The implementation of cross platform wouldn't be out of the realms of possibility.
However, cross platform integration would definitely be a TRC/TCR/lotcheck breaker. Failing them means no platform holder approval, which means your game isn't coming out until you fix the non-compliance, and your development budget is pissed down the drain if you don't fix it.
Rare even managed it with a DS 360 implementation for Viva Pinata - however I think despite their 'late in the day' talk, that the real reason is it was shot down fairly quickly (I'd guess probably by Nintendo rather than MSFT...)
We can't vote for the other team when the government won't call an election or referendum.
The opinion polls indicated (at least, last time I heard the stats) that the ruling party, Labour would be out in the next election, after some disastrous local elections (alas these local elections don't really have a great deal of influence on national politics) so they have nothing to win by calling for an election now - they'll just keep holding off as long as they can get away with it.
Promised referendums for EU membership and adoption of EU treaties regularly don't happen, simply because the government has it's own agenda, as you can see by the original topic.
Grassroots politics and small parties have no power in government to control, and even the typical sanity check of any new legislation having to go through the House of Lords has been neutered now that any law can be passed by the house of commons using the Parliament Act.
Another problem is that a lot of the UK populace really have no interest in politics - voter apathy is high, and polling booth turnout is low compared to a lot of places (iirc). This is pathetically the opposite of any major TV 'create a star/pop band/etc' phone vote, which receive millions of votes each week. They have no real understanding of the modern issues that are being raised in Parliament, and tend to vote based on how they were brought up (as far as I've witnessed) - so a person from working class background will vote Labour, and a middle-class background will vote Tory.
The general populace also doesn't understand the insidious nature of half the laws the government is passing, and whenever they're questioned by the vocal minority, the government uses the old 'think of the children' or 'be afraid of the terrorists' line and the law is passed anyway.
It really is making me totally sick of living in this country. The last time I posted my opinion on/. an ex-armed forces guy even agreed with me about leaving the country - and this was a person in the service of the UK who would have been expected to risk their life for their country!
At one of the schools my fiancee did supply work at, they had CCTV in the staff room. Not because they were worried about the staff's behavior - but because in the past few years several students had went into the staff room to assault the teachers.
The students didn't want to be there, and had very little intention of doing anything after leaving school except working the dole system for their own gain.
Does that reflect a diverse and meritocratic society?
No. In the day and age that the Magna Carta was created, did they have a diverse and Meritocratic society? No.
In modern day America, they still teach the constitution, despite the fact when it was freshly penned, black people were seen as nothing more than slaves. Does that make it any less relevant to teach? No.
Children should be educated about their freedoms. If that means teaching them modern law rather than the Magna Carta, so be it. Either way, they should be able to know enough to see what the rest of us do: the government is taking away their rights, slowly, steadily, and via the back door.
As I recall, the final vestiges of the original Magna Carta was also formally repealed in the 19th Century, as laws had obviously, evolved in time, to keep up with the evolution of the populace and the country's standing.
The original creators probably never envisaged that that document would last to such an extent and be enshrined in so many government's law, and judging the contents of a document that is (iirc) over 500 years old against the present day situation is bound to present such quandries.
My point remains though: regardless of the initial intent of the Magna Carta - the general populace of the UK is more interested in what's going on on TV than learning and understanding about their rights and freedoms.
Unlike your schooling system, which (as I understand it) teaches the constitution, the amendments and so on - and engrains the whole spirit of 'the government should fear their people', the UK has none of this.
The Magna Carta is not taught as part of UK National Curriculum. (It may be taught in private schools, but as another poster observed - the upper class that can afford private schools are the ones enlightened enough to fight this... The ignorant masses can't afford those schools and so aren't.)
The youth of the UK have no education about the document that arguably started the concept of human rights and personal freedoms, the same document the government is wiping it's feet on on a practically daily basis.
I'm trying not to sound like some old bastard (I'm only 25) but their only interest is celebrity scandal and gossip. Their parents are much the same.
It's why I keep getting the feeling that I should leave the country and move elsewhere. What I want for me and my family (i.e. freedom, interest in the country and the community) is not what the general populace of the UK consider important (i.e. the next big brother/pop idol/dancing on ice winner).
I like the netbook remix, but I'm on a 701, so I guess it's better for those with smaller screen sizes?
Either way, I'd also recommend easy peasy - it's really an excellent distro, and far better than the default install.
I just hope they start rolling in some of the changes from intel's moblin work so the eee can boot quicker. That's my only annoyance with ubuntu so far...
EDGE (a magazine which has been going rapidly downhill for the past few years)
Personally, I wouldn't agree with that. Edge provides solid reviews, and they actually use the full review spectrum (i.e. if a game's crap, it gets a 1 or 2, not a negative write up and a 6)
While Edge is sorely missing someone of the calibre of Mr Biffo in their columns section, and their gaming comic, Crashlander is trash, they're the only review that I (as a dev in the industry) actually want to read (although Eurogamer's reviews are starting to become equally as credible, although sometimes they're still a little too easily distracted)
Having read the review in question, I can also understand exactly why it is lower than the average. The game seems to be competant and pretty, but not anything 'great' in terms of gameplay or pushing the FPS genre forward. Which sounds like 7/10 to me.
How about: Step 1. Go to so-called "poor country." Step 2. Buy 10,000 units of drug X at 25% of its cost in the US/Canada/Europe. Step 3. Give away 5,000 units of drug X to the people that need them, for free. Step 4. Sell 5,000 units of drug X in US/Canada/Europe at 50% of its normal Drug X cost (i.e. at twice the price you paid) Step 5. ??? Step 6. No profit, just karma!
I suspect like most attendees, I was watching more for novelty than for content. A film about a gas mask wearing murderous miner doesn't exactly scream quality and production values.
But when the initial 'early adopter' phase passes - the falling attendances (and reduction on RoI) should mean that they'll need to either up the quality and produce movies that are both as sound in writing and acting as they are in visual trickery, or adopt a new trick.
To be fair, most local cinemas to me are always packed on the 'cheap' night - Orange Wednesday (for those of you not in the UK - the mobile phone operator gives you 2 for 1 on a cinema ticket for a screening on Wednesday if you text them)
But despite all the failings of the communal cinema experience that you mention - for me, it's kind of worth it just to get better sound. I've got decent THX-certified 5.1 speakers - but I've not set them up correctly, because the layout of my living room's prohibiting putting the satellites where they're meant to be. Nevermind when I have to turn the sofa 90 degrees for the projector and the left channel is now behind me.
Sometimes that's worth £6-7 each. Nevermind my fiancee feeling like it's a 'treat' lol
Last year in Leicester Square (London), I saw the godawful Beowulf movie in 3D.
Last week in Tyneside (Northern England), I saw the godawful 'My Bloody Valentine' movie in 3D.
The cinemas already seem to be getting the upgrades coming through. I just hope Hollywood gets a similar upgrade to stop churning out such garbage using 3D recording techniques.
You're right about still no copy and paste, but just FYI*, the iPhone 3G has a standard headphone socket.
(And just for pedantry - the original did too, but it was recessed by about 3mm (iirc) so a load of headphones with bulky surrounds to the actual jack plugs wouldn't fit without trimming them down.)
*/me waits for the wisecrack about the 90s calling and wanting their abbreviation back...
I got a freeduino (arduino clone) because I used to be into electronics at high school, and now ten years on, I can't remember which side of a LED symbol is positive and which is negative.
I originally got it for a camera intervalvometer project, but my camera make requires more modding than I'm prepared to do to it to get it to work nicely. So instead, I've played with the arduino a lot. I made a sketch to scroll text on a nice LCD display shield I got on ebay. A week ago I got an ethernet shield, so I'm going to play with it on the network. Yesterday a 8x8 RGB LED matrix arrived that I'm going to have a lot of fun soldering up and playing with, and today I ordered a whole host of other stuff for it. It's so versatile, I'm even thinking of asking work to buy one so we can display the bug status of builds in a very visible way.
It's cheap, clean, and fun to play around with, and the voltages it uses aren't liable to kill you/your son. But having made code and circuits that takes some commands on a PC to something in the real world blink, or move, or change is far cooler (imho) than any code I've ever written for web/apps. (ymmv)
Re:But, I thought "People 'can't wait for ID cards
on
U-Turn On UK ID Cards
·
· Score: 1
just this weekend, I installed Ubuntu eee on my fiancee's eee 701. Boot up time feels 'slightly' slower (i.e. perhaps 1.1 times longer at most) but the OS, firefox, etc feel faster, and doing upgrades/installs of packages with native apt-get/synaptic is just FAR FAR better.
I would agree with one of the sibling comments though that it's a bit hokey still in the current stable build - I had to do a bit of bios hackery to get the webcam working, edit fstab to get USB drives to be recognised (although the card reader worked first time) and the battery life indicator seems to be completely and utterly wrong at the moment, but it's far more *usable* than Xandros on the eee.
Lua's gained quite a following in the games dev community - a lot of high-profile projects have used it for being the glue that holds everything together (e.g. interfaces with engine, audio system, UI/HUD etc)
Also interesting, (and something I didn't know prior to reading the wiki page) is the number of new non-games apps, like Adobe's Lightroom (for example) that use it.
Having RTFA, and also having a background as a games dev. Home is a virtual world, but isn't Microsoft's avatars pretty much just the same approach as Miis?
I think the article's a little misleading in implying that Microsoft are making some virtual world (like Home or 2nd Life), when instead, it's just giving devs a representation of the player to put into their own games, like how Miis are currently handled on the Wii.
Firstly: the school district were closing the school, at a cost of £X to make a new building at another school (at a cost of £Y) and then having to lay on buses for the local kids to get to that school (£Z) all for the reason that apparently the three tier system isn't as popular as the two tier system in the current thinking of the local council.
If they can't afford whatever the cost was of an aging projector, perhaps they should have kept the previous school open and saved far more money?
Secondly: She asked her superiors who said it was ok. Your fundamentally broken argument is like saying beggars asking for change and someone giving them it is stealing.
Thirdly: Wish you weren't AC so you got the mod you deserved.;)
Slashdot Mirror
The implementation of cross platform wouldn't be out of the realms of possibility.
However, cross platform integration would definitely be a TRC/TCR/lotcheck breaker. Failing them means no platform holder approval, which means your game isn't coming out until you fix the non-compliance, and your development budget is pissed down the drain if you don't fix it.
Rare even managed it with a DS 360 implementation for Viva Pinata - however I think despite their 'late in the day' talk, that the real reason is it was shot down fairly quickly (I'd guess probably by Nintendo rather than MSFT...)
http://kotaku.com/392055/rare-mated-viva-pinata-ds-and-360
It's a shame there's not a Score: +1 Optimistic...
We can't vote for the other team when the government won't call an election or referendum.
The opinion polls indicated (at least, last time I heard the stats) that the ruling party, Labour would be out in the next election, after some disastrous local elections (alas these local elections don't really have a great deal of influence on national politics) so they have nothing to win by calling for an election now - they'll just keep holding off as long as they can get away with it.
Promised referendums for EU membership and adoption of EU treaties regularly don't happen, simply because the government has it's own agenda, as you can see by the original topic.
Grassroots politics and small parties have no power in government to control, and even the typical sanity check of any new legislation having to go through the House of Lords has been neutered now that any law can be passed by the house of commons using the Parliament Act.
Another problem is that a lot of the UK populace really have no interest in politics - voter apathy is high, and polling booth turnout is low compared to a lot of places (iirc). This is pathetically the opposite of any major TV 'create a star/pop band/etc' phone vote, which receive millions of votes each week. They have no real understanding of the modern issues that are being raised in Parliament, and tend to vote based on how they were brought up (as far as I've witnessed) - so a person from working class background will vote Labour, and a middle-class background will vote Tory.
The general populace also doesn't understand the insidious nature of half the laws the government is passing, and whenever they're questioned by the vocal minority, the government uses the old 'think of the children' or 'be afraid of the terrorists' line and the law is passed anyway.
It really is making me totally sick of living in this country. The last time I posted my opinion on /. an ex-armed forces guy even agreed with me about leaving the country - and this was a person in the service of the UK who would have been expected to risk their life for their country!
At one of the schools my fiancee did supply work at, they had CCTV in the staff room. Not because they were worried about the staff's behavior - but because in the past few years several students had went into the staff room to assault the teachers.
The students didn't want to be there, and had very little intention of doing anything after leaving school except working the dole system for their own gain.
No. In the day and age that the Magna Carta was created, did they have a diverse and Meritocratic society? No.
In modern day America, they still teach the constitution, despite the fact when it was freshly penned, black people were seen as nothing more than slaves. Does that make it any less relevant to teach? No.
Children should be educated about their freedoms. If that means teaching them modern law rather than the Magna Carta, so be it. Either way, they should be able to know enough to see what the rest of us do: the government is taking away their rights, slowly, steadily, and via the back door.
As I recall, the final vestiges of the original Magna Carta was also formally repealed in the 19th Century, as laws had obviously, evolved in time, to keep up with the evolution of the populace and the country's standing.
The original creators probably never envisaged that that document would last to such an extent and be enshrined in so many government's law, and judging the contents of a document that is (iirc) over 500 years old against the present day situation is bound to present such quandries.
My point remains though: regardless of the initial intent of the Magna Carta - the general populace of the UK is more interested in what's going on on TV than learning and understanding about their rights and freedoms.
I think this may come as a shock to US /. readers.
Unlike your schooling system, which (as I understand it) teaches the constitution, the amendments and so on - and engrains the whole spirit of 'the government should fear their people', the UK has none of this.
The Magna Carta is not taught as part of UK National Curriculum. (It may be taught in private schools, but as another poster observed - the upper class that can afford private schools are the ones enlightened enough to fight this... The ignorant masses can't afford those schools and so aren't.)
The youth of the UK have no education about the document that arguably started the concept of human rights and personal freedoms, the same document the government is wiping it's feet on on a practically daily basis.
I'm trying not to sound like some old bastard (I'm only 25) but their only interest is celebrity scandal and gossip. Their parents are much the same.
It's why I keep getting the feeling that I should leave the country and move elsewhere. What I want for me and my family (i.e. freedom, interest in the country and the community) is not what the general populace of the UK consider important (i.e. the next big brother/pop idol/dancing on ice winner).
I like the netbook remix, but I'm on a 701, so I guess it's better for those with smaller screen sizes?
Either way, I'd also recommend easy peasy - it's really an excellent distro, and far better than the default install.
I just hope they start rolling in some of the changes from intel's moblin work so the eee can boot quicker. That's my only annoyance with ubuntu so far...
EDGE (a magazine which has been going rapidly downhill for the past few years)
Personally, I wouldn't agree with that. Edge provides solid reviews, and they actually use the full review spectrum (i.e. if a game's crap, it gets a 1 or 2, not a negative write up and a 6)
While Edge is sorely missing someone of the calibre of Mr Biffo in their columns section, and their gaming comic, Crashlander is trash, they're the only review that I (as a dev in the industry) actually want to read (although Eurogamer's reviews are starting to become equally as credible, although sometimes they're still a little too easily distracted)
Having read the review in question, I can also understand exactly why it is lower than the average. The game seems to be competant and pretty, but not anything 'great' in terms of gameplay or pushing the FPS genre forward. Which sounds like 7/10 to me.
How about:
Step 1. Go to so-called "poor country."
Step 2. Buy 10,000 units of drug X at 25% of its cost in the US/Canada/Europe.
Step 3. Give away 5,000 units of drug X to the people that need them, for free.
Step 4. Sell 5,000 units of drug X in US/Canada/Europe at 50% of its normal Drug X cost (i.e. at twice the price you paid)
Step 5. ???
Step 6. No profit, just karma!
Somewhere in some auditor's office, a creepy voice has just said "Liquidate Them"
I suspect like most attendees, I was watching more for novelty than for content. A film about a gas mask wearing murderous miner doesn't exactly scream quality and production values.
But when the initial 'early adopter' phase passes - the falling attendances (and reduction on RoI) should mean that they'll need to either up the quality and produce movies that are both as sound in writing and acting as they are in visual trickery, or adopt a new trick.
To be fair, most local cinemas to me are always packed on the 'cheap' night - Orange Wednesday (for those of you not in the UK - the mobile phone operator gives you 2 for 1 on a cinema ticket for a screening on Wednesday if you text them)
But despite all the failings of the communal cinema experience that you mention - for me, it's kind of worth it just to get better sound. I've got decent THX-certified 5.1 speakers - but I've not set them up correctly, because the layout of my living room's prohibiting putting the satellites where they're meant to be. Nevermind when I have to turn the sofa 90 degrees for the projector and the left channel is now behind me.
Sometimes that's worth £6-7 each. Nevermind my fiancee feeling like it's a 'treat' lol
Last year in Leicester Square (London), I saw the godawful Beowulf movie in 3D.
Last week in Tyneside (Northern England), I saw the godawful 'My Bloody Valentine' movie in 3D.
The cinemas already seem to be getting the upgrades coming through. I just hope Hollywood gets a similar upgrade to stop churning out such garbage using 3D recording techniques.
> ultimately, keep wankers in bonuses.
There, fixed that for you.
You're right about still no copy and paste, but just FYI*, the iPhone 3G has a standard headphone socket.
(And just for pedantry - the original did too, but it was recessed by about 3mm (iirc) so a load of headphones with bulky surrounds to the actual jack plugs wouldn't fit without trimming them down.)
* /me waits for the wisecrack about the 90s calling and wanting their abbreviation back...
Samuel Jackson just got a 3AM phone call ...
Curse you! After seeing the story title, I came here directly to post something similar. You beat me to it! :P
And I'll third it.
I got a freeduino (arduino clone) because I used to be into electronics at high school, and now ten years on, I can't remember which side of a LED symbol is positive and which is negative.
I originally got it for a camera intervalvometer project, but my camera make requires more modding than I'm prepared to do to it to get it to work nicely. So instead, I've played with the arduino a lot. I made a sketch to scroll text on a nice LCD display shield I got on ebay. A week ago I got an ethernet shield, so I'm going to play with it on the network. Yesterday a 8x8 RGB LED matrix arrived that I'm going to have a lot of fun soldering up and playing with, and today I ordered a whole host of other stuff for it.
It's so versatile, I'm even thinking of asking work to buy one so we can display the bug status of builds in a very visible way.
It's cheap, clean, and fun to play around with, and the voltages it uses aren't liable to kill you/your son. But having made code and circuits that takes some commands on a PC to something in the real world blink, or move, or change is far cooler (imho) than any code I've ever written for web/apps. (ymmv)
I certainly think she's lame as one.
Mod this up
just this weekend, I installed Ubuntu eee on my fiancee's eee 701. Boot up time feels 'slightly' slower (i.e. perhaps 1.1 times longer at most) but the OS, firefox, etc feel faster, and doing upgrades/installs of packages with native apt-get/synaptic is just FAR FAR better.
I would agree with one of the sibling comments though that it's a bit hokey still in the current stable build - I had to do a bit of bios hackery to get the webcam working, edit fstab to get USB drives to be recognised (although the card reader worked first time) and the battery life indicator seems to be completely and utterly wrong at the moment, but it's far more *usable* than Xandros on the eee.
>Gradually they will be rolled out to more categories of foreigners.
And then the rest of us will be treated like foreigners until we acquire one?
The problem is that 'really kinky but not illegal porn' these days isn't down in black and white either.
I suspect Page 3 pictures from The Sun may even be illegal if they want them to be.
to use the MIT acronym:
IHTFP
Lua's gained quite a following in the games dev community - a lot of high-profile projects have used it for being the glue that holds everything together (e.g. interfaces with engine, audio system, UI/HUD etc)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_programming_language#Games
Also interesting, (and something I didn't know prior to reading the wiki page) is the number of new non-games apps, like Adobe's Lightroom (for example) that use it.
Having RTFA, and also having a background as a games dev.
Home is a virtual world, but isn't Microsoft's avatars pretty much just the same approach as Miis?
I think the article's a little misleading in implying that Microsoft are making some virtual world (like Home or 2nd Life), when instead, it's just giving devs a representation of the player to put into their own games, like how Miis are currently handled on the Wii.
Firstly: the school district were closing the school, at a cost of £X to make a new building at another school (at a cost of £Y) and then having to lay on buses for the local kids to get to that school (£Z) all for the reason that apparently the three tier system isn't as popular as the two tier system in the current thinking of the local council.
If they can't afford whatever the cost was of an aging projector, perhaps they should have kept the previous school open and saved far more money?
Secondly: She asked her superiors who said it was ok. Your fundamentally broken argument is like saying beggars asking for change and someone giving them it is stealing.
Thirdly: Wish you weren't AC so you got the mod you deserved. ;)