Bingo. Exactly why I want one. Traditional tablets are too expensive, and trying too hard to be laptops, IMO. This thing's like a giant iPhone to carry around your house/office to provide a decent-sized display and light interface any place you damn well please.
I want this tablet thing as a portable (around the house) media player. It's big enough for two people (myself and my wife) to watch comfortably, has pretty high resolution, and wireless connectivity.
Select your movie from the file server via VLC's web interface, fire up VLC, connect to the stream, set it up on its stand, and enjoy a movie in any room that doesn't already have a screen. We use our laptops for this kind of thing now, but a tablet would be much, much better.
Want music in any room? Turn it on, plug it in to a couple speakers, open up the music player. Want 'Net access in your study for doing quick lookups while reading, but don't want a dedicated machine in there and don't want to cart your laptop all over the damn house (especially since its fucking battery only lasts like 45 minutes while idle after a year of moderate, mostly-plugged-in use, so you have to carry its cord around to use it for anything). This tablet's perfect for this stuff.
Previous tablets were, IMO, too weak to replace a laptop but too big/expensive/small-screened to fill a sub-laptop niche. This thing's awesome, and hits the sweet spot between internet/video phones and laptops. I love it.
Commander Keen: Showed what graphics could really be done on a PC.
Ah, Commander Keen. One of the few platformer franchises that really rocked on the PC.
Used to be quite a few of them, actually. Duke Nukem I and II (I especially like II), Hunter Hunted (an updated version of this on a console would be sweet), Biomenace, etc. They kind of died off; I guess those sorts of things are just done in Flash these days.
I still can't figure out why they removed functionality from the game after release--namely, the ability to play versus at settings other than "normal".
Sure, it was chosen on the server-side so it was effectively random to the player, but the proper response was to add a simple drop-down to let the user choose rather than taking the option away entirely.
Call me crazy, but I much prefer the fast-paced, wild style of an expert-difficulty versus game to a longer, slower, usually one-sided normal one. I've gotten so sick of knowing which team's going to win by the end of the second map. Expert versus may be shit for competitive play (in fact, I'm sure it is) but it was so much fun! Isn't that the point?
Agreed, for normal difficulty, which is all valve seems to care about.
It's funny--they've put all this effort in to fixing the balance in versus, when just giving us a choice between Normal and Advanced settings would have pretty much fixed it.
Tank too easy? Play advanced. Boomer completely fucking worthless against a team that's got fewer than 3 n00bs? Play advanced. Melee too powerful? Play advanced.
At least half of their fixes would have been unnecessary if they'd allowed at those two difficulty settings as options, IMO.
I still remember when you'd get dumped in to an Expert one every now and then. Hell, those were my favorites--I don't play the game to crush the other team or be crushed by them for 5 maps, I play it for frantic, desperate chaos and sudden changes of fortune, which is exactly what expert-setting versus guaranteed. I miss it. Advanced would at least be closer to that.
Hell, they say in the commentary that they wanted it to be rare for the survivors to make it to the safe room in versus. It was supposed to be a huge struggle. Give us back higher difficulty settings in versus, Valve! As it is, it's usually 5 maps of one team or the other being stomped. I have to deliberately screw around and do stupid things (first one to the safe room wins! No intentional FF, grenades are OK, GO! *opens door*) just to keep it interesting and fun (if I'm on the better team, that is). In probably 4/5 of all (public, random) games you know who's going to win by half way through the third map. It sucks--no wonder people "rage" quit.
We've figured out a marginally less bad base system for governance.
"So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three."
You get this all the time in anti-progress screeds, the "well we traded one problem for another", and then they just leave that hanging, like one problem is exactly the same as another. As Azimov noted, however, this ignores any change in quality. For instance, people used to think the world was flat like a pizza, then they thought it was a perfect sphere. They were wrong too, but, and this is the critical point, a sphere is "more right" than a pizza. THAT is how science works, approaching the asymptote.
Oh cool, someone else who's read that essay!
The Relativity of Wrong, collected in a book of the same name IIRC.
I have no idea what people mean when they write things like this.
WTF can you not do in Gnome that you want to? What?
Personally, I've absolutely mutilated the interface and re-built it to my liking, and 99% of what I did was accomplished using options in menus. None of it was done in their stupid registry-like thing--in fact, I've only ever used it once, and that was back when they first started using it.
Is there some amazing set of things people can do in other DEs that I'm missing out on?
The problem with that assessment is 1) No where near the same percentage of american were filing income tax returns, and 2) the income tax did not hit everyone like it does today. If you back it up to historical standards (correcting for inflation) You'd need to make $250,000 before you paid a penny of income tax.
I haven't checked up on your first point, but everything I can find about the second doesn't seem to support it.
A PDF I found on the Stanford site, for instance, indicates that those making the equivalent of $35,000 (and lower) were paying income taxes in 1950. Their source appears to be the Brookings Institution. Available here.
I found other, less-good sources that said essentially the same thing. Am I reading these wrong? Is there something else I should be looking at?
You further fail to understand the cause of the pending inflation. We don't really print money, but we monetize the debt, which means we sell it. The fed has bought the debt, effectively increasing the dollars in supply. This money has 2 places to go: either it is confiscated with high interest rates, or 2 it is left in the economy and causes inflation. If we choose the first, then we shoot ourselves in the foot of economic recovery. (Raising rates kills lending/spending). If we let it in the economy, we can pay our debts easier, but our savings are destroyed. We also have a drastically weaker dollar that will find its way to obsolescence in international trade, meaning that the US economy is no longer the price setter and we fall by the way side.
I do understand the causes of inflation. I agree that we are likely to have high inflation for a while. I don't agree that hyperinflation is likely. The only way I could see that happening would be if we trailed way, way behind the rest of the world in recovering from the current economic crisis, and I don't expect that to be the case.
Hyper inflation and 60% income tax rates are being talked about on MSNBC tonight.
Hyper inflation is a (somewhat remote) possibility, but a 60% income tax causing some kind of exodus or panic? Assuming that's a top bracket rate, it's more like a return to normal; our top rate now is unusually low.
Hell, it's been over 90% before (post-WWII, even!) and the country got along just fine.
are there any PC games left worth playing that aren't 4-5 years old?
There are still a couple really amazing releases every year, even if you don't count the indie stuff. Just about anything from Valve, for instance (Portal, HL, L4D, etc.) The PC still gets at least one or two very good RPGs a year that are either exclusive (The Witcher) or so much better on the PC that it might as well be (Oblivion, which only nudges up out of "mediocre" territory, through "good" and in to the edge of "very good" when heavily modded). Strategy games, of course, continue to be very nearly a PC-only genre, as do sim-type games (flight sims, etc.)
Holy hell, do I know you? I thought we were the only ones who did Hunt the Raptor. We used Turok: Rage Wars. We'd have hunted a dozen of the damn things if we could, but unfortunately that game had a hard 4-player limit, so we just played 3 at a time vs. 1 bot raptor with the highest AI level.
I also do things like this in Left 4 Dead to keep things interesting when the teams are horribly unbalanced.
If you're on my team and we've demolished the other team in the first two levels of a campaign, expect to hear one of the following (or something similar) at the beginning of the third level:
- "Pistols only, let's give these guys a chance" - "Let's speed run it. Stop only if you absolutely have to, and MOVE MOVE MOVE!" - "FIRST ONE TO THE END WINS! No shooting each other, but grenades are OK. GO!" *sound of door opening* - "OK, we're gonna do (some panic event) in (some really stupid location). Let's rock!"
I mean, if you've shut down the other team in the first two levels you've pretty much already won the campaign. Might as well meta-game in the last 3 to keep it fun. If it means the other team makes a comeback, all the better. Teams that keep trying to play perfectly when they are absurdly far ahead are boring for players on both sides, and they deserve to have their opponents "rage" quit on them, especially if they keep doing it after crushing them in the 3rd level such that it has become impossible for them to lose. A team that's winning that easily and doesn't start dicking around a little to liven things up just sucks.
Incidentally, that whole game is the result of meta-gaming--the commentary says the idea came from a custom Counterstrike: Source game a few of the devs found themselves playing and really enjoying, involving a few teammates vs. a huge team of bots set to knife-only....which is another thing my friends and I did on the N64. We'd play Perfect Dark vs. a shitload of meatsim-AI bots set to melee-only. Loads of fun.
I think we're all in for a whole new world of things to be addicted to as more options are available to technologically "escape reality". I wouldn't be surprised if within 10 years gaming and "virtual reality" addiction are an epidemic out of control.
It'll be extremely immersive VR or super-realistic sex bots that doom us as a species.
* quite a few starships were destroyed by Nemo, so maybe as many as 10,000 Starfleet officers were lost. Suddenly, a third year cadet is a lot more senior than he would ordinarily be.
That's something I wish DS9 had addressed: where the hell do they get new officers when half of them get wiped out in war?
Does the Academy drop its standards through the floor and fast-track the best cadets? Do they have to spread out experienced and made-it-through-the-academy-with-normal-standards officers (even low-ranking ones) so they don't have whole ships being run by these bottom-of-the-barrel types who (like most people, even in the future, surely) can't do warp theory calculations in their heads?
I mean, their main feeder for the officer ranks is a highly-selective school that takes years to complete. It's not like a navy ship where you can have someone competent enough to start doing an ensign's duties in a few months, tops--these starships seem to require leadership and operation by people with a deep understanding of the theory and technology behind their workings, and that apparently takes highly qualified candidates years to achieve. So what do they do? Conscript from merchant fleets? Accept sub-par candidates who will likely never be able to compete for top positions with the much smarter and more talented pre-war officers? Does this cause friction in the ranks post-war (or even during the war)?
Seems to me like the Federation is just asking to get pwned by some species that has figured out a way to design warships that don't require dozens of PhDs in Astrophysics/Warp Theory/Gamma Particle Ray Beam Engineering to operate.
I might be risking my geek-card here, but none of the new Star Wars were actually that boring due to all the big-budget CGI/effects.
I thought the FX were par at best for the time they were made. Several movies that came out before it had better CG FX. A few years later and they're already laughable.
When my wife and I see CG effects that stick out like a sore thumb, we say, "hey look! It's Episode I!" or something along those lines.
Yeah, the death of PC gaming would mean I'd probably drop to spending about 1/2 as much times on games as I do now--and most of that would be re-playing old PC games or discovering ones that I missed the first time, with the balance being spent on the only sorts of games I can stand on consoles (JRPG, Zelda-like games, Prince of Persia-like games, platformers, and multiplayer party games/fighters)
I'm currently re-playing Fallout 2 for perhaps the tenth time, this time with the F2 Restoration mod installed (which is amazing, incidentally). Show me a console RPG with that kind of depth and with the potential for a mod like Restoration to come along and make it even more awesome and I'll think about moving to consoles exclusively.
Show me a console game that can stand toe-to-toe with Deus Ex or System Shock 2. Hell, show me a pure shooter like HL2 that doesn't cause more frustration than fun when played on a console. How about the Mechwarrior series? X-Wing/Tie Figther/X-W Alliance? STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl? Morrowind? Properly-modded Oblivion (sorry console players, no much-needed community fixes and massive content packs for you!)? Arcanum? Starcraft? The Total War series (and even if it did exist on a console and was playable, could I have downloaded a community mod like Europa Barbarorum for R:TW to make it about 10x better)?
There's a whole world of games on the PC that are fucking awesome--often great artistic achievements in storytelling and design, even--that simply don't work on consoles. Frankly, I've only rarely seen console games that even seem to be trying to be as great in the same way as the PC games I listed. I think that generally when a console game is great, it's due to some sort of haiku-like simplicity and good/innovative artistic direction, while PC games tend more toward a games-as-literature direction, if that makes any sense.
The day PC gaming ends is the day that I almost completely stop paying attention to new games, and start catching up on my back-log of older games (admittedly mostly console, though it's primarily SNES JRPGs and similar) I need to play. Or hell, I could start working harder on the decade's (or more) worth of books on my to-read list.
I'm interested in compelling, deep games that I can show to someone and say "THIS is art". I want my games to feel satisfying and enriching. That is what I game for, most of the time. Consoles can satisfy the other 10% that's communal gaming or simple time-waster gaming, but only rarely does a console game appeal to that part of me that drives me to spend real time on the medium.
I'm not anti-console-gaming, mind you. I play console games, and I even love a few of them. The thing is--and I think this is where a lot of misunderstandings occur in the idiotic "PC vs Console" flamewars--they're not even competing, IMO. I think that the motivations that drive people to game primarily on one platform or the other are fundamentally different. For me, the qualities in games that make me love the medium seem to be best expressed in PC games, and crop up most frequently there. That is why I can't just switch to consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo. Exactly why I want one. Traditional tablets are too expensive, and trying too hard to be laptops, IMO. This thing's like a giant iPhone to carry around your house/office to provide a decent-sized display and light interface any place you damn well please.
What's not to like?
The N8x0 is tiny.
I want this tablet thing as a portable (around the house) media player. It's big enough for two people (myself and my wife) to watch comfortably, has pretty high resolution, and wireless connectivity.
Select your movie from the file server via VLC's web interface, fire up VLC, connect to the stream, set it up on its stand, and enjoy a movie in any room that doesn't already have a screen. We use our laptops for this kind of thing now, but a tablet would be much, much better.
Want music in any room? Turn it on, plug it in to a couple speakers, open up the music player. Want 'Net access in your study for doing quick lookups while reading, but don't want a dedicated machine in there and don't want to cart your laptop all over the damn house (especially since its fucking battery only lasts like 45 minutes while idle after a year of moderate, mostly-plugged-in use, so you have to carry its cord around to use it for anything). This tablet's perfect for this stuff.
Previous tablets were, IMO, too weak to replace a laptop but too big/expensive/small-screened to fill a sub-laptop niche. This thing's awesome, and hits the sweet spot between internet/video phones and laptops. I love it.
Ah, Commander Keen. One of the few platformer franchises that really rocked on the PC.
Used to be quite a few of them, actually. Duke Nukem I and II (I especially like II), Hunter Hunted (an updated version of this on a console would be sweet), Biomenace, etc. They kind of died off; I guess those sorts of things are just done in Flash these days.
I still can't figure out why they removed functionality from the game after release--namely, the ability to play versus at settings other than "normal".
Sure, it was chosen on the server-side so it was effectively random to the player, but the proper response was to add a simple drop-down to let the user choose rather than taking the option away entirely.
Call me crazy, but I much prefer the fast-paced, wild style of an expert-difficulty versus game to a longer, slower, usually one-sided normal one. I've gotten so sick of knowing which team's going to win by the end of the second map. Expert versus may be shit for competitive play (in fact, I'm sure it is) but it was so much fun! Isn't that the point?
It's funny--they've put all this effort in to fixing the balance in versus, when just giving us a choice between Normal and Advanced settings would have pretty much fixed it.
Tank too easy? Play advanced. Boomer completely fucking worthless against a team that's got fewer than 3 n00bs? Play advanced. Melee too powerful? Play advanced.
At least half of their fixes would have been unnecessary if they'd allowed at those two difficulty settings as options, IMO.
I still remember when you'd get dumped in to an Expert one every now and then. Hell, those were my favorites--I don't play the game to crush the other team or be crushed by them for 5 maps, I play it for frantic, desperate chaos and sudden changes of fortune, which is exactly what expert-setting versus guaranteed. I miss it. Advanced would at least be closer to that.
Hell, they say in the commentary that they wanted it to be rare for the survivors to make it to the safe room in versus. It was supposed to be a huge struggle. Give us back higher difficulty settings in versus, Valve! As it is, it's usually 5 maps of one team or the other being stomped. I have to deliberately screw around and do stupid things (first one to the safe room wins! No intentional FF, grenades are OK, GO! *opens door*) just to keep it interesting and fun (if I'm on the better team, that is). In probably 4/5 of all (public, random) games you know who's going to win by half way through the third map. It sucks--no wonder people "rage" quit.
"So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three."
- E.M. Forster
Oh cool, someone else who's read that essay!
The Relativity of Wrong, collected in a book of the same name IIRC.
I have no idea what people mean when they write things like this.
WTF can you not do in Gnome that you want to? What?
Personally, I've absolutely mutilated the interface and re-built it to my liking, and 99% of what I did was accomplished using options in menus. None of it was done in their stupid registry-like thing--in fact, I've only ever used it once, and that was back when they first started using it.
Is there some amazing set of things people can do in other DEs that I'm missing out on?
Actually, here's a site that appears to refute the first point as well.
Their source is the IRS.
I haven't checked up on your first point, but everything I can find about the second doesn't seem to support it.
A PDF I found on the Stanford site, for instance, indicates that those making the equivalent of $35,000 (and lower) were paying income taxes in 1950. Their source appears to be the Brookings Institution. Available here.
I found other, less-good sources that said essentially the same thing. Am I reading these wrong? Is there something else I should be looking at?
I do understand the causes of inflation. I agree that we are likely to have high inflation for a while. I don't agree that hyperinflation is likely. The only way I could see that happening would be if we trailed way, way behind the rest of the world in recovering from the current economic crisis, and I don't expect that to be the case.
Hyper inflation is a (somewhat remote) possibility, but a 60% income tax causing some kind of exodus or panic? Assuming that's a top bracket rate, it's more like a return to normal; our top rate now is unusually low.
Hell, it's been over 90% before (post-WWII, even!) and the country got along just fine.
There are still a couple really amazing releases every year, even if you don't count the indie stuff. Just about anything from Valve, for instance (Portal, HL, L4D, etc.) The PC still gets at least one or two very good RPGs a year that are either exclusive (The Witcher) or so much better on the PC that it might as well be (Oblivion, which only nudges up out of "mediocre" territory, through "good" and in to the edge of "very good" when heavily modded). Strategy games, of course, continue to be very nearly a PC-only genre, as do sim-type games (flight sims, etc.)
Holy hell, do I know you? I thought we were the only ones who did Hunt the Raptor. We used Turok: Rage Wars. We'd have hunted a dozen of the damn things if we could, but unfortunately that game had a hard 4-player limit, so we just played 3 at a time vs. 1 bot raptor with the highest AI level.
I also do things like this in Left 4 Dead to keep things interesting when the teams are horribly unbalanced.
If you're on my team and we've demolished the other team in the first two levels of a campaign, expect to hear one of the following (or something similar) at the beginning of the third level:
- "Pistols only, let's give these guys a chance"
- "Let's speed run it. Stop only if you absolutely have to, and MOVE MOVE MOVE!"
- "FIRST ONE TO THE END WINS! No shooting each other, but grenades are OK. GO!" *sound of door opening*
- "OK, we're gonna do (some panic event) in (some really stupid location). Let's rock!"
I mean, if you've shut down the other team in the first two levels you've pretty much already won the campaign. Might as well meta-game in the last 3 to keep it fun. If it means the other team makes a comeback, all the better. Teams that keep trying to play perfectly when they are absurdly far ahead are boring for players on both sides, and they deserve to have their opponents "rage" quit on them, especially if they keep doing it after crushing them in the 3rd level such that it has become impossible for them to lose. A team that's winning that easily and doesn't start dicking around a little to liven things up just sucks.
Incidentally, that whole game is the result of meta-gaming--the commentary says the idea came from a custom Counterstrike: Source game a few of the devs found themselves playing and really enjoying, involving a few teammates vs. a huge team of bots set to knife-only. ...which is another thing my friends and I did on the N64. We'd play Perfect Dark vs. a shitload of meatsim-AI bots set to melee-only. Loads of fun.
That is an awesome suggestion.
Definitely the most promising one I've seen in the thread. Very cool.
It'll be extremely immersive VR or super-realistic sex bots that doom us as a species.
Either way, it'll probably be Japan's fault.
I do that all the time. What decade are you living in?
... but so is anybody not shooting at you.
Next you'll be telling me that we were too preoccupied with whether or not we could that we never stopped to think about whether we should.
I'm telling you, those electrified fences are foolproof. Now go enjoy the tour.
Supposedly, much of the lens flare was real, achieved by pointing a light at the camera from the appropriate angle.
Still artificial, but not CGI.
That's something I wish DS9 had addressed: where the hell do they get new officers when half of them get wiped out in war?
Does the Academy drop its standards through the floor and fast-track the best cadets? Do they have to spread out experienced and made-it-through-the-academy-with-normal-standards officers (even low-ranking ones) so they don't have whole ships being run by these bottom-of-the-barrel types who (like most people, even in the future, surely) can't do warp theory calculations in their heads?
I mean, their main feeder for the officer ranks is a highly-selective school that takes years to complete. It's not like a navy ship where you can have someone competent enough to start doing an ensign's duties in a few months, tops--these starships seem to require leadership and operation by people with a deep understanding of the theory and technology behind their workings, and that apparently takes highly qualified candidates years to achieve. So what do they do? Conscript from merchant fleets? Accept sub-par candidates who will likely never be able to compete for top positions with the much smarter and more talented pre-war officers? Does this cause friction in the ranks post-war (or even during the war)?
Seems to me like the Federation is just asking to get pwned by some species that has figured out a way to design warships that don't require dozens of PhDs in Astrophysics/Warp Theory/Gamma Particle Ray Beam Engineering to operate.
I thought the FX were par at best for the time they were made. Several movies that came out before it had better CG FX. A few years later and they're already laughable.
When my wife and I see CG effects that stick out like a sore thumb, we say, "hey look! It's Episode I!" or something along those lines.
Blender also has editing capabilities.
They're obtuse as hell and I have no idea why anyone would use them, but they exist.
It's so true. A big part of getting to know someone isn't figuring out whether they're fucked up in the head, but how.
That goes double for getting to know yourself.
Oh god, that site is the worst for causing me to open 20+ tabs without realizing it until I look at the tab bar.
The only things that come close to it are Wikipedia and Everything2
Yeah, the death of PC gaming would mean I'd probably drop to spending about 1/2 as much times on games as I do now--and most of that would be re-playing old PC games or discovering ones that I missed the first time, with the balance being spent on the only sorts of games I can stand on consoles (JRPG, Zelda-like games, Prince of Persia-like games, platformers, and multiplayer party games/fighters)
I'm currently re-playing Fallout 2 for perhaps the tenth time, this time with the F2 Restoration mod installed (which is amazing, incidentally). Show me a console RPG with that kind of depth and with the potential for a mod like Restoration to come along and make it even more awesome and I'll think about moving to consoles exclusively.
Show me a console game that can stand toe-to-toe with Deus Ex or System Shock 2. Hell, show me a pure shooter like HL2 that doesn't cause more frustration than fun when played on a console. How about the Mechwarrior series? X-Wing/Tie Figther/X-W Alliance? STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl? Morrowind? Properly-modded Oblivion (sorry console players, no much-needed community fixes and massive content packs for you!)? Arcanum? Starcraft? The Total War series (and even if it did exist on a console and was playable, could I have downloaded a community mod like Europa Barbarorum for R:TW to make it about 10x better)?
There's a whole world of games on the PC that are fucking awesome--often great artistic achievements in storytelling and design, even--that simply don't work on consoles. Frankly, I've only rarely seen console games that even seem to be trying to be as great in the same way as the PC games I listed. I think that generally when a console game is great, it's due to some sort of haiku-like simplicity and good/innovative artistic direction, while PC games tend more toward a games-as-literature direction, if that makes any sense.
The day PC gaming ends is the day that I almost completely stop paying attention to new games, and start catching up on my back-log of older games (admittedly mostly console, though it's primarily SNES JRPGs and similar) I need to play. Or hell, I could start working harder on the decade's (or more) worth of books on my to-read list.
I'm interested in compelling, deep games that I can show to someone and say "THIS is art". I want my games to feel satisfying and enriching. That is what I game for, most of the time. Consoles can satisfy the other 10% that's communal gaming or simple time-waster gaming, but only rarely does a console game appeal to that part of me that drives me to spend real time on the medium.
I'm not anti-console-gaming, mind you. I play console games, and I even love a few of them. The thing is--and I think this is where a lot of misunderstandings occur in the idiotic "PC vs Console" flamewars--they're not even competing, IMO. I think that the motivations that drive people to game primarily on one platform or the other are fundamentally different. For me, the qualities in games that make me love the medium seem to be best expressed in PC games, and crop up most frequently there. That is why I can't just switch to consoles.