Had a discussion with some friends the other day to come up with the most obscure musical instrument possible that a "hero" game could be made from. I think Didgeridoo Hero has a nice ring to it...
The China censorship issue was a very difficult decision
I'm going to assume that you meant "the decision for Google to censor in the first place". Sorry, but I disagree here. Google had a golden opportunity that they, in my opinion, wasted. Here's a large, cutting edge company that has the respect of the internet community and is seen by many as a role model in the corporate world.
If Google's leaders had stated firmly, openly, and loudly that they would never condone censorship of any kind, especially as it pertained to delivering services in China, they not only would have earned the respect of many but would have been essentially in a position to shame any company that didn't follow their lead. It would have given them moral high ground to accuse other companies (e.g. Yahoo) of kowtowing to the will of a government that condones what we view as an oppresive policies; namely censorship and imprisonment of those that disagree with the government.
The fact that google compromised their principles and defied their own mission statement has burned a lot of goodwill that may never be recovered. Good for them that they are considering changing thier policies. I hope they do.
There needs to be a balance.
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 2, Funny
Games that contain unlockable goodies can be a good thing, but there needs to be a balance. There is nothing worse than firing up "Ultimate Generic Fighting Game 2006" or "Ultimate Auto Racing Experience 2006" and finding that you can only select between 3 or 4 fighters (or cars) and that you have to unlock everything else. Anything that tantalizes you by letting you scroll through the endless list of things that you can't select, almost always without telling you exactly how to unlock them is unfair to the gamer. Perhaps even worse are the endless hurdles that you have to pass before unlocking some of the best stuff. I thought driving the Model T would be a nice novelty in Gran Turismo 4 until I found out that you have to get gold medals on all your "S" class license exams. Wow, no thanks guys, I don't think that's EVER going to happen.
I always felt like the GTA games gave you a pretty good balance here. In GTA:SA, you had access to probably the top 80% or so of cars, weapons, etc. for most of the game. If you wanted to complete the endless side quests you could, but you didn't have to. And the stuff that you unlocked was pretty cool, but not so much that you felt like you were missing out if you couldn't get it. This is not the case with a lot of games that force you to pretty much unlock ANYTHING. Fighting and racing games are the worst at this. It's a formula that I wish the game companies would stop.
Back in the olden days of gaming, unlockable content, easter eggs, and whatnot were rare. Usually due to cpu, memory, or graphical limitations. Now that developers are no longer constrained by those limitations I think there is a big tendency to get carried away. Espcially on consoles, unlockable content is threatening to become the scourge of gaming.
I still remember quite vividly the feud between Tom's Hardware Guide and Rambus that resulted in Rambus' stock price tumbling. Even if the other manufacturers kept their prices artificially low (which I doubt), Rambus was easily twice as expensive if not more than the same amount of DDR would have been. The fact that real world performance tests didn't back up the hype that Rambus promised was the nail in the coffin. If it was priced lower, they might have had something. I thought the technology had potential, but it's absurdly high price kept it from ever being realized.
From TFA: Sony, which is refusing to comment on the story, does have a patent on technology which would tie a piece of software to an individual piece of hardware.
I remember reading about this a while back (possibly on slashdot?). IIRC, the technology they were talking about here had something to do with putting a small writeable sector on the disc that, once inserted into a PS3, would be written with an encryption code of some sort that tied it to the serial number of the console, or the processor, something like that. Thus, any attempt to play the disc on another console would be met with failure. I could be remembering this wrong though.
No offense Ken. But I heard this same BS when the PS2 came out. You know, how the PS2 wasn't a video game console, it was a home entertainment device that was going to revolutionize my living room. There was all this talk of expansion, it had built in Firewire and USB, space for a hard drive, people speculated it might function as a DVR too. Even Microsoft tried to sell the original XBOX the same way -- That it was much more than a console. (and before anyone accuses me of being a Nintento fanboy I assure you I'm not. The last Nintendo I ever owned was an SNES).
Fortunately for Sony, the PS2 came out at a time when a lot of people still didn't have DVD players so Sony was somewhat vindicated by that. But Sony has a habit of overhyping and under-delivering (i.e. using cut scenes in product promos and passing them off as real graphics). I think that this round, the PS3 is going to have a tough sell since no one seems to really want to be an early adopter of Blu-Ray / HD-DVD.
I had high hopes for this latest round of next generation systems. I bought a 360, and while it's pretty impressive there still isn't a huge library of games, let alone decent ones, for it. I want to get a PS3 but I am not going to buy one right away if there aren't any decent launch titles (learned my lesson on the 360). I still think the Wii is too gimicky but I might be proven wrong. I want to actually play with one before I decide.
I am starting to wonder if we aren't about to have another video game crash. But maybe I'm being too melodramatic. Either that or Nintendo is about to make a triumphant return to the "good old days". Will be interesting to see...
The problem with this line of reasoning is that you are conveniently forgetting where the electricity is coming from. When you "plug your car into an outlet", as you say, you are drawing energy from the electrical grid. The power for the grid comes from, generally, coal-fired power plants. So at the end of the day, what you have done is caused more coal to have been burned to produce the hydrogen that powers your car. Why not eliminate the middleman and manufacture a car that runs on coal?
You are right about one thing though: it really isn't that hard to obtain hydrogen. The way you go about it, however, is. If there were "hydrogen mines" that you could pull the stuff out of the ground you'd be on to something. That's the beauty of oil and other fossil fuels.
We use QIP for DNS, and it does an acceptable job for that. It doesn't have a very good method for telling "at a glance" what IP space is available though. It pretty much insists that you carve out everything up front, so you can divide a/16 into 255/24s or something if you want. But if you don't know what space you are going to need where, it kind of sucks.
I work for a company with about 70,000 employees. We have a lot of address space. Multiple Class Bs of public IP space not to mention 10.0.0.0/8 and the other RFC 1918 space. Far and away the best tool we have ever used to manage IP space is an Excel spreadsheet located on a network drive. As soon as you're done laughing, read on...
Create a spreadsheet with Column A having the/24s of each block spelled out: 10.0.0.0 10.0.1.0 10.0.2.0 etc.
Colums B through Q should be/28s within each/24. Put the network address of each/28 up there, i.e. 0,16,32,48, etc..
Use the 'Merge Cells' option to block out each subnet that you want to document and then change the background color of that cell to something other than white. White, unmerged cells should always represent available IP space. Put a descriptive text in the cell showing the VLAN, router interface, or firewall that owns that space. If you don't have enough space in the cell, write something very brief and then do an "insert comment" where you can put all the descriptive text you want there.
I use other colors like pink for "reserved" space, i.e. space that I want to use in an upcoming project but it isn't live yet. Try to keep the number of colors you use to a minimum. Ideally you shoudln't need more than two or three colors.
Finally, don't put everything onto one worksheet. Use tabs to break things up into different OSPF areas, or however you want. I have a tab for the DMZ environment, one for the Extranet environment, one for the intranet, etc.. Some of the tabs have address space as small as a/19 defined on them. Most of them are/18s or/17s though.
As long as the file is backed up regularly and all of your network engineers use it religiously, there should be no problems. We have been using this for years now and it has saved our ass on many, many occasions. Only one person can use the file at a time, so conflicts are not an issue.
Using an off the shelf application is asking for trouble, in my opinion. Keep It Simple, Stupid!
One of the absolute best features of Star Control 2 was, without question, the music. How many people here got one of the SC2 songs in their head when they saw the title of this article? I got the "flying through space" music stuck in my head when I saw it.
This may be one of the reasons SC2 was so memorable. Not only was the music in it good but at the time, using.MOD files for music in a video game was something that, up to that point, you only got (for the most part) on an Amiga. The music sounded great on any system, even if you didn't have a sound card it would play on the PC speaker. There was also the side benefit of the fact that you could "rip" the MOD files out of the game's data files and play them in your favorite tracker.
I made a CD of all the tracks that I keep around for whenever I get the urge to listen to game music. I'm sure I wasn't the only one. So my only plea for SC4, should it ever happen, would be that they continue putting good, catchy tunes in there.
Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?
This is a total cliche, but there is no Killer App for collaboration software yet, at least not one that has any traction. Killer Apps seem to happen organically, I don't recall ever seeing one get foisted upon the public that ever went anywhere.
I saw video somewhere of an "A Capella" group that sang the songs of old Nintendo games, also acting out scenes from them live on stage. Anyone know who they were?
If we ever reach a point where DVDs are released at the same time as movies in the theater, get ready for ADVERTISEMENT CITY. You think non-skippable content on DVDs is bad now? Just wait until they start coming out at the same time as the theatrical release.
Why should it be the responsiblity of corporations, who's only concern is to it's shareholders, and the almighty dollar, to pay for health insurance?
If the corporations don't pay for health insurance who should? The worker?
If the worker should pay for health insurance, should the employer be responsible for paying their (full time) workers enough to afford it?
If the employers shouldn't be responsible for paying their (full time) workers enough to afford health insurance, does that mean health insurance isn't something everyone should have?
If health insurance isn't something everyone should have, what should we do with our sick, if they cannot afford treatment or medicine for their ailments - let them suffer or die?
If we let our sick suffer or die, how does that reflect on us as a society?
I'm not trying to suggest there is an easy answer to the question of quality of life as it pertains to health insurance. I think we can all agree that it's a sad state of affairs that health care is so expensive that you need insurance for it to be worthwhile. But to suggest that people not fortunate enough to have insurance should be thrown to the wolves isn't the answer.
I'd like to see them try. If you own a physical CD, ostensibly one that you bought legally, and you copy its contents to your iPod, no laws have been broken. If you got said CD from your neighbor there could be issues, but I'd say that a device like the one in question has, as they say, "substantial non infringing uses".
After all, if it's well established that you can legally use an iPod in the first place, then what is the legal difference between putting a CD in your computer, ripping it, and copying it to your ipod versus eliminating the middleman and copying the CD to your iPod directly?
I have been an AMD fan for a while now; my last couple of desktops used their processors, and the one I am using right now does as well. Having said that, I'd switch back to Intel in a heartbeat on my next system if they are faster and their price/performance ratio is good. Heck, I might even give price a pass if the benchmarks were really that much better (I like to build top of the line and upgrade every 2-3 years).
Good for Intel, I'm sure this is just the latest volley in an ever continuing war. So has Intel officially abandoned the so-called Megahertz Myth? I see that the system in this article ran at a slower clock than the AMD CPU. Interesting.
Something I never thought of until just now, but I think might be relevant to the debate. Let's say that Microsoft decides to release their HD DVD player add-on to the XBOX360. Last time I checked, the 360 doesn't have any digital outputs on the back of the console that support HDCP. Just component video connectors.
And as we all know, the studios are loathe to support anything with a so-called "analog hole", which means that the output of any HD-DVD playing on your 360 would be restricted to 480p resolution. If this happened, why would anyone in their right mind buy such a piece of hardware?
In my opinion, a snafu like this would effectively kill HD-DVD.
Along those same lines, I have long wondered why there is a firewire port on the PS2. Nice that they put one in "for future use" but I never heard of anything that used it.
Side note: Anything on a console that's there "for future use" will never get used. Didn't the original NES have an expansion port on the bottom that never got used?
I hate to say it, but I think MS may have shot themselves in the foot by not having a killer launch title for the 360. The PSU overheating issues were much ado about nothing, in my opinion. The shortages definitely hurt the system's chances too.
But in my opinion the real cause for concern in Redmond is that there isn't a "Must have" game for the 360. Call of Duty and PGR3 are pretty good but neither one is what I would call a "must have" title. Halo 3 would probably fit the bill, but it's not coming out until God knows when.
I was also disappointed with Auto Assault, which was billed as "the next Twisted Metal" by the game magazines. I hope some decent titles start to hit the shelves soon. MS's problem right now is that there is no buzz about this system anymore. Way to go.
Aside from the obvious "your diode is 79 cents, would you like satellite TV with that?" stupidity, there are two things that happened that made me decide to swear off Radio Shack forever.
Several years ago, I bought a fiber cable from Radio Shack for my CD player to hook up to my stereo. Their house brand cables were really cheap, only like 10 bucks for a 6 or 8 foot cable. About a year later I returned to buy additional fiber cables for my cable box and my PS2. They no longer sold the "house brand" and only carried some upscale brand with gold-plated(!) connectors that cost 36-40 bucks appiece. I laughed at the sales guy and told them I wanted the 10 buck model, but since they didn't have those I bought the cables online. 12 bucks with shipping. No Sale, Radio Shack.
I was recently there to look for a cell phone battery for my aging Samsung A500. They had one but with a price tag of $69.95!!! In fact, all of their cell phone batteries were ridiculously expensive. Why even bother carrying them? The sales guy tried to tell me I should buy a new phone and I laughed at him and told him I could get one online for under $20, which I did. I just didn't want to wait 3-5 days for it since the one I had was dying, so I figured the one at Radio Shack couldn't be more than 30-35.
In summary, they are a store with no real purpose. They clearly can't compete with big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City, and their hobbyist section grows smaller and smaller as they try to "reinvent" themselves. News flash radio shack - unless you decide to return to their roots you're dead in the water! Nice knowing you...
Let's not forget about the untold millions of multi-level marketing "work from home" and Herbalife scams thinly disguised as jobs. Last time I looked on Monster.com, which admittedly was a while ago, I was overcome with such listings.
A related comment to that: During the time it took to post this article to slashdot and wait for a sufficient number of responses to your post, you could have been well on your way to getting half or more of your CD collection ripped by yourself. I have about 250 CDs in my collection that I ripped using Winamp while I was web browsing. I was at my computer already, I would just go through 20-30 of them while I was there and after a couple of days I got them all ripped.
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Had a discussion with some friends the other day to come up with the most obscure musical instrument possible that a "hero" game could be made from. I think Didgeridoo Hero has a nice ring to it...
I'm going to assume that you meant "the decision for Google to censor in the first place". Sorry, but I disagree here. Google had a golden opportunity that they, in my opinion, wasted. Here's a large, cutting edge company that has the respect of the internet community and is seen by many as a role model in the corporate world.
If Google's leaders had stated firmly, openly, and loudly that they would never condone censorship of any kind, especially as it pertained to delivering services in China, they not only would have earned the respect of many but would have been essentially in a position to shame any company that didn't follow their lead. It would have given them moral high ground to accuse other companies (e.g. Yahoo) of kowtowing to the will of a government that condones what we view as an oppresive policies; namely censorship and imprisonment of those that disagree with the government.
The fact that google compromised their principles and defied their own mission statement has burned a lot of goodwill that may never be recovered. Good for them that they are considering changing thier policies. I hope they do.
Games that contain unlockable goodies can be a good thing, but there needs to be a balance. There is nothing worse than firing up "Ultimate Generic Fighting Game 2006" or "Ultimate Auto Racing Experience 2006" and finding that you can only select between 3 or 4 fighters (or cars) and that you have to unlock everything else. Anything that tantalizes you by letting you scroll through the endless list of things that you can't select, almost always without telling you exactly how to unlock them is unfair to the gamer. Perhaps even worse are the endless hurdles that you have to pass before unlocking some of the best stuff. I thought driving the Model T would be a nice novelty in Gran Turismo 4 until I found out that you have to get gold medals on all your "S" class license exams. Wow, no thanks guys, I don't think that's EVER going to happen.
I always felt like the GTA games gave you a pretty good balance here. In GTA:SA, you had access to probably the top 80% or so of cars, weapons, etc. for most of the game. If you wanted to complete the endless side quests you could, but you didn't have to. And the stuff that you unlocked was pretty cool, but not so much that you felt like you were missing out if you couldn't get it. This is not the case with a lot of games that force you to pretty much unlock ANYTHING. Fighting and racing games are the worst at this. It's a formula that I wish the game companies would stop.
Back in the olden days of gaming, unlockable content, easter eggs, and whatnot were rare. Usually due to cpu, memory, or graphical limitations. Now that developers are no longer constrained by those limitations I think there is a big tendency to get carried away. Espcially on consoles, unlockable content is threatening to become the scourge of gaming.
I still remember quite vividly the feud between Tom's Hardware Guide and Rambus that resulted in Rambus' stock price tumbling. Even if the other manufacturers kept their prices artificially low (which I doubt), Rambus was easily twice as expensive if not more than the same amount of DDR would have been. The fact that real world performance tests didn't back up the hype that Rambus promised was the nail in the coffin. If it was priced lower, they might have had something. I thought the technology had potential, but it's absurdly high price kept it from ever being realized.
Sony, which is refusing to comment on the story, does have a patent on technology which would tie a piece of software to an individual piece of hardware.
I remember reading about this a while back (possibly on slashdot?). IIRC, the technology they were talking about here had something to do with putting a small writeable sector on the disc that, once inserted into a PS3, would be written with an encryption code of some sort that tied it to the serial number of the console, or the processor, something like that. Thus, any attempt to play the disc on another console would be met with failure. I could be remembering this wrong though.
Fortunately for Sony, the PS2 came out at a time when a lot of people still didn't have DVD players so Sony was somewhat vindicated by that. But Sony has a habit of overhyping and under-delivering (i.e. using cut scenes in product promos and passing them off as real graphics). I think that this round, the PS3 is going to have a tough sell since no one seems to really want to be an early adopter of Blu-Ray / HD-DVD.
I had high hopes for this latest round of next generation systems. I bought a 360, and while it's pretty impressive there still isn't a huge library of games, let alone decent ones, for it. I want to get a PS3 but I am not going to buy one right away if there aren't any decent launch titles (learned my lesson on the 360). I still think the Wii is too gimicky but I might be proven wrong. I want to actually play with one before I decide.
I am starting to wonder if we aren't about to have another video game crash. But maybe I'm being too melodramatic. Either that or Nintendo is about to make a triumphant return to the "good old days". Will be interesting to see...
You are right about one thing though: it really isn't that hard to obtain hydrogen. The way you go about it, however, is. If there were "hydrogen mines" that you could pull the stuff out of the ground you'd be on to something. That's the beauty of oil and other fossil fuels.
We use QIP for DNS, and it does an acceptable job for that. It doesn't have a very good method for telling "at a glance" what IP space is available though. It pretty much insists that you carve out everything up front, so you can divide a /16 into 255 /24s or something if you want. But if you don't know what space you are going to need where, it kind of sucks.
I work for a company with about 70,000 employees. We have a lot of address space. Multiple Class Bs of public IP space not to mention 10.0.0.0/8 and the other RFC 1918 space. Far and away the best tool we have ever used to manage IP space is an Excel spreadsheet located on a network drive. As soon as you're done laughing, read on...
/24s of each block spelled out:
/28s within each /24. Put the network address of each /28 up there, i.e. 0,16,32,48, etc..
/19 defined on them. Most of them are /18s or /17s though.
Create a spreadsheet with Column A having the
10.0.0.0
10.0.1.0
10.0.2.0
etc.
Colums B through Q should be
Use the 'Merge Cells' option to block out each subnet that you want to document and then change the background color of that cell to something other than white. White, unmerged cells should always represent available IP space. Put a descriptive text in the cell showing the VLAN, router interface, or firewall that owns that space. If you don't have enough space in the cell, write something very brief and then do an "insert comment" where you can put all the descriptive text you want there.
I use other colors like pink for "reserved" space, i.e. space that I want to use in an upcoming project but it isn't live yet. Try to keep the number of colors you use to a minimum. Ideally you shoudln't need more than two or three colors.
Finally, don't put everything onto one worksheet. Use tabs to break things up into different OSPF areas, or however you want. I have a tab for the DMZ environment, one for the Extranet environment, one for the intranet, etc.. Some of the tabs have address space as small as a
As long as the file is backed up regularly and all of your network engineers use it religiously, there should be no problems. We have been using this for years now and it has saved our ass on many, many occasions. Only one person can use the file at a time, so conflicts are not an issue.
Using an off the shelf application is asking for trouble, in my opinion. Keep It Simple, Stupid!
This may be one of the reasons SC2 was so memorable. Not only was the music in it good but at the time, using .MOD files for music in a video game was something that, up to that point, you only got (for the most part) on an Amiga. The music sounded great on any system, even if you didn't have a sound card it would play on the PC speaker. There was also the side benefit of the fact that you could "rip" the MOD files out of the game's data files and play them in your favorite tracker.
I made a CD of all the tracks that I keep around for whenever I get the urge to listen to game music. I'm sure I wasn't the only one. So my only plea for SC4, should it ever happen, would be that they continue putting good, catchy tunes in there.
This is a total cliche, but there is no Killer App for collaboration software yet, at least not one that has any traction. Killer Apps seem to happen organically, I don't recall ever seeing one get foisted upon the public that ever went anywhere.
I saw video somewhere of an "A Capella" group that sang the songs of old Nintendo games, also acting out scenes from them live on stage. Anyone know who they were?
more than a half of 9-19 years olds have seen pornography online
If we ever reach a point where DVDs are released at the same time as movies in the theater, get ready for ADVERTISEMENT CITY. You think non-skippable content on DVDs is bad now? Just wait until they start coming out at the same time as the theatrical release.
If the corporations don't pay for health insurance who should? The worker?
If the worker should pay for health insurance, should the employer be responsible for paying their (full time) workers enough to afford it?
If the employers shouldn't be responsible for paying their (full time) workers enough to afford health insurance, does that mean health insurance isn't something everyone should have?
If health insurance isn't something everyone should have, what should we do with our sick, if they cannot afford treatment or medicine for their ailments - let them suffer or die?
If we let our sick suffer or die, how does that reflect on us as a society?
I'm not trying to suggest there is an easy answer to the question of quality of life as it pertains to health insurance. I think we can all agree that it's a sad state of affairs that health care is so expensive that you need insurance for it to be worthwhile. But to suggest that people not fortunate enough to have insurance should be thrown to the wolves isn't the answer.
Here. Guaranteed not to be exploited by any javascript or plugin vulnerability. Or by any site that uses frames.
After all, if it's well established that you can legally use an iPod in the first place, then what is the legal difference between putting a CD in your computer, ripping it, and copying it to your ipod versus eliminating the middleman and copying the CD to your iPod directly?
Good for Intel, I'm sure this is just the latest volley in an ever continuing war. So has Intel officially abandoned the so-called Megahertz Myth? I see that the system in this article ran at a slower clock than the AMD CPU. Interesting.
And as we all know, the studios are loathe to support anything with a so-called "analog hole", which means that the output of any HD-DVD playing on your 360 would be restricted to 480p resolution. If this happened, why would anyone in their right mind buy such a piece of hardware?
In my opinion, a snafu like this would effectively kill HD-DVD.
Side note: Anything on a console that's there "for future use" will never get used. Didn't the original NES have an expansion port on the bottom that never got used?
Don't forget about the oft-missed London: 1961 expansion pack.
But in my opinion the real cause for concern in Redmond is that there isn't a "Must have" game for the 360. Call of Duty and PGR3 are pretty good but neither one is what I would call a "must have" title. Halo 3 would probably fit the bill, but it's not coming out until God knows when.
I was also disappointed with Auto Assault, which was billed as "the next Twisted Metal" by the game magazines. I hope some decent titles start to hit the shelves soon. MS's problem right now is that there is no buzz about this system anymore. Way to go.
In summary, they are a store with no real purpose. They clearly can't compete with big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City, and their hobbyist section grows smaller and smaller as they try to "reinvent" themselves. News flash radio shack - unless you decide to return to their roots you're dead in the water! Nice knowing you...
Let's not forget about the untold millions of multi-level marketing "work from home" and Herbalife scams thinly disguised as jobs. Last time I looked on Monster.com, which admittedly was a while ago, I was overcome with such listings.
A related comment to that: During the time it took to post this article to slashdot and wait for a sufficient number of responses to your post, you could have been well on your way to getting half or more of your CD collection ripped by yourself. I have about 250 CDs in my collection that I ripped using Winamp while I was web browsing. I was at my computer already, I would just go through 20-30 of them while I was there and after a couple of days I got them all ripped.