That Hawk hadn't taken any pictures down the girl's top wouldn't exactly calm down the manager in that instance. It's unfortunate that this happened, but it was a misunderstanding, nothing more. If Hawk wants my sympathy, he should've taken the "they mistook me for a perv and kicked me out" track, not the "moronic staff threw me out because they hate SLRs" track.
According to the comment, he was standing on a balcony directly above one of the female employees, and the boss assumed that he was looking down her top. You don't need a zoom lens, or for that matter a camera, to do it at that distance. If he was changing settings on his camera, I could understand why it would look like he was pointing the camera right down at her.
I'm not so sure about this "the photo in question" business. I kind of doubt he only took one shot, and that the only point in which he angled the camera down was when he took that one shot. Whether he was perving or not, it's entirely possible that he seemed to be.
Mediawatch-UK is a spinoff of the now defunct (read: dead) Mary Whitehouse, probably the whingiest person on the planet during her existence. They're quite genuine, hard as that may be to believe, and have an unimpeachable reputation for complaining about things.
If anyone's making a publicity grab, it's the Daily Mail. The last we saw them on Slashdot, they had come up with a dubious iPhone Nano rumour. They're making a reach for online marketshare by coming up with nonsense and starting storms in teacups, basically taking their approach to newspaper sales but applying it their website. This is a publication which runs features demonising games at random intervals because it gives them something other than Jews, gays and foreigners to attack. They are the ones who probably egged Mediawatch into it in the first place.
Publisher-mandated coverage of the game in the UK peaked a few months ago when it was an Edge cover story. If they are deliberately courting controversy, they've done a poor job of it.
I'd say that the death of the arcade probably killed projects like Crazy Taxi, and projects like Shenmue are a serious risk for any company, but for the life of me I can't figure out why they're not making original games like JSR any more. They're playing it very safe lately.
Furthermore, I should say that fanboys are only defensive about consoles anyway, as they're the expensive part. Kids will vehemently defend a $400 purchase because the cost of being "wrong" is huge. It's the same reason that SUV and Hybrid owners want to murder eachother, while you rarely see a brutal chain beating over bicycle brands. When Sega dropped out of the console business, they no longer threatened to give Jonny Mario a case of buyer's remorse, and therefore were not the enemy.
I'm pretty sure the animosity only existed in deranged teenage fans' heads and the single-format magazines in the first place. Contrary to the 1990s games mags' posturing, Yu Suzuki does not want to send a brick upside Shigeru Miyamoto's face, and likewise no adult Nintendo customer was ever perversely opposed to Sega products.
I don't think there was a time when Spore wasn't an EA product. Maxis was acquired by EA in 1997. So you were never "going to buy Spore before [they] got [their] grimy hands on it".
I'm sure EA would've sold the movie and TV rights for Tiger Woods by now, if only that were possible. How about Burnout? 2 hours of DJ Stryker being brutally beaten with a muffler.
I'm not sure why it would be backwards compatible with USB 2.0, but not USB 1.1 and 1.0. IIRC all USB devices must initially connect as USB 1.0, then negotiate with the controller for higher speeds. By necessity, therefore, anything which accepts USB 2.0 must support USB 1.0 at the very least.
Not to be pedantic, I think you're conflating regular old wonky products, which account for about 2-5% of iPhones, Blackberries, DVD players etc. and arise from the inevitable crapshoot of quality control, with "bugs" and poorly designed products, which necessitate an en-masse recall or revision. I mean, if 20,000 iPhones out of a million have dodgy screens or Just Don't Work, then those 20,000 get replaced by the manufacturer or the store under warranty. If iPhones are designed in such a fashion that they perform poorly to other 3G phones, which is what the article discusses, then that's something which should've been caught at the "let's try it out" stage at the latest.
This isn't to say that the article's wild guesswork is right, of course. I kind of doubt it.
I would've said that's pretty damn counterintuitive, but it seems it's true. Actually it compares favourably to the 2G talk-time I get on my own phone, a bunch of 1998-era features running on a huge smartphone battery. I wonder if Apple should be emphasising that more, I had assumed the iPhone was in the charge-me-every-day club.
Disclaimer: I am not a developer, but I've read a lot of horror stories. If you try to pitch it to an established publisher or developer, the legitimate ones will turn you away because it leaves them wide open to a messy lawsuit if they do anything remotely similar in the future, even by coincidence. The unscrupulous ones will just rip you off. You really need to turn it into a legally-protectable game, or a total conversion mod, or something, and then get it published small-scale to demonstrate popularity. If you don't have the know-how, try to get together a team of amateurs, friends, sufficiently motivated guys online, whatever. Give it away, shareware, however you distribute it make sure that it gets out there and people know it's yours. Enter it in indie game contests. Whatever you can.
Then when you have an actual game to speak of, and some indication that it could sell, see about getting a publisher interested in buying the idea from you. What happens next will depend on the type of game we're talking about.
What I've read about game development in the past suggests that your project may well vanish into development hell at this stage, or be pushed out as a diabolical mess which means nobody will ever want to touch your game ever again. And you'll be unable to make amends because you've sold away the "big version" rights. You may make some money back for your time and effort though. The alternative would be to keep it small-scale, on mobile phones or whatever. This would suit many kinds of games. Only if you can manage to turn that small game into your own personal development empire, could you crank out a large-scale game like Halo or whatever.
Moral: the odds are against you ever being able to produce a Halo-style blockbuster, unless you want to get into career game design or are willing to give the idea to someone who is. And even if you're just trying to create one fun little puzzler, it's going to take a lot of time, effort, and cooperation.
By "knobs" you mean constants, presumably? In that case you could level the same criticism at any theory which involves empirical constants. Which would be quite literally all of science. An accurate theory of gravity, for example, is dependent upon the gravitational constant. I'm not sure what else you could mean.
There certainly isn't an overruling "string theory" with some inbuilt postulate that you can continuously vary to get an infinite number of intermediate theories between bosonic and type IIA. How would one continuously vary a postulate, anyway? There's no knob (and indeed no metaphorical console) that takes you from the postulated 26 dimensions of bosonic down to 10 for IIA and includes everything in between.
Before you get your knickers in a twist, I'd like to remind you that this by no means indicates that string theory is elegant, readily testable, useful, or most imporant of all, correct (my hunch is that it's a dead end), merely that your attacks on it appear to be nonsensical and to the best of my intuition, invented to correspond with some pop-sci perception of it.
I'm not sure that avoidance of Vista translates into good news for Linux. If you have a volume licence to install XP on your whole site, then regardless of what hardware you purchase in the interim, the deadline for switching is 2014 when Extended Support stops. They can sit on XP for that long, I'm sure, by which point the "Vista alternative" being explored will be Windows 7. If you're buying an OS licence tomorow, then getting something other than Vista is a priority, but I wonder how much of MS' business revenue that accounts for.
On this subject: On arrival in the US, my digital cable was hooked up through the aerial hole on the TV, and my DVD player by necessity has to go through the composite video input. I can see why switching to an HDTV would make SD sources look "good enough" by simple virtue of improved interconnects. Buying the TV is justified by that alone, and the customer may not feel the need to buy HD content.
Back home in the UK everyone (including my grandparents) wound up switching from these anchient connectors to RGB SCART cables when DVD and digital TV took off around 2000. Buying an HDTV usually entails a picture-quality drop for SD sources due to scaling, taking it back to composite video quality, so the gap in quality between HD and SD programming is increased, and therefore someone who buys an HDTV may be more motivated to get HD content.
So I have to wonder whether there's any difference in the "attachment rate" of HDTV media and players to HDTVs in the US vs Europe.
No. Your assertion simply does not hold logically. If one item in a class has a property, that property does not immediately extend to the class as a whole
If I find a green ball in a box of red balls, it is not reasonable to assert that "balls are green" or "balls are red". The strongest assertions I can make are "some balls are green" and "some balls are red". Likewise, it is not reasonable to see untestable string theories and assert "string theories are untestable". The existence of even one exception weakens it to "some string theories are untestable".
Slashdot Mirror
That Hawk hadn't taken any pictures down the girl's top wouldn't exactly calm down the manager in that instance. It's unfortunate that this happened, but it was a misunderstanding, nothing more. If Hawk wants my sympathy, he should've taken the "they mistook me for a perv and kicked me out" track, not the "moronic staff threw me out because they hate SLRs" track.
According to the comment, he was standing on a balcony directly above one of the female employees, and the boss assumed that he was looking down her top. You don't need a zoom lens, or for that matter a camera, to do it at that distance. If he was changing settings on his camera, I could understand why it would look like he was pointing the camera right down at her.
I'm not so sure about this "the photo in question" business. I kind of doubt he only took one shot, and that the only point in which he angled the camera down was when he took that one shot. Whether he was perving or not, it's entirely possible that he seemed to be.
Yeah, they noticed those games too. (The Mail took down the original story page as far as I can tell, so I can only give you the mirror.)
Mediawatch-UK is a spinoff of the now defunct (read: dead) Mary Whitehouse, probably the whingiest person on the planet during her existence. They're quite genuine, hard as that may be to believe, and have an unimpeachable reputation for complaining about things.
Overall, a pretty lame publicity grab.
If anyone's making a publicity grab, it's the Daily Mail. The last we saw them on Slashdot, they had come up with a dubious iPhone Nano rumour. They're making a reach for online marketshare by coming up with nonsense and starting storms in teacups, basically taking their approach to newspaper sales but applying it their website. This is a publication which runs features demonising games at random intervals because it gives them something other than Jews, gays and foreigners to attack. They are the ones who probably egged Mediawatch into it in the first place.
Publisher-mandated coverage of the game in the UK peaked a few months ago when it was an Edge cover story. If they are deliberately courting controversy, they've done a poor job of it.
I'd say that the death of the arcade probably killed projects like Crazy Taxi, and projects like Shenmue are a serious risk for any company, but for the life of me I can't figure out why they're not making original games like JSR any more. They're playing it very safe lately.
Furthermore, I should say that fanboys are only defensive about consoles anyway, as they're the expensive part. Kids will vehemently defend a $400 purchase because the cost of being "wrong" is huge. It's the same reason that SUV and Hybrid owners want to murder eachother, while you rarely see a brutal chain beating over bicycle brands. When Sega dropped out of the console business, they no longer threatened to give Jonny Mario a case of buyer's remorse, and therefore were not the enemy.
I'm pretty sure the animosity only existed in deranged teenage fans' heads and the single-format magazines in the first place. Contrary to the 1990s games mags' posturing, Yu Suzuki does not want to send a brick upside Shigeru Miyamoto's face, and likewise no adult Nintendo customer was ever perversely opposed to Sega products.
I don't think there was a time when Spore wasn't an EA product. Maxis was acquired by EA in 1997. So you were never "going to buy Spore before [they] got [their] grimy hands on it".
I'm sure EA would've sold the movie and TV rights for Tiger Woods by now, if only that were possible. How about Burnout? 2 hours of DJ Stryker being brutally beaten with a muffler.
I'm not sure why it would be backwards compatible with USB 2.0, but not USB 1.1 and 1.0. IIRC all USB devices must initially connect as USB 1.0, then negotiate with the controller for higher speeds. By necessity, therefore, anything which accepts USB 2.0 must support USB 1.0 at the very least.
Suddenly, I just can't stop screaming.
Not to be pedantic, I think you're conflating regular old wonky products, which account for about 2-5% of iPhones, Blackberries, DVD players etc. and arise from the inevitable crapshoot of quality control, with "bugs" and poorly designed products, which necessitate an en-masse recall or revision. I mean, if 20,000 iPhones out of a million have dodgy screens or Just Don't Work, then those 20,000 get replaced by the manufacturer or the store under warranty. If iPhones are designed in such a fashion that they perform poorly to other 3G phones, which is what the article discusses, then that's something which should've been caught at the "let's try it out" stage at the latest.
This isn't to say that the article's wild guesswork is right, of course. I kind of doubt it.
I would've said that's pretty damn counterintuitive, but it seems it's true. Actually it compares favourably to the 2G talk-time I get on my own phone, a bunch of 1998-era features running on a huge smartphone battery. I wonder if Apple should be emphasising that more, I had assumed the iPhone was in the charge-me-every-day club.
From his homepage, he seems to be a professional 3D artist for Sony's games division, so at least he has some relevant industry experience.
Sure, and of course if Windows 7 is a lemon, it'll be crunch time.
Disclaimer: I am not a developer, but I've read a lot of horror stories. If you try to pitch it to an established publisher or developer, the legitimate ones will turn you away because it leaves them wide open to a messy lawsuit if they do anything remotely similar in the future, even by coincidence. The unscrupulous ones will just rip you off. You really need to turn it into a legally-protectable game, or a total conversion mod, or something, and then get it published small-scale to demonstrate popularity. If you don't have the know-how, try to get together a team of amateurs, friends, sufficiently motivated guys online, whatever. Give it away, shareware, however you distribute it make sure that it gets out there and people know it's yours. Enter it in indie game contests. Whatever you can.
Then when you have an actual game to speak of, and some indication that it could sell, see about getting a publisher interested in buying the idea from you. What happens next will depend on the type of game we're talking about.
What I've read about game development in the past suggests that your project may well vanish into development hell at this stage, or be pushed out as a diabolical mess which means nobody will ever want to touch your game ever again. And you'll be unable to make amends because you've sold away the "big version" rights. You may make some money back for your time and effort though. The alternative would be to keep it small-scale, on mobile phones or whatever. This would suit many kinds of games. Only if you can manage to turn that small game into your own personal development empire, could you crank out a large-scale game like Halo or whatever.
Moral: the odds are against you ever being able to produce a Halo-style blockbuster, unless you want to get into career game design or are willing to give the idea to someone who is. And even if you're just trying to create one fun little puzzler, it's going to take a lot of time, effort, and cooperation.
By "knobs" you mean constants, presumably? In that case you could level the same criticism at any theory which involves empirical constants. Which would be quite literally all of science. An accurate theory of gravity, for example, is dependent upon the gravitational constant. I'm not sure what else you could mean.
There certainly isn't an overruling "string theory" with some inbuilt postulate that you can continuously vary to get an infinite number of intermediate theories between bosonic and type IIA. How would one continuously vary a postulate, anyway? There's no knob (and indeed no metaphorical console) that takes you from the postulated 26 dimensions of bosonic down to 10 for IIA and includes everything in between.
Before you get your knickers in a twist, I'd like to remind you that this by no means indicates that string theory is elegant, readily testable, useful, or most imporant of all, correct (my hunch is that it's a dead end), merely that your attacks on it appear to be nonsensical and to the best of my intuition, invented to correspond with some pop-sci perception of it.
Last I checked, there is a finite number of string theories, much as there is a finite number of physicists and time to concoct them.
I'm not sure that avoidance of Vista translates into good news for Linux. If you have a volume licence to install XP on your whole site, then regardless of what hardware you purchase in the interim, the deadline for switching is 2014 when Extended Support stops. They can sit on XP for that long, I'm sure, by which point the "Vista alternative" being explored will be Windows 7. If you're buying an OS licence tomorow, then getting something other than Vista is a priority, but I wonder how much of MS' business revenue that accounts for.
On this subject: On arrival in the US, my digital cable was hooked up through the aerial hole on the TV, and my DVD player by necessity has to go through the composite video input. I can see why switching to an HDTV would make SD sources look "good enough" by simple virtue of improved interconnects. Buying the TV is justified by that alone, and the customer may not feel the need to buy HD content.
Back home in the UK everyone (including my grandparents) wound up switching from these anchient connectors to RGB SCART cables when DVD and digital TV took off around 2000. Buying an HDTV usually entails a picture-quality drop for SD sources due to scaling, taking it back to composite video quality, so the gap in quality between HD and SD programming is increased, and therefore someone who buys an HDTV may be more motivated to get HD content.
So I have to wonder whether there's any difference in the "attachment rate" of HDTV media and players to HDTVs in the US vs Europe.
I think I've seen that doctor. Tall, skinny, scraggly dressed, uses a cane...?
Prepare for wackiness in 3, 2, 1...
No. Your assertion simply does not hold logically. If one item in a class has a property, that property does not immediately extend to the class as a whole
If I find a green ball in a box of red balls, it is not reasonable to assert that "balls are green" or "balls are red". The strongest assertions I can make are "some balls are green" and "some balls are red". Likewise, it is not reasonable to see untestable string theories and assert "string theories are untestable". The existence of even one exception weakens it to "some string theories are untestable".