Letter: Your View - Screen Break ..HDLN:
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By Alan Laugh  I AGREE with the "Film credits" letter writer.
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By J.D. Biersdorfer  [Q.] Instead of using a movie screen with my high-definition video projector, I want to put an even bigger image right on the wall.
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Phone fury (and carrier cringes) Letters After my piece lamenting how Nokia's high end phones had lost their ease of use and reliability, we got a letter from reader Brendon McLean. "It's not just Nokia!", wrote Brendon - "but an industry-wide problem". And he encapsulated his complaints very succinctly. So we invited him to expand a little, which he did here yesterday.â¦
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Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
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If you've been around the net for a while you've been subscribed to a few thousand mailing lists.  I'm on a few big mailing lists now that host more than a few thousand users.  Sooner or later some guy on the list will go on vacation and instead of just letting email sit in their inbox he's nice enough to respond to all his email - with a form letter!  Usually in the shape of:  "I'm on vacation.  I'll be back in January."  Of course they're stupid enough to apply this to *every* folder in their inbox and so everytime someone posts or replies to the list this message is sent out to one of every three thousand posters.  We don't care if you're on vacation.  We don't care when you get back and  ...
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Obeying the courts, Windows will no longer have a Media Player in Europe. Also:  Monsanto buys another seed maker & hellip;.  Robot soldiers ready for Iraq & hellip;. and more.
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Tycho:  You might want to see this, or you might not:  I know that Gabriel has sworn off all exposure to the game, which may also be your policy.  Even so, this is the first time they've shown the distaff side of the character creator, so maybe you'll rescind your earlier mandate.  A video with a similar theme popped up over at 1up as well, and it does things a little differently:  I don't like its look at the character creator as well, but the cut they have of the intro is far superior.  If you watched the other one, you're in for a penny, in for a pound:  you should check it out.    There's a lot of other content out today as well  at GameTrailers - but the whole thing is a minefield of spoilers so I'll understand if you hold back.  The intro itself (from the 1up cut) is perfectly executed.  Understand that I am almost the optimal audience for this sort of game, but even so.  I see a lot of game content, and you need to dig pretty deep to generate actual wonder.      I was excited to learn that they got Jack Wall in to do the soundtrack - he's worked with BioWare before, but he also did the soundtrack for Myst IV: Revelations - one of my all-time favorites.    (CW)TB
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Tycho: But if you haven't seen it yet, you should - Street View in Google Maps. Holy F-ing S.(CW)TB
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Here's a screen shot of the HTML source.  Looks like it's trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control. Happy to be using a Mac.  PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there's something weird going on.
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In love with column view? Find out how to make it a permanent thing at the Apple Pro/ site in the latest Mac OS X killer tip. [Sep 29]
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Christopher Breen  takes us on a tour of Apple TV that begins with downloading the software update and ends with the big questionââHowâs it look?â To which Breen responds, âDarned good.â After renting Live Free or Die Hard. Breen reports that â the picture is great on my 42-inch Panasonic plasma display. With a digital audio cable connected to my AV receiver the movie caused the receiverâs 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio light to glow and the resulting sound was bigger than anything Iâve heard come out of the box previously.â
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Perl script that automatically searches for new episodes of your favorite TV shows and downloads the corresponding NZB files from various free sources on the internet.   This release is mostly just to update the .shows file and the README.  I was sleepy, and I stupidly said that you do not have to have the  element in your shows file.  Turns out I'm just an idiot, and you do.  I have updated the .shows file to include the proper template for most shows, which is %name%.S%season%E%episode%  Sorry about that!  I also started a code optimization run which will hopefully over time make things run faster and more efficiently.  I just picked off the low hanging fruit on this release, because I wanted to get the updated README out before too many people had problems.
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International Hologram Manufacturers Association responds to our story on the efficacy of holograms as security measures and readers respond to our little Digg social experiment. Plus: Links to our most popular blog posts.
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DecemberÃ¢ÂÂs Patch Tuesday finds Vista in the bad guysÃ¢ÂÂ sights. Plus: Get Office 2007 SP1, get your fix for Flash, and avoid an HP laptop disaster.
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Google buys a mapquest of its own. Also: Sharp takes us to the future of television in 3-D & hellip;.  PayPal finds a way to make amends for mistakes & hellip;. and more.
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Tycho:  I watched this video myself on Friday, and then watched it again, and then watched it a third time when Khoo came in - providing commentary throughout, which I'm almost certain was unwelcome.  I urge you not to watch the embedded, nasty  version over at GameVideos, but to take advantage of their "Download" or "Watch Larger Version" options.  This way, you can obsess as I have - pausing on each screen of the character generator or battle interface, drinking deep of their  forbidden texts.  (CW)TB
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Did you know that you can access your menus without touching your mouse?