Well, in case of an average car accident, while people die in these too and it's sad and all that, it usually does not seriously damage the space program of an entire nation...
It appears that somebody has moved me to US without telling me, as I don't appear to be a part of your "we", yet I thought that I'm living outside US...
All of these are games that I've wasted plenty of time with.
Mech Force is a Battletech (tm) inspired game for the Amiga. I can't even estimate how much time I've used with that, probably something like half an year of real time though. It would be nice if the source code for that would be released, but I'm not holding my breath... (last time I checked, nobody had managed to locate the original developer anyway)
MOO2 has already been mentioned, so I'll just say that it's most addictive "conquer the universe" game I've ever seen.
Zangband is one of the umpteenth Angband variants (which in itself is an evolution of the Moria, which is an evolution of the Rogue). I used to play that quite a lot over years, although not that much recently; somebody appears to have eaten my spare time.
Master of Magic is from the same people who also did MOO2 (SimTex) and could be said to be a cross between Civilization and name-your-fantasy-RPG here. It's just utterly impressive to use the magic to transform one's own units to be better suited to some purposes. (No ships available and you need to cross an ocean? Just pump waterwalking or flying to your units). Several remake projects for MoM appear to be in progress, so maybe I'll get an updated version to enjoy some day...
Basically, it's Angband with quite a few ideas borrowed from Roger Zelazny's epic Chronicles of Amber series, including a totally changed magic system.
MOO2 is one of my all-time favourites too. Although the gameplay has not offered much surprises for a long time, I still enjoy going through it every now and then. Stellar converter fitted on a ship is so awesome thing that it alone would suffice as a reason for replays:)
While adaptive optics can in general eliminate the smearing caused by the atmosphere and there have been telescopes with a larger aperture for ages, one significant problem remains:
Atmosphere simply stops some frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, either completely or partially. In case of the Hubble, it can also perform observations in ultraviolet. And although the adaptive optics work wonders regarding the resolution, they can't remove the atmospheric glow and the daytime bright sky, though this is not as significant problem.
Also, Hubble does not have a big ball of rock and miscellaneous stuff blocking parts of the sky. (Well, strictly speaking, it does, but the Earth is a much smaller obstacle when viewed from orbit)
So, while the Earth-based telescopes can exceed the performance of current or near-future space telescopes in some areas, there are some problematic areas that can't be solved, at least for now.
While the number of traditional adventures that are commercially released is quite close to zero these days, how about the free Interactive Fiction Archiveand friends? Spending some time trying text adventures again is on the ever-growing list of things that I will try to get time for at some point.
Re:My C64 floppy could do that!
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 1
As far as I remember, "Into the Eagles Nest" on Commodore 64 used the cassette drive motor to produce an imitation of footsteps far away.
I also remember the aforementioned original drive music software for the C64 and the infamous 1541 drive. Oh, those were the days when hardware features were shamelessly used for weird tricks.:)
As being said, in our household we've been pretty happy with a VHS recorder for occasional recording of TV series and such and CD-R/RW for the data. (We do not purchase any VHS/DVD content anyway) And now somebody decides that technology we've not yet seen a need for is obsolete. Suddenly I feel ancient.
I don't have a problem with image stabilization, but it's not going to take the place of larger glass. Why? Because image stabilization only works on non-moving objects. Yeah, you can take a picture at 1/15th of a second instead of 1/60th and still have it turn out, if the subject isn't moving. But if it is, it'll be blurred, and IS won't fix it.
I mostly agree. However, the panning image stabilization mode is occasionally useful, if your subject is e.g. a boat, car or something such that its 'shape' does not change while moving. In the panning mode, the IS detects the direction of the movement and only cancels shake that happens in other directions. Obviously this does not work for all moving targets (the arms and legs of a runner will indeed still get blurred), neither do all image stabilization implementations have such mode. Thus, the larger aperture also remains desireable.
Personally, I have found manual focus a very useful feature even on a Canon EOS 20D, which has significantly better autofocus performance than any P&S I've seen so far. Sure, it works nicely on daylight or during dawn/dusk. However, I kind of like available light / night photography and in those situations, there often isn't enough light for AF. In those situations, it's handy to just preset the focus distance to a suitable value with manual focus.
Sure, I won't use it daily, but it's still something that I wouldn't want to live without and prefocus + focus lock isn't a 100% replacement for it in my case.
Otherwise, I pretty much agree, but with the ever-increasingly powerful/featureful GPUs in graphics cards, DSP/hardware mixer equipped sound cards and so on, the x86-based PC world is really IMO moving to the same direction where Amiga was: less heavy-duty work for the CPU, which mostly just controls what is to be done/performs the generic processing that specialized processing units are less fit for. This has been the trend for last ten years or so, actually, although initially the move was pretty slow.
Quote is from the Google Earth support page (emphasis added by me):
"
Do you support Macintosh?
At this time, Google Earth supports Windows only; however, we hope to support Mac and Linux OS soon. In the meantime, although it might be slower, some Mac users have had success running Google Earth with a PC emulator. "
Well, I guess everyone has their our favourite "this is important" list, which largely differ from each other.:) (personally, I like the two features you don't care about and hardly miss any duotone/tritone stuff)
As it turns out, even many modern consumer cameras give you 12bit or 16bit per channel, and many modern displays can display that.
I'll have to nitpick here a bit. Even on DSLRs there's sufficient amount of noise to make the bit depth somewhat theoretical. But in general , I agree that >8 bits per channel bit depths are commonly used in various contexts and it would be very nice if GIMP would also get the support.
However, for digital camera use, UFRaw plugin for the GIMP does conversion from digital camera RAW files quite intelligently, as the initial adjustments are done with 16 bits per component and only after color balance, saturation, exposure control etc. are done the image is converted to 8 bits per channel. It's available at:
Not that I couldn't get it to work, but then if I wanted sound to work with other things, I need to use a sound daemon. Fair enough, thats not too hard - but then the audio/video sync was out because of the latency in the sound daemon.
Well, I've been happily using SB Live! for quite a few years. Both the OSS and ALSA support hardware mixing without any need for likes of ESD, artsd and friends. No pain at all; I can happily play music with xmms and am still able to hear any game sounds etc. at the same time. I don't know which other sound card drivers for Linux support this, but I'd be suprised if emu10k1 driver would be the only one...
As the subject says, your figure for oxygen is somewhat off the mark; at the moment, the oxygen makes up about 21% of the atmosphere. I do not comment the density though, as I don't really have idea about it.
If you would have seen subtitles since your childhood in most movies, you would not need to concentrate reading them. Even though I understand English, I often prefer to use the subtitles unless the translation appears to be lousy. (I even occasionally follow the subtitles in Finnish movies spoken in native language) The main thing the speech provides to me is the mood of the characters, the text gives me the abstract information. And for movies where characters talk French, Germany or other languages I do not understand, the subtitles are very nice and do not impact the experience at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in case of an average car accident, while people die in these too and it's sad and all that, it usually does not seriously damage the space program of an entire nation...
It appears that somebody has moved me to US without telling me, as I don't appear to be a part of your "we", yet I thought that I'm living outside US...
All of these are games that I've wasted plenty of time with.
Mech Force is a Battletech (tm) inspired game for the Amiga. I can't even estimate how much time I've used with that, probably something like half an year of real time though. It would be nice if the source code for that would be released, but I'm not holding my breath... (last time I checked, nobody had managed to locate the original developer anyway)
MOO2 has already been mentioned, so I'll just say that it's most addictive "conquer the universe" game I've ever seen.
Zangband is one of the umpteenth Angband variants (which in itself is an evolution of the Moria, which is an evolution of the Rogue). I used to play that quite a lot over years, although not that much recently; somebody appears to have eaten my spare time.
Master of Magic is from the same people who also did MOO2 (SimTex) and could be said to be a cross between Civilization and name-your-fantasy-RPG here. It's just utterly impressive to use the magic to transform one's own units to be better suited to some purposes. (No ships available and you need to cross an ocean? Just pump waterwalking or flying to your units). Several remake projects for MoM appear to be in progress, so maybe I'll get an updated version to enjoy some day...
If you're a fan of Angband, a variant of it might be of interest:
http://www.zangband.org/
Basically, it's Angband with quite a few ideas borrowed from Roger Zelazny's epic Chronicles of Amber series, including a totally changed magic system.
MOO2 is one of my all-time favourites too. Although the gameplay has not offered much surprises for a long time, I still enjoy going through it every now and then. Stellar converter fitted on a ship is so awesome thing that it alone would suffice as a reason for replays :)
While adaptive optics can in general eliminate the smearing caused by the atmosphere and there have been telescopes with a larger aperture for ages, one significant problem remains:
Atmosphere simply stops some frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, either completely or partially. In case of the Hubble, it can also perform observations in ultraviolet. And although the adaptive optics work wonders regarding the resolution, they can't remove the atmospheric glow and the daytime bright sky, though this is not as significant problem.
Also, Hubble does not have a big ball of rock and miscellaneous stuff blocking parts of the sky. (Well, strictly speaking, it does, but the Earth is a much smaller obstacle when viewed from orbit)
So, while the Earth-based telescopes can exceed the performance of current or near-future space telescopes in some areas, there are some problematic areas that can't be solved, at least for now.
While the number of traditional adventures that are commercially released is quite close to zero these days, how about the free Interactive Fiction Archiveand friends? Spending some time trying text adventures again is on the ever-growing list of things that I will try to get time for at some point.
As far as I remember, "Into the Eagles Nest" on Commodore 64 used the cassette drive motor to produce an imitation of footsteps far away.
:)
I also remember the aforementioned original drive music software for the C64 and the infamous 1541 drive. Oh, those were the days when hardware features were shamelessly used for weird tricks.
As being said, in our household we've been pretty happy with a VHS recorder for occasional recording of TV series and such and CD-R/RW for the data. (We do not purchase any VHS/DVD content anyway) And now somebody decides that technology we've not yet seen a need for is obsolete. Suddenly I feel ancient.
I don't have a problem with image stabilization, but it's not going to take the place of larger glass. Why? Because image stabilization only works on non-moving objects. Yeah, you can take a picture at 1/15th of a second instead of 1/60th and still have it turn out, if the subject isn't moving. But if it is, it'll be blurred, and IS won't fix it.
I mostly agree. However, the panning image stabilization mode is occasionally useful, if your subject is e.g. a boat, car or something such that its 'shape' does not change while moving. In the panning mode, the IS detects the direction of the movement and only cancels shake that happens in other directions. Obviously this does not work for all moving targets (the arms and legs of a runner will indeed still get blurred), neither do all image stabilization implementations have such mode. Thus, the larger aperture also remains desireable.
I agree on this one. I think that most DSLRs are far more sturdy than average point'n'shoot cameras, excluding perhaps likes of Canon 300D and 350D.
Personally, I have found manual focus a very useful feature even on a Canon EOS 20D, which has significantly better autofocus performance than any P&S I've seen so far. Sure, it works nicely on daylight or during dawn/dusk. However, I kind of like available light / night photography and in those situations, there often isn't enough light for AF. In those situations, it's handy to just preset the focus distance to a suitable value with manual focus.
Sure, I won't use it daily, but it's still something that I wouldn't want to live without and prefocus + focus lock isn't a 100% replacement for it in my case.
I just started to suspect that we're about to witness quite a few Blender-rendered hardcore porn movies.
Otherwise, I pretty much agree, but with the ever-increasingly powerful/featureful GPUs in graphics cards, DSP/hardware mixer equipped sound cards and so on, the x86-based PC world is really IMO moving to the same direction where Amiga was: less heavy-duty work for the CPU, which mostly just controls what is to be done/performs the generic processing that specialized processing units are less fit for. This has been the trend for last ten years or so, actually, although initially the move was pretty slow.
Or even worse, they are trounced by too tight deadlines, which isn't that uncommon. Even good coders will make sloppy code if the time is running out.
Quote is from the Google Earth support page (emphasis added by me): " Do you support Macintosh? At this time, Google Earth supports Windows only; however, we hope to support Mac and Linux OS soon. In the meantime, although it might be slower, some Mac users have had success running Google Earth with a PC emulator. "
Well, I guess everyone has their our favourite "this is important" list, which largely differ from each other. :) (personally, I like the two features you don't care about and hardly miss any duotone/tritone stuff)
As it turns out, even many modern consumer cameras give you 12bit or 16bit per channel, and many modern displays can display that.
I'll have to nitpick here a bit. Even on DSLRs there's sufficient amount of noise to make the bit depth somewhat theoretical. But in general , I agree that >8 bits per channel bit depths are commonly used in various contexts and it would be very nice if GIMP would also get the support.
However, for digital camera use, UFRaw plugin for the GIMP does conversion from digital camera RAW files quite intelligently, as the initial adjustments are done with 16 bits per component and only after color balance, saturation, exposure control etc. are done the image is converted to 8 bits per channel. It's available at:
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
It's not of course a substitute for a real 16-bit support, but makes life a bit less painful at least.
This copypasted text has been seen in only about every article. Please invent something original.
Not that I couldn't get it to work, but then if I wanted sound to work with other things, I need to use a sound daemon. Fair enough, thats not too hard - but then the audio/video sync was out because of the latency in the sound daemon.
Well, I've been happily using SB Live! for quite a few years. Both the OSS and ALSA support hardware mixing without any need for likes of ESD, artsd and friends. No pain at all; I can happily play music with xmms and am still able to hear any game sounds etc. at the same time. I don't know which other sound card drivers for Linux support this, but I'd be suprised if emu10k1 driver would be the only one...
As the subject says, your figure for oxygen is somewhat off the mark; at the moment, the oxygen makes up about 21% of the atmosphere. I do not comment the density though, as I don't really have idea about it.
IMDB is your friend:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1132359/
So, she's about 24 now.
AFAIK, it will be downloadable from the 1st of September also.
If you would have seen subtitles since your childhood in most movies, you would not need to concentrate reading them. Even though I understand English, I often prefer to use the subtitles unless the translation appears to be lousy. (I even occasionally follow the subtitles in Finnish movies spoken in native language) The main thing the speech provides to me is the mood of the characters, the text gives me the abstract information. And for movies where characters talk French, Germany or other languages I do not understand, the subtitles are very nice and do not impact the experience at all.
I guess it's a matter of what you're used to.
Just read the subtitles? I've seen plenty of movies spoken in language that I do not understand and happily just read the subtitles.
:)
(This particular movie is not a problem, as I'm Finnish.