SCUMMVM's graphics filtering does wonders to smoothe out the blocky graphics when playing at high resolution. If you showed a 10-year-old the original version running on SCUMMVM with 3x scaling I bet they'd never guess how old the game is.
I agree with this 100%. I'd wager it would take relatively minimal effort to redo the art at higher resolution and upscale the locations to widescreen. DOTT is absolutely timeless.
I replayed it recently using SCUMMVM on my Gameboy DS (full talkie version) and it was a perfect game for the mobile platform. I'd gladly have repurchased it for that platform if only it were on sale!
I'm doubly thrilled at this announcement; first because I love the first two Monkey Island games, and second because it's been so long since Telltale's Sam and Max Season 2 ended and I miss playing episodic adventure games with my wife. None of Telltale's series since Sam and Max interested us so Monkey Island is doubly appreciated for finally filling the void!
These Telltale adventures are the perfect activity to enjoy with a loved one. They're clever and funny and have great stories, plus the frustrating bits are that much easier when you put two heads together on a puzzle. My wife and I would always count the days until the next Sam and Max episode, so I did not hesitate to preorder the Monkey Island season the moment I learned heard this announcement last night (plus I got a free game of my choice from their site last night for doing so).
Telltale is a studio I put my full faith into, and in my 24 years of PC gaming that's been a very rare thing for me to say. Their games are well programmed, the art style is creative and attractive, and the writing is consistently outstanding. I also love that you can get a very attractive DVD of the season plus some extras for free (plus about $7 shipping) if you own the digtal download season.
Now please excuse me - I'm off to practise my insult swordfighting.
What's next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?
No, just one that says "[Citation needed]".
But seriously, Wikimedia treated CoS the same way they treat any other individual or organization that reliably skews the prose of Wikipedia. CoS should be flattered to be put on the same pedestal as other more reputable and recognized organizations.
All I'm suggesting is that each of Google's projects contribute to its overall image in some small way, and perhaps some people will perceive artificially prolonged beta periods as a problem with quality control. I'm not saying it's true - I just thing it may have been unwise from a purely superficial standpoint.
I use Google For Your Domain (now called Google Apps) on a couple of my websites as well, and since they're non-commercial websites I couldn't be more thrilled with the service. I used to run my own Windows email server (using a wonderful daemon called MailEnable) but one day a spammer broke in and brought my Pentium 3 server to its knees by flooding the outgoing queues. Since switching to Google I too use my own branding and greatly enjoy the spam filtering.
For little mom and pop shops and for hobbyists like myself Gmail is a no-brainer. For bigger enterprises, though, I'm just wondering out loud whether the beta stigma is an insurmountable smudge on Google's record.
Question for you - are your users presented with the "Google Labs BETA" link (on the inbox page and in the settings) that I've seen on other corporate implementations of Google Apps? I'm not sure I'd want my employees (if I had any, of course) to be fiddling around with what Google calls "Some crazy experimental stuff" like beer goggles, adding more mailboxes, adding Google gadget, or other such unsupported applets which may not be appropriate while dealing with confidential materials.
Of course it's easy to run your own mail server, but it's even easier and possibly more cost-effective to outsource it. But would you trust outsourcing to a company in perpetual beta? My original post is about Google's reputation for their long beta cycles, not how feasible the alternatives may be.
My point isn't necessarily that they are correctly or incorrectly labelling their product as Beta - my point is that it's been in public beta for 5 or 6 years now and that makes this company, with record profits and over 10,000 engineers, incompetent.
The thing is that Google DOES sell a few SKUs of Google Apps to individuals and enterprises, and they do promise an SLA of 99.9% uptime which they have failed to deliver during about 1/3 of all the months it's been available.
Probably the fact that the version used by paying customers isn't a beta version? The "beta" version is the free-for-use version that they use to beta test any new features they add.
The corporate and educational versions are really no different from the free versions except that they changed the Gmail Beta jpg and added more storage. They still have a Google Labs Beta in the corporate version so that your employees can enjoy the benefit of unsupported toys like beer goggles.
How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta? They should have done this 3 years ago or more. Gmail has been sufficiently stable all this time, yet this self-deprecating beta designation has constantly served as an admission of being non-committal to SLA.
I can't be the only one to notice that 5% of comments on just about every single Youtube video ask the question "what song is this?"
This is free guerrilla marketing by a genuinely enthusiastic public, with real live potential customers clamouring, publicly, to know what they're hearing and where they can get it. You can't buy marketing like that. If the music industry was smart they'd provide a free Youtube service that identifies a video's soundtrack and includes a "buy now" link to iTunes or maybe a first-party store.
I want some sort of HMD or wearable computer so badly. I want a camera to record where I go and what I do and act as a backup for my cranial memory. I want it to recognize faces to keep track of my history that person. I want an internet connection everywhere so that I can call up an alternative recipe on the fly when I realize at the last minute that I'm missing an ingredient. I want to use the sum analyses of my automotive commutes to recommend ways I can change my driving behaviour to extend the life of my car and use less fuel. I want ubiquitous, always-ready, augmented reality. I want to evolve and extend my senses beyond what any human has ever been capable of, and I want to keep my private matters private.
You're 100% correct that there's a snowball effect in place. I sincerely hope this happens to AoC as well since it's the best MMO I've ever played, thanks in large part to the community. The fact that this game is rated M means there's none of the kiddie attitude of WoW. It makes a world of difference.
It gets worse. Every time you erase a block, you reduce the lifespan of the flash. Standard MLC NAND flash can only be erased 10,000 times before it goes bad and stops storing data.
Based on what I've just told you there are two things you don't want to do when writing to flash: 1) you don't want to overwrite data, and 2) you don't want to erase data. If flash were used as a replacement for DVD-Rs then we wouldn't have a problem, but it's being used as a replacement for conventional HDDs. Who thought that would be a good idea?
I recommend you read some or all of this Anandtech article about the current state of SSD drives. The author has a clear preference for Intel SSD, with data to back up his decision, but makes it very clear that every write and delete operation you do on an SSD drive brings it that much closer to extinction. I highly recommend you at least have a look at the diagrams in this article and re-evaluate how you use your very expensive SSD.
Many programs, and especially games, make direct calls to swap and freak out if they can't find it. Disabling swap is like russian roulette. Not really worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, looks brilliant! But why does Guybrush look like DJ Richie Hawtin?
SCUMMVM's graphics filtering does wonders to smoothe out the blocky graphics when playing at high resolution. If you showed a 10-year-old the original version running on SCUMMVM with 3x scaling I bet they'd never guess how old the game is.
I agree with this 100%. I'd wager it would take relatively minimal effort to redo the art at higher resolution and upscale the locations to widescreen. DOTT is absolutely timeless.
I replayed it recently using SCUMMVM on my Gameboy DS (full talkie version) and it was a perfect game for the mobile platform. I'd gladly have repurchased it for that platform if only it were on sale!
If you strike him down he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!!!
I'm doubly thrilled at this announcement; first because I love the first two Monkey Island games, and second because it's been so long since Telltale's Sam and Max Season 2 ended and I miss playing episodic adventure games with my wife. None of Telltale's series since Sam and Max interested us so Monkey Island is doubly appreciated for finally filling the void!
These Telltale adventures are the perfect activity to enjoy with a loved one. They're clever and funny and have great stories, plus the frustrating bits are that much easier when you put two heads together on a puzzle. My wife and I would always count the days until the next Sam and Max episode, so I did not hesitate to preorder the Monkey Island season the moment I learned heard this announcement last night (plus I got a free game of my choice from their site last night for doing so).
Telltale is a studio I put my full faith into, and in my 24 years of PC gaming that's been a very rare thing for me to say. Their games are well programmed, the art style is creative and attractive, and the writing is consistently outstanding. I also love that you can get a very attractive DVD of the season plus some extras for free (plus about $7 shipping) if you own the digtal download season.
Now please excuse me - I'm off to practise my insult swordfighting.
What's next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?
No, just one that says "[Citation needed]".
But seriously, Wikimedia treated CoS the same way they treat any other individual or organization that reliably skews the prose of Wikipedia. CoS should be flattered to be put on the same pedestal as other more reputable and recognized organizations.
All I'm suggesting is that each of Google's projects contribute to its overall image in some small way, and perhaps some people will perceive artificially prolonged beta periods as a problem with quality control. I'm not saying it's true - I just thing it may have been unwise from a purely superficial standpoint.
I use Google For Your Domain (now called Google Apps) on a couple of my websites as well, and since they're non-commercial websites I couldn't be more thrilled with the service. I used to run my own Windows email server (using a wonderful daemon called MailEnable) but one day a spammer broke in and brought my Pentium 3 server to its knees by flooding the outgoing queues. Since switching to Google I too use my own branding and greatly enjoy the spam filtering.
For little mom and pop shops and for hobbyists like myself Gmail is a no-brainer. For bigger enterprises, though, I'm just wondering out loud whether the beta stigma is an insurmountable smudge on Google's record.
Question for you - are your users presented with the "Google Labs BETA" link (on the inbox page and in the settings) that I've seen on other corporate implementations of Google Apps? I'm not sure I'd want my employees (if I had any, of course) to be fiddling around with what Google calls "Some crazy experimental stuff" like beer goggles, adding more mailboxes, adding Google gadget, or other such unsupported applets which may not be appropriate while dealing with confidential materials.
Of course it's easy to run your own mail server, but it's even easier and possibly more cost-effective to outsource it. But would you trust outsourcing to a company in perpetual beta? My original post is about Google's reputation for their long beta cycles, not how feasible the alternatives may be.
My point isn't necessarily that they are correctly or incorrectly labelling their product as Beta - my point is that it's been in public beta for 5 or 6 years now and that makes this company, with record profits and over 10,000 engineers, incompetent.
The thing is that Google DOES sell a few SKUs of Google Apps to individuals and enterprises, and they do promise an SLA of 99.9% uptime which they have failed to deliver during about 1/3 of all the months it's been available.
Why does it take a company with 10,000 engineers 5 years to make a 20 year old communications protocol stable?
Is email a service you can afford to lose because Google is playing with new features?
Probably the fact that the version used by paying customers isn't a beta version? The "beta" version is the free-for-use version that they use to beta test any new features they add.
The corporate and educational versions are really no different from the free versions except that they changed the Gmail Beta jpg and added more storage. They still have a Google Labs Beta in the corporate version so that your employees can enjoy the benefit of unsupported toys like beer goggles.
How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta? They should have done this 3 years ago or more. Gmail has been sufficiently stable all this time, yet this self-deprecating beta designation has constantly served as an admission of being non-committal to SLA.
Are you suggesting musicians should start writing songs with no names?
I can't be the only one to notice that 5% of comments on just about every single Youtube video ask the question "what song is this?"
This is free guerrilla marketing by a genuinely enthusiastic public, with real live potential customers clamouring, publicly, to know what they're hearing and where they can get it. You can't buy marketing like that. If the music industry was smart they'd provide a free Youtube service that identifies a video's soundtrack and includes a "buy now" link to iTunes or maybe a first-party store.
Just wondering, is Microsoft warning governments about OpenOffice's .DOC support?
I want some sort of HMD or wearable computer so badly. I want a camera to record where I go and what I do and act as a backup for my cranial memory. I want it to recognize faces to keep track of my history that person. I want an internet connection everywhere so that I can call up an alternative recipe on the fly when I realize at the last minute that I'm missing an ingredient. I want to use the sum analyses of my automotive commutes to recommend ways I can change my driving behaviour to extend the life of my car and use less fuel. I want ubiquitous, always-ready, augmented reality. I want to evolve and extend my senses beyond what any human has ever been capable of, and I want to keep my private matters private.
Is that so much to ask?
You're 100% correct that there's a snowball effect in place. I sincerely hope this happens to AoC as well since it's the best MMO I've ever played, thanks in large part to the community. The fact that this game is rated M means there's none of the kiddie attitude of WoW. It makes a world of difference.
From the article:
I recommend you read some or all of this Anandtech article about the current state of SSD drives. The author has a clear preference for Intel SSD, with data to back up his decision, but makes it very clear that every write and delete operation you do on an SSD drive brings it that much closer to extinction. I highly recommend you at least have a look at the diagrams in this article and re-evaluate how you use your very expensive SSD.
I get SFTP too.
Many programs, and especially games, make direct calls to swap and freak out if they can't find it. Disabling swap is like russian roulette. Not really worth it.
For a $30 USB stick your scenario sounds absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to try this out.