I'm a innocent brazilian, and I have a website, and we are talking about british! My site is dead! Well, at least isn't me, as Jean who was killed because was wearing cloths for cold in a warm day.
I think it had more to do with the fact that he just left a building where a suspected terrorist cell was operating (from a flat he shared with several cousins) and because he ran from the police, almost certainly owing to him being an illegal immigrant with a forged stamp on his passport.
Let's get this idea of him being 'innocent' out of the way, and that he was killed merely because 'he was wearing a big jacked'. He had commited a criminal offence and was staying illegally in this country, with a bent passport. That's an entirely pre-medatated crime on his part, and almost certainly explains why he ran from the police, jumped the barrier and tried to make a getaway by going through the underground.
I can't begin to imagine illegally being in a foreign country, with a forged passport, and on the run from armed police (in a western modern democracy, of all places).
I'm quite sure in the heat of the moment he didn't grasp the seriousness of the situation properly or figure he was likely to be shot at by the police (no regular police force carry guns in the met, only the 300 officers in what is known as SO19, the specialist firearms support squad) and it's cetainly unfortunate that he was killed in these circumstances.
However, I'm prepared to the blame here squarely at the criminal who decided to go on the run from armed police, rather than come quietly and go to jail.
Personally I think it's a disgrace that the UK government are considering giving money to his relatives as compensation given he shouldn't even have been here. I'd be trying to find out who forged his passport for him, finding out if (as is not entirely unlikely) his cousins were in on it (he was apparently saying with 3 or 4 cousins in the flat that was in the building being monitored) and then I'd bang up everyone involved in the deception for a few months for being complicit, before deporting them and barring them from re-entry into the country.
But then, I read a lot of 2000 AD as a child.
Illegal imprisonment of a goldfish without a permit? 9 months in the cubes creep!
I thought it started off brilliantly and was immediately very immersive, but it really failed to sustain that interest and the story seemed to fall by the wayside, turning it into a mediocre by-the-numbers shoot em up (albeit one with a great 3rd party physics engine). I found it pretty repetative and formulaic with very linear level design with few 'milestone' points (unlike the origional). I'm fine with 'repetative' in the sense of 'shooting things' over and over (ala Doom 1/2, Unreal 2, etc), but when the environment repeats itself for large sections (as with Doom 3) it gets very tedious. 'Ravenholm' was certainly a nice departure, but they failed to really take enough advantage of it, and they had some dodgy elements to the level design in that section.
Dispite being heavily critisized by some of the gaming press, I loved Unreal 2 because of the varied gameplay. It had many different weapons, multiple types of deployable equipment, several completely different types of enemy and unique envrionments. It also had a consistant story to move things along (between every 'level', there was an additional 'level' set aboard your ship, where you could wander amoung your shipmates and interact with them to play out the story). This was actually a lot more 'interactive' than HL2 (and area in which HL2 is very much overrated IMO), in which it was almost entirely scripted and you just happened to be able to move around - though it was possible to 'trigger' a small number of additional scripted routines by looking or clicking on various things, it was noticeably quite limited.
With regard to HL2 feeling 'linear' IMO, I felt quite artificially constricted in by the outside environment. After playing titles like Ghost Recon, PlanetSide, Soldner, Joint Operations, BattleField (etc), when I'm outdoors I want to have freedom to explore and find my own way from A to B, over a reasonably large map (all of these support maps up to several kilometers in size). I hate getting to the top of a hill or mound - or worse, facing an invisible barrier - and discovering I've reached "the end of the world" just because I've gone a few feet off the beaten track. Far Cry did much better in this respect, and gave the player genuine flexibility and what felt like inteligent AI. There are even open source tools which can seemlessly stick together large outdoor maps into one envrionment (e.g. in whatever map format the Ureal engine uses). HL2 did particularly poorly in this regard, one of my most enduring memories of it is the frequent loading screens.
At the exteme end: You can drive for miles in Solder, for example, and the world just keeps being drawn - without repating the map over and over (forests, lakes, hills, mountains, grassland), because it seems a tool has been used to auto generate a huge amount of terrain and they have simply placed special interest points (i.e. basis, buildings) on top. As a bonus, the terrain in Soldner is dynamically deformable too (as well as buildings, you can fell trees and forests, even create new rivers, or destroy a whole mountain). The descruction models for buldings were a bit linear (several 'impact points' which could be struck and blown up/off/open), but at least they were there. The origional PlanetSide team used real world map data and adapted it to build the continents of Auxaris. I imagine something like an adapted version of the terrain builder from Sim City 4K would be ideal for this sort of work. Certainly after playing larger 16-46 multiplayer games and MMO's (and even the likes of GTA3/VC) I have no desire to back to out door maps that feel like they have been rendered according to the limitations of something like the Q3 engine.
In summary, I think I just felt that HL2 lacked imagination and vision - it did not really bring anything new to the table nor did it alternatively execute it all that well (with regard to the comments above, but also to the much maligned AI of the supposedly more intelligent opponents). For that reason I felt it wasn't as good as some other rec
Who needs nukes? Everyone gets this wrong. Everyone except Heinlein, that is. The real tactic is to drop rocks.
And to think, we've wasted so many resources on building and researching nuclear weapons, when it would have been more effective and far easier to deploy a giant catapult!
Will it run linux if I insert my usb "flesh" stick?
You jest, but have you ever calculated the (awesome) data throughput of a male organ in terms of sperm transfer rate (Things for network engineers to do when they are bored #362)?
The only downside to utilising this interface for data transmission is very 'bursty' traffic patterns and the likelihood of an unpleasant installation procedure for the required 'Johnny Mnemonic'-esque equipment.
Couldn't it just be that Tokyo is not as atractive as other cities? I mean, huge language barriers, high cost of living and all that...
I found the statistics in the previous post interesting.
There could be something in that, in that Japan is very expensive to live in (ven more so than London and New York) and probably has much less space for poorer immigrants than sprawling cities. It's amazing to look at the Google satellite images of Japan and see that every inch of habitable space (i.e. anything that isn't mountainous) seems to be filled already.
This is very unlike the ever expanding London for example, which seems to consist almost predominantly of poor immigrants, and has done for over a century - it just continues to expand and take people on board with cheap to live, squalid and dirty pockets everywhere (right next to 2 bedroom flats worth half a million UKP). Of course there are far too many council estates in central London which artificially keep the price down and the area's nasty and crime ridden [East London, I'm looking at you], which forces regular people ever further out to the suburbs, and drives up house prices in what is already the most expensive city to live in in Europe (bitch moan, etc).
Another significant factor might be that Japan is so physically isolated, as well as culturally isolated in that the US and UK are particularly popular because English is so dominant.
It's an interesting theory that the lack of availably of cheap immigrant labour (as used in the US and across Western Europe) for all sort of crappy low paying menial jobs drives some of the interest in robotics. I think it's a good approach too, because it frees up human's for more interesting jobs (like erm, building robots 8).
By jumping puzzle levels, I'm assuming you mean the ones with the remix of the original SMB theme playing in the background. Those levels were the best part of the game. They felt like the old 2D Mario games.
I'm thinking of the supposedly 'bonus' levels, where the camera constantly moves around you in a largely uncontrollable way (usually in such a way you couldn't see what Mario was doing) and you are on a precarious moving platform trying to collect Shine's and avoid falling to your death in order to proceed (and trigger a new event, meaning they were not really 'bonus' levels as they seemed to start out being). I think we are talking about the same thing though (but I can't remember the music in those sections).
Personally I loved the exploration elements (though I do enjoy just exploring maps), and I think they could have got more milage out of the environments they had but I agree, it would have been nice to have a big snowy mountain for ice levels, or perhaps completely underwater sections, and of course a nice big Bowser castle section!:)
I thought the fairground section was reasonably interesting, but I found the beach battle really annoying till I worked it out (I didn't think it was all that intuitive - could just be me being slow though;-).
actually, as is already pointed out, this is a troll. Mainly because the parent misrepresents the definition of irony. Which is commonly done, but still a troll.
You (and a few other readers) might want to actually read the alt.troll FAQ to understand what a troll is.
It is not in and of itself trolling to mis-use the word 'irony', unless it's in alt.grammar.nazi, for example.
This post ostensibly is not of that nature, it's not even inflammatory, unless you happen to be Zonk. Rather it would more accurately be described as Insightful, as the nature of article is indeed flamebait. An increasing number of/. articles fit into that category (not in the least due to the write ups).
As the Moderator Guidelines indicate, it's inappropriate to moderate the parent down as when moderating you should focus on moderating UP (not DOWN) and save negative moderation's primarily for the likes of goat.ce and the automated troll-bots.
In this case the usage of the word irony is quite justifiable because it is ironic that people have failed to recognise the original article as flamebait but that they have instead incorrectly marked the posting point out that it's flamebait as flamebait.
( It is only correct to assert it is not ironic if you hold the view that we should all know full well it would be incorrectly interpreted not least because 'The Moderators are on Crack', as any fule kno. )
I would note that given that the article has produced several flames already, it's self evident that it is indeed flamebait.
This confusion frequently occurs on/. because people not only fail to understand what it means for a post to be a troll, but also what is meant by flamebait (instead applying them to posts they simply don't like, which is a large part of why we have meta moderation, to prevent people who habitually moderate in such a way from being able to do so in future).
What I find even more annoying is that he said the same thing about Super Mario Sunshine, which started out as easily the best Mario title, and was on it's way to being one of the best video games of all time, when you suddenly realise it's not actually complete and less half the way through they ran out of time to complete it and instead stuffed it with stupidly difficult jumping puzzle levels (which should have been left in, but purely as bonus levels) just to drag it out.
I was very disappointed, particularly after having so much fun with Mario initially (exploring, playing with water, discovering areas and new ways to play in the environment). Comparions with "Sonic Adventure" on the Dreamcast are hard to ignore - it managed to be bursting to the gills with features beyond any reasonable expectations and also felt complete and balanced from start to finish (a real masterpiece). I would have considered it a complete game even if it only had one playable character and a single story line, never mind six!
I wouldn't want to discourage developers from being critical of their past titles, but I would not purchase another Molyneux or Miyamoto game in future without seeing favourable reviews from sources I have faith in, as they have both, on multiple occasions, abused the cachet their names carry by not ensuring the sort of quality expected from finished products that have their names attached.
I have a couple at home (a headless one and a TFT one) powered off a dual CPU Sun Ultra 60 and really like like them too. I have yet to try out the Linux software though (but am looking forward to, as the biggest drawback is that Solaris is so goddamn slow I would only use the Sun Ultra system to handle managing the Sun Rays and export the display from a Debian x86 system, which meant running yet another computer).
HP have the t5500 thin client system which is great for corporate environments (and cheaper than Sun Ray license + Citrix license + Windows license when your only goal is to allow users to run Windows).
I too wish more establishments (universities and medium to large companies specifically) realised how much cheaper and more reliable thin client solutions were.
I know someone who recently phased out desktops in his ~ 30 person company and replaced them with t5000's (which he got for 150 UKP each, the same as the cost of a Sun Ray). You only need two real computers for that sort of network (a primary and a backup) and it's far easier to manage in the long run (he's actually non technical - a recruitment consultant, although he's also looked after the IT infrastructure in his company for a few years and has a reasonable understanding).
RPM (and DEB) vs. Ports
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
It is not superior to RPM, nor DEB for that matter. Anyone who has built or managed a large number of servers with disperate services on them should be able to recognise why.
It checks for required dependancies and installs them as required, something even CPAN can do, and it can even (usually) uninstall them (with varing levels of success), that is more or less it.
What it does not do is check for conflicts between libraries or the dependancies of other applications (meaning it's possible to fuck up one application, by installing another because it may overwrite an existing, older, installed library).
Systems like 'ports' do not verify package integrity, nor do they it support using a previons minor revion of the same application (often a requirement when the 'latest' version of whatever application or library your using breaks a feature you've been relying on, or is simply not a release you've had time to test in your test environment).
An even bigger problem related to the reliance of ports system, one of the most time consuming, is the process of upgrades. Upgrading between newer versions of FreeBSD is a mine field, awash with the potential for screwups, because there is no system in place to handle this task elegantly. Upgrading between disperate versions of the same branch (e.g. 4.6 to 4.11) will often cause serious problems you'll have to sort out manually at the console, upgrading from systems that are not in the same release (from 3.x or 4.x to 5.x) will often take up a good chunk of an afternoon to sort out the resulting mess. Upgrading a DEB or RPM system which is fully packaged managed (kernel and all), even between quite disperate releases is far more straight forward (more along the lines of 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade', or in the case of a Red Hat system, pop in the CD and click the 'Upgrade' button).
Another feature that makes more feature rich package management systems more desirable is the reduced risk. RPM is staggeringly powerful with regard to the sorts of operations it is able to carry out with packages (pretty much every feature you could ever want) and it is also trivial to build packages for - as is also true of DEB. This massively reduces the propensity for mistakes - sure you can write individual custom bash install scripts for packages in ports, but that is not a robust approach when you think about how many packages your likley to use.
There are two practical reasons why people typically dislike RPM:
1) It's refused to do what they wanted because a package was trying to be installed did not have it's appropriate dependancies also installed, or it conflicted in some way.
In these circumstances most users opt to 'force' it to install because they are frustrated at installing dependancies and sub-dependancies, and then they wonder why their system does not work as they expected, and so declare the RPM system to be at fault.
Arguably, it is at least partly at fault, but it was only being accurate by alerting them to problems that they would not otherwise have known about, which is pretty hard to critisize.
2) This is compounded by the fact that they are usually exposed to it in the form of 'Red Hat', or a similar distrobution, which does NOT feature something like 'apt-get'. 'apt-get' is in fact package management system agnostic, at least technically, and their have been RPM based commercial distrobutions which have shipped with it. It's absolutly more associated with Debian, and I think it's a mistake for Red Hat and other vendors not to include it in their RPM based distros because of the frequency of the scenario above, I suspect the cost of maintaining apt repositories (man hours, infrastructure and running costs such as bandwith) are key reasons.
Disclaimer:
I use ports on an almost daily basis, along with De
FYI grownups use words like 'lowercase' and uppercase to decribe the case of words (not 'little' and 'big', unless your about 6 or under). If you want to prove your are in fact a big boy, let's see if you can also use whois as well.
HINT: It shouldn't be hard, given I've been on the net for over 10 years (certainly pre WWW) and loads of my personal details, including my home address, is intentionally listed in umpteen online directories (and several software packages as contact information).
PS, just for the record:
A man who has a seventh child age 80 is still an asshole for doing so, just so we are absolutely crystal clear. In fact, I think I'll set up a web page pointing that out, for those that don't get it. Of course the fact that he split with his wife and four previous kids to shack up with a 18 year old when he was 55 in the first place is pretty suspect too (particularly given he already had children that age and older at the time). I can't imagine his first four children we impressed by daddy running off to bed with someone who was their age. Yeah, he was a real American hero alright.
What's a matter of public record doesn't give any reason to fear for this child's welfare.
If 5 year old child having a 48 year old mother and an 85 year old father is okay with you, then I guess not. I guess we have different visions of what's in the best interest of a child's welfare.
Namely, I don't think a single mother in her 60's is best placed to deal with a teenager, you do.
My point overall is that too much play-balancing detracts from the fun
While I completely see that they have deliberately set out to build an arcade experience, I do think this is spot on. The level of wackiness the game allows for goes out of being merely arcade like and into the realm of frustrating fairly often.
There is a realism mod for Joint Operations which I hear a lot of service / ex-service personnel prefer. I was just about to look it up and post a link but I've got to be at a meeting across town in another office in an hour, and someone has just tried to blow up the station I was going to (bugger).
I've played them all, with the exception of Shadowbane, and I think he is absolutely spot on, and I think most of my friends (the ones that have played at least WoW, SWG and EQ at least) would agree.
SWG has the best crafting system, massive customisation and elements like the player housing and cities are the best bar none. However, the combat is poor and the classes are unbalanced, the skill tree system is so-so and a quest system is basically non existent (and the 3D engine is dubious).
He did compliment WoW's questing system, which is among the best by far, it's still quite repetitive though (not nearly as engaging or dynamic as something in a single player game like the outstanding Morrowind). The crafting system in WoW is very disappoint though (to the extent that other than some potions that are especially useful in PvP, it's largely pointless as drops are far better).
Wow is more popular because it's very 'main stream' and accessible, it's also selling of the back of a well known and respected franchise. The lack of customisation and character housing is not something that in itself add's or contributes to what makes it a good game (though indirectly, it's subsequent simplicity probably does contribute to it's main stream success).
Some of the most fun I've had in an MMORPG has been based around contributing to a player built city and environment and communities where people work together to build whole player cities and rebel and imperial bases, weaving their own story-line. Electing a mayor on policy basis, raising taxes to fund buying your own Shuttle Port for the town (which helped bring in business to the local stores), enduring Imperial player raids on your Rebel outpost (and choosing to join in and help defend).
Player customisation (something which SWG also excelled at), is something that can be underestimated - it really helps players feel more attached to their characters, something difficult in WoW when you keep bumping into dopplegangers.
[ Just for the record, the person that moderated you Troll is a fuckwit (apparently no one who's started using the internet since approximately 1994 has any idea what the word means). Technically it might be considered inflammatory but your still spot on. ]
Sniping is 'nerfed' in BF2 because it's generally quite unpleasant for most users and doesn't make for a very satisfying game. Interestingly it's quite well balanced in a game like PlanetSide (two hits to kill, doesn't display the location of the sniper, except by tracer/muzzle flash which is reasonably difficult to spot), but that's largely due to the vast maps - way beyond the size of anything even in BF2, though BF2 has far more detailed maps - which provide lots of room for manoeuvre.
It's very tricky in games to get users to behave in realistic manner due to lack of real death penalty. It's difficult to have an enjoyable game when your opponents all behave like suicide bombers (because the game mechanics can encourage that type of play, or at least they do not do enough to discourage it).
Perhaps harsher death penalties are the answer (e.g. have it cost the player more than just a single point). PlanetSide tries to do this by increasing your respawn time each time you die, particularly if you die several times in a row quickly, but that has the downside of being quite tedious to endure, especially if you are unlucky several times in a row.
One thing it does quite well is timers on vehicles (for example, if a player is able to requisition a tank at a vehicle bay, they are only allowed 1 every 15 minutes, so they had better make it last). Obviously this doesn't translate directly to a game like BF2, but it might be worth experimenting with the idea that if a player has a poor score it should limit their access to equipment (e.g. preventing them from driving off with armoured vehicles or aircraft in particular - perhaps even classes like the support class, with it's spamming heavy machine gun, too).
Nothing in life is certain, you could have a child in the confines of the happiest marraige and still get killed crossing the street before it reached puberty.
I can tell you one thing that is certain, if you are 80 years old when you have a child, you are not going to be there to support that child as they grow up, as we have sadly just seen.
You can excuse that with irrelevant dialogue stating 'Well you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, so it doesn't matter!'.
You sound as if you've never overcome your father's and stepfather's misfortunes, perhaps psychological consuling is in order?
If you think I counselling because I think parents should be there for their children, then your beyond wacky. From looking at a large number of posts here, it's a very sad reflection of the lack of value placed on the rights of children by a lot of/. readers.
Though where I'm from (Scotland), we have a quite different take on child welfare (you can't hit children to reprimand them, for a start - something quite permissible in the US).
Certainly people here in the office think it's shocking, quite different to the reaction I've witnessed from the majority of Americans here who think it's a man's moral right to do what he likes, and the consequence's for others be damned (and also that it's utterly outrageous that anyone should even question this).
Maybe you should wait until you actually see someone harming a child before you project your own psychotic hysteria onto a situation you don't know much of anything about.
'much of anything'? I think you'll find the facts are a matter of public record..oO(Yanks)
Hey excellent, thanks! I saw that years ago (used to have a copy, but lost the HD it was on). I've wanted to know where I could get that from for ages.
What part of "what business is it of yours" did you find hard to understand? No one else gets to run your life; you don't get to run anyone else's.
You seem more concerned that my criticism infringes on the moral rights of Mr Doohan rather than the care and best interests of his child.
It's "my" business, in the same way it's "my" business if I see someone hitting a child or treating a child in a clearly unacceptable way. I suggest that it ought to be your business too.
Maybe it's time to come to terms with your own family history and get that chip off your shoulder, mate.
Erm, what chip off my shoulder would that be? I'm fairly well adjusted and very up front about the issue as it goes (I'm sure my mother would confirm that), both compliments and criticism where warranted.
Oddly enough, the topic of the article was just brought up by two other people on IRC channels I'm on and the general level of agreement is that everyone think's that his behaviour was appalling and irresponsible. I'm simply not blinded to it because he was in a TV show I really like and find it bizarre that anyone would be.
You (and others I'm sure) may consider the timing 'tactless' and I can understand the basis for that assertion, but I wouldn't bring it up if it wasn't specifically related to the fact he has just died (it makes it specifically relevant). If you think that in that context I'm the one that's guilty of inappropriate behaviour, you are in need of a reality check.
I care a damn sight more about the impact of on a 5 year old child when their father dies, than the feelings of the fans of a departed actor on an internet forum.
It strikes me that a woman with enough love in her heart to genuinely care for an aging (admit it) character actor may be more than capabable of giving enough love to see her child through life?
She's ~ 48 now, as I've pointed out women at her age have a massively increased risk of either having birth complications or of their babies having serious medical problems (for example, at age 45 a 1-30 chance of the baby having Down syndrome, one of the biggest risks).
That alone would be absolutely enough to put me off, especially when child effected with Down's would need a high level of care for the rest of it's life coupled with knowing I wouldn't be around to give it.
After about the relatively young age of 35 giving birth motherhood becomes a seriously risk business for the mother and the baby. People these days want to imagine they can do what they want for as long as they like and settle down later (and Botox themselves high heaven), unfortunately when it comes to having a family, their are very serious consequences to having children at that age, and medical science has no miracle cures.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a innocent brazilian, and I have a website, and we are talking about british! My site is dead! Well, at least isn't me, as Jean who was killed because was wearing cloths for cold in a warm day.
I think it had more to do with the fact that he just left a building where a suspected terrorist cell was operating (from a flat he shared with several cousins) and because he ran from the police, almost certainly owing to him being an illegal immigrant with a forged stamp on his passport.
Let's get this idea of him being 'innocent' out of the way, and that he was killed merely because 'he was wearing a big jacked'. He had commited a criminal offence and was staying illegally in this country, with a bent passport. That's an entirely pre-medatated crime on his part, and almost certainly explains why he ran from the police, jumped the barrier and tried to make a getaway by going through the underground.
I can't begin to imagine illegally being in a foreign country, with a forged passport, and on the run from armed police (in a western modern democracy, of all places).
I'm quite sure in the heat of the moment he didn't grasp the seriousness of the situation properly or figure he was likely to be shot at by the police (no regular police force carry guns in the met, only the 300 officers in what is known as SO19, the specialist firearms support squad) and it's cetainly unfortunate that he was killed in these circumstances.
However, I'm prepared to the blame here squarely at the criminal who decided to go on the run from armed police, rather than come quietly and go to jail.
Personally I think it's a disgrace that the UK government are considering giving money to his relatives as compensation given he shouldn't even have been here. I'd be trying to find out who forged his passport for him, finding out if (as is not entirely unlikely) his cousins were in on it (he was apparently saying with 3 or 4 cousins in the flat that was in the building being monitored) and then I'd bang up everyone involved in the deception for a few months for being complicit, before deporting them and barring them from re-entry into the country.
But then, I read a lot of 2000 AD as a child.
Illegal imprisonment of a goldfish without a permit? 9 months in the cubes creep!
I thought it started off brilliantly and was immediately very immersive, but it really failed to sustain that interest and the story seemed to fall by the wayside, turning it into a mediocre by-the-numbers shoot em up (albeit one with a great 3rd party physics engine). I found it pretty repetative and formulaic with very linear level design with few 'milestone' points (unlike the origional). I'm fine with 'repetative' in the sense of 'shooting things' over and over (ala Doom 1/2, Unreal 2, etc), but when the environment repeats itself for large sections (as with Doom 3) it gets very tedious. 'Ravenholm' was certainly a nice departure, but they failed to really take enough advantage of it, and they had some dodgy elements to the level design in that section.
Dispite being heavily critisized by some of the gaming press, I loved Unreal 2 because of the varied gameplay. It had many different weapons, multiple types of deployable equipment, several completely different types of enemy and unique envrionments. It also had a consistant story to move things along (between every 'level', there was an additional 'level' set aboard your ship, where you could wander amoung your shipmates and interact with them to play out the story). This was actually a lot more 'interactive' than HL2 (and area in which HL2 is very much overrated IMO), in which it was almost entirely scripted and you just happened to be able to move around - though it was possible to 'trigger' a small number of additional scripted routines by looking or clicking on various things, it was noticeably quite limited.
With regard to HL2 feeling 'linear' IMO, I felt quite artificially constricted in by the outside environment. After playing titles like Ghost Recon, PlanetSide, Soldner, Joint Operations, BattleField (etc), when I'm outdoors I want to have freedom to explore and find my own way from A to B, over a reasonably large map (all of these support maps up to several kilometers in size). I hate getting to the top of a hill or mound - or worse, facing an invisible barrier - and discovering I've reached "the end of the world" just because I've gone a few feet off the beaten track. Far Cry did much better in this respect, and gave the player genuine flexibility and what felt like inteligent AI. There are even open source tools which can seemlessly stick together large outdoor maps into one envrionment (e.g. in whatever map format the Ureal engine uses). HL2 did particularly poorly in this regard, one of my most enduring memories of it is the frequent loading screens.
At the exteme end: You can drive for miles in Solder, for example, and the world just keeps being drawn - without repating the map over and over (forests, lakes, hills, mountains, grassland), because it seems a tool has been used to auto generate a huge amount of terrain and they have simply placed special interest points (i.e. basis, buildings) on top. As a bonus, the terrain in Soldner is dynamically deformable too (as well as buildings, you can fell trees and forests, even create new rivers, or destroy a whole mountain). The descruction models for buldings were a bit linear (several 'impact points' which could be struck and blown up/off/open), but at least they were there. The origional PlanetSide team used real world map data and adapted it to build the continents of Auxaris. I imagine something like an adapted version of the terrain builder from Sim City 4K would be ideal for this sort of work. Certainly after playing larger 16-46 multiplayer games and MMO's (and even the likes of GTA3/VC) I have no desire to back to out door maps that feel like they have been rendered according to the limitations of something like the Q3 engine.
In summary, I think I just felt that HL2 lacked imagination and vision - it did not really bring anything new to the table nor did it alternatively execute it all that well (with regard to the comments above, but also to the much maligned AI of the supposedly more intelligent opponents). For that reason I felt it wasn't as good as some other rec
Who needs nukes? Everyone gets this wrong. Everyone except Heinlein, that is. The real tactic is to drop rocks.
And to think, we've wasted so many resources on building and researching nuclear weapons, when it would have been more effective and far easier to deploy a giant catapult!
yes, also the picture should be about 40% of the screen, the rest filled with a marble pattern.
Ah, a Sega Saturn owner!
Will it run linux if I insert my usb "flesh" stick?
You jest, but have you ever calculated the (awesome) data throughput of a male organ in terms of sperm transfer rate (Things for network engineers to do when they are bored #362)?
The only downside to utilising this interface for data transmission is very 'bursty' traffic patterns and the likelihood of an unpleasant installation procedure for the required 'Johnny Mnemonic'-esque equipment.
Couldn't it just be that Tokyo is not as atractive as other cities?
I mean, huge language barriers, high cost of living and all that...
I found the statistics in the previous post interesting.
There could be something in that, in that Japan is very expensive to live in (ven more so than London and New York) and probably has much less space for poorer immigrants than sprawling cities. It's amazing to look at the Google satellite images of Japan and see that every inch of habitable space (i.e. anything that isn't mountainous) seems to be filled already.
This is very unlike the ever expanding London for example, which seems to consist almost predominantly of poor immigrants, and has done for over a century - it just continues to expand and take people on board with cheap to live, squalid and dirty pockets everywhere (right next to 2 bedroom flats worth half a million UKP). Of course there are far too many council estates in central London which artificially keep the price down and the area's nasty and crime ridden [East London, I'm looking at you], which forces regular people ever further out to the suburbs, and drives up house prices in what is already the most expensive city to live in in Europe (bitch moan, etc).
Another significant factor might be that Japan is so physically isolated, as well as culturally isolated in that the US and UK are particularly popular because English is so dominant.
It's an interesting theory that the lack of availably of cheap immigrant labour (as used in the US and across Western Europe) for all sort of crappy low paying menial jobs drives some of the interest in robotics. I think it's a good approach too, because it frees up human's for more interesting jobs (like erm, building robots 8).
By jumping puzzle levels, I'm assuming you mean the ones with the remix of the original SMB theme playing in the background. Those levels were the best part of the game. They felt like the old 2D Mario games.
:)
;-).
I'm thinking of the supposedly 'bonus' levels, where the camera constantly moves around you in a largely uncontrollable way (usually in such a way you couldn't see what Mario was doing) and you are on a precarious moving platform trying to collect Shine's and avoid falling to your death in order to proceed (and trigger a new event, meaning they were not really 'bonus' levels as they seemed to start out being). I think we are talking about the same thing though (but I can't remember the music in those sections).
Personally I loved the exploration elements (though I do enjoy just exploring maps), and I think they could have got more milage out of the environments they had but I agree, it would have been nice to have a big snowy mountain for ice levels, or perhaps completely underwater sections, and of course a nice big Bowser castle section!
I thought the fairground section was reasonably interesting, but I found the beach battle really annoying till I worked it out (I didn't think it was all that intuitive - could just be me being slow though
actually, as is already pointed out, this is a troll. Mainly because the parent misrepresents the definition of irony. Which is commonly done, but still a troll.
/. articles fit into that category (not in the least due to the write ups).
/. because people not only fail to understand what it means for a post to be a troll, but also what is meant by flamebait (instead applying them to posts they simply don't like, which is a large part of why we have meta moderation, to prevent people who habitually moderate in such a way from being able to do so in future).
You (and a few other readers) might want to actually read the alt.troll FAQ to understand what a troll is.
It is not in and of itself trolling to mis-use the word 'irony', unless it's in alt.grammar.nazi, for example.
This post ostensibly is not of that nature, it's not even inflammatory, unless you happen to be Zonk. Rather it would more accurately be described as Insightful, as the nature of article is indeed flamebait. An increasing number of
As the Moderator Guidelines indicate, it's inappropriate to moderate the parent down as when moderating you should focus on moderating UP (not DOWN) and save negative moderation's primarily for the likes of goat.ce and the automated troll-bots.
In this case the usage of the word irony is quite justifiable because it is ironic that people have failed to recognise the original article as flamebait but that they have instead incorrectly marked the posting point out that it's flamebait as flamebait.
( It is only correct to assert it is not ironic if you hold the view that we should all know full well it would be incorrectly interpreted not least because 'The Moderators are on Crack', as any fule kno. )
I would note that given that the article has produced several flames already, it's self evident that it is indeed flamebait.
This confusion frequently occurs on
What I find even more annoying is that he said the same thing about Super Mario Sunshine, which started out as easily the best Mario title, and was on it's way to being one of the best video games of all time, when you suddenly realise it's not actually complete and less half the way through they ran out of time to complete it and instead stuffed it with stupidly difficult jumping puzzle levels (which should have been left in, but purely as bonus levels) just to drag it out.
I was very disappointed, particularly after having so much fun with Mario initially (exploring, playing with water, discovering areas and new ways to play in the environment). Comparions with "Sonic Adventure" on the Dreamcast are hard to ignore - it managed to be bursting to the gills with features beyond any reasonable expectations and also felt complete and balanced from start to finish (a real masterpiece). I would have considered it a complete game even if it only had one playable character and a single story line, never mind six!
I wouldn't want to discourage developers from being critical of their past titles, but I would not purchase another Molyneux or Miyamoto game in future without seeing favourable reviews from sources I have faith in, as they have both, on multiple occasions, abused the cachet their names carry by not ensuring the sort of quality expected from finished products that have their names attached.
I have a couple at home (a headless one and a TFT one) powered off a dual CPU Sun Ultra 60 and really like like them too. I have yet to try out the Linux software though (but am looking forward to, as the biggest drawback is that Solaris is so goddamn slow I would only use the Sun Ultra system to handle managing the Sun Rays and export the display from a Debian x86 system, which meant running yet another computer).
HP have the t5500 thin client system which is great for corporate environments (and cheaper than Sun Ray license + Citrix license + Windows license when your only goal is to allow users to run Windows).
I too wish more establishments (universities and medium to large companies specifically) realised how much cheaper and more reliable thin client solutions were.
I know someone who recently phased out desktops in his ~ 30 person company and replaced them with t5000's (which he got for 150 UKP each, the same as the cost of a Sun Ray). You only need two real computers for that sort of network (a primary and a backup) and it's far easier to manage in the long run (he's actually non technical - a recruitment consultant, although he's also looked after the IT infrastructure in his company for a few years and has a reasonable understanding).
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
It is not superior to RPM, nor DEB for that matter. Anyone who has built or managed a large number of servers with disperate services on them should be able to recognise why.
It checks for required dependancies and installs them as required, something even CPAN can do, and it can even (usually) uninstall them (with varing levels of success), that is more or less it.
What it does not do is check for conflicts between libraries or the dependancies of other applications (meaning it's possible to fuck up one application, by installing another because it may overwrite an existing, older, installed library).
Systems like 'ports' do not verify package integrity, nor do they it support using a previons minor revion of the same application (often a requirement when the 'latest' version of whatever application or library your using breaks a feature you've been relying on, or is simply not a release you've had time to test in your test environment).
An even bigger problem related to the reliance of ports system, one of the most time consuming, is the process of upgrades. Upgrading between newer versions of FreeBSD is a mine field, awash with the potential for screwups, because there is no system in place to handle this task elegantly. Upgrading between disperate versions of the same branch (e.g. 4.6 to 4.11) will often cause serious problems you'll have to sort out manually at the console, upgrading from systems that are not in the same release (from 3.x or 4.x to 5.x) will often take up a good chunk of an afternoon to sort out the resulting mess. Upgrading a DEB or RPM system which is fully packaged managed (kernel and all), even between quite disperate releases is far more straight forward (more along the lines of 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade', or in the case of a Red Hat system, pop in the CD and click the 'Upgrade' button).
Another feature that makes more feature rich package management systems more desirable is the reduced risk. RPM is staggeringly powerful with regard to the sorts of operations it is able to carry out with packages (pretty much every feature you could ever want) and it is also trivial to build packages for - as is also true of DEB. This massively reduces the propensity for mistakes - sure you can write individual custom bash install scripts for packages in ports, but that is not a robust approach when you think about how many packages your likley to use.
There are two practical reasons why people typically dislike RPM:
1) It's refused to do what they wanted because a package was trying to be installed did not have it's appropriate dependancies also installed, or it conflicted in some way.
In these circumstances most users opt to 'force' it to install because they are frustrated at installing dependancies and sub-dependancies, and then they wonder why their system does not work as they expected, and so declare the RPM system to be at fault.
Arguably, it is at least partly at fault, but it was only being accurate by alerting them to problems that they would not otherwise have known about, which is pretty hard to critisize.
2) This is compounded by the fact that they are usually exposed to it in the form of 'Red Hat', or a similar distrobution, which does NOT feature something like 'apt-get'. 'apt-get' is in fact package management system agnostic, at least technically, and their have been RPM based commercial distrobutions which have shipped with it. It's absolutly more associated with Debian, and I think it's a mistake for Red Hat and other vendors not to include it in their RPM based distros because of the frequency of the scenario above, I suspect the cost of maintaining apt repositories (man hours, infrastructure and running costs such as bandwith) are key reasons.
Disclaimer:
I use ports on an almost daily basis, along with De
FYI grownups use words like 'lowercase' and uppercase to decribe the case of words (not 'little' and 'big', unless your about 6 or under). If you want to prove your are in fact a big boy, let's see if you can also use whois as well.
HINT: It shouldn't be hard, given I've been on the net for over 10 years (certainly pre WWW) and loads of my personal details, including my home address, is intentionally listed in umpteen online directories (and several software packages as contact information).
PS, just for the record:
A man who has a seventh child age 80 is still an asshole for doing so, just so we are absolutely crystal clear. In fact, I think I'll set up a web page pointing that out, for those that don't get it. Of course the fact that he split with his wife and four previous kids to shack up with a 18 year old when he was 55 in the first place is pretty suspect too (particularly given he already had children that age and older at the time). I can't imagine his first four children we impressed by daddy running off to bed with someone who was their age. Yeah, he was a real American hero alright.
What's a matter of public record doesn't give any reason to fear for this child's welfare.
If 5 year old child having a 48 year old mother and an 85 year old father is okay with you, then I guess not. I guess we have different visions of what's in the best interest of a child's welfare.
Namely, I don't think a single mother in her 60's is best placed to deal with a teenager, you do.
Interesting earlier post btw.
My point overall is that too much play-balancing detracts from the fun
While I completely see that they have deliberately set out to build an arcade experience, I do think this is spot on. The level of wackiness the game allows for goes out of being merely arcade like and into the realm of frustrating fairly often.
There is a realism mod for Joint Operations which I hear a lot of service / ex-service personnel prefer. I was just about to look it up and post a link but I've got to be at a meeting across town in another office in an hour, and someone has just tried to blow up the station I was going to (bugger).
I've played them all, with the exception of Shadowbane, and I think he is absolutely spot on, and I think most of my friends (the ones that have played at least WoW, SWG and EQ at least) would agree.
SWG has the best crafting system, massive customisation and elements like the player housing and cities are the best bar none. However, the combat is poor and the classes are unbalanced, the skill tree system is so-so and a quest system is basically non existent (and the 3D engine is dubious).
He did compliment WoW's questing system, which is among the best by far, it's still quite repetitive though (not nearly as engaging or dynamic as something in a single player game like the outstanding Morrowind). The crafting system in WoW is very disappoint though (to the extent that other than some potions that are especially useful in PvP, it's largely pointless as drops are far better).
Wow is more popular because it's very 'main stream' and accessible, it's also selling of the back of a well known and respected franchise. The lack of customisation and character housing is not something that in itself add's or contributes to what makes it a good game (though indirectly, it's subsequent simplicity probably does contribute to it's main stream success).
Some of the most fun I've had in an MMORPG has been based around contributing to a player built city and environment and communities where people work together to build whole player cities and rebel and imperial bases, weaving their own story-line. Electing a mayor on policy basis, raising taxes to fund buying your own Shuttle Port for the town (which helped bring in business to the local stores), enduring Imperial player raids on your Rebel outpost (and choosing to join in and help defend).
Player customisation (something which SWG also excelled at), is something that can be underestimated - it really helps players feel more attached to their characters, something difficult in WoW when you keep bumping into dopplegangers.
[ Just for the record, the person that moderated you Troll is a fuckwit (apparently no one who's started using the internet since approximately 1994 has any idea what the word means). Technically it might be considered inflammatory but your still spot on. ]
Sniping is 'nerfed' in BF2 because it's generally quite unpleasant for most users and doesn't make for a very satisfying game. Interestingly it's quite well balanced in a game like PlanetSide (two hits to kill, doesn't display the location of the sniper, except by tracer/muzzle flash which is reasonably difficult to spot), but that's largely due to the vast maps - way beyond the size of anything even in BF2, though BF2 has far more detailed maps - which provide lots of room for manoeuvre.
It's very tricky in games to get users to behave in realistic manner due to lack of real death penalty. It's difficult to have an enjoyable game when your opponents all behave like suicide bombers (because the game mechanics can encourage that type of play, or at least they do not do enough to discourage it).
Perhaps harsher death penalties are the answer (e.g. have it cost the player more than just a single point). PlanetSide tries to do this by increasing your respawn time each time you die, particularly if you die several times in a row quickly, but that has the downside of being quite tedious to endure, especially if you are unlucky several times in a row.
One thing it does quite well is timers on vehicles (for example, if a player is able to requisition a tank at a vehicle bay, they are only allowed 1 every 15 minutes, so they had better make it last). Obviously this doesn't translate directly to a game like BF2, but it might be worth experimenting with the idea that if a player has a poor score it should limit their access to equipment (e.g. preventing them from driving off with armoured vehicles or aircraft in particular - perhaps even classes like the support class, with it's spamming heavy machine gun, too).
Nothing in life is certain, you could have a child in the confines of the happiest marraige and still get killed crossing the street before it reached puberty.
/. readers.
I can tell you one thing that is certain, if you are 80 years old when you have a child, you are not going to be there to support that child as they grow up, as we have sadly just seen.
You can excuse that with irrelevant dialogue stating 'Well you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, so it doesn't matter!'.
You sound as if you've never overcome your father's and stepfather's misfortunes, perhaps psychological consuling is in order?
If you think I counselling because I think parents should be there for their children, then your beyond wacky. From looking at a large number of posts here, it's a very sad reflection of the lack of value placed on the rights of children by a lot of
Though where I'm from (Scotland), we have a quite different take on child welfare (you can't hit children to reprimand them, for a start - something quite permissible in the US).
Certainly people here in the office think it's shocking, quite different to the reaction I've witnessed from the majority of Americans here who think it's a man's moral right to do what he likes, and the consequence's for others be damned (and also that it's utterly outrageous that anyone should even question this).
Maybe you should wait until you actually see someone harming a child before you project your own psychotic hysteria onto a situation you don't know much of anything about.
.oO(Yanks)
'much of anything'? I think you'll find the facts are a matter of public record.
knew
* The K is free.
Hey excellent, thanks! I saw that years ago (used to have a copy, but lost the HD it was on). I've wanted to know where I could get that from for ages.
Actually Ian, it is you that is the asshole.
My name is not 'Ian'. Apparently you are knew to using Google though.
What part of "what business is it of yours" did you find hard to understand? No one else gets to run your life; you don't get to run anyone else's.
You seem more concerned that my criticism infringes on the moral rights of Mr Doohan rather than the care and best interests of his child.
It's "my" business, in the same way it's "my" business if I see someone hitting a child or treating a child in a clearly unacceptable way. I suggest that it ought to be your business too.
Then why should we consider "Because some self-important, neurotic twat named @madeus told me to," an acceptable reason for doing something?
Much as I love being equated with God, you shouldn't use me as an excuse for doing Bad Things(TM) either.
Maybe it's time to come to terms with your own family history and get that chip off your shoulder, mate.
Erm, what chip off my shoulder would that be? I'm fairly well adjusted and very up front about the issue as it goes (I'm sure my mother would confirm that), both compliments and criticism where warranted.
Oddly enough, the topic of the article was just brought up by two other people on IRC channels I'm on and the general level of agreement is that everyone think's that his behaviour was appalling and irresponsible. I'm simply not blinded to it because he was in a TV show I really like and find it bizarre that anyone would be.
You (and others I'm sure) may consider the timing 'tactless' and I can understand the basis for that assertion, but I wouldn't bring it up if it wasn't specifically related to the fact he has just died (it makes it specifically relevant). If you think that in that context I'm the one that's guilty of inappropriate behaviour, you are in need of a reality check.
I care a damn sight more about the impact of on a 5 year old child when their father dies, than the feelings of the fans of a departed actor on an internet forum.
But you do what you think is right.
It strikes me that a woman with enough love in her heart to genuinely care for an aging (admit it) character actor may be more than capabable of giving enough love to see her child through life?
She's ~ 48 now, as I've pointed out women at her age have a massively increased risk of either having birth complications or of their babies having serious medical problems (for example, at age 45 a 1-30 chance of the baby having Down syndrome, one of the biggest risks).
That alone would be absolutely enough to put me off, especially when child effected with Down's would need a high level of care for the rest of it's life coupled with knowing I wouldn't be around to give it.
After about the relatively young age of 35 giving birth motherhood becomes a seriously risk business for the mother and the baby. People these days want to imagine they can do what they want for as long as they like and settle down later (and Botox themselves high heaven), unfortunately when it comes to having a family, their are very serious consequences to having children at that age, and medical science has no miracle cures.