I look at the games available today and can't think of a single one that isn't 100% pretty graphics and 0% gameplay.
The 'Prince of Persia' series has great gameplay IMHO. One of the few remakes where the remake actually does justice to the original AND is a great game by itself.
The problem with this "it used to be so much better" crap is that just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good. The thing is: the crappy old games are long forgotten.
It's just like with 'old' music. "There is so much crap right now, music in the 60s/70s/80s/whatever_period was so much better". No it wasn't, there was just as much crap around then as there is now, only the good songs 'stuck' and are still being played.
Another example: "Oh, this $OLD_DEVICE still works after 20 years while my $NEW_DEVICE broke down after 2 years. They don't make 'em like they used to". Bullshit, it's just that the stuff made then that broke down after 2 years got thrown away 18 years ago.
And you know what? My Great Dane does not mate with my Chiuaua. So I guess those are two different species as well.
No, they are not. They are able to interbreed, maybe some things don't 'fit', but you can fertilize an egg of one of them with the sperm of the other and if you'd let it come to term it will result in a fertile dog.
Interesting, but the species are still mosquitos, they didn't become frogs or blu-jays, or grow gills or learn to spin webs, or change phylum. In the end, they're still mosquitos.
There is no need for them to change into frogs, or blu-jays or whatever. They found a niche, and they are profiting from it.
In any case, as I stated, the new mosquitos are still mosquitos and not some other creature.
By that same argument, humans are still (bald) monkeys and not some other creature.
Also, you must realize that 'big' changes take time. What you are essentially doing is analog to watching a movie about race cars in a million times slow-motion and then concluding that race cars don't move.
I've heard some point out some details about why certain design characteristics of humans are inefficient, but who's to say, if in 100 years, we actually learn that they are quite efficient for their purpose?
I assume you are a US-ian ? For the last hundred years, people have become taller, this may be less noticable in the US (you guys are midgets) but go visit The Netherlands some time, our younger population is one of the tallest in the world. Our back is a really bad design for walking upright (but the very similar design of a monkey's back seems to work pretty well) especially if you're tall (the pressure on the lower vertebrae is too high, among other things). I have some quite tall friends (2 meters) who aren't too happy with this 'intelligently' designed back of theirs. This won't suddenly become 'quite efficient' in the next 100 or even 1000 years, people are getting taller, not shorter (this is caused by better nutricion and medical care while growing up), this will become a bigger problem in the future.
Another example is the 'design' of the eye, they are wired wrong (the nerves run on top of the light-sensitive cells) , resulting in the blind spot in a human's vision (they al 'poke' through the layer of light sensitive cells at the same location). There is no need for this, nor will there ever be, there are species with eyes which are wired the right way around (octopi IIRC) and they work very well.
Go look at creation, it's not intelligently designed at all. There is an alternative creationist-ish theory called 'malicious design' which seems a lot more likely than ID.
Families and species are human constructs, and I daresay there is a difference between the two in nature.
Yes they are, and yes there is. It's all just a definition thing, families and species are different because they wouldn't have been called that way if they were the same. Meanwhile back in the real world, nature doesn't care if we call something a species or a family. The problem is, these are all abstractions, meant to make things manageble for our brains. In reality there are no species, there are no families, there is no micro or macro evolution. There's just billions and billions of individual beings, and really, they aren't really there either, they also are an abstraction made by our wonderful minds. Go find a nearby human and study him/her closely, you percieve him/her as a human being, while in reality it's just a couple of gazillion cells working together, trying to survive.
This is how we humans deal with the real world, we categorize things, we put stuff in imaginary boxes and label them. The same goes for evolution, it's just a model, a simplified representation of reality, so our brain can cope with the enormous complex stuff that happens in nature, nothing more and nothing less. There is no universal rulebook which says animals should evolve such-and-such, it's just what happends, it's an emergent property, evolution tries to describe what happens, approximately.
And you're right in saying that small incremental changes don't have to add up to much. In fact, mostly they don't. Most of the time the changes don't do much, of the changes that do something, most are harmful. But sometimes, just once in a while, a change is beneficial, and that individual might have a slight advantage over the rest of the population which makes the benificial set of genes spread slightly better than than the rest. All of this isn't really making a difference, until you repeat it a gazillion times, which nature does. A tiny chance for an improvement becomes a pretty good chance if you have a billion times a billion tries at it. A slightly better performance in reproducing if you have a certain gene starts adding up if you do it for a million years. Ofcourse, if you have a big advantage (as in the case of the 'peppered moth') you don't need a million years.
What it does not account for is macro-evolution, that is, the changing of one species into another at the chromosomal level by purely natural selection.
The macro/micro evolution distinction is no more than a human contruct, there is no difference between the two in nature.
Having not followed this very closely in the last 10 or so years, I may be out of date, but this is the missing link that would confirm all of the Origin of Species theory, and to my knowledge this link has never been found.
This has been observed, e.g. several new mosquito species have evolved in the London subway. see here for more info.
Side note: I am amazed at the hypocrisy I see when this issue appears. Many people who post they want the GPL upheld using copyright law, turn around and want to deprive others of their rights under copyright law.
Not really.
GPL violations usually involve trying to pass off some source code as your own after making a few modifications. I'm strongly opposed to that. However, If I e.g. share the newest britney spears song (which I don't, it's total crap) I'm not taking credit for someone else's work.
Maybe if your government didn't tax gasoline at a rate of over 100%
Maybe if you didn't make such crappy cars, you wouldn't need so much gas in the first place.
It's really surprising the worlds most motorized country can't even put decent engines in their cars. You're using a typical USian aproach to engine design: brute force and ignorance. USians only seem to care about quantity, not quality.
It's not uncommon to work in a completely different city than where you live, driving for an hour on a highway to get to work
And you think that is uncommon here in the netherlands, with the highest gas prices in the world ? We pay $7.15 per gallon now (1,51 eur/liter). And with the amount of traffic jams we've got here lots of people DO spend an hour or more on the highway to get to work.
At least we have real cars instead of oversized dinky-toys.
And this is exactly the problem with DRM and the whole copyright thing.
You have to return a normal dead-tree book because there are only a few copies, and making more copies costs time, materials and money. Because of this, the product is scarce and thus market forces (supply/demand) apply.
Digital media, however, can be copied without any significant costs whatsoever, there is no longer a 'real' scarcity. The publishers are still trying to sell the work on a per-copy basis like they always did, combined with negligible reproduction costs this means lots-of-$$$. Unfortunately for the publishers, consumers are recognizing that there the products scarcity is purely fictional, and they don't accept this.
Correct. You insert your bank card, enter your PIN and a number is generated, this is used to log in.
In order to actually perform a financial transaction you have to enter your PIN and a code generated by the online banking site into the calculator thingie and then enter the code the device generates on your computer.
Here in the netherlands I have a similar method of accessing my account. In addition to having a calculator device, I have to insert my bank card into the device and enter my PIN before it will function (they use information on the card to generate the code). The upside of this is that the calculator devices are all alike, nothing is stored in the device. If e.g. I'm visiting my parents, I can use their calculator thingie to access my account.
I can assure you the setting does work, so you must have a program running that overrides it, such as nVidia's nView desktop manager.
Ah, that probably is the problem, I got this nview thingie on my desktop, checking...
Yep, disabling the "make windows minimize and maximize faster" setting on the 'effects' tab fixed this. Badly named setting, it doesn't speed anything up, it changes the behaviour.
For example, people used to think that shadowed window edges were "just" eye candy, but as you spend time in WMs that do shadowing, you realize it's a useful visual cue that keeps from obstructing other data on the screen.
Another example is the 'genie' effect when minimizing/restoring windows. At first it looks like a gimmick, but it is in fact a very useful visual cue, it shows you where the window went so you can find it quickly when you need it back. Nowadays, when I use Windows, I get annoyed by windows just disappearing into thin air.
In which case, you should have been comparing various truck lines to one another in the first place.
So, exactly what Apple should I compare to a 199 euro AMD Sempron 2300+, 256MB RAM, 40GB HD, DVD-ROM. Or to a 650 euro Athlon64 3200+, 512 MB, Geforce FX5700 128MB, 160GB 7200 rpm S-ATA HD, NEC Dual-layer DVD+/-RW. (all prices include 19% VAT).
That's my point, there is no comparison, the choice is just too limited. you either buy an expensive low-end SFF mini, or an expensive high-end G5. There is no non-SFF version of the mini, there is no mid-range tower.
The problem is the lack of choice, sure the mini is great value for money compared to other small pc's, but I don't want a small PC. Stick a mac with the mini's specs in a beige box for half the price, and they would sell like crazy.
While I haven't seen it yet, I'm kind of disappointed they only made one movie, there's enough material for more. Imho they should have announced it to be a trilogy (and then actually release 5 movies, one for each book).
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Forgot to add: this still requires physically pushing a button.
Last time I checked, I lived in Europe and my TV remote does exactly the same. So does my Amplifier, DVD, etc.
In Europe you have to physically push a button to turn them on in stand by mode.
How does this work in the US then, TV's turn themselves on ?
The problem with this "it used to be so much better" crap is that just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good. The thing is: the crappy old games are long forgotten.
It's just like with 'old' music. "There is so much crap right now, music in the 60s/70s/80s/whatever_period was so much better". No it wasn't, there was just as much crap around then as there is now, only the good songs 'stuck' and are still being played.
Another example: "Oh, this $OLD_DEVICE still works after 20 years while my $NEW_DEVICE broke down after 2 years. They don't make 'em like they used to". Bullshit, it's just that the stuff made then that broke down after 2 years got thrown away 18 years ago.
People have very selective memories.
Also, you must realize that 'big' changes take time. What you are essentially doing is analog to watching a movie about race cars in a million times slow-motion and then concluding that race cars don't move. I assume you are a US-ian ? For the last hundred years, people have become taller, this may be less noticable in the US (you guys are midgets) but go visit The Netherlands some time, our younger population is one of the tallest in the world. Our back is a really bad design for walking upright (but the very similar design of a monkey's back seems to work pretty well) especially if you're tall (the pressure on the lower vertebrae is too high, among other things). I have some quite tall friends (2 meters) who aren't too happy with this 'intelligently' designed back of theirs. This won't suddenly become 'quite efficient' in the next 100 or even 1000 years, people are getting taller, not shorter (this is caused by better nutricion and medical care while growing up), this will become a bigger problem in the future.
Another example is the 'design' of the eye, they are wired wrong (the nerves run on top of the light-sensitive cells) , resulting in the blind spot in a human's vision (they al 'poke' through the layer of light sensitive cells at the same location). There is no need for this, nor will there ever be, there are species with eyes which are wired the right way around (octopi IIRC) and they work very well.
Go look at creation, it's not intelligently designed at all. There is an alternative creationist-ish theory called 'malicious design' which seems a lot more likely than ID.
This is how we humans deal with the real world, we categorize things, we put stuff in imaginary boxes and label them. The same goes for evolution, it's just a model, a simplified representation of reality, so our brain can cope with the enormous complex stuff that happens in nature, nothing more and nothing less. There is no universal rulebook which says animals should evolve such-and-such, it's just what happends, it's an emergent property, evolution tries to describe what happens, approximately.
And you're right in saying that small incremental changes don't have to add up to much. In fact, mostly they don't. Most of the time the changes don't do much, of the changes that do something, most are harmful. But sometimes, just once in a while, a change is beneficial, and that individual might have a slight advantage over the rest of the population which makes the benificial set of genes spread slightly better than than the rest. All of this isn't really making a difference, until you repeat it a gazillion times, which nature does. A tiny chance for an improvement becomes a pretty good chance if you have a billion times a billion tries at it. A slightly better performance in reproducing if you have a certain gene starts adding up if you do it for a million years. Ofcourse, if you have a big advantage (as in the case of the 'peppered moth') you don't need a million years.
It all comes down to statistics.
This has been observed, e.g. several new mosquito species have evolved in the London subway.
see here for more info.
GPL violations usually involve trying to pass off some source code as your own after making a few modifications. I'm strongly opposed to that. However, If I e.g. share the newest britney spears song (which I don't, it's total crap) I'm not taking credit for someone else's work.
It's really surprising the worlds most motorized country can't even put decent engines in their cars. You're using a typical USian aproach to engine design: brute force and ignorance. USians only seem to care about quantity, not quality.
At least we have real cars instead of oversized dinky-toys.
And this is exactly the problem with DRM and the whole copyright thing.
You have to return a normal dead-tree book because there are only a few copies, and making more copies costs time, materials and money. Because of this, the product is scarce and thus market forces (supply/demand) apply.
Digital media, however, can be copied without any significant costs whatsoever, there is no longer a 'real' scarcity. The publishers are still trying to sell the work on a per-copy basis like they always did, combined with negligible reproduction costs this means lots-of-$$$. Unfortunately for the publishers, consumers are recognizing that there the products scarcity is purely fictional, and they don't accept this.
Correct. You insert your bank card, enter your PIN and a number is generated, this is used to log in.
In order to actually perform a financial transaction you have to enter your PIN and a code generated by the online banking site into the calculator thingie and then enter the code the device generates on your computer.
Here in the netherlands I have a similar method of accessing my account. In addition to having a calculator device, I have to insert my bank card into the device and enter my PIN before it will function (they use information on the card to generate the code). The upside of this is that the calculator devices are all alike, nothing is stored in the device. If e.g. I'm visiting my parents, I can use their calculator thingie to access my account.
I can assure you the setting does work, so you must have a program running that overrides it, such as nVidia's nView desktop manager.
...
Ah, that probably is the problem, I got this nview thingie on my desktop, checking
Yep, disabling the "make windows minimize and maximize faster" setting on the 'effects' tab fixed this. Badly named setting, it doesn't speed anything up, it changes the behaviour.
For example, people used to think that shadowed window edges were "just" eye candy, but as you spend time in WMs that do shadowing, you realize it's a useful visual cue that keeps from obstructing other data on the screen.
Another example is the 'genie' effect when minimizing/restoring windows. At first it looks like a gimmick, but it is in fact a very useful visual cue, it shows you where the window went so you can find it quickly when you need it back. Nowadays, when I use Windows, I get annoyed by windows just disappearing into thin air.
As an non-USian, What the *bleep* is Chuck E. Cheese ??
Most likely all at once, women living together syncronize their periods automagically.
In which case, you should have been comparing various truck lines to one another in the first place.
So, exactly what Apple should I compare to a 199 euro AMD Sempron 2300+, 256MB RAM, 40GB HD, DVD-ROM. Or to a 650 euro Athlon64 3200+, 512 MB, Geforce FX5700 128MB, 160GB 7200 rpm S-ATA HD, NEC Dual-layer DVD+/-RW. (all prices include 19% VAT).
That's my point, there is no comparison, the choice is just too limited. you either buy an expensive low-end SFF mini, or an expensive high-end G5. There is no non-SFF version of the mini, there is no mid-range tower.
Yes, size counts.
Not to me it doesn't.
The problem is the lack of choice, sure the mini is great value for money compared to other small pc's, but I don't want a small PC.
Stick a mac with the mini's specs in a beige box for half the price, and they would sell like crazy.
Just like in commercials on TV, where they manage to show naked women without actually showing anything.
While I haven't seen it yet, I'm kind of disappointed they only made one movie, there's enough material for more. Imho they should have announced it to be a trilogy (and then actually release 5 movies, one for each book).