I think Fallout 3's biggest fault really was just that they'd borrowed too much of the codebase from Oblivion such that it was effectively just Oblivion with different art and story and guns instead of magic/bows.
See, I look at it the other way. Oblivion was Fallout 3, only lacking guns. I enjoyed Fallout 3 much more than Oblivion, mostly because of the atmosphere. Oblivion was Yet Another Fantasy Realm, of which I have seen plenty. Fallout 3 is more grounded in reality, and because I live near DC, I found it much more interesting.
Unfortunately for the rest of us it means that our old 'friend' BSOD is not someone we can afford to have visiting us all the time.
If it's visiting you all the time, you're doing something wrong. I have had one BSOD with Vista SP1. Ironically, it was while playing some little game I installed from MS through Windows Update. Other that that, it's been rock solid. Hell, XP was pretty solid too for that matter.
So are we to believe that simple non-life threatening infections now all of a sudden become deadly because of the basic lack of antibiotics?
They were running out of antibiotics anyway, remember when Anders was sick with some disease on Mudworld and Starbuck had to go beg Fat Lee for medicine?
Ug, what an unbelievably crappy ass implausible ending to an otherwise awesome series... Am I the only one that feels like this???
The extreme spoon feeding of the plot was annoying and insulting. It was also beneath the show.
You know, normally I'd agree with you, but given the number of comments I've seen on the Net about things like, "Wait, so Racetrack was dead when she fired the nukes?" or even "So was Baltar responsible for allowing Six into the defense mainframe?"; it's clear that some people out there wouldn't get it even if the show came with a companion text that explained everything.
But this time, there is absolutely no rational or scientific explanation for the events of the show other than a supernatural god or gods and angels. The show crossed a line here it's never crossed before.
Didn't Baltar's Head Six (ie, the one only he could see) say she was an angel of God at some point? And here you thought she was lying.
But there is still faith involved that it is true for all situations, otherwise it would be a law.
Um, no. Theories don't get upgraded to laws. When people talk about things like the "law of gravity", they are either speaking figuratively or they are referring to the equation for gravitational force between two masses.
Scientists assume they know what the missing frames are and make assumptions in order to fill in the missing frames of the fossil record. This is despite not having lived during the time when the frames they are trying to fill in actually took place chronologically.
Did you ever meet your great great great great great grandfather? Is it too much of an assumption to think that he existed?
Also, as for another assumption, many cosmologists assume there is a black hole in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy, albeit based on observations. There is no direct proof there is a black hole there though but the assumption makes other observations (why the galaxy doesn't fly apart and why objects move faster than they are expected to near the center of the galaxy) make sense.
What the hell? There's no direct proof of anything in science. We've never seen an electron, but we've observed effects that we ascribe to particles with certain properties that we call electrons. I'm not sure what you want. If you're looking for "proof", then take a geometry class and you will prove things all day long.
The problem with evolution is that it does not predict anything
Sure it does. We should never find modern mammal fossils in Precambrian strata. We should never find T-Rex fossils in recent strata. Changes in the environment should result in changes in species to adapt to the environment. DNA of related species should be similar. Etc, etc, etc.
Every day mutations don't count because they don't change species or at least on time scales we need to make predictions similar to what we've supposedly already seen evolution do.
Huh? "Every day mutations", whatever they are, have already resulted in speciation being observed.
So what is my uneducated mind missing that your elitist mind already knows?
Money needs to be an economic good in order to be used as money. In other words, it has to have value as used as something *other* than money.
Why?
We don't have to use gold
If you accept that the currency can be backed by anything, then why can't it be backed by nothing more than people's agreement that it's viable as a medium of exchange?
The greatest asset Win2k had was it was very stable, and didn't try to do everything for the end user. All it did was OS.
Vista is very stable (for me) too, and I don't think it's ever done anything for me that I didn't want it to do (except for changing the folder views -- that drives me nuts sometimes). YMMV.
One beneficial option of Linux would be giving the end user control over which programs are installed. If I don't link Totem for media, I can uninstall it completely.
Sure, and I agree. But the thing is: the average person doesn't care which programs are installed. And memory and hard drive space are so cheap these days that it's would literally cost me more in time and effort to "slim down" the OS than to just install everything and just don't use what I don't want.
Also, the non-sense of 5 different streams of OS...craziness. Win2k was either client, or server. Perfect. WinXP was Home or Pro...alright, I don't like it, but can understand why MS would do such a thing...but Vista? Business 101 says segment your market, so I understand why MS would do that...but it's to the detriment of their users.
And how many Linux distros are there?
Linux installation goes like this:
Hi, I'm Linux, here's everything you might need to operate your computer. What would you like to install? Ah, Ok, almost everything. Great, here it is. Oh, wait, after you installed you changed your mind and want only the bare OS because you want to get rid of the cruft? Done. A different windows manager? Ok, glad I could help.
FWIW, Linux installation has never EVER gone this easily for me. Not even close. On the other hand, the only time I have ever had a problem installing Windows was when XP wanted SATA drivers that I had to hunt around for. Vista Untilate installed perfectly. The Windows 7 Beta installed perfectly in a dual-boot configuration with Vista. It may install things that you personally don't want, but Windows has Linux beat for ease of installation hands down.
It might even resemble Windows 2000 in its simplicity, and Linux in its features.
Elaborate, please. I have Vista on my home system and XP on my work system, and for me going from Vista to XP (let alone 2000) is like going back to the bronze age. Also I develop on Linux at work, and I'm not sure what features it has that I should be wanting on my Windows machine.
Just out of curiosity sake, although the standard allows NULL pointer to have storage other than zero, is there any real world compiler where this is true?
If so, it would break most code that uses unions with pointers for storage (i.e. load-in-place fixups) and code that relies on extra bits and bit-patterns shared with pointers (i.e. lots of lockfree code stuffs data into what is assumed to be unused bits in pointers). It would probably break a lot of code that uses pointer math as well -- for example, anything using an "offsetof()" style macro.
I don't see why a non-zero NULL would break any of that, especially the offsetof() thing?
Redmond, they're called "Preferences". You can add a radio button or checkbox or pulldown menu that lets users select how they want Windows 7 to operate. It doesn't have to be all or none. Thanks.
Then they have to have code to support all possible combination of options, so Slashdot smirks and points out how "bloated" it is.
I suppose I'd like to spend a day watching a windows7 user and see WHY they are getting all these UAC popups.
Hell, I'm running Vista and I'd like to know what people are doing to get all these popups. Pretty much the only time I see one is when I'm installing a new game. And for some reason when I start Steam.
Why? If you're buying a new PC, it'll probably be 64-bit, and it'll run Vista perfectly well. And you'll be able to use more memory. And it won't look like you set the Wayback Machine for 1995.
Because... XP-> Vista is hardly a leap at all, it hardly compares to some of the minor 9x updates that occurred, but because it was parts of the GUI that changed, people think that's somehow more miraculous. There was also significant breakage for very little reward. Suddenly, everything needed new drivers to be rewritten, which often meant new hardware, or unsupported configurations.
Read this paragraph to yourself again. XP>Vista is hardly a leap at all... except for an entirely new (and better) driver model.
It's also a significant move away from the "everybody runs as admin" problem of all previous versions of Windows. It has UAC, which works fine provided you don't turn it off. And it has a 64-bit version that actually works.
But yeah, it's pretty much exactly the same as XP except for all the parts that are brand new.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Fallout 3's biggest fault really was just that they'd borrowed too much of the codebase from Oblivion such that it was effectively just Oblivion with different art and story and guns instead of magic/bows.
See, I look at it the other way. Oblivion was Fallout 3, only lacking guns. I enjoyed Fallout 3 much more than Oblivion, mostly because of the atmosphere. Oblivion was Yet Another Fantasy Realm, of which I have seen plenty. Fallout 3 is more grounded in reality, and because I live near DC, I found it much more interesting.
Is that also true for Linux?
Unfortunately for the rest of us it means that our old 'friend' BSOD is not someone we can afford to have visiting us all the time.
If it's visiting you all the time, you're doing something wrong. I have had one BSOD with Vista SP1. Ironically, it was while playing some little game I installed from MS through Windows Update. Other that that, it's been rock solid. Hell, XP was pretty solid too for that matter.
"Earth" as THEY know it. It wasn't OUR Earth.
My ending would have involved time travel.
Stop right there. God, no.
They already showed an "earth" that looked just like our earth. It was destroyed, not habitable.
Except that they didn't. There was never a shot from space after they jumped to "Earth" that made it clearly identifiable as our Earth.
The show told us that "cinder earth" was in fact our earth.
No, it didn't.
So are we to believe that simple non-life threatening infections now all of a sudden become deadly because of the basic lack of antibiotics?
They were running out of antibiotics anyway, remember when Anders was sick with some disease on Mudworld and Starbuck had to go beg Fat Lee for medicine?
Ug, what an unbelievably crappy ass implausible ending to an otherwise awesome series... Am I the only one that feels like this???
No, but all of you are wrong. :)
The extreme spoon feeding of the plot was annoying and insulting. It was also beneath the show.
You know, normally I'd agree with you, but given the number of comments I've seen on the Net about things like, "Wait, so Racetrack was dead when she fired the nukes?" or even "So was Baltar responsible for allowing Six into the defense mainframe?"; it's clear that some people out there wouldn't get it even if the show came with a companion text that explained everything.
And you would have ended it.... how?
But this time, there is absolutely no rational or scientific explanation for the events of the show other than a supernatural god or gods and angels. The show crossed a line here it's never crossed before.
Didn't Baltar's Head Six (ie, the one only he could see) say she was an angel of God at some point? And here you thought she was lying.
But there is still faith involved that it is true for all situations, otherwise it would be a law.
Um, no. Theories don't get upgraded to laws. When people talk about things like the "law of gravity", they are either speaking figuratively or they are referring to the equation for gravitational force between two masses.
Scientists assume they know what the missing frames are and make assumptions in order to fill in the missing frames of the fossil record. This is despite not having lived during the time when the frames they are trying to fill in actually took place chronologically.
Did you ever meet your great great great great great grandfather? Is it too much of an assumption to think that he existed?
Also, as for another assumption, many cosmologists assume there is a black hole in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy, albeit based on observations. There is no direct proof there is a black hole there though but the assumption makes other observations (why the galaxy doesn't fly apart and why objects move faster than they are expected to near the center of the galaxy) make sense.
What the hell? There's no direct proof of anything in science. We've never seen an electron, but we've observed effects that we ascribe to particles with certain properties that we call electrons. I'm not sure what you want. If you're looking for "proof", then take a geometry class and you will prove things all day long.
The problem with evolution is that it does not predict anything
Sure it does. We should never find modern mammal fossils in Precambrian strata. We should never find T-Rex fossils in recent strata. Changes in the environment should result in changes in species to adapt to the environment. DNA of related species should be similar. Etc, etc, etc.
Every day mutations don't count because they don't change species or at least on time scales we need to make predictions similar to what we've supposedly already seen evolution do.
Huh? "Every day mutations", whatever they are, have already resulted in speciation being observed.
So what is my uneducated mind missing that your elitist mind already knows?
Everything on talkorigins.org, I guess.
...the pompous dismissive imperial manner...
Oh Harlan, Harlan, you short ironic bastard.
Money needs to be an economic good in order to be used as money. In other words, it has to have value as used as something *other* than money.
Why?
We don't have to use gold
If you accept that the currency can be backed by anything, then why can't it be backed by nothing more than people's agreement that it's viable as a medium of exchange?
It didn't work for us in the 30's.
It did, actually.
You want to turn this economy around? Cut taxes to 20%, max.
Yes because tax cuts have done so wonderfully so far.
Reduce regulations on small businesses \ cut the red tape.
So that the small businesses can become too big to fail you mean?
Then you're doing it wrong.
#define offsetof(obj,fld) ((size_t)((char *)&((obj *)0)->fld - (char *)0))
The greatest asset Win2k had was it was very stable, and didn't try to do everything for the end user. All it did was OS.
Vista is very stable (for me) too, and I don't think it's ever done anything for me that I didn't want it to do (except for changing the folder views -- that drives me nuts sometimes). YMMV.
One beneficial option of Linux would be giving the end user control over which programs are installed. If I don't link Totem for media, I can uninstall it completely.
Sure, and I agree. But the thing is: the average person doesn't care which programs are installed. And memory and hard drive space are so cheap these days that it's would literally cost me more in time and effort to "slim down" the OS than to just install everything and just don't use what I don't want.
Also, the non-sense of 5 different streams of OS...craziness. Win2k was either client, or server. Perfect. WinXP was Home or Pro...alright, I don't like it, but can understand why MS would do such a thing...but Vista? Business 101 says segment your market, so I understand why MS would do that...but it's to the detriment of their users.
And how many Linux distros are there?
Linux installation goes like this:
Hi, I'm Linux, here's everything you might need to operate your computer. What would you like to install? Ah, Ok, almost everything. Great, here it is. Oh, wait, after you installed you changed your mind and want only the bare OS because you want to get rid of the cruft? Done. A different windows manager? Ok, glad I could help.
FWIW, Linux installation has never EVER gone this easily for me. Not even close. On the other hand, the only time I have ever had a problem installing Windows was when XP wanted SATA drivers that I had to hunt around for. Vista Untilate installed perfectly. The Windows 7 Beta installed perfectly in a dual-boot configuration with Vista. It may install things that you personally don't want, but Windows has Linux beat for ease of installation hands down.
It might even resemble Windows 2000 in its simplicity, and Linux in its features.
Elaborate, please. I have Vista on my home system and XP on my work system, and for me going from Vista to XP (let alone 2000) is like going back to the bronze age. Also I develop on Linux at work, and I'm not sure what features it has that I should be wanting on my Windows machine.
Just out of curiosity sake, although the standard allows NULL pointer to have storage other than zero, is there any real world compiler where this is true?
Read this
If so, it would break most code that uses unions with pointers for storage (i.e. load-in-place fixups) and code that relies on extra bits and bit-patterns shared with pointers (i.e. lots of lockfree code stuffs data into what is assumed to be unused bits in pointers). It would probably break a lot of code that uses pointer math as well -- for example, anything using an "offsetof()" style macro.
I don't see why a non-zero NULL would break any of that, especially the offsetof() thing?
Redmond, they're called "Preferences". You can add a radio button or checkbox or pulldown menu that lets users select how they want Windows 7 to operate. It doesn't have to be all or none. Thanks.
Then they have to have code to support all possible combination of options, so Slashdot smirks and points out how "bloated" it is.
I suppose I'd like to spend a day watching a windows7 user and see WHY they are getting all these UAC popups.
Hell, I'm running Vista and I'd like to know what people are doing to get all these popups. Pretty much the only time I see one is when I'm installing a new game. And for some reason when I start Steam.
I don't use Windows much so perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but why is it so hard for MS to implement this sort of system?
Because people expect to still be able to use their horribly-written apps that assume they can scribble freely all over the C: drive.
Except that XP does just about everything Vista does.
Except for having reasonable 64-bit support.
And not looking terrible.
Why? If you're buying a new PC, it'll probably be 64-bit, and it'll run Vista perfectly well. And you'll be able to use more memory. And it won't look like you set the Wayback Machine for 1995.
At the end of Fallout 3 your character is literally vaporized,
No (s)he isn't? (S)he's just presumed dead.
Because... XP-> Vista is hardly a leap at all, it hardly compares to some of the minor 9x updates that occurred, but because it was parts of the GUI that changed, people think that's somehow more miraculous. There was also significant breakage for very little reward. Suddenly, everything needed new drivers to be rewritten, which often meant new hardware, or unsupported configurations.
Read this paragraph to yourself again. XP>Vista is hardly a leap at all... except for an entirely new (and better) driver model.
It's also a significant move away from the "everybody runs as admin" problem of all previous versions of Windows. It has UAC, which works fine provided you don't turn it off. And it has a 64-bit version that actually works.
But yeah, it's pretty much exactly the same as XP except for all the parts that are brand new.