I love my GameCube... but my PS2 gets more playtime. This is because the PS2 is the console of this generation to own if you like RPGs.
The GameCube had... what? Skies of Arcadia and Tales of Symphonia. Which are both excellent, of course. But the PS2 wins that round.
Also, a problem I see is that GameCube games are persistently more expensive. I like to wander into GameStop to buy used games to mess around with. PS2 games come down to $10 or below, but GC games stick at $15. Which does make a difference.
Looking at the source, it's actually not awful. My only complaint is that they're creating a background image with a table. (It's 12 250px x 195px images in a 4 x 3 grid.) Then they move everything else, which is fairly sanely marked up over the table with CSS.
If they dumped the table, the whole thing would render quite nicely with CSS turned off. (Firefox: View -> Page Style -> No Style)
I saw Rahxephon in Best Buy a few days ago. They've re-released it in a slim-case box set for around $60. (Like the Firefly box, but a little thicker.)
There's a post it note stuck over my id in my wallet with three 4-digit numbers written on it. None of them are my PIN. My hope is that anyone unscrupulous who winds up in possession of my wallet will try to use an ATM and lose my bank card.
(The numbers are... the password for a bank website that goes with a card that I always keep at home, and two gate codes for my workplace.)
Last time I looked into it (and I can't imagine it would have changed much) Macs were price-competitive on a feature level. That is, if one looks into what it would take to build a PC that would have the same features (including equivalent software, etc) and performance as any particular Mac, it would cost about the same amount of money.
At least with Zelda I can tell my actual playing ability is getting better, whereas with Final Fantasy, you just have to chalk-up more hours to get your character stronger, so that they cause more damage, and have a better hit percentage.
Zelda games have always been about the upgrades, though. You start with three hearts, no magic, no sword, and maybe a shield, and you get better stuff. I'm playing Wind Waker at the moment, and a big part of the reason that I'm doing so much better now than at the start is that I have the Master Sword (half-powered), the boomerang, and 12 hearts.
Sure, I have a better grasp of strategy and controls than I used to, but that argument applies to the sort of RPG you're bitching about as well. You learn the methods that work on certain enemies, and so forth.
You've been complaining about attacks being "5 minute cutscenes" several times in this thread, which I would like to address. This is blatant exaggeration, at least for the Final Fantasy games. (I can't speak for other RPGs out there.) Regular physical attacks were always quick -- run out, slash, jump back -- 1 second, tops. Magic was slightly slower, but still probably maxed at around 4 seconds per spell at the highest levels. Summons took the longest, but normally only 30 seconds or so. (FF8 pushed that up a lot for its Boost system... which at least gave you something to do.)
(Oh, and I'd call Zelda an Action-Adventure game, genre-wise. And hardly any less linear in plot than Final Fantasy games.)
True, my focus was narrow. But if I'm a person who seriously wants to infiltrate one of these buildings then this isn't going to stop me. I don't know how controlled the airspace is within the appropriate range of these buildings, but I could possibly charter a plane / helicopter to fly close enough to get some pictures. Looking at the imagery on google maps, some of the nearby buildings seem to be taller than the Capitol -- I might be able to get on top of those. Or, at the least, I can probably get into an office near the top floor facing in the right direction. Depending on the urgency, the method could range from breaking in to actually renting some office space.
If I was dedicated enough and had the time, I would think the easiest way to infiltrate the Capitol building would be to get onto the staff of a Senator. (Or, failing that, fake enough ID to persuade the guards that you're on the staff of a Senator.)
Unless they've actually entered into some agreement with the map provider to distort the buildings by moving them, say, 200 meters to the left on the photo, then I don't see how it would hurt a theoretical nutjob's ability to bomb 'em.
There seem to be three scenarios:
Long-range missile warfare
If I know where Washington DC is at all, I can probably level it. Nukes, or just a sufficient saturation of high explosives.
Hand-carried bombs
A hand-delivered bomb would rely on local surveillance, I'd think. Satellite photos might be useful for examinations of the roof to find a potential entrance... but one could probably get close enough just by walking.
Long-range pinpoint missiles
This is the closest to inconvenienced an aggressor might get. You'd need highly accurate surveillance to fire a long-range guided missile through a window into the Capitol building, I'd imagine. On the other hand, if you can afford a long-range guided missile, and getting it close enough to Washington DC for this to work, you can probably afford to have a "tourist" walk through the Capitol building with a GPS receiver and a digital camera.
He's connecting to a server. One does not generally have to agree to a license to do so.
I don't agree to a license before I visit a website. I don't agree to a license before I connect to IRC. I don't see why the BitKeeper server is any different from these examples.
Look, this is Slashdot, any link is "an article".:-)
I was just saying that there's nothing in the bibliography that seems to mention the value of variable-type naming conventions. I'm very lazy, and don't want to track down and read all those papers, so I don't know if any of them touched on the issue.
Your complaint with PHP seems to be, as other respondants have said, that you see a lot of crappy code written in it. I'd argue that this is not a function of the language, but of the type of people who wind up using it. (I.e. amateur web-designers who're trying to make OSCommerce do what they want.)
I'm actually in the middle of rewriting a small-scale PHP app for the maintenance of a fiction archive (I felt it would be quicker to take something GPL'd and working and make it better than to try to write something from scratch), and I'm seeing a lot of really, really bad code. But this seems to be because the person who wrote the package didn't understand or care for important concepts, rather than anything inherent in PHP.
If you're willing to follow proceedures like unit tests (buzzwordy, I know), then it shouldn't cause any difficulty to use a dynamicly-typed language like PHP or Python. Indeed, the argument goes that you'll be more productive becuse you won't be dealing with the overhead of static typing, and the unit tests will let you see where bugs are cropping up before you otherwise might have.
Except there is a standard library. It might not be complete enough for you (and some bits aren't compiled by default), but it's definitely a standard group of functions included in the distribution.
The documentation I just linked to is probably one of the biggest reasons for PHP's success. It's comprehensive, provides a good overview, and lets you easily dip in to find what you need. It makes it easy for amateurs to write simple PHP. (Admittedly with a whole load of coding errors, but they can improve.)
I'd also hardly say that no visual cue for what type a variable is represents a serious issue. It wasn't mentioned in that article you linked to, either. What makes it an issue is the easy and automatic typecasting, and lack of a decent structure in most php.
I'd dispute your statement that these things are quantifiable. It really is taste and, more importantly, experience. Many people can read LISP, for instance. To them a LISP program can be read as easily as, say, Python can be read by most traditional programmers. The best you can do is say what the average programmer is likely to find helpful, not necessarily which features are inherently helpful.
You misunderstand the point, or at least the particular nuance of the word "design" in use. Or you're trolling.
From a technological-standards perspective, maybe. But the user doesn't care about that (unless they're blind, admittedly); the user cares about how clean the design is. They care about whether they can easily tell how to navigate the website, easily find the information they want, and so forth.
On those criteria Apple does very well.
I, personally, feel that creating websites to proper standards is important, especially for accessibility reasons. But you can have a perfectly validating site that's a pile of crap from a usability standpoint.
"Because Bush tends to do what he says he's going to do, if he says we're going to Mars, I'm going to trust him somewhat."
That's where I'd disagree. If you phrased it as "Because Bush sometimes tends to do..." then you might have a case. But look at the whole "No Child Left Behind" mess -- he passed that legislation... and then didn't fund it. So it's dead.
Mostly my skepicism come from it still being the first fortnight of the election year, and him having come out with two "visionary" programs already.
The immigration one seems tailor-made to get him support from the latino population, yet get shot down in Congress (by Republicans, most likely) through no apparent fault of his own. So it's a low risk thing for him -- he gets goodwill for suggesting it, but doesn't have to worry about alienating his supporters. (What are the conservatives who don't like this going to do? Vote Dean? Unlikely, even if he does seems to be more of a Republican on fiscal policy than Bush is.)
Then there's the Mars program. Another thing that has no immediate repercussions for him. He can pass legislation supporting it easily enough, and then he can just not come up with the required funding. Even assuming he gets re-elected it's not an issue for his party, since when the deadline comes and the program is, well, dead, the Democrats will likely be in office, so the Republicans can just say "look how these liberal scum have killed the great and visionary programs of Bush!"
So... yeah. I'm not taking this as real unless I see him moving to guarantee funding.
It's fairly well reported that he didn't say he invented the Internet.
What he actually said was:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
And, as the article I linked to says, this is at most a self-serving statement, saying that he acted to support the creation of the Internet. The extent to which he did that is, of course, debatable.
Slashdot Mirror
I love my GameCube... but my PS2 gets more playtime. This is because the PS2 is the console of this generation to own if you like RPGs.
The GameCube had... what? Skies of Arcadia and Tales of Symphonia. Which are both excellent, of course. But the PS2 wins that round.
Also, a problem I see is that GameCube games are persistently more expensive. I like to wander into GameStop to buy used games to mess around with. PS2 games come down to $10 or below, but GC games stick at $15. Which does make a difference.
Looking at the source, it's actually not awful. My only complaint is that they're creating a background image with a table. (It's 12 250px x 195px images in a 4 x 3 grid.) Then they move everything else, which is fairly sanely marked up over the table with CSS.
If they dumped the table, the whole thing would render quite nicely with CSS turned off. (Firefox: View -> Page Style -> No Style)
I saw Rahxephon in Best Buy a few days ago. They've re-released it in a slim-case box set for around $60. (Like the Firefly box, but a little thicker.)
:-D
I think this is the wave of the future.
When I took my A-levels in Maths and Advanced Maths (in England), the grading scheme was extremely process-oriented.
:-D
It was normally 6-10 marks per question, with only 1 being for getting the right answer. You got the rest for how you got that answer.
Yes, this means it was possible to get the right answer on every single question and still fail the exam.
There's a post it note stuck over my id in my wallet with three 4-digit numbers written on it. None of them are my PIN. My hope is that anyone unscrupulous who winds up in possession of my wallet will try to use an ATM and lose my bank card.
(The numbers are... the password for a bank website that goes with a card that I always keep at home, and two gate codes for my workplace.)
Okay, okay, you're a troll. We get it.
Last time I looked into it (and I can't imagine it would have changed much) Macs were price-competitive on a feature level. That is, if one looks into what it would take to build a PC that would have the same features (including equivalent software, etc) and performance as any particular Mac, it would cost about the same amount of money.
So nyaa.
Wouldn't the existance of genetic disorders be incompatible with Biblical creationism, under that view?
Natural selection is not a process of death. It doesn't require those not selected to die, just to have less children.
I really wish that the parent was rated Score: 5, Funny.
Zelda games have always been about the upgrades, though. You start with three hearts, no magic, no sword, and maybe a shield, and you get better stuff. I'm playing Wind Waker at the moment, and a big part of the reason that I'm doing so much better now than at the start is that I have the Master Sword (half-powered), the boomerang, and 12 hearts.
Sure, I have a better grasp of strategy and controls than I used to, but that argument applies to the sort of RPG you're bitching about as well. You learn the methods that work on certain enemies, and so forth.
You've been complaining about attacks being "5 minute cutscenes" several times in this thread, which I would like to address. This is blatant exaggeration, at least for the Final Fantasy games. (I can't speak for other RPGs out there.) Regular physical attacks were always quick -- run out, slash, jump back -- 1 second, tops. Magic was slightly slower, but still probably maxed at around 4 seconds per spell at the highest levels. Summons took the longest, but normally only 30 seconds or so. (FF8 pushed that up a lot for its Boost system... which at least gave you something to do.)
(Oh, and I'd call Zelda an Action-Adventure game, genre-wise. And hardly any less linear in plot than Final Fantasy games.)
True, my focus was narrow. But if I'm a person who seriously wants to infiltrate one of these buildings then this isn't going to stop me. I don't know how controlled the airspace is within the appropriate range of these buildings, but I could possibly charter a plane / helicopter to fly close enough to get some pictures. Looking at the imagery on google maps, some of the nearby buildings seem to be taller than the Capitol -- I might be able to get on top of those. Or, at the least, I can probably get into an office near the top floor facing in the right direction. Depending on the urgency, the method could range from breaking in to actually renting some office space.
If I was dedicated enough and had the time, I would think the easiest way to infiltrate the Capitol building would be to get onto the staff of a Senator. (Or, failing that, fake enough ID to persuade the guards that you're on the staff of a Senator.)
Unless they've actually entered into some agreement with the map provider to distort the buildings by moving them, say, 200 meters to the left on the photo, then I don't see how it would hurt a theoretical nutjob's ability to bomb 'em.
There seem to be three scenarios:
Long-range missile warfare If I know where Washington DC is at all, I can probably level it. Nukes, or just a sufficient saturation of high explosives. Hand-carried bombs A hand-delivered bomb would rely on local surveillance, I'd think. Satellite photos might be useful for examinations of the roof to find a potential entrance... but one could probably get close enough just by walking. Long-range pinpoint missiles This is the closest to inconvenienced an aggressor might get. You'd need highly accurate surveillance to fire a long-range guided missile through a window into the Capitol building, I'd imagine. On the other hand, if you can afford a long-range guided missile, and getting it close enough to Washington DC for this to work, you can probably afford to have a "tourist" walk through the Capitol building with a GPS receiver and a digital camera.
So I don't see the benefit.
He's connecting to a server. One does not generally have to agree to a license to do so.
I don't agree to a license before I visit a website. I don't agree to a license before I connect to IRC. I don't see why the BitKeeper server is any different from these examples.
Look, this is Slashdot, any link is "an article". :-)
I was just saying that there's nothing in the bibliography that seems to mention the value of variable-type naming conventions. I'm very lazy, and don't want to track down and read all those papers, so I don't know if any of them touched on the issue.
Your complaint with PHP seems to be, as other respondants have said, that you see a lot of crappy code written in it. I'd argue that this is not a function of the language, but of the type of people who wind up using it. (I.e. amateur web-designers who're trying to make OSCommerce do what they want.)
I'm actually in the middle of rewriting a small-scale PHP app for the maintenance of a fiction archive (I felt it would be quicker to take something GPL'd and working and make it better than to try to write something from scratch), and I'm seeing a lot of really, really bad code. But this seems to be because the person who wrote the package didn't understand or care for important concepts, rather than anything inherent in PHP.
If you're willing to follow proceedures like unit tests (buzzwordy, I know), then it shouldn't cause any difficulty to use a dynamicly-typed language like PHP or Python. Indeed, the argument goes that you'll be more productive becuse you won't be dealing with the overhead of static typing, and the unit tests will let you see where bugs are cropping up before you otherwise might have.
Except there is a standard library. It might not be complete enough for you (and some bits aren't compiled by default), but it's definitely a standard group of functions included in the distribution.
The documentation I just linked to is probably one of the biggest reasons for PHP's success. It's comprehensive, provides a good overview, and lets you easily dip in to find what you need. It makes it easy for amateurs to write simple PHP. (Admittedly with a whole load of coding errors, but they can improve.)
I'd also hardly say that no visual cue for what type a variable is represents a serious issue. It wasn't mentioned in that article you linked to, either. What makes it an issue is the easy and automatic typecasting, and lack of a decent structure in most php.
I'd dispute your statement that these things are quantifiable. It really is taste and, more importantly, experience. Many people can read LISP, for instance. To them a LISP program can be read as easily as, say, Python can be read by most traditional programmers. The best you can do is say what the average programmer is likely to find helpful, not necessarily which features are inherently helpful.
You misunderstand the point, or at least the particular nuance of the word "design" in use. Or you're trolling.
From a technological-standards perspective, maybe. But the user doesn't care about that (unless they're blind, admittedly); the user cares about how clean the design is. They care about whether they can easily tell how to navigate the website, easily find the information they want, and so forth.
On those criteria Apple does very well.
I, personally, feel that creating websites to proper standards is important, especially for accessibility reasons. But you can have a perfectly validating site that's a pile of crap from a usability standpoint.
Gmail's UI is JavaScript. It's hardly flaky.
Actually, having a blog did get me laid. I met my now-wife as a result of having one.
This may be a statistical outlier, though...
How do you shoot yourself in the foot with SCO-licenced Linux?
...no-one knows; no-one has ever used it.
I always got the impression that Nike was an aspect of Athena. Thus the temple of Athena Nike by the Parthenon in Athens.
ISS happened?
:-P
That's where I'd disagree. If you phrased it as "Because Bush sometimes tends to do..." then you might have a case. But look at the whole "No Child Left Behind" mess -- he passed that legislation... and then didn't fund it. So it's dead.
Mostly my skepicism come from it still being the first fortnight of the election year, and him having come out with two "visionary" programs already.
The immigration one seems tailor-made to get him support from the latino population, yet get shot down in Congress (by Republicans, most likely) through no apparent fault of his own. So it's a low risk thing for him -- he gets goodwill for suggesting it, but doesn't have to worry about alienating his supporters. (What are the conservatives who don't like this going to do? Vote Dean? Unlikely, even if he does seems to be more of a Republican on fiscal policy than Bush is.)
Then there's the Mars program. Another thing that has no immediate repercussions for him. He can pass legislation supporting it easily enough, and then he can just not come up with the required funding. Even assuming he gets re-elected it's not an issue for his party, since when the deadline comes and the program is, well, dead, the Democrats will likely be in office, so the Republicans can just say "look how these liberal scum have killed the great and visionary programs of Bush!"
So... yeah. I'm not taking this as real unless I see him moving to guarantee funding.
What he actually said was:
And, as the article I linked to says, this is at most a self-serving statement, saying that he acted to support the creation of the Internet. The extent to which he did that is, of course, debatable.
Just wait until we hear "The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away."...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of XGrids!