If anybody remembers, there was a Futurama episode ("A Fishful of Dollars") that mentioned Baywatch: Pamela Anderson is surprised to hear Fry hadn't heard of Baywatch: The Movie, her follow up comment included "the first movie shot entirely in slow motion" and "so he doesn't know I won the Oscar?".
I think I'd like to see that version of a Baywatch movie: entirely in slow motion and award winning. Couldn't be any worse than what we got.
I happen to have pre-ordered it so I got it day 1. Outside of popular youtube channels I'm probably one of the first ones to even have this game never mind play it.
I should mention I didn't realize until recently this was the Switch version of a Wii U game. So I don't know what's new the Switch and what was already there. And also the last console mario kart I played win "Mario Kart Wii". I don't know how many there have been since then.
There are the different CC kart classes as always and the different cups as always. I think there's 48 Grand Prix courses and I didn't try to count the number of characters to choose from (across at least three different weight classes). Also a ton of different vehicles a number of types.
One of the main things I found annoying about Mario Kart Wii was being by far in first place (while playing solo) and getting hit but a blue shell then multiple red shells, thus going from 1st to 8th place about 3 feet from the finish line. That just seems like broken AI to me. I haven't experienced that in this one.
I'm knowledgeable enough I know what the popular consensus is with the different cc classes. I know 50cc is entirely too easy and I get beat every track by half the track. And the 200cc is super-crazy-fast-tough (again, as a single player thing). But as with a lot of games now the single player is really just practice for multiplayer. At least that's the vibe I'm starting to sense.
Overall I would say it's very good game well worth the money but it seems very clear it is really intended as a party game.
Uh, you realize you can buy BotW electronically right? Download it directly to the consoles internal storage? Reportedly the load times are way better too. I mean some people won't like that. Just seems necessary to go around trying to catch it in stock.
Technically it may not be "science fiction" and technically it "hasn't been released yet". Just loop that 2 minute preview for two hours and take my $12. I won't complain.
I reserved BotW a few weeks before launch but never got a reservation on the Switch. Then the night of March 2nd I found a bundle-only console for sale online that included BotW. So naturally I opened one copy to play and I have a "sealed in box" copy to keep (neither are "special" or "limited" in any way). I probably should have just returned the extra back to amazon but didn't for no particular reason.
Not sure if that explains the greater than 1:1 attach rate but it could be part of it.
Based only on this description it sounds a lot like a new featured added to the existing gift card functionality already available. So it's not "amazon cash" it's "amazon adds bar code to gift cards". So effectively this is "native content" or maybe just really poorly written. Not sure which.
Search github for "ia-mame". It's a CLI utility that downloads ROMs directly from internet archive. It will grab dependencies like bios files too, auto-magic. I've been writing scripts to get entire console sets at a time (Nes/SNES/Sega CD...). Still have to filter out regions/prototypes/etc you don't want if course, but it's better than a 45 gig zip file.
Haven't tried an arcade game with chd dependencies yet but no reason it wouldn't work.
I'm not involved with ia-mame at all, just a big fan.
Not sure what getting rid of all those CRT TVs would have accomplished. There's a whole community around finding the best CRT TVs for old retro game consoles (they look best on CRTs having been designed for them and functions like light guns won't work with flat panels). There's also an albeit shrinking MAME cabinet community who insists upon CRT for authenticity. Cash-for-CRT-TV-clunkers would have been a disaster for these communities.
I so look forward to the day if the National Popular Vote legislation gets enacted... of a Republican winning the popular vote and all those Democrats having to vote for the Republican....
Before the Republicans went absolutely insane, "Blue" states voted for Republican presidential candidates plenty of times.
The Republicans are the ones desperately trying to hang-on to power. They're the ones passing all those voter ID laws, which courts keep striking down. They're the former home of Jim Crow laws. They're the ones gerrymandering voting districts, which is the only reason the GOP is able to keep their House numbers up, even though the population is mostly Republican. It's a Republican governor and senate in North Carolina stripping the powers of the incoming Democratic governor. Lets be clear which party the facts show are desperately trying to corrupt the democratic process to hang on to power...
It would appear you don't live in California if you think it's Republicans doing the gerrymandering. I don't think gerrymandering is right by any group under any circumstances. But since California won't be changing any time soon I can't exactly blame Republicans for doing the same. Districts of California have the worst representation ratio of any state in the country. It doesn't get any publicity but there are a lot of people who would rather not be apart of the state. California is a complete "banana republic" and has been for a very long time. And don't point the insanity finger any anybody else if you share a party with Uncle Jerry. That guy is bat-shit-insane.
Not sure what the issue is with voter ID laws. If you have to show ID and sign 17 pages of forms to get a library card why is it so much to ask for a simple "are you who you say you are" when you vote? You're right though. That's completely unreasonable.
I didn't see it mentioned in the linked article (on thurrott) nor have I seen it brought up in this thread but...
Windows (Pro/Enterprise) has native Hyper-V and docker container support. Largely speculating here but it seems like containers would be a solution to the driver conflict issue e.g. this game can have directx11 and.net 3.5 (and optimized nvidia drive version x) while that game has directx 12 and VC runtime whatever (driver version y). And the two will be isolate/not interfere with one another. And if it worked at all well it would be easy advertising for this as an enterprise or commercial solution (for the more full featured/highly expensive version...with a support contract).
Just to play devil's advocate here: there was a relatively minor storm (minor for outside of california, somewhat signifcant for where I live) which caused the satellite service to lose signal or be horribly garbled. If I could have the same channels even without time shifting at least I could watch TV when there's a slight breeze/rain outside.
Not sure it'd be worth it though, just saying maybe there is fact one use for it.
The replies I've so far seem pretty hostile to the whole premise of the bash/linux sub-system on windows so I feel some how obliged to mention up front I kind of go both ways. Linux and Windows both seem to have their positives and negatives and I switch between them as needed. You might say I'm "chaotic neutral" on the matter. That's a thing right? Chaotic neutral?
With that out of the way, I would just like to point out you can still use JavaScript for windows scripting. I mean it's technically JScript and grossly out of date but it is there with full access to both Windows Script Host objects and the full WMI suite. There's also VBScript, but who likes that? Except even in "Hyper-V server 2016" (the free-as-in-beer non-GUI server edition) the little choose-an-option menu that comes up is written in VBScript. Why it wasn't powershell I'll never know.
Actually even on Windows 7 or 10 if you search your C: drive for "*.vbs" there are some scripts left over. One of them is actually written a as if it was supposed to be in C but was then converted to VBS. Or C programmer learned VBS in an hour and wrote it in the same format.
Also, people are too hard and CMD batch files. There are a lot of extensions for CMD shell that make it quite powerful. I mean it has so much layered on top of so much else it's really not "elegant" or anything but you can do a lot with it.
For instance, here's a line from a script I wrote a while ago:
if exist "gameinfo\%GAMENAME%_%CONSOLE%.txt" (for/f "usebackq tokens=3 delims= " %%z in (`type gameinfo\%GAMENAME%_%CONSOLE%.txt ^| find/i "current profile"`) do set DISCTYPE=%%z) else (echo could not find text file)
Would anybody assume this could all be done in one line? I mean I find it perfectly readable. It doesn't seem as cool as a bash one-liner but it works. My only point being inefficient though they are there are some solutions on the Windows side, quite capable solutions.
Also feel free to "fork me on github". I would link to it the github project but i have a feeling nobody is going to fork me...
Couldn't you same the same thing about a cheap DVD player and used DVDs? I think they're $1 a piece now. Yet people still get netflix.
I mean I'm just assuming that's Sony's thought process. I don't actually know. If the my LAN streaming of Steam games is any indicator it won't be quite the Netflix-for-games experience the summary implies. I do have a jumbo wrap-around bluetooth gamepad and a couple different Windows tablets (HP Stream 7, for instance) but I'm just assuming the 802.11g and/or my router wouldn't be able deliver a satisfying experience to it. Again based on LAN Steam streaming experience and nothing else which is presumably completely different technology.
It wasn't in the summary for some reason and maybe one cares but actually Windows 10 [pro] has native hyper-v. And with the anniversary update docker containers will be added. Maybe nobody cares. But I think this is kind of significant:
Introducing Hyper-V Container: You can now use Docker natively on Windows 10 with Hyper-V Containers, to build, ship and run containers utilizing the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 Nano Server container OS image. A new version of the Docker engine for Windows has also been made available that extends the support of containers while also improving the DockerFile syntax and getting started experience for users. For more details on how to get started with this check out the Windows container documentation or the Windows 10 Getting Started Guide.
I have it turned off as well. So far as I know if nothing else it can be used to transcribe your words in a voice-to-text sort of way. We here on slashdot may be good touch typists, but some people can't and/or won't commit to typing. So being able to talk into the machine is helpful.
And I guess MS's assumption is some contingent of users have been only using iphone for however long that group may be accustomed to only using voice-to-text. If that were the case said people may find trying to use an icky QWERTY keyboard alienating. I imagine if I were say...14 years old and had used very little iOS 99% of time my whole life being forced to switch to typing on a windows computer could be quite alienating. Like something out of era of bell bottoms (thinking like this imaginary 14 year old for a moment, I lack imagination).
Of course, I can think of other reasons. China and india are big markets for instance and most of those populations have only known the phone as their sole computing device. A voice interface of some type might make this transition much easier.
Lets face it: the markets of "the west" are second fiddle now-days. It's more about accommodating the up-and-coming potential markets. If that were the rational I don't fault MS at all for it. I mean 90%+ market share in the western hemisphere there's not much place else to go but China/India that's like 2+ billion people. Choice of who to cater to seems obvious.
Obviously I'm just speculating here. And I hope I had answer to your question somewhere in there....
The Netflix Open Connect Initiative provides our millions of members the highest-quality viewing experience possible through efforts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to most efficiently deliver content. We partner with hundreds of ISPs to localize substantial amounts of traffic with Open Connect Appliance deployments and have an open peering policy at our interconnection locations.
It wouldn't surprise me if T-Mobile and netflix simply negotiated a deal to provide one of these appliances. And/or the special t-mobile edition of said appliance uses some kind of proprietary compression algorithm optimized for mobile bandwidth.
Obviously I'm only speculating but it would explain why this can't simply be applied to any/all video sites: the Netflix content is coming directly from a t-mobile data center as opposed to an unknown caching location or across the internet. Not sure why t-mobile can't simply say as much. Maybe they think it would make the net neutrality debate/complaints that much worse or maybe there's some kind of exclusivity deal and they can't discuss it?
I don't think keeping a PC constantly up to date is really necessary to enjoy a majority of games. Sure some people spend hundreds of dollars on multiple video cards, high end processors and fancy monitors from Korea but it's not necessary. Mostly because so many PC games are optimized for console hardware released 10 years ago. If your monitor only goes to 1080p you can usually max out the specs anyway. You can run a 4 year old video card and still enjoy most PC games. Because as I said unless you want some 4k magic, 1080p is pretty easy (haven't tried FO4, probably just as true).
I was kind of excited by the possibility of PS2 backwards compatibility for a second though but now not so much (maybe that will change again in December). I haven't modded with my PS2-with-HDD yet (or my original xbox) but I will eventually. Although at this point extremely small form factor PCs are powerful and cheap enough it may not even be necessary as said PC will emulated all the old consoles anyway. I would probably keep a old wii for wii/gamecube stuff and emulate everything pre-360 on a dedicated PC (or my gaming PC via the steam link).
Oh, and I store my HDDs is piles. Lots and lots of piles. Also, an unnecessary 32 gigs of RAM is really cheap.
You know, some kind of indication that "Science" in this context is some kind of organization or group people versus a "method of study". Too much to ask?
This device looks vastly superior but this sort of Windows/Intel form factor has been around for a while. I bought a WinTel device last april for around $100 - about the same shape as an Apple TV. The device from this story is vastly superior as it has a legit x64 CPU that supports 64-bit OS (the WinTel seems locked to 32-bit OS via the UEFI). It looks like the next iteration up of the Atom SoC. Also, the WinTel has an invalid Windows 8 key burned into the firmware. And I can't seem to install 32-bit Windows 7 on it (yes, I've tried every method on the web). Really wish I had waited for this device instead of getting the stupid WinTel.
Slashdot Mirror
If anybody remembers, there was a Futurama episode ("A Fishful of Dollars") that mentioned Baywatch: Pamela Anderson is surprised to hear Fry hadn't heard of Baywatch: The Movie, her follow up comment included "the first movie shot entirely in slow motion" and "so he doesn't know I won the Oscar?".
I think I'd like to see that version of a Baywatch movie: entirely in slow motion and award winning. Couldn't be any worse than what we got.
I happen to have pre-ordered it so I got it day 1. Outside of popular youtube channels I'm probably one of the first ones to even have this game never mind play it.
I should mention I didn't realize until recently this was the Switch version of a Wii U game. So I don't know what's new the Switch and what was already there. And also the last console mario kart I played win "Mario Kart Wii". I don't know how many there have been since then.
There are the different CC kart classes as always and the different cups as always. I think there's 48 Grand Prix courses and I didn't try to count the number of characters to choose from (across at least three different weight classes). Also a ton of different vehicles a number of types.
One of the main things I found annoying about Mario Kart Wii was being by far in first place (while playing solo) and getting hit but a blue shell then multiple red shells, thus going from 1st to 8th place about 3 feet from the finish line. That just seems like broken AI to me. I haven't experienced that in this one.
I'm knowledgeable enough I know what the popular consensus is with the different cc classes. I know 50cc is entirely too easy and I get beat every track by half the track. And the 200cc is super-crazy-fast-tough (again, as a single player thing). But as with a lot of games now the single player is really just practice for multiplayer. At least that's the vibe I'm starting to sense.
Overall I would say it's very good game well worth the money but it seems very clear it is really intended as a party game.
Uh, you realize you can buy BotW electronically right? Download it directly to the consoles internal storage? Reportedly the load times are way better too. I mean some people won't like that. Just seems necessary to go around trying to catch it in stock.
Technically it may not be "science fiction" and technically it "hasn't been released yet". Just loop that 2 minute preview for two hours and take my $12. I won't complain.
I reserved BotW a few weeks before launch but never got a reservation on the Switch. Then the night of March 2nd I found a bundle-only console for sale online that included BotW. So naturally I opened one copy to play and I have a "sealed in box" copy to keep (neither are "special" or "limited" in any way). I probably should have just returned the extra back to amazon but didn't for no particular reason.
Not sure if that explains the greater than 1:1 attach rate but it could be part of it.
Based only on this description it sounds a lot like a new featured added to the existing gift card functionality already available. So it's not "amazon cash" it's "amazon adds bar code to gift cards". So effectively this is "native content" or maybe just really poorly written. Not sure which.
Search github for "ia-mame". It's a CLI utility that downloads ROMs directly from internet archive. It will grab dependencies like bios files too, auto-magic. I've been writing scripts to get entire console sets at a time (Nes/SNES/Sega CD...). Still have to filter out regions/prototypes/etc you don't want if course, but it's better than a 45 gig zip file. Haven't tried an arcade game with chd dependencies yet but no reason it wouldn't work. I'm not involved with ia-mame at all, just a big fan.
Not sure what getting rid of all those CRT TVs would have accomplished. There's a whole community around finding the best CRT TVs for old retro game consoles (they look best on CRTs having been designed for them and functions like light guns won't work with flat panels). There's also an albeit shrinking MAME cabinet community who insists upon CRT for authenticity. Cash-for-CRT-TV-clunkers would have been a disaster for these communities.
You think Trump isn't part of the political elite class? sigh
Before the Republicans went absolutely insane, "Blue" states voted for Republican presidential candidates plenty of times.
The Republicans are the ones desperately trying to hang-on to power. They're the ones passing all those voter ID laws, which courts keep striking down. They're the former home of Jim Crow laws. They're the ones gerrymandering voting districts, which is the only reason the GOP is able to keep their House numbers up, even though the population is mostly Republican. It's a Republican governor and senate in North Carolina stripping the powers of the incoming Democratic governor. Lets be clear which party the facts show are desperately trying to corrupt the democratic process to hang on to power...
It would appear you don't live in California if you think it's Republicans doing the gerrymandering. I don't think gerrymandering is right by any group under any circumstances. But since California won't be changing any time soon I can't exactly blame Republicans for doing the same. Districts of California have the worst representation ratio of any state in the country. It doesn't get any publicity but there are a lot of people who would rather not be apart of the state. California is a complete "banana republic" and has been for a very long time. And don't point the insanity finger any anybody else if you share a party with Uncle Jerry. That guy is bat-shit-insane.
Not sure what the issue is with voter ID laws. If you have to show ID and sign 17 pages of forms to get a library card why is it so much to ask for a simple "are you who you say you are" when you vote? You're right though. That's completely unreasonable.
Also, it was Democrats with the Jim Crow laws.
I didn't see it mentioned in the linked article (on thurrott) nor have I seen it brought up in this thread but...
Windows (Pro/Enterprise) has native Hyper-V and docker container support. Largely speculating here but it seems like containers would be a solution to the driver conflict issue e.g. this game can have directx11 and .net 3.5 (and optimized nvidia drive version x) while that game has directx 12 and VC runtime whatever (driver version y). And the two will be isolate/not interfere with one another. And if it worked at all well it would be easy advertising for this as an enterprise or commercial solution (for the more full featured/highly expensive version...with a support contract).
Again, largely speculating here.
Is there literally any chance any of those listed could be honey pots?
Just to play devil's advocate here: there was a relatively minor storm (minor for outside of california, somewhat signifcant for where I live) which caused the satellite service to lose signal or be horribly garbled. If I could have the same channels even without time shifting at least I could watch TV when there's a slight breeze/rain outside.
Not sure it'd be worth it though, just saying maybe there is fact one use for it.
The replies I've so far seem pretty hostile to the whole premise of the bash/linux sub-system on windows so I feel some how obliged to mention up front I kind of go both ways. Linux and Windows both seem to have their positives and negatives and I switch between them as needed. You might say I'm "chaotic neutral" on the matter. That's a thing right? Chaotic neutral?
With that out of the way, I would just like to point out you can still use JavaScript for windows scripting. I mean it's technically JScript and grossly out of date but it is there with full access to both Windows Script Host objects and the full WMI suite. There's also VBScript, but who likes that? Except even in "Hyper-V server 2016" (the free-as-in-beer non-GUI server edition) the little choose-an-option menu that comes up is written in VBScript. Why it wasn't powershell I'll never know.
Actually even on Windows 7 or 10 if you search your C: drive for "*.vbs" there are some scripts left over. One of them is actually written a as if it was supposed to be in C but was then converted to VBS. Or C programmer learned VBS in an hour and wrote it in the same format.
Also, people are too hard and CMD batch files. There are a lot of extensions for CMD shell that make it quite powerful. I mean it has so much layered on top of so much else it's really not "elegant" or anything but you can do a lot with it.
For instance, here's a line from a script I wrote a while ago:
if exist "gameinfo\%GAMENAME%_%CONSOLE%.txt" (for /f "usebackq tokens=3 delims= " %%z in (`type gameinfo\%GAMENAME%_%CONSOLE%.txt ^| find /i "current profile"`) do set DISCTYPE=%%z) else (echo could not find text file)
Would anybody assume this could all be done in one line? I mean I find it perfectly readable. It doesn't seem as cool as a bash one-liner but it works. My only point being inefficient though they are there are some solutions on the Windows side, quite capable solutions.
Also feel free to "fork me on github". I would link to it the github project but i have a feeling nobody is going to fork me...
I mean I'm just assuming that's Sony's thought process. I don't actually know. If the my LAN streaming of Steam games is any indicator it won't be quite the Netflix-for-games experience the summary implies. I do have a jumbo wrap-around bluetooth gamepad and a couple different Windows tablets (HP Stream 7, for instance) but I'm just assuming the 802.11g and/or my router wouldn't be able deliver a satisfying experience to it. Again based on LAN Steam streaming experience and nothing else which is presumably completely different technology.
Does "Goodwin's law" really have to be a verb? And shouldn't it be Goodwin'd anyway?
Introducing Hyper-V Container: You can now use Docker natively on Windows 10 with Hyper-V Containers, to build, ship and run containers utilizing the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 Nano Server container OS image. A new version of the Docker engine for Windows has also been made available that extends the support of containers while also improving the DockerFile syntax and getting started experience for users. For more details on how to get started with this check out the Windows container documentation or the Windows 10 Getting Started Guide.
source: https://blogs.windows.com/wind...
I have it turned off as well. So far as I know if nothing else it can be used to transcribe your words in a voice-to-text sort of way. We here on slashdot may be good touch typists, but some people can't and/or won't commit to typing. So being able to talk into the machine is helpful.
And I guess MS's assumption is some contingent of users have been only using iphone for however long that group may be accustomed to only using voice-to-text. If that were the case said people may find trying to use an icky QWERTY keyboard alienating. I imagine if I were say...14 years old and had used very little iOS 99% of time my whole life being forced to switch to typing on a windows computer could be quite alienating. Like something out of era of bell bottoms (thinking like this imaginary 14 year old for a moment, I lack imagination).
Of course, I can think of other reasons. China and india are big markets for instance and most of those populations have only known the phone as their sole computing device. A voice interface of some type might make this transition much easier.
Lets face it: the markets of "the west" are second fiddle now-days. It's more about accommodating the up-and-coming potential markets. If that were the rational I don't fault MS at all for it. I mean 90%+ market share in the western hemisphere there's not much place else to go but China/India that's like 2+ billion people. Choice of who to cater to seems obvious.
Obviously I'm just speculating here. And I hope I had answer to your question somewhere in there....
You're a gigantic tool.
I very vaguely remembered something about this so I had to look it up. This t-mobile thing could have something to do with the Netflix Open Connect as documented on the Netflix site:
The Netflix Open Connect Initiative provides our millions of members the highest-quality viewing experience possible through efforts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to most efficiently deliver content. We partner with hundreds of ISPs to localize substantial amounts of traffic with Open Connect Appliance deployments and have an open peering policy at our interconnection locations.
Also I found this old gizmodo article.
It wouldn't surprise me if T-Mobile and netflix simply negotiated a deal to provide one of these appliances. And/or the special t-mobile edition of said appliance uses some kind of proprietary compression algorithm optimized for mobile bandwidth.
Obviously I'm only speculating but it would explain why this can't simply be applied to any/all video sites: the Netflix content is coming directly from a t-mobile data center as opposed to an unknown caching location or across the internet. Not sure why t-mobile can't simply say as much. Maybe they think it would make the net neutrality debate/complaints that much worse or maybe there's some kind of exclusivity deal and they can't discuss it?
I don't think keeping a PC constantly up to date is really necessary to enjoy a majority of games. Sure some people spend hundreds of dollars on multiple video cards, high end processors and fancy monitors from Korea but it's not necessary. Mostly because so many PC games are optimized for console hardware released 10 years ago. If your monitor only goes to 1080p you can usually max out the specs anyway. You can run a 4 year old video card and still enjoy most PC games. Because as I said unless you want some 4k magic, 1080p is pretty easy (haven't tried FO4, probably just as true).
I was kind of excited by the possibility of PS2 backwards compatibility for a second though but now not so much (maybe that will change again in December). I haven't modded with my PS2-with-HDD yet (or my original xbox) but I will eventually. Although at this point extremely small form factor PCs are powerful and cheap enough it may not even be necessary as said PC will emulated all the old consoles anyway. I would probably keep a old wii for wii/gamecube stuff and emulate everything pre-360 on a dedicated PC (or my gaming PC via the steam link).
Oh, and I store my HDDs is piles. Lots and lots of piles. Also, an unnecessary 32 gigs of RAM is really cheap.
Science Magazine has learned...
You know, some kind of indication that "Science" in this context is some kind of organization or group people versus a "method of study". Too much to ask?
Science has learned that the letters ...
Really, science learned something? Science is an entity now? It goes around learning things?
This device looks vastly superior but this sort of Windows/Intel form factor has been around for a while. I bought a WinTel device last april for around $100 - about the same shape as an Apple TV. The device from this story is vastly superior as it has a legit x64 CPU that supports 64-bit OS (the WinTel seems locked to 32-bit OS via the UEFI). It looks like the next iteration up of the Atom SoC. Also, the WinTel has an invalid Windows 8 key burned into the firmware. And I can't seem to install 32-bit Windows 7 on it (yes, I've tried every method on the web). Really wish I had waited for this device instead of getting the stupid WinTel.
"I also don't buy that argument -- otherwise how the hell did Tesla jump start into an already saturated market?"
Are serious? Government /subsidies/ is how Tesla made it. Subsidies. If not for that Tesla wouldn't exist right now.
Well, you asked.