Okay, kevin bacon ever been in a movie with Sean Penn or any of the other actors who have been fighting against the war? Particularly the ones that have gone to Iraq? That could be the connection to Hussein. From Hussein, its not hard to draw the lines over to Bin Laden.
Yes, but many windows games do not support directplay-based joysticks (particularly SDL-based ports from Linux)
The problem is that very few windows-based games have both shared-machine multiplayer and proper directplay support - major retail games don't bother with shared-machine gaming, and indies don't use directplay.
Actually, the Opium production in Afghanistan went _up_ after the americans saved it. Yes, there was a drug trade in Afghanistan at the time, but the Taliban was not responsible for it. Not that I'm defending them, I just think you should hate people for what they did, not what they didn't.
Ni narc. You actually called it grass. Who you working for? The same people who made those little jingles "keep off the grass, keep of the grass, don't play the fool! Drugs are illegal, that is a rule" which cleverly avoid saying what was wrong with them?
Actually, I find tetris better then pad for games, due to the very digital movement of the pieces in tetris. Gamepads seem so clumsy compared to the keyboard and mouse.
While I agree with you that a gamepad is nice for multiple players on one machine - but I can count the number of games that both support USB and multiplayer on one machine on one hand. Meaning that, right now, the PC is piss poor for console games, and the PC already has a good architecture for gamepads and games - Atomic Bomberman is a dream with 8 players and a good USB hub ($10 gamepads and a good USB hub are all you need).
That being said, the problem is Microsoft. Directplay stupidly names the axes and assumes how they are meant to be used. Really, the axes should be unlabelled and rebound at the users discretion. The whole glory of PC hardware is that it embraces new standards as it needs. The SpaceOrb would never exist on a console (they tried, it didn't work).
Personally, I don't want PC standardized pads - it would encourage PC game developers to slack-off on configurability of the controls the way they do on consoles (like UT for Dreamcast console has NO standard Turok style setting - its 4 available setups are all unplayable if you want the alt-fire and jump available).
The fact is that PC's dont come with gamepads, and so gamepads will never be standard. That creates the reciprocal relationship that gamepad-oriented games (fighting games, platformers) do not catch on on PC's.
I don't see it as a problem with the gamepads. PC gamepad system is good and the USB+Directplay is an excellent and good enough standard (for MS boxen). The problem is the games. If MS wants to fix the problem, they need to publish some console-style multiplayer PC games. I've got 4 directplay compatible gamepads collecting dust because I've found 4 games that can handle them all, and one of them I made myself.
Look at the picture - the point is that it is extremely lightweight - it is built into a standard bike-frame, it doesn't even look like a motor vehicle. This means there's none of the weight inconvenience of an electric or moped.
Looking at the new features - they got one of the more annoying features from IE in there - I can't stand the frigging image resize feature. If I want too look at pr0n, I want it to fill the screen in all its pixel-by-pixel glory, not some badly-rescaled image
Yes, but Rattlesnake venom and Hemlock evolvede to be as poisonous as possible. So if one wants to use venom and hemlock as "examples" of natural chemicals (read: among the most poisonous nature can produce) then VX and sarin are fair examples.
He was quoting someone else's requirements for fully EI housing. It sounds like he has banded in with a larger movement because their moral/social needs coincide with his percieved health requirements.
Did I say I wanted a website? Then shut up. I want a UT server, or my own streaming server. Or a heavily scripted site using an unusual language.
In short, I want the connection on my machine. Not hosting. My problem is that there is very little consumer-level server ISP's - they're all aimed at corporates who are have different priorities - things like reliability, high throughput, and scalability are important to the corporate. I just want a fat pipe I can run a dedicated 24h game server through.
Thats what I was thinking. Really, the best use of this technology would be a medium-low end private server.
I am perpetually frustrated by the consumer ISP's industry's belief that all their little users must be good little consumers and not actually use their service for anything but browsing the web and e-mail. I find that most ISP's don't even have functioning DNS servers, which means that most IRC servers (and similar old systems) will reject you from logging on.
What bothers me most is the "no servers" policy. I am paying for the bandwidth - why cant I use it as I choose. Also, what if I want to be more of a server then a user? Why can't I get a better system for uppipe and trade-off my download amount? All the standard gear (DSL, Cable) gets several megabits per second but peaks at 200kb/s. Why is it if I just want to run a medium-sized UT server I have to fork over for a "business" account? Your average leech will have about the same strain on their servers, and yet those of us who actually want to contribute to the internet have very few options as consumers, besides paying for corporate-level accounts that we dont want.
The same thing happened here in Ontario. The government sold off the distribution rights to one of the best hydroelectric systems in North America, and then the prices went through the roof when they were supposed to go down with private ownership. Private owners didn't compete - they collaborated and price fixed so that all the execs could feed their golf and coke habits.
So the government set up a price-cap, and it'll go down-hill from their.
Maybe they should figure out that privatization of essential services is a bad thing, mkay?
As a niven fan, I never expect to read a book that positively revolted me as much as Fallen Angels did. It was painful. I finished the book out of sheer morbid curiousity at where else he was going with this.
I assume that the flavour of this book (except for the NASA-bashing) was not Niven's fault. The novels Niven writes on his own are very apolitical except for a mild pro-corporate attitude. Pournelle, on the other hand, is an extremely old-fashioned conservative - he supports religion, monarchistic power, and is vehemently anti-intellectual. Read the many other collaborations of theirs and compare teh tone to Niven's books alone. Niven's bad guys are con-men and warriors, while Pournelle's bad guys are foolhardy academics and environmentalists. Look at how many academic villains there have been in their compilations - both the Legacy of the Heorot and Mote glorify the militaristic characters while they insult the academics.
This always bothers me. People who consider Dune to be Herberts best don't understand Herbert. As a reader of more of his books then just the Dune series: He meant to do that.
The whole point of Dune wasn't just to tell a good story - it was to create a Bible for the rest of the series to follow. It was the genesis of a setting, less then a story. Paul was an an analogue to Jesus or any other religion-founding super-being, and the later books show the aftermath of his life. He created something unstoppable.
Actually, I liked The Gripping Hand even more then Mote in God's Eye. Niven does space much better then planets, and Gripping Hand had much less of Pournelle's neo-feudalist jingoism. I found it much more enjoyable.
And while I agree that Ringworld Throne was mediocre, Ringworld Engineers (the second book in the unplannned trilogy) is the peak of the series.
I won a free computer through a contest, and it came standard with 128 megs of ram and windows XP. A quick look in my local store's catalog shows this to be the standard loadout. 128 megs and winXP is not usable. New OS is designed for new hardware, but unfortunately until RAM makers discontinue the 128-meg-chip, we will still have computers shipped impotent.
Besides that, harvesting energy from a vacuum has a good chance of causing a collapse of the quantum energy level of space, thus ending the universe as we know it. That's a bad thing.
Well, most major on-line games (Quake, Half-Life, Warcraft 3) just use the CD-Key as a unique ID on their online server browser. If you don't have the key, you can't play over TCP/IP - LAN only for you.
I can definitely see that that is where this is going. Perfect example: XP is skinnable. But, only MS certified skins can be run on XP. MS has not made any avenues for making certified skins. The result? Download a hacked DLL and then use non-certified skins.
There is a massive community of XP-Styles, all centered around a hacked uxtheme.dll. If Explorer specifically looks for a specific version of uxtheme.dll instead of the filename, they're SOL.
I want to find that somewhere - I watched it at my local anime club and was pissing myself laughing the whole way.
For non-fans - His and Her's is basically the best chick-flick ever. Its the usual stupid romantic duelling storyline, except its actually funny (instead of Cameron Diaz traipsing around being a ditz).
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm - lemme think.
Okay, kevin bacon ever been in a movie with Sean Penn or any of the other actors who have been fighting against the war? Particularly the ones that have gone to Iraq? That could be the connection to Hussein. From Hussein, its not hard to draw the lines over to Bin Laden.
Hell, six degrees should be no problem.
Yes, but many windows games do not support directplay-based joysticks (particularly SDL-based ports from Linux)
The problem is that very few windows-based games have both shared-machine multiplayer and proper directplay support - major retail games don't bother with shared-machine gaming, and indies don't use directplay.
Actually, the Opium production in Afghanistan went _up_ after the americans saved it. Yes, there was a drug trade in Afghanistan at the time, but the Taliban was not responsible for it. Not that I'm defending them, I just think you should hate people for what they did, not what they didn't.
Ni narc. You actually called it grass. Who you working for? The same people who made those little jingles "keep off the grass, keep of the grass, don't play the fool! Drugs are illegal, that is a rule" which cleverly avoid saying what was wrong with them?
Actually, I find tetris better then pad for games, due to the very digital movement of the pieces in tetris. Gamepads seem so clumsy compared to the keyboard and mouse.
While I agree with you that a gamepad is nice for multiple players on one machine - but I can count the number of games that both support USB and multiplayer on one machine on one hand. Meaning that, right now, the PC is piss poor for console games, and the PC already has a good architecture for gamepads and games - Atomic Bomberman is a dream with 8 players and a good USB hub ($10 gamepads and a good USB hub are all you need).
That being said, the problem is Microsoft. Directplay stupidly names the axes and assumes how they are meant to be used. Really, the axes should be unlabelled and rebound at the users discretion. The whole glory of PC hardware is that it embraces new standards as it needs. The SpaceOrb would never exist on a console (they tried, it didn't work).
Personally, I don't want PC standardized pads - it would encourage PC game developers to slack-off on configurability of the controls the way they do on consoles (like UT for Dreamcast console has NO standard Turok style setting - its 4 available setups are all unplayable if you want the alt-fire and jump available).
The fact is that PC's dont come with gamepads, and so gamepads will never be standard. That creates the reciprocal relationship that gamepad-oriented games (fighting games, platformers) do not catch on on PC's.
I don't see it as a problem with the gamepads. PC gamepad system is good and the USB+Directplay is an excellent and good enough standard (for MS boxen). The problem is the games. If MS wants to fix the problem, they need to publish some console-style multiplayer PC games. I've got 4 directplay compatible gamepads collecting dust because I've found 4 games that can handle them all, and one of them I made myself.
Notice the weight difference. I think I like a bike I can carry down the stairs.
Maybe a fuel-cell version?
Look at the picture - the point is that it is extremely lightweight - it is built into a standard bike-frame, it doesn't even look like a motor vehicle. This means there's none of the weight inconvenience of an electric or moped.
Well, it does produce a burning sensation... but no, its a very, very strong drink. A byproduct of making wine, and a fun one at that.
Looking at the new features - they got one of the more annoying features from IE in there - I can't stand the frigging image resize feature. If I want too look at pr0n, I want it to fill the screen in all its pixel-by-pixel glory, not some badly-rescaled image
Yes, but Rattlesnake venom and Hemlock evolvede to be as poisonous as possible. So if one wants to use venom and hemlock as "examples" of natural chemicals (read: among the most poisonous nature can produce) then VX and sarin are fair examples.
He was quoting someone else's requirements for fully EI housing. It sounds like he has banded in with a larger movement because their moral/social needs coincide with his percieved health requirements.
Did I say I wanted a website? Then shut up. I want a UT server, or my own streaming server. Or a heavily scripted site using an unusual language.
In short, I want the connection on my machine. Not hosting. My problem is that there is very little consumer-level server ISP's - they're all aimed at corporates who are have different priorities - things like reliability, high throughput, and scalability are important to the corporate. I just want a fat pipe I can run a dedicated 24h game server through.
Thats what I was thinking. Really, the best use of this technology would be a medium-low end private server.
I am perpetually frustrated by the consumer ISP's industry's belief that all their little users must be good little consumers and not actually use their service for anything but browsing the web and e-mail. I find that most ISP's don't even have functioning DNS servers, which means that most IRC servers (and similar old systems) will reject you from logging on.
What bothers me most is the "no servers" policy. I am paying for the bandwidth - why cant I use it as I choose. Also, what if I want to be more of a server then a user? Why can't I get a better system for uppipe and trade-off my download amount? All the standard gear (DSL, Cable) gets several megabits per second but peaks at 200kb/s. Why is it if I just want to run a medium-sized UT server I have to fork over for a "business" account? Your average leech will have about the same strain on their servers, and yet those of us who actually want to contribute to the internet have very few options as consumers, besides paying for corporate-level accounts that we dont want.
In that case I'd like you to put your money where your mouth is and put a match to a balloon full of H2. Tell us how it went.
The same thing happened here in Ontario. The government sold off the distribution rights to one of the best hydroelectric systems in North America, and then the prices went through the roof when they were supposed to go down with private ownership. Private owners didn't compete - they collaborated and price fixed so that all the execs could feed their golf and coke habits.
So the government set up a price-cap, and it'll go down-hill from their.
Maybe they should figure out that privatization of essential services is a bad thing, mkay?
As a niven fan, I never expect to read a book that positively revolted me as much as Fallen Angels did. It was painful. I finished the book out of sheer morbid curiousity at where else he was going with this.
I assume that the flavour of this book (except for the NASA-bashing) was not Niven's fault. The novels Niven writes on his own are very apolitical except for a mild pro-corporate attitude. Pournelle, on the other hand, is an extremely old-fashioned conservative - he supports religion, monarchistic power, and is vehemently anti-intellectual. Read the many other collaborations of theirs and compare teh tone to Niven's books alone. Niven's bad guys are con-men and warriors, while Pournelle's bad guys are foolhardy academics and environmentalists. Look at how many academic villains there have been in their compilations - both the Legacy of the Heorot and Mote glorify the militaristic characters while they insult the academics.
This always bothers me. People who consider Dune to be Herberts best don't understand Herbert. As a reader of more of his books then just the Dune series: He meant to do that.
The whole point of Dune wasn't just to tell a good story - it was to create a Bible for the rest of the series to follow. It was the genesis of a setting, less then a story. Paul was an an analogue to Jesus or any other religion-founding super-being, and the later books show the aftermath of his life. He created something unstoppable.
Actually, I liked The Gripping Hand even more then Mote in God's Eye. Niven does space much better then planets, and Gripping Hand had much less of Pournelle's neo-feudalist jingoism. I found it much more enjoyable.
And while I agree that Ringworld Throne was mediocre, Ringworld Engineers (the second book in the unplannned trilogy) is the peak of the series.
Actually, I was thinking more about the interplanetary hypertubes from Cowboy Bebop. But that one's good too.
I won a free computer through a contest, and it came standard with 128 megs of ram and windows XP. A quick look in my local store's catalog shows this to be the standard loadout. 128 megs and winXP is not usable. New OS is designed for new hardware, but unfortunately until RAM makers discontinue the 128-meg-chip, we will still have computers shipped impotent.
Besides that, harvesting energy from a vacuum has a good chance of causing a collapse of the quantum energy level of space, thus ending the universe as we know it. That's a bad thing.
Well, most major on-line games (Quake, Half-Life, Warcraft 3) just use the CD-Key as a unique ID on their online server browser. If you don't have the key, you can't play over TCP/IP - LAN only for you.
I can definitely see that that is where this is going. Perfect example: XP is skinnable. But, only MS certified skins can be run on XP. MS has not made any avenues for making certified skins. The result? Download a hacked DLL and then use non-certified skins.
There is a massive community of XP-Styles, all centered around a hacked uxtheme.dll. If Explorer specifically looks for a specific version of uxtheme.dll instead of the filename, they're SOL.
I want to find that somewhere - I watched it at my local anime club and was pissing myself laughing the whole way.
For non-fans - His and Her's is basically the best chick-flick ever. Its the usual stupid romantic duelling storyline, except its actually funny (instead of Cameron Diaz traipsing around being a ditz).
Get it for your girlfriends.