I'd add No One Lives Forever 2 VS Contract J.A.C.K to that, as NOLF 2 made every single thing in the game BETTER while at the same time sticking to what made the game fun with a capital F, namely the cool gadgets and stealth mixed with the silly humor.
I have two words for you: respawning guards.
That single lousy design choice totally ruined NOLF2 for me. For me to clear out an entire area and then get shot in the back by a guard who's spawned in an area I know was empty five seconds ago is simply retarded.
Similarly the tornado level would have been great if the bad guys didn't spawn repeatedly just to burn down my health and ammo before I reached the end of the level. That felt like the level had been designed by a twelve-year-old... heck, maybe it was.
Ice Station Evil is still one of my favorite levels in any game though.
True, but Apple has nowhere to go but up. Apple is in a position of being absolutely unable to fail.
That's some mighty fine Koolaid you're drinking there.
It's interesting: last week I was looking through an old computer magazine from 1983 because someone on Slashdot asked about 8-bit computer prices and I had the magazine lying around in the basement. After that I noticed there was a review of the new Apple III, which pretty much said that it sucked, but the conclusion was along the lines of 'good or bad, people will buy it because it's from Apple'.
Clearly they were considered 'unable to fail' back then too, yet they went through some seriously rocky periods between then and now. From what I've found out, pretty much all the things they complained about with the Apple III were The Glorious Jobs' design choices which looked good to him but didn't work in the real world.
Don't blame the vendors. The specs for Vista were metamorphosing from day to day until Service Pack 1, and no vendor could predict which way the other vendors would sway things, so there was no _point_ for them in alpha testing.
Plus it required a major driver rewrite for an OS that few people were going to be using for quite some time, so it was inevitably going to be a low priority compared to XP drivers. Microsoft shot themselves in the ass by making such major changes to the driver model between OS versions.
I dont know that its "Useful" persay, but granted that is something XP cannot have outside of someone rolling their own explorer replacement
I'm always puzzled by people who talk about the glories of 'GPU-accelerated rendering', because Windows has had GPU-accelerated rendering since at least version 3.0. XP desktops are GPU-accelerated unless you have a really shitty driver.
It doesn't have fancy compositing, but who needs it on a business computer?
netbooks are a year or two older, but are *still* waiting for that tech (and they're waay underpowered and under-RAM'd as is.)
Atom-based netbooks can already run two threads with hyperthreading, so it's less of an issue. A dual-core Atom adds a sizable amount of power consumption and needs four threads to max it out; because of in-order execution there are usually plenty of stalls where the single core Atom can run a second thread at no cost to the first.
Cellphones, which don't have "core fever" due to different marketting than PCs, will take forever to justify the performance/battery life drawbacks.
The company I was working for in 2005 was building dual-core ARM chips for such lower-power devices; putting two low-frequency ARMs into a single chip ended up giving us the same performance at lower cost and power consumption than a single higher-frequency ARM for the markets we were aiming at. I think we had at least one cellphone company talking to us at the time.
NYT article is well written and informative. It's clearly not assuming that there is something wrong with scientific method, but just asks - could it be?
There's nothing wrong with the scientific method. The problem is that most modern 'science' has nothing to do with the scientific method.
It's worth noting that while many people know Eisenhower warned of the perils of the growing military-industrial complex in his farewell address, they're not aware that he also warned of the perils of the government-scientific complex where almost all science research funding was coming from the government.
It should be a warning for all those that follow right-populist parties and their diffuse "promises". More work, fewer immigrants, less crime, eliminating abuse of social services... sounds familiar?
That sounds a lot like the left-wing parties in the UK in the 1970s. With the possible exception of the last part.
The BNP in the UK, for example, are repeatedly called 'far-right' by the left-wing media, but as far as I've seen their policies are basically those of the left-wing Labour party of the 70s with a bit more explicit racism on top.
It seems like a lot of countries are going on a slide towards dictatorships and totalitarianism, and if it doesn't stop, I'm pretty sure we're going to see World War III, and I'm willing to bet it's within the next 50 years.
All governments slide towards dictatorship and totalitarianism because all governments want more power. The best you can do is try to put roadblocks in the way to delay them long enough for enough resistance to get in the way of their plans.
But most people will cheer for the dictator so long as he promises to give them free stuff paid for with other people's money.
We travel to see stuff. Modern media has made much of that superfluous.
And globalisation means that even if you do travel, when you get there you find it's just like the place you left except they speak a different language in McDonald's.
Personally, I only make an exception for steam when it's a ridiculous price, or I'm only interested in the data files.
Personally I don't remember the last time I paid more than $9.99 for any game, be it from Steam, Gog or retail. The market is so competitive these days there's really no need to pay more than that.
Given how badly the pc version of Black Ops was pirated I don't see much of a future for pc games with single player campaigns
You missed the 'from big publishers who just regurgitate last years game with slightly better graphics' part. If the big publishers abandon the PC for consoles and leave it to the indie developers, I'd be quite happy... I've bought more indie games than big name games in the current Steam sale because so few of the big name games had any appeal.
Of course that will suck for ATI and Nvidia if no-one has a need for the most expensive 3D graphics cards. But there doesn't seem to be much use for them now when most games are designed for consoles with antique GPUs and ported over to the PC.
Steam cultist remind me of Apple fanboys. "Oh but it's Steam, it's GOOD DRM!" Hilarious! It's still DRM that can disable your games at any time of their chosing.
a) Steam is likely to be around for a long time and has a strong incentive not to cut off old games since it's a distribution system as well as a publisher. If they cut off old games for publisher X, then people are going to stop buying all their other games too. b) I've read that Steam has already been cracked, so if it does shut down I'm sure there'll be a 'permanent offline mode' hack within days.
Why would I throw money at a game where they can cut off access to it at any point in time for ALL of their customers, just because they don't want to pay the bill on those servers anymore?
So don't. The more of us who refuse to buy games which allow them to cut off users at any time, the less games will be released with such draconian DRM.
Personally I now only buy games that are DRM-free, or games which only use Steam for DRM as it can be run in offline mode.
The problem isn't he did a bad job, the problems are a) he turned out to be milquetoast when it came to arguing for his points b) he is (a terrible negotiator | complicit with the corporations | an idiot) and his supporters saw right through him.
The problem is that he claimed to be the Second Coming Of Kennedy (or something) and turned out to be the Second Coming Of Jimmy Carter.
Getting Palin to run as the Republican candidate or magicking up a rapidly growing economy where everyone has a decent job are about the only hopes I can see for remaining in the White House. Any half-competent Republican should be able to beat him at this point.
And neither can Windows, yet it is always blamed for someone installing malware on their systems
What's the percentage of Windows users who install malware on their system rather than being hit by a remote exploit?
Pretty much every major Windows security story I've read in the last couple of years is due to some hole being exploited either in Windows or commonly used Windows software which lacks the sandboxing that's common on Linux (Apparmor, SELinux, etc), not users downloading trojans.
Shame that Android is based on Linux then isn't it?..
Linux can't stop Joe Sixpack from downloading malware from the Internet and installing it on his computer. At least, not without becoming another iThing that only allows installation of Jobs-approved software.
WikiLeaks leaked private communications between a force for reform in Zimbabwe and western nations. Those communications may have irreparably damaged efforts at reform by giving Mugabe and his thugs material to discredit reformers.
You seriously think that a crazed psychopath like Mugabe needs actual, real facts to discredit his opponents?
In any case, what would you think if a politician in your country was conspiring with foreign governments to block trade with your country in order to gain political power? I think I'd be a bit pissed at them, myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Not because of the environment, but so we stop funding Saudi Arabia.
America imports twice as much oil from Canada as Saudi Arabia, and the Chinese will be more than happy to buy any Saudi oil that Americans don't.
I'd add No One Lives Forever 2 VS Contract J.A.C.K to that, as NOLF 2 made every single thing in the game BETTER while at the same time sticking to what made the game fun with a capital F, namely the cool gadgets and stealth mixed with the silly humor.
I have two words for you: respawning guards.
That single lousy design choice totally ruined NOLF2 for me. For me to clear out an entire area and then get shot in the back by a guard who's spawned in an area I know was empty five seconds ago is simply retarded.
Similarly the tornado level would have been great if the bad guys didn't spawn repeatedly just to burn down my health and ammo before I reached the end of the level. That felt like the level had been designed by a twelve-year-old... heck, maybe it was.
Ice Station Evil is still one of my favorite levels in any game though.
True, but Apple has nowhere to go but up. Apple is in a position of being absolutely unable to fail.
That's some mighty fine Koolaid you're drinking there.
It's interesting: last week I was looking through an old computer magazine from 1983 because someone on Slashdot asked about 8-bit computer prices and I had the magazine lying around in the basement. After that I noticed there was a review of the new Apple III, which pretty much said that it sucked, but the conclusion was along the lines of 'good or bad, people will buy it because it's from Apple'.
Clearly they were considered 'unable to fail' back then too, yet they went through some seriously rocky periods between then and now. From what I've found out, pretty much all the things they complained about with the Apple III were The Glorious Jobs' design choices which looked good to him but didn't work in the real world.
Don't blame the vendors. The specs for Vista were metamorphosing from day to day until Service Pack 1, and no vendor could predict which way the other vendors would sway things, so there was no _point_ for them in alpha testing.
Plus it required a major driver rewrite for an OS that few people were going to be using for quite some time, so it was inevitably going to be a low priority compared to XP drivers. Microsoft shot themselves in the ass by making such major changes to the driver model between OS versions.
Sure 64 bit let's u address much more memory but it also doubles the size of any 32 program once converted to 64 bit.
No it doesn't.
I dont know that its "Useful" persay, but granted that is something XP cannot have outside of someone rolling their own explorer replacement
I'm always puzzled by people who talk about the glories of 'GPU-accelerated rendering', because Windows has had GPU-accelerated rendering since at least version 3.0. XP desktops are GPU-accelerated unless you have a really shitty driver.
It doesn't have fancy compositing, but who needs it on a business computer?
Not true either. It is trivially easy to find articles with data to the contrary.
Are those the articles where flipping a burger into a bun and sticking a piece of lettuce on top is counted as 'manufacturing'?
netbooks are a year or two older, but are *still* waiting for that tech (and they're waay underpowered and under-RAM'd as is.)
Atom-based netbooks can already run two threads with hyperthreading, so it's less of an issue. A dual-core Atom adds a sizable amount of power consumption and needs four threads to max it out; because of in-order execution there are usually plenty of stalls where the single core Atom can run a second thread at no cost to the first.
Cellphones, which don't have "core fever" due to different marketting than PCs, will take forever to justify the performance/battery life drawbacks.
The company I was working for in 2005 was building dual-core ARM chips for such lower-power devices; putting two low-frequency ARMs into a single chip ended up giving us the same performance at lower cost and power consumption than a single higher-frequency ARM for the markets we were aiming at. I think we had at least one cellphone company talking to us at the time.
NYT article is well written and informative. It's clearly not assuming that there is something wrong with scientific method, but just asks - could it be?
There's nothing wrong with the scientific method. The problem is that most modern 'science' has nothing to do with the scientific method.
It's worth noting that while many people know Eisenhower warned of the perils of the growing military-industrial complex in his farewell address, they're not aware that he also warned of the perils of the government-scientific complex where almost all science research funding was coming from the government.
It should be a warning for all those that follow right-populist parties and their diffuse "promises". More work, fewer immigrants, less crime, eliminating abuse of social services... sounds familiar?
That sounds a lot like the left-wing parties in the UK in the 1970s. With the possible exception of the last part.
The BNP in the UK, for example, are repeatedly called 'far-right' by the left-wing media, but as far as I've seen their policies are basically those of the left-wing Labour party of the 70s with a bit more explicit racism on top.
It seems like a lot of countries are going on a slide towards dictatorships and totalitarianism, and if it doesn't stop, I'm pretty sure we're going to see World War III, and I'm willing to bet it's within the next 50 years.
All governments slide towards dictatorship and totalitarianism because all governments want more power. The best you can do is try to put roadblocks in the way to delay them long enough for enough resistance to get in the way of their plans.
But most people will cheer for the dictator so long as he promises to give them free stuff paid for with other people's money.
We travel to see stuff. Modern media has made much of that superfluous.
And globalisation means that even if you do travel, when you get there you find it's just like the place you left except they speak a different language in McDonald's.
I was thinking more along the lines of 'well mister, I ain't going to rape your butt no more, but you sure have a purty mouth'...
Personally, I only make an exception for steam when it's a ridiculous price, or I'm only interested in the data files.
Personally I don't remember the last time I paid more than $9.99 for any game, be it from Steam, Gog or retail. The market is so competitive these days there's really no need to pay more than that.
Given how badly the pc version of Black Ops was pirated I don't see much of a future for pc games with single player campaigns
You missed the 'from big publishers who just regurgitate last years game with slightly better graphics' part. If the big publishers abandon the PC for consoles and leave it to the indie developers, I'd be quite happy... I've bought more indie games than big name games in the current Steam sale because so few of the big name games had any appeal.
Of course that will suck for ATI and Nvidia if no-one has a need for the most expensive 3D graphics cards. But there doesn't seem to be much use for them now when most games are designed for consoles with antique GPUs and ported over to the PC.
Steam cultist remind me of Apple fanboys. "Oh but it's Steam, it's GOOD DRM!" Hilarious! It's still DRM that can disable your games at any time of their chosing.
a) Steam is likely to be around for a long time and has a strong incentive not to cut off old games since it's a distribution system as well as a publisher. If they cut off old games for publisher X, then people are going to stop buying all their other games too.
b) I've read that Steam has already been cracked, so if it does shut down I'm sure there'll be a 'permanent offline mode' hack within days.
Why would I throw money at a game where they can cut off access to it at any point in time for ALL of their customers, just because they don't want to pay the bill on those servers anymore?
So don't. The more of us who refuse to buy games which allow them to cut off users at any time, the less games will be released with such draconian DRM.
Personally I now only buy games that are DRM-free, or games which only use Steam for DRM as it can be run in offline mode.
When Berlusconi was first elected as Prime Minister, in 1994. Apparently you haven't been reading the news.
Yeah, right. There was no corruption in Italy prior to 1994.
No, because the people that watch Fox news think that every other news network is part of some secret hidden political agenda and therefor it's real.
True. Most news networks don't even try to hide their political agenda.
The problem isn't he did a bad job, the problems are a) he turned out to be milquetoast when it came to arguing for his points b) he is (a terrible negotiator | complicit with the corporations | an idiot) and his supporters saw right through him.
The problem is that he claimed to be the Second Coming Of Kennedy (or something) and turned out to be the Second Coming Of Jimmy Carter.
Getting Palin to run as the Republican candidate or magicking up a rapidly growing economy where everyone has a decent job are about the only hopes I can see for remaining in the White House. Any half-competent Republican should be able to beat him at this point.
Politicians are really the scum of the earth. This is one of the biggest flaws with our political system. Electioneering has gone horribly wrong here.
Democracy selects for candidates who lie convincingly to get everyone to believe that they're going to get what they want if they vote for them.
We have a word for people like that: psychopaths.
And neither can Windows, yet it is always blamed for someone installing malware on their systems
What's the percentage of Windows users who install malware on their system rather than being hit by a remote exploit?
Pretty much every major Windows security story I've read in the last couple of years is due to some hole being exploited either in Windows or commonly used Windows software which lacks the sandboxing that's common on Linux (Apparmor, SELinux, etc), not users downloading trojans.
Whenever anything bad happens on the android platform related to malware, trojans, etc this distinction is heavily downplayed.
Again, if I download and install malware on one of my Linux boxes, how is this a Linux problem?
Linux protects much better than Windows against remote attacks, it can't protect against stupid users.
Shame that Android is based on Linux then isn't it?..
Linux can't stop Joe Sixpack from downloading malware from the Internet and installing it on his computer. At least, not without becoming another iThing that only allows installation of Jobs-approved software.
WikiLeaks leaked private communications between a force for reform in Zimbabwe and western nations. Those communications may have irreparably damaged efforts at reform by giving Mugabe and his thugs material to discredit reformers.
You seriously think that a crazed psychopath like Mugabe needs actual, real facts to discredit his opponents?
In any case, what would you think if a politician in your country was conspiring with foreign governments to block trade with your country in order to gain political power? I think I'd be a bit pissed at them, myself.