That would be a Nintendo issue. Opera developers will basically put whatever features Nintendo wants to pay for. Nintendo seems to have some tight control over anything involving Opera on the Wii. Some very interesting documents posted by Opera developers about the Wii version got quickly removed at the request of Nintendo a while back. Most unfortunate.
This isn't against capitalism at all. You just have to look at what they are really selling.
Very few people want to pay for a browser. If you see the browser itself as the product, this can be a real problem. So what do you do if you are a browser maker? Opera's browser is their product. They focus pretty heavily on selling it for embedded/small/portable systems.
Mozilla on the other hand launched their campaign to build and promote Firefox. They give the browser away for free because that's how they increase the value of the actual product that they are selling to supporters: marketshare and openness. Investing in Firefox is investing in a new standard that everybody has nearly equal access to. It's building a more open web based market across which to conduct other business.
Some companies may shy away from investing because they don't own the results. But other companies may invest specifically because of how equal the access is to the results.
It was a pretty small team actually. A team of 25 people, 12 of them being coders, built the site in 150 days. They knew going into it the expectations were high. They saw silverlight + M$ perks as the best way to make it happen.
Especially since that site was really designed to be the focal point during the olympics. It was built to be important for 17 days. I think if a site was being developed as the place for olympic info for a long period of time, they wouldn't have needed to develop around a pipeline of constantly incoming pre-recorded and live broadcast video and then they would have been able to develop something using more traditional means.
And it would have ended up being another crappy flash site anyway, lol.
It's interesting to play devil's advocate on this one. A small team has a big task. If at least some of the developers are experienced in.NET languages and M$ approaches them with some kind of perks or support for using SilverLight for the Olympics site, it seems like an easy choice to make.
I guess if there was a way for them to rely on YouTube that would have made more sense, but if it came down to Flash or SilverLight, they are both annoying, they are both primarily for desktop/laptop computers more than anything so requiring a plugin just means a plugin has to be downloaded. Flash obviously is far more widespread now, but SilverLight probably got them some perks from MS. Its available for a bunch of the most popular browsers. Its more flexible when it comes to video formats. Its easy and fast to develop for.
Going with an obscure plugin over a common one still seems bizarre to me. But at the same time, I hate the end result of both of them so if I was in their place, I'd go with the best deal/easiest to develop for.
...you would play as Ishmael, Ahab and every other member of the crew would still die just like in the original work, and at the end of the game, despite all the player's hard work, the last scene would be Ishmael alone in the ocean floating on a coffin right as the Rachel comes to the rescue.
I'm not trying to shoot down the whole idea he's going for but I do think a game can be art, even art that resembles literature. But, I'm not sure if anyone has succeeded in doing that yet.
I do think games have reached some level of being "art." I consider the sculptures and paintings of ancient Egypt art. They are extremely formulaic. It's a numbers game to figure out the proportions. And many of the sculptures fit those proportions beautifully. Does that mean it's not art? Or is the beauty of the initial formula and the precision of it's execution enough to count as art? I think the latter.
Back in the mid 90's we didn't have hordes of people downloading crap from torrents and P2P, we didn't have the masses watching videos on YouTube, Hulu and the like, and spam was at much lower levels.
It doesn't matter if your game doesn't use much bandwidth if the "tubes are clogged".
Those things wouldn't really have effected UMK3 WaveNet anyway since it's not like these machines were running across the internet.
Arcades with wavenet machines had ISDN lines that connected them to a Midway headquarters. They had a direct line to run a few arcade machines over.
What always makes me wonder about these crimes... what did he think was going to happen?
I doubt he thought anything would happen. He was selling Power Players. I see kiosks for those at malls all the time. I've walked up and played the Power Player more than once at malls in my area. I think he knew what he was doing was illegal, but considering how often these things are sold in actual stores, and how rare it is for anything negative to come of it, I bet he just figured he would skate by like everybody else.
In the past when I downloaded cracked versions of games it was to 1) try them out first and/or 2) get a version I was able to mod after purchasing the full version.
This guys games have demos and are built to easily be modded. So I would never pirate them. I also have little to no interest in them. They look like games intended to be teaching tools in classrooms more than anything else.
My guess is people pirate them just to do it for fun. Or because they want the full game to use in their classroom and they are underpaid teachers that don't want to shell out the bucks themselves.
Same experience here. I bought the first wired optical microsoft mouse I saw on the market and it's still running fine. I got a much nicer, more expensive Logitech one for my gf, and its essentially crap.
I've had the same experience with Keyboards. I don't think Microsoft necessarily has the best keyboards, but I've used 2 microsoft Ergo keyboards for the past 8 years or so. The first one still works, it just got a little too yellow so I got a second one that looks nicer for the main comp. They are both very basic, they were very cheap, but they have always been insanely comfortable to me, even for FPS and fighting games.
QBasic was the first language I used to actually make things that seemed complete. I used some other versions of Basic before it but I basically just did short math problems and maybe a loop or two. QBasic is when I triumphantly created pong and breakout clones. I was so proud. They were crap, don't get me wrong, but the fact that I made them myself was the sort of accomplishment that led me to continue programming.
QBasic was an easy language to get into but I think one of the things that helped me out with it was I could easily figure out what command I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it with it's built in help file. The thing that kept me away from a couple other languages at the time was this was before I had internet access, before anyone I knew had internet access actually, and my library didn't have programming books. So without that helpfile I would have quite literally had nothing.
That leads me to believe a solid, easily accessible method to learn about the language is definately key. If it is a support structure that a young teen can be taught to navigate on his or her own, it will be that much better and that future programmer will have a much better time trying to get things done.
A trimmed down Win2K that's hibernated can be surprisingly fast. In college I relied on a Pentium 200 with 32MB RAM and a 2 gig harddrive for my in class note taking and presentations, usually using Office 2000.
On a system with that little ram the default install will use very little memory from a fresh boot and a lot of stuff can still be turned off to get it smaller.
I kind of relied on it shutting down and starting up fast for back to back classes. The laptop was already old and didn't have a working battery so it was a full power down every class. $1200 a semester in books FTL.
Square Enix said in their press conference that they didn't know how many discs the 360 version would be. It's not depending on some rumored Blu Ray 360 at all. It'll just be multidisc the way games like FFVII were.
iPod's were purchased by everybody and their mother. People with no interest in computers or high end stereo equipment or portable audio all of a sudden bought expensive iPods. Now people with not a ton of interest in computers, and definately not in really expensive ones, see a computer that's inexpensive and has an OS that is actually very friendly to newbies, and they are eating it up.
If you haven't tried an EEE and are surprised by the idea of non-geeks using Linux, you should try one with the default setup. A few people I know that were never particularly adept at figuring stuff out in Windows, people that definately don't qualify as geeks, have been picking up the cheapest EEE to use for web browsing and music playing. Then, all of a sudden, they started doing things like switching to the full desktop mode, adding new applications, doing what they have to to get the EEE to support what they want to do.
I'm no UI designer, that's for sure, but there is definately something about the EEE's flavor of linux that has gotten a lot of non-computer types to delve into really learning about and customizing their OS. That's not the case with everybody obviously, but in general there is a level of accessibility in the EEE's setup that seems to just make people happy.
ValuSoft is a division of THQ. They publish and distribute (usually inexpensive and crappy) games and software. I would imagine they are the ones that produce the disc, box, and booklets that come with this Ubuntu package and they handle distributing it to stores. I'd be interested to see if the box has anything on it about the sort of tech support you can get. I kind of doubt ValuSoft is handling tech support for Ubuntu. That seems beyond their scope.
I never tried a dishwasher. But I have 2 MS Ergo keyboards that I find very comfortable. They are kinda flimsy, older models with nasty locking. But they are the exact right shape for me (bad upper back means I have to be picky about hand and arm position while typing). My little cousin managed to spill juice on one of them. I just popped it open and put the plastic top with all the keys attached to it in hot water for a while with some detergent and washed the rubber membrane off in the sink. Good as new. But more effort than a dishwasher, that's for sure.
Thanks for the info. The Razer is a USB keyboard. It can be used without special software and it will function as a standard USB keyboard with a 6 button limit. You can also install drivers on a comp and switch it to a different mode where it has a 10 button limit.
The Razer is the only one I use that lets me press 10 at once. All the laptops I've had allowed 6 or 7 and the average cheap desktop keyboard allows 3 or 4. If model M's in general allowed you to press 10 at once and this did too, I'd be all over it O.O
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That would be a Nintendo issue. Opera developers will basically put whatever features Nintendo wants to pay for. Nintendo seems to have some tight control over anything involving Opera on the Wii. Some very interesting documents posted by Opera developers about the Wii version got quickly removed at the request of Nintendo a while back. Most unfortunate.
This isn't against capitalism at all. You just have to look at what they are really selling.
Very few people want to pay for a browser. If you see the browser itself as the product, this can be a real problem. So what do you do if you are a browser maker? Opera's browser is their product. They focus pretty heavily on selling it for embedded/small/portable systems.
Mozilla on the other hand launched their campaign to build and promote Firefox. They give the browser away for free because that's how they increase the value of the actual product that they are selling to supporters: marketshare and openness. Investing in Firefox is investing in a new standard that everybody has nearly equal access to. It's building a more open web based market across which to conduct other business.
Some companies may shy away from investing because they don't own the results. But other companies may invest specifically because of how equal the access is to the results.
It was a pretty small team actually. A team of 25 people, 12 of them being coders, built the site in 150 days. They knew going into it the expectations were high. They saw silverlight + M$ perks as the best way to make it happen.
Especially since that site was really designed to be the focal point during the olympics. It was built to be important for 17 days. I think if a site was being developed as the place for olympic info for a long period of time, they wouldn't have needed to develop around a pipeline of constantly incoming pre-recorded and live broadcast video and then they would have been able to develop something using more traditional means.
And it would have ended up being another crappy flash site anyway, lol.
It's interesting to play devil's advocate on this one. A small team has a big task. If at least some of the developers are experienced in .NET languages and M$ approaches them with some kind of perks or support for using SilverLight for the Olympics site, it seems like an easy choice to make.
I guess if there was a way for them to rely on YouTube that would have made more sense, but if it came down to Flash or SilverLight, they are both annoying, they are both primarily for desktop/laptop computers more than anything so requiring a plugin just means a plugin has to be downloaded. Flash obviously is far more widespread now, but SilverLight probably got them some perks from MS. Its available for a bunch of the most popular browsers. Its more flexible when it comes to video formats. Its easy and fast to develop for.
Going with an obscure plugin over a common one still seems bizarre to me. But at the same time, I hate the end result of both of them so if I was in their place, I'd go with the best deal/easiest to develop for.
It used a 2.0 beta version.
And windows 2000, 98, and 95 (as an add-on).
There is no quote in TFA that actually mentions him saying it. It almost sounds like Windows Cloud is something like Google AppEngine.
We live in a comic thought bubble coming out of the head of God. And God's God is looking at it in a weekly comic wondering if it's a misprint.
...you would play as Ishmael, Ahab and every other member of the crew would still die just like in the original work, and at the end of the game, despite all the player's hard work, the last scene would be Ishmael alone in the ocean floating on a coffin right as the Rachel comes to the rescue.
I'm not trying to shoot down the whole idea he's going for but I do think a game can be art, even art that resembles literature. But, I'm not sure if anyone has succeeded in doing that yet.
I do think games have reached some level of being "art." I consider the sculptures and paintings of ancient Egypt art. They are extremely formulaic. It's a numbers game to figure out the proportions. And many of the sculptures fit those proportions beautifully. Does that mean it's not art? Or is the beauty of the initial formula and the precision of it's execution enough to count as art? I think the latter.
Back in the mid 90's we didn't have hordes of people downloading crap from torrents and P2P, we didn't have the masses watching videos on YouTube, Hulu and the like, and spam was at much lower levels.
It doesn't matter if your game doesn't use much bandwidth if the "tubes are clogged".
Those things wouldn't really have effected UMK3 WaveNet anyway since it's not like these machines were running across the internet.
Arcades with wavenet machines had ISDN lines that connected them to a Midway headquarters. They had a direct line to run a few arcade machines over.
I doubt he thought anything would happen. He was selling Power Players. I see kiosks for those at malls all the time. I've walked up and played the Power Player more than once at malls in my area. I think he knew what he was doing was illegal, but considering how often these things are sold in actual stores, and how rare it is for anything negative to come of it, I bet he just figured he would skate by like everybody else.
Yeah, the website was being served up by a Sega TeraDrive. So, more than one user and it starts getting a minor case of burning uncontrollably.
It's the calm before the storm.
In the past when I downloaded cracked versions of games it was to 1) try them out first and/or 2) get a version I was able to mod after purchasing the full version.
This guys games have demos and are built to easily be modded. So I would never pirate them. I also have little to no interest in them. They look like games intended to be teaching tools in classrooms more than anything else.
My guess is people pirate them just to do it for fun. Or because they want the full game to use in their classroom and they are underpaid teachers that don't want to shell out the bucks themselves.
The bill of rights doesn't fly any more. Too much of a hassle.
Same experience here. I bought the first wired optical microsoft mouse I saw on the market and it's still running fine. I got a much nicer, more expensive Logitech one for my gf, and its essentially crap.
I've had the same experience with Keyboards. I don't think Microsoft necessarily has the best keyboards, but I've used 2 microsoft Ergo keyboards for the past 8 years or so. The first one still works, it just got a little too yellow so I got a second one that looks nicer for the main comp. They are both very basic, they were very cheap, but they have always been insanely comfortable to me, even for FPS and fighting games.
QBasic was the first language I used to actually make things that seemed complete. I used some other versions of Basic before it but I basically just did short math problems and maybe a loop or two. QBasic is when I triumphantly created pong and breakout clones. I was so proud. They were crap, don't get me wrong, but the fact that I made them myself was the sort of accomplishment that led me to continue programming.
QBasic was an easy language to get into but I think one of the things that helped me out with it was I could easily figure out what command I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it with it's built in help file. The thing that kept me away from a couple other languages at the time was this was before I had internet access, before anyone I knew had internet access actually, and my library didn't have programming books. So without that helpfile I would have quite literally had nothing.
That leads me to believe a solid, easily accessible method to learn about the language is definately key. If it is a support structure that a young teen can be taught to navigate on his or her own, it will be that much better and that future programmer will have a much better time trying to get things done.
A trimmed down Win2K that's hibernated can be surprisingly fast. In college I relied on a Pentium 200 with 32MB RAM and a 2 gig harddrive for my in class note taking and presentations, usually using Office 2000.
On a system with that little ram the default install will use very little memory from a fresh boot and a lot of stuff can still be turned off to get it smaller.
I kind of relied on it shutting down and starting up fast for back to back classes. The laptop was already old and didn't have a working battery so it was a full power down every class. $1200 a semester in books FTL.
Square Enix said in their press conference that they didn't know how many discs the 360 version would be. It's not depending on some rumored Blu Ray 360 at all. It'll just be multidisc the way games like FFVII were.
iPod's were purchased by everybody and their mother. People with no interest in computers or high end stereo equipment or portable audio all of a sudden bought expensive iPods. Now people with not a ton of interest in computers, and definately not in really expensive ones, see a computer that's inexpensive and has an OS that is actually very friendly to newbies, and they are eating it up.
If you haven't tried an EEE and are surprised by the idea of non-geeks using Linux, you should try one with the default setup. A few people I know that were never particularly adept at figuring stuff out in Windows, people that definately don't qualify as geeks, have been picking up the cheapest EEE to use for web browsing and music playing. Then, all of a sudden, they started doing things like switching to the full desktop mode, adding new applications, doing what they have to to get the EEE to support what they want to do.
I'm no UI designer, that's for sure, but there is definately something about the EEE's flavor of linux that has gotten a lot of non-computer types to delve into really learning about and customizing their OS. That's not the case with everybody obviously, but in general there is a level of accessibility in the EEE's setup that seems to just make people happy.
ValuSoft is a division of THQ. They publish and distribute (usually inexpensive and crappy) games and software. I would imagine they are the ones that produce the disc, box, and booklets that come with this Ubuntu package and they handle distributing it to stores. I'd be interested to see if the box has anything on it about the sort of tech support you can get. I kind of doubt ValuSoft is handling tech support for Ubuntu. That seems beyond their scope.
I never tried a dishwasher. But I have 2 MS Ergo keyboards that I find very comfortable. They are kinda flimsy, older models with nasty locking. But they are the exact right shape for me (bad upper back means I have to be picky about hand and arm position while typing). My little cousin managed to spill juice on one of them. I just popped it open and put the plastic top with all the keys attached to it in hot water for a while with some detergent and washed the rubber membrane off in the sink. Good as new. But more effort than a dishwasher, that's for sure.
I discovered the only reason that it appears to be 54 million years old in the first place was that God had NAILED it there.
Thanks for the info. The Razer is a USB keyboard. It can be used without special software and it will function as a standard USB keyboard with a 6 button limit. You can also install drivers on a comp and switch it to a different mode where it has a 10 button limit.
The Razer is the only one I use that lets me press 10 at once. All the laptops I've had allowed 6 or 7 and the average cheap desktop keyboard allows 3 or 4. If model M's in general allowed you to press 10 at once and this did too, I'd be all over it O.O