It seems like Apple would be able to make Safari take advantage of some of the "features" AT&T is touting for Pogo easily. They've already got coverflow working well in iTunes ao I'd guess you could transport that into Safari. Just have a low-res "screengrab" happen whenever you visit a site, you would instantly have that sort of ability available to you in the history or your bookmarks if you were to bookmark it... And I like the idea of an _option_ to have my tabs a little bigger and show that screen grab of the site instead of the teeny-weeny favicon.ico logos and title text.
I just don't see how adding a couple things like that would bog down the browser experience that much. Did Ars leave out a major thing? Where's the 3d experience? Is that just limited to the coverflow styling? my 2d pages aren't translated into 3d magically? meh
I got into games somewhere between age 5 and 8. I remember being very young and going into my dad's work on a Saturday to have him sit me down in from of Leisure Suit Larry while he went on to run some errands. Of course, I had to make it through the prove you're an adult questions before I even got to the game -- which involved a lot of typing, thinking and seeing what bad situations I could get poor Larry into. These days, there are some Nintendo DS games out there that have lengthy dialog and decent mysteries to solve. There's also games that have been aroound a long time like Tetris that really shouldn't have any age restrictions and just challenge you mentally. Seriously, if your kid can hit the buttons and has an interest they should be allowed to play Tetris.
When I was young, Sierra had a great grasp on the adventure game segment. I loved having to type in things and figure out how to solve puzzles and collect items -- often having to reword things so the game would know what I wanted. This no longer exists and when you can find an adventure game today it's just a random mess of clicking to pick up something or several attempts with the wrong something to solve a puzzle. There's some rare exceptions that punish you and some RPG's that are good, but still nothing quite like the old text interfaced adventure games.
That being said, I think the answer is a huge (everyone with me here?) "it depends". Depends on the kid, depends on the parents level of participation in their life, depends on the game and depends on the way the kid will accept, challenge or critic the content of game. I was even taught how to handle my finances in some ways because of my game addiction. When my parents finally got an NES I would rent games, score the games in a little notebook on the same criteria as Nintendo Power and at the end of the month I'd buy one game that I thought I really wanted to play more of... I'd even sell my special Nintendo Power's at the school sometimes... Like the ones that showed how to beat all the mario games or whatever. Made a quick $10 or something sometimes. It's strange how when you're younger you can come up with all sorts of great ideas to make money, but when you're older everything just seems too risky... Anyway...
Let them play. It's just a game. hah../excessive rambling
Build quality and size. 1" thin and 5 pound laptops are hard to come by in similar specs to the macbook. I will still say the macbook is more expensive - sure, but osx is a great OS too and it's not really a simple thing to run that on a regular "PC" laptop. IMHO of course
Dell and HP are a poor comparison to a Macbook. Try comparing prices of the Apple Macbook against a Lenovo Thinkpad (what I would argue is the high end of the "PC" market) instead and you'll see that the prices are actually very competitive.
Oh -- I just priced out getting the hardware to build my own PC vs. buying a new 8 core Mac Pro too and it seems to me that the Mac Pro is priced very competitively as well. Apple has grown up a lot.
I hope they're not planning a human/ipod hybrid... That could be what leads to the inslavement of the human race! If only we would have known they'd unite and overthrow the humans -- I can see it now!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtsHLLqs1D0
sigh
Join me online anytime! I'd be happy to hear a fellow slashdotter in my ear instead of some of the other crazies you get online.:) MY PSN ID is Top_Shelf
I'm surprised there's no mention of Warhawk here... Granted it's a PS3 PSN download and in-store release with no single player abilities, but it's a great game with lots of replay value... If you haven't played it yet do yourself a favor and play it.
Outside of Warhawk, the Orange box/Portal really does take the cake for me, but it's a little unfair since I wouldn't say Portal alone is a game of the year... It's original, but it's not enough game...
Seriously though, who visits Merriam-Webster, m-w.com, and looks up definitions or even votes? Who does that? This is a silly little web poll on their site. Meh. move along, nothing to see here.
I have a ps3 and have purchased a few Blu-Ray movies and if the price goes down on hd-dvd players without the players moving to blu-ray with things I really want I may have to get a cheap hd-dvd player. That being said, I'm not abandoning blu-ray and I love it from a technological standpoint.. More storage is always a good thing...
I agree. However, my understand with the new engine was that no traditional "porting" is being done because the engine is cross-platform. It just takes a compile to make it go on another platform from what I understand... I suppose that means a different compiler or something on each platform -- but using all of the same data... It's about time too.
256 MB XDR @3.2 GHz for system memory and 256 MB GDDR3 @700 MHz for video memory. Not to bring on a console war extravaganza, but the M$ xbox 360 has the same amount of total memory, but instead theirs is 512 MB UMA (Shared with CPU)...
Anyway, memory could very well be a limitation with a cluster of ps3s vs. the microwulf cluster, but it all would depend on the operations your performing. I'd venture to guess the 256mb of system memory would be enough for anyone.:)
During my last years at SJSU, they formed a joint public library and out of convenience I decided it was time to see what the DVD selection was like... There was a good time period where I stopped renting entirely because there was just enough of a selection to keep me happy, it was convenient and free.
Currently I don't have a library in my commute path and it's not as convenient as just showing up to a movie in the mailbox. Also, I use Blockbuster and for just $5.99 I get a free video game rental (in store via a printed coupon from on-line), 2 movies in the mail and 2 movies from the store (trading in each for another). When I was single I would watch movies constantly while doing some programming and stuff after work, but now I come home to a girl and 4 movies a month and a PS3 rental is plenty. Once in a while I'll spend a few bucks to rent that one extra movie, but not too often.
All in all, I feel like it's the best deal for me. I also live just a 10 minute drive or so from a Blockbuster which is right next to a Safeway which = convenience for me...
Maybe I read his post wrong, but I think the parent was saying that the fake money would never be able to be converted to real money if it had been used for gambling.
Personally, I think this is fine and I could see it being that just any "proceeds" of gambling are never convertable to real money, but you could buy any in-game items with it and convert back any invested money remaining back into real money. It could be a very simple formula adding a boolean tag to the money that states whether it was gambling proceeds and tags to the items you bought after the fact to make sure you can't resell those for "real" money.. However, you could sell them to another user in the world for their real money. any proceeds from that sell -- well, that could be converted back to real money because that is just good old capitalism...
So, let's say you have $100 in game that you invested from your real money and the conversion is straight forward... So in their database you have (well, i'm gonna change things up.. let's have a Money table with 2 fields - one = real money.. one = fake)... Money(100,0)
Now, you go and gamble $20 and lose it.. now you have Money(80,0). Now you go gamble another $20 in one go on a game of blackjack and win. You now have Money(80,20)... (I guess whether the 20 you "gambled" is play or not is up for debate, but we can all agree the 20 you won should be play money forever now..).. so, let's say someone is selling a chair for $50... so you buy it with 20 of your proceeds (play/fake money) and 30 of your real money. now you're at Money(50,0).. The person that you bought it from adds 50 to their real money (no reason that this can't be acceptable that I can see, but your chair has the following stat: $20 fake... If you sold it for $20, you'd be at Money(50,20).. if you sold it for $100, you'd be at Money(130,20)... You're always going to have that "fake" part attached to it in your world. I see nothing wrong with that from a legal standpoint.
Seriously though, I know I've spent way too much time thinking this through -- but why is gambling illegal anyway? Starting a business is a gamble. It's not illegal... whatever. And no I've never played SL so my idea of how money works and buying/selling could be all wrong but that's just how I see it working...
I hear what your saying and this may be very well what happens at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk area for instance. Other than having limited free or meter parking and expensive parking lots, the beach access itself is free. Actually, beach access is technically free at most beaches I've been to in California. They usually charge only for vehicles to park, but don't charge per person.
I went off on a tangent, but I was going to say that this would work for the area directly around the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk for instance, but there are several other State Beaches down the 1 that don't have anything around them and charge admission / parking fees. Sure, it sucks but it's not that bad and you know the money is going to pay for cleanup, etc. It's just like any other state park...
On the other hand, city parks tend to be paid for by taxes and typically are free.
The N800 has also received a recent software update to allow for Flash 9 (Youtube galore) and Skype. There's videos of it in action all over youtube and it looks nice. I was really tempted to get one to use as a wifi phone and internet device in my home, but I figured I could wait a little more.
The "Box Office" as you put it -- I'll assume you mean the money and number of paying guests that went to the theater to watch it -- doesn't mean that the people viewing liked them. That's bad logic. If anything, you might be able to read into it and say it means that the marketing campaign was enough to get a lot of people into the theater for said movie. It doesn't say anything about whether they actually liked it.:) Do you get your money back for every movie you saw in the theater and didn't like?
Everyone knew the market for "old-school" gamers existed. Look at your example of MS's Solitaire, but don't forget Yahoo!. I mean, built into the IM client is an easy to use gaming thing that's attracting people that are definitely not hardcore PC users for years.
Also, look at those little joysticks loaded with older games and how those have somehow invaded the stores.
What Nintendo did wasn't just to say, here's a new console and some games for this market -- but they created something that was actually fun and simple for _everyone_ in the market at a reasonable price....
Meanwhile, I'm happy playing my PS3. I liked the Wii, but I think it'll get old. Someone said it before on slashdot and I'll say it again.. The Wii is yet another console to port a new version of Zelda and Mario to.
I've also never seen the "blow a hole in your own face" button to end the game before the others in the game do it for you -- so, how do you explain that?
Yah, I never switched from my 360k floppy disks and my 10MB hard drives and I'm fine with that. Who needs more storage space on optical media anyway!? Crazy I tell you -- that's just crazy.
Seriously, if you think you won't buy either of them you're living in a bubble. You will. Maybe not now, but you will sooner than you think and you'll enjoy the viewing experience... And once the media comes down in price you'll be burning Blu-Ray discs on your PC just like you do now with your DVD burner...
And I agree that Blu-Ray is a much better format and a format that's backed by more companies as well. It's just a matter of time. Go get a PS3 and a 1080p TV and you'll see what I mean...
When I read the subject of this I got excited. I thought maybe, just maybe there were going to be some rules set about how long you can park a domain for -- making it more of a hastle for scammers and squaters to just sit on domains with nothing more than an ad on the site... I'm normally not one to opt for control, but if I can go out and buy just about every mispelling of microsoft or google or whatever possible and sit on them or even have them forward to my site, well that just seems crazy. and if you're rich from selling a business, internet land is cheap... dirt cheap... do we really want a warren buffet of the world to own everything?
I admit that I haven't researched what regulations do exist, but I'm not aware of anything in place to prevent this besides the cost (which is not much as the article mentions)...
One of many things being wrong is this thought of Linux as one single operating system when in reality there's more than a handful of variations. Each has it's own faults and own perks, but until developers unite and start working together rather than branching out like Debian and Ubuntu or fighting among which is better Linux will not be able to compete well against the MS singularity.
Now, on the other hand, it's been a thought of mine for a long time that having a dual boot system with an OS specifically designed for games and the OS for your "business" (i.e. Windows) would be an awesome thing. IMHO, if the Linux community worked on a project like that with game developer support from the start then PC Gamers would have something special. And I know people will say that this means people would have to install another OS, etc. But really, boot off a CD and have the boot/install disc do a sort of "partition magic" style thing to split your HD that's currently only one partition or allow you to select a different drive or drive letter...
Anyway, I don't know if anyone would agree with me but this is my POV. I also happen to think what MS is doing makes business sense, but only partially. It actually makes me wonder if they feel that the XBOX 360 really isn't a big enough success...
How did Aaron Rutkoff get a job writing for the Wall Street Journal??? How did this get past the editor? It's in the TITLE of the article. Ya know, I really think it's time I start looking for a job writing articles about how I waste my time and make money while I do it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like Apple would be able to make Safari take advantage of some of the "features" AT&T is touting for Pogo easily. They've already got coverflow working well in iTunes ao I'd guess you could transport that into Safari. Just have a low-res "screengrab" happen whenever you visit a site, you would instantly have that sort of ability available to you in the history or your bookmarks if you were to bookmark it... And I like the idea of an _option_ to have my tabs a little bigger and show that screen grab of the site instead of the teeny-weeny favicon.ico logos and title text.
I just don't see how adding a couple things like that would bog down the browser experience that much. Did Ars leave out a major thing? Where's the 3d experience? Is that just limited to the coverflow styling? my 2d pages aren't translated into 3d magically? meh
I got into games somewhere between age 5 and 8. I remember being very young and going into my dad's work on a Saturday to have him sit me down in from of Leisure Suit Larry while he went on to run some errands. Of course, I had to make it through the prove you're an adult questions before I even got to the game -- which involved a lot of typing, thinking and seeing what bad situations I could get poor Larry into. These days, there are some Nintendo DS games out there that have lengthy dialog and decent mysteries to solve. There's also games that have been aroound a long time like Tetris that really shouldn't have any age restrictions and just challenge you mentally. Seriously, if your kid can hit the buttons and has an interest they should be allowed to play Tetris.
/excessive rambling
When I was young, Sierra had a great grasp on the adventure game segment. I loved having to type in things and figure out how to solve puzzles and collect items -- often having to reword things so the game would know what I wanted. This no longer exists and when you can find an adventure game today it's just a random mess of clicking to pick up something or several attempts with the wrong something to solve a puzzle. There's some rare exceptions that punish you and some RPG's that are good, but still nothing quite like the old text interfaced adventure games.
That being said, I think the answer is a huge (everyone with me here?) "it depends". Depends on the kid, depends on the parents level of participation in their life, depends on the game and depends on the way the kid will accept, challenge or critic the content of game. I was even taught how to handle my finances in some ways because of my game addiction. When my parents finally got an NES I would rent games, score the games in a little notebook on the same criteria as Nintendo Power and at the end of the month I'd buy one game that I thought I really wanted to play more of... I'd even sell my special Nintendo Power's at the school sometimes... Like the ones that showed how to beat all the mario games or whatever. Made a quick $10 or something sometimes. It's strange how when you're younger you can come up with all sorts of great ideas to make money, but when you're older everything just seems too risky... Anyway...
Let them play. It's just a game. hah..
Build quality and size. 1" thin and 5 pound laptops are hard to come by in similar specs to the macbook. I will still say the macbook is more expensive - sure, but osx is a great OS too and it's not really a simple thing to run that on a regular "PC" laptop. IMHO of course
Yay yay! I'm a moron. Yay! That's great!
Dell and HP are a poor comparison to a Macbook. Try comparing prices of the Apple Macbook against a Lenovo Thinkpad (what I would argue is the high end of the "PC" market) instead and you'll see that the prices are actually very competitive.
Oh -- I just priced out getting the hardware to build my own PC vs. buying a new 8 core Mac Pro too and it seems to me that the Mac Pro is priced very competitively as well. Apple has grown up a lot.
I hope they're not planning a human/ipod hybrid... That could be what leads to the inslavement of the human race! If only we would have known they'd unite and overthrow the humans -- I can see it now!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtsHLLqs1D0
sigh
Join me online anytime! I'd be happy to hear a fellow slashdotter in my ear instead of some of the other crazies you get online. :) MY PSN ID is Top_Shelf
-Jeff
I'm surprised there's no mention of Warhawk here... Granted it's a PS3 PSN download and in-store release with no single player abilities, but it's a great game with lots of replay value... If you haven't played it yet do yourself a favor and play it.
Outside of Warhawk, the Orange box/Portal really does take the cake for me, but it's a little unfair since I wouldn't say Portal alone is a game of the year... It's original, but it's not enough game...
Ahh, those clever guys pushing woot.com...
Seriously though, who visits Merriam-Webster, m-w.com, and looks up definitions or even votes? Who does that? This is a silly little web poll on their site. Meh. move along, nothing to see here.
Are some consumers possibly buying both?
I have a ps3 and have purchased a few Blu-Ray movies and if the price goes down on hd-dvd players without the players moving to blu-ray with things I really want I may have to get a cheap hd-dvd player. That being said, I'm not abandoning blu-ray and I love it from a technological standpoint.. More storage is always a good thing...
What about TV Shows? You could fit great quality complete seasons on one disc (maybe not perfect quality, but very very good).
No reason for multiple discs and that also helps with cost... They don't sell seasons by disc...
Off-topic: When is The Simpsons going HD!? I'd think cartoons would be the easiest transition ever.
I agree. However, my understand with the new engine was that no traditional "porting" is being done because the engine is cross-platform. It just takes a compile to make it go on another platform from what I understand... I suppose that means a different compiler or something on each platform -- but using all of the same data... It's about time too.
256 MB XDR @3.2 GHz for system memory and 256 MB GDDR3 @700 MHz for video memory. Not to bring on a console war extravaganza, but the M$ xbox 360 has the same amount of total memory, but instead theirs is 512 MB UMA (Shared with CPU)...
Anyway, memory could very well be a limitation with a cluster of ps3s vs. the microwulf cluster, but it all would depend on the operations your performing. I'd venture to guess the 256mb of system memory would be enough for anyone. :)
During my last years at SJSU, they formed a joint public library and out of convenience I decided it was time to see what the DVD selection was like... There was a good time period where I stopped renting entirely because there was just enough of a selection to keep me happy, it was convenient and free.
Currently I don't have a library in my commute path and it's not as convenient as just showing up to a movie in the mailbox. Also, I use Blockbuster and for just $5.99 I get a free video game rental (in store via a printed coupon from on-line), 2 movies in the mail and 2 movies from the store (trading in each for another). When I was single I would watch movies constantly while doing some programming and stuff after work, but now I come home to a girl and 4 movies a month and a PS3 rental is plenty. Once in a while I'll spend a few bucks to rent that one extra movie, but not too often.
All in all, I feel like it's the best deal for me. I also live just a 10 minute drive or so from a Blockbuster which is right next to a Safeway which = convenience for me...
Maybe I read his post wrong, but I think the parent was saying that the fake money would never be able to be converted to real money if it had been used for gambling.
... Money(100,0)
Personally, I think this is fine and I could see it being that just any "proceeds" of gambling are never convertable to real money, but you could buy any in-game items with it and convert back any invested money remaining back into real money. It could be a very simple formula adding a boolean tag to the money that states whether it was gambling proceeds and tags to the items you bought after the fact to make sure you can't resell those for "real" money.. However, you could sell them to another user in the world for their real money. any proceeds from that sell -- well, that could be converted back to real money because that is just good old capitalism...
So, let's say you have $100 in game that you invested from your real money and the conversion is straight forward... So in their database you have (well, i'm gonna change things up.. let's have a Money table with 2 fields - one = real money.. one = fake)
Now, you go and gamble $20 and lose it.. now you have Money(80,0). Now you go gamble another $20 in one go on a game of blackjack and win. You now have Money(80,20)... (I guess whether the 20 you "gambled" is play or not is up for debate, but we can all agree the 20 you won should be play money forever now..).. so, let's say someone is selling a chair for $50... so you buy it with 20 of your proceeds (play/fake money) and 30 of your real money. now you're at Money(50,0).. The person that you bought it from adds 50 to their real money (no reason that this can't be acceptable that I can see, but your chair has the following stat: $20 fake... If you sold it for $20, you'd be at Money(50,20).. if you sold it for $100, you'd be at Money(130,20)... You're always going to have that "fake" part attached to it in your world. I see nothing wrong with that from a legal standpoint.
Seriously though, I know I've spent way too much time thinking this through -- but why is gambling illegal anyway? Starting a business is a gamble. It's not illegal... whatever. And no I've never played SL so my idea of how money works and buying/selling could be all wrong but that's just how I see it working...
later
I hear what your saying and this may be very well what happens at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk area for instance. Other than having limited free or meter parking and expensive parking lots, the beach access itself is free. Actually, beach access is technically free at most beaches I've been to in California. They usually charge only for vehicles to park, but don't charge per person.
I went off on a tangent, but I was going to say that this would work for the area directly around the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk for instance, but there are several other State Beaches down the 1 that don't have anything around them and charge admission / parking fees. Sure, it sucks but it's not that bad and you know the money is going to pay for cleanup, etc. It's just like any other state park...
On the other hand, city parks tend to be paid for by taxes and typically are free.
The N800 has also received a recent software update to allow for Flash 9 (Youtube galore) and Skype. There's videos of it in action all over youtube and it looks nice. I was really tempted to get one to use as a wifi phone and internet device in my home, but I figured I could wait a little more.
The "Box Office" as you put it -- I'll assume you mean the money and number of paying guests that went to the theater to watch it -- doesn't mean that the people viewing liked them. That's bad logic. If anything, you might be able to read into it and say it means that the marketing campaign was enough to get a lot of people into the theater for said movie. It doesn't say anything about whether they actually liked it. :) Do you get your money back for every movie you saw in the theater and didn't like?
Everyone knew the market for "old-school" gamers existed. Look at your example of MS's Solitaire, but don't forget Yahoo!. I mean, built into the IM client is an easy to use gaming thing that's attracting people that are definitely not hardcore PC users for years. Also, look at those little joysticks loaded with older games and how those have somehow invaded the stores. What Nintendo did wasn't just to say, here's a new console and some games for this market -- but they created something that was actually fun and simple for _everyone_ in the market at a reasonable price.... Meanwhile, I'm happy playing my PS3. I liked the Wii, but I think it'll get old. Someone said it before on slashdot and I'll say it again.. The Wii is yet another console to port a new version of Zelda and Mario to.
I've also never seen the "blow a hole in your own face" button to end the game before the others in the game do it for you -- so, how do you explain that?
Yah, I never switched from my 360k floppy disks and my 10MB hard drives and I'm fine with that. Who needs more storage space on optical media anyway!? Crazy I tell you -- that's just crazy.
Seriously, if you think you won't buy either of them you're living in a bubble. You will. Maybe not now, but you will sooner than you think and you'll enjoy the viewing experience... And once the media comes down in price you'll be burning Blu-Ray discs on your PC just like you do now with your DVD burner...
And I agree that Blu-Ray is a much better format and a format that's backed by more companies as well. It's just a matter of time. Go get a PS3 and a 1080p TV and you'll see what I mean...
When I read the subject of this I got excited. I thought maybe, just maybe there were going to be some rules set about how long you can park a domain for -- making it more of a hastle for scammers and squaters to just sit on domains with nothing more than an ad on the site... I'm normally not one to opt for control, but if I can go out and buy just about every mispelling of microsoft or google or whatever possible and sit on them or even have them forward to my site, well that just seems crazy. and if you're rich from selling a business, internet land is cheap... dirt cheap... do we really want a warren buffet of the world to own everything?
I admit that I haven't researched what regulations do exist, but I'm not aware of anything in place to prevent this besides the cost (which is not much as the article mentions)...
One of many things being wrong is this thought of Linux as one single operating system when in reality there's more than a handful of variations. Each has it's own faults and own perks, but until developers unite and start working together rather than branching out like Debian and Ubuntu or fighting among which is better Linux will not be able to compete well against the MS singularity.
Now, on the other hand, it's been a thought of mine for a long time that having a dual boot system with an OS specifically designed for games and the OS for your "business" (i.e. Windows) would be an awesome thing. IMHO, if the Linux community worked on a project like that with game developer support from the start then PC Gamers would have something special. And I know people will say that this means people would have to install another OS, etc. But really, boot off a CD and have the boot/install disc do a sort of "partition magic" style thing to split your HD that's currently only one partition or allow you to select a different drive or drive letter...
Anyway, I don't know if anyone would agree with me but this is my POV. I also happen to think what MS is doing makes business sense, but only partially. It actually makes me wonder if they feel that the XBOX 360 really isn't a big enough success...
I couldn't agree more...
:)
How did Aaron Rutkoff get a job writing for the Wall Street Journal??? How did this get past the editor? It's in the TITLE of the article. Ya know, I really think it's time I start looking for a job writing articles about how I waste my time and make money while I do it.
My reaction was similar.
I exclaimed, "W00h00, I'll be alive to see it all happen!"