"because of EA's negotiated exclusivity deal with the NFL, this is the only NFL title you'll get to play this year"
That's why it's mediocre! Clearly when EA has no opposition to worry about they don't feel the need to make the game any good. I hope they never get their hands on Ubisoft who somehow have managed to publish nothing but gold for the last few years.
I've not used Flickr myself but if it's like several other web based gallery systems I've known they all resize and resample the uploaded images to fixed sizes, the original file is then usually deleted. This means the data making up the image will have changed destroying the encrypted data.
From TFA: "V for Vendetta... is set in an alternate universe in which the United Kingdom has a fascistic government"
In this universe Tony Blair has banned protesting within 1000m of the Houses of Parliament, he is trying to introduce trials without jury for many crimes, he now strongly influences what the BBC broadcasts, he is trying to ban criticism of any religion and he is forcing a mandatory ID card scheme on the public and that isn't a facist government??!?
Sadly you're right, there must be a few interesting titles still scheduled for the Cube this year but I can't think of any. Zelda is pretty much the only high profile AAA title left for the platform. Still so long as it's not rushed and short of a few dungeons like Wind Waker I'll be happy to wait.
I'm really looking forward to Trauma Center myself, hopefully the US release isn't too far off now. Is there much of a language barrier to the Japanese version?
Exactly, a portable DVD player is a better purchase if you want movies on the go. You don't have to buy the movie twice, the batteries last longer and you can buy region free players (unlike the PSP).
I was quite disappointed to see that Harry Knowles of Ain't it Cool News was shilling the PSP proclaiming how wonderful it is and how he's quite happy to buy everything twice so he can play films on the PSP...
I've been stuck playing SNES, NES and Neo Geo emulators on my PSP for months now. Aside from GTA:LCS and Burnout Revenge there's nothing in the pipeline for the PSP that looks especially interesting. Sony are great at telling us how amazingly world changing their hardware is going to be but the actual games after launch are often a let down.
Luckily I've had Pac-Pix, Elextroplankton, Meteos, Another Code and Kirby's Cursed Canvas to keep me occupied during the drought. And with Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros, Nintendogs, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, Animal Crossing DS, Mario & Luigi 2, Metroid Prime Hunters, Sonic Rush, Trauma Center and Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble there should be plenty on the DS to keep me occupied!
Since the shipping at Lik-Sang is free, the console is even cheaper to import than to buy it locally.
It is not cheaper to import to the UK. While the price at Lik-Sang for a PSP minus shipping is cheaper than what the UK PSP price will be, you will always get charged import tax plus. Customs seem to know Lik-Sang and they always slap on the import tax. Plus the courier e.g. UPS, DHL et al always put a surcharge on top of the tax because they pay the tax for you at customes and then demand a cheque when they arrive at your door.
So overall it comes out to be more expensive to import by about £20 or so. Still, if importing annoys Sony then I'm all for it, since I don't see why they should be allowed to dictate who can and cannot sell PSPs, it's just a monopoly.
It does make a lot of sense that they could be remaking VII. I mean they are making a sequel film, a PSP game and a mobile phone game.
It seems odd to me that they would do all of this for a game that hasn't been available in shops (outside of bargain bins) for over 5 years now. I suspect a remake of VII could be the centerpiece to all this work...
Sounds like Hollywood has been massively overinflating the worth of its actors again. Who cares if a game has a big name actor in it? It makes no difference to me who did the voice so long as it's appropriate to the character. The amount of effort contributed by a celeb compared to the effort a coder puts in just shows how overpaid these actors really are. I mean you're just paying someone to sit on their arse and read from a script in an air conditioned studio for an afternoon. Hardly taxing is it?
In fact I think some games have been spoiled by the inclusion of some "big name". Just look at the use of Kelly Brook and Brook Burke in Need For Speed Underground 2.
That's not to say some voice actors don't deserve a decent paycheck, David Hayter, Michael Ironside and Ray Liotta were all excellent in their games and Charles Martinet is Mario. But for every one of them there's a miscast celeb who knows nothing about games except that he can get a paycheck out of it.
It's been my experience that language is mostly irrelevant when building a large, scalable web app.
There is certainly a difference in performance between various web languages/libraries but the most important aspect is how well you design your app to scale across multiple servers. Even if you were to spend years writing the most tightly coded app in Assembly that is 99.9% efficient you will still reach a point where you need to use more than one server.
As long as your app is designed with scaling to multiple servers in mind the choice of language should merely be down to what your team is best able to work with and support. It's no good doing everything in ISAPI just because eBay does it if your team is mainly experienced in Perl. Building the app to work well with multiple servers that are clustered according to their function (e.g. a DB cluster, load balanced webservers, large scale storage solution, etc) is the best way to ensure a scalable solution. Picking a database server for example that easily allows you to add a new machine to the cluster should be more important than language choice. Picking high availability software that doesn't require downtime every time you need to add a new server is very important.
Maybe I sound like I'm advocating writing sloppy code and just throwing lots of servers at the solution, but it's worth considering how today's top of the range server will be the cheapest low range machine in a few years. This means you can either pile high with cheap boxes or buy fewer but more powerful servers which have double the capacity of the cheaper server. It's certainly the solution that's worked well for Google...
According to this site here Nintendo is the only games company still making a profit at the moment and in Japan the DS is not far off selling more units that the PS2 and the PSP combined! Admittedly the link is a Nintendo fan site quoting Nintendo sales figures, but Nintendo can't lie about these numbers without causing problems with its shareholders.
I just don't understand why everyone thinks Nintendo is at death's door. Thanks to Hiroshi Yamauchi's legendary control of the purse strings nothing gets spent unless they're sure it will turn a profit. IIRC the GameCube has never actually sold at a loss except for one time when they cut the price to boost sales. Nintendo is extremely good at designing hardware that won't cost them a fortune in R&D and sell at a loss in retail.
Just because Nintendo doesn't have Halo, GTA or any of the other blood letting franchises that apparently "mature" people want to play it doesn't mean they aren't still shifting hardware and making a decent profit.
Personally I think the press has it in for Nintendo and the DS at the moment because they spent so much time hyping the PSP which has had like 3(?) good games so far. They can't stand to see themselves exposed for the corporate shills they are who hype anything that has an advertising budget attached to it.
Well said. Aside from the SNES, NES and Neo Geo emulators my PSP sits in its cradle most of the time. I haven't bought a game for the PSP in ages, there's been nothing good released in ages (as evidenced by the high sales of UMD movies). I think the PSP might see a big boost in sales when GTA:LCS comes out though.
One other area the DS comes out on top over the PSP for me is how quickly you can play a game. The PSP has long loading times and big gaps between save points. There's no way to have a quick five minute game without spending half of it watching loading screens. Sure the PSP has its sleep function but as soon as you finish a level or move to a new area it has to load from the disc again. The DS is much better at offering small chunks of game that can be played quickly but that also stand up to an extended gaming session.
... as I bought one last week that made a nasty bang and electrical flash when I turned it on for the first time. There was a little smoke too.
I don't know what was wrong with it, but it tripped the mains supply to the house too. It's going back to be replaced so hopefully better luck second time around. It wasn't switched to the wrong voltage either as it claims to be auto-switching...
Re:Still a single point of failure
on
Basics of RAID
·
· Score: 1
I had suspected it was like that, given the way it needs its service running in the background and all the benchmarks that showed higher CPU usage than other controllers but I hadn't known for definite. Thanks for the info.
Re:Still a single point of failure
on
Basics of RAID
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've had my data corrupted by a dodgy controller... twice. I've been having terrible luck with the nvRAID provided on nVidia nForce 4 motherboards. Twice now the machine has locked up and on rebooting the RAID array is reported as damaged and a drive is missing from the array. A bit of Googling has revealed it's a common problem.
Fiddling around in the BIOS disabling and reenabling RAID makes both disks show up again but putting them back into a RAID array seems to do no good as Windows always claims files are missing after doing this. If I reinstall Windows my data is always all still there in perfect condition, the hassle of reinstalling Windows and my apps is a pain though. So it's not totally corrupted, but enough to be a complete bitch.
My feeling on RAID on the desktop is that it's a good idea but at least in nVidia's case it's being done on the cheap and is not totally stable. That said Intel's RAID controllers are superb and I'd use one anyday if it weren't for the vast amounts of heat and inferior performance of the P4.
Being in the UK I was always importing Super Famicom and US Super Nintendo games back in their heyday. I'd never usually wait for US releases unless the wait was going to be very short or the game was full of Japanese. It never ceased to amaze me when I saw the final US boxart how they changed it compared to the Super Famicom version.
Take a look on Ebay, search for Final Fight, Turtles in Time, Mystical Ninja/Goemon, Actraiser they all look terrible. Even Zelda III had an inferior US box design.
I dislike it when people instinctivly bash the Windows platform calling it insecure or unstable as MS has done a pretty decent job of improving security recently IMHO. Both Linux and Windows offer a very good platform but when I see stuff like this:
"The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break."
it makes me not care about seeing a fair argument about both operating systems. I mean let's face it, that statement above fits Windows much more appropriately.
For example the registry, corrupt it and Windows and most of its apps will stop working properly. It's a massive single point of failure, they should bring back individual config files like Linux has, the worst you can do is break a single app rather than the entire OS!
DLLs are another big stumbling block, Windows often refuses to unload them so you can't replace them without needing a reboot. Why is that a reason to call Linux more brittle than Windows? I can't remember when I last had to reboot one of the Linux servers after patching something.
SCSI and RAID drivers, why does Windows only accept them on floppies, the most brittle storage medium out there? And if the drivers get corrupted why does that usually mean a full reinstall of Windows?
And then what about Services, those wonderful background tasks that when they fail to start break the OS because other things are dependent on them. What part of services makes Linux so brittle?
Windows still has problems, it is clearly unfair to claim it is superior to Linux at least in the case of extending it. I guess MS needs to start some new FUD now that we all know SCO has no evidence.
Uh, actually it is. In order to progress in the game you have to earn "kudos points" which are awarded for good driving, position on the podium and stunts. Hence PGR puts more emphasis on good driving than say Gran Turismo where you can get away with ramming the side of a car to slow yourself on a bend.
One of my company's customers has a nasty habit of sending extremely abusive emails to any spammers and scammers he finds signed up to his webmail system. The upshot of this has been his domain being joe-jobbed and our mail server being inundated with bounce messages. The upshot of this is much slower mail delivery and the people who received the spam complaining that we had been spamming them when we had nothing to do with it.
While I applaud the sentiment of taking the fight to the spammers and trying to hit them where it hurts, it's much easier for them to do whatever illegal thing they want to get back at you. Making yourself a target is a dangerous game and knowing how bizarre the law is these days I could easily see a lawsuit where a spammer sues and wins against someone who DDoS'ed their site.
I don't think the Xbox 360 will die the way the Dreamcast did, as Microsoft have proven with Xbox 1 that they are willing to throw as much money as needed to keep their console in the race. They must have made quite a loss in Japan but they are still perservering.
Sadly Sega didn't get first mover advantage because Sony promised a console so powerful it could render Toy Story in real time and that the Emotion Engine was allegedly classified as a super-computer by the US government and could not be exported to China or Iraq! I know so many people who decided to wait for the PS2 so they could play "classics" like Ridge Racer 5 and Tekken Tag Tournament... It was like the Emperor's New Clothes when those games came out...
Will this happen again with the X360? I don't think it will or at least not as badly as it did with the DC. MS has built up good brand loyalty with the Xbox, whereas the Dreamcast was launched with the shadow of the MegaCD, 32X and Saturn's failure hanging over it. And of course it sounds like MS are just as canny at the game of spoiling launches. They are apparently planning to launch Halo 3 at the same time the PS3 comes out...
Slashdot Mirror
"because of EA's negotiated exclusivity deal with the NFL, this is the only NFL title you'll get to play this year"
That's why it's mediocre! Clearly when EA has no opposition to worry about they don't feel the need to make the game any good. I hope they never get their hands on Ubisoft who somehow have managed to publish nothing but gold for the last few years.
I've not used Flickr myself but if it's like several other web based gallery systems I've known they all resize and resample the uploaded images to fixed sizes, the original file is then usually deleted. This means the data making up the image will have changed destroying the encrypted data.
From TFA: "V for Vendetta ... is set in an alternate universe in which the United Kingdom has a fascistic government"
In this universe Tony Blair has banned protesting within 1000m of the Houses of Parliament, he is trying to introduce trials without jury for many crimes, he now strongly influences what the BBC broadcasts, he is trying to ban criticism of any religion and he is forcing a mandatory ID card scheme on the public and that isn't a facist government??!?
Not quite, PSP games are region free but UMD movies are all region coded at the insistance of the movie industry.
Sadly you're right, there must be a few interesting titles still scheduled for the Cube this year but I can't think of any. Zelda is pretty much the only high profile AAA title left for the platform. Still so long as it's not rushed and short of a few dungeons like Wind Waker I'll be happy to wait.
I'm really looking forward to Trauma Center myself, hopefully the US release isn't too far off now. Is there much of a language barrier to the Japanese version?
Exactly, a portable DVD player is a better purchase if you want movies on the go. You don't have to buy the movie twice, the batteries last longer and you can buy region free players (unlike the PSP).
I was quite disappointed to see that Harry Knowles of Ain't it Cool News was shilling the PSP proclaiming how wonderful it is and how he's quite happy to buy everything twice so he can play films on the PSP...
I've been stuck playing SNES, NES and Neo Geo emulators on my PSP for months now. Aside from GTA:LCS and Burnout Revenge there's nothing in the pipeline for the PSP that looks especially interesting. Sony are great at telling us how amazingly world changing their hardware is going to be but the actual games after launch are often a let down.
Luckily I've had Pac-Pix, Elextroplankton, Meteos, Another Code and Kirby's Cursed Canvas to keep me occupied during the drought. And with Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros, Nintendogs, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, Animal Crossing DS, Mario & Luigi 2, Metroid Prime Hunters, Sonic Rush, Trauma Center and Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble there should be plenty on the DS to keep me occupied!
Since the shipping at Lik-Sang is free, the console is even cheaper to import than to buy it locally.
It is not cheaper to import to the UK. While the price at Lik-Sang for a PSP minus shipping is cheaper than what the UK PSP price will be, you will always get charged import tax plus. Customs seem to know Lik-Sang and they always slap on the import tax. Plus the courier e.g. UPS, DHL et al always put a surcharge on top of the tax because they pay the tax for you at customes and then demand a cheque when they arrive at your door.
So overall it comes out to be more expensive to import by about £20 or so. Still, if importing annoys Sony then I'm all for it, since I don't see why they should be allowed to dictate who can and cannot sell PSPs, it's just a monopoly.
It does make a lot of sense that they could be remaking VII. I mean they are making a sequel film, a PSP game and a mobile phone game.
It seems odd to me that they would do all of this for a game that hasn't been available in shops (outside of bargain bins) for over 5 years now. I suspect a remake of VII could be the centerpiece to all this work...
Michael Ironside plays Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell games. He's damn good in it too! :)
Sounds like Hollywood has been massively overinflating the worth of its actors again. Who cares if a game has a big name actor in it? It makes no difference to me who did the voice so long as it's appropriate to the character. The amount of effort contributed by a celeb compared to the effort a coder puts in just shows how overpaid these actors really are. I mean you're just paying someone to sit on their arse and read from a script in an air conditioned studio for an afternoon. Hardly taxing is it?
In fact I think some games have been spoiled by the inclusion of some "big name". Just look at the use of Kelly Brook and Brook Burke in Need For Speed Underground 2.
That's not to say some voice actors don't deserve a decent paycheck, David Hayter, Michael Ironside and Ray Liotta were all excellent in their games and Charles Martinet is Mario. But for every one of them there's a miscast celeb who knows nothing about games except that he can get a paycheck out of it.
It's been my experience that language is mostly irrelevant when building a large, scalable web app.
There is certainly a difference in performance between various web languages/libraries but the most important aspect is how well you design your app to scale across multiple servers. Even if you were to spend years writing the most tightly coded app in Assembly that is 99.9% efficient you will still reach a point where you need to use more than one server.
As long as your app is designed with scaling to multiple servers in mind the choice of language should merely be down to what your team is best able to work with and support. It's no good doing everything in ISAPI just because eBay does it if your team is mainly experienced in Perl. Building the app to work well with multiple servers that are clustered according to their function (e.g. a DB cluster, load balanced webservers, large scale storage solution, etc) is the best way to ensure a scalable solution. Picking a database server for example that easily allows you to add a new machine to the cluster should be more important than language choice. Picking high availability software that doesn't require downtime every time you need to add a new server is very important.
Maybe I sound like I'm advocating writing sloppy code and just throwing lots of servers at the solution, but it's worth considering how today's top of the range server will be the cheapest low range machine in a few years. This means you can either pile high with cheap boxes or buy fewer but more powerful servers which have double the capacity of the cheaper server. It's certainly the solution that's worked well for Google...
According to this site here Nintendo is the only games company still making a profit at the moment and in Japan the DS is not far off selling more units that the PS2 and the PSP combined! Admittedly the link is a Nintendo fan site quoting Nintendo sales figures, but Nintendo can't lie about these numbers without causing problems with its shareholders.
I just don't understand why everyone thinks Nintendo is at death's door. Thanks to Hiroshi Yamauchi's legendary control of the purse strings nothing gets spent unless they're sure it will turn a profit. IIRC the GameCube has never actually sold at a loss except for one time when they cut the price to boost sales. Nintendo is extremely good at designing hardware that won't cost them a fortune in R&D and sell at a loss in retail.
Just because Nintendo doesn't have Halo, GTA or any of the other blood letting franchises that apparently "mature" people want to play it doesn't mean they aren't still shifting hardware and making a decent profit.
Personally I think the press has it in for Nintendo and the DS at the moment because they spent so much time hyping the PSP which has had like 3(?) good games so far. They can't stand to see themselves exposed for the corporate shills they are who hype anything that has an advertising budget attached to it.
Well said. Aside from the SNES, NES and Neo Geo emulators my PSP sits in its cradle most of the time. I haven't bought a game for the PSP in ages, there's been nothing good released in ages (as evidenced by the high sales of UMD movies). I think the PSP might see a big boost in sales when GTA:LCS comes out though.
One other area the DS comes out on top over the PSP for me is how quickly you can play a game. The PSP has long loading times and big gaps between save points. There's no way to have a quick five minute game without spending half of it watching loading screens. Sure the PSP has its sleep function but as soon as you finish a level or move to a new area it has to load from the disc again. The DS is much better at offering small chunks of game that can be played quickly but that also stand up to an extended gaming session.
Well this is the PSU I had bought, they're so confident in the quality it even comes with a 3 year warranty! ;)
What do you use to test your PSUs?
... as I bought one last week that made a nasty bang and electrical flash when I turned it on for the first time. There was a little smoke too.
I don't know what was wrong with it, but it tripped the mains supply to the house too. It's going back to be replaced so hopefully better luck second time around. It wasn't switched to the wrong voltage either as it claims to be auto-switching...
I had suspected it was like that, given the way it needs its service running in the background and all the benchmarks that showed higher CPU usage than other controllers but I hadn't known for definite. Thanks for the info.
I've had my data corrupted by a dodgy controller... twice. I've been having terrible luck with the nvRAID provided on nVidia nForce 4 motherboards. Twice now the machine has locked up and on rebooting the RAID array is reported as damaged and a drive is missing from the array. A bit of Googling has revealed it's a common problem.
Fiddling around in the BIOS disabling and reenabling RAID makes both disks show up again but putting them back into a RAID array seems to do no good as Windows always claims files are missing after doing this. If I reinstall Windows my data is always all still there in perfect condition, the hassle of reinstalling Windows and my apps is a pain though. So it's not totally corrupted, but enough to be a complete bitch.
My feeling on RAID on the desktop is that it's a good idea but at least in nVidia's case it's being done on the cheap and is not totally stable. That said Intel's RAID controllers are superb and I'd use one anyday if it weren't for the vast amounts of heat and inferior performance of the P4.
... we can see how the ESRB and Hillary Clinton operate.
Being in the UK I was always importing Super Famicom and US Super Nintendo games back in their heyday. I'd never usually wait for US releases unless the wait was going to be very short or the game was full of Japanese. It never ceased to amaze me when I saw the final US boxart how they changed it compared to the Super Famicom version.
Take a look on Ebay, search for Final Fight, Turtles in Time, Mystical Ninja/Goemon, Actraiser they all look terrible. Even Zelda III had an inferior US box design.
I dislike it when people instinctivly bash the Windows platform calling it insecure or unstable as MS has done a pretty decent job of improving security recently IMHO. Both Linux and Windows offer a very good platform but when I see stuff like this:
"The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break."
it makes me not care about seeing a fair argument about both operating systems. I mean let's face it, that statement above fits Windows much more appropriately.
For example the registry, corrupt it and Windows and most of its apps will stop working properly. It's a massive single point of failure, they should bring back individual config files like Linux has, the worst you can do is break a single app rather than the entire OS!
DLLs are another big stumbling block, Windows often refuses to unload them so you can't replace them without needing a reboot. Why is that a reason to call Linux more brittle than Windows? I can't remember when I last had to reboot one of the Linux servers after patching something.
SCSI and RAID drivers, why does Windows only accept them on floppies, the most brittle storage medium out there? And if the drivers get corrupted why does that usually mean a full reinstall of Windows?
And then what about Services, those wonderful background tasks that when they fail to start break the OS because other things are dependent on them. What part of services makes Linux so brittle?
Windows still has problems, it is clearly unfair to claim it is superior to Linux at least in the case of extending it. I guess MS needs to start some new FUD now that we all know SCO has no evidence.
Uh, actually it is. In order to progress in the game you have to earn "kudos points" which are awarded for good driving, position on the podium and stunts. Hence PGR puts more emphasis on good driving than say Gran Turismo where you can get away with ramming the side of a car to slow yourself on a bend.
One of my company's customers has a nasty habit of sending extremely abusive emails to any spammers and scammers he finds signed up to his webmail system. The upshot of this has been his domain being joe-jobbed and our mail server being inundated with bounce messages. The upshot of this is much slower mail delivery and the people who received the spam complaining that we had been spamming them when we had nothing to do with it.
While I applaud the sentiment of taking the fight to the spammers and trying to hit them where it hurts, it's much easier for them to do whatever illegal thing they want to get back at you. Making yourself a target is a dangerous game and knowing how bizarre the law is these days I could easily see a lawsuit where a spammer sues and wins against someone who DDoS'ed their site.
I don't think the Xbox 360 will die the way the Dreamcast did, as Microsoft have proven with Xbox 1 that they are willing to throw as much money as needed to keep their console in the race. They must have made quite a loss in Japan but they are still perservering.
Sadly Sega didn't get first mover advantage because Sony promised a console so powerful it could render Toy Story in real time and that the Emotion Engine was allegedly classified as a super-computer by the US government and could not be exported to China or Iraq! I know so many people who decided to wait for the PS2 so they could play "classics" like Ridge Racer 5 and Tekken Tag Tournament... It was like the Emperor's New Clothes when those games came out...
Will this happen again with the X360? I don't think it will or at least not as badly as it did with the DC. MS has built up good brand loyalty with the Xbox, whereas the Dreamcast was launched with the shadow of the MegaCD, 32X and Saturn's failure hanging over it. And of course it sounds like MS are just as canny at the game of spoiling launches. They are apparently planning to launch Halo 3 at the same time the PS3 comes out...