Then why not just do the cut scenes in the game engine like FF1-3 for NES, FF4-6 for SNES, and Metal Gear Solid for PS1 did?
I'm not sure why they didn't do that. It worked just fine for Ocarina of Time, which was wildly popular. It may be easier to do certiain things in FMV, especailly when the game engine doesn't support all the special effects you want to show. When the CD based systems first hit the shelves, all the developers were really excited about FMV, because they couldn't do it previously.
The storage space was more about full motion video than it was/is about good graphics. You can't put FMV and CD Quality sound on a cartridge. This time around Nintendo put DVD on the Wii, and it has just as much storage as the XBox. The PS3 has blu-ray, which adds a ton of storage, but I've never seen FF shy away from using multiple discs. The N64 had more than enough power to display all the graphics that FF and any other RPG of it's time had. It was actually better at actual graphics than the PS1. The PS1 just had a lot more storage space. For a quick comparison. Zelda: Ocarina of Time was under 30 MB. FF VII, I believed, filled up 4 CDs.
Unfortunately, you can't really force anybody to buy something. You can force drivers to get insurance, but people can choose not to drive. the only way to force people to buy something, is through taxation. Might as well tax the people, and have a certain percentage of the money earmarked for health care costs. The other part of my argument, is that even if the cost of the US insurance was to be cut in half, it still seems like it would cost a lot more than what most Canadians would pay. Also, if you force people to buy insurance, what's the minimum level of coverage that they have to buy. In Canada, Everybody is garaunteed the same level of service. With forced insurance, you can bet that there would be a lot of insurance companies selling a lot of cheap plans, that in the end, don't really cover much.
Sadly, I don't think that even Final Fantasy could make the Japanese want to buy an XBox. It would just alienate the fans. Considering the popularity of the systems, and the fact that FF doesn't require amazing graphics, I'm surprised they don't put it out on the Wii.
This is why I'm happy I went with the Wii. I do not have 90 minutes to invest in a cutscene for a game. I want to play games. I don't want to sit around watching movies. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie. We used to joke around and wish that our Nintendo had a skip-the-shit button, so you didn't have to sit through all the junk those games had. Little did we know how bad games would get.
While I really enjoyed FF 1,5, and chrono trigger, I have to say that I'm not impressed with the recent ones. I actually stopped playing at FF VII, because it was just so damn boring. The game is boring enough in that you have to spend time leveling up to complete your quests. But that's bearable because the quests are fun, and challenging, and make you think, and the story is good too. FF VII was terrible, because they made the fight system so excruciatingly long. 20 to 30 seconds of animation for each attack sequence. It's cool the first 15 times you see it, but gets really boring really fast. Not only that, the game was extremely linear. There wasn't a lot of figuring out stuff on your own. You basically followed the path they set out for you. It was like watching a good movie, with little bits of interactivity thrown in here and there.
I'm Canadian, and I pay less in taxes, total, than what it would cost me to pay for adequate health insurace in the US. According to a quick google, the insurance premium from an employer health plan covering a family of four would be around $12,000. That's more than my family of 4 paid in taxes last year. Counting income and sales tax.
For me it runs even when launching from the quick launch bar, or from the start menu. For some reason, IE seems to like to load things from the desktop by default. For instance, to change your "view source" application from notepad to notepad++, you can put the following in a notepad.bat file on your desktop.
C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe %1
This problem seems to be two fold. First, Safari will automatically download stuff, to your desktop, without asking you. Secondly, IE will load DLLS from the desktop, just because they happen to have the same name as some other DLL it is looking for. I think the bigger problem here is with IE, because it doesn't matter how the dll got on your desktop, it shouldn't be using it.
Well, from what I've heard from actual Americans, the US system doesn't seem to address any of the problems which seem to crop up in socialized health care systems. One of the big problems is the expense. Yet the American people pay much more money than any other nation for their health care. Another problem people express with socialized systems is quality of care. Yet the US is not without it's share of bad doctors. Another problem seems to be waiting times. From the Americans I've talked to, there are wait times longer there than in Canada, and we think we have a problem. You may be able to get an MRI or hip replacement faster (not immediately life threatening in most cases), but you still may end up waiting in the ER for hours on end (sometimes life threatening). The other problem often cited is not getting to see a doctor of your choice. Yet I'm not aware of any socialized system in a first world nation that doesn't let you choose your own doctor. Yet in the American system, the HMO often has a list of doctors that you are allowed to see.
Maybe it's just because I'm Canadian, but I can't really see why anybody is against gay marriage. Marry whoever you want. It doesn't affect anybody except the people entering into the marriage. You may not agree with it, but you may also not agree with marrying somebody that only makes 1/2 as much money as you do. That doesn't mean that everybody should have to marry in the same income bracket. To me it seems like a no-brainer. Let people marry whoever they want. As long as the people getting married are mentally capable of entering into a contract, I see no reason why anybody should stop them. I really don't understand why there would be any controversy.
Even ignoring the whole unverifiability element of voting machines, they still represent a big problem, as you pointed out. And that is, not enough machines to go around, or too many broken machines. People shouldn't have to wait in line for 6 hours to cast their vote. This is the reason pen and paper should be used. You can't run out of those, and it gets people in and out of the door very easily. It's very easy to set up a bunch of voting booths in a school gymnasium, or other public place.
Is it really the way a windowing system "has to be". I doubt it. There's no reason the graphics system and drivers have to be anywhere close to the same project as the window manager. Do we really need network transparency? Or would using something like VNC serve us well enough. It wouldn't be quite as cool, but it would probably remove quite a bit of complexity from the code.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Open source does not work like big business. It doesn't stagnate because there's no competition. It stagnates because people don't want to work on it. There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either. That doesn't slow down it's development.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
First, I believe your parent post was a joke. Second of all, the reason most open source projects go stagnant seems to be for a couple reasons. First, the code is an ugly mess, and nobody wants to work on it. Second, internal conflict about where the project is going, so nothing gets done, or every new feature or bug fix becomes a big argument, about how it should be done. Thirdly, very boring project subject matter. The last one seems to be the big killer. There could be a nice open source Outlook/Exchange replacement. It wouldn't be inherently hard to build, but it seems that nobody is interested in doing it. Most of the stuff that gets a lot of attention is the stuff that developers are interested in building.
Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 1
You could probably say the same about any software system. Unless it's really bad. A lot of people say windows is pretty bad. I don't run into too many bugs most of the time. A couple here and there, but nothing major.
Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Is there anything else out there? Why is there such a lack of interest in X.org, when so many other projects depend on it. Most of the big projects have been moving quite quickly, making a lot of headway in the past couple of years. What's holding x.org back?
They were made of fabric because it was light. Not because it was durable. Or because it acted as good armour. Planes used to be made of wood also, but you don't see much of that around anymore. Especially not in military aircraft.
Yes, you are right, most software engineers, or people making software, aren't certified software engineers. That wasn't what I was trying to say. What I was saying was that you don't take a mechanical engineer, who's never programmed a thing in his life, and ask him to design a CAD program. He would probably get the interface and concepts right, but I don't think the code would work without bugs, nor would it be easily maintainable. There are mechanical engineers, hardware engineers, and electrical engineers who are really good at designing software. This is specifically because they have had to learn it on their own, because it was necessary, and because there was nobody else who could do it. However, I would never assume that a mechanical engineer knew how to design a software system. And unless he had extensive experience in it, I wouldn't hoist a large software project on a him if I knew I could get someone better qualified to do the job.
You're right. My laptop has a resolution of 1280x800. The 9 inch EEE has a resolution of 1024 x 600. That's 1024000 vs. 614400 pixels. Pretty close to half. It has even less than half if you go with the 7 inch, which only has 800x480 resolution, and 384000 pixels. There's no reason the EEE shouldn't be able to handle a full Linux distro. The only thing holding it back, is the size of the SSD.
You could probably have a program that guesses at the IP of the the gateway, which is probably the same as the DNS. Guess a couple different gateway addresses like 192.168.100.1, and so forth. Figure out the gateway. Once you found the gateway, you could probably probe a couple other addresses for the DNS server. I'm not saying this is what they are doing. But it would be trivial to get most of your network settings configured by default by just scanning a bunch of addresses and ports to find the stuff you need.
I wouldn't be surprised. Check out this video with compiz on an EEE. Granted, that is with Xubuntu (XFCE?) but I don't see why you couldn't run Gnome on an EEE. The EEE has 512 MB of RAM, a 900 MHz intel chip, and an intel mobile CPU. For comparisons sake, I have a full sized Acer 3680 with 512 MB of RAM, a 1.7 GHz processor, and an Intel GMA 950. It runs quite fast. Never noticed any kind of slowdowns.
Not really. I wouldn't have a mechanical engineer design a chip either. I also wouldn't have a hardware/mechanical engineer designing a software system. Let people do what they are good at, and stop trying to cut corners by substituting in people where they have no skills.
My school did that. Worst idea ever. It's much easier to get money out of people for more impulsive things, like chocolate bars, chocolate covered almonds, and cookies. Go around after dinner and sell dessert to people. Always worked like a charm. Each house was done really quick. Either they wanted it, or they didn't. If they didn't you moved on. With wrapping paper, they have to look through the catalog, record the order, write out a cheque, or find money, You have to make change. and then wait for their order to come in a month later, at which point they've completely forgotten they even ordered it.
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Funny thing, that word hysteria
The storage space was more about full motion video than it was/is about good graphics. You can't put FMV and CD Quality sound on a cartridge. This time around Nintendo put DVD on the Wii, and it has just as much storage as the XBox. The PS3 has blu-ray, which adds a ton of storage, but I've never seen FF shy away from using multiple discs. The N64 had more than enough power to display all the graphics that FF and any other RPG of it's time had. It was actually better at actual graphics than the PS1. The PS1 just had a lot more storage space. For a quick comparison. Zelda: Ocarina of Time was under 30 MB. FF VII, I believed, filled up 4 CDs.
Unfortunately, you can't really force anybody to buy something. You can force drivers to get insurance, but people can choose not to drive. the only way to force people to buy something, is through taxation. Might as well tax the people, and have a certain percentage of the money earmarked for health care costs. The other part of my argument, is that even if the cost of the US insurance was to be cut in half, it still seems like it would cost a lot more than what most Canadians would pay. Also, if you force people to buy insurance, what's the minimum level of coverage that they have to buy. In Canada, Everybody is garaunteed the same level of service. With forced insurance, you can bet that there would be a lot of insurance companies selling a lot of cheap plans, that in the end, don't really cover much.
Sadly, I don't think that even Final Fantasy could make the Japanese want to buy an XBox. It would just alienate the fans. Considering the popularity of the systems, and the fact that FF doesn't require amazing graphics, I'm surprised they don't put it out on the Wii.
This is why I'm happy I went with the Wii. I do not have 90 minutes to invest in a cutscene for a game. I want to play games. I don't want to sit around watching movies. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie. We used to joke around and wish that our Nintendo had a skip-the-shit button, so you didn't have to sit through all the junk those games had. Little did we know how bad games would get.
While I really enjoyed FF 1,5, and chrono trigger, I have to say that I'm not impressed with the recent ones. I actually stopped playing at FF VII, because it was just so damn boring. The game is boring enough in that you have to spend time leveling up to complete your quests. But that's bearable because the quests are fun, and challenging, and make you think, and the story is good too. FF VII was terrible, because they made the fight system so excruciatingly long. 20 to 30 seconds of animation for each attack sequence. It's cool the first 15 times you see it, but gets really boring really fast. Not only that, the game was extremely linear. There wasn't a lot of figuring out stuff on your own. You basically followed the path they set out for you. It was like watching a good movie, with little bits of interactivity thrown in here and there.
I'm Canadian, and I pay less in taxes, total, than what it would cost me to pay for adequate health insurace in the US. According to a quick google, the insurance premium from an employer health plan covering a family of four would be around $12,000. That's more than my family of 4 paid in taxes last year. Counting income and sales tax.
Your little anecdotes are nice, but try reading about wait times in the US rather just relying on the few examples which pop up in your life.
For me it runs even when launching from the quick launch bar, or from the start menu. For some reason, IE seems to like to load things from the desktop by default. For instance, to change your "view source" application from notepad to notepad++, you can put the following in a notepad.bat file on your desktop.
C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe %1
This problem seems to be two fold. First, Safari will automatically download stuff, to your desktop, without asking you. Secondly, IE will load DLLS from the desktop, just because they happen to have the same name as some other DLL it is looking for. I think the bigger problem here is with IE, because it doesn't matter how the dll got on your desktop, it shouldn't be using it.
Well, from what I've heard from actual Americans, the US system doesn't seem to address any of the problems which seem to crop up in socialized health care systems. One of the big problems is the expense. Yet the American people pay much more money than any other nation for their health care. Another problem people express with socialized systems is quality of care. Yet the US is not without it's share of bad doctors. Another problem seems to be waiting times. From the Americans I've talked to, there are wait times longer there than in Canada, and we think we have a problem. You may be able to get an MRI or hip replacement faster (not immediately life threatening in most cases), but you still may end up waiting in the ER for hours on end (sometimes life threatening). The other problem often cited is not getting to see a doctor of your choice. Yet I'm not aware of any socialized system in a first world nation that doesn't let you choose your own doctor. Yet in the American system, the HMO often has a list of doctors that you are allowed to see.
Maybe it's just because I'm Canadian, but I can't really see why anybody is against gay marriage. Marry whoever you want. It doesn't affect anybody except the people entering into the marriage. You may not agree with it, but you may also not agree with marrying somebody that only makes 1/2 as much money as you do. That doesn't mean that everybody should have to marry in the same income bracket. To me it seems like a no-brainer. Let people marry whoever they want. As long as the people getting married are mentally capable of entering into a contract, I see no reason why anybody should stop them. I really don't understand why there would be any controversy.
Even ignoring the whole unverifiability element of voting machines, they still represent a big problem, as you pointed out. And that is, not enough machines to go around, or too many broken machines. People shouldn't have to wait in line for 6 hours to cast their vote. This is the reason pen and paper should be used. You can't run out of those, and it gets people in and out of the door very easily. It's very easy to set up a bunch of voting booths in a school gymnasium, or other public place.
Is it really the way a windowing system "has to be". I doubt it. There's no reason the graphics system and drivers have to be anywhere close to the same project as the window manager. Do we really need network transparency? Or would using something like VNC serve us well enough. It wouldn't be quite as cool, but it would probably remove quite a bit of complexity from the code.
Open source does not work like big business. It doesn't stagnate because there's no competition. It stagnates because people don't want to work on it. There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either. That doesn't slow down it's development.
First, I believe your parent post was a joke. Second of all, the reason most open source projects go stagnant seems to be for a couple reasons. First, the code is an ugly mess, and nobody wants to work on it. Second, internal conflict about where the project is going, so nothing gets done, or every new feature or bug fix becomes a big argument, about how it should be done. Thirdly, very boring project subject matter. The last one seems to be the big killer. There could be a nice open source Outlook/Exchange replacement. It wouldn't be inherently hard to build, but it seems that nobody is interested in doing it. Most of the stuff that gets a lot of attention is the stuff that developers are interested in building.
You could probably say the same about any software system. Unless it's really bad. A lot of people say windows is pretty bad. I don't run into too many bugs most of the time. A couple here and there, but nothing major.
Is there anything else out there? Why is there such a lack of interest in X.org, when so many other projects depend on it. Most of the big projects have been moving quite quickly, making a lot of headway in the past couple of years. What's holding x.org back?
They were made of fabric because it was light. Not because it was durable. Or because it acted as good armour. Planes used to be made of wood also, but you don't see much of that around anymore. Especially not in military aircraft.
Yes, you are right, most software engineers, or people making software, aren't certified software engineers. That wasn't what I was trying to say. What I was saying was that you don't take a mechanical engineer, who's never programmed a thing in his life, and ask him to design a CAD program. He would probably get the interface and concepts right, but I don't think the code would work without bugs, nor would it be easily maintainable. There are mechanical engineers, hardware engineers, and electrical engineers who are really good at designing software. This is specifically because they have had to learn it on their own, because it was necessary, and because there was nobody else who could do it. However, I would never assume that a mechanical engineer knew how to design a software system. And unless he had extensive experience in it, I wouldn't hoist a large software project on a him if I knew I could get someone better qualified to do the job.
You're right. My laptop has a resolution of 1280x800. The 9 inch EEE has a resolution of 1024 x 600. That's 1024000 vs. 614400 pixels. Pretty close to half. It has even less than half if you go with the 7 inch, which only has 800x480 resolution, and 384000 pixels. There's no reason the EEE shouldn't be able to handle a full Linux distro. The only thing holding it back, is the size of the SSD.
You could probably have a program that guesses at the IP of the the gateway, which is probably the same as the DNS. Guess a couple different gateway addresses like 192.168.100.1, and so forth. Figure out the gateway. Once you found the gateway, you could probably probe a couple other addresses for the DNS server. I'm not saying this is what they are doing. But it would be trivial to get most of your network settings configured by default by just scanning a bunch of addresses and ports to find the stuff you need.
I wouldn't be surprised. Check out this video with compiz on an EEE. Granted, that is with Xubuntu (XFCE?) but I don't see why you couldn't run Gnome on an EEE. The EEE has 512 MB of RAM, a 900 MHz intel chip, and an intel mobile CPU. For comparisons sake, I have a full sized Acer 3680 with 512 MB of RAM, a 1.7 GHz processor, and an Intel GMA 950. It runs quite fast. Never noticed any kind of slowdowns.
Not really. I wouldn't have a mechanical engineer design a chip either. I also wouldn't have a hardware/mechanical engineer designing a software system. Let people do what they are good at, and stop trying to cut corners by substituting in people where they have no skills.
My school did that. Worst idea ever. It's much easier to get money out of people for more impulsive things, like chocolate bars, chocolate covered almonds, and cookies. Go around after dinner and sell dessert to people. Always worked like a charm. Each house was done really quick. Either they wanted it, or they didn't. If they didn't you moved on. With wrapping paper, they have to look through the catalog, record the order, write out a cheque, or find money, You have to make change. and then wait for their order to come in a month later, at which point they've completely forgotten they even ordered it.