They did a search for certain terms like "Lolita" and deleted any communities where it popped up multiple times, including book clubs that discussed the book.
I'm pretty sure the only reason SP3 exists is because of pressure from a bunch of Microsoft's corporate customers. They aren't likely to use nLite, but they want an up-to-date version of XP. They aren't likely to switch to Vista anytime soon, and many of them have internal web pages and web apps that break with IE7. Having worked in IT for three major corporations, I can see why they'd push for a SP3 even if it isn't what Microsoft wants.
Apple admitted on their own website that it has issues with CSS Hover Menus. KDE's KHMTL passed the ACID 2 test, but not WebKit. Oddly enough WebKit has many improvements since it forked from KHTML, and KHTML also made improvements of their own. They are finally merging back together, and future versions of WebKit should pass ACID 2 the way that KHTML does, but not currently.
Thanks for your response. I found the gameplay a bit mundane for my taste, but it absolutely amazed me how well the game resonated with many people who normally don't play computer games. Other "Sim" games seemed to evolve in the challenges that would develop as your city/anthill/whatever progressed, but with The Sims, gameplay and the challenges contained within basically stayed the same. Empty your bladder, keep up your energy, do something social. The game never changed, yet people just ate it up.
Last I saw (which was years ago) there were plenty of tools to export content from the game and display it, and unofficial tools to create content, but I didn't recall official tools to put content in the game. However, as it wasn't my cup of tea, I didn't continue to follow the community.
It is a bit off-topic but I can't help but ask if you have any opinions on all the controversy on how EA treated their staff, or on EA buying out companies like Maxis and how that has affected the industry.
Lastly, do you think the success of Second Life owes largely to games like Ths Sims? I'm curious why The Sims Online wasn't more like how Second Life turned out.
It can't do multi-touch, but the iPhone won't even let me select a song as my ringtone. Some multimedia phone.
The iPhone won't let me replace the battery, it isn't 3G, Flash doesn't work on the web, CSS doesn't display correctly, it has a low resolution, and the latest PC World (which normally loves Apple products) ranked it fifth out of the 5 smart phones they tested. They said video quality was shockingly low, and the only real praise they had for it was audio output.
As a typical cell phone, it lacks most of the features that free phones offer these days like song ringtones, multimedia messaging, etc.
For $600, some of the real basic missing features are just flat-out shocking. And when you compare it to smart-phones, I'd much rather have a phone where I can add apps, but maybe that is just me.
However, that multi-touch function sure makes it all worthwhile.
Suddenly I'm thinking of the PennyArcade comic where they discuss the potential implications of taking pictures and posting them to XBox Live. Tycho was flooded with pics of Gabe's "man berries".
I'm leaving LJ personally because a bunch of their BS policies lately, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment.
LJ will let you post most anything you want. I saw someone post a TOS violation because a guy had a user-pic of masturbating with a barbie doll. LJ didn't ban him because it wasn't his default icon.
LJ and SixApart came under fire specifically because of journals that had varying levels of content in regards to sex with children. LJ is owned and operated within the US and has to operate in conjunction with US law. LJ admitted they over-reacted initially and deleted some communities they shouldn't have. They reinstanted said communities.
This new policy really is only regards to illegal content, which LJ very losely regulates. There are many pirate communities on LJ, and LJ doesn't care about that. People discuss gangs, illegal drugs, and all kinds of crazy stuff. But when it comes to pedophilia, they have to cover their bases or get in big trouble with the government. When LJ said you couldn't post fan-fic anymore that featured sex and children, people got upset and started linking to it instead. If I owned Six Apart, I'd have the same policy simply to cover my ass.
If you don't like it, blog somewhere else. Quite frankly, if they go elsewhere, LJ is better off for it. Let someone else deal with the legal problems.
I have a copy of the Windows XP SP3 pre-beta. If you really look, you can find it is as well. It is very official, and stable for a beta. However unlike SP1 and SP2 it doesn't offer anything new. It is merely a collection of 900 fixes. Oddly enough, even though IE7 is considered a critical update, it isn't in SP3. So when I made my latest slipstreamed install CD, I still had to add WMP11 and IE7 seperately to the disc. I'm wondering if SP3 will add new functionality after pre-beta status. For instance, I heard the native CD-burning in XP will be upgraded to DVD burning like Vista.
I agree. My favorite interface for a phone seemingly died ages ago, though I hear iPods offer it. I miss the jog-dial. With it, I could easily operate my phone with my left hand while doing something else. I really love my Samsung slider, though I wish the buttons offered even more in the way of tactile feedback. For instance some phones have tiny ridges on some of the numeric keys to act almost as home-keys, so it is easier to avoid mis-dialing a phone number when you're not looking.
The funny thing is that Nokia offers several great devices which should compete with the iPhone at half the price, but the iPhone defenders immediately point to the UI as justifying the cost. Once the UI is similar (and perhaps improved) in the Nokia product, what will the defense be then?
Apple didn't invent the smart phone. They didn't invent the MP3 player, or camera. You could argue that the Newton was a huge innovator, except it flopped.
Apple is not above copying the technology of someone else and claiming they invented it. Look at Spaces. I saw an interview with Jobs where he flat out claimed to have invented this huge innovation in multiple desktops, never mind this technology has been around for near a decade. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple's implementation is different, but they certainly don't innovate nearly as much as the fanatics would have you believe.
The primary reason I switched from Windows to Linux as opposed to OS X was how much I am put off by the deception of Apple's marketing, and the ardent OS X fanatics who can't see any reason. Microsoft and Linux also have fanatics no doubt, but I suppose I find the Linux camp the most reasonable.
Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry. The Sims is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was the single best selling PC title of all time. What he is discussing is a small series of modders who added adult content to a title extremely popular with adults.
The original game is extremely family-friendly, features no sex and in that regard is somewhat lacking as a life simulator. The game is mundane enough that I don't think it ever really caught on with the kids, and despite having a predominant adult audience, the game is in no way adult in nature. The game doesn't cater to adult mods, nor were there any official mod tools that I know of.
The reason adult mods exist for the Sims, is that any major PC game often receives adult mods. If he had spent 5 minutes of a Google search he would have found several sites (won't Google for them at work personally) that cater to providing adult mods for any game out there. His supposition is completely flawed, disturbingly so for a journalist who supposedly specializes in the games industry.
Sex is actually completely absent from the game. Even the "Hot Date" add-on never featured sex of any kind, simulated or otherwise. Babies were produced in the game by alternating between giving someone a back-rub and kissing. The
You can put a swap drive on a USB stick in Linux or XP if you really wanted, but I don't see why you would. Most thumb drives are pretty slow, and it is even slower than paging to your HDD. The only real advantage is if you can't afford more RAM.
You say that benchmarks shouldn't count, and that you're subjective opinion that the system is responsive should be weighed more heavily. While I do credit first-hand experiences as being valid, I prefer to trust a whole boat-load of benchmarks.
I don't doubt that Vista can be capable to run games if you have 4 gigs of RAM and a mammoth system. The system more than makes up for Vista's liabilities. However, there is no doubting that XP is better. By running Vista you handicap yourself. And amazingly, when I show people my dual-boot system there is two things people notice.
1 - My XP looks just like Vista, runs Vista apps, but runs faster. AIOP project and the Vista Transformation Project. Except I don't have all the bugs, instability or driver issues of Vista. 2 - My Linux (Sabayon) partition blows Vista out of the water. I just need to get Cedega running on it and start benchmarking my games on XP versus Linux.
I don't normally respond to AC posts, but I'm going to prove how much of a geek I am. When the Thrawn/Zahn novels had been writen, cannon was still that the Emperor died. Thrawn led the emperor, and the Jedi-nemesis of the time was named something like Jorus C'Boath. Damned if I can recall the spelling, but I haven't read the novel in over ten years. Either way, it was later introduced in the Dark Empire comics that the Emperor himself was cloned and brought back on the planet Byss, but it was Thrawn and C'Boath who cloned Luke in The Last Command, which Mara got to kill.
I read it in a magazine before Matrix Reloaded came out, but it was mentioned on the DVDs as well. They planned to film the sequence on the 101 in California, but had to construct a stretch of freeway of their own to do the filming as I understand it.
IMDB will also let you know where various parts of a film are filmed.
After Vader cut off Luke's hand, I thought the saber would be tumbling somewhere in the Bespin system.
The irony of that moment is that Luke's father "wanted him to have it", except Luke's father cut off his hand to disarm him of it. And apparently Obi-Wan's interpretation of "he wanted you to have it", is "I took it from him after I left the bastard for dead." Though, I imagine his phrasing seems a little more sentimental.
Godwin's Law means you lose the argument, so why intentionally try to invoke it unless it is an underhanded move to make their argument look better by any means necessary?
The only way you could defend this hypocrisy is to poorly argue against it, and invoke Godwin's Law.
...by swapping to the pagefile and thrashing your hard drive, which kills performance.
Benchmarks show that even when you're not swapping, you get better performance in XP. Every single benchmark has confirmed this. XP SP2 can run in 128 megs of memory, and I've seen it run in 64 megs. Doesn't Vista require 1 gig?
Vista's background services can be swapped to the pagefile, but the kernel is significantly bigger, and must always remain in memory.
Not having that huge kernel in memory, and not having to swap the OS to your HDD gives XP a performance boost. What gets me is that I've seen side-by-side screenshots of DX9 and DX10 versions of the same game. The DX10 versions run slower, and don't look really any better.
When I bought my last video card, I was looking at the NVidia line (for better Linux drivers) and all the DirectX 10 cards were considerably more expensive, while offering lower clock speeds and performance in the same price range. Buying a DirectX 10 system, means also buying a more expensive card that is slower at the same price. Surely, that is better for gamers as well, right?
Worse benchmarks, costs more, need a beefier rig, and there are workarounds for getting DX10 to run under XP. Why again are you defending Vista as a gamer OS?
That is immediately at boot, and frankly we're talking about gaming. When loading massive cells of land mass, NPCs, scripts, and textures, you need free memory.
Really? I have a high-end system with a dual-core processor, though I only have 2 gigs of RAM at the moment. I'm seriously thinking of upgrading to 4 gigs, but at the moment nothing slows my beast down, including Oblivion. My machine smokes while running XP, and I dual-boot into Sabayon/Gentoo. We tried Vista for about 2 days on my wife's 64-bit laptop and it was painfully slow compared to XP. Her laptop is a dual-core 64-bit system with only 1 gig of RAM, but I can't imagine that it would run FASTER than XP just by adding the ram.
My XP box only needs about 50 megs of memory when I disable all the unnecessary cruft. Vista out of the box requires 500-700 megs of memory in the background. Every benchmark on the planet shows Vista running slower, so I'm not sure how you intend to back-up your claim that Vista is faster, unless you mean that if you dump several thousands of dollars on your system, Vista isn't quite as slow in comparison.
Either way, gamers often dump that kind of money to eke out every last bit of performance. Freeing up 500-700 megs of memory by not running Vista can be huge. Not having to pagefile and thrash your HDD (often the slowest component in your box) is huge. Maybe that's just me.
Works fine. We have about 15-20 shows set to record the entire season at any given moment, but most of that is for my wife. I watch about 4-5 shows myself.
We can specify first run, repeats, whether to pick it up from multiple channels, HD only, save X number of episodes before deleting, delete when necessary for space, etc.
The only thing TiVo has that I wish Cox had on their remote was the 30-second skip button.
Funny, Cedega supported Half-Life 2 shortly after release, and World of Warcraft. Cedega makes a bigger effort to support current games than older games.
It can be done, but Microsoft just wants people to jump to Vista. I think they are barking up the wrong tree. Gamers who want the best possible performance aren't going to jump to an OS that eats more resources and slows their rig down. I'll consider buying a Direct X 10 game the moment Wine/Cedega supports it.
Dark City openly ripped off the visuals of City of Lost Children, and heavily lifted plot elements from Dune. It was a decent, overlooked movie, but it is in no way in the league of a movie like The Matrix which refined American cinema.
Slashdot Mirror
They did a search for certain terms like "Lolita" and deleted any communities where it popped up multiple times, including book clubs that discussed the book.
I'm pretty sure the only reason SP3 exists is because of pressure from a bunch of Microsoft's corporate customers. They aren't likely to use nLite, but they want an up-to-date version of XP. They aren't likely to switch to Vista anytime soon, and many of them have internal web pages and web apps that break with IE7. Having worked in IT for three major corporations, I can see why they'd push for a SP3 even if it isn't what Microsoft wants.
Apple admitted on their own website that it has issues with CSS Hover Menus. KDE's KHMTL passed the ACID 2 test, but not WebKit. Oddly enough WebKit has many improvements since it forked from KHTML, and KHTML also made improvements of their own. They are finally merging back together, and future versions of WebKit should pass ACID 2 the way that KHTML does, but not currently.
I really enjoy having a different song for everyone in my address book. Picking the perfect song for each person is half the fun.
Thanks for your response. I found the gameplay a bit mundane for my taste, but it absolutely amazed me how well the game resonated with many people who normally don't play computer games. Other "Sim" games seemed to evolve in the challenges that would develop as your city/anthill/whatever progressed, but with The Sims, gameplay and the challenges contained within basically stayed the same. Empty your bladder, keep up your energy, do something social. The game never changed, yet people just ate it up.
Last I saw (which was years ago) there were plenty of tools to export content from the game and display it, and unofficial tools to create content, but I didn't recall official tools to put content in the game. However, as it wasn't my cup of tea, I didn't continue to follow the community.
It is a bit off-topic but I can't help but ask if you have any opinions on all the controversy on how EA treated their staff, or on EA buying out companies like Maxis and how that has affected the industry.
Lastly, do you think the success of Second Life owes largely to games like Ths Sims? I'm curious why The Sims Online wasn't more like how Second Life turned out.
It can't do multi-touch, but the iPhone won't even let me select a song as my ringtone. Some multimedia phone.
The iPhone won't let me replace the battery, it isn't 3G, Flash doesn't work on the web, CSS doesn't display correctly, it has a low resolution, and the latest PC World (which normally loves Apple products) ranked it fifth out of the 5 smart phones they tested. They said video quality was shockingly low, and the only real praise they had for it was audio output.
As a typical cell phone, it lacks most of the features that free phones offer these days like song ringtones, multimedia messaging, etc.
For $600, some of the real basic missing features are just flat-out shocking. And when you compare it to smart-phones, I'd much rather have a phone where I can add apps, but maybe that is just me.
However, that multi-touch function sure makes it all worthwhile.
Suddenly I'm thinking of the PennyArcade comic where they discuss the potential implications of taking pictures and posting them to XBox Live. Tycho was flooded with pics of Gabe's "man berries".
I'm leaving LJ personally because a bunch of their BS policies lately, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment.
LJ will let you post most anything you want. I saw someone post a TOS violation because a guy had a user-pic of masturbating with a barbie doll. LJ didn't ban him because it wasn't his default icon.
LJ and SixApart came under fire specifically because of journals that had varying levels of content in regards to sex with children. LJ is owned and operated within the US and has to operate in conjunction with US law. LJ admitted they over-reacted initially and deleted some communities they shouldn't have. They reinstanted said communities.
This new policy really is only regards to illegal content, which LJ very losely regulates. There are many pirate communities on LJ, and LJ doesn't care about that. People discuss gangs, illegal drugs, and all kinds of crazy stuff. But when it comes to pedophilia, they have to cover their bases or get in big trouble with the government. When LJ said you couldn't post fan-fic anymore that featured sex and children, people got upset and started linking to it instead. If I owned Six Apart, I'd have the same policy simply to cover my ass.
If you don't like it, blog somewhere else. Quite frankly, if they go elsewhere, LJ is better off for it. Let someone else deal with the legal problems.
I have a copy of the Windows XP SP3 pre-beta. If you really look, you can find it is as well. It is very official, and stable for a beta. However unlike SP1 and SP2 it doesn't offer anything new. It is merely a collection of 900 fixes. Oddly enough, even though IE7 is considered a critical update, it isn't in SP3. So when I made my latest slipstreamed install CD, I still had to add WMP11 and IE7 seperately to the disc. I'm wondering if SP3 will add new functionality after pre-beta status. For instance, I heard the native CD-burning in XP will be upgraded to DVD burning like Vista.
I agree. My favorite interface for a phone seemingly died ages ago, though I hear iPods offer it. I miss the jog-dial. With it, I could easily operate my phone with my left hand while doing something else. I really love my Samsung slider, though I wish the buttons offered even more in the way of tactile feedback. For instance some phones have tiny ridges on some of the numeric keys to act almost as home-keys, so it is easier to avoid mis-dialing a phone number when you're not looking.
If this isn't the truth, I don't know what is.
The funny thing is that Nokia offers several great devices which should compete with the iPhone at half the price, but the iPhone defenders immediately point to the UI as justifying the cost. Once the UI is similar (and perhaps improved) in the Nokia product, what will the defense be then?
Apple didn't invent the smart phone. They didn't invent the MP3 player, or camera. You could argue that the Newton was a huge innovator, except it flopped.
Apple is not above copying the technology of someone else and claiming they invented it. Look at Spaces. I saw an interview with Jobs where he flat out claimed to have invented this huge innovation in multiple desktops, never mind this technology has been around for near a decade. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple's implementation is different, but they certainly don't innovate nearly as much as the fanatics would have you believe.
The primary reason I switched from Windows to Linux as opposed to OS X was how much I am put off by the deception of Apple's marketing, and the ardent OS X fanatics who can't see any reason. Microsoft and Linux also have fanatics no doubt, but I suppose I find the Linux camp the most reasonable.
Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry. The Sims is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was the single best selling PC title of all time. What he is discussing is a small series of modders who added adult content to a title extremely popular with adults.
The original game is extremely family-friendly, features no sex and in that regard is somewhat lacking as a life simulator. The game is mundane enough that I don't think it ever really caught on with the kids, and despite having a predominant adult audience, the game is in no way adult in nature. The game doesn't cater to adult mods, nor were there any official mod tools that I know of.
The reason adult mods exist for the Sims, is that any major PC game often receives adult mods. If he had spent 5 minutes of a Google search he would have found several sites (won't Google for them at work personally) that cater to providing adult mods for any game out there. His supposition is completely flawed, disturbingly so for a journalist who supposedly specializes in the games industry.
Sex is actually completely absent from the game. Even the "Hot Date" add-on never featured sex of any kind, simulated or otherwise. Babies were produced in the game by alternating between giving someone a back-rub and kissing. The
You can put a swap drive on a USB stick in Linux or XP if you really wanted, but I don't see why you would. Most thumb drives are pretty slow, and it is even slower than paging to your HDD. The only real advantage is if you can't afford more RAM.
You say that benchmarks shouldn't count, and that you're subjective opinion that the system is responsive should be weighed more heavily. While I do credit first-hand experiences as being valid, I prefer to trust a whole boat-load of benchmarks.
I don't doubt that Vista can be capable to run games if you have 4 gigs of RAM and a mammoth system. The system more than makes up for Vista's liabilities. However, there is no doubting that XP is better. By running Vista you handicap yourself. And amazingly, when I show people my dual-boot system there is two things people notice.
1 - My XP looks just like Vista, runs Vista apps, but runs faster. AIOP project and the Vista Transformation Project. Except I don't have all the bugs, instability or driver issues of Vista.
2 - My Linux (Sabayon) partition blows Vista out of the water. I just need to get Cedega running on it and start benchmarking my games on XP versus Linux.
I don't normally respond to AC posts, but I'm going to prove how much of a geek I am. When the Thrawn/Zahn novels had been writen, cannon was still that the Emperor died. Thrawn led the emperor, and the Jedi-nemesis of the time was named something like Jorus C'Boath. Damned if I can recall the spelling, but I haven't read the novel in over ten years. Either way, it was later introduced in the Dark Empire comics that the Emperor himself was cloned and brought back on the planet Byss, but it was Thrawn and C'Boath who cloned Luke in The Last Command, which Mara got to kill.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234215/trivia
I read it in a magazine before Matrix Reloaded came out, but it was mentioned on the DVDs as well. They planned to film the sequence on the 101 in California, but had to construct a stretch of freeway of their own to do the filming as I understand it.
IMDB will also let you know where various parts of a film are filmed.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234215/locations
After Vader cut off Luke's hand, I thought the saber would be tumbling somewhere in the Bespin system.
The irony of that moment is that Luke's father "wanted him to have it", except Luke's father cut off his hand to disarm him of it. And apparently Obi-Wan's interpretation of "he wanted you to have it", is "I took it from him after I left the bastard for dead." Though, I imagine his phrasing seems a little more sentimental.
Godwin's Law means you lose the argument, so why intentionally try to invoke it unless it is an underhanded move to make their argument look better by any means necessary?
The only way you could defend this hypocrisy is to poorly argue against it, and invoke Godwin's Law.
...by swapping to the pagefile and thrashing your hard drive, which kills performance.
Benchmarks show that even when you're not swapping, you get better performance in XP. Every single benchmark has confirmed this. XP SP2 can run in 128 megs of memory, and I've seen it run in 64 megs. Doesn't Vista require 1 gig?
Vista's background services can be swapped to the pagefile, but the kernel is significantly bigger, and must always remain in memory.
Not having that huge kernel in memory, and not having to swap the OS to your HDD gives XP a performance boost. What gets me is that I've seen side-by-side screenshots of DX9 and DX10 versions of the same game. The DX10 versions run slower, and don't look really any better.
When I bought my last video card, I was looking at the NVidia line (for better Linux drivers) and all the DirectX 10 cards were considerably more expensive, while offering lower clock speeds and performance in the same price range. Buying a DirectX 10 system, means also buying a more expensive card that is slower at the same price. Surely, that is better for gamers as well, right?
Worse benchmarks, costs more, need a beefier rig, and there are workarounds for getting DX10 to run under XP. Why again are you defending Vista as a gamer OS?
That is immediately at boot, and frankly we're talking about gaming. When loading massive cells of land mass, NPCs, scripts, and textures, you need free memory.
Really? I have a high-end system with a dual-core processor, though I only have 2 gigs of RAM at the moment. I'm seriously thinking of upgrading to 4 gigs, but at the moment nothing slows my beast down, including Oblivion. My machine smokes while running XP, and I dual-boot into Sabayon/Gentoo. We tried Vista for about 2 days on my wife's 64-bit laptop and it was painfully slow compared to XP. Her laptop is a dual-core 64-bit system with only 1 gig of RAM, but I can't imagine that it would run FASTER than XP just by adding the ram.
My XP box only needs about 50 megs of memory when I disable all the unnecessary cruft. Vista out of the box requires 500-700 megs of memory in the background. Every benchmark on the planet shows Vista running slower, so I'm not sure how you intend to back-up your claim that Vista is faster, unless you mean that if you dump several thousands of dollars on your system, Vista isn't quite as slow in comparison.
Either way, gamers often dump that kind of money to eke out every last bit of performance. Freeing up 500-700 megs of memory by not running Vista can be huge. Not having to pagefile and thrash your HDD (often the slowest component in your box) is huge. Maybe that's just me.
Works fine. We have about 15-20 shows set to record the entire season at any given moment, but most of that is for my wife. I watch about 4-5 shows myself.
We can specify first run, repeats, whether to pick it up from multiple channels, HD only, save X number of episodes before deleting, delete when necessary for space, etc.
The only thing TiVo has that I wish Cox had on their remote was the 30-second skip button.
Funny, Cedega supported Half-Life 2 shortly after release, and World of Warcraft. Cedega makes a bigger effort to support current games than older games.
Oddly enough there are projects to make Vista games (Direct X 10 games) and apps run on Windows.
http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/
It can be done, but Microsoft just wants people to jump to Vista. I think they are barking up the wrong tree. Gamers who want the best possible performance aren't going to jump to an OS that eats more resources and slows their rig down. I'll consider buying a Direct X 10 game the moment Wine/Cedega supports it.
Dark City openly ripped off the visuals of City of Lost Children, and heavily lifted plot elements from Dune. It was a decent, overlooked movie, but it is in no way in the league of a movie like The Matrix which refined American cinema.