And in those few cases where hands-on experience is absolutely necessary, you don't need to go out into the world and involve innocent third-parties - you set up a controlled environment where they can play on the playground without actually attacking real people. How would you do that? If you set up the security, when you try to break it, you'll have knowledge that the attackers won't. This means that you won't try as hard in areas where you think you did a good job, so those areas might not stand up to a real cracker.
I agree that you shouldn't hack a site to learn how to defend yourself, but as long as nothing gets hurt or damaged I don't have much problem with it, and sometimes it is the best way.
Commiting homicide won't make you a better homicide detective. A homcide detective observes the mistakes of others, a security expert observes their own mistakes.
Kill somebody, and what are the chances you'll notice the eyelash that conveniently fell out? You'd have to look for your own mistakes, while not utilising the information of how it was done at all for you to gain any skill, and it would be easier to wait until somebody gets killed for a reason other than to solve. The killing itself would get you nothing, all the benefit comes from solving it.
On the other hand, when you hack, you find out what mistakes other people make, so that you can then not make them. The benefit comes from knowing how people will attempt to hack you.
To put it another way, a detective must know how to attack. Unless they commit homicide, in which case they'll be on the defense, knowing how to defend is useless if you don't learn how to bypass those defenses, which it won't (note: I am neither a homicide detective nor a cold-blooded murderer). The skill of bypassing defenses comes from attacking, not from defending. A security expert is on the defense though, making him more akin to the killer - and being a homicide detective will certainly help you evade other homicide detectives. Since he must defend, he must know how he will be attacked, and to have the best knowledge of that, he must attack.
This is probably redundant by now, but I don't wanna waste the typing.
Some developers want to tell you that games are just about fun. I like fun a lot, but they're wrong and prejudiced, no matter how kindly and innocent they sound saying it. We need to push forward with designing games from a strongly holistic standpoint if we're to get anywhere with emotional affect, story "telling", and thematics. Designing and developing videogames is not, and cannot be merely about the pragmatics of creating entertainment. Otherwise, our medium of choice will not be able to reach a wider audience, to become universal in its appeal. Excuse me? I play games because I find them fun. Games with no/little plot can still be plenty fun (Zelda I, Tetris, Goldeneye, Animal Crossing - don't tell me they suck). Why cut a game out just because it aims purely to be fun?
There are of course games where the enjoyment comes from the progression of the story (Final Fantasies), and I enjoy them every bit as much as I enjoy the first sort, if not more. However, games with more integral stories lose some of the charm of the others. Ever tried playing an RPG, then coming back after ages? You have no idea what's going on. Tetris, Pong or Pac-man can be played anywhere, anytime, by anybody. Final Fantasy 3/6 or Chrono Trigger, despite being oft-hailed as the best masterpieces ever to be experience, require lots of time, just like a book - but you can't play on the bus (unless they get ported to a handheld) and you can't stop just anywhere. They have many of the failings of books, such as losing the thread if you go away for too long, as well as many others that you get from either interactivity or the almost purely grapical output - ever been annoyed because you can't go to x until you've been to y thanks to a big rockfall that mysteriously vanishes later? There are of course some games where your actions are what allow you to progress, but even they seem far too tacky sometimes, such as picking up an item in x which allows you to destroy the rockfall, and an item in y which lets you get to the next place. In a book you don't have those problems, because you get no control - if the main character is supposed to go to x, then dammit, he will go to x! And the graphical output is another downfall that movies and games (text-based games excluded) can have compred to books, because you don't know thoughts, or even emotions beyond what the actors can express. You can't -not- have the graphical output, which means that things like the weird guy on the poles from one of the Hitch-hiker books who steps from one to another, thirty feet apart without anything appearing to distort fail utterly.
While I will always love any game whch makes me cry (none have succeeded - nor, for that matter have any books or movies, although The Crucible came damn close), to focus on just the fact that you get more engaged because of the interaction would be to lose half the charm of the medium - that you can pick it up, play, and put it down again for ages. I have nothing against games which try to be like a book or a movie, but f it weren't for the ones which do something completely different that can't be obtained from the others, the medium would have died a long time ago.
And for the record, everybody died in Final Fantasy II/IV. Usually several times.
# OLGA/Olg-Anon is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy; neither endorses nor opposes any causes. So why are they so big on God? I may be addicted to gaming (I'm really not, but play along), but if I need to change my beliefs in order to folow the steps, I'd rather remain addicted. Steps 3, 5, 6, 7 and 11 require a belief in God to follow, step two requires you to get that belief.
If they want to help cure addictions, telling people what to believe will just discourage them, as they have no control over their beliefs anyway.
And of course, the fact that the home page breaks in Firefox doesn't help much either.
I have an old RISC OS 3. One time I discovered that I could make it screw up y setting a wallpaper in a particular way. It was something like just making a 1x1 image and tiling it. The screen went really slowly and wouldn't flush properly. You could move windows around, but they'd still be visible where they used to be, and where they'd gone through as well.
It's more to do with the fact that Atheists don't care what you believe because they don't believe it's going to have any effect on you in the long run.
Christians, on the other hand, want you to be saved and believe that their teaching is your path. So do Jews, Muslims and members of any other religion that teaches belief to be the precursor (and often enough, sole precursor) of salvation.
Religions such as Buddhism and (IIRC) Skihism don't believe in an exclusive heaven. Buddhists have no defined beliefs, and I'm pretty sure Sikhs believe that anybody can get in. So I'd expect you're far less likely to see people trying to convert others to those religions than Christianity, and not just because of the numbers.
Christians think that by trying to convert you they're doing you a favour, because you -will- be saved, and you'll thank them for it later, dammit, whereas Atheists think that if somebody's happy believing in a god that doesn't exist, why try to stop them rather than letting them enjoy life?
Of course, this isn't absolute, or anywhere near it. I know many Christians who don't care what you believe any more than you do they (in fact, I only know two who do), and there are probably plenty of athests who'd rather people are miserable knowing the truth than happy believing what they want, although I know none.
Myself, I'm agnostic, and even if I believed I doubt I could ever be a member of an exclusive religion, despite being brought up in a Christian society and currently going to a Catholic school. But hey, to each his own.
It's not the dupe that's been mentioned, it was a thing where you set up a video recording to place at your grave (which people had to pay to watch, incidentally). Can't remember if it was Slashdotted or not, but we had great fun thinking up things to say/do at another forum I visit.
Told you I was ill, it was xyz, I never liked you anyway, loud screaming, that sorta stuff.
Somebody also suggested setting up a pressure pad so that when they stepped on it these hands would come up and grab their ankles.
If it doesn't look right to 60% of the browsing world - probably more, given that W3Schools is hardly the most accurate place for this information - it's not very accessible now, is it?
The point of standards is accessibility, so why use them when they hinder it? Sure it'd be nice if IE was compliant, but since it isn't, make pages that CAN be accessed in all browsers rather than ones that SHOULD be accessible in all browsers.
What, you're saying we should make our pages look sucky in IE so everybody gets Firefox?
Utter crap.
People should get Firefox becase it's a good browser with plenty of features and none of the same security holes as IE. Not because a site they like doesn't work in anything else. Not because 'omg teh IE is notez teh browser!!1!1!' (which the W3C have ).
It's possible that if it was a cone, or even just a plane at the right angle, he'd be able to slide down it.
It would have to be almost 90 degrees of course, and it would have to level out so that he slows down, but if it's convex, angled correctly, steep enough for long enough at the top and shallow enough for long enough at the bottom, there's no reason (other than failure to get really, really lucky) that he couldn't survive.
Pfft. Download two versions. Run the Linux one. Use it to run the Windows one. Use that to run the Linux one. Etc. If you get fifty or so and it's -still- not lagging, then I'll believe them.
Naturally. When everybody knows about a topic, you'll get people who aren't experts/obsessed contributing. When nobody knows about it, you don't. Experts in a field tend to write in the language of said field, which sounds odd to the general public. Loonies with obsessions will often become experts, if not recognised ones.
If I have the definition of a unit test right, there's a strong chance it wouldn't. It would go wrong somewhere (in all probability; I suppose there's a chance it wouldn't) but it might not be noticable and even if you do see it you've got to track it down.
Something I think every language should have is a way of checking for common errors - like a debugger, but easier to use. Just a quick one-time scan, it prints everything that it's skeptical about, then snorts. An easy way to catch things like variable assignment in if statements and bad precedence.
if ($foo = $bar) { ###variable assignment in if statement - did you mean '=='? print ($baz * $blech) / $fum ###'/' operator redundant outside of useful context - have you used brackets correctly?
$25 for a mouse? Pfft. I got mine for 5 pounds - roughly 10 dollars. Comparing features: 1. Five buttons (two plus an up/down/in scroll whell): check 2. Optical: check 3. Ambidextrous: check
I also don't have to be careful about clicking inadvertantly, it's pefectly comfortable, and works with both USB and PS/2 ports.
I might be missing something - the article wasn't big on details - but all I can think of that I might be is wireless, which I don't want, and tilt wheel, which I'm fine without.
And third party clients can't do this because ?... I don't know exactly how this stuff works, but TMK they could, it would just be a lot more work.
How does having people send the queries from 3rd party sites decrease server load at Google ? Because ueries from third-party sites don't ping the front page.
They have a valid reason for this - server load. With their Gmail notifier, they control how often it gets refreshed. As an ancestor said, requests every ten seconds would eat up their bandwidth horrendously. They could simply say 'you may only use an automated checking system if it checks no more than x times per minute/hour', but that would raise two points. Firstly, how would they enforce it? Secondly, as some sort of x cousin y times removed said, third party ones would be more of a demand on the server. Their one could simply send a packet every so often, the third party ones would have to explicitly request such a packet.
Blocking searches from sites other than their home page would be stupid. But they won't do that. It would increase server load. They're doing this to decrease it. They're completely different.
As a teenager (14) who uses computers...
on
Always Use Protection
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Is it really that useful given that I run Linux, don't use chatrooms, don't use P2P software, don't play games and have no friends who both run Linux and give me floppies or CDs (when it comes to it, none of my friends do either)?
I'm reminded of the legend of DWIM. For those that don't know, it was basically an automated error-correction program - Do What I Mean. If it thought you'd typed something in wrong, it would replace it with what it thought you meant.
Somebody tried to delete their backup files, which had $s appended. There were no backup files, so DWIM thought that somehow they'd mistakenly hit the $ key just after pressing *, and in fact meant to delete everything on the disk. And no, heaven forbid that it confirmed this assumption, it merely proceeded to wipe everything. The guy managed to abort it, but wasn't happy.
Now why the hell would I want a computer to assume that it knows what is and isn't spam, and then not give me any way of verifying this? The software is fallible. When judging email that I don't want, the only infallible person is me. That one in 25,000 isn't likely to be important, but it sure would be nice if I was allowed to read it instead of just being told to sod off.
And how can it be better than yourself at finding spam? If you read an email and don't consider it spam, there's a good chance you might actually WANT it. Then a machine comes along, tells you it's spam, and you just accept that blindly?
Maybe by not reading the article I missed something vital, but that's how it seems to me.
I'm 14, and I don't fit into either category. I have 32 Gamecube games (two brothers), but the only ones I've never played are the Sims and Rebel Strike - and that's through lack of desire rather than lack of time. I don't spend long on some games but again, that's because I either don't like them or get bored quickly, rarely because of a great new purchase. And since I get 10-15 pounds a week thanks to my two paper rounds, and games are only 35, I don't find myself short of cash when a new game I want comes out.
I rarely consider a game to be a must buy, and I haven't yet had more than one must buy coming out so close that I haven't had time to finish one before the next comes along. I don't often buy a game if I'm currently playing through one - Sands of Time was a recent exception, being discount, but I was close to the end of Skies of Arcadia Legends when I got it, and finished the latter within a day or two before starting the former.
Of course, if Prime 2: Echoes and Tales of Symphonia come out close to each other, I'm doomed.
Personally, I don't believe a game can be overrated. Underrated, yes. Out of the people that play it, it will almost always be rated exactly as highly as it deserves. I don't like Tony Hawk games, but I don't consider them overrated, just not for me. I also don't like the early Mario or Sonic games but again, they just aren't the sort of games that I like.
I feel that underrating occurs when too many people buy a game that isn't their style. If lots of people like me went out and spontaneously bought THUG and then rated it, it would go down in ratings, because the people playing it don't appreciate games like that. It especially happens with sequels that change some major element, the established fanbase spits on it in disgust and those that didn't like the original most likely won't play.
The PSP won't be anything new. It won't be able to do anything that the PS2 can't, at least not game-wise. The DS on the other hand will be able to take games that can't be done on the normal consoles - not even the up-and-coming Revolution, PS3 and XB2 will be able to play certain DS games, because of the touchscreen. I don't care about two screens, that's just one screen at twice the size. With a bit of thought any games that use two screens could be done with just one. You may have to shrink each one a little, but it's nothing big. The touchscreen is going to be revolutionary. It may already be used in PDAs and things, but they aren't gaming platforms. The touchscreen will allow controls not possible with any other input system. The IPod's rotating disc thingy could be implemented with a touchscreen, but nothing else could do it. It brings your radio tuning slide, your speakers' volume knob, just about every input device ever devised can be shown off with a touchscreen. Think that Submarine game that was demoed at E3. That's what the DS is about, the two screens just gives it a cool name.
As a sidenote, although I said that two screens are no better than one, that's only theoretical. You could have two viewpoints of the same area with a single screen, but splitting one screen across the middle for single player hasn't been done before. I don't know why. With the DS you may effectively only have one screen twice as high, but it won't be used like a single screen much. There's nothing to stop developers putting a 'second screen' in console games, but on the DS they -will- do that. The two screens really just tells them, 'Hey! You know what would be cool? Instead of choosing between camera angles, if you could use both!' - whether or not they'll realise that any time soon remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
And in those few cases where hands-on experience is absolutely necessary, you don't need to go out into the world and involve innocent third-parties - you set up a controlled environment where they can play on the playground without actually attacking real people.
How would you do that? If you set up the security, when you try to break it, you'll have knowledge that the attackers won't. This means that you won't try as hard in areas where you think you did a good job, so those areas might not stand up to a real cracker.
I agree that you shouldn't hack a site to learn how to defend yourself, but as long as nothing gets hurt or damaged I don't have much problem with it, and sometimes it is the best way.
Commiting homicide won't make you a better homicide detective. A homcide detective observes the mistakes of others, a security expert observes their own mistakes.
Kill somebody, and what are the chances you'll notice the eyelash that conveniently fell out? You'd have to look for your own mistakes, while not utilising the information of how it was done at all for you to gain any skill, and it would be easier to wait until somebody gets killed for a reason other than to solve. The killing itself would get you nothing, all the benefit comes from solving it.
On the other hand, when you hack, you find out what mistakes other people make, so that you can then not make them. The benefit comes from knowing how people will attempt to hack you.
To put it another way, a detective must know how to attack. Unless they commit homicide, in which case they'll be on the defense, knowing how to defend is useless if you don't learn how to bypass those defenses, which it won't (note: I am neither a homicide detective nor a cold-blooded murderer). The skill of bypassing defenses comes from attacking, not from defending. A security expert is on the defense though, making him more akin to the killer - and being a homicide detective will certainly help you evade other homicide detectives. Since he must defend, he must know how he will be attacked, and to have the best knowledge of that, he must attack.
This is probably redundant by now, but I don't wanna waste the typing.
Some developers want to tell you that games are just about fun. I like fun a lot, but they're wrong and prejudiced, no matter how kindly and innocent they sound saying it. We need to push forward with designing games from a strongly holistic standpoint if we're to get anywhere with emotional affect, story "telling", and thematics. Designing and developing videogames is not, and cannot be merely about the pragmatics of creating entertainment. Otherwise, our medium of choice will not be able to reach a wider audience, to become universal in its appeal.
Excuse me? I play games because I find them fun. Games with no/little plot can still be plenty fun (Zelda I, Tetris, Goldeneye, Animal Crossing - don't tell me they suck). Why cut a game out just because it aims purely to be fun?
There are of course games where the enjoyment comes from the progression of the story (Final Fantasies), and I enjoy them every bit as much as I enjoy the first sort, if not more. However, games with more integral stories lose some of the charm of the others. Ever tried playing an RPG, then coming back after ages? You have no idea what's going on. Tetris, Pong or Pac-man can be played anywhere, anytime, by anybody. Final Fantasy 3/6 or Chrono Trigger, despite being oft-hailed as the best masterpieces ever to be experience, require lots of time, just like a book - but you can't play on the bus (unless they get ported to a handheld) and you can't stop just anywhere. They have many of the failings of books, such as losing the thread if you go away for too long, as well as many others that you get from either interactivity or the almost purely grapical output - ever been annoyed because you can't go to x until you've been to y thanks to a big rockfall that mysteriously vanishes later? There are of course some games where your actions are what allow you to progress, but even they seem far too tacky sometimes, such as picking up an item in x which allows you to destroy the rockfall, and an item in y which lets you get to the next place. In a book you don't have those problems, because you get no control - if the main character is supposed to go to x, then dammit, he will go to x! And the graphical output is another downfall that movies and games (text-based games excluded) can have compred to books, because you don't know thoughts, or even emotions beyond what the actors can express. You can't -not- have the graphical output, which means that things like the weird guy on the poles from one of the Hitch-hiker books who steps from one to another, thirty feet apart without anything appearing to distort fail utterly.
While I will always love any game whch makes me cry (none have succeeded - nor, for that matter have any books or movies, although The Crucible came damn close), to focus on just the fact that you get more engaged because of the interaction would be to lose half the charm of the medium - that you can pick it up, play, and put it down again for ages. I have nothing against games which try to be like a book or a movie, but f it weren't for the ones which do something completely different that can't be obtained from the others, the medium would have died a long time ago.
And for the record, everybody died in Final Fantasy II/IV. Usually several times.
# OLGA/Olg-Anon is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy; neither endorses nor opposes any causes.
So why are they so big on God? I may be addicted to gaming (I'm really not, but play along), but if I need to change my beliefs in order to folow the steps, I'd rather remain addicted. Steps 3, 5, 6, 7 and 11 require a belief in God to follow, step two requires you to get that belief.
If they want to help cure addictions, telling people what to believe will just discourage them, as they have no control over their beliefs anyway.
And of course, the fact that the home page breaks in Firefox doesn't help much either.
We do?
I always use commas, if anything. Periods are for decimals.
I have an old RISC OS 3. One time I discovered that I could make it screw up y setting a wallpaper in a particular way. It was something like just making a 1x1 image and tiling it. The screen went really slowly and wouldn't flush properly. You could move windows around, but they'd still be visible where they used to be, and where they'd gone through as well.
You could get some really neat things like that.
It's more to do with the fact that Atheists don't care what you believe because they don't believe it's going to have any effect on you in the long run.
Christians, on the other hand, want you to be saved and believe that their teaching is your path. So do Jews, Muslims and members of any other religion that teaches belief to be the precursor (and often enough, sole precursor) of salvation.
Religions such as Buddhism and (IIRC) Skihism don't believe in an exclusive heaven. Buddhists have no defined beliefs, and I'm pretty sure Sikhs believe that anybody can get in. So I'd expect you're far less likely to see people trying to convert others to those religions than Christianity, and not just because of the numbers.
Christians think that by trying to convert you they're doing you a favour, because you -will- be saved, and you'll thank them for it later, dammit, whereas Atheists think that if somebody's happy believing in a god that doesn't exist, why try to stop them rather than letting them enjoy life?
Of course, this isn't absolute, or anywhere near it. I know many Christians who don't care what you believe any more than you do they (in fact, I only know two who do), and there are probably plenty of athests who'd rather people are miserable knowing the truth than happy believing what they want, although I know none.
Myself, I'm agnostic, and even if I believed I doubt I could ever be a member of an exclusive religion, despite being brought up in a Christian society and currently going to a Catholic school. But hey, to each his own.
I remember something like this from ages ago.
It's not the dupe that's been mentioned, it was a thing where you set up a video recording to place at your grave (which people had to pay to watch, incidentally). Can't remember if it was Slashdotted or not, but we had great fun thinking up things to say/do at another forum I visit.
Told you I was ill, it was xyz, I never liked you anyway, loud screaming, that sorta stuff.
Somebody also suggested setting up a pressure pad so that when they stepped on it these hands would come up and grab their ankles.
You insensitive clod!
If it doesn't look right to 60% of the browsing world - probably more, given that W3Schools is hardly the most accurate place for this information - it's not very accessible now, is it?
The point of standards is accessibility, so why use them when they hinder it? Sure it'd be nice if IE was compliant, but since it isn't, make pages that CAN be accessed in all browsers rather than ones that SHOULD be accessible in all browsers.
What, you're saying we should make our pages look sucky in IE so everybody gets Firefox?
Utter crap.
People should get Firefox becase it's a good browser with plenty of features and none of the same security holes as IE. Not because a site they like doesn't work in anything else. Not because 'omg teh IE is notez teh browser!!1!1!' (which the W3C have ).
Accessibility >= Design > Compliance
It's possible that if it was a cone, or even just a plane at the right angle, he'd be able to slide down it.
It would have to be almost 90 degrees of course, and it would have to level out so that he slows down, but if it's convex, angled correctly, steep enough for long enough at the top and shallow enough for long enough at the bottom, there's no reason (other than failure to get really, really lucky) that he couldn't survive.
Pfft. Download two versions. Run the Linux one. Use it to run the Windows one. Use that to run the Linux one. Etc. If you get fifty or so and it's -still- not lagging, then I'll believe them.
No, the PS2 was sold at profit.
Naturally. When everybody knows about a topic, you'll get people who aren't experts/obsessed contributing. When nobody knows about it, you don't. Experts in a field tend to write in the language of said field, which sounds odd to the general public. Loonies with obsessions will often become experts, if not recognised ones.
Something I think every language should have is a way of checking for common errors - like a debugger, but easier to use. Just a quick one-time scan, it prints everything that it's skeptical about, then snorts. An easy way to catch things like variable assignment in if statements and bad precedence.
Nno, that was my fault. I was experimenting with quantum. Turns out, if it isn't in the box, it -is- somewhere else.
$25 for a mouse? Pfft. I got mine for 5 pounds - roughly 10 dollars. Comparing features:
1. Five buttons (two plus an up/down/in scroll whell): check
2. Optical: check
3. Ambidextrous: check
I also don't have to be careful about clicking inadvertantly, it's pefectly comfortable, and works with both USB and PS/2 ports.
I might be missing something - the article wasn't big on details - but all I can think of that I might be is wireless, which I don't want, and tilt wheel, which I'm fine without.
And third party clients can't do this because ?...
I don't know exactly how this stuff works, but TMK they could, it would just be a lot more work.
How does having people send the queries from 3rd party sites decrease server load at Google ?
Because ueries from third-party sites don't ping the front page.
They have a valid reason for this - server load. With their Gmail notifier, they control how often it gets refreshed. As an ancestor said, requests every ten seconds would eat up their bandwidth horrendously. They could simply say 'you may only use an automated checking system if it checks no more than x times per minute/hour', but that would raise two points.
Firstly, how would they enforce it?
Secondly, as some sort of x cousin y times removed said, third party ones would be more of a demand on the server. Their one could simply send a packet every so often, the third party ones would have to explicitly request such a packet.
Blocking searches from sites other than their home page would be stupid. But they won't do that. It would increase server load. They're doing this to decrease it. They're completely different.
Is it really that useful given that I run Linux, don't use chatrooms, don't use P2P software, don't play games and have no friends who both run Linux and give me floppies or CDs (when it comes to it, none of my friends do either)?
I'm reminded of the legend of DWIM. For those that don't know, it was basically an automated error-correction program - Do What I Mean. If it thought you'd typed something in wrong, it would replace it with what it thought you meant.
Somebody tried to delete their backup files, which had $s appended. There were no backup files, so DWIM thought that somehow they'd mistakenly hit the $ key just after pressing *, and in fact meant to delete everything on the disk. And no, heaven forbid that it confirmed this assumption, it merely proceeded to wipe everything. The guy managed to abort it, but wasn't happy.
Now why the hell would I want a computer to assume that it knows what is and isn't spam, and then not give me any way of verifying this? The software is fallible. When judging email that I don't want, the only infallible person is me. That one in 25,000 isn't likely to be important, but it sure would be nice if I was allowed to read it instead of just being told to sod off.
And how can it be better than yourself at finding spam? If you read an email and don't consider it spam, there's a good chance you might actually WANT it. Then a machine comes along, tells you it's spam, and you just accept that blindly?
Maybe by not reading the article I missed something vital, but that's how it seems to me.
I'm 14, and I don't fit into either category. I have 32 Gamecube games (two brothers), but the only ones I've never played are the Sims and Rebel Strike - and that's through lack of desire rather than lack of time. I don't spend long on some games but again, that's because I either don't like them or get bored quickly, rarely because of a great new purchase. And since I get 10-15 pounds a week thanks to my two paper rounds, and games are only 35, I don't find myself short of cash when a new game I want comes out.
I rarely consider a game to be a must buy, and I haven't yet had more than one must buy coming out so close that I haven't had time to finish one before the next comes along. I don't often buy a game if I'm currently playing through one - Sands of Time was a recent exception, being discount, but I was close to the end of Skies of Arcadia Legends when I got it, and finished the latter within a day or two before starting the former.
Of course, if Prime 2: Echoes and Tales of Symphonia come out close to each other, I'm doomed.
Personally, I don't believe a game can be overrated. Underrated, yes. Out of the people that play it, it will almost always be rated exactly as highly as it deserves. I don't like Tony Hawk games, but I don't consider them overrated, just not for me. I also don't like the early Mario or Sonic games but again, they just aren't the sort of games that I like.
I feel that underrating occurs when too many people buy a game that isn't their style. If lots of people like me went out and spontaneously bought THUG and then rated it, it would go down in ratings, because the people playing it don't appreciate games like that. It especially happens with sequels that change some major element, the established fanbase spits on it in disgust and those that didn't like the original most likely won't play.
The PSP won't be anything new. It won't be able to do anything that the PS2 can't, at least not game-wise. The DS on the other hand will be able to take games that can't be done on the normal consoles - not even the up-and-coming Revolution, PS3 and XB2 will be able to play certain DS games, because of the touchscreen. I don't care about two screens, that's just one screen at twice the size. With a bit of thought any games that use two screens could be done with just one. You may have to shrink each one a little, but it's nothing big. The touchscreen is going to be revolutionary. It may already be used in PDAs and things, but they aren't gaming platforms. The touchscreen will allow controls not possible with any other input system. The IPod's rotating disc thingy could be implemented with a touchscreen, but nothing else could do it. It brings your radio tuning slide, your speakers' volume knob, just about every input device ever devised can be shown off with a touchscreen. Think that Submarine game that was demoed at E3. That's what the DS is about, the two screens just gives it a cool name.
As a sidenote, although I said that two screens are no better than one, that's only theoretical. You could have two viewpoints of the same area with a single screen, but splitting one screen across the middle for single player hasn't been done before. I don't know why. With the DS you may effectively only have one screen twice as high, but it won't be used like a single screen much. There's nothing to stop developers putting a 'second screen' in console games, but on the DS they -will- do that. The two screens really just tells them, 'Hey! You know what would be cool? Instead of choosing between camera angles, if you could use both!' - whether or not they'll realise that any time soon remains to be seen.