Yea, Bishounen are guys who are feminine. If you study any Japanese culture, you'll see that bishounen are quite popular. The same way bishoujo are popular. Women have many tastes, and women's sexaulity is a little freer in Japan -- there are more women who like to watch 2 men togther, for example. Are you a guy? Do you like watching 2 women get it on? Why?
Japan makes a lot of video games, Japan likes bishoujo and bishounen. This is why you see lots in video games (look at Guilty Gear XX sometime).
Of course, you could always take a gander at US character design. It reflects the culture just the same way -- all bulgy guys and women with impossible measurements!
"Snake would've basically been Raiden without the needy girlfriend."
Hideo Kojima based Solid Snake off of Snake Pliskin from "Escape From New York." Raiden was supposed to be a bishounen, but Snake was never meant that way.
At least in Canada, if I go right to work after high school I can expect to earn about 12,000$ a year. If I go to university, jobs start at about 30,000$ and go to about 70,000$ or more.
The average student loan debt after 4 years of university is about $25,000 (again, these are Canadian values -- those studying in the US should look into studying in Canada). With things like interest factored in, you're looking at about $35,610.75 on a $25,000 loan with interest over a 10 year payoff (~$297 a month).
So you pay 35 grand so that you can earn about 20 to 50 thousand dollars a year more than you would've otherwise, over the entire span of your work career. The $35,000 investment thus gives you a net of about $1,565,000.. yea, that extra 1.5 million dollars sure makes you a wage slave:p
The best part is that you can stick all that extra money away (or even just a percent) in RRSPs and let it grow interest free until you retire, allowing you to live on the interest and give something to your children.
Because those guys over at Nintendo sure as hell never really had marketshare. They only made Gameboy long enough for kids to get the hang of a d-pad and buttons, so that they'be be ready for the Playstation controller.
There never is a vacuum in the video game power, except for that time in 1983 when Atari let the market down. You don't just waltz in and take the reins, you work your way into the market with a product that is chosen by consumers!
Oh, wait, I played this game. Unless you're playing it for multiplayer (which is still crap), it's horrific. I made the mistake of spending 10$ on the Dreamcast version in a clearance bin. Don't waste your time downloading it unless you're playing it with at least 4 people.
To summarize, it has horrid, empty, repetitive landscapes. You end up fighting the controls to v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y climb up cliffs to get at items. If you meet the AI, it'll usually wait until you're in range, and then fire a whole bunch. It doesn't really try to flank you or do anything cool, not that it'd matter (since all tanks tend to be really slow). Sound wise, get used to the sound of a tank engine. That and shooting is all that Rockstar included. There are no music tracks at all. It's one of the bottom 10 Dreamcast games ever released. Naturally, IGN gave it an 83% and called it a "surprisingly deep game once you get into it" -- but they're shills anyways. PlanetDreamcast's review is much better.
Jurassic Park was a plotless piece of tripe crap about not messing with nature, wrapped around special effects that were trying to make up for the lack of plot.
And yes, it's not what I want. As I said, a true RPG where you make your story. You name your character and guide him/her/it through the adventures possible only in the world where wizards and witches hide from muggles. No such game like this exists, but I know every Potter fan wishes it did.
Why they haven't just put out a Harry Potter RPG. You could either set it a few hundred years before hand, in the rich for story telling era of the original wizards, or set it around the time of everyone's parents.
You could choose your character's stats, or have them randomly generated.. going through, exploring the school and surrounding area, and moving on. You could spend the time there learning magic and fighting mythical monsters, enjoying it all the way. It'd be like KOTOR, but for Happy Potter.
Instead, EA rapes the licence to the game. We get games that are even more cut up than the movie adaptations, forcing our characters to move along linear paths to a conclusion we already know. It's boring, made worse by the fact that we have to endure horrible gameplay to get between the linear points of the story. EA will only go for the safe money with the licence, and us gamers will lose out because the only thing they can do is make crap game software that looks and plays like a shitty PS2 game.
"There is still something strange going on that seems to be triggered by preemption, so for now we suggest not enabling CONFIG_PREEMPT if you want the highest stability. On the other hand, I'd love to have more testing, so that we can try to figure out what the pattern is - but please mention explicitly that you ran with preemption if you have problems."
All the R1 DVDs I see usually have Spanish and French, on account of the rather large population (10 million) French speakers in Quebec, and rather large (30 million? 60?) Spanish speakers in the US and Mexico.
They sometimes have extra tracks of German and Italian as well, which makes it odd that they wouldn't already have a pressing for the other region. Plus, they already translated it for the theatrical release. You can get that pressed to DVD within 2 months after the movie's released, if you really want. The delay's just so they can try and control the market.
If there are only two people in the game, labour's probably going to be very light. If you're running a big, dynamic server farm, having one node run that particular daemon's not that big of a deal.
Before all that other tomfoolery. Look at your wallet: it has your ID cards, money, a Diners' Club credit card, and pictures of your family.
What the hell do you do if you lose it?
I believe the wallet is having too many eggs in one basket.. but people have been getting along with those fine for centuries. The simple solution is to not be a careless fop with things that are valuable to you.
As long as games bring in money, the company will support the games that bring in the money. PSOv2 notwithstanding, the lack of payment was why the Sega Dreamcast online stuff shut down. I don't see Microsoft retiring a service that continues to generate profit.
"If I decide to go to a Steakhouse, I have three choices for payment:"
1) Interac, which is essentialy a mini-ATM which moves the exact amount from your bank account to the store/restraunt's bank account.
2) Credit card (everything's usually accepted).
3) Cash, which is the same as the ATM methods above (perhaps it's 2 options to some..).
I'm still surprised that the US has nothing like Interac in widespread deployment. Everywhere in Canada has had Interac for 8 or more years, yet US banks still only have it deployed in some US cities as a test case. Crazy.
"And you damn well better hope that it's stable and bug free. Because if it isn't -- well, too bad. You can't patch. Xbox changes this for Live games, but not for the majority of games."
Since most of the games are stable and fine, I don't have to sweat the few that are broken. Rental stores let me know ahead of time that a game is broken for a very small fee. I can't rent PC games, and I certainly can't return them if they require a patch -- because everyone has patches on their games! Advantage: Console.
"And it still looks far, far worse than a PC game. You don't have the resolution, you don't have the polygon draw, or the fill rate of even a cheap PC video card. Resolution is a huge issue..."
640x480 is what you see on the TV. If you have HDTV, it's progressive scan (ala your monitor). I don't know about you, but I usually end up playing at that resolution anyways just to keep a steady framerate in 3D games. The graphics chips in the Xbox and GameCube are GeForce 3.5 and Radeon8500ish respectively, and do have a pretty decent fill rate. Enough for filling your TV up nicely:) I don't see how the colour depth sucks, since the only console I've seen anything like banding on is the PS2 -- and that's only on some textures that were downsampled to fit in the PS2's tiny vram. I still think that Final Fantasy X-2 is a sexy looking game, far more sexy looking than any PC game I've played in memory. Advantage: Console.
"Xbox Live isn't hacked yet, but if you think it won't ever be then you're living in a dream world."
Yes, but since it is a money operation for Microsoft, I think you're living in a dream world if you think that Microsoft won't address the situation.
"Sure, it's the same thing in the PC world, but to try and list this as an "advantage" is complete and utter BS."
I think it's an advantage. I never have to worry or wonder if the disc I have from the store will be read by my console, because the console has a standardized format. PC CD games all use different anti-piracy techniques, which break in various ways and just end up messing up your normal customers. I just plain don't worry about that on any of my console games:) By the time I start to need to think about backups of it, I see that I can download one off the internet (like all my NES games I play via emulator now, rather than plugging my cartridges into my NES). Still an advantage: Console.
"If you buy a console when it's brand new then it's about $500 with a memory card and second controller. Each game is $40 or $50 and doesn't drop in price for months or years."
Or if you buy a console about 2-3 years into its life cycle when the console is about 220$ CDN, with many greatest hits games at 30$ as well as budget titles around the same point... along with the fact that all the fancy new games coming out are starting to actually push your console hardware to the limit. Don't be a foolish early adopter -- just buy a little later. The price dropping isn't a big deal, either. FFX came out late last year -- a year I've been busy with all the re-released Resident Evils on GameCube, a few more games I've added to my Dreamcast selection, Xbox Live! games, and litterally hundreds of games purchased for under 40$ CDN. By the time it went Greatest Hits, was about when I had time to play it anyways;) Unfortunately, I didn't like it and got rid of it towards FFX-2 which has a much more fun battle system. Yea, it was full new-release price, but I'll get more than 40 hours of play out of it (like KOTOR, which was my part-time job for a few weeks this summer). I don't recally very many PC games that came out and were worth a damn this year, especially not compared to the flood of awesome console games. Advantage: Console.
"Oh, and the games probably won't be playable on the next generation console"
Fine by me. I have plenty of consoles (13), as well as emulators for
Once you have a service which is the single-sign-on point, you see that you can ban cheaters. You also get an audit log of everything and can require updates to games before letting people online. Beyond that, you can also require that the consoles which connect aren't modified to play edited game data (look around for the infamous Super Enzo Ferrari from PGR2 which lifts off the ground when it accelerates).
I don't think I'd go back anyways. The better integration in KDE has grown on me (KDE's Konquerer Desktop isn't all slow like Nautilus is). Plus, nagging bugs (IE: focus follows mouse defocusing windows when over desktop) aren't in KDE:)
I can still type faster than it responds. I do have a fairly high rate of typing, but I like to think I'm not abnormal. The widgets in Mozilla or Kedit don't seem to have such problems. AFAIK, Mozilla's using GTK+v1 inside it.
Everything else runs at the same or faster as the equivalent under Win2k (last time I stuck in a Windows HD to check was 6 months ago). Mplayer does accelerated playback, etc. The only thing that changed was Gnome 1.4 - 2.2 and then 2.4. It was slow.
It seems to have gotten a little better in 9.1, but KDE is still more responsive in its text areas and terminal widgets. For example, I do ls -la in gnome-terminal in my home dir: I have 508 items listed. It takes ~3.8 seconds to scroll past. In konsole, it takes ~0.6 seconds.
GTK+v2 is just slower. Maybe it's not very compatible with XFree86 4.3 in Xinerama mode w/ the Radeon driver, but I suspect it's mainly GTK+v2's problem.
If I take my Slackware 9 CD and install it onto a box, I can install without Konquerer. If I take a Windows XP CD and install it onto a box, I can't choose to not install IE. It's welded in. Konquerer is only integrated into KDE. Windows has so such separation of window manager/session management/library environment and kernel/base install that Linux has.
Plus, I have absolutely no problem using Thunderbird and Firebird for email and web stuff in Konquerer. It (KDE) respects my choice to use those applications as default, rather than forcing me to use KMail or Konquerer. I've yet to see such respect in Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Go and see what Google shows you.
Yea, Bishounen are guys who are feminine. If you study any Japanese culture, you'll see that bishounen are quite popular. The same way bishoujo are popular. Women have many tastes, and women's sexaulity is a little freer in Japan -- there are more women who like to watch 2 men togther, for example. Are you a guy? Do you like watching 2 women get it on? Why?
Japan makes a lot of video games, Japan likes bishoujo and bishounen. This is why you see lots in video games (look at Guilty Gear XX sometime).
Of course, you could always take a gander at US character design. It reflects the culture just the same way -- all bulgy guys and women with impossible measurements!
"Snake would've basically been Raiden without the needy girlfriend."
Hideo Kojima based Solid Snake off of Snake Pliskin from "Escape From New York." Raiden was supposed to be a bishounen, but Snake was never meant that way.
At least in Canada, if I go right to work after high school I can expect to earn about 12,000$ a year. If I go to university, jobs start at about 30,000$ and go to about 70,000$ or more.
.. yea, that extra 1.5 million dollars sure makes you a wage slave :p
The average student loan debt after 4 years of university is about $25,000 (again, these are Canadian values -- those studying in the US should look into studying in Canada). With things like interest factored in, you're looking at about $35,610.75 on a $25,000 loan with interest over a 10 year payoff (~$297 a month).
So you pay 35 grand so that you can earn about 20 to 50 thousand dollars a year more than you would've otherwise, over the entire span of your work career. The $35,000 investment thus gives you a net of about $1,565,000
The best part is that you can stick all that extra money away (or even just a percent) in RRSPs and let it grow interest free until you retire, allowing you to live on the interest and give something to your children.
Because those guys over at Nintendo sure as hell never really had marketshare. They only made Gameboy long enough for kids to get the hang of a d-pad and buttons, so that they'be be ready for the Playstation controller.
There never is a vacuum in the video game power, except for that time in 1983 when Atari let the market down. You don't just waltz in and take the reins, you work your way into the market with a product that is chosen by consumers!
The modern C spec says that integer variables default to 0, but in the interests of portable code, explicit values are still better.
:) I think your point still came across ;)
I wouldn't worry about it, either
Oh, wait, I played this game. Unless you're playing it for multiplayer (which is still crap), it's horrific. I made the mistake of spending 10$ on the Dreamcast version in a clearance bin. Don't waste your time downloading it unless you're playing it with at least 4 people.
To summarize, it has horrid, empty, repetitive landscapes. You end up fighting the controls to v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y climb up cliffs to get at items. If you meet the AI, it'll usually wait until you're in range, and then fire a whole bunch. It doesn't really try to flank you or do anything cool, not that it'd matter (since all tanks tend to be really slow). Sound wise, get used to the sound of a tank engine. That and shooting is all that Rockstar included. There are no music tracks at all. It's one of the bottom 10 Dreamcast games ever released. Naturally, IGN gave it an 83% and called it a "surprisingly deep game once you get into it" -- but they're shills anyways. PlanetDreamcast's review is much better.
Both functions fail to initialize the integer i before performing an operation on it :)
"here comes the Slammer worm and all hell brakes loose as thousands of computers are infected worldwide.."
.. or is it that my brakes are breaking? How can I seriously read this article if they can't even write properly?
Oh no, my breaks are braking
"Why is it that whenever Microsoft "invents" something that everyone else has had for decades, it's "big news" and "innovation" ?"
;)
Because they have a better PR firm than anyone else. That, and to most people, it is "big news" because they've never heard of it
Jurassic Park was a plotless piece of tripe crap about not messing with nature, wrapped around special effects that were trying to make up for the lack of plot.
At least Tolkien has a story.
And yes, it's not what I want. As I said, a true RPG where you make your story. You name your character and guide him/her/it through the adventures possible only in the world where wizards and witches hide from muggles. No such game like this exists, but I know every Potter fan wishes it did.
Why they haven't just put out a Harry Potter RPG. You could either set it a few hundred years before hand, in the rich for story telling era of the original wizards, or set it around the time of everyone's parents.
You could choose your character's stats, or have them randomly generated.. going through, exploring the school and surrounding area, and moving on. You could spend the time there learning magic and fighting mythical monsters, enjoying it all the way. It'd be like KOTOR, but for Happy Potter.
Instead, EA rapes the licence to the game. We get games that are even more cut up than the movie adaptations, forcing our characters to move along linear paths to a conclusion we already know. It's boring, made worse by the fact that we have to endure horrible gameplay to get between the linear points of the story. EA will only go for the safe money with the licence, and us gamers will lose out because the only thing they can do is make crap game software that looks and plays like a shitty PS2 game.
Linus Torvalds himself said to not use it for a couple of builds.
S W
0 .
http://linuxtoday.com/developer/2003112400826NWKN
"There is still something strange going on that seems to be triggered by preemption, so for now we suggest not enabling CONFIG_PREEMPT if you want the highest stability. On the other hand, I'd love to have more testing, so that we can try to figure out what the pattern is - but please mention explicitly that you ran with preemption if you have problems."
Someone else reported that it was just a mistake on the part of one of the testers, which was revealed http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/16319
Who is a troll -- a person who follows what Linus says in official annoucements, or some random person who says, "works for me" in a rude way?
So preempt must still be broken, as it has been since test10. Don't use it.
All the R1 DVDs I see usually have Spanish and French, on account of the rather large population (10 million) French speakers in Quebec, and rather large (30 million? 60?) Spanish speakers in the US and Mexico.
They sometimes have extra tracks of German and Italian as well, which makes it odd that they wouldn't already have a pressing for the other region. Plus, they already translated it for the theatrical release. You can get that pressed to DVD within 2 months after the movie's released, if you really want. The delay's just so they can try and control the market.
If there are only two people in the game, labour's probably going to be very light. If you're running a big, dynamic server farm, having one node run that particular daemon's not that big of a deal.
Before all that other tomfoolery. Look at your wallet: it has your ID cards, money, a Diners' Club credit card, and pictures of your family.
What the hell do you do if you lose it?
I believe the wallet is having too many eggs in one basket.. but people have been getting along with those fine for centuries. The simple solution is to not be a careless fop with things that are valuable to you.
As long as games bring in money, the company will support the games that bring in the money. PSOv2 notwithstanding, the lack of payment was why the Sega Dreamcast online stuff shut down. I don't see Microsoft retiring a service that continues to generate profit.
"If I decide to go to a Steakhouse, I have three choices for payment:"
1) Interac, which is essentialy a mini-ATM which moves the exact amount from your bank account to the store/restraunt's bank account.
2) Credit card (everything's usually accepted).
3) Cash, which is the same as the ATM methods above (perhaps it's 2 options to some..).
I'm still surprised that the US has nothing like Interac in widespread deployment. Everywhere in Canada has had Interac for 8 or more years, yet US banks still only have it deployed in some US cities as a test case. Crazy.
"And you damn well better hope that it's stable and bug free. Because if it isn't -- well, too bad. You can't patch. Xbox changes this for Live games, but not for the majority of games."
:) I don't see how the colour depth sucks, since the only console I've seen anything like banding on is the PS2 -- and that's only on some textures that were downsampled to fit in the PS2's tiny vram. I still think that Final Fantasy X-2 is a sexy looking game, far more sexy looking than any PC game I've played in memory. Advantage: Console.
:) By the time I start to need to think about backups of it, I see that I can download one off the internet (like all my NES games I play via emulator now, rather than plugging my cartridges into my NES). Still an advantage: Console.
;) Unfortunately, I didn't like it and got rid of it towards FFX-2 which has a much more fun battle system. Yea, it was full new-release price, but I'll get more than 40 hours of play out of it (like KOTOR, which was my part-time job for a few weeks this summer). I don't recally very many PC games that came out and were worth a damn this year, especially not compared to the flood of awesome console games. Advantage: Console.
Since most of the games are stable and fine, I don't have to sweat the few that are broken. Rental stores let me know ahead of time that a game is broken for a very small fee. I can't rent PC games, and I certainly can't return them if they require a patch -- because everyone has patches on their games! Advantage: Console.
"And it still looks far, far worse than a PC game. You don't have the resolution, you don't have the polygon draw, or the fill rate of even a cheap PC video card. Resolution is a huge issue..."
640x480 is what you see on the TV. If you have HDTV, it's progressive scan (ala your monitor). I don't know about you, but I usually end up playing at that resolution anyways just to keep a steady framerate in 3D games. The graphics chips in the Xbox and GameCube are GeForce 3.5 and Radeon8500ish respectively, and do have a pretty decent fill rate. Enough for filling your TV up nicely
"Xbox Live isn't hacked yet, but if you think it won't ever be then you're living in a dream world."
Yes, but since it is a money operation for Microsoft, I think you're living in a dream world if you think that Microsoft won't address the situation.
"Sure, it's the same thing in the PC world, but to try and list this as an "advantage" is complete and utter BS."
I think it's an advantage. I never have to worry or wonder if the disc I have from the store will be read by my console, because the console has a standardized format. PC CD games all use different anti-piracy techniques, which break in various ways and just end up messing up your normal customers. I just plain don't worry about that on any of my console games
"If you buy a console when it's brand new then it's about $500 with a memory card and second controller. Each game is $40 or $50 and doesn't drop in price for months or years."
Or if you buy a console about 2-3 years into its life cycle when the console is about 220$ CDN, with many greatest hits games at 30$ as well as budget titles around the same point... along with the fact that all the fancy new games coming out are starting to actually push your console hardware to the limit. Don't be a foolish early adopter -- just buy a little later. The price dropping isn't a big deal, either. FFX came out late last year -- a year I've been busy with all the re-released Resident Evils on GameCube, a few more games I've added to my Dreamcast selection, Xbox Live! games, and litterally hundreds of games purchased for under 40$ CDN. By the time it went Greatest Hits, was about when I had time to play it anyways
"Oh, and the games probably won't be playable on the next generation console"
Fine by me. I have plenty of consoles (13), as well as emulators for
Once you have a service which is the single-sign-on point, you see that you can ban cheaters. You also get an audit log of everything and can require updates to games before letting people online. Beyond that, you can also require that the consoles which connect aren't modified to play edited game data (look around for the infamous Super Enzo Ferrari from PGR2 which lifts off the ground when it accelerates).
Is there a problem?
:)
I don't think I'd go back anyways. The better integration in KDE has grown on me (KDE's Konquerer Desktop isn't all slow like Nautilus is). Plus, nagging bugs (IE: focus follows mouse defocusing windows when over desktop) aren't in KDE
I can still type faster than it responds. I do have a fairly high rate of typing, but I like to think I'm not abnormal. The widgets in Mozilla or Kedit don't seem to have such problems. AFAIK, Mozilla's using GTK+v1 inside it.
Everything else runs at the same or faster as the equivalent under Win2k (last time I stuck in a Windows HD to check was 6 months ago). Mplayer does accelerated playback, etc. The only thing that changed was Gnome 1.4 - 2.2 and then 2.4. It was slow.
It seems to have gotten a little better in 9.1, but KDE is still more responsive in its text areas and terminal widgets. For example, I do ls -la in gnome-terminal in my home dir: I have 508 items listed. It takes ~3.8 seconds to scroll past. In konsole, it takes ~0.6 seconds.
GTK+v2 is just slower. Maybe it's not very compatible with XFree86 4.3 in Xinerama mode w/ the Radeon driver, but I suspect it's mainly GTK+v2's problem.
If I take my Slackware 9 CD and install it onto a box, I can install without Konquerer. If I take a Windows XP CD and install it onto a box, I can't choose to not install IE. It's welded in. Konquerer is only integrated into KDE. Windows has so such separation of window manager/session management/library environment and kernel/base install that Linux has.
Plus, I have absolutely no problem using Thunderbird and Firebird for email and web stuff in Konquerer. It (KDE) respects my choice to use those applications as default, rather than forcing me to use KMail or Konquerer. I've yet to see such respect in Windows.