fuchikoma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8psUkCBYjM I loved this show... It was like Waiting for Godot: the anime... with monsters and fighting and girls. Hope the second season is as good, though I've heard many say it's not... Also, it's raining for days here.

I actually went to a Lego (name, not trademark) store a while ago and I agree with both sides to some extent... There is still a lot of "pure" Lego, but there's also an insane amount of licensed sets. IMO, those go against the very versatility that makes Lego a creative toy. It turns them into model kits, essentially.

I've seen some haptic touchscreen stuff before, but it was based on tugging or vibrating a hard screen surface sideways when your finger goes over certain elements. Nothing as "real" as 3D buttons - though some who have tested it say the illusion is really good.

I definitely saw the buttons after they flexed down from a shallow angle too. I just didn't say anything because they were flexing so quickly I wasn't certain if it was creases in the membrane, or video compression (delta frame) artifacts.

That is really cool. I'll be able to play a game and not jab the spot beside a button I meant to hit because I had to keep my eye on the action... I wonder how it will look after popping a button in the same spot every day for 3 years? Also, it will definitely not be as tough as treated glass. Still, lots of people still swear by button pads because they hate typing on touchscreens.

I've liked Nine Inch Nails for most of their (Trent Reznor's) career. I was never a Johnny Cash fan - I guess I'm neutral - there are some songs I think are alright... but the poignance he brings to this one makes it better than any version Trent has done. It's just more real.

Summer is time for k-waves LAB

Another SYNC.ART'S vocal arrangement. This time, the EX stage boss theme from Touhou 6: "U.N. Owen was Her?"

They look pretty nice. It's scaled up, but the screen has a very fine dot pitch so it's still pretty sharp - and the black and top brightness levels of the OLED screen makes the colours um... *grasps blindly for a verb* sing. (Though to be honest, I just have that is not representative of most's graphics.)

NHK and TV manufacturers are working on a system to enhance TV broadcasts with extra information that streams along with the show. Not holding my breath for this since various "sideband" data stream technologies have been pushed since around 1990 with little success - but the demos here do look kind of cool. I don't really do live TV anymore, but if I did, it'd be cool to see toggleable nametags on athletes, map positions and the like. (BTW, Japan has done some crazy things in the past with live interactive programming already...)

I'd hate to be accused of being predictable...

I think I found a new one for this thread... In North America, the light petrochemical oil we use in camping stoves and lamps is almost always referred to by the old trademark "Kerosene" while in Britain it's paraffin? This just unraveled an age-old mystery for me because as a kid I remember reading references to "paraffin stoves" in books, but to me, paraffin has always meant the white, tasteless wax used in cheap candles.

Huzzah! I hope it doesn't cause cancer, birth defects, hormonal disruption, implosion, gravitational irregularity, singing off key, or AOL diskettes.

Hey Lucas, I remember you from Kotaku. Welcome to the site!

...but you just described what all of the major studios do. Touché! A little too much realism, perhaps... Though FWIW, in this world, people hate Puzzle Pirates Google had week long (actually I think 10 day long) sale a fair few months back selling a ton of apps for like 10p each. I was miffed that due to the limitations of the market I couldn't buy minecraft back then due to my current phone sucking. Ohh, right. I forgot Kairosoft goes cross-platform too. I was talking about the iPhone price. Does your version have a banner ad, out of curiosity? I've heard it's more common on Android to have in-game ads, at least on cheap or free games (though banners are getting very common on free iOS games now since OS 4.)

I got GDS and played through a game and a half of it. It was kinda fun, but didn't work out well for me - I'd copy combinations that sold really well in the real world but the game didn't like them so they'd flop. I was always just barely scraping by and could rarely go to the convention, so eventually I just had to stick with really trite stereotypical game types... which worked the second time around, but... then I'm really not doing much playing IMO. I just set up my employees and tell them to make the same kind of games everyone makes. I got a couple demos, I think for Hot Springs Story and Mega Mall Story, but before getting really into either, I kinda went "naah..." and deleted them. I still have GDS installed though because it's easy to play while distracted. Dean, 10p? In the Canadian store, it's still $3.99! I'd have a way better opinion of them if they were like $0.25!

I'm pretty bad at differentiating North American accents, but I find British actors tend to do a really great job of Americanizing. I was pretty surprised when I saw Marina Sirtis live, and a lot of the others mentioned here could have fooled me - though my TV experience is also limited. I've only heard Hugh Laurie speak "American" in an interview once. John Noble, if I had to think about it, I'd say he sounds a bit different. I'm not sure how often the opposite applies, but I know I've heard a lot of attempts at a "British accent" that even I can see through.

Why do British people when speaking leave the r off the end of words like "premier" but then add r's to the end of words like "idea"? That's an awesome question, and knowing a little bit about the vocabulary, I looked it up.

ReFS and WinFS seem to be totally different, but I welcome what they're saying about ReFS. It sounds like ReFS is going to be pretty flexible and as they say, "resilient." I'm the type who, given the choice between faster and more reliable would pick reliable 9 times out of 10, so... that's great, if it works. File systems are about as serious as it gets on a computer though, so even though they're sure to test it like crazy, I think this is another thing worth sitting back and letting it mature for a while - assuming it'll even ship with it. WinFS on the other hand... was a relational database based file system. I linked to an article on it and haven't read up on it in ages, but hypothetically such a thing could even throw out the old "file" and "folder" paradigm and just have data in different tables/records, pulling up any relevant files by tags and attributes you search for. It was not fast though, and just about every part of the project has been killed or used in something else instead.

Viewing the size of the recycle bin can show you how much space you'd free up if you emptied it. I used to think it was a pointless feature, but that was back when I used MS-DOS and just went to Windows 3.11 when I needed it for a Windows application - now it's a way of life, even in most Linux GUI desktops. It can be nice to audit deleted files once before annihilating them. The details pane can be resized - bigger at least. Ideally it would just be the status bar though. Most of the data it shows me is already in the column view when I view by details (including ID3 tags and EXIF data) but for some reason they changed Win7 so you can no longer select a group of files and view the size in the status bar - so I need to eat up an additional inch at the bottom of every folder just so the details pane can show that... or hit alt+enter to view the properties window, then close it, every time I want to see how big a group of files is. There's a third party explorer replacement to fix the latter issue, but that's not really ideal. It's easy to find hundreds (thousands?) of people searching for fixes to both problems and lamenting these nonsensical changes. But anyway, these are Windows 7 problems - I just brought them up because they're a couple of obvious ways MS decided to change things just to change them, breaking things more than fixing them. It seems it's always worthwhile to sit back and let a generation or at least a major service pack or two roll out before risking involvement with their "innovations."

Well... I meant more in commercially released versions. There's always a bit of shifting around in dev previews (I remember when "Longhorn" was supposedly going to contain WinFS... nope - still on NTFS here a generation later!) I get the feeling Windows 8 will be of the same stripe as Windows Vista, Windows ME, or even the Win95 shell, Microsoft Bob. It may work for many - a service pack may even make it mostly workable - but I bet if it releases as-is, the overall reaction will be rejection because good or bad, it's a bit too radical and people hate relearning the basics, so its successor will be more conservative to regain consumer confidence again, and will probably keep some of the best ideas from Win8, and keep others included but off by default. (Personally, I'm still frustrated by Windows 7's inability to show recycle bin size or file sizes in the status bar - the details pane is massive and mostly useless... It's also bizarre how one is toggled from the view menu and the other is toggled from the Organize button. It's a mess...)

If you can find a Japanese copy, they're apparently much more abundant - the US ones are apparently expensive now. I dug out my copy of IQ too though - planning to get back into it very soon and finally push past the last level if I can! I should see if I can find a good PSP copy... I played the "related" game, PQ and it started fun, but man it was hard!