I used to read a lot of books on my (now) ancient Asus A600 PDA. Since I've replaced my now also ancient T68i phone with an HTC s730 smartphone, I'm currently using it as my main ebook reader. It has all the benefits you listed, plus, well, it's a phone I'll be carrying around anyway. Also, I don't look like a complete nerd when juggling my Zen Xtra, the PDA, and the phone at the same time when somebody calls me:).
Still, I might go back to reading on the Asus PDA when a new battery arrives from ebay. While it doesn't have Wi-Fi, the trans-reflective screen is larger and more readable in the sunlight or without backlight (useful for prolonging battery life to ridiculous levels). Having read two rather long books, Cryptonomicon and Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, both at around 1000 pages, I can confidently say that I greatly prefer the form factor of the PDA (or the phone) to regular books. I've recently bought Ubik in regular paperback dead-tree from for almost nothing, so I decided to read it that way. Even a small paperback such as this one is much bulkier than the PDA, and simply doesn't fit well into any pockets. Another benefit of the PDA is that it's much easier to operate with one hand, which is useful if you're standing in public transport (ugh) or holding a bag in the other had.
Now as for Kindle, I probably wouldn't buy even if it was available here. It does have some of the same benefits as the PDA plus the e-ink screen, but at 20x13.5 cm it's just too large to use in the way I use the PDA.
No, the criticism of either their coding practices or QA has nothing to do with a new and fairly efficient way to prioritize bug fixes. They already have the software with all the holes built in. Now they should deal with what they have in the best way possible, don't you agree?
Having played the PC version of GoW, I can confidently say that they can keep this thing contained to the consoles. It's not Legendary-bad, but more like Halo\d?-bad, sans the whole cloned levels thing.
Your description of the merits of GoW is laughable. What are the advanced tactics are you talking about? Surely it's not how you have to take cover behind an obviously placed obstacle, pop up, shoot a whole mag into an enemy, duck down to infinitely regenerate health, then repeat until everyone is dead, all while suppressive fire is as effective as shouting insults in Esperanto. I guess you can use your brave immortal teammates for cannon fodder in a variety of ways, which would be a nice idea if they didn't behave like Dreamcast players on a PC Q3 server. GoW isn't tactical. At best, it just might be tacticlol. At least it'd look pretty good if it weren't for the whole "grey is the new brown" theme.
I'm sorry, but the situation is completely opposite of what you're describing. Although I can see how you could get that impression if you only played PC games for a while somewhere during 1993 or just this year, now that all the main franchises have been bastardized^Wconsolized. But PC games are where all the tactical (and other genres which require a nonzero amount of brain activity) games originated, and have been successful. Have you heard of Rainbow Six? If your immediate thought was "oh yeah I played Vegas" then I guess I shouldn't be surprised by your post, or the others like it.
It's also interesting how in your journal you say that PC game makers aren't leet enough to make console games, and use UT3 as an example. Yet here's Epic, the dumbfucks of the UT3 fame, making a super polished game which is waaay to good for us PC players to be able to appreciate. Yeah, ok. I'll quit now, before I start foaming at the mouth. I'm not going to be asking for a port.
P.S. "This comment is not a troll" is about as credible as "I'm not a crook", though I'm not claiming you're trolling right now. P.S.^2 Also, Dead Space sucked and they should not have bothered with a port.
The first thing that came to my mind was OCR too; obviously I also didn't click the link:). Of course everything would've been much simpler if we were dealing with an odometer-type device here.
The sample image should work just fine even in gray-scale. The contrast is high and the needles are pretty large, so it should be reasonably easy for anyone to just get the angle of each one and calculate the value based on that, exactly as you suggest here. One could also hardcode in the areas in which each dial is located to further simplify things. Someone with experience in computer vision could probably write everything from scratch, and there are several computer vision libraries available for everyone else.
The dark title bar for maximized windows is a feature which is supposed to make it clear that the window is maximized and thus can not be resized or moved. Apparently you're not the only one who has a problem with the feature, so they're addressing this issue for W7. Here's the relevant MS blog post
I have to agree with you here, mostly. Most of the tests make very little sense, and expecting W7 to be a rewrite is just stupid. Watching some of the W7-related PDC 2008 videos, I never got the impression that improving performance was their major priority, except perhaps for some tweaks for netbooks. Instead, most of the focus appears to be on other areas such as improved usability and power consumption. Not to mention that the M3 is a pre-beta build.
However, the OS can certainly have a significant impact on something like video encoding: differences in the scheduler or system calls/APIs can do that. Here's a somewhat outdated Vista vs XP benchmark. The xvid and h.264 encoders are around 20% slower in Vista, and the impact is similar in some other cases, such as with WinRAR or UT2004. Differences of just a few percent can usually be ignored, but I find these significant. If somewhere between the release of Vista and W7 the maximum differences are lowered to around 5% compared to XP, whether with a service pack, new drivers or optimizations, I'd consider that good enough and possibly switch. After all, going from Win98 to XP also caused a drop in framerates, but was well worth it.
"This isn't a troll." Yeah, and she said she was 18. Still, I'll give you one (of countless) reasons: have you tried Alt-tabbing to Visual Studio on any of the consoles?
GoW2 is a piece of shit sequel to a piece of shit game. The console gamers probably just don't know any better, but this doesn't change the facts. I didn't like the product so I didn't buy it, but that's Epic's problem, not mine.
That's not a very good analogy. Where's BadAnalogyGuy when we need him most? Anyway, the used car market is quite important (to people and manufacturers alike), and I assume this applies pretty much everywhere. When buying a new car, most people who aren't planning to drive it until it falls apart consider its future sale price as part of buying decision. If car A costs 20k new and will sell for 10k in 5 years while car B also costs 20k new but 13k used, car B is, all else being equal, more attractive to new car buyers, and thus the manufacturer is likely to sell more of them.
This is of course very simplified, but it shows that if a person can resell the game, they'll have more money to buy a new one. Unless, that is, they get something like two bucks for their game while the store resells it for $40*. In this case, the $2 are unlikely to have an impact on anything, while the reseller can easily undercut the prices of new games, leaving the developer/publisher nothing. I've given up on Epic a long time ago, but including some bonus content for the first buyers isn't such a terrible idea. An alternative is to lower prices in an attempt to reach a wider market which obviously exists, but this depends on how low the resellers can go with their used game prices. It might very well be impossible to compete with used games on price.
*I actually have no idea what the real numbers are in this case, as I've never tried to sell my games or buy a used one, but that's what somebody posted in this thread.
>Ask him, "How does one justify a Fire Department if your house has never burned down?"
Well yeah, except this would not necessarily be arguing in the submitter's favor. Imagine if their company/house kept its own fire department (as they do with the IT dpt.), complete with a shiny red fire truck, a few shirtless muscular guys and all the other necessary stuff, all just in case a fire breaks out. This has to be supported whenever the company is operational.
Then compare it to the cost of outsourcing firefighting somewhere, and paying only when a fire is extinguished. Even if they charge significantly more per call or per hour than the in-house operation costs, total costs over a period would be much, much lower. Plus, since they're constantly active, they're likely to be far more experienced.
For the pedantic, yes, there are exceptions of course, such as if the company is specialized in flammable chemicals, or has a huge territory inaccessible from the outside. And obviously fire department != IT department. However, depending on the exact situation, the submitter's little IT department might be about as justifiable as the in-house firefighting team in this example.
Some of Verbatim DVD+Rs (and probably CD-Rs too, but I haven't used those in a few years) are actually made by TY, some of their other ones are Mitsubishi Chemical (Verbatim's parent company), which in my experience are also very good. Some types were also made by other OEMs which are supposedly not as good, but I haven't had any problems with any of the Verbatim branded media. Of course, if you look around you can find TY branded media as well, like at the places mentioned in the other two posts.
Riiight. It's either that, or Spore just isn't nearly as fun as one would expect it to be from all the hype. You apparently bought into it, but not everyone did.
>You can now pick up the baseline 360 for $200. You'd probably spend twice that on just your graphics card to run Gears PC at 720p.
Welcome to two years ago. There's a $130 card that runs Crysis at 1680x1050 at 40 fps. And really, if you'd be content with playing the games on consoles, why don't you save those $200 too and just continue playing on low detail? This way you'd get the same experience you get on the consoles, without spending anything extra!
While John (Romero) deserves every single one of the -20 Daikatana points, he should get at least as many points back for his Melvin comic strips. His site used to have quite a few of them, but now all the links go the smugmug homepage, and his gallery there only has this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Well my solution is even simpler:
don't play the shitty games that are so boring, you need to constantly alt-tab to a browser to entertain yourself.
>It's a digital image, so it's entirely pixels. I'm sure you mean something more . . .
He's probaby seen quite a few 'shops in his time.
Welcome to 1983! Here's an example of what can be done with Silverlight:
Exhibit Q
That's why there is "9/11 Never forget!"
I suggest each one of us gets at least a single mammoth.
>step 1, remove batteries.*
*Does not apply to iphone owners
>Good for you buddy. I keep trying, but can only release vaporware.
That's still better than not being able to release anything at all for decades.
I used to read a lot of books on my (now) ancient Asus A600 PDA. Since I've replaced my now also ancient T68i phone with an HTC s730 smartphone, I'm currently using it as my main ebook reader. It has all the benefits you listed, plus, well, it's a phone I'll be carrying around anyway. Also, I don't look like a complete nerd when juggling my Zen Xtra, the PDA, and the phone at the same time when somebody calls me :).
Still, I might go back to reading on the Asus PDA when a new battery arrives from ebay. While it doesn't have Wi-Fi, the trans-reflective screen is larger and more readable in the sunlight or without backlight (useful for prolonging battery life to ridiculous levels). Having read two rather long books, Cryptonomicon and Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, both at around 1000 pages, I can confidently say that I greatly prefer the form factor of the PDA (or the phone) to regular books. I've recently bought Ubik in regular paperback dead-tree from for almost nothing, so I decided to read it that way. Even a small paperback such as this one is much bulkier than the PDA, and simply doesn't fit well into any pockets. Another benefit of the PDA is that it's much easier to operate with one hand, which is useful if you're standing in public transport (ugh) or holding a bag in the other had.
Now as for Kindle, I probably wouldn't buy even if it was available here. It does have some of the same benefits as the PDA plus the e-ink screen, but at 20x13.5 cm it's just too large to use in the way I use the PDA.
No, the criticism of either their coding practices or QA has nothing to do with a new and fairly efficient way to prioritize bug fixes. They already have the software with all the holes built in. Now they should deal with what they have in the best way possible, don't you agree?
Having played the PC version of GoW, I can confidently say that they can keep this thing contained to the consoles. It's not Legendary-bad, but more like Halo\d?-bad, sans the whole cloned levels thing.
Your description of the merits of GoW is laughable. What are the advanced tactics are you talking about? Surely it's not how you have to take cover behind an obviously placed obstacle, pop up, shoot a whole mag into an enemy, duck down to infinitely regenerate health, then repeat until everyone is dead, all while suppressive fire is as effective as shouting insults in Esperanto. I guess you can use your brave immortal teammates for cannon fodder in a variety of ways, which would be a nice idea if they didn't behave like Dreamcast players on a PC Q3 server. GoW isn't tactical. At best, it just might be tacticlol. At least it'd look pretty good if it weren't for the whole "grey is the new brown" theme.
I'm sorry, but the situation is completely opposite of what you're describing. Although I can see how you could get that impression if you only played PC games for a while somewhere during 1993 or just this year, now that all the main franchises have been bastardized^Wconsolized. But PC games are where all the tactical (and other genres which require a nonzero amount of brain activity) games originated, and have been successful. Have you heard of Rainbow Six? If your immediate thought was "oh yeah I played Vegas" then I guess I shouldn't be surprised by your post, or the others like it.
It's also interesting how in your journal you say that PC game makers aren't leet enough to make console games, and use UT3 as an example. Yet here's Epic, the dumbfucks of the UT3 fame, making a super polished game which is waaay to good for us PC players to be able to appreciate. Yeah, ok. I'll quit now, before I start foaming at the mouth. I'm not going to be asking for a port.
P.S. "This comment is not a troll" is about as credible as "I'm not a crook", though I'm not claiming you're trolling right now.
P.S.^2 Also, Dead Space sucked and they should not have bothered with a port.
The first thing that came to my mind was OCR too; obviously I also didn't click the link :). Of course everything would've been much simpler if we were dealing with an odometer-type device here.
The sample image should work just fine even in gray-scale. The contrast is high and the needles are pretty large, so it should be reasonably easy for anyone to just get the angle of each one and calculate the value based on that, exactly as you suggest here. One could also hardcode in the areas in which each dial is located to further simplify things. Someone with experience in computer vision could probably write everything from scratch, and there are several computer vision libraries available for everyone else.
The dark title bar for maximized windows is a feature which is supposed to make it clear that the window is maximized and thus can not be resized or moved. Apparently you're not the only one who has a problem with the feature, so they're addressing this issue for W7. Here's the relevant MS blog post
I have to agree with you here, mostly. Most of the tests make very little sense, and expecting W7 to be a rewrite is just stupid. Watching some of the W7-related PDC 2008 videos, I never got the impression that improving performance was their major priority, except perhaps for some tweaks for netbooks. Instead, most of the focus appears to be on other areas such as improved usability and power consumption. Not to mention that the M3 is a pre-beta build.
However, the OS can certainly have a significant impact on something like video encoding: differences in the scheduler or system calls/APIs can do that. Here's a somewhat outdated Vista vs XP benchmark. The xvid and h.264 encoders are around 20% slower in Vista, and the impact is similar in some other cases, such as with WinRAR or UT2004. Differences of just a few percent can usually be ignored, but I find these significant. If somewhere between the release of Vista and W7 the maximum differences are lowered to around 5% compared to XP, whether with a service pack, new drivers or optimizations, I'd consider that good enough and possibly switch. After all, going from Win98 to XP also caused a drop in framerates, but was well worth it.
"This isn't a troll." Yeah, and she said she was 18. Still, I'll give you one (of countless) reasons: have you tried Alt-tabbing to Visual Studio on any of the consoles?
GoW2 is a piece of shit sequel to a piece of shit game. The console gamers probably just don't know any better, but this doesn't change the facts. I didn't like the product so I didn't buy it, but that's Epic's problem, not mine.
That's not a very good analogy. Where's BadAnalogyGuy when we need him most? Anyway, the used car market is quite important (to people and manufacturers alike), and I assume this applies pretty much everywhere. When buying a new car, most people who aren't planning to drive it until it falls apart consider its future sale price as part of buying decision. If car A costs 20k new and will sell for 10k in 5 years while car B also costs 20k new but 13k used, car B is, all else being equal, more attractive to new car buyers, and thus the manufacturer is likely to sell more of them.
This is of course very simplified, but it shows that if a person can resell the game, they'll have more money to buy a new one. Unless, that is, they get something like two bucks for their game while the store resells it for $40*. In this case, the $2 are unlikely to have an impact on anything, while the reseller can easily undercut the prices of new games, leaving the developer/publisher nothing. I've given up on Epic a long time ago, but including some bonus content for the first buyers isn't such a terrible idea. An alternative is to lower prices in an attempt to reach a wider market which obviously exists, but this depends on how low the resellers can go with their used game prices. It might very well be impossible to compete with used games on price.
*I actually have no idea what the real numbers are in this case, as I've never tried to sell my games or buy a used one, but that's what somebody posted in this thread.
>I think I speak for everyone when I say: "...what?"
Just vote Zombie Reagan 2008^W2012.
something on jailbreaking iphones? Or maybe FreeBSD jails?
>Ask him, "How does one justify a Fire Department if your house has never burned down?"
Well yeah, except this would not necessarily be arguing in the submitter's favor. Imagine if their company/house kept its own fire department (as they do with the IT dpt.), complete with a shiny red fire truck, a few shirtless muscular guys and all the other necessary stuff, all just in case a fire breaks out. This has to be supported whenever the company is operational.
Then compare it to the cost of outsourcing firefighting somewhere, and paying only when a fire is extinguished. Even if they charge significantly more per call or per hour than the in-house operation costs, total costs over a period would be much, much lower. Plus, since they're constantly active, they're likely to be far more experienced.
For the pedantic, yes, there are exceptions of course, such as if the company is specialized in flammable chemicals, or has a huge territory inaccessible from the outside. And obviously fire department != IT department. However, depending on the exact situation, the submitter's little IT department might be about as justifiable as the in-house firefighting team in this example.
Some of Verbatim DVD+Rs (and probably CD-Rs too, but I haven't used those in a few years) are actually made by TY, some of their other ones are Mitsubishi Chemical (Verbatim's parent company), which in my experience are also very good. Some types were also made by other OEMs which are supposedly not as good, but I haven't had any problems with any of the Verbatim branded media. Of course, if you look around you can find TY branded media as well, like at the places mentioned in the other two posts.
But 7i makes it sound like the processor is fuel-injected, which is also not the case.
> [stuff about how DRM is slowing Spore sales]
Riiight. It's either that, or Spore just isn't nearly as fun as one would expect it to be from all the hype. You apparently bought into it, but not everyone did.
You can even get a stock minivan with 500 hp. See, everything is possible if you don't limit yourself to buying a trendy piece of shit.
>You can now pick up the baseline 360 for $200. You'd probably spend twice that on just your graphics card to run Gears PC at 720p.
Welcome to two years ago. There's a $130 card that runs Crysis at 1680x1050 at 40 fps. And really, if you'd be content with playing the games on consoles, why don't you save those $200 too and just continue playing on low detail? This way you'd get the same experience you get on the consoles, without spending anything extra!
While John (Romero) deserves every single one of the -20 Daikatana points, he should get at least as many points back for his Melvin comic strips. His site used to have quite a few of them, but now all the links go the smugmug homepage, and his gallery there only has this one.