They're different kinds of games. PGR doesn't pretend to be a super-accurate and super-deep simulator. On the Xbox you've got Forza for that. It's more of an arcadey game for the not-so-hardcore. And it looks absolutely gorgeous, and it's fun to play.
I'm a huge fan of the GT series. I've played 1-3 through and am in the middle of 4. But I also love to play the Need for Speed series (on the PC). And I could never say that one's better than the other, they're just two different types of games that do two very different things very well.
runs at roughly 10Mhz (defined by the protagonist as "decisions per second").
Perhaps that's what he meant, but if you were to take this as actual decisions based on weighing any number of factors, you could be talking about a *lot* of clock cycles per decision.
Odd, I've found North American drivers to generally be more sedate off the line than Europeans. In Prague it seems that every intersection is considered by most to be the starting line of a dragstrip.
Others have already countered your choice for best Adventure game with Grim Fandango, a choice I agree with, though for my money the best adventure game out there was The Longest Journey.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I just can't defend a situation akin to someone who's been living neck-deep in shit suddenly getting to live only chest-deep in shit.
Just because it's a little better than the absolute worst doesn't make it a 'good deal.'
While you're right that working a factory job may be better than living on a farm, it still brings to mind the adage 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' or however that goes.
In your post you mentioned a range of conditions, from fairly decent to nightmarish, but compare that to Europe or North America - who on those continents would be satisfied with living in a dorm supplied by his company? If your employees need to be housed by you, then you're obviously not paying them enough to make their own reasonably comfortable housing arrangements, and this, at least in my opinion, is not right. More should be expected of companies that sell their wares in countries where the asking price translates into a massive margin for the company that then goes on to overcompensate the bosses.
If I'm not hurting the Chinese by buying Chinese-made products, then the company execs and shareholders are because they're demanding the money that should rightfully go to the workers.
Yeah, so $4.50 would give you a reasonably comfortable life. Meanwhile, people are claiming that $0.14 is a living wage. I guess these people consider a reasonable living standard to be a shack that you share with 8 other families and dumpster diving for all your nutritional needs.
How anyone can defend the companies that set their wages that low in China is beyond me.
I'll admit that perhaps I'm a bit spoiled. I'm not an office worker and I've had some factory jobs in the past, the worst being a plastics plant that was hot, noisy, and the smell of melted and burning plastic gave you headaches all day. All that for $8CDN/hr. Since then I've moved onto better things. I'll also admit to not knowing how much US working conditions vary from Canadian ones, but I suspect that there won't be all that much of a difference.
What I was trying to say that even if a North American job someone's in is a terrible, bottom rung brainless robot labor, at least it sticks to a ~40hr workweek, compensated overtime, safety standards, and basic job-protection laws. These simply don't exist in China. Sure, not ALL employers are exploitative bastards, but I bet the nice guys are a minority.
I'll just assume that you're arguing this completely off the wall point so you can string your opponent along a bit only to end the discussion with a YHBT.
I'm sorry, but are you claiming that $4.50 is a living wage? Please, tell me where, so I can take my riches from my $23/hr job and live like a king.
As far as domestic employers not treating their employees better - perhaps they wouldn't without the proper laws, but those laws ARE in place and employers are obligated to concern themselves with their employees' welfare (to a point).
We have no right? We have no responsibility for our fellow humans? Should we have ignored the situations in the USSR, Nazi germany, South Africa, Rwanda, Serbia, and many other places and just left millions people to be oppressed, suffer and die?
USSR? I didn't see the US doing much to prevent Stalin from wiping out god knows how many millions of his citizens. Nazi Germany? From what I hear they managed to kill off 6 million people. South Africa? I don't see our oh-so-responsible gov't forcing our drug companies to give out AIDS medicine there for free because otherwise those people will simply not get it. Rwanda? What the hell did we do to prevent the slaughter of 800k Tutsis? Serbia? Well, ok, I suppose if we didn't intervene things could've been worse.
So should we have? No, perhaps not. But for the most part we did. And this is the gov't we're talking about, not a profit-minded corporation.
What's wrong with consumer goods that come from China? I don't see how that necessarily imprisons, oppresses or hurts anyone
You're kidding right? Even the shittiest, dirtiest, lowest paying factory shit job in the US doesn't come close to the ridiculous working hours, ugly conditions, and the pittance that passes for a wage in some Chinese shithole factory.
"The class was mostly in favour of only hiring pretty, thin, young women."
I find this... well if not odd, then illogical. When I walk up to a salesman, clerk, basically anybody whose specific expertise I may at the moment require, having that person look like they were only hired to make guys stare doesn't instill me with confidence in that person's abilities. I'm not saying that the hot chick is ALWAYS as dumb as a post, but unfortunately this is often so.
I guess I'm an exception though. It would explain the study some supermarket chain did a while back where they'd put the young attractive checkout clerks into the express checkout lanes and thus were extremely successful in herding the young and low-middle-age type guys who didn't buy much stuff into those lanes and leaving the other tills clear for the serious shoppers.
As a male, I felt a part of a pretty sorry bunch:(
Heh, yeah, BMW's stripped down M3 with a cardboard trunk floor and you'll pay even more through the nose than normally for those overpriced, overengineered, buggy-computer-driven shitboxes.
Every time I see a BMW or a Benz with their iDrive knob I pray to God that the only people that ever have to be afflicted with idiocy like that are the yuppie twits who buy 'German Luxury'.
But then, you'd be wrong, which is why I am running such a campaign against slashdotters making automotive analogies. Most of you don't know jack shit about cars and have no hope of making a useful automotive analogy except by accident. Even those who do usually botch it badly.
How's he wrong? The removal of the AC not only removes a bit of weight from the car but it also removes the possibility of the AC sucking up horsepower when it's engaged. Not that it's that much of a difference in a 500hp car, but in a 100hp car you CAN notice the difference between driving with and w/o the AC on.
And in fact, the fastest cars are usually pretty heavy so they don't bounce off the road if you hit a little bump at 180 mph. For instance the 300ZX TT and the 3000 GT VR4 are both over 3400lb. In fact, the 300ZX is 3425 and my '81 Mercedes 300SD land yacht is only 3500.
Those cars and not "the fastest cars". Let's stick to things like the Veyron and the McLaren F1 and the Enzo and so on. And the weight is certainly not there to keep'em glued to the road. Aerodynamics take care of that at high speeds. The reason that these supercars don't all weigh about as much as an F1 racecar is because they a) need a massive engine, since a 3.0L V10 revving at 19k RPM doesn't generally last past oh... 400 miles or so b) safety features to comply with road-legal regulations c) creature comforts (even without AC, a street-legal supercar will generally have a roof, doors, windows, windscreen, etc.), and so on. You get the idea.
I'm surprised that some people had such a hard time with the flight school. The only thing I did for my flying missions is remap my keys so my attitude control would be done by the arrow keys, not split up for both hands. I had a much harder time trying to pass the last mission in the driving school than any of the flying missions (though Heli-Hell was a bitch).
Also, in vice-city, do yourself a favor and collect all the hidden items - that'll give you the chaingun at the mansion, and if you've got enough ammo for that, the final mission is a breeze - just stand there and hose him with bullets, he won't even get a shot off.
As for the final mission in SA, the hardest part for me was getting out of the building in time, even while fireproof (I'd finished the Firefighter missions). Once I managed that I got through the chase sequence on my first try.
Oh, and your'e right it's so much more satisfying to finish a game without cheating. The first time through SA I had to use a no-wanted-level cheat to beat the last trucking mission (because even if you took the train tunnels to get to your destination, the police helicopter would shoot and blow up your truck in the open space in LS), and I had to use a time cheat to beat the mission where you have to steal the police bikes. But the second time I played through that game I found that the missions WERE possible without cheating and not even all that difficult. It just helps to come back to a frustrating part after you've had time to cool off.
I'd worry about disease just being in the same room with those worn out skanks. Seriously, if this is the best the game industry can do, maybe getting rid of booth babes isn't an altogether bad idea.
It's sad that a girl that hires herself out for this kind of event seems to be on an even lower rung of life than a stripper.
"Bell Canada deployed Emily a few years back, and the results to date have been excellent. A top-level question of "How can I help you?" replaces several layers of DTMF auto-attendant complexity."
This Emily should be taken out and f*cking shot. Half the time it doesn't understand a simple "Yes" and the other half the time you're trying to figure out how in the hell to express what you want (if it's more complicated than, say "pay bill") so the machine knows how to route your call. Everytime I hit one of those goddamn speech recognition systems I just start stabbing 0 in an attempt to talk to a person.
At least with the old "Press 1 to hear a eunuch burp" kind of system you knew what your choices were! Now it's a stab in the dark as to whether the braindead twits that decided to blow all that money on a completely backwards and unnecessary system had to foresight to preprogram the voice recognition to recognize the words pertaining to MY issue. This is because when I actually call in, it is to solve a problem that a simple trip to the website won't.
You have to help me out here - I speak fluent Czech, but not having lived there for 17 years now I'm obviously a bit behind on the latest slang. I've been wracking my brain and I just can't think of the word/expression that translates into "to look for" and means sexual intercourse.
Look at XBox 360; backward compatibility is not worth talking about
I realize it pales in comparison to the amount of previous generation games the PS2 could play, but a list of 230 some odd XBox games compatible from day 1 with the 360 ain't bad.
They're trying to carve out the Home Entertainment market, but it's crystal clear they just don't understand it. Home Entertaiment electronics are disposable.
I'd say that underneath what they're telling everyone they DO understand this disposability of modern electronics. That's why yes, they do include features like Media Centre PC integration and a DVD remote and whatever else they've come up with. But they put these cheap-to-implement features into the product only because they know that it'll help people justify the purchase. In they end, MS *knows* that it'll be a game machine and that's it, and perhaps that'd explain the ease with which they decided that adding some super-duper next-gen DVD drive is unnecessary.
Slashdot Mirror
PGR is not better than GT.
They're different kinds of games. PGR doesn't pretend to be a super-accurate and super-deep simulator. On the Xbox you've got Forza for that. It's more of an arcadey game for the not-so-hardcore. And it looks absolutely gorgeous, and it's fun to play.
I'm a huge fan of the GT series. I've played 1-3 through and am in the middle of
4. But I also love to play the Need for Speed series (on the PC). And I could never say that one's better than the other, they're just two different types of games that do two very different things very well.
runs at roughly 10Mhz (defined by the protagonist as "decisions per second").
Perhaps that's what he meant, but if you were to take this as actual decisions based on weighing any number of factors, you could be talking about a *lot* of clock cycles per decision.
Odd, I've found North American drivers to generally be more sedate off the line than Europeans. In Prague it seems that every intersection is considered by most to be the starting line of a dragstrip.
Isn't 'Chinese' good enough? Isn't your demand as silly as me wanting to be called a Caucasian-Canadian?
I thought microevolution only applied to microorganisms? Wouldn't a complex organism developing longer legs fall under macroevolution?
BTW I'm not an ID'er in case anyone got the wrong idea.
Others have already countered your choice for best Adventure game with Grim Fandango, a choice I agree with, though for my money the best adventure game out there was The Longest Journey.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I just can't defend a situation akin to someone who's been living neck-deep in shit suddenly getting to live only chest-deep in shit.
Just because it's a little better than the absolute worst doesn't make it a 'good deal.'
While you're right that working a factory job may be better than living on a farm, it still brings to mind the adage 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' or however that goes.
In your post you mentioned a range of conditions, from fairly decent to nightmarish, but compare that to Europe or North America - who on those continents would be satisfied with living in a dorm supplied by his company? If your employees need to be housed by you, then you're obviously not paying them enough to make their own reasonably comfortable housing arrangements, and this, at least in my opinion, is not right. More should be expected of companies that sell their wares in countries where the asking price translates into a massive margin for the company that then goes on to overcompensate the bosses.
If I'm not hurting the Chinese by buying Chinese-made products, then the company execs and shareholders are because they're demanding the money that should rightfully go to the workers.
Yeah, so $4.50 would give you a reasonably comfortable life. Meanwhile, people are claiming that $0.14 is a living wage. I guess these people consider a reasonable living standard to be a shack that you share with 8 other families and dumpster diving for all your nutritional needs.
How anyone can defend the companies that set their wages that low in China is beyond me.
As we begin to see 4-core and 8-core CPUs, how long will it be until Microsoft begins charging per core?
Ah, but why would they? They'll just bloat the OS so it eats up enough CPU to require a multi-multicore chip setup for serious server performance.
I'll admit that perhaps I'm a bit spoiled. I'm not an office worker and I've had some factory jobs in the past, the worst being a plastics plant that was hot, noisy, and the smell of melted and burning plastic gave you headaches all day. All that for $8CDN/hr. Since then I've moved onto better things. I'll also admit to not knowing how much US working conditions vary from Canadian ones, but I suspect that there won't be all that much of a difference.
What I was trying to say that even if a North American job someone's in is a terrible, bottom rung brainless robot labor, at least it sticks to a ~40hr workweek, compensated overtime, safety standards, and basic job-protection laws. These simply don't exist in China. Sure, not ALL employers are exploitative bastards, but I bet the nice guys are a minority.
I'll just assume that you're arguing this completely off the wall point so you can string your opponent along a bit only to end the discussion with a YHBT.
I'm sorry, but are you claiming that $4.50 is a living wage? Please, tell me where, so I can take my riches from my $23/hr job and live like a king.
As far as domestic employers not treating their employees better - perhaps they wouldn't without the proper laws, but those laws ARE in place and employers are obligated to concern themselves with their employees' welfare (to a point).
We have no right? We have no responsibility for our fellow humans? Should we have ignored the situations in the USSR, Nazi germany, South Africa, Rwanda, Serbia, and many other places and just left millions people to be oppressed, suffer and die?
USSR? I didn't see the US doing much to prevent Stalin from wiping out god knows how many millions of his citizens. Nazi Germany? From what I hear they managed to kill off 6 million people. South Africa? I don't see our oh-so-responsible gov't forcing our drug companies to give out AIDS medicine there for free because otherwise those people will simply not get it. Rwanda? What the hell did we do to prevent the slaughter of 800k Tutsis? Serbia? Well, ok, I suppose if we didn't intervene things could've been worse.
So should we have? No, perhaps not. But for the most part we did. And this is the gov't we're talking about, not a profit-minded corporation.
What's wrong with consumer goods that come from China? I don't see how that necessarily imprisons, oppresses or hurts anyone
You're kidding right? Even the shittiest, dirtiest, lowest paying factory shit job in the US doesn't come close to the ridiculous working hours, ugly conditions, and the pittance that passes for a wage in some Chinese shithole factory.
"The class was mostly in favour of only hiring pretty, thin, young women."
:(
I find this... well if not odd, then illogical. When I walk up to a salesman, clerk, basically anybody whose specific expertise I may at the moment require, having that person look like they were only hired to make guys stare doesn't instill me with confidence in that person's abilities. I'm not saying that the hot chick is ALWAYS as dumb as a post, but unfortunately this is often so.
I guess I'm an exception though. It would explain the study some supermarket chain did a while back where they'd put the young attractive checkout clerks into the express checkout lanes and thus were extremely successful in herding the young and low-middle-age type guys who didn't buy much stuff into those lanes and leaving the other tills clear for the serious shoppers.
As a male, I felt a part of a pretty sorry bunch
Heh, yeah, BMW's stripped down M3 with a cardboard trunk floor and you'll pay even more through the nose than normally for those overpriced, overengineered, buggy-computer-driven shitboxes.
Every time I see a BMW or a Benz with their iDrive knob I pray to God that the only people that ever have to be afflicted with idiocy like that are the yuppie twits who buy 'German Luxury'.
But then, you'd be wrong, which is why I am running such a campaign against slashdotters making automotive analogies. Most of you don't know jack shit about cars and have no hope of making a useful automotive analogy except by accident. Even those who do usually botch it badly.
How's he wrong? The removal of the AC not only removes a bit of weight from the car but it also removes the possibility of the AC sucking up horsepower when it's engaged. Not that it's that much of a difference in a 500hp car, but in a 100hp car you CAN notice the difference between driving with and w/o the AC on.
And in fact, the fastest cars are usually pretty heavy so they don't bounce off the road if you hit a little bump at 180 mph. For instance the 300ZX TT and the 3000 GT VR4 are both over 3400lb. In fact, the 300ZX is 3425 and my '81 Mercedes 300SD land yacht is only 3500.
Those cars and not "the fastest cars". Let's stick to things like the Veyron and the McLaren F1 and the Enzo and so on. And the weight is certainly not there to keep'em glued to the road. Aerodynamics take care of that at high speeds. The reason that these supercars don't all weigh about as much as an F1 racecar is because they a) need a massive engine, since a 3.0L V10 revving at 19k RPM doesn't generally last past oh... 400 miles or so b) safety features to comply with road-legal regulations c) creature comforts (even without AC, a street-legal supercar will generally have a roof, doors, windows, windscreen, etc.), and so on. You get the idea.
I'm surprised that some people had such a hard time with the flight school. The only thing I did for my flying missions is remap my keys so my attitude control would be done by the arrow keys, not split up for both hands. I had a much harder time trying to pass the last mission in the driving school than any of the flying missions (though Heli-Hell was a bitch).
Also, in vice-city, do yourself a favor and collect all the hidden items - that'll give you the chaingun at the mansion, and if you've got enough ammo for that, the final mission is a breeze - just stand there and hose him with bullets, he won't even get a shot off.
As for the final mission in SA, the hardest part for me was getting out of the building in time, even while fireproof (I'd finished the Firefighter missions). Once I managed that I got through the chase sequence on my first try.
Oh, and your'e right it's so much more satisfying to finish a game without cheating. The first time through SA I had to use a no-wanted-level cheat to beat the last trucking mission (because even if you took the train tunnels to get to your destination, the police helicopter would shoot and blow up your truck in the open space in LS), and I had to use a time cheat to beat the mission where you have to steal the police bikes. But the second time I played through that game I found that the missions WERE possible without cheating and not even all that difficult. It just helps to come back to a frustrating part after you've had time to cool off.
I'd worry about disease just being in the same room with those worn out skanks. Seriously, if this is the best the game industry can do, maybe getting rid of booth babes isn't an altogether bad idea.
It's sad that a girl that hires herself out for this kind of event seems to be on an even lower rung of life than a stripper.
"Bell Canada deployed Emily a few years back, and the results to date have been excellent. A top-level question of "How can I help you?" replaces several layers of DTMF auto-attendant complexity."
This Emily should be taken out and f*cking shot. Half the time it doesn't understand a simple "Yes" and the other half the time you're trying to figure out how in the hell to express what you want (if it's more complicated than, say "pay bill") so the machine knows how to route your call. Everytime I hit one of those goddamn speech recognition systems I just start stabbing 0 in an attempt to talk to a person.
At least with the old "Press 1 to hear a eunuch burp" kind of system you knew what your choices were! Now it's a stab in the dark as to whether the braindead twits that decided to blow all that money on a completely backwards and unnecessary system had to foresight to preprogram the voice recognition to recognize the words pertaining to MY issue. This is because when I actually call in, it is to solve a problem that a simple trip to the website won't.
You have to help me out here - I speak fluent Czech, but not having lived there for 17 years now I'm obviously a bit behind on the latest slang. I've been wracking my brain and I just can't think of the word/expression that translates into "to look for" and means sexual intercourse.
:)
So please, expand my horizons
So then the building's attempt at slimming down the occupants by shaming them into taking the stairs has failed...
Look at XBox 360; backward compatibility is not worth talking about
I realize it pales in comparison to the amount of previous generation games the PS2 could play, but a list of 230 some odd XBox games compatible from day 1 with the 360 ain't bad.
They're trying to carve out the Home Entertainment market, but it's crystal clear they just don't understand it. Home Entertaiment electronics are disposable.
I'd say that underneath what they're telling everyone they DO understand this disposability of modern electronics. That's why yes, they do include features like Media Centre PC integration and a DVD remote and whatever else they've come up with. But they put these cheap-to-implement features into the product only because they know that it'll help people justify the purchase. In they end, MS *knows* that it'll be a game machine and that's it, and perhaps that'd explain the ease with which they decided that adding some super-duper next-gen DVD drive is unnecessary.