The new generation of DVD disc will spearhead a fresh assault by Microsoft on the home-entertainment market.
So how environmentally friendly are these? If MS is going to be trying to put rental places out of business, do they have a plan for millions of now-useless single-play-DVDs and the associated packaging?
In fact, in Canada this applies to songs whether you bought the album or not. The CRIA is wrong when it talks about "illegal downloads". As long as you're downloading for your own use, it's not illegal.
Actually, I think that it goes something like this under canadian law:
If I burn a copy of a cd I own, and give you the copy, I'm breaking the law.
If I give you a cd I own, you burn a copy, and return the original, no law is broken.
Applying this to the digital world, downloading songs/media/whatever for personal use should be legal, the problem is that most P2P apps also *upload* from your computer, which is in violation of copyright laws (you don't have distribution rights for the media).
Moral of the story? Canadians should use newsgroups for their "illegal" downloads.
However, two way more fundamental relations suddenly become horribly difficult: Say going from town A to C I go from A to B then from B to C. A to B is 5 squandrance, B to C is 3 squandrance, how much squandrance is it from A to C? No, not 8, but 5 + 3 + 2*sqrt(8). The simple addition of distances becomes a square-root function...
Guess what, the old way of determining the distance from A to C, given you went through B and turned a quarter turn at B (which you don't mention, but which your solution relies), you have to take two squares, sum, and then square root that too!
It's not so much compression algorithms as it is generation algorithms.
Spore doesn't store your current type of creature, it stores the parameters used to create (or 'evolve') your creature from scratch, which can indeed be quite small.
I wonder if there were any forward-thinking tv stations/networks that would be willing to buddy up with this idea.
Imagine, the traditional TV shows we're used to, viewable over the internet, commercials intact. How can that not make everybody happy?
Viewers get a legit avenue of watching TV over internet, and the show producers can track download stats and validate commercial impressions to advertisers in much more concrete numbers than the current model (if significantly less in volume)
Leave him with his windows client as is, and just get it to check the gmail account from now on. All his existing email will be stored locally, and in a few years when he decides that he really doesn't need them any more, the new stuff will all be synched between his desktop and gmail on the web, if he decides he wants to switch to a webapp for his email.
Takes the domain name (plus/minus the www. if you prefer) and runs an MD5 of that plus your password, chops it to I think 10 chars. Damn near freakin impossible to work backwards from even though the domain name starts the md5, and it's a dead easy algorithm that you could do manually from the shell if you so desired.
Unfortunately, this only works well for web-based forms, though in theory one could do it via shell for other things.
Haven't heard of F.E.A.R, but the biggest-hyped up and coming shooter I'm aware of is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Black has almost no hype going on at the moment if you can believe the article - it just got a showing at E3, and EA still hasn't put out any press releases or anything for it.
That's actually what I did with the RSS plugin for azureus while BTEfnet was still up. It would automagically grab the shows I was watching as they came out. Went to Mexico for a week and a half holiday, and had the shows I missed already downloaded and ready to watch.
Just spend an hour or two looking at the now-ubiquitous recipe book demo, and see if a system like that could suit your site-building needs.
Looking at what my co-worker just managed to pull out of his hat in a week or so (combination SOAP/XML-HTTP client with revision control on the data, for web-hosting-ish stuff) you may find the hardest part is finding excuses to not convert your other stuff over:P
The most difficult thing I think you'd run into based on your spec is the label printing stuff, but if you found a web-based solution for it in PHP I'm sure the Ruby version should be comparable. Hell, as far as that goes the easiest way I can think of is just take a copy of Access, point it at your database, and use it to generate the right query and design your labels...
Ridiculous looking characters? Perhaps you weren't aware, but they've always been that crazy looking, it was just harder to get the design to fit properly in a 16x16 (or 8x8) sprite.
For each of these uses for an OS (and more) there is a least one Linux based OS serving the need.
Your parent poster's point. Why can't we get a single distro for Joe User, a single distro for techie workstation (though yes, we'll get three: Gnome, KDE, Other) rather than having to pick between a handful of Gnome-based desktop distros, a handful of KDE-based desktop distros....
Choice is one thing, but with all the people available working towards one thing, you free up a lot of duplicated maintenance/integration effort that can be freed to actual developments and improvements.
Patents may be a necessary evil, but software patents aren't (or at least, so we'd like to convince the EU).
I'm totally in favor of patents protecting physical processes (ie. metal processing, manufacturing, that new-fangled method of growing diamonds, etc) but I'm against it for use in software.
Reason being, the purpose of the patent is to allow you a time period that you can use to recoup the money spent on developing the method you've patented. For a physical process, this is the labs to study, prototype machinery, etc to find out if your thought even works at all, let alone can be made to work at a profit.
Software, on the other hand, doesn't take anywhere near the investment capital to develop it, which I don't think should give you a blanket right to be able to use it exclusively for years on end just because of a flash of insight that friday at the pub.
I agree and disagree, depending on execution. The idea of the episodic content (as it was pitched to me, anyways), was that the episodic content would be sold at a substantial decrease to the cost of a single game. So for example, you might have a game with 10 2-hour long episodes, each of which sells for $10-20. Wouldn't this really be preferable if they were released every 3 months or so?
Perhaps you could explain to me how 10 episodes times $10 = decrease to the cost of a game. 'cause that sure looks like you'd be charging the consumer $100 for about 20 hours of gameplay. When you put that on the label, it's padded content and "80 hours of gameplay" RPGs at $60 that will beat you out.
But this 37yo wants a game that takes more planning than pressing a button to take out the enemy or jump at the right time.
Have you tried any of the tactical strategy genre of games? The canonical example on the original playstation was Final Fantasy Tactics, but some of the more recent ones for the PS2 by the japanese studio Nippon Ichi are actually quite fun. In particular, their games are Disgaia, La Pucelle, and Phantom Brave, with the first generally regarded as the best of the bunch.
Re:So are any of the data sets Useful yet?
on
PCGen 5.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yea, it's a great resource, but again, useless for the purpose of collecting data from a bunch of books, as all it has (and will ever have) is stuff directly from SRD.
Which means I'm out of luck on any of the class splatbooks, or any third party publishers (we use a decent amount of swords and sorcery stuff).
I've been (very) slowly working on a homebrew solution for this, but again due to license restrictions, would be unable to redistribute any of it. Some of the books I could reproduce all the relevant spell/feat details, *except* the name, but that's just totally useless:P
So are any of the data sets Useful yet?
on
PCGen 5.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
I recall looking into PCGen a few times over the past few years, but decided that it was mostly useless for the stuff I wanted to use it for.
My point in looking it up was in an attempt to find some way to collate all the data available in the books my gaming group had, mostly for Grand Lists of spells and feats.
While it was possible to filter to just the books in our collection, and get a list of spells, that was it. Just names. Not even a brief summary of what they do, if I wanted to figure out the difference between spell X and spell Y, I would have to go to the books themselves to find even the most basic of beahviour.
I know that due to licensing restrictions I'm never going to get all of the data on a spell available, but at the very least a description of "1d4+1 fire damage" vs "1d6 fire damage" would be enough to allow me to eyeball a comparison...
Sigh... Ahh well. I'd actually download it and check, but the full zip file doesn't seem to be propagated to d/l mirrors yet or something.
Because for all the fun that it is, it's not Best in Genre (10/10), nor a Buy Even If you Don't Like Platformers (9/10), or Buy Even If You're Not A Star Wars Fan (8/10).
All told, it's fairly plain for a platformer, but what it does it does well, and does fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I can spot the 'Dead Like Me' reference in there :)
So how environmentally friendly are these? If MS is going to be trying to put rental places out of business, do they have a plan for millions of now-useless single-play-DVDs and the associated packaging?
Actually, I think that it goes something like this under canadian law:
If I burn a copy of a cd I own, and give you the copy, I'm breaking the law.
If I give you a cd I own, you burn a copy, and return the original, no law is broken.
Applying this to the digital world, downloading songs/media/whatever for personal use should be legal, the problem is that most P2P apps also *upload* from your computer, which is in violation of copyright laws (you don't have distribution rights for the media).
Moral of the story? Canadians should use newsgroups for their "illegal" downloads.
Guess what, the old way of determining the distance from A to C, given you went through B and turned a quarter turn at B (which you don't mention, but which your solution relies), you have to take two squares, sum, and then square root that too!
See instructions here and here
The "Battle Plan" may have been posted by a CSR named Drake, but it is signed Shane Dabiri, Lead Producer.
Spore doesn't store your current type of creature, it stores the parameters used to create (or 'evolve') your creature from scratch, which can indeed be quite small.
Imagine, the traditional TV shows we're used to, viewable over the internet, commercials intact. How can that not make everybody happy?
Viewers get a legit avenue of watching TV over internet, and the show producers can track download stats and validate commercial impressions to advertisers in much more concrete numbers than the current model (if significantly less in volume)
Leave him with his windows client as is, and just get it to check the gmail account from now on. All his existing email will be stored locally, and in a few years when he decides that he really doesn't need them any more, the new stuff will all be synched between his desktop and gmail on the web, if he decides he wants to switch to a webapp for his email.
also, don't replace verbs with a comma.
Takes the domain name (plus/minus the www. if you prefer) and runs an MD5 of that plus your password, chops it to I think 10 chars. Damn near freakin impossible to work backwards from even though the domain name starts the md5, and it's a dead easy algorithm that you could do manually from the shell if you so desired.
Unfortunately, this only works well for web-based forms, though in theory one could do it via shell for other things.
They want to drop on Phobos because it's close enough to Mars to get good pictures and such I guess.
Some recommended reading on the topic of scheduling: Painless Software Schedules
What's with all the acronyms these days anyway?
That's actually what I did with the RSS plugin for azureus while BTEfnet was still up. It would automagically grab the shows I was watching as they came out. Went to Mexico for a week and a half holiday, and had the shows I missed already downloaded and ready to watch.
Looking at what my co-worker just managed to pull out of his hat in a week or so (combination SOAP/XML-HTTP client with revision control on the data, for web-hosting-ish stuff) you may find the hardest part is finding excuses to not convert your other stuff over :P
The most difficult thing I think you'd run into based on your spec is the label printing stuff, but if you found a web-based solution for it in PHP I'm sure the Ruby version should be comparable. Hell, as far as that goes the easiest way I can think of is just take a copy of Access, point it at your database, and use it to generate the right query and design your labels...
You remember Kefka (sprites), right? Take a look at some of the original concept art and the resultant FMV interpretation.
On the rest of it, I'll agree with you in FFIX good, FFX meh.
Your parent poster's point. Why can't we get a single distro for Joe User, a single distro for techie workstation (though yes, we'll get three: Gnome, KDE, Other) rather than having to pick between a handful of Gnome-based desktop distros, a handful of KDE-based desktop distros....
Choice is one thing, but with all the people available working towards one thing, you free up a lot of duplicated maintenance/integration effort that can be freed to actual developments and improvements.
I'm totally in favor of patents protecting physical processes (ie. metal processing, manufacturing, that new-fangled method of growing diamonds, etc) but I'm against it for use in software.
Reason being, the purpose of the patent is to allow you a time period that you can use to recoup the money spent on developing the method you've patented. For a physical process, this is the labs to study, prototype machinery, etc to find out if your thought even works at all, let alone can be made to work at a profit.
Software, on the other hand, doesn't take anywhere near the investment capital to develop it, which I don't think should give you a blanket right to be able to use it exclusively for years on end just because of a flash of insight that friday at the pub.
Perhaps you could explain to me how 10 episodes times $10 = decrease to the cost of a game. 'cause that sure looks like you'd be charging the consumer $100 for about 20 hours of gameplay. When you put that on the label, it's padded content and "80 hours of gameplay" RPGs at $60 that will beat you out.
Have you tried any of the tactical strategy genre of games? The canonical example on the original playstation was Final Fantasy Tactics, but some of the more recent ones for the PS2 by the japanese studio Nippon Ichi are actually quite fun. In particular, their games are Disgaia, La Pucelle, and Phantom Brave, with the first generally regarded as the best of the bunch.
Which means I'm out of luck on any of the class splatbooks, or any third party publishers (we use a decent amount of swords and sorcery stuff).
I've been (very) slowly working on a homebrew solution for this, but again due to license restrictions, would be unable to redistribute any of it. Some of the books I could reproduce all the relevant spell/feat details, *except* the name, but that's just totally useless :P
My point in looking it up was in an attempt to find some way to collate all the data available in the books my gaming group had, mostly for Grand Lists of spells and feats.
While it was possible to filter to just the books in our collection, and get a list of spells, that was it. Just names. Not even a brief summary of what they do, if I wanted to figure out the difference between spell X and spell Y, I would have to go to the books themselves to find even the most basic of beahviour.
I know that due to licensing restrictions I'm never going to get all of the data on a spell available, but at the very least a description of "1d4+1 fire damage" vs "1d6 fire damage" would be enough to allow me to eyeball a comparison...
Sigh... Ahh well. I'd actually download it and check, but the full zip file doesn't seem to be propagated to d/l mirrors yet or something.
All told, it's fairly plain for a platformer, but what it does it does well, and does fun.
Oh just stream it already. They have gobs of bandwidth and it went just fine for me.