On the other hand, controllers have very few buttons in hard to reach spaces if you don't want to use more than one hand. Having an analog stick for movement and the mouse for aiming would be nice; it would be the most precise way of playing. However, using a gamepad in one hand and the mouse in another means that the gamepad hand has access to maybe four buttons. On a keyboard I can reach more than fifteen keys without even moving the hand. If we don't count WASD (stick equialent) that's still eleven keys that can usually be freely assigned.
Even games that don't need extremely fast reactions are hard to play if they need more than a few keys/buttons. Recently, I mapped my Playstation gamepad workalike to key presses and tried to play Escape Velocity: Nova. Even when I mapped the analog sticks to key presses I ran out of buttons. The game makes use of the keyboard and it's much easier to play when you do have access to lots of keys.
The controller is nice for precise movement and it's very portable, but on the other hand it's not as good for fast, precise aiming and it lacks the keyboard's numerous keys. That's what I see as a major reason why nothing has yet displaced the keyboard in mainstream PC gaming. Lack of movement precision is usually just a minor nuisance at best while being able to directly switch to a certain weapon by pressing a number key is very useful.
ibm.at applies better to Ibm than ibm.com does. IBM also has that (as I admitted, Ibm is rather unlikely to compete with IBM for domains), but that would be the far more logical choice to make. Outside the USA.com is not assumed to be the one TLD everyone uses. Local-language sites are expected to use the local ccTLD (a concept virtually unheard of in the states);.com is mostly used by corporations who want all their sites under one central domain or people who didn't get a local-ccTLD domain with their name.
Just put some of the ultra-banned words where they are sent with every reply and watch the GFW bury them in RST packets. You just have to figure out a way to do that to their mail - and hope they don't use botnets.
They still have a meaning if one assumes that the IOC and the Olympic spirit have no relation with each other whatsoever. The IOC is just an entity that, for some reason, has the ability to decide about technical details for the Games.
Yes, I know. It's quite a stretch... In reality, the Glympic Games have devolved into a hybrid sport event/nation-level show-and-shine with an optimistic IOC hoping that some country will be miraculously converted to freedom if they're allowed to host them.
True. Americas "scary CIA plots to overthrow democratic countries" approach just isn't efficient and reliable enough; the EU never really made a serious attempt for the freedom suppression medal, focusing on the red-taping competition (and, quite seriously, we have a good chance for gold there).
The USA will probably make gold in "public relations disaster"; China would have to nuke Tibet in order to outdo the last two legislative periods of the USA. The "lawsuit frenzy" medal is a toss-up between the USA and the EU - where the USA have a long-proven routine of suing everything and anything, the EU has shown that doing high-profile lawsuits against US corporations is a good way to get your name on the title pages.
China will utterly dominate "MMORPG addiction", of course. Nobody gets close to those gold farmers. If China would let it compete, Tibet might make silver in "vocal minority"; gold would go to the USA because they have Cupertino, CA.
Now I just need to convince the Austrian village of Fucking to ask ICANN why it can't have its own TLD. Once it has finally worn down ICANN/the committee enough to get its TLD (after all, "Fucking" isn't offensive at all in Austria and the surrounding countries) it will make a buttload of money giving domains to porn sites.
Let's not forget that there can be international clashes as well. For (an admittedly somewhat unlikely) example, the small town of Ibm, Austria might register the.ibm TLD before the International Business Machines Corporation does. To the people of Ibm,.ibm clearly applies much better to their town than to some corporation that happens to have a similar acronym.
Or some patriotic Germans (read: most likely the NPD) register.brd and get unfriendly letters from Sony who demand the TLD that clearly references their Blu-Ray Disk format.
And who gets.fox? Fox Network? 20th Century? Volkswagen?
Will.wb go to Warner Brothers or the World Bank - or maybe Rwandair Express?
Will Advanced Micro Devices, Dassault Aviation or the Indian Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research get.amd?
Yeah, this is going to result in some very expensive lawsuits.
No problem. We'll take some of the load off nameservers by making the root namespace local (ICANN becomes the American DNS root, ORSN becomes the European one etc.) and add a DNA root qualifier at the end of the domain name. Then we'll add a super-root that points to all DNS roots. So for example www.google.de becomes www.de.google%orsn while www.google.com becomes www.google%icann. billg@microsoft.com becomes billg@microsoft%icann and so on. Maybe not all DNS roots will allow arbitrary TLDs, so in some case you still get stuff like www.google.cn%asiadns. We'll just have to learn the peculiarities and everything will be just fine.
He's not an end user. As you said, he certainly should know why rebooting would be necessary when updating part of the OS.
Actually, he tested the whole thing like one. I read the "Why should I have to reboot?" part as "Why should I have to reboot to install a movie editor?"
None. Windows 7 will be so good it runs perfectly on a Pentium III/500 with 256 MiB of RAM. Its 3D accelerated desktop will be so efficient that a Rage 128 can emulate the shaders needed to display it in realtime. It will also come on a CD-ROM - uncompressed, because Windows 7 will take up less than 500 MiB of storage when installed. The installer will just be a glorified version of dd. And every box will contain 1000 Dollars in cash.
It's relevat when you do max out your memory. Firefox + Thunderbird + VMWare usually equals swapping, for example. The less memory each of the apps uses the less swapping there is.
I solved my memory problem by going 4 GiB (2 clearly isn't enough if you do anything involving desktop OSes in VMs), but this would have been very nice if I hadn't. It should also be nice for those who play Alt+Tab-friendly games and like to have websites with strategy guides or whatever open in the background/on the second screen.
Browser startup time is a non-issue for me as lng as it's not excessively long. I usually don't quit the browser, so the startup time occurs only at system boot and during browser updates. With Firefox 2 also when it chokes on a website and crashes.
As for plugin loading time... I've never seen anything in excess of a second. Okay, Java applets take ages to load, but I'd attribute that to the downloading process and the JVM itself. Same goes for embedded media.
No crashes, but I did run into a weird issue once where Firefox stubbornly refused to take focus (whenever it had focus it immediately lost it again) until I focussed another app and then Firefox again. Happened only once, though. (Mac OS 10.5)
And the UI rendering does look a bit glitchy during startup. I don't know if Fx3 initializes the UI later or Gecko 1.9 works XUL a bit differently internally. It's definitely nothing worth worrying over; essentially it's just page load time applied to the UI.
Only 1500% more smugness? And it doesn't integrate with iTunes, the iPhone and Photoshop? And it still doesn't fix Stacks? UNACCEPTABLE! I shall write a scathing comment on my blog about this, Steve! Just you see!
Side note, the article is being just rabble-rousing by comparing waistlines considering that Americans are so much taller on average than Japanese it makes sense that they would be proportionally larger in waist size.
It is intersting, though, that the average American waistline is 1.4 times mine. Granted, I'm slightly underweight (65.5 kg at 185 cm) and in my mid-twenties, but it's still a bit scary to have that large a waist being the standard.
Whether or not I'd like ads in my game depends on how the ads are executed. There are good and bad ways to put products into a game. Some examples:
Coca Cola is inserted into a Deus Ex-workalike. Good: Soda cans are now Coke cans; there are a few Coke vending machines throughout the game. Bad: Characters talk about how much they'd like a refreshing can of Coke Zero - full taste and zero sugar, yum.
Subway advertises in a multiplayer FPS. Good: Billboards around the map show the "eat fresh" slogan; a downtown map contains a Subway. Bad: Subway baners in every loading screen; every urban map contains a Subway; the Subway Muppet is seen anywhere near the game.
Dunkin' Donuts sponsors the next GTA. Good: There are several DDs sprinkled throughout Abstract Concept City, acting as cop magnets; one mission can be made easier by distracting a cop with a box of donuts. Bad: Every single cop in the city and half of the underworld have no other discussion topic but which kind of donut they love most; every problem can be solved by tossing donuts around, Hostess Fruit Cake-style.
In general, if the product placement is done tactfully and unobtrusively I entirely agree with it and am happy to have my games subsidized. If it's blatant and in-your-face I want the corp in question to piss off and take their product with them.
Stop whining and jump on the capitolism bandwagon end enjoy the greatest, most creative, most inovative county in the world.
Which one would that be? I have yet to see a country that isn't backwards in some area (for the USA home construction, broadband services and wireless services come to mind).
You don't need to. Just throw away her perfectly working old computer and buy her a new one. As an heir to a vast fortune I know how to deal with money; it's hard to understand why anyone would think twice about paying a modest 1000 Dollars for the convenience of having a different Linux pre-installed. I mean, it's not like that's even spare change.
Except that this stuff isn't transparent at all and, surprisingly, supposed to be tougher than regular metal. Not all glass is of the window pane variety.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, controllers have very few buttons in hard to reach spaces if you don't want to use more than one hand. Having an analog stick for movement and the mouse for aiming would be nice; it would be the most precise way of playing. However, using a gamepad in one hand and the mouse in another means that the gamepad hand has access to maybe four buttons. On a keyboard I can reach more than fifteen keys without even moving the hand. If we don't count WASD (stick equialent) that's still eleven keys that can usually be freely assigned.
Even games that don't need extremely fast reactions are hard to play if they need more than a few keys/buttons. Recently, I mapped my Playstation gamepad workalike to key presses and tried to play Escape Velocity: Nova. Even when I mapped the analog sticks to key presses I ran out of buttons. The game makes use of the keyboard and it's much easier to play when you do have access to lots of keys.
The controller is nice for precise movement and it's very portable, but on the other hand it's not as good for fast, precise aiming and it lacks the keyboard's numerous keys. That's what I see as a major reason why nothing has yet displaced the keyboard in mainstream PC gaming. Lack of movement precision is usually just a minor nuisance at best while being able to directly switch to a certain weapon by pressing a number key is very useful.
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union
ibm.at applies better to Ibm than ibm.com does. IBM also has that (as I admitted, Ibm is rather unlikely to compete with IBM for domains), but that would be the far more logical choice to make. Outside the USA .com is not assumed to be the one TLD everyone uses. Local-language sites are expected to use the local ccTLD (a concept virtually unheard of in the states); .com is mostly used by corporations who want all their sites under one central domain or people who didn't get a local-ccTLD domain with their name.
Just put some of the ultra-banned words where they are sent with every reply and watch the GFW bury them in RST packets. You just have to figure out a way to do that to their mail - and hope they don't use botnets.
They still have a meaning if one assumes that the IOC and the Olympic spirit have no relation with each other whatsoever. The IOC is just an entity that, for some reason, has the ability to decide about technical details for the Games.
Yes, I know. It's quite a stretch... In reality, the Glympic Games have devolved into a hybrid sport event/nation-level show-and-shine with an optimistic IOC hoping that some country will be miraculously converted to freedom if they're allowed to host them.
In addition to RST packets and null routes, the Great Firewall of China now also supports Slashdot post moderation.
True. Americas "scary CIA plots to overthrow democratic countries" approach just isn't efficient and reliable enough; the EU never really made a serious attempt for the freedom suppression medal, focusing on the red-taping competition (and, quite seriously, we have a good chance for gold there).
The USA will probably make gold in "public relations disaster"; China would have to nuke Tibet in order to outdo the last two legislative periods of the USA. The "lawsuit frenzy" medal is a toss-up between the USA and the EU - where the USA have a long-proven routine of suing everything and anything, the EU has shown that doing high-profile lawsuits against US corporations is a good way to get your name on the title pages.
China will utterly dominate "MMORPG addiction", of course. Nobody gets close to those gold farmers. If China would let it compete, Tibet might make silver in "vocal minority"; gold would go to the USA because they have Cupertino, CA.
Now I just need to convince the Austrian village of Fucking to ask ICANN why it can't have its own TLD. Once it has finally worn down ICANN/the committee enough to get its TLD (after all, "Fucking" isn't offensive at all in Austria and the surrounding countries) it will make a buttload of money giving domains to porn sites.
Let's not forget that there can be international clashes as well. For (an admittedly somewhat unlikely) example, the small town of Ibm, Austria might register the .ibm TLD before the International Business Machines Corporation does. To the people of Ibm, .ibm clearly applies much better to their town than to some corporation that happens to have a similar acronym.
.brd and get unfriendly letters from Sony who demand the TLD that clearly references their Blu-Ray Disk format.
.fox? Fox Network? 20th Century? Volkswagen? .wb go to Warner Brothers or the World Bank - or maybe Rwandair Express? .amd?
Or some patriotic Germans (read: most likely the NPD) register
And who gets
Will
Will Advanced Micro Devices, Dassault Aviation or the Indian Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research get
Yeah, this is going to result in some very expensive lawsuits.
No problem. We'll take some of the load off nameservers by making the root namespace local (ICANN becomes the American DNS root, ORSN becomes the European one etc.) and add a DNA root qualifier at the end of the domain name. Then we'll add a super-root that points to all DNS roots. So for example www.google.de becomes www.de.google%orsn while www.google.com becomes www.google%icann. billg@microsoft.com becomes billg@microsoft%icann and so on. Maybe not all DNS roots will allow arbitrary TLDs, so in some case you still get stuff like www.google.cn%asiadns. We'll just have to learn the peculiarities and everything will be just fine.
Is it a bird? Is it an airplane? No, it's a joke made on Slashdot!
Hooray for TLD squatters...
I don't see how those are mutually exclusive.
I somehow doubt that. The memo was entered as evidence into an antitrust trial. I would assume that its veracity was checked at that point.
Well, you could instead use MIDI and sue them for infringing on your melodies' copyright. That's a bt more realistic.
None. Windows 7 will be so good it runs perfectly on a Pentium III/500 with 256 MiB of RAM. Its 3D accelerated desktop will be so efficient that a Rage 128 can emulate the shaders needed to display it in realtime. It will also come on a CD-ROM - uncompressed, because Windows 7 will take up less than 500 MiB of storage when installed. The installer will just be a glorified version of dd. And every box will contain 1000 Dollars in cash.
It's relevat when you do max out your memory. Firefox + Thunderbird + VMWare usually equals swapping, for example. The less memory each of the apps uses the less swapping there is.
I solved my memory problem by going 4 GiB (2 clearly isn't enough if you do anything involving desktop OSes in VMs), but this would have been very nice if I hadn't. It should also be nice for those who play Alt+Tab-friendly games and like to have websites with strategy guides or whatever open in the background/on the second screen.
Browser startup time is a non-issue for me as lng as it's not excessively long. I usually don't quit the browser, so the startup time occurs only at system boot and during browser updates. With Firefox 2 also when it chokes on a website and crashes.
As for plugin loading time... I've never seen anything in excess of a second. Okay, Java applets take ages to load, but I'd attribute that to the downloading process and the JVM itself. Same goes for embedded media.
No crashes, but I did run into a weird issue once where Firefox stubbornly refused to take focus (whenever it had focus it immediately lost it again) until I focussed another app and then Firefox again. Happened only once, though. (Mac OS 10.5)
And the UI rendering does look a bit glitchy during startup. I don't know if Fx3 initializes the UI later or Gecko 1.9 works XUL a bit differently internally. It's definitely nothing worth worrying over; essentially it's just page load time applied to the UI.
Only 1500% more smugness? And it doesn't integrate with iTunes, the iPhone and Photoshop? And it still doesn't fix Stacks? UNACCEPTABLE! I shall write a scathing comment on my blog about this, Steve! Just you see!
Whether or not I'd like ads in my game depends on how the ads are executed. There are good and bad ways to put products into a game. Some examples:
Coca Cola is inserted into a Deus Ex-workalike.
Good: Soda cans are now Coke cans; there are a few Coke vending machines throughout the game.
Bad: Characters talk about how much they'd like a refreshing can of Coke Zero - full taste and zero sugar, yum.
Subway advertises in a multiplayer FPS.
Good: Billboards around the map show the "eat fresh" slogan; a downtown map contains a Subway.
Bad: Subway baners in every loading screen; every urban map contains a Subway; the Subway Muppet is seen anywhere near the game.
Dunkin' Donuts sponsors the next GTA.
Good: There are several DDs sprinkled throughout Abstract Concept City, acting as cop magnets; one mission can be made easier by distracting a cop with a box of donuts.
Bad: Every single cop in the city and half of the underworld have no other discussion topic but which kind of donut they love most; every problem can be solved by tossing donuts around, Hostess Fruit Cake-style.
In general, if the product placement is done tactfully and unobtrusively I entirely agree with it and am happy to have my games subsidized. If it's blatant and in-your-face I want the corp in question to piss off and take their product with them.
You don't need to. Just throw away her perfectly working old computer and buy her a new one. As an heir to a vast fortune I know how to deal with money; it's hard to understand why anyone would think twice about paying a modest 1000 Dollars for the convenience of having a different Linux pre-installed. I mean, it's not like that's even spare change.
- P.H.
Except that this stuff isn't transparent at all and, surprisingly, supposed to be tougher than regular metal. Not all glass is of the window pane variety.