That functionality is implemented in all streaming media players though. Even something like Youtube, the Flash player will let you seek back, forth and play as you download (record). The live TV signal could be streaming from anywhere, all TiVo have done is build a streaming media player and put it in a nice box.
As soon as hardware got cheap enough for people to be able to build streaming media players with this sort of functionality people started building them. I had a TV card in my PC years before people started doing live pause. I could record TV but it killed both my CPU and HD so watching the video again wouldn't have been possible anyway. As soon as hardware got fast enough for people to be able to both at once, software started to appear with live pause.
I actually found realistic rather easy, mainly because stealth was so overpowered (as long as you were crouching in shadow, it didn't matter that you were right in front of the enemy).
Tongs lab was in the middle of the game, it's just that there's a moment right before the final level where someone gives you some advice. If Paul survives, he gets the honours. DX was full of moments like that; depending on what you'd said or done previously little story details would develop differently, often just a line or two of dialogue but still. I think those little details more than anything are what made DX unique and the lack of those details is what ruined DX2 and, by the looks of things, the upcoming sequel.
If they just made sure the game was full of meaningful little moments like those then they'd go a long way towards keeping the magic of the original DX.
Unfortunately, I read an interview with one of the DX developers a few months ago where he basically said DX was a massive fluke. He had now idea how they'd managed to bring all the plot together at the last minute and he'd have no idea how to do it again! Maybe they should just do a high-def remake and call it quits, eh?
...it just wasn't used. How they managed to pin the whole fiasco on some poor AO (that's second grade up from bottom on the clerical scale) I'll never know.
Sinister voice of Simons will be returning to announce ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKS !
Isn't that basically what most RPG games do? Unlock levels or upgrade equipment. The unlocks in more recent games have often been the things that kept me interested.
Oh please no! I'm not normally condescending about things like this but DX was never about any of that rubbish! It had an awesome storyline and most of the things you could "unlock" were never advertised as such.
The reward for saving JC's brother, Paul, was that he showed up in Tong's lab in Hong Kong and gave you some advice at the end of the game. It was just full of choices, every situation would change the other characters attitudes towards you in although often inconsequential ways. It had more of the air of interactive fiction with guns tacked on than a traditional first-person RPG
NWN was awesome. I'd recommend you get one of the re-releases of it though. The original campaign was poo, the second expansion, Shadows of Undrentide(sp?) was OK whilst Hordes of the Underdark was awesome, a massive dungeon crawl through the Underdark!
Most of the joy from NWN came from the user mods though. The Penultima series of mods are the only ones that immediately spring to mind; they were full of Pratchett style humour, which I loved.
This is exactly why numerous parents around me are throwing away their 25-35 years old oven or washing machine, at the same time as their kid's 3 to 5 years old ones
WTF? The only oven I've seen last more than 10yrs was my granddad's Rayburn. Given that it had no moving parts, was made entirely out of cast iron and was integrated into his house as the boiler for his central heating it's no wonder it lasted about 50yrs. It may still be in use, he died 10yrs ago so assuming the new owners of his house appreciate things like wood burning range cookers it could still be in use! As a contrast the electric fan oven my parents used to have lasted about 15yrs, eventually the element and the fan motor both packed in and getting spares was too hard. I reckon that's not too bad for a device that had been heat cycling from room temp to 200C every day.
As for washing machines, I've never seen one last more than 5 or 6yrs doing at least one sometimes two washes a day without something going wrong with them. They're full of moving parts!
You may be mistaken. The simple cracks are for WEP, WPA and WPA2 are secure unless you use a simple passphrase for your PSK.
It's possible guess this guy was using a WEP cracker in combination with a dictionary attack for WPA/WPA2, but that's what you get for using a weak password!
I've said this a few times before, but Steams' subscriber agreement says no such thing. Games on Steam are sold as single payment subscriptions. I don't own the orange box, I subscribe to it!
I'm not really worried about it though, Steam is such a valuable asset that even in the very unlikely event that Valve goes under whoever bought it would keep it running. It is a bit annoying how this'll kill off the second-hand market but I guess in future all the decent old games that today you'd get in second-hand will be available at GOG!
Having direct election of the executive would be a massive no here in the UK because all the tabloids would start banging on about how the EU is trying to become a proper federal democracy like the USA. I suppose it's also something that the governments of most member states would be keen to avoid because it could be a challange to their own mandates.
I think all the leaders in Europe find it convenient to have the EU around to blame whenever they all need to do something bad - not that I can actually think of anything truly terrible inflicted on me by the EU mind, it's just all the headlines fade into a general anti-EU fuzz. The main job of the EU is regulating the common market (boring, uncontroversial stuff like what constitutes a fire door) and administering various federal subsidies.
Member states are in full control of this process. For all the talk of a Constitution, all the decisions that really matter to the states occur as a consensus; powers regarding taxes and the military are reserved by states. The real democratic balance is the European Parliament who prevent our leaders from collectively having too much power.
In the latest SI patch they removed SecuROM and replaced it with the basic disc check found in the original Oblivion. I reckon they did this to maintain compatibility with the Oblivion Script Extender - a utility used by a few mods that would almost certainly make SecuROM throw a wobbler as it's an exe hack.
I found this out by accident when I recently loaded up Oblivion with only my original Oblivion disc in the drive.
What else do you expect from Capitalist Democracy though?
Consider:
Politicians need to get re-elected.
The candidate with the most money tends to win.
The best way to get lots of campaign contributions is to suck up to rich people and companies
How can you believe in Capitalism if you don't accept that rich people and companies have the right to give large sums to politicians? Given that they have that right, how can you expect them to do anything other than lobby for their own self-interest?
Under Capitalism there will always be this pressure. In any society economic power is the most important power; whoever controls the means of production (showing my socialist bias, I know:) ) controls the shape of society.
Maybe if we moved to a system of workers co-operatives? If we banned the stock market and made all organisations owned by the workers then the concentration of wealth wouldn't be as severe. I'm not arguing for monolithic socialist/maoist/stanlist monopolies, just the same system we have now with everything owned by workers instead of financial institutions.
I think it'd come closer to the ideal of companies competing in free markets to win over consumers on the basis of better/cheaper products. I doubt it could be worse than the current situation!
The Steam Terms of Service say no such thing. You buy a one off payment subscription to games on Steam, you don't own them. I'd link but I'm late for work so just google for the Steam ToS.
If Valve went into receivership them I doubt the bankruptcy courts would look favourably on their directors nuking their most important asset!
LPBs still have an inherent advantage though. Back in the day I used to play QuakeWorld and often pw0ned players with 1/5 the ping of my dialup connection (usually about 180-220ms). That was due to tactics and map knowledge, same as you I'd bet, but when two players of similar skill run around a corner and see each other at the same time then the LPB will win.
Back on topic, I imagine this would be far worse for fighting games like Street Fighter. My understanding is that online games on consoles get hosted on one of the players consoles so unless the game introduces artificial latency for the local player, said local player would be at an extreme advantage.
I can install 3rd party apps downloaded from anywhere on the net on my N95. To do the same on an iPhone you have to jailbreak it. Jailbreaking may be easy, but why would you want a phone that's defective by design?
Sure, N95 apps have to be signed and it's a pain having to create a developer account with Nokia to self-sign but at least it's free beer.
This is why I'm totally bemused by the iPhone popularity, not necessarily amongst trendy people who don't know any better but also amongst technically aware people. Would you buy a PC that's locked down like that? My N95 is like a tiny computer I take everywhere with me. I haven't been so impressed with a handheld since I got a Palm V back in the day.
with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Check again. ADSL is a contended service, just like cable. It's just the ratios happen to be lower. I used to chat to a guy in Canada and his contention ratio was about 20:1. Here in the UK 20:1 is for business connections and residential gets 50:1 - AFAIK BT hardly ever lets it get to 50:1 and even then they jiggle people around so you don't end up with a load of heavy users on a single circuit but they do advertise contention ratios.
I'd gladly pay MS £30 for a set of working Direct X libraries for Linux. That's about how much a Windows OEM license is; I just hate having to reboot for modern games!
I moved to Linux about 11yrs ago because I really hated Windows. I've been using Debian for 8yrs and now that I've spent (read:wasted:P) all that time getting it working exactly how I want it with all the apps I love I just can't bear to use Windows anymore. It's a pain!
Now that I've been using GNU/Linux for so long I've turned into a total True Believer so I'd never use MS (or Apple for that matter) apps / tools but I don't care about games being proprietary. I'd view it as akin to paying money for a console and I own several of those.
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That functionality is implemented in all streaming media players though. Even something like Youtube, the Flash player will let you seek back, forth and play as you download (record). The live TV signal could be streaming from anywhere, all TiVo have done is build a streaming media player and put it in a nice box.
As soon as hardware got cheap enough for people to be able to build streaming media players with this sort of functionality people started building them. I had a TV card in my PC years before people started doing live pause. I could record TV but it killed both my CPU and HD so watching the video again wouldn't have been possible anyway. As soon as hardware got fast enough for people to be able to both at once, software started to appear with live pause.
I actually found realistic rather easy, mainly because stealth was so overpowered (as long as you were crouching in shadow, it didn't matter that you were right in front of the enemy).
Tongs lab was in the middle of the game, it's just that there's a moment right before the final level where someone gives you some advice. If Paul survives, he gets the honours. DX was full of moments like that; depending on what you'd said or done previously little story details would develop differently, often just a line or two of dialogue but still. I think those little details more than anything are what made DX unique and the lack of those details is what ruined DX2 and, by the looks of things, the upcoming sequel.
If they just made sure the game was full of meaningful little moments like those then they'd go a long way towards keeping the magic of the original DX.
Unfortunately, I read an interview with one of the DX developers a few months ago where he basically said DX was a massive fluke. He had now idea how they'd managed to bring all the plot together at the last minute and he'd have no idea how to do it again! Maybe they should just do a high-def remake and call it quits, eh?
...it just wasn't used. How they managed to pin the whole fiasco on some poor AO (that's second grade up from bottom on the clerical scale) I'll never know.
Sinister voice of Simons will be returning to announce ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKS !
Isn't that basically what most RPG games do? Unlock levels or upgrade equipment. The unlocks in more recent games have often been the things that kept me interested.
Oh please no! I'm not normally condescending about things like this but DX was never about any of that rubbish! It had an awesome storyline and most of the things you could "unlock" were never advertised as such.
The reward for saving JC's brother, Paul, was that he showed up in Tong's lab in Hong Kong and gave you some advice at the end of the game. It was just full of choices, every situation would change the other characters attitudes towards you in although often inconsequential ways. It had more of the air of interactive fiction with guns tacked on than a traditional first-person RPG
NWN was awesome. I'd recommend you get one of the re-releases of it though. The original campaign was poo, the second expansion, Shadows of Undrentide(sp?) was OK whilst Hordes of the Underdark was awesome, a massive dungeon crawl through the Underdark!
Most of the joy from NWN came from the user mods though. The Penultima series of mods are the only ones that immediately spring to mind; they were full of Pratchett style humour, which I loved.
While UK game shops have used-game sections, they aren't as huge as in the States and I've never had any pressure from the staff to buy one instead.
Gamestation. I can't recall ever seeing their new games section at my local store; it's wall-to-wall used as far as I recall!
I disagree.
I'm a tweaker and tend to re-install windows very often, especially when tweaking for a specific game.
Maybe if you weren't taking so much meth then you'd remember you'd installed Windows properly the first time? Just a thought...
This is exactly why numerous parents around me are throwing away their 25-35 years old oven or washing machine, at the same time as their kid's 3 to 5 years old ones
WTF? The only oven I've seen last more than 10yrs was my granddad's Rayburn. Given that it had no moving parts, was made entirely out of cast iron and was integrated into his house as the boiler for his central heating it's no wonder it lasted about 50yrs. It may still be in use, he died 10yrs ago so assuming the new owners of his house appreciate things like wood burning range cookers it could still be in use! As a contrast the electric fan oven my parents used to have lasted about 15yrs, eventually the element and the fan motor both packed in and getting spares was too hard. I reckon that's not too bad for a device that had been heat cycling from room temp to 200C every day.
As for washing machines, I've never seen one last more than 5 or 6yrs doing at least one sometimes two washes a day without something going wrong with them. They're full of moving parts!
You may be mistaken. The simple cracks are for WEP, WPA and WPA2 are secure unless you use a simple passphrase for your PSK.
It's possible guess this guy was using a WEP cracker in combination with a dictionary attack for WPA/WPA2, but that's what you get for using a weak password!
Or reading from an old textbook. Degrees was only dropped from the front of Kelvin in the 60's.
Just goes to show you don't really know what you're talking about!
I've said this a few times before, but Steams' subscriber agreement says no such thing. Games on Steam are sold as single payment subscriptions. I don't own the orange box, I subscribe to it!
I'm not really worried about it though, Steam is such a valuable asset that even in the very unlikely event that Valve goes under whoever bought it would keep it running. It is a bit annoying how this'll kill off the second-hand market but I guess in future all the decent old games that today you'd get in second-hand will be available at GOG!
Having direct election of the executive would be a massive no here in the UK because all the tabloids would start banging on about how the EU is trying to become a proper federal democracy like the USA. I suppose it's also something that the governments of most member states would be keen to avoid because it could be a challange to their own mandates.
I think all the leaders in Europe find it convenient to have the EU around to blame whenever they all need to do something bad - not that I can actually think of anything truly terrible inflicted on me by the EU mind, it's just all the headlines fade into a general anti-EU fuzz. The main job of the EU is regulating the common market (boring, uncontroversial stuff like what constitutes a fire door) and administering various federal subsidies.
Member states are in full control of this process. For all the talk of a Constitution, all the decisions that really matter to the states occur as a consensus; powers regarding taxes and the military are reserved by states. The real democratic balance is the European Parliament who prevent our leaders from collectively having too much power.
In the latest SI patch they removed SecuROM and replaced it with the basic disc check found in the original Oblivion. I reckon they did this to maintain compatibility with the Oblivion Script Extender - a utility used by a few mods that would almost certainly make SecuROM throw a wobbler as it's an exe hack.
I found this out by accident when I recently loaded up Oblivion with only my original Oblivion disc in the drive.
What else do you expect from Capitalist Democracy though?
Consider:
How can you believe in Capitalism if you don't accept that rich people and companies have the right to give large sums to politicians? Given that they have that right, how can you expect them to do anything other than lobby for their own self-interest?
Under Capitalism there will always be this pressure. In any society economic power is the most important power; whoever controls the means of production (showing my socialist bias, I know :) ) controls the shape of society.
Maybe if we moved to a system of workers co-operatives? If we banned the stock market and made all organisations owned by the workers then the concentration of wealth wouldn't be as severe. I'm not arguing for monolithic socialist/maoist/stanlist monopolies, just the same system we have now with everything owned by workers instead of financial institutions.
I think it'd come closer to the ideal of companies competing in free markets to win over consumers on the basis of better/cheaper products. I doubt it could be worse than the current situation!
The Steam Terms of Service say no such thing. You buy a one off payment subscription to games on Steam, you don't own them. I'd link but I'm late for work so just google for the Steam ToS.
If Valve went into receivership them I doubt the bankruptcy courts would look favourably on their directors nuking their most important asset!
16GB is 2x a dual layer, 4x a single layer. It's not "1/2", that's one half. If that were true a double layer disc would be 32GB.
SD Cards use CPRM. That's what stops you from copying games for mobile phones, there's no reason why consoles using flash carts can't use it.
CPRM has been around for ages so I assume it's been cracked but it stops casual copying, which is the best DRM can do anyway.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/27/1930214
I don't have time to check that link again, but I recall it was hundreds (maybe a thousand?) £ per litre. Looks awesome though!
I guess that means the Linux kernel hasn't evolved in that whole time eh?
Or you just don't know what your talking about. Or maybe you're trolling.
Anyone else feel like adding more options?
...when you can't even call someone a dumbshit without getting modded flamebait?
Although seriously, I totally agree with your post.
LPBs still have an inherent advantage though. Back in the day I used to play QuakeWorld and often pw0ned players with 1/5 the ping of my dialup connection (usually about 180-220ms). That was due to tactics and map knowledge, same as you I'd bet, but when two players of similar skill run around a corner and see each other at the same time then the LPB will win.
Back on topic, I imagine this would be far worse for fighting games like Street Fighter. My understanding is that online games on consoles get hosted on one of the players consoles so unless the game introduces artificial latency for the local player, said local player would be at an extreme advantage.
I can install 3rd party apps downloaded from anywhere on the net on my N95. To do the same on an iPhone you have to jailbreak it. Jailbreaking may be easy, but why would you want a phone that's defective by design?
Sure, N95 apps have to be signed and it's a pain having to create a developer account with Nokia to self-sign but at least it's free beer.
This is why I'm totally bemused by the iPhone popularity, not necessarily amongst trendy people who don't know any better but also amongst technically aware people. Would you buy a PC that's locked down like that? My N95 is like a tiny computer I take everywhere with me. I haven't been so impressed with a handheld since I got a Palm V back in the day.
with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Check again. ADSL is a contended service, just like cable. It's just the ratios happen to be lower. I used to chat to a guy in Canada and his contention ratio was about 20:1. Here in the UK 20:1 is for business connections and residential gets 50:1 - AFAIK BT hardly ever lets it get to 50:1 and even then they jiggle people around so you don't end up with a load of heavy users on a single circuit but they do advertise contention ratios.
Read around the thread; They've admitted liability. Get in touch with them and tell them your caps have started leaking. They should sort you out.
I'd gladly pay MS £30 for a set of working Direct X libraries for Linux. That's about how much a Windows OEM license is; I just hate having to reboot for modern games!
I moved to Linux about 11yrs ago because I really hated Windows. I've been using Debian for 8yrs and now that I've spent (read:wasted :P) all that time getting it working exactly how I want it with all the apps I love I just can't bear to use Windows anymore. It's a pain!
Now that I've been using GNU/Linux for so long I've turned into a total True Believer so I'd never use MS (or Apple for that matter) apps / tools but I don't care about games being proprietary. I'd view it as akin to paying money for a console and I own several of those.