Please mod parent up. For an analogy, this is similar to the control US conglomerates have over ring tones. Why are people still paying out the nose to their phone service provider for ring tones? Because you can't upload third party stuff to your own phone. Japanese phone companies aren't stupid; they want that same level of control over their own customers.
This has little to do with copyright, and everything to do with control. Think DRM.
You're right about the sequential injection not being ready yet, and that's a real shame, as it would result in smoother idle for a lot of cars. The reason they haven't done it yet is because at high RPMs the injectors are on most of the time anyway, and are injecting onto a closed valve. But the ECU really does need to know the cam angle in order to inject a single squirt of fuel into an open intake valve. This is because the intake valve opens once every 720 crank degrees (one cam rotation). If the ECU only knows the crank angle, the best it can do is squirt twice per cam rev: once into an open intake valve and once into a closed one. I'm not sure what your stock ECU is doing, but if it doesn't know the cam angle it can't do true sequential fuel injection. This is basically what inline 4 cylinder bank fire on MS does already. It's counterintuitive, but injecting onto closed valves isn't really a bad thing, since all that fuel gets sucked into the cylinders and burned anyway. And unless you have the tools, time, and talent to tune each cylinder individually, there's no performance reason to do sequential. So these guys aren't "full of shit", they're just focusing their time on other things.
As for the wasted spark ignition on your Subaru, fully distributorless ignitions aren't supported on the stock MS-II firmware, but both MSnS-Extra and the latest version of MS-II/Extra support it. Yes, it's true that the stock MS/II only supports one coil, but the MS-I Extra firmware has supported up to 6 coils for quite awhile, along with a decent variety of cam/crank wheels. You just need to make a few hardware modifications (specifically, adding as many coil drivers as you have coils), and if you do coil on plug you need to know the cam angle (wasted spark only needs the crank angle).
Above all, it's not a plug-and-play solution in any case, and that means it's not for everyone. MegaSquirt requires getting your hands dirty, learning the specifics of how your stock fuel and ignition work, figuring out coolant sensors, crank angle teeth, throttle position sensors, et cetera. And then once you've installed it you have to fiddle with numbers to get the thing to even start up. Sure, you could pay 3 or 4 times as much, buy a prewired Fuel Commander and be done with it... but then you wouldn't learn anything, and on top of that you have the typical problems with closed source: you're assuming the code works as stated. You're assuming their fuel and spark map is the best possible tune for your specific exhaust, headers, and intake system (here's a hint: altering any of those can shift the ideal mapping). And you're at their mercy for support, meaning if you want to alter the fuel map or spark timing or some other parameter and they don't give you the tools, well....
If you're willing to give it a shot, there is a whole forum of people that can help you out, from choosing which version of the hardware and firmware to run, all the way to how to wire up extra coils. It's hard, but it's extremely rewarding.
You, my friend, need to build yourself a MegaSquirt. You can build the whole thing by yourself for about $200, and the code is GPL. You can interface with the box using a serial cable, and there's a version of the code that lets you control both fuel and spark advance, as well as things like turbo wastegates and even nitrous if you want to go that far. Take a look; I learned things about cars I never knew just by building and installing one of these.
Please mod parent informative. The ECU knows how much fuel goes into the engine because... it's the one injecting precise measurements of fuel into the engine!
Wow. Looking at the sheer number of galaxies in that photograph, thinking about how many stars are in each of those galaxies, realizing how huge a star is, and then reflecting upon the fact that the photograph you posted was but a minuscule part of the visible sky... it makes me feel really really small.
Sound trucks are still prevalent here in Japan. Pachinko parlors use them quite frequently, along with the militant right-wing weirdos in their black vans. And just last week the folks running for public office in my neighborhood were driving around in vans with loudspeakers shouting at the top of their lungs. Made me want to take a baseball bat to the damn things. Consider yourself lucky they don't exist in the US anymore.
Likewise, there will be little need for war since there are no resources to argue over
What about beachfront property? You can't replicate real estate. Power? Fame? Some people will do anything to be "above" others, whether that means respect or fear; the rest of us will have to fight to stay on even footing. And people will still go to war over attractive mates. There's a reason The Iliad is such a timeless story. It's human nature.
Sorry, I didn't mean to come down so hard on you. It is a shame that we're building more coal plants while there are better and cleaner ways to generate power. With all the specs I've seen for IFR and breeder reactors it's a wonder that countries like France aren't building them. I would think that generating electricity would be cheaper than standing guard over what amounts to a 100,000 year death pit. Sure it costs money to build the thing, but people are practically giving the fuel away. I guess regulations are keeping it from being cost-effective?
You're right in that diversification is an ideal plan... I just can't see any companies in the United States investing in solar or wind or even nuclear over coal. As we can see in the US, any company with money is going to take the shortest path to quick profits. What we need to do is make coal cost-ineffective to burn by passing back the indirect health costs to the coal plant owners. Unfortunately, normal folks can't do that without massive campaign contributions. Who has the money to pay politicians? Oh yeah, the guys spending money on coal plants. Argh.
Other than France, NO country is truly dependent on Nukes (America is 2'nd largest user at only 19%).
Wow, that's a skewed use of statistics if I've ever seen one. The way you put it, only one country generates more than 19% of its energy from nuclear power. But I think you're quite wrong: Countries generating the largest percentage of their electricity in 2005 from nuclear energy were: France, 78.5 percent; Lithuania, 69.6 percent; Slovakia, 56.1 percent; Belgium 55.6 percent... these are the countries that are doing it right. Sure, France isn't completely dependent on nuclear energy, but I think almost 80% is a damn large number. In fact if you shut off all the other types of plants in France, the economy would take a hit but the society could keep running. The number two position is Slovakia at a respectable 70%. If America is the world's second largest user of nuclear energy by megawatts (and not percentage of total energy production) and yet that energy only supplies 20% of the nation's electricity needs, it would seem to indicate we have a problem with consumption. While we certainly need to switch to cleaner ways to make energy, we also need to find more efficient ways to spend it.
Or it could be that the logical individual does the "right" thing because of a variation of the prisoner's dilemma. A normal prisoner's dilemma has only two players, but in our variation we'll say we have as many players as are in the society. Each player has two options per "turn": Behave (play nice, don't steal, don't murder), or Betray (kill, rape, pillage, et cetera).
In the classical prisoners' dilemma, if both parties betray, both parties lose a lot, and if neither party betrays then both parties lose to a lesser extent. In the real world, if everyone steals and murders and whatnot, everyone loses. But if everyone cooperates then nobody really loses. Of course, if only one person betrays, that person can win a bit at the expense of everyone else. But most societies catch on to betrayers pretty quick, and dispose of them. The optimal solution for the society as a whole is one in which everyone behaves, and societies with a large number of betrayers fall behind and stay behind, I'd imagine (witness most of Africa, where bands of militias steal from others within the society).
In short, most people behave for two reasons. The first is because it would suck to live in a world where everyone misbehaved. The second is that the penalty for being caught is usually more than the potential gains from betraying. (As a side note, different cultures define "misbehavior" in different ways and have different rules for how much a betrayer loses when caught, which is why you get your hand cut off for stealing in certain countries and a slap on the wrist in others.)
This was one of the things that Planescape: Torment did perfectly. You could grind mobs if you wanted to (in fact, near the end of the game there were several places specifically designed to let you do so). But most of your experience points came through revealing parts of the story arc. If I recall correctly there are only a handful of points where combat is explicitly required, and it's never for the purpose of increasing a stat so you can beat another boss. If you wanted to fight, you could fight. If you got bored, you could just ignore the random guy or two trying to pick fights with you and continue the storyline without consequence.
The Zelda games also base character development on your progress through the game rather than on arbitrary stats. While fighting through a dungeon, you get a new item which makes your character indirectly stronger (maybe by supplying the player a way to easily beat monsters that are difficult or impossible to fight with just a sword). And when you beat the boss of that dungeon, you get another immediate reward in the form of being able to take more damage. Outside of the dungeons, if the player spends time looking for secrets they can become stronger, but it's never necessary. The great thing about this is the pacing; if the player plays through the game quickly they'll get rewards faster to match the challenges they face, and at no time will the player be too weak to proceed. At the same time, they still have to earn those rewards. This is why the Zelda adventure formula is popular.
Contrast this with a game like Final Fantasy X, where most of your time is spent fighting random monster battles in between major plot elements. If you run from the monsters you encounter in these random battles instead of cutting your way through, the boss battles will become more and more frustratingly difficult until they are nearly impossible. Since the storyline is about a long journey, this game mechanic works to the extent that a long journey is supposed to be long. And most players who reach the end of the game feel an attachment to the characters since they've spent the game traveling together. But it feels artificial because it's disruptive to the gameplay if you don't play at the exact pace the designers intended. And fighting a thousand random battles because you HAVE to is annoying even to many RPG players.
Your previous generation of self-appointed "webmasters" were the first folks on the scene. This was before most people even knew what a hyperlink was, let alone HTML. Therefore, being able to hack together a page that would render properly was a rare ability. It was a new form of media, with its own rules, and it was trying to borrow aesthetically from print media. So you had a bunch of "pages" that, honestly, looked like crap (partly because the people with skills were focusing more on functionality than form, and partly because nobody knew what a good "web page" was supposed to look like).
Gradually, programmers started making better tools so that less technically-inclined people could jump in and try things. Some of these folks were artists, and some rather beautiful and elegant layouts were developed. At about the same time, tools started popping up that allowed people to type content into a text box and have it appear with the proper formatting applied, or have the data be automatically imported and formatted from a database. With this, the amount of content on the web increased dramatically. A webmaster's focus was on editing and uploading individual HTML files (a comparatively laborious task compared to entering something into a blog post form), and at the same time he had to compete directly with the better designs and layouts from the art pool.
So what happened? The more technically oriented webmasters became LAMP specialists or coders (and the bottom of the barrel started making IE-only pages). The more artistically inclined ones discovered CSS and Dreamweaver and went on to contribute to a prettier and easier to use web. A very small minority with talents in both areas got fantastic jobs and made lots of money making tools for artists or better interfaces (dynamic HTML, slide-out widgets, WYSIWYG in forms). And the rest? Well, you don't get very far if you can't adapt.
Indeed. But keep in mind it's done with the complicity of the airlines. There's no law on the books that says a passenger on some list can't fly on an airplane, because that would be discriminatory, right? But an airline has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, and that's how they get around it. Hey, if you wanted to, you could always charter a jet and they can't stop you, assuming you have assloads of cash. So EACH AND EVERY AIRLINE delegates the responsibility of refusing service off to the TSA, ho hum, everything is legal. It also makes sure that the "oh shit, we screened the wrong person" stuff gets foisted off onto the TSA instead of the individual airlines. Yes, of course it's bullshit. Conspiracy? You tell me.
This holds up against legal recourse because they refund your money or otherwise compensate you for your inconvenience (usually by giving you a ticket to a later flight, oh joy), thus keeping you from suing them for not providing a service paid for. Ideally you should be able to sue because they delayed your flight, you lost money because you missed a crucial business meeting from being delayed at security, etc. But for that reason, the airlines don't have a clause in their contract that says they HAVE to get you there on time. In fact if you actually read the contract you'll see that it leaves you with little recourse in the event of anything happening. Every plane in the fleet could be grounded because of incompetence and you have no way to sue them for breach of contract. None.
Or, you know, you could actually PROMOTE those games properly. Publishers dump boatloads of money into promoting sequels like the latest Madden 200X (which is already going to sell well without any effort), but I don't recall seeing any advertising for Okami. Certainly there was nothing memorable.
Of course the standard single page ad in a magazine generally doesn't even play up a game's strengths properly. If "beautiful graphics" are touted on the box cover, I'll see four 1 inch square microscopic "screenshots". If they're trying to promote the story we get a few stale phrases like "expansive storyline". You're not getting my attention, guys. And don't get me started about eye-splitting obnoxious flash ads. Oh, you're selling a game. That's nice. Your ad doesn't even try to tell me how it's different from the other 50 blockbusters on the market. That kind of sloppy advertising works fine for your sports sequel, because people already know what they're buying, and they're lined up to buy the next installment anyway. But it makes genuinely unique games like Okami flop.
Most companies seem to be blind to the difference between a great product promoted poorly and a mediocre sequel marketed to the gills. If a good game is not selling, fire your marketers and hire new ones. And if a bad game isn't selling, THEN you fire development staff.
Code like that *works* in UTF-8, which is one of the things that makes it beatiful. (among many others)
It allows you to deal with world characters sets when it matters, and allows you to ignore them when it does not.
It's not always true. What about code that scans for lowercase letters and capitalizes them? That will royally screw up any UTF-8 string that isn't based off a Latin alphabet, like CJK languages. And it even has the potential to screw up languages like Czech. Oh, you say, just use the builtin functions. Regardless it's something you really should keep in mind when coding. Don't assume everyone uses English, and don't assume that single character conversions will work. Quite often, they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
We tried to make a list, but they wouldn't let us publish it.
Please mod parent up. For an analogy, this is similar to the control US conglomerates have over ring tones. Why are people still paying out the nose to their phone service provider for ring tones? Because you can't upload third party stuff to your own phone. Japanese phone companies aren't stupid; they want that same level of control over their own customers.
This has little to do with copyright, and everything to do with control. Think DRM.
You're right about the sequential injection not being ready yet, and that's a real shame, as it would result in smoother idle for a lot of cars. The reason they haven't done it yet is because at high RPMs the injectors are on most of the time anyway, and are injecting onto a closed valve. But the ECU really does need to know the cam angle in order to inject a single squirt of fuel into an open intake valve. This is because the intake valve opens once every 720 crank degrees (one cam rotation). If the ECU only knows the crank angle, the best it can do is squirt twice per cam rev: once into an open intake valve and once into a closed one. I'm not sure what your stock ECU is doing, but if it doesn't know the cam angle it can't do true sequential fuel injection. This is basically what inline 4 cylinder bank fire on MS does already. It's counterintuitive, but injecting onto closed valves isn't really a bad thing, since all that fuel gets sucked into the cylinders and burned anyway. And unless you have the tools, time, and talent to tune each cylinder individually, there's no performance reason to do sequential. So these guys aren't "full of shit", they're just focusing their time on other things. As for the wasted spark ignition on your Subaru, fully distributorless ignitions aren't supported on the stock MS-II firmware, but both MSnS-Extra and the latest version of MS-II/Extra support it. Yes, it's true that the stock MS/II only supports one coil, but the MS-I Extra firmware has supported up to 6 coils for quite awhile, along with a decent variety of cam/crank wheels. You just need to make a few hardware modifications (specifically, adding as many coil drivers as you have coils), and if you do coil on plug you need to know the cam angle (wasted spark only needs the crank angle). Above all, it's not a plug-and-play solution in any case, and that means it's not for everyone. MegaSquirt requires getting your hands dirty, learning the specifics of how your stock fuel and ignition work, figuring out coolant sensors, crank angle teeth, throttle position sensors, et cetera. And then once you've installed it you have to fiddle with numbers to get the thing to even start up. Sure, you could pay 3 or 4 times as much, buy a prewired Fuel Commander and be done with it... but then you wouldn't learn anything, and on top of that you have the typical problems with closed source: you're assuming the code works as stated. You're assuming their fuel and spark map is the best possible tune for your specific exhaust, headers, and intake system (here's a hint: altering any of those can shift the ideal mapping). And you're at their mercy for support, meaning if you want to alter the fuel map or spark timing or some other parameter and they don't give you the tools, well.... If you're willing to give it a shot, there is a whole forum of people that can help you out, from choosing which version of the hardware and firmware to run, all the way to how to wire up extra coils. It's hard, but it's extremely rewarding.
You, my friend, need to build yourself a MegaSquirt. You can build the whole thing by yourself for about $200, and the code is GPL. You can interface with the box using a serial cable, and there's a version of the code that lets you control both fuel and spark advance, as well as things like turbo wastegates and even nitrous if you want to go that far. Take a look; I learned things about cars I never knew just by building and installing one of these.
Damn. The fuel costs on that must be astronomical!
Please mod parent informative. The ECU knows how much fuel goes into the engine because... it's the one injecting precise measurements of fuel into the engine!
Is it just me, or does that mainframe look disturbingly similar to the WOPR?
"Would you like to play a game?"
Wow. Looking at the sheer number of galaxies in that photograph, thinking about how many stars are in each of those galaxies, realizing how huge a star is, and then reflecting upon the fact that the photograph you posted was but a minuscule part of the visible sky... it makes me feel really really small.
Sound trucks are still prevalent here in Japan. Pachinko parlors use them quite frequently, along with the militant right-wing weirdos in their black vans. And just last week the folks running for public office in my neighborhood were driving around in vans with loudspeakers shouting at the top of their lungs. Made me want to take a baseball bat to the damn things. Consider yourself lucky they don't exist in the US anymore.
What about beachfront property? You can't replicate real estate. Power? Fame? Some people will do anything to be "above" others, whether that means respect or fear; the rest of us will have to fight to stay on even footing. And people will still go to war over attractive mates. There's a reason The Iliad is such a timeless story. It's human nature.
Sorry, I didn't mean to come down so hard on you. It is a shame that we're building more coal plants while there are better and cleaner ways to generate power. With all the specs I've seen for IFR and breeder reactors it's a wonder that countries like France aren't building them. I would think that generating electricity would be cheaper than standing guard over what amounts to a 100,000 year death pit. Sure it costs money to build the thing, but people are practically giving the fuel away. I guess regulations are keeping it from being cost-effective?
You're right in that diversification is an ideal plan... I just can't see any companies in the United States investing in solar or wind or even nuclear over coal. As we can see in the US, any company with money is going to take the shortest path to quick profits. What we need to do is make coal cost-ineffective to burn by passing back the indirect health costs to the coal plant owners. Unfortunately, normal folks can't do that without massive campaign contributions. Who has the money to pay politicians? Oh yeah, the guys spending money on coal plants. Argh.
Wow, that's a skewed use of statistics if I've ever seen one. The way you put it, only one country generates more than 19% of its energy from nuclear power. But I think you're quite wrong: Countries generating the largest percentage of their electricity in 2005 from nuclear energy were: France, 78.5 percent; Lithuania, 69.6 percent; Slovakia, 56.1 percent; Belgium 55.6 percent... these are the countries that are doing it right. Sure, France isn't completely dependent on nuclear energy, but I think almost 80% is a damn large number. In fact if you shut off all the other types of plants in France, the economy would take a hit but the society could keep running. The number two position is Slovakia at a respectable 70%. If America is the world's second largest user of nuclear energy by megawatts (and not percentage of total energy production) and yet that energy only supplies 20% of the nation's electricity needs, it would seem to indicate we have a problem with consumption. While we certainly need to switch to cleaner ways to make energy, we also need to find more efficient ways to spend it.
Come now, I think that joke was a bit forced.
One other thing I've always been confused about: why do legal documents always have to SHOUT LIKE THIS?
Leia, half-naked!
Natalie Portman!
Han Solo petrified!
I'm sure someone else can fit "Hot Grits" into there somewhere.
And Maryland is very very close to Washington, D.C. Hmm.
Oh wait, I guess cockroaches can survive pretty much anything.
Or it could be that the logical individual does the "right" thing because of a variation of the prisoner's dilemma. A normal prisoner's dilemma has only two players, but in our variation we'll say we have as many players as are in the society. Each player has two options per "turn": Behave (play nice, don't steal, don't murder), or Betray (kill, rape, pillage, et cetera).
In the classical prisoners' dilemma, if both parties betray, both parties lose a lot, and if neither party betrays then both parties lose to a lesser extent. In the real world, if everyone steals and murders and whatnot, everyone loses. But if everyone cooperates then nobody really loses. Of course, if only one person betrays, that person can win a bit at the expense of everyone else. But most societies catch on to betrayers pretty quick, and dispose of them. The optimal solution for the society as a whole is one in which everyone behaves, and societies with a large number of betrayers fall behind and stay behind, I'd imagine (witness most of Africa, where bands of militias steal from others within the society).
In short, most people behave for two reasons. The first is because it would suck to live in a world where everyone misbehaved. The second is that the penalty for being caught is usually more than the potential gains from betraying. (As a side note, different cultures define "misbehavior" in different ways and have different rules for how much a betrayer loses when caught, which is why you get your hand cut off for stealing in certain countries and a slap on the wrist in others.)
This was one of the things that Planescape: Torment did perfectly. You could grind mobs if you wanted to (in fact, near the end of the game there were several places specifically designed to let you do so). But most of your experience points came through revealing parts of the story arc. If I recall correctly there are only a handful of points where combat is explicitly required, and it's never for the purpose of increasing a stat so you can beat another boss. If you wanted to fight, you could fight. If you got bored, you could just ignore the random guy or two trying to pick fights with you and continue the storyline without consequence.
The Zelda games also base character development on your progress through the game rather than on arbitrary stats. While fighting through a dungeon, you get a new item which makes your character indirectly stronger (maybe by supplying the player a way to easily beat monsters that are difficult or impossible to fight with just a sword). And when you beat the boss of that dungeon, you get another immediate reward in the form of being able to take more damage. Outside of the dungeons, if the player spends time looking for secrets they can become stronger, but it's never necessary. The great thing about this is the pacing; if the player plays through the game quickly they'll get rewards faster to match the challenges they face, and at no time will the player be too weak to proceed. At the same time, they still have to earn those rewards. This is why the Zelda adventure formula is popular.
Contrast this with a game like Final Fantasy X, where most of your time is spent fighting random monster battles in between major plot elements. If you run from the monsters you encounter in these random battles instead of cutting your way through, the boss battles will become more and more frustratingly difficult until they are nearly impossible. Since the storyline is about a long journey, this game mechanic works to the extent that a long journey is supposed to be long. And most players who reach the end of the game feel an attachment to the characters since they've spent the game traveling together. But it feels artificial because it's disruptive to the gameplay if you don't play at the exact pace the designers intended. And fighting a thousand random battles because you HAVE to is annoying even to many RPG players.
Your previous generation of self-appointed "webmasters" were the first folks on the scene. This was before most people even knew what a hyperlink was, let alone HTML. Therefore, being able to hack together a page that would render properly was a rare ability. It was a new form of media, with its own rules, and it was trying to borrow aesthetically from print media. So you had a bunch of "pages" that, honestly, looked like crap (partly because the people with skills were focusing more on functionality than form, and partly because nobody knew what a good "web page" was supposed to look like).
Gradually, programmers started making better tools so that less technically-inclined people could jump in and try things. Some of these folks were artists, and some rather beautiful and elegant layouts were developed. At about the same time, tools started popping up that allowed people to type content into a text box and have it appear with the proper formatting applied, or have the data be automatically imported and formatted from a database. With this, the amount of content on the web increased dramatically. A webmaster's focus was on editing and uploading individual HTML files (a comparatively laborious task compared to entering something into a blog post form), and at the same time he had to compete directly with the better designs and layouts from the art pool.
So what happened? The more technically oriented webmasters became LAMP specialists or coders (and the bottom of the barrel started making IE-only pages). The more artistically inclined ones discovered CSS and Dreamweaver and went on to contribute to a prettier and easier to use web. A very small minority with talents in both areas got fantastic jobs and made lots of money making tools for artists or better interfaces (dynamic HTML, slide-out widgets, WYSIWYG in forms). And the rest? Well, you don't get very far if you can't adapt.
Wow. Now that's some beautiful ragdoll physics in action.
Well, lasers aren't free you know.
Indeed. But keep in mind it's done with the complicity of the airlines. There's no law on the books that says a passenger on some list can't fly on an airplane, because that would be discriminatory, right? But an airline has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, and that's how they get around it. Hey, if you wanted to, you could always charter a jet and they can't stop you, assuming you have assloads of cash. So EACH AND EVERY AIRLINE delegates the responsibility of refusing service off to the TSA, ho hum, everything is legal. It also makes sure that the "oh shit, we screened the wrong person" stuff gets foisted off onto the TSA instead of the individual airlines. Yes, of course it's bullshit. Conspiracy? You tell me.
This holds up against legal recourse because they refund your money or otherwise compensate you for your inconvenience (usually by giving you a ticket to a later flight, oh joy), thus keeping you from suing them for not providing a service paid for. Ideally you should be able to sue because they delayed your flight, you lost money because you missed a crucial business meeting from being delayed at security, etc. But for that reason, the airlines don't have a clause in their contract that says they HAVE to get you there on time. In fact if you actually read the contract you'll see that it leaves you with little recourse in the event of anything happening. Every plane in the fleet could be grounded because of incompetence and you have no way to sue them for breach of contract. None.
Or, you know, you could actually PROMOTE those games properly. Publishers dump boatloads of money into promoting sequels like the latest Madden 200X (which is already going to sell well without any effort), but I don't recall seeing any advertising for Okami. Certainly there was nothing memorable.
Of course the standard single page ad in a magazine generally doesn't even play up a game's strengths properly. If "beautiful graphics" are touted on the box cover, I'll see four 1 inch square microscopic "screenshots". If they're trying to promote the story we get a few stale phrases like "expansive storyline". You're not getting my attention, guys. And don't get me started about eye-splitting obnoxious flash ads. Oh, you're selling a game. That's nice. Your ad doesn't even try to tell me how it's different from the other 50 blockbusters on the market. That kind of sloppy advertising works fine for your sports sequel, because people already know what they're buying, and they're lined up to buy the next installment anyway. But it makes genuinely unique games like Okami flop.
Most companies seem to be blind to the difference between a great product promoted poorly and a mediocre sequel marketed to the gills. If a good game is not selling, fire your marketers and hire new ones. And if a bad game isn't selling, THEN you fire development staff.
Best gadget? A gadget is something you buy one of. I'd say a nail is more of a staple commodity.
*ducks*
It's not always true. What about code that scans for lowercase letters and capitalizes them? That will royally screw up any UTF-8 string that isn't based off a Latin alphabet, like CJK languages. And it even has the potential to screw up languages like Czech. Oh, you say, just use the builtin functions. Regardless it's something you really should keep in mind when coding. Don't assume everyone uses English, and don't assume that single character conversions will work. Quite often, they don't.