Have you tried EndWar? I played the demo and found it gimmicky and oddly unpolished, but the voice control scheme was surprisingly usable.
Re:Both franchise shared the same fate.
on
New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 2, Funny
I agree, except whoa, jebus, can't they do something about how f***ing depressing the series has become? Part of me can't wait for the last few episodes to air, and the other part is afraid I'll slit my wrists after viewing a couple.
Okay: seriously? You and five guys you know haven't had problems, so therefore his opinion is skewed because he reads Slashdot?
My anecdote: My second unit in two years just burned out. I keep it on a shelf elevated about two feet from the floor, with little stone coasters under its feet to give it a little extra elevation.
Back in the day, I used to play FPS games constantly - Doom and its (early) sequels, Duke 3d. Then Quake came out. I played it obsessively. Then QuakeWorld, then maybe a million different Quake mods.
A few months later, I tried to play a some Duke 3d and Shadow Warrior, and found that they made me horribly motion sick within about five minutes. The difference? The fully 3d animated models in Quake had spoiled me for the comparably primitive sprite models in Duke. I tried a similar test more recently when Marathon was re-released on XBox Live. I seriously came close to throwing up.
I suspect there's something that goes away if you don't exercise it, too - these days, almost any 3d game with many rapid perspective shifts (EndWar, I'm looking at you) are enough to disorient me a bit.
Macs can boot using an option called "Target disk mode", in which the entire Mac essentially becomes a big Firewire drive enclosure. This is absurdly useful when you, say, upgrade to a new model Macbook: you start your old one in as a target disk, attach it to your new one, and then boot the new one. OS X magically detects your applications and user settings, and migrates them all to the new hard drive. I've used it every time I upgraded to a new machine (4 times now), and it's a fantastic feature.
That said, I'm prett sure that most of the complaining is by people who don't want to upgrade to a new video camera at the same time they're shelling out for a new laptop. Can't really say that I blame them.
A few years ago, I worked for a network operations center at a university, and we managed the internet access of over one hundred thousand users (mostly the university interconnects and the internet gateways, not everything down to the dorm room or anything like that). We were toying with the idea of using a ticketing system to handle issues that cropped up, and I was asked to evaluate some open source software packages.
Eventually, I found Request Tracker, slapped together a demo server, and showed it to the "Director of Technology." He stroked his beard. "It's okay," he said, frowning, "but the ticket you just created has the ID number of 1."
I shrugged. "Well... yeah," I said. "It's the first ticket."
He shook his head. "That's not going to work. We need to be able to start it much higher. Otherwise everyone is going to know that the software is new."
I stared at him. "We get phone calls from about two dozen network engineers," I said. "We're on a first name basis with all of them. I think the giveaway will be that they get a ticket number at all, not that it's low."
But he was adamant. I was annoyed enough by the whole conversation that I stopped working on it, and for all I know they're still not using a formal ticketing system. (Which is probably just as well, because even if they'd started a ticketing system at id # 0, four years later they'd probably be into the low three digits.)
Tech support is a shitty and thankless job, and if you're ever frustrated that you've been handed off to some monkey reading from a script, you should keep in mind that it's because most people aren't willing to put up with the crap that comes with the job. Genuinely good tech support guys are systems engineers - they just don't make as much money and specialize in consumer/user level equipment.
When I took biology in 10th grade, I was in a terrible, terrible class. It was in a "level 2" class, which technically means "average", but really meant "harder than either "above average" or the AP level classes because we'll bury you in grunt-work." It was consistently my worst class - the only one in which I had straight D's. In fact, probably the only one in which I'd gotten a D at all.
To get a better picture of what the actual capabilities of the students were across the whole grade, my school set up a standardized bio test as the final for the year. It was graded on separate curves for each level (AP, level 1, level 2, level 3) for fairness. It had absolutely nothing to do with what we studied throughout the year, which I can say with some certainty because I set the curve for the "average" class and didn't remember having studied anything that was on it previously. In addition to pissing off a lot of my classmates, it caused a bit of a stir among the teachers, or so I gather - the kid with straight D's had managed to swing a C in the class by blowing away the final.
After, the teacher came about thiiiiis close to accusing me of cheating, but he didn't. When he asked how I'd done so well, I told him the truth - the final was mostly material I'd learned outside of class. They used a different one the next year.
If I'd had the opportunity to just take that test first, and spare myself the misery of that class, you bet your ass I would have.
What blows my mind is what raging idiot at Microsoft green lighted this ad campaign? they KNEW that it was a flop from the above statement. yet they still spend the outrageous cash to have written and shoot and print those horrid commercials?
I can think of two possibilities.
1. They're lying when they said this was expected. That's the "oh, you poor dumb saps" explanation. 2. Someone at their ad agency thought it would be a great idea, and by the time anyone realized what a train wreck it was going to be, it had gathered too much steam to stop. By the time they released it, probably most of the people involved thought, "well... look on the bright side! It might not suck too bad! It might even be 'so bad it's good'!"
It also has some odd bugs. A few weeks ago I was in a Starbucks in suburban Philadelphia, and my iPhone (using the Starbucks wireless network) put my location as being somewhere in Washington state. Whoops.
Why would it necessarily be a bad thing? Instead of trying to solve the problem for a game designer point of view, try to solve the problem from the point of view of an hypothetical spacecraft designer from the futuristic future. The problem remains, you naturally don't hear a sound in reality. So what do you do? You equip the spacecraft with sensors that can detect the kind of dangers you care to be warned about and you give them a warning sound or visual indication. That's actually how it works in modern fighters, because you can't hear it either when a missile is fired at you from 25 miles away.
Oh, come on. If your hypothetical spacecraft of the future can detect small weapons fire, it should be perfectly capable of making "pew pew pew" sounds to let you know you're being shot at. Next time you feel the urge to gripe about how sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, how about pretending it's the flight control system synthesizing the sound of weapons fire to wake up the pilot?
I saw the trailer when I went to go see Dark Knight a couple of weeks ago. At first, I wasn't sure what I was looking at, until I saw the pair of CGI-ified Billy Crudups floating around with the little atom symbol on their foreheads.
"Wait a minute. That looks like Dr. Manhattan."
Then the serious special effects started, and I saw The Comedian's smiley face button, and my eyes rolled back into my head and I went into a blissed-out fugue state. So, I dunno, maybe this is for the best, for the sake of my fragile sanity, but damn I wanted to see this movie.
A reputation, based on people with a serious ideological axe to grind. Blind faith in the market producing magical efficiency gains is contrary to everything I have seen during my professional life, both in the public and private sector. From my perspective, I have never seen one bit of evidence to show there is any truth to it outside the imaginations of Tory politicians.
Well, if you'd come on over to the USA for a little while, you could have the pleasure of seeing it in the imaginations of our conservatives as well.
Not to say I haven't seen horribly inefficient and stupid government agencies on this side of the pond. But it seems to me that every time conservative politicians are let near a social program or government organization, we see something like the following:
[Senator] "This program doesn't work because it's inefficient! We need to hack away the fat!" (attacks program with machete, leaving a mangled bloody corpse.) [Senator] "See?!? It's still not working! Looks like we're just going to have to farm this out to my good buddy Ted."
[CEO] Hi. I just bought my third mansion and a private 20-seat jet with the massive reimbursement plan I just secured.
No, it isn't, because you know perfectly well that copyright infringement isn't theft.
And no, my saying that doesn't imply that I'm a pirate myself or that I think copyright infringement is OK or that INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE MAN or any of those other bullshit strawman arguments you're thinking of.
And yes, that IS what you were thinking.
Bullshit. I was thinking that software piracy is theft, in the same way that jumping the turnstile on the metro is theft, or leaching off your neighbor's cable is theft. You're welcome to disagree with me, but don't put strawman arguments in my mouth to do it.
Heh. I am in complete agreement. I read the "Belgariad" when I was in junior high, loved them, and when I found out there was a second series being made, jumped at the chance to read them. They were a horrible slog, and when I revisited the Belgariad, I discovered that it was a less horrible slog, but also sloglike.
Oddly, though, I always hated McCaffrey, though my opinion of her writing is probably colored by the fact that I ran a MOO based on the Pern books for several years.
It stretches out the judicial review process so much that the government will in many cases be able to complete its surveillance activities before the courts finish deciding on its legality."
Without having read the article: is that really new? The current FISA provision allows agencies to start wiretapping 72 hours before filing a request.
So you and I are now "engaged" in a "cyber-electronic engagement" because we are both posting to/. here.
In which case "cyber-electronic" is redundant. There is no non-electronic means of accessing "cyberspace" as he uses the term.
And I'm sure that Taco can point to the physical boxes that house slashdot. So "cyberspace" is a little... whatever.
I'll still refer to it as "posting on slashdot".
This is relevant for another reason, though: by disclosing what he means by "cyber-electronic engagement" (very nearly anything) it is implied that very nearly anything can fall under the army's purview as cyber-electronic engagement, right down to posting on Slashdot.
Or phrased differently, "cyber-electronic engagement" can mean just about any damn thing they want it to.
Slashdot Mirror
Step aside, son. I'll handle this.
Have you tried EndWar? I played the demo and found it gimmicky and oddly unpolished, but the voice control scheme was surprisingly usable.
I agree, except whoa, jebus, can't they do something about how f***ing depressing the series has become? Part of me can't wait for the last few episodes to air, and the other part is afraid I'll slit my wrists after viewing a couple.
Okay: seriously? You and five guys you know haven't had problems, so therefore his opinion is skewed because he reads Slashdot?
My anecdote: My second unit in two years just burned out. I keep it on a shelf elevated about two feet from the floor, with little stone coasters under its feet to give it a little extra elevation.
The actual data: scary. And that was in 2007.
(That said, I've long since given up PC gaming, with the exception of little confections like the Penny Arcade games.)
Back in the day, I used to play FPS games constantly - Doom and its (early) sequels, Duke 3d. Then Quake came out. I played it obsessively. Then QuakeWorld, then maybe a million different Quake mods.
A few months later, I tried to play a some Duke 3d and Shadow Warrior, and found that they made me horribly motion sick within about five minutes. The difference? The fully 3d animated models in Quake had spoiled me for the comparably primitive sprite models in Duke. I tried a similar test more recently when Marathon was re-released on XBox Live. I seriously came close to throwing up.
I suspect there's something that goes away if you don't exercise it, too - these days, almost any 3d game with many rapid perspective shifts (EndWar, I'm looking at you) are enough to disorient me a bit.
Sniff. And I used to be hardcore.
Macs can boot using an option called "Target disk mode", in which the entire Mac essentially becomes a big Firewire drive enclosure. This is absurdly useful when you, say, upgrade to a new model Macbook: you start your old one in as a target disk, attach it to your new one, and then boot the new one. OS X magically detects your applications and user settings, and migrates them all to the new hard drive. I've used it every time I upgraded to a new machine (4 times now), and it's a fantastic feature.
That said, I'm prett sure that most of the complaining is by people who don't want to upgrade to a new video camera at the same time they're shelling out for a new laptop. Can't really say that I blame them.
A few years ago, I worked for a network operations center at a university, and we managed the internet access of over one hundred thousand users (mostly the university interconnects and the internet gateways, not everything down to the dorm room or anything like that). We were toying with the idea of using a ticketing system to handle issues that cropped up, and I was asked to evaluate some open source software packages.
Eventually, I found Request Tracker, slapped together a demo server, and showed it to the "Director of Technology." He stroked his beard. "It's okay," he said, frowning, "but the ticket you just created has the ID number of 1."
I shrugged. "Well... yeah," I said. "It's the first ticket."
He shook his head. "That's not going to work. We need to be able to start it much higher. Otherwise everyone is going to know that the software is new."
I stared at him. "We get phone calls from about two dozen network engineers," I said. "We're on a first name basis with all of them. I think the giveaway will be that they get a ticket number at all, not that it's low."
But he was adamant. I was annoyed enough by the whole conversation that I stopped working on it, and for all I know they're still not using a formal ticketing system. (Which is probably just as well, because even if they'd started a ticketing system at id # 0, four years later they'd probably be into the low three digits.)
Mod parent up.
Tech support is a shitty and thankless job, and if you're ever frustrated that you've been handed off to some monkey reading from a script, you should keep in mind that it's because most people aren't willing to put up with the crap that comes with the job. Genuinely good tech support guys are systems engineers - they just don't make as much money and specialize in consumer/user level equipment.
When I took biology in 10th grade, I was in a terrible, terrible class. It was in a "level 2" class, which technically means "average", but really meant "harder than either "above average" or the AP level classes because we'll bury you in grunt-work." It was consistently my worst class - the only one in which I had straight D's. In fact, probably the only one in which I'd gotten a D at all.
To get a better picture of what the actual capabilities of the students were across the whole grade, my school set up a standardized bio test as the final for the year. It was graded on separate curves for each level (AP, level 1, level 2, level 3) for fairness. It had absolutely nothing to do with what we studied throughout the year, which I can say with some certainty because I set the curve for the "average" class and didn't remember having studied anything that was on it previously. In addition to pissing off a lot of my classmates, it caused a bit of a stir among the teachers, or so I gather - the kid with straight D's had managed to swing a C in the class by blowing away the final.
After, the teacher came about thiiiiis close to accusing me of cheating, but he didn't. When he asked how I'd done so well, I told him the truth - the final was mostly material I'd learned outside of class. They used a different one the next year.
If I'd had the opportunity to just take that test first, and spare myself the misery of that class, you bet your ass I would have.
. . . a 5% stake in A.I.G. in compensation.
Take it back! Take it back!
I can think of two possibilities.
1. They're lying when they said this was expected. That's the "oh, you poor dumb saps" explanation.
2. Someone at their ad agency thought it would be a great idea, and by the time anyone realized what a train wreck it was going to be, it had gathered too much steam to stop. By the time they released it, probably most of the people involved thought, "well... look on the bright side! It might not suck too bad! It might even be 'so bad it's good'!"
It also has some odd bugs. A few weeks ago I was in a Starbucks in suburban Philadelphia, and my iPhone (using the Starbucks wireless network) put my location as being somewhere in Washington state. Whoops.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Schmidt. Your flight has been delayed by two hours."
"Son of a... do you people know who I am? Dammit, get Brin on the phone."
Not only that, but Ms. Rowling explicitly said that she had no objection if the Lexicon continues to be published for free on the web.
It's really, really hard for me to get worked up over this.
Why would it necessarily be a bad thing? Instead of trying to solve the problem for a game designer point of view, try to solve the problem from the point of view of an hypothetical spacecraft designer from the futuristic future. The problem remains, you naturally don't hear a sound in reality. So what do you do? You equip the spacecraft with sensors that can detect the kind of dangers you care to be warned about and you give them a warning sound or visual indication. That's actually how it works in modern fighters, because you can't hear it either when a missile is fired at you from 25 miles away.
Oh, come on. If your hypothetical spacecraft of the future can detect small weapons fire, it should be perfectly capable of making "pew pew pew" sounds to let you know you're being shot at. Next time you feel the urge to gripe about how sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, how about pretending it's the flight control system synthesizing the sound of weapons fire to wake up the pilot?
My kingdom for a Freespace 2.
Obligatory Fishbone reference here.
Argh.
I saw the trailer when I went to go see Dark Knight a couple of weeks ago. At first, I wasn't sure what I was looking at, until I saw the pair of CGI-ified Billy Crudups floating around with the little atom symbol on their foreheads.
"Wait a minute. That looks like Dr. Manhattan."
Then the serious special effects started, and I saw The Comedian's smiley face button, and my eyes rolled back into my head and I went into a blissed-out fugue state. So, I dunno, maybe this is for the best, for the sake of my fragile sanity, but damn I wanted to see this movie.
Well, if you'd come on over to the USA for a little while, you could have the pleasure of seeing it in the imaginations of our conservatives as well.
Not to say I haven't seen horribly inefficient and stupid government agencies on this side of the pond. But it seems to me that every time conservative politicians are let near a social program or government organization, we see something like the following:
[Senator] "This program doesn't work because it's inefficient! We need to hack away the fat!"
(attacks program with machete, leaving a mangled bloody corpse.)
[Senator] "See?!? It's still not working! Looks like we're just going to have to farm this out to my good buddy Ted."
[CEO] Hi. I just bought my third mansion and a private 20-seat jet with the massive reimbursement plan I just secured.
[Senator] Now that's what I call efficiency!
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I mean, is there any SysAdmin who didn't think of doing just that?
What, cool my heels in jail over petty revenge that I'm too dumb and venal to let go?
No. No, I've never considered that.
No, it isn't, because you know perfectly well that copyright infringement isn't theft.
And no, my saying that doesn't imply that I'm a pirate myself or that I think copyright infringement is OK or that INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE MAN or any of those other bullshit strawman arguments you're thinking of.
And yes, that IS what you were thinking.
Bullshit. I was thinking that software piracy is theft, in the same way that jumping the turnstile on the metro is theft, or leaching off your neighbor's cable is theft. You're welcome to disagree with me, but don't put strawman arguments in my mouth to do it.
And really, log in.
How about "theft"? That's a good one.
Heh. I am in complete agreement. I read the "Belgariad" when I was in junior high, loved them, and when I found out there was a second series being made, jumped at the chance to read them. They were a horrible slog, and when I revisited the Belgariad, I discovered that it was a less horrible slog, but also sloglike.
Oddly, though, I always hated McCaffrey, though my opinion of her writing is probably colored by the fact that I ran a MOO based on the Pern books for several years.
Without having read the article: is that really new? The current FISA provision allows agencies to start wiretapping 72 hours before filing a request.
So you and I are now "engaged" in a "cyber-electronic engagement" because we are both posting to /. here.
In which case "cyber-electronic" is redundant. There is no non-electronic means of accessing "cyberspace" as he uses the term.
And I'm sure that Taco can point to the physical boxes that house slashdot. So "cyberspace" is a little ... whatever.
I'll still refer to it as "posting on slashdot".
This is relevant for another reason, though: by disclosing what he means by "cyber-electronic engagement" (very nearly anything) it is implied that very nearly anything can fall under the army's purview as cyber-electronic engagement, right down to posting on Slashdot.
Or phrased differently, "cyber-electronic engagement" can mean just about any damn thing they want it to.