Why is one DU round worse than hundreds or thoudsands of smaller 7.62 or 5.56mm lead bullets shot off equivalently instead?
Smaller doses, lead bullets are encased in metal casing (not to mention the encased within clips as well) and radiation has this tendancy to leak through anything less dense than lead.
M1A1 DU rounds are handled by the case, not by the "bullet" part, and the penetrator is encased in a sabot anyways. Most of the ammo handling for the A10 is done with machines, unless you are counting loading the loader.
True, but again when your talking about HUNDREDS of these rounds being loaded, unloaded, carried and then put into tanks the radiation adds up. If I sneeze on you once chances are you're not going to get sick. If I sneeze on you everyday, over the course of a few months and you don't take any medicine chances are you're going to at least develop some symptoms.
Uh, weren't depleted uranium weapons first and only used during the Gulf War and then almost immediately decommissioned when the U.S. military suddenly realized they couldn't even clean up the destroyed U.S. tanks that used them? The fact that U.S. soldiers were handling the stuff BARE HANDED sometimes didn't help either. (Cue Gulf War Syndrome cases 2+ years later.)
As for depleted uranium bombs being used in Yugoslavia, I have no clue where the parent post got that. Given the amount of media attention given to the war at the time (ZOMG genocide in Europe again?! Its a modern day Hitler, someone bring Churchill back from the dead!11!!) I think this fact (if it was true) would be more common knowledge.
WoW has been suffering from a series of community rumbling lately (no thanks to their continued server instability and PvP queues), the NextGen consoles are flat-out too expensive for the average teenage college student ($300 for the regular Xbox360 and the PS3 reportedly being $500+ is enough to pay a month's rent in some areas not to mention games and accessories) and Madden sales have gone flat thanks to EA's poor improvements and Sega's (arguably) better Blitz series.
Why the bias toward companies? I "legally" have my own name in my home country.
No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com? What if I immigrated to the EU or had my citizenship changed, do I get to reserve steven.eu or steven.cn or steven.hk as well?
Heck I should charge people for using the name 'Steven' because its "legally" mine!/sarcasm
You have two and ONLY two "fair" choices... Pure random lottery, or first-come-first-serve.
Or you could let people and companies petition beforehand to reserve certain web addresses. Microsoft Corp.? Fine, they get microsoft.eu. Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no. Apple Corp. and Paul McCartney in contest over apple.eu? We'll place that on hold until the courts can make a decision. Joe Somebody wants imasuperl33td00d.eu? Fine, whatever.
If I own something that you want and I don't want to give it to you, that does not count as extortion.
Except you're seeing PRIVATE INDIVIDUALLY charging MILLIONS of dollars for web names. Face it, the majority of these.eu web address purchase rushes are for the purpose of extortion. Apple.eu, Microsoft.eu and Dell.eu would all fetch a couple million easy. They're all multi-BILLION dollar companies, a few million is not that hard to squeeze out of them.
It does not bother me in the least if someone other than IBM owns ibm.eu.
And if you're the CEO of IBM and people start complaining about a picture of a kitten on fire posted on ibm.eu who do you think they're going to bitch to first? As a private citizen, you're not even worth a memo compared to these multibillion dollar companies. No one visits johnjackson.com but THOUSANDS of people visit ibm.com DAILY.
if someone wants to pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to waste.
Reports of people selling web addresses that were nothing more than family names for tens of thousands was common in the '90s. Where have you been for the past ten years?
Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs?
Let the courts figure that out. They're what they're for.
In the end, all the Elder Scrolls games reward you for doing everything with your character while having the highest possible magicka and hitpoints possible (with magicka being more important).
Sure if you like being a magic/alchemy nerd that can barely hold all of his potions let alone armor and a weapon.
The leveling system in the Elder Scroll games were always 'OK' as long as you didn't try making a 'jack-of-all-trades master-of-none' character. Try creating a character class with athletics, acrobatics, sneak, security, illusion, restoration and marksman (half of those skills are useless in combat and the other half causes your levels to skyrocket since they're so useful/easy to skill up) and watch as you get creamed by daedra, vampires and anything that uses a shield.
On the other hand, create a class with block, blade/blunt/hand-to-hand, heavy/light armor and any other skills of your choice and you can plow through the entire game with the expection of the Thieves Guild quests. (The first three skills turn you into the perfect Warrior and the Thieves Guild penalizes you for unauthorized murder on the job.)
You can blame the RIAA and the fear of innovating for Apple's runaway success. The Apple Music Store flat-out works plug-and-play, other services like Napster do not. The iPod is sexy looking, iPod copycats like the iNomad do not. The iPod is (now) a camera, a portable movie/TV episode player and a radio player, iPod knockoffs either do none of the above, some of the above or simply do them poorly. The Apple Music Store has (relatively) good selections and almost no restrictions, other stores have iffy selections and unusual restrictions (blame the RIAA.)
Admittedly the iPod has its flaws (its durability is one of the worst without a cover) but overall, its by far the best in the market.
And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?
What about Fred McDonald, Cindy Dunn and Dan Franklin? Hell what about insanely common names like Tony, Chang, Bob or Steven? I once talked a school teacher who had THREE Stevens, two Elizabeths and two Megans in one class for a whole school year. You can't use a lottery system for name purchasing simply because you want things to be 'fair.'
I say just give major companies first dibs if the address name is the same as the LEGALLY REGISTERED company name in that/those countries (Microsoft.eu, Apple.eu, Dell.eu, McDonalds.eu, etc) after that, its all free game. Right now what we're seeing is simple extortion. I was able to register X web address and now you need to pay me Y amount of money or I'll slander your company name for YEARS using the most obvious web address for your company. (Lindows anyone?)
Um, spend about 6 months cracking different versions of firmware only to have Sony update it regularly whenever you put a game/movie in? Then realize that its no longer worth the trouble of cracking version X.00 and beyond only to have your PS3 turned into an oversized, overpriced paperweight because you can't play anything official without destroying all your homebrewed software on it?
No, posse up a few grand
Few grand!? Whoa! If I had a few grand I'd simply buy a PC!
Professional developers are already bitching about how new, complicated and difficult it is to code for the Cell processor already. What makes you think the open source community is going be crack the firmware and then be able to code for it like some homebrewed Linux box?
[Danseglio] cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines.
One computer, easy. 2,000+? No freakin way.
One that should work in any enterprise environment as well (assuming that there are only 3-4 different builds).
3-4 different builds? Have you ever worked tech support for any company of any size? I once worked at a company with less than 10 employees and there were 5 different builds. The president's personal travel laptop, the VP's, the accountant's, the central server and everyone else's standard build. With 2,000+ machines I'd assume theres at least 50+ different builds within that branch alone.
Actually, the entire competition was very hush-hush and rarely spoken of, let alone known even after it ended.
The contest page was visited 48.000 times but we received 0 applications. No one showed up.
48,000 visits? Slashdot probably gets that many visits in an hour and we're supposed to be impressed? If they said 480,000 or even 4.8 million unique visits, I'd be more understanding but 48,000? Thats NOTHING by internet standards.
So theorically it wouldn't be too hard to create a "World of Starcraft"... It would require a graphical overhaul, but thats nothing since they managed put some Starcraft units in Warcraft 3 as easter eggs. Gameplay-wise, its all there, PvE, PvP, raids/armies, fighting on mounts = vehicles, melee combat, ranged combat etc.
Then theres the nitpicking, but otherwise its all there. Storyline, key NPCs, THREE seperate sides with openings for cross-cooperation, planets and locations they can pull out of their ass... (Whoever heard of The Temple of Atal'Hakkar or Gnomeregan prior to WoW?)
Sony conversely during the rootkit fiasco within days removed the rootkit.
The rootkit fiasco existed for MONTHS before they acknowledged and admitted it publicly. They even tried to blame it on other companies. I don't know where you got the 'days' estimate.
They didn't fight this in court for years and years.
Thats because the courts kissed Sony's asses and let them have their way. The rootkit installed itself without showing an/the EULA and without asking for permission. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure thats illegal in the U.S.
Agreed, I think thats one of the biggest problems with these surveys. Sony has one of the biggest/widest marketshares/mindshares in the electronics industry GLOBALLY. Of course its gonna get top marks in a popularity contest. Thats like comparing a Ford to a BMW, BMW's cars could explode if you leave them out in the sun and they'd still score higher in terms of popularity.
Microsoft on the other hand freakin gets slammed every 5 minutes by a different media source, small and large. For crying out loud, Slashdot simply scoffs and says "ANOTHER security update? Dupe!" when theres a new security alert. Of course customers/consumers are going to be paranoid of them.
Heck just look at the different responses between the rootkit fiasco and government reaction to Windows. Sony gets off with a slap on the wrist and a few reports on the major news networks. Microsoft on the other hand gets dragged into court for YEARS, gets sued in MULTIPLE countries, its basicly told to butcher its own work only to have consumers ignore the hack job versions AND it gets threatened AGAIN when they try to ship a new version of Windows with anti-virus software. Which of the two do you think is going to be more popular even for the educated, news following, tech savvy person?
I don't like Microsoft as much as anyone else (Goddamnit Microsoft quit spreading yourself out and focus on a product line so they're all not crappy half-done pieces of work) but saying Microsoft is pure crap compared to Sony is like saying a terrorist is SO MUCH worse than a murderer. They both kill people, the only difference is one gets a wider, and thus worse, reputation for his actions.
If they simply abandoned the old 'the player MUST be the hero' mentality. Its so ingrained into games that we recognize when its NOT used. (Halo and Half-Life 1 + 2's you've won the battle but not the war endings, virtually any Star Wars game/battle/war's over but at a terrible cost ending due to the Republic senate/Jedi Council's past actions/inactions, Starcraft's you win the battles but if you didn't change sides between campaigns you would've been on the losing side of the war all being well known cases.)
MMORPGs COULD be called RPGs, IF they simply got over the idea that the players MUST end up being better than 90% of the enemies in the game. (WoW's end game gear is so overpowering that stories of people equiped in epic tier 2 gear doing 1-on-3 no epic equiped players and winning are not uncommon. Theres are even complaints about high level enchants being usable by low level players, essentially turning matches into level 20ish people versus level 30ish-par equiped players.) This is why I think quick reward MMOs such as WoW are doomed to fail in the long run. Constantly creating 'uber-gear' ultimately leads to players belittling the rest of the game content and boredom FAST.
Hardware horsepower makes it far easier to build games with a wider scope for play.
Thats true, but then wheres the software to take advantage of all this new hardware? There are 3+ GHz processors out on the market for less than $200, yet the most hardware intensive things available are computer graphics, which have unrealisticly high levels for casual use/creation besides video games. Physics usage is new only because of prior software immaturity (UT2k3 had ragdoll physics but you didn't see much showcasing of it especially since most gamers ignored it at the first week) and because most developers really couldn't find a way to implement it into games without it being nothing more than a gimmick. (Which is where a lot of anti-HL2 protesters get their claims about the game being nothing more than a showcase for the game engine.)
They made heavy use of the fact that there was physics in the game -- and that depended on the hardware horsepower of the XBox.
No offense, but have you even played Halo 1 or 2? Physics is that game is really nothing more than eye candy 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time where physics in the game really matters is when you take the time to VERY slowly (the 4 grenades of each limit really bogs things down) move things around the environment to your advantage. (On levels where there were those Covenant crates, it was possible to use them as a source of movable cover, assuming the enemies didn't rush you or have some serious firepower or the fact that you had to move them inches at a time.)
The GameCube controller is just the Dual Shock with no L1, L3, R3, or Select buttons, and the D-pad and left stick are switched, and the L2 and R2 are analog like on the Dreamcast controller and Dual Shock 2.
Wow, two extra shoulder buttons and the ability to press down on the analog sticks (which almost no game uses because you can't hold them down while pushing at full force) suddenly makes a superior controller? Keeping the D-pad as a primary means of control was a mistake from the get-go, every serious gamer realized that when the N64 showcased Goldeneye and even Nintendo has stated that they simply kept the D-pad for the N64 because developers asked for it. The shoulder buttons on the Gamecube are analog as well, developers just don't use them too often because it leads to confusion over control setups. ("How hard do I press down?")
If you really want to nitpick, Sony simply ripped off Nintendo's controller design from the beginning. The ORIGINAL PS1 controller had no analog sticks, it was a knock-off SNES controller with two extra shoulder buttons. The Dual Shock simply added two analog sticks, which most developers refused to support at first in fear of alienating those who refused to update. The Dual Shock 2 was an insult, basicly being nothing more than another update with many gamers (rightfully) simply buying dirt cheap Dual Shock 1 controllers for the PS1 and plugging them into their PS2s.
it takes some thing special for me to play something that doesn't have quad damage and a rocket launcher.
Or you could simply find some trick (or simply create a mod using the insanely easy to use content creator) and create a super enchanted weapon that could kill anything in an area the size of a small town in one shot using the in game weapon Enchanting. It was so bad in the previous game, Morrowind, people figured out how to essentially give themselves god mode without leaving town, leveling up or cheating/modding all in game.
Heck, people even figured out how to do a speed run through Morrowind in under 10 minutes. You can be INSANELY powerful if you know what to do, how to do it and when to do it in any of the TES games.
When it comes to printed media (such as books), generally 'fanmade' stuff is frowned upon generally because its sold for profit (to cover the cost of printing of course). In addition, because content is released so slowly 'fanmade' works can be too easily mistaken or accepted as "official" works. (the sheer amount of Star Wars fanmade works are impossible to accurately keep track of, especially since between '83 to '99 there were no 'new' Star Wars movies).
As for Anne McCaffrey, if you read any of her books, its not surprising to see that she squelched fan artists. A huge amount of stuff in the books rely heavily on the reader's imaginations.
The books were writing for the original Doom 1 and the last book of the series published in 1996. From the Amazon short description on the fourth Doom book, Endgame...
The war for Earth is over. But the battle for the stars has just begun...
Battle for the stars? Wtf? I thought the whole story revolved around daemons from hell. I'm pretty sure the books are non-canon.
You are on mars and they have accidently opened the gates of hell. Go kill deamons...
Who said it was accidental? And who said your objective was to kill the daemons? Half the time you're simply trying to survive one way or another (Fall back to HQ, rally with a unit trying to call for help, regroup at Delta Labs.)
a variety of aliens from other worlds working for either the combine or allied with you,
What variety of aliens? All the enemies in the game were either mutated/brainwashed humans or Xen wildlife that had tagged along for the ride during the invasion.
the local sell-outs working with the evil aliens
Gee, wow. Two humans. Thats an accurate gauge for measuring the number of human sell-outs.
the resistance fighters who have sprung up to fight against the new overloards
Yeah, I didn't see that one coming.../sarcasm
The G-man who is your 'boss' (through no choice of your own)
Technically, you DID have a choice at the end of Half-Life 1... (And some players have actually speculated that if the G-man didn't disarm you it WOULD have been possible to fight off that army, without God mode, although it would've been a hardcore fight of endurance.)
your struggle to find a way to thwart their plans to take over the world
Uhh... they already took over the world and all you did at the end of Half-Life 2 was blow up their Frontline HQ and not THE HQ of the Combine. Thats akin to blowing up an enemy outpost when their main base is in a different hemisphere.
The storyline was pisspoor. Classic underdog resistance overthrows alien invaders... in ONE city. You didn't even directly attack their HQ either. You spent 90% of the game trying to Reach the Resistance/Flee a beseiged Resistance base/outpost. And then the game ends more or less telling you, "Good job but this was just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, so everything you just did was largely worthless and its (presumably) back into stasis for you." This is all IN GAME as well, no out of game "Well Valve said..." additions to the storyline either.
The US is getting close to making sure all encrypted communication has back doors for the government.
Wow, you need to lay off on the 1990 paranoid theories. Back doors into software are so easily cracked (50~100 corporate programmers versus 500~1000 skilled/curious/hobbist "lets take it apart and see how it works just for fun" programmers online) no programmer uses them anymore.
The overall problem the parent posts are trying to bring up is the fact that a HUGE amount of 'backstory' (for the lack of a better word) doesn't exist IN GAME. Even the link you showed is full of flaws and is largely extrapolated.
Under the supervision of researchers Eli Vance and Dr.Kleiner, crystals are retrieved from Xen, and organisms are analyzed.
In Half-Life 1, the scientists reacted to the headcrabs as if it was the first time they had seen them. With the exception of the experimental weapons (which could be justified as nothing more than experimental future weapons, don't forget assault rifles were experimentally used in the 1940's but were only fully adopted in the 60's), theres no evidence of any alien technology besides the alien artifact in the beginning.
1.3. The Portal Storms
Pure extrapolation. No evidence to support this entire segment. Considering the Combine's advanced technology and comparisons to modern human technology, a worldwide invasion in 7 hours (according to the in game newspaper clipping) is easy. Hit key military installations via a blitzkrieg air assault (a jet fighter can fly across the world in under 12 hours, alien technology could easily halve this), threaten the political leadership with military superiority (parking a tank on the front lawn usually does the trick) and the war ends when governments realize they can't use the nuclear option (Can't launch nukes through teleporters you don't even know about.)
Breen surrenders Earth to the Combine, explaining that the Combine are here for good, to immortalize humanity.
Actually near the end of Half-Life 2, Breen is reluctant to flee to the Combine homeworld since he would be forced to abandon his human body. Sounds like hes simply doing it for power by any means necessary.
The whole Half-Life storyline is extremely poor. In game theres virtually nothing, its like an action/mystery story without the answer at the end. Gameplay-wise its awesome, but storyline-wise Doom 3 had a stronger storyline in comparison.
If I'm PAYING for a service, I expect that service to be ready and waiting WHEN I SAY SO. I don't pay for cable TV only to have the cable company say "whoops, you can't watch TV right now cause we crashed the systems during an update." I don't pay for internet service only to be told "you can't surf the net at peak times because we're too cheap to upgrade our systems." I don't pay Blizzard only to be told "you can't log onto WoW because our infrastruction is a mess, but we won't admit it after 1+ year of running."
Don't like it? I don't see anyone forcing you to play.
Yeah, thats why I cancelled my subscription last week after just three months. This is not 1997 when MMOs like Ultima Online could get away with horrible connection issues and claim "well thats what happens when your the first one out."
Slashdot Mirror
Smaller doses, lead bullets are encased in metal casing (not to mention the encased within clips as well) and radiation has this tendancy to leak through anything less dense than lead.
M1A1 DU rounds are handled by the case, not by the "bullet" part, and the penetrator is encased in a sabot anyways. Most of the ammo handling for the A10 is done with machines, unless you are counting loading the loader.
True, but again when your talking about HUNDREDS of these rounds being loaded, unloaded, carried and then put into tanks the radiation adds up. If I sneeze on you once chances are you're not going to get sick. If I sneeze on you everyday, over the course of a few months and you don't take any medicine chances are you're going to at least develop some symptoms.
As for depleted uranium bombs being used in Yugoslavia, I have no clue where the parent post got that. Given the amount of media attention given to the war at the time (ZOMG genocide in Europe again?! Its a modern day Hitler, someone bring Churchill back from the dead!11!!) I think this fact (if it was true) would be more common knowledge.
WoW has been suffering from a series of community rumbling lately (no thanks to their continued server instability and PvP queues), the NextGen consoles are flat-out too expensive for the average teenage college student ($300 for the regular Xbox360 and the PS3 reportedly being $500+ is enough to pay a month's rent in some areas not to mention games and accessories) and Madden sales have gone flat thanks to EA's poor improvements and Sega's (arguably) better Blitz series.
No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com? What if I immigrated to the EU or had my citizenship changed, do I get to reserve steven.eu or steven.cn or steven.hk as well?
Heck I should charge people for using the name 'Steven' because its "legally" mine! /sarcasm
You have two and ONLY two "fair" choices... Pure random lottery, or first-come-first-serve.
Or you could let people and companies petition beforehand to reserve certain web addresses. Microsoft Corp.? Fine, they get microsoft.eu. Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no. Apple Corp. and Paul McCartney in contest over apple.eu? We'll place that on hold until the courts can make a decision. Joe Somebody wants imasuperl33td00d.eu? Fine, whatever.
If I own something that you want and I don't want to give it to you, that does not count as extortion.
Except you're seeing PRIVATE INDIVIDUALLY charging MILLIONS of dollars for web names. Face it, the majority of these .eu web address purchase rushes are for the purpose of extortion. Apple.eu, Microsoft.eu and Dell.eu would all fetch a couple million easy. They're all multi-BILLION dollar companies, a few million is not that hard to squeeze out of them.
It does not bother me in the least if someone other than IBM owns ibm.eu.
And if you're the CEO of IBM and people start complaining about a picture of a kitten on fire posted on ibm.eu who do you think they're going to bitch to first? As a private citizen, you're not even worth a memo compared to these multibillion dollar companies. No one visits johnjackson.com but THOUSANDS of people visit ibm.com DAILY.
if someone wants to pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to waste.
Reports of people selling web addresses that were nothing more than family names for tens of thousands was common in the '90s. Where have you been for the past ten years?
Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs?
Let the courts figure that out. They're what they're for.
Sure if you like being a magic/alchemy nerd that can barely hold all of his potions let alone armor and a weapon.
The leveling system in the Elder Scroll games were always 'OK' as long as you didn't try making a 'jack-of-all-trades master-of-none' character. Try creating a character class with athletics, acrobatics, sneak, security, illusion, restoration and marksman (half of those skills are useless in combat and the other half causes your levels to skyrocket since they're so useful/easy to skill up) and watch as you get creamed by daedra, vampires and anything that uses a shield.
On the other hand, create a class with block, blade/blunt/hand-to-hand, heavy/light armor and any other skills of your choice and you can plow through the entire game with the expection of the Thieves Guild quests. (The first three skills turn you into the perfect Warrior and the Thieves Guild penalizes you for unauthorized murder on the job.)
Admittedly the iPod has its flaws (its durability is one of the worst without a cover) but overall, its by far the best in the market.
What about Fred McDonald, Cindy Dunn and Dan Franklin? Hell what about insanely common names like Tony, Chang, Bob or Steven? I once talked a school teacher who had THREE Stevens, two Elizabeths and two Megans in one class for a whole school year. You can't use a lottery system for name purchasing simply because you want things to be 'fair.'
I say just give major companies first dibs if the address name is the same as the LEGALLY REGISTERED company name in that/those countries (Microsoft.eu, Apple.eu, Dell.eu, McDonalds.eu, etc) after that, its all free game. Right now what we're seeing is simple extortion. I was able to register X web address and now you need to pay me Y amount of money or I'll slander your company name for YEARS using the most obvious web address for your company. (Lindows anyone?)
Um, spend about 6 months cracking different versions of firmware only to have Sony update it regularly whenever you put a game/movie in? Then realize that its no longer worth the trouble of cracking version X.00 and beyond only to have your PS3 turned into an oversized, overpriced paperweight because you can't play anything official without destroying all your homebrewed software on it?
No, posse up a few grand
Few grand!? Whoa! If I had a few grand I'd simply buy a PC!
Professional developers are already bitching about how new, complicated and difficult it is to code for the Cell processor already. What makes you think the open source community is going be crack the firmware and then be able to code for it like some homebrewed Linux box?
One computer, easy. 2,000+? No freakin way.
One that should work in any enterprise environment as well (assuming that there are only 3-4 different builds).
3-4 different builds? Have you ever worked tech support for any company of any size? I once worked at a company with less than 10 employees and there were 5 different builds. The president's personal travel laptop, the VP's, the accountant's, the central server and everyone else's standard build. With 2,000+ machines I'd assume theres at least 50+ different builds within that branch alone.
The contest page was visited 48.000 times but we received 0 applications. No one showed up.
48,000 visits? Slashdot probably gets that many visits in an hour and we're supposed to be impressed? If they said 480,000 or even 4.8 million unique visits, I'd be more understanding but 48,000? Thats NOTHING by internet standards.
Then theres the nitpicking, but otherwise its all there. Storyline, key NPCs, THREE seperate sides with openings for cross-cooperation, planets and locations they can pull out of their ass... (Whoever heard of The Temple of Atal'Hakkar or Gnomeregan prior to WoW?)
The rootkit fiasco existed for MONTHS before they acknowledged and admitted it publicly. They even tried to blame it on other companies. I don't know where you got the 'days' estimate.
They didn't fight this in court for years and years.
Thats because the courts kissed Sony's asses and let them have their way. The rootkit installed itself without showing an/the EULA and without asking for permission. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure thats illegal in the U.S.
Thats the simplest way of looking at it.
Microsoft on the other hand freakin gets slammed every 5 minutes by a different media source, small and large. For crying out loud, Slashdot simply scoffs and says "ANOTHER security update? Dupe!" when theres a new security alert. Of course customers/consumers are going to be paranoid of them.
Heck just look at the different responses between the rootkit fiasco and government reaction to Windows. Sony gets off with a slap on the wrist and a few reports on the major news networks. Microsoft on the other hand gets dragged into court for YEARS, gets sued in MULTIPLE countries, its basicly told to butcher its own work only to have consumers ignore the hack job versions AND it gets threatened AGAIN when they try to ship a new version of Windows with anti-virus software. Which of the two do you think is going to be more popular even for the educated, news following, tech savvy person?
I don't like Microsoft as much as anyone else (Goddamnit Microsoft quit spreading yourself out and focus on a product line so they're all not crappy half-done pieces of work) but saying Microsoft is pure crap compared to Sony is like saying a terrorist is SO MUCH worse than a murderer. They both kill people, the only difference is one gets a wider, and thus worse, reputation for his actions.
MMORPGs COULD be called RPGs, IF they simply got over the idea that the players MUST end up being better than 90% of the enemies in the game. (WoW's end game gear is so overpowering that stories of people equiped in epic tier 2 gear doing 1-on-3 no epic equiped players and winning are not uncommon. Theres are even complaints about high level enchants being usable by low level players, essentially turning matches into level 20ish people versus level 30ish-par equiped players.) This is why I think quick reward MMOs such as WoW are doomed to fail in the long run. Constantly creating 'uber-gear' ultimately leads to players belittling the rest of the game content and boredom FAST.
Five, if you count the Z-button.
Thats true, but then wheres the software to take advantage of all this new hardware? There are 3+ GHz processors out on the market for less than $200, yet the most hardware intensive things available are computer graphics, which have unrealisticly high levels for casual use/creation besides video games. Physics usage is new only because of prior software immaturity (UT2k3 had ragdoll physics but you didn't see much showcasing of it especially since most gamers ignored it at the first week) and because most developers really couldn't find a way to implement it into games without it being nothing more than a gimmick. (Which is where a lot of anti-HL2 protesters get their claims about the game being nothing more than a showcase for the game engine.)
They made heavy use of the fact that there was physics in the game -- and that depended on the hardware horsepower of the XBox.
No offense, but have you even played Halo 1 or 2? Physics is that game is really nothing more than eye candy 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time where physics in the game really matters is when you take the time to VERY slowly (the 4 grenades of each limit really bogs things down) move things around the environment to your advantage. (On levels where there were those Covenant crates, it was possible to use them as a source of movable cover, assuming the enemies didn't rush you or have some serious firepower or the fact that you had to move them inches at a time.)
Wow, two extra shoulder buttons and the ability to press down on the analog sticks (which almost no game uses because you can't hold them down while pushing at full force) suddenly makes a superior controller? Keeping the D-pad as a primary means of control was a mistake from the get-go, every serious gamer realized that when the N64 showcased Goldeneye and even Nintendo has stated that they simply kept the D-pad for the N64 because developers asked for it. The shoulder buttons on the Gamecube are analog as well, developers just don't use them too often because it leads to confusion over control setups. ("How hard do I press down?")
If you really want to nitpick, Sony simply ripped off Nintendo's controller design from the beginning. The ORIGINAL PS1 controller had no analog sticks, it was a knock-off SNES controller with two extra shoulder buttons. The Dual Shock simply added two analog sticks, which most developers refused to support at first in fear of alienating those who refused to update. The Dual Shock 2 was an insult, basicly being nothing more than another update with many gamers (rightfully) simply buying dirt cheap Dual Shock 1 controllers for the PS1 and plugging them into their PS2s.
Or you could simply find some trick (or simply create a mod using the insanely easy to use content creator) and create a super enchanted weapon that could kill anything in an area the size of a small town in one shot using the in game weapon Enchanting. It was so bad in the previous game, Morrowind, people figured out how to essentially give themselves god mode without leaving town, leveling up or cheating/modding all in game.
Heck, people even figured out how to do a speed run through Morrowind in under 10 minutes. You can be INSANELY powerful if you know what to do, how to do it and when to do it in any of the TES games.
As for Anne McCaffrey, if you read any of her books, its not surprising to see that she squelched fan artists. A huge amount of stuff in the books rely heavily on the reader's imaginations.
The war for Earth is over. But the battle for the stars has just begun...
Battle for the stars? Wtf? I thought the whole story revolved around daemons from hell. I'm pretty sure the books are non-canon.
Who said it was accidental? And who said your objective was to kill the daemons? Half the time you're simply trying to survive one way or another (Fall back to HQ, rally with a unit trying to call for help, regroup at Delta Labs.)
a variety of aliens from other worlds working for either the combine or allied with you,
What variety of aliens? All the enemies in the game were either mutated/brainwashed humans or Xen wildlife that had tagged along for the ride during the invasion.
the local sell-outs working with the evil aliens
Gee, wow. Two humans. Thats an accurate gauge for measuring the number of human sell-outs.
the resistance fighters who have sprung up to fight against the new overloards
Yeah, I didn't see that one coming... /sarcasm
The G-man who is your 'boss' (through no choice of your own)
Technically, you DID have a choice at the end of Half-Life 1... (And some players have actually speculated that if the G-man didn't disarm you it WOULD have been possible to fight off that army, without God mode, although it would've been a hardcore fight of endurance.)
your struggle to find a way to thwart their plans to take over the world
Uhh... they already took over the world and all you did at the end of Half-Life 2 was blow up their Frontline HQ and not THE HQ of the Combine. Thats akin to blowing up an enemy outpost when their main base is in a different hemisphere.
The storyline was pisspoor. Classic underdog resistance overthrows alien invaders... in ONE city. You didn't even directly attack their HQ either. You spent 90% of the game trying to Reach the Resistance/Flee a beseiged Resistance base/outpost. And then the game ends more or less telling you, "Good job but this was just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, so everything you just did was largely worthless and its (presumably) back into stasis for you." This is all IN GAME as well, no out of game "Well Valve said..." additions to the storyline either.
Wow, you need to lay off on the 1990 paranoid theories. Back doors into software are so easily cracked (50~100 corporate programmers versus 500~1000 skilled/curious/hobbist "lets take it apart and see how it works just for fun" programmers online) no programmer uses them anymore.
The overall problem the parent posts are trying to bring up is the fact that a HUGE amount of 'backstory' (for the lack of a better word) doesn't exist IN GAME. Even the link you showed is full of flaws and is largely extrapolated.
Under the supervision of researchers Eli Vance and Dr.Kleiner, crystals are retrieved from Xen, and organisms are analyzed.
In Half-Life 1, the scientists reacted to the headcrabs as if it was the first time they had seen them. With the exception of the experimental weapons (which could be justified as nothing more than experimental future weapons, don't forget assault rifles were experimentally used in the 1940's but were only fully adopted in the 60's), theres no evidence of any alien technology besides the alien artifact in the beginning.
1.3. The Portal Storms
Pure extrapolation. No evidence to support this entire segment. Considering the Combine's advanced technology and comparisons to modern human technology, a worldwide invasion in 7 hours (according to the in game newspaper clipping) is easy. Hit key military installations via a blitzkrieg air assault (a jet fighter can fly across the world in under 12 hours, alien technology could easily halve this), threaten the political leadership with military superiority (parking a tank on the front lawn usually does the trick) and the war ends when governments realize they can't use the nuclear option (Can't launch nukes through teleporters you don't even know about.)
Breen surrenders Earth to the Combine, explaining that the Combine are here for good, to immortalize humanity.
Actually near the end of Half-Life 2, Breen is reluctant to flee to the Combine homeworld since he would be forced to abandon his human body. Sounds like hes simply doing it for power by any means necessary.
The whole Half-Life storyline is extremely poor. In game theres virtually nothing, its like an action/mystery story without the answer at the end. Gameplay-wise its awesome, but storyline-wise Doom 3 had a stronger storyline in comparison.
Don't like it? I don't see anyone forcing you to play.
Yeah, thats why I cancelled my subscription last week after just three months. This is not 1997 when MMOs like Ultima Online could get away with horrible connection issues and claim "well thats what happens when your the first one out."