You can book a flight in a MiG-31 to 28km up for a third of the stated price. The stay at the altitude is way shorter, though.
Seems kind of like the difference between a Mach-2 flight in a jet fighter and Concorde; in one case you're strapped in an ejection seat and wearing a pressure suit for ten minutes until it runs out of fuel, in the other you were free to walk around for two hours, eating caviar, and drinking champagne.
Our netbook went from something like eight hours of battery life running XP to about six running Ubuntu. However, it came with some kind of additional power management software from the manufacturer, so it had probably been carefully tweaked for their hardware.
From the look of the Linux diagnostics, much of it was timer expiry in Firefox waking up the CPU a couple of hundred times a second.
Except, historically, Windows has generally given a better battery life on the same hardware than Linux. I guess Android's user space may be more efficient than the typical Linux install.
On the other hand, it is kinda fun to load up an old game and crank the settings all the way up, turn on all the eye candy, and still get hundreds of frames per second.
That's because Doom 3 just renders everything in black.
You just a nostalgia guy who don't try new stuff and think everything was better back then. Hint: it's not. Games today are much much better, you just closed your mind.
I recently bought Carmageddon from Gog.com and managed to set it up to run at 1920x1080. I've put more hours into that than any recent game I've bought, because it's actually a game, rather than a C-grade movie with a few interactive segments. No-one makes me sit through a half-hour unskippable cut-scene and decide whether to pick either the 'good guy' or 'bad guy' dialogue sequence before I can slide my car sideways through a flock of sheep.
$49.99 seems about normal these days. Except the DLC will appear the next day for $20.
Personally I've only paid more than $10 for one PC game in the last three or four years. Most just aren't worth more than that any more, and will probably drop that low in six months to a year.
How do you plan on constructing said ship (long-term, high-cost project) without attracting government attention, then making launching the ship before being arrested or shot, then making out of Earth orbit before being shot down?
Uh, no-one would be building it in Earth orbit.
Besides which, Big Government is on the verge of collapse world-wide, and will be a distant memory by the time such a ship is technologically possible.
The bad news is, we likely won't even reach those places, due to the vast distance. If we do, we maybe found a way to take 'shortcuts', but then, orders can be sent through those shortcuts, too.
There's no known technical reason why we can't travel at around 10% of the speed of light. At that rate we can expand across the entire galaxy in a million years or so.
Yes, Comrade! The only hope for the world is The Glorious Workers' Revolution!
Of course, if you really are one of the few remaining unrepentant Commies, you should be celebrating technology like the 3D printer that allows workers to own the means of production.
Except what most Commies really want is to control those workers, not set them free.
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy because almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate. There's no real advantage for legitimate use over fiat currency at this time, and significant disadvantages. So long as we pay for our groceries in dollars, most people would much rather have dollars than some bits that have no established support.
The good news is that, once we're off this planet, most of those grand old sociopathic power dreams become impossible. There'll never be a Galactic Empire, because you can't boss people around when your orders take thousands of years to reach them. There will probably never even be a Solar Empire, because the odds are high that your 'private army' can't travel at more than 10% of the speed of light, and the Oort Cloud is far enough away for even that to be very hard to control.
In movies I can't choose if the main character will save the day as a paragon or a renegade, nor can I choose who the main character will pursue a romance with.
Yeah, that's such an important fake choice you got there. Where are the games where I can choose to say 'screw your stupid story, find someone else to 'save the day'?' and do something more interesting instead? The Bethesda games are about the closest, becuase they're so heavily modded and I can just ignore the main plot-line if I want to. But they still expect you to level up and fight the Wombat Of Doom eventually.
BTW, there have been a few 'pick your ending' movies before, and at least one movie which had several endings and put a different one on on each print. That's about the same level of interactivity as most games these days.
They put in the effort to Strip Games for Windows Live from the first 2 Batman games just recently for example.
Uh, probably because the games would have instantiy died otherwise, due to using GFWL to store their save games.
You'll note that they didn't put in the extra effort required to let people dumb enough to buy them in the GFWL era keep their save games now it no longer uses GFWL.
Whoopee-doo. I get to splatter the bad guys with goo rather than shoot them with a mini-gun. That's incredibly innovative.
When they're not making you sit through tedious, unskippable cut-scenes and canned dialogue, games are still mostly just following the only corridor available and shooting things, except these days you don't even have to worry about collecting health packs because your health magically regenerates after ten seconds. Even the 'open world' games are still mostly just running around a few streets in a world that's dead when you're not around.
To be honest, that what is marketed as 'AAA'-games is all like Wolfenstein. Walk through a maze and shoot bad guys.
Oh, but if only it was... then the games might actually be fun.
It's more like: watch two minute cut-scene where all the cool stuff happens. Walk through a door and see the bad guys. Press space a few times to win. Watch another two minute cut-scene where all the cool stuff happens. Sit through five minutes of boring dialogue with some random NPC where you get to select a few meaningless options. Repeat until bored.
See, as crappy as EA is, I thought they were actually pretty cool with the new IPs they introduced this generation. Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect, Crysis, Spore, etc were all new.
Mass Effect, with its half-hour, unskippable cut-scenes between occasional ten second shooting sequences or long, tedious, repetitive driving around on planet sequences, pretty much epitomises the decline of PC gaming to me. By the time I reached the point where I was driving a jeep with the manouverability of a dead whale around an empty planet surface from which giant worms randomly jumped up and killed me, I just quit.
Dead Space is the game with ten-minute unskippable cut-scenes that becomes unplayable if you enable VSYNC, isn't it?
What happened to games that are actually fun, rather than failed attempts to make a SyFy channel B-movie?
Slashdot Mirror
If you have $75G to waste on a vacation trip, then chances are you have $250G to waste also.
That's like saying that if you can afford a new Honda Civic, chances are you can afford a new Porsche.
There are plenty of us who could pay $75,000 for a vacation, but couldn't (or wouldn't) pay $250,000.
You can book a flight in a MiG-31 to 28km up for a third of the stated price. The stay at the altitude is way shorter, though.
Seems kind of like the difference between a Mach-2 flight in a jet fighter and Concorde; in one case you're strapped in an ejection seat and wearing a pressure suit for ten minutes until it runs out of fuel, in the other you were free to walk around for two hours, eating caviar, and drinking champagne.
On the other hand, the fact that you assume "x bone" is something a 13 year old would come up with says more about you than anything else.
Well, 13 year old boys seem to be the target market for most recent console games.
Doesn't look like either of them are in the Ubuntu repositories.
Our netbook went from something like eight hours of battery life running XP to about six running Ubuntu. However, it came with some kind of additional power management software from the manufacturer, so it had probably been carefully tweaked for their hardware.
From the look of the Linux diagnostics, much of it was timer expiry in Firefox waking up the CPU a couple of hundred times a second.
Except, historically, Windows has generally given a better battery life on the same hardware than Linux. I guess Android's user space may be more efficient than the typical Linux install.
On the other hand, it is kinda fun to load up an old game and crank the settings all the way up, turn on all the eye candy, and still get hundreds of frames per second.
That's because Doom 3 just renders everything in black.
I ditched OO and LO on about 100 small business networks because I wanted to ditch JAVA.
What does Java have to do with Open Office?
You're not one of these idiots who thinks Open Office is written in Java, are you?
And the NSA have a copy of everything, so there's no need to back it up yourself.
I don't want to install java on my mac so that is my reason for not installing libreoffice...
You, uh, do realise that Libreoffice doesn't need Java, right?
No, clearly you don't.
You just a nostalgia guy who don't try new stuff and think everything was better back then. Hint: it's not. Games today are much much better, you just closed your mind.
I recently bought Carmageddon from Gog.com and managed to set it up to run at 1920x1080. I've put more hours into that than any recent game I've bought, because it's actually a game, rather than a C-grade movie with a few interactive segments. No-one makes me sit through a half-hour unskippable cut-scene and decide whether to pick either the 'good guy' or 'bad guy' dialogue sequence before I can slide my car sideways through a flock of sheep.
$49.99 seems about normal these days. Except the DLC will appear the next day for $20.
Personally I've only paid more than $10 for one PC game in the last three or four years. Most just aren't worth more than that any more, and will probably drop that low in six months to a year.
How do you plan on constructing said ship (long-term, high-cost project) without attracting government attention, then making launching the ship before being arrested or shot, then making out of Earth orbit before being shot down?
Uh, no-one would be building it in Earth orbit.
Besides which, Big Government is on the verge of collapse world-wide, and will be a distant memory by the time such a ship is technologically possible.
The bad news is, we likely won't even reach those places, due to the vast distance. If we do, we maybe found a way to take 'shortcuts', but then, orders can be sent through those shortcuts, too.
There's no known technical reason why we can't travel at around 10% of the speed of light. At that rate we can expand across the entire galaxy in a million years or so.
No wonder Europe is doomed, if so many there can't even see that the EU is, and always was, intended to create a 'United States Of Europe'.
Yes, Comrade! The only hope for the world is The Glorious Workers' Revolution!
Of course, if you really are one of the few remaining unrepentant Commies, you should be celebrating technology like the 3D printer that allows workers to own the means of production.
Except what most Commies really want is to control those workers, not set them free.
Yes they will. They will follow you there, eventually, and with guns.
How do you plan to boss me around when I'm living on a comet in the Oort Cloud? Or just blasting out into deep space in a self-contained ship?
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy because almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate. There's no real advantage for legitimate use over fiat currency at this time, and significant disadvantages. So long as we pay for our groceries in dollars, most people would much rather have dollars than some bits that have no established support.
The good news is that, once we're off this planet, most of those grand old sociopathic power dreams become impossible. There'll never be a Galactic Empire, because you can't boss people around when your orders take thousands of years to reach them. There will probably never even be a Solar Empire, because the odds are high that your 'private army' can't travel at more than 10% of the speed of light, and the Oort Cloud is far enough away for even that to be very hard to control.
In movies I can't choose if the main character will save the day as a paragon or a renegade, nor can I choose who the main character will pursue a romance with.
Yeah, that's such an important fake choice you got there. Where are the games where I can choose to say 'screw your stupid story, find someone else to 'save the day'?' and do something more interesting instead? The Bethesda games are about the closest, becuase they're so heavily modded and I can just ignore the main plot-line if I want to. But they still expect you to level up and fight the Wombat Of Doom eventually.
BTW, there have been a few 'pick your ending' movies before, and at least one movie which had several endings and put a different one on on each print. That's about the same level of interactivity as most games these days.
They put in the effort to Strip Games for Windows Live from the first 2 Batman games just recently for example.
Uh, probably because the games would have instantiy died otherwise, due to using GFWL to store their save games.
You'll note that they didn't put in the extra effort required to let people dumb enough to buy them in the GFWL era keep their save games now it no longer uses GFWL.
I think you made the GP's point.
Whoopee-doo. I get to splatter the bad guys with goo rather than shoot them with a mini-gun. That's incredibly innovative.
When they're not making you sit through tedious, unskippable cut-scenes and canned dialogue, games are still mostly just following the only corridor available and shooting things, except these days you don't even have to worry about collecting health packs because your health magically regenerates after ten seconds. Even the 'open world' games are still mostly just running around a few streets in a world that's dead when you're not around.
To be honest, that what is marketed as 'AAA'-games is all like Wolfenstein. Walk through a maze and shoot bad guys.
Oh, but if only it was... then the games might actually be fun.
It's more like: watch two minute cut-scene where all the cool stuff happens. Walk through a door and see the bad guys. Press space a few times to win. Watch another two minute cut-scene where all the cool stuff happens. Sit through five minutes of boring dialogue with some random NPC where you get to select a few meaningless options. Repeat until bored.
See, as crappy as EA is, I thought they were actually pretty cool with the new IPs they introduced this generation. Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect, Crysis, Spore, etc were all new.
Mass Effect, with its half-hour, unskippable cut-scenes between occasional ten second shooting sequences or long, tedious, repetitive driving around on planet sequences, pretty much epitomises the decline of PC gaming to me. By the time I reached the point where I was driving a jeep with the manouverability of a dead whale around an empty planet surface from which giant worms randomly jumped up and killed me, I just quit.
Dead Space is the game with ten-minute unskippable cut-scenes that becomes unplayable if you enable VSYNC, isn't it?
What happened to games that are actually fun, rather than failed attempts to make a SyFy channel B-movie?
Yes, I was actually parodying all the Windows users who used to make fun of Linux for breaking things on upgrades.