Well said. As a possible alternative to encouraging Mr Atkinson to move on, the Queensland Government is considering allowing "refused classification" games to be considered as R18+ within that state. There is a e-petition available here: http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_qld/CurrentEPetition.aspx?PetNum=1346&lIndex=-1
The associated wordage is:
Queensland residents draws to the attention of the House that the Classification of Computer Games and Images Act 1995 is currently out of step with the wishes of the electorate. Your petitioners, therefore, request the House that it be amended to permit computer games to receive the R18+ classification when they have been refused classification under the Commonwealth Act.
This might be a shorter term solution if they could make it work - head up to Qld for a weekend of sunshine and some grownup videogame purchases. Kinda like Canberra and porn...
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won't be clever enough to debug it. "
You have to be very careful with sonic systems and creatures like bats and flying foxes. There are arguments afoot here in Australia that many sonic systems are waayyyyyy overpowered, causing bats to freak out and drop their young, or fall straight out of the sky and hurt themselves. Although technically this is a deterrent, it isn't really a good thing for the bats, which is the main point of the system. It might be like trying to keep humans away from an area by blasting our optic nerves with a near-blinding psychedelic lightshow and being a little miffed when the human falls over backwards in shock, tumbles down a hill and breaks their legs. Whoops.
Well said. An additional important point (IMO) is that WoW is many games in one, all interconnected. Depending on your personal preference, you can spend time questing, pvping, raiding, crafting, building faction reputation, trading on the auction house, doing achievements or even metagaming with item stat spreadsheets and talent combinations.
All of these mini-games give rewards that help other mini-games. If you spend the time building up your crafting skills, you can make weapons or armor, and that helps with raiding. Some achievements give flying mounts, which make questing and gathering faster and easier.
The interconnectedness is another level of design magic, I think. Don't like pvp? Knock over those dungeons. Don't like raiding? Quest away. Plus, when players are sick and tired of raiding, they can spend a few hours in the arena, or just toddle around doing some quests and earning some gold.
It's as if in real life, when you were sick of playing football with your friends, you could go home and chop wood so that next time your football skills would be a little bit better.
Yep, I have a similar story. Last year of high school when I was training for rowing ten times a week and in the best shape of my life, my BMI was still ~ 12%. I remember looking at the table and just laughing, as there was no way that I was obese. As has been mentioned in this comments already, BMI seems to disadvantage taller people, as well as people of heavier builds (like myself).
Freakin' signed. New games are AU$110 here in Australia, which is crazy. God of War 2 was a completely signed, sealed and delivered Must Buy for me, and I had no problem waiting until I could buy it for $47 (and I got the Collector's Edition for that price). There are second-hand games stores popping up everywhere now, so I often drop by there to pick up reasonably recent games for significantly reduced prices. My buddies and I also make a point of swapping games around when we're done with them, because the prices are nuts.
I'm fairly sure that raising prices has significantly cut the amount of money game companies and publishers get from me, which is pretty much the reverse of what they intended to happen. Nice work, dumbasses.
Except if the 0.5 kid was embedded in the 1 kid's chest, saying "Quaaaaiiidddd... start the reactor... freeeee Mars...." then it would okay. Well, it would still be a bit annoying, but you could always turn the music right up so you couldn't hear him.
Good points, although I suspect the biggest thing Microsoft needs to do to make inroads into the designer/photographer/artists market is make their new software run on OS X. No holy platform wars, that's just where the designer/photographer/artist market lives.
You can type, but you can't see the text of the email you're replying to, or the recipients. Admittedly these aren't vital if you're writing a brand new message to someone you know (you can fill in their email address when you get online, too) but if you want to refer to something they said, or check if your email should be worded for a particular group, it would help.
Is there a funky GMail offline mode that I haven't found yet?
I totally agree. Although they're throwing the word episodic around, Valve is doing expansion packs the same way they did with HL1. I'm beginning to wonder whether they're even capable of doing it (and this may not be such a bad thing). It requires a different way of development than what they're used to... fast, brutal and simplistic. Can't get that scripted event working in a week? It's gone. The main level only looks good instead of great? Tough cookies. Find a show-stopping bug an hour before release? Well... hmmm.
Valve seems like they're perfectionists, and it shows in their games. They polish, polish, polish, tweak, test and test again, and it shows. I'm not sure they would be able to deal with a hard and fast schedule.
I agree, although I suspect they might have a number of permanent seeder clients out on the net to maintain the swarm at any given moment. Otherwise someone might purchase "Gigli" and nobody would have it. I guess they're paying for those seeders, but it does seem a little unwholesome.
The other thing I was thinking, if each of these movies are DRMed, doesn't that mean each movie is unique, making them pointless to try and Bittorrent? Or is it more that the movie is encrypted with a given key, and your DRM player adds that key to its "keychain" so you get access to it?
It's even worse in countries like Australia, where a 20GB monthly download limit is at the upper limit of most plans. HD video streaming just doesn't work here, unless it's through an ISP's local content streaming system, which is usually quite limited and lame.
XP's driver support was much better than Vista, that's certainly true. This is probably because Vista has a new driver model, and XP was basically Windows 2000 Plus, which meant that the drivers were essentially the same. Therefore drivers for Vista are taking a while to appear in the wild, and upgrading on existing hardware is currently a bit of crapshoot. My recommendation to friends and coworkers is not to upgrade to Vista at all on their existing hardware at all - instead wait for their next hardware refresh when they can be assured (well, more likely at least) to have Vista-compatible hardware.
For enthusiasts and box builders, sites like Tech Report have useful articles like their Vista System Guide that includes notes on Vista support for various pieces of hardware in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. Interestingly the current video card king, the GeForce 8800, only has preliminary support for Vista. Updates are no doubt in the pipeline, but it's good info to know before going shopping.
To be honest, I don't think the Zune is going to do well. The hardware is decent, but the OS is nerfed into insignificance. However, I'm sure people are already thinking about a custom Zune OS that allows you to:
1) Wirelessly share anything, with no restrictions 2) Use the Zune as a portable storage device (ie: drive letter on your PC) 3) Play Xvid/DivX/Theora/etc 4) Record from radio 5)... 6) Profit!!
Let's fast forward to a time when this has been (well, apart from 6). Would people buy the Zune and use the new OS? What would Microsoft have to say about an indie (and probably OSS) project that takes their lame ass product and makes it awesome?
Slashdot Mirror
Well said. As a possible alternative to encouraging Mr Atkinson to move on, the Queensland Government is considering allowing "refused classification" games to be considered as R18+ within that state. There is a e-petition available here: http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_qld/CurrentEPetition.aspx?PetNum=1346&lIndex=-1
The associated wordage is:
Queensland residents draws to the attention of the House that the Classification of Computer Games and Images Act 1995 is currently out of step with the wishes of the electorate. Your petitioners, therefore, request the House that it be amended to permit computer games to receive the R18+ classification when they have been refused classification under the Commonwealth Act.
This might be a shorter term solution if they could make it work - head up to Qld for a weekend of sunshine and some grownup videogame purchases. Kinda like Canberra and porn...
Obligatory quote:
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won't be clever enough to debug it. "
You have to be very careful with sonic systems and creatures like bats and flying foxes. There are arguments afoot here in Australia that many sonic systems are waayyyyyy overpowered, causing bats to freak out and drop their young, or fall straight out of the sky and hurt themselves. Although technically this is a deterrent, it isn't really a good thing for the bats, which is the main point of the system. It might be like trying to keep humans away from an area by blasting our optic nerves with a near-blinding psychedelic lightshow and being a little miffed when the human falls over backwards in shock, tumbles down a hill and breaks their legs. Whoops.
Well said. An additional important point (IMO) is that WoW is many games in one, all interconnected. Depending on your personal preference, you can spend time questing, pvping, raiding, crafting, building faction reputation, trading on the auction house, doing achievements or even metagaming with item stat spreadsheets and talent combinations.
All of these mini-games give rewards that help other mini-games. If you spend the time building up your crafting skills, you can make weapons or armor, and that helps with raiding. Some achievements give flying mounts, which make questing and gathering faster and easier.
The interconnectedness is another level of design magic, I think. Don't like pvp? Knock over those dungeons. Don't like raiding? Quest away. Plus, when players are sick and tired of raiding, they can spend a few hours in the arena, or just toddle around doing some quests and earning some gold.
It's as if in real life, when you were sick of playing football with your friends, you could go home and chop wood so that next time your football skills would be a little bit better.
Let me guess, you a have a friend named Tyler Durden?
That's not a bug, that's a RIAA-approved feature!
Viva vas deferens!
Only if he's in Japan.
64 cores should be enough for anybody.
You can also install Oldbar, an addon that makes the Awesomebar act like the old Firefox bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
I use it and it does the job nicely.
Let's ask the shareholders at the next meeting!
THUMP!
"Continue the research."
Yep, I have a similar story. Last year of high school when I was training for rowing ten times a week and in the best shape of my life, my BMI was still ~ 12%. I remember looking at the table and just laughing, as there was no way that I was obese. As has been mentioned in this comments already, BMI seems to disadvantage taller people, as well as people of heavier builds (like myself).
Freakin' signed. New games are AU$110 here in Australia, which is crazy. God of War 2 was a completely signed, sealed and delivered Must Buy for me, and I had no problem waiting until I could buy it for $47 (and I got the Collector's Edition for that price). There are second-hand games stores popping up everywhere now, so I often drop by there to pick up reasonably recent games for significantly reduced prices. My buddies and I also make a point of swapping games around when we're done with them, because the prices are nuts.
I'm fairly sure that raising prices has significantly cut the amount of money game companies and publishers get from me, which is pretty much the reverse of what they intended to happen. Nice work, dumbasses.
Except if the 0.5 kid was embedded in the 1 kid's chest, saying "Quaaaaiiidddd... start the reactor... freeeee Mars...." then it would okay. Well, it would still be a bit annoying, but you could always turn the music right up so you couldn't hear him.
Good points, although I suspect the biggest thing Microsoft needs to do to make inroads into the designer/photographer/artists market is make their new software run on OS X. No holy platform wars, that's just where the designer/photographer/artist market lives.
You can type, but you can't see the text of the email you're replying to, or the recipients. Admittedly these aren't vital if you're writing a brand new message to someone you know (you can fill in their email address when you get online, too) but if you want to refer to something they said, or check if your email should be worded for a particular group, it would help.
Is there a funky GMail offline mode that I haven't found yet?
I totally agree. Although they're throwing the word episodic around, Valve is doing expansion packs the same way they did with HL1. I'm beginning to wonder whether they're even capable of doing it (and this may not be such a bad thing). It requires a different way of development than what they're used to... fast, brutal and simplistic. Can't get that scripted event working in a week? It's gone. The main level only looks good instead of great? Tough cookies. Find a show-stopping bug an hour before release? Well... hmmm.
Valve seems like they're perfectionists, and it shows in their games. They polish, polish, polish, tweak, test and test again, and it shows. I'm not sure they would be able to deal with a hard and fast schedule.
I agree, although I suspect they might have a number of permanent seeder clients out on the net to maintain the swarm at any given moment. Otherwise someone might purchase "Gigli" and nobody would have it. I guess they're paying for those seeders, but it does seem a little unwholesome.
The other thing I was thinking, if each of these movies are DRMed, doesn't that mean each movie is unique, making them pointless to try and Bittorrent? Or is it more that the movie is encrypted with a given key, and your DRM player adds that key to its "keychain" so you get access to it?
Great, it's Darth Clippious.
It's even worse in countries like Australia, where a 20GB monthly download limit is at the upper limit of most plans. HD video streaming just doesn't work here, unless it's through an ISP's local content streaming system, which is usually quite limited and lame.
True, but HD-DVD is quite self explanatory. It's a DVD, but Hi-Definition. Blu-Ray sounds like the creature that killed Steve Irwin.
XP's driver support was much better than Vista, that's certainly true. This is probably because Vista has a new driver model, and XP was basically Windows 2000 Plus, which meant that the drivers were essentially the same. Therefore drivers for Vista are taking a while to appear in the wild, and upgrading on existing hardware is currently a bit of crapshoot. My recommendation to friends and coworkers is not to upgrade to Vista at all on their existing hardware at all - instead wait for their next hardware refresh when they can be assured (well, more likely at least) to have Vista-compatible hardware.
For enthusiasts and box builders, sites like Tech Report have useful articles like their Vista System Guide that includes notes on Vista support for various pieces of hardware in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. Interestingly the current video card king, the GeForce 8800, only has preliminary support for Vista. Updates are no doubt in the pipeline, but it's good info to know before going shopping.
And comments! Good coders always comment their code!
To be honest, I don't think the Zune is going to do well. The hardware is decent, but the OS is nerfed into insignificance. However, I'm sure people are already thinking about a custom Zune OS that allows you to:
...
1) Wirelessly share anything, with no restrictions
2) Use the Zune as a portable storage device (ie: drive letter on your PC)
3) Play Xvid/DivX/Theora/etc
4) Record from radio
5)
6) Profit!!
Let's fast forward to a time when this has been (well, apart from 6). Would people buy the Zune and use the new OS? What would Microsoft have to say about an indie (and probably OSS) project that takes their lame ass product and makes it awesome?