The whole article is full of fail; half the listed mods haven't even been released yet.
But yeah, VTM: Bloodlines is pretty goddamn fantastic, and the Unofficial Patch makes it playable, though there's been some breakage in recent versions. It's unique (somehow, the vampire theme is rare in RPG format), creepy, funny, at times very scary, and just extraordinarily well-written, with a dark, gritty, very real atmosphere throughout. And I say this as someone who usually has little patience for epic stories in RPGs. Give me an engaging setting and I'll pay attention to your story.
Unfortunately, Bloodlines stops being fun about 2/3 of the way through the game. Starting with the sewers and continuing through the end game, it turns a fantastic, deep RPG into an unremarkable FPS. It's as if they suddenly fired all their writers and designers, and got some level designers well-versed in recycled FPS cliches to build the rest of the game.
Amen. It's downright creepy how often this comes up on Slashdot. There are *at least* several dozen major issues that are far more important right now, including: health care, the economy, environment, and of course the most egregious abuses of the Bush administration involving civil liberties, the Constitution, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention becoming a credible world leader again.
Personally, I have no idea how I'm going to vote on 2/5. Obama's health care policy is an abject disaster, and I've seen nothing to indicate he'll actually push for meaningful "change". I don't need to enumerate Clinton's downsides, but she's strong on policy where it matters (health care, economy), and she knows how to play the game. For any Obama supporters who aren't sure what I'm talking about, read pretty much anything Paul Krugman has written in the past few months.
Exactly! I don't understand why GnuPG signatures aren't in common use in the open-source world. Gentoo and other distros use them to sign packages, but if there's a weak link upstream, that's no good. It requires some extra infrastructure (a central key server for well-established developers/release engineers would be nice), but once you had that set up, verifying any package would be automatic.
GPG signing is more secure, but if the secret key is compromised, they can be faked as well.
And that's relatively unlikely, since an attacker would need both the key and its password.
An outside observer has no trouble measuring the true velocity. But if you were traveling at close to c and wanted to measure your own speed, then yes, you'd need to correct for time dilation. If you tried to measure speed as distance over time in that situation, it would seem as if you were moving at much greater than c.
The TCP packets have checksums too. It's trivial to recalculate them.
Something like a PGP signature would work, and would only need to be generated once for a static page. But you'd need a reliable way of transferring public keys.
The Buffy comics, in my opinion, are nowhere nearly as good as the series was. Could be pacing, could be the layouts (they don't help), could be the fact that one issue of the comic seems to cover a bizzaro combination of a quarter of an episode and half a season. Whatever it is, it's lacking.
Completely agree. I described them -- to a comic book store owner, as I was purchasing Angel: After The Fall -- as reading like bad fan fiction. He seemed to agree. I'm terribly disappointed that these are the official comics that Joss wrote. The Warren thing alone is an absurd, impossible rewriting of history, vastly alters Willow's actions at the end of Season 6, and is bizarrely out-of-character for Amy.
P.S. The Angel comic was funny, but otherwise not much better than Buffy Season 8.
I concur with FireGPG. USB key drives of 2GB and larger are dirt cheap these days, so just install your fully-customized version of Firefox on one, if you're using many unconnected computers. Thunderbird/Enigmail is even better if you're using Gmail, especially now that they offer IMAP.
Re:Let's hope it's cancelled after 15 eps
on
Joss Whedon Back on TV
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The last *two* seasons of Angel? Seriously? Season 4 turned Angel into The Connor Show, with that fucking annoying little brat ruining nearly every episode. Even the actor who played Connor was apparently sick of him, saying each episode was pretty much whine, beat up on Angel, whine some more, no character development. And then there was the annoying/fake Cordy, with the ickiness of Cordy/Connor.
Season 5, though...wow. Spike, plus Amy Acker as Illyria, plus great plots. And probably one of the best season/series finales ever made.
Uh...not counting this, Joss Whedon has done a grand total of two different universes, Buffy/Angel and Firefly. It's not really surprising that you can recognize his work.
Not so. The Flash media server can do streaming content without FLVs (see Fabchannel.com, for example). Streaming-only media in an obscure, proprietary format is about as secure as it gets.
They've got a *lot* of missing content even in the years they do cover. But there's an indicator that they might cover the Craig Kilborn days eventually: there's 1996-1998 on their new timeline widget.
Well, when you're talking about replacing DirectX, the rest of it (input + sound) needs to come from somewhere. IMO, non-professionals who don't need bleeding-edge shiny effects should stick to higher level interfaces anyway: OGRE + OpenAL does the job nicely.
Monster is a convenient standard for well-built cables, which are still overpriced, just not obscenely so. Though it is hilarious that they sell different 1/4" instrument cables: "rock", "bass", "acoustic", "jazz", "keyboard".
Huh? Everything is distorted, unless you're playing music back on a good pair of studio monitors. Even then, it was recorded with imperfect microphones, and probably run through an equalizer during the mastering process. "If it sounds good, it is good."
I can't comment on tubes in hifi amplifiers, but their use in guitar amps is obvious. In a mic preamp, they also color vocals in a pleasant way.
That's what stompbox tuners are for. Schedule quick tuning breaks mid-set if you must. A crowd won't kill you if you take 30 seconds instead of 5 seconds to check your tuning.
Don't buy a piece of shit, and don't store it somewhere that the temperature fluctuates significantly during the day (eg, in direct sunlight), and you won't spend very much time tuning, unless you like exotic tunings. But then that's just part of playing the instrument. Even my poorly-maintained Fender Mexi Strat doesn't require more than small weekly adjustments. Takes all of 20 seconds with an electronic tuner.
Indeed. The bigger problem with tuning is not getting the open strings to match the right pitch, which is easy, but rather getting the intonation right, so the notes are still the right pitch as you move up the fretboard.
There's no Talking Heads either. Blame the label, I suppose. On the other hand, they had the newly-released obscure Belgian album I wanted, for $1 cheaper than iTunes.
Slashdot Mirror
Add Germany to the list. EUR 25/month for Alice DSL, 14Mbit down/1Mbit up, no caps. In Berlin, at least.
The whole article is full of fail; half the listed mods haven't even been released yet.
But yeah, VTM: Bloodlines is pretty goddamn fantastic, and the Unofficial Patch makes it playable, though there's been some breakage in recent versions. It's unique (somehow, the vampire theme is rare in RPG format), creepy, funny, at times very scary, and just extraordinarily well-written, with a dark, gritty, very real atmosphere throughout. And I say this as someone who usually has little patience for epic stories in RPGs. Give me an engaging setting and I'll pay attention to your story.
Unfortunately, Bloodlines stops being fun about 2/3 of the way through the game. Starting with the sewers and continuing through the end game, it turns a fantastic, deep RPG into an unremarkable FPS. It's as if they suddenly fired all their writers and designers, and got some level designers well-versed in recycled FPS cliches to build the rest of the game.
Amen. It's downright creepy how often this comes up on Slashdot. There are *at least* several dozen major issues that are far more important right now, including: health care, the economy, environment, and of course the most egregious abuses of the Bush administration involving civil liberties, the Constitution, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention becoming a credible world leader again.
Personally, I have no idea how I'm going to vote on 2/5. Obama's health care policy is an abject disaster, and I've seen nothing to indicate he'll actually push for meaningful "change". I don't need to enumerate Clinton's downsides, but she's strong on policy where it matters (health care, economy), and she knows how to play the game. For any Obama supporters who aren't sure what I'm talking about, read pretty much anything Paul Krugman has written in the past few months.
An outside observer has no trouble measuring the true velocity. But if you were traveling at close to c and wanted to measure your own speed, then yes, you'd need to correct for time dilation. If you tried to measure speed as distance over time in that situation, it would seem as if you were moving at much greater than c.
The TCP packets have checksums too. It's trivial to recalculate them.
Something like a PGP signature would work, and would only need to be generated once for a static page. But you'd need a reliable way of transferring public keys.
I don't know. I loved most of Buffy and Angel, and I was completely bored by Firefly.
But I am also a big fan of the Aaron Sorkin years of West Wing, so I guess that fits into your witty dialog theory.
P.S. The Angel comic was funny, but otherwise not much better than Buffy Season 8.
I concur with FireGPG. USB key drives of 2GB and larger are dirt cheap these days, so just install your fully-customized version of Firefox on one, if you're using many unconnected computers. Thunderbird/Enigmail is even better if you're using Gmail, especially now that they offer IMAP.
The last *two* seasons of Angel? Seriously? Season 4 turned Angel into The Connor Show, with that fucking annoying little brat ruining nearly every episode. Even the actor who played Connor was apparently sick of him, saying each episode was pretty much whine, beat up on Angel, whine some more, no character development. And then there was the annoying/fake Cordy, with the ickiness of Cordy/Connor.
Season 5, though...wow. Spike, plus Amy Acker as Illyria, plus great plots. And probably one of the best season/series finales ever made.
Uh...not counting this, Joss Whedon has done a grand total of two different universes, Buffy/Angel and Firefly. It's not really surprising that you can recognize his work.
If we define King Crimson as "some band Robert Fripp plays in", then yes.
Not so. The Flash media server can do streaming content without FLVs (see Fabchannel.com, for example). Streaming-only media in an obscure, proprietary format is about as secure as it gets.
Why surprised? They *require* SSL for POP.
They've got a *lot* of missing content even in the years they do cover. But there's an indicator that they might cover the Craig Kilborn days eventually: there's 1996-1998 on their new timeline widget.
Absolutely...spiritual successor my ass.
For those who want to play through SS2 again, check out SHTUP and Rebirth.
I2P, or even Freenet.
Well, when you're talking about replacing DirectX, the rest of it (input + sound) needs to come from somewhere. IMO, non-professionals who don't need bleeding-edge shiny effects should stick to higher level interfaces anyway: OGRE + OpenAL does the job nicely.
Monster is a convenient standard for well-built cables, which are still overpriced, just not obscenely so. Though it is hilarious that they sell different 1/4" instrument cables: "rock", "bass", "acoustic", "jazz", "keyboard".
Huh? Everything is distorted, unless you're playing music back on a good pair of studio monitors. Even then, it was recorded with imperfect microphones, and probably run through an equalizer during the mastering process. "If it sounds good, it is good."
I can't comment on tubes in hifi amplifiers, but their use in guitar amps is obvious. In a mic preamp, they also color vocals in a pleasant way.
That's what stompbox tuners are for. Schedule quick tuning breaks mid-set if you must. A crowd won't kill you if you take 30 seconds instead of 5 seconds to check your tuning.
Don't buy a piece of shit, and don't store it somewhere that the temperature fluctuates significantly during the day (eg, in direct sunlight), and you won't spend very much time tuning, unless you like exotic tunings. But then that's just part of playing the instrument. Even my poorly-maintained Fender Mexi Strat doesn't require more than small weekly adjustments. Takes all of 20 seconds with an electronic tuner.
Indeed. The bigger problem with tuning is not getting the open strings to match the right pitch, which is easy, but rather getting the intonation right, so the notes are still the right pitch as you move up the fretboard.
There's no Talking Heads either. Blame the label, I suppose. On the other hand, they had the newly-released obscure Belgian album I wanted, for $1 cheaper than iTunes.