I've rather curious as to what exactly you'd be looking for as evidence that they interbred? Given the similarity between the two groups in the first place, if you found a hybrid, what makes you think you could identify it? Especially since you can't determine the genealogy of a fossil. A hybrid might very well simply resemble either parent so closely that you couldn't tell its hybrid ancestry.
My study of biology in college has taught me that species designation means exactly nothing in determining whether two organisms can interbreed. Viable crosses between supposedly different species in the same genus are absurdly common in the animal kingdom (Is there any justification at all for multiple species in Canis?), and interbreeding of plants in different families is not unheard of. At most, I'm willing to believe that Neanderthals might have possessed some mutation that caused crosses to be sterile, but even that I'm rather skepitcal of, as it seems unlikely between two groups so recently differentiated. I rather suspect that hybrids and hybrid communities might simply make up the groups labeled "advanced neanderthals" by anthropologists.
I.e. Alliance will finally be able to camp just outside low-level towns and gank with impunity, just like horde does now. Fantastic gameplay there! I play alliance, and if you're on a server with even a SLIGHT imbalance towards horde, leveling becomes painful at about lvl 20, due to high level horde running around ganking lowbies. And yes, its usually shaman.
It's probably EEPROM as well rather than flash.
on
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Thought I'd pipe in again, judging from the amount of memory, it's probably an EEPROM chip rather than flash. This might indicate that they're actually planning on just physcially keeping a list of savegames (along witht their location, but the the files themselves, just an index) on the remote itself, probably along with varios configuration data or whatever..
Well, there have been rumors that the remote would store save-games. However, the 6KB makes that seem unlikely, except the reality MIGHT be that remote store some data about its "owner" i.e. You have your own personal remote and it stores data that tells the Wii itself which savegames are yours. The Wii maybe saves some identifying data (name, profile, etc) on the remote, which also goes with savegame files. This sounds at least vaguely plausible to me.
Also Nintendo has historically not shown up at the Tokyo Game Show, and the word on the street is they're not showing up this year either. Somehow I expect Nintendo to make an announcement about the Wii around the time of the show (release date anyone?) and that ending up being bigger news than the whole TGS itself.
"Junk DNA" is a significant misnomer among lay people. Genetists have a reasonably good idea about what much of it actually is. Some of it pretty much what you said, redundant copies of genes which, modified over time, may become activiated again and serve some useful function (although it may in fact do nothing at this point) Large portions of it are retroviral remanants, DNA inserted into genomes by retroviruses in the distant past, that have since mutated and become more or less non-functional (the degree of non-functionality varies widely, some are still capable of varying levels of expression. We know that many are in fact retroviral genomes because we can find considerable similarity with extant retroviruses. Other sections are known to be important for "structural" reasons, that is, they're important for maintaining chromosome shape, which in turn has significant regulatory consequences.
Modern biologists know much more than you give them credit for, and in turn are more aware than than their predecessors of how much they do not know.
Depends on who you're talking about by saying "the industry." Sony and Microsoft, not doing so hot. Nintendo (as usual actually) is rolling in it. And they're doing it by focusing on a cheaper machine with an emphasis on fun games (the DS). I say this bodes well for the Wii, not so well for the PS3, with its high price and focus on Blu-Ray movies (rather like the PSP and UMD).
"Mario will probably put in a showing on the Wii"??? Do what?!!
Super Mario Galaxy anyone? It's only one of the most hotly awaited titles for the console! It's not going to make launch, but it's scheduled for an early 2007 release. The demos shown at E3 this year generated a huge amount of buzz, since as shown it demostrated a return to Mario 64 style gameplay (at a silky smooth 60fps even in alpha/beta).
Sonic to some degree has migrated to Nintendo's camp as well, since all the Sonic titles will be available for the Wii, and there's a new title announced for the Wii sometime near launch as well.
I really don't the DMCA is that much of a deterrant. I've seen lots of modded xboxes.
I definately agree with your cynicism regarding free-market forces, however, I think there are numerous reasons to think Sony is about to screw themselves out of the market. Slashdot readers should be very well aware of Sony's laundry list of crimes, so I won't repeat them here. Additionally, Nintendo looks like they're going to have a very good launch line-up this fall, as opposed to the N64 and Gamecube which were pretty lousy. The specific details of the current situation cause me to discard (or at least reduce) my normal cynicism regarding the abilities of the market in favor of hope for a company I like.
Alternatively, they might sell none at all, as all the customers go and buy hardware that doesn't implement such restrictions, and has a plentiful supply of less expensive titles. I can see why Publishers might THINK they want this, but unless it is implemented universally (and it can't be really, modded consoles would render this moot for everything except online games, and if you're going to mod your console, you might as well pirate the games) but in reality other companies would offer a more custumer friendly approach and reap the benefits in the market.
Of course, I hate Sony anyway, so I'm all in favor of them implementing this kind of scheme. Nintendo Wii FTW.
Thank fucking god! "Urban Culture" is pathetic bullshit to begin with. Games based on it are just sad beyond belief. They're blatant attempts to cash in on "hip." Let's get back to the proper business of killing orcs and zombies.
Let's see, maybe because most games never see a Mac release? While a few of the titles I listed do, not even all of them do. There are a lot of other older 2D titles that were never released for Macs, much less OS X. And even for those few titles that were crossplatform, going about tracking down such releases isn't exactly easy.
I'm not sure what you're seeing, but something vaguely similar can happen on poorly supported video chipsets when running on Native HW. If I recall correctly, theres a setting within the game itself that can make them go away. It's one of the graphical options.
Like Baldur's Gate, or Icewind Dale, or Planescape (Any Bioware Infinity Engine Titles really). How do games of this nature run under Parallels? Is DirectX handled acceptably for everything other than 3D acceleration? If so, I'll probably have to speed up my plans to upgrade to an Intel based Mac. I'm a recent switcher, and this is the only thing that's been really hurting me. I use my Gamecube for new games, but to relive older titles it would be awesome if parallels would fill the gap.
Hey! You don't have to be THAT old to have played a Sierra-Online game! They had plenty of titles in the late '80's, early '90 which is only, umm, 15 years ago.
To DO an adventure game nowadays? Let's say you wanted to do a SVGA (SCUMM-style) 256-color 640x480, animated, with full voice acting game? Let's say you pull all the stops, go whole hog, and get like, Tony DiTerlizzi to do your background paintings and Character designs, put together your own studio, etc? I mean, jesus, it probably wouldn't be more than like $500,000. How can the market NOT support this? Even with fairly modest sales you'd expect a couple million in revenue. Let's suppose you sell 60,000 units at full retail price of like $40 and recoup $20 of that after packaging and the retailors cut, that's still $1.2Million. And honestly I'd expect a game with decent writing and production values to EASILY sell in excess of a hundred thousand units.
At this point I'd half expect someone to be able to make a game in their freaking basement, and then jump start a studio off just a few thousand digital download sales, with a few thousand in revenue. I mean really, we've got the Gimp, various free audio editing tools, Python is Free/Free. Studio recording equipment is Ass-cheap. What's stopping people?
Yes, to the FFA, but only between factions (horde/alliance). However due to numerous issues this means that if you play Alliance, you get murdered and spawn camped for 1/2 an hour. This was one of my numerous gripes with the game. Along with Crafting: nerfed to uselessness, control scheme: Starcraft with one (1) unit, constant grinding, and despite said grinding a complete lack of a feeling of accomplishment. My character never FELT like he was getting any better over 40+ levels. As opposed to say, a Diablo character.
Ah but what matters in civil court is: can it be argued that Microsoft did, or should have forseen the disabling of legal copies, and if so does that mean that acted in bad faith? All you really have to do is make a plausible argument for "yes" and you win.
Problem is (for microsoft) even if you as a user agree to such an thing, you still have legal recourse. If they try to pull that bullshit about the EULA, the judge will laugh them out of court. "You can't sue us" clauses are purely there to discourage people too stupid to realize that, in the USA at least, YOU CAN ALWAYS SUE. You may not win, but if Microsoft really started doing this, they'd probably lose a big Class Action lawsuit, unfortunately probably not big enough(In my opinion such a ruling, in order to actually fulfill its purpse would have to award a. cash, and b. be in the multi-billion dollar range. Fining Microsft millions does nothing, if governments really wanted to have an effect, they need to lay down a $20billion or so fine. that would make a difference), but they'd still get a court order to stop in all probability.
Wrong, the Pentium Pro was the first x86 chip not derived from the 80386. It had a front end designed for decoding the same Instruction set as the 80386, but at the architectural level, the two aren't even remotely related. The Pro was the first Intel chip to decode x86 instructions in micro ops (a special instruction set never exposed externally) it is these the Pro executes, and the architecture is other very different.
Technically they did on N64. Largely because accessing a cart is so fast, you can treat it as a somewhat lower speed texture cache. See "Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine" for an example of this.
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My study of biology in college has taught me that species designation means exactly nothing in determining whether two organisms can interbreed. Viable crosses between supposedly different species in the same genus are absurdly common in the animal kingdom (Is there any justification at all for multiple species in Canis?), and interbreeding of plants in different families is not unheard of. At most, I'm willing to believe that Neanderthals might have possessed some mutation that caused crosses to be sterile, but even that I'm rather skepitcal of, as it seems unlikely between two groups so recently differentiated. I rather suspect that hybrids and hybrid communities might simply make up the groups labeled "advanced neanderthals" by anthropologists.
I.e. Alliance will finally be able to camp just outside low-level towns and gank with impunity, just like horde does now. Fantastic gameplay there! I play alliance, and if you're on a server with even a SLIGHT imbalance towards horde, leveling becomes painful at about lvl 20, due to high level horde running around ganking lowbies. And yes, its usually shaman.
Thought I'd pipe in again, judging from the amount of memory, it's probably an EEPROM chip rather than flash. This might indicate that they're actually planning on just physcially keeping a list of savegames (along witht their location, but the the files themselves, just an index) on the remote itself, probably along with varios configuration data or whatever..
Also Nintendo has historically not shown up at the Tokyo Game Show, and the word on the street is they're not showing up this year either. Somehow I expect Nintendo to make an announcement about the Wii around the time of the show (release date anyone?) and that ending up being bigger news than the whole TGS itself.
Modern biologists know much more than you give them credit for, and in turn are more aware than than their predecessors of how much they do not know.
Depends on who you're talking about by saying "the industry." Sony and Microsoft, not doing so hot. Nintendo (as usual actually) is rolling in it. And they're doing it by focusing on a cheaper machine with an emphasis on fun games (the DS). I say this bodes well for the Wii, not so well for the PS3, with its high price and focus on Blu-Ray movies (rather like the PSP and UMD).
Super Mario Galaxy anyone? It's only one of the most hotly awaited titles for the console! It's not going to make launch, but it's scheduled for an early 2007 release. The demos shown at E3 this year generated a huge amount of buzz, since as shown it demostrated a return to Mario 64 style gameplay (at a silky smooth 60fps even in alpha/beta).
Sonic to some degree has migrated to Nintendo's camp as well, since all the Sonic titles will be available for the Wii, and there's a new title announced for the Wii sometime near launch as well.
Firstly, Isn't this a dupe? And secondly, have they checked ebay yet?
I really don't the DMCA is that much of a deterrant. I've seen lots of modded xboxes. I definately agree with your cynicism regarding free-market forces, however, I think there are numerous reasons to think Sony is about to screw themselves out of the market. Slashdot readers should be very well aware of Sony's laundry list of crimes, so I won't repeat them here. Additionally, Nintendo looks like they're going to have a very good launch line-up this fall, as opposed to the N64 and Gamecube which were pretty lousy. The specific details of the current situation cause me to discard (or at least reduce) my normal cynicism regarding the abilities of the market in favor of hope for a company I like.
Of course, I hate Sony anyway, so I'm all in favor of them implementing this kind of scheme. Nintendo Wii FTW.
Thank fucking god! "Urban Culture" is pathetic bullshit to begin with. Games based on it are just sad beyond belief. They're blatant attempts to cash in on "hip." Let's get back to the proper business of killing orcs and zombies.
Except that the ruling made it clear that it is fine for YOU to do that. The problem is when I make an edit, and then sell it to YOU.
Let's see, maybe because most games never see a Mac release? While a few of the titles I listed do, not even all of them do. There are a lot of other older 2D titles that were never released for Macs, much less OS X. And even for those few titles that were crossplatform, going about tracking down such releases isn't exactly easy.
I'm not sure what you're seeing, but something vaguely similar can happen on poorly supported video chipsets when running on Native HW. If I recall correctly, theres a setting within the game itself that can make them go away. It's one of the graphical options.
Like Baldur's Gate, or Icewind Dale, or Planescape (Any Bioware Infinity Engine Titles really). How do games of this nature run under Parallels? Is DirectX handled acceptably for everything other than 3D acceleration? If so, I'll probably have to speed up my plans to upgrade to an Intel based Mac. I'm a recent switcher, and this is the only thing that's been really hurting me. I use my Gamecube for new games, but to relive older titles it would be awesome if parallels would fill the gap.
Damn You kids! Get off my Lawn!
And the Pre-installed Spyware and Adware was FREE too!
At this point I'd half expect someone to be able to make a game in their freaking basement, and then jump start a studio off just a few thousand digital download sales, with a few thousand in revenue. I mean really, we've got the Gimp, various free audio editing tools, Python is Free/Free. Studio recording equipment is Ass-cheap. What's stopping people?
Yes, to the FFA, but only between factions (horde/alliance). However due to numerous issues this means that if you play Alliance, you get murdered and spawn camped for 1/2 an hour. This was one of my numerous gripes with the game. Along with Crafting: nerfed to uselessness, control scheme: Starcraft with one (1) unit, constant grinding, and despite said grinding a complete lack of a feeling of accomplishment. My character never FELT like he was getting any better over 40+ levels. As opposed to say, a Diablo character.
I know, they must be as bad as Nintendo!
Ah but what matters in civil court is: can it be argued that Microsoft did, or should have forseen the disabling of legal copies, and if so does that mean that acted in bad faith? All you really have to do is make a plausible argument for "yes" and you win.
Problem is (for microsoft) even if you as a user agree to such an thing, you still have legal recourse. If they try to pull that bullshit about the EULA, the judge will laugh them out of court. "You can't sue us" clauses are purely there to discourage people too stupid to realize that, in the USA at least, YOU CAN ALWAYS SUE. You may not win, but if Microsoft really started doing this, they'd probably lose a big Class Action lawsuit, unfortunately probably not big enough(In my opinion such a ruling, in order to actually fulfill its purpse would have to award a. cash, and b. be in the multi-billion dollar range. Fining Microsft millions does nothing, if governments really wanted to have an effect, they need to lay down a $20billion or so fine. that would make a difference), but they'd still get a court order to stop in all probability.
And Skylab was launched into orbit on a lone Saturn V, what's your point?
Wrong, the Pentium Pro was the first x86 chip not derived from the 80386. It had a front end designed for decoding the same Instruction set as the 80386, but at the architectural level, the two aren't even remotely related. The Pro was the first Intel chip to decode x86 instructions in micro ops (a special instruction set never exposed externally) it is these the Pro executes, and the architecture is other very different.
Technically they did on N64. Largely because accessing a cart is so fast, you can treat it as a somewhat lower speed texture cache. See "Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine" for an example of this.