Maybe so, but geeks (me included) will want choice.
When it comes down to it, regardless of how many distros there are, whether it's one or one thousand, there's always a choice in the software you run. Beyond that, they're basing their distro on Debian, just adding software that Debian won't include (like closed-source drivers). You could always choose Debian, or another distro, or modify the UserLinux distro for yourself.
How will the business people know that UserLinux is the one true distro any more than they know that Debian is the one true distro now?
How do they know what RedHat or SuSe are? They don't. They rely on people that know what they're doing to make the right decision. That's why US Corporations have been moving to have positions like CTO and CFO alongside the CEO, because they need people with a firm understanding of the technical and financial sides of business. If the CTO doesn't know about UserLinux, or any other distro of Linux, chances are he knows that someone on his staff will be able to give him an informed decision. My favorite part about being a geek is not just the control over my computer, but also being the person people go to when they want to know what they should do to keep up with technology. The best managers know that there are people working for them that know particular portions of their business better than they do, and will go to those people for advice on those portions of the business.
but if the architecture is totally different, then you must rely COMPLETELY on the API's for your game if you wish to port to the PC, which is not the current state of affairs if you want the fastest game possible.
Most people don't drop down past the APIs to write to the CPU any more, though. The place they do this is for the video card, using extensions or specialized languages to get closer to the GPU and get finer control. This is helped by the fact that the current XBox uses an nVidia chipset which is fairly compatible with the nVidia GPUs in home PCs. In the case of the next XBox, you're looking at an ATI part that will probably be similar to the ATI parts at home, but, most importantly, you're looking at a part that many developers have claimed does very well with straight DirectX9 code without dropping down to a lower level, because it was designed for the API and the API was tweaked with the ATI hardware available.
Regarding the PsP prototype shots. It would have been useful for you to supply a link so I knew specifically what the fuck you were talking about but since you did not I'll just have to google it and see if I can find something. Also since you did not supply a link I have no idea of the credibility of your claims of the prototype shots.
Better than a google, go through last week's games.slashdot.org stories, there were 2 last week linking to different sites with the prototype shots, which is probably why he didn't bother linking to the shots for you.
I believe the PsP will dominate over the Game Boy Advance for several reasons:
* Sony Knows their shit and wouldn't waste time and money by coming out with a piece of shit like the nokia.
That remains to be seen, since they've never competed in this market before (the closest they came was the PocketStation, which was more like a DreamCast memory card than a handheld console). Nokia certainly 'knows their shit' when it comes to cell phones, but that didn't stop them from producing shit.
* Sony has a great library of playstation games to port to the new portable.
Quick! Name 10 Sony games. Nevermind, I don't really want to know. Sony has a lot of contracts with people to do PS2 games. I haven't seen anouncements on who has been contractually obligated to make PSP games, whether ports or not.
* I never found the GBA appealing - it is lacking in its game library (no new mario platformer???) and there is no backlighting.
So get a GBA-SP which has a front/side-light. I think I prefer SMB3 to a 'new' mario platformer, although I agree that if done right it'd be nice to see Mario's 2D legacy continued. 2 of the 3 Castlevania games are excellent. Then there's WarioWare, Golden Sun, Advance Wars, Zelda, and so on.
* The GBA is marketed primarily towards kids. The PsP will be marketed to teens and young adults. Kids have no money to spend - Teens and young adults do.
Which is why more GBAs are selling than PS2s, everywhere. Nokia shot themselves in the foot by saying the GBA was for kids, because, surprise, the market they claimed they were aiming for already owns GBAs. Sony's likely to find that very few people buying PSPs for games don't already own a GBA.
How can I predict the popularity of the next Xbox? --- Because Microsoft is the only console maker that appears to be in high gear for their next console.
What hole did you crawl into? Microsoft is barely starting design of the processor and has selected a vendor for their GPU. On the Sony side, they were talking about cell processors with IBM and Hitachi shortly after the PS2 was released. On the Nintendo side the work's been going for some time and they solidified their deals with ATI and IBM as well. If anything, Microsoft is a bit behind, especially since Sony's been working on the PS3 since before the XBox and Cube were released.
It will be out on the market way ahead of Nintendo and Sony's next attempt. The PS2 is already stale - I own one and might buy one or 2 more games that's about it. The current Xbox has about 3 customers and the GameCube . . . well the Cube is alright - it would be nice to see a Super Mario game though.
Nintendo already stated they won't be last to market. I think you'll find that all 3 consoles will be released close on the heels of one another, unlike this current generation, where the DreamCast was released about a year ahead of the PS2, and the XBox and Cube were released about a year after the PS2. I've still got plenty of PS2 titles I want, but then I only buy exclusive titles for it, since I'm one of the 3 XBox owners and buy most of the cross-platform games for it. As for the Cube, I take it you mean a Super Mario game besides Sunshine.
Regardless, by the time the next Xbox comes out the GameCube will be showing its age pretty badly and gamers will be hurting for a new system. With Nintendo an
So, MS is going to have to port over a major portion of their kernel, including directx and a few other bits, to the G5? Is this like Apple internally porting OS-X to intel, but never letting the public have it?
No, because the PPC port of NT is sitting on most of the NT4 discs out there. They just dropped support for it eventually, and unless a significant demand for XP on PPC comes along after they've put it on XBox, it's unlikely that they'll start shipping it again.
That being said, maybe shifting the XBox to PPC will be enough to drive demand amongst XBox developers to have XP on PPC (this all assumes that they aren't going to keep using 2k as the kernel for the next XBox).
As for SLI, I think that as long as the two cards matched they would SLI and in SLI mode it only made use of 16M total (so either the 8M or 12M cards were exactly the same if you bought two and SLI'ed them.) I did not ever SLI mine, one $300 card was enough for me, thanks.
The texture RAM would be the same on both cards, so the 8MB was essentially 12MB in SLI (4+4+4), while the 12MB was 16MB in SLI(4+4+8). The 8MB of (non-texture) video RAM was essentially being used to produce the 1024x768 resolution, but since SLI rendered alternating lines, each card had to have the same set of textures. I don't think there was a BestBuy near me when the cards came out, and I'm still pretty sure I paid more than $300 for each card. The filter here says that archive.org is filtered for sex when I actually try to run a search on it, so maybe Ill check from home on what Diamond was selling the Monster 2s for back in 98.
Damn, I think I put that card in a machine I paid $1,600 for to start with - bringing the total over $2k. I only WISH I could justify dropping $2k on a machine today.
I dropped it over time, with the V2s and the 400MHz!!! CPU being the last 2 items. Unfortunately, the V2s didn't drop much in price until the TNTs came out, but I saved ~$300-400 on the CPU. It's pretty easy to calculate that I spent closer to $3000 including the monitor, and almost $3800 with the printer on top of that. Then the V2 cards started an internal struggle to burn the whole system down, starting with each other and progressing to the sound card and ethernet card;) I eventually had about 6 case fans mostly for the V2s and the hard drives.
During the times when you are standing around in a store with money burning a hole in your pocket, the Ebert kind are the ones you want to listen to. During the times when you want to increase your appreciation for the artform, or see trends or underlying symbolic themes that some movies might share, or learn about the artistic effect of certain new techniques and technologies, or consider the relationship between the story of a film and the political environment that spawned it, or weigh the merits of attributing a collaborative medium like film to the vision of a single director, then maybe Ebert isn't your man.
Still, Ebert does tend to give light to some of the deeper form of criticism. In fact, it tends to get in the way of his judgment on films from time to time, where he spends too much time analyzing how the movie fits in it's genre or how it made him feel rather than telling people it's a good movie (or he doesn't notice it's a good movie because he pigeon-holed it wrong at the start).
I think that's the point, though, because current game reviewers don't even bother trying to be Ebert, they don't ground their reviews well in context, they simply review the points, and in many cases a particular magazine's (or site's) review system will get in the reviewer's way as much as anything else (score on graphics, sound, etc).
Part of the problem is simply that games aren't ready for this yet. We still read reviews to find out whether or not a game is buggy (or well-executed) rather than whether or not we want to play it. In fact, most of us know we want to play a game before we read a review of it. If the technology can mature to a point where we aren't worried about the mechanics, I think it will be much more likely that reviewers can go a little deeper in their reviews and give us more information than simply whether or not the developers screwed up the controls and the game crashes 5 times in 10 minutes (hell, I had no problems with C&C Generals, but with the expansion I get a crash to desktop every 3rd game or so), and whether or not the game engine takes advantage of the technology, or whether or not the game actually runs on that minimum system listed on the box.
With more developers sharing and re-using technology, as well as productions costs rising for games, it's very likely that things will become more stable (as people realize they don't need to build their own engine every time they make a game), and then reviews can get away from the mechanics and talk about the game, for once.
We'd probably even buy more Macs, since their graphics HW is so sleek.
I agree with everything else, basically, but the graphics hardware on Macs is the same as it is on x86, with the exception of the monitors (which can be used on an x86 PC as well). An ATI Radeon doesn't have much to differentiate between an x86 or PPC card, just as with the nVidia cards.
Mech Warrior took my breath away. The flyby scenes of the two clans headquarters when you started up? Oh my goodness. I forget what year this game was released, probably '96. I might just go home and fire this up after work.
The flyby (in MechWarrior 2) was pre-rendered. The game itself was in software. Later on they released a version of it for 3dfx cards, but frankly it had some issues and only added textures (instead of flat colours) to a game that was already visually impressive.
Sure it's always a little bit of a letdown to play the old games that looked awesome back then. But remeniscing keeps my interest long enough for a few games. Hell, the original Pool of Radiance (not 3d) still hold my interest with it's crude graphics.
I've never managed to get into MechWarrior 3 or 4 the way I got into MechWarrior 2, and I'm not really sure why that is.
I stuck my 12MB V2 (Diamond Monster 3D 2) card into my dad's new P2-400 (I was buying parts to build mine at the time, so this was a card I had bought for my first computer, but I was still saving up for the CPU and 2nd V2) and loaded up Unreal and showed that outdoors level off to everyone that would look.
Nothing since has been quite as mind-blowing, despite the graphics and cards getting better. It was simply because it was the first to do it really well, and, of course, the game pretty much fell apart a couple more levels down the line.
The V2 cards were very solid until everyone moved to either D3D or pure OpenGL (instead of the miniGL crap needed for the 3dfx cards, or glide). I still remember having to use a program that forced games to use the Voodoo card instead of the Riva 128, or later the TNT card, because many of the earlier games didn't expect people to have 3D capabilities on their 2D card and a 3D add-on board, but the 2D-only cards were dying out when the V2 came out and although the TNT and TNT2 could deal out some D3D goodness, it wasn't until the TNT2Ultra that OpenGL performance was as good as the miniGL, and that most games stopped being Glide-only.
People say that the OS X GUI takes up too much CPU, while in fact it takes up almost none. All of the windows, shadows, etc, are being done with the video card though Quartz Extreme, no programming necessary from the app writer to take advantage of this either.
This isn't quite true. Most of the desktop rendering is still done by the CPU in the same way that it was done before QE was added to OS X. It's simply the individual windows that are rendered by QE, and OpenGL handles the 'surface' which is handed to it by Quartz and QE. So OpenGL mostly comes in to handle effects (like Expose, the fast user switching animation, and the opening/closing animations) and shadows, QE handles the windows and passes the textures to OpenGL when an effect is needed, and the CPU still does it's thing for the desktop (until you hand off the desktop as a surface to OpenGL for the user switching animation).
In other words, things that were basically eye-candy and were really slowing OS X down quite badly before QE are now handled by QE, but the base 2D engine that utilizes the CPU is still working the same way it does with most other operating systems.
That being said, free eye candy is free eye candy, and although there are many people out there that prefer things to be stripped down, I'd rather have something with a little flash that can be done just as quickly.
Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.
The Voodoo2 cards started at $250 and $350 (or somewhere around there) for the 8MB and 12MB models, respectively. The only way to get the 1024x768 mentioned in the article was to have 2 12MB cards in SLI mode (which meant connecting the 2 V2 cards with a small ribbon cable between the two cards inside the case). Additionally, the pass-through cables that came with most V2 cards caused some degredation of the signal going to the monitor, so the graphics tended to be a bit dark, but was easily fixed by buying a better cable.
The performance was definitely solid, though, since the V2 cards I had were originally passing the 2D signal of a Riva128, and then a TNT, and finally a TNT2Ultra was the card that made me decide to pull out the V2 cards (not to mention that the V2s I owned did not have fans on the boards/chips, which meant that one of them burned up within about 6 months).
The combination of the lack of real OpenGL support, lack of 32-bit colour, and the speed of the TNT2 Ultra was what finally put 3dfx to bed, as the Voodoo 3 couldn't keep up and the Voodoo 4 was delayed far too long while 3dfx kept talking about how raw framerates were more important than features, and that no one could see the difference between 24-bit (the V3 supposedly output 24-bit colour through some tricks) and 32-bit colour anyway. Quake 3 proved them wrong quite quickly, as anyone could show with a few screenshots at the time.
Re:Only 1996 to the Present
on
Video Card History
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's basically just an article on the early 3dfx cards and then a quick skim of about 1/4th of nVidia's lineup and a love-fest with ATI's most recent cards.
It almost sounds like the author only talked about the cards he owned.
Just on the nVidia side, he barely mentioned the TNT and it's various derivatives, didn't mention the TNT2 Ultra or other TNT2 cards (except the baseline), and didn't mention that the GeForce 256 came in SDR and DDR versions, pretty much solidifying the future of DDR on video cards (because there was little other difference between the cards to explain the difference in benchmarks). Not to mention the later GF2 upgrades, the GF3, and the GF4.
Even with his early mentions of ATI he missed the mark a bit. ATI wasn't aiming for the 3d market so much because they had a solid hold on the OEM market, which didn't care (at the time) about 3d. When the OEM's started to care, nVidia had their chipset ready in part because of their XBox work (or they got the XBox work because they were working on the chipsets for the OEM market, either way it wasn't long before they were releasing motherboard chipsets), and a solid hold on the lead in 3D graphics technology.
Beyond that, he mentions that nVidia 'bought out 3dfx', which isn't quite right, since nVidia simply bought most of their IP and left the company to it's own devices (3dfx basically sold all of their assets and shut down).
Overall, it's a very light article that could be surpassed by a quick read through the review history on most sites that review graphics hardware.
including the fact that they hold tradition and social standing in higher regard. Diamonds, marriages, all these things point to a higher bar for entry with female gamers, because a game will have to become a cultural phenomenon for many women to even bother taking a look.
I don't think this is quite as true as many people would like to believe. Many women don't care if they have a traditional wedding or not, especially as they get older (or, more accurately, as younger generations get older). It's more something that their mother, their family, wants than they want themselves. My girlfriend prefers emeralds to diamonds, but has a few beliefs about natural vs. lab-created that she holds to fairly strongly (which points towards the traditional belief), but could be broken if she would pay attention. As far as games, the hardest part is getting her to play. Once she's interested in a game she'll play it like a compulsion (and I'm probably buying a second GameCube for the bedroom soon so we can play different games at the same time).
Compare this to men, who see killing, and go "uh. Me see kill. Me want kill." and start playing.
This difference should be attributed to the way in which men and women take part in competition. Men are extremely overt, while women are very subtle. At the same time, I think women are much more harsh in competing for something, and tend to not get into something they don't understand.
This leads to a few different things: 1) if they can't learn to play the game, with all it's subtleties, fairly quickly, they won't play. If it frustrates them or the control scheme doesn't make sense to them, they often quit before they even really get started. 2) Women will compete for the best time or score, but may also compete for other things, like completeness or more subtle goals.
Of course, this does not apply to all girls, as every individual is different. I've played TFC with a handful of very skilled women that played for many of the same reasons the guys did, or at least didn't appear to have any different methods of playing from the men and didn't express views on the gameplay that were any different from those held by the men.
Of course, I keep asking my girlfriend to try something besides Pokemon. My only successes so far have been Animal Crossing and WarioWare. As I said, though, it's usually just a matter of getting the controller in her hands and her being able to pick up the controls fairly quickly (which is helped by a quick explanation of them if I can get the basics down to a couple short sentences).
"GC/GBA: The entire original Prince of Persia, unlockable via the GBA or GameCube. Connectivity between the two will also allow for automatic health regeneration on the GameCube game."
which in my opinion translates into: you don't get to play it(the bonus, original prince of persia) if you just own gameboy color(such has appeared in few other games as well.. that you get extra content if you have a gba).
It says the original Prince of Persia will be unlockable via the GBA or the GameCube. The 'or' in that sentence is the clue that the GBA isn't required. It then goes on to say that the GBA connectivity will give automatic health regeneration on the GameCube game, which is, well, only a big deal if you have a problem beating the game the way it was designed.
As for the GameBoy Color, what does that have to do with anything? The GBC isn't mentioned in the article and doesn't do much of anything with a GameCube.
Why not just do a proper group review, rather than saying "Don't by this because we don't like it"?
Umm they didn't say that. In fact, they repeatedly praised the iPod to try to make sure people that read it understood that they feel the iPod is the best MP3 player on the market. That being said, they tried to put forward some good MP3 players that might serve some people better, based on certain requirements, and did it in an interesting way (5 reasons not to buy an iPod), rather than just doing yet another group review in which the iPod would beat the snot out of all of them and leave people wondering why they bothered.
WHen are you ever away from a power source ad listening to music continually for 6 hours? This is unlikely to be an issue for most people.
Every time I fly to my parents' house, or international flights. If there's a cigarette lighter adapter I'd certainly never have a problem driving anywhere, but airports and planes are a pain in the ass, and I never do get to go from the east coast to the west coast (or back) without a layover somewhere.
Compared to the cost of the music required to fill it, the iPod is dirt cheap.
So where can I go to buy an iPod, spread the cost out over 15 years, and pay in $10-15 increments, with spurts where I don't pay for as much as a year at a time (without having some lawyer come after me for not paying)?
Looking it up though, the iPod has come down quite a bit as they've increased the size of drives available. A 40GB iPod might actually be able to hold all of my music at moderate compression levels. Still, for my uses, the CD-based players may actually be better, despite the need to swap CDs to have access to my full library (and have all of those CDs accessable in the first place).
I think the main point of the article, though, is to expose people to more MP3 players, since, as they said, the iPod is the most popular MP3 player available, and may not be ideal for everyone (even if just for it's price).
But what about the millions of amateur musicians out there? I would LOVE to have a device that I can take to an informal gig or jam session and make a decent-sounding recording, and then transfer it to my computer later. Right now I use a Sony Minidisc recorder, but you're limited to just a couple hours per disc if you want any sort of quality, and then you have to do an analog transfer of the audio to your computer later! Almost defeats the purpose of recording it digitally in the first place.
I tend to use a small rack of equipment (amp/preamp, eq, effects, roughly 5 rack-spaces in a 6-space rack) regardless of where I'm playing (I simply vary the speakers that I use), so, if I wanted to do a high quality recording I could get something much better suited to the job in a rackmount unit. That being said, an iPod (or just about any other hard drive based unit) would probably be much cheaper for that sort of thing, especially if you aren't doing it for the purpose of recording an album (since there isn't a need for the absolute best recording possible).
On the other hand, if I were playing any place larger than I currently do, I'd have a lot more equipment to haul around and a small computer would probably be part of that.
Storage issues may be going away on the desktop, and on some hard drive-based portables, but for the most part, it's still an issue with portables as well as with most (non-LAN) networks. Sure, if I'm sending it from my home office to my living room I should be ok sending the full bitrate file. If I'm sending it to my cubicle at work, though, I'll get in trouble streaming (or downloading) full-sized files. Similarly, most of my MP3 files can't be sent through email because my provider has a limit on file sizes (so I have to split each file over 5 or more email attachments), but at a lower bit rate they could go through a little more easily, and even a little more quickly.
I don't need CD quality at the gym, or even in the car (where it would cost me even more to sound proof the interior to the point where I could tell), but I'd like it at home, and I shouldn't have to re-encode for every situation.
If you want to take the posture that your Windows setup is as important as some critical piece of business equipment then you'd better just read the damn EULA that comes with products in the first place, as you would there.
I simply take the posture that installing software from any vendor should not break software from another vendor, or break the OS itself, both of which iTunes does. I don't recall anyone pointing out anything in the EULA that says 'iTunes will make your CD-ROM drive inaccessible if you uninstall the software'. I can understand some people thinking it's ok for MusicMatch to be broken simply because Apple developed the functionality and warned you, but that's an issue of whether or not you believe it's ok for someone to (A) do this in the first place and (B) get away with it just because it's in an EULA. Making the CD-ROM drive stop working properly after removing the iTunes software is a mess, but then you weren't defending that (and may not have been aware of it).
Chances are you had Musicsnatch installed in order to update your iPod in the first place and it beggars belief that you'd want to keep it for that purpose after seeing and installing iTunes.
Since I don't have MusicMatch or an iPod, that particular problem is not mine, but I believe (mostly as a software developer, but also as a user) that installing one piece of software should not screw up another, even if you put it in an EULA (and I don't believe half or more of what's in an EULA should be legally binding).
I don't even know why I'm typing this because it's just the same attitude I always see from Windows using trolls who are jealous of the quality of Apple's stuff and desperately seek some pathetically minor point to snipe at them with.
The quality of Apple's Windows software is questionable at best, especially if iTunes is the best example. Their software for Mac OS may be top-notch, but I really wouldn't know since I haven't used an Apple computer in several years (though I had few complaints when I did).
As far as I can tell, iTunes breaks MusicMatch, disables the CD-ROM on uninstall of iTunes, and possibly causes other issues with access to music files (I'm going to have to go home and investigate this tonite because suddenly my gf can't access her music files). The CD-ROM access alone was a big problem for me, but luckily I found a working list of the registry entries required to fix the problem. I'm hoping the problem with my home computer is simply user error, as I actually like using iTunes for my mp3 collection, even if I don't use most of the features (iTunes Music Service and iPod synchronization), dislike the installation/uninstallation, and have problems with the interface. It does play my (fairly large) playlist without a hitch, regardless of what I do, which in itself means that at home it gets more use than any other player on the system. Since I didn't bother installing an mp3 ripper at work, though, iTunes can only play about 5% of my playlist and is useless here, therefore it was best to remove it (and then try to fix the uninstall problems).
No it can't. There is not one single case on record of physical Marijuana addiction ever. There is no known psysiological mechanism for this to happen. Just because those nice DARE people told you this in school doesn't make it true.
Almost anything can be physically addictive, it's just a matter of knowing what effects it has on the body (or, in the case of most addictions, brain's chemistry), and what the withdrawal symptoms are. In the cases of most drugs previously considered mentally addictive, they didn't have the technology or knowledge to know the physical effects of the drug outside of observation, so they attributed the addiction to a mental dependency. Additionally, most studies can not be done in a scientific manner on things like addiction because of ethics problems with forcing people to do something that you believe (or know) is harmful to them. Additionally, because different people can have different reactions to the same drugs (based on their body's (or brain's) chemistry), it's impossible to know what the effect will be on every individual. Marijuana can be physically addictive just because it causes one person to have a particular chemical reaction in their brain that we are not currently aware of; that doesn't mean that it always is, or even in the majority of people. By the way, those nice DARE people haven't been involved in my education in the last 15 or so years, and until about 5-10 years ago cocaine did not have any known physiological mechanism for addiction and therefore was not physically addictive. Now, however, they have a very good idea of what cocaine does in the brain and it is quite well-accepted as a physical addiction.
Case in point, I smoke heavily (and I mean heavily) every day and have done for years, but I've been in Japan for a week with nothing and I have had no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever.
If you took a drug test today it's very likely that they could find the marijuana in your system, even with a urine test. The fact that marijuana takes as much as 2 weeks to disappear from a urine test is exactly why withdrawal symptoms can be much easier to handle than with other drugs, and much harder to detect. It also makes it harder for some people to stop (unless they dislike the effects that most people use marijuana to attain), because negative side-effects are mostly believed to be negligible and are hard to detect and correlate to the marijuana use.
As a side note, this is also why I enjoy the recent advertisements (at least in my area) stating that X% of wreckless drivers tested had marijuana in their system, because, unlike alcohol, marijuana stays in your system much longer than most of the impairing effects (though some people notice that they are impaired to some extent for as long as several days, much like an alcohol hangover can impair a person despite having little or no alcohol in their system, though not to the extent that they are impaired while directly under the influence of the drug).
Oh, and I don't mean enjoy in the normal fashion, I also enjoy the anti-smoking ads, despite being a pack-a-day smoker, simply because they're so stupid and so obviously misleading. Someone used marijuana 10 days before getting arrested for a wreckless driving offense, so marijuana is evil, yeah, and everyone that dies of lung cancer that ever smoked a cigarette in their lives died because the tobacco companies are evil.
I was actually arguing that I was not "addicted" to any of those activities; the main point being that I didn't believe in the notion of "mental addition". Therefore, since sex/toons/games are not physical substances that are introduced into your body, they by definition cannot be addictive.
Actually, mental addiction is mostly considered to be a category for addictions for which they have not yet found the physical component. Most of the drugs that were considered mental addictions when I (and probably most of the people here) was growing up are now considered physical addictions because they have since found new methods of mapping the chemical levels in the brain, and found that these drugs (cocaine, for instance) have drastic effects on these drugs. Sex and other things that do not involve directly placing a chemical into the body can still cause increases in the chemicals in the brain and body that can be addictive, and therefore can be physically addictive. However, the average person is never exposed to these activities at levels that would increase the chemicals for an amount of time that would be considered addictive. That doesn't mean that there aren't people out there with 'addictive personalities' that are susceptible to these things because their brain responds differently to the same stimulus, thereby causing increased reactions and an increased chance of physical addiction.
Actually the more I think of it, the more we were really saying close to the exact same thing.
We probably were (or are) but from different angles;)
I am a bit obsessive about music though. 12,000 mp3s on random 24/7/365 to every room in the house. Mp3-cd player in car. Mp3s at work. Control via infrared remote (and soon 100-ft range keyboard).
Most of this is exactly the same for me, except that I'm a bit limited at the moment by my own resources (in other words, I can't afford an in-dash MP3 player in my car, or I'd have a hard drive-based player in a heartbeat, so I deal with cassettes at the moment). My mp3 folder at work is 2GB, down from 4GB because I needed more hard drive space for actual work, but I've been looking at methods to stream it from my home computer over the internet (the problem being that it would be a giant alarm bell to the people monitoring our network to have a constant stream of high-quality MP3 files coming in). I'm also looking at re-purposing an old computer at home to just stream MP3 and maybe movie files throughout the house, especially since it has an unused hard drive (which, when combined with the hard drive already full of MP3s in my current computer, would double my storage space). I also tend to go to sleep with one of the digital cable's music channels on.
If the power goes out, the music stopping wakes me from my sleep within 30 seconds. If I realize I'm in silence, I am alarmingly disturbed. If I try to sleep in silence, every single sound I hear causes my adrenaline to surge and my body to tense up wondering what it is.
See, for me, if the power goes out it's not music stopping that wakes me up, but rather the lack of certain sounds that a lot of people don't seem to notice, like a TV or clock being on (whether there's any volume or signal or not), or the hum from a light.
But I think I am just an obsessive personality. Just ask my wife.
It could be. I tend to have more of a 'collector' type of personality. I collect CDs, DVDs, and games the way some people collect baseball cards and comic books (well, actually, I still have my baseball cards and comic books, too, I just no longer add to those collections).
Just a quick note, though I agree with most of what you're saying, the word you're looking for is either dependent or dependant, the antonym of independent (either spelling, with an 'a' or 'e' has the same definition, whereas 'dependend' has no definition). (From dictionary.com: Note: The forms dependant, dependance, dependancy are from the French; the forms dependent, etc., are from the Latin. Some authorities give preference to the form dependant when the word is a noun, thus distinguishing it from the adjective, usually written dependent.)
I tend to think that dependent has a slightly less negative connotation than addiction, although it's certainly ever bit as serious (and essentially the same thing) when you're dependent on a drug or some other damaging activity or substance. This portion in particular: The necessary descriptive characteristics are preoccupation with a desire to obtain and take the drug and persistent drug-seeking behaviour. strikes home for me quite well as having had a teenage addiction to amphetamines. At times my friends and I could spend hours or even a full day doing nothing but finding someone that could get us the drugs, and then once we had them we didn't do much else but use them. The combination of the seeking behavior and the later withdrawals were exactly why I decided to stop, and probably had a lot to do with my success at breaking the addiction.
It's often drugs with the least obvious effects that become the most addictive, as you don't have an immediate extremely bad withdrawal to put your mind into motion to stop the behavior and/or use. That's why no matter how often studies are released showing a relation between smoking and serious long-term health problems, people will smoke, or between drinking and serious long-term health problems (although drinking has a rather nasty withdrawal).
If they are right, I guess I am "mentally addicted" to having sex, masturbating, listening to music, watching cartoons, playing games both video and real. And I am physically addicted to food and water.
Chances are that you never maintain high enough levels of the chemicals released during sex and masturbation (or in the case of most men, at the end of it) to become physically addicted to it. At the same time, there are many people that become obsessed with the act itself, or with trying to obtain the physical high they achieve during sex.
Listening to music, watching cartoons, and playing games, on the other hand, would have to appeal to people in very specific ways, trigger certain responses, to become addictive. In other words, it's unlikely that you'd be addicted to music, but rather to a piece of music or a genre which stimulates a particular response in your brain. The same would be true with cartoons, as they are also a passive medium. Games are slightly different because they get people directly involved, but many of the responses are the same. The primary difference comes in games like most MMO games which appeal to a certain quality in addictive personalities, as they offer an ever-reducing reward for an ever-increasing exposure. The difference, of course, is that in drugs you're directly using a chemical that effects your brain, whereas in games you're producing chemicals in your brain as a reaction to the environment. In many people a particular game may have no reaction at all because it simply doesn't trigger any strong emotional responses.
Marijuana is not physically addictive, but DAMN is it fun, or so I hear
Marijuana can be physically addictive, it's just a matter of time conditioning your system to the chemicals released by the marijuana. On the other hand, most people have a tendency towards occasional use rather than the extremes, as with most other drugs (that don't have a strong initial addiction). Additionally, withdrawals from a physical addiction can differ a great deal based on which of the body's natural chemicals are affected, and how long it takes for the drug to leave the system. Marijuana happens to take a lot longer to leave the system than say cocaine, heroin, or amphetamines (about 7x as long, iirc), so any symptoms will be much more subtle, and even much further out than most people would expect. Someone that smokes a bowl or a joint every couple of days might never experience a single symptom of withdrawal, but might also not be taking in enough of the chemicals to become addicted, either (and even much heavier users).
I have to agree with this. I tend to be very reluctant to get involved in social situations, or to go out without a very good reason to do so. I also tend to get very irritable in public places. On the other hand, I also have the same problem with certain types of multiplayer environments. It's very easy for me to jump into a game of Quake 3 DM, but I get more irritable in team-based games (on the other hand, with people I know fairly well, I enjoy team-based games a great deal). I can't stand the majority of the current MMO games because grouping up with other players is almost a requirement at many levels of the game.
On the other hand, if I am not playing games (whether console or PC games), I find myself doing something else, whether it's reading, watching TV, or programming, that still involves little interaction with the rest of the world. Granted, none of it stops me from having a girlfriend (though she occasionally complains because our personalities are very different, she has a hard time spending time alone), or from going out to see a movie or a concert (saw Slayer w/ Arch Enemy, Hatebreed, and Epoxy just a couple nights ago, plan to see the new Matrix either tonite or tomorrow, probably the latter since I can catch an early showing with fewer people), but overall I prefer to be entertained in the comfort of my home, rather than through social stimulus.
Just because I play games at least as much as I work in the average week doesn't mean that it's an addiction, it just means that I have a lot of free time on my hands;)
However, there's no real depth (at least early on) to those characters. They're simply images. There's no detail on why Mario's saving the princess, for all we know he's never even seen her before he saves her. Sonic had character built up through the way he was designed and some of the things he did in the game (try setting the controller down for a while, for instance). Sonic had an attitude, but this is still image rather than any significant depth in the character.
Even Max Payne, which was the article's first mention of strong character, is every bit as derivative as the plot, and his character is developed primarily through the story.
Some basic social psychology can tell us (or, more importantly, artists) that designing the character's image in certain ways can project feelings onto the viewer, without knowing anything about that character, and both Nintendo and Sega used this well in their games, but in the end the story tells the tale. Sonic's sharp lines project his attitude, while Mario's round-ness projects a likeable character. Disney uses similar ideas in their animation, and Pixar has translated this into the computer-generated arm of animation. Shrek is an ogre, a creature that would normally be depicted as a scary, vile, disgusting creature, instead we get a round character with story points that emphasize no matter how hard he tries, no one's going to think he's scary or vile (though perhaps disgusting all the same). Try to count how many Disney villains have pointy chins or noses and thin, tall bodies with sharp lines. These things are important to get a point across at a glance, but are always developed by story.
If you're the kind of person that wants a strong connection with the characters in your game, than perhaps you'll like games that center on them, but without a plot to develop the character, that character is simply what you project onto them.
For advertising and to get people interested you may use a strong image to project your character, and it is important that the image and the plot that develops that character mesh well together, but if the story isn't there, or just doesn't develop the character, than the image will be all you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe so, but geeks (me included) will want choice.
When it comes down to it, regardless of how many distros there are, whether it's one or one thousand, there's always a choice in the software you run. Beyond that, they're basing their distro on Debian, just adding software that Debian won't include (like closed-source drivers). You could always choose Debian, or another distro, or modify the UserLinux distro for yourself.
How will the business people know that UserLinux is the one true distro any more than they know that Debian is the one true distro now?
How do they know what RedHat or SuSe are? They don't. They rely on people that know what they're doing to make the right decision. That's why US Corporations have been moving to have positions like CTO and CFO alongside the CEO, because they need people with a firm understanding of the technical and financial sides of business. If the CTO doesn't know about UserLinux, or any other distro of Linux, chances are he knows that someone on his staff will be able to give him an informed decision. My favorite part about being a geek is not just the control over my computer, but also being the person people go to when they want to know what they should do to keep up with technology. The best managers know that there are people working for them that know particular portions of their business better than they do, and will go to those people for advice on those portions of the business.
but if the architecture is totally different, then you must rely COMPLETELY on the API's for your game if you wish to port to the PC, which is not the current state of affairs if you want the fastest game possible.
Most people don't drop down past the APIs to write to the CPU any more, though. The place they do this is for the video card, using extensions or specialized languages to get closer to the GPU and get finer control. This is helped by the fact that the current XBox uses an nVidia chipset which is fairly compatible with the nVidia GPUs in home PCs. In the case of the next XBox, you're looking at an ATI part that will probably be similar to the ATI parts at home, but, most importantly, you're looking at a part that many developers have claimed does very well with straight DirectX9 code without dropping down to a lower level, because it was designed for the API and the API was tweaked with the ATI hardware available.
Regarding the PsP prototype shots. It would have been useful for you to supply a link so I knew specifically what the fuck you were talking about but since you did not I'll just have to google it and see if I can find something. Also since you did not supply a link I have no idea of the credibility of your claims of the prototype shots.
Better than a google, go through last week's games.slashdot.org stories, there were 2 last week linking to different sites with the prototype shots, which is probably why he didn't bother linking to the shots for you.
I believe the PsP will dominate over the Game Boy Advance for several reasons:
* Sony Knows their shit and wouldn't waste time and money by coming out with a piece of shit like the nokia.
That remains to be seen, since they've never competed in this market before (the closest they came was the PocketStation, which was more like a DreamCast memory card than a handheld console). Nokia certainly 'knows their shit' when it comes to cell phones, but that didn't stop them from producing shit.
* Sony has a great library of playstation games to port to the new portable.
Quick! Name 10 Sony games. Nevermind, I don't really want to know. Sony has a lot of contracts with people to do PS2 games. I haven't seen anouncements on who has been contractually obligated to make PSP games, whether ports or not.
* I never found the GBA appealing - it is lacking in its game library (no new mario platformer???) and there is no backlighting.
So get a GBA-SP which has a front/side-light. I think I prefer SMB3 to a 'new' mario platformer, although I agree that if done right it'd be nice to see Mario's 2D legacy continued. 2 of the 3 Castlevania games are excellent. Then there's WarioWare, Golden Sun, Advance Wars, Zelda, and so on.
* The GBA is marketed primarily towards kids. The PsP will be marketed to teens and young adults. Kids have no money to spend - Teens and young adults do.
Which is why more GBAs are selling than PS2s, everywhere. Nokia shot themselves in the foot by saying the GBA was for kids, because, surprise, the market they claimed they were aiming for already owns GBAs. Sony's likely to find that very few people buying PSPs for games don't already own a GBA.
How can I predict the popularity of the next Xbox? --- Because Microsoft is the only console maker that appears to be in high gear for their next console.
What hole did you crawl into? Microsoft is barely starting design of the processor and has selected a vendor for their GPU. On the Sony side, they were talking about cell processors with IBM and Hitachi shortly after the PS2 was released. On the Nintendo side the work's been going for some time and they solidified their deals with ATI and IBM as well. If anything, Microsoft is a bit behind, especially since Sony's been working on the PS3 since before the XBox and Cube were released.
It will be out on the market way ahead of Nintendo and Sony's next attempt. The PS2 is already stale - I own one and might buy one or 2 more games that's about it. The current Xbox has about 3 customers and the GameCube . . . well the Cube is alright - it would be nice to see a Super Mario game though.
Nintendo already stated they won't be last to market. I think you'll find that all 3 consoles will be released close on the heels of one another, unlike this current generation, where the DreamCast was released about a year ahead of the PS2, and the XBox and Cube were released about a year after the PS2. I've still got plenty of PS2 titles I want, but then I only buy exclusive titles for it, since I'm one of the 3 XBox owners and buy most of the cross-platform games for it. As for the Cube, I take it you mean a Super Mario game besides Sunshine.
Regardless, by the time the next Xbox comes out the GameCube will be showing its age pretty badly and gamers will be hurting for a new system. With Nintendo an
So, MS is going to have to port over a major portion of their kernel, including directx and a few other bits, to the G5? Is this like Apple internally porting OS-X to intel, but never letting the public have it?
No, because the PPC port of NT is sitting on most of the NT4 discs out there. They just dropped support for it eventually, and unless a significant demand for XP on PPC comes along after they've put it on XBox, it's unlikely that they'll start shipping it again.
That being said, maybe shifting the XBox to PPC will be enough to drive demand amongst XBox developers to have XP on PPC (this all assumes that they aren't going to keep using 2k as the kernel for the next XBox).
As for SLI, I think that as long as the two cards matched they would SLI and in SLI mode it only made use of 16M total (so either the 8M or 12M cards were exactly the same if you bought two and SLI'ed them.) I did not ever SLI mine, one $300 card was enough for me, thanks.
;) I eventually had about 6 case fans mostly for the V2s and the hard drives.
The texture RAM would be the same on both cards, so the 8MB was essentially 12MB in SLI (4+4+4), while the 12MB was 16MB in SLI(4+4+8). The 8MB of (non-texture) video RAM was essentially being used to produce the 1024x768 resolution, but since SLI rendered alternating lines, each card had to have the same set of textures. I don't think there was a BestBuy near me when the cards came out, and I'm still pretty sure I paid more than $300 for each card. The filter here says that archive.org is filtered for sex when I actually try to run a search on it, so maybe Ill check from home on what Diamond was selling the Monster 2s for back in 98.
Damn, I think I put that card in a machine I paid $1,600 for to start with - bringing the total over $2k. I only WISH I could justify dropping $2k on a machine today.
I dropped it over time, with the V2s and the 400MHz!!! CPU being the last 2 items. Unfortunately, the V2s didn't drop much in price until the TNTs came out, but I saved ~$300-400 on the CPU. It's pretty easy to calculate that I spent closer to $3000 including the monitor, and almost $3800 with the printer on top of that. Then the V2 cards started an internal struggle to burn the whole system down, starting with each other and progressing to the sound card and ethernet card
During the times when you are standing around in a store with money burning a hole in your pocket, the Ebert kind are the ones you want to listen to. During the times when you want to increase your appreciation for the artform, or see trends or underlying symbolic themes that some movies might share, or learn about the artistic effect of certain new techniques and technologies, or consider the relationship between the story of a film and the political environment that spawned it, or weigh the merits of attributing a collaborative medium like film to the vision of a single director, then maybe Ebert isn't your man.
Still, Ebert does tend to give light to some of the deeper form of criticism. In fact, it tends to get in the way of his judgment on films from time to time, where he spends too much time analyzing how the movie fits in it's genre or how it made him feel rather than telling people it's a good movie (or he doesn't notice it's a good movie because he pigeon-holed it wrong at the start).
I think that's the point, though, because current game reviewers don't even bother trying to be Ebert, they don't ground their reviews well in context, they simply review the points, and in many cases a particular magazine's (or site's) review system will get in the reviewer's way as much as anything else (score on graphics, sound, etc).
Part of the problem is simply that games aren't ready for this yet. We still read reviews to find out whether or not a game is buggy (or well-executed) rather than whether or not we want to play it. In fact, most of us know we want to play a game before we read a review of it. If the technology can mature to a point where we aren't worried about the mechanics, I think it will be much more likely that reviewers can go a little deeper in their reviews and give us more information than simply whether or not the developers screwed up the controls and the game crashes 5 times in 10 minutes (hell, I had no problems with C&C Generals, but with the expansion I get a crash to desktop every 3rd game or so), and whether or not the game engine takes advantage of the technology, or whether or not the game actually runs on that minimum system listed on the box.
With more developers sharing and re-using technology, as well as productions costs rising for games, it's very likely that things will become more stable (as people realize they don't need to build their own engine every time they make a game), and then reviews can get away from the mechanics and talk about the game, for once.
We'd probably even buy more Macs, since their graphics HW is so sleek.
I agree with everything else, basically, but the graphics hardware on Macs is the same as it is on x86, with the exception of the monitors (which can be used on an x86 PC as well). An ATI Radeon doesn't have much to differentiate between an x86 or PPC card, just as with the nVidia cards.
Mech Warrior took my breath away. The flyby scenes of the two clans headquarters when you started up? Oh my goodness. I forget what year this game was released, probably '96. I might just go home and fire this up after work.
The flyby (in MechWarrior 2) was pre-rendered. The game itself was in software. Later on they released a version of it for 3dfx cards, but frankly it had some issues and only added textures (instead of flat colours) to a game that was already visually impressive.
Sure it's always a little bit of a letdown to play the old games that looked awesome back then. But remeniscing keeps my interest long enough for a few games. Hell, the original Pool of Radiance (not 3d) still hold my interest with it's crude graphics.
I've never managed to get into MechWarrior 3 or 4 the way I got into MechWarrior 2, and I'm not really sure why that is.
I stuck my 12MB V2 (Diamond Monster 3D 2) card into my dad's new P2-400 (I was buying parts to build mine at the time, so this was a card I had bought for my first computer, but I was still saving up for the CPU and 2nd V2) and loaded up Unreal and showed that outdoors level off to everyone that would look.
Nothing since has been quite as mind-blowing, despite the graphics and cards getting better. It was simply because it was the first to do it really well, and, of course, the game pretty much fell apart a couple more levels down the line.
The V2 cards were very solid until everyone moved to either D3D or pure OpenGL (instead of the miniGL crap needed for the 3dfx cards, or glide). I still remember having to use a program that forced games to use the Voodoo card instead of the Riva 128, or later the TNT card, because many of the earlier games didn't expect people to have 3D capabilities on their 2D card and a 3D add-on board, but the 2D-only cards were dying out when the V2 came out and although the TNT and TNT2 could deal out some D3D goodness, it wasn't until the TNT2Ultra that OpenGL performance was as good as the miniGL, and that most games stopped being Glide-only.
People say that the OS X GUI takes up too much CPU, while in fact it takes up almost none. All of the windows, shadows, etc, are being done with the video card though Quartz Extreme, no programming necessary from the app writer to take advantage of this either.
This isn't quite true. Most of the desktop rendering is still done by the CPU in the same way that it was done before QE was added to OS X. It's simply the individual windows that are rendered by QE, and OpenGL handles the 'surface' which is handed to it by Quartz and QE. So OpenGL mostly comes in to handle effects (like Expose, the fast user switching animation, and the opening/closing animations) and shadows, QE handles the windows and passes the textures to OpenGL when an effect is needed, and the CPU still does it's thing for the desktop (until you hand off the desktop as a surface to OpenGL for the user switching animation).
In other words, things that were basically eye-candy and were really slowing OS X down quite badly before QE are now handled by QE, but the base 2D engine that utilizes the CPU is still working the same way it does with most other operating systems.
That being said, free eye candy is free eye candy, and although there are many people out there that prefer things to be stripped down, I'd rather have something with a little flash that can be done just as quickly.
Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.
The Voodoo2 cards started at $250 and $350 (or somewhere around there) for the 8MB and 12MB models, respectively. The only way to get the 1024x768 mentioned in the article was to have 2 12MB cards in SLI mode (which meant connecting the 2 V2 cards with a small ribbon cable between the two cards inside the case). Additionally, the pass-through cables that came with most V2 cards caused some degredation of the signal going to the monitor, so the graphics tended to be a bit dark, but was easily fixed by buying a better cable.
The performance was definitely solid, though, since the V2 cards I had were originally passing the 2D signal of a Riva128, and then a TNT, and finally a TNT2Ultra was the card that made me decide to pull out the V2 cards (not to mention that the V2s I owned did not have fans on the boards/chips, which meant that one of them burned up within about 6 months).
The combination of the lack of real OpenGL support, lack of 32-bit colour, and the speed of the TNT2 Ultra was what finally put 3dfx to bed, as the Voodoo 3 couldn't keep up and the Voodoo 4 was delayed far too long while 3dfx kept talking about how raw framerates were more important than features, and that no one could see the difference between 24-bit (the V3 supposedly output 24-bit colour through some tricks) and 32-bit colour anyway. Quake 3 proved them wrong quite quickly, as anyone could show with a few screenshots at the time.
It's basically just an article on the early 3dfx cards and then a quick skim of about 1/4th of nVidia's lineup and a love-fest with ATI's most recent cards.
It almost sounds like the author only talked about the cards he owned.
Just on the nVidia side, he barely mentioned the TNT and it's various derivatives, didn't mention the TNT2 Ultra or other TNT2 cards (except the baseline), and didn't mention that the GeForce 256 came in SDR and DDR versions, pretty much solidifying the future of DDR on video cards (because there was little other difference between the cards to explain the difference in benchmarks). Not to mention the later GF2 upgrades, the GF3, and the GF4.
Even with his early mentions of ATI he missed the mark a bit. ATI wasn't aiming for the 3d market so much because they had a solid hold on the OEM market, which didn't care (at the time) about 3d. When the OEM's started to care, nVidia had their chipset ready in part because of their XBox work (or they got the XBox work because they were working on the chipsets for the OEM market, either way it wasn't long before they were releasing motherboard chipsets), and a solid hold on the lead in 3D graphics technology.
Beyond that, he mentions that nVidia 'bought out 3dfx', which isn't quite right, since nVidia simply bought most of their IP and left the company to it's own devices (3dfx basically sold all of their assets and shut down).
Overall, it's a very light article that could be surpassed by a quick read through the review history on most sites that review graphics hardware.
including the fact that they hold tradition and social standing in higher regard. Diamonds, marriages, all these things point to a higher bar for entry with female gamers, because a game will have to become a cultural phenomenon for many women to even bother taking a look.
I don't think this is quite as true as many people would like to believe. Many women don't care if they have a traditional wedding or not, especially as they get older (or, more accurately, as younger generations get older). It's more something that their mother, their family, wants than they want themselves. My girlfriend prefers emeralds to diamonds, but has a few beliefs about natural vs. lab-created that she holds to fairly strongly (which points towards the traditional belief), but could be broken if she would pay attention. As far as games, the hardest part is getting her to play. Once she's interested in a game she'll play it like a compulsion (and I'm probably buying a second GameCube for the bedroom soon so we can play different games at the same time).
Compare this to men, who see killing, and go "uh. Me see kill. Me want kill." and start playing.
This difference should be attributed to the way in which men and women take part in competition. Men are extremely overt, while women are very subtle. At the same time, I think women are much more harsh in competing for something, and tend to not get into something they don't understand.
This leads to a few different things:
1) if they can't learn to play the game, with all it's subtleties, fairly quickly, they won't play. If it frustrates them or the control scheme doesn't make sense to them, they often quit before they even really get started.
2) Women will compete for the best time or score, but may also compete for other things, like completeness or more subtle goals.
Of course, this does not apply to all girls, as every individual is different. I've played TFC with a handful of very skilled women that played for many of the same reasons the guys did, or at least didn't appear to have any different methods of playing from the men and didn't express views on the gameplay that were any different from those held by the men.
Of course, I keep asking my girlfriend to try something besides Pokemon. My only successes so far have been Animal Crossing and WarioWare. As I said, though, it's usually just a matter of getting the controller in her hands and her being able to pick up the controls fairly quickly (which is helped by a quick explanation of them if I can get the basics down to a couple short sentences).
"GC/GBA: The entire original Prince of Persia, unlockable via the GBA or GameCube. Connectivity between the two will also allow for automatic health regeneration on the GameCube game."
which in my opinion translates into: you don't get to play it(the bonus, original prince of persia) if you just own gameboy color(such has appeared in few other games as well.. that you get extra content if you have a gba).
It says the original Prince of Persia will be unlockable via the GBA or the GameCube. The 'or' in that sentence is the clue that the GBA isn't required. It then goes on to say that the GBA connectivity will give automatic health regeneration on the GameCube game, which is, well, only a big deal if you have a problem beating the game the way it was designed.
As for the GameBoy Color, what does that have to do with anything? The GBC isn't mentioned in the article and doesn't do much of anything with a GameCube.
Why not just do a proper group review, rather than saying "Don't by this because we don't like it"?
Umm they didn't say that. In fact, they repeatedly praised the iPod to try to make sure people that read it understood that they feel the iPod is the best MP3 player on the market. That being said, they tried to put forward some good MP3 players that might serve some people better, based on certain requirements, and did it in an interesting way (5 reasons not to buy an iPod), rather than just doing yet another group review in which the iPod would beat the snot out of all of them and leave people wondering why they bothered.
WHen are you ever away from a power source ad listening to music continually for 6 hours? This is unlikely to be an issue for most people.
Every time I fly to my parents' house, or international flights. If there's a cigarette lighter adapter I'd certainly never have a problem driving anywhere, but airports and planes are a pain in the ass, and I never do get to go from the east coast to the west coast (or back) without a layover somewhere.
Compared to the cost of the music required to fill it, the iPod is dirt cheap.
So where can I go to buy an iPod, spread the cost out over 15 years, and pay in $10-15 increments, with spurts where I don't pay for as much as a year at a time (without having some lawyer come after me for not paying)?
Looking it up though, the iPod has come down quite a bit as they've increased the size of drives available. A 40GB iPod might actually be able to hold all of my music at moderate compression levels. Still, for my uses, the CD-based players may actually be better, despite the need to swap CDs to have access to my full library (and have all of those CDs accessable in the first place).
I think the main point of the article, though, is to expose people to more MP3 players, since, as they said, the iPod is the most popular MP3 player available, and may not be ideal for everyone (even if just for it's price).
But what about the millions of amateur musicians out there? I would LOVE to have a device that I can take to an informal gig or jam session and make a decent-sounding recording, and then transfer it to my computer later. Right now I use a Sony Minidisc recorder, but you're limited to just a couple hours per disc if you want any sort of quality, and then you have to do an analog transfer of the audio to your computer later! Almost defeats the purpose of recording it digitally in the first place.
I tend to use a small rack of equipment (amp/preamp, eq, effects, roughly 5 rack-spaces in a 6-space rack) regardless of where I'm playing (I simply vary the speakers that I use), so, if I wanted to do a high quality recording I could get something much better suited to the job in a rackmount unit. That being said, an iPod (or just about any other hard drive based unit) would probably be much cheaper for that sort of thing, especially if you aren't doing it for the purpose of recording an album (since there isn't a need for the absolute best recording possible).
On the other hand, if I were playing any place larger than I currently do, I'd have a lot more equipment to haul around and a small computer would probably be part of that.
Storage issues may be going away on the desktop, and on some hard drive-based portables, but for the most part, it's still an issue with portables as well as with most (non-LAN) networks. Sure, if I'm sending it from my home office to my living room I should be ok sending the full bitrate file. If I'm sending it to my cubicle at work, though, I'll get in trouble streaming (or downloading) full-sized files. Similarly, most of my MP3 files can't be sent through email because my provider has a limit on file sizes (so I have to split each file over 5 or more email attachments), but at a lower bit rate they could go through a little more easily, and even a little more quickly.
I don't need CD quality at the gym, or even in the car (where it would cost me even more to sound proof the interior to the point where I could tell), but I'd like it at home, and I shouldn't have to re-encode for every situation.
If you want to take the posture that your Windows setup is as important as some critical piece of business equipment then you'd better just read the damn EULA that comes with products in the first place, as you would there.
I simply take the posture that installing software from any vendor should not break software from another vendor, or break the OS itself, both of which iTunes does. I don't recall anyone pointing out anything in the EULA that says 'iTunes will make your CD-ROM drive inaccessible if you uninstall the software'. I can understand some people thinking it's ok for MusicMatch to be broken simply because Apple developed the functionality and warned you, but that's an issue of whether or not you believe it's ok for someone to (A) do this in the first place and (B) get away with it just because it's in an EULA. Making the CD-ROM drive stop working properly after removing the iTunes software is a mess, but then you weren't defending that (and may not have been aware of it).
Chances are you had Musicsnatch installed in order to update your iPod in the first place and it beggars belief that you'd want to keep it for that purpose after seeing and installing iTunes.
Since I don't have MusicMatch or an iPod, that particular problem is not mine, but I believe (mostly as a software developer, but also as a user) that installing one piece of software should not screw up another, even if you put it in an EULA (and I don't believe half or more of what's in an EULA should be legally binding).
I don't even know why I'm typing this because it's just the same attitude I always see from Windows using trolls who are jealous of the quality of Apple's stuff and desperately seek some pathetically minor point to snipe at them with.
The quality of Apple's Windows software is questionable at best, especially if iTunes is the best example. Their software for Mac OS may be top-notch, but I really wouldn't know since I haven't used an Apple computer in several years (though I had few complaints when I did).
As far as I can tell, iTunes breaks MusicMatch, disables the CD-ROM on uninstall of iTunes, and possibly causes other issues with access to music files (I'm going to have to go home and investigate this tonite because suddenly my gf can't access her music files). The CD-ROM access alone was a big problem for me, but luckily I found a working list of the registry entries required to fix the problem. I'm hoping the problem with my home computer is simply user error, as I actually like using iTunes for my mp3 collection, even if I don't use most of the features (iTunes Music Service and iPod synchronization), dislike the installation/uninstallation, and have problems with the interface. It does play my (fairly large) playlist without a hitch, regardless of what I do, which in itself means that at home it gets more use than any other player on the system. Since I didn't bother installing an mp3 ripper at work, though, iTunes can only play about 5% of my playlist and is useless here, therefore it was best to remove it (and then try to fix the uninstall problems).
No it can't. There is not one single case on record of physical Marijuana addiction ever. There is no known psysiological mechanism for this to happen. Just because those nice DARE people told you this in school doesn't make it true.
Almost anything can be physically addictive, it's just a matter of knowing what effects it has on the body (or, in the case of most addictions, brain's chemistry), and what the withdrawal symptoms are. In the cases of most drugs previously considered mentally addictive, they didn't have the technology or knowledge to know the physical effects of the drug outside of observation, so they attributed the addiction to a mental dependency. Additionally, most studies can not be done in a scientific manner on things like addiction because of ethics problems with forcing people to do something that you believe (or know) is harmful to them. Additionally, because different people can have different reactions to the same drugs (based on their body's (or brain's) chemistry), it's impossible to know what the effect will be on every individual. Marijuana can be physically addictive just because it causes one person to have a particular chemical reaction in their brain that we are not currently aware of; that doesn't mean that it always is, or even in the majority of people. By the way, those nice DARE people haven't been involved in my education in the last 15 or so years, and until about 5-10 years ago cocaine did not have any known physiological mechanism for addiction and therefore was not physically addictive. Now, however, they have a very good idea of what cocaine does in the brain and it is quite well-accepted as a physical addiction.
Case in point, I smoke heavily (and I mean heavily) every day and have done for years, but I've been in Japan for a week with nothing and I have had no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever.
If you took a drug test today it's very likely that they could find the marijuana in your system, even with a urine test. The fact that marijuana takes as much as 2 weeks to disappear from a urine test is exactly why withdrawal symptoms can be much easier to handle than with other drugs, and much harder to detect. It also makes it harder for some people to stop (unless they dislike the effects that most people use marijuana to attain), because negative side-effects are mostly believed to be negligible and are hard to detect and correlate to the marijuana use.
As a side note, this is also why I enjoy the recent advertisements (at least in my area) stating that X% of wreckless drivers tested had marijuana in their system, because, unlike alcohol, marijuana stays in your system much longer than most of the impairing effects (though some people notice that they are impaired to some extent for as long as several days, much like an alcohol hangover can impair a person despite having little or no alcohol in their system, though not to the extent that they are impaired while directly under the influence of the drug).
Oh, and I don't mean enjoy in the normal fashion, I also enjoy the anti-smoking ads, despite being a pack-a-day smoker, simply because they're so stupid and so obviously misleading. Someone used marijuana 10 days before getting arrested for a wreckless driving offense, so marijuana is evil, yeah, and everyone that dies of lung cancer that ever smoked a cigarette in their lives died because the tobacco companies are evil.
I was actually arguing that I was not "addicted" to any of those activities; the main point being that I didn't believe in the notion of "mental addition". Therefore, since sex/toons/games are not physical substances that are introduced into your body, they by definition cannot be addictive.
;)
Actually, mental addiction is mostly considered to be a category for addictions for which they have not yet found the physical component. Most of the drugs that were considered mental addictions when I (and probably most of the people here) was growing up are now considered physical addictions because they have since found new methods of mapping the chemical levels in the brain, and found that these drugs (cocaine, for instance) have drastic effects on these drugs. Sex and other things that do not involve directly placing a chemical into the body can still cause increases in the chemicals in the brain and body that can be addictive, and therefore can be physically addictive. However, the average person is never exposed to these activities at levels that would increase the chemicals for an amount of time that would be considered addictive. That doesn't mean that there aren't people out there with 'addictive personalities' that are susceptible to these things because their brain responds differently to the same stimulus, thereby causing increased reactions and an increased chance of physical addiction.
Actually the more I think of it, the more we were really saying close to the exact same thing.
We probably were (or are) but from different angles
I am a bit obsessive about music though. 12,000 mp3s on random 24/7/365 to every room in the house. Mp3-cd player in car. Mp3s at work. Control via infrared remote (and soon 100-ft range keyboard).
Most of this is exactly the same for me, except that I'm a bit limited at the moment by my own resources (in other words, I can't afford an in-dash MP3 player in my car, or I'd have a hard drive-based player in a heartbeat, so I deal with cassettes at the moment). My mp3 folder at work is 2GB, down from 4GB because I needed more hard drive space for actual work, but I've been looking at methods to stream it from my home computer over the internet (the problem being that it would be a giant alarm bell to the people monitoring our network to have a constant stream of high-quality MP3 files coming in). I'm also looking at re-purposing an old computer at home to just stream MP3 and maybe movie files throughout the house, especially since it has an unused hard drive (which, when combined with the hard drive already full of MP3s in my current computer, would double my storage space). I also tend to go to sleep with one of the digital cable's music channels on.
If the power goes out, the music stopping wakes me from my sleep within 30 seconds. If I realize I'm in silence, I am alarmingly disturbed. If I try to sleep in silence, every single sound I hear causes my adrenaline to surge and my body to tense up wondering what it is.
See, for me, if the power goes out it's not music stopping that wakes me up, but rather the lack of certain sounds that a lot of people don't seem to notice, like a TV or clock being on (whether there's any volume or signal or not), or the hum from a light.
But I think I am just an obsessive personality. Just ask my wife.
It could be. I tend to have more of a 'collector' type of personality. I collect CDs, DVDs, and games the way some people collect baseball cards and comic books (well, actually, I still have my baseball cards and comic books, too, I just no longer add to those collections).
So you are dependend
Just a quick note, though I agree with most of what you're saying, the word you're looking for is either dependent or dependant, the antonym of independent (either spelling, with an 'a' or 'e' has the same definition, whereas 'dependend' has no definition). (From dictionary.com: Note: The forms dependant, dependance, dependancy are from the French; the forms dependent, etc., are from the Latin. Some authorities give preference to the form dependant when the word is a noun, thus distinguishing it from the adjective, usually written dependent.)
I tend to think that dependent has a slightly less negative connotation than addiction, although it's certainly ever bit as serious (and essentially the same thing) when you're dependent on a drug or some other damaging activity or substance. This portion in particular:
The necessary descriptive characteristics are preoccupation with a desire to obtain and take the drug and persistent drug-seeking behaviour.
strikes home for me quite well as having had a teenage addiction to amphetamines. At times my friends and I could spend hours or even a full day doing nothing but finding someone that could get us the drugs, and then once we had them we didn't do much else but use them. The combination of the seeking behavior and the later withdrawals were exactly why I decided to stop, and probably had a lot to do with my success at breaking the addiction.
It's often drugs with the least obvious effects that become the most addictive, as you don't have an immediate extremely bad withdrawal to put your mind into motion to stop the behavior and/or use. That's why no matter how often studies are released showing a relation between smoking and serious long-term health problems, people will smoke, or between drinking and serious long-term health problems (although drinking has a rather nasty withdrawal).
If they are right, I guess I am "mentally addicted" to having sex, masturbating, listening to music, watching cartoons, playing games both video and real. And I am physically addicted to food and water.
Chances are that you never maintain high enough levels of the chemicals released during sex and masturbation (or in the case of most men, at the end of it) to become physically addicted to it. At the same time, there are many people that become obsessed with the act itself, or with trying to obtain the physical high they achieve during sex.
Listening to music, watching cartoons, and playing games, on the other hand, would have to appeal to people in very specific ways, trigger certain responses, to become addictive. In other words, it's unlikely that you'd be addicted to music, but rather to a piece of music or a genre which stimulates a particular response in your brain. The same would be true with cartoons, as they are also a passive medium. Games are slightly different because they get people directly involved, but many of the responses are the same. The primary difference comes in games like most MMO games which appeal to a certain quality in addictive personalities, as they offer an ever-reducing reward for an ever-increasing exposure. The difference, of course, is that in drugs you're directly using a chemical that effects your brain, whereas in games you're producing chemicals in your brain as a reaction to the environment. In many people a particular game may have no reaction at all because it simply doesn't trigger any strong emotional responses.
Marijuana is not physically addictive, but DAMN is it fun, or so I hear
Marijuana can be physically addictive, it's just a matter of time conditioning your system to the chemicals released by the marijuana. On the other hand, most people have a tendency towards occasional use rather than the extremes, as with most other drugs (that don't have a strong initial addiction). Additionally, withdrawals from a physical addiction can differ a great deal based on which of the body's natural chemicals are affected, and how long it takes for the drug to leave the system. Marijuana happens to take a lot longer to leave the system than say cocaine, heroin, or amphetamines (about 7x as long, iirc), so any symptoms will be much more subtle, and even much further out than most people would expect. Someone that smokes a bowl or a joint every couple of days might never experience a single symptom of withdrawal, but might also not be taking in enough of the chemicals to become addicted, either (and even much heavier users).
I have to agree with this. I tend to be very reluctant to get involved in social situations, or to go out without a very good reason to do so. I also tend to get very irritable in public places. On the other hand, I also have the same problem with certain types of multiplayer environments. It's very easy for me to jump into a game of Quake 3 DM, but I get more irritable in team-based games (on the other hand, with people I know fairly well, I enjoy team-based games a great deal). I can't stand the majority of the current MMO games because grouping up with other players is almost a requirement at many levels of the game.
;)
On the other hand, if I am not playing games (whether console or PC games), I find myself doing something else, whether it's reading, watching TV, or programming, that still involves little interaction with the rest of the world. Granted, none of it stops me from having a girlfriend (though she occasionally complains because our personalities are very different, she has a hard time spending time alone), or from going out to see a movie or a concert (saw Slayer w/ Arch Enemy, Hatebreed, and Epoxy just a couple nights ago, plan to see the new Matrix either tonite or tomorrow, probably the latter since I can catch an early showing with fewer people), but overall I prefer to be entertained in the comfort of my home, rather than through social stimulus.
Just because I play games at least as much as I work in the average week doesn't mean that it's an addiction, it just means that I have a lot of free time on my hands
However, there's no real depth (at least early on) to those characters. They're simply images. There's no detail on why Mario's saving the princess, for all we know he's never even seen her before he saves her. Sonic had character built up through the way he was designed and some of the things he did in the game (try setting the controller down for a while, for instance). Sonic had an attitude, but this is still image rather than any significant depth in the character.
Even Max Payne, which was the article's first mention of strong character, is every bit as derivative as the plot, and his character is developed primarily through the story.
Some basic social psychology can tell us (or, more importantly, artists) that designing the character's image in certain ways can project feelings onto the viewer, without knowing anything about that character, and both Nintendo and Sega used this well in their games, but in the end the story tells the tale. Sonic's sharp lines project his attitude, while Mario's round-ness projects a likeable character. Disney uses similar ideas in their animation, and Pixar has translated this into the computer-generated arm of animation. Shrek is an ogre, a creature that would normally be depicted as a scary, vile, disgusting creature, instead we get a round character with story points that emphasize no matter how hard he tries, no one's going to think he's scary or vile (though perhaps disgusting all the same). Try to count how many Disney villains have pointy chins or noses and thin, tall bodies with sharp lines. These things are important to get a point across at a glance, but are always developed by story.
If you're the kind of person that wants a strong connection with the characters in your game, than perhaps you'll like games that center on them, but without a plot to develop the character, that character is simply what you project onto them.
For advertising and to get people interested you may use a strong image to project your character, and it is important that the image and the plot that develops that character mesh well together, but if the story isn't there, or just doesn't develop the character, than the image will be all you have.