I'm American, and speak only English. When I bought the movie "Run Lola Run", it had both the English voice-overs and the original German with English subs. The voice-over was honestly excellent and couldn't have been done better, but I still preferred the sound of the original German.
I think I would like to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in a similar way - with the original Russian being spoken with English subtitles. Normally this sort of reverse localization isn't done, but I see there's a mod for that, which I might experiment with:
No, really, we actually can't build them that fast:
"To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we'll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we'd have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now."
I live a block down the road from the Microsoft Redmond campus (it used to be 12 blocks, but they metatasized), so I walk by all this each day. But I don't work at Microsoft, so all I have is just sidewalk testimony.
The older Microsoft campus was confined to the east side of highway 520, with dozens and dozens of properties rented and scattered all over Redmond, Bellevue, and other places in the area. Lately they have been building an absolutely HUGE property just across the highway from the old campus, where they will consolidate all that rented office space.
Only 7 new buildings? When I walk by there, I can see at least 14 or 17 structures going up, but I can't tell what will be in them. Some of them are titled buildings number 97, 98, 99, and by that they mean Microsoft Redmond campus literally has that many buildings.
The city of Redmond has a height limit on its buildings. I don't know the exact rules, but no skyscrapers. The Microsoft buildings are all about 4 or 5 very tall stories, so they are forced to sprawl rather than go up. When they dug the hole for it all, it seemed to be about 6-12 blocks on a side. Huge, huge hole for that 4600 car parking garage. Then they put up more of those big construction cranes than I've ever seen in such a small space - at one point they had 9 or 10 of them.
With that huge parking garage right next to the highway, they should have just let Microsoft have highway entrances directly out onto 520 and keep all that traffic off the local streets. That would make perfect sense to me. But it exits out onto NE 40th Street, which is a relatively small cross-street, which has relatively small entrance and exits to 520.
There is already a bridge across 520 between the Microsoft campuses - the NE 40th overpass and intersection with 520. Also, Microsoft has a huge fleet of hundreds of shuttle buses and cars that transfer people from point to point in the Microsoft sprawl. My reaction as a local to the idea of a car and pedestrian bridge for Microsoft is that, while it would be beneficial to the locals to keep some of the terrible Microsoft drivers off the local streets (a lot of them are from India!), Microsoft should foot the entire bill.
Retinitis Pigmentosa is a progressive vision loss disease. The age at which it begins and the rate at which it progresses varies (and greatly), but generally speaking, the younger people haven't lost all of their vision yet, while the older people have. While some children lose all vision by their teens, many victims don't start losing vision until their 20s and don't go fully blind until quite late in life.
This experiment will apply to younger people, but those younger people usually still have some vision left. It is far better to perform the experiment on someone who has lost all of their vision because they have nothing to lose if the experiment goes bad.
I have retinitis pigmentosa; I'm 39, and have only lost my peripheral vision so far. Pictures of what I can see and can't see wouldn't translate very well. The part of my vision where I can't see does not show as black, like when you close your eyes. There's no color at all - it's not color, it's nothing. What color do you see out of the back of your head?
The nothing is so nothing that as it slowly took over my peripheral vision over a period of 20 years, I never noticed it was there. It was not until an optometrist looked into my eyes while I was getting new glasses that I found out it was happening.
The linked article uses the word "influential", while the Guiness Records list does not. Guiness uses this criteria: "a top 50 list of games ranked both on their importance and on how fun they are to play." In this case, importance doesn't mean influential. Reading the linked article, it seems that by "importance", they mean which games sold the most and for the longest time.
A list of influential games would be entirely different, with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Dune II and Ultima III at the top.
The indie artists will get exactly as much as the non-indie artists (what do you call those, anyway?)
You don't really think any musician would ever see a penny of this tax go in their checking account, do you?
Generally speaking, much less is scientifically understood about what makes a man's face attractive than what makes a woman's face attractive. Could it be because scientists are mostly men?
But I have not actually looked into this. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask:
How can a user set things up so that the user is notified when Securom attempts to install itself, and allow the user the choice of going forward with the install or not?
I ask this because Securom has a nasty way of installing itself when the user least expects it - for example, from the Bioshock demo and from the Spore Creature Editor demo.
I am aware that Flickr is owned by Yahoo. I'm curious as to whether or not it is possible for this sort of Picasa tagging to spill over into Flickr.
I'm also curious about the effect of the taggings of large porn collections (both pro and amateur) when these tags become public.
Finished State versus Meaningful Updates: this gave me pause too; if it's in a finished state, then why would it need updates? I guess what they are referring to by "unfinished state" is games that ship with show-stopping bugs (Elder Scrolls II was like this) or missing content. One "missing content" game I remember particularly was one of Everquest's expansions (Planes of Power?) in which gamers proved that the endgame zones did not exist until well after the release of the expansion by reaching the endgame zones more quickly than SOE expected them to.
#4 (against forcing download managers and updaters to run): this can't apply to MMOs for sure and most online gameplay. A bunch of these rules (most of them, really) can't be applied to MMOs.
I've never run into a single-player game (which forced me) to be connected to the Internet. If it does, I imagine live content updates might be useful. New content on the fly intrigues me.
Mass Effect. Absolutely no online gameplay content, but requires that you connect to the Internet for its DRM.
Vinegar for flies. We need more honey, less vinegar.
This phrase is more important than you know. This is by far Microsoft's biggest challenge - getting the average user to update their system. 90% of Internet users are dumber than a herd of cows.
I would estimate that for every person smart enough to have figured out how to use an adblocker, there are a thousand idiots who turn off their antivirus software and automatic Windows updates so the computer will stop asking them questions.
"or possibly it all came on so slowly they don't even realize it..."
Some may question how you can possibly not notice you are losing your vision. The problem is that your brain is incredibly good at filling in the blanks. Peripheral vision, a subtle thing if ever there was, is particularly subject to this, and it's also absolutely critical to your driving skills.
I started losing my peripheral vision about 20 years ago due to a genetic condition, and did not notice until last year when I went to get new glasses and the optometrist noticed something funny about my eyes. The onset was very slow and very insidious, with my brain filling in the blanks so effectively that I never knew it. This explains why I've been more and more reluctant to drive - I've been having scary moments when driving. Sooner or later I was going to hit someone, most likely a pedestrian, so I quit driving sooner. I'm 38.
So I'm putting my money where my mouth is when I say this kind of assistance is not going to help.
The root of the problem is the difficulty of changing the DPI. This wasn't an issue before with CRTs, because CRTs could perfectly display any resolution lower than its maximum, so changing the DPI wasn't ever necessary. LCDs, on the other hand, lose data if you display a resolution less than its maximum, because the pixels are a fixed grid; now being able to change DPI is highly desirable.
Windows XP lets you change the default DPI in the Display control panel (Advanced button, General tab). However, changing the DPI even to 120, much less a custom setting, is poorly supported. I tried it for a day or two before going back to the default 96 DPI - you'll quickly see what I mean if you try it. I've heard it's a little better in Vista but still not good enough, though not having run Vista I can't speak for that.
Apple calls the concept of being able to change DPI "resolution independence", and they were making a big push to having it in Mac OS X 10.4 but it got pushed back; then it was going to be in 10.5, but at this point they've admitted the problem is way more difficult and complicated than even they thought, and it's going to be a long haul for them to fix it. They appear to be genuinely working on solving it the right way no matter how long it takes; Steve Jobs' obsession with displaying fonts correctly is a good thing.
WoW began in 2004, and millions of players will hit a wall where WoW won't be fun anymore around 5 years after they began. Yes, I'm proclaiming a 5 year rule on MMOs, and current WoW players won't believe it to be possible, that they'll want to play it forever. A few of the diehards will make it to 7 or more years, refusing to believe that everyone left for that other game.
One big reason for this is graduation. Either high school or college, take your pick. An MMO is a habit, and your habits change drastically when you graduate.
Back in the early 90s, I was the sysop of a local BBS with about 50 members. This was just before the internet went mainstream in 1995, and people used Bulletin Board Systems instead, and they behaved just like internet forums do these days, except that all of the people are within local phone calling distance. The people on my BBS were mostly near my age, early 20s.
As the sysop, I had the ability to read all private emails, but started out with the stance that it would be unethical for me to look.
Eventually, one of the male members sent a batch of harassing emails to several female members. The first female that read one complained to me about it, and after booting him from the system, I ended up needing to read emails to delete the rest of the harassing emails, because they were pretty nasty and I didn't want them to be received.
The BBS software was pretty basic, and to remove some of a person's received emails you had to page through all of their received emails. In the process of doing so, I discovered that one of the targeted females was using the BBS emails to coordinate the sale of illegal drugs to several other members. This prompted me to read all of the emails on the system. I found nothing else of interest and booted all of the druggie members from the BBS.
It is interesting to me now that reporting the drug sales to the police did not even occur to me then. I think I was still in the mindset that what I was looking at was private.
My mom came to visit and brought her laptop with her. We have a small home network with only wired ethernet (no wireless at all) and I have an extra cable ready for visitors who want to check their email. She has wireless at home.
So she sits down in the room, opens up her laptop and checks her email. I notice that she's forgotten to plug in the ethernet cable, so I ask her how she connected to the net. She had no idea. It just all happened automatically, and she has no idea who or what she connected to, and as far as I know, we have no way of finding out. Evidently, some neighbor has their wireless completely open.
Because atmospheric drag is still an issue at 330 miles up. They used Mach number, not the speed of sound. Mach numbers are extremely important when talking about hypersonic speeds in atmosphere.
Look up the wiki articles on "Mach Number" and "Earth's atmosphere" for more info.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm American, and speak only English. When I bought the movie "Run Lola Run", it had both the English voice-overs and the original German with English subs. The voice-over was honestly excellent and couldn't have been done better, but I still preferred the sound of the original German.
I think I would like to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in a similar way - with the original Russian being spoken with English subtitles. Normally this sort of reverse localization isn't done, but I see there's a mod for that, which I might experiment with:
http://stalker.filefront.com/file/In_Game_CC_and_Subtitles_for_Oblivion_Lost_22%3B97756
"After installing InGameCC you can bravely replace all sounds to Russian with Authenticity Sound Pack or a similar sound mod..."
Does it make sense to, for example, haul coal on planes? I don't believe you can replace trains with planes, or planes with trains.
No, really, we actually can't build them that fast:
"To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we'll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we'd have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/189293
The Copernicus Crater link is the first time I've ever had Firefox 3 resize its window. WTH?
I live a block down the road from the Microsoft Redmond campus (it used to be 12 blocks, but they metatasized), so I walk by all this each day. But I don't work at Microsoft, so all I have is just sidewalk testimony.
The older Microsoft campus was confined to the east side of highway 520, with dozens and dozens of properties rented and scattered all over Redmond, Bellevue, and other places in the area. Lately they have been building an absolutely HUGE property just across the highway from the old campus, where they will consolidate all that rented office space.
Only 7 new buildings? When I walk by there, I can see at least 14 or 17 structures going up, but I can't tell what will be in them. Some of them are titled buildings number 97, 98, 99, and by that they mean Microsoft Redmond campus literally has that many buildings. The city of Redmond has a height limit on its buildings. I don't know the exact rules, but no skyscrapers. The Microsoft buildings are all about 4 or 5 very tall stories, so they are forced to sprawl rather than go up. When they dug the hole for it all, it seemed to be about 6-12 blocks on a side. Huge, huge hole for that 4600 car parking garage. Then they put up more of those big construction cranes than I've ever seen in such a small space - at one point they had 9 or 10 of them.
With that huge parking garage right next to the highway, they should have just let Microsoft have highway entrances directly out onto 520 and keep all that traffic off the local streets. That would make perfect sense to me. But it exits out onto NE 40th Street, which is a relatively small cross-street, which has relatively small entrance and exits to 520.
There is already a bridge across 520 between the Microsoft campuses - the NE 40th overpass and intersection with 520. Also, Microsoft has a huge fleet of hundreds of shuttle buses and cars that transfer people from point to point in the Microsoft sprawl. My reaction as a local to the idea of a car and pedestrian bridge for Microsoft is that, while it would be beneficial to the locals to keep some of the terrible Microsoft drivers off the local streets (a lot of them are from India!), Microsoft should foot the entire bill.
Retinitis Pigmentosa is a progressive vision loss disease. The age at which it begins and the rate at which it progresses varies (and greatly), but generally speaking, the younger people haven't lost all of their vision yet, while the older people have. While some children lose all vision by their teens, many victims don't start losing vision until their 20s and don't go fully blind until quite late in life.
This experiment will apply to younger people, but those younger people usually still have some vision left. It is far better to perform the experiment on someone who has lost all of their vision because they have nothing to lose if the experiment goes bad.
I have retinitis pigmentosa; I'm 39, and have only lost my peripheral vision so far. Pictures of what I can see and can't see wouldn't translate very well. The part of my vision where I can't see does not show as black, like when you close your eyes. There's no color at all - it's not color, it's nothing. What color do you see out of the back of your head?
The nothing is so nothing that as it slowly took over my peripheral vision over a period of 20 years, I never noticed it was there. It was not until an optometrist looked into my eyes while I was getting new glasses that I found out it was happening.
The linked article uses the word "influential", while the Guiness Records list does not. Guiness uses this criteria: "a top 50 list of games ranked both on their importance and on how fun they are to play." In this case, importance doesn't mean influential. Reading the linked article, it seems that by "importance", they mean which games sold the most and for the longest time.
A list of influential games would be entirely different, with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Dune II and Ultima III at the top.
The indie artists will get exactly as much as the non-indie artists (what do you call those, anyway?) You don't really think any musician would ever see a penny of this tax go in their checking account, do you?
Generally speaking, much less is scientifically understood about what makes a man's face attractive than what makes a woman's face attractive. Could it be because scientists are mostly men?
But does it install Securom?
I *think* the answer may be Process Explorer, because Securom really, really hates Process Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
But I have not actually looked into this. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask:
How can a user set things up so that the user is notified when Securom attempts to install itself, and allow the user the choice of going forward with the install or not?
I ask this because Securom has a nasty way of installing itself when the user least expects it - for example, from the Bioshock demo and from the Spore Creature Editor demo.
I am aware that Flickr is owned by Yahoo. I'm curious as to whether or not it is possible for this sort of Picasa tagging to spill over into Flickr. I'm also curious about the effect of the taggings of large porn collections (both pro and amateur) when these tags become public.
#4 (against forcing download managers and updaters to run): this can't apply to MMOs for sure and most online gameplay. A bunch of these rules (most of them, really) can't be applied to MMOs.
I've never run into a single-player game (which forced me) to be connected to the Internet. If it does, I imagine live content updates might be useful. New content on the fly intrigues me.
Mass Effect. Absolutely no online gameplay content, but requires that you connect to the Internet for its DRM.
Vinegar for flies. We need more honey, less vinegar.
No no, we need more vinegar! http://xkcd.com/357/
"as 90% of my users are still using IE6"
This phrase is more important than you know. This is by far Microsoft's biggest challenge - getting the average user to update their system. 90% of Internet users are dumber than a herd of cows.
I would estimate that for every person smart enough to have figured out how to use an adblocker, there are a thousand idiots who turn off their antivirus software and automatic Windows updates so the computer will stop asking them questions.
"or possibly it all came on so slowly they don't even realize it..."
Some may question how you can possibly not notice you are losing your vision. The problem is that your brain is incredibly good at filling in the blanks. Peripheral vision, a subtle thing if ever there was, is particularly subject to this, and it's also absolutely critical to your driving skills.
I started losing my peripheral vision about 20 years ago due to a genetic condition, and did not notice until last year when I went to get new glasses and the optometrist noticed something funny about my eyes. The onset was very slow and very insidious, with my brain filling in the blanks so effectively that I never knew it. This explains why I've been more and more reluctant to drive - I've been having scary moments when driving. Sooner or later I was going to hit someone, most likely a pedestrian, so I quit driving sooner. I'm 38.
So I'm putting my money where my mouth is when I say this kind of assistance is not going to help.
The root of the problem is the difficulty of changing the DPI. This wasn't an issue before with CRTs, because CRTs could perfectly display any resolution lower than its maximum, so changing the DPI wasn't ever necessary. LCDs, on the other hand, lose data if you display a resolution less than its maximum, because the pixels are a fixed grid; now being able to change DPI is highly desirable. Windows XP lets you change the default DPI in the Display control panel (Advanced button, General tab). However, changing the DPI even to 120, much less a custom setting, is poorly supported. I tried it for a day or two before going back to the default 96 DPI - you'll quickly see what I mean if you try it. I've heard it's a little better in Vista but still not good enough, though not having run Vista I can't speak for that. Apple calls the concept of being able to change DPI "resolution independence", and they were making a big push to having it in Mac OS X 10.4 but it got pushed back; then it was going to be in 10.5, but at this point they've admitted the problem is way more difficult and complicated than even they thought, and it's going to be a long haul for them to fix it. They appear to be genuinely working on solving it the right way no matter how long it takes; Steve Jobs' obsession with displaying fonts correctly is a good thing.
I live 6 blocks down the road from Microsoft Redmond Campus. Verizon FIOS is still not available here yet. WTF???
She already knows, Mr. Hartley.
The next big tribal shift will happen in 2009.
WoW began in 2004, and millions of players will hit a wall where WoW won't be fun anymore around 5 years after they began. Yes, I'm proclaiming a 5 year rule on MMOs, and current WoW players won't believe it to be possible, that they'll want to play it forever. A few of the diehards will make it to 7 or more years, refusing to believe that everyone left for that other game.
One big reason for this is graduation. Either high school or college, take your pick. An MMO is a habit, and your habits change drastically when you graduate.
Back in the early 90s, I was the sysop of a local BBS with about 50 members. This was just before the internet went mainstream in 1995, and people used Bulletin Board Systems instead, and they behaved just like internet forums do these days, except that all of the people are within local phone calling distance. The people on my BBS were mostly near my age, early 20s. As the sysop, I had the ability to read all private emails, but started out with the stance that it would be unethical for me to look. Eventually, one of the male members sent a batch of harassing emails to several female members. The first female that read one complained to me about it, and after booting him from the system, I ended up needing to read emails to delete the rest of the harassing emails, because they were pretty nasty and I didn't want them to be received. The BBS software was pretty basic, and to remove some of a person's received emails you had to page through all of their received emails. In the process of doing so, I discovered that one of the targeted females was using the BBS emails to coordinate the sale of illegal drugs to several other members. This prompted me to read all of the emails on the system. I found nothing else of interest and booted all of the druggie members from the BBS. It is interesting to me now that reporting the drug sales to the police did not even occur to me then. I think I was still in the mindset that what I was looking at was private.
My mom came to visit and brought her laptop with her. We have a small home network with only wired ethernet (no wireless at all) and I have an extra cable ready for visitors who want to check their email. She has wireless at home. So she sits down in the room, opens up her laptop and checks her email. I notice that she's forgotten to plug in the ethernet cable, so I ask her how she connected to the net. She had no idea. It just all happened automatically, and she has no idea who or what she connected to, and as far as I know, we have no way of finding out. Evidently, some neighbor has their wireless completely open.
Because atmospheric drag is still an issue at 330 miles up. They used Mach number, not the speed of sound. Mach numbers are extremely important when talking about hypersonic speeds in atmosphere.
Look up the wiki articles on "Mach Number" and "Earth's atmosphere" for more info.
So it's twice the size of a man and weighs 3000 pounds?
"If you have observed how hostile women are in the U.S. toward men,"
Actually, no I haven't. What do you do to them?
"The social breakdown in the U.S. is so advanced that often even men are hostile toward men."
*blink* You say this like this happens in no other civilized place. Like, say, Rio?