Six-axis controls are junk. I have yet to hear of a game where they're even half-way reliable. Remember Lair? It was supposed to be the poster boy for what the PS3 could do, graphics-wise and control-wise, and the Sixaxis was a MESS. So no, you don't really have partial motion control. You have one of those "tilt the box to get the bead in the hole" puzzles integrated in to your controller.
How are the six axis controllers junk and since you are making reference to "tilt the box to get the bead in the hole" you must have seen or possibly played Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction" of course if you really had played the game you would have realised that you could use the analogue sticks if you wanted. The only time you really did need the six axis controls was when you were gliding - calling that junk now that is trolling. If you could manage the R&C ToD gliding you could also manage Lair and flying is very easy to do providing you don't try to fight the controls. What should have been done with Lair was to provide control with analogue sticks for those people who could not manage (more like comprehend) using the six axis control.
Most games on the PS3 allow you to make the choice of using the six axis controller or the analogue sticks. Even Grand Theft Auto IV has motion control if you want (your choice) and it does work very well. For some games six-axis works really well for others analogue sticks are better and for some games motion control is not even used. At least you have a choice. Personally I find the motion control fairly accurate but this does depend on the game.
Since when is Tomb Raider the standard of quality? That the Wii version sucks can just as well be developer incompetence (especially if it lags in the controls).
My son tried to play Mario Galaxy on a 40" HDTV using composite (PAL) video to the Wii and while the graphics actually looked jaggy although sort of acceptable he actually found the response of the Wii remote lagged significantly even though the IR receiver was set-up correctly.
Looking for money, I'd go for the larger customer base - the Wii.
Are you sure? The larger customer base is the Xbox360 and the PS3 combined and they both have the same power PC architecture, so develop for the PS3 and you can port to the Xbox360 and vice versa although I think one way is harder than the other. Of course there are some limitations. The myth of the Wii being cheaper to develop for is just that a myth although it may have been true in the early days but once you have built up gaming engines and libraries for the PS3 and the Xbox porting is not that difficult, now if only they would make more innovative games instead of just rehashing old ones. We all know Nintendo does not do this - don't we?:)
They said RE4 couldn't be done on the Wii - bullshit, go to 16-bit color depth and dither, wham! - there it was running just fine on the Wii with solid frame rates.
Yes you are right but RE4 was first developed for the Gamecube and Gamecube games actually run on the Wii, as was "The Twilight Princess". It is funny that RE4 also works just fine on the PS2 and actually looks even better up-scaled graphically (720p and/or 1080p) with solid frame rates and colour on a backwards compatible PS3 that in turn is connected to a HDTV.
Spend a couple of hours playing Wii Fit with your parents and your kids and then you can talk about the future of gaming.
This is not much more different than playing "Duck Hunt" for the NES. Great for a few hours and even a few days with the family and then put away in the cupboard to gather dust. Some people will persevere but many more won't.
Gee, what a crazy idea, to play a game and have fun?! Remember the NES and it's two buttons that anyone could figure out? Didn't have a memorize what L1 R1 L2 R2 X O triangle square up down left or right did, just move and press A or B. ta-da! Simple and fun.
Some of those old NES games were thumb busting hard and not many could easily play some of the more serious fighting games. Yes you had two buttons (A and B) but I can guarantee that there were many people who had very sore hands after an hours play.
See they should have a "I'm a Wii... and I'm a PS3/Xbox360" and on the PS3/Xbox360 there's a guy showing someone how to play a game "press X.... NOW!.... no no that was too late, here now press O to wind up again and...." and with the Wii he just walks up and says "here", handing him the controller, and he immediately hits a homerun.
Some people like myself do like the challenge of being able to press buttons in a sequence to achieve a specific result. Having the game do most things for you such as auto jumping in a platformer game or auto aiming in a baseball game may be fun for you but it is not for me since the challenge is now gone and I think I speak for the more serious gamers.
This publisher is exactly why the Wii is selling well and the other consoles are struggling.
True but combined the PS3 and the Xbox360 are outselling the Wii and that speaks volumes for the type of people who prefer the PS3 and the Xbox360.
Sales of Wii Fit are surprising especially since it is not a pack-in. I was informed by one of my female co-workers that the reason they want to get a Wii plus the Wii Fit is they are going to loose weight with this. After a few months I could not see any body or fitness improvement. Ok that was a personal experience with one person but I can't help but feel that the majority of people who get Wii Fit are women who think this device will help them loose weight and get a fabulous figure.
This is not to say that Wii Fit can't get you fitter if you dedicate some time on the exercises however human nature being what it is few would persevere. It would be interesting determining how many of those people who brought Wii Fit are still successfully using it. Yes I am pessimistic but I have seen the same thing with multivitamins as well which are IMHO a total wast of money unless you have a vitamin deficiency and if this is case you are better off seeing a nutritionist and learning how to cook properly.
And the others aren't exactly swimming in RAM by modern standards. No, sorry, it's not that they can't adapt, it's that the games they are making now just can't work in the same way on the Wii.
You are falling into the trap of comparing a PC with a console. A game console is not a general purpose computer although is can do some of the things that a PC can do. Since consoles are programmable devices it is not that hard for games designers to write games for the PS3 and the Xbox360 to work exactly like the Wii all you need are the appropriate peripherals and both the PS3 and Xbox have them already.
There is no denying the Wii is a successfully selling console however combine the sales of Xbox and PS3 consoles and the Wii is slightly behind. Basically the Wii is the only console that was designed for Standard Definition TV while the other two are aimed at HDTV although you can display to SDTV if you want but why would you. On smaller HDTV's the Wii is fine but the larger the HDTV the worse the display looks and since HDTV's are selling very well in most first world countries not displaying in high definition may be a real problem for the Wii in the near future. I do think that even displaying in 720p would have made the Wii almost unbeatable but limiting it to Standard Def may not be good in the long term. Still only time will tell.
What would be the point of owning all three consoles if they all got the same games and had the same capabilities anyway?
I could not agree more but have you compared a game that is available on the PS3, Wii and Xbox360? The same game on the Wii is graphically (even on an SDTV) and even AI inferior. OK graphics aren't everything (it helps though) but poor AI can really dumb down a game.
That alone is why I really like games pre-PS2/GC/Xbox, I have not seen a recent console game have the storytelling power that those had.
Well it does depend on what you consider a good story but saying that the last generation Xbox and GC (PS2 is still a viable platform) did not have the story telling power of previous games hints to me that you have not looked very hard. I won't deny that some of the old games do have a good story line (not that many IMHO), however it is rare to have good storytelling on any game but an RPG (I have seen some stinkers as well) although I have seen some action adventure games that do have a good story (again rare IMHO), most other games have simplistic if any storytelling and push action instead.
Take the first person shooter for example does that have good story telling? Most have a veneer of storytelling but this is minimal preferring sometimes mindless action instead. The alternative is a first person action adventure which can be RPG like and may have good story telling power, then again it may not. It really is up to the player to determine if a game has good story telling or not and do they really care.
The U.S. population uses metric. They just don't know it.
Having metric items does not really instil the concept of the metric system. I would venture to say that it would be rare for many people in the US to use metric wording such as kilograms, litres, kilometres and variations on them. Just curious but except for people studying the sciences are US children actually taught metric measurements or do they have to learn all the imperial measurements and their IMHO nightmarish interrelations? When I was at school I was forced to learn the imperial system and when the metric system was introduced it like a breath of fresh air. My children are quite nonplussed when someone mentions non metric measurements so I begrudgingly translate and they are suitably appalled.
That 1/2" piece of plywood is actually 12 mm.
If you as the carpenter are going to use imperial measurements you would have a tape measure or ruler in imperial units. I think the carpenter may have something to say about getting a 12mm board when they can see it is not actually 1/2 inch according to their imperial measuring tool. Of course the supplier can get away with it if they provide their product in clearly defined metric units, then the carpenter would most likely find it easier to switch to metric.
Ok we know that the US uses "miles", "yards", "feet" and "inches" for length measurement, then "tons", "pounds" and "ounces" for weight, "miles/hour" for speed, "gallons" (US) and "pints" for volume and "Fahrenheit" for temperature. These units are not SI (metric) and since I don't live in the US I would like to know what SI units do you actually use (spoken words not metric items) on a regular basis?
I do know that the US had the option to switch to the metric system after it was created and there is nothing in the law preventing it from being adopted, however as many people worldwide know it was never adopted which has resulted in some expensive stuff ups .
Living in Australia it is sometime quite surprising that we still get tools from the US that are using non metric measurements even though Australia became nearly 100% metric by 1981. I very much doubt Australia will become 100% metric much to the bewilderment of the young till the US actually switches since we do get US movies and documentaries which still insist on using non metric measurements. It would not surprise me that the rest of the world is also in the predicament.
Fedora 10 on my laptop takes about a minute for a full GUI desktop. Prior to that all my applications such as Apache has already started. I can even login via ssh in about 3 seconds from another machine. All up from pressing the power button to logging in to the desktop takes approx 3 minutes and even on commercial blades running Redhat 4 I have found full boot times to be less than 5 minutes.
Fedora is only supported for 18 months or so, do you want to reinstall your server in 18 months time ?
To reinstall a server is silly unless you are performing a disaster recovery. In a commercial environment it is almost impossible to get some firms to approve of an update never mind an upgrade. I know of firms who are still running Redhat 2.1 which is now unsupported even though we have been hounding them about this for the last two years.
Actually it's very simple you have a flat sheet of plastic or waterproof material, then hang it up so that one corner is sloping down to some sort of collection media (ie a bottle) and then wait for the hopefully cool night. During the night the material will be cooler than the dew point of the air causing moisture to condense on the material. Once condensed the water will slowly flow down to the collection point. Normally you won't get much water but in some situations the amount collected could be the difference between life and death.
Here is another form of desert water collection that is very cheap if you are near areas which have fogs .
So RAID-0 your drives... Instantly double the speed. And if you really can't find a way to use the space, buy a pair of 500GB drives instead of 1x 1TB drive. With the popularity of SATA RAID controllers, most systems can easily enough have 4 HD drives in a RAID set. Are you suggesting that 4x the transfer speed of the best 10kRPM drives still isn't fast enough for you?
RAID-0 is a stripe which has no redundancy so loose a drive and you loose all your data. RAID-5 is a safer solution although effectively you cannot use one disk so a four disk RAID-5 has an effective data size of three disks. RAID-5 does not have a good write performance compared to RAID-0 but that it the price you need to pay for redundancy. Of course you could use another RAID-0 array as your backup. You have considered backup haven't you?
Basically the greater the data the more valuable it becomes and therefore the greater the need to back it up. You also have to consider the capacity of the data backbone, after all it is pointless if your array can handle 1GB/sec when your cables/fibre can only handle 100MB/sec. In a commercial environment it is amazing that companies buy high performing storage arrays and don't invest in increased network (include SAN as well) bandwidths and speeds then complain of performance bottle necks. What is even worse is investing in high performance backup solutions and not buffering the backup data for streaming so you have backups which go over 24 hours when you could put in a virtual storage library which in turn spools off to tape that can reduce your backups to a few hours. It must be noted that what I have just touched on are enterprise solutions which are way beyond the purchase of home systems.
Besides, who cares how long your site backup takes or how long it takes to fill up your DVR? That's where spinning disks are going.
Any business that want to remain in business cares significantly about backup times. Basically you want to backup as quickly as possible (ie. not during business hours) and if required recover just as quickly. Even with disk to disk backups (great and relatively cheap for home use) you are always going to have a latency problem. Unfortunately the more elaborate a backup and recovery strategy is the more expensive it becomes.
As for a DVR this is normally up to the household although it can be quite funny or stressful when you want backup up you favourite program and you have no more space on the disk. Mass panic to clean up normally happens. Anyone in the IT industry has seen this on a regular basis.
It must be remembered that backups are not about just recovering data to existing systems if required it is about recovering from disasters as well. It is quite scary that many companies have a half hearted approach to backup and recovery and many don't even go through the exercise of testing a disaster recovery scenario since they think it is going to be disruptive or is going to cost too much. Of course these companies are basically a disaster waiting to happen however it is very difficult for IT to explain to management that they need to test their disaster recovery processes when management can't understand that their own PC's need backing up (at least their user data) as well.
I viewed the latest E3 Metroid and while I thought this could be great I was also disappointed as well since the graphics was basically the same as the original graphics on the Gamecube which originally looked fantastic on my Standard Def TV. Now I have a HDTV, playing that same Metroid or any of my Gamecube games is ok but the poorer graphics definitely detracts from the game play. This is one of the major reasons why I won't get a Wii since I have seen Wii graphics on friends HDTV's and am not impressed.
Many people here would say that the Gamecube and consequently the Wii are more powerful then the PS2. I will not argue the point however I do have a BC PS3 and on many occasions I actually find myself playing PS2 games even though I have a decent collection of PS3 games. PS2 games played via my BC PS3 are up-scaled and smoothed on my HDTV and do look great to play well. Unfortunately PS1 games IMHO while great in their day are not as much fun to play anymore even though they are up-scaled as well but they don't look anywhere as good as an up-scaled PS2 game.
I don't care about sequels if the games are good. I always expect there to be Mario games. But I want something other than a the goddamn plumber. Maybe that excites you nintendo fanboys, but not me...
Now I can relate to that. Actually as far as Metroid and Zelda games go I definitely can forgive sequels although up to a point. Mario meh!
No Final Fantasy XIII, but it does get Dragon Quest X, the latest entry of the #1 selling RPG franchise in Japan. Not to mention that Dragon Quest games tend to be better than Final Fantasy anyway.
However, porting ability? If the Wii's power was a problem, they wouldn't even dream of porting their titles to the PlayStation 2. But many developers do.
How about no FF V11, V111, 1X, X, X-2 and X11 (X1 is a PC game. X111 and X1V are not out yet) and if you like no Dragon Quest V111 which IMHO is great game especially when played on my BC PS3 to my HDTV. I am not aware of Wii games being ported to the PS2 although the other way is definitely the case. I think this is normally called shovelware and even then if the game requires more buttons than what the Wii has it is difficult to port.
The reality is the Wii is slightly more powerful than the Gamecube which in turn had a bit more powerful than the PS2. If you look at games that run on both the Wii, PS3 and the Xbox360 you will see that the game on the Wii looks less polished graphically on a HDTV than the other consoles. In addition the Wii just can't do what the PS3 and Xbox360 can do (motion controller aside). Take a look at the "Force Unleashed" and you will see what I mean.
Plus, the Wii is so much cheaper to develop for. I don't know exact budgets, but just the textures and modeling is so much more intensive on the PS3 and 360, I'd be suprised if a Wii game cost half as much to develop. Probably significantly less. I would have thought the Wii would have more cool, 'indy' titles, where risks are taken. The other consoles, everything has to be like a summer blockbuster. Big budget, guaranteed return, slickly polished, and no risk.
I just get a feeling of untapped potential for the Wii, that I don't get from the other two consoles.
Rubbish! if that was the case then PC games would have died ages ago since PC games have graphics that normally equal or even surpass those of the PS3 and the Xbox360. There is so much more to making a game than programming. If you want to make a cheap game get a game that has already been made then modify the models slightly, create a slightly different story line and then you too can have the latest and greatest first person shooter.:)
Joking aside I was using a FPS as an example but it could be any game you can modify and with the exception of the first game when you as the programmer are getting to grips with the computer modelling requirements of the gaming engine, additions or continuation of the franchise is very much cheaper, high resolution or even low resolution the costs are roughly the same.
The biggest cost of any game is the initial planning which includes story, initial hand drawn art and lots of discussion before even getting to the programming. Like it or not the requirement for many games today is for High Resolution and since there are many really good Hi Res gaming engines out there now, Low Res games are actually becoming difficult more expensive to make.
Don't get me wrong if the Wii at least supported 720p it would get a huge amount of third party games and while to many "graphics aren't everything" they do go a long way to making a great game greater. For most people who have HDTV's and that number is rapidly climbing the demand for HD content is also growing and that includes games. At the moment the Wii while selling well as a console is not getting that many good third party games. If you are happy with native Nintendo and a few thrird party games then fine but many more serious gamers are preferring the PC, PS3 and the Xbox360.
What the Wii doesn't have is buttons, if you use the motion controls it ends up not working like all the other consoles, if you don't use the motion controls you get angry reviewers saying how it doesn't use "the full potential" of the Wii.
I fully concur with the buttons. One reason for not having a game called Psychonauts (PS2 and Xbox) on the Gamecube much less the Wii was lack of buttons. One of the main issues with the Wii is the over emphasis of making use of the motion sensor even if it is not really appropriate and has got to the stage of "dammed if you do and dammed if you don't".
Like it or not the Developers opted to develop for the PS2 over the so called technically superior Xbox and Gamecube and both Microsoft and Nintendo effectively killed their products after four years only selling approx 24 million each leaving the PS2 an open field. Comparing CPU MHz or even GHz is not a good way of determining performance, you need to take all factors into account. Basically the Xbox was very much cut-down PC although it did have a good graphics card The PS2 on the other hand had the emotion engine cpu which was radically different to the Xbox's Intel cpu and an enormous pipeline but a lesser but adequate graphics card.
As for graphics card support being able to do shading or whatever, so what, if the programmer knows what they are doing they can do that with the cpu anyway. A good example of this was the first PS2 Tekken game which did not have anti-aliasing. Many people pointed at Sony and said that this was a shortcoming in the PS2. A simple subroutine actually fixed the problem within the day.
While I don't like Microsoft and try to avoid their products I don't have any issues with Nintendo and have had every console from the NES to the Gamecube however this generation I was hoping for a Wii that at least supported 720p including up scaling Gamecube games, but since they stuck to standard definition I did not bother getting one. I have a HDTV and playing Gamecube games on it is acceptable but the graphics are not quite right. Playing PS2 games via my BC PS3 is much a better experience since the games are correctly up-scaled and very much more playable, so much so that later release games have up-scaled and smoothed graphics that are approaching those of a PS3 game.
I do believe that if Nintendo had at least supported 720p on the Wii you would see so much more better quality third party games on it, I know I would have brought one.
Out of all the casual games ever made Solitaire would have to be the most played throughout the world with an almost infinite replay value. Of course it would also be the most time wasting application ever made as well. Personally "Minesweeper" is one of those games you end up playing at least once then very quickly get bored with and rarely ever play agian.:)
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Six-axis controls are junk. I have yet to hear of a game where they're even half-way reliable. Remember Lair? It was supposed to be the poster boy for what the PS3 could do, graphics-wise and control-wise, and the Sixaxis was a MESS. So no, you don't really have partial motion control. You have one of those "tilt the box to get the bead in the hole" puzzles integrated in to your controller.
How are the six axis controllers junk and since you are making reference to "tilt the box to get the bead in the hole" you must have seen or possibly played Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction" of course if you really had played the game you would have realised that you could use the analogue sticks if you wanted. The only time you really did need the six axis controls was when you were gliding - calling that junk now that is trolling. If you could manage the R&C ToD gliding you could also manage Lair and flying is very easy to do providing you don't try to fight the controls. What should have been done with Lair was to provide control with analogue sticks for those people who could not manage (more like comprehend) using the six axis control.
Most games on the PS3 allow you to make the choice of using the six axis controller or the analogue sticks. Even Grand Theft Auto IV has motion control if you want (your choice) and it does work very well. For some games six-axis works really well for others analogue sticks are better and for some games motion control is not even used. At least you have a choice. Personally I find the motion control fairly accurate but this does depend on the game.
Since when is Tomb Raider the standard of quality? That the Wii version sucks can just as well be developer incompetence (especially if it lags in the controls).
My son tried to play Mario Galaxy on a 40" HDTV using composite (PAL) video to the Wii and while the graphics actually looked jaggy although sort of acceptable he actually found the response of the Wii remote lagged significantly even though the IR receiver was set-up correctly.
Looking for money, I'd go for the larger customer base - the Wii.
Are you sure? The larger customer base is the Xbox360 and the PS3 combined and they both have the same power PC architecture, so develop for the PS3 and you can port to the Xbox360 and vice versa although I think one way is harder than the other. Of course there are some limitations. The myth of the Wii being cheaper to develop for is just that a myth although it may have been true in the early days but once you have built up gaming engines and libraries for the PS3 and the Xbox porting is not that difficult, now if only they would make more innovative games instead of just rehashing old ones. We all know Nintendo does not do this - don't we? :)
They said RE4 couldn't be done on the Wii - bullshit, go to 16-bit color depth and dither, wham! - there it was running just fine on the Wii with solid frame rates.
Yes you are right but RE4 was first developed for the Gamecube and Gamecube games actually run on the Wii, as was "The Twilight Princess". It is funny that RE4 also works just fine on the PS2 and actually looks even better up-scaled graphically (720p and/or 1080p) with solid frame rates and colour on a backwards compatible PS3 that in turn is connected to a HDTV.
Spend a couple of hours playing Wii Fit with your parents and your kids and then you can talk about the future of gaming.
This is not much more different than playing "Duck Hunt" for the NES. Great for a few hours and even a few days with the family and then put away in the cupboard to gather dust. Some people will persevere but many more won't.
Gee, what a crazy idea, to play a game and have fun?! Remember the NES and it's two buttons that anyone could figure out? Didn't have a memorize what L1 R1 L2 R2 X O triangle square up down left or right did, just move and press A or B. ta-da! Simple and fun.
Some of those old NES games were thumb busting hard and not many could easily play some of the more serious fighting games. Yes you had two buttons (A and B) but I can guarantee that there were many people who had very sore hands after an hours play.
See they should have a "I'm a Wii... and I'm a PS3/Xbox360" and on the PS3/Xbox360 there's a guy showing someone how to play a game "press X.... NOW!.... no no that was too late, here now press O to wind up again and...." and with the Wii he just walks up and says "here", handing him the controller, and he immediately hits a homerun.
Some people like myself do like the challenge of being able to press buttons in a sequence to achieve a specific result. Having the game do most things for you such as auto jumping in a platformer game or auto aiming in a baseball game may be fun for you but it is not for me since the challenge is now gone and I think I speak for the more serious gamers.
This publisher is exactly why the Wii is selling well and the other consoles are struggling.
True but combined the PS3 and the Xbox360 are outselling the Wii and that speaks volumes for the type of people who prefer the PS3 and the Xbox360.
Sales of Wii Fit are surprising especially since it is not a pack-in. I was informed by one of my female co-workers that the reason they want to get a Wii plus the Wii Fit is they are going to loose weight with this. After a few months I could not see any body or fitness improvement. Ok that was a personal experience with one person but I can't help but feel that the majority of people who get Wii Fit are women who think this device will help them loose weight and get a fabulous figure.
This is not to say that Wii Fit can't get you fitter if you dedicate some time on the exercises however human nature being what it is few would persevere. It would be interesting determining how many of those people who brought Wii Fit are still successfully using it. Yes I am pessimistic but I have seen the same thing with multivitamins as well which are IMHO a total wast of money unless you have a vitamin deficiency and if this is case you are better off seeing a nutritionist and learning how to cook properly.
And the others aren't exactly swimming in RAM by modern standards. No, sorry, it's not that they can't adapt, it's that the games they are making now just can't work in the same way on the Wii.
You are falling into the trap of comparing a PC with a console. A game console is not a general purpose computer although is can do some of the things that a PC can do. Since consoles are programmable devices it is not that hard for games designers to write games for the PS3 and the Xbox360 to work exactly like the Wii all you need are the appropriate peripherals and both the PS3 and Xbox have them already.
There is no denying the Wii is a successfully selling console however combine the sales of Xbox and PS3 consoles and the Wii is slightly behind. Basically the Wii is the only console that was designed for Standard Definition TV while the other two are aimed at HDTV although you can display to SDTV if you want but why would you. On smaller HDTV's the Wii is fine but the larger the HDTV the worse the display looks and since HDTV's are selling very well in most first world countries not displaying in high definition may be a real problem for the Wii in the near future. I do think that even displaying in 720p would have made the Wii almost unbeatable but limiting it to Standard Def may not be good in the long term. Still only time will tell.
What would be the point of owning all three consoles if they all got the same games and had the same capabilities anyway?
I could not agree more but have you compared a game that is available on the PS3, Wii and Xbox360? The same game on the Wii is graphically (even on an SDTV) and even AI inferior. OK graphics aren't everything (it helps though) but poor AI can really dumb down a game.
That alone is why I really like games pre-PS2/GC/Xbox, I have not seen a recent console game have the storytelling power that those had.
Well it does depend on what you consider a good story but saying that the last generation Xbox and GC (PS2 is still a viable platform) did not have the story telling power of previous games hints to me that you have not looked very hard. I won't deny that some of the old games do have a good story line (not that many IMHO), however it is rare to have good storytelling on any game but an RPG (I have seen some stinkers as well) although I have seen some action adventure games that do have a good story (again rare IMHO), most other games have simplistic if any storytelling and push action instead.
Take the first person shooter for example does that have good story telling? Most have a veneer of storytelling but this is minimal preferring sometimes mindless action instead. The alternative is a first person action adventure which can be RPG like and may have good story telling power, then again it may not. It really is up to the player to determine if a game has good story telling or not and do they really care.
The U.S. population uses metric. They just don't know it.
Having metric items does not really instil the concept of the metric system. I would venture to say that it would be rare for many people in the US to use metric wording such as kilograms, litres, kilometres and variations on them. Just curious but except for people studying the sciences are US children actually taught metric measurements or do they have to learn all the imperial measurements and their IMHO nightmarish interrelations? When I was at school I was forced to learn the imperial system and when the metric system was introduced it like a breath of fresh air. My children are quite nonplussed when someone mentions non metric measurements so I begrudgingly translate and they are suitably appalled.
That 1/2" piece of plywood is actually 12 mm.
If you as the carpenter are going to use imperial measurements you would have a tape measure or ruler in imperial units. I think the carpenter may have something to say about getting a 12mm board when they can see it is not actually 1/2 inch according to their imperial measuring tool. Of course the supplier can get away with it if they provide their product in clearly defined metric units, then the carpenter would most likely find it easier to switch to metric.
Ok we know that the US uses "miles", "yards", "feet" and "inches" for length measurement, then "tons", "pounds" and "ounces" for weight, "miles/hour" for speed, "gallons" (US) and "pints" for volume and "Fahrenheit" for temperature. These units are not SI (metric) and since I don't live in the US I would like to know what SI units do you actually use (spoken words not metric items) on a regular basis?
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I do know that the US had the option to switch to the metric system after it was created and there is nothing in the law preventing it from being adopted, however as many people worldwide know it was never adopted which has resulted in some expensive stuff ups
Living in Australia it is sometime quite surprising that we still get tools from the US that are using non metric measurements even though Australia became nearly 100% metric by 1981. I very much doubt Australia will become 100% metric much to the bewilderment of the young till the US actually switches since we do get US movies and documentaries which still insist on using non metric measurements. It would not surprise me that the rest of the world is also in the predicament.
Meanwhile wolfram alpha doesn't know WTF the metric system is, never mind who uses it. http://www79.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=metric+system [wolframalpha.com]
Try this
It takes 15 minutes to log in.
Fedora 10 on my laptop takes about a minute for a full GUI desktop. Prior to that all my applications such as Apache has already started. I can even login via ssh in about 3 seconds from another machine. All up from pressing the power button to logging in to the desktop takes approx 3 minutes and even on commercial blades running Redhat 4 I have found full boot times to be less than 5 minutes.
A 20 second boot? What happens after that?
How about a 15 second boot, then a 10 second boot then eventually a zero second boot then we can can go were no man/woman has gone before :)
Fedora is only supported for 18 months or so, do you want to reinstall your server in 18 months time ?
To reinstall a server is silly unless you are performing a disaster recovery. In a commercial environment it is almost impossible to get some firms to approve of an update never mind an upgrade. I know of firms who are still running Redhat 2.1 which is now unsupported even though we have been hounding them about this for the last two years.
Actually it's very simple you have a flat sheet of plastic or waterproof material, then hang it up so that one corner is sloping down to some sort of collection media (ie a bottle) and then wait for the hopefully cool night. During the night the material will be cooler than the dew point of the air causing moisture to condense on the material. Once condensed the water will slowly flow down to the collection point. Normally you won't get much water but in some situations the amount collected could be the difference between life and death.
Here is another form of desert water collection that is very cheap if you are near areas which have fogs .
So RAID-0 your drives... Instantly double the speed. And if you really can't find a way to use the space, buy a pair of 500GB drives instead of 1x 1TB drive. With the popularity of SATA RAID controllers, most systems can easily enough have 4 HD drives in a RAID set. Are you suggesting that 4x the transfer speed of the best 10kRPM drives still isn't fast enough for you?
RAID-0 is a stripe which has no redundancy so loose a drive and you loose all your data. RAID-5 is a safer solution although effectively you cannot use one disk so a four disk RAID-5 has an effective data size of three disks. RAID-5 does not have a good write performance compared to RAID-0 but that it the price you need to pay for redundancy. Of course you could use another RAID-0 array as your backup. You have considered backup haven't you?
Basically the greater the data the more valuable it becomes and therefore the greater the need to back it up. You also have to consider the capacity of the data backbone, after all it is pointless if your array can handle 1GB/sec when your cables/fibre can only handle 100MB/sec. In a commercial environment it is amazing that companies buy high performing storage arrays and don't invest in increased network (include SAN as well) bandwidths and speeds then complain of performance bottle necks. What is even worse is investing in high performance backup solutions and not buffering the backup data for streaming so you have backups which go over 24 hours when you could put in a virtual storage library which in turn spools off to tape that can reduce your backups to a few hours. It must be noted that what I have just touched on are enterprise solutions which are way beyond the purchase of home systems.
So, we'd be where we're at right now, just with 100x the storage? That wouldn't be too bad in my book.
And a 100 times the backup requirement.. I would like to see the IT manager explain this to Management..
Besides, who cares how long your site backup takes or how long it takes to fill up your DVR? That's where spinning disks are going.
Any business that want to remain in business cares significantly about backup times. Basically you want to backup as quickly as possible (ie. not during business hours) and if required recover just as quickly. Even with disk to disk backups (great and relatively cheap for home use) you are always going to have a latency problem. Unfortunately the more elaborate a backup and recovery strategy is the more expensive it becomes.
As for a DVR this is normally up to the household although it can be quite funny or stressful when you want backup up you favourite program and you have no more space on the disk. Mass panic to clean up normally happens. Anyone in the IT industry has seen this on a regular basis.
It must be remembered that backups are not about just recovering data to existing systems if required it is about recovering from disasters as well. It is quite scary that many companies have a half hearted approach to backup and recovery and many don't even go through the exercise of testing a disaster recovery scenario since they think it is going to be disruptive or is going to cost too much. Of course these companies are basically a disaster waiting to happen however it is very difficult for IT to explain to management that they need to test their disaster recovery processes when management can't understand that their own PC's need backing up (at least their user data) as well.
Many people here would say that the Gamecube and consequently the Wii are more powerful then the PS2. I will not argue the point however I do have a BC PS3 and on many occasions I actually find myself playing PS2 games even though I have a decent collection of PS3 games. PS2 games played via my BC PS3 are up-scaled and smoothed on my HDTV and do look great to play well. Unfortunately PS1 games IMHO while great in their day are not as much fun to play anymore even though they are up-scaled as well but they don't look anywhere as good as an up-scaled PS2 game.
I don't care about sequels if the games are good. I always expect there to be Mario games. But I want something other than a the goddamn plumber. Maybe that excites you nintendo fanboys, but not me...
Now I can relate to that. Actually as far as Metroid and Zelda games go I definitely can forgive sequels although up to a point. Mario meh!
No Final Fantasy XIII, but it does get Dragon Quest X, the latest entry of the #1 selling RPG franchise in Japan. Not to mention that Dragon Quest games tend to be better than Final Fantasy anyway.
However, porting ability? If the Wii's power was a problem, they wouldn't even dream of porting their titles to the PlayStation 2. But many developers do.
How about no FF V11, V111, 1X, X, X-2 and X11 (X1 is a PC game. X111 and X1V are not out yet) and if you like no Dragon Quest V111 which IMHO is great game especially when played on my BC PS3 to my HDTV. I am not aware of Wii games being ported to the PS2 although the other way is definitely the case. I think this is normally called shovelware and even then if the game requires more buttons than what the Wii has it is difficult to port.
The reality is the Wii is slightly more powerful than the Gamecube which in turn had a bit more powerful than the PS2. If you look at games that run on both the Wii, PS3 and the Xbox360 you will see that the game on the Wii looks less polished graphically on a HDTV than the other consoles. In addition the Wii just can't do what the PS3 and Xbox360 can do (motion controller aside). Take a look at the "Force Unleashed" and you will see what I mean.
Plus, the Wii is so much cheaper to develop for. I don't know exact budgets, but just the textures and modeling is so much more intensive on the PS3 and 360, I'd be suprised if a Wii game cost half as much to develop. Probably significantly less. I would have thought the Wii would have more cool, 'indy' titles, where risks are taken. The other consoles, everything has to be like a summer blockbuster. Big budget, guaranteed return, slickly polished, and no risk. I just get a feeling of untapped potential for the Wii, that I don't get from the other two consoles.
Rubbish! if that was the case then PC games would have died ages ago since PC games have graphics that normally equal or even surpass those of the PS3 and the Xbox360. There is so much more to making a game than programming. If you want to make a cheap game get a game that has already been made then modify the models slightly, create a slightly different story line and then you too can have the latest and greatest first person shooter. :)
Joking aside I was using a FPS as an example but it could be any game you can modify and with the exception of the first game when you as the programmer are getting to grips with the computer modelling requirements of the gaming engine, additions or continuation of the franchise is very much cheaper, high resolution or even low resolution the costs are roughly the same.
The biggest cost of any game is the initial planning which includes story, initial hand drawn art and lots of discussion before even getting to the programming. Like it or not the requirement for many games today is for High Resolution and since there are many really good Hi Res gaming engines out there now, Low Res games are actually becoming difficult more expensive to make.
Don't get me wrong if the Wii at least supported 720p it would get a huge amount of third party games and while to many "graphics aren't everything" they do go a long way to making a great game greater. For most people who have HDTV's and that number is rapidly climbing the demand for HD content is also growing and that includes games. At the moment the Wii while selling well as a console is not getting that many good third party games. If you are happy with native Nintendo and a few thrird party games then fine but many more serious gamers are preferring the PC, PS3 and the Xbox360.
What the Wii doesn't have is buttons, if you use the motion controls it ends up not working like all the other consoles, if you don't use the motion controls you get angry reviewers saying how it doesn't use "the full potential" of the Wii.
I fully concur with the buttons. One reason for not having a game called Psychonauts (PS2 and Xbox) on the Gamecube much less the Wii was lack of buttons. One of the main issues with the Wii is the over emphasis of making use of the motion sensor even if it is not really appropriate and has got to the stage of "dammed if you do and dammed if you don't".
Like it or not the Developers opted to develop for the PS2 over the so called technically superior Xbox and Gamecube and both Microsoft and Nintendo effectively killed their products after four years only selling approx 24 million each leaving the PS2 an open field. Comparing CPU MHz or even GHz is not a good way of determining performance, you need to take all factors into account. Basically the Xbox was very much cut-down PC although it did have a good graphics card The PS2 on the other hand had the emotion engine cpu which was radically different to the Xbox's Intel cpu and an enormous pipeline but a lesser but adequate graphics card.
As for graphics card support being able to do shading or whatever, so what, if the programmer knows what they are doing they can do that with the cpu anyway. A good example of this was the first PS2 Tekken game which did not have anti-aliasing. Many people pointed at Sony and said that this was a shortcoming in the PS2. A simple subroutine actually fixed the problem within the day.
While I don't like Microsoft and try to avoid their products I don't have any issues with Nintendo and have had every console from the NES to the Gamecube however this generation I was hoping for a Wii that at least supported 720p including up scaling Gamecube games, but since they stuck to standard definition I did not bother getting one. I have a HDTV and playing Gamecube games on it is acceptable but the graphics are not quite right. Playing PS2 games via my BC PS3 is much a better experience since the games are correctly up-scaled and very much more playable, so much so that later release games have up-scaled and smoothed graphics that are approaching those of a PS3 game.
I do believe that if Nintendo had at least supported 720p on the Wii you would see so much more better quality third party games on it, I know I would have brought one.
World of Warcraft... Who needs to leave the house anyways ?
Prior to WoW we had games like Hack that had highly detailed ASCII graphics. Boy was that a great time waster I only got out of the dungeon once.
No way man.. Solitaire!
Out of all the casual games ever made Solitaire would have to be the most played throughout the world with an almost infinite replay value. Of course it would also be the most time wasting application ever made as well. Personally "Minesweeper" is one of those games you end up playing at least once then very quickly get bored with and rarely ever play agian. :)