's aren't very long lived and don't have as good an image quality as they will in the future. Welding it to a computer might be more of a problem of hobbling the CPU when the LCD finally dies rather than vice versa.
Agreed
Many readers won't go past the initial two paragraphs in an article. Many Game sites have the annoying habit of starting an article by reprinting the publisher's press release, without even bothering to strip out the obvious factual mistakes... like declaring Grand Theft Auto 3 "Only for the XBox!"
Once you get past that, they're excited about the new hyper-realtime plasma chain-combo burst processed fighting style, which means absolutely nothing except it has a nifty (but forced) combo system. They parrot much of the official publisher line, they love all of new features... They don't yet know how anything actually works after only 3 hours of play, but the guy that gave them the disk said everything was perfect, right?
Games are reviewed by people who want to review games. If someone on your staff is a football fan, you're going to give them NFL 2K4 to review. If they love FPS games, they get the new Half-Life. Neither of these reviews will reflect the opinion of the person sitting on the fence wondering what to buy. How will that guy who has played every other Legacy of Kain game to death feel about the new one? Why, he'll love it, and give it a 9.7. Greatest Game Ever. This, of course, doesn't really help anyone.
If sites are going to be consumer reports, where are the side-by-side comparisons? How does one decide between Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne, Age of Mythology: Titans, and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World? What does one invest their time and money into? If sites are trying to be the next Siskel and Ebert, where are the deep, probing social correlations? Where does Max Payne 2 fit into our societal consciousness? Right now we're still at the level of "This game ROXX!!!!" or "This game SUXX!!!!"
Part of the problem is definitely the quality of writing in online gaming journalism. People grew up expounding on the quality of one game or another, and carry that style into their professional lives. "How did you like such-and-such a game?" "I loaded it up with anticipation, but it sucked. 7.9" Certainly this personal style can be interesting and easy to read, but it leads to a superficial understanding of the situation. Furthermore, it leads to juvenile descriptions of what the reviewers would like to do with the female character's breasts, long-winded sidetracks onto subjects which have little to do with the matter at hand, logorrhea, and plain old fashioned bad grammar.
The most useful part of any magazine was the section where 4 reviewers were constrained to one paragraph and a score, combining directness, succinctness, and judgement. Losing your audience was not an option, as you had very little space within which to formulate an opinion on a game. And no matter how many people you had on staff, you were unlikely to have 4 that happened to be huge soccer game fans. Hype was often balanced by objectivity or downright dourness, and overall the impression left behind of the game was pretty solid.
Sadly, such varied formats have been whitewashed by the world wide web, where page constraints have disappeared. In gaming publication's heyday, there would be a special hype 4-page section for upcoming buzzworthy games, a 1 page section for upcoming games that may or may not be cool, a "quick clips" page for small releases, 1 or 2 page reviews of released games, the 1 paragraph condensed review galleria, a 1 page perspective piece on the industry, a rumors page, letters, and an in-depth strategy guide. Now sites have 4 page reviews, a "news" section that they haven't really focused on since 2000, and strategy guides for subscribers. Only the games that everyone already knows about make it to the front page (Legacy of Kain has been sitting on Gamespot's front page for about a month now), and smaller titles get lost in the shuffle. So much text is generated that the signal is lost in the noise.
If online 'zines are to be relevant again, they need to re-think their formula. Condensed information, available now, from passably elo
Final Fantasy XII takes place in a magical fantasy world, where humans co-exist with beasts. Mysterious rocks will power spells, summon monstrous beasts, and boost either HP or SP.
The Hero is a young man, just heading out into the world with nothing to his name but a sword and a bad haircut. Soon, he will discover the truth of his origins and the love of a childhood friend. He will form a rag-tag band including a fighter, a healing spellcaster, a criminal with a heart of gold, and a cute, semi-coherent, bumbling creature. But the forces of the Dark Empire are looming, and must be stopped from destroying the planet in their mad quest for non-ecofriendly power.
In their quest players will join the rebellion, ride on Chocobos, and fly in Airships. They must defeat the underworld people, release the spirits on a haunted boat, visit the tree of Mana, and discover the power of love.
The game is roughly 40-50 hours long, though much longer if you want to complete all of the side quests. I don't want to give away too much here, but lots of mini-games will be involved.
All in all, another revolutionary game from the greatest game company that ever lived. The only problem is that those random enemy encounters are just too frequent, but that will probably be fixed for the American release. 9.5 out of 10.
Perhaps they mean the justification is paper thin?
So how long until someone rewrites the firmware?
Let's see... Time to rewrite the firmware... 100 hours by a seasoned professional. Pay for a seasoned professional, 50 dollars per hour. Quality of the pictures you can take with the camera: Junk.
Judging by the quality of the pictures the thing takes, 10 dollars is about the right price. I've seen $40 webcams with better image quality. They're not subsidizing an awesome camera to get you to pay for processing, they're selling a crappy camera at cost to get you to pay for processing. It hardly seems worth the effort.
Of course, that same jaded logic didn't stop the original person from extending the functionality of the thing.
Nintendo is known for spreading more pre-launch hype than any other console company. They hyped Project Reality (PR) years before it was ready, they hyped the Dolphin from day one... Just about the only thing they didn't grossly overhype was the Game Boy Advance, and that was because their stopgap Game Boy Color was so popular they felt they would alienate part of the market if they did.
The hypemeter around this is low, so the likelihood of a next-generation console is quite slim. More likely, they will announce a GameCube compatible DVD player from a 3rd party company, or possibly (and this is the one I'm hoping for) a GBA built into a proper Game Cube controller.
Until they start trotting around Miyamoto shouting about the second coming of Mario, they're not launching the next console yet. Until they have hardware in the hands of developers, they're not ready to launch.
Even without the landing gear, the EMBRIO would be stable when motionless because of the gyroscope.
I doubt anyone knew about X3D goggles before this, and the likelihood of commentators mentioning them in a positive light are extremely slim. They cost 60 bucks online, they're cheap, and they use LCD technology that first saw commercial release on the SEGA Mastersystem in '83, possibly earlier. This is not a form of advanced TFT display device, these are little left-right blinking glasses that also blink your display.
In that sense, any kind of publicity is good publicity for them. It certainly won't cause anyone to underestimate their product.
To move the Embrio, you use an accelerator trigger on the left handlebar and a brake trigger on the right.
You're welcome.
The same risk level? At 15-20 MPH it has a *much* lower risk level... about equivalent to that of a bicycle with really old brakes. So long as you learn to roll properly, you should be able to get out of a crash with only superficial injuries at top speed, even on cement (assuming you aren't run over). On a motorcycle, however, with full safety equipment a full-speed crash that only results in a week's stay in the hospital is a good crash.
Cool little product. Thanks for posting it!
I wouldn't like to be caught on an ice patch, a slick roadway, or an unsure trail off the road.
If there is a gyroscope and a rapidly spinning wheel for stability, I can't imagine hitting a slick spot on the ice would throw you off... You're not relying on your contact patch for orientation. Likewise this is definitely not an offroad vehicle. Just look at it. Want to guess how much active suspension it has?
What I would be more afraid of is, as another poster pointed out, a system failure. What happens when the bike gets old and a wire breaks? What happens to the stability of the gyroscope when you drop the bike? What happens when you get a flat?
It's a cool concept, and I look forward to riding one... in 2025, when they have all of the safety issues ironed out.
-Chris
We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes. If its not computerized, someone has to count them all up... We want what we want, and we want it now!
In the presidential race, why not just give everyone a ballot which they can mark and place into a box for their preferred candidate? At the end of the day the minimum wage workers can weigh the ballots, and return that result. Adding up the various weights wouldn't be too difficult, and there would be an unambiguous result.
Anyone voting in a non-presidential election is guaranteed to be at least semi-literate, and won't require such measures. SAT bubble sheets would work just fine there.
I assume it will be sighs of relief.
If Nokia is like every other console company, they take a cut of sales of the cartridges. Sure, most make a little bit on hardware too, but Nokia has really lost that battle. Getting a cut of games released that will play on someone else's platform would be ideal. Think about how much money IBM would have made if they had some way to require licenses to release games on any hardware compatible with their system.
As they don't control the hardware it isn't a viable long-term solution, but if Nokia was smart (tacophone aside) they would release their own attachments to other phones to facilitate N-Gage playing. That way, at least, they could bow out gracefully and make a little money along the way.
As long as what they report is the truth ( or with a disclaimer that its opinion and not fact ) then they are within their rights to do what ever they want with THEIR data...
But there is a vested public interest in historical records of our time. In the previous generation of publishing, printed copies of a magazine couldn't be retracted... They could only stop the presses. Copies in the wild were free to be archived by libraries, schools, think-tanks, and the general population. The laws of the time reflected the media of the time.
Now, however, copying a Time Online article is illegal, and there are no backup copies (wayback machine not withstanding). If there is no law saying that such important information doesn't need to be backed up, it is only because the laws haven't caught up with the times.
A significant part of keeping our political process honest is having an accurate archive of the statements and claims that politicians have made to the public. Without this public record, accountability would be lost and no claim made by an elected official would carry any weight. Likewise, the view of American history would be even more skewed, leading to further gross miscarriages of justice. Even now you see people comparing Iraq to the "good works" we did in Vietnam...
Data is NOT owned by the paper. Data is not owned by anybody. Data has no protection under the law in the US, and can not have an owner. Copyright is given to the producers and distributors of data in order to further the creation and dissemination of creative media, but copyright only covers the expressive portion of the work.
If Time removed this one article out of many stored on their server, It was out of political interests and not merely financial routine. Either they were bowing to pressure from a particular Pennsylvania Avenue resident, or they were attempting to support a particular political candidate. Both options are reprehensible... As a news magazine Time should be held to certain journalistic standards that other corporations may not be. As such, Time shouldn't be attempting to revise history, and shouldn't be bowing to pressure to do so without, at bare minimum, a court order.
Information is a cornerstone of a democratic society. Undermining its already perilous foundation should be considered reprehensible, if not treasonous.
Companies do have to keep honest, and news organizations have to keep honest more than most. This means both that they have to tell the truth when they speak, and they can't censor the truths that they find displeasurable.
Ahem. AlwaysOnNetwork was the name of the Slashdotted website the article was referring to. Nobody would argue that Network Administrators who are always on call are underpaid... Mainly because they would stop buying us sushi if we did.
Amusingly enough, the opposite proved true. (can't tell if you were being sarcastic)
Sony's specialized parts ensured that Sony owned all of the rights. Sony's intimate knowledge of the parts and the manufacturing has allowed them to combine silicon, cutting down on overall size and costs. Likewise, the only profittaking is from Sony, and with fewer hands in the pot the margins can be shrunk. Unfortunately for Microsoft, using off-the-shelf parts from different manufacturers ensured that they needed the cooperation (and credits) from different companies. Nvidia, for example, gets a cut on the sales of the hardware, not from the software like ATI gets from Nintendo. Microsoft similarly needs to use faster hardware in their machines as they aren't exactly console-optimized. The 'Cube, again, can get away with running on much slower (read, cheaper) hardware, because it would be a terrible webserver. Say what you will about the XBox OS, it's hardware and interfaces were not originally developed with gaming in mind.
On the other hand, the success of the PS2 can probably be traced to GT3, GTA, Square, Metal Gear Solid 2, Onimusha, and a host of must-have games that were released before the Xbox hit its stride. People buy games and hardware to play those games, not hardware and games to play on that hardware.