To tell you the truth I'm disappointed with all the DS ereaders I've tried because they don't support being held sideways like the Brain Age games. That's almost a dealbreaker for me. However, most support scrolling with the stylus which is quite precise and handy.
The R4 is what I would call a soft mod - the DS hardware and OS aren't changed, it's just a normally shaped cartridge that takes a standard Micro SD memory stick.
As a new owner of an R4DS micro SD cartridge I'm glad to report that homebrew on the DS is totally wicked. There are productivity apps like e-readers, media players, web browsers, IRC clients, wardriving packet capture utils, and much more. Also, many retro PC games like Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Flashback, Lemmings, SCUMMVM, and lots more have been ported to the DS.
Considering Nintendo's resistance to homebrew I'd be wary of an officially supported solution. I think your best bet is to go with a third party solution. This would enable you to play homebrew NES, SNES, MAME, and other ROMs using their various emulators. This ought to be legal, DMCA notwithstanding.
The DS is probably the console most in need of backups in all history. The cartridges are quite small and easy to lose, but are bulky enough that it's annoying having to bring more than one or two along with you. My R4 slot 1 SD backup device lets me store all my games on the one cartridge that I never have to take out. It's very convenient.
I bought 3 Tabula Rasa preorder packs (me, wife, friend) for a buck at the local electronics store because they came with beta keys. We played for several hours the first day and a bit more for a second day. We'd all gotten through the introductory tutorial ("noob island") and completed several quests on the main land. Upon exiting the game and logging back in all 3 of us would find our characters back on noob island, yet the quests to get us back to the mainland were not available! None of us could figure out how to play the game again so we all uninstalled.
The biggest disappointment was the execution and design of this very ordinary MMO despite RG's frequent proclamations that this game would be far different from all the other quest/farming grind games out there. It's WoW with frickin' laser beams. Yawn. Even if the game had worked flawlessly I wouldn't play it for free.
Didn't mean to look like a wet blanket, but I have a sore spot when it comes to advertising. After having so much with with Bittorrent and Miro we decided just yesterday to cancel our TV cable since there are so many ad-free alternatives.
I shouldn't have to show a receipt whenever I want to put some spare change in my pocket.
Your phrasing is awesome because while I'm against showing my receipt in a store, I'm frustrated by but not really against product activation. Perhaps I'm being a hypocrite.
Regardless, my point is that the author of the article was fully aware of the need to purchase and activate his software, but admitted he was too lazy to do so. Now he's written an article describing what happens in this scenario. If he wasn't aware of the activation requirement before he bought the software then I'd empathize, but he was so I don't.
I consider Visio to be part of Office. It has the same activation procedure, you can get information and updates for Visio from the Office website, and it is a personal productivity application. When I google "visio" the top result is http://office.microsoft.com/visio/ . I think it's a safe assumption that Microsoft has correlated Visio with Office.
The author of the article admits he was too lazy to run the wizard that would have solved his problem. I consider this to be a trivial issue. I'm lazy myself, so I take off my pants when I get home from work. Should I post this on Slashdot too?
I read the article. I guess I've used Office and Visio enough to assume they're part of the same suite, even if they don't come in the same box. But in TFA the guy admits that he's just been too lazy to go through the activation wizard which will solve all his problems. It's the fault of his laziness that he's having this issue.
Forgive my ignorance but I don't really understand the problem here. Why not just activate Office? You can do it over the internet or by a toll free phone call. You can only open Office apps so many times before you must activate it, so why delay?
I can think of a few areas in HL2 that would benefit nicely from HDR, like some long dark tunnels you drive through with the car. Episode One really did benefit from HDR as a game mechanic, though. The reactor room you have to restabilize is so incredibly bright that you really have to sit a minute and let your "eyes" adjust before you walk across various narrow beams and moving platforms. I'm no level designer but I stopped and marvelled much longer than I needed to in that area. The first time I saw the luminescent pulsating core through an opening window my jaw dropped.
I've seen HDR implemented in some interesting ways since then. For example, the new Test Drive game uses it to very dramatic effect. The game is set in sunny Hawaii and when you drive down a street through the shadows of surrounding buildings it's subtle but striking the way the sky becomes more prevalent and washes out the other colours. It's almost a little too much, and kind of makes me want to wear sunglasses while I play. Very effective.
I'm oversimplifying, of course, but HDR did take a heck of a long time to implement. Valve says in the Episode One commentary that they're not planning to implement HDR in the original Half Life 2 because it took so very, very long to assign luminosity levels to objects and shadows and light sources.
You're right - it's only been a bit more than a year. I had my dates confused since Episode 2 was due to come out before Episode 1 ended up being released. I was incredibly impressed with Ep1 and vowed to never wish that Valve would hurry up and release after thoroughly enjoying the fine polish on that expansion and all their games. Still, even a year is a hell of a long time to wait for the continuation of the story which will, I'm sure, pose more new questions than it answers.
And I'm with you 100% on your TF2 comment. I haven't enjoyed multiplayer FPS deathmatch since Doom 1 but I gave TF2 a try and it's a really fun, fantastic game. I was especially amazed at the motion blur effect you see when you whip the camera around! Oddly, I noticed it right away but 10 minutes later I could hardly notice it. I think motion blur will become a standard bullet point (no pun intended) in FPS games from now on.
Very good points. Some genres lend themselves better to episodic serials than others, and I'd much rather play a good shooter than a merely recent one. It's really the label "episode" that frustrates me when it comes to Half Life. I wish they'd developed episodes one through three as Half Life 3 or as an expansion pack. Instead I'll have ended up spending about $80 on expansions that combined are shorter than the $50 original.
I much prefer the way Telltale did their episodic series to Valve's. If I recall, the second Sam and Max episode came out a little late, but all the rest were either on time or early. A month between episodes was the perfect length - my excitement from the last episode hadn't cooled by the time the next one came out. Having the option to buy all episodes in advance for a greatly reduced price was a much better idea than Orange box, which would have been a great deal 3 years ago. Telltale even made a gorgeous retail DVD box available to season subscribers for merely the cost of shipping, and it was packed with tons of content not included in the digital downloads. Very timely, classy, and professional.
I love Half Life and I really love Episode One. I hate how long it was in development and would rather have played it a year sooner with no HDR. The again, Valve's releases are near-immaculate and the developer commentary hints at how much painstaking care they put into their games, so I've learned not to wish too hard that they rush their releases. Still, it's been YEARS since the last episode and if for some reason Episode Two never came out I'd hardly miss it at this point.
Thanks for the advice with hacking other drivers' INF files, but it's a brand new HP laptop and I really don't want to risk voiding the warranty or anything. I think I'll try giving her alternative browsers for Blackboard (Firefox, Opera, or even Safari) or perhaps I'll set up a WinXP VM or something. Unfortunately her school's email wasn't specific enough to say whether the problem was with Vista, IE7, or both together.
My sister just bought a laptop with a fair number of bells and whistles - webcam, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, portrait/landscape image flipper, and more. The machine comes with Vista preinstalled and although it comes with no reinstall disks it has a dedicated image partition with instructions on how to burn your own recovery disks. (pretty chintzy, eh?)
Naturally, she got an email from her university just after buying her laptop, saying that Vista is incompatible with many features on the Blackboard scheduling and class management system. I decided to install XP for her since she's more familiar with it anyway. No dice. Much of her hardware, including, surprisingly, her GeForce Go 6150 video card, has no Windows XP drivers developed! I searched for many drivers but could only find message board threads featuring questions about where the heck the XP drivers were. Long story short, my third attempt to recover the system worked and she's back to Vista.
It seems that she doesn't even have the option to revert to XP. I hope she doesn't need much troubleshooting (that's wishful thinking) because my few experiences with Vista have been befuddling.
Stealing from a person and shoplifting are very different matters. Unless I was the sole proprietor of a store I'd never care enough about merchandise to detain a shoplifter physically. I'd get his license plate number and notify the police. I'm concerned that the the Circuit City situation teaches us that it's okay to take the law into your own hands.
As for the cop, I definitely disagree with him. Righi was compliant with the cop for all his requests except his demand to produce identification. If American law sides with civilians on this matter then that's an important distinction and no one has the authority to revoke that right. Americans have the right to a relatively free society in general, but also to specific freedoms. That's what defines the character of a country.
All this being said, I myself have daydreamed about walking past receipt checkers but I can't be bothered. I'd rather take the path of least resistance on that matter. If it's my right to keep my receipt to myself then I'm content enough knowing this that I don't need to practise it. If the law is in my favour then I don't feel the need to test it.
My wife and I each have cell phones and no land line. With my last cell phone I used to get automated calls from one debt consolidation company and no amount of complaints or reports would stop them, but it was only that one company I'd get calls from. Since I switched carriers 10 months ago I haven't gotten a single telemarketing or other soliciting phone call.
P.s., I use SkypeOut whenever I have to make a long distance or long local call. It's not good enough for me to rely on exclusively but it's pretty damn great.
He was on their property when he was asked to show his receipt, but the receipt and the merchandise were his property at that point. Then a manager and an employee followed him outside the store and physically detained the car he was a passenger in.
A store has a right to protect its property and eject people from its premises. They have no rights concerning someone else's property nor their mobility. They should have written down his license plate number and let the police do the policing.
I was late to the party as I only had internet access around '94 (I was big into the BBS scene before that, starting at 2400 baud in '91), but I've been around the block. I used to use Infoseek and Excite. I used Yahoo in the mid-90's but only for their category directories, not for search. I've really only ever used AltaVista for Babelfish.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't tried it yet but the program I was referring to is DSBlue.
Here's a link to DSreader which isn't too bad - http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=68172
To tell you the truth I'm disappointed with all the DS ereaders I've tried because they don't support being held sideways like the Brain Age games. That's almost a dealbreaker for me. However, most support scrolling with the stylus which is quite precise and handy.
The R4 is what I would call a soft mod - the DS hardware and OS aren't changed, it's just a normally shaped cartridge that takes a standard Micro SD memory stick.
As a new owner of an R4DS micro SD cartridge I'm glad to report that homebrew on the DS is totally wicked. There are productivity apps like e-readers, media players, web browsers, IRC clients, wardriving packet capture utils, and much more. Also, many retro PC games like Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Flashback, Lemmings, SCUMMVM, and lots more have been ported to the DS.
Considering Nintendo's resistance to homebrew I'd be wary of an officially supported solution. I think your best bet is to go with a third party solution. This would enable you to play homebrew NES, SNES, MAME, and other ROMs using their various emulators. This ought to be legal, DMCA notwithstanding.
The DS is probably the console most in need of backups in all history. The cartridges are quite small and easy to lose, but are bulky enough that it's annoying having to bring more than one or two along with you. My R4 slot 1 SD backup device lets me store all my games on the one cartridge that I never have to take out. It's very convenient.
You know the G in Gmail is for Google and not God, right? You're thanking the wrong party!
I occasionally get spam in my Gmail inboxes - especially when it's written in other languages. Thunderbird filters those out, thankfully.
I bought 3 Tabula Rasa preorder packs (me, wife, friend) for a buck at the local electronics store because they came with beta keys. We played for several hours the first day and a bit more for a second day. We'd all gotten through the introductory tutorial ("noob island") and completed several quests on the main land. Upon exiting the game and logging back in all 3 of us would find our characters back on noob island, yet the quests to get us back to the mainland were not available! None of us could figure out how to play the game again so we all uninstalled.
The biggest disappointment was the execution and design of this very ordinary MMO despite RG's frequent proclamations that this game would be far different from all the other quest/farming grind games out there. It's WoW with frickin' laser beams. Yawn. Even if the game had worked flawlessly I wouldn't play it for free.
Didn't mean to look like a wet blanket, but I have a sore spot when it comes to advertising. After having so much with with Bittorrent and Miro we decided just yesterday to cancel our TV cable since there are so many ad-free alternatives.
Regardless, my point is that the author of the article was fully aware of the need to purchase and activate his software, but admitted he was too lazy to do so. Now he's written an article describing what happens in this scenario. If he wasn't aware of the activation requirement before he bought the software then I'd empathize, but he was so I don't.
I consider Visio to be part of Office. It has the same activation procedure, you can get information and updates for Visio from the Office website, and it is a personal productivity application. When I google "visio" the top result is http://office.microsoft.com/visio/ . I think it's a safe assumption that Microsoft has correlated Visio with Office.
The author of the article admits he was too lazy to run the wizard that would have solved his problem. I consider this to be a trivial issue. I'm lazy myself, so I take off my pants when I get home from work. Should I post this on Slashdot too?
I read the article. I guess I've used Office and Visio enough to assume they're part of the same suite, even if they don't come in the same box. But in TFA the guy admits that he's just been too lazy to go through the activation wizard which will solve all his problems. It's the fault of his laziness that he's having this issue.
Forgive my ignorance but I don't really understand the problem here. Why not just activate Office? You can do it over the internet or by a toll free phone call. You can only open Office apps so many times before you must activate it, so why delay?
I can think of a few areas in HL2 that would benefit nicely from HDR, like some long dark tunnels you drive through with the car. Episode One really did benefit from HDR as a game mechanic, though. The reactor room you have to restabilize is so incredibly bright that you really have to sit a minute and let your "eyes" adjust before you walk across various narrow beams and moving platforms. I'm no level designer but I stopped and marvelled much longer than I needed to in that area. The first time I saw the luminescent pulsating core through an opening window my jaw dropped.
I've seen HDR implemented in some interesting ways since then. For example, the new Test Drive game uses it to very dramatic effect. The game is set in sunny Hawaii and when you drive down a street through the shadows of surrounding buildings it's subtle but striking the way the sky becomes more prevalent and washes out the other colours. It's almost a little too much, and kind of makes me want to wear sunglasses while I play. Very effective.
I'm oversimplifying, of course, but HDR did take a heck of a long time to implement. Valve says in the Episode One commentary that they're not planning to implement HDR in the original Half Life 2 because it took so very, very long to assign luminosity levels to objects and shadows and light sources.
You're right - it's only been a bit more than a year. I had my dates confused since Episode 2 was due to come out before Episode 1 ended up being released. I was incredibly impressed with Ep1 and vowed to never wish that Valve would hurry up and release after thoroughly enjoying the fine polish on that expansion and all their games. Still, even a year is a hell of a long time to wait for the continuation of the story which will, I'm sure, pose more new questions than it answers.
And I'm with you 100% on your TF2 comment. I haven't enjoyed multiplayer FPS deathmatch since Doom 1 but I gave TF2 a try and it's a really fun, fantastic game. I was especially amazed at the motion blur effect you see when you whip the camera around! Oddly, I noticed it right away but 10 minutes later I could hardly notice it. I think motion blur will become a standard bullet point (no pun intended) in FPS games from now on.
Very good points. Some genres lend themselves better to episodic serials than others, and I'd much rather play a good shooter than a merely recent one. It's really the label "episode" that frustrates me when it comes to Half Life. I wish they'd developed episodes one through three as Half Life 3 or as an expansion pack. Instead I'll have ended up spending about $80 on expansions that combined are shorter than the $50 original.
I much prefer the way Telltale did their episodic series to Valve's. If I recall, the second Sam and Max episode came out a little late, but all the rest were either on time or early. A month between episodes was the perfect length - my excitement from the last episode hadn't cooled by the time the next one came out. Having the option to buy all episodes in advance for a greatly reduced price was a much better idea than Orange box, which would have been a great deal 3 years ago. Telltale even made a gorgeous retail DVD box available to season subscribers for merely the cost of shipping, and it was packed with tons of content not included in the digital downloads. Very timely, classy, and professional.
I love Half Life and I really love Episode One. I hate how long it was in development and would rather have played it a year sooner with no HDR. The again, Valve's releases are near-immaculate and the developer commentary hints at how much painstaking care they put into their games, so I've learned not to wish too hard that they rush their releases. Still, it's been YEARS since the last episode and if for some reason Episode Two never came out I'd hardly miss it at this point.
Thanks for the advice with hacking other drivers' INF files, but it's a brand new HP laptop and I really don't want to risk voiding the warranty or anything. I think I'll try giving her alternative browsers for Blackboard (Firefox, Opera, or even Safari) or perhaps I'll set up a WinXP VM or something. Unfortunately her school's email wasn't specific enough to say whether the problem was with Vista, IE7, or both together.
My sister just bought a laptop with a fair number of bells and whistles - webcam, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, portrait/landscape image flipper, and more. The machine comes with Vista preinstalled and although it comes with no reinstall disks it has a dedicated image partition with instructions on how to burn your own recovery disks. (pretty chintzy, eh?)
Naturally, she got an email from her university just after buying her laptop, saying that Vista is incompatible with many features on the Blackboard scheduling and class management system. I decided to install XP for her since she's more familiar with it anyway. No dice. Much of her hardware, including, surprisingly, her GeForce Go 6150 video card, has no Windows XP drivers developed! I searched for many drivers but could only find message board threads featuring questions about where the heck the XP drivers were. Long story short, my third attempt to recover the system worked and she's back to Vista.
It seems that she doesn't even have the option to revert to XP. I hope she doesn't need much troubleshooting (that's wishful thinking) because my few experiences with Vista have been befuddling.
Stealing from a person and shoplifting are very different matters. Unless I was the sole proprietor of a store I'd never care enough about merchandise to detain a shoplifter physically. I'd get his license plate number and notify the police. I'm concerned that the the Circuit City situation teaches us that it's okay to take the law into your own hands.
As for the cop, I definitely disagree with him. Righi was compliant with the cop for all his requests except his demand to produce identification. If American law sides with civilians on this matter then that's an important distinction and no one has the authority to revoke that right. Americans have the right to a relatively free society in general, but also to specific freedoms. That's what defines the character of a country.
All this being said, I myself have daydreamed about walking past receipt checkers but I can't be bothered. I'd rather take the path of least resistance on that matter. If it's my right to keep my receipt to myself then I'm content enough knowing this that I don't need to practise it. If the law is in my favour then I don't feel the need to test it.
My wife and I each have cell phones and no land line. With my last cell phone I used to get automated calls from one debt consolidation company and no amount of complaints or reports would stop them, but it was only that one company I'd get calls from. Since I switched carriers 10 months ago I haven't gotten a single telemarketing or other soliciting phone call.
P.s., I use SkypeOut whenever I have to make a long distance or long local call. It's not good enough for me to rely on exclusively but it's pretty damn great.
He was on their property when he was asked to show his receipt, but the receipt and the merchandise were his property at that point. Then a manager and an employee followed him outside the store and physically detained the car he was a passenger in.
A store has a right to protect its property and eject people from its premises. They have no rights concerning someone else's property nor their mobility. They should have written down his license plate number and let the police do the policing.
I was late to the party as I only had internet access around '94 (I was big into the BBS scene before that, starting at 2400 baud in '91), but I've been around the block. I used to use Infoseek and Excite. I used Yahoo in the mid-90's but only for their category directories, not for search. I've really only ever used AltaVista for Babelfish.
They found it this time! They just didn't make a big deal out of it.