What is insightfull about this? Is sony supposed to make PSP that works on absorbing brainwaves? Wouldn't work on this guy.
The PSP has a battery life of over 5 hours with a fresh battery (almost 5 gaming + 1 hour mp3). So that is better then a phone and a laptop but less then a gameboy (depends heavily on battery class AND for the gba use of afterburner and gba SP on use of light, don't know about DS) and a mp3 player.
And if you got trouble in 2004 remembering to plug in your devices for reloading then the solution is simple. Don't buy them.
What next, fashion people complaing that the latest clothes still require you to put them on?
Geez. First the idiot directly above. The battery is easily swappable. It is a custom battery but it is an open compartment and it doesn't look like you need a tool. This is sony. They know handhelds. They have been doing special batteries that can be swapped for longer then anybody else.
Next is the slashdot article it self. The article has almost 5 hours of gameplay, that much is true BUT it also has an hour of mp3 playing.
So what does that make actual game time? Who knows. This was a stupid test.
After all this test includes numerous boots and shutoffs not straight gaming. Neither did they just game.
Is the battery life any good?
Well it ain't an iPod or similar that's for sure but it doesn't compare to badly with my gba+afterburner especially considering the increased screen size.
Is it long enough? For short work commutes, sure. For a plane flight or long train journey? You need to take some extra batteries with you. It is hardly as bad as other handhelds that tried to compete with the gameboy but it isn't quit up to gameboy standards.
Personally I think the far more impressive graphics are a perfectly acceptable excuse for the lesser battery time. For my own typical use it is enough. I would simply plug it in along with my phone and mp3 player.
Price might be a bigger obstacle. I was really disappointed with the GBA and the games and their prices. I only played the real quality titles during commutes. Will sony be charging console prices (I am a PC player) for these games or even higher?
At the moment it will have to compete for me with buying a portable movie player (the iRiver linux one looks so sweet). Will have to see how easy it is to watch downloaded content on the PSP.
Yeah the opposite was so much better
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Robbers Scared by GTA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Where a landowner could just kill a dirty peasant coming on their land or have them flogged to within an inch of their lives.
People always complain about the extreme of laws but never seem to have the intelligence to ask why these laws are there.
The laws in question deal with two things. So called self-defence and playing your own judge.
There was time when property owners (the upper class/royalty) had plenty of rights. Steal or even just be on the land of the local landlord and you could be killed by his guards. Punishments was whatever the local lord saw fit to deal out.
This has changed. Now it is up to the police and court system to punish crimes.
Do criminals have rights? Well the problem is who defines who is a criminal? Is a peasant catching a deer to feed his family a criminal? Well yes and off with their head.
Nowadays we prefer the courtsystem to decide guilt and punishment. Sometimes this results in "unjust" decisions but what every intelligent person has to ask themselve is what would the alternative result in. Would you allow force to protect a car from being broken into?
My car is parked on parking lot and you standing next to it causes the alarm to go off. Luckily I got my gun and under your jobbo rule I blow him away. Oops turned out you just bumped my car with your elbow while opening your own. Oh well. At least your family has the right to shoot people who trespass on your grave eh?
The last dutch goverment left a real feeling of frustration on the voter. It left the country open to the rise of Pim Fortuyn who for better or worse was at least promising to shake up the system. Sadly he was murdered and the entire country voted for a party with an inexperienced leader because he was the safest most boring choice.
Since then "Balkenende" has shown a complete lack of leadership skill. His party has tried to force through cuts in pension plans despire massive opposotiion from the unions, industry AND the goverments economic think tank. Massive demonstations have no effect EVEN a gigantic drop in the polls has no effect. Even in cases where both industry AND unions together without threath of strikes agree to compensate the cuts for the workers involved the goverment wants to outlaw this.
This is part of a much larger problem in europe. You see for all the talk about america and its two party system and the Bushes and Haliburtons there is one thing to remember. People are talking about the problems in america. Michael Moore does make his documenturies. There is no such thing in holland or for that matter the EU.
Whenever you hear about corruption/incompetence/complacency in america the exact same thing is happening in europe. Withone tiny little difference. Nobody is talking about it.
Basically what you got is corrupt system, not the kind of corruption you see in the movies with brown envolopes but a far deeper backroom deals going unquestioned for ever corruption of the mind. Most of the people involved wouldn't even be able to consider taking "hospitality" from MS as being corrupted. They live in their own world wich has been carefully drained of everyone who questions things.
If you want to see the idea. Examine "group think" on places like/.
That is somebody from the province of friesland. To translate to an american, think inbred right-wing religious freak hillbilly from the deepest south. Very little is known about friesland wich has its own langauge wich isn't related to any known language. (goverment tv transmits some programs in fries. It is rather telling that they always seem to be about farming and have at least one interviewy with his/her arms up a cow) If your a foreign visitor and you find yourselve stuck on the "afsluitdijk" heading east from Amsterdam STOP AND TURN BACK. On no account head on. They eat people there.
Sometimes some of the fries make it west accross the "afsluitdijk" and cause havoc in Amsterdam before they are beaten up by the locals. If you ever see a fight in Amsterdam it is always a farmer from friesland or it close relative groningen.
Every country got parts it ain't proud off. Americans got the bible belt. The united kingdom got wales. Germany got all off germany and The Netherlands got friesland. We are still trying to convince them to start a war of independence.
It will be done by someone somewhere soon. You can count on that.
If people can run Linux on a iPod then a powerfull system like this should be a cakewalk.
It will be more intresting to see what sony will have to say about it. They did put Linux officially on their big console. There is apparently some support for running games from memory sticks. Is sony going to allow or even encourage home grown software?
On the one hand they have a locked in control of the data media. Extra sales of memory sticks couldn't hurt. On the other hand sony is also a content company not exactly desiring to encourage people to have a free reign with their hardware.
With portable video players coming out now it will be intresting to see where peoples money is going to go. Will the PSP be able to play that tv show you recorded? Will the other video players be able to do something more?
Does anyone care? If you want to run stuff on a handheld buy a zaurus!
Magic smoke is pretty harmless except that it smells very bad to the females of the human species and drives them away. Check your love live to see if you removed the magic smoke screws and forgot to put them back in.
That is exactly the problem, the tracker is blameless. The tracker is google. That is the whole legal problem. All the tracker does is give you some adresses where a certain filename might be. Prostitution is illegal in some places but giving people directions to the red light district is not. Well not in free countries anyway, the US might be another matter.
So basically your entire argument is wrong. Only the actual filesharers can be held to blame in bittorrent not the central tracker.
Including doctored photos wich for a long time had been accepted as real. Simple examination with modern tools show that a lot of the photos we accept as accurate had infact been colored in to reduce the quake damage.
The fact was that quake damage was not covered by insurance. Fire damage was. If your property had been destroyed in the quake you got none. If it had survived the quake but been later destroyed in the fire resulting from the quake you got your money back.
So their was a very large scale fraud. Including doctoring evidence like photographs AND messing with the death toll.
I am afraid you are getting your evidence from what the authorities of the time wanted you to believe. It is an amazing story really but the evidence is clear. These arial photos just prove it more. Just compare them with some of the other "official" photographs of the time. Buildings they show standing are gone here.
Until OSS can finally get of its collective ass and start adding easy ways for users to have software installed that will totally destroy their desktop it just cannot compete with the likes of MS. Even OSX just doesn't deliver. Simple to use HA. Just try adding hiding your IP from being broadcasted on an Apple. Can't be done. Or making sure you clock is up-to-date? No 1001 smilies for you you unix user.
Frankly I see no problems with companies like this. Spyware/Adware is a great tool wich allows me to instantly judge your intelligence. You got it? You don't have any. (Works both ways. Those without adware will see the logic, those with adware will have to find someone to explain it to them).
I knew one couple who had actually had their own house build according to their design but the husband who was my collegue couldn't understand why I didn't like the read made windows desktop.
LFS is the most extreme way to get a linux system unless your firstname rhymes with a popular OS. What does it do? Well nothing except really show you what makes up a system. It won't teach you anything about programming but it will teach you a lot about just how complicated a modern computer system really is. The amount of code needed to create even the most basic system is insane. Start adding stuff like a grahpical desktop and you might start to have a better understanding of how all the software packages work together to make your desktop.
It is like stripping a car engine. Doing it doesn't make you a better driver but it can be a rewarding learning experience nonetheless.
Some of us are not satisfied to work with blackboxes. Just like those people who want THEIR house to be THEIR house LFS allows you total control over your system. Of course most users use a "regular" distro for their actual work but just maybe they have come to understand their systems a little better.
But to answer your question directly. If you got to ask why then it is not meant for you. It is like asking why people climb mountaints. Because they are there.
It is more like the EU. Nobody in their right minds would think that just because say Holland and Greece are in the same union that they are the same. So why do people think that places like New York and Texas are the same?
Japan on the other hand is far far smaller ESPECIALLY the japan we are talking about. Lets face it, we are talking about urban japan here. There are probably rural areas in japan were people live like the more "rural" areas in america or europe.
So why do they have more gadgets? Well why is the Philips (a dutch company) not available in holland? Why is the smart made by an american company only recently available in the US? Why was the german beetle car made the longest in mexico?
We buy what is on sale and on sale is what sells but this is a dreamland capatalists fool themselves we live in.
Any western store that carries the zaurus PDA can kiss the sales of all the other PDA's goodbye. Tiny phones are alright except the average person in holland is over two meters and that is the women. Perhaps their fingers need a slightly bigger keypad.
It is a huge combination of factors that decide wich product does and does not sale. I have a pretty simple one. Caramel sauce. It is very nice, people in holland like it on the McD Sunday ice and in other ice. It is very cheap to make (burn sugar) compared to say fruit sauces AND yet it isn't sold in stores. None of the supermarkets carry it. Why do I have to go to a british store (for ex-pats) to get it?
it used to be sold as part of a range from a local maker but for some reason supermarkets have stopped carrying it.
Is there to little shelf space? Is there not enough demand? Explain the lack of caramel sauce on the shelfs of major dutch supermarkets and you got the whole gadget divide sorted as well. Sometimes products just stay in their own area. Sometimes they cross. Cookies are a good example. American cookies are constantly introduced here but never really seem to take off. Despite the fact the tastes are pretty similar. Thank god for international cities like Amsterdam were there is bound to be a store selling the foods of every culture. If you really want a japanese gadget, get it. Someone somewhere is selling it with english instructions.
I just don't buy the explantion that if there is enough demand the major chains will carry it. There is enough demand for caramel sauce and for tivos over here.
In the western countries and then mostly those who have been there for a while the trend is to have fewer childeren.
In other parts of the world and other cultures or in the west in past a couple needed to get as many kids as possible in the hope that at least some survived so that the kids could then take care of the parents AND make kids of their own insuring survival of the species. Since childbirth was also extremely dangerous to the mother it was basically a race to get as many kids out before the mother croaked and then hope that at least some kids survived.
However slowly living conditions and medical care became better (in the west) were child birth related deaths are now pretty rare (it was once the leading cause of death for women) and child death itself is also rare. If a couple gets two kids chances are they will have two kids grow up to adulthood.
There still are some couples in the west who crank out the kids but they end up with a dozen kids easily wich is to much for the western live style. Meantime the same couple in a place like africa will be lucky if 1 or 2 survives.
But now a problem is starting to occur. The culture in africa is to get as many kids as possible in the hope that some survive. A couple that would limit themselves to 1-2 kids as in the west will (if they are lucky enough to live to an old age) end up childless. A childless couple has noone to take care of them in old age.
Western medicine is however screwing things up in the short term. With western medicine in a limited resource enviroment (no food) you would at the same time have reduce the number of childeren being born as you introduce medicine to keep the childeren alive. If you keep the high birth rates AND keep the childeren alive you set yourselve up for a massive famine. Worse medicine costs money wich can only be gained by exporting food and you get the huge mess of african nations exporting money to pay for medicine then getting a famine end needing food brought back in. Reading up on the constant cycle of death and hope in africa is depressing reading.
Add AIDS and you got a truly messed up system. Lets assume for a moment that no aids cure can be found. Then at the moment every aids child alive is just a drain. Humanity forbids us to just put them to rest but keeping them alive creates a nasty cycle of death. Human culture is based on three stages, childhood where you learn for later stages, adulthood where you take care of the other stages AND create the first stage and finally old age were your experience helps the first two stages. Western culture has moved away from this a bit but for a long time families consisted of childern, adults and grandparents ALL doing their bid to keep the family alive. Grandparents are one of the things that sets us apart from animals. Teenage wolfs often help out their parents with their raising of the next litter but humans have a whole extra set of hands with super experience to help them out.
Aids disrupts this. A child born with aids is not going to survive for long and will only cost resources without ever growing old enough to "repay". Worse if they live long enough to bear childeren those kids will have aids as well and no parents let alone grandparents to raise them. The whole social structure that makes humans human collapses.
Oh and africa is not africa. Not all of africa is hunger and AIDS and misery. Some bits do alright until sooner or later something goes wrong. At the moment there is another locust plague destroying food on a gigantic scale. Huge areas were people had made a good living are now heading to famine and all the other problems like war and AIDS are sure to follow.
As for the sexual fitness. Survival of the fittest. Someone who lives to the age of 82 got to be amazingly fit. In the west we can afford to not be fit. Males can remain sexually reproductive even after death. This is nothing weird. Just that in the west most have other luxury problems that make it all not work. We also got a slight culture problem with 80yr men marrying reproductive females.
I am talking about a game that uses nearly the same tech and just adds a new story re-using a lot of the material.
Games are very expensive to develop. Basically you got the following areas to cover.
The engine (not just graphics but also things like collesion detection, basic ai, scripting capabilty in short what you get when you license quake or source or unreal).
Artwork. All the models and textures and sounds that make a game and of course the levels themselves. This only seems to increase.
The game. This is hardest to define but is basically that wich makes a level be a game and not just a static set for you to noclip through. Basically the story.
Kotor seems to have basically used the same engine and re-used a lot of the artwork. Only the story has changed. Considering typical development time of Kotor 1 and Kotor 2 it seems that it has saved them a huge amount of time == money.
I have been thinking that this must ultimately be the way for the game industry to get better. Hollywood has long since stopped making custom sets for each movie. During the golden age they had a few stock sets wich were slightly remoddelled or just short from different angles between different movies. A lot of the b&w westerns have exactly the same street.
Say that sometime in the future it becomes possible to make big enough levels so that you do have a realistic city (and not just 1 short street). You could then make a series of episodes all set in the same city but following different stories. In the first episode the barber beneath your apartment would just be empty but another episode wich needs it adds the graphics but reuses the ones from your apartment. It would reduce the cost for each episode and each episode could be produced much faster.
At the moment the game industry is reinventing the camera and sound equipment and the basic tech of set building for each and every game. It usually gives us huge improvements but it also takes 2-3 years between games wich have to recoup all their investments in one sale. Expansion packs are sometimes a way to get some extra money but expansion packs are rare on non-hd game systems for obvious reasons.
Would there be a market for shorter games costing less wich you can buy new chapters/stories for?
The Sims 1 sold for years with the same engine. Half-Life mods have a following long after the engine had been surpassed. And these are PC games where the hardware gets better a lot faster and more often then on consoles. Yet kotor 2 for the x-box (a really crap piece of hardware by PC standards) gets slagged for not improving the visuals.
Is the reviewer just whining or is the industry doomed to have to rebuild the engine for each story?
Check the american history and how it treats its own citizens who had different politcal ideas. But they that is alright because everyone who is not a capatalist is an enemy right? America is for free people and free people only choose capatalism otherwise they are not free. Nice dogma mate.
Doom is not the title, it is the movies future
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Doom Movie Update
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· Score: 1
We all just been duped. The producer took one look at the crew he has put together, the budget he has and the script and wrote "DOOM" on the script.
Some nerds took it the wrong way and now half of slashdot believes Doom will have a movie. Idiots.
If this is serious then it is a joke. 70 million dollars I have seen mentioned. Not exactly a lot for a special effects movie. Worse if you then see an excuse that recreating the hell from the game is to expensive you really have to start wondering about the capacities of the crew. Are sheep entrails nailed to upside down crosses (two bits of wood nailed to each other) really that expensive? Are we going to get "Red Dward" sets instead?
The only thing being used is the name. I wish them luck. ID so far has had a good reputation but if they tie their name to this movie it will be mud in hollywood forever. Don't do it. Get the lawyers and force the movie to adopt a different name. It is not going to earn you anything but ridicule.
Doom: we just found out. They dropped everything that makes doom doom. High cost of upturned crosses? How budget is this? Last time I checked an upturned cross did not cost so much more then a cross rightside up. Is upturning crosses a union job or something?
Duke Nukem: That is going to be a movie? Probably going to be released after Forever has ended.
D&D 2: We seen the first. Yuck. I don't even know what was so bad about it. Watched it recently because I was desperate for some fantasy and am going senile. Sequels rarely improve.
That leaves V:TM. Should be simple enough. There have been plenty of Vampire movies before. Granted the TV series is not that well reviewed (never seen it) but how hard can it be to make a good movie when Hollywood has already made movies that could easily have been set in that universe?
In theory both D&D and V:TM should be the easiest to turn into a movie as they are not stories but universes. Doom and DN both got heroes, sets, equipment, baddies that people will expect to see. Not so in the roleplaying games. V:TM could be set anywhere and be any kind of story, comedy, romance, action, suspense, sci-fi and still be true. After all the entire setting is, reality + monsters. D&D is slightly harder since it so depends on creating the right "magical" world.
So my bet is on V:TM. It is the only one that a "serious" crew could work on without everyone calling them a bunch of nerds.
It is a troika game so it has a couple of bugs but this time it is mild enough to actually allow you to finish the game and only needing 1 cheat to finish. Not bad, maybe the upcoming patch will make it perfect. (Only gamekiller bug I encountered was that I couldn't finish a level. I had to "cheat" to complete the level and load the next one. It is the bit were you leave a cave on a boat.)
The source engine gives it pretty nice graphics even if there are ocasional glitches (elongated necks during some cutscenes). Think somewhere between Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex (2 for the graphics 1 for the size of the levels). Although it lack the fysics of Half-Life 2 or Deus Ex 1. I still think Deus Ex 1 with its bullets that rained back down stands alone for that).
The story is okay, very Deus Ex again but way way better then the diablo that was redemption. There are some lenghty combat levels but in between there are plenty of true RPG talky bits where you can both use wits and brawn to solve problems.
The game is by no means perfect as I had hoped for a deeper game dealing more with your vampire nature. Your character seems very resigned to becoming a vampire. There are some dark story lines but apart from them it could have been a Deus Ex storyline. Except that this time at least you got the option I always wanted in those games. Screw them all. If you don't like anyone in the game you can be decide to be a lone wolf instead. Finally.
Good game, not perfect but a RPG well worth playing if you like Deus Ex style games.
What makes it so highly recommended is that there is a real difference between the various clans. Malkavians (madmen) are a lot of fun as they "hear" voices and give you the weirdest conversation options.
Act I: The hero who got problems clashes with his bosses while the bad guy shows he is really evil OR if it is a monster we get some hints about it but if it is half way decent monster we never see it. Those killed are incredibly stupid. We also meet somone who is going to be killed in act 2 and someone who needs to be rescued in 3.
Act II: The middle fight. We met a whole lot of people but most are going to die at the hands of a monster/bad guy who somehow completly fails to kill the hero. The hero never seems to be faced by the losses he suffers.
Act III: Having suffered casualty rates that make WW1 generals look good the hero nonetheless manages to win while the bad guy/monster seems to have spend all his special powers in Act 1 and 2. Best punishment for a bad guy is a quick death not live long rotting in jail being gangbanged. Monsters loose all their invincibilty and die way to quickly but not so quick as to not reveal they really are just humans with bits of latex stuck on.
TV is becoming less and less appealing to me. The BBC only has only a tiny handfull of programs that I care to watch in a week and most of them are re-runs.
Worse they are putting crap programs of the exact same nature back to back or even on both channels at the same time. ARGH. I already hate "home improvement" programs but can probably survive the best of them for half an hour. 2 for a full hour however is to much and I switch the TV off.
This is I think the biggest shift. It is not that tv has become worse. I used to have the tv on in the background and just do other stuff while waiting for something watchable to appear.
But nowadays the non-watchable stuff is so bad that even muted it insults me. There are also to many bad programs behind each other so I just turn the TV off and remind myself to switch on at XX:XX. Except I forget because I am to deep into something else. End result? Even the programs I find worth watching I don't watch anymore. TV really needs to start to worry when I prefer not waking the cat over getting up for the remote.
This is something that is being regonized although more on radio. The Netherlands has only recently gone commercial on radio and instead of getting a lot of different stations aiming at their own group we get all of them aiming at the same group. Result? More and more people switcing to MP3 players and the radio stations unable to get the advertising they need.
More and more tv tries to appeal to everyone and ends up appealing to noone. There is nothing wrong with the occasional survivor, those of us who don't like it just don't watch that night, but when every night has its own mindless show you get a large group of people who switch off the tv and don't switch it on again.
Remember this, TV got big when it was basically on all the time. When people start switching off you lost them. TV is not a drug, there are no withdrawal symptoms. All people got to do to get rid of their addiction is say "no thanks".
Break the bank and you draw attention. Be tonights lucky winner and you walk away with a small fortune. The house doesn't always win. If you think that your an idiot who needs to study basic economy. The house wins more then it loses. If it wins a million but loses half a million to you it is still making a profit. That is the entire trick of running a casino. Making sure that people do win but that the house wins a little bit more.
So an individual can win and casino's even like that. It makes the rest of the customers who are loosing feel better.
Is democracy damned when people don't vote? The damned view believes that non-voters don't have fate in the system. On the other hand perhaps these people think everything is just fine.
But would spreading voting out over more then a day really help? Those who "forget" to go would still forget and you would also miss the effect of having voting day. One clear day on wich everyone knows that today is the day to vote with everyone remembring people around them.
Sure sure economic effect of people taking an hour of to vote (or even a day). So what? Cost of doing business. If a company really really needs all its people there let it open a polling boot inside.
Also would candidates still be banned from campaigning during the entire two weeks?
As for mistakes and cost of salaries. Well now the ballot boxes have to be guarded for 1 day. The staff needs to be paid for 1 day and only take 1 day of from their day job. You just increase the cost because now the polling station has to be guarded for 14 days and nights. The cost for foreing volunteers to observe the elections also goes op (hmmm might US elections not withstand foreign scrutiny?)
Few polling stations? Oh goodie, means longer distances to travel. No problem for the rich and middle classes but poorer people might have to spend more money they don't have to get to their polling station. Isn't the entire idea of having so many stations to make them easily accesable to everyone?
Lets review
Increase distance to polling station wich affects the poorer people most.
Decrease public awareness of "voting day".
Give the postponers more excuses to not vote because they will just do it tomorrow until it is to late
Increase security risks because the ballots have to be guared for far far longer.
Increase costs to volunteers because of time of needed
Increase likelyhood of failure in machine and electronics.
Impose a 2 week gag order on parties OR have campaigning during voting.
Cuts in staff are unlikely because you would have more people coming to the station and therefore more of a chance of a rush at peak times (like me who votes before going to work like all the other people in the que or is that just in holland?)
Is it really that much of a problem to go and vote?
The netherlands has gotten used to something called coalition goverment. Unlike the US or england we got a lot of parties ranging from (when I was young) to extreme left to extreme right. To be sure both extremes were tiny but they were there with a seat in the goverment after some elections (we are talking really really small here).
So to get a majority the biggest partie would form a coalition with smaller parties and agree on a common policy to govern the country with. A bit of give and take.
This type of goverment was applied also the other areas like the eternal war between goverment industry and unions. Basically for a long time these three social partners talked and achieved a sort of middle ground everyone could live with. By and large it worked or perhaps more accurate failed to fail. Think of it like this. If an action is certain to lead to disaster but there is something opposite of it stopping the disaster from happening then all seems good. The counter action was the growing economy. After the bubble this counter failed and so the polder model started to slide.
The partnership of goverment industry and unions can be reflected in political alignment. Unions are of course on the left wanting the best for the common worker. Industry is on the right wanting the best for their shareholders. Goverment are the liberals in the middel wanting both happy workers and happy shareholders but also things like freedom, a clean enviroment etc etc. (Unions are not anti-enviroment just as long as it doesn't cost jobs and business is not anti freedom as long as it cut profits).
With the economy going down all of sudden things started to go wrong. Money was no longer growing on trees (the netherlands is a fairly rich country with a varied export market and a positive trade balance BUT it is also small and very sensitive to other economies. Shipping relies mostly on trade other countries do, construction on projects in other countries, export obviously on other countries).
The current goverment has forced through cuts and savings that are widely critized as being to harsh and even worse and being bad economic policie by the goverments own think tanks. Before nobody cared about backhanded deals were goverment was just forced through in back chambers without consultation with the voter because each voter was part of the polder model through being represented by either goverment industry or the union.
But now everytime at least one of the social partner seems to disagree. You get the weird situation that the unions and industry agree on say compensating health care cuts (with industry picking up the bill because healthy workers work harder) and the goverment trying to block it because they don't want it. Weird.
So the current economy is in a downward spiral were all the social balances that have been achieved in the decades since WW2 are now being eroded.
There is also a huge other problem involving immigration. Although the golden age for the netherlands came in a time when holland opened its gates to everyone in europe who was persecuted in recent times this has led to frictions.
During earlier decades there was a shortage of labour so it seemed to make sense to import workers from poor countries like turkey. Integrating these workers was never done as things like enforced learning of the dutch language was considered both expensive and politically incorrect. Hell these workers were not supposed to stay here. Just work, get some money then go back to turkey.
However the immigrants did not go back. They stayed. Not only stayed but invited their families over and had childeren. The sad thing is that no matter how much the immigrants might complain about holland and how badly the cultures may clash the simple fact is that you couldn't force them to go back at gunpoint. The goverment is even offering cash payments for immigrants who go back. Take up is very very low.
Over the years three cultures have emerged, the im
I thought the DS used a lcd. A lot of people always want to reuse their old laptop LCD's and have to be told that sadly this is not possible because LCD's need special hardware to get them to work. This hardware is an integral part of you laptop.
Unless the DS has a tv out why should it ever generate a tv signal? It simply computes a screen and sends it to the lcd. The only way they would have a tv signal is if the computer first generates a digital image, this is then converted to a analog signal (this signal leaks to your tv) then the analog is send to a tv receiver wich decodes the analog signal to the digital signal the lcd needs.
Even if the screen could be send over wifi or usb it would be send as digital data and how the hell should a tv be able to do anything with that?
TV's are also interlaced and lcd's and presumably the DS like all other computers are not.
Can anyone explain how the hell the DS could or would generate a signal that a tv could display?
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What is insightfull about this? Is sony supposed to make PSP that works on absorbing brainwaves? Wouldn't work on this guy.
The PSP has a battery life of over 5 hours with a fresh battery (almost 5 gaming + 1 hour mp3). So that is better then a phone and a laptop but less then a gameboy (depends heavily on battery class AND for the gba use of afterburner and gba SP on use of light, don't know about DS) and a mp3 player.
And if you got trouble in 2004 remembering to plug in your devices for reloading then the solution is simple. Don't buy them.
What next, fashion people complaing that the latest clothes still require you to put them on?
Go get a portable chess set. No batteries needed.
Geez. First the idiot directly above. The battery is easily swappable. It is a custom battery but it is an open compartment and it doesn't look like you need a tool. This is sony. They know handhelds. They have been doing special batteries that can be swapped for longer then anybody else. Next is the slashdot article it self. The article has almost 5 hours of gameplay, that much is true BUT it also has an hour of mp3 playing. So what does that make actual game time? Who knows. This was a stupid test. After all this test includes numerous boots and shutoffs not straight gaming. Neither did they just game. Is the battery life any good? Well it ain't an iPod or similar that's for sure but it doesn't compare to badly with my gba+afterburner especially considering the increased screen size. Is it long enough? For short work commutes, sure. For a plane flight or long train journey? You need to take some extra batteries with you. It is hardly as bad as other handhelds that tried to compete with the gameboy but it isn't quit up to gameboy standards. Personally I think the far more impressive graphics are a perfectly acceptable excuse for the lesser battery time. For my own typical use it is enough. I would simply plug it in along with my phone and mp3 player. Price might be a bigger obstacle. I was really disappointed with the GBA and the games and their prices. I only played the real quality titles during commutes. Will sony be charging console prices (I am a PC player) for these games or even higher? At the moment it will have to compete for me with buying a portable movie player (the iRiver linux one looks so sweet). Will have to see how easy it is to watch downloaded content on the PSP.
People always complain about the extreme of laws but never seem to have the intelligence to ask why these laws are there.
The laws in question deal with two things. So called self-defence and playing your own judge.
There was time when property owners (the upper class/royalty) had plenty of rights. Steal or even just be on the land of the local landlord and you could be killed by his guards. Punishments was whatever the local lord saw fit to deal out.
This has changed. Now it is up to the police and court system to punish crimes.
Do criminals have rights? Well the problem is who defines who is a criminal? Is a peasant catching a deer to feed his family a criminal? Well yes and off with their head.
Nowadays we prefer the courtsystem to decide guilt and punishment. Sometimes this results in "unjust" decisions but what every intelligent person has to ask themselve is what would the alternative result in. Would you allow force to protect a car from being broken into?
My car is parked on parking lot and you standing next to it causes the alarm to go off. Luckily I got my gun and under your jobbo rule I blow him away. Oops turned out you just bumped my car with your elbow while opening your own. Oh well. At least your family has the right to shoot people who trespass on your grave eh?
Since then "Balkenende" has shown a complete lack of leadership skill. His party has tried to force through cuts in pension plans despire massive opposotiion from the unions, industry AND the goverments economic think tank. Massive demonstations have no effect EVEN a gigantic drop in the polls has no effect. Even in cases where both industry AND unions together without threath of strikes agree to compensate the cuts for the workers involved the goverment wants to outlaw this.
This is part of a much larger problem in europe. You see for all the talk about america and its two party system and the Bushes and Haliburtons there is one thing to remember. People are talking about the problems in america. Michael Moore does make his documenturies. There is no such thing in holland or for that matter the EU.
Whenever you hear about corruption/incompetence/complacency in america the exact same thing is happening in europe. Withone tiny little difference. Nobody is talking about it.
Basically what you got is corrupt system, not the kind of corruption you see in the movies with brown envolopes but a far deeper backroom deals going unquestioned for ever corruption of the mind. Most of the people involved wouldn't even be able to consider taking "hospitality" from MS as being corrupted. They live in their own world wich has been carefully drained of everyone who questions things.
If you want to see the idea. Examine "group think" on places like /.
Sometimes some of the fries make it west accross the "afsluitdijk" and cause havoc in Amsterdam before they are beaten up by the locals. If you ever see a fight in Amsterdam it is always a farmer from friesland or it close relative groningen.
Every country got parts it ain't proud off. Americans got the bible belt. The united kingdom got wales. Germany got all off germany and The Netherlands got friesland. We are still trying to convince them to start a war of independence.
If people can run Linux on a iPod then a powerfull system like this should be a cakewalk.
It will be more intresting to see what sony will have to say about it. They did put Linux officially on their big console. There is apparently some support for running games from memory sticks. Is sony going to allow or even encourage home grown software?
On the one hand they have a locked in control of the data media. Extra sales of memory sticks couldn't hurt. On the other hand sony is also a content company not exactly desiring to encourage people to have a free reign with their hardware.
With portable video players coming out now it will be intresting to see where peoples money is going to go. Will the PSP be able to play that tv show you recorded? Will the other video players be able to do something more?
Does anyone care? If you want to run stuff on a handheld buy a zaurus!
Magic smoke is pretty harmless except that it smells very bad to the females of the human species and drives them away. Check your love live to see if you removed the magic smoke screws and forgot to put them back in.
So basically your entire argument is wrong. Only the actual filesharers can be held to blame in bittorrent not the central tracker.
The betamax case had two giants fighting. Sony must have paid more.
The fact was that quake damage was not covered by insurance. Fire damage was. If your property had been destroyed in the quake you got none. If it had survived the quake but been later destroyed in the fire resulting from the quake you got your money back.
So their was a very large scale fraud. Including doctoring evidence like photographs AND messing with the death toll.
I am afraid you are getting your evidence from what the authorities of the time wanted you to believe. It is an amazing story really but the evidence is clear. These arial photos just prove it more. Just compare them with some of the other "official" photographs of the time. Buildings they show standing are gone here.
Frankly I see no problems with companies like this. Spyware/Adware is a great tool wich allows me to instantly judge your intelligence. You got it? You don't have any. (Works both ways. Those without adware will see the logic, those with adware will have to find someone to explain it to them).
Yet there is a group of people who do this.
I knew one couple who had actually had their own house build according to their design but the husband who was my collegue couldn't understand why I didn't like the read made windows desktop.
LFS is the most extreme way to get a linux system unless your firstname rhymes with a popular OS. What does it do? Well nothing except really show you what makes up a system. It won't teach you anything about programming but it will teach you a lot about just how complicated a modern computer system really is. The amount of code needed to create even the most basic system is insane. Start adding stuff like a grahpical desktop and you might start to have a better understanding of how all the software packages work together to make your desktop.
It is like stripping a car engine. Doing it doesn't make you a better driver but it can be a rewarding learning experience nonetheless.
Some of us are not satisfied to work with blackboxes. Just like those people who want THEIR house to be THEIR house LFS allows you total control over your system. Of course most users use a "regular" distro for their actual work but just maybe they have come to understand their systems a little better.
But to answer your question directly. If you got to ask why then it is not meant for you. It is like asking why people climb mountaints. Because they are there.
Japan on the other hand is far far smaller ESPECIALLY the japan we are talking about. Lets face it, we are talking about urban japan here. There are probably rural areas in japan were people live like the more "rural" areas in america or europe.
So why do they have more gadgets? Well why is the Philips (a dutch company) not available in holland? Why is the smart made by an american company only recently available in the US? Why was the german beetle car made the longest in mexico?
We buy what is on sale and on sale is what sells but this is a dreamland capatalists fool themselves we live in.
Any western store that carries the zaurus PDA can kiss the sales of all the other PDA's goodbye. Tiny phones are alright except the average person in holland is over two meters and that is the women. Perhaps their fingers need a slightly bigger keypad.
It is a huge combination of factors that decide wich product does and does not sale. I have a pretty simple one. Caramel sauce. It is very nice, people in holland like it on the McD Sunday ice and in other ice. It is very cheap to make (burn sugar) compared to say fruit sauces AND yet it isn't sold in stores. None of the supermarkets carry it. Why do I have to go to a british store (for ex-pats) to get it?
it used to be sold as part of a range from a local maker but for some reason supermarkets have stopped carrying it.
Is there to little shelf space? Is there not enough demand? Explain the lack of caramel sauce on the shelfs of major dutch supermarkets and you got the whole gadget divide sorted as well. Sometimes products just stay in their own area. Sometimes they cross. Cookies are a good example. American cookies are constantly introduced here but never really seem to take off. Despite the fact the tastes are pretty similar. Thank god for international cities like Amsterdam were there is bound to be a store selling the foods of every culture. If you really want a japanese gadget, get it. Someone somewhere is selling it with english instructions.
I just don't buy the explantion that if there is enough demand the major chains will carry it. There is enough demand for caramel sauce and for tivos over here.
In other parts of the world and other cultures or in the west in past a couple needed to get as many kids as possible in the hope that at least some survived so that the kids could then take care of the parents AND make kids of their own insuring survival of the species. Since childbirth was also extremely dangerous to the mother it was basically a race to get as many kids out before the mother croaked and then hope that at least some kids survived.
However slowly living conditions and medical care became better (in the west) were child birth related deaths are now pretty rare (it was once the leading cause of death for women) and child death itself is also rare. If a couple gets two kids chances are they will have two kids grow up to adulthood.
There still are some couples in the west who crank out the kids but they end up with a dozen kids easily wich is to much for the western live style. Meantime the same couple in a place like africa will be lucky if 1 or 2 survives.
But now a problem is starting to occur. The culture in africa is to get as many kids as possible in the hope that some survive. A couple that would limit themselves to 1-2 kids as in the west will (if they are lucky enough to live to an old age) end up childless. A childless couple has noone to take care of them in old age.
Western medicine is however screwing things up in the short term. With western medicine in a limited resource enviroment (no food) you would at the same time have reduce the number of childeren being born as you introduce medicine to keep the childeren alive. If you keep the high birth rates AND keep the childeren alive you set yourselve up for a massive famine. Worse medicine costs money wich can only be gained by exporting food and you get the huge mess of african nations exporting money to pay for medicine then getting a famine end needing food brought back in. Reading up on the constant cycle of death and hope in africa is depressing reading.
Add AIDS and you got a truly messed up system. Lets assume for a moment that no aids cure can be found. Then at the moment every aids child alive is just a drain. Humanity forbids us to just put them to rest but keeping them alive creates a nasty cycle of death. Human culture is based on three stages, childhood where you learn for later stages, adulthood where you take care of the other stages AND create the first stage and finally old age were your experience helps the first two stages. Western culture has moved away from this a bit but for a long time families consisted of childern, adults and grandparents ALL doing their bid to keep the family alive. Grandparents are one of the things that sets us apart from animals. Teenage wolfs often help out their parents with their raising of the next litter but humans have a whole extra set of hands with super experience to help them out.
Aids disrupts this. A child born with aids is not going to survive for long and will only cost resources without ever growing old enough to "repay". Worse if they live long enough to bear childeren those kids will have aids as well and no parents let alone grandparents to raise them. The whole social structure that makes humans human collapses.
Oh and africa is not africa. Not all of africa is hunger and AIDS and misery. Some bits do alright until sooner or later something goes wrong. At the moment there is another locust plague destroying food on a gigantic scale. Huge areas were people had made a good living are now heading to famine and all the other problems like war and AIDS are sure to follow.
As for the sexual fitness. Survival of the fittest. Someone who lives to the age of 82 got to be amazingly fit. In the west we can afford to not be fit. Males can remain sexually reproductive even after death. This is nothing weird. Just that in the west most have other luxury problems that make it all not work. We also got a slight culture problem with 80yr men marrying reproductive females.
Games are very expensive to develop. Basically you got the following areas to cover.
Kotor seems to have basically used the same engine and re-used a lot of the artwork. Only the story has changed. Considering typical development time of Kotor 1 and Kotor 2 it seems that it has saved them a huge amount of time == money.
I have been thinking that this must ultimately be the way for the game industry to get better. Hollywood has long since stopped making custom sets for each movie. During the golden age they had a few stock sets wich were slightly remoddelled or just short from different angles between different movies. A lot of the b&w westerns have exactly the same street.
Say that sometime in the future it becomes possible to make big enough levels so that you do have a realistic city (and not just 1 short street). You could then make a series of episodes all set in the same city but following different stories. In the first episode the barber beneath your apartment would just be empty but another episode wich needs it adds the graphics but reuses the ones from your apartment. It would reduce the cost for each episode and each episode could be produced much faster.
At the moment the game industry is reinventing the camera and sound equipment and the basic tech of set building for each and every game. It usually gives us huge improvements but it also takes 2-3 years between games wich have to recoup all their investments in one sale. Expansion packs are sometimes a way to get some extra money but expansion packs are rare on non-hd game systems for obvious reasons.
Would there be a market for shorter games costing less wich you can buy new chapters/stories for?
The Sims 1 sold for years with the same engine. Half-Life mods have a following long after the engine had been surpassed. And these are PC games where the hardware gets better a lot faster and more often then on consoles. Yet kotor 2 for the x-box (a really crap piece of hardware by PC standards) gets slagged for not improving the visuals.
Is the reviewer just whining or is the industry doomed to have to rebuild the engine for each story?
Check the american history and how it treats its own citizens who had different politcal ideas. But they that is alright because everyone who is not a capatalist is an enemy right? America is for free people and free people only choose capatalism otherwise they are not free. Nice dogma mate.
Some nerds took it the wrong way and now half of slashdot believes Doom will have a movie. Idiots.
If this is serious then it is a joke. 70 million dollars I have seen mentioned. Not exactly a lot for a special effects movie. Worse if you then see an excuse that recreating the hell from the game is to expensive you really have to start wondering about the capacities of the crew. Are sheep entrails nailed to upside down crosses (two bits of wood nailed to each other) really that expensive? Are we going to get "Red Dward" sets instead?
The only thing being used is the name. I wish them luck. ID so far has had a good reputation but if they tie their name to this movie it will be mud in hollywood forever. Don't do it. Get the lawyers and force the movie to adopt a different name. It is not going to earn you anything but ridicule.
Duke Nukem: That is going to be a movie? Probably going to be released after Forever has ended.
D&D 2: We seen the first. Yuck. I don't even know what was so bad about it. Watched it recently because I was desperate for some fantasy and am going senile. Sequels rarely improve.
That leaves V:TM. Should be simple enough. There have been plenty of Vampire movies before. Granted the TV series is not that well reviewed (never seen it) but how hard can it be to make a good movie when Hollywood has already made movies that could easily have been set in that universe?
In theory both D&D and V:TM should be the easiest to turn into a movie as they are not stories but universes. Doom and DN both got heroes, sets, equipment, baddies that people will expect to see. Not so in the roleplaying games. V:TM could be set anywhere and be any kind of story, comedy, romance, action, suspense, sci-fi and still be true. After all the entire setting is, reality + monsters. D&D is slightly harder since it so depends on creating the right "magical" world.
So my bet is on V:TM. It is the only one that a "serious" crew could work on without everyone calling them a bunch of nerds.
The source engine gives it pretty nice graphics even if there are ocasional glitches (elongated necks during some cutscenes). Think somewhere between Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex (2 for the graphics 1 for the size of the levels). Although it lack the fysics of Half-Life 2 or Deus Ex 1. I still think Deus Ex 1 with its bullets that rained back down stands alone for that).
The story is okay, very Deus Ex again but way way better then the diablo that was redemption. There are some lenghty combat levels but in between there are plenty of true RPG talky bits where you can both use wits and brawn to solve problems.
The game is by no means perfect as I had hoped for a deeper game dealing more with your vampire nature. Your character seems very resigned to becoming a vampire. There are some dark story lines but apart from them it could have been a Deus Ex storyline. Except that this time at least you got the option I always wanted in those games. Screw them all. If you don't like anyone in the game you can be decide to be a lone wolf instead. Finally.
Good game, not perfect but a RPG well worth playing if you like Deus Ex style games.
What makes it so highly recommended is that there is a real difference between the various clans. Malkavians (madmen) are a lot of fun as they "hear" voices and give you the weirdest conversation options.
The END.
Worse they are putting crap programs of the exact same nature back to back or even on both channels at the same time. ARGH. I already hate "home improvement" programs but can probably survive the best of them for half an hour. 2 for a full hour however is to much and I switch the TV off.
This is I think the biggest shift. It is not that tv has become worse. I used to have the tv on in the background and just do other stuff while waiting for something watchable to appear.
But nowadays the non-watchable stuff is so bad that even muted it insults me. There are also to many bad programs behind each other so I just turn the TV off and remind myself to switch on at XX:XX. Except I forget because I am to deep into something else. End result? Even the programs I find worth watching I don't watch anymore. TV really needs to start to worry when I prefer not waking the cat over getting up for the remote.
This is something that is being regonized although more on radio. The Netherlands has only recently gone commercial on radio and instead of getting a lot of different stations aiming at their own group we get all of them aiming at the same group. Result? More and more people switcing to MP3 players and the radio stations unable to get the advertising they need.
More and more tv tries to appeal to everyone and ends up appealing to noone. There is nothing wrong with the occasional survivor, those of us who don't like it just don't watch that night, but when every night has its own mindless show you get a large group of people who switch off the tv and don't switch it on again.
Remember this, TV got big when it was basically on all the time. When people start switching off you lost them. TV is not a drug, there are no withdrawal symptoms. All people got to do to get rid of their addiction is say "no thanks".
Only 1 program of every kind per night.
So an individual can win and casino's even like that. It makes the rest of the customers who are loosing feel better.
Is democracy damned when people don't vote? The damned view believes that non-voters don't have fate in the system. On the other hand perhaps these people think everything is just fine.
But would spreading voting out over more then a day really help? Those who "forget" to go would still forget and you would also miss the effect of having voting day. One clear day on wich everyone knows that today is the day to vote with everyone remembring people around them.
Sure sure economic effect of people taking an hour of to vote (or even a day). So what? Cost of doing business. If a company really really needs all its people there let it open a polling boot inside.
Also would candidates still be banned from campaigning during the entire two weeks?
As for mistakes and cost of salaries. Well now the ballot boxes have to be guarded for 1 day. The staff needs to be paid for 1 day and only take 1 day of from their day job. You just increase the cost because now the polling station has to be guarded for 14 days and nights. The cost for foreing volunteers to observe the elections also goes op (hmmm might US elections not withstand foreign scrutiny?)
Few polling stations? Oh goodie, means longer distances to travel. No problem for the rich and middle classes but poorer people might have to spend more money they don't have to get to their polling station. Isn't the entire idea of having so many stations to make them easily accesable to everyone?
Lets review
Is it really that much of a problem to go and vote?
The netherlands has gotten used to something called coalition goverment. Unlike the US or england we got a lot of parties ranging from (when I was young) to extreme left to extreme right. To be sure both extremes were tiny but they were there with a seat in the goverment after some elections (we are talking really really small here).
So to get a majority the biggest partie would form a coalition with smaller parties and agree on a common policy to govern the country with. A bit of give and take.
This type of goverment was applied also the other areas like the eternal war between goverment industry and unions. Basically for a long time these three social partners talked and achieved a sort of middle ground everyone could live with. By and large it worked or perhaps more accurate failed to fail. Think of it like this. If an action is certain to lead to disaster but there is something opposite of it stopping the disaster from happening then all seems good. The counter action was the growing economy. After the bubble this counter failed and so the polder model started to slide.
The partnership of goverment industry and unions can be reflected in political alignment. Unions are of course on the left wanting the best for the common worker. Industry is on the right wanting the best for their shareholders. Goverment are the liberals in the middel wanting both happy workers and happy shareholders but also things like freedom, a clean enviroment etc etc. (Unions are not anti-enviroment just as long as it doesn't cost jobs and business is not anti freedom as long as it cut profits).
With the economy going down all of sudden things started to go wrong. Money was no longer growing on trees (the netherlands is a fairly rich country with a varied export market and a positive trade balance BUT it is also small and very sensitive to other economies. Shipping relies mostly on trade other countries do, construction on projects in other countries, export obviously on other countries).
The current goverment has forced through cuts and savings that are widely critized as being to harsh and even worse and being bad economic policie by the goverments own think tanks. Before nobody cared about backhanded deals were goverment was just forced through in back chambers without consultation with the voter because each voter was part of the polder model through being represented by either goverment industry or the union.
But now everytime at least one of the social partner seems to disagree. You get the weird situation that the unions and industry agree on say compensating health care cuts (with industry picking up the bill because healthy workers work harder) and the goverment trying to block it because they don't want it. Weird.
So the current economy is in a downward spiral were all the social balances that have been achieved in the decades since WW2 are now being eroded.
There is also a huge other problem involving immigration. Although the golden age for the netherlands came in a time when holland opened its gates to everyone in europe who was persecuted in recent times this has led to frictions.
During earlier decades there was a shortage of labour so it seemed to make sense to import workers from poor countries like turkey. Integrating these workers was never done as things like enforced learning of the dutch language was considered both expensive and politically incorrect. Hell these workers were not supposed to stay here. Just work, get some money then go back to turkey.
However the immigrants did not go back. They stayed. Not only stayed but invited their families over and had childeren. The sad thing is that no matter how much the immigrants might complain about holland and how badly the cultures may clash the simple fact is that you couldn't force them to go back at gunpoint. The goverment is even offering cash payments for immigrants who go back. Take up is very very low.
Over the years three cultures have emerged, the im
Unless the DS has a tv out why should it ever generate a tv signal? It simply computes a screen and sends it to the lcd. The only way they would have a tv signal is if the computer first generates a digital image, this is then converted to a analog signal (this signal leaks to your tv) then the analog is send to a tv receiver wich decodes the analog signal to the digital signal the lcd needs.
Even if the screen could be send over wifi or usb it would be send as digital data and how the hell should a tv be able to do anything with that?
TV's are also interlaced and lcd's and presumably the DS like all other computers are not.
Can anyone explain how the hell the DS could or would generate a signal that a tv could display?