I loved Underworld! One of the few games I can say I truly enjoyed. It was not the first 3D game I had played but I found it so incredibly immersive. I havent played the second very much. I only got my hands on it a couple of years ago, and had even forgotten about it. Must browse my backup CDs to see if it's still there. I dont know much about SS2 or Thief, but I'll look into it;) Thanks for the tip:)
The gist of it is that some people think life on Earth arose far too quickly, and that amazes some scientists who propose that it must have had time to evolve first in some other place, and then contaminated Earth and continued its evolution here.
What? Since when did adventure games involve killing monsters? Adventure games as I recall them were point-and-click interactive stories. One could say that they were a direct descendant of the old text-mode Interactive Fiction games, but with graphics and a mouse interface. They were based around a plot that progressed through your actions, which usually involved using a few objects somewhere, or with each other. Most of them weren't really any good since the actions one was required to perform were completely illogical, leaving you with no other choice but to try every combination of items in your inventory with everything on the screen, brute-force algorithm style. On top of that, a lot of crucial items could only be gotten through what is known as "hunt-the-pixel" where there was only one single pixel on the screen representing your crucial item... it was very easy to miss. I welcome the death of the adventure game. Though I would love to see a bit more of their quirky humour in modern games, they usually weren't THAT entertaining, but rather frustrating. You would be stuck in the same spot for weeks and would often give up on the game. A lot of games, I could only complete with the advent of the internet and gamefaqs.com! Personally, I believe that a solid plot fills the niche wanted by adventure gamers: Games at the time of the glorious VGA resolution were usually divisible into zero-plot repetitive shooters and plot-only adventure games. Half-Life and Deus Ex, for instance, are so much better than any old 2d shooter or adventure game, that I find it hard to miss any of them. If only game developers would give us more quality, immersive games like those two, instead of the shallow click-fest that is Unreal Tournament and Quake... Any game recommendations btw? I havent played a really good game in a loooong time.
My host is www.lusodigital.com... the webpage is in portuguese, but its actually part of an american group called Everlasting LLC. I have no idea where the servers are located though, or what hosting companies this american group has on the other side of the pond.
My budget? I have never bought a single CD or DVD in my whole life. I do not own a stereo or a DVD player. I'm [un|self]employed. I do some websites here and there ($200-$300 a piece), set up the occasional network (same) and fix the odd computer ($50). Back when i was a web developer I earned a glorious $300-$400 a month doing ASP (ASP sucks!!!). Euros actually... same difference. I go to the movies once or twice a month($10), read a few websites with my 512k DSL($35/month), and spend my boring life wondering why the hell did I pick Computer Science. I used to eat out a lot($10-$20 per meal), but now I've resorted to cooking for my gf instead. Thank God I dont pay any rent. My family owns this (crappy 3-story 70-yr-old) building. Putting up with all the relatives sucks though:| It never ceases to amaze me how so many americans make more money than our president ($5000). I'm from Portugal, and if I had just one of your salaries, it would last me a year or two:P
I dont need to contact anyone, I just setup my old phone to forward the calls to my new one. Then as people phone, I inform them of my new number. Usually there arent many ppl to inform since nearly everyone I know are people I see very often, and those that I dont, dont really matter to me and end up being deleted. Theoretically, according to my pricing scheme I can keep my old phone forever without paying anything to any company, as long as I either receive or make a call at least once every 90 days. Anyway do you really need to be instantly reachable by all of FIFTY people?:O Tell me what's your secret, I wanna have a busy social life like yours:( Hmm, then again, I don't have a lot of spare time for socializing...
I would really hate it if we got this in my country... i mean, if you cant instantly tell the network when you look at the number, how will i know the price of the phone call in advance? Not everyone is rich enough not to worry about such things you know. I can call my girlfriend for 5 cents, but calling people on other networks would cost me 30 cents per minute! And that's at the discounted rate for people in my "top 10" list... most people can only afford 10 or 20 euros per month of cell phone usage and if they run out they wont put more money in it until the end of the month comes and they get paid. We would have to start writing the network's name together with the phone number, it would just be confusing. Unless cell phones start automating the network identification in some way. Why are you so attached to your phone number anyway? I dont see people screaming for email adress portability, or home adress portability or anything like that. Actually I never saw anyone complain about changing phone numbers either. I'm on my third phone number and I lost count of all the email adresses I've had in my 7 years of mobile and internet usage. Changing has never been a problem for me *shrugs*:|
You're more than welcome to show up at my door, anytime. I live in Lisbon, Portugal, and yes, some things are dirt cheap here, because we're all very poor compared to americans. Sadly, the digicam that I want costs $150 in the states and $400 around here:( Same goes for any technological gadget, I'm afraid...
If you remember the controversial meteor of martian origin that was found a while ago, you will also recall that the alleged signs of life were iron crystals of a kind that is usually, at least on Earth, only produced by bacteria. Hematite is an iron ore. It's logical to assume they're looking for more rocks like that one, which could point towards the existance of life on Mars, past or present.
erm, the full price for a movie around here is $4.75... but its a lot cheaper on mondays, and ppl older than 65 and younger than 26, if bearing a special card, can see the movie at the discounted rate on tuesdays, wednesdays and thursdays as well. And there are 50% off discount coupons regularly published in major newspapers, which i often use. Cheaper still are the non-megacorp theaters and hey, they showed "The Core" for free (legally) at my college before it even got to the theaters.
All you businness types out there who need to be contacted, read this: You don't need to have an email adress on your website. Ever heard of the FORM tag? Cool isnt it? How about the TEXTAREA tag? You can code a single-line PHP file in 5 seconds that will receive the contents of a form and will forward it to your email adress. You dont even need to know how to code since you can see sample code on the php.net site that will do that. Server-side PHP code isnt readable by unauthorized users. Put your email adress there!
I don't even get that much. I havent received a single spam since last august, which is when i switched to ADSL. OTOH, my former email accountstill gets several dozen spams per day even after all these months of inactivity, but its not like its hard to clean out even without filters. I just pick the few relevant messages, transfer them to another folder and then select all the rest in a single mouse click and delete it. It's over in less than a minute.
Like the anonymous poster said, you are mistaken. My knowledge of physics is basically what I learned in high school many moons ago, but please don't let our present scientific progress dazzle you into thinking that science will eventually make anything possible. You are being unwise in putting too much faith in the scientific method. Several of our greatest thinkers seem to believe that exponential growth, be it in science or anything else, is unsustainable in the long term, and so it will eventually, at best, level off and become logarithmic. Besides, it's not like we've advanced a whole lot lately: While it is true that computer speeds have advanced exponentially, other fields have grown only moderately and some have not experienced much growth at all. Getting back on the topic, IIRC the uncertainty principle claims that you cannot accurately measure the position and velocity of a particle, because measuring one changes the other. By velocity I dont mean scalar speed but both the speed and the heading of a particle. If you know where a particle now is with any degree of accuracy, you cannot determine where it is heading, and if you know where it is heading (eg. "north"), you cannot know precisely where it is now. So you end up with a cloud of probability where you know that the particle has a different chance of being in a different part of a general, largish area. I strongly suggest that you seek someone more knowledgeable than I am, so that they may better enlighten you about these fundamental matters.
Ever heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, or better yet, Chaos Theory? You are basically mistaken, because measuring things alters them. We don't live in a deterministic world. I can't explain it very well to you because I am not a physicist or anything like that, but I know that very smart people have written long and detailed mathematical proofs about it, so if you could make your way to the nearest scientist im sure he will be glad to explain it.
Ever saw the "flower" visualization thingy for winamp? Its the same thing! Look, you can plot the graph of a function on a typical 2D cartesian X,Y reference frame or you can plot it in a circular reference frame where Y is the distance from the center at which you plot and X is the "degree" where you plot it. So if you plot a constant C in the 1st ref. frame you get a straight horizontal line at Y=C and on the 2nd one you get a straight circle where the radius = C. If you plot a function, like a sine, it will make a wavy pattern along a line, or along a circle - RESEMBLING FLOWERS - like the winamp vis plugin... This is a trivial mathematical fact and less innovative than the crap MS spews out every other year. Does anyone know where I can read the stupid paper without subscribing to that site?
For gods sake, a stupid little Qbasic program i wrote years ago could ALSO generate a lot of different shapes like those using modified circle equations. I called it a "2d renderer" and didnt think it was anything significant. I still dont think it is of any significance and wonder why the hell there are so many crappy trivialities being passed off as important research breakthroughs.
Uh no, the last time I watched the simpsons was in 1993... It hasnt been on TV in my country for a long long time, at least AFAIK - I just don't watch television.
Consider this example: Some wacky hillbilly suddenly decides that, if you use the road that happens to pass through one of his plots of land, you, your wife, your car, and all your belongings are suddenly his to do as he sees fit, and thus proceeds to rob you blind. Why should this be any more legal than what these people are claiming? If something is mine, regardless of what the fuck I choose to do with it, then you have no right to claim it for your own perverted uses. Of course this clause is ridiculous and would never stand up in any decent court, but the problem is that if you tell a lie one too many times people, yourself included, will begin to see it as the truth. We cannot sit idly by while things like these are happening all over the place. It's not the first time this happens and if we keep sitting on our collective arse, like we're all so fond of doing, then 1984 will arrive a bit late instead of never. Personally, there's not much I can do against an ISP on the other side of the world, but I will sure talk to all my friends in NZ to warn them about this and will be advising them to send letters of protest. The snail-mail kind, which is usually taken a bit more seriously.
No it doesnt. I gained 70 pounds during my college years and was still bloody cold. Let's not forget that the heat sensors on our nerve endings are in our skin (the dermal layer), and the fat is below it (hypodermal layer - hypo meaning under in greek IIRC).
Well yes, I live right smack in the middle of a largish city... I'm seriously considering moving to a quieter place in a few years, when I start having kids and run out of space for them. But with the economy being what it is, I can't afford making any major changes to my life until I start earning some decent money again. Sometimes I just wish I was a farmer or something;)
Granted, a bus with 50 people is much better in terms of air pollution than 50 gas-guzzling SUVs. But where I live, we used to have an extensive transportation network of trams, which are electric, therefore cleaner and more silent. On top of that, most electricity here comes from dams which are relatively clean in terms of pollution although they may damage the environment in other ways. For some reason, the local government-backed surface transportation monopoly has been decimating the tramways and adding more buses instead. Noisy, smoggy buses at that. Which sucks. IMHO we could all do very well without them if we further developed the subway and rebuilt the tram network, but alas, people hate taxes because they don't seem to realize that paying more taxes is the only way they will ever get the government to do anything about our infrastructure, and so we get what we pay for...
I couldnt care less if it's about global warming or the ozone layer or saving pink river dolphins from extinction. Environmental-friendly living is a worthy pursuit in and of itself! Do you shit on the floor? Do you piss in the kitchen sink? Earth is where we live for crying out loud, we should try to keep out planetary home as clean as possible even if there ISN'T a single dangerous side effect of pollution. Where are your manners? Can we call ourselves truly civilized? I'm sick of this stupid polluted town with dirty floors and smoggy air. I'm sick of waking up every day around 6AM when the first round of buses start zooming past my windows, which btw, keep getting black with soot.I find it terribly bothersome that, as an amateur astronomer, I have to travel hundreds of miles in order to do any half-decent observation and I really can't understand how the simple logic of keeping our own damn "house" half-clean seems to be beyond the feeble minds of its inhabitants. *shrugs*
Slashdot Mirror
I loved Underworld! One of the few games I can say I truly enjoyed. It was not the first 3D game I had played but I found it so incredibly immersive. ;) :)
I havent played the second very much. I only got my hands on it a couple of years ago, and had even forgotten about it. Must browse my backup CDs to see if it's still there.
I dont know much about SS2 or Thief, but I'll look into it
Thanks for the tip
The gist of it is that some people think life on Earth arose far too quickly, and that amazes some scientists who propose that it must have had time to evolve first in some other place, and then contaminated Earth and continued its evolution here.
What?
Since when did adventure games involve killing monsters?
Adventure games as I recall them were point-and-click interactive stories.
One could say that they were a direct descendant of the old text-mode Interactive Fiction games, but with graphics and a mouse interface.
They were based around a plot that progressed through your actions, which usually involved using a few objects somewhere, or with each other.
Most of them weren't really any good since the actions one was required to perform were completely illogical, leaving you with no other choice but to try every combination of items in your inventory with everything on the screen, brute-force algorithm style.
On top of that, a lot of crucial items could only be gotten through what is known as "hunt-the-pixel" where there was only one single pixel on the screen representing your crucial item... it was very easy to miss.
I welcome the death of the adventure game. Though I would love to see a bit more of their quirky humour in modern games, they usually weren't THAT entertaining, but rather frustrating. You would be stuck in the same spot for weeks and would often give up on the game. A lot of games, I could only complete with the advent of the internet and gamefaqs.com!
Personally, I believe that a solid plot fills the niche wanted by adventure gamers: Games at the time of the glorious VGA resolution were usually divisible into zero-plot repetitive shooters and plot-only adventure games.
Half-Life and Deus Ex, for instance, are so much better than any old 2d shooter or adventure game, that I find it hard to miss any of them.
If only game developers would give us more quality, immersive games like those two, instead of the shallow click-fest that is Unreal Tournament and Quake...
Any game recommendations btw? I havent played a really good game in a loooong time.
how much do you want for it and where do you live?
My host is www.lusodigital.com... the webpage is in portuguese, but its actually part of an american group called Everlasting LLC.
I have no idea where the servers are located though, or what hosting companies this american group has on the other side of the pond.
My budget? :| :P
I have never bought a single CD or DVD in my whole life. I do not own a stereo or a DVD player.
I'm [un|self]employed. I do some websites here and there ($200-$300 a piece), set up the occasional network (same) and fix the odd computer ($50).
Back when i was a web developer I earned a glorious $300-$400 a month doing ASP (ASP sucks!!!). Euros actually... same difference.
I go to the movies once or twice a month($10), read a few websites with my 512k DSL($35/month), and spend my boring life wondering why the hell did I pick Computer Science.
I used to eat out a lot($10-$20 per meal), but now I've resorted to cooking for my gf instead.
Thank God I dont pay any rent. My family owns this (crappy 3-story 70-yr-old) building. Putting up with all the relatives sucks though
It never ceases to amaze me how so many americans make more money than our president ($5000).
I'm from Portugal, and if I had just one of your salaries, it would last me a year or two
I dont need to contact anyone, I just setup my old phone to forward the calls to my new one. :O :(
Then as people phone, I inform them of my new number. Usually there arent many ppl to inform since nearly everyone I know are people I see very often, and those that I dont, dont really matter to me and end up being deleted.
Theoretically, according to my pricing scheme I can keep my old phone forever without paying anything to any company, as long as I either receive or make a call at least once every 90 days.
Anyway do you really need to be instantly reachable by all of FIFTY people?
Tell me what's your secret, I wanna have a busy social life like yours
Hmm, then again, I don't have a lot of spare time for socializing...
I would really hate it if we got this in my country... i mean, if you cant instantly tell the network when you look at the number, how will i know the price of the phone call in advance? :|
Not everyone is rich enough not to worry about such things you know. I can call my girlfriend for 5 cents, but calling people on other networks would cost me 30 cents per minute!
And that's at the discounted rate for people in my "top 10" list... most people can only afford 10 or 20 euros per month of cell phone usage and if they run out they wont put more money in it until the end of the month comes and they get paid.
We would have to start writing the network's name together with the phone number, it would just be confusing. Unless cell phones start automating the network identification in some way.
Why are you so attached to your phone number anyway? I dont see people screaming for email adress portability, or home adress portability or anything like that. Actually I never saw anyone complain about changing phone numbers either.
I'm on my third phone number and I lost count of all the email adresses I've had in my 7 years of mobile and internet usage. Changing has never been a problem for me *shrugs*
You're more than welcome to show up at my door, anytime. I live in Lisbon, Portugal, and yes, some things are dirt cheap here, because we're all very poor compared to americans. Sadly, the digicam that I want costs $150 in the states and $400 around here :(
Same goes for any technological gadget, I'm afraid...
If you remember the controversial meteor of martian origin that was found a while ago, you will also recall that the alleged signs of life were iron crystals of a kind that is usually, at least on Earth, only produced by bacteria.
Hematite is an iron ore. It's logical to assume they're looking for more rocks like that one, which could point towards the existance of life on Mars, past or present.
erm, the full price for a movie around here is $4.75... but its a lot cheaper on mondays, and ppl older than 65 and younger than 26, if bearing a special card, can see the movie at the discounted rate on tuesdays, wednesdays and thursdays as well.
And there are 50% off discount coupons regularly published in major newspapers, which i often use.
Cheaper still are the non-megacorp theaters and hey, they showed "The Core" for free (legally) at my college before it even got to the theaters.
All you businness types out there who need to be contacted, read this:
You don't need to have an email adress on your website.
Ever heard of the FORM tag? Cool isnt it? How about the TEXTAREA tag?
You can code a single-line PHP file in 5 seconds that will receive the contents of a form and will forward it to your email adress.
You dont even need to know how to code since you can see sample code on the php.net site that will do that.
Server-side PHP code isnt readable by unauthorized users. Put your email adress there!
I don't even get that much.
I havent received a single spam since last august, which is when i switched to ADSL.
OTOH, my former email accountstill gets several dozen spams per day even after all these months of inactivity, but its not like its hard to clean out even without filters. I just pick the few relevant messages, transfer them to another folder and then select all the rest in a single mouse click and delete it. It's over in less than a minute.
Like the anonymous poster said, you are mistaken.
My knowledge of physics is basically what I learned in high school many moons ago, but please don't let our present scientific progress dazzle you into thinking that science will eventually make anything possible. You are being unwise in putting too much faith in the scientific method. Several of our greatest thinkers seem to believe that exponential growth, be it in science or anything else, is unsustainable in the long term, and so it will eventually, at best, level off and become logarithmic.
Besides, it's not like we've advanced a whole lot lately:
While it is true that computer speeds have advanced exponentially, other fields have grown only moderately and some have not experienced much growth at all.
Getting back on the topic, IIRC the uncertainty principle claims that you cannot accurately measure the position and velocity of a particle, because measuring one changes the other.
By velocity I dont mean scalar speed but both the speed and the heading of a particle.
If you know where a particle now is with any degree of accuracy, you cannot determine where it is heading, and if you know where it is heading (eg. "north"), you cannot know precisely where it is now. So you end up with a cloud of probability where you know that the particle has a different chance of being in a different part of a general, largish area.
I strongly suggest that you seek someone more knowledgeable than I am, so that they may better enlighten you about these fundamental matters.
1 - LOL :)
2 - Thanks. You know you finally found a decent sig when someone replies to it
Ever heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, or better yet, Chaos Theory?
You are basically mistaken, because measuring things alters them. We don't live in a deterministic world. I can't explain it very well to you because I am not a physicist or anything like that, but I know that very smart people have written long and detailed mathematical proofs about it, so if you could make your way to the nearest scientist im sure he will be glad to explain it.
He added a varying radius instead of a constant one and felt very manly about it. Woop-dee-doo.
Ever saw the "flower" visualization thingy for winamp?
Its the same thing!
Look, you can plot the graph of a function on a typical 2D cartesian X,Y reference frame or you can plot it in a circular reference frame where Y is the distance from the center at which you plot and X is the "degree" where you plot it.
So if you plot a constant C in the 1st ref. frame you get a straight horizontal line at Y=C and on the 2nd one you get a straight circle where the radius = C.
If you plot a function, like a sine, it will make a wavy pattern along a line, or along a circle - RESEMBLING FLOWERS - like the winamp vis plugin...
This is a trivial mathematical fact and less innovative than the crap MS spews out every other year. Does anyone know where I can read the stupid paper without subscribing to that site?
For gods sake, a stupid little Qbasic program i wrote years ago could ALSO generate a lot of different shapes like those using modified circle equations. I called it a "2d renderer" and didnt think it was anything significant. I still dont think it is of any significance and wonder why the hell there are so many crappy trivialities being passed off as important research breakthroughs.
Uh no, the last time I watched the simpsons was in 1993... It hasnt been on TV in my country for a long long time, at least AFAIK - I just don't watch television.
Consider this example: Some wacky hillbilly suddenly decides that, if you use the road that happens to pass through one of his plots of land, you, your wife, your car, and all your belongings are suddenly his to do as he sees fit, and thus proceeds to rob you blind. Why should this be any more legal than what these people are claiming?
If something is mine, regardless of what the fuck I choose to do with it, then you have no right to claim it for your own perverted uses.
Of course this clause is ridiculous and would never stand up in any decent court, but the problem is that if you tell a lie one too many times people, yourself included, will begin to see it as the truth. We cannot sit idly by while things like these are happening all over the place. It's not the first time this happens and if we keep sitting on our collective arse, like we're all so fond of doing, then 1984 will arrive a bit late instead of never.
Personally, there's not much I can do against an ISP on the other side of the world, but I will sure talk to all my friends in NZ to warn them about this and will be advising them to send letters of protest. The snail-mail kind, which is usually taken a bit more seriously.
No it doesnt. I gained 70 pounds during my college years and was still bloody cold. Let's not forget that the heat sensors on our nerve endings are in our skin (the dermal layer), and the fat is below it (hypodermal layer - hypo meaning under in greek IIRC).
Well yes, I live right smack in the middle of a largish city... I'm seriously considering moving to a quieter place in a few years, when I start having kids and run out of space for them. But with the economy being what it is, I can't afford making any major changes to my life until I start earning some decent money again. Sometimes I just wish I was a farmer or something ;)
Granted, a bus with 50 people is much better in terms of air pollution than 50 gas-guzzling SUVs. But where I live, we used to have an extensive transportation network of trams, which are electric, therefore cleaner and more silent. On top of that, most electricity here comes from dams which are relatively clean in terms of pollution although they may damage the environment in other ways.
For some reason, the local government-backed surface transportation monopoly has been decimating the tramways and adding more buses instead. Noisy, smoggy buses at that.
Which sucks. IMHO we could all do very well without them if we further developed the subway and rebuilt the tram network, but alas, people hate taxes because they don't seem to realize that paying more taxes is the only way they will ever get the government to do anything about our infrastructure, and so we get what we pay for...
I couldnt care less if it's about global warming or the ozone layer or saving pink river dolphins from extinction. Environmental-friendly living is a worthy pursuit in and of itself!
Do you shit on the floor? Do you piss in the kitchen sink? Earth is where we live for crying out loud, we should try to keep out planetary home as clean as possible even if there ISN'T a single dangerous side effect of pollution. Where are your manners? Can we call ourselves truly civilized?
I'm sick of this stupid polluted town with dirty floors and smoggy air. I'm sick of waking up every day around 6AM when the first round of buses start zooming past my windows, which btw, keep getting black with soot.I find it terribly bothersome that, as an amateur astronomer, I have to travel hundreds of miles in order to do any half-decent observation and I really can't understand how the simple logic of keeping our own damn "house" half-clean seems to be beyond the feeble minds of its inhabitants. *shrugs*