If you happen to see a guy in a dark suit who likes to hang out behind windows and doors that for some reason you can never get into do not hesitate to shoot his ass.
I tried but whenever I point my gun at him, I inexplicably point it down.
It was worse than that. Halo was originally going to be a Mac game with the Windows version coming out the same day. Bungie made their rep as game developers for the Mac, most notably the Marathon franchise.
Halo got revealed at Macworld in 1999 I believe. Then MS bought Bungie and then there was no Mac version at all. It got immortalized in a PA strip.
The GP has a point, but games is about the only thing I use Windows for these days. Without 'em, I have even fewer reasons to hop on the Windows upgrade mill.
Eh, different strokes for different folks, I guess. Probably my only complaints with Sins is I'd like for there to be more victory conditions than "vanquish all foes" and I'd love to have ground-based combat for taking planets, rather than just bombing them into submission. How do you feel about RTS games in general? For example, everyone raved about "Gears of War", but I didn't really care for it, but then I like few first person and squad shooters, so I'm not one to say it sucks, because it's not my bag.
If you prefer turn-based in general, adding a few of the 4x tropes to RTS probably isn't going to do much for you. For example, The tech tree is quite involved compared to most RTS games, but is a bit anemic next to Alpha Centauri's or even Master of Orion's 15-year old tech tree. One of the reasons I like it is that it's the first RTS game I've seen where I can use a CivIII/IV-like cultural dominance to help win the game ("Victory is at hand for The Unity!")
I really don't need to pick up Alpha Centauri. I think it's the only game I have bought for Windows, Mac, AND Linux. I played the hell out of that game, and even made up my own factions with new graphics back in the day. I keep an old glibc around just so my Loki port of SMAC can still run on my Slackware 12.1 box.:-)
Because it's supposed to be a game. If it were truly evolution-style, the player would have nothing to do but watch. Games that are made to be realistic are oftentimes dull as wet cardboard. That you design your creature I hope doesn't come as a shock to you, since every Spore tech demo Will Wright gave in the last two to three years showed exactly that.
Personally, I really enjoyed it until I got to the space thing. I wasn't aware that I'd have to play a broken tech-demo version of Master of Orion to finish the game. I was in constant space combat using a control/camera system that I'm sure was designed to make space combat as painful as possible. And my race had been pretty much a peacenik during the whole history. None of that mattered anymore, apparently. The cell, creature, and tribal stages I thought were fun. The civ stage was okay. Once you get to space, just quit and go load up Sins of a Solar Empire instead.
I don't remember Altavista's search ever being that bad, but I switched permanently to Google when Altavista started to remake themselves into a portal. Google's interface was so clean it trumped altavista.
Now, Google can be a portal, but it's not a bad one, and can all be dismissed and returned to an interface that isn't much more different than the one they had then.
Europe seems to be making a better job of it even though the member states are still separate countries!
the EU in its present form is not even 20 years old, and is a descendant of the EEC which is only 50 years old. Their common currency is not even 10 years old.
Get back to me in 100-200 years and tell me how much fun the EU's having then. Personally, I hope Europe can do a better job of federation than the United States has, but if human history is any sort of guide, my hope is probably vain.
I never really thought about that before, but you're right. The portal gun is also a perpetual motion engine. Put a portal above a paddle wheel, and a portal below the paddle wheel. Add enough water to get the paddle going, and poof. Power until enough water evaporates that it can't turn the wheel anymore.
At least, not mine, despite their page stating that they support "Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5)." and "Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works." I have a Mac running Tiger, Safari 3.1, and Firefox 2, and I got the "We're sorry" message with both.
Aren't Mac users a big chunk of the core Democratic Party base?;-)
Well sure. The point was that it's difficult to take seriously anyone's criticism of advanced science topics like materials science and fluid dynamics when it's patently obvious that they have not yet mastered the basic science that precedes them.
Gravity is a force, and imparts acceleration, which on Earth is 32.1 feet per second per second.
You have to use the distance equation: d = (1/2)at^2 + (v0)t + d0. The last two terms are zero in this case. Solve 741 = (1/2)(32.1)(t^2) yields 6.79 seconds.
I can't speak to NIST's credibility, but unlike you, they at least understand high school physics.
Nando became McClatchy Interactive, a bloated and confused shadow of its former self. They've got a lot of talented tech and content folks still, but they're rendered ineffective due to multiple thick coats of management and bureaucracy applied to it.
As someone who worked for one of the bigger newspaper chains in "new media" for two years, I have to agree with this. In theory local information is something that local papers should be able to dominate in online. The reality is the papers spend basically squat on local presence and are centralizing all their web presence. Google, and MSN and Yahoo for that matter, have way too many people all smarter than the people running the online newspaper business. Those companies will eat the newspapers for lunch and they won't know what hit them.
The paper I worked for had just spent 30 million dollars on a new press facility, while online media was me (engineer), my boss, a designer, and an online editor, and we were lucky to have that much. Our servers were handled centrally and we paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year for the privilege. For what we got out of that money, we could've bought a couple servers, dropped in a DS3, and hired another person and done way more than what we did. We spent a lot of our time wrestling with their byzantine CMS, when we could've done the whole thing with Drupal or some other decent open source CMS and some customization.
I hear the executives talk the talk about how their industry must transform, but my brief experience indicated that they don't have clue one on how to do it. I wouldn't touch a newspaper stock with a ten foot pole.
Tools do matter, though, and I always thought of Perl as a Swiss Army knife, a handy portable tool to let you quick field maintenance stuff, but no replacement for a set of good purpose-built hand and power tools if I want to make fine cabinetry or musical instruments.
Lord, I thought the bless thing was a pain, and now you're telling me that there's at least FIVE different CPAN thingys that give me a way to do object-oriented Perl development? Perl's been on my "avoid" list for years now, and what you've revealed to me scares me to my very core, and only further cements my desire to continue avoiding it. It was great in the early-mid 90s as a way to make interactive web apps, and it fit really nicely into that "need more power than a shell script, but C is overkill" niche, but now? Perl sounds like the MCP from Tron, absorbing all functions into it.:-)
Since there are at least five of them, something tells me that the odds are decent that at a given Perl shop, some genius thought they all sucked and rolled his own all-singing, all-dancing object model. The net result is basically nobody can now claim to be truly knowledgeable about object-oriented development in Perl.
Python and Ruby also tend to offend the client IT teams standards folks, who aren't quite sure about this new-fangled stuff.
If they think Python is new-fangled, tell them it's only four years younger than Perl (1991 vs 1987), and older than the first release of Microsoft SQL Server for Windows.:-)
Frankly, unless you're doing pre-press or anything else that lives and dies in CMYK/spot color profile-aware space (admittedly a good chunk of PS users), the advantages of Photoshop over the GIMP makes it really hard to justify the price these days. GIMP's UI used to really suck but it's gotten better and keeps getting better all the time.
I'd skip it. But in the meantime, I'd find a drive-in theater and wait until they play "Closed for The Season", usually in the late fall. It's a pretty long movie, but spectacular. They seldom show it at regular theaters, but it's much better at a drive-in.
Seriously, who dominates a little kid at checkers? If you're going to win, at least make it close. Present the kid with options of multiple decent moves, and let him experience the ramifications of choosing the better move, and the ramifications of choosing the worse move. Use the game to reward strategic thinking, to reward planning ahead.
Actually, I did to a little kid, my son, at chess. I never held back (I'm not a really good chess player, either, so it's not like I'd be holding back much), but every game, I'd explain what he did wrong, and what I did wrong that he didn't capitalize on.
He's 15 now, and though I still beat him, it gets harder each time, and I know that the day is coming where I will lose to him. That's okay. He already beats me at Halo and Quake. I still dominate him at Starcraft, though.:-)
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Wow, that's a proportionate response. You're a real piece of work, ain't ya?
If you happen to see a guy in a dark suit who likes to hang out behind windows and doors that for some reason you can never get into do not hesitate to shoot his ass.
I tried but whenever I point my gun at him, I inexplicably point it down.
It was worse than that. Halo was originally going to be a Mac game with the Windows version coming out the same day. Bungie made their rep as game developers for the Mac, most notably the Marathon franchise.
Halo got revealed at Macworld in 1999 I believe. Then MS bought Bungie and then there was no Mac version at all. It got immortalized in a PA strip.
The GP has a point, but games is about the only thing I use Windows for these days. Without 'em, I have even fewer reasons to hop on the Windows upgrade mill.
Eh, different strokes for different folks, I guess. Probably my only complaints with Sins is I'd like for there to be more victory conditions than "vanquish all foes" and I'd love to have ground-based combat for taking planets, rather than just bombing them into submission. How do you feel about RTS games in general? For example, everyone raved about "Gears of War", but I didn't really care for it, but then I like few first person and squad shooters, so I'm not one to say it sucks, because it's not my bag.
If you prefer turn-based in general, adding a few of the 4x tropes to RTS probably isn't going to do much for you. For example, The tech tree is quite involved compared to most RTS games, but is a bit anemic next to Alpha Centauri's or even Master of Orion's 15-year old tech tree. One of the reasons I like it is that it's the first RTS game I've seen where I can use a CivIII/IV-like cultural dominance to help win the game ("Victory is at hand for The Unity!")
I really don't need to pick up Alpha Centauri. I think it's the only game I have bought for Windows, Mac, AND Linux. I played the hell out of that game, and even made up my own factions with new graphics back in the day. I keep an old glibc around just so my Loki port of SMAC can still run on my Slackware 12.1 box. :-)
Because it's supposed to be a game. If it were truly evolution-style, the player would have nothing to do but watch. Games that are made to be realistic are oftentimes dull as wet cardboard. That you design your creature I hope doesn't come as a shock to you, since every Spore tech demo Will Wright gave in the last two to three years showed exactly that.
Personally, I really enjoyed it until I got to the space thing. I wasn't aware that I'd have to play a broken tech-demo version of Master of Orion to finish the game. I was in constant space combat using a control/camera system that I'm sure was designed to make space combat as painful as possible. And my race had been pretty much a peacenik during the whole history. None of that mattered anymore, apparently. The cell, creature, and tribal stages I thought were fun. The civ stage was okay. Once you get to space, just quit and go load up Sins of a Solar Empire instead.
I don't remember Altavista's search ever being that bad, but I switched permanently to Google when Altavista started to remake themselves into a portal. Google's interface was so clean it trumped altavista.
Now, Google can be a portal, but it's not a bad one, and can all be dismissed and returned to an interface that isn't much more different than the one they had then.
I consider not ever getting email from Daniel Brandt to be one of Gmail's most compelling features.
Unfortunately, it has just about everyone connected to technology talking about Microsoft in close proximity to the letters "WTF".
Somewhere on my list of "things to do when I get a time machine":
Find the Netscape and Sun marketroids who coined the name "JavaScript" and kick them all in the gender-appropriate gonads before they do it.
Please ask him to stop.
Or at least share.
Europe seems to be making a better job of it even though the member states are still separate countries!
the EU in its present form is not even 20 years old, and is a descendant of the EEC which is only 50 years old. Their common currency is not even 10 years old.
Get back to me in 100-200 years and tell me how much fun the EU's having then. Personally, I hope Europe can do a better job of federation than the United States has, but if human history is any sort of guide, my hope is probably vain.
I never really thought about that before, but you're right. The portal gun is also a perpetual motion engine. Put a portal above a paddle wheel, and a portal below the paddle wheel. Add enough water to get the paddle going, and poof. Power until enough water evaporates that it can't turn the wheel anymore.
Ah, that explains it then. My Mac is an old G4. Mind you it still runs the latest 10.4 version.
Ah well, it's not like I was voting for Obama anyway.
At least, not mine, despite their page stating that they support "Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5)." and "Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works." I have a Mac running Tiger, Safari 3.1, and Firefox 2, and I got the "We're sorry" message with both.
Aren't Mac users a big chunk of the core Democratic Party base? ;-)
Well sure. The point was that it's difficult to take seriously anyone's criticism of advanced science topics like materials science and fluid dynamics when it's patently obvious that they have not yet mastered the basic science that precedes them.
You FAIL physics.
Gravity is a force, and imparts acceleration, which on Earth is 32.1 feet per second per second.
You have to use the distance equation: d = (1/2)at^2 + (v0)t + d0. The last two terms are zero in this case. Solve 741 = (1/2)(32.1)(t^2) yields 6.79 seconds.
I can't speak to NIST's credibility, but unlike you, they at least understand high school physics.
You know what, Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other people here in this trailer park.
Nando became McClatchy Interactive, a bloated and confused shadow of its former self. They've got a lot of talented tech and content folks still, but they're rendered ineffective due to multiple thick coats of management and bureaucracy applied to it.
As someone who worked for one of the bigger newspaper chains in "new media" for two years, I have to agree with this. In theory local information is something that local papers should be able to dominate in online. The reality is the papers spend basically squat on local presence and are centralizing all their web presence. Google, and MSN and Yahoo for that matter, have way too many people all smarter than the people running the online newspaper business. Those companies will eat the newspapers for lunch and they won't know what hit them.
The paper I worked for had just spent 30 million dollars on a new press facility, while online media was me (engineer), my boss, a designer, and an online editor, and we were lucky to have that much. Our servers were handled centrally and we paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year for the privilege. For what we got out of that money, we could've bought a couple servers, dropped in a DS3, and hired another person and done way more than what we did. We spent a lot of our time wrestling with their byzantine CMS, when we could've done the whole thing with Drupal or some other decent open source CMS and some customization.
I hear the executives talk the talk about how their industry must transform, but my brief experience indicated that they don't have clue one on how to do it. I wouldn't touch a newspaper stock with a ten foot pole.
Tools do matter, though, and I always thought of Perl as a Swiss Army knife, a handy portable tool to let you quick field maintenance stuff, but no replacement for a set of good purpose-built hand and power tools if I want to make fine cabinetry or musical instruments.
Lord, I thought the bless thing was a pain, and now you're telling me that there's at least FIVE different CPAN thingys that give me a way to do object-oriented Perl development? Perl's been on my "avoid" list for years now, and what you've revealed to me scares me to my very core, and only further cements my desire to continue avoiding it. It was great in the early-mid 90s as a way to make interactive web apps, and it fit really nicely into that "need more power than a shell script, but C is overkill" niche, but now? Perl sounds like the MCP from Tron, absorbing all functions into it. :-)
Since there are at least five of them, something tells me that the odds are decent that at a given Perl shop, some genius thought they all sucked and rolled his own all-singing, all-dancing object model. The net result is basically nobody can now claim to be truly knowledgeable about object-oriented development in Perl.
Python and Ruby also tend to offend the client IT teams standards folks, who aren't quite sure about this new-fangled stuff.
If they think Python is new-fangled, tell them it's only four years younger than Perl (1991 vs 1987), and older than the first release of Microsoft SQL Server for Windows. :-)
Frankly, unless you're doing pre-press or anything else that lives and dies in CMYK/spot color profile-aware space (admittedly a good chunk of PS users), the advantages of Photoshop over the GIMP makes it really hard to justify the price these days. GIMP's UI used to really suck but it's gotten better and keeps getting better all the time.
I'd skip it. But in the meantime, I'd find a drive-in theater and wait until they play "Closed for The Season", usually in the late fall. It's a pretty long movie, but spectacular. They seldom show it at regular theaters, but it's much better at a drive-in.
Seriously, who dominates a little kid at checkers? If you're going to win, at least make it close. Present the kid with options of multiple decent moves, and let him experience the ramifications of choosing the better move, and the ramifications of choosing the worse move. Use the game to reward strategic thinking, to reward planning ahead.
Actually, I did to a little kid, my son, at chess. I never held back (I'm not a really good chess player, either, so it's not like I'd be holding back much), but every game, I'd explain what he did wrong, and what I did wrong that he didn't capitalize on.
He's 15 now, and though I still beat him, it gets harder each time, and I know that the day is coming where I will lose to him. That's okay. He already beats me at Halo and Quake. I still dominate him at Starcraft, though. :-)