Would you pay 11$ a month if you could get 3-6 megabyte/s download rates? I would. Even if I had to wait a few years before it fully kicked in. It's still a great deal.
"I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages"
While letter-based entry is easy for computers to be designed to do, symbol based output is much more efficient than letter based words. It's a lot easier to write fast car in Japanese -- 2 characters (one for speed, one for car) vs. 7 in English + space or hyphenation.
Before you whine that learning a few thousand symbols would be hard, stop and consider how you read. Unless you're 5 or younger, you probably read by doing word recognition instead of sounding each letter out by phonics rules, and then comparing to words you know. Your visual vocabulary is probably many tens of thousands of words strong, nothing compared to the couple thousand kanji that Japanese people use daily.
And, for those who haven't learned specific characters you, you can always include explanitory text in one of the character-based languages (ala furigana).
Look into linguistics sometime, you'll find that communication is a really fascinating science.
"The biggest problem with rpgs, really, is the advancement of the action-rpg (Zelda being the primary example of this). There are generally so many more action-rpgs made these days, it's easy to get confused as to what a real traditional rpg is."
The biggest problem with RPGs are the constant, unfettered flow of cliche after cliche after cliche; reliance on random battles as a means of stretching out gameplay; lack of character freedom; and the fact that most companies put the same games out again and again.
Final Fantasy is the worst series in regard to lack of freedom -- the first let you pick any party you wanted, with any name, and develop them how you liked; current ones require you play as a set group of characters through a set story line -- even the battles are on rails, thanks to the boring summons that look cool the first (or second) time, but past that are merely a cinema to watch and make the random battles that much agonizingly longer.
Zelda is a great example of how you can have a good game with only battles you choose, and still have 30-40 hours of gameplay, lots of side quests, and a good story. How is that reducing RPGs? It's not. You play the role of Link (or some succesor), and enjoy the story and mechanics. The boss battles are fun, and the game in enjoyable. It's also not super hard like Halo on Legendary -- people of every age and gender seem to be able to get into it equally, rather than the stereotype of only the while male 18-31.
Also, considering that there were 10-15 "traditional" RPGs out this year, compared to the action RPGS (5-8), I don't think the release schedule's diluting it either.
You say it's not an RPG unless it has random battles. So, by that logic, Grandia and Grandia 2 aren't RPGs. Sounds like someone secretly likes Final Fantasy to the exclusion of all else.
"It was probably easier to write something from scratch than adapt say RedHat's installer to meet those requirements. It also doesn't sound as crude as your making it out to be. This installer has hardware detection and automatic module configuration. "
Implement the equivalent of latebinding for the installer. The bootable CD/DISK need only know how to get a base FS structure setup with a kernel+network driver and basic userland + rest of the installer. Stage 2 (located on a harddrive with network access, etc) could then be a text or GUI, and do all the rest with simplified logic because the initiall installation part was separate.
This is how all the recent Windows flavours do it, as well as some other OSes.
"Also the emails are getting "smarter" in that they look more like the place and making use of the old http://www.domain1.com@www.domain2.com which for a newbie can be very easily misread"
That'd be a case of the client being dumber, and supporting this without putting up HUGE WARNING DIALOGS or (much better) just not supporting those forms of URIs at all.
When was the last time you saw a raw hex encoded IP that was not in a misleading spam? How about the domain@domain form you mention?
If something is used so little, and so easy to abuse, it'd be better to just not have it at all. That's proper security design.
If Squaresoft actually went and made a new Final Fantasy game with generic characters. People you could name, who didn't have preset names of paths. Like the Light Warriors of FF1. No preset names, no preset paths -- only what you did with them.
Another Final Fantasy game that has the exact same gameplay with the exact same hundreds of cliche plot points and done-it-before gameplay makes me yawn.
"Grandia 2. Some people mentioned it on the site already, but yeah, they're right, this is a severely underrated game. Some of the best writing and voice acting you'll hear in a RPG. Not too challenging (unless you count the secret extra dungeon late in the game, which has some hard foes in it), but the brilliant combat system created for the first game really comes to shine here."
Maybe it's because it came out on the Dreamcast, but Grandia 2 is overrated. First off, the voice acting isn't awesome. Compared to the verbal ear-rape in most NA RPGs it's decent, but the fact is that they're still cartoon voice actors -- not professional voice actors.
The battle system is nice, but unlike Grandia 1, all you had to do was set it to auto battle and be done with it. There was no strategy involved at all. In Grandia 1, you actually improved spells and attacks by doing them. Unless you sat and played the game for more than 100 hours, you'd have to pick how you wanted to specialize each supporting character in it. In Grandia 2, it's all a matter of giving more skill and spell points. It's not as compelling if you've played both.
It's a good RPG, but it's not the be-all and end-all that some DC fans make it out to be. That'd be Shenmue, which was very much an enjoyable trip to Japan:)
"i can look past some silly stuff. for example:... - sentinels weren't able to be shot at in previous movies; only emps worked"
EMPs were the only weapons that'd kill a sentinel and any backup sentinels in a large enough range that they wouldn't be able to turn tail and go get backup.
"- for that matter, sentinels never relayed back to other computers when they found a ship"
And I quote, "let's bring the Logos up to broadcast depth so we can enter the Matrix." Radio works, but when you're a few km under ground in tubes of metal, it doesn't work so well. By EMP blasting them before they could leave, the Sentinels couldn't do it. In the most recent movie, there was a complete tunnel all the way down from the surface, plus millions of Sentinels who were all relaying information back and forth with their point-to-point radios.
Think a little harder on what you think of as issues, and you'll see there's a deeper explanation.
"The whole plot about the purpose of having humans in pods "generating" electricity for the machines was never explained.. The laws of thermodynamics do not allow for this, and that is why the movie seems to not be closed completely for me..."
Cars run on gasoline. Gasoline is a distillate of oil, which comes from fermented organic matter. It powers our cars on the same principle as the Matrix, essentially. You have lots of human bodies. With the body paralyzed, all muscle spasm electricity goes to the Matrix. With the body paralyzed, all excess heat generation can be skimmed off via peltier devices, which generate electricity. If you have enough humans, this isn't an issue at all. It's just like any other energy pyramid.
Yes, you do need lots of humans. Billions to support the machines. However, given what I've seen of the scope of the Matrix in the movies and side stories, I believe this to be entirely possible. Although I'd expect that, at some point, the machines would design and launch solar energy collecting satalites which could send microwave beams to Earth. Perhaps the humans' sky darkening technology blocks this, though.
Something similar happened in Canada during WW1; December 6th, 1917 to be exact.
"The Mont Blanc, a French steamer, was 330 feet long and 40 feet wide. Her cargo of explosives was bound for the fighting in Europe by way of Bordeaux, France. And what a cargo it was...! The manifest of the Mont Blanc reads like a chemistry experiment:
2300 tons of wet and dry picric acid;
200 tons of TNT;
35 tons of benzol (stored on the open decks); and
10 tons of gun cotton."
"I like the way the PS2 did it better than the X-Box. With the PS2 it was free, no $30 extra (I later bought the PS2 remote when it was onsale for $10 just for convience sake)."
You paid for that feature. It's just that you paid by not having an 8gb HD in your system. The dongle that plugs into the Xbox is not just an IR sensor, it's the complete DVD playback program. The features in it are more complete than the "console only" features in a PS2. The PS2 requires you spend that same US$ 30 on a memory card that's 8megabytes in size, rather than a nice 8gigabyte HD. Failing to acknowledge this is just deluding yourself.
"I personally doubt that the licensing fee added anything significant to the cost of my PS2 or X-Box, maybe $1 at most."
On the Xbox, maybe, but on the PS2, wrong. The DVD CCA licence is more than US$ 1 -- you're deluding yourself.
There are plenty of people who won't acknowledge that the GameCube is a viable console choice because it won't play DVDs. Even though it's 110$ cheaper than PS2 or Xbox, and you can buy for 60$ a superior DVD player that also does video CDs (which no current consoles do), MP3 cds (ditto), and Kodak picture CDs (ditto), among other things.
The DVD player feature was fine when decent DVD players cost a fair chunk of change. Since they now cost the same as a new release video game, it's not a big deal. Only people who don't know anything about DVD players will convince themselves it's worth the extra expense.
Honestly, I'm sure the ratio of men after nothing but vagina equals the women after nothing but penis.
Most women and men view the body as a whole. It's not just the penises that they're talking about here, it's that women (in general in MMOs) have all their measurements and sizes configurable in a way that isn't possible on the male models.
Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves. Yes, they put in some effort on Tony Hawk 2x (new levels, volumetric grass, custom soundtracks), but Tony Hawk 3 was a stop back (the only Xbox-ish feature was 4 player support).
Then they came out with Tony Hawk 4. At a time when every other game came with online features, Tonk Hawk 4 topped out at 2 players and no other features. Talk about lame! Additionally, despite the fact that the Xbox uses DVD9 discs, the music soundtracks are overly compressed on Tony Hawk 4, making it essentially unlistenable on a good sound setup.
THUG not having online support is just a reaffirmation that Activision doesn't care about its users. It's only supporting the Xbox because people will buy anything they put out.
Don't believe me? Read this comment that essentially says, " I think the series peaked with THPS3 -- 4 was good but it was incredibly, awfully hard, which made it just a smidgen less exciting than 3. Now this one seems like it's going to be more of the same.... Now, if SSX3 hadn't come out last week, I probably would be all over this [THUG]" Even the people who say it's bad can't help but buy it. Way to go, Activision -- milk that franchise!
This man lacks an understanding of the problems.
on
The Problem With Abundance
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
He makes such statements as, "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr" which is entirely false, as anyone who's studied the wave behaviour of traffic can attest to.
Then he makes the assertions, "Nor can we solve obesity by reducing the shelves in the supermarket, or Spam by making it difficult and costly to send e-mail."
Really, if you reduced the number of high-fat foods in super markets and made it so that email did cost more to send, would that not both reduce the fat in most people's diets, as well as make it harder for bulk mailers to send email cheaply? Wouldn't that solve those problems?
This article spends its entire time chasing its own tail around before making unsupported assertions!
The male body is as beautiful as the female body; the notion that it's not attractive is as silly as the notion that women have a lower sex drive. As guys, we usually don't go around checking other guys out -- but we are subconciously rating ourselves in to our competition. Women do this too, they just do it a lot more conciously that guys. They're willing to tell you about it;) Plus, because of how the media works, there is a lower ratio of attractive guys to attractive girls in most things.
Women do tend to look at more of the full meal deal when talking about how attractive a guy is, but that's only natural since they get to be pregnant. If guys were the ones who became pregnant after a night of sex, I'm sure we'd all be thinking more of the long-term when looking at women. Most guys start to look at the long-term anynays, once they're past the high school relationship phase.
If you're looking for simplicity, grab your TWM and VI via xterm. Live in them all you want.
I want usability. I want to be able to say where the 3 most common dirs I save in KWrite are in a shortcut on the left hand-side, and I want to be able to customize my browse-for-icon dialog to include/usr/share/pixmaps. I want drag and drop from Konq to download files to the desktop intelligently (which Mozilla doesn't do, annoyingly). I want all these great features Mac users have, because the automation means I spend less time working on the computer, and more time working using a computer.
I ran KDE 1.1 in 1999. Then I ran Gnome 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, and recently 2.0. Guess what? Going over to KDE 3.2 recently was great. Not only is QT faster than GTK+ 2 (which is mind bogglingly slow on my Athlon XP), I gained usability of file dialogs.
You may think it's complicated, but it's not. It intelligently sizes itself to be a larger portion of my desktop, and the customizable (per app!) quick-jump bookmarks on the left make it so much easier to work with data in directories that are far apart, it's not funny.
Before you knock it, try it. I've ran Gnome for a lot longer than I've been running KDE, but KDE beats the pants off Gnome -- I have no problem admitting it.
Getting closer to QT/KDE's fileselector. Once they add home; back; forward; logical parent; new dir; bookmarks (web kind), configure, a direct type path with memory; character encoding; proper MIME filtering; and (my favourite feature) an easy to configure with custom-icons left-hand directory bookmark, which just happens to be configurable per-app that calls the file selector dialog or globally, we'll have seen progress.
Sender Permitted From, a handy little concept whereby DNS servers for domains publish lists of what servers are vouched for, so to speak. By only accepting email from servers which implement SPF, you reduce spam a lot. With SPF, if anyone is doing spam, it's very traceable and prosecuteable. You also cut down on people trying to fake identities.
If everyone implements SPF, it'd solve this problem in a fairer way.
This person has obviously not had his article peer reviewed by someone familiar with Microsoft's online offerings. If he'd bothered to go te the Xbox Live! calendar he'd see that there's more Mech Assalt content listed as coming, contrary to the claim: "In fact, just about all the games with downloadable content on Xbox Live released to date, have released their last known downloads, with no known plans to release any more. This includes Microsoft with MechAssault."
I find it odd that this person mentions Counter Strike as the best online game recently, yet doesn't mention that it's coming to Xbox in November -- Live! enabled. They also decry the best features of the live service, persistant stats and friends lists, as "not worth the money." Later on in the same article, the author states, "While the anonymity factor can be fun, sometimes, it's always more fun when you get a groove on with people you know. Team based games are more fun when you know your teammate(s). Even one-on-one games against each other are more fun when you know your opponent."
So which is it? Is it worth it to have an online identity that follows you, or is it not? If it wasn't worth the money, why would you say that having persistant friends and less anonymity was great?
The most obvious typo is "Midnight Run II" in the list of sports/racing games. I'm assuming they meant Midnight Club II, but this is just another example of some poor fact checking and peer reviewing going on with the article. Yes, it's good to have fresh content on your website, but you should resist the urge to post it before the content is actually fact-checked and complete.
The entire piece comes off as more on a reason why the author things PC online gaming should be the only way to go, yet it does not address the much higher rate of cheating with PC online games (and other PC online gaming cons), while contradicting itself in several places.
When you're older than 20 and working 40 hours a week, you sometimes don't have the time to drive over to a friend's house and back. Meeting up on Xbox Live! via one of the games is a lot better, especially since you don't have to share screen real estate.
Slashdot Mirror
"Are they really getting a good deal?"
Would you pay 11$ a month if you could get 3-6 megabyte/s download rates? I would. Even if I had to wait a few years before it fully kicked in. It's still a great deal.
"I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages"
While letter-based entry is easy for computers to be designed to do, symbol based output is much more efficient than letter based words. It's a lot easier to write fast car in Japanese -- 2 characters (one for speed, one for car) vs. 7 in English + space or hyphenation.
Before you whine that learning a few thousand symbols would be hard, stop and consider how you read. Unless you're 5 or younger, you probably read by doing word recognition instead of sounding each letter out by phonics rules, and then comparing to words you know. Your visual vocabulary is probably many tens of thousands of words strong, nothing compared to the couple thousand kanji that Japanese people use daily.
And, for those who haven't learned specific characters you, you can always include explanitory text in one of the character-based languages (ala furigana).
Look into linguistics sometime, you'll find that communication is a really fascinating science.
"The biggest problem with rpgs, really, is the advancement of the action-rpg (Zelda being the primary example of this). There are generally so many more action-rpgs made these days, it's easy to get confused as to what a real traditional rpg is."
The biggest problem with RPGs are the constant, unfettered flow of cliche after cliche after cliche; reliance on random battles as a means of stretching out gameplay; lack of character freedom; and the fact that most companies put the same games out again and again.
Final Fantasy is the worst series in regard to lack of freedom -- the first let you pick any party you wanted, with any name, and develop them how you liked; current ones require you play as a set group of characters through a set story line -- even the battles are on rails, thanks to the boring summons that look cool the first (or second) time, but past that are merely a cinema to watch and make the random battles that much agonizingly longer.
Zelda is a great example of how you can have a good game with only battles you choose, and still have 30-40 hours of gameplay, lots of side quests, and a good story. How is that reducing RPGs? It's not. You play the role of Link (or some succesor), and enjoy the story and mechanics. The boss battles are fun, and the game in enjoyable. It's also not super hard like Halo on Legendary -- people of every age and gender seem to be able to get into it equally, rather than the stereotype of only the while male 18-31.
Also, considering that there were 10-15 "traditional" RPGs out this year, compared to the action RPGS (5-8), I don't think the release schedule's diluting it either.
You say it's not an RPG unless it has random battles. So, by that logic, Grandia and Grandia 2 aren't RPGs. Sounds like someone secretly likes Final Fantasy to the exclusion of all else.
Halo for PC came out a while ago. Please update your template to say "Halo for Macintosh."
The fact that something encased like this would be perfect for downhilling, where weight isn't a big deal, is something that goes without saying.
Or were you implying that this advance would be useless for touring and road biking?
"It was probably easier to write something from scratch than adapt say RedHat's installer to meet those requirements. It also doesn't sound as crude as your making it out to be. This installer has hardware detection and automatic module configuration. "
Implement the equivalent of latebinding for the installer. The bootable CD/DISK need only know how to get a base FS structure setup with a kernel+network driver and basic userland + rest of the installer. Stage 2 (located on a harddrive with network access, etc) could then be a text or GUI, and do all the rest with simplified logic because the initiall installation part was separate.
This is how all the recent Windows flavours do it, as well as some other OSes.
"Also the emails are getting "smarter" in that they look more like the place and making use of the old http://www.domain1.com@www.domain2.com which for a newbie can be very easily misread"
That'd be a case of the client being dumber, and supporting this without putting up HUGE WARNING DIALOGS or (much better) just not supporting those forms of URIs at all.
When was the last time you saw a raw hex encoded IP that was not in a misleading spam? How about the domain@domain form you mention?
If something is used so little, and so easy to abuse, it'd be better to just not have it at all. That's proper security design.
If Squaresoft actually went and made a new Final Fantasy game with generic characters. People you could name, who didn't have preset names of paths. Like the Light Warriors of FF1. No preset names, no preset paths -- only what you did with them.
Another Final Fantasy game that has the exact same gameplay with the exact same hundreds of cliche plot points and done-it-before gameplay makes me yawn.
"Grandia 2. Some people mentioned it on the site already, but yeah, they're right, this is a severely underrated game. Some of the best writing and voice acting you'll hear in a RPG. Not too challenging (unless you count the secret extra dungeon late in the game, which has some hard foes in it), but the brilliant combat system created for the first game really comes to shine here."
:)
Maybe it's because it came out on the Dreamcast, but Grandia 2 is overrated. First off, the voice acting isn't awesome. Compared to the verbal ear-rape in most NA RPGs it's decent, but the fact is that they're still cartoon voice actors -- not professional voice actors.
The battle system is nice, but unlike Grandia 1, all you had to do was set it to auto battle and be done with it. There was no strategy involved at all. In Grandia 1, you actually improved spells and attacks by doing them. Unless you sat and played the game for more than 100 hours, you'd have to pick how you wanted to specialize each supporting character in it. In Grandia 2, it's all a matter of giving more skill and spell points. It's not as compelling if you've played both.
It's a good RPG, but it's not the be-all and end-all that some DC fans make it out to be. That'd be Shenmue, which was very much an enjoyable trip to Japan
"i can look past some silly stuff. for example: ...
- sentinels weren't able to be shot at in previous movies; only emps worked"
EMPs were the only weapons that'd kill a sentinel and any backup sentinels in a large enough range that they wouldn't be able to turn tail and go get backup.
"- for that matter, sentinels never relayed back to other computers when they found a ship"
And I quote, "let's bring the Logos up to broadcast depth so we can enter the Matrix." Radio works, but when you're a few km under ground in tubes of metal, it doesn't work so well. By EMP blasting them before they could leave, the Sentinels couldn't do it. In the most recent movie, there was a complete tunnel all the way down from the surface, plus millions of Sentinels who were all relaying information back and forth with their point-to-point radios.
Think a little harder on what you think of as issues, and you'll see there's a deeper explanation.
"The whole plot about the purpose of having humans in pods "generating" electricity for the machines was never explained.. The laws of thermodynamics do not allow for this, and that is why the movie seems to not be closed completely for me..."
Cars run on gasoline. Gasoline is a distillate of oil, which comes from fermented organic matter. It powers our cars on the same principle as the Matrix, essentially. You have lots of human bodies. With the body paralyzed, all muscle spasm electricity goes to the Matrix. With the body paralyzed, all excess heat generation can be skimmed off via peltier devices, which generate electricity. If you have enough humans, this isn't an issue at all. It's just like any other energy pyramid.
Yes, you do need lots of humans. Billions to support the machines. However, given what I've seen of the scope of the Matrix in the movies and side stories, I believe this to be entirely possible. Although I'd expect that, at some point, the machines would design and launch solar energy collecting satalites which could send microwave beams to Earth. Perhaps the humans' sky darkening technology blocks this, though.
Something similar happened in Canada during WW1; December 6th, 1917 to be exact.
"The Mont Blanc, a French steamer, was 330 feet long and 40 feet wide. Her cargo of explosives was bound for the fighting in Europe by way of Bordeaux, France. And what a cargo it was...! The manifest of the Mont Blanc reads like a chemistry experiment:
2300 tons of wet and dry picric acid;
200 tons of TNT;
35 tons of benzol (stored on the open decks); and
10 tons of gun cotton."
CBC even has a $ value breakdown, roughly 3.6 million US 1917 dollars -- an amazing amount to explode in Halifax harbour.
Nice details + pictures here..also, another page detailing the timeline and some injuries.
" A console can still not achieve the versatility of a PC when it comes to gaming. "
That's right, where else can I play only the best first-person shooters, strategy games, or North American-style RPGs?
Oh, wait, what if I want to play platformers, 2D games of any sort, Japanese-style RPGs, adventure games, etc?
The number of these games that come out on PCs is about 1 every 4 years. The only thing the PC has going for it, genre wise, are strategy games.
MS has advanced online for 800,000 people. Then again, when will it be profitable?
"I like the way the PS2 did it better than the X-Box. With the PS2 it was free, no $30 extra (I later bought the PS2 remote when it was onsale for $10 just for convience sake)."
You paid for that feature. It's just that you paid by not having an 8gb HD in your system. The dongle that plugs into the Xbox is not just an IR sensor, it's the complete DVD playback program. The features in it are more complete than the "console only" features in a PS2. The PS2 requires you spend that same US$ 30 on a memory card that's 8megabytes in size, rather than a nice 8gigabyte HD. Failing to acknowledge this is just deluding yourself.
"I personally doubt that the licensing fee added anything significant to the cost of my PS2 or X-Box, maybe $1 at most."
On the Xbox, maybe, but on the PS2, wrong. The DVD CCA licence is more than US$ 1 -- you're deluding yourself.
There are plenty of people who won't acknowledge that the GameCube is a viable console choice because it won't play DVDs. Even though it's 110$ cheaper than PS2 or Xbox, and you can buy for 60$ a superior DVD player that also does video CDs (which no current consoles do), MP3 cds (ditto), and Kodak picture CDs (ditto), among other things.
The DVD player feature was fine when decent DVD players cost a fair chunk of change. Since they now cost the same as a new release video game, it's not a big deal. Only people who don't know anything about DVD players will convince themselves it's worth the extra expense.
Honestly, I'm sure the ratio of men after nothing but vagina equals the women after nothing but penis.
Most women and men view the body as a whole. It's not just the penises that they're talking about here, it's that women (in general in MMOs) have all their measurements and sizes configurable in a way that isn't possible on the male models.
Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves. Yes, they put in some effort on Tony Hawk 2x (new levels, volumetric grass, custom soundtracks), but Tony Hawk 3 was a stop back (the only Xbox-ish feature was 4 player support).
... Now, if SSX3 hadn't come out last week, I probably would be all over this [THUG]" Even the people who say it's bad can't help but buy it. Way to go, Activision -- milk that franchise!
Then they came out with Tony Hawk 4. At a time when every other game came with online features, Tonk Hawk 4 topped out at 2 players and no other features. Talk about lame! Additionally, despite the fact that the Xbox uses DVD9 discs, the music soundtracks are overly compressed on Tony Hawk 4, making it essentially unlistenable on a good sound setup.
THUG not having online support is just a reaffirmation that Activision doesn't care about its users. It's only supporting the Xbox because people will buy anything they put out.
Don't believe me? Read this comment that essentially says, " I think the series peaked with THPS3 -- 4 was good but it was incredibly, awfully hard, which made it just a smidgen less exciting than 3. Now this one seems like it's going to be more of the same.
He makes such statements as, "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr" which is entirely false, as anyone who's studied the wave behaviour of traffic can attest to.
Then he makes the assertions, "Nor can we solve obesity by reducing the shelves in the supermarket, or Spam by making it difficult and costly to send e-mail."
Really, if you reduced the number of high-fat foods in super markets and made it so that email did cost more to send, would that not both reduce the fat in most people's diets, as well as make it harder for bulk mailers to send email cheaply? Wouldn't that solve those problems?
This article spends its entire time chasing its own tail around before making unsupported assertions!
The male body is as beautiful as the female body; the notion that it's not attractive is as silly as the notion that women have a lower sex drive. As guys, we usually don't go around checking other guys out -- but we are subconciously rating ourselves in to our competition. Women do this too, they just do it a lot more conciously that guys. They're willing to tell you about it ;) Plus, because of how the media works, there is a lower ratio of attractive guys to attractive girls in most things.
Women do tend to look at more of the full meal deal when talking about how attractive a guy is, but that's only natural since they get to be pregnant. If guys were the ones who became pregnant after a night of sex, I'm sure we'd all be thinking more of the long-term when looking at women. Most guys start to look at the long-term anynays, once they're past the high school relationship phase.
If you're looking for simplicity, grab your TWM and VI via xterm. Live in them all you want.
/usr/share/pixmaps. I want drag and drop from Konq to download files to the desktop intelligently (which Mozilla doesn't do, annoyingly). I want all these great features Mac users have, because the automation means I spend less time working on the computer, and more time working using a computer.
I want usability. I want to be able to say where the 3 most common dirs I save in KWrite are in a shortcut on the left hand-side, and I want to be able to customize my browse-for-icon dialog to include
I ran KDE 1.1 in 1999. Then I ran Gnome 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, and recently 2.0. Guess what? Going over to KDE 3.2 recently was great. Not only is QT faster than GTK+ 2 (which is mind bogglingly slow on my Athlon XP), I gained usability of file dialogs.
You may think it's complicated, but it's not. It intelligently sizes itself to be a larger portion of my desktop, and the customizable (per app!) quick-jump bookmarks on the left make it so much easier to work with data in directories that are far apart, it's not funny.
Before you knock it, try it. I've ran Gnome for a lot longer than I've been running KDE, but KDE beats the pants off Gnome -- I have no problem admitting it.
Getting closer to QT/KDE's fileselector. Once they add home; back; forward; logical parent; new dir; bookmarks (web kind), configure, a direct type path with memory; character encoding; proper MIME filtering; and (my favourite feature) an easy to configure with custom-icons left-hand directory bookmark, which just happens to be configurable per-app that calls the file selector dialog or globally, we'll have seen progress.
Hopefully the Gnome people can build on this.
Sender Permitted From, a handy little concept whereby DNS servers for domains publish lists of what servers are vouched for, so to speak. By only accepting email from servers which implement SPF, you reduce spam a lot. With SPF, if anyone is doing spam, it's very traceable and prosecuteable. You also cut down on people trying to fake identities.
If everyone implements SPF, it'd solve this problem in a fairer way.
She's hot, man!
This person has obviously not had his article peer reviewed by someone familiar with Microsoft's online offerings. If he'd bothered to go te the Xbox Live! calendar he'd see that there's more Mech Assalt content listed as coming, contrary to the claim: "In fact, just about all the games with downloadable content on Xbox Live released to date, have released their last known downloads, with no known plans to release any more. This includes Microsoft with MechAssault."
I find it odd that this person mentions Counter Strike as the best online game recently, yet doesn't mention that it's coming to Xbox in November -- Live! enabled. They also decry the best features of the live service, persistant stats and friends lists, as "not worth the money." Later on in the same article, the author states, "While the anonymity factor can be fun, sometimes, it's always more fun when you get a groove on with people you know. Team based games are more fun when you know your teammate(s). Even one-on-one games against each other are more fun when you know your opponent."
So which is it? Is it worth it to have an online identity that follows you, or is it not? If it wasn't worth the money, why would you say that having persistant friends and less anonymity was great?
The most obvious typo is "Midnight Run II" in the list of sports/racing games. I'm assuming they meant Midnight Club II, but this is just another example of some poor fact checking and peer reviewing going on with the article. Yes, it's good to have fresh content on your website, but you should resist the urge to post it before the content is actually fact-checked and complete.
The entire piece comes off as more on a reason why the author things PC online gaming should be the only way to go, yet it does not address the much higher rate of cheating with PC online games (and other PC online gaming cons), while contradicting itself in several places.
When you're older than 20 and working 40 hours a week, you sometimes don't have the time to drive over to a friend's house and back. Meeting up on Xbox Live! via one of the games is a lot better, especially since you don't have to share screen real estate.