Re:Only so much carbon...
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 1
why dont we bury all our radioactive garbage deep into a subduction tectonic plate, near a subduction zone
Well, I really should google your question, but I'd rather talk out my ass... I do remember reading somewhere that this suggestion of yours was and is being seriously considered, but might be infesible for financial reasons...
Take down a space station
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 5, Funny
To much garbage in space? Man that would my point for being 'buried' in space... to become a potentially dangerous piece of space debris! It would be like coming back from the dead to strike fear in the hearts of the living!
Re:Why bother with google?
on
Cyberchondria
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, the general idea with med school, difficult examinations, certifications and what-not is that really dumb people will get weeded out...
So while 50% of all doctors will still be below the average, I would hope that the "average" for doctors is higher than the average for Joe Schmoe Garbageman when it comes to medical know-how.
Is the average for doctors as high as we would all like it to be? Probably not. But I do believe that they are as good at their job as house painters are at theirs, despite having a more difficult job (no offense meant to house painters).
"The Timber Wolf is based off an old game I have called Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries"
and when I click on my beloved Timber Wolf, he says:
" I based my LEGO Timberwolf off an image taken from Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, and old game that came with my oldest computer when I bought it."
Ouch.
Man, I can remember when Mechwarrior 2 was the reigning champ and Mercenaries was the new kid on the block that my friends and I were unsure whether we liked it as much...
Oh yeah, and those Lego 'mechs aren't that impressive.
I think part of the idea is that many gamers who use linux also *already* dual boot or have a secondary Windows computer for gaming, and so for them there is no point in selling them a Linux version.
Yeah I'm sure someone will immediately respond to this post with a "I haven't used a Microsoft product in years and I play x, y, and z all the time!" But even if you represent half of the "linux gamer" population out there, that's still halving an already tiny market.
I do my best to ignore release dates until the damn game actually comes out... and I always add a quarter to even a half a year to all release dates...
Actual conversation I had with a friend in 1998 who called me from his cell phone while in a computer game store:
Friend: Dude, Half-Life's out. Me: Bullshit. Friend: No really, its out! Me: Yeah right. I haven't heard about it... they never make those release dates anyway. They've delayed it before and they'll delay it again. Friend: Dude, I'm holding the box in my hands right now! Me: (long pause) Friend: Yo, come over my house in a hour and we'll try it out. Me: We'll see.
You know those rubber pads that often are at the bottom of public urinals? One time I saw one with the name of the company that made it, Johnson Sanders & Son or something like that, proudly written across it.
And I suddenly realized: I'm pissing on this guy's name!
Offtopic I guess because I doubt that Mr. Sander's job or his son's was all that bad... but one example of when not to name your company after yourself...
K5 already does this. Not the financial hit part, but everyone can moderate and anyone can see who moderated what. I'm not sure if it would work here as K5 has a different kind of community feel than/. (and I understand that there are/were little mob-bombing wars that would go on, but at least they were open about it), but it's an interesting alternative system.
A quick secondary example to the 'audience feeling foolish that they ever regarded the sentinels as truly dangerous' is Aliens 2, which I saw just after seeing the first one.
In the first Alien movie, there is only one alien, and its scary as can be. The characters just have no defenses against it and are easily picked off. It is finally killed by Sigourney (sp?) Weaver's character only by luck and ingenuity... and its still hella hard to kill: it dies only after being sucked out into the vacuum of space AND being blasted by the (presumably) powerful engines of the spacecraft.
Fast forward to Aliens 2, where we have a more heavily armed but still vulnerable-seeming marine squad facing down an army of these creatures who have been already established to be nearly invincible. And then the aliens get cut to ribbons by ordinary bullets. The only danger they now present to the marines is sheer numbers.
The movie itself was awesome, but I seriously felt let down by this incredible change from the ground rules set out by the first movie.
Sorry that this became such a rant, but to bring it back on topic: I'm not sure if games being internally is a good thing or not (I can't come up with any examples at the moment), but sequels being inconsistant with their originals can be extremely annoying. Case in point could be the "dumbing-down" of Deux Ex 2, if that example hasn't been beaten to death yet.
Yeah this does seem pointless. What's so hard about returning a movie to the rental place? And with things like netflix, you don't even need to go to a physical store. Just mail it.
Holy crap, you just brought back two memories I didn't even know I had. Legends of the Hidden Temple and those Johnson Smith catalogues... damn.
But to answer your question, I don't really remember what prizes were given out at the end of the Nickelodeon show, but I'm sure I saw what you're talking about in the catalogues... and damn if I remember what it was. I think I was just getting to the age where I became able to separate crap products from good products, so while I'm sure I still desperately wanted that thing, I knew that I was a bad idea.
(Getting more OT) This also reminds me of some computer game catalogue I recently found in the back of my closet that dates from around when CD-ROM drives first became available for PCs and that enormous glut of "multimedia" "interactive full screen video" games came out. Looking at that catalogue now, I realize how bad most of those games must have been. And they all sounded so cool and seemed so cutting-edge at the time!
So, anyway, to bring this back to the conversation at hand... um... all fads die away eventually, or something?
Hear hear! I loved the additions and updates that Vice City brought, but the city grew so boring after a while that I had difficulty finishing it.
After that I went back to GTA3, and I found it so much more fun than VC simply because of the hills. Funny how those rolling-down-hills-on-fire-but-I-can't-freaking-ge t-out moments in GTA3 that made me want the ability to jump out of a car so badly never showed up in VC very much... because there aren't any hills to roll down!
Anyway, San Francisco seems like a perfect place to stage some crazy cop chases in. I can't wait.
While I'm not going to agree or disagree with your assessment of the two desktops, I have to say that you are quite correct about how having two different desktops is confusing to ordinary users.
Just a couple of months ago I made my first plunge into the world of Linux with Mandrake 9.1, which I downloaded because I heard it was "newbie-friendly". When I got to the point in the installation when I was asked which user interface I would like to default to, I realized I had no idea what they were talking about. I literally chose KDE because I liked the sound of its name better (gnomes make me think of stupid lawn ornaments). After using KDE for awhile I gave Gnome a spin, but since I couldn't find any major improvements in it from KDE, and I had already gotten used to KDE, I stuck with my first choice. Maybe I'll go back and give Gnome a more serious look someday, but I'm too busy at the moment.
So anyway, I think the point I'd like to make is that for most users, getting more than one choice only make sense if the choices are significantly different. If some magical OS included both the Windows 2k UI and the MAC OSX UI, the user would be able to notice the differences between the two pretty quickly (flashy vs. non-flashy for example) and make a choice. But while there may be significant difference in KDE's and Gnome's toolkit thingy, on the surface there's not enough difference. So while I may disagree with UserLinux's specific choice (and mostly out of ignorance), I think they have the right idea overall.
Not exactly the same concept (and less news-oriented than Slashdot), but Kuro5shin is at least worth checking out. (they have a "story queue" where anybody can view developing stories and then vote on whether it should be put on the front page... at least I think that's the way it works, I don't go there all that often).
That's neat... you just entirely missed his point. Or angrily made it for him while insulting him. If he wanted to play "374732 tactical ego shooters" then he wouldn't be complaining about console game makers not porting their software like "Metroid Prime or Final Fantasy 10", would he? Dumbass.
And to throw my own two cents in about the "limitations" of consoles that some people have been complaining about: I remember eagerly awaiting the port of GTA: Vice City to the PC after playing it on a friend's PS2 -- I already have a decent computer (its over 3 years old, but runs modern PC games fine) so I wasn't about to run out and buy a PS2 (and hell, I guess I'd need a TV, too) just to play the game. Anyway, once I got it, I realized that it really feels like the game was meant to be played on a computer. I could crank the resolution to the max, up the texture detail, aim with a mouse which is so much better than the stupid aiming system on the PS2 (which takes absolutely no skill), no loading times.... I can't play the game on my friend's PS2 anymore, it's too painful. What's more, if I were so inclined I could go and download the multiplayer mod for the game (which may be only for GTA3, don't remember).
Yes, there are limitations to the PC, most notably the QA nightmare that so many different setups creates, but having "all current PC games" suck shouldn't be one of them. Sure, Soul Caliber 2 would be crap without a gamepad... but I'd immediately go out and buy one if they released the game for the PC.
Damn, imagine if they had designed that game like the best PC developers do and make it easily moddable (and maybe they did, I don't know). Imagine if they had a simple scripting engine you could use to make up new moves and combos... or if you could go to some site and download new skins, costumes, or even new fighters that enterprising players created?
Consoles are moving in this direction, with hard drives and internet access, but they are not there yet. And until they are, it would be nice if more developers took advantage of the strengths that the PC platform has.
RockBox is great. I bought an Archos about 8 months ago because it was more than $100 dollars cheaper than an iPod at that time, and RockBox has made it usable. I hate trying to work with my friend's Archos as he still has the original firmware. I consider my inability to convert him to RockBox to be my worst failing in the open source zealotry field, worse than the number of people I know who still are using IE instead of Firebird. Some day I should just steal it from him, install the software myself, and let him see what he's been missing.
RockBox is also a great example to use when explaining the concept of open source software to "normal people". I've noticed that if you talk about Linux most get hung up on the fact that someone's "giving it away for free", but if you describe how sucky the Archos firmware is and how these guys just wanted to make it better and set it up so others could help them and then give it away for free because who the hell's gonna pay for new firmware for an MP3 player (although donations are accepted, I'm sure), then they get it.
"Increased proportionally"? What's that mean? That there have been 10 million more drive-by-shootings since it came out (or whatever insane number of copies the GTA games have sold, maybe its not that high)?
Where has this increase been? How do you know it was related to GTA? Could there - I don't know - other reasons for it? A major gang war going on somewhere?
But anyway, it doesn't matter, because after the ungodly number of hours I've put into the GTA games, I don't know any more about how to actually pull off a drive-by shooting then I knew before I started playing. I assume it involves sticking gun out of a car window (that you don't roll down, according to the game), but that's exactly what I would have said before hand.
I have not downloaded the demo yet, but after reading your and other people's assessment, I'm not sure if I want to. I read on the petition that you do not need to reload your weapon. Is this true? If it is, then that would seem to me to be such a incredibly stupid step away from the realism of the first game that there would be no chance in hell that I'd buy this game. Not that reloading by itself is that important, but that plus some of the other "dumbing-down" complaints seems indicative of greater problems I'd have with the gameplay (and anyone who liked the first one).
Yes, lack of complexity does not mean lack of depth, but... "universal ammo"? No location damage? Weapons that keep on shooting until you run out of all your ammo? Might as well keep on removing every part of modern FPS game combat that makes said combat challenging and interesting until it becomes an RPG.
Sorry for the rant which may be misguided anyway. I sure hope I'm wrong, or that the game is better than what I've heard about the demo.
Check out this extension. You just highlight the text, right click it, and select "Open Link in New Tab" (or new window). No its an extra click or two from Mozilla, but I prefer having my middle mouse button open for scrolling the way Firebird does it.
And I really wish more KDE/Linux applications used the middle mouse button as a scroll wheel without any fancy configuring, such as Konqueror or OpenOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
why dont we bury all our radioactive garbage deep into a subduction tectonic plate, near a subduction zone
Well, I really should google your question, but I'd rather talk out my ass... I do remember reading somewhere that this suggestion of yours was and is being seriously considered, but might be infesible for financial reasons...
To much garbage in space? Man that would my point for being 'buried' in space... to become a potentially dangerous piece of space debris! It would be like coming back from the dead to strike fear in the hearts of the living!
Well, the general idea with med school, difficult examinations, certifications and what-not is that really dumb people will get weeded out...
So while 50% of all doctors will still be below the average, I would hope that the "average" for doctors is higher than the average for Joe Schmoe Garbageman when it comes to medical know-how.
Is the average for doctors as high as we would all like it to be? Probably not. But I do believe that they are as good at their job as house painters are at theirs, despite having a more difficult job (no offense meant to house painters).
From the Mechwarrior page:
...
"The Timber Wolf is based off an old game I have called Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries"
and when I click on my beloved Timber Wolf, he says:
" I based my LEGO Timberwolf off an image taken from Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, and old game that came with my oldest computer when I bought it."
Ouch.
Man, I can remember when Mechwarrior 2 was the reigning champ and Mercenaries was the new kid on the block that my friends and I were unsure whether we liked it as much
Oh yeah, and those Lego 'mechs aren't that impressive.
I think part of the idea is that many gamers who use linux also *already* dual boot or have a secondary Windows computer for gaming, and so for them there is no point in selling them a Linux version.
Yeah I'm sure someone will immediately respond to this post with a "I haven't used a Microsoft product in years and I play x, y, and z all the time!" But even if you represent half of the "linux gamer" population out there, that's still halving an already tiny market.
I do my best to ignore release dates until the damn game actually comes out... and I always add a quarter to even a half a year to all release dates...
Actual conversation I had with a friend in 1998 who called me from his cell phone while in a computer game store:
Friend: Dude, Half-Life's out.
Me: Bullshit.
Friend: No really, its out!
Me: Yeah right. I haven't heard about it... they never make those release dates anyway. They've delayed it before and they'll delay it again.
Friend: Dude, I'm holding the box in my hands right now!
Me: (long pause)
Friend: Yo, come over my house in a hour and we'll try it out.
Me: We'll see.
I kinda like the once a year incremental scheme the UT team has going. It makes it feel more episodic
Now to just wipe the memory of the two new films completely from memory...
You know those rubber pads that often are at the bottom of public urinals? One time I saw one with the name of the company that made it, Johnson Sanders & Son or something like that, proudly written across it.
And I suddenly realized: I'm pissing on this guy's name!
Offtopic I guess because I doubt that Mr. Sander's job or his son's was all that bad... but one example of when not to name your company after yourself...
K5 already does this. Not the financial hit part, but everyone can moderate and anyone can see who moderated what. I'm not sure if it would work here as K5 has a different kind of community feel than /. (and I understand that there are/were little mob-bombing wars that would go on, but at least they were open about it), but it's an interesting alternative system.
Thank god this was pushed back from it's previous release dates... now I might actually pass this semester.
A quick secondary example to the 'audience feeling foolish that they ever regarded the sentinels as truly dangerous' is Aliens 2, which I saw just after seeing the first one.
In the first Alien movie, there is only one alien, and its scary as can be. The characters just have no defenses against it and are easily picked off. It is finally killed by Sigourney (sp?) Weaver's character only by luck and ingenuity... and its still hella hard to kill: it dies only after being sucked out into the vacuum of space AND being blasted by the (presumably) powerful engines of the spacecraft.
Fast forward to Aliens 2, where we have a more heavily armed but still vulnerable-seeming marine squad facing down an army of these creatures who have been already established to be nearly invincible. And then the aliens get cut to ribbons by ordinary bullets. The only danger they now present to the marines is sheer numbers.
The movie itself was awesome, but I seriously felt let down by this incredible change from the ground rules set out by the first movie.
Sorry that this became such a rant, but to bring it back on topic: I'm not sure if games being internally is a good thing or not (I can't come up with any examples at the moment), but sequels being inconsistant with their originals can be extremely annoying. Case in point could be the "dumbing-down" of Deux Ex 2, if that example hasn't been beaten to death yet.
Half-Life did that as well.
Yeah this does seem pointless. What's so hard about returning a movie to the rental place? And with things like netflix, you don't even need to go to a physical store. Just mail it.
Holy crap, you just brought back two memories I didn't even know I had. Legends of the Hidden Temple and those Johnson Smith catalogues... damn.
But to answer your question, I don't really remember what prizes were given out at the end of the Nickelodeon show, but I'm sure I saw what you're talking about in the catalogues... and damn if I remember what it was. I think I was just getting to the age where I became able to separate crap products from good products, so while I'm sure I still desperately wanted that thing, I knew that I was a bad idea.
(Getting more OT) This also reminds me of some computer game catalogue I recently found in the back of my closet that dates from around when CD-ROM drives first became available for PCs and that enormous glut of "multimedia" "interactive full screen video" games came out. Looking at that catalogue now, I realize how bad most of those games must have been. And they all sounded so cool and seemed so cutting-edge at the time!
So, anyway, to bring this back to the conversation at hand... um... all fads die away eventually, or something?
... available here
Hear hear! I loved the additions and updates that Vice City brought, but the city grew so boring after a while that I had difficulty finishing it.
e t-out moments in GTA3 that made me want the ability to jump out of a car so badly never showed up in VC very much... because there aren't any hills to roll down!
After that I went back to GTA3, and I found it so much more fun than VC simply because of the hills. Funny how those rolling-down-hills-on-fire-but-I-can't-freaking-g
Anyway, San Francisco seems like a perfect place to stage some crazy cop chases in. I can't wait.
While I'm not going to agree or disagree with your assessment of the two desktops, I have to say that you are quite correct about how having two different desktops is confusing to ordinary users.
Just a couple of months ago I made my first plunge into the world of Linux with Mandrake 9.1, which I downloaded because I heard it was "newbie-friendly". When I got to the point in the installation when I was asked which user interface I would like to default to, I realized I had no idea what they were talking about. I literally chose KDE because I liked the sound of its name better (gnomes make me think of stupid lawn ornaments). After using KDE for awhile I gave Gnome a spin, but since I couldn't find any major improvements in it from KDE, and I had already gotten used to KDE, I stuck with my first choice. Maybe I'll go back and give Gnome a more serious look someday, but I'm too busy at the moment.
So anyway, I think the point I'd like to make is that for most users, getting more than one choice only make sense if the choices are significantly different. If some magical OS included both the Windows 2k UI and the MAC OSX UI, the user would be able to notice the differences between the two pretty quickly (flashy vs. non-flashy for example) and make a choice. But while there may be significant difference in KDE's and Gnome's toolkit thingy, on the surface there's not enough difference. So while I may disagree with UserLinux's specific choice (and mostly out of ignorance), I think they have the right idea overall.
Not exactly the same concept (and less news-oriented than Slashdot), but Kuro5shin is at least worth checking out. (they have a "story queue" where anybody can view developing stories and then vote on whether it should be put on the front page... at least I think that's the way it works, I don't go there all that often).
That's neat... you just entirely missed his point. Or angrily made it for him while insulting him. If he wanted to play "374732 tactical ego shooters" then he wouldn't be complaining about console game makers not porting their software like "Metroid Prime or Final Fantasy 10", would he? Dumbass.
And to throw my own two cents in about the "limitations" of consoles that some people have been complaining about: I remember eagerly awaiting the port of GTA: Vice City to the PC after playing it on a friend's PS2 -- I already have a decent computer (its over 3 years old, but runs modern PC games fine) so I wasn't about to run out and buy a PS2 (and hell, I guess I'd need a TV, too) just to play the game. Anyway, once I got it, I realized that it really feels like the game was meant to be played on a computer. I could crank the resolution to the max, up the texture detail, aim with a mouse which is so much better than the stupid aiming system on the PS2 (which takes absolutely no skill), no loading times.... I can't play the game on my friend's PS2 anymore, it's too painful. What's more, if I were so inclined I could go and download the multiplayer mod for the game (which may be only for GTA3, don't remember).
Yes, there are limitations to the PC, most notably the QA nightmare that so many different setups creates, but having "all current PC games" suck shouldn't be one of them. Sure, Soul Caliber 2 would be crap without a gamepad... but I'd immediately go out and buy one if they released the game for the PC.
Damn, imagine if they had designed that game like the best PC developers do and make it easily moddable (and maybe they did, I don't know). Imagine if they had a simple scripting engine you could use to make up new moves and combos... or if you could go to some site and download new skins, costumes, or even new fighters that enterprising players created?
Consoles are moving in this direction, with hard drives and internet access, but they are not there yet. And until they are, it would be nice if more developers took advantage of the strengths that the PC platform has.
RockBox is great. I bought an Archos about 8 months ago because it was more than $100 dollars cheaper than an iPod at that time, and RockBox has made it usable. I hate trying to work with my friend's Archos as he still has the original firmware. I consider my inability to convert him to RockBox to be my worst failing in the open source zealotry field, worse than the number of people I know who still are using IE instead of Firebird. Some day I should just steal it from him, install the software myself, and let him see what he's been missing.
RockBox is also a great example to use when explaining the concept of open source software to "normal people". I've noticed that if you talk about Linux most get hung up on the fact that someone's "giving it away for free", but if you describe how sucky the Archos firmware is and how these guys just wanted to make it better and set it up so others could help them and then give it away for free because who the hell's gonna pay for new firmware for an MP3 player (although donations are accepted, I'm sure), then they get it.
That has to be the longest off-topic non-troll post I've ever seen on /.
You, sir could give my rambling 80-year-old professor a run for his money. Well done.
What math?
"Increased proportionally"? What's that mean? That there have been 10 million more drive-by-shootings since it came out (or whatever insane number of copies the GTA games have sold, maybe its not that high)?
Where has this increase been? How do you know it was related to GTA? Could there - I don't know - other reasons for it? A major gang war going on somewhere?
But anyway, it doesn't matter, because after the ungodly number of hours I've put into the GTA games, I don't know any more about how to actually pull off a drive-by shooting then I knew before I started playing. I assume it involves sticking gun out of a car window (that you don't roll down, according to the game), but that's exactly what I would have said before hand.
I have not downloaded the demo yet, but after reading your and other people's assessment, I'm not sure if I want to. I read on the petition that you do not need to reload your weapon. Is this true? If it is, then that would seem to me to be such a incredibly stupid step away from the realism of the first game that there would be no chance in hell that I'd buy this game. Not that reloading by itself is that important, but that plus some of the other "dumbing-down" complaints seems indicative of greater problems I'd have with the gameplay (and anyone who liked the first one).
Yes, lack of complexity does not mean lack of depth, but... "universal ammo"? No location damage? Weapons that keep on shooting until you run out of all your ammo? Might as well keep on removing every part of modern FPS game combat that makes said combat challenging and interesting until it becomes an RPG.
Sorry for the rant which may be misguided anyway. I sure hope I'm wrong, or that the game is better than what I've heard about the demo.
Check out this extension. You just highlight the text, right click it, and select "Open Link in New Tab" (or new window). No its an extra click or two from Mozilla, but I prefer having my middle mouse button open for scrolling the way Firebird does it.
And I really wish more KDE/Linux applications used the middle mouse button as a scroll wheel without any fancy configuring, such as Konqueror or OpenOffice.