That is what gets me. If everybody thinks that parents should be responsible for policing what games their kids buy and play why is it wrong to require that some games can not be purchased by children? We do it with tobacco, alcohol, and firearms, why not games?
Games are not tobacco, alcohol, or firearms. Games will not directly hurt or kil someone. Possibly indirectly, but that is dependant on the child's state of mind and upbringing, and could be taken well or badly depending on the child. Tobacco will always damage a child's lungs, irreguardles of the upbringing.
What I don't like is mega corps wrapping up profit at any cost in the flag of freedom of speech!
I find it shocking that you're willing to sacrifice freedom of speech just because some mega corps profit from it.
We've gotten this far with movies only being self-regulated, and books not at all. There are books out there more disturbing than any video game made, yet no one is calling for the government to stop some books from being sold to minors. Video games are just a convenient scapegoat, which distract us from the big problems, like Iraq, global warming, the rising deficit, that our leaders don't know how to fix. Gay marriage got overplayed, and now they need something new. It's just pointless. There are other things much more important than video games.
I don't agree with you. I don't see the point of playing a Wii game by being passive on a couch and doing simple flicks of the wrist. That to me looks incredibly boring. I think the fun in playing the Wii is making the actual motion with your arm. Also, please tell me how you'd similuate a golf swing or a baseball swing with just your wrist. Seems clunky to me. I might as well just push a button.
I'm pretty sure it will depend on the game. There's some videos on YouTube that show actual gameplay, not just people hopping around. WarioWare is going to require a lot of different motions, like putting the wiimote on your head and doing squats, spinning around with the wiimote, etc. Wii Sports Tennis will require actually waving it around like you're playing tennis (which I'll like, because even though I live across the street from a tennis court there's usally snow on it). However, Metroid looks (despite the videos of the guy jumping over the chair and attempting to role into a morphball) like the wiimote is just used for aiming, so you'll point it at the TV and do small motions. I'm also sure they'll be games that don't require moving at all, much like some DS games don't use the stylus. So there'll be a variety of ways to use the wiimote.
Yeah, I don't think we "need" larger disks either. It's not like Nintendo and Microsoft are going to stop making games in a year or two because they ran out of space. However, I wonder what game developers might be able to do with so much extra space? Have they been holding back to stay within space constraints? Will they be able to make sweet huge games on the PS3 that aren't possible on other systems? It's not worth (to me, at least) the gamble at $600 right now, but I'll be interested to see what comes out for it later.
Except it won't play HD-DVD games, which defeats a lot of the purpose. Basically, if you have or are getting a 360 and are planning on buying an HD-DVD player anyway, Microsoft's got a fairly cheap option. But the combined price is still expensive enough that anyone that wasn't looking for a 360 (or an HD-DVD player) isn't going to care.
Even if it did play HD-DVD games, very few games would be HD-DVD just because so few 360 owners would have it. Remember Sega CD and 32x? Not exactly Sega's brightest moves. So, no, Microsoft's strategy is not beautiful.
It's 6% of brick-and-mortar game stores' business. Go in to EB, Gamestop, Game Crazy - any mainstream game store and count the PC games. Now count the console games. I haven't actually counted myself, but the PC games in all the game stores I've been to have been a tiny percentage of the console games. Maybe he did pull 6% out of his ass, but it's not an unrealistic number.
Was that not the purpose of the 2nd Amendment to the US constitution? So as to enable the people to re-take control if the government got out of hand.
Well, yeah, but that was when the best weapons were muskets and civilians could (and did) have enough to make overthrowing a government practical. Now, with all sorts of weapons like tanks and missles and fighter planes, it's impossible for civilians to take on the government one on one. Even if the second admendment included tanks and stuff, only the richest could afford them, so I guess the poor and middle class would just have to choose some rich person to give their support, and that really doesn't sound like a revolution.
Admittedly, it was foolish for... Bethesda to leave that topless texture on the disc
As I understand, the topless texture was for male charactors, modders just decided to put it on female charactors. If that is correct, then I don't believe it was Bethesda's fault at all.
Game designers did just fine when they had to put some games on 3-4 CDs in the PSX era. What's the problem with printing large games on 3-4 DVDs? The fact that the player will have to disc-swap a few times?
For a linear RPG, that's not a problem. For a game like GTA, where you just get a huge area to play in, it's more of a problem. Imagine taking a wrong turn in San Andreas and accidently crossing the DVD line. Now you have to switch disks, wait for it to load, go back, switch disks, and wait for more loading. Maybe they could have a cancel option so you don't have to load it if you hit it accidently, but what if you want to grab one thing that's just over the line? I've played games with that kind of disk-swapping, and it's so freaking annoying.
Last I checked, myspace has no teaching facility, and never will. I'm assuming most of the kids are copying & pasting CSS code from some blinky-ass website to copy & paste.
Copy and paste still teaches. Even if it starts out looking like gibberish, eventually, you see that this gibberish does that, and that gibberish does this, and you can start to break it down. Then, you get curious, and want to do something slightly different from your copy and paste, so you start actually working with the code to see what does what, so then you can make your own. I learned more about working with a command line copying and pasting from UbuntuGuide.com than I learned in my "Advanced" Linux Administration course in college. A lot of it has to do with learning being easier when you're doing what you want rather than what someone tells you, but I would definately agree that MySpace has taught more people more CSS and HTML than probably anything else.
It seems that the tilt features on the controllers are a bit sensitive and tweaky, so perhaps rumble breaks tilt sensing.
That was the official explanation, IIRC, but it seems pretty weak to me.
That's because the real reason is that some other company owns the patents to rumble, so they can't use it anymore. Microsoft paid that company a whole bunch of money, and Nintendo's rumble is different enough from the patent, but Sony's just stuck. So they pulled out some half-baked feature to attempt to make up for it.
With Windows, it's a black box. I can try to reboot and uninstall/reinstall various drivers, service packs, DLLs, etc., and if I'm lucky, I'll come up with a procedure that mysteriously works more often than others. Actual solutions are often nowhere to be found.
I wasn't comparing it to Windows. I like Windows even less.
It's probably because (proprietary) Flash doesn't support ALSA, and ALSA is how you get software mixing. It's probably trying to get exclusive access to the sound card, and failing due to something else already using the sound card.
Yeah, I know, but I fixed it. I spent weeks reading forums and trying different solutions and then it worked! Now it's forgotten all of that. I don't understand why. I've been with Ubuntu since Hoary, and it seems like every release has worse sound issues. I'm sick of it.
The simplest solution to that is to buy an SB Live! (emu10k1), or some other card that has hardware mixing support.
Hey, that's what I've got! So how do I enable the hardware mixing?
Note: if sound doesn't work in Flash Player (for example on YouTube): sudo apt-get install alsa-oss gksudo gedit/etc/firefox/firefoxrc Change: FIREFOX_DSP="" To: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" Restart Mozilla Firefox. Now sound should work in Flash Player.
Whatever. I did that like 3 months ago and it didn't help. Followed some other advice in the forums, and it worked, but now it's randomly decided to stop again. Whatever. I'm switching to Mepis.
Yeah, don't worry about my friend. She's back with Windows.
As for me, I've used EasyUbuntu, Automatix, and Ubuntu Guide, and I'm just sick of tweaking stuff. I have another friend who I gave Mepis to (see my journal) and she's all cool with YouTube and podcasts and all that crap now and I'm jealous. She's the newbie, why can she do things I can't? So I think I'm going to switch to Mepis.
Why not just use "mobi.ibm.com", for example - why do we need a TLD for this? It's not like there's going to be millions of.mobi sites.
Because ibm.mobi is shorter to type than mobi.ibm.com (mobiles don't have the best keyboards), and so that mobiles can default or have a shortcut key for.mobi so that people can get to sites that their phone can handle with even less typing.
If they're for mobile phones, wich usually don't have complete keyboard, doesn't it make sense to use a shorter TLD? A 4-letter one will be a pain to type for each site...
I imagine if.mobi gets popular, mobiles will default to.mobi or have a shortcut key for it.
Hell if anyone can remember past 6 years ago, Ross Periot of all people came damn close to becoming president.
"Damn close" was less than 5% of the vote. And he's got billions of dollars. How for do you think I'd get? Maybe I'd get arrested for going to the debates, like the Libertarian and Green Party candidates did in 2004? Maybe I'll get modded troll for bringing that up, like the sibling post did. Morons.
Come on! They will be dependent on a different platform (Linux) and different software (OO, etc).
Using open-source software means that they won't be dependent on Linux, because the software can be ported to any other operating system (and likely already has), by the makers of the software, the makers of the operating system, other random people, or even people hired by Munich. Using software that saves to open file formats, like ODF, means that they have a wide variety of choices if OO or whatever no longer meets their needs. So no, they will not be dependent on a different platform and different software.
Oh my God, can we please stop repeating this false, outdated "example". With Ubuntu (and many other distros) 90% of the programs that anyone needs are in the repositories, and installing from a repository is much easier than installing in Windows. Quake 3 doesn't happen to be in Ubuntu's repositories, but installing it doesn't have to be nearly as complicated as you make it sound.
Step One: wine/media/cdrom/setup.exe (oh horrors! the command line! well, quake 2 is in the repositories if you're that scared.)
Step Two: Follow Windows directions.
And where's the central repository of knowledge that tells me what's the best text editor of the 9,000 available for Linux? The best media player, the best burning software?
Look, I know you're used to Windows which comes with a bare-bones text editor, a bloated pos for a media player, and no dedicated burning software, but Linux distros tend to come with decent programs to do all those things. If you're willing to use whatever some random guy uses too, then why not just stick with the perfectly usable defaults?
Installing in Windows just as easy as installing something on Linux. Frequently it's a heck of a lot easier to set up due to gui set up, rather than having to use config files.
Config files? No, on Ubuntu it's just point and click. Ok, type in something to search, but on the whole, less clicks than Windows installers.
Even with its package manager I had to trudge through the forums to find out what program does what.
It says what it does right in the description. What more information did you need?
Not to mention the fact that in order to replace my Windows setup I need to add repositories that aren't in there by default. I know why there no there to begin with, but it's a pain to add them for every install, and every tutorial I've seen just uses the command line anyway.
You don't have to use the command line, people just like it because it's more straight-foward. You can add them through Synaptic (forget where, not in front of my ubuntu box, sorry) or you can get EasyUbuntu, which will install mp3, flash, etc, as well. Or you could get Mepis.
Linux when it works is perfect. Linux when it doesn't is just weird and fucked up. I tried installing Ubuntu for a newbie recently, and sudo decided it just wasn't going to work. So I'm futzering around with weird commands and the Ubuntu forum for a couple hours, and yeah, my newbie was real pleased with her new system. Uh huh.
Now my home Ubuntu computer has decided (again!) that flash doesn't need sound. No more Youtube for me anymore...
Come on! If they can afford the hardware they can afford the measley "Microsoft tax" - it's a small percentage of the cost of a machine.
China is where they make all those cheap generic (and not so generic) computer parts. I imagine the Chinese get their computers without going to Dell.com.
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I find it shocking that you're willing to sacrifice freedom of speech just because some mega corps profit from it.
We've gotten this far with movies only being self-regulated, and books not at all. There are books out there more disturbing than any video game made, yet no one is calling for the government to stop some books from being sold to minors. Video games are just a convenient scapegoat, which distract us from the big problems, like Iraq, global warming, the rising deficit, that our leaders don't know how to fix. Gay marriage got overplayed, and now they need something new. It's just pointless. There are other things much more important than video games.
Yeah, I don't think we "need" larger disks either. It's not like Nintendo and Microsoft are going to stop making games in a year or two because they ran out of space. However, I wonder what game developers might be able to do with so much extra space? Have they been holding back to stay within space constraints? Will they be able to make sweet huge games on the PS3 that aren't possible on other systems? It's not worth (to me, at least) the gamble at $600 right now, but I'll be interested to see what comes out for it later.
Except it won't play HD-DVD games, which defeats a lot of the purpose. Basically, if you have or are getting a 360 and are planning on buying an HD-DVD player anyway, Microsoft's got a fairly cheap option. But the combined price is still expensive enough that anyone that wasn't looking for a 360 (or an HD-DVD player) isn't going to care.
Even if it did play HD-DVD games, very few games would be HD-DVD just because so few 360 owners would have it. Remember Sega CD and 32x? Not exactly Sega's brightest moves. So, no, Microsoft's strategy is not beautiful.
It's 6% of brick-and-mortar game stores' business. Go in to EB, Gamestop, Game Crazy - any mainstream game store and count the PC games. Now count the console games. I haven't actually counted myself, but the PC games in all the game stores I've been to have been a tiny percentage of the console games. Maybe he did pull 6% out of his ass, but it's not an unrealistic number.
He hasn't actually done it yet, so you can't say he's done it right. I think it's a good idea too, but I won't be surprised if he fucks it up.
Yeah, I know, but I fixed it. I spent weeks reading forums and trying different solutions and then it worked! Now it's forgotten all of that. I don't understand why. I've been with Ubuntu since Hoary, and it seems like every release has worse sound issues. I'm sick of it.
Hey, that's what I've got! So how do I enable the hardware mixing?
Yeah, don't worry about my friend. She's back with Windows.
As for me, I've used EasyUbuntu, Automatix, and Ubuntu Guide, and I'm just sick of tweaking stuff. I have another friend who I gave Mepis to (see my journal) and she's all cool with YouTube and podcasts and all that crap now and I'm jealous. She's the newbie, why can she do things I can't? So I think I'm going to switch to Mepis.
Oh my God, can we please stop repeating this false, outdated "example". With Ubuntu (and many other distros) 90% of the programs that anyone needs are in the repositories, and installing from a repository is much easier than installing in Windows. Quake 3 doesn't happen to be in Ubuntu's repositories, but installing it doesn't have to be nearly as complicated as you make it sound. /media/cdrom/setup.exe (oh horrors! the command line! well, quake 2 is in the repositories if you're that scared.)
Step One: wine
Step Two: Follow Windows directions.
Config files? No, on Ubuntu it's just point and click. Ok, type in something to search, but on the whole, less clicks than Windows installers.
It says what it does right in the description. What more information did you need?
You don't have to use the command line, people just like it because it's more straight-foward. You can add them through Synaptic (forget where, not in front of my ubuntu box, sorry) or you can get EasyUbuntu, which will install mp3, flash, etc, as well. Or you could get Mepis.
I wish we had good public transportation here...
Linux when it works is perfect. Linux when it doesn't is just weird and fucked up. I tried installing Ubuntu for a newbie recently, and sudo decided it just wasn't going to work. So I'm futzering around with weird commands and the Ubuntu forum for a couple hours, and yeah, my newbie was real pleased with her new system. Uh huh.
Now my home Ubuntu computer has decided (again!) that flash doesn't need sound. No more Youtube for me anymore...