I bought a Mini-disc player from Sony, the format and devices flopped in the end.
I bought a (what was considered at the time) next-generation MP3 player from Sony that couldn't play MP3s -- Flopped too in the end.
I bought a game console from Sony, the PlayStation, with games on CDs instead of cartridges, the format and device succeeded in the end.
I bought a (what was considered at the time) next-generation game console from Sony, The PlayStation2, with games on DVDs instead of CDs, the format and device succeeded in the end.
Guess what? Every company has both successes and failures. Sony had the mini-disc, Nintendo had the Virtual Boy.
Fred Phelps (the "God hates fags" guy) behaved in a very similar manner to Jack Thompson over a long period of time. Eventually he was disbarred. Jack Thompson will probably get himself disbarred eventually.
What freightens me though is, how long will it take to have him disbarred? Are the standards so low that he actually needs to tell a judge to fuck off 42 times before he gets punished? I am far from very knowledgeable about law stuff, but from a lay man point of view, seeing a lawyer ridicule the justice systems like he does and not being disciplined, that's pretty amazing.
Back in 2001 I pre-ordered a Gamecube at Futureshop and when I walked in they must have had (at least) 50 Gamecubes in a pile and everyone who pre-ordered ended up with a system; today, the Wii is launching with (about) twice as many systems as the Gamecube did and EB Games are averaging 10 systems per store for to pre-order. It seems that something is off to me, either EB Games is getting screwed on the number of systems they're getting, or they're purposefully limiting pre-orders.
I'm not sure how things were in the US back then, but EB Games and other big video-games-only stores are fairly recent up here in Quebec. Back in 2001, the choice was pretty much limited to Future Shop, Zellers, or small local game shops (which were few and far between) when going to buy a console (Walmart wasn't quite well known here back then). It was probably easier for Nintendo and Sony to give a decent supply of consoles to the big stores (there's about 2 or 3 of those big stores per major city, less than 1 per medium-sized city), while now, with all those EB-Games, GameBuzz and such that opened in the past 5 years, there are many more stores that need a supply of consoles (heck, I can probably find 5 stores that sell consoles within walking distance in downtown Montreal).
All those new stores require extra logistics to handle supply, and even if Nintendo produces twice as many Wiis as there were GameCubes in 2001, there are more than twice the numbers of stores that will sell them, so each store will likely receive fewer units than before.
This student calling the principal a lesbian was as easy as selecting funny answers for personal questions. Did she get offended that he called her fat as well?
Her fake profile received "explicit" comments from complete strangers. FTA : few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage
Either the mere fact of posing as a lesbian attracts weirdos that leave obscene comments (I don't know much about MySpace, but I guess that could be possible), or the rest of her fake profile depicted her as a rather promiscuous lesbian, maybe even replying to some of those comments, and that is more than selecting funny answers for personal questions. I guess that will be for the courts to decide where to draw the line between name-calling and libel.
Heck, I'm 35- and I think that people posting defamatory information are saying more about themselves than the person they are defaming. To that end, why would I ever sue over my enemy making himself look like a big fat idiot?
True. However, can you spot the difference between :
Hey people, did you know that MarxistHacker42 is gay and likes to have sex with animals?
Hey people, I'm MarxistHacker42, I'm gay and I like to have sex with animals.
A reader who sees the first ones can easily understand that somebody thinks you are gay and tries to defame you. The second one howerver, is different in that you seem to be coming out of the closet yourself, and you might be sending an invitation for people to bring their dogs at your place. Saying something about someone, and posing as that someone saying that same thing can have tremendously different effects on that person's reputation.
What is the precedent? In earlier days, if students started passing around notes about this teacher, were the parents held responsible?
In earlier days, if students started passing around notes about this teacher, the teacher wouldn't receive obscene phone calls as a direct result. FTA: a few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage.
Passing around notes about a teacher leads to a bunch of kids laughing and goofing around, pretty easy for a teacher to get over that. Posting a fake profile leads to local perverts contacting and maybe stalking the teacher, that's quite a different situation.
So? green peppers have seeds too, are they a fruit? The tomato is a vegetable. It is present in most vegetable cocktails, and I do not like to eat fruit but I love tomatoes. QED.
That's actually the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit
Wisdom is knowing that you don't put tomatoes in a fruit salad
Hell, I can't count the number of times Perfect Dark hard-locked on my N64. If the older systems supported updates, you wouldn't have to deal with them once a patch is released.
They will fix bugs alright, but it all depends on your definition of "bug". If your system can run emulators to have it play games rather than watch UMD movies (*cough* PSP *cough*), then it is a "bug" and you bet it will be "patched" soon. That's the kind of patching they want, not the kind that actually makes the console more usable.
And don't forget that the support for Qt is superb. I have worked with them, and any time I had a question they responded quickly and to the point. Really a great company.
Very true. an MSDN subscription might be about $1000, but you're only allowed to contact them twice if you want support (they charge every call after the second one). With Qt, you get unlimited support, and their reply is always fast, complete and professional, even if the answer could have been a simple RTFM.
In many ways, it is shameful to know that the OSS community helped those guys to develop a product but in return they offer a licensing model which suits only "Big Players"
Actually, *they* developed the product on their own, and then decided to open-source it. They have every right in the world to do that.
I got pretty frustrated that me, and a couple of friends, cant use QT to develop commercial software. For the 4 of us we would have to spend some 12.000 Euros. with a monthly avg salary of 400 Euros per month (my country), we just cant afford to start a business based on QT.
The "full" version of Qt is $3300, which is about 2600 EUR each, with 4 developers, it's 10400 EUR. If you're planning on starting a business doing commercial software, with 4 employees, and you can't expect to recoup the initial costs of 10000 EUR, then your business plan is seriously fucked up and you really should reconsider. 4 salaries would cost you more than double that.
except for games, have you considered qemu or VMWare Server under Linux?
Unfortunately, the only reason I still boot into Windows is for the games. I have tried them all with both wine and vmware, and they all fail at some point (either refuses to install or freezes while playing) except one (Baldur's Gate II on VMware), but it doesn't give me a reasonable framerate.
As good as wine and vmware are, they still can't handle mainstream games.
And if it uses enough power and generates enough heat you could use it too warm your home. Offsetting heating bills against it might mean more people can afford the thing.
That would also mean that you can only play between November and March... In July, I got AC trying to keep the living room at a comfortable temperature. Having a device warming the home at the same time would be counter-productive...
"According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, "One small step for a man..." in a total of 35 milliseconds"
35 milliseconds for that sentence, and only the 'a' didn't get through, is a lot better than I could do!
That's just plain impossible. I guess the article meant to say that Armstrong spoke the "missing a" in 35 milliseconds... you can't say more than one syllable in such a short time.
Since this is a recall, they have to take back the bad batch of batteries and replace them with new ones.
And when Sony is left with hundreds of thousand of bad batteries on their hands, don't you think someone somewhere will figure out how to grab a couple of them and sell them? I doubt all those batteries will be destroyed/recycled within months or even years.
we have freedom of expression - for example, I could publish a novel about Jesus and Mohammed's homoerotic entanglements and not be sanctioned by the government.
Dance Dance Revolution - which has been remarkably popular. DDR has even (according to previous Slashdot articles) made it into secondary school phys. ed. programs.
DDR looks pretty fun indeed, and a nice way to get fit(ter). Unfortunately, I never dared buy it since I live in a 4th floor apartment and I bet the family living under me would appreciate the dancing... Buying a house next year though, so I might get it then
Thanks for the link. However, from the article you pointed to :
No price point has been announced for any of the items that will be available, nor do we know how downloads will be made available in different regions. For example, if a player is "shopping" in North America, will he or she only be able to purchase cars available in that area? Will cars be available in packs or as individual units? At this point, it's still up in the air. Furthermore, the idea of purchasing new cars and tracks brings up the rather obvious question of unlockable content in the next GT. What incentive will there be for players to unlock cars, if they can merely whip out their credit card and simply buy exactly what they want? Nonetheless, it seems as though a balance will be struck between purchased and unlocked content in the game's after-release support.
"It's still up in the air". So it's still all a rumor... both the "you need to buy everything" and the "you don't need to buy anything" bits.
I'm going to repeat it again because some people still keep saying you need to buy all cars and tracks in Gran Turismo HD.
The news was actually that everything would be avaible in the game when you bought it but when you want to unlock cars (which you normaly win or buy with in-game credit won from races) you could pay for them instead of needing to win all races.
And I'm going to repeat a question I asked earlier on, do you have a source for that info? The only info I have so far comes from 1up.com and it says :
The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.
If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?
The availability of all cars by winning races is as much a rumor as the need to buy them all so far.
Don't forget the extra money for "microdownloads" (the buzzword for "content that should've been included in the original package"), especially for the GT series.
And you damn better hope that your hard drive never crashes, even under warranty, cause they probably won't give you your money or cars back.
Oh, relax. Just to keep beating on a dead horse, the payment is to unlock cars without winning in-game races. It's always been the case in Gran Turismo series that you need to win races to get certain cars, right? You haven't lost anything; Sony is just giving you an opportunity to cheat.
Do you have a source for that? The only source so far that I have for this case comes from 1up.com and says :
The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.
If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?
Don't. You'll be dissapointed. I finished it with two buddies, and it was pretty dissapointing. Lame story, and as you said, boring fight system (not counting how many times we said "Bring the bucket over here, there's a monster tearing me apart offscreen"). And those random "story telling" cutscreens at crossroads... long pointless conversation and in the end, they give you......... a potato! Gawd we laughed on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a (what was considered at the time) next-generation MP3 player from Sony that couldn't play MP3s -- Flopped too in the end.
I bought a game console from Sony, the PlayStation, with games on CDs instead of cartridges, the format and device succeeded in the end.
I bought a (what was considered at the time) next-generation game console from Sony, The PlayStation2, with games on DVDs instead of CDs, the format and device succeeded in the end.
Guess what? Every company has both successes and failures. Sony had the mini-disc, Nintendo had the Virtual Boy.
What freightens me though is, how long will it take to have him disbarred? Are the standards so low that he actually needs to tell a judge to fuck off 42 times before he gets punished? I am far from very knowledgeable about law stuff, but from a lay man point of view, seeing a lawyer ridicule the justice systems like he does and not being disciplined, that's pretty amazing.
I'm not sure how things were in the US back then, but EB Games and other big video-games-only stores are fairly recent up here in Quebec. Back in 2001, the choice was pretty much limited to Future Shop, Zellers, or small local game shops (which were few and far between) when going to buy a console (Walmart wasn't quite well known here back then). It was probably easier for Nintendo and Sony to give a decent supply of consoles to the big stores (there's about 2 or 3 of those big stores per major city, less than 1 per medium-sized city), while now, with all those EB-Games, GameBuzz and such that opened in the past 5 years, there are many more stores that need a supply of consoles (heck, I can probably find 5 stores that sell consoles within walking distance in downtown Montreal).
All those new stores require extra logistics to handle supply, and even if Nintendo produces twice as many Wiis as there were GameCubes in 2001, there are more than twice the numbers of stores that will sell them, so each store will likely receive fewer units than before.
Her fake profile received "explicit" comments from complete strangers. FTA : few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage
Either the mere fact of posing as a lesbian attracts weirdos that leave obscene comments (I don't know much about MySpace, but I guess that could be possible), or the rest of her fake profile depicted her as a rather promiscuous lesbian, maybe even replying to some of those comments, and that is more than selecting funny answers for personal questions. I guess that will be for the courts to decide where to draw the line between name-calling and libel.
However, FTA : The police were able to determine that the computers used to create the site were located in the students' homes
Chances are the school's internet access is filtered, and MySpace might not have been allowed (or surely isn't now).
True. However, can you spot the difference between :
- Hey people, did you know that MarxistHacker42 is gay and likes to have sex with animals?
- Hey people, I'm MarxistHacker42, I'm gay and I like to have sex with animals.
A reader who sees the first ones can easily understand that somebody thinks you are gay and tries to defame you. The second one howerver, is different in that you seem to be coming out of the closet yourself, and you might be sending an invitation for people to bring their dogs at your place. Saying something about someone, and posing as that someone saying that same thing can have tremendously different effects on that person's reputation.In earlier days, if students started passing around notes about this teacher, the teacher wouldn't receive obscene phone calls as a direct result. FTA: a few were individuals Ms. Draker did not recognize, that lived near Clark High School, and had made suggestive, lewd and obscene comments based on the content of the webpage.
Passing around notes about a teacher leads to a bunch of kids laughing and goofing around, pretty easy for a teacher to get over that. Posting a fake profile leads to local perverts contacting and maybe stalking the teacher, that's quite a different situation.
If you missed the memo, here it is.
That's actually the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
They will fix bugs alright, but it all depends on your definition of "bug". If your system can run emulators to have it play games rather than watch UMD movies (*cough* PSP *cough*), then it is a "bug" and you bet it will be "patched" soon. That's the kind of patching they want, not the kind that actually makes the console more usable.
If you see Qt as being only a "bloody windowing system only", then you have no idea what Qt is, and you should indeed stay away from it.
Very true. an MSDN subscription might be about $1000, but you're only allowed to contact them twice if you want support (they charge every call after the second one). With Qt, you get unlimited support, and their reply is always fast, complete and professional, even if the answer could have been a simple RTFM.
Actually, *they* developed the product on their own, and then decided to open-source it. They have every right in the world to do that.
I got pretty frustrated that me, and a couple of friends, cant use QT to develop commercial software. For the 4 of us we would have to spend some 12.000 Euros. with a monthly avg salary of 400 Euros per month (my country), we just cant afford to start a business based on QT.
The "full" version of Qt is $3300, which is about 2600 EUR each, with 4 developers, it's 10400 EUR. If you're planning on starting a business doing commercial software, with 4 employees, and you can't expect to recoup the initial costs of 10000 EUR, then your business plan is seriously fucked up and you really should reconsider. 4 salaries would cost you more than double that.
Unfortunately, the only reason I still boot into Windows is for the games. I have tried them all with both wine and vmware, and they all fail at some point (either refuses to install or freezes while playing) except one (Baldur's Gate II on VMware), but it doesn't give me a reasonable framerate.
As good as wine and vmware are, they still can't handle mainstream games.
That would also mean that you can only play between November and March... In July, I got AC trying to keep the living room at a comfortable temperature. Having a device warming the home at the same time would be counter-productive...
"According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, "One small step for a man ..." in a total of 35 milliseconds"
35 milliseconds for that sentence, and only the 'a' didn't get through, is a lot better than I could do!
That's just plain impossible. I guess the article meant to say that Armstrong spoke the "missing a" in 35 milliseconds... you can't say more than one syllable in such a short time.
And when Sony is left with hundreds of thousand of bad batteries on their hands, don't you think someone somewhere will figure out how to grab a couple of them and sell them? I doubt all those batteries will be destroyed/recycled within months or even years.
True, but don't you dare write your opinion on a plastic bag, or you'll get detained. Nice freedom of expression.
DDR looks pretty fun indeed, and a nice way to get fit(ter). Unfortunately, I never dared buy it since I live in a 4th floor apartment and I bet the family living under me would appreciate the dancing... Buying a house next year though, so I might get it then
No price point has been announced for any of the items that will be available, nor do we know how downloads will be made available in different regions. For example, if a player is "shopping" in North America, will he or she only be able to purchase cars available in that area? Will cars be available in packs or as individual units? At this point, it's still up in the air. Furthermore, the idea of purchasing new cars and tracks brings up the rather obvious question of unlockable content in the next GT. What incentive will there be for players to unlock cars, if they can merely whip out their credit card and simply buy exactly what they want? Nonetheless, it seems as though a balance will be struck between purchased and unlocked content in the game's after-release support.
"It's still up in the air". So it's still all a rumor... both the "you need to buy everything" and the "you don't need to buy anything" bits.
And I'm going to repeat a question I asked earlier on, do you have a source for that info? The only info I have so far comes from 1up.com and it says :
The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.
If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?
The availability of all cars by winning races is as much a rumor as the need to buy them all so far.
If I work more hours to be able to afford the PS3, I won't have any time left to actually play with the PS3...
And you damn better hope that your hard drive never crashes, even under warranty, cause they probably won't give you your money or cars back.
Do you have a source for that? The only source so far that I have for this case comes from 1up.com and says :
The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.
If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?
Don't. You'll be dissapointed. I finished it with two buddies, and it was pretty dissapointing. Lame story, and as you said, boring fight system (not counting how many times we said "Bring the bucket over here, there's a monster tearing me apart offscreen"). And those random "story telling" cutscreens at crossroads... long pointless conversation and in the end, they give you... ... ... a potato! Gawd we laughed on that one.