They only charge a monthly fee if you want to own land. If you have friends who own land, they can let you hang out on it for free. You can build at your friends' place, or in a public sandbox.
Uploading textures/animations/sounds costs L$10 apiece. Free accounts no longer get a monthly stipend, so you'll have to pump money in now and then. A few bucks goes a long way: the current exchange rate is L$272 = US$1.
Of course, there are other reasons to stay off of SL.
Gunstar Heroes. Dynamite Headdy. Sin & Punishment: Successor To The Earth.
And possibly more of Treasure's games - if you haven't played any of their titles, you really owe it to yourself to skim their gameography via emulators, at least, and pick the ones that appeal to you to play on the real hardware. "Radiant Silvergun" appears on almost every 'top 10 shmups' list I've ever seen - and if it doesn't, there's usually a paragraph explaining why.
I have not played more than a tease of Okami but it's one of the few games out there that really makes me think of getting a PS2 again. You're an all-powerful creation goddess in the form of a wolf; flowers spring up in your wake, and you have a button that does absolutely nothing except make you go 'woof!'. It's wonderful.
Katamari Damancy. Maybe KD2 but it's really struck me as being What The Fans Asked For.
Rez. Shootemups are about putting you in a timeless, mindless place, and Rez is really, really good at that.
Maybe also Gungrave. It, too, is a beautifully stylized shooter, with an emphasis on rhythm (though not as overtly as Rez). It requires a LOT of rhythmic button pushing which might be painful, though. Short but sweet.
Soul Reaver. Skip all the other slow, leaden games of the Kain series; SR is a great blend of action and story, with lovely music, that its sequels ruined. Be warned, the story doesn't end in one game, but the other Soul Reaver games are work, not fun.
Ape Escape. don't worry about the sequel, it added nothing.
One on one instruction? Heh. My mother has said that the one thing she really wishes she could have done with my education was tutoring from people who could keep up with me.
Before school, I was hot for Weird Math - I ate up all the Martin Garnder "Mathematical Recreations" collections I could find, loved playing with all the concepts. Then I went to school. My main memory of math in school is sitting out in the hall in third or fourth grade with an exercise book of dull, dull fraction drill stuff I'd gotten the hang of forever, because I was way ahead of the rest of the class, and disruptive due to being BORED BORED BORED.
I barely know a damn thing about math nowadays. By the time anything even remotely interesting got introduced I'd completely lost interest.
Some years later when the boring, slow, dull math concept of the moment was square roots and the immensely tedious process of calculating them by hand, I was so bored I just plain refused to bother with them. We got a friend in the neighborhood - a structural engineer of some kind, IIRC - to give me some idea of when they might be used, and show me how to do them, including faster ways than the show-every-boring-bit-of-work methods the school textbook had.
I would like to say I still remember how to do them, but, well, I've really never needed to do one by hand since.
Smart kids need one-on-one education as much as any other "special needs" class. They just need a really different kind - one that can keep them INTERESTED, one that can call in esoteric specialists to help them pick up whatever path they become fascinated with, and can use this to slide in other curriculum elements outside of their speciality...
Except the featured Firefox addon of the moment is "Sage", using the search box on the Firefox addons page for "jahjah" gets nothing, and jahjah.com doesn't seem to exist.
Although Googling for "jahjah voip" does return hits, so whatever.
Just who are these Gartner folks and why should anyone listen to them? The only time I ever hear about them is in stories like this- "Analyst firm Gartner claimed that Apple should stop doing what they're doing and start acting like every other computer company".
Seriously, every time I see these folks mentioned it seems like it's in this sort of context. Analyst firm Gartner claims that $company would do better if it started following the herd.
The Slingbox family of products enable you to watch and control your TV anywhere you are from virtually any Internet-connected laptop, PDA, or Windows cell phone.
- from Sling Media's site, for people like me who just kinda avoid TV, since both summary and article seem to assume you know what it is.
"Image Metrics assisted in the making of Polar Express and are currently working on a number of major projects soon to be publicly announced."
Polar Express: this facial mo-cap technology. (albiet an earlier version) Pixar: animators building each scene.
So I think Salzbrot's point was that we need to spend time and money on better animation if we want animated films that aren't full of creepy wax dolls, because their flagship use of this technology lost all the subtelties that a human cares about.
There will be some things it is suitable for, and some things it's useless for. I can't see this having much use in the production of a show based around drawings, for instance!
Back during the production of "Snow White", Disney shot a lot of reference film. Some of the animators leaned heavily on this, essentially just rotoscoping the model and stylizing her a little into Snow White. Master animator Grim Natwick would refer to the first and last frames of his reference film, to make sure it hooked up properly with the adjoining scenes, and essentially ignored the rest.
Guess whose scenes had the most life in them?
For some purposes, the raw data out of this will be fine. For other, it's a starting point for an animator to go over, and possibly completely abandon.
Power users can make smart playlists to do a lot of these sorts of things.
In fact, now that I know iTunes has a 'last skipped' filter (thanks!), I can make my 'not recently played' smart playlist actually work:
Last Played is not in the last 5 weeks, Date Added is not in the last 2 weeks (because I want to avoid stuff I just got), Last Skipped is not in the last 5 weeks, Comment does not contain "difficult". (some things just don't work in general rotation...)
Well, a lot of the IF community got into these games back when an 80-column display on a home computer was high tech. The medium has been proclaimed dead as a commercial form, and lives solely due to the efforts of hobbyists, who are (for the most part) writing esoteric, artsy games.
The process of playing the games requires hard thought, and most modern IF is by and for people who've played all the classics of the field. Comparing a modern IF game of the type found in these yearly competitions to most modern computer toys isn't just like sitting down with a book versus watching a movie; it's like deciding to learn Greek while reading Plato, rather than watching this summer's sure-fire action hit. These are games by and for a relatively small and specialized community.
That said, dude, the download page for the competition games tells you what to do, it has a package of interpreters for Windows, it has a link to the best Mac interpreter, it has the games. What more do you want? I've had more hassle figuring out how to play emulated console games than this would be.
paid users won't see sponsored stuff -- ignore the previous post. paid users won't ever see ads. that's why you paid, and we're not in the business of pissing off paid users. (just in the business of writing misleading posts to paid users, apparently... *sigh*)
-Brad, creator of LJ, in what is now the top post on lj_biz, citing miscommunication between coding and advertising folks.
IIRC I remember seeing a couple screenshots of a concentration camp administrator game in an Amiga magazine once, years ago. It was supposedly made by some German nazi wannabe teens.
I'm sure that as more and more people have easier and easier game-making tools, other people of a similar bent have written similar games on newer platforms.
Obviously these things aren't going to be for-profit big-budget games. But they exist.
It sounds like this particular game is not really about glorifying the Columbine shootings. I dunno, I haven't played it.
Why is it necessary for there to be deep, nuanced critique of books, movies, or music?
The "gaming audience" and politicians may not be interested in this sort of criticism, but there are people who want to make games, or want to think about them on other levels besides "GAMEPLAY: 8/10 GRAPHICS: 10/10 MUSIC:3/10 OVERALL SCORE: 95%!!!".
Insightful criticism can help reveal ways of approaching the medium that are not immediately obvious from a simple viewing. Some creators will take inspiration from this sort of thinking.
It's the difference between passive and active spreading of information.
You know how you clip funny cartoons out and stick them on your cubicle wall, if you have an office job? Suddenly, little elves are sneaking around and Xeeroxing those cartoons and handing them out to every single one of your friends. You didn't want them to see it that badly. But the elves think it's of incredible importance, and everyone needs to know you got a chuckle out of that Dilbert with the joke about the obnoxious co-worker having toilet problems the instant they get to the office!
Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in
Type a path? That takes forever! Hit the Finder in the dock and drag the folder you want into the file selector. Or drag the exact file you want. Most of the time I have the folder I'm working in open in the Finder anyway. If you have frequently-visited folders, drop them into the Finder's sidebar. They show up in the file dialogues too, then. If you must type, you could switch to the Finder and do apple-shift-g to type in the precise path and drag the folder in - OSX still has the 'drag the folder icon from a window's title bar to drag the folder' behavior that 9 did. Or you could pop up Quicksilver and navigate to the folder by the keyboard, then drag it in.
I still haven't managed to teach one aging Mac fanatic friend the difference between closing a document window and closing an application
Except in the case of a very few apps that suck up CPU, why does this matter? Stop using it and it'll get swapped out to disc. Most of the time I'll have had Illustrator and Photoshop running for days on end. They swap in when I ask for them, they swap back out when I go do something else. Why do I explicitly need to "run" an application that's an essential part of my toolkit? I'll need it again in a few hours, and it'll be there in a matter of seconds instead of the several minutes it takes to start up. Hell, if it's running, it might make it easier to get back to something in progress: some apps expose their recent documents list in their dock menu!
I'll agree that brushed metal/normal finder is stupid. I use Shapeshifter and the 'Good Grey' scheme to get rid of that. And the 'give us $25 more to unlock Quicktime Pro' is stupid, too.
The original question seemed to be all about 'how do I communicate a bunch of forms to programmers without actually learning how to give them HTML?'. Paper works pretty much as well as anything else, IMHO.
Ideally, of course, a "ubiquitous web designer" would be able to, you know, open up a text editor and pull out their favorite cheatsheet to refresh themselves on how forms work and give the programmer something to work with. But somehow it sounds like the original questioner is convinced they can never learn HTML.
Blogger has a templating language now! How terribly newsworthy.
It's not like any blog system before this ever had conditionals!
Bonus points to the article for putting a table in monospaced Flyspeck 3 and having it in the middle of a design that completely breaks when you bump up the text size.
Paper-making is not a closed source process. You won't be betraying the ideals of the open source movement if you pick up a pen or pencil and just start doodling.
You can probably do a couple iterations on your design in the time it takes you to install and boot up any software package. Hand the best one to the programmer, or scan it and e-mail it to her.
Given that one can sum up the half the problems with the current games industry as "games by men! for men!" I can't really see this logo attracting new, non-HARDCORE!!! audiences.
If you want GPS, music playing, games, contacts, alarms, and whatnot all in one device you'll need a piece of hardware - but these days your celphone probably does all the address book stuff that PDAs were originally sold for.
Bandwidth of a 737 full of tapes: 100% data loss when the TSA hears a rumor about a plot to blow up planes via bombs concealed in fake thumbdrives, and makes you throw every single one of them away at the security checkpoint.
More and more blog packages that you run on your own servers have OpenID plugins, but as far as I know 6A's TypePad is the only hosted solution that has it built in. Funny, that.
Slashdot Mirror
They only charge a monthly fee if you want to own land. If you have friends who own land, they can let you hang out on it for free. You can build at your friends' place, or in a public sandbox.
Uploading textures/animations/sounds costs L$10 apiece. Free accounts no longer get a monthly stipend, so you'll have to pump money in now and then. A few bucks goes a long way: the current exchange rate is L$272 = US$1.
Of course, there are other reasons to stay off of SL.
Gunstar Heroes.
Dynamite Headdy.
Sin & Punishment: Successor To The Earth.
And possibly more of Treasure's games - if you haven't played any of their titles, you really owe it to yourself to skim their gameography via emulators, at least, and pick the ones that appeal to you to play on the real hardware. "Radiant Silvergun" appears on almost every 'top 10 shmups' list I've ever seen - and if it doesn't, there's usually a paragraph explaining why.
I have not played more than a tease of Okami but it's one of the few games out there that really makes me think of getting a PS2 again. You're an all-powerful creation goddess in the form of a wolf; flowers spring up in your wake, and you have a button that does absolutely nothing except make you go 'woof!'. It's wonderful.
Katamari Damancy. Maybe KD2 but it's really struck me as being What The Fans Asked For.
Rez. Shootemups are about putting you in a timeless, mindless place, and Rez is really, really good at that.
Maybe also Gungrave. It, too, is a beautifully stylized shooter, with an emphasis on rhythm (though not as overtly as Rez). It requires a LOT of rhythmic button pushing which might be painful, though. Short but sweet.
Soul Reaver. Skip all the other slow, leaden games of the Kain series; SR is a great blend of action and story, with lovely music, that its sequels ruined. Be warned, the story doesn't end in one game, but the other Soul Reaver games are work, not fun.
Ape Escape. don't worry about the sequel, it added nothing.
One on one instruction? Heh. My mother has said that the one thing she really wishes she could have done with my education was tutoring from people who could keep up with me.
Before school, I was hot for Weird Math - I ate up all the Martin Garnder "Mathematical Recreations" collections I could find, loved playing with all the concepts. Then I went to school. My main memory of math in school is sitting out in the hall in third or fourth grade with an exercise book of dull, dull fraction drill stuff I'd gotten the hang of forever, because I was way ahead of the rest of the class, and disruptive due to being BORED BORED BORED.
I barely know a damn thing about math nowadays. By the time anything even remotely interesting got introduced I'd completely lost interest.
Some years later when the boring, slow, dull math concept of the moment was square roots and the immensely tedious process of calculating them by hand, I was so bored I just plain refused to bother with them. We got a friend in the neighborhood - a structural engineer of some kind, IIRC - to give me some idea of when they might be used, and show me how to do them, including faster ways than the show-every-boring-bit-of-work methods the school textbook had.
I would like to say I still remember how to do them, but, well, I've really never needed to do one by hand since.
Smart kids need one-on-one education as much as any other "special needs" class. They just need a really different kind - one that can keep them INTERESTED, one that can call in esoteric specialists to help them pick up whatever path they become fascinated with, and can use this to slide in other curriculum elements outside of their speciality...
I'd get the same thing repeatedly if I reloaded repeatedly. Could be browser cache issues; I didn't probe.
Never mind, their site works now - and the Firefox featured addon is Clipmarks. Said feature seems to be randomly selected every minute or two.
Except the featured Firefox addon of the moment is "Sage", using the search box on the Firefox addons page for "jahjah" gets nothing, and jahjah.com doesn't seem to exist.
Although Googling for "jahjah voip" does return hits, so whatever.
Just who are these Gartner folks and why should anyone listen to them? The only time I ever hear about them is in stories like this- "Analyst firm Gartner claimed that Apple should stop doing what they're doing and start acting like every other computer company".
Seriously, every time I see these folks mentioned it seems like it's in this sort of context. Analyst firm Gartner claims that $company would do better if it started following the herd.
- from Sling Media's site, for people like me who just kinda avoid TV, since both summary and article seem to assume you know what it is.
Go to the company's Flash site, hit 'Productions', then 'Films'.
"Image Metrics assisted in the making of Polar Express and are currently working on a number of major projects soon to be publicly announced."
Polar Express: this facial mo-cap technology. (albiet an earlier version)
Pixar: animators building each scene.
So I think Salzbrot's point was that we need to spend time and money on better animation if we want animated films that aren't full of creepy wax dolls, because their flagship use of this technology lost all the subtelties that a human cares about.
It's another tool.
There will be some things it is suitable for, and some things it's useless for. I can't see this having much use in the production of a show based around drawings, for instance!
Back during the production of "Snow White", Disney shot a lot of reference film. Some of the animators leaned heavily on this, essentially just rotoscoping the model and stylizing her a little into Snow White. Master animator Grim Natwick would refer to the first and last frames of his reference film, to make sure it hooked up properly with the adjoining scenes, and essentially ignored the rest.
Guess whose scenes had the most life in them?
For some purposes, the raw data out of this will be fine. For other, it's a starting point for an animator to go over, and possibly completely abandon.
Power users can make smart playlists to do a lot of these sorts of things.
In fact, now that I know iTunes has a 'last skipped' filter (thanks!), I can make my 'not recently played' smart playlist actually work:
Last Played is not in the last 5 weeks,
Date Added is not in the last 2 weeks (because I want to avoid stuff I just got),
Last Skipped is not in the last 5 weeks,
Comment does not contain "difficult". (some things just don't work in general rotation...)
Well, a lot of the IF community got into these games back when an 80-column display on a home computer was high tech. The medium has been proclaimed dead as a commercial form, and lives solely due to the efforts of hobbyists, who are (for the most part) writing esoteric, artsy games.
The process of playing the games requires hard thought, and most modern IF is by and for people who've played all the classics of the field. Comparing a modern IF game of the type found in these yearly competitions to most modern computer toys isn't just like sitting down with a book versus watching a movie; it's like deciding to learn Greek while reading Plato, rather than watching this summer's sure-fire action hit. These are games by and for a relatively small and specialized community.
That said, dude, the download page for the competition games tells you what to do, it has a package of interpreters for Windows, it has a link to the best Mac interpreter, it has the games. What more do you want? I've had more hassle figuring out how to play emulated console games than this would be.
-Brad, creator of LJ, in what is now the top post on lj_biz, citing miscommunication between coding and advertising folks.
IIRC I remember seeing a couple screenshots of a concentration camp administrator game in an Amiga magazine once, years ago. It was supposedly made by some German nazi wannabe teens.
I'm sure that as more and more people have easier and easier game-making tools, other people of a similar bent have written similar games on newer platforms.
Obviously these things aren't going to be for-profit big-budget games. But they exist.
It sounds like this particular game is not really about glorifying the Columbine shootings. I dunno, I haven't played it.
Why is it necessary for there to be deep, nuanced critique of books, movies, or music?
The "gaming audience" and politicians may not be interested in this sort of criticism, but there are people who want to make games, or want to think about them on other levels besides "GAMEPLAY: 8/10 GRAPHICS: 10/10 MUSIC:3/10 OVERALL SCORE: 95%!!!".
Insightful criticism can help reveal ways of approaching the medium that are not immediately obvious from a simple viewing. Some creators will take inspiration from this sort of thinking.
Are we doing anything like what their aims are? Are we pulling out of the Middle East? Nope. They're not winning. We sure as hell haven't won either.
It's the difference between passive and active spreading of information.
You know how you clip funny cartoons out and stick them on your cubicle wall, if you have an office job? Suddenly, little elves are sneaking around and Xeeroxing those cartoons and handing them out to every single one of your friends. You didn't want them to see it that badly. But the elves think it's of incredible importance, and everyone needs to know you got a chuckle out of that Dilbert with the joke about the obnoxious co-worker having toilet problems the instant they get to the office!
Dock: So turn the zoom factor down.
Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in
Type a path? That takes forever! Hit the Finder in the dock and drag the folder you want into the file selector. Or drag the exact file you want. Most of the time I have the folder I'm working in open in the Finder anyway.
If you have frequently-visited folders, drop them into the Finder's sidebar. They show up in the file dialogues too, then. If you must type, you could switch to the Finder and do apple-shift-g to type in the precise path and drag the folder in - OSX still has the 'drag the folder icon from a window's title bar to drag the folder' behavior that 9 did. Or you could pop up Quicksilver and navigate to the folder by the keyboard, then drag it in.
I still haven't managed to teach one aging Mac fanatic friend the difference between closing a document window and closing an application
Except in the case of a very few apps that suck up CPU, why does this matter? Stop using it and it'll get swapped out to disc. Most of the time I'll have had Illustrator and Photoshop running for days on end. They swap in when I ask for them, they swap back out when I go do something else. Why do I explicitly need to "run" an application that's an essential part of my toolkit? I'll need it again in a few hours, and it'll be there in a matter of seconds instead of the several minutes it takes to start up. Hell, if it's running, it might make it easier to get back to something in progress: some apps expose their recent documents list in their dock menu!
I'll agree that brushed metal/normal finder is stupid. I use Shapeshifter and the 'Good Grey' scheme to get rid of that. And the 'give us $25 more to unlock Quicktime Pro' is stupid, too.
The original question seemed to be all about 'how do I communicate a bunch of forms to programmers without actually learning how to give them HTML?'. Paper works pretty much as well as anything else, IMHO.
Ideally, of course, a "ubiquitous web designer" would be able to, you know, open up a text editor and pull out their favorite cheatsheet to refresh themselves on how forms work and give the programmer something to work with. But somehow it sounds like the original questioner is convinced they can never learn HTML.
Blogger has a templating language now! How terribly newsworthy.
It's not like any blog system before this ever had conditionals!
Bonus points to the article for putting a table in monospaced Flyspeck 3 and having it in the middle of a design that completely breaks when you bump up the text size.
Paper-making is not a closed source process. You won't be betraying the ideals of the open source movement if you pick up a pen or pencil and just start doodling.
You can probably do a couple iterations on your design in the time it takes you to install and boot up any software package. Hand the best one to the programmer, or scan it and e-mail it to her.
You know what I read this logo as?
"MAN! FESTER games".
Given that one can sum up the half the problems with the current games industry as "games by men! for men!" I can't really see this logo attracting new, non-HARDCORE!!! audiences.
Have you considered retro solutions?
If you want GPS, music playing, games, contacts, alarms, and whatnot all in one device you'll need a piece of hardware - but these days your celphone probably does all the address book stuff that PDAs were originally sold for.
Bandwidth of a 737 full of tapes: 100% data loss when the TSA hears a rumor about a plot to blow up planes via bombs concealed in fake thumbdrives, and makes you throw every single one of them away at the security checkpoint.
I have a couple of Blogger blogs in my LJ friends list, thanks to the magic of syndicated LJ accounts.
More and more blog packages that you run on your own servers have OpenID plugins, but as far as I know 6A's TypePad is the only hosted solution that has it built in. Funny, that.