I find I like the idea of text adventures more than the practice. Mostly me being crap and needing hints rather than evil designers, though. A lot of games seem to allow for enough backtracking to not simply write off an entire gaming experience because of the aforementioned "you didn't do something earlier" syndrome found in HHG.
This isn't a property of text games per se, but of 1980s adventures in general. It was once LucasArts hit on the idea of eliminating all possible deaths and all the no-win situations that modern adventures really got going: Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle... That liberated the player to walk up to dangerous pirates and insult them to their faces and know that however embarrassing the consequences, it would never be fatal to the game.
Most of the modern text games I've seen follow this ethos; they make it hard, if not always impossible, to lose - or at least, to lose without knowing it...
You get a general mental version of the world your in, and you can assume its more detailed then wandering the plains in EQ2, unless your imaginaionally inept.
Damn right. I've played so many RPGs over the years and some of them have been absolutely magnificent, but nothing was ever so perfectly rendered as the environment around Flood Control Dam #3...
and though the article is talking about electron spinning and uranium then I assume they still use the carbon atoms somehow, unless we all have a lot of uranium in us.
Nope, carbon dating has nothing to do with this. The timescale here is from 100,000 - 1,000,000 years ago. Carbon dating is only good on a timescale of thousands of years; that's great for mysterious Assyrian artefacts, frozen icemen, Egyptian mummies and so forth, and it's not bad for mammoths and sabretooths and things, but not for this. Once something's been dead for a very long time, nearly all the radioactive carbon has decayed and it's no longer a useful clock.
What's being used here is apparently electron spin resonance dating, of which more here. Not sure what the uranium measurement is, though; AFAIK, the uranium-lead clock is used on a timescale of billions of years, to date the most ancient rocks, though I'm no geologist and there may well be other decay products that give a shorter-term measure.
... next you're gonna tell me godzilla lived. Like there ever were a bunch of giant lizard roaming the earth. That's just silly.
Gojira isn't a dinosaur. Superficially he looks quite similar to a T. rex, but he's a lot bigger, and has radioactive fire breath. No evidence has ever been found to support nuclear combustible respiration in any fossilised saurian.
Re:100,000 years humans did not walk in asia
on
King Kong Lived?
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you take a look at this map, it suggests that modern man entered asia only about 70-60,000 years ago. So this ceartue may not have lived alongside early humans.
It may not have lived alongside H. sapiens, but it definitely would have encountered H. erectus, which certainly constitutes 'early human', don't you think?
What is Nessie is a Megafauna, a species of some sort of giant fish or cold-blooded reptile
The Loch Ness monster isn't really a good example. Loch Ness just plain isn't big enough to feed a breeding population of plesiosaurs for all these years.
If I was going to go off on a cryptozoological expedition, I'd head for the Himalayas and hunt yeti.
So it could just as easily have been a species of normal sized apes with abnormally sized heads, rather than abnormally sized apes with normal sized heads.
Not so easily. First off, large heads will require proportionately broad hips at least, else the species will run into severe difficulties reproducing itself. Second, the proportion of head (or more accurately brain) size to body size is roughly correlated to intelligence - for instance an elephant has a bigger brain than I do, but also a much bigger body. A head as disproportionately large as you suggest would suggest that these apes were very bright - so why do we rule the world?
Wikipedia's article on battery operated vehicles is pretty damn interesting. Why was that technology abandoned?
Same reason the Queen never does anything unexpected, the metric system never quite caught on in the US, Atlantis is not on any map, everyone thinks there's no life on Mars, Steve Gutenberg is famous, cave fish are blind and the Oscars are distinctly suspect...
People just don't want to "try before they buy" or "find the best one that suits you" for 16 different word processors, they want to get the one that will do the job. They don't want to have to worry about the distro choice because all software marked "Linux compatible" should work on it (without worrying about RPM TGZ and however many upyourarse variations there may be)...
I have been examining Ubuntu rather closely recently and whilst I like what it offers, I'm still a newbie and find it confusing to examine projects - I can get things from my synaptic installer and I can add repositories to make more things available, but I still can't suss out how to go to the applications' homepage and download/run a single package - from a Windows perspective, I have come to trust the programs more when I can download them directly from the authors homepage, I don't like to get from secondary sources.
'Fraid you can't have it both ways. You can have free choice to do it just the way you please, or you can have It Just Works and nothing to worry about. If you get your software from your distro's repository, you can be sure that the distributor has tested the software and made sure it will install to all the right places on your system, compiled it, packaged it and worked out all the necessary dependencies so that it can all be handled automatically. Doing it that way is simple and easy, but sometimes restrictive.
If you get it from the author's website, you'll probably have to compile it yourself, handle the dependencies yourself, and install it yourself. Doing it that way gives you complete freedom, and is difficult, confusing and not much fun except for hackers and geeks.
I might add that if you don't trust your distributor's repository, you have a big problem. You don't trust these guys to supply your apps, but you do trust them to supply your computer's basic OS?
If it's at all possible to do so, you should get your software from your distributor's repository. Only go direct to the author's website if this is not possible; you'll save yourself an awful lot of bother.
and their hardcore promotion of the word "Free" is also quite a plus.. i'll be damned if i ever pay a flippin' dime to RedHat, Mandriva, SuSE, or whoever else makes you pay for their crap..
Free Software is free as in free speech, not necessarily free as in free beer. Nothing in the GPL says you may not charge people for software.
I don't see why that precludes installing Gentoo. 10 minutes is all it takes.
Ten minutes?... WTF?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
Big difference between microevolution and macroevolution.
Big difference between walking a mile and walking a thousand miles. I've seen people walk a mile, but nope, I ain't never seen nobody walk no thousand miles... sure, they college professors with they big city ten dollar words tell you people done walk a thousand miles but they ain't got no proof, nope.
You know, a certain other OS manufacturing guy took the other route. He made an OS and even though it is an inferior product, gave the buyer the freedom to install it on the hardware of their choice. He's doing pretty well these days.
You mean Linus, right? Created an OS kernel that wasn't as functional as other Unices, but released the source code. Then people could install it on the hardware of their choice, rather than only on the platform for which binaries had been published, which was the style at the time.
Certainly no closed-source OS can be installed on the hardware of your choice; only on hardware on which the publisher saw fit to compile the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
> MOD -1 TROLL WITH NASTY KNIFE
> nw
Please tell me that when you first met a native English-speaker, you did not greet them with 'Hello sailor'...
This isn't a property of text games per se, but of 1980s adventures in general. It was once LucasArts hit on the idea of eliminating all possible deaths and all the no-win situations that modern adventures really got going: Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle... That liberated the player to walk up to dangerous pirates and insult them to their faces and know that however embarrassing the consequences, it would never be fatal to the game.
Most of the modern text games I've seen follow this ethos; they make it hard, if not always impossible, to lose - or at least, to lose without knowing it...
> WHAT IS A GRUE?
Damn right. I've played so many RPGs over the years and some of them have been absolutely magnificent, but nothing was ever so perfectly rendered as the environment around Flood Control Dam #3...
* sniffle * ... oh, the nostalgia...
Mike, the obnoxious hack-and-slash D&D player, finds himself in an open field west of a white house...
... My blood pressure has gone up.
Nope, carbon dating has nothing to do with this. The timescale here is from 100,000 - 1,000,000 years ago. Carbon dating is only good on a timescale of thousands of years; that's great for mysterious Assyrian artefacts, frozen icemen, Egyptian mummies and so forth, and it's not bad for mammoths and sabretooths and things, but not for this. Once something's been dead for a very long time, nearly all the radioactive carbon has decayed and it's no longer a useful clock.
What's being used here is apparently electron spin resonance dating, of which more here. Not sure what the uranium measurement is, though; AFAIK, the uranium-lead clock is used on a timescale of billions of years, to date the most ancient rocks, though I'm no geologist and there may well be other decay products that give a shorter-term measure.
Gojira isn't a dinosaur. Superficially he looks quite similar to a T. rex, but he's a lot bigger, and has radioactive fire breath. No evidence has ever been found to support nuclear combustible respiration in any fossilised saurian.
It may not have lived alongside H. sapiens, but it definitely would have encountered H. erectus, which certainly constitutes 'early human', don't you think?
Nope. It was Frieza.
The Loch Ness monster isn't really a good example. Loch Ness just plain isn't big enough to feed a breeding population of plesiosaurs for all these years.
If I was going to go off on a cryptozoological expedition, I'd head for the Himalayas and hunt yeti.
Not so easily. First off, large heads will require proportionately broad hips at least, else the species will run into severe difficulties reproducing itself. Second, the proportion of head (or more accurately brain) size to body size is roughly correlated to intelligence - for instance an elephant has a bigger brain than I do, but also a much bigger body. A head as disproportionately large as you suggest would suggest that these apes were very bright - so why do we rule the world?
'There were giants in the earth in those days' - Genesis 6:4
Hmm. Japanese space robot goes bananas, attacks other Japanese space robot, hurls it off into deep space... I've seen that before somewhere.
Same reason the Queen never does anything unexpected, the metric system never quite caught on in the US, Atlantis is not on any map, everyone thinks there's no life on Mars, Steve Gutenberg is famous, cave fish are blind and the Oscars are distinctly suspect...
I have been examining Ubuntu rather closely recently and whilst I like what it offers, I'm still a newbie and find it confusing to examine projects - I can get things from my synaptic installer and I can add repositories to make more things available, but I still can't suss out how to go to the applications' homepage and download/run a single package - from a Windows perspective, I have come to trust the programs more when I can download them directly from the authors homepage, I don't like to get from secondary sources.
'Fraid you can't have it both ways. You can have free choice to do it just the way you please, or you can have It Just Works and nothing to worry about. If you get your software from your distro's repository, you can be sure that the distributor has tested the software and made sure it will install to all the right places on your system, compiled it, packaged it and worked out all the necessary dependencies so that it can all be handled automatically. Doing it that way is simple and easy, but sometimes restrictive.
If you get it from the author's website, you'll probably have to compile it yourself, handle the dependencies yourself, and install it yourself. Doing it that way gives you complete freedom, and is difficult, confusing and not much fun except for hackers and geeks.
I might add that if you don't trust your distributor's repository, you have a big problem. You don't trust these guys to supply your apps, but you do trust them to supply your computer's basic OS?
If it's at all possible to do so, you should get your software from your distributor's repository. Only go direct to the author's website if this is not possible; you'll save yourself an awful lot of bother.
Yep, it's an old troll, one of a dozen or so perennial troll posts that get pasted in every so often.
I seem to remember that there used to be more of that particular troll, though. I think quite a bit has been left out...
OSX is based on BSD.
Free Software is free as in free speech, not necessarily free as in free beer. Nothing in the GPL says you may not charge people for software.
Ten minutes?... WTF?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Big difference between walking a mile and walking a thousand miles. I've seen people walk a mile, but nope, I ain't never seen nobody walk no thousand miles... sure, they college professors with they big city ten dollar words tell you people done walk a thousand miles but they ain't got no proof, nope.
$ timezone
Finding timezone for 127.0.0.1...
You mean Linus, right? Created an OS kernel that wasn't as functional as other Unices, but released the source code. Then people could install it on the hardware of their choice, rather than only on the platform for which binaries had been published, which was the style at the time.
Certainly no closed-source OS can be installed on the hardware of your choice; only on hardware on which the publisher saw fit to compile the OS.