one of the great features of this keyboard that i don't think any other keyboard has is that it is wired to take huge key combinations (at least 9 simultaneous keys). this was an annoying problem on every keyboard i've had before including the $80 G15. for example in BF2142, if i needed to keep moving (W) while running (left shift) i couldn't send a squad order (V) or accept an order from the squad leader (PageUp). i learned to play around it (stop running long enough to hit the other key) but it's nice to be able to just hit the keys i need to hit.
i'm definitely not a progamer and i bought one. they were on sale at dell.com for $107 (free shipping) a few weeks ago.
i love the thing. i got my first upscale keyboard a couple months ago - a logitech g15. i liked the volume control and the LCD but the build quality was really cheap. it felt like a thin piece of plastic; i probably could have torn it in half with my hands. after using the same keyboard for a decade (a $10 dell) i managed to break the g15 twice in a month.
then i went to a lan party in san francisco in march, and one of the sponsors was steelseries. never heard of them so i looked them up and immediately fell in love with their aesthetic: no frills, just over-the-top performance.
i ordered the 7g and it's amazing. the backspace key is too small but other than that it's a real pleasure to use. it just feels good to type on it - the internal mechanisms are smooth and the feedback is just right.
i don't know if this keyboard could make a huge difference to a gamer but i hope it lasts me for decades.
i guess i'm in the minority here but i got the first one and watched a 12 year old play it for a few hours.
shoot everything that moves, run through room to open next door. repeat 10,000 times.
i found it VERY boring. the graphics are simplistic, perhaps by necessity. but the gameplay is simplistic too. seemed to me like they made the 3d engine, the character models, the weapons and the other details, and then just bailed on the story/mapping.
no good team fortress mod out(best multiplayer fps of all time). sourceforts is ok.
good new rts? maybe CoH, but it's too easy and too short. nothing like C&C, populous, starcraft, civilization or other RTS classics have come out in a long time. civ4= civ3 clone with 3d. it's not a "new game."
sports games are no different than the last few years except with new team/stats/player database
recent FPS games: fear, prey. both pretty "been there, done that." maybe portal will be cool. hl2 was a good engine a couple years ago but they haven't done much with it yet other than the mediocre single player game, and the sourcified CS which has been dumbed down to compete with halo.
MMORPG is still WoW, unless you like 5+ year old games
there haven't been any new great games in the past 3 years, pretty much. it seems like a Crappy Age, not a Golden Age.
i would hate to see how they determine what's "notable."
the wikipedia encyclopedia is ok for science topics but for all the cultural/historical entries, it's like the worst of MySpace combined with the most boring blogs. half the admins there pound anyone who disagrees with them into the ground by using the "rules" and the senior staff arbitarily make secret decisions w/o any oversight. so i don't trust wikianything any more.
HL2 was such a dog (more of a technology demo than a game) that i'll be passing on their expansions for it. plus steam is dog slow and buggy as hell. they really went from one of the best video game companies to one of the worst in my opinion.
(a) keep out little kids (b) keep out the deaf (c) keep out people with no hands/knuckles? (d) keep out lock pickers until they figure out how it works
in case anyone was wondering, i was one of the first people to figure out how to do it and i wrote up a detailed howto on how to add these to maps (as well as add spawn points, convert map types, and other things)...
what's the point of putting network latency between all those shipping containers? if they want to use them for computing, why can't they just put them all next to each other in the same room?
i've been looking for a specifi ASCII-graphics DOS-based dungeon adventure game for a decade. i played it on a Tandy in 1987. it was pretty straightforward - roll up a character, kill stuff to level up. the thing is,i spent many months as a little kid playing it and i'd really love to find it again and play it for nostalgia's sake, and introduce it to a 10-year-old i know. i've downloaded a lot of old dos dungeon games trying to find it but no match yet.
there were no colors or graphics (except the ascii symbols to form a simple map), and the dungeon layout was static (not randomized each time). i can remember the first room - about 5 steps north was a fountain that would randomly add or subtract a stat from your character.
if anyone can help me find it, i'll pray to FSM to bless you with good karma.
i could have had joe.com but i was just barely too late. now i have joe.to instead and i actually prefer it, because people remember the somewhat interesting top-level domain.
then you have other examples like del.icio.us where people really took advantage of their top-level domain.
so maybe look around and forget.com and get something even better
yeah i worked at scopus, which was acquired by siebel, so i became a siebel employee.
they were polar opposities in every way
scopus was founded by a programmer siebel was founded by a salesman
scopus was lax on dress code siebel had a strict dress code
scopus was a very laid-back organization. one indian programmer i had to work with insisted on working 4 hours a day - midnight to 4am. siebel had an unwritten rule that 10 hours was barely acceptable, and most people worked 12+ hours
scopus had no rules about your work area siebel had a bunch of rules, basically amounting to No Personal Items In Sight - no posters, no toys, not even a soft drink on your cubicle desk
scopus was a technically innovative product with cool stuff under the hood and a small(ish) footprint siebel was bloated and clunky and gigantic
scopus was user-unfriendly because of lack of documentation and lack of consistency (naming standards, etc.) siebel had every tiny little widget fully documented and uber standardization
scopus was run by a nice guy who was loyal to his employees and gave a lot of money to charities siebel was (is) run by an arrogant asshole
what really got to me at siebel was the way the whole company has 2-3 marketing filters. it was suffocating because of all the sales-marketing bullshit encrusted onto everything.
for example, IN THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT, when you were making a new project, you had to create "Business Objects." WTF why were they called "Business Objects"? because it appealed to the C_O crowd and gave them little hard-ons to see words they recognized instead of confusing technical stuff. the whole product was like that - full of little marketing flair where there should have been efficient user tools/labels/whatever.
stunt car racer is what i meant, not roller coaster racer:) god damn that game was so simple but so fun.
i've spent a couple hours today looking up old amiga software. is there a site with lots of UAE "roms" to download?
there was 1 game with very little graphics, just a map of china. it was a turn-based strategy game where you build an army and try to take over china, region by region. i can't find it anywhere and i can't remember the name:(
i never saw one in stores in the US but i went to germany in the US army and they were all over - amiga stores on the US Bases, amiga stores in the local economy. it was very popular
we had a club of all army guys that would meet once every 2 weeks on base. everyone would bring their games (on 3.5" disks) and some guy would sell stacks of blanks - 50 for $20 i think. and we would spend literally all day copying each other's games. i usually came home with 400 floppies to try out, and usually about 50 new good working games. there were also a few companies that listed every game in their catalog and sold "backup copies" including documentation for as little as $2.
i guess in a way we helped drive them out of business by not supporting the software developers but i made $600 a month. if i had to buy software for $30/title, it just wasn't goign to happen. i DID buy a few titles, mainly from psygnosis, who released just AWESOME games that were a decade ahead of their time. and other guys in the barracks saw me having so much fun, they went and got amigas too. these were totally computer illiterate guys who had never heard of a mouse, back in 1990.
we would set up very rudimentary LAN parties with 2 or 3 amigas connected by serial cable and play roller coaster racer all night... amazing fun. i remember the first time i saw populous. it was at about 8pm, and next thing i new it was 6am and time for exercise. i was tired but excited all day:)
i'm not surprised IBM won the PC race but i am sad and disappointed that the creativity and genius that went into games 15 years ago seems to be gone now. there used to be 20 or 30 new games every year that were totally original. now 1 original game like katamarcy darcy comes out and everyone talks about how great it is:( if only they knew...
actually i just played a (PC port of) an amiga game a couple days ago. i was surfing around and somehow saw a reference to Overlord, which was a great game for the amiga, really fun and creative graphics about taking over planets. anyway i googled around a little and discovered i could download and play it for free! the sound is PC speaker beeps instead of midi quality music and sound samples the amiga had, and the graphics arent quite as good but it still brings back fond memories:) http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele= MTEyMDc=
this article articulates exactly how i felt after playing Half-Life 2:
why was that game 12 hours when it had about 4 hours worth of content?
every "level" went from exciting, to interesting, to ok, to boring, to mind-numbing. i felt like they didn't have the game done on time so they just stretched out the levels by 200%.
a game of perfect length is probably the underrated classic The Neverhood. lots of great puzzles and right when you start to lose interest, a 180 degree turn in the gameplay, and a big satisfying finish not long after.
the quality of the answers probably is related to the labor available at minimum wage, rather than any kind of gender bias because the customer is female.
at the end of 2100 (3rd in the series of 2001[which was a short story actually] and 2010), it turns out that one of the moons of jupiter is covered in... diamonds. the epilogue of the book describes a world where diamonds are as plentiful as dirt, and they are used in completely mundane ways like as a building material.
i thought that was a fascinating thought - if diamonds were as cheap as cement, imagine how many ways you could use the hardest known substance in the world...
i've been playing almost 8+ hours every day for a year and i haven't noticed any new problems from the past week.
of much bigger concern to everyone i know in the game is the recent announcement that they are lowering the xp requirements to hit level 75 (max level)
- are people with multiple jobs at 75 getting screwed ?
- there's not enough places for 75's to play as it is. if they make it easier to get to 75, where the hell are all these new people going to go?
it's a great game but the endgame has always been really weak and this can't help matters
Slashdot Mirror
i'm amazed no one mentioned martin gardner yet. he's the guy who turned me on to math when i was in high school.
pretty much anything by him is great but Aha! was especially fun.
one of the great features of this keyboard that i don't think any other keyboard has is that it is wired to take huge key combinations (at least 9 simultaneous keys). this was an annoying problem on every keyboard i've had before including the $80 G15. for example in BF2142, if i needed to keep moving (W) while running (left shift) i couldn't send a squad order (V) or accept an order from the squad leader (PageUp). i learned to play around it (stop running long enough to hit the other key) but it's nice to be able to just hit the keys i need to hit.
i'm definitely not a progamer and i bought one. they were on sale at dell.com for $107 (free shipping) a few weeks ago.
i love the thing. i got my first upscale keyboard a couple months ago - a logitech g15. i liked the volume control and the LCD but the build quality was really cheap. it felt like a thin piece of plastic; i probably could have torn it in half with my hands. after using the same keyboard for a decade (a $10 dell) i managed to break the g15 twice in a month.
then i went to a lan party in san francisco in march, and one of the sponsors was steelseries. never heard of them so i looked them up and immediately fell in love with their aesthetic: no frills, just over-the-top performance.
i ordered the 7g and it's amazing. the backspace key is too small but other than that it's a real pleasure to use. it just feels good to type on it - the internal mechanisms are smooth and the feedback is just right.
i don't know if this keyboard could make a huge difference to a gamer but i hope it lasts me for decades.
i guess i'm in the minority here but i got the first one and watched a 12 year old play it for a few hours.
shoot everything that moves, run through room to open next door. repeat 10,000 times.
i found it VERY boring. the graphics are simplistic, perhaps by necessity. but the gameplay is simplistic too. seemed to me like they made the 3d engine, the character models, the weapons and the other details, and then just bailed on the story/mapping.
no good team fortress mod out(best multiplayer fps of all time). sourceforts is ok.
good new rts? maybe CoH, but it's too easy and too short. nothing like C&C, populous, starcraft, civilization or other RTS classics have come out in a long time. civ4= civ3 clone with 3d. it's not a "new game."
sports games are no different than the last few years except with new team/stats/player database
recent FPS games: fear, prey. both pretty "been there, done that." maybe portal will be cool. hl2 was a good engine a couple years ago but they haven't done much with it yet other than the mediocre single player game, and the sourcified CS which has been dumbed down to compete with halo.
MMORPG is still WoW, unless you like 5+ year old games
there haven't been any new great games in the past 3 years, pretty much. it seems like a Crappy Age, not a Golden Age.
generally people in the textbook industry have to at least have some kind of quality in their product. they are, after all, selling textbooks.
wikipedia has no quality control. someone who has never heard of marine biology can edit the entry on the octopus because they feel like it.
i don't even see any basis for comparison.
what other form of publication allows editing by anyone in the world, anonymously?
i would hate to see how they determine what's "notable."
the wikipedia encyclopedia is ok for science topics but for all the cultural/historical entries, it's like the worst of MySpace combined with the most boring blogs. half the admins there pound anyone who disagrees with them into the ground by using the "rules" and the senior staff arbitarily make secret decisions w/o any oversight. so i don't trust wikianything any more.
speak the wikitruth! http://www.wikitruth.info/
HL2 was such a dog (more of a technology demo than a game) that i'll be passing on their expansions for it. plus steam is dog slow and buggy as hell. they really went from one of the best video game companies to one of the worst in my opinion.
(a) keep out little kids
(b) keep out the deaf
(c) keep out people with no hands/knuckles?
(d) keep out lock pickers until they figure out how it works
that's all i can come up with
in case anyone was wondering, i was one of the first people to figure out how to do it and i wrote up a detailed howto on how to add these to maps (as well as add spawn points, convert map types, and other things)...
here's the instructions
http://www.joe.to/cstrike/ents/
what's the point of putting network latency between all those shipping containers? if they want to use them for computing, why can't they just put them all next to each other in the same room?
i've been looking for a specifi ASCII-graphics DOS-based dungeon adventure game for a decade. i played it on a Tandy in 1987. it was pretty straightforward - roll up a character, kill stuff to level up. the thing is,i spent many months as a little kid playing it and i'd really love to find it again and play it for nostalgia's sake, and introduce it to a 10-year-old i know. i've downloaded a lot of old dos dungeon games trying to find it but no match yet.
there were no colors or graphics (except the ascii symbols to form a simple map), and the dungeon layout was static (not randomized each time). i can remember the first room - about 5 steps north was a fountain that would randomly add or subtract a stat from your character.
if anyone can help me find it, i'll pray to FSM to bless you with good karma.
i could have had joe.com but i was just barely too late. now i have joe.to instead and i actually prefer it, because people remember the somewhat interesting top-level domain.
.com and get something even better
then you have other examples like del.icio.us where people really took advantage of their top-level domain.
so maybe look around and forget
yeah i worked at scopus, which was acquired by siebel, so i became a siebel employee.
they were polar opposities in every way
scopus was founded by a programmer
siebel was founded by a salesman
scopus was lax on dress code
siebel had a strict dress code
scopus was a very laid-back organization. one indian programmer i had to work with insisted on working 4 hours a day - midnight to 4am.
siebel had an unwritten rule that 10 hours was barely acceptable, and most people worked 12+ hours
scopus had no rules about your work area
siebel had a bunch of rules, basically amounting to No Personal Items In Sight - no posters, no toys, not even a soft drink on your cubicle desk
scopus was a technically innovative product with cool stuff under the hood and a small(ish) footprint
siebel was bloated and clunky and gigantic
scopus was user-unfriendly because of lack of documentation and lack of consistency (naming standards, etc.)
siebel had every tiny little widget fully documented and uber standardization
scopus was run by a nice guy who was loyal to his employees and gave a lot of money to charities
siebel was (is) run by an arrogant asshole
what really got to me at siebel was the way the whole company has 2-3 marketing filters. it was suffocating because of all the sales-marketing bullshit encrusted onto everything.
for example, IN THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT, when you were making a new project, you had to create "Business Objects." WTF why were they called "Business Objects"? because it appealed to the C_O crowd and gave them little hard-ons to see words they recognized instead of confusing technical stuff. the whole product was like that - full of little marketing flair where there should have been efficient user tools/labels/whatever.
stunt car racer is what i meant, not roller coaster racer :) god damn that game was so simple but so fun.
:(
i've spent a couple hours today looking up old amiga software. is there a site with lots of UAE "roms" to download?
there was 1 game with very little graphics, just a map of china. it was a turn-based strategy game where you build an army and try to take over china, region by region. i can't find it anywhere and i can't remember the name
we had a club of all army guys that would meet once every 2 weeks on base. everyone would bring their games (on 3.5" disks) and some guy would sell stacks of blanks - 50 for $20 i think. and we would spend literally all day copying each other's games. i usually came home with 400 floppies to try out, and usually about 50 new good working games. there were also a few companies that listed every game in their catalog and sold "backup copies" including documentation for as little as $2.
i guess in a way we helped drive them out of business by not supporting the software developers but i made $600 a month. if i had to buy software for $30/title, it just wasn't goign to happen. i DID buy a few titles, mainly from psygnosis, who released just AWESOME games that were a decade ahead of their time. and other guys in the barracks saw me having so much fun, they went and got amigas too. these were totally computer illiterate guys who had never heard of a mouse, back in 1990.
we would set up very rudimentary LAN parties with 2 or 3 amigas connected by serial cable and play roller coaster racer all night... amazing fun. i remember the first time i saw populous. it was at about 8pm, and next thing i new it was 6am and time for exercise. i was tired but excited all day :)
i'm not surprised IBM won the PC race but i am sad and disappointed that the creativity and genius that went into games 15 years ago seems to be gone now. there used to be 20 or 30 new games every year that were totally original. now 1 original game like katamarcy darcy comes out and everyone talks about how great it is :( if only they knew...
actually i just played a (PC port of) an amiga game a couple days ago. i was surfing around and somehow saw a reference to Overlord, which was a great game for the amiga, really fun and creative graphics about taking over planets. anyway i googled around a little and discovered i could download and play it for free! the sound is PC speaker beeps instead of midi quality music and sound samples the amiga had, and the graphics arent quite as good but it still brings back fond memories :) http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele= MTEyMDc=
this article articulates exactly how i felt after playing Half-Life 2:
why was that game 12 hours when it had about 4 hours worth of content?
every "level" went from exciting, to interesting, to ok, to boring, to mind-numbing. i felt like they didn't have the game done on time so they just stretched out the levels by 200%.
a game of perfect length is probably the underrated classic The Neverhood. lots of great puzzles and right when you start to lose interest, a 180 degree turn in the gameplay, and a big satisfying finish not long after.
what server are you on? i'm grunion on midgardsormr :) just got did CoP 8-2 this weekend
i never played FF games before FFXI (MMORPG), and as a hardcore ffxi player i'm wondering if anyone knows if S-E is planning another MMORPG?
ffxi is 3+ years old now and any new MMORPG they announce could be seen as the beginning of the end for FFXI.
the quality of the answers probably is related to the labor available at minimum wage, rather than any kind of gender bias because the customer is female.
at the end of 2100 (3rd in the series of 2001[which was a short story actually] and 2010), it turns out that one of the moons of jupiter is covered in ... diamonds. the epilogue of the book describes a world where diamonds are as plentiful as dirt, and they are used in completely mundane ways like as a building material.
i thought that was a fascinating thought - if diamonds were as cheap as cement, imagine how many ways you could use the hardest known substance in the world...
anyone have a clue if this or the first title will ever be released on gamecube?
i've been playing almost 8+ hours every day for a year and i haven't noticed any new problems from the past week.
of much bigger concern to everyone i know in the game is the recent announcement that they are lowering the xp requirements to hit level 75 (max level)
- are people with multiple jobs at 75 getting screwed ?
- there's not enough places for 75's to play as it is. if they make it easier to get to 75, where the hell are all these new people going to go?
it's a great game but the endgame has always been really weak and this can't help matters
www.jux2.com compares the result sets from google, yahoo, and ask jeeves and you can immediately see what's missing from each