My favorite aspect of racism in WoW (in a "did they really do that?" sort of way) was the boss by Lordamere Lake, a dark-skinned Orc on a watermelon farm named Nagaz.
I mean, COME ON.
Re:It's not a game....
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
Simcity was (hell, is) continually fun, compelling and challenging. Spore offers no real sense of accomplishment and isn't really fun, and the only challenging aspect of the game is navagating the UI. Just because the game isn't supposed to be played like a first-person shooter doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
Re:Good review
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 2, Informative
MOD PARENT UP.
The review was a bit too glowing in my opinion. DRM is never okay, but DRM on top of a nerfed evolution engine and a painful UI is too much for me.
It goes farther than the controls, too - unless I'm missing something, you can't select a group of attacking units in the tribal, creature or civilization stages and change their attack focus to a new unit without clicking on it, which combined with a camera that slides between HUGELY FAR AWAY and UP YOUR UNITS' NOSES, makes it hard to differentiate between your units and the baddies; you spend a lot of unfortunate time standing around and getting attacked by creatures you can't see.
The lag in the space portion, like the parent said, is totally unforgivable - every time you land on a planet, it lags, and the game essentially is about taking off from one planet and flying to and landing on another one. you do it A LOT, which means the game freezes for a good5-10 seconds every minute or two, and lags in the first 30 seconds on a planet, which wouldn't be SO bad except you're working under a timer most of the time.
It's the space portion's navigational interface that really gets to me, though: the galaxy is represented by a rotatable 2d representation of 3d space, and your space ship's range is represented by a 2d ring. You can only travel to planets within that ring. The problem is, unless I'm missing something, that space is 3d, so some planets inside the ring are actually really the hell far away on the Z-axis and there's no easy way to tell this without madly clicking around on every planet in the ring until you find one that takes you somewhere, though it might be (again because of the z-axis thing) in the wrong direction. Which is fine but, again, you're working UNDER A TIMER.
DRM stupidity aside, the whole thing feels rushed to me, and not beta-tested at all. WTF, Will?
I mean, seriously, when and how did the penis size obsession get started anyway? (Including all the stupidities that serve as substitute penis size symbols.) Did marketing just manage to make half the male population insecure and unhappy about being normal human beings? And we still think that marketing is a _good_ thing then?
There's a piece of parchment that was found in an ancient Egyptian garbage dump. A portion of the translatable part of the parchment reads, "Oh my. It's big and thick as a roof-beam." It was a best-seller in its day - the fragment appears all over the place.
The scrap is 2,000 years old. My guess is, marketing didn't need to do much to fuel the size obsession. It's been around for a long, long, LONG time.
Sounds good to me. Let us start by teaching them about Tiamat, how she got raped to give birth to the elder gods, and how her head was crushed with a sledghehammer by her son to create the land.
And then other Assyrian/Babylonian myths, including the Judeo-Christian variety.
Let's not neglect the western varieties, like how the frozen milk from the cow Audhumbla created Burr, the father of Burin, the father of Odin, the all-father.
That's pretty much exactly how my world literature class freshman year of high school went over a decade ago; I grew up in New Jersey. If that wasn't typical or isn't currently common, things are worse than I thought.
My girlfriend just bought a new budget windows laptop. It shipped with Vista but was underpowered to run it to the point of it being unusable for anything other than web browsing or word processing. So she installed Ubuntu and has been fighting tooth and nail to get the thing to work right, from having to deal with wireless networking issues to problems with gnome. She's wasting so much time trying to get her computer to work that she isn't actually using it for anything.
Meanwhile, I've got a macbook and, while I admit to its problems (the video card is a PoS (friggin' integrated graphics), it desperately needs a RAM upgrade, the glossy screen is impossible to keep clean and clear, the keyboard has some quirks, etc) for 99% of what I need to use a computer for, it does it without a hitch. I get stuff done. I've been getting stuff done since I pulled it out of the box.
I might pick up one of these clones to play around with, but here's the thing: It would just be play, and it would be money I wouldn't be spending if there wasn't an alternative. Kinda like the music piracy question of lost POTENTIAL sales - I would never go out and buy an Apple desktop, so buying one from a clone manufacturer isn't a lost sale on apple's part.
Just sayin'. I don't see this as much of a threat, at least not at the moment.
'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there.
This misses the fundamental point of the whole thing - the statistics don't reveal the countries where a new singer is most popular, they reveal the countries where people have heard of a new singer. Just because I've downloaded something doesn't mean it's any good, it means I was curious about it, and I'm more likely to take the chance with a download because it isn't costing me anything - if I don't like it, I can delete it or, more likely with the kind of storage space I've got on my computer, just won't listen to it again. Media penetration != popularity.
"The *IAA will soon reach a point where everyone (not just us internet folk) knows that if they could form their own police force like the Gestapo, they would."
Not sure if you had a different version than I did, but my copy of Sim City came with a pamphlet of codes composed of pairs of blocks with different corners of the blocks shaded, listed next to cities and their populations - the game gave you some combination of codes and populations and asked for the city name (or something like that).
The best part was, it was printed in black on red paper so you couldn't photocopy it. My grandmother and I took the time to hand-copy the thing, line by line, onto graph paper; I never looked back.
(I was 9 and my grandfather worked for IBM. It wasn't called "Piracy" back then, though, it was called "sharing with your grandson.")
I'd probably choose an ISP that carries the latest kernel downloads locally...
hahahahaha. You think the ISPs are going to start caching the Linux kernel? Where's the money in that? Now, if you want the latest Britney Spears video (kickbacks for promotion from the RIAA) or movie trailers (ditto from the MPAA) or game demos, you're set.
You gotta understand, to the content distribution companies, "legal P2P" = "free shit that we'll give you under the hope that you'll spend money later". Linux absolutely isn't on that list.
Memory. Human, neurological, living and breathing memory. Get out from behind the damned camera and play with your son, and talk about him with your family and your friends. Tell stories. Add the memory of him to the persistent memory that is community storytelling - in 15 years, somebody will remember something that you've forgotten and remind you, and you'll get to relive the whole thing in your imagination all over again, clear as life.
I have one of these; it's called a "Computer." Seriously - every necessary portable device I own charges through USB - my phone, my camera, my mp3 player, all of it.
Westinghouse is essentially trying to sell me a hundred dollar USB hub. That's progress for you.
doesn't the RIAA risk facing sanctions or worse? If not from the courts, there has got to be something from the Bar Association that prevents unethical behavior like this...
(IANAL)
The Bar can levy sanctions against the RIAA's lawyers - the responsibility of ethical conduct in a court case falls on the law professionals, not on the plaintiffs, and the Bar holds no power over non-lawyers whatsoever.
The closest you can get to what you're talking about is a countersuit from people sued by the RIAA's legal machine that might, MIGHT, prevent further legal proceedings in the same vein as the ones the RIAA is behind.
2. Competition among private services gives private companies an incentive to provide the best possible service at the lowest price. Because there is only one provider for a public service (and no competing providers are permitted to exist), there is no incentive for public services to provide the best service or the cheapest service.
...so what you're telling me is, if my neighbor can't afford to hire a private fire department to protect their home but I can, I would have to wait until my house was on fire to have it taken care of?
It isn't video specifially so much as any service that proves that "unlimited" internet service doesn't mean what they've been insinuating it means for years.
Look at it like this: When the cable companies sell their service to the public, the only thing they can say that users can latch into is that it's Faster Than X, where X is a transfer speed offered by a competitor or, in areas where there isn't much competition, X is a perception of slowness in general. That, or reliability, but let's focus on the first.
They've been riding on preexisting infrastructure, but But now that people are actually using their services, the companies are realizing that a maintenance-only approach isn't cutting it any more, and that expanding to new areas won't help if the areas they're already servicing start becoming saturated with downloaders.
So the broadband money faucet is drying up while costs are rising, and all of a sudden the pinch is being felt, and lawyers are cheaper than fiber.
What the companies don't realize is that, there's absolutely no way they can win this fight. More programs that need more bandwidth bandwidth will force the companies to innovate, advance or die.
This is just a sucky time to be an internet user. C'est la vie, say the old folks.
That printer's paper handling had better be absolutely amazing - I can't foresee a situation where a stack of daily-used, mildly dog-eared papers DOESN'T jam the thing on a regular basis.
fantastically easy way to get around that:
Instead of the 30's, make it 1930's with a heavy dose of steampunk. Case closed.
See? Sci-fi solves everything, and everything it doesn't, anime does.
The posting title reminds me of the Simpsons gag of Homer imagining what it would be like to be a moderately rich man. "Tee hee! I could rent anything I want!"
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite aspect of racism in WoW (in a "did they really do that?" sort of way) was the boss by Lordamere Lake, a dark-skinned Orc on a watermelon farm named Nagaz.
I mean, COME ON.
Simcity was (hell, is) continually fun, compelling and challenging. Spore offers no real sense of accomplishment and isn't really fun, and the only challenging aspect of the game is navagating the UI. Just because the game isn't supposed to be played like a first-person shooter doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
MOD PARENT UP.
The review was a bit too glowing in my opinion. DRM is never okay, but DRM on top of a nerfed evolution engine and a painful UI is too much for me.
It goes farther than the controls, too - unless I'm missing something, you can't select a group of attacking units in the tribal, creature or civilization stages and change their attack focus to a new unit without clicking on it, which combined with a camera that slides between HUGELY FAR AWAY and UP YOUR UNITS' NOSES, makes it hard to differentiate between your units and the baddies; you spend a lot of unfortunate time standing around and getting attacked by creatures you can't see.
The lag in the space portion, like the parent said, is totally unforgivable - every time you land on a planet, it lags, and the game essentially is about taking off from one planet and flying to and landing on another one. you do it A LOT, which means the game freezes for a good5-10 seconds every minute or two, and lags in the first 30 seconds on a planet, which wouldn't be SO bad except you're working under a timer most of the time.
It's the space portion's navigational interface that really gets to me, though: the galaxy is represented by a rotatable 2d representation of 3d space, and your space ship's range is represented by a 2d ring. You can only travel to planets within that ring. The problem is, unless I'm missing something, that space is 3d, so some planets inside the ring are actually really the hell far away on the Z-axis and there's no easy way to tell this without madly clicking around on every planet in the ring until you find one that takes you somewhere, though it might be (again because of the z-axis thing) in the wrong direction. Which is fine but, again, you're working UNDER A TIMER.
DRM stupidity aside, the whole thing feels rushed to me, and not beta-tested at all. WTF, Will?
I mean, seriously, when and how did the penis size obsession get started anyway? (Including all the stupidities that serve as substitute penis size symbols.) Did marketing just manage to make half the male population insecure and unhappy about being normal human beings? And we still think that marketing is a _good_ thing then?
There's a piece of parchment that was found in an ancient Egyptian garbage dump. A portion of the translatable part of the parchment reads, "Oh my. It's big and thick as a roof-beam." It was a best-seller in its day - the fragment appears all over the place.
The scrap is 2,000 years old. My guess is, marketing didn't need to do much to fuel the size obsession. It's been around for a long, long, LONG time.
Two guys peeing off a bridge. "The water's cold!" says the first. "And deep..." says the second.
Give credit where it's due - that's a Richard Pryor joke.
Sounds good to me. Let us start by teaching them about Tiamat, how she got raped to give birth to the elder gods, and how her head was crushed with a sledghehammer by her son to create the land. And then other Assyrian/Babylonian myths, including the Judeo-Christian variety. Let's not neglect the western varieties, like how the frozen milk from the cow Audhumbla created Burr, the father of Burin, the father of Odin, the all-father.
That's pretty much exactly how my world literature class freshman year of high school went over a decade ago; I grew up in New Jersey. If that wasn't typical or isn't currently common, things are worse than I thought.
Titanium is nice and all, but TUNGSTEN is where it's at.
I have no idea what a beer bong game would involve, other than drinking excessive amounts of beer.
That's a helluva typo. Allow me to elucidate with the help of hot chicks:
This is a beer bong.
This is beer pong.
There really are blogs for everything.
Anyone else read that as "Video Surveillance TechNICIAN Detects Abnormal Activity"? I was confused for a bit.
My girlfriend just bought a new budget windows laptop. It shipped with Vista but was underpowered to run it to the point of it being unusable for anything other than web browsing or word processing. So she installed Ubuntu and has been fighting tooth and nail to get the thing to work right, from having to deal with wireless networking issues to problems with gnome. She's wasting so much time trying to get her computer to work that she isn't actually using it for anything.
Meanwhile, I've got a macbook and, while I admit to its problems (the video card is a PoS (friggin' integrated graphics), it desperately needs a RAM upgrade, the glossy screen is impossible to keep clean and clear, the keyboard has some quirks, etc) for 99% of what I need to use a computer for, it does it without a hitch. I get stuff done. I've been getting stuff done since I pulled it out of the box.
I might pick up one of these clones to play around with, but here's the thing: It would just be play, and it would be money I wouldn't be spending if there wasn't an alternative. Kinda like the music piracy question of lost POTENTIAL sales - I would never go out and buy an Apple desktop, so buying one from a clone manufacturer isn't a lost sale on apple's part.
Just sayin'. I don't see this as much of a threat, at least not at the moment.
'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there.
This misses the fundamental point of the whole thing - the statistics don't reveal the countries where a new singer is most popular, they reveal the countries where people have heard of a new singer. Just because I've downloaded something doesn't mean it's any good, it means I was curious about it, and I'm more likely to take the chance with a download because it isn't costing me anything - if I don't like it, I can delete it or, more likely with the kind of storage space I've got on my computer, just won't listen to it again. Media penetration != popularity.
--Triv
"The *IAA will soon reach a point where everyone (not just us internet folk) knows that if they could form their own police force like the Gestapo, they would."
Oh please, the RIAA would never do anything like that.
Not sure if you had a different version than I did, but my copy of Sim City came with a pamphlet of codes composed of pairs of blocks with different corners of the blocks shaded, listed next to cities and their populations - the game gave you some combination of codes and populations and asked for the city name (or something like that).
The best part was, it was printed in black on red paper so you couldn't photocopy it. My grandmother and I took the time to hand-copy the thing, line by line, onto graph paper; I never looked back.
(I was 9 and my grandfather worked for IBM. It wasn't called "Piracy" back then, though, it was called "sharing with your grandson.")
I'd probably choose an ISP that carries the latest kernel downloads locally...
hahahahaha. You think the ISPs are going to start caching the Linux kernel? Where's the money in that? Now, if you want the latest Britney Spears video (kickbacks for promotion from the RIAA) or movie trailers (ditto from the MPAA) or game demos, you're set.
You gotta understand, to the content distribution companies, "legal P2P" = "free shit that we'll give you under the hope that you'll spend money later". Linux absolutely isn't on that list.
Memory. Human, neurological, living and breathing memory. Get out from behind the damned camera and play with your son, and talk about him with your family and your friends. Tell stories. Add the memory of him to the persistent memory that is community storytelling - in 15 years, somebody will remember something that you've forgotten and remind you, and you'll get to relive the whole thing in your imagination all over again, clear as life.
Cameras are overrated. Storytelling isn't.
I have one of these; it's called a "Computer." Seriously - every necessary portable device I own charges through USB - my phone, my camera, my mp3 player, all of it.
Westinghouse is essentially trying to sell me a hundred dollar USB hub. That's progress for you.
Connecting to them pesky youngsters has been tried before. It didn't turn out so well.
doesn't the RIAA risk facing sanctions or worse? If not from the courts, there has got to be something from the Bar Association that prevents unethical behavior like this...
(IANAL)
The Bar can levy sanctions against the RIAA's lawyers - the responsibility of ethical conduct in a court case falls on the law professionals, not on the plaintiffs, and the Bar holds no power over non-lawyers whatsoever.
The closest you can get to what you're talking about is a countersuit from people sued by the RIAA's legal machine that might, MIGHT, prevent further legal proceedings in the same vein as the ones the RIAA is behind.
2. Competition among private services gives private companies an incentive to provide the best possible service at the lowest price. Because there is only one provider for a public service (and no competing providers are permitted to exist), there is no incentive for public services to provide the best service or the cheapest service.
Some things should be socialized.
(This is ALL supposition.)
It isn't video specifially so much as any service that proves that "unlimited" internet service doesn't mean what they've been insinuating it means for years.
Look at it like this: When the cable companies sell their service to the public, the only thing they can say that users can latch into is that it's Faster Than X, where X is a transfer speed offered by a competitor or, in areas where there isn't much competition, X is a perception of slowness in general. That, or reliability, but let's focus on the first.
They've been riding on preexisting infrastructure, but But now that people are actually using their services, the companies are realizing that a maintenance-only approach isn't cutting it any more, and that expanding to new areas won't help if the areas they're already servicing start becoming saturated with downloaders.
So the broadband money faucet is drying up while costs are rising, and all of a sudden the pinch is being felt, and lawyers are cheaper than fiber.
What the companies don't realize is that, there's absolutely no way they can win this fight. More programs that need more bandwidth bandwidth will force the companies to innovate, advance or die.
This is just a sucky time to be an internet user. C'est la vie, say the old folks.
That printer's paper handling had better be absolutely amazing - I can't foresee a situation where a stack of daily-used, mildly dog-eared papers DOESN'T jam the thing on a regular basis.
fantastically easy way to get around that: Instead of the 30's, make it 1930's with a heavy dose of steampunk. Case closed. See? Sci-fi solves everything, and everything it doesn't, anime does.
*hums quietly. Catches himself.
Fuck You. I was an innocent bystander.
--Triv
And I'm sure my neighbor leaves his front door unlocked because he wants me to come on in and make a sandwich.
That reminds me: You're outta mayo.
--Your Neighbor
The posting title reminds me of the Simpsons gag of Homer imagining what it would be like to be a moderately rich man. "Tee hee! I could rent anything I want!"