Scott Carrier made a very interesting argument that humans are exceptional distance runners a decade or so ago on This American Life. It wasn't exactly a scientific analysis, but after interviewing some biologists and trying to chase down antelope (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Running-After-Antelope-Scott-Carrier/dp/1582431116), he concluded that humans actually aren't all that good at it.
I, for one, loved the first Sonic Adventure. It seems to catch a lot of flak these days, but remember that it got excellent reviews in its time.
That said, I can understand why fans of old school Sonic did not like the new direction of the series, even if it was quite well executed, and I readily admit that Sonic Adventure 2, Heores, etc. were less fun. I have high hopes for this new title - the change in genre doesn't bother me at all.
"As a result, Opera 9.5 contains more than a year of improvements on the rendering engine. This includes improved CSS3 support (text-shadow anyone ), superior SVG support and a brand new javascript engine with support for ECMAScript 4 'getters' and 'setters'. Apart from being the best standard compliant browser, Opera 9.5 will also display even more webpages with bad coding."
They've always been aggressive about making sure websites work in the browser.
Point is, just about every remotely modern laptop and desktop in the world has USB ports, a redesign or different format without backwards compatability would defeat the purpose of it.
From the article: "I dont consider myself a very tech savvy person. Heck, I still have trouble navigating my email. Yet I had no trouble hooking up the XBOX 360. A perfunctory glance at the included documentation was needed to verify a few points, but other than that, its nearly fool-proof."
Hasn't this been true of just about every console in history? If anything, the 360 is far more complex than previous consoles because it relies on a network connection for much of its functionality, and thus one more wire and one more point of failure. The article goes on to describe how the games are reasonably accessable...
"I found the controls in most titles to be too esoteric for me and I was just uncomfortable sitting in one place, holding a controller in my warm, tense hands. But over the course of time, I came to relax with the controller and master several of the controls in the games I attempted to play."
Again, things have only risen in complexity since the days of the NES and prior (not a bad thing, of course). If anything has brought gaming to the masses, it's marketing - certainly not any change in ease of use.
A lot of the screenshots show highly customized desktops (look at the KDE 3.5 shot), which makes a comparison difficult. They're also all in low-resoultion JPEG format, which seems an odd choice...
Archive.org Moving Images Repository: http://www.archive.org/details/movies
Archive.org Live Music Repository: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php
I believe they collaborate with other projects to assemble these repositories, for instance their text database has Project Gutenberg's works (among others).
Emily Lakdawalla wrote a good summary of this debate for her blog the other day. She echoes the suggestion that we should define more than just 'planets', but rather specific types of planets. Things like Jupiter and Saturn would be defnined as 'Gas Giant Planets' while planets like Earth and Venus would be 'Terrestrial Planets', Plutos would be 'Minor Planets', etc. Seeing as gas giants and terrestrial planets really are completely different things that aren't fit to be grouped together as 'planets', I support this plan. Of course, there will innevitably be arguments about the intricacies of these sub-definitions...
Uh, I think the SNES did that first... and the Genesis... and the NES... and the Atari 2600... and the PC. I wouldn't disagree that the PSX extended the 'mainstream invasion', but it certainly didn't spark it. Because the game industry has been growing, you could say that each generation of consoles had that same effect: the PSX was in no way unusual in that regard.
Check out their Flash demo (created to demonstrate this mind-numbingly simple task to users with low comprehension but lightning-quick visual recognition, it seems). Who new that Swedes liked American Sci-Fi?
I think using 2000 instead of XP is more akin to running kernel 2.4 instead of 2.6 than running a 'vulnerable' version of the kernel. Remember that older Linux kernels are still maintained, and used by many people who require specific features that were changed in more recent versions.
I think the same can be said of many Windows 2000 users, who may not like a lot of the interface changes made to XP (and, yes, that goes beyond the Luna theme, which I realize is merely a default). Of course, as others noted, cost is probably the foremost concern.
Odd, as i read your post I was agreeing with you. Then I went to GameRankings and was surprised to find that the DS has no games with an average score over 90, and only four over 80. The PSP is actually marginally better: one over 90 and eight over 80. Obviously that doesn't take into account games not yet released, which was where your prime qualm was, but it still shocked me a little and is good to keep in mind.
One could also make the argument that those critics are only rating the games in comparison to others on the system, and that the DS games are all inherently better because of the dual screens and stylus. That's probably a stretch, though.
While there may be some truth to what you suspect, you shouldn't have expected to find gameplay details in this article. The article was written about the new partnership between MTV and Midway, using the game as evidence of that fact. It listed details supporting the fact that MTV and Midway are in collaboration, such as the soundtracks and whatnot. This was NOT an article about the game itself.
I imagine this game will be no more impaired by the licensing (and, in fact, perhaps aided by it) than the ESPN sports games were. Fans generally would rather here commentary by the same man telecasting the games they watch than some generic voice actor, and generally do want to hear music by their favorite artists rather than game composers. It's likely positive, no need to be suspicious.
'Matt Casamassina
IGN
Casamassina deserves a spot on this list if only for his ability to manage a surprisingly massive, usually angry and always poor-spelling audience of Nintendo fans. Plus, he does this on a system where big games are few and far between...'
Wow, I can't believe that in a paragraph designed to award Casamassina an honor they managed to insult both what he writes about and who he writes it for. Was there really any need to do that? Especially since the insults they used where representative of brash stereotypes, something which has no place in a site for 'game industry *professionals*'.
Sort of... they attributed the decline to increases in use of the more 'user-friendly' Debians like Xandros and Ubuntu. By the way, these results differ signifigantly from another good source of such statistics: distrowatch.org The right sidebar on their homepage tallies vistors' distros.
Good news, even for Sid users.
on
Sarge is Now Frozen
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was upset to see that KDE 3.4 was being held back from Sid until Sarge released (I ended up getting it from the Kubuntu sources), and I believe a few other packages followed this policy as well. Now that Sarge is coming out I assume we'll see some major updates in Sid. On that note, does anyone know when Debian will adopt X.org?
I don't really see anything wrong with sequels themselves, what exactly are you criticizing? There's nothing inherently better or worse about a member of a franchise as compared to an original title, even if you feel that a disproportionate amount of sequels are of poor quality. Nintendo in particular has a very good reputation with its sequels, they tend to be received as well made and innovative: not 'cookie-cutters'. Take for instance games like Mario Kart DD and Super Smash Brothers Melee, both anticipated to be remakes of their N64 versions with prettier graphics. They ended up being significantly evolved from their earlier versions, and (check Gamerankings if you wish) were very well reviewed.
'It's been a slow few days as far as gaming news goes, so I thought this would be a good time to share an article I wrote...'
I agree with you, but at least he justifies it right at the beginning of the piece.
Speaking of Gecko Browsers Using Native Widgets...
on
CaminoBrowser.org Launches
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I recently stumbled upon Kazehakase, which uses GTK+ and is available for Linux. It's in many ways a superior Gecko browser for Linux to Firefox, mostly because it avoids the drawbacks of XUL. It has mouse gestures, full text search and thumbnailed history, RSS, better tabbing (drag and drop of them, they can be displayed vertically, etc.), and I believe some sort of benefit for Japanses speakers. Despite their limited development base, I really think Firefox's platform-specific alternatives (including Camino and K-Meleon) are superior to it.
The toolbar does more than just offer a 'search at Yahoo!' field. From TFA:
"It provides bookmarks and custom buttons, a means to search only within a particular site, stored search history, Yahoo! Mail alerts, and one-click page translation based on Babelfish."
I'm guessing a native port of KDE was impossible because Qt for Windows is not released under the GPL. Now, however, Trolltech will be releasing it under the GPL. Does this mean all the work of porting it was needless? Furthermore, does this mean we'll see an influx of Qt apps being ported to Windows now that they're free to use Qt on that platform?
Slashdot Mirror
Scott Carrier made a very interesting argument that humans are exceptional distance runners a decade or so ago on This American Life. It wasn't exactly a scientific analysis, but after interviewing some biologists and trying to chase down antelope (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Running-After-Antelope-Scott-Carrier/dp/1582431116), he concluded that humans actually aren't all that good at it.
I, for one, loved the first Sonic Adventure. It seems to catch a lot of flak these days, but remember that it got excellent reviews in its time.
That said, I can understand why fans of old school Sonic did not like the new direction of the series, even if it was quite well executed, and I readily admit that Sonic Adventure 2, Heores, etc. were less fun. I have high hopes for this new title - the change in genre doesn't bother me at all.
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/kestrel-is-co minga>
"As a result, Opera 9.5 contains more than a year of improvements on the rendering engine. This includes improved CSS3 support (text-shadow anyone ), superior SVG support and a brand new javascript engine with support for ECMAScript 4 'getters' and 'setters'. Apart from being the best standard compliant browser, Opera 9.5 will also display even more webpages with bad coding."
They've always been aggressive about making sure websites work in the browser.
USB = UNIVERSAL Serial Bus
Point is, just about every remotely modern laptop and desktop in the world has USB ports, a redesign or different format without backwards compatability would defeat the purpose of it.
From the article:
"I dont consider myself a very tech savvy person. Heck, I still have trouble navigating my email. Yet I had no trouble hooking up the XBOX 360. A perfunctory glance at the included documentation was needed to verify a few points, but other than that, its nearly fool-proof."
Hasn't this been true of just about every console in history? If anything, the 360 is far more complex than previous consoles because it relies on a network connection for much of its functionality, and thus one more wire and one more point of failure. The article goes on to describe how the games are reasonably accessable...
"I found the controls in most titles to be too esoteric for me and I was just uncomfortable sitting in one place, holding a controller in my warm, tense hands. But over the course of time, I came to relax with the controller and master several of the controls in the games I attempted to play."
Again, things have only risen in complexity since the days of the NES and prior (not a bad thing, of course). If anything has brought gaming to the masses, it's marketing - certainly not any change in ease of use.
A lot of the screenshots show highly customized desktops (look at the KDE 3.5 shot), which makes a comparison difficult. They're also all in low-resoultion JPEG format, which seems an odd choice...
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446 Looks like they're at least considering it.
http://ariya.blogspot.com/2006/07/eiffel-in-perfec tion.html
Obviously, this is a work in progress and not quite the same as native support for Corel documents, but it's worht mentioning.
Archive.org Moving Images Repository: http://www.archive.org/details/movies Archive.org Live Music Repository: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php I believe they collaborate with other projects to assemble these repositories, for instance their text database has Project Gutenberg's works (among others).
Emily Lakdawalla wrote a good summary of this debate for her blog the other day. She echoes the suggestion that we should define more than just 'planets', but rather specific types of planets. Things like Jupiter and Saturn would be defnined as 'Gas Giant Planets' while planets like Earth and Venus would be 'Terrestrial Planets', Plutos would be 'Minor Planets', etc. Seeing as gas giants and terrestrial planets really are completely different things that aren't fit to be grouped together as 'planets', I support this plan. Of course, there will innevitably be arguments about the intricacies of these sub-definitions...
Uh, I think the SNES did that first... and the Genesis... and the NES... and the Atari 2600... and the PC. I wouldn't disagree that the PSX extended the 'mainstream invasion', but it certainly didn't spark it. Because the game industry has been growing, you could say that each generation of consoles had that same effect: the PSX was in no way unusual in that regard.
Check out their Flash demo (created to demonstrate this mind-numbingly simple task to users with low comprehension but lightning-quick visual recognition, it seems). Who new that Swedes liked American Sci-Fi?
I think using 2000 instead of XP is more akin to running kernel 2.4 instead of 2.6 than running a 'vulnerable' version of the kernel. Remember that older Linux kernels are still maintained, and used by many people who require specific features that were changed in more recent versions.
I think the same can be said of many Windows 2000 users, who may not like a lot of the interface changes made to XP (and, yes, that goes beyond the Luna theme, which I realize is merely a default). Of course, as others noted, cost is probably the foremost concern.
Odd, as i read your post I was agreeing with you. Then I went to GameRankings and was surprised to find that the DS has no games with an average score over 90, and only four over 80. The PSP is actually marginally better: one over 90 and eight over 80. Obviously that doesn't take into account games not yet released, which was where your prime qualm was, but it still shocked me a little and is good to keep in mind.
One could also make the argument that those critics are only rating the games in comparison to others on the system, and that the DS games are all inherently better because of the dual screens and stylus. That's probably a stretch, though.
While there may be some truth to what you suspect, you shouldn't have expected to find gameplay details in this article. The article was written about the new partnership between MTV and Midway, using the game as evidence of that fact. It listed details supporting the fact that MTV and Midway are in collaboration, such as the soundtracks and whatnot. This was NOT an article about the game itself.
I imagine this game will be no more impaired by the licensing (and, in fact, perhaps aided by it) than the ESPN sports games were. Fans generally would rather here commentary by the same man telecasting the games they watch than some generic voice actor, and generally do want to hear music by their favorite artists rather than game composers. It's likely positive, no need to be suspicious.
'Matt Casamassina IGN Casamassina deserves a spot on this list if only for his ability to manage a surprisingly massive, usually angry and always poor-spelling audience of Nintendo fans. Plus, he does this on a system where big games are few and far between...' Wow, I can't believe that in a paragraph designed to award Casamassina an honor they managed to insult both what he writes about and who he writes it for. Was there really any need to do that? Especially since the insults they used where representative of brash stereotypes, something which has no place in a site for 'game industry *professionals*'.
The author probably wasn't using the symbiotic loader, which keeps Office in RAM at all times for the sole purpose of faster startup times.
Sort of... they attributed the decline to increases in use of the more 'user-friendly' Debians like Xandros and Ubuntu. By the way, these results differ signifigantly from another good source of such statistics: distrowatch.org The right sidebar on their homepage tallies vistors' distros.
I was upset to see that KDE 3.4 was being held back from Sid until Sarge released (I ended up getting it from the Kubuntu sources), and I believe a few other packages followed this policy as well. Now that Sarge is coming out I assume we'll see some major updates in Sid. On that note, does anyone know when Debian will adopt X.org?
I don't really see anything wrong with sequels themselves, what exactly are you criticizing? There's nothing inherently better or worse about a member of a franchise as compared to an original title, even if you feel that a disproportionate amount of sequels are of poor quality. Nintendo in particular has a very good reputation with its sequels, they tend to be received as well made and innovative: not 'cookie-cutters'. Take for instance games like Mario Kart DD and Super Smash Brothers Melee, both anticipated to be remakes of their N64 versions with prettier graphics. They ended up being significantly evolved from their earlier versions, and (check Gamerankings if you wish) were very well reviewed.
'It's been a slow few days as far as gaming news goes, so I thought this would be a good time to share an article I wrote...' I agree with you, but at least he justifies it right at the beginning of the piece.
I recently stumbled upon Kazehakase, which uses GTK+ and is available for Linux. It's in many ways a superior Gecko browser for Linux to Firefox, mostly because it avoids the drawbacks of XUL. It has mouse gestures, full text search and thumbnailed history, RSS, better tabbing (drag and drop of them, they can be displayed vertically, etc.), and I believe some sort of benefit for Japanses speakers. Despite their limited development base, I really think Firefox's platform-specific alternatives (including Camino and K-Meleon) are superior to it.
Even more impressive was Klaatu's 'Around the UNIVERSE in 80 days'
The toolbar does more than just offer a 'search at Yahoo!' field. From TFA:
"It provides bookmarks and custom buttons, a means to search only within a particular site, stored search history, Yahoo! Mail alerts, and one-click page translation based on Babelfish."
I'm guessing a native port of KDE was impossible because Qt for Windows is not released under the GPL. Now, however, Trolltech will be releasing it under the GPL. Does this mean all the work of porting it was needless? Furthermore, does this mean we'll see an influx of Qt apps being ported to Windows now that they're free to use Qt on that platform?