I do the same thing as you: I find the incredible mass of games available for the DS confusing, and I find that reviews often don't reflect my personal tasts.
I like having the R4 because I can download copies of the games I am interested in, and check if the game is good before I toss-in my money. I've already bought one game this way, and have another on my list to buy (the new Castlevania), because it's an awesome game. I then continue to play the copies on my R4 because it's convenient to never have to switch cartridges.
In addition, the documentation and toolset are so fleshed-out that I'm also programming some of my own homebrew. The R4 is the best $20 I've ever spent.
Same here. Even at the 9th hour, my brain is already turned to mush. That's why I'm happy-as-hell that my employer offers an OPTIONAL 9/80 work week. The people who do take advantage enjoy it, and I enjoy those Fridays because nobody is here to bug me:)
This isn't as bad as it sounds. I've played all the Final Fantasy games released for NES/SNES, and of the three not released in the US, only one is passingly decent (FF3).
FF2: It seemed like I was always going back to the same castle time-after-time whenever a quest was complete, to get my next quest. BORING. The "use it or lose it" stats system was also incedibly annoying, because Square hadn't embraced useful batttle concepts like GUARD - imagine your wizard LOSING intelligence because they (worthlessly) hacked their dagger at a monster in-battle. You're constantly fighting to keep characters on the right stats path, because GAINING stas in one area means you LOSE stats in another.
FF5: same engine as FF4, but the characters and storyline sucked. The storyline was too predictable, and the character personalities were paper-thin. The game writers were too pussified to even "kill" major party members - when the one major party member DOES die (obvious from miles away), his daughter MAGICALLY gains his stats and powers, and joins the party. There is absolutely no plot fallout, and absolutely no justification for his death, other than finishing-off the last of the "old" Dawn Warriors.
Oh yeah, the FORCED job system in this game sucks balls. I never understood why the "non-job" character class existed at all - it had no stats bonus, and room for TWO custom battle controls. Your character was more capable in a beefy job class.
It's better to eat a little bit of everything. Even if you consume fatty foodas and sugar, if you consume them in reasonable quantities, you can still lead a healthy life and maintain weight.
Delaware does the same thing for Marylanders - they have slot machines to entice you to make the drive, and tax-free shopping to get you to spend more money. It's especally attractive to those in Baltimore, because the drive is only an hour and a half.
Nothing wrong with attracting out-of-state shoppers. The little states have to pay the bills too!
There's a congressional mandate that cable companies have to continue to provide NTSC over their system until 2012. After that, you'll need digital cable service, or a converter box.
They will stop broadcasting analog TV as soon as they can, because it takes-up valuable spectrum. With h.264, the same 6 MHz channel required for every NTSC analog channel can house several standard-definition digital channels, or two to three high-definition digital channels.
Ahh, no, we say 'license plate.' I can't speak for people in the Midwest, but everywhere I've lived/visited (West Coast, Texas, Bible Belt, East Coast), it's a 'license plate' in casual conversation.
They only call it a 'tag' in official channels because the term "Tag & Title" rolls off the tounge better than "Plate & Title." 'Tag' is a creation of salesmen and government bureaucrats.
Yup, I bought a BH6 back in college, and was impressed with it. I got my Celeron 300a to run at 450 MHz on 2.2v. In fact, the reason people didn't buy the (very stable) ASUS P2-B for overclocking was because the board didn't offer voltage adjustment!
But beyond overclocking, the board had issues. The ISA implementation was crap: at the time I had an ISA network card (worked fine in my previous system), and it refused to work on the BH6 unless I put Windows to sleep, and then woke it up. This was far too much work just to connect to a newtwork, so I had to shell-out for a new PCI card (expensive back then).
I did eventually purchase more Abit boards, but I noticed the build quality was going downhill. Today, I only use ASUS boards, because nobody else offers the same build quality.
I hate noisy fans too, so for years I've simply been buying the card and replacing the cooler. Got a vf700 for my GeForce 6600GT, and a vf900 for my 7900GT (that fan was at %100 all the time!). But unfortunately, that voids the warranty of the card.
I recently purchased an HD 4850, and I've tried using the stock fan, and here is my impressions: with a properly-ventilated case, the idle fan speed of the 4850 is %10 or less, which is almost inaudible. It gets a bit noisier in the summer when the house temperature sometime tops 27C, and even though this accounts for only a few months out of the year, I'm still considering a third-party heatsink.
That said, if you want similar performance with much less idle power consumption, look to the HD 4830: it uses less than half the power of the 4850 at idle, so the fan never spins-up.
You don't seem to understand the Cell's architecture at all.
The cell has 7 SPEs, but one is reserved for the Hypervisor.
Second, each SPE can perform two 128-bit vector operations per-cycle, so long as you do not use double-precision. That's EIGHT 32-bit float operations per SPE, per cycle, excluding the overhead of store operations.
When you do the math, the real performance for a single Cell is between 24 and 48 FLOP per cycle, single-percision (I'd put the number closer to 24). The double-precision performance is about 1/10 the above, as it is not pipelined.
Sure, current LED arrays have problems with lighting uniformity, but from experience, I can say the exact same thing of early flourescent backlighting (late 90s). It's only a matter of time before we can toss the inefficient flourescent backlighting of current LCDs, and move-on to something much better.
Russia's still too unstable to make it as an economic superpower.
Absolutely. After 15 years of pseudo-democracy, Russia still has some of the highest rates of corruption, and very little infarstructure improvement. The country survives almost exclusively on it's energy exports, which have been hit pretty hard lately.
Hell, when my mother did a tour recently in Eastern Europe and Russia, the only place she was told not to drink the water was in the massive city of St. Petersburg. That's hardly a sign of an impending world economic power, if you can't even keep disease out of your water supply in one of your largest cities.
There's nothing except your own priorities from stopping you doing fun stuff as a hobby at home! I'm sure you could pick up a cheap FPGA board if that's your interest, and it's easy to do software development using free tools under both Linux and Windows.
Yes, the boards are cheap, and the tools are free, but the test equipment is not. When you work with real hardware, it becomes an issue.
I recently took a class from John's Hopkins on FPGA VHDL development, and we used inexpensive project boards. The early part of the class was interesting, and since all operations stayed on the board, I could resolve all issues with the simulator, testbench and/or debug outputs. But as the projects got more complicated, we started interfacing with real hardware, and I had a lot more trouble.
Our final project was to interface with a PS/2 keyboard and VGA monitor and provide a text-based calculator. I ended-up with several hardware problems because (1) I misinterpreted the specs on the PS/2 keyboard, and didn't handle the scan codes, and (2) my only CRT monitor wouldn't handle my to-spec VGA timings. The scan code problem would have been obvious if I had an oscilliscope, and the CRT monitor problem just points to me not having enough test hardware options available.
If you stay on-chip, you can fool around with just the FPGA board. But if you interface with anything, prepare to shell-out for real test equipment, or else pull your hair out.
A lot of songs have recently been censored. The one that bothers me the most is:
Alice in Chains - "Man in the Box"
Come on people! He's saying "shit," but it's not all that clear, so for over a decade nobody cared. The sad fact is, because Lane Staley is dead (and because he wouldn't do it anyway), they have a very poor voiceover to try to make "shit" sound like "shift" or "spit." Whenever I hear that song on the radio today (and they still play it, believe me), I now switch the channel, because it sounds like...shit.
It got worse in Ep. 2 when SHE forced you on a major side quest. In HL1, you could kneecap a scientist who got in your way and just keep going. In Ep. 2, you had to save the life of an NPC. Even on the side quest they gave you a sidekick (the Vort).
Yeah, I'm really sick of being dependent on game "AI" for my own survival/success in a game. HL1 was perfect: you were the only one who HAD to survive. You could make your life easier by helping others (escort a scientist who opens a door to goodies, keep a guard alive so you can take advantage of his unlimited ammo), but you were the only one who mattered in the end.
In HL2, I got annoyed at the jail levels because I put my life in the hands of those annoying sentry guns. Every time I play through HL2, I enjoy the first half of the game, and stop playing at the jail with the sentry guns. The damn guns are such poor shots, and so easy to knock-over, I'm usually stuck taking the entire army on with my submachinegun.
For the episodes, this got even worse. I almost broke my keyboard in frustration when I tried to save stupid Alyx from bloody Antlion death. She would just stand there shooting the damn things even when we needed to keep moving, and I failed if she died. Nope, didn't finish that game either.
I would have felt really shafted after buying the Orange Box, had it not been for Portal and TF2. Portal is closer in feel to the original Half-Life than any of the sequels, and TF2 is just plain fun.
The Super NES made MIDI sound fantastic! The sound chip they used allowed samples to be used, and allowed for filtering features like reverb, to make the music more life-like.
Today's consoles have MIDI chipsets that put the SNES to shame! The Wii and Gamecube make use of Midi for all sorts of musical soundtracks - even the music in Twilight Princess is entirelly MIDI with quality samples and high-resolution DSP effects.
If the MIDI tracks in this game sound like crap, it's not the fault of the hardware; it's the fault of the writers, who didn't take advantage of the features available. The fact is, when done correclty, MIDI sounds great!
Well if you're trasmitting digital without any sort of error correction, say SPDIF over copper, then the quality of the cable does matter. Noise WILL cause a change in the received data, and your equipment won't know any better.
Yeah. Get back to me when you find a DATA-GRADE cable that's so crappy it can't transmit data at 1.5 Mbps. I think you'd have to fall back to doorbell wiring and get yourself some Cat 1.
Of course Intel's specs are to be believed. If those TDP numbers weren't representative, nobody could do business with them; manufacturers who buy Intel parts have to design their systems with power dissipation in-mind. Nvidia has recently earned the ire of the industry with their new 9300/9400 chipsets for this very reason.
I wouldn't hold my breath on Intel's PowerVR graphics on-board Polubso (GMA500). According to this review, it scores 405 3D marks...in 3dmark 2003. For comparison, The Eee PC 701 scores 364 stock, and 457 with a slight overclock (at that speed, the CPUs are evenly-matched).
While it is an improvement in terms of power consumption, the performance is not improved, and you do sacrifice a few other things to reach such low power: Polubso can only handle 1GB ram, and the GMA500 has a maximum resolution of 1366x768.
XP didn't come with a firewall. You had to upgrade to SP2 (IIRC) to get the Windows firewall. Granted, if you bought XP after SP2 was released you'd have the firewall, otherwise you can potentially get infected very quickly... way before you get the chance to download SP2 and enable the firewall.
Not quite true. Windows XP came with a firewall. It was not enabled by default until Service Pack 2, and the settings were buried. Service Pack 2 changed the firewall configuration system, and had the system bug you about various security settings, including antivirus and firewall.
Yeah, the firewall that came with XP sucked, but it was there.
And I find it hilarious: Intel consistently makes better mobile CPUs definitely but everything else they do in mobile space reeks to high heaven. To this day its nearly impossible to buy a Atom netbook without a Intel GMA based chipset: thats a 2 watt cpu and a 12-25 watt chipset. If you buy a normal laptop, its probably a 45w or 35w chip, even though the Pxx00 series is 25w and almost the same price, and again it comes with an absolutely worthless video card that sucks down >10 watts.
Not true at all, where have you been reading this bullshit? The Intel 945G Mobile is the standard chipset used by netbooks, and has a TDP of between 5-7w. The Mobile 945GSE used by the Asus netbooks has a TDP of only 6w. You don't really think they'd have the power in one of those tiny nettops to power a desktop chipset for 2+ hours, do you?
The chipset you are thinking of is the craptastic 945GC, which is the leftovers remaining after Intel cherry-picks the mobile versions. The only reason Intel uses these on their Atom motherboards is because the boards are designed for MINIMUM COST for developing markets, not minimum power. Since the 945GC is practically free to use (leftovers), Intel can sell the whole board + Atom for $70.
There's nothing preventing other manufacturers from releasing an Atom motherboard with a mobile chipset, aside from cost...but cost is a strong factor in designs. Typically, if they go to that kind of trouble to design for low power, they design to tighter specs and sell the board to the embedded market for $300+. In the consumer DESKTOP market, most people don't care about the difference between 20w and 40w, so the ideal board for you will never be sold.
I have to agree, Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda in a long time that I didn't finish.
Two things that really irked me:
1. There was no obvious forward progression. I kept having to go back to the same damn dungeon too many times to count, and every time it was the same dungeon with a few more levels accessable, and a clock to annoy me. No, I don't mind going back to a dungeon again if say a large event occured in-game that changed everything. But Hourglass is just repetitive for the sake of making the game seem longer.
ADDENTUM: if you're going to make a game THIS damn repetitive, do us gamers a favor and put in a quest log. If I so much as put the game down for a week, I had no freaking idea where I needed to go next.
2. The touch screen control is a bad idea for a top-down Zelda game, PERIOD. The problem is, some items benefitted from the interface (boomerang, bow and arrows) while others suffered (swordplay, movement), but overall the gameplay got worse. I say leave in the drawing gimmicks, and give me back my buttons.
I can believe he isn't a lawyer. Most laywers would add a tagline to a post like that claiming this should "not be considered legal advice." My brother-in-law (who is a lawyer) does that every time we discuss anything legal, since he isn't licensed in my state.
There is a justification for this. They created the "Hazard Course" as a way to get new players used to playing 3D games with the mouse (and other complex movements like the long jump and the duck jump). But it also provided a foundation for Gordon's skills: "employees" have to pass the Hazard Course in order to be certified for the hazard suit.
I think anyone in real life who could shoot all the targets on the last leg of the hazard course could shoot as straight as Gordon. In fact, I have my love of FPG games to thank for my impressive skest shooting skills (no, I'm not kidding, twitch amiming is what I'm best at).
Slashdot Mirror
I do the same thing as you: I find the incredible mass of games available for the DS confusing, and I find that reviews often don't reflect my personal tasts.
I like having the R4 because I can download copies of the games I am interested in, and check if the game is good before I toss-in my money. I've already bought one game this way, and have another on my list to buy (the new Castlevania), because it's an awesome game. I then continue to play the copies on my R4 because it's convenient to never have to switch cartridges.
In addition, the documentation and toolset are so fleshed-out that I'm also programming some of my own homebrew. The R4 is the best $20 I've ever spent.
Same here. Even at the 9th hour, my brain is already turned to mush. That's why I'm happy-as-hell that my employer offers an OPTIONAL 9/80 work week. The people who do take advantage enjoy it, and I enjoy those Fridays because nobody is here to bug me :)
* Technically, it's not really #3 either.
This isn't as bad as it sounds. I've played all the Final Fantasy games released for NES/SNES, and of the three not released in the US, only one is passingly decent (FF3).
FF2: It seemed like I was always going back to the same castle time-after-time whenever a quest was complete, to get my next quest. BORING. The "use it or lose it" stats system was also incedibly annoying, because Square hadn't embraced useful batttle concepts like GUARD - imagine your wizard LOSING intelligence because they (worthlessly) hacked their dagger at a monster in-battle. You're constantly fighting to keep characters on the right stats path, because GAINING stas in one area means you LOSE stats in another.
FF5: same engine as FF4, but the characters and storyline sucked. The storyline was too predictable, and the character personalities were paper-thin. The game writers were too pussified to even "kill" major party members - when the one major party member DOES die (obvious from miles away), his daughter MAGICALLY gains his stats and powers, and joins the party. There is absolutely no plot fallout, and absolutely no justification for his death, other than finishing-off the last of the "old" Dawn Warriors.
Oh yeah, the FORCED job system in this game sucks balls. I never understood why the "non-job" character class existed at all - it had no stats bonus, and room for TWO custom battle controls. Your character was more capable in a beefy job class.
It's better to eat no fat.
If you eat no fat whatsoever, your body will have a fit. You must intake around %15-30 of your calories as fat to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
So let me re-phrease your comment:
It's better to eat a little bit of everything. Even if you consume fatty foodas and sugar, if you consume them in reasonable quantities, you can still lead a healthy life and maintain weight.
Delaware does the same thing for Marylanders - they have slot machines to entice you to make the drive, and tax-free shopping to get you to spend more money. It's especally attractive to those in Baltimore, because the drive is only an hour and a half.
Nothing wrong with attracting out-of-state shoppers. The little states have to pay the bills too!
There's a congressional mandate that cable companies have to continue to provide NTSC over their system until 2012. After that, you'll need digital cable service, or a converter box.
They will stop broadcasting analog TV as soon as they can, because it takes-up valuable spectrum. With h.264, the same 6 MHz channel required for every NTSC analog channel can house several standard-definition digital channels, or two to three high-definition digital channels.
license tag to our American friends
Ahh, no, we say 'license plate.' I can't speak for people in the Midwest, but everywhere I've lived/visited (West Coast, Texas, Bible Belt, East Coast), it's a 'license plate' in casual conversation.
They only call it a 'tag' in official channels because the term "Tag & Title" rolls off the tounge better than "Plate & Title." 'Tag' is a creation of salesmen and government bureaucrats.
Yup, I bought a BH6 back in college, and was impressed with it. I got my Celeron 300a to run at 450 MHz on 2.2v. In fact, the reason people didn't buy the (very stable) ASUS P2-B for overclocking was because the board didn't offer voltage adjustment!
But beyond overclocking, the board had issues. The ISA implementation was crap: at the time I had an ISA network card (worked fine in my previous system), and it refused to work on the BH6 unless I put Windows to sleep, and then woke it up. This was far too much work just to connect to a newtwork, so I had to shell-out for a new PCI card (expensive back then).
I did eventually purchase more Abit boards, but I noticed the build quality was going downhill. Today, I only use ASUS boards, because nobody else offers the same build quality.
I hate noisy fans too, so for years I've simply been buying the card and replacing the cooler. Got a vf700 for my GeForce 6600GT, and a vf900 for my 7900GT (that fan was at %100 all the time!). But unfortunately, that voids the warranty of the card.
I recently purchased an HD 4850, and I've tried using the stock fan, and here is my impressions: with a properly-ventilated case, the idle fan speed of the 4850 is %10 or less, which is almost inaudible. It gets a bit noisier in the summer when the house temperature sometime tops 27C, and even though this accounts for only a few months out of the year, I'm still considering a third-party heatsink.
That said, if you want similar performance with much less idle power consumption, look to the HD 4830: it uses less than half the power of the 4850 at idle, so the fan never spins-up.
You don't seem to understand the Cell's architecture at all.
The cell has 7 SPEs, but one is reserved for the Hypervisor.
Second, each SPE can perform two 128-bit vector operations per-cycle, so long as you do not use double-precision. That's EIGHT 32-bit float operations per SPE, per cycle, excluding the overhead of store operations.
When you do the math, the real performance for a single Cell is between 24 and 48 FLOP per cycle, single-percision (I'd put the number closer to 24). The double-precision performance is about 1/10 the above, as it is not pipelined.
Yes, but LED backlighting changes that equation yet again
So will OLED displays, once they take over the market in [5, 10, 20, 50] years.
Yes, in fact, a high-enough resolution LED backlight can theoretically add extra contrast to a display, while reducing power consumption. Of particular interest is producing colored backlighting to match the picture using the RGB LED arrays.
Sure, current LED arrays have problems with lighting uniformity, but from experience, I can say the exact same thing of early flourescent backlighting (late 90s). It's only a matter of time before we can toss the inefficient flourescent backlighting of current LCDs, and move-on to something much better.
Yeah. RISC is good.
Russia's still too unstable to make it as an economic superpower.
Absolutely. After 15 years of pseudo-democracy, Russia still has some of the highest rates of corruption, and very little infarstructure improvement. The country survives almost exclusively on it's energy exports, which have been hit pretty hard lately.
Hell, when my mother did a tour recently in Eastern Europe and Russia, the only place she was told not to drink the water was in the massive city of St. Petersburg. That's hardly a sign of an impending world economic power, if you can't even keep disease out of your water supply in one of your largest cities.
There's nothing except your own priorities from stopping you doing fun stuff as a hobby at home! I'm sure you could pick up a cheap FPGA board if that's your interest, and it's easy to do software development using free tools under both Linux and Windows.
Yes, the boards are cheap, and the tools are free, but the test equipment is not. When you work with real hardware, it becomes an issue.
I recently took a class from John's Hopkins on FPGA VHDL development, and we used inexpensive project boards. The early part of the class was interesting, and since all operations stayed on the board, I could resolve all issues with the simulator, testbench and/or debug outputs. But as the projects got more complicated, we started interfacing with real hardware, and I had a lot more trouble.
Our final project was to interface with a PS/2 keyboard and VGA monitor and provide a text-based calculator. I ended-up with several hardware problems because (1) I misinterpreted the specs on the PS/2 keyboard, and didn't handle the scan codes, and (2) my only CRT monitor wouldn't handle my to-spec VGA timings. The scan code problem would have been obvious if I had an oscilliscope, and the CRT monitor problem just points to me not having enough test hardware options available.
If you stay on-chip, you can fool around with just the FPGA board. But if you interface with anything, prepare to shell-out for real test equipment, or else pull your hair out.
A lot of songs have recently been censored. The one that bothers me the most is:
Alice in Chains - "Man in the Box"
Come on people! He's saying "shit," but it's not all that clear, so for over a decade nobody cared. The sad fact is, because Lane Staley is dead (and because he wouldn't do it anyway), they have a very poor voiceover to try to make "shit" sound like "shift" or "spit." Whenever I hear that song on the radio today (and they still play it, believe me), I now switch the channel, because it sounds like...shit.
STOP CHANGING OUR PAST, MOTHERFUCKING BUSYBODY MOTHER HENS.
It got worse in Ep. 2 when SHE forced you on a major side quest. In HL1, you could kneecap a scientist who got in your way and just keep going. In Ep. 2, you had to save the life of an NPC. Even on the side quest they gave you a sidekick (the Vort).
Yeah, I'm really sick of being dependent on game "AI" for my own survival/success in a game. HL1 was perfect: you were the only one who HAD to survive. You could make your life easier by helping others (escort a scientist who opens a door to goodies, keep a guard alive so you can take advantage of his unlimited ammo), but you were the only one who mattered in the end.
In HL2, I got annoyed at the jail levels because I put my life in the hands of those annoying sentry guns. Every time I play through HL2, I enjoy the first half of the game, and stop playing at the jail with the sentry guns. The damn guns are such poor shots, and so easy to knock-over, I'm usually stuck taking the entire army on with my submachinegun.
For the episodes, this got even worse. I almost broke my keyboard in frustration when I tried to save stupid Alyx from bloody Antlion death. She would just stand there shooting the damn things even when we needed to keep moving, and I failed if she died. Nope, didn't finish that game either.
I would have felt really shafted after buying the Orange Box, had it not been for Portal and TF2. Portal is closer in feel to the original Half-Life than any of the sequels, and TF2 is just plain fun.
The Super NES made MIDI sound fantastic! The sound chip they used allowed samples to be used, and allowed for filtering features like reverb, to make the music more life-like.
Today's consoles have MIDI chipsets that put the SNES to shame! The Wii and Gamecube make use of Midi for all sorts of musical soundtracks - even the music in Twilight Princess is entirelly MIDI with quality samples and high-resolution DSP effects.
If the MIDI tracks in this game sound like crap, it's not the fault of the hardware; it's the fault of the writers, who didn't take advantage of the features available. The fact is, when done correclty, MIDI sounds great!
Well if you're trasmitting digital without any sort of error correction, say SPDIF over copper, then the quality of the cable does matter. Noise WILL cause a change in the received data, and your equipment won't know any better.
Yeah. Get back to me when you find a DATA-GRADE cable that's so crappy it can't transmit data at 1.5 Mbps. I think you'd have to fall back to doorbell wiring and get yourself some Cat 1.
Nope, God uses a Microsoft derived OS.
Absolutely!
Everyone knows God uses Xenix! All the self-torture of using System 5 with a decidely Microsoft aftertaste!
Of course Intel's specs are to be believed. If those TDP numbers weren't representative, nobody could do business with them; manufacturers who buy Intel parts have to design their systems with power dissipation in-mind. Nvidia has recently earned the ire of the industry with their new 9300/9400 chipsets for this very reason.
I wouldn't hold my breath on Intel's PowerVR graphics on-board Polubso (GMA500). According to this review, it scores 405 3D marks...in 3dmark 2003. For comparison, The Eee PC 701 scores 364 stock, and 457 with a slight overclock (at that speed, the CPUs are evenly-matched).
While it is an improvement in terms of power consumption, the performance is not improved, and you do sacrifice a few other things to reach such low power: Polubso can only handle 1GB ram, and the GMA500 has a maximum resolution of 1366x768.
XP didn't come with a firewall. You had to upgrade to SP2 (IIRC) to get the Windows firewall. Granted, if you bought XP after SP2 was released you'd have the firewall, otherwise you can potentially get infected very quickly... way before you get the chance to download SP2 and enable the firewall.
Not quite true. Windows XP came with a firewall. It was not enabled by default until Service Pack 2, and the settings were buried. Service Pack 2 changed the firewall configuration system, and had the system bug you about various security settings, including antivirus and firewall.
Yeah, the firewall that came with XP sucked, but it was there.
And I find it hilarious: Intel consistently makes better mobile CPUs definitely but everything else they do in mobile space reeks to high heaven. To this day its nearly impossible to buy a Atom netbook without a Intel GMA based chipset: thats a 2 watt cpu and a 12-25 watt chipset. If you buy a normal laptop, its probably a 45w or 35w chip, even though the Pxx00 series is 25w and almost the same price, and again it comes with an absolutely worthless video card that sucks down >10 watts.
Not true at all, where have you been reading this bullshit? The Intel 945G Mobile is the standard chipset used by netbooks, and has a TDP of between 5-7w. The Mobile 945GSE used by the Asus netbooks has a TDP of only 6w. You don't really think they'd have the power in one of those tiny nettops to power a desktop chipset for 2+ hours, do you?
The chipset you are thinking of is the craptastic 945GC, which is the leftovers remaining after Intel cherry-picks the mobile versions. The only reason Intel uses these on their Atom motherboards is because the boards are designed for MINIMUM COST for developing markets, not minimum power. Since the 945GC is practically free to use (leftovers), Intel can sell the whole board + Atom for $70.
There's nothing preventing other manufacturers from releasing an Atom motherboard with a mobile chipset, aside from cost...but cost is a strong factor in designs. Typically, if they go to that kind of trouble to design for low power, they design to tighter specs and sell the board to the embedded market for $300+. In the consumer DESKTOP market, most people don't care about the difference between 20w and 40w, so the ideal board for you will never be sold.
I have to agree, Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda in a long time that I didn't finish.
Two things that really irked me:
1. There was no obvious forward progression. I kept having to go back to the same damn dungeon too many times to count, and every time it was the same dungeon with a few more levels accessable, and a clock to annoy me. No, I don't mind going back to a dungeon again if say a large event occured in-game that changed everything. But Hourglass is just repetitive for the sake of making the game seem longer.
ADDENTUM: if you're going to make a game THIS damn repetitive, do us gamers a favor and put in a quest log. If I so much as put the game down for a week, I had no freaking idea where I needed to go next.
2. The touch screen control is a bad idea for a top-down Zelda game, PERIOD. The problem is, some items benefitted from the interface (boomerang, bow and arrows) while others suffered (swordplay, movement), but overall the gameplay got worse. I say leave in the drawing gimmicks, and give me back my buttons.
Hell, I'd finish Zelda II before Hourglass.
Oh and IANAL but I don't belive that YANAL.
I can believe he isn't a lawyer. Most laywers would add a tagline to a post like that claiming this should "not be considered legal advice." My brother-in-law (who is a lawyer) does that every time we discuss anything legal, since he isn't licensed in my state.
A real lawyer covers his/her ass!
There is a justification for this. They created the "Hazard Course" as a way to get new players used to playing 3D games with the mouse (and other complex movements like the long jump and the duck jump). But it also provided a foundation for Gordon's skills: "employees" have to pass the Hazard Course in order to be certified for the hazard suit.
I think anyone in real life who could shoot all the targets on the last leg of the hazard course could shoot as straight as Gordon. In fact, I have my love of FPG games to thank for my impressive skest shooting skills (no, I'm not kidding, twitch amiming is what I'm best at).