Same here, and I don't even have bus or train rides. So not only do I have a 40-60-minute commute, I have to be paying attention to the stop-and-go traffic to make sure I don't die. I guess the benefit is that if I ever feel like going somewhere other than straight home, I can.
But yeah, I'd probably pay an extra $5 or so to get a DVD with the UMD version included. $15-$20 is more than I'll pay for movies with no features and that will only play on the PSP.
I liked RahXephon, too, I think partly because it felt a bit different than Evangelion and still managed to be a crazy psychological confusion-fest. I mean, I guess the central story was a kid pulled completely out of anything he recognized as reality and thrust into some crazy defense role at the helm of a mysterious organic fighting robot thing with a mysterious girl with mysterious origins, and... oh. I think maybe it felt a little more concrete somehow than some of the Evangelion stuff did, though, and I'm not really sure why. Or maybe that most of the characters were at least pretty much sane in RahXephon. By the end of Evangelion (not to mention End of Evangelion), everyone was in the middle of complete mental breakdowns even before all the really crazy stuff started happening. Hrm. Now I want to watch both series again.
Woah, so they actually state that they review based on their expectation of public opinion rather than the game's actual merits? That's pretty amusing. "Well, frankly, we hated the game, but we figure you guys'll love it because we assume you couldn't tell a Rembrandt from a Warhol, and there are guns and a couple of cars and an explosion. Buy it at a Gamestop while you're at it, why don't you?"
With the exception of the occasional "world exclusive" story and/or irresistible demo disc, I pretty much rely on Internet news, too. And I stopped regularly reading PC Gamer somewhere around 2000 (college for me, too), so I guess I missed the succumbing to hype. I've gotten a couple issues of OXM recently (Chaos Theory and Unreal Championship 2 demos on one disc, Doom 3 and Psychonauts on this month's) and unless PC Gamer has slid significantly downhill in quality since my last issue a year or two ago, it's still one of the better gaming magazines out there, content-wise. Or it might just be that I'm more drawn to the PC-type content. They still have Vederman, at least. Any idea if Coconut Monkey still makes appearances? I'm still waiting on Gravy Trader.
PC Accelerator lasted a couple years. It was pretty much a raunchier PC Gamer. Same publisher and everything. I've always been a PC Gamer purist. I bought a couple of PC Accelerator issues, too, I think. Decent quality, actually, but seemed to be trying too hard to be edgy. Only other gaming magazines I've bought have been for demo discs. I'm not subscribed to anything now, but PC Gamer is the only gaming magazine to which I've ever subscribed. I remember the first issue I bought (quite a while before I ever subscribed) had a 3.25" floppy disk with a demo of The Incredible Machine 2. There was apparently a CD version of the magazine introduced I think just that month, but I hadn't yet taken the optical plunge. Reviews that issue I think included Wing Commander 3 and Warcraft 2.
As for Game Informer, I've heard of it, but I think mostly just when I've been in Gamestop locations. I've definitely never read a copy.
I'm guessing that a UMD will be more than the 1350 yen diffreence there. 100 yen can be loosely estimated to about 1 US dollar. UMD movies coming out this week in the US are $15 retail, and one is $20 (House of Flying Daggers). Since US DVDs aren't generally $35-$40, I'd wager that a UMD release in Japan would be a little more expensive than in the US, too, so the two-pack looks to be a good deal, relatively. That's assuming you'll be able to make decent use of the UMD, of course.
I wondered the same thing the other day. According to Wikipedia, DNS = Domain Name System, so "DNS Server" is correct and not redundant.
I just feel sorry for their call center people since the DNS crap started. They must be swamped. Have they resolved the issues yet? My router is still using 4.2.2.1 for now after I realized the problem was apparently recurring.
Phone company in these parts is BellSouth, with their overpriced "FastAccess" DSL, which I used from 2001 through last summer, at which point there were BellSouth service problems and a nice introductory deal going with Comcast. Haven't really regretted the switch.
My main beef is still the upstream bandwidth throttling on pretty much all consumer-grade broadband services. I regularly get over 400KB/s while downloading large files, but 30KB/s saturates my upstream and pretty much brings my internet connection to a halt.
I don't know about the GeForce4 440 laptop version, but I recall the 3-digit (I think something like 420, 440, and 460, though I'm not sure) GF4-branded PCI and AGP cards were called "GeForce4 MX" and were, I think, closer to souped-up GeForce 2 cards than actual GeForce4, and thus lacked the shader capabilities required for some of the essential graphical effects used in the game. The upshot is that the minimum GeForce 4 card that supported shaders was, I think, the 4200. And I'm pretty sure all GeForce 3 cards had shader support.
T-Mobile seems to be at least good about not crippling their phones or phone compatibility. I have a Nokia 3660 that seems to be fully functional. Recently got a USB Bluetooth dongle for my computer and transferred over a handy file manager app (FExplore) to the phone (files transferred to the phone show up as new messages, apparently). Anyway, I haven't run into any odd proprietary roadblocks with this phone yet, and it was provided by T-Mobile, has the T-Mobile logo on it and everything. Also, a friend of mine ordered a Windows Mobile smartphone from a third party and seemingly had no trouble getting it supported on his T-Mobile plan.
The local NPR station (http://wpln.org/) is about all I listen to around here (Nashville area), on the radio, at least. Unfortunately, with the exception of a couple of live studio-type music shows throughout the week and "Echoes" late on Saturday night, its music is pretty much a variety of classical stuff between nonmusic shows. I use "unfortunately" kind of loosely, though, as I do listen to their classical stuff pretty often, too. "Bluegrass Breakdown" and "The Thistle and Shamrock" on Saturdays are good.
There's also a public-supported jazz station (http://www.wmot.org/), but its variety of jazz is fairly limited. There's occasionally some neat stuff on that, but it's mostly older standard jazz and newer jazz emulating and/or covering those older types.
Aside from that, there's not much variety. There are several country stations, a couple of rap stations, a Top 40 station or two, a couple of current rock stations, and a smattering of oldies and classic rock, which are not bad.
Out of curiosity, how does that selection compare to elsewhere? Just wondering how "Music City" compares variety-wise to other markets.
Also, the two public stations I linked both have live internet streams of their content.
Except you can make a good (photorealistic, too!) movie if you have a good script, a few talented actor friends, maybe a musician friend, and a $3000 digital camcorder. It's hard to do that with games.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think Circuit City might have had something like that going in their physical stores. I wonder if they rationalized that everywhere else would sell out, so people would have to resort to the forced bundle if they wanted a PSP anywhere near the release date.
Everyone's assuming that it's underclocked for power consumption purposes, right? Hard for me to begrudge it for that. Plus it's to some degree promoting efficiency by developers if they want maximum performance.
It'll be interesting if they decide to unlock the CPU and bus speeds later on, and maybe release games that require a specific battery or a newer low-power revision of the processor in order to play them. I'll wager the games will be impressive if they do unlock it. Increasing CPU speed by 50% for developers that are used to the 222MHz could result in some very nice looking games. Memory constraints would still exist, though, I guess.
Thinking about Sony's official "bundle", the only really superfluous bits that came with it were the movie and maybe the headphones, though the little inline remote can be handy but could be sold as an official accessory. The slipcover and screen cloth are invaluable and should be included with even a barebones bundle, and the memory stick is necessary, though I guess the Playstation/PS2's memory cards prove that you can get away with charging people $25 extra for something completely needed by modern games in the name of "choice". What amuses me is that the PS2 memory cards are STILL $25--with the occasional $20 sale price--each for 8MB of flash memory, 4.5 years after US release. I have to wonder what kind of profit margins they have on those things.
And I got mine at Best Buy, no extra game purchases required. Ended up with Wipeout and their last copy of Lumines, and only 2 stuck subpixels that don't bother me at all. Got their last copy of Metal Gear Acid a few days later, after someone had apparently returned it, unopened of course.
Ha, wonderful. Not only do they offer no help and put that lack of help in a location rendered hard to reach with the current problems, but their powers of understatement seem nigh unparalleled. I'm going to make a stretch and guess that "Some" most likely means "Most" or "Almost all" or even "All" and that, based on my experiences, the "network problems" are pretty much just the DNS problems. Unless the DNS problems in our areas are somehow caused by network problems in other areas.
Any word on what the whole DNS problem is? I ended up manually setting my router to use 4.2.2.1 for a DNS server. Network speed seems fine. My most recent use of BitTorrent was, believe it or not, a Linux LiveCD, and I was getting a little over 400KB/s on that, though I had upload rate limited because 30KB/s up completely saturates the paltry upstream limit they impose.
Then he should have used parentheses to alleviate ambiguity!
Kidding, of course, but he did seem to pose the possibility of cancellation as not unlikely... which I guess is probably the case. Wish we could hear one way or the other, regardless. Hmm... I wonder what a season of AD costs to produce...
Whoa, what's this about Arrested Development being cancelled? Has there been word of cancellation? I know of the reduced order this season. The reasoning did seem a little suspect (American Dad's (abysmal) premiere episode got good ratings.. you know, immediately after the Super Bowl, during which it had been heavily advertised...). At least the reduced order resulted in a hilarious gag in a recent episode (the reduced housing order from 22 to 18 homes, where Michael said "But we already had all the blueprints drawn up..." and the narrator cut in with "Actually, they didn't... but they would have.").
Anyway, yeah, I'm mad enough that the almost certainly doomed to both critical and popular failure American Dad shortened the Arrested Development season on stupid grounds. If they cancel the show, I'll be even less enthused.
Well, in Blizzard's defense, they do explicitly list 512MB as the minimum RAM for playing WoW on OS X.
I haven't tried attaching a printer to this yet. My current printer is parallel, so emailing the file to an XP machine attached to the printer for the few times I've had to print has sufficed and delayed the purchase of a USB printer (or maybe just a USB cable; I forget if this printer does both, but it definitely didn't come with a USB cable) for a while.
As for shortcut keys, I do still get mixed up, especially since my computer at work is Windows 2000. So I sometimes find myself pressing Ctrl+C at home, and sometimes Alt+C at work.
I'm using the mini as my primary computer at the moment. Immersion definitely helps familiarity as it does for other things.
The nearest actual Apple store to me being a 4-hour drive, I ended up at a significantly closer CompUSA on release day, since they have their Apple corner. Definitely not a nice Saturday. It was windy and spitting snow while I was out. They didn't have any minis on display, but I asked a clerk about them, and he said they had a few. I really should have asked how many they had sold so far. There was someone talking to him about the mini before I got a hold of him, but I don't think the person was interested in buying at that time. Regardless, there weren't many people in the Apple section of that store at the time, but I assume that was a combination of the weather, the fact that even I wasn't sure if CompUSA would really have any minis in stock on release day, and maybe the fact that the store isn't in the area of town likely to contain large amounts of Apple users (and that there is another CompUSA in an area that might be more likely to cater to a portion of that crowd). That and that Nashville is a Dell town... or something. Anyway, I ended up getting the 1.42GHz model, into which I recently put a 512MB stick of RAM. It's my first Apple product ever, though I'd used Apple products occasionally in schools (IIe, early iMac (so terrible...), and what I now assume were G4 eMacs with OS X). I'm really enjoying it so far, especially with more RAM. Runs World of Warcraft well enough, though unfortunately without the shaders that make it look so nice. Just this week bought the Cocoa development book that several people recommended in the Ask Slashdot topic lower on the Apple page. Have yet to do anything with that, though.
Slashdot Mirror
But yeah, I'd probably pay an extra $5 or so to get a DVD with the UMD version included. $15-$20 is more than I'll pay for movies with no features and that will only play on the PSP.
I liked RahXephon, too, I think partly because it felt a bit different than Evangelion and still managed to be a crazy psychological confusion-fest. I mean, I guess the central story was a kid pulled completely out of anything he recognized as reality and thrust into some crazy defense role at the helm of a mysterious organic fighting robot thing with a mysterious girl with mysterious origins, and... oh. I think maybe it felt a little more concrete somehow than some of the Evangelion stuff did, though, and I'm not really sure why. Or maybe that most of the characters were at least pretty much sane in RahXephon. By the end of Evangelion (not to mention End of Evangelion), everyone was in the middle of complete mental breakdowns even before all the really crazy stuff started happening. Hrm. Now I want to watch both series again.
Woah, so they actually state that they review based on their expectation of public opinion rather than the game's actual merits? That's pretty amusing. "Well, frankly, we hated the game, but we figure you guys'll love it because we assume you couldn't tell a Rembrandt from a Warhol, and there are guns and a couple of cars and an explosion. Buy it at a Gamestop while you're at it, why don't you?"
With the exception of the occasional "world exclusive" story and/or irresistible demo disc, I pretty much rely on Internet news, too. And I stopped regularly reading PC Gamer somewhere around 2000 (college for me, too), so I guess I missed the succumbing to hype. I've gotten a couple issues of OXM recently (Chaos Theory and Unreal Championship 2 demos on one disc, Doom 3 and Psychonauts on this month's) and unless PC Gamer has slid significantly downhill in quality since my last issue a year or two ago, it's still one of the better gaming magazines out there, content-wise. Or it might just be that I'm more drawn to the PC-type content. They still have Vederman, at least. Any idea if Coconut Monkey still makes appearances? I'm still waiting on Gravy Trader.
As for Game Informer, I've heard of it, but I think mostly just when I've been in Gamestop locations. I've definitely never read a copy.
I'm guessing that a UMD will be more than the 1350 yen diffreence there. 100 yen can be loosely estimated to about 1 US dollar. UMD movies coming out this week in the US are $15 retail, and one is $20 (House of Flying Daggers). Since US DVDs aren't generally $35-$40, I'd wager that a UMD release in Japan would be a little more expensive than in the US, too, so the two-pack looks to be a good deal, relatively. That's assuming you'll be able to make decent use of the UMD, of course.
I wondered the same thing the other day. According to Wikipedia, DNS = Domain Name System, so "DNS Server" is correct and not redundant.
I just feel sorry for their call center people since the DNS crap started. They must be swamped. Have they resolved the issues yet? My router is still using 4.2.2.1 for now after I realized the problem was apparently recurring.
Phone company in these parts is BellSouth, with their overpriced "FastAccess" DSL, which I used from 2001 through last summer, at which point there were BellSouth service problems and a nice introductory deal going with Comcast. Haven't really regretted the switch.
My main beef is still the upstream bandwidth throttling on pretty much all consumer-grade broadband services. I regularly get over 400KB/s while downloading large files, but 30KB/s saturates my upstream and pretty much brings my internet connection to a halt.
I don't know about the GeForce4 440 laptop version, but I recall the 3-digit (I think something like 420, 440, and 460, though I'm not sure) GF4-branded PCI and AGP cards were called "GeForce4 MX" and were, I think, closer to souped-up GeForce 2 cards than actual GeForce4, and thus lacked the shader capabilities required for some of the essential graphical effects used in the game. The upshot is that the minimum GeForce 4 card that supported shaders was, I think, the 4200. And I'm pretty sure all GeForce 3 cards had shader support.
That's the beauty of this plan! It manages to solve both problems!
I doubt you're going to have a Hummer do a 100+ mile per hour dive through the roof into your living room with naught but air to slow it down, though.
T-Mobile seems to be at least good about not crippling their phones or phone compatibility. I have a Nokia 3660 that seems to be fully functional. Recently got a USB Bluetooth dongle for my computer and transferred over a handy file manager app (FExplore) to the phone (files transferred to the phone show up as new messages, apparently). Anyway, I haven't run into any odd proprietary roadblocks with this phone yet, and it was provided by T-Mobile, has the T-Mobile logo on it and everything. Also, a friend of mine ordered a Windows Mobile smartphone from a third party and seemingly had no trouble getting it supported on his T-Mobile plan.
There's also a public-supported jazz station (http://www.wmot.org/), but its variety of jazz is fairly limited. There's occasionally some neat stuff on that, but it's mostly older standard jazz and newer jazz emulating and/or covering those older types.
Aside from that, there's not much variety. There are several country stations, a couple of rap stations, a Top 40 station or two, a couple of current rock stations, and a smattering of oldies and classic rock, which are not bad.
Out of curiosity, how does that selection compare to elsewhere? Just wondering how "Music City" compares variety-wise to other markets.
Also, the two public stations I linked both have live internet streams of their content.
Ah, here we go:0 -23&res=l
0 -08&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-1
Except you can make a good (photorealistic, too!) movie if you have a good script, a few talented actor friends, maybe a musician friend, and a $3000 digital camcorder. It's hard to do that with games.
Especially when you have to first figure out toward what you are rapidly falling.
And you thought you'd never again have to constructively (maybe creatively?) use knowledge of order of operations!
I'm not entirely sure, but I think Circuit City might have had something like that going in their physical stores. I wonder if they rationalized that everywhere else would sell out, so people would have to resort to the forced bundle if they wanted a PSP anywhere near the release date.
It'll be interesting if they decide to unlock the CPU and bus speeds later on, and maybe release games that require a specific battery or a newer low-power revision of the processor in order to play them. I'll wager the games will be impressive if they do unlock it. Increasing CPU speed by 50% for developers that are used to the 222MHz could result in some very nice looking games. Memory constraints would still exist, though, I guess.
And I got mine at Best Buy, no extra game purchases required. Ended up with Wipeout and their last copy of Lumines, and only 2 stuck subpixels that don't bother me at all. Got their last copy of Metal Gear Acid a few days later, after someone had apparently returned it, unopened of course.
Ha, wonderful. Not only do they offer no help and put that lack of help in a location rendered hard to reach with the current problems, but their powers of understatement seem nigh unparalleled. I'm going to make a stretch and guess that "Some" most likely means "Most" or "Almost all" or even "All" and that, based on my experiences, the "network problems" are pretty much just the DNS problems. Unless the DNS problems in our areas are somehow caused by network problems in other areas.
Any word on what the whole DNS problem is? I ended up manually setting my router to use 4.2.2.1 for a DNS server. Network speed seems fine. My most recent use of BitTorrent was, believe it or not, a Linux LiveCD, and I was getting a little over 400KB/s on that, though I had upload rate limited because 30KB/s up completely saturates the paltry upstream limit they impose.
Kidding, of course, but he did seem to pose the possibility of cancellation as not unlikely... which I guess is probably the case. Wish we could hear one way or the other, regardless. Hmm... I wonder what a season of AD costs to produce...
Anyway, yeah, I'm mad enough that the almost certainly doomed to both critical and popular failure American Dad shortened the Arrested Development season on stupid grounds. If they cancel the show, I'll be even less enthused.
I haven't tried attaching a printer to this yet. My current printer is parallel, so emailing the file to an XP machine attached to the printer for the few times I've had to print has sufficed and delayed the purchase of a USB printer (or maybe just a USB cable; I forget if this printer does both, but it definitely didn't come with a USB cable) for a while.
As for shortcut keys, I do still get mixed up, especially since my computer at work is Windows 2000. So I sometimes find myself pressing Ctrl+C at home, and sometimes Alt+C at work.
I'm using the mini as my primary computer at the moment. Immersion definitely helps familiarity as it does for other things.
The nearest actual Apple store to me being a 4-hour drive, I ended up at a significantly closer CompUSA on release day, since they have their Apple corner. Definitely not a nice Saturday. It was windy and spitting snow while I was out. They didn't have any minis on display, but I asked a clerk about them, and he said they had a few. I really should have asked how many they had sold so far. There was someone talking to him about the mini before I got a hold of him, but I don't think the person was interested in buying at that time. Regardless, there weren't many people in the Apple section of that store at the time, but I assume that was a combination of the weather, the fact that even I wasn't sure if CompUSA would really have any minis in stock on release day, and maybe the fact that the store isn't in the area of town likely to contain large amounts of Apple users (and that there is another CompUSA in an area that might be more likely to cater to a portion of that crowd). That and that Nashville is a Dell town... or something. Anyway, I ended up getting the 1.42GHz model, into which I recently put a 512MB stick of RAM. It's my first Apple product ever, though I'd used Apple products occasionally in schools (IIe, early iMac (so terrible...), and what I now assume were G4 eMacs with OS X). I'm really enjoying it so far, especially with more RAM. Runs World of Warcraft well enough, though unfortunately without the shaders that make it look so nice. Just this week bought the Cocoa development book that several people recommended in the Ask Slashdot topic lower on the Apple page. Have yet to do anything with that, though.