I never played the game (Vista prerequisite? That's cute.) but I listen to the PC Gamer Podcast and those chaps seemed to thoroughly enjoy the game until Team Fortress 2 came out. Was Shadowrun really such a trainwreck?
BTW, for a very hard-hitting and informative look into the late FASA studios I highly recommend listening to this interview with FASA GM Mitch Gitelman. No punches are pulled in the questioning and I have great respect for Mitch for bravely meeting each challenge head-on.
NESDS is the best NES emulator I've ever used on any platform. Not only can you do all the stuff every other emulator allows, but you can actually rewind with the L button which lets me cheat my way through all the games my juvenile hands used to rip through!
SNESDS, on the other hand, I've had no luck with. It was discontinued 2 years ago and is unfinished. No other SNES emulator works perfectly or even very well, as far as I've seen. The DS is just too wussy of a machine, methinks.
I used to do the same thing with host files pointing ad servers to 127.0.0.1. Noob that I was, I couldn't figure out why my personal website would appear in ad frames on other people's websites! Then it dawned on me that I was serving my website with IIS on my desktop computer.
Nowadays I much prefer adblock. Sometimes domains host their own ads so I don't want to block the whole domain on every port.
I don't think AdBlock, nor "The AdBlock Crew", are professionally affiliated with Mozilla. Besides, Google's main source of income is advertising and I don't think they've balked at this extension yet. Currently AdBlock blocks all Google ads very thoroughly.
Do we really want the courts to decide which web standards to use? The web dev community can't even decide this. Wouldn't it be best to leave this question to the community?
Sorry to be nitpickey, but IE and Opera are WEB browsers, not internet browsers. If anything, an internet browser would be a packet capture util like Ettercap.
Google's AdWords system is pretty interesting. Advertisers can choose the most they're willing to spend on a single click, and the most they're willing to spend per day and per campaign. Google shows the ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as on related websites that use AdSense. Ads that are viewed but not clicked don't cost a penny, but ads that are clicked cost up to the amount specified per click.
You don't necessarily pay as much as the maximum you specify. AdWords works like an auction - you bid on keywords and whoever pays the most is placed at the top of the page. If you specify $20 as the maximum click price and the next highest bidder specifies $10 then you will probably only pay $10.10 or so and still get to the top.
Click fraud is a huge issue since webmasters using AdSense are tempted to click their own ads to make money, but Google has some crafty ways to filter these clicks out. There's no telling whether a program like yours would be caught or not but it still runs the risk of costing someone a lot of money for nothing. In my opinion if you hate ads you should use something like AdBlock Plus to passively hide them instead of actively clicking them.
I don't like the idea of automatically clicking ads. I manage some AdWords campaigns for my company and a single click costs us as much as $15. If you're prepared to foot the bill the go ahead and click all you like, but as is you risk costing a lot of money to a lot of small businesses.
If you're sufficiently annoyed at Google that you actually want to punish them for their query retention policy, I recommend the TrackMeNot Firefox extension by Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum. It automatically submits a false query to Google x times per minute, obscuring your real queries within a torrent of crap.
Nowhere did I say that this specific eReader is the right one for the job. Even if I did, surely one eReader is more environmentally sound than a lifetime worth of books, no?
One of these days mankind is going to have to forgo the luxury of killing trees because they smell nice. Why not today?
I applaud manufacturers of eReaders. A perfect one hasn't come out yet but each new model seems to learn from the mistakes of the last. Nevertheless, a mini tablet PC fits in my pocket better than one book, never mind ten million of them.
You're correct, of course, since you're the one who did it. I didn't mean to be facetious or a baseless flamer although I probably should have qualified my "laughed out of the office" remark.
What I meant was that Joe Cubicle doesn't know how to use anything but Windows XP, and barely knows even that much. The same goes for the vast majority of IT teams. It's one thing to turn a linux server into a one task appliance, but quite another to replace your information workers' PCs over the weekend with Ubuntu/OpenOffice or OSX/iLife. Who's going to train them? Who's going to fix their OSes when they break? How much of Active Directory and Exchange are you willing to forgo?
My point was that time is money and the average user can probably make the (supposed) $700 for Vista Ultimate faster than it'd take to learn a new OS and regain productivity, and also that Vista Ultimate does indeed have some benefits that the lesser SKUs do not.
I don't think I've ever seen Vista Ultimate sold for more than $400, and that was the ridiculous version that was signed by Bill Gates. Regardless, Ultimate does have a few good features and I'd probably buy it over any other version. For instance, it gives you both 32bit and 64bit support which makes it a good buy for the sake of longevity. It also has some bullet points for business like a remote desktop client, a more flexible virtualization license, and BitLocker encryption.
And let's be honest here - if you're a gamer or an IT manager and you recommend Ubuntu or Mac you're going to get laughed out of the office. Mac is proprietary in every way and the average Windows user will have a lot of habits to change before getting accustomed to it, and as they say about Linux, it's free if your time is worthless.
I'm not defending the price of Vista Ultimate because I agree it's quite steep, but you blew things a bit out of proportion in your post so I'm just balancing out the cosmos.
Seems to me TFA predicts the end of the album as we know it, not necessarily the music industry. Could we be entering the golden age of the one hit wonder?
I'm a computer nerd and an English nerd so I enjoy video game reviews just for the writing. Sometimes I read his reviews even if I'm not interested in the game or don't have the system. My entertainment dollars are short so if I'm really considering a game I'll check several sources. Reviewers are only human so it's reasonable to expect a wide range of scores from site to site.
I frequent Gamespot often enough that I set up a Firefox quick search ("gs gamename" in my address bar), and I recognize Gerstmann as one of their senior, more talented writers and personalities. I actually thought he was one of the founders of Gamespot, considering his seniority and tendency to review many of the more anticipated AAA titles.
The site won't be the same without him. I may even change my quick search to 1up.com or metacritic.com as a result. I can't attest to the veracity of this gossipey claim in the article but Gerstmann has earned enough journalistic integrity that I'm not surprised that he'd review high profile games honestly.
Really, is getting fired for accurate journalism a curse or a great bullet point on your resume? I'd wish Jeff luck but thanks to his outstanding track record I'm sure he won't need any.
Sorry, didn't realize that Taco had editorialized there.
I too might have been interested in a Summer of Code project in high school. I was big into BBSes then (I graduated high school in 1994) and had begun writing a Star Wars text-based space combat door game in Turbo Pascal. It was a lofty project that feature creeped its way out of my humble programming skills and I lost interest before long. However, I really enjoyed writing user instructions and story prose and went on to study Technical Communication, so I'm quite interested in your CMS software and will enthusiastically check it out!
Slashdot Mirror
I never played the game (Vista prerequisite? That's cute.) but I listen to the PC Gamer Podcast and those chaps seemed to thoroughly enjoy the game until Team Fortress 2 came out. Was Shadowrun really such a trainwreck?
BTW, for a very hard-hitting and informative look into the late FASA studios I highly recommend listening to this interview with FASA GM Mitch Gitelman. No punches are pulled in the questioning and I have great respect for Mitch for bravely meeting each challenge head-on.
NESDS is the best NES emulator I've ever used on any platform. Not only can you do all the stuff every other emulator allows, but you can actually rewind with the L button which lets me cheat my way through all the games my juvenile hands used to rip through!
SNESDS, on the other hand, I've had no luck with. It was discontinued 2 years ago and is unfinished. No other SNES emulator works perfectly or even very well, as far as I've seen. The DS is just too wussy of a machine, methinks.
Since I bought a Nintendo DS this year and was delighted to learn there's a port of SCUMMVM I think I might have to agree with your choice.
I used to do the same thing with host files pointing ad servers to 127.0.0.1. Noob that I was, I couldn't figure out why my personal website would appear in ad frames on other people's websites! Then it dawned on me that I was serving my website with IIS on my desktop computer.
Nowadays I much prefer adblock. Sometimes domains host their own ads so I don't want to block the whole domain on every port.
I don't think AdBlock, nor "The AdBlock Crew", are professionally affiliated with Mozilla. Besides, Google's main source of income is advertising and I don't think they've balked at this extension yet. Currently AdBlock blocks all Google ads very thoroughly.
Do we really want the courts to decide which web standards to use? The web dev community can't even decide this. Wouldn't it be best to leave this question to the community?
Sorry to be nitpickey, but IE and Opera are WEB browsers, not internet browsers. If anything, an internet browser would be a packet capture util like Ettercap.
Google's AdWords system is pretty interesting. Advertisers can choose the most they're willing to spend on a single click, and the most they're willing to spend per day and per campaign. Google shows the ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as on related websites that use AdSense. Ads that are viewed but not clicked don't cost a penny, but ads that are clicked cost up to the amount specified per click.
You don't necessarily pay as much as the maximum you specify. AdWords works like an auction - you bid on keywords and whoever pays the most is placed at the top of the page. If you specify $20 as the maximum click price and the next highest bidder specifies $10 then you will probably only pay $10.10 or so and still get to the top.
Click fraud is a huge issue since webmasters using AdSense are tempted to click their own ads to make money, but Google has some crafty ways to filter these clicks out. There's no telling whether a program like yours would be caught or not but it still runs the risk of costing someone a lot of money for nothing. In my opinion if you hate ads you should use something like AdBlock Plus to passively hide them instead of actively clicking them.
I don't like the idea of automatically clicking ads. I manage some AdWords campaigns for my company and a single click costs us as much as $15. If you're prepared to foot the bill the go ahead and click all you like, but as is you risk costing a lot of money to a lot of small businesses.
If you're sufficiently annoyed at Google that you actually want to punish them for their query retention policy, I recommend the TrackMeNot Firefox extension by Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum. It automatically submits a false query to Google x times per minute, obscuring your real queries within a torrent of crap.
I know it's been forever since you posted this, but just wanted to tell you that it still has me in stitches. Good show, sir.
No, YOU'RE a stinky pants.
Nowhere did I say that this specific eReader is the right one for the job. Even if I did, surely one eReader is more environmentally sound than a lifetime worth of books, no?
I ask genuinely - I don't know the answer.
One of these days mankind is going to have to forgo the luxury of killing trees because they smell nice. Why not today?
I applaud manufacturers of eReaders. A perfect one hasn't come out yet but each new model seems to learn from the mistakes of the last. Nevertheless, a mini tablet PC fits in my pocket better than one book, never mind ten million of them.
True enough, some people are sociopathic and do not empathize. I'm not a psychologist but I believe that is the one and only exception to this rule.
I'm sure everyone responds differently, but what we all have in common while viewing violent images is empathy.
You're correct, of course, since you're the one who did it. I didn't mean to be facetious or a baseless flamer although I probably should have qualified my "laughed out of the office" remark.
What I meant was that Joe Cubicle doesn't know how to use anything but Windows XP, and barely knows even that much. The same goes for the vast majority of IT teams. It's one thing to turn a linux server into a one task appliance, but quite another to replace your information workers' PCs over the weekend with Ubuntu/OpenOffice or OSX/iLife. Who's going to train them? Who's going to fix their OSes when they break? How much of Active Directory and Exchange are you willing to forgo?
My point was that time is money and the average user can probably make the (supposed) $700 for Vista Ultimate faster than it'd take to learn a new OS and regain productivity, and also that Vista Ultimate does indeed have some benefits that the lesser SKUs do not.
I don't think I've ever seen Vista Ultimate sold for more than $400, and that was the ridiculous version that was signed by Bill Gates. Regardless, Ultimate does have a few good features and I'd probably buy it over any other version. For instance, it gives you both 32bit and 64bit support which makes it a good buy for the sake of longevity. It also has some bullet points for business like a remote desktop client, a more flexible virtualization license, and BitLocker encryption.
And let's be honest here - if you're a gamer or an IT manager and you recommend Ubuntu or Mac you're going to get laughed out of the office. Mac is proprietary in every way and the average Windows user will have a lot of habits to change before getting accustomed to it, and as they say about Linux, it's free if your time is worthless.
I'm not defending the price of Vista Ultimate because I agree it's quite steep, but you blew things a bit out of proportion in your post so I'm just balancing out the cosmos.
I was going to dial 867-5309 to ask for a witty retort but instead I ran - I ran so far away.
Seems to me TFA predicts the end of the album as we know it, not necessarily the music industry. Could we be entering the golden age of the one hit wonder?
I'm a computer nerd and an English nerd so I enjoy video game reviews just for the writing. Sometimes I read his reviews even if I'm not interested in the game or don't have the system. My entertainment dollars are short so if I'm really considering a game I'll check several sources. Reviewers are only human so it's reasonable to expect a wide range of scores from site to site.
I frequent Gamespot often enough that I set up a Firefox quick search ("gs gamename" in my address bar), and I recognize Gerstmann as one of their senior, more talented writers and personalities. I actually thought he was one of the founders of Gamespot, considering his seniority and tendency to review many of the more anticipated AAA titles.
The site won't be the same without him. I may even change my quick search to 1up.com or metacritic.com as a result. I can't attest to the veracity of this gossipey claim in the article but Gerstmann has earned enough journalistic integrity that I'm not surprised that he'd review high profile games honestly.
Really, is getting fired for accurate journalism a curse or a great bullet point on your resume? I'd wish Jeff luck but thanks to his outstanding track record I'm sure he won't need any.
Sorry, didn't realize that Taco had editorialized there.
I too might have been interested in a Summer of Code project in high school. I was big into BBSes then (I graduated high school in 1994) and had begun writing a Star Wars text-based space combat door game in Turbo Pascal. It was a lofty project that feature creeped its way out of my humble programming skills and I lost interest before long. However, I really enjoyed writing user instructions and story prose and went on to study Technical Communication, so I'm quite interested in your CMS software and will enthusiastically check it out!
Just curious, what door games did you write?