I almost stopped reading the article because it didn't address used games, which even stores like EB offer now as well as the places that specialize in such.
IMHO if you you're going to wait for a certain game to price drop significantly instead of buying it right off, you might as well stake out a used copy. Even re impulse buys, there have been quite a few games I would never pay x$ for, but then saw extra cheap used and went for.
Anyway, he does include some numbers for used data in the spreadsheets he links at the end, in case anyone is interested.
tcq would make writes less safe, since the drive is deciding on the write order rather than the OS (one alternative to journaling file systems is keeping very close track of write orders/dependencies). for scsi there are commands to skip the cache and write directly to disk for OSes to use, however. the use of such commands (and the performance penalty for writing safely) is why everyone complains about winxp scsi performance. normal ata has no such commands, although you can disable the write cache entirely (which is what microsoft recommends). I don't know if sata added these.
That's actually more a function of how it's administered rather than the actual sensor degrading. You can dial the sensitivity up and down you see, and guess what the admin gets yelled at for more?
You title your post "romantic vs. rational" seeming to want to associate your position with rationality, but then you argue for only letting space related science progress in the romantic direction. Exploring with remote probes is useless if we never go there. The Hubble is busy looking at crap we won't have practical interest in for centuries.
Your position smacks of navel gazing while us zealots at least want to go do something and develop the technology needed to put people in space and on other worlds and keep them there. Having useless, unpractical astronomy and "just for knowledge, not for use" exploration grouped in with real progress is an insult, not an insight.
Well with the "not authorized to redistribute" quote we know what this particular incident is about, but I see tons of posts above saying how terrible it is to block people coming from Linux news site. I think it's quite possible that it would be beneficial. Linux users tend to be much more tech savy than most and along with browsers like Mozilla rather than MSIE they are much more likely to simply block advertisements than run of the mill users.
Personally I don't block adds at all (well I refuse to install annoying ad showing software like that flash crap) and will actually click on ads for sites I like. However, I know countless people who not only block ads to leech off sites for free, but seem proud of doing so. Anyway, my point was simply that with the number of people who do this rising, being selective about who you waste bandwidth (which can be quite costly for large sites) on isn't necessarily a losing prospect anymore.
> I would be willing to argue that the sexual nature of the line of questioning was nonconsensual.
Insightful...more like absolutely clueless. This is an interview with someone who won, sexiest gamer, a contest which involves how intentionally sexy and provoking they can be strutting around and sending in hot pictures (also note both males and females competed so his "of women" crap is out of line as well;p)...and now sexual questions in a post interview are nonconsensual!?
It's sad how all these claimants of our society's degradation have to blatantly twist situations around in a desperate attempt to prove their point. Just because politicians will make an issue out of nothing to blind side the dumber voters into reacting without looking doesn't mean such methods should be considered insightful reasoning when mimicked.
Well re my SL760 there are several compiles of mplayer out there, one of which has a driver for the ATI chip to get some acceleration. There are also GUIs for mplayer and then other graphic players. The opie media player comes to mind and Dr. Z is the commercial competitor to tkcVideo. The only ones of those that have ever crashed on me were opie and a java frontend for mplayer.
Btw, if choosing between Dr. Z and tkcVideo I highly recommend the former. tkcVideo when I tried it couldn't even go full screen without some crappy black border and was much slower and prone to losing sync compared to Dr. Z. I actually use mplayer now anyway, though. ^^
>whatever you can do in linux, you can now do on the sl5500/c860's
Well I love my Z and all, but they are still pretty slow which makes some tasks grueling. I always pre-rasterize my postscript and pdf files, for example, because the Z is so slow at zooming and panning around larger ones (like class notes, and bus schedules) at least with my setup (qpdf2 on a sl760).
Well personally I think music is a waste of time so have no experience there. But I commute by bus and subway often and always have my nose buried in a book or PDA and have noticed a similar effect to what the article describes. In such crowded conditions people will actually stand/sit closer to you if you are really into a book and not looking around/moving much than they would otherwise.
Although this sounds different than the article's "headphones reclaim some space" theme at first glance, it's actually the same thing - the crowd is not considering you as an active entity and not worrying as much about interacting with you.
Well I agree with the general sense of the article that it would be nice if money has to be spent in this direction then fund new exclusive games, don't bribe non-release of existing ones. However, I have to say if every game came out for all formats I would have just stuck with my PC (which has the ultimate exclusive titles, those apps I need for college work) and screw the XBox and PS2. So it makes sense to me if the big consoles do everything in their power to get exclusives and survive.
I think they'll gain a lot more buyers doing this then they'll lose due to the boycotters the article expects (besides not wanting to give up a good console, I suspect most gamers don't even read gaming news, much as most US anime fans actually watch dubs and not subs..) - and of course more buyers is actually good for those of us who have already bought and will buy future Sony consoles since it could help prevent them from dieing out early and leaving the owners in the dust like so many Sega consoles have done to people...
Favorite quote from the interview: "Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." Awesome, none of this idiotic, politically correct, don't-say-what-you're-thinking crap for Clarke. I was all set to write the Brits off as total losers - we recently had articles with them trying to get people to stop using the terms boyfriend/girlfriend and then tring to ban a video game for having animal violence (what's next, ban Looney Tunes?) - pretty much as far from this free thinking fellow as possible. Then again the interview also said he doesn't have any interest in returning to England...maybe we should all just write US, UK, and company off as old fogeys that are only getting worse and more restrictive rather than the innovative places they used to be.
>the biggest problem with Win-Live CD is that YOU CAN'T PATCH IT!
Wrong. Windows already supports patching install CDs (a process called slipstreaming where you can copy your original install CD, add the current service pack files and a fix rollup, and then burn a new, up to date install CD - just google it for more info). I've done this plenty of times with my consumer versions so it's not even limited to enterprise/admins. There's no reason they wouldn't provide the same capability with a live offering.
The article says 2 million to clean it up, 40 million to preserve it. So the "saving this doesn't cost anything" post above is wrong by a factor of 20...
500 isn't so bad, I got my PDA for gaming and playing media and paid 800 (imported from Japan, has a beautiful 640x480 screen ^^). So cut that in half and I paid 400 for the gaming, heh.
The emu options for PDAs are really great: mame/nes/snes (the last is a little slow, but fine for rpg's). None of that catridge crap like gameboy, one microdrive and I have a huge library of games.
Graphics in terms of "looking realistic" might be approaching it's peak, but that's the most useless application of graphics to gaming there is in my mind. I actually prefer Doom to Quake since Quake looks like mud (literally, all the colors are dark and muted and blend into each other) and Doom is nice and simple to navigate and fight in - that last is the point of the game remember. I still have directories full of maps to try for Doom while my copy of Quake is getting dusty on a shelf somewhere. I can't talk about much newer FPS games since I don't consider the what they add to be worth the hardware it would cost me to play them.
Similarly I would hate increased realism graphics being applied to some of my favorite gaming pass times. Continuum is a great 2d multiplayer ship combat game and increased realism in the graphics department (e.g. 3D) would just hurt it. Now better graphics as part of new weapons, ships, translucent radar that only shows when you look at it, and stuff like that would be most welcome. There isn't a peak for these things either, since they are gameplay and game system intertwined like all important graphics decisions are. I hate all these graphics MMO RPGs out there (tend to be filled with repetitive tasks and non role players...) compared to MUDs, but when my favorite mud added an overland map I rather liked it since it improved gameplay.
Worse than that...key features are neglected
on
KISS
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a professor who mentioned his cell is years old because all the new, small phones can't punch a signal through his house. He likes the big numbers and easy to hit buttons as well. I bet all the people I see at work during lunch time desperately trying to get a call out by standing near the window and finally going outside would appreciate it more than size as well.
Don't forget, people do cast these things (that means someone chooses the actor/actress for the role, you ignorant fuck), and it's not like all the plays around are about overweight gothic-looking people.
I have to disagree on this. School plays take from the club, not a broad pool of actors. So casting can do very little. As far as my college was concerned all the drama chicks were somewhat overweight and into weird things like goth. There was maybe a single girl on my track team (a thrower) that weighed more than any of the drama girls and we made fun of her endlessly.
Anyway it makes sense that the drama folks would be chubby compared to the actual lookers in the school, the jocks. Dancers generally gave better things and practices to do than the drama club so they don't even have that helping them out. Denying the generally overweight nature of drama chicks just makes your own veracity seem strained.
You're thinking about gloves designed for insulation. These are heat pipe gloves and have no need to be so thick and clunky. If you want insulation as well just put a second pair over them and that second pair can be removed for the pockets handling and what not.
I love those levs in TW. They help kill all the idiots wasting time dueling in spawn while the actual basers who play the game are barely bothered.
At least many of the levs are kind enough to switch freqs before they do useless crap/build lts. The majority of the foresaid, can't-find-their-way-out-of-spawn players waste slots on freqs that are actually trying to play.
I feel the exact opposite as the OP. I graduated with BS in CS a while back, worked for two years, then came back for graduate work (and my school is all theory courses, unlike some schools which have very specific technology courses like "Programming with.NET" and such which I'm starting to drool over). Almost every potential employer I talked to in the field, the first question out of their mouth would be something like "Can you use/have you used C#?" and other very specific application/technology questions - deciding if I could fit into whatever operation they were running.
So yes I would love to have been able to say I had been working with [insert very popular app] for quite some time as opposed to faking it and saying I'm familiar with the theory (ie. OOP or distributed computing or presentation software in general, etc) which is assumed knowledge anyway if you have the app.
They obviously never used a PCJr (as I did whilst growing up). The sidecar expansion they so insult was one of the best features. You could upgrade your memory without ever opening the case!
This is the sort of thing I only see in future concept models of computers nowadays (slot in components, computing cores, etc). If you needed another hd/drive/memory expansion you just slapped on another sidecar, it extended the bus for you.
My right hand was out of commission for a few months ("accident" involving a rottweiler...) and I found one hand and one foot is plenty to run a gamepad (PS2 mostly). At first my foot was rather clumsy so I held the controller backwards (direction controls on the right) with my good hand and used the big toe to handle the d-pad and analog stick. With one hand and one foot direction controls are actually very easy because you can move the gamepad around against your foot using the hand that's holding the pad and doing the buttons.
Later on I actually grew to prefer hitting the buttons with my toes (well big toe mostly) since it required less fine control (and worst case you just lock your toe and move the gamepad against it using your one hand that's holding the pad and handling the other half again). I was even able to hit all the shoulder buttons fine with my big toe using this method (again move the gamepad to help you reach), although multiple buttons at once was tougher. Anyway you hear stories of kids who can write with their feet, running half a gamepad with your hand moving it about the help is nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
I almost stopped reading the article because it didn't address used games, which even stores like EB offer now as well as the places that specialize in such.
IMHO if you you're going to wait for a certain game to price drop significantly instead of buying it right off, you might as well stake out a used copy. Even re impulse buys, there have been quite a few games I would never pay x$ for, but then saw extra cheap used and went for.
Anyway, he does include some numbers for used data in the spreadsheets he links at the end, in case anyone is interested.
tcq would make writes less safe, since the drive is deciding on the write order rather than the OS (one alternative to journaling file systems is keeping very close track of write orders/dependencies). for scsi there are commands to skip the cache and write directly to disk for OSes to use, however. the use of such commands (and the performance penalty for writing safely) is why everyone complains about winxp scsi performance. normal ata has no such commands, although you can disable the write cache entirely (which is what microsoft recommends). I don't know if sata added these.
That's actually more a function of how it's administered rather than the actual sensor degrading. You can dial the sensitivity up and down you see, and guess what the admin gets yelled at for more?
You title your post "romantic vs. rational" seeming to want to associate your position with rationality, but then you argue for only letting space related science progress in the romantic direction. Exploring with remote probes is useless if we never go there. The Hubble is busy looking at crap we won't have practical interest in for centuries.
Your position smacks of navel gazing while us zealots at least want to go do something and develop the technology needed to put people in space and on other worlds and keep them there. Having useless, unpractical astronomy and "just for knowledge, not for use" exploration grouped in with real progress is an insult, not an insight.
Well with the "not authorized to redistribute" quote we know what this particular incident is about, but I see tons of posts above saying how terrible it is to block people coming from Linux news site. I think it's quite possible that it would be beneficial. Linux users tend to be much more tech savy than most and along with browsers like Mozilla rather than MSIE they are much more likely to simply block advertisements than run of the mill users.
Personally I don't block adds at all (well I refuse to install annoying ad showing software like that flash crap) and will actually click on ads for sites I like. However, I know countless people who not only block ads to leech off sites for free, but seem proud of doing so. Anyway, my point was simply that with the number of people who do this rising, being selective about who you waste bandwidth (which can be quite costly for large sites) on isn't necessarily a losing prospect anymore.
Insightful...more like absolutely clueless. This is an interview with someone who won, sexiest gamer, a contest which involves how intentionally sexy and provoking they can be strutting around and sending in hot pictures (also note both males and females competed so his "of women" crap is out of line as well ;p)...and now sexual questions in a post interview are nonconsensual!?
It's sad how all these claimants of our society's degradation have to blatantly twist situations around in a desperate attempt to prove their point. Just because politicians will make an issue out of nothing to blind side the dumber voters into reacting without looking doesn't mean such methods should be considered insightful reasoning when mimicked.
Well re my SL760 there are several compiles of mplayer out there, one of which has a driver for the ATI chip to get some acceleration. There are also GUIs for mplayer and then other graphic players. The opie media player comes to mind and Dr. Z is the commercial competitor to tkcVideo. The only ones of those that have ever crashed on me were opie and a java frontend for mplayer.
Btw, if choosing between Dr. Z and tkcVideo I highly recommend the former. tkcVideo when I tried it couldn't even go full screen without some crappy black border and was much slower and prone to losing sync compared to Dr. Z. I actually use mplayer now anyway, though. ^^
>whatever you can do in linux, you can now do on the sl5500/c860's
Well I love my Z and all, but they are still pretty slow which makes some tasks grueling. I always pre-rasterize my postscript and pdf files, for example, because the Z is so slow at zooming and panning around larger ones (like class notes, and bus schedules) at least with my setup (qpdf2 on a sl760).
Well personally I think music is a waste of time so have no experience there. But I commute by bus and subway often and always have my nose buried in a book or PDA and have noticed a similar effect to what the article describes. In such crowded conditions people will actually stand/sit closer to you if you are really into a book and not looking around/moving much than they would otherwise.
Although this sounds different than the article's "headphones reclaim some space" theme at first glance, it's actually the same thing - the crowd is not considering you as an active entity and not worrying as much about interacting with you.
Well I agree with the general sense of the article that it would be nice if money has to be spent in this direction then fund new exclusive games, don't bribe non-release of existing ones. However, I have to say if every game came out for all formats I would have just stuck with my PC (which has the ultimate exclusive titles, those apps I need for college work) and screw the XBox and PS2. So it makes sense to me if the big consoles do everything in their power to get exclusives and survive.
I think they'll gain a lot more buyers doing this then they'll lose due to the boycotters the article expects (besides not wanting to give up a good console, I suspect most gamers don't even read gaming news, much as most US anime fans actually watch dubs and not subs..) - and of course more buyers is actually good for those of us who have already bought and will buy future Sony consoles since it could help prevent them from dieing out early and leaving the owners in the dust like so many Sega consoles have done to people...
Favorite quote from the interview: "Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." Awesome, none of this idiotic, politically correct, don't-say-what-you're-thinking crap for Clarke. I was all set to write the Brits off as total losers - we recently had articles with them trying to get people to stop using the terms boyfriend/girlfriend and then tring to ban a video game for having animal violence (what's next, ban Looney Tunes?) - pretty much as far from this free thinking fellow as possible. Then again the interview also said he doesn't have any interest in returning to England...maybe we should all just write US, UK, and company off as old fogeys that are only getting worse and more restrictive rather than the innovative places they used to be.
>the biggest problem with Win-Live CD is that YOU CAN'T PATCH IT!
Wrong. Windows already supports patching install CDs (a process called slipstreaming where you can copy your original install CD, add the current service pack files and a fix rollup, and then burn a new, up to date install CD - just google it for more info). I've done this plenty of times with my consumer versions so it's not even limited to enterprise/admins. There's no reason they wouldn't provide the same capability with a live offering.
The article says 2 million to clean it up, 40 million to preserve it. So the "saving this doesn't cost anything" post above is wrong by a factor of 20...
500 isn't so bad, I got my PDA for gaming and playing media and paid 800 (imported from Japan, has a beautiful 640x480 screen ^^). So cut that in half and I paid 400 for the gaming, heh.
The emu options for PDAs are really great: mame/nes/snes (the last is a little slow, but fine for rpg's). None of that catridge crap like gameboy, one microdrive and I have a huge library of games.
I'm convinced. Ever consider running for president?
Graphics in terms of "looking realistic" might be approaching it's peak, but that's the most useless application of graphics to gaming there is in my mind. I actually prefer Doom to Quake since Quake looks like mud (literally, all the colors are dark and muted and blend into each other) and Doom is nice and simple to navigate and fight in - that last is the point of the game remember. I still have directories full of maps to try for Doom while my copy of Quake is getting dusty on a shelf somewhere. I can't talk about much newer FPS games since I don't consider the what they add to be worth the hardware it would cost me to play them.
Similarly I would hate increased realism graphics being applied to some of my favorite gaming pass times. Continuum is a great 2d multiplayer ship combat game and increased realism in the graphics department (e.g. 3D) would just hurt it. Now better graphics as part of new weapons, ships, translucent radar that only shows when you look at it, and stuff like that would be most welcome. There isn't a peak for these things either, since they are gameplay and game system intertwined like all important graphics decisions are. I hate all these graphics MMO RPGs out there (tend to be filled with repetitive tasks and non role players...) compared to MUDs, but when my favorite mud added an overland map I rather liked it since it improved gameplay.
I have a professor who mentioned his cell is years old because all the new, small phones can't punch a signal through his house. He likes the big numbers and easy to hit buttons as well. I bet all the people I see at work during lunch time desperately trying to get a call out by standing near the window and finally going outside would appreciate it more than size as well.
nasty things? turn in your geek card. I had my sound blaster reciting the opening speech from Star Trek 4...
Don't forget, people do cast these things (that means someone chooses the actor/actress for the role, you ignorant fuck), and it's not like all the plays around are about overweight gothic-looking people.
I have to disagree on this. School plays take from the club, not a broad pool of actors. So casting can do very little. As far as my college was concerned all the drama chicks were somewhat overweight and into weird things like goth. There was maybe a single girl on my track team (a thrower) that weighed more than any of the drama girls and we made fun of her endlessly.
Anyway it makes sense that the drama folks would be chubby compared to the actual lookers in the school, the jocks. Dancers generally gave better things and practices to do than the drama club so they don't even have that helping them out. Denying the generally overweight nature of drama chicks just makes your own veracity seem strained.
You're thinking about gloves designed for insulation. These are heat pipe gloves and have no need to be so thick and clunky. If you want insulation as well just put a second pair over them and that second pair can be removed for the pockets handling and what not.
I love those levs in TW. They help kill all the idiots wasting time dueling in spawn while the actual basers who play the game are barely bothered.
At least many of the levs are kind enough to switch freqs before they do useless crap/build lts. The majority of the foresaid, can't-find-their-way-out-of-spawn players waste slots on freqs that are actually trying to play.
Well I'm not the one who likes abuse, but as for myself I use UWIN instead of Cygwin because the former supports named pipes...
I feel the exact opposite as the OP. I graduated with BS in CS a while back, worked for two years, then came back for graduate work (and my school is all theory courses, unlike some schools which have very specific technology courses like "Programming with .NET" and such which I'm starting to drool over). Almost every potential employer I talked to in the field, the first question out of their mouth would be something like "Can you use/have you used C#?" and other very specific application/technology questions - deciding if I could fit into whatever operation they were running.
So yes I would love to have been able to say I had been working with [insert very popular app] for quite some time as opposed to faking it and saying I'm familiar with the theory (ie. OOP or distributed computing or presentation software in general, etc) which is assumed knowledge anyway if you have the app.
They obviously never used a PCJr (as I did whilst growing up). The sidecar expansion they so insult was one of the best features. You could upgrade your memory without ever opening the case!
This is the sort of thing I only see in future concept models of computers nowadays (slot in components, computing cores, etc). If you needed another hd/drive/memory expansion you just slapped on another sidecar, it extended the bus for you.
My right hand was out of commission for a few months ("accident" involving a rottweiler...) and I found one hand and one foot is plenty to run a gamepad (PS2 mostly). At first my foot was rather clumsy so I held the controller backwards (direction controls on the right) with my good hand and used the big toe to handle the d-pad and analog stick. With one hand and one foot direction controls are actually very easy because you can move the gamepad around against your foot using the hand that's holding the pad and doing the buttons.
Later on I actually grew to prefer hitting the buttons with my toes (well big toe mostly) since it required less fine control (and worst case you just lock your toe and move the gamepad against it using your one hand that's holding the pad and handling the other half again). I was even able to hit all the shoulder buttons fine with my big toe using this method (again move the gamepad to help you reach), although multiple buttons at once was tougher. Anyway you hear stories of kids who can write with their feet, running half a gamepad with your hand moving it about the help is nothing.