if it doesn't show up in windows with "show hidden files and folders" checked it is
There are actually two options: "Show hidden files and folders" and "Hide protected operating system files." To see everything, you need to select "show hidden files" and uncheck "hide protected."
"Show hidden files and folders" reveals files marked "hidden" and not "system" while unchecking "hide protected operating system files" shows things marked both "hidden" and "system." These include files like Restore Points (under \System Volume Information), NTLDR, and the page file.
In my case, Comcast replaced it with a used box. At least I get the channels I'm supposed to now.
I really want to just ditch my cable box and replace it with a TiVo Series 3. But until this whole CableCard mess is sorted out, I'm not really willing to.
That's great, until the ISP decides that they can block any UDP traffic that isn't DNS to their servers.
Thankfully that will likely never happen since it would kill VOIP and many online game protocols use UDP. Killing UDP won't happen, since it would kill too many legitimate uses.
A much better idea would be to simply make the connections look as much like HTTP over SSL as possible. They can't block that.
This can, theoretically, already be done. (Sort of...) Since BitTorrent already runs over TCP and SSL (actually, TLS now) is simply a presentation-layer protocol, there's no reason BitTorrent can't be run over TLS.
The problem is the "sort of." Since BitTorrent involves a lot more back-and-forth than HTTPS would (HTTPS would be small upload followed by large download), it's still almost certainly possible to block BitTorrent traffic that runs over TLS. There's really no way around this - the send/receive ratios for BitTorrent will always be different from HTTPS ratios.
Besides, the ISP doesn't even really need that to throttle BitTorrent or P2P in general. All they really need to do is start blocking SYN packets from reaching their subscribers, or at the very least, throttle the number of SYN packets their subscribers can receive to, say, five every 30 minutes. About the only "legitimate" uses for subscribers accepting connections are active-mode FTP and various chat protocols. And even then, the only times chat protocols generally require the client to accept a connection is for direct peer-to-peer transfers, and the ISP won't care to kill those.
I assume you mean XML+CSS is unrecommended. XHTML+CSS is the recommended way - that's what the XSLT translates to.:)
But, yes, after screwing around with XML+CSS, I have to agree that it's a bad idea. It's neat in that it demonstrates the power of XML and CSS, but ultimately it involves either turning CSS into XSLT (gratuitous use of the CSS "content" attribute) or re-ordering your XML to match the desired output structure and not the semantic structure.
But that's not what the original poster was asking, at least as I understood it. They were asking why you can't create new semantic tags and use them in an existing XHTML document. The answer is that you can, but it won't work in IE. Or, at least, I don't think it'll work in IE - the "run it through XSLT" trick someone mentioned might work, but I haven't tried it.
Which, assuming you want to support IE users, means no.
Of course, it's not like we can expect IE to rush out to support these new tags either. Making the whole effort, honestly, pointless.
It's already possible to take a plain XML document and style it completely using only CSS. It turns out to be impractical (some tags sort of require special support that can't be duplicated just by CSS rules, like <img>, <a>, and <script>), but it's possible.
First, ignore all the comments pointing out that WINE stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator. You're using "emulate" in a different sense than the WINE acronym is. By "WINE Is Not an Emulator" it means exactly your point: WINE does not emulate a physical machine - or, in other words, virtualize the process. WINE implements a compatible version of the Windows API, but it does not create a virtual machine. It's best called a compatibility layer or something like that.
Cygwin does something similar under Windows for UNIX. It emulates a UNIX environment under Windows, mapping standard UNIX calls to Windows equivalents. WINE does the same in reverse - it maps standard Windows calls to UNIX equivalents. (Pedantic note: I know I'm misusing the term UNIX. Someone else can come up with better terms.)
In any case, WINE is not a virtualization approach. A Windows program run through WINE is executed directly by the hardware the OS is running on. WINE simply provides a loader that can load and execute EXE and DLL programs, along with compatible implementations of Windows API.
Short answer: you're right. WINE is not virtualization.
Maybe, but I've done the math and that gives about $1,300 per person. And that's rounded down and with an over-estimated current population figure. It's based on data from the US Census Bureau.
Well, he said "per person" and your data is "per student."
Going back to the original source finds that they list a total US educational spending of $427,167,462,000 with the per-student spending at $8,701 as you already mentioned. So if we assume that the original poster really did mean "per person" and that the US population is currently 310,000,000 (the US census population clock places it closer to 302,000,000 so this figure will be low), then we get a total education expense of $1,378 per person.
Which leaves the $50 per person figure as being amazingly inaccurate.
PS3 as a DVR, huh? Well, that raises the following questions:
Does it support CableCard?
If not, how does it change channels?
Does it support HD? (I'd assume it does.)
Is it an additional add-on? (I'd assume it is, with a remote.) If so, how much does it cost?
How does it compare to other DVRs? Specifically, does it require a subscription? Offer TV listings? Offer suggestions?
Can it record while a game is playing? While a movie (DVD/Blu-Ray) is playing?
Does it use the same hard drive that games use? Will they be competing for available space?
I think that's my list of questions. I could see it working, but it'd have to be able to beat TiVo on ease of use. I'd rather have a separate DVR, but I can definitely understand that some people would want a combination console/DVD/Blu-Ray/DVR unit.
I've added code that is essentially my own version of the "lameness filter." This has been enough to stop almost all the spammers. It may annoy some legitimate posters, but it works, and legit posters can still post (unless they want to post about Levitra, Cialis, or Viagra). It doesn't require JavaScript, which is a plus, since as a NoScript user I would be kind of annoyed if it did. (And, yes, I'm pretty sure I never whitelisted my own domain.)
But I'd still like to block spammers before I get to the point of doing various magic like a lameness filter, preventing access altogether, so that if they ever do code to work around the filter they're still blocked from posting. It would also potentially reduce the load on the servers.
This seems like as good a place to ask as any. Can mostly email-based DNSBLs be used to try and block comment spammers? I'd love to reduce the load I get from comment spammers trying to spam my website.
I've been contemplating using an existing DNSBL, but all the well-known ones are focused on email spam. I expect that comment spambots and email spambots mostly overlap, but I'm not sure how effective such a measure would be.
My cellphone is now more powerful than the first computer I used. It supports up to 1GB of removable storage in about the smallest form factor I've ever seen (micro SD). It's built-in camera is as good as the first digital camera that I owned.
In other words, yes, people may start demanding smaller and more powerful devices - but so what? It just means that instead of speed doubling, power use might start decreasing, storage density might increase, who knows what. We're using computers for purposes I never would have dreamed of when ten years ago. I have a computer under my TV that records shows - I never saw that coming until it did.
Computers will continue to evolve. The laptop and desktop might start to fade out, but new devices will take their place.
I'm currently paying approximately $50/month for "high speed Internet" access through Comcast in a Boston suburb. I have no idea what it would actually cost to get just Internet access through Comcast because I'm also paying for cable TV, which bumps the bill up to over $100/month. According to Comcast's website, if I dropped the cable TV, I'd have to pay about $60/month for Internet access. Of course, they don't list the "taxes, surcharges, and fees" for that plan.
You'll note I didn't list a speed there. That's because Comcast doesn't give one on my bill. After looking it up on their website, it's apparently 6Mbps. Of course, they actually list that as "up to 4x faster than 1.5Mbps DSL!" For an additional $10/month, you can upgrade to 8Mbps.
Now I'm an anomaly. I have access to another cable internet provider. They claim to offer 10Mbps for the same price as Comcast offers 6Mbps, although I wasn't able to figure out if that was an introductory offer or not. (Although I may need to look into them a bit more...)
The HTTP spec clearly says that GET requests should only be used for idempotent actions. Technically, deleting an entry is an idempotent action, so using a GET link for a delete entry is - well, brain-dead stupid. But it doesn't break the spec.
See, an idempotent action is simply an action which has the same outcome the second time you attempt it. Deleting an entry twice doesn't change the final state of the system - the entry is still deleted. That makes it idempotent.
Of course, anyone with an ounce of sense would realize that what they really meant was that GET requests shouldn't change state and that POST requests should be used to change a system's state. (Or PUT, or DELETE. But no one ever uses those.) Which was the point of the parent poster in any case.
But before someone pulls out the "GET is supposed to be idempotent" part of the HTTP spec, remember that deletes are, technically, idempotent. They're safe to attempt multiple times, and leave the system in the same state afterwards.
It was all basically centred around Britain. All the wizarding history and what not.
To be fair, technically we only saw it from a British point of view because Harry was British. However I think the implication was that Merlin was one of the first great wizards and that the current wizarding world started with him? I dunno. In any case, it's possible that there's a whole international history we never saw as the story really only focuses on Voldemort.
With a whole world of wizards, why didn't any of the come to aid them in their struggle?
Well, there was Fleur, and maybe Krum...
Presumably because the Ministry never asked. The way I view it, the Ministry of Magic was only the British Ministry, it didn't have jurisdiction over the entire world. Throughout the series, the Ministry of Magic was essentially denying that there was any problem and claiming that everything was OK. This would be the news that the rest of the world was hearing. When Voldemort took over the Ministry, he became the new official British wizarding power. At that point, foreign wizards attempting to fight him would be fighting the legitimate British magical government, which may have been politically impossible.
Of course, that really fails to answer why no individual powerful wizards from other nations came to help, just why other nations wouldn't help.
I suppose it's possible that Voldemort and his Death Eaters could have blocked all communication to foreigners, so no one ever knew. Whatever the case, yes, it seems kind of strange that no foreigners helped (except, of course, for Fleur).
It just seems that Voldemort was strong enough to be a threat to the entire world.
Maybe - but in both of Voldemort's reigns of terror, his sphere of influence apparently never made it out of Great Britain. Maybe the rest of the world just didn't see him as a real threat, just some crazy British criminal that was their problem.
You know where I learned the word "fuck?" In a church. I was second grade, which would place me about seven years old.
Guess what - I never told a teacher to fuck off or started cursing in a Wal-Mart.
I'd expect that a seven year old can figure out what times are appropriate to use curse words (e.g., when trying to tick off your parents) and what times are not (e.g., when trying to act polite).
Censoring television isn't going to help anything. What type of TV are you planning on watching with your seven year old child that contains the word "fuck" anyway? Shows aimed at children aren't going to start containing characters who curse like sailors just because they can.
There are plenty of other places to learn curse words. Like on the school bus, from older students who think that teaching elementary school students to say "fuck" is just hilarious.
The plot is more "adult" themed than others in that it is very political. At 9 hours in you haven't even scratched the surface of what is going on.
The problem here is that the story is so boring that I really don't feel like continuing it. Good stories grab their audience early and keep their interest throughout the story. FFXII is about as bad as you can get in that respect: it starts with one story and jumps to another one very early in the game. They do reconnect several hours into the game, but it makes the story that much more difficult to get involved in.
So in this game you set up your gambits to deal with the easy fights....you prefer mashing a single button to select fight in the old ones?
That's a false dichotomy. There's more to life than button mashing and auto-play. My personal favorite of all the various Final Fantasy battle systems was FFX's. There needs to be a middle ground where you're still actively involved in influencing combat and the strategy and having a completely automated system.
Just because I don't like the completely passive system doesn't mean I want the exact opposite.
The license grid works perfectly fine. I didn't use a strategy guide because all the stuff that is related (like shields)...get this...they are all grouped next to each other so it is freaking obvious which upgrade path you want to take.
You're obviously not a min/maxer, but my main complaint with shields was based on a specific example where I had to grab a whole bunch of armor licenses to find the right shield license to obtain. I'd much rather have the entire grid revealed so I can figure out which licenses I want to grab and which I can safely skip. Knowing that there are techniques in one direction is nice, but I have no idea if any of them are worth anything! Maybe there's a technique I'd really want to work towards, but there's no way of knowing that without moving through all the techniques.
The most powerful weapon in the game is obtainable in two ways. The way you describe is a way to get it incredibly early in the game. The alternative is to get it later in the game by completing different objectives.
We're not talking about the same thing, then, since the alternative is to get a 0.1% chance drop. No typo there - literally a 1 in 1000 chance to get it as a chest drop. You can repeatedly spawn the chest, though. Of course, if I wanted to do that, I'd play an MMORPG and at least pretend there was a social aspect to it.
And I don't know of a single chest that has anything to do with kill chains.
Chest drop rates are influenced by chain levels, at least according to the FAQs I checked. Some chests will only drop certain items at higher levels.
FFXII sucked. I've played a total of like nine hours into it and got bored with it to the point I really don't plan on playing it again. The gambit system will literally play the game for you, leaving you free to run between cutscenes. The boss battles devolve into manually potion-spamming but otherwise letting the AI run free.
The story is practically incoherent, even this far into it. The characters are rebelling against the Empire because of the Last Rule of Politics. (Kingdoms are good. Empires are evil.) I have really no idea what anyone's motivation is - it seems to generically be "the Empire is evil." Which is evil because they said so, with no real evidence. (In fact, all evidence so far shows that said kingdom is better off under Imperial rule than it ever was under the old kingdom.)
The license grid is insanely lame and seems to be designed to force you to buy a strategy guide. The main problem with it is that it doesn't say what a given slot does until you've got something unlocked next to it. This makes guiding advancement essentially impossible. A license that has nothing next to it may say something like "Shields" but won't offer any idea of which shields it allows. So you wind up having to guess which "Shields" you need to move towards to use your new shiny shield. Likewise, any advancing towards specific abilities is impossible.
Unless, of course, you already know what's on the grid, by buying the strategy guide. (Or looking it up online...)
Likewise, the most powerful weapon in the game can only be obtained if you don't open certain chests. Problem: most chests are randomly generated, are actually called "treasures" and there's no indication that these magic chests are any different from any other randomly generated chest. They're also strategically placed so that it's impossible to miss them while progressing through the game. They're literally placed at key points that you have to travel through.
This "random chest generation" scheme also means that some of the best equipment has a very small (less than 1% in some cases) chance of being generated, and only after building a very long "chain" (killing the same monster family over and over and over and over again).
Personally, I enjoyed FFX far more than FFXII. FFXII really has no Final Fantasy "feel" to it, and despite being set in Ivalice, has no FF Tactics feel to it.
Look again - closely. The effect is fairly subtle under the XP look but much more noticeable under Vista with the full Aero Glass effects enabled.
When you position the mouse cursor over a scrollbar, it's supposed to light up. Under Vista, this means going from a gray color to a blue color, making it fairly noticeable. Under XP's look, this means going from a light blue to an even lighter blue. If you're using the Classic look, there's nothing to see, since there is no mouse-over effect.
Vista's full Aero Glass additional has a fade-in effect where the button background on the arrows is supposed to appear. (Firefox fails to do this, just like IE7.) Likewise, there's a fade-out effect when the mouse leaves the scrollbar that both IE7 and Firefox fail to do. Of course, IE7 can't do it since it never did the original mouse-over effect.
Under IE7, this effect never happens. Mousing-over the scrollbar does nothing.
I've got a movie of it happening under Vista using FRAPS. Unfortunately I'll have to go hunting for something to change it into a useful format, since I doubt a lot of people have the FRAPS codec installed.
Keep in mind this only happens in the MSHTML control. All form controls inside of MSHTML are emulated. You can easily verify this by looking at a form button with a very large caption - IE6/IE7 stretch out the button background to the point it looks strange. Not to mention that all form controls in IE7 are missing Vista's Aero Glass fade-in/fade-out effects.
IE7's interface makes sense (somewhat) under Vista, where it matches Windows Explorer and generally fits in with the rest of the Vista interface. Of course, as you imply, it absolutely does not fit in under Windows XP.
Although my favorite IE7-ism is that it fails to emulate the scroll bar correctly. None of the mouse-over effects work. (If you're using XP's look or Vista's look, the scroll bar should "light up" when hovered over, Firefox emulates this.) In Vista, mousing over it should cause the arrows to gain a button background.
Thanks to this, I now know that IE7, like Firefox, doesn't actually use native controls. Instead it emulates them in the same way Firefox does. The hilarious part is that it actually does it worse than Firefox does.
Slashdot Mirror
There are actually two options: "Show hidden files and folders" and "Hide protected operating system files." To see everything, you need to select "show hidden files" and uncheck "hide protected."
"Show hidden files and folders" reveals files marked "hidden" and not "system" while unchecking "hide protected operating system files" shows things marked both "hidden" and "system." These include files like Restore Points (under \System Volume Information), NTLDR, and the page file.
In my case, Comcast replaced it with a used box. At least I get the channels I'm supposed to now.
I really want to just ditch my cable box and replace it with a TiVo Series 3. But until this whole CableCard mess is sorted out, I'm not really willing to.
The foolish fool who foolishly points out the foolish foolery of the fool who posted the foolishly foolish fool of the original comment?
(It's a Franziska von Karma joke. She talks like that.)
Thankfully that will likely never happen since it would kill VOIP and many online game protocols use UDP. Killing UDP won't happen, since it would kill too many legitimate uses.
A much better idea would be to simply make the connections look as much like HTTP over SSL as possible. They can't block that.This can, theoretically, already be done. (Sort of...) Since BitTorrent already runs over TCP and SSL (actually, TLS now) is simply a presentation-layer protocol, there's no reason BitTorrent can't be run over TLS.
The problem is the "sort of." Since BitTorrent involves a lot more back-and-forth than HTTPS would (HTTPS would be small upload followed by large download), it's still almost certainly possible to block BitTorrent traffic that runs over TLS. There's really no way around this - the send/receive ratios for BitTorrent will always be different from HTTPS ratios.
Besides, the ISP doesn't even really need that to throttle BitTorrent or P2P in general. All they really need to do is start blocking SYN packets from reaching their subscribers, or at the very least, throttle the number of SYN packets their subscribers can receive to, say, five every 30 minutes. About the only "legitimate" uses for subscribers accepting connections are active-mode FTP and various chat protocols. And even then, the only times chat protocols generally require the client to accept a connection is for direct peer-to-peer transfers, and the ISP won't care to kill those.
I assume you mean XML+CSS is unrecommended. XHTML+CSS is the recommended way - that's what the XSLT translates to. :)
But, yes, after screwing around with XML+CSS, I have to agree that it's a bad idea. It's neat in that it demonstrates the power of XML and CSS, but ultimately it involves either turning CSS into XSLT (gratuitous use of the CSS "content" attribute) or re-ordering your XML to match the desired output structure and not the semantic structure.
But that's not what the original poster was asking, at least as I understood it. They were asking why you can't create new semantic tags and use them in an existing XHTML document. The answer is that you can, but it won't work in IE. Or, at least, I don't think it'll work in IE - the "run it through XSLT" trick someone mentioned might work, but I haven't tried it.
Yes, in browsers that fully implement XHTML.
Which, assuming you want to support IE users, means no.
Of course, it's not like we can expect IE to rush out to support these new tags either. Making the whole effort, honestly, pointless.
It's already possible to take a plain XML document and style it completely using only CSS. It turns out to be impractical (some tags sort of require special support that can't be duplicated just by CSS rules, like <img>, <a>, and <script>), but it's possible.
First, ignore all the comments pointing out that WINE stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator. You're using "emulate" in a different sense than the WINE acronym is. By "WINE Is Not an Emulator" it means exactly your point: WINE does not emulate a physical machine - or, in other words, virtualize the process. WINE implements a compatible version of the Windows API, but it does not create a virtual machine. It's best called a compatibility layer or something like that.
Cygwin does something similar under Windows for UNIX. It emulates a UNIX environment under Windows, mapping standard UNIX calls to Windows equivalents. WINE does the same in reverse - it maps standard Windows calls to UNIX equivalents. (Pedantic note: I know I'm misusing the term UNIX. Someone else can come up with better terms.)
In any case, WINE is not a virtualization approach. A Windows program run through WINE is executed directly by the hardware the OS is running on. WINE simply provides a loader that can load and execute EXE and DLL programs, along with compatible implementations of Windows API.
Short answer: you're right. WINE is not virtualization.
Maybe, but I've done the math and that gives about $1,300 per person. And that's rounded down and with an over-estimated current population figure. It's based on data from the US Census Bureau.
Well, he said "per person" and your data is "per student."
Going back to the original source finds that they list a total US educational spending of $427,167,462,000 with the per-student spending at $8,701 as you already mentioned. So if we assume that the original poster really did mean "per person" and that the US population is currently 310,000,000 (the US census population clock places it closer to 302,000,000 so this figure will be low), then we get a total education expense of $1,378 per person.
Which leaves the $50 per person figure as being amazingly inaccurate.
So claim it! It can be "El Cabri's Law," or something to that effect. :)
PS3 as a DVR, huh? Well, that raises the following questions:
I think that's my list of questions. I could see it working, but it'd have to be able to beat TiVo on ease of use. I'd rather have a separate DVR, but I can definitely understand that some people would want a combination console/DVD/Blu-Ray/DVR unit.
I'd go a step further than that. Who cares if people consider video games to be art?
I've added code that is essentially my own version of the "lameness filter." This has been enough to stop almost all the spammers. It may annoy some legitimate posters, but it works, and legit posters can still post (unless they want to post about Levitra, Cialis, or Viagra). It doesn't require JavaScript, which is a plus, since as a NoScript user I would be kind of annoyed if it did. (And, yes, I'm pretty sure I never whitelisted my own domain.)
But I'd still like to block spammers before I get to the point of doing various magic like a lameness filter, preventing access altogether, so that if they ever do code to work around the filter they're still blocked from posting. It would also potentially reduce the load on the servers.
This seems like as good a place to ask as any. Can mostly email-based DNSBLs be used to try and block comment spammers? I'd love to reduce the load I get from comment spammers trying to spam my website.
I've been contemplating using an existing DNSBL, but all the well-known ones are focused on email spam. I expect that comment spambots and email spambots mostly overlap, but I'm not sure how effective such a measure would be.
Want to buy the 2GB Micro SD I bought before finding where in the manual it explained it only supported up to 1GB Micro SD?
My cellphone is now more powerful than the first computer I used. It supports up to 1GB of removable storage in about the smallest form factor I've ever seen (micro SD). It's built-in camera is as good as the first digital camera that I owned.
In other words, yes, people may start demanding smaller and more powerful devices - but so what? It just means that instead of speed doubling, power use might start decreasing, storage density might increase, who knows what. We're using computers for purposes I never would have dreamed of when ten years ago. I have a computer under my TV that records shows - I never saw that coming until it did.
Computers will continue to evolve. The laptop and desktop might start to fade out, but new devices will take their place.
I'm currently paying approximately $50/month for "high speed Internet" access through Comcast in a Boston suburb. I have no idea what it would actually cost to get just Internet access through Comcast because I'm also paying for cable TV, which bumps the bill up to over $100/month. According to Comcast's website, if I dropped the cable TV, I'd have to pay about $60/month for Internet access. Of course, they don't list the "taxes, surcharges, and fees" for that plan.
You'll note I didn't list a speed there. That's because Comcast doesn't give one on my bill. After looking it up on their website, it's apparently 6Mbps. Of course, they actually list that as "up to 4x faster than 1.5Mbps DSL!" For an additional $10/month, you can upgrade to 8Mbps.
Now I'm an anomaly. I have access to another cable internet provider. They claim to offer 10Mbps for the same price as Comcast offers 6Mbps, although I wasn't able to figure out if that was an introductory offer or not. (Although I may need to look into them a bit more...)
The HTTP spec clearly says that GET requests should only be used for idempotent actions. Technically, deleting an entry is an idempotent action, so using a GET link for a delete entry is - well, brain-dead stupid. But it doesn't break the spec.
See, an idempotent action is simply an action which has the same outcome the second time you attempt it. Deleting an entry twice doesn't change the final state of the system - the entry is still deleted. That makes it idempotent.
Of course, anyone with an ounce of sense would realize that what they really meant was that GET requests shouldn't change state and that POST requests should be used to change a system's state. (Or PUT, or DELETE. But no one ever uses those.) Which was the point of the parent poster in any case.
But before someone pulls out the "GET is supposed to be idempotent" part of the HTTP spec, remember that deletes are, technically, idempotent. They're safe to attempt multiple times, and leave the system in the same state afterwards.
To be fair, technically we only saw it from a British point of view because Harry was British. However I think the implication was that Merlin was one of the first great wizards and that the current wizarding world started with him? I dunno. In any case, it's possible that there's a whole international history we never saw as the story really only focuses on Voldemort.
With a whole world of wizards, why didn't any of the come to aid them in their struggle?Well, there was Fleur, and maybe Krum...
Presumably because the Ministry never asked. The way I view it, the Ministry of Magic was only the British Ministry, it didn't have jurisdiction over the entire world. Throughout the series, the Ministry of Magic was essentially denying that there was any problem and claiming that everything was OK. This would be the news that the rest of the world was hearing. When Voldemort took over the Ministry, he became the new official British wizarding power. At that point, foreign wizards attempting to fight him would be fighting the legitimate British magical government, which may have been politically impossible.
Of course, that really fails to answer why no individual powerful wizards from other nations came to help, just why other nations wouldn't help.
I suppose it's possible that Voldemort and his Death Eaters could have blocked all communication to foreigners, so no one ever knew. Whatever the case, yes, it seems kind of strange that no foreigners helped (except, of course, for Fleur).
It just seems that Voldemort was strong enough to be a threat to the entire world.Maybe - but in both of Voldemort's reigns of terror, his sphere of influence apparently never made it out of Great Britain. Maybe the rest of the world just didn't see him as a real threat, just some crazy British criminal that was their problem.
You mean there isn't a Harry Potter / Bleach crossover? Rats.
(Get it, deathly Hollows? Hehehe.)
You know where I learned the word "fuck?" In a church. I was second grade, which would place me about seven years old.
Guess what - I never told a teacher to fuck off or started cursing in a Wal-Mart.
I'd expect that a seven year old can figure out what times are appropriate to use curse words (e.g., when trying to tick off your parents) and what times are not (e.g., when trying to act polite).
Censoring television isn't going to help anything. What type of TV are you planning on watching with your seven year old child that contains the word "fuck" anyway? Shows aimed at children aren't going to start containing characters who curse like sailors just because they can.
There are plenty of other places to learn curse words. Like on the school bus, from older students who think that teaching elementary school students to say "fuck" is just hilarious.
The problem here is that the story is so boring that I really don't feel like continuing it. Good stories grab their audience early and keep their interest throughout the story. FFXII is about as bad as you can get in that respect: it starts with one story and jumps to another one very early in the game. They do reconnect several hours into the game, but it makes the story that much more difficult to get involved in.
So in this game you set up your gambits to deal with the easy fights....you prefer mashing a single button to select fight in the old ones?That's a false dichotomy. There's more to life than button mashing and auto-play. My personal favorite of all the various Final Fantasy battle systems was FFX's. There needs to be a middle ground where you're still actively involved in influencing combat and the strategy and having a completely automated system.
Just because I don't like the completely passive system doesn't mean I want the exact opposite.
The license grid works perfectly fine. I didn't use a strategy guide because all the stuff that is related (like shields)...get this...they are all grouped next to each other so it is freaking obvious which upgrade path you want to take.You're obviously not a min/maxer, but my main complaint with shields was based on a specific example where I had to grab a whole bunch of armor licenses to find the right shield license to obtain. I'd much rather have the entire grid revealed so I can figure out which licenses I want to grab and which I can safely skip. Knowing that there are techniques in one direction is nice, but I have no idea if any of them are worth anything! Maybe there's a technique I'd really want to work towards, but there's no way of knowing that without moving through all the techniques.
The most powerful weapon in the game is obtainable in two ways. The way you describe is a way to get it incredibly early in the game. The alternative is to get it later in the game by completing different objectives.We're not talking about the same thing, then, since the alternative is to get a 0.1% chance drop. No typo there - literally a 1 in 1000 chance to get it as a chest drop. You can repeatedly spawn the chest, though. Of course, if I wanted to do that, I'd play an MMORPG and at least pretend there was a social aspect to it.
And I don't know of a single chest that has anything to do with kill chains.Chest drop rates are influenced by chain levels, at least according to the FAQs I checked. Some chests will only drop certain items at higher levels.
FFXII sucked. I've played a total of like nine hours into it and got bored with it to the point I really don't plan on playing it again. The gambit system will literally play the game for you, leaving you free to run between cutscenes. The boss battles devolve into manually potion-spamming but otherwise letting the AI run free.
The story is practically incoherent, even this far into it. The characters are rebelling against the Empire because of the Last Rule of Politics. (Kingdoms are good. Empires are evil.) I have really no idea what anyone's motivation is - it seems to generically be "the Empire is evil." Which is evil because they said so, with no real evidence. (In fact, all evidence so far shows that said kingdom is better off under Imperial rule than it ever was under the old kingdom.)
The license grid is insanely lame and seems to be designed to force you to buy a strategy guide. The main problem with it is that it doesn't say what a given slot does until you've got something unlocked next to it. This makes guiding advancement essentially impossible. A license that has nothing next to it may say something like "Shields" but won't offer any idea of which shields it allows. So you wind up having to guess which "Shields" you need to move towards to use your new shiny shield. Likewise, any advancing towards specific abilities is impossible.
Unless, of course, you already know what's on the grid, by buying the strategy guide. (Or looking it up online...)
Likewise, the most powerful weapon in the game can only be obtained if you don't open certain chests. Problem: most chests are randomly generated, are actually called "treasures" and there's no indication that these magic chests are any different from any other randomly generated chest. They're also strategically placed so that it's impossible to miss them while progressing through the game. They're literally placed at key points that you have to travel through.
This "random chest generation" scheme also means that some of the best equipment has a very small (less than 1% in some cases) chance of being generated, and only after building a very long "chain" (killing the same monster family over and over and over and over again).
Personally, I enjoyed FFX far more than FFXII. FFXII really has no Final Fantasy "feel" to it, and despite being set in Ivalice, has no FF Tactics feel to it.
Look again - closely. The effect is fairly subtle under the XP look but much more noticeable under Vista with the full Aero Glass effects enabled.
When you position the mouse cursor over a scrollbar, it's supposed to light up. Under Vista, this means going from a gray color to a blue color, making it fairly noticeable. Under XP's look, this means going from a light blue to an even lighter blue. If you're using the Classic look, there's nothing to see, since there is no mouse-over effect.
Vista's full Aero Glass additional has a fade-in effect where the button background on the arrows is supposed to appear. (Firefox fails to do this, just like IE7.) Likewise, there's a fade-out effect when the mouse leaves the scrollbar that both IE7 and Firefox fail to do. Of course, IE7 can't do it since it never did the original mouse-over effect.
Under IE7, this effect never happens. Mousing-over the scrollbar does nothing.
I've got a movie of it happening under Vista using FRAPS. Unfortunately I'll have to go hunting for something to change it into a useful format, since I doubt a lot of people have the FRAPS codec installed.
Keep in mind this only happens in the MSHTML control. All form controls inside of MSHTML are emulated. You can easily verify this by looking at a form button with a very large caption - IE6/IE7 stretch out the button background to the point it looks strange. Not to mention that all form controls in IE7 are missing Vista's Aero Glass fade-in/fade-out effects.
IE7's interface makes sense (somewhat) under Vista, where it matches Windows Explorer and generally fits in with the rest of the Vista interface. Of course, as you imply, it absolutely does not fit in under Windows XP.
Although my favorite IE7-ism is that it fails to emulate the scroll bar correctly. None of the mouse-over effects work. (If you're using XP's look or Vista's look, the scroll bar should "light up" when hovered over, Firefox emulates this.) In Vista, mousing over it should cause the arrows to gain a button background.
Thanks to this, I now know that IE7, like Firefox, doesn't actually use native controls. Instead it emulates them in the same way Firefox does. The hilarious part is that it actually does it worse than Firefox does.