According to legend, when the day comes that a Slashdot article links to a Digg article which in turn links back to the original/. article, the combined forces of the digg and/. effects will create a massive vortex, tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time
Sometimes a negatively dugg comment on digg can experience sort of an "overflow" effect where if its bad enough, it actually gets read more. When you see a comment that has been dugg down to like -300 its hard to resist reading it to see how bad it actually is. And you just know everybody else is reading it too or it wouldn't have been down dugg so many times.
I've also played every iteration of D&D since the early 80's and I have to say the d20 system is by far the best evolution of the game to date. To me, a good system is one where the game mechanics are consistent and streamlined enough that I only have to look something up in the book if its complicated or used infrequently (like grapple rules, arg!). This keeps pacing of the game steady and allows us to concentrate on having fun and playing rather than wrestling with the rules and tables. This was particularly poignant when we tried playing Hackmaster for a couple sessions a few weeks ago. Pretty much every swing of a weapon resulted in the GM having to look up stuff in a table to tell us the outcome.
WoTC also gives away a shitload of their d20 content for free (as in speech) under their Open Gaming License allowing a large number of other companies to create products for the system.
Overall I think that Wizards has done an excellent job of taking a product that was languishing under TSR's mismanagement and turning it into something that has help grow the RPG industry in a way that hasn't been seen since the 80's.
The grammar, style and even the subject of your post typifies what I see in the comments on digg.
Whenever I start thinking the quality of posts on/. has completely gone downhill, I just go read digg for five minutes and come back to/. with a renewed outlook.
I ran into a problem with Samba 3 where there seems to be a cap on the number of groups an AD user can belong to if you're trying to authenticate a share based on AD Group membership. It seems that if a user belongs to around 20 AD groups, or the aggregate text length of the user's AD group names is too long, Samba will not recognize the user account's group membership past a certain point in the user's AD group membership list.
To demonstrate this problem, make a new AD group and add a user account that already has membership in a shitload of other AD groups. Then add a user to the group that belongs to only a few other groups. Create a new share on your samba box and allow your newly created AD group access to it. The account with a few memberships will work while the one belonging to a whack of other groups will not.
I'm not sure why this is, or if they've fixed it recently, but its a serious pain in the ass if your AD structure has any sort of complexity.
even more power-gamer than the book it was suppossedly going to balance
I can vouch first hand for that. In my group I have one player who has a formula for building a cleric based on stuff found in BoED. His typical cleric has Exalted Turning, Exalted Healing, Exalted etc. and he takes pretty much every vow they have in there. His character ends up being pretty stacked and unbalanced compared to other party members in the group of the same level.
I find that bug(feature?) annoying as hell too. When I get e-mail from a machine that has the time out of whack (almost always spam), I have to dig around in my messages list to find it so I can delete it. Outlook sorts by recieved date automatically. It would seem to be a fairly straight-forward feature to implement and would really improve the usability of T-Bird.
The thing I don't get, is why the hell did they bother trying to market this thing so heavily in Japan when the worldwide demand elsewhere was so high? You see news reports about slow 360 sales in Japan, where only 62,000 were sold the first couple of days. Does this mean there is still a shitload of Xbox 360's sitting on the shelves in Tokyo?
If I were Microsoft, I would have said "Screw 'em". After selling only half a million of the original Xboxes in total in Japan, they should have considered the Japenese Xbox market dead. All the surplus 360's sitting on the shelves in Japan should have been sent to markets where they would have been sold, like North America and Europe.
Perhaps he has abnormally large balls though. "Bulge" is a generalization of Superman's crotch area.
For the anatomically correct pedants such as yourself, perhaps they should have phrased it as "The new Superman is giving movie bosses a headache - because of the size of his penis and/or testicles."
I've been a Unix admin for 10+ years and I'm by no means an MS fanboy. However, I realized years ago that blatantly bashing a piece of technology based strictly on the vendor/OS is short sighted and more than a little immature. I wonder had the exact same piece of hardware been sold with a Nintendo logo on it, would it have been panned as badly as the Xbox 360 has been.
Microsoft does occasionally make some cool shit.
I've had my 360 for about a week and experienced no problems with it. I've found the PSU barely warm to the touch after hours of play so I'm not sure what people are doing to require it be suspended by string or whatever. In fact, overall, I've been very impressed with the games I got with it and Xbox Live! seems to have a lot of potential.
One of more poignant realizations of the sheer power of this system came when I was playing Kameo the other day. There was one scene where you're at the top of this hill on your warhorse and there are hundreds of trolls charging up the hill towards you, as I charged down the hill trampling trolls, I realized that each troll model and its AI was operating completely independently of the other trolls. There were over a thousand trolls each doing their own thing in response to what I was doing. That takes some serious hardware horsepower to pull off.
If you've ever seen the inside of the original Xbox, you'd notice that the power supply part of that unit is a 3 inch wide board running from front to back underneath the hard drive. All they've done with the 360 is take that part out and package it in a separate piece to give the perception that the 360 does indeed have a smaller form factor than its predecessor.
It makes more sense to buy a separate tuner card if you're any sort of serious gamer. The life cycle of a capture board is much longer than your graphics chipset. Since we're talking ATI here, I would recommend one of the boards based on the Theater 550 chipset which can be had for less than $100. A review and comparison of three of these boards can be found here. Personally, I own a Sapphire Theatrix Theatre 550 and I have to say this card is great for ripping home movies from the video camera and I also use it as a PVR with SageTV. What I really like about it is I can upgrade my main video card independently, and it doesn't matter if I decide to go with ATI or Nvidia.
I have the same dilemma. While I'd love to support my local gaming store, I find it really hard to justify paying 35% or more in additional cost on almost all products. There have been lots of times where I've seen new WoTC D20 releases listed on E-Bay for $9.99 as well.
Big empire online sales are killing the revenue model of the local reseller. I'm not sure if anything can be done to save them, because Hasbro is not going to quit distributing to huge volume channels like Amazon or B&N.
Slashdot Mirror
According to legend, when the day comes that a Slashdot article links to a Digg article which in turn links back to the original /. article, the combined forces of the digg and /. effects will create a massive vortex, tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time
Sometimes a negatively dugg comment on digg can experience sort of an "overflow" effect where if its bad enough, it actually gets read more. When you see a comment that has been dugg down to like -300 its hard to resist reading it to see how bad it actually is. And you just know everybody else is reading it too or it wouldn't have been down dugg so many times.
Digg comments are the same type of comments that Fark has... people talking about stuff they have no clue of.
Sometimes when I need an ego boost, I post a comment on Digg and I feel like a freakin' genius among retards.
how is this different from purchasing anything else on E-Bay?
I've also played every iteration of D&D since the early 80's and I have to say the d20 system is by far the best evolution of the game to date. To me, a good system is one where the game mechanics are consistent and streamlined enough that I only have to look something up in the book if its complicated or used infrequently (like grapple rules, arg!). This keeps pacing of the game steady and allows us to concentrate on having fun and playing rather than wrestling with the rules and tables. This was particularly poignant when we tried playing Hackmaster for a couple sessions a few weeks ago. Pretty much every swing of a weapon resulted in the GM having to look up stuff in a table to tell us the outcome.
WoTC also gives away a shitload of their d20 content for free (as in speech) under their Open Gaming License allowing a large number of other companies to create products for the system.
Overall I think that Wizards has done an excellent job of taking a product that was languishing under TSR's mismanagement and turning it into something that has help grow the RPG industry in a way that hasn't been seen since the 80's.
The grammar, style and even the subject of your post typifies what I see in the comments on digg.
/. has completely gone downhill, I just go read digg for five minutes and come back to /. with a renewed outlook.
Whenever I start thinking the quality of posts on
You should go hang out on digg
I ran into a problem with Samba 3 where there seems to be a cap on the number of groups an AD user can belong to if you're trying to authenticate a share based on AD Group membership. It seems that if a user belongs to around 20 AD groups, or the aggregate text length of the user's AD group names is too long, Samba will not recognize the user account's group membership past a certain point in the user's AD group membership list.
To demonstrate this problem, make a new AD group and add a user account that already has membership in a shitload of other AD groups. Then add a user to the group that belongs to only a few other groups. Create a new share on your samba box and allow your newly created AD group access to it. The account with a few memberships will work while the one belonging to a whack of other groups will not.
I'm not sure why this is, or if they've fixed it recently, but its a serious pain in the ass if your AD structure has any sort of complexity.
MBA = Management by Bumbling Around
even more power-gamer than the book it was suppossedly going to balance
I can vouch first hand for that. In my group I have one player who has a formula for building a cleric based on stuff found in BoED. His typical cleric has Exalted Turning, Exalted Healing, Exalted etc. and he takes pretty much every vow they have in there. His character ends up being pretty stacked and unbalanced compared to other party members in the group of the same level.
No, he's just drunk.
I find that bug(feature?) annoying as hell too. When I get e-mail from a machine that has the time out of whack (almost always spam), I have to dig around in my messages list to find it so I can delete it. Outlook sorts by recieved date automatically. It would seem to be a fairly straight-forward feature to implement and would really improve the usability of T-Bird.
The thing I don't get, is why the hell did they bother trying to market this thing so heavily in Japan when the worldwide demand elsewhere was so high? You see news reports about slow 360 sales in Japan, where only 62,000 were sold the first couple of days. Does this mean there is still a shitload of Xbox 360's sitting on the shelves in Tokyo?
If I were Microsoft, I would have said "Screw 'em". After selling only half a million of the original Xboxes in total in Japan, they should have considered the Japenese Xbox market dead. All the surplus 360's sitting on the shelves in Japan should have been sent to markets where they would have been sold, like North America and Europe.
Perhaps he has abnormally large balls though. "Bulge" is a generalization of Superman's crotch area.
For the anatomically correct pedants such as yourself, perhaps they should have phrased it as "The new Superman is giving movie bosses a headache - because of the size of his penis and/or testicles."
Yuck! Who wants a blowjob from their sister?
are you actually trying to suggest that nobody is using Apache 2.0.x?
Fuck man, your responses crack me up. I can really feel your frustration.
Neither is ABC's Lost, but for some reason Lost is arguably the most successful series ABC has ever produced.
hell, I think somebody should resurrect the fake Ghostbusters too... you know, the one with Tracy the clothes wearing gorilla.
I've been a Unix admin for 10+ years and I'm by no means an MS fanboy. However, I realized years ago that blatantly bashing a piece of technology based strictly on the vendor/OS is short sighted and more than a little immature. I wonder had the exact same piece of hardware been sold with a Nintendo logo on it, would it have been panned as badly as the Xbox 360 has been.
Microsoft does occasionally make some cool shit.
I've had my 360 for about a week and experienced no problems with it. I've found the PSU barely warm to the touch after hours of play so I'm not sure what people are doing to require it be suspended by string or whatever. In fact, overall, I've been very impressed with the games I got with it and Xbox Live! seems to have a lot of potential.
One of more poignant realizations of the sheer power of this system came when I was playing Kameo the other day. There was one scene where you're at the top of this hill on your warhorse and there are hundreds of trolls charging up the hill towards you, as I charged down the hill trampling trolls, I realized that each troll model and its AI was operating completely independently of the other trolls. There were over a thousand trolls each doing their own thing in response to what I was doing. That takes some serious hardware horsepower to pull off.
If you've ever seen the inside of the original Xbox, you'd notice that the power supply part of that unit is a 3 inch wide board running from front to back underneath the hard drive. All they've done with the 360 is take that part out and package it in a separate piece to give the perception that the 360 does indeed have a smaller form factor than its predecessor.
There was this car made out of wood. The body was made of wood, the frame was made of wood and the engine was made of wood.
Guess what?
It woodn't run.
It makes more sense to buy a separate tuner card if you're any sort of serious gamer. The life cycle of a capture board is much longer than your graphics chipset. Since we're talking ATI here, I would recommend one of the boards based on the Theater 550 chipset which can be had for less than $100. A review and comparison of three of these boards can be found here.
Personally, I own a Sapphire Theatrix Theatre 550 and I have to say this card is great for ripping home movies from the video camera and I also use it as a PVR with SageTV. What I really like about it is I can upgrade my main video card independently, and it doesn't matter if I decide to go with ATI or Nvidia.
I have the same dilemma. While I'd love to support my local gaming store, I find it really hard to justify paying 35% or more in additional cost on almost all products. There have been lots of times where I've seen new WoTC D20 releases listed on E-Bay for $9.99 as well.
Big empire online sales are killing the revenue model of the local reseller. I'm not sure if anything can be done to save them, because Hasbro is not going to quit distributing to huge volume channels like Amazon or B&N.
Another one for your list:
1982 AD&D: Treasure of Tarmin for the Intellivision.