What about the U-2? (the spyplane, not the awful band)
Altitude limit is around 80,000 feet. The balloon would be about 30,000 feet higher.
I believe all the jets that have gone over 100,000 feet were just performing zoom climbs where you climb until you stall (or push the nose down). That's not really 'flying' in the accepted sense.
Book a MiG-25. We already have private "space tourism" at this level of hopelessly deluded definition of "space tourism".
a) can a MIG-25 fly at 110,000 feet? b) can a MIG-25 fly up there, fly around and return for less than the cost of a balloon flight? Older-generation jet fighters typically cost about $50k an hour, don't they? c) can a MIG-25 do that safer than a balloon? d) can you eat a meal in the back seat of a MIG-25 while watching the scenery go by?
All that said for $150k I think I'd just save another $50k and buy a real suborbital flight from Virgin.
How much bad will do you have to be running up for people to think Bing might be a better idea?
I've found that Bing is much better than Google for technical searches because it just seems to search for what I actually asked it to search for and not search for words I didn't ask for which it thinks I might perhaps have meant to search for. Google search really sucks these days and I'm probably going to switch completely away from it soon. Every new 'upgrade' to their search seems to make it even worse.
Oh yeah, and let's not forget stealing the up and down arrow keys from the scrollbar so now I can no longer use them to scroll quickly up and down the page and instead they scroll through search results one by one.
You don't buy (or pirate) many games do you? They come a lot worse.
I generally don't buy games unless other people say they're good or I played an earlier game in the same series and liked it. I honestly have no idea why so many people love the Mass Effect games because the three hour long unskippable cutscene at the start of the game was enough that I almost quit playing straight away.
I should also probably add that I very rarely pay more than $5 for a game these days so I'm far more likely to bin something that I don't like than I was when I paid $50.
OK, maybe that cutscene isn't three hours long but it sure feels that way.
Plenty of voice actors can be had for less than $10.00 an hour. and yes there are plenty at colleges that would even work for FREE To get their name in the credits of something.
And a lot of us just read the subtitles and skip the 'Hollywood voice acting' anyway. Unless the game has unskippable dialog, which seems to be a new trend in 'trying to make our games seem longer even though they're less fun as a result'.
If I wanted to watch a movie I'd watch a movie, when I'm playing a game I want to actually play it, not sit waching boring cutscenes. Anything much beyond 'go here and shoot these things' is starting to get tedious.
Sorry, that was Mass Effect 1; though from what I saw Mass Effect 2 was the same game but with flashing icons showing you exactly which rail you were supposed to follow.
And that means a few changes to game design, like making your enemies scale somewhat so that they remain a challenge to a high "level" character while not being unbeatable for someone who hasn't spent 50 hours grinding in the side areas of the game (looking right at you, Final Fantasy series).
Enemy scaling sucks. What's the point of levelling up if I'm just going to end up having to fight harder monsters as a result? Plus it leads to absurdities where you walk into a crappy little village and the bandits living there are using some of the best weapons and armor in the game.
Mass Effect 2 had a lot of player statistics being collected:
Mass Effect 2 with its unskippable cutscenes, repetitive dialog and stupid quests is one of the worst games I've ever played. I managed to get to the first planet where I'm randomly killed by giant worms jumping out of the ground before I threw it in the trashcan.
I'm surprised that even 50% bothered to finish it.
Sandbox translates into "great, you've finished the 4 fucking hours of crapass story we decided to make. Now go shoot some people, fuck some hookers, beat them up after, kill all the cops you can find, and generally make an ass of yourself in GTA 4 till we make GTA 5."
But the sandbox is by far the best part of the GTA games. That's why they force you to go through the missions to unlock it, because otherwise you wouldn't bother with the boring-ass crap that they make you do in the missions, usually multiple times until you either find the trick or get lucky.
Is six years too long to be stopped by one stupid challenge from unlocking a significant portion of the game?
YES!
'Unlocking' is just a lame way for game developers to pretend a game has more content than it does because it forces you to repeat things you hate in order to unlock something that you actually want to do. I'm not at all surprised that very few people can be bothered to go through all the nonsense required to 'unlock' most of these games.
By "anything" I mean anything a developer can convince a computer to do.
My hamster can do anything a dog can, but playing 'fetch' with him is pretty dull when he takes five minutes to run to the stick and half an hour to drag it back to me.
I see a lot more iPads on the commuter trains than laptops. A lot more. They're usually people reviewing documents, some are typing on them (obviously creating something), some reading the morning news, more than half are standing up. The odd duck luzer with the laptop isn't getting anything done with his aircraft carrier sized HP concrete slab.
Personally I don't work outside office time unless I'm being paid for it. I find that much preferable to being given an iPad to work on the train.
And those $399 laptops weigh about eight pounds - not really what most people want to be carrying around all day.
My gaming laptop weighs six pounds and it's packed with goodies. My netbook weighs about three pounds and while the keyboard isn't great it's certainly a heck of a lot better than a touchscreen. The first $399 laptop I could find on the web weighs under five pounds.
And, frankly, if you're really 'carrying it around all day' then you probably are the target market for iPads and the like because you won't want to be wasting time opening and closing the laptop to use the keyboard and screen. But most people don't do that.
Considering Red Hat and Novell are the employers of the developers and designers, I wonder how they convinced the Server OS vendors that a tablet interface was good FOR A SERVER.
This is what I don't understand. Red Hat's primary customer base are people who do real work with their systems and they're apparently paying for someone to cripple the desktop to make it far less efficient for doing real work.
If you look carefully at Rockstar Games... these guys KNOW how to do it. They know how to make a game feel like you're right there and you can get right into the story.
I totally disagree. In the GTA games I find the 'story' is mostly just an annoying means of preventing me from doing what I want to do.
"Go to the other side of the map to start the mission. Watch a cutscene. Go back to the side you started on to get a car. Go back to the other side again to pick up a passenger. Get chased by a dozen bad guys as you drive back to the side of the map you started on. Oh dear, you got there five seconds too late. Go back and start again. But first, your cousin wants to play darts."
That's what I see as the 'story' in a typical GTA game. I'd much rather they just forgot the 'story' and let me play the actual game.
It will be a marked difference from GW1, where a lone player could use henchmen, consumables and gimmicky builds to achieve pretty much anything a full group of players could.
But in GW1 the henchmen were much smarter than a typical pickup group. Compulsory pickup groups for casual players would really, really suck in a game that's supposed to be designed to be fun rather than a grind.
"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." - Alan Shepard (supposedly, it's often quoted but I haven't seen a definitive source)
Much of the performance advice we have seen given by GPU teams in the past had zero benefit to game performance and took weeks of developer time to implement and maintain.
One thing worth noting is that a change that makes no difference on the card you're testing with may make the difference between the game being playable or a slideshow on a different card.
One particularly amusing issue I remember was with a new feature in Direct3D where I believe we were the only people who supported it in hardware at that time and everyone else emulated it in software; we got a new game from big name game developer X and it ran vastly slower on our card than on much less powerful systems. The idea was that you'd enable this feature once and then keep using it, but they were turning it on and off hundreds of times in a frame and each time that caused a major pipeline stall in our hardware. So once we figured that out we just detected the game and dropped back to software emulation like everyone else, but if they'd known what they were doing the game would have worked fine on all cards and been faster on ours because they'd actually have been using the hardware instead of the CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the U-2? (the spyplane, not the awful band)
Altitude limit is around 80,000 feet. The balloon would be about 30,000 feet higher.
I believe all the jets that have gone over 100,000 feet were just performing zoom climbs where you climb until you stall (or push the nose down). That's not really 'flying' in the accepted sense.
Book a MiG-25. We already have private "space tourism" at this level of hopelessly deluded definition of "space tourism".
a) can a MIG-25 fly at 110,000 feet?
b) can a MIG-25 fly up there, fly around and return for less than the cost of a balloon flight? Older-generation jet fighters typically cost about $50k an hour, don't they?
c) can a MIG-25 do that safer than a balloon?
d) can you eat a meal in the back seat of a MIG-25 while watching the scenery go by?
All that said for $150k I think I'd just save another $50k and buy a real suborbital flight from Virgin.
How much bad will do you have to be running up for people to think Bing might be a better idea?
I've found that Bing is much better than Google for technical searches because it just seems to search for what I actually asked it to search for and not search for words I didn't ask for which it thinks I might perhaps have meant to search for. Google search really sucks these days and I'm probably going to switch completely away from it soon. Every new 'upgrade' to their search seems to make it even worse.
Oh yeah, and let's not forget stealing the up and down arrow keys from the scrollbar so now I can no longer use them to scroll quickly up and down the page and instead they scroll through search results one by one.
And keep in mind that it's hard to hear the public's cries and complaints with money coming out of your ears.
It's a lot easier once people dump your system because they're fed up with you pushing ads all the time.
Having lived through the Halflife/Halflife 2 era of games, it's very hard for me to find anything that's fun enough to finish playing.
Half-Life? With the stupid alien platform jumping levels?
I finished it once using cheats so I don't have to do the tedious jumping crap, then whenever I replayed it I just quit when I got to that point.
You don't buy (or pirate) many games do you? They come a lot worse.
I generally don't buy games unless other people say they're good or I played an earlier game in the same series and liked it. I honestly have no idea why so many people love the Mass Effect games because the three hour long unskippable cutscene at the start of the game was enough that I almost quit playing straight away.
I should also probably add that I very rarely pay more than $5 for a game these days so I'm far more likely to bin something that I don't like than I was when I paid $50.
OK, maybe that cutscene isn't three hours long but it sure feels that way.
But then how do they sell you DLC for $10 a time?
Plenty of voice actors can be had for less than $10.00 an hour. and yes there are plenty at colleges that would even work for FREE To get their name in the credits of something.
And a lot of us just read the subtitles and skip the 'Hollywood voice acting' anyway. Unless the game has unskippable dialog, which seems to be a new trend in 'trying to make our games seem longer even though they're less fun as a result'.
If I wanted to watch a movie I'd watch a movie, when I'm playing a game I want to actually play it, not sit waching boring cutscenes. Anything much beyond 'go here and shoot these things' is starting to get tedious.
Sorry, that was Mass Effect 1; though from what I saw Mass Effect 2 was the same game but with flashing icons showing you exactly which rail you were supposed to follow.
I am not buying any of the DLC, I will get the GOTY edition for $20.
I'll get the GOTY edition for $5 because I know I won't have time to finish it.
And that means a few changes to game design, like making your enemies scale somewhat so that they remain a challenge to a high "level" character while not being unbeatable for someone who hasn't spent 50 hours grinding in the side areas of the game (looking right at you, Final Fantasy series).
Enemy scaling sucks. What's the point of levelling up if I'm just going to end up having to fight harder monsters as a result? Plus it leads to absurdities where you walk into a crappy little village and the bandits living there are using some of the best weapons and armor in the game.
Mass Effect 2 had a lot of player statistics being collected:
Mass Effect 2 with its unskippable cutscenes, repetitive dialog and stupid quests is one of the worst games I've ever played. I managed to get to the first planet where I'm randomly killed by giant worms jumping out of the ground before I threw it in the trashcan.
I'm surprised that even 50% bothered to finish it.
Sandbox translates into "great, you've finished the 4 fucking hours of crapass story we decided to make. Now go shoot some people, fuck some hookers, beat them up after, kill all the cops you can find, and generally make an ass of yourself in GTA 4 till we make GTA 5."
But the sandbox is by far the best part of the GTA games. That's why they force you to go through the missions to unlock it, because otherwise you wouldn't bother with the boring-ass crap that they make you do in the missions, usually multiple times until you either find the trick or get lucky.
Is six years too long to be stopped by one stupid challenge from unlocking a significant portion of the game?
YES!
'Unlocking' is just a lame way for game developers to pretend a game has more content than it does because it forces you to repeat things you hate in order to unlock something that you actually want to do. I'm not at all surprised that very few people can be bothered to go through all the nonsense required to 'unlock' most of these games.
By "anything" I mean anything a developer can convince a computer to do.
My hamster can do anything a dog can, but playing 'fetch' with him is pretty dull when he takes five minutes to run to the stick and half an hour to drag it back to me.
I see a lot more iPads on the commuter trains than laptops. A lot more. They're usually people reviewing documents, some are typing on them (obviously creating something), some reading the morning news, more than half are standing up. The odd duck luzer with the laptop isn't getting anything done with his aircraft carrier sized HP concrete slab.
Personally I don't work outside office time unless I'm being paid for it. I find that much preferable to being given an iPad to work on the train.
Troll rating: 2/10.
And those $399 laptops weigh about eight pounds - not really what most people want to be carrying around all day.
My gaming laptop weighs six pounds and it's packed with goodies. My netbook weighs about three pounds and while the keyboard isn't great it's certainly a heck of a lot better than a touchscreen. The first $399 laptop I could find on the web weighs under five pounds.
And, frankly, if you're really 'carrying it around all day' then you probably are the target market for iPads and the like because you won't want to be wasting time opening and closing the laptop to use the keyboard and screen. But most people don't do that.
Considering Red Hat and Novell are the employers of the developers and designers, I wonder how they convinced the Server OS vendors that a tablet interface was good FOR A SERVER.
This is what I don't understand. Red Hat's primary customer base are people who do real work with their systems and they're apparently paying for someone to cripple the desktop to make it far less efficient for doing real work.
pro tip: don't forget that you can use extensions to modify it to behave exactly how you'd like it to.
Yeah, that lame old excuse: 'if you don't like the default you can always write your own extensions to make it work in a sane manner'.
I'll just switch to XFCE so I don't have to spend an age working around the retarded Gnome 3 design.
Why else reinvent the wheel?!
Otherwise they might have to actually, you know, fix some bugs.
If you look carefully at Rockstar Games... these guys KNOW how to do it. They know how to make a game feel like you're right there and you can get right into the story.
I totally disagree. In the GTA games I find the 'story' is mostly just an annoying means of preventing me from doing what I want to do.
"Go to the other side of the map to start the mission. Watch a cutscene. Go back to the side you started on to get a car. Go back to the other side again to pick up a passenger. Get chased by a dozen bad guys as you drive back to the side of the map you started on. Oh dear, you got there five seconds too late. Go back and start again. But first, your cousin wants to play darts."
That's what I see as the 'story' in a typical GTA game. I'd much rather they just forgot the 'story' and let me play the actual game.
It will be a marked difference from GW1, where a lone player could use henchmen, consumables and gimmicky builds to achieve pretty much anything a full group of players could.
But in GW1 the henchmen were much smarter than a typical pickup group. Compulsory pickup groups for casual players would really, really suck in a game that's supposed to be designed to be fun rather than a grind.
"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." - Alan Shepard (supposedly, it's often quoted but I haven't seen a definitive source)
Much of the performance advice we have seen given by GPU teams in the past had zero benefit to game performance and took weeks of developer time to implement and maintain.
One thing worth noting is that a change that makes no difference on the card you're testing with may make the difference between the game being playable or a slideshow on a different card.
One particularly amusing issue I remember was with a new feature in Direct3D where I believe we were the only people who supported it in hardware at that time and everyone else emulated it in software; we got a new game from big name game developer X and it ran vastly slower on our card than on much less powerful systems. The idea was that you'd enable this feature once and then keep using it, but they were turning it on and off hundreds of times in a frame and each time that caused a major pipeline stall in our hardware. So once we figured that out we just detected the game and dropped back to software emulation like everyone else, but if they'd known what they were doing the game would have worked fine on all cards and been faster on ours because they'd actually have been using the hardware instead of the CPU.
(Details kept vague to protect the guilty)