Another complaint is about being able to kill innocent people, and then making money for it. Fair point, almost. You can kill people if you like, but that's really your choice. It's not the goal of the game. (besides, wouldn'it be MORE twisted if the game didn't respond to people getting run over or hit with a bat at all? What kind of message would that send to children?) It doesn't help you in any way. If anything, this aspect of the game game teaches you a sense of right and wrong. If you beat somebody up, the cops will come get you. If you resist the cops, more of them will come. Before you know it, the entire city is against you. There's something to be said for reality here. If I kill somebody, my freedom is over. The 'money' you recieve from killing somebody is probably more a reward for taking the risk, rather than a reward for killing somebody. You have to kill a LOT of people before you can actually do anything with the money. It's kinda like getting paid 50 cents to piss off the cops. There's no benefit to murder, it only makes the game harder.
And you get a wanted level, you either bribe the police or get your car painted. It's not hard to get rid of wanted levels. (That's a good thing to teach people, how to bribe police)
Plus the goal of many missions is to kill people. They may not be innocent in the sense that they are merely pedestrians, but you do end up killing alot of people in the game, even if you are very careful not to kill "innocent bystanders".
Agreed. There is a huge difference between watching your friends play it and playing it yourself. I'll admit that, when I first got the game, the joy of being able to just go anywhere and kill people was fun. But that gets old. That's where the missions come in.
Multiplayer would be pointless the only way you could make this multiplayer would be to make it an FPS-type game where you go around killing other gamers. But this is not an FPS game: there are plenty of better FPS games out there if you just want to kill other gamers.
GTA is not an FPS. There are FPS aspects (you can use a first person mode and shoot people so there you go). But the goal of the game is to finish the missions. It will take you 15+ hours to finish all the missions in the game, and the missions are not all identical.
For a while, the EA NBA games had the permission of the NBA Players Association, but not of Michael Jordan (not sure why he had separate permission). All of the players in the NBA were there. Except the starting shooting guard of the Chicago Bulls was an unnamed player wearing jersey #99.
Tom's Hardware has tested a bunch of processors from 100 MHz to 3 GHz (and it's not just game benchmarks). Almost makes other processor articles redundant.
Why can't articles link to the patent application (I'm talking more about the Mac Observer article than the Slashdot article.) I guess I'm just getting used to the blogging model: when something is being discussed, a link to that is provided. I've noticed op-eds doing the same thing: discussing another op-ed without providing a link to it. Haven't they heard of the A HREF tag?
However, the overall speed of desktop applications is much more dependent on processor speed than it is for the overall speed of games, so processor speed is still relevant to them in that sense.
Huh? I see no difference in speed in desktop apps (word processor, browser). Where I see the difference is MP3 encoding. As for games not being dependent on processor. Try playing Q3 on a 400MHz computer, then a 1GHz computer back to back.
There are 22 CDs on that list that I have been able to rip. Not listed are some CDs I had a bear of a time trying to rip (I couldn't rip an image using Exact Audio Copy and could only rip individual tracks. These included discs by Front Line Assembly and Queens of the Stone Age.)
CDs are still priced to high with regard to the P2P situation and the should include MP3s of the songs and no copy protection...
Agree about the pricing. But MP3s are trivial to make from a non-copy-protected CD and the vast majority of CDs are not copy protected. Just hope that stays that way.
Re:This is actually major news to some people
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First HDTV Camcorder
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Why won't they distribute high-def films? Not because there might not be a market for it, but because it's currently impossible.
It's not i>impossible. There is currently one system available that allows you to record HD and, more importantly, to distribute HD content. That is D-VHS. For a list of currently available HD movies, click here.
The one thing that turns me away from buying DVDs is that I very rarely re-watch movies. I always find that, after I buy a DVD, I rarely watch it, so it seems like a waste to me. I guess I could always Ebay it, though.
I've been voting from home ever since Arizona started allowing it. They send you the paper ballot in the mail, you mark it up, then mail it back. No waiting in lines.
You can always check out the Netflix web site to see if it is worth it for you. If you had bought your DVD player from Best Buy, you would have seen a coupon for a free Netflix trial. It's really not THAT popular, as far as I can tell. It's not nearly as big as Blockbuster or Hollywood in terms of revenue. But they do have a huge selection of DVDs and there is no time limit for your rentals. What always got me about Blockbuster rentals was the 2 or 5 day rental period. With my schedule, it wasn't always easy to watch in the time period. With Netflix, I've kept movies for weeks at a time, waiting for a time to watch it.
I have no problems with the data provided by the author. It seems to be well thought out and well executed. However, it seems that non-Netflix subscribers are reading the data and concluding that a subscriber will never get the movies he wanted or never get popular movies.
I created a list of 45 movies in my queue that did not have an availability of "Now."
Note that he specifically selected movies that weren't available. That does not mean that all movies are unavailable. Nor does it mean that popular movies are unavailable. If you look at the list of the top rentals of the past week and compare the list to the movies he checked, you'll notice very few movies that are in both lists.
By focusing on unavailable movies, the author was able to hypothesize the criteria used by Netflix to determine who should get the next copy of a movie. However, some/.ers are extrapolating that data to mean that long time subscribers never get the movie they want to see, as if a person wanted to rent Harry Potter, but is stuck watching Manos, the Hands of Fate (the worst movie of all-time, according to IMDB). That is not the case, if your top movie is unavailable, the next movie in your queue, a movie you specifically picked as being one you want to watch, is sent to you.
so, basically your saying that as a user of NetFlix, if I do not have a cue of at least 100, then I am getting screwed and i will never get the movies that I want?
No. I have 33 movies in my queue, only 3 are on Wait status.
Netflix should stock up on popular movies and then unload them when demand for those movies decreases, otherwise they will never be able to adjust to demand... NEVER ever....
You think they never thought of that? They know what movies will be popular and they get a ton of copies of those movies. I would bet they have a lot more copies of Spider Man than they do of Scratch. What do they do with movies they have extra copies of? Beats me. Ebay would be a logical choice, though.
My experience isn't nearly as bad as the original articles. Currently, I have 34 movies in my queue, only 3 of them have a Wait status. Each of my top 10 movies are available.
So why would you rely on mailorder, when you can get the same deal locally? And not have to deal with netflix availability problems.
Because then you'd have to deal with another problem: Blockbuster availability. Blockbuster gets huge numbers of the recent releases and even guarantees their availability. But a lot of the older movies, they only have one or two copies, and they may be checked out at the time.
Plus, Netflix has a much larger selection of movies than any Blockbuster I've been to. Example, I just went to Netflix and they featured One Crazy Summer (1986) and Great Expectations (1946) on the front page. Try finding those at your local Blockbuster. In particular, Netflix has a huge selection of music DVDs. I've never seen more than a few concert videos at Blockbuster. Same goes with "classic" movies, and Foreign movies. A true movie buff will never run out of things to watch at Netflix.
Here's a little hint. Netflix offers the promise of "unlimited" movies for a set price per month, but they don't promise that those movies will be the ones that you actually want to see.
If you don't want to see the movie, don't put it on your queue.
But if they allow you to burn a track to a normal audio CD, then you can just rip that CD and have a new file in the format of your choice. They can't track that. I guess you would call this CD laundering.
*Large labels get web site and have music for download.
*Indipendant artist also makes website, has music for download.
And how does the independent artist get his name out there? Mostly by word of mouth and hopefully some positive reviews. Britney still has MTV and the radio to pimp the hell out of her music.
Mod this up. The standard/. line is that bands make money touring, but that thinking is based on seeing the year-end figures for the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney. I'd always thought that a Medium sized act (which is mostly what I listen to) doesn't make that much money from touring.
Slashdot Mirror
And you get a wanted level, you either bribe the police or get your car painted. It's not hard to get rid of wanted levels. (That's a good thing to teach people, how to bribe police)
Plus the goal of many missions is to kill people. They may not be innocent in the sense that they are merely pedestrians, but you do end up killing alot of people in the game, even if you are very careful not to kill "innocent bystanders".
Agreed. There is a huge difference between watching your friends play it and playing it yourself. I'll admit that, when I first got the game, the joy of being able to just go anywhere and kill people was fun. But that gets old. That's where the missions come in.
Multiplayer would be pointless the only way you could make this multiplayer would be to make it an FPS-type game where you go around killing other gamers. But this is not an FPS game: there are plenty of better FPS games out there if you just want to kill other gamers.
GTA is not an FPS. There are FPS aspects (you can use a first person mode and shoot people so there you go). But the goal of the game is to finish the missions. It will take you 15+ hours to finish all the missions in the game, and the missions are not all identical.
For a while, the EA NBA games had the permission of the NBA Players Association, but not of Michael Jordan (not sure why he had separate permission). All of the players in the NBA were there. Except the starting shooting guard of the Chicago Bulls was an unnamed player wearing jersey #99.
Tom's Hardware has tested a bunch of processors from 100 MHz to 3 GHz (and it's not just game benchmarks). Almost makes other processor articles redundant.
Intel gets its slogan stolen. Intel defends its name. Defending is bad.
Anyway, here is a link to patent application 20030076303. You can see the images from there also.
Huh? I see no difference in speed in desktop apps (word processor, browser). Where I see the difference is MP3 encoding. As for games not being dependent on processor. Try playing Q3 on a 400MHz computer, then a 1GHz computer back to back.
There are 22 CDs on that list that I have been able to rip. Not listed are some CDs I had a bear of a time trying to rip (I couldn't rip an image using Exact Audio Copy and could only rip individual tracks. These included discs by Front Line Assembly and Queens of the Stone Age.)
Agree about the pricing. But MP3s are trivial to make from a non-copy-protected CD and the vast majority of CDs are not copy protected. Just hope that stays that way.
It's not i>impossible. There is currently one system available that allows you to record HD and, more importantly, to distribute HD content. That is D-VHS. For a list of currently available HD movies, click here.
The one thing that turns me away from buying DVDs is that I very rarely re-watch movies. I always find that, after I buy a DVD, I rarely watch it, so it seems like a waste to me. I guess I could always Ebay it, though.
I've been voting from home ever since Arizona started allowing it. They send you the paper ballot in the mail, you mark it up, then mail it back. No waiting in lines.
You can always check out the Netflix web site to see if it is worth it for you. If you had bought your DVD player from Best Buy, you would have seen a coupon for a free Netflix trial. It's really not THAT popular, as far as I can tell. It's not nearly as big as Blockbuster or Hollywood in terms of revenue. But they do have a huge selection of DVDs and there is no time limit for your rentals. What always got me about Blockbuster rentals was the 2 or 5 day rental period. With my schedule, it wasn't always easy to watch in the time period. With Netflix, I've kept movies for weeks at a time, waiting for a time to watch it.
Vin Diesel is no Rock either.
The key part of the article is this quote:
Note that he specifically selected movies that weren't available. That does not mean that all movies are unavailable. Nor does it mean that popular movies are unavailable. If you look at the list of the top rentals of the past week and compare the list to the movies he checked, you'll notice very few movies that are in both lists.By focusing on unavailable movies, the author was able to hypothesize the criteria used by Netflix to determine who should get the next copy of a movie. However, some /.ers are extrapolating that data to mean that long time subscribers never get the movie they want to see, as if a person wanted to rent Harry Potter, but is stuck watching Manos, the Hands of Fate (the worst movie of all-time, according to IMDB). That is not the case, if your top movie is unavailable, the next movie in your queue, a movie you specifically picked as being one you want to watch, is sent to you.
No. I have 33 movies in my queue, only 3 are on Wait status.
Netflix should stock up on popular movies and then unload them when demand for those movies decreases, otherwise they will never be able to adjust to demand... NEVER ever....
You think they never thought of that? They know what movies will be popular and they get a ton of copies of those movies. I would bet they have a lot more copies of Spider Man than they do of Scratch. What do they do with movies they have extra copies of? Beats me. Ebay would be a logical choice, though.
My experience isn't nearly as bad as the original articles. Currently, I have 34 movies in my queue, only 3 of them have a Wait status. Each of my top 10 movies are available.
Because then you'd have to deal with another problem: Blockbuster availability. Blockbuster gets huge numbers of the recent releases and even guarantees their availability. But a lot of the older movies, they only have one or two copies, and they may be checked out at the time.
Plus, Netflix has a much larger selection of movies than any Blockbuster I've been to. Example, I just went to Netflix and they featured One Crazy Summer (1986) and Great Expectations (1946) on the front page. Try finding those at your local Blockbuster. In particular, Netflix has a huge selection of music DVDs. I've never seen more than a few concert videos at Blockbuster. Same goes with "classic" movies, and Foreign movies. A true movie buff will never run out of things to watch at Netflix.
If you don't want to see the movie, don't put it on your queue.
But if they allow you to burn a track to a normal audio CD, then you can just rip that CD and have a new file in the format of your choice. They can't track that. I guess you would call this CD laundering.
*Indipendant artist also makes website, has music for download.
And how does the independent artist get his name out there? Mostly by word of mouth and hopefully some positive reviews. Britney still has MTV and the radio to pimp the hell out of her music.
Mod this up. The standard /. line is that bands make money touring, but that thinking is based on seeing the year-end figures for the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney. I'd always thought that a Medium sized act (which is mostly what I listen to) doesn't make that much money from touring.