I got those insanely expensive sony earbuds because regular headphones make my ears get all hot and sweaty. I also like the way they reduce the outside noise a bit.
My music tends to be pretty gentle but I probably will be deaf in my old age. Then again who is to say I will not die of a heart attack before?
All this worry about headphones is a bit silly. All that has to happen is that you stand to close to someone popping an airhose and bam, you loose more hearing then an iPod can do in a year.
Okay I can understand the use of an AI that can understand a question like, 'what will the weather be like tomorrow'. This is a complex question especially if you factor in that if I ask it YOU might know that tomorrow I am going to england/london.
But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history? I want small talk from my PC? If I want meaningless drivel I talk to the my co-workers thank you very much. I really can't see this as being usefull. A good receptionist gives you the information you want, he/she does NOT show you the photographs of the kids.
I don't get this whole "making computers easier to communicate with" deal either. By the time this tech will be usable all the old people who have a VCR with a blinking timer will be death and kids who grew up with PC's will have taken over. Spend you time on a better google, not on creating another Bob or Clippy or that damn stupid Dog in that made me hate XP with a passion first time I saw it.
7. Redmond still can't find a way to shake its shoddy security image: In 2005, Microsoft spent lots of time, energy and Webcasts detailing its plans to improve security. But at the end of the year, as security expert Bruce Schneier put it so succinctly: Internet Explorer sucks. Here's hoping Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7.0 improve things a bit.
Who here honestly believed that MS would really put some effort in cleaning up the crap that is IE? Oh sure, they might make some fixes to the next version but what do you expect? The people at MS are not insane or stupid, they do not produce shoddy code on purpose. It is just the MS always adds so many features to its product that on release it turns out there are a whole lot of open holes because of all the features. The best way to make IE more secure is to rip out activex. Not going to happen.
You can in theory do the best more secure development in the world and if you then have some idiot decide that it would be really cool if unknown code could have free access to the system (html/javascript email) none of it matters. It would be like trying to design a safe and have markelting insist on a nice clear glass panel in the outside wall so people can see how save their money is.
No I am not a Sony fanboy directly. Only consoles I own are handheld. The new Cell processor IF it lives up to its promisses could however be a intresting new approach. Some Intel exec said it was a stupid design and we all know what that means. (Oh you don't? Well that it will be insanely fast while not causing a china syndrome in your box).
IF the PS3 will indeed have a linux-on-hd addon and it is properly open I am looking forward to see what it will do as a desktop machine.
IF sony indeed will support linux on it may be the first time that modern graphics hardware has open drivers, okay this is a long jump, Sony could easily combine the GPL Kernel with a closed source driver BUT lets be positive here shall we?
Linux already has a lot of support for multi-core machines and while the Cell is not a regular SMP machine it will nontheless be intresting to see how a desktop will behave with 8 cores inside.
Of course there is a lot of IF's here but who knows. Sony in my opinion wants to take MS on for the PC in the living room market. They do not have the resources to write their own. They might just pull an IBM and decide to support linux fully in the hope of using it to bring MS down a notch.
This I think will be the biggest story in 2006. The possible emergences of a desktop contented.
Yes even paypal. What Sony uses is Global Collect. They make it their business to know all the various methods of payment in all the corners of the world and collect the money for you. Bibit is a similar company but I am not sure how they operate now (implemented a pay site using their services that worked across europe).
CC are an american thing. Do not let anyone from the US tell you differently. IF you desire business from abroad your best bet is to offer real alternatives. Wire transfer and such are not alternatives, they are expensive and slow.
Global Collect or Bibit or similar companies are probably your best bet for true international payment. Let specialists deal with the collecting.
Please yanks, do not mention such things a debet cards or whatever. You are americans, you cannot understand that the rest of the world uses different systems. Every single time the issue of non-credit card owners paying online comes up there are always some yanks who somehow think they know how payment systems in europe work. It gets old
Russia got nothing better to do at the moment then go after filesharers. America wanted the soviet union gone, well this is what you get.
Odd the same claim is not made about china. China would feel a trade ban far worse, or could it be that such a ban would be bad for america?
The US stands alone in the war on terror. Russia has its own war against pretty much the same enemy. Logical US diplomatic action? Upset Russia every chance you get.
WTO is already being seen as an american puppet. If this succeeds then it will be confirmed.
No, this is clearly insane. Those who voted for the senators involved should be shot for being a waste of good air.
On the other hand if the russians want to show the US up all they have to do is announce that they are a P2P safeheaven. Nah, I think this is one of those fantasie ideas that show why the RIAA is such an obsolete organisation.
A dutch documentairy maker, glas was made in the 50's and showed the production of glass bottles. Even won an Oscar so I guess the appeal of watching machines is pretty far reaching.
But hey who doesn't like to watch other people work:)
He probably thinks it is a good thing that Dell sells only Wintel (unless you look really hard and I know the links thank you).
MS still controls the OS and Office software market, sure you are not forced at gunpoint to use MS software. You just can't work with XX% of systems where XX is a number above 50 at least.
Websites still can't move beyond IE's crippled capabilities (PNG support being a personal gripe), when someone wants your CV it better be in Office Word format.
The EU is still not able to get MS to open up its specifications for such simple projects like Samba.
The day when websites can be developed to a standard and not to MS crippled browser is the day MS will no longer be a browser monopoly.
The day the samba team can just look up the specs instead of having to reverse engineer with each new windows release is the day MS will no longer be a OS monopoly.
The day I can just send a document made in my editor to anyone and they can read it will be the day that MS will no longer have an office monopoly.
The original poster has his head to far up Bill Gates ass. He talks about MS opening up for interoperability. Right, wich is why the EU is threathening with fines if they do not open up soon.
Oh well at least the MS apologists can't claim that/. never posts pro-MS posts. Pity that it is such a crap one.
The author judges the japanese as being wrong. The west is obviously right in its fear of robots and love of cheap immigrans. That there have been no robot riots and several western countries have had to deal with immigrant riots is neither here nor there.
But I think there is a far simpler reason behind the lack of immigration. Japanese companies had a pact with their workers. You work hard and we give you employment for live. While this is changing on the whole a japanese company is far more likely to stick with the expensive locals then say an american company who is always looking to reduce labor costs.
As we are seeing now with the claimed shortage in tech workers (wich has been proven again and again not to be true) western companies are always looking for an excuse to get lower wage workers in place.
Immigrants do not complain and do not demand high wages or sane hours. When even they became to expensive entire production facilities were located off-shore and now even the office work is being put in low wage nations.
Because there is nobody to do the work here? No, because it allows them to scrape another percentage of the labor costs. Fuck the longterm economy, next quarters stock price is what matters.
Japanese companies operated on a slightly different moral principle. Their workers worked themselves into an easy grave and in exchange the japanese worker was assured a job for live (strangely enough with all that hard work the japanese get older then most westeners).
The west is currently having major problems with the results of it open immigration policy, right or wrong you can hardly blame the japanese for not wanting to have race riots in their cities. And no, not just in France. They have had them in england and in holland.
Perhaps we should ask why the west is so afraid of robots instead.
Oh wtf, it is christmas, it is the season for non-sensical newsstories.
So I downloaded, put it on my video iPod and watched it.
It is the thrilling tale of a log burning with passion or possibly petrol.
It is still as much of a thrill ride as it was in the good old days of vhs but now you can have a big burning log in your pants.
Technically it sucks a bit as their are a lot of artifacts leading me to believe that someone was a bit to conservative with the compression settings. It is actually bad because fire of course contains a lot of movement and color ranges. So the vid just plain looks bad. Give me the high-def version, who cares if it sucks the battery dry in an hour.
How about that whole 'it costs $200 per month to pay for this addiction' crap.
Just buying 1 laptop could account for an entire year. Is buying 1 laptop an addiction nowadays?
Guys it is a slow newsday. This reporter needed his christmas bonus so he put in a small non-article with a nice headline that while at the same time being properly alarmist is also nice and safe not to ruin the giftmas feeling.
Ask your elders about handhelds of their youths. About the LCD games BEFORE we got pixel based screens. Compared with them the original Gameboy was HD. So was the Color version vs the black & white. So was the GBA vs the GB Color and now the DS.
Each version sported massivly improved graphics. Wich is all that HD is. Higher resolution.
Check the "resoltion" on your DS. The screen real estate is simply 2x the size!!! as that of what game before.
Oh and you can't afford HD? What are you sitting behind when writing this? Could it be a screen that easily spanks most HD tv's?
If you were still playing on an original Gameboy then you could claim to be a non-hd house. I would just whip out my Game&Watch mario game and call you a graphics freak who doesn't understand about the joy of pure gameplay.
Kids these days don't know how good they got it, why when I was your age we had to BUY a NEW console EVERYTIME we wanted to play a new game. AND The store was uphill both ways! If you wanted a new battery you had to go the other way, uphill AND through the snow. Rechargeable? HA! Spoiled brat.
Nice, kinda of odd I flunked out of school then. For your information, an IQ of 130 or higher puts you at the high end of the human race. Only a few percent score that high.
Odd thing, for some reason a lot more people then a few percent seemed to be able to work with Linux long before Windows ever made an appearance. Of course they called it unix in those days but what's in a name?
Earlier computer systems were even more primitive and being operated NOT by MIT graduates but by a girl promoted from the typing pool. For that matter how do you think the earliest word processors and such worked? Point and click? Nor were they being used by harvard graduates. Just girls with barely a diploma in home economics.
Nah, linux is easy. It is just called hard by the amazingly lazy who do not want to be bothered having to relearn their leet button clicking skills.
In the real world, people have used all kinds of systems and continue to do so. You would be suprised how many companies still run their essential software via ancient telnet terminals that make you wish you were running DOS (oh okay maybe not DOS).
Here is a tip for succesfull management of your employees. Do not hire people with skills if office package X (and that includes oOO). Hire people with an average intelligence and tell them I pay your wages, I choose the software, here is a manual. Any person with a IQ above room temperature will get the hint.
Not sure about the exact arrangements in every country but most, holland, england, america and france got 2 houses or whatever the local version. One is the 'goverment' It is the one that gets the biggest headlines and from here the ministers are chosen. In america and holland the elections are also staggered. So you have elections every 2 years rotating. One for the president and his ministers. One for a second group who do not directly control goverment.
They are however the final step for any law that has to be passed. Now this changes immensly between countries BUT if directly elected this second house is still usually different from the main house. 2 years is a long time in politics and in america it used to be a case that a party would rarely control both at the same time. One of the reasons Bush is so powerfull is that currently the republicans own both houses.
There is also another difference. The up and comers and career makers are in the first house. This is were the attention is and this is where you can make it big. The second house tends be more like a retirement home. It has older people who don't feel they have to make a name for themselves anymore.
Strangely enough while it would make you suppose they are extremely conservative this is not always the case. They certainly can be far less corrupt. A person with no ambition is far harder to buy off. A person with grandchilderen will be more concerned with the enviroment then with getting a seat at the board of a big oil company.
The second house can act like a brake. Wich is why it is there in the first place. It is far from unusual for the second house to shoot down the more ambitious new laws. While sometimes this can be seen as bad when it comes to progress it also stops law like these from being passed.
It is not just political gaming when this happens, it is the system working. Not fast, not perfectly but as it was intended to.
The next time you wonder why you got so many different elections? It is because each election allows you to vote for a brake. I like a lot of brakes. Goverments should never move at more then a snails pace. Fast moving goverments tend to invade poland.
'Goverment' also wanted to push that through. The voter didn't go for it. Not in france, not in holland (where I am from).
There is a backlash going on with the voter not taking it anymore. I am not that familiar with france (language barrier) but I do get the impression that it has much the same problems as holland. With a cultural elite (media and politics) having put themselves in ivory towers where they can keep telling each other everything is alright while the real world is going to hell.
Holland had Pim Fortyun and Theo van Gogh and their murderers who upset this carefully constructed fantasy world. France had the recent riots and the continuing rise of extreme right.
With the EU constition it became painfully clear that the politicians were totally removed from the real world. They just could not get that the voters were not going to vote it through just because they told them to.
I think this "protest" vote is a sign that even certain circles of goverment are beginning to realize that something is wrong.
To dismiss this as simply a publicity stunt is cheap. It is like calling the EU constition rejection a cheap stunt by the voters, no this is a way to tell the direct leaders of a country to get their act together. The NEW rules proposed are bad for the public and this was one way to make it painfully clear that there is resistance. Sometimes you have to shoot people in the face to get their attention.
Of course the problem is that the media who are supposed to tell us about these kind of things are the people behind the whole DMCA and similar crap.
But still it is good to see some resistance. I think this battle is far from over. If your leaders got a brain they will not want to have another disaster like the referendum. Of course if they had a brain none of this would have happened in the first place.
If I buy sugar am I allowed to then offer people sugar in their tea to my hearts content? If I buy a car can I offer rides to hitchhikers as much as I want?
Then why should music be different?
The current system was introduced only at the beginning of the last centurie. We survived millenia without it. Do not think that just because currently the law has made for an industry were none of the normal rules apply that this has to remain the same for eternity.
To lazy to check but very recent I saw that during signup you can also have the catchpa spoken out. It was a regular link so a speech to text browser should be able to detect as well the poor sighted.
Is it secure? Well I suppose both speech and sight can be regonized by software. Just make the sound with background noise that humans have no trouble with but machines do. Same as the visual ones.
Really the question seems immensly stupid to me. Gee, we got blind people who can't see a piece of text. Oh my god how could we possibly solve this. Gee if only we had some tech that could you know get info to a blind person.
SOUND YOU TARD.
Lucasarts also gave us the movie tie-in
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In a good way. X-wing was the bomb. Later games would be like The Phantom Menace but X-wing showed us what a movie tie-in was meant to be. Not just the endless disney tie-ins where a bad sidescoller has the sprites replaced with the latest chars.
Don't forget Battle over/of Britain
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· Score: 2, Interesting
and Secret weapons of the Luftwaffe. THE ORIGINAL.
Of course by todays standard they are truly horrible and the flight and combat is a joke BUT at the time it was great. Shooting pixels at pixels. Sitting in a bomber with a bloody rocket after you are trying to fly under a bomber to use your upward firing missles. Great stuff.
Oh also a game that had a manual that not only told you about the game but also the history of the era you were fighting in and a whole chapter in SWOTL about the impact the various real strategies had. You could even follow them and see the effect. Like concentrating on bombing oil installations really worked!
X-wing was a nice game and all but it came with a couple of stencil sheets for a manual. Sigh. The beginning of the end. Soon we would have games that didn't even need a manual. Or PDF's.
I am sad now and must cuddle my F-16 Fighting Falcon 3.0 manual.
Steve Ballmer hurdled a chair through his office shouting, "Fucking Samuel J. Palmisano is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill IBM."
To wich Bill Gates replied, "and this time we fucking make sure IBM stays dead."
Oh god, the world is upside down. IBM the new and happening company, MS and Intel as "the man". Apple is still a bunch of new age hippies right?
I remember being young. Sure this whole adult paying the bills and having to work (and no skipping shifts) thing sucks. For some reason my gf also seems to get more upset at me expecting her to do all the chores. Reminding her that your mom used to AND was better at it is not something I recommend.
But all of it is made up by the easily available sex. No more quickies in the back of your car on a friday night (unless you want to). Just waking up on a lazy sunday morning and find something warm, soft and willing next to you and nothing to do for the whole next 5 minutes.
The sandbox people, who liked that they could make their own characters. Who revelled in the wide selection of clothing.
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones not dancing with a weapon equipped.
The levellers. Levelling up is the name of the game and XP is your e-penis. They want fights, they want fights that give max xp and they want to get a character that is super powerfull.
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones in horribly mismatched outfits or even underwear. Just the stats matter nothing else.
Of course almost nobody is 100% one or the other. That would be too easy for game developers BUT nobody is 50-50 either. The two sides really are each other opposites.
The sandbox people do not care if their character is less powerfull then another character. They at most care wether they can be the character they want (for instance a death dealing dancer was not possible, should all SWG proffesions cost the same amount of skill points). That their ranger/medic does a fraction of the damage of a combat character is not important. Their choice.
The levellers DO care. OMG GOD, sword can do 10% more damage per second then fencer? NERF THEM. They like competition but also want it to be fair. To them the mix and match is about getting the best results. PvP players are even worse, have to be, because what is the point of a duel if the winner is already known?
Perhaps the biggest difference is that levellers dream of being able to solo X while sandboxers can't see the point of soloing in an mmo.
Worse is that both groups do not like each other much. The Levellers see the Sandboxers as a bunch of low level roleplaying freaks, the Sandbox people see the levellers as ill mannered script kiddies always looking for the latest exploit.
Obvious example? Image designer. Now if there ever was a profession were a player should not care about maxing XP results it was image designer. Boy were they screwed. This meant that only hardcore sandboxers did it. Levellers had a use for them because even the most hardcore leveller wants to change their looks sometimes BUT there was a mismatch. Levellers would ask for an image desinger to change them, the nicer levellers would come to the ID but many seemed to think that the ID should come to them and just cough up the travel costs. Paying for the ID session? Why? The ID gets XP for it so why should I pay for it? That master image designers have no need for XP seems something a leveller cannot understand.
Same with other "helper" jobs like entertainers. Levellers are lousy tippers. To them XP is the name of the game and they cannot understand that the best entertainers can only get money from tips.
Medics? Just as bad. Healing costs resources yet levellers will not help medics who kept them alive either by donating resources (if they even have the skills in aquiring them) or paying for the job. Hell I seen levellers who had to be constantly healed and then try to sell medic loot to the healer that saved their skin. No wonder medics died out.
With NGE sony seems to have decided to aim for the leveller crowd. An intresting move since there seem to a be a lot of them. Small problem? The levellers left and went to WoW. It is the Sandbox people that have stuck with SWG through thick and thin and it is them that are most badly screwed with this update.
No more mix and matching your own job. Clothes and armour are given not bought from crafters. Less of a crafter run economy. The whole combat level crap. No, SWG went from a sandbox/leveller hybrid wich was bad enough to a leveller game. All very nice but WoW does it better.
I don't know if there is room for a sandbox only game. Compared to the standard leveller games that are EQ and WoW. The sims is a sandbox game and it sold amazingly well. Its online version did not. Can a mmo "the sims" work. I think so but you need to design a true sandbox game and not some weird hybrid. A true sandbox game is not about levelling up. This is hard as levelling is easy. Just as
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My music tends to be pretty gentle but I probably will be deaf in my old age. Then again who is to say I will not die of a heart attack before?
All this worry about headphones is a bit silly. All that has to happen is that you stand to close to someone popping an airhose and bam, you loose more hearing then an iPod can do in a year.
Live is to short to worry.
Ugly, cheap, effective, easy to fly. Scrapped. Sex sells, even in the military.
But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history? I want small talk from my PC? If I want meaningless drivel I talk to the my co-workers thank you very much. I really can't see this as being usefull. A good receptionist gives you the information you want, he/she does NOT show you the photographs of the kids.
I don't get this whole "making computers easier to communicate with" deal either. By the time this tech will be usable all the old people who have a VCR with a blinking timer will be death and kids who grew up with PC's will have taken over. Spend you time on a better google, not on creating another Bob or Clippy or that damn stupid Dog in that made me hate XP with a passion first time I saw it.
Who here honestly believed that MS would really put some effort in cleaning up the crap that is IE? Oh sure, they might make some fixes to the next version but what do you expect? The people at MS are not insane or stupid, they do not produce shoddy code on purpose. It is just the MS always adds so many features to its product that on release it turns out there are a whole lot of open holes because of all the features. The best way to make IE more secure is to rip out activex. Not going to happen.
You can in theory do the best more secure development in the world and if you then have some idiot decide that it would be really cool if unknown code could have free access to the system (html/javascript email) none of it matters. It would be like trying to design a safe and have markelting insist on a nice clear glass panel in the outside wall so people can see how save their money is.
No I am not a Sony fanboy directly. Only consoles I own are handheld. The new Cell processor IF it lives up to its promisses could however be a intresting new approach. Some Intel exec said it was a stupid design and we all know what that means. (Oh you don't? Well that it will be insanely fast while not causing a china syndrome in your box).
IF the PS3 will indeed have a linux-on-hd addon and it is properly open I am looking forward to see what it will do as a desktop machine.
IF sony indeed will support linux on it may be the first time that modern graphics hardware has open drivers, okay this is a long jump, Sony could easily combine the GPL Kernel with a closed source driver BUT lets be positive here shall we?
Linux already has a lot of support for multi-core machines and while the Cell is not a regular SMP machine it will nontheless be intresting to see how a desktop will behave with 8 cores inside.
Of course there is a lot of IF's here but who knows. Sony in my opinion wants to take MS on for the PC in the living room market. They do not have the resources to write their own. They might just pull an IBM and decide to support linux fully in the hope of using it to bring MS down a notch.
This I think will be the biggest story in 2006. The possible emergences of a desktop contented.
CC are an american thing. Do not let anyone from the US tell you differently. IF you desire business from abroad your best bet is to offer real alternatives. Wire transfer and such are not alternatives, they are expensive and slow.
Global Collect or Bibit or similar companies are probably your best bet for true international payment. Let specialists deal with the collecting.
Please yanks, do not mention such things a debet cards or whatever. You are americans, you cannot understand that the rest of the world uses different systems. Every single time the issue of non-credit card owners paying online comes up there are always some yanks who somehow think they know how payment systems in europe work. It gets old
No, this is clearly insane. Those who voted for the senators involved should be shot for being a waste of good air.
On the other hand if the russians want to show the US up all they have to do is announce that they are a P2P safeheaven. Nah, I think this is one of those fantasie ideas that show why the RIAA is such an obsolete organisation.
But hey who doesn't like to watch other people work :)
MS still controls the OS and Office software market, sure you are not forced at gunpoint to use MS software. You just can't work with XX% of systems where XX is a number above 50 at least.
Websites still can't move beyond IE's crippled capabilities (PNG support being a personal gripe), when someone wants your CV it better be in Office Word format.
The EU is still not able to get MS to open up its specifications for such simple projects like Samba.
The day when websites can be developed to a standard and not to MS crippled browser is the day MS will no longer be a browser monopoly.
The day the samba team can just look up the specs instead of having to reverse engineer with each new windows release is the day MS will no longer be a OS monopoly.
The day I can just send a document made in my editor to anyone and they can read it will be the day that MS will no longer have an office monopoly.
The original poster has his head to far up Bill Gates ass. He talks about MS opening up for interoperability. Right, wich is why the EU is threathening with fines if they do not open up soon.
Oh well at least the MS apologists can't claim that /. never posts pro-MS posts. Pity that it is such a crap one.
But I think there is a far simpler reason behind the lack of immigration. Japanese companies had a pact with their workers. You work hard and we give you employment for live. While this is changing on the whole a japanese company is far more likely to stick with the expensive locals then say an american company who is always looking to reduce labor costs.
As we are seeing now with the claimed shortage in tech workers (wich has been proven again and again not to be true) western companies are always looking for an excuse to get lower wage workers in place.
Immigrants do not complain and do not demand high wages or sane hours. When even they became to expensive entire production facilities were located off-shore and now even the office work is being put in low wage nations.
Because there is nobody to do the work here? No, because it allows them to scrape another percentage of the labor costs. Fuck the longterm economy, next quarters stock price is what matters.
Japanese companies operated on a slightly different moral principle. Their workers worked themselves into an easy grave and in exchange the japanese worker was assured a job for live (strangely enough with all that hard work the japanese get older then most westeners).
The west is currently having major problems with the results of it open immigration policy, right or wrong you can hardly blame the japanese for not wanting to have race riots in their cities. And no, not just in France. They have had them in england and in holland.
Perhaps we should ask why the west is so afraid of robots instead.
So I downloaded, put it on my video iPod and watched it.
It is the thrilling tale of a log burning with passion or possibly petrol.
It is still as much of a thrill ride as it was in the good old days of vhs but now you can have a big burning log in your pants.
Technically it sucks a bit as their are a lot of artifacts leading me to believe that someone was a bit to conservative with the compression settings. It is actually bad because fire of course contains a lot of movement and color ranges. So the vid just plain looks bad. Give me the high-def version, who cares if it sucks the battery dry in an hour.
So final result?
Not bad for a christmas novelty story.
Subject says it all really. They weren't extinct back then and the easiest way to get a complete skeleton is to remove the owner.
How about that whole 'it costs $200 per month to pay for this addiction' crap.
Just buying 1 laptop could account for an entire year. Is buying 1 laptop an addiction nowadays?
Guys it is a slow newsday. This reporter needed his christmas bonus so he put in a small non-article with a nice headline that while at the same time being properly alarmist is also nice and safe not to ruin the giftmas feeling.
It also got iPod in it wich is always good.
Bleh.
Each version sported massivly improved graphics. Wich is all that HD is. Higher resolution.
Check the "resoltion" on your DS. The screen real estate is simply 2x the size!!! as that of what game before.
Oh and you can't afford HD? What are you sitting behind when writing this? Could it be a screen that easily spanks most HD tv's?
If you were still playing on an original Gameboy then you could claim to be a non-hd house. I would just whip out my Game&Watch mario game and call you a graphics freak who doesn't understand about the joy of pure gameplay.
Kids these days don't know how good they got it, why when I was your age we had to BUY a NEW console EVERYTIME we wanted to play a new game. AND The store was uphill both ways! If you wanted a new battery you had to go the other way, uphill AND through the snow. Rechargeable? HA! Spoiled brat.
Odd thing, for some reason a lot more people then a few percent seemed to be able to work with Linux long before Windows ever made an appearance. Of course they called it unix in those days but what's in a name?
Earlier computer systems were even more primitive and being operated NOT by MIT graduates but by a girl promoted from the typing pool. For that matter how do you think the earliest word processors and such worked? Point and click? Nor were they being used by harvard graduates. Just girls with barely a diploma in home economics.
Nah, linux is easy. It is just called hard by the amazingly lazy who do not want to be bothered having to relearn their leet button clicking skills.
In the real world, people have used all kinds of systems and continue to do so. You would be suprised how many companies still run their essential software via ancient telnet terminals that make you wish you were running DOS (oh okay maybe not DOS).
Here is a tip for succesfull management of your employees. Do not hire people with skills if office package X (and that includes oOO). Hire people with an average intelligence and tell them I pay your wages, I choose the software, here is a manual. Any person with a IQ above room temperature will get the hint.
They are however the final step for any law that has to be passed. Now this changes immensly between countries BUT if directly elected this second house is still usually different from the main house. 2 years is a long time in politics and in america it used to be a case that a party would rarely control both at the same time. One of the reasons Bush is so powerfull is that currently the republicans own both houses.
There is also another difference. The up and comers and career makers are in the first house. This is were the attention is and this is where you can make it big. The second house tends be more like a retirement home. It has older people who don't feel they have to make a name for themselves anymore.
Strangely enough while it would make you suppose they are extremely conservative this is not always the case. They certainly can be far less corrupt. A person with no ambition is far harder to buy off. A person with grandchilderen will be more concerned with the enviroment then with getting a seat at the board of a big oil company.
The second house can act like a brake. Wich is why it is there in the first place. It is far from unusual for the second house to shoot down the more ambitious new laws. While sometimes this can be seen as bad when it comes to progress it also stops law like these from being passed.
It is not just political gaming when this happens, it is the system working. Not fast, not perfectly but as it was intended to.
The next time you wonder why you got so many different elections? It is because each election allows you to vote for a brake. I like a lot of brakes. Goverments should never move at more then a snails pace. Fast moving goverments tend to invade poland.
There is a backlash going on with the voter not taking it anymore. I am not that familiar with france (language barrier) but I do get the impression that it has much the same problems as holland. With a cultural elite (media and politics) having put themselves in ivory towers where they can keep telling each other everything is alright while the real world is going to hell.
Holland had Pim Fortyun and Theo van Gogh and their murderers who upset this carefully constructed fantasy world. France had the recent riots and the continuing rise of extreme right.
With the EU constition it became painfully clear that the politicians were totally removed from the real world. They just could not get that the voters were not going to vote it through just because they told them to.
I think this "protest" vote is a sign that even certain circles of goverment are beginning to realize that something is wrong.
To dismiss this as simply a publicity stunt is cheap. It is like calling the EU constition rejection a cheap stunt by the voters, no this is a way to tell the direct leaders of a country to get their act together. The NEW rules proposed are bad for the public and this was one way to make it painfully clear that there is resistance. Sometimes you have to shoot people in the face to get their attention.
Of course the problem is that the media who are supposed to tell us about these kind of things are the people behind the whole DMCA and similar crap.
But still it is good to see some resistance. I think this battle is far from over. If your leaders got a brain they will not want to have another disaster like the referendum. Of course if they had a brain none of this would have happened in the first place.
Then why should music be different?
The current system was introduced only at the beginning of the last centurie. We survived millenia without it. Do not think that just because currently the law has made for an industry were none of the normal rules apply that this has to remain the same for eternity.
Is it secure? Well I suppose both speech and sight can be regonized by software. Just make the sound with background noise that humans have no trouble with but machines do. Same as the visual ones.
Really the question seems immensly stupid to me. Gee, we got blind people who can't see a piece of text. Oh my god how could we possibly solve this. Gee if only we had some tech that could you know get info to a blind person.
SOUND YOU TARD.
In a good way. X-wing was the bomb. Later games would be like The Phantom Menace but X-wing showed us what a movie tie-in was meant to be. Not just the endless disney tie-ins where a bad sidescoller has the sprites replaced with the latest chars.
Of course by todays standard they are truly horrible and the flight and combat is a joke BUT at the time it was great. Shooting pixels at pixels. Sitting in a bomber with a bloody rocket after you are trying to fly under a bomber to use your upward firing missles. Great stuff.
Oh also a game that had a manual that not only told you about the game but also the history of the era you were fighting in and a whole chapter in SWOTL about the impact the various real strategies had. You could even follow them and see the effect. Like concentrating on bombing oil installations really worked!
X-wing was a nice game and all but it came with a couple of stencil sheets for a manual. Sigh. The beginning of the end. Soon we would have games that didn't even need a manual. Or PDF's.
I am sad now and must cuddle my F-16 Fighting Falcon 3.0 manual.
To wich Bill Gates replied, "and this time we fucking make sure IBM stays dead."
Oh god, the world is upside down. IBM the new and happening company, MS and Intel as "the man". Apple is still a bunch of new age hippies right?
I remember being young. Sure this whole adult paying the bills and having to work (and no skipping shifts) thing sucks. For some reason my gf also seems to get more upset at me expecting her to do all the chores. Reminding her that your mom used to AND was better at it is not something I recommend.
But all of it is made up by the easily available sex. No more quickies in the back of your car on a friday night (unless you want to). Just waking up on a lazy sunday morning and find something warm, soft and willing next to you and nothing to do for the whole next 5 minutes.
I am kidding!
Depth in a slashdot article dupe or not. HA!
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones not dancing with a weapon equipped.
The levellers. Levelling up is the name of the game and XP is your e-penis. They want fights, they want fights that give max xp and they want to get a character that is super powerfull.
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones in horribly mismatched outfits or even underwear. Just the stats matter nothing else.
Of course almost nobody is 100% one or the other. That would be too easy for game developers BUT nobody is 50-50 either. The two sides really are each other opposites.
The sandbox people do not care if their character is less powerfull then another character. They at most care wether they can be the character they want (for instance a death dealing dancer was not possible, should all SWG proffesions cost the same amount of skill points). That their ranger/medic does a fraction of the damage of a combat character is not important. Their choice.
The levellers DO care. OMG GOD, sword can do 10% more damage per second then fencer? NERF THEM. They like competition but also want it to be fair. To them the mix and match is about getting the best results. PvP players are even worse, have to be, because what is the point of a duel if the winner is already known?
Perhaps the biggest difference is that levellers dream of being able to solo X while sandboxers can't see the point of soloing in an mmo.
Worse is that both groups do not like each other much. The Levellers see the Sandboxers as a bunch of low level roleplaying freaks, the Sandbox people see the levellers as ill mannered script kiddies always looking for the latest exploit.
Obvious example? Image designer. Now if there ever was a profession were a player should not care about maxing XP results it was image designer. Boy were they screwed. This meant that only hardcore sandboxers did it. Levellers had a use for them because even the most hardcore leveller wants to change their looks sometimes BUT there was a mismatch. Levellers would ask for an image desinger to change them, the nicer levellers would come to the ID but many seemed to think that the ID should come to them and just cough up the travel costs. Paying for the ID session? Why? The ID gets XP for it so why should I pay for it? That master image designers have no need for XP seems something a leveller cannot understand.
Same with other "helper" jobs like entertainers. Levellers are lousy tippers. To them XP is the name of the game and they cannot understand that the best entertainers can only get money from tips.
Medics? Just as bad. Healing costs resources yet levellers will not help medics who kept them alive either by donating resources (if they even have the skills in aquiring them) or paying for the job. Hell I seen levellers who had to be constantly healed and then try to sell medic loot to the healer that saved their skin. No wonder medics died out.
With NGE sony seems to have decided to aim for the leveller crowd. An intresting move since there seem to a be a lot of them. Small problem? The levellers left and went to WoW. It is the Sandbox people that have stuck with SWG through thick and thin and it is them that are most badly screwed with this update.
No more mix and matching your own job. Clothes and armour are given not bought from crafters. Less of a crafter run economy. The whole combat level crap. No, SWG went from a sandbox/leveller hybrid wich was bad enough to a leveller game. All very nice but WoW does it better.
I don't know if there is room for a sandbox only game. Compared to the standard leveller games that are EQ and WoW. The sims is a sandbox game and it sold amazingly well. Its online version did not. Can a mmo "the sims" work. I think so but you need to design a true sandbox game and not some weird hybrid. A true sandbox game is not about levelling up. This is hard as levelling is easy. Just as