Portal is a puzzle game, not an action game. Having a 10 ms response time instead of a 25 ms response time does not affect gameplay much (most of the time you are spent thinking how to get there from here, not jumping and aiming). Even on sequences where aiming and shooting are important, the aiming help will make up for a big part of the difference without it being very noticeable.
Once you have taken that into consideration I prefer putting the disk in my system and start playing, rather than turn the computer on, install the game, activate through the internet and then play the game in a smaller screen (because my monitor is smaller than my TV, which does not mean it has to be that way for everybody, but that is how it is in my setup).
Not to mention the point I made before, where it is actually cheaper to buy the printed book.
But aussersterne makes a very good point, I hadn't thought of that and it makes sense to pay a little more to avoid clutter, that is why laptops are so popular.
E-books don't make economical sense to me. For example: this book, as of this writing the paperback version is $8.99 and it has the four books for the price of three promotion so if I buy four books (about one month's worth) it will cost me $26.97. I could also go with the kindle version and buy four books at $7.99 each or $31.96 and I'm not even getting something physical out of that transaction. It simply does not make sense to me.
Seriously, is anyone using this? With the horrible memories I have of AOL I would not use anything they made and I would think most people feel similarly.
Since TV here is dominated by advertisement money, soccer isn't financially viable for the networks because they can't sell commercials during the game.
I am guessing you have never seen soccer in TV. Here in Mexico there are ads in the field, during every dead ball, popups over the action, commentators making advertisements, etc.
If NFL football is chess, soccer is go. The difference? It actually requires talent to be good at goh, whereas a supercomputer can beat anyone at chess. Skilled athletes excel at soccer, overweight drug addicts who should have failed out of high school win football games.
How can you be labeled insightful! It actually takes a lot of talent to play chess, invalidating chess only because computers are better at it (with human made algorithms) is like saying that mathematics are useless because computers can do very fast addition!
And just so you know, it will not take a whole lot longer before computers and human made algorithms regularly beat Go masters, just like it happened with chess.
My god, reading that Sean Malstrom guy is a lot like reading nutritional information: there might be something valuable there for the right kind of people, but it is incredibly boring.
The saddest part is that he knows his style is boring and he still uses it
I must admit I bowed out of the Sony Conference because it was too damn long. It just went on and on and on. If I want to see something that goes on and on and on forever, I will just read myself.
There was this game on Atari called Rescue on Fractalus. You fly a ship looking for lost pilots, when you find one, you land close to them and turn off the engines, then open the ship door and let them enter. But you could always turn on the engines while they were waiting for you to open the door and burn them alive. For some reason, that still makes me giggle and it has given me tons of fun over the long term.
I have no idea where you live, because here in the US, the Xbox 360 is $250 and a 40 inch decent HDTV is no more than $900, while the cheapest 30 inch monitor which supports 2560 x 1600 in newegg is the LG W3000H-Bn at $1,150.
I could buy the Xbox 360 with two games and a decent HDTV for the price you paid for your monitor. But hey! You are able to play Crysis (a two year old mediocre game as far as gaming is concerned) in ultra high resolution!
No, no, no!! He wants a console, not a crappy gaming PC
But I can totally see your point, look at the difference in graphics between the PC and Xbox version of Mass Effect 2. It really is like night and day, and in the PC version you also get DRM totally free. Ha! suck it console fanboys!
The Xbox (orig or extra 360 crispy) didn't provide a comparable experience to PC's *when it was released*, let alone today.
Completely agree. Consider the list of the top 10 games from the last year from Gamerankings (after removing duplicates):
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Mass Effect 2
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
Red Dead Redemption
LittleBigPlanet: Game of the Year Edition
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Batman: Arkham Asylum
God of War III
Braid
Of those games, 8 are on PS3, 6 on Xbox 360 and 5 on PC. Of the games which were released for PC, every single one is available on Xbox 360 and the PC is the only gaming platform without an exclusive. So yeah, it seems the PC does not provide a comparable experience.
Well, size might not matter to you, but I am sure it matters to tons of people who prefer small, sexy gadgets. I already thought that the 360 was fairly big and making it bigger is certainly not great design, specially if the article is right and the only thing they are really adding is Wi-Fi (the HDD would be the same physical size).
Where are these stastics that say ignoring the speed limit and driving the road for what it was built for is "fairly dangerous"?
From your article:
There are a number of road segments that cross the mountain ranges. [...] While many segments are posted at 90 km/h, few vehicles can safely be maneuvered near that speed.
I'll spell it out for you: If vehicles cannot be maneuvered safely at that speed then it is "fairly dangerous."
And of course, there is research showing that about 40% of road deaths were caused by speeding, which would account for 16,644 deaths if we go by my original numbers of 41,611 deaths in car accidents.
Also, your analogy fails, what I said is that driving recklessly could lead to killing someone. If someone wants to serve things with salt they can do it, if they want to force me into eating them, then we will have a problem. Or do you allow people in the street to force you into eating anything they want?
I don't understand people that think speed limits are moral imperatives that fall on the same line as murder or arson.
I don't think GP said anything similar to that statement
You people act like I just raped somebody if I want to go 55 in a 50 mile an hour zone.
Well, unless by driving recklessly you cause an accident and actually kill someone.
With some googling I found out that in the year 2000 15,517 people were murdered while 41,611 died in car accidents. That means that if we could prevent all car accidents the benefit in human lives would be almost three times greater.
You might only be driving 55 on a 50 mph zone, but a lot of people are driving much faster and statistics show it is fairly dangerous.
This kind of things always make me shudder, they estimate the money they might have made had they lived in medieval times or something. It is similar to "losing an election": you never had the election, you never won, you cannot lose it. You cannot lose money you never had.
"Brain surgery is hard. Medicine students should dive directly into brain surgery without even knowing the difference between the heart and the stomach. Think of how not knowing brain surgery will affect their flu patients!"
Whooooosh! Missed the point completely. Let me put some formatting so you get the idea. GGGGGGP said:
Even multi-page letters and reports should be in a plain text file. All the bad formating does is make the document harder to read.
What I answered was:
If I only had plain text the information would still be there, but unless I were a computer it would be very hard to make any sense of it.
Then you decided to stick your nose and make an unintelligible comment bashing power point, which wasn't even part of the discussion, and calling people stupid.
The point here is formatting, when used appropriately, makes important information apparent (see what I did there?) Text only files hide important information in seas of irrelevant information.
Apparently in bizarro world where you come from people have all the time in the universe to get the full information of every single problem and analyze it fully without the use of machines (they are evil). On the real world I prefer having important information be as clear as possible and if possible have the computer give me just the data points relevant to my current problem so I can make informed decisions fast. This does not mean I don't have the same information you do, I do.
But we'll just have to disagree seeing how we live in different universes.
It's stupid thinking like that that led to bad decisions through a badly-done powerpoint presentation that resulted in the shuttle disaster.
Of course! It's stupid thinking like that! Instead of doing badly-done powerpoint presentations we should be making decisions off of raw text. For example, it would be much easier to determine if a shuttle's systems are on line by parsing a two hundred line document than by looking at a green light, I mean, who needs lights when you have text?
And while we are at it, it's stupid thinking that punctuation marks are useful, they only help to dilute the data in your sentence. If people really want to make sense of what you say, it better cost them. We don't want all those stupid people understanding what you say, right? (I'm happy the world has geniuses like you, I don't know where we would be if everyone was a stupid sheep like me)
If it's an important decision, it shouldn't be made fast, and it should be made by someone who can actually understand the information without it being dumbed down and pre-digested.
Obviously! Where I work we have thousands of incredibly smart people just waiting to memorize raw data, every single point in the two million point benchmarks analysis, they want them all. I am glad we have the kind of man power to have all this people looking at numbers in a text file rather than, you know, revolutionizing the world or something. Of course... by the time they actually made sense of the two million points of data it is a bit late to make any decisions regarding performance because we have already shipped, but decisions like "we should investigate why this is slow" shouldn't be taken lightly!
Look at the case where financial models were out of whack for a year because a secretary changed one cell - and replaced the formula with a number.
You are completely right! Financial models would be much better if everyone had to make their own calculations, that's why every time I do kinematics problems I recalculate the value of gravity. Of course that takes some time, but it is better to calculate everything by hand than relying on technology.
That is a report that will eventually get to decision makers and if decisions have to be made fast they will want the information to be apparent not hidden in text only.
I'll have to disagree. If I have a table of numbers I just obtained from a benchmark and I want to see how they compare to the past then it is very easy to use a spreadsheet to automatically give me the percentages. Further still, if I want to see graphically if the numbers are better or worse I could use conditional formatting to give me shades of green or red, depending on how much better or worse it is, then, with one quick look, I will be able to say "you know what, xyz got much worse but everything else looks the same, maybe we should investigate that". If I only had plain text the information would still be there, but unless I were a computer it would be very hard to make any sense of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried pressing Alt + Up? I'm addicted to that shortcut.
Portal is a puzzle game, not an action game. Having a 10 ms response time instead of a 25 ms response time does not affect gameplay much (most of the time you are spent thinking how to get there from here, not jumping and aiming). Even on sequences where aiming and shooting are important, the aiming help will make up for a big part of the difference without it being very noticeable.
Once you have taken that into consideration I prefer putting the disk in my system and start playing, rather than turn the computer on, install the game, activate through the internet and then play the game in a smaller screen (because my monitor is smaller than my TV, which does not mean it has to be that way for everybody, but that is how it is in my setup).
is it really cheaper? How much do you think you spend on gas to drive to the bookstore?
I spend exactly $0. I order everything by Amazon, delivered to my doorstep, free for orders over $25.
Not to mention the point I made before, where it is actually cheaper to buy the printed book.
But aussersterne makes a very good point, I hadn't thought of that and it makes sense to pay a little more to avoid clutter, that is why laptops are so popular.
E-books don't make economical sense to me. For example: this book, as of this writing the paperback version is $8.99 and it has the four books for the price of three promotion so if I buy four books (about one month's worth) it will cost me $26.97. I could also go with the kindle version and buy four books at $7.99 each or $31.96 and I'm not even getting something physical out of that transaction. It simply does not make sense to me.
Seriously, is anyone using this? With the horrible memories I have of AOL I would not use anything they made and I would think most people feel similarly.
Since TV here is dominated by advertisement money, soccer isn't financially viable for the networks because they can't sell commercials during the game.
I am guessing you have never seen soccer in TV. Here in Mexico there are ads in the field, during every dead ball, popups over the action, commentators making advertisements, etc.
If NFL football is chess, soccer is go. The difference? It actually requires talent to be good at goh, whereas a supercomputer can beat anyone at chess. Skilled athletes excel at soccer, overweight drug addicts who should have failed out of high school win football games.
How can you be labeled insightful! It actually takes a lot of talent to play chess, invalidating chess only because computers are better at it (with human made algorithms) is like saying that mathematics are useless because computers can do very fast addition!
And just so you know, it will not take a whole lot longer before computers and human made algorithms regularly beat Go masters, just like it happened with chess.
My god, reading that Sean Malstrom guy is a lot like reading nutritional information: there might be something valuable there for the right kind of people, but it is incredibly boring.
The saddest part is that he knows his style is boring and he still uses it
I must admit I bowed out of the Sony Conference because it was too damn long. It just went on and on and on. If I want to see something that goes on and on and on forever, I will just read myself.
There was this game on Atari called Rescue on Fractalus. You fly a ship looking for lost pilots, when you find one, you land close to them and turn off the engines, then open the ship door and let them enter. But you could always turn on the engines while they were waiting for you to open the door and burn them alive. For some reason, that still makes me giggle and it has given me tons of fun over the long term.
I have no idea where you live, because here in the US, the Xbox 360 is $250 and a 40 inch decent HDTV is no more than $900, while the cheapest 30 inch monitor which supports 2560 x 1600 in newegg is the LG W3000H-Bn at $1,150.
I could buy the Xbox 360 with two games and a decent HDTV for the price you paid for your monitor. But hey! You are able to play Crysis (a two year old mediocre game as far as gaming is concerned) in ultra high resolution!
And unless you have a ~$400 USD video card and ~$1,000 USD monitor you won't be playing games at 2560x1600 resolution either
No, no, no!! He wants a console, not a crappy gaming PC
But I can totally see your point, look at the difference in graphics between the PC and Xbox version of Mass Effect 2. It really is like night and day, and in the PC version you also get DRM totally free. Ha! suck it console fanboys!
The Xbox (orig or extra 360 crispy) didn't provide a comparable experience to PC's *when it was released*, let alone today.
Completely agree. Consider the list of the top 10 games from the last year from Gamerankings (after removing duplicates):
Of those games, 8 are on PS3, 6 on Xbox 360 and 5 on PC. Of the games which were released for PC, every single one is available on Xbox 360 and the PC is the only gaming platform without an exclusive. So yeah, it seems the PC does not provide a comparable experience.
Well, size might not matter to you, but I am sure it matters to tons of people who prefer small, sexy gadgets. I already thought that the 360 was fairly big and making it bigger is certainly not great design, specially if the article is right and the only thing they are really adding is Wi-Fi (the HDD would be the same physical size).
What he is saying is that he wants a gaming machine which will last 5 years and cost around $300 USD. That sounds fairly reasonable.
Where are these stastics that say ignoring the speed limit and driving the road for what it was built for is "fairly dangerous"?
From your article:
There are a number of road segments that cross the mountain ranges. [...] While many segments are posted at 90 km/h, few vehicles can safely be maneuvered near that speed.
I'll spell it out for you: If vehicles cannot be maneuvered safely at that speed then it is "fairly dangerous."
And of course, there is research showing that about 40% of road deaths were caused by speeding, which would account for 16,644 deaths if we go by my original numbers of 41,611 deaths in car accidents.
Also, your analogy fails, what I said is that driving recklessly could lead to killing someone. If someone wants to serve things with salt they can do it, if they want to force me into eating them, then we will have a problem. Or do you allow people in the street to force you into eating anything they want?
I don't understand people that think speed limits are moral imperatives that fall on the same line as murder or arson.
I don't think GP said anything similar to that statement
You people act like I just raped somebody if I want to go 55 in a 50 mile an hour zone.
Well, unless by driving recklessly you cause an accident and actually kill someone.
With some googling I found out that in the year 2000 15,517 people were murdered while 41,611 died in car accidents. That means that if we could prevent all car accidents the benefit in human lives would be almost three times greater.
You might only be driving 55 on a 50 mph zone, but a lot of people are driving much faster and statistics show it is fairly dangerous.
This kind of things always make me shudder, they estimate the money they might have made had they lived in medieval times or something. It is similar to "losing an election": you never had the election, you never won, you cannot lose it. You cannot lose money you never had.
Children who returned hostility with hostility appeared to be the most mature
Nothing says mature like beating the crap out of someone
"Brain surgery is hard. Medicine students should dive directly into brain surgery without even knowing the difference between the heart and the stomach. Think of how not knowing brain surgery will affect their flu patients!"
Whooooosh! Missed the point completely. Let me put some formatting so you get the idea. GGGGGGP said:
Even multi-page letters and reports should be in a plain text file. All the bad formating does is make the document harder to read.
What I answered was:
If I only had plain text the information would still be there, but unless I were a computer it would be very hard to make any sense of it.
Then you decided to stick your nose and make an unintelligible comment bashing power point, which wasn't even part of the discussion, and calling people stupid.
The point here is formatting, when used appropriately, makes important information apparent (see what I did there?) Text only files hide important information in seas of irrelevant information.
Apparently in bizarro world where you come from people have all the time in the universe to get the full information of every single problem and analyze it fully without the use of machines (they are evil). On the real world I prefer having important information be as clear as possible and if possible have the computer give me just the data points relevant to my current problem so I can make informed decisions fast. This does not mean I don't have the same information you do, I do.
But we'll just have to disagree seeing how we live in different universes.
It's stupid thinking like that that led to bad decisions through a badly-done powerpoint presentation that resulted in the shuttle disaster.
Of course! It's stupid thinking like that! Instead of doing badly-done powerpoint presentations we should be making decisions off of raw text. For example, it would be much easier to determine if a shuttle's systems are on line by parsing a two hundred line document than by looking at a green light, I mean, who needs lights when you have text?
And while we are at it, it's stupid thinking that punctuation marks are useful, they only help to dilute the data in your sentence. If people really want to make sense of what you say, it better cost them. We don't want all those stupid people understanding what you say, right? (I'm happy the world has geniuses like you, I don't know where we would be if everyone was a stupid sheep like me)
If it's an important decision, it shouldn't be made fast, and it should be made by someone who can actually understand the information without it being dumbed down and pre-digested.
Obviously! Where I work we have thousands of incredibly smart people just waiting to memorize raw data, every single point in the two million point benchmarks analysis, they want them all. I am glad we have the kind of man power to have all this people looking at numbers in a text file rather than, you know, revolutionizing the world or something. Of course... by the time they actually made sense of the two million points of data it is a bit late to make any decisions regarding performance because we have already shipped, but decisions like "we should investigate why this is slow" shouldn't be taken lightly!
Look at the case where financial models were out of whack for a year because a secretary changed one cell - and replaced the formula with a number.
You are completely right! Financial models would be much better if everyone had to make their own calculations, that's why every time I do kinematics problems I recalculate the value of gravity. Of course that takes some time, but it is better to calculate everything by hand than relying on technology.
That is a report that will eventually get to decision makers and if decisions have to be made fast they will want the information to be apparent not hidden in text only.
I'll have to disagree. If I have a table of numbers I just obtained from a benchmark and I want to see how they compare to the past then it is very easy to use a spreadsheet to automatically give me the percentages. Further still, if I want to see graphically if the numbers are better or worse I could use conditional formatting to give me shades of green or red, depending on how much better or worse it is, then, with one quick look, I will be able to say "you know what, xyz got much worse but everything else looks the same, maybe we should investigate that". If I only had plain text the information would still be there, but unless I were a computer it would be very hard to make any sense of it.