It's true that the battery life isn't very long and it's easier to read the time off a Casio when in bright light. However...
1) I have a flashlight with me at all times, which is very useful for 2:00 AM bottle feeding 2) I can set discreet timers that don't send me lunging for my phone in the middle of a meeting/public talk 3) I can answer my phone right away and then find it instead of digging through my bag/pocket frantically 4) I can carry my shopping list on my wrist and check things off instead of having to unlock my phone over and over 5) Microsoft makes a watch face that creates a very easy-to-read calendar through curved lines of different colours 6) I can leave my phone charging more often.
There's more, but that's what springs to mind right now. And then there are the notifications that everyone talks about. All in all, my Moto 360 was well worth the 99 pounds that I paid for it (on sale).
Re:Old guy here - pixel art reminds me of bad game
on
The Decline of Pixel Art
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are a few things at work here, I think. And these might not all apply for you, because different people enjoy games for different reasons... some really enjoy stepping into other people's shoes to become, say, a soldier (which I couldn't care less about), and I'm sure that increased verisimilitude makes games more enjoyable for these people.
1) Pixel art makes your brain work to fill in the gaps, and often involves strong patches of bright colour. I like this aesthetically, and wouldn't want to see it disappear. It's a bit like the difference between pointillism or impressionism and realism. All three are interesting.
2) The iconicity of much pixel art makes it easy to understand the visuals in terms of interaction. The more realistic things get, the more it becomes an issue of what is interactive and what is not. And if games were entirely interactive, the costs would be staggering, and everything would become a sandbox-type game. I don't think that pointing arrows showing "you can click on this!" help, because then it becomes a matter of the game telling you what to do, not you exploring the game. I think that there are probably styles of game that are less affected by this than others, of course.
3) Leading from (2), HD art is expensive. This means that companies can't make as much of it, and want to make sure that you see all of it. The result is that large, expansive, difficult games become shiny rollercoasters that play themselves.
Oh, one more thing: do you remember the beautiful glow that some of these games gave off? Just a few months ago I had the opportunity to try Asteroids in the original. The bullets that you shoot are mesmerising.
AfterShot Pro, while not open source, is cross platform and very good indeed. It lets you manage your library quite effectively through tagging, and gives you non-destructive RAW editing so that you can create multiple versions of each file (that are subsequently grouped together). Browsing is also very easy and quick.
It's been a while since I had a look at the open source equivalents, but I remember thinking that, even on a teacher's salary, it was worth the extra few dollars (I was Linux-only at the time). Lock-in is another thing, of course.
That all said, I moved to iPhoto + Photoshop in the end.
The problem comes when you do not have admin rights and XP doesn't trust the drivers you are trying to install. (And yes, in an ideal world, you wouldn't need to do this).
Good point, but you're actually being generous in your estimate: agricultural land (arable + fruit crops + pasture) amounts to just under 50 million km^2.
48,836,976 km^2 / 7,008,069,781 people
=0.006968677 km^2 / person
=6968.677 m^2
(about 83 x 83)
Numbers from US Census and Wikipedia
Several people have posted stating that time is arbitrary, but few psychologists would agree. There are many clues (light, temperature) that night has arrived, and people generally react to these cues by sleeping. Yes, artificial light and temperature control negate this to some extent, but not entirely. Even if you keep the light on sometimes, your body still adapts its 24-hour rhythm to the environmental cues around it as best it can. It's hard to say exactly why, but teenagers seem to prefer to stay awake a bit longer and ignore these cues. Perhaps certain hormones are secreted at certain times of day that have an effect on energy levels. Perhaps there was some evolutionary advantage to having teenagers available to patrol the early night hours. I really don't have the answers to that, but the effect itself is real.
I can't get the thoroughput/ping at the moment, since I'm on wireless with only 2Mbps making it all the way upstairs (when I do a speed check, I get every single byte that I should be getting of those 2Mbps). I remember that when we did check it we got a very significant percent of the advertised 12Mbps. As far as the latency on the voice IP goes, it's at very close to zero. No real difference from usual phone conversations.
I also haven't run into any problems running any services, aside from working around the firewall, but that has nothing to do with Yahoo or Softbank. I've done FTP servers, the dude next room over hammers P2P, and ICQ/IRC/whatever works well too. I'm not really doing a whole lot with the connection, however, since most of my time is taken up with studying. Internet is mostly wasting time on Slashdot and checking my mail.
Sorry for replying to my own comment, but I forgot one REALLY cool feature:
If you plug a phone into the modem itself, then you get IP-phoning without any setup. Calls to Canada for like 2 cents a minute or something, plus the quality hardly changes from a regular international call (actually, it's far superior to many regular calling solutions). It costs more to make a phone call from an hour's drive away in Canada than it does to call half way around the world with this thing, and it just plugs right in, which I find pretty incredible.
We've got this hooked up in the house I live in just outside of Tokyo. We split it among all the members of the house.
It's actually pretty sweet; the modem itself came with a little PCMCIA-like slot card as a part of a bonus offer, which gives us a pretty strong wireless LAN with no extra hardware (I'm two floors away from the modem, and it's a concrete earthquake-proof house); you just slide in the card and set up WEP or whatever. We also got this free calendar/calculator thingy which has a cool sliding mechanism. Hey, it was that or a coffee mug (or something else, I forget what). Anyhow, we also got 2 months (or was it 3?) free just for joining on top of all that.
I can confirm what the article says about the teens in white jackets pimping the stuff outside of every station, too. They're everywhere.
If anyone has any questions on the service, fire away. Despite the 24-hour porn dog in the next room over (he has somewhere near a 100 gig collection), the connection is still pretty speedy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that the battery life isn't very long and it's easier to read the time off a Casio when in bright light. However...
1) I have a flashlight with me at all times, which is very useful for 2:00 AM bottle feeding
2) I can set discreet timers that don't send me lunging for my phone in the middle of a meeting/public talk
3) I can answer my phone right away and then find it instead of digging through my bag/pocket frantically
4) I can carry my shopping list on my wrist and check things off instead of having to unlock my phone over and over
5) Microsoft makes a watch face that creates a very easy-to-read calendar through curved lines of different colours
6) I can leave my phone charging more often.
There's more, but that's what springs to mind right now. And then there are the notifications that everyone talks about. All in all, my Moto 360 was well worth the 99 pounds that I paid for it (on sale).
Oh, one more thing: do you remember the beautiful glow that some of these games gave off? Just a few months ago I had the opportunity to try Asteroids in the original. The bullets that you shoot are mesmerising.
AfterShot Pro, while not open source, is cross platform and very good indeed. It lets you manage your library quite effectively through tagging, and gives you non-destructive RAW editing so that you can create multiple versions of each file (that are subsequently grouped together). Browsing is also very easy and quick.
It's been a while since I had a look at the open source equivalents, but I remember thinking that, even on a teacher's salary, it was worth the extra few dollars (I was Linux-only at the time). Lock-in is another thing, of course.
That all said, I moved to iPhoto + Photoshop in the end.
The problem comes when you do not have admin rights and XP doesn't trust the drivers you are trying to install. (And yes, in an ideal world, you wouldn't need to do this).
Alternately, Windows XP will not support new hardware, but that doesn't shift the blame now, does it?
Good point, but you're actually being generous in your estimate: agricultural land (arable + fruit crops + pasture) amounts to just under 50 million km^2.
48,836,976 km^2 / 7,008,069,781 people
=0.006968677 km^2 / person
=6968.677 m^2
(about 83 x 83)
Numbers from US Census and Wikipedia
Several people have posted stating that time is arbitrary, but few psychologists would agree. There are many clues (light, temperature) that night has arrived, and people generally react to these cues by sleeping. Yes, artificial light and temperature control negate this to some extent, but not entirely. Even if you keep the light on sometimes, your body still adapts its 24-hour rhythm to the environmental cues around it as best it can. It's hard to say exactly why, but teenagers seem to prefer to stay awake a bit longer and ignore these cues. Perhaps certain hormones are secreted at certain times of day that have an effect on energy levels. Perhaps there was some evolutionary advantage to having teenagers available to patrol the early night hours. I really don't have the answers to that, but the effect itself is real.
I can't get the thoroughput/ping at the moment, since I'm on wireless with only 2Mbps making it all the way upstairs (when I do a speed check, I get every single byte that I should be getting of those 2Mbps). I remember that when we did check it we got a very significant percent of the advertised 12Mbps. As far as the latency on the voice IP goes, it's at very close to zero. No real difference from usual phone conversations.
I also haven't run into any problems running any services, aside from working around the firewall, but that has nothing to do with Yahoo or Softbank. I've done FTP servers, the dude next room over hammers P2P, and ICQ/IRC/whatever works well too. I'm not really doing a whole lot with the connection, however, since most of my time is taken up with studying. Internet is mostly wasting time on Slashdot and checking my mail.
Sorry for replying to my own comment, but I forgot one REALLY cool feature:
If you plug a phone into the modem itself, then you get IP-phoning without any setup. Calls to Canada for like 2 cents a minute or something, plus the quality hardly changes from a regular international call (actually, it's far superior to many regular calling solutions). It costs more to make a phone call from an hour's drive away in Canada than it does to call half way around the world with this thing, and it just plugs right in, which I find pretty incredible.
We've got this hooked up in the house I live in just outside of Tokyo. We split it among all the members of the house.
It's actually pretty sweet; the modem itself came with a little PCMCIA-like slot card as a part of a bonus offer, which gives us a pretty strong wireless LAN with no extra hardware (I'm two floors away from the modem, and it's a concrete earthquake-proof house); you just slide in the card and set up WEP or whatever. We also got this free calendar/calculator thingy which has a cool sliding mechanism. Hey, it was that or a coffee mug (or something else, I forget what). Anyhow, we also got 2 months (or was it 3?) free just for joining on top of all that.
I can confirm what the article says about the teens in white jackets pimping the stuff outside of every station, too. They're everywhere.
If anyone has any questions on the service, fire away. Despite the 24-hour porn dog in the next room over (he has somewhere near a 100 gig collection), the connection is still pretty speedy.