Sometimes the buying guide can be spot on, but sometimes they miss (you get that with rumours). And I think they're perpetually telling you to wait;)
I'm just amused (in a vaguely horrified way) that I've not only bought my own Mac, but FINALLY managed to get Work to buy one.... just before an update.
I'd love to be developing websites or something. I love the challenge of trying to do that kind of stuff, but I also know the stress it can cause as well (just from my hobby website stuff)
Thing is, having done a lot of less-stressful things I don't love so much, I can tell you now, you're lucky being in the more stressful job you DO enjoy. You go home with a wonderful feeling of achievement when you're doing something challenging that you enjoy. You won't get that with a factory job.
Best advice I can give you is to find ways to manage the stress a little.
You realise you're talking about CARTOON CHARACTERS right? Cartoon characters are generally pretty stylised, I don't know if you can really say if a character is good or bad looking based on a stylised cartoon character design.
Particularly when it's something as stylised as Penny Arcade, where there is not a great amount of detail used in the characters themselves.
Are the characters in The Simpsons good or bad looking?
Plus, I'm sure the guys at PA probably DO feel that their girlfriends are good looking. Just because you don't think that Kara's good looking, doesn't mean that they agree with you. Most people feel that their significant others are good looking.
It's not a new trend to see so much scantily clad women (be they digital or real) in a videogame mag. I remember a few years ago one even had a "game girl of the month" in one of the mags I had, which featured a full page scantily clad glamor shot of a model dressed as say, Lara Croft, or such. In the style of say, FHM.
But back then, there was a higher percentage of content than there seems to be now.
Now if I buy a magazine, I know I'll get to see lots of semi naked polygon girls, anime girls, real girls, etc, but I'm pretty sure I won't find out anything interesting on the games....
Site Theft is pretty common, and not always for "business" reasons as well. I used to webmaster a Final Fantasy VII site and that was stolen too, right down to all the fans' fanart, fan-fiction, etc.
Course, there was no financial gain for that one, I guess they just wanted the credit or something. Still, I was pretty pissed off at the time, and I wasn't webmaster back then -- I only had my fan art stolen.
Well, for Browser or Mail, I highly recommend both Opera or Mozilla. Both will handle Mail and Browsing quite well, and a few other nifty things too.
I have used both, and there are features in both that I like... both are free, although one will display ads (Opera) until you purchase a copy.
I strongly suggest downloading a copy of both, and seeing which one you prefer.
If you want Graphics software for any arty things, try the GIMP, or if you want something a little more painty (ie; emulates real painting and drawing materials) Open Canvas is good. I guess it depends what your needs are when it comes to editing or creating pictures.
FFVII is arguably the most popular of the FF series overall, although FFX has been the most popular recently. And cause it has so many fans, if it was done badly, it would piss a lot of people off, which is one of the reasons the Square-Enix guys stated.
The other is that FFVII uses what is now very old game data. It is not possible for Square-Enix to create a sequel to FFVII with the old game data; they'd have to start development from scratch. Which is expensive.
One of the deciding factors in the making of FFX-2 was the fact that they could use game data from FFX to make the game -- so in effect they were just adding some extra features to an existing Final Fantasy, rather than developing a new one from scratch. If it hadn't been possible to make the game "on the cheap" like that, I am not so sure they would've done it...
Hmm... I heard a whisper about this earlier, and there were suspicions earlier when I read the Financial Review and was told that they need to halve their IT spending.
I don't know if Telstra are doing this because of the benefits that Open Source could provide, or cause they've been told to save money.
I just hope that they get it right for once. They seem to have enough trouble with their Microsoft products.... (the school's system in South Australia -- run by Telstra -- was down for three hours due to the Blaster worm on Monday, as was a number of Telstra dialup and e-mail....)
I guess Save Points, and whether there are too many, or not enough, may depend on the player's skill level to begin with.
I can't say I condone the act of saving, then dying and reloading back to the save (so you don't lose the life, etc), in my books that's "cheating" regardless of skill level, but I do see Save Points as a valuable "safety net" for less skilled gamers, and a useful tool even for skilled gamers.
A very skilled and confident gamer is probably going to regard too many Save Points as "taking the challenge out of the game". And to some extent it does make things easier, but if that's a problem, I suggest that those same players simply bypass those save opportunities.
A less skilled gamer however is probably going to rely on Save Points fairly heavily. It provides a way for less skilled gamers to get through a game that they might otherwise give up on entirely.
Also, like somebody else mentioned, frequent save points are necessary for younger children, in part due to their level of skill, and also because their Console/Computer is probably shared with siblings and parents, meaning you're likely to need to save frequently as they tend to kick you off for various reasons (Homework, Dinner, parent or sibling needs/wants/bitched to mum/whined to use the machine, bed time, etc)
Us chicks already get the short straw there -- handbags.
Phone, PDA, wallet, usually odd pieces of jewellery, chequebook.... in mine there's even sometimes a digital camera. All in a nice handy carry-bag, ready-to-go.
They really need to start putting pockets in women's clothing!
Keep your stuff where you can see it, don't lend it to anybody, and don't leave it unattended. If you can, put it in your pockets.
Personally, I wouldn't lend my phone to a stranger in the first place. Especially without keeping an eye on it!
Maybe one idea is to have lockers set up at the place, like they do say.. when you go to the pool or something. Course, I don't think it should have to go that far, but if this kind of thing is a problem, it may well have to.
I'd rather see people use a little more common sense though.....
Well, I'm too much of a wuss to actually *play* it, but I help out my partner when he does.
I gotta admit, part of me is itching with excitement over this. I REALLY enjoyed Silent Hill 2, and out of all the survival horror my partner and I have "played" together, I find the Silent Hill series to be the best.
Let's hope that Silent Hill 3 is as good as that guy makes it sound:)
This wouldn't be the first time the State Government has done something silly.
While I think that Open Source stuff doesn't get noticed much as far as State Supply goes, I don't think this is the right way to go about getting it noticed/used either.
Hmm... I'll check it out if it has a PAL release.... but most of the games I wanna play don't (ie, Xenogears).
And I'm not really saying I don't like the turn based battle system of Final Fantasy... it's just... MAN... it was hard to go back to it after just thwap-ing things with a giant keyblade.
I know, sad, isn't it? It changed my preferences in Playstation games towards RPG's, and when I looked up a walkthrough on the net, I found a little site called the Final Fantasy VII Citadel....
... which somehow, three years later.... I seem to be running.
Now I get to write daily nasty e-mail replies to people who think that "lol aeris is a httie i lik her2 bad she dide spehriot is badass" is a sentence.
I've grown up on Final Fantasy, and I love it (I mean, you have to to run a Final Fantasy VII site) but after playing Kingdom Hearts, I've found myself lusting after that style of gameplay in a Final Fantasy.
I want to see the more "action" based battle system, combined with the storytelling of Final Fantasy. I doubt it'll ever happen, but I'd love it if it did. Truth be told, I loved getting the opportunity to just WHACK THE CRAP OUTTA things, rather than have turn-based battle. Perhaps I'm just one of those people with a short attention span, but it kept those bits "between major plot developments" more interesting.
Final Fantasy changed my gaming habits forever.
Kingdom Hearts changed the way I want my Final Fantasy.
I'm not surprised, to tell the truth. Two seconds of looking on Whirlpool (the Australian Broadband Users' Community) will highlight exactly how bodgy Bigpond can be. I'm sure their own spam procedures have been less than perfect (or even good) for a long time, so I'm not surprised that other ISP's have had to block them out.
As much as I hate AOL, I'm not sure that this situation is ALL their fault -- if Telstra took the spam problem more seriously themselves, then AOL may not have felt that they need to take this measure.
Still, that all said, I do find it amusing that one bodgy, overpriced major ISP has blocked another bodgy, overpriced major ISP....
What I want to know is, what exactly constitutes "copyrighted material" legally here in Australia.
I have a bunch of SNES ROM's and anime (series, music and movies) that have no licencing in Australia. I also have some PlayStation ISO's, same deal. The anime/game wasn't released in Australia (or in any PAL territory, with some of them), so the only way that I could get it was online.
If it were possible for me to have acquired this stuff another way, I'd have done it...
Yes, there will be some people who will use IM badly. They'll spend all day on it, messaging people both inside and outside of their organisation, gossiping about their weekends or whatever.
There will also be people who will use it productively, and won't waste massive amounts of time on it.
It's just like people talking at work or surfing the internet. Some people will talk all day if they can get away with it, others will still talk every now and then, but they won't waste their work time on it.
People are all different. Because of that, Instant Messaging could go either way. I don't think it would make that much of an impact on a businessplace as far as productivity goes.
It's just yet another tool that staff could use, simple as that.
Yeah, keyboards are pretty reliable. I work in a high school from time to time, and we have some close to seven years old that still haven't managed to be destroyed by the rabid teenagers. (Course, the mice aren't that lucky... apparently the mouse balls go well in slingshots...)
My own keyboard's about five years old and has survived being dropped, kicked, stepped on (it was on the floor, I was drunk) and having ten ton of sawdust in it from when the floorboards were sanded and polished.
All the letters are worn off, except for maybe the F1, F2, etc buttons, and when I had somebody over to install something, they had to ask me to type in the details as they couldn't touch type and didn't know where the letters were.
The only reason I changed keyboard is cause I was getting tendonitis in my fingers and I had to get an ergonomic one.... my fingers broke before the keyboard did!
While moving out of my old house (in rather a hurry) I dropped my then P3 733 onto the concrete kerb. The case was dented horribly, paint taken off, etc. I was in too much of a hurry to check it there and then, but when I got to my new place, I promptly plugged it in to test (right in the front doorway) and it was fine. Course, about six months down the track the hard drive didn't sound too healthy....
I've heard re-draw noises too, on an older monitor I had. Every time I so much as moved the mouse, there was an (almost high pitched) buzzing. If I didn't have some music playing, it would get irritating. (Although in general, that monitor was irritating.... it flickered too.)
Now I've switched to a new monitor, a Mitsubishi (can't remember what the other was, cheap and nasty as I recall) and I don't hear the noise anymore. I'd switched video card some months before, from a TNT2 to a GeForce2, and the noise remained.
I don't believe I had moved my speakers during that time... at least, not enough to have made a difference; the positioning was more or less the same.
I'm guessing it's a mix between monitor and speakers, and the cheap and nasty monitor had a greater (and more annoying) effect upon my speakers than my new monitor. I know I don't remember hearing that noise since I got the new monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes the buying guide can be spot on, but sometimes they miss (you get that with rumours). And I think they're perpetually telling you to wait ;)
I'm just amused (in a vaguely horrified way) that I've not only bought my own Mac, but FINALLY managed to get Work to buy one.... just before an update.
Why do Apple magically release bigger, faster, shinier versions of things right after I buy something?
... gimme.
Curse you, Apple!
Ah, you lucky guy.
I'd love to be developing websites or something. I love the challenge of trying to do that kind of stuff, but I also know the stress it can cause as well (just from my hobby website stuff)
Thing is, having done a lot of less-stressful things I don't love so much, I can tell you now, you're lucky being in the more stressful job you DO enjoy. You go home with a wonderful feeling of achievement when you're doing something challenging that you enjoy. You won't get that with a factory job.
Best advice I can give you is to find ways to manage the stress a little.
You realise you're talking about CARTOON CHARACTERS right? Cartoon characters are generally pretty stylised, I don't know if you can really say if a character is good or bad looking based on a stylised cartoon character design. Particularly when it's something as stylised as Penny Arcade, where there is not a great amount of detail used in the characters themselves. Are the characters in The Simpsons good or bad looking? Plus, I'm sure the guys at PA probably DO feel that their girlfriends are good looking. Just because you don't think that Kara's good looking, doesn't mean that they agree with you. Most people feel that their significant others are good looking.
It's not a new trend to see so much scantily clad women (be they digital or real) in a videogame mag. I remember a few years ago one even had a "game girl of the month" in one of the mags I had, which featured a full page scantily clad glamor shot of a model dressed as say, Lara Croft, or such. In the style of say, FHM.
But back then, there was a higher percentage of content than there seems to be now.
Now if I buy a magazine, I know I'll get to see lots of semi naked polygon girls, anime girls, real girls, etc, but I'm pretty sure I won't find out anything interesting on the games....
Site Theft is pretty common, and not always for "business" reasons as well. I used to webmaster a Final Fantasy VII site and that was stolen too, right down to all the fans' fanart, fan-fiction, etc.
Course, there was no financial gain for that one, I guess they just wanted the credit or something. Still, I was pretty pissed off at the time, and I wasn't webmaster back then -- I only had my fan art stolen.
Well, for Browser or Mail, I highly recommend both Opera or Mozilla. Both will handle Mail and Browsing quite well, and a few other nifty things too.
I have used both, and there are features in both that I like... both are free, although one will display ads (Opera) until you purchase a copy.
I strongly suggest downloading a copy of both, and seeing which one you prefer.
If you want Graphics software for any arty things, try the GIMP, or if you want something a little more painty (ie; emulates real painting and drawing materials) Open Canvas is good. I guess it depends what your needs are when it comes to editing or creating pictures.
FFVII is arguably the most popular of the FF series overall, although FFX has been the most popular recently. And cause it has so many fans, if it was done badly, it would piss a lot of people off, which is one of the reasons the Square-Enix guys stated.
The other is that FFVII uses what is now very old game data. It is not possible for Square-Enix to create a sequel to FFVII with the old game data; they'd have to start development from scratch. Which is expensive.
One of the deciding factors in the making of FFX-2 was the fact that they could use game data from FFX to make the game -- so in effect they were just adding some extra features to an existing Final Fantasy, rather than developing a new one from scratch. If it hadn't been possible to make the game "on the cheap" like that, I am not so sure they would've done it...
Yep, I did some research, and found the article in the Financial Review. (mentioned in earlier post)
Telstra to Slash IT Bill in Half Interesting.
Hmm... I heard a whisper about this earlier, and there were suspicions earlier when I read the Financial Review and was told that they need to halve their IT spending.
I don't know if Telstra are doing this because of the benefits that Open Source could provide, or cause they've been told to save money.
I just hope that they get it right for once. They seem to have enough trouble with their Microsoft products.... (the school's system in South Australia -- run by Telstra -- was down for three hours due to the Blaster worm on Monday, as was a number of Telstra dialup and e-mail....)
I guess Save Points, and whether there are too many, or not enough, may depend on the player's skill level to begin with.
I can't say I condone the act of saving, then dying and reloading back to the save (so you don't lose the life, etc), in my books that's "cheating" regardless of skill level, but I do see Save Points as a valuable "safety net" for less skilled gamers, and a useful tool even for skilled gamers.
A very skilled and confident gamer is probably going to regard too many Save Points as "taking the challenge out of the game". And to some extent it does make things easier, but if that's a problem, I suggest that those same players simply bypass those save opportunities.
A less skilled gamer however is probably going to rely on Save Points fairly heavily. It provides a way for less skilled gamers to get through a game that they might otherwise give up on entirely.
Also, like somebody else mentioned, frequent save points are necessary for younger children, in part due to their level of skill, and also because their Console/Computer is probably shared with siblings and parents, meaning you're likely to need to save frequently as they tend to kick you off for various reasons (Homework, Dinner, parent or sibling needs/wants/bitched to mum/whined to use the machine, bed time, etc)
Us chicks already get the short straw there -- handbags.
Phone, PDA, wallet, usually odd pieces of jewellery, chequebook.... in mine there's even sometimes a digital camera. All in a nice handy carry-bag, ready-to-go.
They really need to start putting pockets in women's clothing!
Keep your stuff where you can see it, don't lend it to anybody, and don't leave it unattended. If you can, put it in your pockets.
Personally, I wouldn't lend my phone to a stranger in the first place. Especially without keeping an eye on it!
Maybe one idea is to have lockers set up at the place, like they do say.. when you go to the pool or something. Course, I don't think it should have to go that far, but if this kind of thing is a problem, it may well have to.
I'd rather see people use a little more common sense though.....
Well, I'm too much of a wuss to actually *play* it, but I help out my partner when he does.
:)
I gotta admit, part of me is itching with excitement over this. I REALLY enjoyed Silent Hill 2, and out of all the survival horror my partner and I have "played" together, I find the Silent Hill series to be the best.
Let's hope that Silent Hill 3 is as good as that guy makes it sound
Renaming Final Fantasy VII's hero "Cloud Strife" to be "God" makes for some amusing moments.
Barret: The planet is dying, God!
God: I don't care! I just want my money!
o_O
This wouldn't be the first time the State Government has done something silly. While I think that Open Source stuff doesn't get noticed much as far as State Supply goes, I don't think this is the right way to go about getting it noticed/used either.
Hmm... I'll check it out if it has a PAL release.... but most of the games I wanna play don't (ie, Xenogears).
And I'm not really saying I don't like the turn based battle system of Final Fantasy... it's just... MAN... it was hard to go back to it after just thwap-ing things with a giant keyblade.
Final Fantasy VII changed my life.
... which somehow, three years later.... I seem to be running.
I know, sad, isn't it? It changed my preferences in Playstation games towards RPG's, and when I looked up a walkthrough on the net, I found a little site called the Final Fantasy VII Citadel....
Now I get to write daily nasty e-mail replies to people who think that "lol aeris is a httie i lik her2 bad she dide spehriot is badass" is a sentence.
I've grown up on Final Fantasy, and I love it (I mean, you have to to run a Final Fantasy VII site) but after playing Kingdom Hearts, I've found myself lusting after that style of gameplay in a Final Fantasy.
I want to see the more "action" based battle system, combined with the storytelling of Final Fantasy. I doubt it'll ever happen, but I'd love it if it did. Truth be told, I loved getting the opportunity to just WHACK THE CRAP OUTTA things, rather than have turn-based battle. Perhaps I'm just one of those people with a short attention span, but it kept those bits "between major plot developments" more interesting.
Final Fantasy changed my gaming habits forever.
Kingdom Hearts changed the way I want my Final Fantasy.
I'm not surprised, to tell the truth. Two seconds of looking on Whirlpool (the Australian Broadband Users' Community) will highlight exactly how bodgy Bigpond can be. I'm sure their own spam procedures have been less than perfect (or even good) for a long time, so I'm not surprised that other ISP's have had to block them out.
As much as I hate AOL, I'm not sure that this situation is ALL their fault -- if Telstra took the spam problem more seriously themselves, then AOL may not have felt that they need to take this measure.
Still, that all said, I do find it amusing that one bodgy, overpriced major ISP has blocked another bodgy, overpriced major ISP....
What I want to know is, what exactly constitutes "copyrighted material" legally here in Australia.
I have a bunch of SNES ROM's and anime (series, music and movies) that have no licencing in Australia. I also have some PlayStation ISO's, same deal. The anime/game wasn't released in Australia (or in any PAL territory, with some of them), so the only way that I could get it was online.
If it were possible for me to have acquired this stuff another way, I'd have done it...
Is that kind of thing considered illegal?
Yes, there will be some people who will use IM badly. They'll spend all day on it, messaging people both inside and outside of their organisation, gossiping about their weekends or whatever.
There will also be people who will use it productively, and won't waste massive amounts of time on it.
It's just like people talking at work or surfing the internet. Some people will talk all day if they can get away with it, others will still talk every now and then, but they won't waste their work time on it.
People are all different. Because of that, Instant Messaging could go either way. I don't think it would make that much of an impact on a businessplace as far as productivity goes.
It's just yet another tool that staff could use, simple as that.
Yeah, keyboards are pretty reliable. I work in a high school from time to time, and we have some close to seven years old that still haven't managed to be destroyed by the rabid teenagers. (Course, the mice aren't that lucky... apparently the mouse balls go well in slingshots...)
My own keyboard's about five years old and has survived being dropped, kicked, stepped on (it was on the floor, I was drunk) and having ten ton of sawdust in it from when the floorboards were sanded and polished.
All the letters are worn off, except for maybe the F1, F2, etc buttons, and when I had somebody over to install something, they had to ask me to type in the details as they couldn't touch type and didn't know where the letters were.
The only reason I changed keyboard is cause I was getting tendonitis in my fingers and I had to get an ergonomic one.... my fingers broke before the keyboard did!
While moving out of my old house (in rather a hurry) I dropped my then P3 733 onto the concrete kerb. The case was dented horribly, paint taken off, etc. I was in too much of a hurry to check it there and then, but when I got to my new place, I promptly plugged it in to test (right in the front doorway) and it was fine. Course, about six months down the track the hard drive didn't sound too healthy....
I've heard re-draw noises too, on an older monitor I had. Every time I so much as moved the mouse, there was an (almost high pitched) buzzing. If I didn't have some music playing, it would get irritating. (Although in general, that monitor was irritating.... it flickered too.)
Now I've switched to a new monitor, a Mitsubishi (can't remember what the other was, cheap and nasty as I recall) and I don't hear the noise anymore. I'd switched video card some months before, from a TNT2 to a GeForce2, and the noise remained.
I don't believe I had moved my speakers during that time... at least, not enough to have made a difference; the positioning was more or less the same.
I'm guessing it's a mix between monitor and speakers, and the cheap and nasty monitor had a greater (and more annoying) effect upon my speakers than my new monitor. I know I don't remember hearing that noise since I got the new monitor.