The headphones in Sony PSP are set to attenuate the signal at the headphone socket (ie make them quieter than than they should be) - apparantly so they couldn't be sued for hearing damage. If you want to listen to it at full scale output you have to buy your own.
Another Code was a great game - I'd like to play more Point and Click adventure Myst like games (in fact even the original one would be great - it seemed to old to play on my PC when I tried). LucasArts Adventures have a good rep as well.
I think a PDA would only happen on a cart - but an Internet Browser being added to the firmware would be absolutely great. Its on my wish list higher than any game.
I like my DS and everyone I've shown it to has been impressed by it and enthusiastic about it (even my girlfriend bought one!)...but what my (non-gaming) friends have been talking about is the PSP, and in salivating in the same way my Apple friends were pre ipod launch.
It also helps that at launch they have a wider (though not necc. better!) range of games than the DS has after 6 months here. If it wasn't for importing certain items I'd be less enthusiastic about the DS than I am. That will be sorted out by the end of November.
One of the reasons for the long delay in a game making it to England is sometimes the fact that the UK is treated as part of the Europe market in terms of release. The wait is then for the translations to happen for the major continental European languages.
I guess as voice becomes more and more popular as a replacement for text for explaining things/moving plots along etc this process gets more complicated.
If its only a couple of weeks between release dates I don't mind - it gives me a chance to check out reviews and change my mind on buying it if it appears to suck.
iTunes runs on Windows as well and it was this that helped (amongst other factors) pushed iPod sales into the big time, not already converted Mac users. Just because XP isn't as good as MacOS doesn't mean a great user friendly program can't be made to run on it.
I think IBM had the ability to produce chips that were what Apple wanted in terms of power (as the article points out - the newer batch of PowerPC chips are more like what they want).
Here's my theory. Steve Jobs has a long-term goal to position Apple as 'the' online media company. He already dominates the online music business with the iTunes/iPod combination. Now he wants to repeat the trick with online movies.
But Hollywood studios won't do a deal with him because they are worried about piracy. They want a platform with rock-solid 'digital rights management' (DRM) built in. And it just so happens that Intel has been moving technical mountains to build strong DRM into its processor architecture, whereas IBM doesn't see it as a priority.
Well also the music industry. I traditionally have been someone who purchased a reasonable amount of movies and music (at least one CD and a couple of DVDs a month), but bought my first ever games console in March (a Nintendo DS). Since then most of my spare 'luxury goods' money has gone towards games for that. I've only bought two commercial artiste CDs and two DVDs in that time period, coz they were going cheap. (And one of them was Baseketball!)
There is only so much dosh for us punters to spend money on - I hope the movie and music industry pay attention to this when they produce reports on falling income. Or at least someone points this out to the government being lobbied!
The movie industry makes money from licensing half the games anyway.
Mussolini, in a speech delivered on October 28, 1925, stated the following maxim that encapsulates the fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato." ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".) Therefore, he reasoned, all individuals' business is the state's business, and the state's existence is the sole duty of the individual.
Well I would *really* like to know is how and when am I going to be able to use it with my standard wireless router at home.
In a way a real killer app for home use would be a plain web browser (with Opera style stylus gestures) - maybe with IM stuck in it as well. It would be even better if it was bundled with the DSpeak package for DS 2 DS phone calls that got shown off at E3 last month, and maybe sold as a single 'Touch and Connect' type package.
Its actually a crappy feature of the OS itself...allowing one program to grab focus while you are typing something / about to click something is just plain stupid. Can be fixed using one of the settings in TweakUI, available as a free download from the MS website.
Strangely I get this as a forward just before reading the slashdot article...
Below is a copy of a letter that won a competition in UK as complaint letter of the year.
A real-life customer complaint letter sent to NTL (to their complaints dept....)
Dear Cretins,
I have been an NTL customer since 9th July 2001, when I signed up for your 3-in-one deal for cable TV, cable modem, and telephone. During this three-month period I have encountered inadequacy of service which I had not previously considered possible, as well as ignorance and stupidity of monolithic proportions. Please allow me to provide specific details, so that you can either pursue your professional prerogative, and seek to rectify these difficulties - or more likely (I suspect) so that you can have some entertaining reading material as you while away the working day smoking B&H and drinking vendor-coffee on the bog in your office:
My initial installation was cancelled without warning, resulting in my spending an entire Saturday sitting on my fat arse waiting for your technician to arrive. When he did not arrive, I spent a further 57 minutes listening to your infuriating hold music, and the even more annoying Scottish robot woman telling me to look at your helpful website....HOW?
I alleviated the boredom by playing with my testicles for a few minutes - an activity at which you are no-doubt both familiar and highly adept. The rescheduled installation then took place some two weeks later, although the technician did forget to bring a number of vital tools - such as a drill-bit, and his cerebrum. Two weeks later, my cable modem had still not arrived. After 15 telephone calls over 4 weeks my modem arrived... six weeks after I had requested it, and begun to pay for it.
I estimate your internet server's downtime is roughly 35%... hours between about 6pm -midnight, Mon-Fri, and most of the weekend. I am still waiting for my telephone connection. I have made 9 calls on my mobile to your no-help line, and have been unhelpfully transferred to a variety of disinterested individuals, who are it seems also highly skilled bollock jugglers.
I have been informed that a telephone line is available (and someone will call me back); that no telephone line is available (and someone will call me back); that I will be transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available (and then been cut off); that I will be transferred to someone (and then been redirected to an answer machine informing me that your office is closed); that I will be transferred to someone and then been redirected to the irritating Scottish robot woman...and several other variations on this theme.
Doubtless you are no longer reading this letter, as you have at least a thousand other dissatisfied customers to ignore, and also another one of those crucially important testicle-moments to attend to. Frankly I don't care; it's far more satisfying as a customer to voice my frustrations in print than to shout them at your unending hold music. Forgive me, therefore, if I continue.
I thought BT were shit, that they had attained the holy piss-pot of god-awful customer relations, that no-one, anywhere, ever, could be more disinterested, less helpful or more obstructive to delivering service to their customers. That's why I chose NTL, and because, well, there isn't anyone else is there? How surprised I therefore was, when I discovered to my considerable dissatisfaction and disappointment what a useless shower of bastards you truly are. You are sputum-filled pieces of distended rectum incompetents of the highest order.
British Telecom - wankers though they are - shine like brilliant beacons of success, in the filthy puss-filled mire of your seemingly limitless inadequacy. Suffice to say that I have now given up on my futile and foolhardy quest to receive any kind of service from you. I suggest that you cease any potential future attempts to extort payment from me for the services which you have so pointedly and
Slashdot Mirror
Its only porting 'from' the Revolution that will be a problem - there is an anolog stick as an optional plugin if required.
Demonstrated by the fact the controller has to support Gamecube games.
The headphones in Sony PSP are set to attenuate the signal at the headphone socket (ie make them quieter than than they should be) - apparantly so they couldn't be sued for hearing damage. If you want to listen to it at full scale output you have to buy your own.
Another Code was a great game - I'd like to play more Point and Click adventure Myst like games (in fact even the original one would be great - it seemed to old to play on my PC when I tried). LucasArts Adventures have a good rep as well.
I think a PDA would only happen on a cart - but an Internet Browser being added to the firmware would be absolutely great. Its on my wish list higher than any game.
But its a bit big to hold one handed.
That makes it difficult to hold the PSP at the same time.
I like my DS and everyone I've shown it to has been impressed by it and enthusiastic about it (even my girlfriend bought one!)...but what my (non-gaming) friends have been talking about is the PSP, and in salivating in the same way my Apple friends were pre ipod launch. It also helps that at launch they have a wider (though not necc. better!) range of games than the DS has after 6 months here. If it wasn't for importing certain items I'd be less enthusiastic about the DS than I am. That will be sorted out by the end of November.
Are you playing Donkey Konga?
One of the reasons for the long delay in a game making it to England is sometimes the fact that the UK is treated as part of the Europe market in terms of release. The wait is then for the translations to happen for the major continental European languages.
I guess as voice becomes more and more popular as a replacement for text for explaining things/moving plots along etc this process gets more complicated.
If its only a couple of weeks between release dates I don't mind - it gives me a chance to check out reviews and change my mind on buying it if it appears to suck.
iTunes runs on Windows as well and it was this that helped (amongst other factors) pushed iPod sales into the big time, not already converted Mac users. Just because XP isn't as good as MacOS doesn't mean a great user friendly program can't be made to run on it.
Their Dawn of Sorry page also has no link to any of the rather groovy trailers. http://www.gamershell.com/download_8186.shtml
I think IBM had the ability to produce chips that were what Apple wanted in terms of power (as the article points out - the newer batch of PowerPC chips are more like what they want).
What does Intel have that IBM didn't? Better support for DRM type stuff in the processor. From http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,1 2449,1504558,00.html
Here's my theory. Steve Jobs has a long-term goal to position Apple as 'the' online media company. He already dominates the online music business with the iTunes/iPod combination. Now he wants to repeat the trick with online movies.
But Hollywood studios won't do a deal with him because they are worried about piracy. They want a platform with rock-solid 'digital rights management' (DRM) built in. And it just so happens that Intel has been moving technical mountains to build strong DRM into its processor architecture, whereas IBM doesn't see it as a priority.
Jackson Pollock painted? I thought he just threw those things up!
Well also the music industry. I traditionally have been someone who purchased a reasonable amount of movies and music (at least one CD and a couple of DVDs a month), but bought my first ever games console in March (a Nintendo DS). Since then most of my spare 'luxury goods' money has gone towards games for that. I've only bought two commercial artiste CDs and two DVDs in that time period, coz they were going cheap. (And one of them was Baseketball!)
There is only so much dosh for us punters to spend money on - I hope the movie and music industry pay attention to this when they produce reports on falling income. Or at least someone points this out to the government being lobbied!
The movie industry makes money from licensing half the games anyway.
Well Mozilla will have to take on the air force now! And not only do they have great big guns on their planes, they also have the secret to disarm any geek...A woman! http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/16/woman.thunderbird /index.html
Hey is that a PSP in your pocket...or are you just pleased to see me?
Maybe not a police state, but it certainly looks like its heading towards a democratic fascist state:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Mussolini, in a speech delivered on October 28, 1925, stated the following maxim that encapsulates the fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato." ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".) Therefore, he reasoned, all individuals' business is the state's business, and the state's existence is the sole duty of the individual.
Seems to sum up the Bush POV to me.
Well I would *really* like to know is how and when am I going to be able to use it with my standard wireless router at home.
In a way a real killer app for home use would be a plain web browser (with Opera style stylus gestures) - maybe with IM stuck in it as well. It would be even better if it was bundled with the DSpeak package for DS 2 DS phone calls that got shown off at E3 last month, and maybe sold as a single 'Touch and Connect' type package.
Maybe this guy needs to make the break from film to game play...http://filmsound.studienet.org/cliche/wilhe lmscream.htm
Its actually a crappy feature of the OS itself...allowing one program to grab focus while you are typing something / about to click something is just plain stupid. Can be fixed using one of the settings in TweakUI, available as a free download from the MS website.
From Gamespot
Nintendo's next-gen console will also be around an inch tall; will support GameCube and DVD discs.
Strangely I get this as a forward just before reading the slashdot article...
Below is a copy of a letter that won a competition in UK as complaint letter of the year.
A real-life customer complaint letter sent to NTL (to their complaints dept....)
Dear Cretins,
I have been an NTL customer since 9th July 2001, when I signed up for your 3-in-one deal for cable TV, cable modem, and telephone. During this three-month period I have encountered inadequacy of service which I had not previously considered possible, as well as ignorance and stupidity of monolithic proportions. Please allow me to provide specific details, so that you can either pursue your professional prerogative, and seek to rectify these difficulties - or more likely (I suspect) so that you can have some entertaining reading material as you while away the working day smoking B&H and drinking vendor-coffee on the bog in your office:
My initial installation was cancelled without warning, resulting in my spending an entire Saturday sitting on my fat arse waiting for your technician to arrive. When he did not arrive, I spent a further 57 minutes listening to your infuriating hold music, and the even more annoying Scottish robot woman telling me to look at your helpful website....HOW?
I alleviated the boredom by playing with my testicles for a few minutes - an activity at which you are no-doubt both familiar and highly adept. The rescheduled installation then took place some two weeks later, although the technician did forget to bring a number of vital tools - such as a drill-bit, and his cerebrum. Two weeks later, my cable modem had still not arrived. After 15 telephone calls over 4 weeks my modem arrived... six weeks after I had requested it, and begun to pay for it.
I estimate your internet server's downtime is roughly 35%... hours between about 6pm -midnight, Mon-Fri, and most of the weekend. I am still waiting for my telephone connection. I have made 9 calls on my mobile to your no-help line, and have been unhelpfully transferred to a variety of disinterested individuals, who are it seems also highly skilled bollock jugglers.
I have been informed that a telephone line is available (and someone
will call me back); that no telephone line is available (and someone will call me back); that I will be transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available (and then been cut off); that I will be transferred to someone (and then been redirected to an answer machine informing me that your office is closed); that I will be transferred to someone and then been redirected to the irritating Scottish robot woman...and several other variations on this theme.
Doubtless you are no longer reading this letter, as you have at least a thousand other dissatisfied customers to ignore, and also another one of those crucially important testicle-moments to attend to. Frankly I don't care; it's far more satisfying as a customer to voice my frustrations in print than to shout them at your unending hold music. Forgive me, therefore, if I continue.
I thought BT were shit, that they had attained the holy piss-pot of god-awful customer relations, that no-one, anywhere, ever, could be more disinterested, less helpful or more obstructive to delivering service to their customers. That's why I chose NTL, and because, well, there isn't anyone else is there? How surprised I therefore was, when I discovered to my considerable dissatisfaction and disappointment what a useless shower of bastards you truly are. You are sputum-filled pieces of distended rectum incompetents of the highest order.
British Telecom - wankers though they are - shine like brilliant beacons of success, in the filthy puss-filled mire of your seemingly limitless inadequacy. Suffice to say that I have now given up on my futile and foolhardy quest to receive any kind of service from you. I suggest that you cease any potential future attempts to extort payment from me for the services which you have so pointedly and
Hey - don't you dare accuse any of us Linux users of spending our time gaming!
The first book I can rememeber reading on my own was Mr Messy.
I don't think a movie would ever do *that* book justice either.
Shouldn't that be:
It's also good for flirting with the opposite sex, but then again, SO is /.?
"There is no OpenSolaris," read an anonymous post on operating systems news Web site OSNews.com. "Show us the code or quit mentioning it."
To refute this they have gone ahead and released a few lines of code....
#include <stdio.h>Thats as far as they can go right now until the legal issues are cleared up though.