How many people can hear an old gametune and relive the fond memories of those days? I managed to get my cellphone working with a USB cable (take that evil moneygrubbing $2/download phone company) and regularly use old NES or SNES music as ringtones. Actually, the polyphonic ringtones on myphone do a pretty darn good job of playing those midis... so it's fun to play guess-the-game when I'm with geek friends and my phone goes off with the latest ringer.
Also, if you enjoy old game tunes, check out some of the remix sites like ocremix. They've got some decent remixes of old game tunes (as well as some not-so-decent, but not everything's a classic), as well as some newer ones.
Nintendo is not the only console out today, not even the most biggest. It's not in any way monopolistic to limit what will play on their hardware.... as opposed to not letting developers make games for others' hardware.
McDonalds is for people that don't have time for good food (or sense to find a quick place iwth good food). It's also for people with kids.
Kids like McDonalds. Parents like McDonalds (or other fast-food places) when they have entertainment for the kids so they'll shut up, be it in the form of a play area, gaming kiosk, or gaming connection.
Yeah, but while I wouldn't buy a product based on a slashdot headline, I might *not* buy a product based on the comments. You'll notice a lot of people above pointing out why the listed stats are bunk and where the screen falls short. It gives me more I can check with in regards to the product mentioned, and other similar products.
Actually, another cause could be a looped network connection. We have problems with students who will connect two network jacks together, thus creating a loopback in the switch they are connected to. Generates a whole lot of network traffic. Basically they were doing this when they had exams requiring computers, because bringing down the network ensured no exam...
The days of guys building a game in their garage and then selling it to a publisher are behind us, I'm afraid
There are a few smaller companies that do such things. Certainly there are also a lot of tools for making such games, and in some areas a rather large open-source community behind them. I've always looked at OGRE as being one of my favorites from a perspective of capabilities/possibility. There are also a lot of sweet code samples.
The downside is that the organization/requirements of the libs is a bit off, and even following the forum I've only been able to get my test projects (in Quanta) to make it to the point where they segfault:-(
Still, I haven't played with it in awhile, and certainly others seem to do fairly well. The biggest problem I have is the consumer/marketing focus on flashy graphics. All the coding talent in the world won't get you far on your own unless you have skills (or help from somebody with skills) in graphics and probably sound as well.
Some of the games definately look cool/promising though, but they big money is probably still in being bought out by a larger gaming firm... sadly.
I wish some of the old devs like SM who now have 'made their way' might look at amassing groups of the smaller companies and helping them market (for a cut of the pie, but a reasonable one). Certainly it would be nicer than seeing their dreams swallowed by larger behemoths to join in the 'bargain bin' collection or and endless line of sequels.
Indeed, Visa has some interesting terms that few people know about. I know a few places that offer 3% less if you pay cash (basically they raise the price by 3% for visa, the lesser is the advertised price). From what I've read, this is completely contradictory to their merchant agreement with Visa, and they could get in deep shit for it.
One I'm not sure about is price. I know car dealerships won't accept Visa for car payments (3% of a 20-30k purchase can be a fair bit for them). However, if you want to pay a little bit such as the downpayment on Visa, they'll happily run it through their 'repair center.' It seem that if they actually accepted Visa in the dealership, they'd be obligated to accept Visa for the whole thing (I could be wrong on that, but otherwise why go to the trouble to avoid accepting Visa).
Use the best tool for the job. I haven't used an Epia with BSD yet, but if you're worried about compatability glitches I'd have to say that the support given by VIA for my M-10000/M2-10000 in linux has been pretty decent. Hard to figure out at times, but it works quite well: sound, DVD accelerate, 3d acceleration (basic, but good enough for neverball), and TV-out etc all work nicely.
What I haven't tried yet is the Cardreader or PCMCIA slot on the M2. I'd imagine PCMCIA would be standard, and I believe others have gotten the cardreader to work nicely.
Really,you could have almost a whole town full of zombies first thing in the morning if you stopped deliveries of coffee to local stores and shut down the starbucks for a day or two. I swear some of my co-workers have groaned in a very zombie-like manner without their morning java beeeeeeeans.
30 seconds is a pretty long time to boot. I have an Mp3 deck with the annoying 'feature' that when playing an Mp3 file, it will start from the song beginning after the power has been turned off. That's annoying enough (if you take a trip with lots of short stops you hear the same song over several times).
Having the thing need 30 seconds to boot is even worse though... that's just way to long a delay. Have you looked at ways to trim-down boot-time? I've have a mini-ITX system originally intended for the car (until I got a new car and DVD-mp3 deck).
I've been looking at the possibility of having a good 'session' saved using the suspend-to-disk feature (obviously needs >64MB space). Restoring the memory contents from a disk-based suspend could cut your boot-time down significantly, especially if you're loading from a fairly fast cardreader (I know my USB2 memory stick is very fast for loading files, I'm not sure how fast the Epia M-2's cardreader would be though since I've never bothered to get it working).
You know, I think that while advertisers in some situations have gotten more annoying, in other ways they've gotten smarter. 10 years ago, I highly doubt anyone would have yelled to me (while I'm getting a snack during a commercial break, etc) "hey, come back here and check out this *product X* commercial, it's hilarious." I've seen some commercials for products such as Molson Canadian that were often more entertaining than the shows.
Sadly, Molson will no longer make the "I am Canadian" ads since they joined up to become Molson-Coors, citing it might damage international relations. But there are plenty of other great commercials out there, so much that there are even websites dedicated to them
As telecommunications become more digital, I think systems such as 'commercial feedback' could become very useful. Click a button on your remote and rate the current commercial... and perhaps future advertisers will learn to make commercials that don't suck as less-rated commercials get blocked by TIVOs and their ilk.
Definately true... but the problem is: when does it end? At some point, you have to suffer the issues associated with not following a stupid trend, in order to demonstrate that you will not always blindly follow in current and future stupid trends...
So basically, for Canada not to follow in doing something stupid is also stupid? There's a point where somebody has to stop and say "this is dumb, I'm not doing that" rather than saying "this is dumb, but everyone else is doing it"
Ummm, like if you drove over a province or two and swapped 1-2 timezones. Because goodness knows nobody goes between provinces but everyone goes to the US...
Did I say that? No, I said that given the provinces already have different time zones and yet still manage interprovincial commerce, stating financial reasons is pretty lame in towing to the US DST change. Really, letting the US have a different timezone isn't going make trade any worse than it is across the timezones of various provinces.
Last time I checked, both Canada and the US did trade with countries other than each other. Some of these are in other time zones. Hell, there's a 3h discepancy between here (BC) and Ontario, and I live in the same country.
I hope that a lot of people come out very vocally to demonstrate what a stupid idea this is, and how it's just a case of nose-to-ass following without justification.
Wouldn't the clock itself be a manual. I mean, if you can see that the sun is in position X when midnight hits, etc etc, it would make sense to perhaps corellate the two.
One more thing... if a company already has a patches section with the words "Coming Soon" before the game is released, is that suggesting something about the quality of the product?
Sometimes patches add features instead of just fixing them. They might also add functionality for future video cards, etc that aren't out yet. Add-ons etc also sometimes fall under patches... so really it's a good idea to have such a section.
Is a symptom of a larger disease. It involves political corruption, and the ability for corporations to bribe politicians in order to buy new laws, and then throw frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt those who can't afford them.
Filesharing isn't just about music or movies, it's about the ability for large enterprises to enforce their values over a population that in majority doesn't support those values...something laws are support to also support.
If you tend to do it at the same time (or always after Starbucks, though that could be due to a little too much battery-acid coffee), it could probably become habit. Shitting is a necessity to life, but if you feel the need to go at a specific time per day, or after a certain activity, then it could also be a habit.
Not all habits are bad, and by repeating various activities (exercise such as evening walks, or regular gym visits, etc) one would think they could also engrain themselves upon one's psyche. Does this work as well, and what happens when you formula a good habit, fall out of habit, and form a bad one? Do the two conflict?
Probably the same way people did it before big tractors, harvesters, and bio technology. With animals, long hours, and lots of hard, hard work. That isn't to say that a little technology wouldn't help the situation though, just that it's doable without.
The anti-Jack movement thrives on revealing stupid actions and comments made by JT by posting them publicly. Perhaps in the future he'll be disbarred or successfully sued for some of the more aggressive or unprofessional remarks he has made
However, Jack also thrives on the stupid, violent, or aggressive comments made against him. So rather than advocate such things and paint ourselves exactly as he is trying to do, how about we just use calm, professional points with correct facts - which seems to annoy him the most anyways - and avoid playing into his game.
From most of the JT comments I've read, he seems to regard gamers and indeed geeks in general as a rather intellectually-insufficient subspecies. By providing intelligent feedback and/or responses we probably annoy him a lot more anyways, by proving him wrong. In such debates, he often also seems to make some pretty unprofessional and irrational comments, further proving our view that he seems to have some major personality and/or professionalism issues...
Jack, if you're reading this, people of all types use the internet, play video games, and generally populate the USA. You're going to get idiots of various varieties as a representation of the general population, so if 1 in 10,000 people in the US are somewhat demented (and base on what I have seen in a 1000 or less school population, this probably actually a higher number), and 1 in 5000 play video games, then chances are you get some overlap there.
It seems that the defect has to be potentially life-threatening for HP to react. I have an HP ZD7000 laptop. There is a known fault in something to do with the RAM controller wherein - if you have the secondary RAM slot filled - the laptop will reboot or shutdown spontaneously in instances of applications that have heavy memory usage (I'm assuming those that have requirements of memory from both slots). Generally the problems have been noticed in photoshop, but I've had them occur in GIMP or some games. Others have been experiencing the same problems. Adobe has a warning on this.
So I've contacted HP technical support about this. I've talked on the phone, and then by email. The representative from HP assured me that no such issue existed, and we back-and-forthed for awhile. Eventually, I found this article on HP's own website. When I emailed it to the HP rep, he prompted stopped answering my emails.
Maybe if my battery had exploded I would have gotten better support from HP, but it seems it has to be a big issue for them to do anything about it.
"HP fully stands behind the products it makes?" Maybe, but only when it looks like it might lose them money due to lawsuits or poses a health risk.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people can hear an old gametune and relive the fond memories of those days? I managed to get my cellphone working with a USB cable (take that evil moneygrubbing $2/download phone company) and regularly use old NES or SNES music as ringtones. Actually, the polyphonic ringtones on myphone do a pretty darn good job of playing those midis... so it's fun to play guess-the-game when I'm with geek friends and my phone goes off with the latest ringer.
Also, if you enjoy old game tunes, check out some of the remix sites like ocremix. They've got some decent remixes of old game tunes (as well as some not-so-decent, but not everything's a classic), as well as some newer ones.
Nintendo is not the only console out today, not even the most biggest. It's not in any way monopolistic to limit what will play on their hardware.... as opposed to not letting developers make games for others' hardware.
McDonalds is for people that don't have time for good food (or sense to find a quick place iwth good food). It's also for people with kids.
Kids like McDonalds. Parents like McDonalds (or other fast-food places) when they have entertainment for the kids so they'll shut up, be it in the form of a play area, gaming kiosk, or gaming connection.
Yeah, but while I wouldn't buy a product based on a slashdot headline, I might *not* buy a product based on the comments. You'll notice a lot of people above pointing out why the listed stats are bunk and where the screen falls short. It gives me more I can check with in regards to the product mentioned, and other similar products.
Actually, another cause could be a looped network connection. We have problems with students who will connect two network jacks together, thus creating a loopback in the switch they are connected to. Generates a whole lot of network traffic. Basically they were doing this when they had exams requiring computers, because bringing down the network ensured no exam...
The days of guys building a game in their garage and then selling it to a publisher are behind us, I'm afraid
:-(
There are a few smaller companies that do such things. Certainly there are also a lot of tools for making such games, and in some areas a rather large open-source community behind them. I've always looked at OGRE as being one of my favorites from a perspective of capabilities/possibility. There are also a lot of sweet code samples.
The downside is that the organization/requirements of the libs is a bit off, and even following the forum I've only been able to get my test projects (in Quanta) to make it to the point where they segfault
Still, I haven't played with it in awhile, and certainly others seem to do fairly well. The biggest problem I have is the consumer/marketing focus on flashy graphics. All the coding talent in the world won't get you far on your own unless you have skills (or help from somebody with skills) in graphics and probably sound as well.
Some of the games definately look cool/promising though, but they big money is probably still in being bought out by a larger gaming firm... sadly.
I wish some of the old devs like SM who now have 'made their way' might look at amassing groups of the smaller companies and helping them market (for a cut of the pie, but a reasonable one). Certainly it would be nicer than seeing their dreams swallowed by larger behemoths to join in the 'bargain bin' collection or and endless line of sequels.
Indeed, Visa has some interesting terms that few people know about. I know a few places that offer 3% less if you pay cash (basically they raise the price by 3% for visa, the lesser is the advertised price). From what I've read, this is completely contradictory to their merchant agreement with Visa, and they could get in deep shit for it.
One I'm not sure about is price. I know car dealerships won't accept Visa for car payments (3% of a 20-30k purchase can be a fair bit for them). However, if you want to pay a little bit such as the downpayment on Visa, they'll happily run it through their 'repair center.' It seem that if they actually accepted Visa in the dealership, they'd be obligated to accept Visa for the whole thing (I could be wrong on that, but otherwise why go to the trouble to avoid accepting Visa).
Wouldn't those intel chips be single-core as well? These chips might give them a run for their money.
"As for Linux, I'd rather wait 30s for FreeBSD"
Use the best tool for the job. I haven't used an Epia with BSD yet, but if you're worried about compatability glitches I'd have to say that the support given by VIA for my M-10000/M2-10000 in linux has been pretty decent. Hard to figure out at times, but it works quite well: sound, DVD accelerate, 3d acceleration (basic, but good enough for neverball), and TV-out etc all work nicely.
What I haven't tried yet is the Cardreader or PCMCIA slot on the M2. I'd imagine PCMCIA would be standard, and I believe others have gotten the cardreader to work nicely.
Really,you could have almost a whole town full of zombies first thing in the morning if you stopped deliveries of coffee to local stores and shut down the starbucks for a day or two. I swear some of my co-workers have groaned in a very zombie-like manner without their morning java beeeeeeeans.
30 seconds is a pretty long time to boot. I have an Mp3 deck with the annoying 'feature' that when playing an Mp3 file, it will start from the song beginning after the power has been turned off. That's annoying enough (if you take a trip with lots of short stops you hear the same song over several times).
Having the thing need 30 seconds to boot is even worse though... that's just way to long a delay. Have you looked at ways to trim-down boot-time? I've have a mini-ITX system originally intended for the car (until I got a new car and DVD-mp3 deck).
I've been looking at the possibility of having a good 'session' saved using the suspend-to-disk feature (obviously needs >64MB space). Restoring the memory contents from a disk-based suspend could cut your boot-time down significantly, especially if you're loading from a fairly fast cardreader (I know my USB2 memory stick is very fast for loading files, I'm not sure how fast the Epia M-2's cardreader would be though since I've never bothered to get it working).
You know, I think that while advertisers in some situations have gotten more annoying, in other ways they've gotten smarter. 10 years ago, I highly doubt anyone would have yelled to me (while I'm getting a snack during a commercial break, etc) "hey, come back here and check out this *product X* commercial, it's hilarious." I've seen some commercials for products such as Molson Canadian that were often more entertaining than the shows.
Sadly, Molson will no longer make the "I am Canadian" ads since they joined up to become Molson-Coors, citing it might damage international relations. But there are plenty of other great commercials out there, so much that there are even websites dedicated to them
As telecommunications become more digital, I think systems such as 'commercial feedback' could become very useful. Click a button on your remote and rate the current commercial... and perhaps future advertisers will learn to make commercials that don't suck as less-rated commercials get blocked by TIVOs and their ilk.
Definately true... but the problem is: when does it end? At some point, you have to suffer the issues associated with not following a stupid trend, in order to demonstrate that you will not always blindly follow in current and future stupid trends...
So basically, for Canada not to follow in doing something stupid is also stupid? There's a point where somebody has to stop and say "this is dumb, I'm not doing that" rather than saying "this is dumb, but everyone else is doing it"
Ummm, like if you drove over a province or two and swapped 1-2 timezones. Because goodness knows nobody goes between provinces but everyone goes to the US...
Did I say that? No, I said that given the provinces already have different time zones and yet still manage interprovincial commerce, stating financial reasons is pretty lame in towing to the US DST change. Really, letting the US have a different timezone isn't going make trade any worse than it is across the timezones of various provinces.
Last time I checked, both Canada and the US did trade with countries other than each other. Some of these are in other time zones. Hell, there's a 3h discepancy between here (BC) and Ontario, and I live in the same country.
I hope that a lot of people come out very vocally to demonstrate what a stupid idea this is, and how it's just a case of nose-to-ass following without justification.
Wouldn't the clock itself be a manual. I mean, if you can see that the sun is in position X when midnight hits, etc etc, it would make sense to perhaps corellate the two.
One more thing... if a company already has a patches section with the words "Coming Soon" before the game is released, is that suggesting something about the quality of the product?
Sometimes patches add features instead of just fixing them. They might also add functionality for future video cards, etc that aren't out yet. Add-ons etc also sometimes fall under patches... so really it's a good idea to have such a section.
Is a symptom of a larger disease. It involves political corruption, and the ability for corporations to bribe politicians in order to buy new laws, and then throw frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt those who can't afford them.
Filesharing isn't just about music or movies, it's about the ability for large enterprises to enforce their values over a population that in majority doesn't support those values...something laws are support to also support.
If you tend to do it at the same time (or always after Starbucks, though that could be due to a little too much battery-acid coffee), it could probably become habit. Shitting is a necessity to life, but if you feel the need to go at a specific time per day, or after a certain activity, then it could also be a habit.
Not all habits are bad, and by repeating various activities (exercise such as evening walks, or regular gym visits, etc) one would think they could also engrain themselves upon one's psyche. Does this work as well, and what happens when you formula a good habit, fall out of habit, and form a bad one? Do the two conflict?
Probably the same way people did it before big tractors, harvesters, and bio technology. With animals, long hours, and lots of hard, hard work. That isn't to say that a little technology wouldn't help the situation though, just that it's doable without.
The anti-Jack movement thrives on revealing stupid actions and comments made by JT by posting them publicly. Perhaps in the future he'll be disbarred or successfully sued for some of the more aggressive or unprofessional remarks he has made
However, Jack also thrives on the stupid, violent, or aggressive comments made against him. So rather than advocate such things and paint ourselves exactly as he is trying to do, how about we just use calm, professional points with correct facts - which seems to annoy him the most anyways - and avoid playing into his game.
From most of the JT comments I've read, he seems to regard gamers and indeed geeks in general as a rather intellectually-insufficient subspecies. By providing intelligent feedback and/or responses we probably annoy him a lot more anyways, by proving him wrong. In such debates, he often also seems to make some pretty unprofessional and irrational comments, further proving our view that he seems to have some major personality and/or professionalism issues...
Jack, if you're reading this, people of all types use the internet, play video games, and generally populate the USA. You're going to get idiots of various varieties as a representation of the general population, so if 1 in 10,000 people in the US are somewhat demented (and base on what I have seen in a 1000 or less school population, this probably actually a higher number), and 1 in 5000 play video games, then chances are you get some overlap there.
It seems that the defect has to be potentially life-threatening for HP to react. I have an HP ZD7000 laptop. There is a known fault in something to do with the RAM controller wherein - if you have the secondary RAM slot filled - the laptop will reboot or shutdown spontaneously in instances of applications that have heavy memory usage (I'm assuming those that have requirements of memory from both slots). Generally the problems have been noticed in photoshop, but I've had them occur in GIMP or some games. Others have been experiencing the same problems. Adobe has a warning on this.
So I've contacted HP technical support about this. I've talked on the phone, and then by email. The representative from HP assured me that no such issue existed, and we back-and-forthed for awhile. Eventually, I found this article on HP's own website. When I emailed it to the HP rep, he prompted stopped answering my emails.
Maybe if my battery had exploded I would have gotten better support from HP, but it seems it has to be a big issue for them to do anything about it.
"HP fully stands behind the products it makes?" Maybe, but only when it looks like it might lose them money due to lawsuits or poses a health risk.