I remember trying lots of encoders back then and various bit rates (including VBR). I remember it on Beck's "Mutations" mainly (which was 1998). I listened to it millions of times on CD before I converted it, which is why it stood out so much.
I might give it a shot later tonight (I really don't have any CD's handy at all). I also have the built-in excuse of being older now than when I first really noticed it, so I might not be a good test subject:).
You definitely notice it most on CD's you've listened to a lot on headphones. Cymbals are the most obvious place you hear it. A MP3 will have "wispy" sounding cymbals. It's sort of like a flange effect but not as pronounced.
On songs I've heard an insane amount of times on CD it drives me crazy. These days I buy a CD and immediately convert it.
I think the "Public Quests" are a pretty neat innovation. It's kind of like a 20 minute raid (which has a story) that you automatically join once you walk up. At the end everyone rolls for rewards, and you get bonuses to your rolls depending on how much you contributed and you also get a bonus if you didn't win anything the last time you tried. During these quests, you're also making progress on your "area influence", which allows you to get some nice rewards as well pretty quickly.
It might seem like a "small" innovation, but I keep wondering why I haven't seen it in any other game (and I've played quite a few).
Will this affect my driving in the future? If I'm in my car using my car's GPSIII nav and suddenly get zero signal, should I pull over immediately to 'duck and cover'?:)
TF (on the mini-GL port of Quake) was the reason I bought a Voodoo card back in the day and started paying for a dual bonded ISDN connection (128 kbps! which was not cheap back then). Such a great game and I totally agree about TFC not feeling the same.
Guarding the flag in "the well" as a sniper was loads of fun. Bonus points for sniping a potential thief in mid-air and creating what looked like a firework explosion of blood.:)
The great thing about TF was it's the first team based FPS that I remember having the equivalent of "classes" (almost like an RPG, but obviously not that complicated). Someone correct me if I missed something else with that type of feature. Sniper, Medic, Scout, HW Guy, Soldier, Demo Man, Pyro, and Spy all offered a different sort of experience. Lots of games (every WW2 FPS it seems, BF/BF2, etc.) use that type of feature these days.
I'll never forget how excited I was about TF2. It's amazing how many videos they had for what appears to be "vaporware" for the most part. I think they're releasing a new TF2, but I'm not sure if it's anything like their original vision.
I see it more like "sending a Word document makes some assumptions about what software the recipient will have installed". I personally feel PDF is quite a bit more ubiquitous, so I always use PDFCreator (which installs a PDF virtual printer). Then from Word you just print it out to PDF.
FWIW, the number is actually 5 for a large portion of the game (about halfway thru Act 2). The older ones were 6 maximum, correct? In any event, it beats the number NWN1 imposed in the single player campaign;).
I think there are actually quite a few side quests in NWN2, but none of them feel trivial (they're more like arcs than simple quests). I know a lot of the quests I did seemed completely unrelated to the main quest. A lot of the quests you get from talking to your party members are optional (Neeksha vs. her old thieving partner, Khelgar and the monk quest, Elaine's (sp? druid) quests etc.).
The thing I really liked about the BG and IWD series was the party formations. You put your party in a certain order, and that order dictated the formation everyone was arranged in (you could put tanks at the front, casters in the back). In NWN1/2, it's actually fairly random how your party will arrive at a destination. The formations were nice for performing actions like "move to this doorway".
The party AI in NWN2 sucks though. Most people just put them in "puppet mode" where they don't do anything you don't instruct. Otherwise you'll find yourself asking things like: wizard, why did you just cast Bull's Strength on yourself???.
I haven't finished NWN2 yet (I'm in what I believe is the final act, so guessing I'm at about 80%), but I've really enjoyed it so far. The keep maintenance stuff was cool and the crafting (as limited as it might be) is nice.
The only time I really get annoyed with the limits of standard SQL stored procedures is when I need an array of values to be passed into it. For instance, there are many times where a stored procedure that uses an "IN" statement could really benefit from passing in an array of values for the "IN". To get around this, you basically have to write a data access layer that creates SQL on the fly.
I'm all about separating "logic" from the data access layer, but simple things like that are probably possible using the C# stored procs.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but this approach is not too dissimilar from what Oracle has done with Java.
That's the first thing I thought when I read it. I've used various versions of VS for years and never noticed the annoyance he's going on about. I'm starting to use VS 2005 and haven't noticed it be annoying like this yet.
I use RAID-0 at home. A lot of motherboards only support 0 or 1, and 0 performs better on writes (obviously).
As far as hard drives failing, I find I can easily backup all of the truly important things (source code, documents) to my USB keychain drive. The typical home computer's hard drive is usually about 90% (made it up, probably higher, but you get the point) taken up with things you could install from CD if you lost it and other things that really are not that important.
No problem. I'm sure his comment was definitely a backlash against the people who spell Microsoft with a "$":). He was just trying to show something that went the other way in the typical "rip off" arguments (both from a language and xUnit standpoint ).
I try to stay neutral on the "X" ripped off "Y" arguments. It turns out that a lot of the time when people "reinvent the wheel", they end up doing a slightly better job since they have the benefit of hindsight.
If you do any.NET stuff in Visual Studio by the way, be sure you've looked at http://www.testdriven.net/. It's a very sweet way to do unit tests with NUnit (and other test suites) within Visual Studio. It allows you to right click within a test method and run it as a test etc. Very handy...
I think his point is more specifically about marking your code with.NET "attributes" to specify the method is a test etc.
In other words, Java added a new feature to the language in Java 5 (called "annotation") which was something that.NET had (called "attributes") and now the new JUnit is allowing you to mark your methods specifically as tests to be run (like NUnit has for quite some time).
I finished the game, and I agree with your points. The gameplay is very long (especially if you're a pack rat like myself who tries to complete every set of armor and refuses to sell "Unique" items:)).
The lack of single PC control got annoying at times. There is a certain point in the game where one party member has to run into a room to activate something and another member has to stay near another control. Doing this in DS2 required "Rampage" mode and directly clicking the items in question so that people would not follow.
The landscape was awesome indeed. The amount of ferns etc. in the jungle were very well done. One of the cool things (that they continued) from DS1 was the seamless scene manager (no "zoning").
The plot line was very linear, but I thought the story was pretty good. There's a small twist ending at the end which I didn't expect.
I had forgotten DS1 didn't have auto-cast, but it's an absolute must for buffs and healing spells on your nature mage.
I definitely have some complaints about the game (for instance the first time I played thru a bug caused a primary quest to be broken, making me restart the game), but overall it's a good game.
I went to your link about new keyboards, and I couldn't agree more. I dread the day that my current keyboards die.
The most annoying part is MS has done this in the past. I remember the first "Natural" keyboards got it right. Then they decided to mess it up with the next version (cross instead of inverted "T" for cursor keys, and I think they did something screwy with the Ins/Del group as well back then). Eventually, they figured out that this upset people and went back to version 1 layout. Why on earth they decided to screw it up again, I have no idea. Are they trying to create "collector's editions" of their keyboards?:)
The most annoying thing about the new layouts is Logitech seems to be copying the MS layout. I'd gladly buy a new Logitech keyboard if they decided to stick to the sane layout, but unfortunately they've decided to follow MS's lead.
In Temple of Elemental Evil (a D&D RPG game published by Atari), the game originally had children walking around inside a town. Apparently in the game you are able to attack and kill any NPC, so they actually had to remove all children from the game because they wanted to release it in Germany.
Unfortunately, they ruined a lot of "quests" if you will in the process. Lots of NPC dialog still referred to the children etc., and some quests even required interacting with the now nonexistent children:).
It's not just the resolution. There's also an incredible amount of color bleeding through "RCA" connectors, and an INSANE amount if you have to use composite (god have mercy on your soul...). Put a vertical white line on a black background on RCA or composite and tell me you only see black and white:).
Unless all these TV's have some "nice" connections on them, it's not really close to comparing it to a 640x480 VGA monitor.
I watched the Nova on "dirty bombs" a few weeks ago. In that episode, they mentioned that detectors located near docks in NY or NJ caused people who had recently had radiation therapy for cancer to be pulled over.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget: Intel vs. AMD NVidia vs. ATI iPhone vs. Android
I remember trying lots of encoders back then and various bit rates (including VBR). I remember it on Beck's "Mutations" mainly (which was 1998). I listened to it millions of times on CD before I converted it, which is why it stood out so much. I might give it a shot later tonight (I really don't have any CD's handy at all). I also have the built-in excuse of being older now than when I first really noticed it, so I might not be a good test subject :).
You definitely notice it most on CD's you've listened to a lot on headphones. Cymbals are the most obvious place you hear it. A MP3 will have "wispy" sounding cymbals. It's sort of like a flange effect but not as pronounced. On songs I've heard an insane amount of times on CD it drives me crazy. These days I buy a CD and immediately convert it.
I think the "Public Quests" are a pretty neat innovation. It's kind of like a 20 minute raid (which has a story) that you automatically join once you walk up. At the end everyone rolls for rewards, and you get bonuses to your rolls depending on how much you contributed and you also get a bonus if you didn't win anything the last time you tried. During these quests, you're also making progress on your "area influence", which allows you to get some nice rewards as well pretty quickly. It might seem like a "small" innovation, but I keep wondering why I haven't seen it in any other game (and I've played quite a few).
Maybe the EPA shouldn't have mentioned V1agra in the subject...
Will this affect my driving in the future? If I'm in my car using my car's GPSIII nav and suddenly get zero signal, should I pull over immediately to 'duck and cover'? :)
TF (on the mini-GL port of Quake) was the reason I bought a Voodoo card back in the day and started paying for a dual bonded ISDN connection (128 kbps! which was not cheap back then). Such a great game and I totally agree about TFC not feeling the same.
:)
Guarding the flag in "the well" as a sniper was loads of fun. Bonus points for sniping a potential thief in mid-air and creating what looked like a firework explosion of blood.
The great thing about TF was it's the first team based FPS that I remember having the equivalent of "classes" (almost like an RPG, but obviously not that complicated). Someone correct me if I missed something else with that type of feature. Sniper, Medic, Scout, HW Guy, Soldier, Demo Man, Pyro, and Spy all offered a different sort of experience. Lots of games (every WW2 FPS it seems, BF/BF2, etc.) use that type of feature these days.
I'll never forget how excited I was about TF2. It's amazing how many videos they had for what appears to be "vaporware" for the most part. I think they're releasing a new TF2, but I'm not sure if it's anything like their original vision.
I see it more like "sending a Word document makes some assumptions about what software the recipient will have installed". I personally feel PDF is quite a bit more ubiquitous, so I always use PDFCreator (which installs a PDF virtual printer). Then from Word you just print it out to PDF.
FWIW, the number is actually 5 for a large portion of the game (about halfway thru Act 2). The older ones were 6 maximum, correct? In any event, it beats the number NWN1 imposed in the single player campaign ;).
I think there are actually quite a few side quests in NWN2, but none of them feel trivial (they're more like arcs than simple quests). I know a lot of the quests I did seemed completely unrelated to the main quest. A lot of the quests you get from talking to your party members are optional (Neeksha vs. her old thieving partner, Khelgar and the monk quest, Elaine's (sp? druid) quests etc.).
The thing I really liked about the BG and IWD series was the party formations. You put your party in a certain order, and that order dictated the formation everyone was arranged in (you could put tanks at the front, casters in the back). In NWN1/2, it's actually fairly random how your party will arrive at a destination. The formations were nice for performing actions like "move to this doorway".
The party AI in NWN2 sucks though. Most people just put them in "puppet mode" where they don't do anything you don't instruct. Otherwise you'll find yourself asking things like: wizard, why did you just cast Bull's Strength on yourself???.
I haven't finished NWN2 yet (I'm in what I believe is the final act, so guessing I'm at about 80%), but I've really enjoyed it so far. The keep maintenance stuff was cool and the crafting (as limited as it might be) is nice.
Looks like it's generally considered Urban Legend:
p /
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/fordpart.as
The only time I really get annoyed with the limits of standard SQL stored procedures is when I need an array of values to be passed into it. For instance, there are many times where a stored procedure that uses an "IN" statement could really benefit from passing in an array of values for the "IN". To get around this, you basically have to write a data access layer that creates SQL on the fly.
I'm all about separating "logic" from the data access layer, but simple things like that are probably possible using the C# stored procs.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but this approach is not too dissimilar from what Oracle has done with Java.
That's the first thing I thought when I read it. I've used various versions of VS for years and never noticed the annoyance he's going on about. I'm starting to use VS 2005 and haven't noticed it be annoying like this yet.
I use RAID-0 at home. A lot of motherboards only support 0 or 1, and 0 performs better on writes (obviously).
As far as hard drives failing, I find I can easily backup all of the truly important things (source code, documents) to my USB keychain drive. The typical home computer's hard drive is usually about 90% (made it up, probably higher, but you get the point) taken up with things you could install from CD if you lost it and other things that really are not that important.
I hear Team Fortress 2 will require a machine like this as well...
No problem. I'm sure his comment was definitely a backlash against the people who spell Microsoft with a "$" :). He was just trying to show something that went the other way in the typical "rip off" arguments (both from a language and xUnit standpoint ).
.NET stuff in Visual Studio by the way, be sure you've looked at http://www.testdriven.net/. It's a very sweet way to do unit tests with NUnit (and other test suites) within Visual Studio. It allows you to right click within a test method and run it as a test etc. Very handy...
I try to stay neutral on the "X" ripped off "Y" arguments. It turns out that a lot of the time when people "reinvent the wheel", they end up doing a slightly better job since they have the benefit of hindsight.
If you do any
I think his point is more specifically about marking your code with .NET "attributes" to specify the method is a test etc.
.NET had (called "attributes") and now the new JUnit is allowing you to mark your methods specifically as tests to be run (like NUnit has for quite some time).
In other words, Java added a new feature to the language in Java 5 (called "annotation") which was something that
Technically speaking you HAVE to use portals to get between certain areas (so you can't walk the whole world), but I agree.
DS1 and DS2 are good examples of writing a scene manager that loads and unloads resources (textures, scenery, sounds, NPC geometry, etc.) effectively.
I finished the game, and I agree with your points. The gameplay is very long (especially if you're a pack rat like myself who tries to complete every set of armor and refuses to sell "Unique" items :)).
The lack of single PC control got annoying at times. There is a certain point in the game where one party member has to run into a room to activate something and another member has to stay near another control. Doing this in DS2 required "Rampage" mode and directly clicking the items in question so that people would not follow.
The landscape was awesome indeed. The amount of ferns etc. in the jungle were very well done. One of the cool things (that they continued) from DS1 was the seamless scene manager (no "zoning").
The plot line was very linear, but I thought the story was pretty good. There's a small twist ending at the end which I didn't expect.
I had forgotten DS1 didn't have auto-cast, but it's an absolute must for buffs and healing spells on your nature mage.
I definitely have some complaints about the game (for instance the first time I played thru a bug caused a primary quest to be broken, making me restart the game), but overall it's a good game.
I went to your link about new keyboards, and I couldn't agree more. I dread the day that my current keyboards die.
:)
The most annoying part is MS has done this in the past. I remember the first "Natural" keyboards got it right. Then they decided to mess it up with the next version (cross instead of inverted "T" for cursor keys, and I think they did something screwy with the Ins/Del group as well back then). Eventually, they figured out that this upset people and went back to version 1 layout. Why on earth they decided to screw it up again, I have no idea. Are they trying to create "collector's editions" of their keyboards?
The most annoying thing about the new layouts is Logitech seems to be copying the MS layout. I'd gladly buy a new Logitech keyboard if they decided to stick to the sane layout, but unfortunately they've decided to follow MS's lead.
I've run into the German issue before.
:).
In Temple of Elemental Evil (a D&D RPG game published by Atari), the game originally had children walking around inside a town. Apparently in the game you are able to attack and kill any NPC, so they actually had to remove all children from the game because they wanted to release it in Germany.
Unfortunately, they ruined a lot of "quests" if you will in the process. Lots of NPC dialog still referred to the children etc., and some quests even required interacting with the now nonexistent children
It's not just the resolution. There's also an incredible amount of color bleeding through "RCA" connectors, and an INSANE amount if you have to use composite (god have mercy on your soul...). Put a vertical white line on a black background on RCA or composite and tell me you only see black and white :).
Unless all these TV's have some "nice" connections on them, it's not really close to comparing it to a 640x480 VGA monitor.
Pfft... You mean you can't do the 443 stuff in your head too? It's just a little rougher :).
Actually, I think it was in this movie:
Batman (1966)
But it might have been in an episode too?
Section 1.3 and 1.4 of the FAQ seem to indicate Xen does not support Windows.
FAQ: Xen FAQ
Perhaps it's out of date?
I watched the Nova on "dirty bombs" a few weeks ago. In that episode, they mentioned that detectors located near docks in NY or NJ caused people who had recently had radiation therapy for cancer to be pulled over.