Sony have an all-singing, all-dancing ninja device that plays more traditional games, but much prettier than before. Are they really "failing"? Or is the market for this just rather smaller than people who will buy a DS for Brain Training?
Option 3: Perhaps people aren't too interested in playing the same games over and over, and want something different.
My gaming background is as a pretty hardcore PC FPS player, but that genre seems to have stagnated of late... Doom 3, Quake 4, Half Life 2 were all pretty much the same thing that we've played countless times before, except now the red key is replaced with an engineer or a security guard, and the graphics look prettier. Woohoo. And honestly, can someone please produce an FPS in which the AI understands that I can just circle strafe them into the ground? The most interesting FPS I've played lately was Far Cry, but that was a couple of years ago now.
On the other hand, I bought a DS last autumn, and have bought about 10 games for it, not all of which fall into the casual Brain Training genre that you cite. There's all kinds of games in my selection, and there's fun and different and some of them make great use of the stylus, even if it is just a glorified mouse.
As far as I can see, the most telling thing is that so many games on the PSP seem to be ports of PS2 games and re-hashes of things that people are tired of, which the Sony guy himself acknowledged.
Not sure who was originally responsible for this...
Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today, is the word fuck. Of all the English words beginning with f, fuck is the single one referred to as the "f-word". It's the one magical word. Just by it's sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most words in the English language, is derived from German. Fuck from German's "fliechen" which mean to strike. In English, fuck folds into many grammatical categories. As a transitional verb for instance, "John fucked Shirley". As an intransitive verb; "Shirley fucks". It's meaning is not always sexual, it can be used as an adjective such as; "John's doing all the fucking work". As part of an adverb; "Shirley talks too fucking much", as an adverb enhancing an adjective; "Shirley is fucking beautiful". As a noun; "I don't give a fuck". As part of a word: "abso-fucking-lutely" or "in-fucking-credible". And, as almost every word in the sentence: "fuck the fucking fuckers!". As you must realize, there aren't too many words with the versatility of fuck, as in these examples describing situations such as;
fraud: "I got fucked at the used car lot"
dismay: "Oh, fuck it!"
trouble: "I guess I'm really fucked now"
aggresion: "don't fuck with me, buddy!"
difficulty: "I don't understand this fucking question"
inquiry: "who the fuck was that?"
dissatisfaction: "I don't like what the fuck is going on here"
incompetence: "he's a fuck-off!"
dismissal: "why don't you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself?"
I'm sure you can think of many more examples.
With all these multipurpoused applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word?
We say, use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly:
FUCK YOU!
Taken from here, where there is also an MP3 of the above.
Parallel example... I was listening to the radio (Radio 1, in the UK) earlier today, and one of Snoop Dogg's tracks was on. Lyrics follow:
Oh you got a gun so you wanna pop back?
AK47 now nigga, stop that!
Cement shoes, now I'm on the move
You're family's crying, now you on the news
They can't find you, and now they miss you
Must I remind you I'm only here to twist you
Pistol whip you, dip you then flip you
Then dance to this motherfucking music we crip to
Subscribe nigga, get yo issue
Baby come close, let me see how you get loose!
Now, it being the middle of the day, the words "nigga" and the "fucking" part of "motherfucking" were censored. Now, I may be alone on this, but I think there are more issues with that delightful little stanza than those couple of words.
Pray tell, what liberty is there to download films illegally? Or are we operating under Slash-Law where it's your inalienable right to enjoy everything for free?
And the previous point will be re-iterated... What if someone else takes the picture?
You must have remarkable restraint if you've never done anything that might be embarrassing were someone to take a picture of it and show, say, your boss, your wife, your parents, etc.
Why the heck can't it show me the size of directories in detail view? When I need to find out which program has suddenly eaten the remaining 12GB of hard disk it's tiresome to recurse through every directory, right clicking and checking the size.
At the place I work, the voicemail is so nonsensical. You dial the number and it tells you all the stuff about how many messages you've got, and it gives you the options for what you want to do. Except - and heaven only knows why - the numbers it gives you are out of order. So, if you've just listened to a message and it's asking you what you want to do with it, then the voice is there going "Press 4 to keep the message, 1 to delete the message, 5 to return the call, 9 to transfer the message to another user, etc etc" and you're sat there thinking "Well, I wanted the 3rd thing she said, but what the heck was the number?"
A few years ago a friend told me of something that happened to his dad. His dad had just bought a new Mercedes with some early computer controlled braking system in it. It was one of these that works on the premise that if you slam the brakes really hard, the car takes over and brings the car to a complete halt as quickly as possible.
So, this guy is out driving and he comes to a 40 mph stretch of road. Now, lots of people speed down this section of road, and he's no different, so he's doing 60 down there, when all of a sudden he spots a policeman with a speed gun (this is in the UK) hiding in a gateway just up ahead. He doesn't want to get done doing 60, so he slams on the brakes and... the car takes over. He slows to 40, but the car doesn't care, it's working on stopping him altogether. He decelerates and rolls to a complete halt right next to the cop in the gateway, who looked somewhat amused and confused as my friends dad persuaded the car to move off again.
If you have a TV licence for your house, then it covers all TVs within that house, as well as any and all TVs that can be powered solely from their own internal power source i.e. batteries at any other location. The iPod would qualify for that, so as long as you had a TV license at home (which you almost certainly would) then you'd be OK. If you didn't, then they might have to re-think things. That being said, it would only affect BBC programmes, as the license fee is only there to support the BBC as other channels are supported by commercials, so it would be entirely up to the BBC whether they even made their programmes available via iTunes.
Also, there has been talk - I think it's even been posted here on/. - of altering the TV licence to cover computers too, given that TV shows can be acquired (legitimately or not) through them, though I think it got smacked down at the time and I've not heard any more about it since.
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
If that doesn't turn your crank, I suspect a modern translation of Song Of Songs might turn out racy enough to qualify as erotic literature. Better get biblegateway.com moved to biblegateway.xxx
I'm a Christian BTW, and I don't think porn is a terribly good thing, but then I don't get to be in charge of what a whole load of non-Christians want. I also don't think that a.xxx tld would do a damn thing to fix the problem.
Well, I've heard that apparently buying an XBox actually costs MS money (the parts themselves cost more than they sell them for), so it's not the consoles themselves that are making the money.
Console games however... see printer companies for a similar business model.
There's a show in the UK called Top Gear, which is a magazine show about cars, basically. It's hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, who is a bit of a bigot and a big kid who refuses to grow up. They drive lots of cars very fast, and do various crazy things with them from time to time.
They have a test course near their studio, and guests on the show have to drive a car around the course, and their time is put on a leader board. I don't know how long the course is, but a professional driver in the current top end Mercedes sports car took 1:20 to get round it, and the slowest time in the standard car was 2:02 or something (by Richard Whiteley of Countdown fame, for any Brits reading).
Anyway, the point is they get loads of letters from people bragging that they could do the course faster, but by and large the ignore them. Except one time, when a blind guy wrote in saying he could do it. He was a former soldier and had lost his sight to a rare disease while serving in Bosnia or somewhere.
So, they got him in, and he and Jeremy Clarkson had some practise and then did the course. They developed a system similar to what a rally car crew uses, with the passenger telling the driver what kind of corners are coming up and so on.
Long story short, the guy did it in just under two minutes - faster than two of the previous sighted guests times. Not bad for a blind guy, and considering there were two guys in the car rather than one.
Disclaimer: Yes, I appreciate there may be some scepticism as to whether he was actually blind, so take it or leave it.
I played Theme Park fanatically when it first came out. Waiting for new rides and shops to be researched was agonising. You'd sit doing little routine things to pass the time, waiting for the little light bulb to appear in the top right hand corner of the screen. After playing that for hours at a time, I'd keep imagining I was seeing something flashing just out of sight.
More recently, playing Splinter Cell makes you look out for shadows and places to hide. I used to catch myself trying to step as lightly as possible when walking around too.
At my mother-in-law's house the bathroom is at the top of the stairs, but slightly offset. You go up the main lot of stairs, turn left and go up like two more steps, then the bathroom is on the right. I tend to run up the stairs, leap to the left, and then step forward into the bathroom. It always makes me think of strafing in FPS games.
Playing any game with sniper rifles always has me looking out for places where other snipers might be hiding, and for places I could snipe from.
After playing games that make use of EAX, and being impressed, I have been known to walk into the bathroom or somewhere and think "wow, that's a good effect". The same as people saying they've been impressed with "the graphics" outside, and wondering how the engine can handle the level of detail in such a wide open area.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony have an all-singing, all-dancing ninja device that plays more traditional games, but much prettier than before. Are they really "failing"? Or is the market for this just rather smaller than people who will buy a DS for Brain Training?
Option 3: Perhaps people aren't too interested in playing the same games over and over, and want something different.
My gaming background is as a pretty hardcore PC FPS player, but that genre seems to have stagnated of late... Doom 3, Quake 4, Half Life 2 were all pretty much the same thing that we've played countless times before, except now the red key is replaced with an engineer or a security guard, and the graphics look prettier. Woohoo. And honestly, can someone please produce an FPS in which the AI understands that I can just circle strafe them into the ground? The most interesting FPS I've played lately was Far Cry, but that was a couple of years ago now.
On the other hand, I bought a DS last autumn, and have bought about 10 games for it, not all of which fall into the casual Brain Training genre that you cite. There's all kinds of games in my selection, and there's fun and different and some of them make great use of the stylus, even if it is just a glorified mouse.
As far as I can see, the most telling thing is that so many games on the PSP seem to be ports of PS2 games and re-hashes of things that people are tired of, which the Sony guy himself acknowledged.
Are you going from "Don't use science to antagonise religious people" to "Religious people are insane and allergic to logic" in just one move?
Nice.
Not sure who was originally responsible for this...
Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today, is the word fuck. Of all the English words beginning with f, fuck is the single one referred to as the "f-word". It's the one magical word. Just by it's sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most words in the English language, is derived from German. Fuck from German's "fliechen" which mean to strike. In English, fuck folds into many grammatical categories. As a transitional verb for instance, "John fucked Shirley". As an intransitive verb; "Shirley fucks". It's meaning is not always sexual, it can be used as an adjective such as; "John's doing all the fucking work". As part of an adverb; "Shirley talks too fucking much", as an adverb enhancing an adjective; "Shirley is fucking beautiful". As a noun; "I don't give a fuck". As part of a word: "abso-fucking-lutely" or "in-fucking-credible". And, as almost every word in the sentence: "fuck the fucking fuckers!". As you must realize, there aren't too many words with the versatility of fuck, as in these examples describing situations such as;
I'm sure you can think of many more examples.
With all these multipurpoused applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word? We say, use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly:
FUCK YOU!
Taken from here, where there is also an MP3 of the above.
Parallel example... I was listening to the radio (Radio 1, in the UK) earlier today, and one of Snoop Dogg's tracks was on. Lyrics follow:
Oh you got a gun so you wanna pop back?
AK47 now nigga, stop that!
Cement shoes, now I'm on the move
You're family's crying, now you on the news
They can't find you, and now they miss you
Must I remind you I'm only here to twist you
Pistol whip you, dip you then flip you
Then dance to this motherfucking music we crip to
Subscribe nigga, get yo issue
Baby come close, let me see how you get loose!
Now, it being the middle of the day, the words "nigga" and the "fucking" part of "motherfucking" were censored. Now, I may be alone on this, but I think there are more issues with that delightful little stanza than those couple of words.
Our kids understand that the use of those words simply is a sign to people of how dumb and inarticulate you are.
Or, as I have seen it said:
Profanity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
I heard the in-car entertainment system was the Phantom.
Fine, so you can pay to watch the film, then tell everyone about it. That about fits your campfire metaphor, right?
Pray tell, what liberty is there to download films illegally? Or are we operating under Slash-Law where it's your inalienable right to enjoy everything for free?
Such a document.
And the previous point will be re-iterated... What if someone else takes the picture?
You must have remarkable restraint if you've never done anything that might be embarrassing were someone to take a picture of it and show, say, your boss, your wife, your parents, etc.
Why the heck can't it show me the size of directories in detail view? When I need to find out which program has suddenly eaten the remaining 12GB of hard disk it's tiresome to recurse through every directory, right clicking and checking the size.
Oh man... you wanna talk about voicemail...
At the place I work, the voicemail is so nonsensical. You dial the number and it tells you all the stuff about how many messages you've got, and it gives you the options for what you want to do. Except - and heaven only knows why - the numbers it gives you are out of order. So, if you've just listened to a message and it's asking you what you want to do with it, then the voice is there going "Press 4 to keep the message, 1 to delete the message, 5 to return the call, 9 to transfer the message to another user, etc etc" and you're sat there thinking "Well, I wanted the 3rd thing she said, but what the heck was the number?"
Honestly, who thought that was a good idea?
... Someone in a call center, perhaps.
In related news... Etch-a-sketch Tech Support!
A few years ago a friend told me of something that happened to his dad. His dad had just bought a new Mercedes with some early computer controlled braking system in it. It was one of these that works on the premise that if you slam the brakes really hard, the car takes over and brings the car to a complete halt as quickly as possible.
So, this guy is out driving and he comes to a 40 mph stretch of road. Now, lots of people speed down this section of road, and he's no different, so he's doing 60 down there, when all of a sudden he spots a policeman with a speed gun (this is in the UK) hiding in a gateway just up ahead. He doesn't want to get done doing 60, so he slams on the brakes and... the car takes over. He slows to 40, but the car doesn't care, it's working on stopping him altogether. He decelerates and rolls to a complete halt right next to the cop in the gateway, who looked somewhat amused and confused as my friends dad persuaded the car to move off again.
If you have a TV licence for your house, then it covers all TVs within that house, as well as any and all TVs that can be powered solely from their own internal power source i.e. batteries at any other location. The iPod would qualify for that, so as long as you had a TV license at home (which you almost certainly would) then you'd be OK. If you didn't, then they might have to re-think things. That being said, it would only affect BBC programmes, as the license fee is only there to support the BBC as other channels are supported by commercials, so it would be entirely up to the BBC whether they even made their programmes available via iTunes.
Here's a Google-HTML-ised-PDF from the BBC website about some of the above.
Also, there has been talk - I think it's even been posted here on /. - of altering the TV licence to cover computers too, given that TV shows can be acquired (legitimately or not) through them, though I think it got smacked down at the time and I've not heard any more about it since.
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
If that doesn't turn your crank, I suspect a modern translation of Song Of Songs might turn out racy enough to qualify as erotic literature. Better get biblegateway.com moved to biblegateway.xxx
I'm a Christian BTW, and I don't think porn is a terribly good thing, but then I don't get to be in charge of what a whole load of non-Christians want. I also don't think that a .xxx tld would do a damn thing to fix the problem.
This search page will search for unsafe pages using that method, though I have yet to find^H^H^H^H hear of one that will do the same for images.
Well, I've heard that apparently buying an XBox actually costs MS money (the parts themselves cost more than they sell them for), so it's not the consoles themselves that are making the money. Console games however... see printer companies for a similar business model.
There's a show in the UK called Top Gear, which is a magazine show about cars, basically. It's hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, who is a bit of a bigot and a big kid who refuses to grow up. They drive lots of cars very fast, and do various crazy things with them from time to time.
They have a test course near their studio, and guests on the show have to drive a car around the course, and their time is put on a leader board. I don't know how long the course is, but a professional driver in the current top end Mercedes sports car took 1:20 to get round it, and the slowest time in the standard car was 2:02 or something (by Richard Whiteley of Countdown fame, for any Brits reading).
Anyway, the point is they get loads of letters from people bragging that they could do the course faster, but by and large the ignore them. Except one time, when a blind guy wrote in saying he could do it. He was a former soldier and had lost his sight to a rare disease while serving in Bosnia or somewhere.
So, they got him in, and he and Jeremy Clarkson had some practise and then did the course. They developed a system similar to what a rally car crew uses, with the passenger telling the driver what kind of corners are coming up and so on.
Long story short, the guy did it in just under two minutes - faster than two of the previous sighted guests times. Not bad for a blind guy, and considering there were two guys in the car rather than one.
Disclaimer: Yes, I appreciate there may be some scepticism as to whether he was actually blind, so take it or leave it.
Here's what Jesus thinks about that.
Here you go...
And this, whatever the hell it is.
Well, technically you heard it two weeks - (14 x 2.68 micro seconds) ago.