Do you have any idea complicated drug interactions are? I don't, but i've gotten a vague idea from talking to a friend who's going to pharmaceutical school. Assuming that since one drug has effect A and another drug has effect B that using both of them at once will give the equivalent of numerically adding both the effects is a good way to get people killed.
Even if the combination is safe there's no guarantee that the result will be the "obvious" one. Perhaps the drugs combine in some way to cancel each other out. Perhaps they use the same receptors and interfere with each other. Or perhaps some interaction multiples the total effect (but not strongly enough to back into killing the patient territory again.)
You can argue about the relative merrit of these kinds of studies vs other more original kinds of research, but i don't think you can reasonably argue that it's useless.
I'm pretty sure in Civ3 they could have a lot more than 5 hp, the minimum was 10hp i think. No, phalanxes can't attack battleships. The stereotypical problem was battleships attacking phalanxes fortified in cities and getting blown up by them. The Phalanxes weren't attacking, but they _were_ wiping out the battleships.
This would happen because a phalanx fortified in a walled city has a decent defense (4? 8?) enough so that occasionaly they would beat the battleship's attack score. In Civ1 (and Civ2? i can't remember when the HP system was introduced) this would mean the battleship was blown up. This happened quite a lot. There have been arguments about whether or not it was out of line with the probabilities you would expect from the game mechanics, but it was defintitely far outside the range you would expect in any real world scenario.
After the introduction of hp losing a round of combat just meant the battleship lost a little health. Since battleships have quite a lot of health it meant the battleship would have to lose several rounds of combat in a row to the phalanx, a fairly unlikely occurance.
What i'm saying is that by reducing the number of hit points from 10+ to 3 they're greatly increasing the odds of such chance occurances happening again. They're also bringing back the ridiculous situation where a group of people with bronze spears are sinking a modern warship. They're consoling you by saying it was only one warship in the group, but it's still rather silly.
_That_ was about the dumbest controller idea ever. No, sorry, the second dumbest idea ever. The dumbest idea ever was making the buttons in the analog stick cancel what you're trying to do while trying to use the analag stick, so that if you're not very carefull with how hard you press you end up undoing everything. See SSX.
The third dumbest idea was the GameCube controller having three shoulder buttons instead of four.
I suppose i should have stoped to mention that i was refering to Civ4, though most people could probably figure that out given the three options. Ok, so maybe i'm a little overly excited about it:)
The globe sounds cool, but does that mean you can't do torus maps anymore?:)
They seem to have done a 180 on the issue of corruption. It wasn't like the players were begging for more corruption in Civ3, _they_ were the ones who thought it was a necessary play element. Not having to deal with corruption and pollution will be less annoying, but do they have some other means to address the issues those concepts were originaly meant to correct? And what happens to all the tech and structures that dealt with pollution? Are they just being removed as useless now?
I'm not sure what i think about the inclusion of religion. I have to admit that religion has had a very important effect on most periods of history, but i'm not sure i want to deal with it.
The government part sounds a bit like Call to Power but more complex. Especially the bit about slavery.
"The tech tree has been completely rethought and is no longer broken up into eras." ie they're going back to the way it used to be?:) And it sounds like they're reworking things to encourage you to do exactly what the eras concept was designed to prevent, skipping around the tech tree to get to "the good stuff":)
"Great People" sounds pretty much like the leaders in MoM and MoO2. Not that that's a bad thing.
I'm a little confused as to how the combat change is an improvement. From the description they've gotten rid of the health bar only be giving every unit a pseudo health bar of three HP. Unless they've done something else to change the combat there's going to be a sudden increase in Phalanxes wiping out Battleships again.
Being able to see wonders and such on the main map sounds really cool though:)
The lower power is also probably going to translate into a lower (perhaps much lower) launch price, which could be an asset during the opening months of the next cycle, when the other consoles are still $400+.
What are you basing the "lower power" comment on? The specs i've seen show the Revolution being pretty much on par with the 360. (Four cores at a slightly lower speed vs. three cores at a slightly higher speed.)
Perhaps you're listening to the marketing-speak? Sony and Microsoft both claim their new consoles will be a jazillion times better than the old ones, while Nintendo only claims its will be two or three times better, but so far this exactly mirros the claims made by all three companies for the last generation. How many times can people be taken in by Microsoft and Sony's inflated figures before they get a clue?
Well than next time say _that_ rather than "less than 50,000 yen that means LESS than $465," (which is an obvious but completly meaningless statement when dealing with marketing speak) and then stating you think that means it will go for $299 with nothing else to back it up. All anyone can reply to is what you actually say.
i'm betting that this quote is by someone that isn't authorized to say anything.
Now that i'm doubtful of. I don't think officials from Sony would be giving interviews to newspapers without knowing exactly what they were allowed to say. If they gave out a number, any number, about such a crucial issue without approval from higher up i'm sure some heads are going to roll.
(This is of course assuming it was actually an interview as stated in the summary, i can't RTFA since i'm at work right now.)
or some caffeine or something. I thought "award winning producer Koji Igarashi" said "akward whining producer Koji Igarashi" and it took a second or two to figure out i was reading it wrong. And this isn't some snide commentary about the producer in question, i don't even know who he is.
that means LESS than $465. It is probably just someone saying the equivalent of "my car cost less than $100k." True statement, vague though.
I don't expect to see the PS3 come down at $450. If I were a betting man I'd say $299.
This is elementary marketing, you _must_ have run into it before. When touting your own product you want to make it seem as cheap as possible, so you pick how much it costs (or how much you think it will cost) add a tiny increment, and say it costs less than that.
If a store advertises that they have something for "less than $10" you can be pretty sure it will cost $9.99. That's certainly what a "betting man" would go with. Also note that there is a certain amount of psychology in the "look" of the price. Subtracting one cent has a greater psychological effect than the actual price difference merits, especially when you you're talking about a psychologically significant barrier such as $1, $10, $100 or $1000, and to a lesser extent $5, $25, $50, and any other multiple of 10 or 100.
If Sony _knew_ they were going to sell it at $299 they would be saying "less than $300" (or whatever the yen equivalent of that is.) The fact that they're not saying that indicates they think there is a reasonably strong possibility that it will cost more than that.
Do they mean to say that he turns into wolf, and therefore he might be termed a werewolf, or that he actually turns into a werewolf?
In once case it's just a change of form from one natural creature to another, which we've seen before in the series. In the other it's (depending on which mythology you choose to believe in) a curse which turns you into a supernatural creature.
Is he going to be vulnerable to silver and have to change during the full moon? Or will he just be a wolf some of the time? I'm guessing that the use of the term werewolf in the summary was probably a mistake.
Re:I guess I don't understand...
on
Out Of The XBox
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· Score: 1
Um, so? Blind hate is as misguided as blind adulation.
So what about informed dislike?
I put up with microsoft when necessary, but i don't like their buisness practices and in the case of consoles there's nothing necessary about it. I can get a PS2 and a GameCube, or a PS3 and a Revolution, and not be missing out on much from the lack of any kind of XBox.
I'd rather not see Microsoft start using the same kinds of tactics in the game industry that they've been using in other areas. Nintendo and Sony aren't perfect, but they've demonstrably not caused any critical damage to the industry so far, and better the devil you know.
And given that there are compelling reasons to look dimly on Microsoft as an organization, what does it matter what the intentions of the devs are?
Of course as far as i could tell that article didn't actually describe how lightsabers _work_, an interesting oversight given the name of the site. It described the pieces of a lightsaber and what you can use a lightsaber for. However it did not describe the actual workings, ie how whatever it is the beam is made out of is created, emitted, and stopped or reversed at a certain distance from the emitter.
The first was a huge, embarrassing, computer-animated steaming turd from beginning to end
I just watched episode 1 & 2 again over the weekend and i disagree.
Episode I took a whole ten minutes before it turned into crap. Right up until the point where they ran into JarJar it wasn't bad at all.
I agree with you on the second one though. It had its problems, but it was certainly watchable. Of course watching it right after Episode I made it seem like a work of art in comparison:)
Human sense augmentation has come quite a long way when we can identify a millisecond event in a gigayear process within a gigaparsec radius. But we can't find Osama, or my car keys.
I realize you're being droll, but it's obviously a signal to noise ratio issue. The gamma ray burst was a friggin huge signal against a (comparitively) quiet background. If Osama or your car keys were the loudest thing on the planet by an order of magnitude we'd have no trouble finding him/it. Alternatly if the US army started removing noise by killing every living creature they came across eventualy they'd be able to single out Osama's signal.
...er, on second thought, perhaps i should have kept that idea to myself.
Yeah! Why did this stupid story get published while the interesting story i submited got rejected? I think i'll pay for an advertisement^W^W^W^W copy-paste my submission as a post in another unrelated story while complaining bitterly about the stupidity of the editors!
I don't think you can deny that it is an accomplishment for a director to helm a trilogy in which each film is much better than the previous one. Admitedly however the start George Lucas had with Episode I may have been setting the bar just a bit low.
Of course there's always the more general version of that joke:
If cars had followed the same developmental path as computers a Rolls Royce would cost $100 today, get a million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.
Was Bandai the one that there were rumors of Nintendo trying to buy out awhile ago? This would make them a much more valuable acquisiton, but probably more difficult to actually acquire.
Endlessly readable, never forgettable. There was a guy who really knew where his towel was.
Except if you had read TFA you would know that he _didn't_ know where his towel was.
"I thought, of course. You have to be the kind of person who doesn't know where his towel is to notice that the people who do are the truly cool people. And I was glad Douglas didn't."
A postmortem is a document written about the development of a game after the fact. Postmodernism would be a style or philosophy in which such a document could be written. I'm just not sure if the statement i was questions is actually postmodernist or some other style.
Perhaps you missed the implication that i've read quite a number of books, and let me assure you that the implication is indeed the case. I'll admit that i haven't made a great study of postmodernism, however that doesn't seem to be the grounds for random insults against me, especially given my self-profession of a lack of expertise in the subject.
However a quick check of the wikipedia shows: "Post-modernism rapidly developed a vocabulary of anti-enlightenment rhetoric, used to argue that rationality was neither as sure or as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge. To escape from constructed knowledge, it then becomes necessary to critique it, and thus deconstruct the asserted knowledge."
That seems to fit with the statement that "using Chinese or any other Asian language... might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events." Since you claim to have a greater knowledge please explain to me how either my interpretation is mistaken or the wikipedia is wrong.
"Expendable" is probably the one to start with since it introduces a lot of background to his regular universe. After that it doesn't matter a gread deal which order you read his work in since each book is _mostly_ independent of the others.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the combination is safe there's no guarantee that the result will be the "obvious" one. Perhaps the drugs combine in some way to cancel each other out. Perhaps they use the same receptors and interfere with each other. Or perhaps some interaction multiples the total effect (but not strongly enough to back into killing the patient territory again.)
You can argue about the relative merrit of these kinds of studies vs other more original kinds of research, but i don't think you can reasonably argue that it's useless.
I'm pretty sure in Civ3 they could have a lot more than 5 hp, the minimum was 10hp i think. No, phalanxes can't attack battleships. The stereotypical problem was battleships attacking phalanxes fortified in cities and getting blown up by them. The Phalanxes weren't attacking, but they _were_ wiping out the battleships.
This would happen because a phalanx fortified in a walled city has a decent defense (4? 8?) enough so that occasionaly they would beat the battleship's attack score. In Civ1 (and Civ2? i can't remember when the HP system was introduced) this would mean the battleship was blown up. This happened quite a lot. There have been arguments about whether or not it was out of line with the probabilities you would expect from the game mechanics, but it was defintitely far outside the range you would expect in any real world scenario.
After the introduction of hp losing a round of combat just meant the battleship lost a little health. Since battleships have quite a lot of health it meant the battleship would have to lose several rounds of combat in a row to the phalanx, a fairly unlikely occurance.
What i'm saying is that by reducing the number of hit points from 10+ to 3 they're greatly increasing the odds of such chance occurances happening again. They're also bringing back the ridiculous situation where a group of people with bronze spears are sinking a modern warship. They're consoling you by saying it was only one warship in the group, but it's still rather silly.
_That_ was about the dumbest controller idea ever. No, sorry, the second dumbest idea ever. The dumbest idea ever was making the buttons in the analog stick cancel what you're trying to do while trying to use the analag stick, so that if you're not very carefull with how hard you press you end up undoing everything. See SSX.
The third dumbest idea was the GameCube controller having three shoulder buttons instead of four.
I suppose i should have stoped to mention that i was refering to Civ4, though most people could probably figure that out given the three options. Ok, so maybe i'm a little overly excited about it :)
They seem to have done a 180 on the issue of corruption. It wasn't like the players were begging for more corruption in Civ3, _they_ were the ones who thought it was a necessary play element. Not having to deal with corruption and pollution will be less annoying, but do they have some other means to address the issues those concepts were originaly meant to correct? And what happens to all the tech and structures that dealt with pollution? Are they just being removed as useless now?
I'm not sure what i think about the inclusion of religion. I have to admit that religion has had a very important effect on most periods of history, but i'm not sure i want to deal with it.
The government part sounds a bit like Call to Power but more complex. Especially the bit about slavery.
"The tech tree has been completely rethought and is no longer broken up into eras." ie they're going back to the way it used to be? :) And it sounds like they're reworking things to encourage you to do exactly what the eras concept was designed to prevent, skipping around the tech tree to get to "the good stuff" :)
"Great People" sounds pretty much like the leaders in MoM and MoO2. Not that that's a bad thing.
I'm a little confused as to how the combat change is an improvement. From the description they've gotten rid of the health bar only be giving every unit a pseudo health bar of three HP. Unless they've done something else to change the combat there's going to be a sudden increase in Phalanxes wiping out Battleships again.
Being able to see wonders and such on the main map sounds really cool though :)
What are you basing the "lower power" comment on? The specs i've seen show the Revolution being pretty much on par with the 360. (Four cores at a slightly lower speed vs. three cores at a slightly higher speed.)
Perhaps you're listening to the marketing-speak? Sony and Microsoft both claim their new consoles will be a jazillion times better than the old ones, while Nintendo only claims its will be two or three times better, but so far this exactly mirros the claims made by all three companies for the last generation. How many times can people be taken in by Microsoft and Sony's inflated figures before they get a clue?
Games Are Fun had a blog of the Nintendo conference with smaller "wrap-up" articles about the details for the DS and the Revolution. As well as lots of other E3 coverage of course :)
So they take turns riding each other? O=)
i'm betting that this quote is by someone that isn't authorized to say anything.
Now that i'm doubtful of. I don't think officials from Sony would be giving interviews to newspapers without knowing exactly what they were allowed to say. If they gave out a number, any number, about such a crucial issue without approval from higher up i'm sure some heads are going to roll.
(This is of course assuming it was actually an interview as stated in the summary, i can't RTFA since i'm at work right now.)
or some caffeine or something. I thought "award winning producer Koji Igarashi" said "akward whining producer Koji Igarashi" and it took a second or two to figure out i was reading it wrong. And this isn't some snide commentary about the producer in question, i don't even know who he is.
I don't expect to see the PS3 come down at $450. If I were a betting man I'd say $299.
This is elementary marketing, you _must_ have run into it before. When touting your own product you want to make it seem as cheap as possible, so you pick how much it costs (or how much you think it will cost) add a tiny increment, and say it costs less than that.
If a store advertises that they have something for "less than $10" you can be pretty sure it will cost $9.99. That's certainly what a "betting man" would go with. Also note that there is a certain amount of psychology in the "look" of the price. Subtracting one cent has a greater psychological effect than the actual price difference merits, especially when you you're talking about a psychologically significant barrier such as $1, $10, $100 or $1000, and to a lesser extent $5, $25, $50, and any other multiple of 10 or 100.
If Sony _knew_ they were going to sell it at $299 they would be saying "less than $300" (or whatever the yen equivalent of that is.) The fact that they're not saying that indicates they think there is a reasonably strong possibility that it will cost more than that.
In once case it's just a change of form from one natural creature to another, which we've seen before in the series. In the other it's (depending on which mythology you choose to believe in) a curse which turns you into a supernatural creature.
Is he going to be vulnerable to silver and have to change during the full moon? Or will he just be a wolf some of the time? I'm guessing that the use of the term werewolf in the summary was probably a mistake.
So what about informed dislike?
I put up with microsoft when necessary, but i don't like their buisness practices and in the case of consoles there's nothing necessary about it. I can get a PS2 and a GameCube, or a PS3 and a Revolution, and not be missing out on much from the lack of any kind of XBox.
I'd rather not see Microsoft start using the same kinds of tactics in the game industry that they've been using in other areas. Nintendo and Sony aren't perfect, but they've demonstrably not caused any critical damage to the industry so far, and better the devil you know.
And given that there are compelling reasons to look dimly on Microsoft as an organization, what does it matter what the intentions of the devs are?
Of course as far as i could tell that article didn't actually describe how lightsabers _work_, an interesting oversight given the name of the site. It described the pieces of a lightsaber and what you can use a lightsaber for. However it did not describe the actual workings, ie how whatever it is the beam is made out of is created, emitted, and stopped or reversed at a certain distance from the emitter.
I just watched episode 1 & 2 again over the weekend and i disagree.
Episode I took a whole ten minutes before it turned into crap. Right up until the point where they ran into JarJar it wasn't bad at all.
I agree with you on the second one though. It had its problems, but it was certainly watchable. Of course watching it right after Episode I made it seem like a work of art in comparison :)
I realize you're being droll, but it's obviously a signal to noise ratio issue. The gamma ray burst was a friggin huge signal against a (comparitively) quiet background. If Osama or your car keys were the loudest thing on the planet by an order of magnitude we'd have no trouble finding him/it. Alternatly if the US army started removing noise by killing every living creature they came across eventualy they'd be able to single out Osama's signal.
Yeah! Why did this stupid story get published while the interesting story i submited got rejected? I think i'll pay for an advertisement^W^W^W^W copy-paste my submission as a post in another unrelated story while complaining bitterly about the stupidity of the editors!
I don't think you can deny that it is an accomplishment for a director to helm a trilogy in which each film is much better than the previous one. Admitedly however the start George Lucas had with Episode I may have been setting the bar just a bit low.
If cars had followed the same developmental path as computers a Rolls Royce would cost $100 today, get a million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.
Was Bandai the one that there were rumors of Nintendo trying to buy out awhile ago? This would make them a much more valuable acquisiton, but probably more difficult to actually acquire.
Except if you had read TFA you would know that he _didn't_ know where his towel was.
"I thought, of course. You have to be the kind of person who doesn't know where his towel is to notice that the people who do are the truly cool people. And I was glad Douglas didn't."
That might explain things a bit, since i'm pretty sure it was the first series i sampled. Thanks for the tip.
A postmortem is a document written about the development of a game after the fact. Postmodernism would be a style or philosophy in which such a document could be written. I'm just not sure if the statement i was questions is actually postmodernist or some other style.
However a quick check of the wikipedia shows: "Post-modernism rapidly developed a vocabulary of anti-enlightenment rhetoric, used to argue that rationality was neither as sure or as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge. To escape from constructed knowledge, it then becomes necessary to critique it, and thus deconstruct the asserted knowledge."
That seems to fit with the statement that "using Chinese or any other Asian language ... might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events." Since you claim to have a greater knowledge please explain to me how either my interpretation is mistaken or the wikipedia is wrong.
"Expendable" is probably the one to start with since it introduces a lot of background to his regular universe. After that it doesn't matter a gread deal which order you read his work in since each book is _mostly_ independent of the others.