Nice legs and ass? Dude, where do you live and how do your real estate prices look?
Since bone-skinny has become synonym for sexy, healthy and so on, it's become hard to even FIND women with boobs or asses AT ALL. And the legs? Straight sticks, man. Nothing curvy about that! On the plus side, their hips can easily be used as hooks for your jacket...
Nope. There's only 7.6% sales tax in Switzerland. amazon.ca billed me around 10 percentish.
No, the problem is that for the Slim, they just took the price in US$ and exchanged the $ for a Euro sign. That's like a fifty percent markup right there.
Oh yeah, keep whining. In Europe we pay over a hundred bucks for a PS3 game sometimes.
Say, who decided that we Europeans were so rich that we could easily pay so much more for the same product? I am in the process of importing a PS3 Slim with two games and a controller from Canada. I'm saving one THIRD and that doesn't even include a tax refund!
It's been this bad 70 years ago. 70 years ago we didn't pollute ANYWHERE as much as we do today. If our polluting nature is supposed to be the cause for climate change, which would then lead to, say, DUSTSTORMS, how come the same thing happened when we had barely begun the polluting?
Climate change is real. It happened since the beginning of this dirtball. The question is, how much of what we see today is natural and how much is man-made. Considering that they also found that CO2 rises came after our atmosphere warming up and not before, I'd like for you to give me a few examples of shut down points in favour of us not having much to do with the situation.
It's easy to say "Everyone KNOWS that your arguments won't hold up". But have the common decency to prove it instead of making blanket statements about our intelligence.
I am fucking fed up with this behaviour. Time and again, people had to lower their eyes in shame after they had made fun of others for their outrageously unpopular statements and then being proven wrong after all. How can any sane and halfway intelligent being continue doing that when none of us have any kind of insight into the bigger picture? Have you ever checked which scientists have proclaimed human induced climate change? Have you checked their work? Have you checked their numbers? Their conclusions? Have you checked whether their institutes are low on cash and just freaking needed the publicity?
Same goes for any opponents of human induced climate change, by the way. Same rules for all of us. The difference between you and me is that I don't call you stupid just because you have a different opinion than I have. All I call you is frickin' rude.
First, why can't an MMO not contain FPS bits when it clearly makes sense? Is standing there, in the middle of a corridor, taking shots left and right for thirty seconds any more enjoyable than actually, gasp, having to do something to survive?
MMO, as far as I remember, stands for massive, multi-user and online. Which of those would a realistic ST RPG not conform to? Just because YOU think MMO equals WoW-style gameplay?
With one hit kills, you at least don't have the problem that some high level asshole just cleans out all the enemies in your general vicinity leaving you to wait for a respawn.
You could make very cool games by tying levelling into a rank system... like becoming a starship captain, perhaps? You could build up stats that let you draw your weapon faster or that make you aware of enemies sooner.
Frankly, I find your rather narrow imagination rather limiting for the MMO genre.
You extrapolate wrong, though. In your own example, the price has actually risen between 2004 and 2009. Even keeping inflation in mind, the price drop during those three years will come out as marginal. So the curve of this price drop has become quite flat, don't you think?
This implies, IMO, that even though manufacturing costs have dropped, the consumer price has not changed all that much. Obviously, someone is finally making a profit... Or rather huge profits all of a sudden, depending on how cynical you want to be.
Thank you, that is exactly what I'm talking about.
They don't have to all be one hit kills. But how good can immersion be if your enemy and you just stand across each other being blasted repeatedly by deadly weapons? In FPS games, there is a concept called relativity. You get hit by a handgun in the shoulder? No big. If it happens to be a tank shell, you're dead. Doesn't matter what 'level' you are.
I mean this is supposed to be a role playing game, or am I wrong? How much immersion can you expect, when people don't even feel the need to duck and cover when assaulted by an enemy outnumbering them 2.5 to one?
It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap. Of course, third person shooters, even if your weapon is a lightsaber, are much easier to make than space fighter simulations, especially when there actually is not one dude commanding and piloting the ship himself but a whole bunch of people working together. Nobody ever accused capturing that as being easy.
I was putting high hopes into STOnline... until I saw that video from E3, I believe it was. Two Klingons standing across the hall from five Federation type people. One of them stands directly in front of the Klingon. So what happens? A short bout of Phaser fire and perhaps a bit of one on one? No. It took them like thirty seconds to take an unmoving target down and surely somewhere among ten to fifteen Phaser blasts.
So basically, they copied WoW. You have your stats, the enemy has his and you just trade blows until the weaker one dies.
WTF?
When did that EVER happen in ANY Star Trek series or movie? They use weapons that kill instantly (or at least stun, unless you are Borg). Not swords or axes that may be excused with glancing blows.
So yes, making this somewhat 'realistic' is harder than a fantasy game for the masses. You should have realized that even before you began.
I believe Star Trek games are crappy because the developers feel we ST fans are somehow pretty dumb. That we'll gobble up any game that even hints as letting us play as our heroes. So they slap some crude Star Trek graphics on the cheapest source code they can find. They cut corners when something is harder to do.
Because we IT folk are not trustworthy with money. If left to our own devices, we tend to geek out on cool new tech that is untested and has not proven its stability in any meaningful markets. Unless we are kept on a tight leash, we will start many projects in parallel, never finishing any, just because we want to do fun things instead of work.
At least that's the vibes my management gives off. Frankly, I don't know where this comes from. I mean it's not like I'd want to constantly work around annoying bugs. One would think it would be in my interest first and foremost to have infrastructures that works. Me being the storage and backup guy, it would fall to me to restore lost data so you can bet your ass, your family and your eternal soul that I'll stay away from the cool stuff as far away as possible. I want the reliable stuff.
See, in my company we've had to increase our budget estimates because we knew that management would cut them to shreds anyway. We had to make sure what would be left would be enough to do anything at all. It's basically a self-fullfilling prophecy: They don't trust us and tie our hands in so many ways that we have to start to lie to them to get anything done.
It's frustrating and I, for one, am fed up with it, because on top of it all, when something eventually breaks, it suddenly becomes your fault again. That and the meagre salary I get make me wish I had done something worthwhile. Being a carpenter sounds really neat compared.
Just wait until some soccer mom needs to protect her genius of a brat from all the bad things there are. Latest crusade? A 'bad' word in a CAPTCHA. Just you wait, it will happen.
Friend of mine married another friend (this time female) of mine. She 'playfully' hits him regularly. Frankly, I'd have smacked her by now. So what do you think would happen if this marriage took a dive? What happens when the atmosphere turns negative and he starts seeing this in a new light?
Frankly, I believe women are much more likely to strike their husband than the other way around. Just because, usually, they are weaker and the pain thus becomes 'negligible' does not mean it's not violence.
Things work as designed under Windows 98% under Linux what? 30%?
This is all only talking from personal experience and is not supposed to be misinterpreted as anything even remotely resembling fact but the above numbers are what I have experienced with Windows since XP SP2 and with Linux since about year 2000 (several distributions). The two percent missing on Windows have usually been some tools hastily put together by some stoned dude or games where the developer rushed the product. For the latter, there were patches.
While I agree with you, real life makes Linux unusable for me. Windows seems near perfect compared. And that's truly a sad state of things.
Your post is full of nothing (the atrocious spelling aside...).
Without knowing what it is that this women tries to do with her netbook, it's pretty hard to judge whether it's the netbook's fault or the husband's for being a cheap bastard.
Sure, if she's surfing the net over wifi in her garden with several sturdy walls between her and the AP, then the netbook obviously will be slow. If she tries to play games, it's going to be way too slow.
So without giving any stats concerning the hardware and the use to which it is put, your post is just a pile of stinky whining. Oh and seriously, learn the difference between there, their and they're...
Hype? What hype? Here in Switzerland the kids often thought it was the PS2 or X-Box (having no idea about their actual release dates). You need to know that Sega, as far as I know, was never all that popular in Europe. I don't know about the rest of the world, but here nobody even knew they'd made a new console.
Hell, we had to look on the internet (without youtube) for the actual DC commercials since we didn't have even one around here (since Switzerland has German TV stations, I feel safe to say in all German speaking countries, there was a marketing black hole when it comes to that piece of hardware).
The games were great, the hardware was advanced and powerful. Just... nobody knew that.
I can't help but think that a bazooka, although counter-productive in short term, would be a much more satisfying solution to that particular problem;)
English is not my first language, so I probably didn't catch the whole meaning, but...
The idea was that everyone can be identified with only the birth date, gender and ZIP code? So... err... There is, in fact, not even one ZIP code that has two people living there of the same gender that happen to share a birthday? Sure, to have the year coincide would take a bit more than just the date itself but it's hard for me to imagine that this could be true.
I did read the books and got the reference. But how is a badly written child's fantasy world a requirement for a true geek? I'm getting sick of people telling me it's such a great work just because he is the father of fantasy. So bloody what? Doesn't make the books any less boring.
Credit where credit is due: He put a lot of work into creating a new world. Writing skills he lacked, though.
1. Who's to say it was wrong? We THINK it's not a nice thing to do. But please point out to me the members on Slashdot that do engage or have engage in slave trade.
2. Bullshit. FORCING an apology is merely a tool to point a finger at someone else, especially when that someone else isn't even personally responsible for it.
No, the right thing to do would be to realise that there can only be a victim if harm has been done, then defining harm as something tangible (this would exclude many things including perceived loss of income through filesharing) and then leaving those who do not harm anybody the hell be.
Obviously, we are still ruled by our fear of the unknown. By forcing or giving an apology for this, we are merely making ourselves feel better without it having ANY kind of positive impact whatsoever. It's hypocritical to the extreme and I for one think all the energy spent on this could be used in much better ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice legs and ass? Dude, where do you live and how do your real estate prices look?
Since bone-skinny has become synonym for sexy, healthy and so on, it's become hard to even FIND women with boobs or asses AT ALL. And the legs? Straight sticks, man. Nothing curvy about that! On the plus side, their hips can easily be used as hooks for your jacket...
Nope. There's only 7.6% sales tax in Switzerland. amazon.ca billed me around 10 percentish.
No, the problem is that for the Slim, they just took the price in US$ and exchanged the $ for a Euro sign. That's like a fifty percent markup right there.
Oh yeah, keep whining. In Europe we pay over a hundred bucks for a PS3 game sometimes.
Say, who decided that we Europeans were so rich that we could easily pay so much more for the same product? I am in the process of importing a PS3 Slim with two games and a controller from Canada. I'm saving one THIRD and that doesn't even include a tax refund!
How do you shoot down a simple argument of logic?
It's been this bad 70 years ago.
70 years ago we didn't pollute ANYWHERE as much as we do today.
If our polluting nature is supposed to be the cause for climate change, which would then lead to, say, DUSTSTORMS, how come the same thing happened when we had barely begun the polluting?
Climate change is real. It happened since the beginning of this dirtball. The question is, how much of what we see today is natural and how much is man-made. Considering that they also found that CO2 rises came after our atmosphere warming up and not before, I'd like for you to give me a few examples of shut down points in favour of us not having much to do with the situation.
It's easy to say "Everyone KNOWS that your arguments won't hold up". But have the common decency to prove it instead of making blanket statements about our intelligence.
I am fucking fed up with this behaviour. Time and again, people had to lower their eyes in shame after they had made fun of others for their outrageously unpopular statements and then being proven wrong after all. How can any sane and halfway intelligent being continue doing that when none of us have any kind of insight into the bigger picture? Have you ever checked which scientists have proclaimed human induced climate change? Have you checked their work? Have you checked their numbers? Their conclusions? Have you checked whether their institutes are low on cash and just freaking needed the publicity?
Same goes for any opponents of human induced climate change, by the way. Same rules for all of us. The difference between you and me is that I don't call you stupid just because you have a different opinion than I have. All I call you is frickin' rude.
...unless you are the scum of the world...
You do realize that we are talking about governments here, yes?
And I still fail to see your point.
First, why can't an MMO not contain FPS bits when it clearly makes sense? Is standing there, in the middle of a corridor, taking shots left and right for thirty seconds any more enjoyable than actually, gasp, having to do something to survive?
MMO, as far as I remember, stands for massive, multi-user and online. Which of those would a realistic ST RPG not conform to? Just because YOU think MMO equals WoW-style gameplay?
With one hit kills, you at least don't have the problem that some high level asshole just cleans out all the enemies in your general vicinity leaving you to wait for a respawn.
You could make very cool games by tying levelling into a rank system... like becoming a starship captain, perhaps? You could build up stats that let you draw your weapon faster or that make you aware of enemies sooner.
Frankly, I find your rather narrow imagination rather limiting for the MMO genre.
You extrapolate wrong, though. In your own example, the price has actually risen between 2004 and 2009. Even keeping inflation in mind, the price drop during those three years will come out as marginal. So the curve of this price drop has become quite flat, don't you think?
This implies, IMO, that even though manufacturing costs have dropped, the consumer price has not changed all that much. Obviously, someone is finally making a profit... Or rather huge profits all of a sudden, depending on how cynical you want to be.
Thank you, that is exactly what I'm talking about.
They don't have to all be one hit kills. But how good can immersion be if your enemy and you just stand across each other being blasted repeatedly by deadly weapons? In FPS games, there is a concept called relativity. You get hit by a handgun in the shoulder? No big. If it happens to be a tank shell, you're dead. Doesn't matter what 'level' you are.
I mean this is supposed to be a role playing game, or am I wrong? How much immersion can you expect, when people don't even feel the need to duck and cover when assaulted by an enemy outnumbering them 2.5 to one?
Well, I don't expect anything to be decent that is modelled after Episodes one to three. A turd is a turd, after all.
It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap. Of course, third person shooters, even if your weapon is a lightsaber, are much easier to make than space fighter simulations, especially when there actually is not one dude commanding and piloting the ship himself but a whole bunch of people working together. Nobody ever accused capturing that as being easy.
I was putting high hopes into STOnline... until I saw that video from E3, I believe it was. Two Klingons standing across the hall from five Federation type people. One of them stands directly in front of the Klingon. So what happens? A short bout of Phaser fire and perhaps a bit of one on one? No. It took them like thirty seconds to take an unmoving target down and surely somewhere among ten to fifteen Phaser blasts.
So basically, they copied WoW. You have your stats, the enemy has his and you just trade blows until the weaker one dies.
WTF?
When did that EVER happen in ANY Star Trek series or movie? They use weapons that kill instantly (or at least stun, unless you are Borg). Not swords or axes that may be excused with glancing blows.
So yes, making this somewhat 'realistic' is harder than a fantasy game for the masses. You should have realized that even before you began.
I believe Star Trek games are crappy because the developers feel we ST fans are somehow pretty dumb. That we'll gobble up any game that even hints as letting us play as our heroes. So they slap some crude Star Trek graphics on the cheapest source code they can find. They cut corners when something is harder to do.
So what do you expect?
Why would you want something else indeed.
Because we IT folk are not trustworthy with money. If left to our own devices, we tend to geek out on cool new tech that is untested and has not proven its stability in any meaningful markets. Unless we are kept on a tight leash, we will start many projects in parallel, never finishing any, just because we want to do fun things instead of work.
At least that's the vibes my management gives off. Frankly, I don't know where this comes from. I mean it's not like I'd want to constantly work around annoying bugs. One would think it would be in my interest first and foremost to have infrastructures that works. Me being the storage and backup guy, it would fall to me to restore lost data so you can bet your ass, your family and your eternal soul that I'll stay away from the cool stuff as far away as possible. I want the reliable stuff.
See, in my company we've had to increase our budget estimates because we knew that management would cut them to shreds anyway. We had to make sure what would be left would be enough to do anything at all. It's basically a self-fullfilling prophecy: They don't trust us and tie our hands in so many ways that we have to start to lie to them to get anything done.
It's frustrating and I, for one, am fed up with it, because on top of it all, when something eventually breaks, it suddenly becomes your fault again. That and the meagre salary I get make me wish I had done something worthwhile. Being a carpenter sounds really neat compared.
Sorry for the rant.
We usually call people who don't lie and cheat socially inept. There is a 'too honest' if you want to get along with your peers.
Now I'm not saying that this is not a very damning situation for a race to be in, but there you have it.
Just wait until some soccer mom needs to protect her genius of a brat from all the bad things there are. Latest crusade? A 'bad' word in a CAPTCHA. Just you wait, it will happen.
Trolling isn't your forte, is it?
Feel safe as much as you want, but I wouldn't.
Friend of mine married another friend (this time female) of mine. She 'playfully' hits him regularly. Frankly, I'd have smacked her by now. So what do you think would happen if this marriage took a dive? What happens when the atmosphere turns negative and he starts seeing this in a new light?
Frankly, I believe women are much more likely to strike their husband than the other way around. Just because, usually, they are weaker and the pain thus becomes 'negligible' does not mean it's not violence.
Oh yes, because domestic violence always is the guy's fault and the woman is the target...
Amen, brother!
Things work as designed
under Windows 98%
under Linux what? 30%?
This is all only talking from personal experience and is not supposed to be misinterpreted as anything even remotely resembling fact but the above numbers are what I have experienced with Windows since XP SP2 and with Linux since about year 2000 (several distributions). The two percent missing on Windows have usually been some tools hastily put together by some stoned dude or games where the developer rushed the product. For the latter, there were patches.
While I agree with you, real life makes Linux unusable for me. Windows seems near perfect compared. And that's truly a sad state of things.
There's a club for people like you. We have t-shirts.
Your post is full of nothing (the atrocious spelling aside...).
Without knowing what it is that this women tries to do with her netbook, it's pretty hard to judge whether it's the netbook's fault or the husband's for being a cheap bastard.
Sure, if she's surfing the net over wifi in her garden with several sturdy walls between her and the AP, then the netbook obviously will be slow. If she tries to play games, it's going to be way too slow.
So without giving any stats concerning the hardware and the use to which it is put, your post is just a pile of stinky whining. Oh and seriously, learn the difference between there, their and they're...
Hype? What hype? Here in Switzerland the kids often thought it was the PS2 or X-Box (having no idea about their actual release dates). You need to know that Sega, as far as I know, was never all that popular in Europe. I don't know about the rest of the world, but here nobody even knew they'd made a new console.
Hell, we had to look on the internet (without youtube) for the actual DC commercials since we didn't have even one around here (since Switzerland has German TV stations, I feel safe to say in all German speaking countries, there was a marketing black hole when it comes to that piece of hardware).
The games were great, the hardware was advanced and powerful. Just... nobody knew that.
I can't help but think that a bazooka, although counter-productive in short term, would be a much more satisfying solution to that particular problem ;)
English is not my first language, so I probably didn't catch the whole meaning, but...
The idea was that everyone can be identified with only the birth date, gender and ZIP code? So... err... There is, in fact, not even one ZIP code that has two people living there of the same gender that happen to share a birthday? Sure, to have the year coincide would take a bit more than just the date itself but it's hard for me to imagine that this could be true.
So... what did I miss?
I did read the books and got the reference. But how is a badly written child's fantasy world a requirement for a true geek? I'm getting sick of people telling me it's such a great work just because he is the father of fantasy. So bloody what? Doesn't make the books any less boring.
Credit where credit is due: He put a lot of work into creating a new world. Writing skills he lacked, though.
1. Who's to say it was wrong? We THINK it's not a nice thing to do. But please point out to me the members on Slashdot that do engage or have engage in slave trade.
2. Bullshit. FORCING an apology is merely a tool to point a finger at someone else, especially when that someone else isn't even personally responsible for it.
No, the right thing to do would be to realise that there can only be a victim if harm has been done, then defining harm as something tangible (this would exclude many things including perceived loss of income through filesharing) and then leaving those who do not harm anybody the hell be.
Obviously, we are still ruled by our fear of the unknown. By forcing or giving an apology for this, we are merely making ourselves feel better without it having ANY kind of positive impact whatsoever. It's hypocritical to the extreme and I for one think all the energy spent on this could be used in much better ways.