First of all, what you mean to say is that you don't like futuristic technology. None of the FF games are even close to science fiction. "Fantasy" is not analogous to "medieval technology", nor is "sci-fi" the same as "futuristic technology." There are other threads here with a more detailed explanation.
Second, you're flat out wrong. FF9, 11, and 12 are all rooted in medieval fantasy. Outside of the main series, Tactics and Crystal Chronicles fit in, too. There are plenty of castles in all of those games. 11 is even an MMORPG, which happens to be the topic of discussion here! If you want to be pedantic, I can also distinctly recall the word "castle" being used in FF8, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was used somewhere in 7 or 10, although I can't recall off the top of my head.
While I like Phantasy Star Online, most people would not consider it "massively multiplayer", and "sci-fi" is stretching it (come on, you're fighting dragons with a laser sword). The actual action is limited to a maximum of 4 players; the lobbies that people gather in have higher player limits, but they're still relatively small (32? 64? I forget). A "normal" MMORPG can support at least a few hundred players in an area at a time, sometimes thousands. It also lacks a persistant world -- there's no day/night cycle, no NPC schedules, and any items left on the ground will be lost to the ether as soon as you exit the current game.
You can't really say that these things only define "current" MMOs and weren't expected back in PSO's day -- there were plenty of MMORPGs before it that fit the bill (Ultima Online, for example).
With that said, though, Phantasy Star Universe is going to rock, and I'd recommend looking into it for anybody who's interested in a sci-fi MMORPG, even though it fits the bill only slightly moreso than PSO did.
That's happened to me, too, and I've worked in tech support. The lesson my boss taught me: if the light on the floppy drive is constantly on, the cable is upside-down. Apparently it's a pretty common problem.
You realize it's a bit hypocritical to say that after you say you're hoping for a sequel to VS, right?
By the way, FFXII and VS have the same director and composer (and I believe they share a few other team members, too, but I can't recall off the top of my head). They've got quite a bit in common, stylistically.
Dude! Nobody likes Sendmail. That's why they use things like Exim or Postfix. Getting a legit version of Advanced Server 2003 is serious overkill if you just need a mail server.
One is the number of options. Can't do it this way, try that way. You aren't forced to do things the same way everybody does, there may be another more efficient way to do the particular type of work that you do.
That's a completely theoretical argument. Could you name some exact situations where OS X forced you to do something that was not as efficient as it could have been if they had given you multiple options? If we're just talking theory, then it could also be said that it doesn't matter how many options there are to do something as long as the best one is available. If the best one can be presented, then what's the point in offering less efficient options?
With synaptic or adept, available in any Debian-like Linux, you have tens of thousands of software packets which you can install with a couple of mouse clicks. Installing software on the Mac is also very easy, but you have to get that software before you start installing.
Simply not true. With Fink or DarwinPorts, you can install software in the same way that programs like apt-get handle it. While they don't have quite as many packages in them as Debian's repositories, they've still got more than most people would ever need to install; if there's something they don't have, there's nothing stopping you from downloading and compiling it yourself. Sure, there are a few programs that don't work -- but the whole point of the open source community is that surely there's another option you can use, right?
Why do you think that? Some things that are easy in Linux are even easier in a Mac, I'll grant you that, but if you had tried using any modern Linux you'd know that Linux is better for anyone who is a moderate to heavy computer user. If you do anything more than sending pictures of your cat to your mom or if you use applications other than Photoshop, Linux is more powerful than a Mac.
Gotta disagree here. I spend 14+ hours a day at a computer, a good chunk of which is spend developing software (in C++, Python, and Java, primarily), and I'd say that OS X and Linux are roughly equally "powerful" (although that's an incredibly vague term), but simple things take much less work to accomplish on a Mac. Admittedly, I don't care about compiling my entire GUI from source or testing out the latest alpha version of some KDE widget, I just want to get my work done.
1) What exactly separates Doom from Oblivion? NPCs that talk to you and money to spend? You're welcome to play whatever sort of character you want in Doom. Sneak around and kill everything before it sees you, run in with guns blazing, blow everything up, try to run away without killing anything.
2) You can choose not to play the main quest at all in FFVII, too. Races chocobos until you end up in first place, then declare that you've "won." Sure, there's not much you can do if you refuse to make the plot progress, but I did say that Oblivion doesn't give you much more freedom. I'll admit that it gives a little. Nonetheless, joining the dark brotherhood doesn't really change anything; after you've played through it, then what? The rest of the world is still exactly the same, minus the NPCs you've murdered.
I am not saying that playing a role is being a pre-defined character. I'm saying that playing a role is playing a role. You're trying to define role-playing as a situation where, not only do you play a role, but you have free reign over the morality of that role. That's a subset of the set that the term "role-playing game" defines. Yes, if you interpret it loosely enough, you can consider almost any game a RPG. That doesn't mean that you should restrict the term so tightly that only the sub-genre you approve of can be called "RPGs"; that just means that when you use the term "RPG" to describe a game, you should be more specific if you don't want people to misinterpret what you're saying.
And please, don't insult me baselessly. I play D&D weekly, and I've been playing it since shortly after 2nd Ed., Revised was released.
Just because a game doesn't let you make many significant choices doesn't mean it's not a role-playing game. It's entirely possible to play a role without making choices -- look at centuries of theatre, for example. Plays have a set script, and actors are expected to go through the motions and read their lines. The play will turn out basically the same every time, but nobody would argue that the actors aren't playing roles. One could argue that they do make choices -- they can move differently, put different inflections in their voices, dress differently, etc., but you have the same degree of freedom in games like FFVII; you can walk in any direction you want, customize your characters' equipment and abilities, pick dialogue options that provoke different responses from NPCs, and so forth.
Besides, it's not like Oblivion really gives you much more freedom -- no matter what you do, the main plot line always turns out exactly the same. You can murder people left and right, and you'll still be praised as a hero in the end. There are no real consequences in the game, other than the fact that you'll eventually run out of NPCs to murder.
What you want is a choice-making game, not an RPG.
Why does it scream "unpatched" to you? Did you read the article? The computers weren't infected by old exploits -- they were infected by a Trojan that had been custom-written for the job. No patch or anti-virus software is going to detect a Trojan that's never been seen before. It's really pretty easy to write a little program that will autorun when Windows mounts a drive.
Furthermore, why do you put so many underscores in random places in your post?
Make sure you've got your units right. "b" is bit, "B" is byte; there are eight bits in a byte. If they adverties a max of 512 Kbps down, that's the same as a max of 64 KBps down. Your actual download speed will be slightly less than that, due to packet overhead, imperfections in the physical media, and so forth, so I would expect to get about 55 KB/s at most.
Similarly, if a service advertises 7 Mbps down, that's the same as that's the same as 896 KBps. ( 7 * 1024 / 8 ) I'd expect a maximum download speed of around 800 KBps, although at those sorts of rates, there will also be other factors limiting you (such as saturation of your connection due to other users and how much bandwidth the server you're connecting to has).
You might try out the AF Level Mod and see if you like it. I greatly prefer it to Oblivion's level system; now I can just use skills normally and not have to worry about maxing multipliers.
To be fair, Photoshop's PNG support is really pretty awful. Heck, its 8-bit PNGs frequently come out larger than equivalent GIFs. Try using this plug-in to save PNGs instead: http://www.fnordware.com/superpng/. You'll find that it's much faster and they come out smaller. Still not as small a JPEG (in most cases), but...
I don't think you understand exactly what "W3C compliant" means. It's not a rating system, nor is it any sort of flashy or "insecure" technology. The W3C's HTML 4.01 standard is over six years old, and it has been proven to be more than adequate. The W3C defines the standards for languages like HTML and CSS; "W3C compliant" just means that your HTML/CSS is valid, according to the standard. There are no "artificial ratings" to it; code is either compliant or it isn't. Why should you care? Because, if you write standards-compliant code, any web browser that can read standard HTML will be able to read your code.
Sure, maybe at the moment, everybody in your family uses IE 6.0, and you can throw together sloppy code that would make a validator cry; just wait until somebody decides to try out that new "Firefox" program they've heard of, or maybe somebody else decides to buy a Mac and use Safari, and suddenly everybody wants to know why your web page is the only one that doesn't look right. Nobody will understand your points if they can't even read them. What will you do when your grandma's sight gets bad enough that she can't read text on a monitor any more, or if somebody goes blind, and your pages can't be parsed by a text reader for the blind? Don't answer with, "I'll just make everything compliant whenever that happens." It has been proven repeatedly in the world of engineering that it's much easier to just do something right the first time rather than do it wrong the first time and then fix it later.
Try looking around on http://www.w3.org/ for more information about why standards are good.
It sounds like PhysOrg's interviewer was talking to some PR rep who didn't understand how the technology actually worked. Nintendo's web page says it uses Bluetooth.
Can you point to any announcements from to Nintendo that say that? I can point you to videos that show that the controller does not need to even remotely be pointed towards the sensors. Besides, that would make it impossible to hold the controller sideways and use it like a standard game pad. But, maybe Nintendo's invented some form of non-directional IR emitter...
Do you even know what a gyroscope and accelerometer are? Using an accelerometer for tilting would make no sense at all, considering how hard it would be to accurately measure acceleration when a controller's being tilted around and arbitrary point. And a gyroscope for "pointing"? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
To be fair, Microsoft's controller (and Sony's new one) used a gyroscope/accelerometer combination to track movement. Nintendo is using RF direction finding to determine the exact position of the controller in space.
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First of all, what you mean to say is that you don't like futuristic technology. None of the FF games are even close to science fiction. "Fantasy" is not analogous to "medieval technology", nor is "sci-fi" the same as "futuristic technology." There are other threads here with a more detailed explanation.
Second, you're flat out wrong. FF9, 11, and 12 are all rooted in medieval fantasy. Outside of the main series, Tactics and Crystal Chronicles fit in, too. There are plenty of castles in all of those games. 11 is even an MMORPG, which happens to be the topic of discussion here! If you want to be pedantic, I can also distinctly recall the word "castle" being used in FF8, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was used somewhere in 7 or 10, although I can't recall off the top of my head.
While I like Phantasy Star Online, most people would not consider it "massively multiplayer", and "sci-fi" is stretching it (come on, you're fighting dragons with a laser sword). The actual action is limited to a maximum of 4 players; the lobbies that people gather in have higher player limits, but they're still relatively small (32? 64? I forget). A "normal" MMORPG can support at least a few hundred players in an area at a time, sometimes thousands. It also lacks a persistant world -- there's no day/night cycle, no NPC schedules, and any items left on the ground will be lost to the ether as soon as you exit the current game.
You can't really say that these things only define "current" MMOs and weren't expected back in PSO's day -- there were plenty of MMORPGs before it that fit the bill (Ultima Online, for example).
With that said, though, Phantasy Star Universe is going to rock, and I'd recommend looking into it for anybody who's interested in a sci-fi MMORPG, even though it fits the bill only slightly moreso than PSO did.
Try running "vimdiff" from the command line and pass it the name of two files you want to compare. Works rather nicely, in my opinion.
That's happened to me, too, and I've worked in tech support. The lesson my boss taught me: if the light on the floppy drive is constantly on, the cable is upside-down. Apparently it's a pretty common problem.
Come down to San Antonio! I've got a pretty nice two bedroom apartment that's cheaper than a PS3 per month.
Enough of this rinse and repeat crap.
You realize it's a bit hypocritical to say that after you say you're hoping for a sequel to VS, right?
By the way, FFXII and VS have the same director and composer (and I believe they share a few other team members, too, but I can't recall off the top of my head). They've got quite a bit in common, stylistically.
Dude! Nobody likes Sendmail. That's why they use things like Exim or Postfix. Getting a legit version of Advanced Server 2003 is serious overkill if you just need a mail server.
One is the number of options. Can't do it this way, try that way. You aren't forced to do things the same way everybody does, there may be another more efficient way to do the particular type of work that you do.
That's a completely theoretical argument. Could you name some exact situations where OS X forced you to do something that was not as efficient as it could have been if they had given you multiple options? If we're just talking theory, then it could also be said that it doesn't matter how many options there are to do something as long as the best one is available. If the best one can be presented, then what's the point in offering less efficient options?
With synaptic or adept, available in any Debian-like Linux, you have tens of thousands of software packets which you can install with a couple of mouse clicks. Installing software on the Mac is also very easy, but you have to get that software before you start installing.
Simply not true. With Fink or DarwinPorts, you can install software in the same way that programs like apt-get handle it. While they don't have quite as many packages in them as Debian's repositories, they've still got more than most people would ever need to install; if there's something they don't have, there's nothing stopping you from downloading and compiling it yourself. Sure, there are a few programs that don't work -- but the whole point of the open source community is that surely there's another option you can use, right?
Why do you think that? Some things that are easy in Linux are even easier in a Mac, I'll grant you that, but if you had tried using any modern Linux you'd know that Linux is better for anyone who is a moderate to heavy computer user. If you do anything more than sending pictures of your cat to your mom or if you use applications other than Photoshop, Linux is more powerful than a Mac.
Gotta disagree here. I spend 14+ hours a day at a computer, a good chunk of which is spend developing software (in C++, Python, and Java, primarily), and I'd say that OS X and Linux are roughly equally "powerful" (although that's an incredibly vague term), but simple things take much less work to accomplish on a Mac. Admittedly, I don't care about compiling my entire GUI from source or testing out the latest alpha version of some KDE widget, I just want to get my work done.
1) What exactly separates Doom from Oblivion? NPCs that talk to you and money to spend? You're welcome to play whatever sort of character you want in Doom. Sneak around and kill everything before it sees you, run in with guns blazing, blow everything up, try to run away without killing anything.
2) You can choose not to play the main quest at all in FFVII, too. Races chocobos until you end up in first place, then declare that you've "won." Sure, there's not much you can do if you refuse to make the plot progress, but I did say that Oblivion doesn't give you much more freedom. I'll admit that it gives a little. Nonetheless, joining the dark brotherhood doesn't really change anything; after you've played through it, then what? The rest of the world is still exactly the same, minus the NPCs you've murdered.
I am not saying that playing a role is being a pre-defined character. I'm saying that playing a role is playing a role. You're trying to define role-playing as a situation where, not only do you play a role, but you have free reign over the morality of that role. That's a subset of the set that the term "role-playing game" defines. Yes, if you interpret it loosely enough, you can consider almost any game a RPG. That doesn't mean that you should restrict the term so tightly that only the sub-genre you approve of can be called "RPGs"; that just means that when you use the term "RPG" to describe a game, you should be more specific if you don't want people to misinterpret what you're saying.
And please, don't insult me baselessly. I play D&D weekly, and I've been playing it since shortly after 2nd Ed., Revised was released.
Just because a game doesn't let you make many significant choices doesn't mean it's not a role-playing game. It's entirely possible to play a role without making choices -- look at centuries of theatre, for example. Plays have a set script, and actors are expected to go through the motions and read their lines. The play will turn out basically the same every time, but nobody would argue that the actors aren't playing roles. One could argue that they do make choices -- they can move differently, put different inflections in their voices, dress differently, etc., but you have the same degree of freedom in games like FFVII; you can walk in any direction you want, customize your characters' equipment and abilities, pick dialogue options that provoke different responses from NPCs, and so forth.
Besides, it's not like Oblivion really gives you much more freedom -- no matter what you do, the main plot line always turns out exactly the same. You can murder people left and right, and you'll still be praised as a hero in the end. There are no real consequences in the game, other than the fact that you'll eventually run out of NPCs to murder.
What you want is a choice-making game, not an RPG.
Why does it scream "unpatched" to you? Did you read the article? The computers weren't infected by old exploits -- they were infected by a Trojan that had been custom-written for the job. No patch or anti-virus software is going to detect a Trojan that's never been seen before. It's really pretty easy to write a little program that will autorun when Windows mounts a drive.
Furthermore, why do you put so many underscores in random places in your post?
Make sure you've got your units right. "b" is bit, "B" is byte; there are eight bits in a byte. If they adverties a max of 512 Kbps down, that's the same as a max of 64 KBps down. Your actual download speed will be slightly less than that, due to packet overhead, imperfections in the physical media, and so forth, so I would expect to get about 55 KB/s at most.
Similarly, if a service advertises 7 Mbps down, that's the same as that's the same as 896 KBps. ( 7 * 1024 / 8 ) I'd expect a maximum download speed of around 800 KBps, although at those sorts of rates, there will also be other factors limiting you (such as saturation of your connection due to other users and how much bandwidth the server you're connecting to has).
You might try out the AF Level Mod and see if you like it. I greatly prefer it to Oblivion's level system; now I can just use skills normally and not have to worry about maxing multipliers.
I make sure to open every book at least once, because you never know which ones will give you stat bonuses.
Well, and "The Lusty Argonian Maid" was a fairly amusing read.
Man, why would you use lynx when you can just use telnet? I hate waiting for curses to redraw the screen.
Right, because it's not like you can play any of the Doom games on a Mac. Funny! (but wrong)
I tried this on a 7MP photo. jpeg had it down to 3MB, jpeg2000 down to 1MB (same quality), png with that plugin was 9MB!
So the PNG was only 3x larger than the JPEG? That's pretty darn good for a 7 megapixel photograph.
I'm guessing that you may not understand the difference between lossy and lossless compression. Take a look here.
To be fair, Photoshop's PNG support is really pretty awful. Heck, its 8-bit PNGs frequently come out larger than equivalent GIFs. Try using this plug-in to save PNGs instead: http://www.fnordware.com/superpng/. You'll find that it's much faster and they come out smaller. Still not as small a JPEG (in most cases), but...
I don't think you understand exactly what "W3C compliant" means. It's not a rating system, nor is it any sort of flashy or "insecure" technology. The W3C's HTML 4.01 standard is over six years old, and it has been proven to be more than adequate. The W3C defines the standards for languages like HTML and CSS; "W3C compliant" just means that your HTML/CSS is valid, according to the standard. There are no "artificial ratings" to it; code is either compliant or it isn't. Why should you care? Because, if you write standards-compliant code, any web browser that can read standard HTML will be able to read your code.
Sure, maybe at the moment, everybody in your family uses IE 6.0, and you can throw together sloppy code that would make a validator cry; just wait until somebody decides to try out that new "Firefox" program they've heard of, or maybe somebody else decides to buy a Mac and use Safari, and suddenly everybody wants to know why your web page is the only one that doesn't look right. Nobody will understand your points if they can't even read them. What will you do when your grandma's sight gets bad enough that she can't read text on a monitor any more, or if somebody goes blind, and your pages can't be parsed by a text reader for the blind? Don't answer with, "I'll just make everything compliant whenever that happens." It has been proven repeatedly in the world of engineering that it's much easier to just do something right the first time rather than do it wrong the first time and then fix it later.
Try looking around on http://www.w3.org/ for more information about why standards are good.
It sounds like PhysOrg's interviewer was talking to some PR rep who didn't understand how the technology actually worked. Nintendo's web page says it uses Bluetooth.
Can you point to any announcements from to Nintendo that say that? I can point you to videos that show that the controller does not need to even remotely be pointed towards the sensors. Besides, that would make it impossible to hold the controller sideways and use it like a standard game pad. But, maybe Nintendo's invented some form of non-directional IR emitter...
Do you even know what a gyroscope and accelerometer are? Using an accelerometer for tilting would make no sense at all, considering how hard it would be to accurately measure acceleration when a controller's being tilted around and arbitrary point. And a gyroscope for "pointing"? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
To be fair, Microsoft's controller (and Sony's new one) used a gyroscope/accelerometer combination to track movement. Nintendo is using RF direction finding to determine the exact position of the controller in space.