"None of the game's ideas are thought out or fully explored, so the game feels like a series of dead ends in a world that is hard to care about, in which you play a bland character doing boring things against stock enemies using weak guns."
Pretty much sums up my experience of every game from id.
Considering the fact that you can donate 50% of your income to charity pre-tax* and given that ultimately that's what the system is designed for you to do (give freely of your own choosing, rather than let the government just spend as they see fit), then you see that tax is the whip and charity is the carrot. But if you're a greedy, self-absorbed sod of a grinchy Scrooge, then giving to charity won't make you feel any better, like it does for normal humans.
The carrot's not as sweet without knowing the sting of the whip.
* - From http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=31 : "For most people, the limits on charitable contributions don't apply. Only if you contribute more than 20% of your adjusted gross income to charity is it necessary to be concerned about donation limits. If the contribution is made to a public charity, the deduction is limited to 50% of your contribution base. For example, if you have an adjusted gross income of $100,000, your deduction limit for that year is $50,000."
Correction: the X11 server runs on your glass; eg: your Windows system. All you need then are X11 clients on the Linux cluster nodes.
So yeah, you'll need the libs and other support files for X11, but not the server itself. You'll save a bit on disk space by not installing the server. If it's just a single X11 client you need to run, then you can figure out exactly what it needs and not have a bunch of other crap (fonts, *GL, window managers, libs you're not using...) installed. Plus, you won't have a daemon running that takes resources despite being idle, and is an attack vector since it manages user logins.
What we should have done was created a GUI which has exact formal one-for-one-correspondence with the underlying CLI, so that for any given task, you can use the interface of your choice that works for you - or create new graphical interfaces for the special custom jobs you end up doing multiple times.
It was called AREXX and it was astoundingly powerful. Unfortunately, it (and the interface layer that went into many, many Amiga apps) never really made it beyond the Amiga. Most apps just recreated their GUI interface so you would essentially tell the script "File Menu -> Save As... -> Filename", etc, etc. And since AmigaDOS was multitasking, AREXX was as well - the script could run a terminal program, call a BBS, download a file, open another application (or two) to manipulate the file, and send the file back up to the BBS without having to shutdown the terminal app and redial into the BBS.
If you ever want to present the best argument for abolishing patents, just watch Connections with James Burke. All the episodes are available on YouTube:
Good luck with that. I think what you'll see soon is exactly the reverse.
I would contend that laptop (and desktop) prices have been made artificially low by the demand FROM EVERYONE to "get connected". The vast majority of people do not want a general-purpose computer like a {desk,lap}top. Most people do just want to surf the web, read emails, listen to music, and watch videos. It occurred to me recently that very soon, the only reason a person might need more than a tablet is to write and compile code for tablets.
Thus, as all those people jump ship from the {desk,lap}top boat, you might see tablet prices drop but much more likely is you'll see {desk,lap}top prices skyrocket as demand for them falls away. As the already razor-thin margin on them evaporates, many companies will be getting out of that market altogether. Certainly the big buyers will still be corporate users, but you're not talking about beefy multimedia gaming systems there - you're talking thin (cheap) clients.
In the meantime, I think you'll see current tablet prices become the new price point target, so they probably won't change much.
We created computers specifically to do math, which our sensory input-pattern-matching organ (aka "brain") is so horribly bad at that we have to memorize multiplication tables. Yet what do we do with them? Try to make the math machine simulate our meaty pattern-sensing pathways.
Massive monetary and time investment on a computer that can figure out trivia. Why am I reminded of: FORD: Hey Marvin! MARVIN: What do you want? FORD: Give Zaphod a yell will you? MARVIN: Ahhh. Mind-taxing time again is it? FORD: Just get on with it. MARVIN: I’ve just worked out an answer to the square root of minus one. FORD: Go and get Zaphod. MARVIN: It’s never been worked out before. It’s always been thought impossible. FORD: Go and get - MARVIN: I’m going. Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task. Never thinking to ask for reward, recognition, or even a moment’s ease from the terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. “Fetch Beeblebrox,” they say, and forth he goes.
I was telling a friend this the other day. Want to make a semi-public transit system completely different from roads - say, a tracked system where you get to buy your own personal "pod" to ride around in? Sell it to women: "Hey guess what! We have this neat little pod. It can only go where the track goes, but it goes to work, the grocery store, and the Mall! ALL AT THE TOUCH OF A SINGLE BUTTON. You don't get to go everywhere, but no more pumping smelly gas, and you get to at least buy your own personalized pod, which comes in all these fabulous colors."
Bury the tracks in the current road so people with cars can still drive, but as the margins for gas cars fade and gas becomes $10/gallon due to lack of demand, and change over will only take a few years just from market forces.
Exactly. The Amiga 1000 I bought in 1988 had a hack like this done by the prior owner (in fact, it's still in my attic). Tripled the motherboards' memory (256 to 768k iirc...), and since the Amiga would detect any memory in the system and just tack it onto the address space, no configuration headaches. Damn, those were the days.:) (FWIW, it had that piggy-back chip hack, the front-loaded mem expansion, I added a 1.5 MB daughterboard that plugged into the CPU socket, and finally added some SIMMS to my Xetec SCSI controller)
Prior art and all that, but I'm sure Samsung got a patent.
Netrek is great example of a good, team-based, network game. But that's all it is. Single-player netrek is non-existent. There's no story, and at best you could only play against a few robots
Nethack is an example of a great, story(ish)-oriented, single player game. And that's all it is. It simply wouldn't make a good MUD.
Populous (for those of us who remember!) was actually a decent game on both sides. The computer opponents and the story-line were compelling enough to keep it interesting, but it was great fun to play against a friend over the modem.
...rescuing the big content players from the brink of oblivion...
Why do they deserve to be rescued from oblivion? What have they done to deserve having their profits protected? Did we kill the automotive industry to protect all the businesses dependent on horses being used as transportation?
Just because he plays on a computer doesn't mean he has any sort of knack for programming.
Better than coding might be buying him an X-acto set, some Duco Cement, some Testers paints, and some various model kits - a rocket, plane, boat, car, etc. Mix it up and get him a four-channel R/C setup and let him tear some s#!t up!
Building stuff you can play with is immensely rewarding and not confined to coding games (or other programs).
Hell, even something really useful like a carpentry class. My school system had them starting in 8th grade.
"No really, I'll just use it to help you diet. No one else will have access to the information. Ever."
"Ok, cool!"
One year later...
"Hey kid, um, bad news. The Bursar's office called and said they wanted your DNA since they're funding your financial aid to the tune of $100,000 (much more than that after years and years of interest of course...). I fought them, but the Regents stepped in, kicked me out, and gave the Bursar's office all my data. Sorry. You should totally sue. Anyway, I'm off to St. Thomas to be a scuba instructor. Good luck with that!"
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much sums up my experience of every game from id.
Now they just need to do that with CO2. Release the O2 and sequester the carbon to make graphite, graphene, and/or diamond.
Considering the fact that you can donate 50% of your income to charity pre-tax* and given that ultimately that's what the system is designed for you to do (give freely of your own choosing, rather than let the government just spend as they see fit), then you see that tax is the whip and charity is the carrot. But if you're a greedy, self-absorbed sod of a grinchy Scrooge, then giving to charity won't make you feel any better, like it does for normal humans.
The carrot's not as sweet without knowing the sting of the whip.
* - From http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=31 :
"For most people, the limits on charitable contributions don't apply. Only if you contribute more than 20% of your adjusted gross income to charity is it necessary to be concerned about donation limits. If the contribution is made to a public charity, the deduction is limited to 50% of your contribution base. For example, if you have an adjusted gross income of $100,000, your deduction limit for that year is $50,000."
* Did they pay their taxes to support such an institution?
That's why heading south always feels like going downhill. I thought I was just a descendant of Treebeard. Ba room.
Correction: the X11 server runs on your glass; eg: your Windows system. All you need then are X11 clients on the Linux cluster nodes.
So yeah, you'll need the libs and other support files for X11, but not the server itself. You'll save a bit on disk space by not installing the server. If it's just a single X11 client you need to run, then you can figure out exactly what it needs and not have a bunch of other crap (fonts, *GL, window managers, libs you're not using...) installed. Plus, you won't have a daemon running that takes resources despite being idle, and is an attack vector since it manages user logins.
What we should have done was created a GUI which has exact formal one-for-one-correspondence with the underlying CLI, so that for any given task, you can use the interface of your choice that works for you - or create new graphical interfaces for the special custom jobs you end up doing multiple times.
It was called AREXX and it was astoundingly powerful. Unfortunately, it (and the interface layer that went into many, many Amiga apps) never really made it beyond the Amiga. Most apps just recreated their GUI interface so you would essentially tell the script "File Menu -> Save As... -> Filename", etc, etc. And since AmigaDOS was multitasking, AREXX was as well - the script could run a terminal program, call a BBS, download a file, open another application (or two) to manipulate the file, and send the file back up to the BBS without having to shutdown the terminal app and redial into the BBS.
In the late 80's.
If you ever want to present the best argument for abolishing patents, just watch Connections with James Burke. All the episodes are available on YouTube:
Starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g
Good luck with that. I think what you'll see soon is exactly the reverse.
I would contend that laptop (and desktop) prices have been made artificially low by the demand FROM EVERYONE to "get connected". The vast majority of people do not want a general-purpose computer like a {desk,lap}top. Most people do just want to surf the web, read emails, listen to music, and watch videos. It occurred to me recently that very soon, the only reason a person might need more than a tablet is to write and compile code for tablets.
Thus, as all those people jump ship from the {desk,lap}top boat, you might see tablet prices drop but much more likely is you'll see {desk,lap}top prices skyrocket as demand for them falls away. As the already razor-thin margin on them evaporates, many companies will be getting out of that market altogether. Certainly the big buyers will still be corporate users, but you're not talking about beefy multimedia gaming systems there - you're talking thin (cheap) clients.
In the meantime, I think you'll see current tablet prices become the new price point target, so they probably won't change much.
We created computers specifically to do math, which our sensory input-pattern-matching organ (aka "brain") is so horribly bad at that we have to memorize multiplication tables. Yet what do we do with them? Try to make the math machine simulate our meaty pattern-sensing pathways.
Massive monetary and time investment on a computer that can figure out trivia. Why am I reminded of:
FORD: Hey Marvin!
MARVIN: What do you want?
FORD: Give Zaphod a yell will you?
MARVIN: Ahhh. Mind-taxing time again is it?
FORD: Just get on with it.
MARVIN: I’ve just worked out an answer to the square root of minus one.
FORD: Go and get Zaphod.
MARVIN: It’s never been worked out before. It’s always been thought impossible.
FORD: Go and get -
MARVIN: I’m going. Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task. Never thinking to ask for reward, recognition, or even a moment’s ease from the terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. “Fetch Beeblebrox,” they say, and forth he goes.
The problem isn't the expectation of being future-proof, the problem is the very small value of "future" (now a moving target per the manufacturer).
I was telling a friend this the other day. Want to make a semi-public transit system completely different from roads - say, a tracked system where you get to buy your own personal "pod" to ride around in? Sell it to women:
"Hey guess what! We have this neat little pod. It can only go where the track goes, but it goes to work, the grocery store, and the Mall! ALL AT THE TOUCH OF A SINGLE BUTTON. You don't get to go everywhere, but no more pumping smelly gas, and you get to at least buy your own personalized pod, which comes in all these fabulous colors."
Bury the tracks in the current road so people with cars can still drive, but as the margins for gas cars fade and gas becomes $10/gallon due to lack of demand, and change over will only take a few years just from market forces.
Having a computer solve a mental exercise is like sending your robot to the gym to lift weights.
Exactly. The Amiga 1000 I bought in 1988 had a hack like this done by the prior owner (in fact, it's still in my attic). Tripled the motherboards' memory (256 to 768k iirc...), and since the Amiga would detect any memory in the system and just tack it onto the address space, no configuration headaches. Damn, those were the days. :) (FWIW, it had that piggy-back chip hack, the front-loaded mem expansion, I added a 1.5 MB daughterboard that plugged into the CPU socket, and finally added some SIMMS to my Xetec SCSI controller)
Prior art and all that, but I'm sure Samsung got a patent.
This is what they predicted when the Newton came out.
In other news, I predict that sometime in the future everything will be a bit different than it is now.
Send an email to the folks at the CISL division of NCAR.
They know a thing or two about Crays.
Speaking as an Old Fogey,
Use it if the game warrants it.
Netrek is great example of a good, team-based, network game. But that's all it is. Single-player netrek is non-existent. There's no story, and at best you could only play against a few robots
Nethack is an example of a great, story(ish)-oriented, single player game. And that's all it is. It simply wouldn't make a good MUD.
Populous (for those of us who remember!) was actually a decent game on both sides. The computer opponents and the story-line were compelling enough to keep it interesting, but it was great fun to play against a friend over the modem.
Therefore Plato was, in fact, Francis Bacon.
One month from now: .xxxx! Hell yeah!"
"But our site is so hot it blows all those tame triple-x sites out of the water! We need
Why do they deserve to be rescued from oblivion? What have they done to deserve having their profits protected? Did we kill the automotive industry to protect all the businesses dependent on horses being used as transportation?
No.
Just because he plays on a computer doesn't mean he has any sort of knack for programming.
Better than coding might be buying him an X-acto set, some Duco Cement, some Testers paints, and some various model kits - a rocket, plane, boat, car, etc. Mix it up and get him a four-channel R/C setup and let him tear some s#!t up!
Building stuff you can play with is immensely rewarding and not confined to coding games (or other programs).
Hell, even something really useful like a carpentry class. My school system had them starting in 8th grade.
Soooo...
Amazon was trying to work a deal where it got to sell mp3s earlier than Apple? Isn't that anti-competitive too?
Now Apple is being investigated for being anti-competitive to a competitors anti-competitiveness.
Isn't that just competition?
Mad props to whoever made me go lookup "goblin punch" on urbandictionary.com! Thanks for the laugh.
"Hey! Gimmie your DNA, I'll help you diet!"
"Wellll..."
"No really, I'll just use it to help you diet. No one else will have access to the information. Ever."
"Ok, cool!"
One year later...
"Hey kid, um, bad news. The Bursar's office called and said they wanted your DNA since they're funding your financial aid to the tune of $100,000 (much more than that after years and years of interest of course...). I fought them, but the Regents stepped in, kicked me out, and gave the Bursar's office all my data. Sorry. You should totally sue. Anyway, I'm off to St. Thomas to be a scuba instructor. Good luck with that!"
"Shit."
America's first? Really? Are we that far behind the times?
Sad.