The lack of simple installer packages is one thing that could be changed.
Maybe you could set up a system of download repositories containing vast collections of open-source software, and include with the distribution a GUI app which would make installing such software as easy as selecting it from a menu...
I think the last major console to be as underpowered as the Wii was the N64
Surely you jest. The N64 was a serious piece of kit. Remember when Ocarina first came out? How incredibly, spectacularly gorgeous it was? N64's problem wasn't with the console's power, it was with the cost, and the storage capacity, of cartridges relative to CDs - that and the fact that the PS1 had about a year's head start on it.
A few weeks ago there was a poll on Everybody Votes Channel: 'Do you live with your parents?'
The hand of Nintendo marketing is obvious there. They want to know who had their Wii bought for them, and who bought it themselves. They want to know their market. And fair enough: what else is the Everybody Votes Channel for but market research disguised as a game?
The results were interesting. Without checking on the Wii (because it's downstairs and off), it was about 55-45 in favour of 'No'. Most Wii gamers bought their own, but not by a wide margin.
Even more interesting - and big news for Nintendo marketing - was the gender breakdown. Of those whose Miis were male, the divide was nearly even. Of those whose Miis were femals, the divide was more like 60-40. In other words: adult women are buying Wii for themselves. Or the SOs of gamers who bought Wii are playing and voting. That's one monster breakthrough.
Much like hentai, where many of the styles have "young" looks, even though the characters aren't.
Don't ever read a 'Basic Japanese' book. You might discover that when the subtitles say 'eighteen years old' the spoken dialogue says something quite different. And then you might feel horribly guilty about all that J-pr0n you've collected.
If my health insurance plan has to subsidize every person with a known horrible condition that could cost my insurance company thousands or millions per patient, my rates would be ridiculous. And you know what, I want cheap rates. But the implication around/. is that this makes me a bad person, because I want to pay for me, and not for the guy who is known to have some horrible genetic condition.
If that's what you want, why take out insurance at all? Just keep those premiums to yourself, and when you fall ill, you pay for you.
If only you understood how penalties worked in soccer... Whether anyone likes it or not, "faking" is part of soccer. No one complains about a basketball player who "draws a foul," yet since many Americans don't understand how soccer fouls/penalties work, they see a player who "fakes" an injury as being a sissy. As hard as it is for some people to understand, it's part of the game.
The mistake they make is thinking that the man who takes a dive is being a sissy, as opposed to being a cheating bastard. De facto part of the game it may be, but I'm always delighted when the referee actually calls people on this one; to see a notorious diver actually get booked for simulation once in a while is a wonderful thing.
I think that there is room for an expensive, powerful console. I just think Sony overestimated how expensive "expensive" could be.
I think part of the problem Sony has hit here is that their competition isn't really the 360 or Wii. It's a PC, or an upgrade to an existing PC. Reasoning like: 'if I were to buy an Xbox instead of a PS3, what would I miss out on? If I instead spent the difference on getting a better video card and more memory in the new PC I'm going to buy anyway, what would I gain?'
Sony's best excuse for making such a monster is that they want it to last a long time - to still look fresh years from now. If so, they'd better be planning to drop the price steeply and soon. It won't be long before contemporary PCs are far beyond PS3.
Satellites are all very well, but limited for this sort of application for technical reasons. The one that excites me is the prospect of the Antigua data haven: because the US laws on internet gambling constitute an unfair barrier to free trade with Antigua, they're threatening to retaliate by declaring all American copyrights, patents and whatnot entirely void. Best of all, the US won't be able to use its large allies and front organisations as leverage: the EU and Japan are supporting Antigua, and the WTO reckon disregarding US copyrights would be perfectly fair under the circumstances...
So, my question is: what's wrong with everyone knowing what everyone else voted? Does it create bias in the workplace? Do Liberal bosses see their Conservative employees votes and thus not give them raises, or worse, in an at-will state such as mine, just fire them outright?
Perhaps. It's happened before, and it happens all over the world in countries with less strongly established democratic principles. Look up the phrase 'rotten borough', a constituency where the landlord corruptly controls both the electorate and the MP. British democracy was once thoroughly corrupted by vote-buying and coercion as a result of the lack of a secret ballot. Though there is still much wrong - don't get me started on the bloody first-past-the-post system - at least all votes are free of outside influence as a result of their total secrecy. 'Vote for me or I'll fire you / evict you / break your legs' doesn't work if the voter can simply lie about what he did in the polling booth.
Previously there'd been two competing digital TV providers: Sky, selling digital via satellite, and ITV Digital, selling digital via aerial. Although both carried the same basic menu of free-to-air channels, they were basically pay-TV providers trying to push subscription services, and didn't really achieve much. Sky Digital inherited the viewers from Murdoch's existing satellite operation, but didn't really expand the market AFAIK, and ITV Digital did very poorly, being a second-best offering as a pay-TV platform, and again failing to win over the majority who aren't really interested in pay-TV. ITV Digital folded after a while.
At this point a BBC-led group established the Freeview standard, which is based around a set-top box made as cheap and simple as possible, and which provides a comparatively small number of free-to-air channels. There's an expansion that allows encrypted pay-TV channels, but few exist and hardly anyone bothers. Because the box was very cheap and it was a one-off expense - no subscriptions, no registration - it became the standard very quickly. These days it's being built in to most new TV sets as standard, and supposedly we're on course to be able to switch off the old analogue broadcasts on schedule.
Maybe, someone can clue in eveyone else on exactly how fundamental less oxygen is to particular theories? Do any of them just seem like crap now, or can all the numbers just be slashed to make the same point?
Oxygen is a by-product of nuclear fusion in some stars. Hydrogen is burnt to helium in the main-sequence part of a star's life, helium is burnt to carbon in the red giant phase, and after that there are a sequence of short-lived reactions that only take place in the larger stars, in which carbon is burnt oxygen and oxygen is burnt to a whole bunch of things.
The nuclear physics of all this is well understood, so if the amount of oxygen in the Sun is less than we'd anticipated then that means we've got something wrong about how we understand the insides of stars, about the pressures and temperatures that hold there. It might mean that fewer stars ever get around to producing oxygen, or perhaps that more stars make it all the way to burning it up again, or it might tell us there was something unusual about the nebula our own sun came from. It means, basically, that there's some interesting astrophysics waiting to be done, and that's enough to make astrophysicists very happy:-)
Want the widescreen resolution? Wireless? Sound? Video card? USB? Firewire? That printer? At least a few of those would require me to tweak the system to make things work, if at all.
Funny that, it works 100% with me out of the box for the last three releases of Ubuntu (well, I had to use the GUI printer manager to make the printer work, because it's a networked printer and so ubuntu can't just detect it as it would the dwl-g650 or other attached device). Maybe you're still stuck in 1993?
Wireless, sound, USB, no problem, work perfectly out of the box on Feisty. Don't have firewire or a printer on this machine. Video card, well, I had to specify that I wanted the proprietary drivers. There's a GUI specifically for that and it took about three clicks. The only one that required any tweaking was to get the widescreen resolution, and that was a matter of sudo nano/etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding '1440x900' to the list. Not exactly taxing, and if I didn't already know that was what needed doing it wouldn't exactly be a difficult set of instructions to follow. I had far more trouble getting Windows to play nice with this monitor.
Unfortunately for third-party developers, I am the Nintendo customer they fear. The chances of me purchasing a non-Nintendo game for the Wii are EXTREMELY low. The control scheme would have to offer a fundamentally different game experience (and a better one than a comparable first-party game).
Accordingly popularity of parties that pledge to take countries out of the EU, cut immigration and put their own first is soaring.
Which is why the extreme right-winger Jean Marie Le Pen looks set to be the next president of France, having gained an unprecedentedly high share of the vote. Oh, wait. No, actually he came flat last.
You will never hear about these, because "150 Iraqis die in a car-bomb blast" is more sensational than "15 Iraqi children have their sight restored due to help from US military doctors".
You'd prefer it if the media dwelt on the n people saved from blindness, rather than the 10n people killed? Strange priorities you have there.
I guess what I'm saying is that Super Mario 3 can not be improved upon. Only changed. It's as tuned and polished as it's going to be for what it is. Super Mario 1 can't say the same thing.
I would probably agree with this. Between them, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World pretty much achieve the pinnacle of what it is possible for a 2D platform game to be. Maybe they killed the whole genre with those games, just because nothing would ever be as good.
Meanwhile, going back to Super Mario 1, yeah, there's room for improvement, and it's called New Super Mario Bros.
I generally have a wave of nostalgia flow over me when I think of playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time
Christmas Day, 1991.
On New Year's Eve my parents moved the TV under the stairs to make space in the living room for party visitors to dance and stuff. Suited me just fine. Four hours or so into 1992 I was most of the way through World 4.
One thing that is disappointing to me is how easy many RPGs are. Back in the NES days and early 16-bit (SNES) days, they were fairly difficult. Nowadays they are nearly so easy that you have to go out of your way to even make them a challenge (either by limiting yourself to not using the most powerful abilities that make the games easy, or doing the ridiculously long side quests that don't matter to the main plot).
But why were they so difficult? Was it because of endless repetitive pointless random encounters? It was, wasn't it? Difficulty courtesy of flinging endless monsters at you does not make a great game.
RPGs have moved away from that and I for one am glad of it. Baldur's Gate had it pretty near right, and Planescape: Torment nailed it. Combat should be a part of the game and the player should have to have an eye to tactics in order to get through it, but it shouldn't be the whole challenge of the game. RPG: Role Playing Game. If I just want to kill things I'll play Quake. I want a story, I want plot progression, I do not want meaningless fetch quests through territory with random encounters every five steps.
But most important, the game play was better. Go down any list of "Best Games Ever", and it's freakin' dominated by old titles. Railroad Tycoon, Civ, Wasteland, Zork, X-Com, Monkey Island, Wizardy, Ultima...
Your range of 'old' runs from the late seventies to the mid nineties. Assuming we mean by 'new' anything since then, well, GTA: San Andreas, Knights of the Old Republic, Wii Sports, Deus Ex, Ocarina of Time, Pokémon, Half-Life, Resident Evil...
Of course the 'best games ever' are going to be old if your definition of 'old' encompasses the majority of games ever made. And was the gameplay really better? Or have we just managed to forget the countless crappy games there were back then too?
I'd say Nintendo are uniquely placed to answer this. How are Virtual Console sales going, compared to new Wii games? How many are they selling of the NES and SNES Zelda games, compared to Twilight Princess? There's a chance for direct comparison here.
Then again, there's a selection bias; only good games of old get remembered. Same with most culture; the 95% of crap is forgotten, and we end up thinking of a golden age that never really was.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you could set up a system of download repositories containing vast collections of open-source software, and include with the distribution a GUI app which would make installing such software as easy as selecting it from a menu...
It's Latin: 'porne' means a whore or harlot, so pictures of harlots are called pornography.
Surely you jest. The N64 was a serious piece of kit. Remember when Ocarina first came out? How incredibly, spectacularly gorgeous it was? N64's problem wasn't with the console's power, it was with the cost, and the storage capacity, of cartridges relative to CDs - that and the fact that the PS1 had about a year's head start on it.
The hand of Nintendo marketing is obvious there. They want to know who had their Wii bought for them, and who bought it themselves. They want to know their market. And fair enough: what else is the Everybody Votes Channel for but market research disguised as a game?
The results were interesting. Without checking on the Wii (because it's downstairs and off), it was about 55-45 in favour of 'No'. Most Wii gamers bought their own, but not by a wide margin.
Even more interesting - and big news for Nintendo marketing - was the gender breakdown. Of those whose Miis were male, the divide was nearly even. Of those whose Miis were femals, the divide was more like 60-40. In other words: adult women are buying Wii for themselves. Or the SOs of gamers who bought Wii are playing and voting. That's one monster breakthrough.
Either Geller is a simple con man, or our whole understanding of physics is entirely wrong.
I know which way I'm betting.
Much like hentai, where many of the styles have "young" looks, even though the characters aren't. Don't ever read a 'Basic Japanese' book. You might discover that when the subtitles say 'eighteen years old' the spoken dialogue says something quite different. And then you might feel horribly guilty about all that J-pr0n you've collected.
I assume that means you use a BSD-based kernel?
If that's what you want, why take out insurance at all? Just keep those premiums to yourself, and when you fall ill, you pay for you.
The mistake they make is thinking that the man who takes a dive is being a sissy, as opposed to being a cheating bastard. De facto part of the game it may be, but I'm always delighted when the referee actually calls people on this one; to see a notorious diver actually get booked for simulation once in a while is a wonderful thing.
I think part of the problem Sony has hit here is that their competition isn't really the 360 or Wii. It's a PC, or an upgrade to an existing PC. Reasoning like: 'if I were to buy an Xbox instead of a PS3, what would I miss out on? If I instead spent the difference on getting a better video card and more memory in the new PC I'm going to buy anyway, what would I gain?'
Sony's best excuse for making such a monster is that they want it to last a long time - to still look fresh years from now. If so, they'd better be planning to drop the price steeply and soon. It won't be long before contemporary PCs are far beyond PS3.
Satellites are all very well, but limited for this sort of application for technical reasons. The one that excites me is the prospect of the Antigua data haven: because the US laws on internet gambling constitute an unfair barrier to free trade with Antigua, they're threatening to retaliate by declaring all American copyrights, patents and whatnot entirely void. Best of all, the US won't be able to use its large allies and front organisations as leverage: the EU and Japan are supporting Antigua, and the WTO reckon disregarding US copyrights would be perfectly fair under the circumstances...
Perhaps. It's happened before, and it happens all over the world in countries with less strongly established democratic principles. Look up the phrase 'rotten borough', a constituency where the landlord corruptly controls both the electorate and the MP. British democracy was once thoroughly corrupted by vote-buying and coercion as a result of the lack of a secret ballot. Though there is still much wrong - don't get me started on the bloody first-past-the-post system - at least all votes are free of outside influence as a result of their total secrecy. 'Vote for me or I'll fire you / evict you / break your legs' doesn't work if the voter can simply lie about what he did in the polling booth.
Digital TV via an aerial.
Previously there'd been two competing digital TV providers: Sky, selling digital via satellite, and ITV Digital, selling digital via aerial. Although both carried the same basic menu of free-to-air channels, they were basically pay-TV providers trying to push subscription services, and didn't really achieve much. Sky Digital inherited the viewers from Murdoch's existing satellite operation, but didn't really expand the market AFAIK, and ITV Digital did very poorly, being a second-best offering as a pay-TV platform, and again failing to win over the majority who aren't really interested in pay-TV. ITV Digital folded after a while.
At this point a BBC-led group established the Freeview standard, which is based around a set-top box made as cheap and simple as possible, and which provides a comparatively small number of free-to-air channels. There's an expansion that allows encrypted pay-TV channels, but few exist and hardly anyone bothers. Because the box was very cheap and it was a one-off expense - no subscriptions, no registration - it became the standard very quickly. These days it's being built in to most new TV sets as standard, and supposedly we're on course to be able to switch off the old analogue broadcasts on schedule.
Oxygen is a by-product of nuclear fusion in some stars. Hydrogen is burnt to helium in the main-sequence part of a star's life, helium is burnt to carbon in the red giant phase, and after that there are a sequence of short-lived reactions that only take place in the larger stars, in which carbon is burnt oxygen and oxygen is burnt to a whole bunch of things.
The nuclear physics of all this is well understood, so if the amount of oxygen in the Sun is less than we'd anticipated then that means we've got something wrong about how we understand the insides of stars, about the pressures and temperatures that hold there. It might mean that fewer stars ever get around to producing oxygen, or perhaps that more stars make it all the way to burning it up again, or it might tell us there was something unusual about the nebula our own sun came from. It means, basically, that there's some interesting astrophysics waiting to be done, and that's enough to make astrophysicists very happy :-)
Wireless, sound, USB, no problem, work perfectly out of the box on Feisty. Don't have firewire or a printer on this machine. Video card, well, I had to specify that I wanted the proprietary drivers. There's a GUI specifically for that and it took about three clicks. The only one that required any tweaking was to get the widescreen resolution, and that was a matter of sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding '1440x900' to the list. Not exactly taxing, and if I didn't already know that was what needed doing it wouldn't exactly be a difficult set of instructions to follow. I had far more trouble getting Windows to play nice with this monitor.
* Christian Mind Trick *
You don't want to be Elfstar any more. You want to be Debbie.
Two words: The. Godfather.
Which is why the extreme right-winger Jean Marie Le Pen looks set to be the next president of France, having gained an unprecedentedly high share of the vote. Oh, wait. No, actually he came flat last.
You'd prefer it if the media dwelt on the n people saved from blindness, rather than the 10n people killed? Strange priorities you have there.
I would probably agree with this. Between them, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World pretty much achieve the pinnacle of what it is possible for a 2D platform game to be. Maybe they killed the whole genre with those games, just because nothing would ever be as good.
Meanwhile, going back to Super Mario 1, yeah, there's room for improvement, and it's called New Super Mario Bros.
Christmas Day, 1991.
On New Year's Eve my parents moved the TV under the stairs to make space in the living room for party visitors to dance and stuff. Suited me just fine. Four hours or so into 1992 I was most of the way through World 4.
But why were they so difficult? Was it because of endless repetitive pointless random encounters? It was, wasn't it? Difficulty courtesy of flinging endless monsters at you does not make a great game.
RPGs have moved away from that and I for one am glad of it. Baldur's Gate had it pretty near right, and Planescape: Torment nailed it. Combat should be a part of the game and the player should have to have an eye to tactics in order to get through it, but it shouldn't be the whole challenge of the game. RPG: Role Playing Game. If I just want to kill things I'll play Quake. I want a story, I want plot progression, I do not want meaningless fetch quests through territory with random encounters every five steps.
Your range of 'old' runs from the late seventies to the mid nineties. Assuming we mean by 'new' anything since then, well, GTA: San Andreas, Knights of the Old Republic, Wii Sports, Deus Ex, Ocarina of Time, Pokémon, Half-Life, Resident Evil...
Of course the 'best games ever' are going to be old if your definition of 'old' encompasses the majority of games ever made. And was the gameplay really better? Or have we just managed to forget the countless crappy games there were back then too?
New Super- Enough, though, that re-releases of old Castlevania and Super Mario Brothers games are best sellers *now*.
- ... OK, fair enough.
Then again, there's a selection bias; only good games of old get remembered. Same with most culture; the 95% of crap is forgotten, and we end up thinking of a golden age that never really was.