If you still want both Streaming and DVD/BluRay mailed to you, then a little planning makes your cost only $7.99/month, thanks to Netflix letting you change your plan at the drop of a hat.
I mainly keep the DVD mailers for the shows that are not and will not ever be streamed in the near future, such as HBO original series like The Wire and Game of Thrones. I don't really need DVDs all of the time, though, so I plan to watch The Wire for a month and cancel my streaming plan, then I plan to watch streaming for a month and switch the plan back to DVD-only.
It's a little bit of a hassle, but it does save you $7.99/month.
On the other hand, any movie before TV has a huge advantage in total tickets sold because there was much less competition for the entertainment dollar back then. If you wanted moving images, movies were pretty much the only show out there.
I agree that 3000 lumens is not needed to get a decent picture. My InFocus X1 is (I think) 1000 lumens and it does fine in a fairly brightly-lit room on color movies. Not any worse than the TV would look in the same light anyway. Black and white movies are a different story. You have to have a mostly dark room for those to get decent contrast.
The projector is somewhat noisy, but like the projector at the movie theater, your ears get used to the noise and tune it out. My computer which plays the DVDs is another story though. I may invest in one of those quiet power supplies to reduce the roar during quiet scenes in movies. I only use my projector to watch Netflix stuff and streaming video off the net, so no comment on how it handles TV.
Another advantage of a projector over plasma/big screen TV/rear projected TV (especially for an apartment-dweller like me) is that a projector + screen combined only weighs around 20 or 30 pounds (projector is 10 lbs, screen about 15 or 20), so you can move it without any help. Also, even with limited space (I only project from 8 feet away) I get a 5-foot wide by 2.5 foot tall screen at 16x9 aspect ratio, which is more than 60 inch projection TV. (about 69 inches diagonal, and at 4x3 aspect ratio 75 inches). Plus, when you are done watching a movie you can roll up the screen so it doesn't dominate the living room.
I think the idea that there was a "golden age" in the 80's where games had great stories and great gameplay really ignores the great games of the 90's. Here are 5 games that had fantastic writing and/or craftsmanship that were released after 1995: Fallout Planescape:Torment Baldur's Gate 2 StarCraft Half-Life
If nothing else, the games of today have much better potential because there is more potential for improving the stability/gameplay through patches and mods and games also have less annoying copy protection than those classics of old. (I know I'm not the only one who hated looking up things on a codewheel or rifling through a manual to find the unlocking code on page 46, not to mention some of those Infocom classics that because of their copy protection would lock up occasionally on my Apple 2 -- despite that everything else worked fine on that disk drive...)
That wouldn't work. What if your hard drive crashes and you reinstall the game and have to update it again? You solution would take away the customer's rights to their own software.
If you want an example of a MMORPG that is planning to do this, look no further than this article Project Entropia.
PE will have its own virtual economy. You play for free, but you can choose to add money to your player's account in the form of PED (project entropia dollars) at a $1 (US) to 10 PED exchange rate. It is worth checking out, since it doesn't cost you anything to try the game out for an unlimited amount of time. Should be out later this year.
I think the role of real money in the game is more important than you make it out to be. After all, it is the purchasing of PEDs that allow MindArk to make money, so it better be an important part of the game or MindArk will not be around for long.
The key is that the financial system in the game gives you options. Are you a poor college student? Play for free, but you'll have to spend more time earning money for basic equipment. Are you gainfully employed? Spend some money up front to save yourself some playing time.
BTW, for all those people who said that it looks like a scam where the money goes in but doesn't go out, you need to read the FAQ on the Entropia web site. I believe there is only a transaction fee for taking money out of the game, not for putting it into the game.
My favorite part of their financial system is that it gives you a lot more than you would get from playing another MMORPG such as EverQuest. For EQ, you have to pay money up front for the software plus a monthly fee. All you get for that money is the privilege of using Verant's game servers. In Project Entropia, you could instead invest that money in your character.
I wonder how far money will go? Will $50 get you decent starting equipment or will it be just enough to get you going? How much will item insurance cost relative to the full cost of the item? (for those of you who haven't read the Entropia FAQ, you can buy insurance on your items so if you get PK'ed, you don't lose them. BTW, Pk'ing people makes you temporarily lose your insurance for a few hours...)
Finally, there is one important thing that is not made clear to me by the FAQ: can you buy and sell your character as well as your equipment? I think the answer is "No". This means that people who dedicate a lot of time to playing will have the advantage of much better training over those rich newbie characters that buy an early equipment advantage.
Re:Torched SUV Dealership
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
Even if you ignore the pollutants released by burning the SUV dealership, the energy required to rebuild the dealership and replace the SUVs is huge. VERY counterproductive.
The reasons that Diablo and Diablo 2 are more popular than Nethack is not just because Diablo has flashy graphics and sound. It is because it is an easy game to learn and the game has a coherent world design.
I've played a lot of Nethack, and the randomness of the gameplay is way too frustrating -- your hero can die through random events that are no indication of your lack of skill as a play. For example, it is too easy to get down to the lower levels and run out of food, and there are no places to buy food anywhere within the last 15 levels and no monsters that drop food. The worst part of this is that if you carry enough food to feed yourself you are too slow to fight.
The other main gripe about NetHack is that the controls are very badly designed. Diablo makes it fairly easy to manage your inventory and cast spells and use items. In NetHack I have to remember that there are different keys to use items in different ways, even though a generic "use" key would suffice for all of them. Because it is limited to text, it can also be difficult to see all of the information you need to see on one screen. (like inventory for example).
I think Netscape/AOL is perfectly justified in removing Illegal (Child Porn, Warez, etc) from the ODP. After all, by allowing editors to index the content, they are opening themselves up to lawsuits and encouraging people to break the law.
The real problem that they have is: where do they draw the line? I think Child Porn is almost universally illegal and is justfied in being removed, but other categories are a little fuzzier, especially the Warez and Drugs site index, because Warez sites have some software (mostly No-CD patches) that are useful to people that own the game legally. Many Drug sites could also be useful to people simply for educational purposes.
For all practical purposes, though, they are just making the illegal content harder to find in their index rather than stripping the index of all illegal content. People will just think of new jargon to categorize the illegal content under and the struggle to remove illegal content will continue.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if Embedded Qt doesn't require X, then Qt apps should work on MacOS X without having to also run an X server. Of course you still wouldn't get all of the nifty features of Quartz, but on the other hand you wouldn't have to run an X server to use Koffice either.
The worst part about the diamond and rectangular buttons is that it is hard to tell whether they are pressed or not. I much prefer the checkmarks of windows to the "depressed" diamond button.
In addition, long pull-down menus are handled very poorly in Motif. Just look through a long Bookmarks menu in Netscape on Linux for an example.
There are practically no RPG's on linux today except for NetHack. That's why I'd like to see my favorites on Linux. StarCraft would be nice, but why not wait until Blizzard makes StarCraft 2 and port it instead?
One way to keep mindworms from attacking is to terraform all of the fungus away. That decreases the number of places they can form. You must also make sure to defend your cities with lots of units (3 or so) so the worms won't demolish your cities.
Do not underestimate the power of elite hovertanks to demolish all mindworm attackers within seconds. Build plenty of magtubes and they can handle any attack.
Instead of complaining about having to work on New Year's Eve and the Morning of the New Year, my friends just held a New Year's Day party instead and had a great time.
Besides, as many people have pointed out, the real millennium is in 2001, so we get another chance for a big party.
Since most distros now include both GNOME and KDE+Qt, the issue of limiting Opera to KDE users is a moot point. Running GNOME apps in KDE or running KDE apps in GNOME works with little or no difficulties.
I've got both games, and both are excellent but very different gaming experiences.
RRT2 happens in real time - there are no turns, although you can speed up the game and slow it down when you need to plan where your rails are going.
You also have the option of playing scenarios as well as randomly generated games. The scenarios, for the most part, are based on actual historic events, which makes it more exciting than Alpha Centauri because the events are more familiar to you than, say, being the first to discover Organic Superlubricant.
Get the game. It's a great strategy game and very challenging.
I have not used the KDE 2.0 Konqueror, but I have used the 1.1.2 kfm and while it works very well for most basic browsing tasks (it's great for reading documentation) its cookie support is flaky and it is somewhat slower than Netscape or Mozilla 5 at rendering pages. I would love it if they used the renderer from Mozilla and kept all of their nice extensions (such as support for reading man and info pages).
KDE and GNOME have different ways of implementing CORBA functionality and use different ORB's. Is there any way to get the Bonobo and KOM/Openparts working together so, for example, I could embed a KDE part into a GNOME part? (for example: embedding a KDE text editor into a GNOME mail client) Are there plans to add this functionality in the future if it is not already there? Is this sort of interoperability difficult or impossible?
I agree with you: KDE is ahead of GNOME. However, the way you describe the superiority of KDE is unfair to both the KDE project and the GNOME project. You make it sound as if KDE and GNOME are still fighting like they were in the pre-QPL days when in actuality they are cooperating more and more each day (consistent standards for Drag and Drop, Desktop files, and I've heard that they're working on standardizing the sound daemon for both environments as well).
Koffice is ahead of GNOME's Office app projects (GNOME Workshop), but at this point it is very difficult to try out KOffice because the KDE 2 libraries and KOffice are a moving target and they require gobs of memory and processing speed to compile in your lifetime.
On the other hand, there are RPM's available for GNOME's spreadsheet and it is usable right now.
We will see in about three months which environment and Office suite is the best...the KDE Krash (1.89) release will at least give you alpha-level KDE 2 software to play with (and it will hopefully come in binary packages!) and I'm sure the GNOME folks wil have made a lot of progress on their projects too.
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If you still want both Streaming and DVD/BluRay mailed to you, then a little planning makes your cost only $7.99/month, thanks to Netflix letting you change your plan at the drop of a hat.
I mainly keep the DVD mailers for the shows that are not and will not ever be streamed in the near future, such as HBO original series like The Wire and Game of Thrones. I don't really need DVDs all of the time, though, so I plan to watch The Wire for a month and cancel my streaming plan, then I plan to watch streaming for a month and switch the plan back to DVD-only.
It's a little bit of a hassle, but it does save you $7.99/month.
On the other hand, any movie before TV has a huge advantage in total tickets sold because there was much less competition for the entertainment dollar back then. If you wanted moving images, movies were pretty much the only show out there.
I agree that 3000 lumens is not needed to get a decent picture. My InFocus X1 is (I think) 1000 lumens and it does fine in a fairly brightly-lit room on color movies. Not any worse than the TV would look in the same light anyway. Black and white movies are a different story. You have to have a mostly dark room for those to get decent contrast.
The projector is somewhat noisy, but like the projector at the movie theater, your ears get used to the noise and tune it out. My computer which plays the DVDs is another story though. I may invest in one of those quiet power supplies to reduce the roar during quiet scenes in movies. I only use my projector to watch Netflix stuff and streaming video off the net, so no comment on how it handles TV.
Another advantage of a projector over plasma/big screen TV/rear projected TV (especially for an apartment-dweller like me) is that a projector + screen combined only weighs around 20 or 30 pounds (projector is 10 lbs, screen about 15 or 20), so you can move it without any help. Also, even with limited space (I only project from 8 feet away) I get a 5-foot wide by 2.5 foot tall screen at 16x9 aspect ratio, which is more than 60 inch projection TV. (about 69 inches diagonal, and at 4x3 aspect ratio 75 inches). Plus, when you are done watching a movie you can roll up the screen so it doesn't dominate the living room.
Same here is Atlanta. Usually the local theaters on the north side don't pick up too many foreign films, but they had Spirited Away.
Your comment reminded me of my first disk drive for the family's Apple ][+.
It was so loud that you could tell what program was loading by the clicks of the drive.
I think the idea that there was a "golden age" in the 80's where games had great stories and great gameplay really ignores the great games of the 90's. Here are 5 games that had fantastic writing and/or craftsmanship that were released after 1995:
Fallout
Planescape:Torment
Baldur's Gate 2
StarCraft
Half-Life
If nothing else, the games of today have much better potential because there is more potential for improving the stability/gameplay through patches and mods and games also have less annoying copy protection than those classics of old. (I know I'm not the only one who hated looking up things on a codewheel or rifling through a manual to find the unlocking code on page 46, not to mention some of those Infocom classics that because of their copy protection would lock up occasionally on my Apple 2 -- despite that everything else worked fine on that disk drive...)
That wouldn't work. What if your hard drive crashes and you reinstall the game and have to update it again? You solution would take away the customer's rights to their own software.
If you want an example of a MMORPG that is planning to do this, look no further than this article Project Entropia.
PE will have its own virtual economy. You play for free, but you can choose to add money to your player's account in the form of PED (project entropia dollars) at a $1 (US) to 10 PED exchange rate. It is worth checking out, since it doesn't cost you anything to try the game out for an unlimited amount of time. Should be out later this year.
I think the role of real money in the game is more important than you make it out to be. After all, it is the purchasing of PEDs that allow MindArk to make money, so it better be an important part of the game or MindArk will not be around for long.
The key is that the financial system in the game gives you options. Are you a poor college student? Play for free, but you'll have to spend more time earning money for basic equipment. Are you gainfully employed? Spend some money up front to save yourself some playing time.
BTW, for all those people who said that it looks like a scam where the money goes in but doesn't go out, you need to read the FAQ on the Entropia web site. I believe there is only a transaction fee for taking money out of the game, not for putting it into the game.
My favorite part of their financial system is that it gives you a lot more than you would get from playing another MMORPG such as EverQuest. For EQ, you have to pay money up front for the software plus a monthly fee. All you get for that money is the privilege of using Verant's game servers. In Project Entropia, you could instead invest that money in your character.
I wonder how far money will go? Will $50 get you decent starting equipment or will it be just enough to get you going? How much will item insurance cost relative to the full cost of the item? (for those of you who haven't read the Entropia FAQ, you can buy insurance on your items so if you get PK'ed, you don't lose them. BTW, Pk'ing people makes you temporarily lose your insurance for a few hours...)
Finally, there is one important thing that is not made clear to me by the FAQ: can you buy and sell your character as well as your equipment? I think the answer is "No". This means that people who dedicate a lot of time to playing will have the advantage of much better training over those rich newbie characters that buy an early equipment advantage.
Even if you ignore the pollutants released by burning the SUV dealership, the energy required to rebuild the dealership and replace the SUVs is huge. VERY counterproductive.
The reasons that Diablo and Diablo 2 are more popular than Nethack is not just because Diablo has flashy graphics and sound. It is because it is an easy game to learn and the game has a coherent world design.
I've played a lot of Nethack, and the randomness of the gameplay is way too frustrating -- your hero can die through random events that are no indication of your lack of skill as a play. For example, it is too easy to get down to the lower levels and run out of food, and there are no places to buy food anywhere within the last 15 levels and no monsters that drop food. The worst part of this is that if you carry enough food to feed yourself you are too slow to fight.
The other main gripe about NetHack is that the controls are very badly designed. Diablo makes it fairly easy to manage your inventory and cast spells and use items. In NetHack I have to remember that there are different keys to use items in different ways, even though a generic "use" key would suffice for all of them. Because it is limited to text, it can also be difficult to see all of the information you need to see on one screen. (like inventory for example).
I think Netscape/AOL is perfectly justified in removing Illegal (Child Porn, Warez, etc) from the ODP. After all, by allowing editors to index the content, they are opening themselves up to lawsuits and encouraging people to break the law.
The real problem that they have is: where do they draw the line? I think Child Porn is almost universally illegal and is justfied in being removed, but other categories are a little fuzzier, especially the Warez and Drugs site index, because Warez sites have some software (mostly No-CD patches) that are useful to people that own the game legally. Many Drug sites could also be useful to people simply for educational purposes.
For all practical purposes, though, they are just making the illegal content harder to find in their index rather than stripping the index of all illegal content. People will just think of new jargon to categorize the illegal content under and the struggle to remove illegal content will continue.
Actually, it's a three question poll:
Should today's software includes printed manuals?
1. yes
2. no
3. Who reads the manuals?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if Embedded Qt doesn't require X, then Qt apps should work on MacOS X without having to also run an X server. Of course you still wouldn't get all of the nifty features of Quartz, but on the other hand you wouldn't have to run an X server to use Koffice either.
Does this mean that if my tape media goes bad I can still use it to tape posters on my wall?
If I'm not mistaking, the LGPL only allows dynamic linking of non-free software with libraries, not static linking.
The GPL does not allow any kind of linking if your app is not free software.
The worst part about the diamond and rectangular buttons is that it is hard to tell whether they are pressed or not. I much prefer the checkmarks of windows to the "depressed" diamond button.
In addition, long pull-down menus are handled very poorly in Motif. Just look through a long Bookmarks menu in Netscape on Linux for an example.
Baldur's Gate
Civilization 3
Fallout series
There are practically no RPG's on linux today except for NetHack. That's why I'd like to see my favorites on Linux. StarCraft would be nice, but why not wait until Blizzard makes StarCraft 2 and port it instead?
One way to keep mindworms from attacking is to terraform all of the fungus away. That decreases the number of places they can form. You must also make sure to defend your cities with lots of units (3 or so) so the worms won't demolish your cities.
Do not underestimate the power of elite hovertanks to demolish all mindworm attackers within seconds. Build plenty of magtubes and they can handle any attack.
Instead of complaining about having to work on New Year's Eve and the Morning of the New Year, my friends just held a New Year's Day party instead and had a great time.
Besides, as many people have pointed out, the real millennium is in 2001, so we get another chance for a big party.
Since most distros now include both GNOME and KDE+Qt, the issue of limiting Opera to KDE users is a moot point. Running GNOME apps in KDE or running KDE apps in GNOME works with little or no difficulties.
I've got both games, and both are excellent but very different gaming experiences.
RRT2 happens in real time - there are no turns, although you can speed up the game and slow it down when you need to plan where your rails are going.
You also have the option of playing scenarios as well as randomly generated games. The scenarios, for the most part, are based on actual historic events, which makes it more exciting than Alpha Centauri because the events are more familiar to you than, say, being the first to discover Organic Superlubricant.
Get the game. It's a great strategy game and very challenging.
I hope that they do too.
I have not used the KDE 2.0 Konqueror, but I have used the 1.1.2 kfm and while it works very well for most basic browsing tasks (it's great for reading documentation) its cookie support is flaky and it is somewhat slower than Netscape or Mozilla 5 at rendering pages. I would love it if they used the renderer from Mozilla and kept all of their nice extensions (such as support for reading man and info pages).
KDE and GNOME have different ways of implementing CORBA functionality and use different ORB's. Is there any way to get the Bonobo and KOM/Openparts working together so, for example, I could embed a KDE part into a GNOME part? (for example: embedding a KDE text editor into a GNOME mail client) Are there plans to add this functionality in the future if it is not already there? Is this sort of interoperability difficult or impossible?
I agree with you: KDE is ahead of GNOME. However, the way you describe the superiority of KDE is unfair to both the KDE project and the GNOME project. You make it sound as if KDE and GNOME are still fighting like they were in the pre-QPL days when in actuality they are cooperating more and more each day (consistent standards for Drag and Drop, Desktop files, and I've heard that they're working on standardizing the sound daemon for both environments as well).
Koffice is ahead of GNOME's Office app projects (GNOME Workshop), but at this point it is very difficult to try out KOffice because the KDE 2 libraries and KOffice are a moving target and they require gobs of memory and processing speed to compile in your lifetime.
On the other hand, there are RPM's available for GNOME's spreadsheet and it is usable right now.
We will see in about three months which environment and Office suite is the best...the KDE Krash (1.89) release will at least give you alpha-level KDE 2 software to play with (and it will hopefully come in binary packages!) and I'm sure the GNOME folks wil have made a lot of progress on their projects too.