If you insist on having personal stats that advance independently of the equipment, then just make it be a linear progression based on the amount of time spent doing stuff. You use melee weapons a lot, your melee skill grows. You use the bow, that grows. But if you don't use staff weapons, then that stat never progresses.
They tried that in Final Fantasy II. (I don't need to add the "J" any more, do I? Everyone knows FFII as the NES game by now, not the US release of FFIV, right?) It sucked.
The problem is that it takes mindless grinding from "grinding to raise every stat" to "grinding to raise a single stat." So in that game you'd find yourself wandering around getting attacked, ignoring the enemies, and then fighting amongst yourself to boost HP and weapon skills to the point where the enemies in the next area wouldn't kill you. It also meant that you could easily gain useless equipment. (Great, I've got the Staff of Pwning, and everyone is Level 1 Staves.)
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming.
(There's no rule about responding in order, is there? Er, anyway...) I disagree. The numerical stats and assigning points are done in computer RPGs because the run on computers. A computer is good at handling numbers. When you get right down to it, every computer game has these numerical stats. For example, in an FPS, each weapon has a different damage stat and enemies have different health and armor stats. The player might not see the stats, but ultimately, every computer simulation basically handles things using numerical stats.
What I would agree with is having "large jumps" in power levels is a hold over from pen and pencil days. There's a reason that the level cap in WoW is 80 and the level cap in D&D is 20. (I think?) In WoW, the computer can easily handle the larger range in values, where a human with pencil and paper would easily get bogged down if they had to keep track of everything.
I think they should just ditch the idea of leveling. If you just make it equipment-based, you start out with crappy loot and get better loot the further you go. Better loot means you can take on bigger tasks.
The problem with that comes when combined with:
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game.
Leveling allows a player to adjust difficulty within the game. If you absolutely suck at the game, you can grind until you get higher stats and reduce the challenges to the point where you can handle them.
If you tie advancement to equipment, if the player sucks at the game, they're either SOL because they can never gain more power until they overcome the current challenge, or they have to look into a guidebook to discover which pixel the Staff of Pwning is hidden under.
Otherwise, I agree - you shouldn't need a guidebook to be able to generally play the game. The game mechanics should be easy enough that you don't need to worry about permanently screwing up your character. Good PC applications have an "Undo" button for a reason - the user/player should not be punished for experimenting. ("Save repeatedly" isn't acceptable for a PC application, it shouldn't be for a game, either.)
But computer games are always going to have stats, and allowing grinding to advance turns out to make the games more accessible to a wider range of skill levels. The best players can blaze through at low levels, while the worst can slowly slog along.
I find that the symbols on the PlayStation controller prevent me from confusing it with the SNES controller. It's the Xbox controller that kills me, because it uses the same letters the SNES controller uses, just backwards.
"OK, so now I just need to press A... oops, that was B because B is A and A is B and X is Y and Y is X and... AAAAAGH!"
Considering Jeremy Clarkson's statements about the US, I think it's perfectly fair to base my opinion of the UK on Top Gear. Turn about is fair play, or whatever the saying is.
Which I have to say, I found hilarious, because they said to avoid San Fransisco because their sports teams haven't won a championship in ages.
Also, avoid Boston, because their sports teams recently have won championships.
So, obviously, you want to live some place where the sports teams have never won recently, but are still some of the best in the nation? I'm confused here.
Of course, I've heard Red Sox fans who seriously complain about the Red Sox winning the World Series: see, it ruined the fan base because younger Red Sox fans don't know the joy of almost winning but failing at the last minute.
You know what, screw sports. I'm going to back to video games.
It's also the audio format that my Garmin nüvi uses. If you go into the About screen it lists licensing information for several components, including an Ogg Vorbis decoder.
As I recall, starting with Unreal Tournament 2003, the "official" music format that Unreal uses is Ogg Vorbis as well. (According to the Ogg Vorbis FAQ, I'm correct.)
So it may not be in wide use in portable media players, but it's out there.
Read the linked decision - this didn't say that you don't have to read past Page 1, it said that only informing the user of the existence of licensing terms if they scroll to the very bottom of the page doesn't make the terms binding.
Essentially, if the plugin installer used a "clickwrap" license - as explicitly stated by Sotomayor in a footnote - it could have been binding.
But instead, there was a single sentence at the bottom of the page: "Please review and agree to the terms of the Netscape SmartDownload software license agreement before downloading and using the software." Installing the plugin didn't show the license, and if you didn't scroll down past the download button, you wouldn't see anything about the license.
You should read the ruling, it seems pretty clear to me that Sotomayor did indeed know what she's talking about and came to the correct decision.
Re:Heroin? What Kinda Book Reading Do You Do, JR?
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I caught that after posting. I still think adding "them" to the end would have made the sentence much clearer: "Believe it or not I do reread these before I submit them."
And on preview, I notice I added another word in there, changing "reread" to "do reread." So I still think the sentence should be rewritten for clarity.:)
Re:Heroin? What Kinda Book Reading Do You Do, JR?
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While we're bashing about typos and grammar:
There are many more similarities between the books than their are differences.
That should be "there" - just like at the start of the sentence.
Also:
The issue for newer readers is that they don't have the nostalgia to gloss over the stories issues.
That'd be "story's" since it's possessive, not plural.
And finally:
Believe it or not I reread these a few times before I submit.
That should be submitted, as it happened in the past. I'd actually go with "submitted them" since I think it reads better. Also, I'm not sure why "these" and not "this" but I suppose you could mean the comment along with the review.
I'm done nitpicking. Might as well get it out of my system, especially because I can't write or spell worth beans anyway.:)
And as Top Gear showed us, virtually indestructible;)
Toyota has been running ads in the US that feature "automotive experts in Europe" trying to destroy a Hilux. Of course, as the fine print below the ad admits, the Hilux isn't sold in the US. (According to the fine print, it's only sold in the U.K.)
Sadly, they never admit that the "experts" they're referring to include Jeremy Clarkson - who did eventually succeed in killing a Hilux with his Toybota.
I'm not sure how that will protect against data loss from equipment failure, natural disaster, fire, software failure, solar flares, Secret Service, or really anything other than hackers.
Offsite, offline backups aren't a good idea solely to protect against hackers. They're a good idea to protect against data loss in general.
I know, that was the moment I could no longer suspend disbelief. The writers worked so hard to make the 40-50 thousand refugees believable (with conflicts, indecision, even mutiny and greed). But on what would have been the most shocking decision to date they all suddenly agreed?
Yeah, and you could tell that the writers agree with you, because of the throw-away line by lawyer-dude whose name I can't remember expressing disbelief that they'd all go along with it.
Funny how a microoft ad for a vista-only product shows it running on a mac... (check out the window decorations on the dialog it's eithr a mac or linux with the osx look-n-feel).
I disagree - it's obviously not the standard Windows chrome, but it's not Mac OS X either. It looks more like a graphic designer decided to ape the Windows look for some reason - the window border is a strange cross between XP and Vista. (Vista Aero border with XP window buttons.) And the rest of the UI looks like Microsoft's standard "make stuff up" approach to apps, like how Office 2007 goes as far to use its own window borders instead of the standard Windows ones.
On the other hand, the laptop the little girl is using is clearly a poorly disguised MacBook Pro. (Wikipedia link since it's the older design.) Check out the back - a sticker almost covers up the Apple logo. Almost, but not quite. You can still see the leaf of the apple poking up from behind the stick and a part of the apple to the left.
Plus if you let the movie play long enough, you have to love the looks of shocked horror of the people in the meeting where he's singing. (Tip: mute it if you're going to try that.)
--That the 5 have been living amongst the humans for some time now, will Colonel Tigh being around for quit a long time. How did they get there? How did they get by in the colonial "system", as it were? Why did they suddenly get activated? Surely someone in the cyclons know.
The writers have had the characters themselves ask those questions, so they're at least aware that they need to answer them. Which gives us hope that they will.
--On the point of the 5, somehow the cylons don't even know who they are for most of the series, don't even know the final 5 are in the fleet, but somehow through all the nuking the cylons did, all the shooting and destruction--somehow, the 5 are still alive? Riiiight.
Yeah, I find that a bit... convenient. Of course, the whole "our goal is to destroy humanity, except not really" thing already makes that a smaller issue. Apparently the Cylon plan was "Kill All Humans - well, except for a few, because we need to run experiments with them to figure out this procreation thing. Oh, and the fleet, which we apparently were planning on allowing to live because we placed sleeper agents in it." So they apparently were always planning on allowing the fleet to survive, because they pre-seeded it with Cylon sleepers. Maybe.
--That the humans created the Cylons as machines, had a big fight with them, the Cylons left for 40 years (?), came back with human looking versions, of which there are supposedly 12 models (only 7 are duplicated?). But now, the 13th colony ---2,000 years ago---was actually all human-looking cylons. Wait, what? That doesn't provide an explanation of how they could be living with humans at all.
Why did the Cylons bother creating human looking versions of themselves in the first place? For all we know, the Cylons that were created by the humans were in fact created by surviving members of the 13th tribe. But, again, the writers have acknowledged that they need to explain how the "final five" got to the colonies, so hopefully this will be answered along with that.
Without getting into too much of a spoiler - they're at least plausible now. There are a ton of questions left open, but it's at least possible to believe that the questions are answerable. Plus, the characters actually acknowledged some of the questions, so we know that the writers are at least aware of them.
Without getting into too much detail, we now have an answer as to why they'd be living as humans for as long as they did and why the Cylons weren't aware of their identities. (Then again, how did they know that there were 12 models, again? And the answers given seem to suggest that the five shouldn't count as Cylon models, especially given the model numbers we know.)
So, yes, quite a few questions left open, but at least it seems plausible that they can be answered.
Man, I wish that were a joke, but it just isn't. The series producers have admitted that the whole "and they have a plan" thing was added "because it seemed cool."
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
The writers have never had a real plan and have been playing the entire thing mostly by ear. And it shows: the "and they have a plan" thing has just vanished. What is that plan? Did they give up on it? Why didn't they finish wiping out the human race? (Problems with Cylons procreating, apparently?) What's the deal with the human/Cylon hybrids (versus the Basestar/humanoid Cylon hybrid)?
I will give them credit, though. They've managed to take the identities of the Final Five Cylons in the most recent episode and make them make sense. Sure, not everything is explained yet, and there are remaining questions, but at least the idea that they're Cylons doesn't seem completely implausible any more.
Hopefully they'll find a way to tackle some of the dangling threads and finally figure out what the Cylon's plan was. Because they sure don't appear to have had a plan in the series so far.
Dreams are good, hate the recursive ones where you dream you woke up, but it's all good.
I managed to get that to go a good three-deep once. First I dreamed I woke up, then I realized it was a dream and woke up and went and paid a bill, but that was a dream from which I woke up from and went and took a shower, but that turned out to be a dream so then I really woke up and discovered I was late for work.
So in the end I ran out the door without remembering to grab the bill and without enough time to take a shower.
Dreams are nice, but it sucks when it turns out you only dreamed being ready to face the day.
The idea is fairly simple, actually - the government requires TV shows to have ratings (sort of like they do now) and parents can use government-required technology in their TVs (sort of like the V-Chip) to filter out shows they are objectionable. In return, broadcasters can broadcast anything they want, as long as it's properly rated. (OK, so not anything, but, well, almost anything...)
Several "parents groups" have claimed this is what they're demanding from the government, and that once it's in place, they'll have no problem with uncensored content being broadcast, as long as it's properly marked.
Somehow I find it hard to believe, considering that the technology exists and they still won't shut up about "filth on TV," but the idea behind "tak[ing] steps to allow parents to determine what their kids can and cannot see" is essentially a compromise between censorship and freedom of speech. It's a pragmatic solution, not a perfect solution.
In Canada it's even worse - the highest trim level of the Honda Civic (badged the EX in the USA) is badged as an Acura.
It's the Si in the US. The EX just adds features to the LX that the Canadian LX apparently already has. (According to the Wikipedia - I think, the article is kind of unclear.)
Look again - it's changing for Windows 7. Sadly it's hard to say exactly how it works based on nothing but screenshots, but there are enough to know that it's not the old Quick Launch bar. In the old Quick Launch bar, clicking on an icon multiple times would launch multiple copies of the application. From the looks of the new bar, they've combined the little icon with the "application window group" idea from XP. So each application gets one icon on the task bar, and that icon can be used to pull up individual windows from that application. (Like the existing "application window group" in XP.) I'd guess that clicking on it again brings the running application to the front and doesn't launch a new instance.
The best evidence that it's how it works is from the few screenshots where they actually launch one of the three applications on the left. Instead of popping up a new window icon to the right like in older Windows, it changes in to look exactly like the window icons for the front-most window that have been shown in the task bar in previous screen shots.
This is pretty much exactly how the Dock works - assuming, of course, that it does in fact work like the Dock works. It certainly looks like it does, but since I haven't had a chance to actually use Windows 7, I can't say for certain it really does.
No, not at all the same. The Dock combines those "quick launch" style icons with their window icons - which is exactly what this new Windows 7 Task Bar appears to be doing. So after launching an application, the icon becomes the window/application icon - clicking on it again doesn't launch a new copy of the application like the Quick Launch bar does, it brings the current instance of the application to the front. (Sadly, the screenshots never really revealed if that's actually what it's doing. But it sure looks like that's the plan.)
Which isn't to say that ripping off the Dock is necessarily a bad idea if they add in the feature where the Dock lets you know that it's actually launching the application you clicked on, rather than the old Quick Launch behavior of giving absolutely no indication that it's launching the application and not completely ignoring you...
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks suspiciously like Mac OS X's Dock. Hmm, single icon per application, where I have I seen that before?...
For further confirmation that this is Window's take on the Dock, take a peek at this screenshot. Hmm, "Unpin this program from the taskbar"... Seems a bit like dragging the application onto the Dock, thereby "pinning" it. (Although at least Window 7's little "launched border" is easier to see than the glowing dot on the Dock.)
Of course, I'd have to use it to see if it actually works. Mac OS X's Dock works the way it does due to the way Mac handles applications - each application gets a single instance and has a single menu bar but can have multiple windows. Windows does it differently - each window is essentially its own application. So directly ripping off the Dock probably won't work.
Still, it's nice to see that Microsoft's stance on innovation hasn't changed.:)
Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images.
I don't - Slashdot seems to have found a way to load ads via Web 2.0 in the new discussion view; I'm sure ZDnet and their advertisers can come up with a way to rotate ads using Web 2.0 techniques...
No. That involves gears. These mechanical computers don't use gears, and there's a good reason for that - the physics simulation doesn't quite work for gears.
The way it works is that when the game has decided that an object has been sufficiently crushed by another object, it just deletes it in a puff of smoke. (It's a kind of neat effect.) Creating gears, sadly, causes them to crush each other as the game tries to figure out how to make them spin. They have pre-crafted gears and I tried to make a simple set of three gears turned by giving power to one gear - and it worked for like three seconds before the game decided one of the gears had been crushed and deleted it.
For added nuisance, it's next to impossible to "anchor" the gears dead-center since you're using a PS3 controller. You can turn on a grid to try and help you, but it doesn't help that much.
1. Great, it's big. Just about the same size as a keyboard, and somewhat larger than my mousepad.
Your keyboard is tiny, then... It's quite a bit smaller than a keyboard, it's just almost twice the size of a standard touch pad on most laptops. (Four times the size? Twice as wide/high.) It makes a difference since you don't run out of room quite as quickly. It's just about the right size to allow you to sweep you hand across without moving your wrist, which I assume was the goal.
3. I can perform the same "gestures" on my keyboard.
Not the point. The idea behind doing them on the Trackpad is to avoid switching between the keyboard and the mouse (or Trackpad in this case). Yes, you can do just about everything you can do with gestures on the keyboard.
4. What's the point of 'touch-computing' if you have to have yet another input device to register the input for you? What you have is just a slightly better version of the standard 'mouse' touch-pad that almost all laptops have these days.
That's really my point - yes, the MacBook is just an evolution of the mouse touch-pad that most laptops have. It's "touch" in the sense that you can do most of the gestures the article talks about, but it doesn't involve touching the screen and doesn't require strange hand or head positions to take advantage of.
It solves some of the problems that traditional touch pads have, and it demonstrates a way of combining "touch gestures" and existing interfaces without screwing things up. Touch works - it just doesn't work better than keyboard and mouse. But in scenarios where it's impractical to use a keyboard and mouse (laptop on an airplane or similarly constrained space, hand-held device, etc.) touch can work.
It just doesn't work on the desktop, which I think we agree on. I know I don't wish I were using a Trackpad instead of a mouse while I'm typing this up on a desktop. The keyboard and mouse do work better - when you've got the space.
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If you insist on having personal stats that advance independently of the equipment, then just make it be a linear progression based on the amount of time spent doing stuff. You use melee weapons a lot, your melee skill grows. You use the bow, that grows. But if you don't use staff weapons, then that stat never progresses.
They tried that in Final Fantasy II. (I don't need to add the "J" any more, do I? Everyone knows FFII as the NES game by now, not the US release of FFIV, right?) It sucked.
The problem is that it takes mindless grinding from "grinding to raise every stat" to "grinding to raise a single stat." So in that game you'd find yourself wandering around getting attacked, ignoring the enemies, and then fighting amongst yourself to boost HP and weapon skills to the point where the enemies in the next area wouldn't kill you. It also meant that you could easily gain useless equipment. (Great, I've got the Staff of Pwning, and everyone is Level 1 Staves.)
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming.
(There's no rule about responding in order, is there? Er, anyway...) I disagree. The numerical stats and assigning points are done in computer RPGs because the run on computers. A computer is good at handling numbers. When you get right down to it, every computer game has these numerical stats. For example, in an FPS, each weapon has a different damage stat and enemies have different health and armor stats. The player might not see the stats, but ultimately, every computer simulation basically handles things using numerical stats.
What I would agree with is having "large jumps" in power levels is a hold over from pen and pencil days. There's a reason that the level cap in WoW is 80 and the level cap in D&D is 20. (I think?) In WoW, the computer can easily handle the larger range in values, where a human with pencil and paper would easily get bogged down if they had to keep track of everything.
I think they should just ditch the idea of leveling. If you just make it equipment-based, you start out with crappy loot and get better loot the further you go. Better loot means you can take on bigger tasks.
The problem with that comes when combined with:
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game.
Leveling allows a player to adjust difficulty within the game. If you absolutely suck at the game, you can grind until you get higher stats and reduce the challenges to the point where you can handle them.
If you tie advancement to equipment, if the player sucks at the game, they're either SOL because they can never gain more power until they overcome the current challenge, or they have to look into a guidebook to discover which pixel the Staff of Pwning is hidden under.
Otherwise, I agree - you shouldn't need a guidebook to be able to generally play the game. The game mechanics should be easy enough that you don't need to worry about permanently screwing up your character. Good PC applications have an "Undo" button for a reason - the user/player should not be punished for experimenting. ("Save repeatedly" isn't acceptable for a PC application, it shouldn't be for a game, either.)
But computer games are always going to have stats, and allowing grinding to advance turns out to make the games more accessible to a wider range of skill levels. The best players can blaze through at low levels, while the worst can slowly slog along.
It has a cross or a times symbol or something - it's not an "X" unless you really want it to be an X. I guess.
I dunno, I never had problems with it since it was the only common control.
I find that the symbols on the PlayStation controller prevent me from confusing it with the SNES controller. It's the Xbox controller that kills me, because it uses the same letters the SNES controller uses, just backwards.
"OK, so now I just need to press A... oops, that was B because B is A and A is B and X is Y and Y is X and ... AAAAAGH!"
Considering Jeremy Clarkson's statements about the US, I think it's perfectly fair to base my opinion of the UK on Top Gear. Turn about is fair play, or whatever the saying is.
Which I have to say, I found hilarious, because they said to avoid San Fransisco because their sports teams haven't won a championship in ages.
Also, avoid Boston, because their sports teams recently have won championships.
So, obviously, you want to live some place where the sports teams have never won recently, but are still some of the best in the nation? I'm confused here.
Of course, I've heard Red Sox fans who seriously complain about the Red Sox winning the World Series: see, it ruined the fan base because younger Red Sox fans don't know the joy of almost winning but failing at the last minute.
You know what, screw sports. I'm going to back to video games.
It's also the audio format that my Garmin nüvi uses. If you go into the About screen it lists licensing information for several components, including an Ogg Vorbis decoder.
As I recall, starting with Unreal Tournament 2003, the "official" music format that Unreal uses is Ogg Vorbis as well. (According to the Ogg Vorbis FAQ, I'm correct.)
So it may not be in wide use in portable media players, but it's out there.
Read the linked decision - this didn't say that you don't have to read past Page 1, it said that only informing the user of the existence of licensing terms if they scroll to the very bottom of the page doesn't make the terms binding.
Essentially, if the plugin installer used a "clickwrap" license - as explicitly stated by Sotomayor in a footnote - it could have been binding.
But instead, there was a single sentence at the bottom of the page: "Please review and agree to the terms of the Netscape SmartDownload software license agreement before downloading and using the software." Installing the plugin didn't show the license, and if you didn't scroll down past the download button, you wouldn't see anything about the license.
You should read the ruling, it seems pretty clear to me that Sotomayor did indeed know what she's talking about and came to the correct decision.
I caught that after posting. I still think adding "them" to the end would have made the sentence much clearer: "Believe it or not I do reread these before I submit them."
And on preview, I notice I added another word in there, changing "reread" to "do reread." So I still think the sentence should be rewritten for clarity. :)
While we're bashing about typos and grammar:
There are many more similarities between the books than their are differences.
That should be "there" - just like at the start of the sentence.
Also:
The issue for newer readers is that they don't have the nostalgia to gloss over the stories issues.
That'd be "story's" since it's possessive, not plural.
And finally:
Believe it or not I reread these a few times before I submit.
That should be submitted, as it happened in the past. I'd actually go with "submitted them" since I think it reads better. Also, I'm not sure why "these" and not "this" but I suppose you could mean the comment along with the review.
I'm done nitpicking. Might as well get it out of my system, especially because I can't write or spell worth beans anyway. :)
And as Top Gear showed us, virtually indestructible ;)
Toyota has been running ads in the US that feature "automotive experts in Europe" trying to destroy a Hilux. Of course, as the fine print below the ad admits, the Hilux isn't sold in the US. (According to the fine print, it's only sold in the U.K.)
Sadly, they never admit that the "experts" they're referring to include Jeremy Clarkson - who did eventually succeed in killing a Hilux with his Toybota.
How about we just shoot all hackers?
I'm not sure how that will protect against data loss from equipment failure, natural disaster, fire, software failure, solar flares, Secret Service, or really anything other than hackers.
Offsite, offline backups aren't a good idea solely to protect against hackers. They're a good idea to protect against data loss in general.
I know, that was the moment I could no longer suspend disbelief. The writers worked so hard to make the 40-50 thousand refugees believable (with conflicts, indecision, even mutiny and greed). But on what would have been the most shocking decision to date they all suddenly agreed?
Yeah, and you could tell that the writers agree with you, because of the throw-away line by lawyer-dude whose name I can't remember expressing disbelief that they'd all go along with it.
Funny how a microoft ad for a vista-only product shows it running on a mac ... (check out the window decorations on the dialog it's eithr a mac or linux with the osx look-n-feel).
I disagree - it's obviously not the standard Windows chrome, but it's not Mac OS X either. It looks more like a graphic designer decided to ape the Windows look for some reason - the window border is a strange cross between XP and Vista. (Vista Aero border with XP window buttons.) And the rest of the UI looks like Microsoft's standard "make stuff up" approach to apps, like how Office 2007 goes as far to use its own window borders instead of the standard Windows ones.
On the other hand, the laptop the little girl is using is clearly a poorly disguised MacBook Pro. (Wikipedia link since it's the older design.) Check out the back - a sticker almost covers up the Apple logo. Almost, but not quite. You can still see the leaf of the apple poking up from behind the stick and a part of the apple to the left.
Plus if you let the movie play long enough, you have to love the looks of shocked horror of the people in the meeting where he's singing. (Tip: mute it if you're going to try that.)
--That the 5 have been living amongst the humans for some time now, will Colonel Tigh being around for quit a long time. How did they get there? How did they get by in the colonial "system", as it were? Why did they suddenly get activated? Surely someone in the cyclons know.
The writers have had the characters themselves ask those questions, so they're at least aware that they need to answer them. Which gives us hope that they will.
--On the point of the 5, somehow the cylons don't even know who they are for most of the series, don't even know the final 5 are in the fleet, but somehow through all the nuking the cylons did, all the shooting and destruction--somehow, the 5 are still alive? Riiiight.
Yeah, I find that a bit... convenient. Of course, the whole "our goal is to destroy humanity, except not really" thing already makes that a smaller issue. Apparently the Cylon plan was "Kill All Humans - well, except for a few, because we need to run experiments with them to figure out this procreation thing. Oh, and the fleet, which we apparently were planning on allowing to live because we placed sleeper agents in it." So they apparently were always planning on allowing the fleet to survive, because they pre-seeded it with Cylon sleepers. Maybe.
--That the humans created the Cylons as machines, had a big fight with them, the Cylons left for 40 years (?), came back with human looking versions, of which there are supposedly 12 models (only 7 are duplicated?). But now, the 13th colony ---2,000 years ago---was actually all human-looking cylons. Wait, what? That doesn't provide an explanation of how they could be living with humans at all.
Why did the Cylons bother creating human looking versions of themselves in the first place? For all we know, the Cylons that were created by the humans were in fact created by surviving members of the 13th tribe. But, again, the writers have acknowledged that they need to explain how the "final five" got to the colonies, so hopefully this will be answered along with that.
Without getting into too much of a spoiler - they're at least plausible now. There are a ton of questions left open, but it's at least possible to believe that the questions are answerable. Plus, the characters actually acknowledged some of the questions, so we know that the writers are at least aware of them.
Without getting into too much detail, we now have an answer as to why they'd be living as humans for as long as they did and why the Cylons weren't aware of their identities. (Then again, how did they know that there were 12 models, again? And the answers given seem to suggest that the five shouldn't count as Cylon models, especially given the model numbers we know.)
So, yes, quite a few questions left open, but at least it seems plausible that they can be answered.
Man, I wish that were a joke, but it just isn't. The series producers have admitted that the whole "and they have a plan" thing was added "because it seemed cool."
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
The writers have never had a real plan and have been playing the entire thing mostly by ear. And it shows: the "and they have a plan" thing has just vanished. What is that plan? Did they give up on it? Why didn't they finish wiping out the human race? (Problems with Cylons procreating, apparently?) What's the deal with the human/Cylon hybrids (versus the Basestar/humanoid Cylon hybrid)?
I will give them credit, though. They've managed to take the identities of the Final Five Cylons in the most recent episode and make them make sense. Sure, not everything is explained yet, and there are remaining questions, but at least the idea that they're Cylons doesn't seem completely implausible any more.
Hopefully they'll find a way to tackle some of the dangling threads and finally figure out what the Cylon's plan was. Because they sure don't appear to have had a plan in the series so far.
Dreams are good, hate the recursive ones where you dream you woke up, but it's all good.
I managed to get that to go a good three-deep once. First I dreamed I woke up, then I realized it was a dream and woke up and went and paid a bill, but that was a dream from which I woke up from and went and took a shower, but that turned out to be a dream so then I really woke up and discovered I was late for work.
So in the end I ran out the door without remembering to grab the bill and without enough time to take a shower.
Dreams are nice, but it sucks when it turns out you only dreamed being ready to face the day.
The idea is fairly simple, actually - the government requires TV shows to have ratings (sort of like they do now) and parents can use government-required technology in their TVs (sort of like the V-Chip) to filter out shows they are objectionable. In return, broadcasters can broadcast anything they want, as long as it's properly rated. (OK, so not anything, but, well, almost anything...)
Several "parents groups" have claimed this is what they're demanding from the government, and that once it's in place, they'll have no problem with uncensored content being broadcast, as long as it's properly marked.
Somehow I find it hard to believe, considering that the technology exists and they still won't shut up about "filth on TV," but the idea behind "tak[ing] steps to allow parents to determine what their kids can and cannot see" is essentially a compromise between censorship and freedom of speech. It's a pragmatic solution, not a perfect solution.
So:
var c=[];
/* */ c.push(String(i));
for (var i=0;i<=100;i++)
eval(c.join('+'));
Would be considered wrong? I'm not storing an array of numbers and I never iterate over the array...
(Retarded comment for indentation due to deficiencies in Slashdot's commenting code, not to make the answer more wrong.)
In Canada it's even worse - the highest trim level of the Honda Civic (badged the EX in the USA) is badged as an Acura.
It's the Si in the US. The EX just adds features to the LX that the Canadian LX apparently already has. (According to the Wikipedia - I think, the article is kind of unclear.)
Look again - it's changing for Windows 7. Sadly it's hard to say exactly how it works based on nothing but screenshots, but there are enough to know that it's not the old Quick Launch bar. In the old Quick Launch bar, clicking on an icon multiple times would launch multiple copies of the application. From the looks of the new bar, they've combined the little icon with the "application window group" idea from XP. So each application gets one icon on the task bar, and that icon can be used to pull up individual windows from that application. (Like the existing "application window group" in XP.) I'd guess that clicking on it again brings the running application to the front and doesn't launch a new instance.
The best evidence that it's how it works is from the few screenshots where they actually launch one of the three applications on the left. Instead of popping up a new window icon to the right like in older Windows, it changes in to look exactly like the window icons for the front-most window that have been shown in the task bar in previous screen shots.
This is pretty much exactly how the Dock works - assuming, of course, that it does in fact work like the Dock works. It certainly looks like it does, but since I haven't had a chance to actually use Windows 7, I can't say for certain it really does.
No, not at all the same. The Dock combines those "quick launch" style icons with their window icons - which is exactly what this new Windows 7 Task Bar appears to be doing. So after launching an application, the icon becomes the window/application icon - clicking on it again doesn't launch a new copy of the application like the Quick Launch bar does, it brings the current instance of the application to the front. (Sadly, the screenshots never really revealed if that's actually what it's doing. But it sure looks like that's the plan.)
Which isn't to say that ripping off the Dock is necessarily a bad idea if they add in the feature where the Dock lets you know that it's actually launching the application you clicked on, rather than the old Quick Launch behavior of giving absolutely no indication that it's launching the application and not completely ignoring you...
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks suspiciously like Mac OS X's Dock. Hmm, single icon per application, where I have I seen that before?...
For further confirmation that this is Window's take on the Dock, take a peek at this screenshot. Hmm, "Unpin this program from the taskbar"... Seems a bit like dragging the application onto the Dock, thereby "pinning" it. (Although at least Window 7's little "launched border" is easier to see than the glowing dot on the Dock.)
Of course, I'd have to use it to see if it actually works. Mac OS X's Dock works the way it does due to the way Mac handles applications - each application gets a single instance and has a single menu bar but can have multiple windows. Windows does it differently - each window is essentially its own application. So directly ripping off the Dock probably won't work.
Still, it's nice to see that Microsoft's stance on innovation hasn't changed. :)
Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images.
I don't - Slashdot seems to have found a way to load ads via Web 2.0 in the new discussion view; I'm sure ZDnet and their advertisers can come up with a way to rotate ads using Web 2.0 techniques...
No. That involves gears. These mechanical computers don't use gears, and there's a good reason for that - the physics simulation doesn't quite work for gears.
The way it works is that when the game has decided that an object has been sufficiently crushed by another object, it just deletes it in a puff of smoke. (It's a kind of neat effect.) Creating gears, sadly, causes them to crush each other as the game tries to figure out how to make them spin. They have pre-crafted gears and I tried to make a simple set of three gears turned by giving power to one gear - and it worked for like three seconds before the game decided one of the gears had been crushed and deleted it.
For added nuisance, it's next to impossible to "anchor" the gears dead-center since you're using a PS3 controller. You can turn on a grid to try and help you, but it doesn't help that much.
1. Great, it's big. Just about the same size as a keyboard, and somewhat larger than my mousepad.
Your keyboard is tiny, then... It's quite a bit smaller than a keyboard, it's just almost twice the size of a standard touch pad on most laptops. (Four times the size? Twice as wide/high.) It makes a difference since you don't run out of room quite as quickly. It's just about the right size to allow you to sweep you hand across without moving your wrist, which I assume was the goal.
3. I can perform the same "gestures" on my keyboard.
Not the point. The idea behind doing them on the Trackpad is to avoid switching between the keyboard and the mouse (or Trackpad in this case). Yes, you can do just about everything you can do with gestures on the keyboard.
4. What's the point of 'touch-computing' if you have to have yet another input device to register the input for you? What you have is just a slightly better version of the standard 'mouse' touch-pad that almost all laptops have these days.
That's really my point - yes, the MacBook is just an evolution of the mouse touch-pad that most laptops have. It's "touch" in the sense that you can do most of the gestures the article talks about, but it doesn't involve touching the screen and doesn't require strange hand or head positions to take advantage of.
It solves some of the problems that traditional touch pads have, and it demonstrates a way of combining "touch gestures" and existing interfaces without screwing things up. Touch works - it just doesn't work better than keyboard and mouse. But in scenarios where it's impractical to use a keyboard and mouse (laptop on an airplane or similarly constrained space, hand-held device, etc.) touch can work.
It just doesn't work on the desktop, which I think we agree on. I know I don't wish I were using a Trackpad instead of a mouse while I'm typing this up on a desktop. The keyboard and mouse do work better - when you've got the space.