On 1): if you write a wrong unit test and then wrong code that passes it, this is hardly by chance.
On 2): this could apply to any kind of testing process: having a Test team could make Devs overconfident and make them check in any kind of crap (in fact it does) but this isn't a good reason scrap Testing teams
If it were such a thing as a perfect search engine given some words/description it would retrieve the sites on the topic (quite subjective concept) ordered by "relevancy" (highly subjective concept). Such a perfect engine would simply ignore changes made by SEOs for these are hardly making the content of a page more "relevant".
In this optic people exploiting google's deficiencies are just giving google the chance to make their algorithms better... and being better is how the become #1 after all.
I'm pretty sure (or at least I hope) that there is no place on earth were being smarter than Pagerank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagerank is considered a criminal offence and hence those jailed people should have gone a little beyond being smart.
In Switzerland the "rumored" (like in pre-order from someobscurereseller.com) price is 899 Swiss Francs:
899 CHF = 899 * 0,8001 USD = 720 USD
899 CHF = 899 * 0,6188 Euro = 556 Euro
Swiss VAT is 7.6%, stripping that down we have a price of 665$ (720 *.924) or 514 Euro (556 * 924). That is the markup is more than 11%. Even more is the price difference for the Wii: 399 CHF = 320 USD without VAT: 369 CHF = 297 USD, that is a markup of 47 USD or almost 20%.
I think that shipping and logistics don't really justify such a price difference and that the eventual price is a marketing decision based on the supposition that in Europe people are ready to pay more for gaming than in US. In other words shame on us;)
Putting people working together under the same roof is not just a matter of reducing the cost of working space by economies of scale.
Telecommuiting is a great way to increase flexibility and optimize the working time. E.g. Before commuting to work you can check and answer emails from your veranda over a coffee (while waiting for the gridlocks to dissolve).
But communication and social interactions still have some role to play in the working life of humans.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I firmly believe that if farmers can prosper in MMORPG the problem lies in the game. If the way to walk up the ladder in a game is to repeat menial and boring tasks over and over again maybe there's something wrong with the gameplay (IMHO).
The fact that in a world willing to be about heroism, the way do make it is the virtual equivalent of assembly line work, sounds dangerously like a bug or a loophole (IMHO).
Thus I think the real issue isn't about whether online America hates chinese farmers or not, but rather if farmers make sense at all in an online RPG (IMHO).
Patches for higher resolution don't sound so new... if you, for instance, plug a vga box into your xbox (e.g. x2vga) you will most probably have to patch by hand some executable (usually some default.xbe files) with an Hex editor in order to make a non negligible amount of games work in progressive scan. Your console must, of course, allow you to do that (he that hath ear to hear...). Basically such patches consist in changing the way the video mode is initializated (read this post for some further informations).
I suppose that the XB->XB360 patches do nothing but alter the calls of set video mode functions and add the initialization the anti aliasing stuff (which, as xbox doesn't perform any antialiasing, simply do not exist in the original game code).
I think xvid would give a better than needed quality (especially for the first series) and compression algorithms seem to work nicely on pyjamas.
My estimate is around 500Mb per hour, hence 32,638 minutes = 544 hours would fit in about 277Mb.
If I weren't an honest citizen I could even think that buying an external 500gb hd and downloading it from the internet would be far cheaper way, more confortable to browse (be serious you don't really want 200+ dvd) and I could look on the net for sanskrit subtitles when I feel I want it exoteric.
Apple is posting profits => Apple doesn't need to be saved.
Market share does matter only if you're from Redmond and/or your plotting to rule the world, "normal" corporation are just after money, and money is just what Apple is making.
is interesting that in the list pages Europe hit are marked with a french flag...
hey people at Siliconera France is a lovely and quite large country and of course it's in Europe, but it's far far far away from represent the entire continent; the EU flag might be more appropriated : )
Our hardware cycles are different to what the games business is used to and our strategy is clearly to have more devices
N-Gage is primarily a cell phone, Nokia renew its whole line of cell phones as often as many change theirs socks, so a new versione of N-Gage isn't so unlikely to be expected quite soon, i.e. N-Gage is avout to become obsolete.
Does it seems quite unfair to early adopters? I suppose that cell phone users are used to that.
What is shipped with the camera is more a demo than a game, but eye toy groove is for instance pretty much funnier... some sort of Dance Dance Revolution but with the big plus your neighbour won't make voodoo rituals against you because theirs ceiling lamps tremble whenever you play ; )
I have to agree, it was a little too large... actually it was no more "portable" than the portable dreamcast, but well this is really an example of exotic hardware;-)
It's possibly a cultural issue; gaming still be considered as somthing childish and/or really geekish, at least in Europa, particularly when drums, maracas or carpetlike pads are involved;
so how many of your friends nodded their heads when they saw your gadgets... and maybe right after they began a gaming spree that lasted until you chased them out of your home.
... 2006 it just 2 years away, and it's not really likely that Nintendo and Microsoft can get some new hardware out and make a real breakthrough in a such relatively short time.
The only unknown is what online console gaming will be in two years... till now isn't really much more than a buzzworld in the mouth of the marketing people... celebrate the millionth customer of XBox live while sony is shipping the 70millionth ps2 it's just a proof you don't play in the same league:-)
OK I'm not american and I don't live in America, so all this election circus it's just entertainement for me;
well maybe it's just because I don't know enough about US politics, but I could even think that sen. Lieberman is doing his crusade against violence in videogames (he started yelling against Mortal Kombat AFAIK) just because 1) to be against violence always sells, 2) people who play videogames are usually young and they can't vote (I know there are plenty of grown up videogamers around, myself for instance, but videogaming still considered as something childish).
The shares were selling for $28.50 at the close of regular trading on Tuesday
...the company had 4,577,761 shares
$28.5/stock and 4.5M stocks, that means some 140M$ paper... not that bad, but still far away from something that make you believable if you want to go after sony, M$ and Big N... and the fact that we're talking about financial statement but so far no games's screenshot is available reminds me of the good ol' times.... I still waiting for the flare one;-)
analysts look at the potential profits of a cross-platform Sunshine, Kart, Metroid or Wind Waker -- and note that the profit margin for Nintendo would be much much higher.
The brand of Nintendo is so strong because of the hardware, and this hype surrounding every single little stuff Nintendo does comes from the role of hardware maker big N plays.
I mean if Nintendo says there's something new coming next year rumors start spreading instantaniously, if for instance Capcom tries something like that reactions would be more like "shut up till frigging resident evil vs. x-man it's on the shelves".
So in to the long run Mario and Zelda would stay, but without the bandwagon effect titles like Pikmin and Metroid (that actually was something totally fogotten for a whole decade) would surely suffer.
The total 2002 share of EA is wrong, otherwise how could it be that a more than a billion $ sales (1'021'832'000$) correspond to 8.6%, or 0.2% less than what the 483 millions of Nintendo do... I suppose that someone made some copy/past mistakes... the right figure should be 18.6% (=483/1000*8.8%)
It's a open vs. close system issue... historycally open system always won... but I don't see why in the future should it have just an online console, today the market is large enough to allow more systems to attain the critical mass.
Moreover there's no need to be number one to survive and even flourish; afaik Burger King and Pepsi are all but about to go out of businness, and their chances to become #1 are just marginally higher than zero.
It looks like the businnes idea of the former CEG was to be the link between game publishers and developpers...
By outsourcing game production to professionals at CEG, game publishers could relieve themselves of the production process and focus on sales, distribution and marketing.
well if publishers give up the control of the content and the quality of the game they turn themselves into merely box distribution companies, and eventually they'll disappear the very first day after the game distribution channels will really go on line... so why the hell should the publishers be willing to give away the part of their businness with the highest added value?
Slashdot Mirror
On 1): if you write a wrong unit test and then wrong code that passes it, this is hardly by chance. On 2): this could apply to any kind of testing process: having a Test team could make Devs overconfident and make them check in any kind of crap (in fact it does) but this isn't a good reason scrap Testing teams
If it were such a thing as a perfect search engine given some words/description it would retrieve the sites on the topic (quite subjective concept) ordered by "relevancy" (highly subjective concept). Such a perfect engine would simply ignore changes made by SEOs for these are hardly making the content of a page more "relevant".
In this optic people exploiting google's deficiencies are just giving google the chance to make their algorithms better... and being better is how the become #1 after all.
I'm pretty sure (or at least I hope) that there is no place on earth were being smarter than Pagerank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagerank is considered a criminal offence and hence those jailed people should have gone a little beyond being smart.
In Switzerland the "rumored" (like in pre-order from someobscurereseller.com) price is 899 Swiss Francs:
.924) or 514 Euro (556 * 924). That is the markup is more than 11%. Even more is the price difference for the Wii: 399 CHF = 320 USD without VAT: 369 CHF = 297 USD, that is a markup of 47 USD or almost 20%.
;)
899 CHF = 899 * 0,8001 USD = 720 USD
899 CHF = 899 * 0,6188 Euro = 556 Euro
Swiss VAT is 7.6%, stripping that down we have a price of 665$ (720 *
I think that shipping and logistics don't really justify such a price difference and that the eventual price is a marketing decision based on the supposition that in Europe people are ready to pay more for gaming than in US. In other words shame on us
Putting people working together under the same roof is not just a matter of reducing the cost of working space by economies of scale. Telecommuiting is a great way to increase flexibility and optimize the working time. E.g. Before commuting to work you can check and answer emails from your veranda over a coffee (while waiting for the gridlocks to dissolve). But communication and social interactions still have some role to play in the working life of humans.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I firmly believe that if farmers can prosper in MMORPG the problem lies in the game. If the way to walk up the ladder in a game is to repeat menial and boring tasks over and over again maybe there's something wrong with the gameplay (IMHO).
The fact that in a world willing to be about heroism, the way do make it is the virtual equivalent of assembly line work, sounds dangerously like a bug or a loophole (IMHO).
Thus I think the real issue isn't about whether online America hates chinese farmers or not, but rather if farmers make sense at all in an online RPG (IMHO).
Patches for higher resolution don't sound so new... if you, for instance, plug a vga box into your xbox (e.g. x2vga) you will most probably have to patch by hand some executable (usually some default.xbe files) with an Hex editor in order to make a non negligible amount of games work in progressive scan. Your console must, of course, allow you to do that (he that hath ear to hear...). Basically such patches consist in changing the way the video mode is initializated (read this post for some further informations).
I suppose that the XB->XB360 patches do nothing but alter the calls of set video mode functions and add the initialization the anti aliasing stuff (which, as xbox doesn't perform any antialiasing, simply do not exist in the original game code).
I think xvid would give a better than needed quality (especially for the first series) and compression algorithms seem to work nicely on pyjamas. My estimate is around 500Mb per hour, hence 32,638 minutes = 544 hours would fit in about 277Mb.
If I weren't an honest citizen I could even think that buying an external 500gb hd and downloading it from the internet would be far cheaper way, more confortable to browse (be serious you don't really want 200+ dvd) and I could look on the net for sanskrit subtitles when I feel I want it exoteric.
If just I weren't...
If theaters/projectors/seats would be counted as movie hardware the movie industry figure would be even bigger.
The Skinheads have taken Madonna hostage. Take the law into your own hands!
good ol' Vigilante
Apple is posting profits => Apple doesn't need to be saved.
Market share does matter only if you're from Redmond and/or your plotting to rule the world, "normal" corporation are just after money, and money is just what Apple is making.
is interesting that in the list pages Europe hit are marked with a french flag...
hey people at Siliconera France is a lovely and quite large country and of course it's in Europe, but it's far far far away from represent the entire continent; the EU flag might be more appropriated : )
N-Gage is primarily a cell phone, Nokia renew its whole line of cell phones as often as many change theirs socks, so a new versione of N-Gage isn't so unlikely to be expected quite soon, i.e. N-Gage is avout to become obsolete.
Does it seems quite unfair to early adopters? I suppose that cell phone users are used to that.
What is shipped with the camera is more a demo than a game, but eye toy groove is for instance pretty much funnier... some sort of Dance Dance Revolution but with the big plus your neighbour won't make voodoo rituals against you because theirs ceiling lamps tremble whenever you play ; )
I have to agree, it was a little too large... actually it was no more "portable" than the portable dreamcast, but well this is really an example of exotic hardware ;-)
It's possibly a cultural issue; gaming still be considered as somthing childish and/or really geekish, at least in Europa, particularly when drums, maracas or carpetlike pads are involved;
so how many of your friends nodded their heads when they saw your gadgets... and maybe right after they began a gaming spree that lasted until you chased them out of your home.
... 2006 it just 2 years away, and it's not really likely that Nintendo and Microsoft can get some new hardware out and make a real breakthrough in a such relatively short time.
:-)
The only unknown is what online console gaming will be in two years... till now isn't really much more than a buzzworld in the mouth of the marketing people... celebrate the millionth customer of XBox live while sony is shipping the 70millionth ps2 it's just a proof you don't play in the same league
sorry about the link... wrong copy paste I suppose ;-)
it shoud have been this one, I beg your pardon.
it seems that among many other emulators a port of MAME is in progress, altough it looks like now just some very old games run.
OK I'm not american and I don't live in America, so all this election circus it's just entertainement for me;
well maybe it's just because I don't know enough about US politics, but I could even think that sen. Lieberman is doing his crusade against violence in videogames (he started yelling against Mortal Kombat AFAIK) just because 1) to be against violence always sells, 2) people who play videogames are usually young and they can't vote (I know there are plenty of grown up videogamers around, myself for instance, but videogaming still considered as something childish).
I mean if Nintendo says there's something new coming next year rumors start spreading instantaniously, if for instance Capcom tries something like that reactions would be more like "shut up till frigging resident evil vs. x-man it's on the shelves".
So in to the long run Mario and Zelda would stay, but without the bandwagon effect titles like Pikmin and Metroid (that actually was something totally fogotten for a whole decade) would surely suffer.
The total 2002 share of EA is wrong, otherwise how could it be that a more than a billion $ sales (1'021'832'000$) correspond to 8.6%, or 0.2% less than what the 483 millions of Nintendo do... I suppose that someone made some copy/past mistakes... the right figure should be 18.6% (=483/1000*8.8%)
It's a open vs. close system issue... historycally open system always won... but I don't see why in the future should it have just an online console, today the market is large enough to allow more systems to attain the critical mass.
Moreover there's no need to be number one to survive and even flourish; afaik Burger King and Pepsi are all but about to go out of businness, and their chances to become #1 are just marginally higher than zero.