Note that you are talking about a rather extreme sort of fundamentalists. Most christians believe the earth is quite a lot more than 6000 years old. The 6000 years is an unbliblical, medieval idea that most christians have dropped ages ago.
For scientists stubbornly believing in this that have been quite thoroughly disproven, yes, there is a problem. But that's a tiny minority.
1) Here's the thing, if I buy a PC to play DVD's, browse the Internet, etc, I can get something for $400-600 that does the job adequately. However, that system will not play games. If I want to play games I'm looking at a $1000-1500 box at a minimum.
Nonsense. Only if you want to play Crysis on the highest settings do you need to spend that much on a PC. You can get an excellent gaming PC for much less, particularly if you want to play strategy games, which is where PCs excell. Consoles still don't come with a mouse (still the fastest, easiest and most versatile controller).
What I'm saying is that when the PS2 came out, my PC was substantially faster than the PS2. When the PS3 came out, the overall performance was probably a little better in my PC, but not enough that I'd really notice with most games.
That's because the PS3 cost as much as a PC when it first came out.
Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware.
Exactly. In the end, it's the interface that matters most, and there are a lot of games for which a standard console controler is a completely unsuitable interface. A mouse is faster, more accurate, and much more versatile. The wiimote is very promising, however. Finally a controler that can be used as a mouse.
Microsoft shouldn't have been liable for any 'additional value' add-ons.
But Microsoft should be liable for lying to the kid about it. According to TFA, they told him his autographs would be safe. From that point on, they should be liable. Particularly if this scrubbing procedure is standard treatment.
That's why the gransparent said to switch the case. Then you've got a signed XBox that works.
And perhaps you can even send the broken XBox with the new case to Microsoft's scrubbing center to get fixed. Then you've got 2 XBoxes, one of them still signed. Sell one, and you didn't even lose any money (beyond whatever that repair costs). But it's a lot of hassle, so if Microsoft tells the kid this isn't necessary, why shouldn't he believe them?
The kid specifically asked if he could keep his own case with the signatures, without it being damaged. If that was not an option, Microsoft should have said so. Instead "Microsoft ensured him that his request would not be a problem." So the kid has every right to be angry.
This is not about corporate greed, it's simply about corporations doing what they just promised to do. The kid did exactly what he should: he asked first. He didn't blindly assume, he got an annswer, and he believed that answer. When Microsoft breaks its word, that's Microsoft's fault, not the kid's.
Yes. Or, they could not send sensitive information via email.
Or, when they do send sensitive information by email, use encryption.
It still amazes me how much highly sensitive information is transported in unencrypted form. A few years ago in Netherland, people would find unencrypted USB sticks with unencrypted sensitive military information all over the place. When a Dutch public prosecutor bought a new PC, he simply placed his old PC simply outside with the garbage, somebody else picked it up, and discovered lots of data about sensitive criminal cases still under investigation. The prosecutor got mangled for not disposing of his PC in the proper manner, but I'd like to know how it was even possible that a private PC contains such sensitive data without any sort of rigidly enforced encryption?
I agree, but Obama is American of direct African ancestry. I don't see where it would be more appropriate.
True. Having half his family live in Ethiopia, he's far more African American than the majority of black Americans, yet he's as white as he's black.
African American is, by the way, a silly term to refer to people whose great grandparents have never even been to Africa (like the majority of black Americans). Besides, why is it necessary to divide a population by the colour of its skin anyway?
And Clinton is 60. Not exactly a spring chicken herself.
She still has 12 years on McCain. Wasn't Ronals Reagan 69 when he became president? McCain is even older, whereas Clinton will still be younger when she leaves office.
My introduction to RPGs was from D2 as well, and chances are, your definition of RPG is a bit different from his definition of RPG. To the GP: Try playing some NWN.
Ah, D2 is a CRPG? I wondered why I didn't recognise the name (although it made me think of the d6 system and the d20 system). It's useful to distinguish between CRPGs and "real" RPGs. To a lot of people (including me) CRPGs aren't real RPGs but adventure games with RPG elements. Actual roleplaying is hard to do on a computer.
At least with a computer as GM. I have seen some very good roleplaying on TinyMUDs, in email and on various fora, though, but that was usually systemless, and certainly not at all anything like CRPGs. But definitions vary, particularly with people with little or no exposure to "real" RPGs.
I'm still hoping for a real solo RPG on the computer, but I'm doubtful whether that's even possible. Planescape:Torment was a nice approximation, though.
I totally don't want to start a debate on this, but... AC, HP and spell memorization are actually pretty sweet conventions, and were awesome for the time. RPing may have move past them, and they have held things up, but in a lot of cases they remain the simplest, best way to handle things.
Mostly, they simply needed some mechanic, and these were a lot better than nothing. But particularly spell memorization was very quickly succeeded by mana/magic points in the vast majority of games. And AC is usually replaced with some sort of damage absorbtion. The only mechanism that really survived in dozens of more modern games is HP, not because it's good or realistic (it's neither), but because it's very easy and most more realistic damage systems are extremely hard. Except Fudge. I think Fudge does it best, but it's too small and too late to have a very big influence on anything.
As an example: in 4E, diagonal movement is as cheap as straight movement. This simplifies the system somewhat, and eliminates a certain amount of annoying "busywork" from combats. It is not, in terms of power, unbalancing, since it affects monsters and humans alike.
Are you saying that D&D uses squares instead of the hexes that every single other RPG (the ones that feel the need to include miniature rules anyway) uses? It's the entire concept of moving "diagonally" that's wrong and unrealistic. Granted, hexes are also an abstract approximation, but much, much less so than squares.
The problem isn't the cost of diagonal movement, but the fact that there even is such a thing as diagonal movement. Every direction of movement should be the same.
Then again, the group I play d&d with consists of 2 guys who have been practicing martial arts for years, a guy who is almost six and a half feet tall and works as a security guard, and a guy who was on the varsity track team. Kinda defies the stereotype there.
Martial arts is not uncommon for geeks, and being over six feet tall is certainly not an obstacle to geekdom. I think an important attribute many geeks have in common is a reduced (to varying degrees) sense of some social subtleties, and that can make you a target for getting picked on.
In my experience, roleplaying games are a great way to learn to deal with such social subtleties in a safe environment, so perhaps bullies feel threatened by RPGs because they risk losing their victims.
This goes against the spirit of the GPL.... To take your example to the extreme, suppose that they made the code available via 3of9 barcode in printed format? stone tablet (mailed to you via overnight delivery at your expense)? 8" floppy disks? download via modem @ 300bps at $19.95/minute? Maybe stone tablets aren't machine readable but the rest are.
Quoting the same bit from GPL 2.0 again:
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange..."
Are bar codes customary for software interchange? 8" floppies? 300bps modem? Is $19.95/minute really your cost of physically performing source distribution?
How many computers have floppy disks these days? Mine doesn't. When was the last time you saw anyone exchange code on a floppy disk?
Neither does my new one, but my old PC still have a floppy drive, and very recently floppies were still being used for software distribution. A company still doing it now would be living in the past if you ask me, but if it's acceptable to its customers, what do you care? If you're a customer and don't have a floppy drive, ask them to provide the source in a more accessible form. If they don't, I guess a judge may have to decide whether floppies are still customary enough these days. It's old technology, but not completely gone yet.
"It is the same principle with the girls I know complaining that every guy they meet just wants their body. So I reply to them - well, stop meeting all the guys in bars! "
This has nothing to do with meeting guys in bars...it has to do with meeting guys. Yes, it is true, the vast majority of us are just after your body. We want sex...with women. We're genetically programmed that way...and anything else like personality and all, gets appreciated later (maybe). Trust me, there has never been a guy that saw a girl across the way and said/thought "Man, I'll bet she has a great personality..I've GOT to go meet her now.".
I'd say most guys want to score with women, that are shapely and attractive. To do so...we try to do those things that make us attractive to you. I hate to break it to you...but, the old joke of "Why did God give women breasts? So men would talk to them" is largely true.
Yes, we do often find one that we do like on levels other than sex, but, not that often...but, we will act and tell you everything in the world otherwise, just to keep your legs uncrossed. Don't kid yourself otherwise on that one.
Speak for yourself. There are lots of men out there that aren't as shallow as you.
I've seen both: ties are a safety hazard if you have to put your head inside server racks or do lifting to get equipment into the right place. But they're a dress standard in many corporate cultures, just as a tidy desk is. Like doctors wearing scrubs in the hospital, they identify you as professional staff rather than as service staff, even though we often are service staff.
So if service staff wears ties, how does a tie identify you as non-service staff? (I don't really see why service staff can't be professional, but I'm not very much at home with labels anyway.)
Anyway, in my opinion, if you need certain clothes to appear professional, you aren't. Real professionals appear that way because of the things they do or say, not because of the uniform they wear. Ofcourse you should still pay attention to your clothes, but ties aren't part of that. To me, a guy who wears a tie because he has to looks like a schmuck, not like a professional.
Building a business, building a team, management -- they're all forms of creative problem solving every bit as "fun" or creative as programming is. In fact, imaging programming for a CPU whose instructions have unpredictable execution speeds and results.
What's fun about programming for a CPU with unpredictable results? That's just an excercise in extreme frustration. I don't want to program for a CPU at all. I want to program with well-defined interfaces, and build predictable, reliable software. Or at least I want it to be unpredictable, wild, fun and creative in the way I intended.
It's a shallow swipe at some IT stereotypes, nothing more. It should be in some internet scrapheap, not the front page.
I think it's pretty mild, actually. It doesn't insist on suit and tie, as long as your jeans are not too tight and your T-shirt doesn't have a band picture on it.
Fortunately my belt and my combat boots are both black, so I'm okay there. My only real board room faux pas is my hair, apparently.
If you look at the computer revolution, it only entered everyday home and work life once software became a commercialized commodity.
You've got your timeline wrong. Software had already been a commercialised commodity (aimed at very large corporations) for a long time before computers started entering people's home in the '70s and '80s. And interestingly enough, that's also the time when hobbyists started playing with software and distributing their work for free, first on PDP-11s, later on cheaper home computers.
FOSS doesn't have a profit motive, which means you can create what you want, but it also means there's no strong incentive to provide a product that *others* want.
This is partially true, and one of the reasons why FOSS doesn't always conquer the marketshare it could have, but there's also a lot of commercial FOSS software out there that is designed to be what people want.
Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it.
The main thing people want is compatibility. They don't care so much about features, they just want to be able to exchange software with their buddies, play the most popular games that dominate the market, etc. That means they want what everybody else has, and that just happens to be Windows. Windows users have hated Windows since just about forever, but there was never a viable alternative that was compatible enough.
Look at Vista; MS put crap into it no one wanted, and now large numbers of people aren't buying the thing.
Because it broke compatibility.
FOSS is great, but it's a very niche system that serves a niche very very well, but the computing world could survive without it. It could not survive a world without commercial software.
I agree completely. 5 year old computers are still way better than the super computers of 20 years ago. The real polution in computer usage isn't the electricity bill, it's buying a new PC every couple of years.
The problem is, we have to buy a new PC every couple of years, because we want to use the latest software, play the latest games, join in the latest fad, and for that, we need a fast PC.
While in many areas, technological progress often means more efficiency and more environmental friendliness, in PC use, it just means our hardware gets obsolete sooner, and we want to buy new stuff that still works perfectly well.
Unfortunately I'm just as guilty of this as most: I'm currently in the process of buying a new PC, because my old Athlon 1800+ can't handle the last couple of years' worth of cool new games, and is generally just not as good and fast as what I've gotten used to. And although that new PC is as quiet and energy-efficient as possible, it'd be a lot better if I simply stuck to older games (there are plenty I haven't tried yet), and perhaps cleaned out the dust so the fans won't be as noisy.
Actually, I was even planning to buy a small new server that consumes as little electricity as possible, but instead I think I'll clean my old PC, perhaps replace the occasional fan, and reuse it in a new role. It even saves me money. I just hope I can get that bloody thing a bit quieter.
Do you only have one program ever open at a time? Not all of my software is multi-core aware by any means, but it still makes a tremendous difference when they're not all fighting over the same bit of silicon. I tend to have a dozen or so programs open at any given time at home (not to mention background processes) and while they're not all resource hogs, I like being able to let something churn away in the background without slowing down what I'm working on at the time to a crawl.
For that, a dual core is an excellent idea, a quad core is not. A quad (or sex?) core is only useful when your workload can be divided into 4 roughly equal parts. This is true for servers, which are running dozens of threads of the same application at the same time, this may be true for some workstations running specialist applications that are sufficiently multithreaded to make use of multiple cores, and no doubt in the future there will be games that make good use of multiple cores, but for normal desktop use, more than 2 cores is useless.
Most of the time, there's one application that you're actually using and that's actually doing something. Everything else uses maybe a few percent of the CPU. In 99% of the cases, one process will be using at least 50% of the CPU. A second core will certainly improve the responsiveness of the system, giving the less demanding processes a chance for CPU time without interrupting the main process, but more than two cores will add nothing.
By all means, buy a dual core, but before you waste money on a quad core or bigger, please check if you'll actually be able to make use of all the extra cores.
First of all, I didn't write the explanation of what the GURPS rule is SUPPOSED to do. The GURPS rules say they do and intend to do one thing and then do the exact opposite.
I can't remember ever seeing that in a GURPS book. Do you have a page number for me?
No, they switched from slashing weapons to both bludgeoning and impaling weapons (swords with points and no edges appeared in response to metal armor), and in the case of the bludgeoning weapons, they usually had spikes. At Agincourt arrows annihilated massed plate-armored cavalry. The Mongols had no problems with plate armored opposition.
Heavy armour led to things like the bastard sword, which as far as I know is mostly slashing. Purely implaing swords, like the rapier, appeared much later, when gunpowder had made armour obsolete. (Although the rise of rapiers more a fashion thing than a practical change.)
Ideally, you want both. But I leave you with this: at what point have professional soldiers preferred maces and hammers to swords and lances? Try to find one such moment in history.
Swords have always been popular due to their alround practicality, but if they really were as superior as you claim, there wouldn't even be any maces, hammers and flails. Maces and warhammers were most definitely used (during the late middle ages mostly), because they were superior to swords in some specialised usage, particularly against heavy armour.
Of course, one might say that the third edition spent a whopping 16 years in print, but that ignores the fact that it was changed to be GURPS, Third Edition, Revised in 1994. And then in 1996 things were shook up with the release of Compedium I and Compendium II and their status as "core books".
Third Edition, Revised didn't change any rules, it just added more advantages and skills. Mostly advantages and skills that already existed before that time in other books. The Compendia basically did the same thing: collect abilities from other books so you'd only have to buy one book to get everything you want, instead of having to figure out which ability is in which out-of-print book and then paying $80 for the book on eBay.
Both Revised and the Compendia (which are still just Revised) are perhaps comparable to the publication of Unearthed Arcana for AD&D2. It's not a new edition, just more stuff for the same old edition.
GURPS achieves outstanding backwards compatibility by never fixing major bugs. E.g. impaling weapons are supposed to do less damage but be better at penetrating armor,
Why would impaling weapons do less damage? They reach deeper into the body, are better able to damage vital organs and have less chance of being blocked by bones.
Also take a look at what happened in the middle ages when knights started wearing heavy plate armour: they didn't start using more arrows, swords and spears, they dropped those weapons and migrated to maces, flails, heavier swords (slasing instead of thrusting), and polearms with funky, often hammer-shaped heads.
I think GURPS has it right. Weight helps more than a thin sharp point against solid armour.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that you are talking about a rather extreme sort of fundamentalists. Most christians believe the earth is quite a lot more than 6000 years old. The 6000 years is an unbliblical, medieval idea that most christians have dropped ages ago.
For scientists stubbornly believing in this that have been quite thoroughly disproven, yes, there is a problem. But that's a tiny minority.
Nonsense. Only if you want to play Crysis on the highest settings do you need to spend that much on a PC. You can get an excellent gaming PC for much less, particularly if you want to play strategy games, which is where PCs excell. Consoles still don't come with a mouse (still the fastest, easiest and most versatile controller).
What I'm saying is that when the PS2 came out, my PC was substantially faster than the PS2. When the PS3 came out, the overall performance was probably a little better in my PC, but not enough that I'd really notice with most games.That's because the PS3 cost as much as a PC when it first came out.
Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware.Exactly. In the end, it's the interface that matters most, and there are a lot of games for which a standard console controler is a completely unsuitable interface. A mouse is faster, more accurate, and much more versatile. The wiimote is very promising, however. Finally a controler that can be used as a mouse.
Somehow I doubt the kid tied up the representative and smacked him with a shovel, but I'm sure he'd really love to do that now.
But Microsoft should be liable for lying to the kid about it. According to TFA, they told him his autographs would be safe. From that point on, they should be liable. Particularly if this scrubbing procedure is standard treatment.
That's why the gransparent said to switch the case. Then you've got a signed XBox that works.
And perhaps you can even send the broken XBox with the new case to Microsoft's scrubbing center to get fixed. Then you've got 2 XBoxes, one of them still signed. Sell one, and you didn't even lose any money (beyond whatever that repair costs). But it's a lot of hassle, so if Microsoft tells the kid this isn't necessary, why shouldn't he believe them?
The kid specifically asked if he could keep his own case with the signatures, without it being damaged. If that was not an option, Microsoft should have said so. Instead "Microsoft ensured him that his request would not be a problem." So the kid has every right to be angry.
This is not about corporate greed, it's simply about corporations doing what they just promised to do. The kid did exactly what he should: he asked first. He didn't blindly assume, he got an annswer, and he believed that answer. When Microsoft breaks its word, that's Microsoft's fault, not the kid's.
Or, when they do send sensitive information by email, use encryption.
It still amazes me how much highly sensitive information is transported in unencrypted form. A few years ago in Netherland, people would find unencrypted USB sticks with unencrypted sensitive military information all over the place. When a Dutch public prosecutor bought a new PC, he simply placed his old PC simply outside with the garbage, somebody else picked it up, and discovered lots of data about sensitive criminal cases still under investigation. The prosecutor got mangled for not disposing of his PC in the proper manner, but I'd like to know how it was even possible that a private PC contains such sensitive data without any sort of rigidly enforced encryption?
True. Having half his family live in Ethiopia, he's far more African American than the majority of black Americans, yet he's as white as he's black.
African American is, by the way, a silly term to refer to people whose great grandparents have never even been to Africa (like the majority of black Americans). Besides, why is it necessary to divide a population by the colour of its skin anyway?
She still has 12 years on McCain. Wasn't Ronals Reagan 69 when he became president? McCain is even older, whereas Clinton will still be younger when she leaves office.
Ah, D2 is a CRPG? I wondered why I didn't recognise the name (although it made me think of the d6 system and the d20 system). It's useful to distinguish between CRPGs and "real" RPGs. To a lot of people (including me) CRPGs aren't real RPGs but adventure games with RPG elements. Actual roleplaying is hard to do on a computer.
At least with a computer as GM. I have seen some very good roleplaying on TinyMUDs, in email and on various fora, though, but that was usually systemless, and certainly not at all anything like CRPGs. But definitions vary, particularly with people with little or no exposure to "real" RPGs.
I'm still hoping for a real solo RPG on the computer, but I'm doubtful whether that's even possible. Planescape:Torment was a nice approximation, though.
Mostly, they simply needed some mechanic, and these were a lot better than nothing. But particularly spell memorization was very quickly succeeded by mana/magic points in the vast majority of games. And AC is usually replaced with some sort of damage absorbtion. The only mechanism that really survived in dozens of more modern games is HP, not because it's good or realistic (it's neither), but because it's very easy and most more realistic damage systems are extremely hard. Except Fudge. I think Fudge does it best, but it's too small and too late to have a very big influence on anything.
Are you saying that D&D uses squares instead of the hexes that every single other RPG (the ones that feel the need to include miniature rules anyway) uses? It's the entire concept of moving "diagonally" that's wrong and unrealistic. Granted, hexes are also an abstract approximation, but much, much less so than squares.
The problem isn't the cost of diagonal movement, but the fact that there even is such a thing as diagonal movement. Every direction of movement should be the same.
Martial arts is not uncommon for geeks, and being over six feet tall is certainly not an obstacle to geekdom. I think an important attribute many geeks have in common is a reduced (to varying degrees) sense of some social subtleties, and that can make you a target for getting picked on.
In my experience, roleplaying games are a great way to learn to deal with such social subtleties in a safe environment, so perhaps bullies feel threatened by RPGs because they risk losing their victims.
Quoting the same bit from GPL 2.0 again:
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange..."Are bar codes customary for software interchange? 8" floppies? 300bps modem? Is $19.95/minute really your cost of physically performing source distribution?
How many computers have floppy disks these days? Mine doesn't. When was the last time you saw anyone exchange code on a floppy disk?Neither does my new one, but my old PC still have a floppy drive, and very recently floppies were still being used for software distribution. A company still doing it now would be living in the past if you ask me, but if it's acceptable to its customers, what do you care? If you're a customer and don't have a floppy drive, ask them to provide the source in a more accessible form. If they don't, I guess a judge may have to decide whether floppies are still customary enough these days. It's old technology, but not completely gone yet.
"It is the same principle with the girls I know complaining that every guy they meet just wants their body. So I reply to them - well, stop meeting all the guys in bars! "
This has nothing to do with meeting guys in bars...it has to do with meeting guys. Yes, it is true, the vast majority of us are just after your body. We want sex...with women. We're genetically programmed that way...and anything else like personality and all, gets appreciated later (maybe). Trust me, there has never been a guy that saw a girl across the way and said/thought "Man, I'll bet she has a great personality..I've GOT to go meet her now.".
I'd say most guys want to score with women, that are shapely and attractive. To do so...we try to do those things that make us attractive to you. I hate to break it to you...but, the old joke of "Why did God give women breasts? So men would talk to them" is largely true.
Yes, we do often find one that we do like on levels other than sex, but, not that often...but, we will act and tell you everything in the world otherwise, just to keep your legs uncrossed. Don't kid yourself otherwise on that one.
Speak for yourself. There are lots of men out there that aren't as shallow as you.
So if service staff wears ties, how does a tie identify you as non-service staff? (I don't really see why service staff can't be professional, but I'm not very much at home with labels anyway.)
Anyway, in my opinion, if you need certain clothes to appear professional, you aren't. Real professionals appear that way because of the things they do or say, not because of the uniform they wear. Ofcourse you should still pay attention to your clothes, but ties aren't part of that. To me, a guy who wears a tie because he has to looks like a schmuck, not like a professional.
What's fun about programming for a CPU with unpredictable results? That's just an excercise in extreme frustration. I don't want to program for a CPU at all. I want to program with well-defined interfaces, and build predictable, reliable software. Or at least I want it to be unpredictable, wild, fun and creative in the way I intended.
It's a shallow swipe at some IT stereotypes, nothing more. It should be in some internet scrapheap, not the front page.
I think it's pretty mild, actually. It doesn't insist on suit and tie, as long as your jeans are not too tight and your T-shirt doesn't have a band picture on it.
Fortunately my belt and my combat boots are both black, so I'm okay there. My only real board room faux pas is my hair, apparently.
You've got your timeline wrong. Software had already been a commercialised commodity (aimed at very large corporations) for a long time before computers started entering people's home in the '70s and '80s. And interestingly enough, that's also the time when hobbyists started playing with software and distributing their work for free, first on PDP-11s, later on cheaper home computers.
FOSS doesn't have a profit motive, which means you can create what you want, but it also means there's no strong incentive to provide a product that *others* want.This is partially true, and one of the reasons why FOSS doesn't always conquer the marketshare it could have, but there's also a lot of commercial FOSS software out there that is designed to be what people want.
Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it.The main thing people want is compatibility. They don't care so much about features, they just want to be able to exchange software with their buddies, play the most popular games that dominate the market, etc. That means they want what everybody else has, and that just happens to be Windows. Windows users have hated Windows since just about forever, but there was never a viable alternative that was compatible enough.
Look at Vista; MS put crap into it no one wanted, and now large numbers of people aren't buying the thing.Because it broke compatibility.
FOSS is great, but it's a very niche system that serves a niche very very well, but the computing world could survive without it. It could not survive a world without commercial software.A lot of FOSS is commercial software.
I agree completely. 5 year old computers are still way better than the super computers of 20 years ago. The real polution in computer usage isn't the electricity bill, it's buying a new PC every couple of years.
The problem is, we have to buy a new PC every couple of years, because we want to use the latest software, play the latest games, join in the latest fad, and for that, we need a fast PC.
While in many areas, technological progress often means more efficiency and more environmental friendliness, in PC use, it just means our hardware gets obsolete sooner, and we want to buy new stuff that still works perfectly well.
Unfortunately I'm just as guilty of this as most: I'm currently in the process of buying a new PC, because my old Athlon 1800+ can't handle the last couple of years' worth of cool new games, and is generally just not as good and fast as what I've gotten used to. And although that new PC is as quiet and energy-efficient as possible, it'd be a lot better if I simply stuck to older games (there are plenty I haven't tried yet), and perhaps cleaned out the dust so the fans won't be as noisy.
Actually, I was even planning to buy a small new server that consumes as little electricity as possible, but instead I think I'll clean my old PC, perhaps replace the occasional fan, and reuse it in a new role. It even saves me money. I just hope I can get that bloody thing a bit quieter.
For that, a dual core is an excellent idea, a quad core is not. A quad (or sex?) core is only useful when your workload can be divided into 4 roughly equal parts. This is true for servers, which are running dozens of threads of the same application at the same time, this may be true for some workstations running specialist applications that are sufficiently multithreaded to make use of multiple cores, and no doubt in the future there will be games that make good use of multiple cores, but for normal desktop use, more than 2 cores is useless.
Most of the time, there's one application that you're actually using and that's actually doing something. Everything else uses maybe a few percent of the CPU. In 99% of the cases, one process will be using at least 50% of the CPU. A second core will certainly improve the responsiveness of the system, giving the less demanding processes a chance for CPU time without interrupting the main process, but more than two cores will add nothing.
By all means, buy a dual core, but before you waste money on a quad core or bigger, please check if you'll actually be able to make use of all the extra cores.
I can't remember ever seeing that in a GURPS book. Do you have a page number for me?
No, they switched from slashing weapons to both bludgeoning and impaling weapons (swords with points and no edges appeared in response to metal armor), and in the case of the bludgeoning weapons, they usually had spikes. At Agincourt arrows annihilated massed plate-armored cavalry. The Mongols had no problems with plate armored opposition.Heavy armour led to things like the bastard sword, which as far as I know is mostly slashing. Purely implaing swords, like the rapier, appeared much later, when gunpowder had made armour obsolete. (Although the rise of rapiers more a fashion thing than a practical change.)
Ideally, you want both. But I leave you with this: at what point have professional soldiers preferred maces and hammers to swords and lances? Try to find one such moment in history.Swords have always been popular due to their alround practicality, but if they really were as superior as you claim, there wouldn't even be any maces, hammers and flails. Maces and warhammers were most definitely used (during the late middle ages mostly), because they were superior to swords in some specialised usage, particularly against heavy armour.
Of course, one might say that the third edition spent a whopping 16 years in print, but that ignores the fact that it was changed to be GURPS, Third Edition, Revised in 1994. And then in 1996 things were shook up with the release of Compedium I and Compendium II and their status as "core books".
Third Edition, Revised didn't change any rules, it just added more advantages and skills. Mostly advantages and skills that already existed before that time in other books. The Compendia basically did the same thing: collect abilities from other books so you'd only have to buy one book to get everything you want, instead of having to figure out which ability is in which out-of-print book and then paying $80 for the book on eBay.
Both Revised and the Compendia (which are still just Revised) are perhaps comparable to the publication of Unearthed Arcana for AD&D2. It's not a new edition, just more stuff for the same old edition.
Why would impaling weapons do less damage? They reach deeper into the body, are better able to damage vital organs and have less chance of being blocked by bones.
Also take a look at what happened in the middle ages when knights started wearing heavy plate armour: they didn't start using more arrows, swords and spears, they dropped those weapons and migrated to maces, flails, heavier swords (slasing instead of thrusting), and polearms with funky, often hammer-shaped heads.
I think GURPS has it right. Weight helps more than a thin sharp point against solid armour.