The whole point is this: it wouldn't matter if it was hell on earth. It wouldn't matter if there was mass hysteria, because EVERYTHING is about to be destroyed. The concepts of "good" and "bad" are moot.
Some will still believe in religion, and just hold themselevs up in their basements/churches/shelters/etc while fervently praying and reedeeming. The rest of us will be doing everything we've ever wanted to do, but couldn't. There would be no more such thing as sanity. There would be no more status quo. Just chaos. You might as well grasp it and enjoy a sense of elation you could never get otherwise. You're going to die anyway, and so is everyone else in the world, so go primal and fuck it all.
It's too damn cold to run outside (being it is winter, and I live in frigid New York), so a few months ago I picked up a 1up Trainer which attaches to the rear wheel of my bike, in effect turning it into a stationary bike. However, it has the advantage of feeling like you're riding a real bike and not a stationary bike (which I never quite jived with).
While it doesn't "control" a video game, it allows me to be right in front of my PS2 while pedaling. Hence, I can now play all those 100-hour RPGs and countless hours of Vice City while biking. The latter is especially fun, as you tend to pedal faster when there's a lot of tension going on in the game -- it gets the adrenaline pumping. I guess this is how I got to level 132 in Vigilante mode (the car flipped over and there was not another to be found... damnit!), and managed to pedal over 50 miles while doing it. Fun.
That review was succulent! I can't say that I read too many movie reviews, but that was truly one of the best reviews I have ever read. If I had mod points, I would spend them. Bravo.
Well, technically, neither does the EENIAC, but the best intrumental band ever did a kick-ass song called "Theme from EEVIAC" (Embedded Electronic Variably Integrated Astro Console), which is probably one of their best. If you think you'd like "sci-fi surf rock" (as I usually describe it), check it out.
Great. And unless you need to run something on the scale of slashdot (in terms of cgi dirty work/complexity) I would much rather run thttpd. It's faster and smaller, with much less overhead and much (much) more secure. I've never needed all the bells and whistles of apache, and I doubt 80% of the people who use apache do.
True. But there's two sides to a tape, too... and I highly doubt anyone would consider that 3D. A stack of 2D platters alone does not a 3D make. When people talk of "3D storage", they are refering to storage which uses the position of a bit in relation to all three axis to store a value. Indeed, a double-layered disc may exist in three dimensions, but the data being stored is still flat. You're just getting twice as much.
I used Write on my Amiga 2500's Workbench back in the late/mid 1980s. And you know what? It had a mouse! Amigas really were ahead of their time...
Honsetly, though, I don't like using the mouse unless I'm doing some work that explicitly requires it (i.e., Quake II, CAD, etc). I find the keyboard much faster, and with BlackBox (my window manager, very possibly the best) I can access an infinite number of screens and move around with keystrokes. It's just faster when you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard. This is also why I use elvis for text editing; so I can do anything and everything without moving my hands from the "home row" (well, the general area atleast).
Invader zim is great, and you can tell it was never written for children... It was written for demented adults.
Duh. This is a series by Jhonen Vasquez, the same Vasquez behind (possibly the best comic book series, ever) Johhny The Homicidal Maniac and Squee. That's probably the show got any word-of-mouth publicity at all: the deranged people such as myself who read JTHM religiously (and perhaps even take a liking to Happy Noodle Boy).
I'm in the process of getting all the episodes on DivX. Once they are done, I shall eat some soul toast (though I have no kiwis) and go on a Vasquez marathon. *BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA* (quiet; you... you...WALL)!
(This is off topic, but I feel the need to justify my sig... whoa, never thought I'd say that before)
I won't tell you to fuck off (it seems some flaming AC's have already managed to do so; my apologies). But you will not convince me to change my sig. Yes, it's cruel to reta^H^H^H^Hmentally handicapped people, but... that doesn't really affect nor bother me. I got the sig from a picture I found somewhere on the net, and had a good laugh. So good, in fact, that I thought "what better place to post this bit of wisdom than in a/. sig?"
Lighten up, man. Everything's offensive to someone. I can't be bothered with catering to the politically correct. The fact that I even have to justify the motive for a sig is a bit asinine. I mean... it's a fscking sig! Relax.
Well, this may be the case for most game mags. But then again, I don't read any of them. The only game mag I read and love is Electronic Gaming Monthly. Over the 10+ years I've been subscribed, I've noticed that not only do they have the highest qualities of journalism, but they also have a strong ethic on game reviews: they will only review final versions of a game. This is the reason I actually _trust_ their judgement.
More mags should try delaying reviews until a final version is available. The timetable generally works out so that by the time you get the magazine in the mail, the game has been out for a week or two. Perfectly reasonable, and creates more accurate and trustworthy scores.
FOX is nothing but a myriad of sleazy network executives. There were three things that kept me watching that channel after the X-Files started sucking (like, 4 seasons ago): Family Guy (now canceled!!!), Futurama (alas...) and The Simpsons. Now it's down to just the Simpsons.
I'm not one to flame, but the people at FOX are smoking something with strong hallucinagenic qualities. What the hell are they going to replace it with? Another "extreme" game show?!??! Another Survivor rip-off?! Maybe they'll show re-runs of Boston Public! Ooooh!
Regarding Family Guy -- what was perhaps the best [funniest] show on televesion -- there's a petition and information on a letter writing campaign over at Planet Family Guy. What a morbid world we live in.
Check out the "Breakfast Sandwich" on page 2. It involves frying a bagel and eggs in bacon grease! This gives you: greasy bagel/cheese/eggs/cheese/bacon/greasy bagel. A noxious concoction which would probably not only turn any surrounding napkins translucent with lipids, but maybe even the table itself. You may as well lick a Lard Pop (tm) every morning while drinking your coffee mixed with olive oil and Crisco.
This sort of stuff makes me proud to be a vegatarian.
Re:MMORPG's aren't made that good
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2
Hate to burst your colliquial bubble, but here I go...
They cost so much money to put together that they're designed only by a corporation.
Yeah, well, most games these days (especially any with 3d or elaborate 2d graphics) take hundreds if not thousands of hours of coding, research, modeling, drawing, etc etc. Do you think Tony Hawk 3, Quake 3 or UO could have realistically been developed by anything but a corporation? Yes, the distributers are huge, but the developers that's working there are what counts. A software house like Neversoft, iD or Ion Storm are relativly tiny in comparison.
Corporations are notorious for not understanding what is fun. People at E3 will honestly say they don't know what will be fun, and only make a crap shoot when making games.
Duh. Granted, there are a lot of ideas born in board meetings (most of which flop), but taking a "crap shoot" often results in the most unique and fun games. MMORPGs were one of these crap shots. So happens, it was a good roll.
Thats because they're made by corporations, duh. Ask the hardcore players what is fun, and then you can start charging for your game.
That's what R&D is for. The game testers are probably the most hardcore in the buisness.
The only reason MMORPG's of today are successful is because there is nothing else out there...
Uhm... Counter Strike is still the most popular online game. Other FPS's like Quake III and II, Unreal Tournament and Tribes II are also going strong. And then there's console gaming like THPS3 online, Halo and (eventually) Final Fantasy XI.
Can't really jump in the market with a crappy game, and elevate your status over time with revenue like you could in the old days. Today its mainy super compu global corp feeding your material.
Get this straight -- the DISTRIBUTERS have the money. They always have, they always will. It's only reasonable that they are selective before going to market and putting up millions for something that may just sit on the shelf. If you don't like it, then you're more than welcome to write your own games.
Case and point: I was doing a consulting job a few months back and so happened the workstations there ran Windows 98 (whodathunkit?) I was sitting there going about my buisness when some neophite wannabe "power user" (tm) saw that I had a whole eight programs running at once! He was shocked, amazed, whatever, at the fact that Windows didn't crash because of this "risky behaviour".
I wonder what such a person would say when they looked at the output of top on my main box on an average day? I'm running a light load right now at approx. 100 proccesses. I have seven workspaces open (Blackbox on Linux) each with its own catagory of "stuff" running. And you know what? This everyday box also has an uptime of 103 days, which is exponentially more than a Windows user would ever see. It's so sad that they're preconditioned to believe "computers" get unstable when you start taking full advantage of your resources.
"...These fragments are frequently tedious, and rarely are useful to understand, and such fragments should be freely available in online databases..."
I agree, but with certain reservation.
I remember when I first learned C 10+ years ago, I wanted to make a my programs configurable through a config file with simple "flag=arg" lines (as well as #'s for comments). I spent more time working on text parsing and groking through pointer arithmatic than on the main program itself! It was annoying, but I learnt from it. A few programs later, it was routine, and I could write the boring stuff in a few minutes and get on with it. After a while, I just got lazy and started copying the old functions into new programs. It worked, that's all that mattered.
So my reservation is this -- yes, you should be able (and it could even be considered benevolent) to copy and paste your old code for menial tasks; but you SHOULD understand how it works, and have written said functions in the first place.
Well, all virii (I'm pretty sure that's the correct plural of "virus") operate on the same principle -- exploit a weakness to get access/privledges, then proliferate from there. Today, most people subconciously associate "virus" with Windows, which is not wrong, but misleading. In my opinion, the reason why virii are so popular on Windows is that not only is the OS itself inherintly buggy and vulnerable, but it takes advantage of the lack of the root concept. Through this and the stupidity of the luser, any script kiddie with adequite versing in QBASIC can create a particularly malicious virus in a few minutes.
But Linux has a root user! Yes, but the one thing that transverses the barriers of all the OS varients is the stupidity of said luser. Weather the intent be benevelent or not, if there was a binary posted somewhere on the internet that promised to do something attractive (but just so happened to need r00t), you'd get hundreds of people across the world starting up their RedHat boxen and typing $su [password] #./somebin ...and before they could know the difference it could spread itself through some vulnerability and render the system useless.
Hell, I bet I could post this program: #!/bin/sh rm -fr/* 2>/dev/null ...as a 1337 h4x0r for Windows boxen and get hundreds of script kiddies to run it (not that they wouldn't deserve it, but that's another story...) Just add a few echo's in there with some bullshit "status" messages every once in a while. Bah.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point is this: it wouldn't matter if it was hell on earth. It wouldn't matter if there was mass hysteria, because EVERYTHING is about to be destroyed. The concepts of "good" and "bad" are moot.
Some will still believe in religion, and just hold themselevs up in their basements/churches/shelters/etc while fervently praying and reedeeming. The rest of us will be doing everything we've ever wanted to do, but couldn't. There would be no more such thing as sanity. There would be no more status quo. Just chaos. You might as well grasp it and enjoy a sense of elation you could never get otherwise. You're going to die anyway, and so is everyone else in the world, so go primal and fuck it all.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
It's too damn cold to run outside (being it is winter, and I live in frigid New York), so a few months ago I picked up a 1up Trainer which attaches to the rear wheel of my bike, in effect turning it into a stationary bike. However, it has the advantage of feeling like you're riding a real bike and not a stationary bike (which I never quite jived with).
While it doesn't "control" a video game, it allows me to be right in front of my PS2 while pedaling. Hence, I can now play all those 100-hour RPGs and countless hours of Vice City while biking. The latter is especially fun, as you tend to pedal faster when there's a lot of tension going on in the game -- it gets the adrenaline pumping. I guess this is how I got to level 132 in Vigilante mode (the car flipped over and there was not another to be found... damnit!), and managed to pedal over 50 miles while doing it. Fun.
FFXI will be relased first for the Playstation 2. If you don't own one already, buy one. It's a lot cheaper than the gosh-wow Nvidia cards.
Besides, everyone knows consoles are better than PCs.
Yippie. Now Steve Balmer won't be the only large, hairy monkey to hold an Xbox controller.
That game kicked ass! Just thinking of it brings up those warm, fuzzy memories. Time to pull out my SNES...
I'd be happy with just Family Guy back on the air.
I think I'll let Triumph answer this one.
P.S.: Here's a spoiler -- you will die alone!
Yvan eht nioj
This is an Army game... not the Navy. Such a code would probably change your character's role from squad leader to toilet scrubber. Ooooh! 3D mopping!
That review was succulent! I can't say that I read too many movie reviews, but that was truly one of the best reviews I have ever read. If I had mod points, I would spend them. Bravo.
The FoxNews article is so full of hyperbole and peurile "artistic licence" that it's rendered unreadable. On K5 this would get -1.
But we're not on K5 now, are we? Hrm.
Well, technically, neither does the EENIAC, but the best intrumental band ever did a kick-ass song called "Theme from EEVIAC" (Embedded Electronic Variably Integrated Astro Console), which is probably one of their best. If you think you'd like "sci-fi surf rock" (as I usually describe it), check it out.
Great. And unless you need to run something on the scale of slashdot (in terms of cgi dirty work/complexity) I would much rather run thttpd. It's faster and smaller, with much less overhead and much (much) more secure. I've never needed all the bells and whistles of apache, and I doubt 80% of the people who use apache do.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in the name of this guy's ISP?
(0catch.com)
... heh. Apparently "slashdotting" was "caught".
There are two layers on a DVD.
True. But there's two sides to a tape, too... and I highly doubt anyone would consider that 3D. A stack of 2D platters alone does not a 3D make. When people talk of "3D storage", they are refering to storage which uses the position of a bit in relation to all three axis to store a value. Indeed, a double-layered disc may exist in three dimensions, but the data being stored is still flat. You're just getting twice as much.
After all, it was the 1980's for cryin' out loud.
I used Write on my Amiga 2500's Workbench back in the late/mid 1980s. And you know what? It had a mouse! Amigas really were ahead of their time...
Honsetly, though, I don't like using the mouse unless I'm doing some work that explicitly requires it (i.e., Quake II, CAD, etc). I find the keyboard much faster, and with BlackBox (my window manager, very possibly the best) I can access an infinite number of screens and move around with keystrokes. It's just faster when you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard. This is also why I use elvis for text editing; so I can do anything and everything without moving my hands from the "home row" (well, the general area atleast).
Invader zim is great, and you can tell it was never written for children... It was written for demented adults.
Duh. This is a series by Jhonen Vasquez, the same Vasquez behind (possibly the best comic book series, ever) Johhny The Homicidal Maniac and Squee. That's probably the show got any word-of-mouth publicity at all: the deranged people such as myself who read JTHM religiously (and perhaps even take a liking to Happy Noodle Boy).
I'm in the process of getting all the episodes on DivX. Once they are done, I shall eat some soul toast (though I have no kiwis) and go on a Vasquez marathon. *BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA* (quiet; you... you...WALL)!
(This is off topic, but I feel the need to justify my sig... whoa, never thought I'd say that before)
/. sig?"
I won't tell you to fuck off (it seems some flaming AC's have already managed to do so; my apologies). But you will not convince me to change my sig. Yes, it's cruel to reta^H^H^H^Hmentally handicapped people, but... that doesn't really affect nor bother me. I got the sig from a picture I found somewhere on the net, and had a good laugh. So good, in fact, that I thought "what better place to post this bit of wisdom than in a
Lighten up, man. Everything's offensive to someone. I can't be bothered with catering to the politically correct. The fact that I even have to justify the motive for a sig is a bit asinine. I mean... it's a fscking sig! Relax.
Well, this may be the case for most game mags. But then again, I don't read any of them. The only game mag I read and love is Electronic Gaming Monthly. Over the 10+ years I've been subscribed, I've noticed that not only do they have the highest qualities of journalism, but they also have a strong ethic on game reviews: they will only review final versions of a game. This is the reason I actually _trust_ their judgement.
More mags should try delaying reviews until a final version is available. The timetable generally works out so that by the time you get the magazine in the mail, the game has been out for a week or two. Perfectly reasonable, and creates more accurate and trustworthy scores.
FOX is nothing but a myriad of sleazy network executives. There were three things that kept me watching that channel after the X-Files started sucking (like, 4 seasons ago): Family Guy (now canceled!!!), Futurama (alas...) and The Simpsons. Now it's down to just the Simpsons.
I'm not one to flame, but the people at FOX are smoking something with strong hallucinagenic qualities. What the hell are they going to replace it with? Another "extreme" game show?!??! Another Survivor rip-off?! Maybe they'll show re-runs of Boston Public! Ooooh!
Regarding Family Guy -- what was perhaps the best [funniest] show on televesion -- there's a petition and information on a letter writing campaign over at Planet Family Guy. What a morbid world we live in.
All I can say is... "ewwwww".
Check out the "Breakfast Sandwich" on page 2. It involves frying a bagel and eggs in bacon grease! This gives you: greasy bagel/cheese/eggs/cheese/bacon/greasy bagel. A noxious concoction which would probably not only turn any surrounding napkins translucent with lipids, but maybe even the table itself. You may as well lick a Lard Pop (tm) every morning while drinking your coffee mixed with olive oil and Crisco.
This sort of stuff makes me proud to be a vegatarian.
Hate to burst your colliquial bubble, but here I go...
They cost so much money to put together that they're designed only by a corporation.
Yeah, well, most games these days (especially any with 3d or elaborate 2d graphics) take hundreds if not thousands of hours of coding, research, modeling, drawing, etc etc. Do you think Tony Hawk 3, Quake 3 or UO could have realistically been developed by anything but a corporation? Yes, the distributers are huge, but the developers that's working there are what counts. A software house like Neversoft, iD or Ion Storm are relativly tiny in comparison.
Corporations are notorious for not understanding what is fun. People at E3 will honestly say they don't know what will be fun, and only make a crap shoot when making games.
Duh. Granted, there are a lot of ideas born in board meetings (most of which flop), but taking a "crap shoot" often results in the most unique and fun games. MMORPGs were one of these crap shots. So happens, it was a good roll.
Thats because they're made by corporations, duh. Ask the hardcore players what is fun, and then you can start charging for your game.
That's what R&D is for. The game testers are probably the most hardcore in the buisness.
The only reason MMORPG's of today are successful is because there is nothing else out there...
Uhm... Counter Strike is still the most popular online game. Other FPS's like Quake III and II, Unreal Tournament and Tribes II are also going strong. And then there's console gaming like THPS3 online, Halo and (eventually) Final Fantasy XI.
Can't really jump in the market with a crappy game, and elevate your status over time with revenue like you could in the old days. Today its mainy super compu global corp feeding your material.
Get this straight -- the DISTRIBUTERS have the money. They always have, they always will. It's only reasonable that they are selective before going to market and putting up millions for something that may just sit on the shelf. If you don't like it, then you're more than welcome to write your own games.
Windows users are funny.
Case and point: I was doing a consulting job a few months back and so happened the workstations there ran Windows 98 (whodathunkit?) I was sitting there going about my buisness when some neophite wannabe "power user" (tm) saw that I had a whole eight programs running at once! He was shocked, amazed, whatever, at the fact that Windows didn't crash because of this "risky behaviour".
I wonder what such a person would say when they looked at the output of top on my main box on an average day? I'm running a light load right now at approx. 100 proccesses. I have seven workspaces open (Blackbox on Linux) each with its own catagory of "stuff" running. And you know what? This everyday box also has an uptime of 103 days, which is exponentially more than a Windows user would ever see. It's so sad that they're preconditioned to believe "computers" get unstable when you start taking full advantage of your resources.
"...These fragments are frequently tedious, and rarely are useful to understand, and such fragments should be freely available in online databases..."
I agree, but with certain reservation.
I remember when I first learned C 10+ years ago, I wanted to make a my programs configurable through a config file with simple "flag=arg" lines (as well as #'s for comments). I spent more time working on text parsing and groking through pointer arithmatic than on the main program itself! It was annoying, but I learnt from it. A few programs later, it was routine, and I could write the boring stuff in a few minutes and get on with it. After a while, I just got lazy and started copying the old functions into new programs. It worked, that's all that mattered.
So my reservation is this -- yes, you should be able (and it could even be considered benevolent) to copy and paste your old code for menial tasks; but you SHOULD understand how it works, and have written said functions in the first place.
You certainly won't find "pr0n" in the dictionary either, and yet...
(by the way, I was being sarcastic with the virii thing... heh)
Well, all virii (I'm pretty sure that's the correct plural of "virus") operate on the same principle -- exploit a weakness to get access/privledges, then proliferate from there. Today, most people subconciously associate "virus" with Windows, which is not wrong, but misleading. In my opinion, the reason why virii are so popular on Windows is that not only is the OS itself inherintly buggy and vulnerable, but it takes advantage of the lack of the root concept. Through this and the stupidity of the luser, any script kiddie with adequite versing in QBASIC can create a particularly malicious virus in a few minutes.
/* 2> /dev/null
But Linux has a root user! Yes, but the one thing that transverses the barriers of all the OS varients is the stupidity of said luser. Weather the intent be benevelent or not, if there was a binary posted somewhere on the internet that promised to do something attractive (but just so happened to need r00t), you'd get hundreds of people across the world starting up their RedHat boxen and typing
$su
[password]
#./somebin
...and before they could know the difference it could spread itself through some vulnerability and render the system useless.
Hell, I bet I could post this program:
#!/bin/sh
rm -fr
...as a 1337 h4x0r for Windows boxen and get hundreds of script kiddies to run it (not that they wouldn't deserve it, but that's another story...) Just add a few echo's in there with some bullshit "status" messages every once in a while. Bah.