We're comparing it to the NG and 3DO? I thought the point was to be SUCCESSFUL. "Expensive" isn't some sort of absolute comparison to everything that's come before it, it's what people consider above a reasonable price ceiling. The only point you could make with that data is that the PS3 is too expensive, because it's closest comparable compatriots were monumental flops!
1) The PS2 didn't cost 400 freaking quid 2) DVD was an emerging standard with a huge and noticeable advantage over the popular storage medium of the time (VHS), while BR is not 3) Sony will lose money hand over fist if people just buy it as a player without games. However, this doesn't happen, because people do buy consoles for games. The entire business model is driven by this fact. 4) Did I mention it cost 400 freaking pounds?!
Evidence, evidence, evidence. Organized crime is brilliant at insulating those at the top from the orders they give those at the bottom. Even in countries where what they're doing is illegal (often not the case with spammers) you still need to tie that person to something through evidence.
RICO is nice in that you can nab higher-ups if you can get two predicate acts on an underling, but a) they tend to shelve said underling after he's busted, because they have lawyers too, and b) most of these acts are against people they've intimidated, cowed, blackmailed, or are criminals themselves, which means we get a missing person and not a murder rap.
You're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to get these guys, essentially you run detectives around looking into what they did, looking for the small screwup that lets them open an investigation and start searching places. It's long and it's tough. Like I said before, "everyone knows he's doing it" isn't evidence.
Not really. Cybercrime and high-profile crime in areas with bad law enforcement are rarely that hidden. In Chicago, for instance, the police department up until recently actually posted organizational charts of the outfit so everyone in the department knew who they were.
The mafia and cybercriminals are very similar in that regard- you don't need to be hidden in a bunker somewhere, just be very good at separating yourself (be it through proxies, wardriven connections, a hired gang or expendable street thugs) from the instrumentalities of your crimes. "Everyone knows they did it" is nice, but it's not evidence.
I don't see why you can't. We can break it down into two parts: "controller sucks" and "short on time."
The controller could suck with regards to that game because it was short on time to make the game. The controller could suck regardless of how much time was put into the game. The controller could not suck even if they were short on time to make the game. The controller could not suck regardless of time put into the game.
I don't get how it has to be either a software or hardware problem, but not both. There's lots of crap hardware. There's lots of crap software. There's lots of crap software running on crap hardware, and good software running on crap hardware, and crap software running on good hardware.
In fact, they could both or neither contribute. They're independent variables. I don't see how you can't have it both ways.
For the life of me, I still do not get America's obsession with small business. Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees, or do not pay for their health insurance, or even both.
I understand they're "living the american dream" and all that, but how much is that worth us as a society? It seems to me that people have just automatically assumed that larger businesses are bad (by associating them with some bad actors among the super-big actors) and that smaller business are somehow intrinsically "good," regardless of the costs to society a large number of small business vs. a smaller number of larger business incur.
I know better than to feed the trolls, but I suppose it's worth mentioning that I have two systems running PIVs. My last AMD CPU was a K6-7. So, uh... yeah.
Although one must wonder why AMD would be scared of a 5.2 gHz rather than a 3.7 when CPUs that fast are never, ever the system's bottleneck. Seems like a lot of posturing.
I've been using SuSE since 6.2 (I believe), and the answer is "nothing." YaST is still making good progress, YOU has become better and better since the acquisition (though I have no idea if that's Novell's influence or not), and setting up remote RPM upgrade trees is as easy as typing in the URL and selecting your packages. It's a slick system.
I really don't see anything that has changed as a result of the acquisition.
I think the Wii is ideal for RPGs. Why bother with menus sitting on the bottom with so many sub-menus when you can actually use the buttons at your disposal (8, counting the two on the nunchuck). That's a lot of commands you can map directly onto buttons, rather than going through stupidly complicated layers of submenus. Need to attack? Point the wand at the target and hit A. Need to cast a spell? Have one or two of your favorites mapped to the triggers, or hit up to bring up a radial menu with all of the spells a wrist-flick away, instead of scrolling through 3 pages of text.
Plus, less overhead means you can have greater reaction time. For instance, I'm playing a putative FFIV Wii version, and I'm up against, say, Zeromus. I'm thinking about where he is in the battle, and I'm pretty sure he's going to throw Big Bang at me. Rosa's just come up, and I have maybe a second to get my command in before I lose Edge (you always lose Edge) and maybe Yang. Which is faster? W Magic-> down down down right -> A -> right -> A or, Hold down A and wave over party (or possibly just aim at an "all" bug)
The second method's a hell of a lot better, and since it's faster, lets you speed up combat, which is always a good thing in wandering monster RPGs.
Okay, since I know people are going to jump on the ambiguity, there's nothing in the constitution that protects you from speech that harms other people, depending on the circumstances. It's all insanely complicated, and I find all the first-amendment waving ridiculous. There have only been two absolutist justices in the history of the Supreme Court. It's not a magic bullet.
The first amendment only applies to government actors. Private corporations deal with an extraconsitutional "wrongful discharge" statute which is far weaker.
Uh, Wii controller with analog attachment. You have the same basic mouselook with the remote and the WASD interface with the attachment. Might even be better, since you can twitch. And FPSs are all about twitching.
I don't mean to troll, but I find zero appeal in the show. It falls in the category I call "psuedo-literature," a group which includes works that try so very hard to actually be quality literature, but ironically, trying so hard ruins the whole exercise. The writers for the show obviously through from the start that they were going to write a grand epic; they put enough twists and turns into the plot to get people convinced, even. If it's that complicated, it HAS to be good, right?
Wrong. The quality of a piece of literature isn't in its complexity, it's actually in the simple, easily apparent parts. The complexity adds dimensions to the simple story, but it does not add meaning itself, and often *confuses* meaning by adding extraneous material in the attempt to make "a really cool story."
So that leaves us with Evangelion, admired by hordes and spurned by people who are described by said hordes as "not getting it." Perhaps there's just not that much to get? Perhaps you're adding too much into a reading, because they left so much hanging you constructed around the work? That's not literature. Literature guides your faculties, it doesn't fool them and then expect them to expand things past the breaking point.
To wit, look at shakespeare. Generally, a couple rich people who get in trouble with someone else, and either laugh it off or die. The end. The complexity is internalized in the characters; the plot itself is simple. That is why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Evangelion is just another mecha anime.
What I find funny about these stories and the obligatory "parents need to not suck!" argument is that it assumes that all parents have the same technical ability that we do. Or even the same language ability that we do. Or the TIME that we do. This seems to be the mother of all projections, as far as this site goes- "I could do it this way, it should be done this way, therefore EVERYONE should be fine doing it this way, and if they don't, it's their fault."
Lots of parents work two jobs. Lots of parents don't understand computers. Lots of parents simply don't know enough about their teenager's life to check for some things (to those that do, or think your parents did, I'm sorry. You're lying. Everyone keeps things from everyone else, regardless of their relationship).
And even so, how is this a raising thing? Kids are having sex, and parents can't stop them from that. How does it make any difference when it's some guy they met at school, planning over AIM and some guy on myspace who happens to be a sexual predator? Again, you don't know everything your child is up to (nor should you), and you never will.
Even putting that aside, these arguments are ridiculous. We have a problem of kids being subjected to predators on a website. The state has a duty (not even just a right, a duty) to ensure that if there are unacceptable risks, safeguards are put in place to assure that we've done all we reasonably can to protect the children. This is bad how? Because it'll curb kids' ability to use a website to share things? While I think the child's ability to express himself online is important, I think making our best effort to ensure that kid isn't going to be assaulted by a predator is pretty darn important too.
The "parent more" argument is a useful tool for people with agendas, but it has no logical stopping point. Why should the state have battery laws? Shouldn't parents teach their kids how to avoid fights? How about laws against gang activity? Shouldn't parents tell their kids to avoid gangs and vandalism? By this logic, simply "raising" your kid would solve the problem, but obviously it doesn't.
If you want to do Who, you should use Hero System 5.
Absolute Time Sense Danger Sense Universal Translator Simulate Death Teleportation (Time/Unlimited Range/Obvious Inaccessible Focus) Find Weakness Mind Control (only on friendly target/limited to suggestion) and then 20 INT and a billion points into various skills.
Yeah, because angry, ambitious people NEVER hurt people that are close to them. They certainly never fly into a fit of rage at an apparnent betrayal and try to hurt them. I mean, you'd think that they'd come up with something like "in the heat of passion" categorizations for violent crimes if people did THAT.
That's why DAs offices never have ridiculously overburdened domestic violence divisions.
You have it backwards; Senator Clinton became a public figure and was villified because of the health care proposal, not the other way around. Andrew Sullivan, in particular, led the crusade against "HillaryCare," and that's where she got her bad reputation. The usual suspects would have responded to the plan in the same manner, regardless of who had created and proposed it.
I am inspired- inspired!- by this man's ability to keep his chin up through it all, shoulder all the adversity, and successfully move from a series of abysmal failures to merely a catastrophic failure!
By that logic, banks are a scam, too. Holy crap! They take the money you put in and give it to other people through loans! We need to replace banks with more privater schemes, like plastic bags and matresses.
The Japanese can pronounce it about as well as most loan words, and just as well as "revolution." There's also the added bonus of greater consistency in the pronunciation of difthongs, so it's not even ambiguous.
Slashdot Mirror
Silly nitpick, but seppuku is performed with the wakizashi.
Back to your regularly scheduled Sony flamewar.
We're comparing it to the NG and 3DO? I thought the point was to be SUCCESSFUL. "Expensive" isn't some sort of absolute comparison to everything that's come before it, it's what people consider above a reasonable price ceiling. The only point you could make with that data is that the PS3 is too expensive, because it's closest comparable compatriots were monumental flops!
1) The PS2 didn't cost 400 freaking quid
2) DVD was an emerging standard with a huge and noticeable advantage over the popular storage medium of the time (VHS), while BR is not
3) Sony will lose money hand over fist if people just buy it as a player without games. However, this doesn't happen, because people do buy consoles for games. The entire business model is driven by this fact.
4) Did I mention it cost 400 freaking pounds?!
Evidence, evidence, evidence. Organized crime is brilliant at insulating those at the top from the orders they give those at the bottom. Even in countries where what they're doing is illegal (often not the case with spammers) you still need to tie that person to something through evidence.
RICO is nice in that you can nab higher-ups if you can get two predicate acts on an underling, but a) they tend to shelve said underling after he's busted, because they have lawyers too, and b) most of these acts are against people they've intimidated, cowed, blackmailed, or are criminals themselves, which means we get a missing person and not a murder rap.
You're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to get these guys, essentially you run detectives around looking into what they did, looking for the small screwup that lets them open an investigation and start searching places. It's long and it's tough. Like I said before, "everyone knows he's doing it" isn't evidence.
Not really. Cybercrime and high-profile crime in areas with bad law enforcement are rarely that hidden. In Chicago, for instance, the police department up until recently actually posted organizational charts of the outfit so everyone in the department knew who they were.
The mafia and cybercriminals are very similar in that regard- you don't need to be hidden in a bunker somewhere, just be very good at separating yourself (be it through proxies, wardriven connections, a hired gang or expendable street thugs) from the instrumentalities of your crimes. "Everyone knows they did it" is nice, but it's not evidence.
I don't see why you can't. We can break it down into two parts: "controller sucks" and "short on time."
The controller could suck with regards to that game because it was short on time to make the game.
The controller could suck regardless of how much time was put into the game.
The controller could not suck even if they were short on time to make the game.
The controller could not suck regardless of time put into the game.
I don't get how it has to be either a software or hardware problem, but not both. There's lots of crap hardware. There's lots of crap software. There's lots of crap software running on crap hardware, and good software running on crap hardware, and crap software running on good hardware.
In fact, they could both or neither contribute. They're independent variables. I don't see how you can't have it both ways.
For the life of me, I still do not get America's obsession with small business. Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees, or do not pay for their health insurance, or even both.
I understand they're "living the american dream" and all that, but how much is that worth us as a society? It seems to me that people have just automatically assumed that larger businesses are bad (by associating them with some bad actors among the super-big actors) and that smaller business are somehow intrinsically "good," regardless of the costs to society a large number of small business vs. a smaller number of larger business incur.
I know better than to feed the trolls, but I suppose it's worth mentioning that I have two systems running PIVs. My last AMD CPU was a K6-7. So, uh... yeah.
Although one must wonder why AMD would be scared of a 5.2 gHz rather than a 3.7 when CPUs that fast are never, ever the system's bottleneck. Seems like a lot of posturing.
I've been using SuSE since 6.2 (I believe), and the answer is "nothing." YaST is still making good progress, YOU has become better and better since the acquisition (though I have no idea if that's Novell's influence or not), and setting up remote RPM upgrade trees is as easy as typing in the URL and selecting your packages. It's a slick system.
I really don't see anything that has changed as a result of the acquisition.
Uh, RPGs generally require ONE button.
I think the Wii is ideal for RPGs. Why bother with menus sitting on the bottom with so many sub-menus when you can actually use the buttons at your disposal (8, counting the two on the nunchuck). That's a lot of commands you can map directly onto buttons, rather than going through stupidly complicated layers of submenus. Need to attack? Point the wand at the target and hit A. Need to cast a spell? Have one or two of your favorites mapped to the triggers, or hit up to bring up a radial menu with all of the spells a wrist-flick away, instead of scrolling through 3 pages of text.
Plus, less overhead means you can have greater reaction time. For instance, I'm playing a putative FFIV Wii version, and I'm up against, say, Zeromus. I'm thinking about where he is in the battle, and I'm pretty sure he's going to throw Big Bang at me. Rosa's just come up, and I have maybe a second to get my command in before I lose Edge (you always lose Edge) and maybe Yang. Which is faster?
W Magic-> down down down right -> A -> right -> A
or,
Hold down A and wave over party (or possibly just aim at an "all" bug)
The second method's a hell of a lot better, and since it's faster, lets you speed up combat, which is always a good thing in wandering monster RPGs.
Okay, since I know people are going to jump on the ambiguity, there's nothing in the constitution that protects you from speech that harms other people, depending on the circumstances. It's all insanely complicated, and I find all the first-amendment waving ridiculous. There have only been two absolutist justices in the history of the Supreme Court. It's not a magic bullet.
The first amendment only applies to government actors. Private corporations deal with an extraconsitutional "wrongful discharge" statute which is far weaker.
That, good sir, is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I wish I had mod points.
Uh, Wii controller with analog attachment. You have the same basic mouselook with the remote and the WASD interface with the attachment. Might even be better, since you can twitch. And FPSs are all about twitching.
I don't mean to troll, but I find zero appeal in the show. It falls in the category I call "psuedo-literature," a group which includes works that try so very hard to actually be quality literature, but ironically, trying so hard ruins the whole exercise. The writers for the show obviously through from the start that they were going to write a grand epic; they put enough twists and turns into the plot to get people convinced, even. If it's that complicated, it HAS to be good, right?
Wrong. The quality of a piece of literature isn't in its complexity, it's actually in the simple, easily apparent parts. The complexity adds dimensions to the simple story, but it does not add meaning itself, and often *confuses* meaning by adding extraneous material in the attempt to make "a really cool story."
So that leaves us with Evangelion, admired by hordes and spurned by people who are described by said hordes as "not getting it." Perhaps there's just not that much to get? Perhaps you're adding too much into a reading, because they left so much hanging you constructed around the work? That's not literature. Literature guides your faculties, it doesn't fool them and then expect them to expand things past the breaking point.
To wit, look at shakespeare. Generally, a couple rich people who get in trouble with someone else, and either laugh it off or die. The end. The complexity is internalized in the characters; the plot itself is simple. That is why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Evangelion is just another mecha anime.
What I find funny about these stories and the obligatory "parents need to not suck!" argument is that it assumes that all parents have the same technical ability that we do. Or even the same language ability that we do. Or the TIME that we do. This seems to be the mother of all projections, as far as this site goes- "I could do it this way, it should be done this way, therefore EVERYONE should be fine doing it this way, and if they don't, it's their fault."
Lots of parents work two jobs. Lots of parents don't understand computers. Lots of parents simply don't know enough about their teenager's life to check for some things (to those that do, or think your parents did, I'm sorry. You're lying. Everyone keeps things from everyone else, regardless of their relationship).
And even so, how is this a raising thing? Kids are having sex, and parents can't stop them from that. How does it make any difference when it's some guy they met at school, planning over AIM and some guy on myspace who happens to be a sexual predator? Again, you don't know everything your child is up to (nor should you), and you never will.
Even putting that aside, these arguments are ridiculous. We have a problem of kids being subjected to predators on a website. The state has a duty (not even just a right, a duty) to ensure that if there are unacceptable risks, safeguards are put in place to assure that we've done all we reasonably can to protect the children. This is bad how? Because it'll curb kids' ability to use a website to share things? While I think the child's ability to express himself online is important, I think making our best effort to ensure that kid isn't going to be assaulted by a predator is pretty darn important too.
The "parent more" argument is a useful tool for people with agendas, but it has no logical stopping point. Why should the state have battery laws? Shouldn't parents teach their kids how to avoid fights? How about laws against gang activity? Shouldn't parents tell their kids to avoid gangs and vandalism? By this logic, simply "raising" your kid would solve the problem, but obviously it doesn't.
If you want to do Who, you should use Hero System 5.
Absolute Time Sense
Danger Sense
Universal Translator
Simulate Death
Teleportation (Time/Unlimited Range/Obvious Inaccessible Focus)
Find Weakness
Mind Control (only on friendly target/limited to suggestion)
and then 20 INT and a billion points into various skills.
And, of course, Dependent NPC.
Fun stuff.
Yeah, because angry, ambitious people NEVER hurt people that are close to them. They certainly never fly into a fit of rage at an apparnent betrayal and try to hurt them. I mean, you'd think that they'd come up with something like "in the heat of passion" categorizations for violent crimes if people did THAT.
That's why DAs offices never have ridiculously overburdened domestic violence divisions.
You have it backwards; Senator Clinton became a public figure and was villified because of the health care proposal, not the other way around. Andrew Sullivan, in particular, led the crusade against "HillaryCare," and that's where she got her bad reputation. The usual suspects would have responded to the plan in the same manner, regardless of who had created and proposed it.
I am inspired- inspired!- by this man's ability to keep his chin up through it all, shoulder all the adversity, and successfully move from a series of abysmal failures to merely a catastrophic failure!
My hat, sir, is off to you!
You sound like you need you some Star Ocean.
By that logic, banks are a scam, too. Holy crap! They take the money you put in and give it to other people through loans! We need to replace banks with more privater schemes, like plastic bags and matresses.
I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the reason why no-one takes games (and by extension, gamers) seriously.
Congratulations, DoA-lady-fanciers! You're pathetic.
The Japanese can pronounce it about as well as most loan words, and just as well as "revolution." There's also the added bonus of greater consistency in the pronunciation of difthongs, so it's not even ambiguous.