Most of the familiar characters returned from the first game, including Imoen, a somewhat naïve fellow orphan and fledgling mage/thief...
When I play BG as an evil person, the first thing I always do is murder Imoen (irritating little twerp) and take that magic rose of hers.
...Jaheira, a druid harper who was obsessed with keeping your character on a path balanced between good and evil...
Again, if you're playing as an evil character, it doesn't make sense to go looking for Jaheira — just head on south with those two crazy dudes. Which is another reason to dispense with Imoen — you don't need two thieves.
...
and the fan favorite Minsc, an eccentric ranger who kept his pet, Boo, a miniature "giant space hamster," on his person at all times.
Oops! Last time I met Minsc, I had to kill him, even though my character was a goodie-goodie. I was rude to his hamster, and he attacked me!
I do browse at 3. But the moderators notion of what deserves to get modded up isn't always mine. Like if there's a story that has anything to do with global warming, you're sure to have yet another flame war over whether it's real or not. Which most Slashdotters seem to enjoy, but which I've long since gotten bored with.
Oh yeah, that's real smart — start playing tit-for-tat games with a flaky guy who's demonstrated poor impulse control and is probably connected to the illegal drug market. Yeah, that's a great idea.
In any case, this was before caller ID. If he had continued to call me after I moved ("Why did you move the fucking motel!") I would have called PacBell and asked them to monitor the line. But even this flake wasn't that stupid.
You're right about needing to be able to skip a comment tree. You don't even need a fancy collapse feature — just a link that means, "go to the next comment at this level". I often don't bother to look at popular stories because I know I'll never have the patience to find my way past all the trolling, irrelevent jokes, and shoot-from-the-lip flame wars that the initial posters always indulge in.
This wasn't such a big deal when I started following Slashdot 5 years ago. But there are a lot more users now. It's really pathetic when any popular site is unable to evolve with the times — but when it's Slashdot, you want to cry.
That's interesting. I've worked at many different companies that had similar systems, and never had that issue. But there was always a difference from your DSN system: the internal number was always 4 digits (most companies), 5 digits (large companies) or 6 digits (large companies with overseas offices). It was never 7 digits. People look at a 7-digit number and they think "standard phone number!" even if it's not. Hence your problem. The military should add or remove a digit...
I once had a similar issue with my landline. The problem was that if you swapped two digits while dialing a certain motel, you'd get my number. Not only did I get a lot of calls from people who were just sloppy dialing, but I got a lot of calls from one particular flake who misdialed the number quite consistently. Never did find out why he called the motel so much, though his attitude and way of talking made me think his drug connection must have worked there. He'd refuse to believe me when I told him he had the wrong number, and get really nasty when I'd remind him that this was the umpteenth time he'd done so.
Once I answered the phone, got the usual idiot. I said, "Asshole!" and hung up. He speed-dialed me until I got tired of hanging up on him, then left a 20-minute rant on my answering machine.
Eventually, I moved to a different area code and had to change my number. Had Pacific Bell notify callers of my new number. Came home one day to find a message on my machine: "What the fuck?" Yep, same guy. I'll always wonder: did he think the motel had moved across state or what?
That's actually too charitable. They're not even doing market research. Google employees are encouraged to spend time on their own pet projects.. It doesn't seem to be very hard to get your project added to the public site, especially if it's a search engine enhancement. So every time somebody in Google has a bright idea, it gets handed off to us to play with. Which is nice if you like trying out new tech, but also kind of unprofessional, since you never know whether they're going to stick with a new feature. And even if they do stick with it, they rarely give it the work it needs to move from "Beta" to something that can be considered a finished product.
I think you're right, though I'm having a little trouble confirming it. Still, they do sell gigabit crossover cables. Also note that the auto-crossover hack was introduced when Apple (and everyone else) was still selling systems with 10BaseT and 100BaseT interfaces.
Assuming a lot of physics theory is wrong. Which is always a possibility, but you need more than some unexplained heat to overturn theory. You might as well talk about phlogiston.
It isn't a software thing. On non-Macs, you need a crossover cable.
You're right, it probably doesn't add that much to the cost of each Mac, because of economies of scale. But by the same token, the small cost per Mac adds up to make a significant hit in Apple's bottom line. And this for a feature that only a few people actually use. Not to mention that the crossover cables aren't exactly expensive and hard to find.
Of course, it does add a little to Apple's famous usability, since a person who doesn't know about crossover cables still gets the desired result.
It certainly doesn't mean what you think it means, since that sentence doesn't use a subjunctive verb. If you want to play grammar nazi, you could insist that the statement is semanticly subjunctive, and that it's a grammatical error not to use a subjunctive verb (if congress continues -> if congress were to continue). Except that's absurdly unidiomatic, like most grammar nazi rules.
High school English technicalities aside, the author is simply making a statement about the future consequence of current actions. Grammatically correct or not, his intent is quite clear. If you don't have a counterargument (I'd suggest one of your patent conspiracy theories), you're not helping things with grammatical nitpicking that most people don't care about and isn't correct in the first place.
If you bought that dual-celeron system for personal use, you made a good choice. Home systems, oddly enough, need better hardware than business systems. Because the kind of stuff you do at home (games, multimedia, art) has more overhead than business applications.
I have to admit the rationale for dual-core celeron systems escapes me. If you're going to pay extra for extra performance, why get a celeron?
To me (as someone with a PowerMac with an ADC connector and a converter dongle hanging out the back), that gives me a good feeling -- they realized it really wasn't what people wanted and dropped it.
Let's not make the standard conservative/libertarian error of confusing economics with "what people want". I'm sure most people want less cable spaghetti. They're just not will to pay hundreds of bucks to get it.
Incidentally, do Macs still have that Ethernet hack that allows you to connect two systems without a hub or a special cable? That's the classical "Yeah, a good idea, but not worth the cost it adds to a system" — how many folks have precisely two systems and no broadband internet connection?
I think you're reading too much into this conversation. Nobody's saying that proprietary interfaces are evil. Indeed, as you point out, sometimes they're the only way to solve a problem. Just remember that they drive up the cost of hardware, which is why Apple gave up on the ADC.
Which is actually too bad. Anybody who's had to deal with cable spaghetti can appreciate the wisdom of combining three cables. It's a pity that the ADC didn't become an industry standard itself, instead of being forced out by existing cable standards. Alas, that's not the way the industry works.
True, I don't. In fact it bores me to tears. I was only trying to point out that different things engage different people. To you, Pac Man is just about gobbling dots. To me, all those sports are just about moving a round object back and forth for no good reason. Neither of us is "right". There are just complexities to Pac Man that don't interest you and subtleties to soccer/football that are a complete mystery to me.
Why persist in these malicious lies?... Perhaps you have a large investment in a tokamak company?
Actually, I'm part of the Zionist Occupation Government. We're afraid that cheap energy will loosen our stranglehold on power. And discrediting Cold Fusion wasn't easy, let me tell you! We had to bribe, intimidate, or murder every single person who actually figured out how to design a generator using this process. Plus we had to secretly edit every relevent textbook and scientific paper so they'd use a physical theory that didn't allow fusion through chemical processes.
If you know what's good for you, you'll shut up before our Men in Black grab you and shove you through the nearest Stargate!
The list you point to says that these physicists have reported "excess heat". That could be anything from measurement errors to an novel chemical process. I very much doubt that any of these physicists think that fusion is going on.
Mostly, I think, because they realized there were lots of DVI monitors out there that weren't Apple that cost less and people had to buy adapters for. They figured "ah hell, it's cheaper for us to just use DVI anyway."
Logical enough. Except that in the past, Apple has always resisted using standard tech when they thought they could do better.
So Apple is dropping the ADC interface? Which, as you describe it, is just a combination of three industry-standard interfaces. That would seem to mean that are totally giving up on hardware with proprietary hacks. Something they used to be famous for. Of course, it was a big reason their hardware was so expensive.
My favorite was the IWM or Incredible Woz Machine. It was the disk controller used in Apple IIs and early Macs that slowed down the drive motor when the disk was accessing the outer tracks, which allowed it to squeeze in a few extra sectors. Of course, it also made Apple/Mac floppies unreadable on systems that didn't have similar special hardware....
You're assuming even though cold fusion has been debunked by every physicist on the planet, there's still a small chance that Fleischmann and Pons were right after all. There is as much chance for this project to work as there is to design and build a heater powered by phlogiston.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a friend who was very fond of the sex thing in BG2. Her only complaint was that her female character was only allowed to get it on with guys....
So much self-righteousness, so few brains.
I do browse at 3. But the moderators notion of what deserves to get modded up isn't always mine. Like if there's a story that has anything to do with global warming, you're sure to have yet another flame war over whether it's real or not. Which most Slashdotters seem to enjoy, but which I've long since gotten bored with.
I wouldn't use filters for Slashdot for the same reason I don't use them for email: too many false positives.
In any case, this was before caller ID. If he had continued to call me after I moved ("Why did you move the fucking motel!") I would have called PacBell and asked them to monitor the line. But even this flake wasn't that stupid.
This wasn't such a big deal when I started following Slashdot 5 years ago. But there are a lot more users now. It's really pathetic when any popular site is unable to evolve with the times — but when it's Slashdot, you want to cry.
That's interesting. I've worked at many different companies that had similar systems, and never had that issue. But there was always a difference from your DSN system: the internal number was always 4 digits (most companies), 5 digits (large companies) or 6 digits (large companies with overseas offices). It was never 7 digits. People look at a 7-digit number and they think "standard phone number!" even if it's not. Hence your problem. The military should add or remove a digit...
Once I answered the phone, got the usual idiot. I said, "Asshole!" and hung up. He speed-dialed me until I got tired of hanging up on him, then left a 20-minute rant on my answering machine.
Eventually, I moved to a different area code and had to change my number. Had Pacific Bell notify callers of my new number. Came home one day to find a message on my machine: "What the fuck?" Yep, same guy. I'll always wonder: did he think the motel had moved across state or what?
I think you're right, though I'm having a little trouble confirming it. Still, they do sell gigabit crossover cables. Also note that the auto-crossover hack was introduced when Apple (and everyone else) was still selling systems with 10BaseT and 100BaseT interfaces.
You're right, it probably doesn't add that much to the cost of each Mac, because of economies of scale. But by the same token, the small cost per Mac adds up to make a significant hit in Apple's bottom line. And this for a feature that only a few people actually use. Not to mention that the crossover cables aren't exactly expensive and hard to find.
Of course, it does add a little to Apple's famous usability, since a person who doesn't know about crossover cables still gets the desired result.
High school English technicalities aside, the author is simply making a statement about the future consequence of current actions. Grammatically correct or not, his intent is quite clear. If you don't have a counterargument (I'd suggest one of your patent conspiracy theories), you're not helping things with grammatical nitpicking that most people don't care about and isn't correct in the first place.
If you bought that dual-celeron system for personal use, you made a good choice. Home systems, oddly enough, need better hardware than business systems. Because the kind of stuff you do at home (games, multimedia, art) has more overhead than business applications.
I have to admit the rationale for dual-core celeron systems escapes me. If you're going to pay extra for extra performance, why get a celeron?
Incidentally, do Macs still have that Ethernet hack that allows you to connect two systems without a hub or a special cable? That's the classical "Yeah, a good idea, but not worth the cost it adds to a system" — how many folks have precisely two systems and no broadband internet connection?
Which is actually too bad. Anybody who's had to deal with cable spaghetti can appreciate the wisdom of combining three cables. It's a pity that the ADC didn't become an industry standard itself, instead of being forced out by existing cable standards. Alas, that's not the way the industry works.
True, I don't. In fact it bores me to tears. I was only trying to point out that different things engage different people. To you, Pac Man is just about gobbling dots. To me, all those sports are just about moving a round object back and forth for no good reason. Neither of us is "right". There are just complexities to Pac Man that don't interest you and subtleties to soccer/football that are a complete mystery to me.
If you know what's good for you, you'll shut up before our Men in Black grab you and shove you through the nearest Stargate!
The list you point to says that these physicists have reported "excess heat". That could be anything from measurement errors to an novel chemical process. I very much doubt that any of these physicists think that fusion is going on.
My favorite was the IWM or Incredible Woz Machine. It was the disk controller used in Apple IIs and early Macs that slowed down the drive motor when the disk was accessing the outer tracks, which allowed it to squeeze in a few extra sectors. Of course, it also made Apple/Mac floppies unreadable on systems that didn't have similar special hardware....
You're assuming even though cold fusion has been debunked by every physicist on the planet, there's still a small chance that Fleischmann and Pons were right after all. There is as much chance for this project to work as there is to design and build a heater powered by phlogiston.
When it comes to technology, the stupidity of investors is much more important!
So kicking a ball back and forth is exciting, but once you bring your hands into the equation it's boring?