Yes, but the gameplay was excellent and inventive and that covered for the story line. Half Life did a very good job of building tension and making you feel like you were really there. The opening sequence with the long train ride, and the trip to the test chamber were sheer brilliance.
My favorite game in terms of story line is Max Payne 2. You get a good story line, told using a mix of comic strips and cut scenes and also great game play.
Half life varied things with interesting subquests. That is, you had to solve a particular problem before you could move on.
For example the tentacle mosters in the blast pit. In that section in order to progress you needed: 1. To crawl around quietly a lot 2. Move through a number of quite different environments 3. Ride lifts (which broke), jump large gaps. 4. Kill a variety of alien species. 5. A nice cut scene of sorts with a scientist being dragged out by a tentacle monster
The point is that there was variation and there was a purpose to your actions. The reviews I am reading for Doom 3 do not suggest there is either variation or purpose. Apart from that half life had some stuff that was just plain cool, like the map you could use to call in air strikes.
I also own a T40 and it is a very nice compromise of power, battery life and size. I get ~3 hours (working solidly) on the standard battery with nothing at all turned off. I haven't tried the extended battery yet.
I split a glass of water over my T40 while it was running. After drying it, no problems at all. I haven't done this to other laptops, so I've got nothing to compare it, but I was impressed.
I think it is spelt Haiti but I could be wrong. What you missed in your comment on Haiti is that the US installed the dictator in the first place. When the troops rolled in their first objective was to secure the government buildings that contained the documentation.
Iraq - At the risk of -1 flamebait
I think the the desire to go to Iraq had nothing to do with WMD. As far as I can see it was a combination of having a live enemy, a feeling of unfinished business and an nebulous aim to promote democracy in the region. I think they wanted to believe that there were WMDs there and that clouded their thinking.
If 10 years from now Iraq looks like Iran, it was probably a failure
Iran's current state is to a large part also the US's resposibility.
If I were to characterise US foreign policy I'd say it is well-intentioned, short-term and insensitive. The US wants to do the right thing, but seems to be unable to think beyond more than a couple of years, if that. The US is also incredibly ham fisted when in comes to other cultures. US diplomacy isn't.
My feel is that the US is feared for their miliary might, but none the less despised. Fear is not the same as respect.
Actually it did work for the Romans, as the other poster has commented.
It also worked for the Byzantine empire, which followed the Roman empire.
It also worked for Napoleon. The army that marched on Russia contained a significant proportion of non-French soldiers.
The Germans in WW2 used volunteers from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Western Europe, not to mention the inclusion of Italian and Romanian armies effectively under German command. Some of these were forced conscripts, some not. The assault on Stalingrad was (IIRC) ~1/3 Romanian and Italian troops. Ironically the last defence of the Fuhrer bunker was fought by mainly French volunteers. The fact that the Germans lost the war is not necessarily a comment on the effectiveness of this policy.
No doubt there are many other examples, however these are just the ones that I have read of and can back up with documentation.
Sorry, I posted the earlier comment in a hurry. After cleaning it up a little...
I find it difficult to understand how it is that you are unable to see that one language can be intrinsically worse than another language. I am not just talking about it being worse one one situation when compared to another language, I am talking about an overall comparison to another language.
I do a little woodwork. I can go shopping for a new hammer, examine the ones on sale and decide that one is better than another. Sure for each of the hammers on sale there is a situation or maybe multiple situations where it is better than another, but I can say with certainty that one hammer is better than another. Better made, a better weight balance to it, a better grip, a better steel head.
I reiterate, are you trying to tell me that beatnik is on the same level as C? Why has PL/I fallen by the wayside?
Your comment on string delimiters made me smile. You advocate three delimiters, ", ', and one other. But this implies that we want to tie up a character (or balanced pair of characters) redundantly representing strings. Should we sacrifice (), [] or {}? Each would have repercussions.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was placing an upper limit on the number of delimiters that should be made available. This is a concession towards the perl's of the programming world. My point was that perl goes far beyond this.
My personal view is that there should be one delimiter for strings and that delimiter should be either " or '. Actually I go so far as to say that it should be ", I only mention ' as an option because it is already used in a number of languages.
There are also other approaches to backslashes, for example SQL escapes ' with '' (SQL uses ' as a delimiter), and VB (and variants) use "" to represent ".
I think perl makes things somewhat more complicated with the use of interpolation which has the side effect of forcing you to use more \. If you only had to escape ", life would be somewhat simpler, even when generating HTML (which tends to use a lot of double quotes).
I find it difficult to understand how it is that you are unable to see that one language can be intrinsically worse than another language. I am not just talking about it being worse overall than another language.
I do a little woodwork. I can go shopping for a new hammer, examine the ones on sale and decide that one is better than another. Sure for each of the hammers on sale there is a situation or maybe multiple situations where it is better than another.
I reiterate, are you trying to tell me that beatnik is on the same level as C?
To me, that's nicer than escaping the internal "s.
So there is a case for having two possible delimiters, a " and a non ". You could argue for a third ' as it is used in other languages and is pretty similar to ".
But there is no reason for any more. What purpose can it possibly serve except to make the code harder to read? I've read studies that found in code that used negative conditions (eg if ! Foo() ), errors rose significantly. This was due to the fact that programmers could understand it less quickly. Anything that adds even a speedbump to a programmer's understanding of the code in front of them should be avoided. Anything that can aid recognition is an advantage, and patterns aid recognition, like myvar = "some string". The more patterns you introduce the more problems.
Code is to be written for legibility above all else, because one day, some time someone is going to have to maintain it. Sure there are other factors to keep in mind, but they are more easily resolved if the code is clean.
I spend a lot of time thinking over this issue, things like, should I use the following:
if ([cond])
[one line statement];
The advantage is that it is consise, the disadvantage is that with that construct it is easy to do this: if ([cond])
[one line statement];
[another statement];
In the end I have come to the conclusion after weighing the options that for clarity it is better to this:
if ([cond]) [one line statement];
or
if ([cond]) {
[one line statement]; }
I'd use the second one if the line got too long.
The fact is that perl encourages bad coding techniques. All languages let you write bad code. Perl makes it a heck of a lot easier.
The fact that there are multiple ways to do everything means that you have to know about each of the different syntaxes. More complexity, decreased understanding. I remember when I read the camel, my constant question was, why on earth would you want to do things that way? I realised after a while that the only way to use perl was to pick a subset of the syntax and use only that. Otherwise your code would be a mess.
Languages in themselves have no quality of goodness or badness. They are just tools.Is a hammer an appalling tool?
A hammer is an appalling tool if you rae trying to take out a screw. Languages can be inherently good or bad, it is not just the programmers. Don't believe me? Code up your next project using either brainfuck (excuse my language), Beatnik or whitespace.
I agree that most programmers are apalling programmers. I hold to that pretty strongly, but a language can be pretty bad even without the help of programmers. To just blame the programmers is a cop-out.
I like perl to some extent. When I am hacking out scripts, I use perl rather than any of the alternatives.
However perl requires strong discipline. In terms of maintainability it has no safety rails and this is a very bad thing. Every has slips in discipline, perl punishes those excessively. Using perl is like walking around with a bomb strapped to you. If you are disciplined and don't do anything stupid you won't have any problems. But if you accidentally brush the self destruct button you have problems.
How is it possible to defend a language that has so many string delimiters? How the hell are you going to maintain an app effectively if the person before you has used a different style quoting? It can serve no purpose but to confuse people. And this thinking permiates the entire freaking language!
TMTOWTDI, even if some of them are crap. Even if it makes it more confusing.
Perl is an apalling language that is rescued by its features, in particular the regexpr engine and the sheer number of modules that have been written for it
And yes I do regularly write ~500 line perl scripts.
They could have learnt lessons from before Vietnam.
"For, although one may be very strong in armed forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives" Machiavelli, The prince
The Bush administration has an apalling grasp of history and as they say, those who do not understand history are destined to repeat it.
1. simple phone interface 2. simple SMS messaging interface 3. Bluetooth 4. Small, preferably flip phone 5. Able to sync all phone data with a PC (SMS messages, phone book, call register)
Those are my phone requirements. Can you find a phone on the market that does those? Simple stuff, but no phone that I am aware of can do them.
I currently have a Motorolla T720. It is a pretty poor phone. For each action I want to perform there seem to be around 2 more button presses than is neccessary. You can sync phone numbers with your PC, but nothing else and the options are pretty crippled. Lastly it is sloooooow.
I could not care less about cameras, Java support (although that is rather cool, I have no need), WAP or $Next_Gen_Feature. Just give me a phone that does a decent job as a phone.
istorically, Americans are strange warriors in that they can be attacked over and over again and they won't respond.
This isn't strictly the case. America is a strange country in that it meddles in other countries pretty comprehensively (sometimes with very damaging consequences), then when a response is made, one might say the attack is returned, then America is horrified. That said that meddling does not always involve direct military intervention, although a quick examination of the modern history of South America shows plreny of interventions. Iraq & Iran are also great examples of American meddling. Iran had a democratically elected president toppled, to be replaced by a autocratic ruler. When he was finally removed by a popular revolution (resulting in an islamic state), America supports Iraq as counterbalacing force. Support includes delivery of chemical weapons.
America has the dubious priveledge of being the only democracy to invade another democracy (the Dominican Republic).
Then, one more little attack comes, and they respond with a built up ferocity that is vastly greater than sum of all the attacks that initially made on them. I don't think that the Arabs quite realize this and as a result of many relatively small attacks could find themselves subjected to a systemic de-population campaign from the West. The Americans nearly wiped out the native Indian tribes of North America in the late 1800's when the Native Americans wouldn't stop attacking and murdering the settlers. This could easily end up being the fate of Islam as well.
Those in the middle East have long memories. Very long memories. The crusades still resonate for people in that region. The point is that memories are very long, people are equally willing to wait a long time for results. What we are seeing in Iraq is only the beginning. I think America has drawn itself into a war that it cannot win. Not even by genocide. America is attempting to swat a mosquito with a sledgehammer.
I found something in Machiavelli's The Prince a while ago that I'm going to paraphrase: "No country can enter another contry unless it has the support of the population, no matter how strong its army is".
I mean really, why? The FAQ does not answer this, the FAQ explains how XHTML works, how it is different and all that. But it doesn't explain why I should change. It explains why HTML is bad, or to be more accurate how easy it is to write bad HTML, but that is not sufficient reason for me. Sure if I want to use some of the newer features, I need to use XHTML, but I'm not seeing anything I need there either.
Here are some reasons *not* to change: 1. It doesn't work in IE without a nasty work around. IE is still the dominant browser last time I checked, despite a 2. It doesn't work in older browsers. Some people still do use them. 3. I have a boatload of stuff in HTML and experience to match. Any time spent upgrading that for no real benefit is time wasted.
I've been having the same problems today and after a little messing around I have come to the concolusion that it is Moz. When I opened a page in a new tab, it rendered fine, moved to another tab and moved back to the original tab the page was having issues. One less mystery.
Are you sure? I think what is actually happening is that/. is sending part of the page and the dropping the connection. Moz/Fire* then renders what it has been given. Unfortunately a view source in Mozilla results in a new request so this is hard to verify.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the gameplay was excellent and inventive and that covered for the story line. Half Life did a very good job of building tension and making you feel like you were really there. The opening sequence with the long train ride, and the trip to the test chamber were sheer brilliance.
My favorite game in terms of story line is Max Payne 2. You get a good story line, told using a mix of comic strips and cut scenes and also great game play.
If mummy and daddy are happy forking out a coupld of grand on a box to run I, I can't see them having a problem forking out $55 for a game.
Half life varied things with interesting subquests. That is, you had to solve a particular problem before you could move on.
For example the tentacle mosters in the blast pit. In that section in order to progress you needed:
1. To crawl around quietly a lot
2. Move through a number of quite different environments
3. Ride lifts (which broke), jump large gaps.
4. Kill a variety of alien species.
5. A nice cut scene of sorts with a scientist being dragged out by a tentacle monster
The point is that there was variation and there was a purpose to your actions. The reviews I am reading for Doom 3 do not suggest there is either variation or purpose. Apart from that half life had some stuff that was just plain cool, like the map you could use to call in air strikes.
Yet they have the cash for the kind of system needed to run the game?
I concur.
I also own a T40 and it is a very nice compromise of power, battery life and size. I get ~3 hours (working solidly) on the standard battery with nothing at all turned off. I haven't tried the extended battery yet.
I split a glass of water over my T40 while it was running. After drying it, no problems at all. I haven't done this to other laptops, so I've got nothing to compare it, but I was impressed.
Not only do I play an attorney on TV
Which show?
A couple of comments
Hattie - Good intentions, restore a democracy.
I think it is spelt Haiti but I could be wrong. What you missed in your comment on Haiti is that the US installed the dictator in the first place. When the troops rolled in their first objective was to secure the government buildings that contained the documentation.
Iraq - At the risk of -1 flamebait
I think the the desire to go to Iraq had nothing to do with WMD. As far as I can see it was a combination of having a live enemy, a feeling of unfinished business and an nebulous aim to promote democracy in the region. I think they wanted to believe that there were WMDs there and that clouded their thinking.
If 10 years from now Iraq looks like Iran, it was probably a failure
Iran's current state is to a large part also the US's resposibility.
If I were to characterise US foreign policy I'd say it is well-intentioned, short-term and insensitive. The US wants to do the right thing, but seems to be unable to think beyond more than a couple of years, if that. The US is also incredibly ham fisted when in comes to other cultures. US diplomacy isn't.
My feel is that the US is feared for their miliary might, but none the less despised. Fear is not the same as respect.
Actually it did work for the Romans, as the other poster has commented.
It also worked for the Byzantine empire, which followed the Roman empire.
It also worked for Napoleon. The army that marched on Russia contained a significant proportion of non-French soldiers.
The Germans in WW2 used volunteers from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Western Europe, not to mention the inclusion of Italian and Romanian armies effectively under German command. Some of these were forced conscripts, some not. The assault on Stalingrad was (IIRC) ~1/3 Romanian and Italian troops. Ironically the last defence of the Fuhrer bunker was fought by mainly French volunteers. The fact that the Germans lost the war is not necessarily a comment on the effectiveness of this policy.
No doubt there are many other examples, however these are just the ones that I have read of and can back up with documentation.
I like the guy on the right.
Back to WW2 style British army helmets.
That was my quote!
Sorry, I posted the earlier comment in a hurry. After cleaning it up a little...
I find it difficult to understand how it is that you are unable to see that one language can be intrinsically worse than another language. I am not just talking about it being worse one one situation when compared to another language, I am talking about an overall comparison to another language.
I do a little woodwork. I can go shopping for a new hammer, examine the ones on sale and decide that one is better than another. Sure for each of the hammers on sale there is a situation or maybe multiple situations where it is better than another, but I can say with certainty that one hammer is better than another. Better made, a better weight balance to it, a better grip, a better steel head.
I reiterate, are you trying to tell me that beatnik is on the same level as C? Why has PL/I fallen by the wayside?
Your comment on string delimiters made me smile. You advocate three delimiters, ", ', and one other. But this implies that we want to tie up a character (or balanced pair of characters) redundantly representing strings. Should we sacrifice (), [] or {}? Each would have repercussions.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was placing an upper limit on the number of delimiters that should be made available. This is a concession towards the perl's of the programming world. My point was that perl goes far beyond this.
My personal view is that there should be one delimiter for strings and that delimiter should be either " or '. Actually I go so far as to say that it should be ", I only mention ' as an option because it is already used in a number of languages.
There are also other approaches to backslashes, for example SQL escapes ' with '' (SQL uses ' as a delimiter), and VB (and variants) use "" to represent ".
I think perl makes things somewhat more complicated with the use of interpolation which has the side effect of forcing you to use more \. If you only had to escape ", life would be somewhat simpler, even when generating HTML (which tends to use a lot of double quotes).
I find it difficult to understand how it is that you are unable to see that one language can be intrinsically worse than another language. I am not just talking about it being worse overall than another language.
I do a little woodwork. I can go shopping for a new hammer, examine the ones on sale and decide that one is better than another. Sure for each of the hammers on sale there is a situation or maybe multiple situations where it is better than another.
I reiterate, are you trying to tell me that beatnik is on the same level as C?
$thing->{ id } = qq[$thing->{ id }];
To me, that's nicer than escaping the internal "s.
So there is a case for having two possible delimiters, a " and a non ". You could argue for a third ' as it is used in other languages and is pretty similar to ".
But there is no reason for any more. What purpose can it possibly serve except to make the code harder to read? I've read studies that found in code that used negative conditions (eg if ! Foo() ), errors rose significantly. This was due to the fact that programmers could understand it less quickly. Anything that adds even a speedbump to a programmer's understanding of the code in front of them should be avoided. Anything that can aid recognition is an advantage, and patterns aid recognition, like myvar = "some string". The more patterns you introduce the more problems.
Code is to be written for legibility above all else, because one day, some time someone is going to have to maintain it. Sure there are other factors to keep in mind, but they are more easily resolved if the code is clean.
I spend a lot of time thinking over this issue, things like, should I use the following:
if ([cond])
[one line statement];
The advantage is that it is consise, the disadvantage is that with that construct it is easy to do this:
if ([cond])
[one line statement];
[another statement];
In the end I have come to the conclusion after weighing the options that for clarity it is better to this:
if ([cond]) [one line statement];
or
if ([cond])
{
[one line statement];
}
I'd use the second one if the line got too long.
The fact is that perl encourages bad coding techniques. All languages let you write bad code. Perl makes it a heck of a lot easier.
The fact that there are multiple ways to do everything means that you have to know about each of the different syntaxes. More complexity, decreased understanding. I remember when I read the camel, my constant question was, why on earth would you want to do things that way? I realised after a while that the only way to use perl was to pick a subset of the syntax and use only that. Otherwise your code would be a mess.
Languages in themselves have no quality of goodness or badness. They are just tools.Is a hammer an appalling tool?
A hammer is an appalling tool if you rae trying to take out a screw. Languages can be inherently good or bad, it is not just the programmers. Don't believe me? Code up your next project using either brainfuck (excuse my language), Beatnik or whitespace.
I agree that most programmers are apalling programmers. I hold to that pretty strongly, but a language can be pretty bad even without the help of programmers. To just blame the programmers is a cop-out.
I like perl to some extent. When I am hacking out scripts, I use perl rather than any of the alternatives.
However perl requires strong discipline. In terms of maintainability it has no safety rails and this is a very bad thing. Every has slips in discipline, perl punishes those excessively. Using perl is like walking around with a bomb strapped to you. If you are disciplined and don't do anything stupid you won't have any problems. But if you accidentally brush the self destruct button you have problems.
How is it possible to defend a language that has so many string delimiters? How the hell are you going to maintain an app effectively if the person before you has used a different style quoting? It can serve no purpose but to confuse people. And this thinking permiates the entire freaking language!
TMTOWTDI, even if some of them are crap. Even if it makes it more confusing.
Perl is an apalling language that is rescued by its features, in particular the regexpr engine and the sheer number of modules that have been written for it
And yes I do regularly write ~500 line perl scripts.
They could have learnt lessons from before Vietnam.
"For, although one may be very strong in armed
forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives"
Machiavelli, The prince
The Bush administration has an apalling grasp of history and as they say, those who do not understand history are destined to repeat it.
OK How about this for phone requirements:
1. simple phone interface
2. simple SMS messaging interface
3. Bluetooth
4. Small, preferably flip phone
5. Able to sync all phone data with a PC (SMS messages, phone book, call register)
Those are my phone requirements. Can you find a phone on the market that does those? Simple stuff, but no phone that I am aware of can do them.
I currently have a Motorolla T720. It is a pretty poor phone. For each action I want to perform there seem to be around 2 more button presses than is neccessary. You can sync phone numbers with your PC, but nothing else and the options are pretty crippled. Lastly it is sloooooow.
I could not care less about cameras, Java support (although that is rather cool, I have no need), WAP or $Next_Gen_Feature. Just give me a phone that does a decent job as a phone.
istorically, Americans are strange warriors in that they can be attacked over and over again and they won't respond.
This isn't strictly the case. America is a strange country in that it meddles in other countries pretty comprehensively (sometimes with very damaging consequences), then when a response is made, one might say the attack is returned, then America is horrified. That said that meddling does not always involve direct military intervention, although a quick examination of the modern history of South America shows plreny of interventions. Iraq & Iran are also great examples of American meddling. Iran had a democratically elected president toppled, to be replaced by a autocratic ruler. When he was finally removed by a popular revolution (resulting in an islamic state), America supports Iraq as counterbalacing force. Support includes delivery of chemical weapons.
America has the dubious priveledge of being the only democracy to invade another democracy (the Dominican Republic).
Then, one more little attack comes, and they respond with a built up ferocity that is vastly greater than sum of all the attacks that initially made on them. I don't think that the Arabs quite realize this and as a result of many relatively small attacks could find themselves subjected to a systemic de-population campaign from the West. The Americans nearly wiped out the native Indian tribes of North America in the late 1800's when the Native Americans wouldn't stop attacking and murdering the settlers. This could easily end up being the fate of Islam as well.
Those in the middle East have long memories. Very long memories. The crusades still resonate for people in that region. The point is that memories are very long, people are equally willing to wait a long time for results. What we are seeing in Iraq is only the beginning. I think America has drawn itself into a war that it cannot win. Not even by genocide. America is attempting to swat a mosquito with a sledgehammer.
I found something in Machiavelli's The Prince a while ago that I'm going to paraphrase:
"No country can enter another contry unless it has the support of the population, no matter how strong its army is".
I mean really, why? The FAQ does not answer this, the FAQ explains how XHTML works, how it is different and all that. But it doesn't explain why I should change. It explains why HTML is bad, or to be more accurate how easy it is to write bad HTML, but that is not sufficient reason for me. Sure if I want to use some of the newer features, I need to use XHTML, but I'm not seeing anything I need there either.
Here are some reasons *not* to change:
1. It doesn't work in IE without a nasty work around. IE is still the dominant browser last time I checked, despite a
2. It doesn't work in older browsers. Some people still do use them.
3. I have a boatload of stuff in HTML and experience to match. Any time spent upgrading that for no real benefit is time wasted.
YMMV.
It HTML really that hard?
/. breaks up long URLS.
link
Like gun makers should include a provision that people shouldn't use these to kill?
I've been having the same problems today and after a little messing around I have come to the concolusion that it is Moz. When I opened a page in a new tab, it rendered fine, moved to another tab and moved back to the original tab the page was having issues. One less mystery.
Otherwise known as a firewall.
Are you sure? I think what is actually happening is that /. is sending part of the page and the dropping the connection. Moz/Fire* then renders what it has been given. Unfortunately a view source in Mozilla results in a new request so this is hard to verify.