To me the feel had little to do with the engine. It was the gameplay. The story, the characters, the decision taking, the fact that I thought long and hard about what can chance the nature of a man despite knowing full well that it had no impact on the game what you choose(?). Could have done it with quake engine and it still would have been PST.
I have recently replayed it and the graphics are way past it. Not as bad as one of my other all favorite games, X-com apocalypse but still enough to distract. I also recently played Icewind dale 1 and 2 (wich started me on a replay of PST) and 2 definitly aged better because of the higher graphics option.
I just never noticed a real difference in the controls of the game, just totally different ways of doing an RPG.
Anyway good luck with the project, must be a hell of a job to do. Just hope you find someway to increase the resolution:P
Your example line is perfectly correct and unix works like that too, minus the c:\ crap bit replace it with the root /
../../../../home and/home are (on my setup the same directory. The root.. just points back to the the / dir. So you can do as many../ as you want. Try it.
Not sure if the same is true on dos but it should be else you could go some place weird just by doing a cd.. to many.
Blocking alternative fuel depends entirely on the block working. If somehow such a blockade is broken by some third party then the fuel companies will have spend a lot of money on giving someone else a free market.
It is like price fixing, keeping the prices high by making agreements between all the parties only works if all the parties keep to it. This is hard as in it will also make it extremely lucrative to then go under the fixed price and get all the business.
So the fuel companies are researching very hard because to them it is better to be in the future the hydrogen industry at the cost of some profit to their current petroleum industry then risk a future where they will be the petroleam industry when the market has gone hydrogen. Further more there will still be a market for oil, just what do you think plastics come from?
Such a system as this would still have to be built by someone. BP/Shell doesn't care how they make money. Who does care? Goverments, no fuel tax on hydrogen yet. Same with bio-diesel. Or how about the arab nations. Without the dependency of oil exactly who would give a shit anymore?
Make the car a not so asshole american version removing at least 2 tons from the weight to be moved. Now put the solar panels on the roof of the house as well as the other equipment saving yet more weight and space plus gaining a lot of area for solar panels.
So what you got? Free fuel when you park the car at your house. Will enough be generated? Well depending on the money and eviromental cost of the setup it might make a difference not just because of less fuel consumed but also in less fuel consumed getting the fuel to you.
A few miles isn't that impressive yet but if you can save a few liters of bought fuel per day it might start to add up.
Planescape Torment remains to me one the finest RPG's I ever played and one of the best computer games around. Sadly I am one of the few who bought it when it came out and there is little chance of an official sequel. It is still popular on bittorrent sites but of course that is only extra proof to game studios that there is no money in a sequel.
However I am a bit worried about them using the PT engine to create their addon. PT did have a problem and that was the engine. It had a rather limited resolution and it does hurt. Yes the game was very very nice but nowadays we expect better pictures.
Good luck to them although I do have my doubts, any team that can lose so much work due to a simple HD failure might not have what it takes to truly make an RPG. An RPG is not like a Quake map or even a total conversion. It needs story telling but also needs various threads of stories to work together. Can someone who can't make a succesfull backup strategie really be counted on making a social RPG (lots of decisions affecting lots of things) work?
I hope so but won't get my hopes up.
I am also kinda puzzled why they are not using a more modern engine. To me Planescape was the story and the fact you could talk your way out of most scraps coupled with the detailed NPC's who were more then just an extra set of weapons on legs. The art was far less important since it was so low res anyway, couldn't they be done in the Neverwinter engine?
It is so simple it will never occur to anyone in hollywood. A group of marins is stationed on mars at research facility to keep the peace. It is an important post and the duty is peacefull but requires lots of discipline to exist as a civilian peacekeeper so in contrast to all hollywood movies the marines are well trained and disciplined and selected for their stable family backgrounds and general good social skills. They can be a mixture of all races and religion but they are all okay with each other.
They are commanded by a hardbitten veteran sergeant for who this is a reward, a few easy years at a top post before his retirement. He does not a chip on his shoulder about anything. New is the officer but he is smart, knows his stuff, knows to use his NCO's and that sometimes orders are there to be disobeyed. None of his family had been killed by anyone and he is single.
In the first ten minutes we learn a little about how nice and stable they all are and see a bit of the base. Perhaps get a few hints about some Big Fucking Gun being developed and meet the system administrator, a nice tomboy girl with no hangups and also single. She and the officer take an instant "dis"like to each other and trade funny one liners.
Remember this takes about ten minutes. During the opening credits. Then the movie starts and hell breaks loose as the research goes wrong.
From then on we don't got any lines longer then two sentences. The "story" is basically the sergeant and the officer trying to get their team together (spread out across the base during the incident) with the help of the system admin (que banter and very light love interest) and then beat back the demons with the help of the tech gadgets hinted at during the intro with of course the final mission to collect the BFG and kill the boss demon.
After the first suprise no-one gets killed needlessly, everyone does their job with perhaps just a few civilians being funnily slaughtered because they do the stupid thing. None of the marines panick or betray the team or any of the hollywood crap. The team doesn't get smaller and smaller but gets bigger as the group gathers members.
In short? Band of Brothers Meets Alien. That is the Real men acting like real men in a future world with really nasty monsters and big explosions.
Avoid all the "incompetent officer" "hardbitten marine with broken home" "backstabbing civilian" "scream queen love interest" "slowly people getting killed off in incredibly stupid ways" and you won't need a "great story", the audience will be too relieved with your originality to care.
Doom doesn't have a story. I don't care what was in the readme, you just had several levels with increasing difficulty.
What it does have is a universe with certain symbols and actions that people who played doom will expect in the movie.
Except that that was exactly what was wrong with super mario brothers. There they had to bolt a story on a game universe that really didn't have a story yet keep the "regonizable" bits. Like the jumping boots, the walking bomb and other crap.
Doom is pretty close to the world of alien and we all know what a hit and miss that his been with people trying to tell their story and yet keep it fitting in the alien universe.
I hope that if this movie ever happens it will only take the art direction from the game. Any reference to game elements like searching for colored keycards, health packs, powerups will ruin it totally.
Frankly I think it is going to be as bad as all the other "he this is a popular game lets make it into a movie despite the fact that their is no story at all present and a lot of silly stuff people are going to expect wich aren't any fun and will totally confuse any member of the audience who doesn't know the game". History seems to agree with me.
If russia had wanted western europe it could have just rolled over the americans. The two land armies were totally mismatched. That is why america was so hot on the atomic bomb because it new that on land it didn't stand a change.
Tiny little problem was that for a long time america had no nukes and even later could have destroyed only a tiny percentage of the soviet union by wich time the soviets had the bomb as well and the whole nuclear balance of terror began.
Anyway america is in plenty of places right now and that isn't stopping anyone from fighting.
I was once part of a tiny company invited by xerox to give a proposal for project to do with the paperless office. This was xerox THE INTVENTER of the computer as we use it today coming to a tiny little upstart for a project. The entire presentation I was wondering were the candid camera was hidden.
That AT&T the creators of unix is now shopping for unix clones is intresting.
The PC people got the extra's free. The X-box people get to pay for it and, at least over here, also have to pay more for the game. So your screwed twice.
Also this hardly qualifies as an expansion pack, closer to the "extra" missions the better game companies sometimes put online to download. Missions that weren't good enough for the full game or to big for the minimum requirements but are downloadable if you want them.
Then again this has been happening less often recently.
Is this still a clutch system (not sure about the world, the sytem that disengages the motor from the gearbox)?
Usually when you shift in these systems you first will have to engage the clutch disengaging the transmission and then shift. Doing it without clutching is possible but sounds nasty.
I can imagine that a system would then refuse to release the clutch if the speeds are to mismatched but this would still slow you down (no power reaching the wheels after all) and not keep you going for an hour.
If it is more an F1 like setup where you press a button and the car clutches and shifts for you I can imagine it.
Yet both cases sounds like over-confidence. You can brake with your engine and if for some reason the real brakes fail it may be your only option. Removing a valid way of decelerating sounds stupid. If this is really the case then yes we have become to reliant on computers.
Thing go wrong, don't remove safety features. Why don't cars have a fuel cutoff near the drivers seat? After all he is between the fuel tank and the engine in 99% of the cases.
It is double fud. iTunes has drm and so does the iPod. Same as windows has. Except that it ain't enforced in both cases. So you can listen to "illegal" mp3's on every OS and most players.
Yes this is MS fud at its best. Lets investigate wich OS is used for the greatest amount of music copyright infringement. Could it possible be windows?
However it makes one wonder about the future of windows. Does this mean that in a future version you will no longer be able to play non-drm songs on MS software/hardware?
What I don't get is what does MS care? Just like Philips doesn't care about CD copying (it sold its music publishing but does still sell cd copiers) why does MS care?
Like all the music I have bought on lp or tapes or minidisc or even, yes shock horror CD.
Since I now listen to music on my PC, oh so much easier to just set it at random then to mess with changing cd's, or my Mp3 players all the old media is useless but I still have paid for it.
PC games are different and aimed at a different audience. Complaining that the PC doesn't have "on rails" shooters and the light guns for them is like complaining a ferrari doesn't have enough space for your extended family and luggage.
We got high resolution monitors and extreme amount of buttons on our controller (called a keyboard) Consoles got more "wacky" stuff. Is not like those consoles are so expensive you can't have both.
The PC problem with developing "nice" input devices is that the market is incredibly tiny. Many have already tried to create "the" game input device but faced with a market where 99% if the users are satisfied with their mouse keyboard combination there just aren't enough customers.
Even consoles have a heard time selling these things. Why do you think they are selling it as a bundle?
It isn't just true for the UN but for peace in general. Wether it is organisations like the EU, the benelux or for that matter the United States of America, all of them can only work if all the members want it to work.
Even peace can only work if both sides want peace. After WW2 the european nations more or less decided that there were to be no more wars (on european soil between european nations, the rest of the world was still open season) and because all of them decided it it happened. Even though spain and england have a dispute over the rock of gibraltar. Even though Ireland and England are in dispute. Even though most of the nations have a long long history of war with each other there has been peace.
But even in europe there are still wars, Northern Ireland and Baskenland, because in those cases one side doesn't want peace.
Or maybe I am using the wrong word. It is not so much a case of wanting or not wanting peace. It is a case of the various sides wanting or not wanting things but not considering war to be a way of achieving those wants.
Simple example. Drugs. The Netherlands has a rather liberal policy on it, France does not. In the past the frence goverment wanted holland to change its policy but not so badly as to go to war. Unlike america wich has gone to war over drugs.
The UN can only work if all the sides involved consider war not really to be an option. It is like those pub fights were arguments flare up and things get out of hand. In some cases both the fighters can't back down but really want a third person to step in and stop the fight allowing both to save face. If however one in the fight really wants the fight to happen the third party is powerless.
Of course the world is not a pub. In a pub you got maybe 4 sides, the two fighters, those who want to watch a fight and those who don't. The world has got close to two hundred countries with each country often having conflicting intrests. The fact that the UN still exists may be considered an achievement.
I think not. Simple fact is that BSD was there before Linux. So if BSD could have been Linux it had the chance.
The BSD license is liked by MS but hated by most other businesses. After all BSD is a license to take my/the companies work without ever having to give back. The GNU license wich Linux uses forces you to give back. Sure you can work from my work but in turn I will benefit from your work on my work. A giant communist or at least very socialist developement.
BSD is not to be ignored and its license makes it less of an obstacle to get bits adopted. BUT it cannot be used for shared developement as it invites for anti-social behaviour with people only taking.
Say you buy a new car, drive it out of the shop down the hill only to find that the brand new car with all the shining new features is missing steering and brakes. Then after you have crashed, your kids have been buried and you have after 2 years of legal battles and medical recovery the car company comes around and fixes the brakes. Would you then still feel you have something to complain about?
There are two kinds of people who complain about MS. Those with somekind of hatred towards MS for whatever reason and those who of us who are tired of the constant delays, promised features that are moved to the next version and just plain shoddy code.
It is like with IE, geezus MS how long is it going to take to get proper PNG support. Or with AMD, exactly what is taking so long to get 64bit support out? Linux and BSD got it now for ages, are opensource developers really that much better and more motivated?
The list goes on, Longhorn? The next big thing? Well not really, features and improvements are being dropped left right and center until what is left over is still just another point upgrade and not the much needed rewrite that windows needs.
If I need something done and you do it without being asked then I will be gratefull. If I ask you to do something and you do it then I will thank you. If I have to keep nagging you for years to do something and then finally you do it in a half-assed way then I am going to think your a fucking asshole.
Get married and you will find that this is pretty normal human behaviour.
Sure you could go to the local computer shop with your business needs and put your contract for say 200 machines with that shop who will then bend over backwards to help as your contract is the difference between success and bankruptcy but the suits want dell. Go figure.
MS is not at 2GB, stop being a MS drone
on
100 GB Email Account
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Hell they only recently started the upgrade to 250mb wich they had promised a long time ago. One of the usual hype then delay tactics of MS, it works for people like you apparently.
For the rest of us what counts is what is actually being offered to users at this moment.
This idea is insane and could possibly only be uttered by someone totally unaware of anything to do with flying/safety and common sense.
So exactly why would closing of the outside world be such a bad idea?
Aircraft instruments ain't failsafe. There have been countless incidents where instruments have failed not totally, easily spotted, but slightly (a direction finder slightly off, an altitude meter reading to high) off. Sure aircraft have redundant instruments and pilots are supposed to check but they don't. Even the fact that a plane got two pilots each with their own instruments has not proven enough in the past to prevent a disaster when the captain decides to follow his instrument readout.
So what does this have to do with windows? Well a look at the outside will quickly tell you a lot that you would take several instruments. Altitude, attitude, weather, air traffic, ground traffic. All pretty damn important.
Worse while pilots are trained to fly without outside references it does have the danger of the pilot loosing orientation. Thinking that up is down and such. I remember at least one crash investigation where the pilot was following his instruments into trying to correct the aircraft while he was in fact flying it straight into the ground.
So the above post is not informative. It is totally mis-informed. Pilots need their windows.
The stuff is still radioactive genius. This is just a way to contain the material. Store radio active waste in a barrel and it might break and the material leak out in to the enviroment. This will stop that but the blocks themselves still are as dangerous as if you just had the waste on its own. Glass is not known for its shielding properties.
This kinda thing is like the Windows XP skin. Removed in a few seconds by anyone who knows what they are doing. Why? Because it wastes time and desktop space. Those extra thick borders take up way more space and those scrolling menus take time to deploy wich if you are using your computer anywhere near serious is just a waste.
Same with this 3D pager crap. So now I got to sit and watch a 2-3 second animation each time I switch? Yippie!
Seriously who of the linux users really has the time for this? I am all for eye candy but not at the cost of either my working speed or taking up valuable desktop space.
I kinda like the way Enlightenment does it where you can drag a desktop over another and see them both at once partially although I have now switched the XFCE4 for its speed.
There may be a use for 3D on the desktop but so far nobody seems to have found it. About the only thing I can imagine is to go to 3D since you can then use the graphics cards power and offload the poor cpu.
The problem with most new gadgets including suns attempt is that they dare not break the current desktop design (because that would break all current application) and truly design a new interface.
As someone else pointed out, meaningless figures
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
How are the figures measured. It been pointed out already but apparently people keep falling for the simple "lets compare measurement A method with measurement B method" lie. There may be lies and damn lies and then there may be statistics but they all are nothing to when people compare different statistics.
In europe we got slightly more experience with it since it is so easy to get the news from another country. Pretty common for politicians claiming that their country does better because factor X is lower/higher then in other EU countries. Neatly forgetting that factor X is being calculated differently in all the countries.
It is so simple to do. First of all you can mess around by counting how many people there are in your country. In the modern world with illegal immigrants this can really screw up your stats. After all one way or another they are either taking jobs or being unemployed.
A second one is determining who is looking for a job. Is a student looking for a job? Most have side jobs so they have to count somewhere but are not in the market for a fulltime job. Same with 2 parent families, if one parent stays at home is that because they are unemployed or is that a life choice? If I can afford to retire but am still working age where am I counted? Just because I don't have to collect benefits doesn't mean I am not looking for a job.
Then there is how you count jobs. Not all jobs are equal especially not in non-minimum wage america. You can say 20.000 jobs or whatever have been created but what has really happened? If X high paying jobs have been replaced by X+20k starvation wage jobs then yes you have had job growth. Not sure if this is a good thing however.
Of course there is the nice thing of having seasonal work. Some seasons have more work then others. Very nice to measure at a seasonal peak to show how many extra jobs there are.
I don't know much about america but I seen to many shows and "documentaries" were american families are working 2 jobs per parent and still barely making ends meet to have much fate in your style of economy. A simple stat like the number of unemployed has very little meaning when you can have a 4 job household and still be in debt.
I am to lazy to look it up but I remember a movie with 2 ex american presidents being forced on a roadtrip together. At one point they take hitch a ride in car with a family. At first it is all peaches but then the presidents keep being to full of themselves and it comes out that they both created policies that make the family loose their job and their house. The family is not on trip. They are living in their car.
American really needs a third option but until things really hit the fan I don't think it will happen. Just a constant change between two sides who both are determined to screw america up and the rest of the world along with it.
Don't feel bad about it. Dutch politics is in the same shitter. The party that when I was young was totally ruining the country is back and they are taking off where they left off. Making holland into an american style ghetto with all the dis-advantages and none of the advantages. No matter how bad the americans screw their country up, we can do it better.
Slashdot Mirror
I have recently replayed it and the graphics are way past it. Not as bad as one of my other all favorite games, X-com apocalypse but still enough to distract. I also recently played Icewind dale 1 and 2 (wich started me on a replay of PST) and 2 definitly aged better because of the higher graphics option.
I just never noticed a real difference in the controls of the game, just totally different ways of doing an RPG.
Anyway good luck with the project, must be a hell of a job to do. Just hope you find someway to increase the resolution :P
../../../../home and /home are (on my setup the same directory. The root .. just points back to the the / dir. So you can do as many ../ as you want. Try it.
Not sure if the same is true on dos but it should be else you could go some place weird just by doing a cd .. to many.
It is like price fixing, keeping the prices high by making agreements between all the parties only works if all the parties keep to it. This is hard as in it will also make it extremely lucrative to then go under the fixed price and get all the business.
So the fuel companies are researching very hard because to them it is better to be in the future the hydrogen industry at the cost of some profit to their current petroleum industry then risk a future where they will be the petroleam industry when the market has gone hydrogen. Further more there will still be a market for oil, just what do you think plastics come from?
Such a system as this would still have to be built by someone. BP/Shell doesn't care how they make money. Who does care? Goverments, no fuel tax on hydrogen yet. Same with bio-diesel. Or how about the arab nations. Without the dependency of oil exactly who would give a shit anymore?
So what you got? Free fuel when you park the car at your house. Will enough be generated? Well depending on the money and eviromental cost of the setup it might make a difference not just because of less fuel consumed but also in less fuel consumed getting the fuel to you.
A few miles isn't that impressive yet but if you can save a few liters of bought fuel per day it might start to add up.
However I am a bit worried about them using the PT engine to create their addon. PT did have a problem and that was the engine. It had a rather limited resolution and it does hurt. Yes the game was very very nice but nowadays we expect better pictures.
Good luck to them although I do have my doubts, any team that can lose so much work due to a simple HD failure might not have what it takes to truly make an RPG. An RPG is not like a Quake map or even a total conversion. It needs story telling but also needs various threads of stories to work together. Can someone who can't make a succesfull backup strategie really be counted on making a social RPG (lots of decisions affecting lots of things) work?
I hope so but won't get my hopes up.
I am also kinda puzzled why they are not using a more modern engine. To me Planescape was the story and the fact you could talk your way out of most scraps coupled with the detailed NPC's who were more then just an extra set of weapons on legs. The art was far less important since it was so low res anyway, couldn't they be done in the Neverwinter engine?
They are commanded by a hardbitten veteran sergeant for who this is a reward, a few easy years at a top post before his retirement. He does not a chip on his shoulder about anything. New is the officer but he is smart, knows his stuff, knows to use his NCO's and that sometimes orders are there to be disobeyed. None of his family had been killed by anyone and he is single.
In the first ten minutes we learn a little about how nice and stable they all are and see a bit of the base. Perhaps get a few hints about some Big Fucking Gun being developed and meet the system administrator, a nice tomboy girl with no hangups and also single. She and the officer take an instant "dis"like to each other and trade funny one liners.
Remember this takes about ten minutes. During the opening credits. Then the movie starts and hell breaks loose as the research goes wrong.
From then on we don't got any lines longer then two sentences. The "story" is basically the sergeant and the officer trying to get their team together (spread out across the base during the incident) with the help of the system admin (que banter and very light love interest) and then beat back the demons with the help of the tech gadgets hinted at during the intro with of course the final mission to collect the BFG and kill the boss demon.
After the first suprise no-one gets killed needlessly, everyone does their job with perhaps just a few civilians being funnily slaughtered because they do the stupid thing. None of the marines panick or betray the team or any of the hollywood crap. The team doesn't get smaller and smaller but gets bigger as the group gathers members.
In short? Band of Brothers Meets Alien. That is the Real men acting like real men in a future world with really nasty monsters and big explosions.
Avoid all the "incompetent officer" "hardbitten marine with broken home" "backstabbing civilian" "scream queen love interest" "slowly people getting killed off in incredibly stupid ways" and you won't need a "great story", the audience will be too relieved with your originality to care.
What it does have is a universe with certain symbols and actions that people who played doom will expect in the movie.
Except that that was exactly what was wrong with super mario brothers. There they had to bolt a story on a game universe that really didn't have a story yet keep the "regonizable" bits. Like the jumping boots, the walking bomb and other crap.
Doom is pretty close to the world of alien and we all know what a hit and miss that his been with people trying to tell their story and yet keep it fitting in the alien universe.
I hope that if this movie ever happens it will only take the art direction from the game. Any reference to game elements like searching for colored keycards, health packs, powerups will ruin it totally.
Frankly I think it is going to be as bad as all the other "he this is a popular game lets make it into a movie despite the fact that their is no story at all present and a lot of silly stuff people are going to expect wich aren't any fun and will totally confuse any member of the audience who doesn't know the game". History seems to agree with me.
Tiny little problem was that for a long time america had no nukes and even later could have destroyed only a tiny percentage of the soviet union by wich time the soviets had the bomb as well and the whole nuclear balance of terror began.
Anyway america is in plenty of places right now and that isn't stopping anyone from fighting.
Just like it didn't in korea or vietnam.
That AT&T the creators of unix is now shopping for unix clones is intresting.
Also this hardly qualifies as an expansion pack, closer to the "extra" missions the better game companies sometimes put online to download. Missions that weren't good enough for the full game or to big for the minimum requirements but are downloadable if you want them.
Then again this has been happening less often recently.
Usually when you shift in these systems you first will have to engage the clutch disengaging the transmission and then shift. Doing it without clutching is possible but sounds nasty.
I can imagine that a system would then refuse to release the clutch if the speeds are to mismatched but this would still slow you down (no power reaching the wheels after all) and not keep you going for an hour.
If it is more an F1 like setup where you press a button and the car clutches and shifts for you I can imagine it.
Yet both cases sounds like over-confidence. You can brake with your engine and if for some reason the real brakes fail it may be your only option. Removing a valid way of decelerating sounds stupid. If this is really the case then yes we have become to reliant on computers.
Thing go wrong, don't remove safety features. Why don't cars have a fuel cutoff near the drivers seat? After all he is between the fuel tank and the engine in 99% of the cases.
Yes this is MS fud at its best. Lets investigate wich OS is used for the greatest amount of music copyright infringement. Could it possible be windows?
However it makes one wonder about the future of windows. Does this mean that in a future version you will no longer be able to play non-drm songs on MS software/hardware?
What I don't get is what does MS care? Just like Philips doesn't care about CD copying (it sold its music publishing but does still sell cd copiers) why does MS care?
Since I now listen to music on my PC, oh so much easier to just set it at random then to mess with changing cd's, or my Mp3 players all the old media is useless but I still have paid for it.
We got high resolution monitors and extreme amount of buttons on our controller (called a keyboard) Consoles got more "wacky" stuff. Is not like those consoles are so expensive you can't have both.
The PC problem with developing "nice" input devices is that the market is incredibly tiny. Many have already tried to create "the" game input device but faced with a market where 99% if the users are satisfied with their mouse keyboard combination there just aren't enough customers.
Even consoles have a heard time selling these things. Why do you think they are selling it as a bundle?
Even peace can only work if both sides want peace. After WW2 the european nations more or less decided that there were to be no more wars (on european soil between european nations, the rest of the world was still open season) and because all of them decided it it happened. Even though spain and england have a dispute over the rock of gibraltar. Even though Ireland and England are in dispute. Even though most of the nations have a long long history of war with each other there has been peace.
But even in europe there are still wars, Northern Ireland and Baskenland, because in those cases one side doesn't want peace.
Or maybe I am using the wrong word. It is not so much a case of wanting or not wanting peace. It is a case of the various sides wanting or not wanting things but not considering war to be a way of achieving those wants.
Simple example. Drugs. The Netherlands has a rather liberal policy on it, France does not. In the past the frence goverment wanted holland to change its policy but not so badly as to go to war. Unlike america wich has gone to war over drugs.
The UN can only work if all the sides involved consider war not really to be an option. It is like those pub fights were arguments flare up and things get out of hand. In some cases both the fighters can't back down but really want a third person to step in and stop the fight allowing both to save face. If however one in the fight really wants the fight to happen the third party is powerless.
Of course the world is not a pub. In a pub you got maybe 4 sides, the two fighters, those who want to watch a fight and those who don't. The world has got close to two hundred countries with each country often having conflicting intrests. The fact that the UN still exists may be considered an achievement.
The BSD license is liked by MS but hated by most other businesses. After all BSD is a license to take my/the companies work without ever having to give back. The GNU license wich Linux uses forces you to give back. Sure you can work from my work but in turn I will benefit from your work on my work. A giant communist or at least very socialist developement.
BSD is not to be ignored and its license makes it less of an obstacle to get bits adopted. BUT it cannot be used for shared developement as it invites for anti-social behaviour with people only taking.
There are two kinds of people who complain about MS. Those with somekind of hatred towards MS for whatever reason and those who of us who are tired of the constant delays, promised features that are moved to the next version and just plain shoddy code.
It is like with IE, geezus MS how long is it going to take to get proper PNG support. Or with AMD, exactly what is taking so long to get 64bit support out? Linux and BSD got it now for ages, are opensource developers really that much better and more motivated?
The list goes on, Longhorn? The next big thing? Well not really, features and improvements are being dropped left right and center until what is left over is still just another point upgrade and not the much needed rewrite that windows needs.
If I need something done and you do it without being asked then I will be gratefull. If I ask you to do something and you do it then I will thank you. If I have to keep nagging you for years to do something and then finally you do it in a half-assed way then I am going to think your a fucking asshole.
Get married and you will find that this is pretty normal human behaviour.
Sure you could go to the local computer shop with your business needs and put your contract for say 200 machines with that shop who will then bend over backwards to help as your contract is the difference between success and bankruptcy but the suits want dell. Go figure.
For the rest of us what counts is what is actually being offered to users at this moment.
He is a comedian, his estimate was clearly a joke. Anyone with a sense of humor would understand that there is no date set yet.
So exactly why would closing of the outside world be such a bad idea?
Aircraft instruments ain't failsafe. There have been countless incidents where instruments have failed not totally, easily spotted, but slightly (a direction finder slightly off, an altitude meter reading to high) off. Sure aircraft have redundant instruments and pilots are supposed to check but they don't. Even the fact that a plane got two pilots each with their own instruments has not proven enough in the past to prevent a disaster when the captain decides to follow his instrument readout.
So what does this have to do with windows? Well a look at the outside will quickly tell you a lot that you would take several instruments. Altitude, attitude, weather, air traffic, ground traffic. All pretty damn important.
Worse while pilots are trained to fly without outside references it does have the danger of the pilot loosing orientation. Thinking that up is down and such. I remember at least one crash investigation where the pilot was following his instruments into trying to correct the aircraft while he was in fact flying it straight into the ground.
So the above post is not informative. It is totally mis-informed. Pilots need their windows.
The stuff is still radioactive genius. This is just a way to contain the material. Store radio active waste in a barrel and it might break and the material leak out in to the enviroment. This will stop that but the blocks themselves still are as dangerous as if you just had the waste on its own. Glass is not known for its shielding properties.
Same with this 3D pager crap. So now I got to sit and watch a 2-3 second animation each time I switch? Yippie!
Seriously who of the linux users really has the time for this? I am all for eye candy but not at the cost of either my working speed or taking up valuable desktop space.
I kinda like the way Enlightenment does it where you can drag a desktop over another and see them both at once partially although I have now switched the XFCE4 for its speed.
There may be a use for 3D on the desktop but so far nobody seems to have found it. About the only thing I can imagine is to go to 3D since you can then use the graphics cards power and offload the poor cpu.
The problem with most new gadgets including suns attempt is that they dare not break the current desktop design (because that would break all current application) and truly design a new interface.
In europe we got slightly more experience with it since it is so easy to get the news from another country. Pretty common for politicians claiming that their country does better because factor X is lower/higher then in other EU countries. Neatly forgetting that factor X is being calculated differently in all the countries.
It is so simple to do. First of all you can mess around by counting how many people there are in your country. In the modern world with illegal immigrants this can really screw up your stats. After all one way or another they are either taking jobs or being unemployed.
A second one is determining who is looking for a job. Is a student looking for a job? Most have side jobs so they have to count somewhere but are not in the market for a fulltime job. Same with 2 parent families, if one parent stays at home is that because they are unemployed or is that a life choice? If I can afford to retire but am still working age where am I counted? Just because I don't have to collect benefits doesn't mean I am not looking for a job.
Then there is how you count jobs. Not all jobs are equal especially not in non-minimum wage america. You can say 20.000 jobs or whatever have been created but what has really happened? If X high paying jobs have been replaced by X+20k starvation wage jobs then yes you have had job growth. Not sure if this is a good thing however.
Of course there is the nice thing of having seasonal work. Some seasons have more work then others. Very nice to measure at a seasonal peak to show how many extra jobs there are.
I don't know much about america but I seen to many shows and "documentaries" were american families are working 2 jobs per parent and still barely making ends meet to have much fate in your style of economy. A simple stat like the number of unemployed has very little meaning when you can have a 4 job household and still be in debt.
I am to lazy to look it up but I remember a movie with 2 ex american presidents being forced on a roadtrip together. At one point they take hitch a ride in car with a family. At first it is all peaches but then the presidents keep being to full of themselves and it comes out that they both created policies that make the family loose their job and their house. The family is not on trip. They are living in their car.
American really needs a third option but until things really hit the fan I don't think it will happen. Just a constant change between two sides who both are determined to screw america up and the rest of the world along with it.
Don't feel bad about it. Dutch politics is in the same shitter. The party that when I was young was totally ruining the country is back and they are taking off where they left off. Making holland into an american style ghetto with all the dis-advantages and none of the advantages. No matter how bad the americans screw their country up, we can do it better.
Gives you more time to point and laught at the people at the gas station as they hand over their first born to pay for a full tank.