In case you're interested in how exactly the LCC (Library of Congress Classification) works, check out this page at the Library of Congress' website. Shows a complete breakdown of how it works, what all the categories are, etc.
It's the Library of Congress system, for reasons which should be fairly self explanatory. When I was in high school and during the summers in college, I worked at my local library. During about 4-5 years of time, I and several other people went about the arduous task of methodically stripping the plastic protector off of each hardcover's dust jacket, peel the Dewey Decimal label off, apply the correct LOC label, doublecheck that the right LOC label was applied, put a new plastic covering on the dust jacket (harder than you may think) and reshelve it in the constantly expanding and moving LOC section. All the while with confused patrons complaining because they're utterly used to the old Dewey method and the new fangled thing is throwing them for a loop. They spent FAR more than $500/year doing this switchover, just on how much they paid me on any given year I was there.
Support your local library, btw, even in the days of the Patriot Act. Librarians are good people, and get a bad rap for being boring that they just don't deserve. Go browse around, most libraries have a few comfortable chairs for reading if you don't feel comfortable creating a record that you checked a particular book out. Never know what you might find in a library. Working at my library was one of the best times in my life.
I think the Highlander films, in concert with the TV series', have pretty much proven the Parallel Sequels theory to just about everyon's satisfaction.
The existance of dark levels is assumed, but no hard evidence has emerged as yet.
I admit it, I own and enjoy all (except Biohazard: Zero) or the Resident Evil games. I don't enjoy them because they're scary, because frankly they aren't particularly so. They're suspenseful to a certain extent, but in the end it's more of a sci-fi zombie anime kind of thing. A bit campy, and intended to be.
I think changing the name from Biohazard to Resident Evil did the series a disservice in people's expectations. Resident Evil sets you up to be some kind of dark mystical haunted mansion your characters are walking into. It's OK for the first one, as it ended up, for me, working like a plot twist (Ahhh, evil corporation testing a virus, interesting). Biohazard implies mad biologists, or some kind of 28 Days Later type plague happening, which sets you up better.
In the end though, I like these games (and most "survival horror" type games, be they scary or not) because I believe they're the direct descendents of the venerable text adventure. Encounter various puzzles walking your path, find the key item or whatever to get through. Backtracking to rooms you couldn't open before to find different key items. Set piece monster battles (for the most part). The parallels in the game structure between Resident Evil/Silent Hill and the various Infocom text adventure games are pretty stark. I remember way back when, all the dead trees me and my family printed "verbose" logs of Zork 1 on, trying to work out the best way through the game. It's no different from people methodically working their way through Resident Evil or Silent Hill, trying to get the shortest complete times, etc.
And about "camera problems." Every game I've ever played and liked, SOMEONE lambasts it for having horrible camera problems, and 99% of the time, I don't have a clue what they're talking about. Spiderman was accused by zillions of having horrible camera issues, to which I say, how the hell would you implement a camera that perfectly tracks a guy who can CLIMB ON WALLS for goodness sake. No one has given me an answer that's any better than what Neversoft did. And with most survival horror games, people complaining about the camera just don't get it, and aren't worth arguing with. I'm not saying that Dino Crisis' camera isn't horrible, because I don't know, and not having an Xbox, I'll probably never know unless I seek out someone with DC3 to check it out. However, I'm suspicious of all reviews that blame the camera for a bad rating.
While I'm appalled at VeriSign's rank power grab, it's probably done me, personally, more good than harm Why you ask? Well, I took the time to get up to speed on BIND 9 and am running my office/home DNS on local machines, and uitilizing the code that blocks Verisign's hijacking attempt from affecting me.
Now I can charge my clients for setting up a DNS server on their local networks on any spare crap machine they have lying around, making their networks more resilient to ISP DNS outages and crap like this.
Now I have every excuse I might need to move all my clients name registrations to another registrar ASAP, and all the reason I need to not use VeriSign, or be plagued by their idiot customer service ever again!
Thank you Verisign, for teaching me how to laugh about love...again.
...as I never really have a clue what has a Japanese release and what's US only. Mark of Kri, for example, I'm surprised hasn't had a Japanese release until now. I know it was developed in the US, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. My general impression is that most games are released in Japan first, but I may need to change that to "most games I want" get released there first. "Wow, that looks neat, and I'll never see that here. Nor that. Nor that. Nor that." Nice to see that for once a real revolutionary game got put together on this side of the Pacific. I'm this close to taking Japanese classes so I can play some of these amazing games we get shafted on day after day...if I only had the money for the Japanese classes.
But I'm really concerned that this effectively lets VeriSign get away with it. They've bust everyone's trust folks, doesn't anyone care?
Of course people care, and of course people aren't going to just let them get away with it. Personally, I'm impressing on my clients the need to move to another registrar very very fast. They may control the.com and.net databases, but neither I, my clients, nor my friends (who I'll volunteer time to make the move for) will be paying them to enter something in that database. Plenty of other registrars to give money to, and they ALL charge less, and it's impossible to have worse service than Verisign. I'm also checking into whether our clients are using VeriSign as a CA for any of their commerce sites and getting the wheels in motion to move those over if they are.
And yes, if things get really wacky, I'm more than willing to run DNS services for my clients and remove the Verisign controlled servers from the root.hints file.
I tried e-mailing some of the addresses that were listed in the last slashdot post on this subject, but they all bounced back, so either they moved people's e-mail addresses after the flood, or they're white-listing those addresses. In the end, though, I don't believe complaining to Verisign management will do much good, if any. I don't plan on ever using their services again, even if they stop, so why would they care if I'm pissed at them. They'd be wasting their time trying to get me back, and I and my clients are small potatoes in any case. My only hope is that more people like me get on this bandwagon, because only then would they start to feel the heat.
the e-mail addresses you listed for the President and the CEO bounced back on me. I'll post any new ones I find, but they probably disabled the accounts until the flood stops.
The idea that MS can claim ownership on the machines ONCE THEY ARE SOLD is dangerous in the extreme.
No, they're claiming, rightly, that they can stop you from using a service they run if you've altered the hardware and software of your Xbox. A service that you are not required to use, and have to pay a seperate startup and yearly fee for, to boot. If you don't like it, don't buy an Xbox Live account for your Xbox.
Do you close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears when watching the TV, in case any ads get you?
Well, I don't watch TV (though I have a television...movies, etc) and the only radio I listen to is public radio. Yeah, the "sponsrship" is pretty much indistinguishable from an ad, but they generally have the decency to mention them once every half hour or more, instead of every 6 minutes with a commercial station.
Ads on websites are trivially easy to avoid, though I generally don't do more than use the popup blocker in Mozilla. I pay for premium access to a few sites, all of which remove the ads for paying viewers, otherwise I wouldn't have subscribed (no slashdot isn't one of them). I don't browse nearly as widely as I used to, so most of the time ads aren't an issue.
Do you choose routes which avoid all billboards?
Thankfully I live in an area with pretty strict restrictions on billboards. That, and I'm generally watching the road for people doing idiot things while they're driving (like reading billboards) to worry too much about seeing any billboards myself.
MDK are in financial trouble, and need to raise funds. This seems to be a perfectly sensible way of doing it/
Yeah, and if you happen to be someone who takes some kind of measure to avoid advertisements, not using Mandrake would be an intesely simple way of going about it.
American coders and IT workers of all stripes, you are a commodity and you always have been. You used to be a valuable one, now you are expendable and replaceable. If you want to keep coding or doing IT work, you need to take responsibility for yourself and work to find a job. If you can't find a job in IT that pays enough, no matter how hard and long you work, you have a hard choice. Either stick with it because that's what you love and deal with the hard times, or take the hard choice and find a different career where people are hiring.
No one outside your country is going to want you to come and take jobs away from their citizens, even if your country is more than willing to take jobs away from it's own citizens. No amount of complaining is going to get you a good IT job. We all laughed at those who were having trouble when we were riding sky high. Now it's our turn to eat some humble pie.
I can't understand one bit why they're releasing this. Hardly anyone plays the first one, and what servers are up are generally populated by bots, more often than not.
If the Star Wars mod wasn't in the works, I'd probably have traded in the game LONG ago, and may still do so. A complete waste of $50. I certainly don't plan on making the same mistake twice.
Ah, forgot about Hitman 2, but I was just rolling off what I had at the top of my head.
Hell, put Enter the Matrix in there. You're killing all kinds of cops and government people. Yeah, I know, you're in a computer, but even in the matrix world, the people those avatars represent still die.
Blood Omen 2: You are the demon. A vampire to be exact. You kill people in bloody and gruesome ways.
Blood Rayne: Ditto.
Dead to Rights: You're a vigilante cop spreading death in a manner that would make Max Payne cringe.
Yeah, these are all fine friendly things for the GameCube. Just because they aren't cops and bystanders on a street doesn't make it any more right. Just because GTA 3/VC allow you to enough freedom to kill cops, you can go through the entire game without killing any cop or bystander if you're careful enough.
Only problem with that is most people who'd want GTA 4 already have a PS2. I have a Cube and am quite happy with it, but I have a PS2 as well, and I'm fine with getting it for PS2. I wouldn't buy it twice, I don't care how neato it looks. And I don't mind a bit that the graphics are blocky and not overly detailed on the PS2. Graphics aren't the reason they're good games.
Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, 3, and eventually 4. Dead to Rights Hunter: The Reckoning Bood Omen 2 Bood Rayne Eternal Darkness
Some of the most violent games released recently, all with a GameCube version. Think you'd better sell the GameCube back to the store and get yourself a used Super Nintendo or a Genesis. You're not getting the kid friendly world you're looking for with that Cube, I'm sorry to say.
Or as I have often put it, science is a religion. It attempts to explain our world and justify our actions based on that explanation. It's not pure empirical observation and recording, if it ever was (remember that most of the first true scientists in the Western world were monks). It's adherents sure act like fundamentalists whenever someone deigns to question their closely held beliefs. "Prove to me X exists". I say prove it doesn't. The "death of science" and the "end of knowledge" and "impossibility" have been predicted far too many times in the past for me to believe that we have any real clue about what the world around us is really like. Studies are all fine and dandy, but they are not infallible. Stop treating them like they are.
I'm not saying this infrasound study is wrong. I have no proof either way. However, just because you can prove that an effect can be caused by a certain stimuli doesn't prove anything about specific instances of that effect other than the one you created. Claiming otherwise makes you just as foolish as the people who leap on the successive contradicting diet claims as "the truth".
As far as my quick research showed, Eidos has released 3 games for the Cube. None of which I own. One of which Eidos won't be publishing the sequel for (Timesplitters 2). So why should I care?
I find it interesting that Activision believed the outcry was because people wanted to play the game, not because of the precedent it sets of shutting out other sites.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you're interested in how exactly the LCC (Library of Congress Classification) works, check out this page at the Library of Congress' website. Shows a complete breakdown of how it works, what all the categories are, etc.
It's the Library of Congress system, for reasons which should be fairly self explanatory. When I was in high school and during the summers in college, I worked at my local library. During about 4-5 years of time, I and several other people went about the arduous task of methodically stripping the plastic protector off of each hardcover's dust jacket, peel the Dewey Decimal label off, apply the correct LOC label, doublecheck that the right LOC label was applied, put a new plastic covering on the dust jacket (harder than you may think) and reshelve it in the constantly expanding and moving LOC section. All the while with confused patrons complaining because they're utterly used to the old Dewey method and the new fangled thing is throwing them for a loop. They spent FAR more than $500/year doing this switchover, just on how much they paid me on any given year I was there.
Support your local library, btw, even in the days of the Patriot Act. Librarians are good people, and get a bad rap for being boring that they just don't deserve. Go browse around, most libraries have a few comfortable chairs for reading if you don't feel comfortable creating a record that you checked a particular book out. Never know what you might find in a library. Working at my library was one of the best times in my life.
I think the Highlander films, in concert with the TV series', have pretty much proven the Parallel Sequels theory to just about everyon's satisfaction.
The existance of dark levels is assumed, but no hard evidence has emerged as yet.
I admit it, I own and enjoy all (except Biohazard: Zero) or the Resident Evil games. I don't enjoy them because they're scary, because frankly they aren't particularly so. They're suspenseful to a certain extent, but in the end it's more of a sci-fi zombie anime kind of thing. A bit campy, and intended to be.
I think changing the name from Biohazard to Resident Evil did the series a disservice in people's expectations. Resident Evil sets you up to be some kind of dark mystical haunted mansion your characters are walking into. It's OK for the first one, as it ended up, for me, working like a plot twist (Ahhh, evil corporation testing a virus, interesting). Biohazard implies mad biologists, or some kind of 28 Days Later type plague happening, which sets you up better.
In the end though, I like these games (and most "survival horror" type games, be they scary or not) because I believe they're the direct descendents of the venerable text adventure. Encounter various puzzles walking your path, find the key item or whatever to get through. Backtracking to rooms you couldn't open before to find different key items. Set piece monster battles (for the most part). The parallels in the game structure between Resident Evil/Silent Hill and the various Infocom text adventure games are pretty stark. I remember way back when, all the dead trees me and my family printed "verbose" logs of Zork 1 on, trying to work out the best way through the game. It's no different from people methodically working their way through Resident Evil or Silent Hill, trying to get the shortest complete times, etc.
And about "camera problems." Every game I've ever played and liked, SOMEONE lambasts it for having horrible camera problems, and 99% of the time, I don't have a clue what they're talking about. Spiderman was accused by zillions of having horrible camera issues, to which I say, how the hell would you implement a camera that perfectly tracks a guy who can CLIMB ON WALLS for goodness sake. No one has given me an answer that's any better than what Neversoft did. And with most survival horror games, people complaining about the camera just don't get it, and aren't worth arguing with. I'm not saying that Dino Crisis' camera isn't horrible, because I don't know, and not having an Xbox, I'll probably never know unless I seek out someone with DC3 to check it out. However, I'm suspicious of all reviews that blame the camera for a bad rating.
While I'm appalled at VeriSign's rank power grab, it's probably done me, personally, more good than harm Why you ask? Well, I took the time to get up to speed on BIND 9 and am running my office/home DNS on local machines, and uitilizing the code that blocks Verisign's hijacking attempt from affecting me.
Now I can charge my clients for setting up a DNS server on their local networks on any spare crap machine they have lying around, making their networks more resilient to ISP DNS outages and crap like this.
Now I have every excuse I might need to move all my clients name registrations to another registrar ASAP, and all the reason I need to not use VeriSign, or be plagued by their idiot customer service ever again!
Thank you Verisign, for teaching me how to laugh about love...again.
...as I never really have a clue what has a Japanese release and what's US only. Mark of Kri, for example, I'm surprised hasn't had a Japanese release until now. I know it was developed in the US, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. My general impression is that most games are released in Japan first, but I may need to change that to "most games I want" get released there first. "Wow, that looks neat, and I'll never see that here. Nor that. Nor that. Nor that." Nice to see that for once a real revolutionary game got put together on this side of the Pacific. I'm this close to taking Japanese classes so I can play some of these amazing games we get shafted on day after day...if I only had the money for the Japanese classes.
But I'm really concerned that this effectively lets VeriSign get away with it. They've bust everyone's trust folks, doesn't anyone care?
.com and .net databases, but neither I, my clients, nor my friends (who I'll volunteer time to make the move for) will be paying them to enter something in that database. Plenty of other registrars to give money to, and they ALL charge less, and it's impossible to have worse service than Verisign. I'm also checking into whether our clients are using VeriSign as a CA for any of their commerce sites and getting the wheels in motion to move those over if they are.
Of course people care, and of course people aren't going to just let them get away with it. Personally, I'm impressing on my clients the need to move to another registrar very very fast. They may control the
And yes, if things get really wacky, I'm more than willing to run DNS services for my clients and remove the Verisign controlled servers from the root.hints file.
I tried e-mailing some of the addresses that were listed in the last slashdot post on this subject, but they all bounced back, so either they moved people's e-mail addresses after the flood, or they're white-listing those addresses. In the end, though, I don't believe complaining to Verisign management will do much good, if any. I don't plan on ever using their services again, even if they stop, so why would they care if I'm pissed at them. They'd be wasting their time trying to get me back, and I and my clients are small potatoes in any case. My only hope is that more people like me get on this bandwagon, because only then would they start to feel the heat.
the e-mail addresses you listed for the President and the CEO bounced back on me. I'll post any new ones I find, but they probably disabled the accounts until the flood stops.
Well, my browser is currently waiting to timeout, so many are I imagine... that or they underestimated the bandwidth they'd get slammed with.
The idea that MS can claim ownership on the machines ONCE THEY ARE SOLD is dangerous in the extreme.
No, they're claiming, rightly, that they can stop you from using a service they run if you've altered the hardware and software of your Xbox. A service that you are not required to use, and have to pay a seperate startup and yearly fee for, to boot. If you don't like it, don't buy an Xbox Live account for your Xbox.
...because the only true open ended games out there, MMOs, are constanly plagued by idiots who complain about the lack of an "end game".
Do you close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears when watching the TV, in case any ads get you?
Well, I don't watch TV (though I have a television...movies, etc) and the only radio I listen to is public radio. Yeah, the "sponsrship" is pretty much indistinguishable from an ad, but they generally have the decency to mention them once every half hour or more, instead of every 6 minutes with a commercial station.
Ads on websites are trivially easy to avoid, though I generally don't do more than use the popup blocker in Mozilla. I pay for premium access to a few sites, all of which remove the ads for paying viewers, otherwise I wouldn't have subscribed (no slashdot isn't one of them). I don't browse nearly as widely as I used to, so most of the time ads aren't an issue.
Do you choose routes which avoid all billboards?
Thankfully I live in an area with pretty strict restrictions on billboards. That, and I'm generally watching the road for people doing idiot things while they're driving (like reading billboards) to worry too much about seeing any billboards myself.
MDK are in financial trouble, and need to raise funds. This seems to be a perfectly sensible way of doing it/
Yeah, and if you happen to be someone who takes some kind of measure to avoid advertisements, not using Mandrake would be an intesely simple way of going about it.
...and I judge it barely worth ridicule.
...you might want to smell the coffee now.
American coders and IT workers of all stripes, you are a commodity and you always have been. You used to be a valuable one, now you are expendable and replaceable. If you want to keep coding or doing IT work, you need to take responsibility for yourself and work to find a job. If you can't find a job in IT that pays enough, no matter how hard and long you work, you have a hard choice. Either stick with it because that's what you love and deal with the hard times, or take the hard choice and find a different career where people are hiring.
No one outside your country is going to want you to come and take jobs away from their citizens, even if your country is more than willing to take jobs away from it's own citizens. No amount of complaining is going to get you a good IT job. We all laughed at those who were having trouble when we were riding sky high. Now it's our turn to eat some humble pie.
I can't understand one bit why they're releasing this. Hardly anyone plays the first one, and what servers are up are generally populated by bots, more often than not.
If the Star Wars mod wasn't in the works, I'd probably have traded in the game LONG ago, and may still do so. A complete waste of $50. I certainly don't plan on making the same mistake twice.
Ah, forgot about Hitman 2, but I was just rolling off what I had at the top of my head.
Hell, put Enter the Matrix in there. You're killing all kinds of cops and government people. Yeah, I know, you're in a computer, but even in the matrix world, the people those avatars represent still die.
Yeah, use standard media because you can't download any GameCube games for free, you mean...
Idiot.
Do you know what you're talking about?
Blood Omen 2: You are the demon. A vampire to be exact. You kill people in bloody and gruesome ways.
Blood Rayne: Ditto.
Dead to Rights: You're a vigilante cop spreading death in a manner that would make Max Payne cringe.
Yeah, these are all fine friendly things for the GameCube. Just because they aren't cops and bystanders on a street doesn't make it any more right. Just because GTA 3/VC allow you to enough freedom to kill cops, you can go through the entire game without killing any cop or bystander if you're careful enough.
Only problem with that is most people who'd want GTA 4 already have a PS2. I have a Cube and am quite happy with it, but I have a PS2 as well, and I'm fine with getting it for PS2. I wouldn't buy it twice, I don't care how neato it looks. And I don't mind a bit that the graphics are blocky and not overly detailed on the PS2. Graphics aren't the reason they're good games.
Lessee...
Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, 3, and eventually 4.
Dead to Rights
Hunter: The Reckoning
Bood Omen 2
Bood Rayne
Eternal Darkness
Some of the most violent games released recently, all with a GameCube version. Think you'd better sell the GameCube back to the store and get yourself a used Super Nintendo or a Genesis. You're not getting the kid friendly world you're looking for with that Cube, I'm sorry to say.
Or as I have often put it, science is a religion. It attempts to explain our world and justify our actions based on that explanation. It's not pure empirical observation and recording, if it ever was (remember that most of the first true scientists in the Western world were monks). It's adherents sure act like fundamentalists whenever someone deigns to question their closely held beliefs. "Prove to me X exists". I say prove it doesn't. The "death of science" and the "end of knowledge" and "impossibility" have been predicted far too many times in the past for me to believe that we have any real clue about what the world around us is really like. Studies are all fine and dandy, but they are not infallible. Stop treating them like they are.
I'm not saying this infrasound study is wrong. I have no proof either way. However, just because you can prove that an effect can be caused by a certain stimuli doesn't prove anything about specific instances of that effect other than the one you created. Claiming otherwise makes you just as foolish as the people who leap on the successive contradicting diet claims as "the truth".
There are much better solutions.
If there are better solutions, why don't you enlighten us. Just saying there are better solutions doesn't fix anything.
As far as my quick research showed, Eidos has released 3 games for the Cube. None of which I own. One of which Eidos won't be publishing the sequel for (Timesplitters 2). So why should I care?
I find it interesting that Activision believed the outcry was because people wanted to play the game, not because of the precedent it sets of shutting out other sites.
Mod it down. I'd heard trolls were doing this. Boston.com isn't even near being slashdotted.