I'm sorry the Mario^H^H^H^H^H Foundry scene was just the most childish insult to the audience I'd ever seen. I was half expecting to see Anikin start jumping on Goombas.
I'm sorry, was a little frustrated with coding at the time - its just that I've noticed that nearly every mod, particularly for the half-life engine, is some sort of realism-combat setting (either WW2, or modern commando warfare). I haven't played DoD so I don't know how original the actual gameplay is, I just think that mod developers are limiting themselves by all sticking to the same tired settings.
Personally, I'm dissapointed that all 2d sidescrollers have to be just dull rehashes of the previous games. What, after some 20-odd Megaman games, only 2 of them have been multiplayer.
When I saw the name "mega man network transmission" I was like "allright! finally megaman action online". Nope - just some lame-ass plot where they've turned megaman into a Digimon. Give me fscking Liero anyday.
That depends if there's a home machine already. If so, ditch the laptop and bring a real PC. Or, if you want the laptop, get the laptop but pick up an external keyboard, mouse, etc. Your hands will thank you.
All the people with laptops stop bringing them to lectures damn fast, ditto palms. Just get some good (paper) notebooks and use a PC. You'll get less funny stares, and it doens't really help anymore to have it on disk.
Software, on the otherhand, is different. Whether its Waterloo Maple (my recommendation), MATLAB, or Python with NumPy, get a good mathematical analysis tool onto your computer and learn it. They will not teach you, but the assigments may very well be impossible without it.
And flip-flops. Bring flip-flops, or your feet will regret it.
Fake-ID is a must. Doesn't matter if its good or not in most towns, as long as the bouncers see something its usually good enough for plausible deniability on their part.
Speaking of NI, some labs I've worked with use LabVIEW. Yes, its prohibitively expensive (especially compared to VB) but its spectacular for scientific RAD. Plus, the programming is wholly graphical, which should be refreshing to those scientists that have no experience with text-based programming.
An opensource group would do well to attempt some sort of "workalike" to the language - the ease-of-use is stunning.
That being said, part of the reason it is popular is that instrument companies are pretty good for providing drivers for LabVIEW. An open-source project would lack that unless they also implemented their driver system, which would probably get that project in big trouble.
What would be more interesting would be to have a few parallel gameworlds administrated differently.
You know, we have the "official" game world - your character is always forked from this one.
Then, we have the "moderated" gameworld, where the administration is done by moderated users.
Then we have the "lottery" gameworld. This is where the fun shiznit happens.
Moderated could be divided into sectors, so you would know what kook's domain you were in. If there's one guy with a sense of slapstick, and that sort of thing turns your crank, hang out there.
That makes *how* many fantasy MMORPG's? God, the game industry has become just freaking pathetic to have produced that many nearly-identical games. I hope they all hemorrage money for oversaturating such a tight genre.
StarCraft is even worse - the only female combat unit is the air-to-air missile launcher, and that was an add-on unit. Every other female is a support person (the computer, the transport pilot, and the medic) - Kerrigan was an exception, but she was an excuse because they just wanted a character to turn into a Giger-esque chick-demon.
There are some games that do women credit. Oddly enough, FPS games are pretty good at it. For example, Quake II has a male and female character model, and the female is very serious looking. Quake III continues this, including both serious female characters and sexy female characters.
Japanese Fighting games have always been the worst culprits - there have been attempts to stray from the stereotype - one of my favourite characters in Bloody Roar was a big, mean, butch 40-something woman in overalls. She was ugly, but she could kick some serious ass, and was cool in a violent sort of way. She could also transform into a big scary warthog.
The sequel removed her and replaced her with a blond in a super-high miniskirt and a lether shirt that cut down to her navel.
I remember one SNES title called "pretty fighter" that had a cast consisting of a girl in a school uniform, a girl in a school gym suit, a girl in nurse uniform, a cheerleaer, etc.
I often find that the portrayal of females is a good baseline to determine the quality of the game. Sexualized but not obviously so means the game is mainstream - nothing wierd about it. Hypersexualized games are usually tongue-in-cheek humourous about it, like the Tomb Raider and DoA games (play alone or play with yourself). The fun ones are the games that are outright bizarro-sarcastic about the sexuality of the characters, like Space Bunnies Must Die! - which was sort of a redneck tomb-raider.
Very few games take themselves seriously enough to include non-sexual females. From the dev's standpoint, there's little reason to. Girl gamers are fringe in action games, and the males are adolescents who are still discovering the glory of spanking the monkey.
The fact is that games are still pulp. There is very little "high-art" in games. While that continues, women will be sex-objects or neglected.
Actually, what is normal GPS accuracy? The combination of this technology with the US space-based missile-defense shield is more scary.
Think of this combination - known GPS signal + hyper-accurate orbital-based laser system. Anyone who has a device like this implanted could be popped the moment they stepped outside, any time anyone cared to do so.
I could see the US government implanting these in known criminals and dissidents. Perhaps as a condition of parole.
Most annoyingly, will go ahead and make a specific update even if you've asked that update not to happen. I've a nice SBLive - the Microsoft system has terrible support for its special features, and allowing microsoft to install the drivers overrides the SBLive driver system.
I turned down the download when it asked. A month later the next update came and it was installed. Very frustrating.
proper approach would be to make it resolve to goatse.cx
That would make it plainly clear around the office who the slackers are - the people trying to cover the screen with their hands while simultaneously gouging their own eyes out and vomiting all over the keyboard.
I noticed that myself - who would pay $20 for a friggin glorified VNC system? If the dynamic-IP adress is a problem, then just get a dynamic-IP redirection service like dynip.com - that's $25 per year for a big, user friendly business.
Great, I can replicate their service for 1/10th the cost, and could set it up in five minutes flat. Don't even have to memorize an IP address. Not to mention that with the IP redirection, you could also set up an FTP so you could get your files locally.
Hell, I don't see why anyone should ever need to use such a service. With ICQ2Go, Webmail service, and MSN I can log in to all my communications systems at any net cafe or handheld. I can keep in touch just fine - I only VNC to my machine to use the compiler.
Hmm - yes, I realize that the traditional suggestion is "burn divX to CD" is not appropriate - artifacts and CD decay. But the concept of digital is not to be thrown out.
The point is that, in ideal form, digital would be best - you could arrange things such that your backups would be perfectly preserved - but it would be expensive...
First, use a minimally compressed format. No artifacts. That will hurt bad for space, and have you buying 120 gig HD's in bulk, but if you want no artifacts, you do that.
Second, hard disk explode, degrade, etc. CD's and DVD's also have a limited lifespan. So you don't use a single hard disk, and you certainly don't use CD's and DVD's. You use a RAID array. You make storage an active process, not a passive process - you have the files stored in a high-redudancy RAID array, and have the system be keeping watch on the discs for degredation and move the data around where needed. This also brings up feedback information - the array will tell you when it needs to have a drive replaced.
I visualize a system like that to be the ultimate (and most expensive) video storage scheme - but it would be appropriate for a movie company to use. A warehouse full of RAID arrays sounds expensive and difficult to maintain, but once you consider the cost they go through to make these films, it doesn't seem excessive at all - they've put a lot of money in, they should be preserving their investment maximally. And if you're worried about your facility beind destroyed and losing your originals, you can may zero-degredation copies of the digital data and create a redundant facility.
Still, that's not an argument that helps the ask-slashdot person - that's simply the ultimate video storage system.
Even if your array goes kaput, you'll still have the full data available on the drives for recovery. Still, fully redundant arrays isn't a bad idea - I've heard extreme cases where a badly-protected power surge has destroyed the entire contents of a fileserver.
What interests me is comments about other tape formats that have lower degredation and suchlike. CD's decay - it takes decades, but they do. In 30 years, Myst may be lost to the world - things like that. It seems a shame - does anyone know of similarly long-lifespan digital mediums?
You mean its not like that already? Okay, with C, java, python - yeah, I expect people not to know. But I learned HTML in half an hour. Non-geeks CAN learn HTML, and its not that hard. Hell, these are small business owners, so they've at least got enough intelligence to perform their own accounting, HTML should be a breeze. Buy a book that explains HTML and how to use FrontPage. The only thing left is an easier interface for setting up shops online (PayPal is pretty close). Or, just make an HTML exporter for MS Word that produces actual useable webpages instead of bizarre imbedded crap.
Not based on the Tron movies - lack of multiplayer.... boy, just gets better and better. Sounds like Monolith is doing their regular quality of gaming. Crud. Sounds like I'll be sticking to GLTron for my Tron-action.
Well - judging by his last favourite being X-Wing, there are more appropriate places to go. Freelancer is apparently the big thing in that industry. StarLancer is just a modern retread of X-Wing and Wing Commander. My fave space combat game will always be Independance War II, a real interesting fun genre buster.
In other space-vehicle combat games, there are a few real winners over on the-underdogs.org that are good abandonware titles only a few years old. For example, OutWar is a good halfway between Quake games and MechWarrior II with a heavy emphasis on jump-jets. HardWar is a good starfighter game with lots of trading, bounty-hunting and all that other free-environment stuff. My favourite is Psygnosis Lander, the most bizarre space game I've played - it handles like a hybrid between a helicopter and a space fighter. An excellent game. All those are available for free at underdogs.
Well, the nice part of the DC is that there are no hacks or mods required to run 3rd party software - just download and burn. Its simple, neet, sweet, petite.
That, and some nice PC titles have been ported. Most of the major famous games that went open source (Q1,2, Descent, Doom, Wolf, ROTT, etc) have been ported to DC. Jumpnbump.
Most notably, the SNES emulator is pretty friggin sweet for some games. Emulators in general are a pretty good feature.
Yes, Moore is sloppy and loose with his statistics. And I don't give a rats ass. I still watch him, read him, and enjoy whatever he publishes. Besides, you can't say that the American Right blowhards are wholly accurate in their stats either.
I don't follow Moore because his numbers are perfect - its 'cause he's saying things that should be said, louder then most of us can say them. And he's saying them in a way people can swallow.
The left horrible at spin. Where the right has polished charmers, we've got robots like Gore, snooty intillectuals like Chomsky, or loudmouths like Rage Against the Machine. Granola, academics and loonies represent the compassionate half of the political spectrum - even though most leftists are just normal folks who've been screwed by corporate greed too many times.
Moore is different - he's normal. He's a good blue-collar everyman. He's just some fat factory dork from Flint - he's like most american men - overweight, ill shaven, and dressed in blue-jeans and a baseball cap. That is why he's important. He's someone representing the left who's not an alien freak. He's saying plain things in a plain way. Sure his numbers are off - but nobody ever cares about the numbers exactly. And yes, most of his evidence is anecdotal - but even anecdotal stuff counts for something. What made bowling for Columbine cool was where he took the camera. He listened to what Americans were talking about, who they were talking about, and just walked in there with a camera and showed "well, this is how they are".
Yeah, well if we have to apologize for Celine Dion, that means you have to apologize for Britney, Christina, the Backstreet Boys, NSync, and every other pop group for the last two decades. That shit is painful.
And for the record, I'm a little more embarrassed by Shatner then Celine. Besides, we already made good for Celine - we gave you Pamela.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry the Mario^H^H^H^H^H Foundry scene was just the most childish insult to the audience I'd ever seen. I was half expecting to see Anikin start jumping on Goombas.
I'm sorry, was a little frustrated with coding at the time - its just that I've noticed that nearly every mod, particularly for the half-life engine, is some sort of realism-combat setting (either WW2, or modern commando warfare). I haven't played DoD so I don't know how original the actual gameplay is, I just think that mod developers are limiting themselves by all sticking to the same tired settings.
The sad part is I read my own comment over and thought the same thing - I spend all this time talking computer and then mention flip-flops. ERTW.
So, is it valve that has no sense of originality and only supports realism mods, or is the mod dev community voluntarily that unoriginal?
Personally, I'm dissapointed that all 2d sidescrollers have to be just dull rehashes of the previous games. What, after some 20-odd Megaman games, only 2 of them have been multiplayer.
When I saw the name "mega man network transmission" I was like "allright! finally megaman action online". Nope - just some lame-ass plot where they've turned megaman into a Digimon. Give me fscking Liero anyday.
Yup. Real men have plantar's warts from the friggin' unhygenic showers.
That depends if there's a home machine already. If so, ditch the laptop and bring a real PC. Or, if you want the laptop, get the laptop but pick up an external keyboard, mouse, etc. Your hands will thank you.
All the people with laptops stop bringing them to lectures damn fast, ditto palms. Just get some good (paper) notebooks and use a PC. You'll get less funny stares, and it doens't really help anymore to have it on disk.
Software, on the otherhand, is different. Whether its Waterloo Maple (my recommendation), MATLAB, or Python with NumPy, get a good mathematical analysis tool onto your computer and learn it. They will not teach you, but the assigments may very well be impossible without it.
And flip-flops. Bring flip-flops, or your feet will regret it.
Fake-ID is a must. Doesn't matter if its good or not in most towns, as long as the bouncers see something its usually good enough for plausible deniability on their part.
Speaking of NI, some labs I've worked with use LabVIEW. Yes, its prohibitively expensive (especially compared to VB) but its spectacular for scientific RAD. Plus, the programming is wholly graphical, which should be refreshing to those scientists that have no experience with text-based programming.
An opensource group would do well to attempt some sort of "workalike" to the language - the ease-of-use is stunning.
That being said, part of the reason it is popular is that instrument companies are pretty good for providing drivers for LabVIEW. An open-source project would lack that unless they also implemented their driver system, which would probably get that project in big trouble.
Red? I see it as blue, on the front page sea of green. Very confusing. Anyone see any other colours for this article?
What would be more interesting would be to have a few parallel gameworlds administrated differently.
You know, we have the "official" game world - your character is always forked from this one.
Then, we have the "moderated" gameworld, where the administration is done by moderated users.
Then we have the "lottery" gameworld. This is where the fun shiznit happens.
Moderated could be divided into sectors, so you would know what kook's domain you were in. If there's one guy with a sense of slapstick, and that sort of thing turns your crank, hang out there.
THat's actually the most sensible comment I've heard on this all day....
Johnny Depp must play Misato's squeeze - I don't remember his name.
That makes *how* many fantasy MMORPG's? God, the game industry has become just freaking pathetic to have produced that many nearly-identical games. I hope they all hemorrage money for oversaturating such a tight genre.
StarCraft is even worse - the only female combat unit is the air-to-air missile launcher, and that was an add-on unit. Every other female is a support person (the computer, the transport pilot, and the medic) - Kerrigan was an exception, but she was an excuse because they just wanted a character to turn into a Giger-esque chick-demon.
There are some games that do women credit. Oddly enough, FPS games are pretty good at it. For example, Quake II has a male and female character model, and the female is very serious looking. Quake III continues this, including both serious female characters and sexy female characters.
Japanese Fighting games have always been the worst culprits - there have been attempts to stray from the stereotype - one of my favourite characters in Bloody Roar was a big, mean, butch 40-something woman in overalls. She was ugly, but she could kick some serious ass, and was cool in a violent sort of way. She could also transform into a big scary warthog.
The sequel removed her and replaced her with a blond in a super-high miniskirt and a lether shirt that cut down to her navel.
I remember one SNES title called "pretty fighter" that had a cast consisting of a girl in a school uniform, a girl in a school gym suit, a girl in nurse uniform, a cheerleaer, etc.
I often find that the portrayal of females is a good baseline to determine the quality of the game. Sexualized but not obviously so means the game is mainstream - nothing wierd about it. Hypersexualized games are usually tongue-in-cheek humourous about it, like the Tomb Raider and DoA games (play alone or play with yourself). The fun ones are the games that are outright bizarro-sarcastic about the sexuality of the characters, like Space Bunnies Must Die! - which was sort of a redneck tomb-raider.
Very few games take themselves seriously enough to include non-sexual females. From the dev's standpoint, there's little reason to. Girl gamers are fringe in action games, and the males are adolescents who are still discovering the glory of spanking the monkey.
The fact is that games are still pulp. There is very little "high-art" in games. While that continues, women will be sex-objects or neglected.
Actually, what is normal GPS accuracy? The combination of this technology with the US space-based missile-defense shield is more scary.
Think of this combination - known GPS signal + hyper-accurate orbital-based laser system. Anyone who has a device like this implanted could be popped the moment they stepped outside, any time anyone cared to do so.
I could see the US government implanting these in known criminals and dissidents. Perhaps as a condition of parole.
Most annoyingly, will go ahead and make a specific update even if you've asked that update not to happen. I've a nice SBLive - the Microsoft system has terrible support for its special features, and allowing microsoft to install the drivers overrides the SBLive driver system.
I turned down the download when it asked. A month later the next update came and it was installed. Very frustrating.
proper approach would be to make it resolve to goatse.cx
That would make it plainly clear around the office who the slackers are - the people trying to cover the screen with their hands while simultaneously gouging their own eyes out and vomiting all over the keyboard.
I noticed that myself - who would pay $20 for a friggin glorified VNC system? If the dynamic-IP adress is a problem, then just get a dynamic-IP redirection service like dynip.com - that's $25 per year for a big, user friendly business.
Great, I can replicate their service for 1/10th the cost, and could set it up in five minutes flat. Don't even have to memorize an IP address. Not to mention that with the IP redirection, you could also set up an FTP so you could get your files locally.
Hell, I don't see why anyone should ever need to use such a service. With ICQ2Go, Webmail service, and MSN I can log in to all my communications systems at any net cafe or handheld. I can keep in touch just fine - I only VNC to my machine to use the compiler.
Hmm - yes, I realize that the traditional suggestion is "burn divX to CD" is not appropriate - artifacts and CD decay. But the concept of digital is not to be thrown out.
The point is that, in ideal form, digital would be best - you could arrange things such that your backups would be perfectly preserved - but it would be expensive...
First, use a minimally compressed format. No artifacts. That will hurt bad for space, and have you buying 120 gig HD's in bulk, but if you want no artifacts, you do that.
Second, hard disk explode, degrade, etc. CD's and DVD's also have a limited lifespan. So you don't use a single hard disk, and you certainly don't use CD's and DVD's. You use a RAID array. You make storage an active process, not a passive process - you have the files stored in a high-redudancy RAID array, and have the system be keeping watch on the discs for degredation and move the data around where needed. This also brings up feedback information - the array will tell you when it needs to have a drive replaced.
I visualize a system like that to be the ultimate (and most expensive) video storage scheme - but it would be appropriate for a movie company to use. A warehouse full of RAID arrays sounds expensive and difficult to maintain, but once you consider the cost they go through to make these films, it doesn't seem excessive at all - they've put a lot of money in, they should be preserving their investment maximally. And if you're worried about your facility beind destroyed and losing your originals, you can may zero-degredation copies of the digital data and create a redundant facility.
Still, that's not an argument that helps the ask-slashdot person - that's simply the ultimate video storage system.
Even if your array goes kaput, you'll still have the full data available on the drives for recovery. Still, fully redundant arrays isn't a bad idea - I've heard extreme cases where a badly-protected power surge has destroyed the entire contents of a fileserver.
What interests me is comments about other tape formats that have lower degredation and suchlike. CD's decay - it takes decades, but they do. In 30 years, Myst may be lost to the world - things like that. It seems a shame - does anyone know of similarly long-lifespan digital mediums?
You mean its not like that already? Okay, with C, java, python - yeah, I expect people not to know. But I learned HTML in half an hour. Non-geeks CAN learn HTML, and its not that hard. Hell, these are small business owners, so they've at least got enough intelligence to perform their own accounting, HTML should be a breeze. Buy a book that explains HTML and how to use FrontPage. The only thing left is an easier interface for setting up shops online (PayPal is pretty close). Or, just make an HTML exporter for MS Word that produces actual useable webpages instead of bizarre imbedded crap.
Not based on the Tron movies - lack of multiplayer.... boy, just gets better and better. Sounds like Monolith is doing their regular quality of gaming. Crud. Sounds like I'll be sticking to GLTron for my Tron-action.
Well - judging by his last favourite being X-Wing, there are more appropriate places to go. Freelancer is apparently the big thing in that industry. StarLancer is just a modern retread of X-Wing and Wing Commander. My fave space combat game will always be Independance War II, a real interesting fun genre buster.
In other space-vehicle combat games, there are a few real winners over on the-underdogs.org that are good abandonware titles only a few years old. For example, OutWar is a good halfway between Quake games and MechWarrior II with a heavy emphasis on jump-jets. HardWar is a good starfighter game with lots of trading, bounty-hunting and all that other free-environment stuff. My favourite is Psygnosis Lander, the most bizarre space game I've played - it handles like a hybrid between a helicopter and a space fighter. An excellent game. All those are available for free at underdogs.
Well, the nice part of the DC is that there are no hacks or mods required to run 3rd party software - just download and burn. Its simple, neet, sweet, petite.
That, and some nice PC titles have been ported. Most of the major famous games that went open source (Q1,2, Descent, Doom, Wolf, ROTT, etc) have been ported to DC. Jumpnbump.
Most notably, the SNES emulator is pretty friggin sweet for some games. Emulators in general are a pretty good feature.
Yes, Moore is sloppy and loose with his statistics. And I don't give a rats ass. I still watch him, read him, and enjoy whatever he publishes. Besides, you can't say that the American Right blowhards are wholly accurate in their stats either.
I don't follow Moore because his numbers are perfect - its 'cause he's saying things that should be said, louder then most of us can say them. And he's saying them in a way people can swallow.
The left horrible at spin. Where the right has polished charmers, we've got robots like Gore, snooty intillectuals like Chomsky, or loudmouths like Rage Against the Machine. Granola, academics and loonies represent the compassionate half of the political spectrum - even though most leftists are just normal folks who've been screwed by corporate greed too many times.
Moore is different - he's normal. He's a good blue-collar everyman. He's just some fat factory dork from Flint - he's like most american men - overweight, ill shaven, and dressed in blue-jeans and a baseball cap. That is why he's important. He's someone representing the left who's not an alien freak. He's saying plain things in a plain way. Sure his numbers are off - but nobody ever cares about the numbers exactly. And yes, most of his evidence is anecdotal - but even anecdotal stuff counts for something. What made bowling for Columbine cool was where he took the camera. He listened to what Americans were talking about, who they were talking about, and just walked in there with a camera and showed "well, this is how they are".
Moore for president.
Yeah, well if we have to apologize for Celine Dion, that means you have to apologize for Britney, Christina, the Backstreet Boys, NSync, and every other pop group for the last two decades. That shit is painful.
And for the record, I'm a little more embarrassed by Shatner then Celine. Besides, we already made good for Celine - we gave you Pamela.