I just tried it. I actually really like the layout and the uniform way the articles unfold (the white space seems to make reading easier). It's almost exactly like Google Images. The topics are definitely a bit watered down though, and I really hate the headlines. Each one of them reads like ad spam.
The level of Quality Control in WOTC is astounding.
That may be the case, but they allow plenty of broken cards to be printed; cards that end the game by sending the rules into an infinite loop, or cards that end up in nearly every deck for a given color.
I think the real reason Magic wins the card game race is simple momentum. When your choices are playing a new game that no one else is playing, or playing an established game with an enormous player base, there really isn't much of a decision to make.
This is a continuation of a chain of events that began when the N64 was released. Whether it was the cart vs CD debate, or whether it was something else, the result was that the majority of third party developers stuck with the Playstation. It's been the same story ever since: Third parties are hard to come by, and Nintendo's first party games are criticized for being too childish. The first Wii was a huge success because it filled a casual gaming need that is now being fulfilled by iPads and phones.
Nintendo's handhelds seem to do well, perhaps because the same people who talked up the "childish" nature of Nintendo's games were also self-selected out of the handheld gaming audience.
Correlation is not causation, right? There are many socioeconomic factors that contribute to the quality of public schools beyond the availability of private schools.
Movie theater is $30 plus the junk food and other costs to see a movie once
Good grief which movie theater are you going to? You don't have to go to the IMAX, XD, or 3D showing of a movie, and if you do you're getting a much better experience than you're likely to get on Blu Ray. Heck you're likely to get a better experience even with a $6 matinee, which is the price you should be paying if you're interested in spending less money.
Now Netflix is another story, since the monthly fee is a pittance compared to buying the discs or attending a movie. But I vastly prefer the theater experience.
2-3 years? These days you can buy a mid-low end graphics card and keep it for 5 years. You can thank the consoles for this, since publishers are keeping their hardware requirements low enough to run on the Playstation and XBox.
That said, we get new consoles this year. So that means this may be the year to upgrade your graphics card too, if you want to be proactive about it. Or be like me and hold on to the old card until you encounter a game you really like that runs poorly.
I guess you missed the point. Do you like the outdoors? They could turn Yosemite into a theme park. Do you like food? They could outlaw salt. It really doesn't matter how broad your interests are. Someone can tread on them.
Choosing not to participate doesn't magically remove the problem.
There's the rub. What makes you think they decided correctly? Freedom of Speech is not absolute. It is supposed to be interpreted reasonably.
Let's look at the purpose of the constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Which of these purposes does the court's decision serve? I can think of none. If anything, it disrupts the general welfare by polluting people's property with trash. I would say the ruling is unreasonable.
Right. What Nintendo viewed as innovative (hey look a touchscreen on the controller!) actually turned out to be an inferior imitation of the already-popular iPad. If they were hoping for people to be wowed, I think they failed. They may have been better off ditching the new controller and just calling it the Wii HD honestly, but it's just not Nintendo's style to release something so bland. They probably got a little cocky.
Crazy hardware carries with it a big risk. If people don't fall for it, you're done! You simply can't afford to write off an entire console generation. The Wii U is not the Virtual Boy; it's supposed to be their flagship. Perhaps if they are lucky they can transition the new controller into the role formerly held by R.O.B. That is, an eye-catching gimmick that quickly loses support as Nintendo realizes the merits of selling a cheaper hardware bundle without it.
The same people that now prefer tablet gaming over console gaming happen to be right in the center of Nintendo's demographic. That's their real problem. It's a problem for MS and Sony too, but to a lesser degree.
Even professionals need leadership. I don't view this particular move as disrespectful. It's not strictly a money grab, it's not exploitative, it's not done from a place of ignorance, and it comes at a time when a drastic cultural change is needed. In many respects Yahoo needs a reboot. Mayer can and should make a big splash to establish a new work culture baseline and hopefully bring about a new perspective for everyone working there.
The no-telecommute policy, in one fell swoop, encourages a lot of employees to make a decision on whether or not they choose to follow Mayer's new direction. It could end up being a great decision.
That said I'm glad my workplace allows me to telecommute from time to time.
Right on. The ability to simply know what's going on eliminates the need for most of the frivolous stuff that destroys productivity. Communication is fundamental. People are too quick compromise on that simply because we have fancy technology, and because they can't stand the thought of sharing a building with other people.
But be careful about stuffing everyone in a war room. It worked out for you, awesome. I can see it working great for crunch time too. But it only works if you have the right people in the room. I'm not for cube farms, but I'm not for a complete lack of personal space and/or privacy either.
There's got to be a better middle ground. Maybe instead of having cubes, have walled-off areas with smaller groups of people. That, at least, allows people to separate themselves from those who they are incompatible with, and allows you to isolate the Pig Pens and Chatty Cathy's. There are people I work with that, although I like them, I'm glad I have some sort of separation from them.
Oh, and in a war room it sucks to be the guy with his monitor facing the manager's desk. That's just wrong.
Vector graphics were used as an example somewhere else in the thread. Despite being a low-bandwidth alternative to bitmaps and despite offering additional design flexibility, they never really caught on except in Flash where they served niche purposes. Why? Because they weren't integrated into the standard. HTML is a perfect example of the standard driving design instead of the other way around. People have been using hacks and workarounds for years to get their pages to display the way they want, because the standardized solution wasn't comprehensive enough.
If the standard turns out to be just plain wrong, you fix it with the next version of the standard. I understand the reluctance to create a standard that has flaws, but guess what? It's going to be flawed anyway, no matter how long you wait. Put the thing out there, see what people do with it, then revise it later.
Wait, so the market has to exist before people bother with a standard? What happened to creating the tools first and allowing the ideas to happen later?
I've done research on the try-before-you buy "game demo" method in my own apps. What happens is that players impulsively download the games. Some forget about them, then delete them without ever playing the games. Most play the game first, feel their curiosity is mostly satisfied, then they forget about it and delete it later. A rare few will download the game, play the demo, then after that impulse has passed, return to the game and buy the "next episode" or "full game".
Two things:
1) It's perfectly valid for someone to try your game, decide it's not for them, then delete the demo. That's one more person that would never have considered your game otherwise. You had a chance at landing a sale that you otherwise would not have had. Probably.
2) It could be the quality of your demos. Did you allow them ample time to become absorbed into the game? Did you provide real goals within the demo? Too many developers are afraid of making their demos too good, fearing that it will somehow be too satisfying. The success of sequels is strong evidence that this is wrong thinking. Make sure you have a demo worth playing. Make sure they want more.
After using Google Drive for a while, it seems clear to me that the best way to operate is to have a local folder which automatically syncs to the cloud (pretty sure MS offers something like this too). This way you don't really have to worry about how long your access lasts because you have local copies of everything. I would hope that the new cloud-centric apps with collaborative features would do something like this in reverse... save to the cloud and sync locally.
The upcoming Steambox will hopefully be the new benchmark for software. It would be nice if they'd release a certification badge upon release that other hardware makers could use. I agree 100% with the comment about GPU/CPU naming conventions. They are even worse than cell phones. If there's one thing we can learn from the iPhone, let it be simple names.
I'm impressed with this game regardless of who made it. The Street Fighter character redraws are excellent, and the musical renditions are spot-on. I also appreciate the free-wheeling nature of the app itself; no installation process, no complicated menus, dead simple customization of controls and screen sizes, and no pointless online features. About the only thing that I'm not a huge fan of is charging the vanilla Mega Buster (it encourages the player to constantly hold down the shoot button, bleh) but that has been a staple ever since Mega Man 4.
Slashdot Mirror
I just tried it. I actually really like the layout and the uniform way the articles unfold (the white space seems to make reading easier). It's almost exactly like Google Images. The topics are definitely a bit watered down though, and I really hate the headlines. Each one of them reads like ad spam.
That may be the case, but they allow plenty of broken cards to be printed; cards that end the game by sending the rules into an infinite loop, or cards that end up in nearly every deck for a given color.
I think the real reason Magic wins the card game race is simple momentum. When your choices are playing a new game that no one else is playing, or playing an established game with an enormous player base, there really isn't much of a decision to make.
Jellyfish-powered cars?
This is a continuation of a chain of events that began when the N64 was released. Whether it was the cart vs CD debate, or whether it was something else, the result was that the majority of third party developers stuck with the Playstation. It's been the same story ever since: Third parties are hard to come by, and Nintendo's first party games are criticized for being too childish. The first Wii was a huge success because it filled a casual gaming need that is now being fulfilled by iPads and phones.
Nintendo's handhelds seem to do well, perhaps because the same people who talked up the "childish" nature of Nintendo's games were also self-selected out of the handheld gaming audience.
I would like to give you a high five, but I can't.
Correlation is not causation, right? There are many socioeconomic factors that contribute to the quality of public schools beyond the availability of private schools.
BUT most games are ported between platforms. So gone is this notion of "it will always be there". It won't.
Good grief which movie theater are you going to? You don't have to go to the IMAX, XD, or 3D showing of a movie, and if you do you're getting a much better experience than you're likely to get on Blu Ray. Heck you're likely to get a better experience even with a $6 matinee, which is the price you should be paying if you're interested in spending less money.
Now Netflix is another story, since the monthly fee is a pittance compared to buying the discs or attending a movie. But I vastly prefer the theater experience.
2-3 years? These days you can buy a mid-low end graphics card and keep it for 5 years. You can thank the consoles for this, since publishers are keeping their hardware requirements low enough to run on the Playstation and XBox.
That said, we get new consoles this year. So that means this may be the year to upgrade your graphics card too, if you want to be proactive about it. Or be like me and hold on to the old card until you encounter a game you really like that runs poorly.
I guess you missed the point. Do you like the outdoors? They could turn Yosemite into a theme park. Do you like food? They could outlaw salt. It really doesn't matter how broad your interests are. Someone can tread on them.
Choosing not to participate doesn't magically remove the problem.
Well for one thing it denies them a highly-anticipated game. Or ruins it perhaps.
Would you feel impacted if they ruined the upcoming Hobbit films?
Would you feel impacted if they made the Super Bowl pay-per-view?
Would you feel impacted if Slashdot decided to cover celebrity gossip instead of nerd news?
You can choose not to participate in any of the above. Doesn't mean it won't ruin your day.
There's the rub. What makes you think they decided correctly? Freedom of Speech is not absolute. It is supposed to be interpreted reasonably.
Let's look at the purpose of the constitution:
Which of these purposes does the court's decision serve? I can think of none. If anything, it disrupts the general welfare by polluting people's property with trash. I would say the ruling is unreasonable.
Right. What Nintendo viewed as innovative (hey look a touchscreen on the controller!) actually turned out to be an inferior imitation of the already-popular iPad. If they were hoping for people to be wowed, I think they failed. They may have been better off ditching the new controller and just calling it the Wii HD honestly, but it's just not Nintendo's style to release something so bland. They probably got a little cocky.
Crazy hardware carries with it a big risk. If people don't fall for it, you're done! You simply can't afford to write off an entire console generation. The Wii U is not the Virtual Boy; it's supposed to be their flagship. Perhaps if they are lucky they can transition the new controller into the role formerly held by R.O.B. That is, an eye-catching gimmick that quickly loses support as Nintendo realizes the merits of selling a cheaper hardware bundle without it.
The same people that now prefer tablet gaming over console gaming happen to be right in the center of Nintendo's demographic. That's their real problem. It's a problem for MS and Sony too, but to a lesser degree.
Even professionals need leadership. I don't view this particular move as disrespectful. It's not strictly a money grab, it's not exploitative, it's not done from a place of ignorance, and it comes at a time when a drastic cultural change is needed. In many respects Yahoo needs a reboot. Mayer can and should make a big splash to establish a new work culture baseline and hopefully bring about a new perspective for everyone working there.
The no-telecommute policy, in one fell swoop, encourages a lot of employees to make a decision on whether or not they choose to follow Mayer's new direction. It could end up being a great decision.
That said I'm glad my workplace allows me to telecommute from time to time.
Right on. The ability to simply know what's going on eliminates the need for most of the frivolous stuff that destroys productivity. Communication is fundamental. People are too quick compromise on that simply because we have fancy technology, and because they can't stand the thought of sharing a building with other people.
But be careful about stuffing everyone in a war room. It worked out for you, awesome. I can see it working great for crunch time too. But it only works if you have the right people in the room. I'm not for cube farms, but I'm not for a complete lack of personal space and/or privacy either.
There's got to be a better middle ground. Maybe instead of having cubes, have walled-off areas with smaller groups of people. That, at least, allows people to separate themselves from those who they are incompatible with, and allows you to isolate the Pig Pens and Chatty Cathy's. There are people I work with that, although I like them, I'm glad I have some sort of separation from them.
Oh, and in a war room it sucks to be the guy with his monitor facing the manager's desk. That's just wrong.
Vector graphics were used as an example somewhere else in the thread. Despite being a low-bandwidth alternative to bitmaps and despite offering additional design flexibility, they never really caught on except in Flash where they served niche purposes. Why? Because they weren't integrated into the standard. HTML is a perfect example of the standard driving design instead of the other way around. People have been using hacks and workarounds for years to get their pages to display the way they want, because the standardized solution wasn't comprehensive enough.
If the standard turns out to be just plain wrong, you fix it with the next version of the standard. I understand the reluctance to create a standard that has flaws, but guess what? It's going to be flawed anyway, no matter how long you wait. Put the thing out there, see what people do with it, then revise it later.
Wait, so the market has to exist before people bother with a standard? What happened to creating the tools first and allowing the ideas to happen later?
Two things:
1) It's perfectly valid for someone to try your game, decide it's not for them, then delete the demo. That's one more person that would never have considered your game otherwise. You had a chance at landing a sale that you otherwise would not have had. Probably.
2) It could be the quality of your demos. Did you allow them ample time to become absorbed into the game? Did you provide real goals within the demo? Too many developers are afraid of making their demos too good, fearing that it will somehow be too satisfying. The success of sequels is strong evidence that this is wrong thinking. Make sure you have a demo worth playing. Make sure they want more.
After using Google Drive for a while, it seems clear to me that the best way to operate is to have a local folder which automatically syncs to the cloud (pretty sure MS offers something like this too). This way you don't really have to worry about how long your access lasts because you have local copies of everything. I would hope that the new cloud-centric apps with collaborative features would do something like this in reverse... save to the cloud and sync locally.
Hardware, I meant of course.
The upcoming Steambox will hopefully be the new benchmark for software. It would be nice if they'd release a certification badge upon release that other hardware makers could use. I agree 100% with the comment about GPU/CPU naming conventions. They are even worse than cell phones. If there's one thing we can learn from the iPhone, let it be simple names.
Thanks for the info. Looks like I was dead wrong.
I'm impressed with this game regardless of who made it. The Street Fighter character redraws are excellent, and the musical renditions are spot-on. I also appreciate the free-wheeling nature of the app itself; no installation process, no complicated menus, dead simple customization of controls and screen sizes, and no pointless online features. About the only thing that I'm not a huge fan of is charging the vanilla Mega Buster (it encourages the player to constantly hold down the shoot button, bleh) but that has been a staple ever since Mega Man 4.
Wow, really? This may partly explain why I disliked the action scenes in Gladiator. Did you read an explanation of why they did this?