I remember this coming out for the PS3 a while back. Knew one guy that bought it and swore by it, but outside of that, never heard anything about it one way or the other.
In theory, though, seems like it would be an excellent way to get the best of both worlds.
That's all subjective. Some console games have a "quick turn" button that allow you to instantly be looking behind you. Also, depending on where your mouse acceleration is set, turning completely around may be even slower than turning with a joystick.
Why is it so hard for people to admit that it's not black and white, and one is not clearly better than the other? Do you have some emotional investment into the K&M or what? I guaran-fucking-tee there are FPS players out there that can wipe the floor with you using a controller while you use the "superior" K&M. Probably even players that can turn around faster than you using a standard Xbox 360 controller. You can even adjust the sensitivity of the sticks themselves in many games to the point where the slightest push left or right whips you around the other direction.
Unless we're talking about the "best" K&M player versus the "best" controller player, it's all nothing but opinion, anyway, which is formed largely from personal preference which...wait for it...comes from familiarity more than anything else.
This may totally blow your mind, but other people sometimes have preferences that differ from yours.
I only have a limited number of hours in the day with which I can even think about playing a game. I don't want my bandwidth to be the limiting factor anymore than it already is.
Amazing what a little competition can do. It was never about them being unable to bring people these speeds, or it being cost prohibitive...they just don't want to spend the fucking money until they're losing more customers than they're signing up in a given quarter. I've had techs from my ISP, Charter Communications, basically tell me that my local node is way oversaturated due to this being a very densely populated area, and that the main hardware is complete crap, but that corporate isn't going to upgrade until the amount they're spending on service calls exceeds the cost of upgrading the node. You know it's fucked up when the company's own fucking techs are exasperated enough to start telling customers shit like that...
They ought to say fuck the desktops and notebooks and get a fucking Steambox on the market. With proper partner support for the hardware, they wouldn't even need to rely on Dell or HP or Microsoft, they could do it all in-house, and if they do it right and allow expansion/upgradeability, it could be a real competitor to the console systems and mobile apps that are pretty much dominating gaming right now.
I disagree. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal...but most PC gamers I know already have much more money invested into their Steam Library then the retail cost of Windows 8. None of them have any plans to upgrade, not their gaming rigs, anyway, for specifically that reason.
The only reason you find them superior is because you've been using WADS since 1992, you're used to it. If you'd been playing FPSs on a console for the last 20 years, you'd be pointing and laughing at the K&M users.
The keyboard part of the combo is fucking awful for a beginner. It's not intuitive at all, especially in games that greatly extend beyond the standard WADS interface and have a shit-ton of extended function keys (most FPSs these days).
It's really no different than why the standard QWERTY keyboard layout stuck around all these years. It's no inherently better than the most common alternatives like DVORAK, but they'll never catch on because everyone learned on QWERTY and thus are most familiar with it.
You can find the same arguments in the controller versus motion control debate. Maybe we should all just get the fuck off each other's lawns and accept the fact that it's an issue of personal preference and little else?
I find that kills my energy more than anything, not the exercising, but an overly large meal break. The days where I just eat a sammich and keep on trucking I generally do alright, but the once or twice a week we go out to lunch somewhere like Chili's or Olive Garden all I want to do is go to sleep when I get back to work.
I do ~15 miles a day on a recumbent bike that varies resistance levels over the course of the ride and I generally feel more tired after the large meal than I do the ride.
The simple fact is, most people don't give a shit about injustice until it effects them personally. Civil disobedience brings it to their doorstep and forces them to acknowledge it. It took people occupying segregated lunch counters in the South before civil rights were really addressed 50 years ago, just as it took people occupying lower Manhattan to get wealth inequality really addressed today. Whether you agree with the protesters or not is irrelevant (and I'm really not interested in a bunch of ranting responses about the Occupy movement one way or the other, honestly); it forced those issues into the limelight. Mission: Accomplished.
Chess is about to become a whole lot more boring a lot sooner than that, once things like Google's Project Glass hit the scene.
No more thinking about your next move, now you've got the Chess App tracking the pieces visually suggesting moves in real-time. Of course, so does your opponent, so now you've got two human beings doing little more than manually moving the pieces around while Google plays with itself.
It won't be about who's the better chess player, it'll be about who has the better chess app. I'd imagine a lot of games with a strategic element are about to become boring when we're all wearing our fancy connected glasses...and once we move on to ocular implants, you won't even know whether or not your opponent is doing this at all and everything will be on the honor system.
I collected comic books myself. Got boxes and boxes of them in the basement boarded and bagged in sealed containers, just waiting for the day for me to pass them off to my unborn son.
Who will more than likely deem them retarded and sell them off, but hey, I tried.
Yeah, I've got hundreds of self-burned DVD's from the early 2000's that I had to trash because they're unreadable now. I wouldn't consider that being a real long-term solution. Flash memory (in some form) will probably be okay, though. Even the oldest flash drives I have (32-64 whole MB's of storage! WOW!!) are still readable today. They're useless due to their size, of course, but they still work and the data is still on them.
Now, if the USB interface disappears in the next 25 years you could be screwed, but I somehow doubt they will be entirely gone in 25 years, considering the availability of serial ports still in place today that predate USB by decades themselves.
Or, for a cheaper alternative, one of those digital photo frames that can play video as well as display pictures. Most of them plug in and take standard memory cards. A tablet would probably also suffice, but I would opt for something that can take removable media independently and isn't limited to internal storage. Not sure it would work for the data archival, but it should work for the media at least...
As soon as they try to implement it in earnest it will end up being slapped down. Almost everyone I know on social media isn't acting as themselves, they're acting as the idealized version of themselves that they want other people to see.
They'll bring in some angry basement dweller chan-tard based on his online persona, and they'll quickly find that he's just a scared, immature little fuck-wit, and this will all go out the window. Either that, or some politician's son or daughter will set off a few triggers and it'll end up squashed that way.
But how many people have an online persona that is vastly different than they're real life one? I have friends that act like they're Che Guevara on their social media postings that, in real life, will bitch and cry and complain for an hour if the person at Starbucks takes too long to prepare their non-fat mochaccinolatte, and don't even get me started on all the people that bitch and complain about "freeloaders" and "people living on the government teat" that I know for a fact are collecting government services themselves or have benefited from them in the past....that's another particularly LOL-worthy demographic these days. And then, of course, there's the "I'm ME and I don't care if anyone likes my opinions or not!" posts I used to see all the time, written by people that are, without a hint of irony, obviously searching for positive reinforcement from their social group.
The number of people I know that are actually 'themselves' on the internet, and not some idealized version of themselves that they invented to be popular, is quite slim. I don't bother with social media anymore because I got tired of dealing with cartoon characters and hypocrites. If people actually had to be themselves on the internet, warts and all, I bet the number of social media junkies out there would plummet overnight...
For those reasons, I fail to see the value in this...
I grew up in a military family. My step-father was career Army, my brother and his wife are both Marines, and not only that, but pretty much my entire extended family comes from rural settings where guns are ubiquitous and I spent many a summer on a farm. I've been around guns almost my entire life. I'm not afraid of guns, I'm afraid of the number of idiots out there that think they're fucking Rambo because they took an 8-hour course and fired at a few paper targets.
My brother carries a piece and I don't feel nervous around him because he not only has been trained how to use the weapon, but he's actually used weapons in combat while in Iraq during the initial invasion back in '03, as has his wife. My step-father did multiple tours, both in Desert Shield/Storm and Iraqi Freedom (not to mention the random ops he was involved in down in Central and South America in the 80's and 90's doing who knows what), and he also has combat experience. My extended family were born and raised with guns and are avid hunters (not to mention a few police officers in the mix as well). They've got the experience.
Contrast that with the idiot friend of mine that found out that they were legalizing concealed carry here in Wisconsin and treated it like a goddamned Xbox 360 achievement to unlock, went out and bought a ridiculous hand-cannon that he can barely handle because he wanted a 'Deagle' just like the ones in the FPSs he likes to play that he's shot a handful of times, and is now looking to pick up an AR-15, because the hand-cannon wasn't enough for the "defense" of his apartment with papier-mâché walls. I would trust my step-father or my brother with that weapon, but him? Absolutely not.
The law doesn't make a distinction for fucking retards getting a gun for all the wrong reasons, and I don't know how it ever would without impinging upon the rights of those mature enough to handle a weapon, but to pretend like it's not a worthy concern and stems only from a fear of guns is ridiculous. I'm betting you yourself know people in your own life that you know should not be carrying a weapon that are legally in their rights to do so because there is nothing to stop them from applying and receiving the permits. Hell, I'll make it even easier: How often do you see people driving that you cannot believe they actually managed to get a fucking license? They fulfilled the training requirements, they took the test and passed, but they still drive like a fucking retard? Surely there are gun owners out there that fit the same criteria, and if you deny that, you're just being deliberately obtuse.
You're ignoring the possibility that innocents would have likely been hit in the crossfire. A permit to carry doesn't mean the person carrying a sharpshooter or even necessarily a good shot. I know a person that carries a ridiculous hand-cannon he bought when they legalized concealed carry here recently and he's only fired the weapon a couple times total (he joked about how he could barely keep the thing on target due to the recoil and this is a weapon he carries for self-defense in public!). I actually feel less safe when I'm with him and he's packing, which is why I won't hang out with him when he is. He chalks it up to me being afraid of guns, but in actuality, I'm afraid of him with a gun...
In the right hands it's possible that someone could have taken this guy out and prevented this many deaths, but it's equally possible we could be talking about even more dead, with some of them tragically being killed by people trying to shoot the asshole that shot up the place. I doubt the families of those victims would have taken much comfort in the circumstances, regardless of who was pulling the trigger and why.
Of course, I understand that there are many vectors through which morons can harm others either deliberately or through the fact that they're fucking morons, but I was talking about guns because that's the subject at hand; alcohol abuse and inexperienced drivers is another argument.
The problem is that the second I utter my concerns about how easy it is for people to get guns in this country that really shouldn't have them I get pounced on by a ton of rabid pro-gun people that mistake my misgivings for me advocating that all guns be banned forever from civilian hands. They use the same arguments you do.
For what it's worth, the amount of training required to get a license these days is much, much higher than it was in my day, and my day was only 20 years ago. I waltzed into the DMV in Georgia and got my license on my 16th birthday after passing a written test only a real retard could possibly fail and taking a road test that consisted of 4 right turns around the block, a Y-turn in the parking lot, and then backing into a parking space. Contrast this with the mandatory 6-months of Driver's Ed that kids are required to take here, the many hours of practical driving time with an instructor present, and the fact that kids can only get a probationary license until they're 18, which carries restrictions on how many people can be in the car, what hours they're allowed to operate the car, and that a single fuck-up results in them losing their license for a varying length of time. They are also required to take and pass an alcohol awareness course. Getting busted for underage drinking, even if it has nothing to do with driving at all, results in suspension of their license up here. That's automatic.
What level of training do you feel is appropriate for firearms ownership? Do you believe that the level of training required today for gun ownership is sufficient? Honest question, because many of the people I talk to that are decidedly pro-gun feel that there are already too many restrictions on gun ownership and that it should be easier for people to get guns "for their protection"...a sentiment that, coupled with my first-hand experiences with that friend of mine packing that ridiculous weapon, is frankly terrifying.
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I remember this coming out for the PS3 a while back. Knew one guy that bought it and swore by it, but outside of that, never heard anything about it one way or the other.
In theory, though, seems like it would be an excellent way to get the best of both worlds.
And to think I only spent 20 minutes this morning wondering what the fuck I managed to break this time...
Working fine for me again, btw. Whatever they broke seems fixed unless they're rolling it out in stages...
That's all subjective. Some console games have a "quick turn" button that allow you to instantly be looking behind you. Also, depending on where your mouse acceleration is set, turning completely around may be even slower than turning with a joystick.
Why is it so hard for people to admit that it's not black and white, and one is not clearly better than the other? Do you have some emotional investment into the K&M or what? I guaran-fucking-tee there are FPS players out there that can wipe the floor with you using a controller while you use the "superior" K&M. Probably even players that can turn around faster than you using a standard Xbox 360 controller. You can even adjust the sensitivity of the sticks themselves in many games to the point where the slightest push left or right whips you around the other direction.
Unless we're talking about the "best" K&M player versus the "best" controller player, it's all nothing but opinion, anyway, which is formed largely from personal preference which...wait for it...comes from familiarity more than anything else.
You don't consider movement beneficial of precision? Really?
Part of playing a FPS is not getting shot, ya know.
This may totally blow your mind, but other people sometimes have preferences that differ from yours.
I only have a limited number of hours in the day with which I can even think about playing a game. I don't want my bandwidth to be the limiting factor anymore than it already is.
And the analog joystick has far more precision for movement than WADS does. It's still just a matter of personal preference and familiarity.
Amazing what a little competition can do. It was never about them being unable to bring people these speeds, or it being cost prohibitive...they just don't want to spend the fucking money until they're losing more customers than they're signing up in a given quarter. I've had techs from my ISP, Charter Communications, basically tell me that my local node is way oversaturated due to this being a very densely populated area, and that the main hardware is complete crap, but that corporate isn't going to upgrade until the amount they're spending on service calls exceeds the cost of upgrading the node. You know it's fucked up when the company's own fucking techs are exasperated enough to start telling customers shit like that...
They ought to say fuck the desktops and notebooks and get a fucking Steambox on the market. With proper partner support for the hardware, they wouldn't even need to rely on Dell or HP or Microsoft, they could do it all in-house, and if they do it right and allow expansion/upgradeability, it could be a real competitor to the console systems and mobile apps that are pretty much dominating gaming right now.
2. Steam's lock-in isn't that powerful.
I disagree. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal...but most PC gamers I know already have much more money invested into their Steam Library then the retail cost of Windows 8. None of them have any plans to upgrade, not their gaming rigs, anyway, for specifically that reason.
The only reason you find them superior is because you've been using WADS since 1992, you're used to it. If you'd been playing FPSs on a console for the last 20 years, you'd be pointing and laughing at the K&M users.
The keyboard part of the combo is fucking awful for a beginner. It's not intuitive at all, especially in games that greatly extend beyond the standard WADS interface and have a shit-ton of extended function keys (most FPSs these days).
It's really no different than why the standard QWERTY keyboard layout stuck around all these years. It's no inherently better than the most common alternatives like DVORAK, but they'll never catch on because everyone learned on QWERTY and thus are most familiar with it.
You can find the same arguments in the controller versus motion control debate. Maybe we should all just get the fuck off each other's lawns and accept the fact that it's an issue of personal preference and little else?
So, in other words, you don't use Facebook?
I used a gym ball for a while and I found that I missed being able to sit back and kick my feet up too much. Back to a good old computer chair for me.
I've wanted to give this a go for a while now, just can't find the time to implement it.
Still, looks awesome.
I find that kills my energy more than anything, not the exercising, but an overly large meal break. The days where I just eat a sammich and keep on trucking I generally do alright, but the once or twice a week we go out to lunch somewhere like Chili's or Olive Garden all I want to do is go to sleep when I get back to work.
I do ~15 miles a day on a recumbent bike that varies resistance levels over the course of the ride and I generally feel more tired after the large meal than I do the ride.
There are ways to dispute a law you disagree with. Disobeying it is usually not a good way.
I disagree. Civil disobedience, historically speaking, is a very effective method to bring about political change. The founding of the U.S. itself is steeped in civil disobedience.
The simple fact is, most people don't give a shit about injustice until it effects them personally. Civil disobedience brings it to their doorstep and forces them to acknowledge it. It took people occupying segregated lunch counters in the South before civil rights were really addressed 50 years ago, just as it took people occupying lower Manhattan to get wealth inequality really addressed today. Whether you agree with the protesters or not is irrelevant (and I'm really not interested in a bunch of ranting responses about the Occupy movement one way or the other, honestly); it forced those issues into the limelight. Mission: Accomplished.
Chess is about to become a whole lot more boring a lot sooner than that, once things like Google's Project Glass hit the scene.
No more thinking about your next move, now you've got the Chess App tracking the pieces visually suggesting moves in real-time. Of course, so does your opponent, so now you've got two human beings doing little more than manually moving the pieces around while Google plays with itself.
It won't be about who's the better chess player, it'll be about who has the better chess app. I'd imagine a lot of games with a strategic element are about to become boring when we're all wearing our fancy connected glasses...and once we move on to ocular implants, you won't even know whether or not your opponent is doing this at all and everything will be on the honor system.
I collected comic books myself. Got boxes and boxes of them in the basement boarded and bagged in sealed containers, just waiting for the day for me to pass them off to my unborn son.
Who will more than likely deem them retarded and sell them off, but hey, I tried.
Yeah, I've got hundreds of self-burned DVD's from the early 2000's that I had to trash because they're unreadable now. I wouldn't consider that being a real long-term solution. Flash memory (in some form) will probably be okay, though. Even the oldest flash drives I have (32-64 whole MB's of storage! WOW!!) are still readable today. They're useless due to their size, of course, but they still work and the data is still on them.
Now, if the USB interface disappears in the next 25 years you could be screwed, but I somehow doubt they will be entirely gone in 25 years, considering the availability of serial ports still in place today that predate USB by decades themselves.
Or, for a cheaper alternative, one of those digital photo frames that can play video as well as display pictures. Most of them plug in and take standard memory cards. A tablet would probably also suffice, but I would opt for something that can take removable media independently and isn't limited to internal storage. Not sure it would work for the data archival, but it should work for the media at least...
As soon as they try to implement it in earnest it will end up being slapped down. Almost everyone I know on social media isn't acting as themselves, they're acting as the idealized version of themselves that they want other people to see.
They'll bring in some angry basement dweller chan-tard based on his online persona, and they'll quickly find that he's just a scared, immature little fuck-wit, and this will all go out the window. Either that, or some politician's son or daughter will set off a few triggers and it'll end up squashed that way.
Either way, I'm not very concerned.
But how many people have an online persona that is vastly different than they're real life one? I have friends that act like they're Che Guevara on their social media postings that, in real life, will bitch and cry and complain for an hour if the person at Starbucks takes too long to prepare their non-fat mochaccinolatte, and don't even get me started on all the people that bitch and complain about "freeloaders" and "people living on the government teat" that I know for a fact are collecting government services themselves or have benefited from them in the past....that's another particularly LOL-worthy demographic these days. And then, of course, there's the "I'm ME and I don't care if anyone likes my opinions or not!" posts I used to see all the time, written by people that are, without a hint of irony, obviously searching for positive reinforcement from their social group.
The number of people I know that are actually 'themselves' on the internet, and not some idealized version of themselves that they invented to be popular, is quite slim. I don't bother with social media anymore because I got tired of dealing with cartoon characters and hypocrites. If people actually had to be themselves on the internet, warts and all, I bet the number of social media junkies out there would plummet overnight...
For those reasons, I fail to see the value in this...
Or even full-on psychopathy...
I grew up in a military family. My step-father was career Army, my brother and his wife are both Marines, and not only that, but pretty much my entire extended family comes from rural settings where guns are ubiquitous and I spent many a summer on a farm. I've been around guns almost my entire life. I'm not afraid of guns, I'm afraid of the number of idiots out there that think they're fucking Rambo because they took an 8-hour course and fired at a few paper targets.
My brother carries a piece and I don't feel nervous around him because he not only has been trained how to use the weapon, but he's actually used weapons in combat while in Iraq during the initial invasion back in '03, as has his wife. My step-father did multiple tours, both in Desert Shield/Storm and Iraqi Freedom (not to mention the random ops he was involved in down in Central and South America in the 80's and 90's doing who knows what), and he also has combat experience. My extended family were born and raised with guns and are avid hunters (not to mention a few police officers in the mix as well). They've got the experience.
Contrast that with the idiot friend of mine that found out that they were legalizing concealed carry here in Wisconsin and treated it like a goddamned Xbox 360 achievement to unlock, went out and bought a ridiculous hand-cannon that he can barely handle because he wanted a 'Deagle' just like the ones in the FPSs he likes to play that he's shot a handful of times, and is now looking to pick up an AR-15, because the hand-cannon wasn't enough for the "defense" of his apartment with papier-mâché walls. I would trust my step-father or my brother with that weapon, but him? Absolutely not.
The law doesn't make a distinction for fucking retards getting a gun for all the wrong reasons, and I don't know how it ever would without impinging upon the rights of those mature enough to handle a weapon, but to pretend like it's not a worthy concern and stems only from a fear of guns is ridiculous. I'm betting you yourself know people in your own life that you know should not be carrying a weapon that are legally in their rights to do so because there is nothing to stop them from applying and receiving the permits. Hell, I'll make it even easier: How often do you see people driving that you cannot believe they actually managed to get a fucking license? They fulfilled the training requirements, they took the test and passed, but they still drive like a fucking retard? Surely there are gun owners out there that fit the same criteria, and if you deny that, you're just being deliberately obtuse.
You're ignoring the possibility that innocents would have likely been hit in the crossfire. A permit to carry doesn't mean the person carrying a sharpshooter or even necessarily a good shot. I know a person that carries a ridiculous hand-cannon he bought when they legalized concealed carry here recently and he's only fired the weapon a couple times total (he joked about how he could barely keep the thing on target due to the recoil and this is a weapon he carries for self-defense in public!). I actually feel less safe when I'm with him and he's packing, which is why I won't hang out with him when he is. He chalks it up to me being afraid of guns, but in actuality, I'm afraid of him with a gun...
In the right hands it's possible that someone could have taken this guy out and prevented this many deaths, but it's equally possible we could be talking about even more dead, with some of them tragically being killed by people trying to shoot the asshole that shot up the place. I doubt the families of those victims would have taken much comfort in the circumstances, regardless of who was pulling the trigger and why.
Of course, I understand that there are many vectors through which morons can harm others either deliberately or through the fact that they're fucking morons, but I was talking about guns because that's the subject at hand; alcohol abuse and inexperienced drivers is another argument.
The problem is that the second I utter my concerns about how easy it is for people to get guns in this country that really shouldn't have them I get pounced on by a ton of rabid pro-gun people that mistake my misgivings for me advocating that all guns be banned forever from civilian hands. They use the same arguments you do.
For what it's worth, the amount of training required to get a license these days is much, much higher than it was in my day, and my day was only 20 years ago. I waltzed into the DMV in Georgia and got my license on my 16th birthday after passing a written test only a real retard could possibly fail and taking a road test that consisted of 4 right turns around the block, a Y-turn in the parking lot, and then backing into a parking space. Contrast this with the mandatory 6-months of Driver's Ed that kids are required to take here, the many hours of practical driving time with an instructor present, and the fact that kids can only get a probationary license until they're 18, which carries restrictions on how many people can be in the car, what hours they're allowed to operate the car, and that a single fuck-up results in them losing their license for a varying length of time. They are also required to take and pass an alcohol awareness course. Getting busted for underage drinking, even if it has nothing to do with driving at all, results in suspension of their license up here. That's automatic.
What level of training do you feel is appropriate for firearms ownership? Do you believe that the level of training required today for gun ownership is sufficient? Honest question, because many of the people I talk to that are decidedly pro-gun feel that there are already too many restrictions on gun ownership and that it should be easier for people to get guns "for their protection"...a sentiment that, coupled with my first-hand experiences with that friend of mine packing that ridiculous weapon, is frankly terrifying.