This is fine up to a point. The real problem with what Sony are doing here is the fact that versions of these games for other platforms exist and have been released outside Europe. If Apple released iMovie 4 for Windows in the US but not Europe, that would be a worthwhile analogy. Of course, that situation wouldn't arise because DVD drives aside, PCs don't contain the region-locking features that modern console owners 'enjoy' (yet).
So Halo 2 will be an Xbox exclusive, just like Metroid Prime was a GC exclusive, and that's fine; they're the platforms' killer apps, and hopefully they'll result in the best use being made of the hardware. But if Bungie made a PS2 Halo 2 and it wasn't released in the US, how much outcry do you think there'd be?
Another way of looking at it: 'genuine' exclusive titles encourage competition between the platforms, which is potentially a Good Thing. GC can do Wind Walker? Well, Xbox can do Project Gotham... and so on. This isn't anywhere near as healthy when all the console companies do is limit the distribution of existing, cross-platform titles - mainly because such titles are rarely written to target the strengths of each platform (e.g. Sony's peripherals, Xbox' hard drive, GC's Gameboy linkup...).
Apple limited the places that sell Macs because so many of them did it so badly.
The only place around here that stocks Macs is the local PC World. I was browsing down there the other day and noticed a G5 was out on display, so I went over to take a look - there was also a 12" G4 iBook and a 15" PB, which I was interested in checking out. All three were running the Simple Finder, with no Applications present and no files in the Documents folder. In short, nothing; the only thing you could do was log out and log back in again. The G5 also seemed to have some kind of Japanese installation of OSX, judging by the menus (this is in the UK). Meanwhile, the assorted Vaios and HPs were running Deus Ex II, DVD players, music jukeboxes, etc. etc. People came over to the Macs, admired the design briefly, and moved on...
Yeah, I'm sorry. Cheap shot. But too juicy a shot to pass on. Lord knows I wouldn't want to store my music files any way other than the way you describe - nested in folders and boiling down to just the song title as the filename. Fortunately for lazy me, I can just let iTunes and CDDB sort things out. It'll backfire one day.
This is a great article for anyone interested in electronic texts and/or Creative Commons. Some departments are looking into ebook deals at the college where I work, and it's depressing to contemplate what the publishers are going to do to these wide-eyed academics who are being convinced to bypass the college library and buy ebooks directly. Every day I see scores of students borrowing older editions of books (we only keep them if they're still of use). I can't see that practice lasting long in the ebook world. I hear about deals that offer, say, ten electronic 'copies' that can be viewed at any one time. This is, of course, identical to buying ten paperback copies - the annoyance is that it does absolutely nothing to harness the strengths of the ebook. In fact, if you end up with an ebook with limited or crippled printing / copying permissions, and they certainly exist, you've got something far less useful to everyone except the publisher.
Like Doctorow, I'm not against ebooks - they can be marvellous when they fully explot their format. But it's depressing to hear about that format being abused in the name of sheer profit, especially in the realm of education. (Though/. is home to enough sad tales of print-based academic text gouging, too.)
People have been doing some interesting things with Doctorow's recently released Creative Commons title, Eastern Standard Tribe, and he has plenty of anecdotes about how releasing the book for 'free' (with Some Rights Reserved) has helped sales of the print copy. He's promoting the ebook environment I'd love to see flourishing five years down the line. The (well, one, but a likely one) alternative is books with DRM, which is the saddest kind of book I can imagine.
Hm. I don't know what Garageband is doing, especially - I haven't really used it much - but I get much better performance that this - on a 800mhz G3 iBook, no less - from Ableton Live 3, with several tracks and all manner of VST effects. Now, that is a much more expensive product, granted. But you can get the cut-down version, Steinberg Remix, for a little less that iLife (but without iPhoto, iMovie etc., of course).
Not to knock iLife, which I think is wonderful. But Garageband doesn't exhibit the performance I'd expect, based on my use of Remix and Live. Still, it's easy to use and interacts well with the other iApps, so I guess it's a case of the right tool for the job. I'd undoubtedly put my dad on Garageband as opposed to Remix, for example. I guess Garageband is to me what iMovie is to someone who has Final Cut - that doesn't make it any worse an application...
Trackball mouse. It works on the plane, in the back seat of a car, on the beach, wherever. It also doesn't keep my roommate/girlfriend up at night with the light of a regular optical mouse.
What are you using, some kind of halogen mouse? Isn't the light of the screen a bigger concern? At any rate, you can get around this by simply having a baby, and then moving your desk into the baby's room and using your optical mouse as both a pointing device and a nightlight.
Actually, interesting point - all the optical mice I've seen / used have been designed to flaunt their lights like garish mini-floodlamps, via transparent sides or something similar. There must be a market for a discrete optical mouse. Maybe over in Iraq, where the colonel's Intellimouse Explorer becomes a sniper's dream...
It does make sense to use what you've got, up to a point. But there are advantages to getting a dedicated midi/USB controller. I use a Midiman Oxygen 8, which is pretty cheap. You wouldn't expect a trained pianist to be happy with it, but it works for me. The real advantage over the 'classic' midi keyboard is that it offers a heap of definable knobs (well, 8, as the name implies) that you can map to filter cutoff, reverb send, delay feedback, etc. etc. I haven't used it much with Garageband, but it's invaluable with programs like Reason, Reaktor and Live - much nicer to be able to tweak parameters that way, and to be able to tweak more than one at a time and hop between them intuitively. Mouse XY controllers help in this regard, but I much prefer the Oxygen 8's hardware control method...
Oh, I've played a whole crapload of FPS games, and Halo wipes 'em all, IMO. I've never known a game that I've been able to come back to so often and still find something new. Nigh on every encounter is simply different every time, even if you decide to follow the same route. And I've never played an FPS with so many fantastic non-scripted moments - I've had random encounters in Halo that have been far better than scripted sequences in other games.
This is all single player, really - I've not played Halo with more than four people. I can certainly see the advantage of team / role-based games for larger multiplayer sessions.
It isn't really the tech that keeps me coming back to Halo, though it doesn't hurt... it's the emergent gameplay, which is more than the empty buzzword it sometimes seems to be. The AI in Halo isn't amazing. The weapons aren't amazing (though they are amazingly well balanced). The magic of Halo is in the way every feature interlocks and interacts with every other feature, enabling endless permutations. Halo isn't focused on the large battles; it's focused on the many small ones they're composed of.
But as I said, YMMV. If you're after a rich plot and a variety of experiences, Halo probably won't do much for you - you've met all your enemies by the halfway point, for one thing. But for depth of play, I rate it very highly - though I stress again, it HAS to be played on Legendary for this to show through. Working down from the Control Room in Two Betrayals always puts a grin on my face; how am I going to do it THIS time...?
I can't comment on the performace, as I've only played Halo on Xbox. But I do think you're missing out on the gameplay front.
You have to play on Legendary. The other modes are OK to get you up to speed with the controls and weapons, but the gameplay is all on Legendary. When you're there, the map 'repetition' (remember that Halo offers Silent Cartographer as well as The Library) and lack of enemy variety cease to be concerns. Your sole concern is how you're going to get past that single Covenant Elite and his handful of grunts now that you're out of rockets and down to just a Needler. And that battle - which would be over in under a minute in most FPS titles - might last you five minutes. And if, not when, you win, it'll be an achievement.
Halo doesn't need a wide variety of enemies. They'd dilute the experience. It't not perfect - some might say the adult Flood are an enemy too far - but it's very, very good. The little 'headchicken' Flood creatures are a well thought-out enemy, though - normally they're just an annoyance, easily killed or ignored, and they do precious little damage. But when your shield is gone, a swarm of them can kill you very quickly - they flip from being an annoyance in the background to your most pressing concern.
Still and all, YMMV. But having had countless hours of enjoyment from Xbox Halo (I got it at launch and I still love to play it, even in single player), I feel obliged to defend its gameplay when the opportunity arises. It's likely the best game I've played...
So what's your suggestion for a better system than 'My Photos'? Going one way, you revert to simply 'My Documents', or whatever you want to call the general user data folder, and rely on the user to organise their own folders - but as others have said, the first thing they'll probably do is create a 'photos' folder, so you're back to square one. If they don't organise further subfolders, it's hardly Microsoft's fault.
Going in the other direction, you end up with some kind of wizard system that asks you about photos as they're being imported, and files them according to your answers. I'm sure a lot of people would find this annoying - I know when I import from my camera, I'm often importing photos of a variety of events. I don't want them all lumped uner 'wedding' or whatever, and I don't want to have to provide import-time metadata for each photo.
So the best solution I've found is iPhoto - import in bulk, and then arrange and group easily and at leisure. But my groupings then only make sense in iPhoto itself - on the HD, they're arranged in a human-confusing date-based subfolder system under Apple's equivalent of the 'My Photos' folder. So it seems to me that the 'My Photos' approach is just fine, so long as you have a decent tool for accessing and organising the contents. Your 'consumer level' Mac user probably never even opens their 'Photos' folder - or if they do, they hurry back to the comfort of iPhoto sharpish.
Ha, yeah. I work in a library, and I used to add and replace the spine labels on books. This was done on a large, heavy Olympia typewriter that I came to name 'Oily Pam' (through anagramese). Time came when we invested in a computerised labeller, though we kept Oily Pam on hand for clothbound books, which the computer-created labels weren't great for. Every time a labeller tape ran out, the last few inches of the reel had a striped silver warning design that was still adhesive, and I gradually covered Pam in this half-mirror pattern. But eventually she fell by the wayside entirely, and one day I had to intervene to stop her being thrown in the garbage; now she lives under my desk and my God, I've just noticed this whole story is sounding pretty perverse.
Anyway, the computer-created labels look dreadfully sterile compared to Pam's output, and I found creating them to be a pretty joyless task - tap tap, click, print, as opposed to the handle-cranking, knob-turning, bell-ringing joy of using Pam. Good lord, that's almost obscene, isn't it? I think I might have a problem here.
And if this isn't enough for your typical Unix geek, just pipe your AppleScripts to the BSD command line with scripts like do shell script "ps -auxwww" and voila.
That is a nice feature - I hadn't played around with Applescript before this week, but in an evening I was able to create a small GUI for checking, starting and stopping a MySQL server, and I could see a lot of scope for easily adding functionality to it. Not revolutionary, but it works and saves me a little time - and more importantly, demonstrates to me the potential of wrapping shell scripts (not to mention interactions with iTunes et al) in easily constructed Cocoa GUIs. Aqua + Perl + iPhoto = cheap, easy fun. Scriptable Bluetooth is promising, too...
Yeah, I've used them a few times (and they're only based a few miles away from my home) - they're generally more expensive than the higher profile importers, but as you say, they're not overpriced, and they do offer the security of an inclusive price, so at least you know exactly what you'll be paying. Worth it for expensive discs or sets where the duty would seriously do you some damage... and the service has always been great.
Can't change the weather though... That one you're stuck with- nature of where you are and all.
Ah, but you can use sunglasses or an umbrella, just to muddy up any metaphors that might be in play.
Apathy is certainly an issue, but people with a little online savvy in the UK have the advantage of sites such as STAND to keep them informed and services like Fax Your MP to encourage them to participate. It's never been easier to keep yourself informed and active; you still need the motivation and some sense of hope, of course. Where you'd look for those, I have no idea...
Well, clearly I was... ah... trying to convey that the post should be read as one long, breathless, babbling rant, while avoiding the old caps lock schtick.
Next time, I'll use paragraphs but remove the spaces between words - and you watch, someone will complain about that, too.
In my defence, I'm in the UK - the only <p>s I had were mushy <p>s.
So it's really WAS those Brussels beaurocrats all along? I'll never doubt the tabloids again. Still and all, the BPI are the ones hurling legal around, and they go so far as to have 'British' in their name, so I can't start waving my Union Jack just yet... but at least it could be worse. For a change.
As a general rule, you can import anything under the value of eighteen GB pounds, and be exempt from both VAT and import duty.
Oh, yeah, that is an important point to mention - where possible, order in small or single quantities to take advantage of this. If you do get caught out, the duty (and tax) will be a lot more than the extra postage required.
As far as I can make out, items over 18 are a lottery right now - I've only been caught out three times in scores of purchases, so overall I've saved a hell of a lot of money. I've always been caught around Xmas time, too - I guess they're more vigilant then, though you'd think they'd be too busy to pay much attention. I don't think having a great big branded Amazon box helped, either... red rag to a bull...
I've had nigh on a hundred DVDs shipped over from Hong Kong without any problems at all - sent in a plain envelope, tied with string(!) and marked as a 'gift' - though I don't think the gift/merchandise marking matters if the price barrier is broken, IIRC.
It just makes me even more determined to import, just out of spite... Before long, I'll be regularly paying more than UK prices, just to make a point. That's the real curse of being British...
Gots to be Monkey Ball for non-gamers - no buttons to push (in the main game), gameplay based around simple physics - everyone knows about gravity and inertia, even if only instinctively - a great learning curve, a simple goal, intuitive control with instant feedback... and all wrapped in a great package. I bought my GameCube into work at Xmas, and one non-gaming coworker had ordered one of their own within five minutes of starting Monkey Ball. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it at all; it's a perfect game.
Having said that, try explaining the Monkey Bowling mode to a novice...
"Okay, there'll be a bouncing line - don't press A yet, or... okay, you pressed it, no problem - there's the line. You have to stop it in the middle. Just press A.... you've only got a few seconds. Don't panic! Right, you've stopped it at the side, you'll start rolling in a second or so - you'll need to spin in the opposite direction. Use the shoulder button. No, the shoulder button. Before you cross that line! Oh, see, you span the wrong way. Your monkey's dead."
(Trying to explain it beforehand is even worse, by the way).
It's because they're selling to british and the british are meant to suffer.
We surely are. As an example, I recently sought to nab the 3rd and 4th MST3K box sets. So to start with, not available in the UK. I shop around, find a good deal on Amazon for the pair, and send off. Now, importing into the UK is an absolutely random gamble - your package may or may not be checked and subjected to extra duty. Mine was - an extra 13 on top, split between Customs and the Royal Mail. But it's not all bad - the total price was still less than the other vendors, and way less than I would have been expected to pay if there was a UK release. Our prices are generally ridiculous for DVDs and CDs - there has been some improvement of late, but price cuts are generally led by major chains who can afford the risk, leaving smaller independent stores in an unfortunate position. If I think an independent store is worth supporting, I'll happily do so - but I won''t fork cash out to high-street chains when I can get the same product much cheaper online (though the online store is probably a subsidiary of the bricks-and-mortar one) and I won't buy British when I can buy American (or even better, Chinese) for far less. It's not like I'm helping kill off master British craftsmen - just a few corpulent CEOs. And while I might contribute to a salesperson begin surplus to requirements, I'll also be contributing to the demand for postal workers...
It's just a very nice tool to use with the iPod, that's all. You don't need it, I don't need it, but I do enjoy having it. I don't and can't use the music store, but iTunes makes it very easy to organize, sort and import files through a very nice interface. There's also a lot of scope for extending functionality through Applescript. I'm sure there are lots of alternative apps that do similar things, from proprietary tools to OGG/MP3 handling Perl scripts, and that's great. But an iPod and iTunes have a very nice synergy. One of the features I really like is iTunes' smart playlists, and the ability to create them on the iPod.
Well, there you go. Some people like it, is all. I think it's a very well designed piece of software and it's certainly the best music handling program I've used. YMMV - try it and see, if you're curious. Won't cost you anything.
Yok! Though Aphex is probably delighted with that. This is an interesting problem, though - the flat fee works well for a lot of electronica, as tracks can often be very lengthy. But they can also be extremely short - you know, not usually THIS short, but still... Warp could charge according to time, but they'd have a hard time arriving at a fair price due to the extreme variations in length.
Personally, I've bought several albums from Warp, and that works out very cheap. I've bought a few single tracks, but clearly you'd have to be quite eccentric to fork out over a dollar for six seconds. Good cause, though.
I can't use the iTunes store yet, but I notice on there they have a number of long jazz tracks that maintain the 99c price - heading into the 20/30 minute mark on occasion. It's nice to see the prices for these left static - I'd have expected them to be raised. Tragic cynicysm, really...
Sorry, yes - what I meant to say was that if enough people come to their site *and* mention that it's not very usable - it seems to me that the site has intrinsic usability problems, so as more people come to it, more will hopefully comment on this. Sadly, I couldn't seem to find a comment link on the site itself, merely a contact email for order problems. I guess the regular Warp site email would suffice, but even that could be hard to find for people what with all the Flash navigation and 'mystery clicking' required.
You're quite right, they need a feedback option. Maybe they've had a lot of crazy user input in the past and they now discourage it, who knows...
Yeah, the site is as bad as the rest of the Warp site - terrible to use. The worst thing is using their poxy arrows to scroll through the tiny frames - no scrollbars at all, and the arrows move the (potentially lengthy) list at a crawl. At least they don't appear to use the dreaded accelleration effect, where the list starts moving at warp speed (no pun intended) just as it reaches your destination...
So they need a lot of positive feedback on the content and delivery, and a lot of requests for a better navigation system. Chiefly, give me a scrollbar! They're part of the toolkit for a reason, and replacing them with your own inferior solution is annoying and, I guess, arrogant.
It'll be Designers Republic, won't it? They can undeniably design, but they're not that concerned with usability. The site does look professional, but after using it for a while I was itching for a more convenient, friendlier interface. YMMV, naturally, you might think the site is the best thing since sliced bread. I think the SERVICE might be the best thing since sliced bread, definitely... I've now bought over half a gig of tracks. I'm going to recommend this up the yin-yang; and maybe if more people come to the site, Warp will feel a need to reassess the design.
Slashdot Mirror
This is fine up to a point. The real problem with what Sony are doing here is the fact that versions of these games for other platforms exist and have been released outside Europe. If Apple released iMovie 4 for Windows in the US but not Europe, that would be a worthwhile analogy. Of course, that situation wouldn't arise because DVD drives aside, PCs don't contain the region-locking features that modern console owners 'enjoy' (yet).
So Halo 2 will be an Xbox exclusive, just like Metroid Prime was a GC exclusive, and that's fine; they're the platforms' killer apps, and hopefully they'll result in the best use being made of the hardware. But if Bungie made a PS2 Halo 2 and it wasn't released in the US, how much outcry do you think there'd be?
Another way of looking at it: 'genuine' exclusive titles encourage competition between the platforms, which is potentially a Good Thing. GC can do Wind Walker? Well, Xbox can do Project Gotham... and so on. This isn't anywhere near as healthy when all the console companies do is limit the distribution of existing, cross-platform titles - mainly because such titles are rarely written to target the strengths of each platform (e.g. Sony's peripherals, Xbox' hard drive, GC's Gameboy linkup...).
Apple limited the places that sell Macs because so many of them did it so badly.
The only place around here that stocks Macs is the local PC World. I was browsing down there the other day and noticed a G5 was out on display, so I went over to take a look - there was also a 12" G4 iBook and a 15" PB, which I was interested in checking out. All three were running the Simple Finder, with no Applications present and no files in the Documents folder. In short, nothing; the only thing you could do was log out and log back in again. The G5 also seemed to have some kind of Japanese installation of OSX, judging by the menus (this is in the UK). Meanwhile, the assorted Vaios and HPs were running Deus Ex II, DVD players, music jukeboxes, etc. etc. People came over to the Macs, admired the design briefly, and moved on...
Yeah, I'm sorry. Cheap shot. But too juicy a shot to pass on. Lord knows I wouldn't want to store my music files any way other than the way you describe - nested in folders and boiling down to just the song title as the filename. Fortunately for lazy me, I can just let iTunes and CDDB sort things out. It'll backfire one day.
This is a great article for anyone interested in electronic texts and/or Creative Commons. Some departments are looking into ebook deals at the college where I work, and it's depressing to contemplate what the publishers are going to do to these wide-eyed academics who are being convinced to bypass the college library and buy ebooks directly. Every day I see scores of students borrowing older editions of books (we only keep them if they're still of use). I can't see that practice lasting long in the ebook world. I hear about deals that offer, say, ten electronic 'copies' that can be viewed at any one time. This is, of course, identical to buying ten paperback copies - the annoyance is that it does absolutely nothing to harness the strengths of the ebook. In fact, if you end up with an ebook with limited or crippled printing / copying permissions, and they certainly exist, you've got something far less useful to everyone except the publisher.
/. is home to enough sad tales of print-based academic text gouging, too.)
Like Doctorow, I'm not against ebooks - they can be marvellous when they fully explot their format. But it's depressing to hear about that format being abused in the name of sheer profit, especially in the realm of education. (Though
People have been doing some interesting things with Doctorow's recently released Creative Commons title, Eastern Standard Tribe, and he has plenty of anecdotes about how releasing the book for 'free' (with Some Rights Reserved) has helped sales of the print copy. He's promoting the ebook environment I'd love to see flourishing five years down the line. The (well, one, but a likely one) alternative is books with DRM, which is the saddest kind of book I can imagine.
Hm. I don't know what Garageband is doing, especially - I haven't really used it much - but I get much better performance that this - on a 800mhz G3 iBook, no less - from Ableton Live 3, with several tracks and all manner of VST effects. Now, that is a much more expensive product, granted. But you can get the cut-down version, Steinberg Remix, for a little less that iLife (but without iPhoto, iMovie etc., of course).
Not to knock iLife, which I think is wonderful. But Garageband doesn't exhibit the performance I'd expect, based on my use of Remix and Live. Still, it's easy to use and interacts well with the other iApps, so I guess it's a case of the right tool for the job. I'd undoubtedly put my dad on Garageband as opposed to Remix, for example. I guess Garageband is to me what iMovie is to someone who has Final Cut - that doesn't make it any worse an application...
Trackball mouse. It works on the plane, in the back seat of a car, on the beach, wherever. It also doesn't keep my roommate/girlfriend up at night with the light of a regular optical mouse.
What are you using, some kind of halogen mouse? Isn't the light of the screen a bigger concern? At any rate, you can get around this by simply having a baby, and then moving your desk into the baby's room and using your optical mouse as both a pointing device and a nightlight.
Actually, interesting point - all the optical mice I've seen / used have been designed to flaunt their lights like garish mini-floodlamps, via transparent sides or something similar. There must be a market for a discrete optical mouse. Maybe over in Iraq, where the colonel's Intellimouse Explorer becomes a sniper's dream...
so if they all look like "08 U2 -" then that would kind of suck.
Wow, it certainly would. There, a snarky reply to a lucid and earnest response, and the week's work is at an end.
and whatever rhymes with eloquent
Wherever Tom Selleck went.
People found him eloquent.
No charge to you.
It does make sense to use what you've got, up to a point. But there are advantages to getting a dedicated midi/USB controller. I use a Midiman Oxygen 8, which is pretty cheap. You wouldn't expect a trained pianist to be happy with it, but it works for me. The real advantage over the 'classic' midi keyboard is that it offers a heap of definable knobs (well, 8, as the name implies) that you can map to filter cutoff, reverb send, delay feedback, etc. etc. I haven't used it much with Garageband, but it's invaluable with programs like Reason, Reaktor and Live - much nicer to be able to tweak parameters that way, and to be able to tweak more than one at a time and hop between them intuitively. Mouse XY controllers help in this regard, but I much prefer the Oxygen 8's hardware control method...
Oh, I've played a whole crapload of FPS games, and Halo wipes 'em all, IMO. I've never known a game that I've been able to come back to so often and still find something new. Nigh on every encounter is simply different every time, even if you decide to follow the same route. And I've never played an FPS with so many fantastic non-scripted moments - I've had random encounters in Halo that have been far better than scripted sequences in other games.
This is all single player, really - I've not played Halo with more than four people. I can certainly see the advantage of team / role-based games for larger multiplayer sessions.
It isn't really the tech that keeps me coming back to Halo, though it doesn't hurt... it's the emergent gameplay, which is more than the empty buzzword it sometimes seems to be. The AI in Halo isn't amazing. The weapons aren't amazing (though they are amazingly well balanced). The magic of Halo is in the way every feature interlocks and interacts with every other feature, enabling endless permutations. Halo isn't focused on the large battles; it's focused on the many small ones they're composed of.
But as I said, YMMV. If you're after a rich plot and a variety of experiences, Halo probably won't do much for you - you've met all your enemies by the halfway point, for one thing. But for depth of play, I rate it very highly - though I stress again, it HAS to be played on Legendary for this to show through. Working down from the Control Room in Two Betrayals always puts a grin on my face; how am I going to do it THIS time...?
I can't comment on the performace, as I've only played Halo on Xbox. But I do think you're missing out on the gameplay front.
You have to play on Legendary. The other modes are OK to get you up to speed with the controls and weapons, but the gameplay is all on Legendary. When you're there, the map 'repetition' (remember that Halo offers Silent Cartographer as well as The Library) and lack of enemy variety cease to be concerns. Your sole concern is how you're going to get past that single Covenant Elite and his handful of grunts now that you're out of rockets and down to just a Needler. And that battle - which would be over in under a minute in most FPS titles - might last you five minutes. And if, not when, you win, it'll be an achievement.
Halo doesn't need a wide variety of enemies. They'd dilute the experience. It't not perfect - some might say the adult Flood are an enemy too far - but it's very, very good. The little 'headchicken' Flood creatures are a well thought-out enemy, though - normally they're just an annoyance, easily killed or ignored, and they do precious little damage. But when your shield is gone, a swarm of them can kill you very quickly - they flip from being an annoyance in the background to your most pressing concern.
Still and all, YMMV. But having had countless hours of enjoyment from Xbox Halo (I got it at launch and I still love to play it, even in single player), I feel obliged to defend its gameplay when the opportunity arises. It's likely the best game I've played...
So what's your suggestion for a better system than 'My Photos'? Going one way, you revert to simply 'My Documents', or whatever you want to call the general user data folder, and rely on the user to organise their own folders - but as others have said, the first thing they'll probably do is create a 'photos' folder, so you're back to square one. If they don't organise further subfolders, it's hardly Microsoft's fault.
Going in the other direction, you end up with some kind of wizard system that asks you about photos as they're being imported, and files them according to your answers. I'm sure a lot of people would find this annoying - I know when I import from my camera, I'm often importing photos of a variety of events. I don't want them all lumped uner 'wedding' or whatever, and I don't want to have to provide import-time metadata for each photo.
So the best solution I've found is iPhoto - import in bulk, and then arrange and group easily and at leisure. But my groupings then only make sense in iPhoto itself - on the HD, they're arranged in a human-confusing date-based subfolder system under Apple's equivalent of the 'My Photos' folder. So it seems to me that the 'My Photos' approach is just fine, so long as you have a decent tool for accessing and organising the contents. Your 'consumer level' Mac user probably never even opens their 'Photos' folder - or if they do, they hurry back to the comfort of iPhoto sharpish.
Ha, yeah. I work in a library, and I used to add and replace the spine labels on books. This was done on a large, heavy Olympia typewriter that I came to name 'Oily Pam' (through anagramese). Time came when we invested in a computerised labeller, though we kept Oily Pam on hand for clothbound books, which the computer-created labels weren't great for. Every time a labeller tape ran out, the last few inches of the reel had a striped silver warning design that was still adhesive, and I gradually covered Pam in this half-mirror pattern. But eventually she fell by the wayside entirely, and one day I had to intervene to stop her being thrown in the garbage; now she lives under my desk and my God, I've just noticed this whole story is sounding pretty perverse.
Anyway, the computer-created labels look dreadfully sterile compared to Pam's output, and I found creating them to be a pretty joyless task - tap tap, click, print, as opposed to the handle-cranking, knob-turning, bell-ringing joy of using Pam. Good lord, that's almost obscene, isn't it? I think I might have a problem here.
And if this isn't enough for your typical Unix geek, just pipe your AppleScripts to the BSD command line with scripts like do shell script "ps -auxwww" and voila.
That is a nice feature - I hadn't played around with Applescript before this week, but in an evening I was able to create a small GUI for checking, starting and stopping a MySQL server, and I could see a lot of scope for easily adding functionality to it. Not revolutionary, but it works and saves me a little time - and more importantly, demonstrates to me the potential of wrapping shell scripts (not to mention interactions with iTunes et al) in easily constructed Cocoa GUIs. Aqua + Perl + iPhoto = cheap, easy fun. Scriptable Bluetooth is promising, too...
Yeah, I've used them a few times (and they're only based a few miles away from my home) - they're generally more expensive than the higher profile importers, but as you say, they're not overpriced, and they do offer the security of an inclusive price, so at least you know exactly what you'll be paying. Worth it for expensive discs or sets where the duty would seriously do you some damage... and the service has always been great.
Can't change the weather though... That one you're stuck with- nature of where you are and all.
Ah, but you can use sunglasses or an umbrella, just to muddy up any metaphors that might be in play.
Apathy is certainly an issue, but people with a little online savvy in the UK have the advantage of sites such as STAND to keep them informed and services like Fax Your MP to encourage them to participate. It's never been easier to keep yourself informed and active; you still need the motivation and some sense of hope, of course. Where you'd look for those, I have no idea...
Well, clearly I was... ah... trying to convey that the post should be read as one long, breathless, babbling rant, while avoiding the old caps lock schtick.
Next time, I'll use paragraphs but remove the spaces between words - and you watch, someone will complain about that, too.
In my defence, I'm in the UK - the only <p>s I had were mushy <p>s.
Sorry.
So it's really WAS those Brussels beaurocrats all along? I'll never doubt the tabloids again. Still and all, the BPI are the ones hurling legal around, and they go so far as to have 'British' in their name, so I can't start waving my Union Jack just yet... but at least it could be worse. For a change.
As a general rule, you can import anything under the value of eighteen GB pounds, and be exempt from both VAT and import duty.
Oh, yeah, that is an important point to mention - where possible, order in small or single quantities to take advantage of this. If you do get caught out, the duty (and tax) will be a lot more than the extra postage required.
As far as I can make out, items over 18 are a lottery right now - I've only been caught out three times in scores of purchases, so overall I've saved a hell of a lot of money. I've always been caught around Xmas time, too - I guess they're more vigilant then, though you'd think they'd be too busy to pay much attention. I don't think having a great big branded Amazon box helped, either... red rag to a bull...
I've had nigh on a hundred DVDs shipped over from Hong Kong without any problems at all - sent in a plain envelope, tied with string(!) and marked as a 'gift' - though I don't think the gift/merchandise marking matters if the price barrier is broken, IIRC.
It just makes me even more determined to import, just out of spite... Before long, I'll be regularly paying more than UK prices, just to make a point. That's the real curse of being British...
Gots to be Monkey Ball for non-gamers - no buttons to push (in the main game), gameplay based around simple physics - everyone knows about gravity and inertia, even if only instinctively - a great learning curve, a simple goal, intuitive control with instant feedback... and all wrapped in a great package. I bought my GameCube into work at Xmas, and one non-gaming coworker had ordered one of their own within five minutes of starting Monkey Ball. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it at all; it's a perfect game.
Having said that, try explaining the Monkey Bowling mode to a novice...
"Okay, there'll be a bouncing line - don't press A yet, or... okay, you pressed it, no problem - there's the line. You have to stop it in the middle. Just press A.... you've only got a few seconds. Don't panic! Right, you've stopped it at the side, you'll start rolling in a second or so - you'll need to spin in the opposite direction. Use the shoulder button. No, the shoulder button. Before you cross that line! Oh, see, you span the wrong way. Your monkey's dead."
(Trying to explain it beforehand is even worse, by the way).
It's because they're selling to british and the british are meant to suffer.
We surely are. As an example, I recently sought to nab the 3rd and 4th MST3K box sets. So to start with, not available in the UK. I shop around, find a good deal on Amazon for the pair, and send off. Now, importing into the UK is an absolutely random gamble - your package may or may not be checked and subjected to extra duty. Mine was - an extra 13 on top, split between Customs and the Royal Mail. But it's not all bad - the total price was still less than the other vendors, and way less than I would have been expected to pay if there was a UK release. Our prices are generally ridiculous for DVDs and CDs - there has been some improvement of late, but price cuts are generally led by major chains who can afford the risk, leaving smaller independent stores in an unfortunate position. If I think an independent store is worth supporting, I'll happily do so - but I won''t fork cash out to high-street chains when I can get the same product much cheaper online (though the online store is probably a subsidiary of the bricks-and-mortar one) and I won't buy British when I can buy American (or even better, Chinese) for far less. It's not like I'm helping kill off master British craftsmen - just a few corpulent CEOs. And while I might contribute to a salesperson begin surplus to requirements, I'll also be contributing to the demand for postal workers...
It's just a very nice tool to use with the iPod, that's all. You don't need it, I don't need it, but I do enjoy having it. I don't and can't use the music store, but iTunes makes it very easy to organize, sort and import files through a very nice interface. There's also a lot of scope for extending functionality through Applescript. I'm sure there are lots of alternative apps that do similar things, from proprietary tools to OGG/MP3 handling Perl scripts, and that's great. But an iPod and iTunes have a very nice synergy. One of the features I really like is iTunes' smart playlists, and the ability to create them on the iPod.
Well, there you go. Some people like it, is all. I think it's a very well designed piece of software and it's certainly the best music handling program I've used. YMMV - try it and see, if you're curious. Won't cost you anything.
Yok! Though Aphex is probably delighted with that. This is an interesting problem, though - the flat fee works well for a lot of electronica, as tracks can often be very lengthy. But they can also be extremely short - you know, not usually THIS short, but still... Warp could charge according to time, but they'd have a hard time arriving at a fair price due to the extreme variations in length.
Personally, I've bought several albums from Warp, and that works out very cheap. I've bought a few single tracks, but clearly you'd have to be quite eccentric to fork out over a dollar for six seconds. Good cause, though.
I can't use the iTunes store yet, but I notice on there they have a number of long jazz tracks that maintain the 99c price - heading into the 20/30 minute mark on occasion. It's nice to see the prices for these left static - I'd have expected them to be raised. Tragic cynicysm, really...
Sorry, yes - what I meant to say was that if enough people come to their site *and* mention that it's not very usable - it seems to me that the site has intrinsic usability problems, so as more people come to it, more will hopefully comment on this. Sadly, I couldn't seem to find a comment link on the site itself, merely a contact email for order problems. I guess the regular Warp site email would suffice, but even that could be hard to find for people what with all the Flash navigation and 'mystery clicking' required.
You're quite right, they need a feedback option. Maybe they've had a lot of crazy user input in the past and they now discourage it, who knows...
Yeah, the site is as bad as the rest of the Warp site - terrible to use. The worst thing is using their poxy arrows to scroll through the tiny frames - no scrollbars at all, and the arrows move the (potentially lengthy) list at a crawl. At least they don't appear to use the dreaded accelleration effect, where the list starts moving at warp speed (no pun intended) just as it reaches your destination...
So they need a lot of positive feedback on the content and delivery, and a lot of requests for a better navigation system. Chiefly, give me a scrollbar! They're part of the toolkit for a reason, and replacing them with your own inferior solution is annoying and, I guess, arrogant.
It'll be Designers Republic, won't it? They can undeniably design, but they're not that concerned with usability. The site does look professional, but after using it for a while I was itching for a more convenient, friendlier interface. YMMV, naturally, you might think the site is the best thing since sliced bread. I think the SERVICE might be the best thing since sliced bread, definitely... I've now bought over half a gig of tracks. I'm going to recommend this up the yin-yang; and maybe if more people come to the site, Warp will feel a need to reassess the design.