I'm certainly no biologist or quantum physicist for that matter, but I have this habit of pondering about things and trying to find explanations for the weird and wonderful in our lives. I generally don't beleive in ghosts, aliens, god, psychic powers and so forth but I do try to debate with myself as to how these things could be possible because well, to me that seems the best way of deciding whether I do or don't beleive in something.
One of the things I've wondered about in the past is that of supposed psychic powers and that of twins supposedly being able to tell when each other is in pain or some other state even when thousands of miles apart. Could it be that we as humans can communicate at a quantum level however far apart we are, much like the whole "spooky action at a distance" thing? Is this the kind of thing that quantum biology might cover?
As I say, please don't flame me as a complete nut job, this is a random uneducated idea, and well this topic seemed a pretty relevant one to put forward my pondering to see if anyone can totally debunk it or say whether this sort of thing could potentially be possible!;)
I'm from the UK and I personally don't feel that offended by things surrounding the whole columbine situation. If however there were to be a game surrounding for example, the July 2005 bombings it'd bother me a whole lot more. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd guess if it isn't and this in fact extends to other people then how far you are removed geographically or possibly even from a cultural point of view also is a large factor. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of say, Afghans for example who absolutely would not care about this kind of thing.
Not sure where you're buying Wii games from for the equivalent of $80, most shops don't charge more than around (£29.99) $59 and I picked up Super Monkey Ball at shopto.net the other week for £26.99 ($53). We do get ripped off, but it's not _quite_ that bad;) $80 US is just a little over £40, the RRP of Wii games is no higher than £39.99 and it's a bit daft to buy at RRP when there's so many places willing to sell for £5 - £15 less!
He's right that people of all professions who do put across a dangerous view for personal gain from bribes or whatever should be stripped of any accreditation they have but you'll always have the problem of who decides what "right" is. Furthermore you'll always run the risk of people using it as a way of suppressing minority views, whilst I do not believe climate skeptics have a leg to stand on and they are mostly just corporate puppets being paid a fortune to shed doubt (or hoardes of uneducated muppets who enjoy rebelling against climate change proof in a dire attempt to make themselves look, well, rebellious) there are other places where this could be abused.
If we had a sure fire way of finding out people who are casting doubt abusing their accreditation for personal gain with no care of the consequences then I'd agree with this guy, but as we don't and likely never will then sadly, I have to disagree - still, it's good someone's bringing corrupt scientists into the spotlight again such that people are aware that it happens.
I'll be honest and say I haven't played with Word enough, and quite frankly I'd say you're probably right, there are no 30minutes style tasks in Word that I can think of either. There are however certainly tasks in Powerpoint and Excel that benefit. Word itself does still benefit from the new UI however because of the smaller scale productivity gains such as context sensitive menubars, better preview methods to avoid the need for undo and so forth. I wont go into it again here, but check my other post here as someone asked a nearly identical question to you in response to the same posts I originally posted here so check there for my Excel example and explanation of the smaller productivity based gains.
Things like making Excel fill cells like a progress bar depending on the value, say for example you had a cell with "20%" in it, you can easily make Excel shade 20% of the cell in colour to allow you to see at a glance what percentage the cell is holding.
In the past we've had a spreadsheet storing the amount of customer time they have used out of a specific contract, with 232 contracts we wanted to see at a glance which ones have reached their limit so that we could contact them and let them knowing - having a column of progress bars was fantastic for this. We could do it previously either manually, or by writing a macro - both of these can take quite a while - in Office 2007, highlight the column, select the option straight off the menu and voila. This is just one example of many, there's another good example regarding turning a bullet pointed list into a nice little graphical chart in 5 seconds flat when it would take you over 30minutes in powerpoint but I can't for the life of me remember what the proper name for those type of charts is so I wont even try;)
Alongside the useful features as above that you may only use once per document there's also the everyday improvements, Microsoft make sure you don't have to hit undo as much as you used to - a feature that was used much too much. How did they solve the undo problem? they made it so you just click the tool you want, hover over the various options and see the change on the fly, the changes aren't actually applied until you click the specific option. The result of this is that you no longer need to try something and hit undo, you just try one thing, try another and if you're happy click it, if you're not then don't. The new toolbars in general are context sensitive, for example there's little point having a whole bunch of text formatting options in your face if you're dealing with an image, of course you could have every single toolbar you may need up, but this increases clutter and hence indirectly reduces productivity due to the fact that you need to sort out what you need from amongst the clutter.
I can't possibly go into all the features of Office 2007 that increase productivity and decrease wasted time because there is too many to mention. I don't imagine it's beyond any slashdotter to use Google if they want to find further examples! I'm not sure if Microsoft have a beta or anything available still, but of course the best option if you have a spare machine around of course is to try it for yourself.
This seems the least thought through attempt at jumping on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon - Office 2007 is the first version in 12 years that really changes the way you use office to truly make you more productive. There are tools in Office 2007 to let you do some of the things that used to take you upwards of half an hour in under a minute.
It's sad that MS is slagged of for not changing Office much over the years, then why they finally do innovate, and change it to improve productivity and usefulness people slag it off with "Booohooo it has a steep learning curve". Honestly, Microsoft may do a lot of things wrong, but they do also do something right (i.e. the XBox 360, Visual Studio etc.), I honestly think Office 2007 is one of those things they've done right.
Exactly that's just it - some users just call IT because it's less energy to pick up the phone and sit on their arse for 10minutes until IT arrives than it is to walk to the other side of the room and just deal with the problem - any idiot can do it, these people are often just simply too lazy. Is it any wonder we insult these people? Not only do these people deserve any insults they recieve but they also deserve to be made redundant because they do waste company, or in the case of local goverment/goverment offices - tax payers - money.
You're right, unfortunately the experience I'm talking about is inkjet printers, not even toner based lasers!
The worst call I had regarding a printer was "Hi, the printers got an orange flashing light on it, no paper in it and it's not printing" - I kid you not, is it really any suprise these people get insulted by us? Their idiocy is at a level that I simply cannot possibly comprehend.
Certainly IT isn't the only customer focussed industry where this happens, it's an extremely naive viewpoint to suggest that is the case. I can think of countless call centres for things such as gas, phones and so forth where I've been treated by people with abysmal attitudes.
As to why it happens at all, I think the reasons are rather varied.
You have people who are forced into using IT because everyone needs to use it for their job nowadays, only some people don't want to so they purposely make moan and make out the situation is worse than it is just to satisfy their own technophobic paranoia - people like this are extremely frustrating to work with.
Then there are people who treat IT workers as their own personal slaves, requests such as "change my printer cartridge too" - things that frankly, even a monkey could be trained to do, this type of thing is completely demoralising. If you had a mechanic out to look at your car, what do you think their reaction would be if you turned round and say "Oh go and fill it up with gas for me too".
There's the people who simply ask too much, most IT departments are staffed okay for looking after the business but there are those that seem to feel that the IT staff should deal with the home too. We've currently got a situation where we're staffed fine to run a secure, locked down network but our company has decided to push homeworking - this means people are wanting to setup home broadband on their laptop, this leaves us with a choice between having to visit each and every persons home - where two technicians have to do the visit, because one person can't go because of the danger of some pathetic low-life claiming the technician tried to rape them, steal from their house or whatever or alternatively we can remove the security settings so that the users can setup their home broadband on their laptops themselves. Again, this is a hopeless scenario because we then have to spend day in day out clearing spyware, viruses, finding space on their laptop for their work after their kids have installed Quake 8 or whatever on it.
There's plenty more reasons, but it seems more generally that IT has an identity crisis - users aren't entirely sure what we actually do, where the line is drawn as to what a user issue is and what an IT worker issue is. Do we fix printers? probably, do we fix photocopiers? probably not, what if we have a multi-function printer/photocopier? What about telephones, if it's VOIP we most likely deal with it, but if it's a typical old fashioned Nortel or whatever system then there's likely a phone technician to deal with it. Now, I'm personally willing to have a go at fixing anything if there's a real need, but I don't like whiping the asses of lazy people who can't be bothered to change a printer cartridge and secondly, I simply don't have time to do absolutely everything. The issue is lack of well defines roles for most IT people and also hence lack of definition for users as to what they should and shouldn't expect from their IT department.
Even in this case would it really be viable evidence? I'm not sure by observing the swarm that you can ever tell that these people have actually received the full file and in that case, with many media formats all you're left with is a file full of random bytes, at what point does it become copyright infringement? I was under the impression in the cases of file sharers they've actually had to demonstrate having downloaded an entire file to prove infringement, merely receiving half a file isn't enough as half a file may quite often be nothing but useless data. Would the same apply to observing a swarm? i.e. being unable to tell if the full file is actually ever being received by anyone?
IANAL but surely if the downloads they provide aren't copyright protected content and are in fact junk then you're not actually breaking any law because you're not actually downloading copyrighted content.
Contrary to that, surely if it is copyrighted content then the MPAA is making the content available to you. Is it really illegal to download something from the copyright owner if they make it available publicly with no license to agree to prior to download? I'd have thought they'd have a hard time arguing that they didn't intend the content be distributed in the case that they place it readily available on a file sharing site. What's more, even if the MPAA did use this argument then surely if this became precedent then it would have the side effect of destroying any court cases against file sharers as those sharers could merely claim that they didn't intend the files they were sharing to be distributed much like the MPAA might in this scenario?
I just don't see how this really has any legal grounding, however law is a funny thing, particularly in the US so I could be wrong here!
Research Machines has an absolutely monopoly on UK schools hardware and software supplies. They charge schools over £1000 for PCs still in an era where you can buy them for £300. The amount of backhander deals that occur in so many authorities relating to RM equipment and software is disgusting, I've seen the most appalling deals go through and what really irks me about it the most is the fact that we're talking about tax payers money going to waste, when we have 171 schools in our district and all of them have an average of 30 PCs (some have 100+, others may only have 10) all being sold to the schools at a profit of over £800 a peice that's a serious wad of tax payers money going to waste.
Now, I wont say it's all bad for RM, their new stuff Community Connect 3 is pretty decent, some of their educational software is pretty decent. Their support website and support phone number is second to none nowadays when compared to the awful call centres companies like Dell use. The issue now is the cost, whilst CC3 is in fact pretty cool and does what it's designed to do well it is just a dumbed down front end for active directory which and hence is horribly overpriced and again as mentioned above the same goes for hardware etc. That said I still haven't totally forgiven RM for their Windows 98 era software which was most certainly the most poorly written, poorly thought out, poorly designed software I've ever seen (i.e. CC2.4).
I would love to see nothing more than an alternative in the UK education market and Microsoft entering it? Fantastic news, we definitely need more vanilla Windows client/server networks in UK schools to compete with RMs peer-to-peer and client server solutions forcing RM to drop their prices. Unfortunately this also points out what's so utterly wrong about this article, Microsoft doesn't have a direct monopoly, RM has that, RM is based on Windows but if RM moved to Linux then the schools would followed at the drop of a hat due to RM lock in - in my eyes a direct Microsoft monopoly in UK schools would in fact be superior to the current situation because it would in fact be cheaper than the premium extra charged by RM for their services, of course neither is ideal but a Microsoft monopoly is the better of the two devils.
When we're playing with tax payers money there's nothing I despise more than seeing people carrying out the sick overcharging that RM do. Also the people in local education authorities, BECTA and so forth letting these things happen. The UK goverment needs a department who's entire aim is to allow anonymous reporting of IT back handers, overcharging, security breaches and so forth afaik there's no way for me to pass these kind of things on so as is usual in local goverment, they go unchecked and continue.
I'm not sure how you can suggest Rare isn't still consistently churning out solid games when they're able to develop 3 - 4 platinum selling titles at once. They have more developers than ever allowing them to have multiple games in progress at a time and a large set of IP to aid in this. As I mentioned they only get lucky and release killer titles once every 5 - 10 years, as it's not even been 10 years since their last killer title, it's a little early to say they're not doing this anymore - again however, in the meantime they're still pulling out more platinums than ever before.
The complaints here really do seem like a heavy case of rose tintied spectacles, because Rare's financial worth, their good sets of IP, their amount of employees and the amount of platinum selling games they acheive each year is higher than ever and more importantly, are still growing year on year - those are all facts, so how can anyone justifiably say Rare is going down hill? Things have also gotten better for Rare's staff, now they're part of MS they have much better benefits, much better career prospects and much friendlier working hours, all in all, Rare is nothing but on the up. Does the loss of the founders suck? Sure it does, but it's certainly nothing major for the company, those two certainly weren't the only ones responsible for Rare's products - the people who saw through many of Rare's successful games from the Design phase to publication are still there, whilst the founders have a massive amount of experience under their belts losing two out of over 100 staff isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
These comments seem rather unfair, do Rare constantly churn out killer games? No, sure they don't, however they do churn out the odd killer game, and when they do that game dwarfs all others in it's success. No one can argue the success of the Donkey Game series, particularly the earlier ones but more importantly, Goldeneye on the N64 is the largest selling FPS game of all time with only Halo 2 coming a close second - it beats Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Half-Life, Half-Life 2. Even if Rare only pulls off these kind of successes once every 10 years, they are still making higher average sales per year for 10 years for that success than most other games manage in their lifetimes.
You're correct in saying Perfect Dark Zero wasn't groundbreaking, it wasn't but only in the sense that not many games are nowadays, it was still a platinum title, which puts it pretty high up the success list, very few games reach platinum each year.
Rare has around 3 - 4 development teams active at any one time, whilst I'm not sure what they're doing now that Viva Pinata is released, I know at least that a few months ago they were working on the next installment of Conker, Viva Pinata and Kameo 2 - they also mentioned they had a small group of developers developing for mobile devices so that's what their developers are upto!
Kameo is a really good game, I think it's a set of IP they can really build on also, Viva Pinata is the kind of game everyone can play too, Rare certainly isn't stuck in terms of new ideas. Whilst they are going downhill, they're only doing so in the sense that it's pretty damn hard to outdo yourself when you've managed to produce the best selling FPS game of all time - in this respect pretty much every developer is going downhill when measuring up to the success that was Goldeneye 64.
Now, I'm no real Rare fanboy (personally Donkey Kong was never my thing, neither was Perfect Dark or Conker), honestly I didn't know a lot about them until I was at a Microsoft game developer conference back in March last year but when I realised the titles they had pulled out, and did a little research into them I began to realise that Rare is one of the major players in the video game industry, we're talking about a company that dwarfs id Software, Valve and so forth in terms of units of all games sold per year - that's no small acheivement. The only fault I'd say Rare has is that it's rather media shy, such that people don't know as much about them as they probably should - they're an important player in the industry.
One final thing to note is that Microsoft didn't buy Rare to sell games, they bought Rare to sell consoles - Rare's existence no longer hinges on whether they make the next killer game or not, they can try new things, they can fill niche areas nowadays which I'd guess is why they've developed Viva Pinata - to fill the lack of games for young kids on the 360. Goldeneye 64 is certainly the game that sold N64 systems and without being able to buy Square Enix or Nintendo - other firms that produce games that make people want to buy consoles Rare is an extremely sensible purchase for MS, it's a solid bet that can consistently churn out platinum titles with the odd absolutely killer console-shifting title once every 5 - 10 years.
With the GPU doing graphics, one core doing AI/Gameplay, another doing Physics, another doing Audio/Networking/Input you've pretty much got all the processing power you need. If you start spreading a game out across too many cores it's going to negatively effect the speed of the game due to the fact you're going to spend all your time trying to keep threads in sync. I'd argue that this is why Sony has it wrong and MS has it right. The GPU can handle graphics, then the 3 cores can be used as mentioned above - this seems the optimal division of work in a game engine. I'm convinced that 4 physical processing units at 4ghz would be better than 8 physical processing units at 3.2ghz so perhaps that would've been a better route for Sony if they really felt the need to beat the 360 on performance.
To me the Cell seems more suited to number crunching type applications, the sort where you can offload large amounts of data to each cell and let them go on their merry way processing these chunks without having to worry about whether every few bytes of data is in sync.
I honestly wonder if Sony management just assumed that the Playstation 3 would cell like the PS2 and PS1 and hence just insisted they use it as the tool to bring down the prices of Cell and BluRay regardless of whether they were fit for purpose or not.
You have to draw a distinction between what you mean by "Do next-gen games have to be 3D?", do you mean "Do next-gen games have to use a 3D engine?" or do you mean "Do next-gen games have to play in 3D".
In the first case I'd say yes, next-gen games should always be built in a 3D engine, there's simply no reason to do otherwise, you can offer far more animations, a near infinite amount if you include rag-doll physics in your game than you ever could draw each object frame by frame.
In the second case, what this means is whilst your game is 3D, your gameplay doesn't have to be. Anyone who's ever played Cloning Clyde or Assault Heroes on the 360 knows what I mean - these games play from a side scrolling or above scrolling perspective like the games of old however they are entirely 3D.
To answer the question, there's little point not building a game in a 3D engine, it really offers little benefit not to in 99% of games however there's still plenty of room for 2D gameplay in a 3D world.
I do love the Live Arcade and I love many games on it, but for my taste the release of arcade games is too slow, MS struggle to hit their target of one a week, whilst Nintendo is throwing out 5 - 10 a week. Some may argue that Nintendo has a bigger library but I don't think that's the case - MS has a massive library of PC games as has been demonstrated by the release of Doom and the upcoming release of Worms and such, there's plenty more PC classics they could throw out there, I can't beleive getting the IP holders to allow and follow through with this is the bottleneck here.
The other issue regarding content is the fact they've tried to shove a patch for Texas hold 'em and a set of Kameo Uno card decks on us as the supposed weekly game, that really does sound like they're clutching at straws some weeks to get any content at all out (some weeks have missed any kind of release entirely). From what I've read and what I've gathered the bottleneck seems to be MS' certification process if anything, god only knows what it involves but the speed it takes almost makes me wonder if they do a full source code audit of every submission couple with rigorous beta testing - that's no bad thing if you have the resources on the task to get it done rapidly.
I'm hoping with XNA people will start churning out stuff that MS will see and say "Hey, we need to get this onto the arcade ASAP", but even XNA is bottlenecked right now in that the only distribution method is to zip up your XNA project source and assets and e-mail them or whatever to whoever you're distributing to so that they can compile them using their copy of VC# and deploy it to their 360 themselves but if I've got a game I want to sell on the arcade, I don't want to be handing out source so I'm not entirely sure how MS expects anyone to get a game to be popular enough whilst at the same time not handing out your source when that's the only distribution method. You could use XNA and deploy a commercial version of your project for Windows but that's hardly an option if you're designing around the 360 controller, the 360 controller does work on Windows but I doubt many people would buy one to play games on their Windows machine.
MS is getting there and they're well ahead of Sony, but only just up with Nintendo on the whole downloadable games thing - XNA has potential though so let's hope they can convince the MS execs that XNA is good so that the XNA team is given permission to make a proper process for game distribution as well as permission to add networking support to XNA - something that it sorely needs!
This is certainly something I've never encountered, I'm pretty sure networking code isn't so far down the priority chain in most engines that this is the case, netcode isn't something so processor intensive that there isn't room for it - if your machine is struggling to parse incoming packets and build outgoing packets then you're not going to have much fun anyway because your machine will be having even more trouble trying to render to screen.
This is even more the case in online games where if anything your GPU is going to be the bottleneck, the CPU likely wont have to worry about AI or even complex physics as a client - that'll be upto the server for the most part leaving plenty of room for the CPU to handle networking which again only uses an absolute minority of processing time in comparison.
I could beleive the information about the card more if it exposed an API such that the card would handle encryption and decryption of packets for games and so forth as well but it doesn't even do that afaik - application level encryption/decryption of packets alone is more CPU intensive than building/parsing TCP/UDP packets.
More to the point, with physics cards becoming available or alternatively physics being handled by graphics cards it's beginning to free up the CPU even more, with multiple cores the CPU can do more again so it really does lower the value of this NIC yet more, networking just isn't an area that needs moving offboard - building say, dedicated AI hardware would've been a far superior option.
I ping from my router to my ISP and get and average of 30ms ping, I do the same from my computer and get 31ms ping. I'm intrigued to know how it can possibly increase my latency without making some modification to my router to make it communicate faster with the exchange which let's face it, is practically impossible.
Of course they could claim my router is the bottleneck but then, seeing as it's impossible for me to get an ethernet port connected directly to some internet backbone then I have no use for this card anyway.
More to the point however, this is around the 4th time this has been posted on Slashdot, not another "Slashdot repeated news postings whine" but more intrigued to know who this KillerNIC company is paying to keep getting their lies spread all over the internet?
I don't know if this is any help, I haven't as many consoles setup as you but I have a desk setup where I do work/gaming (rather than a living room TV setup) and use the following:
- A Samsung 244T 24" TFT - 4 port KVM into the DVI port of the above which I have my computers plugged into - XBox 360 in the 15 pin analog VGA port (can play XBox games) - Wii in the composite in (can play my old Gamecube games) One of my machines on the KVM is on 24/7 and I put audio into the line in of this machine and have 5.1 surround on the machine so all consoles go into line in using some decent stereo audio splitters to get them all to go through the one line in port.
The Samsung 244T also has s-video in and the old yellow phono style connector in (can't remember what it's called) so theoretically I could send 2 more consoles in through that. Switching display is then just a simple case of pressing the source button on the monitor to switch video sources or using the menu to cycle through the video sources to choose a specific one.
This setup could be adapted to most screens I'd think, I don't think the Samsung 244T is particularly rare in having so many possible different inputs. Also, having a PC in the setup opens the option for emulators too so it's probably one of the more versatile options.
The key is simply about using lots of adapters and splitters as required, but this does require some planning however because for example the 360 needed to use the VGA cable as component in looked crap. Still, as I say, extension cables, component in and a display system with multiple input types is the key I think;)
No wait, hear me out, I'm not just being pedantic - didn't Sony recently lose a court case to have the PS3 classed as a computer? Surely if the courts draw a distinction between consoles and computers then they would also do so in the case of the patent such that the patent describes a device designed for a computer and not one designed for a console?
Of course IANAL but would this kind of argument stick in court?
Don't know if you'll see this in time but I just got the following e-mail from Amazon.co.uk:
Dear Nintendo fan,
Great news! We've managed to get our hands on some more Wii consoles and will be putting them on sale between 3pm and 4pm today (Friday, December 8). Last time we sold out in 7 minutes and we expect this batch to go even more quickly.
So if you read it in time you've got 45mins to get to Amazon.co.uk and start site camping;)
Delivered by courier only 20mins ago, if only I didn't have to work! Still at least I didn't have to camp out in the bitter cold for well, days;)
Unfortunately, my experience of getting additional controllers has been rather less easy. Preordered from play.com just after they put them up for preorder and have been told they don't have enough nunchucks, classic controllers, component cables, wii motes or copies of wii play to fill even one out of my order of 3 nunchucks, 2 classic, 1 component, 2 wii motes, 1 wii play. Also they were unwilling to tell me where I am in the preorder queue but that they were getting some in before xmas - doesn't help that they didn't tell me if the ones in before xmas would reach me in the queue though!
I have a local supplier that lives just down my road though, keeping my fingers crossed he'll get enough in to save one/some for me!
For reference, current eBay price seems to be about £250 - £290, not terribly spectacular but still a nice profit if you put no effort into getting your Wii by just pre-ordering online, mines for keeps though;)
Unfortunately this is how the corporate world all too often works.
It's hard to just sack people else you risk all sorts of industrial tribunals, unfair dismissal cases and so forth, what's more management jobs really are often quite easy, as an example I've seen first hand we had a guy once who made us £1.5million a year in sales when a management position came up it went to the guy who only made £300,000 a year because the management job really wasn't too tough and why take away someone making you £1.5million was the argument of management. Often it's easier for companies to just promote people out of the way than it is to trial and do what companies should be able to do - sack them for incompetence.
Personally I think it's a poor idea, if you screw over the most deserving ones their productivity will drop anyway so it's silly to think you can leave them where they are making you money indefinetely without rewarding them with promotion, unfortunately too many management teams simply don't understand this concept.
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I'm certainly no biologist or quantum physicist for that matter, but I have this habit of pondering about things and trying to find explanations for the weird and wonderful in our lives. I generally don't beleive in ghosts, aliens, god, psychic powers and so forth but I do try to debate with myself as to how these things could be possible because well, to me that seems the best way of deciding whether I do or don't beleive in something.
;)
One of the things I've wondered about in the past is that of supposed psychic powers and that of twins supposedly being able to tell when each other is in pain or some other state even when thousands of miles apart. Could it be that we as humans can communicate at a quantum level however far apart we are, much like the whole "spooky action at a distance" thing? Is this the kind of thing that quantum biology might cover?
As I say, please don't flame me as a complete nut job, this is a random uneducated idea, and well this topic seemed a pretty relevant one to put forward my pondering to see if anyone can totally debunk it or say whether this sort of thing could potentially be possible!
I'm from the UK and I personally don't feel that offended by things surrounding the whole columbine situation. If however there were to be a game surrounding for example, the July 2005 bombings it'd bother me a whole lot more. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd guess if it isn't and this in fact extends to other people then how far you are removed geographically or possibly even from a cultural point of view also is a large factor. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of say, Afghans for example who absolutely would not care about this kind of thing.
Not sure where you're buying Wii games from for the equivalent of $80, most shops don't charge more than around (£29.99) $59 and I picked up Super Monkey Ball at shopto.net the other week for £26.99 ($53). We do get ripped off, but it's not _quite_ that bad ;) $80 US is just a little over £40, the RRP of Wii games is no higher than £39.99 and it's a bit daft to buy at RRP when there's so many places willing to sell for £5 - £15 less!
He's right that people of all professions who do put across a dangerous view for personal gain from bribes or whatever should be stripped of any accreditation they have but you'll always have the problem of who decides what "right" is. Furthermore you'll always run the risk of people using it as a way of suppressing minority views, whilst I do not believe climate skeptics have a leg to stand on and they are mostly just corporate puppets being paid a fortune to shed doubt (or hoardes of uneducated muppets who enjoy rebelling against climate change proof in a dire attempt to make themselves look, well, rebellious) there are other places where this could be abused.
If we had a sure fire way of finding out people who are casting doubt abusing their accreditation for personal gain with no care of the consequences then I'd agree with this guy, but as we don't and likely never will then sadly, I have to disagree - still, it's good someone's bringing corrupt scientists into the spotlight again such that people are aware that it happens.
I'll be honest and say I haven't played with Word enough, and quite frankly I'd say you're probably right, there are no 30minutes style tasks in Word that I can think of either. There are however certainly tasks in Powerpoint and Excel that benefit. Word itself does still benefit from the new UI however because of the smaller scale productivity gains such as context sensitive menubars, better preview methods to avoid the need for undo and so forth. I wont go into it again here, but check my other post here as someone asked a nearly identical question to you in response to the same posts I originally posted here so check there for my Excel example and explanation of the smaller productivity based gains.
Things like making Excel fill cells like a progress bar depending on the value, say for example you had a cell with "20%" in it, you can easily make Excel shade 20% of the cell in colour to allow you to see at a glance what percentage the cell is holding.
;)
In the past we've had a spreadsheet storing the amount of customer time they have used out of a specific contract, with 232 contracts we wanted to see at a glance which ones have reached their limit so that we could contact them and let them knowing - having a column of progress bars was fantastic for this. We could do it previously either manually, or by writing a macro - both of these can take quite a while - in Office 2007, highlight the column, select the option straight off the menu and voila. This is just one example of many, there's another good example regarding turning a bullet pointed list into a nice little graphical chart in 5 seconds flat when it would take you over 30minutes in powerpoint but I can't for the life of me remember what the proper name for those type of charts is so I wont even try
Alongside the useful features as above that you may only use once per document there's also the everyday improvements, Microsoft make sure you don't have to hit undo as much as you used to - a feature that was used much too much. How did they solve the undo problem? they made it so you just click the tool you want, hover over the various options and see the change on the fly, the changes aren't actually applied until you click the specific option. The result of this is that you no longer need to try something and hit undo, you just try one thing, try another and if you're happy click it, if you're not then don't. The new toolbars in general are context sensitive, for example there's little point having a whole bunch of text formatting options in your face if you're dealing with an image, of course you could have every single toolbar you may need up, but this increases clutter and hence indirectly reduces productivity due to the fact that you need to sort out what you need from amongst the clutter.
I can't possibly go into all the features of Office 2007 that increase productivity and decrease wasted time because there is too many to mention. I don't imagine it's beyond any slashdotter to use Google if they want to find further examples! I'm not sure if Microsoft have a beta or anything available still, but of course the best option if you have a spare machine around of course is to try it for yourself.
This seems the least thought through attempt at jumping on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon - Office 2007 is the first version in 12 years that really changes the way you use office to truly make you more productive. There are tools in Office 2007 to let you do some of the things that used to take you upwards of half an hour in under a minute.
It's sad that MS is slagged of for not changing Office much over the years, then why they finally do innovate, and change it to improve productivity and usefulness people slag it off with "Booohooo it has a steep learning curve". Honestly, Microsoft may do a lot of things wrong, but they do also do something right (i.e. the XBox 360, Visual Studio etc.), I honestly think Office 2007 is one of those things they've done right.
Exactly that's just it - some users just call IT because it's less energy to pick up the phone and sit on their arse for 10minutes until IT arrives than it is to walk to the other side of the room and just deal with the problem - any idiot can do it, these people are often just simply too lazy. Is it any wonder we insult these people? Not only do these people deserve any insults they recieve but they also deserve to be made redundant because they do waste company, or in the case of local goverment/goverment offices - tax payers - money.
You're right, unfortunately the experience I'm talking about is inkjet printers, not even toner based lasers!
The worst call I had regarding a printer was "Hi, the printers got an orange flashing light on it, no paper in it and it's not printing" - I kid you not, is it really any suprise these people get insulted by us? Their idiocy is at a level that I simply cannot possibly comprehend.
Certainly IT isn't the only customer focussed industry where this happens, it's an extremely naive viewpoint to suggest that is the case. I can think of countless call centres for things such as gas, phones and so forth where I've been treated by people with abysmal attitudes.
As to why it happens at all, I think the reasons are rather varied.
You have people who are forced into using IT because everyone needs to use it for their job nowadays, only some people don't want to so they purposely make moan and make out the situation is worse than it is just to satisfy their own technophobic paranoia - people like this are extremely frustrating to work with.
Then there are people who treat IT workers as their own personal slaves, requests such as "change my printer cartridge too" - things that frankly, even a monkey could be trained to do, this type of thing is completely demoralising. If you had a mechanic out to look at your car, what do you think their reaction would be if you turned round and say "Oh go and fill it up with gas for me too".
There's the people who simply ask too much, most IT departments are staffed okay for looking after the business but there are those that seem to feel that the IT staff should deal with the home too. We've currently got a situation where we're staffed fine to run a secure, locked down network but our company has decided to push homeworking - this means people are wanting to setup home broadband on their laptop, this leaves us with a choice between having to visit each and every persons home - where two technicians have to do the visit, because one person can't go because of the danger of some pathetic low-life claiming the technician tried to rape them, steal from their house or whatever or alternatively we can remove the security settings so that the users can setup their home broadband on their laptops themselves. Again, this is a hopeless scenario because we then have to spend day in day out clearing spyware, viruses, finding space on their laptop for their work after their kids have installed Quake 8 or whatever on it.
There's plenty more reasons, but it seems more generally that IT has an identity crisis - users aren't entirely sure what we actually do, where the line is drawn as to what a user issue is and what an IT worker issue is. Do we fix printers? probably, do we fix photocopiers? probably not, what if we have a multi-function printer/photocopier? What about telephones, if it's VOIP we most likely deal with it, but if it's a typical old fashioned Nortel or whatever system then there's likely a phone technician to deal with it. Now, I'm personally willing to have a go at fixing anything if there's a real need, but I don't like whiping the asses of lazy people who can't be bothered to change a printer cartridge and secondly, I simply don't have time to do absolutely everything. The issue is lack of well defines roles for most IT people and also hence lack of definition for users as to what they should and shouldn't expect from their IT department.
Even in this case would it really be viable evidence? I'm not sure by observing the swarm that you can ever tell that these people have actually received the full file and in that case, with many media formats all you're left with is a file full of random bytes, at what point does it become copyright infringement? I was under the impression in the cases of file sharers they've actually had to demonstrate having downloaded an entire file to prove infringement, merely receiving half a file isn't enough as half a file may quite often be nothing but useless data. Would the same apply to observing a swarm? i.e. being unable to tell if the full file is actually ever being received by anyone?
IANAL but surely if the downloads they provide aren't copyright protected content and are in fact junk then you're not actually breaking any law because you're not actually downloading copyrighted content.
Contrary to that, surely if it is copyrighted content then the MPAA is making the content available to you. Is it really illegal to download something from the copyright owner if they make it available publicly with no license to agree to prior to download? I'd have thought they'd have a hard time arguing that they didn't intend the content be distributed in the case that they place it readily available on a file sharing site. What's more, even if the MPAA did use this argument then surely if this became precedent then it would have the side effect of destroying any court cases against file sharers as those sharers could merely claim that they didn't intend the files they were sharing to be distributed much like the MPAA might in this scenario?
I just don't see how this really has any legal grounding, however law is a funny thing, particularly in the US so I could be wrong here!
Woohoo, I'm not the only one who despises this.
Research Machines has an absolutely monopoly on UK schools hardware and software supplies. They charge schools over £1000 for PCs still in an era where you can buy them for £300. The amount of backhander deals that occur in so many authorities relating to RM equipment and software is disgusting, I've seen the most appalling deals go through and what really irks me about it the most is the fact that we're talking about tax payers money going to waste, when we have 171 schools in our district and all of them have an average of 30 PCs (some have 100+, others may only have 10) all being sold to the schools at a profit of over £800 a peice that's a serious wad of tax payers money going to waste.
Now, I wont say it's all bad for RM, their new stuff Community Connect 3 is pretty decent, some of their educational software is pretty decent. Their support website and support phone number is second to none nowadays when compared to the awful call centres companies like Dell use. The issue now is the cost, whilst CC3 is in fact pretty cool and does what it's designed to do well it is just a dumbed down front end for active directory which and hence is horribly overpriced and again as mentioned above the same goes for hardware etc. That said I still haven't totally forgiven RM for their Windows 98 era software which was most certainly the most poorly written, poorly thought out, poorly designed software I've ever seen (i.e. CC2.4).
I would love to see nothing more than an alternative in the UK education market and Microsoft entering it? Fantastic news, we definitely need more vanilla Windows client/server networks in UK schools to compete with RMs peer-to-peer and client server solutions forcing RM to drop their prices. Unfortunately this also points out what's so utterly wrong about this article, Microsoft doesn't have a direct monopoly, RM has that, RM is based on Windows but if RM moved to Linux then the schools would followed at the drop of a hat due to RM lock in - in my eyes a direct Microsoft monopoly in UK schools would in fact be superior to the current situation because it would in fact be cheaper than the premium extra charged by RM for their services, of course neither is ideal but a Microsoft monopoly is the better of the two devils.
When we're playing with tax payers money there's nothing I despise more than seeing people carrying out the sick overcharging that RM do. Also the people in local education authorities, BECTA and so forth letting these things happen. The UK goverment needs a department who's entire aim is to allow anonymous reporting of IT back handers, overcharging, security breaches and so forth afaik there's no way for me to pass these kind of things on so as is usual in local goverment, they go unchecked and continue.
I'm not sure how you can suggest Rare isn't still consistently churning out solid games when they're able to develop 3 - 4 platinum selling titles at once. They have more developers than ever allowing them to have multiple games in progress at a time and a large set of IP to aid in this. As I mentioned they only get lucky and release killer titles once every 5 - 10 years, as it's not even been 10 years since their last killer title, it's a little early to say they're not doing this anymore - again however, in the meantime they're still pulling out more platinums than ever before.
The complaints here really do seem like a heavy case of rose tintied spectacles, because Rare's financial worth, their good sets of IP, their amount of employees and the amount of platinum selling games they acheive each year is higher than ever and more importantly, are still growing year on year - those are all facts, so how can anyone justifiably say Rare is going down hill? Things have also gotten better for Rare's staff, now they're part of MS they have much better benefits, much better career prospects and much friendlier working hours, all in all, Rare is nothing but on the up. Does the loss of the founders suck? Sure it does, but it's certainly nothing major for the company, those two certainly weren't the only ones responsible for Rare's products - the people who saw through many of Rare's successful games from the Design phase to publication are still there, whilst the founders have a massive amount of experience under their belts losing two out of over 100 staff isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
These comments seem rather unfair, do Rare constantly churn out killer games? No, sure they don't, however they do churn out the odd killer game, and when they do that game dwarfs all others in it's success. No one can argue the success of the Donkey Game series, particularly the earlier ones but more importantly, Goldeneye on the N64 is the largest selling FPS game of all time with only Halo 2 coming a close second - it beats Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Half-Life, Half-Life 2. Even if Rare only pulls off these kind of successes once every 10 years, they are still making higher average sales per year for 10 years for that success than most other games manage in their lifetimes.
You're correct in saying Perfect Dark Zero wasn't groundbreaking, it wasn't but only in the sense that not many games are nowadays, it was still a platinum title, which puts it pretty high up the success list, very few games reach platinum each year.
Rare has around 3 - 4 development teams active at any one time, whilst I'm not sure what they're doing now that Viva Pinata is released, I know at least that a few months ago they were working on the next installment of Conker, Viva Pinata and Kameo 2 - they also mentioned they had a small group of developers developing for mobile devices so that's what their developers are upto!
Kameo is a really good game, I think it's a set of IP they can really build on also, Viva Pinata is the kind of game everyone can play too, Rare certainly isn't stuck in terms of new ideas. Whilst they are going downhill, they're only doing so in the sense that it's pretty damn hard to outdo yourself when you've managed to produce the best selling FPS game of all time - in this respect pretty much every developer is going downhill when measuring up to the success that was Goldeneye 64.
Now, I'm no real Rare fanboy (personally Donkey Kong was never my thing, neither was Perfect Dark or Conker), honestly I didn't know a lot about them until I was at a Microsoft game developer conference back in March last year but when I realised the titles they had pulled out, and did a little research into them I began to realise that Rare is one of the major players in the video game industry, we're talking about a company that dwarfs id Software, Valve and so forth in terms of units of all games sold per year - that's no small acheivement. The only fault I'd say Rare has is that it's rather media shy, such that people don't know as much about them as they probably should - they're an important player in the industry.
One final thing to note is that Microsoft didn't buy Rare to sell games, they bought Rare to sell consoles - Rare's existence no longer hinges on whether they make the next killer game or not, they can try new things, they can fill niche areas nowadays which I'd guess is why they've developed Viva Pinata - to fill the lack of games for young kids on the 360. Goldeneye 64 is certainly the game that sold N64 systems and without being able to buy Square Enix or Nintendo - other firms that produce games that make people want to buy consoles Rare is an extremely sensible purchase for MS, it's a solid bet that can consistently churn out platinum titles with the odd absolutely killer console-shifting title once every 5 - 10 years.
Cell just isn't that suited to gaming.
With the GPU doing graphics, one core doing AI/Gameplay, another doing Physics, another doing Audio/Networking/Input you've pretty much got all the processing power you need. If you start spreading a game out across too many cores it's going to negatively effect the speed of the game due to the fact you're going to spend all your time trying to keep threads in sync. I'd argue that this is why Sony has it wrong and MS has it right. The GPU can handle graphics, then the 3 cores can be used as mentioned above - this seems the optimal division of work in a game engine. I'm convinced that 4 physical processing units at 4ghz would be better than 8 physical processing units at 3.2ghz so perhaps that would've been a better route for Sony if they really felt the need to beat the 360 on performance.
To me the Cell seems more suited to number crunching type applications, the sort where you can offload large amounts of data to each cell and let them go on their merry way processing these chunks without having to worry about whether every few bytes of data is in sync.
I honestly wonder if Sony management just assumed that the Playstation 3 would cell like the PS2 and PS1 and hence just insisted they use it as the tool to bring down the prices of Cell and BluRay regardless of whether they were fit for purpose or not.
You have to draw a distinction between what you mean by "Do next-gen games have to be 3D?", do you mean "Do next-gen games have to use a 3D engine?" or do you mean "Do next-gen games have to play in 3D".
In the first case I'd say yes, next-gen games should always be built in a 3D engine, there's simply no reason to do otherwise, you can offer far more animations, a near infinite amount if you include rag-doll physics in your game than you ever could draw each object frame by frame.
In the second case, what this means is whilst your game is 3D, your gameplay doesn't have to be. Anyone who's ever played Cloning Clyde or Assault Heroes on the 360 knows what I mean - these games play from a side scrolling or above scrolling perspective like the games of old however they are entirely 3D.
To answer the question, there's little point not building a game in a 3D engine, it really offers little benefit not to in 99% of games however there's still plenty of room for 2D gameplay in a 3D world.
I do love the Live Arcade and I love many games on it, but for my taste the release of arcade games is too slow, MS struggle to hit their target of one a week, whilst Nintendo is throwing out 5 - 10 a week. Some may argue that Nintendo has a bigger library but I don't think that's the case - MS has a massive library of PC games as has been demonstrated by the release of Doom and the upcoming release of Worms and such, there's plenty more PC classics they could throw out there, I can't beleive getting the IP holders to allow and follow through with this is the bottleneck here.
The other issue regarding content is the fact they've tried to shove a patch for Texas hold 'em and a set of Kameo Uno card decks on us as the supposed weekly game, that really does sound like they're clutching at straws some weeks to get any content at all out (some weeks have missed any kind of release entirely). From what I've read and what I've gathered the bottleneck seems to be MS' certification process if anything, god only knows what it involves but the speed it takes almost makes me wonder if they do a full source code audit of every submission couple with rigorous beta testing - that's no bad thing if you have the resources on the task to get it done rapidly.
I'm hoping with XNA people will start churning out stuff that MS will see and say "Hey, we need to get this onto the arcade ASAP", but even XNA is bottlenecked right now in that the only distribution method is to zip up your XNA project source and assets and e-mail them or whatever to whoever you're distributing to so that they can compile them using their copy of VC# and deploy it to their 360 themselves but if I've got a game I want to sell on the arcade, I don't want to be handing out source so I'm not entirely sure how MS expects anyone to get a game to be popular enough whilst at the same time not handing out your source when that's the only distribution method. You could use XNA and deploy a commercial version of your project for Windows but that's hardly an option if you're designing around the 360 controller, the 360 controller does work on Windows but I doubt many people would buy one to play games on their Windows machine.
MS is getting there and they're well ahead of Sony, but only just up with Nintendo on the whole downloadable games thing - XNA has potential though so let's hope they can convince the MS execs that XNA is good so that the XNA team is given permission to make a proper process for game distribution as well as permission to add networking support to XNA - something that it sorely needs!
This is certainly something I've never encountered, I'm pretty sure networking code isn't so far down the priority chain in most engines that this is the case, netcode isn't something so processor intensive that there isn't room for it - if your machine is struggling to parse incoming packets and build outgoing packets then you're not going to have much fun anyway because your machine will be having even more trouble trying to render to screen.
This is even more the case in online games where if anything your GPU is going to be the bottleneck, the CPU likely wont have to worry about AI or even complex physics as a client - that'll be upto the server for the most part leaving plenty of room for the CPU to handle networking which again only uses an absolute minority of processing time in comparison.
I could beleive the information about the card more if it exposed an API such that the card would handle encryption and decryption of packets for games and so forth as well but it doesn't even do that afaik - application level encryption/decryption of packets alone is more CPU intensive than building/parsing TCP/UDP packets.
More to the point, with physics cards becoming available or alternatively physics being handled by graphics cards it's beginning to free up the CPU even more, with multiple cores the CPU can do more again so it really does lower the value of this NIC yet more, networking just isn't an area that needs moving offboard - building say, dedicated AI hardware would've been a far superior option.
I ping from my router to my ISP and get and average of 30ms ping, I do the same from my computer and get 31ms ping. I'm intrigued to know how it can possibly increase my latency without making some modification to my router to make it communicate faster with the exchange which let's face it, is practically impossible.
Of course they could claim my router is the bottleneck but then, seeing as it's impossible for me to get an ethernet port connected directly to some internet backbone then I have no use for this card anyway.
More to the point however, this is around the 4th time this has been posted on Slashdot, not another "Slashdot repeated news postings whine" but more intrigued to know who this KillerNIC company is paying to keep getting their lies spread all over the internet?
I don't know if this is any help, I haven't as many consoles setup as you but I have a desk setup where I do work/gaming (rather than a living room TV setup) and use the following:
;)
- A Samsung 244T 24" TFT
- 4 port KVM into the DVI port of the above which I have my computers plugged into
- XBox 360 in the 15 pin analog VGA port (can play XBox games)
- Wii in the composite in (can play my old Gamecube games)
One of my machines on the KVM is on 24/7 and I put audio into the line in of this machine and have 5.1 surround on the machine so all consoles go into line in using some decent stereo audio splitters to get them all to go through the one line in port.
The Samsung 244T also has s-video in and the old yellow phono style connector in (can't remember what it's called) so theoretically I could send 2 more consoles in through that. Switching display is then just a simple case of pressing the source button on the monitor to switch video sources or using the menu to cycle through the video sources to choose a specific one.
This setup could be adapted to most screens I'd think, I don't think the Samsung 244T is particularly rare in having so many possible different inputs. Also, having a PC in the setup opens the option for emulators too so it's probably one of the more versatile options.
The key is simply about using lots of adapters and splitters as required, but this does require some planning however because for example the 360 needed to use the VGA cable as component in looked crap. Still, as I say, extension cables, component in and a display system with multiple input types is the key I think
No wait, hear me out, I'm not just being pedantic - didn't Sony recently lose a court case to have the PS3 classed as a computer? Surely if the courts draw a distinction between consoles and computers then they would also do so in the case of the patent such that the patent describes a device designed for a computer and not one designed for a console?
Of course IANAL but would this kind of argument stick in court?
Don't know if you'll see this in time but I just got the following e-mail from Amazon.co.uk:
;)
Dear Nintendo fan,
Great news! We've managed to get our hands on some more Wii consoles and will be putting them on sale between 3pm and 4pm today (Friday, December 8). Last time we sold out in 7 minutes and we expect this batch to go even more quickly.
So if you read it in time you've got 45mins to get to Amazon.co.uk and start site camping
Delivered by courier only 20mins ago, if only I didn't have to work! Still at least I didn't have to camp out in the bitter cold for well, days ;)
;)
Unfortunately, my experience of getting additional controllers has been rather less easy. Preordered from play.com just after they put them up for preorder and have been told they don't have enough nunchucks, classic controllers, component cables, wii motes or copies of wii play to fill even one out of my order of 3 nunchucks, 2 classic, 1 component, 2 wii motes, 1 wii play. Also they were unwilling to tell me where I am in the preorder queue but that they were getting some in before xmas - doesn't help that they didn't tell me if the ones in before xmas would reach me in the queue though!
I have a local supplier that lives just down my road though, keeping my fingers crossed he'll get enough in to save one/some for me!
For reference, current eBay price seems to be about £250 - £290, not terribly spectacular but still a nice profit if you put no effort into getting your Wii by just pre-ordering online, mines for keeps though
Unfortunately this is how the corporate world all too often works.
It's hard to just sack people else you risk all sorts of industrial tribunals, unfair dismissal cases and so forth, what's more management jobs really are often quite easy, as an example I've seen first hand we had a guy once who made us £1.5million a year in sales when a management position came up it went to the guy who only made £300,000 a year because the management job really wasn't too tough and why take away someone making you £1.5million was the argument of management. Often it's easier for companies to just promote people out of the way than it is to trial and do what companies should be able to do - sack them for incompetence.
Personally I think it's a poor idea, if you screw over the most deserving ones their productivity will drop anyway so it's silly to think you can leave them where they are making you money indefinetely without rewarding them with promotion, unfortunately too many management teams simply don't understand this concept.