I don't know that this is much of a nomenclature problem for the professionals, only for us ignorant civilians that don't have the hard & fast definitions to hand (or a media that's sloppy using those definitions perhaps).
As a karma-whore, here are the def's from http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/fra mes.html: PLANET: An object that formed in the disk surrounding a star. To be called a planet, an object must be more massive than Pluto (1/500 the Earth's mass) and less massive than ten times Jupiter's mass. Unlike stars, planets do not produce light of their own but merely reflect that of the star(s) they orbit. STAR:A celestial object that generates energy by means of nuclear fusion at its core. To do this it must have more than about 0.08 the sun's mass. If, for instance, the planet Jupiter were some fifty to one hundred times more massive than it is, fusion reactions would transpire in its core and it would be a star.
there actually is a good point in there about free-ditribution of books online.
http://www.baen.com/library has a large collection of downloadable books, and a great philosophical point about it. Basically, they're putting their money where their mouth is. Commendable.
I entirely disagree. The 'serious action' you mention prove it themselves. The console titles are inherently unMODable, but look at the game concepts: MGS2 (derived from Thief), Halo (derived from TeamFortress), FFX is essentially the tenth 'mod' of FF. The PC titles are even better: The Sims is blazingly customizeable (not the engine, but the superficial stuff that is amusing to those who play the Sims) and RCT is equally moddable with custom rides etc. Tell me how successful the Sims would have been if you get 2 people, 3 types of houses, 2 carpets, 5 pictures, and some furniture - and NEVER ANYTHING ELSE. Or RCT if you had only the default rides, no self-designs or importables. No, this precisely proves that customizability directly extends a games lifespan.
It's simple; he's talking about all the damn games that ship with neither an editor or customization tools. For every Quake3 there are a dozen Cossacks or Baldur's Gates. There are mainly 2 reasons (IMO) that this is the case: 1) marketing wonks decide that letting the players make more games means foreshortened revenue stream. These are the same idiots that think people will buy a 'scenario pack' at the store for $40. Tell you what moron, how about I take that same amount of money and just buy a different game? 2) developers throw together tools to build a rough version of the game to sell to investors or publishers. Publishers bite, and developers jump into building the game. They work for many months on this labor of love. Finally, they start planning on what goes into the final master disk. Someone realizes there's enough space to include the devtools but whoops- these are the same crappy, kludgy, hard-to-use tools they've been using since before they had a publisher. Suddenly, the idea of nursemaiding 000's of gamers (some of the "cd-tray is a cupholder" variety) through using tools that, if misused, my seriously screw up the game, is much less attractive and the idea dies a quiet death.
Both of these are patronizing. Give us the tools. Id proved with DOOM that even marginal access to the code under the game will ultimately extend the lifespan of the game tenfold. If I play a marginal game, but have no tools I play it and toss it in the drawer, never to be seen again. Give me the tools, and if I'm interested in the game I may try to make it better.
Most of the bigger companies have NOT figured this out, to their woe.
I had those bendy-frame titanium glasses....
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· Score: 2
and they sucked. Frame: bendy as all heck, would return with nary a problem. HINGES: due to the difficulty of welding titanium (so they explained to me) they had to use a milder-than-normal steel for the hinges. Bent like tin. (so they said, but when I asked them how they welded the eyeloops & nose bridge together, they didn't know...)
So as long as the only thing getting bent on your glasses was the actual lens fram or nose bridge, everything was cool. But if the hinges were put under stress (like 99.999% of the time), you're screwed.
To their credit, it only took moderate bitching before they allowed me to return them for a pair of plain-old-spring-hinge glasses which are great.
Being a reviewer myself (pimpage: for Strategy-Gaming.com) I'll be the very first to admit that reviews are subjective. The only way a review is of objective value is if you follow a few reviewers or sites and find that their opinions coincide with your own on some past games that you liked or didn't. Once you've established that commonality, then you have a reasonable chance that their opinion is going to be a useful predictor of a new game.
Back on-topic, I'm still waiting for my swag, dammit. I get free games, but that's it.
And I would agree generally with many of the points above. 1) The ability to voicedial does not mitigate the loss of tactile dialing. I do 75% of my phoning while driving (yes, I'm one of THEM) and not being able to dial while driving is really tough. Voicedial helps, but then I have to have the number in my addressbook first. 2) the joint functionality is barely more useful than duct-taping a phone and a pda together. Sure you can dial numbers out of the address book, but the two branches of functionality (phone functions: call logging, message reception, etc) are all on the "phone" interface. The palm functions are all on the palm interface. Want to look up a spreadsheet while you're on the phone? SORRY. 3) the buttons/ergonomics are atrocious. Part of it has to do with the only case available being this clunky folding leatherette POS (with no belt clip, I might add:( ), but having buttons on opposing sides means its convenient for neither lefties OR righties. 4) the power meter is a fantasy. Have the phone on, it reads 50% remain. Turn off phone, it says 25% remain (only running the palm?) turn phone back on, it says 100% remain. Reliable=not! 5) the software interface is possibly the worst. Sure the palm's the palm. But the phone didn't have to be locked into a rectangular grid of 1-9 buttons like a phone - it's a screen, they could have done anything with it. No ability to scroll through what's on the screen with any of the buttons, and a lot of the phone functions are hidden beneath buttons that only a stylus is small enough to hit. 6) the phone is mediocre in terms of signal control, reception, dropping etc but that might be Sprint vs. AT&T (my old carrier)
Despite all this bitching, I'd still give it a 5.5 on a 1-10 score (10 being good). I only have to carry 1 "thing" which is a plus. And all my stuff (no matter how clumsily presented) is in one place.
It's clearly first-generation, and it will get better, but hey, that's life at the bleeding edge. I just wish I could find SOMEONE at Samsung that would care about these user issues, so the i-Whatever could be better.
Ironically, I also use my Yahoo account for junkmail which is mostly filled with spam from -you guessed it- Yahoo.
So how much of their purported 'traffic' is them sending email to themselves? Are their corporate reports audited by Arthur Anderson by any chance? Doesn't this mean that they'll choke on themselves, like some sort of reverse Ouroboros thingy?
I'm curious how people could get goverment to consider this. I live in the metro area of MN, but I'm in 56k hell - no DSL provider, the local telco (a subsid of Sprint) has been telling me "within the next 6 months" for 3 years...and a cable company based in Bumf*ck, MN that is entirely uninterested in offering cable internet. I called them on it and their reply was "Why would we want to do that?". Ugh. So how did the PUD (unfortunate acronym, that) of WA get such enlightenment? Help a guy join the 21st century from home.
"I stick with Intel because it just plain works, no worries."
For which the stockholders of Intel thank you for being a consumer who apparently cares less about his money than they do.
Why would anyone buy this nonsense? Do Fords work better than Chevrolet? Toyotas better than Honda? Maybe you have some uber-comfort-level you have to have with your chips, but I'd rather save 50% of the cash, thanks.
I haven't heard anyything about this life form, but it's clearly not the largest life form on earth. 1) it's individuals as a collective organism, so if you use this as a "single mass" specimen the Great barrier Reef is probably the biggest. 2) For single 'organism' the biggest is clearly the Armillaria ostoyae (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/ fungus000806.html) or the Aspen tree "pando" (http://www.extremescience.com/aspengrove.htm)
Actually, one of the critical bases for assuming there's an ocean under the surface of the ice on Europa is that the cracks on the surface are dynamic and the surface is so remarkably free of impact structures that it is clear that rapid refreezing of a liquid medium is the most likely cause. If this is the case, then the liquid UNDER the ice has been exposed to external 'contaminantion' almost constantly. If you're talking more specifically about somehow contaminating the "Europa Biome" with something from the "Terra Biome", well, that's an argument against ANY space exploration, ever. I think we've gotten pretty good at cleaning the probes we're sending to other planets by now. At least, nobody's complained!
1) not having seen it myself, I have to rely on all the reports I've read from others, but they are universally commenting on how easy it is to 'build a dungeon' - 15-20 minutes and you have a fully adventurable B2 Keep on the Borderlands-style dungeon crawl, with about that same level of inherent logic. Obviously, more complicated things take more time, but the scripting engine is reportedly similarly straighforward, one outside observer having IIRC set up a guard that would wander randomly around a town, and say hello, nice night to every townsperson, call for the watch and attack any thief seen committing a thiefly act, or go up and question any non-townsperson seen as to destination and reason for being there. This took about 15 minutes, and is a script that could then be applied to any or all guards in that town.
2) I think this is going to be the toughest part for DM's to deal with. Yes, in NWN you can become anything in the game, and possess any NPC invisibly to the players (so suddenly you ARE that bartender they are talking too...play it right and they will never know you were there...) that still leaves a big THING unresolved, and that's fudging. As a DM, I can't conceive in a PnP game when I haven't fudged here & there, usually in favor of the characters. Maybe I've overpowered an encounter, maybe the characters are having unjustifiable bad luck. But in NWN "still it runs" with the game system operating so fast and a level below events (i.e. attack rolls, etc) I don't know that I'll be able to intervene invisibly. After all, in a PnP game the DM can always say "you go back to town and a few days pass" well, in NWN the tired & beaten PC's have to GET back to town. In PnP you maybe 'forgot' to roll for encounters. In NWN if you've said there's a 30% chance they meet a Dragon, they have that chance whether you're feeling sympathetic or no. I think DM'ing is going to require lightning reflexes to intervene in these cases, and to do with with a light touch.
I entirely disagree. I'm a game reviewer and I run into this from reader email all the time.
While nostalgia for old classic computer games might be cool in sort of a "I remember when..." way, PLAY THEM. Go to the Underdogs site and download them and play them. You will soon see that despite rosy-colored memories of how much fun you had playing Empire or Sword of Aragon, suddenly it's apparent that, while great games for their time, our expectations are tremendously higher. Games back then managed a very small number of variables, and were incredibly easy to 'break' by disobeying the programmer's expectations. Either that, or you were straitjacketed by the game to play the way it wanted you to. And let me say right out: this is NOT to demean the creations of pioneering game programmers like Dan(i) Bunten. Dani created some outstandingly playable games. But play Command HQ (probably the best game of its type at the time) and then play a beta of Warcraft III or Europa Universalis2. There are a jillion more levels of strategy, AI capability (sans cheating), units, capabilities, flexibility for mod authors, and on and on and on...
In the same sense everyone likes to dis as 'chrome' modern graphics ("real computer gamers will play in EGA and like it!"), that's horse puckey too. EGA SUCKED. I still can't even see the colors Cyan or Magenta without being nauseated.
Face it, like it or not, while some modern games blow, so did some old ones. And the good ones then can't really hold a candle to the good ones now (SFC, Shogun, West Front, EU2, etc) except through the fuzzy favorable view of nostalgia.
While I 100% agree that fantasy movies aren't 'serious enough' for the navel-contemplating academy, it stands to reason that a movie that is essentially 1 giant movie released in 3 parts (unlike, frex Star Wars or Jaws, where the sequels were rationalized appendices to the original movie) would not seriously come up for consideration until all 3 were out. Yeah, it's not really fair but it makes a *kind* of sense.
Plus it's 99% who slept with whom. Shakespeare in Love won best pic over Saving Private Ryan, remember.
While I understand at a gut level that you might be disappointed in the engine, I'd disagree that it's a big deal. To implement "swimming" sounds simple, but realize that they have MILLIONS of combinations of body types (you will be able to mix & match to make a new creature out of an orc with long draggy arms f'rinstance). Swimming (like horseback riding also not included) would entail a HUGE investment in new models, motions, AI programming for relatively limited gamevalue return. Remember, every monster would have to constantly make the calculation 'can i get there quicker by cutting across the stream rather than use the footbridge?' along with commensurate risk evaluations. Ditto climbing, and in fact probably WORSE. So it was a matter of resources. And yes, they've been doing it a long time, but it's a HUGE project.
To dash a little more cold water on the subject of swimming (ha ha, sorry) IMO swimming is very much one of those categories of events that DM's fudge, and that is going to be an area where NWN is weak - especially for those of us running persistent 24/7 servers ala [shameless plug/]www.alandfaraway.net. [/shameless plug] Look, in a PnP game, you (as the DM) are constantly tweaking and managing NPC and environmental changes in response to all the unexpected crap PC's come up with. While NWN is implementing everything they can to allow DM's to deal with this, the nature of the beast is such that players can play while you're NOT THERE, meaning every dialogue, every event, every potential NPC reaction will have to be scripted or risk 'breaking' your precious scenario. In the case of swimming, I can't for a moment think of a published module in which making a swimming check is indispensable; failing it is simply too save-or-die for most DM's and players. Usually it's more like "the ship sinks in a storm and you get washed ashore - make a swim check to see how much of your stuff you could save" - which obviously could be handled in a variety of other ways. Climbing, being more critical to a specific class, is somewhat more missed. But the various forum boards have already pretty much addressed the issue, and AFAIK Bioware IS contemplating adding both of these to an expansion/sequel....but people now just want the darn game in their sweaty paws and would rather omit these than wait longer!
The critical VALUE to NWN that makes it so much better than BG or IWD is 1) the implementation of D&D 3e rules set, meaning a HUGE player base familiar with the rules and system, 2) a distinct and major effort by Bioware to make the game customizeable and usable by anyone to build anything they want...paralleling the value of RPG's in general, and addressing the main weakness of CRPGs.
While everyone is ooh-ing and ahh-ing at this (remarkable) accomplishment, doesn't this simply highlight how ABSURD it was that the "Middle Kingdom" essentially turned it's back on the world thereafter?
If I were the Chinese, I'd be a little proud, but a lot embarrassed. Kind of like finding out your uncle invented sustainable tabletop fusion 50 years ago, and has been using it since then to run his toaster and heating pad.
...and the native americans, fearing that their government benefits might be affected, will immediately claim they they are actually native americans and need to be re-interred as quickly as possible (despite the big horned helmet and firecrackers found beside the body).
just another viewpoint getting in the way
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Let's see, we don't like mass media because the information they present is filtered, edited, spun, and content-stripped away until there's little left besides indoctrinary pablum fit for the lowest-common-denominator viewer, John & Joanne Q. Public.
But we LIKE disinformation.com because the information they present is filtered, edited, spun, and content-stripped away until there's little left besides indoctrinary pablum fit for the lowest-common-denominator "independent thinker", John & Joanne Q. Public.
Oh yeah, sure. That's a HUGE improvent.
Granted, disinfo.com is much more of the category of "oh look at me, I'm a free-thinker not beholden to mass-media" club, or perhaps the "look I'm different like everyone else" category. IMO you're just sucking at a different tit, and fooling yourself that it's more 'significant' because it's not mainstream. Well, sorry, that only means its got fewer error-checking hurdles.
The 'real' web is what you make of it, not what someone shoves in your face as 'important'. I choose my content, and I find my own primary sources. I refuse to see ideolgue-flavored ranting as an example of the best the web can be, rather, it's an example of the crap that one has to wade through to GET to the good parts.
And by the way, in re Marty's rant about cheerleaders: maybe we will never know if there is a higher power, but it certainly IS relevant, or does he disagree with Pascal's logic in the matter?
Didn't they say that this device ("IT") would revolutionize the tranportation industry, and would change the design of cities in the future?
I'm sorry, but this is one of the most stupid & overblown ideas I've ever seen (and that's NOT hyperbole). It's a magnificent idea...unless you have to carry something bigger than a pen. It's a tremendous idea...unless you live somewhere where there is WEATHER. Sure, I'm going to ride the segway my 46-mile one way trip to work, in Minnesota, in any month besides July or August. Yeah.
For the 0.00002% of the world population that could afford this stupid thing, and the 0.0000001% of them who live indoors their entire lives this is the perfect device. I believe that leaves 13/1000ths of a single human for which this is the ultimate vehicle.
More like revolutionize the hyperbole and change the design of your wallet in the future.
Couldn't you (as a net admin) block the IP to the peekaboo(ty) site?
Lesseee, according to my monitor Jimmy in accounting has used 1.8 gigs of bandwidth on our t1 in the last 4 hours all from one IP. Hm, IP doesn't show up on my list of naughty sites, and it's not stileproject.com. OK, I'll just ban that IP, copy the contents of his temp file to my admin machine... done.
In that circumstance what has peekabooty done except given poor Jimmy a false sense of security. In that respect, it's a Machiavellian netadmin's dream.
Well, I'd agree with a lot of what Jon is saying, aside from the fact that BHD blew as a movie. The reason the US soldiers got caught in Mogadishu was not because they didn't know how to fight in the environment (the U.S. military MOUT schools and trainers are excellent), it was not becuase they "didn't know what to do when civilians were used as shields" (they did: try not to deliberately kill civilians but defend yourself and your unit first - a complicated and contradictory task that they by & large performed admirably). Mogadishu was a perfect example of peaceime soldiering on so many levels:
1)first and foremost, the responsibility of ANY commander is to recognize that in any operation there is a potential for disaster. Like Gordon at Khartoum, the general in charge utterly failed this first-order responsibility, and *should* have been court-martialled for not having the proper assets available for extrication (i.e. armored troops on hand, warmed up and ready to go).
2) excessive high-level interference. Some sources speculate that the REASON insufficient rescue forces were available was because the Clinton administration was not willing for such heavy forces to be committed in theater, and simultaneously was not trusting enough of our allies to let them know to be ready (altho, according to my personal contacts, this lack of trust was entirely justified as regards the Italians, for example)
3) No commander refuses intelligence, even crappy intel. The fact that the local CIA station was not allowed (again, by White House order according to the the BHD book) to communicate directly with the armed forces commander is a sad commentary on the armchair-soldiering going on in Washington. The idea that the local assets 'value' was going to be estimated several thousand miles away and THEN distributed for force-consumption is ludicrously patronizing at best, criminally irresponsible at worst.
BHD *could* have been a great movie, because there were a lot of subtleties of colonialism, politics, diplomacy, and militray policy that could have played out like a greek tragedy: like a Sophoclean hero, everyone (except the lowest grunts, and even some of them) KNEW what their fatal flaw was, and yet soldiered on knowing that therein lay their doom. Could have been great, that is, except for Mr. Bruckheimer who never saw a scene that could use 'a few more explosions, and how about some more bullets? Can we get more bullets?'. Bah, BHD-Movie had about as much to do with what happened in Mogadishu as Pearl Harbor-movie had to do with what happened 12/7/41.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know that this is much of a nomenclature problem for the professionals, only for us ignorant civilians that don't have the hard & fast definitions to hand (or a media that's sloppy using those definitions perhaps).
a mes.html:
As a karma-whore, here are the def's from http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Glossary/fr
PLANET: An object that formed in the disk surrounding a star. To be called a planet, an object must be more massive than Pluto (1/500 the Earth's mass) and less massive than ten times Jupiter's mass. Unlike stars, planets do not produce light of their own but merely reflect that of the star(s) they orbit.
STAR:A celestial object that generates energy by means of nuclear fusion at its core. To do this it must have more than about 0.08 the sun's mass. If, for instance, the planet Jupiter were some fifty to one hundred times more massive than it is, fusion reactions would transpire in its core and it would be a star.
there actually is a good point in there about free-ditribution of books online.
http://www.baen.com/library has a large collection of downloadable books, and a great philosophical point about it. Basically, they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Commendable.
I entirely disagree.
The 'serious action' you mention prove it themselves. The console titles are inherently unMODable, but look at the game concepts: MGS2 (derived from Thief), Halo (derived from TeamFortress), FFX is essentially the tenth 'mod' of FF. The PC titles are even better: The Sims is blazingly customizeable (not the engine, but the superficial stuff that is amusing to those who play the Sims) and RCT is equally moddable with custom rides etc.
Tell me how successful the Sims would have been if you get 2 people, 3 types of houses, 2 carpets, 5 pictures, and some furniture - and NEVER ANYTHING ELSE. Or RCT if you had only the default rides, no self-designs or importables.
No, this precisely proves that customizability directly extends a games lifespan.
It's simple; he's talking about all the damn games that ship with neither an editor or customization tools. For every Quake3 there are a dozen Cossacks or Baldur's Gates. There are mainly 2 reasons (IMO) that this is the case:
1) marketing wonks decide that letting the players make more games means foreshortened revenue stream. These are the same idiots that think people will buy a 'scenario pack' at the store for $40. Tell you what moron, how about I take that same amount of money and just buy a different game?
2) developers throw together tools to build a rough version of the game to sell to investors or publishers. Publishers bite, and developers jump into building the game. They work for many months on this labor of love. Finally, they start planning on what goes into the final master disk. Someone realizes there's enough space to include the devtools but whoops- these are the same crappy, kludgy, hard-to-use tools they've been using since before they had a publisher. Suddenly, the idea of nursemaiding 000's of gamers (some of the "cd-tray is a cupholder" variety) through using tools that, if misused, my seriously screw up the game, is much less attractive and the idea dies a quiet death.
Both of these are patronizing. Give us the tools. Id proved with DOOM that even marginal access to the code under the game will ultimately extend the lifespan of the game tenfold. If I play a marginal game, but have no tools I play it and toss it in the drawer, never to be seen again.
Give me the tools, and if I'm interested in the game I may try to make it better.
Most of the bigger companies have NOT figured this out, to their woe.
and they sucked.
Frame: bendy as all heck, would return with nary a problem.
HINGES: due to the difficulty of welding titanium (so they explained to me) they had to use a milder-than-normal steel for the hinges. Bent like tin.
(so they said, but when I asked them how they welded the eyeloops & nose bridge together, they didn't know...)
So as long as the only thing getting bent on your glasses was the actual lens fram or nose bridge, everything was cool. But if the hinges were put under stress (like 99.999% of the time), you're screwed.
To their credit, it only took moderate bitching before they allowed me to return them for a pair of plain-old-spring-hinge glasses which are great.
Being a reviewer myself (pimpage: for Strategy-Gaming.com) I'll be the very first to admit that reviews are subjective. The only way a review is of objective value is if you follow a few reviewers or sites and find that their opinions coincide with your own on some past games that you liked or didn't. Once you've established that commonality, then you have a reasonable chance that their opinion is going to be a useful predictor of a new game.
Back on-topic, I'm still waiting for my swag, dammit. I get free games, but that's it.
And I would agree generally with many of the points above. :( ), but having buttons on opposing sides means its convenient for neither lefties OR righties.
1) The ability to voicedial does not mitigate the loss of tactile dialing. I do 75% of my phoning while driving (yes, I'm one of THEM) and not being able to dial while driving is really tough. Voicedial helps, but then I have to have the number in my addressbook first.
2) the joint functionality is barely more useful than duct-taping a phone and a pda together. Sure you can dial numbers out of the address book, but the two branches of functionality (phone functions: call logging, message reception, etc) are all on the "phone" interface. The palm functions are all on the palm interface. Want to look up a spreadsheet while you're on the phone? SORRY.
3) the buttons/ergonomics are atrocious. Part of it has to do with the only case available being this clunky folding leatherette POS (with no belt clip, I might add
4) the power meter is a fantasy. Have the phone on, it reads 50% remain. Turn off phone, it says 25% remain (only running the palm?) turn phone back on, it says 100% remain. Reliable=not!
5) the software interface is possibly the worst. Sure the palm's the palm. But the phone didn't have to be locked into a rectangular grid of 1-9 buttons like a phone - it's a screen, they could have done anything with it. No ability to scroll through what's on the screen with any of the buttons, and a lot of the phone functions are hidden beneath buttons that only a stylus is small enough to hit.
6) the phone is mediocre in terms of signal control, reception, dropping etc but that might be Sprint vs. AT&T (my old carrier)
Despite all this bitching, I'd still give it a 5.5 on a 1-10 score (10 being good). I only have to carry 1 "thing" which is a plus. And all my stuff (no matter how clumsily presented) is in one place.
It's clearly first-generation, and it will get better, but hey, that's life at the bleeding edge. I just wish I could find SOMEONE at Samsung that would care about these user issues, so the i-Whatever could be better.
www.scumware.com
Ironically, I also use my Yahoo account for junkmail which is mostly filled with spam from -you guessed it- Yahoo.
So how much of their purported 'traffic' is them sending email to themselves? Are their corporate reports audited by Arthur Anderson by any chance? Doesn't this mean that they'll choke on themselves, like some sort of reverse Ouroboros thingy?
I'm curious how people could get goverment to consider this. I live in the metro area of MN, but I'm in 56k hell - no DSL provider, the local telco (a subsid of Sprint) has been telling me "within the next 6 months" for 3 years...and a cable company based in Bumf*ck, MN that is entirely uninterested in offering cable internet. I called them on it and their reply was "Why would we want to do that?". Ugh.
So how did the PUD (unfortunate acronym, that) of WA get such enlightenment?
Help a guy join the 21st century from home.
"I stick with Intel because it just plain works, no worries."
For which the stockholders of Intel thank you for being a consumer who apparently cares less about his money than they do.
Why would anyone buy this nonsense? Do Fords work better than Chevrolet? Toyotas better than Honda? Maybe you have some uber-comfort-level you have to have with your chips, but I'd rather save 50% of the cash, thanks.
I haven't heard anyything about this life form, but it's clearly not the largest life form on earth./ fungus000806.html) or the Aspen tree "pando" (http://www.extremescience.com/aspengrove.htm)
1) it's individuals as a collective organism, so if you use this as a "single mass" specimen the Great barrier Reef is probably the biggest.
2) For single 'organism' the biggest is clearly the Armillaria ostoyae (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews
Actually, one of the critical bases for assuming there's an ocean under the surface of the ice on Europa is that the cracks on the surface are dynamic and the surface is so remarkably free of impact structures that it is clear that rapid refreezing of a liquid medium is the most likely cause.
If this is the case, then the liquid UNDER the ice has been exposed to external 'contaminantion' almost constantly.
If you're talking more specifically about somehow contaminating the "Europa Biome" with something from the "Terra Biome", well, that's an argument against ANY space exploration, ever. I think we've gotten pretty good at cleaning the probes we're sending to other planets by now. At least, nobody's complained!
1) not having seen it myself, I have to rely on all the reports I've read from others, but they are universally commenting on how easy it is to 'build a dungeon' - 15-20 minutes and you have a fully adventurable B2 Keep on the Borderlands-style dungeon crawl, with about that same level of inherent logic.
Obviously, more complicated things take more time, but the scripting engine is reportedly similarly straighforward, one outside observer having IIRC set up a guard that would wander randomly around a town, and say hello, nice night to every townsperson, call for the watch and attack any thief seen committing a thiefly act, or go up and question any non-townsperson seen as to destination and reason for being there. This took about 15 minutes, and is a script that could then be applied to any or all guards in that town.
2) I think this is going to be the toughest part for DM's to deal with. Yes, in NWN you can become anything in the game, and possess any NPC invisibly to the players (so suddenly you ARE that bartender they are talking too...play it right and they will never know you were there...) that still leaves a big THING unresolved, and that's fudging.
As a DM, I can't conceive in a PnP game when I haven't fudged here & there, usually in favor of the characters. Maybe I've overpowered an encounter, maybe the characters are having unjustifiable bad luck. But in NWN "still it runs" with the game system operating so fast and a level below events (i.e. attack rolls, etc) I don't know that I'll be able to intervene invisibly. After all, in a PnP game the DM can always say "you go back to town and a few days pass" well, in NWN the tired & beaten PC's have to GET back to town. In PnP you maybe 'forgot' to roll for encounters. In NWN if you've said there's a 30% chance they meet a Dragon, they have that chance whether you're feeling sympathetic or no. I think DM'ing is going to require lightning reflexes to intervene in these cases, and to do with with a light touch.
But those probably address your points, anyway.
I entirely disagree. I'm a game reviewer and I run into this from reader email all the time.
While nostalgia for old classic computer games might be cool in sort of a "I remember when..." way, PLAY THEM. Go to the Underdogs site and download them and play them. You will soon see that despite rosy-colored memories of how much fun you had playing Empire or Sword of Aragon, suddenly it's apparent that, while great games for their time, our expectations are tremendously higher. Games back then managed a very small number of variables, and were incredibly easy to 'break' by disobeying the programmer's expectations. Either that, or you were straitjacketed by the game to play the way it wanted you to. And let me say right out: this is NOT to demean the creations of pioneering game programmers like Dan(i) Bunten. Dani created some outstandingly playable games. But play Command HQ (probably the best game of its type at the time) and then play a beta of Warcraft III or Europa Universalis2. There are a jillion more levels of strategy, AI capability (sans cheating), units, capabilities, flexibility for mod authors, and on and on and on...
In the same sense everyone likes to dis as 'chrome' modern graphics ("real computer gamers will play in EGA and like it!"), that's horse puckey too. EGA SUCKED. I still can't even see the colors Cyan or Magenta without being nauseated.
Face it, like it or not, while some modern games blow, so did some old ones. And the good ones then can't really hold a candle to the good ones now (SFC, Shogun, West Front, EU2, etc) except through the fuzzy favorable view of nostalgia.
While I 100% agree that fantasy movies aren't 'serious enough' for the navel-contemplating academy, it stands to reason that a movie that is essentially 1 giant movie released in 3 parts (unlike, frex Star Wars or Jaws, where the sequels were rationalized appendices to the original movie) would not seriously come up for consideration until all 3 were out.
Yeah, it's not really fair but it makes a *kind* of sense.
Plus it's 99% who slept with whom. Shakespeare in Love won best pic over Saving Private Ryan, remember.
While I understand at a gut level that you might be disappointed in the engine, I'd disagree that it's a big deal.
To implement "swimming" sounds simple, but realize that they have MILLIONS of combinations of body types (you will be able to mix & match to make a new creature out of an orc with long draggy arms f'rinstance). Swimming (like horseback riding also not included) would entail a HUGE investment in new models, motions, AI programming for relatively limited gamevalue return. Remember, every monster would have to constantly make the calculation 'can i get there quicker by cutting across the stream rather than use the footbridge?' along with commensurate risk evaluations.
Ditto climbing, and in fact probably WORSE.
So it was a matter of resources. And yes, they've been doing it a long time, but it's a HUGE project.
To dash a little more cold water on the subject of swimming (ha ha, sorry) IMO swimming is very much one of those categories of events that DM's fudge, and that is going to be an area where NWN is weak - especially for those of us running persistent 24/7 servers ala [shameless plug/]www.alandfaraway.net. [/shameless plug] Look, in a PnP game, you (as the DM) are constantly tweaking and managing NPC and environmental changes in response to all the unexpected crap PC's come up with. While NWN is implementing everything they can to allow DM's to deal with this, the nature of the beast is such that players can play while you're NOT THERE, meaning every dialogue, every event, every potential NPC reaction will have to be scripted or risk 'breaking' your precious scenario. In the case of swimming, I can't for a moment think of a published module in which making a swimming check is indispensable; failing it is simply too save-or-die for most DM's and players. Usually it's more like "the ship sinks in a storm and you get washed ashore - make a swim check to see how much of your stuff you could save" - which obviously could be handled in a variety of other ways.
Climbing, being more critical to a specific class, is somewhat more missed. But the various forum boards have already pretty much addressed the issue, and AFAIK Bioware IS contemplating adding both of these to an expansion/sequel....but people now just want the darn game in their sweaty paws and would rather omit these than wait longer!
The critical VALUE to NWN that makes it so much better than BG or IWD is 1) the implementation of D&D 3e rules set, meaning a HUGE player base familiar with the rules and system, 2) a distinct and major effort by Bioware to make the game customizeable and usable by anyone to build anything they want...paralleling the value of RPG's in general, and addressing the main weakness of CRPGs.
Why not? Bill Gates = richest man in world = pissing on customers is clever business strategy.
QED.
While everyone is ooh-ing and ahh-ing at this (remarkable) accomplishment, doesn't this simply highlight how ABSURD it was that the "Middle Kingdom" essentially turned it's back on the world thereafter?
If I were the Chinese, I'd be a little proud, but a lot embarrassed. Kind of like finding out your uncle invented sustainable tabletop fusion 50 years ago, and has been using it since then to run his toaster and heating pad.
...and the native americans, fearing that their government benefits might be affected, will immediately claim they they are actually native americans and need to be re-interred as quickly as possible (despite the big horned helmet and firecrackers found beside the body).
Let's see, we don't like mass media because the information they present is filtered, edited, spun, and content-stripped away until there's little left besides indoctrinary pablum fit for the lowest-common-denominator viewer, John & Joanne Q. Public.
But we LIKE disinformation.com because the information they present is filtered, edited, spun, and content-stripped away until there's little left besides indoctrinary pablum fit for the lowest-common-denominator "independent thinker", John & Joanne Q. Public.
Oh yeah, sure. That's a HUGE improvent.
Granted, disinfo.com is much more of the category of "oh look at me, I'm a free-thinker not beholden to mass-media" club, or perhaps the "look I'm different like everyone else" category. IMO you're just sucking at a different tit, and fooling yourself that it's more 'significant' because it's not mainstream. Well, sorry, that only means its got fewer error-checking hurdles.
The 'real' web is what you make of it, not what someone shoves in your face as 'important'. I choose my content, and I find my own primary sources. I refuse to see ideolgue-flavored ranting as an example of the best the web can be, rather, it's an example of the crap that one has to wade through to GET to the good parts.
And by the way, in re Marty's rant about cheerleaders: maybe we will never know if there is a higher power, but it certainly IS relevant, or does he disagree with Pascal's logic in the matter?
Didn't they say that this device ("IT") would revolutionize the tranportation industry, and would change the design of cities in the future?
I'm sorry, but this is one of the most stupid & overblown ideas I've ever seen (and that's NOT hyperbole). It's a magnificent idea...unless you have to carry something bigger than a pen. It's a tremendous idea...unless you live somewhere where there is WEATHER. Sure, I'm going to ride the segway my 46-mile one way trip to work, in Minnesota, in any month besides July or August. Yeah.
For the 0.00002% of the world population that could afford this stupid thing, and the 0.0000001% of them who live indoors their entire lives this is the perfect device. I believe that leaves 13/1000ths of a single human for which this is the ultimate vehicle.
More like revolutionize the hyperbole and change the design of your wallet in the future.
Couldn't you (as a net admin) block the IP to the peekaboo(ty) site?
... done.
Lesseee, according to my monitor Jimmy in accounting has used 1.8 gigs of bandwidth on our t1 in the last 4 hours all from one IP. Hm, IP doesn't show up on my list of naughty sites, and it's not stileproject.com. OK, I'll just ban that IP, copy the contents of his temp file to my admin machine
In that circumstance what has peekabooty done except given poor Jimmy a false sense of security. In that respect, it's a Machiavellian netadmin's dream.
...at which point this morphs into the "Cowboy Bebop MMORPG" - an entirely COOLER proposition.
I get to play Ed!
Well, I'd agree with a lot of what Jon is saying, aside from the fact that BHD blew as a movie. The reason the US soldiers got caught in Mogadishu was not because they didn't know how to fight in the environment (the U.S. military MOUT schools and trainers are excellent), it was not becuase they "didn't know what to do when civilians were used as shields" (they did: try not to deliberately kill civilians but defend yourself and your unit first - a complicated and contradictory task that they by & large performed admirably). Mogadishu was a perfect example of peaceime soldiering on so many levels:
1)first and foremost, the responsibility of ANY commander is to recognize that in any operation there is a potential for disaster. Like Gordon at Khartoum, the general in charge utterly failed this first-order responsibility, and *should* have been court-martialled for not having the proper assets available for extrication (i.e. armored troops on hand, warmed up and ready to go).
2) excessive high-level interference. Some sources speculate that the REASON insufficient rescue forces were available was because the Clinton administration was not willing for such heavy forces to be committed in theater, and simultaneously was not trusting enough of our allies to let them know to be ready (altho, according to my personal contacts, this lack of trust was entirely justified as regards the Italians, for example)
3) No commander refuses intelligence, even crappy intel. The fact that the local CIA station was not allowed (again, by White House order according to the the BHD book) to communicate directly with the armed forces commander is a sad commentary on the armchair-soldiering going on in Washington. The idea that the local assets 'value' was going to be estimated several thousand miles away and THEN distributed for force-consumption is ludicrously patronizing at best, criminally irresponsible at worst.
BHD *could* have been a great movie, because there were a lot of subtleties of colonialism, politics, diplomacy, and militray policy that could have played out like a greek tragedy: like a Sophoclean hero, everyone (except the lowest grunts, and even some of them) KNEW what their fatal flaw was, and yet soldiered on knowing that therein lay their doom. Could have been great, that is, except for Mr. Bruckheimer who never saw a scene that could use 'a few more explosions, and how about some more bullets? Can we get more bullets?'. Bah, BHD-Movie had about as much to do with what happened in Mogadishu as Pearl Harbor-movie had to do with what happened 12/7/41.