For the first half of GTA-3, you play a bottom-rung flunkie for the mob, fresh from a jailbreak.
Unlike fantasy RPG's, where the whole point (for most people) is to be a big-shot hero, I don't think it will hurt the story at all to have PC's play as one of a thousand mafia errand-boys, doing the dirty work for low-ranking made men.
Being a nearly faceless scoff-law trying to build a rep for himself is what GTA is really all about.
I just got rid of my one and only Windows PC, since my current MMORPG choice, World of Warcraft, runs on my Mac, and I mostly game on the X-Box other than that.
However, if APB turns out to be a Windows-only game in 2007, I will run out and build a brand new Intel or AMD whatever-the-hell-version it is up to , slap in whichever nVidia or ATI card is the new hottness at the time, and install Longhorn (which just might be out by then)... for no other reason than playing this game!
That said, it would rock if I could just play it on my media-room Mac.
Assuming roughly 4 minutes per track, gives 5040 maximum songs per free account per fortnight.
During that time, you cannot listen to any other music, or play games (sound card needed for most..) or reboot.
Having a faster broadband connection won't help you, because the songs have to be played at normal speed.
How exactly does this add up to hundreds of thousands of songs for free?
If 100 people each download songs with no overlap, and then share their tracks on this new thing called the Internet, then everybody gets 504,000 free songs.
I think you will find that there are a heck of a lot of loose ends which were only hinted at in Season 1 of Alias. The institutions which were destroyed only served to reveal powers behind them to the audience.
As of the end of Season 3, there are still elements of Sydney Bristow's history (and that of her family) which are somewhat shrouded in mystery.
But seriously, check out "House." He does an American accent so perfectly, and carries himself so differently, you will hardly recognize him as the same guy who played Wooster (or any of his other various lighthearted comedy roles.)
Why not have a hybrid. Underlying themes/plots coming up in the episodes, but each episode having some individual aspect to help bring in the n00bs.
You just described every Joss Whedon show.
Maybe he should do the next Star Trek.
Oh wait... he already did a much better sci-fi show. It got cancelled but is now going to be a movie next fall (which is likely to be the first of several), so I guess he's too busy.
That wasn't my experience with Alias at all. When I caught an episode here and there, I thought it was a pretty lame show. Once I saw the pilot and the first couple episodes (in order) on DVD, I was hooked and have now watched it through Season 3, and I'm waiting for the DVD release of Season 4 because I don't want to watch them out of sequence.
British actor Hugh Laurie has had some great roles over the years. I used to think that Bernie Wooster was the role he was born to play... but he's topped himself with this show.
What is really going on is that people are playing different games within the MMO - some are playing the Advancement Game, and for them, people who buy stuff are cheating. But people who are playing the Exploring Game or the Socializing Game only see the advancement as a means to an end - in the case of the latter, it may be a way to keep up with friends.
That's just about the smartest thing I've ever seen anybody say on the subject of farming.
Personally, I tend to play the "roleplaying game."
In EverQuest, I had a character named "Iwalk", who was an even cleric with a very simple ethos:
1. Never run. It's undignified.
2. Never fight. Hurting people is beneath me.
3. Heal people if they want me to.
I played the character up to about level 8 or so (and that took weeks) while strolling leisurely through the forest. Some were amused by my quirky character, and dozens tried to explain to me how I was playing "wrong" because it would take longer for me to "level up" doing what I was doing.
All of my exp came from delivering mail for the bard's guild (a newbie quest which merely involved going from one place to another with "mail"), and from rare people chosing to invite me into their group, in spite of the fact that I told them up front that I would neither fight nor run. (Some of them were stunned when they discovered that I meant it. They would try to "lead" me to some hunting ground or another, only to turn around at the end of their jog and realize that they left me about a half-mile behind.)
I got almost nothing "accomplished" in that vitrual world, but man was it ever fun. I felt a lot like Kwai Chang Caine, walking among the cowboys of the Old West, who can't understand why he doesn't carry a gun or eat meat like regular folks.
In fact, next time I log in to WoW, I think it's about time I bring the character concept back.:)
The difference is that Bush made a policy decision which you don't like (and may consider illegitimate), but Nixon and Clinton obstructed justice, which is an attack on the judiciary by the leader of the executive branch of government.
Every president is going to make some decisions which some people are going to claim run afoul of their constitutional mandate (for every Gitmo or Abu Graib scandal you can name, a Clinton hater could trot out Ruby Ridge, Waco, or Elian Gonzalez, and we'd all go round and round on the wheel of flame-war accusations), but that's why we have elections, so the people can decide if such policy decisions warrent a continued tenure in office.
What Nixon (and later, Clinton) did, however, was obstruct justice for the sake of hiding their own criminal behaviors, however "minor" the crimes (an alleged hotel break-in in Nixon's case; alleged sexual harrassment and/or rape in Clinton's) may have been in the scope of how important we deem their jobs to be. That is why both presidents deserve every ounce of scorn they get, in spite of the fact that both of them accomplished a lot of Good Things while in office.
Depending on your take of the definition of Treason, your could argue that protecting corporate NDA violators is more valid than protecting government whistleblowers.
My "take on the definition of treason" would include Presidents Nixon and Clinton, both of whom obstructed justice while sworn in as our chief executive the law.
(Okay, Nixon was never actually convicted of obstruction of justice, but he probably would have been had he not been pardoned by Ford. Clinton had the bad luck of being followed in office by a member of the opposition party. Had he stepped down in the final year or two of his term, Al Gore could have saved him about $95 Million, not to mention all the legal fees.)
My definition of treason would not include somebody who truthfully reported corruption within the government. Criticism of the government is at least half of the reason why the First Amendment exists.
Woodward & Berstein have promised to reveal Deep Throat's identity after he's dead. Most bookies are laying odds on it being either Alexander Haig or Patrick Buchannan, in spite of strong denials from each.
However, there's a difference between protecting a whistle-blower in a corrupt presidential administration, and protecting the corportate espianage of people who sign and then violate NDA contracts.
Every time a post like this is made, an RIAA lawyer gets his wings.
Look, the RIAA doesn't "control" anything. They do the bidding of the big record labels, and take all the heat from people like you so Sony Music and the other actual villains in this story don't have to.
The last decision which the RIAA made was the standardized design of that little preamp that goes into the "phono" input of most stereos prior to 1998 or so.
All they do now is serve as a mouthpiece (and lightning rod) for the record labels in their efforts to lock down their IP. Ranting about how eeeeevil the RIAA is simply plays right into the hands of the labels behind it all.
Ironically, your entire post was devoted to telling me my choice of controller is wrong.
I'm glad you caught the irony, but saddened that you thought it unintentional. I guess subtly really is pointless on Slashdot after all.
There is no reason to snub you people, but the intelligent thing to do would have been to offer a choice (I know, not Microsoft's forte), not to force the bigger controller on a reluctant public.
They didn't force anything on anybody. First of all, you certainly didn't need to buy and X-Box. Secondly, the market is absolutely stuffed with thrid-party controllers for both the X-Box and the PS2. Oddly enough, the most popular third-party X-Box controllers look a lot like the original beast that once shipped with the X-Box, so I'm obviously far from the only one who prefers the hefty gear.
Well said. I have an X-Box, but probably will not get the X-Box 2. Not because I think there's anything wrong with the X-Box 2, it's just that I don't have a burning desire to collect whatever new titles might be coming out for it.
Unless some game comes along which I consider worth the price of the console + the price of the game, I intend to skip a version generation of PS or X-Box after this next one. Nevertheless, I'm glad to see MS pushing the envelope and keeping the market competitive and interesting.
If by "nighmare" you mean "wonderful dream come true", then I agree.
All three of my third-party X-Box controllers are almost the exact same shape & size as the original controller, and I would have it no other way.
The "S" controller was made specifically for the Japanese market (where almost everybody has tiny little hands), and caught on in the US with PS2 bigots who bought the X-Box as a "second" console.
It was bundled with later X-Boxes not as an admission of anything, but because it was cheaper. You know, like the crappy PS2 controller is cheaper.
If it were up to me, I would want the X-Box controller to be even BIGGER. A flooer-mounted job with the two halves of the controller a good foot and a half apart. That would not be practical to package and sell with the console, and the original X-Box controller design was a nice compromise.
I don't currently have a PS2, but if I bought one (and GTA:SA was almost enough to get me to cave in), I would probably run out and buy bigger and better controllers for it before I even powered it up.
Now you may disagree with every word I just said, but guess what? It's all opinion. Telling me that my choice of controller is "wrong" or "inferior" is about as useless as telling an emacs user that his text editor is a "nightmare" and he should be using vi.
I like the big honkin' X-Box controller, you like the li'l bitty PS2 controller. "Cain't we all jess git along!?"
"Wah wah! Those big meanies are advancing the technology expectations of customers too fast! No fair!"
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I can't possibly find fault with a company for releasing a cool new console too soon. (Unless I'm a competitor, anyway.)
I don't subscribe to cable, so I'm using the EyeTV tuner to get terrestrial-based HDTV (and digital SDTV) broadcasts.
It tunes in the signal and feeds the MPEG-2 signal to the mini, which can cache and/or record just like any other PVR set-up, and then outputs the same digital stream via DVI cable. It's pretty slick, but if I had cable it would not be much use, since it's only built for tuning in HD over the air.
Sounds incredibly useful if you are using a cheap, noisy AMD box running linux to do your video capture. However, the Mac G5 Towers run just as quiet as the mini, if not more so, which means there's no real need to hide the server in the back of your wine cellar.
Also, I could see why you would want this if you are using satellite or digital cable. The current offerings from El Gato (the company which makes EyeTV) really only support so many video formats.
Thanks for spelling out the real-world advantages of the code, instead of just giving boilerplate Stallmanist dogma about "libre" software. I don't think MythTV is the right solution for my set-up, but I can now see where it would be the ideal way to go for a lot of other folk.
I've just started using that same device myself. Seeing as it already does a great job of giving you complete PVR functions in HDTV on the Mac, what exactly does MythTV bring to the table that we don't already have?
Slashdot Mirror
For the first half of GTA-3, you play a bottom-rung flunkie for the mob, fresh from a jailbreak.
Unlike fantasy RPG's, where the whole point (for most people) is to be a big-shot hero, I don't think it will hurt the story at all to have PC's play as one of a thousand mafia errand-boys, doing the dirty work for low-ranking made men.
Being a nearly faceless scoff-law trying to build a rep for himself is what GTA is really all about.
I just got rid of my one and only Windows PC, since my current MMORPG choice, World of Warcraft, runs on my Mac, and I mostly game on the X-Box other than that.
However, if APB turns out to be a Windows-only game in 2007, I will run out and build a brand new Intel or AMD whatever-the-hell-version it is up to , slap in whichever nVidia or ATI card is the new hottness at the time, and install Longhorn (which just might be out by then)... for no other reason than playing this game!
That said, it would rock if I could just play it on my media-room Mac.
What's wrong with people that they think a game that allows you to beat up women, shoot cops and steal cars is fun?
Nothing. Every healthy mind has fantasies about taboo behavior of some kind or another.
Next question.
Assuming roughly 4 minutes per track, gives 5040 maximum songs per free account per fortnight.
During that time, you cannot listen to any other music, or play games (sound card needed for most..) or reboot.
Having a faster broadband connection won't help you, because the songs have to be played at normal speed.
How exactly does this add up to hundreds of thousands of songs for free?
If 100 people each download songs with no overlap, and then share their tracks on this new thing called the Internet, then everybody gets 504,000 free songs.
Next question.
I think you will find that there are a heck of a lot of loose ends which were only hinted at in Season 1 of Alias. The institutions which were destroyed only served to reveal powers behind them to the audience.
As of the end of Season 3, there are still elements of Sydney Bristow's history (and that of her family) which are somewhat shrouded in mystery.
I think you meant 2nd April...
There's two Aprils now!?
God, why do Europeans have to make everything so confusing!
(Insert rods-to-the-hogshead joke from the Simpsons here.)
My bad.
But seriously, check out "House." He does an American accent so perfectly, and carries himself so differently, you will hardly recognize him as the same guy who played Wooster (or any of his other various lighthearted comedy roles.)
Why not have a hybrid. Underlying themes/plots coming up in the episodes, but each episode having some individual aspect to help bring in the n00bs.
You just described every Joss Whedon show.
Maybe he should do the next Star Trek.
Oh wait... he already did a much better sci-fi show. It got cancelled but is now going to be a movie next fall (which is likely to be the first of several), so I guess he's too busy.
That wasn't my experience with Alias at all. When I caught an episode here and there, I thought it was a pretty lame show. Once I saw the pilot and the first couple episodes (in order) on DVD, I was hooked and have now watched it through Season 3, and I'm waiting for the DVD release of Season 4 because I don't want to watch them out of sequence.
You want to see really great episodic television?
"House, MD"
British actor Hugh Laurie has had some great roles over the years. I used to think that Bernie Wooster was the role he was born to play... but he's topped himself with this show.
What is really going on is that people are playing different games within the MMO - some are playing the Advancement Game, and for them, people who buy stuff are cheating. But people who are playing the Exploring Game or the Socializing Game only see the advancement as a means to an end - in the case of the latter, it may be a way to keep up with friends.
:)
That's just about the smartest thing I've ever seen anybody say on the subject of farming.
Personally, I tend to play the "roleplaying game."
In EverQuest, I had a character named "Iwalk", who was an even cleric with a very simple ethos:
1. Never run. It's undignified.
2. Never fight. Hurting people is beneath me.
3. Heal people if they want me to.
I played the character up to about level 8 or so (and that took weeks) while strolling leisurely through the forest. Some were amused by my quirky character, and dozens tried to explain to me how I was playing "wrong" because it would take longer for me to "level up" doing what I was doing.
All of my exp came from delivering mail for the bard's guild (a newbie quest which merely involved going from one place to another with "mail"), and from rare people chosing to invite me into their group, in spite of the fact that I told them up front that I would neither fight nor run. (Some of them were stunned when they discovered that I meant it. They would try to "lead" me to some hunting ground or another, only to turn around at the end of their jog and realize that they left me about a half-mile behind.)
I got almost nothing "accomplished" in that vitrual world, but man was it ever fun. I felt a lot like Kwai Chang Caine, walking among the cowboys of the Old West, who can't understand why he doesn't carry a gun or eat meat like regular folks.
In fact, next time I log in to WoW, I think it's about time I bring the character concept back.
The difference is that Bush made a policy decision which you don't like (and may consider illegitimate), but Nixon and Clinton obstructed justice, which is an attack on the judiciary by the leader of the executive branch of government.
Every president is going to make some decisions which some people are going to claim run afoul of their constitutional mandate (for every Gitmo or Abu Graib scandal you can name, a Clinton hater could trot out Ruby Ridge, Waco, or Elian Gonzalez, and we'd all go round and round on the wheel of flame-war accusations), but that's why we have elections, so the people can decide if such policy decisions warrent a continued tenure in office.
What Nixon (and later, Clinton) did, however, was obstruct justice for the sake of hiding their own criminal behaviors, however "minor" the crimes (an alleged hotel break-in in Nixon's case; alleged sexual harrassment and/or rape in Clinton's) may have been in the scope of how important we deem their jobs to be. That is why both presidents deserve every ounce of scorn they get, in spite of the fact that both of them accomplished a lot of Good Things while in office.
g/95 Million/s//95 Thousand/
Sorry... decimal error.
Depending on your take of the definition of Treason, your could argue that protecting corporate NDA violators is more valid than protecting government whistleblowers.
My "take on the definition of treason" would include Presidents Nixon and Clinton, both of whom obstructed justice while sworn in as our chief executive the law.
(Okay, Nixon was never actually convicted of obstruction of justice, but he probably would have been had he not been pardoned by Ford. Clinton had the bad luck of being followed in office by a member of the opposition party. Had he stepped down in the final year or two of his term, Al Gore could have saved him about $95 Million, not to mention all the legal fees.)
My definition of treason would not include somebody who truthfully reported corruption within the government. Criticism of the government is at least half of the reason why the First Amendment exists.
Woodward & Berstein have promised to reveal Deep Throat's identity after he's dead. Most bookies are laying odds on it being either Alexander Haig or Patrick Buchannan, in spite of strong denials from each.
However, there's a difference between protecting a whistle-blower in a corrupt presidential administration, and protecting the corportate espianage of people who sign and then violate NDA contracts.
I was responding to your comment, merely piling on and joining your glorious chorus of cynicism. This is a flimsy story to support flimsy criticisms.
Not everybody who relies in your thread is doing so to disagree.
Every time a post like this is made, an RIAA lawyer gets his wings.
Look, the RIAA doesn't "control" anything. They do the bidding of the big record labels, and take all the heat from people like you so Sony Music and the other actual villains in this story don't have to.
The last decision which the RIAA made was the standardized design of that little preamp that goes into the "phono" input of most stereos prior to 1998 or so.
All they do now is serve as a mouthpiece (and lightning rod) for the record labels in their efforts to lock down their IP. Ranting about how eeeeevil the RIAA is simply plays right into the hands of the labels behind it all.
Ironically, your entire post was devoted to telling me my choice of controller is wrong.
I'm glad you caught the irony, but saddened that you thought it unintentional. I guess subtly really is pointless on Slashdot after all.
There is no reason to snub you people, but the intelligent thing to do would have been to offer a choice (I know, not Microsoft's forte), not to force the bigger controller on a reluctant public.
They didn't force anything on anybody. First of all, you certainly didn't need to buy and X-Box. Secondly, the market is absolutely stuffed with thrid-party controllers for both the X-Box and the PS2. Oddly enough, the most popular third-party X-Box controllers look a lot like the original beast that once shipped with the X-Box, so I'm obviously far from the only one who prefers the hefty gear.
Well said. I have an X-Box, but probably will not get the X-Box 2. Not because I think there's anything wrong with the X-Box 2, it's just that I don't have a burning desire to collect whatever new titles might be coming out for it.
Unless some game comes along which I consider worth the price of the console + the price of the game, I intend to skip a version generation of PS or X-Box after this next one. Nevertheless, I'm glad to see MS pushing the envelope and keeping the market competitive and interesting.
Their original controller was a nightmare
If by "nighmare" you mean "wonderful dream come true", then I agree.
All three of my third-party X-Box controllers are almost the exact same shape & size as the original controller, and I would have it no other way.
The "S" controller was made specifically for the Japanese market (where almost everybody has tiny little hands), and caught on in the US with PS2 bigots who bought the X-Box as a "second" console.
It was bundled with later X-Boxes not as an admission of anything, but because it was cheaper. You know, like the crappy PS2 controller is cheaper.
If it were up to me, I would want the X-Box controller to be even BIGGER. A flooer-mounted job with the two halves of the controller a good foot and a half apart. That would not be practical to package and sell with the console, and the original X-Box controller design was a nice compromise.
I don't currently have a PS2, but if I bought one (and GTA:SA was almost enough to get me to cave in), I would probably run out and buy bigger and better controllers for it before I even powered it up.
Now you may disagree with every word I just said, but guess what? It's all opinion. Telling me that my choice of controller is "wrong" or "inferior" is about as useless as telling an emacs user that his text editor is a "nightmare" and he should be using vi.
I like the big honkin' X-Box controller, you like the li'l bitty PS2 controller. "Cain't we all jess git along!?"
"Wah wah! Those big meanies are advancing the technology expectations of customers too fast! No fair!"
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I can't possibly find fault with a company for releasing a cool new console too soon. (Unless I'm a competitor, anyway.)
Cool.
I don't subscribe to cable, so I'm using the EyeTV tuner to get terrestrial-based HDTV (and digital SDTV) broadcasts.
It tunes in the signal and feeds the MPEG-2 signal to the mini, which can cache and/or record just like any other PVR set-up, and then outputs the same digital stream via DVI cable. It's pretty slick, but if I had cable it would not be much use, since it's only built for tuning in HD over the air.
Since when is "a few TB of drive space" cheap?
If I want to archive shows, I'll burn a disk.
Sounds incredibly useful if you are using a cheap, noisy AMD box running linux to do your video capture. However, the Mac G5 Towers run just as quiet as the mini, if not more so, which means there's no real need to hide the server in the back of your wine cellar.
Also, I could see why you would want this if you are using satellite or digital cable. The current offerings from El Gato (the company which makes EyeTV) really only support so many video formats.
Thanks for spelling out the real-world advantages of the code, instead of just giving boilerplate Stallmanist dogma about "libre" software. I don't think MythTV is the right solution for my set-up, but I can now see where it would be the ideal way to go for a lot of other folk.
So was the software that came with the the HDTV tuner.
Are you talking about the EyeTV 500?
I've just started using that same device myself. Seeing as it already does a great job of giving you complete PVR functions in HDTV on the Mac, what exactly does MythTV bring to the table that we don't already have?
Just curious, is all...