I had a plague run amok in GemStone ][ some 14 odd years ago.
That was called "slowdowns", wasn't it?
(I'm an old GS2'er, from the last month of beta through the end, but I don't remember a plague, probably because the slowdowns were so bad. As in you got a command run every couple of minutes while the monsters got their moves every 10 seconds on the clock. Good ol' Honeywell mainframes. But I do remember how Bardon was totally pissed when the dragon got killed.)
... a magical little thing called a "Tape Recorder". Or at the very least a "Line Out Jack". I mean, yeah, the quality of XM/Sirius is CD-level so the comparison to taping plain old OTA radio is a bit weak, but it still applies.
I guess they forgot about the Line Out Jack after home taping killed the record industry back in the '80s. Yeah, that must be it.
Whenever I need to test my new firewall installation, I just open up an IRC session or post a Usenet post (containing my IP address) saying something like "Hi there, I'm a researcher for Microsoft/SCO/Natalie Portman/George Bush and I've been watching you all and you are all lamers"
Then I just wait for the attack to begin.
Do you also tell them your IP address is 127.0.0.1?
The first game was SHORT! basically 12 missions with 6 side missions all almost the same. 3 area that's it.
Uh, you missed a couple. The original game also had the side missions of finding all objects and all names. That could easily take at least a month to finish. Some of those are really hard to find, and a few can just barely be rolled up before the scale changes and they disappear. And then there's that damn bear with a rocket up his ass.
Easy. Make it marginally difficult to mod so that only those interested pursue it.
This is a lesson that Sony has had plenty of time to learn. Set the wayback machine to eleven or so years ago to original Playstation. They had actually designed the thing so that it was easier to crack the copied-games lockout than to crack the region protection! So what happens? Mod chips everywhere... you had to get a mod chip that would let you play copied games even if all you wanted was to play imports.
Compare this with the region mods for its competitors at the time, the Saturn (very tedious but straightforward switch mod) and the N64 (open it up and remove or cut away parts of a piece of plastic). As for later systems, Dreamcast needed a boot disc (there was a 3rd party available, but there were also homebrew loaders once the CD boot hole was discovered), and GC also needed a boot disc. No Gameboy has had a region lockout, and I doubt the DS has one either.
What about Grand Theft Mario? Who needs all these kiddy games... and don't say kids, they don't matter.
As silly as you were trying to be, that actually sounds like fun. For instance, Wario and Bowser could be two of the mob leaders. Then all we need is a "hot mushroom" mod.
The original Katamari was one of the miniscule set of PS2 games that didn't have long load times. Now I have to wait for loading in the middle of the freakin' level?
Apparently we just never realized that this was happening in the original... because it didn't say it was loading. After the second time of hitting the mid-level loading screen, I realized that was why they had the king say things and point out the cones to the next level in the original. Because while it was loading, we were busy madly pressing the X button to skip the king's BS. I think the difference is that now they support more objects in an area, so it takes a bit longer to load everything.
What I'm disappointed in is that they seemed to not be catering to the folks like me who played the "collecting" side-game. I didn't care much about the "get every single damn fish/girl/bird in five minutes" levels, but it took me like two months to finish the item and name lists. Now the item lists aren't as detailed (no by-area lists), there's nothing to show you the percentage of the total objects collected (and you have to play the ending to see the number of total objects), and there's no name lists. The "shadows" of some objects that haven't been collected yet is kind of nice, but it doesn't make up for everything else.
I really miss the by-area item lists, because without them, it will be a lot more difficult to get those last few items.
For example: Just because Apple makes money on iTunes (ie: legitimate music sales) they make far, far more on sales of the iPod -- which are prediated on the availability of free pirated music.
So iPods are only used to play any music that is 1) purchased from the Apple store or 2) pirated?
Then excuse me for "pirating" music off of the pile of CDs that I already own.
why the heck the iPod doesn't have a radio is completely beyond my understanding
Because FM radio is overrated (I haven't listened to it in years), thanks mostly to Clear Channel and the crap that the RIAA record companies are shoveling out, and AM radio is almost never implemented, probably because it's too hard to avoid interference from the rest of the player.
The Hummer branding of it may be a bit cheesy, but the Hummer Shake Flashlight that you can get at Sharper Image works great. 20 years ago my mom got a flashlight which ran with a squeeze grip geared into a toy motor. Last year we got a couple of these and it is so much better.
First of all, it's a linear generator, so each time the weight inside crosses the center it makes power; second, it uses an LED which is much lower power than old incandescent bulbs; and third, it has a supercapacitor which can power the LED for a few minutes with 30 seconds of shaking. Just be sure to shake it horizontally, as the instructions warn that you might break it if the weight hits an end too hard on a vertical downstroke.
The best part is you never have to worry about the batteries running down or leaking when you don't use it, and you never have to avoid using regularly for fear of running the batteries down. It has a power switch, so you can shake it up and use it as needed, then just shake it again when it runs down.
Slashdot readers would be recommended to get the "red" model, as that is translucent and you can see the guts of it operating, for higher geek value.
Re:Speaking of Vacuum tubes.. Here's a possible so
on
NASA's New Shuttle
·
· Score: 1
We build a sphere/dome/donought shaped diamond structure - roughly 1 kilometer in diameter. Ok?
Thank you, Buckminster Fuller.
It become a giant vacuum inside.
Great, I'm tired of vacuuming the carpet! So how are you going to get inside this ginormous soap bubble?
This is being done TODAY, the only need would be to expand the "ovens" that are currently pressing out tiny 4 carrot rocks.
Mmmmm... carrots. Yummy. Anyhow, it's a long step from 3-inch sheets to a one-kilometer sphere. And just because diamond is hard doesn't mean it won't be brittle in thin sheets. People who live in diamond sheet bubbles shouldn't throw meteorites.
P.S. UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. - McElwaine
(Sorry about not being able to link it with a _blank window of the proper size. If that's a problem, go to spaceflight.nasa.gov and it's currently linked in the bottom right corner of the main page.)
I had never known what that tower thingy on top of the Saturn V stack was. It was a small rocket to launch the Command Module off of the rest of the rocket in case of an emergency before reaching Earth orbit. And it's a part of the new design as well.
In case you haven't read it in one of the other posts on this topic, the new controller works perfectly well from your lap, with only a small range of motion.
And we all know what that looks like, don't we? "You'll go blind if you keep doing that!"
Think of it this way: which can you do faster, twitch your thumbs or wave your arms? And which can you do more precisely at high speed? I think it will end up making many games harder, because you have to use larger and less precise muscle movements.
Also, having a D-pad with your other fingers beneath it gives you something to push against, so you don't have to recover from a push in one direction before you can reverse to the other direction.
...and awaaaaay goes your battery life. These things aren't wirelessly powered, you know. While the average gamepad controller just has one small low-power chip, it's always possible that someone will want to hook up some kind of monster controller that wasn't made with low-power chips. Not only that, but if you're going to hook up four controllers, that's four times the battery drain.
Why is it that half the games on the market begin with your character as the sole survivor of some mysterious holocaust?
Because then they'd actually have to make more interactive characters! If you're the last one to survive, there's nobody around to interact with, aside from using your shotgun to interact with the assorted zombies, demons, and wildlife left behind.
Ahem, sorry about that, as I was clicking the Submit button, I remembered that this was a Mikey Mouse Registrar and whois doesn't work automatically...
$ host warez.uk.com
warez.uk.com has address 213.146.149.160
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
No match for "WAREZ.UK.COM".
Hey, where's the entry "warez A 127.0.0.1"? Everyone doing 2LDs has to have a 127.0.0.1 entry for warez!
Re:Office 12 and Windows Stability
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 1
You must be new here. It's always Windows fault.
Except when it's Seg's fault. Just who does this Seg guy think he is anyhow? And what's so special about his wife Page?
Actually, a few came out after Disinfectant stopped being updated.
About four years ago I had copied a bunch of floppy discs, maybe as much as 200 megs, onto my PowerMac. Apparently one nVir-infected app somewhere on one of them got launched by accident (from matching a document), and it dropped itself into the System file. This is one of the viruses that would cause a small random number of beeps every time you launched an app. And it was causing crashing problems by being incompatible with something, I don't know what. I had to pay 60 bucks to get a copy of Dr. Solomon's to get rid of it.
Slashdot Mirror
That was called "slowdowns", wasn't it?
(I'm an old GS2'er, from the last month of beta through the end, but I don't remember a plague, probably because the slowdowns were so bad. As in you got a command run every couple of minutes while the monsters got their moves every 10 seconds on the clock. Good ol' Honeywell mainframes. But I do remember how Bardon was totally pissed when the dragon got killed.)
I guess they forgot about the Line Out Jack after home taping killed the record industry back in the '80s. Yeah, that must be it.
Do you also tell them your IP address is 127.0.0.1?
Uh, you missed a couple. The original game also had the side missions of finding all objects and all names. That could easily take at least a month to finish. Some of those are really hard to find, and a few can just barely be rolled up before the scale changes and they disappear. And then there's that damn bear with a rocket up his ass.
This is a lesson that Sony has had plenty of time to learn. Set the wayback machine to eleven or so years ago to original Playstation. They had actually designed the thing so that it was easier to crack the copied-games lockout than to crack the region protection! So what happens? Mod chips everywhere... you had to get a mod chip that would let you play copied games even if all you wanted was to play imports.
Compare this with the region mods for its competitors at the time, the Saturn (very tedious but straightforward switch mod) and the N64 (open it up and remove or cut away parts of a piece of plastic). As for later systems, Dreamcast needed a boot disc (there was a 3rd party available, but there were also homebrew loaders once the CD boot hole was discovered), and GC also needed a boot disc. No Gameboy has had a region lockout, and I doubt the DS has one either.
As silly as you were trying to be, that actually sounds like fun. For instance, Wario and Bowser could be two of the mob leaders. Then all we need is a "hot mushroom" mod.
Apparently we just never realized that this was happening in the original... because it didn't say it was loading. After the second time of hitting the mid-level loading screen, I realized that was why they had the king say things and point out the cones to the next level in the original. Because while it was loading, we were busy madly pressing the X button to skip the king's BS. I think the difference is that now they support more objects in an area, so it takes a bit longer to load everything.
What I'm disappointed in is that they seemed to not be catering to the folks like me who played the "collecting" side-game. I didn't care much about the "get every single damn fish/girl/bird in five minutes" levels, but it took me like two months to finish the item and name lists. Now the item lists aren't as detailed (no by-area lists), there's nothing to show you the percentage of the total objects collected (and you have to play the ending to see the number of total objects), and there's no name lists. The "shadows" of some objects that haven't been collected yet is kind of nice, but it doesn't make up for everything else.
I really miss the by-area item lists, because without them, it will be a lot more difficult to get those last few items.
So iPods are only used to play any music that is 1) purchased from the Apple store or 2) pirated?
Then excuse me for "pirating" music off of the pile of CDs that I already own.
Because FM radio is overrated (I haven't listened to it in years), thanks mostly to Clear Channel and the crap that the RIAA record companies are shoveling out, and AM radio is almost never implemented, probably because it's too hard to avoid interference from the rest of the player.
First of all, it's a linear generator, so each time the weight inside crosses the center it makes power; second, it uses an LED which is much lower power than old incandescent bulbs; and third, it has a supercapacitor which can power the LED for a few minutes with 30 seconds of shaking. Just be sure to shake it horizontally, as the instructions warn that you might break it if the weight hits an end too hard on a vertical downstroke.
The best part is you never have to worry about the batteries running down or leaking when you don't use it, and you never have to avoid using regularly for fear of running the batteries down. It has a power switch, so you can shake it up and use it as needed, then just shake it again when it runs down.
Slashdot readers would be recommended to get the "red" model, as that is translucent and you can see the guts of it operating, for higher geek value.
Or for that matter, Pluto's Kiss.
After all, "A man can't just sit around."
Thank you, Buckminster Fuller.
It become a giant vacuum inside.
Great, I'm tired of vacuuming the carpet! So how are you going to get inside this ginormous soap bubble?
This is being done TODAY, the only need would be to expand the "ovens" that are currently pressing out tiny 4 carrot rocks.
Mmmmm... carrots. Yummy. Anyhow, it's a long step from 3-inch sheets to a one-kilometer sphere. And just because diamond is hard doesn't mean it won't be brittle in thin sheets. People who live in diamond sheet bubbles shouldn't throw meteorites.
P.S. UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. - McElwaine
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo_ mission.html
(Sorry about not being able to link it with a _blank window of the proper size. If that's a problem, go to spaceflight.nasa.gov and it's currently linked in the bottom right corner of the main page.)
I had never known what that tower thingy on top of the Saturn V stack was. It was a small rocket to launch the Command Module off of the rest of the rocket in case of an emergency before reaching Earth orbit. And it's a part of the new design as well.
And we all know what that looks like, don't we? "You'll go blind if you keep doing that!"
Also, having a D-pad with your other fingers beneath it gives you something to push against, so you don't have to recover from a push in one direction before you can reverse to the other direction.
...and awaaaaay goes your battery life. These things aren't wirelessly powered, you know. While the average gamepad controller just has one small low-power chip, it's always possible that someone will want to hook up some kind of monster controller that wasn't made with low-power chips. Not only that, but if you're going to hook up four controllers, that's four times the battery drain.
Because then they'd actually have to make more interactive characters! If you're the last one to survive, there's nobody around to interact with, aside from using your shotgun to interact with the assorted zombies, demons, and wildlife left behind.
No, blockhead, the "pretend it's really 2005 in that storyline" theme.
$ host warez.uk.com
warez.uk.com has address 213.146.149.160
It's still not 127.0.0.l, so there.
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
No match for "WAREZ.UK.COM".
Hey, where's the entry "warez A 127.0.0.1"? Everyone doing 2LDs has to have a 127.0.0.1 entry for warez!
Except when it's Seg's fault. Just who does this Seg guy think he is anyhow? And what's so special about his wife Page?
About four years ago I had copied a bunch of floppy discs, maybe as much as 200 megs, onto my PowerMac. Apparently one nVir-infected app somewhere on one of them got launched by accident (from matching a document), and it dropped itself into the System file. This is one of the viruses that would cause a small random number of beeps every time you launched an app. And it was causing crashing problems by being incompatible with something, I don't know what. I had to pay 60 bucks to get a copy of Dr. Solomon's to get rid of it.
(psst... I know you enjoy being a Mr. Knowitall, but hey, look at your calendar... you've entirely missed the point)
I hear there's this really nice one called "Aqua". They're even porting it to other architectures now.