I agree the whole thing is moot. But mainly because I haven't met *anyone*, even people with 60+ inch home theatres, who gives a shit about either format. Most DVDs look good enough on HDTVs that I think it's going to be an exceptionally slow adoption curve. More like laserdisk than DVD.
My apologies on Acid, then! Plus it was from your wife so you probably couldn't return it or complain too much about it! I won't argue that my DS has been getting more play than my PSP lately (Animal Crossing, Pheonix Wright, AoK, Tetris...), but my point is just that the PSP as a machine I think is rad; software just hasn't always been there yet for some people.
FTR: That Dick's shot is from their site... my visit in February was predictably rainy (and windy, just to add some variety)!
Loading is strictly a feature of individual games, not an inherent fault. My company made a game for PSP (Death, Jr.) which featured levels of >60MB (on a system with 24MB usable RAM) with no perceptable in-level loading times, and loading times ~5 seconds to start the levels. A lot of time with launch software, there's not enough time to focus on optimizing elements like loading, so launch titles have very long loading times. But titles like GripShift have almost no load times. So you can't blame the system itself for this.
Further, Metal Gear Ac!d was pretty clearly a card game if you look at the back of the box. You've bought maybe 5 games out of a library of 100; I'm sorry your results haven't been great, but if we're just offering anecdotal evidence here:
I bought MGA knowing exactly what to expect and enjoyed the game
I loved Lumines and wasted many hours playing it
I spent many, many hours leveling enjoyably in Untold Legends. Load times weren't great, but not bad enough to keep me from playing it
I had a great time, with fine loading times, playing the decidely old-school RPG Legend of Heroes.
Capcom Classics Remix is fantastic, as is Powered Up.
There are two major pc builders in China. Lenevo and SomeOtherCompanyYouWouldn'tRecognizeTheNameOf. IBM chose SOCTYWRTNO to build the ThinkPad thanks it its committment to quality. But they sold out to their competitor, Lenevo. So there's precedent to think that the quality will decrease.
I just bought a T60, after several years of having an R40. I have to admit, when I got my R40, it felt pretty neat, to own an actual *IBM* brand personal computer. I assume it's similar to what people who bought cadillacs in the 1960s felt. I had clearly just overspent on something that was actually significantly better than everything else available, and came with teh name to prove it.
The experience of getting my Lenevo ThinkPad was actually much lamer, although the computer was designed by the same people, and is obviously way better (1400 x 1050, dual core 1.8Ghz... very nice machine). Maybe nothing replaces your first IBM, but also I was surpirsed at home much they pushed the Lenevo name, instead of just capitalizing on the Think brand. That actually turned me off. The computer itself is awesome, but there is a lot less brand loyalty cache behind it. I think the value of the IBM name itself, especially to brand loyal buyers (like me, I guess) may have been undervalued.
If Lenevo abandons the awesome keyboard of the Think series (which they have already on their cut-rate Lenevo brand laptops), there's no way I'll buy another. I am just glad my T60 still says IBM, because it's going to be a cool artifact at some point in the future.
Ya know, I'm kind of impressed with regular super glue's "1 car / quarter" pressure resistance. I guess that dude really did just super glue that hard hat to the beam.
I love how you people characterize other people as "you people" without stopping to think. Let's look at my post again: I'm against wasting tax dollars. I'm against outsourcing our manufacturing capability to a communist country. I'm opposed to the the state being forced to subsidize a company, or its workers.
Granted, when it comes to social programs, I am against hospitals turning away people without the proven ability to pay, which does make me a little bit of a bleeding heart, I guess, but there's really nothing else in my post which could identify me, based on my opinion about this issue, as anything but a small "c" conservative.
Of course, I don't particualry identify as one, because that would make many people group me in with retards like you.
According to this site , Wal-Mart only has about 47% health care coverage among its workers, vs. 67% as the national average, and 80% of those who are in retail unions.
You may want to read this pdf on outsourcing to a communist country.
I didn't, in my original post, get into the harmfulness of Wal-Mart sucking money from local economies and reinvesting it in China, but you can (I'd hope) be able to figure out that our for yourself.
And nothing in your personal attack addresses the base point of my post: You cannot judge Wal-Mart soley by the prices on the goods. You have to look at the actual societal cost to shopping there.
You forget the extra $600 in taxes he's paying thanks to all the health-care free Wal-Mart employees having to take their kids to the emergency room every time they get the flu. Or the fact that his kid had to wait in the eRoom for six hours with a broken leg, keeping him out of work, while he waited for the same aforementioned Wal-Mart employees' kids. Or the fact that the cheap $60 [object] he got a great deal on at Wal Mart breaks 5 times more frequently than the $200 [object] he could have purchased elsewhere, before 100% of its production was outsourced to China.
By focusing only on the price, you are ignoring the total cost , and that can be a very short-sighted thing to do when considering Wal-Mart's overall impact.
Actually F1 drivers -- and most racers -- *do* play racing games. They help them learn the track layouts.
I was actually pretty surprised to hear this; I never would have thought that racing games were that close to real tracks, but I believe Carl Edwards said that he played EA's NASCAR game to learn breaking points at Pocono (which he won the first time he raced there). I guess the sims can be pretty realistic in that respect, not unlike a flight sim giving real pilots some good info.
Some, especially at the F1 level, go so far as to comission custom track simulations (we interviewed a guy once who did them for a few years).
As for only losers playing games, looking again at race car drivers... most of them have Xboxes in their motorhomes, and I've seen Halo on many a TV during rain delays...
So, are they adding a second physical mouse button to the laptops yet? That would be sweet, because while I love Apple hardware, they lost me in the switch from 9 to X. (Not a fan of the OSX GUI at all.)
I would love to have some alternative when I need to replace my laptop in 2+ years, because I am assuming Lenovo will have destroyed the Think line by then. I just got a T60 and the amount of crap that was preloaded reminded me of a Dell or whatever. I only got 512MB physical RAM and out of the box, only 80MB was free. OMGWTFBBQ.
So does the lack of comments to this story indicate that the average slashdotter's head am explode by conservatives defending videogames, while Hillary Clinton bags on them?
Email can be a waste of time too, spending lots of time crafting a perfect message when a quick phone call can accomplish the same thing.
And that's what they invented IM and SMS for...
Seriously, though, I didn't understand the point in the article where he was like "everyone knows email is broken." Really? Who is everybody? Everybody I know uses email pretty well, thanks.
While I like the idea of collaborative software, it kind of reminds me of group living situations, where someone is eating other peoples' food, and you're like "ok, everyone, don't eat anyone else's food," but one guy in the house wants to have a house meeting to discuss it. That's the collabrative software guy. The simple solution (email, not eating anyone else's food) works 90% of the time for 95% of the people, but the quest for perfection can waste a lot of people's time.
I once ran over a rabbit... and it was only my *friend* who played Ultima III, on an Apple ][+. That's how harmful videogames, and RPGs in particular, can be.
Ask's search results are just as good as Google's IMHO (when I've asked it about a subject I know a lot about, sometimes the results are actually better than Google's to be honest). I use Google more cause of the toolbar, but I use Ask's portal as my homepage because it's full featured, loads quickly, and is ad free.
I think studios saw sales spikes from novelty purchases ("Hey, my PSP can play movies! I should try one") and quickly flooded the market with the same kind of crap they were able to sell at the begining of the DVD market. But no one wants to rebuild their catalogs on UMD like they did on DVD. I think there really is a UMD movie market, but assuming it's a duplicate of the DVD market is probably a bad idea.
(Disclaimer: I just took possession of a sweet new Lenovo ThinkPad yesterday, so I already mey be compromised.)
The risk/reward for putting a human asset into place is not as good as the risk/reward for spending an awful lot of time getting a sneaky key logger onto 14,000 machines. One guy with one USB key could cause an international incident for maybe 1 gig of files. A key logger doesn't require any human assets in place at the destination and can capture everything 14,000 gvt. employees type for the next five years.
Assuming the IT guys are gonna wipe the drives, where would you hide a key logger in this situation? Little extra hardware in the USB bus?
These problems are irritating, but the fact that Alienware keyboards have the tiny backspace key has always kept me from ordering. If I'm buying a cool looking PC with matching keyboard, I want to be able to use it!
Even an R series @ 5-6lbs is fine for just about everyone, and they're becoming cheap as dirt ( My girlfriend has a R51 and she loves it. She does a lot of writing though, so the keyboard is important; that's the main reason I wanted her to get a ThinkPad over a Mac. I have a T60 dualcore on order, but honestly my R4x was working fine, and with the 14.1 inch screen, it's really small enough to be used anywhere, even Coach. Even Coach on United!
No, no! At least for me, I need to make the FOV in the game pretty wide (120 degrees maybe -- more than 90) and decrease the actual FOV it takes up, by moving away. Again, at least for me, the motion sickness is caused more by the camera movement than by the FOV I am seeing, so a wider field of view requires less jerky camera swings to see what's going on, and then things are ok. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed HALO so much was that the action mostly takes place at a distance, so I didn't need to swing the camera around all the time.
I can get terrible motion sickness from 1st person games (not third person, oddly enough -- I remember seeing an early build of EverQuest when I was a journalist. In third person, fine. In first person, I was ready to puke), as well as from inconsistant frame rates. And actually, after about 10 hours straight, just about any 3D game will make me sick unless I've been taking breaks.
Expanding the FOV can really help, as can sitting back from the TV or monitor, but framerate may be something you can't do anything about. I don't think you can change the FOV in Silent Hill, but maybe you can lower detail to get a more consistant FR. Anyway, breaks of about 5 min every hour are also good.
12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.
Anyway, what's sad to me is all these "inventions" are hundreds of years old. It paints a picture of Islam as a stagnant culture, which is probably the opposite of the good intentions that the curators had.
All Xbox 360 games run from RAM; you can't assume a system will have a HDD (remember, there are "core" systems out there). Because PC game makers have a more expansive platform to work with they frequently will cache things to disc, and as the parent notes, be "sloppy." I don't know how much you can bag on them for it (ok, actually I do, since I work with a lot of console engineers, and the answer there is "an unlimited amount"), because obviously they have a lot of other things to deal with, such as making their games run under Windows, on a huge variety of PCs and configurations.
I like the part where there's this worry that the foil will somehow block the heat transfer. Right. If you believe that, wrap your hand in tinfoil and stick it in a fire.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree the whole thing is moot. But mainly because I haven't met *anyone*, even people with 60+ inch home theatres, who gives a shit about either format. Most DVDs look good enough on HDTVs that I think it's going to be an exceptionally slow adoption curve. More like laserdisk than DVD.
FTR: That Dick's shot is from their site... my visit in February was predictably rainy (and windy, just to add some variety)!
Further, Metal Gear Ac!d was pretty clearly a card game if you look at the back of the box. You've bought maybe 5 games out of a library of 100; I'm sorry your results haven't been great, but if we're just offering anecdotal evidence here:
I bought MGA knowing exactly what to expect and enjoyed the game
I loved Lumines and wasted many hours playing it
I spent many, many hours leveling enjoyably in Untold Legends. Load times weren't great, but not bad enough to keep me from playing it
I had a great time, with fine loading times, playing the decidely old-school RPG Legend of Heroes.
Capcom Classics Remix is fantastic, as is Powered Up.
So from my perspective, PSP is pretty good!
There are two major pc builders in China. Lenevo and SomeOtherCompanyYouWouldn'tRecognizeTheNameOf. IBM chose SOCTYWRTNO to build the ThinkPad thanks it its committment to quality. But they sold out to their competitor, Lenevo. So there's precedent to think that the quality will decrease.
The experience of getting my Lenevo ThinkPad was actually much lamer, although the computer was designed by the same people, and is obviously way better (1400 x 1050, dual core 1.8Ghz... very nice machine). Maybe nothing replaces your first IBM, but also I was surpirsed at home much they pushed the Lenevo name, instead of just capitalizing on the Think brand. That actually turned me off. The computer itself is awesome, but there is a lot less brand loyalty cache behind it. I think the value of the IBM name itself, especially to brand loyal buyers (like me, I guess) may have been undervalued.
If Lenevo abandons the awesome keyboard of the Think series (which they have already on their cut-rate Lenevo brand laptops), there's no way I'll buy another. I am just glad my T60 still says IBM, because it's going to be a cool artifact at some point in the future.
Ya know, I'm kind of impressed with regular super glue's "1 car / quarter" pressure resistance. I guess that dude really did just super glue that hard hat to the beam.
Granted, when it comes to social programs, I am against hospitals turning away people without the proven ability to pay, which does make me a little bit of a bleeding heart, I guess, but there's really nothing else in my post which could identify me, based on my opinion about this issue, as anything but a small "c" conservative.
Of course, I don't particualry identify as one, because that would make many people group me in with retards like you. According to this site , Wal-Mart only has about 47% health care coverage among its workers, vs. 67% as the national average, and 80% of those who are in retail unions.
You may want to read this pdf on outsourcing to a communist country.
I didn't, in my original post, get into the harmfulness of Wal-Mart sucking money from local economies and reinvesting it in China, but you can (I'd hope) be able to figure out that our for yourself.
And nothing in your personal attack addresses the base point of my post: You cannot judge Wal-Mart soley by the prices on the goods. You have to look at the actual societal cost to shopping there.
By focusing only on the price, you are ignoring the total cost , and that can be a very short-sighted thing to do when considering Wal-Mart's overall impact.
I was actually pretty surprised to hear this; I never would have thought that racing games were that close to real tracks, but I believe Carl Edwards said that he played EA's NASCAR game to learn breaking points at Pocono (which he won the first time he raced there). I guess the sims can be pretty realistic in that respect, not unlike a flight sim giving real pilots some good info.
Some, especially at the F1 level, go so far as to comission custom track simulations (we interviewed a guy once who did them for a few years).
As for only losers playing games, looking again at race car drivers... most of them have Xboxes in their motorhomes, and I've seen Halo on many a TV during rain delays...
I would love to have some alternative when I need to replace my laptop in 2+ years, because I am assuming Lenovo will have destroyed the Think line by then. I just got a T60 and the amount of crap that was preloaded reminded me of a Dell or whatever. I only got 512MB physical RAM and out of the box, only 80MB was free. OMGWTFBBQ.
So does the lack of comments to this story indicate that the average slashdotter's head am explode by conservatives defending videogames, while Hillary Clinton bags on them?
And that's what they invented IM and SMS for...
Seriously, though, I didn't understand the point in the article where he was like "everyone knows email is broken." Really? Who is everybody? Everybody I know uses email pretty well, thanks.
While I like the idea of collaborative software, it kind of reminds me of group living situations, where someone is eating other peoples' food, and you're like "ok, everyone, don't eat anyone else's food," but one guy in the house wants to have a house meeting to discuss it. That's the collabrative software guy. The simple solution (email, not eating anyone else's food) works 90% of the time for 95% of the people, but the quest for perfection can waste a lot of people's time.
I once ran over a rabbit... and it was only my *friend* who played Ultima III, on an Apple ][+. That's how harmful videogames, and RPGs in particular, can be.
Ask's search results are just as good as Google's IMHO (when I've asked it about a subject I know a lot about, sometimes the results are actually better than Google's to be honest). I use Google more cause of the toolbar, but I use Ask's portal as my homepage because it's full featured, loads quickly, and is ad free.
I think studios saw sales spikes from novelty purchases ("Hey, my PSP can play movies! I should try one") and quickly flooded the market with the same kind of crap they were able to sell at the begining of the DVD market. But no one wants to rebuild their catalogs on UMD like they did on DVD. I think there really is a UMD movie market, but assuming it's a duplicate of the DVD market is probably a bad idea.
The risk/reward for putting a human asset into place is not as good as the risk/reward for spending an awful lot of time getting a sneaky key logger onto 14,000 machines. One guy with one USB key could cause an international incident for maybe 1 gig of files. A key logger doesn't require any human assets in place at the destination and can capture everything 14,000 gvt. employees type for the next five years.
Assuming the IT guys are gonna wipe the drives, where would you hide a key logger in this situation? Little extra hardware in the USB bus?
Don't blame Slashdot. For once, the error is in TFA (nice job, Reuters).
Ugliness redefined, but there's no doubt what they sell, or whether or not it's in stock.
These problems are irritating, but the fact that Alienware keyboards have the tiny backspace key has always kept me from ordering. If I'm buying a cool looking PC with matching keyboard, I want to be able to use it!
Even an R series @ 5-6lbs is fine for just about everyone, and they're becoming cheap as dirt ( My girlfriend has a R51 and she loves it. She does a lot of writing though, so the keyboard is important; that's the main reason I wanted her to get a ThinkPad over a Mac. I have a T60 dualcore on order, but honestly my R4x was working fine, and with the 14.1 inch screen, it's really small enough to be used anywhere, even Coach. Even Coach on United!
No, no! At least for me, I need to make the FOV in the game pretty wide (120 degrees maybe -- more than 90) and decrease the actual FOV it takes up, by moving away. Again, at least for me, the motion sickness is caused more by the camera movement than by the FOV I am seeing, so a wider field of view requires less jerky camera swings to see what's going on, and then things are ok. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed HALO so much was that the action mostly takes place at a distance, so I didn't need to swing the camera around all the time.
Expanding the FOV can really help, as can sitting back from the TV or monitor, but framerate may be something you can't do anything about. I don't think you can change the FOV in Silent Hill, but maybe you can lower detail to get a more consistant FR. Anyway, breaks of about 5 min every hour are also good.
Anyway, what's sad to me is all these "inventions" are hundreds of years old. It paints a picture of Islam as a stagnant culture, which is probably the opposite of the good intentions that the curators had.
All Xbox 360 games run from RAM; you can't assume a system will have a HDD (remember, there are "core" systems out there). Because PC game makers have a more expansive platform to work with they frequently will cache things to disc, and as the parent notes, be "sloppy." I don't know how much you can bag on them for it (ok, actually I do, since I work with a lot of console engineers, and the answer there is "an unlimited amount"), because obviously they have a lot of other things to deal with, such as making their games run under Windows, on a huge variety of PCs and configurations.
I like the part where there's this worry that the foil will somehow block the heat transfer. Right. If you believe that, wrap your hand in tinfoil and stick it in a fire.