Totally, some of my best stuff. I have theories that later comments roll onto later pages, and that nobody ever reads anything but page one. I didn't even realize there were more than one page of comments for well-commented stories for many months.
Only 11 blades to go until we get to Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee's 17-blade razor. He did a wonderful article 30 years ago about all manner of crazy shavers based on what was already stupidity on the razor manufacturer's part. One razor had dozens of very narrow blades, side by side, each independently spring loaded, so they could go over pimples without a severing accident. Another razor had little gripping claws that entered the follicle and gripped the hair by the root and yanked it out. And, of course, prescient of today's idiocy, the 17 blade razor.
said Google's use of thumbnail-sized reproductions in its image search program violated the copyright of Perfect 10, a publisher of X-rated magazines and Web sites, because it undermined that company's ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users
Clearly the judge is confused as to what's going on. These images are already available for free, and free access, on the Internet -- or else Google wouldn't be able to index them!. Hence the ability to license these to mobile phone users is already undermined by those very same people seeking to sell it.
Yes, but "who wants to watch little men lifting little weights?"
As CoH and every fantasy RPG out there has learned, even the squishies can't be that squishy, hence squishy casters can stand there and take gigantic gatling gun fire and only suffer a few points of damage. And casters can cast spells while doing this, or while a 10 foot tall, 4000 lb. fighter is crowning them with a giant, 200 lb. blade.
So I guess Batman'll be able to stand with Superman vs. the same threat, no kryptonite needed, for more than 1.6 nanoseconds.
> Wait until you see just how gay those costumes look > when you actually have to wear one. What looks great on a stylish comic book page
I beg to differ. Rogue's green-and-yellow clownsuit (especially with trenchcoat (!?!?) over it), or Wolverine's blue-and-yellow monstrosity are hardly fashion statements on actual comic pages.
Wolverine vs. The Thing, The Actual Version (Imagine underline characters here that don't violate the lameness filter)
The Thing claps his hands together, WHAM! Wolvie falls unconscious. The Thing picks him up and blows into the earhole, vacating the skull of all contents. Time: 8.6 seconds.
> This problem came up with the Star Wars MMO as well >...you can't have everybody running around as Luke or Vader.
And, worse, simultaneously you can't not have everybody running around as Luke or Vader. Being a Jedi is 95% of the attraction, with the remaining 4% wanting to be Boba Fett (like my son), or, for very old-school RPG'ers like me, the remaining 1% being an "Exquisite Leotard" dancer just for the pure novelty of it.
Yeah, you can't let everybody be a Jedi, but you can't not, either. Bad choice for game designers.
I wanna play the unionized government worker who sits in the elevator all day and pushes the buttons for people!
Yes! The elevator stopped on the magical 13th floor that doesn't exist! Increased padding for my chair! Who rules now? Take that, "Fires of Heaven"!
(Two months later)
Son of a bitch! They nerfed the padding to be only 40% as soft as it used to be!
Ok, admit it. People would actually play that character. Actually, a Hobo/Bum type character who got points and better skill at searching thru trash would be even more fun to play. You could get bonus power ups by seeing how close you could penetrate into DC's "green zone" around the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court areas, before the cops got you and booted you into the surrounding disadvantaged neighborhoods. Cool! I got another powerup by successfully spitting down from an overpass onto a Congressman's car as he traveled to his home in Virginia!
Yeah, and then you could have Elite professions based on Hobo, like the elevator sitting person, or people paid to stand in line for lobbyists.
I can't wait to see how Superman-level "tanks" can't dish out as much damage as Batman-type Rogues. Or how Superman-like characters with flight max out at 40 MPH.
And I'll grant that CoH has magnificent travel powers -- high speed, and early level achieved, compared to stupidity like the mule-amblin' speed of WoW's Lear-jet cost "horse", level 40. Plus it's a true 3D world with integrated 3D travel, unlike WoW or EQ or SWG any other number of embarassments where "flight" is just you running along the ground, translated 6' up into the air.
Yes, I hope this game at least takes three lessons from CoH:
1. True 3D travel powers, and high speed, and early on, for little or no cost
2. No hyper-nerfs completely re-writing the game, ala the "Enhancement Diversity" super-nerf. I quit because of that, haven't been back.
3. Magnificent character customization, including sliders so you can make a nice J-Lo @$$y girl with a thin waist. You "straight, what are you, gay?" guys can run around behind your finely-toned muscle d'erriers for hours. I'll take a Jennifer Lopez circa "Selena" days any day over that. But with a Sela Ward face with Sela's kinked eyebrows, black hair, and dual pigtails. And strappy heels and fishnets. Yeah, isn't Zatana and Black Songbirdwidow or whatever fishnet-wearing women?
Plus the three sliders, in vertical order: MAX, MIN, MAX! Don't forget those sliders!
IIRC, it was even worse than that early on. Supposedly there were/-commands that would set your costume to pre-designed perfect duplicates of various Marvel characters.
(sitting in a tub full of foam) "Sir, you have me at a disadvantage."
"Madame, the disadvantage is all mine."
"Could you hand me something to put on?"
(Nerd reaches down and picks up a pair of 5" Cell processors and wordlessly holds them out to Octopiler.)
"The quiet type, eh? Don't you have something seductive to say, James?"
"D'joo see 'Matrix'? When Mouse runs into the lunchroom and says 'Morpheus is fightin' Neo!', then they all scramble out to go look and Neo is moving so fast onscreen, we see ripping and tearing on the screen ala Quake cranked way up in the framerate with V-sync turned off! Wow! Wowowoeee!"
Re:There are still games for gamers low on time
on
Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
> Older gamers (such as myself, 33 > >... > I've gotten hooked on Desert Combat
I remember late-nite cable getting hooked on Desert Hearts. Good god, watching a middle aged woman's awakening and the collapse of her social resistence was a nice thing...
No, we didn't have no steenkeeng pr0n to download. No, you stayed up late and prayed your parents went to bed early so you could watch mainstream movies on ON TV. Boy, Tess d'Ubervilles was boring 99% of the time, but man that Natassja Kinski, whoo hoo!
Re:competition with PC games, then and now
on
Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
It's true. All desktop sub-workstation class computers were called "PCs" back then. Even a Mac could be referred to such in the very early days. And PCs (I.e. IBM and clones) weren't generally referred to by a generic "PC". No, you had an XT, or even the super-duper AT if you were lucky. Heck, the final text-based version of Word Perfect ran on the pre-AT XT a guy I knew had well into the early-mid '90's.
Nah, IBM adopting the name "PC" exclusively for its own design was prescient of Microsoft's later glom of "Windows" to describe it's window-based operating system. Mercifully a judge denied Microsoft when they attempted to copyright or trademark "Windows", I forget which, to the level where they could prevent computer science from discussing "windowing systems". Bzzzt, sorry, it's a well-established term, that's why your business people attempting to steal^H^H^H^H^H glom onto it.
Re:competition with PC games, then and now
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
I'll forever be a PC player ever since the Colecovision went out of style. Had "Max Payne 2" for X-Box or PS2, forget which (we have both) for the kid, but I could not get into it. Bought it later for PC, magnificent. Keyboarding is where it's at for games like that. Dual thumbsticks just ain't gonna cut it. I need a mouse to turn and aim, sorry.
I heard one or the other or both can accept USB mouse and/or keyboard, but I never looked into it to confirm. One would also need to be able to re-configure the keyboard so you could set up your own modified "Thresh" layout rather than the clumsy layouts offered as standard installs. The backspace to back up with your thumb is the proper way -- one direction for each finger/thumb, no wasting time switching one finger from one button to the other...
Re:How much did a PC with that cost?
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
I remember going to a Mac Expo type thing in the Detroit area somewhere, and we got to go see the new "Mac IIfx" 68040 prototype, as long as we signed an NDA. People from the Detroit News were the only others there, and they loaded up a gigantic color Postscript layout (or whatever professional graphics package was in use back then) file from some front page they had recently done, to see how fast they could manipulate it.
This was the machine advertised as "wicked fast". I assume the NDA has expired.
Re:How much did a PC with that cost?
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
Er, they were 386 cards -- confusing Mac and PC, I was a Mac-o-phile at the time. Yeah, when my later IIci, creaking and wheezing with its 68040 accelerator card, couldn't keep up with the new phenomenon of the Internet (it could open full-screen pr0n.jpegs in 8-10 seconds instead of lame 30+ seconds like comparable PCs) I broke down and got a Pentium Pro. Stunned my buds as I was the local Mac advocate. But a PC surfed just as well, ran Word and Excel just as well, and played a hell of a lot more games, and was cheaper. And I was skilled with fighting with it, being a programmer who used one at work. The choice was obvious.
Re:How much did a PC with that cost?
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
It occurs to me I still have my "Gold Hill" coffee cup after all these years -- my wife has it at work currently as her cup.
Re:How much did a PC with that cost?
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
We bought 2 add-in cards to put in a PC that cost $8000.00 each for a government (naturally) project. These were 20 MHz 68030 cards that we bought to run Gold Hill's gigantic expert system as fast as possible, with an astounding 8 meg of RAM on them. I was in charge of getting the Gold Hill system installed and up and running. They had a massive 3.5" floppy disk package with something on the order of 30 floppies to install, one after the other. I couldn't believe how fast "dir"'s listing of files flew by on the screen on that machine (which was also a 386.)
To put the cost in perspective, my development machine was a "Bentley", a 286 with a "turbo" button that doubled the clock speed. And I was the biggest stud in the office except for these government-bound supermachines. I had a rolly cart for it to sit on, and on a few occasions we pushed it out to the secretary's desk so she could print some graphics using the then-popular graphics program (forget the name), which built it all in RAM then piped it to the laser printer. I still remember the slow crawl of the . . . across the screen for over half an hour.
It wouldn't be for several years that I'd get my own 386, 20 MHz, and on that I played Wolf 3D. Headache be damned. No, I wasn't a lucky person who had the original Sound Blaster, but I knew a guy who did. "Mein leiben!", or some such, later immortalized by Beavis as "My liver!"
Re:Are we remembering the same 1986?
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
Never heard of it.
However, I did send my Mac Plus back to the "Computer Kickoff" at U-Mich because it wouldn't play "Megaroids", which everyone else's new computer would. All their RAM and other test programs passed it with flying colors, but Megaroids crashed. So they gave me a new one out of their general supply for the University.
Yeah, the number of hours I wasted on "Lode Runner" was phenomenal back then. Digitized sound, something general IBM PCs didn't have yet, and even though it was black and white, the fine-grain pixels made the graphics look very nice and not pixellated -- jaggies were so small to be non-existent.
Back then, there was no "warez" -- no, you copied your floppies the hard way, with a (copy) of Copy2Mac.
Nostalgia is "the veneration of that which formed us."
Of course the Nintendo is a big deal -- for you young punks. Clearly the Atari (not called the 2600 at the time) was the far superior impact on society. Heck, by the time Nintendo came out, Saturday morning cartoons were half dead -- because kids were playing their Ataris instead.
Remembering Nintendo fondly? Imagine 20 years from now people harken back to World of Warcraft -- the MMORPG that started it all! Ahh, the nostalgia...
Slashdot Mirror
Slavery can only exist when the government recognizes it, either directly, or is so weak private organizations can impose their will.
Totally, some of my best stuff. I have theories that later comments roll onto later pages, and that nobody ever reads anything but page one. I didn't even realize there were more than one page of comments for well-commented stories for many months.
Only 11 blades to go until we get to Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee's 17-blade razor. He did a wonderful article 30 years ago about all manner of crazy shavers based on what was already stupidity on the razor manufacturer's part. One razor had dozens of very narrow blades, side by side, each independently spring loaded, so they could go over pimples without a severing accident. Another razor had little gripping claws that entered the follicle and gripped the hair by the root and yanked it out. And, of course, prescient of today's idiocy, the 17 blade razor.
Clearly the judge is confused as to what's going on. These images are already available for free, and free access, on the Internet -- or else Google wouldn't be able to index them!. Hence the ability to license these to mobile phone users is already undermined by those very same people seeking to sell it.
If I could play as Sandra Bullock, this game might actually be interesting. Long black hair, creamy white skin, full red lips, yeah, yeah...
Yes, but "who wants to watch little men lifting little weights?"
As CoH and every fantasy RPG out there has learned, even the squishies can't be that squishy, hence squishy casters can stand there and take gigantic gatling gun fire and only suffer a few points of damage. And casters can cast spells while doing this, or while a 10 foot tall, 4000 lb. fighter is crowning them with a giant, 200 lb. blade.
So I guess Batman'll be able to stand with Superman vs. the same threat, no kryptonite needed, for more than 1.6 nanoseconds.
Sigh.
> Wait until you see just how gay those costumes look
> when you actually have to wear one. What looks great on a stylish comic book page
I beg to differ. Rogue's green-and-yellow clownsuit (especially with trenchcoat (!?!?) over it), or Wolverine's blue-and-yellow monstrosity are hardly fashion statements on actual comic pages.
Wolverine vs. The Thing, The Actual Version
(Imagine underline characters here that don't violate the lameness filter)
The Thing claps his hands together, WHAM! Wolvie falls unconscious. The Thing picks him up and blows into the earhole, vacating the skull of all contents. Time: 8.6 seconds.
> This problem came up with the Star Wars MMO as well ...you can't have everybody running around as Luke or Vader.
>
And, worse, simultaneously you can't not have everybody running around as Luke or Vader. Being a Jedi is 95% of the attraction, with the remaining 4% wanting to be Boba Fett (like my son), or, for very old-school RPG'ers like me, the remaining 1% being an "Exquisite Leotard" dancer just for the pure novelty of it.
Yeah, you can't let everybody be a Jedi, but you can't not, either. Bad choice for game designers.
I wanna play the unionized government worker who sits in the elevator all day and pushes the buttons for people!
Yes! The elevator stopped on the magical 13th floor that doesn't exist! Increased padding for my chair! Who rules now? Take that, "Fires of Heaven"!
(Two months later)
Son of a bitch! They nerfed the padding to be only 40% as soft as it used to be!
Ok, admit it. People would actually play that character. Actually, a Hobo/Bum type character who got points and better skill at searching thru trash would be even more fun to play. You could get bonus power ups by seeing how close you could penetrate into DC's "green zone" around the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court areas, before the cops got you and booted you into the surrounding disadvantaged neighborhoods. Cool! I got another powerup by successfully spitting down from an overpass onto a Congressman's car as he traveled to his home in Virginia!
Yeah, and then you could have Elite professions based on Hobo, like the elevator sitting person, or people paid to stand in line for lobbyists.
All right!
I can't wait to see how Superman-level "tanks" can't dish out as much damage as Batman-type Rogues. Or how Superman-like characters with flight max out at 40 MPH.
And I'll grant that CoH has magnificent travel powers -- high speed, and early level achieved, compared to stupidity like the mule-amblin' speed of WoW's Lear-jet cost "horse", level 40. Plus it's a true 3D world with integrated 3D travel, unlike WoW or EQ or SWG any other number of embarassments where "flight" is just you running along the ground, translated 6' up into the air.
Yes, I hope this game at least takes three lessons from CoH:
1. True 3D travel powers, and high speed, and early on, for little or no cost
2. No hyper-nerfs completely re-writing the game, ala the "Enhancement Diversity" super-nerf. I quit because of that, haven't been back.
3. Magnificent character customization, including sliders so you can make a nice J-Lo @$$y girl with a thin waist. You "straight, what are you, gay?" guys can run around behind your finely-toned muscle d'erriers for hours. I'll take a Jennifer Lopez circa "Selena" days any day over that. But with a Sela Ward face with Sela's kinked eyebrows, black hair, and dual pigtails. And strappy heels and fishnets. Yeah, isn't Zatana and Black Songbirdwidow or whatever fishnet-wearing women?
Plus the three sliders, in vertical order: MAX, MIN, MAX! Don't forget those sliders!
IIRC, it was even worse than that early on. Supposedly there were /-commands that would set your costume to pre-designed perfect duplicates of various Marvel characters.
"I'm Octopiler. And you are?"
"Nerd. James Nerd."
(sitting in a tub full of foam) "Sir, you have me at a disadvantage."
"Madame, the disadvantage is all mine."
"Could you hand me something to put on?"
(Nerd reaches down and picks up a pair of 5" Cell processors and wordlessly holds them out to Octopiler.)
"The quiet type, eh? Don't you have something seductive to say, James?"
"D'joo see 'Matrix'? When Mouse runs into the lunchroom and says 'Morpheus is fightin' Neo!', then they all scramble out to go look and Neo is moving so fast onscreen, we see ripping and tearing on the screen ala Quake cranked way up in the framerate with V-sync turned off! Wow! Wowowoeee!"
"Oh, James!"
> The Associated Press is reporting that the Justice Department rejected Google's concerns
In an unrelated story, sexual abusers rejected children's concerns about abusers sliding hands down their pants and feeling around.
"Justin Bailey" script kiddies. I love it!
A shade of Justin, you guys are not! =D
> Older gamers (such as myself, 33 ...
>
>
> I've gotten hooked on Desert Combat
I remember late-nite cable getting hooked on Desert Hearts. Good god, watching a middle aged woman's awakening and the collapse of her social resistence was a nice thing...
No, we didn't have no steenkeeng pr0n to download. No, you stayed up late and prayed your parents went to bed early so you could watch mainstream movies on ON TV. Boy, Tess d'Ubervilles was boring 99% of the time, but man that Natassja Kinski, whoo hoo!
It's true. All desktop sub-workstation class computers were called "PCs" back then. Even a Mac could be referred to such in the very early days. And PCs (I.e. IBM and clones) weren't generally referred to by a generic "PC". No, you had an XT, or even the super-duper AT if you were lucky. Heck, the final text-based version of Word Perfect ran on the pre-AT XT a guy I knew had well into the early-mid '90's.
Nah, IBM adopting the name "PC" exclusively for its own design was prescient of Microsoft's later glom of "Windows" to describe it's window-based operating system. Mercifully a judge denied Microsoft when they attempted to copyright or trademark "Windows", I forget which, to the level where they could prevent computer science from discussing "windowing systems". Bzzzt, sorry, it's a well-established term, that's why your business people attempting to steal^H^H^H^H^H glom onto it.
I'll forever be a PC player ever since the Colecovision went out of style. Had "Max Payne 2" for X-Box or PS2, forget which (we have both) for the kid, but I could not get into it. Bought it later for PC, magnificent. Keyboarding is where it's at for games like that. Dual thumbsticks just ain't gonna cut it. I need a mouse to turn and aim, sorry.
I heard one or the other or both can accept USB mouse and/or keyboard, but I never looked into it to confirm. One would also need to be able to re-configure the keyboard so you could set up your own modified "Thresh" layout rather than the clumsy layouts offered as standard installs. The backspace to back up with your thumb is the proper way -- one direction for each finger/thumb, no wasting time switching one finger from one button to the other...
I remember going to a Mac Expo type thing in the Detroit area somewhere, and we got to go see the new "Mac IIfx" 68040 prototype, as long as we signed an NDA. People from the Detroit News were the only others there, and they loaded up a gigantic color Postscript layout (or whatever professional graphics package was in use back then) file from some front page they had recently done, to see how fast they could manipulate it.
This was the machine advertised as "wicked fast". I assume the NDA has expired.
Er, they were 386 cards -- confusing Mac and PC, I was a Mac-o-phile at the time. Yeah, when my later IIci, creaking and wheezing with its 68040 accelerator card, couldn't keep up with the new phenomenon of the Internet (it could open full-screen pr0n .jpegs in 8-10 seconds instead of lame 30+ seconds like comparable PCs) I broke down and got a Pentium Pro. Stunned my buds as I was the local Mac advocate. But a PC surfed just as well, ran Word and Excel just as well, and played a hell of a lot more games, and was cheaper. And I was skilled with fighting with it, being a programmer who used one at work. The choice was obvious.
It occurs to me I still have my "Gold Hill" coffee cup after all these years -- my wife has it at work currently as her cup.
We bought 2 add-in cards to put in a PC that cost $8000.00 each for a government (naturally) project. These were 20 MHz 68030 cards that we bought to run Gold Hill's gigantic expert system as fast as possible, with an astounding 8 meg of RAM on them. I was in charge of getting the Gold Hill system installed and up and running. They had a massive 3.5" floppy disk package with something on the order of 30 floppies to install, one after the other. I couldn't believe how fast "dir"'s listing of files flew by on the screen on that machine (which was also a 386.)
To put the cost in perspective, my development machine was a "Bentley", a 286 with a "turbo" button that doubled the clock speed. And I was the biggest stud in the office except for these government-bound supermachines. I had a rolly cart for it to sit on, and on a few occasions we pushed it out to the secretary's desk so she could print some graphics using the then-popular graphics program (forget the name), which built it all in RAM then piped it to the laser printer. I still remember the slow crawl of the . . . across the screen for over half an hour.
It wouldn't be for several years that I'd get my own 386, 20 MHz, and on that I played Wolf 3D. Headache be damned. No, I wasn't a lucky person who had the original Sound Blaster, but I knew a guy who did. "Mein leiben!", or some such, later immortalized by Beavis as "My liver!"
Never heard of it.
However, I did send my Mac Plus back to the "Computer Kickoff" at U-Mich because it wouldn't play "Megaroids", which everyone else's new computer would. All their RAM and other test programs passed it with flying colors, but Megaroids crashed. So they gave me a new one out of their general supply for the University.
Yeah, the number of hours I wasted on "Lode Runner" was phenomenal back then. Digitized sound, something general IBM PCs didn't have yet, and even though it was black and white, the fine-grain pixels made the graphics look very nice and not pixellated -- jaggies were so small to be non-existent.
Back then, there was no "warez" -- no, you copied your floppies the hard way, with a (copy) of Copy2Mac.
Nostalgia is "the veneration of that which formed us."
Of course the Nintendo is a big deal -- for you young punks. Clearly the Atari (not called the 2600 at the time) was the far superior impact on society. Heck, by the time Nintendo came out, Saturday morning cartoons were half dead -- because kids were playing their Ataris instead.
Remembering Nintendo fondly? Imagine 20 years from now people harken back to World of Warcraft -- the MMORPG that started it all! Ahh, the nostalgia...
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us "5 blade" razors are stupid, too!
I heard they even went along with themselves to their own IRS hearing -- not as a legal representative, but to explain the tax laws.