People who are *really* into MMO's spend tons of time doing analysis of game mechanics. It's not uncommon to find discussions in the EverQuest2 class forums go straight to calculus.
The mystery your missing is called infant mortality. In the modern (first) world it's about 2% but in a pre-modern (no science based healthcare) it can be in the ~80% range. Add to that much shorter life spans, ~35 or so, and I think you'll find the answers to your questions.
Seriously, I doubt that companies like Valve will switch to OpenGL for winxp releases. They already have extensive directx know-how and will probably just build in DX9 and DX10 support just like they currently build in support for DX7, 8 and 9.
In the end, most people will upgrade to vista. Either because they want to or because they need it for a certain program to run or simply because it came pre-installed on their shiny new Dell. It is inevitable.
I've owned four creative cards in the last ten or twelve years. They were all great. Their drivers have been hit or miss in the past but, with the exception of vista drivers and everyones vista drivers suck at this point, I haven't had any problems with them since I used windows 98se.
I own an x-fi and the drivers work well. The sound quality is much better than the audigy was and is far and away better than any on-board sound card I've ever heard. I had some issues on my nforce4 based system but an update to the driver fixed it.
I pretty much only listen to music and play games on my pc. I have a good quality pair of speakers.
"This will no doubt fuel the debate about whether binary blob drivers should be allowed in Linux."
Allowed huh? I thought linux was about having choices. How is preventing binary drivers from working with the linux kernel true to the free mantra of the FOSS crowd?
A mark of a successful free system is that it allows people to use it in ways that the creators didn't intend and are actually offended by. How does the old saying go? Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Really, I mean why do people wear clothes for that matter? I mean we are all made of meat covered in skin. We all know what human bodies look like. Everyone should just go naked from now on. Who needs privacy when you have nothing to hide?
So how do you tell which fossils belong to which species then? Fossils don't reproduce.
There are a number of generally recognized elements that can isolate one population from another reproductively; mechanical (my dong is too big to fit in your hoo-hoo without cracking you open (think great dane and toy poodle), behavioral (common in birds, I only like to hump things that dance the way I like to dance (hmm, applies to ravers too?)), actual biological barriers (ie chromosome mismatch, offspring get random numbers of chromosomes like in mules), um a few others I don't remember since I've only had one cup of coffee this morning but I think you see what I'm gettting at. There are a lot of ways to define a species and the tried and true "if they can do it they are a species" just doesn't cut it.
It's hard enough to define a species if your examples are still living and reproducing, once they are dead and fossilized, it's just a matter of educated guess work. This is why the number and relationships of "species" that are only known through fossils are constantly in flux. Read pretty much anything by Stephen J Gould for an indepth discussion of the problems of assigning species to fossils especially "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory". The term chronospecies gets thrown around a bit in discussions about how to tell which fossilized parts of individuals constitute a "species". The idea is to recognize that we are making up the species groupings based on limited knowledge and guesswork and that mostly when we define a fossil as a species we are saying that it seems to fit anatonically into some other group or series of specimens that are generally agreed to be related.
Also, since human and chimpanzee apparently shared an ancestor, there's nothing really that strange about them interbreeding even after having been reproductively isolated for a while. Remember that 6-5 million years ago there was no "we" (homo sapiens) just things that turned out to be our ancestors. Australopithecus looked a lot more like a chimp than you or I do.
And, just to stave off the "who-the-hell-are-you" nay sayers, I am an anthropologist and I've specialized in human biology so, while I am by no means an expert, I am speaking within my field of expertise.
The variety you seek is in the strategies of the people you are playing against and your own.
Q3 is a super fast paced strategy game.
Really, what matters in the levels is not what they look like but their structure and how they are fit together internally. I agree that the decorations on the geometry aren't really that creatively or artistically designed but, are you playing the game to look at the wall textures or for the game play?
If you want beauty, go play Uru;-)
This is why I've been playing UT2K4 so much lately. It's core game play (in deathmatch) is almost as honed as Q3's, the maps are well layed out (if a bit gimmicky sometimes) and it has nice colorful environments. UT2K4 suffers from weaponitis though.
On the topic of "The weapons all work the same, some of them just hurt more." I both agree and disagree. Lets be honest here, in every FPS the only difference between weapons is how you deliver the damage and how much damage they do.
Different weapons in Q3 work very differently and are appropriate for different strategies / situations. Rail for sniping; shot gun, lightening gun or plasma gun for in tight hallways; RL for open areas; machine gun for plinking from a distance; shotty for close to medium range; grenade launcher for spamming choke points / spawns or bouncing around corners; BFG for when your opponents aren't going to get too close to you.
One of the things that makes Q3 great is that every weapon is dangerous in the hands of someone who really understands how to use it. Anyone can fly a redeemer into the general area of their opponent, not everyone can juggle their opponents in the air with three or four consecutive rockets.
What makes Q3 great is its incredibly simple laser-beam focus. There is almost nothing extraneous in the game. It's like a bonzai tree or a zen rock garden.
I've played almost every game you listed. Many of them four or five times (some even more) and they all have more story than Q3, a lot of them have more weapons or more game play modes. Some even look better.
But, Q3 was installed and played almost daily on my computer from the day I bought it (a few weeks after it became available) until about three months ago.
Q3 is deathmatch and maybe capture the flag if you swing that way. It is nothing else and it never claimed to be anything else.
Although I disagree on dhalgren. I've read it too many times to count over the last 20 years. I love that book but I understand why people don't like it. I just meant that his prose is gorgeous and concise.
I submit that you are confusing vague and flowery wording for challenging writing. In straight science fiction, see "Dhalgren" by Samuel Delany and the "Dune" books by Frank Herbert for examples of challenging writing that isn't vague or flowery. Outside of SF, see pretty much anything by Louis-Ferdinand Celine although I personally recommend both "Journey to the end of the night" and "Death on the installment plan". "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon is a good example too.
Some novels aspire to be more than something to be consumed, pooped out and forgotten.
So, doing something that's fun but challenging isn't worthwhile like say, cycling, learning how to fix a car, weight lifting or carpentry? Only things that are easy to do and pose no challenge are fun and worth doing?
You are an idiot. "But pretty much everything that's hard to read is crap, because if you have to struggle to read it, then its other qualities just don't matter."
let me fix that for you.
"But pretty much everything that's hard to do is crap, because if you have to struggle to do it, then its other qualities just don't matter."
Um, the current version of virex is unsupported on intel macs and basically doesn't work at all if you install it anyway (or even can install it).
I realize that intel macs are the smallest subset of the al;ready smalll mac market but still. You'd think they would atleast have a product that they could sell to those windows switchers they seem to be targeting.
I've purchased one e-book. I'm an experienced and sophisticated computer user.
I cannot get adobe acrobat to authenticate so I can download the actual book. I log in at adobe's site, it tells me that my copy of acrobat is authenticated and then when I try to open the book it tells me that my copy of acrobat is not authenticated and that I must authenticate before I can access my book. I've reinstalled acrobat and re-authenticated more times than I can to remember.
australopithecus lived around ~6 mya and modern humans show up in the fossil record around ~200,000 years ago so the species had already been around for ~170,000 years when that first known pottery was made.
I question whether pottery is a good indicator of civilisation for a lot of reasons but, off the top of my head, it takes a lot of knowledge about the natural world to get to the point where you can make pottery; fire, clay, temper, and so on. Where in the process of figuring these things out did "civilisation" start? Why not with stone tools? Yeah they are stone but, can you make a stone tool? I certainly can't and I've studied them and seen them be made.
That would put "civilisation" back around 1.8 mya predating modern Homo by about 1.6 my. That puts us in Homo erectus era and you do find erectus all over the middle east and asia. Interestingly, erectus is found in asia up to about 500,000 years ago while it is entirely replaced by more modern forms in africa and the middle east over that period.
To go back to your point, this isn't unreasonable but there is a metric butt ton of fossil and genetic evidence that points to an african origin for genus Homo and modern Homo that will need t be clarified in order for the asian source theory to take off.
Slashdot Mirror
check this out. http://www.wowwiki.com/Theorycraft
People who are *really* into MMO's spend tons of time doing analysis of game mechanics. It's not uncommon to find discussions in the EverQuest2 class forums go straight to calculus.
The mystery your missing is called infant mortality. In the modern (first) world it's about 2% but in a pre-modern (no science based healthcare) it can be in the ~80% range. Add to that much shorter life spans, ~35 or so, and I think you'll find the answers to your questions.
The concept is a bit older than Buffy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
It was already written and it's called "Across Realtime" by Vernor Vinge.
DX9 should be enough for anybody . . .
Seriously, I doubt that companies like Valve will switch to OpenGL for winxp releases. They already have extensive directx know-how and will probably just build in DX9 and DX10 support just like they currently build in support for DX7, 8 and 9.
In the end, most people will upgrade to vista. Either because they want to or because they need it for a certain program to run or simply because it came pre-installed on their shiny new Dell. It is inevitable.
I've owned four creative cards in the last ten or twelve years. They were all great. Their drivers have been hit or miss in the past but, with the exception of vista drivers and everyones vista drivers suck at this point, I haven't had any problems with them since I used windows 98se.
I own an x-fi and the drivers work well. The sound quality is much better than the audigy was and is far and away better than any on-board sound card I've ever heard. I had some issues on my nforce4 based system but an update to the driver fixed it.
I pretty much only listen to music and play games on my pc. I have a good quality pair of speakers.
the article is a troll. don't feed the trolls.
"This will no doubt fuel the debate about whether binary blob drivers should be allowed in Linux."
Allowed huh? I thought linux was about having choices. How is preventing binary drivers from working with the linux kernel true to the free mantra of the FOSS crowd?
A mark of a successful free system is that it allows people to use it in ways that the creators didn't intend and are actually offended by. How does the old saying go? Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
But, if we get rid of the caps lock key how will AOL users out themselves?
This man speaks the truth.
Life expectance changes over the life span of an individual. That's why it's always specified "at birth" or "at 5 years of age".
Read up on human population biology, demographics and bio-demography for a deeper understanding of how this science works.
The actual truth is that living beings aren't "designed" at all. And, the fact that people do live longer than 40 years disproves your assertion too.
In most people the things you describe happen after they've reproduced so how could natural selection work on them?
Really, I mean why do people wear clothes for that matter? I mean we are all made of meat covered in skin. We all know what human bodies look like. Everyone should just go naked from now on. Who needs privacy when you have nothing to hide?
So how do you tell which fossils belong to which species then? Fossils don't reproduce.
There are a number of generally recognized elements that can isolate one population from another reproductively; mechanical (my dong is too big to fit in your hoo-hoo without cracking you open (think great dane and toy poodle), behavioral (common in birds, I only like to hump things that dance the way I like to dance (hmm, applies to ravers too?)), actual biological barriers (ie chromosome mismatch, offspring get random numbers of chromosomes like in mules), um a few others I don't remember since I've only had one cup of coffee this morning but I think you see what I'm gettting at. There are a lot of ways to define a species and the tried and true "if they can do it they are a species" just doesn't cut it.
It's hard enough to define a species if your examples are still living and reproducing, once they are dead and fossilized, it's just a matter of educated guess work. This is why the number and relationships of "species" that are only known through fossils are constantly in flux. Read pretty much anything by Stephen J Gould for an indepth discussion of the problems of assigning species to fossils especially "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory". The term chronospecies gets thrown around a bit in discussions about how to tell which fossilized parts of individuals constitute a "species". The idea is to recognize that we are making up the species groupings based on limited knowledge and guesswork and that mostly when we define a fossil as a species we are saying that it seems to fit anatonically into some other group or series of specimens that are generally agreed to be related.
Also, since human and chimpanzee apparently shared an ancestor, there's nothing really that strange about them interbreeding even after having been reproductively isolated for a while. Remember that 6-5 million years ago there was no "we" (homo sapiens) just things that turned out to be our ancestors. Australopithecus looked a lot more like a chimp than you or I do.
And, just to stave off the "who-the-hell-are-you" nay sayers, I am an anthropologist and I've specialized in human biology so, while I am by no means an expert, I am speaking within my field of expertise.
The variety you seek is in the strategies of the people you are playing against and your own.
;-)
Q3 is a super fast paced strategy game.
Really, what matters in the levels is not what they look like but their structure and how they are fit together internally. I agree that the decorations on the geometry aren't really that creatively or artistically designed but, are you playing the game to look at the wall textures or for the game play?
If you want beauty, go play Uru
This is why I've been playing UT2K4 so much lately. It's core game play (in deathmatch) is almost as honed as Q3's, the maps are well layed out (if a bit gimmicky sometimes) and it has nice colorful environments. UT2K4 suffers from weaponitis though.
On the topic of "The weapons all work the same, some of them just hurt more." I both agree and disagree. Lets be honest here, in every FPS the only difference between weapons is how you deliver the damage and how much damage they do.
Different weapons in Q3 work very differently and are appropriate for different strategies / situations. Rail for sniping; shot gun, lightening gun or plasma gun for in tight hallways; RL for open areas; machine gun for plinking from a distance; shotty for close to medium range; grenade launcher for spamming choke points / spawns or bouncing around corners; BFG for when your opponents aren't going to get too close to you.
One of the things that makes Q3 great is that every weapon is dangerous in the hands of someone who really understands how to use it. Anyone can fly a redeemer into the general area of their opponent, not everyone can juggle their opponents in the air with three or four consecutive rockets.
What makes Q3 great is its incredibly simple laser-beam focus. There is almost nothing extraneous in the game. It's like a bonzai tree or a zen rock garden.
I've played almost every game you listed. Many of them four or five times (some even more) and they all have more story than Q3, a lot of them have more weapons or more game play modes. Some even look better.
But, Q3 was installed and played almost daily on my computer from the day I bought it (a few weeks after it became available) until about three months ago.
Q3 is deathmatch and maybe capture the flag if you swing that way. It is nothing else and it never claimed to be anything else.
Well glad to see we cleared this up ;-)
Although I disagree on dhalgren. I've read it too many times to count over the last 20 years. I love that book but I understand why people don't like it. I just meant that his prose is gorgeous and concise.
I submit that you are confusing vague and flowery wording for challenging writing. In straight science fiction, see "Dhalgren" by Samuel Delany and the "Dune" books by Frank Herbert for examples of challenging writing that isn't vague or flowery. Outside of SF, see pretty much anything by Louis-Ferdinand Celine although I personally recommend both "Journey to the end of the night" and "Death on the installment plan". "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon is a good example too.
Some novels aspire to be more than something to be consumed, pooped out and forgotten.
So, doing something that's fun but challenging isn't worthwhile like say, cycling, learning how to fix a car, weight lifting or carpentry? Only things that are easy to do and pose no challenge are fun and worth doing?
You are an idiot.
"But pretty much everything that's hard to read is crap, because if you have to struggle to read it, then its other qualities just don't matter."
let me fix that for you.
"But pretty much everything that's hard to do is crap, because if you have to struggle to do it, then its other qualities just don't matter."
Um, the current version of virex is unsupported on intel macs and basically doesn't work at all if you install it anyway (or even can install it).
I realize that intel macs are the smallest subset of the al;ready smalll mac market but still. You'd think they would atleast have a product that they could sell to those windows switchers they seem to be targeting.
Arcanum is full of funny and interesting quests. Bloodlines is too. I miss Troika.
I've purchased one e-book. I'm an experienced and sophisticated computer user.
I cannot get adobe acrobat to authenticate so I can download the actual book. I log in at adobe's site, it tells me that my copy of acrobat is authenticated and then when I try to open the book it tells me that my copy of acrobat is not authenticated and that I must authenticate before I can access my book. I've reinstalled acrobat and re-authenticated more times than I can to remember.
So I say Fuck e-books! Dead trees forever.
amen brother!
because issues like this are almost always concluded with a single study . . . .
australopithecus lived around ~6 mya and modern humans show up in the fossil record around ~200,000 years ago so the species had already been around for ~170,000 years when that first known pottery was made.
I question whether pottery is a good indicator of civilisation for a lot of reasons but, off the top of my head, it takes a lot of knowledge about the natural world to get to the point where you can make pottery; fire, clay, temper, and so on. Where in the process of figuring these things out did "civilisation" start? Why not with stone tools? Yeah they are stone but, can you make a stone tool? I certainly can't and I've studied them and seen them be made.
That would put "civilisation" back around 1.8 mya predating modern Homo by about 1.6 my. That puts us in Homo erectus era and you do find erectus all over the middle east and asia. Interestingly, erectus is found in asia up to about 500,000 years ago while it is entirely replaced by more modern forms in africa and the middle east over that period.
To go back to your point, this isn't unreasonable but there is a metric butt ton of fossil and genetic evidence that points to an african origin for genus Homo and modern Homo that will need t be clarified in order for the asian source theory to take off.