As you point out, Yahoo has a number of online games. They also have their own IM client, YM. I don't see why they just don't integrate the two. Yahoo has done some cool stuff (like adding webcams to YM), so obviously they've got no problem with being innovative. Bump up the size of the game window so that it can fit an ad, and it pays for itself.
I'm fairly sure the N64 went through a pricedrop before the GCN was released. We do know that nintendo is releasing something "game related" next year. Or at the very least, announcing it at E3 2004.
I believe the other consoles are looking at a 2005 update, but i'm not 100% on that.
I've never really bought the Christmas release date, at least when it comes to the A+ computer games (which HL2 presumably will be).
Blizzard has *never* released a product near Christmas, despite several rumors that they would. Starcraft was hopefully going to come out holiday season 97, but instead was released April 98. Diablo 2 came out in early November, when it presumably could have been held back a month or so. The worst was the original Diablo which, as I recall, was released in January 97 (the 4th, if memory serves correctly). And just about every Blizzard game has set new sales records
There's no point holding a game as popular as HL2 until a holiday season, as it is going to sell through the roof no matter when it is released. Holiday releases are for the smaller games that perhaps don't have the visibility. Release during the holiday, when it'll be brand new and prominent on the shelves and when everyone will be at the mall.
this isn't entirely true. Half-Life Fortress was announced prior to HLs release. All online retailers had both products listed. So I think there was the expectation in Valve's mind, at last, that it was going to be released as a retail mod soon after HL was released.
That obviously didn't happen. To appease all the people who bought HL in anticipation of Fortress, they released the free conversion of Team Fortress. At that point they announced that Team Fortress 2 would be a retail product to be released when it was finished. This was years ago, and the product has been demoed in various forms for quite a while now. Demonstrations of the voice - lip synching technology, screen shots, ingame video. I think Valve had every intention of releasing TF2 prior to HL2.
Presumably, they'll actually release it after HL2, but who knows...
as I mentioned in the previous thread on Steam, I have had nothing but horrible experiences with it.
Valve tells everyone to download the steam+content version (the 300+ mb file) after the small steam file fails for a lot of people. Sure, I got that, install it (after scouring the net looking for a site that doesn't have a 300+ person waiting list). And when I go to install the games that already have the content in the steam file, it instead goes to the net to download it. ??? I want to play Day of Defeat, it takes me 2 days to eventually download the content (even though there's a 358 mb file already sitting there).
And the program doesn't even really tell me that it is downloading stuff, unless I go out of my way to find out. You click a game, and it freezes the system nicely. One has to alt-tab, back to steam, to check the monitor to see what's going on.
First time you then actually play a game, for some reason it takes 10-20 minutes to validate resources. And during this point, I don't know if it's validating or downloading new content (as it apparently has done both on me).
There is NO way they can use this to distribute HL2. Gamers want their games now. They don't want to wait 3-4 days to get a game online, when they can drive to the store and go home 15 minutes later with the product...
Their resigning makes the statement that "we failed in our mission. we take responsibility. we're now going to step aside so that you can implement new policies with a new safety board."
you leave fingerprints on the paper ballots that you fill out as well.
besides, in most elections there are multiple issues to be decided. guy B is going to come in and find your fingerprints all over the place, and not know if the fingerprint in the Bush box was a vote for Bush or a vote for proposition 103 which was 5 screens away...
speed of light...
on
Microwave Fun
·
· Score: 2, Informative
my worst microwave moment: I have a couple lizards (leopard geckos to be precise). in their cage, i had a piece of a bark they were using as a hiding spot. i was washing the bark one day and wanted to dry it in the microwave (not the brightest idea, but whatever). Apparently a cricket had hidden itself somewhere inside one of the porous spaces. Long story short, when I nuked it, about 10 s into the run, i hear a brief high pitched whine, increasing frequency and then a splat noise. apparently i boiled the cricket from the inside out, and like a pressure cooker with a not so well attached lid, it exploded.
But this really implies that a game can sometimes be responsible for someone's actions.
That doesn't seem to be what the author is advocating. To sum the article in a single sentence: "be a better parent and stop blaming your child's misbehavior on anything other than your lack of attention."
The author make mention that children might use specific scenarios in game as a template for misbehavior (ala the kids recently shooting at trucks on the freeway), but that simply illustrates that the child is lacking some sort of moral lens that lets them distinguish between right and wrong. The point is clearly made that parents are to blame for this problem.
Children are easily influenced and just as importantly, children don't have fully formed ability to rationally judge things. So, the parent's just is to influence them in a positive manner, reinforcing what is right and wrong. And that is is a failure in this regard that the author of the article is highlighting.
What the players are protesting essentially is the taxation of their role as content providers.
From what I've read on Second Life (which admittedly has been this article as well as the interesting story a month or 2 ago about people being abducted ingame by aliens), players create most of the content. Content is most MMORPGs is produced by developers who are paid to do so. In SL, the players are seemingly given a toolkit to build what they want. So rather than have pre-rendered dungeons or quests, players can "build" a UFO which goes around randomly abducting other players. rather nifty. And for their efforts at coding the new item, they are being taxed.
So they're essentially being taxed for content that in other games is produced through the real-life subscription fees. Seems a bit unfair. So they are protesting. And, as the writer of the article points out, the very act of protesting within the game is part of the game, and part of the fun.
(then again, i could be completely wrong, as I've only recently heard about second life)
the fog part of the story does seem to be a dupe, but there's the far more interesting part where the guy makes the image appear without fog/smoke/anything visible to bounce the light off of.
my sister-in-law actually was a barnyard ejaculator. there's more to that job than they mention. apparently, the other side of the equation, checking for pregnancies involves putting on an arm glove and shoving your entire arm up a cow's rectum. she had this nice circular bruise a couple inches below her shoulder for several days after that...
my personal worst job was a during a wonderful "research project" involving a lake. we needed to install some "anchors" at the bottom of the lake (metal sign posts with chains attached to them). The lake, actually was a recharge basin (the one pictured there), which was routinely drained and cleaned. First cautionary sign: Although they allow fishing, they allow no bodily contact, because the water is essentially treated wastewater, mixed with whatever surface runoff they can gather. They wouldn't let us dive in the water, for fear of our health.
So they drained the lake one week, and as such things go, they did NOT remove the fish. So now we have a "dry" lake with hundreds of dead fish at the bottom. And by dry, I mean a 2 foot thick layer of muck (and where do all the toxins in a slowly draining body of water go? that's right, down into the mud). So I have to walk down the side of the lake and along the lake bottom, through the fishes (which were somewhat plowed under by the earth movers), dragging a chain. Said chain had a hook attached to it with some bailing wire.
Luckily, it was a nice bright, warm southern california day (and the fish had had almost a week to really get nice and ripe). Several times my boots would get stuck in the mud from the suction and my feet would almost come out of them as I tried to extricate myself. Eventually I get to the spot and start reeling in the chain. When I get to the end of the, by now quite dirty, chain I brilliantly scratched my hand on the bailing wire. Wasn't too deep, but it did draw blood.
Just stood there for a while, thinking "well, that's it. i'm going to lose my arm, now. I wonder how long it takes for gangrene to really set in?" luckily a tetanus shot prevented anything major from happening.
i can remember way back in the day when i had my atari 800. some computer mag had a program that supposedly monitored your biorythms. so, being the industrious 5th grader i was, i typed the thing in and then went about constructing the necessary hardware. As I recall, the instructions had me disassembling one of the paddle controllers, banana clipping wires somewhere inside the paddle and then clipping the other end to aluminum foil wrapped around my finger.
unfortunately it never quite worked right. on the other hand, it was definitely a lot cheaper than $129...
While MS isn't really trying to kill of PC gaming, it's surely depriving it of a good dose of oxygen..as far as MS game titles are concerned.
I think last portion of your post (which I have bolded) is the most important. MS has never really been known for their computer games. (I seem to remember some crappy underwater shooter game that my father bought, kinda like Abyss meets Tempest or something.) Ensemble has really been the only MS developer that has made an impact (that I can name off the top of my head) and they are PC only (that i know of). Bungie doesn't count, as they haven't released a PC game under MS yet. True, Halo was to be the killer FPS and having it go Xbox exclusive for several years was a bit of a disappointment for PC-only gamers. But it was more of a slight dent in the PC gamers world, rather than a full blown loss.
The day that Blizzard, iD, Valve, Sid Meier and Will Wright stop making games for the PC is the day that one needs to buy a console.
STEAM is aimed towards the AOL crowd who is often too stupid to unzip a zip file - never mind patching a game.
And what's wrong with making a system where patches are auto downloaded and applied?
Patching Half-Life was a pain. In the early days, there weren't full upgrade patches. The first several patches were all incremental, REQUIRING you to get them and apply them in sequence. Then, if you stopped playing for a while, and came back to the game several patches behind, you were in the position of a) finding which incrementals you needed to get up to speed or b) uninstalling and then reinstalling and applying a full upgrade.
Never mind that these patches were spread out all over the net, often at sites that either required registration, waiting in line to download, or were just damn slow. Finding a working link to download Steam was pain enough (first couple sites were saturated, I think I had to go through an australian site to get it). One shouldn't have to work to patch a game.
A system to automatically distribute patches is a wonderful idea. No one has ever faulted Blizzard for battle.net auto updating their game, and steam sounds not so different (although it sounds like it will update whenever you are online and need an upgrade).
I'm just not too happy with it's performance at the moment. tried to reinstall steam last night. I think it finally got it updated by this morning (after it froze at 60% overnight). and I still don't have any content downloaded yet...
Yes and no... I can see how forcing one to use Steam to play a game could be viewed as troubling. On the other hand it is a wonderful tool to keep your game up to date. No more waiting in line at fileplanet or hunting for the obscure european site that doesn't require membership or figuring out the odd upgrade patch scheme (lessee, i have 1.0.0.4; so I need the 10041008 upgrade then I can get the 1008 to 1010 patch. or i can uninstall and simply get the 10011010 patch.). You're online, and your game will be kept up to date. Nice, for programs that routinely have patches upwards of 10 to 100 MB. (plus the ability for mod makers to distribute their mods in a centralized location, giving them lots of visibility).
At this point in time though, I don't think we know what exactly Valve has planned for Steam with respect to HL2. Obviously verification of cd-keys. But whether one has to use it exclusively to get patches, or join games isn't known (or at least i haven't seen it announced as a mandatory feature)
My experience with it so far though, has been anything but pleasant. As I describe above, I've yet to actually be able to play a game using the non-beta client. Maybe it's just growing pains and in a week or 2, things will be perfect.
as previously reported cd prices are being lowered. I don't know if it will make a difference, but as I was browsing the best buy weekly ad, I noticed the new releases were going for as low as $6.99. That's fairly amazing, given that one can regularly find $18.99 cds on the shelves.
while this probably won't bring the price in line with DVDs, its nice to see that prices are as low (and even lower) than when CDs first were released.
Downloaded the steam non-beta client right after the original story was posted to slashdot. the beta client wouldn't uninstall through window add/remove. eventually found the correct unwise.exe command line to get it out.
Installed steam and pretty much left the computer while it updated itself, I'm guessing it took several hours (what with the thousands of other people doing it simultaneously).
Then it died at some point while trying to transfer my existing content (HL and whatever mods I had installed through regular means). So we had to re-install steam and go through it all over again. (where it didn't want to transfer existing content anymore, for some reason)
After several more hours, I finally have steam working properly, so I try and play HL. Does nothing after pressing the install button over and over (install, wait 10 minutes to see if it's doing anything, no? click HL again and repress install). Eventually, half a day later (literally), it finally opens the progress window. Have to download it (400+ MB). So, after what it predicts to be 140 minutes, apparently it has HL. (I went to bed at this point). Get up, try to run HL, steam crashes with some memory address is can't access or whatever. Reboot, retry several times, same problem. Steam is crashing on load (far before it gets to loading HL)
The stupid client seems to keep corrupting itself. So for now, I've given up. Steam FAQ doesn't address this, and they've taken the steam forums down temporarily.
I seriously can't see how they can distribute HL2 through this method. Regardless of how much cheaper it is to purchase HL2 through steam, I'm buying the retail version, simply because I want a freaking executable I can run. (this presuming they don't hide the HL2 executable behind steam; and only use steam as the cd-key verification tool. which is a big presumption at this point).
Steam beta eventually worked for me (after a few initial corruptions of the client requiring re-installs), but I don't have 13 hours to install steam, update steam, install HL only to have it corrupt itself again.
sodium borate is borax. seems rather odd to have a recipe that includes elmer's glue combining with an esoteric chemical when there's a much commoner name that could be used...
I don't mind hard games at all. I've played a number of games that aren't for the faint of heart.
The problem with F-Zero is the lack of a tutorial or anything similar. I'm stuck on the 3rd mission in the story mode (the casino race). For the life of me, I can't get better than 11th place. I don't know exactly why. Am I turning wrong? Do I need to use regular turns, drift turns, the sharp turns? Should I configure my vehicle for speed or acceleration? I haven't a clue, and the game isn't helping me figure it out.
I'm not asking for hand holding, just some psuedo training. One level where drift turns are used exclusively and when you lose it says "try drift turns next time". Levels/Tutorials that show you how to attack and when to use the attacks.
Don't dumb the skill down, but teach me how to get better. I'm sure if I sit down and play the game for several days straight, I'll eventually figure it out. But several days of frustration isn't what I bought the game for.
...and what if it gets into the water and a lake full of fish ingest all that iron?
this will likely not happen. as someone who studies the transport of nano-sized particles in porous media, i can tell you the iron isn't going to migrate too far. (i research virus / bacteria filtration in subsurface environments.)
the particles begin with a 0 net charge on them. however, they are quickly going to oxidize, likely to Fe(OH)2. This compound is itself ionizable depending on the solution pH (too early for me to get my chem book out). It'll become positive. Consider the bulk sediment phase (i.e., the subsurface rocks and minerals) are generally negatively charged. You've now got positively charged nanoparticles flowing through a negatively charged matrix. Very quickly you're going to have physicochemical filtration and remove the particles from the bulk solution (in my experiments, i can remove 99% of the negatively charged particles i inject into a positively charged column with 3 cm!). So they'll be immobilized somewhere in the groundwater and unable to get to the hypothetical lake.
the size is part of the issue (smaller particles have more surface area). the more important point is that iron in the evironment is already in an oxidized state, e.g., Fe(OH)2. And it is the oxidation/reduction reaction that is driving the detoxification of the compounds. Specifically, Fe0 goes to Fe2+ or Fe3+, giving up 2 electrons which then are used to reduce the compound. (reduction also has the benefit that it usually makes the compound more amenable for microorganisms to chew up naturally).
This site has some diagrams of chemical pathways. Also try googling "zero valent iron".
The " - To operate XIII commercially" is idiotic, imho. They want to prohibit people from running servers for pay?
exactly. Ubisoft is paying for the game and licensing it to you for personal use. You want to make money off the game somehow, you have to negotiate that with Ubisoft. Same thing with just about any moddable software out there. IIRC, Blizzard went after the few "unofficial" expansions to Starcraft that were released retail. OTOH, a number of developers successfully negotiated with sierra/valve and were able to release retail mods using the HL engine.
Slashdot Mirror
As you point out, Yahoo has a number of online games. They also have their own IM client, YM. I don't see why they just don't integrate the two. Yahoo has done some cool stuff (like adding webcams to YM), so obviously they've got no problem with being innovative. Bump up the size of the game window so that it can fit an ad, and it pays for itself.
I'm fairly sure the N64 went through a pricedrop before the GCN was released. We do know that nintendo is releasing something "game related" next year. Or at the very least, announcing it at E3 2004.
I believe the other consoles are looking at a 2005 update, but i'm not 100% on that.
I've never really bought the Christmas release date, at least when it comes to the A+ computer games (which HL2 presumably will be).
Blizzard has *never* released a product near Christmas, despite several rumors that they would. Starcraft was hopefully going to come out holiday season 97, but instead was released April 98. Diablo 2 came out in early November, when it presumably could have been held back a month or so. The worst was the original Diablo which, as I recall, was released in January 97 (the 4th, if memory serves correctly). And just about every Blizzard game has set new sales records
There's no point holding a game as popular as HL2 until a holiday season, as it is going to sell through the roof no matter when it is released. Holiday releases are for the smaller games that perhaps don't have the visibility. Release during the holiday, when it'll be brand new and prominent on the shelves and when everyone will be at the mall.
this isn't entirely true. Half-Life Fortress was announced prior to HLs release. All online retailers had both products listed. So I think there was the expectation in Valve's mind, at last, that it was going to be released as a retail mod soon after HL was released.
That obviously didn't happen. To appease all the people who bought HL in anticipation of Fortress, they released the free conversion of Team Fortress. At that point they announced that Team Fortress 2 would be a retail product to be released when it was finished. This was years ago, and the product has been demoed in various forms for quite a while now. Demonstrations of the voice - lip synching technology, screen shots, ingame video. I think Valve had every intention of releasing TF2 prior to HL2.
Presumably, they'll actually release it after HL2, but who knows...
as I mentioned in the previous thread on Steam, I have had nothing but horrible experiences with it.
Valve tells everyone to download the steam+content version (the 300+ mb file) after the small steam file fails for a lot of people. Sure, I got that, install it (after scouring the net looking for a site that doesn't have a 300+ person waiting list). And when I go to install the games that already have the content in the steam file, it instead goes to the net to download it. ??? I want to play Day of Defeat, it takes me 2 days to eventually download the content (even though there's a 358 mb file already sitting there).
And the program doesn't even really tell me that it is downloading stuff, unless I go out of my way to find out. You click a game, and it freezes the system nicely. One has to alt-tab, back to steam, to check the monitor to see what's going on.
First time you then actually play a game, for some reason it takes 10-20 minutes to validate resources. And during this point, I don't know if it's validating or downloading new content (as it apparently has done both on me).
There is NO way they can use this to distribute HL2. Gamers want their games now. They don't want to wait 3-4 days to get a game online, when they can drive to the store and go home 15 minutes later with the product...
Either Amazon/Toys R Us made a premature announcement with no gamecubes in stock, or they've sold out of their entire inventory.
I see it the other way.
Their resigning makes the statement that "we failed in our mission. we take responsibility. we're now going to step aside so that you can implement new policies with a new safety board."
i think this is paranoia run amok.
you leave fingerprints on the paper ballots that you fill out as well.
besides, in most elections there are multiple issues to be decided. guy B is going to come in and find your fingerprints all over the place, and not know if the fingerprint in the Bush box was a vote for Bush or a vote for proposition 103 which was 5 screens away...
they don't even include (at least not on casual glance) how one can calculate the speed of light using a microwave and a plate of marshmellows. that's one i'd really like to attempt some time when i'm bored enough.
my worst microwave moment: I have a couple lizards (leopard geckos to be precise). in their cage, i had a piece of a bark they were using as a hiding spot. i was washing the bark one day and wanted to dry it in the microwave (not the brightest idea, but whatever). Apparently a cricket had hidden itself somewhere inside one of the porous spaces. Long story short, when I nuked it, about 10 s into the run, i hear a brief high pitched whine, increasing frequency and then a splat noise. apparently i boiled the cricket from the inside out, and like a pressure cooker with a not so well attached lid, it exploded.
But this really implies that a game can sometimes be responsible for someone's actions.
That doesn't seem to be what the author is advocating. To sum the article in a single sentence: "be a better parent and stop blaming your child's misbehavior on anything other than your lack of attention."
The author make mention that children might use specific scenarios in game as a template for misbehavior (ala the kids recently shooting at trucks on the freeway), but that simply illustrates that the child is lacking some sort of moral lens that lets them distinguish between right and wrong. The point is clearly made that parents are to blame for this problem.
Children are easily influenced and just as importantly, children don't have fully formed ability to rationally judge things. So, the parent's just is to influence them in a positive manner, reinforcing what is right and wrong. And that is is a failure in this regard that the author of the article is highlighting.
What the players are protesting essentially is the taxation of their role as content providers.
From what I've read on Second Life (which admittedly has been this article as well as the interesting story a month or 2 ago about people being abducted ingame by aliens), players create most of the content. Content is most MMORPGs is produced by developers who are paid to do so. In SL, the players are seemingly given a toolkit to build what they want. So rather than have pre-rendered dungeons or quests, players can "build" a UFO which goes around randomly abducting other players. rather nifty. And for their efforts at coding the new item, they are being taxed.
So they're essentially being taxed for content that in other games is produced through the real-life subscription fees. Seems a bit unfair. So they are protesting. And, as the writer of the article points out, the very act of protesting within the game is part of the game, and part of the fun.
(then again, i could be completely wrong, as I've only recently heard about second life)
the fog part of the story does seem to be a dupe, but there's the far more interesting part where the guy makes the image appear without fog/smoke/anything visible to bounce the light off of.
his website is www.io2technology.com
it was a lie detector, although I seem to remember this coming out much earlier than 1986...
my sister-in-law actually was a barnyard ejaculator. there's more to that job than they mention. apparently, the other side of the equation, checking for pregnancies involves putting on an arm glove and shoving your entire arm up a cow's rectum. she had this nice circular bruise a couple inches below her shoulder for several days after that...
my personal worst job was a during a wonderful "research project" involving a lake. we needed to install some "anchors" at the bottom of the lake (metal sign posts with chains attached to them). The lake, actually was a recharge basin (the one pictured there), which was routinely drained and cleaned. First cautionary sign: Although they allow fishing, they allow no bodily contact, because the water is essentially treated wastewater, mixed with whatever surface runoff they can gather. They wouldn't let us dive in the water, for fear of our health.
So they drained the lake one week, and as such things go, they did NOT remove the fish. So now we have a "dry" lake with hundreds of dead fish at the bottom. And by dry, I mean a 2 foot thick layer of muck (and where do all the toxins in a slowly draining body of water go? that's right, down into the mud). So I have to walk down the side of the lake and along the lake bottom, through the fishes (which were somewhat plowed under by the earth movers), dragging a chain. Said chain had a hook attached to it with some bailing wire.
Luckily, it was a nice bright, warm southern california day (and the fish had had almost a week to really get nice and ripe). Several times my boots would get stuck in the mud from the suction and my feet would almost come out of them as I tried to extricate myself. Eventually I get to the spot and start reeling in the chain. When I get to the end of the, by now quite dirty, chain I brilliantly scratched my hand on the bailing wire. Wasn't too deep, but it did draw blood.
Just stood there for a while, thinking "well, that's it. i'm going to lose my arm, now. I wonder how long it takes for gangrene to really set in?" luckily a tetanus shot prevented anything major from happening.
i can remember way back in the day when i had my atari 800. some computer mag had a program that supposedly monitored your biorythms. so, being the industrious 5th grader i was, i typed the thing in and then went about constructing the necessary hardware. As I recall, the instructions had me disassembling one of the paddle controllers, banana clipping wires somewhere inside the paddle and then clipping the other end to aluminum foil wrapped around my finger.
unfortunately it never quite worked right. on the other hand, it was definitely a lot cheaper than $129...
While MS isn't really trying to kill of PC gaming, it's surely depriving it of a good dose of oxygen..as far as MS game titles are concerned.
I think last portion of your post (which I have bolded) is the most important. MS has never really been known for their computer games. (I seem to remember some crappy underwater shooter game that my father bought, kinda like Abyss meets Tempest or something.) Ensemble has really been the only MS developer that has made an impact (that I can name off the top of my head) and they are PC only (that i know of). Bungie doesn't count, as they haven't released a PC game under MS yet. True, Halo was to be the killer FPS and having it go Xbox exclusive for several years was a bit of a disappointment for PC-only gamers. But it was more of a slight dent in the PC gamers world, rather than a full blown loss.
The day that Blizzard, iD, Valve, Sid Meier and Will Wright stop making games for the PC is the day that one needs to buy a console.
STEAM is aimed towards the AOL crowd who is often too stupid to unzip a zip file - never mind patching a game.
And what's wrong with making a system where patches are auto downloaded and applied?
Patching Half-Life was a pain. In the early days, there weren't full upgrade patches. The first several patches were all incremental, REQUIRING you to get them and apply them in sequence. Then, if you stopped playing for a while, and came back to the game several patches behind, you were in the position of a) finding which incrementals you needed to get up to speed or b) uninstalling and then reinstalling and applying a full upgrade.
Never mind that these patches were spread out all over the net, often at sites that either required registration, waiting in line to download, or were just damn slow. Finding a working link to download Steam was pain enough (first couple sites were saturated, I think I had to go through an australian site to get it). One shouldn't have to work to patch a game.
A system to automatically distribute patches is a wonderful idea. No one has ever faulted Blizzard for battle.net auto updating their game, and steam sounds not so different (although it sounds like it will update whenever you are online and need an upgrade).
I'm just not too happy with it's performance at the moment. tried to reinstall steam last night. I think it finally got it updated by this morning (after it froze at 60% overnight). and I still don't have any content downloaded yet...
Yes and no... I can see how forcing one to use Steam to play a game could be viewed as troubling. On the other hand it is a wonderful tool to keep your game up to date. No more waiting in line at fileplanet or hunting for the obscure european site that doesn't require membership or figuring out the odd upgrade patch scheme (lessee, i have 1.0.0.4; so I need the 10041008 upgrade then I can get the 1008 to 1010 patch. or i can uninstall and simply get the 10011010 patch.). You're online, and your game will be kept up to date. Nice, for programs that routinely have patches upwards of 10 to 100 MB. (plus the ability for mod makers to distribute their mods in a centralized location, giving them lots of visibility).
At this point in time though, I don't think we know what exactly Valve has planned for Steam with respect to HL2. Obviously verification of cd-keys. But whether one has to use it exclusively to get patches, or join games isn't known (or at least i haven't seen it announced as a mandatory feature)
My experience with it so far though, has been anything but pleasant. As I describe above, I've yet to actually be able to play a game using the non-beta client. Maybe it's just growing pains and in a week or 2, things will be perfect.
as previously reported cd prices are being lowered. I don't know if it will make a difference, but as I was browsing the best buy weekly ad, I noticed the new releases were going for as low as $6.99. That's fairly amazing, given that one can regularly find $18.99 cds on the shelves.
while this probably won't bring the price in line with DVDs, its nice to see that prices are as low (and even lower) than when CDs first were released.
Downloaded the steam non-beta client right after the original story was posted to slashdot. the beta client wouldn't uninstall through window add/remove. eventually found the correct unwise.exe command line to get it out.
Installed steam and pretty much left the computer while it updated itself, I'm guessing it took several hours (what with the thousands of other people doing it simultaneously).
Then it died at some point while trying to transfer my existing content (HL and whatever mods I had installed through regular means). So we had to re-install steam and go through it all over again. (where it didn't want to transfer existing content anymore, for some reason)
After several more hours, I finally have steam working properly, so I try and play HL. Does nothing after pressing the install button over and over (install, wait 10 minutes to see if it's doing anything, no? click HL again and repress install). Eventually, half a day later (literally), it finally opens the progress window. Have to download it (400+ MB). So, after what it predicts to be 140 minutes, apparently it has HL. (I went to bed at this point). Get up, try to run HL, steam crashes with some memory address is can't access or whatever. Reboot, retry several times, same problem. Steam is crashing on load (far before it gets to loading HL)
The stupid client seems to keep corrupting itself. So for now, I've given up. Steam FAQ doesn't address this, and they've taken the steam forums down temporarily.
I seriously can't see how they can distribute HL2 through this method. Regardless of how much cheaper it is to purchase HL2 through steam, I'm buying the retail version, simply because I want a freaking executable I can run. (this presuming they don't hide the HL2 executable behind steam; and only use steam as the cd-key verification tool. which is a big presumption at this point).
Steam beta eventually worked for me (after a few initial corruptions of the client requiring re-installs), but I don't have 13 hours to install steam, update steam, install HL only to have it corrupt itself again.
sodium borate is borax. seems rather odd to have a recipe that includes elmer's glue combining with an esoteric chemical when there's a much commoner name that could be used...
I don't mind hard games at all. I've played a number of games that aren't for the faint of heart.
The problem with F-Zero is the lack of a tutorial or anything similar. I'm stuck on the 3rd mission in the story mode (the casino race). For the life of me, I can't get better than 11th place. I don't know exactly why. Am I turning wrong? Do I need to use regular turns, drift turns, the sharp turns? Should I configure my vehicle for speed or acceleration? I haven't a clue, and the game isn't helping me figure it out.
I'm not asking for hand holding, just some psuedo training. One level where drift turns are used exclusively and when you lose it says "try drift turns next time". Levels/Tutorials that show you how to attack and when to use the attacks.
Don't dumb the skill down, but teach me how to get better. I'm sure if I sit down and play the game for several days straight, I'll eventually figure it out. But several days of frustration isn't what I bought the game for.
this will likely not happen. as someone who studies the transport of nano-sized particles in porous media, i can tell you the iron isn't going to migrate too far. (i research virus / bacteria filtration in subsurface environments.)
the particles begin with a 0 net charge on them. however, they are quickly going to oxidize, likely to Fe(OH)2. This compound is itself ionizable depending on the solution pH (too early for me to get my chem book out). It'll become positive. Consider the bulk sediment phase (i.e., the subsurface rocks and minerals) are generally negatively charged. You've now got positively charged nanoparticles flowing through a negatively charged matrix. Very quickly you're going to have physicochemical filtration and remove the particles from the bulk solution (in my experiments, i can remove 99% of the negatively charged particles i inject into a positively charged column with 3 cm!). So they'll be immobilized somewhere in the groundwater and unable to get to the hypothetical lake.
the size is part of the issue (smaller particles have more surface area). the more important point is that iron in the evironment is already in an oxidized state, e.g., Fe(OH)2. And it is the oxidation/reduction reaction that is driving the detoxification of the compounds. Specifically, Fe0 goes to Fe2+ or Fe3+, giving up 2 electrons which then are used to reduce the compound. (reduction also has the benefit that it usually makes the compound more amenable for microorganisms to chew up naturally).
This site has some diagrams of chemical pathways. Also try googling "zero valent iron".
The " - To operate XIII commercially" is idiotic, imho. They want to prohibit people from running servers for pay?
exactly. Ubisoft is paying for the game and licensing it to you for personal use. You want to make money off the game somehow, you have to negotiate that with Ubisoft. Same thing with just about any moddable software out there. IIRC, Blizzard went after the few "unofficial" expansions to Starcraft that were released retail. OTOH, a number of developers successfully negotiated with sierra/valve and were able to release retail mods using the HL engine.