Large "box" tech stores AND small tech stores are both hurting. There's almost no profit in parts, unless you massively overcharge. Anyone can go browse online retailers and see prices way lower than any retail store can offer, even counting shipping.
People always act a little surprised when I tell them the store I work at doesn't sell parts. (They usually want to argue with me about it a bit too.) Sorry folks, parts can't pay our rent or salary. My best guess is that soon all the small computer stores will be out of business.
Meanwhile, I can happily hand out the few parts we do have for free, and not have to deal with people's whiny bitching or stinky money.
Considering all you need to do to "hack" MBTA's system is to use last year's card for that month, I hope the awesome brainpower of MIT can improve the situation somewhat.
I watched a friend play GTA4 for over 30 minutes, so I'm good on buying it, thanks anyway. I mean, I've pretty much seen everything there IS to see already. If I get in the mood I'll probably just load up Vice City, it's more or less the same.
Even without the bugs and DRM, I'd have waited as long to buy it for PC as they waited between XBOX and PC releases. Fair is fair right?;)
I have health insurance, and from my own personal experiences plus what I've heard from others, the entire thing is one big scam.
Long story short: they sent me the wrong medication (as in, not what I ordered) and when I called to get the error corrected, they basically told me "Too bad, that'll be $400."
For-profit health care is a seven-layer bullshit burrito, and the people actually responsible for it being that way should be dragged out into the street and shot.
Hopefully we as a species can move beyond needing to push little pieces of paper around to accomplish anything, before we run out of some resource we require and our civilization collapses like the house of cards that it is, and before we manage to extinct ourselves fighting over those resources, and before our sun explodes.
"When you run into other members of your species, they are always identical clones of you.
False. I've run into "previous" versions of my creatures. It depends on if you save your creature after every modification.
Nor does it have natural selection. "There are no consequences for dying, since you just reappear at your nest
False. ANOTHER creature of your species appears at the nest. The last one you were playing is still dead. (If you hurry you can go see it's corpse) Also the creature that ate you seems more pre-disposed to hunt you after that. (Perhaps as they learn that you=food)
Your organism does evolve, says Gregory, "in the sense that it changes over time, but it really has no bearing on how things evolve in the real world."
Depends. The changes you can make to your species aren't 'locked' to only what is considered reasonable by evolutionary standards. HOWEVER if that's how you wish to play your species, go right ahead and make small changes over time to reach your desired goal. I played a species where I stuck to tighter evolution-style changes, and it was a very rewarding style of play. If you design your species to 'min/max' it, putting on parts just because of their point value, you WILL have a pretty repetative experience after the first dozen games. Design your critters for what YOU think is cool. You don't actually need the highest level abilities to win the creature stage, and after that the abilities don't matter much anyway.
I'm not saying Spore is the best game ever. I've hardly played it since I got to the center of the galaxy, having moved on to other games. All the stages are painfully shallow experiences compared to their potential. I can practically SEE the dotted lines where they cut stuff out to put in expansion packs. (I don't know if that was EA or Will Wright who did that, though my guess would be EA.)
Faults: Cell stage, identical creatures. Cell stage doesn't use user-created content, so you end up seeing the same (what, two dozen?) critters every game. Creature stage: Shallow play, obvious features missing (ref: game developer conference video) Tribal stage: Very shallow gameplay. I didn't feel like I was playing a species that had just clawed it's way to the vaguest semblance of intelligence. Civilization stage: Extremely shallow gameplay. I mean, seriously. We had two ways to interact before, now only 1 per type of civ. Why not two? One passive, one active. Economic: Slow Buyout*/Hostile Takeover, Military: Mercenaries/Combat Troops* Religious: Proselytizers/Converters*, existing ones marked with *. There, how hard was that? Space stage: 'OMFG why am I in a fucking kiddie pool' shallow gameplay. Why can't I tell my allies to make peace with each other? Or communicate any other complex concepts?
Verdict: If you haven't bought it already, wait for Spore 2, by that time all the expansion packs for Spore 1 will be out and bundled into a cheap discount package. If you have bought it, shelve it for a few years and then pick up the expansions when they're cheap. Otherwise be prepared for Spore to start feeling a lot like The Sims 1 with no expansions after a few games. (Remember that? Nothing but the same six objects, bed, fridge, toilet, shower, tv, and couch, which your characters endlessly wandered between in a vague mockery of life.)
I tried their STUPID validator a while back on some HTML code I wrote by hand, and it wouldn't stop complaining about invalid markup. First about some doctype COMMENT (which of course it didn't provide a valid template for) and then it went on to nitpick every single line pretty much. Fuck that. I'm sorry <P> isn't good enough, but the HTML code in question works on everything, including Lynx.
Did you miss the part where he kept getting blown to shit by players he had no chance against? =)
That's pretty much why I quit Eve. I tried it again recently and it was the same thing, some guy with THREE accounts gate camping in battle cruisers. Yeah. I loved Eve though even despite it's flaws so as soon as someone tells me how I can fight fairly against that I might sign back up - as long as it's possible to do without spending half a decade playing or buying half a dozen more accounts...;)
RunUO is written in C#
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1
For anyone interested in programming in C# but don't know any good reasons to actually get into it, I give you one: http://www.runuo.com/ - You're welcome. =)
Voting with your dollar doesn't work in certain cases. EA doesn't give two shits about your stupid fifty bucks. Now, voting with other people's dollars, that's where it, the be, is. The comments on Amazon about DRM, etc, are effective strategies that consumers can use in this modern electronical computers era.
Aside: I bought Spore, in a store, for money, the day it came out. I love it. (I didn't try that shitty DRM bonus game though, seems like most people think it sucks.)
I like how neither Microsoft nor Apple talk about games in their commercials. Well, we know why Apple doesn't mention it...;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAgrrwL_mk . But seeing as how it's really the only thing Windows is good for, I don't know why Microsoft doesn't even mention it. ( http://www.xbox.com/en-US/ ) Nope, no idea whatsoever.
Funny that all the credit card makers would need to do to make "safe" RFID cards is to make a card that only transmits when a certain point is squeezed (connecting internal contacts...)
I get almost all my news from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. So do most of the people I know around my own age.
Yes, really.
CNN is basically useless - how much are they really allowed to say? Between the watered-down news plus the extraneous fluff (shouting head matches and scandal of the week) they don't actually show much news.
Fox News should be called Faux News - these are the guys who basically got the courts to say it was okay to lie to people about the news, remember?
and local news channels are a joke - something caught on fire? ORLY? In a city with a million plus people, something catches on fire EVERY DAMN DAY. Get over it. Oh, good, that leaves more time for water skiing dogs and other junk news, right after that report about the great festival this past weekend that was so awesome. You know, the festival? The one they DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT until it was too late to attend? Yeah, it rocked.
Also there's a "state change" involved. People in an advanced civilization would literally think differently than we do. (An enlightening article about how altruism changed people like that was here on Slashdot recently, even)
Imagine that you knew everything you did during the day directly or indirectly benefited the entire species as a whole, inherently. Think about how good that would feel. Multiply by an entire species.
Everyone would literally be "high on life" all the time.
Replicators and such are crutches that make it easier, but they aren't necessary to get to that point.
I wonder if 'billg' has ever had to go through Windows Activation...
I wonder if I can email him to get some kind of credit for the YEAR(S) OF MY LIFE I've spent on the phone over the past decade reactivating various Windows boxes... (At 10 minutes a call it adds up.)
I love the concept of a block/counterattack system (a 'perfect' block takes no damage AND performs a counterattack) - it just seems like I've never counterattacked except by accident. When I *try* I usually miss, and mashing the spacebar randomly isn't working as well as it did in the beginning. ^.^; Does anyone have any tips/suggestions on how to block effectively?
I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for a while. They have a pretty good selection, the only problem is it changes fairly frequently. They only tend to have new book releases and such, older titles get dropped off their selection list.
Overall I was pleased with the selection and quality of the books, though it's worth noting that some of the books have poor quality page cutting or things like that.. not sure what it's really called, but the 'edge' of the pages were uneven, or other minor defects. They may get batches of lower-quality books (ones with printing or binding defects) at a discount in order to save money or offer them cheaper or such like that. (Of course, they may have stopped that, it's been a few years.)
I didn't really 'unsubscribe', just moved a few times and didn't update my info, or didn't order enough books and they auto-canceled.
You do have to pick a certain number of books to start with, and then buy a certain number more, their web site will have the details.
The only thing PC copy protection seems to do is to stop legitimate users from playing the game. Whatever copy protection method Spore uses, it will be cracked - before the game is on store shelves, most likely. The only people who will be hindered at all are the ones who paid for it legitimately.
I'm done buying games with annoying copy protection. Now, I read what people say about the game's copy protection, and if it's a problem at all, I wait until the game company removes it or the game ends up on Steam. Steam usually removes other copy protection in favor of the Steam protection, which is much nicer and as another person said only requires an initial validation.
I stopped reading Dilbert years ago, when a flash Coke ad appeared on the site complete with sound effects. ("SSSSCHLUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!1111ONEOMFGNOOB")
That was about the same time I installed Proxomitron, which was the awesome sauce. It's gone now, but I use this instead: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm It blocks almost all the ads on the internet.
Awesome sauce, thanks for marking the post I already marked as OT, as OT. I forgot that if I wanted an actual answer, I should have gone on and on about how perfect Creative cards are, and how if you're a serious gamer there's nothing else out there worth buying. I bet that would have gotten people riled up enough to post their recommendations. =)
Next time I guess I better also include 1: gaynoobs.lol/tehbuttsex 2: ??? 3: Profit! - those posts always get modded up enough to get noticed and responded to.
Modding this post down doesn't make it any less true, btw.;)
Kinda OT: I'm looking for a good gaming sound card. My on-board one is a joke, and while I'm currently using a lower-end Creative card, I would like to get something better. I read about the problems with Creative in the comments on Newegg for their current offerings, but I didn't see anything else that really stood out. That said, does anyone have any recommendations for a good gaming sound card, ideally one that supports as many as possible of the modern acceleration features? Thank you.
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Large "box" tech stores AND small tech stores are both hurting. There's almost no profit in parts, unless you massively overcharge. Anyone can go browse online retailers and see prices way lower than any retail store can offer, even counting shipping.
People always act a little surprised when I tell them the store I work at doesn't sell parts. (They usually want to argue with me about it a bit too.) Sorry folks, parts can't pay our rent or salary. My best guess is that soon all the small computer stores will be out of business.
Meanwhile, I can happily hand out the few parts we do have for free, and not have to deal with people's whiny bitching or stinky money.
What's our secret? I ain't tellin'! ;)
Now all we need is a torrent download of a sound file that says viruses are wrong. =)
Considering all you need to do to "hack" MBTA's system is to use last year's card for that month, I hope the awesome brainpower of MIT can improve the situation somewhat.
I watched a friend play GTA4 for over 30 minutes, so I'm good on buying it, thanks anyway. I mean, I've pretty much seen everything there IS to see already. If I get in the mood I'll probably just load up Vice City, it's more or less the same.
Even without the bugs and DRM, I'd have waited as long to buy it for PC as they waited between XBOX and PC releases. Fair is fair right? ;)
I have health insurance, and from my own personal experiences plus what I've heard from others, the entire thing is one big scam.
Long story short: they sent me the wrong medication (as in, not what I ordered) and when I called to get the error corrected, they basically told me "Too bad, that'll be $400."
For-profit health care is a seven-layer bullshit burrito, and the people actually responsible for it being that way should be dragged out into the street and shot.
Hopefully we as a species can move beyond needing to push little pieces of paper around to accomplish anything, before we run out of some resource we require and our civilization collapses like the house of cards that it is, and before we manage to extinct ourselves fighting over those resources, and before our sun explodes.
"When you run into other members of your species, they are always identical clones of you.
False. I've run into "previous" versions of my creatures. It depends on if you save your creature after every modification.
Nor does it have natural selection. "There are no consequences for dying, since you just reappear at your nest
False. ANOTHER creature of your species appears at the nest. The last one you were playing is still dead. (If you hurry you can go see it's corpse) Also the creature that ate you seems more pre-disposed to hunt you after that. (Perhaps as they learn that you=food)
Your organism does evolve, says Gregory, "in the sense that it changes over time, but it really has no bearing on how things evolve in the real world."
Depends. The changes you can make to your species aren't 'locked' to only what is considered reasonable by evolutionary standards. HOWEVER if that's how you wish to play your species, go right ahead and make small changes over time to reach your desired goal. I played a species where I stuck to tighter evolution-style changes, and it was a very rewarding style of play. If you design your species to 'min/max' it, putting on parts just because of their point value, you WILL have a pretty repetative experience after the first dozen games. Design your critters for what YOU think is cool. You don't actually need the highest level abilities to win the creature stage, and after that the abilities don't matter much anyway.
I'm not saying Spore is the best game ever. I've hardly played it since I got to the center of the galaxy, having moved on to other games. All the stages are painfully shallow experiences compared to their potential. I can practically SEE the dotted lines where they cut stuff out to put in expansion packs. (I don't know if that was EA or Will Wright who did that, though my guess would be EA.)
Faults: Cell stage, identical creatures. Cell stage doesn't use user-created content, so you end up seeing the same (what, two dozen?) critters every game. Creature stage: Shallow play, obvious features missing (ref: game developer conference video) Tribal stage: Very shallow gameplay. I didn't feel like I was playing a species that had just clawed it's way to the vaguest semblance of intelligence. Civilization stage: Extremely shallow gameplay. I mean, seriously. We had two ways to interact before, now only 1 per type of civ. Why not two? One passive, one active. Economic: Slow Buyout*/Hostile Takeover, Military: Mercenaries/Combat Troops* Religious: Proselytizers/Converters*, existing ones marked with *. There, how hard was that? Space stage: 'OMFG why am I in a fucking kiddie pool' shallow gameplay. Why can't I tell my allies to make peace with each other? Or communicate any other complex concepts?
Verdict: If you haven't bought it already, wait for Spore 2, by that time all the expansion packs for Spore 1 will be out and bundled into a cheap discount package. If you have bought it, shelve it for a few years and then pick up the expansions when they're cheap. Otherwise be prepared for Spore to start feeling a lot like The Sims 1 with no expansions after a few games. (Remember that? Nothing but the same six objects, bed, fridge, toilet, shower, tv, and couch, which your characters endlessly wandered between in a vague mockery of life.)
I tried their STUPID validator a while back on some HTML code I wrote by hand, and it wouldn't stop complaining about invalid markup. First about some doctype COMMENT (which of course it didn't provide a valid template for) and then it went on to nitpick every single line pretty much. Fuck that. I'm sorry <P> isn't good enough, but the HTML code in question works on everything, including Lynx.
You want some valid HTML? Here you go:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>Some text</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Guess what web browsers that code is compatible with? ALL OF THEM. =D
> didn't interact with anyone, and didn't PvP
Did you miss the part where he kept getting blown to shit by players he had no chance against? =)
That's pretty much why I quit Eve. I tried it again recently and it was the same thing, some guy with THREE accounts gate camping in battle cruisers. Yeah. I loved Eve though even despite it's flaws so as soon as someone tells me how I can fight fairly against that I might sign back up - as long as it's possible to do without spending half a decade playing or buying half a dozen more accounts... ;)
For anyone interested in programming in C# but don't know any good reasons to actually get into it, I give you one: http://www.runuo.com/ - You're welcome. =)
Voting with your dollar doesn't work in certain cases. EA doesn't give two shits about your stupid fifty bucks. Now, voting with other people's dollars, that's where it, the be, is. The comments on Amazon about DRM, etc, are effective strategies that consumers can use in this modern electronical computers era.
Aside: I bought Spore, in a store, for money, the day it came out. I love it. (I didn't try that shitty DRM bonus game though, seems like most people think it sucks.)
I like how neither Microsoft nor Apple talk about games in their commercials. Well, we know why Apple doesn't mention it... ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAgrrwL_mk . But seeing as how it's really the only thing Windows is good for, I don't know why Microsoft doesn't even mention it. ( http://www.xbox.com/en-US/ ) Nope, no idea whatsoever.
I didn't quite get the "hip wriggle" thing at the end of the first commercial. Was Bill Gates basically saying "I'm a billionaire, kiss my ass"?
Funny that all the credit card makers would need to do to make "safe" RFID cards is to make a card that only transmits when a certain point is squeezed (connecting internal contacts...)
I get almost all my news from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. So do most of the people I know around my own age.
Yes, really.
CNN is basically useless - how much are they really allowed to say? Between the watered-down news plus the extraneous fluff (shouting head matches and scandal of the week) they don't actually show much news.
Fox News should be called Faux News - these are the guys who basically got the courts to say it was okay to lie to people about the news, remember?
and local news channels are a joke - something caught on fire? ORLY? In a city with a million plus people, something catches on fire EVERY DAMN DAY. Get over it. Oh, good, that leaves more time for water skiing dogs and other junk news, right after that report about the great festival this past weekend that was so awesome. You know, the festival? The one they DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT until it was too late to attend? Yeah, it rocked.
Also there's a "state change" involved. People in an advanced civilization would literally think differently than we do. (An enlightening article about how altruism changed people like that was here on Slashdot recently, even)
Imagine that you knew everything you did during the day directly or indirectly benefited the entire species as a whole, inherently. Think about how good that would feel. Multiply by an entire species.
Everyone would literally be "high on life" all the time.
Replicators and such are crutches that make it easier, but they aren't necessary to get to that point.
I wonder if 'billg' has ever had to go through Windows Activation...
I wonder if I can email him to get some kind of credit for the YEAR(S) OF MY LIFE I've spent on the phone over the past decade reactivating various Windows boxes... (At 10 minutes a call it adds up.)
I love the concept of a block/counterattack system (a 'perfect' block takes no damage AND performs a counterattack) - it just seems like I've never counterattacked except by accident. When I *try* I usually miss, and mashing the spacebar randomly isn't working as well as it did in the beginning. ^.^; Does anyone have any tips/suggestions on how to block effectively?
If this comic worked, you could see they poke fun at Windows, using Linux as a better example: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/3/5/
Their archive is messed up. I've tried to let them know.
The transcript is here: http://pennyarcade.wikia.com/wiki/March_5,_1999
"Rebooting again? What is that the third time today?"
I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for a while. They have a pretty good selection, the only problem is it changes fairly frequently. They only tend to have new book releases and such, older titles get dropped off their selection list.
Overall I was pleased with the selection and quality of the books, though it's worth noting that some of the books have poor quality page cutting or things like that.. not sure what it's really called, but the 'edge' of the pages were uneven, or other minor defects. They may get batches of lower-quality books (ones with printing or binding defects) at a discount in order to save money or offer them cheaper or such like that. (Of course, they may have stopped that, it's been a few years.)
I didn't really 'unsubscribe', just moved a few times and didn't update my info, or didn't order enough books and they auto-canceled.
You do have to pick a certain number of books to start with, and then buy a certain number more, their web site will have the details.
The only thing PC copy protection seems to do is to stop legitimate users from playing the game. Whatever copy protection method Spore uses, it will be cracked - before the game is on store shelves, most likely. The only people who will be hindered at all are the ones who paid for it legitimately.
I bought Overlord and had it not work due to copy protection. A quick visit to gamecopyworld.com and oh look it works now.
I'm done buying games with annoying copy protection. Now, I read what people say about the game's copy protection, and if it's a problem at all, I wait until the game company removes it or the game ends up on Steam. Steam usually removes other copy protection in favor of the Steam protection, which is much nicer and as another person said only requires an initial validation.
Video games are art.
I stopped reading Dilbert years ago, when a flash Coke ad appeared on the site complete with sound effects. ("SSSSCHLUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!1111ONEOMFGNOOB")
That was about the same time I installed Proxomitron, which was the awesome sauce. It's gone now, but I use this instead: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm It blocks almost all the ads on the internet.
Awesome sauce, thanks for marking the post I already marked as OT, as OT. I forgot that if I wanted an actual answer, I should have gone on and on about how perfect Creative cards are, and how if you're a serious gamer there's nothing else out there worth buying. I bet that would have gotten people riled up enough to post their recommendations. =)
;)
Next time I guess I better also include 1: gaynoobs.lol/tehbuttsex 2: ??? 3: Profit! - those posts always get modded up enough to get noticed and responded to.
Modding this post down doesn't make it any less true, btw.
Kinda OT: I'm looking for a good gaming sound card. My on-board one is a joke, and while I'm currently using a lower-end Creative card, I would like to get something better. I read about the problems with Creative in the comments on Newegg for their current offerings, but I didn't see anything else that really stood out. That said, does anyone have any recommendations for a good gaming sound card, ideally one that supports as many as possible of the modern acceleration features? Thank you.