Surely the difference between a BA and BSc is in the approach of study - and some subjects are approachable from many angles. While I'd not expect a BA in Engineering, other cutting-edge science could be - I'd expect a BSc in genetics or nanotech to be versed in the technical application thereof, while a BA could be more on the ethics, real-world scenarios and so forth. Both would be strongly versed in theory, of course.
But yeah, I would expect a BA in Maths to be about as useful as a BSc in art - while a fascinating idea, I wouldn't get such a person to design me something:)
Who is buying it elsewhere, and finding it cheaper? I found the exact *opposite*, that it was cheaper to buy it on Steam than it was to buy it in the shops (or indeed online, from another source). Mostly due to the US dollar being so damn cheap right now.
Orange box is £35-40 from most retailers (list price 40), it was US$45 from Steam. Turning that into pounds came out to just under £25.
Considering/. is usually american-centric, who is finding it cheaper to buy from overseas? It's cheaper for the Europeans to buy it on Steam than online, and it's not going to be cheaper for the US players to buy it from overseas.
For me, of those 8 games I'd be interested in 4, 2 of which are also available on PC.
I'm glad you're enjoying your PS3 for gaming (hell, competition is what keeps things improving) but the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
You may not like them. I certainly don't like them. I can choose to not watch them, as can you, but who are you to determine what other people can or can't watch?
Censorship is moral policing - nobody has the right to tell another adult that they are not allowed to watch a particular movie. Or for that matter, play a particular game.
Why are films like Saw or Hostel allowed to air (with massive publicity and positive media coverage, no less) when a computer game with the same style of content is deemed unfit for consumption? Both are forms of entertainment.
And thank you very much for your comment, that's some great info:)
I'll probably buy their mid-range amp and some new phones when I have the cash (looking at AKG 701s), but I didn't know much about balanced inputs. Thanks!
I've actually bought one of headphone.com's headphone amps (listening through it right now) - their entry-level ones, $100 or so. I do find it makes a perceptible difference, if small. The crossover does help a lot.
I'm not a total idiot, the first time I tried a pair of > $20 headphones and was blown away, I spent a couple of hours trying *every* pair in the shop, and walked away with the cheapest pair that I could still hear the difference with (about $100. They went up to $350). But I do think there is a big difference between those $20 headphones and my $100 ones. Or rather, the $200 ones I now have, 10 years later.
(To Headphone's credit, even they on their site says most of their high-end products are "totally unnecessary", but just there for someone who wants to blow several thousand on a stereo)
You obviously have a lot more knowledge of electronics than I do, could you spare a minute to explain why a balanced input headphone amplifier would not make sense? A few words on what you reckon about headphone amps in general, and whether you think the electronics behind their low-end and high-end (non-balanced) would make a difference, would be very good reading to me as well.
Because if Skype started offering what you would consider a decent solution (open protocols, interoperability), then suddenly all other clients could/would support Skype, and nobody would use their client. This is the only piece they would control, and with fewer people using it means less control and less revenue.
Skype doesn't open everything up because they have MUCH more to lose than to gain. They have the userbase, and they have the lock-in, all they have to work out is how to "monetize" that (ugh, hate that word)
In exactly the same way as the first. "Old money" companies (as 1st generation dotcom companies like eBay are now, in comparison) paying way too much money in speculation, for a piece of the "next big thing". Next Big Thing fails to materialise as a sustainable business enterprise, money is wasted.
3 years ago, it seemed like everyone and their mom was getting into VoIP. I remember asking someone writing one, how are they going to make any money? He answered, get bought out by a big corporation.
It's up to the developers to handle this sort of thing. If there is no HD, you load everything each time. If there is one, cache the important stuff on it. If the user chooses the cheap-ass version of the console, then they can put up with the inconvenience.
Similarly, once the HD-drive takes off, I'm sure you will see games coming on either format. If you have an HD-drive, you can buy the single-disc version. If you don't, you buy the one on 3 DVDs. Don't some games on the 360 already come on multiple DVDs, eg Blue Dragon?
I'm sure MS will start selling a version with HD drive built in sometime soon, when the manufacturing cost comes down, and the drive has popularity. And they'll keep issuing games on DVD and HD formats, the same way that, even now to some extent, game developers on PC issue games on DVD and CD, the consumer gets to choose which they buy.
All this is to keep the price low, which as MS shrewdly worked out, is what is winning this generation of the console war. If Microsoft had started selling the 360 at $600, you can bet they'd have had the same amount of problems moving units as Sony has had over the past year.
What is Home, aside from Second Life with a better graphics engine, and less user generated content?
You "only" need Maya to make content. So that's, what, $150? Plus the PC to use it on. And mastery of an insanely complicated development environment. Second Life only has the attraction it does because people can *easily* make content for it. Playing online pool and watching videos? What's wrong with youtube and countless existing facebook plugins or flash sites?
I don't see what the attraction for Home is, beyond going into a pretty environment and getting spammed with advertising - if I wanted that, I'd go walk down a main street.
It's an MMORPG engine wrapper for their XBLA equivalent, obviously. But how much time do you spend in XBLA (or whatever your version is... Steam perhaps?) hanging out, rather than actually playing?
But WinRaR is something I use very sporadically, twice a year perhaps. Windows Commander is something I use every day. Ironically, I don't use WinRaR so often as Windows Commander has really great built-in rar handling:)
I wouldn't expect to pay, or HAVE to pay, for software I use once in a blue moon, but for something that you use regularly and often, nagware is often enough to get you to pay.
The key is to make the protection a slight annoyance/reminder to the user (but not enough that stops them using the software), but not worth the effort for a cracking group to spend time ripping it out and distributing it.
The best example I can think of is Windows Commander ( http://www.ghisler.com/ ), which is a program I both use and love. It has a nagware screen each time you start it up, but otherwise functions fully for free. I did actually buy it, as it's a great program, but I found that out by using it for a year or so - the protection didn't get in the way of that.
Of course, this is a balance in that windows commander only costs $30, if it was a piece of software that cost $300, it may have to be a lot stricter as there is more incentive for a user to never register it.
About as dumb as people who think a "ringtone" is anything other than getting fucked up the peehole by the RIAA. $2 to get a crappy sounding midi or 30-second low-quality clip of a song? You deserve to get shafted if you think that's good value.
(Forgetting that the game was so cool that you'd go back and take out the bosses again and again just to do cooler bullet-time things)
Nice to know that I wasn't the only one to do that. I would replay sequences of enemies or bosses again and again until I managed to do something so ridiculously cool that I knew I wouldn't be able to match it.
The boss that comes out of the lift with his two cronies... throw a grenade over the partition then hide round the corner... just before it explodes, race out of there and hit bullet time right as it explodes. The underlings are taken out by the blast, the boss gets thrown into the air... dual Mac-10s blasting in to him, pushing him all the way back until he hits the far wall at chest height then falls down dead. Amazing. Wish I'd frapsed it.
Glad you get my point though, only thing that gets my juices going now in terms of working hard on something then finally accomplishing it is taking down raid bosses in WoW...
but it seems 80% of the replies I've got miss what I'm actually talking about.
I'm not calling for games to go back to one-level repetitive, simple arcade style games. If I was, I'd be off playing Sinistar right now.
I think that the difficulty progression that went through earlier games was a great thing, and I wished modern games, such as Max Payne as you mentioned, maintained that.
Infinite or near infinite games such as Pac-man are a bad example. Let's say something like Contra, or Green Beret. They had discrete levels (though I believe Contra allowed you to replay the game even harder if you completed it?), and although they were both pretty difficult, the later levels were really MUCH more difficult. Progression through the game was not only down to experiencing it, but being good enough to get through it.
To take Max Payne as an example (a good one for me as I completed that on two difficulty levels. Good game but it still suffers from this problem), the game throughout is about the same difficulty - the first boss and the last boss aren't vastly different. If it took you 2 tries to get down the first boss, it should only take you a similar number of tries for the last boss.
(Forgetting that the game was so cool that you'd go back and take out the bosses again and again just to do cooler bullet-time things)
Yes, Max Payne had varying (and inventive) difficulty levels, but that seems to me a side-step of the problem. Game publishers seem reluctant to give a game a progressing level of difficulty. Why is that? Will players get frustrated and not buy their games again? Do players *expect* to be able to finish a game these days? When my friends and I had Green Beret on our C64s and Amigas, we certainly didn't *expect* to be able to finish it. And the first time we saw the last level, it was a HUGE rush, after spending maybe a week trying to get through there. Max Payne, as great as it was, missed out on that feeling as it had a linear, or flat, difficulty level. Finished it in 2-3 days, if I remember, and there was no sense of anticipation from working hard to defeat some really tough boss or level. My point is that if it had that as well, it would be an even better game, and there would be a sense of wonder at being able to achieve the higher levels.
Yes, developers are coming up with other ways of compensating for this - user-selectable difficulty level, dynamic difficulty, achievements rewards and such, but they all assume that a game that is too difficult for 50% (20%? 80%?) of its players to finish, is a bad thing. I disagree. I'm not the best player in the world, nor am I the worst, but the games I finished that others did not gave me a source of pride and achievement, and likewise the ones others did and I did not, gave me a goal to try to achieve.
Actually, there was more than just the speed of the game, the power-up pills worked for a shorter time for example.
Perhaps there were patterns in those simple games that could be exploited to turn it into nothing more than a test of speed, but otherwise the game certainly got harder as it went along.
all difficult tasks require repetition. In terms of the skilled old games, they required repetition to get your skill high enough to finish the harder level, before continuing. For more modern games, they require some repetition to get through the content (and of course, "getting through the content" is a whole lot of fun!), but little to no skill increase.
I'm certainly not wanting games to become more simplistic, single-level repetitive affairs. I'm disappointed that, say, GTA 3 didn't get harder as the game went on, that unlocking content in it is a reward only of time invested, rather than developing skill and ability. I'm just wishing that modern games were also an increasingly demanding test of skill, than just a test of perseverance or more accurately, endurance.
However looking through some of the guides you linked to (eg http://www.achieve360points.com/txt/d/Dead_Rising_ AG.txt ) it seems they are mostly about collecting items or finding secrets, rather than eking out the last bit of skill from their performance? That's what I meant, games like GTA award perseverance and endurance over skill.
I agree there's definitely potential in the achievements to have skill-based secondary goals, and I like that idea. Thanks for the heads-up.
This is not an expansion, the change is there - most new games do not get significantly harder throughout their levels like they used to. Some people, including me, enjoyed that.
I enjoyed (and finished) all such modern games I listed in my original post, but as good as they were, I felt they weren't testing my abilities any harder towards their end than they were at the beginning - and that is the point.
Rhythm games certainly do become a test of skill, you're very right. I'd not included them in my thinking.
WoW (as a player too myself), I'd have to disagree, aside from PvP which is only a small part of the game (or, a large part of the game for only a small number of people) - in that, it becomes a test of matching skill against another human as all online games from chess to Counterstrike do, but as the opponent is a human, not due to the game itself becoming harder as it progresses.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the difference between a BA and BSc is in the approach of study - and some subjects are approachable from many angles. While I'd not expect a BA in Engineering, other cutting-edge science could be - I'd expect a BSc in genetics or nanotech to be versed in the technical application thereof, while a BA could be more on the ethics, real-world scenarios and so forth. Both would be strongly versed in theory, of course.
:)
But yeah, I would expect a BA in Maths to be about as useful as a BSc in art - while a fascinating idea, I wouldn't get such a person to design me something
They usually show pre-rendered stuff and imply it's in-game. Killzone, etc.
Who is buying it elsewhere, and finding it cheaper? I found the exact *opposite*, that it was cheaper to buy it on Steam than it was to buy it in the shops (or indeed online, from another source). Mostly due to the US dollar being so damn cheap right now.
/. is usually american-centric, who is finding it cheaper to buy from overseas? It's cheaper for the Europeans to buy it on Steam than online, and it's not going to be cheaper for the US players to buy it from overseas.
Orange box is £35-40 from most retailers (list price 40), it was US$45 from Steam. Turning that into pounds came out to just under £25.
Considering
How does that work?
"e^i*pi = -1. How does that make you feel?"
"Pythagoras' Theorem is a^2 + b^2 = c^2. What do you think he was trying to convey by that?"
8 games? Yikes, either you play *everything* or you've got some real crud in there. Care to elaborate? (I hope one of them isn't Lair ;) )
To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more ( http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/ ). Only one of those is over 90.
To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more ( http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/ ) 9 of which rate 90 or more.
For me, of those 8 games I'd be interested in 4, 2 of which are also available on PC.
I'm glad you're enjoying your PS3 for gaming (hell, competition is what keeps things improving) but the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
Because some people like to see them.
You may not like them. I certainly don't like them. I can choose to not watch them, as can you, but who are you to determine what other people can or can't watch?
Censorship is moral policing - nobody has the right to tell another adult that they are not allowed to watch a particular movie. Or for that matter, play a particular game.
Why are films like Saw or Hostel allowed to air (with massive publicity and positive media coverage, no less) when a computer game with the same style of content is deemed unfit for consumption? Both are forms of entertainment.
And thank you very much for your comment, that's some great info :)
I'll probably buy their mid-range amp and some new phones when I have the cash (looking at AKG 701s), but I didn't know much about balanced inputs. Thanks!
I've actually bought one of headphone.com's headphone amps (listening through it right now) - their entry-level ones, $100 or so. I do find it makes a perceptible difference, if small. The crossover does help a lot.
:)
I'm not a total idiot, the first time I tried a pair of > $20 headphones and was blown away, I spent a couple of hours trying *every* pair in the shop, and walked away with the cheapest pair that I could still hear the difference with (about $100. They went up to $350). But I do think there is a big difference between those $20 headphones and my $100 ones. Or rather, the $200 ones I now have, 10 years later.
(To Headphone's credit, even they on their site says most of their high-end products are "totally unnecessary", but just there for someone who wants to blow several thousand on a stereo)
You obviously have a lot more knowledge of electronics than I do, could you spare a minute to explain why a balanced input headphone amplifier would not make sense? A few words on what you reckon about headphone amps in general, and whether you think the electronics behind their low-end and high-end (non-balanced) would make a difference, would be very good reading to me as well.
Thanks
It already does. You see adds when the client is open.
Because if Skype started offering what you would consider a decent solution (open protocols, interoperability), then suddenly all other clients could/would support Skype, and nobody would use their client. This is the only piece they would control, and with fewer people using it means less control and less revenue.
Skype doesn't open everything up because they have MUCH more to lose than to gain. They have the userbase, and they have the lock-in, all they have to work out is how to "monetize" that (ugh, hate that word)
In exactly the same way as the first. "Old money" companies (as 1st generation dotcom companies like eBay are now, in comparison) paying way too much money in speculation, for a piece of the "next big thing". Next Big Thing fails to materialise as a sustainable business enterprise, money is wasted.
3 years ago, it seemed like everyone and their mom was getting into VoIP. I remember asking someone writing one, how are they going to make any money? He answered, get bought out by a big corporation.
Well, it worked for Skype, I guess.
It's up to the developers to handle this sort of thing. If there is no HD, you load everything each time. If there is one, cache the important stuff on it. If the user chooses the cheap-ass version of the console, then they can put up with the inconvenience.
Similarly, once the HD-drive takes off, I'm sure you will see games coming on either format. If you have an HD-drive, you can buy the single-disc version. If you don't, you buy the one on 3 DVDs. Don't some games on the 360 already come on multiple DVDs, eg Blue Dragon?
I'm sure MS will start selling a version with HD drive built in sometime soon, when the manufacturing cost comes down, and the drive has popularity. And they'll keep issuing games on DVD and HD formats, the same way that, even now to some extent, game developers on PC issue games on DVD and CD, the consumer gets to choose which they buy.
All this is to keep the price low, which as MS shrewdly worked out, is what is winning this generation of the console war. If Microsoft had started selling the 360 at $600, you can bet they'd have had the same amount of problems moving units as Sony has had over the past year.
What is Home, aside from Second Life with a better graphics engine, and less user generated content?
You "only" need Maya to make content. So that's, what, $150? Plus the PC to use it on. And mastery of an insanely complicated development environment. Second Life only has the attraction it does because people can *easily* make content for it. Playing online pool and watching videos? What's wrong with youtube and countless existing facebook plugins or flash sites?
I don't see what the attraction for Home is, beyond going into a pretty environment and getting spammed with advertising - if I wanted that, I'd go walk down a main street.
It's an MMORPG engine wrapper for their XBLA equivalent, obviously. But how much time do you spend in XBLA (or whatever your version is... Steam perhaps?) hanging out, rather than actually playing?
I am in exactly the same position actually :)
:)
But WinRaR is something I use very sporadically, twice a year perhaps. Windows Commander is something I use every day. Ironically, I don't use WinRaR so often as Windows Commander has really great built-in rar handling
I wouldn't expect to pay, or HAVE to pay, for software I use once in a blue moon, but for something that you use regularly and often, nagware is often enough to get you to pay.
The key is to make the protection a slight annoyance/reminder to the user (but not enough that stops them using the software), but not worth the effort for a cracking group to spend time ripping it out and distributing it.
The best example I can think of is Windows Commander ( http://www.ghisler.com/ ), which is a program I both use and love. It has a nagware screen each time you start it up, but otherwise functions fully for free. I did actually buy it, as it's a great program, but I found that out by using it for a year or so - the protection didn't get in the way of that.
Of course, this is a balance in that windows commander only costs $30, if it was a piece of software that cost $300, it may have to be a lot stricter as there is more incentive for a user to never register it.
what you don't realize is HOW BIG RINGTONES ARE!
hahaha!
that's only twice what Apple charges
Hahahaha!!
plus it's CD quality
HAHAAHAHAHAH!!!11one
This sounds dumb
You said it.
About as dumb as people who think a "ringtone" is anything other than getting fucked up the peehole by the RIAA. $2 to get a crappy sounding midi or 30-second low-quality clip of a song? You deserve to get shafted if you think that's good value.
Wall of text crits you for 5126 damage.
You die.
Seriously, a good read, thank you.
(Forgetting that the game was so cool that you'd go back and take out the bosses again and again just to do cooler bullet-time things)
Nice to know that I wasn't the only one to do that. I would replay sequences of enemies or bosses again and again until I managed to do something so ridiculously cool that I knew I wouldn't be able to match it.
The boss that comes out of the lift with his two cronies... throw a grenade over the partition then hide round the corner... just before it explodes, race out of there and hit bullet time right as it explodes. The underlings are taken out by the blast, the boss gets thrown into the air... dual Mac-10s blasting in to him, pushing him all the way back until he hits the far wall at chest height then falls down dead. Amazing. Wish I'd frapsed it.
Glad you get my point though, only thing that gets my juices going now in terms of working hard on something then finally accomplishing it is taking down raid bosses in WoW...
but it seems 80% of the replies I've got miss what I'm actually talking about.
I'm not calling for games to go back to one-level repetitive, simple arcade style games. If I was, I'd be off playing Sinistar right now.
I think that the difficulty progression that went through earlier games was a great thing, and I wished modern games, such as Max Payne as you mentioned, maintained that.
Infinite or near infinite games such as Pac-man are a bad example. Let's say something like Contra, or Green Beret. They had discrete levels (though I believe Contra allowed you to replay the game even harder if you completed it?), and although they were both pretty difficult, the later levels were really MUCH more difficult. Progression through the game was not only down to experiencing it, but being good enough to get through it.
To take Max Payne as an example (a good one for me as I completed that on two difficulty levels. Good game but it still suffers from this problem), the game throughout is about the same difficulty - the first boss and the last boss aren't vastly different. If it took you 2 tries to get down the first boss, it should only take you a similar number of tries for the last boss.
(Forgetting that the game was so cool that you'd go back and take out the bosses again and again just to do cooler bullet-time things)
Yes, Max Payne had varying (and inventive) difficulty levels, but that seems to me a side-step of the problem. Game publishers seem reluctant to give a game a progressing level of difficulty. Why is that? Will players get frustrated and not buy their games again? Do players *expect* to be able to finish a game these days? When my friends and I had Green Beret on our C64s and Amigas, we certainly didn't *expect* to be able to finish it. And the first time we saw the last level, it was a HUGE rush, after spending maybe a week trying to get through there. Max Payne, as great as it was, missed out on that feeling as it had a linear, or flat, difficulty level. Finished it in 2-3 days, if I remember, and there was no sense of anticipation from working hard to defeat some really tough boss or level. My point is that if it had that as well, it would be an even better game, and there would be a sense of wonder at being able to achieve the higher levels.
Yes, developers are coming up with other ways of compensating for this - user-selectable difficulty level, dynamic difficulty, achievements rewards and such, but they all assume that a game that is too difficult for 50% (20%? 80%?) of its players to finish, is a bad thing. I disagree. I'm not the best player in the world, nor am I the worst, but the games I finished that others did not gave me a source of pride and achievement, and likewise the ones others did and I did not, gave me a goal to try to achieve.
Actually, there was more than just the speed of the game, the power-up pills worked for a shorter time for example.
Perhaps there were patterns in those simple games that could be exploited to turn it into nothing more than a test of speed, but otherwise the game certainly got harder as it went along.
all difficult tasks require repetition. In terms of the skilled old games, they required repetition to get your skill high enough to finish the harder level, before continuing. For more modern games, they require some repetition to get through the content (and of course, "getting through the content" is a whole lot of fun!), but little to no skill increase.
I'm certainly not wanting games to become more simplistic, single-level repetitive affairs. I'm disappointed that, say, GTA 3 didn't get harder as the game went on, that unlocking content in it is a reward only of time invested, rather than developing skill and ability. I'm just wishing that modern games were also an increasingly demanding test of skill, than just a test of perseverance or more accurately, endurance.
As I've never owned an XBox, this is news to me.
_ AG.txt ) it seems they are mostly about collecting items or finding secrets, rather than eking out the last bit of skill from their performance? That's what I meant, games like GTA award perseverance and endurance over skill.
However looking through some of the guides you linked to (eg http://www.achieve360points.com/txt/d/Dead_Rising
I agree there's definitely potential in the achievements to have skill-based secondary goals, and I like that idea. Thanks for the heads-up.
This is not an expansion, the change is there - most new games do not get significantly harder throughout their levels like they used to. Some people, including me, enjoyed that.
I enjoyed (and finished) all such modern games I listed in my original post, but as good as they were, I felt they weren't testing my abilities any harder towards their end than they were at the beginning - and that is the point.
Rhythm games certainly do become a test of skill, you're very right. I'd not included them in my thinking.
WoW (as a player too myself), I'd have to disagree, aside from PvP which is only a small part of the game (or, a large part of the game for only a small number of people) - in that, it becomes a test of matching skill against another human as all online games from chess to Counterstrike do, but as the opponent is a human, not due to the game itself becoming harder as it progresses.