I hate that. Some are better than others - the original Far Cry wasn't too bad, you could hide out for a while and watch the soldiers beat the bushes fruitlessly, but they were always jumpy after that, especially the sniper in a guard tower two miles away who could see you no matter where you were in the bushes.
I have also found STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl with the Oblivion Lost mod running has pretty believable AI patterns, the enemies usually can't see you if you can't see them and you can evade them, sneak around them and set traps for them. Enemy factions fight each other, mutants fight soldiers and you can sit back and watch and loot corpses afterwards. But once again, every once in a while you get a supernatural sharpshooter who can hit you with that pistol from two blocks away. The mod also introduces some really strange spawning issues - getting killed by a horde of mutants the second you load a new area really sucks.
On the flip side, games programmed for stealth can result in a hilarious breakdown in NPC programming patterns when you don't sneak. I really enjoyed Thief: Deadly Shadows but the game is just awful if you're not playing as a hardcore thief. Once your cover is blown, it's blown. And if you defend yourself, God help you. They can see you in the dark, people freak out in the streets when they see any dead bodies and sometimes they start fighting each other or humping the wall. And sometimes the enemies had Daredevil hearing, other times you could jump on their heads and they wouldn't even notice you.
And for the record, dammit, I guess I need to re-think my novel... AGAIN. Good-bye, black-humour social satire, hello throbbing shafts of love and steamy windows of desire.
It's cool, but I highly doubt it will convince many people to really learn the guitar. Guitar Hero is a game. You can pretend to be Slash or Jimmy Page with minimal effort. That's why people play it.
I smell Christmas cash-in on parents who worry little Johnny and Susie are wasting too much time on a video game. "Now they can REALLY learn music... the FUN® way!"
People would be better off putting that money into a month's worth of guitar lessons at the music shop down the street. That's about the amount of time it would take for someone to decide they're serious about learning to play, and also about the amount of time it would take to get sick of playing this "Headliner."
I had the same reaction. Ass... mud... dinosaur... basketball... *headasplode*
Seriously, how did this get approved? It has nothing to do with the article.
The actual newsworthiness of the article is that the fossil prints are the first found of a meat-eating dinosaur's front limbs. No fucking basketballs anywhere in the article.
The find has shaken up paleontologists' understanding of how dinosaurs evolved into modern birds.
Please don't approve any more submissions from "Gre7g" until he gets his substance abuse problem under control.
I just built a website for my church using a Wordpress install. I had it done in a day (found a nice, free pre-made template and customized it with my own graphics, had some PHP plugins from the previous incarnation from the site that just needed some tweaking.) Best of all, I was able to, in half an hour, train someone at the church office to use the Dashboard so I don't have to upload everything myself (although they need some lessons in ascending versus descending order). It's great and for a code neophyte like me it didn't give me nightmares.
I would say Wordpress is great for small businesses (without online storefronts, although I don't think this is impossible with Wordpress) non-profits and charities, but Joomla has more appeal and features and modules for medium-large businesses and organizations, or people with more time and skill to invest in setting it up.
I looked at Joomla but having a vague familiarity with Wordpress because of my blog, I chose the one I knew.
It's an interesting theory, and could tie in to Middle Eastern flood stories. There has been some scientific research done suggesting that the Black Sea at one time was dry, until the swelling Mediterranean burst through the Bosphorus and wiped out the settlements in the valley and creating the coastlines that would one day become the playgrounds of Russian communists on holidays.
Meanwhile, an old dude in a boat was bobbing around aimlessly, and after he landed one of the first things he did was get really, really drunk.
If you're really concerned, make your own website and put its link in your resume/cover letter. Don't give it any further thought. By strongly trying to disassociate yourself from search engine results, you may be sending the wrong message.
A bunch of this crap already fell through the skies in Canada and hit the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. And NORAD phoned ahead to warn Calgary it was coming. So the collision might be unprecedented but the falling space junk is not...
I'm not trying to make a judgment here but the American media frenzy is an interesting contrast to the Canadian "whatever, eh" reaction.
And the scariest thing here is how bad their math was, predicting it would hit somewhere in Alberta and then having it land off the coast of AFRICA. Someone move a decimal place?
In Canada we don't send people to prison -- we send them home. Or to the country club minimum security prison. The only way to get thrown in the maximum security facility is to intentionally kill someone and eat their eyeballs. Or bring a camcorder into a theatre in Quebec.
Yes... meanwhile the local crack dealer, convicted for the ninth time for dealing, got another suspended sentence while two people died of an overdose last night. Isn't the justice system great!
Kind of like those annual antivirus program licences that many people who thought about it for half a second stopped paying for, and installed a freeware program instead.
Maybe it would work for Windows, if they found the right price point for a licence fee, but it might also backfire and encourage people to look at Mac or Linux options.
I couldn't tell you if there is an exception for Canada.
Don't bet on it. The iTunes store for Canada sucks (for video, anyway). Choices are severely limited from major American networks. It's almost enough to make a guy get off the computer and go outside.
Hooray for copyright laws, and protectionist governments that bow to every whim of the entertainment industry! Soon to be celebrated for helping make Canadians the most fit of all G8 nation citizens!
I read a lot of PDF files on my Mac and work and it has been my experience that the "native" PDF plugin (which really isn't, in older versions of the OS it was called the "SchubertIT" plugin) is inferior to Acrobat's reader (I believe I am using version 7-8, not at work so can't check.) Also using X 10.4 so maybe it's better in 10.5.
On my iMac (one of the last PowerPC models shipped) the Adobe version is faster, renders text and documents more accurately and more quickly, and is more accurate when selecting text.
I'm not a fanboi or anything, and would be interested in a Mac PDF reader that's better than either of the above options.
You do? Some actual numbers comparing online versus magazine publishing revenue would be nice to see, from your perspective as an author, for other budding authors out there who may be dismayed by the news reported in TFA.
It's not just nationalism. It's hubris. That has been a part of Russia's collective psyche for at least the past 100 years. They're not going to let anyone tell them what to do, and they balk at receiving help from anyone - it's a sign of weakness. They have a strong "us and them" mentality which has not faded away one bit since the end of Communism.
I can't really fault Russians or Putin for that, other countries are loud and proud of themselves and can also be a bit protectionist from time to time. But in Putin's case, it could be incredibly self-destructive, although I would bet that his people will support him even if it means economic disaster.
I'll probably get modded troll for that second paragraph, but just remember, in post-Soviet Russia, troll mods YOU.
Perhaps those of you in this thread who hate journalists so much should make efforts to give scientists some media training so that when they are interviewed, they speak in clear language, not jargon.
Yes, it's the journalist's job to be clear and accurate, but it's pretty damn difficult when the interview subject spews out line after line of technobabble only meaningful to another scientist.
Also, don't blame journalists for trying (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) to spice things up and present scientific stories to a broader audience. Only slashdot readers are going to get excited when they see "We report teleportation of quantum information between atomic quantum memories separated by about 1 meter" and the thrilling "Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits" headline (the word "teleportation" is used in the abstract, so don't blame the journalist.)
At the very least, people interested in the topic can go look up the referenced abstract and read it for themselves. Granted, it requires some critical thinking skills and some initiative to do that, which might be expecting a lot from people. But without the hated journalist's efforts they wouldn't even know about the story.
It can be argued that OLPC started the netbook category, when ASUS and Intel saw the outpouring of support.
This is the only article I could find cited by Wikipedia supporting the widely-repeated claim that OLPC inspired the "netbook" market, and this is just speculation by one UK blogger. Yet it's cited as a source for a factual statement in Wikipedia article about the XO-1 filled with "citation needed" tags.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's kind of a broad and evangelistic claim and requires a little more research.
Thankfully, Gizmodo did an excellent series on the trials and triumphs of OLPC, including the "who invented the netbook" question. There's no clear answer, but it definitely appears that the OLPC woke up computer manufacturers to the fact that there was a large, untapped market out there for cheap "netbooks."
Slashdot Mirror
it's like once your cover is broken it's broken
I hate that. Some are better than others - the original Far Cry wasn't too bad, you could hide out for a while and watch the soldiers beat the bushes fruitlessly, but they were always jumpy after that, especially the sniper in a guard tower two miles away who could see you no matter where you were in the bushes.
I have also found STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl with the Oblivion Lost mod running has pretty believable AI patterns, the enemies usually can't see you if you can't see them and you can evade them, sneak around them and set traps for them. Enemy factions fight each other, mutants fight soldiers and you can sit back and watch and loot corpses afterwards. But once again, every once in a while you get a supernatural sharpshooter who can hit you with that pistol from two blocks away. The mod also introduces some really strange spawning issues - getting killed by a horde of mutants the second you load a new area really sucks.
On the flip side, games programmed for stealth can result in a hilarious breakdown in NPC programming patterns when you don't sneak. I really enjoyed Thief: Deadly Shadows but the game is just awful if you're not playing as a hardcore thief. Once your cover is blown, it's blown. And if you defend yourself, God help you. They can see you in the dark, people freak out in the streets when they see any dead bodies and sometimes they start fighting each other or humping the wall. And sometimes the enemies had Daredevil hearing, other times you could jump on their heads and they wouldn't even notice you.
Dammit, I can never tell when ACs are being sarcastic or not.
throbbing shaft of sarcasm, plunged into the moaning mounds of slashdot comments.
Hey... that's pretty good. Can I use it in my e-chicklit-bodiceripper?
This is the first time in history that salacious content has driven book sales.
No, it isn't. And again, no.
And for the record, dammit, I guess I need to re-think my novel... AGAIN. Good-bye, black-humour social satire, hello throbbing shafts of love and steamy windows of desire.
It's cool, but I highly doubt it will convince many people to really learn the guitar. Guitar Hero is a game. You can pretend to be Slash or Jimmy Page with minimal effort. That's why people play it.
I smell Christmas cash-in on parents who worry little Johnny and Susie are wasting too much time on a video game. "Now they can REALLY learn music... the FUN® way!"
People would be better off putting that money into a month's worth of guitar lessons at the music shop down the street. That's about the amount of time it would take for someone to decide they're serious about learning to play, and also about the amount of time it would take to get sick of playing this "Headliner."
I had the same reaction. Ass... mud... dinosaur... basketball... *headasplode*
Seriously, how did this get approved? It has nothing to do with the article.
The actual newsworthiness of the article is that the fossil prints are the first found of a meat-eating dinosaur's front limbs. No fucking basketballs anywhere in the article.
The find has shaken up paleontologists' understanding of how dinosaurs evolved into modern birds.
Please don't approve any more submissions from "Gre7g" until he gets his substance abuse problem under control.
If we did we could DDOS the living Xenu out of them.
That's actually an O-Ring
And in an off-topic comment... WTF Slashdot? Ads for "Learn Biblical Hebrew online?" It's not April 1 yet.
I agree, the context matters.
I just built a website for my church using a Wordpress install. I had it done in a day (found a nice, free pre-made template and customized it with my own graphics, had some PHP plugins from the previous incarnation from the site that just needed some tweaking.) Best of all, I was able to, in half an hour, train someone at the church office to use the Dashboard so I don't have to upload everything myself (although they need some lessons in ascending versus descending order). It's great and for a code neophyte like me it didn't give me nightmares.
I would say Wordpress is great for small businesses (without online storefronts, although I don't think this is impossible with Wordpress) non-profits and charities, but Joomla has more appeal and features and modules for medium-large businesses and organizations, or people with more time and skill to invest in setting it up.
I looked at Joomla but having a vague familiarity with Wordpress because of my blog, I chose the one I knew.
I recall a remote-controlled cockroach in this movie...
Kind of gives new meaning to the "this room is bugged" cliche.
It's an interesting theory, and could tie in to Middle Eastern flood stories. There has been some scientific research done suggesting that the Black Sea at one time was dry, until the swelling Mediterranean burst through the Bosphorus and wiped out the settlements in the valley and creating the coastlines that would one day become the playgrounds of Russian communists on holidays.
Meanwhile, an old dude in a boat was bobbing around aimlessly, and after he landed one of the first things he did was get really, really drunk.
Exactly.
If you're really concerned, make your own website and put its link in your resume/cover letter. Don't give it any further thought. By strongly trying to disassociate yourself from search engine results, you may be sending the wrong message.
With a name like "smallfurrycreature" you should know that Canada's national emblem is the beaver. Problem solved.
A bunch of this crap already fell through the skies in Canada and hit the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. And NORAD phoned ahead to warn Calgary it was coming. So the collision might be unprecedented but the falling space junk is not...
I'm not trying to make a judgment here but the American media frenzy is an interesting contrast to the Canadian "whatever, eh" reaction.
And the scariest thing here is how bad their math was, predicting it would hit somewhere in Alberta and then having it land off the coast of AFRICA. Someone move a decimal place?
+1 Totally Irrelevant Analogy
Anonymous libel/slander does not equal free speech.
And it's kind of funny you posted AC.
In Canada we don't send people to prison -- we send them home. Or to the country club minimum security prison. The only way to get thrown in the maximum security facility is to intentionally kill someone and eat their eyeballs. Or bring a camcorder into a theatre in Quebec.
Yes... meanwhile the local crack dealer, convicted for the ninth time for dealing, got another suspended sentence while two people died of an overdose last night. Isn't the justice system great!
Kind of like those annual antivirus program licences that many people who thought about it for half a second stopped paying for, and installed a freeware program instead.
Maybe it would work for Windows, if they found the right price point for a licence fee, but it might also backfire and encourage people to look at Mac or Linux options.
That would require getting up.
If I really cared there are ways around limitations on downloading by country, specifically IP identification.
I couldn't tell you if there is an exception for Canada.
Don't bet on it. The iTunes store for Canada sucks (for video, anyway). Choices are severely limited from major American networks. It's almost enough to make a guy get off the computer and go outside.
Hooray for copyright laws, and protectionist governments that bow to every whim of the entertainment industry! Soon to be celebrated for helping make Canadians the most fit of all G8 nation citizens!
I read a lot of PDF files on my Mac and work and it has been my experience that the "native" PDF plugin (which really isn't, in older versions of the OS it was called the "SchubertIT" plugin) is inferior to Acrobat's reader (I believe I am using version 7-8, not at work so can't check.) Also using X 10.4 so maybe it's better in 10.5.
On my iMac (one of the last PowerPC models shipped) the Adobe version is faster, renders text and documents more accurately and more quickly, and is more accurate when selecting text.
I'm not a fanboi or anything, and would be interested in a Mac PDF reader that's better than either of the above options.
You do? Some actual numbers comparing online versus magazine publishing revenue would be nice to see, from your perspective as an author, for other budding authors out there who may be dismayed by the news reported in TFA.
It's not just nationalism. It's hubris. That has been a part of Russia's collective psyche for at least the past 100 years. They're not going to let anyone tell them what to do, and they balk at receiving help from anyone - it's a sign of weakness. They have a strong "us and them" mentality which has not faded away one bit since the end of Communism.
I can't really fault Russians or Putin for that, other countries are loud and proud of themselves and can also be a bit protectionist from time to time. But in Putin's case, it could be incredibly self-destructive, although I would bet that his people will support him even if it means economic disaster.
I'll probably get modded troll for that second paragraph, but just remember, in post-Soviet Russia, troll mods YOU.
Perhaps those of you in this thread who hate journalists so much should make efforts to give scientists some media training so that when they are interviewed, they speak in clear language, not jargon.
Yes, it's the journalist's job to be clear and accurate, but it's pretty damn difficult when the interview subject spews out line after line of technobabble only meaningful to another scientist.
Also, don't blame journalists for trying (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) to spice things up and present scientific stories to a broader audience. Only slashdot readers are going to get excited when they see "We report teleportation of quantum information between atomic quantum memories separated by about 1 meter" and the thrilling "Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits" headline (the word "teleportation" is used in the abstract, so don't blame the journalist.)
At the very least, people interested in the topic can go look up the referenced abstract and read it for themselves. Granted, it requires some critical thinking skills and some initiative to do that, which might be expecting a lot from people. But without the hated journalist's efforts they wouldn't even know about the story.
It can be argued that OLPC started the netbook category, when ASUS and Intel saw the outpouring of support.
This is the only article I could find cited by Wikipedia supporting the widely-repeated claim that OLPC inspired the "netbook" market, and this is just speculation by one UK blogger. Yet it's cited as a source for a factual statement in Wikipedia article about the XO-1 filled with "citation needed" tags.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's kind of a broad and evangelistic claim and requires a little more research.
Thankfully, Gizmodo did an excellent series on the trials and triumphs of OLPC, including the "who invented the netbook" question. There's no clear answer, but it definitely appears that the OLPC woke up computer manufacturers to the fact that there was a large, untapped market out there for cheap "netbooks."