Yeah, and that's why everyone who undergoes an MRI scan immediately becomes either a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon. Remember to attach a magnet to your tin-foil hats, everyone!
You've watched too many 1950's monster movies.
An aligned magnetic field over the lifetime of a person is nothing like one huge dose of a circular magnet and radio waves.
In the same manner, a person who has always had a healthy diet will not be the same as a person who has only had an unhealthy diet and then eats one meal with 10,000 the RDA of important vitamins.
Once how the rankings are computed is understood it's easy to get to a very high ranking as long as you understand and implement it better than most other people. (tracking down higher rated players and catch them on a losing team and then joining the winning team is one of the most useful tactics to boost stats regardless of the specific ranking system).
As far as ranking, being the better player is more difficult than figuring out how to trick ranking systems into thinking that you're a better player.
1) Out of mousemat error.
Sooner or later, your going run out of mousemat when your turning and will have to lift the mouse back onto the pad to continue. Meaning you'll simply stop turning while your doing this. On a DJC, you just tilt the right analouge stick right or left for continuous turning.
That's silly. Any experienced gamer uses a large mousepad and sets the sensitivity so that moving to the left or right edge of the pad == 180 degree turn. It's common sense. No lifting of the mouse is necessary. If it is, then the sensitivity is not set correctly.
2) Out of fingers error.
With a keyboard and mouse, you aim with the mouse, meaning one hand, and all its fingers, can only access, 2-3 buttons.(Scrollwheels help with this a lot though) Usually these are shoot,change weapon and other. Meanwhile your other fingers, usually 2-3, are stuck on WASD for moving. If you want to crouch, reload, zoom, jump or perhaps change weapon reverse, you will need to do some keyboard gymnastics, look down, or (horror of horrors) stop moving to press other buttons. On a DJC, one thumb is used for movement, the other for aiming. Flipper pads mean four buttons are easily reachable by two more fingers, and the dpad and other buttons are acessable by a nimble other if required. Bottom line. You can keep moving while you perform on the fly weapon maitainance. DJC has a lot more buffer space for out of fingers errors.
Again silly. Good gamers don't usually use WASD. It's not the natural typing position and limits the number of keys that can be used without moving the hand. Gamers that need a lot of keys use ESDF because they never have to look at the keyboard because there's usually a divit on the F key to keep the person from losing position. Using the home typing position, 28 keys are available without moving the left hand out of standard typing postion.
3) Mouse Error, Error.
Most comupter mice are fairly cheap anyaway. Mice get junk in the wheels. Even optical mice glitch from time to time. Buttons sometimes get stuck, and of course hands may slip or be jostled from time to time. The average DJC is of a higher quaility than the average mouse and suffers far less from any of these problems.
meh, I don't want to bite on that hook.
4) Keyboard limitations
Open up a text editor. Press and hold E. Without letting go hold C. Now while holding, tap U. See the problem? Now try W,D and E. E will not register. Try WAQ. There are umpteen other combinations. Keyboards can't handle many multiple keydown combinations. DJC can.
More trolling. Cheap keyboards only register 3 keys pressed at one time. You know that. Spending more than $15USD more often than not gets a keyboard that can handle more than 3 keys at at time.
{SNIP REST OF BS}
Re:An upcoming shift of the magnetic poles?
on
Canada Loses North Pole
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Several writers have suggested that a "polar shift" may occur in the near future. While I'm not a geophysicist myself, perhaps that is what we are seeing: a reverse in polarity of the north and south magnetic poles.
It will happen in the close future. Actually, it'll flip-flop back and forth a few times before settling down in a reverse manner.
While it's doing that, we'll be exposed to quite a bit more radiation than usual since the magnetic field is what stops most of the nasty radiation.
This may explain quite a few questions about significant mutations and the fact that they often happen quite quickly.
I do have the feeling that the magnetic field has quite an effect on the brain (intelligence in particular...the brain relies on electricity and magnetism effects this) and that the lessening of the field (what happens before a reverse) may effecting us quite a bit now.
The magnetic field North-South was quite strong when recorded civilization did some incredible things that modern technology still hasn't completely puzzled out. The field is much more weak now than it was when they did those incredible things.
Oddly enough, even with the extremely large population we have, we don't have nearly as many (proportionally) 'out of the box' thinking people that existed in previous recorded history.
If you were building a house, no-one would come and say that you need to add one more floor that is twice as wide between floors 2 and 3 when you are already making the roof. Oh and it's done in two weeks, right?
House structure: Concrete (cough), easy to visualize and understand even by someone without building experience.
Software: Abstract and evidentally pixies and gnomes are involved somehow.
For an old sit-com, 'I Love Lucy' had an even less complicated formula and was still a major success:
1. Lucy get's an Idea
2. Lucy screws up whatever it is she was going to do
3. Lucy tries to hide the screw-up
4. Hilarity ensues when she gets found out
What's the point? Ok, it'll be pretty to look at, but highly accurate maps are actually less useful in pretty much all applications than simplified thematic representations.
Yes, but now we'll know where the better looking hookers are at before we travel to a new city.
Speeds like that can be disasterous during a printing accident. Recently in the office a young secretary accidentally printed out (on one of our 75 pages/min printers) numerous copies of a document around 400 pages in length. Thankfully it was just black-and-white text, rather than colorful images.
And, badly written applications can cause accidents regardless of how knowledgeable a person is.
It was common for people at a place I worked to print old invoices for various reasons. Even though the system was rock solid UNIX, the invoice retrieval application didn't take into account that people might accidentally reverse 'print invoices 100405-100410' to 100410-100405 and end up printing invoices starting at 100410 and wrapping around to 100405.
The system started printing 12 years worth* of vehicle and sales invoices the first time someone made that mistake.
Thank goodness I had routed those print jobs to the set of slow dot matrix printers instead of the set of laser or ink-jet printers otherwise it would have been an extremely expensive mistake.
*Yes, there are many reasons to keep records that old available for vehicles
Damn this is true! I went to my insurance agent the other day, and he uses IE to access all my account information that is stored on the headquarters's server. Made me want to reconsider my choice of insurance companies.
See if you can 'chat up' a secretary at a doctor's office. Turn the conversation to computers and try to get a look at the computer screen.
More often than not, you'll see IE running and an anti-virus running yet not a good firewall in sight much less a spyware detection program.
It's very unsettling to know that the person entering your personal data and scheduling information is an easy target for exploitation.
This is the same thing Metallica did in its early days to get known, and it worked.
Yes, I have been upset with Metallica every since they showed up on the cover of Rolling Stone.
A friend of mine who was stationed in Germany (years ago) send me a purchased copy of 'Cliff Em All' where things were said like (paraphrase, someone lifted my video a while back so it's a bit fuzzy) 'we would have named our album 'Metal Up Your Ass' but since the executives wouldn't let us do that we're calling it 'Kill Em All' (with the implication that it was aimed at all of the middlemen in the recording industry).
Fast forward some years and they completely sell out and have the balls to say that their earlier music was crap.
Bah. Us fans who ate up their music when they couldn't get on standard radio and had to go the College Radio route are suddenly without musical taste.
Not only are we without taste, we're also criminals for downloading music like live bootlegs that don't hurt them and in fact boost their CD sales.
I refuse to listen to any Metallica that was created after the sell-out happened. I won't download anything. I won't buy their CD's even if someone has put them on their Xmas wish list.
Example: I download all my PC games to try them out before buying. I never want to get screwed, and a lot of games are lemons that you can't return.
My first 'piracy' was Quake1. I and a lot of others had pre-bought Quake1 and were told we'd get copies before anyone else. This didn't happen for a lot of people. We saw copies on the shelves first. So, we pirated a game we had already paid for
Fast forward to Unreal2. I purchased it. It locked up or crashed more than it actually played. I repair PC's for a living and have a 100% success rate unless the customer balks at buying new hardware if needed. So, all of the 'it's your PC that's the problem' answers just pissed me off. I could not return it and wouldn't inflict it on anyone so it ended up in the trash can.
I was so disgusted with it and a few other lemons that I vowed to never purchase a game that I didn't first pirate. Now, I download pirated games and if they fulfill their advertising claims, I go ahead and purchase them. If they are crap, I'll know it very quickly and will delete it. This means that I spend ~$500 a year for new games that play decently. (Hey, ya gotta do something while running virus checks and reinstalls...I'm not in my moms basement BTW)
And, if the game supports Linux servers, I end up advertising those games for the LAN I run and increase the sales for those games.
My ID's have always had unfortunate encounters with magnets. The barcodes have inexplicably had incidents also. I try to protect the integrity of the ID's, but something always happens.
The only bad thing about it is when purchasing alcohol or going to a 21+ establishement.
Some will not accept my ID because it can't be read (and recorded) by their scanning devices. With the National ID card, I fear that with accidents that prevent it from being read, especially over a distance of meters, I'll stick out like a sore thumb and someday end up like that guy in They Live.
I thought of that is less then 30 seconds, what are the odds Google has already thought about it?
Search engine coders have been aware and interested in that problem for ~8 years. Making text/background a similar color has been pretty much useless for all of that time because comparing background color tags and text color tags is very easy.
OTOH, using a colored background picture that closely matches some text has been possible due to it being more complex to detect.
The parent said he wanted to pick the box off the shelf, install and play. Not pick the box off the shelf, install, go online to download crack, then play.
I'm aware of that.
That's what quoting is for. I was replying to what I quoted.
Sort of a chicken/egg thing you got going there. I suspect 56k people just aren't buying the game.
Exactly. This is why it isn't likely to hurt Valve's bottom line. Even they lose a portion of their customers, they'll make it up with the money saved from not putting it on shelves.
"Blah blah, back when I got into [scene] it was so much better and more exclusive. Everyone was hardcore and there was none of this watered-down-for-the-mainstream crap."
It works for any subculture or hobby. Usually it comes from people who are too young to realize that there were always superficial aspects to whatever it is they're so concerned with, and that in 5-10 years they're going to wonder why they cared so much.
Actually, you can't dismiss everything like that automatically. There are many instances where this is a true fact and not just perspective. I do agree that what you said is often the case, but it's not always by any means.
Many subcultures that have to do with the internet have been ruined by an influx of people who are there just there to cause trouble, for personal gain only, cry about how the culture (game in this instance) should change to fit them, or compromises that are made to appeal to a wider audience.
USENET is a good example of where your description fails. But, that's completely off-topic...
I live in Oregon. I don't think I've ever been in a theater that held more than a few hundred people.
Take a look at the site below. You might find a nice older large capacity theater in your area. It's quite a different experience than modern theaters and well worth the money. Large theaters designed like these are a dying breed so if you get a chance, check one out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and that's why everyone who undergoes an MRI scan immediately becomes either a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon. Remember to attach a magnet to your tin-foil hats, everyone!
You've watched too many 1950's monster movies.
An aligned magnetic field over the lifetime of a person is nothing like one huge dose of a circular magnet and radio waves.
In the same manner, a person who has always had a healthy diet will not be the same as a person who has only had an unhealthy diet and then eats one meal with 10,000 the RDA of important vitamins.
I would be interested to know how you turn more than 180 degrees without lifting the mouse, for example while circle-strafing.
I don't circle-strafe in the same direction for very long. Otherwise, I'd be dead because of my being predictable.
Keep 'em guessing.
I fed it but then again, I was Trolling the Trolls back when A.S.T was in it's infancy so it's more hungry than it was before I posted.
There are plenty of trackball players that I personally know that are well matched up with mouse players.
I didn't mention it because the Bridge Fellow was talking about mice and I have been a mouser since the Doom mouse patch (IIRC, v1.2).
Ok, I'll bite... got a good link that explains "boosting" in a Halo 2 context (or any other gaming ranking system for that matter)?
Try the http://csports.net/ forums for example.
You can see how ranking is figured out there.
Once how the rankings are computed is understood it's easy to get to a very high ranking as long as you understand and implement it better than most other people. (tracking down higher rated players and catch them on a losing team and then joining the winning team is one of the most useful tactics to boost stats regardless of the specific ranking system).
As far as ranking, being the better player is more difficult than figuring out how to trick ranking systems into thinking that you're a better player.
Oh of course, loads of us. There was a world wide Rise of the Triad competition the other day too.
Strangely enough, I still have ROTT on my gaming box.
Quake3 Arena was pretty much ROTT with better graphics.
Nothing to see here...move along, move along.
What is it, does wireless have lag?
Of course. Especially if you have the transmissions encrypted as they should be.
Encoding, transmission, and decoding in both directions takes a significant hit on your latency.
Not to mention that the compression schemes that wireless often uses increases the delays in what you see and react to.
If you want to do better in online FPS gaming, you need to ditch wireless.
1) Out of mousemat error. Sooner or later, your going run out of mousemat when your turning and will have to lift the mouse back onto the pad to continue. Meaning you'll simply stop turning while your doing this. On a DJC, you just tilt the right analouge stick right or left for continuous turning.
That's silly. Any experienced gamer uses a large mousepad and sets the sensitivity so that moving to the left or right edge of the pad == 180 degree turn. It's common sense. No lifting of the mouse is necessary. If it is, then the sensitivity is not set correctly.
2) Out of fingers error. With a keyboard and mouse, you aim with the mouse, meaning one hand, and all its fingers, can only access, 2-3 buttons.(Scrollwheels help with this a lot though) Usually these are shoot,change weapon and other. Meanwhile your other fingers, usually 2-3, are stuck on WASD for moving. If you want to crouch, reload, zoom, jump or perhaps change weapon reverse, you will need to do some keyboard gymnastics, look down, or (horror of horrors) stop moving to press other buttons. On a DJC, one thumb is used for movement, the other for aiming. Flipper pads mean four buttons are easily reachable by two more fingers, and the dpad and other buttons are acessable by a nimble other if required. Bottom line. You can keep moving while you perform on the fly weapon maitainance. DJC has a lot more buffer space for out of fingers errors.
Again silly. Good gamers don't usually use WASD. It's not the natural typing position and limits the number of keys that can be used without moving the hand. Gamers that need a lot of keys use ESDF because they never have to look at the keyboard because there's usually a divit on the F key to keep the person from losing position. Using the home typing position, 28 keys are available without moving the left hand out of standard typing postion.
3) Mouse Error, Error. Most comupter mice are fairly cheap anyaway. Mice get junk in the wheels. Even optical mice glitch from time to time. Buttons sometimes get stuck, and of course hands may slip or be jostled from time to time. The average DJC is of a higher quaility than the average mouse and suffers far less from any of these problems.
meh, I don't want to bite on that hook.
4) Keyboard limitations Open up a text editor. Press and hold E. Without letting go hold C. Now while holding, tap U. See the problem? Now try W,D and E. E will not register. Try WAQ. There are umpteen other combinations. Keyboards can't handle many multiple keydown combinations. DJC can.
More trolling. Cheap keyboards only register 3 keys pressed at one time. You know that. Spending more than $15USD more often than not gets a keyboard that can handle more than 3 keys at at time.
{SNIP REST OF BS}
Several writers have suggested that a "polar shift" may occur in the near future. While I'm not a geophysicist myself, perhaps that is what we are seeing: a reverse in polarity of the north and south magnetic poles.
It will happen in the close future. Actually, it'll flip-flop back and forth a few times before settling down in a reverse manner.
While it's doing that, we'll be exposed to quite a bit more radiation than usual since the magnetic field is what stops most of the nasty radiation.
This may explain quite a few questions about significant mutations and the fact that they often happen quite quickly.
I do have the feeling that the magnetic field has quite an effect on the brain (intelligence in particular...the brain relies on electricity and magnetism effects this) and that the lessening of the field (what happens before a reverse) may effecting us quite a bit now.
The magnetic field North-South was quite strong when recorded civilization did some incredible things that modern technology still hasn't completely puzzled out. The field is much more weak now than it was when they did those incredible things.
Oddly enough, even with the extremely large population we have, we don't have nearly as many (proportionally) 'out of the box' thinking people that existed in previous recorded history.
Here is a good link http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/
BTW: I'm much more concerned with a polarity shift or no shielding at all than a random asteroid mucking up our planet.
You have to admit that eventually though also religion is self correcting too.
Yes, it all gets straightened out when we die.
If you were building a house, no-one would come and say that you need to add one more floor that is twice as wide between floors 2 and 3 when you are already making the roof. Oh and it's done in two weeks, right?
House structure: Concrete (cough), easy to visualize and understand even by someone without building experience.
Software: Abstract and evidentally pixies and gnomes are involved somehow.
For an old sit-com, 'I Love Lucy' had an even less complicated formula and was still a major success:
1. Lucy get's an Idea
2. Lucy screws up whatever it is she was going to do
3. Lucy tries to hide the screw-up
4. Hilarity ensues when she gets found out
What's the point? Ok, it'll be pretty to look at, but highly accurate maps are actually less useful in pretty much all applications than simplified thematic representations.
Yes, but now we'll know where the better looking hookers are at before we travel to a new city.
I used to have more GPF's than anyone I had ever heard of or met.
Damn. I could have submitted a story about it and used that same box as the web server.
Speeds like that can be disasterous during a printing accident. Recently in the office a young secretary accidentally printed out (on one of our 75 pages/min printers) numerous copies of a document around 400 pages in length. Thankfully it was just black-and-white text, rather than colorful images.
And, badly written applications can cause accidents regardless of how knowledgeable a person is.
It was common for people at a place I worked to print old invoices for various reasons. Even though the system was rock solid UNIX, the invoice retrieval application didn't take into account that people might accidentally reverse 'print invoices 100405-100410' to 100410-100405 and end up printing invoices starting at 100410 and wrapping around to 100405.
The system started printing 12 years worth* of vehicle and sales invoices the first time someone made that mistake.
Thank goodness I had routed those print jobs to the set of slow dot matrix printers instead of the set of laser or ink-jet printers otherwise it would have been an extremely expensive mistake.
*Yes, there are many reasons to keep records that old available for vehicles
Damn this is true! I went to my insurance agent the other day, and he uses IE to access all my account information that is stored on the headquarters's server. Made me want to reconsider my choice of insurance companies.
See if you can 'chat up' a secretary at a doctor's office. Turn the conversation to computers and try to get a look at the computer screen.
More often than not, you'll see IE running and an anti-virus running yet not a good firewall in sight much less a spyware detection program.
It's very unsettling to know that the person entering your personal data and scheduling information is an easy target for exploitation.
This is the same thing Metallica did in its early days to get known, and it worked.
Yes, I have been upset with Metallica every since they showed up on the cover of Rolling Stone.
A friend of mine who was stationed in Germany (years ago) send me a purchased copy of 'Cliff Em All' where things were said like (paraphrase, someone lifted my video a while back so it's a bit fuzzy) 'we would have named our album 'Metal Up Your Ass' but since the executives wouldn't let us do that we're calling it 'Kill Em All' (with the implication that it was aimed at all of the middlemen in the recording industry).
Fast forward some years and they completely sell out and have the balls to say that their earlier music was crap.
Bah. Us fans who ate up their music when they couldn't get on standard radio and had to go the College Radio route are suddenly without musical taste.
Not only are we without taste, we're also criminals for downloading music like live bootlegs that don't hurt them and in fact boost their CD sales.
I refuse to listen to any Metallica that was created after the sell-out happened. I won't download anything. I won't buy their CD's even if someone has put them on their Xmas wish list.
Example: I download all my PC games to try them out before buying. I never want to get screwed, and a lot of games are lemons that you can't return.
My first 'piracy' was Quake1. I and a lot of others had pre-bought Quake1 and were told we'd get copies before anyone else. This didn't happen for a lot of people. We saw copies on the shelves first. So, we pirated a game we had already paid for
Fast forward to Unreal2. I purchased it. It locked up or crashed more than it actually played. I repair PC's for a living and have a 100% success rate unless the customer balks at buying new hardware if needed. So, all of the 'it's your PC that's the problem' answers just pissed me off. I could not return it and wouldn't inflict it on anyone so it ended up in the trash can.
I was so disgusted with it and a few other lemons that I vowed to never purchase a game that I didn't first pirate. Now, I download pirated games and if they fulfill their advertising claims, I go ahead and purchase them. If they are crap, I'll know it very quickly and will delete it. This means that I spend ~$500 a year for new games that play decently. (Hey, ya gotta do something while running virus checks and reinstalls...I'm not in my moms basement BTW)
And, if the game supports Linux servers, I end up advertising those games for the LAN I run and increase the sales for those games.
My ID's have always had unfortunate encounters with magnets. The barcodes have inexplicably had incidents also. I try to protect the integrity of the ID's, but something always happens.
The only bad thing about it is when purchasing alcohol or going to a 21+ establishement.
Some will not accept my ID because it can't be read (and recorded) by their scanning devices. With the National ID card, I fear that with accidents that prevent it from being read, especially over a distance of meters, I'll stick out like a sore thumb and someday end up like that guy in They Live.
I thought of that is less then 30 seconds, what are the odds Google has already thought about it?
Search engine coders have been aware and interested in that problem for ~8 years. Making text/background a similar color has been pretty much useless for all of that time because comparing background color tags and text color tags is very easy.
OTOH, using a colored background picture that closely matches some text has been possible due to it being more complex to detect.
It is supposed to be released next year according to the links listed. JSYK!
The parent said he wanted to pick the box off the shelf, install and play. Not pick the box off the shelf, install, go online to download crack, then play.
I'm aware of that.
That's what quoting is for. I was replying to what I quoted.
Sort of a chicken/egg thing you got going there. I suspect 56k people just aren't buying the game.
Exactly. This is why it isn't likely to hurt Valve's bottom line. Even they lose a portion of their customers, they'll make it up with the money saved from not putting it on shelves.
I can see my house!
And, who is that guy with my girlfriend?
"Blah blah, back when I got into [scene] it was so much better and more exclusive. Everyone was hardcore and there was none of this watered-down-for-the-mainstream crap." It works for any subculture or hobby. Usually it comes from people who are too young to realize that there were always superficial aspects to whatever it is they're so concerned with, and that in 5-10 years they're going to wonder why they cared so much.
Actually, you can't dismiss everything like that automatically. There are many instances where this is a true fact and not just perspective. I do agree that what you said is often the case, but it's not always by any means.
Many subcultures that have to do with the internet have been ruined by an influx of people who are there just there to cause trouble, for personal gain only, cry about how the culture (game in this instance) should change to fit them, or compromises that are made to appeal to a wider audience.
USENET is a good example of where your description fails. But, that's completely off-topic...
I live in Oregon. I don't think I've ever been in a theater that held more than a few hundred people.
8 1&state=38/
Take a look at the site below. You might find a nice older large capacity theater in your area. It's quite a different experience than modern theaters and well worth the money. Large theaters designed like these are a dying breed so if you get a chance, check one out.
http://www.cinematreasures.org/location/country=1