As a side note, I don't know why game companies use starforce. It doesn't prevent piracy, there's even a little program you can run to get around it completely, and then you run the game like all the rest of the pirated crap. Game companies need to stop waging war on their own customers to stop piracy, because they aren't preventing piracy anyway.
The ability for a mobile USB Host is there, I have one in an MP3 player of mine and it's a great little piece of functionality.
PDAs just don't have enough memory to be fully useful. I think PDAs should be a mini-computer, but they just aren't anything even approaching as useful as a computer on a mobile level.
I used to have a Palm pilot from IBM, I forget exactly what model. It did have its uses. We are just now seeing the reinstitution of things like caching websites for later viewing on the road without Internet again, I had this on my palm already. I could do a lot of neat stuff with the little applications I could find for the palm, but a lot of it was a cheap hack I must say.
If you want a PDA to be as useful as a computer, you should mix MP3 player storage and playing ability with perhaps video support as well, the ability to be a USB host, and to run applications. And make the platform easy to code for. Palm used to really be an easy platform for designers, the design kit was free of charge. MS's stuff seems less accessible. There are many obvious features that are simply missing because people don't understand what a mobile PC like device should be capable of.
...is this such a big deal? Games are out of the basement now. They don't require hours of toiling around to learn how to play. Hell, my 6 year old cousin plays more games than I ever did at his age. They are a full grown entertainment category. You're obviously going to get more girl gamers, and who cares. You'll get more of every type of gamer, because the technology has become definitely something more immersive than any other type of entertainment. Some girls will play, some won't. Some guys will play, some won't. There's not really a news story here. Attaching a stigma to the fact that there are female gamers is the same thing as saying girls aren't good at math or science or whatever. Stop putting such an emphasis on gender. And I'll still kick that bitch's ass at Quake anyday =P
Let's face this fact:
Regular people aren't going to throw away their shiny dell boxes in order to run a new OS. It's not going to happen, it won't happen. If Apple seriously wanted to lure Windows customers over to itself, it would have an OS X version that could be installed on a Dell, not a software package to install Windows XP on an iMac. The problem isn't that people are having trouble running Windows on their iMac, the trouble is that people are having troulbe with the OS on their Dell and don't see an alternative. I personally would love to try OS X, but I don't want Apple's hardware. Despite what they might say, it's akin to other designer garbage I wouldn't waste my money on, because it's not superior due to brand alone. (But it does cost more)
Maybe not hardcore gamers, people tend to get in these circles and forget that most people aren't hardcore gamers. Most people that buy games aren't hardcore about them, and that deer hunting for the computer was a great selling title.
Don't get too far up your own ass, lots of gamers buy walmart, maybe just not the gamers you know.
In case you haven't heard, in related news....and this is right kiddies, walmart is getting into the high end business too. Maybe snapper will re-debut there. This will not last forever, surely the sun will turn into a red giant if a nuclear winter doesn't first kill us all, or global warming or whatever, but it's going to last a long fuckin time given the current climate of the country.
That's horse shit, before walmart moved into my town there was k-mart, and a ton of other things that could fill the needs of a walmart type store. They are building a superwalmart ten minutes from where I live when there's already a regular walmart 15 minutes up, and 20 minutes in the other direction. It's not a matter of need, nobody needs this many fucking walmarts.
I am so sick of this argument. I can vote all I want with my dollar, if I was only going to spend 200 a year at walmart anyway, it doesn't leave a mark on it. I can _try_ and fail to arrange a boycott, and I can do a lot of other things that will probably have no bearing on the store. Morons will continue to shop there whether you do or not, regardless of their policies. Some shop there because it's plain and simply all they can afford anymore. When you vote with your dollar, however, you are almost sure to be voted down. What I think is the government needs more control over retail monsters like Walmart. (Though I'm sure the laissez faire capitalists and the lobbyist assholes would never allow this due to their "free market"). Investigate into Walmart, they use government social programs to sustain their employees past what normally would be the breaking point. So technically I pay for Walmart to have a higher profit in my taxes. Vote with your dollar my ass.
Of course you haven't seen a shooter that runs as smoothly as the original Doom, Doom was originally 2d sprites and an emulated "3d looking" environment. It wasn't even true 3d. But, I don't have a 400 dollar video card and I can play Oblivion, which is probably the most resource intensive game out there nowadays, and it runs fairly smoothly to great on my hardware. And that game is anything but "closed in to make up for framerates." You may disagree for the need to pursue photo realism over gameplay, but let's please not pretend like you have to be a bleeding edge with a 3000 dollar system just to play today's games, it's simply untrue. And let's also not pretend like you can't get smooth frame rates in anything. Hell, if we aren't even going high def, you could put your PC on 640x480 (a traditional console res) and run smooth as silk.
...something had to be done in the world of console FPS games. Using both analog sticks at the same time is still miles behind mouselook. Everyone talks about GTA for the PS2 and such, but I waited for the PC editions, and what I found is I could easily beat the games in a considerably smaller amount of time because I wasn't battling the controller to try to aim. I don't think using both thumbs is a proper workaround. I've been gaming practically all my life and it seems very foreign to me, I can definitely see how that puts non gamers off. It's crap, and I guess, at least Nintendo is trying. Play before having an opinion, but at least there's an attempt at a better control mechanism.
Who are these people that find that Oblivion just does not have enough content and they must buy even more addons? From my view, it looks like you'd never even, in imaginable life, even if you were playing hours upon hours a day, really come across everything in Oblivion it is so big, and you need more? Then you wanna complain about high prices? Anyone dumb enough to need more content in that game deserves to pay.
...might be a bad PR move for Amazon, but surely whether it leaves a "black mark" on the company or not, they continue, whereas they can practically kill the lesser site with litigation. Maybe now, now patents aren't leaving that big of a mark on innovation, but what happens when Ballmer actually does pull out his crappy bag of tricks on linux. The truth is I don't care why companies aren't suing upstarts, I care about the fact that the suit is possible, and in time may prove more profitable and offer quite an opportunity to stifle competition. The normal use case aside, it's like he says, "the principle of the matter", here. This is why government is in place, I don't give a shit why a company isn't suing someone for using a status bar, they shouldn't be able to in the first place, it's ridiculous.
Very true, and this is what the government has done for centuries. Instead of having real stances on real issues that you can hear and be party to, candidates nowadays just play on your respective biases on minor social issues.
Whether gay people get married or not is not really that big of an issue in the overall sense of things, but to a lot of backward thinking people (many of those in the so-called "red states"), this is THE issue.
Jon Stewart touched on this after the elections, how people thought they were voting in completely different elections. His was about issues, and the war in Iraq, and a return to sanity, whereas their election was based on dem damn homosexuals.
People have given into these minor divisions for years. It's simple, you divide people up into subdivisions based on physical/pyschological properties that they cannot change and then use these divisions as a way to get them to vote for your party. In the meantime, your party can do whatever it likes because of its standing on irrelevant issues, and still win elections.
It's simple really, and both parties do it to some extent. Democrats seem to do it on a non-winning spectrum, however, attempting to "promote awareness" for "minorities" instead.
Only, until we can wake up and stop voting for these "rich cocksuckers who don't give a shit about you" (George Carlin), the problems will never be dealt with.
Good luck running Oblivion on this, the system requirements are so stringent that even my 4200+ X2 with 2gb of ram gets a bit scathed by running it. Now I must admit that my video card is kind of subpar compared to other components (GEForce 6600GT), but still, good luck.
500 every six months is still cheaper than having to buy a new system every six months. And let's face it, only morons with more money than brains buy 500 dollar video cards every six months.
I took your advice:
fascism (fsh'z'm) pronunciation
n.
1. often Fascism
a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
Here I thought I was being ironic and look at that...kind of turned out true.
Thanks for the suggestion.
This works in graphics because different card makers might concentrate on different new elements of their cards. For example, Nvidia might focus more on lightning and environmental effects and ATI focuses on reflections (just an example). These features, therefore are unique, but when trying to make a graphics card capable of displaying more and more complicated and realistic graphics, it makes sense that the two companies would not always have the same immediate focus, because the problem is huge. The window manager problem is not huge, and hasn't had any huge advances in the last decade really. Maybe a touch up here or there, but nothing that should impede the ability for developers for linux from writing write once, play forever style GUI software for linux. I honestly think this is not only an easily reachable goal, but also an important one for Linux development. It's not necessary, as some say, to completely merge the window managers, but to provide common ground so that application developers don't have to worry about what window manager you picked I would argue is necessary. Choice is important, but so is ease of development. This way you get both.
You are correct, but do you think that they even have that? Evidence of IP addresses can't even confirm what user was using the computer at the time, or the connection with the advent of routers. It could easily have been someone else entirely.
I call BS, there are legal arguments to be made in the matter. It's not a matter of the legality of piracy, but the proof that can be questioned in nine out of ten cases. I'd like for these RIAA attorneys to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the charges are accurate in these cases. First of all, the amounts are questionable. I don't think $750 per song shared is a reasonable assumption of loss. There's no telling how much money would've actually been made had the person not shared the song. For the first thing, you can't assume that everyone that downloaded the song would've bought it. You also can't assume that every time a person downloaded a portion of a song, that this is legally the same as downloading the whole thing. Even if you charge $1 per song downloaded, or $1 per shared copy distributed, it's hard to actually come up with concrete numbers in these cases. This is a court of law, they have to prove losses, not speculate, and I think this is where the RIAA can definitely be challenged.
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As a side note, I don't know why game companies use starforce. It doesn't prevent piracy, there's even a little program you can run to get around it completely, and then you run the game like all the rest of the pirated crap. Game companies need to stop waging war on their own customers to stop piracy, because they aren't preventing piracy anyway.
No duel setup is ever a waste of resources, EN GARDE!!
The ability for a mobile USB Host is there, I have one in an MP3 player of mine and it's a great little piece of functionality. PDAs just don't have enough memory to be fully useful. I think PDAs should be a mini-computer, but they just aren't anything even approaching as useful as a computer on a mobile level. I used to have a Palm pilot from IBM, I forget exactly what model. It did have its uses. We are just now seeing the reinstitution of things like caching websites for later viewing on the road without Internet again, I had this on my palm already. I could do a lot of neat stuff with the little applications I could find for the palm, but a lot of it was a cheap hack I must say. If you want a PDA to be as useful as a computer, you should mix MP3 player storage and playing ability with perhaps video support as well, the ability to be a USB host, and to run applications. And make the platform easy to code for. Palm used to really be an easy platform for designers, the design kit was free of charge. MS's stuff seems less accessible. There are many obvious features that are simply missing because people don't understand what a mobile PC like device should be capable of.
...is this such a big deal? Games are out of the basement now. They don't require hours of toiling around to learn how to play. Hell, my 6 year old cousin plays more games than I ever did at his age. They are a full grown entertainment category. You're obviously going to get more girl gamers, and who cares. You'll get more of every type of gamer, because the technology has become definitely something more immersive than any other type of entertainment. Some girls will play, some won't. Some guys will play, some won't. There's not really a news story here. Attaching a stigma to the fact that there are female gamers is the same thing as saying girls aren't good at math or science or whatever. Stop putting such an emphasis on gender. And I'll still kick that bitch's ass at Quake anyday =P
Let's face this fact: Regular people aren't going to throw away their shiny dell boxes in order to run a new OS. It's not going to happen, it won't happen. If Apple seriously wanted to lure Windows customers over to itself, it would have an OS X version that could be installed on a Dell, not a software package to install Windows XP on an iMac. The problem isn't that people are having trouble running Windows on their iMac, the trouble is that people are having troulbe with the OS on their Dell and don't see an alternative. I personally would love to try OS X, but I don't want Apple's hardware. Despite what they might say, it's akin to other designer garbage I wouldn't waste my money on, because it's not superior due to brand alone. (But it does cost more)
Don't get too far up your own ass, lots of gamers buy walmart, maybe just not the gamers you know.
In case you haven't heard, in related news....and this is right kiddies, walmart is getting into the high end business too. Maybe snapper will re-debut there. This will not last forever, surely the sun will turn into a red giant if a nuclear winter doesn't first kill us all, or global warming or whatever, but it's going to last a long fuckin time given the current climate of the country.
That's horse shit, before walmart moved into my town there was k-mart, and a ton of other things that could fill the needs of a walmart type store. They are building a superwalmart ten minutes from where I live when there's already a regular walmart 15 minutes up, and 20 minutes in the other direction. It's not a matter of need, nobody needs this many fucking walmarts.
I am so sick of this argument. I can vote all I want with my dollar, if I was only going to spend 200 a year at walmart anyway, it doesn't leave a mark on it. I can _try_ and fail to arrange a boycott, and I can do a lot of other things that will probably have no bearing on the store. Morons will continue to shop there whether you do or not, regardless of their policies. Some shop there because it's plain and simply all they can afford anymore. When you vote with your dollar, however, you are almost sure to be voted down. What I think is the government needs more control over retail monsters like Walmart. (Though I'm sure the laissez faire capitalists and the lobbyist assholes would never allow this due to their "free market"). Investigate into Walmart, they use government social programs to sustain their employees past what normally would be the breaking point. So technically I pay for Walmart to have a higher profit in my taxes. Vote with your dollar my ass.
Of course you haven't seen a shooter that runs as smoothly as the original Doom, Doom was originally 2d sprites and an emulated "3d looking" environment. It wasn't even true 3d. But, I don't have a 400 dollar video card and I can play Oblivion, which is probably the most resource intensive game out there nowadays, and it runs fairly smoothly to great on my hardware. And that game is anything but "closed in to make up for framerates." You may disagree for the need to pursue photo realism over gameplay, but let's please not pretend like you have to be a bleeding edge with a 3000 dollar system just to play today's games, it's simply untrue. And let's also not pretend like you can't get smooth frame rates in anything. Hell, if we aren't even going high def, you could put your PC on 640x480 (a traditional console res) and run smooth as silk.
Right, because high resolution graphics have never helped PC games either. What are they thinking with higher quality?
...something had to be done in the world of console FPS games. Using both analog sticks at the same time is still miles behind mouselook. Everyone talks about GTA for the PS2 and such, but I waited for the PC editions, and what I found is I could easily beat the games in a considerably smaller amount of time because I wasn't battling the controller to try to aim. I don't think using both thumbs is a proper workaround. I've been gaming practically all my life and it seems very foreign to me, I can definitely see how that puts non gamers off. It's crap, and I guess, at least Nintendo is trying. Play before having an opinion, but at least there's an attempt at a better control mechanism.
Who are these people that find that Oblivion just does not have enough content and they must buy even more addons? From my view, it looks like you'd never even, in imaginable life, even if you were playing hours upon hours a day, really come across everything in Oblivion it is so big, and you need more? Then you wanna complain about high prices? Anyone dumb enough to need more content in that game deserves to pay.
...might be a bad PR move for Amazon, but surely whether it leaves a "black mark" on the company or not, they continue, whereas they can practically kill the lesser site with litigation. Maybe now, now patents aren't leaving that big of a mark on innovation, but what happens when Ballmer actually does pull out his crappy bag of tricks on linux. The truth is I don't care why companies aren't suing upstarts, I care about the fact that the suit is possible, and in time may prove more profitable and offer quite an opportunity to stifle competition. The normal use case aside, it's like he says, "the principle of the matter", here. This is why government is in place, I don't give a shit why a company isn't suing someone for using a status bar, they shouldn't be able to in the first place, it's ridiculous.
Very true, and this is what the government has done for centuries. Instead of having real stances on real issues that you can hear and be party to, candidates nowadays just play on your respective biases on minor social issues. Whether gay people get married or not is not really that big of an issue in the overall sense of things, but to a lot of backward thinking people (many of those in the so-called "red states"), this is THE issue. Jon Stewart touched on this after the elections, how people thought they were voting in completely different elections. His was about issues, and the war in Iraq, and a return to sanity, whereas their election was based on dem damn homosexuals. People have given into these minor divisions for years. It's simple, you divide people up into subdivisions based on physical/pyschological properties that they cannot change and then use these divisions as a way to get them to vote for your party. In the meantime, your party can do whatever it likes because of its standing on irrelevant issues, and still win elections. It's simple really, and both parties do it to some extent. Democrats seem to do it on a non-winning spectrum, however, attempting to "promote awareness" for "minorities" instead. Only, until we can wake up and stop voting for these "rich cocksuckers who don't give a shit about you" (George Carlin), the problems will never be dealt with.
Good luck running Oblivion on this, the system requirements are so stringent that even my 4200+ X2 with 2gb of ram gets a bit scathed by running it. Now I must admit that my video card is kind of subpar compared to other components (GEForce 6600GT), but still, good luck.
500 every six months is still cheaper than having to buy a new system every six months. And let's face it, only morons with more money than brains buy 500 dollar video cards every six months.
Wouldn't that legal argument be the equivalent of owning a handgun and being responsible for someone committing a crime by using it?
I took your advice: fascism (fsh'z'm) pronunciation n. 1. often Fascism a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government. 2. Oppressive, dictatorial control. Here I thought I was being ironic and look at that...kind of turned out true. Thanks for the suggestion.
Wait, wouldn't KDE be the square in that case?
This works in graphics because different card makers might concentrate on different new elements of their cards. For example, Nvidia might focus more on lightning and environmental effects and ATI focuses on reflections (just an example). These features, therefore are unique, but when trying to make a graphics card capable of displaying more and more complicated and realistic graphics, it makes sense that the two companies would not always have the same immediate focus, because the problem is huge. The window manager problem is not huge, and hasn't had any huge advances in the last decade really. Maybe a touch up here or there, but nothing that should impede the ability for developers for linux from writing write once, play forever style GUI software for linux. I honestly think this is not only an easily reachable goal, but also an important one for Linux development. It's not necessary, as some say, to completely merge the window managers, but to provide common ground so that application developers don't have to worry about what window manager you picked I would argue is necessary. Choice is important, but so is ease of development. This way you get both.
...that Apple would just ship OS X for regular PCs, that way we could all put OS X on our machines and be done with this whole thing.
You are correct, but do you think that they even have that? Evidence of IP addresses can't even confirm what user was using the computer at the time, or the connection with the advent of routers. It could easily have been someone else entirely.
I call BS, there are legal arguments to be made in the matter. It's not a matter of the legality of piracy, but the proof that can be questioned in nine out of ten cases. I'd like for these RIAA attorneys to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the charges are accurate in these cases. First of all, the amounts are questionable. I don't think $750 per song shared is a reasonable assumption of loss. There's no telling how much money would've actually been made had the person not shared the song. For the first thing, you can't assume that everyone that downloaded the song would've bought it. You also can't assume that every time a person downloaded a portion of a song, that this is legally the same as downloading the whole thing. Even if you charge $1 per song downloaded, or $1 per shared copy distributed, it's hard to actually come up with concrete numbers in these cases. This is a court of law, they have to prove losses, not speculate, and I think this is where the RIAA can definitely be challenged.
...the multimillion dollar corporations sue you!