Reminds me of when Final Fantasy VII came out, and all the fanboys believed that there was a way to bring Aeris back...
WHAT?! You mean A4eris DIES?!!!!111one11!? Damn, she can't die, not when she and Cloud are going to have mad sexx0r in Kingdom Hearts 2!!!!
OK, seriously, this isn't as bad as everyone thinks it is. A buddy of mine plays City of Heroes-- I thought it was OK but there was little in the way of a coherent story. Well, he's big into role-playing, so he decides to start his own story within the game... currently he's garnered quite a bit of following. You have a valid point, these people should be playing the game-- but if the content isn't there, players will have to find some way to amuse themselves once the world is saved lest they realize they wasted $50 on a ten-minute thrill.
I think the bard thing was pretty clever, but that's just me. Clever, but ultimately stupid.
Tech jobs are more easily relocatable than most, because for a lot of it you're just pushing information around, so with global communication, the physical locality is just not important.
Fine, so why don't contractor companies start setting up shops in places like Nebraska and Kansas and Ohio and Pennsylvania; places within the US where tech jobs aren't currently found and the cost of living is significantly cheaper than California and Washington? I will admit it's not as dirt-cheap as India or Whereverstan, but it is a fair shade better than killing off 50-odd jobs. Plus, well, think of the publicity a firm could get-- if it works for clothes and food that have the "Made in the USA" sticker, why not software?
Disclaimer: I am horribly naive and bitter right now. Anything I say can and will likely be dumb.
I am firmly and solidly against outsourcing as of 11:30 am yesterday, when I found out my position was being cut in favor of sending the work to India....big deal, I didn't really like working with SQL anyway. I wonder if EB Games is still hiring...
BTW, does anyone else see Michael Jackson in the Half Life 2 ad on this page?
Funny you mention that. I was looking at the cover of The Sims 2 the other day and swore up and down that the Token Asian Woman on the cover looked an awful lot like Rinoa Heartilly from FF8.
Or, y'know, we could both be tremendous nerds. That's always an option.:)
Gigarectum is one that's probably not so frequently used. Same goes for Xenomorph, flagellate, moribund, logorrhea, sialoquent, genetrix, and bolection.
At Otakon for the past two years my group has used a hemostat to get the coax cable off the back of the TV for use with gaming machines etc. You can probably get one at a medical supplies store-- or, worse comes to worse, if you live near a liberal arts school, check in the bookstore; the nursing kits might have them.
Getting back to the topic, I'm more interested in the video in capabilities of this as I am a game reviewer, about to shell out $100-ish for a Hauppage capture device.
The key to remember is average working year. Not average over all working years, but average among all employees. If 16,000 people work four months and 1,000 work year round (maintaining the office, handling money, etc.), that will average out to just over four months.
Re:Jeopardy rules (OT: Bob's Your Uncle)
on
They Killed Ken!
·
· Score: 1
There is another big problem: the phrase isn't recorded until 1937, in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Mr Partridge suggested it had been in use since the 1890s, but nobody has found an example in print. This is surprising.
Not necessarily. Given a slow rate of propagation of certain elements of slang or speech from 1890-1937, I'm not surprised that no writer used it in a work until Partridge's dictionary. Certainly you wouldn't see it in a scientific journal, and the odds of it appearing in a novel are slim if the phrase didn't spread much outside of certain circles. It's important to remember that the concept of a meme becoming widespread in a short time is due in part to a globalized media infrastructure (specifically the Internet) allowing rapid dissemination of information; though even that is a relatively recent phenomenon (q.v. "All Your Base" taking about six months to actually gain in popularity, versus the Star Wars kid becoming popular almost overnight). The ultimate point being that slang words like "bob's your uncle" from Britain and "yinz" from Pittsburgh, PA, USA did not spread in usage because they did not get carried out of those areas often enough, sometimes staying within a very narrow area (I live in Erie, PA now, about 100 miles north of my birthplace of Pittsburgh, and have yet to hear "yinz" used by anyone who's not a Pitts. native). (big disclaimer: I'm a software engineer, not an etymologist; though I did take my fair share of English courses in school, and having a healthy interest in language in general.)
Yeah, this is all massively off-topic, but hey. It could come up on Jeopardy some day, and then you'll be sorry for modding it down!:)
OK, so let me see if I understand this correctly. An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense, but rather a piece of software which controls the display. An X "client", then, is the software which tells the server what to draw. The server then figures out how to draw it. Is this close to being right? It's a bit confusing thinking that the server is the thing the user deals with directly and the client could be on a rackmount thousands of miles away, but it makes sense when you think about it for a few seconds.
Aside from advanced support for 3D accelerators, what's really missing out of X as it is now?
Yeah, but from earlier reports ESPN NFL is even more buggy than Madden. I went with ESPN, sure, and just yesterday picked up NHL 2K5 as well, but that's because I like it better anyway.
Your point is valid on another level. Player should probably forego this year's football games altogether. Better yet, do it the way I do it-- buy the god damned game once and don't buy it again next year when all that's changed is a stupid roster.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make (or not, it's been a long day)... is that we're seeing a hyper expansive version of the days before the crash of 84. (mainly it's expansive is because games and console entertainment in general are much more a part of society than in 1984.)
While I wasn't much of a gamer in those days, I have to respectfully disagree here. In general the "next big thing" has been a bad thing for gaming because it takes the focus off of what's out now; and the reason we're always looking forward to the next big thing is because the next big thing is so overmarketed that it's very nearly impossible to avoid it. Granted, a crappy game is a crappy game; however, as long as marketing can sucker enough people into buying the game sight unseen (Enter the Matrix), the industry will not crash because someone will ride the profits from that.
I also have to disagree with your statement calling Acclaim a "big publisher". Since the astounding failure that was everything they published from 95-98, I can hardly call them a big publisher since nobody in their right mind was looking forward to any of their games. Let's face it, since about 96 seeing the Acclaim name on a box meant one thing and one thing alone-- that the game contained within was shit of the purest degree, squeezed out of a collective rectum of marketing zombies and developers who couldn't take a stand against the jargon their managers were spouting.
As I said when I submitted this story (on Monday-- but hey, I'm not complaining), I feel bad for the developers and testers who lost their jobs, but what really killed Acclaim waqs the fact that their managerial and corporate staff wouldn't know a good game if it came down from heaven on a beam of light. And even then, even when they had a good game to work with, somehow they would manage to fuck it up (see: every single thing they licensed from Sega). Acclaim is dead because of its stupid choices and shitty steering committee. I don't think it's representative of the industry as a whole because, well, I still have some stuff that I'm playing through now, and there's plenty that I'm looking forward to.
Oh, and if I could offer one suggestion-- you might want to check out Advance Wars and AW2 if you like TBS... good stuff.
Then use your brain, keep two backups, and don't piss off (read: contact) the administrator unless it's an absolute bona-fide emergency. I was a bofh. I know what I'm talking about.:)
Agreed wholeheartedly. If you work-study in your school's IT department, it's great for your eventual resume (and trust me, you want to be thinking about that now, too) but your social life will be shot to fucking hell whenever the slightest computer malady hits your dorm/floor/apartment building. Vapid clueless silicone-chested nursing majors and hulking monolithic sports-scholarship leechers will beat down your door looking for answers.
That said, reaping the rewards afterwards... particularly from the girls... might not be such a bad thing. ^_^
Related to this. If your uni offers storage space on their servers, USE IT! You have a free, secure, off-site storage area that's reasonably secure against unauthorized online access and very secure against unauthorized physical access. The most secure areas I've ever seen were campus server rooms.
Forget bringing your own printer-- save yourself the money on ink cartridges and print from the labs. Better than the savings of money, you'll get some exercise walking back and forth.
That's another thing. Unless your campus is miles and miles across, you really don't need a car. Walking is cheap and efficient exercise-- though don't hesitate to take advantage of any of the uni's health facilities, either. Plus, it gives you time to think as you move between areas; and talking with a few friends makes any walk seem far shorter.
Just a few random thoughts. Use them at your discretion.
OK, maybe I'm getting way too existential here, but let's say you set this program to check the NIST clock every five minutes. If the time is being kept incorrectly by the local machine, how does it know when five minutes have elapsed so that it can go and get the new time?
Yeah, every so often on my own site I present Disturbing Search String Theater (always presented in bold, of course). Of course, with a site like "thefurryone.net" you're going to get a few oddball requests:
"Don't eat shinobi" (early August 2004) "accidental boob slip videos" (March 8, 2004) "drunk woman" (Feb 8, 2004) "im drunk" (April 2004, and were they declaring they were drunk or did they want to find people who were drunk?) "house of the unknown pervert" (August 27, 2003) "you act like it all matters" (Nov 4, 2003-- what engine were they using, NihilisticSearch? Did they get "no results found"?)
Not insulting anyone: but most liberals I know are sorta cowardly, but definitly fearful. They seem to worry about everything...
OK. Your comment is sort of like saying "Not that this applies to anyone personally, but everyone I don't like are morons with no sense of hygeine and even less in the way of morals. They ought to be shot, drawn and quartered, and then shot again for good measure. But please, liberals, don't take that personally!"
If you're going to state your opinion, don't preface it with "I don't really mean this".
Slashdot Mirror
Dude. That is VERY VERY COOL. You need to set that up as a screensaver or something.
Reminds me of when Final Fantasy VII came out, and all the fanboys believed that there was a way to bring Aeris back...
WHAT?! You mean A4eris DIES?!!!!111one11!? Damn, she can't die, not when she and Cloud are going to have mad sexx0r in Kingdom Hearts 2!!!!
OK, seriously, this isn't as bad as everyone thinks it is. A buddy of mine plays City of Heroes-- I thought it was OK but there was little in the way of a coherent story. Well, he's big into role-playing, so he decides to start his own story within the game... currently he's garnered quite a bit of following. You have a valid point, these people should be playing the game-- but if the content isn't there, players will have to find some way to amuse themselves once the world is saved lest they realize they wasted $50 on a ten-minute thrill.
I think the bard thing was pretty clever, but that's just me. Clever, but ultimately stupid.
Tech jobs are more easily relocatable than most, because for a lot of it you're just pushing information around, so with global communication, the physical locality is just not important.
Fine, so why don't contractor companies start setting up shops in places like Nebraska and Kansas and Ohio and Pennsylvania; places within the US where tech jobs aren't currently found and the cost of living is significantly cheaper than California and Washington? I will admit it's not as dirt-cheap as India or Whereverstan, but it is a fair shade better than killing off 50-odd jobs. Plus, well, think of the publicity a firm could get-- if it works for clothes and food that have the "Made in the USA" sticker, why not software?
Disclaimer: I am horribly naive and bitter right now. Anything I say can and will likely be dumb.
I am firmly and solidly against outsourcing as of 11:30 am yesterday, when I found out my position was being cut in favor of sending the work to India. ...big deal, I didn't really like working with SQL anyway. I wonder if EB Games is still hiring...
This game is ancient, and 10% of people (more than 25000) play the game at resolutions LOWER than 640x480?
I'd be willing to bet some of the statistics were accidentally pulled from standalone servers.
BTW, does anyone else see Michael Jackson in the Half Life 2 ad on this page?
:)
Funny you mention that. I was looking at the cover of The Sims 2 the other day and swore up and down that the Token Asian Woman on the cover looked an awful lot like Rinoa Heartilly from FF8.
Or, y'know, we could both be tremendous nerds. That's always an option.
Gigarectum is one that's probably not so frequently used. Same goes for Xenomorph, flagellate, moribund, logorrhea, sialoquent, genetrix, and bolection.
(Most of these I got from here: http://phrontistery.50megs.com/ihlstart.html)
At Otakon for the past two years my group has used a hemostat to get the coax cable off the back of the TV for use with gaming machines etc. You can probably get one at a medical supplies store-- or, worse comes to worse, if you live near a liberal arts school, check in the bookstore; the nursing kits might have them.
Getting back to the topic, I'm more interested in the video in capabilities of this as I am a game reviewer, about to shell out $100-ish for a Hauppage capture device.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that. Bravo to you for trying to nail him.
What is the Florida Orange Grower's Association?
The key to remember is average working year. Not average over all working years, but average among all employees. If 16,000 people work four months and 1,000 work year round (maintaining the office, handling money, etc.), that will average out to just over four months.
There is another big problem: the phrase isn't recorded until 1937, in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Mr Partridge suggested it had been in use since the 1890s, but nobody has found an example in print. This is surprising.
:)
Not necessarily. Given a slow rate of propagation of certain elements of slang or speech from 1890-1937, I'm not surprised that no writer used it in a work until Partridge's dictionary. Certainly you wouldn't see it in a scientific journal, and the odds of it appearing in a novel are slim if the phrase didn't spread much outside of certain circles. It's important to remember that the concept of a meme becoming widespread in a short time is due in part to a globalized media infrastructure (specifically the Internet) allowing rapid dissemination of information; though even that is a relatively recent phenomenon (q.v. "All Your Base" taking about six months to actually gain in popularity, versus the Star Wars kid becoming popular almost overnight). The ultimate point being that slang words like "bob's your uncle" from Britain and "yinz" from Pittsburgh, PA, USA did not spread in usage because they did not get carried out of those areas often enough, sometimes staying within a very narrow area (I live in Erie, PA now, about 100 miles north of my birthplace of Pittsburgh, and have yet to hear "yinz" used by anyone who's not a Pitts. native). (big disclaimer: I'm a software engineer, not an etymologist; though I did take my fair share of English courses in school, and having a healthy interest in language in general.)
Yeah, this is all massively off-topic, but hey. It could come up on Jeopardy some day, and then you'll be sorry for modding it down!
YOU SON OF A BITCH. I very nearly snorted a candy bar out my nose at that. WARN PEOPLE NEXT TIME!
(seriously, that was great, man.)
OK, so let me see if I understand this correctly. An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense, but rather a piece of software which controls the display. An X "client", then, is the software which tells the server what to draw. The server then figures out how to draw it. Is this close to being right? It's a bit confusing thinking that the server is the thing the user deals with directly and the client could be on a rackmount thousands of miles away, but it makes sense when you think about it for a few seconds.
Aside from advanced support for 3D accelerators, what's really missing out of X as it is now?
Yeah, but from earlier reports ESPN NFL is even more buggy than Madden. I went with ESPN, sure, and just yesterday picked up NHL 2K5 as well, but that's because I like it better anyway.
Your point is valid on another level. Player should probably forego this year's football games altogether. Better yet, do it the way I do it-- buy the god damned game once and don't buy it again next year when all that's changed is a stupid roster.
God dammit, I'm watching through that series now and that's the first thing *I* thought of, too.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make (or not, it's been a long day)... is that we're seeing a hyper expansive version of the days before the crash of 84. (mainly it's expansive is because games and console entertainment in general are much more a part of society than in 1984.)
While I wasn't much of a gamer in those days, I have to respectfully disagree here. In general the "next big thing" has been a bad thing for gaming because it takes the focus off of what's out now; and the reason we're always looking forward to the next big thing is because the next big thing is so overmarketed that it's very nearly impossible to avoid it. Granted, a crappy game is a crappy game; however, as long as marketing can sucker enough people into buying the game sight unseen (Enter the Matrix), the industry will not crash because someone will ride the profits from that.
I also have to disagree with your statement calling Acclaim a "big publisher". Since the astounding failure that was everything they published from 95-98, I can hardly call them a big publisher since nobody in their right mind was looking forward to any of their games. Let's face it, since about 96 seeing the Acclaim name on a box meant one thing and one thing alone-- that the game contained within was shit of the purest degree, squeezed out of a collective rectum of marketing zombies and developers who couldn't take a stand against the jargon their managers were spouting.
As I said when I submitted this story (on Monday-- but hey, I'm not complaining), I feel bad for the developers and testers who lost their jobs, but what really killed Acclaim waqs the fact that their managerial and corporate staff wouldn't know a good game if it came down from heaven on a beam of light. And even then, even when they had a good game to work with, somehow they would manage to fuck it up (see: every single thing they licensed from Sega). Acclaim is dead because of its stupid choices and shitty steering committee. I don't think it's representative of the industry as a whole because, well, I still have some stuff that I'm playing through now, and there's plenty that I'm looking forward to.
Oh, and if I could offer one suggestion-- you might want to check out Advance Wars and AW2 if you like TBS... good stuff.
Then use your brain, keep two backups, and don't piss off (read: contact) the administrator unless it's an absolute bona-fide emergency. I was a bofh. I know what I'm talking about. :)
Agreed wholeheartedly. If you work-study in your school's IT department, it's great for your eventual resume (and trust me, you want to be thinking about that now, too) but your social life will be shot to fucking hell whenever the slightest computer malady hits your dorm/floor/apartment building. Vapid clueless silicone-chested nursing majors and hulking monolithic sports-scholarship leechers will beat down your door looking for answers.
That said, reaping the rewards afterwards... particularly from the girls... might not be such a bad thing. ^_^
Related to this. If your uni offers storage space on their servers, USE IT! You have a free, secure, off-site storage area that's reasonably secure against unauthorized online access and very secure against unauthorized physical access. The most secure areas I've ever seen were campus server rooms.
Forget bringing your own printer-- save yourself the money on ink cartridges and print from the labs. Better than the savings of money, you'll get some exercise walking back and forth.
That's another thing. Unless your campus is miles and miles across, you really don't need a car. Walking is cheap and efficient exercise-- though don't hesitate to take advantage of any of the uni's health facilities, either. Plus, it gives you time to think as you move between areas; and talking with a few friends makes any walk seem far shorter.
Just a few random thoughts. Use them at your discretion.
OK, maybe I'm getting way too existential here, but let's say you set this program to check the NIST clock every five minutes. If the time is being kept incorrectly by the local machine, how does it know when five minutes have elapsed so that it can go and get the new time?
Yeah, every so often on my own site I present Disturbing Search String Theater (always presented in bold, of course). Of course, with a site like "thefurryone.net" you're going to get a few oddball requests:
"Don't eat shinobi" (early August 2004)
"accidental boob slip videos" (March 8, 2004)
"drunk woman" (Feb 8, 2004)
"im drunk" (April 2004, and were they declaring they were drunk or did they want to find people who were drunk?)
"house of the unknown pervert" (August 27, 2003)
"you act like it all matters" (Nov 4, 2003-- what engine were they using, NihilisticSearch? Did they get "no results found"?)
[subject:]Taxiderminecrobestixenopaedophilia!
As an added bonus you can sing it to the tune of Supercalifragilistic etc.
You know, when you mentioned singing it, I tried doing it in my head.
Now it won't get out.
DAMN YOU TO HELL.
That said, the next time I watch Mary Poppins with my little cousins is going to be very interesting...
(replying only because I don't have mod points)
So when JibJab copyrights the new lyrics, does that mean "This Land" will become Their Song?
(only half-joking)
A similar story is that Toyota was going to name a line of American cars after vegetables. "Zuchini", "Tomato", and "Lemon", for example.
:)
Boy, am I glad that didn't happen. Especially because tomatos and lemons are fruits.
(for reference, yes I get the joke)
Not insulting anyone: but most liberals I know are sorta cowardly, but definitly fearful. They seem to worry about everything...
OK. Your comment is sort of like saying "Not that this applies to anyone personally, but everyone I don't like are morons with no sense of hygeine and even less in the way of morals. They ought to be shot, drawn and quartered, and then shot again for good measure. But please, liberals, don't take that personally!"
If you're going to state your opinion, don't preface it with "I don't really mean this".