I realize it doesn't have those - but that's for a good reason - those things are freaking huge. OLE and VB would be projects as large as the spreadsheet itself, being made for a fringe group of users (not many people script in Excel - I've done a lot, but few normal users will).
Hell, excel script itself is unpopular because Microsoft includes a warning when you open the file about the script.
Re:Not the first, not the second...
on
Masters of Doom
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oddly enough, I found that one of the most inventive games ever was a post 96 FPS by the same name: BattleZone.
BattleZone '98 was a kick-ass RTS/FPS hybrid (avoid the sequel, it lost the charm). It had a wonderful premise (secret cold-war combat on the moon in the '70s) and excellent gameplay. Very inventive, very fun. Still, classic Bzone players wouldn't like it as its much more modern-FPS style of play.
Re:One of the things I find annoying...
on
Masters of Doom
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· Score: 1
This is my biggest pet peeve. Especially since Warcraft 1 and Dune II both predate C&C. Plus, C&C was the first of Westwood's "change all the graphics but keep everything else" line of C&C sequels. Least inventive games ever.
WC1 was also the first one with multiplayer. So the honour belongs to Dune II and WC1, not C&C. Besides, I just liked DuneII better than C&C - graphics just looked nicer IMHO, and the caryalls were the best.
Well, being someone who actually lives in an urban environment (as opposed to suburbanite/.ers) I can say that these people do need to be tracked for their own benefit. Many of them cannot access social services precisely because they do not have a stable mailbox or other contact system. The government is unable to contact them with important information (such as the death of a family member).
Many homeless don't want housing - there is little stable work for them, and a house ties them in place, while wandering from shelter to shelter allows them to be opportunistic with work (such as summer picking and carnival gigs that pop-up all over the place). Having a tracking system that would allow the government to stay in touch with them while they are on the move would be helpful.
Still, this sounds like its being misused, tracking them like animals. They are human beings, and this violates their human rights to improper search. You would not want a police officer to be able to access your medical or personal information whenever they want - so why should the homeless be denied that?
Actually, the line is "oh, the humanities!" if you listen carefully. Funny, either way it doesn't make much sense. Whatever. The reason the Hindenburg blew up was it was coated in a magnesium compound similar to rocket fuel.
I'm sorry, but the above poster is a moron. Hydrogen is not plentiful as an energy source. Hydrogen is an energy storage system.
Now - some basic physics: you get hydrogen from water. Then you burn hydrogen with air, and get water back. The amount of energy it took to get the hydrogen from the water is equal to the amount you got, minus the loss from inefficiency (which is substantial).
Therefore, using hydrogen as an energy source is like changing money to two different fixed currencies as a revenue source - you don't make anything, and you end up losing things to the middlemen conversion industries.
Unless you can find pure, elemental hydrogen naturally, the hydrogen/water power system is a storage vessel only - a well-compressed but inefficient energy storage system.
Anyone who believes otherwise either has not taken basic science (grade 10 should cover it) or hasn't thought it through and is just a loudmouthed idiot. Either way, shouldn't be discussing issues they have no knowledge of.
I got an SBLive driver from MS Update that fucked over all my sound settings - more problematically, the MS driver lacked 90% of the configuration tools to alter the sound settings. When your front speakers are 10% as powerful as your back speakers, tweaking the sound settings is a must.
Even after I rejected the patch, it patched again later.
"Anyone who maintains that a fertilized egg is not a human being doesn't know biology, or is lying."
I know biology, and I don't claim that a fertilized egg is a human being. It is a human organism. It is human tissue. But human being is a philosophical term, not a scientific term. Show me the biological textbook that has a definition for "human being".
I have a homework assignment for you. Find pictures and biological analysis of the fetus of a gerbil at 2 weeks. Then find one for a human. If you can really tell the difference, I'll buy you a coke.
It is human life, human tissue. It is genetically unique. So are many things. So are cancer cells. We give humans special priority in the biotic kingdom because of our minds. The human brain is where we draw the line. It has no brain.
Yes, I can see arguments against late-term abortions - some basic cognitive process may have begun at that point. However, most late-term abortions are for lethal birth defects. Worst of all, the bans on specific forms of late term (3rd trimester) abortions (see the "partial birth" abortion dispute) are not based on any resoning but how unpleasant the procedure sounds. The inexplicable ban on partial-birth abortions, even for terminal birth-defects, leaves doctors' only alternative to be much more painful, unpleasant, and generally violent procedures. Its just rather stupid. At least the partial-birth abortion leaves the mother with something to bury.
Whoa, was the IRV comment your sig, or part of the comment? Its disappeared in the response screen, but its very pertinent.
I like that system. I'd looked into approval voting (my fave for sheer simplicity) but IRV is nice - easy for voters to understand prioritizing, but the analysis system might offend some with its complexity - also make counting more difficult. Still, its an interestingly powerful system.
His representative shouldn't need a majority - they should, however, need a plurality. Plurality is the basis for the US electoral system. The idea that a person could be elected without plurality is prepostrous.
I prefer the semi-neutral "greetings". I could just be polite, or an RPGer. I think the best is a compromise - be polite. Personally, I think people who use abnormal (old or l33t) english in games are like americans who try and speak mock-british accents when performing shakespeare or reciting Monty Python - it just sounds stupid.
I always wondered at that - so many people play book RPG's for the dungeon crawling aspect rather than the role-playing - why not just play a board game or card game? Munchkin, Hero Quest, Nightmare... hell D&D was a wargame called Chainmail originally.
I play book RPG's for roleplaying - Paranoia and Fading Suns are my faves. I've never been fond of dungeon crawlers - "lets get a bunch of human players together to slaughter non-existant monsters". It becomes even more strange in MMO's - "Join a network of thousands of players, then go off on your own to go kill computer controlled monsters",
Look at mod and mod communities - you see tons of content for UT and UT2k3 adn other games, in the form of plug-ins etc.
The reason is this: they have freedom. The artists working in those projects are doing what they want. The coder tries to work with the content they've created. Why? Art is not like coding - coding is an interesting challenge no matter what you're implementing. Art is not - if its not something you can do in your personal style, its terminally dull.
My best suggestion is make a devkit as powerful as possible, and as expandible as possible, so artists don't need to work with the programmers - just some basic scripting and content management. Make the artists want to use your product to create, and they'll come to you. Look at various moddable games for tips on how to do this. Total Annihilation was a good game for allowing artists to create content in small packages with minimal coding - it was mostly making a model. Ditto with player models in UT and Q3 - for examples of that community, see www.polycount.com
Artists are in shorter supply in general - they get hired faster then coders, so you have to entice them. If you can't promise them money, offer them fun and freedom.
Yes, but that means that your clients have to connect to a non-standard port. This becomes a headache on their part, as its extra configuration. The worst is apps that say "we'll use 3/4 of the upper port spectrum, and we listen on all of them" that are totally unNAT-able. I've seen several UDP VOIP systems that are like that.
Have you tried to do voice chat? Gaming? Serving? Anything other then basic web browsing behind a NAT? NATs seriously reduce the usability of the internet - in many cases, either you forward (thus making it so only one computer behind a NAT of many may serve a certain content) or you don't use that on your computer.
Its sad that there is still no free VOIP client that works consistently behind a NAT (and there are many, many free VOIP clients). Direct P2P file transfers are similarly painful.
Yes, there are solutions, but they're either rare, expensive, hacks, or a combination of the above. Thinking that a NAT is fine just means that you don't do much with your computer.
The manager system is aweful. When I try and change the order of the bookmarks or put in separators, they don't drag to the place I drag them to, they don't appear in the same order in the manager as they do in the bookmarks list, etc. Plus, there's not the nice in-box drag-and-drop to manage your bookmarks.
You obviously haven't viewed it to carefully, as its intended to _replace_ mozilla. The idea is that Thunderbird and Firebird, when complete, will be released in tandem in replacement for the bloated mess that Moz has become.
Firebird is sweet - nothing but the minimal browser stuff, + skinning (and many nice skins are available) and tabs. IE style sidebars for history, etc. Plugins galore are available so you can choose whatever bloat you'd like for it (I use mouse gestures).
The only actual problem I have with Firebird is that the bookmarking manager is piss-poor.
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I realize it doesn't have those - but that's for a good reason - those things are freaking huge. OLE and VB would be projects as large as the spreadsheet itself, being made for a fringe group of users (not many people script in Excel - I've done a lot, but few normal users will).
Hell, excel script itself is unpopular because Microsoft includes a warning when you open the file about the script.
Oddly enough, I found that one of the most inventive games ever was a post 96 FPS by the same name: BattleZone.
BattleZone '98 was a kick-ass RTS/FPS hybrid (avoid the sequel, it lost the charm). It had a wonderful premise (secret cold-war combat on the moon in the '70s) and excellent gameplay. Very inventive, very fun. Still, classic Bzone players wouldn't like it as its much more modern-FPS style of play.
This is my biggest pet peeve. Especially since Warcraft 1 and Dune II both predate C&C. Plus, C&C was the first of Westwood's "change all the graphics but keep everything else" line of C&C sequels. Least inventive games ever.
WC1 was also the first one with multiplayer. So the honour belongs to Dune II and WC1, not C&C. Besides, I just liked DuneII better than C&C - graphics just looked nicer IMHO, and the caryalls were the best.
Well, being someone who actually lives in an urban environment (as opposed to suburbanite /.ers) I can say that these people do need to be tracked for their own benefit. Many of them cannot access social services precisely because they do not have a stable mailbox or other contact system. The government is unable to contact them with important information (such as the death of a family member).
Many homeless don't want housing - there is little stable work for them, and a house ties them in place, while wandering from shelter to shelter allows them to be opportunistic with work (such as summer picking and carnival gigs that pop-up all over the place). Having a tracking system that would allow the government to stay in touch with them while they are on the move would be helpful.
Still, this sounds like its being misused, tracking them like animals. They are human beings, and this violates their human rights to improper search. You would not want a police officer to be able to access your medical or personal information whenever they want - so why should the homeless be denied that?
Actually, the line is "oh, the humanities!" if you listen carefully. Funny, either way it doesn't make much sense. Whatever. The reason the Hindenburg blew up was it was coated in a magnesium compound similar to rocket fuel.
I'm sorry, but the above poster is a moron. Hydrogen is not plentiful as an energy source. Hydrogen is an energy storage system.
Now - some basic physics: you get hydrogen from water. Then you burn hydrogen with air, and get water back. The amount of energy it took to get the hydrogen from the water is equal to the amount you got, minus the loss from inefficiency (which is substantial).
Therefore, using hydrogen as an energy source is like changing money to two different fixed currencies as a revenue source - you don't make anything, and you end up losing things to the middlemen conversion industries.
Unless you can find pure, elemental hydrogen naturally, the hydrogen/water power system is a storage vessel only - a well-compressed but inefficient energy storage system.
Anyone who believes otherwise either has not taken basic science (grade 10 should cover it) or hasn't thought it through and is just a loudmouthed idiot. Either way, shouldn't be discussing issues they have no knowledge of.
I got an SBLive driver from MS Update that fucked over all my sound settings - more problematically, the MS driver lacked 90% of the configuration tools to alter the sound settings. When your front speakers are 10% as powerful as your back speakers, tweaking the sound settings is a must.
Even after I rejected the patch, it patched again later.
I repeat: Oh shit.
Why did this have to be invented with W in office? He's the first post cold-war president to actually be interested in nuclear weapons development.
How is this a troll? Mod parent up.
"Anyone who maintains that a fertilized egg is not a human being doesn't know biology, or is lying."
I know biology, and I don't claim that a fertilized egg is a human being. It is a human organism. It is human tissue. But human being is a philosophical term, not a scientific term. Show me the biological textbook that has a definition for "human being".
I have a homework assignment for you. Find pictures and biological analysis of the fetus of a gerbil at 2 weeks. Then find one for a human. If you can really tell the difference, I'll buy you a coke.
It is human life, human tissue. It is genetically unique. So are many things. So are cancer cells. We give humans special priority in the biotic kingdom because of our minds. The human brain is where we draw the line. It has no brain.
Yes, I can see arguments against late-term abortions - some basic cognitive process may have begun at that point. However, most late-term abortions are for lethal birth defects. Worst of all, the bans on specific forms of late term (3rd trimester) abortions (see the "partial birth" abortion dispute) are not based on any resoning but how unpleasant the procedure sounds. The inexplicable ban on partial-birth abortions, even for terminal birth-defects, leaves doctors' only alternative to be much more painful, unpleasant, and generally violent procedures. Its just rather stupid. At least the partial-birth abortion leaves the mother with something to bury.
Whoa, was the IRV comment your sig, or part of the comment? Its disappeared in the response screen, but its very pertinent.
I like that system. I'd looked into approval voting (my fave for sheer simplicity) but IRV is nice - easy for voters to understand prioritizing, but the analysis system might offend some with its complexity - also make counting more difficult. Still, its an interestingly powerful system.
His representative shouldn't need a majority - they should, however, need a plurality. Plurality is the basis for the US electoral system. The idea that a person could be elected without plurality is prepostrous.
RTFA. Its a girl. Hence, not a vimpi lyttol girli man.
Mod parent up - its on topic, and much more to the point then my post. Hell, I'm sure he speaks for a lot of guys here.
I think I speak for almost every man here when I ask you the one question every guy here wants to ask you...
/.er here but self, as self is already engaged to other magical wonderful woman).
Will you marry me?
(well, every
Hmm - this sounds like the more bizarro mock-supervillain stuf that ends up in Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
I prefer the semi-neutral "greetings". I could just be polite, or an RPGer. I think the best is a compromise - be polite. Personally, I think people who use abnormal (old or l33t) english in games are like americans who try and speak mock-british accents when performing shakespeare or reciting Monty Python - it just sounds stupid.
I always wondered at that - so many people play book RPG's for the dungeon crawling aspect rather than the role-playing - why not just play a board game or card game? Munchkin, Hero Quest, Nightmare... hell D&D was a wargame called Chainmail originally.
I play book RPG's for roleplaying - Paranoia and Fading Suns are my faves. I've never been fond of dungeon crawlers - "lets get a bunch of human players together to slaughter non-existant monsters". It becomes even more strange in MMO's - "Join a network of thousands of players, then go off on your own to go kill computer controlled monsters",
Look at mod and mod communities - you see tons of content for UT and UT2k3 adn other games, in the form of plug-ins etc.
The reason is this: they have freedom. The artists working in those projects are doing what they want. The coder tries to work with the content they've created. Why? Art is not like coding - coding is an interesting challenge no matter what you're implementing. Art is not - if its not something you can do in your personal style, its terminally dull.
My best suggestion is make a devkit as powerful as possible, and as expandible as possible, so artists don't need to work with the programmers - just some basic scripting and content management. Make the artists want to use your product to create, and they'll come to you. Look at various moddable games for tips on how to do this. Total Annihilation was a good game for allowing artists to create content in small packages with minimal coding - it was mostly making a model. Ditto with player models in UT and Q3 - for examples of that community, see www.polycount.com
Artists are in shorter supply in general - they get hired faster then coders, so you have to entice them. If you can't promise them money, offer them fun and freedom.
Did you check the caches on those 403's?
Is there a win32 distro of iChat? I speak to normal humans who need a win32 version if I want to talk to them with it.
Yes, but that means that your clients have to connect to a non-standard port. This becomes a headache on their part, as its extra configuration. The worst is apps that say "we'll use 3/4 of the upper port spectrum, and we listen on all of them" that are totally unNAT-able. I've seen several UDP VOIP systems that are like that.
Have you tried to do voice chat? Gaming? Serving? Anything other then basic web browsing behind a NAT? NATs seriously reduce the usability of the internet - in many cases, either you forward (thus making it so only one computer behind a NAT of many may serve a certain content) or you don't use that on your computer.
Its sad that there is still no free VOIP client that works consistently behind a NAT (and there are many, many free VOIP clients). Direct P2P file transfers are similarly painful.
Yes, there are solutions, but they're either rare, expensive, hacks, or a combination of the above. Thinking that a NAT is fine just means that you don't do much with your computer.
The manager system is aweful. When I try and change the order of the bookmarks or put in separators, they don't drag to the place I drag them to, they don't appear in the same order in the manager as they do in the bookmarks list, etc. Plus, there's not the nice in-box drag-and-drop to manage your bookmarks.
You obviously haven't viewed it to carefully, as its intended to _replace_ mozilla. The idea is that Thunderbird and Firebird, when complete, will be released in tandem in replacement for the bloated mess that Moz has become.
Firebird is sweet - nothing but the minimal browser stuff, + skinning (and many nice skins are available) and tabs. IE style sidebars for history, etc. Plugins galore are available so you can choose whatever bloat you'd like for it (I use mouse gestures).
The only actual problem I have with Firebird is that the bookmarking manager is piss-poor.