Make sure you tell your school this! It may never go anywhere, but mail your school's administration, your district administration (I'm assuming this is a high school-type place), and your student-run media (newspaper, A/V club) and student council (class president, etc.). Show as many people as you can in that school (and those who support and help run it) that BitTorrent isn't a "rogue protocol,"
There are two definitions of rogue available for use:
1. It is only used for illegal activities(e.g. underground network). This is the definition that is implied by the statement. 2. "Out-of-Control." It is taking up much more bandwidth than what it should be using. In this case, BitTorrent is sighted as a protocol that takes up too much bandwidth, since it is constantly transferring data 24/7 as users connect and also try to download. (Generally, twice the bandwidth - users are expected to upload at least what they download, making it twice the amount transferred through FTP or HTTP.) Even if the IT department isn't using this definition, they could easily fall back to it if necessairy.
Of course, BitTorrent is slow behind a college-level firewall - you can't receive any form of inbound connection, thus crippling your download rate.
FYI, some internet connection plans are based around a $/GB plan - thus the college may be paying more money to support BitTorrent when they could instead provide local download mirrors to the students for academic materials. And as you know, money can talk louder than letters.
Besides, how much could 9th graders really contribute to IT anyway, maybe Sponge-Bob drawings?
Don't be suprised. When I was Grade 9, I could easily write small-scale C programs that could do a given task. The only reason I couldn't do anything medium to large scale was because there was no available training that I could get my hands on that actually taught people how to plan software development.
The only reason these 9th graders aren't doing real IT stuff is because they don't have the resources to do anything special - both material wise (compilers and such), and reference wise (e.g. information on how to plan software development).
Around that time, I only had access to BorlandC, which could not be used effectivly for anything beyond 64K. I got GCC some time later, but by then, I've been discouraged by my lack of ability to produce anything large. It took until after College before I had the confidence enough to write a medium scale project.
Many players can effectively micro-manage units, while playing fastest.
No - many Battle.Net players. This is a big difference.
As soon as you increase the speed, it simply becomes a war of who can build and deploy units faster. The game was never designed to handle constant fastest play - as demonstrated by the simple tactic of retreating a single unit to wipe out an enemy attacking force trying to reach that unit. As of yet, I have not seen any game that breaks a single-unit target paridigm. (Kohan comes close, but a unit is merely multiple soldiers)
A better solution would invlove increasing the number of starting resources. This strips the most tedious section of the game, and removes the need to play always on fastest to get past this bump. However, this disrupts game balance, since Protoss still have to build two consecutive structures before their first unit (or base defence) can come out.
At least it's not as bad as Warcraft II - on fastest speed, there is not enough time to even click on a peon leaving a mine and giving a stop order.
The counterpart to this is your videocard. If you're not planning on gaming, look at one of the lower-end videocards that use a heatsink only.
A better idea for those who aren't going to game is to stick with an on-board video card. It's almost always quiet and still has the advantage of being instantly upgraded to a gaming machine with one hardware addition.
Also, even a "high-end" video card can have a cheap fan - when I purchased my Geforce TI4400 (Asus V8440) years ago, It came with a fan that was designed to push air sideways with many small fins (I just found out, since I took it apart to oil the fan). The fan, as you can guess, was the biggest noise maker in my system (other than the 30mm fan on my caddy, which had a bad bearing.)
Of course, I doubt the fan in question is doing anything useful, since it doesn't appear to be transferring the air over anything that heats up. But I won't be taking any chances unless someone else with an says it's perfectly fine.
Outside of these five is when you start getting into specialty areas: Putting noise-absorbing material in the case, using large heat-pipe coolers in place of fans on your video card, moving the computer to a closet and running long cables, etc. Honestly, though, if you follow the above recommendations, you should get something quiet enough that you don't need to worry.
Actually, there is one missing - use a low angular velocity CD-reader/writer. This isn't (or shouldn't be) special since the only real advantage of CDs being faster than 16X would only be useful for those who want to minimize install times for whatever (which is now pointless in a multi-tasking system.)
The only problem here is that those CD readers are out of production, or hard to find.
Haven't they found the one 2 up from that one yet? I cracked it the other day. It's 10921601209381283939528579258588293236501826350187 26347610732650752384751204702754081273540781523087 60187259387598287309820238560861098264011
If you want to type in a random number and claim it to be prime, at least have the decency to check that it isn't divisible by 3.
A quick way of confirming this is to ensure the sum of all it's digits does not add up to a multiple of 3.
Global variables are fine in games and necessary in most cases for performance.
That statement is simple to counter. Let's say you suddenly realize that you need an additional global variable - you need to make a minimum of three changes: first to add the variable, second to add it to the things to save to a file, and third to ad it to the things needing to be loaded.
At the very least, it should be encapsulated within a struct (even one at global scope) so that only one change needs to be made. At worst, this would pin the saved games to either one version and/or one operating system - which doesn't even come close to outweighing the benefits for ease of management.
I can describe it right here. The game area is a basic ring, with units being inserted on the left and right sides. You control one unit at a time in attempt to go to a one-on-one showdown where all the units basically have a same aura attack. (A bug in the game tends to favour player one, but that's another story.) The final confrontation with the two exeters is basically the same. There is no AI support.
That's basically it. Anything from the first two archons have been removed entirely, thus making Archon III entirely bad. And as we know, bad sequels are true sequels.:)
You can download it from arnold.c64.org, and it works fine. But Archon I and Archon II are better download choices instead - they're much more entertaining.
How about Archon II (for the c64 at least)? I liked that game a lot more. Fun stuff.
If you're going to recommend a sequel, try Archon III. This is a true sequel, unlike Archon II, as it fufills the rule of the original game(s) being much better.
Getting other people to play that game was a Kodak moment - the realization that the series has been driven into the ground after they saw the wonders of the first two games.
You must have had bad luck. Everyone I've ever known who had a C-64 talks about the tank-like nature of the machine. These were all kids who dropped them down flights of stairs, spilled coke in them (worked after a cleaning), and generally abused the machines like kids do. They just don't break.
I've had multiple C64s. While I haven't tried smashing them, I remember the following dying:
- One had rapid video corruption, rendering it unusable. (especially writing Basic programs.) - One had a keyboard/joystick malfunction, where you couldn't type into the computer for long. - One has subtle video corruption - it would normally work fine, but some drawing operations would not set the colour of the display properly and thus cause other programs to look buggy.
I've been through three C64s, all of which failed. Itmay be a tank, but it's internal electronics can still fail. (BTW, I heard reports that another C64 was lent to another family, who discovered that pretty colours can be drawn on the screen by carpet scrubbing and touching one of the joystick ports. It was fried after enough of that treatment.)
On my Windows XP system, an empty Word document is 11K. Adding about 34K of ASCII text, and the size is 105K.
Last time I checked, Microsoft Word uses unicode to store text - not Ascii. While this might appear as nitpicking, it's really more important than it appears, since it effectivly means that your text is twice as large (e.g. 68K instead of 34K.) However, this still leaves 26K unaccounted for.
It's not the best way of storing information, as English documents rarely need anything more than 256 unique characters. However, I susepct that data storage is done this way because of some application features (e.g. shared editing, etc.)
There is no possible way that you could rationally argue that Diablo 2 should have gotten a Teen rating. There is more blood in the first act of that game than in many other Mature games. Discounting that the tortured and partially dismembered naked people hanging on hooks alone is pretty bad, even if they aren't photorealistic.
Honestly, I haven't noticed those partially dismembered bodies around the dungeons. If that is true, then I'd agree with the "M" rating - but for now, let's assume that it isn't.
What's left with Diablo II receiving the high rating would be the massive amounts of violence and blood. The violence in Diablo II isn't much different than the violence in Star Trek: Elite Force - you attack a large quantity of monsters to kill or get rid of them. This leaves only the blood.
Operation Flashpoint and Ghost Recon receive an 'M' rating, with the only appearant difference being the blood either pooling on the floor or on the body of a target. This is somehow saying that Blood of any kind somehow magically makes a game unsuitable for people 13-16, even though they've already seen enough fo their own injuries when they accidently hit a desk or something as they get used to growing. Thus, unless there's blood spraying out of dead bodies or limbs constantly splitting apart, blood should not be a factor in rating.
With this reasoning, I could basically consider multiple games that receive an 'M' rating to instead really be a 'T', or vice versa. As you mentioned, Diablo II is an exception because of the skimpy characters and tortured bodies on poles - basically the only reason why it couldn't be changed. Once you remove the artwork lying around the dungeons, it will instantly become 'T'een, since it will be no different than Angband or Nethack where a single '@' slaughters tons and tons of other characters. Even if you can't rationalize Diablo II all the way down to Teen, it can come very close to the lower rating tier.
Until I'm convinced otherwise, I'm comfortable giving Op Flash, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and similar games to a 13-16 year old person. However, I might consider Duke3D (where I didn't notice the excessive adult content until *after* I purchased the game - at the time, I had the shareware version and was underage) or a few other games to be unsuitable. If it's generally unsuitable, I'll treat it on a case-by-case basis, as it should be done.
Am I the only one who doesn't have problems playing Steam games offline? According to my experience, when my network cable is unplugged I have no problems playing.
Most of the negative comments about Steam problems are usually something that is incorrect. In fact, such inaccurrate comments were posted to annoying frequencies to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (and other off-topic newsgroups) that it's simply damned annoying.
Those postings have had the net effect of showing any person who bashes Steam look like yet another Steam bashing twat. In fact, the regulars of the newsgroup have gotten very tired of correcting the most basic of facts, such as being unable to play while offline.
(Okay, there is an "offline" mode, but its more of a hack than a feature, as it involves copying files around just to trick Steam into acting like you're signed on)
Citations please. After all the tikme I've spent with Steam, I never had to copy one file to get offline mode to work (and therefore play the singleplayer games without problem.)
The only times I had to do file management was because I transferred the program to a different hard-drive, since Steam cached the pathnames of critical files.
While I understand that Command and Conquer and it's sequels/expansions could easily be seen as portraying China in a negative light, the premise of the "Generals" series is hardly anti-Chinese:
Even if it isn't anti-Chinese, it's extremely easy assume otherwise. Most of the claims of racism seem to stem from stereotypical nature of the game, including both units and the voice acting. As an example, some voices from the Worker indicate that there's a limited grasp of english - which is more significant than a simple accent.
The expansion pack Zero Hour, given some plot discontinuities within itself and the original campaign, feels a little like damage control to try an give the Chinese a happy ending. (e.g. USA got attacked and retaliated, but when they got attacked again, they pulled back and strengthened homeland security.)
Oddly enough, it didn't seem to be noticable with Red Alert or Red Alert 2. It could be that the accent was used to indiate the faction rather than produce character - which is enough of a different to matter.
2. How about a more detailed story overview?
Set roughly 20 years into our future, China is no longer governed by old communist beliefs and cold war mentality. While still communist, the new Chinese government are people that grew up on modern culture and things like MTV.
This could be a trigger for China banning the game, and does sound plausable. However, China's official explaination also sounds plausable, turning it into a word-vs-word description. You can guess who won.
There could have been ways to make the Chinese government look a little worse for banning the game without reason (or at least deflected the banning to banned games rather than legit games.) However, it feels like EA Pacific was a bit too careless in creating the faction, thus creating an anti-Chinese impression.
Paul Graham is a very highly-driven individual, and his advice would work well for a younger version of himself. But I have plenty of friends who are happy taking a fairly laid-back attitude towards life.
I don't think that's the "wasting time" that Paul Graham is talking about.
Based on the contents of the article (and I was merely skimming rather than reading, since this is a dial-up connection), He's more in the lines about students not finding out what they should do with their lives. This has nothing to do with spending time on entertainment.
In a way, there isn't much of a choice that some high-school students have. They know that they have specialized, but cannot progress because of one reason or another (e.g. they don't have any target goal for any personal projects, or sufficient knowledge or tools on how to obtain such a goal.) In addition, they might get turned away from what would have been an open door because of one reason or another (e.g. the student feels he's learning much slower than what he should be and loses interest in fields he would have examined.)
Explore your inner slacker as well as your inner Einstein.
This bring me to the other side of the problem. With my personal experience with school, I have never failed a high-school or early college course because I have never studied. This has ultimatly been a bad influence, as it never encouraged me to proceed on a task over a long period of time, as I usually lose interest or otherwise try to do something else.
This is something that I need to shake off, preferably quickly. However, this behaviour is not easily changed, especially when built up un high-school.
When is your next eye appointment again? What you save now by straiting your eyes AND running a CRT you're going to pay for in eye glasses in your later years.
If a person is going to need eye glasses, a CRT will not have any impact on when this will occurr. Most perscriptions have to do with near-sightededness or far-sightedness, where the lens of the eye does not focus correctly at certain distances.
The only confirmed eye problems with CRT monitors are temporary eye strain that can be recovered from or easily corrected. Until I see a medical report saying otherwise, the permanent damage from looking at a computer screen is no different than looking outside.
There's plenty of other myths about eyes. At the very least, you should read up on medical reports rather than believing regular hear-say by laymens on internet forums (like this posting.)
Samsung has just implemented a 0 dead pixels policy, where if any of htem are dead they replace it.
Only in South Korea. It also isn't really helpful, since most manufacturers just simply abide by an extremely low QA.
I use large (21" and greater) B&W LCD and CRT monitors at work for ~8 hours/day, switching every month or so between the two types. I find that when I'm using the LCDs, the pictures seem sharper and brighter, but I seem to end up with daily eyestrain and headaches.
Headaches and Eyestrain from CRT monitors are usually caused by three things:
1. Montior brightness/contrast too high, causing the White to be somewhat painfully bright. 2. Refresh rate is too low. While the default 60Hz works if you are not working with a bright background, it really should be at least 72Hz. In general, higher refresh rates are better. (If you have interlacing, the refresh rate is effectivly halved.) 3. Distance - you don't want to be too close to the monitor screen.
If you take care of these three factors, the problems should be reduced (but aren't guarenteed to disappear entirely.)
one additional drawback that LCDs have, is that the image quality is dropping severly, if you dont run it on the "native resolution". while this may be not a great issue when using the LCDs mainly for desktop applictions, but in case of computer games you may want to reduce the screen resolution in order to gain some extra FPS. the reduced screen resolution will lead to blurry images due to interpolation, so you might want to stick with your old CRT if you are a 3d gamer.
That's assuming that the monitor will perform interpolation. It won't if the desktop resolution is at the native screen resolution, and the game is playing within at a reduced resolution inside a window.
Alternativly, a well designed LCD monitor can give the option to shrink a screen as opposed to interpolating. While this does create a large black area, there won't be any blurring caused by a mis-matched resolution.
That in mind, why don't the "folks" have the e-mails that he sent to them? Wouldn't you keep (even treasure) the e-mails of a family member, especially if the family member was in a situation where death may be near?
It depends. Before the 250MB upgrade, the users were forced to eventually delete messages because of lack of space - usually this results in the oldest messages being deleted first. In addition, the other people might also be using things like Yahoo mail or Hotmail, where sotring sent messages also cuts into space.
If the family memebers also use Yahoo or some other address, they might not be able to keep all the correspondance either.
The story changes after the 250MB upgrade, where things can get kept longer.
Or even if they deleted the e-mails, I'm sure they replied to them first, so maybe they have copies in their Sent folder.
It takes two people to e-mail, and even if Yahoo! won't release the e-mails I'm sure the OTHER end of the conversation may be more willing to do so.
How do they know who is trading? It doesn't have to be the one signed up with the ISP, if can be his wife (or her husband), it can be someone else in the family, or a friend visiting and so on
This is a non-issue.
The person responsible for the downloading his or her Internet connection is the one that may be assumed to be using the file trading software. If the person responsible for the connection knows that his friend used the computer to download or trade the stuff, then that person may ask the court to change the defendant to reference his or her friend.
If you want more information on basic legal tactics, you should ask or retain either a Paralegal or a Lawyer.
So, if they already KNOW that we do not like what they are doing, and if we vote them out of office, they can then REALLY cash in, why would it matter if we write them and let them know what we think? THat is useless to us.
When you vote those bastards out of office, the next attempt to tighten copyright laws (which seems to happen very frequently) can backfire more easily and result in some changes in favour of the citizens (or against the holders). For example, the copy-protected works of copywritten products will not receive any compensation from the copyright levy (while the benefits from the levy still extend to these products.)
Not that it would happen in a two party system. If you really want those politicians truly removed from office, then you might consider trying your best to drum up support for one of the third parties.
Try them, and if found guilty, hang them publicly. After that happens a couple of times, no politician would want to bring on such shame and humiliation on his/her family, which could last for generations.
It won't work for practical reasons. The most obvious example would be the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where one senator was framed for trying to pass a bill through for his personal gain. (The bill was legitimate, but the evidence pointing to personal gain was forged.) If Senator Smith got hanged, you would have one innocent person killed by the death penalty.
1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush.
I never thought so...just having quad doesn't mean you can hit your target any better. In my CTF 4 days, quad + str rune usually was more dangerous to yourself then anyone else.
It's true that Quad doesn't improve accurracy, but it makes certain weapons extremely powerful. For example, the basic shotgun can usually kill in 4-5 hits, but when quadded does a 1 hit kill.
It's next to placing an insta-gib weapon in a match using normal weapons.
2. If you suicide with the thunderbolt, the early versions of Quake cause the client to enter a permanent zombie state. This wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that this got carried over to some expansion pack weaponry.
I never experienced this...is it common? I never heard of it, and i was playing quake in college for years (96-99). Such a bug would go around the dorms pretty quick I'd think.
It was mentioned in the 1.06 patch. You won't see this bug at all unless you play either on a 1.01 serever or on one of the two mission packs.
4. Quake is sensitive to spam because of it's low MAX_EDICTS. If enough players constantly fire Nailguns (30 max nails/person, although I haven't seen it go that high), you could crash some servers running fairly large maps.
I run a dedicated server w/16 players on a P90 w/32mb ram and never had this problem.
It won't be a problem in most cases, mainly because not many players will all use the nailgun at one time in an attempt to reach the maximum limit. However, TF needed to change the nailgun code to produce half as many projectiles because of it's greater use.
Even if you don't directly have the problem, you can till get affected with it if you use the original Quake server or client - it puts a limit on how complex a map can become (e.g. TF's Canalzone stated in the readme that some features had to be scaled back because of that limit).
I've had fun with this before, myself having the haste rune + a friend using the GL also...but i never heard anyone say it was unbalanced. Again, you were more likely to kill yourself as an enemy.
Were would be true - but given that the world skill with these games has improved, players shouldn't have to worry about accidently hitting themselves as often with the GL. Although it's a bit harder to master than the other weapons, it's still quite dangerous.
Wasn't as bad as the multi grenade in DoE - it was too powerful in the CTF game mode as it prevented persuers. Servers that enabled runes made it worse - Multi-GL + rune = guarenteed flag capture.
Only if the other player is injured already (or you had quad or a rune). But so will a Halo rocket under those conditions.
Acutally, a direct or near hit does do an instant kill from the starting 100 health (it does 120 radius damage from about 1 player width away). Given that vertical aiming was a slight shift from Doom, it did feel as if it were one of the most powerful weapons - and naturally caused rushes to be the first rocket launcher user.
This isn't saying that it was too powerful - as the players learn how to use the rocket launcher, they also learn how to dodge it as well. However, it did seem to be quite powerful when it was first encountered. It's sort of like the Panzerfaust in RTCW:ET - it is balanced, but it still draws a lot of "panzer whore" messages.
If these issues are minor, why do you say Quake's DM is obsolete?
Quake DM is obsolete because it's been replaced by newer games. This doesn't mean that it's bad, even if it might appear that way.
Indeed, the company (Petroglyph) is made up mainly of ex-Westwood employees, who were responsible for every Command & Conquer game up until (Not including) Generals.
Personally, I'd only give them credit for pioneering the RTS genre with C&C and Red Alert. While TS was okay, it wasn't perfect as it was still limited by clicking required to build units.
The series went downhill after Red Alert 2 - the AI looked like it was obviously scripted and could be countered without problem. This left the focus on the multiplayer, which isn't working as well as it was a few years ago (e.g. cheaters beginning to run rampant and the more intellegent players switching to other games.) The good news is that the blame can be laid on EA rather than Westwood.
However, I do hope that they will be successful in their RTS, and perhaps remove the most damaging bottlenecks from the genre (clicking and scrolling).
Certainly EA threw out all of C&C's trademark gameplay mechanics when they made Generals.
EA certainly threw out more than that. The only thing that makes Generals looks interesting is the Multiplayer, and that's beginning to be swamped by cheaters ever since EA broke off it's support prematurely.
The thing with Quake is that there are no other games from 1996 which even compare to today's games. Quake (deathmatch) can still just about hold its own even against today's titles like UT2004.
While it's true that no other game in 1996 is memorable off-hand, Quake's deathmatch can be consdiered obsolete:
1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush. 2. If you suicide with the thunderbolt, the early versions of Quake cause the client to enter a permanent zombie state. This wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that this got carried over to some expansion pack weaponry. 3. The crosshair is slightly off center. 4. Quake is sensitive to spam because of it's low MAX_EDICTS. If enough players constantly fire Nailguns (30 max nails/person, although I haven't seen it go that high), you could crash some servers running fairly large maps. 5. The Grenade launcher balance is debatable - while I might agree with it, it was classified as an overpowered spam weapon. 6. The Rocket launcher balace is also debatable - it can do a long-range instant kill.
But other than these minor issues, I still see people going for the nostalgic gameplay - whether in QuakeWorld, or DMC under Half-Life.
Well Spiderweb's RPGs have always been good, but I was a bit disappointed to see the Exile series rehashed into Avernum. However the games are still good anyway, although I do wish they could come out with something new.
The storyline and combat in Spiderweb's game can be good, but soon after I purchased the game, I found another RPG called "Angband", version 2.7.9. After that, I found the Exile series to have a somewhat clumsy interface because of the lack of keyboard targetting (e.g. you require a mouse to play.)
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1. It is only used for illegal activities(e.g. underground network). This is the definition that is implied by the statement.
2. "Out-of-Control." It is taking up much more bandwidth than what it should be using. In this case, BitTorrent is sighted as a protocol that takes up too much bandwidth, since it is constantly transferring data 24/7 as users connect and also try to download. (Generally, twice the bandwidth - users are expected to upload at least what they download, making it twice the amount transferred through FTP or HTTP.) Even if the IT department isn't using this definition, they could easily fall back to it if necessairy.
Of course, BitTorrent is slow behind a college-level firewall - you can't receive any form of inbound connection, thus crippling your download rate.
FYI, some internet connection plans are based around a $/GB plan - thus the college may be paying more money to support BitTorrent when they could instead provide local download mirrors to the students for academic materials. And as you know, money can talk louder than letters.
The only reason these 9th graders aren't doing real IT stuff is because they don't have the resources to do anything special - both material wise (compilers and such), and reference wise (e.g. information on how to plan software development).
Around that time, I only had access to BorlandC, which could not be used effectivly for anything beyond 64K. I got GCC some time later, but by then, I've been discouraged by my lack of ability to produce anything large. It took until after College before I had the confidence enough to write a medium scale project.
As soon as you increase the speed, it simply becomes a war of who can build and deploy units faster. The game was never designed to handle constant fastest play - as demonstrated by the simple tactic of retreating a single unit to wipe out an enemy attacking force trying to reach that unit. As of yet, I have not seen any game that breaks a single-unit target paridigm. (Kohan comes close, but a unit is merely multiple soldiers)
A better solution would invlove increasing the number of starting resources. This strips the most tedious section of the game, and removes the need to play always on fastest to get past this bump. However, this disrupts game balance, since Protoss still have to build two consecutive structures before their first unit (or base defence) can come out.
At least it's not as bad as Warcraft II - on fastest speed, there is not enough time to even click on a peon leaving a mine and giving a stop order.
A better idea for those who aren't going to game is to stick with an on-board video card. It's almost always quiet and still has the advantage of being instantly upgraded to a gaming machine with one hardware addition.
Also, even a "high-end" video card can have a cheap fan - when I purchased my Geforce TI4400 (Asus V8440) years ago, It came with a fan that was designed to push air sideways with many small fins (I just found out, since I took it apart to oil the fan). The fan, as you can guess, was the biggest noise maker in my system (other than the 30mm fan on my caddy, which had a bad bearing.)
Of course, I doubt the fan in question is doing anything useful, since it doesn't appear to be transferring the air over anything that heats up. But I won't be taking any chances unless someone else with an says it's perfectly fine.
Actually, there is one missing - use a low angular velocity CD-reader/writer. This isn't (or shouldn't be) special since the only real advantage of CDs being faster than 16X would only be useful for those who want to minimize install times for whatever (which is now pointless in a multi-tasking system.)
The only problem here is that those CD readers are out of production, or hard to find.
If you want to type in a random number and claim it to be prime, at least have the decency to check that it isn't divisible by 3.
A quick way of confirming this is to ensure the sum of all it's digits does not add up to a multiple of 3.
At the very least, it should be encapsulated within a struct (even one at global scope) so that only one change needs to be made. At worst, this would pin the saved games to either one version and/or one operating system - which doesn't even come close to outweighing the benefits for ease of management.
I can describe it right here. The game area is a basic ring, with units being inserted on the left and right sides. You control one unit at a time in attempt to go to a one-on-one showdown where all the units basically have a same aura attack. (A bug in the game tends to favour player one, but that's another story.) The final confrontation with the two exeters is basically the same. There is no AI support.
:)
That's basically it. Anything from the first two archons have been removed entirely, thus making Archon III entirely bad. And as we know, bad sequels are true sequels.
You can download it from arnold.c64.org, and it works fine. But Archon I and Archon II are better download choices instead - they're much more entertaining.
Getting other people to play that game was a Kodak moment - the realization that the series has been driven into the ground after they saw the wonders of the first two games.
- One had rapid video corruption, rendering it unusable. (especially writing Basic programs.)
- One had a keyboard/joystick malfunction, where you couldn't type into the computer for long.
- One has subtle video corruption - it would normally work fine, but some drawing operations would not set the colour of the display properly and thus cause other programs to look buggy.
I've been through three C64s, all of which failed. Itmay be a tank, but it's internal electronics can still fail. (BTW, I heard reports that another C64 was lent to another family, who discovered that pretty colours can be drawn on the screen by carpet scrubbing and touching one of the joystick ports. It was fried after enough of that treatment.)
It's not the best way of storing information, as English documents rarely need anything more than 256 unique characters. However, I susepct that data storage is done this way because of some application features (e.g. shared editing, etc.)
What's left with Diablo II receiving the high rating would be the massive amounts of violence and blood. The violence in Diablo II isn't much different than the violence in Star Trek: Elite Force - you attack a large quantity of monsters to kill or get rid of them. This leaves only the blood.
Operation Flashpoint and Ghost Recon receive an 'M' rating, with the only appearant difference being the blood either pooling on the floor or on the body of a target. This is somehow saying that Blood of any kind somehow magically makes a game unsuitable for people 13-16, even though they've already seen enough fo their own injuries when they accidently hit a desk or something as they get used to growing. Thus, unless there's blood spraying out of dead bodies or limbs constantly splitting apart, blood should not be a factor in rating.
With this reasoning, I could basically consider multiple games that receive an 'M' rating to instead really be a 'T', or vice versa. As you mentioned, Diablo II is an exception because of the skimpy characters and tortured bodies on poles - basically the only reason why it couldn't be changed. Once you remove the artwork lying around the dungeons, it will instantly become 'T'een, since it will be no different than Angband or Nethack where a single '@' slaughters tons and tons of other characters. Even if you can't rationalize Diablo II all the way down to Teen, it can come very close to the lower rating tier.
Until I'm convinced otherwise, I'm comfortable giving Op Flash, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and similar games to a 13-16 year old person. However, I might consider Duke3D (where I didn't notice the excessive adult content until *after* I purchased the game - at the time, I had the shareware version and was underage) or a few other games to be unsuitable. If it's generally unsuitable, I'll treat it on a case-by-case basis, as it should be done.
Those postings have had the net effect of showing any person who bashes Steam look like yet another Steam bashing twat. In fact, the regulars of the newsgroup have gotten very tired of correcting the most basic of facts, such as being unable to play while offline.
Citations please. After all the tikme I've spent with Steam, I never had to copy one file to get offline mode to work (and therefore play the singleplayer games without problem.)
The only times I had to do file management was because I transferred the program to a different hard-drive, since Steam cached the pathnames of critical files.
The expansion pack Zero Hour, given some plot discontinuities within itself and the original campaign, feels a little like damage control to try an give the Chinese a happy ending. (e.g. USA got attacked and retaliated, but when they got attacked again, they pulled back and strengthened homeland security.)
Oddly enough, it didn't seem to be noticable with Red Alert or Red Alert 2. It could be that the accent was used to indiate the faction rather than produce character - which is enough of a different to matter.
This could be a trigger for China banning the game, and does sound plausable. However, China's official explaination also sounds plausable, turning it into a word-vs-word description. You can guess who won.
There could have been ways to make the Chinese government look a little worse for banning the game without reason (or at least deflected the banning to banned games rather than legit games.) However, it feels like EA Pacific was a bit too careless in creating the faction, thus creating an anti-Chinese impression.
Based on the contents of the article (and I was merely skimming rather than reading, since this is a dial-up connection), He's more in the lines about students not finding out what they should do with their lives. This has nothing to do with spending time on entertainment.
In a way, there isn't much of a choice that some high-school students have. They know that they have specialized, but cannot progress because of one reason or another (e.g. they don't have any target goal for any personal projects, or sufficient knowledge or tools on how to obtain such a goal.) In addition, they might get turned away from what would have been an open door because of one reason or another (e.g. the student feels he's learning much slower than what he should be and loses interest in fields he would have examined.)
This bring me to the other side of the problem. With my personal experience with school, I have never failed a high-school or early college course because I have never studied. This has ultimatly been a bad influence, as it never encouraged me to proceed on a task over a long period of time, as I usually lose interest or otherwise try to do something else.
This is something that I need to shake off, preferably quickly. However, this behaviour is not easily changed, especially when built up un high-school.
The only confirmed eye problems with CRT monitors are temporary eye strain that can be recovered from or easily corrected. Until I see a medical report saying otherwise, the permanent damage from looking at a computer screen is no different than looking outside.
There's plenty of other myths about eyes. At the very least, you should read up on medical reports rather than believing regular hear-say by laymens on internet forums (like this posting.)
Only in South Korea. It also isn't really helpful, since most manufacturers just simply abide by an extremely low QA.
1. Montior brightness/contrast too high, causing the White to be somewhat painfully bright.
2. Refresh rate is too low. While the default 60Hz works if you are not working with a bright background, it really should be at least 72Hz. In general, higher refresh rates are better. (If you have interlacing, the refresh rate is effectivly halved.)
3. Distance - you don't want to be too close to the monitor screen.
If you take care of these three factors, the problems should be reduced (but aren't guarenteed to disappear entirely.)
Alternativly, a well designed LCD monitor can give the option to shrink a screen as opposed to interpolating. While this does create a large black area, there won't be any blurring caused by a mis-matched resolution.
If the family memebers also use Yahoo or some other address, they might not be able to keep all the correspondance either.
The story changes after the 250MB upgrade, where things can get kept longer.
Or even if they deleted the e-mails, I'm sure they replied to them first, so maybe they have copies in their Sent folder.
It takes two people to e-mail, and even if Yahoo! won't release the e-mails I'm sure the OTHER end of the conversation may be more willing to do so.
The person responsible for the downloading his or her Internet connection is the one that may be assumed to be using the file trading software. If the person responsible for the connection knows that his friend used the computer to download or trade the stuff, then that person may ask the court to change the defendant to reference his or her friend.
If you want more information on basic legal tactics, you should ask or retain either a Paralegal or a Lawyer.
Not that it would happen in a two party system. If you really want those politicians truly removed from office, then you might consider trying your best to drum up support for one of the third parties.
It won't work for practical reasons. The most obvious example would be the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where one senator was framed for trying to pass a bill through for his personal gain. (The bill was legitimate, but the evidence pointing to personal gain was forged.) If Senator Smith got hanged, you would have one innocent person killed by the death penalty.
It's true that Quad doesn't improve accurracy, but it makes certain weapons extremely powerful. For example, the basic shotgun can usually kill in 4-5 hits, but when quadded does a 1 hit kill.
It's next to placing an insta-gib weapon in a match using normal weapons.
It was mentioned in the 1.06 patch. You won't see this bug at all unless you play either on a 1.01 serever or on one of the two mission packs.
It won't be a problem in most cases, mainly because not many players will all use the nailgun at one time in an attempt to reach the maximum limit. However, TF needed to change the nailgun code to produce half as many projectiles because of it's greater use.
Even if you don't directly have the problem, you can till get affected with it if you use the original Quake server or client - it puts a limit on how complex a map can become (e.g. TF's Canalzone stated in the readme that some features had to be scaled back because of that limit).
Were would be true - but given that the world skill with these games has improved, players shouldn't have to worry about accidently hitting themselves as often with the GL. Although it's a bit harder to master than the other weapons, it's still quite dangerous.
Wasn't as bad as the multi grenade in DoE - it was too powerful in the CTF game mode as it prevented persuers. Servers that enabled runes made it worse - Multi-GL + rune = guarenteed flag capture.
Acutally, a direct or near hit does do an instant kill from the starting 100 health (it does 120 radius damage from about 1 player width away). Given that vertical aiming was a slight shift from Doom, it did feel as if it were one of the most powerful weapons - and naturally caused rushes to be the first rocket launcher user.
This isn't saying that it was too powerful - as the players learn how to use the rocket launcher, they also learn how to dodge it as well. However, it did seem to be quite powerful when it was first encountered. It's sort of like the Panzerfaust in RTCW:ET - it is balanced, but it still draws a lot of "panzer whore" messages.
Quake DM is obsolete because it's been replaced by newer games. This doesn't mean that it's bad, even if it might appear that way.
I would have played
The series went downhill after Red Alert 2 - the AI looked like it was obviously scripted and could be countered without problem. This left the focus on the multiplayer, which isn't working as well as it was a few years ago (e.g. cheaters beginning to run rampant and the more intellegent players switching to other games.) The good news is that the blame can be laid on EA rather than Westwood.
However, I do hope that they will be successful in their RTS, and perhaps remove the most damaging bottlenecks from the genre (clicking and scrolling).
EA certainly threw out more than that. The only thing that makes Generals looks interesting is the Multiplayer, and that's beginning to be swamped by cheaters ever since EA broke off it's support prematurely.
1. Quad damage was unbalancingly powerful. Whoever grabs it gains several free frags (even with the shotgun). Although, players that are skilled enough can lay an ambush.
2. If you suicide with the thunderbolt, the early versions of Quake cause the client to enter a permanent zombie state. This wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't for the fact that this got carried over to some expansion pack weaponry.
3. The crosshair is slightly off center.
4. Quake is sensitive to spam because of it's low MAX_EDICTS. If enough players constantly fire Nailguns (30 max nails/person, although I haven't seen it go that high), you could crash some servers running fairly large maps.
5. The Grenade launcher balance is debatable - while I might agree with it, it was classified as an overpowered spam weapon.
6. The Rocket launcher balace is also debatable - it can do a long-range instant kill.
But other than these minor issues, I still see people going for the nostalgic gameplay - whether in QuakeWorld, or DMC under Half-Life.