The reason kids get obsessive behaviors is because their parents push games and drugs on them. And I'm not talking about pot-smoking parents, I'm talking about the straight-laced, good citizen parents who will buy their kids $thousands in games but never so much as a hammer and a toolbox.
Very few people know about Usenet or, more important, *how* to use it. There's an excessive amount of rarring and parring involved, not to mention finding a decent client app. It took me 12 years to find the one I'm using now (newsbin), and the guy is still developing it.
Then you have the fact that downloading 11 million headers for alt.binaries.dvd (yes, I just checked) would take all afternoon. And browsing it, one page at a time, would take a week.
Bittorrent is another question. But if they manage to kill bittorrent, usenet is basically the same thing, just more work.
I wish I had an opinion of John Carmack, but I mostly play 3D games, and he has yet to make one. Doom 1 & 2 were fun, what's he done since? Even Quake Arena is too old to install on this computer. I was going to try and get multi-head working, but the game itself rapes my computer like a piece of spyware.
>Modern digital sensors can often see the stars even in the daytime, even though most developments of the file would not show them.
I would love to see that. And then give one of these cameras to NASA so they can take their first star photos. It's not just the moon I'm talking about. ISS photos don't have stars, Cassini photos don't have stars, even Hubble's 10-minute exposure of Saturn doesn't have stars.
All media is biased because all people have a point of view. You can try to be unbiased, and it helps, but you need to know what everyone else's bias is, in order to figure out the definition of "unbiased." For example, does being wrong count as a bias? Because you can't be right all the time.
As for the NYT, they have both left and right biases, depending on whether the journalists or editors are calling the shots.
>Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."
The videos of Flight 175 hitting WTC2 were fake. If they were real, you would have independent witnesses and/or independent photos of the event. Instead, people reported a small plane, or missed it entirely. You can also watch them, and you will see that they are all different. In one case, broadcast with Dan Rather, the plane misses the point of impact, flying about 10 floors too low before being obscured by the building. In another, used for a PBS documentary, the plane appears in mid-air, while the voiceover says, "And then, a mysterious shape appears on the horizon."
To switch back on topic, the fact that these photos are on the Lebanese point of view is not an accident. It's meant to discredit the Lebanese side of the argument. Consider how Dan Rather's career was wrecked, by reporting fake documents about a real event, Bush's no-show in the national guard.
Thanks, my game was Rogue-like, top-down view. I think it had some semblance of graphics though (at worst, extended ASCII), and I think it was real-time because I remember battles happening very fast.
It was called "Dungeon" on my floppy disk. It had a sick intro where you would zoom down from heaven after picking your attributes.
Thanks for the reply. I haven't played Metroid Prime, and while I remember what you're saying about the Mario64 camera, it wasn't a huge problem for me. By the time I played Mario a few times through, I could jump in any direction regardless of the camera. And I was still hungry for more.
Mario was unique because it emphasized the 3D environment. You were like a cat, crawling through every nook and cranny. After games reverted to a fixed camera, they became more linear (Banjo Kazooie, and One for psx come to mind). So instead of exploring your world, you were back to running through a maze to the boss.
My opinion is that FPS games would be great, if you could zoom out and see all of the characters, so you could coordinate your team's movements. And to make up for the camera distance, aiming would be de-emphasized and basically automatic.
>Obviously there are a few out there that really pull it off. But the majority do not, in my opinion.
Yep. With Mario64, you had complete control over the camera, which means you could line up your jump precisely if you needed to. And if not, you could make yourself feel like a hero by jumping off-angle.
Then they decided that controlling the camera was too hard for us stupid, 19-year-old CS majors, so every game since then, on every 3D platform, camera control was totally dropped. Now you have to wait for the camera to lazily float into the right position, if it does, and forget zooming, looking to the side, or behind. This is a massive, immersive 3D world, why would you want to look around??
There might be a couple of exceptions, and I certainly hope so. But dropping camera control within 1 year of its being invented is something I clearly remember. And it's also the point when console games jumped the shark.
> In my particular situation, I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive. However, when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it.
Well they could read the reviews. On-line even, reviews are free these days. If people are still walking into stores and just pulling titles off the shelves based on box art, then they haven't made the progression from when I was eleven to when I was thirteen.
Although it wouldn't surprise me, I guess. No matter how smart/savvy people get, these companies always seem to find a dumber consumer and start targeting them.
>When's the last time we had a decent turn-based strategy game?
Turn-based games always had a problem, which is that as you controlled more towns, the time to complete a turn went up exponentially. Civ has have this problem, Ascendancy was even worse. And because of the time factor, I stuck with Vandal Hearts over FFT, and X-Com over Jagged Alliance.
I *wish* RTS was all the rage, I think you're imagining things. First-person is all the rage from what I can see, there's about 1 decent RTS game at any particular time. Starcraft shipped with 3 races and 3 campaigns, War3 shipped with 2, Warhammer shipped with one campaign. If there's a boatload of good RTS out there, let me know. I tend to doubt it.
I think it's interesting that the generation after me is just as obsessed with NES as we were. These kids weren't even *born* when NES came out, by the time they were old enough to play, SNES was already hitting the shelves. And yet they've played Zelda and Mario just as much as we have.
You don't see this same level of nostalgia for Atari, Intellivision, Coleco, and the Odyssey. I don't think I've seen any of these systems in person since the originals were sold off at garage sales.
I think I had Dungeon for my DOS box. That game had everything you would expect from an RPG - levels, attributes, money, inventory, shopping, special items, exploration, real-time combat. The only problem is that it was rendered in ASCII, or close to it. But in terms of gameplay, nothing was lacking.
I need to copy my 5.25's before they turn into dust. Fuck, it's been 20 years, they are dust...
Kid Icarus is a very, very strange game. It's like they never tested it or something.
As for Mario64, I still say they should have released a level-pak for that game. I haven't been more satisfied with play controls before or since. There's also a bunch of time wasters in Mario64 (auto-exits from levels, for example, after each star) that prevent you from beating it fluidly. As good as that game was, it had 2-3x untapped potential.
Good point. I see a lot of games that simply get bigger. Heroes of Might and Magic 1 & 2 had some great battles. Heroes 3 and 4? Same thing, just more. Civilization 4? Long and boring. FF Tactics? Same as Vandal Hearts, just 10x longer.
Mechwarrior 4? Same as Mech2, just more involved. Warcraft3? War3 has an excellent map editor, but the melee action is: the same as Starcraft, just more involved. WOW? That game is so similar to Ultima VI (1990), and AD&D, that I can barely look at it. But WOW is, no surprise, very involved.
This add->polish->bore to death has been going on a long time, too. Super Metroid, for example, was nice. How many times have I played it? Once or twice.
I don't think NASA had a mountain of union workers who tweaked all the designs and never wrote anything down. Space programs don't work like that.
I was more referring to the fact that a lack of documentary evidence of the moon program is pretty unbelievable. Right here you have someone from NASA admitting that we can't even go to the moon now.
>Slash your number 5 times down and I would still happily pick this job up. If you doubt it, check some salary numbers for Spain:
Damn. Since you claim to do this work, I'll take your word for it. I could almost see doing this for $3/machine in the US (if it only takes 5 minutes per machine) but driving between sites, I'd get killed on gas money.
>A couple months ago, I got into a discussion about the WTC collapse. One thing that was mentioned is that a large part of the collapse was due to the extreme temperatures of burning jet fuel weakening the elastic modulus of the steel-framed structure.
Doesn't sound like a good discussion then. Most of the jet fuel exploded outside the building. A half-hour later, there were people standing in the impact zones. Chief Palmer reached the 78th floor and reported that they could "knock it down with two lines."
The WTC collapses may be a tricky structural subject, but extreme temperatures is probably the biggest, most easily proved flaw in the argument.
>Here's a "for instance" -- you need a deeply throtleable rocket engine to safely land a vehicle on the Moon. We had one on the LEM in Apollo, but it hasn't been built in 35 years. There are no CAD models of such an engine; the plans have been lost;
ROFL.
>We need to develop a space suit that can walk on the Moon again. There are no plans, the materials are all different, and the suit will need to be designed and tested.
LOL.
>Another "for instance" -- no Saturn 5?
LOL.
>the Earth reentry vehicle will be travelling at 10-12 km/s. That's kilometers per second! Even if we had the drawings,
LOL.
>in fact, we don't have a lot of the technologies that we used to have.
Why? It's freaking email. Subject, recipient, body, x-headers...this stuff is already standardized otherwise you wouldn't be able to send email in the first place.
Creating a standard storage format is cake-simple. Getting Eudora and Outlook to adopt and export it would be the challenge. And yes, it does lend itself well to XML, especially since most client inboxes are text-format and XML would allow you to read your archives with an editor (or a simple web application *gasp*).
Slashdot Mirror
The reason kids get obsessive behaviors is because their parents push games and drugs on them. And I'm not talking about pot-smoking parents, I'm talking about the straight-laced, good citizen parents who will buy their kids $thousands in games but never so much as a hammer and a toolbox.
Very few people know about Usenet or, more important, *how* to use it. There's an excessive amount of rarring and parring involved, not to mention finding a decent client app. It took me 12 years to find the one I'm using now (newsbin), and the guy is still developing it.
Then you have the fact that downloading 11 million headers for alt.binaries.dvd (yes, I just checked) would take all afternoon. And browsing it, one page at a time, would take a week.
Bittorrent is another question. But if they manage to kill bittorrent, usenet is basically the same thing, just more work.
I wish I had an opinion of John Carmack, but I mostly play 3D games, and he has yet to make one. Doom 1 & 2 were fun, what's he done since? Even Quake Arena is too old to install on this computer. I was going to try and get multi-head working, but the game itself rapes my computer like a piece of spyware.
>Modern digital sensors can often see the stars even in the daytime, even though most developments of the file would not show them.
I would love to see that. And then give one of these cameras to NASA so they can take their first star photos. It's not just the moon I'm talking about. ISS photos don't have stars, Cassini photos don't have stars, even Hubble's 10-minute exposure of Saturn doesn't have stars.
>Do they even make B&W digital backs?
Yeah, there's a B&W CCD in every digital camera. Sometimes three. You think a CCD can detect wavelength?
>at one time you could get very nice, high-resolution B&W LCD
I'm not sure why you would need one, as the resolution of color LCD's is now approaching CRT monitors.
All media is biased because all people have a point of view. You can try to be unbiased, and it helps, but you need to know what everyone else's bias is, in order to figure out the definition of "unbiased." For example, does being wrong count as a bias? Because you can't be right all the time.
As for the NYT, they have both left and right biases, depending on whether the journalists or editors are calling the shots.
>Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."
The videos of Flight 175 hitting WTC2 were fake. If they were real, you would have independent witnesses and/or independent photos of the event. Instead, people reported a small plane, or missed it entirely. You can also watch them, and you will see that they are all different. In one case, broadcast with Dan Rather, the plane misses the point of impact, flying about 10 floors too low before being obscured by the building. In another, used for a PBS documentary, the plane appears in mid-air, while the voiceover says, "And then, a mysterious shape appears on the horizon."
To switch back on topic, the fact that these photos are on the Lebanese point of view is not an accident. It's meant to discredit the Lebanese side of the argument. Consider how Dan Rather's career was wrecked, by reporting fake documents about a real event, Bush's no-show in the national guard.
Thanks, my game was Rogue-like, top-down view. I think it had some semblance of graphics though (at worst, extended ASCII), and I think it was real-time because I remember battles happening very fast.
It was called "Dungeon" on my floppy disk. It had a sick intro where you would zoom down from heaven after picking your attributes.
Thanks for the reply. I haven't played Metroid Prime, and while I remember what you're saying about the Mario64 camera, it wasn't a huge problem for me. By the time I played Mario a few times through, I could jump in any direction regardless of the camera. And I was still hungry for more.
;)
Mario was unique because it emphasized the 3D environment. You were like a cat, crawling through every nook and cranny. After games reverted to a fixed camera, they became more linear (Banjo Kazooie, and One for psx come to mind). So instead of exploring your world, you were back to running through a maze to the boss.
My opinion is that FPS games would be great, if you could zoom out and see all of the characters, so you could coordinate your team's movements. And to make up for the camera distance, aiming would be de-emphasized and basically automatic.
That's an RTS
>Obviously there are a few out there that really pull it off. But the majority do not, in my opinion.
Yep. With Mario64, you had complete control over the camera, which means you could line up your jump precisely if you needed to. And if not, you could make yourself feel like a hero by jumping off-angle.
Then they decided that controlling the camera was too hard for us stupid, 19-year-old CS majors, so every game since then, on every 3D platform, camera control was totally dropped. Now you have to wait for the camera to lazily float into the right position, if it does, and forget zooming, looking to the side, or behind. This is a massive, immersive 3D world, why would you want to look around??
There might be a couple of exceptions, and I certainly hope so. But dropping camera control within 1 year of its being invented is something I clearly remember. And it's also the point when console games jumped the shark.
FPS games? Whale jumping, for sure.
> In my particular situation, I have a customer who claims that the product we delivered them was slow and unresponsive. However, when we tested it to try and determine what was wrong, we didn't find anything wrong with it.
Sorry, you'll have to be more specific.
Well they could read the reviews. On-line even, reviews are free these days. If people are still walking into stores and just pulling titles off the shelves based on box art, then they haven't made the progression from when I was eleven to when I was thirteen.
Although it wouldn't surprise me, I guess. No matter how smart/savvy people get, these companies always seem to find a dumber consumer and start targeting them.
>When's the last time we had a decent turn-based strategy game?
Turn-based games always had a problem, which is that as you controlled more towns, the time to complete a turn went up exponentially. Civ has have this problem, Ascendancy was even worse. And because of the time factor, I stuck with Vandal Hearts over FFT, and X-Com over Jagged Alliance.
I *wish* RTS was all the rage, I think you're imagining things. First-person is all the rage from what I can see, there's about 1 decent RTS game at any particular time. Starcraft shipped with 3 races and 3 campaigns, War3 shipped with 2, Warhammer shipped with one campaign. If there's a boatload of good RTS out there, let me know. I tend to doubt it.
I think it's interesting that the generation after me is just as obsessed with NES as we were. These kids weren't even *born* when NES came out, by the time they were old enough to play, SNES was already hitting the shelves. And yet they've played Zelda and Mario just as much as we have.
You don't see this same level of nostalgia for Atari, Intellivision, Coleco, and the Odyssey. I don't think I've seen any of these systems in person since the originals were sold off at garage sales.
I think I had Dungeon for my DOS box. That game had everything you would expect from an RPG - levels, attributes, money, inventory, shopping, special items, exploration, real-time combat. The only problem is that it was rendered in ASCII, or close to it. But in terms of gameplay, nothing was lacking.
I need to copy my 5.25's before they turn into dust. Fuck, it's been 20 years, they are dust...
Hate to break it to you, but FF 1 has no battle tactics. Dragon Warrior 2, which I got my hands on much later, is a lot more interesting.
And I would venture to say that battle tactics are weak throughout the FF series, up till 7, which is the last one I played.
Kid Icarus is a very, very strange game. It's like they never tested it or something.
As for Mario64, I still say they should have released a level-pak for that game. I haven't been more satisfied with play controls before or since. There's also a bunch of time wasters in Mario64 (auto-exits from levels, for example, after each star) that prevent you from beating it fluidly. As good as that game was, it had 2-3x untapped potential.
Good point. I see a lot of games that simply get bigger. Heroes of Might and Magic 1 & 2 had some great battles. Heroes 3 and 4? Same thing, just more. Civilization 4? Long and boring. FF Tactics? Same as Vandal Hearts, just 10x longer.
Mechwarrior 4? Same as Mech2, just more involved. Warcraft3? War3 has an excellent map editor, but the melee action is: the same as Starcraft, just more involved. WOW? That game is so similar to Ultima VI (1990), and AD&D, that I can barely look at it. But WOW is, no surprise, very involved.
This add->polish->bore to death has been going on a long time, too. Super Metroid, for example, was nice. How many times have I played it? Once or twice.
I don't think NASA had a mountain of union workers who tweaked all the designs and never wrote anything down. Space programs don't work like that.
I was more referring to the fact that a lack of documentary evidence of the moon program is pretty unbelievable. Right here you have someone from NASA admitting that we can't even go to the moon now.
>Slash your number 5 times down and I would still happily pick this job up. If you doubt it, check some salary numbers for Spain:
Damn. Since you claim to do this work, I'll take your word for it. I could almost see doing this for $3/machine in the US (if it only takes 5 minutes per machine) but driving between sites, I'd get killed on gas money.
>Nothing terribly exciting about it after the 3rd or 4th time. And there wasn't all that much science to be gained by additional landings.
Agreed!
>A couple months ago, I got into a discussion about the WTC collapse. One thing that was mentioned is that a large part of the collapse was due to the extreme temperatures of burning jet fuel weakening the elastic modulus of the steel-framed structure.
Doesn't sound like a good discussion then. Most of the jet fuel exploded outside the building. A half-hour later, there were people standing in the impact zones. Chief Palmer reached the 78th floor and reported that they could "knock it down with two lines."
The WTC collapses may be a tricky structural subject, but extreme temperatures is probably the biggest, most easily proved flaw in the argument.
>Here's a "for instance" -- you need a deeply throtleable rocket engine to safely land a vehicle on the Moon. We had one on the LEM in Apollo, but it hasn't been built in 35 years. There are no CAD models of such an engine; the plans have been lost;
ROFL.
>We need to develop a space suit that can walk on the Moon again. There are no plans, the materials are all different, and the suit will need to be designed and tested.
LOL.
>Another "for instance" -- no Saturn 5?
LOL.
>the Earth reentry vehicle will be travelling at 10-12 km/s. That's kilometers per second! Even if we had the drawings,
LOL.
>in fact, we don't have a lot of the technologies that we used to have.
+5 Informative indeed.
> The reason we've been so slow at getting back to the Moon was because people stopped watching the Apollo landings
And why do you think that is?
Why? It's freaking email. Subject, recipient, body, x-headers...this stuff is already standardized otherwise you wouldn't be able to send email in the first place.
Creating a standard storage format is cake-simple. Getting Eudora and Outlook to adopt and export it would be the challenge. And yes, it does lend itself well to XML, especially since most client inboxes are text-format and XML would allow you to read your archives with an editor (or a simple web application *gasp*).