To me it seems like any question you ask, you get a snappy response or someone trying to make you look like a fool. As a person who's been using computers in some capacity for over 15 years, it's quite irritating to my senses. To linux snobs, it doesn't matter how much you know if you are just beginning in linux, because you are a linux n00b that's worthless and should "go back to windows." Another thing I really hate is the insistance that Windows is the wrong application in every place. I was having a candid discussion about how I was reinstalling windows on my laptop because I couldn't get the resolution to go past 800x600 in linux and I didn't feel like farting around with it anymore. I got berated by people telling me how awful it was to do this, no suggestions otherwise of how to fix my particular problem besides general FAQs which I had already gone through and saw fail, and looked at as a hater of OSS. Well, I run linux on my second computer, and I would love to transition my main computer to linux but the support just really isn't there and I don't get a great deal of pleasure farting around with my computer when I can just use the free windows I have installed and get some real use out of it. To Linux nazis like the ones I encountered tho, there is no in between. If you are running windows on anything you are an ignoramous who knows nothing about computers... If you want people to use things, this is hardly the way to go about it.
I've said this before, but dual-analog SUCKS. It is a horrid way to control a FPS and it has kept me from buying one of the current incarnations of consoles. If I wanted to play FPS I would just play them on the PC where it makes sense. They need a new control mechanism if they want to do FPS games on a console effectively. If you think about it, the controller design with the seperate analog stick might just be what is needed, a separation of concerns. Yes it will be able to detect position and everything, but just the fact that you have one hand controlling position and the other controlling other actions is a step closer to the native feel of mouselook.
Looks like AMD still has them beat. From my take on this, on pure performance, the 3800+ X2 is going toe-to-toe and the 4800+ X2 is beating it every single time. So again, not that impressive. Now the per watt performance is important in some applications, so I can see why it would be a better, say, mobile platform than the AMD chips. But let's not pretend that Intel is winning the benchmarks with this quite yet.
...a simulation of an afternoon over your annoying cousin's house as a kid who would never let you play his video games, but instead insisted you watch him instead...
This is where I would break into the radical of saying that software companies using this model should perhaps keep a backlog of previous versions available to their customer and continue to support these for as long as possible, even if the features in one particular version have become obsolete or have been removed in subsequent versions. This would be part of that model.
In an online model, you have no choice essentially but to upgrade, unless the provider runs a separate server with old versions which seems very unlikely to be expected. However, I'd think in the online model it would be less expected for apps to have a "platform" to run on, essentially. Online applications are essentially more of a risk in general, because you have to be reasonbly sure that the company will continue to operate, because there is no "hard copy" of the software at all.
It's pretty sad when you leave a complete genre in the dirt in order to pursue a more generalized and clunky system for controlling characters. Adventure games weren't supposed to be platformers, or 3d fighting games, or any of the stuff that these companies tried to turn them into just before pulling the plug entirely, and then they wondered why all their legacy titles "new updated versions" didn't sell well.
Anyone that says that "point-and-click is dead" obviously never played the Sims...Which just happens to be a great selling title for EA and uses ALL point-and-click.
The fact remains that point-and-click, for 3rd person adventure games still remains probably the best method of control for a PC. Adventure games aren't supposed to be about navigating the environment in the same way as other games. The death of the quest for glory, kings quest, and indiana jones series were definitely when they stepped out of the genre of point and click, fun, light, mind adventures, into the world of 3rd person, poorly designed navigation. I actually still kind of liked the charm of QFG5's story despite the absolutely horrible controls and very cumbersome fight interface. They could've easily slapped on 3d engines to this relatively simple point-and-click model, but instead these companies tried to fit a stereotype and lost. The death of point and click adventures is something that is seriously tragic for PC gaming. And I believe it killed the reputations of both Sierra and Lucasarts.
Game companies have grown too complacent and used to the idea that by spinning off another game based on a successful franchise, your going to make millions in profit. Every MAJOR game developer currently is working on a SEQUEL. Smaller game developers are simply cloning big game franchise and offering some moderate twists and variations of a theme.
Not everyone is in this, see Will Wright and spore....
If you look at the fact that no code is ever flawless, and always has bugs, so there's always patches and upgrades. Most people in the regular software industry are passing off intermediate versions of flawed software as a product, and then giving the service away for free. This is just the opposite of that model and it makes more sense. Continuing to support, and making bug fixes to past versions of software is part of the service, clients have a real voice in the future of the software package by communicating what their future needs are. As they pay per period versus per version, software development companies don't have to guess anymore what their clients want to get them to "buy the new version" instead, the clients can have a real voice in what features are important to them in the future, without the need for pushing stuff off to a higher version versus an incremental update. It's a better model because instead of selling "why you have to ditch this old one and buy this new one" you are instead saying, "we have an established relationship in the past, and if you enjoy this, we can continue." Resulting in less useless bells and whistles in new versions, and more of the actual needed functionality. Instead of inventing things you dream they will want, you take care of their changing needs instead. That's why I think it's a winning model (if companies followed it correctly).
I think having the vehicle control emergency systems is a lot safer than having the car completely drive itself at this point. It combines the best of what people are good at, which is being able to physically identify where they need to be on the road and maintain basic control, and what a computer is good at: namely, crunching numbers.
Humans are worse at thinking logically in situations where they have to emergency brake, or steer, etc. and are more prone to panic. If the computer could figure out these functions for the driver, that would make driving a car a lot safer in hazardous conditions.
Having played Morrowind, I understand why they made this game behave the way they did, but I can't say that I agree with it.
In Morrowind, it was very simple to amass large quantities of wealth by stealing everything in houses and going off to the nearest trader, who would give you money in exchange. This was certainly much easier than killing the overpowering monsters that attacked you (especially as a thief) and then getting 5 gold for their pelts.
I think, however, that they thought this was _too_ easy and too tempting for ordinary classes.
I'd argue that while it is pretty easy, it is necessary. It's unrealistic to have people steal things and get caught by the simple fact that the item is "stolen." It's an invisible flag that doesn't make any sense. I think that the creators of Oblivion were bothered by how easily you could get away with stealing in the first game and decided that this was the way to curtail that.
I believe that they should've just made the shops more strictly guarded. They should've made stealing harder, the penalties for getting caught maybe more severe. A lot of the ability to steal in Morrowind stemed from the fact that most shops had other rooms with no guards, no locks, or a petty lock and stuff sitting out everywhere with nobody looking after it.
But yes, the stolen flag does indeed cut down on realism quite a bit, and I totally disagree with that decision. Part of what made Morrowind so fun was the ability to steal without getting caught in a realistic way.
This could kill small and medium-sized web hosting providers.
Like they care, the ability of killing off small and medium sized hosting providers is a fucking fringe benefit. They don't like the freedom of having these alternatives to the major infrastructure monopolies available anyway. Killing off these providers will allow the Internet to become as corporately dominated as any other type of media, and help make it so you cannot venture outside of the system.
Umm, let's see, how about ACTUAL POLICE INVESTIGATION.
This is, plain and simple, a government regulated attempt at creating a permanent pond for a fishing expedition. I am sorry, you cannot sit back and welcome our country's parallel of the Chinese government (read China's policies on data retention in the other news today), and say that it's necessary to catch child molestors. There _are_ other methods.
What it is is a product of the fact that search engines are actually useful now. I remember in Altavista you used to have to wade knee deep in sewage through all the pages before you found something relevant to what you searched for. Because of the way the engine functioned, the first results were usually the least relevant. Nowadays search engines like Google usually nail it outright, making even the "I'm feeling lucky" button work a majority of the time. I see this as an absolutely positive thing, and I wouldn't have needed an investigation to figure this out either.
...would be able to quote this as a good thing. The fact that Sony, Dell, and Bose also scored high shows that the study has nothing to do with quality of company at all. Look at Dell, its outsourced support, its inferior products. Look at Sony, rootkits, proprietary formats, total lack of quality in most components... Look at bose, in the industry it stands for "buy other sound equipment", and frequently people say "no highs, no lows, must be bose", there's also a slogan that alters the company motto: "bose: better sound through marketing". These companies aren't being graded in this article because of _quality_ as the other companies listed are hardly quality players themselves. If Apple fans want to be taken seriously, they should stop worrying so much about winning converts or market share and start worrying about how to make cheaper or actually superior products. Anything short of wanting this end, instead of just popularity, is just brand loyalty and nothing else. So if this makes you smile, it's probably because you are a fan boy.
It does not usually include the data processed by programs unless this is in a format such as multimedia which depends on the use of computers for its presentation.
It doesn't require the use of a computer, unless you consider everything that has a processor containing the ability to read and play an MP3 file a computer. Which is a stretch of the definition but I bet some would take it that far. I, on the other hand, would not.
I'm sick of people letting them get away with misrepresentations and use them as legal loopholes. There may be things that are half-code and half-data, as was mentioned by someone in this reply chain, there may be some things like multimedia CDs which are both, but a strict media file containing no executable information is simply NOT software. I don't care who came up with the definition.
If they want to put it under the definition of media, that would actually make more sense. Either way I'm against the idea of taxing digital downloads, but that classification would at least make sense. But these assholes are too lazy to even make a new law to collect their money, presumably because the new law would garner little to no public support.
I would actually argue that the meshing of data and software is not a great thing anyway, but that's a computer science perspective. People have different expectations for data, such as Office macro viruses. I understand the usability argument contained in this, it's useful to have scripts in data and everything, but I would argue that it would be good to keep these things as separate as possible without impeding functionality too much. It promotes the propagation of viruses. However, there still is a difference between the database itself, and the thing utilizing the database in most cases, for example.
The software acts like the hardware, virtually, in the case of multimedia. A player is just like an empty CD player in the real world, and the MP3 file is the "disc." It's an interpretation of data->audio, not self-executable code->audio, and that's why I find the software argument to be very inaccurate. If they want to make this argument, then in my opinion these multimedia "software" files should use procedural routines to generate the audio on demand, instead of relying on hard data...
I also understand that some software packages are a balance of both, data and procedures, with either one being relatively useless without the other, as in the case of games and such. But the distinction between a game's engine and that the creative people fuel that engine with, is still there to quite an extent. If you were just to sell game data on a CD, I think it would be inaccurate to describe that as "software" too.
I apologize for the lack of a better example, but the idea I have, I believe is right. There should be a very distinct difference in most peoples' minds between data and executables, tho executables can contain data, and vice versa. And this is the very reason that.jpg.exe was such a popular way to pass around viruses for a while.
Even in the case of MS Office data files, the code portion would be pretty much useless without the "software" that is MS Office... Though that distinction is a lot more arguable.
...a DVD, a CD, and other types of media that are just media are also "software." In a CD's case for example, the CD causes a CD player program to react and play a tune, so is the CD now software? These idiots don't even understand the distinction between "data" and software. Let me give you a hint morons: software is executable, data isn't, the two are not the same at all. Data, in and of itself, causes nothing to happen. You could double-click on an MP3 all day, if you have no player installed it doesn't work. We seriously need to start getting people into office that understand computers at least to this basic degree.
But if you are into free internet hookups, myspace is definitely a pretty good source. It allows you to actually find non-tech girls and tech girls alike. Almost everyone has a myspace, so you aren't just limited to the fat girls that have to talk on the Internet cuz they can't get a man elsewhere anymore. All this variety, despite the crappy pages, is great. It's good to meet people on the Internet that aren't all just about the Internet. No matter if the pages are ugly or not...cuz I don't look at them much to begin with.
Alcohol's side effects also have to do with the liver usage involved in breaking down the chemicals. You have to remember that alcohol is essentially to our bodies, a poison.
I have noticed a large amount of sleep helps, this is probably due to the fact that it takes a while for the liver to work it off.
Why didn't they host torrents to their own games? They try to act like starforce was uncrackable, complete lie. I know for a fact you can easily get around their copy protection.
How about actual game economics? What you need is a fixed amount of money to flow into the game at all times, instead of merchants constantly willing to buy items off of you and an unlimited amount of gold available. Now I know in games there's _technically_ a limit, but I think this should be more regulated in game form. MMOs are starting to echo the real world in the need for real economic controls. I think prices for things, instead of varying from town to town in game, should also vary based on other factors. I honestly think that a game with a more complicated virtual economy might be able to curtail some of these issues, by making it harder to get cheap gold by tricks, and making it easier to get enough gold to afford what you need. Just imagine if a game had a flaw where you could find an infinite amount of some type of sword by killing something over and over again, but as the market gets flooded with the sword in the game, the price for it goes down just like it would in real life. Now that's a game I'd like to be a part of.
Slashdot Mirror
To me it seems like any question you ask, you get a snappy response or someone trying to make you look like a fool. As a person who's been using computers in some capacity for over 15 years, it's quite irritating to my senses. To linux snobs, it doesn't matter how much you know if you are just beginning in linux, because you are a linux n00b that's worthless and should "go back to windows." Another thing I really hate is the insistance that Windows is the wrong application in every place. I was having a candid discussion about how I was reinstalling windows on my laptop because I couldn't get the resolution to go past 800x600 in linux and I didn't feel like farting around with it anymore. I got berated by people telling me how awful it was to do this, no suggestions otherwise of how to fix my particular problem besides general FAQs which I had already gone through and saw fail, and looked at as a hater of OSS. Well, I run linux on my second computer, and I would love to transition my main computer to linux but the support just really isn't there and I don't get a great deal of pleasure farting around with my computer when I can just use the free windows I have installed and get some real use out of it. To Linux nazis like the ones I encountered tho, there is no in between. If you are running windows on anything you are an ignoramous who knows nothing about computers... If you want people to use things, this is hardly the way to go about it.
I've said this before, but dual-analog SUCKS. It is a horrid way to control a FPS and it has kept me from buying one of the current incarnations of consoles. If I wanted to play FPS I would just play them on the PC where it makes sense. They need a new control mechanism if they want to do FPS games on a console effectively. If you think about it, the controller design with the seperate analog stick might just be what is needed, a separation of concerns. Yes it will be able to detect position and everything, but just the fact that you have one hand controlling position and the other controlling other actions is a step closer to the native feel of mouselook.
When I download the shows there's definitely no advertisements =P Thank god for bittorrent...
Looks like AMD still has them beat. From my take on this, on pure performance, the 3800+ X2 is going toe-to-toe and the 4800+ X2 is beating it every single time. So again, not that impressive. Now the per watt performance is important in some applications, so I can see why it would be a better, say, mobile platform than the AMD chips. But let's not pretend that Intel is winning the benchmarks with this quite yet.
...a simulation of an afternoon over your annoying cousin's house as a kid who would never let you play his video games, but instead insisted you watch him instead...
How did they know what I wanted?
This is where I would break into the radical of saying that software companies using this model should perhaps keep a backlog of previous versions available to their customer and continue to support these for as long as possible, even if the features in one particular version have become obsolete or have been removed in subsequent versions. This would be part of that model. In an online model, you have no choice essentially but to upgrade, unless the provider runs a separate server with old versions which seems very unlikely to be expected. However, I'd think in the online model it would be less expected for apps to have a "platform" to run on, essentially. Online applications are essentially more of a risk in general, because you have to be reasonbly sure that the company will continue to operate, because there is no "hard copy" of the software at all.
It's pretty sad when you leave a complete genre in the dirt in order to pursue a more generalized and clunky system for controlling characters. Adventure games weren't supposed to be platformers, or 3d fighting games, or any of the stuff that these companies tried to turn them into just before pulling the plug entirely, and then they wondered why all their legacy titles "new updated versions" didn't sell well.
Anyone that says that "point-and-click is dead" obviously never played the Sims...Which just happens to be a great selling title for EA and uses ALL point-and-click.
The fact remains that point-and-click, for 3rd person adventure games still remains probably the best method of control for a PC. Adventure games aren't supposed to be about navigating the environment in the same way as other games. The death of the quest for glory, kings quest, and indiana jones series were definitely when they stepped out of the genre of point and click, fun, light, mind adventures, into the world of 3rd person, poorly designed navigation. I actually still kind of liked the charm of QFG5's story despite the absolutely horrible controls and very cumbersome fight interface. They could've easily slapped on 3d engines to this relatively simple point-and-click model, but instead these companies tried to fit a stereotype and lost. The death of point and click adventures is something that is seriously tragic for PC gaming. And I believe it killed the reputations of both Sierra and Lucasarts.
Not everyone is in this, see Will Wright and spore....
If you look at the fact that no code is ever flawless, and always has bugs, so there's always patches and upgrades. Most people in the regular software industry are passing off intermediate versions of flawed software as a product, and then giving the service away for free. This is just the opposite of that model and it makes more sense. Continuing to support, and making bug fixes to past versions of software is part of the service, clients have a real voice in the future of the software package by communicating what their future needs are. As they pay per period versus per version, software development companies don't have to guess anymore what their clients want to get them to "buy the new version" instead, the clients can have a real voice in what features are important to them in the future, without the need for pushing stuff off to a higher version versus an incremental update. It's a better model because instead of selling "why you have to ditch this old one and buy this new one" you are instead saying, "we have an established relationship in the past, and if you enjoy this, we can continue." Resulting in less useless bells and whistles in new versions, and more of the actual needed functionality. Instead of inventing things you dream they will want, you take care of their changing needs instead. That's why I think it's a winning model (if companies followed it correctly).
I think having the vehicle control emergency systems is a lot safer than having the car completely drive itself at this point. It combines the best of what people are good at, which is being able to physically identify where they need to be on the road and maintain basic control, and what a computer is good at: namely, crunching numbers.
Humans are worse at thinking logically in situations where they have to emergency brake, or steer, etc. and are more prone to panic. If the computer could figure out these functions for the driver, that would make driving a car a lot safer in hazardous conditions.
Having played Morrowind, I understand why they made this game behave the way they did, but I can't say that I agree with it. In Morrowind, it was very simple to amass large quantities of wealth by stealing everything in houses and going off to the nearest trader, who would give you money in exchange. This was certainly much easier than killing the overpowering monsters that attacked you (especially as a thief) and then getting 5 gold for their pelts. I think, however, that they thought this was _too_ easy and too tempting for ordinary classes. I'd argue that while it is pretty easy, it is necessary. It's unrealistic to have people steal things and get caught by the simple fact that the item is "stolen." It's an invisible flag that doesn't make any sense. I think that the creators of Oblivion were bothered by how easily you could get away with stealing in the first game and decided that this was the way to curtail that. I believe that they should've just made the shops more strictly guarded. They should've made stealing harder, the penalties for getting caught maybe more severe. A lot of the ability to steal in Morrowind stemed from the fact that most shops had other rooms with no guards, no locks, or a petty lock and stuff sitting out everywhere with nobody looking after it. But yes, the stolen flag does indeed cut down on realism quite a bit, and I totally disagree with that decision. Part of what made Morrowind so fun was the ability to steal without getting caught in a realistic way.
...until it comes to questions of child workers...then it's all about the profit.
Like they care, the ability of killing off small and medium sized hosting providers is a fucking fringe benefit. They don't like the freedom of having these alternatives to the major infrastructure monopolies available anyway. Killing off these providers will allow the Internet to become as corporately dominated as any other type of media, and help make it so you cannot venture outside of the system.
Umm, let's see, how about ACTUAL POLICE INVESTIGATION. This is, plain and simple, a government regulated attempt at creating a permanent pond for a fishing expedition. I am sorry, you cannot sit back and welcome our country's parallel of the Chinese government (read China's policies on data retention in the other news today), and say that it's necessary to catch child molestors. There _are_ other methods.
What it is is a product of the fact that search engines are actually useful now. I remember in Altavista you used to have to wade knee deep in sewage through all the pages before you found something relevant to what you searched for. Because of the way the engine functioned, the first results were usually the least relevant. Nowadays search engines like Google usually nail it outright, making even the "I'm feeling lucky" button work a majority of the time. I see this as an absolutely positive thing, and I wouldn't have needed an investigation to figure this out either.
...would be able to quote this as a good thing. The fact that Sony, Dell, and Bose also scored high shows that the study has nothing to do with quality of company at all. Look at Dell, its outsourced support, its inferior products. Look at Sony, rootkits, proprietary formats, total lack of quality in most components... Look at bose, in the industry it stands for "buy other sound equipment", and frequently people say "no highs, no lows, must be bose", there's also a slogan that alters the company motto: "bose: better sound through marketing". These companies aren't being graded in this article because of _quality_ as the other companies listed are hardly quality players themselves. If Apple fans want to be taken seriously, they should stop worrying so much about winning converts or market share and start worrying about how to make cheaper or actually superior products. Anything short of wanting this end, instead of just popularity, is just brand loyalty and nothing else. So if this makes you smile, it's probably because you are a fan boy.
It doesn't require the use of a computer, unless you consider everything that has a processor containing the ability to read and play an MP3 file a computer. Which is a stretch of the definition but I bet some would take it that far. I, on the other hand, would not.
I'm sick of people letting them get away with misrepresentations and use them as legal loopholes. There may be things that are half-code and half-data, as was mentioned by someone in this reply chain, there may be some things like multimedia CDs which are both, but a strict media file containing no executable information is simply NOT software. I don't care who came up with the definition.
If they want to put it under the definition of media, that would actually make more sense. Either way I'm against the idea of taxing digital downloads, but that classification would at least make sense. But these assholes are too lazy to even make a new law to collect their money, presumably because the new law would garner little to no public support.
I would actually argue that the meshing of data and software is not a great thing anyway, but that's a computer science perspective. People have different expectations for data, such as Office macro viruses. I understand the usability argument contained in this, it's useful to have scripts in data and everything, but I would argue that it would be good to keep these things as separate as possible without impeding functionality too much. It promotes the propagation of viruses. However, there still is a difference between the database itself, and the thing utilizing the database in most cases, for example.
The software acts like the hardware, virtually, in the case of multimedia. A player is just like an empty CD player in the real world, and the MP3 file is the "disc." It's an interpretation of data->audio, not self-executable code->audio, and that's why I find the software argument to be very inaccurate. If they want to make this argument, then in my opinion these multimedia "software" files should use procedural routines to generate the audio on demand, instead of relying on hard data...
I also understand that some software packages are a balance of both, data and procedures, with either one being relatively useless without the other, as in the case of games and such. But the distinction between a game's engine and that the creative people fuel that engine with, is still there to quite an extent. If you were just to sell game data on a CD, I think it would be inaccurate to describe that as "software" too.
I apologize for the lack of a better example, but the idea I have, I believe is right. There should be a very distinct difference in most peoples' minds between data and executables, tho executables can contain data, and vice versa. And this is the very reason that .jpg.exe was such a popular way to pass around viruses for a while.
Even in the case of MS Office data files, the code portion would be pretty much useless without the "software" that is MS Office... Though that distinction is a lot more arguable.
because they will be full of ads anyway...
...a DVD, a CD, and other types of media that are just media are also "software." In a CD's case for example, the CD causes a CD player program to react and play a tune, so is the CD now software? These idiots don't even understand the distinction between "data" and software. Let me give you a hint morons: software is executable, data isn't, the two are not the same at all. Data, in and of itself, causes nothing to happen. You could double-click on an MP3 all day, if you have no player installed it doesn't work. We seriously need to start getting people into office that understand computers at least to this basic degree.
But if you are into free internet hookups, myspace is definitely a pretty good source. It allows you to actually find non-tech girls and tech girls alike. Almost everyone has a myspace, so you aren't just limited to the fat girls that have to talk on the Internet cuz they can't get a man elsewhere anymore. All this variety, despite the crappy pages, is great. It's good to meet people on the Internet that aren't all just about the Internet. No matter if the pages are ugly or not...cuz I don't look at them much to begin with.
Alcohol's side effects also have to do with the liver usage involved in breaking down the chemicals. You have to remember that alcohol is essentially to our bodies, a poison.
I have noticed a large amount of sleep helps, this is probably due to the fact that it takes a while for the liver to work it off.
It doesn't even prevent piracy. Starforce has been hacked since the day it came out almost. You make it hack proof and we'll make a better hack.
Why didn't they host torrents to their own games? They try to act like starforce was uncrackable, complete lie. I know for a fact you can easily get around their copy protection.
How about actual game economics? What you need is a fixed amount of money to flow into the game at all times, instead of merchants constantly willing to buy items off of you and an unlimited amount of gold available. Now I know in games there's _technically_ a limit, but I think this should be more regulated in game form. MMOs are starting to echo the real world in the need for real economic controls. I think prices for things, instead of varying from town to town in game, should also vary based on other factors. I honestly think that a game with a more complicated virtual economy might be able to curtail some of these issues, by making it harder to get cheap gold by tricks, and making it easier to get enough gold to afford what you need. Just imagine if a game had a flaw where you could find an infinite amount of some type of sword by killing something over and over again, but as the market gets flooded with the sword in the game, the price for it goes down just like it would in real life. Now that's a game I'd like to be a part of.
...even the duke nukem forever april 1st joke is late!