Wow, so the Guardian not only didn't want Bush to win, but they continue to report on potentially illegal things that he is striving for? I guess you would be more likely to take the paper's opinion not to vote for Bush if they never report anything bad about him?
They begged America not to vote for Bush because of all the negative articles about Bush that the write, not the other way around. I suppose their public opinion is somehow less savory to you than Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC's "claimed" balanced view despite obvious bias?
(And yes, it does appear if you actually read the treaty, that this action doesn't break the treaty. But your Ad hominem attack on the newspaper is what I'm refuting, not the main article.)
Basically this utility works NO DIFFERENT than "Start-->Search-->Search IN files", except that noobs don't know how to use Search properly, and Google search is "prettier". Oh, and MS's brain dead Search
can't peek inside compressed files. Whoopie-do.
Just a minor correction to a post I otherwise agree with 100%... Windows' default search can and does search inside of ZIP files.
Uh, clearly written by somebody who has never had anything go gold... Before something is going gold, you have release candidates. You test the release candidates intensely, and if you find no bugs, then it goes gold. So you can't say on Friday that you are going gold on monday, unless you already know you have no bugs, in which case you already should have gone gold...
If this were real, he would say that they had a release candidate. The difference between an RC and Gold is testing, which is what will be happening between now and Monday...
On the Alpine unit, "Song information -- including artist, album and song name -- is displayed on the head unit", but on the BMW unit, "our iPod adapter simulates the CD changer function in your audio system, allowing you to move between and view track numbers in up to five BMW playlists."..
I think the advantage of actually having track names displayed on the screen vs just the number of the track in the required specially generated "BMWLIST#1-5" is quite a distinction.
1. Plug: Plug your iPod into the iPod adapter cable securely integrated into your BMW's glovebox to experience the best sound quality on wheels. The adapter frees your car from messy wires, acts as a dedicated power source and delivers phenomenal sound.
2. Play: Navigate through tracks and your BMW playlists and adjust volume with the fully integrated steering wheel control function. Skip between tracks with "Up" and "Down" arrows or play the contents of your personal collection in "Random" mode.
3. See/Hear: View and control up to five unique BMW playlists and virtually endless miles of music. Your iPod adapter simulates the CD changer function in your audio system, allowing you to move between and view track numbers in up to five BMW playlists.
It appears that all it does it pick track numbers based on predefined playlists. It sounds like just about the most basic functionality they could possibly get away with. I am not impressed.
Make your "five unique BMW playlists" and "view track numbers"? Gee, you think they just made it look like a 5-disc CD changer? That's the best they could do in cooperation with Apple? That is really disappointing. At least do CD-text info!
So many people are commenting about how awful Real's player is and the dreaded "Buffering..." that always pops up.
But if they read the article they would see that this model does not use streaming, but rather just downloading. If they are downloaded onto your local drive, you aren't going to have buffering issues!
Indeed, it almost sounds like the model doesn't even support buffering, because if it did then quotes like
downloading a movie takes 10 to 30 minutes, depending on connection speeds.
"You can sit down before dinner and say, 'What movie do we want to watch tonight?' " he said. "And after dinner the movie is ready."
would make no sense, since a movie that takes 30 minutes to download would definitely get the data before it was needed...
So I'd give it a chance. For the new generation of portable video devices, (like the iRiver on Slashdot last week), this looks like a great source of content. Of course tech geeks like us can already just record our cable feeds and process the content ourselves, but 99% of the people out there can't. And that's a pretty good market!
Sure, let the companies buy 3 minute ads and play the song in them. I don't see any problem with that. But in what crazy world does Billboard live in that those plays count towards the number of times radio stations chose to play the song?
If those count as plays, I'm surprised that Billboard list isn't proclaiming that "Tom Shane's new hit: 'We are importing emeralds now'" and "Toyota's breakout '0.9% financing for June'" are top hits...
For those of you not in the military, this means that if the bodies of the dead were to get up again, we could kill them all 12 more times. We humans are capable of creating a much larger catastrophe than our often theoretical cousins in space; and it's saddening.
The fact that man has the power to potentially do something shouldn't make you sad. It should actually make you proud. Now, if man would actually do it, that would be sad.
Man can kill man, but until they do, there is nothing to be sad about.
And so the problem with major companies dominating the industry ordering what type of standards should be imposed, rears its head again.
And letting Joe Average into the convention will help this how? Not at all...
Um, you DO know that reviewing sites such as GameSpot get (media) exclusive preview copies of games right? Try reading game previews more often.
Do you know what the definition of a "surprise hit" is? It is a game that is any good that wasn't noticed at E3. You know how many of those there are a year? Not many...
At E3, small developers try to get publishing deals. And publishers try to sell games to stores. Are there flaws in the system? Sure. But none of those flaws get helped by letting you get a sneak peak at the games. There is no benefit to any company at E3 to have random people at the show. And all of your complaints that "big companies have too much power" or "big sites would still get review copies" don't change that.
Despite how many of us use it as a chance to see upcoming games before anyone else, and maybe win free $500 video cards, the point of E3 is to convince RETAIL buyers to buy the games, not individual buyers. Random people with no relation to the industry are not supposed to be there.
And if you ARE in the industry, it is trivial to get free passes, because nVidia/ATI/MS/Sony/etc want the developers to see their cool new hardware and capabilities to have better games developed for their systems.
The companies that pay BIG money to show at E3 do not gain anything by having randoms off the street showing up. So they try to stop those people from coming. If some "adventuresome gamer" spends 30 minutes playing the new indie game that you are looking for, that is 30 minutes that the Best Buy or EBGames or GameSpot representative can't be playing the game, and putting in orders for millions of copies of the game to be displayed on endcaps to sell well, or for the reviews to be written on mass-market sites to build up demand.
If your E3 display convinces 1000 gamers that they want the game, but doesn't convince any retail buyers or website reviewers or game publishers, then the game won't ever even make it to market.
And I accidentally did that last week; its real easy... Checking my email, saw the topmost message was spam, hit the topmost checkbox, and clicked the spam button. I do it so often, I barely thought about it. Until I realized the topmost checkbox was for "Check All", and I had just told Yahoo that a bunch of personal non-spam emails were spam. Oops.
Very annoying to have no confirmation prompt at ALL when you are sending 50 messages at once to the spam processor... It really is a bad UI decision. And once its clicked, no way to stop it! I wonder what processing Yahoo has in place to handle obviously erroneously marked messages?
Don't tell us that we'll get better if we work at it - WE DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO. We want to be able to sit down and play with people at comparable skill levels and enjoy the game *now*, without having to devote our lives to learning to become uber-1337 at it.
None of the cheats out there "even the field"... They don't improve your aim; they make it impossible to miss. How is that enjoying the game? The only enjoyment the cheaters get is in annoying the other players of the game.
Its not like the cheats are a handicap where you can give yourself 30% extra life or money or something... They are all or none.
You could go further with something like BitTorrent...
Considering Valve hired the writer of BitTorrent, I imagine they plan on adding something similar to BitTorrent into Steam. Not sure whats taking so long; seems like it would be a pretty easy addition, but it'll be nice when its there!
The first question they ask when you try to sign up is "What is your phone number?". If you don't have a phone (through any company) you cannot order Speakeasy DSL. That makes this Qwest service different.
The very fact that the Supreme Court has decided to hear it, means that the Court thinks there are legitimate questions that need to be answered. The court is quite happy to just refuse to hear cases that it feels don't need to be heard.
Re:Here's a couple I really want to know
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Your comment is basically the same as my attitude against Searle's Chinese room argument. Quickly summarising, he says that if you had a book that gave you rules on how to convert seemingly random symbols to other seemingly random symbols, that get converted to Chinese, nobody would say the book understands Chinese. And if you get so good at following the book's rules that you don't need the book, you still don't understand Chinese, just the random symbols.
My attitude on that was that it was a silly analogy, because if I were given the raw impulses going on in my brain I wouldn't be able to decipher it, yet clearly my brain can. Would Searl say my brain knows more than I do?
This seems to be the same as the telepathy issue: Sure, given a printout of the impulses you couldn't figure it out, but if somehow you could map someone else's impulses onto your brain, it seems quite likely that the brain would figure out what to do.
Having worked in the game industry for over 10 years (but just having left this past year), your question and the answers you are getting are a clear indicator of the decline in the quality of games in recent years.
People are answering your question as if the goal is to design the best looking levels, or the easiest way to build them, or other construction related questions. But those are not the right questions you should be asking.
Just as an architect needs to find out what the goal of their building is, a level designer needs to have a goal for a level. An amazing house that doesn't have the rooms a buyer wants is still a failure. An amazing level that doesn't advance a game, or isn't any fun, is also a failure.
Before you start building a level, write it out. Put together a story of how the player will move through the level. Sketch storyboards of interesting challenges that will occur. Start with a rough layout of the rooms you plan to link, and describe whats going to be happening to the player as they move through those areas. Figure out which areas are dull, and either liven them up or cut them out. And once the flow of the level makes sense and seems enjoyable, a level designer passes the documents off to an artist, whose job is to make it look good.
Far too often, the process gets reversed. The levels are designed from an artistic perspective first, without first determining why the levels are there, or where the player will be. Time gets spent fleshing out regions that the player runs through once, hunting for something to do, and never looks at. Those areas may get thrown away in playtesting, or just kept in and bore the players. Not good.
So basically, if you want to be a level designer, design levels. Don't be a CAD designer; that is the artist's job. As a former game developer, I would have appreciated it. As a current game player, I would appreciate it perhaps even more.
I think the site is down due to many security issues/flaws. People were sending messages to the entire userbase, and more significantly, people were able to delete accounts that weren't theirs... Myself and quite a few of my friends' accounts were deleted, and it seems good that Google locked the door for a while until the iron out some of these major kinks.
... tantamount to politely telling someone their fly is unzipped and getting your nose punched in gratitude (as the person continues to wander around with the fly unzipped, punching people who are trying to help them)
That is more like a casual user of the website finding a bug. But if it requires probing, a more apt analogy would be walking up to random women on the street and groping their breasts and telling them you are checking for breast cancer. Sure, you may occasionally find it, but that doesn't give you the right to be probing there without their permission.
I was woken up many times in the night from faxes, and I didn't even have a fax machine, so I don't have any paper trail of being bombarded by calls. Does the money just go to the state or do the victims get any?
Oh thats right, he didn't give a cause other than media. He even said Canada has MORE guns per person than the US. Does Canada not get GTA3? Nope, thats available there too.
So what, exactly, was "especially telling" about the movie? Other than that people who want to see a problem will see it even if there is no proof for it.
Slashdot Mirror
They begged America not to vote for Bush because of all the negative articles about Bush that the write, not the other way around. I suppose their public opinion is somehow less savory to you than Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC's "claimed" balanced view despite obvious bias?
(And yes, it does appear if you actually read the treaty, that this action doesn't break the treaty. But your Ad hominem attack on the newspaper is what I'm refuting, not the main article.)
Wonderful for the moderators to mod him "informative" even though everything he's saying is garbage.
But everything else, spot on.
The Slashdot article is here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/14/163521 2&tid=, and the website is http://www.real.com/partners/starz.
Uh, clearly written by somebody who has never had anything go gold... Before something is going gold, you have release candidates. You test the release candidates intensely, and if you find no bugs, then it goes gold. So you can't say on Friday that you are going gold on monday, unless you already know you have no bugs, in which case you already should have gone gold...
If this were real, he would say that they had a release candidate. The difference between an RC and Gold is testing, which is what will be happening between now and Monday...
I think the advantage of actually having track names displayed on the screen vs just the number of the track in the required specially generated "BMWLIST#1-5" is quite a distinction.
The Alpine unit also allows you to " browse the iPod's entire music library right from the Alpine head unit ".
In short, the Alpine unit is actually a good interface, whereas the BMW unit just acts like a lame CD changer.
2. Play: Navigate through tracks and your BMW playlists and adjust volume with the fully integrated steering wheel control function. Skip between tracks with "Up" and "Down" arrows or play the contents of your personal collection in "Random" mode.
3. See/Hear: View and control up to five unique BMW playlists and virtually endless miles of music. Your iPod adapter simulates the CD changer function in your audio system, allowing you to move between and view track numbers in up to five BMW playlists.
It appears that all it does it pick track numbers based on predefined playlists. It sounds like just about the most basic functionality they could possibly get away with. I am not impressed.
Make your "five unique BMW playlists" and "view track numbers"? Gee, you think they just made it look like a 5-disc CD changer? That's the best they could do in cooperation with Apple? That is really disappointing. At least do CD-text info!
But if they read the article they would see that this model does not use streaming, but rather just downloading. If they are downloaded onto your local drive, you aren't going to have buffering issues!
Indeed, it almost sounds like the model doesn't even support buffering, because if it did then quotes like
would make no sense, since a movie that takes 30 minutes to download would definitely get the data before it was needed...So I'd give it a chance. For the new generation of portable video devices, (like the iRiver on Slashdot last week), this looks like a great source of content. Of course tech geeks like us can already just record our cable feeds and process the content ourselves, but 99% of the people out there can't. And that's a pretty good market!
If those count as plays, I'm surprised that Billboard list isn't proclaiming that "Tom Shane's new hit: 'We are importing emeralds now'" and "Toyota's breakout '0.9% financing for June'" are top hits...
Information from them may have led to these arrests, but they definitely are not the same arrests.
The fact that man has the power to potentially do something shouldn't make you sad. It should actually make you proud. Now, if man would actually do it, that would be sad.
Man can kill man, but until they do, there is nothing to be sad about.
And letting Joe Average into the convention will help this how? Not at all...
Um, you DO know that reviewing sites such as GameSpot get (media) exclusive preview copies of games right? Try reading game previews more often.
Do you know what the definition of a "surprise hit" is? It is a game that is any good that wasn't noticed at E3. You know how many of those there are a year? Not many...
At E3, small developers try to get publishing deals. And publishers try to sell games to stores. Are there flaws in the system? Sure. But none of those flaws get helped by letting you get a sneak peak at the games. There is no benefit to any company at E3 to have random people at the show. And all of your complaints that "big companies have too much power" or "big sites would still get review copies" don't change that.
And if you ARE in the industry, it is trivial to get free passes, because nVidia/ATI/MS/Sony/etc want the developers to see their cool new hardware and capabilities to have better games developed for their systems.
The companies that pay BIG money to show at E3 do not gain anything by having randoms off the street showing up. So they try to stop those people from coming. If some "adventuresome gamer" spends 30 minutes playing the new indie game that you are looking for, that is 30 minutes that the Best Buy or EBGames or GameSpot representative can't be playing the game, and putting in orders for millions of copies of the game to be displayed on endcaps to sell well, or for the reviews to be written on mass-market sites to build up demand.
If your E3 display convinces 1000 gamers that they want the game, but doesn't convince any retail buyers or website reviewers or game publishers, then the game won't ever even make it to market.
TweakUI, configure many useful hidden settings in Windows.
Open Command Window Here, useful for getting to the command prompt from any window you happen to be in.
Power Calculator, a great graphing calculator with built in function support. Very handy.
Online ClearType configuration, an online extra-powerful setup for the excellent ClearType subpixel font system in XP.
Then also turn off all the "hide extensions" and turn on "classic view".
Aside from that, the basics... AVG antivirus, FireFox, etc. But its good to see Microsoft actually providing some good extra utils for their OS.
And I accidentally did that last week; its real easy... Checking my email, saw the topmost message was spam, hit the topmost checkbox, and clicked the spam button. I do it so often, I barely thought about it. Until I realized the topmost checkbox was for "Check All", and I had just told Yahoo that a bunch of personal non-spam emails were spam. Oops.
Very annoying to have no confirmation prompt at ALL when you are sending 50 messages at once to the spam processor... It really is a bad UI decision. And once its clicked, no way to stop it! I wonder what processing Yahoo has in place to handle obviously erroneously marked messages?
Its not like the cheats are a handicap where you can give yourself 30% extra life or money or something... They are all or none.
The first question they ask when you try to sign up is "What is your phone number?". If you don't have a phone (through any company) you cannot order Speakeasy DSL. That makes this Qwest service different.
The very fact that the Supreme Court has decided to hear it, means that the Court thinks there are legitimate questions that need to be answered. The court is quite happy to just refuse to hear cases that it feels don't need to be heard.
My attitude on that was that it was a silly analogy, because if I were given the raw impulses going on in my brain I wouldn't be able to decipher it, yet clearly my brain can. Would Searl say my brain knows more than I do?
This seems to be the same as the telepathy issue: Sure, given a printout of the impulses you couldn't figure it out, but if somehow you could map someone else's impulses onto your brain, it seems quite likely that the brain would figure out what to do.
People are answering your question as if the goal is to design the best looking levels, or the easiest way to build them, or other construction related questions. But those are not the right questions you should be asking.
Just as an architect needs to find out what the goal of their building is, a level designer needs to have a goal for a level. An amazing house that doesn't have the rooms a buyer wants is still a failure. An amazing level that doesn't advance a game, or isn't any fun, is also a failure.
Before you start building a level, write it out. Put together a story of how the player will move through the level. Sketch storyboards of interesting challenges that will occur. Start with a rough layout of the rooms you plan to link, and describe whats going to be happening to the player as they move through those areas. Figure out which areas are dull, and either liven them up or cut them out. And once the flow of the level makes sense and seems enjoyable, a level designer passes the documents off to an artist, whose job is to make it look good.
Far too often, the process gets reversed. The levels are designed from an artistic perspective first, without first determining why the levels are there, or where the player will be. Time gets spent fleshing out regions that the player runs through once, hunting for something to do, and never looks at. Those areas may get thrown away in playtesting, or just kept in and bore the players. Not good.
So basically, if you want to be a level designer, design levels. Don't be a CAD designer; that is the artist's job. As a former game developer, I would have appreciated it. As a current game player, I would appreciate it perhaps even more.
I think the site is down due to many security issues/flaws. People were sending messages to the entire userbase, and more significantly, people were able to delete accounts that weren't theirs... Myself and quite a few of my friends' accounts were deleted, and it seems good that Google locked the door for a while until the iron out some of these major kinks.
That is more like a casual user of the website finding a bug. But if it requires probing, a more apt analogy would be walking up to random women on the street and groping their breasts and telling them you are checking for breast cancer. Sure, you may occasionally find it, but that doesn't give you the right to be probing there without their permission.
I was woken up many times in the night from faxes, and I didn't even have a fax machine, so I don't have any paper trail of being bombarded by calls. Does the money just go to the state or do the victims get any?
So what, exactly, was "especially telling" about the movie? Other than that people who want to see a problem will see it even if there is no proof for it.