Back in my Quake days I could let just about anybody have all the rockets they wanted, and still gib them six ways from Sunday with other weapons. They might get the occational "splash damage" kill on me if I step too close to a wall at the wrong moment, of fail to "rocket jump" off their shot, but at the end of the level, it would be my name at the top of the screen, not theirs.
A team-mate of mine would frequently kill rocket-weilder's with the crowbar just to prove he could. Rockets were great, but they can be avoided if you know what you are doing. People who complained about rockets in Quake I are whiners.
I'm with you on liking the old rockets. I don't think I've ever enjoyed an FPS deathmatch more than the original low-gravity level on quake. (By the way, in big low-G maps, other weapons were much more effective than the rockets, unless your opponent was foolish enough to keep his feet on the ground the whole time. Hitting an airborne moving target with the rocket launcher, while you are also airborne and moving, was both very tricky and very fun.)
In answer to the poster's original question: It doesn't matter what FPS you start with. You will feel like a total "n00b" for a while. Even with a brand-new game, you'll find yourself on servers populated entirely by the original beta testers, all sitting on the local networks of their ISP office and taking full advatage of the DS3 drop. Even when that's not the case, somebody who's mastered one mouse-based 360-degree FPS is going to be pretty good at all of them, so they will always have a leg up on you until you've played a little more. Just get in there, get killed, have fun, and you'll learn. Ignore your scores while you practice your strafing techniques and get the hang of aiming on the run. Soon you'll be spraying death everywhere with the rest of us.
I see the problem here. You define "winning a debate" as "convincing ignorant masses." When I was talking about who wins the argument, I meant "who's logic is the most sound."
I can't help but observe that Zen wisdom and Irish humor are very close to the same thing.
The differnece being that the Zen master is seeking ultimate enlightenment while the ironic Irish jokester is just killing time over a Guinness while his friend is trying to remember a dirty limerick he heard the other day. Oh wait... that's not really all that different either.
I guess the main difference is that Irish pub music is more fun to listen to than Zen chanting. Otherwise, it's all the same.
Actually, I would rather have the urinal job than the plumming systems job. Explaining your first job would bore people at parties, while your current job, as long as you have a good sense of humor about it, is a conversation starter. Everybody gets it when you say "I design urinals," but being asked about specialized jobs which don't result in a product that people see every day forces you to quickly change the subject from your day job to the Metallica cover band you play with on the weekends, or your vast collection of anime DVDs, and then you really sound dull!
Dude. The guy who cleans them has a much worse job than you. Try to keeps some perspective. The world could use better urinal designs. (There's still a lot of work to be done on reducing the dreaded "splashback" effect!)
Actually, the thrid person, who says he doesn't know, but has no way of being sure that the answer is unknowable, wins the argument every time.
Just because A can't prove he knows, it does not follow that B can prove that it can't be known.
An agnostic who insists that God can't be known is just an atheist pretending to be open-minded on the subject.
Re:Arguments against postmodern deconstructionists
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"What else is natural science than a common set of rules for perception" is their answer and I can't answer it. I believe my inability to refute their point is simply because the point they make is so idiotic, but still...
Their point is difficult to refute because it's true, obvious, and pointless, all at once.
All of the axioms of natural science are based on our observations. All observations depend on sensory input. Since our senses can be fooled, so can natural science. Ultimately, the only thing you can be sure of is "Cogito Ergo Sum," as old Rene once said. Everything else requires faith in the correctness of our perception.
However, it's a pointless observation. If we reject the input of our senses, we have nothing at all to go on which establishes even the existence of anything, yes. However, there is no way to demonstrate the total falsehood of observation because we have nothing else to go on.
I agree. It's easy for us to imagine a world without Euclid by considering what our world was like before Euclid... but what if a world that had no such mathematician eventually invented a kind of geometry in which the volume of an ovoid object could be worked out without Calculus, because they lacked the two-dimensional geometry upon which Calculus is based? Maybe if we did not have the crutch of dividing objects into an infinite stack of 2-D planes, we would have toiled our way to a method which could be mastered by small children. What would the study of physics be like in such a world? It's almost pointless to speculate, exactly what it would be like, but it's not hard to imagine that aliens from another world might have a system of mathematics that describes time and space very differently from how we do it.
Re:The Da Vinci Code
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In the movie Pi, both Phi and Theta are referenced as possible evidence of an Order to the Universe. The protaganist, Max Coen, is trying to hack this order by examining the Stock Market for patterns (since the market is a subset of nature, and patterns are postulated to be everywhere in nature, he believes a pattern can be found in the market, which cna lead to a better understanding of how the world is put together.)
His university mentor, a Jewish concentration-camp survivor (Soviet, not Nazi), was performing a similar pattern-search using Pi as his data set. This is where the title of the movie comes from.
The plot thickens when a group of Hasidic fanatics who are searching for the name of God by scanning the Torrah for patterns recruit Max to help them, and Max's curiosity, along with his migrane-induced hallucinations, leads him to the blurry line between number theory and numberology.
It's probably one of my favorite movies of the last 10 years.
Umm, yeah, if that were the case, then Gore would have won hands down. There's no doubt that he won the popular vote in 2K.
Actually, by percentage, the margin by which Gore won the popular vote is smaller than the margin by which he lost in Florida. If the Florida result deserved a recount (or two), then you could certainly make the case than the entire national vote would have been recounted, possibly with a different result, if it mattered. Since it doesn't matter, other than for the purposes of Democratic Party rhetoric, there was no reason to do so.
Oh for gods sake, wearing an attractive watch is neither vain nor an affectation, and there is a special place reserved in hell for those who invented and use the term 'metrosexual'.
Ouch. Looks like I struck a nerve.:)
A good analog watch is also a piece of mechanical craftsmanship that any man should be able to appreciate.
Any man should be able to appreciate the advantages of using skin moisturizer, too, but that doesn't mean that every man uses it.
"They are worn as jewelry for men. It's a vain, metrosexual affectation to wear a gold watch. There's your real reason."
So?
Take it easy. I didn't say there was anything wrong with metrosexuality. I just said that a watch is really about wearing jewelry, because nobody really needs one to tell time anymore.
Wasn't metrosexual one of those banished words of 2004
Yes, and I refused to use it until it was.
It's such a perfect word for describing 21st Century male vanity, simply because it's so amusing when used semi-ironically.
There was a time when all this was simply called "good grooming," but these days if you so much as let a nail buffer touch you, you're making a statement.
That may be what your watch is for, but I have not worn a dedicated timepiece of any sort for more than 10 years. I realized it's silly to carry a clock around on your wrist in an age when we are surrounded by clocks everywhere we go. Even as a type this, a clock ticks away on the corner of my laptop screen, and another is in eyeshot just a few inches away from it. When I get in my car, there are two on the dashboard, and several are visible during my commute.
These days, I have usually two devices on my person, a cell phone and an MP3 player, which have built-on clocks. Even on the rare occasion when I'm in a place where there are no clocks (such as a casino or shopping mall), and have none with me by pure accident of fate, I'm surrounded by people not only carry clocks around on their wrists, but actually derive pleasure from the brief moment of human contact they experience when I say "excuse me, but do you have the time?"
Strapping something to my wrist which only tells time would be a waste of five seconds each morning. I'm happier without one more item to worry about breaking or losing.
I look forward to the day when my phone, MP3 player, watch, GPS, daily planner, and sunglasses are all one small, light, rugged device.
Besides, it's a myth that timekeeping is what analog watches are for. They are worn as jewelry for men. It's a vain, metrosexual affectation to wear a gold watch. There's your real reason.
I just thought that I'd clear up the common misconception that there is a performance or innovation cost for including the PS2's backward compatibility. There wasn't. The PS2 contains the entirety of the PSOne hardware, PSOne games are played natively, not emulated, and the PSOne hardware controls I/O when a PS2 game is running.
Quite correct. Thank you for exposing this myth!
Anybody who understands how the PS2 is designed knows that it's pathetically inferior performance has nothing whatsoever to do with it's support for a dead platform from the same company, known as PSOne.
The better graphics, load times, FPS, etc. which X-Box owners enjoy is only a result of using better hardware, not the fact that it was unfettered from the "need" to support Final Fantasy 0.5 and a bunch of "classic" side-scrollers.
If, by in the hunt, you mean sales almost an order of magnitude lower, then yes. To date, 70 million PS2 have geen sold, while only ~13 million Xbox and GC each
Oooo! Sony controls about 72% of the market! I guess everybody else should just lie down and let them have the rest of it!
News flash: Nobody who owns an X-Box or GC gives a shit about Sony's market share.
If Apple can survive with 4% of the PC market, I'm sure the 2nd and 3rd place game console companies can find a way to soldier on.
I didn't buy an X-Box to join the bigger side of some ass-hat console war. I bought it because of superior graphics, a controller that fits my grown-up sized hands, and some really fun games that are available for it. Even if Sony "wins" by driving Nintendo out of business and MS out of the market, I'll still have my X-Box and all my games.
When the next generation of consoles come out, and if I am ready to move on to a new console, the only factor I will consider is: Do the games for this console make it worth buying? If the answer if "yes" for the X-Box2, I'll buy it. If the answer is "yes" for the PSX, I'll buy that. If I'm loaded at the time, those evaluations might not even be mutually exclusive.
Platform bigotry went out with the Commodore Amiga. Get with the 21st Century.
If I want to play my old games, I can play them on the old X-Box. If X-Box2 (Y-Box?) supports the old games, I probably would not be able to sell the old one for much money anyway.
The key to getting me to buying a new-generation X-Box is not backward compatibility. It's making sure that there are fun games which take advantage of the better technology.
Being backward compatible with existing USB controllers would be nice, though. I would hate to think that people who bought $100 DDR pads or fancy steering wheels would be unable to use them with the new system.
This policy covers a specific motherboard defect, which your iBook has. It has nothing to do with warrantee issues, so I would be shocked if Apple did not agree to replace the motherboard for you under the circumstances.
Of course, if your little case mod makes it impossible for their techs to re-assemble it, you might be SOL.
Class action lawyers are *always* paid from damages collected (never by the plaintiffs), so there is zero incentive for a frivolous lawsuit...
...Again, if the plaintiff can actually pull this off, then the public can feel very comfortable that the outcome was correct. The burden to success is quite high.
I call bullshit.
You and I both know that the vast majority of class action lawsuits do not end in a judgement, one way or the other. They usually end in a settlement, whether the defendant was really in the wrong or not, because the cost of defending against a class-action suit is prohibitively high.
It's just like when Blockbuster Video was sued for charging "unfair" late fees. They gave a few million to the weasel lawyers, a few coupons for free rentals to each customer, and their late fee policy stayed exactly the same.
Ditto when my phone company was sued. I was offered the chance to sign on to their lawsuit (as one of the people "wronged" by Qwest, even though they already gave me three months of free service, including DSL, to make up for the problem I had with them, which I was happy with.) If I had, it would have meant about $100 taken off my tab for my bills, and millions for the lawyers involved. Was Qwest really in the wrong? Not in this case? Did they lose in court? No. Did they have to pay? You betcha. Frivolous lawsuits are a gold mine for weasel lawyers.
I recently got another one. A lawsuit against my mortgage broker. I've always been thrilled with them when doing business, but it seems I'm "entitled" to compensation for something.
Bah! Lawyers getting fat, while the rest of us wonder why we need to pay a little more for everything in order to cover the legal costs of all the companies we buy from.
I own one of the iBooks covered in this program. It had this exact problem just three weeks before the warrantee expired. They swapped in a new one, no questions asked (even though less was known about this bug at the time), and no shipping costs involved. The motherboard was covered for an additional three months, and I was a little concerned that this might happen again in a year or two. Thanks to Apple being the kind of company they are, I can relax. This iBook will be obsolete before this new program expires. Hooray!
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A team-mate of mine would frequently kill rocket-weilder's with the crowbar just to prove he could. Rockets were great, but they can be avoided if you know what you are doing. People who complained about rockets in Quake I are whiners.
I'm with you on liking the old rockets. I don't think I've ever enjoyed an FPS deathmatch more than the original low-gravity level on quake. (By the way, in big low-G maps, other weapons were much more effective than the rockets, unless your opponent was foolish enough to keep his feet on the ground the whole time. Hitting an airborne moving target with the rocket launcher, while you are also airborne and moving, was both very tricky and very fun.)
In answer to the poster's original question: It doesn't matter what FPS you start with. You will feel like a total "n00b" for a while. Even with a brand-new game, you'll find yourself on servers populated entirely by the original beta testers, all sitting on the local networks of their ISP office and taking full advatage of the DS3 drop. Even when that's not the case, somebody who's mastered one mouse-based 360-degree FPS is going to be pretty good at all of them, so they will always have a leg up on you until you've played a little more. Just get in there, get killed, have fun, and you'll learn. Ignore your scores while you practice your strafing techniques and get the hang of aiming on the run. Soon you'll be spraying death everywhere with the rest of us.
All English-character spellings are merely phonetic interpretations. Kind of like how "Yahweh" and "Jehovah" are both correct.
I see the problem here. You define "winning a debate" as "convincing ignorant masses." When I was talking about who wins the argument, I meant "who's logic is the most sound."
The differnece being that the Zen master is seeking ultimate enlightenment while the ironic Irish jokester is just killing time over a Guinness while his friend is trying to remember a dirty limerick he heard the other day. Oh wait... that's not really all that different either.
I guess the main difference is that Irish pub music is more fun to listen to than Zen chanting. Otherwise, it's all the same.
If you are going to dream, dream big.
Actually, I would rather have the urinal job than the plumming systems job. Explaining your first job would bore people at parties, while your current job, as long as you have a good sense of humor about it, is a conversation starter. Everybody gets it when you say "I design urinals," but being asked about specialized jobs which don't result in a product that people see every day forces you to quickly change the subject from your day job to the Metallica cover band you play with on the weekends, or your vast collection of anime DVDs, and then you really sound dull!
Dude. The guy who cleans them has a much worse job than you. Try to keeps some perspective. The world could use better urinal designs. (There's still a lot of work to be done on reducing the dreaded "splashback" effect!)
Oh, they are talking about dream jobs for Electrical Engineers only?
In that case: A great dream job would be a trophy husband to a beautiful, weathly, fun-loving supermodel.
What? You think having EE degrees means they would rather stare at oscilliscopes all day!?
Just because A can't prove he knows, it does not follow that B can prove that it can't be known.
An agnostic who insists that God can't be known is just an atheist pretending to be open-minded on the subject.
Their point is difficult to refute because it's true, obvious, and pointless, all at once.
All of the axioms of natural science are based on our observations. All observations depend on sensory input. Since our senses can be fooled, so can natural science. Ultimately, the only thing you can be sure of is "Cogito Ergo Sum," as old Rene once said. Everything else requires faith in the correctness of our perception.
However, it's a pointless observation. If we reject the input of our senses, we have nothing at all to go on which establishes even the existence of anything, yes. However, there is no way to demonstrate the total falsehood of observation because we have nothing else to go on.
Western concepts of logic win again! W00t! Yoo Ess Ay! Yoo Ess Ay!
I agree. It's easy for us to imagine a world without Euclid by considering what our world was like before Euclid... but what if a world that had no such mathematician eventually invented a kind of geometry in which the volume of an ovoid object could be worked out without Calculus, because they lacked the two-dimensional geometry upon which Calculus is based? Maybe if we did not have the crutch of dividing objects into an infinite stack of 2-D planes, we would have toiled our way to a method which could be mastered by small children. What would the study of physics be like in such a world? It's almost pointless to speculate, exactly what it would be like, but it's not hard to imagine that aliens from another world might have a system of mathematics that describes time and space very differently from how we do it.
His university mentor, a Jewish concentration-camp survivor (Soviet, not Nazi), was performing a similar pattern-search using Pi as his data set. This is where the title of the movie comes from.
The plot thickens when a group of Hasidic fanatics who are searching for the name of God by scanning the Torrah for patterns recruit Max to help them, and Max's curiosity, along with his migrane-induced hallucinations, leads him to the blurry line between number theory and numberology.
It's probably one of my favorite movies of the last 10 years.
Actually, by percentage, the margin by which Gore won the popular vote is smaller than the margin by which he lost in Florida. If the Florida result deserved a recount (or two), then you could certainly make the case than the entire national vote would have been recounted, possibly with a different result, if it mattered. Since it doesn't matter, other than for the purposes of Democratic Party rhetoric, there was no reason to do so.
Dude! That is so obviously a t-shirt slogan waiting to be made. Time to buy some transfer paper for the printer...
Ouch. Looks like I struck a nerve. :)
A good analog watch is also a piece of mechanical craftsmanship that any man should be able to appreciate.
Any man should be able to appreciate the advantages of using skin moisturizer, too, but that doesn't mean that every man uses it.
So?
Take it easy. I didn't say there was anything wrong with metrosexuality. I just said that a watch is really about wearing jewelry, because nobody really needs one to tell time anymore.
Yes, and I refused to use it until it was.
It's such a perfect word for describing 21st Century male vanity, simply because it's so amusing when used semi-ironically.
There was a time when all this was simply called "good grooming," but these days if you so much as let a nail buffer touch you, you're making a statement.
These days, I have usually two devices on my person, a cell phone and an MP3 player, which have built-on clocks. Even on the rare occasion when I'm in a place where there are no clocks (such as a casino or shopping mall), and have none with me by pure accident of fate, I'm surrounded by people not only carry clocks around on their wrists, but actually derive pleasure from the brief moment of human contact they experience when I say "excuse me, but do you have the time?"
Strapping something to my wrist which only tells time would be a waste of five seconds each morning. I'm happier without one more item to worry about breaking or losing.
I look forward to the day when my phone, MP3 player, watch, GPS, daily planner, and sunglasses are all one small, light, rugged device.
Besides, it's a myth that timekeeping is what analog watches are for. They are worn as jewelry for men. It's a vain, metrosexual affectation to wear a gold watch. There's your real reason.
Quite correct. Thank you for exposing this myth!
Anybody who understands how the PS2 is designed knows that it's pathetically inferior performance has nothing whatsoever to do with it's support for a dead platform from the same company, known as PSOne.
The better graphics, load times, FPS, etc. which X-Box owners enjoy is only a result of using better hardware, not the fact that it was unfettered from the "need" to support Final Fantasy 0.5 and a bunch of "classic" side-scrollers.
Oooo! Sony controls about 72% of the market! I guess everybody else should just lie down and let them have the rest of it!
News flash: Nobody who owns an X-Box or GC gives a shit about Sony's market share.
If Apple can survive with 4% of the PC market, I'm sure the 2nd and 3rd place game console companies can find a way to soldier on.
I didn't buy an X-Box to join the bigger side of some ass-hat console war. I bought it because of superior graphics, a controller that fits my grown-up sized hands, and some really fun games that are available for it. Even if Sony "wins" by driving Nintendo out of business and MS out of the market, I'll still have my X-Box and all my games.
When the next generation of consoles come out, and if I am ready to move on to a new console, the only factor I will consider is: Do the games for this console make it worth buying? If the answer if "yes" for the X-Box2, I'll buy it. If the answer is "yes" for the PSX, I'll buy that. If I'm loaded at the time, those evaluations might not even be mutually exclusive.
Platform bigotry went out with the Commodore Amiga. Get with the 21st Century.
Backward compatability is the key.
Why?
If I want to play my old games, I can play them on the old X-Box. If X-Box2 (Y-Box?) supports the old games, I probably would not be able to sell the old one for much money anyway.
The key to getting me to buying a new-generation X-Box is not backward compatibility. It's making sure that there are fun games which take advantage of the better technology.
Being backward compatible with existing USB controllers would be nice, though. I would hate to think that people who bought $100 DDR pads or fancy steering wheels would be unable to use them with the new system.
Of course, if your little case mod makes it impossible for their techs to re-assemble it, you might be SOL.
...Again, if the plaintiff can actually pull this off, then the public can feel very comfortable that the outcome was correct. The burden to success is quite high.
I call bullshit.
You and I both know that the vast majority of class action lawsuits do not end in a judgement, one way or the other. They usually end in a settlement, whether the defendant was really in the wrong or not, because the cost of defending against a class-action suit is prohibitively high.
It's just like when Blockbuster Video was sued for charging "unfair" late fees. They gave a few million to the weasel lawyers, a few coupons for free rentals to each customer, and their late fee policy stayed exactly the same.
Ditto when my phone company was sued. I was offered the chance to sign on to their lawsuit (as one of the people "wronged" by Qwest, even though they already gave me three months of free service, including DSL, to make up for the problem I had with them, which I was happy with.) If I had, it would have meant about $100 taken off my tab for my bills, and millions for the lawyers involved. Was Qwest really in the wrong? Not in this case? Did they lose in court? No. Did they have to pay? You betcha. Frivolous lawsuits are a gold mine for weasel lawyers.
I recently got another one. A lawsuit against my mortgage broker. I've always been thrilled with them when doing business, but it seems I'm "entitled" to compensation for something.
Bah! Lawyers getting fat, while the rest of us wonder why we need to pay a little more for everything in order to cover the legal costs of all the companies we buy from.
I own one of the iBooks covered in this program. It had this exact problem just three weeks before the warrantee expired. They swapped in a new one, no questions asked (even though less was known about this bug at the time), and no shipping costs involved. The motherboard was covered for an additional three months, and I was a little concerned that this might happen again in a year or two. Thanks to Apple being the kind of company they are, I can relax. This iBook will be obsolete before this new program expires. Hooray!
MMORPG without a keyboard is a dreadful experience. A keyboard for X-Box2 (Y-Box?) could bring the MMORPG experience into the living room.