1. We shot rockets to the moon (whose side effects could apparently kill you) 2. We had really powerful pesticides like DDT (although it could kil you too.) 3. We had extra heavy and powerful cars like the dart that really did intimidate (although getting into a simple crash could kill you).
Apparently everything tended to build character in those days. It's a testament I suppose to the advancements in technology that we don't 'build character' as much anymore;)
One point that I think that isn't covered because it's potentially obvious is the potential effect of ultraviolent games on the fairly young. I don't mean your average teen who has watched enough TV and movies to know what a hollow point does to someone, but the young who are just beginning to learn things about the world.
I worry about the kids who have violent video games (such as SoF 1 or 2) as their first major violent expereicnce. It's one thing for a child to see a bar fight or mafia war on TV. It's another to be _in control_ of a game persona that can shoot an other person into little chunks. Even if the child is explained to that "____ is not real," there's nothing like experiencing err, virtually first-hand, something like that.
But then again, that's what games are nowdays. I can't pretend it's not fun to go around and get frags (Unreal, Quake), run people over (GTA*, Carmageddon), or chop or beat down others (MK* and Time Killers comes to mind)... However the fact that I and millions of normal fun loving gamers think nothing of doing these things in virtual personas is just a little disturbing.
Between EV, Marathon, and the best Tetris clone which I can't remember the name of right now, made me proud to play with a Mac in the last 90's. At least Ambrosia stayed away from the dark side!
Sweeeet. If you get stuck on a level, just hide for 5 minutes and wait for the walls to turn into exits (oh wait... I mean 3D exits). Sooo... since most games have 20 levels, this game should take 1 hour to beat;)
why don't I see these games at the local D&B? (where one can get a full body workout simply by playing all the rythym and VR games)
I can't really see these drum doing that well in homes, even if 900k drum fanatics have bought it in Japan. Maybe kids will just use it for evil (bop-ing their opponent with the drumpad when things aren't going well in the game.)
You know, people are always knocking the Atari Pac-Man version because it was not the arcade port they were looking for. I don't agree with that. I never expected it to be just like the arcade. It was simply the pac man I played when I was at home. I mean, its not as if other games on the 2600 were a whole lot better than Pac Man in terms of graphics (combat, circus atari, basketball). OK there were good games that did look pretty good, but not like the arcade.
It's funny how we need to use 3d cards, which have something on the order of 1e8 transistors, to draw something just as fast as the old chips (680?) which only has about 1e3 of transistors.
This time, you aren't fighting to escape a dungeon, you're trying to get to the boss who killed your friend, kidnapped your daughter, polluted your lands (and killed another one of your friends), and finally, kept you in a POW cell for a long long time.
Featuring over 10 seconds of voiceovers!
Fight your way thorough endless enemies, while you never actually die.
Featuring red, green, yellow and blue colors (and the one warrior class)
Unlockable characters include: Dolph, Mr. T, Bolo, Apollo Creed, and of course Richard Dawson.... Or not;)
All those Eamon text based RPG games, which, while were easy to cheat on (ok so charaters had +31 everything), it was fun to design my own levels and adventures. Endless fun with what was just lines of simple basic.
So someone (Columbia) finally picked it up and is hopefully planning a DVD:) I saw this a few years ago and it basically sparked my interest in anime. My tastes tend towards the darker comedy side, so it's a bit obvious why I like Memories.
Although Cannon Fodder is a bit short and slow for my tastes, I loved Magnetic Rose and Stink bomb. Magnetic Rose for its tension, heart and fatalistic end, and Stink bomb for its dark comedy. I think I loved Stink bomb a little more because of his blind idiocy and his stink bomb powers (I wish I had some way to defeat both smart and dumb munitions with my odor;) ).
I think it's great that it's finally being released for real in the US: till now people had a few choices: imports ($$$), VHS fansubs (low quality), Online or one of those HK anime pirates (bad). I'm hoping that when it does come out, it will sell decently.
I'm using the following: WinXP, Athlon 2400+, WinPVR (Hauppage),400 GB hd space.
Good things: Great signal quality, and so with all my space I can record as much as I wish. After that, commercials can easily be cropped with the mpeg editor. A quick divx-ing through gknot and it's all done.
Bad things: Stupid Hauppauge drivers are inconsistent. Their scheduling program only starts up correctly maybe 75% of the time. Also, their installation instructions are rather hackish as well (unplug my ethernet connection to install?). Because of its lack of consistency, however, any show I really need to record and am not going to be home for... I use my VCR:(
I haven't really researched out to see if there's any good work arounds, but all in all, when it does record, I have no complaints at all.
From about K through 6, I fondly remember using LOGO and I think PILOT to make different graphical creations. I also recall Logowriter as a fun tool to even make movies with;) (I still remember making about a 5 minute long 'movie' with Airwolf (hey, it was a cool show), using a bunch of different sprites.)
Note though that these, I believe, helped me to learn to use the computer in a fun and natural way, not necessarially to learn how to actually program correctly with them. That is probably more important than anything to get kids to go into the computer fields. I mean, once they start taking those comp sci classes, by that time they either like CS or don't. Once they go down the path CS or eng, then they can take whatever requisite classes are necessary.
Some of the true potential of transparent transistors, Wager said, has already been visualized by Hollywood in futuristic, science fiction movies that show people working with elaborate, invisible electronic systems that so far only exist in on-screen special effects and the mind of a movie director.
On second thought, I guess we'll be able to build HAL now.
billions and billions ... of planets
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, why don't we just say any object orbiting a star is a planet? That way, we can classify the Oort cloud as a billion planets and see how kids decide to build it into their solar system models.;)
Before, with CRTs and cheap LCDs, anytime that I moved a big window (typically bright, say all white), and wiggled it around the desktop, I heard something similar to a, "wheeeee, weeeeee" kind of sound (the 'wheee' matching the window movement). Of course, this was a very very high pitch sound; a quieter and higher pitched version of the whine that TVs and crappy old CRTs make. Now I have a new and really nice LCD... I can't really hear anything, but then again, maybe I'm just getting old.
Isn't it great to know you have good hearing though?
This is a little OT but... back when I was a kid, I think I had even better hearing... I used to stay at my grandparents' house, and I could sense people walking down the hall to my room, no matter how quiet they were. The floor didn't squeak, and my grandmother used to walk around softly. But I could tell when she was coming. Basically, I would hear what seemed to me a lack of noise approaching; there was a lot of ambient noise from the living room (the windows were open which means lots of trees, birds, wind, etc. to hear), so someone walking down the hallway towards my room from the living room seemingly blocked some of the sound. It was very slight, but it was enough so I would usually be looking up at my grandma when she turned the corner to my room. I've had other experiences, like hearing if someone was sticking their hand in front of my face when I was blindfolded (it had to be in a fairly quiet room however).
Sigh, I miss having my good hearing. 25 years and lots of concerts, New years festivals and 4th of Julys will do that. It would be so helpful now to have that hearing, especially when my boss walks to my cubicle;)
The Attorney General's Office is looking for samples of spam that meet all of the following conditions:
You are the recipient of the spam and you are a resident of California.
The spam was delivered via servers located in California (sender's, recipient's or intermediary server will suffice).
There is some indication that the spammer is operating in California, such as a California telephone number or address for orders. If you can identify the spammer and have information from other sources showing that the spammer is in California, that will also work.
The spam fails to comply with the statutory restrictions. To comply, the unsolicited advertising emails' subject line must begin with "ADV:", the first text in the message must offer a toll-free number or functioning email address for removal of the recipient from further unsolicited emails, and that statement must be in a type size as large as most of the other text.
Ok, so maybe I'm a lazy guy, but why does it have to be our burden to look for all this? Couldn't we just forward email to them, and maybe they could hire someone to write some parser and other functions to try and determine this? I mean, it's enough work to to weed out all the other spam I get daily. Oh well.
Well, now that we have the 'Mr. Fusion'-like device, we only need the flux capacitora and then we're all set... oh wait, I'm in L.A! Douh! Too much traffic on the 405!... can't hit 88 mph! I guess we need the levitating cars then as well.
Robot: "What's that noise from my owner's room? Oh, it's midnight, it must be master's pr0n time"
Auto-Robot IM message to the owner: Robot(11:00PM): STOP watching pr0n you PERV! Robot(11:00PM): STOP watching pr0n you PERV! Robot(11:01PM): STOP watching pr0n you PERV!
Owner: (coming out to shut off the robot) "Ok ok, fine, robot. Let me just turn off this switch..."
Robot: "Sorry for the error master! Sound pattern previously recoreded now determined as normal voice pattern of master. Recorded as non-anomalous behaviour. It will not happen again. Thank you for your cooperation. Have a good night master."
The Challenger O-Ring disaster happened on the 28th of January. Saturday was supposed to be the successful completion of the 28th mission for the Columbia orbiter.
The replies of people that actually owned some of these bad (both mentioned or left unmentioned by the article) systems shows that there are a lot of us that end up buying bad systems. I wonder what drove us to buy these systems? Is it ignorance? Because we had disposable incomes (to try and one up our neighbors)? We certainly didn't have the web and its plethora of tools (slashdot, google, etc) to make us better consumers. (Hey, I had a Lynx. My excuse is that I was an Atari fanboy, with the 2600, the 800, and the 1040ST...)
I'd say that it's hard to make an uninformed purchase nowadays, unless you're a lazy ass who doesn't bother researching the web before buying wonderful techie toys;) Or are we all still drones that are easily swayed by hype and commericals?
Not to sound like a commercial or anything, but I would go with Orbitz IF you are strictly looking for airfares and such. Within the last couple of years, I have stopped trying all the different sites for fares, and now I just use Orbitz. I even used relatives who were travel agents before that, but they couldn't really find anything cheaper than the online stuff for just airfare.
But if you are looknig for like a tour package, like adding a good hotel, car and other activities, use a travel agency. They have the abliitity to link up special deals that they have with certain hotels and car rental places.
As an example, I recently went on a trip to Maui. After looking high and low for open hotel rooms, special deals on those travel sites and lots of googling, my friends and I just gave up and went to a travel agency. That day we had our tickets, hotel, and car all set up, with special deals for some snorkeling, etc if we wanted to do those things.
actually, you just tense up that muscle in the back of your neck really hard, and volia! a constant spastic shake that would give 100% lying response;)
Wow, in my wee days I loved to play with my Atari ST and my Apple IIe. I loved opening up STart and looking for things to program into my ST. That was really the only way I could get a lot of fun out of the Atari. Being a little kid in a humble home with parents that weren't really into computers, I couldn't really get any games for my systems ( except once a year for my b-day). So yeah, I did have games like Dungeon Master, some spy hunter ripoff, and Tanglewood (which I never finished). But those are only a few games that I usually grew tired of after a few months. But after getting STart, I would always hope that they would have a game that I could program in.
I remember once my parents bought for me a 10 disc collection of shareware games for the Atari, but I think only 1/3 of them actually worked, and 1/2 of those didn't like my joystick driver.
So when I finally got my IIe (hand me down from a cousin), and their collection of games, I loved that I could finally play with some. I loved playing all the Eamon games and of course whatever games my cousin had ( hehe, mention "brun choplifter" now to someone and they'd probably think it's some new German salad dicer ) But now with these games I programmed less and tended to try less things (although I do recall making some programs requiring call -151 in them)
Nowadays, I look back with my PS2 and my PC games requiring the latest and greatest video card, and it's a little sad to see that things will never be like how they were back then. Sure, I've tried going back and trying some of those games, but it's just not the same anymore.
A little kid now doesn't really have a chance to make a game, unless they somehow can learn how to write in a major languauge, utilize OpenGL or DirectX, create textures, etc, whereas when I was a kid, none of that was needed. I could make a game that, although certainly not up to par with a commecial game, could entertain me for a while. What's the chance now that a kid could make something that would (graphically as well) entertain a typical kid, as well as say, super smash brothers, Gran Turismo 3, or GTA3VC (although kids shouldn't be playing with that last one;) ). And that's what makes me just a little bit sadder.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish things were the 60's again:
;)
1. We shot rockets to the moon (whose side effects could apparently kill you)
2. We had really powerful pesticides like DDT (although it could kil you too.)
3. We had extra heavy and powerful cars like the dart that really did intimidate (although getting into a simple crash could kill you).
Apparently everything tended to build character in those days. It's a testament I suppose to the advancements in technology that we don't 'build character' as much anymore
One point that I think that isn't covered because it's potentially obvious is the potential effect of ultraviolent games on the fairly young. I don't mean your average teen who has watched enough TV and movies to know what a hollow point does to someone, but the young who are just beginning to learn things about the world.
I worry about the kids who have violent video games (such as SoF 1 or 2) as their first major violent expereicnce. It's one thing for a child to see a bar fight or mafia war on TV. It's another to be _in control_ of a game persona that can shoot an other person into little chunks. Even if the child is explained to that "____ is not real," there's nothing like experiencing err, virtually first-hand, something like that.
But then again, that's what games are nowdays. I can't pretend it's not fun to go around and get frags (Unreal, Quake), run people over (GTA*, Carmageddon), or chop or beat down others (MK* and Time Killers comes to mind)... However the fact that I and millions of normal fun loving gamers think nothing of doing these things in virtual personas is just a little disturbing.
Just my 2c...
Between EV, Marathon, and the best Tetris clone which I can't remember the name of right now, made me proud to play with a Mac in the last 90's. At least Ambrosia stayed away from the dark side!
Sweeeet. If you get stuck on a level, just hide for 5 minutes and wait for the walls to turn into exits (oh wait... I mean 3D exits). Sooo... since most games have 20 levels, this game should take 1 hour to beat ;)
why don't I see these games at the local D&B? (where one can get a full body workout simply by playing all the rythym and VR games)
I can't really see these drum doing that well in homes, even if 900k drum fanatics have bought it in Japan. Maybe kids will just use it for evil (bop-ing their opponent with the drumpad when things aren't going well in the game.)
You know, people are always knocking the Atari Pac-Man version because it was not the arcade port they were looking for. I don't agree with that. I never expected it to be just like the arcade. It was simply the pac man I played when I was at home. I mean, its not as if other games on the 2600 were a whole lot better than Pac Man in terms of graphics (combat, circus atari, basketball). OK there were good games that did look pretty good, but not like the arcade.
My 2c
It's funny how we need to use 3d cards, which have something on the order of 1e8 transistors, to draw something just as fast as the old chips (680?) which only has about 1e3 of transistors.
;)
Too bad you can't draw with opcodes anymore
URBAN GAUNTLET
... Or not ;)
This time, you aren't fighting to escape a dungeon, you're trying to get to the boss who killed your friend, kidnapped your daughter, polluted your lands (and killed another one of your friends), and finally, kept you in a POW cell for a long long time.
Featuring over 10 seconds of voiceovers!
Fight your way thorough endless enemies, while you never actually die.
Featuring red, green, yellow and blue colors (and the one warrior class)
Unlockable characters include: Dolph, Mr. T, Bolo, Apollo Creed, and of course Richard Dawson.
All those Eamon text based RPG games, which, while were easy to cheat on (ok so charaters had +31 everything), it was fun to design my own levels and adventures. Endless fun with what was just lines of simple basic.
So someone (Columbia) finally picked it up and is hopefully planning a DVD :) I saw this a few years ago and it basically sparked my interest in anime. My tastes tend towards the darker comedy side, so it's a bit obvious why I like Memories.
;) ).
Although Cannon Fodder is a bit short and slow for my tastes, I loved Magnetic Rose and Stink bomb. Magnetic Rose for its tension, heart and fatalistic end, and Stink bomb for its dark comedy. I think I loved Stink bomb a little more because of his blind idiocy and his stink bomb powers (I wish I had some way to defeat both smart and dumb munitions with my odor
I think it's great that it's finally being released for real in the US: till now people had a few choices: imports ($$$), VHS fansubs (low quality), Online or one of those HK anime pirates (bad). I'm hoping that when it does come out, it will sell decently.
I'm using the following:
:(
WinXP, Athlon 2400+, WinPVR (Hauppage),400 GB hd space.
Good things: Great signal quality, and so with all my space I can record as much as I wish. After that, commercials can easily be cropped with the mpeg editor. A quick divx-ing through gknot and it's all done.
Bad things: Stupid Hauppauge drivers are inconsistent. Their scheduling program only starts up correctly maybe 75% of the time. Also, their installation instructions are rather hackish as well (unplug my ethernet connection to install?). Because of its lack of consistency, however, any show I really need to record and am not going to be home for... I use my VCR
I haven't really researched out to see if there's any good work arounds, but all in all, when it does record, I have no complaints at all.
From about K through 6, I fondly remember using LOGO and I think PILOT to make different graphical creations. I also recall Logowriter as a fun tool to even make movies with
Note though that these, I believe, helped me to learn to use the computer in a fun and natural way, not necessarially to learn how to actually program correctly with them. That is probably more important than anything to get kids to go into the computer fields. I mean, once they start taking those comp sci classes, by that time they either like CS or don't. Once they go down the path CS or eng, then they can take whatever requisite classes are necessary.
Some of the true potential of transparent transistors, Wager said, has already been visualized by Hollywood in futuristic, science fiction movies that show people working with elaborate, invisible electronic systems that so far only exist in on-screen special effects and the mind of a movie director.
On second thought, I guess we'll be able to build HAL now.
Hmm, why don't we just say any object orbiting a star is a planet? That way, we can classify the Oort cloud as a billion planets and see how kids decide to build it into their solar system models. ;)
I just had the impulse to throw screamer slices ;)
Before, with CRTs and cheap LCDs, anytime that I moved a big window (typically bright, say all white), and wiggled it around the desktop, I heard something similar to a, "wheeeee, weeeeee" kind of sound (the 'wheee' matching the window movement). Of course, this was a very very high pitch sound; a quieter and higher pitched version of the whine that TVs and crappy old CRTs make. Now I have a new and really nice LCD... I can't really hear anything, but then again, maybe I'm just getting old.
;)
Isn't it great to know you have good hearing though?
This is a little OT but... back when I was a kid, I think I had even better hearing... I used to stay at my grandparents' house, and I could sense people walking down the hall to my room, no matter how quiet they were. The floor didn't squeak, and my grandmother used to walk around softly. But I could tell when she was coming. Basically, I would hear what seemed to me a lack of noise approaching; there was a lot of ambient noise from the living room (the windows were open which means lots of trees, birds, wind, etc. to hear), so someone walking down the hallway towards my room from the living room seemingly blocked some of the sound. It was very slight, but it was enough so I would usually be looking up at my grandma when she turned the corner to my room. I've had other experiences, like hearing if someone was sticking their hand in front of my face when I was blindfolded (it had to be in a fairly quiet room however).
Sigh, I miss having my good hearing. 25 years and lots of concerts, New years festivals and 4th of Julys will do that. It would be so helpful now to have that hearing, especially when my boss walks to my cubicle
- You are the recipient of the spam and you are a resident of California.
- The spam was delivered via servers located in California (sender's, recipient's or intermediary server will suffice).
- There is some indication that the spammer is operating in California, such as a California telephone number or address for orders. If you can identify the spammer and have information from other sources showing that the spammer is in California, that will also work.
- The spam fails to comply with the statutory restrictions. To comply, the unsolicited advertising emails' subject line must begin with "ADV:", the first text in the message must offer a toll-free number or functioning email address for removal of the recipient from further unsolicited emails, and that statement must be in a type size as large as most of the other text.
Ok, so maybe I'm a lazy guy, but why does it have to be our burden to look for all this? Couldn't we just forward email to them, and maybe they could hire someone to write some parser and other functions to try and determine this? I mean, it's enough work to to weed out all the other spam I get daily. Oh well.Well, now that we have the 'Mr. Fusion'-like device, we only need the flux capacitora and then we're all set... oh wait, I'm in L.A! Douh! Too much traffic on the 405!... can't hit 88 mph! I guess we need the levitating cars then as well.
Robot:
"What's that noise from my owner's room? Oh, it's midnight, it must be master's pr0n time"
Auto-Robot IM message to the owner:
Robot(11:00PM): STOP watching pr0n you PERV!
Robot(11:00PM): STOP watching pr0n you PERV!
Robot(11:01PM): STOP watching pr0n you PERV!
Owner: (coming out to shut off the robot) "Ok ok, fine, robot. Let me just turn off this switch..."
Robot: "Sorry for the error master! Sound pattern previously recoreded now determined as normal voice pattern of master. Recorded as non-anomalous behaviour. It will not happen again. Thank you for your cooperation. Have a good night master."
Owner: "Hmm, ok. Good night robot."
Robot: (quietly) "pervert."
Owner: "huh?"
The Challenger O-Ring disaster happened on the 28th of January. Saturday was supposed to be the successful completion of the 28th mission for the Columbia orbiter.
The replies of people that actually owned some of these bad (both mentioned or left unmentioned by the article) systems shows that there are a lot of us that end up buying bad systems. I wonder what drove us to buy these systems? Is it ignorance? Because we had disposable incomes (to try and one up our neighbors)? We certainly didn't have the web and its plethora of tools (slashdot, google, etc) to make us better consumers. (Hey, I had a Lynx. My excuse is that I was an Atari fanboy, with the 2600, the 800, and the 1040ST...)
;) Or are we all still drones that are easily swayed by hype and commericals?
I'd say that it's hard to make an uninformed purchase nowadays, unless you're a lazy ass who doesn't bother researching the web before buying wonderful techie toys
Not to sound like a commercial or anything, but I would go with Orbitz IF you are strictly looking for airfares and such. Within the last couple of years, I have stopped trying all the different sites for fares, and now I just use Orbitz. I even used relatives who were travel agents before that, but they couldn't really find anything cheaper than the online stuff for just airfare.
But if you are looknig for like a tour package, like adding a good hotel, car and other activities, use a travel agency. They have the abliitity to link up special deals that they have with certain hotels and car rental places.
As an example, I recently went on a trip to Maui. After looking high and low for open hotel rooms, special deals on those travel sites and lots of googling, my friends and I just gave up and went to a travel agency. That day we had our tickets, hotel, and car all set up, with special deals for some snorkeling, etc if we wanted to do those things.
Hope this helps!
actually, you just tense up that muscle in the back of your neck really hard, and volia! a constant spastic shake that would give 100% lying response ;)
must have been popping these all this time. Otherwise he'd have stopped long ago.
Wow, in my wee days I loved to play with my Atari ST and my Apple IIe. I loved opening up STart and looking for things to program into my ST. That was really the only way I could get a lot of fun out of the Atari. Being a little kid in a humble home with parents that weren't really into computers, I couldn't really get any games for my systems ( except once a year for my b-day). So yeah, I did have games like Dungeon Master, some spy hunter ripoff, and Tanglewood (which I never finished). But those are only a few games that I usually grew tired of after a few months. But after getting STart, I would always hope that they would have a game that I could program in.
;) ). And that's what makes me just a little bit sadder.
I remember once my parents bought for me a 10 disc collection of shareware games for the Atari, but I think only 1/3 of them actually worked, and 1/2 of those didn't like my joystick driver.
So when I finally got my IIe (hand me down from a cousin), and their collection of games, I loved that I could finally play with some. I loved playing all the Eamon games and of course whatever games my cousin had ( hehe, mention "brun choplifter" now to someone and they'd probably think it's some new German salad dicer ) But now with these games I programmed less and tended to try less things (although I do recall making some programs requiring call -151 in them)
Nowadays, I look back with my PS2 and my PC games requiring the latest and greatest video card, and it's a little sad to see that things will never be like how they were back then. Sure, I've tried going back and trying some of those games, but it's just not the same anymore.
A little kid now doesn't really have a chance to make a game, unless they somehow can learn how to write in a major languauge, utilize OpenGL or DirectX, create textures, etc, whereas when I was a kid, none of that was needed. I could make a game that, although certainly not up to par with a commecial game, could entertain me for a while. What's the chance now that a kid could make something that would (graphically as well) entertain a typical kid, as well as say, super smash brothers, Gran Turismo 3, or GTA3VC (although kids shouldn't be playing with that last one