On something like Starcraft, the tutorial scenarios are nice, but perhaps they could be streamlined a bit. From what I recall (it's been quite a while), they're set up so that each scenario is the tutorial for using one type of unit. Even though, IIRC, those scenarios are fairly short, it would still be not difficult to combine a couple units' scenarios.
Starcraft is about what I had in mind when I wrote that. The second time I play the starcraft campaign I may not need to start at the "I've never played an RTS in my life stage".
I don't mind that the tutorials are there, I mind that I can't skip them, or just play the last 3 in the series, or whatever.
And then do what once the player has exhausted the space on the memory cards? Offer to rent the player more space to save games on the Internet?
On systems with only "memory cards" sure the behaviour should take that into account, and having rolling autosaves separate from explicit player saves or something.
Backwards like O vs. X in PlayStation games from different regions, or the placement of A and B buttons on Xbox vs. DS?
Backwards like every game lets you push start or 'A' to start, except one which requires you to push 'B' or select to start. I wasn't actually aware O and X are swapped on PS regions... that seems a little demeneted too. As for A/B on the DS vs Xbox, I don't really have an issue with that.
And what happens when the player has remapped the buttons such that the menus become useless?
Typically, you map game functions to buttons, so "fire" maps to "a" instead of "x". It would be moronic to remap button 'a' to button 'x'. Thus, the menus should continue to work just fine, because changing what button causes 'fire' in the game has no impact on the menu.
Then what graphic is the game expected to use to represent your controller? Most players don't know where "Button 0" through "Button 15" are. Or should we expect players to use a digital camera to produce a photo of their controller?
The controls setup, when you are using a keyboard/mouse usually just shows you the functions, grouped by category and the key(s)/mouse buttons you have mapped to them. No image is necessary. If I'm playing with a 360 controller, sure, show me a 360 controller if you want to make it easier, and its part of the 'games for windows' logo program that you support it, but if im not, then don't.
The issue with lost planet was that when a new action was required it would prompt me in game with stuff like "Push to "
Huh?! Why isn't it just telling me to press the 'V' key, which is what the function it wants me to use is actually mapped to? Or at the very least, why isn't it telling me the function name like Push the "Use Object" button. No, its showing me what the function is mapped to on a controller I'm not using. So I have to pause the effing game, and go look at the xbox controller setup to figure out what function that button is mapped to, and then lookup what keyboard key that function is mapped to in order to figure out what to push.
It should only swap out the whole 8GB if your actually using all that memory, at least software suspend on linux works this way.
Fair comment.
I figure if i'm running so many apps that i'm using 8gb of ram, then loading memory from disk will actually be quicker than loading all those apps manually.
Not necessarily. Its true if you wanted to pick up where you left off exactly. But usually I find I'll start my day with checking email, checking the news, etc. On a cold boot I get to do that markedly faster. Its true my VMWare machines haven't loaded yet, or the Visual Studio debugging session hasn't started yet, but I find waiting for all of them to load at once at the beginning to be an annoyance... especially if I'm not going to actually -use- Visual Studio & Photoshop for the next several hours...
Also, at least with software suspend it can compress the image and it resumes fairly quickly, because it swaps the core kernel back in and swaps all the apps back in later (chances are you wont be actively using every app your running on an 8gb system).
Compression helps a bit, in theory at least, I've never tested it with compression disabled/enabled to see how much it really makes a difference. But regardless the disk is still thrashing until its done. I don't find the system to be terribly usable until its finished loading.
With vista, resuming from hibernate gives you an extra 'spinning logo' screen to sit through while it restores the memory image. So its not interactive at all until its done. And I find I generally prefer a cold start to having my desktop recreated exactly where I left off.
The trouble is that some applications aren't compatible with these sleep/resume techniques, and the last thing you want after a wake from hibernation is a bunch of 'application must be closed' dialog boxes.
It seems many applications don't release resources and reacquire them properly after a hibernation cycle. The medical imaging software [video capture] in particular doesn't survive a hibernate cycle.
#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one.
#2 - always say "press any button" to start game. whatever. I'd say its more important to just work with the common ones. Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.
#3 - go one further - acknowledge left handed players and design a map, sure it won't match every lefties preference but nothing sucks worse than having to remap a game from SCRATCH because its totally unusable for a lefty especially since at this point we haven't played it yet and don't really know which commands are most important, a lefthanded-template to start from would be nice. (This applies mostly to keyboard / PC games of course)
Also let us save and restore our control maps on the fly for crying out loud. More than one player plays the game, and my brother uses some whacky options. And don't lock it up in some player profile we select when we start the game. When I play NFS carbon for example my friends and frequently just hand off the controller between races in career mode, we don't want to each run our own separate career, and we want to be able to swap control preferences easily.
And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one. And don't prompt me ingame to push xbox controller buttons. (I'm looking at you Lost Planet!!)
#4 - cutscenese - yeah we need to be able to skip them, especially the long one at the beginning, and doubly so for anything we might see -during- gameplay. ESPECIALY the one right before the boss fight that you'll have to redo a dozen times or so. I've given up on games because I couldn't handle the cutscene between dying and trying again. And seriously, get rid of those cutscenese that are 4 minutes long, then require you to manually walk forward 3 feet, open a door, and then launch into another 4 minute cutscene.... that's just retarded.
#5 - good camera controls - obviously
#6 - good controls - obviously
#7 - accessibility options - meh, this is important, but not top 10.
#8 - cheap enemies is an issue. cheap level design is even worse.
#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these. When the first 5 missions of a cmapaign are really the instruction manual/tutorial. Yes, have tutorials in the game, but give players the option to skip the 'learn how to move my units' missions, or set them aside as the "Tutorial Campaign".
#10 - let players in and out of the game painlessly. obviously a good idea.
My memory usage when running my usual set of apps (excluding vmware) is around 2.5GB to 3.0GB. My comment about upgrading to 8GB was based largely on my use of VMWare; and the fact that I run various linuxes, along with XP Pro and Vista x32 as guest OSes (not all at once, but usually more than one); and that uses gobs of RAM.
OK let me rephrase: what do you want 4GB of RAM for anyway, if you don't have a RAID 0+1 array of Seagate Barracudas to make disk writes quick?
I currently spend very little time swapping to the page file, so the disk write speed is actually less of an issue. That said, I have a fast sata2 drive with NCQ enabled, and while not as fast as a raid, is faster than any single disk I've ever used before. (I also have an eSata drive hooked up for backups, etc).
I use my (desktop) computer with S3 suspend. 5 seconds later and it's on again (it takes more time for my monitor to wake up). There's only one problem though: sometimes, the Bluetooth dongle takes a longer nap and I have to wait about 30 seconds to have my keyboard back.
My wired usb mouse has the same issue [Razer Copperhead - its hard finding a decent laser mouse for left handed people, I think logitech and microsoft hate us.]; just waking up from sleep it will often take 15 seconds after the rest of the PC is ready to go. Drives me nuts.
Is there an option to load the state of the machine on a fresh boot? That would save time on reboots.
I have 4GB of RAM (2x2GB) with Windows x64, and expect to have 8GB within the year. I've tried the hibernate or whatever its called. Its not really faster. The time time to save and load that 4GB file is non-trivial. In theory its nice when you've got a lot of open stuff on the go, but then I don't trust it enough not to save all my work properly anyway.
Overall, I don't think its that great, and I particularly don't like that its the default in vista. For example, when support tells you to reboot they want a fresh start, half the time the users just turn it off and on, instead of 'reboot', and under vista that just bounces into hibernate and back and accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Probably because they didn't feel they had enough evidence against her and they wanted to strenghten thier case. Moral or not, it is legal.
If you get one speeding ticket a day for 3 years they still expect you to pay them all.
But if you got one ticket a day for 3 years, you would have known by the 2nd day you were doing something wrong. They don't wait three years before dumping them all in your lap at once.
You don't get a free pass on the first year of tickets if they only come after you the 2nd for not paying, even though they "allowed" you to keep driving.
This isn't about not *paying* the first year of tickets. They never brought them to you in the first place. You didn't know you had the tickets, you might not even have known you were speeding. They just kept accumulating them in a box and then dumped them all on you at once the 2nd year.
No, distributing songs on Kaza requires you to either place a song in your shared folder, or download one and leave it in the shared folder. It also requires you to start Kaza whenever you want to begin sharing.
Its been a long time since I used a Kazaa program, but most of them offer to round up your music during install / first run, and the sharing is on by default. All you have to do is click through it with the defaults. And nobody turns Kazaa on becaise they 'want to begin sharing' they turn it own to either download or listen to a song. The sharing happens incidentally and automatically. I'm not saying it happens 'against their will'.
In fact its just like most speeding tickets - most of the time people are just driving with the flow of traffic and they get busted. They were speeding, and its not like they were doing it against their will, but its not like they set out to speed that day either.
Not just shoplifting... shoplifting CDs, making thousands of copies of them,
It wasn't actually established she made even a single copy, never mind thousands. Potentially she made thousands, but potentially she made 3.
and handing them out to everyone who wanted one.
Firstly, If she was standing on the street corner for 3 years handing out thousands of CDs for free the first question that would come to my mind is why didn't they stop her after a couple days? Why wait until thousands have been distributed?
When a cop pulls you over for speeding he gives you a speeding ticket for that incident of speeding, he doesn't stalk you for 15 months, and then dump 360 speeding tickets worth $50,000 on you all at once, one for every time you went over the limit.
When the police find someone doing B&E's they stop him immediately, they don't follow him for 3 years, and then at the end hit him with hundreds of charges.
In other words, if they'd contacted this woman in a timely manner, instead of monitoring her for years there'd be no potential that she distributed thousands of copies, and the harm she'd caused would be minimal, and the settlement, likewise, minimal. Which would be appropriate.
And secondly, if she was handing out CD's she would physically be handing them out. Operating Kazaa involves installing it, and walking away for a year without touching it. If I put a CD on my website so I can download it at work, and forget about it and sits there for a year, I still only did at most one minor inadvertant crime, even if thousands of copies were made. I shouldn't be held to the same punishment that someone with a cd replicator making thousands of copies would be. That's a sophisticated operation showing intent to massively infringe, installing Kazaa barely registers as intent to commit a massive crime.
She was charged with distributing, not just downloading.
And yet there was no evidence presented that she actually distributed a thing. She was charged with 'distributing' for merely 'making available', and the actual 'making available' was accomplished with little more than a single click when she initially installed the software. You can't seriously claim that's on par with running a bank of cd replicators churning out thousands of discs.
more attention should be paid to the damages the law says is reasonable
Agreed.
This case is on par with shoplifting and should be punished as such.
The woman probably lied to the jury, and the woman was probably guilty, and the jury was probably right to convict. But the damages, those are the real question. And as part of that, are the damages so out of whack that they motivated to the defendant to lie?
I mean, if I were at a shoplifting trial and the penalty was a public stoning, I would expect the defendant to try pretty much anything to dodge the bullet. And if I thought the defendant did it, but that there was no way she should have to pay that kind of price I'm stuck.
Yes, there is 'jury nullification', but lawyers universally hate it, judges don't like it (probably because they are all former lawyers), and when juries are instructed by the judge the option to nullify isn't mentioned. So it isn't mentioned much, and doesn't happen much, and most people don't know its really an option.
Additionally, in this case its not so much the law itself that needs to be nullified but the damages attached to it. I don't think shoplifting is right, but I'm not going to stone someone over it, not ever, not even if they lied to me to my face in a court. But that's me.
I'm looking for better results from the unreasonable/unconstitutional damages cases that are springing up, because those I think have real shot at winning. And this case will only fuel that fire. $220,000 for 24 shared tracks is absurd.
1) In the case of skydiving, the FAA regulates the activity. That's more than 'guidelines'. And the helmet requirement is not a 'suggestion'.
In the case of racing, the various 'guidelines' while not enforced as 'laws' they are still strictly enforced. You drive unsafe on a track and you'll be removed from that track immediately.
2) Pretty much *Everybody* travels by car as driver or passenger. So it impacts pretty much everybody. On top of that there were 6.28 million -police reported- crashes in the US in 1999... one every 5 seconds, so accidents happen a LOT.
It should be no surprise that there is an entire section of the government devoted to operating motor vehicles on the road.
And if we as a society decided en mass to all go rock climbing every day you should pretty much expect to see an extensive body of law written around that too.
Because once they realized they'd need a name MORE CLEVER than..
This isn't about clever.
Its name doesn't need to elicit feelings of euphoria or anything.
No, but its name shouldn't elicit feelings of mediocre, lower quality, and bargain basement cheap.
In Canada and much of the US at least, the store "K-mart" is a widely known 'walmart-like' store that's known for being a 'cheap/bargain department store'.
And he's suggesting a K-"product" like KOffice picks up on that K association. Sort of like naming it McOffice might resonate with the lower quality cheap McDonald's food (or McFood).
At least that's where I think he's going, I don't personally have that much of an association with the letter K. But then, I didn't live near a k-mart most of my life either.
Then you'd agree that we should ban skydiving, rock climbing, bull riding, car racing, and anything else you might have to "fund your care for 30 years".
Most of those activities have safety guidelines to minimize the incidence and the extent of injuries. The last time I took my car on the track I had to have the vehicle inspected, wear the seatbelt, and a helmet too.
As well as sit through a short refresher on track safety, track signals, and an overview of the track itself including a discussion of the various corners and how to take them, and the fact that one of the straightaways that did double duty as a drag-strip tended to be oilier than the rest of the track.
Next factor in that there are no 'intersections', and that if an accident does occur anywhere, the rest of the vehicles are immediately signaled to alert them of the unsafe conditions ahead, and/or signalled to stop or slow down and not attempt passing as needed.
Next factor in that emergency crews are on hand, and spotters line the track.
Finally, if anyone drives in an unsafe manner they are immediately flagged down and removed, warned, and likely suspended from re-entering.
Overall, I'd say its far *safer* than driving on the street, despite the higher speeds.
Not wearing a seatbelt is pretty dumb, or at best self destructive. But why don't people have the right to be dumb or self destructive?
Good question.
As long as you are being covered by insurance it is reasonable to require you to take *reasonable* steps to mitigate health and safety risks.
Frankly, I'm willing to allow people to be outright self destructive if they can demonstrate an ability to pay for any consequences [and go off the insurance by putting some millions into escrow instead], and they can demonstrate that they are of sound mind going into it.
The first criteria is because I don't think we the public, or even we the other people paying insurance premiums should subsidize your *deliberate* stupidity. But I don't want to create a position where we let you die while you beg for help because you've gone 'off insurance' and now can't pay.
The second criteria is there because I don't want to enable people who aren't thinking straight to do suicidal stuff. (Going a bit on-tangent, I am pro euthanasia, and right to die, but temper it with a belief that most people shouldn't *want* to die or injure themselves, and that if they do it is right to try and help get people through it. But if they are in constant unbearable pain, and just want out, by all means, they should have the right.
That said, how many people really qualify on both criteria? I suspect if there were actually enough of them to matter, they could get a law passed to allow them to do what they want. I for one wouldn't stand in their way *IF* they could pay, and *IF* they weren't of unsound mind.
Isn't "90 to 95 percent self-sufficient" another way of saying "Not self-sufficient"?
Absolutely.
But "100%" isn't really required. If a re-supply rocket from earth has to drop off additional resources to keep it going once every two years then it would be more than self-sufficient enough.
An inter-stellar voyage, with the goal of colonizing another planetary system at the other end would need to be self sufficient, and contain the resources it would need to build at the other end.
A moon base, by contrast, is little more than the ISS, except on the moon. We can anticipate shuttling personnel and resources back and forth on a semi-regular basis.
People such as yourself seem quick to forget that multiplayer gaming on the PC wasn't always free
Pretty much, yes, it was.
but you forget about services such as TEN, Dwango, MPlayer, Heat.net
No, those were matchmaking services. Multiplayer was already available on an "enter the ip address of the server", basis.
Besides those were never that popular outside of what they offered for free. (I vaguely recall using mplayer for something, rainbow six maybe? But I never paid them a dime.
The only reason Xbox live is doing well is because they have the platform so locked up nobody else can introduce any alternatives.
No. Its not the hobbit. Its what happens after the Hobbit, before LoTR. Jackson appears to want to do TWO movies, first The Hobbit, then one about the interim in between.
Well, not to argue against your general points (which I agree with), but in this case, yes, if you had to pay damages you would pretty much be expected to pay 20x more if you caused 20x more damages.
But you are considering only restitution.
There is restitution and there is punitive damages. Typically, a significant part of the damages award is 'punitive' to discourage you from doing it. If I stole a pack of cigarettes, got caught, and had to pay for the cigarettes there'd be no reason not to do it. So typically the court assesses a punitive amount as well.
In the case of copyright, a statutory $750 minimum is established for violating a work, even if the actual damages are less than that.
So for cigarettes, if you steal a pack, the damages would be say $7. If you steal a carton the damages would be $210. But the punitive damages would probably be the same for both, say $500. So $7 + $500 = $507 for a single pack, or $210 + $500 = $710 for the carton. No court would award $10,140 (20x507) because you stole a carton instead of a pack.
Unfortunately, for copyright infringement, they do. If you infringe a song its $750 in damages minimum, even if no real harm was caused. Infringe -1 CD- of 24 songs and you are on the hook for a minimum of $18,000 EVEN IF NO REAL DAMAGES WERE CAUSED.
In Gmail you can easily import mail from any POP3 account. There are a lot of tools available that check for new messages on gmail or any other webmail.
Right, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about all the stuff that desktop mail clients can do with other applications on the desktop.
How often do you really have to restart your browser?
Every time I have a couple dozen windows open, which happens frequently.
Also, you don't loose any data when closing & reopening your webmail so I don't see a problem here.
I don't want it to require reopening my webmail. I find it an annoying issue. I like that my email is in a different stack in my task bar on windows/linux, or a different icon on the dock when using OSX. Makes it easier to switch to it, then to hunt through a dozen browser windows...
You don't need a mail client for that, just a harddisk where you can store downloaded attachments too.
The most logical place to leave those large attachments is attached to the email they came on. Why would I want to implement some perverse local attachment filing system?
but I find that the added features like fast full text search,
No reason a desktop version can't do that.
not having to delete any email
No reason a desktop version can't do that.
no worries with backups
Unless your webmail host goes bankrupt. I've seen it happen to people before. And google isn't immune from bankruptcy. (Although I concede its not likely for the foreseeable future.)
Compare this to "Always accessible, on any computer, anywhere"....that has high speed internet.
I don't know what planet your on, but this one has huge swatches of space where internet is nonexistant (airplanes, the cabin in the mountains, the boat on the lake, ), slow (most of rural america is still on dialup, high speed digital cellular access is still fairly limited in many regions), or ghastly expensive (international roaming on those aforementioned digital celluar services, the resort hotel in mexico...)
I much prefer being able to read & search all my mail wherever I am.
I have a laptop. Unlike high speed internet, it actually is possible to use it anywhere I take it.
Besides that, you can have both.
Yes, and I never said otherwise. Webmail is useful and it has its place, but it doesn't replace a mail client. A lot of people have a need and preference for both. I don't want to give up webmail access but I'm not willing to abandon using a mail client either.
I would hope that any decent ISP would have periodic backups of the mail servers, so they probably do have everything you've ever sent or received.
What on earth would they keep around 5 year old backups of the mail queue for?
For that matter, even if you run your own mail server, your ISP could monitor everything that goes across your line.
Suppose there are 2 pills. One pill is poisonous and if you choose it you will die. The other pill is considerably less poisonous and if you eat it you might die, but probably not, in fact odds are you won't even get sick.
Which pill do you choose?
I'll choose the strong likelihood of surviving over certain death every time thank you.
Yes my ISP *might* scan or read my email, but google *does*. See the difference?
Its not so much the policy itself, its the impact of the policy.
Consider how much information they potentially have about you if your an avid google fan... and even if your not they have a shocking amount of data.
They might have any or all of the following:
1) your email (and your contacts) 2) your search history... 3) the analytics information from any site you visited using google analytics (no small number) 4) your conversations in google talk... 5) your youtube activity... 6) your google documents... 7) what ads you've clicked on (assuming they were google or doubleclick ads which form a significant chunk of them.) 8) your picasa activities 9) your computers contents if you use google desktop 9) They likely even combine it with what is attributed to you on the public web
From that they can fairly reliably deduce where you bank, what credit cards you have, what products you own, where you live, where you go, your sexual orientation, your age, your job, whether you have kids, your income level, where you vacation, your education level, and so on and so on...
Combine all that with:
"We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information."
Considering that the primary service they offer is highly detailed profiles of various demographics to advertisers, improving their primary service means building better profiles. Even if they have a policy of not sharing 'personal' information, what do they define as personal?
If you take a profile as detailed as the one's google has on some people and 'anonymise' it how hard would it be to fill in the blanks? Does google anonymize it internally? Nope.
I don't think they are at this stage yet where they are actually doing this level of cross indexing to identify people, but its coming.
And I for one, realize that what I do on the web is largely in plain sight to the world.
Its not a big issue if your ISP knows where you go, an advertising company knows what you click on, and a search engine company knows what you search for, and your phone company knows who you call, but you combine all that information in one place, and then give them your email, your pictures, your documents, and your contacts... and it paints a very different picture.
I don't intend on helping them profile me more than I have to, feeding them valuable personal information, in exchange for what? "free webmail"?
What exactly happens, of any interest, in that period?
Hmm.. I'm not 100% on the timeline but...
Gandalf and Aragorn meet. The romance of Aragorn and Arwen. Aragorn serving with the Armies of Rohan.
Gollum pursues Bilbo from the mountains. I beleive Gandalf investigates the creature and discovers its history in this period. Mordor also captures Gollum at some point.
The Dwarves (including Balin of the hobbits) try and retake Moria.
Sauruman is corrupted by Mordor through the Palantir.
Sauroman corrupts Theoden through Grima Wormtongue.
Sauron, identified as the 'Necromancer' was discovered as the source of evil in Mirkwood and was driven out by the White Council, only to resurface later rebuilding in Mordor.
I dunno... I've seen movies made on smaller premises than that:)
Slashdot Mirror
The issue with lost planet was that when a new action was required it would prompt me in game with stuff like "Push to "
supposed to be:
"push {picture of xbox 'z' button} to {perform action}"
On something like Starcraft, the tutorial scenarios are nice, but perhaps they could be streamlined a bit. From what I recall (it's been quite a while), they're set up so that each scenario is the tutorial for using one type of unit. Even though, IIRC, those scenarios are fairly short, it would still be not difficult to combine a couple units' scenarios.
Starcraft is about what I had in mind when I wrote that. The second time I play the starcraft campaign I may not need to start at the "I've never played an RTS in my life stage".
I don't mind that the tutorials are there, I mind that I can't skip them, or just play the last 3 in the series, or whatever.
And then do what once the player has exhausted the space on the memory cards? Offer to rent the player more space to save games on the Internet?
On systems with only "memory cards" sure the behaviour should take that into account, and having rolling autosaves separate from explicit player saves or something.
Backwards like O vs. X in PlayStation games from different regions, or the placement of A and B buttons on Xbox vs. DS?
Backwards like every game lets you push start or 'A' to start, except one which requires you to push 'B' or select to start. I wasn't actually aware O and X are swapped on PS regions... that seems a little demeneted too. As for A/B on the DS vs Xbox, I don't really have an issue with that.
And what happens when the player has remapped the buttons such that the menus become useless?
Typically, you map game functions to buttons, so "fire" maps to "a" instead of "x". It would be moronic to remap button 'a' to button 'x'. Thus, the menus should continue to work just fine, because changing what button causes 'fire' in the game has no impact on the menu.
Then what graphic is the game expected to use to represent your controller? Most players don't know where "Button 0" through "Button 15" are. Or should we expect players to use a digital camera to produce a photo of their controller?
The controls setup, when you are using a keyboard/mouse usually just shows you the functions, grouped by category and the key(s)/mouse buttons you have mapped to them. No image is necessary. If I'm playing with a 360 controller, sure, show me a 360 controller if you want to make it easier, and its part of the 'games for windows' logo program that you support it, but if im not, then don't.
The issue with lost planet was that when a new action was required it would prompt me in game with stuff like "Push to "
Huh?! Why isn't it just telling me to press the 'V' key, which is what the function it wants me to use is actually mapped to? Or at the very least, why isn't it telling me the function name like Push the "Use Object" button. No, its showing me what the function is mapped to on a controller I'm not using. So I have to pause the effing game, and go look at the xbox controller setup to figure out what function that button is mapped to, and then lookup what keyboard key that function is mapped to in order to figure out what to push.
It should only swap out the whole 8GB if your actually using all that memory, at least software suspend on linux works this way.
Fair comment.
I figure if i'm running so many apps that i'm using 8gb of ram, then loading memory from disk will actually be quicker than loading all those apps manually.
Not necessarily. Its true if you wanted to pick up where you left off exactly. But usually I find I'll start my day with checking email, checking the news, etc. On a cold boot I get to do that markedly faster. Its true my VMWare machines haven't loaded yet, or the Visual Studio debugging session hasn't started yet, but I find waiting for all of them to load at once at the beginning to be an annoyance... especially if I'm not going to actually -use- Visual Studio & Photoshop for the next several hours...
Also, at least with software suspend it can compress the image and it resumes fairly quickly, because it swaps the core kernel back in and swaps all the apps back in later (chances are you wont be actively using every app your running on an 8gb system).
Compression helps a bit, in theory at least, I've never tested it with compression disabled/enabled to see how much it really makes a difference. But regardless the disk is still thrashing until its done. I don't find the system to be terribly usable until its finished loading.
With vista, resuming from hibernate gives you an extra 'spinning logo' screen to sit through while it restores the memory image. So its not interactive at all until its done. And I find I generally prefer a cold start to having my desktop recreated exactly where I left off.
The trouble is that some applications aren't compatible with these sleep/resume techniques, and the last thing you want after a wake from hibernation is a bunch of 'application must be closed' dialog boxes.
It seems many applications don't release resources and reacquire them properly after a hibernation cycle. The medical imaging software [video capture] in particular doesn't survive a hibernate cycle.
#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one.
#2 - always say "press any button" to start game. whatever. I'd say its more important to just work with the common ones. Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.
#3 - go one further - acknowledge left handed players and design a map, sure it won't match every lefties preference but nothing sucks worse than having to remap a game from SCRATCH because its totally unusable for a lefty especially since at this point we haven't played it yet and don't really know which commands are most important, a lefthanded-template to start from would be nice. (This applies mostly to keyboard / PC games of course)
Also let us save and restore our control maps on the fly for crying out loud. More than one player plays the game, and my brother uses some whacky options. And don't lock it up in some player profile we select when we start the game. When I play NFS carbon for example my friends and frequently just hand off the controller between races in career mode, we don't want to each run our own separate career, and we want to be able to swap control preferences easily.
And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one. And don't prompt me ingame to push xbox controller buttons. (I'm looking at you Lost Planet!!)
#4 - cutscenese - yeah we need to be able to skip them, especially the long one at the beginning, and doubly so for anything we might see -during- gameplay. ESPECIALY the one right before the boss fight that you'll have to redo a dozen times or so. I've given up on games because I couldn't handle the cutscene between dying and trying again. And seriously, get rid of those cutscenese that are 4 minutes long, then require you to manually walk forward 3 feet, open a door, and then launch into another 4 minute cutscene.... that's just retarded.
#5 - good camera controls - obviously
#6 - good controls - obviously
#7 - accessibility options - meh, this is important, but not top 10.
#8 - cheap enemies is an issue. cheap level design is even worse.
#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these. When the first 5 missions of a cmapaign are really the instruction manual/tutorial. Yes, have tutorials in the game, but give players the option to skip the 'learn how to move my units' missions, or set them aside as the "Tutorial Campaign".
#10 - let players in and out of the game painlessly. obviously a good idea.
what do you want 4GB of ram for anyway?
My memory usage when running my usual set of apps (excluding vmware) is around 2.5GB to 3.0GB. My comment about upgrading to 8GB was based largely on my use of VMWare; and the fact that I run various linuxes, along with XP Pro and Vista x32 as guest OSes (not all at once, but usually more than one); and that uses gobs of RAM.
OK let me rephrase: what do you want 4GB of RAM for anyway, if you don't have a RAID 0+1 array of Seagate Barracudas to make disk writes quick?
I currently spend very little time swapping to the page file, so the disk write speed is actually less of an issue. That said, I have a fast sata2 drive with NCQ enabled, and while not as fast as a raid, is faster than any single disk I've ever used before. (I also have an eSata drive hooked up for backups, etc).
I use my (desktop) computer with S3 suspend. 5 seconds later and it's on again (it takes more time for my monitor to wake up). There's only one problem though: sometimes, the Bluetooth dongle takes a longer nap and I have to wait about 30 seconds to have my keyboard back.
My wired usb mouse has the same issue [Razer Copperhead - its hard finding a decent laser mouse for left handed people, I think logitech and microsoft hate us.]; just waking up from sleep it will often take 15 seconds after the rest of the PC is ready to go. Drives me nuts.
Is there an option to load the state of the machine on a fresh boot? That would save time on reboots.
I have 4GB of RAM (2x2GB) with Windows x64, and expect to have 8GB within the year. I've tried the hibernate or whatever its called. Its not really faster. The time time to save and load that 4GB file is non-trivial. In theory its nice when you've got a lot of open stuff on the go, but then I don't trust it enough not to save all my work properly anyway.
Overall, I don't think its that great, and I particularly don't like that its the default in vista. For example, when support tells you to reboot they want a fresh start, half the time the users just turn it off and on, instead of 'reboot', and under vista that just bounces into hibernate and back and accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Probably because they didn't feel they had enough evidence against her and they wanted to strenghten thier case. Moral or not, it is legal.
If you get one speeding ticket a day for 3 years they still expect you to pay them all.
But if you got one ticket a day for 3 years, you would have known by the 2nd day you were doing something wrong. They don't wait three years before dumping them all in your lap at once.
You don't get a free pass on the first year of tickets if they only come after you the 2nd for not paying, even though they "allowed" you to keep driving.
This isn't about not *paying* the first year of tickets. They never brought them to you in the first place. You didn't know you had the tickets, you might not even have known you were speeding. They just kept accumulating them in a box and then dumped them all on you at once the 2nd year.
No, distributing songs on Kaza requires you to either place a song in your shared folder, or download one and leave it in the shared folder. It also requires you to start Kaza whenever you want to begin sharing.
Its been a long time since I used a Kazaa program, but most of them offer to round up your music during install / first run, and the sharing is on by default. All you have to do is click through it with the defaults. And nobody turns Kazaa on becaise they 'want to begin sharing' they turn it own to either download or listen to a song. The sharing happens incidentally and automatically. I'm not saying it happens 'against their will'.
In fact its just like most speeding tickets - most of the time people are just driving with the flow of traffic and they get busted. They were speeding, and its not like they were doing it against their will, but its not like they set out to speed that day either.
Not just shoplifting... shoplifting CDs, making thousands of copies of them,
It wasn't actually established she made even a single copy, never mind thousands. Potentially she made thousands, but potentially she made 3.
and handing them out to everyone who wanted one.
Firstly, If she was standing on the street corner for 3 years handing out thousands of CDs for free the first question that would come to my mind is why didn't they stop her after a couple days? Why wait until thousands have been distributed?
When a cop pulls you over for speeding he gives you a speeding ticket for that incident of speeding, he doesn't stalk you for 15 months, and then dump 360 speeding tickets worth $50,000 on you all at once, one for every time you went over the limit.
When the police find someone doing B&E's they stop him immediately, they don't follow him for 3 years, and then at the end hit him with hundreds of charges.
In other words, if they'd contacted this woman in a timely manner, instead of monitoring her for years there'd be no potential that she distributed thousands of copies, and the harm she'd caused would be minimal, and the settlement, likewise, minimal. Which would be appropriate.
And secondly, if she was handing out CD's she would physically be handing them out. Operating Kazaa involves installing it, and walking away for a year without touching it. If I put a CD on my website so I can download it at work, and forget about it and sits there for a year, I still only did at most one minor inadvertant crime, even if thousands of copies were made. I shouldn't be held to the same punishment that someone with a cd replicator making thousands of copies would be. That's a sophisticated operation showing intent to massively infringe, installing Kazaa barely registers as intent to commit a massive crime.
She was charged with distributing, not just downloading.
And yet there was no evidence presented that she actually distributed a thing. She was charged with 'distributing' for merely 'making available', and the actual 'making available' was accomplished with little more than a single click when she initially installed the software. You can't seriously claim that's on par with running a bank of cd replicators churning out thousands of discs.
more attention should be paid to the damages the law says is reasonable
Agreed.
This case is on par with shoplifting and should be punished as such.
The woman probably lied to the jury, and the woman was probably guilty, and the jury was probably right to convict. But the damages, those are the real question. And as part of that, are the damages so out of whack that they motivated to the defendant to lie?
I mean, if I were at a shoplifting trial and the penalty was a public stoning, I would expect the defendant to try pretty much anything to dodge the bullet. And if I thought the defendant did it, but that there was no way she should have to pay that kind of price I'm stuck.
Yes, there is 'jury nullification', but lawyers universally hate it, judges don't like it (probably because they are all former lawyers), and when juries are instructed by the judge the option to nullify isn't mentioned. So it isn't mentioned much, and doesn't happen much, and most people don't know its really an option.
Additionally, in this case its not so much the law itself that needs to be nullified but the damages attached to it. I don't think shoplifting is right, but I'm not going to stone someone over it, not ever, not even if they lied to me to my face in a court. But that's me.
I'm looking for better results from the unreasonable/unconstitutional damages cases that are springing up, because those I think have real shot at winning. And this case will only fuel that fire. $220,000 for 24 shared tracks is absurd.
Guidelines, yes, but for the most part not laws.
1) In the case of skydiving, the FAA regulates the activity. That's more than 'guidelines'. And the helmet requirement is not a 'suggestion'.
In the case of racing, the various 'guidelines' while not enforced as 'laws' they are still strictly enforced. You drive unsafe on a track and you'll be removed from that track immediately.
2) Pretty much *Everybody* travels by car as driver or passenger. So it impacts pretty much everybody. On top of that there were 6.28 million -police reported- crashes in the US in 1999... one every 5 seconds, so accidents happen a LOT.
It should be no surprise that there is an entire section of the government devoted to operating motor vehicles on the road.
And if we as a society decided en mass to all go rock climbing every day you should pretty much expect to see an extensive body of law written around that too.
Because once they realized they'd need a name MORE CLEVER than ..
This isn't about clever.
Its name doesn't need to elicit feelings of euphoria or anything.
No, but its name shouldn't elicit feelings of mediocre, lower quality, and bargain basement cheap.
In Canada and much of the US at least, the store "K-mart" is a widely known 'walmart-like' store that's known for being a 'cheap/bargain department store'.
And he's suggesting a K-"product" like KOffice picks up on that K association. Sort of like naming it McOffice might resonate with the lower quality cheap McDonald's food (or McFood).
At least that's where I think he's going, I don't personally have that much of an association with the letter K. But then, I didn't live near a k-mart most of my life either.
Then you'd agree that we should ban skydiving, rock climbing, bull riding, car racing, and anything else you might have to "fund your care for 30 years".
Most of those activities have safety guidelines to minimize the incidence and the extent of injuries.
The last time I took my car on the track I had to have the vehicle inspected, wear the seatbelt, and a helmet too.
As well as sit through a short refresher on track safety, track signals, and an overview of the track itself including a discussion of the various corners and how to take them, and the fact that one of the straightaways that did double duty as a drag-strip tended to be oilier than the rest of the track.
Next factor in that there are no 'intersections', and that if an accident does occur anywhere, the rest of the vehicles are immediately signaled to alert them of the unsafe conditions ahead, and/or signalled to stop or slow down and not attempt passing as needed.
Next factor in that emergency crews are on hand, and spotters line the track.
Finally, if anyone drives in an unsafe manner they are immediately flagged down and removed, warned, and likely suspended from re-entering.
Overall, I'd say its far *safer* than driving on the street, despite the higher speeds.
Not wearing a seatbelt is pretty dumb, or at best self destructive. But why don't people have the right to be dumb or self destructive?
Good question.
As long as you are being covered by insurance it is reasonable to require you to take *reasonable* steps to mitigate health and safety risks.
Frankly, I'm willing to allow people to be outright self destructive if they can demonstrate an ability to pay for any consequences [and go off the insurance by putting some millions into escrow instead], and they can demonstrate that they are of sound mind going into it.
The first criteria is because I don't think we the public, or even we the other people paying insurance premiums should subsidize your *deliberate* stupidity. But I don't want to create a position where we let you die while you beg for help because you've gone 'off insurance' and now can't pay.
The second criteria is there because I don't want to enable people who aren't thinking straight to do suicidal stuff. (Going a bit on-tangent, I am pro euthanasia, and right to die, but temper it with a belief that most people shouldn't *want* to die or injure themselves, and that if they do it is right to try and help get people through it. But if they are in constant unbearable pain, and just want out, by all means, they should have the right.
That said, how many people really qualify on both criteria? I suspect if there were actually enough of them to matter, they could get a law passed to allow them to do what they want. I for one wouldn't stand in their way *IF* they could pay, and *IF* they weren't of unsound mind.
Isn't "90 to 95 percent self-sufficient" another way of saying "Not self-sufficient"?
Absolutely.
But "100%" isn't really required. If a re-supply rocket from earth has to drop off additional resources to keep it going once every two years then it would be more than self-sufficient enough.
An inter-stellar voyage, with the goal of colonizing another planetary system at the other end would need to be self sufficient, and contain the resources it would need to build at the other end.
A moon base, by contrast, is little more than the ISS, except on the moon. We can anticipate shuttling personnel and resources back and forth on a semi-regular basis.
more and more it's looking like the PS3 will be the primary platform for fans of the indie scene.
I suppose. At least if you restrict the conversation soley to the consoles.
The PC has been, and will continue for the foreseeable future, to be the primary platform for 'fans of the indie scene'.
People such as yourself seem quick to forget that multiplayer gaming on the PC wasn't always free
Pretty much, yes, it was.
but you forget about services such as TEN, Dwango, MPlayer, Heat.net
No, those were matchmaking services. Multiplayer was already available on an "enter the ip address of the server", basis.
Besides those were never that popular outside of what they offered for free. (I vaguely recall using mplayer for something, rainbow six maybe? But I never paid them a dime.
The only reason Xbox live is doing well is because they have the platform so locked up nobody else can introduce any alternatives.
No. Its not the hobbit. Its what happens after the Hobbit, before LoTR. Jackson appears to want to do TWO movies, first The Hobbit, then one about the interim in between.
The only thing that really cuts against this is that ads could be misleading
Them I'm sure they'll fit right in.
I'm sure they'll be less misleading than a lot of auctions though, and probably fewer will be outright scams.
Well, not to argue against your general points (which I agree with), but in this case, yes, if you had to pay damages you would pretty much be expected to pay 20x more if you caused 20x more damages.
But you are considering only restitution.
There is restitution and there is punitive damages. Typically, a significant part of the damages award is 'punitive' to discourage you from doing it. If I stole a pack of cigarettes, got caught, and had to pay for the cigarettes there'd be no reason not to do it. So typically the court assesses a punitive amount as well.
In the case of copyright, a statutory $750 minimum is established for violating a work, even if the actual damages are less than that.
So for cigarettes, if you steal a pack, the damages would be say $7. If you steal a carton the damages would be $210. But the punitive damages would probably be the same for both, say $500. So $7 + $500 = $507 for a single pack, or $210 + $500 = $710 for the carton. No court would award $10,140 (20x507) because you stole a carton instead of a pack.
Unfortunately, for copyright infringement, they do. If you infringe a song its $750 in damages minimum, even if no real harm was caused. Infringe -1 CD- of 24 songs and you are on the hook for a minimum of $18,000 EVEN IF NO REAL DAMAGES WERE CAUSED.
In Gmail you can easily import mail from any POP3 account. There are a lot of tools available that check for new messages on gmail or any other webmail.
...that has high speed internet.
Right, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about all the stuff that desktop mail clients can do with other applications on the desktop.
How often do you really have to restart your browser?
Every time I have a couple dozen windows open, which happens frequently.
Also, you don't loose any data when closing & reopening your webmail so I don't see a problem here.
I don't want it to require reopening my webmail. I find it an annoying issue. I like that my email is in a different stack in my task bar on windows/linux, or a different icon on the dock when using OSX. Makes it easier to switch to it, then to hunt through a dozen browser windows...
You don't need a mail client for that, just a harddisk where you can store downloaded attachments too.
The most logical place to leave those large attachments is attached to the email they came on. Why would I want to implement some perverse local attachment filing system?
but I find that the added features like fast full text search,
No reason a desktop version can't do that.
not having to delete any email
No reason a desktop version can't do that.
no worries with backups
Unless your webmail host goes bankrupt. I've seen it happen to people before. And google isn't immune from bankruptcy. (Although I concede its not likely for the foreseeable future.)
Compare this to "Always accessible, on any computer, anywhere".
I don't know what planet your on, but this one has huge swatches of space where internet is nonexistant (airplanes, the cabin in the mountains, the boat on the lake, ), slow (most of rural america is still on dialup, high speed digital cellular access is still fairly limited in many regions), or ghastly expensive (international roaming on those aforementioned digital celluar services, the resort hotel in mexico...)
I much prefer being able to read & search all my mail wherever I am.
I have a laptop. Unlike high speed internet, it actually is possible to use it anywhere I take it.
Besides that, you can have both.
Yes, and I never said otherwise. Webmail is useful and it has its place, but it doesn't replace a mail client. A lot of people have a need and preference for both. I don't want to give up webmail access but I'm not willing to abandon using a mail client either.
I would hope that any decent ISP would have periodic backups of the mail servers, so they probably do have everything you've ever sent or received.
What on earth would they keep around 5 year old backups of the mail queue for?
For that matter, even if you run your own mail server, your ISP could monitor everything that goes across your line.
Suppose there are 2 pills. One pill is poisonous and if you choose it you will die. The other pill is considerably less poisonous and if you eat it you might die, but probably not, in fact odds are you won't even get sick.
Which pill do you choose?
I'll choose the strong likelihood of surviving over certain death every time thank you.
Yes my ISP *might* scan or read my email, but google *does*. See the difference?
Its not so much the policy itself, its the impact of the policy.
Consider how much information they potentially have about you if your an avid google fan... and even if your not they have a shocking amount of data.
They might have any or all of the following:
1) your email (and your contacts)
2) your search history...
3) the analytics information from any site you visited using google analytics (no small number)
4) your conversations in google talk...
5) your youtube activity...
6) your google documents...
7) what ads you've clicked on (assuming they were google or doubleclick ads which form a significant chunk of them.)
8) your picasa activities
9) your computers contents if you use google desktop
9) They likely even combine it with what is attributed to you on the public web
From that they can fairly reliably deduce where you bank, what credit cards you have, what products you own, where you live, where you go, your sexual orientation, your age, your job, whether you have kids, your income level, where you vacation, your education level, and so on and so on...
Combine all that with:
"We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information."
Considering that the primary service they offer is highly detailed profiles of various demographics to advertisers, improving their primary service means building better profiles. Even if they have a policy of not sharing 'personal' information, what do they define as personal?
If you take a profile as detailed as the one's google has on some people and 'anonymise' it how hard would it be to fill in the blanks? Does google anonymize it internally? Nope.
I don't think they are at this stage yet where they are actually doing this level of cross indexing to identify people, but its coming.
And I for one, realize that what I do on the web is largely in plain sight to the world.
Its not a big issue if your ISP knows where you go, an advertising company knows what you click on, and a search engine company knows what you search for, and your phone company knows who you call, but you combine all that information in one place, and then give them your email, your pictures, your documents, and your contacts... and it paints a very different picture.
I don't intend on helping them profile me more than I have to, feeding them valuable personal information, in exchange for what? "free webmail"?
Opera has this nifty feature, where you right-click on a tab, and get the choice to "Close All but Active"...
Too bad I frequenltly have 2 or 3 messages being composed at once.
What exactly happens, of any interest, in that period?
:)
Hmm.. I'm not 100% on the timeline but...
Gandalf and Aragorn meet. The romance of Aragorn and Arwen. Aragorn serving with the Armies of Rohan.
Gollum pursues Bilbo from the mountains. I beleive Gandalf investigates the creature and discovers its history in this period. Mordor also captures Gollum at some point.
The Dwarves (including Balin of the hobbits) try and retake Moria.
Sauruman is corrupted by Mordor through the Palantir.
Sauroman corrupts Theoden through Grima Wormtongue.
Sauron, identified as the 'Necromancer' was discovered as the source of evil in Mirkwood and was driven out by the White Council, only to resurface later rebuilding in Mordor.
I dunno... I've seen movies made on smaller premises than that