I remember RPG Maker 2000... Was translated from japanese to english by some russian fellow. All hell broke loose with the original developer, because everyone was downloading the ripped english version of the game and not the japanese version. They immediately went on a berserk and condemned that they would not release any upcoming version of the game to the US or to Europe and that they wont translate it at all because of what happened with RPGM2k. Brilliant.
Great product meets small but active niche, gets translated ( rather badly but hey, who cares... ) and the original developer fails to see how potentially lucrative an english release may be, instead claiming they'll never release to the US or Europe again. Seems like they mixed up their bitterness at being outdone by random people with their business sense...
Really now. India and Taiwan I can imagine as good sources for cheap labour. Stable and growing economies backed by a stable enough political systems. Now about most of Africa then? Only the countries at the northern most end and the southern most end ( Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and South-Africa. ) are anywhere near stable. The countries in the middle are plagued by atrocious economies that can't support anything, absolute lack of anything after YEARS of prolonged warfare and famine, no political stability whatsoever and plenty of tribal conflicts to boot.
I would think twice of investing resources in a country where the next day you might have to deal with 50k refugees from your neighbor camping on your grounds, the local fundamentalist warlord taking over control of the country and/or a tribal warfare because you've employed someone from tribe Z which pissed of tribes A to Y.
Some more info here regarding this whole stunt. I wonder about blogspot's policies regarding the use of their services as part of a hoax/advertisement campaign...
That's the usual way of how things sometimes work. If it doesn't kill, maim, burn, freeze or radiate soldiers, it might just be good enough to apply to civilians. Think of computers, radar, ARPAnet, etcetera. All stuff made by the military but applied for civilian uses later on.
Here in the middle of the Netherlands, ATM and their bastard offspring have become an issue. Oh, they work nicely enough, do what they are supposed to do and of course we got the random bulgarian fuckwits who attach magnetic card readers, so our ATMs work just like any other ATM. The problem is the fact that banks use ATMs as a cheap means to close down local establishments. Instead of talking to a human person, banks now give us two ATMs to withdraw money, another specialized ATM-like thingy to deposit money and a big sticker with an URL on it to their online banking site. ( Which, if I may add, works perfectly with Mozilla. Go ABN-Amro! *ahem* )
For daily stuff this isn't much of an issue and the town where I live in is considered large enough ( 100k+ ) for banks to have permanent establishments, but what about smaller towns? Because this is the middle of nowhere, there are plenty of towns without bank establishments, where it was cheaper for the bank to put an ATM or two in place, promote online banking and telling people to go fuck themselves. Even though for daily use ATM suffice, how about non-daily things? Stuff like opening new accounts, information, major transactions*, mortages and supplemental financial services?
Mind you, this is the Netherlands. Almost no one here has creditcards and instead most of us pay directly from our bank accounts using our bank's card with our PIN. Think of it as an ATM which pays your purchases, comparable to a debit card.
* ) This means anything about EUR 1500 because of the default limit of EUR 1500 max withdrawal per day. Basically, we've got three options if we want to buy something EUR 1500+; use the ATM once a day for several days, raise the limit at a bank establishment and withdraw money at said bank establishment. ( Limits dont apply for non-ATM withdrawals ) Of course, since most establishments have been closed and allot of people around here live in the middle of nowhere, options 2 and 3 aren't really valid unless you want to travel 25km in the hope of finding a local bank establishment. Try paying for a EUR 20k car that way.
We tried. We actually have to work with Linux, on the desktop, as part of our ICT course. ( Think of remocable HDs here ) Half of the crap doesn't work. We can't access out network drives under Linux because no one has a clue how to log in to the AD network. Even if we do manage that and write up a report, then what? Print it? No printers in the classes, so we go to the library, boot up a PC with Knoppix, get thrown out for doing something that the library staff doesn't understand. Boot up Windows XP, realize Word 200(something) can't read OO.org files and mangles OO.org.doc files' layout. Oh well, we'll use intranet to send the document instead. Get kicked out of library again because you're taking to much time, so back to the classroom.
Back there, we boot up Linux, find the file, open Mozilla/Konquerer/Galeon/whatever the hell is available to surf the intranet. Bitch about proxies, DHCP and inept admins, boot random PC in Windows XP to find out proxy configuration du jour. Cram proxy configuration in Linux browser, go to intranet site, get stunned by non-functionality. Boot up random Windows PC again, load same site in IE, figure out your file is still on your Linux computer. Try to find a floppy, then try to find a PC with functional floppy drive and removable HD system. ( Crap PCs at college... )
Kick the sucker who took over the Windows PC away from it. Log in under your account, send intramail with IE, bitch about lack of IMAP to random person who doesnt know what IMAP is and get a bad grade because of mangled.doc layout. Go home, eat, drink, sleep, come back and hope removable HD hasn't died today. ( School issued hardware, definitely cheapest contractor work. Like the PCs. )
It's still roughly 131 GB per square inch. Ask any photographer who uses digital cameras often wether 120 GB of of storage would be be considered insignificant.
That's because HyperThreading is a neat and very low level trick that makes it appear like there are two processors. A dual-core processor doesn't use any tricks and physically contains two processing cores on one chip. Of course, this could lead to some very interesting things such as an dual core AMD proc using one shared on-chip memory controller or Intel procs with dual-cores AND hyperthreading for a total of 4 procs.
Anyone know of a nice, decent and relatively cheap ( as in, below 500 euro ) video camera? Preferably digital, but I don't really know much about cameras so before someone starts screaming that cameras with tapes are by far superior, please enlighten me. Anyways, I'm looking for a simple camera. High resolution, perfect quality and all that are nice, but I just want to record simple things with it. I'm by no means whatsoever a professional and spending 2000 euro on a camera still makes me a crap cameraman. I just want something nice and simple for average home stuff. Record family, stuff, dad's shiny motorbike he's oh-so-proud of, mom's new creative stuff, friends, etc.
So, anyone got a few nice suggestions regarding that? I'm open to all kinds of ideas, just with a few minor preferences, which are all open to discussion. I'd like it to store data on some sort of flash memory, preferably encoded in a rather normal format such as divx or xvid or whatever. Also, USB connections would be best, considering my current lack of firewire. Some simple video-editing program would be nice too, so I can recode/encode the video to mpeg2 and burn it on DVD afterwards.
So, if anyone got a suggestion as to what camera would be ideal and on which notions I'm horribly wrong, feel free to reply. Cheers!
Re:Obviously not talking about Japanese Games...
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Indeed. Thought, if a game does have to do anything with religion it is usually limited to RPGs. And even then usually to japanese RPGs. Xenogears is a good example you gave there, with it almost not being released in the US. However, for anyone unfamiliar with those RPGs, do remember that they deal with fictional gods and goddesses, not direct reference to the deities of any current religion. For example, Grandia II focusses on two gods, one evil god named Valmar and one good god named Granas. This is also in contrast with three of the four major religion, because christianity, islam and judaism are monotheistic religions. Lunar: SSS(C) focuses one a single goddess called Althena. No reference to any real religion either.
it gets really interesting in the Baldur's Gate series though. Instead of following a religion you actually become part of it. Long story and a big spoiler, won't go into detail. Hoever, for a western RPG to include such large elements of religion is quite unusual...
However, if you model a robot after an average human, you can easily give away boring human tasks. Even public ones. For example, you could design a special excavator robot, a special pipeline construction robot, etc. However, you can also make 5 standard humanoid robots and put one in a normal excavtor, have one fit the piping, etc. Remember that everything so far has been designed for human use.
Also, I think it would be easier to deal with humanoid robots in public space then lumbering machines.
The problem with win2k and winXP aren't stability issues or security issues. Really, a properly managed Windows system can do whatever task is assigned to it quite well. Surely, Windows requires you to prey upon all major security lists but hey, so does Linux. I'm not going to go into detail about that, let's just assume that being a lazy admin is bad, whatever operating system you choose.
No, the problem with Windows is the same as Linux. Drivers. Windows drivers are occasionally horrible, especially the odd bits of hardware often required in the professional world. ( Think high-end SCSI/SATA/ATA RAID controllers, tape drives, etc ) Nearly all modern BSODs one sees are driver related. Odd hardware behaviour can likely be traced back to some funky drivers or an conflict. The second advice given by any helpdesk/organization ( the first being the blanket advice of "Please reboot your system and tell me what happens." ) is to check that all drivers are up to date. Compare this with Linux drivers which are far better... Yet nowhere nearly as numerous or available and occasionally are forced to include some nasty hacks to allow stuff to work. So both systems got their weak points.
Technicaly, the best solution to this would be to use hard and software from the same company. I'm pretty damned sure Sun and Apple know the exact specs and quirks of their own hardware. That would solve nearly all driver problems... At a cost.
Why the HELL would anyone want wireless communication in his car? Even better, why the hell from Microsoft, a company known for its appaling security record? MS products on computers I can imagine. I'd rather have my PC cracked at home instead of my Fiat's internal systems cracked on the highway.
Remember that the US goverment is good at aquiring convenient evidence. Do you also remember those WMD that were piled in 10m high stacks at every streetcorner in Baghdad that no one ever found? Also, regarding the debris field, you should remember we're dealing with an airliner here, not some fragile jetfighter. Besides, depending on which weapon used, the results would likely still be the same. Sidewinders are short range, heat/IR guided and not that powerful, thus considering jetliners carry their engines external, under the wing, a direct hit on the engine with a Sidewinder would blow up the engine or knock it off, not much else. This means the jetliner would simply plummet down. Sparrows and AMRAAMs use active radar, which means they'll hit the damn thing plain smack in the middle. This would breach the hull of the jetliner but is by far not enough to outright destroy it. The massive decompression and damage would cause the plane to loose control and crash down relatively intact.
the UK will probably get it first, on or about August 6th. Everywhere else will probably be Friday, August 13th (cue Twilight Zone Theme) or close to that date, with just a few exceptions (e.g. Russia and Poland)
Why? Why not just give one release date? Or approximate release date where the product will be shipped to as mnay stores as possible? Why this?
Here in the Netherlands, the fact that that asshole minister of us voted FOR software patents has been a nice little riot in the dutch techie world. People were encouraged to write said minister, write to his party, write to the head of the party, parliament, etc. I think that all of this caused sufficient public backlash that forced our goverment to make that bastard swallow his words and do The Right Thing(tm).
The "web community" also promotes the use of Flash, RealMedia, narcism (*logs/*journals) and IE-only sites like Slashdot. ( Stupid admins STILL haven't fixed the overlapping problem in Mozilla/Firefox ) So fuck the "web community" as a whole and let's concentrate on the individual communities that do not suck. ( Hello Wikipedia )
And german suppliers will STILL be allot cheaper then Dutch suppliers. Cheapest dvd player around here is about 69 or 89 euro. And stuff at those price is only for sale in an Aldi or Lidl. ( German supermarkets, for those of you who don't have a clue what I'm talking about ) We the Dutch elevated taxing to a religion; 19% VAT on anything electronic, copyright extor- uhm, protection taxes on blank media, outrageous amounts of regular taxes, etcetera. Thankfully, we live next to Germany so we can always buy stuff over there at about 75% down to 50% of the price here in the NL due to excessive taxing. Heck, with Pentium being classiefied as weapons, I'm sure Harry Potter will find some other way to tax a few more euros out of us again. How does "Weapons Trade & Distribution Tax" sound?
In short: Don't complain and buy me one of those dual-layer DVD RW drives, will you?:P
Slashdot Mirror
I remember RPG Maker 2000... Was translated from japanese to english by some russian fellow. All hell broke loose with the original developer, because everyone was downloading the ripped english version of the game and not the japanese version. They immediately went on a berserk and condemned that they would not release any upcoming version of the game to the US or to Europe and that they wont translate it at all because of what happened with RPGM2k. Brilliant.
Great product meets small but active niche, gets translated ( rather badly but hey, who cares... ) and the original developer fails to see how potentially lucrative an english release may be, instead claiming they'll never release to the US or Europe again. Seems like they mixed up their bitterness at being outdone by random people with their business sense...
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/rep ort/1985/WJ.htm
Really now. India and Taiwan I can imagine as good sources for cheap labour. Stable and growing economies backed by a stable enough political systems. Now about most of Africa then? Only the countries at the northern most end and the southern most end ( Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and South-Africa. ) are anywhere near stable. The countries in the middle are plagued by atrocious economies that can't support anything, absolute lack of anything after YEARS of prolonged warfare and famine, no political stability whatsoever and plenty of tribal conflicts to boot.
I would think twice of investing resources in a country where the next day you might have to deal with 50k refugees from your neighbor camping on your grounds, the local fundamentalist warlord taking over control of the country and/or a tribal warfare because you've employed someone from tribe Z which pissed of tribes A to Y.
It's harder NOT to notice them.
But yeah, good point. Still, MS advertisements for a main article has got to be a new thingy...
Some more info here regarding this whole stunt. I wonder about blogspot's policies regarding the use of their services as part of a hoax/advertisement campaign...
Slashdot running guerilla advertisements for MS endorsed products.
I can already imagine a MS marketing executive going to bed with a HUGE grin tonight.
That's the usual way of how things sometimes work. If it doesn't kill, maim, burn, freeze or radiate soldiers, it might just be good enough to apply to civilians. Think of computers, radar, ARPAnet, etcetera. All stuff made by the military but applied for civilian uses later on.
Here in the middle of the Netherlands, ATM and their bastard offspring have become an issue. Oh, they work nicely enough, do what they are supposed to do and of course we got the random bulgarian fuckwits who attach magnetic card readers, so our ATMs work just like any other ATM. The problem is the fact that banks use ATMs as a cheap means to close down local establishments. Instead of talking to a human person, banks now give us two ATMs to withdraw money, another specialized ATM-like thingy to deposit money and a big sticker with an URL on it to their online banking site. ( Which, if I may add, works perfectly with Mozilla. Go ABN-Amro! *ahem* )
For daily stuff this isn't much of an issue and the town where I live in is considered large enough ( 100k+ ) for banks to have permanent establishments, but what about smaller towns? Because this is the middle of nowhere, there are plenty of towns without bank establishments, where it was cheaper for the bank to put an ATM or two in place, promote online banking and telling people to go fuck themselves. Even though for daily use ATM suffice, how about non-daily things? Stuff like opening new accounts, information, major transactions*, mortages and supplemental financial services?
Mind you, this is the Netherlands. Almost no one here has creditcards and instead most of us pay directly from our bank accounts using our bank's card with our PIN. Think of it as an ATM which pays your purchases, comparable to a debit card.
* ) This means anything about EUR 1500 because of the default limit of EUR 1500 max withdrawal per day. Basically, we've got three options if we want to buy something EUR 1500+; use the ATM once a day for several days, raise the limit at a bank establishment and withdraw money at said bank establishment. ( Limits dont apply for non-ATM withdrawals ) Of course, since most establishments have been closed and allot of people around here live in the middle of nowhere, options 2 and 3 aren't really valid unless you want to travel 25km in the hope of finding a local bank establishment. Try paying for a EUR 20k car that way.
Doesn't work, trust me.
We tried. We actually have to work with Linux, on the desktop, as part of our ICT course. ( Think of remocable HDs here ) Half of the crap doesn't work. We can't access out network drives under Linux because no one has a clue how to log in to the AD network. Even if we do manage that and write up a report, then what? Print it? No printers in the classes, so we go to the library, boot up a PC with Knoppix, get thrown out for doing something that the library staff doesn't understand. Boot up Windows XP, realize Word 200(something) can't read OO.org files and mangles OO.org .doc files' layout. Oh well, we'll use intranet to send the document instead. Get kicked out of library again because you're taking to much time, so back to the classroom.
Back there, we boot up Linux, find the file, open Mozilla/Konquerer/Galeon/whatever the hell is available to surf the intranet. Bitch about proxies, DHCP and inept admins, boot random PC in Windows XP to find out proxy configuration du jour. Cram proxy configuration in Linux browser, go to intranet site, get stunned by non-functionality. Boot up random Windows PC again, load same site in IE, figure out your file is still on your Linux computer. Try to find a floppy, then try to find a PC with functional floppy drive and removable HD system. ( Crap PCs at college... )
Kick the sucker who took over the Windows PC away from it. Log in under your account, send intramail with IE, bitch about lack of IMAP to random person who doesnt know what IMAP is and get a bad grade because of mangled .doc layout. Go home, eat, drink, sleep, come back and hope removable HD hasn't died today. ( School issued hardware, definitely cheapest contractor work. Like the PCs. )
It's still roughly 131 GB per square inch. Ask any photographer who uses digital cameras often wether 120 GB of of storage would be be considered insignificant.
That's because HyperThreading is a neat and very low level trick that makes it appear like there are two processors. A dual-core processor doesn't use any tricks and physically contains two processing cores on one chip. Of course, this could lead to some very interesting things such as an dual core AMD proc using one shared on-chip memory controller or Intel procs with dual-cores AND hyperthreading for a total of 4 procs.
I'm looking forward to dual-cores.
Anyone know of a nice, decent and relatively cheap ( as in, below 500 euro ) video camera? Preferably digital, but I don't really know much about cameras so before someone starts screaming that cameras with tapes are by far superior, please enlighten me. Anyways, I'm looking for a simple camera. High resolution, perfect quality and all that are nice, but I just want to record simple things with it. I'm by no means whatsoever a professional and spending 2000 euro on a camera still makes me a crap cameraman. I just want something nice and simple for average home stuff. Record family, stuff, dad's shiny motorbike he's oh-so-proud of, mom's new creative stuff, friends, etc.
So, anyone got a few nice suggestions regarding that? I'm open to all kinds of ideas, just with a few minor preferences, which are all open to discussion. I'd like it to store data on some sort of flash memory, preferably encoded in a rather normal format such as divx or xvid or whatever. Also, USB connections would be best, considering my current lack of firewire. Some simple video-editing program would be nice too, so I can recode/encode the video to mpeg2 and burn it on DVD afterwards.
So, if anyone got a suggestion as to what camera would be ideal and on which notions I'm horribly wrong, feel free to reply. Cheers!
Indeed. Thought, if a game does have to do anything with religion it is usually limited to RPGs. And even then usually to japanese RPGs. Xenogears is a good example you gave there, with it almost not being released in the US. However, for anyone unfamiliar with those RPGs, do remember that they deal with fictional gods and goddesses, not direct reference to the deities of any current religion. For example, Grandia II focusses on two gods, one evil god named Valmar and one good god named Granas. This is also in contrast with three of the four major religion, because christianity, islam and judaism are monotheistic religions. Lunar: SSS(C) focuses one a single goddess called Althena. No reference to any real religion either.
it gets really interesting in the Baldur's Gate series though. Instead of following a religion you actually become part of it. Long story and a big spoiler, won't go into detail. Hoever, for a western RPG to include such large elements of religion is quite unusual...
However, if you model a robot after an average human, you can easily give away boring human tasks. Even public ones. For example, you could design a special excavator robot, a special pipeline construction robot, etc. However, you can also make 5 standard humanoid robots and put one in a normal excavtor, have one fit the piping, etc. Remember that everything so far has been designed for human use.
Also, I think it would be easier to deal with humanoid robots in public space then lumbering machines.
Mmm.
The problem with win2k and winXP aren't stability issues or security issues. Really, a properly managed Windows system can do whatever task is assigned to it quite well. Surely, Windows requires you to prey upon all major security lists but hey, so does Linux. I'm not going to go into detail about that, let's just assume that being a lazy admin is bad, whatever operating system you choose.
No, the problem with Windows is the same as Linux. Drivers. Windows drivers are occasionally horrible, especially the odd bits of hardware often required in the professional world. ( Think high-end SCSI/SATA/ATA RAID controllers, tape drives, etc ) Nearly all modern BSODs one sees are driver related. Odd hardware behaviour can likely be traced back to some funky drivers or an conflict. The second advice given by any helpdesk/organization ( the first being the blanket advice of "Please reboot your system and tell me what happens." ) is to check that all drivers are up to date. Compare this with Linux drivers which are far better... Yet nowhere nearly as numerous or available and occasionally are forced to include some nasty hacks to allow stuff to work. So both systems got their weak points.
Technicaly, the best solution to this would be to use hard and software from the same company. I'm pretty damned sure Sun and Apple know the exact specs and quirks of their own hardware. That would solve nearly all driver problems... At a cost.
Read this.
Why the HELL would anyone want wireless communication in his car? Even better, why the hell from Microsoft, a company known for its appaling security record? MS products on computers I can imagine. I'd rather have my PC cracked at home instead of my Fiat's internal systems cracked on the highway.
Remember that the US goverment is good at aquiring convenient evidence. Do you also remember those WMD that were piled in 10m high stacks at every streetcorner in Baghdad that no one ever found? Also, regarding the debris field, you should remember we're dealing with an airliner here, not some fragile jetfighter. Besides, depending on which weapon used, the results would likely still be the same. Sidewinders are short range, heat/IR guided and not that powerful, thus considering jetliners carry their engines external, under the wing, a direct hit on the engine with a Sidewinder would blow up the engine or knock it off, not much else. This means the jetliner would simply plummet down. Sparrows and AMRAAMs use active radar, which means they'll hit the damn thing plain smack in the middle. This would breach the hull of the jetliner but is by far not enough to outright destroy it. The massive decompression and damage would cause the plane to loose control and crash down relatively intact.
Why? Why not just give one release date? Or approximate release date where the product will be shipped to as mnay stores as possible? Why this?
Do NOT bloat the browser.
Want to add crap? PLUGINS!
Here in the Netherlands, the fact that that asshole minister of us voted FOR software patents has been a nice little riot in the dutch techie world. People were encouraged to write said minister, write to his party, write to the head of the party, parliament, etc. I think that all of this caused sufficient public backlash that forced our goverment to make that bastard swallow his words and do The Right Thing(tm).
The "web community" also promotes the use of Flash, RealMedia, narcism (*logs/*journals) and IE-only sites like Slashdot. ( Stupid admins STILL haven't fixed the overlapping problem in Mozilla/Firefox ) So fuck the "web community" as a whole and let's concentrate on the individual communities that do not suck. ( Hello Wikipedia )
Ignore it. It's a BOOTLEG. Unless you enjoy looking at a shaky recording of a recording with poor audio.
And german suppliers will STILL be allot cheaper then Dutch suppliers. Cheapest dvd player around here is about 69 or 89 euro. And stuff at those price is only for sale in an Aldi or Lidl. ( German supermarkets, for those of you who don't have a clue what I'm talking about ) We the Dutch elevated taxing to a religion; 19% VAT on anything electronic, copyright extor- uhm, protection taxes on blank media, outrageous amounts of regular taxes, etcetera. Thankfully, we live next to Germany so we can always buy stuff over there at about 75% down to 50% of the price here in the NL due to excessive taxing. Heck, with Pentium being classiefied as weapons, I'm sure Harry Potter will find some other way to tax a few more euros out of us again. How does "Weapons Trade & Distribution Tax" sound?
In short: Don't complain and buy me one of those dual-layer DVD RW drives, will you? :P
Someone give that Johanson kid a call.