Complete conjecture, but the only rationalization of which I could think: the flag is a symbol of the liberties and principles of the republic, not of whoever is currently perverting, misconstruing, or undermining those liberties and principles.
Any country's flag being just an easily reproduced bit of colored stuff, though, I don't particularly see a reason to outlaw its burning. The mere fact that it's a symbol means that it symbolizes different things to different people. Regardless, though it's a potentially striking image for the newspaper or TV, I figure there are more constructive or effective ways to voice disapproval of current events, or, you know, maybe even effecting change.
A month or so ago I was playing a PS2 game (I think it was Jak II), and I noticed that the outside edge of my hands at the base of my thumbs were hurting to a surprising degree. I guess it was the fairly wide range of motion required by the analog thumbsticks combined with the fact that I probably had the muscles tensed. Regardless, I was massaging my hands for quite a while after finishing that mission and turning off the PS2.
I'll attribute that to the fact that the thumbstick locations on the PS2 controller are pretty much crap. At my desk just now, I put my hands in the positions required to use the stick with the thumbs and still have finger access to the shoulder buttons, and my thumbs were already extended from the resting position. The Gamecube controller and XBox S controller put the primary analog stick and shoulder buttons in much more natural positions.
I wrote a check this morning, and had to really think to remember how to write a cursive lower-case 'f.' It was bizarre. Thinking about it now, the formation of the letter and the associated hand motions seem pretty natural, but at the time it felt totally alien. Maybe it's like when you think about a common word and its spelling or pronunciation begins to seem wholly unnatural, despite firm knowledge of its correctness.
My handwriting was never great. "Legible" would probably be the most you could say of it. In the 8 months or so since I finished school, though, I find it getting even worse without all the note-taking and such. Filling out a form at the doctor's office the other day, I felt so uncoordinated, watching in shame as each terribly misformed letter was committed to posterity on the page.
I infinitely prefer mouse+keyboard for some game types, especially shooters (first and third person), point-and-click adventures (Myst, old LucasArts adventures, etc.), and RTS. Some game types, though, would benefit only marginally from that setup (standard console RPGs seem like a mouse might help just a little, but not much). Still others, like fighters, action/adventures (e.g. recent EA Lord of the Rings action games), and platformers, really benefit from a console controller.
Ah, okay. I've only just recently become interested in Macs, so I wasn't sure of the details. Is the general point just to free up main CPU time by offloading desktop rendering to the GPU, then? I'd admired what I'd heard about OS X, but until Mini was anounced, I had no firm plans for the acquisition of one. Now that I have my Mini, I'm definitely impressed. Plus I can ease myself into Unix, X11, and such. I still need to get more RAM, though. And a putty knife.
I assume you meant "kernel," but no: my intent was to provide the homophone "colonel" since it is a military rank and the accepted pronunciations of the two words are pretty much identical.
The only concern I've heard about Tiger is that since its GUI is fully OpenGL accelerated, graphics accelerators with less than 64MB of onboard memory might have to swap out some textures and such with system memory, degrading performance. The mini's Radeon 9200 chipset is pretty nice, but it still only has 32MB (2 16MB chips on the motherboard) of memory.
I'm hoping that those fears prove unfounded. I would think that Apple would make sure their new systems could run their upcoming flagship OS without problems.
Still don't know why they insist on shipping minis, eMacs, and iMacs with 256MB of RAM by default. Memory swapping to the hard drive gets sluggish while multitasking, especially with the slow hard drive on the mini.
An amusing result of the "annoyed grunt" convention is that the official title of the Mary Poppins parody episode is "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious"
Yeah, except with decent resolution, competent hardware, a usable form factor, and the fact that it's coming from a well-established gaming division. I'll consider the PSP's battery life+UMD-shooting a draw with N-Gage's horribly convoluted game changing requirements.
The resolution thing still confuses me. My Nokia 3660 has better resolution than the N-Gage.
Also, I'm not a Sony apologist. If anything, I'd probably fall into the Nintendo fanboy category. I have a Gamecube, GBA, GBA SP (original GBA given to younger brother), and a DS. The dismissal of the PSP as "another N-Gage" still struck me as inexcusably trollish.
Also, the lack of good games on the DS so far is still disappointing.
I share your pain in that regard, especially the input selecting. While it seems that most (or at least many) VCRs let you set the A/V inputs as standard channels in the normal tuning sequence (though setting that up still requires the remote), both of the TVs I have with A/V inputs require a remote for access to those. Which is frustrating when you have the DVD player remote in hand, with its audio running to external speakers and all you have to do is press a single button once (maybe twice, depending on which input is used) on the TV remote which is nowhere to be found.
...but for an 82 year old man he's going to have more money than he can likely spend in the remainder of his lifetime.
Depends on how much Stark Industries charges for an Iron Man suit.
Re:If movie reviews were written like game reviews
on
Death to the Fanboy Press
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Or maybe when more games have actually well-realized plot and characterization that serve as more than just a framework around which to wrap the gameplay or, in some cases, the tech demo. This isn't meant as a troll, as I don't mind a crappy story if the game itself is fun. Similarly, I'll sometimes endure repetitive or flawed gameplay if the story or characters are compelling. Some reviewers tailor their reviews to the game being reviewed. If story and characterization play a big part in the game, they are given a decent amount of discussion in a good review. The fact remains that it's still a video game, which implies gameplay is involved somewhere, and the fun derived from the gameplay is often the primary aspect of the game. As for tech, it can play a very important role in establishing an atmosphere, context, or environment to fit the gameplay and story. There are some games that simply don't work as well without impressive technology. The Splinter Cell games come to mind. Without the complex and impressive lighting used in the games, the gameplay does suffer.
And all of this is not to defend all reviewers. I'm sure there are many that focus excessively or primarily on the technological feats achieved in the games. Impressive, and often necessary, as they may be, you're right that there are other aspects of the games that help determine whether it's actually worth playing.
Yeah, but any more storage capacity and the lack of display would be more than just an inconvenience. I have a 128MB MuVo and with its mere 30-song capacity the lack of display still gets annoying. It has identical controls to the Shuffle, plus an A-B loop button (and a replaceable AAA battery). I can't imagine trying to navigate through a GB of music with just the controls available there.
The Shuffle feature and iTunes integration will be the selling points, undoubtedly, and very likely enough to make it sell well. I wouldn't mind having shuffle on my MuVo. The actually competitive price point (though current MuVo models have a display) doesn't hurt, either. I see it selling fairly well as a companion to the HD-based iPods and iPod minis.
Though it does look like removing the power/play mode switch is necessary for innards removal, as it seems to snap over a little metal 3-way switch attached to the circuit board. But since that's such a trivial and apparently nondamaging step, no problem there. I agree with the article and other posters that removing the control disc was probably unnecessary for disassembly, though.
According to the article, there were about 40 video games listed in the initial suit that purportedly violated the patents. Does anyone know what in the games violated the patents? Would it be any game that utilized the rumble feature? If that's the case, Immersion is wanting fees for not only the hardware that includes the feature, but also for software that has the audacity use features included in the hardware?
Also, weren't there questions the last time this made Slashdot about the validity of Immersion's patents? Prior art in the N64's rumble pack or something? I don't recall. Also, did Immersion ever do anything with the idea, or just get a patent and sit around waiting for market saturation of the feature?
The frequent disparity between function names and syntax can be annoying. Simply trying to return the top 100 results in a query to an Oracle DB once necessitated a fairly substantial restructuring of the SQL command I assumed would work based on the reference I had at hand. Only after considerable Googling did I find a comparison of that particular functionality between Oracle and mySQL. I understand the differences are at least partially for product differentiation for marketability, but underlying architecture and efficient execution of a standardized syntax and set of commands would strike me as a selling point more than nonstandard syntax. Again, though, I'm just getting into this and don't know the extent to which things differ, and how proprietary/copyrighted some syntaxes, commands, algorithms, etc. might be. For all I know, in order to accomplish something without violating one DB vendor's copyright, you might have to make an entirely new command and have the syntax completely different. But for something as simple and obvious as just returning the first however many results, one would expect an agreed-upon syntax. Ah well.
I'm only just now getting into anything at all close to DB use, but isn't there a tradeoff between custom-writing scripts for particular DBs versus using an abstraction layer like PEAR (and I assume the Perl DBI, too)? There's only so much architecture-specific optimizing you can put into an abstraction layer and still have it work well with whatever query language you decide to abstract to. I guess the trade-offs are just considered based on the task at hand?
Try to find a cheap copy of ICO for PS2 somewhere. Its atmosphere is one of the best I've experienced on a current console. It's fundamentally a puzzle/exploratory/adventure game. Combat is very simple but spaced out so as not to ever get particularly repetitive. The main draw of the game, thuough, is the interaction with and exploration of the environment. The complete integration of the puzzles into the environment is a very, very large part of the effectiveness of the atmosphere, I think. The art style is similarly effective in the immersion, though. While none of the graphics are particularly detailed, the entire environment is cohesive and nothing at all sticks out as just there for the gameplay. Portions of the game remind me of the atmosphere established in the original Myst. It was apparently initially intended for the PS1, though judging from the final game, I think it was probably moved to PS2 reasonably early in development. It unquestionably benefits from the PS2's more powerful hardware. Nevertheless, it's the only PS2 game I've seen on a CD instead of DVD.
Also, Half-Life 2 does a great job at establishing immersion and atmosphere despite complaints about the story and lack of gameplay innovation.
A great point, and the reason why I don't think there could ever be, for instance, a successful faithful movie adaptation of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Despite its considerable greatness, it is very obviously a product of the '80s and would not be a commercially viable movie if the story and mood are translated accurately. Miller's Sin City, though, is fairly time-independent, which, along with the movie's director's apparent love of the comics themselves, is what gives me hope for Sin City.
The atmosphere in Moore's Watchmen is similarly entrenched in 80s Cold War sentiment, but since its history is significantly more revisionist than DKR's, it still might work while remaining reasonably faithful to the comic.
Having not read V for Vendetta (sounds like I need to), I'll have to take your word for the Thatcher-era politics. Is the comic abstracted far enough away from the actual personages and events to be appreciated without knowledge of the exact situations that inspired it?
Several people are pointing out the inclusion of 2-port hub functionality on Mac keyboards, which I do admit is quite handy, and probably the way I'll go when/if I get a Mac mini. The only thing I might note is that the extra ports on those keyboards are (I assume) not powered like the ones on the back of the case or on a powered hub. While that's fine for mice, most cameras, and PDAs that are charged via an electrical outlet, there are devices that derive substantial power from the USB port that won't work correctly on a nonpowered hub.
Something I've not considered until just now: can I attach a powered hub to a port on a nonpowered hub and have powered devices work correctly?
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Any country's flag being just an easily reproduced bit of colored stuff, though, I don't particularly see a reason to outlaw its burning. The mere fact that it's a symbol means that it symbolizes different things to different people. Regardless, though it's a potentially striking image for the newspaper or TV, I figure there are more constructive or effective ways to voice disapproval of current events, or, you know, maybe even effecting change.
I'll attribute that to the fact that the thumbstick locations on the PS2 controller are pretty much crap. At my desk just now, I put my hands in the positions required to use the stick with the thumbs and still have finger access to the shoulder buttons, and my thumbs were already extended from the resting position. The Gamecube controller and XBox S controller put the primary analog stick and shoulder buttons in much more natural positions.
My handwriting was never great. "Legible" would probably be the most you could say of it. In the 8 months or so since I finished school, though, I find it getting even worse without all the note-taking and such. Filling out a form at the doctor's office the other day, I felt so uncoordinated, watching in shame as each terribly misformed letter was committed to posterity on the page.
I infinitely prefer mouse+keyboard for some game types, especially shooters (first and third person), point-and-click adventures (Myst, old LucasArts adventures, etc.), and RTS. Some game types, though, would benefit only marginally from that setup (standard console RPGs seem like a mouse might help just a little, but not much). Still others, like fighters, action/adventures (e.g. recent EA Lord of the Rings action games), and platformers, really benefit from a console controller.
Ah, okay. I've only just recently become interested in Macs, so I wasn't sure of the details. Is the general point just to free up main CPU time by offloading desktop rendering to the GPU, then? I'd admired what I'd heard about OS X, but until Mini was anounced, I had no firm plans for the acquisition of one. Now that I have my Mini, I'm definitely impressed. Plus I can ease myself into Unix, X11, and such. I still need to get more RAM, though. And a putty knife.
I assume you meant "kernel," but no: my intent was to provide the homophone "colonel" since it is a military rank and the accepted pronunciations of the two words are pretty much identical.
I'm hoping that those fears prove unfounded. I would think that Apple would make sure their new systems could run their upcoming flagship OS without problems.
Still don't know why they insist on shipping minis, eMacs, and iMacs with 256MB of RAM by default. Memory swapping to the hard drive gets sluggish while multitasking, especially with the slow hard drive on the mini.
And Colonel Panic. Or something.
An amusing result of the "annoyed grunt" convention is that the official title of the Mary Poppins parody episode is "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious"
Sure. The count as I see it still 4-1 in favor of the PSP, though.
Yeah, except with decent resolution, competent hardware, a usable form factor, and the fact that it's coming from a well-established gaming division. I'll consider the PSP's battery life+UMD-shooting a draw with N-Gage's horribly convoluted game changing requirements.
The resolution thing still confuses me. My Nokia 3660 has better resolution than the N-Gage.
Also, I'm not a Sony apologist. If anything, I'd probably fall into the Nintendo fanboy category. I have a Gamecube, GBA, GBA SP (original GBA given to younger brother), and a DS. The dismissal of the PSP as "another N-Gage" still struck me as inexcusably trollish.
Also, the lack of good games on the DS so far is still disappointing.
I share your pain in that regard, especially the input selecting. While it seems that most (or at least many) VCRs let you set the A/V inputs as standard channels in the normal tuning sequence (though setting that up still requires the remote), both of the TVs I have with A/V inputs require a remote for access to those. Which is frustrating when you have the DVD player remote in hand, with its audio running to external speakers and all you have to do is press a single button once (maybe twice, depending on which input is used) on the TV remote which is nowhere to be found.
Depends on how much Stark Industries charges for an Iron Man suit.
And all of this is not to defend all reviewers. I'm sure there are many that focus excessively or primarily on the technological feats achieved in the games. Impressive, and often necessary, as they may be, you're right that there are other aspects of the games that help determine whether it's actually worth playing.
The Shuffle feature and iTunes integration will be the selling points, undoubtedly, and very likely enough to make it sell well. I wouldn't mind having shuffle on my MuVo. The actually competitive price point (though current MuVo models have a display) doesn't hurt, either. I see it selling fairly well as a companion to the HD-based iPods and iPod minis.
Though it does look like removing the power/play mode switch is necessary for innards removal, as it seems to snap over a little metal 3-way switch attached to the circuit board. But since that's such a trivial and apparently nondamaging step, no problem there. I agree with the article and other posters that removing the control disc was probably unnecessary for disassembly, though.
Also, weren't there questions the last time this made Slashdot about the validity of Immersion's patents? Prior art in the N64's rumble pack or something? I don't recall. Also, did Immersion ever do anything with the idea, or just get a patent and sit around waiting for market saturation of the feature?
The frequent disparity between function names and syntax can be annoying. Simply trying to return the top 100 results in a query to an Oracle DB once necessitated a fairly substantial restructuring of the SQL command I assumed would work based on the reference I had at hand. Only after considerable Googling did I find a comparison of that particular functionality between Oracle and mySQL. I understand the differences are at least partially for product differentiation for marketability, but underlying architecture and efficient execution of a standardized syntax and set of commands would strike me as a selling point more than nonstandard syntax. Again, though, I'm just getting into this and don't know the extent to which things differ, and how proprietary/copyrighted some syntaxes, commands, algorithms, etc. might be. For all I know, in order to accomplish something without violating one DB vendor's copyright, you might have to make an entirely new command and have the syntax completely different. But for something as simple and obvious as just returning the first however many results, one would expect an agreed-upon syntax. Ah well.
I'm only just now getting into anything at all close to DB use, but isn't there a tradeoff between custom-writing scripts for particular DBs versus using an abstraction layer like PEAR (and I assume the Perl DBI, too)? There's only so much architecture-specific optimizing you can put into an abstraction layer and still have it work well with whatever query language you decide to abstract to. I guess the trade-offs are just considered based on the task at hand?
Also, Half-Life 2 does a great job at establishing immersion and atmosphere despite complaints about the story and lack of gameplay innovation.
The atmosphere in Moore's Watchmen is similarly entrenched in 80s Cold War sentiment, but since its history is significantly more revisionist than DKR's, it still might work while remaining reasonably faithful to the comic.
Having not read V for Vendetta (sounds like I need to), I'll have to take your word for the Thatcher-era politics. Is the comic abstracted far enough away from the actual personages and events to be appreciated without knowledge of the exact situations that inspired it?
Visionary!
Something I've not considered until just now: can I attach a powered hub to a port on a nonpowered hub and have powered devices work correctly?
You both got hosed. I paid $2 for one a couple months ago, and it came with a cassette tape reader!
From the Mac mini Technical Specifications page (the last fine print bullet point at the bottom of the page).