It means that instead of pressing one button a few dozen times per combat you have to dedicated a lot of though to the combat itself. This is REALLY annoying when you like to just level up and go to the next story. If you want to make a fighting game, make a fighting game. If you want to make an RPG make an RPG.
The previous poster named Zelda as a good RPG. Zelda games have _loads_ of combat, but the combat is realtime and fully integrated into the game, not breaking up the flow; it's also simple. Once you've learned the spin attack and how to use a few key weapons (hookshot, bow, boomerang) you can cope with pretty much anything. Of course, it's an advantage that Nintendo _really_ know their stuff when it comes to designing games like this. However much they pay Miyamoto, it can't be enough...
Unfortunately, Nintendo broke this terribly when they made Super Mario RPG. They took the Mario characters and world and implemented a Final Fantasy game engine. Aargh! So Mario encounters some Koopas, and I have to go into a menu-driven turn-based combat mode to deal with them. This is MARIO. These are KOOPAS. I have a GAMEPAD in my HANDS. I know how to deal with these things, I've been playing Mario games ince 1988. Let me get on with it.
I've been playing Baldur's Gate 2 recently, and it's starting to piss me off; I turn another corner and have to squish some more feeble monsters. Not interested. Planescape: Torment looks interesting, though, in which your own character is immortal and can restore party members by magic anyway. Freedom to get on with the story, that's the key.
responsibility to the nation than can least afford to do it.
That responsibility was given to the nation that was the most qualified to do it.
Given the Russians' experience on Mir, I'd certainly insist on the life-support systems on my Mars ship being stamped 'Made in Moscow'. Trouble was, in order to get the US government to approve the funding for the station, sufficient pork-barrel spending had to be approved. So instead of simply sending the Russians a cheque for twenty million dollars for a life-support system proved by twelve years of extremely tough duty aboard Mir, they approve forty million to send to Lockheed to develop a new and unproved system from scratch - because that way the money goes to some congressman's voters.
Of course, there was no way in hell NASA could hope to build a station alone, so Congress had to be persuaded to write the Russians a cheque anyway. That's where the 'if they don't work for us, they'll work for Saddam' argument came in.
Still, though, most of the spending had to be done in the USA for political reasons. If America really wanted the best possible station as cheaply as possible, they would have had the Russians do the whole thing. As it was, it was a political compromise, with each senator bought off with a plum contract for his own voters...
It would be nice if that tool knew how to fake out dpkg and rpm and would auto-detect what was on the system... it would require the people putting together the packages to write up a dependency list for them tho. -shrug
I seem to remember reading about a program that would handle all your./configure - make - make install work for you, and also keep track of which 'make install' had put what where, the better to handle uninstalls. Alas, I forget the name... but if something like that were included in a Friendly GUI, then we could really get somewhere.
Of course, that wouldn't get round the dependency issue; if the configure script barfs up 'libBLAH.so not found' then Joe Luser is still going to panic...
The NASA study didn't even get to the point where they measured exhaust gas velocity.
NASA have a small project called the Breakthrough Physics Program whose job it is to give credible-sounding crackpots a go, on the offchance that one of them might be right. It's Pascal's Wager - though the chances of one of them being right are minimal, if one actually IS then the payoff is immense.
So NASA pick up this Blacklight bloke who is peddling a perpetual motion machine that flatly contradicts the most accurate scientific model ever constructed of any system (the quantum-mechanical model of the hydrogen atom) and give him a fair go. They perform a few experiments to test his claims, and in the end they say 'Meh. Well, maybe, kind of, sorta, but not so as you'd notice. Results inconclusive.'
Thing is, they have to say 'inconclusive'. If they didn't, they'd have to explain to their bosses why they've just spent a good deal of taxpayers' money on snake oil, and their funding is at risk. So they return the Scottish verdict, they stay in work, and the snake oil peddler goes away claiming that NASA scientists endorse his scheme and that the only reason they said 'inconclusive' was because Big Oil made them cover it up.
Umm... I normally ignore 'mods on crack' posts, but I really have to make one now. And it's about one of my own posts. And it's been modded up. Twice.
The thing is, 'Informative'? I just claimed that there was a railway line from the Millennium Dome past the Thames Barrier through a Neil Gaiman fantasy world on to Cthulhu's undersea mansion and terminating at the capital city of Hell. I also claimed that there was an underground dragon-breeding project, and that the dome robbers knew about it - has nobody seen 'Reign of Fire'?
There's '+1 Funny' if you want, but Gordon Bennett don't call a stack of 100% made-up rubbish like that 'Informative'!
Heh! I guess the moderators haven't heard of Mornington Crescent. This comment couldn't be more on-topic if it tried.
Well, they probably haven't heard of it because there was a major contractual wrangle between the the IAMCP (Imperial Association of Mornington Crescent Players) and the AUMCO (American United Mornington Crescent Organisation) over who had rights to radio broadcasts, in the early thirties. The IAMCP won and sold the rights to the BBC for a comparatively small sum, while the AUMCO broke away and renamed the game after the stations of New York. Bit like the way Monopoly was rewritten with London streets for the UK edition. Sadly, since then, what with one ruling and another over the years, the American and British versions have become quite mutually unintelligible.
... The Government has put a D-notice on the publishers of London Underground maps. There are stations the public aren't supposed to know about out east; they built the Dome to discourage prospective explorers. The Forbidden Line starts near the Thames Barrier then goes 'London Below - Rl'yeh - Pandaemonium'. Another station serves the workers on the underground dragon-breeding project.
They claimed that those raiders who attacked the Dome with a JCB were aiming to steal diamonds. We know the truth now! They were aiming to break into the main shaft and expose the horrors below... Don't let them lie to you!
Re:They need geography lessons !
on
Earth as Art
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Greenland is governed by Denmark which makes it part of Europe.
In other news today, Hong Kong is currently celebrating the fifth anniversary of its move from Europe to Asia. The project was an incredible feat of tectonic engineering, ripping up an entire city from the English east coast and shipping it halfway around the world to a prepared harbour in southern China.
Re:Download a printable poster TIFF file...
on
Earth as Art
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Oh, well done. Find the biggest image files on the site and post the URLs on slashdot. What are you, a sadist?
At least you didn't make 'em hyperlinks...
Re:Other planets are art as well... but...
on
Earth as Art
·
· Score: 2
Earth's stark contrast of water, ice, cloud and land cannot be beat. The other planets are very beautiful, but nothing comes close to Earth.
For variety and detail, I'd take Earth; the unique effects of life all over its surface have made an incredible difference. But then we're biased; our eyes have evolved to use the colour palette used on Earth, so of course it looks good to us. Take a look at Jupiter in radio or magnetic spectra some time...
From a non-homeworld-chauvinistic view, the jewel of the Solar System can only be this one. Pick a spectrum, any spectrum, it's still magnificent. Even buy a cheap telescope and just look at the thing. That's going to be the mother of all tourist attractions five hundred years from now.
But, that isn't stopping Blair from going after it hell bent.
Hague said he'd definitely keep the pound. Blair said in principle he would join the euro, and in practice would put it to a referendum when the time was judged to be right.
William Hague was subsequently defeated in the election, doing as badly as Major had in the previous one. And since then the Conservatives have barely appeared on the radar. If people cared so much about saving the pound, surely that line would have saved Hague's hide at the last election? Surely it would have won him at least _SOME_ votes...
Yeah, and in episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a (heh heh) magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Actually, that was the error that I noticed the most, and actually found annoying. We see a _lot_ of Frodo, and he's frequently standing right next to either Gandalf or Aragorn - and he varies enormously in height. Gimli stays much the same - it seems to be just the Hobbits who change in size.
This isn't a geeky pedant point like the comment about Scratchy's ribs; this is a fundamental physical characteristic of the main character of a major motion picture. Just how tall is Frodo supposed to be? This is something that _does_ get noticed; several friends who didn't really know the books came out wondering exactly how tall Hobbits were relative to Men. The film had been extremely ambiguous.
Furrfu... So, what's new? Now we know it's SMB popups for sure, then? What were those two Romanians doing telling him that would get through people's firewalls?
Sure, most of the good ones are gone, but it ain't over till the obese female cantillates!
For land area, mineral resources, and future strategic potential, you left out the big one: the Antarctic Territory. Once the Antarctic Treaty expires, there'll be some valuable mining rights to be had.
OK, so the Chilean and Argentinian claims overlap the entirety of the British claim, but we know what Argentinian claims on British territory in the South Atlantic are worth...
C'mon people...is it really THAT big of a deal? I don't have any problems hitting delete when I receive spam.
For bulk email, a bulk delete key is needed. Find out where Ralsky is at the moment and pipe all traffic from that ISP to/dev/null.
And geez...the reason it still exists is because it is proven to work. I'd be willing to bet that a good percentage of people who get pissed off after reading stories like this aren't mad about spam, they're mad because they didn't think to get in on it first.
Or because they remember the days before spam? We are the Noldor who have seen Aman defiled by the Enemy, and now pursue him to the ends of the earth; hatred he shall have undying who doth spam us, be he Vala, Elf, or Man unborn, or any other creature that Eru shall cause to come into being until the end of days.
Just because someone has an expensive house or drives a nice car, doesn't mean they have a net worth of a million dollars. One can have very little in the way of assets but can still get mortgages and auto loans.
Yes, Ralsky's been bankrupt and has a terrible credit rating. But he refinanced and got a good deal on a mortgage loan, and now he makes $$$ in a profitable home business.
Can anyone envision what could possibly do this? Does your browser have to be trojoned to accomplish this feat? Could it be an IE-only kind of design bug?
Either (a) he's been lied to, and has bought into the NET SEND spamware - which certainly won't get through any firewall worthy of the name - or (b) he plans to trojan people. Something like Gator or Cydoor or that lot. He could probably afford to have his malware introduced into the next Kazaa release.
Look out for MS's righteous rage when the forged MAC addresses start colliding with existing, non-hacker users and it disrupts the Live service they've paid for! Can anyone say "bolt the door, the wolf's outside" ?
If I was being responsible, I'd set my Xbox MAC address to be exactly the same as the one on my PC... I assume no other Xbox is likely to have that MAC.
But then again the range of MAC addresses is so vast, why bother with that? The chances of collision have got to be vanishingly small, right?
Slashdot Mirror
So, how large a Beowulf cluster of these would you need before you had something capable of posting Beowulf jokes to /.?
The previous poster named Zelda as a good RPG. Zelda games have _loads_ of combat, but the combat is realtime and fully integrated into the game, not breaking up the flow; it's also simple. Once you've learned the spin attack and how to use a few key weapons (hookshot, bow, boomerang) you can cope with pretty much anything. Of course, it's an advantage that Nintendo _really_ know their stuff when it comes to designing games like this. However much they pay Miyamoto, it can't be enough...
Unfortunately, Nintendo broke this terribly when they made Super Mario RPG. They took the Mario characters and world and implemented a Final Fantasy game engine. Aargh! So Mario encounters some Koopas, and I have to go into a menu-driven turn-based combat mode to deal with them. This is MARIO. These are KOOPAS. I have a GAMEPAD in my HANDS. I know how to deal with these things, I've been playing Mario games ince 1988. Let me get on with it.
I've been playing Baldur's Gate 2 recently, and it's starting to piss me off; I turn another corner and have to squish some more feeble monsters. Not interested. Planescape: Torment looks interesting, though, in which your own character is immortal and can restore party members by magic anyway. Freedom to get on with the story, that's the key.
OK, so you're trolling and all, but I actually think you might have a market niche here... I certainly want one of those!
That responsibility was given to the nation that was the most qualified to do it.
Given the Russians' experience on Mir, I'd certainly insist on the life-support systems on my Mars ship being stamped 'Made in Moscow'. Trouble was, in order to get the US government to approve the funding for the station, sufficient pork-barrel spending had to be approved. So instead of simply sending the Russians a cheque for twenty million dollars for a life-support system proved by twelve years of extremely tough duty aboard Mir, they approve forty million to send to Lockheed to develop a new and unproved system from scratch - because that way the money goes to some congressman's voters.
Of course, there was no way in hell NASA could hope to build a station alone, so Congress had to be persuaded to write the Russians a cheque anyway. That's where the 'if they don't work for us, they'll work for Saddam' argument came in.
Still, though, most of the spending had to be done in the USA for political reasons. If America really wanted the best possible station as cheaply as possible, they would have had the Russians do the whole thing. As it was, it was a political compromise, with each senator bought off with a plum contract for his own voters...
Yeah, they go a lot better with a Wilber or a Kandalf...
I seem to remember reading about a program that would handle all your ./configure - make - make install work for you, and also keep track of which 'make install' had put what where, the better to handle uninstalls. Alas, I forget the name... but if something like that were included in a Friendly GUI, then we could really get somewhere.
Of course, that wouldn't get round the dependency issue; if the configure script barfs up 'libBLAH.so not found' then Joe Luser is still going to panic...
NASA have a small project called the Breakthrough Physics Program whose job it is to give credible-sounding crackpots a go, on the offchance that one of them might be right. It's Pascal's Wager - though the chances of one of them being right are minimal, if one actually IS then the payoff is immense.
So NASA pick up this Blacklight bloke who is peddling a perpetual motion machine that flatly contradicts the most accurate scientific model ever constructed of any system (the quantum-mechanical model of the hydrogen atom) and give him a fair go. They perform a few experiments to test his claims, and in the end they say 'Meh. Well, maybe, kind of, sorta, but not so as you'd notice. Results inconclusive.'
Thing is, they have to say 'inconclusive'. If they didn't, they'd have to explain to their bosses why they've just spent a good deal of taxpayers' money on snake oil, and their funding is at risk. So they return the Scottish verdict, they stay in work, and the snake oil peddler goes away claiming that NASA scientists endorse his scheme and that the only reason they said 'inconclusive' was because Big Oil made them cover it up.
In Soviet Russia, they call it Informative when it's fiction from beginning to end.
I think the third one came along, saw my followup post, and decided to be wilfully perverse :-)
The trailers for RoF all showed dragons wrecking London with great enthusiasm, so I don't think I've given away anything particularly spoilerish...
If london can find lost stations, why can't we find jimmy hoffa or the spammer who keeps sending me herbal viagra ads?
7 50 505
We found him. We know where he lives, and now, so does every paper junkmailer in North America.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=45984&cid=4
The mods are sorry, but they hadn't a clue.
The thing is, 'Informative'? I just claimed that there was a railway line from the Millennium Dome past the Thames Barrier through a Neil Gaiman fantasy world on to Cthulhu's undersea mansion and terminating at the capital city of Hell. I also claimed that there was an underground dragon-breeding project, and that the dome robbers knew about it - has nobody seen 'Reign of Fire'?
There's '+1 Funny' if you want, but Gordon Bennett don't call a stack of 100% made-up rubbish like that 'Informative'!
Well, they probably haven't heard of it because there was a major contractual wrangle between the the IAMCP (Imperial Association of Mornington Crescent Players) and the AUMCO (American United Mornington Crescent Organisation) over who had rights to radio broadcasts, in the early thirties. The IAMCP won and sold the rights to the BBC for a comparatively small sum, while the AUMCO broke away and renamed the game after the stations of New York. Bit like the way Monopoly was rewritten with London streets for the UK edition. Sadly, since then, what with one ruling and another over the years, the American and British versions have become quite mutually unintelligible.
... The Government has put a D-notice on the publishers of London Underground maps. There are stations the public aren't supposed to know about out east; they built the Dome to discourage prospective explorers. The Forbidden Line starts near the Thames Barrier then goes 'London Below - Rl'yeh - Pandaemonium'. Another station serves the workers on the underground dragon-breeding project.
They claimed that those raiders who attacked the Dome with a JCB were aiming to steal diamonds. We know the truth now! They were aiming to break into the main shaft and expose the horrors below... Don't let them lie to you!
In other news today, Hong Kong is currently celebrating the fifth anniversary of its move from Europe to Asia. The project was an incredible feat of tectonic engineering, ripping up an entire city from the English east coast and shipping it halfway around the world to a prepared harbour in southern China.
Oh, well done. Find the biggest image files on the site and post the URLs on slashdot. What are you, a sadist? At least you didn't make 'em hyperlinks...
For variety and detail, I'd take Earth; the unique effects of life all over its surface have made an incredible difference. But then we're biased; our eyes have evolved to use the colour palette used on Earth, so of course it looks good to us. Take a look at Jupiter in radio or magnetic spectra some time...
From a non-homeworld-chauvinistic view, the jewel of the Solar System can only be this one. Pick a spectrum, any spectrum, it's still magnificent. Even buy a cheap telescope and just look at the thing. That's going to be the mother of all tourist attractions five hundred years from now.
Hague said he'd definitely keep the pound. Blair said in principle he would join the euro, and in practice would put it to a referendum when the time was judged to be right.
William Hague was subsequently defeated in the election, doing as badly as Major had in the previous one. And since then the Conservatives have barely appeared on the radar. If people cared so much about saving the pound, surely that line would have saved Hague's hide at the last election? Surely it would have won him at least _SOME_ votes...
Yeah, and in episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a (heh heh) magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Actually, that was the error that I noticed the most, and actually found annoying. We see a _lot_ of Frodo, and he's frequently standing right next to either Gandalf or Aragorn - and he varies enormously in height. Gimli stays much the same - it seems to be just the Hobbits who change in size.
This isn't a geeky pedant point like the comment about Scratchy's ribs; this is a fundamental physical characteristic of the main character of a major motion picture. Just how tall is Frodo supposed to be? This is something that _does_ get noticed; several friends who didn't really know the books came out wondering exactly how tall Hobbits were relative to Men. The film had been extremely ambiguous.
This Alan Ralsky?
8 25 6&tid=111
2 .h tm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/22/165
As described here, quite recently?
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_2002112
Furrfu... So, what's new? Now we know it's SMB popups for sure, then? What were those two Romanians doing telling him that would get through people's firewalls?
For land area, mineral resources, and future strategic potential, you left out the big one: the Antarctic Territory. Once the Antarctic Treaty expires, there'll be some valuable mining rights to be had.
OK, so the Chilean and Argentinian claims overlap the entirety of the British claim, but we know what Argentinian claims on British territory in the South Atlantic are worth...
For bulk email, a bulk delete key is needed. Find out where Ralsky is at the moment and pipe all traffic from that ISP to /dev/null.
And geez...the reason it still exists is because it is proven to work. I'd be willing to bet that a good percentage of people who get pissed off after reading stories like this aren't mad about spam, they're mad because they didn't think to get in on it first.
Or because they remember the days before spam? We are the Noldor who have seen Aman defiled by the Enemy, and now pursue him to the ends of the earth; hatred he shall have undying who doth spam us, be he Vala, Elf, or Man unborn, or any other creature that Eru shall cause to come into being until the end of days.
Yes, Ralsky's been bankrupt and has a terrible credit rating. But he refinanced and got a good deal on a mortgage loan, and now he makes $$$ in a profitable home business.
Either (a) he's been lied to, and has bought into the NET SEND spamware - which certainly won't get through any firewall worthy of the name - or (b) he plans to trojan people. Something like Gator or Cydoor or that lot. He could probably afford to have his malware introduced into the next Kazaa release.
If I was being responsible, I'd set my Xbox MAC address to be exactly the same as the one on my PC... I assume no other Xbox is likely to have that MAC.
But then again the range of MAC addresses is so vast, why bother with that? The chances of collision have got to be vanishingly small, right?