"Sounds great! Where do I download the driver? From the manufacturer? How do I know who that is? Do I have to open up my laptop and void the warranty? What if they don't support my version of Windows? Can you point me to a guide that just lets me use the Linux driver in Windows?"
Oh, Lord.
You can start by clicking on Windows Update. Failing that, you can look at the box or the invoice to determine the model and manufacturer. If someone isn't able to determine the manufacturer and model of a video card, for example, I daresay they won't have an easier time finding and installing native Linux drivers, much less using ndiswrapper.
1. Are any of the people involved with the original in on this? I know TFA says that they were in contact with Activision regarding backstory, but that's not necessarily the same thing.
2. Will there be a Blackberry-friendly site? They mention the iPhone (booo! hiss!), so I assume there's a mobile version of the site, but they specified iPhone, not mobile, and I'm a paranoiac at heart.
When I read this headline in my feed this morning I almost wept. Zork was the first computer game I ever played (in 1985, at the age of 7), and I remember taking copious notes during play and somehow loving it.
I suspect you're from the land of tea and crumpets. When I first met a friend of mine from Wales he dropped the usual "American gun nut" zinger that the British seem to get a kick out of when talking to Americans. About two minutes later he mentioned in an offhand way something about English suburbanites shooting rabbits in their front yard with shotguns as a form of pest control. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to associate a palm-sized.22 caliber pistol with sociopathy and consider a 20 gauge shotgun the functional equivalent of a flying rabbit-trap.
It was reassuring however to hear that there are also rednecks in Britain.
And now to the point. I noticed that a UK news outlet ran the story, no doubt going for the "crazy Americans and their guns" angle. The better reason to ridicule us would be the judge, who (from the GP article), from the intellectual base of a law degree, spouts forth a load of bull about dopamine and neurotransmitters. Again, for the sake of emphasis, these nuggets of neurological wisdom are coming from someone whose professional experience with biochemistry, neurology, or anything else amounts to diddly-squat. Please, laugh at us for having a legal culture that promotes judicial activism and overstimulates the egos of politically successful lawyers, not for exercising legitimate constitutional rights.
-John 13:34 "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." Now, anyone with a family knows that sometimes loving someone and getting along with someone are two different things, true. I'll grant you that. Various translations say either commandment or law. Now, it's true that the line is "new commandment", which doesn't necessarily exclude the other commandments. I would humbly suggest, however, that if the new commandment is to love one another as Christ loved the Apostles that would imply unconditional love and limitless forgiveness for one another. You would therefore still love someone even if they ate shrimp, let's say. Prior laws and prophecies are important in a sense but not as a guide for personal behavior.
-Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." You're right, nothing about fire there. Exodus gives you a bit of latitude for your witch-killing methods.
I might have given the impression from my earlier post that I'm an atheist. In fact, I'm an Episcopalian, although sometimes the difference between the two can be pretty fine. I've never been brow beaten with any religion. My friends run the gamut from atheist to catholic to jewish and we all seem to get along just fine. My experience with brimstone stems largely from television: politics, people protesting about prayer in school, gay marriage, etc..
The point I was trying to make in my initial post was that the Bible is not a single work but a collection of books written by many different authors. If you read it from that perspective and not as if it was supposed to be a single, coherent text, then cognitive dissonance doesn't come in to play.
Read _A History of God_ by Karen Armstrong. Interesting book that covers Judaism, Christianity and Islam from a historical perspective. A history of how ideas developed in those beliefs, really.
The thing about the Bible the trips some people up is that they read it as a continuous narrative when it's more like an anthology. The Old Testament is easily half the book if not more and contains such crowd-pleasers as Leviticus, with the famous dietary laws along with times when it's appropriate to sell your sister to a giraffe. Rules to cover every eventuality. Then you hit the Gospels and Jesus says something along the lines of, "Okay, forget the earlier stuff about not eating monkeys or goats, just be nice to each other and we'll call that good enough." Which of course makes everything prior to that in the Bible totally irrelevant as moral handbooks go. It seems like a lot of the loudest Christians prefer the earlier parts about setting witches on fire and such to the just trying to get along with everybody revision.
Re:If the decision were made this year, makes sens
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That's a fair point. Where I live (Maryland) the southern part of the state used to be pretty rural and out of the way. Now a lot of people are moving down there and commuting to DC. Problem is that broadband hasn't followed yet, so people (new and old) are either dealing with dialup or no internet access at all or they're suckin' it up and getting dishes. It makes absolutely no sense to move for more attractive internet access, you know? I mean, the internet's cool and all, but...
Wait a minute. Am I missing something or is the OP complaining that rich, white Cape Codders are unable to exercise enough political influence to have things their way? Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?
I kid! Seriously though, no matter how red you paint a school bus it's never gonna win at Daytona, you know what I'm sayin'? The most optimized dial-up connection is not going to get any faster than the hardware allows, and the most ideal scenario is still much slower than broadband. The other option appears to be satellite, which your parents don't like for aesthetic reasons. Well, that's their call, but there doesn't seem to be a viable third option. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that your parents are not especially tech savvy, so any options more technical or creative than what you could find in a phone book probably aren't on the table. Part of the package when you buy those nice, expensive, quaint, historic old cottages is that they tend to be in out-of-the-way areas; that's the selling point, in fact, for a lot of people. At the risk of sounding a little too much like a class warrior it's really an issue of trying to have your cake and eat it too, I'm afraid.
I dual boot Ubuntu and XP Pro. Tried Vista late last year and hated it. It was slow on my box and a lot of games didn't run, or at least run well, on it. Don't have a DX10 card, so it wasn't really necessary on that front. Now, I use my computer for online classes, email, personal finance, word processing, and then the other 90% of the time for gaming. I've tried to do all of that on Linux and came pretty close thanks to Wine. But the problem is that while some games work like a charm many of the ones I play either have little buggy issues, weird graphics anomalies or don't work at all. I get a lot of games through Steam, and although the individual games work fine (generally) I have to install an entirely new copy of the game on my Linux partition which is pretty inconvenient. Especially if the game turns out not to work.
The bottom line is that my PC is my main gaming "console", and for that purpose XP works with the least amount of fuss and the most success. That's not to say that Linux can't or couldn't be a great gaming platform, just that I know for a fact that if I buy a game it will work in Windows. If it doesn't work in Windows it certainly won't work in Linux. It might work on both, but Windows is a known factor. Patching and driver hunts in my experience are no worse on Windows than trying to fine-tune Wine and hunt down drivers in Linux.
In several months I'm going to throw together a new PC specifically for gaming and I'll probably be using Vista on that for the DX10 support. My current computer will then be a dedicated Linux machine, for movies, music, stuff like that. But, for whatever reasons, as it stands now Linux is just not the most reliable or the most convenient gaming OS.
I think this may be the finest job of trolling I've ever seen, as illustrated by the length and quality of this thread. Sometimes I just wake up filled with gratitude that I live in such exciting times./obligatory//tribute///slashies
I agree to a certain extent. My girlfriend teaches elementary school, and one of her students who has severe ADHD was offered access to a computer to type answers to quizzes, assigments, etc. My girlfriend pointed out that a kid who couldn't be asked a question at a reading table and then told to go to his seat and write his answer without losing track of what he was doing wouldn't be best served by having to go to a separate table, log in, start Word, and type his response. The County, however, likes to see computers in classrooms for statistical (read: funding) reasons.
On the other hand, I understand school funding in Alabama (and school quality) to be substandard, and if they're using this to maybe provide texts that they can't afford to issue to kids normally, then this could be a great idea. Besides which, it doesn't hurt to get kids used to using computers, breaking up the "digital divide" so to speak.
"The parasite basically rewires the crab for its own ends, and the crab becomes a helpless vehicle, expending its energy caring for the young organisms that will move on to inflict themselves upon other crabs."
Until, somewhere around age 50, after a loud, indignant and drunken therapy session with the other crabs at the pub, the crab calls a divorce attorney. Or buys a motorcycle.
Seeing that they're willing to can an honest (and talented) reviewer rather than risk losing an advertiser is definitely a disappointment, and I'm finding myself relying more and more on user reviews and Metacritic as a result. However, consider this point: Gamespot is a business; they're trying to make a profit. That profit can come from user subscriptions, and it can come from advertisers. Right now, I'd hazard a guess that something like 85% of their income is from ads. How much of a subscription fee would you be willing to pay to remove all software and hardware advertising so as to ensure that reviews would be unbiased?
Now, you may be thinking that game adverts could be replaced by non-tech companies as mentioned earlier in this thread, such as Frito-Lay, Honda, etc. Maybe that's doable, but pretend you're the head of their sales department, and you're trying to get advertisers. Would it be easier to convince Eidos to buy ad space on a game site, or Pepsi? Because Pepsi can reach a lot of its target audience on the websites for ESPN, mtv, etc. Eidos can't really have that same level of success shilling this Kane and Lynch monstrosity on, say, MSNBC. And, after all, pick up any car or motorcycle mag that does reviews, and you'll see a whole host of car or bike ads.
I don't know if I qualify as a hard-core gamer, whatever that is. I own a Cube, an Xbox, a PS2, a DS, a PC whose primary use is gaming, and I just got a Wii for my birthday a few months ago. I spend about $100 a month on games, maybe $750 on average for PC hardware. So that's where I'm coming from. I don't own any Halo t-shirts, though, so I'm not sure if I'd pass. That being said, I spend about three hours a day, more on weekends, playing video games. From this perspective, I gotta say the only console I was interested in was the Wii.
The way I saw it, and the way I still see it, all the other consoles are basically hamstrung PCs. Games aside, I could build a computer that did everything the PS3 does, hook up a controller to it, and have the exact same experience. The Wii, while not as beefy hardware-wise, has the whole control system going for it. So from my pseudo-hardcore perspective, I have the option of dropping several hundred dollars on a console and dropping several hundred dollars in to my computer to gain access to essentially two overlapping libraries of games (since, especially with the 360, many of the big games are available on PC), or spend a couple hundred on a console and several hundred on my computer and have access to two rather different libraries of games. Easy choice for me.
Now, Nintendo is grabbing up market share by selling to the casual gamer crowd with both the Wii and the DS. If you look at the ads for the Wii, they're basically saying to the consumer, "A console is a centerpiece in your entertainment center or living room. Buy a 360 or a PS3 and you'll have a rather expensive additional DVD player and have to hope that whichever one you buy is using the standard (HD or Blu-ray) that becomes dominant. And you'll need an HD tv to get the most out of it. And all the games are geared toward teenage boys and college students. Buy a Wii, on the other hand, and not only will you save money, but you can use it with the television you already have. You won't be able to play movies on it, but you probably don't need another DVD player. And, you can play games with everyone in your family. And furthermore, these games are physically active, so you won't feel bad about your kids playing them." It's working because any "hardcore" gamers who want the Wii already have it, and they're waiting for 3rd party developers to get on board, which they are, and to see more adult-oriented (read: violent) games to be released, which they also are, albeit slowly. They really needed the parents to get behind them. Even the price is geared toward reluctant parents and older adults in that it's not such an expensive commitment as a 360 or, god forbid, a PS3.
As a caveat, let me just say that as fanboish as that sounded, I personally like both of the other consoles, and if they were cheaper I'd probably pick them up. I'm just saying that, for my part, the Wii has the most bang for the buck, and I know that my girlfriend, based on fights we've had, definitely considers me a "hardcore" gamer.
I think I almost agree with you, except for several points. I'm coming from the experience of using Windows since 3.1, including Vista since its release. I recently formatted and am now dual booting Ubuntu and XP (for some games). My computer is by no means a powerhouse, but it scored 4.8 on the Vista rating utility thing and is reasonably robust. Pentium 4 3.2ghz with 2g ram, Geforce 7800 gtx, which should be more than enough to run Vista without any of the Aero stuff turned on. I found that even with a fresh install startup times were longer than XP, it took longer to actually start an application, and copying/moving large files took an absurdly long time. How beefy does a Vista pc need to be, exactly? If Vista needs an inordinate amount of resources/hardware to perform standard os duties, it's a hog; not a "hog, but...", or a "hog if...", just a hog.
I totally agree that if you have a broadband connection and more or less standard hardware XP installs are quick and easy, even if you don't have an SP2 disc; with one, they're even easier. So was Ubuntu, in my case, although I've had hardware issues with that in the past. And although I think the quality of the changes in Vista is uneven (I liked the permission system, multiple account handling, networking, for instance; not so fond of the popups etc.)I concede that a lot of the aesthetic changes are matters of, well, taste.
As far as price, well, yes, yes it is expensive. If you buy a new computer then you'll have whatever OEM version of Vista along with that, which is how I suspect many people have come by XP. However, let's say I've got XP Pro, and I want to upgrade to Vista. In order to get the equivalent Vista version, Ultimate, I'd have to shell out $260. Maybe reread this paragraph to be safe. I'm not arguing that buying XP Pro was ever cheap, I'm saying that, unless you buy a PC with Ultimate preinstalled, the cost to upgrade is prohibitive. Ubuntu, obviously, is free.
I can't speak to whether Ubuntu is more or less difficult to keep running, although I suspect that one of the benefits of open source is that patches and upgrades and tweaks are released faster. In my experience Vista ran reliably poorly. XP of course has the decay, where it just seems to run slower and slower as the year goes on until, finally, you have to format and reinstall.
I'm not saying that people who prefer Vista to Linux hate freedom and/or puppies or anything, I'm just saying that there is something to the fact that some PC vendors are pushing XP over Vista. I'm not necessarily the average consumer, although I might be close, but if my behavior is any indication there are plenty of people who will start looking at Ubuntu over Vista when XP starts to lose support.
I just got a Wii and have been reliving my youth through buying old NES games to play, and I find this article a propos in the extreme. Mainly because I can't disagree more, and I'm a little surprised that someone can be this myopic. I gleefully shelled out about $100 for WiiPoints and started grabbing up games I used to love when I was 10. Ninja Gaiden! Legend of Kage! Excitebike! Whee! Minutes after playing, I found that most of the games I loved just didn't quite cut it anymore. Here's why:
1. Many games today are cookie-cutter versions of other games, but this was even more true in the past. Sure, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are pretty similar (WW2 FPS) and, especially in the case of MoH are guilty of tweaking the original game and releasing the change as a new entry in the series, but this is not a phenomenon particular to recent times. Gradius, anyone? How many platform jumpers got released in the '80s and early '90s?
2. Games in the past were as complex as they needed to be, and as they could be. Sure, there was Qbert, but there was also Zork. Looking further, there was Final Fantasy, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, various military sims (GATO, for example). If games have become more complex, it's because modern hardware allows it, not because back-in-the-day designers weren't willing.
3. Pong was a great game in it's day because the control was effective and the gameplay was fun. People developed video games beyond Pong because after awhile Pong gets pretty dull. Good games throughout history succeed in part because of accurate and non-frustrating controls, not necessarily because of simplicity. Next time you get tired or disillusioned with modern games, play Half-Life 2, then play the first Metroid. Seriously. Control in video games, certain genres excepted, has improved leaps and bounds over games in the "good ol' days."
4. Games in the Pong era were meant to accomplish something different than modern games. You'll never find a table-top version of Metal Gear Solid. It's not meant to be played in ten minutes bursts while you're eating pizza and drinking beer. A solid majority of games today are judged on plot. Plot! Think about that for a minute. What was the plot of Dig-Dug? Can you imagine the guys who made Donkey Kong sitting around a table thinking about character development? Pacing? Games today are like interactive movies more than time-wasting distractions. Sure they still exist, because there's always a market for Solitaire, Tetris, parlor games, etc., but they no longer comprise the entirety of the market.
I am lucky to be one of that generation who grew up knowing the gamut of games, from the Atari 2600 to the PC and the Wii. I've felt that same nostalgia for "old-school" games, and that has its place. At the same time, I am under no illusions about the state of video game development. Pong was fun, but I'll hold on to my copy of Half-Life 2, thank you very much.
First they had no idea what would prompt accusations of traffic shaping or blocking torrent traffic. Then they "remembered" that policy after speaking with their PR people. In particular, they remembered that they don't "stop" traffic so much as "delay" traffic, although I'm not sure there's much of a difference there. Finally, that's totally justified since the people being affected are a minority of users who are monopolizing the bandwidth and preventing Gramma and the rest of the "average" internet users from checking their email.
Now, compare that to this:
[Government policy A] isn't a policy, we don't do that. Lemme think for a minute! No, yeah, okay, we don't do that, we do [Government Policy A sub 1]. But that's totally justified since we only do it to bad people, not any of you good folks.
"I was actually surprised that this was such a routine transaction that it would have a set fee," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.
Two things that I find strange. First, take this out of the context of FISA. If a state prosecutor, say, subpoenas records from a private business, do they routinely pay said business for the processing? Generally speaking, it seems that when a court orders something, you don't get paid for the time or effort. Even if you hire a lawyer to handle the subpoena process you don't get reimbursed for that. Maybe someone with some inside knowledge can fill me in here, but wouldn't you have to file a petition to have any processing costs refunded?
Second thing that's a little quirky, why is there a maintenance fee? Why is there an initial cost? I wouldn't think that it's Comcast's own techs doing the surveillance. After all, when phone lines are tapped Verizon guys don't do the tapping. Is it to compensate for lost bandwidth? Doesn't seem likely. Again, if someone knows better, please fill me in, but it seems a bit strange that Comcast is able to charge money to allow the government to perform court-ordered surveillance.
My degree's in political science, and I concentrated in international relations theory. This just sounds like applied game theory with all the switches thrown. One of the problems is that, while you can account for players lacking information in theory you can't account for what information the players lack in a practical, real-world application. In other words, a player might make a subjectively rational, objectively irrational decision based on imperfect information, and in a controlled environment we'd know what the imperfect info was. However, as one of the players in the game in the real world we wouldn't necessarily know what information we lacked. It's easy to predict a poker game's outcome if the table's glass and you're underneath it. Not so easy if you're one of the players.
Another major problem is that, at least when it comes to IR, there's still a lot of debate over who even makes the decisions. Some theories say that only states matter, and that they act monolithically, some say it has to do with historical trends, some say it's inherent in the capabilities of states (i.e. powerful states become dominant, as opposed to domineering states becoming powerful), some say it has to do with culture, economics, individual personalities within political systems, the structure of the state itself, etc.
It's an interesting idea, but I think it's doomed to fail considering we don't even know how to phrase the question yet.
I sympathize, and up until Feisty I had such a difficult time getting Linux up and running that I never got far enough to consider using it as a viable gaming platform, but over the past week I've had a total change of heart. I use my computer to check email, browse the web, write, store and play music and video (of multiple formats), stream video and music over a LAN, and play games. Lots of games. In fact, I'd say that games account for 80% of my usage time.
I'd been running Vista and it was a disaster. I have an Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, which doesn't support DX10, so even when I got Bioshock I never really benefitted from that aspect of Vista. Long story short, Vista turned me off so much that I now dual boot XP and Ubuntu, with the idea that I'd use Ubuntu as sort of a project to noodle around with, getting used to Linux in anticipation of XP's future abandonment.
Two weeks in I've been pleasantly surprised by how well Ubuntu works and how much I don't need XP. Everything non-game related works great, and I've even made inroads towards weaning my girlfriend off of iTunes. Wine runs EVE well after some mucking about with settings. I still need XP for Bioshock, but HL2 seems to work fine. I have yet to try BF2142 and I have some older games I'd like to try out but so far I'd characterize it as a net success.
So yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that games are important, but people who ask me for recommendations as to software tend to be friends/family that will subsequently ask me to install and maintain said software, and on that basis I'd much rather set them up with Ubuntu than XP or Vista. With my admittedly limited experience with Linux, I still like that when things go wrong in Linux they seem to go wrong for obvious reasons and be relatively straightforward to fix, where Windows does so much mysterious crap in the background it seems like problems just arise out of the ether. I get the impression that extended use is not intended use, unlike with Windows.
As it stands now, I no longer consider XP to be my main os. I basically consider Ubuntu my "serious" os, and the XP partition as essentially the same as my Wii: a console for a few specific games.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that guy actually said, "I use Windows and Mac."
"Sounds great! Where do I download the driver? From the manufacturer? How do I know who that is? Do I have to open up my laptop and void the warranty? What if they don't support my version of Windows? Can you point me to a guide that just lets me use the Linux driver in Windows?"
Oh, Lord.
You can start by clicking on Windows Update. Failing that, you can look at the box or the invoice to determine the model and manufacturer. If someone isn't able to determine the manufacturer and model of a video card, for example, I daresay they won't have an easier time finding and installing native Linux drivers, much less using ndiswrapper.
1. Are any of the people involved with the original in on this? I know TFA says that they were in contact with Activision regarding backstory, but that's not necessarily the same thing.
2. Will there be a Blackberry-friendly site? They mention the iPhone (booo! hiss!), so I assume there's a mobile version of the site, but they specified iPhone, not mobile, and I'm a paranoiac at heart.
When I read this headline in my feed this morning I almost wept. Zork was the first computer game I ever played (in 1985, at the age of 7), and I remember taking copious notes during play and somehow loving it.
As an elephant in a room, etc...
I suspect you're from the land of tea and crumpets. When I first met a friend of mine from Wales he dropped the usual "American gun nut" zinger that the British seem to get a kick out of when talking to Americans. About two minutes later he mentioned in an offhand way something about English suburbanites shooting rabbits in their front yard with shotguns as a form of pest control. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to associate a palm-sized .22 caliber pistol with sociopathy and consider a 20 gauge shotgun the functional equivalent of a flying rabbit-trap.
It was reassuring however to hear that there are also rednecks in Britain.
And now to the point. I noticed that a UK news outlet ran the story, no doubt going for the "crazy Americans and their guns" angle. The better reason to ridicule us would be the judge, who (from the GP article), from the intellectual base of a law degree, spouts forth a load of bull about dopamine and neurotransmitters. Again, for the sake of emphasis, these nuggets of neurological wisdom are coming from someone whose professional experience with biochemistry, neurology, or anything else amounts to diddly-squat. Please, laugh at us for having a legal culture that promotes judicial activism and overstimulates the egos of politically successful lawyers, not for exercising legitimate constitutional rights.
-John 13:34 "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another."
Now, anyone with a family knows that sometimes loving someone and getting along with someone are two different things, true. I'll grant you that. Various translations say either commandment or law. Now, it's true that the line is "new commandment", which doesn't necessarily exclude the other commandments. I would humbly suggest, however, that if the new commandment is to love one another as Christ loved the Apostles that would imply unconditional love and limitless forgiveness for one another. You would therefore still love someone even if they ate shrimp, let's say. Prior laws and prophecies are important in a sense but not as a guide for personal behavior.
-Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
You're right, nothing about fire there. Exodus gives you a bit of latitude for your witch-killing methods.
I might have given the impression from my earlier post that I'm an atheist. In fact, I'm an Episcopalian, although sometimes the difference between the two can be pretty fine. I've never been brow beaten with any religion. My friends run the gamut from atheist to catholic to jewish and we all seem to get along just fine. My experience with brimstone stems largely from television: politics, people protesting about prayer in school, gay marriage, etc..
The point I was trying to make in my initial post was that the Bible is not a single work but a collection of books written by many different authors. If you read it from that perspective and not as if it was supposed to be a single, coherent text, then cognitive dissonance doesn't come in to play.
Read _A History of God_ by Karen Armstrong. Interesting book that covers Judaism, Christianity and Islam from a historical perspective. A history of how ideas developed in those beliefs, really.
The thing about the Bible the trips some people up is that they read it as a continuous narrative when it's more like an anthology. The Old Testament is easily half the book if not more and contains such crowd-pleasers as Leviticus, with the famous dietary laws along with times when it's appropriate to sell your sister to a giraffe. Rules to cover every eventuality. Then you hit the Gospels and Jesus says something along the lines of, "Okay, forget the earlier stuff about not eating monkeys or goats, just be nice to each other and we'll call that good enough." Which of course makes everything prior to that in the Bible totally irrelevant as moral handbooks go. It seems like a lot of the loudest Christians prefer the earlier parts about setting witches on fire and such to the just trying to get along with everybody revision.
That's a fair point. Where I live (Maryland) the southern part of the state used to be pretty rural and out of the way. Now a lot of people are moving down there and commuting to DC. Problem is that broadband hasn't followed yet, so people (new and old) are either dealing with dialup or no internet access at all or they're suckin' it up and getting dishes. It makes absolutely no sense to move for more attractive internet access, you know? I mean, the internet's cool and all, but...
Wait a minute. Am I missing something or is the OP complaining that rich, white Cape Codders are unable to exercise enough political influence to have things their way? Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?
I kid! Seriously though, no matter how red you paint a school bus it's never gonna win at Daytona, you know what I'm sayin'? The most optimized dial-up connection is not going to get any faster than the hardware allows, and the most ideal scenario is still much slower than broadband. The other option appears to be satellite, which your parents don't like for aesthetic reasons. Well, that's their call, but there doesn't seem to be a viable third option. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that your parents are not especially tech savvy, so any options more technical or creative than what you could find in a phone book probably aren't on the table. Part of the package when you buy those nice, expensive, quaint, historic old cottages is that they tend to be in out-of-the-way areas; that's the selling point, in fact, for a lot of people. At the risk of sounding a little too much like a class warrior it's really an issue of trying to have your cake and eat it too, I'm afraid.
I dual boot Ubuntu and XP Pro. Tried Vista late last year and hated it. It was slow on my box and a lot of games didn't run, or at least run well, on it. Don't have a DX10 card, so it wasn't really necessary on that front. Now, I use my computer for online classes, email, personal finance, word processing, and then the other 90% of the time for gaming. I've tried to do all of that on Linux and came pretty close thanks to Wine. But the problem is that while some games work like a charm many of the ones I play either have little buggy issues, weird graphics anomalies or don't work at all. I get a lot of games through Steam, and although the individual games work fine (generally) I have to install an entirely new copy of the game on my Linux partition which is pretty inconvenient. Especially if the game turns out not to work.
The bottom line is that my PC is my main gaming "console", and for that purpose XP works with the least amount of fuss and the most success. That's not to say that Linux can't or couldn't be a great gaming platform, just that I know for a fact that if I buy a game it will work in Windows. If it doesn't work in Windows it certainly won't work in Linux. It might work on both, but Windows is a known factor. Patching and driver hunts in my experience are no worse on Windows than trying to fine-tune Wine and hunt down drivers in Linux.
In several months I'm going to throw together a new PC specifically for gaming and I'll probably be using Vista on that for the DX10 support. My current computer will then be a dedicated Linux machine, for movies, music, stuff like that. But, for whatever reasons, as it stands now Linux is just not the most reliable or the most convenient gaming OS.
Pecksniffian? Pecksniffian was in the running??
Seriously???
I think this may be the finest job of trolling I've ever seen, as illustrated by the length and quality of this thread. Sometimes I just wake up filled with gratitude that I live in such exciting times. /obligatory //tribute ///slashies
I agree to a certain extent. My girlfriend teaches elementary school, and one of her students who has severe ADHD was offered access to a computer to type answers to quizzes, assigments, etc. My girlfriend pointed out that a kid who couldn't be asked a question at a reading table and then told to go to his seat and write his answer without losing track of what he was doing wouldn't be best served by having to go to a separate table, log in, start Word, and type his response. The County, however, likes to see computers in classrooms for statistical (read: funding) reasons.
On the other hand, I understand school funding in Alabama (and school quality) to be substandard, and if they're using this to maybe provide texts that they can't afford to issue to kids normally, then this could be a great idea. Besides which, it doesn't hurt to get kids used to using computers, breaking up the "digital divide" so to speak.
...I'm not dead!!!
....uh.....what??? Can we mod parent down due to, I don't know, maybe schizophrenia, please?
"The parasite basically rewires the crab for its own ends, and the crab becomes a helpless vehicle, expending its energy caring for the young organisms that will move on to inflict themselves upon other crabs."
Until, somewhere around age 50, after a loud, indignant and drunken therapy session with the other crabs at the pub, the crab calls a divorce attorney. Or buys a motorcycle.
Seeing that they're willing to can an honest (and talented) reviewer rather than risk losing an advertiser is definitely a disappointment, and I'm finding myself relying more and more on user reviews and Metacritic as a result. However, consider this point: Gamespot is a business; they're trying to make a profit. That profit can come from user subscriptions, and it can come from advertisers. Right now, I'd hazard a guess that something like 85% of their income is from ads. How much of a subscription fee would you be willing to pay to remove all software and hardware advertising so as to ensure that reviews would be unbiased?
Now, you may be thinking that game adverts could be replaced by non-tech companies as mentioned earlier in this thread, such as Frito-Lay, Honda, etc. Maybe that's doable, but pretend you're the head of their sales department, and you're trying to get advertisers. Would it be easier to convince Eidos to buy ad space on a game site, or Pepsi? Because Pepsi can reach a lot of its target audience on the websites for ESPN, mtv, etc. Eidos can't really have that same level of success shilling this Kane and Lynch monstrosity on, say, MSNBC. And, after all, pick up any car or motorcycle mag that does reviews, and you'll see a whole host of car or bike ads.
Fantastic, another thing you won't be able to do in a Maryland bar...
I don't know if I qualify as a hard-core gamer, whatever that is. I own a Cube, an Xbox, a PS2, a DS, a PC whose primary use is gaming, and I just got a Wii for my birthday a few months ago. I spend about $100 a month on games, maybe $750 on average for PC hardware. So that's where I'm coming from. I don't own any Halo t-shirts, though, so I'm not sure if I'd pass. That being said, I spend about three hours a day, more on weekends, playing video games. From this perspective, I gotta say the only console I was interested in was the Wii.
The way I saw it, and the way I still see it, all the other consoles are basically hamstrung PCs. Games aside, I could build a computer that did everything the PS3 does, hook up a controller to it, and have the exact same experience. The Wii, while not as beefy hardware-wise, has the whole control system going for it. So from my pseudo-hardcore perspective, I have the option of dropping several hundred dollars on a console and dropping several hundred dollars in to my computer to gain access to essentially two overlapping libraries of games (since, especially with the 360, many of the big games are available on PC), or spend a couple hundred on a console and several hundred on my computer and have access to two rather different libraries of games. Easy choice for me.
Now, Nintendo is grabbing up market share by selling to the casual gamer crowd with both the Wii and the DS. If you look at the ads for the Wii, they're basically saying to the consumer, "A console is a centerpiece in your entertainment center or living room. Buy a 360 or a PS3 and you'll have a rather expensive additional DVD player and have to hope that whichever one you buy is using the standard (HD or Blu-ray) that becomes dominant. And you'll need an HD tv to get the most out of it. And all the games are geared toward teenage boys and college students. Buy a Wii, on the other hand, and not only will you save money, but you can use it with the television you already have. You won't be able to play movies on it, but you probably don't need another DVD player. And, you can play games with everyone in your family. And furthermore, these games are physically active, so you won't feel bad about your kids playing them." It's working because any "hardcore" gamers who want the Wii already have it, and they're waiting for 3rd party developers to get on board, which they are, and to see more adult-oriented (read: violent) games to be released, which they also are, albeit slowly. They really needed the parents to get behind them. Even the price is geared toward reluctant parents and older adults in that it's not such an expensive commitment as a 360 or, god forbid, a PS3.
As a caveat, let me just say that as fanboish as that sounded, I personally like both of the other consoles, and if they were cheaper I'd probably pick them up. I'm just saying that, for my part, the Wii has the most bang for the buck, and I know that my girlfriend, based on fights we've had, definitely considers me a "hardcore" gamer.
I think I almost agree with you, except for several points. I'm coming from the experience of using Windows since 3.1, including Vista since its release. I recently formatted and am now dual booting Ubuntu and XP (for some games). My computer is by no means a powerhouse, but it scored 4.8 on the Vista rating utility thing and is reasonably robust. Pentium 4 3.2ghz with 2g ram, Geforce 7800 gtx, which should be more than enough to run Vista without any of the Aero stuff turned on. I found that even with a fresh install startup times were longer than XP, it took longer to actually start an application, and copying/moving large files took an absurdly long time. How beefy does a Vista pc need to be, exactly? If Vista needs an inordinate amount of resources/hardware to perform standard os duties, it's a hog; not a "hog, but...", or a "hog if...", just a hog.
I totally agree that if you have a broadband connection and more or less standard hardware XP installs are quick and easy, even if you don't have an SP2 disc; with one, they're even easier. So was Ubuntu, in my case, although I've had hardware issues with that in the past. And although I think the quality of the changes in Vista is uneven (I liked the permission system, multiple account handling, networking, for instance; not so fond of the popups etc.)I concede that a lot of the aesthetic changes are matters of, well, taste.
As far as price, well, yes, yes it is expensive. If you buy a new computer then you'll have whatever OEM version of Vista along with that, which is how I suspect many people have come by XP. However, let's say I've got XP Pro, and I want to upgrade to Vista. In order to get the equivalent Vista version, Ultimate, I'd have to shell out $260. Maybe reread this paragraph to be safe. I'm not arguing that buying XP Pro was ever cheap, I'm saying that, unless you buy a PC with Ultimate preinstalled, the cost to upgrade is prohibitive. Ubuntu, obviously, is free.
I can't speak to whether Ubuntu is more or less difficult to keep running, although I suspect that one of the benefits of open source is that patches and upgrades and tweaks are released faster. In my experience Vista ran reliably poorly. XP of course has the decay, where it just seems to run slower and slower as the year goes on until, finally, you have to format and reinstall.
I'm not saying that people who prefer Vista to Linux hate freedom and/or puppies or anything, I'm just saying that there is something to the fact that some PC vendors are pushing XP over Vista. I'm not necessarily the average consumer, although I might be close, but if my behavior is any indication there are plenty of people who will start looking at Ubuntu over Vista when XP starts to lose support.
I just got a Wii and have been reliving my youth through buying old NES games to play, and I find this article a propos in the extreme. Mainly because I can't disagree more, and I'm a little surprised that someone can be this myopic. I gleefully shelled out about $100 for WiiPoints and started grabbing up games I used to love when I was 10. Ninja Gaiden! Legend of Kage! Excitebike! Whee! Minutes after playing, I found that most of the games I loved just didn't quite cut it anymore. Here's why:
1. Many games today are cookie-cutter versions of other games, but this was even more true in the past. Sure, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are pretty similar (WW2 FPS) and, especially in the case of MoH are guilty of tweaking the original game and releasing the change as a new entry in the series, but this is not a phenomenon particular to recent times. Gradius, anyone? How many platform jumpers got released in the '80s and early '90s?
2. Games in the past were as complex as they needed to be, and as they could be. Sure, there was Qbert, but there was also Zork. Looking further, there was Final Fantasy, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, various military sims (GATO, for example). If games have become more complex, it's because modern hardware allows it, not because back-in-the-day designers weren't willing.
3. Pong was a great game in it's day because the control was effective and the gameplay was fun. People developed video games beyond Pong because after awhile Pong gets pretty dull. Good games throughout history succeed in part because of accurate and non-frustrating controls, not necessarily because of simplicity. Next time you get tired or disillusioned with modern games, play Half-Life 2, then play the first Metroid. Seriously. Control in video games, certain genres excepted, has improved leaps and bounds over games in the "good ol' days."
4. Games in the Pong era were meant to accomplish something different than modern games. You'll never find a table-top version of Metal Gear Solid. It's not meant to be played in ten minutes bursts while you're eating pizza and drinking beer. A solid majority of games today are judged on plot. Plot! Think about that for a minute. What was the plot of Dig-Dug? Can you imagine the guys who made Donkey Kong sitting around a table thinking about character development? Pacing? Games today are like interactive movies more than time-wasting distractions. Sure they still exist, because there's always a market for Solitaire, Tetris, parlor games, etc., but they no longer comprise the entirety of the market.
I am lucky to be one of that generation who grew up knowing the gamut of games, from the Atari 2600 to the PC and the Wii. I've felt that same nostalgia for "old-school" games, and that has its place. At the same time, I am under no illusions about the state of video game development. Pong was fun, but I'll hold on to my copy of Half-Life 2, thank you very much.
First they had no idea what would prompt accusations of traffic shaping or blocking torrent traffic. Then they "remembered" that policy after speaking with their PR people. In particular, they remembered that they don't "stop" traffic so much as "delay" traffic, although I'm not sure there's much of a difference there. Finally, that's totally justified since the people being affected are a minority of users who are monopolizing the bandwidth and preventing Gramma and the rest of the "average" internet users from checking their email.
Now, compare that to this:
[Government policy A] isn't a policy, we don't do that. Lemme think for a minute! No, yeah, okay, we don't do that, we do [Government Policy A sub 1]. But that's totally justified since we only do it to bad people, not any of you good folks.
Best line from the article:
"I was actually surprised that this was such a routine transaction that it would have a set fee," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.
Two things that I find strange. First, take this out of the context of FISA. If a state prosecutor, say, subpoenas records from a private business, do they routinely pay said business for the processing? Generally speaking, it seems that when a court orders something, you don't get paid for the time or effort. Even if you hire a lawyer to handle the subpoena process you don't get reimbursed for that. Maybe someone with some inside knowledge can fill me in here, but wouldn't you have to file a petition to have any processing costs refunded?
Second thing that's a little quirky, why is there a maintenance fee? Why is there an initial cost? I wouldn't think that it's Comcast's own techs doing the surveillance. After all, when phone lines are tapped Verizon guys don't do the tapping. Is it to compensate for lost bandwidth? Doesn't seem likely. Again, if someone knows better, please fill me in, but it seems a bit strange that Comcast is able to charge money to allow the government to perform court-ordered surveillance.
I used to be really good at Goldeneye, and I'm not doing anything special right now...
My degree's in political science, and I concentrated in international relations theory. This just sounds like applied game theory with all the switches thrown. One of the problems is that, while you can account for players lacking information in theory you can't account for what information the players lack in a practical, real-world application. In other words, a player might make a subjectively rational, objectively irrational decision based on imperfect information, and in a controlled environment we'd know what the imperfect info was. However, as one of the players in the game in the real world we wouldn't necessarily know what information we lacked. It's easy to predict a poker game's outcome if the table's glass and you're underneath it. Not so easy if you're one of the players.
Another major problem is that, at least when it comes to IR, there's still a lot of debate over who even makes the decisions. Some theories say that only states matter, and that they act monolithically, some say it has to do with historical trends, some say it's inherent in the capabilities of states (i.e. powerful states become dominant, as opposed to domineering states becoming powerful), some say it has to do with culture, economics, individual personalities within political systems, the structure of the state itself, etc.
It's an interesting idea, but I think it's doomed to fail considering we don't even know how to phrase the question yet.
I sympathize, and up until Feisty I had such a difficult time getting Linux up and running that I never got far enough to consider using it as a viable gaming platform, but over the past week I've had a total change of heart. I use my computer to check email, browse the web, write, store and play music and video (of multiple formats), stream video and music over a LAN, and play games. Lots of games. In fact, I'd say that games account for 80% of my usage time.
I'd been running Vista and it was a disaster. I have an Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, which doesn't support DX10, so even when I got Bioshock I never really benefitted from that aspect of Vista. Long story short, Vista turned me off so much that I now dual boot XP and Ubuntu, with the idea that I'd use Ubuntu as sort of a project to noodle around with, getting used to Linux in anticipation of XP's future abandonment.
Two weeks in I've been pleasantly surprised by how well Ubuntu works and how much I don't need XP. Everything non-game related works great, and I've even made inroads towards weaning my girlfriend off of iTunes. Wine runs EVE well after some mucking about with settings. I still need XP for Bioshock, but HL2 seems to work fine. I have yet to try BF2142 and I have some older games I'd like to try out but so far I'd characterize it as a net success.
So yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that games are important, but people who ask me for recommendations as to software tend to be friends/family that will subsequently ask me to install and maintain said software, and on that basis I'd much rather set them up with Ubuntu than XP or Vista. With my admittedly limited experience with Linux, I still like that when things go wrong in Linux they seem to go wrong for obvious reasons and be relatively straightforward to fix, where Windows does so much mysterious crap in the background it seems like problems just arise out of the ether. I get the impression that extended use is not intended use, unlike with Windows.
As it stands now, I no longer consider XP to be my main os. I basically consider Ubuntu my "serious" os, and the XP partition as essentially the same as my Wii: a console for a few specific games.