Digital controls suck for racing. The analog sticks are ok but you really need a wheel for it to feel right.
Interestingly, I got very used to using D-Pad-style controls for racing games, and I can't stand using the sticks. I can tap the left and right buttons fast enough that the games average out the movement to a turn that's 70% max, or whatever's needed.
Reminds me of Yahtzee's comment about Little Big Planet:
"If a game that stands up by itself (Half-Life 2, Quake) wants to release level design and modding tools, then brillo-bananas! Modding communities are the sprinkling of cinnamon on a delicious trifle, and hence relying on user-made content is like eating heaped spoonfuls of cinnamon nicked from the jar."
Yep -- I was a summer camp archery instructor, and I enjoy shooting, and I know several people who have their dominant eye on the opposite side as their dominant hand. I'm right-handed and right-eye-dominant, but back when I played paintball I taught myself to shoot left-handed, because in doing so you expose yourself to opponents less when shooting from the left side of a bunker.
What I'm saying is that doing any specific action "to stop global warming" could have unforeseen consequences. Nature has a way of balancing things, and a sudden drop in methane production could have an effect on our climate besides "stopping global warming".
As for FLACs, they're portable in the sense of different platforms, but I meant in the sense that they take up huge amounts of space. I have a 2GB Sansa running Rockbox, and the FLAC folder on my computer is over 30GB. I can only fit about 4 albums' worth of FLACs on my Sansa, but I can fit about 20 albums' worth of Oggs, encoding at "-q 6".
How do you know that this will produce an overall benefit? What if, by making cows produce less methane, we upset the balance of our atmosphere such that we induce global warming, or a new ice age?
Plus people rarely change units anyway. If you're talking geographical distance, you measure in miles, and if you're talking length of a handheld item, you measure in inches. It would be asinine to measure these things the other way around, even though it's possible. It would be like saying that my foot is around 0.0003 km long; you're just confusing everyone (as evidenced by the fact that I had to double-check my conversion from cm to km!)
Outside of the scientific world, nobody does conversions on a regular basis; people just use the unit that's most convenient for everyone, whether those units are SI or Imperial.
The funny bit is that they don't much mention anything about IT.
Exactly why I'm wondering what they mean. I'm a software developer; when these guys say that Chicago is good for "IT", does that mean I can get a good job there, or would I have to become a sysadmin to work in that city?
That brings up a question for me: this article talks about "IT", but are they counting the entire computer industry, including engineers and developers, or are do they mean actual IT jobs, like sysadmins and DBadmins?
Most of Slashdot's audience is in the US, with the remainder mostly coming from Europe. In that market, VCD and SVCD practically didn't exist, except for personal backups in the time before DVD burners and DVD-Rs became cheap.
And my current issue with Comcast right now is being in California and Comast routing the IP network cross country to New Jersey at 1/4 the bandwidth I had when they were routing through San Francisco.
They were re-routing your traffic so the NSA wouldn't be able to read your e-mail.:)
with your definition most professional game developers are NOT indie either!
Well, I think that's kinda true... as someone above said, if you're paid for your work before you have a finished product, then whoever paid for the product likely has a decent amount of control over it.
I agree it's not a perfect definition, as I'm sure there will be a counterexample somewhere. Think of Valve though; despite their success and relatively large size (for a "small" game company), they are a fully independent game company. Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington founded the company with their own money, and they're still privately owned. They essentially self-publish their games through Steam, so even though EA handles their retail publication and distribution, EA doesn't really have any veto power for their content like they might for other developers.
Under many other metrics, Valve may not be an "indie" company, but in terms of control over what content goes into their games, I don't think they can be beat.
I disagree. "Day job" vs "on the side" is professional vs amateur, not whether you're indie.
Indie just means you're independent; take that as you will, but to me it means that you answer to yourself. Both amateur and professional developers can be independent, depending on how much control they have over their own project(s).
He was listing a bunch of reasons that people use to say that a game "isn't indie enough". Deciding whether those reasons are any good is left as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't your player just decode the DTS signal to a 5.1 channel LPCM signal? Then you'd get the same quality.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic...
Digital controls suck for racing. The analog sticks are ok but you really need a wheel for it to feel right.
Interestingly, I got very used to using D-Pad-style controls for racing games, and I can't stand using the sticks. I can tap the left and right buttons fast enough that the games average out the movement to a turn that's 70% max, or whatever's needed.
Reminds me of Yahtzee's comment about Little Big Planet:
"If a game that stands up by itself (Half-Life 2, Quake) wants to release level design and modding tools, then brillo-bananas! Modding communities are the sprinkling of cinnamon on a delicious trifle, and hence relying on user-made content is like eating heaped spoonfuls of cinnamon nicked from the jar."
Wow, on-topic spam!
What's next, on-topic goatse links?
I don't play RPGs much, but if a boss is beating you hands-down, isn't that usually a sign that you need to level up more?
Yep -- I was a summer camp archery instructor, and I enjoy shooting, and I know several people who have their dominant eye on the opposite side as their dominant hand. I'm right-handed and right-eye-dominant, but back when I played paintball I taught myself to shoot left-handed, because in doing so you expose yourself to opponents less when shooting from the left side of a bunker.
64-bit execution that works. XP-x64 has poor application compatibility compared with Vista-x64 and Win7-x64.
As far as I know, Ford declined to take any bailout money from the government, they just said they might need to take a loan.
Also, since about the year 2000, Fords have been hugely improved over earlier years, and they've been much more reliable.
What I'm saying is that doing any specific action "to stop global warming" could have unforeseen consequences. Nature has a way of balancing things, and a sudden drop in methane production could have an effect on our climate besides "stopping global warming".
As for FLACs, they're portable in the sense of different platforms, but I meant in the sense that they take up huge amounts of space. I have a 2GB Sansa running Rockbox, and the FLAC folder on my computer is over 30GB. I can only fit about 4 albums' worth of FLACs on my Sansa, but I can fit about 20 albums' worth of Oggs, encoding at "-q 6".
How do you know that this will produce an overall benefit? What if, by making cows produce less methane, we upset the balance of our atmosphere such that we induce global warming, or a new ice age?
And computers do math in powers of two far easier too, assuming you're working with integers!
int gallons = 1;
int quarts = gallons << 2;
int pints = quarts << 1;
int cups = pints << 1;
int ounces = cups << 3;
"ounces" would now have 128!
Or, if you don't care about truncation, you can also go the other way:
int ounces = 65535;
int gallons = ounces >> 7;
"gallons" would have 511. Of course, you'd only be an ounce from 512, but c'est la vie...
Plus people rarely change units anyway. If you're talking geographical distance, you measure in miles, and if you're talking length of a handheld item, you measure in inches. It would be asinine to measure these things the other way around, even though it's possible. It would be like saying that my foot is around 0.0003 km long; you're just confusing everyone (as evidenced by the fact that I had to double-check my conversion from cm to km!)
Outside of the scientific world, nobody does conversions on a regular basis; people just use the unit that's most convenient for everyone, whether those units are SI or Imperial.
Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA.
A bigger part of it is just that European governments take the privacy of their citizens very seriously.
Except Britain, of course.
The funny bit is that they don't much mention anything about IT.
Exactly why I'm wondering what they mean. I'm a software developer; when these guys say that Chicago is good for "IT", does that mean I can get a good job there, or would I have to become a sysadmin to work in that city?
That brings up a question for me: this article talks about "IT", but are they counting the entire computer industry, including engineers and developers, or are do they mean actual IT jobs, like sysadmins and DBadmins?
Most of Slashdot's audience is in the US, with the remainder mostly coming from Europe. In that market, VCD and SVCD practically didn't exist, except for personal backups in the time before DVD burners and DVD-Rs became cheap.
Plus the "Meddlers" in this case would be the oppressive government, which is exactly what River Tam was talking about.
He had less than half of that 10 grand mark though...
And my current issue with Comcast right now is being in California and Comast routing the IP network cross country to New Jersey at 1/4 the bandwidth I had when they were routing through San Francisco.
They were re-routing your traffic so the NSA wouldn't be able to read your e-mail. :)
with your definition most professional game developers are NOT indie either!
Well, I think that's kinda true... as someone above said, if you're paid for your work before you have a finished product, then whoever paid for the product likely has a decent amount of control over it.
I agree it's not a perfect definition, as I'm sure there will be a counterexample somewhere. Think of Valve though; despite their success and relatively large size (for a "small" game company), they are a fully independent game company. Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington founded the company with their own money, and they're still privately owned. They essentially self-publish their games through Steam, so even though EA handles their retail publication and distribution, EA doesn't really have any veto power for their content like they might for other developers.
Under many other metrics, Valve may not be an "indie" company, but in terms of control over what content goes into their games, I don't think they can be beat.
I disagree. "Day job" vs "on the side" is professional vs amateur, not whether you're indie.
Indie just means you're independent; take that as you will, but to me it means that you answer to yourself. Both amateur and professional developers can be independent, depending on how much control they have over their own project(s).
He was listing a bunch of reasons that people use to say that a game "isn't indie enough". Deciding whether those reasons are any good is left as an exercise for the reader.
Back when I worked in IT, the jokingly-said catch-phrase was "Install Linux; problem solved."
The main downside is that you just can't drive as fast on them as asphalt.
But it's fun as hell to do so anyway! :)