I do wish people wouldn't decide they have to be anti-Bush, and then swing 180 for one policy, then back again for another. I mean, I don't know what Stern said, as I live in the UK and never bother to listen to him on netradio, but is it not a bit more likely that he just agreed with the move to go to war? You know, he still would rather have had someone else in charge (and not fucking up the economy, censorship, abortion rights, stem cell research (what's best for the country my arse)) but he didn't disagree with a decision.
I wouldn't support anyone running for government here or in the US currently, but I would vote for who I am less appalled by.
I think it's the equivalent of a politician leaving a party, having firmly stood against say, gay marriage, and then saying 'well, that was my party's view, actually I think it's a good thing...'
Either that or she just hadn't actually had it explained to her properly. It did sound like the penny dropped when Lessig talked about it.
Peter: As we all know, Christmas is that mystical time of year when the ghost of Jesus rises from the grave to feast on the flesh of the living! So we all sing Christmas Carols to lull him back to sleep.
Bob: Outrageous, How dare he say such blasphemy. I've got to do something.
Man #1: Bob there's nothing you can do.
Bob: Well I guess I'll just have to develop a sense of humour
I just want to address a couple of points you make.
As far as Intel scrapping the 4ghz, I don't think it's wise to see that, as is, as evidence of Moore's Law no longer being attainable. We could clearly make processors running at higher speeds that that, but it wouldn't be cost effective for the current consumer market. That is pretty much the problem underlying all of this.
What Kurzweil is claiming will happen in 20 years, I think is easily possible. It would take work, and a shitload of cash, but it's possible. But that's the issue. Money. We have the ability to roam around a city with a foldable OLED screen, with wifi capability that gives you access to the net from anyhere in the world. What stops this being the case already? Money. The technology is there. We know it is. It has been for a couple of years, but it takes many to filter onto the market. As with new medicines and vaccinations.
I do certainly agree that Kurzweil, and some of the other guys I've seen predicting the near future, are doing so irresponsibly. I think they should not get so carried away by their dreams and visions, and carefully assess the situation.
When we look back in 20 years and reminisce about the Star Wars Nonology we will finally see why Greedo had to shoot first and why Jar Jar was crucial to the story of Anakin Skywalker.
I totally disagree. I have tried not to care about the changes he continues to make, as I have copies of the original release that will keep me happy, but I just can't fathom his decisions. Well... No, that's not quite true.
I took a look at the comparison of the three releases, and the apparently dodgy censorship (the red flashes in the prison scene) and Greedo's shooting first, only appear to be ways of making the film more kid friendly. As of course Jar Jar and the awful slapstick he added in the Mos Eisley approach and other inserts also go to show.
I just can't understand why he is doing this. It removes about thirteen layers from Han's character, making him fairly uninteresting for a start.
It's not that I'm worried about my childhood memories. Like I say, I have the originals, my memories are intact. The problem is, now anyone who hasn't seen the originals will see the new DVD release, and it's not the same movie. I can fully appreciate a director's wish to go back and fix special effects, and even insert some new scenes to expand the scale - like with Mos Eisley. But I'd do it seriously. Adding laughs into those bits is lame and wrong pacewise.
Basically, he's taken his movies, and turned them into a cleaner, more child-friendly franchise. I almost wouldn't be surprised if he does release the unaltered remastered editions to get the rest of the available cash, but that depends on if he's willing to allow such violence to be seen! I've lost pretty much all my respect for the guy, aside from, as someone mentioned, what he did for sound and effects in the industry.
I might do the migration on the work machine from Eudora to Thunderbird.
I migrated from Eudora to Moz, to TBird, and it took some work back when I did it. But to bug test like this and try and get more people using TBird, is a great idea for sure.
"html today is USED to fake a editoring software like quark, pagemaker or TeX. Designers use photoshop to conceive webpages, then webmasters uses zillion of tables --that were supposed to display data-- to create a presentation for the text...and then throw in some scripts to make dirty work arounds for something in the presentation that can't be done with tables only"
Yeah, that's one way of doing it. Or you can do it in an external stylesheet and knock it all down to a few lines.
It is true that with the European version, having 5 tracks and 60 some cars, I spend most of my time racing Cita de Italia (that mountainside town) in the Subaru WRX '99 edition. It just flows so beautifully, and frankly the other cars, except for the Skylines, get me in the mood to go out on a normal track.
I'm glad to see the return of GameBlender.
I was very much a part of the community for a year or two, and was really sad when I popped back into it to discover the VC's had let them down. And then very glad to see Ton doing everything he could to get it all back on track!
From the time I spent being involved with it, and running thegameblender.co.uk for a brief while, I got to see that GameBlender is actually a very promising little program. Yes, the 'learning curve' (ick) is very steep, but once people start to get through it they start to produce some really nice stuff. I was working on a project in it for a while, which never got off the ground enough due to my cravings of scale, but it was remarkably intuitive to work with, despite the amount of options and possibilities that have to be accomodated in the UI. I am going to have to check the new version out (last time I did was to use the OSX version on the only laptop I had available to me while travelling), and see if or how much it has changed.
Anyway I hurt to much from actually going out to say much of interest, but hey to any of you who I remember from the good old days!
Indeed. Recumbant bikes do work fairly well, being near enough your really big hog too.
What I find interesting is that this version of the Akira bike is a kludge. It was articulated in the centre point in the film, what they've done here is made it look like that but actually just mounted shitloads of body work onto the front forks.
BRTakes a lot of what made me scared of the handling away from it.
I don't think it'll be quite true of WETA, that they will go under having bought the hardware.
If you look at what they are lined up to do - Eva live action movie, King Kong... There are a few others I saw listed as being worked on by them.
Basically, they have garnered so much positive attention from their work on LotR that they are in no worry of losing money any time soon. Not with the business they're getting.
Not true. Semi true yes, but you can regain control of a spinning, well, sliding car.
As you beging to lose control you can give it more in a FF to try and pull you round, you can raise a gear in a FR to stop the rear wheels spinning and try to gain traction, and in a MR, you can pray!
You do have options, and it's all about fast reactions and knowing quite what's happening. The above not being a rule. You'd have to adjust what you did in either of those situations depending on what you feel is happening.
Indeed, things like the amount or rubble and broken wood lying around in Call of Duty, and the dead animals and shit everywhere.
Runing through shelled buildings, there was phenomenal amount of stuff strewn around, and touches like the glowing embers on the wooden structuring post shell hit were nice touches.
I think Call of Duty was one game that really started to raise the bar for realism in gaming, on all fronts really. Stalker looks like it could do the same again.
I'm certainly not of the opinion that FPS could transfer much, except as I said, possibly honing reaction time.
And you're most certainly right, wheel-to-wheel would take real life practice/training to, well probably to not crash and burn! I do think that you can learn a lot about the mechanics and physics of driving from GT though, including apexing, acceleration and braking points and proper use of gears, among other stuff, like keeping control of a spinning or sliding car.
I managed to pull some stupid moves driving too, and all of those times it has been the stuff I learnt from playing Gran Turismo that got me out of it without at least damaging my car.
Just being able to know how it will behave when certain things happen, which I have learnt pretty much from games, as well as the ability to take basic physics and apply common sense (as opposed to my mate who when we were riding his Dad's trike in the field, figured it was OK to take a 90 degree corner, sharply, in fifth...).
All the incidents are basically things like throwing the car into a corner too fast, and being able to keep it under control while braking hard and turning. Knowing that it's a FF car and thus being able to work out what will go wrong, nd how to fix it all came from playing games.
I also however noticed that it goes the other way. I got my license about a year ago, and have been driving a lot since. I visited my brother the other week and we were playing GT3. He , it turns out has started using manual transmission while playing (which makes the Viper a fantastic car for instance), and I decided to try. I'd never even begun to manage, but since driving, I was just able to do it without thinking. Knowing just when to, and how to change to keep the car under control and get the most speed and acceleration.
So yea, skills definitely transfer to real life in some areas (driving and reaction timing mostly I'd think) but also the other way over time. So it's kind of hardly surprising actually, since you'd expect real life skills to apply to games, why not vice versa?
I thought PoP had it just right.
I got stuck on the occasional bit - am now in fact, but I give it a break for a few days, go back and I can manage it. Even some of the puzzles - one in particular took me a bit of thought as to how to get through. This is great, 'cause it means I don't complete it in a day.
Call of Duty also - fucking difficult on even regular in some places. It is a stunningly well balanced game, getting harded all through, but basing all the difficulties on how you handle situations.
I'm holding tight to my DVD's of the unedited versions, taken from Hong Kong Laserdisc.
You wouldn't believe how glad I am to have a copy of the proper ones that won't degrade!
Regarding the bad analogue on PS2 Dual Shock buttons, I actually found it gave quite good control. The control is not in how far you depress them, but how hard you subsequently press.
For things like GTA:VC this allowed good control of speed. I never did get used to it for shooting in FIFA whichever it was I played briefly.
As for the XBox triggers, I found them very good for something like Colin McRae Rally, where they are used in place of the right analogue stick on the PS2, to control accelerate and break. I didn't think I could get used to playing it any other way, but have found I got used to using the right analogue stick on the PC version (with Dual Shock controller) just as quickly, and effectively. I'd be interested to compare times though, to see if one does have a slight advantage for me.
Basically, I'm not sure about them changing the Dual Shock, since I can't stand playing FPS on console. It just doesn't work. It needs a mouse and keyboard for me, or it's unplayable.
But at the end of the day, they will probably release a normal Dual Shock for the PS3, or at least allow backwards compatibility with the PS2 Dual Shock. Which would be nice.
When we were discussin this issue on a forum, one guy said that he had been unable to rent Clerks one day before his birthday, and that nothing had changed over night. My friend posited that in fact, in the one day, he had gained legal responsibility for his actions. I thought this very interesting, since I very much support the idea of parents actually getting involved in their child's lives, and not sheltering them unduly by refusing to let them near anything with a rating above U, or whatever the US equivalent is.
The Europeans (and unlucky Africans) that settled North and South America didn't send something to report back saying, "Oh, that's nice", they went there.
Yeah, you can breath in North America though!
Slashdot Mirror
I do wish people wouldn't decide they have to be anti-Bush, and then swing 180 for one policy, then back again for another. I mean, I don't know what Stern said, as I live in the UK and never bother to listen to him on netradio, but is it not a bit more likely that he just agreed with the move to go to war? You know, he still would rather have had someone else in charge (and not fucking up the economy, censorship, abortion rights, stem cell research (what's best for the country my arse)) but he didn't disagree with a decision.
I wouldn't support anyone running for government here or in the US currently, but I would vote for who I am less appalled by.
I think it's the equivalent of a politician leaving a party, having firmly stood against say, gay marriage, and then saying 'well, that was my party's view, actually I think it's a good thing...'
Either that or she just hadn't actually had it explained to her properly. It did sound like the penny dropped when Lessig talked about it.
Peter: As we all know, Christmas is that mystical time of year when the ghost of Jesus rises from the grave to feast on the flesh of the living! So we all sing Christmas Carols to lull him back to sleep.
Bob: Outrageous, How dare he say such blasphemy. I've got to do something.
Man #1: Bob there's nothing you can do.
Bob: Well I guess I'll just have to develop a sense of humour
I just want to address a couple of points you make. As far as Intel scrapping the 4ghz, I don't think it's wise to see that, as is, as evidence of Moore's Law no longer being attainable. We could clearly make processors running at higher speeds that that, but it wouldn't be cost effective for the current consumer market. That is pretty much the problem underlying all of this.
What Kurzweil is claiming will happen in 20 years, I think is easily possible. It would take work, and a shitload of cash, but it's possible. But that's the issue. Money. We have the ability to roam around a city with a foldable OLED screen, with wifi capability that gives you access to the net from anyhere in the world. What stops this being the case already? Money. The technology is there. We know it is. It has been for a couple of years, but it takes many to filter onto the market. As with new medicines and vaccinations.
I do certainly agree that Kurzweil, and some of the other guys I've seen predicting the near future, are doing so irresponsibly. I think they should not get so carried away by their dreams and visions, and carefully assess the situation.
When we look back in 20 years and reminisce about the Star Wars Nonology we will finally see why Greedo had to shoot first and why Jar Jar was crucial to the story of Anakin Skywalker.
I totally disagree. I have tried not to care about the changes he continues to make, as I have copies of the original release that will keep me happy, but I just can't fathom his decisions. Well... No, that's not quite true.
I took a look at the comparison of the three releases, and the apparently dodgy censorship (the red flashes in the prison scene) and Greedo's shooting first, only appear to be ways of making the film more kid friendly. As of course Jar Jar and the awful slapstick he added in the Mos Eisley approach and other inserts also go to show.
I just can't understand why he is doing this. It removes about thirteen layers from Han's character, making him fairly uninteresting for a start.
It's not that I'm worried about my childhood memories. Like I say, I have the originals, my memories are intact. The problem is, now anyone who hasn't seen the originals will see the new DVD release, and it's not the same movie. I can fully appreciate a director's wish to go back and fix special effects, and even insert some new scenes to expand the scale - like with Mos Eisley. But I'd do it seriously. Adding laughs into those bits is lame and wrong pacewise.
Basically, he's taken his movies, and turned them into a cleaner, more child-friendly franchise. I almost wouldn't be surprised if he does release the unaltered remastered editions to get the rest of the available cash, but that depends on if he's willing to allow such violence to be seen! I've lost pretty much all my respect for the guy, aside from, as someone mentioned, what he did for sound and effects in the industry.
This is fantastic. God I love Mozilla!
I might do the migration on the work machine from Eudora to Thunderbird.
I migrated from Eudora to Moz, to TBird, and it took some work back when I did it. But to bug test like this and try and get more people using TBird, is a great idea for sure.
"html today is USED to fake a editoring software like quark, pagemaker or TeX. Designers use photoshop to conceive webpages, then webmasters uses zillion of tables --that were supposed to display data-- to create a presentation for the text ...and then throw in some scripts to make dirty work arounds for something in the presentation that can't be done with tables only"
Yeah, that's one way of doing it. Or you can do it in an external stylesheet and knock it all down to a few lines.
It is true that with the European version, having 5 tracks and 60 some cars, I spend most of my time racing Cita de Italia (that mountainside town) in the Subaru WRX '99 edition. It just flows so beautifully, and frankly the other cars, except for the Skylines, get me in the mood to go out on a normal track.
Nurburgring in the full game though...
I'm glad to see the return of GameBlender.
I was very much a part of the community for a year or two, and was really sad when I popped back into it to discover the VC's had let them down. And then very glad to see Ton doing everything he could to get it all back on track!
From the time I spent being involved with it, and running thegameblender.co.uk for a brief while, I got to see that GameBlender is actually a very promising little program. Yes, the 'learning curve' (ick) is very steep, but once people start to get through it they start to produce some really nice stuff.
I was working on a project in it for a while, which never got off the ground enough due to my cravings of scale, but it was remarkably intuitive to work with, despite the amount of options and possibilities that have to be accomodated in the UI. I am going to have to check the new version out (last time I did was to use the OSX version on the only laptop I had available to me while travelling), and see if or how much it has changed.
Anyway I hurt to much from actually going out to say much of interest, but hey to any of you who I remember from the good old days!
So you never reread books?
I had replayed Grim Fandango purely in the way I would rewatch a movie.
Sam and Max, Monkey Island, Half-Life, FFVII...
Furry Artpron making it's way through all these Mobo's... You see...
Took me a loooong while but I got there.
Well, that was a constructive waste of 20 minutes.
Indeed. Recumbant bikes do work fairly well, being near enough your really big hog too.
What I find interesting is that this version of the Akira bike is a kludge. It was articulated in the centre point in the film, what they've done here is made it look like that but actually just mounted shitloads of body work onto the front forks.
BRTakes a lot of what made me scared of the handling away from it.
I don't think it'll be quite true of WETA, that they will go under having bought the hardware.
If you look at what they are lined up to do - Eva live action movie, King Kong... There are a few others I saw listed as being worked on by them.
Basically, they have garnered so much positive attention from their work on LotR that they are in no worry of losing money any time soon. Not with the business they're getting.
Not true. Semi true yes, but you can regain control of a spinning, well, sliding car.
As you beging to lose control you can give it more in a FF to try and pull you round, you can raise a gear in a FR to stop the rear wheels spinning and try to gain traction, and in a MR, you can pray!
You do have options, and it's all about fast reactions and knowing quite what's happening. The above not being a rule. You'd have to adjust what you did in either of those situations depending on what you feel is happening.
Indeed, things like the amount or rubble and broken wood lying around in Call of Duty, and the dead animals and shit everywhere.
Runing through shelled buildings, there was phenomenal amount of stuff strewn around, and touches like the glowing embers on the wooden structuring post shell hit were nice touches.
I think Call of Duty was one game that really started to raise the bar for realism in gaming, on all fronts really.
Stalker looks like it could do the same again.
I'm certainly not of the opinion that FPS could transfer much, except as I said, possibly honing reaction time.
And you're most certainly right, wheel-to-wheel would take real life practice/training to, well probably to not crash and burn!
I do think that you can learn a lot about the mechanics and physics of driving from GT though, including apexing, acceleration and braking points and proper use of gears, among other stuff, like keeping control of a spinning or sliding car.
I thought, as well, that I recalled Troika being non US company. I may be wrong however.
I managed to pull some stupid moves driving too, and all of those times it has been the stuff I learnt from playing Gran Turismo that got me out of it without at least damaging my car.
Just being able to know how it will behave when certain things happen, which I have learnt pretty much from games, as well as the ability to take basic physics and apply common sense (as opposed to my mate who when we were riding his Dad's trike in the field, figured it was OK to take a 90 degree corner, sharply, in fifth...).
All the incidents are basically things like throwing the car into a corner too fast, and being able to keep it under control while braking hard and turning. Knowing that it's a FF car and thus being able to work out what will go wrong, nd how to fix it all came from playing games.
I also however noticed that it goes the other way. I got my license about a year ago, and have been driving a lot since. I visited my brother the other week and we were playing GT3. He , it turns out has started using manual transmission while playing (which makes the Viper a fantastic car for instance), and I decided to try. I'd never even begun to manage, but since driving, I was just able to do it without thinking. Knowing just when to, and how to change to keep the car under control and get the most speed and acceleration.
So yea, skills definitely transfer to real life in some areas (driving and reaction timing mostly I'd think) but also the other way over time. So it's kind of hardly surprising actually, since you'd expect real life skills to apply to games, why not vice versa?
The poor sales and marketing for Grim Fandango were a real shame, especially considering the number of top 100 games lists it still resides on.
Hell, while it's facing tougher competition now with games like PoP and Call of Duty out, it would probably still be on my top ten of all time.
But anyway, Sam and Max not happening is a real shame, I was looking forward to it greatly.
I thought PoP had it just right.
I got stuck on the occasional bit - am now in fact, but I give it a break for a few days, go back and I can manage it. Even some of the puzzles - one in particular took me a bit of thought as to how to get through.
This is great, 'cause it means I don't complete it in a day.
Call of Duty also - fucking difficult on even regular in some places. It is a stunningly well balanced game, getting harded all through, but basing all the difficulties on how you handle situations.
I'm holding tight to my DVD's of the unedited versions, taken from Hong Kong Laserdisc.
You wouldn't believe how glad I am to have a copy of the proper ones that won't degrade!
Yeah, but Rockstar North are left pretty much to do as they see fit.
Rockstar Games aren't about to fuck with a guarunteed good thing!
Regarding the bad analogue on PS2 Dual Shock buttons, I actually found it gave quite good control. The control is not in how far you depress them, but how hard you subsequently press.
For things like GTA:VC this allowed good control of speed. I never did get used to it for shooting in FIFA whichever it was I played briefly.
As for the XBox triggers, I found them very good for something like Colin McRae Rally, where they are used in place of the right analogue stick on the PS2, to control accelerate and break.
I didn't think I could get used to playing it any other way, but have found I got used to using the right analogue stick on the PC version (with Dual Shock controller) just as quickly, and effectively.
I'd be interested to compare times though, to see if one does have a slight advantage for me.
Basically, I'm not sure about them changing the Dual Shock, since I can't stand playing FPS on console. It just doesn't work. It needs a mouse and keyboard for me, or it's unplayable.
But at the end of the day, they will probably release a normal Dual Shock for the PS3, or at least allow backwards compatibility with the PS2 Dual Shock. Which would be nice.
When we were discussin this issue on a forum, one guy said that he had been unable to rent Clerks one day before his birthday, and that nothing had changed over night. My friend posited that in fact, in the one day, he had gained legal responsibility for his actions.
I thought this very interesting, since I very much support the idea of parents actually getting involved in their child's lives, and not sheltering them unduly by refusing to let them near anything with a rating above U, or whatever the US equivalent is.
The Europeans (and unlucky Africans) that settled North and South America didn't send something to report back saying, "Oh, that's nice", they went there. Yeah, you can breath in North America though!