All of Oblivion's procedural terrain was generated once via tools like speedtree then saved to the disc. Nothing is generated once the player is in the game. This isn't really what I was referring to with procedural content.
Whats the relationship of your sensor bar to your TV? Is it above or below? I had my sensor bar about 8 inches below the bottom bezel of my tv, and it was not easy to use. I propped it up with some books to be closer to the bottom edge, and things improved. Then, I put it on top of the TV (changed the sensor bar settings) and I feel I got the tightest response at that point. If this doesn't help, I got nothing.
I'm still on the fence regarding red steel; the reviews are all over the place.
If I wanted to handle my own cart/checkout, I'd have bought it online. When I go to a grocery store or retail outlet, I always use a checkout clerk because the dozen or so times I used self check out, it didn't save me any time. Also, my grocery shopping consists of about 75% fruits and vegetables, and doing those on your own (numeric touch screen that doesn't always recognize the fruit code) definitely doesn't save you time.
There was also a 6 month period where I went to Home depot about twice a week, and bought lumber every time (I was building a lot of stuff). Their self checkout system doesn't (or at least didn't) allow for construction materials purchases, so the self checkout was NEVER an option.
I encourage others not to use self check outs, and spend a few extra minutes in line. That way, the big expensive machine that they replaced two humans with doesn't provide them any utility.
This is a perfect example of the viral nature of the DS Lite. You (the technopioneering geek type) go out and get a DS lite, and a few games. EVERYONE around you starts asking questions: "How much is that?" "where can I get one?" "Only $129???"
And soon enough you're having pickup tetris tournaments on the couch.
Word of advice: As many posters have already said, BUY TWO! The first week I had mine, it ended up in my gf's purse. So I had to buy her one, too (a shiny black one!)
Do you live near a walmart? because if you do, there's probably no way Bestbuy can compete with their prices for entry level consumer electronics. When Walmart steps up to the plate and buys 25% of Philips' TV's they get a great price. Probably an unbeatable one. When they turn to Philips, and ask them to make an exclusive redesign thats 20% cheaper (which Philips finds a way to do, or lose 1/4 of their tube tv sales in one fell swoop), Bestbuy, and everyone else trying to sell a tube TV, gets clobbered. Bestbuy may be huge, but its like solar system big versus galaxy big.
according to their own SEC filings, they've spent about 10% or so of their budget on R&D (on a new console here, mind thee), and about 70%+ on 'consulting fees'. Scam? Yes.
His comments are even more ridiculous when you consider that a lot of commodities are governement subsidized, and some commodities prices are governement regulated.
Ticketmaster has been tried as a monopoly and has some how kept it from sticking, the important thing to realize (and that many posters have missed) is that they still enjoy monopolistic power. They can implement price fixing that is not a result of market pressures, and other companies cannot compete with their exclusive contracts. The fact that a consumer can either 'buy it, or not' is no indication of a non-monopoly, or a healthy, free market. Thats really confusing democracy as an economic principle of some sort
If TicketMaster implements a $5 breathing charge on top of their ticket fees, what options do you as a consumer have (assuming you are buying a ticket)? None. If you're a TicketMaster competitor can you take this as an opportunity to sell at a lower price? No, you can't compete.
If Aldi's raises the price of milk by a dime*, you go to Win Dixie and shop there instead.
* Aldi's probably wouldn't do this. They're dedicated to low prices!
Whats amazing tho' is how much more content and game play you get your your $50 compared to NES days. NES titles were about 32-128k apiece, and most had maybe a few hours of gameplay. I finished over 80 titles for the original nintendo.
Titles now range several hundred megs to a gig or more. There are still titles you can finish in a few hours, and sports games don't really fit the example too well, but many adventure and rpg games now are built around having 100's of hours of gameplay. Its intense!
In a lot of cases, its difficult to find the copyright holders because the original company that produced them have long since dissolved or been bought, and the people who hold the rights (and haven't exercised them in a couple decades) may not even know it any more.
As a rom selling company, trying to do the right thing, it becomes quite untenable to try and find all these individual owners, so many titles become 'lost.' Even though you want to give them money, and they probably wouldn't mind getting some there's no good way for buyer to meet seller and business to occur.
In my area, there's two EB games and two Gamestops in close proximity to me. In one gamestop, PC games get one 4'x5' shelf in the entire store. The other Gamestop has ZERO PC games (the sales guy said they had some promo copies of Quake 4, but literally could not sell me a computer game). Of the EB games, one has about 1/4 shelf space devoted to PC games (this is where I generally buy them), and the other has 'virtually' no PC games. No new titles, just an aging rack of left overs on clearance. Major retailers like best buy, compusa, circuit city, target seem to have a small fraction of PC to console games available. Much less than 1/2.
I only started getting spam when I started sending emails to sales reps using PC computers full of virii. Before that, all my email correspondences were with mac users and conscientous PC users, and I had basically zero spam for years.
Nowadays, I keep getting this wierd spam full of cyrillic characters. Maybe a few a week. I have no idea what they're shilling (although I'd bet its related to viagra), no idea how to contact them, or buy what they're selling.;(
What should be said is that it is NOT PowerPC hardware, there are NO G5's in them, and they don't run OSX. They're a sleek chassis full of RAID hardware, fiber channel connectivity, and 7 independant SATA controllers each with 2 hot swappable drives. Price/GB compared to rival products is extremely competitive, as in worlds cheaper. With 2x 512MB caches and dual fibrechannel connectivity, performance is pretty amazing with a full compliment of drives. The RAID servers are certified to work with Novell, Oracle, Windows Server, MacOSX, RedHat, YellowDog, Emulex, Cisco, ATTO, ADIC, etc. etc. etc. They still need some method of administering it (its just the storage), which may be an XServe, or virtually any other modern computer.
I will accept that some contractors are highly skilled problem solving ninjas, well worth the premium they're paid.
The stories that I'm always fed are about contractors who are paid 180-300% what the regular coders get, eat steak every day from their ridiculous per diem and travel compensations, jerk off for a few weeks at the office, then its up to the regular staffers to fix their shoddy code for a month afterwards. And for whatever reason, some companies get stuck in these loops for a long time. A friend of mine built databases for a big big big tech firm (huge chip/IC mfr), and that was his story about twice a month. What was even richer was when he was laid off along with most of his dept while the company increased its reliance on the shoddy contractor work (he found a better position in a couple weeks since he was experienced and talented). Of course, this is more a story about poor management than any real statement about contracting.
Apple has always had userfriendliness as a high priority with their previous operating systems. With OS X this changed. By basing it on a UNIX-system Apple lost all of their simplicity. Not that OS 9 was great in anyway but atleast you didn't have to mess around with a text based terminal to get things working.
In fact many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface, so if you want them to work, you better start making friends with the terminal.
I work in tech support with hundreds of mac users going through our helpdesk a week, many of whom are professionals in every imaginable industry. I'd say around 1-3% of them use the terminal regularly, and less than actually have to.
"many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface" which is to say, with Mac OS X, there are lots of terminal based applications already installed and many more available to you. Quite impressive he's trying to spin the robustness of unix as a drawback. I've met some very nice linux developers at my job. I'd say without the combination of friendly GUI and powerful commandline, they probably wouldn't be using a mac to begin with.
Repair the XBox. Thats it. Most consumer products' limited product warranty states that continuous usage is not guaranteed. If he got more free stuff, thats great, but M$ would have no obligation to provide him more.
Hard things only scratch less hard things if they are of a requisite hardness. I know, that sentence makes my head spin as well, but in the world of plastics, they scratch more easily if they are hard plastics, and less hard plastics scratch less because they deform. iPod plastic (polycarbonate) is hard, and rigid. It has to maintain its form to protect the innards of the iPod. Incidentally, it scratches because of that as well. Softer plastics, like the ones that compose iPod wrappers and such, are bendable pliable, stretchy, and deform instead of scratching. So what you really want is hard, rigid plastic inside, soft reapplyable cover on the outside. Luckily, companies make products like that.
Having studied both Korean and Japanese for several years, I'd say, yes, Korean is easier to learn. The korean alphabet consists almost entirely of straight lines which are easy to learn and reproduce. Pronunciation is very consistent, and when it varies, it is predictable because character positioning largely dictates pronunciation. Their alphabet is something like 14 consonants and 10 vowels. To make things simpler, they use different vowels for dipthongs and such, so each vowel only has one possible pronunciation (as opposed to our vowel system). So reading their written language is a series of consonant-vowel-consonant structures that are at least easy to read. So if you know 'k-a' and you know 'n', then you can trivially construct 'n-a' as well.
Japanese is also very systematic, having something like 8 primary consonant sounds, and 5 primary vowel sounds, but each combination of consonant vowel has its own character, for 40+ individual characters that seem entirely independent. Learning the character for 'ka' doesn't teach you anything about the character for 'sa' or for 'ko'. They also have a second alphabet, which is a simplified version of the first reserved for writing foreign words, proper nouns, and some names.
Both languages make extensive usage of chinese characters in their written language as well. The challege arrives in that in different contexts, chinese characters are substituted for native characters (either japanese or korean), but can have entirely different meanings and pronunciations depending on context. To further mire the situation, a single chinese character can replace different numbers of native characters, making the translation/reading process rather intense. For instance, the chinese character for mouth is used in japanese in the words for mouth, opening, door, gate, etc... but the japanese words were derived from ancient spoken japanese, so its replacing japanese character(s) with a chinese one of rather unsimilar origin.
the video iPod supports MPEG4 and H.264. Both at 30 fps. H.264 is at 320x240 resolution, and the MPEG4 is up to 480x480 resolution (although obviously not on the ipod's screen). Don't know how it handles various resolutions of MPEG4, but I do know that the low resolution kills it for me. (And by kills it, I mean reduces it from "Really Want" to "Mildy Interesting" ((since it's still a sexy, thin, new ipod)) ).
PVR IN the portable device? Wait, so let me get this straight: the same device I want to take with me has to be slaved to a cable receiver for recording episodes? SO, I stick it in my bag, enjoy the content, at the price of recording new content???. To get new content on there, it sits useless, tethered in my livingroom?
It seems to me the lack of synergy with portable video player + PVR is pretty astounding, but maybe I just watch too much TV
(I love my ReplayTV, with big, fatty hacked HDD for mucho hours of recording)
Every battery ever made wears out. This statement bears repeating because you obviously don't grasp it. Every battery ever made wears out! Have you ever wondered why you go to the grocery store year after year, and they have those little packs of batteries? Surely it can't be because.... I dunno... they wear out???
Whats fascinating is that people understand that pager batteries and cellphone batteries, and flashlight batteries, and car batteries, and PDA batteries, and portable electronics batteries, and laptop batteries need replacing. But, as soon as it involves an iPod, its a serious defect. Defect, they say because Apple couldn't defy the laws of physics and manufacturing and invent an infinitely reusable battery. Apple will even replace the entire ipod for $59 out of warranty as a battery replacement. Well within what you'd pay to swap the rechargeable battery for your cellphone or pager.
The screen on an ipod is rubber mounted and encased in polycarbonate. It takes excessive force to crack it. Dropping it from about 4 feet repeatedly onto concrete will not do it, and thats more than enough to damage any HDD based electronic device. If you encounter an ipod with a cracked display, it is extremely safe to assume it has endured enough abuse to damage the internals. The ipod has 2 80Mhz processors, 32 mb's of ram, an internal harddrive, its own operating system, and a screen. Its a small computer. People toss them around, and sit on them, drop them, and wonder why they don't last forever. Would you assume your laptop could survive similar treatment?
The Class Action suit was settled out of court. There is no guilt, or winning, or losing associated with a settlement. The claims upon which the settlement were based were that 1) it did not have the battery life represented and/or 2) that the battery's capacity to take and hold a charge substantially diminished over time. As for the first claim, there are variances in batteries, but many reviewers and ipod owners have confirmed they play as long as advertised. As to the 2nd, this is true of all batteries. As a result, Apple has admitted no guilt, and the Plaintiffs have AGREED. Please note that the plaintiffs did have a suit, until apple filled their pockets with money.
If you go into security options from Disk Utility, there's a click box for "zero out all data", "7 times zero", and "35 times zero", depending on how sensitive your data is. It even warns you "this will take 35 times as long as a single erase.
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All of Oblivion's procedural terrain was generated once via tools like speedtree then saved to the disc. Nothing is generated once the player is in the game. This isn't really what I was referring to with procedural content.
procedurally generated?
I can't think of any other games currently in development by a major studio with a notable amount of procedural content.
Whats the relationship of your sensor bar to your TV? Is it above or below? I had my sensor bar about 8 inches below the bottom bezel of my tv, and it was not easy to use. I propped it up with some books to be closer to the bottom edge, and things improved. Then, I put it on top of the TV (changed the sensor bar settings) and I feel I got the tightest response at that point. If this doesn't help, I got nothing.
I'm still on the fence regarding red steel; the reviews are all over the place.
If only mario galaxy was a launch title...
The interns worked right along side everyone else in development.
This conflicts with the duck hunt remake they've been showing off already. although its not yet clear how/when they'll release that.
If I wanted to handle my own cart/checkout, I'd have bought it online. When I go to a grocery store or retail outlet, I always use a checkout clerk because the dozen or so times I used self check out, it didn't save me any time. Also, my grocery shopping consists of about 75% fruits and vegetables, and doing those on your own (numeric touch screen that doesn't always recognize the fruit code) definitely doesn't save you time.
There was also a 6 month period where I went to Home depot about twice a week, and bought lumber every time (I was building a lot of stuff). Their self checkout system doesn't (or at least didn't) allow for construction materials purchases, so the self checkout was NEVER an option.
I encourage others not to use self check outs, and spend a few extra minutes in line. That way, the big expensive machine that they replaced two humans with doesn't provide them any utility.
This is a perfect example of the viral nature of the DS Lite. You (the technopioneering geek type) go out and get a DS lite, and a few games. EVERYONE around you starts asking questions: "How much is that?" "where can I get one?" "Only $129???"
And soon enough you're having pickup tetris tournaments on the couch.
Word of advice: As many posters have already said, BUY TWO! The first week I had mine, it ended up in my gf's purse. So I had to buy her one, too (a shiny black one!)
Do you live near a walmart? because if you do, there's probably no way Bestbuy can compete with their prices for entry level consumer electronics. When Walmart steps up to the plate and buys 25% of Philips' TV's they get a great price. Probably an unbeatable one. When they turn to Philips, and ask them to make an exclusive redesign thats 20% cheaper (which Philips finds a way to do, or lose 1/4 of their tube tv sales in one fell swoop), Bestbuy, and everyone else trying to sell a tube TV, gets clobbered. Bestbuy may be huge, but its like solar system big versus galaxy big.
according to their own SEC filings, they've spent about 10% or so of their budget on R&D (on a new console here, mind thee), and about 70%+ on 'consulting fees'. Scam? Yes.
His comments are even more ridiculous when you consider that a lot of commodities are governement subsidized, and some commodities prices are governement regulated.
Ticketmaster has been tried as a monopoly and has some how kept it from sticking, the important thing to realize (and that many posters have missed) is that they still enjoy monopolistic power. They can implement price fixing that is not a result of market pressures, and other companies cannot compete with their exclusive contracts. The fact that a consumer can either 'buy it, or not' is no indication of a non-monopoly, or a healthy, free market. Thats really confusing democracy as an economic principle of some sort
If TicketMaster implements a $5 breathing charge on top of their ticket fees, what options do you as a consumer have (assuming you are buying a ticket)? None. If you're a TicketMaster competitor can you take this as an opportunity to sell at a lower price? No, you can't compete.
If Aldi's raises the price of milk by a dime*, you go to Win Dixie and shop there instead.
* Aldi's probably wouldn't do this. They're dedicated to low prices!
Whats amazing tho' is how much more content and game play you get your your $50 compared to NES days. NES titles were about 32-128k apiece, and most had maybe a few hours of gameplay. I finished over 80 titles for the original nintendo.
Titles now range several hundred megs to a gig or more. There are still titles you can finish in a few hours, and sports games don't really fit the example too well, but many adventure and rpg games now are built around having 100's of hours of gameplay. Its intense!
In a lot of cases, its difficult to find the copyright holders because the original company that produced them have long since dissolved or been bought, and the people who hold the rights (and haven't exercised them in a couple decades) may not even know it any more.
As a rom selling company, trying to do the right thing, it becomes quite untenable to try and find all these individual owners, so many titles become 'lost.' Even though you want to give them money, and they probably wouldn't mind getting some there's no good way for buyer to meet seller and business to occur.
In my area, there's two EB games and two Gamestops in close proximity to me. In one gamestop, PC games get one 4'x5' shelf in the entire store. The other Gamestop has ZERO PC games (the sales guy said they had some promo copies of Quake 4, but literally could not sell me a computer game). Of the EB games, one has about 1/4 shelf space devoted to PC games (this is where I generally buy them), and the other has 'virtually' no PC games. No new titles, just an aging rack of left overs on clearance. Major retailers like best buy, compusa, circuit city, target seem to have a small fraction of PC to console games available. Much less than 1/2.
I only started getting spam when I started sending emails to sales reps using PC computers full of virii. Before that, all my email correspondences were with mac users and conscientous PC users, and I had basically zero spam for years.
;(
Nowadays, I keep getting this wierd spam full of cyrillic characters. Maybe a few a week. I have no idea what they're shilling (although I'd bet its related to viagra), no idea how to contact them, or buy what they're selling.
What should be said is that it is NOT PowerPC hardware, there are NO G5's in them, and they don't run OSX. They're a sleek chassis full of RAID hardware, fiber channel connectivity, and 7 independant SATA controllers each with 2 hot swappable drives. Price/GB compared to rival products is extremely competitive, as in worlds cheaper. With 2x 512MB caches and dual fibrechannel connectivity, performance is pretty amazing with a full compliment of drives. The RAID servers are certified to work with Novell, Oracle, Windows Server, MacOSX, RedHat, YellowDog, Emulex, Cisco, ATTO, ADIC, etc. etc. etc. They still need some method of administering it (its just the storage), which may be an XServe, or virtually any other modern computer.
I will accept that some contractors are highly skilled problem solving ninjas, well worth the premium they're paid.
The stories that I'm always fed are about contractors who are paid 180-300% what the regular coders get, eat steak every day from their ridiculous per diem and travel compensations, jerk off for a few weeks at the office, then its up to the regular staffers to fix their shoddy code for a month afterwards. And for whatever reason, some companies get stuck in these loops for a long time. A friend of mine built databases for a big big big tech firm (huge chip/IC mfr), and that was his story about twice a month. What was even richer was when he was laid off along with most of his dept while the company increased its reliance on the shoddy contractor work (he found a better position in a couple weeks since he was experienced and talented). Of course, this is more a story about poor management than any real statement about contracting.
I work in tech support with hundreds of mac users going through our helpdesk a week, many of whom are professionals in every imaginable industry. I'd say around 1-3% of them use the terminal regularly, and less than actually have to.
"many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface" which is to say, with Mac OS X, there are lots of terminal based applications already installed and many more available to you. Quite impressive he's trying to spin the robustness of unix as a drawback. I've met some very nice linux developers at my job. I'd say without the combination of friendly GUI and powerful commandline, they probably wouldn't be using a mac to begin with.
Repair the XBox. Thats it. Most consumer products' limited product warranty states that continuous usage is not guaranteed. If he got more free stuff, thats great, but M$ would have no obligation to provide him more.
Hard things only scratch less hard things if they are of a requisite hardness. I know, that sentence makes my head spin as well, but in the world of plastics, they scratch more easily if they are hard plastics, and less hard plastics scratch less because they deform. iPod plastic (polycarbonate) is hard, and rigid. It has to maintain its form to protect the innards of the iPod. Incidentally, it scratches because of that as well. Softer plastics, like the ones that compose iPod wrappers and such, are bendable pliable, stretchy, and deform instead of scratching. So what you really want is hard, rigid plastic inside, soft reapplyable cover on the outside. Luckily, companies make products like that.
Having studied both Korean and Japanese for several years, I'd say, yes, Korean is easier to learn. The korean alphabet consists almost entirely of straight lines which are easy to learn and reproduce. Pronunciation is very consistent, and when it varies, it is predictable because character positioning largely dictates pronunciation. Their alphabet is something like 14 consonants and 10 vowels. To make things simpler, they use different vowels for dipthongs and such, so each vowel only has one possible pronunciation (as opposed to our vowel system). So reading their written language is a series of consonant-vowel-consonant structures that are at least easy to read. So if you know 'k-a' and you know 'n', then you can trivially construct 'n-a' as well.
Japanese is also very systematic, having something like 8 primary consonant sounds, and 5 primary vowel sounds, but each combination of consonant vowel has its own character, for 40+ individual characters that seem entirely independent. Learning the character for 'ka' doesn't teach you anything about the character for 'sa' or for 'ko'. They also have a second alphabet, which is a simplified version of the first reserved for writing foreign words, proper nouns, and some names.
Both languages make extensive usage of chinese characters in their written language as well. The challege arrives in that in different contexts, chinese characters are substituted for native characters (either japanese or korean), but can have entirely different meanings and pronunciations depending on context. To further mire the situation, a single chinese character can replace different numbers of native characters, making the translation/reading process rather intense. For instance, the chinese character for mouth is used in japanese in the words for mouth, opening, door, gate, etc... but the japanese words were derived from ancient spoken japanese, so its replacing japanese character(s) with a chinese one of rather unsimilar origin.
the video iPod supports MPEG4 and H.264. Both at 30 fps. H.264 is at 320x240 resolution, and the MPEG4 is up to 480x480 resolution (although obviously not on the ipod's screen). Don't know how it handles various resolutions of MPEG4, but I do know that the low resolution kills it for me. (And by kills it, I mean reduces it from "Really Want" to "Mildy Interesting" ((since it's still a sexy, thin, new ipod)) ).
PVR IN the portable device? Wait, so let me get this straight: the same device I want to take with me has to be slaved to a cable receiver for recording episodes? SO, I stick it in my bag, enjoy the content, at the price of recording new content???. To get new content on there, it sits useless, tethered in my livingroom?
It seems to me the lack of synergy with portable video player + PVR is pretty astounding, but maybe I just watch too much TV
(I love my ReplayTV, with big, fatty hacked HDD for mucho hours of recording)
Every battery ever made wears out. This statement bears repeating because you obviously don't grasp it. Every battery ever made wears out! Have you ever wondered why you go to the grocery store year after year, and they have those little packs of batteries? Surely it can't be because.... I dunno... they wear out???
Whats fascinating is that people understand that pager batteries and cellphone batteries, and flashlight batteries, and car batteries, and PDA batteries, and portable electronics batteries, and laptop batteries need replacing. But, as soon as it involves an iPod, its a serious defect. Defect, they say because Apple couldn't defy the laws of physics and manufacturing and invent an infinitely reusable battery. Apple will even replace the entire ipod for $59 out of warranty as a battery replacement. Well within what you'd pay to swap the rechargeable battery for your cellphone or pager.
The screen on an ipod is rubber mounted and encased in polycarbonate. It takes excessive force to crack it. Dropping it from about 4 feet repeatedly onto concrete will not do it, and thats more than enough to damage any HDD based electronic device. If you encounter an ipod with a cracked display, it is extremely safe to assume it has endured enough abuse to damage the internals. The ipod has 2 80Mhz processors, 32 mb's of ram, an internal harddrive, its own operating system, and a screen. Its a small computer. People toss them around, and sit on them, drop them, and wonder why they don't last forever. Would you assume your laptop could survive similar treatment?
The Class Action suit was settled out of court. There is no guilt, or winning, or losing associated with a settlement. The claims upon which the settlement were based were that 1) it did not have the battery life represented and/or 2) that the battery's capacity to take and hold a charge substantially diminished over time. As for the first claim, there are variances in batteries, but many reviewers and ipod owners have confirmed they play as long as advertised. As to the 2nd, this is true of all batteries. As a result, Apple has admitted no guilt, and the Plaintiffs have AGREED. Please note that the plaintiffs did have a suit, until apple filled their pockets with money.
If you go into security options from Disk Utility, there's a click box for "zero out all data", "7 times zero", and "35 times zero", depending on how sensitive your data is. It even warns you "this will take 35 times as long as a single erase.