I was just thinking of the same thing. Our senior class play in high school was Drood. It took some extra preparation having to know all the possible outcomes, but it was fun to be a part of, and we ended up getting to do a different ending each night we put it on.
"I said, an assignation with Mayor Sapsea, who lives just around behind..."
"What's that you say, Bill?"
"I said, 'A round behind...'"
"And so have you!"
"I didn't come here to be insulted!"
"Why, where do you usually go?"
"I'm not a complete fool, you know!"
"Oh, which bit is missing?"
"You're next to an idiot!"
"Pleased to meet you!"
I actually just pulled aparty my iBook last night to replace the hard drive. I've done it a few times recently, including doing the same for my sister's, and I'm pretty sure it didn't take much more than 20 minutes this time (just for disassembly, not putting it back together). It was brutal the first time, but now that I've gotten the hang of it, it's not so bad, although I still believe that whoever designed it has a vendetta against everyone who repairs computers. In comparison, my old Wallstreet was great to work on; I could pull it apart and put it back together in half the time of this thing.
I honestly had no trouble with the final boss (or opening doors or turning other knobs), and I easily beat it on my first try. As long as you turn it/rotate your hand while keeping it pointing in the same direction that it originally was (at the knob or whatever), it works perfectly well. If you point at the ceiling or something while turning, I suppose that would make the camera point at the ceiling and wobble about, but if you just point forward and rotate the wiimote around the long axis, no problem, at least for me.
Now successfully beating some of the later challenge levels, on the other hand... That could just be that I'm not good enough at the game, though, because it's obviously possible if plenty of other people have done it. Heh.
I use Safari on my iBook. Last time I tried it, Camino actually had fewer features that I use than Safari. I still keep it around in case something doesn't work right in Safari, but that hasn't happened for a while, especially since I started using nightly WebKit builds and now the Safari 3 beta (which have all been rather speedy and accurate lately). Firefox does have a bunch of neat extensions and stuff, but I rarely have a use for them, and it irritates me how obviously non-Mac-native it's been when I've tried it in the past. I know plenty of people who like and use each of the three. I just can't see why I personally would use one of the others.
I totally agree about OS X's font rendering and subpixel antialiasing compared to ClearType in XP, though.
This "love"-emoticon looks like a pair of tits hanging from the roof.
And only because of saving two chars.
Or trying to look dumb. Definitely trying to look dumb. It comes naturally to some people, while the rest of us have to put some effort into it. And I always thought it looked more like someone's nuts (which makes it a lot more interesting to read things as "I ball <whatever>" or even "I teabag <whatever>").
Personally, I prefer a set of good earphones (without noise canceling, mind you, perhaps a good set of Grados) for those times at home, and in noisy environments, nothing beats a pair of decent in ear noise isolating ear buds. They are essentially ear plugs with embedded speakers, absolutely amazing products. Check out a pair of Shures or Etymotics, definitely won't disappoint. I <3 my Grados. Not enough people are aware that they exist. They're missing out (so they should click that link and fix that). They're pretty hard to beat for the money. I've been meaning to get a pair of Etymotics at some point, but I just can't justify it right now since I don't listen to music while I'm out much.
"Or we'd get SC1 in 1600x1200 with true 3D, zooming and surround sound."
Frankly, I'd love to see that. And a bit of U/I updating, larger groups, etc.
SC1 is a blast, but it's ugly, especially on a laptop. I would really like that, too. Not necessarily as SC2, but as an update to the original SC. Probably like a lot of other people, the SC2 announcement inspired me to go back and play SC some more again, but it's pretty painful being stuck in such a low resolution with such a small field of view, regardless of how good the game itself is. I got frustrated pretty quickly. Some old games I can go back to easily, and they're still just as good, but things like that sometimes leave me wondering how I put up with them in the first place. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dig out stuff like StarCon2. Heh.
In the large cities, finding someone who speaks English is becoming easier as capitalism takes over, but let me add that when I arrived here four years ago, absolutely no one spoke English! I had to visit the local university's English department to find any. That's strange. When I was there in the early 90s visiting family, in every city we went to it was completely trivial to find someone who spoke English. Almost all young people spoke English (and most older people spoke Russian, not surprisingly). Nearly everywhere we went, we were able to find people who spoke enough English without much trouble, from Warsaw to Krakow to Lublin to Sochaczew and Chodakow. Certainly not everyone did, but many did. I got the impression from my cousins that many young people were learning it in school by that point, as opposed to the previous generation with Russian. Of course, that's just my experience, and I was only there for a couple weeks, not a few years.
Sure. Advanced math and sciences are pretty complex, and to fully understand any of them can take a lot of work. When the summary at the top of an article is completely nonsensical to anyone who isn't already a part of the field because of the jargon used, there's a problem, though. The meat of the article or a textbook or any other source can and should be as in depth as necessary to explain the subject at hand. When intelligent people who have plenty of experience in a related field (but not the specific field the article is about) can't understand the overview, which is supposed to explain what something is and what it's for, without looking up every third word, something's wrong. No one's trying to take your textbooks away from you. They're just trying to make some understanding of your field and why it's important more accessible to people who aren't a part of it.
I used to make fun of a friend for the same kind of thing. I joked that there was a requirement that every paper written by anyone in her major include the word "problematize" at least once. I can't remember what the other words on the list were anymore now that it's been a few years, but there were some "good" ones. The scary part is that they really did show up (unnecessarily) that often.
No, you most certainly do not need to use big words, or even any fancy terminology at all, if you're explaining calculus, at least the basics. Calculus By and For Young People is a perfect example of that. It might not explain things in the same method as a high school or college class, but thanks to it, I understood things like the concept of limits better than other people who learned them in the "normal" way later on, and the idea behind derivatives (not all the history and mathematics behind them, just the concept and what they represent) can similarly be explained in less than 15 minutes.
Concepts and the commonly used terminology to describe/refer to them are related, but they're not the same thing. It's just like a map vs. the terrain itself. The "big words" we use are just one way of representing the ideas, but they're not the ideas themselves, and they're not even the only way to represent them.
Unsurprisingly, that book uses different representations of the ideas from the ones used when someone can be expected to have 10+ years of math classes in school already by the time they're towards the end of high school, at least partially because it's aimed at people who haven't even been alive that long. Not surprisingly, though, it introduces basic concepts and then builds on them, gradually becoming more complex...almost as if it were real math.
Meanwhile, I should go post my positive review of it to balance out the negative ones complaining that it's too small. It's for little kids with little hands. Get over it. The content is more important than minor things like that. Sheesh.
I remember all the button mashing I did back in Myst. Sometimes a game doesn't have to involve twitch interaction to be engaging. It does actually have to be interesting and fun to play, though. Myst was one of the most boring games I've ever played in my life, and I like solving puzzles. I feel like it sold a lot of copies because it was new and different, and at some point sold more because it had already sold a lot of copies and everyone had heard of it, even people who wouldn't normally have. Some of them must've liked it, or it wouldn't have ended up with a good reputation preceding it. Unfortunately, popularity doesn't make something enjoyable. The whole thing seemed way too arbitrary, and I couldn't be bothered to care about anything at all in the game because there was nothing to really draw me in. The puzzles weren't interesting enough on their own to keep me playing, and with not much other point to it, I couldn't drag myself through it past the first handful of hours. Maybe it gets better at some point, but everything I saw was frustrating and painfully slow-paced. Supposedly something about it engaged some people, but I have a hard time figuring out what. Good on them for being able to get something positive out of it.
(Can you tell I didn't really like it much? Heh. For something from roughly the same time period, 3 in Three was much more to my puzzle-solving tastes.)
I just saw someone with a Discman/portable CD player of some sort a day or two ago, and it occurred to me how few of them I see now. It really does seem like the vast majority of what I see these days is iPods and similar. I would say that maybe it's because I hang around nerdy tech people, except I usually see people listening to things like that while I'm riding the bus or subway, which have pretty much all kinds of people on them.
Was wondering about that myself. Do we need to start building a scrith ring edge on with Eta Carradine?
Great. One more thing to worry about with Eta Carradine. Wait, what were we talking about?
That reminds me of something kind of similar I worked on almost exactly ten years ago. It supported eight keyboard/mouse setups (well, keyboard/drawing tablet, but it would've been trivial to use mice instead...) on the same computer. Only one had focus at a time, while the others had dummy pointers that could be used to gesture at or point out things, but there was a queueing system for requesting focus for input (for what we were using it for, it was easier and more useful to do it that way). Not nearly as fancy, but it was still pretty interesting to fool around with.
I know it's unrealistic to expect perfect spelling and grammar on the Web, but that was the worst misspelling of Chrono Trigger that I've ever seen!
The best part of this is that I can't decide whether you meant, "Chrono Trigger is wildly overrated," or, "the TRUE BEST RPG EVER, Chrono Trigger." It really could go either way, depending on who you ask, although I tend to lean towards the first option. Heh.
I suspect it's more that he's confused because you're not making much sense. You do realize that MacBooks start at about $1100, and the iBook was pretty similarly priced, right? It's the MacBook Pro that's $2000+, so it's hard to tell what you're trying to say.
Isn't that basically what they're doing with the new Sonic game on the Wii? I haven't been following it too closely, but it sounds like what you're asking for, if memory serves me right.
Similar to what someone else said, when I worked in retail at a musical equipment store a few years ago, we were also told not to do anything to stop anyone unless they agreed to stop. We could ask them to stay, check their receipts to compare them to what they were carrying, try to stall them with a few questions if we were suspicious about something, but if they really wanted to leave we were to leave them alone. We were warned explicitly and repeatedly never to touch them.
I took my turn up by the door sometimes, but only once did it ever amount to anything. Someone tried to blatantly walk out with $1,200 of rental/display stuff under his arm, and he was just high enough that trying to talk to him about it confused him while I caught the attention of someone at the front register, who had the general manager call the police, who conveniently arrived after he and the store manager had somehow convinced the guy to wait in a back room. Anyone with any sense who had just walked out the door would've at least temporarily gotten away with it, since there's nothing any of us really could've done if he hadn't cooperated.
When I started preparing the cash registers and bank deposits and tallying the previous day's receipts every morning, I was much more likely to catch other employees than customers. It's a lot easier when you have a captive population to work with and a paper trail, instead of people who can wander off at any time without a trace who you can't do anything to...
It seems like every couple years, there's another new warning added in-game or in the instruction booklets. With the current expectation that people need to be reminded of every possible bad thing that could happen to them with everything they use, no matter how trivial or nonsensical, the paragraph or two at the beginning of the instructions Nintendo used to have in the 80s, which has now turned into two full pages of fine print, will become a multi-section legal document in a decade like the EULAs you see currently.
The reminders in Wii Sports actually remind me of what they did with the Virtual Boy (man, do I wish I'd grabbed all the games when EB had a lot of them in stock for $.50-$1 each a few months after it had launched, just for novelty value), where it does pretty much the same thing, only you could disable it. Now it's mandatory. Oh, and on the VB, it was a feature of the system, not the game.
Also, I remember reading about how they wanted to make it load as fast as possible, both from when you turn the console on to the menu screen and from the menu to playing a game. I wonder whether the mandatory health and safety warning screens in both cases help to disguise load times, delay getting to what you actually want to do, or a mixture of both in different situations.
Last, speaking of photosensitive seizure warnings, I actually have photosensitive epilepsy, but I've never had a seizure triggered by video games, TV, movies, etc. I do have probably half the symptoms listed in the warnings they give when I do have one, though. Nothing in a game has ever been the right frequency or taken up enough of my field of vision, even though that's what you see warnings on the most, but Times Square while unmedicated was an adventure. Everyone's brain is different.
Slashdot Mirror
"I said, an assignation with Mayor Sapsea, who lives just around behind..."
"What's that you say, Bill?"
"I said, 'A round behind...'"
"And so have you!"
"I didn't come here to be insulted!"
"Why, where do you usually go?"
"I'm not a complete fool, you know!"
"Oh, which bit is missing?"
"You're next to an idiot!"
"Pleased to meet you!"
So basically Harvest Moon: Clark Gable Edition?
Game journalism: So awesome.
I actually just pulled aparty my iBook last night to replace the hard drive. I've done it a few times recently, including doing the same for my sister's, and I'm pretty sure it didn't take much more than 20 minutes this time (just for disassembly, not putting it back together). It was brutal the first time, but now that I've gotten the hang of it, it's not so bad, although I still believe that whoever designed it has a vendetta against everyone who repairs computers. In comparison, my old Wallstreet was great to work on; I could pull it apart and put it back together in half the time of this thing.
I honestly had no trouble with the final boss (or opening doors or turning other knobs), and I easily beat it on my first try. As long as you turn it/rotate your hand while keeping it pointing in the same direction that it originally was (at the knob or whatever), it works perfectly well. If you point at the ceiling or something while turning, I suppose that would make the camera point at the ceiling and wobble about, but if you just point forward and rotate the wiimote around the long axis, no problem, at least for me.
Now successfully beating some of the later challenge levels, on the other hand... That could just be that I'm not good enough at the game, though, because it's obviously possible if plenty of other people have done it. Heh.
I use Safari on my iBook. Last time I tried it, Camino actually had fewer features that I use than Safari. I still keep it around in case something doesn't work right in Safari, but that hasn't happened for a while, especially since I started using nightly WebKit builds and now the Safari 3 beta (which have all been rather speedy and accurate lately). Firefox does have a bunch of neat extensions and stuff, but I rarely have a use for them, and it irritates me how obviously non-Mac-native it's been when I've tried it in the past. I know plenty of people who like and use each of the three. I just can't see why I personally would use one of the others.
I totally agree about OS X's font rendering and subpixel antialiasing compared to ClearType in XP, though.
And only because of saving two chars.
Or trying to look dumb. Definitely trying to look dumb. It comes naturally to some people, while the rest of us have to put some effort into it. And I always thought it looked more like someone's nuts (which makes it a lot more interesting to read things as "I ball <whatever>" or even "I teabag <whatever>").
Frankly, I'd love to see that. And a bit of U/I updating, larger groups, etc.
SC1 is a blast, but it's ugly, especially on a laptop. I would really like that, too. Not necessarily as SC2, but as an update to the original SC. Probably like a lot of other people, the SC2 announcement inspired me to go back and play SC some more again, but it's pretty painful being stuck in such a low resolution with such a small field of view, regardless of how good the game itself is. I got frustrated pretty quickly. Some old games I can go back to easily, and they're still just as good, but things like that sometimes leave me wondering how I put up with them in the first place. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dig out stuff like StarCon2. Heh.
Sure. Advanced math and sciences are pretty complex, and to fully understand any of them can take a lot of work. When the summary at the top of an article is completely nonsensical to anyone who isn't already a part of the field because of the jargon used, there's a problem, though. The meat of the article or a textbook or any other source can and should be as in depth as necessary to explain the subject at hand. When intelligent people who have plenty of experience in a related field (but not the specific field the article is about) can't understand the overview, which is supposed to explain what something is and what it's for, without looking up every third word, something's wrong. No one's trying to take your textbooks away from you. They're just trying to make some understanding of your field and why it's important more accessible to people who aren't a part of it.
I used to make fun of a friend for the same kind of thing. I joked that there was a requirement that every paper written by anyone in her major include the word "problematize" at least once. I can't remember what the other words on the list were anymore now that it's been a few years, but there were some "good" ones. The scary part is that they really did show up (unnecessarily) that often.
No, you most certainly do not need to use big words, or even any fancy terminology at all, if you're explaining calculus, at least the basics. Calculus By and For Young People is a perfect example of that. It might not explain things in the same method as a high school or college class, but thanks to it, I understood things like the concept of limits better than other people who learned them in the "normal" way later on, and the idea behind derivatives (not all the history and mathematics behind them, just the concept and what they represent) can similarly be explained in less than 15 minutes.
Concepts and the commonly used terminology to describe/refer to them are related, but they're not the same thing. It's just like a map vs. the terrain itself. The "big words" we use are just one way of representing the ideas, but they're not the ideas themselves, and they're not even the only way to represent them.
Unsurprisingly, that book uses different representations of the ideas from the ones used when someone can be expected to have 10+ years of math classes in school already by the time they're towards the end of high school, at least partially because it's aimed at people who haven't even been alive that long. Not surprisingly, though, it introduces basic concepts and then builds on them, gradually becoming more complex...almost as if it were real math.
Meanwhile, I should go post my positive review of it to balance out the negative ones complaining that it's too small. It's for little kids with little hands. Get over it. The content is more important than minor things like that. Sheesh.
(Can you tell I didn't really like it much? Heh. For something from roughly the same time period, 3 in Three was much more to my puzzle-solving tastes.)
I just saw someone with a Discman/portable CD player of some sort a day or two ago, and it occurred to me how few of them I see now. It really does seem like the vast majority of what I see these days is iPods and similar. I would say that maybe it's because I hang around nerdy tech people, except I usually see people listening to things like that while I'm riding the bus or subway, which have pretty much all kinds of people on them.
Great. One more thing to worry about with Eta Carradine. Wait, what were we talking about?
That reminds me of something kind of similar I worked on almost exactly ten years ago. It supported eight keyboard/mouse setups (well, keyboard/drawing tablet, but it would've been trivial to use mice instead...) on the same computer. Only one had focus at a time, while the others had dummy pointers that could be used to gesture at or point out things, but there was a queueing system for requesting focus for input (for what we were using it for, it was easier and more useful to do it that way). Not nearly as fancy, but it was still pretty interesting to fool around with.
The best part of this is that I can't decide whether you meant, "Chrono Trigger is wildly overrated," or, "the TRUE BEST RPG EVER, Chrono Trigger." It really could go either way, depending on who you ask, although I tend to lean towards the first option. Heh.
Clearly it should be Wii 2: Electric Boogaloo.
I suspect it's more that he's confused because you're not making much sense. You do realize that MacBooks start at about $1100, and the iBook was pretty similarly priced, right? It's the MacBook Pro that's $2000+, so it's hard to tell what you're trying to say.
See: http://store.apple.com/
Isn't that basically what they're doing with the new Sonic game on the Wii? I haven't been following it too closely, but it sounds like what you're asking for, if memory serves me right.
Similar to what someone else said, when I worked in retail at a musical equipment store a few years ago, we were also told not to do anything to stop anyone unless they agreed to stop. We could ask them to stay, check their receipts to compare them to what they were carrying, try to stall them with a few questions if we were suspicious about something, but if they really wanted to leave we were to leave them alone. We were warned explicitly and repeatedly never to touch them.
I took my turn up by the door sometimes, but only once did it ever amount to anything. Someone tried to blatantly walk out with $1,200 of rental/display stuff under his arm, and he was just high enough that trying to talk to him about it confused him while I caught the attention of someone at the front register, who had the general manager call the police, who conveniently arrived after he and the store manager had somehow convinced the guy to wait in a back room. Anyone with any sense who had just walked out the door would've at least temporarily gotten away with it, since there's nothing any of us really could've done if he hadn't cooperated.
When I started preparing the cash registers and bank deposits and tallying the previous day's receipts every morning, I was much more likely to catch other employees than customers. It's a lot easier when you have a captive population to work with and a paper trail, instead of people who can wander off at any time without a trace who you can't do anything to...
It seems like every couple years, there's another new warning added in-game or in the instruction booklets. With the current expectation that people need to be reminded of every possible bad thing that could happen to them with everything they use, no matter how trivial or nonsensical, the paragraph or two at the beginning of the instructions Nintendo used to have in the 80s, which has now turned into two full pages of fine print, will become a multi-section legal document in a decade like the EULAs you see currently.
The reminders in Wii Sports actually remind me of what they did with the Virtual Boy (man, do I wish I'd grabbed all the games when EB had a lot of them in stock for $.50-$1 each a few months after it had launched, just for novelty value), where it does pretty much the same thing, only you could disable it. Now it's mandatory. Oh, and on the VB, it was a feature of the system, not the game.
Also, I remember reading about how they wanted to make it load as fast as possible, both from when you turn the console on to the menu screen and from the menu to playing a game. I wonder whether the mandatory health and safety warning screens in both cases help to disguise load times, delay getting to what you actually want to do, or a mixture of both in different situations.
Last, speaking of photosensitive seizure warnings, I actually have photosensitive epilepsy, but I've never had a seizure triggered by video games, TV, movies, etc. I do have probably half the symptoms listed in the warnings they give when I do have one, though. Nothing in a game has ever been the right frequency or taken up enough of my field of vision, even though that's what you see warnings on the most, but Times Square while unmedicated was an adventure. Everyone's brain is different.
What's next? Does Nintendo have to include a helmet for the possibility that someone might hit themselves in the head?
Hell yeah.