For future reference, the laptop hard disk connector standard is very similar to a standard desktop IDE, except without the power connectors... 40 pin vs 44 pin. Many converters exist on the market for it becase Laptop drives, as well as PCMCIA and Compact Flash cards, are all nearly identical pin-for-pin with IDE.
I mean, I can turn on my nightly news and hear about "getting ripped off at the dry cleaners? Let our investigative unit show you how!" but when your personal home network with all your work, personal stuff, family photos, etc are now open to the world because of some backdoor its like its no big deal.
Do you have any idea how easy it is to pick your front door lock? I don't mean the few seconds it would take a skilled tradesman with years of experience, but how long it takes the average high-school student to learn to pick a lock? In a few short weeks anyone can learn to competently pick a lock with nothing more than a bent screwdriver and a coat hanger. Did you know that they sell skeleton keys for that U-lock on your two thousand dollar bicycle for 400 dollars?
Consumer-grade security is a joke. It's the plastic lock on the front of your computer case. Your house, your car, your stuff could be stolen on a whim, and isn't pretty much because there aren't a lot of people who want to do that kind of thing.
Not to pick on the parent specifically, but people have a surprisingly large amount of faith in what are essentially symbolic deterrent systems. Heck, all of the doors in my apartment complex have the pins on the outside, yet nobody is the wiser. The windows all latch and lock, but the glass is held into the pane by putty. The building I work in requires people to sign in and out after a certain hour, but don't check any identifications. It's the illusion of security that provides deterrent security against the illusion of the crime wave that the world isn't under. And in most cases the illusion is sufficient.
The whole thing breaks down with the internet, sadly. The one person in my neighborhood who is planning to steal from everyone might go through three of us, get caught, and go to jail, shoring up our neighborhood. The interconnectedness of computer systems ensures that even if an attacker gets caught, another attacker can take his or her place immediately, if not concurrently. But take away that, and what do you have? A superficial degree of security, that will deterr everyone but those few with the secret knowledge. That's not news.
In my day, the grease-on ben-tra ran like grease on a pan - that had been burned in place and left there for weeks. Our grease-on ben-tra had a zero to sixty time of sixty seconds, and couldn't steer without rattling like the bones of Buddy Holly. Fuel efficiency? That thing drank like an ex army sergent. And it broke down more often than Tammy Fae. Often times we would be driving it to the shop, and it would break down again on the way. You'd hook it up to the tow truck because of a broken front wheel and the rear axle would crack. Load it on the back, and the bumper would fall off. That thing wasn't a deathtrap: deathtraps have moving parts.
Hope you like it. Have fun with your car!
(note: it was an '86. I've heard they have gotten better.)
Because the bottom line is, game companies won't ship a finished, polished game if they don't have to.
Can we please get away from this attitude of "All game companies want to ship crap." Even the attitude that all publishers want to ship crap is incorrect. Sure there are some toothbrush salesmen at publishers, but most of the people want something great. Now, whether or not they want a great game because they love the industry or because they know a million seller will get them a house in Florida is anyone's guess, but everyone is looking to release the next Diablo.
And as for the developers... Why would someone work 60 hour weeks on a game that they think will suck? Games suck because of bad timing, bad management, and bad decision making, not a lack of developer attention and intent. Many of the worst games in the past few years were paved with the best of intensions. MOO3. Daiktana. Killer Instinct. People worked very hard on those games, pouring in love and effort. The game company wanted to ship a finished, polished game, and in some ways did. But they also mismanaged their time, focusing upon the wrong things, and reached a point where they just had to ship what they had... No additional amount of polishing would shine those turds.
In other words, lay off us. Just because we can be incompetent doesn't mean our hearts aren't in the right place.
Another example of a major bug in the middle years of console gaming is at the end of the optional Ancient Cave in Lufia 2. The graphics are competely gliched up on the 99th level of the cave, though it is still possible to blindly make your way to the boss at the end. Of course, most people who played that game (before emulation, anyway) never got that far, so this is another example of a bug that really didn't mean much.
Considering I couldn't get even to the 50th level of the Ancient castle because Lufia 2 crashed and ate my save... twice... I would consider a total graphical glitch to be the least of the team's offences.
The Relm sketching bug, however, was priceless. It took her from the realm of a useless additional character to one of might and importance. Sure, if you sketched invisible things there was a pretty good chance you'd spend 20 minutes selling off thousands of unusable dirks, but small price to pay for an exploit that might give you a dozen masamunes, twenty glass swords, two lightsabers, and about a million other random useless items (frying pans, etc). Total corruption of your save was also rare, even when the glitch did occur. I wouldn't be surprised if an unofficial grouping of QA people saw the problem and decided that it improved the character significantly. Sometimes bugs like that make it into the shipping game on strength of their side effects.
Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self.
Yeah, sorry about that Brian. I'm trying to cut back my hours. But as the new guy I'm expected to wow and dazzle. This is my chance to stake a claim to my chosen profession, and as such I need to prove myself... Justify myself against all of the people out there who might have already implemented distance-based reflection maps or authored giant, multi-segment levels with unnoticably repeating geometry. I've got to do something to counterbalance my lack of experience.
I'd love to see a union, but if you asked me 6 months ago would I be willing to be a scab? Probably.
Instead we saw a fixed size, which indicates the card was always rendering the same size, meaning NO load balancing was being done.
Or that the amount of data being fed to the two cards to crunch was staying roughly the same for the two seconds of available grainy video from Tech TV. Geeze, for a multi-thousand dollar system which requires an 800 watt power supply, and two top-of-the-line graphics cards for a %50 percent increase in performance, the best complaint you can come up with is that the preview demo isn't obviously load balancing?
What about the futility of paying an extra thousand bucks for an upgrade that will need to be re-purchased every 6 months?
what are the pros and cons of a raytracing GPU, compared to the polygon pushers we currently know and love.
Raytracing is generally more expensive than traditional polygon based graphics. You get more realistic curvature, far more realistic lighting, (including incidental light, diffuse light, etc), reflections, deflections / transparencies (such as those glass balls everyone loves), etc, etc, etc.
When Pixar goes rendering, Pixar raytraces. When Cameron goes rendering, Cameron raytraces.
The downside is that raytracing is a total resource hog. Essentially, for every pixel on the screen you trace the path of the light backwards, discovering every incidental surface and light source that might be effecting it along the way.
Polygon algorithims put stuff immediately to the screen, only going so far as to cull the faces that aren't visible to the camera. This is a lot more efficient for today's graphics, and will be far into the future.
And every time we get a step closer to using realtime raytracing, we get better polygon altorithims. First we had flat polygons, then we had colored vertexes, now we texture a character based upon averages of the normals of the surrounding vertexts, creating seamless skins. Originally we had no light, then a baked in faked lighting, now we have multiple light sources with multiple faked shadows on a baked environment. Glass and mirrors, once unheard of in a videogame, are now common. We even sample textures over a given area to try and get a more accurate per pixel representation.
So to answer your question, a raytracing GPU would have to be bloody powerful to do what you can do today with a polygon engine in realtime. Again, everyone thinks we'll get there someday, and there is no doubt in my mind that we will, but a realtime raytraced commercial game is such a distant possibility as to be a lifelong aspiration.
You forgot a major one, that games are difficult by design to get. Wireless carriers realize that their power is one of a gatekeeper, that their best interests are served if people are limited to a few high-priced games that they choose to sell, that way they can extract the maximum amount of money from both the customer and the developer. Compare this to the console model, where the console provider is best served as a bouncer, or the PC model where it is a free-for-all.
Phone game development most closely resembles Shareware on the PC, in that it takes place without the support and help of a publisher or 1st party advisors. But on the other hand, unlike Shareware, you need to go begging to the phone companies after the fact to get your title published. It's a feudal system, in other words. Someone wants you to commit to spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time, and once you are done will decide from on high if they approve or not.
You didn't think there was so few games available for your phone because they just weren't getting made, did you?
Exactly. In games you take the path of most-resistance.
Perhaps it was because Warren Spector didn't understand that people are drawn to conflict that Deus Ex 2 was so poorly recieved. Sure, you could break the window, sneak in through the bathroom, but you could do that at home. Why not run in with guns blazing? Or at least sneak around trying to avoid the turret of death rather than avoiding the tidy bowl.
I guess that sums up the experience with Deus Ex 2 rather nicely... Frequently, the best solution to the problem would be the most mundane, bribe a guard, pretend to be something else, etc. None of these has the associated real-world risk of getting caught, so they're trivial. And where is the fun in triviality?
Why is it we must resort to trying to push back the tide of capable graphics applications, when we really should just make money harder to counterfit? Why not have money with two different types of paper? Or with embedded RFID tags? Or with some form of cheezy hologram? Or a multi-level print system? What about bumpy, raised sections?
The fact of the matter is, there are many ways to make money more robust, and there are many excellent detection schemes on the market today. That US dollar bill marker is a good example. But like that US dollar bill marker, nobody uses them. It ads another thing to do. It's easier to just push this all onto the people making graphics applications, and assume the worst. Of course this will shut down most open source software packages and any pictures of money in commercials, but that's a small price to pay for piece of mind, right?
Parent has a very good point. IE still freaks out with regular use, bloating up to tremendous size and crashing. Opera (which I'm writing this on now) also crashes, perhaps once a day. It's not such a big deal in Opera, because it saves what pages you're looking at, but it still happens. Mozilla crashes. iCab crashes. I can't vouch for Konqueror or Safari, as I haven't spent enough time with either.
In short, while bugs are annoying, FireFox isn't buggier than any of the other browsers out there, and in some comparisons is a lot less buggy. Compared to Opera's break-fix development cycle, FireFox is a rock of gibraltar.
No offense intended. I know medics are concerned with far more important things during an accident, and the hard work is appreciated. The point was to show how messed up our media outlet's values have become... that a woman's life is equal in value to her CD collection. It would be like calling Mother Teresa a terrorist for her crusade against poverty in Shell-owned Nigeria. Or when the Broccoli council labeled George Senior unamerican for not liking their insignificant vegetable.
Perhaps I shouldn't have perpetuated the stereotype by using medics. Sorry, I'm just not very creative.
Scroll Lock? There is an even more useless key.
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
If you want to talk useless keys, how about "pause/break?" Even in videogames it's useless, as everyone knows that you press Esc to pause. And Break? Why is it I instinctually reach for Ctrl-C when something goes wrong? At least Scroll Lock arguably does something. It makes a light go on the keyboard. A light! Think of the number of things you could control from the keyboard with a simple rewiring job!
But Pause/Break? They key so useless they had to map two useless functions to it?
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but every now and then while working as tech support I'd have to tell people to reboot their computer rapidly using the reset button. Sure, turning the thing off and unplugging it for a while would also generally work, but by that time the people wanted the solution that most closely resembled KICKING THE F*%KER IN THE TEETH!!!!
Roommate: Hey, the CD's over and the party's dying. Get up off the floor and put another one on. You: Ngguh. Roommate: You've got to. It's your fault for getting smashed by 11. You: Nnnnuuuuuuuh. Roommate: Dude, that cute girl in red has been giving me looks all night. You have to keep the party going. You: Nnnnuh. Nuhhhhhhhh. Roommate: Allright, we'll do this the hard way. Give me your hand. Guh! Damn you're heavy. Guh! Ok, over to the stereo! And no grunting in protest.
Roommate: Phew. I knew we should have just played MP3's.
Scene 2:
Employee: Welcome to Walmart! How can I help you? Customer: I'd like to buy a copy of "Vespertine" by Bjork. Employee: Ok. I need your fingerprint and 3 forms of ID. There will be a 4 day waiting period while we burn an individualized copy. Customer: What? Employee: We do all of this for your convienience. Customer: That doesn't make any sense. Employee: See, right here on the label of the sample box. It says "For your convienience, this recording is individually traced." Customer:...How much is that shotgun? Employee: Fourty-nine ninty five, with your super-saver card. Customer: Deal. [turns gun on Employee] Now give me that CD. Employee: Sure thing.
Scene 3:
[Scene 3 has been lost. The woman delivering scene 3 to the studios struck a telephone pole while trying to get approved by her biometric car stereo. But on the bright side, none of the medics stole any of her CDs.]
I worked at a place that required finger prints as a confirmation that employees weren't checking in / out for eachother. After a few years the system got so bad that you could check in with the wrong finger, with someone else's finger, with toes, with an elbow... I've even signed in using a warm hot dog.
In short, the real-world performance of these systems is still greatly up in the air, and is by no means a solution to security problems. The idea of etching a fingerprint photograph onto a PCB and into a gummy bear is ingenious, but somehow I doubt that after a few years of being kicked around any of these systems will be sensitive enough to tell if you took a picture of a fingerprint or of the president's head.
Regular Expressions are very simple, but there just aren't enough places to use them. We need to standardize upon a search implementation, so that *.* means the same thing in google as in your text editor's search function. There are two different subsets of regular expressions to learn if you use TheBat as your e-mail device and Crimson Editor as a notepad. They need to become as standard as C or C++ if they are to be widely accepted.
Regular expressions are powerful, but also unintuitive. They read like Perl, when they should read like BASIC. replace "foo" in files "*.html" with "bar". That would be a lot easier to learn.
Stretch Panic was indeed a weird experiment. It was essentially a series of eight creative and unique boss fights, against such bosses as Mrs. Potato head, a manic / depressive witch, and a boss so ugly that even looking at her would kill you. You used your posessed scarf to return your sisters to their former selves, before their negative attributes were posessed and turned them into evil beings. The scarf could directly pull on parts of the boss and snap them back, could grab the boss's projectiles and throw them back, and could launch the player around the area / at the boss like a missile.
The giant breasts which you refer to were only on the "bonito" girls, the women in the filler levels, and were not bosses. Their giant breasts were actually shields, and were impervious to attack. Stronger bonitos had the ability to punch you with said breasts. Sadly these levels were entirely filler, and were the worst thing about the game. Without them the game could probably be beaten within an hour be a player with no experience. At the insistence of their publisher, Treasure padded the game with the unnecessary, repetitive task of stretching these girls for tokens used to fight the bosses. The boss fights themselves are great... Intense, powerful, and imminently fun. One boss has you running from a giant robot trying to squish you underfoot like a bug, the next might involve freeing tiny flying warriors from a spider's web so that they can attack an alien.
It was a game that should have gone down in the anals of short, intense Treasure legends, but the addition of padding seriously hurt the title. It's available online for below 20 dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
People very much settle on identity.
I haven't settled on identity.
I use my RAM disk as a swap drive, to make the system go even faster.
For future reference, the laptop hard disk connector standard is very similar to a standard desktop IDE, except without the power connectors... 40 pin vs 44 pin. Many converters exist on the market for it becase Laptop drives, as well as PCMCIA and Compact Flash cards, are all nearly identical pin-for-pin with IDE.
America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
I think your sig is a little out of date...
I mean, I can turn on my nightly news and hear about "getting ripped off at the dry cleaners? Let our investigative unit show you how!" but when your personal home network with all your work, personal stuff, family photos, etc are now open to the world because of some backdoor its like its no big deal.
Do you have any idea how easy it is to pick your front door lock? I don't mean the few seconds it would take a skilled tradesman with years of experience, but how long it takes the average high-school student to learn to pick a lock? In a few short weeks anyone can learn to competently pick a lock with nothing more than a bent screwdriver and a coat hanger. Did you know that they sell skeleton keys for that U-lock on your two thousand dollar bicycle for 400 dollars?
Consumer-grade security is a joke. It's the plastic lock on the front of your computer case. Your house, your car, your stuff could be stolen on a whim, and isn't pretty much because there aren't a lot of people who want to do that kind of thing.
Not to pick on the parent specifically, but people have a surprisingly large amount of faith in what are essentially symbolic deterrent systems. Heck, all of the doors in my apartment complex have the pins on the outside, yet nobody is the wiser. The windows all latch and lock, but the glass is held into the pane by putty. The building I work in requires people to sign in and out after a certain hour, but don't check any identifications. It's the illusion of security that provides deterrent security against the illusion of the crime wave that the world isn't under. And in most cases the illusion is sufficient.
The whole thing breaks down with the internet, sadly. The one person in my neighborhood who is planning to steal from everyone might go through three of us, get caught, and go to jail, shoring up our neighborhood. The interconnectedness of computer systems ensures that even if an attacker gets caught, another attacker can take his or her place immediately, if not concurrently. But take away that, and what do you have? A superficial degree of security, that will deterr everyone but those few with the secret knowledge. That's not news.
In my day, the grease-on ben-tra ran like grease on a pan - that had been burned in place and left there for weeks. Our grease-on ben-tra had a zero to sixty time of sixty seconds, and couldn't steer without rattling like the bones of Buddy Holly. Fuel efficiency? That thing drank like an ex army sergent. And it broke down more often than Tammy Fae. Often times we would be driving it to the shop, and it would break down again on the way. You'd hook it up to the tow truck because of a broken front wheel and the rear axle would crack. Load it on the back, and the bumper would fall off. That thing wasn't a deathtrap: deathtraps have moving parts.
Hope you like it. Have fun with your car!
(note: it was an '86. I've heard they have gotten better.)
Because the bottom line is, game companies won't ship a finished, polished game if they don't have to.
Can we please get away from this attitude of "All game companies want to ship crap." Even the attitude that all publishers want to ship crap is incorrect. Sure there are some toothbrush salesmen at publishers, but most of the people want something great. Now, whether or not they want a great game because they love the industry or because they know a million seller will get them a house in Florida is anyone's guess, but everyone is looking to release the next Diablo.
And as for the developers... Why would someone work 60 hour weeks on a game that they think will suck? Games suck because of bad timing, bad management, and bad decision making, not a lack of developer attention and intent. Many of the worst games in the past few years were paved with the best of intensions. MOO3. Daiktana. Killer Instinct. People worked very hard on those games, pouring in love and effort. The game company wanted to ship a finished, polished game, and in some ways did. But they also mismanaged their time, focusing upon the wrong things, and reached a point where they just had to ship what they had... No additional amount of polishing would shine those turds.
In other words, lay off us. Just because we can be incompetent doesn't mean our hearts aren't in the right place.
Does anyone know if Ion Storm was utilizing an in-house bug team, or if they were relying upon Eidos' "crack" Quality Assurance team?
Another example of a major bug in the middle years of console gaming is at the end of the optional Ancient Cave in Lufia 2. The graphics are competely gliched up on the 99th level of the cave, though it is still possible to blindly make your way to the boss at the end. Of course, most people who played that game (before emulation, anyway) never got that far, so this is another example of a bug that really didn't mean much.
Considering I couldn't get even to the 50th level of the Ancient castle because Lufia 2 crashed and ate my save... twice... I would consider a total graphical glitch to be the least of the team's offences.
The Relm sketching bug, however, was priceless. It took her from the realm of a useless additional character to one of might and importance. Sure, if you sketched invisible things there was a pretty good chance you'd spend 20 minutes selling off thousands of unusable dirks, but small price to pay for an exploit that might give you a dozen masamunes, twenty glass swords, two lightsabers, and about a million other random useless items (frying pans, etc). Total corruption of your save was also rare, even when the glitch did occur. I wouldn't be surprised if an unofficial grouping of QA people saw the problem and decided that it improved the character significantly. Sometimes bugs like that make it into the shipping game on strength of their side effects.
Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self.
Yeah, sorry about that Brian. I'm trying to cut back my hours. But as the new guy I'm expected to wow and dazzle. This is my chance to stake a claim to my chosen profession, and as such I need to prove myself... Justify myself against all of the people out there who might have already implemented distance-based reflection maps or authored giant, multi-segment levels with unnoticably repeating geometry. I've got to do something to counterbalance my lack of experience.
I'd love to see a union, but if you asked me 6 months ago would I be willing to be a scab? Probably.
Instead we saw a fixed size, which indicates the card was always rendering the same size, meaning NO load balancing was being done.
Or that the amount of data being fed to the two cards to crunch was staying roughly the same for the two seconds of available grainy video from Tech TV. Geeze, for a multi-thousand dollar system which requires an 800 watt power supply, and two top-of-the-line graphics cards for a %50 percent increase in performance, the best complaint you can come up with is that the preview demo isn't obviously load balancing?
What about the futility of paying an extra thousand bucks for an upgrade that will need to be re-purchased every 6 months?
What? You mean people behaving in a self-aggrandizing, immature, money grubbing fashion... on the Internet?! Say it isn't so!
what are the pros and cons of a raytracing GPU, compared to the polygon pushers we currently know and love.
Raytracing is generally more expensive than traditional polygon based graphics. You get more realistic curvature, far more realistic lighting, (including incidental light, diffuse light, etc), reflections, deflections / transparencies (such as those glass balls everyone loves), etc, etc, etc.
When Pixar goes rendering, Pixar raytraces. When Cameron goes rendering, Cameron raytraces.
The downside is that raytracing is a total resource hog. Essentially, for every pixel on the screen you trace the path of the light backwards, discovering every incidental surface and light source that might be effecting it along the way.
Polygon algorithims put stuff immediately to the screen, only going so far as to cull the faces that aren't visible to the camera. This is a lot more efficient for today's graphics, and will be far into the future.
And every time we get a step closer to using realtime raytracing, we get better polygon altorithims. First we had flat polygons, then we had colored vertexes, now we texture a character based upon averages of the normals of the surrounding vertexts, creating seamless skins. Originally we had no light, then a baked in faked lighting, now we have multiple light sources with multiple faked shadows on a baked environment. Glass and mirrors, once unheard of in a videogame, are now common. We even sample textures over a given area to try and get a more accurate per pixel representation.
So to answer your question, a raytracing GPU would have to be bloody powerful to do what you can do today with a polygon engine in realtime. Again, everyone thinks we'll get there someday, and there is no doubt in my mind that we will, but a realtime raytraced commercial game is such a distant possibility as to be a lifelong aspiration.
You forgot a major one, that games are difficult by design to get. Wireless carriers realize that their power is one of a gatekeeper, that their best interests are served if people are limited to a few high-priced games that they choose to sell, that way they can extract the maximum amount of money from both the customer and the developer. Compare this to the console model, where the console provider is best served as a bouncer, or the PC model where it is a free-for-all.
Phone game development most closely resembles Shareware on the PC, in that it takes place without the support and help of a publisher or 1st party advisors. But on the other hand, unlike Shareware, you need to go begging to the phone companies after the fact to get your title published. It's a feudal system, in other words. Someone wants you to commit to spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time, and once you are done will decide from on high if they approve or not.
You didn't think there was so few games available for your phone because they just weren't getting made, did you?
Exactly. In games you take the path of most-resistance.
Perhaps it was because Warren Spector didn't understand that people are drawn to conflict that Deus Ex 2 was so poorly recieved. Sure, you could break the window, sneak in through the bathroom, but you could do that at home. Why not run in with guns blazing? Or at least sneak around trying to avoid the turret of death rather than avoiding the tidy bowl.
I guess that sums up the experience with Deus Ex 2 rather nicely... Frequently, the best solution to the problem would be the most mundane, bribe a guard, pretend to be something else, etc. None of these has the associated real-world risk of getting caught, so they're trivial. And where is the fun in triviality?
Why is it we must resort to trying to push back the tide of capable graphics applications, when we really should just make money harder to counterfit? Why not have money with two different types of paper? Or with embedded RFID tags? Or with some form of cheezy hologram? Or a multi-level print system? What about bumpy, raised sections?
The fact of the matter is, there are many ways to make money more robust, and there are many excellent detection schemes on the market today. That US dollar bill marker is a good example. But like that US dollar bill marker, nobody uses them. It ads another thing to do. It's easier to just push this all onto the people making graphics applications, and assume the worst. Of course this will shut down most open source software packages and any pictures of money in commercials, but that's a small price to pay for piece of mind, right?
Parent has a very good point. IE still freaks out with regular use, bloating up to tremendous size and crashing. Opera (which I'm writing this on now) also crashes, perhaps once a day. It's not such a big deal in Opera, because it saves what pages you're looking at, but it still happens. Mozilla crashes. iCab crashes. I can't vouch for Konqueror or Safari, as I haven't spent enough time with either.
In short, while bugs are annoying, FireFox isn't buggier than any of the other browsers out there, and in some comparisons is a lot less buggy. Compared to Opera's break-fix development cycle, FireFox is a rock of gibraltar.
No offense intended. I know medics are concerned with far more important things during an accident, and the hard work is appreciated. The point was to show how messed up our media outlet's values have become... that a woman's life is equal in value to her CD collection. It would be like calling Mother Teresa a terrorist for her crusade against poverty in Shell-owned Nigeria. Or when the Broccoli council labeled George Senior unamerican for not liking their insignificant vegetable.
Perhaps I shouldn't have perpetuated the stereotype by using medics. Sorry, I'm just not very creative.
If you want to talk useless keys, how about "pause/break?" Even in videogames it's useless, as everyone knows that you press Esc to pause. And Break? Why is it I instinctually reach for Ctrl-C when something goes wrong? At least Scroll Lock arguably does something. It makes a light go on the keyboard. A light! Think of the number of things you could control from the keyboard with a simple rewiring job!
But Pause/Break? They key so useless they had to map two useless functions to it?
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but every now and then while working as tech support I'd have to tell people to reboot their computer rapidly using the reset button. Sure, turning the thing off and unplugging it for a while would also generally work, but by that time the people wanted the solution that most closely resembled KICKING THE F*%KER IN THE TEETH!!!!
It wasn't any less clean than what I was about to eat the hotdog with.
Scene 1:
...How much is that shotgun?
Roommate: Hey, the CD's over and the party's dying. Get up off the floor and put another one on.
You: Ngguh.
Roommate: You've got to. It's your fault for getting smashed by 11.
You: Nnnnuuuuuuuh.
Roommate: Dude, that cute girl in red has been giving me looks all night. You have to keep the party going.
You: Nnnnuh. Nuhhhhhhhh.
Roommate: Allright, we'll do this the hard way. Give me your hand. Guh! Damn you're heavy. Guh! Ok, over to the stereo! And no grunting in protest.
Roommate: Phew. I knew we should have just played MP3's.
Scene 2:
Employee: Welcome to Walmart! How can I help you?
Customer: I'd like to buy a copy of "Vespertine" by Bjork.
Employee: Ok. I need your fingerprint and 3 forms of ID. There will be a 4 day waiting period while we burn an individualized copy.
Customer: What?
Employee: We do all of this for your convienience.
Customer: That doesn't make any sense.
Employee: See, right here on the label of the sample box. It says "For your convienience, this recording is individually traced."
Customer:
Employee: Fourty-nine ninty five, with your super-saver card.
Customer: Deal. [turns gun on Employee] Now give me that CD.
Employee: Sure thing.
Scene 3:
[Scene 3 has been lost. The woman delivering scene 3 to the studios struck a telephone pole while trying to get approved by her biometric car stereo. But on the bright side, none of the medics stole any of her CDs.]
I worked at a place that required finger prints as a confirmation that employees weren't checking in / out for eachother. After a few years the system got so bad that you could check in with the wrong finger, with someone else's finger, with toes, with an elbow... I've even signed in using a warm hot dog.
In short, the real-world performance of these systems is still greatly up in the air, and is by no means a solution to security problems. The idea of etching a fingerprint photograph onto a PCB and into a gummy bear is ingenious, but somehow I doubt that after a few years of being kicked around any of these systems will be sensitive enough to tell if you took a picture of a fingerprint or of the president's head.
Regular Expressions are very simple, but there just aren't enough places to use them. We need to standardize upon a search implementation, so that *.* means the same thing in google as in your text editor's search function. There are two different subsets of regular expressions to learn if you use TheBat as your e-mail device and Crimson Editor as a notepad. They need to become as standard as C or C++ if they are to be widely accepted.
Regular expressions are powerful, but also unintuitive. They read like Perl, when they should read like BASIC. replace "foo" in files "*.html" with "bar". That would be a lot easier to learn.
Stretch Panic was indeed a weird experiment. It was essentially a series of eight creative and unique boss fights, against such bosses as Mrs. Potato head, a manic / depressive witch, and a boss so ugly that even looking at her would kill you. You used your posessed scarf to return your sisters to their former selves, before their negative attributes were posessed and turned them into evil beings. The scarf could directly pull on parts of the boss and snap them back, could grab the boss's projectiles and throw them back, and could launch the player around the area / at the boss like a missile.
The giant breasts which you refer to were only on the "bonito" girls, the women in the filler levels, and were not bosses. Their giant breasts were actually shields, and were impervious to attack. Stronger bonitos had the ability to punch you with said breasts. Sadly these levels were entirely filler, and were the worst thing about the game. Without them the game could probably be beaten within an hour be a player with no experience. At the insistence of their publisher, Treasure padded the game with the unnecessary, repetitive task of stretching these girls for tokens used to fight the bosses. The boss fights themselves are great... Intense, powerful, and imminently fun. One boss has you running from a giant robot trying to squish you underfoot like a bug, the next might involve freeing tiny flying warriors from a spider's web so that they can attack an alien.
It was a game that should have gone down in the anals of short, intense Treasure legends, but the addition of padding seriously hurt the title. It's available online for below 20 dollars.