The entertainment of a game is its challenge to achieve success. Too easy and it's dull, too hard and you give up, inexplicable (i.e. just when you thought you made it the rules change) and you beat your head against a table.
The ideal is to find a game you really like and stick with it, rather than whatever piece of crap is fashionable among the sheep these days. Amazing how many people I see playing board games, now. Check out the Empire Builder series from Mayfair, great stuff.
This is true of single player games. For those, the fun and challenge is your progression through the game, which can be "unlocking" levels, or equipment or whatever. My beef is with multiplayer games. Take Burnout 3-- to unlock the tracks and cars I wanted to play online with my friends, I had to play dozens and dozens of single-player missions in all sorts of gametypes I wasn't interested in.
No multiplayer game should ever have a single-player unlock requirement. Leave the challenge in the single player mode, but open up all the content for online play. The challenge is playing my friends, not racking up points in crash mode so that I can then later get online and play the race I wanted, unless of course my friends have not also unlocked the track or car.
If I wanted the content spread out, I'd stop playing and do some actual work in between.
I wholeheartedly agree
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Unlockable content is just in the way of me having fun. Burnout 3 drove me nuts because of this-- I just wanted to get online for a half-hour once a week and race a friend or two. But to gain access to other courses and cars, I had to slog through a neverending series of single-player races I wasn't interested in. I gave up after a few weeks.
It may make some sense in an adventure or RPG game that you can't see the last level without playing the rest of the game-- but at the very least, no multiplayer game should ever have a single-player "unlock" requirement. I don't want to dork around unlocking extra carts and courses in Mario Kart, I just want to play all the courses I paid for when my friends drop by.
If you weren't just being silly, I would point out that he's talking about getting hydrogen and oxygen from lunar ice, which is in fact made from hydrogen and oxygen, just like all water is. Not getting oxygen from hydrogen.
You can do whatever the hell you want if you do it the way NASA did it in the 1960s-- enough money solves everything. I don't believe NASA can realistically afford to replicate the 1960s effort. Whatever they do will probably have to achieve a massive improvement in cost efficiency while simultaneously guaranteeing no fatalities or the program will be shelved for years.
Well, then you'd have that thing from radio shack I use to turn lamps on and off.:)
I believe somebody else pointed out that the communications lines are usually 3x redundant or some such-- why not ditch two of 'em, and use wireless for one and the power line for the other? 2/3 communications wiring weight reduction with redundancy across multiple mediums-- not just three of the same wire.
I believe you may have overlooked the fact that all the places the communication lines go have power for other reasons. You're not gonna be moving the rudder without power nearby, and you're not gonna see anything on the cockpit displays without power.
So there is indeed one less line between the two, even though everything remains connected to power.
It may be somewhat improved, but it doesn't seem that the quantity is greatly different. If anything, it appears to be worse:
This says that there are hundreds of miles of wiring on a 777, despite the use of the modernized communication bus. The wiring is most likely thinner, for what you found about the weight reduction to be true-- but it is still highly unlikely that hundreds of miles of wiring is an insignificant amount of weight.
that nintendo has placed both analog sticks in the center for their Wii controller for non-motion-sensor games. It looks like the bastard offspring of an overweight SNES controller and the DualShock.
It will be great for the vintage games with the d-pad in the comfy spot, but they've sure made it ugly for the 3D platformers we're used to.
A quick google says a 747-400 has 171 miles of wiring. While some of that is likely not replaceable (power distribution, etc...)-- a good chunk is almost certainly control wiring. Let's make a wild guess and say that just 1/10 of that is control wiring, since those wires are likely thinner than the power lines, even if they are more numerous.
It's hard to imagine 17 miles of anything, even tiny glass fibers, not weighing quite a bit. Anybody have real numbers on this, or the quantity of wire that could be eliminated on a plane like this?
We're not talking about the deflection of plain old sunlight radiation, like visible light, IR, and UV-- we're talking about "hard" radiation in the solar wind, made from high-energy charged particles. (electrons and protons, etc...)
This may still produce some heat on collision, I'm not sure. But it's not the same as "more sunlight."
But then again, I think that Fight Night Round 3 is an amazing game with a lot of depth, fantastic graphics, great action...and generally a lot of fun.
Ah, Fight Night 3. The best torso-rotation simulator game ever produced. I particularly love the graphics-- never have shiny laminated men boxing been so realistically portrayed. As fighting games go, it's my favorite-- but I'm not much for fighting games. Playing FN3 was slightly better than getting a dental implant, but there was no positive outcome when I was done.
No argument with any of your points except for the bird one again-- yes, the tips are moving at 80mph or so. Birds will hit them, but so far, the studied incidence is lower than the collision incidence with plain old buildings or automobiles. They are quite slow enough to avoid, much like you could cross a street between cars going 80mph, with a significant, constant gap between them.
The average number of bird casualties per windmill per year is less than two. The trainwreck design and higher casualties at Altamont Pass has given the entire industry a black eye that will take decades to recover from-- it's like wind power's Chernobyl.
Neither wind or solar work as baseline because of the inability to store the power. A nationwide wind-power network would reduce this volatility somewhat because it would not be limited by a single region's weather. Nontheless, something like nuclear power is still necessary to provide a steady level of power until we figure out how to store adequate energy from transient systems to make them work consistently.
Modern commercially available solar panels, depending on type, pay off their production energy in 2-5 years, and last 20-30 years.
Modern windmills turn at a whopping 18rpm, slow enough for birds to clearly see and avoid. Their appearance is subjective, but I kinda like 'em. Their production may not be pollution-free (after all, NOTHING is) but in terms of power produced per unit of pollution, they are the standout winner across the board right now.
Nuclear power is a fantastic option that needs wider deployment.
That said, I think we can all agree that the nutcases waving the "environmentalist" flag these days are doing more harm than good, but you seem to be as irrational in your denigration of solar and wind as the greenpeace nutters are in their denigration of nuclear power.
You and I are the only two people in the entire universe that are even AWARE that the dual-shock buttons are pressure-sensitive analog buttons. I'll bet even Sony doesn't remember.:)
I think Ratchet & Clank tried to use them at one point, but it was a pointless addon.
Yeah, it's hard to believe. But physics is funny like that-- things aren't always intuitive.
That boxy blunt-ended design (called a Kammback) is staggeringly aerodynamic. The prius, despite its chunky silliness, gets a.26 coefficient of drag, beating performance vehicles like the corvette (.29) or a Ferrari F50 (.372).
All this time, I thought that it didn't matter *where* I sat, my TV would have the same number of pixels. I had no idea that sitting far away would reduce the number of pixels present!
Is it permanent? Will my TV always have fewer pixels? Or can I move the couch closer and reverse the process? Do they come back slowly over time, or will it be a sudden increase in resolution? Will the new pixels all show up on one side in a clump, or do they reappear evenly spaced among the existing pixels?
No worries. Everyone's an asshole on the internet, myself included. I yelled at some dude last week for a very similar misunderstanding. Communication nuance is completely lost via text.
First I did mention you could turn off the engine if you were parked. however the idea you could turn it off when cuising is ass backward nonsense. When you are cruising, you MUST run the engine.
I think I see our miscommunication here. My implication was that since a hybrid uses a small gas engine and an electric motor to replace a large gas engine, you can turn the electric motor off when cruising, effectively shutting off half your engine when not needed. The same is true of the gas engine, but only for shorter distances-- the gas engine cannot remain off if the battery runs flat.
You were referring to the fact (and I agree!) that hybrids are ultimately purely gas-powered. The car may run for 10 miles in electric-only mode while cruising, but eventually the battery runs dry and the gas engine *must* kick in.
Splitting the system in to multiple parts yields a number of advantages in your ability to optimize how you're using power.
Of course, you could do it with a different body. On the other hand, I like the Prius-- but I liked the Aztek, too. It's a roomy, practical design that also has a staggeringly low coefficient of drag. Perhaps I'm getting too dorky in my old age even for slashdot, but I prefer optimized engineering to swoopy curves and spoilers any day.
But hey, we can all have our own opinions-- I'm not gonna make you drive one just 'cause *I* like it.
Slashdot Mirror
The entertainment of a game is its challenge to achieve success. Too easy and it's dull, too hard and you give up, inexplicable (i.e. just when you thought you made it the rules change) and you beat your head against a table.
The ideal is to find a game you really like and stick with it, rather than whatever piece of crap is fashionable among the sheep these days. Amazing how many people I see playing board games, now. Check out the Empire Builder series from Mayfair, great stuff.
This is true of single player games. For those, the fun and challenge is your progression through the game, which can be "unlocking" levels, or equipment or whatever. My beef is with multiplayer games. Take Burnout 3-- to unlock the tracks and cars I wanted to play online with my friends, I had to play dozens and dozens of single-player missions in all sorts of gametypes I wasn't interested in.
No multiplayer game should ever have a single-player unlock requirement. Leave the challenge in the single player mode, but open up all the content for online play. The challenge is playing my friends, not racking up points in crash mode so that I can then later get online and play the race I wanted, unless of course my friends have not also unlocked the track or car.
Man, that's the dumbest thing I've heard all day.
If I wanted the content spread out, I'd stop playing and do some actual work in between.
Unlockable content is just in the way of me having fun. Burnout 3 drove me nuts because of this-- I just wanted to get online for a half-hour once a week and race a friend or two. But to gain access to other courses and cars, I had to slog through a neverending series of single-player races I wasn't interested in. I gave up after a few weeks.
It may make some sense in an adventure or RPG game that you can't see the last level without playing the rest of the game-- but at the very least, no multiplayer game should ever have a single-player "unlock" requirement. I don't want to dork around unlocking extra carts and courses in Mario Kart, I just want to play all the courses I paid for when my friends drop by.
I wholeheartedly agree. Why do people slack at work? Because they don't get enough dedicated "slack" time in their vacation.
OMG you want the game to be racist against people from Michigan!!!
If you weren't just being silly, I would point out that he's talking about getting hydrogen and oxygen from lunar ice, which is in fact made from hydrogen and oxygen, just like all water is. Not getting oxygen from hydrogen.
You can do whatever the hell you want if you do it the way NASA did it in the 1960s-- enough money solves everything. I don't believe NASA can realistically afford to replicate the 1960s effort. Whatever they do will probably have to achieve a massive improvement in cost efficiency while simultaneously guaranteeing no fatalities or the program will be shelved for years.
Well, then you'd have that thing from radio shack I use to turn lamps on and off. :)
I believe somebody else pointed out that the communications lines are usually 3x redundant or some such-- why not ditch two of 'em, and use wireless for one and the power line for the other? 2/3 communications wiring weight reduction with redundancy across multiple mediums-- not just three of the same wire.
I believe you may have overlooked the fact that all the places the communication lines go have power for other reasons. You're not gonna be moving the rudder without power nearby, and you're not gonna see anything on the cockpit displays without power.
So there is indeed one less line between the two, even though everything remains connected to power.
It may be somewhat improved, but it doesn't seem that the quantity is greatly different. If anything, it appears to be worse:
This says that there are hundreds of miles of wiring on a 777, despite the use of the modernized communication bus. The wiring is most likely thinner, for what you found about the weight reduction to be true-- but it is still highly unlikely that hundreds of miles of wiring is an insignificant amount of weight.
that nintendo has placed both analog sticks in the center for their Wii controller for non-motion-sensor games. It looks like the bastard offspring of an overweight SNES controller and the DualShock.
It will be great for the vintage games with the d-pad in the comfy spot, but they've sure made it ugly for the 3D platformers we're used to.
A quick google says a 747-400 has 171 miles of wiring. While some of that is likely not replaceable (power distribution, etc...)-- a good chunk is almost certainly control wiring. Let's make a wild guess and say that just 1/10 of that is control wiring, since those wires are likely thinner than the power lines, even if they are more numerous.
It's hard to imagine 17 miles of anything, even tiny glass fibers, not weighing quite a bit. Anybody have real numbers on this, or the quantity of wire that could be eliminated on a plane like this?
The article is woefully short on real numbers.
We're not talking about the deflection of plain old sunlight radiation, like visible light, IR, and UV-- we're talking about "hard" radiation in the solar wind, made from high-energy charged particles. (electrons and protons, etc...)
This may still produce some heat on collision, I'm not sure. But it's not the same as "more sunlight."
That's not specific enough. It's possible for poorly written language to avoid ambiguity.
How about "Ambiguously written English is ambiguous?"
Tautologies FTW!
Also, this "not previewing my post" thing is fun.
But then again, I think that Fight Night Round 3 is an amazing game with a lot of depth, fantastic graphics, great action...and generally a lot of fun.
;)
Ah, Fight Night 3. The best torso-rotation simulator game ever produced. I particularly love the graphics-- never have shiny laminated men boxing been so realistically portrayed. As fighting games go, it's my favorite-- but I'm not much for fighting games. Playing FN3 was slightly better than getting a dental implant, but there was no positive outcome when I was done.
Hey, this "not trolling" thing is fun!
No argument with any of your points except for the bird one again-- yes, the tips are moving at 80mph or so. Birds will hit them, but so far, the studied incidence is lower than the collision incidence with plain old buildings or automobiles. They are quite slow enough to avoid, much like you could cross a street between cars going 80mph, with a significant, constant gap between them.
The average number of bird casualties per windmill per year is less than two. The trainwreck design and higher casualties at Altamont Pass has given the entire industry a black eye that will take decades to recover from-- it's like wind power's Chernobyl.
Neither wind or solar work as baseline because of the inability to store the power. A nationwide wind-power network would reduce this volatility somewhat because it would not be limited by a single region's weather. Nontheless, something like nuclear power is still necessary to provide a steady level of power until we figure out how to store adequate energy from transient systems to make them work consistently.
Modern commercially available solar panels, depending on type, pay off their production energy in 2-5 years, and last 20-30 years.
Modern windmills turn at a whopping 18rpm, slow enough for birds to clearly see and avoid. Their appearance is subjective, but I kinda like 'em. Their production may not be pollution-free (after all, NOTHING is) but in terms of power produced per unit of pollution, they are the standout winner across the board right now.
Nuclear power is a fantastic option that needs wider deployment.
That said, I think we can all agree that the nutcases waving the "environmentalist" flag these days are doing more harm than good, but you seem to be as irrational in your denigration of solar and wind as the greenpeace nutters are in their denigration of nuclear power.
You and I are the only two people in the entire universe that are even AWARE that the dual-shock buttons are pressure-sensitive analog buttons. I'll bet even Sony doesn't remember. :)
I think Ratchet & Clank tried to use them at one point, but it was a pointless addon.
But I thought *everybody* called their Genesis their "Sega."
Yeah, it's hard to believe. But physics is funny like that-- things aren't always intuitive.
.26 coefficient of drag, beating performance vehicles like the corvette (.29) or a Ferrari F50 (.372).
That boxy blunt-ended design (called a Kammback) is staggeringly aerodynamic. The prius, despite its chunky silliness, gets a
All this time, I thought that it didn't matter *where* I sat, my TV would have the same number of pixels. I had no idea that sitting far away would reduce the number of pixels present!
Is it permanent? Will my TV always have fewer pixels? Or can I move the couch closer and reverse the process? Do they come back slowly over time, or will it be a sudden increase in resolution? Will the new pixels all show up on one side in a clump, or do they reappear evenly spaced among the existing pixels?
No worries. Everyone's an asshole on the internet, myself included. I yelled at some dude last week for a very similar misunderstanding. Communication nuance is completely lost via text.
First I did mention you could turn off the engine if you were parked. however the idea you could turn it off when cuising is ass backward nonsense. When you are cruising, you MUST run the engine.
I think I see our miscommunication here. My implication was that since a hybrid uses a small gas engine and an electric motor to replace a large gas engine, you can turn the electric motor off when cruising, effectively shutting off half your engine when not needed. The same is true of the gas engine, but only for shorter distances-- the gas engine cannot remain off if the battery runs flat.
You were referring to the fact (and I agree!) that hybrids are ultimately purely gas-powered. The car may run for 10 miles in electric-only mode while cruising, but eventually the battery runs dry and the gas engine *must* kick in.
Splitting the system in to multiple parts yields a number of advantages in your ability to optimize how you're using power.
Of course, you could do it with a different body. On the other hand, I like the Prius-- but I liked the Aztek, too. It's a roomy, practical design that also has a staggeringly low coefficient of drag. Perhaps I'm getting too dorky in my old age even for slashdot, but I prefer optimized engineering to swoopy curves and spoilers any day.
But hey, we can all have our own opinions-- I'm not gonna make you drive one just 'cause *I* like it.