Sure, it's backwards compatible, but people want better graphics and support for whatever revolution the Revolution has.
If you think the Nintendo fans want better graphics, then you have no idea of what Nintendo is about. If all you care for a game is graphics, you either get an Xbox or a PC.
When you play Nintendo, you do so for the gameplay, and for the fun. If a game doesn't display gazillions of polygons, it won't matter at all on a Nintendo console.
According to TFA, I should be interested in Call of Duty 2 because "The smoke looks stunning". Yeh, because that's the primary thing I'm after in a game. Sheesh.
Don't forget "The original was brilliant", because every single sequel has always been so much better than the original... really...
Actually, duplicating some of a CD or cassette tape for a friend or family member has long been accepted as fair-use - ie not requiring authorization from the copyright holder.
So is duplicating some of a book.
Not quite sure if it's the same because I didn't RTA, but the French-Canadian equivalent of the RIAA recently did a raid on recordable media. What they did is go to some flea markets to actually shut down the kiosks that were obviously selling illegal copies (French link). And it did work, because when they came back the next week, 60% of the CD kiosks at those markets were gone.
This is probably what the RIAA is looking to do, shut down people who *sell* illegal CDs, not people who simply make a backup copy for their friend and such.
That being said, why hasn't Nintentdo taken this route at all (or at least now that they've seen the potential market)? I'm serious, can you imagine the type of sales they would get if they created a portable device that allowed you to legally play all those great games from your childhood all for a nice low hardware price?
Too many parents today want an easy out. They don't want to have to monitor their kids. They want someone else to tell them what is appropriate or not.
Funny thing is, the ESRB is telling them what is appropriate or not, they just ignore it, then whine that they didn't get warned.
maybe most families wouldn't be burdened with multiple jobs and working parents and they could actually have time to monitor what their kids are playing. You know, when having a stay-at-home parent is a luxury in our society, that's a sign that we're heading down the wrong path.
whoa... you're waaaay off there. Having a stay-at-home parent isn't a luxury and never was. Families now have two working parents for two reasons:
1) Women decided that it wasn't solely the man's job to bring in the money, so they wanted a job too. Feminists made people believe that staying at home to raise your kids was wrong.
2) When families realized that having a second income allowed you to buy more stuff, they began to want even more stuff. Think people, do you really need two cars, a 50 inches TV, a SUV, all those branded clothes, etc?
Families don't have two working parents because they have to, they do because they want to buy stuff instead of spending quality time with their family. Get your priorities straight, and you'll realize that having a stay-at-home parent is much much more affordable than you think.
I can't name one AO 18+ game that is widely available except GTA:SA.
Are there any games that actually got the AO rating? I just did a search on the Gamespot finder for all recent consoles (PC, PS2, Xbox, GC, GBA, DS and PSP), of all games rated AO, and the only game that popped up was GTA:SA.
Does GameSpot simply never review an AO game or do none actually exist?
OK, so what if I enclose all numbers in DIV tags, setting the class on each to "number"? That's something that you might well want to do (i.e. fairly bloody obvious), and then it's possible to toggle borders using one line of CSS. Come on, we have an entire style system devoted to handling this sort of change!
Nope, you'd still be safe because of two of the claims :
18. The method of claim 17, wherein the dynamically linked library is further operative to allow a unique color attribute may to specified for each of the string numbers, the ordinal numbers, and the roman numerals.
19. The method of claim 18, wherein the dynamically linked library is further operative to receive a request to deemphasize the located numerical data and, in response to receiving the request, to remove the emphasis from the located numerical data.
As long as you don't have a DLL that serves the purpose of highlighting the stuff, you should be ok.
The application is for dynamically highlighting (or whatever) all numeric elements within a document, even if the numerics are expressed in words (e.g., "one thousand") in any supported language.
If that's what it's about (can't tell exactly since the site is down and I don't speak legalease anyway), then these guys can definitely claim prior art, for their "prism" feature did that, at least in French.
There's always been a market for third party controllers.
What I find really amazing now is that they just don't seem to make any "turbo" controllers that are worth buying anymore.
I remember back in the NES days, the NES Advantage joystick had a turbo function that ruled. I don't know what's the frequency of the button pushing of that turbo, but it made going through Track&Field II a breeze.
I bought a third-party controller with turbo feature for the gamecube, for when I'm playing solo Mario Party and didn't want to suffer on those button bashing mini-games, but it ends up I'm "better" than the controller... I can hit that button manually about twice as fast as it does on turbo mode.
Same goes for a PS2. I bought a turbo controller for those FF-VIII GF boosts. And yet again, the turbo function is no match for my manual button-bashing.
Although it is a lot less tiring to use the turbo even if slower, I can't understand that, in 2005, they can't make a piece of electronics that sends a signal at a higher frequency than I can hit a button manually. Or do they do that on purpose? What's the point of advertising a turbo feature if it's not "as fast as the hardware can make it"?
I've grown to learn that third-party controllers suck.
Small point, but they believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny because their parents, whom they trust implicitly, lied to them about it from the moment they were old enough to understand the concept.
They see images of Santa and the Easter Bunny, but it's the parents who (explicitely, by telling them or implicitly, by playing along and not correcting them) tell the child they're real, and should be believed-in.
What do you mean, they lied to them? Santa exists! I know, I see him in the mall every year.
You probably don't see him because he's at my mall though, so he can't be in yours... I mean... he's Santa, but he still can't be in two places at once, right?
I assume you don't mean the first part of this sentence since I know that I've certainly used lower quality software than *many* of MS's products (at least the newer ones).
This is unfortunately true. Lots of people say "For every Microsoft product, there is a free and open-source alternative". It's true. However, most of those free and open-source alternatives are in permanent beta-stage, while proprietary products have seen many release versions.
Visio -> Dia : The project seems dead, version is 0.94, latest news on the site dates from august 2004.
Outlook -> Sunbird : Seems to still be in development, but version number is 0.2, far, far from a stable 1.0 release. The latest news, from July 11th (after 5 months of inactivity), clearly mentions that "Please be aware that these testing builds are considered unstable and are made available only for testing purposes. We do not recommend these builds for the use on production machines", therefore, it is *not* an alternative.
Lots of open source projects have an insanely large amount of 0.9.x versions, making tons of bugfixes, but never having the guts to actually release a version 1.0 of the product. Either that, or they know that their software lacks the required quality to make it 1.0 stable.
besides that bloody invisible wall... how did that make it past QA?
I worked in QA at Ubisoft Montreal (not on the PoP project, but I personally know QA people that were on that project), and I know how it happens over there...
Chances are QA saw that invisible walll, and reported it as a bug. However, the developers (or their managers) just don't care. In many Ubisoft games (and I can guess the same happens for EA and others), most of the bugs that are complained about in forums and reviews are "known issues", because QA did find them and reported them. Problem is, fixing those bugs might require delaying the release of the game, and that's something managers don't tend to like.
I think it was pretty unfair to use this game as an example of unneccessary bullet time usage. The game is about time travel. Plus, the creators were very inventive with the concept - you have sand tanks that, when broken, reverse time temporarily. Considering much of the game consists of hard combinations of "run on wall, jump to pole, swing off pole, duck under spikes, roll to edge, jump to cloth, leap across doorway", it was a needed feature to not have every misstep result in "game over" and start and the beginning of the level again.
I'm not 100% sure because I haven't played PoP:WW, but I think you are describing PoP:Sands of Time. In Sands of Time, the rewind feature is awesome. All I know about WW is that it got such horrible reviews that I don't want to even try it...
No, it's weight, not mass. You're trying to lift mass out of a gravity well, where it has weight (by definition).
The part that "fights gravity" is weight indeed (which is directly proportional to mass anyway).
If there was no gravity well, semi-infinite mass wouldn't matter
It wouldn't matter as long as you care about either standing still (no acceleration) or about crashing (no deceleration). Even when there's no gravity involved (places where it has the word space), it's the mass that counts when it comes to acceleration or deceleration.
That's why we need moonbases. Build the heavy stuff there from raw materials mined and refined on-site and you'll have a much smaller gravity well to get out of, and thus much lower fuel requirements.
It's not only about fighting the gravity while leaving Earth. Even if lead shielding weighs nothing in space (zero-G), it still has a huge mass, which requires loads of fuel to accelerate to a decent speed (unless you want the travel to last for decades), as well as decelerate in order not to crash on landing.
Whether you build that massive (as opposed to heavy) equipement on Earth, the moon, Mars or in zero-G space doesn't matter, it still needs lots of force to accelerate because of mass.
Can we not desing the spacecraft and the spacesuits to block radiation? Such things exist here on Earth. Is cosmic radiation different than radiation here on earth?
It's nothing personal, I got nothing against you, but I suppose that NASA tends to employ people that are much, much smarter than you (or me) and therefore, if they are worried, they probably have a good reason to be and the solution is non-trivial.
They are labeling jobs as "junior" but the skill set for the job is somewhat more advanced.
That is so true. When I got out of college with my software engineering degree, looking for "junior" jobs (knowing that I shouldn't aim for intermediate and senior positions anyway), I found a whole lot of openings with descriptions like "Junior progrogrammer position, requires 5 years of experience in C# as well as 3 years of database management experience". A whole lot of companies expect people to come out of college with 5 or more years of experience somehow. Honest to god, I've even seen, back in 2003, an opening that required 5 years of experience in.NET programming... meaning you needed to be "junior", but have been doing.NET programming since 1998! Those HR people just like to fill their openings with loads of buzzwords, but they tend to stick to it during the interview, and they don't care for whatever reason you couldn't get those 5 years of experience during college...
Actually, they just want to hire an intermediate-level coder with a junior salary.
From my understanding they have two tools they use with any competing product, they either buy it, or break it.
That strategy can't work on Linux though. Linux can't be bought (because it's not owned by anybody), and it can't really be broken. If they try to break Linux, all they can do is fork and make MS-Linux, and then break *that*... MS-Linux will then become nothing but one of so many distros out there, and the current non-broken distros will continue to exist.
What they could possibly do though is make MS-Linux and break it, and then show the whole world how Linux is broken and how it's inferior to Windows. However, I doubt that even the best marketing department in the world can spin that while hiding every other Linux distros and hiding the fact that it's the "MS" part of the MS-Linux that is broken...
The main problem I had with the game was...it was impossible to win if you were playing 'white'! I couldnt get more than 10 minutes into level 3 as a good guy. Am I just [i]really[/i] bad at this game and just don't know it, or were there some serious balance issues between the two sides.
I actually always thought the opposite... I have played "white" all along and finished the game as "white". I always figured it would be *harder* to play "black" since you have less population from sacrificing too many, and less resources from burning everything down.
I began doing "black" after finishing the game twice as white (yes, I'm that patient), but then got bored at level 3 and stopped playing.
Just because something isn't on iTunes doesn't mean you should rip it off of P2P. If you're aware of a particular local musician, you likely have the wherewithal to buy the CD. Even the big chain, Barnes and Noble, has a local music section.
Local music I can indeed find in a store, and I do buy it in a store. What I can't find is German and Italian and Russian music... That's the kind of stuff that is available through iTunes German store, but not on iTunes Canadian store, nor in any physical stores around. Now I don't expect stores to have every single album that was ever released in the entire world, but when all legal sources have been tried, and only P2P can provide me with what I want, then with P2P I will go.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think the Nintendo fans want better graphics, then you have no idea of what Nintendo is about. If all you care for a game is graphics, you either get an Xbox or a PC.
When you play Nintendo, you do so for the gameplay, and for the fun. If a game doesn't display gazillions of polygons, it won't matter at all on a Nintendo console.
So you're gonna buy all 5 versions of the Xbox 360? Because technically, they're not the same system...
Don't forget "The original was brilliant", because every single sequel has always been so much better than the original... really...
So is duplicating some of a book.
Not quite sure if it's the same because I didn't RTA, but the French-Canadian equivalent of the RIAA recently did a raid on recordable media. What they did is go to some flea markets to actually shut down the kiosks that were obviously selling illegal copies (French link). And it did work, because when they came back the next week, 60% of the CD kiosks at those markets were gone.
This is probably what the RIAA is looking to do, shut down people who *sell* illegal CDs, not people who simply make a backup copy for their friend and such.
Didn't they do that on the GBA with the Classic NES series?
Funny thing is, the ESRB is telling them what is appropriate or not, they just ignore it, then whine that they didn't get warned.
whoa... you're waaaay off there. Having a stay-at-home parent isn't a luxury and never was. Families now have two working parents for two reasons:
1) Women decided that it wasn't solely the man's job to bring in the money, so they wanted a job too. Feminists made people believe that staying at home to raise your kids was wrong.
2) When families realized that having a second income allowed you to buy more stuff, they began to want even more stuff. Think people, do you really need two cars, a 50 inches TV, a SUV, all those branded clothes, etc?
Families don't have two working parents because they have to, they do because they want to buy stuff instead of spending quality time with their family. Get your priorities straight, and you'll realize that having a stay-at-home parent is much much more affordable than you think.
Are there any games that actually got the AO rating? I just did a search on the Gamespot finder for all recent consoles (PC, PS2, Xbox, GC, GBA, DS and PSP), of all games rated AO, and the only game that popped up was GTA:SA.
Does GameSpot simply never review an AO game or do none actually exist?
Nope, you'd still be safe because of two of the claims :
As long as you don't have a DLL that serves the purpose of highlighting the stuff, you should be ok.
If that's what it's about (can't tell exactly since the site is down and I don't speak legalease anyway), then these guys can definitely claim prior art, for their "prism" feature did that, at least in French.
What I find really amazing now is that they just don't seem to make any "turbo" controllers that are worth buying anymore.
I remember back in the NES days, the NES Advantage joystick had a turbo function that ruled. I don't know what's the frequency of the button pushing of that turbo, but it made going through Track&Field II a breeze.
I bought a third-party controller with turbo feature for the gamecube, for when I'm playing solo Mario Party and didn't want to suffer on those button bashing mini-games, but it ends up I'm "better" than the controller... I can hit that button manually about twice as fast as it does on turbo mode.
Same goes for a PS2. I bought a turbo controller for those FF-VIII GF boosts. And yet again, the turbo function is no match for my manual button-bashing.
Although it is a lot less tiring to use the turbo even if slower, I can't understand that, in 2005, they can't make a piece of electronics that sends a signal at a higher frequency than I can hit a button manually. Or do they do that on purpose? What's the point of advertising a turbo feature if it's not "as fast as the hardware can make it"?
I've grown to learn that third-party controllers suck.
They see images of Santa and the Easter Bunny, but it's the parents who (explicitely, by telling them or implicitly, by playing along and not correcting them) tell the child they're real, and should be believed-in.
What do you mean, they lied to them? Santa exists! I know, I see him in the mall every year.
You probably don't see him because he's at my mall though, so he can't be in yours... I mean... he's Santa, but he still can't be in two places at once, right?
For PoP:WW, Ubisoft was both developer and publisher, so I guess it doesn't matter...
This is unfortunately true. Lots of people say "For every Microsoft product, there is a free and open-source alternative". It's true. However, most of those free and open-source alternatives are in permanent beta-stage, while proprietary products have seen many release versions.
Visio -> Dia : The project seems dead, version is 0.94, latest news on the site dates from august 2004.
Outlook -> Sunbird : Seems to still be in development, but version number is 0.2, far, far from a stable 1.0 release. The latest news, from July 11th (after 5 months of inactivity), clearly mentions that "Please be aware that these testing builds are considered unstable and are made available only for testing purposes. We do not recommend these builds for the use on production machines", therefore, it is *not* an alternative.
Lots of open source projects have an insanely large amount of 0.9.x versions, making tons of bugfixes, but never having the guts to actually release a version 1.0 of the product. Either that, or they know that their software lacks the required quality to make it 1.0 stable.
I worked in QA at Ubisoft Montreal (not on the PoP project, but I personally know QA people that were on that project), and I know how it happens over there...
Chances are QA saw that invisible walll, and reported it as a bug. However, the developers (or their managers) just don't care. In many Ubisoft games (and I can guess the same happens for EA and others), most of the bugs that are complained about in forums and reviews are "known issues", because QA did find them and reported them. Problem is, fixing those bugs might require delaying the release of the game, and that's something managers don't tend to like.
Part of why I left the gaming industry...
I'm not 100% sure because I haven't played PoP:WW, but I think you are describing PoP:Sands of Time. In Sands of Time, the rewind feature is awesome. All I know about WW is that it got such horrible reviews that I don't want to even try it...
The part that "fights gravity" is weight indeed (which is directly proportional to mass anyway).
If there was no gravity well, semi-infinite mass wouldn't matter
It wouldn't matter as long as you care about either standing still (no acceleration) or about crashing (no deceleration). Even when there's no gravity involved (places where it has the word space), it's the mass that counts when it comes to acceleration or deceleration.
It's mass, not weight.
It's not only about fighting the gravity while leaving Earth. Even if lead shielding weighs nothing in space (zero-G), it still has a huge mass, which requires loads of fuel to accelerate to a decent speed (unless you want the travel to last for decades), as well as decelerate in order not to crash on landing.
Whether you build that massive (as opposed to heavy) equipement on Earth, the moon, Mars or in zero-G space doesn't matter, it still needs lots of force to accelerate because of mass.
It's nothing personal, I got nothing against you, but I suppose that NASA tends to employ people that are much, much smarter than you (or me) and therefore, if they are worried, they probably have a good reason to be and the solution is non-trivial.
That is so true. When I got out of college with my software engineering degree, looking for "junior" jobs (knowing that I shouldn't aim for intermediate and senior positions anyway), I found a whole lot of openings with descriptions like "Junior progrogrammer position, requires 5 years of experience in C# as well as 3 years of database management experience". A whole lot of companies expect people to come out of college with 5 or more years of experience somehow. Honest to god, I've even seen, back in 2003, an opening that required 5 years of experience in .NET programming... meaning you needed to be "junior", but have been doing .NET programming since 1998! Those HR people just like to fill their openings with loads of buzzwords, but they tend to stick to it during the interview, and they don't care for whatever reason you couldn't get those 5 years of experience during college...
Actually, they just want to hire an intermediate-level coder with a junior salary.
That strategy can't work on Linux though. Linux can't be bought (because it's not owned by anybody), and it can't really be broken. If they try to break Linux, all they can do is fork and make MS-Linux, and then break *that*... MS-Linux will then become nothing but one of so many distros out there, and the current non-broken distros will continue to exist.
What they could possibly do though is make MS-Linux and break it, and then show the whole world how Linux is broken and how it's inferior to Windows. However, I doubt that even the best marketing department in the world can spin that while hiding every other Linux distros and hiding the fact that it's the "MS" part of the MS-Linux that is broken...
They do...
I actually always thought the opposite... I have played "white" all along and finished the game as "white". I always figured it would be *harder* to play "black" since you have less population from sacrificing too many, and less resources from burning everything down.
I began doing "black" after finishing the game twice as white (yes, I'm that patient), but then got bored at level 3 and stopped playing.
Local music I can indeed find in a store, and I do buy it in a store. What I can't find is German and Italian and Russian music... That's the kind of stuff that is available through iTunes German store, but not on iTunes Canadian store, nor in any physical stores around. Now I don't expect stores to have every single album that was ever released in the entire world, but when all legal sources have been tried, and only P2P can provide me with what I want, then with P2P I will go.