Regarding 1, when you start getting to Rohan and Gondor there are some more character interactions. Sam also becomes more interesting in the 3rd book, not just the loyal servant. For the most part, though, that's a valid criticism.
The strongest description of the good is Galadriel and Lothlorien, which you should be getting to shortly.
What's with the +5 ever time someone says this? Look, the reason why people are concerned with the MPAA is that we like movies. If we didn't like them, we wouldn't care about the legal crap at all. You seem to be implying hypocrisy, what exactly are the contradictions? 1) We like movies 2) the movies are controlled by an "evil" bunch. Therefore, what, we should stop watching movies? What would that accomplish? Everyone stops watching movies, so none of them get made, everyone loses. Not that any boycott is going to even get noticed. The battle is elsewhere, in the legal realm, fight it there.
According to these statistics, even Waterworld made money including overseas distrbution 88 + 165 > 167 by a long shot. Now, if Battlefield Earth has any chance, I wouldn't know.
He's probably referring to the new LoTR game designed by Reiner Knizia. The game art is very beautiful and the game itself is quite good. Knizia is one of the best game designers working these days.
You can so have time travel without paradox. It all depends on your "game" rules. Check out the GURPS RPG book Time Travel or read Time Travel by Paul J. Nahin, which is a reference book for SF writers. It's sold by Writer's Digest, who don't seem to allow direct linking.
If you don't allow paradox, then you get some really odd things like the Observer Effect where you can change anything if and only if you don't already know the outcome. Alternate worlds are another way to avoid paradox, when you time travel, you basically create a new stream.
The original Wells story had no paradoxical elements, although that became all the rage later ("By His Bootstraps" and "All you Zombies" by Heinlien are probably the templates).
BTW, I did think the Time Breakers series was quite good.
John Varley - lots, try "Barbie Murders" for example
Robert Heinlein - "I Will Fear no Evil", "Time Enough for Love"
Joanna Russ - lots, particularly "Female Man"
Carol Emshwiller - "Sex, and or Mr. Morrison", a short story in Ellison's "Dangerous Visions", there are also a few others in that book
James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) - "Houston, Houston, do you read?" and "The Screwfly Solution" are good short stories.
These are all classics in the field and represent a wide range of authors and periods.
If you are looking for a list of good games, pick up the December issue of Games Magazine . It has the annual Games 100, which lists all kinds of excellent games.(List available here)
I would recommend Lord of the Rings, it is designed by Reiner Knizia, one of the world's greatest game designers. In it, you must work together to destroy the ring, while the game itself represents Sauron's evil minions. The dynamics work really well, the game gets tense and exciting, particularly near the end. It is also the most beautiful board game ever.
On a different note, check out Cheap-Ass Games. They're sold on the idea that you'll already have tokens and dice and such from other games. These items are what makes a game expensive (~40 bucks, generally). Cheap-ass games are typically sold in paper pouches for 5 bucks. The games themselves are usually well-designed, funny, and for that price, what do you have to lose? Try Kill Dr. Lucky or any of the zombie games (zombies working fast-food, with one brain between them...)
Lars Ulrich demanded that Slashdot transcribe his answers word for word. As a result, you got a lot of sentences like "It's sort of like, you know what, fair enough, I can certainly respect and I would certainly somewhat agree with the fact that paying 16 bucks for a CD is probably, you know, pushing too much". One of Pinker's books has a transcription of part of the Watergate tapes, unedited. Nixon and company come across as idiots in a direct transcription.
Whenever an interview is typed up, the exact words are not used. I'm not sure why the third person voice was used, probably to indicate that this was in fact a third party report. At any rate, a word-for-word copy would give that same information in a harder to follow format.
In "Pirates of the Universe" by Terry Bisson there is a man who wants to spend time with a virtual reality girlfriend named Tiffany. The problem is that when he isn't in the virtual space, he cannot remember anything concrete about her. The reason why is that she has been copy protected!
This novel is full of nifty ideas and deserves to be better known. If you like "out there" writers like Dick, Varley or Egan pick it up.
I think you would have a point if they'd only changed the benchmarks; but they have actually given you a greater framerate. The point of Quake III is that it can use higher framerates, or atleast lots of players seem to think so; so it's actually a legitimate optimisation. I mean its not THAT obvious when you are playing the game is it?
Look at it this way:
Any other game I have a choice 1) high quality images or 2) higher frame rate.
Quake 3 with this "optimization" gives me only option 2, even if I want 1. If I want the higher framerate, I can set the damn settings myself, like those "hardcore" Quake 1 people who reportedly play in low resolution. If I want hi resolution, the card cuts it out. So, ATI is screwing over Quake 3 players who don't give a damn about 15% for framerate. Why is this so difficult to understand?
This is NOT an optimization, this is ignoring settings when they aren't good for benchmarking, the players of Quake 3 gain absolutely nothing from this.
Too bad some stupid kid choked to death on the Rivetron rivets and they had a recall. When my Mom got the recall letter, she refused to send it back since she knew it was on of our favorites.
I'm concerned about the general demise of building toys, they're mostly what I had as a kid: Lego, Brix Blox (a cheap Lego knockoff), Girder and Panel (bridges and buildings), Tinkertoy, Erector (newer plastic version), Erector (MUCH cooler 1940's version with metal pieces and a 120V AC motor!, found at an auction for a steal), Micronauts (a bit of a stretch, but the city expansion definitely qualifies), Lincoln Logs (what's so bad about cabins?), probably others. Now, almost all of these are gone...
Bullfrog, (and it's progeny including Lionhead, Big Blue Box, and Muckyfoot), Rare, Croateam (Serious Sam), Psygnosis, the Max Payne guys. Any what about Infogrames, the French company which owns so many U.S. developers?
This is just off the top of my head. Yes, there are many PC developers in here, but I don't think that distinction is quite as valid anymore.
Rudy Rucker once wrote a story where a shell was discovered with strange markings on it. Those marking turned out to by a coded message about an alien civilization, sort of like we sent in the Voyager probes. The story gives lots of details about those aliens, their culture and something that they referred to as the Joke. It seems that this wondrous coding scheme for all of their accomplishments and history was equal to pi.
If you want to see a guy who spends way too much time with PI, check out Mike Keith. There is some other, truly amazing stuff on his home page as well.
This article is pretty Laim, I mean, come on, the guys keep arguing with each other, I can get on IRC to hear this, I don't want to look at it on Slashdot
You don't want to look at people arguing on Slashdot? Why exactly are you here, then?
Funny you should call it the metric calendar. You see, the same people who brought us the mmetric system also tried to change the calendar, getting rid of all the "old gods" and such. This happened in France just after the Revolution and before the Reign of Terror. Guess what happened to the calendar reformers...
Changing the calendar is not something that people accept, there were riots when the Gregorian calendar was adopted due to people being upset that they were losing 10 days. You might say people are more rational these days, but I don't see any evidence of that.
Have you ever read Robert Sheckley (one of Adams' favorite authors, BTW)? Then, did you go see an abomination called Freejack, supposedly based on Immortality, Inc.? There is no limit to how badly a movie can butcher a brilliant SF story. Especially if that author is known for a sarcastic, biting type of dark humor, which applies to Adams as well as anyone I can think of.
Raven - the developers of Heritic got the job because they made the top mods for Quake.
Heretic was created long before Quake. Raven started as two brothers making an Amiga game called Black Crypt and expanded out from there. At the time, PC game developers were very few and shared a lot of their ideas and resources. The guys from Raven convinced the guys at id that they could use their engine to make really cool games. This goes back to ShadowCaster which was a Wolf3D variant.
Really? What three products did you buy from WotC prior to the 1993 introduction of Magic?
Primal Order, Pawns and, I think, Chessboards (the alternate dimensions sourcebook). Was I the only person who bought the Primal Order? (not to mention the military order, economic order, and all the other lost projects). If you're looking for some tough RPG encounters, check out Pawns, one of the last works of the great Nigel Findley.
If the "Black Book" being released is the same as the dead-tree edition I am checking right now, it includes the Zen of Code Optimization. In fact, it is a collection of Zen of Code Optimization, Zen of Graphics Programming, all the Dr. Dobbs and other magazine columns, and some extra Quake-related articles. 1342 pages full of hardcore goodness.
Actually by making it pretty easy to put "flashy" effects in, this card might allow the developer to spend more time working on the other parts of the game. The "next big effect" is required in order to get noticed, otherwise people bitch up and down about how behind the times you are. If hardware T&L and the like make it easier to get nifty effects, then we'll have more time to work on AI, gameplay, stuff like that.
In short, if you want games with plot and gameplay, perhaps these Uber-cards aren't the enemy after all.
And dumping "disney day-care" into google turned up this message
Hmm, I typed "Disney sues Florida day-care center" and didn't get jack squat. Is there some secret method of getting good results from Google that I haven't figured out yet? Is putting too many keywords a problem? I tried your search, and it was the number one response.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding 1, when you start getting to Rohan and Gondor there are some more character interactions. Sam also becomes more interesting in the 3rd book, not just the loyal servant. For the most part, though, that's a valid criticism.
The strongest description of the good is Galadriel and Lothlorien, which you should be getting to shortly.
What's with the +5 ever time someone says this? Look, the reason why people are concerned with the MPAA is that we like movies. If we didn't like them, we wouldn't care about the legal crap at all. You seem to be implying hypocrisy, what exactly are the contradictions? 1) We like movies 2) the movies are controlled by an "evil" bunch. Therefore, what, we should stop watching movies? What would that accomplish? Everyone stops watching movies, so none of them get made, everyone loses. Not that any boycott is going to even get noticed. The battle is elsewhere, in the legal realm, fight it there.
According to these statistics, even Waterworld made money including overseas distrbution 88 + 165 > 167 by a long shot. Now, if Battlefield Earth has any chance, I wouldn't know.
He's probably referring to the new LoTR game designed by Reiner Knizia. The game art is very beautiful and the game itself is quite good. Knizia is one of the best game designers working these days.
You can so have time travel without paradox. It all depends on your "game" rules. Check out the GURPS RPG book Time Travel or read Time Travel by Paul J. Nahin, which is a reference book for SF writers. It's sold by Writer's Digest, who don't seem to allow direct linking.
If you don't allow paradox, then you get some really odd things like the Observer Effect where you can change anything if and only if you don't already know the outcome. Alternate worlds are another way to avoid paradox, when you time travel, you basically create a new stream.
The original Wells story had no paradoxical elements, although that became all the rage later ("By His Bootstraps" and "All you Zombies" by Heinlien are probably the templates).
BTW, I did think the Time Breakers series was quite good.
heh, a full CGI version of 'Ringworld', anyone? THAT would be cool
How about one rumored to be directed by
James Cameron?
If your looking for gender ideas in SF:
Theodore Sturgeon - "Venus plus X"
John Varley - lots, try "Barbie Murders" for example
Robert Heinlein - "I Will Fear no Evil", "Time Enough for Love"
Joanna Russ - lots, particularly "Female Man"
Carol Emshwiller - "Sex, and or Mr. Morrison", a short story in Ellison's "Dangerous Visions", there are also a few others in that book
James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) - "Houston, Houston, do you read?" and "The Screwfly Solution" are good short stories.
These are all classics in the field and represent a wide range of authors and periods.
I would recommend Lord of the Rings, it is designed by Reiner Knizia, one of the world's greatest game designers. In it, you must work together to destroy the ring, while the game itself represents Sauron's evil minions. The dynamics work really well, the game gets tense and exciting, particularly near the end. It is also the most beautiful board game ever.
On a different note, check out Cheap-Ass Games. They're sold on the idea that you'll already have tokens and dice and such from other games. These items are what makes a game expensive (~40 bucks, generally). Cheap-ass games are typically sold in paper pouches for 5 bucks. The games themselves are usually well-designed, funny, and for that price, what do you have to lose? Try Kill Dr. Lucky or any of the zombie games (zombies working fast-food, with one brain between them...)
Whenever an interview is typed up, the exact words are not used. I'm not sure why the third person voice was used, probably to indicate that this was in fact a third party report. At any rate, a word-for-word copy would give that same information in a harder to follow format.
This novel is full of nifty ideas and deserves to be better known. If you like "out there" writers like Dick, Varley or Egan pick it up.
I think you would have a point if they'd only changed the benchmarks; but they have actually given you a greater framerate. The point of Quake III is that it can use higher framerates, or atleast lots of players seem to think so; so it's actually a legitimate optimisation. I mean its not THAT obvious when you are playing the game is it?
Look at it this way:
Any other game I have a choice 1) high quality images or 2) higher frame rate.
Quake 3 with this "optimization" gives me only option 2, even if I want 1. If I want the higher framerate, I can set the damn settings myself, like those "hardcore" Quake 1 people who reportedly play in low resolution. If I want hi resolution, the card cuts it out. So, ATI is screwing over Quake 3 players who don't give a damn about 15% for framerate. Why is this so difficult to understand?
This is NOT an optimization, this is ignoring settings when they aren't good for benchmarking, the players of Quake 3 gain absolutely nothing from this.
I'm concerned about the general demise of building toys, they're mostly what I had as a kid: Lego, Brix Blox (a cheap Lego knockoff), Girder and Panel (bridges and buildings), Tinkertoy, Erector (newer plastic version), Erector (MUCH cooler 1940's version with metal pieces and a 120V AC motor!, found at an auction for a steal), Micronauts (a bit of a stretch, but the city expansion definitely qualifies), Lincoln Logs (what's so bad about cabins?), probably others. Now, almost all of these are gone...
This is just off the top of my head. Yes, there are many PC developers in here, but I don't think that distinction is quite as valid anymore.
Rudy Rucker once wrote a story where a shell was discovered with strange markings on it. Those marking turned out to by a coded message about an alien civilization, sort of like we sent in the Voyager probes. The story gives lots of details about those aliens, their culture and something that they referred to as the Joke. It seems that this wondrous coding scheme for all of their accomplishments and history was equal to pi.
If you want to see a guy who spends way too much time with PI, check out Mike Keith. There is some other, truly amazing stuff on his home page as well.
You don't want to look at people arguing on Slashdot? Why exactly are you here, then?
Changing the calendar is not something that people accept, there were riots when the Gregorian calendar was adopted due to people being upset that they were losing 10 days. You might say people are more rational these days, but I don't see any evidence of that.
Have you ever read Robert Sheckley (one of Adams' favorite authors, BTW)? Then, did you go see an abomination called Freejack, supposedly based on Immortality, Inc.? There is no limit to how badly a movie can butcher a brilliant SF story. Especially if that author is known for a sarcastic, biting type of dark humor, which applies to Adams as well as anyone I can think of.
Heretic was created long before Quake. Raven started as two brothers making an Amiga game called Black Crypt and expanded out from there. At the time, PC game developers were very few and shared a lot of their ideas and resources. The guys from Raven convinced the guys at id that they could use their engine to make really cool games. This goes back to ShadowCaster which was a Wolf3D variant.
So, was Dalmuti's named after the game or vice versa? Just curious.
Primal Order, Pawns and, I think, Chessboards (the alternate dimensions sourcebook). Was I the only person who bought the Primal Order? (not to mention the military order, economic order, and all the other lost projects). If you're looking for some tough RPG encounters, check out Pawns, one of the last works of the great Nigel Findley.
If the "Black Book" being released is the same as the dead-tree edition I am checking right now, it includes the Zen of Code Optimization. In fact, it is a collection of Zen of Code Optimization, Zen of Graphics Programming, all the Dr. Dobbs and other magazine columns, and some extra Quake-related articles. 1342 pages full of hardcore goodness.
In short, if you want games with plot and gameplay, perhaps these Uber-cards aren't the enemy after all.
I wonder if it isn't really named after the popular San Francisco fetish model and dominatrix.
Hmm, I typed "Disney sues Florida day-care center" and didn't get jack squat. Is there some secret method of getting good results from Google that I haven't figured out yet? Is putting too many keywords a problem? I tried your search, and it was the number one response.