To be fair, Yahoo's is just a collection of controls and widgets to be included in a project indvidually - which has been offered by many other sites for quite a while now - while Google's promises to be a framework that takes the headache out of front-end AJAX development. Of course, in my experience "automatically generates code" and "takes the headache out of" are eventually incompatible down the line, but what do I know.
I haven't played with either yet, but they sound like two different beasts to me. The most interesting part of this to me would be to see how Google writes their web code.
The name of the console can mean the difference between having the consumer be a Nintendo PLAYER and a Nintendo EVANGELIST.
Fine by me. I don't like hearing sales pitches from my friends, of all people.
Ever considered that Nintendo might be trying to distance itself from fanatic fanboys?
"Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else." (http://revolution.nintendo.com/)
That's what it sounds like to me.
I'm not a console player, and I pledge no allegiance to one platform or another - nor do I want to. I would have to be convinced I want the GAMES for a platform, not the platform itself. Anyone preaching a specific platform's virtues to me is just likely to make me suspicious and turn me off from that platform.
Maybe that's just me, or maybe I'm part of a demographic Nintendo is trying to go after... who knows?
I.e. its like the publicity the N-Gage got for looking like a taco stuck to your head. Hilarious yes, but it didnt sell for shit.
No, it's not really like the N-Gage. Half the N-Gage's functionality was just plain badly designed.
You don't buy electronics because of the model name, you buy electronics because of the functionality. IF the Wii has good features, must-play games, and a good price, it'll do well despite the name. If it doesn't, it'll tank despite all the publicity (bad or otherwise) from the name.
In the meanwhile, the whole name thing has people looking at it and evaluating whether the features are right for them (or will, once more details are announced).
So, because of the name everyone's talking about Nintendo's console.
Two stories in two days on Slashdot about the name alone - first one got almost 1000 replies.
Blog articles are popping up left and right about it.
Even months from now, when you hear the name you'll smile or chuckle - because you think the name is funny, because you think it's refreshing, because you think it's colossally stupid and find it amusing that a company can make a mistake this big. In the meanwhile, the names "PlayStation" or "XBox" will just elicit a shrug.
Already - in one single day - Nintendo has managed to set itself apart from its competitors, and generate a huge amount of buzz about its console - without a massive ad campaign or billions in R&D. Just by releasing three letters to the public.
Y'know... I used to reason along the same lines. After 10 years of building/upgrading my own computer, however, I realized one thing:
Not once has it made sense to upgrade the processor. Every time it would've provided only a small gain compared to the expense and hassle. I've upgraded the RAM, hard drives, and video card several times - but by the time I felt I needed a better processor, it made more sense to replace the entire motherboard and go with a new generation (or build a new box entirely).
To each his own, of course. But in the future I'm going to worry about the upgrade paths a motherboard offers for the RAM, drives, or video - and not the CPU, because I know I'll never bother.
Then again, so far I've mostly had AMD boxes, so maybe there is some truth to what you say.:)
As another Slashdot poster said in a previous article, the media machine will make sure the buzz for the new formats will only increase... after all, if everyone's talking about them, they must be worth purchasing, right?
Well, I find this topic deeply uninteresting, and would be that much happier if I could avoid the upcoming flood of BluHD-DVDRay articles (what's this doing under games, anyway?).
And yes, this is the first and last time I'll post complaining about this - I'll ignore the next ones the old-fashioned way, by rolling my eyes and sighing. I can't be the only one who feels this way.
Many countries already have offences such as Driving without Due Care and Attention. This is fairly non-specific and can be used against any driver who endangers others by performing a non-driving activity (such as having their groin scalded by superheated coffee) whilst nominally in control of a moving vehicle.
Because I'd rather see a law that tries (whether effectively or not is another issue) to PREVENT an accident before it happens, rather than going after a driver AFTER they've already ruined someone else's life.
"Don't be stupid" laws are great in theory, but the people with enough common sense to realize what constitutes a stupid action are probably the ones least likely to do it in the first place.
Resolutions supported are limited to triple 640x480 (1920x480), triple 800x600(2400x600), triple 1024x768(3072x768), and triple 1280x1024(3840x1024).
If you have the room for three 19" CRTs, they're dirt cheap nowadays. Even LCDs have come down in price a lot - 17" and 19" LCDs are generally 1280x1024, and you can easily find cheap 19" LCDs for under CAD$300 (and decent ones around $350). Not all three monitors need to be identical... I'd suggest a quality monitor in the middle (since it'll be used the most), and cheaper ones on the sides.
Wouldn't you want to get as much of the obvious searching as possible out of the way BEFORE you shell out the hundreds or thousands of dollars for a patent attorney? If it's obvious an idea won't fly and it's something I could find out for myself, I sure wouldn't want to spend the $$ for someone else to tell me that. I'd only want to spend the money to be told it can't work because of something I COULDN'T find by myself, or to confirm my suspicion that I can patent it.
Stanislaw Lem was easily of my favourite writers, regardless of genre or language. His short stories are nothing short of brilliant (no pun intended) - it's the caliber of writing that subtly changes the way you think of the world.
Beyond that, a Computer Engineering which encompasses both Software and Hardware engineering is another type of program that would be useful.
For what it's worth, that describes my degree from the University of Toronto.
Whether it was a good program, and how effective it was at covering both software and hardware engineering, is another matter entirely, but that is its stated purpose.
The only description of this "new tech" I could find in the article was:
Blomberg is working on an invention to give users more control over the volume output of their portable devices. Although he declined to tell me much about it, I gleaned it's some sort of software solution for the iPod that can make users aware of unsafe volumes. Whatever Blomberg's working on, we should know more about it in a couple of months.
The rest of the article has some fairly common-sense stuff about protecting your hearing... nothing very techy though...
The whole ipod is killing this generation's hearing hysteria lately has been bugging me though. Loud music and earbuds were around long before the ipod... are there any stats that look at how many people were using walkmans in the 80's (or whenever they came out), portable CD players after that, and what effect that had on hearing? It's not like any of this is a new problem, the only difference I can see might be in the extent...
You're wasting your breath (and your karma)... don't expect a post (no matter how well thought out and neutrally stated) that as much as HINTS that an Apple product might not be the best thing to happen in the history of mankind, and that there might be better alternatives, to be very welcome on Slashdot. Clearly there exists no alternative to QuickTime or the iPod - if you prefer anything else, you're either an ignorant luddite, or paid by Microsoft.
Note to mods: THIS might be considered troll/flamebait/offtopic, not the parent post.
Yes, it's simple enough, and yes, it seems like that's the most complicated part of the entire process, but again I had to chuckle at the image of asking a newbie to open a terminal and type that in.
The script itself sounds great though... I wouldn't mind having something like that for Windows.
Administration and development: There are numerous impressive efforts going on in this area, and three products are particularly promising. pgAdmin III has a particularly long development history and is capable of handling practically any task ranging from simple table creation to managing replication across multiple servers. Navicat PostgreSQL offers features similar to pgAdmin III and is packaged in a very well-designed interface. A good, Web-based tool is phpPgAdmin.
Now, I am NOT a DBA, and I'm generally a newbie when it comes to databases. I've been trying to use PostgreSQL for a small learning project. PostgreSQL itself is fine (then again, for our very limited needs pretty much anything would be), but pgAdmin III has been driving me nuts... the two worst things that have happened (repeatedly) was pgAdmin crashing when trying to view data in some tables, and pgAdmin hanging indefinitely when trying to drop some tables (and every time after when trying to interact with those tables - until I deleted the entire database and started again). Yes, I don't really know what I'm doing, and these were most likely caused by user errors, but program crashes and freezes are NOT a good sign, no matter what.
I guess I'll give Navicat a try, it might be better.
Not at all tenuous... when watching that video, the first parts of the game reminded me very much of an Evo with updated graphics. Which is a great thing - Evo was pretty addictive! I'm looking forward to that part of Spore.
The sandbox mode at the end - with the UFO and all that - seems to be designed to let you replay the parts you enjoyed the most... also great, don't need to start a new game to play around in the single-cell mode, for example.
The only part I'm not very sure of is the "RTS" mode, and the city building... not sure how compelling that'll be... from the video it didn't look like the creature design affects this part that much - the changes seemed mostly cosmetic (ohh, look how easy it is to make a mushroom-shaped building.. now let's put it down... uhhh, they seem to like it... it doesn't affect the game world in any way, but it's mushroom shaped!).
I've read my fair share of e-books - years ago during slow summer jobs, or more recently on a laptop in bed. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Advantages: in certain ways, e-books are more portable than plain-old-books; I can keep them in my gmail account and access them from any computer, for example (or on a PDA if I had one). There's lots of quality free content out there (been lately making my way through some of the java books from http://www.theserverside.com/tss). There are, of course, disadvantages, many of which I agree with and have been mentioned in other posts.
Even though I've read a fair number of e-books, I haven't BOUGHT any, and I don't see myself doing that anytime soon. Buying anything electronic is, at best, renting it. Paper books don't become obsolete; they don't get lost in hard drive crashes, left behind when you switch computers, put on a CD and forgotten about, etc. They just sit there on a shelf, you can take them out, read them, and put them back with no fuss, and the only time you really have to worry about them is when you move. It's a physical object you OWN, and which is superbly suited to its purpose, which is not the case with e-books. Perhaps even more importantly, books are expensive, but they're not THAT expensive - I generally feel it's a fair price for what you get (an exception would be university textbooks, but that's another story:p)
At most, I could see myself paying for a subscription-based system - pay a fixed fee, have access to all the e-books in the system. Even then, I'd only really see myself doing that for technical books - I find the information I need, I use it when I need it, and I don't worry about it again.
Slashdot Mirror
Ohhh? Was it overlooked?
To be fair, Yahoo's is just a collection of controls and widgets to be included in a project indvidually - which has been offered by many other sites for quite a while now - while Google's promises to be a framework that takes the headache out of front-end AJAX development. Of course, in my experience "automatically generates code" and "takes the headache out of" are eventually incompatible down the line, but what do I know.
I haven't played with either yet, but they sound like two different beasts to me. The most interesting part of this to me would be to see how Google writes their web code.
The name of the console can mean the difference between having the consumer be a Nintendo PLAYER and a Nintendo EVANGELIST.
Fine by me. I don't like hearing sales pitches from my friends, of all people.
Ever considered that Nintendo might be trying to distance itself from fanatic fanboys?
"Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else." (http://revolution.nintendo.com/)
That's what it sounds like to me.
I'm not a console player, and I pledge no allegiance to one platform or another - nor do I want to. I would have to be convinced I want the GAMES for a platform, not the platform itself. Anyone preaching a specific platform's virtues to me is just likely to make me suspicious and turn me off from that platform.
Maybe that's just me, or maybe I'm part of a demographic Nintendo is trying to go after... who knows?
I.e. its like the publicity the N-Gage got for looking like a taco stuck to your head. Hilarious yes, but it didnt sell for shit.
No, it's not really like the N-Gage. Half the N-Gage's functionality was just plain badly designed.
You don't buy electronics because of the model name, you buy electronics because of the functionality. IF the Wii has good features, must-play games, and a good price, it'll do well despite the name. If it doesn't, it'll tank despite all the publicity (bad or otherwise) from the name.
In the meanwhile, the whole name thing has people looking at it and evaluating whether the features are right for them (or will, once more details are announced).
So, because of the name everyone's talking about Nintendo's console.
Two stories in two days on Slashdot about the name alone - first one got almost 1000 replies.
Blog articles are popping up left and right about it.
Even months from now, when you hear the name you'll smile or chuckle - because you think the name is funny, because you think it's refreshing, because you think it's colossally stupid and find it amusing that a company can make a mistake this big. In the meanwhile, the names "PlayStation" or "XBox" will just elicit a shrug.
Already - in one single day - Nintendo has managed to set itself apart from its competitors, and generate a huge amount of buzz about its console - without a massive ad campaign or billions in R&D. Just by releasing three letters to the public.
So, remind me again... why is this name bad?
Y'know... I used to reason along the same lines. After 10 years of building/upgrading my own computer, however, I realized one thing:
:)
Not once has it made sense to upgrade the processor. Every time it would've provided only a small gain compared to the expense and hassle. I've upgraded the RAM, hard drives, and video card several times - but by the time I felt I needed a better processor, it made more sense to replace the entire motherboard and go with a new generation (or build a new box entirely).
To each his own, of course. But in the future I'm going to worry about the upgrade paths a motherboard offers for the RAM, drives, or video - and not the CPU, because I know I'll never bother.
Then again, so far I've mostly had AMD boxes, so maybe there is some truth to what you say.
So that I can just ignore all these articles.
As another Slashdot poster said in a previous article, the media machine will make sure the buzz for the new formats will only increase... after all, if everyone's talking about them, they must be worth purchasing, right?
Well, I find this topic deeply uninteresting, and would be that much happier if I could avoid the upcoming flood of BluHD-DVDRay articles (what's this doing under games, anyway?).
And yes, this is the first and last time I'll post complaining about this - I'll ignore the next ones the old-fashioned way, by rolling my eyes and sighing. I can't be the only one who feels this way.
Because I'd rather see a law that tries (whether effectively or not is another issue) to PREVENT an accident before it happens, rather than going after a driver AFTER they've already ruined someone else's life.
"Don't be stupid" laws are great in theory, but the people with enough common sense to realize what constitutes a stupid action are probably the ones least likely to do it in the first place.
If you have the room for three 19" CRTs, they're dirt cheap nowadays. Even LCDs have come down in price a lot - 17" and 19" LCDs are generally 1280x1024, and you can easily find cheap 19" LCDs for under CAD$300 (and decent ones around $350). Not all three monitors need to be identical... I'd suggest a quality monitor in the middle (since it'll be used the most), and cheaper ones on the sides.
Wouldn't you want to get as much of the obvious searching as possible out of the way BEFORE you shell out the hundreds or thousands of dollars for a patent attorney? If it's obvious an idea won't fly and it's something I could find out for myself, I sure wouldn't want to spend the $$ for someone else to tell me that. I'd only want to spend the money to be told it can't work because of something I COULDN'T find by myself, or to confirm my suspicion that I can patent it.
Hunters can't use maces, you n00b! omgwtfbbq l2play kthxbai!
*blink*
What just happened? I think I had a flashback... *shudder*
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Mushroom, mushroom!
Stanislaw Lem was easily of my favourite writers, regardless of genre or language. His short stories are nothing short of brilliant (no pun intended) - it's the caliber of writing that subtly changes the way you think of the world.
e la.htm (his official site)
A couple of links to bibliographies and excerpts:
http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/dziela/dzi
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/lem/lem.html
Some of my favourite works are The Cyberiad, The Futurological Congress, and of course The Star Diaries. I have a lot of his work left to read...
May he rest in peace. Douglas Adams had nothing on Stanislaw Lem.
Then, clearly, all the Sudoku, Kakuro and Chess have paid off for you. I bow to your superior intellect! :p
And no, English isn't my first language either.
That's a given, but I'm not even sure what that sentence MEANS.
Interesting. How many of my brains will these games make sharper? Three of them? Five?
Beyond that, a Computer Engineering which encompasses both Software and Hardware engineering is another type of program that would be useful.
For what it's worth, that describes my degree from the University of Toronto.
Whether it was a good program, and how effective it was at covering both software and hardware engineering, is another matter entirely, but that is its stated purpose.
The rest of the article has some fairly common-sense stuff about protecting your hearing... nothing very techy though...
The whole ipod is killing this generation's hearing hysteria lately has been bugging me though. Loud music and earbuds were around long before the ipod... are there any stats that look at how many people were using walkmans in the 80's (or whenever they came out), portable CD players after that, and what effect that had on hearing? It's not like any of this is a new problem, the only difference I can see might be in the extent...
Lara Croft counts as two. :p
You're wasting your breath (and your karma)... don't expect a post (no matter how well thought out and neutrally stated) that as much as HINTS that an Apple product might not be the best thing to happen in the history of mankind, and that there might be better alternatives, to be very welcome on Slashdot. Clearly there exists no alternative to QuickTime or the iPod - if you prefer anything else, you're either an ignorant luddite, or paid by Microsoft.
Note to mods: THIS might be considered troll/flamebait/offtopic, not the parent post.
I love the instructions for installing Automatix:Yes, it's simple enough, and yes, it seems like that's the most complicated part of the entire process, but again I had to chuckle at the image of asking a newbie to open a terminal and type that in.
The script itself sounds great though... I wouldn't mind having something like that for Windows.
Now, I am NOT a DBA, and I'm generally a newbie when it comes to databases. I've been trying to use PostgreSQL for a small learning project. PostgreSQL itself is fine (then again, for our very limited needs pretty much anything would be), but pgAdmin III has been driving me nuts... the two worst things that have happened (repeatedly) was pgAdmin crashing when trying to view data in some tables, and pgAdmin hanging indefinitely when trying to drop some tables (and every time after when trying to interact with those tables - until I deleted the entire database and started again). Yes, I don't really know what I'm doing, and these were most likely caused by user errors, but program crashes and freezes are NOT a good sign, no matter what.
I guess I'll give Navicat a try, it might be better.
what's to say they're not delaying to make the copy protection scheme less intrusive and more practical for end users?
Logic? Past experience?
Not at all tenuous... when watching that video, the first parts of the game reminded me very much of an Evo with updated graphics. Which is a great thing - Evo was pretty addictive! I'm looking forward to that part of Spore.
The sandbox mode at the end - with the UFO and all that - seems to be designed to let you replay the parts you enjoyed the most... also great, don't need to start a new game to play around in the single-cell mode, for example.
The only part I'm not very sure of is the "RTS" mode, and the city building... not sure how compelling that'll be... from the video it didn't look like the creature design affects this part that much - the changes seemed mostly cosmetic (ohh, look how easy it is to make a mushroom-shaped building.. now let's put it down... uhhh, they seem to like it... it doesn't affect the game world in any way, but it's mushroom shaped!).
I've read my fair share of e-books - years ago during slow summer jobs, or more recently on a laptop in bed. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Advantages: in certain ways, e-books are more portable than plain-old-books; I can keep them in my gmail account and access them from any computer, for example (or on a PDA if I had one). There's lots of quality free content out there (been lately making my way through some of the java books from http://www.theserverside.com/tss). There are, of course, disadvantages, many of which I agree with and have been mentioned in other posts.
:p)
Even though I've read a fair number of e-books, I haven't BOUGHT any, and I don't see myself doing that anytime soon. Buying anything electronic is, at best, renting it. Paper books don't become obsolete; they don't get lost in hard drive crashes, left behind when you switch computers, put on a CD and forgotten about, etc. They just sit there on a shelf, you can take them out, read them, and put them back with no fuss, and the only time you really have to worry about them is when you move. It's a physical object you OWN, and which is superbly suited to its purpose, which is not the case with e-books. Perhaps even more importantly, books are expensive, but they're not THAT expensive - I generally feel it's a fair price for what you get (an exception would be university textbooks, but that's another story
At most, I could see myself paying for a subscription-based system - pay a fixed fee, have access to all the e-books in the system. Even then, I'd only really see myself doing that for technical books - I find the information I need, I use it when I need it, and I don't worry about it again.
I know this might come as a shock to you... but PDAs are also computers :p