All you are saying is that Physics engines are now in the same state as GPU's were when they first emerged. Hell at the time game mags even had little icons to show wich games supported wich cards.
No common interface and the game makers just had to make sure to include code for the cards they thought of as important enough.
This lasted quite a long time until things settled down. Oh but wait NO!
Check Tomb Raider Legends. It has a special option, "Next gen content" wich is claimed to be optomized for the Nvidia cards. Granted some bugs seem to get in the way BUT it seems clear that even in the days of directx there still is room for games having extra content depending on your card.
What we are going to see is that this company is going to proudly list the games that support it and be very optomistic about listing all the games that could possibly support it because the game company didn't flatly turn them down.
Some very successfull games will happen who don't give a shit. Some mediocre games will look better because they support it until finally this product will either die (Like virtual reality helmets) or stay with us (like GPU cards).
Wich one will be the case? Frankly I don't know. Graphics in a way are easy and if you remember it didn't take a redesign of the game to add the Monsterboard patch for games like Tomb Raider and Quake. The games stayed the same.
The physics part that is just pretty pictures would still not be easy. All Tomb Raider and the Quake patch had to do was release higher res version of the super high res textures the developers had anyway. Is it going to be as easy to add increased physics to a game?
Is there going to be any demand for just pretty picture physics or are people going to want to see the gameplay affected before they invest in this card?
We will just have to wait and see. I think the battle is going to be wether gamers will find that it improves their game. Game makers will deliver the code if their is a demand, just like they did with the first gpu's.
Wait till males reach the age of about 25 or so. The only parts not hairy are the palms of my hand. Wich is a suprise considering folklore.
Does it matter? Well, it is all about what you care about. Presentation or substance. Not that looking like a mess means you got subtance or vice versa BUT I might just choose a lawyer who looks like he been up all night reading legal papers rather then just fresh from the spa.
Then again that could just mean the latter guy knows his stuff while the first is still studying.
Oooh how about this one. Can't judge a book by its cover?
I seen every excuse possible for the name change so far.
The simplest problem is that "Nintendo Revolution" while merely the codename for the upcoming console worked. It appealled to people and told them what this console was all about.
X-box 360 is just as stupid but since its codename wasn't that appealling, what was it anyway, we could only joke about the stupidity of doing a 360 wich means you end facing the same direction as before just more dizzy.
PS3? Talk about playing it save. Granted when you are the top of the heap, why take risks.
But Nintendo got a trippe whammy, they removed the beloved codename, they added a silly new name and they forgot to just play it safe.
Does it matter? Well think of it like this. IF the name doesn't matter then why did they spend a fortune on choosing it? Marketeers will tell you that your product name means EVERYTHING wich is why you need to pay them big bucks to choose the right one.
So either they are lying OR names matter.
Since Nintendo obviously choose a marketting name rather then just a descriptive name (gamecube 2 or even Nintendo 256 (or whatever)) they believe the name matters as far as sales are concerned.
The real problem I think is going to be with marketing. Wii doesn't exactly tell me they are going to give a shit about gamers. That is fine but the odd thing is that Nintendo needs the hardcore gamers to sell their systems to the casual gamers. I know plenty of GBA and DS owners who are not hardcore gamers BUT they bought them on advice from gamers.
I don't think Wii is a smart choice. Nintendo already is no MS who can afford to loose round after round nor is it even a Sony that can bank on its old successes and hope other divisions cover any lossses. Even if Wii only looses them 1% of sales that might be enough.
For the most part I am not worried about the name itself but rather about the ideas behind it. It really send me on a flashback to the internet bubble when you had countless launches and relaunches all with names thought up by marketing that had to be explained.
That is the worst bit. Even Nintendo realized that Wii had to be explained. A good name doesn't have to be explained. Says it all really.
Sue people who are already upset and got loaded guns for the last salute. There are some people you sue, and some who you don't. People who can answer the question "you and what army" fall in the last group.
a 20-G centrifuge machine that can simulate up to 20 times the terrestrial gravity
Geez, no shit sherlock. I wonder how much G earth gravity is?
I can understand if this bit of info has to be included in say a BBC report but this is supposed to be a place filled with geeks and nerds who could work out for themselves that 20G is 20 times the G force of earths gravity. Even the americans should be able to handle the math involved. The canadians might need help. The dutch? It is sunday morning. To stoned to care. Not that it being sunday morning has anything to do with that.
An expansive reading of the bill doesn't suggest that every website should keep those records.
An expansive reading of the DOES suggest that every website should keep those records for the live of your account + a minimum of 1 year. Minimum of 1 year AFTER the end of the subscription.
Quite frankly I can only give a sorta hollow laugh/snigger. Sure sure I live in a different country but if anything dutch politicians are even worse. Dutch voters? Well, lets just say that the brightest of them would make a texan look dumb.
Our current party in power and its leader (CDA and Balkenstein) are firm admires of Bush and intent on copying everything. Although in a way that removes even what little value the republicans add. Sorta like europe always takes the fast out of fast food.
You sometimes hear old people, who been in WW2 or WW1, that kids these days need a good war to set them straight.
I am inclined to agree. NOT that war itself is good are creates character BUT after a big war there is always a period of great political change. It is the time to take bold steps while it seems decades of peace just lead to a slow rot.
America got the new deal, england had a huge social reform, holland got rid off "pillars/zuiltjes" (flattening of the classes?). Also introduced such thing as national healthcare and offcourse the buildup to women liberation etc etc.
Time for another WW. And no the war on islam oops terror don't count. We need an enemy that can put up a fight so afterwards both parties are determined never to have a war again (well only against their former allies but that doesn't count).
I am not making any sense and got stupid ideas? Cool, I should run for office.
I learned it on the Commodore 64 where I programmed my first "game". It started with the tutorial for making the sprite of a balloon move across the screen. Coupled that with some other examples and got myself a shoot the balloon game.
While it could not compare with full C64 games it wasn't that bad either.
BUT what I think is even more important, it was relativly simple to achieve. Drawing a sprite on the C64 was infinitly easier then getting Dos let alone windows to even enter a graphical mode for simple drawing. Calling DirectX? Gibberish.
If I look back at Basic vs the languages you need today then we were in a way lucky.
I think however that it ain't all bad. Websites can take the place of the simple home computers. Getting some result with HTML and PHP is fairly easy and direct.
If there is a problem I would say it is because more and more computers are black boxes that just work. How many people who grew up from say Windows 2000 on have had to meddle with at least.bat files?
Old people like us HAD to learn some basic programming to even be able to use our computers. That I think has disappeared.
to mount a non-encrypted disk in Vista in an older format that Linux can read and write too?
Shocking.
Will it be possible to mount non-encrypted disks in Vista? Well, unless MS is finally prepared to kick backwards compatibilty then yes.
Even if unencrypted HD's ain't supported (unlikely) they would still need to support regular filesystems like FAT for all those flash disks from your camera and USB keys and such.
I am as anti-ms as you can get (if I am ever diagnosed with an incurable disease Gates gets a bullet in the head the next day thanks to my Halo training. Eh non-MS FPS training) but this is just to much. Linux disk encryption makes it just as hard for linux to dualboot windows. In fact every linux distro should just use FAT to make sure windows can be dualbooted and read the linux data.
Geez.
Americans work long hours
on
EA Spouse Outed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It is their way of life. Are they right? Well it all depends on what you use as measurement and how you measure it.
Some very silly people use money as a measurement forgetting totally that money does not have the same value. 1 dollar in say New York has a totally different value then 1 dollar in say Greece. Hell everyone knows this is even true in far small areas like say New York vs Hicksville.
So any comparison between the money produced by either economy is silly. Even more if you realise that even in europe working hour practices are different. The brits for instance lean far more to american working hours.
So who is right?
Funny thing but one of those wise lessons from american sitcoms/dramas is that nobody on their death bed ever regretted not having spend more time in the office.
If you do not live to work then surely the only sensible number of hours to work is the amount you need to be able to afford to live right?
So how much do you need to live? This can get very funny. It starts simple. Cheap supermarkets are open from 8 to 8 in Holland. (Can't say for the rest of the world so don't attack me for that). There are a few that stay open later but they typically charge more and only carry the brand names (wich are more expensive) and don't have sales. The cheapest places to get food however is the market wich opens officially at 8 but is usually closing as early as 16:00.
So now you get the following effect. If your unemployed you got the least amount of money BUT have the time to shop at the cheapest place, the market. If you got a 40 hour 8-5 job the market is out so you need to shop at the regular but slightly more expensive supermarket. More money but your also spending more on food. Now if you work longer hours and can't make the regular opening hours you need the special stores at train stations. More money offcourse in salary but your food expenses shoot up. Work even more and you won't even have time to cook and eating in restaurants or takeaway really becomes fucking expensive.
Kids follow a similar pattern. The more you work, the more you make but also the more you spend on childcare. I had one co-worker who flatly refused to work on a friday (4 day contract) unless the company paid him double since that was his day to take care of the kid and if he worked on friday his entire salery would go to childcare meaning he effectlivly worked for nothing AND missed out on spending time with his child.
Same with other stuff. You can eat better cheaper and healthier if you can shop for fresh food every day. Don't have the time? Pay more AND pay for a huge fridge and the electricity.
The above is not just crap made up by some slashdot idiot. The effect that being going from unemployed to employed while leading to an increase in salary actually ends up with the person having less money is a big problem for countries with a decent social security system.
Some of you may even have experienced the effect of a promotion and payment increase actually ending up with you having less "free" money because all of sudden you need to buy rounds not of beer but whiskey or wear real suits or chip in for golf clubs instead of mousemat birthday gifts.
Whenever I see someone defend a 80 hour workweek because they are more productive I don't even bother with trying to reason that such a person will be too tired at work to do a decent job. I just wonder how that person finds enough free time to actually have some fun. Congrats that you earn twice as much as me. I will be sure to envy you while I am sitting with my feet up in the sun after a short day at work.
IF western computer companies are determined to force DRM down our throaths will China do the same? I am perfectly happy with the performance of my dual P3 rig and although the proposed machine will be slower this may not be forever. Anyway if the choice is between a fast windows slave and a free linux machine then I am willing to be slow and free.
Could be an odd alternative. A free PC from a dictatorship. We live in intresting times.
I just got back from a long flashback to the bubble and endless presentations with out there graphics in wich companies explained their mission through their new company name/slogan/motto all dancing all singing all crap.
Telfort (dutch mobile phone daughter of British Telecom) to O2, as in oxygen was especially sickening. So succesfull they now are back to telfort again.
When the real revolution comes can we line up the marketting people behind the lawyers and safe some bullets?
Take a country with no borders so you don't have to deal with foreigners for the following bit.
If a country had a totally free healthcare system where each person gets the medical aid they need. What need would that country have of an ID system for medical care.
That is right. None. The only ID system needed would be to identify a persons medical history but that can be anonymous. You could carry your medical history with you without it being tied in name to your person.
There is a reason most countries don't have truly free medical care. It is expensive and requires the majority of people to pay for medical care they don't personally receive.
It is socialism and socialists have high tax bills. That doesn't get you elected anymore.
So we come up with other systems all of wich involve the simple fact that now we need to attach financial info to the medical history. Who received what for how much and how are they going to pay for it. Or even better, how have they already paid for it. Your medical insurance company is going to want to know for certain that it is you getting the medical threatment they are paying for and not some stranger.
Well actually they don't really give a shit. You do because else your insurance costs would sky-rocket.
Do you know how much of your car insurance goes into a general pool that is used by all insurers to cover people without insurance? Yeah, that is right. Your paying for that asswipe who has no car insurance. Nice eh?
Oh you want something done about that? What like an ID card?
If you want to limit something to a select group you need to be sure who belongs in that group and who does not. An ID card is nothing more then an account. Notice how slashdot only gives certain privileges to people who ID themselves and denies them if you forget them. Even worse, it keeps a complete record of your posting history!
ID cards are inevitable unless we choose to accept the price of anonymity.
Still got the answers wrong. About half in fact. Granted in real life I would have given the answer to "wich of these sites do you think is safe to visit": "NEITHER"
But that was not an option.
Anyway perhaps linux users are even worse. How many of use just install packages from your distro without ever checking who actually wrote them? Just because no-one included a spyware package yet doesn't mean you are being safe. Just lucky.
You are asked to choose between various free sites and have to judge just buy a screenshot wich one is save. That of course is very hard to do. Worse is that you can't choose the answer "none of the above" wich I think is the only real answer.
Frankly I wouldn't trust any screensaver or smiley site. Period full stop end of story.
Oh and as for people using virus scanners. Well yeah. Because others have hit them over the head and tied them to a chair and then installed the virus scanner for them and then trained them with a cattle prod not to remove it. They still go out of their way to make live hard for the virus scanners and still basically just get it.
Virus scanner == safety belt. Wearing a safety belt doesn't make you a safe driver.
It only takes common sense to keep your machine clean. Right the same common sense that tells you to limit your speed in dangerous road conditions?
Common sense is a misnomer because whatever it is it sure as hell ain't common.
I am from holland where the current story is about a match between Feyenoord and Ajax and how the police had to arrest a few hundred feyenoord supporters to keep them from attacking Ajax supporters.
Oh and a smaller article about 2 ADO fans who were caught trying to set fire to a Ajax clubhouse supposdely in revenge for a group of Ajax fans who attacked a ADO clubhouse and beat up the people inside.
Yeah, that sounds like things being under control.
NOT.
As for the police being sent a bill, good for you. Sounds like the UK got fed up with this nonsense. It is still not being done in Holland. In fact the most recent attemps to charge for police presence go out of their way to mention soccer matches and focus instead on arts festivals.
Perhaps I should have mentioned the country in question.
If you mean how many flac rips I download vs MP3 then the answer is any chance I can get.
Oh and I went from tape based walkman to cd and then mini-disc at the earliest opportunity.
My MP3 players also get replaced once a year to keep up.
Call me a slave to consumerism.
Granted sometimes a format fails, it happens. In video land I think the most recent one was laserdisc.
This time it is different. You got a new generation of TV's that are getting HD feeds from your cable supplier yet when people pay 20 bucks for a DVD they are getting a inferior version.
So I don't have DVD-audio disks. In the same way I don't have Betamax tapes (actually I do but that is work related) because the other format (online music) won in that format war.
If you are slightly older and wiser then your average teenager, you might have seen similar reactions to other studies.
Believe it or not young ones but there was a time when some people claimed smoking wasn't just not bad for you but actually GOOD for you. Boggles the mind doesn't it? You can imagine that smokers having grown up with idea that smoking a good thing didn't react all that well when people started telling them how bad it is.
Even worse when smoking parents were being told they were harming their childeren.
It is a sorta holy war. A constant one is the debate as to who is right when it comes to working hours. The americans with long working weeks or the europeans with short ones. Part of the problem is perhaps that their is no right answer but I think the main reason that such a discussion always becomes a flame war is that each side feels themselves being attacked for a fundemental part of their livestyle.
To test the effects of violent games on gamers lets use another hobby but one where we have very clear examples of the violence it generates. Soccer.
I am sure even americans have heard about violent soccer fans (hooligans) that are a major problem in europe and have been since I was a kid. Almost every match needs a sizable and costly police force to keep things under control. Even with this huge cost to the taxpayer it still frequently goes wrong and you the results are very clear closed of city centers that look like a disaster struck and a constant bill for public transport in destroyed vehicles (and a train costs a lot to rebuild).
Now I challenge you with this. You go on public tv in europe and claim that soccer is the cause of this violence and that restrictions should be put in place to curb the violence. Good luck.
The evidence of violence is very clar as is the link. If a hundred hooligans go out of the stadion and on a rampage it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you forbid audiences at soccer matches you would limit the problem.
Hell, even simpler suggestion. Let the soccer clubs pay for the police presence. They make billions they can afford it. Good luck again.
So, nobody likes to be told that their hobby is the cause of problems. Nobody likes to be told what they should do.
So is that strange that gamers react strongly to being told that their hobby is bad and should be regulated or even banned?
It doesn't matter if the accusations hold water. What matters is that your lifestyle is being questioned. The smoker doesn't want to be told to stop smoking, the soccer fan doesn't want to pay for the soccer hooligans and the gamer does not want to be restricted in the games he can play.
Very normal. But is it helpfull?
Smokers have lost, soccer fans hangon because soccer is a billion dollar industry with a wide fanbase. Gamers? Well, we are not exactly popular are we. We don't have the public on our side.
Does it really help our case of "violent games don't cause violence" if we react violently against anyone who claims it? Isn't that rather like claiming "I am peacefull and will kill anyone who claims that ain't so"?
It is easy to feel attacked in your personal freedom but when you attack your enemy for claiming your violent you are only proving his point.
Worse, perhaps we are like those smokers who claim that smoking ain't bad for you. How many gamers are even willing to consider that the link between violence and gaming could exist? Based on past experience, not many. This is another holy war and both sides got their fanatics.
Who hundred of dollars. The same hundreds or even thousands of dollars people spend on all those HD-TV's? Every trash day you see those boxes. People seem t be spending a lot of money on those TV's. Why? They are not that much better then my PC tv card.
To me.
Just because you don't find it worth the money doesn't mean that everyone else agrees with you.
I seen some bittorrent releases in HD formats and the difference is huge. Granted the largest actually have to be scaled down to fit on my screen but you can't deny the difference. It is the difference between an actors face being a blur with darkspots for eyes and mouth and being able to see wether they had a good nights sleep the day before.
Does it matter?
If it didn't we would still be using 8mm film. Black & White.
Everytime a new format comes along you get the same old argument about it being to costly for a minor increase. Yet that never stopped anyone before.
We will see one of these being the winner in a few years time. The early players will be sold out in no time and take up will be a lot faster then you think and then when the next-gen format war starts you will be spouting the same nonsense.
TV is a lot more important to people then you think. A 1000 dollars to have the next best thing is nothing to a lot of people.
I am not in a chair. I just used to live near a handicapped area in my youth (A small part of Arnhem, Holland that was a project to get a living zone specially adapated for handicapped when the whole idea of special facilities for handicapped people was still new).
It was no uncommon to have to help some wheelchair user get either unstuck because they misjudged the roadsurface OR help them get around an obstacle. With normal wheel chairs it is already a pain but the electric ones are fucking heavy (or at least were 20 years ago).
So based on observation I would say an alternative to easily stuck wheels that would allow a handicapped person to use the same terrain a walking person can use would be a benefit.
Yeah, specially adapated chairs for special terrain would be nice for outings perhaps but they probably ain't suited for daily use. This ads costs and again doesn't help if a person suddenly finds themselves needing an all-terrain chair when they are in their regular chair.
Oh boy. Two games, Gray Company and Spores, are going to be relying heavily on it. The first directly and the second is going to be made by the same guy that gave us toilet training 101.
If you ever played The Sims 1 or 2 you know that the biggest pain is to get your sims to not pee their pants. Especially the morning is a problem becauser they all need to go at once and if your house has only a dozen toilets for every member of the household well then they are all going to cue in front of one. Since my sims are all girls (what kind of sicko plays with a male avatar?) they have the bladder control of a happy puppy.
The other needs are just as hard to fill but at least waiting endlessly in cue for one bath/shower doesn't cause any damage.
In short, I am not that impressed with the AI in The Sims if they can't even get the characters to use all the available bathrooms/showers etc etc. It can't be that hard. Find path to nearest bathroom. If occupied, find nearest bathoom except this one. At least then any accidents would be realistic.
I am old and I remember open games before that were going to use AI to get away from thighly scripted games and let you truly be free. Never works.
As for Maxis delivering a truly free game. Yeah right. Name one single Maxis game in wich you truly are free and are not forced onto one very narrow road to success.
Don't believe me? The Sims, the only path is capatalist. There is no social security system in the game. So you can't be a stay at home single parent living of social security. Neither can you sponge of your parents.
Same way with Sim City. Just try to create a non-car based city.
Nice idea, wheelchairs are idiotic devices. Forget chairs, they can't even deal with a bit of loose sand. Broken up pavement? Going for a ride/walk in nature? Forget it.
If the device is going to be like the one in the picture I see another advantage. Raise the wheelchair user to eyelevel with standing people.
Of course this wouldn't be slashdot if someone didn't come up with a lame weak point. This thing can't be pushed if the battery runs out. Granted, electric wheel chairs especially the models used by the elderly can't be pushed without being handicapped yourselve but still.
Slashdot Mirror
No common interface and the game makers just had to make sure to include code for the cards they thought of as important enough.
This lasted quite a long time until things settled down. Oh but wait NO!
Check Tomb Raider Legends. It has a special option, "Next gen content" wich is claimed to be optomized for the Nvidia cards. Granted some bugs seem to get in the way BUT it seems clear that even in the days of directx there still is room for games having extra content depending on your card.
What we are going to see is that this company is going to proudly list the games that support it and be very optomistic about listing all the games that could possibly support it because the game company didn't flatly turn them down.
Some very successfull games will happen who don't give a shit. Some mediocre games will look better because they support it until finally this product will either die (Like virtual reality helmets) or stay with us (like GPU cards).
Wich one will be the case? Frankly I don't know. Graphics in a way are easy and if you remember it didn't take a redesign of the game to add the Monsterboard patch for games like Tomb Raider and Quake. The games stayed the same.
The physics part that is just pretty pictures would still not be easy. All Tomb Raider and the Quake patch had to do was release higher res version of the super high res textures the developers had anyway. Is it going to be as easy to add increased physics to a game?
Is there going to be any demand for just pretty picture physics or are people going to want to see the gameplay affected before they invest in this card?
We will just have to wait and see. I think the battle is going to be wether gamers will find that it improves their game. Game makers will deliver the code if their is a demand, just like they did with the first gpu's.
Does it matter? Well, it is all about what you care about. Presentation or substance. Not that looking like a mess means you got subtance or vice versa BUT I might just choose a lawyer who looks like he been up all night reading legal papers rather then just fresh from the spa.
Then again that could just mean the latter guy knows his stuff while the first is still studying.
Oooh how about this one. Can't judge a book by its cover?
The simplest problem is that "Nintendo Revolution" while merely the codename for the upcoming console worked. It appealled to people and told them what this console was all about.
X-box 360 is just as stupid but since its codename wasn't that appealling, what was it anyway, we could only joke about the stupidity of doing a 360 wich means you end facing the same direction as before just more dizzy.
PS3? Talk about playing it save. Granted when you are the top of the heap, why take risks.
But Nintendo got a trippe whammy, they removed the beloved codename, they added a silly new name and they forgot to just play it safe.
Does it matter? Well think of it like this. IF the name doesn't matter then why did they spend a fortune on choosing it? Marketeers will tell you that your product name means EVERYTHING wich is why you need to pay them big bucks to choose the right one.
So either they are lying OR names matter.
Since Nintendo obviously choose a marketting name rather then just a descriptive name (gamecube 2 or even Nintendo 256 (or whatever)) they believe the name matters as far as sales are concerned.
The real problem I think is going to be with marketing. Wii doesn't exactly tell me they are going to give a shit about gamers. That is fine but the odd thing is that Nintendo needs the hardcore gamers to sell their systems to the casual gamers. I know plenty of GBA and DS owners who are not hardcore gamers BUT they bought them on advice from gamers.
I don't think Wii is a smart choice. Nintendo already is no MS who can afford to loose round after round nor is it even a Sony that can bank on its old successes and hope other divisions cover any lossses. Even if Wii only looses them 1% of sales that might be enough.
For the most part I am not worried about the name itself but rather about the ideas behind it. It really send me on a flashback to the internet bubble when you had countless launches and relaunches all with names thought up by marketing that had to be explained.
That is the worst bit. Even Nintendo realized that Wii had to be explained. A good name doesn't have to be explained. Says it all really.
Sue people who are already upset and got loaded guns for the last salute. There are some people you sue, and some who you don't. People who can answer the question "you and what army" fall in the last group.
a 20-G centrifuge machine that can simulate up to 20 times the terrestrial gravity
Geez, no shit sherlock. I wonder how much G earth gravity is?
I can understand if this bit of info has to be included in say a BBC report but this is supposed to be a place filled with geeks and nerds who could work out for themselves that 20G is 20 times the G force of earths gravity. Even the americans should be able to handle the math involved. The canadians might need help. The dutch? It is sunday morning. To stoned to care. Not that it being sunday morning has anything to do with that.
O_O squeel piggy squeel.
Funny in a way because IF there would be any logic to the idea that you absorb the essence of what you eat, then all the predators would be prey.
The mighty wolf would be a bit of a deer. The great white a bit of a surfer dude. The anteater a tiny insect.
But I guess when your chinese you are pretty desperate for anything that might give you a bigger penis.
Lucky as a true nerd I am above that. Doesn't much matter for jerking off what size it is ^_^
An expansive reading of the DOES suggest that every website should keep those records for the live of your account + a minimum of 1 year. Minimum of 1 year AFTER the end of the subscription.
Quite frankly I can only give a sorta hollow laugh/snigger. Sure sure I live in a different country but if anything dutch politicians are even worse. Dutch voters? Well, lets just say that the brightest of them would make a texan look dumb.
Our current party in power and its leader (CDA and Balkenstein) are firm admires of Bush and intent on copying everything. Although in a way that removes even what little value the republicans add. Sorta like europe always takes the fast out of fast food.
You sometimes hear old people, who been in WW2 or WW1, that kids these days need a good war to set them straight.
I am inclined to agree. NOT that war itself is good are creates character BUT after a big war there is always a period of great political change. It is the time to take bold steps while it seems decades of peace just lead to a slow rot.
America got the new deal, england had a huge social reform, holland got rid off "pillars/zuiltjes" (flattening of the classes?). Also introduced such thing as national healthcare and offcourse the buildup to women liberation etc etc.
Time for another WW. And no the war on islam oops terror don't count. We need an enemy that can put up a fight so afterwards both parties are determined never to have a war again (well only against their former allies but that doesn't count).
I am not making any sense and got stupid ideas? Cool, I should run for office.
Cause mine isn't, it is secure in my hand and aimed at your head. And so the student becomes the master.
While it could not compare with full C64 games it wasn't that bad either.
BUT what I think is even more important, it was relativly simple to achieve. Drawing a sprite on the C64 was infinitly easier then getting Dos let alone windows to even enter a graphical mode for simple drawing. Calling DirectX? Gibberish.
If I look back at Basic vs the languages you need today then we were in a way lucky.
I think however that it ain't all bad. Websites can take the place of the simple home computers. Getting some result with HTML and PHP is fairly easy and direct.
If there is a problem I would say it is because more and more computers are black boxes that just work. How many people who grew up from say Windows 2000 on have had to meddle with at least .bat files?
Old people like us HAD to learn some basic programming to even be able to use our computers. That I think has disappeared.
Shocking.
Will it be possible to mount non-encrypted disks in Vista? Well, unless MS is finally prepared to kick backwards compatibilty then yes.
Even if unencrypted HD's ain't supported (unlikely) they would still need to support regular filesystems like FAT for all those flash disks from your camera and USB keys and such.
I am as anti-ms as you can get (if I am ever diagnosed with an incurable disease Gates gets a bullet in the head the next day thanks to my Halo training. Eh non-MS FPS training) but this is just to much. Linux disk encryption makes it just as hard for linux to dualboot windows. In fact every linux distro should just use FAT to make sure windows can be dualbooted and read the linux data.
Geez.
Some very silly people use money as a measurement forgetting totally that money does not have the same value. 1 dollar in say New York has a totally different value then 1 dollar in say Greece. Hell everyone knows this is even true in far small areas like say New York vs Hicksville.
So any comparison between the money produced by either economy is silly. Even more if you realise that even in europe working hour practices are different. The brits for instance lean far more to american working hours.
So who is right?
Funny thing but one of those wise lessons from american sitcoms/dramas is that nobody on their death bed ever regretted not having spend more time in the office.
If you do not live to work then surely the only sensible number of hours to work is the amount you need to be able to afford to live right?
So how much do you need to live? This can get very funny. It starts simple. Cheap supermarkets are open from 8 to 8 in Holland. (Can't say for the rest of the world so don't attack me for that). There are a few that stay open later but they typically charge more and only carry the brand names (wich are more expensive) and don't have sales. The cheapest places to get food however is the market wich opens officially at 8 but is usually closing as early as 16:00.
So now you get the following effect. If your unemployed you got the least amount of money BUT have the time to shop at the cheapest place, the market. If you got a 40 hour 8-5 job the market is out so you need to shop at the regular but slightly more expensive supermarket. More money but your also spending more on food. Now if you work longer hours and can't make the regular opening hours you need the special stores at train stations. More money offcourse in salary but your food expenses shoot up. Work even more and you won't even have time to cook and eating in restaurants or takeaway really becomes fucking expensive.
Kids follow a similar pattern. The more you work, the more you make but also the more you spend on childcare. I had one co-worker who flatly refused to work on a friday (4 day contract) unless the company paid him double since that was his day to take care of the kid and if he worked on friday his entire salery would go to childcare meaning he effectlivly worked for nothing AND missed out on spending time with his child.
Same with other stuff. You can eat better cheaper and healthier if you can shop for fresh food every day. Don't have the time? Pay more AND pay for a huge fridge and the electricity.
The above is not just crap made up by some slashdot idiot. The effect that being going from unemployed to employed while leading to an increase in salary actually ends up with the person having less money is a big problem for countries with a decent social security system.
Some of you may even have experienced the effect of a promotion and payment increase actually ending up with you having less "free" money because all of sudden you need to buy rounds not of beer but whiskey or wear real suits or chip in for golf clubs instead of mousemat birthday gifts.
Whenever I see someone defend a 80 hour workweek because they are more productive I don't even bother with trying to reason that such a person will be too tired at work to do a decent job. I just wonder how that person finds enough free time to actually have some fun. Congrats that you earn twice as much as me. I will be sure to envy you while I am sitting with my feet up in the sun after a short day at work.
Could be an odd alternative. A free PC from a dictatorship. We live in intresting times.
Telfort (dutch mobile phone daughter of British Telecom) to O2, as in oxygen was especially sickening. So succesfull they now are back to telfort again.
When the real revolution comes can we line up the marketting people behind the lawyers and safe some bullets?
Take a country with no borders so you don't have to deal with foreigners for the following bit.
If a country had a totally free healthcare system where each person gets the medical aid they need. What need would that country have of an ID system for medical care.
That is right. None. The only ID system needed would be to identify a persons medical history but that can be anonymous. You could carry your medical history with you without it being tied in name to your person.
There is a reason most countries don't have truly free medical care. It is expensive and requires the majority of people to pay for medical care they don't personally receive.
It is socialism and socialists have high tax bills. That doesn't get you elected anymore.
So we come up with other systems all of wich involve the simple fact that now we need to attach financial info to the medical history. Who received what for how much and how are they going to pay for it. Or even better, how have they already paid for it. Your medical insurance company is going to want to know for certain that it is you getting the medical threatment they are paying for and not some stranger.
Well actually they don't really give a shit. You do because else your insurance costs would sky-rocket.
Do you know how much of your car insurance goes into a general pool that is used by all insurers to cover people without insurance? Yeah, that is right. Your paying for that asswipe who has no car insurance. Nice eh?
Oh you want something done about that? What like an ID card?
If you want to limit something to a select group you need to be sure who belongs in that group and who does not. An ID card is nothing more then an account. Notice how slashdot only gives certain privileges to people who ID themselves and denies them if you forget them. Even worse, it keeps a complete record of your posting history!
ID cards are inevitable unless we choose to accept the price of anonymity.
But that was not an option.
Anyway perhaps linux users are even worse. How many of use just install packages from your distro without ever checking who actually wrote them? Just because no-one included a spyware package yet doesn't mean you are being safe. Just lucky.
The reason is simple. The test is loaded.
You are asked to choose between various free sites and have to judge just buy a screenshot wich one is save. That of course is very hard to do. Worse is that you can't choose the answer "none of the above" wich I think is the only real answer.
Frankly I wouldn't trust any screensaver or smiley site. Period full stop end of story.
Oh and as for people using virus scanners. Well yeah. Because others have hit them over the head and tied them to a chair and then installed the virus scanner for them and then trained them with a cattle prod not to remove it. They still go out of their way to make live hard for the virus scanners and still basically just get it.
Virus scanner == safety belt. Wearing a safety belt doesn't make you a safe driver.
It only takes common sense to keep your machine clean. Right the same common sense that tells you to limit your speed in dangerous road conditions?
Common sense is a misnomer because whatever it is it sure as hell ain't common.
Oh and a smaller article about 2 ADO fans who were caught trying to set fire to a Ajax clubhouse supposdely in revenge for a group of Ajax fans who attacked a ADO clubhouse and beat up the people inside.
Yeah, that sounds like things being under control.
NOT.
As for the police being sent a bill, good for you. Sounds like the UK got fed up with this nonsense. It is still not being done in Holland. In fact the most recent attemps to charge for police presence go out of their way to mention soccer matches and focus instead on arts festivals.
Perhaps I should have mentioned the country in question.
If you mean how many flac rips I download vs MP3 then the answer is any chance I can get.
Oh and I went from tape based walkman to cd and then mini-disc at the earliest opportunity.
My MP3 players also get replaced once a year to keep up.
Call me a slave to consumerism.
Granted sometimes a format fails, it happens. In video land I think the most recent one was laserdisc.
This time it is different. You got a new generation of TV's that are getting HD feeds from your cable supplier yet when people pay 20 bucks for a DVD they are getting a inferior version.
So I don't have DVD-audio disks. In the same way I don't have Betamax tapes (actually I do but that is work related) because the other format (online music) won in that format war.
Believe it or not young ones but there was a time when some people claimed smoking wasn't just not bad for you but actually GOOD for you. Boggles the mind doesn't it? You can imagine that smokers having grown up with idea that smoking a good thing didn't react all that well when people started telling them how bad it is.
Even worse when smoking parents were being told they were harming their childeren.
It is a sorta holy war. A constant one is the debate as to who is right when it comes to working hours. The americans with long working weeks or the europeans with short ones. Part of the problem is perhaps that their is no right answer but I think the main reason that such a discussion always becomes a flame war is that each side feels themselves being attacked for a fundemental part of their livestyle.
To test the effects of violent games on gamers lets use another hobby but one where we have very clear examples of the violence it generates. Soccer.
I am sure even americans have heard about violent soccer fans (hooligans) that are a major problem in europe and have been since I was a kid. Almost every match needs a sizable and costly police force to keep things under control. Even with this huge cost to the taxpayer it still frequently goes wrong and you the results are very clear closed of city centers that look like a disaster struck and a constant bill for public transport in destroyed vehicles (and a train costs a lot to rebuild).
Now I challenge you with this. You go on public tv in europe and claim that soccer is the cause of this violence and that restrictions should be put in place to curb the violence. Good luck.
The evidence of violence is very clar as is the link. If a hundred hooligans go out of the stadion and on a rampage it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you forbid audiences at soccer matches you would limit the problem.
Hell, even simpler suggestion. Let the soccer clubs pay for the police presence. They make billions they can afford it. Good luck again.
So, nobody likes to be told that their hobby is the cause of problems. Nobody likes to be told what they should do.
So is that strange that gamers react strongly to being told that their hobby is bad and should be regulated or even banned?
It doesn't matter if the accusations hold water. What matters is that your lifestyle is being questioned. The smoker doesn't want to be told to stop smoking, the soccer fan doesn't want to pay for the soccer hooligans and the gamer does not want to be restricted in the games he can play.
Very normal. But is it helpfull?
Smokers have lost, soccer fans hangon because soccer is a billion dollar industry with a wide fanbase. Gamers? Well, we are not exactly popular are we. We don't have the public on our side.
Does it really help our case of "violent games don't cause violence" if we react violently against anyone who claims it? Isn't that rather like claiming "I am peacefull and will kill anyone who claims that ain't so"?
It is easy to feel attacked in your personal freedom but when you attack your enemy for claiming your violent you are only proving his point.
Worse, perhaps we are like those smokers who claim that smoking ain't bad for you. How many gamers are even willing to consider that the link between violence and gaming could exist? Based on past experience, not many. This is another holy war and both sides got their fanatics.
To me.
Just because you don't find it worth the money doesn't mean that everyone else agrees with you.
I seen some bittorrent releases in HD formats and the difference is huge. Granted the largest actually have to be scaled down to fit on my screen but you can't deny the difference. It is the difference between an actors face being a blur with darkspots for eyes and mouth and being able to see wether they had a good nights sleep the day before.
Does it matter?
If it didn't we would still be using 8mm film. Black & White.
Everytime a new format comes along you get the same old argument about it being to costly for a minor increase. Yet that never stopped anyone before.
We will see one of these being the winner in a few years time. The early players will be sold out in no time and take up will be a lot faster then you think and then when the next-gen format war starts you will be spouting the same nonsense.
TV is a lot more important to people then you think. A 1000 dollars to have the next best thing is nothing to a lot of people.
It was no uncommon to have to help some wheelchair user get either unstuck because they misjudged the roadsurface OR help them get around an obstacle. With normal wheel chairs it is already a pain but the electric ones are fucking heavy (or at least were 20 years ago).
So based on observation I would say an alternative to easily stuck wheels that would allow a handicapped person to use the same terrain a walking person can use would be a benefit.
Yeah, specially adapated chairs for special terrain would be nice for outings perhaps but they probably ain't suited for daily use. This ads costs and again doesn't help if a person suddenly finds themselves needing an all-terrain chair when they are in their regular chair.
If you ever played The Sims 1 or 2 you know that the biggest pain is to get your sims to not pee their pants. Especially the morning is a problem becauser they all need to go at once and if your house has only a dozen toilets for every member of the household well then they are all going to cue in front of one. Since my sims are all girls (what kind of sicko plays with a male avatar?) they have the bladder control of a happy puppy.
The other needs are just as hard to fill but at least waiting endlessly in cue for one bath/shower doesn't cause any damage.
In short, I am not that impressed with the AI in The Sims if they can't even get the characters to use all the available bathrooms/showers etc etc. It can't be that hard. Find path to nearest bathroom. If occupied, find nearest bathoom except this one. At least then any accidents would be realistic.
I am old and I remember open games before that were going to use AI to get away from thighly scripted games and let you truly be free. Never works.
As for Maxis delivering a truly free game. Yeah right. Name one single Maxis game in wich you truly are free and are not forced onto one very narrow road to success.
Don't believe me? The Sims, the only path is capatalist. There is no social security system in the game. So you can't be a stay at home single parent living of social security. Neither can you sponge of your parents.
Same way with Sim City. Just try to create a non-car based city.
Perhaps Spore will be different. I doubt it.
If the device is going to be like the one in the picture I see another advantage. Raise the wheelchair user to eyelevel with standing people.
Of course this wouldn't be slashdot if someone didn't come up with a lame weak point. This thing can't be pushed if the battery runs out. Granted, electric wheel chairs especially the models used by the elderly can't be pushed without being handicapped yourselve but still.