Well, this is the final impetus I needed to order Redhat 6.1 from CheapBytes--I'd been holding off before because the Live! binary driver only worked with the 6.0 kernel I plastered over my 5.9 system (and then only grudgingly, complaining about the -15 version indicator of all things). I've emailed at least twice asking for the SBL! source to be opened; I'm glad that against all odds, Creative finally listened to reason and agreed to do so.
Gonna be nice to be on the bleeding-edge side of the non-experimental setups again.
I do both! I run a line out of my DVD decoder card in the back of my computer to my TV set. At the moment, I can only do this when I'm in Windows mode, but I'm hoping that'll change soon. I'll swap out my Hollywood Plus for a Linux-compatible card when one becomes available.
As long as we're dreaming, I'd like to suggest that the next movie be based on Peter David's novel Q-in-Law. They wanted to make this into a TNG episode, but there was too much red tape in the way or something; I don't know the whole story. With the two most memorable recurring guests in the franchise around, it would be an absolute blast.
Too bad it'll never happen. Oh well. At least I have the book.
I know what you mean. I stopped watching Trek during the first year of Voyager (more because it wasn't convenient than that I didn't like it anymore), and from what I've heard since then, I only regret it a little bit, and that for Deep Space Nine. Voyager, it seems, has started borrowing plots from bad fan parodies. I find this Voyager quote to be rather rather self-descriptive: "Get this cheese to sickbay!"
I recently passed the 25 Karma mark and gained the new privilege of an automatic +1 rating to the posts I made (my Karma's currently 31, I just checked it). I was very proud of that accomplishment...it meant that I had contributed enough worthwhile discussion to be considered a valued member of the community.
Now, however, it seems I'm not getting that bonus anymore, and the option to post without it is gone.
And as an aside, our technology has advanced in Trekkish directions, too. We now (or will soon) have...
Handheld "communicators" with which we can reach out and touch anyone on the planet, or be thus reached. Heck, we have cellular phones not much bigger than a mini-box of matches now--way smaller than the original Old Series communicators, and approaching the "wearable badge" size of TNG.
Pneumatic hypodermic syringes.
Handheld textual display and computing devices with touch-sensitive screens, some of which can even tap into our data networks via wireless communication. (It is just so wickedly appropriate to be able to read Q-in-Law on a PADD-like device (my Palm IIIe), courtesy of Peanut Press)
Paperless books (q.v. Peanut Press)...will physical books soon become the rarity that they are in Picard's day?
Hand-held sensory devices (well, okay, they aren't actually here in widespread use in the consumer market yet, but I've heard of some such gadgets that are gradually getting there).
I have to wonder whether at least some of these advances weren't due to kids getting inspired by Star Trek and saying, "I'm gonna invent that when I grow up."
How peculiar! That's precisely how Pepsi and Coke tend to taste to me!
I'm a big Dr. Pepper & Mt. Dew person...but the funny thing is, I drank Wal-Mart's store brand Mt. Dew-alike, Green Lightning aka Mountain Lightning, for quite some time, and the only real difference I could tell was that the Wal-Mart store brand didn't have those ultra-wide mouth-holes that the Mt. Dew cans instituted a while back. And they were cheaper, too.
It's funny...people like to claim they aren't affected by advertising, that it's more annoying than effective...but the thing is, it is effective--a lot more than people realize, if only subliminally. Let's play a little word-association game. If I say "overnight package delivery," what is the first name that pops into your mind? Or, alternately, if I said, "When it absolutely positively has to get there overnight"? I would bet real money it's Federal Express in both cases.
And that's the really insidious thing about advertising. Like Pavlov's dog by the dinner bell, we're conditioned by constant, repetitive bombardment of commercials. While those commercials may not prompt you, upon watching them, to go out and ship a package or buy a soft drink or rent a car or fly an airline somewhere...the folks paying for them know that sooner or later, you're going to want to do one or all of those things...and that if they can lodge their products firmly enough in your subconscious mind that they're the first thing you think of when the time comes...guess what, that ad just paid off. And the fact that companies continue to pay for advertising and product placement is proof that the system is working.
And, ironically enough, the consumers themselves subsidize their own indoctrination by paying premium brand prices for brand-name products, prices that include money to cover overhead--including costs of advertising--instead of buying the cheaper, and often equivalent, generic substitutes. Think about that the next time you plunk down fifty or seventy-five cents to "obey your thirst."
Oddly enough, on my campus, the Coke machine prices are the one vending machine price that hasn't changed. (Well, the cup-drop machines went up, but the canned dispensers are still at fifty cents per 12oz aluminum can--which is cheaper than I've seen it just about anywhere else, including some parts of town.
Even so, buying it by the 12 & 24 pack is >=50%cheaper, especially at the K-Mart where I get a 10% discount already. A classmate and I have worked a deal where we split the cost of a case, and I'll keep them in my fridge and bring them to class with me every day.
What I find interesting is how the article notes that this could lead to vending machine price wars, wherein they try to undercut the competition by selling cheaper. Given that for a lot of people, colas are highly substitutable anyway...this could be interesting.
I'm no expert, and only know what I've heard, but what I've heard is that PRK involves making little slits in your cornea, and thus weakening it, which means if you got a sharp impact to it, it would be easier for it to tear. Laser surgery, on the other hand, would reshape it and leave it intact.
That would be a consideration for me, I think. (And I may well have it done eventually, but only when I can afford it.:)
Y'know, it's a lot easier to be noble in the abstract. Sure, let's make these grand, philanthropic treaties that block access to the moon. Nobody's going to be colonizing there in our lifetimes anyway, the congressmen might think, and it makes us look all noble and humanitarian to the constituents back home.
I have to wonder just how long all these treaties will hold up when travel to and colonization of the moon (or Mars, etc.) becomes non-trivial.
After all, nuclear test-ban treaties are broken all the time...
Not to argue with the main point of the editorial, which is interesting and thoughtful (though nothing we couldn't have come up with on our own;), it seems to me that two or three of the paragraphs in the story look rather familiar...rather like they've been lifted almost verbatim from last week's New York Times article on the game--a few words have been changed, but the phrasing is the same. Whether this was accidental or just plain lazy on Jon's part, I can't say...
...for being an early adopter. Maybe other people have more money to throw around than I do, but I wouldn't want to order a Visor just now anyway. My IIIe, crippled though it is, can still do most of the stuff that a Visor could, since I don't believe there are very many springboard modules out yet...and with color Palms on the horizon, why would I want to buy something that I'd just want to trade in again a week later?
Not to mention that by a few months from now, they'll probably be available in Best Buys and Circuit Cities and such all across the country, with no pesky waiting for your order to come in.
I am looking forward to the Visor's enhanced capacities...but not to the point where I want to subject myself to the hassle of ordering them direct yet.
You know, you can get Screenwrite, which allows you to write on the screen. The thing is, I'm actually glad for the Palm's separate writespace. I can put a piece of post-it notepaper over it to keep it from scratching up, and I don't write on the screen as much. I can replace the notepaper, but once the screen gets scratched up, that's that.
Anyway...I'm perfectly happy with my Palm, nonscreen-writing space and all.
(I guess it's too late in the day for this message to have much chance of getting moderated up to where many people will read it. Oh well.)
As someone who works a register at K-Mart (just got back from a four-hour shift today, in fact), I've had a bit of time and cause to ruminate on this subject.
My K-Mart accepts credit cards (of course) and debit cards. As a matter of policy, register operators are supposed to verify signatures on receipts against signatures on back of cards (and ask for ID if the card is unsigned). It's kind of an annoying hassle for both operator and customer ("Why do you have to compare my signature? Doesn't the picture on the license look enough like me?"), which is why a lot of checkout operators don't do it (especially with the new PINpads we've got that let customers run their own cards through). But I do, and occasionally get complimented on my perspicacity by the customers.
The thing is, a lot of the time the signatures don't look a darned thing alike, and what am I supposed to do? Some people just don't sign the same from signature to signature; am I supposed to deny them their purchase based on their inability to duplicate a scrawl?
I, as a cashier, would feel a lot better with some sort of digsig pad (kind of like the folks at Best Buy and Circuit City have, I suppose) with an LCD display signature device--something that would take the customer's signature and flash a little thingie on the screen saying "Verifying..." on it and then verify it against the credit card company or bank's database. After all, we do this already with debit cards or the MICR reader on checks. It would be less work and less responsibility for us (and less likelihood that the #%$@^!! register printer would choose to eat the credit card slip instead of printing it out). And I think the customers would feel better, too, knowing that their signature was being checked on, and not just eyeballed by fallible cashiers with pressure on them to get to the next person in line.
(And maybe that way it would also eliminate those credit card slips we have to have signed for the bank to authorize the transactions. Card number, expiration date, and signature, all in the same place...talk about a security risk!)
Whilst we have ported portions of our code to several UNIX platforms we currently have no plans to support LINUX. However I will forward your message to our product manager for consideration.
Which would seem to suggest that if enough people write them to have an impact, they could come out with the necessary software...
Well, I downloaded the software--or tried to, at least. I got about 900K into the 1.2-meg download before I accidentally caused the download to abort, and couldn't get back in to download it again. Oh well, I'll try again this evening.
I'm not sure how useful this is going to be; I dual-boot and am in Linux most of the time (since I found sync utilities for my Palm), and even when I'm in Windows, I don't have Word on it--I don't have the hard drive space! On the other hand, I can get a legitimately-registered copy of Office 2000 from my school, if I just had the space on which to put it...guess I'm going to have to see about getting one of those 12-gig hard drives to move all my games onto...
Well, I'll just have to see how useful this turns out to be. At least it's free (until October 31).
If the PenOp people are smart, they'll soon come out with plugins and packages for other popular wordproc applications, including the Linux ones. I've written their tech support address to ask about that possibility, and would suggest that anyone else with an interest in this new technology do the same. Maybe if they perceive demand, they'll do it sooner.
and Starcraft still has a very healthy online gaming community based around it even so long after the original release.
Even if they HAD released halflife, why would we want it NOW?
You answer your own question. Having been active in it for a good while, I can tell you with certainty that Half-Life does have a strong gaming community based around it. What's more, there are already a dozen mods out for it, some of which are extremely popular (Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Action Half-Life, Science and Industry), and more on the way. There's a much-awaited expansion pack, Opposing Force, due out next month.
Quake3 (like halflife only better) is just around the corner,
Half-Life is far from dead. Quake III isn't gonna kill it any more than Half-Life killed Unreal. (Well, okay, IMO Half-Life blows Unreal away, but that's just my opinion.:)
and some form of Tribes (an ORIGINAL game, instead of just more derivitive mindless point-and-shoot..) may be released.
You've never actually played Half-Life, have you? Well, all right, I'll grant that generic HL multiplay is kind of lacking, but single-play requires a lot of thought rather than just shooting. And the great teamplay mods that have come out (especially Team Fortress Classic and Counterstrike) more than make up for it.
Of course, according to Gabe's letter, the multiplay feature (and those mods) would have been kind of lacking in Mac Half-Life anyway, which kind of renders the point moot, but still, Half-Life is the best FPS I've yet played, and that includes Q3Atest.
Having Halflife would have been cool at the time it was released, but now I for one am no longer very interested in it.
Well, it's the same endless-loop dichotomy that we get in other computer-related instances.
If you want your new computer to be better...wait.
Take me, for example...I bought a Palm IIIe a couple months ago...a couple of weeks before the Visors came out, and boy don't I wish I had waited now.:)
On the other hand...I've had the use of the IIIe for those last two months, and will have it for more months to come...and when I get my financial aid at the beginning of the next semester, well, a friend of mine is already willing to buy it from me whenever I'm ready to sell it, and I'll upgrade to a new model. By then it should be apparent which new flavors of Palmoid have the best prospects (and their already-low prices might have come down even further), and I'll know which one to get.
My advice to you is to go ahead, jump in. If you're uncertain which new one to buy, get an older one; there are plenty of used Palm Pros & IIIs floating around on Ebay. One of those should do you just fine 'til you're ready to make the big investment.
Well, according to a TV interview transcript posted on their site, nobody actually gets "killed"...the angels and demons just get "banished" to their respective planes when you deal them enough damage. Also, it's hinted that if you play as a demon and "win," you really lose in the end. "Evil demands its own reward" and so forth.
Isn't it funny how people's opinions and motives of something Christian change depending on whether it's expressly produced by evangelical Christians or not? In Nomine, the Steve Jackson Games RPG of demons vs. angels, is simply a game using the war in Heaven as an interesting setting, and I doubt slashdotters would be up in arms over that...but one whiff of serious intent behind it, and boom, it's ridiculous.
I don't think they could open-source the engine even if they wanted to...if I recall correctly, they used (a modified version of?) the Quake II engine for Half-Life.
...here I'd been telling all my Macophile friends about how good Half-Life was, and some were even looking forward to playing it. I'd been hoping I would be able to gib them on my favorite 3D-shooter game, but alas...and if Gabe's note is to be believed, I wouldn't have been able to anyway.
I posted about this to the Half-Life newsgroup, and thus far every one of the 10 or so responses has been resoundingly antiMac ("Great! Now they need to cancel the Macintosh!"). Losers
When I mentioned this to some of my chatroom friends, they wondered if Gabe's note might not be the whole story. Sierra, it seems, is being gutted from the inside out, with even some of the more popular games being pulled for no apparent reason (such as the B5 flightsim, which was essentially ready for release when it was canned...what sense does that make?). They seem, my friend suggested, to be staking their life on "Deer Hunter".
What do you think...is Sierra dying? Will they be dead and gone by a couple years from now?
I'm glad that Half-Life: Opposing Force is being made by another company...means there's much more chance we'll actually get to see it.
In related news, has anyone heard about the Christian first-person-shooter game that's hitting stores this week? There was a story in the NY Times about it the other day. It sounds like a dumb idea, but then, so did "Deer Hunter" and look at how well that's done.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is the final impetus I needed to order Redhat 6.1 from CheapBytes--I'd been holding off before because the Live! binary driver only worked with the 6.0 kernel I plastered over my 5.9 system (and then only grudgingly, complaining about the -15 version indicator of all things). I've emailed at least twice asking for the SBL! source to be opened; I'm glad that against all odds, Creative finally listened to reason and agreed to do so.
Gonna be nice to be on the bleeding-edge side of the non-experimental setups again.
I do both! I run a line out of my DVD decoder card in the back of my computer to my TV set. At the moment, I can only do this when I'm in Windows mode, but I'm hoping that'll change soon. I'll swap out my Hollywood Plus for a Linux-compatible card when one becomes available.
As long as we're dreaming, I'd like to suggest that the next movie be based on Peter David's novel Q-in-Law . They wanted to make this into a TNG episode, but there was too much red tape in the way or something; I don't know the whole story. With the two most memorable recurring guests in the franchise around, it would be an absolute blast.
Too bad it'll never happen. Oh well. At least I have the book.
I know what you mean. I stopped watching Trek during the first year of Voyager (more because it wasn't convenient than that I didn't like it anymore), and from what I've heard since then, I only regret it a little bit, and that for Deep Space Nine. Voyager, it seems, has started borrowing plots from bad fan parodies. I find this Voyager quote to be rather rather self-descriptive: "Get this cheese to sickbay!"
I recently passed the 25 Karma mark and gained the new privilege of an automatic +1 rating to the posts I made (my Karma's currently 31, I just checked it). I was very proud of that accomplishment...it meant that I had contributed enough worthwhile discussion to be considered a valued member of the community.
Now, however, it seems I'm not getting that bonus anymore, and the option to post without it is gone.
What gives?
- Handheld "communicators" with which we can reach out and touch anyone on the planet, or be thus reached. Heck, we have cellular phones not much bigger than a mini-box of matches now--way smaller than the original Old Series communicators, and approaching the "wearable badge" size of TNG.
- Pneumatic hypodermic syringes.
- Handheld textual display and computing devices with touch-sensitive screens, some of which can even tap into our data networks via wireless communication. (It is just so wickedly appropriate to be able to read Q-in-Law on a PADD-like device (my Palm IIIe), courtesy of Peanut Press)
- Paperless books (q.v. Peanut Press)...will physical books soon become the rarity that they are in Picard's day?
- Hand-held sensory devices (well, okay, they aren't actually here in widespread use in the consumer market yet, but I've heard of some such gadgets that are gradually getting there).
I have to wonder whether at least some of these advances weren't due to kids getting inspired by Star Trek and saying, "I'm gonna invent that when I grow up."How peculiar! That's precisely how Pepsi and Coke tend to taste to me!
I'm a big Dr. Pepper & Mt. Dew person...but the funny thing is, I drank Wal-Mart's store brand Mt. Dew-alike, Green Lightning aka Mountain Lightning, for quite some time, and the only real difference I could tell was that the Wal-Mart store brand didn't have those ultra-wide mouth-holes that the Mt. Dew cans instituted a while back. And they were cheaper, too.
It's funny...people like to claim they aren't affected by advertising, that it's more annoying than effective...but the thing is, it is effective--a lot more than people realize, if only subliminally. Let's play a little word-association game. If I say "overnight package delivery," what is the first name that pops into your mind? Or, alternately, if I said, "When it absolutely positively has to get there overnight"? I would bet real money it's Federal Express in both cases.
And that's the really insidious thing about advertising. Like Pavlov's dog by the dinner bell, we're conditioned by constant, repetitive bombardment of commercials. While those commercials may not prompt you, upon watching them, to go out and ship a package or buy a soft drink or rent a car or fly an airline somewhere...the folks paying for them know that sooner or later, you're going to want to do one or all of those things...and that if they can lodge their products firmly enough in your subconscious mind that they're the first thing you think of when the time comes...guess what, that ad just paid off. And the fact that companies continue to pay for advertising and product placement is proof that the system is working.
And, ironically enough, the consumers themselves subsidize their own indoctrination by paying premium brand prices for brand-name products, prices that include money to cover overhead--including costs of advertising--instead of buying the cheaper, and often equivalent, generic substitutes. Think about that the next time you plunk down fifty or seventy-five cents to "obey your thirst."
Oddly enough, on my campus, the Coke machine prices are the one vending machine price that hasn't changed. (Well, the cup-drop machines went up, but the canned dispensers are still at fifty cents per 12oz aluminum can--which is cheaper than I've seen it just about anywhere else, including some parts of town.
Even so, buying it by the 12 & 24 pack is >=50%cheaper, especially at the K-Mart where I get a 10% discount already. A classmate and I have worked a deal where we split the cost of a case, and I'll keep them in my fridge and bring them to class with me every day.
What I find interesting is how the article notes that this could lead to vending machine price wars, wherein they try to undercut the competition by selling cheaper. Given that for a lot of people, colas are highly substitutable anyway...this could be interesting.
I'm no expert, and only know what I've heard, but what I've heard is that PRK involves making little slits in your cornea, and thus weakening it, which means if you got a sharp impact to it, it would be easier for it to tear. Laser surgery, on the other hand, would reshape it and leave it intact.
:)
That would be a consideration for me, I think. (And I may well have it done eventually, but only when I can afford it.
I meant to say when travel to and colonization becomes trivial, not non-trivial. Sigh.
Y'know, it's a lot easier to be noble in the abstract. Sure, let's make these grand, philanthropic treaties that block access to the moon. Nobody's going to be colonizing there in our lifetimes anyway, the congressmen might think, and it makes us look all noble and humanitarian to the constituents back home.
I have to wonder just how long all these treaties will hold up when travel to and colonization of the moon (or Mars, etc.) becomes non-trivial.
After all, nuclear test-ban treaties are broken all the time...
Junkbuster comes in a Windows flavor, too. I use it on my home dual boot system in both its Windows and Linux versions.
Not to argue with the main point of the editorial, which is interesting and thoughtful (though nothing we couldn't have come up with on our own ;), it seems to me that two or three of the paragraphs in the story look rather familiar...rather like they've been lifted almost verbatim from last week's New York Times article on the game--a few words have been changed, but the phrasing is the same. Whether this was accidental or just plain lazy on Jon's part, I can't say...
...for being an early adopter. Maybe other people have more money to throw around than I do, but I wouldn't want to order a Visor just now anyway. My IIIe, crippled though it is, can still do most of the stuff that a Visor could, since I don't believe there are very many springboard modules out yet...and with color Palms on the horizon, why would I want to buy something that I'd just want to trade in again a week later?
Not to mention that by a few months from now, they'll probably be available in Best Buys and Circuit Cities and such all across the country, with no pesky waiting for your order to come in.
I am looking forward to the Visor's enhanced capacities...but not to the point where I want to subject myself to the hassle of ordering them direct yet.
You know, you can get Screenwrite, which allows you to write on the screen. The thing is, I'm actually glad for the Palm's separate writespace. I can put a piece of post-it notepaper over it to keep it from scratching up, and I don't write on the screen as much. I can replace the notepaper, but once the screen gets scratched up, that's that.
Anyway...I'm perfectly happy with my Palm, nonscreen-writing space and all.
It's a part-time job to help pay for my college education. Pays better than on-campus work.
(I guess it's too late in the day for this message to have much chance of getting moderated up to where many people will read it. Oh well.)
As someone who works a register at K-Mart (just got back from a four-hour shift today, in fact), I've had a bit of time and cause to ruminate on this subject.
My K-Mart accepts credit cards (of course) and debit cards. As a matter of policy, register operators are supposed to verify signatures on receipts against signatures on back of cards (and ask for ID if the card is unsigned). It's kind of an annoying hassle for both operator and customer ("Why do you have to compare my signature? Doesn't the picture on the license look enough like me?"), which is why a lot of checkout operators don't do it (especially with the new PINpads we've got that let customers run their own cards through). But I do, and occasionally get complimented on my perspicacity by the customers.
The thing is, a lot of the time the signatures don't look a darned thing alike, and what am I supposed to do? Some people just don't sign the same from signature to signature; am I supposed to deny them their purchase based on their inability to duplicate a scrawl?
I, as a cashier, would feel a lot better with some sort of digsig pad (kind of like the folks at Best Buy and Circuit City have, I suppose) with an LCD display signature device--something that would take the customer's signature and flash a little thingie on the screen saying "Verifying..." on it and then verify it against the credit card company or bank's database. After all, we do this already with debit cards or the MICR reader on checks. It would be less work and less responsibility for us (and less likelihood that the #%$@^!! register printer would choose to eat the credit card slip instead of printing it out). And I think the customers would feel better, too, knowing that their signature was being checked on, and not just eyeballed by fallible cashiers with pressure on them to get to the next person in line.
(And maybe that way it would also eliminate those credit card slips we have to have signed for the bank to authorize the transactions. Card number, expiration date, and signature, all in the same place...talk about a security risk!)
The email address is support@penop.com.
Well, I downloaded the software--or tried to, at least. I got about 900K into the 1.2-meg download before I accidentally caused the download to abort, and couldn't get back in to download it again. Oh well, I'll try again this evening.
I'm not sure how useful this is going to be; I dual-boot and am in Linux most of the time (since I found sync utilities for my Palm), and even when I'm in Windows, I don't have Word on it--I don't have the hard drive space! On the other hand, I can get a legitimately-registered copy of Office 2000 from my school, if I just had the space on which to put it...guess I'm going to have to see about getting one of those 12-gig hard drives to move all my games onto...
Well, I'll just have to see how useful this turns out to be. At least it's free (until October 31).
If the PenOp people are smart, they'll soon come out with plugins and packages for other popular wordproc applications, including the Linux ones. I've written their tech support address to ask about that possibility, and would suggest that anyone else with an interest in this new technology do the same. Maybe if they perceive demand, they'll do it sooner.
Ten years down the road..."
"Omigod! You're Mel Gibson! Can I...can I get your autograph?"
"Why, sure."
(fumbling with Palms)
beep!
"Wow, thanks! I'll...never erase this!"
You answer your own question. Having been active in it for a good while, I can tell you with certainty that Half-Life does have a strong gaming community based around it. What's more, there are already a dozen mods out for it, some of which are extremely popular (Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Action Half-Life, Science and Industry), and more on the way. There's a much-awaited expansion pack, Opposing Force, due out next month.
Half-Life is far from dead. Quake III isn't gonna kill it any more than Half-Life killed Unreal. (Well, okay, IMO Half-Life blows Unreal away, but that's just my opinion.
You've never actually played Half-Life, have you? Well, all right, I'll grant that generic HL multiplay is kind of lacking, but single-play requires a lot of thought rather than just shooting. And the great teamplay mods that have come out (especially Team Fortress Classic and Counterstrike) more than make up for it.
Of course, according to Gabe's letter, the multiplay feature (and those mods) would have been kind of lacking in Mac Half-Life anyway, which kind of renders the point moot, but still, Half-Life is the best FPS I've yet played, and that includes Q3Atest.
Too bad...you're missing out.
Well, it's the same endless-loop dichotomy that we get in other computer-related instances.
:)
If you want your new computer to be better...wait.
Take me, for example...I bought a Palm IIIe a couple months ago...a couple of weeks before the Visors came out, and boy don't I wish I had waited now.
On the other hand...I've had the use of the IIIe for those last two months, and will have it for more months to come...and when I get my financial aid at the beginning of the next semester, well, a friend of mine is already willing to buy it from me whenever I'm ready to sell it, and I'll upgrade to a new model. By then it should be apparent which new flavors of Palmoid have the best prospects (and their already-low prices might have come down even further), and I'll know which one to get.
My advice to you is to go ahead, jump in. If you're uncertain which new one to buy, get an older one; there are plenty of used Palm Pros & IIIs floating around on Ebay. One of those should do you just fine 'til you're ready to make the big investment.
Well, according to a TV interview transcript posted on their site, nobody actually gets "killed"...the angels and demons just get "banished" to their respective planes when you deal them enough damage. Also, it's hinted that if you play as a demon and "win," you really lose in the end. "Evil demands its own reward" and so forth.
Isn't it funny how people's opinions and motives of something Christian change depending on whether it's expressly produced by evangelical Christians or not? In Nomine, the Steve Jackson Games RPG of demons vs. angels, is simply a game using the war in Heaven as an interesting setting, and I doubt slashdotters would be up in arms over that...but one whiff of serious intent behind it, and boom, it's ridiculous.
I don't think they could open-source the engine even if they wanted to...if I recall correctly, they used (a modified version of?) the Quake II engine for Half-Life.
...here I'd been telling all my Macophile friends about how good Half-Life was, and some were even looking forward to playing it. I'd been hoping I would be able to gib them on my favorite 3D-shooter game, but alas...and if Gabe's note is to be believed, I wouldn't have been able to anyway.
I posted about this to the Half-Life newsgroup, and thus far every one of the 10 or so responses has been resoundingly antiMac ("Great! Now they need to cancel the Macintosh!"). Losers
When I mentioned this to some of my chatroom friends, they wondered if Gabe's note might not be the whole story. Sierra, it seems, is being gutted from the inside out, with even some of the more popular games being pulled for no apparent reason (such as the B5 flightsim, which was essentially ready for release when it was canned...what sense does that make?). They seem, my friend suggested, to be staking their life on "Deer Hunter".
What do you think...is Sierra dying? Will they be dead and gone by a couple years from now?
I'm glad that Half-Life: Opposing Force is being made by another company...means there's much more chance we'll actually get to see it.
In related news, has anyone heard about the Christian first-person-shooter game that's hitting stores this week? There was a story in the NY Times about it the other day. It sounds like a dumb idea, but then, so did "Deer Hunter" and look at how well that's done.