yeah, i'm gonna have to agree with this. I don't buy many games each year, but i DO get the A-list titles (CoD4,Crysis,BioShock etc.) and they really do try to balance these things. Where you start seeing the crap games where eye candy takes over is in those 2nd tier games. Every time i try out one of them i can't stand it and vow never again. usually that's good until it's been 3 months since the last a-list game and i'm getting bored. I can't even remember the names of examples, but i've got a stack of them back at the house.
Only PC tech demos (DOOM3)really forgo gameplay for graphics. HEY NOW! DOOM3 had no more story than DOOM and that's ok. I don't think ANYONE expects more from the DOOM series.
AMEN brother! I have a 65" 1080p tv and was pissed i found out about the $99 toshiba a day too late. I'm out on Blu-Ray, I've seen Sony drop the ball too many times over the years to be sure it will remain a viable format. Now, some people here think that BR will be the answer for pc and backup, but it won't be if media prices are too high. If they don't sell enough of the drives, the media prices will never drop. If i can get a 50 pack of HD-DVD disks for the same price as a 10 pack of BR disks... capacity isn't gonna matter. I can find room to store a few extra disks when i back up.
the bottom line is that no one really KNOWS how this is gonna shake out. The people that will decide the format war don't read slashdot. they don't really care about bit rates and capacities. they want to know how much is it? and does it look better than my DVDs or better yet my FRIEND'S DVDs? you can throw all this technical crap at them, but for most folks if one is cheaper than the other it's good enough.
dunno, i use my blackberry pearl for internet, video, text, phone. in that order. while i have some issues with the iPhone, the bottom line is for the things i want my phone to do well, it will be excellent. personally i think there will be a 16gb iPhone and another price drop on the 8gb by xmas. you read it here first (maybe).
people aren't flocking to smartphones because the carriers don't push them. they also rarely offer them free. discounted maybe, but not free. if joe consumer walks in and you show him 6 phones, 5 of which are free w/contract, he's not likely to buy the $99 smartphone if you can't/won't sell him on it. personally, i welcome ANY new players in this arena. I've moved from smartphone to smartphone for several years now and the iPhone has really changed the game.
doesn't DVORAK translate to TOOL in many languages? I used to think that guy was cool or at least insightful. please don't flame me. it's been so long since he was right about anything that wasn't painfully obvious that i'm amazed he still has a job. i still read his crap just out of morbid curiosity. his column reads like a lame blog most of the time.
as an owner of several smartphones running Windows Mobile 2002 thru 5.0 i can tell you that crashes are pretty common place. at least for me. I finally gave up, my blackberry pearl has yet to crash and as mentioned in someone else's post, it just works.
never another WM phone for me.
i did try writing a couple of apps for WM5.0 using visual studio.net. was pretty cool and easy to work with. I liked being able to emulate a handset to check things out.
I have beryl installed in feisty and it's working great. should i disable or uninstall prior to upgrading or will the installer see it and disable compiz. just wondering since compiz is enabled by default.
amen to that. I have a crapload of 3rd party software installed and my BB Pearl has never crashed. Rebooting my 5 previous Windows Mobile devices was a daily occurrence. That said, I'm still tempted by teh iFone. We'll see how this 3rd party and SDK thing really plays out, THEN maybe i'll get one.
i wonder, did you read the post, or just want a chance to post how great you are? who was whining? excuses? where? all i said was whether it's cost or family/job duties that are preventing it, not everyone can go to a university. When taken in the context of the REST of my post I thought it was pretty clear that i thought a CC was an affordable and flexible way to get an education. my post was an attempt to refute the parent posts statement that everyone at a CC is brain dead and doesn't want to be there anyway. I could certainly be WRONG, but why would you spend your own $$ to be lectured to if you didn't want to be there?
anyway, tuition costs, while not as high as the general cost of staying alive, are not heading downward. There may be a day when,like many other things, even the middle class gets priced out of an education. Just because you are willing to work 5 jobs to get that degree doesn't mean that 5 jobs will pay for it. Of course you can take out 100K in loans and spend half your working life paying them off.
FYI and not that it's anyones business, but i am doing it. may take me 10 years to get a BA, but it will be mine!!
wow. elitist? could it also be that community colleges are filled with people who actually have jobs and family responsibilities and want to better themselves? this may come as a complete shock to you, but not everyone is able to go to a university straight out of high school. have you seen the rising costs of tuition? never mind the textbook racket.
considering that many community college students are paying for it from their own pocket AND cramming it into a normal life of 40+ hour work weeks, i'm surprised that you would think they don't WANT to be there. hmmm. honestly you should substitute "Community College" in your post with "High School" and it might be accurate.
take a step back from your perceived greatness for a minute or two. might do you some good.
what i've always found crazy about digital images... i'm looking at a blank monitor screen (don't get smart, i have 2 monitors).
on that screen, every possible image no matter how private, or bizzare is available by just activating the correct pixels. seriously, every scene from history. every fantasy. in photo realistic detail. what if there was a program that would plow through every possible combination. what images might pop up? why waste bluegene on chess? creepy.
recently ditched the windows world and have been happily working with ubuntu for a couple of months now. ran vista for a few months when it came out, funny how all those cool Aero effects look pretty weak compared to Beryl... I'm starting to think MS hasn't got a clue. 5 YEARS for Vista and this is IT? half my games wouldn't even work. in fact several of them run better in ubuntu w/ wine than they did in Vista. now that's pretty sad. Whatever, i've seen the writing on the wall, and i'm getting a console for gaming. The only reason i was still on windows was games, but i've reached the point due to tech advances that it's going to cost me as much as getting PS3/360/Wii combined to continue enjoying games on the PC. Unfortunately, nothing else i do on the pc requires nearly that much horsepower.
bye bye bill.
thats funny! you might be interested to know that i am on my 5th smartphone from att/cingular/att/cingular/att in the last several years and i have been able to install 3rd party apps on all of them. i've also been able to put mp3s or portions of as ringtones on them too. did i mention that i didn't need anymore than a usb cable and my pc to do that?
this smartphone lockdown is a new thing and seems to only affect the iPhone. My blackberry pearl and my friends Curve aren't locked out of squat.
thanks
i finally switched to linux a couple of weeks ago. using ubuntu. i couldn't be happier and haven't missed XP/Vista yet. it took a little geek to get it dialed in, but what's funny about that is that it was fun. compared to windows, where doing this kind of stuff just feels like such a drain.
with all the changes in hardware lately (multi core, pci-e, etc.) i was going to have to build/buy a new pc to be able to play the newer games. unfortunately, my athlon64, 2gb ram, nvidia 6600gt machine works great for everything EXCEPT the latest games (pointing at you Bioshock). at this point i'm out on pc gaming. i can get a 360 AND a Wii for what it would cost to upgrade this pc. and i'd STILL be upgrading video cards every 12 months. bleh.
uhhhhh. should have been there first? yeah damn that apple! os 9 was such a load. my mac shoulda come with os x in the first place. as the owner of a zen xtra, i can tell you the plays for sure firmware came out at least 2 years AFTER i bought my 40GB player (which had been on the market at least a year). yeah i could upgrade to a new player, but why? i want my mp3 player to hold a crapload of music and play it back. guess what? IT JUST WORKS! amazing. actually, i dropped the thing not too long ago and killed the HDD. Got an 80GB drive on newegg for $50. undo a couple of screws in the back, pull out old drive, insert new, close case. use paperclip to boot into recovery and reformat. guess what? IT JUST WORKS! and i doubled the capacity for $50. yeah i could have a slicker interface, but at what price for the same capacity?
you know, thats something i've noticed as well. The performance of EDGE and my overall call quality/% dropped calls have been great. MY personal experience with EDGE has been good. Is it a 6mb connection, no, but i never expected that. Pages load quickly on my blackberry pearl. At least they dont load slow enough to irritate me. Also, this isnt limited to my 'home area' (dfw). I've had good performance on the road as well... L.A., Palm Springs, Austin, Houston, Philly, even on a recent trip to Puerto Rico. anyway, i see a lot of bashing of the cingular/att network and i have yet to personally experience the same issues. I wonder how many of these issues are related to the device being used.
after 3 buggy windows mobile phones, locked to the point of uselessness by att/cingular i just got a blackberry pearl a couple of weeks ago. the only other phone that just worked this well was a sony-ericsson i had a couple of years back. the difference between my 6 month old WM5.0 phone and the blackberry is night and day. the blackberry is just more responsive, the interface is easier to use. i cant put my finger on it, or maybe i can, but i had this phone figured out in 10 minutes, it just makes SENSE.
Windows mobile just gets more bloated and i've found i keep the windows mobile phones for less and less time. I'm moderately willing to put up with flakyness, crashes, incompatibilites on my desktop, but damn it i just want my phone to WORK.
funny, i go to windows media player, right click a playlist, select "add to synclist" and it syncs up just fine... now my zen is 4 years old, the interface is plain but not horrible. don't know about the newer ones, maybe they suck. my point is i need portable mass storage that happens to play music. i've seen used zens on ebay with crapped hard drives for $30. 30+50 = 80gb mp3 player for $80. not a bad deal if you don't need the latest, greatest.
yes the ipod has a nice interface, but i don't like the prices or the dependancy on itunes. My 4 year old creative zen plays well with media player and windows explorer. I recently dropped at the airport. first time i had it out of its protective case and within 30 min, wham. goodbye 40 GB hard drive. oh well, got an 80 GB on new egg for $50, 5 min replacement, reformat and voila, doubled. Anyway, i only use about 50% of my zen for music, gets a lot of use as a portable drive. don't really need a slick interface, just big storage cheap. and it plays music. i win.
it doesn't really matter how slick the mobile OS is. the cellular service providers (i'm flipping you off cingular/att) will make the phone practically useless. unless, of course, you purchase from them. My windows mobile 5 phone is completely unable to run most 3rd party apps, opera mobile for example, because cingular has blocked that functionality on the phone...
i'm sure there's a way to 'unlock' the phone to allow me to run things, but i haven't found a method that works yet. why can they sell an essentially broken product? its not just cingular, they all love to do this crap.
after 4 months of living with vista, i decided to go back to XP today. there's just not enough there to be worth the hassles. UAC was the least of my issues. once you get things set up, it doesn't intrude often.
The bigger issue was that i couldn't get any game but Half-Life 2 to run properly, and it still had issues. Since gaming is half my PC usage, i couldn't take it anymore. Old games, new games, whatever. funky graphical artifacts, weird crashes or inability to launch. and yes, my pc is well over the min. specs, i have the latest, greatest VISTA drivers for all my hardware, all the games in question were patched, and i tried adjusting compatibility mode for each game. no luck, and honestly, it's just not worth the effort. except for the 3 new games i've gotten since i took the vista plunge, all my others ran great on the same pc under XP.
anyway, i gave up more than i gained. so long vista, i'm sure we'll reunite someday.
sad but true. there have been too many changes lately and i'm going to have to buy/build a new PC to handle Crysis. my athlon64 3200/1gb ram/6600gt combo is starting to show it's age on some of the newer games. After pricing CoreDuo/Mobo/Videocard/new sound card that effing works in vista the cost to buy a pc with a warranty at best buy is too damn close.
bleh. must play crysis though. and STALKER doesn't run for shit either on my current rig.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, i'm gonna have to agree with this. I don't buy many games each year, but i DO get the A-list titles (CoD4,Crysis,BioShock etc.) and they really do try to balance these things. Where you start seeing the crap games where eye candy takes over is in those 2nd tier games. Every time i try out one of them i can't stand it and vow never again. usually that's good until it's been 3 months since the last a-list game and i'm getting bored. I can't even remember the names of examples, but i've got a stack of them back at the house.
Only PC tech demos (DOOM3)really forgo gameplay for graphics. HEY NOW! DOOM3 had no more story than DOOM and that's ok. I don't think ANYONE expects more from the DOOM series.
AMEN brother! I have a 65" 1080p tv and was pissed i found out about the $99 toshiba a day too late. I'm out on Blu-Ray, I've seen Sony drop the ball too many times over the years to be sure it will remain a viable format. Now, some people here think that BR will be the answer for pc and backup, but it won't be if media prices are too high. If they don't sell enough of the drives, the media prices will never drop. If i can get a 50 pack of HD-DVD disks for the same price as a 10 pack of BR disks... capacity isn't gonna matter. I can find room to store a few extra disks when i back up.
the bottom line is that no one really KNOWS how this is gonna shake out. The people that will decide the format war don't read slashdot. they don't really care about bit rates and capacities. they want to know how much is it? and does it look better than my DVDs or better yet my FRIEND'S DVDs? you can throw all this technical crap at them, but for most folks if one is cheaper than the other it's good enough.
dunno, i use my blackberry pearl for internet, video, text, phone. in that order. while i have some issues with the iPhone, the bottom line is for the things i want my phone to do well, it will be excellent. personally i think there will be a 16gb iPhone and another price drop on the 8gb by xmas. you read it here first (maybe).
people aren't flocking to smartphones because the carriers don't push them. they also rarely offer them free. discounted maybe, but not free. if joe consumer walks in and you show him 6 phones, 5 of which are free w/contract, he's not likely to buy the $99 smartphone if you can't/won't sell him on it. personally, i welcome ANY new players in this arena. I've moved from smartphone to smartphone for several years now and the iPhone has really changed the game.
doesn't DVORAK translate to TOOL in many languages? I used to think that guy was cool or at least insightful. please don't flame me. it's been so long since he was right about anything that wasn't painfully obvious that i'm amazed he still has a job. i still read his crap just out of morbid curiosity. his column reads like a lame blog most of the time.
as an owner of several smartphones running Windows Mobile 2002 thru 5.0 i can tell you that crashes are pretty common place. at least for me. I finally gave up, my blackberry pearl has yet to crash and as mentioned in someone else's post, it just works. never another WM phone for me.
.net. was pretty cool and easy to work with. I liked being able to emulate a handset to check things out.
i did try writing a couple of apps for WM5.0 using visual studio
A list of companies NOT named might be interesting, too. Among them are: Apple Samsung Micron/Lexar Sony
Isn't MemoryStick (named in the summary) a proprietary Sony product?
I have beryl installed in feisty and it's working great. should i disable or uninstall prior to upgrading or will the installer see it and disable compiz. just wondering since compiz is enabled by default.
I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already released an MP3-playing toothbrush.
you asked for it... http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/exclusive-video-hasbro-tooth-tunes-mp3-toothbrush-210116.php
still alive i see.
amen to that. I have a crapload of 3rd party software installed and my BB Pearl has never crashed. Rebooting my 5 previous Windows Mobile devices was a daily occurrence. That said, I'm still tempted by teh iFone. We'll see how this 3rd party and SDK thing really plays out, THEN maybe i'll get one.
steve jobs is still a tool.
i wonder, did you read the post, or just want a chance to post how great you are? who was whining? excuses? where? all i said was whether it's cost or family/job duties that are preventing it, not everyone can go to a university. When taken in the context of the REST of my post I thought it was pretty clear that i thought a CC was an affordable and flexible way to get an education. my post was an attempt to refute the parent posts statement that everyone at a CC is brain dead and doesn't want to be there anyway. ,like many other things, even the middle class gets priced out of an education. Just because you are willing to work 5 jobs to get that degree doesn't mean that 5 jobs will pay for it. Of course you can take out 100K in loans and spend half your working life paying them off.
I could certainly be WRONG, but why would you spend your own $$ to be lectured to if you didn't want to be there?
anyway, tuition costs, while not as high as the general cost of staying alive, are not heading downward. There may be a day when
FYI and not that it's anyones business, but i am doing it. may take me 10 years to get a BA, but it will be mine!!
wow. elitist? could it also be that community colleges are filled with people who actually have jobs and family responsibilities and want to better themselves? this may come as a complete shock to you, but not everyone is able to go to a university straight out of high school. have you seen the rising costs of tuition? never mind the textbook racket.
considering that many community college students are paying for it from their own pocket AND cramming it into a normal life of 40+ hour work weeks, i'm surprised that you would think they don't WANT to be there. hmmm. honestly you should substitute "Community College" in your post with "High School" and it might be accurate.
take a step back from your perceived greatness for a minute or two. might do you some good.
what i've always found crazy about digital images... i'm looking at a blank monitor screen (don't get smart, i have 2 monitors). on that screen, every possible image no matter how private, or bizzare is available by just activating the correct pixels. seriously, every scene from history. every fantasy. in photo realistic detail. what if there was a program that would plow through every possible combination. what images might pop up? why waste bluegene on chess? creepy.
Bah! My tv allows me to download firmware updates on my PC and stick on a flash drive. said drive then plugs into tv and update is applied.
wurd
recently ditched the windows world and have been happily working with ubuntu for a couple of months now. ran vista for a few months when it came out, funny how all those cool Aero effects look pretty weak compared to Beryl... I'm starting to think MS hasn't got a clue. 5 YEARS for Vista and this is IT? half my games wouldn't even work. in fact several of them run better in ubuntu w/ wine than they did in Vista. now that's pretty sad. Whatever, i've seen the writing on the wall, and i'm getting a console for gaming. The only reason i was still on windows was games, but i've reached the point due to tech advances that it's going to cost me as much as getting PS3/360/Wii combined to continue enjoying games on the PC. Unfortunately, nothing else i do on the pc requires nearly that much horsepower. bye bye bill.
thats funny! you might be interested to know that i am on my 5th smartphone from att/cingular/att/cingular/att in the last several years and i have been able to install 3rd party apps on all of them. i've also been able to put mp3s or portions of as ringtones on them too. did i mention that i didn't need anymore than a usb cable and my pc to do that? this smartphone lockdown is a new thing and seems to only affect the iPhone. My blackberry pearl and my friends Curve aren't locked out of squat. thanks
i finally switched to linux a couple of weeks ago. using ubuntu. i couldn't be happier and haven't missed XP/Vista yet. it took a little geek to get it dialed in, but what's funny about that is that it was fun. compared to windows, where doing this kind of stuff just feels like such a drain. with all the changes in hardware lately (multi core, pci-e, etc.) i was going to have to build/buy a new pc to be able to play the newer games. unfortunately, my athlon64, 2gb ram, nvidia 6600gt machine works great for everything EXCEPT the latest games (pointing at you Bioshock). at this point i'm out on pc gaming. i can get a 360 AND a Wii for what it would cost to upgrade this pc. and i'd STILL be upgrading video cards every 12 months. bleh.
uhhhhh. should have been there first? yeah damn that apple! os 9 was such a load. my mac shoulda come with os x in the first place. as the owner of a zen xtra, i can tell you the plays for sure firmware came out at least 2 years AFTER i bought my 40GB player (which had been on the market at least a year). yeah i could upgrade to a new player, but why? i want my mp3 player to hold a crapload of music and play it back. guess what? IT JUST WORKS! amazing. actually, i dropped the thing not too long ago and killed the HDD. Got an 80GB drive on newegg for $50. undo a couple of screws in the back, pull out old drive, insert new, close case. use paperclip to boot into recovery and reformat. guess what? IT JUST WORKS! and i doubled the capacity for $50. yeah i could have a slicker interface, but at what price for the same capacity?
you know, thats something i've noticed as well. The performance of EDGE and my overall call quality/% dropped calls have been great. MY personal experience with EDGE has been good. Is it a 6mb connection, no, but i never expected that. Pages load quickly on my blackberry pearl. At least they dont load slow enough to irritate me. Also, this isnt limited to my 'home area' (dfw). I've had good performance on the road as well... L.A., Palm Springs, Austin, Houston, Philly, even on a recent trip to Puerto Rico. anyway, i see a lot of bashing of the cingular/att network and i have yet to personally experience the same issues. I wonder how many of these issues are related to the device being used.
after 3 buggy windows mobile phones, locked to the point of uselessness by att/cingular i just got a blackberry pearl a couple of weeks ago. the only other phone that just worked this well was a sony-ericsson i had a couple of years back. the difference between my 6 month old WM5.0 phone and the blackberry is night and day. the blackberry is just more responsive, the interface is easier to use. i cant put my finger on it, or maybe i can, but i had this phone figured out in 10 minutes, it just makes SENSE.
Windows mobile just gets more bloated and i've found i keep the windows mobile phones for less and less time. I'm moderately willing to put up with flakyness, crashes, incompatibilites on my desktop, but damn it i just want my phone to WORK.
funny, i go to windows media player, right click a playlist, select "add to synclist" and it syncs up just fine... now my zen is 4 years old, the interface is plain but not horrible. don't know about the newer ones, maybe they suck. my point is i need portable mass storage that happens to play music. i've seen used zens on ebay with crapped hard drives for $30. 30+50 = 80gb mp3 player for $80. not a bad deal if you don't need the latest, greatest.
yes the ipod has a nice interface, but i don't like the prices or the dependancy on itunes. My 4 year old creative zen plays well with media player and windows explorer. I recently dropped at the airport. first time i had it out of its protective case and within 30 min, wham. goodbye 40 GB hard drive. oh well, got an 80 GB on new egg for $50, 5 min replacement, reformat and voila, doubled. Anyway, i only use about 50% of my zen for music, gets a lot of use as a portable drive. don't really need a slick interface, just big storage cheap. and it plays music. i win.
it doesn't really matter how slick the mobile OS is. the cellular service providers (i'm flipping you off cingular/att) will make the phone practically useless. unless, of course, you purchase from them. My windows mobile 5 phone is completely unable to run most 3rd party apps, opera mobile for example, because cingular has blocked that functionality on the phone...
i'm sure there's a way to 'unlock' the phone to allow me to run things, but i haven't found a method that works yet. why can they sell an essentially broken product? its not just cingular, they all love to do this crap.
after 4 months of living with vista, i decided to go back to XP today. there's just not enough there to be worth the hassles. UAC was the least of my issues. once you get things set up, it doesn't intrude often.
The bigger issue was that i couldn't get any game but Half-Life 2 to run properly, and it still had issues. Since gaming is half my PC usage, i couldn't take it anymore. Old games, new games, whatever. funky graphical artifacts, weird crashes or inability to launch. and yes, my pc is well over the min. specs, i have the latest, greatest VISTA drivers for all my hardware, all the games in question were patched, and i tried adjusting compatibility mode for each game. no luck, and honestly, it's just not worth the effort. except for the 3 new games i've gotten since i took the vista plunge, all my others ran great on the same pc under XP.
anyway, i gave up more than i gained. so long vista, i'm sure we'll reunite someday.
sad but true. there have been too many changes lately and i'm going to have to buy/build a new PC to handle Crysis. my athlon64 3200/1gb ram/6600gt combo is starting to show it's age on some of the newer games. After pricing CoreDuo/Mobo/Videocard/new sound card that effing works in vista the cost to buy a pc with a warranty at best buy is too damn close. bleh. must play crysis though. and STALKER doesn't run for shit either on my current rig.