It ended with lots of nuclear explosions, there were no snivelling kids at all in the movie (which totally ruined T2), there was plenty of physical destruction to be used in 5 movies... so what part of T3 was bad?
You know, I think they used to have those on cars... don't see too many people turning the cranks to start their lamborghini's... or even their Ford Fuckus (I mean Focus)'s.
And let me also guess: your grandpa smoked all his life, and he lived to be 150?
Just because it's happening to you, doesn't make it a rule. If your XP is locking up, it's gotta be your hardware. Just ask around, do an *unbiased* survey, and see how many XP users have 0 problems of that nature.
And if the Chinese get there first, what exactly will happen? Will there we hordes of roving Chinese in our streets, raping our dogs and killing our women? Oh please, lead me on that acid journey where this is a bad thing.
Hell, at this point I say: wait for them to get there first. From the point of business (my business view is limited to the last decade or so), it's rarely the first company that succeeds in a market. Look at all the telecoms - they all wasted their money building the infrastructure, quite a few went under.
So they're gonna be the first to get there, so what? We'll see what they've done, adapt the process to do it in half the time/cost/whatever... and do it better.
If your engine is on fire, what's the chance you can save anything in there? And if your engine is on fire, isn't opening the hood and letting oxygen in the last thing you want to do?
Besides, I've been driving for a while now... and I have not yet seen a car spontaneously combust.
Oh no, not the fiery pits of hell! You know, when I was five, I may have been scared of this crap (like that South Park episode, where Cartman becomes the preacher and scares all the kids into giving him money). I've since grown up, and cannot be frigtened by made-up creatures, be they orcs, the boogie man, sasquatch, or, yes indeed, the devil.
Grow the fuck up. ---- Unless this was meant to be funny, in which case... ha ha... freedom to fornicate... ha ha...
"Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day. God I love to sleep in so I hate this one."
Back in '99, I got a job where I can show up any time between 9 and 11, and as long as I work my 8 hours, the bosses are happy. If I'm working on something late, or if I have tennis practice later at night... you know, something that makes me extra-tired, I just sleep in the next morning, as long as I feel it's necessary... The result?
On the weekends, I tend to get up earlier than on the weekdays. I think it's getting better sleep because there is no knowledge of having to go to work the next day... and also the fact that I'm pretty *rested* already with the flex schedule that I have.
If you feel like sleeping in on the weekends, maybe you should - your body is trying to tell you it needs more rest. Listen to it! What good is an extra hour of being awake if you're just going to zombie through the next 15?
"I don't ever remember my parents sitting down with me and telling me that I played D&D or that any of the games I played on the Commodore"
Maybe that's because killing a monster was done with two sprites: 1) alive 2) dead (or a red splat) on the screen
I absolutely agree with you that parental interest in their child is key, but I have to wonder what will happen when the games get *so real* that kids will truly barely be able to distinguish "fantasy" people from real people. That *has to* be doing to a psyche of a 14-15 year old, and guess what, when little Billy isn't home, he's at his friends', whose parents just don't care, and little JimBob does have GTA15: Pimp Heaven...
Those movies you also mentioned... they were back then a contrast to relatively "harmless-looking" games. I mean, in Scarface Pacino dies (oh wait, should I have done a tag?:)), in Godfather plenty of people die, in Heat, same thing... they were real, they were shocking... I remember even now, the chainsaw scene from Scarface is one of my top two cringing scenes, together with the cop-tied-to-chair out of Reservoir Dogs.
"Upgradability was a problem back when software demanded more than hardware could provide".
Yeah, no kidding. Used to be the software was written "for the next generation of hardware" (or the next CPU, that would make it run "just right"). Back then we didn't know because the machine we had ran program X the fastest we've seen up that point. We didn't think that it'll run in 10 seconds with the next processor, since the current one runs in in decent 20, compared to the last CPU (which ran it in 40).
These days, hardware has way outpaced the software's ability to use it... I mean, when's WinXP for 64-bit Athlons coming out? This summer/fall or something? Why would you even consider buying hardware before the software is even available? Either wait, and the hardware prices of what you want today will drop, or get something cheaper (and in this case 32-bit, and save your money!) As it is, you'll just get angrier every day "your" software isn't shipping.
Yeah, I think about the only thing we haven't seen from this administration is a pyramid scheme letter with George W. Bush, 1400 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC address at the top.
You too can quit your job! Just send $5 to each of the five addresses at the top of this letter...
Dick Cheney made $3,555,400 in just the first month of signing up with our program! When reached for comment, he said: "I can now finally afford growing my own clone to with a brand new heart!" Thank you, originators of this letter!
Good point about converting people. I've given up on having my girlfriend play games. She sees it as a horrible waste of time, and no attempt to explain the game attraction to her has succeeded. So I just quit trying. As long as she allows me to spend an entire Xmas week at her family's house playing KOTOR (I swear I logged in about 50 hours in some 6 days I was there), we'll be fine. And then, there was a documentary about EQ, and this guy with kids was videotaped during the day. He was looking after a 4-year old, and a toddler, and they showed his day in fast-mo. I swear he was playing EQ 95% of the time he was supposed to watch the kids. I mean, they were all in the same room, but he totally wasn't paying any attention to them. I just thought that was so sad... really really sad.
Unfortunately, that also has its dangers, since the people who would vote would rarely have any ideas of what they voting on, or, even worse, a skewed idea of what they were voting for. Consider this last little adventure in Iraq and how a majority of Americans were convinced that Saddam caused 9/11. If popular voting were put in place today, all the power would go to the media companies, which, you guessed it, are owned by very few people. Also, some ideas are right, just not accepted socially. Take the civil rights movement... had it been put to a mass vote back in the day, I'm not sure it would've happened as quickly as with a relatively small number of people involved. The Supreme Court was always my favorite in the entire government structure. They may not reach a decision I'm always crazy for, but at least they seem to have a pretty good idea of how to back up their position. They are also not afraid to reach progressive decisions...
My ideas are to either give people a quiz on the issue before they can vote (they fail the quiz, their vote doesn't count), or to have a way to literally vote with their taxes (so you say what percent of your money goes to what govt. program).
Another idea I've been kicking around is to make the politician's job not to come up with decisions, but with 3-4 of the best choices, which again, would be voted upon by a well informed electorate. So their entire job would be to come up with reasonable/inovative choices on how to get the state/country out of problems. So as an example, a politician decides that we need a balanced budget, he consults a wide array of economists, and comes up with 5-8 plans on how to do it. Then we vote on it. Given effective managers (sort of like a governorship position in the Congress), people would actually make their own choices and couldn't be mad at somebody in the office for just doing whatever they didn't vote for. Then again, somebody needs to make me dictator before I can implement these changes.
Didn't I just read about EA in the latest Newsweek (with Jon Stewart on the cover)? They were lauded for being the top moneymaker in the game business, having all these hit games, like the Sims, Harry Potter, etc, etc... What we're seeing here is a very *business-oriented* company infiltrating the traditionally artsy/geeky world, and hey, it seems that they're doing well.
(no point here, insert own thoughts on the evils of capitalism, or the rightful domination of the free market).
Hmmm... and I thought Kotor was so great precisely because it didn't have all those cliched elements. I loved Fallout2 because it was futuristic (and had many realistic guns). System Shock2, you guessed it, in the future. Even old games that tried it, like Buck Rogers RPG, now that was fun. The only challenge is to balance those games... after a while, you get the feeling you're just looking at a sea of stats, since you have no idea of how a poly-alloy armor is different from a titanium/chrome bodysuit.
Have you played Kotor, btw? Excellent, gripping story. Borrow it from a friend and give it a whirl!
Amen, Brother! I had serious doubts about buying this game, even after reading many rave reviews and all... It's Star Wars, right? The same universe in which the new movies suck horribly?:) But the first day I played, I was up till 2:30am, trying to do "just one more thing". It's been years (probably Fallout) since I've done that. You're right about the SW=battles there... I was giddy when I first started kicking ass as a Jedi:) The thing about the character classes - why make such a stupid distinction? Completely unnecessary. Give people a way to fully customize their characters... For every level, give them N advancement points. Make feats cost x points each, skills y points, and jedi powers Z points. Let people do what they want!
I'll take that a step further, and say that the problem isn't so much in random encounters (as long as they're kept to a reasonable level, i.e. Fallout 2). The problem is that you could possibly become an uber-high level character who can scorch the entire planet clean of monsters, and that low-level monsters are now Booooring. One of the most fun times I've had in an RPG was in Morrowind, on levels 10. Apart from the amazement at how beautiful the world was (the first time it rained, I waited it out under a big mushroom tree so I wouldn't get wet!), I was afraid of anything... I mean three or four rats could kill me.
I'm not saying you shouldn't get stronger, but everything in reasonable limits. HP's should be allocated based on your body mass, hence a dragon should have a few hundred/thousand, and a human should never cross 50-100.
When the game gets so routine you can beat anything, what's the point?
So if you keep the random encounters within reasonable limits, even getting to another city should be an adventure in itself, not a "routine" task.
I don't think we'd kill each other with it... We would probably just kill our planet faster with all the excess heat. Think about using this energy... a by-product of using electricity is almost always heat... At least now, people have this view of coal burning plants, and say "Maybe I will turn the lights off when I leave". If you had virtually free energy, any conservation would be out the window, I'm afraid. A very simplified view, to be sure, but something to think about.
I completely agree. If the answer requires doing *that* much computation, either the problem was chosen poorly for the test, or you're doing something wrong (back in HS, we couldn't use calculators... and having to compute ridiculous fractions like 1256/14564 meant you were off the track to the right answer).
I think even graphing calculators should be disallowed until about Diff. Equations.
"That inhuman pack of gunship flying, mercenary hiring, indigenous population exploiting *ssholes can suck it down and shut up"
Exactly my sentiment. However, if they lose their source of income, things will only get worse before they get better. Think about it - you're a mercenary, you've killed so many people you've lost count, you enjoy all the finest clothes, drugs and women in the world/your region, and your source of profits dries up. Will you: a) put the stanglehold on the remaining resources (i.e. food) b) hang up your rifle, and go to a life of hard labour, like farming, living in peace and harmony with your neighbours, whose daughters you've been raping last week?
It always amazes me when the US and Israel request the unilateral disarmament and disbanding of the all the Islam radicals. Do they seriously expect these guys will say: You know, we've been wrong... Can we go back and be janitors, for the glory of Palestine? These people know nothing else but killing... and the only solution is to find them and kill them. Goes for Israel/Palestine and Africa as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey T3 was pretty good!
It ended with lots of nuclear explosions, there were no snivelling kids at all in the movie (which totally ruined T2), there was plenty of physical destruction to be used in 5 movies... so what part of T3 was bad?
You know, I think they used to have those on cars... don't see too many people turning the cranks to start their lamborghini's...
or even their Ford Fuckus (I mean Focus)'s.
And let me also guess: your grandpa smoked all his life, and he lived to be 150?
Just because it's happening to you, doesn't make it a rule. If your XP is locking up, it's gotta be your hardware. Just ask around, do an *unbiased* survey, and see how many XP users have 0 problems of that nature.
And if the Chinese get there first, what exactly will happen? Will there we hordes of roving Chinese in our streets, raping our dogs and killing our women? Oh please, lead me on that acid journey where this is a bad thing.
Hell, at this point I say: wait for them to get there first. From the point of business (my business view is limited to the last decade or so), it's rarely the first company that succeeds in a market. Look at all the telecoms - they all wasted their money building the infrastructure, quite a few went under.
So they're gonna be the first to get there, so what? We'll see what they've done, adapt the process to do it in half the time/cost/whatever... and do it better.
If your engine is on fire, what's the chance you can save anything in there? And if your engine is on fire, isn't opening the hood and letting oxygen in the last thing you want to do?
Besides, I've been driving for a while now... and I have not yet seen a car spontaneously combust.
What are the odds?
You know, I'm sure glad that Keanu Reeves was able to teach all these eggheads something...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115857/
Oh no, not the fiery pits of hell!
You know, when I was five, I may have been scared of this crap (like that South Park episode, where Cartman becomes the preacher and scares all the kids into giving him money).
I've since grown up, and cannot be frigtened by made-up creatures, be they orcs, the boogie man, sasquatch, or, yes indeed, the devil.
Grow the fuck up.
----
Unless this was meant to be funny, in which case... ha ha... freedom to fornicate... ha ha...
Maybe they packed an UV lamp on the rover. They turned it on and...
"Oh my god! The planet is covered with spooge!"
"Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day. God I love to sleep in so I hate this one."
Back in '99, I got a job where I can show up any time between 9 and 11, and as long as I work my 8 hours, the bosses are happy.
If I'm working on something late, or if I have tennis practice later at night... you know, something that makes me extra-tired, I just sleep in the next morning, as long as I feel it's necessary...
The result?
On the weekends, I tend to get up earlier than on the weekdays. I think it's getting better sleep because there is no knowledge of having to go to work the next day... and also the fact that I'm pretty *rested* already with the flex schedule that I have.
If you feel like sleeping in on the weekends, maybe you should - your body is trying to tell you it needs more rest. Listen to it!
What good is an extra hour of being awake if you're just going to zombie through the next 15?
"I don't ever remember my parents sitting down with me and telling me that I played D&D or that any of the games I played on the Commodore"
:)), in Godfather plenty of people die, in Heat, same thing... they were real, they were shocking... I remember even now, the chainsaw scene from Scarface is one of my top two cringing scenes, together with the cop-tied-to-chair out of Reservoir Dogs.
:)
Maybe that's because killing a monster was done with two sprites:
1) alive
2) dead (or a red splat) on the screen
I absolutely agree with you that parental interest in their child is key, but I have to wonder what will happen when the games get *so real* that kids will truly barely be able to distinguish "fantasy" people from real people. That *has to* be doing to a psyche of a 14-15 year old, and guess what, when little Billy isn't home, he's at his friends', whose parents just don't care, and little JimBob does have GTA15: Pimp Heaven...
Those movies you also mentioned... they were back then a contrast to relatively "harmless-looking" games. I mean, in Scarface Pacino dies (oh wait, should I have done a tag?
No real ending, just thought I'd rant a touch
"Upgradability was a problem back when software demanded more than hardware
could provide".
Yeah, no kidding. Used to be the software was written "for the next generation of hardware" (or the next CPU, that would make it run "just right"). Back then we didn't know because the machine we had ran program X the fastest we've seen up that point. We didn't think that it'll run in 10 seconds with the next processor, since the current one runs in in decent 20, compared to the last CPU (which ran it in 40).
These days, hardware has way outpaced the software's ability to use it... I mean, when's WinXP for 64-bit Athlons coming out? This summer/fall or something? Why would you even consider buying hardware before the software is even available? Either wait, and the hardware prices of what you want today will drop, or get something cheaper (and in this case 32-bit, and save your money!)
As it is, you'll just get angrier every day "your" software isn't shipping.
Do you live in the US? If so, you better be pissed cause every cent of this money will have to paid at some point by you or your children!
Yeah, I think about the only thing we haven't seen from this administration is a pyramid scheme letter with George W. Bush, 1400 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC address at the top.
You too can quit your job! Just send $5 to each of the five addresses at the top of this letter...
Dick Cheney made $3,555,400 in just the first month of signing up with our program! When reached for comment, he said: "I can now finally afford growing my own clone to with a brand new heart!" Thank you, originators of this letter!
Good point about converting people. I've given up on having my girlfriend play games. She sees it as a horrible waste of time, and no attempt to explain the game attraction to her has succeeded. So I just quit trying.
As long as she allows me to spend an entire Xmas week at her family's house playing KOTOR (I swear I logged in about 50 hours in some 6 days I was there), we'll be fine.
And then, there was a documentary about EQ, and this guy with kids was videotaped during the day. He was looking after a 4-year old, and a toddler, and they showed his day in fast-mo. I swear he was playing EQ 95% of the time he was supposed to watch the kids. I mean, they were all in the same room, but he totally wasn't paying any attention to them. I just thought that was so sad... really really sad.
They really meant Alabama.
Unfortunately, that also has its dangers, since the people who would vote would rarely have any ideas of what they voting on, or, even worse, a skewed idea of what they were voting for.
Consider this last little adventure in Iraq and how a majority of Americans were convinced that Saddam caused 9/11. If popular voting were put in place today, all the power would go to the media companies, which, you guessed it, are owned by very few people.
Also, some ideas are right, just not accepted socially. Take the civil rights movement... had it been put to a mass vote back in the day, I'm not sure it would've happened as quickly as with a relatively small number of people involved. The Supreme Court was always my favorite in the entire government structure. They may not reach a decision I'm always crazy for, but at least they seem to have a pretty good idea of how to back up their position. They are also not afraid to reach progressive decisions...
My ideas are to either give people a quiz on the issue before they can vote (they fail the quiz, their vote doesn't count), or to have a way to literally vote with their taxes (so you say what percent of your money goes to what govt. program).
Another idea I've been kicking around is to make the politician's job not to come up with decisions, but with 3-4 of the best choices, which again, would be voted upon by a well informed electorate. So their entire job would be to come up with reasonable/inovative choices on how to get the state/country out of problems. So as an example, a politician decides that we need a balanced budget, he consults a wide array of economists, and comes up with 5-8 plans on how to do it. Then we vote on it. Given effective managers (sort of like a governorship position in the Congress), people would actually make their own choices and couldn't be mad at somebody in the office for just doing whatever they didn't vote for.
Then again, somebody needs to make me dictator before I can implement these changes.
Didn't I just read about EA in the latest Newsweek (with Jon Stewart on the cover)? They were lauded for being the top moneymaker in the game business, having all these hit games, like the Sims, Harry Potter, etc, etc...
What we're seeing here is a very *business-oriented* company infiltrating the traditionally artsy/geeky world, and hey, it seems that they're doing well.
(no point here, insert own thoughts on the evils of capitalism, or the rightful domination of the free market).
Hmmm... and I thought Kotor was so great precisely because it didn't have all those cliched elements.
I loved Fallout2 because it was futuristic (and had many realistic guns). System Shock2, you guessed it, in the future. Even old games that tried it, like Buck Rogers RPG, now that was fun. The only challenge is to balance those games... after a while, you get the feeling you're just looking at a sea of stats, since you have no idea of how a poly-alloy armor is different from a titanium/chrome bodysuit.
Have you played Kotor, btw? Excellent, gripping story. Borrow it from a friend and give it a whirl!
Amen, Brother! :) :)
I had serious doubts about buying this game, even after reading many rave reviews and all... It's Star Wars, right? The same universe in which the new movies suck horribly?
But the first day I played, I was up till 2:30am, trying to do "just one more thing". It's been years (probably Fallout) since I've done that.
You're right about the SW=battles there... I was giddy when I first started kicking ass as a Jedi
The thing about the character classes - why make such a stupid distinction? Completely unnecessary. Give people a way to fully customize their characters... For every level, give them N advancement points. Make feats cost x points each, skills y points, and jedi powers Z points. Let people do what they want!
I'll take that a step further, and say that the problem isn't so much in random encounters (as long as they're kept to a reasonable level, i.e. Fallout 2).
The problem is that you could possibly become an uber-high level character who can scorch the entire planet clean of monsters, and that low-level monsters are now Booooring.
One of the most fun times I've had in an RPG was in Morrowind, on levels 10. Apart from the amazement at how beautiful the world was (the first time it rained, I waited it out under a big mushroom tree so I wouldn't get wet!), I was afraid of anything... I mean three or four rats could kill me.
I'm not saying you shouldn't get stronger, but everything in reasonable limits. HP's should be allocated based on your body mass, hence a dragon should have a few hundred/thousand, and a human should never cross 50-100.
When the game gets so routine you can beat anything, what's the point?
So if you keep the random encounters within reasonable limits, even getting to another city should be an adventure in itself, not a "routine" task.
I guess in those 20 minutes, you might actually have some time to reorganize your punch card collection?
A 20 minute wait is so... 1950s.
"For starters I would look at how much more chemicals are in our air, and some of the things we use; cleaning products, spray deodorant, etc..."
Let me guess... you're from France?
I don't think we'd kill each other with it... We would probably just kill our planet faster with all the excess heat.
Think about using this energy... a by-product of using electricity is almost always heat... At least now, people have this view of coal burning plants, and say "Maybe I will turn the lights off when I leave". If you had virtually free energy, any conservation would be out the window, I'm afraid.
A very simplified view, to be sure, but something to think about.
I completely agree. If the answer requires doing *that* much computation, either the problem was chosen poorly for the test, or you're doing something wrong (back in HS, we couldn't use calculators... and having to compute ridiculous fractions like 1256/14564 meant you were off the track to the right answer).
I think even graphing calculators should be disallowed until about Diff. Equations.
"That inhuman pack of gunship flying, mercenary hiring, indigenous population exploiting *ssholes can suck it down and shut up"
Exactly my sentiment. However, if they lose their source of income, things will only get worse before they get better.
Think about it - you're a mercenary, you've killed so many people you've lost count, you enjoy all the finest clothes, drugs and women in the world/your region, and your source of profits dries up. Will you:
a) put the stanglehold on the remaining resources (i.e. food)
b) hang up your rifle, and go to a life of hard labour, like farming, living in peace and harmony with your neighbours, whose daughters you've been raping last week?
It always amazes me when the US and Israel request the unilateral disarmament and disbanding of the all the Islam radicals. Do they seriously expect these guys will say: You know, we've been wrong... Can we go back and be janitors, for the glory of Palestine? These people know nothing else but killing... and the only solution is to find them and kill them.
Goes for Israel/Palestine and Africa as well.