They would like the institution to last 500 years, not the structure. It's not good for the historical items if the organisation who takes care of it goes belly up.
Then again, you could also argue that a 20th/21st century building is more likely to withstand 500 years of use than one from the 15th/16th century. Castles excepted, of course.
While we're on the subject of temperature, can anyone enlighten me as to the point of having a data center in Florida? Wouldn't you want hardware like this in a climate that's naturally as cool as possible?
thinner and lighter than iphone 3g/s
- And uglier.
3.7" 400x800 AMOLED display
- This is nice.
5MP, LED flash camera
video at 720x480
- These are pointless when the problem with mobile cameras has always been optics, not how many pixels it blows the image up to. I mean the Omnia HD can shoot 720p video but picture quality, which is what you actually want, is subpar. It's blurry and it skips frames. Only sample pics will tell if the camera in the Nexus is actually good, or just high resolution.
3.5mm headphone adapter (first HTC android phone to move away from mini-usb only design)
proximity sensor
light sensor
- Basically they're just catching up with what iphone users already have.
android 2.1
- Still worse than the iPhone OS, at least from looking at the engadget video that was on/. a few days ago. Buggy, jerky, laggy and won't interpret touch correctly at times. I hate the design philosophy behind the iPhone OS but clearly it makes a better OS.
I take it this device is a nice leap forward for HTC users, and that's to be lauded, but it's apparently supposed to be an iphone killer. I'm a huge gadget enthusiast and I'd really like there to be a real iphone killer, but with a product that seems to perform worse than the iphone, they just haven't got one.
I voted for the change yesterday, but after doing so, I began to think about what this will actually solve.
I mean, their problem is the GFDL in its current implementation being slightly too difficult to work with, and generally not really what they want for Wikipedia. Correct?
My question is, since they plan to DUAL LICENSE everything, not only replace the GFDL with CC-BY-SA (apparently), won't they still be bound to whatever problems they have with their old license? So how will this fix their problem?
Honestly, it was the most interesting piece of Star Trek since TNG. Implement some DS9 continuity and I think it could be really successful. Just my two cents.
If you look on metacritic there is an incredible divide between so-called "professional reviews" and the reader comments - with professional reviews having a far more positive opinion than the readers. That does not often happen, so I'm curious what happened.
What happened is, professional reviewers played the game for a few hours and then reviewed it. Hence, they don't know it sucks.
Players either played through it, enduring the mindless repetition and crappy gameplay, or quit because of it. So they do know it sucks.
Redoing them, again some of them didn't stick, and I had to redo them
I think they've done something to the sounds. It seems the klack of shoes while walking, pedestrian sounds, environment feeling inside cars, and such is much clearer now. It feels like they enabled EAX or something. This is good
Shadows are fixed, they're passable now and not like this. Also, the shadow detail slider now actually changes something (how far away and detailed the game draws shadows)
Playing pool is still broken, it's like a have a controller constantly pushing the rod forward. However this can't be controller incompatibility since I have none, and since this behavior occurs nowhere else in the game. This only means I can't play pool. (And anyway, I can't understand why they changed the pool controls from San Andreas, they were awesome compared to the console ones we have now. It's like Rockstar had a strange perversion to have as many functions in the game as possible controlled by the keyboard.)
The longer I played, the slower the game seemed to load textures.
Couple of hours into a game session I got some hitches of a few whole seconds. Then after a while I got a yellow screen before a scene change. Again a few minutes went by and the game froze, taking the OS (XP) down with it.
Overall some nice improvements, but disappointigly, the major issues of the game remained untouched (DRM and consoley UI).
Red Alert 3 - disagree. I hate the direction the RA dev teams have taken the series since the first RA. Base building was hugely fun in RA, and in this installment they've placed so little emphasis on it they could've just removed it. I got rid of my RA3 installation really quickly but from what I've seen, you can't even harass other players economically any more, since the ore trucks only stay at the designated point (and I mean harass, not destroy). Graphics-wise this is basically C&C3 so you can't zoom out far enough, which is basically the only thing that matters for an RTS graphics engine in my book. Cartoony style in menus was nice, but since it's in the menus, you never really get to see it. In the real game it's just C&C3 with different colors. As for units, mechamen and robots suck. Ships that turn in to tanks, airplanes or whatever also suck. And annoying DRM.
Far Cry 2 - disagree. Crappy console port. It sucked in almost all gameplay respects. Very pretty, but not as pretty as Crysis, which was a better game. Only things good about the FC2 engine were, because it wasn't as pretty as Crysis, it also ran better. Bushfires and daycycle were nice, but I'd gladly trade those for a better AI and weapon customization.
GTA IV PC - disagree. Crappy console port. Physics engine is nice, but look at the trade-offs: it looks awful and runs worse than Crysis. They've also dropped every feature since San Andreas, except character movement, weapons and storyline, only to add the annoying grind-fest that is the buddy thing. One thing I did like in principle was the on-call weapons store with Little Jacob, but that is rendered useless by the fact it doesn't supply body armor. Story and missions are nice in GTA IV, but I'd gladly trade some of the quality there for some programming quality. Also, HUGELY annoying DRM. I can only wish Vice City will be better on this engine when they get around to doing that.
Crysis Warhead - agreed. Very good game. Disagree about the length though, it was perfect for me, didn't bore me, nor leave me craving for more. For their next installment, I'd like Crysis in Africa, without the aliens.
Fallout 3 - haven't tried it either. I hear it's based on the Oblivion engine, which is famous for being about as immersive as EVE Online. Or Microsoft Word.
You direct your thoughts at mine in such a way I feel I need to respond directly.
I'm assuming, from the way you view this matter, that you are a long-time EVE player. I think you might currently be a tad too stuck with the EVE model to objectively comment on the model I described above.
Let me expand on my original post: in my mind, flying from A to B doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be waiting like it is in EVE. Neither has it to be uninterrupted travel. There could be any number of things to do while in warp from A to B.
From another perspective, any hostiles could be equipped with scanners to detect ships in warp and intercept them. How likely it is for, say, a trader to run into one could be determined by how much of a detour said trader is willing to take. Say, a 5 minute warp from A to B with potential hostiles in scanning range in contrast to a 15 minute one with relatively clear waters.
What I'm trying to say through examples is, even if space travel without "teleport" gates can be made boring, it doesn't have to be. It just takes skill, vision and competence to make an interesting game around such a model. I'd be the first in line to try out such a game.
What I hate about all the spacefaring games I've seen so far is the way they divide space into "rooms". At the boundaries of each one you have to go through a magical door to get to another one, not actually fly really fast across vast distances like I always imagined.
Jumpgate has jumpgates, the X series has gates, EVE has stargates and so on. In fact EVE is a good example. In a game with such prevalent PvP what this philosophy translates into is all the pirates just camping the gates so they are bound to get fights, because everyone has to pass through that bottleneck.
I believe STO (Star Trek Online) will be the first to feature some genuine SPACE and the ability to fly from A to B without "leaving the universe" in between. Then there's Infinity, but that one's so far from beta it's not funny.
Anyone know any current (modern) space games without such a claustrophobic representation of space?
Yeah, though I don't think this was a prank. More like something broke in the rating system and the mainpage isn't getting any ratings (resulting in no stories shown in full).
I did click around with the preferences thingy and even though I selected "all full", which I think should ignore ratings, the mainpage was still titles only. This does go against the above a bit.
Personally I switched to classic mode while they fix the beta.
Eight million downloads is a lot, and I do think SW did well, but I hope Iron Sky isn't expected (by the media) to reach those sort of numbers. I mean, Star Wreck was so heavily about ST and Babylon 5, it intrigued their fans. Whereas Iron Sky is completely original and will mostly draw Star Wreck fans... Which, let's face it, is a small-ish group of people. I'd feel really bad for Samuli Torssonen et gang if a month or so after release the media were touting, "Iron Sky a failure, only watched by 1 million"...
Talking about Windows-breaking bugs in games, the public beta for Test Drive Unlimited had an interesting one.. It seemed to be fine, until the beta was ending and people started uninstalling the game. The uninstaller would just wipe c:\ empty of all files, including boot.ini. (They did eventually release a patch to address this.)
Heh, I remember once having to enter some cryptic captcha string into a text field at rapidshare or some nameless file hosting service. I think the problem with it was there was no discrimination between O and zero, or something to that extent. Anyway, the captcha sucked so much I misread it three times, in which the site replied with "You are a bot!" and shut me out of the system. Funny way of showing appreciation and respect to customers.
By the way - since I started typing on this subject - I run a couple of phpBB forums which get quite a few spambots even daily. I've found the best way to deal with them is just to write your own captcha, or an extra form input, requiring dynamic input (doesn't have to be text). Even if your captcha is incredibly weak, it's not likely to be broken because no spambot developer is going to bother cracking a captcha of just one website. Widespread captcha MODs tend to get broken more often so they aren't half as effective.
On my forum, I have a ten by five cell table filled with checkboxes, and a line of text that says "Please check ten of the checkboxes below", with the number changing on each pageload. The captcha only took me a couple of hours to code, and I haven't had a single spambot registration since I wrote it.
Umm, I think it's time for you to turn over your geek license, friend. The Klingons do have a cloak, they "bought" an early version from the Romulans. In fact, the Enterprise had a cloak, too.. Too bad it was illegal. See the TNG episode about the ship Pegasus (IIRC) for more info..
We don't have the source material and time to rebuild 153 icons.
Um, what does rebuild mean, anyway? Just plain redraw of the icons? Can't I use my own icons if I create all of them by myself, thus requiring you/. people to do nothing about them?
Slashdot Mirror
They would like the institution to last 500 years, not the structure. It's not good for the historical items if the organisation who takes care of it goes belly up.
Then again, you could also argue that a 20th/21st century building is more likely to withstand 500 years of use than one from the 15th/16th century. Castles excepted, of course.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/2315211
While we're on the subject of temperature, can anyone enlighten me as to the point of having a data center in Florida? Wouldn't you want hardware like this in a climate that's naturally as cool as possible?
thinner and lighter than iphone 3g/s
/. a few days ago. Buggy, jerky, laggy and won't interpret touch correctly at times. I hate the design philosophy behind the iPhone OS but clearly it makes a better OS.
- And uglier.
3.7" 400x800 AMOLED display
- This is nice.
5MP, LED flash camera
video at 720x480
- These are pointless when the problem with mobile cameras has always been optics, not how many pixels it blows the image up to. I mean the Omnia HD can shoot 720p video but picture quality, which is what you actually want, is subpar. It's blurry and it skips frames. Only sample pics will tell if the camera in the Nexus is actually good, or just high resolution.
3.5mm headphone adapter (first HTC android phone to move away from mini-usb only design)
proximity sensor
light sensor
- Basically they're just catching up with what iphone users already have.
android 2.1
- Still worse than the iPhone OS, at least from looking at the engadget video that was on
I take it this device is a nice leap forward for HTC users, and that's to be lauded, but it's apparently supposed to be an iphone killer. I'm a huge gadget enthusiast and I'd really like there to be a real iphone killer, but with a product that seems to perform worse than the iphone, they just haven't got one.
I voted for the change yesterday, but after doing so, I began to think about what this will actually solve.
I mean, their problem is the GFDL in its current implementation being slightly too difficult to work with, and generally not really what they want for Wikipedia. Correct?
My question is, since they plan to DUAL LICENSE everything, not only replace the GFDL with CC-BY-SA (apparently), won't they still be bound to whatever problems they have with their old license? So how will this fix their problem?
Honestly, it was the most interesting piece of Star Trek since TNG. Implement some DS9 continuity and I think it could be really successful. Just my two cents.
What happened is, professional reviewers played the game for a few hours and then reviewed it. Hence, they don't know it sucks.
Players either played through it, enduring the mindless repetition and crappy gameplay, or quit because of it. So they do know it sucks.
Overall some nice improvements, but disappointigly, the major issues of the game remained untouched (DRM and consoley UI).
Thought I'd post my $0.02:
Red Alert 3 - disagree. I hate the direction the RA dev teams have taken the series since the first RA. Base building was hugely fun in RA, and in this installment they've placed so little emphasis on it they could've just removed it. I got rid of my RA3 installation really quickly but from what I've seen, you can't even harass other players economically any more, since the ore trucks only stay at the designated point (and I mean harass, not destroy). Graphics-wise this is basically C&C3 so you can't zoom out far enough, which is basically the only thing that matters for an RTS graphics engine in my book. Cartoony style in menus was nice, but since it's in the menus, you never really get to see it. In the real game it's just C&C3 with different colors. As for units, mechamen and robots suck. Ships that turn in to tanks, airplanes or whatever also suck. And annoying DRM.
Far Cry 2 - disagree. Crappy console port. It sucked in almost all gameplay respects. Very pretty, but not as pretty as Crysis, which was a better game. Only things good about the FC2 engine were, because it wasn't as pretty as Crysis, it also ran better. Bushfires and daycycle were nice, but I'd gladly trade those for a better AI and weapon customization.
GTA IV PC - disagree. Crappy console port. Physics engine is nice, but look at the trade-offs: it looks awful and runs worse than Crysis. They've also dropped every feature since San Andreas, except character movement, weapons and storyline, only to add the annoying grind-fest that is the buddy thing. One thing I did like in principle was the on-call weapons store with Little Jacob, but that is rendered useless by the fact it doesn't supply body armor. Story and missions are nice in GTA IV, but I'd gladly trade some of the quality there for some programming quality. Also, HUGELY annoying DRM. I can only wish Vice City will be better on this engine when they get around to doing that.
Crysis Warhead - agreed. Very good game. Disagree about the length though, it was perfect for me, didn't bore me, nor leave me craving for more. For their next installment, I'd like Crysis in Africa, without the aliens.
Fallout 3 - haven't tried it either. I hear it's based on the Oblivion engine, which is famous for being about as immersive as EVE Online. Or Microsoft Word.
You direct your thoughts at mine in such a way I feel I need to respond directly.
I'm assuming, from the way you view this matter, that you are a long-time EVE player. I think you might currently be a tad too stuck with the EVE model to objectively comment on the model I described above.
Let me expand on my original post: in my mind, flying from A to B doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be waiting like it is in EVE. Neither has it to be uninterrupted travel. There could be any number of things to do while in warp from A to B.
From another perspective, any hostiles could be equipped with scanners to detect ships in warp and intercept them. How likely it is for, say, a trader to run into one could be determined by how much of a detour said trader is willing to take. Say, a 5 minute warp from A to B with potential hostiles in scanning range in contrast to a 15 minute one with relatively clear waters.
What I'm trying to say through examples is, even if space travel without "teleport" gates can be made boring, it doesn't have to be. It just takes skill, vision and competence to make an interesting game around such a model. I'd be the first in line to try out such a game.
What I hate about all the spacefaring games I've seen so far is the way they divide space into "rooms". At the boundaries of each one you have to go through a magical door to get to another one, not actually fly really fast across vast distances like I always imagined.
Jumpgate has jumpgates, the X series has gates, EVE has stargates and so on. In fact EVE is a good example. In a game with such prevalent PvP what this philosophy translates into is all the pirates just camping the gates so they are bound to get fights, because everyone has to pass through that bottleneck.
I believe STO (Star Trek Online) will be the first to feature some genuine SPACE and the ability to fly from A to B without "leaving the universe" in between. Then there's Infinity, but that one's so far from beta it's not funny.
Anyone know any current (modern) space games without such a claustrophobic representation of space?
Yeah, though I don't think this was a prank. More like something broke in the rating system and the mainpage isn't getting any ratings (resulting in no stories shown in full).
I did click around with the preferences thingy and even though I selected "all full", which I think should ignore ratings, the mainpage was still titles only. This does go against the above a bit.
Personally I switched to classic mode while they fix the beta.
I thought common consensus was that Google are already busy analyzing the hell out of them...
Have you ever read this? http://www.pcpitstop.com/spycheck/eula.asp
I bet people read privacy policies even less than EULAs, but hey.
Then crack it.
Eight million downloads is a lot, and I do think SW did well, but I hope Iron Sky isn't expected (by the media) to reach those sort of numbers. I mean, Star Wreck was so heavily about ST and Babylon 5, it intrigued their fans. Whereas Iron Sky is completely original and will mostly draw Star Wreck fans... Which, let's face it, is a small-ish group of people. I'd feel really bad for Samuli Torssonen et gang if a month or so after release the media were touting, "Iron Sky a failure, only watched by 1 million"...
Talking about Windows-breaking bugs in games, the public beta for Test Drive Unlimited had an interesting one.. It seemed to be fine, until the beta was ending and people started uninstalling the game. The uninstaller would just wipe c:\ empty of all files, including boot.ini. (They did eventually release a patch to address this.)
The touchscreen. A stylus or any other inanimate object doesn't trigger any response on it.
Not every iPhone user writes in a language supported by the spell checker.
You must be new here :-)
Heh, I remember once having to enter some cryptic captcha string into a text field at rapidshare or some nameless file hosting service. I think the problem with it was there was no discrimination between O and zero, or something to that extent. Anyway, the captcha sucked so much I misread it three times, in which the site replied with "You are a bot!" and shut me out of the system. Funny way of showing appreciation and respect to customers.
By the way - since I started typing on this subject - I run a couple of phpBB forums which get quite a few spambots even daily. I've found the best way to deal with them is just to write your own captcha, or an extra form input, requiring dynamic input (doesn't have to be text). Even if your captcha is incredibly weak, it's not likely to be broken because no spambot developer is going to bother cracking a captcha of just one website. Widespread captcha MODs tend to get broken more often so they aren't half as effective.
On my forum, I have a ten by five cell table filled with checkboxes, and a line of text that says "Please check ten of the checkboxes below", with the number changing on each pageload. The captcha only took me a couple of hours to code, and I haven't had a single spambot registration since I wrote it.
They have no power over you. Just go somewhere else for your research. That's what I do when I come across a stupid website like that.
What's wrong with using TABLE for tabular data? Do you also use some kind of SPAN.header instead of H1?
Umm, I think it's time for you to turn over your geek license, friend. The Klingons do have a cloak, they "bought" an early version from the Romulans. In fact, the Enterprise had a cloak, too.. Too bad it was illegal. See the TNG episode about the ship Pegasus (IIRC) for more info..
We don't have the source material and time to rebuild 153 icons.
Um, what does rebuild mean, anyway? Just plain redraw of the icons? Can't I use my own icons if I create all of them by myself, thus requiring you /. people to do nothing about them?