fuchikoma

I like to load my car up with these guys in the summer... aside from being great on their own, it reminds me of the days when Ridge Racer was good.

That's funny... Well, I've already gone on record how I feel about Steam anyway - the full rant is around here somewhere. I stick to PC games that don't require online authentication to run. I'll let consoles get away with it, but that's because there's no real alternative and the games will only be around for about 10 years tops anyway.

Probably does it so it doesn't mess up realtime online games.

Yeah, I had no problem with it, though I'm not a minority, so... I can't necessarily argue their side at length either. They were all boring by default, so if you wanted the stereotypes you had to pick them. I just picked a character I thought was cool and went on with enjoying the game.

[edit: Pretty much said this already, but I can't delete...] Racist in that the Americans were godly?

I don't know much of anything about Irish politics, but I've been reading that Sinn Féin seems to be fairly popular in Northern Ireland and ROI... Do you suppose there's any chance of a unification under them? I've also read that there are still a number of holdouts, so I don't know how likely that would be anytime soon...

Haha... now you've made me do it - here's my party in ClaDun x2 (well, the first 4): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gCWCP9ME30

A high performance oxygen delivery solution has been made, that could be injected into people unable to breathe, allowing them to survive for additional minutes. No video clip, but... c'mon! This is awesome!

I thought they'd already gone beyond the pale when they required third party site credentials to login to Gawker. Those guys are true innovators in sucking... Ah well! The more the merrier here!

Welcome to not-Kotaku!

Pretty much... though I think that only looks at the really big budget games, or those from big studios. That's going to affect a huge number of people, but I wouldn't say quite everyone will cave. On the PC I've pretty much gotten used to life without them because with all the random DRM out there, it's just safer not to get involved with them at all. So I play a lot of indie/doujin games because they can't afford the licensing cost and consumer rejection of DRM. I still have some big name titles on consoles though since they're largely safe so far. When I'm offered special logins for EA or something I decline them. For titles that significantly suffer when servers are shut down like Demons Souls... I just steer clear altogether. Also, I suspect this lockdown will come with an increasing tendency to sell games as a service - like that single player, offline game? Get it now for only $6.95 per month!

That's impressive, but I'm looking at it more from the standpoint of Sandia's credibility. They have some incredible minds working for them, so do you think they're distorting the usefulness of this device? That it will dissipate heat very poorly? That they've overlooked this and maybe not tested it yet? You have me dead to rights on the theoretical capabilities of it, but I'd find it really strange that they'd put out this video if it turned out it doesn't work very well compared to existing active cooling systems.

That's the new sea lab? Awesome! I wonder what the acceleration will be like in the top floors when massive waves are tossing it about... At first I thought "hey, that looks like a floating Burj al Arab..." derp. Of course it does - it was designed to look like a sail after all...

I disagree. It matters very much what the thickness of any thermal insulator is - even thermal paste. It stands to reason that it's still less optimal to have a gap than to have a continuous conductive medium, but it is possible to get it down to a point where the detriments no longer outweigh the benefits, depending on the dissipation of the cooling fin surface. They were saying that one of the main problems they were working against was the insulating effect of stagnant air on fin surfaces - perhaps the dynamic nature of the air bearing effectively prevents the insulating effect that static air between surfaces could lead to - slowly heating up, but not going anywhere or effectively exchanging its heat? So whatever conducts to the air is whisked off, and radiative heat transfer is easily facilitated? I can't say for sure, I'm no engineer.

That... actually sounds extremely close to how I see it too. Masaru Ibuka, one of Sony's founders, wrote "The first and primary motive for setting up this company was to create a stable work environment where engineers who had a deep and profound appreciation for technology could realize their societal mission and work to their heart's content." Ken Kutaragi did groundbreaking research and electronics engineering before he was dropped into management and subsequently bombed and ejected. I really wonder what PS4 will be like now that he's gone. Sony has long let engineering get ahead of product design - look at the Aibo and Qrio. They didn't even sell Qrio! And the Rolly... did the world need a dancing MP3 player? Not really, but it's kinda neat to look at... and kinda crazy to think someone would pay hundreds of dollars for one! XBox - I can't say as I don't know it that well. It seemed more about ways of making a concept (DirectX game system) happen rather than "let's apply this new stuff we came up with and stick it in a console!" It would have taken a seriously calculated marketing strategy to crack the game console market, and the original was basically kept afloat by pumping a stream of money into it constantly so it didn't look like a failure. It's definitely a brand vehicle now - in fact it seems they're taking all the stuff that failed when it was "Zune" and calling it "XBox" now. They also managed to convince people multiplayer gaming was something you should pay for - and it worked perfectly. High-level marketing there. Wii - Is Miyamoto someone's mad uncle? That seems likely.

I had the same first impression. "I'm SURE we have fans like that already..." I'm guessing that the air gap is extremely small between heatsink and fan, and maybe the fan surface is even coloured to increase its absorption? I'm sure for things like laptops they could cut the fins down (then maybe run advanced physics simulations and alter the fin spacing and angle...) though I wonder how well this 2000 RPM fan holds up to being moved about while it's running, or how much power it uses to begin with. As for the noise, I really agree... the thing sounds like a Maxtor hard drive, and while motorless it's very quiet, I'm not sure how they plan to run it without a motor. They could put some kind of sound-absorbing cap in the middle, but I'm certain that would screw up their carefully crafted airflow. They could put the motor in a box underneath the fan and turn it with a driveshaft... but they couldn't center the fan on a chip and might even need a hole in the circuit board (which is, well... not so hard, looking at the concessions for big heavy copper coolers.) My money is on adding magnets to the rotating part and base and turning it into a motor itself.

Sandia labs have made a fancy fan... Ok, so that's selling it way short, but not quite untrue either... I wonder what the MTBF is on it, and how its life is affected by starting and stopping it.

I know... I just decided to respond to a limited form of that because 3 people have already basically said "well, I have enough games saved up to play in the meantime." That's basically my position too, but when Thursday said "you totally need the games industry" I thought "do I really? I'd get games anyway. The best ones don't even come from the games industry - they come from people making what they want to play. The games industry just wants to make something safe that'll definitely sell."

That is true... Maybe there's a reluctance because it's not a "Playstation" game (as in the home consoles,) but "mobile" games are for phones, so it just gets lumped in to the Vita system thread?

Also, in parts of Asia there's a small motorbike type called an "underbone." Over here we'd probably call those "mopeds" - though at least in Canada there are legal limits to that term that vary by province - maximum displacement, maximum acceleration and so on. If it's too powerful it doesn't count (but someone with a learner's permit can ride one without a supervisor in many places, making them a possible first vehicle for kids 14 to 16 years old)

Yeah, now that I own both, I specify and say "motorbike", but still, when I say "bike" people often ask "you mean motorcycle or pedal-bike?" so sometimes I have to say "mountain bike" instead (though my other bicycle is a road-mountain hybrid, so if I said "hybrid bike" I'm sure it'd cause even more confusion...) I was actually thinking of posting this here before but it didn't seem too relevant: In North America, cars, motorcycles, and most cheaper (department store, hardware store) bikes have Schrader valves on the tires (also, "tyres" is never used even in Canada.) Road bicycles with higher pressure tires, as well as more expensive mountain bikes tend to use Presta valves. I have never in my life seen a Dunlop valve in person - how widely are they used?

For all content producers in the world to stop... even in one medium, just couldn't happen - I think it'd be a rejection of our humanity. We can't not make art. If the "games industry" shut down on the other hand, hypothetically... I think they'd never recover from it when they tried to come back. There are tons of indie game makers, and many more would go indie in the meantime. Even if there was a global law against selling games, people would give them away and we'd still have stuff to play. I think in this era if any content industry dug its heels in and tried to starve the market, they and their customers would quickly realize their irrelevance. They're not needed for promotion, nor distribution, and platforms that require licensing would be the only ones to suffer. Mainly their role is huge-scale project management and coordination. Sure, we wouldn't have many multimillion dollar blockbusters - personally I'd hardly notice but I know many would be bothered. Still, there will be games as long as something is programmable.

Oh! Double hate score if it's from Reddit! I read the site myself, but when I go to Youtube I don't need to see the first 2 pages of comments saying stuff like "thumbs up if Reddit brought you here." A lot of Redditors seem to think they're in this special little group that no one knows about. I think of it as "a secret club of millions."

I can't find a place to change the difficulty, so that kind of wrecked it for me. I used to play DoA2 on very hard and try to see how fast I could beat the arcade mode. I found in Dimensions, I didn't even have to worry about reversing or being reversed - I'd just mash attacks and my opponents would fall. I haven't beaten everything yet - I only made it about 75 opponents into the 100-opponent survival, but it's so grueling I've only tried it twice. It definitely felt wrong mowing through previous games' bosses one after the other like they were noobs. (I mean, beating 10 opponents in DoA2 survival is good!) What really gets me though is that the StreetPass duel opponents can be really hard sometimes - brutally so - so the AI is actually there, they just refuse to make use of it in the course of the normal game...

I got Dimensions, but found there was no way to make it challenging, so I'm extremely skeptical for 5 - hopeful though. I've always liked the fluidity and no-nonsense (well, in 2 anyway) fight mechanics. 4 was alright - the boss was annoyingly agile, but still far easier than most fighting games. 3, I can't say... never had an XBox 1, never will... I'm also not thrilled with what they did to their faces, or all the crossovers I'm reading about, but... if it turns out to be a good game, that's that. I'd love to have a good, modern, challenging DoA game but Dimensions... the mechanics felt perfect, and the difficulty was so very wrong.