Everything you say is true, although to my sensitive thumbs, the NA region [] button is still not on-centre compared to the rest for its spring and what not. I haven't had any problems with any games yet, but I've mainly been playing Lumines, which isn't exactly hard on the [] button.
"Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement."
At LWE in January, 2001, at a conference on Slashcode, someone asked us at Newsforge how our site had so few dupes compared to Slashdot. There were two reasons: 1) We had a smaller audience of people to see the dupes we did accidently post. 2) We searched our archives before posting any story. We searched by story URL, by story keyword. We also generally skimmed the site when we weren't working to be aware of what was being posted.
Clearly, #1 is something Slashdot doesn't have working in its immediate favour, but #2 is something that shouldn't be too hard. Zonk, Timothy, Cliff, Simonker, etc, don't post dupes nearly as frequently as CmdrTaco. Hemos doesn't post often, but he also seems to be pretty dupey (understandable as he's not really associated with/. anymore, and wouldn't be familiar with what's been posted).
The worst example is something like the PSP dupe story: Taco didn't even check out the games section, which had that story right at the top! A simple search for "PSP" and "Browser" would've shown it even if he never reads sections.
CmdrTaco doesn't read his own site. What does this tell you about how he feels about it?
I don't read Kuro5hin much anymore for the same reason. Complaining about dupes will just drive him further away, even though he still has to work on it by contract.
Technical schools, like the US's community college structure, are about how to do things. Like how to make a DLL. Universities, like the University of Calgary, Saskatchewan, Alberta, etc, focus in the why. As in, why you should make a DLL, and why is it possible to make a DLL.
The stated goal of a University is to never teach anything practical. Read that twice if you don't get the joke;) In University, the focus is always on theory. Theory of data structures, algorithms, logic, digital circuits, machine design, OS algorithms and stuctures, security, etc. It's all the kind of stuff easily transferable to any language or problem, as well.
In University, assignments are handed out merely as a guideline towards what you should understand and know for the final exam (which is typically 50% or more of your final grade). At the Usask CS dept, CMPT 214 is a good example of this. In the course they introduce people to Unix OSes, Bash, C, and Perl. They don't lecture very much on Bash, C, or Perl, except to go other a little of what's different compared to other languages. Mainly they focus on why you should use a different tool for a different job, Unix theory in general, etc.
You'll find that these courses are much more interesting than applied technology courses because they get you thinking about the reasons for things; you're never handed something and said it's magic (except for a bit in first year, but you can always research it yourself). With a real CS degree, you're also much more marketable. People who can run a Unix machine are a dime a dozen compared to people who understand Unix machines to the point where they can write their own kernel modifications and so on.
Similarly, people who can't transfer anything they learn across language barriers are the majority of for-hire programmers out there. In the IT food chain, these guys get the implementation detail jobs. People with CS degrees get the design, coordination, project management, etc, positions: the good ones, the ones which pay about double per year.
Plus, you can always go into post grad studies and take our collective CS knowledge further. Don't waste your time in a technical college if any of this interests you.
The last realistic effort, although fun to play, wasn't really fun to watch. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask represent a big step back in the Zelda graphics. Wind Waker is great, it's a 3D Link to the Past!
Link to the Past is my favourite Zelda game, as I think it represents a good balance. All the GBA and GBC (even the original GB Zelda verison) sport the graphics design of LTTP. Only the N64 ones are bad. Unspurisingly, despite me owning several copies (N64 carts + the GC bonus disc versions), they're the only Zelda games I haven't beaten.
I bet you like FF7 more than FF6, too, just because it was 3D.
EB, GameStop, etc, all crave money on their used ("preowned") stuff to the detriment of the new stuff. If they could, as a chain, still be respected for knowing games if they didn't carry new games, they probably would. New games are there so they can get you to buy the strategy guide (200% markup!), etc.
"But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc."
I've been playing it for over a week. Seriously (I have a couple of characters, the highest of which is level 20). In that time I've not had maintenance done on my realm, any unexplained lag surges, client crash bugs. The only thing I did get was a bugged node where looting something (I kept being attacked while trying to loot, causing a dialog to come up, then be dismissed immediately) which led to me being locked in loot mode once I did get into it, but a quick logout/in fixed that. There was no damage done.
In terms of new content, I've already spend a good 30 some hours playing it this week. I've not gotten into very much of the content. I've never raided an instanced dugeon, for example. With the constant number of quests I have in my quest queue (whose max size is 20, and whose load seems to remain around 16-18), there's always something more to do. To really experience all the content in the game, you'd have to play through on both Alliance and Horde sides with a couple of characters all the way to 60, and that's probably an entire's year's worth of content (considering what you need to level as you get higher). I think complaints about content would be valid in a year, not a couple of months after its launch.
Most of your complaints seem pretty cookie-cutter. Yea, Blizzard didn't anticipate the demand that they received, but I haven't had any problems recently, nor have any of my friends who've played right from the beginning.
"And lastly: if the business is so lucrative, why haven't any of the companies themselves decided to sell "special" accounts to people and cash in on the money?"
When the game has it so that it takes time and effort to get ahead, getting ahead is valued. Once you can just spend a few shillings to become a grandmaster in some skill, it's not worth your time because you could just pay to be there. You'd never be exposed to the content, and most people would follow a path of lesser resistance and just pay to have higher level chars.
Entertainment on this scale isn't open to everyone; it's open to the people it targets. If people beyond that target also enjoy it, more the better. Enjoying it isn't a right, and people shouldn't destroy parts of the in-game balance just so they can enforce their own ideas of how the game should unfold on it.
I suggest you migrate to it as well. I have an archive back to 1999 accesible anywhere I have Thunderbird, Mozilla, or a web browser (thanks to Squirrel mail).
X's implementation uses very fast IPC for the overhead (cost = same as normal windowing calls) for the case of Xservers and clients on the same machine.
The other major point you bring up is, why-oh-why does OS X's Unix experience have to be the Unix of the 1980s? Haven't we learned anything in 20 years? I think we have, and it's all in Linux. A much richer, enjoyable environment which has better support for efficient work patterns.
It also has the unfortunate side effect (thanks to it being Apple) that I can't configure it effectively at all./etc is a joke, and much of the work requires non-X apps, making remote administration ni-impossible (a situation worse than even the 1980s Unix face you claim to be Madonna!).
OS X's Unix is old and archaic, and any of the subtle beauty is removed in favour of a single-user, local machine approach to computing. It's BeOS with better POSIX support. I still think it whips the pants off of any Windows family OS, and I'd love to use it on a laptop, but for a desktop I'd always choose Linux.
Is because an AMD64 with a gig of RAM can be had for less than half the cost of the equivalent G5 machine. The OS is interesting, but only for officially sanctioned WoW support. All my applications are on Linux (some are ported to MacOS X, not many), and I prefer to do all my work in a true Unix, not a half-baked Unix (you have to do intense amounts of work to make the OS X Terminal somewhat friendly with things like colour ls and bash, etc).
Why can't I play pretty much any DX game released between 1996 and 1999? Because the track record isn't so hot. Only the APIs relating to the keyboard and the mouse (IE: the stuff that didn't change much) works well. Games like FF7 aren't playable on the PC unless you have a very specific mix of drivers.
DX7 and up have been the ones which seem relatively stable, but even the DX7 emulation in DX9 has the odd bug in it.
Symmetric stick placement is only good for people who have thumbs that are an equal length to their fingers (IE: no one).
Having to shift my hands around and curve my holding so that my thumbs are forced to the middle, instead of having a direct line on the left stick + a direct line on the right stick (with a set of face buttons above) is downright painful.
I'd rather we have the console makers as is. When you have people who can deny you a licence to a console, you can enforce certain minimal standards. Yes, even though no one pays lip service to these (although Nintendo still has the Nintendo seal of quality, despite their willingness to vet shit like Superman 64), it's still a point to consider.
A DVD is an MPEG2 movie with some interpreter code. This should me simple, yet I've had to deal with tons of movies which force me to sit through previews or other things I don't want to watch because the people who make the DVDs think they're smarter than me. At least with game consoles, I have that layer of abstraction between me and the content providers that hopefully stop the most evil of content fuckups.
"If and when video game consoles work like that, I'll no longer be cursing Sega for picking the wrong box to put Panzer Dragoon on, or find myself dropping a couple hundred extra dollars so I can play Metal Gear Solid."
If you're a real gamer, you'll own them all anyways. Game consoles (buying all in a generation with games and peripherals) are still cheaper than keeping 1 PC up-to-date for PC games, let alone buying the games and dealing with patches, Windows, and general fuckery.
3D0 tried to make a game console that was a standard which lots of people made in different versions. Philips tried to as well (CD-i). Yea, those really didn't pan out, and it's not because of the technical hurdles.
There are just too many fundamental differences in world views on games and interfaces, etc, for all companies to agree on a gaming standard like you suggest should exist.
I think the "one-gaming-platform" you suggest is the PC, and its generality is a curse that has led to constant bugs, patches, Windows, etc. Even with DirectX, that's no good, because you now need to add "install latest DirectX and pray older games don't break" into the list next to "buy well-supported hardware"... in the DOS days, at least having a GUS and a VGA card meant you got great support in primo games, but that required its own set of problems.
I have no problem subsidizing education, much like I have no problem subsidizing universal health care. Ooh, some money I don't really need is lopped off my paycheque. Big deal. There are larger things than what you take home every pay period affecting the country.
When you're like me, working through Univursity to pay for a computer science degree that's being paid concurrently, these are great. Rather than going to a soul killing job that has no relevance to my course of studies, but happens to pay me money, I can just do a mod to Gnome (which is relevant to my studies), and get paid 10 times my soul-sucking hourly rate.
This isn't for people who have jobs which pay them so much money they can have sexy-parties with hookers and blow every Tuesday, this is for people who need a little financial incentive to do it, or for people who aren't established and want to make some money while they're making their name. Obviously you're a hookers and blow kind of guy, so maybe you shouldn't send in any patches.
"and Pokemon Colloseum (Basically an updated version of Pokemon Stadium). Again, where's the 3D Pokemon RPG that kids would obviously be interested in?"
Uh, how about the 3D Pokemon RPG included in Pokemon Coliseum where you have to snatch shadow Pokemon and unlock their hearts? It's not super long, and it's not super polished, but it is 3D, Pokemon, and an RPG...
Pokemon Box was not released in North America because it was also built into the Pokemon Coliseum release.
With a maximum party size of 4, it's no MMORPG. Yes, it's an MORPG, but that's not the same thing.
The Xbox does VGA internally, except it's passed through a TV output circuit (which does support progressive scan video VGA mode: 480p = 640x480).
Otherwise, though, the Dreamcast was pretty innovative, which is why it's still my favourite console (and I own as much Dreamcast stuff as I can get:)).
In Canada, thanks to federal funding of post-secondary, you don't have to put up with that.
After high school, there are real technical schools, and real Universities. This allows most of the population to stream off. The rest end up working retail somewhere.
My undergraduate degree (4-year honours computer science) is going to cost me roughly 25-30,000$ Canadian in tuition. I don't have to take unrelated classes. I take classes that are important (for example, 6 credits from a class graded primarily on essay based writing to show that I have english proficiency, differential and integral calculus, statistics, and linear algebra), and a few electives (most likely chem, biochem, and bioinformatics) which can also be fun (drama). The rest is a choice between a more theory oriented approach to CS (the logic classes, the circuit design classes, the AI classes), or a more practical approach (the project classes, software engineering classes, web application classes).
I've read many comments where people in the US complain about the relevancy of the courses. I don't know if this is because the are the kind of people who think they know everything and disdain learning, or if this is because the US has a weak post-secondary education system.
Either way, considering the intense cost associate with the US system, you should probably consider being educated in Canada. You pay a bit more than a native Canadian, but you still pay less than in the US. During that time, you can get a citizenship and avoid being drafted into the draconian military industrial complex that rules the US, as well as see what life is like in a country that has no analog to the "department of homeland security."
You know, replace the term "Babylon 5" with "Star Trek" (and I do mean Trek circa Shatner), and your comment is equally valid.
I find in really weird that all these geeks and nerds whos bread and butter sci-fi has been Star Trek can't get past the same flaws in another series which manages in include new types of characters, as well as include new types of storylines only possible because of the plot continuity.
Perhaps we need a "Babylon 5: The Next Generation" to bring more to the fold.
Ford Explorer -- does that also access the internet?
Hyundai Accent -- is it about the korean language?
Honda Accord -- music perhaps?
People make names which they feel are the best for something. They rely on something's ability to be good at it to spread the love, so to speak. If it's good, people will remember it. If it's not good, it goes away and it's no issue. Do you really like how people went to ultrageneric names and domain speculation on the Internet? Pets.com? Mail.com? News.com?
Take a look at things which people remember. What about Napster implies filesharing? What about Suprnova? What about Google implies searching?
Naming is a magic game. Just because you don't like how others play it, does not mean they are playing it wrong. This whole "incorrect naming" meme is stupid and pointless. Start thinking critically about what you're saying before you repeat it everywhere.
"The company even suggests that customers might upload a shopping list to the store's website before leaving home, and then download the list to the shopping cart upon arriving at the store."
Why stop there? Why not just have people send a list of what they want, and then when they get there they pay for it and just take it (prebagged) into their car. Boom, no more need to worry about having displays, samples, etc. People just tell you what they want, and then pick it up. You could even take it further and deliver to their home, but there are already a few businesses like that out there. There aren't any "phone-ahead" grocery orders I know of on a large scale, though.
"Why is it so difficult to understand that the one-button default is great for those older new-computer-users (I deal with my 75 year old aunt on the phone and my near-60 parents as their computer phone-support all the time)? "
In 40 years, those people will be dead. Everyone who is like you or me will be close to their age. Everyone, pretty much, will have grown up with computers by then, and have a much better understanding of such things. All future generations will also have this understanding. Why optimize for this hump that is temporary? No one really thinks ahead in comp sci -- near-term (5 years max) is about the end of where most people think to.
" Those are things like costume slipups and continuity errors....."Bug" in the context of software means something that prevents the program from executing properly, like a crash bug, or a rendering anomaly."
Sounds like one and the same to me.
I go by the dictionary definition of bug:
2: a fault or defect in a system
Slashdot Mirror
Timothy didn't post it to the main page. This means that I didn't have to deal with the site not working, like last time it was posted.
:o
It was down for a good few days
Everything you say is true, although to my sensitive thumbs, the NA region [] button is still not on-centre compared to the rest for its spring and what not. I haven't had any problems with any games yet, but I've mainly been playing Lumines, which isn't exactly hard on the [] button.
"Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement."
/. anymore, and wouldn't be familiar with what's been posted).
At LWE in January, 2001, at a conference on Slashcode, someone asked us at Newsforge how our site had so few dupes compared to Slashdot. There were two reasons:
1) We had a smaller audience of people to see the dupes we did accidently post.
2) We searched our archives before posting any story. We searched by story URL, by story keyword. We also generally skimmed the site when we weren't working to be aware of what was being posted.
Clearly, #1 is something Slashdot doesn't have working in its immediate favour, but #2 is something that shouldn't be too hard. Zonk, Timothy, Cliff, Simonker, etc, don't post dupes nearly as frequently as CmdrTaco. Hemos doesn't post often, but he also seems to be pretty dupey (understandable as he's not really associated with
The worst example is something like the PSP dupe story: Taco didn't even check out the games section, which had that story right at the top! A simple search for "PSP" and "Browser" would've shown it even if he never reads sections.
CmdrTaco doesn't read his own site. What does this tell you about how he feels about it?
I don't read Kuro5hin much anymore for the same reason. Complaining about dupes will just drive him further away, even though he still has to work on it by contract.
Technical schools, like the US's community college structure, are about how to do things. Like how to make a DLL. Universities, like the University of Calgary, Saskatchewan, Alberta, etc, focus in the why. As in, why you should make a DLL, and why is it possible to make a DLL.
;) In University, the focus is always on theory. Theory of data structures, algorithms, logic, digital circuits, machine design, OS algorithms and stuctures, security, etc. It's all the kind of stuff easily transferable to any language or problem, as well.
The stated goal of a University is to never teach anything practical. Read that twice if you don't get the joke
In University, assignments are handed out merely as a guideline towards what you should understand and know for the final exam (which is typically 50% or more of your final grade). At the Usask CS dept, CMPT 214 is a good example of this. In the course they introduce people to Unix OSes, Bash, C, and Perl. They don't lecture very much on Bash, C, or Perl, except to go other a little of what's different compared to other languages. Mainly they focus on why you should use a different tool for a different job, Unix theory in general, etc.
You'll find that these courses are much more interesting than applied technology courses because they get you thinking about the reasons for things; you're never handed something and said it's magic (except for a bit in first year, but you can always research it yourself). With a real CS degree, you're also much more marketable. People who can run a Unix machine are a dime a dozen compared to people who understand Unix machines to the point where they can write their own kernel modifications and so on.
Similarly, people who can't transfer anything they learn across language barriers are the majority of for-hire programmers out there. In the IT food chain, these guys get the implementation detail jobs. People with CS degrees get the design, coordination, project management, etc, positions: the good ones, the ones which pay about double per year.
Plus, you can always go into post grad studies and take our collective CS knowledge further. Don't waste your time in a technical college if any of this interests you.
The last realistic effort, although fun to play, wasn't really fun to watch. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask represent a big step back in the Zelda graphics. Wind Waker is great, it's a 3D Link to the Past!
Link to the Past is my favourite Zelda game, as I think it represents a good balance. All the GBA and GBC (even the original GB Zelda verison) sport the graphics design of LTTP. Only the N64 ones are bad. Unspurisingly, despite me owning several copies (N64 carts + the GC bonus disc versions), they're the only Zelda games I haven't beaten.
I bet you like FF7 more than FF6, too, just because it was 3D.
EB, GameStop, etc, all crave money on their used ("preowned") stuff to the detriment of the new stuff. If they could, as a chain, still be respected for knowing games if they didn't carry new games, they probably would. New games are there so they can get you to buy the strategy guide (200% markup!), etc.
"But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc."
I've been playing it for over a week. Seriously (I have a couple of characters, the highest of which is level 20). In that time I've not had maintenance done on my realm, any unexplained lag surges, client crash bugs. The only thing I did get was a bugged node where looting something (I kept being attacked while trying to loot, causing a dialog to come up, then be dismissed immediately) which led to me being locked in loot mode once I did get into it, but a quick logout/in fixed that. There was no damage done.
In terms of new content, I've already spend a good 30 some hours playing it this week. I've not gotten into very much of the content. I've never raided an instanced dugeon, for example. With the constant number of quests I have in my quest queue (whose max size is 20, and whose load seems to remain around 16-18), there's always something more to do. To really experience all the content in the game, you'd have to play through on both Alliance and Horde sides with a couple of characters all the way to 60, and that's probably an entire's year's worth of content (considering what you need to level as you get higher). I think complaints about content would be valid in a year, not a couple of months after its launch.
Most of your complaints seem pretty cookie-cutter. Yea, Blizzard didn't anticipate the demand that they received, but I haven't had any problems recently, nor have any of my friends who've played right from the beginning.
"And lastly: if the business is so lucrative, why haven't any of the companies themselves decided to sell "special" accounts to people and cash in on the money?"
When the game has it so that it takes time and effort to get ahead, getting ahead is valued. Once you can just spend a few shillings to become a grandmaster in some skill, it's not worth your time because you could just pay to be there. You'd never be exposed to the content, and most people would follow a path of lesser resistance and just pay to have higher level chars.
Entertainment on this scale isn't open to everyone; it's open to the people it targets. If people beyond that target also enjoy it, more the better. Enjoying it isn't a right, and people shouldn't destroy parts of the in-game balance just so they can enforce their own ideas of how the game should unfold on it.
Problem solved.
I suggest you migrate to it as well. I have an archive back to 1999 accesible anywhere I have Thunderbird, Mozilla, or a web browser (thanks to Squirrel mail).
X's implementation uses very fast IPC for the overhead (cost = same as normal windowing calls) for the case of Xservers and clients on the same machine.
/etc is a joke, and much of the work requires non-X apps, making remote administration ni-impossible (a situation worse than even the 1980s Unix face you claim to be Madonna!).
The other major point you bring up is, why-oh-why does OS X's Unix experience have to be the Unix of the 1980s? Haven't we learned anything in 20 years? I think we have, and it's all in Linux. A much richer, enjoyable environment which has better support for efficient work patterns.
It also has the unfortunate side effect (thanks to it being Apple) that I can't configure it effectively at all.
OS X's Unix is old and archaic, and any of the subtle beauty is removed in favour of a single-user, local machine approach to computing. It's BeOS with better POSIX support. I still think it whips the pants off of any Windows family OS, and I'd love to use it on a laptop, but for a desktop I'd always choose Linux.
Is because an AMD64 with a gig of RAM can be had for less than half the cost of the equivalent G5 machine. The OS is interesting, but only for officially sanctioned WoW support. All my applications are on Linux (some are ported to MacOS X, not many), and I prefer to do all my work in a true Unix, not a half-baked Unix (you have to do intense amounts of work to make the OS X Terminal somewhat friendly with things like colour ls and bash, etc).
Why can't I play pretty much any DX game released between 1996 and 1999? Because the track record isn't so hot. Only the APIs relating to the keyboard and the mouse (IE: the stuff that didn't change much) works well. Games like FF7 aren't playable on the PC unless you have a very specific mix of drivers.
DX7 and up have been the ones which seem relatively stable, but even the DX7 emulation in DX9 has the odd bug in it.
Symmetric stick placement is only good for people who have thumbs that are an equal length to their fingers (IE: no one).
Having to shift my hands around and curve my holding so that my thumbs are forced to the middle, instead of having a direct line on the left stick + a direct line on the right stick (with a set of face buttons above) is downright painful.
I'd rather we have the console makers as is. When you have people who can deny you a licence to a console, you can enforce certain minimal standards. Yes, even though no one pays lip service to these (although Nintendo still has the Nintendo seal of quality, despite their willingness to vet shit like Superman 64), it's still a point to consider.
... in the DOS days, at least having a GUS and a VGA card meant you got great support in primo games, but that required its own set of problems.
A DVD is an MPEG2 movie with some interpreter code. This should me simple, yet I've had to deal with tons of movies which force me to sit through previews or other things I don't want to watch because the people who make the DVDs think they're smarter than me. At least with game consoles, I have that layer of abstraction between me and the content providers that hopefully stop the most evil of content fuckups.
"If and when video game consoles work like that, I'll no longer be cursing Sega for picking the wrong box to put Panzer Dragoon on, or find myself dropping a couple hundred extra dollars so I can play Metal Gear Solid."
If you're a real gamer, you'll own them all anyways. Game consoles (buying all in a generation with games and peripherals) are still cheaper than keeping 1 PC up-to-date for PC games, let alone buying the games and dealing with patches, Windows, and general fuckery.
3D0 tried to make a game console that was a standard which lots of people made in different versions. Philips tried to as well (CD-i). Yea, those really didn't pan out, and it's not because of the technical hurdles.
There are just too many fundamental differences in world views on games and interfaces, etc, for all companies to agree on a gaming standard like you suggest should exist.
I think the "one-gaming-platform" you suggest is the PC, and its generality is a curse that has led to constant bugs, patches, Windows, etc. Even with DirectX, that's no good, because you now need to add "install latest DirectX and pray older games don't break" into the list next to "buy well-supported hardware"
I have no problem subsidizing education, much like I have no problem subsidizing universal health care. Ooh, some money I don't really need is lopped off my paycheque. Big deal. There are larger things than what you take home every pay period affecting the country.
When you're like me, working through Univursity to pay for a computer science degree that's being paid concurrently, these are great. Rather than going to a soul killing job that has no relevance to my course of studies, but happens to pay me money, I can just do a mod to Gnome (which is relevant to my studies), and get paid 10 times my soul-sucking hourly rate.
This isn't for people who have jobs which pay them so much money they can have sexy-parties with hookers and blow every Tuesday, this is for people who need a little financial incentive to do it, or for people who aren't established and want to make some money while they're making their name. Obviously you're a hookers and blow kind of guy, so maybe you shouldn't send in any patches.
"and Pokemon Colloseum (Basically an updated version of Pokemon Stadium). Again, where's the 3D Pokemon RPG that kids would obviously be interested in?"
Uh, how about the 3D Pokemon RPG included in Pokemon Coliseum where you have to snatch shadow Pokemon and unlock their hearts? It's not super long, and it's not super polished, but it is 3D, Pokemon, and an RPG...
Pokemon Box was not released in North America because it was also built into the Pokemon Coliseum release.
With a maximum party size of 4, it's no MMORPG. Yes, it's an MORPG, but that's not the same thing.
:)).
The Xbox does VGA internally, except it's passed through a TV output circuit (which does support progressive scan video VGA mode: 480p = 640x480).
Otherwise, though, the Dreamcast was pretty innovative, which is why it's still my favourite console (and I own as much Dreamcast stuff as I can get
In Canada, thanks to federal funding of post-secondary, you don't have to put up with that.
After high school, there are real technical schools, and real Universities. This allows most of the population to stream off. The rest end up working retail somewhere.
My undergraduate degree (4-year honours computer science) is going to cost me roughly 25-30,000$ Canadian in tuition. I don't have to take unrelated classes. I take classes that are important (for example, 6 credits from a class graded primarily on essay based writing to show that I have english proficiency, differential and integral calculus, statistics, and linear algebra), and a few electives (most likely chem, biochem, and bioinformatics) which can also be fun (drama). The rest is a choice between a more theory oriented approach to CS (the logic classes, the circuit design classes, the AI classes), or a more practical approach (the project classes, software engineering classes, web application classes).
I've read many comments where people in the US complain about the relevancy of the courses. I don't know if this is because the are the kind of people who think they know everything and disdain learning, or if this is because the US has a weak post-secondary education system.
Either way, considering the intense cost associate with the US system, you should probably consider being educated in Canada. You pay a bit more than a native Canadian, but you still pay less than in the US. During that time, you can get a citizenship and avoid being drafted into the draconian military industrial complex that rules the US, as well as see what life is like in a country that has no analog to the "department of homeland security."
You know, replace the term "Babylon 5" with "Star Trek" (and I do mean Trek circa Shatner), and your comment is equally valid.
I find in really weird that all these geeks and nerds whos bread and butter sci-fi has been Star Trek can't get past the same flaws in another series which manages in include new types of characters, as well as include new types of storylines only possible because of the plot continuity.
Perhaps we need a "Babylon 5: The Next Generation" to bring more to the fold.
How is this not like life?
Ford Explorer -- does that also access the internet?
Hyundai Accent -- is it about the korean language?
Honda Accord -- music perhaps?
People make names which they feel are the best for something. They rely on something's ability to be good at it to spread the love, so to speak. If it's good, people will remember it. If it's not good, it goes away and it's no issue. Do you really like how people went to ultrageneric names and domain speculation on the Internet? Pets.com? Mail.com? News.com?
Take a look at things which people remember. What about Napster implies filesharing? What about Suprnova? What about Google implies searching?
Naming is a magic game. Just because you don't like how others play it, does not mean they are playing it wrong. This whole "incorrect naming" meme is stupid and pointless. Start thinking critically about what you're saying before you repeat it everywhere.
"The company even suggests that customers might upload a shopping list to the store's website before leaving home, and then download the list to the shopping cart upon arriving at the store."
Why stop there? Why not just have people send a list of what they want, and then when they get there they pay for it and just take it (prebagged) into their car. Boom, no more need to worry about having displays, samples, etc. People just tell you what they want, and then pick it up. You could even take it further and deliver to their home, but there are already a few businesses like that out there. There aren't any "phone-ahead" grocery orders I know of on a large scale, though.
And one of the famous NWD (no-wheel drive) models to boot...
"Why is it so difficult to understand that the one-button default is great for those older new-computer-users (I deal with my 75 year old aunt on the phone and my near-60 parents as their computer phone-support all the time)? "
In 40 years, those people will be dead. Everyone who is like you or me will be close to their age. Everyone, pretty much, will have grown up with computers by then, and have a much better understanding of such things. All future generations will also have this understanding. Why optimize for this hump that is temporary? No one really thinks ahead in comp sci -- near-term (5 years max) is about the end of where most people think to.
" Those are things like costume slipups and continuity errors. ...."Bug" in the context of software means something that prevents the program from executing properly, like a crash bug, or a rendering anomaly."
Sounds like one and the same to me.
I go by the dictionary definition of bug:
2: a fault or defect in a system
A fault or defect in a movie.. hmm!