Is anybody else driven nuts by the fact that the camera doesn't show his slides? He keeps talking to them and they sound real interesting, but the camera stays fixed on his face for the entire time it's not in game mode.
Hmm, this game sounds like Evolutionay propaganda to me. I demand that the game include a "truth" mode where your civilization simply appears as fully developed humans (minus one rib in the male model) and goes from there.:)
Actually, that would be a clever little joke on the creator's part. Perhaps include a "-dogma" commandline switch that does just that. If they really wanted to get some reactionary types mad, they could even include various modes for all of the crazy creation myths from various world religions.
From the looks of it, they're just releasing a chip that is 40% less of a dog than the existing chip. Still not that great. It is a bit more power efficent than a Pentium-M, but you really pay for that in the performance. Not a terribly exciting chip IMHO, but one that will probably find some use in set-top appliances and the like.
I wish someone would have posted a bunch of links to that forum for torrents of games that _are_ protected by Starforce. They aren't hard to find. This was little more than a scare tactic.
I read tons of books back in college on the bus (often with direct sunlight coming in) on my Palm IIIe. I know most people shun passive mono displays these days, but for something like an ebook they're really all you need.
Even on Analog on a high quality display it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference from your normal no-name cable and a Monster cable that is 8x as expensive. Monster cables are a rip off.
Yeah, one thing I've discovered about 2000 and XP is that they are absolutely terrible about the way they handle the pagefile. In particular, they love to keep swapping out parts of running applications to make room for applications you might want to start later. This is why you can have 1GB of memory, open up Mozilla browse a bit, and minimize it, and when you go to unminimize it the application takes 3 minutes to swap back in, despite the fact that you weren't anywhere near expending your physical memory. Disabling (or reducing to 2MB) the pagefile can make the OS perform _much_ better, even if it does complain everytime you start the machine.
Microsoft claims they're going to fix that in Vista, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Unless you have some batshit insane game developer that spawns a new thread for every bullet or something, I doubt "5x as many instructions to spawn a process" is going to matter much for games. Even if they are relatively expensive, it's absolutely nothing compared to the amount of CPU most games suck down for AI and whatnot.
VHS has been dead for several years now. People are just politely ignoring the stench of decay from the VHS section of the store, indeed if it even exists anymore.
It's probably too late to change the type of drive though. In fact "wait and see" seems really self destructive for a product that is supposed to be the big shoehorn for the technology.
Besides, being proprietary and overpriced has never stopped Sony before. Does anybody still have a Memory Stick or two somewhere?
I'm reasonably certain that players for either format will support regular DVD discs as well. Nobody is that dumb.
In the end, this looks like it might turn out like the DVD-R/DVD+R battle. General consumer confusion and annoyance until everybody just goes out and builds dual format hardware.
Eh, having a store in every mall isn't a big deal for me when I'm looking to buy resistors. I don't think I'd really mind driving a few extra miles, especially since it wouldn't be very often. Plus: Radio Shack has crummy hours, unlike most of the big box stores.
My biggest complaint is that they do such a half assed job at filling their niche. They have like 6 different kinds of LEDs, maybe a dozen different switches, and just generally spotty selection. It's like going to a hardware store and discovering that they only carry nuts in full 1/4" increments, and only have 8 different kinds of bolts, and if you want a wingnut you're completely out of luck.
I think that limitation was removed in one of the updates. I forget though. When the drive in my Tivo died (after only 2 years, piece of crap drive!), 120GB was the sweet spot for drives at the time and that's what I used. Lucky thing I had the backup image handy.
One thing I reccomend for anybody who gets a TiVo is to wait until their warentee expires (doesn't take very long) and then crack the case and make a backup image of their hard drive. The drives will fail eventually and if you don't have a backup it's a lot harder to fix. If you have a backup, you can just run down to your local CompUSA or whatever and pick up just about any old ATA HDD, install your backup image, and put it in the TiVo.
I like to think of it this way: The money you put down on the game is for the inital development costs. The monthly fee pays for the content upgrades. Now there is no way to say "I want to keep playing but I don't want any more upgrades" but that's the nature of the beast. It'd be nearly impossible to cater to that market due to technical reasons.
Also, the game didn't cost $50 up front, rather it cost $35 because it includes one month of gameplay. $35 for a new PC game is cheap.
I don't know about the Radio Shacks near where you live, but the back of mine stil has this large tool-cabinet like thing that is filled with a wide (but not deep) assortment of parts. It is frustrating that they'll only carry maybe 6 different kinds of switches, and anything too obscure is right out, but for basic easy stuff they're still there. Granted, you'd better know what you're looking for because the salesdrone is about as useful as a BestBuy or Circuit City one. You definatly pay a premium too, but compared to buying that $0.30 part online and paying $2 shipping, even 100% markup can be a good deal.
It's a shame that I have to go online so much for parts these days. Radio Shack doesn't even carry any wire smaller than 24 gauge, and even the 24 gauge is in an inconvienent form (a spool of security system wire--which is a bundle with 2 wires in it IIRC).
It would be so easy for someplace like Best Buy or Circuit City to crush them. All they'd have to do is convert one aisle into a larger/better version of the back of a Radio Shack and suddenly the Shack would have no niche at all.
Heh, I never actually got around to playing that, I just watched a guy who had it. He summoned in just about every battle and ignored the junction system because he "didn't want to farm spells forever".
In the long run it would have probably saved him a lot of time despite being tedious. He was one of those guys who played for the storyline though, and hated just mashing things to level up.
Wow, do you mean you actually liked sitting through the summon animations for the umpteenth time in VIII? You're the first person I've found who does.
Re:Apparently their "prime" was after conception?
on
Cut Down In Their Prime
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· Score: 3, Informative
The official (or even semi-official) reasons aren't always the real reasons. "Financial Concerns" is often a codeword for "the developers aren't getting it done and we're not wasting any more money on this project".
One reason I would have liked to have seen for about half of those games: "It was turning into yet another also-ran FPS, we wanted to work on something unique". The Bab5 game is a real loss though, although it looks like it would have been Wing Commander with different actors, I think it could have done really well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Some random guy" probably has a name like "GM_Bob" though, most people will respond when a GM sends them a quick "are you awake?" message.
Is anybody else driven nuts by the fact that the camera doesn't show his slides? He keeps talking to them and they sound real interesting, but the camera stays fixed on his face for the entire time it's not in game mode.
Hmm, this game sounds like Evolutionay propaganda to me. I demand that the game include a "truth" mode where your civilization simply appears as fully developed humans (minus one rib in the male model) and goes from there. :)
Actually, that would be a clever little joke on the creator's part. Perhaps include a "-dogma" commandline switch that does just that. If they really wanted to get some reactionary types mad, they could even include various modes for all of the crazy creation myths from various world religions.
Unless you have a cycle hungry database to run on the same server of course.
From the looks of it, they're just releasing a chip that is 40% less of a dog than the existing chip. Still not that great. It is a bit more power efficent than a Pentium-M, but you really pay for that in the performance. Not a terribly exciting chip IMHO, but one that will probably find some use in set-top appliances and the like.
To be honest, I had to look up Skype on google to find out what it was. It's not a good name either.
I wish someone would have posted a bunch of links to that forum for torrents of games that _are_ protected by Starforce. They aren't hard to find. This was little more than a scare tactic.
Hey, at least it's a real unit. They could have reported it in Libraries of Congress or some other useless unit.
I read tons of books back in college on the bus (often with direct sunlight coming in) on my Palm IIIe. I know most people shun passive mono displays these days, but for something like an ebook they're really all you need.
Even on Analog on a high quality display it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference from your normal no-name cable and a Monster cable that is 8x as expensive. Monster cables are a rip off.
Yeah, one thing I've discovered about 2000 and XP is that they are absolutely terrible about the way they handle the pagefile. In particular, they love to keep swapping out parts of running applications to make room for applications you might want to start later. This is why you can have 1GB of memory, open up Mozilla browse a bit, and minimize it, and when you go to unminimize it the application takes 3 minutes to swap back in, despite the fact that you weren't anywhere near expending your physical memory. Disabling (or reducing to 2MB) the pagefile can make the OS perform _much_ better, even if it does complain everytime you start the machine.
Microsoft claims they're going to fix that in Vista, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Unless you have some batshit insane game developer that spawns a new thread for every bullet or something, I doubt "5x as many instructions to spawn a process" is going to matter much for games. Even if they are relatively expensive, it's absolutely nothing compared to the amount of CPU most games suck down for AI and whatnot.
They could do what most companies do: Just use it anyway and then laugh at the puny legal efforts from the open source community.
VHS has been dead for several years now. People are just politely ignoring the stench of decay from the VHS section of the store, indeed if it even exists anymore.
It's probably too late to change the type of drive though. In fact "wait and see" seems really self destructive for a product that is supposed to be the big shoehorn for the technology.
Besides, being proprietary and overpriced has never stopped Sony before. Does anybody still have a Memory Stick or two somewhere?
I'm reasonably certain that players for either format will support regular DVD discs as well. Nobody is that dumb.
In the end, this looks like it might turn out like the DVD-R/DVD+R battle. General consumer confusion and annoyance until everybody just goes out and builds dual format hardware.
I'm more worried about $55 component cables. Was he pushing "Monster" cables or something?
Eh, having a store in every mall isn't a big deal for me when I'm looking to buy resistors. I don't think I'd really mind driving a few extra miles, especially since it wouldn't be very often. Plus: Radio Shack has crummy hours, unlike most of the big box stores.
My biggest complaint is that they do such a half assed job at filling their niche. They have like 6 different kinds of LEDs, maybe a dozen different switches, and just generally spotty selection. It's like going to a hardware store and discovering that they only carry nuts in full 1/4" increments, and only have 8 different kinds of bolts, and if you want a wingnut you're completely out of luck.
I think that limitation was removed in one of the updates. I forget though. When the drive in my Tivo died (after only 2 years, piece of crap drive!), 120GB was the sweet spot for drives at the time and that's what I used. Lucky thing I had the backup image handy.
One thing I reccomend for anybody who gets a TiVo is to wait until their warentee expires (doesn't take very long) and then crack the case and make a backup image of their hard drive. The drives will fail eventually and if you don't have a backup it's a lot harder to fix. If you have a backup, you can just run down to your local CompUSA or whatever and pick up just about any old ATA HDD, install your backup image, and put it in the TiVo.
I like to think of it this way: The money you put down on the game is for the inital development costs. The monthly fee pays for the content upgrades. Now there is no way to say "I want to keep playing but I don't want any more upgrades" but that's the nature of the beast. It'd be nearly impossible to cater to that market due to technical reasons.
Also, the game didn't cost $50 up front, rather it cost $35 because it includes one month of gameplay. $35 for a new PC game is cheap.
I don't know about the Radio Shacks near where you live, but the back of mine stil has this large tool-cabinet like thing that is filled with a wide (but not deep) assortment of parts. It is frustrating that they'll only carry maybe 6 different kinds of switches, and anything too obscure is right out, but for basic easy stuff they're still there. Granted, you'd better know what you're looking for because the salesdrone is about as useful as a BestBuy or Circuit City one. You definatly pay a premium too, but compared to buying that $0.30 part online and paying $2 shipping, even 100% markup can be a good deal.
It's a shame that I have to go online so much for parts these days. Radio Shack doesn't even carry any wire smaller than 24 gauge, and even the 24 gauge is in an inconvienent form (a spool of security system wire--which is a bundle with 2 wires in it IIRC).
It would be so easy for someplace like Best Buy or Circuit City to crush them. All they'd have to do is convert one aisle into a larger/better version of the back of a Radio Shack and suddenly the Shack would have no niche at all.
Heh, I never actually got around to playing that, I just watched a guy who had it. He summoned in just about every battle and ignored the junction system because he "didn't want to farm spells forever".
In the long run it would have probably saved him a lot of time despite being tedious. He was one of those guys who played for the storyline though, and hated just mashing things to level up.
Wow, do you mean you actually liked sitting through the summon animations for the umpteenth time in VIII? You're the first person I've found who does.
The official (or even semi-official) reasons aren't always the real reasons. "Financial Concerns" is often a codeword for "the developers aren't getting it done and we're not wasting any more money on this project".
One reason I would have liked to have seen for about half of those games: "It was turning into yet another also-ran FPS, we wanted to work on something unique". The Bab5 game is a real loss though, although it looks like it would have been Wing Commander with different actors, I think it could have done really well.