You can't expect Square to continue creating games as great as FFVII.
No, I can't. But I can hope for them to stop what is in my opinion a consistent downward slope. For me, FF7 was 'fantastic!', FF8 was 'very good', FF9 was 'fairly good', FFX was 'alright', FFXI was 'tedious', FFX-2 made me wonder if MTV had been given some creative control of the franchise without me hearing about it.
Sort of like the whole Matrix deal, except with video games instead of movies.
That is precisely what I consider a worst case scenario. The Matrix 2 was a special-effects cash-in, but I enjoyed it because I presumed it was leaving all those open plot holes to set us up for all the answers in 3. In hindsight, it merely looks like a slice of swiss cheese, and they dropped even the pseudo-philosophy that could've been an explanation in favour of simply using more mysterious handwaving about Neo being "the one".
The second and third movies made it clear they had no respect for the intellectual capacity of their fans, preferring to focus their efforts on car chases, explosions, and bullet-time. They apparently completely lost sight of why people enjoyed the first movie so much. The Final Fantasy series seems to have been taking much the same tack lately. Challenge my brain with story, not my eyes with eye-candy. It's the former that got me hooked, the latter didn't even exist when I started playing.
I'm on my second run through (You can carry over many of the things you accomplished in your first run through, if you choose to do so), the first having taken some 75 hours of my time, with not too many sidequests and not much level treadmilling. The puzzles sometimes make me wonder if I'm playing Zelda though, some people may consider that a good thing, some may consider it bad.;)
I hope you enjoy it as much as I have so far.
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I think that was the idea behind the original post, get your sarcasm meter checked.
Besides that, I'm with you. Vote third party. Even if they don't win, it's the only way you'll actually create change. It's a long term goal, not a win-this-election goal. If democracy is only really open to people with a few specific sets of ideas, that's not democracy, it's a game of 'pick your poison'.
Up until lately, I felt the same way about Canadian politics. Despite our 4 major parties, the floor was very much closed to the voices on the edges (never underestimate the people at the ends of the political spectrum, they may not be big, but they literally *define* the center) and even to the two smaller major parties. However, I was heartened by the fledgling Green party's good showing in the last election, as well as the two smaller parties, so I have some hope for the system again.
Anyway, good luck USA, we're all worried about you.:P
A lot of people, including myself, lump FFX - to some extent - and FFX-2 definitely, into the category of "royally sucks".
I think FF has been going downhill since FF7. I'm used to the wacky changes in battle systems and completely disconnected stories and settings and I think that's great, I love seeing a company that isn't afraid to experiment. But one thing that has always tied the FF stories together is a rich and engrossing, and especially an epic story.
Anyway, I've found solace in Tales of Symphonia for GameCube. It's what the last bunch of FF games should've been, perhaps even better. It's an absolutely fantastic game, and I highly recommend it to any FF fan.
Yeah, thinking back on the rise of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. it certainly had the potential to turn that way. Companies like Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Rockwell, and others *did* basically have a military. Fortunately they just considered it inventory for them to sell, and not something more sinister.
Thankfully, the way it turned out it just provides reinforcement for my idea that any sufficiently sneaky conspiracy is impossible, because the government, and companies, are too stupid to think that far ahead.
Well, being "out" of oil never really happens since current recovery technology only allows us to get about 20% (on average) of the existing oil out of the ground, but as far as oil production, yes, most of the domestic U.S. oil fields are either unviable fields (there's a break even point where it costs more to produce a barrel of oil than you get for selling it) or very mature (fields that have produced most of their recoverable oil, have therefore lost most of their pressure, and are only pumping a tiny fraction of what they were at their peak)
A lot of this is because the first oil well was drilled in the U.S. and the U.S. quickly became a leader in the process. It took about 40 years after that before oil was discovered in most of the middle east.
But yeah. I work in the oil and gas industry (aka Pure Evil Incorporated), and I don't have much sympathy for the anti-OPEC crowd either, because I think they're actually surprisingly reasonable. Sure, they're artificially keeping the price high (albeit still reasonable enough for people to buy it, apparently), but like you said, the alternative is much worse for them and for everyone. s/oil/(some endangered but useful-to-hunt animal)/ and the reason they act the way they do becomes more clear.
Besides, I know that if I was in their position, I'd be much less reasonable than they are about pricing and market demands, heh.;)
Because they're a group of countries, not a business, and countries aren't subject to any sort of anti-trust law. They're free to do whatever they want with the their own resources, including gouging other countries. It's one of the wonderful rights you get by being a soverign country.
I realize that globalization is busy blurring the line between the two sets of entities, but at the moment businesses don't have militaries.
The voltage difference required to push a lightning strike through thousands of feet of air, which is normally quite a good insulator even when it's humid, is many orders of magnitude larger than any large group of human beings could unintentionally create. It would be like pissing in the ocean.
Your tin-foil hat doesn't work, apparently, as the government brain-waves have already corrupted you to believe that they can't ignore their own rules at will. Of course they can decrypt the results without caring whether they've violated the DMCA.
Clearly you haven't tried to actually use USB at those speeds.
There is no question, as far as I know, that Firewire 400 provides better throughput than USB 2.0 in a typical environment (and most non-typical ones as well). Not just better, either. Significantly better. I can attest to this personally. A file that, via USB, takes 3 seconds to copy to the hard drive in my USB2/Firewire400 enclosure, only takes about 1.5 seconds via Firewire. (for those concerned about my testing methods, yes, these are smallish files for a reason. I don't want the drive's maximum to be taken into account. As long as we're only writing to the 8MB cache, we should be fine.
Anyway, yeah. Ignore the marketing hype and look at benchmarks. USB 2.0 -- replacing the Mhz myth with the Mbps myth.
65 cents on a 99 cent song goes to the RIAA. 34 cents is used by Apple for hardware, bandwidth, maintenance, and development.
They allegedly make no profit at all, and use it as a marketing venue for iPods, which still leaves them feeling pretty happy about it at the end of the day.
Congratulations, you paraphrased exactly what the end of the story said (and will probably get modded up for it)
The optimistic assessment led one reporter to ask if future sample-return missions might forego the theatrics of using Hollywood stunt pilots to make mid-air retrievals of capsules, and instead simply design the shells to survive a freefall.
"The lessons from this one will affect all future sample returns," said Gentry Lee, a JPL engineer.
What's amazing is that you can reply to a post that suggests conservativism may lead to anything between a hard-right Stalinism and a neoconservative utopia, and you somehow only bother to read the first half and perceive it as an entirely negative attack by a lefty? Those are some impressive blinders you have on.
there's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modfying an open source project and creating a new closed source project forked off of it.
Um, are you sure about that? I was pretty sure that was the whole intention of the GPL, and that everything in the GPL is about preventing that. (I'm right, by the way)
True, but even 64 bits will be able to count seconds until well after Sol has become a red giant and Earth has been incinerated.
Besides, we all know what a big deal Y2K turned out to be after all. Y2.038K will be an even smaller problem, since a) there is no user-interface for entering those numbers and b) except on the integer-size level, they are perfectly backwards compatable, ie sending you a string "1058382094" is a valid time, 32-bit or 64-bit or 4096-bit.
And the integer size issue needs to be dealt with for *every* integer a program uses, not just time. We'll still have problems with people who insist on using their old 32-bit computers 30 years from now because "it just works and we can't afford to port all our software over!" but that's their fault, and their problem.
Anyway, should be fun regardless. I look forward to the media hype.:)
It's too bad that the US electoral system casts out people who stand by their convictions. That's one thing that I can actually say I appreciate about George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Right or wrong, they have convictions and stand by them. Mind you, that's also the only good thing I have to say about them.
Lack of any beliefs or willingness to stand up for them seems to be one of the fundamental problems with US politics.
Just a note. It is very common in North America to reverse the generally accepted axis of longitude coordinates so that west is positive and east is negative, so I'm sure it's not just a mistake.
I work on GIS software, too, so I am not just talking out my ass (for once). And yes, before you ask, our software does reverse the longitudes to make west positive.
Oh, they've made it precisely difficult enough so that automatically suing every independent music creator is an easier route, and for the few who don't settle, let the courts prove them wrong if the independent artist finds they're somehow wealthy enough to fight with the RIAA's lawyers.
I used to live near a wind power plant, what the hell are you talking about? Have you been watching too many cartoons? 40ft fan blades turning at 5 rpm make no meaningful noise whatsoever.
Any overclocker would know that the noise a fan makes is proportional to the rpm of the fan, or inversely proportional to the size of the fan if you keep airflow constant. Besides, the reason fans are loud, aside from the motors themselves, is because they are creating air motion, aka sound. Outside, there is already a hell of a lot more air motion than a fan could ever hope to make, we call it wind, and it's already loud.
Where does all this misinformation about wind power come from? (I'm from Alberta which is, from my anecdotal evidence, one of the most wind-power-friendly places in Canada)
Slashdot Mirror
You can't expect Square to continue creating games as great as FFVII.
No, I can't. But I can hope for them to stop what is in my opinion a consistent downward slope. For me, FF7 was 'fantastic!', FF8 was 'very good', FF9 was 'fairly good', FFX was 'alright', FFXI was 'tedious', FFX-2 made me wonder if MTV had been given some creative control of the franchise without me hearing about it.
Sort of like the whole Matrix deal, except with video games instead of movies.
That is precisely what I consider a worst case scenario. The Matrix 2 was a special-effects cash-in, but I enjoyed it because I presumed it was leaving all those open plot holes to set us up for all the answers in 3. In hindsight, it merely looks like a slice of swiss cheese, and they dropped even the pseudo-philosophy that could've been an explanation in favour of simply using more mysterious handwaving about Neo being "the one".
The second and third movies made it clear they had no respect for the intellectual capacity of their fans, preferring to focus their efforts on car chases, explosions, and bullet-time. They apparently completely lost sight of why people enjoyed the first movie so much. The Final Fantasy series seems to have been taking much the same tack lately. Challenge my brain with story, not my eyes with eye-candy. It's the former that got me hooked, the latter didn't even exist when I started playing.
I'm on my second run through (You can carry over many of the things you accomplished in your first run through, if you choose to do so), the first having taken some 75 hours of my time, with not too many sidequests and not much level treadmilling. The puzzles sometimes make me wonder if I'm playing Zelda though, some people may consider that a good thing, some may consider it bad. ;)
I hope you enjoy it as much as I have so far.
I think that was the idea behind the original post, get your sarcasm meter checked.
:P
Besides that, I'm with you. Vote third party. Even if they don't win, it's the only way you'll actually create change. It's a long term goal, not a win-this-election goal. If democracy is only really open to people with a few specific sets of ideas, that's not democracy, it's a game of 'pick your poison'.
Up until lately, I felt the same way about Canadian politics. Despite our 4 major parties, the floor was very much closed to the voices on the edges (never underestimate the people at the ends of the political spectrum, they may not be big, but they literally *define* the center) and even to the two smaller major parties. However, I was heartened by the fledgling Green party's good showing in the last election, as well as the two smaller parties, so I have some hope for the system again.
Anyway, good luck USA, we're all worried about you.
I may be stupid, but at least I'm not close-minded like you. *shrug*
A lot of people, including myself, lump FFX - to some extent - and FFX-2 definitely, into the category of "royally sucks".
I think FF has been going downhill since FF7. I'm used to the wacky changes in battle systems and completely disconnected stories and settings and I think that's great, I love seeing a company that isn't afraid to experiment. But one thing that has always tied the FF stories together is a rich and engrossing, and especially an epic story.
Anyway, I've found solace in Tales of Symphonia for GameCube. It's what the last bunch of FF games should've been, perhaps even better. It's an absolutely fantastic game, and I highly recommend it to any FF fan.
Yeah, thinking back on the rise of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. it certainly had the potential to turn that way. Companies like Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Rockwell, and others *did* basically have a military. Fortunately they just considered it inventory for them to sell, and not something more sinister.
Thankfully, the way it turned out it just provides reinforcement for my idea that any sufficiently sneaky conspiracy is impossible, because the government, and companies, are too stupid to think that far ahead.
Well, being "out" of oil never really happens since current recovery technology only allows us to get about 20% (on average) of the existing oil out of the ground, but as far as oil production, yes, most of the domestic U.S. oil fields are either unviable fields (there's a break even point where it costs more to produce a barrel of oil than you get for selling it) or very mature (fields that have produced most of their recoverable oil, have therefore lost most of their pressure, and are only pumping a tiny fraction of what they were at their peak)
;)
A lot of this is because the first oil well was drilled in the U.S. and the U.S. quickly became a leader in the process. It took about 40 years after that before oil was discovered in most of the middle east.
But yeah. I work in the oil and gas industry (aka Pure Evil Incorporated), and I don't have much sympathy for the anti-OPEC crowd either, because I think they're actually surprisingly reasonable. Sure, they're artificially keeping the price high (albeit still reasonable enough for people to buy it, apparently), but like you said, the alternative is much worse for them and for everyone. s/oil/(some endangered but useful-to-hunt animal)/ and the reason they act the way they do becomes more clear.
Besides, I know that if I was in their position, I'd be much less reasonable than they are about pricing and market demands, heh.
Because they're a group of countries, not a business, and countries aren't subject to any sort of anti-trust law. They're free to do whatever they want with the their own resources, including gouging other countries. It's one of the wonderful rights you get by being a soverign country.
I realize that globalization is busy blurring the line between the two sets of entities, but at the moment businesses don't have militaries.
That's the real difference.
Ah, armchair science.
The voltage difference required to push a lightning strike through thousands of feet of air, which is normally quite a good insulator even when it's humid, is many orders of magnitude larger than any large group of human beings could unintentionally create. It would be like pissing in the ocean.
Your tin-foil hat doesn't work, apparently, as the government brain-waves have already corrupted you to believe that they can't ignore their own rules at will. Of course they can decrypt the results without caring whether they've violated the DMCA.
That's why I use a lead helmet.
Clearly you haven't tried to actually use USB at those speeds.
There is no question, as far as I know, that Firewire 400 provides better throughput than USB 2.0 in a typical environment (and most non-typical ones as well). Not just better, either. Significantly better. I can attest to this personally. A file that, via USB, takes 3 seconds to copy to the hard drive in my USB2/Firewire400 enclosure, only takes about 1.5 seconds via Firewire. (for those concerned about my testing methods, yes, these are smallish files for a reason. I don't want the drive's maximum to be taken into account. As long as we're only writing to the 8MB cache, we should be fine.
Anyway, yeah. Ignore the marketing hype and look at benchmarks. USB 2.0 -- replacing the Mhz myth with the Mbps myth.
65 cents on a 99 cent song goes to the RIAA.
34 cents is used by Apple for hardware, bandwidth, maintenance, and development.
They allegedly make no profit at all, and use it as a marketing venue for iPods, which still leaves them feeling pretty happy about it at the end of the day.
What's amazing is that you can reply to a post that suggests conservativism may lead to anything between a hard-right Stalinism and a neoconservative utopia, and you somehow only bother to read the first half and perceive it as an entirely negative attack by a lefty? Those are some impressive blinders you have on.
there's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modfying an open source project and creating a new closed source project forked off of it.
Um, are you sure about that? I was pretty sure that was the whole intention of the GPL, and that everything in the GPL is about preventing that. (I'm right, by the way)
True, but even 64 bits will be able to count seconds until well after Sol has become a red giant and Earth has been incinerated.
:)
Besides, we all know what a big deal Y2K turned out to be after all. Y2.038K will be an even smaller problem, since a) there is no user-interface for entering those numbers and b) except on the integer-size level, they are perfectly backwards compatable, ie sending you a string "1058382094" is a valid time, 32-bit or 64-bit or 4096-bit.
And the integer size issue needs to be dealt with for *every* integer a program uses, not just time. We'll still have problems with people who insist on using their old 32-bit computers 30 years from now because "it just works and we can't afford to port all our software over!" but that's their fault, and their problem.
Anyway, should be fun regardless. I look forward to the media hype.
Right, because YYYYMMDDHHmmNN can fit in a 32 bit integer with no problems at all.
4294967295 (max unsigned 32-bit number)
20040909090201 (sample of YYYYMMDDHHmmNN)
Slashdot really Lone Gunman'ed this.
Bonus points for the people who remember what I'm talking about.
It's too bad that the US electoral system casts out people who stand by their convictions. That's one thing that I can actually say I appreciate about George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Right or wrong, they have convictions and stand by them. Mind you, that's also the only good thing I have to say about them.
Lack of any beliefs or willingness to stand up for them seems to be one of the fundamental problems with US politics.
Just a note. It is very common in North America to reverse the generally accepted axis of longitude coordinates so that west is positive and east is negative, so I'm sure it's not just a mistake.
I work on GIS software, too, so I am not just talking out my ass (for once). And yes, before you ask, our software does reverse the longitudes to make west positive.
Oh, they've made it precisely difficult enough so that automatically suing every independent music creator is an easier route, and for the few who don't settle, let the courts prove them wrong if the independent artist finds they're somehow wealthy enough to fight with the RIAA's lawyers.
Naturally, the RIAA is fine with this.
I could be wrong, but my finely-tuned USENET senses suggest that YHBT. YHL. HAND.
FF4 (aka 2) was my first, but FF7 is my favourite.
Well, I suspect it has probably improved since last time I installed it (about 7 months ago), but I will keep that in mind for next time I install it.
Thanks for the reply.
I used to live near a wind power plant, what the hell are you talking about? Have you been watching too many cartoons? 40ft fan blades turning at 5 rpm make no meaningful noise whatsoever.
Any overclocker would know that the noise a fan makes is proportional to the rpm of the fan, or inversely proportional to the size of the fan if you keep airflow constant. Besides, the reason fans are loud, aside from the motors themselves, is because they are creating air motion, aka sound. Outside, there is already a hell of a lot more air motion than a fan could ever hope to make, we call it wind, and it's already loud.
Where does all this misinformation about wind power come from? (I'm from Alberta which is, from my anecdotal evidence, one of the most wind-power-friendly places in Canada)