Yes, but 'Empire Strikes Back' was a good movie with a decent story, and was quite self-contained. 'Matrix 2' had crap for a story, and hour-long boring effects sequences.
Now, sure, if Lucas had had his way I'm sure he'd have turned 'Empire Strikes Back' into a story-free boring effects show like 'Phantom Menace', but at the time he didn't have that much control.
"Of course it can. Either pay for QuicktimePro that allows you to do this ($30) or get an alternative player to do so."
The odd thing is, you seem to be claiming that my point was wrong, while stating rather blatantly that I'm right. Yeah, wonderful, I could pay $30 for the priviledge of doing something that any other movie player allows me to do by default... or I could just use a non-crappy movie format instead.
"Mostly looks like they are spending the money on special effects and music."
God, I hope they don't. The effects in the second movie were so over-done they became boring, and I have no desire to sit through another FX porn movie.
Maybe this time they could cut out a few minutes of Neo fighting multiple Agent Smiths (who, you know, are never going to actually hurt him, so why even bother), and put in something else, like... a story, maybe.
Sorry, but the Quicktime player is shit: the user interface is lousy and inefficient, the code is (or was in earlier versions) buggy, and it can't even play fullscreen. I absolutely hate it, and wish people would stop using the damn thing.
"We must be able to run a deficit during times of crisis (think World War II),"
If you accept that, it will just mean that governments will deliberately create crises like WWII (which America could have stayed out of if the US government hadn't pushed the Japanese into attacking them) in order to justify deficits.
Really, Slashdot posters should learn to think like government burrowcrats before posting their Grand Plans To Save The World.
Yeah, years ago when blocklists were fairly new I had some idiot put the ISP I used on their list. It did get sorted before too long, but it was a big pain in the ass having a lot of people I knew unable to mail me because some bozo decided that one spammer on an ISP was justification to stop email going to all their customers.
Needless to say, I've never even considered using any of these lists since.
In case you haven't noticed, most non-Americans can't vote in America (unless, for example, they're Mexicans with their new California Driving Licence). So why should American bureaucrats care in the slightest about what non-Americans think?
US government bureaucrats are capricious enough with Americans, as it is... so it's no surprise that they would treat non-Americans with disdain. I'm sure the bureaucrats in your country regard foreigners in exactly the same way.
"Doesn't the state department realize some people, other than themselves, have lives and expenses too?"
They're government bureaucrats. Worse, they're government bureaucrats who spend most of their time dealing with foreigners, not even Americans. Why should they care? It's not as though any of them will lose their job over this, they'll probably be given _more_ money to hire computer security staff.
Government bureaucrats don't give a damn about anything because if they do a bad job they won't get sacked and they will get more money to "fix" their problems. If you don't realise that, you won't understand much about how the modern world works.
"Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs"
Which is, of course, utter bollocks. The problem, if there is one, is rampant _deflation_ of prices: items that would have cost 2000 whatsits when they first appeared cost 20 whatsits today because they're so common. It's only the brand-new and very rare items that cost a lot.
"the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation."
Why do you need to accumulate wealth when goods cost 1% of the price they sold for when they first appeared? A new "poor" player in Everquest can equip themselves with items for a thousand platinum that would have cost many tens of thousands when the game was young... and make that thousand platinum in a few hours of killing spiders.
Frankly, whenever I read an article complaining about "inflation" in MMORPGs I know from the start that the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
"All prices in advertisments/listings aimed at consumers must include VAT (although they can list an ex-vat price as well if they want, but they must emphasise the inc-vat one)."
If that's true, then most electronics ads in the UK are breaking the law, since they almost always have the tax-free price in big print and either 'prices do not include VAT' hidden away somewhere, or the tax-added price in tiny little letters elsewhere.
Tell the EU to go screw themselves: there's nothing in the EU worth visiting anyway, and your EU customers will like you for it.
Or are you really going to start collecting Somalian Sales Tax, Haitian Sales Tax, Saudi Sales Tax, Nigerian Sales Tax and all the taxes that every other nation on the planet would like to force you to collect for them for free?
"I've been told in the EU it is illegal to display prices without VAT"
Not true: most electronics prices in the UK have no VAT included... it's horrific to see just how much those prices are loaded up with tax, especially when you consider that there's probably plenty of import duties on top. The tax on the camcorder I bought a few years back would have paid for a flight to New York to buy one tax-free, and still left a couple of hundred dollars to spend on beer and loose women.
"I have a dual Athlon at home that runs circles around a 3.2 gig P4."
Why would you buy an Athlon machine for Lightwave, when it's so SSE2-intensive? Even my P4-2.4 beats an Athlon 3200+ in most Lightwave rendering benchmarks I've seen. Or were you using another machine for Lightwave?
"Nvidia and ATI cards have been running neck and neck for a couple of years now and all of a sudden at an ATI event the ATI card has twice the framerates?"
They _haven't_ been running neck-and-neck: it's been widely reported that the the Radeons get about twice the framerate of the equivalent FX card in synthetic DX9 shader benchmarks. Why do you think that nvidia had to 'optimize' the 3DMark03 shader benchmark by replacing the shader they were supposed to run with a completely different shader that ran much faster?
The low performance of DX9 shaders on FX cards is just not news to anyone who's looked at the numbers posted on the web. And HL2 is one of the first games to really take advantage of them.
Often true -- the FX cards are decent DX8.1 cards -- but totally worthless. I mean, who's going to buy a DX9 card just to run DX8 games?
Geforce FX DX9 support is slow, and shader benchmarks have been showing this for a long time. The fans have been saying 'oh, but they're synthetic benchmarks so they don't matter'... well, now we have a real DX9 game and it's running just as badly as the synthetic shader benchmarks run. The odd thing is that anyone is actually surprised at this.
"Security experts say that with the increased use of biometrics, our reliance on passwords will lessen in the future"
What kind of "security expert" would reccomend fixed, unchangable biometric "passwords" in place of text passwords? They have their place in some situations, but for general use they're as bad as putting the same password on every account and never changing it even if you know that it's been compromised.
True, in a previous job the office was broken into at night and a few computers were stolen: took us about a week before we discovered that one of the obscure, rarely used Mac servers was among them.
"You're young, healthy and I presume able to have a decent insurance (or you haven't had the pleasure to fall through one of their loopholes yet), but you'll change your tone once you're no longer deemed "productive"..."
By the time we're that old, the Boomers will have bankrupted the nation to pay for their pensions and "free" healthcare by stealing money from our pockets. My generation will suffer the most from the evils of the welfare state, because we'll be forced to pay for welfare for the old farts, but by the time we get to their age it will be dead and gone. So excuse me if I want to see the whole thing shut down before I have to pay 80+% tax rates.
Sun also made 486 cards for their Sparcstations, though I'm not sure whether they were ever released as official products: I had a prototype for a while in one of my previous jobs. The problem was that the overhead of getting data in and out of the card was pretty substantial, so AFAIR it wasn't that much faster than software unless you were running something CPU-intensive that didn't do much I/O.
Exactly. The only way to eliminate spam is to force everyone to include real-world indentification data in every single email and Internet posting. Do you really want your SSN on every post you make to Slashdot and the natalie-portman-fantasies mailing list ready for future employers and partners to find?
The price you'll pay for anti-spam laws is the complete end to anonymity on the Net: personally I think that's a pretty lousy trade compared to local filters and ready use of the delete key.
No, it's realistic. Just look at something like the Osprey, which the US military didn't want, which doesn't really work, and which has killed quite a few people in crashes, but Congress kept forcing funding onto the military for because it kept the pork going to their mates.
If they know the right people they will get the contracts whether or not it works: there's a huge amount of pork available for "anti-terror" projects at the moment, so they merely need to grease the right palms to get their share. Not working is irrelevant when politicos are involved.
"I wouldn't want to be working for that company any more though.:)"
Why? Just because it doesn't work, that doesn't mean they can't get the government to mandate its installation in all public places to catch "terrorists". That's the great thing about government contracts: it's not whether it works, it's who you know with their face in the pork trough...
"Of course, they kinda blew it when Neo gained some powers in the "real world"."
Hardly, the "real world" will presumably turn out to be just level of the Matrix. Haven't you seen "Existenz"?
As for plot holes, if the original poster has only just noticed one, they can't be too observant. Even the first movie was riddled with them from beginning to end.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but 'Empire Strikes Back' was a good movie with a decent story, and was quite self-contained. 'Matrix 2' had crap for a story, and hour-long boring effects sequences.
Now, sure, if Lucas had had his way I'm sure he'd have turned 'Empire Strikes Back' into a story-free boring effects show like 'Phantom Menace', but at the time he didn't have that much control.
"Of course it can. Either pay for QuicktimePro that allows you to do this ($30) or get an alternative player to do so." The odd thing is, you seem to be claiming that my point was wrong, while stating rather blatantly that I'm right. Yeah, wonderful, I could pay $30 for the priviledge of doing something that any other movie player allows me to do by default... or I could just use a non-crappy movie format instead.
"Mostly looks like they are spending the money on special effects and music."
God, I hope they don't. The effects in the second movie were so over-done they became boring, and I have no desire to sit through another FX porn movie.
Maybe this time they could cut out a few minutes of Neo fighting multiple Agent Smiths (who, you know, are never going to actually hurt him, so why even bother), and put in something else, like... a story, maybe.
Sorry, but the Quicktime player is shit: the user interface is lousy and inefficient, the code is (or was in earlier versions) buggy, and it can't even play fullscreen. I absolutely hate it, and wish people would stop using the damn thing.
"We must be able to run a deficit during times of crisis (think World War II),"
If you accept that, it will just mean that governments will deliberately create crises like WWII (which America could have stayed out of if the US government hadn't pushed the Japanese into attacking them) in order to justify deficits.
Really, Slashdot posters should learn to think like government burrowcrats before posting their Grand Plans To Save The World.
Yeah, years ago when blocklists were fairly new I had some idiot put the ISP I used on their list. It did get sorted before too long, but it was a big pain in the ass having a lot of people I knew unable to mail me because some bozo decided that one spammer on an ISP was justification to stop email going to all their customers.
Needless to say, I've never even considered using any of these lists since.
In case you haven't noticed, most non-Americans can't vote in America (unless, for example, they're Mexicans with their new California Driving Licence). So why should American bureaucrats care in the slightest about what non-Americans think?
US government bureaucrats are capricious enough with Americans, as it is... so it's no surprise that they would treat non-Americans with disdain. I'm sure the bureaucrats in your country regard foreigners in exactly the same way.
"Doesn't the state department realize some people, other than themselves, have lives and expenses too?"
They're government bureaucrats. Worse, they're government bureaucrats who spend most of their time dealing with foreigners, not even Americans. Why should they care? It's not as though any of them will lose their job over this, they'll probably be given _more_ money to hire computer security staff.
Government bureaucrats don't give a damn about anything because if they do a bad job they won't get sacked and they will get more money to "fix" their problems. If you don't realise that, you won't understand much about how the modern world works.
"No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers."
Or, indeed, that it was written by a teacher.
"So why not make items degrade over time like they do in real life?"
Because that creates price inflation? It's because items don't decay that you can now buy them for a small fraction of the original price.
Or do you think that you could help the poor in the real world by spending people around to their house once a year to smash up all their stuff?
"Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs"
Which is, of course, utter bollocks. The problem, if there is one, is rampant _deflation_ of prices: items that would have cost 2000 whatsits when they first appeared cost 20 whatsits today because they're so common. It's only the brand-new and very rare items that cost a lot.
"the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation."
Why do you need to accumulate wealth when goods cost 1% of the price they sold for when they first appeared? A new "poor" player in Everquest can equip themselves with items for a thousand platinum that would have cost many tens of thousands when the game was young... and make that thousand platinum in a few hours of killing spiders.
Frankly, whenever I read an article complaining about "inflation" in MMORPGs I know from the start that the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
"All prices in advertisments/listings aimed at consumers must include VAT (although they can list an ex-vat price as well if they want, but they must emphasise the inc-vat one)."
If that's true, then most electronics ads in the UK are breaking the law, since they almost always have the tax-free price in big print and either 'prices do not include VAT' hidden away somewhere, or the tax-added price in tiny little letters elsewhere.
Tell the EU to go screw themselves: there's nothing in the EU worth visiting anyway, and your EU customers will like you for it.
Or are you really going to start collecting Somalian Sales Tax, Haitian Sales Tax, Saudi Sales Tax, Nigerian Sales Tax and all the taxes that every other nation on the planet would like to force you to collect for them for free?
"I've been told in the EU it is illegal to display prices without VAT"
Not true: most electronics prices in the UK have no VAT included... it's horrific to see just how much those prices are loaded up with tax, especially when you consider that there's probably plenty of import duties on top. The tax on the camcorder I bought a few years back would have paid for a flight to New York to buy one tax-free, and still left a couple of hundred dollars to spend on beer and loose women.
"I have a dual Athlon at home that runs circles around a 3.2 gig P4."
Why would you buy an Athlon machine for Lightwave, when it's so SSE2-intensive? Even my P4-2.4 beats an Athlon 3200+ in most Lightwave rendering benchmarks I've seen. Or were you using another machine for Lightwave?
"Nvidia and ATI cards have been running neck and neck for a couple of years now and all of a sudden at an ATI event the ATI card has twice the framerates?"
They _haven't_ been running neck-and-neck: it's been widely reported that the the Radeons get about twice the framerate of the equivalent FX card in synthetic DX9 shader benchmarks. Why do you think that nvidia had to 'optimize' the 3DMark03 shader benchmark by replacing the shader they were supposed to run with a completely different shader that ran much faster?
The low performance of DX9 shaders on FX cards is just not news to anyone who's looked at the numbers posted on the web. And HL2 is one of the first games to really take advantage of them.
"If you use DX8 then Nvidia beats ATI"
Often true -- the FX cards are decent DX8.1 cards -- but totally worthless. I mean, who's going to buy a DX9 card just to run DX8 games?
Geforce FX DX9 support is slow, and shader benchmarks have been showing this for a long time. The fans have been saying 'oh, but they're synthetic benchmarks so they don't matter'... well, now we have a real DX9 game and it's running just as badly as the synthetic shader benchmarks run. The odd thing is that anyone is actually surprised at this.
"Security experts say that with the increased use of biometrics, our reliance on passwords will lessen in the future"
What kind of "security expert" would reccomend fixed, unchangable biometric "passwords" in place of text passwords? They have their place in some situations, but for general use they're as bad as putting the same password on every account and never changing it even if you know that it's been compromised.
True, in a previous job the office was broken into at night and a few computers were stolen: took us about a week before we discovered that one of the obscure, rarely used Mac servers was among them.
"You're young, healthy and I presume able to have a decent insurance (or you haven't had the pleasure to fall through one of their loopholes yet), but you'll change your tone once you're no longer deemed "productive"..."
By the time we're that old, the Boomers will have bankrupted the nation to pay for their pensions and "free" healthcare by stealing money from our pockets. My generation will suffer the most from the evils of the welfare state, because we'll be forced to pay for welfare for the old farts, but by the time we get to their age it will be dead and gone. So excuse me if I want to see the whole thing shut down before I have to pay 80+% tax rates.
The sooner we see the end of sites with stupid embedded Quicktime movies or "look, ain't I cool?" Flash crap, the better.
Sun also made 486 cards for their Sparcstations, though I'm not sure whether they were ever released as official products: I had a prototype for a while in one of my previous jobs. The problem was that the overhead of getting data in and out of the card was pretty substantial, so AFAIR it wasn't that much faster than software unless you were running something CPU-intensive that didn't do much I/O.
Exactly. The only way to eliminate spam is to force everyone to include real-world indentification data in every single email and Internet posting. Do you really want your SSN on every post you make to Slashdot and the natalie-portman-fantasies mailing list ready for future employers and partners to find?
The price you'll pay for anti-spam laws is the complete end to anonymity on the Net: personally I think that's a pretty lousy trade compared to local filters and ready use of the delete key.
"Well, that's particularly cynical."
No, it's realistic. Just look at something like the Osprey, which the US military didn't want, which doesn't really work, and which has killed quite a few people in crashes, but Congress kept forcing funding onto the military for because it kept the pork going to their mates.
If they know the right people they will get the contracts whether or not it works: there's a huge amount of pork available for "anti-terror" projects at the moment, so they merely need to grease the right palms to get their share. Not working is irrelevant when politicos are involved.
"I wouldn't want to be working for that company any more though. :)"
Why? Just because it doesn't work, that doesn't mean they can't get the government to mandate its installation in all public places to catch "terrorists". That's the great thing about government contracts: it's not whether it works, it's who you know with their face in the pork trough...
"Of course, they kinda blew it when Neo gained some powers in the "real world"."
Hardly, the "real world" will presumably turn out to be just level of the Matrix. Haven't you seen "Existenz"?
As for plot holes, if the original poster has only just noticed one, they can't be too observant. Even the first movie was riddled with them from beginning to end.