It's also got a couple of 4/5 JRPGs, which is more than I can say for the other two consoles, which are filled with soulless JRPGs that have promise for a couple hours then just get worse and worse the more you play. That really surprised me--I've got a PS3 (and used to have a 360) and thought maybe I just didn't like JRPGs any more, until I got a Wii (mostly as another Netflix device and to play Gamecube games, intially).
Granted, it's only a couple; all the good JRPGs are on handhelds this generation, it seems, which makes no damn sense to me--I don't want to stare at my tiny little DS or PSP for hours on end or watch cutscenes on it, I want to play 15 minutes then put it away, or maybe an hour in the car or on a plane a few times a year. At least the PSP can be made to display on a TV, but the DS--ugh. I rarely play JRPGs except cooperatively with my wife, and handhelds are worthless for that.
For a while blocks of regularly-formatted nonsense were posted anonymously on this site fairly often. Haven't seen it for a couple years at least, but it sure looked like encoded/encrypted messages. Not sure if anyone ever figured out what those were.
So have I. I learned to program on Perl. I wrote CGI in Perl.
Then I switched to PHP for web programming, and the biggest differences were probably adding an "e" to my "elsif" statements, escaping fewer characters in strings, and being able to embed it in HTML, all of which take maybe a day to get used to. Oh, some minor differences in the way array notation looks, though they work almost exactly the same.
A Perl coder can pretty much just write the same code they would have in Perl with some very minor differences, call it a.php, and it'll run. This is especially true for the trivial, routine shit that PHP is used for 99.99% of the time.
As for what breaks when going from PHP4 to PHP5: the first thing an even moderately competent programmer will do is Google it, and get a more comprehensive list than the person with PHP4-5 experience has in their head (and guess where that probably-incomplete list in their head likely came from? Yep, Google).
They're about as similar as two languages can be without one being considered a variant or sub-language of the other.
There ought to be some kind of wiki for fictional predictions. Not like "2430 - The Borg fight The Enterprise at Vega" but more like "2190 - First contact with aliens (Star Trek: First Contact)" or "2050 - World War III begins (some other show)" or "October 23, 2077 - Nuclear war between China and the US (Fallout)" (all dates made up by me except the last one).
It'd be really cool to be able to see what sort of huge events were supposed to have happened on a given date according to some TV show, movie, book, or video game.
Wikipedia has some pages that sort of serve this function, but they're all very incomplete or mixed up with real-life predictions, which are lame.
He was right, but we've coped with it, though at some cost.
We must specialize to a high degree. It's far more difficult to be a polymath now than in the 18th century. This greatly reduces the amount of information that must be dealt with.
We must rely on experts and tradition to dictate what we read. Tradition and experts say that there are only a handful of long-form prose fiction works from the 18th century that are worth reading, and damn near all the rest are complete shit. Unless one wishes to specialize in 18th century literature, one's best bet is to simply trust the experts and read those select few works. Most people don't read all the defining works in a math or science field to learn about it; they read a much smaller number of modern textbooks that have been (ideally) written to transmit that knowledge as efficiently as possible. Only when they reach the top levels of a small branch of it will they start getting most of their new knowledge from original papers and such.
In short, information overload killed the classical education by making it impractical. It's one of the ways we've paid to have all the nice things around us.
Lethal tender was a pretty interesting game in that it allowed you to do things which I can't recall any other game allowing you to do at the time. Strip the guards for a uniform
Hm... Wolfenstein: Enemey Territory? It was a free multiplayer-only demo for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but was actually better than (and quite different from) the game it was supposed to be promoting. The spy class could take a deceased enemy's uniform and use it to open doors that normally only worked for the opposing team, and would appear to be the person whose uniform it was until he attacked someone.
get injured in a limb and end up running in circles if you didn't heal.
That a nation is founded on an idea doesn't make that idea true any more than doing anything else with an idea does. I was long enamored with the idea of natural rights, too, but on reflection I've had to admit that they're just a pretty fiction. And yes, I've read my fair share of both Paine and Locke.
They're no more real than any number of other pretty, abstract constructions dreamed up by philosophers. They're as real as Plato's forms, and are consequently about as difficult to defend.
Yours too? I've got an HP Pavilion DV6000-series that's nearly as bad. If I don't prop the back end up (the fans point down and to the back, rather than just back--WTF sense does that make???) it overheats and shuts down if I play a flash video in full screen. Hell, sometimes it does anyway. It's a pretty high-end laptop, or was at the time, but gaming is only a possibility in the winter with the thermostat set on 60.
I'm guessing it gave a less noisy supply of power to the savegame memory chips in the cartridge during the shutdown process. I never had Final Fantasy, but I only recall the handful of games with on-cartridge saves (e.g. Zelda II) saying that.
The real difficulty I see right now in playing older games is with Win95/Win98 games. Dos games? 99%+ of them work fine in Dosbox. Every console up to and including the Playstation 2? Emulated, and getting better with each passing year. Old Macs? Amiga? Well emulated.
Win95/98 games often can't be played--at least as best I can tell--without original hardware, which is getting damn old. Installing Win95/98 on modern hardware won't work, since drivers will be absent, and even if you could install it many of the games would still refuse to work because they'd be confused by the graphics card.
Virtual machines (VirtualBox, VMWare) can run the operating systems, but I have yet to find one that emulates an early GeForce or Radeon card, instead using some sort of custom 3D layer that many games refuse to or are unable to use.
Fewer of these games run with each new release of Windows. I've got several games that I used to love but haven't been able to find a way to play aside from buying 1995-2000 vintage hardware, and others that require their own software life-support system to get running (Grim Fandango for example), which, having so narrow a focus, is at risk of no longer being updated some day. I wish I could find an emulator or VM that could run these games, or some sort of tiny, cheap little box that had had a modern re-creation of the old hardware in the vein of those NES/SNES knockoffs (hell, you could probably put something like that in a machine half the size of a Mac Mini these days, and it'd be less powerful than a Sony PSP so I'd expect it to cost no more than that).
Tracer Tong played live by an actual Chinese guy? Anna Navarre voiced by a pimple-faced overweight teenage girl with dyed-black hair, an oversized black tee shirt, a spikey choker necklace, and the voice/personality of Daria?
On the Playstation, I loved the Need for Speed series, but I got frustrated by the fact that I had to play through and unlock tracks in single-player mode before I could compete on them in multi-player mode. Mario Kart on the Wii is the same way. Why is there no multi-player quest mode that lets my kid and I unlock new tracks by playing together?
I hate shit like that. Makes it a pain in the ass if your memory card or hard drive or whatever bites the dust, if you want to play at someone else's house but forgot to bring your save, if you want to buy it on a new medium (say, a Playstation Network download), etc. Adds nothing whatsoever in return.
I bought one of those a couple years ago, mostly because I planned to do video editing on it; gaming was a nice bonus.
It's a piece of shit. Runs so hot that everyone who uses it comments on the heat, but if you throttle it any it feels crazy-slow. The heat's so bad that if I don't make some sort of special arrangement for it to sit up where it can get airflow, it'll overheat and shut down during games (or sometimes just while playing back a video!). The damn rear vent points down and to the back at a 45 degree angle, meaning that it heats any surface it's on until it's no longer cooling efficiently. Worst. Design. Ever.
TL;DR: I'm sticking to netbooks from now on, and leaving the heavy lifting to desktops and consoles.
Hell, these days I could buy a decent netbook and a decent gaming desktop (by which I mean a brain transplant for my existing, old as hell desktop) for the $900 I paid for this thing. $400 netbook, $500 for parts, done.
For the record, it's an HP Pavillion from the dv6000 series.
Yeah, this'll be awesome for early adopters and then start to suck as soon as their neighbors get it, kind of like how 802.11g sucks but N is still OK (for now).
Also, people getting pwned in online games will stop saying "fucking lag!" and start saying "goddamn microwave!"
And your girlfriend didn't seem to understand humanities where 100% can indeed be impossible
I've never understood the point of a grading scale with one end so high that it is considered to be unattainable. Every time I encounter the concept it reminds me of the "this amp goes to 11" scene, but in reverse--and every bit as absurd.
I'm not sure I'd call a majority of the coding that takes place on the planet engineering.
More like plumbing.
That includes most of the stuff done by degreed "computer scientists" working in industry, and it's not necessarily because they're incompetent (though it's often a factor) but because the work simply isn't engineering work; it's plumbing.
College is a mix of vocational training (particularly important for some professions) and personal growth in the "learn to be a good citizen" sense.
I would define it as a year's worth of review of junior high and high school material followed by a year's worth of actual new material spread out over three years.
That's probably because damn near every game on that system that's worth playing has a native PC port (or was ported from the PC to the X-Box to begin with, e.g. Morrowind) and often the PC version is better.
I doubt we'd have as many man-hours put in to making several advanced SNES emulators if the 100 best games were all available for the PC and played the same or better on it.
OTOH, PS2 and Gamecube emulation have come pretty far. Wii, too.
The Gamecube controller has fewer buttons than the N64 controller. It's got fewer than Playstation controllers, too--only eight by my count, while the PS controller has ten (not counting R3/L3).
Playstation: 8 normal game buttons, 2 start/select, 2 R3/L3 Gamecube: 7 game buttons, 1 start N64: 9 game buttons, 1 start
It's a problem in the N64 emulation community, actually. Very, very few controllers have enough well-placed buttons to stand in for a real N64 controller. Saitek (IIRC) makes one, but it's reputed to have an awful D-pad with a tendency to fall off after a month or two of moderate use, and square analog stick holes rather than round.
You're left using an N64 controller via a USB adapter and living with its bad, often-broken analog stick or using a controller with fewer buttons but two analog sticks and mapping the C-buttons to the right stick, which sort-of works but not very well.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also got a couple of 4/5 JRPGs, which is more than I can say for the other two consoles, which are filled with soulless JRPGs that have promise for a couple hours then just get worse and worse the more you play. That really surprised me--I've got a PS3 (and used to have a 360) and thought maybe I just didn't like JRPGs any more, until I got a Wii (mostly as another Netflix device and to play Gamecube games, intially).
Granted, it's only a couple; all the good JRPGs are on handhelds this generation, it seems, which makes no damn sense to me--I don't want to stare at my tiny little DS or PSP for hours on end or watch cutscenes on it, I want to play 15 minutes then put it away, or maybe an hour in the car or on a plane a few times a year. At least the PSP can be made to display on a TV, but the DS--ugh. I rarely play JRPGs except cooperatively with my wife, and handhelds are worthless for that.
For a while blocks of regularly-formatted nonsense were posted anonymously on this site fairly often. Haven't seen it for a couple years at least, but it sure looked like encoded/encrypted messages. Not sure if anyone ever figured out what those were.
So have I. I learned to program on Perl. I wrote CGI in Perl.
Then I switched to PHP for web programming, and the biggest differences were probably adding an "e" to my "elsif" statements, escaping fewer characters in strings, and being able to embed it in HTML, all of which take maybe a day to get used to. Oh, some minor differences in the way array notation looks, though they work almost exactly the same.
A Perl coder can pretty much just write the same code they would have in Perl with some very minor differences, call it a .php, and it'll run. This is especially true for the trivial, routine shit that PHP is used for 99.99% of the time.
As for what breaks when going from PHP4 to PHP5: the first thing an even moderately competent programmer will do is Google it, and get a more comprehensive list than the person with PHP4-5 experience has in their head (and guess where that probably-incomplete list in their head likely came from? Yep, Google).
They're about as similar as two languages can be without one being considered a variant or sub-language of the other.
You know how I know you haven't watched Archer?
There ought to be some kind of wiki for fictional predictions. Not like "2430 - The Borg fight The Enterprise at Vega" but more like "2190 - First contact with aliens (Star Trek: First Contact)" or "2050 - World War III begins (some other show)" or "October 23, 2077 - Nuclear war between China and the US (Fallout)" (all dates made up by me except the last one).
It'd be really cool to be able to see what sort of huge events were supposed to have happened on a given date according to some TV show, movie, book, or video game.
Wikipedia has some pages that sort of serve this function, but they're all very incomplete or mixed up with real-life predictions, which are lame.
Throughout history... since the 19th century... you know, same thing.
You can do a similar modless hack with slim PS2s.
He was right, but we've coped with it, though at some cost.
We must specialize to a high degree. It's far more difficult to be a polymath now than in the 18th century. This greatly reduces the amount of information that must be dealt with.
We must rely on experts and tradition to dictate what we read. Tradition and experts say that there are only a handful of long-form prose fiction works from the 18th century that are worth reading, and damn near all the rest are complete shit. Unless one wishes to specialize in 18th century literature, one's best bet is to simply trust the experts and read those select few works. Most people don't read all the defining works in a math or science field to learn about it; they read a much smaller number of modern textbooks that have been (ideally) written to transmit that knowledge as efficiently as possible. Only when they reach the top levels of a small branch of it will they start getting most of their new knowledge from original papers and such.
In short, information overload killed the classical education by making it impractical. It's one of the ways we've paid to have all the nice things around us.
Hm... Wolfenstein: Enemey Territory? It was a free multiplayer-only demo for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but was actually better than (and quite different from) the game it was supposed to be promoting. The spy class could take a deceased enemy's uniform and use it to open doors that normally only worked for the opposing team, and would appear to be the person whose uniform it was until he attacked someone.
Deus Ex, kind of.
Interesting. Thanks for the info.
That a nation is founded on an idea doesn't make that idea true any more than doing anything else with an idea does. I was long enamored with the idea of natural rights, too, but on reflection I've had to admit that they're just a pretty fiction. And yes, I've read my fair share of both Paine and Locke.
They're no more real than any number of other pretty, abstract constructions dreamed up by philosophers. They're as real as Plato's forms, and are consequently about as difficult to defend.
Yours too? I've got an HP Pavilion DV6000-series that's nearly as bad. If I don't prop the back end up (the fans point down and to the back, rather than just back--WTF sense does that make???) it overheats and shuts down if I play a flash video in full screen. Hell, sometimes it does anyway. It's a pretty high-end laptop, or was at the time, but gaming is only a possibility in the winter with the thermostat set on 60.
I'm guessing it gave a less noisy supply of power to the savegame memory chips in the cartridge during the shutdown process. I never had Final Fantasy, but I only recall the handful of games with on-cartridge saves (e.g. Zelda II) saying that.
FWIW, I never did it but never had a problem.
The real difficulty I see right now in playing older games is with Win95/Win98 games. Dos games? 99%+ of them work fine in Dosbox. Every console up to and including the Playstation 2? Emulated, and getting better with each passing year. Old Macs? Amiga? Well emulated.
Win95/98 games often can't be played--at least as best I can tell--without original hardware, which is getting damn old. Installing Win95/98 on modern hardware won't work, since drivers will be absent, and even if you could install it many of the games would still refuse to work because they'd be confused by the graphics card.
Virtual machines (VirtualBox, VMWare) can run the operating systems, but I have yet to find one that emulates an early GeForce or Radeon card, instead using some sort of custom 3D layer that many games refuse to or are unable to use.
Fewer of these games run with each new release of Windows. I've got several games that I used to love but haven't been able to find a way to play aside from buying 1995-2000 vintage hardware, and others that require their own software life-support system to get running (Grim Fandango for example), which, having so narrow a focus, is at risk of no longer being updated some day. I wish I could find an emulator or VM that could run these games, or some sort of tiny, cheap little box that had had a modern re-creation of the old hardware in the vein of those NES/SNES knockoffs (hell, you could probably put something like that in a machine half the size of a Mac Mini these days, and it'd be less powerful than a Sony PSP so I'd expect it to cost no more than that).
Tracer Tong played live by an actual Chinese guy? Anna Navarre voiced by a pimple-faced overweight teenage girl with dyed-black hair, an oversized black tee shirt, a spikey choker necklace, and the voice/personality of Daria?
I hate shit like that. Makes it a pain in the ass if your memory card or hard drive or whatever bites the dust, if you want to play at someone else's house but forgot to bring your save, if you want to buy it on a new medium (say, a Playstation Network download), etc. Adds nothing whatsoever in return.
I bought one of those a couple years ago, mostly because I planned to do video editing on it; gaming was a nice bonus.
It's a piece of shit. Runs so hot that everyone who uses it comments on the heat, but if you throttle it any it feels crazy-slow. The heat's so bad that if I don't make some sort of special arrangement for it to sit up where it can get airflow, it'll overheat and shut down during games (or sometimes just while playing back a video!). The damn rear vent points down and to the back at a 45 degree angle, meaning that it heats any surface it's on until it's no longer cooling efficiently. Worst. Design. Ever.
TL;DR: I'm sticking to netbooks from now on, and leaving the heavy lifting to desktops and consoles.
Hell, these days I could buy a decent netbook and a decent gaming desktop (by which I mean a brain transplant for my existing, old as hell desktop) for the $900 I paid for this thing. $400 netbook, $500 for parts, done.
For the record, it's an HP Pavillion from the dv6000 series.
Yeah, this'll be awesome for early adopters and then start to suck as soon as their neighbors get it, kind of like how 802.11g sucks but N is still OK (for now).
Also, people getting pwned in online games will stop saying "fucking lag!" and start saying "goddamn microwave!"
I've never understood the point of a grading scale with one end so high that it is considered to be unattainable. Every time I encounter the concept it reminds me of the "this amp goes to 11" scene, but in reverse--and every bit as absurd.
No. I'm just a big fan of the pipe character.
I'm not sure I'd call a majority of the coding that takes place on the planet engineering.
More like plumbing.
That includes most of the stuff done by degreed "computer scientists" working in industry, and it's not necessarily because they're incompetent (though it's often a factor) but because the work simply isn't engineering work; it's plumbing.
I would define it as a year's worth of review of junior high and high school material followed by a year's worth of actual new material spread out over three years.
But maybe that's just the schools I've been to.
Ditto. I just use EmuLoader (for MAME) and EmuCon (for everything else). Keeps it organized, but lets me use better emulators for everything.
EmuCon and EmuLoader
That's probably because damn near every game on that system that's worth playing has a native PC port (or was ported from the PC to the X-Box to begin with, e.g. Morrowind) and often the PC version is better.
I doubt we'd have as many man-hours put in to making several advanced SNES emulators if the 100 best games were all available for the PC and played the same or better on it.
OTOH, PS2 and Gamecube emulation have come pretty far. Wii, too.
The Gamecube controller has fewer buttons than the N64 controller. It's got fewer than Playstation controllers, too--only eight by my count, while the PS controller has ten (not counting R3/L3).
Playstation: 8 normal game buttons, 2 start/select, 2 R3/L3
Gamecube: 7 game buttons, 1 start
N64: 9 game buttons, 1 start
It's a problem in the N64 emulation community, actually. Very, very few controllers have enough well-placed buttons to stand in for a real N64 controller. Saitek (IIRC) makes one, but it's reputed to have an awful D-pad with a tendency to fall off after a month or two of moderate use, and square analog stick holes rather than round.
You're left using an N64 controller via a USB adapter and living with its bad, often-broken analog stick or using a controller with fewer buttons but two analog sticks and mapping the C-buttons to the right stick, which sort-of works but not very well.