"And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it." (Jack Handey)
The problem here is the prisoner's dilemma. If we co-operate, we get by pretty well. If one guy decides to exploit the system, he makes out like a bandit, leaving everyone else worse off. As long as people are human, I think you're going to continue to have this problem.
At least under UNIX and assorted related OSes, you're looking for fork() and exec(). I'm pretty sure similar functionality exists under, e.g. Windows, though it may be a bit more work to make that magic happen.
I want to take exception with that. The first Knights of the Old Republic game was also very good. (The second was... less so. The ending sort of fell apart, seemingly due to constraints on the development schedule.) Unless you mean the only decent movie/TV show. In which case, sure, but it's a damn short list in the first place.
A lot of 2-D cel-style animation is done entirely digitally these days, actually. (As noted by another poster, South Park simulates their collage-style using computers.) There's a lot that is done in Flash, actually.
Motion capture helps a lot with 3-D stuff, but it's probably still too expensive to do for a TV show that's got to do a couple dozen episodes a year. Movement in the new Clone Wars series looked acceptable to me, but I'd agree that it's less than perfect--some movements too quick, some too exaggerated, some simply there where they maybe shouldn't be. (Actually, it looks to me like they've done a lot of motion capture; I wonder if it's all new, or if they're leveraging stuff from the Star Wars prequels and various LucasArts games?) I expect we'll get to see a lot more of this sort of thing, though. Cel animation is expensive, even when done digitally, even when farmed out to animation studios in places like Korea and China. One nice thing about 3-D is that you can (I think) offload the rendering (and even a lot of the animation, once motion capture becomes sufficiently ubiquitous) to computers and let people spend most of their time directing. Obviously, that's a trade-off, but for a lot of the projects being done in animation at present, it's probably not a big one.
Reality? In an economic/environmental scenario that would be unfavorable to the US?
You're clearly not new here, but maybe you should pay closer attention to the way these discussions go on Slashdot, or even the Internet as a whole. Personally, I'm not sure how regulation is going to clean up anything. Regulations intended to force cleaner power production in the US have already made infeasible in many cases to upgrade and/or phase out older, dirtier power generation equipment at existing plants, because it would require bringing entire plants up to current standards before any new capacity could be added. That's a significant cost.
Mud's got a flat taste and chalky texture to it. Not very tasty, really.
Try a mild brew from your nearest coffee house, actually. Be careful about anything you get in a cafeteria or pre-ground in a 5lb. can. Personal suggestion? Skip the French and Italian roasts: stuff always tastes burnt to me, anyway. You may find black or green tea a better alternative if you need a caffeine fix, though.
Seems like it would depend on whether or not making that information public would increase the risk of people so identified being killed. It might also constitute some sort of interfering-in-an-ongoing-investigation charge, if any of the identified persons are currently undercover.
Look, you're either intentionally thick or you're incapable of understanding this. You've already demonstrated the ability to use a dictionary, you can look up terms like profane and obscene on your own. I'm not going to waste time explaining in small words the sort of things that you ought to have figured out by now.
You want a rational reason not to use those words? Isn't avoiding unnecessary offense rational enough? Or do you need to have the whole history of the language laid out for you to accept that some words are inappropriate for general use for reasons related to protocol that you, apparently, have never bothered to learn?
Look, I'm a software engineer. I was being exaggeratedly careful in the previous post to make a point. You've already exhausted my patience. The rational reason, the simplest one, is that using those words causes some people offense and portrays oneself as an uneducated, uncouth bore. Your obsession with a deeper rationalisation mostly betrays a lack of imagination, and I really don't have time or inclination to speculate on the reasons that some behaviors are considered polite and some are not. Life is short, and God knows I've better things to do. Good day.
How thoroughly delightful. We shall all talk like uncultured bores, saying the sorts of things that our betters would not in polite company, and be callow with respect to the feelings of our fellows. What fun! How enlightened we must be, and not at all like those dregs of society whose minds cannot conjure up suitably polite conversation out of their limited vocabularies.
Or, we could talk like decent people, and at least limit the use of profanities and obscenities for those times when we are simply too overcome with emotion to remember social niceties like good manners and proper behavior. At the very least, there are perfectly useful terms that are neither childish (as 'poo') nor vulgar (as 'shit') nor technical (as 'feces') when such things must be discussed in polite company. Or are you unfamiliar with 'manure'? Presumably, you are an adult. Might be time to start using language like one. Unless you enjoy looking like an uncouth oaf.
'Shit' is unacceptable in polite society, primarily because it is vulgar. It's crass. If you have to have that explained, then this conversation isn't worth having. You're either too poorly acculturated to be educated in this limited space, or you're being intentionally thick, whether for your own amusement or in the belabored service of some 'point' about how we should all behave like jackanapes because social distinctions are artificial. (As if that observation were novel or deep: of course good manners are largely artificial. Were they not, your dog would know to keep his elbows off the table and to eat with a knife and fork.) That society is so degraded that polite society is hard to find is no excuse to pretend that politeness is without value.
Look, an opinion can be wrong. A gamepad is not a better FPS controller. This is easily observed by way of the need for auto-aiming to compensate for the relatively greater accuracy of the keyboard and mouse combo (check out the upcaming Shadowrun shooter, which will allow PC and console gamers to play with/against each other over Live: console gamers get some auto-aiming and other tweaks to even things out some). This is not a simple statement of "I like x, some people like y". I'm saying there are easily grasped quantitative differences, and the opinion expressly contradicts that.
The guy's allowed to like the gamepad. Nobody's going to knock him down in the street, take his gamepad and force a keyboard and mouse on him. But he doesn't get to say 'gamepads are better' and not get contradicted just because he thought he said 'I like gamepads better'.
Even were this not so, one is still quite within bounds to hold and to express an opinion which runs contrary to the opinion of another. For heaven's sake, however do you think politics exists if not for the ability of two people to engage a difference of opinion? Don't be stupid. Of course, you can call others wrong because you disagree with them. If you can back that up, so much the better.
Vehicles? Separate buttons for... seriously, what-in-the-heck?
Have you never heard of Tribes or Tribes 2, you philistine? I'm not sure even the shield was a new invention, but vehicles were done in Tribes, and so were limited inventories. The Tribes control scheme included a mapping for throwing grenades. And I'm fairly certain that Duke Nukem and Doom both had 'melee attacks'. I think Duke's was even a separate keymapping, but I'm not sure.
Halo had a limited inventory because flipping through many weapons is _tedious_, and can be a real inconvenience even on a PC with a scroll wheel.
If my opinion were that the sun revolves around the earth, wouldn't my opinion be wrong?
Just because a statement is someone's opinion doesn't make it a judgement-free zone. God knows PC gamers have access to joysticks and gamepads and so forth, and mostly prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters. (Personally, I'd probably prefer a control stick and foot treadles.)
Halo, at least, is very polished. The interface is a bit stripped down and the controls simplified to facilitate playing on a console, but the gameplay is very smooth and well-refined, at least in the single player portion. The story was nice (not great, but nice), the graphics were very good for the day, and the gameplay, as I said, very polished and refined. Because it was designed for a console, the interface and interaction are simpler, and the depth of gameplay doesn't stack up well in my memory to, say, Unreal Tournament, which preceded it by about two years. Still, very well polished.
Completely different and original? There's a ridiculous preponderance of protagonists who are young (FFII, FFIII, FFV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFXII), are male (FFII, FFIII, FFIV, FFV, FFVII, FVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFXII), have a mysterious past or are amnesiac (FFII, FFIII, FFIV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX), are disaffected (FFIV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII, FFX), not what they seem to be (FFIII, FFIV, FFVI, FFVII, FFIX, FFX).... I think FFXII did a much better job than usual of breaking out of the bulk of those clichés, but it's hardly fair to say that the series as a whole is somehow free of them (final boss with angel wings? check!), or that the games are 'completely different'. They aren't identical, and they don't have recurring characters, exactly, but they certainly have recurring thematic, story, and setting elements.
That's an exchange of goods and services. Please, don't troll me with this crap. Theft is theft. Being unable to afford something that you want does not make it okay to steal it.
Criminy. This is the stupidest argument every time I hear it. I'm not even going to dignify it with a counter-argument. Grow up or get bent, hippie twit.
Actually, I picked politics as an example because he's a professor of 'government', which sounds like polisci to me. I should probably have picked something more public than a magazine subscription. Let us propose that a prominent religious figure had been a member of a fascist youth organization in a totalitarian country.
If his reasons for his actions were defensible when he acted, they should still be defensible now, in the historical context in which they exist. If that reveals flaws in one's characters which are not demonstrably corrected, well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? I'm not defending the status quo. I'm defending the idea that there is a better standard of behavior than "do as you will", and that people will treat as consequential those things which have consequences.
Some of us can't afford to buy every piece of software/media we want to consume.
So... don't? You're free not to 'consume' software or media you cannot afford, after all. It's not like you'll die for want of access to Die Hard XV: My God, Bruce Willis Is Getting Old, or Microsoft Windows XP.NET for Professionals. When did desire ever imply a right?
The good doctor is complaining because people might feel pressure to be more circumspect in the words and actions because their history may, at any time, return to haunt them. Is that really a bad thing, or is he just worried that all those years of being subscribed to Marxist Weekly (or whatever) may undermine his credibility as a professor of government?
While I think Zahn's actually a competent SF writer (and agree that his books among the best of the Star Wars stories I've read), I want to point out that 'best Star Wars writing out there' is not a particularly high bar. Some of 'the best' Star Wars stories are still gawdawful.
Yeah. Truth is, if you find that you are less enthused with the work you're doing after upgrading to a new job at a new company, it might just be the work environment, rather than the work itself. You might consider looking for work with a smaller company, or a company in a different industry, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
"And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it." (Jack Handey)
The problem here is the prisoner's dilemma. If we co-operate, we get by pretty well. If one guy decides to exploit the system, he makes out like a bandit, leaving everyone else worse off. As long as people are human, I think you're going to continue to have this problem.
At least under UNIX and assorted related OSes, you're looking for fork() and exec(). I'm pretty sure similar functionality exists under, e.g. Windows, though it may be a bit more work to make that magic happen.
I want to take exception with that. The first Knights of the Old Republic game was also very good. (The second was ... less so. The ending sort of fell apart, seemingly due to constraints on the development schedule.) Unless you mean the only decent movie/TV show. In which case, sure, but it's a damn short list in the first place.
A lot of 2-D cel-style animation is done entirely digitally these days, actually. (As noted by another poster, South Park simulates their collage-style using computers.) There's a lot that is done in Flash, actually.
Motion capture helps a lot with 3-D stuff, but it's probably still too expensive to do for a TV show that's got to do a couple dozen episodes a year. Movement in the new Clone Wars series looked acceptable to me, but I'd agree that it's less than perfect--some movements too quick, some too exaggerated, some simply there where they maybe shouldn't be. (Actually, it looks to me like they've done a lot of motion capture; I wonder if it's all new, or if they're leveraging stuff from the Star Wars prequels and various LucasArts games?) I expect we'll get to see a lot more of this sort of thing, though. Cel animation is expensive, even when done digitally, even when farmed out to animation studios in places like Korea and China. One nice thing about 3-D is that you can (I think) offload the rendering (and even a lot of the animation, once motion capture becomes sufficiently ubiquitous) to computers and let people spend most of their time directing. Obviously, that's a trade-off, but for a lot of the projects being done in animation at present, it's probably not a big one.
Reality? In an economic/environmental scenario that would be unfavorable to the US?
You're clearly not new here, but maybe you should pay closer attention to the way these discussions go on Slashdot, or even the Internet as a whole. Personally, I'm not sure how regulation is going to clean up anything. Regulations intended to force cleaner power production in the US have already made infeasible in many cases to upgrade and/or phase out older, dirtier power generation equipment at existing plants, because it would require bringing entire plants up to current standards before any new capacity could be added. That's a significant cost.
Mud's got a flat taste and chalky texture to it. Not very tasty, really.
Try a mild brew from your nearest coffee house, actually. Be careful about anything you get in a cafeteria or pre-ground in a 5lb. can. Personal suggestion? Skip the French and Italian roasts: stuff always tastes burnt to me, anyway. You may find black or green tea a better alternative if you need a caffeine fix, though.
So, have they made any announcement with respect to Steam-only pricing of Episode 2, Portal, or Team Fortress 2?
Seems like it would depend on whether or not making that information public would increase the risk of people so identified being killed. It might also constitute some sort of interfering-in-an-ongoing-investigation charge, if any of the identified persons are currently undercover.
Seriously, it's not cool.
Look, you're either intentionally thick or you're incapable of understanding this. You've already demonstrated the ability to use a dictionary, you can look up terms like profane and obscene on your own. I'm not going to waste time explaining in small words the sort of things that you ought to have figured out by now.
You want a rational reason not to use those words? Isn't avoiding unnecessary offense rational enough? Or do you need to have the whole history of the language laid out for you to accept that some words are inappropriate for general use for reasons related to protocol that you, apparently, have never bothered to learn?
Look, I'm a software engineer. I was being exaggeratedly careful in the previous post to make a point. You've already exhausted my patience. The rational reason, the simplest one, is that using those words causes some people offense and portrays oneself as an uneducated, uncouth bore. Your obsession with a deeper rationalisation mostly betrays a lack of imagination, and I really don't have time or inclination to speculate on the reasons that some behaviors are considered polite and some are not. Life is short, and God knows I've better things to do. Good day.
For starters, 'freak' is not an obscenity. 'Fuck', in all its forms, is.
How thoroughly delightful. We shall all talk like uncultured bores, saying the sorts of things that our betters would not in polite company, and be callow with respect to the feelings of our fellows. What fun! How enlightened we must be, and not at all like those dregs of society whose minds cannot conjure up suitably polite conversation out of their limited vocabularies.
Or, we could talk like decent people, and at least limit the use of profanities and obscenities for those times when we are simply too overcome with emotion to remember social niceties like good manners and proper behavior. At the very least, there are perfectly useful terms that are neither childish (as 'poo') nor vulgar (as 'shit') nor technical (as 'feces') when such things must be discussed in polite company. Or are you unfamiliar with 'manure'? Presumably, you are an adult. Might be time to start using language like one. Unless you enjoy looking like an uncouth oaf.
'Shit' is unacceptable in polite society, primarily because it is vulgar. It's crass. If you have to have that explained, then this conversation isn't worth having. You're either too poorly acculturated to be educated in this limited space, or you're being intentionally thick, whether for your own amusement or in the belabored service of some 'point' about how we should all behave like jackanapes because social distinctions are artificial. (As if that observation were novel or deep: of course good manners are largely artificial. Were they not, your dog would know to keep his elbows off the table and to eat with a knife and fork.) That society is so degraded that polite society is hard to find is no excuse to pretend that politeness is without value.
Look, an opinion can be wrong. A gamepad is not a better FPS controller. This is easily observed by way of the need for auto-aiming to compensate for the relatively greater accuracy of the keyboard and mouse combo (check out the upcaming Shadowrun shooter, which will allow PC and console gamers to play with/against each other over Live: console gamers get some auto-aiming and other tweaks to even things out some). This is not a simple statement of "I like x, some people like y". I'm saying there are easily grasped quantitative differences, and the opinion expressly contradicts that.
The guy's allowed to like the gamepad. Nobody's going to knock him down in the street, take his gamepad and force a keyboard and mouse on him. But he doesn't get to say 'gamepads are better' and not get contradicted just because he thought he said 'I like gamepads better'.
Even were this not so, one is still quite within bounds to hold and to express an opinion which runs contrary to the opinion of another. For heaven's sake, however do you think politics exists if not for the ability of two people to engage a difference of opinion? Don't be stupid. Of course, you can call others wrong because you disagree with them. If you can back that up, so much the better.
If you check out the othe post I made under this thread, you'll find that I don't think Halo is a bad game, per se.
I would submit, however, that it's strength is not in innovation so much as refinement.
Vehicles? Separate buttons for ... seriously, what-in-the-heck?
Have you never heard of Tribes or Tribes 2, you philistine? I'm not sure even the shield was a new invention, but vehicles were done in Tribes, and so were limited inventories. The Tribes control scheme included a mapping for throwing grenades. And I'm fairly certain that Duke Nukem and Doom both had 'melee attacks'. I think Duke's was even a separate keymapping, but I'm not sure.
Halo had a limited inventory because flipping through many weapons is _tedious_, and can be a real inconvenience even on a PC with a scroll wheel.
If my opinion were that the sun revolves around the earth, wouldn't my opinion be wrong?
Just because a statement is someone's opinion doesn't make it a judgement-free zone. God knows PC gamers have access to joysticks and gamepads and so forth, and mostly prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters. (Personally, I'd probably prefer a control stick and foot treadles.)
Halo, at least, is very polished. The interface is a bit stripped down and the controls simplified to facilitate playing on a console, but the gameplay is very smooth and well-refined, at least in the single player portion. The story was nice (not great, but nice), the graphics were very good for the day, and the gameplay, as I said, very polished and refined. Because it was designed for a console, the interface and interaction are simpler, and the depth of gameplay doesn't stack up well in my memory to, say, Unreal Tournament, which preceded it by about two years. Still, very well polished.
Completely different and original? There's a ridiculous preponderance of protagonists who are young (FFII, FFIII, FFV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFXII), are male (FFII, FFIII, FFIV, FFV, FFVII, FVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFXII), have a mysterious past or are amnesiac (FFII, FFIII, FFIV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX), are disaffected (FFIV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII, FFX), not what they seem to be (FFIII, FFIV, FFVI, FFVII, FFIX, FFX) .... I think FFXII did a much better job than usual of breaking out of the bulk of those clichés, but it's hardly fair to say that the series as a whole is somehow free of them (final boss with angel wings? check!), or that the games are 'completely different'. They aren't identical, and they don't have recurring characters, exactly, but they certainly have recurring thematic, story, and setting elements.
That's an exchange of goods and services. Please, don't troll me with this crap. Theft is theft. Being unable to afford something that you want does not make it okay to steal it.
Criminy. This is the stupidest argument every time I hear it. I'm not even going to dignify it with a counter-argument. Grow up or get bent, hippie twit.
Actually, I picked politics as an example because he's a professor of 'government', which sounds like polisci to me. I should probably have picked something more public than a magazine subscription. Let us propose that a prominent religious figure had been a member of a fascist youth organization in a totalitarian country.
If his reasons for his actions were defensible when he acted, they should still be defensible now, in the historical context in which they exist. If that reveals flaws in one's characters which are not demonstrably corrected, well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? I'm not defending the status quo. I'm defending the idea that there is a better standard of behavior than "do as you will", and that people will treat as consequential those things which have consequences.
The good doctor is complaining because people might feel pressure to be more circumspect in the words and actions because their history may, at any time, return to haunt them. Is that really a bad thing, or is he just worried that all those years of being subscribed to Marxist Weekly (or whatever) may undermine his credibility as a professor of government?
It'll never work. How will we prevent you from stealing things?
While I think Zahn's actually a competent SF writer (and agree that his books among the best of the Star Wars stories I've read), I want to point out that 'best Star Wars writing out there' is not a particularly high bar. Some of 'the best' Star Wars stories are still gawdawful.
Yeah. Truth is, if you find that you are less enthused with the work you're doing after upgrading to a new job at a new company, it might just be the work environment, rather than the work itself. You might consider looking for work with a smaller company, or a company in a different industry, for that matter.