I second that.. My hb & play still play SC 2, MoM, & Wizardry 8 all the time. Wizardry 8 is probably the best RPG I've ever played. I'd love to find more games like it.
I actually love Gamestop's policy. The trick is to only buy a used game when you know you are going to have time to play it heavy in the 7 days you have for a no question return. I've always been hesitant to buy used games, but their policy converted me. I recently bought Baroque used and I couldn't stand the fact they don't give you time to explore (your vitality constantly decreases over time). I took it back after 6 days. I had the option to get my money back or pick out a new game. I picked out a pinball game which was *terrible*. I've seen more imagination and options in real pinball machines. I took that game back after another 6 days and got The Force Unleashed which I beat in about 10 hours. Returned that one and got Marvel Alliance which I really enjoy and I'm going to keep.
I still buy new games but I'm very cautious about those purchases. At twice the price I spend a lot of time researching game play & bugs before I shell out the dough. Used games are my "impulse" purchases and it does help me find games I'd never try otherwise.
FictionPimp also makes an excellent point that the money we get for turning in our used games helps us buy more new games. If a company makes a really good game with re-playability I eat the cost and keep the game. Most games though go right back to the store to feed my habit.
Don't forget NASA is one industry that puts a lot of money back into the US economy. Due to export controls and ITAR restrictions nearly every man hour is paid to a U.S. Citizen and nearly every part is built here. NASA farms out quite a bit of work to Universities so the next crop of engineers actually gets hands on experience in building equipment.
At a seminar I was at one NASA employee said that it takes over seven years after a student graduates before they are fully beneficial to the NASA program. If the student had hands on experience that number can be reduced to below three years. Many NASA employees are nearing retirement age and there already is a problem finding replacements. If you cut money now NASA won't/can't hire new employees to be trained by experienced personnel, Universities won't be able to fund new space projects so the students will not be fully prepared or trained to take over jobs once funding is returned, and those that are looking for jobs now will most likely go into private industry where their innovations and ideas will become the property of their employer and be lost to public enterprise.
So I'm for our government pouring money into NASA and rewarding a group that has been highly successful (recently). Why should they just be dumping money into failures (mortgage companies, banks, wallstreet, automotive).
I agree Arkham Horror is an excellent game. You do have to kill monsters to win. I'm guessing if you tried to skip this portion you'd lose pretty quick due to terror level problems. My board gaming group has played this quite a bit and we've found the more we play together the better we do. It is also nice because if everyone in your group is not at the same level strategically you can help out those that are having trouble. If they die they just start over with a new character. No sitting out waiting for the next game to start.
I have the Lord of the Rings game. I got it for Christmas a while ago and never took it out of the box. Now that I know it is cooperative I'll take a look. Thanks for the recommendation.
The LEGO games while they do have "killing" they are really fun to play multiplayer. My husband and I have played all of them cooperatively and really enjoyed them. It doesn't matter how many times you die (other then losing money, once you get the $ multipliers then it doesn't matter at all). There are some easy puzzles that mostly consist of pushing blocks, but some of them require you to bring items like vehicles from other sections of the game.
We do play games like Civ or Colonization together and we play a single side and split the duties. I do the diplomacy and trade and he makes the armies and goes to war. We both get to play the portions of the games we like especially since I'm an uber achiever. I'll do all the "busy" work that drives him crazy so he can just get to the good stuff. Part of what makes it interesting is both of us having to make concessions. Sometimes I need to let him research the war machine so we don't get squished and sometimes he needs to let me spread the wealth with well placed bribes. Though it can be frustrating for him when we get an early win through diplomacy before he got to try out his army.
If you have a wii I'd also recommend looking at some party games. Rayman Raving Rabbids & Warioware Smooth Moves are both a lot of fun and are relatively non violent. (Ok you don't actually kill any rabbids, but you may hit them in the head with a hammer repeatedly:) While there isn't a co-operative mode you can hand the controller back and forth as you play.
You are definitely right about the amount of time yum takes to do anything. The advantage is that it takes the same amount of time for me to run and grab a cup of espresso.
I prefer yum. One of the things I find that people don't know about is: yum provides x Sometimes I'll be compiling a piece of software and it will complain that I don't have a certain library or a certain command. Use the yum provides to find out what package will install what you need and then use yum install packagename. Ding! All done.
If you are looking for parts try a junk yard. You may have to do some driving to find the right "kind" of junkyard. Some specialize in parts that can be re-used in vehicles as originally intended. These junkyards are expensive. Look for a yard in a small town or in the country. I've been to junkyards that will sell you stuff by how much you can carry or how much you can fit on a cart. These are the best because you can get a lot of stuff pretty cheap.
Bring a good set of gloves, make sure your tetanus shot is up to date, and have a ton of fun digging through the junk.
The freedom that Blizzard gave map creators for WC3 allowed some really cool mods. You could download a map that was a truly unique game within itself. My lan party group still grabs RPG maps for WC3 for us all to get together and do a little co-op dungeon crawling. Some of the mods made the game completely unrecognizable as WC3.
The only game I found unplayable without a mod is Temple of Elemental Evil. I started playing it and I had a really good start with a party that I liked and then found a small problem. The NPC's are rabid looters. The worst part is they would loot unique items they couldn't even use. I've got no problems w/ NPC's getting a piece of the action, but them taking items they couldn't use drove me crazy.
The final straw was the NPC druid I picked up looted a set of full plate mail. The mail was too heavy for her to carry so she was encumbered (and moved terribly slow). I got her back to the city and normally once you entered a store the NPC's would sell the loot they couldn't use. She refused to sell the item and couldn't get unencumbered. I looked online and found a mod that let you modify NPC's inventory like they were a true party member. Got the armor out of her inventory and proceeded to enjoy the rest of the game.
Good point. I think all shipping companies have their problems. What ticked me off in this case was that the items were insured and Fed-Ex tried to get out of paying because someone signed off on the items. (Someone who isn't our receiving person and who never saw the boxes). They claimed that since someone signed off on the delivery the damage must have come after it was delivered.
It took a lot of photographs on our part and a letter from the vendor stating they did not ship our stuff in DET labeled boxes before we got our money.
Also cell coverage is not universal. I live in cell black hole. So far none of the my friend's cells work within 15 minutes. The "phone" that gets the closest and still works is a vehicle with Onstar, but even that cuts out before they even turn onto my road.
Since I'm not willing to invest in WiMax equipment yet dial-up is my only internet option at home. Even if cell service worked it wouldn't be convenient/affordable to dial in this way.
I always love it when Fed-Ex destroys something and then tries to hide it. One day I walked past the shipping office and I smelled the very strong odor of hydraulic oil coming from the room. I take a look inside since we shouldn't be receiving anything that has hydraulic oil in it. I found a bunch of boxes with the local Detroit Airport logo all over them and sealed with DET labeled tape. The cardboard was completely soaked through with the oil.
I carefully opened one of the boxes and found it contained servers! It appears that the original boxes got in some sort of accident at the airport and were completely soaked. At the airport Fed-Ex or the baggage handlers did us a "favor" and re-boxed everything. The servers were so coated (and filled) that even the new boxes were completely soaked through and the bottoms of the boxes were starting to pull apart. The Fe-Ex guy (so we wouldn't refuse them) dropped them off at lunch and then got some random person in the hall to sign off on it.
We had to pay for new servers to be built ASAP and shipped overnight (UPS this time) at huge cost for us. Since someone had signed off on the package we then had a very long fight to get Fed-Ex to pay for the equipment they destroyed. We never got the extra cost for the overnight shipping and the rush build reimbursed.
What I regret losing is not speed but function. Firewire allows target disk mode which is one of the best tools you can ever give your IT staff. Besides being useful for loads & backups, it can be real life saver when you have hardware failure or even when someone drops their laptop 5 minutes before an important meeting.
With the new laptops you'll have to pull the disk if you need to do any emergency data recovery. Sure it is only one screw to get the drives out, but target disk allowed you access without any tools and nearly instantly. The only think you need is a firewire cable and another mac.
Amen to that. Offline LAN parties are what sold me on the whole franchise to begin with. I got hooked at a WC LAN party and never looked back. I still regularly host LAN parties for WC3.
So you spawn a few games for people who don't have the disk. What happens? They have a good time playing a game they don't own and THEY BUY IT! Plus the people who don't play at home tend to get smashed rather early which just encourages them to buy it.Luckily WC3 is still in stores so new people to the group don't have to look far to get their copy. I guess the company is going to be more Activision and less Blizzard.
We have a hodgepodge system at my U. You can use a standard imap/pop email with any client you choose (my favorite since I use pine) or you can use Exchange. While the exchange calendaring does seem to work well the email portion does not. Even with IMAP setup on the exchange server the client side compatibility in a mixed OS environment isn't as seamless as a straight IMAP option. Also it doesn't seem to scale as well as other services.
Gmail has both pop & imap access and their web interface is fast even on a slow connection. The spam filtering is very good. I've got a Yahoo account and while I still check it once a month that usually is just to empty the inbox into the spam folder. MS & Google also have calendaring options, but I don't believe Yahoo does. If calendaring is important get a demo on how well it works for shared calendaring and if there are privacy options.
One important factor about handing your email over to a third party vendor. Get the privacy agreement clearly spelled out. Since you are a U (and especially if you are large U) you will probably have data that falls under HIPAA or is export controlled that gets sent through email. Make sure that your groups will have a reasonable right to privacy and won't have to start running their own mail servers because grants or projects they work on have security requirements that your vendor won't meet.
I've got a digital television and a digital converter box and I can say both suck. On both no matter how clear and strong the signal is the close captioning rarely works. When it does work the text is about 2-3 seconds delayed. The analog version of the stations never have this problem.
The other problem is the "all or nothing" viewing. I live in the middle of nowhere. I can pull analog UHV & VHF signal from stations that are over 100 miles away, but I can only pull digital signal from stations that are within 50 miles. I have a very good UHV antenna so that isn't the problem.
I can't see purchasing a dish for *free* television. Oh well I'm glad I've got Netflix.
Isn't that the point? If they are smart enough that we can't find their info I want them working for us! It is always my goal to try and hire people with more knowledge or different knowledge than me.
When we've looked at hiring people in the past (student or otherwise) I always search the interwebs for dirt. I think it has saved us a ton of trouble. The worst one was when we had an applicant whose resume was one of our top picks and we were thinking about interviewing him. Then I saw his Myspace page.
He drank underage, admitted to doing drugs, liked to steal, and wanted to go to Iraq so he could "pop a cap in someones ass and not get in trouble for murder". (BTW he was a white guy so us not interviewing him was not racially motivated). He's is either technically stupid for posting this wherever anyone can see or not the kind of person we want running around with keys to the kingdom.
As a side note (and as others have previously mentioned) the people we've hired with almost no web presence have turned out to be the most technically competent.
Scientists have shown that the moon is moving away at a tiny yet measurable distance from the earth every year. If you do the math, you can calculate that 85 million years ago the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface. This would explain the death of the dinosaurs. The tallest ones, anyway.
Wrong direction, everyone should be riding the exact same bike. The Tour is about the athletes not the equipment.
I completely disagree with this. There are approximately 200 athletes in the Tour de France and I think it would be cruel and unusual to make them share one bike. It would be hard enough to get them to fit on there let alone figure out who actually won.
Slashdot Mirror
I second that.. My hb & play still play SC 2, MoM, & Wizardry 8 all the time. Wizardry 8 is probably the best RPG I've ever played. I'd love to find more games like it.
I actually love Gamestop's policy. The trick is to only buy a used game when you know you are going to have time to play it heavy in the 7 days you have for a no question return. I've always been hesitant to buy used games, but their policy converted me. I recently bought Baroque used and I couldn't stand the fact they don't give you time to explore (your vitality constantly decreases over time). I took it back after 6 days. I had the option to get my money back or pick out a new game. I picked out a pinball game which was *terrible*. I've seen more imagination and options in real pinball machines. I took that game back after another 6 days and got The Force Unleashed which I beat in about 10 hours. Returned that one and got Marvel Alliance which I really enjoy and I'm going to keep.
I still buy new games but I'm very cautious about those purchases. At twice the price I spend a lot of time researching game play & bugs before I shell out the dough. Used games are my "impulse" purchases and it does help me find games I'd never try otherwise.
FictionPimp also makes an excellent point that the money we get for turning in our used games helps us buy more new games. If a company makes a really good game with re-playability I eat the cost and keep the game. Most games though go right back to the store to feed my habit.
Don't forget NASA is one industry that puts a lot of money back into the US economy. Due to export controls and ITAR restrictions nearly every man hour is paid to a U.S. Citizen and nearly every part is built here. NASA farms out quite a bit of work to Universities so the next crop of engineers actually gets hands on experience in building equipment.
At a seminar I was at one NASA employee said that it takes over seven years after a student graduates before they are fully beneficial to the NASA program. If the student had hands on experience that number can be reduced to below three years. Many NASA employees are nearing retirement age and there already is a problem finding replacements. If you cut money now NASA won't/can't hire new employees to be trained by experienced personnel, Universities won't be able to fund new space projects so the students will not be fully prepared or trained to take over jobs once funding is returned, and those that are looking for jobs now will most likely go into private industry where their innovations and ideas will become the property of their employer and be lost to public enterprise.
So I'm for our government pouring money into NASA and rewarding a group that has been highly successful (recently). Why should they just be dumping money into failures (mortgage companies, banks, wallstreet, automotive).
I agree Arkham Horror is an excellent game. You do have to kill monsters to win. I'm guessing if you tried to skip this portion you'd lose pretty quick due to terror level problems. My board gaming group has played this quite a bit and we've found the more we play together the better we do. It is also nice because if everyone in your group is not at the same level strategically you can help out those that are having trouble. If they die they just start over with a new character. No sitting out waiting for the next game to start.
I have the Lord of the Rings game. I got it for Christmas a while ago and never took it out of the box. Now that I know it is cooperative I'll take a look. Thanks for the recommendation.
The LEGO games while they do have "killing" they are really fun to play multiplayer. My husband and I have played all of them cooperatively and really enjoyed them. It doesn't matter how many times you die (other then losing money, once you get the $ multipliers then it doesn't matter at all). There are some easy puzzles that mostly consist of pushing blocks, but some of them require you to bring items like vehicles from other sections of the game.
We do play games like Civ or Colonization together and we play a single side and split the duties. I do the diplomacy and trade and he makes the armies and goes to war. We both get to play the portions of the games we like especially since I'm an uber achiever. I'll do all the "busy" work that drives him crazy so he can just get to the good stuff. Part of what makes it interesting is both of us having to make concessions. Sometimes I need to let him research the war machine so we don't get squished and sometimes he needs to let me spread the wealth with well placed bribes. Though it can be frustrating for him when we get an early win through diplomacy before he got to try out his army.
If you have a wii I'd also recommend looking at some party games. Rayman Raving Rabbids & Warioware Smooth Moves are both a lot of fun and are relatively non violent. (Ok you don't actually kill any rabbids, but you may hit them in the head with a hammer repeatedly :) While there isn't a co-operative mode you can hand the controller back and forth as you play.
You are definitely right about the amount of time yum takes to do anything. The advantage is that it takes the same amount of time for me to run and grab a cup of espresso.
I prefer yum. One of the things I find that people don't know about is: yum provides x Sometimes I'll be compiling a piece of software and it will complain that I don't have a certain library or a certain command. Use the yum provides to find out what package will install what you need and then use yum install packagename. Ding! All done.
3 words. British Penal Colony There, fixed that for you
If you are looking for parts try a junk yard. You may have to do some driving to find the right "kind" of junkyard. Some specialize in parts that can be re-used in vehicles as originally intended. These junkyards are expensive. Look for a yard in a small town or in the country. I've been to junkyards that will sell you stuff by how much you can carry or how much you can fit on a cart. These are the best because you can get a lot of stuff pretty cheap.
Bring a good set of gloves, make sure your tetanus shot is up to date, and have a ton of fun digging through the junk.
The freedom that Blizzard gave map creators for WC3 allowed some really cool mods. You could download a map that was a truly unique game within itself. My lan party group still grabs RPG maps for WC3 for us all to get together and do a little co-op dungeon crawling. Some of the mods made the game completely unrecognizable as WC3.
The only game I found unplayable without a mod is Temple of Elemental Evil. I started playing it and I had a really good start with a party that I liked and then found a small problem. The NPC's are rabid looters. The worst part is they would loot unique items they couldn't even use. I've got no problems w/ NPC's getting a piece of the action, but them taking items they couldn't use drove me crazy.
The final straw was the NPC druid I picked up looted a set of full plate mail. The mail was too heavy for her to carry so she was encumbered (and moved terribly slow). I got her back to the city and normally once you entered a store the NPC's would sell the loot they couldn't use. She refused to sell the item and couldn't get unencumbered. I looked online and found a mod that let you modify NPC's inventory like they were a true party member. Got the armor out of her inventory and proceeded to enjoy the rest of the game.
Good point. I think all shipping companies have their problems. What ticked me off in this case was that the items were insured and Fed-Ex tried to get out of paying because someone signed off on the items. (Someone who isn't our receiving person and who never saw the boxes). They claimed that since someone signed off on the delivery the damage must have come after it was delivered.
It took a lot of photographs on our part and a letter from the vendor stating they did not ship our stuff in DET labeled boxes before we got our money.
Yes, but that is only because you keep asking for asbestos sweaters.
Also cell coverage is not universal. I live in cell black hole. So far none of the my friend's cells work within 15 minutes. The "phone" that gets the closest and still works is a vehicle with Onstar, but even that cuts out before they even turn onto my road.
Since I'm not willing to invest in WiMax equipment yet dial-up is my only internet option at home. Even if cell service worked it wouldn't be convenient/affordable to dial in this way.
I always love it when Fed-Ex destroys something and then tries to hide it. One day I walked past the shipping office and I smelled the very strong odor of hydraulic oil coming from the room. I take a look inside since we shouldn't be receiving anything that has hydraulic oil in it. I found a bunch of boxes with the local Detroit Airport logo all over them and sealed with DET labeled tape. The cardboard was completely soaked through with the oil.
I carefully opened one of the boxes and found it contained servers! It appears that the original boxes got in some sort of accident at the airport and were completely soaked. At the airport Fed-Ex or the baggage handlers did us a "favor" and re-boxed everything. The servers were so coated (and filled) that even the new boxes were completely soaked through and the bottoms of the boxes were starting to pull apart. The Fe-Ex guy (so we wouldn't refuse them) dropped them off at lunch and then got some random person in the hall to sign off on it.
We had to pay for new servers to be built ASAP and shipped overnight (UPS this time) at huge cost for us. Since someone had signed off on the package we then had a very long fight to get Fed-Ex to pay for the equipment they destroyed. We never got the extra cost for the overnight shipping and the rush build reimbursed.
What I regret losing is not speed but function. Firewire allows target disk mode which is one of the best tools you can ever give your IT staff. Besides being useful for loads & backups, it can be real life saver when you have hardware failure or even when someone drops their laptop 5 minutes before an important meeting.
With the new laptops you'll have to pull the disk if you need to do any emergency data recovery. Sure it is only one screw to get the drives out, but target disk allowed you access without any tools and nearly instantly. The only think you need is a firewire cable and another mac.
My theory on the whole geek/nerd difference is that geeks shower.
Amen to that. Offline LAN parties are what sold me on the whole franchise to begin with. I got hooked at a WC LAN party and never looked back. I still regularly host LAN parties for WC3.
So you spawn a few games for people who don't have the disk. What happens? They have a good time playing a game they don't own and THEY BUY IT! Plus the people who don't play at home tend to get smashed rather early which just encourages them to buy it.Luckily WC3 is still in stores so new people to the group don't have to look far to get their copy. I guess the company is going to be more Activision and less Blizzard.
We have a hodgepodge system at my U. You can use a standard imap/pop email with any client you choose (my favorite since I use pine) or you can use Exchange. While the exchange calendaring does seem to work well the email portion does not. Even with IMAP setup on the exchange server the client side compatibility in a mixed OS environment isn't as seamless as a straight IMAP option. Also it doesn't seem to scale as well as other services.
Gmail has both pop & imap access and their web interface is fast even on a slow connection. The spam filtering is very good. I've got a Yahoo account and while I still check it once a month that usually is just to empty the inbox into the spam folder. MS & Google also have calendaring options, but I don't believe Yahoo does. If calendaring is important get a demo on how well it works for shared calendaring and if there are privacy options.
One important factor about handing your email over to a third party vendor. Get the privacy agreement clearly spelled out. Since you are a U (and especially if you are large U) you will probably have data that falls under HIPAA or is export controlled that gets sent through email. Make sure that your groups will have a reasonable right to privacy and won't have to start running their own mail servers because grants or projects they work on have security requirements that your vendor won't meet.
I thought pudding was sent via wireless? Oh wait Peter Mehring killed that project. http://www.crazyapplerumors.com/?p=105
She told me she only had eyes for the women of slashdot.... both of us.
That's it I'm going over there and getting my Star Wars figures back. She better not have taken Yoda out of his package!
I've got a digital television and a digital converter box and I can say both suck. On both no matter how clear and strong the signal is the close captioning rarely works. When it does work the text is about 2-3 seconds delayed. The analog version of the stations never have this problem.
The other problem is the "all or nothing" viewing. I live in the middle of nowhere. I can pull analog UHV & VHF signal from stations that are over 100 miles away, but I can only pull digital signal from stations that are within 50 miles. I have a very good UHV antenna so that isn't the problem.
I can't see purchasing a dish for *free* television. Oh well I'm glad I've got Netflix.
Isn't that the point? If they are smart enough that we can't find their info I want them working for us! It is always my goal to try and hire people with more knowledge or different knowledge than me.
When we've looked at hiring people in the past (student or otherwise) I always search the interwebs for dirt. I think it has saved us a ton of trouble. The worst one was when we had an applicant whose resume was one of our top picks and we were thinking about interviewing him. Then I saw his Myspace page.
He drank underage, admitted to doing drugs, liked to steal, and wanted to go to Iraq so he could "pop a cap in someones ass and not get in trouble for murder". (BTW he was a white guy so us not interviewing him was not racially motivated). He's is either technically stupid for posting this wherever anyone can see or not the kind of person we want running around with keys to the kingdom.
As a side note (and as others have previously mentioned) the people we've hired with almost no web presence have turned out to be the most technically competent.
Scientists have shown that the moon is moving away at a tiny yet measurable distance from the earth every year. If you do the math, you can calculate that 85 million years ago the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface. This would explain the death of the dinosaurs. The tallest ones, anyway.
Wrong direction, everyone should be riding the exact same bike. The Tour is about the athletes not the equipment.
I completely disagree with this. There are approximately 200 athletes in the Tour de France and I think it would be cruel and unusual to make them share one bike. It would be hard enough to get them to fit on there let alone figure out who actually won.