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User: Metaphorically

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Comments · 270

  1. Re:Insomniac Put Me To Sleep on GDC - Sony Keynote · · Score: 1

    I'd guess a periodic fee or share of revenue at least. In reality Sony stands to gain a lot from this kind of connectivity - especially since MS Live won't do it yet. They've also taken on the risk of building this stuff tho - so they've got a right to get something upfront. I guess you could have a look at their Beyond site and see if it tells you anything.

  2. Re:Price? on GDC - Sony Keynote · · Score: 1

    From the look of things: lots. Not only in the apparent cost of buying the game, but all the extra add-ons they'll offer (and that your kids will buy). Extra levels, new episodes, any other downloadables and game merchandise. I don't think they'll reduce the cost of the PS3 box too much to reflect this, either, since it's an uncertain source of revenue.

  3. Re:More editing: on GDC - Sony Keynote · · Score: 1

    I heard him say it. It wasn't the Sony guy but the guy from God of War 2.

  4. Re:Thi is the promise of the internet on GDC - The Importance of Self-Publishing · · Score: 1

    Apparently FreeCell has some history well before Windows. Whether there are rights to be owned or who owns them I don't know.

  5. Re:Thi is the promise of the internet on GDC - The Importance of Self-Publishing · · Score: 2, Informative

    The bitter truth may be that there's growing restrictions by huge companies learning that they can squeeze a few more bucks out of all the participants, but that's not a good excuse to sit back and do nothing. If you have a dream of making a game, have a dream of publishing yourself or have a dream of spreading your maniac manifesto, the best time was four years ago. The second best time is today. Last time I checked you can still set up a site with shared hosting for less than 10 bucks a month and put up a pretty wide range of whatever the hell you want with little or no hassle.

    If you want to publish games and the web is your medium then there's plenty of time before that door slams shut. Get off your ass and get to work. That's what I'm going to do when I'm done complaining here. You need some help getting started? My vehicle is SVG and DHTML, there are lots of things you can build with free open source tools. Some quick examples: Freecell, Connect 4, and a simple templated puzzle example.

  6. Re:Some initial installation notes on Fedora Core 5 Available · · Score: 1

    I used that same installation guide to find the setup for my NVidia card and a few other good tweaks.

  7. Re:Other PS3 storage media. on PS3s Online Services to Compete With XBox 360 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know, looking on Amazon the price for compact flash is still between 50% and 90% the price of memory stick. I bought a Sony camera a couple years back because the prices looked "close" to me. I've had to take endless ridicule from CF users as I hunted for bargains on memory stick that brought the price anywhere near that of cheap compact flash card.

  8. Re:Other PS3 storage media. on PS3s Online Services to Compete With XBox 360 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So they're going from insanely high price per megabyte of storage to just ridiculously highly priced storage. I thought the PS3 was supposed to have a reader for other memory card formats as well. Wonder if they're going to only the memory stick option will support other media like that.

  9. Re:What about cell phones? on University Bans wi-fi as Health Concern · · Score: 1

    I hope your kidding. SAR: Specific Absorbed Radiation. Absorbed by tissue like yours.

  10. Re:What about cell phones? on University Bans wi-fi as Health Concern · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nice way to engage in dialog.

    I also questioned the numbers since I remember that right when cell phone popularity started growing dramatically, there was a statement (in the manual of my Motorola flip phone) about the limits on maximum emission levels being raised recently. That was back in the early 90s.

    Anyhow, I think the number this guy quotes correlates to SAR which this list claims goes pretty close to the 1.6 Watts SAR maximum level mentioned in the page you link to.

    btw, that list is the highest SAR levels mentioned from this other page.

  11. Re:I'm reminded of "The Producers"... on Phantom Console Put on Hold · · Score: 1

    They showed a "product" and some great big banners at E3. What the "product" did, I'm not sure, I didn't try it.

  12. Re:Leasing happens all the time. on RX-8 Hydrogen RE a Dual Fuel Car · · Score: 1

    Fwiw, Ford owns Mazda. So they'd just have to ship it to the appropriate mob.

  13. Re:accessability guidelines on The Current State of Ajax · · Score: 1

    Accessibility takes a back seat to flashiness so far. A lot of "gee-whiz" ajax applications are great eye candy and the surprising responsiveness can make you wonder if it's just a web page or something more. I think that most of what we're seeing now doesn't get past that stage.

    I follow Ajaxian, and even though it doesn't cover accessibility directly, I find that the developers they link to do get in to these issues sometimes. It's a new field, so you have to dig deeper to find people doing apps that are more than just experiments.

    Degrade gracefully. Include keyboard accelerators. Always use alt text. The same rules, but there's got to be a lot of interpretation still.

  14. Re:What is it? on The Current State of Ajax · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ajax is a buzz-word for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It generally refers to web based applications that feel more responsive than traditional pages because they don't refresh the whole page every time the user does an action. There's plenty more on Wikipedia.

    Once you get down to the brass tacks of writing an app, here's a good way to deal with implementation problems people run in to.

  15. Re:Que? No Explaino! on Kurt Cagle's OpenSVG Keynote · · Score: 1

    If you don't count Opera.

  16. Re:There isn't a single complete SVG viewer anywhe on Kurt Cagle's OpenSVG Keynote · · Score: 2, Informative

    At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.

    Complete implementation? No. But pretty much every feature has been implemented and tested in some implementation as of the end of last year:
    http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/statu s/matrix.html

    Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases, but for some reason everybody wants to write their own browser plugin from scratch instead of starting from the authoring tools and extending them to support a 'playback' mode.

    Not to knock the great work Inkscape has done, but it's not the most advanced. I would guess Adobe SVG Viewer is better as a viewer. It's definitely been around longer.

    Having a reference implementation from the W3C would be great, sure, but it's not essential. Look at CSS. There are plenty of subtle bugs out there, and everybody loves to rail on the most popular browser not supporting important parts of the spec, but nobody would deny that CSS is useful.

  17. Re:SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics)? on Google Maps Creator Takes Browsers To The Limit · · Score: 1

    The main problem is twofold, the lack of tools to create SVG's (though you can write it up in a text editor just like HTML...

    Besides the link you provide to a tool that produces SVG, there are plenty of others that support SVG to some degree or another. The most popular is Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a very well know vector graphics application which has been able to do SVG for years.

    ... and the fact that your lovely SVG graphics will display in nearly nothing.

    The desktop browser world is important, but it isn't everything. There are applications that use SVG on the server-side then send a raster to the client. Yes you lose many advantages over client-side SVG but you can still take advantage of the fact that it's an XML-based graphics language. There are tools from Apache and Adobe designed to support server-side use.

    Look at XML, it's rare that a site delivers raw XML to a client, but there are more sites than anyone could know that are using XML on the server side then delivering HTML to the client.

    The focus right now is on getting SVG in the client, but server-side and other applications give SVG a way to bootstrap; to avoid the chicken and egg problem that you describe. Have a look around and you'll see there's more to it than you know.

  18. Re:SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics)? on Google Maps Creator Takes Browsers To The Limit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't forget the cell phones. SVG Tiny would be a good way to get Google Maps access to a bunch of mobile browsers. If they can do it in VML, then it should be easy to do in SVG. SVG would be a whole lot simpler than the stuff they do for paths with PNGs in Firefox (imo).

  19. Re:I was wondering what SVG was on Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer · · Score: 2, Informative

    While you're totally right about the vector/raster distinction, SVG defines filters that do some of the things that are associated with retouching a photo. One example would be a colour transform, here's an example. SVG can also include a raster image with an image tag and crop it (another photo retouching function).

    Not saying that Inkscape or SVG are great for photo editing, just wanted to point out that some of these things can be done.

  20. Re:I was wondering what SVG was on Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer · · Score: 1

    It's not an either/or thing. The Gimp does rasters (mostly) and Inkscape does SVG. There's no reason to ditch the Gimp.

  21. Re:Great. on Firefox 1.1 Scrapped · · Score: 1

    Fwiw, if you are using a nightly with SVG or an alpha build, I've written a dirt-simple extension for toggling that flag. I needed to turn SVG support on and off for some testing. You can install it from here (my blog).

  22. Re:AN OS? on Designing an OS for Blind/Deaf Users? · · Score: 1

    Thank you. Why does everyone equate the OS with the user interface?

    The OP's question makes a lot more sense when it's phrased in terms of UI than it does when you try to make the user a function of the OS.

    I think the confusion comes about from marketing, but we should know better than to adopt every misconception propogated by talking heads.

  23. Re:faster writes? on Flash Drives in Future Apple Laptops? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Write speed for flash is slower than read speed for flash, but making a direct comparison like that can be tricky because of differences in the technology.

    Flash memory has to be erased before it can be written and has an inherent minimum erase block size. This has made designers put some write buffering in the card (at least in the older PC Card devices, which afaik are just bigger versions of CF cards). That write buffering is one layer of caching, then there can be additional layers of read and write caching in the driver.

    Generally those caches improve normal use of the device, but in cases like yours you blow right through all those caches since you're rewriting the whole card.

    btw, that caching is why you have to tell Windows to eject the device before you pull it out. Your write might not have actually finished even though you can do other things to the drive in Explorer.

  24. Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets on Flash Drives in Future Apple Laptops? · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's the one. I must be bad with names; bubble memory is what I call those flashbacks of what my paycheck looked like 5 years ago.

    Still keeps me up some nights.

    ... if you listen close, you can hear the quiet sobbing

  25. Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets on Flash Drives in Future Apple Laptops? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember talking to a guy at Radio Shack about flash-based drives and how this was going to be the new option back in 1992. I think they were calling it a "hard card." Looking back, it was probably the same thing as PCMCIA Flash drive. That's the precursor to Compact Flash cards for you young'uns.

    It wasn't new then and it isn't new now. Is it time? Sure. It's long overdue and I'd love to see solid state drives suddenly become financially feasable.

    I doubt it's going to happen though because it seems like the cost of the magnetic materials used in disc platters will always be low and a solid state memory cell (flash, ram, eeprom, whatever) takes a couple transistors. The price of both drops, but hard drive price per GB (or MB, TB, whatever) always drops faster because of the lower transistor count.