...a Game Developer's Playground
but with macs holding <4% of the market it is not a viable playground...
I know that actually reading the article will just slow you down, but if you'd bothered, the emphasis was on developer. The guy was talking about how quick and easy it was to develop tools for his Playstation development on a Mac. Not about playing games on a Mac.
If you think that Australia has it bad, take a look at how Broadband is doing in Ireland. The prices are like USD100/month for a 512/128 kbit connection with a 3 GIG DL LIMIT!!!!
That's pretty harsh. My Aussie ADSL is the same deal (512/128, 3 gig/month limit), but it only costs about half what you're paying.
I think England is a little worse than Australia too. At least, it was last year when I was living there. NTL cable was competitively priced but didn't actually seem to be available anywhere - maybe it has improved.
Unfortunately, only portions of large metropolitan areas have access to Optus cable.
Also Optus only provide cable to houses, not apartments. When I enquired about getting connected, as soon as they heard the slash in my address, they said no. Apparently it costs slightly more to hook up an apartment (longer wire needed, I guess) and since they're overflowing with demand, they ignore all apartment dwellers in favour of the more profitable house dwellers.
So here I am with Telstra, wondering if my bill is about to go up $6/month as this rumour would have it.:-(
In a way, they kind of have. Remember, this is a 15" flat-panel display, it has nearly the effective display area of a 17" CRT monitor.
Truly. I just built a new PC, after selling my old one and moving to the other side of the world, and this time went for a flat-panel. A Hercules Prophetview, to be precise, which is a 15"-er. Measured up against the 17" CRT on a friend's machine, this is the tiniest bit smaller.. maybe it's equivalent to a 16.5" CRT.
This is easily the coolest thing I've ever bought for a PC, it's absolutely beautiful, takes up so little space, it's ultra crisp and flicker free at 1024x768, blurs up lower resolutions attractively rather than just doubling up on some pixels like the shitty display on my old laptop, and has no ghosting at all even roaring around in Serious Sam or Wolfenstein. I'm delighted, and if the screen in the new iMac is similar quality, I can guarantee you that anyone out there in consumer-land will be equally delighted.
Why do fans of a given system feel the need to freak out when there's even a hint that their pet system may not be the number one selling system? They foam at the mouth and rant and rave about stats and 'they're only selling more of the other system because blah blah blah'.
Because they made a choice and made an investment in it. The thought process goes like this: "I picked PS2/Gamecube/XBox and spent my n hundreds of $$ on it. If it turns out that it isn't the best, that means that I am the stupidest fucking idiot alive, everyone will laugh at me, and I will never have sex again. Furthermore, any suggestion that my console was not the most successful directly implies that it is not the best, and that I'm the stupidest fucking idiot alive etc. etc." So, any such suggestion needs to be attacked, viciously.
These arguments have been absolutely identical ever since I was a 10 year old kid arguing over whether a C64 kicked a TRS-80's ass or whether both of them kicked Microbee's ass, and I'm sure they were identical long before I encountered them then.
It's not that odd, since everything that can run W95 can run W98 too, IOW there is no reason not to upgrade from W95 to W98.
How about not wanting to spend $106.99 upgrading a shitty installation that's only there so I can play some Windows games?
Re:Fast CPUs might be bad.
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Yay, karma whore.
The instant I saw this story on the front page, I knew one of the first comments would be "what's the use of faster CPUs blah blah blah software is bloated blah blah blah I don't need it blah blah blah". And I knew it would be modded up as interesting, insightful, etc.
It's not interesting and it's not insightful. It's an utterly banal and uninteresting observation, that some whore trots out every time Slashdot runs a story that hints that CPUs in the future will actually be faster than CPUs today. Moderators, don't encourage it, please!
Krapangor, go home. If you don't want a faster CPU, we don't care. Some people will be buying or upgrading next year, and the fact that AMD and Intel both hope to be on 0.13micron process early in the year is stuff that matters to them.
If they are only paying 5 to 15% they will get screwed if banking gets established instead. The going credit card rate is around 18% and some loans are even higher. 5% sounds like a great deal.
He's not talking interest rates, he's talking "commission" for wire transfers. ie you send home $100 via this service, your folks only receive $85-$95, the company skims off $5-$15.
However, given that most banks (in the UK and Australia at least) tend to have about a 10% difference between their buying and selling exchange rates, AND charge several % in commission, AND have a minimum commission for small conversions.. it all doesn't sound too bad to me.
Interesting benchmark of Intel's compiler vs. gcc 2.95.4, but what about gcc 3.0? I'd love to see how that compared, given that I've heard such mixed opinions about whether it's optimisation tends to be better, worse, or the same as the 2.95 series..
I betcha this "0backlash0" character is actually the guy that currently has the domain registered and is running the porn site on it. He's invoking a slashdotting to get his banner ad hits up.:-)
The same thing is said every time Slashdot posts a story concerning any upcoming CPU which will be faster than what's available at present! It's a popular and successful karma whore..
Interestingly, I guess this is the case in the USA (based on all the other comments to this story). It certainly isn't in Australia or the UK (the only two countries I've lived and worked in). Apologies to any Americans who were left wondering what I was exploding about.:-)
You go after them in bankruptcy court. Michael's intimation that somehow the employees' theivery is justified in these situations is just so stupid it makes me sick.
Crap. The system is totally set against the worker (who do you think comes last in the list of who gets paid from the liquidated assets of a bankrupt company?), so you got to take care of yourself outside the system. Why should that laptop get sold so some bank the company owes money to can avoid writing off a thousand bucks worth of bad debt (amongst its billion dollar profits for the year) rather than being sold to feed the family of an employee who's been stiffed out of a month's pay? Employees should absolutely be the first to get paid when a company gets liquidated, and as long as they aren't, anyone who takes the law into their own hands is a Robin Hood figure, as far as I'm concerned.
In the UK, the situation is somewhat similar to the US, but with a few differences: credit, but particularly debit card usage is on the increase for payment of small debts, whilst cheques are slowly going out of fashion for personal use.
Slowly is the word for cheques. I've lived the last 15 months in the UK after spending all my life in Australia, and I can't believe how much cheque use there is here. I honestly never saw anyone ever pay by cheque in a restaurant or supermarket in Australia - that seems not uncommon at all here in England.
Of course, I believe Australians are among the heaviest abusers of credit cards in the world, so that's probably part of it. Lord know I contributed to that reputation in my youth..:-)
One interesting thing that I haven't seen in other countries (but may simply not have noticed) is the Direct Debit scheme.
Yeah.. I'm a bit dubious about it, but I do it for a couple of bills and haven't had any problems. A good rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone who has displayed considerable incompetence, don't trust them with direct debit. e.g. getting my phone connected via NTL was a complete saga of idiocy on their part, so there's no way they're getting their hands on my bank account. They can just send me a bill and wait to get paid, even if they do offer a £2/month discount for direct debits. Cretins.
Re:This is starting to become a pattern...
on
Simsville Canceled
·
· Score: 2
Companies are cancelling projects that don't meet their standards. They seem to think the loss of big money already thrown into the project is less important than the loss of reputation due to a shoddy product.
According to a friend of mine in the industry, a lot of this is also due to marketing expenses. Marketing a game costs so much that if you think it's going to flop, it's better to axe it (even if it's completely finished!) and lose the money spent developing, than to spend more money marketing it. It'd be throwing good money after bad.
Indeed. Not only did I learn that it had been done, but also that the Empire State Building had been destroyed by a terrorist with a hugely distended rectum.
But it is not perfect. What about exact pharse searches? Try this search on google. "to be or not to be, that is the question" Google first hit is something about horticulture, huh?!? "To spray or not to spray?" And the rest of the hits have nothing to do with Shakespeare.
Notice the message that Google gave you along with that query: The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be that is.
If you read The Basics of Google Search, you'll see that to force searching for common words, you need to use a plus sign. Hence, the correct query is "+to +be +or not +to +be, +that +is the question". Plug that in, hit "I'm feeling lucky", and bing! You're at Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.
In fact, the only way this DVD could not suck is if you got a copy which accidentally had a different movie pressed onto it.
Re:The numbers don't work
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
HP has a market cap of about $1.5B, CPQ has $24B.
Where on earth did you get those numbers?? According to Datastream Advance, Compaq has a market value of about $21B, but HP is about $45B! I think you might have been looking up the wrong company when you found that $1.5B number..
Re:Why buy them hardback when you can get softcove
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure how the "adult versions" they refer to differ from the normal versions - perhaps a bit extra content?
No, it's just a different cover. Seriously. So many adults loved the books but said they were embarrassed to read them on the train or whatever because they looked like kids books. So the printed an edition with fairly dull serious looking covers, for uptight adults to read in public.:-)
I agree with Captain Frisk that this appears to be a bad take-off on a bad parody of a flame-baiting troll
Actually, it was intended as a sarcastic rejoinder to Katz's breathless "I've just discovered this kewl new piece of 'sci-fi' which might, just might, be almost as good as Star Wars!" tone. I wasn't seriously trolling, although it does seem that I got a few bites.
but it is amazing how many readers of fantasy (even high-quality fantasy) don't know (a) how much modern fantasy owes to JRRT and TLOTR
Truly. Although I disagree with the common line of reasoning that if [some work of fantasy] would not be around without Tolkien's pioneering, it follows that [some work of fantasy] must necessarily be an inferior work.
(b) how incredibly detailed the world of TLORT is in terms of history, politics, economy, etc.
..sadly combined with incredibly weakly realized characters and horrible dialog..
It took me a while to convince him that LOTR came first, and that without it Redwall probably wouldn't exist.
What's a Redwall?
Similarly, while George Lucas acknowledges many sources for SW:ANH, Tolkein is not least among them.
Don't tell Katz that! Lucas is influenced by nothing other than his own godlike intellect and creativity! SW is 100% original! Also, don't tell him that the hobbits aren't really a metaphor for the oppressed geeks of the earth, bullied by the orcs (=jocks), Sauron (=Bill Gates) and Saruman (="The Man") !!
Slashdot Mirror
but with macs holding <4% of the market it is not a viable playground...
I know that actually reading the article will just slow you down, but if you'd bothered, the emphasis was on developer. The guy was talking about how quick and easy it was to develop tools for his Playstation development on a Mac. Not about playing games on a Mac.
If you think that Australia has it bad, take a look at how Broadband is doing in Ireland. The prices are like USD100/month for a 512/128 kbit connection with a 3 GIG DL LIMIT!!!!
That's pretty harsh. My Aussie ADSL is the same deal (512/128, 3 gig/month limit), but it only costs about half what you're paying.
I think England is a little worse than Australia too. At least, it was last year when I was living there. NTL cable was competitively priced but didn't actually seem to be available anywhere - maybe it has improved.
Unfortunately, only portions of large metropolitan areas have access to Optus cable.
Also Optus only provide cable to houses, not apartments. When I enquired about getting connected, as soon as they heard the slash in my address, they said no. Apparently it costs slightly more to hook up an apartment (longer wire needed, I guess) and since they're overflowing with demand, they ignore all apartment dwellers in favour of the more profitable house dwellers.
So here I am with Telstra, wondering if my bill is about to go up $6/month as this rumour would have it. :-(
In a way, they kind of have. Remember, this is a 15" flat-panel display, it has nearly the effective display area of a 17" CRT monitor.
Truly. I just built a new PC, after selling my old one and moving to the other side of the world, and this time went for a flat-panel. A Hercules Prophetview, to be precise, which is a 15"-er. Measured up against the 17" CRT on a friend's machine, this is the tiniest bit smaller.. maybe it's equivalent to a 16.5" CRT.
This is easily the coolest thing I've ever bought for a PC, it's absolutely beautiful, takes up so little space, it's ultra crisp and flicker free at 1024x768, blurs up lower resolutions attractively rather than just doubling up on some pixels like the shitty display on my old laptop, and has no ghosting at all even roaring around in Serious Sam or Wolfenstein. I'm delighted, and if the screen in the new iMac is similar quality, I can guarantee you that anyone out there in consumer-land will be equally delighted.
Why do fans of a given system feel the need to freak out when there's even a hint that their pet system may not be the number one selling system? They foam at the mouth and rant and rave about stats and 'they're only selling more of the other system because blah blah blah'.
Because they made a choice and made an investment in it. The thought process goes like this: "I picked PS2/Gamecube/XBox and spent my n hundreds of $$ on it. If it turns out that it isn't the best, that means that I am the stupidest fucking idiot alive, everyone will laugh at me, and I will never have sex again. Furthermore, any suggestion that my console was not the most successful directly implies that it is not the best, and that I'm the stupidest fucking idiot alive etc. etc." So, any such suggestion needs to be attacked, viciously.
These arguments have been absolutely identical ever since I was a 10 year old kid arguing over whether a C64 kicked a TRS-80's ass or whether both of them kicked Microbee's ass, and I'm sure they were identical long before I encountered them then.
Ever looked at an .advocacy group on Usenet?
It's not that odd, since everything that can run W95 can run W98 too, IOW there is no reason not to upgrade from W95 to W98.
How about not wanting to spend $106.99 upgrading a shitty installation that's only there so I can play some Windows games?
Yay, karma whore.
The instant I saw this story on the front page, I knew one of the first comments would be "what's the use of faster CPUs blah blah blah software is bloated blah blah blah I don't need it blah blah blah". And I knew it would be modded up as interesting, insightful, etc.
It's not interesting and it's not insightful. It's an utterly banal and uninteresting observation, that some whore trots out every time Slashdot runs a story that hints that CPUs in the future will actually be faster than CPUs today. Moderators, don't encourage it, please!
Krapangor, go home. If you don't want a faster CPU, we don't care. Some people will be buying or upgrading next year, and the fact that AMD and Intel both hope to be on 0.13micron process early in the year is stuff that matters to them.
If they are only paying 5 to 15% they will get screwed if banking gets established instead. The going credit card rate is around 18% and some loans are even higher. 5% sounds like a great deal.
He's not talking interest rates, he's talking "commission" for wire transfers. ie you send home $100 via this service, your folks only receive $85-$95, the company skims off $5-$15.
However, given that most banks (in the UK and Australia at least) tend to have about a 10% difference between their buying and selling exchange rates, AND charge several % in commission, AND have a minimum commission for small conversions.. it all doesn't sound too bad to me.
they could do this just by storing a serial number that the game uses on each CD, avoiding the silly mistake-prone key typing.
Dude, CDs are mass produced. That means they have to all be the same. That's why the keycode is always on a little sticker stuck onto the box.
Interesting benchmark of Intel's compiler vs. gcc 2.95.4, but what about gcc 3.0? I'd love to see how that compared, given that I've heard such mixed opinions about whether it's optimisation tends to be better, worse, or the same as the 2.95 series..
I betcha this "0backlash0" character is actually the guy that currently has the domain registered and is running the porn site on it. He's invoking a slashdotting to get his banner ad hits up. :-)
The same thing was said 3 months ago.. :)
The same thing is said every time Slashdot posts a story concerning any upcoming CPU which will be faster than what's available at present! It's a popular and successful karma whore..
The workers are the first to get paid.
Interestingly, I guess this is the case in the USA (based on all the other comments to this story). It certainly isn't in Australia or the UK (the only two countries I've lived and worked in). Apologies to any Americans who were left wondering what I was exploding about. :-)
You go after them in bankruptcy court. Michael's intimation that somehow the employees' theivery is justified in these situations is just so stupid it makes me sick.
Crap. The system is totally set against the worker (who do you think comes last in the list of who gets paid from the liquidated assets of a bankrupt company?), so you got to take care of yourself outside the system. Why should that laptop get sold so some bank the company owes money to can avoid writing off a thousand bucks worth of bad debt (amongst its billion dollar profits for the year) rather than being sold to feed the family of an employee who's been stiffed out of a month's pay? Employees should absolutely be the first to get paid when a company gets liquidated, and as long as they aren't, anyone who takes the law into their own hands is a Robin Hood figure, as far as I'm concerned.
In the UK, the situation is somewhat similar to the US, but with a few differences: credit, but particularly debit card usage is on the increase for payment of small debts, whilst cheques are slowly going out of fashion for personal use.
Slowly is the word for cheques. I've lived the last 15 months in the UK after spending all my life in Australia, and I can't believe how much cheque use there is here. I honestly never saw anyone ever pay by cheque in a restaurant or supermarket in Australia - that seems not uncommon at all here in England.
Of course, I believe Australians are among the heaviest abusers of credit cards in the world, so that's probably part of it. Lord know I contributed to that reputation in my youth.. :-)
One interesting thing that I haven't seen in other countries (but may simply not have noticed) is the Direct Debit scheme.
Yeah.. I'm a bit dubious about it, but I do it for a couple of bills and haven't had any problems. A good rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone who has displayed considerable incompetence, don't trust them with direct debit. e.g. getting my phone connected via NTL was a complete saga of idiocy on their part, so there's no way they're getting their hands on my bank account. They can just send me a bill and wait to get paid, even if they do offer a £2/month discount for direct debits. Cretins.
Companies are cancelling projects that don't meet their standards. They seem to think the loss of big money already thrown into the project is less important than the loss of reputation due to a shoddy product.
According to a friend of mine in the industry, a lot of this is also due to marketing expenses. Marketing a game costs so much that if you think it's going to flop, it's better to axe it (even if it's completely finished!) and lose the money spent developing, than to spend more money marketing it. It'd be throwing good money after bad.
It's been done - check the lower scored posts..
Indeed. Not only did I learn that it had been done, but also that the Empire State Building had been destroyed by a terrorist with a hugely distended rectum.
So, who'll be the first to complain that it should have been called "Cracking Linux Exposed" ..?
But it is not perfect. What about exact pharse searches? Try this search on google. "to be or not to be, that is the question" Google first hit is something about horticulture, huh?!? "To spray or not to spray?" And the rest of the hits have nothing to do with Shakespeare.
Notice the message that Google gave you along with that query:
The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be that is.
If you read The Basics of Google Search, you'll see that to force searching for common words, you need to use a plus sign. Hence, the correct query is "+to +be +or not +to +be, +that +is the question". Plug that in, hit "I'm feeling lucky", and bing! You're at Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.
In fact it was remarkably mediocre.
In fact, the only way this DVD could not suck is if you got a copy which accidentally had a different movie pressed onto it.
HP has a market cap of about $1.5B, CPQ has $24B.
Where on earth did you get those numbers?? According to Datastream Advance, Compaq has a market value of about $21B, but HP is about $45B! I think you might have been looking up the wrong company when you found that $1.5B number..
I'm not sure how the "adult versions" they refer to differ from the normal versions - perhaps a bit extra content?
No, it's just a different cover. Seriously. So many adults loved the books but said they were embarrassed to read them on the train or whatever because they looked like kids books. So the printed an edition with fairly dull serious looking covers, for uptight adults to read in public. :-)
From your Amazon link: here is the standard edition, and here is the adult edition.
p.s. a picture of Miss Flannery for you, Shoe.
All in all it's a fairly interesting approach and I intend to study it further.
You're not fooling anyone, Shoeboy! "Intend to study it further" my foot, you're lusting after this poor girl, admit it! What will Heidi say??
I agree with Captain Frisk that this appears to be a bad take-off on a bad parody of a flame-baiting troll
Actually, it was intended as a sarcastic rejoinder to Katz's breathless "I've just discovered this kewl new piece of 'sci-fi' which might, just might, be almost as good as Star Wars!" tone. I wasn't seriously trolling, although it does seem that I got a few bites.
but it is amazing how many readers of fantasy (even high-quality fantasy) don't know (a) how much modern fantasy owes to JRRT and TLOTR
Truly. Although I disagree with the common line of reasoning that if [some work of fantasy] would not be around without Tolkien's pioneering, it follows that [some work of fantasy] must necessarily be an inferior work.
(b) how incredibly detailed the world of TLORT is in terms of history, politics, economy, etc.
..sadly combined with incredibly weakly realized characters and horrible dialog..
It took me a while to convince him that LOTR came first, and that without it Redwall probably wouldn't exist.
What's a Redwall?
Similarly, while George Lucas acknowledges many sources for SW:ANH, Tolkein is not least among them.
Don't tell Katz that! Lucas is influenced by nothing other than his own godlike intellect and creativity! SW is 100% original! Also, don't tell him that the hobbits aren't really a metaphor for the oppressed geeks of the earth, bullied by the orcs (=jocks), Sauron (=Bill Gates) and Saruman (="The Man") !!