Is this only true for older hardware(motherboard, harddrives...) ?
I recently assembled a new computer with a SATA harddrive and I decided to forgo getting a floppy drive since if I really needed one I could have borrowed it from one of the older computers I have at home. After putting everything together, I started up the machine and I noticed that the startup screen already showed the harddrive and that the BIOS detected it too. This is before I inserted any disks or did anything to the machine. I installed Win XP pro and skipped the part where they ask to load 3rd party drivers, but the installation program had no problems detecting it either. The only issue I noticed was that it only detected about 140gb of the 160gb drive. But I managed to fix it later using Partition Magic.
Well, that's my own experience installing a SATA drive without a floppy drive. If anyone else is having problems, one method I heard of solving the driver issue is to use a Win XP installation disk with SP2 on it(which mine did not have). Either you find a disk that comes with it or you slipstream SP2 onto the installation disk.
Ah..reminds me of this one time i was watching my brother play UT2k3. I think it was the last level where it was 1 on 1 DM with a bot. So they're both running around, fragging each other and it comes to this point when the bot starts chasing my brother. So, he goes up an elavator/lift thingy to higher ground and waits at the top all the time firing through the opening hoping to get the bot while it was coming up. But after about 20 seconds or so, there was no lift rising sound and no bot in sight.
So we thought, wow, the AI is pretty decent not to follow such an obvious trap. Since it took so long, we figured that by now it probably ran off to some alternate route, so my brother jumped back down through the opening. Lo and behold, the bot was still there, waiting at the bottom of the lift and it blasted him to smithereens.
Now that is smart AI. I know human players who can't even play that well.
Hmm..I've been looking through the posts and no one has said much about the other side of the coin.
Isn't anybody else here curious about death?
I for one would really like to find out what actually happens once life ends. Is it heaven? hell? or is it just nothing? like in a coma or deep dreamless sleep. Does it maybe depend on what you believe will happen?
I'm sure most of you would like to postpone finding out as long as possible. After all, you only find out once and there's no turning back after that. But still, I'm terribly curious and have been wondering and wanting to find out about it since my pre-adolescent years.
I think one of the reasons religion is so popular is because many people don't want to accept the nothing outcome. What would that be anyway? It's hard to imagine an afterlife of non-consciousness. At least with heaven, or even hell, there's something at least somewhat familiar for us to look forward to.
More on-topic, I think in reality, instead of immortality in the traditional sense, where your physical body starts to last forever and will never deteriorate, what's more plausible (and more likely to happen sooner) is the preservation of the mind. After all, I think the single most important thing about immortality is the preservation of our consciousness.
How would this be done? I tend to imagine a Matrix-esque system when I think about immortal consciousness. Whole systems of computers or somesuch machines storing the memories and representing the thoughts of a person's mind. Of course along with that there would be the sensory input and some kind of output system as well. A stagnant mind seems pretty meaningless to me.
I can certainly see something like this happening. It's more 'when' than 'if'.
Of course, then arises the question of whether it's really us who are immortal, or just a copy of us. Would that really be immortality?
Well, considering that they are refering to the highly anticipated titles, it's no surprise that all the games stated were sequels. Games like Doom 3 and Half Life 2 have had a long time to sit out in the press and get lots of publicity before they were released.
On the other hand, games like Far Cry and Chronicles of Riddick had no where near as much hype. No previous exposure to the game universe (unless you count the movies) and both games were from unknown first time developers. But that doesn't mean they didn't turn out to be good games. They were great games in fact. Only thing is, not many knew enough about them to be excited about them beforehand.
Sequels will almost always receive more attention. If it's a sequel to something that has been proven and people know to be good, then at least there's something to expect. Big name developers are also capable of garnering such hype.
If you want non-sequels which are good games just look around a little. Hype isn't exactly the best way to figure out which games to buy. For those complaining about lack of originality, try Katamari Damacy. True, innovation is getting rarer but if you look around you'll find some gems.
Overall, I'd say it's been a good year for games(well,gamers actually), sequels or not.
"Retail distribution costs are VERY HIGH; manufacturing, distribution, advertisement, retail promotion, shelf-space agreements, and other overhead add up to a significant portion of a game's budget"
Which is why I would prefer to use a content distributer like Steam to get this game. If I'm paying for a game, I would much rather have a significant portion of that money go directly to the developers, the ones who actually spent years making the game, than towards paying for the distribution itself. It's like paying for shipping when what you want is the product. More money to the developers and perhaps they might charge less(yeah right). But at least this would help ease the burnout and suffering the devs went through to get this game to us. (Check out the GameSpot article. 24 pages long but a very interesting read.)
I'm not saying Steam is perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. Authentication for copies bought through conventional retail means however,...
If he donates anonymously, how will we be able to complain about it.;)
Besides, how would anyone know if he did make anonymous donations? Maybe he has, but it was anonymous so we couldn't attribute it to him.
Re:An id game I'd like to see
on
Life After Doom
·
· Score: 1
Actually i think a good game for the doom3 engine would be Alien vs Predator, or maybe just Alien. Claustrophobic indoor environment, lack of lighting... sounds just right for an Alien game.
mmm..imagine AVP2 in the doom3 engine. though hopefully, wall crawling would be in 3rd person.
You know what, I think slashdot should come up with some easy way for story submitters(or maybe also for the average joe/.) to provide torrents for situations like this. I mean/.ers are basically the ones who can benefit most from something like this.
Think about it, instantly having torrent files for interesting videos and stuff and no more bitching about not getting to WTFV.
How hard could it be? Just have to come up with some bot or script to automatically create torrent files after given the link to the file. Well, I have no idea how bit torrent works though, so i'm not too sure how plausible this idea is. But it does sound like it's possible.
Methinks a suggestion to slashdot overlords is warranted. Or has this already been suggested but no one has bothered/it's too hard/it's impossible to do something like this?
"So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power? All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters."
I speculate that one of the reasons would be pride.
Imagine how you would feel if your house was being raided daily by strangers inspecting every inch of your house and taking pictures and stuff. How long would you be able to tolerate it?
Now imagine how long someone who has been living like a king most of his life would tolerate it. And, if kicking inspectors out his palaces would not necessarily instantly incite a war or some similarly bad consequence for him, why not do it. Of course we have seen that eventually his decision was a bad one but if you look at it, it probably was an attractive, if only for a short term, course of action.
"they get to go after illegal porn (where $illegal is something like snuff films, or child porn, etc)"
Just so you know, in Malaysia, all porn is illegal.
I agree though, that going after porn should be a higher priority. Since porn is outlawed, only outlaws have porn. And most of these people who sell porn aren't very much concerned about who it goes to as long as they make some money.
I remember hearing from someone once that there were guys selling porn for about the equivalent of US$0.50 a CD, in front of a school! It makes sense that the police are first concentrating more on cracking down on something so easily available to minors.
"There may not be as much free content, but I sincerely doubt that the real quality stuff will disappear."
Are you sure? I don't really know what "real quality stuff" you are referring to, so it would be premature for me to jump to conclusions but it'd like to know what "real quality stuff" you have free and unhindered access to, which don't feature at least some form of advertising. If you haven't noticed, even google, slashdot(quality? hmm...questionable) and free porn sites(now that's quality) feature ads.
Now let's say that there are those websites out there which feature good content for free and are capable of sustaining themsleves even without ads. Don't you think that if they were to allow revenue from ads to help maintain their sites, they'd have more money left over to spend on other improvements? Instead of spending x amount of their budjet on maintainence, with ads they would have extra left over to: help improve content, upgrade thier servers, save for a rainy day or the ocassional slashdotting.
You're right in pointing out that banner ads are relatively young. I guess you could consider this a form of evolution. Why are banner ads so prevalent after just being introduced not so long ago? Because it's something which works, one of the better solutions for web masters to avoid having to charge users to maintain their website.
Frankly, I'm glad that there are ads. I just like most others, like free stuff, more so if it's quality free stuff. I think ads are probably among the less obtrusive ways to help provide such stuff. Personally, ads don't bother me much. I can go through pages barely even noticing ads, even if their smack in the middle of an article i'm trying to read. As long as it doesn't block what i'm trying to see, i treat as just another part of the background. If you're bothered by popups, start using browsers which block these like Opera or Mozilla or go get a pop-up blocker.
In short, it's a good thing that ads are here, probably to stay. Just treat them the way you do TV ads; ignore 'em.
I always find it amusing when someone like Google has a problem rousing someone from slashdot to rise up and speak for the wisdom and intelligence of the people who work google.
How about when Microsoft has a problem then? Don't they employ suitably intelligent people who are quite capable themselves. Considering that MS can afford to pay top dollar why would they choose to hire inadequate people. From my days of perusing/., it certainly seems as though the general consensus is that that is what they do.
Why the double standard? Why doesn't anyone seem to want to point out that the microsoft employees might very be as capable as google employees? Because google is very widely used by many people around the world? hmm.. Because google does very well in business and makes alot of money? hmm.. Because google is the no.1 choice of most people despite there being strong competition from many other search engines? hmm..hmm..hmm....
Excuse me for my offtopic rant but i thought i'd like to point that out.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this only true for older hardware(motherboard, harddrives...) ?
I recently assembled a new computer with a SATA harddrive and I decided to forgo getting a floppy drive since if I really needed one I could have borrowed it from one of the older computers I have at home. After putting everything together, I started up the machine and I noticed that the startup screen already showed the harddrive and that the BIOS detected it too. This is before I inserted any disks or did anything to the machine. I installed Win XP pro and skipped the part where they ask to load 3rd party drivers, but the installation program had no problems detecting it either. The only issue I noticed was that it only detected about 140gb of the 160gb drive. But I managed to fix it later using Partition Magic.
Well, that's my own experience installing a SATA drive without a floppy drive. If anyone else is having problems, one method I heard of solving the driver issue is to use a Win XP installation disk with SP2 on it(which mine did not have). Either you find a disk that comes with it or you slipstream SP2 onto the installation disk.
Ah..reminds me of this one time i was watching my brother play UT2k3. I think it was the last level where it was 1 on 1 DM with a bot. So they're both running around, fragging each other and it comes to this point when the bot starts chasing my brother. So, he goes up an elavator/lift thingy to higher ground and waits at the top all the time firing through the opening hoping to get the bot while it was coming up. But after about 20 seconds or so, there was no lift rising sound and no bot in sight.
So we thought, wow, the AI is pretty decent not to follow such an obvious trap. Since it took so long, we figured that by now it probably ran off to some alternate route, so my brother jumped back down through the opening. Lo and behold, the bot was still there, waiting at the bottom of the lift and it blasted him to smithereens.
Now that is smart AI. I know human players who can't even play that well.
Yes... *sigh*
$80,000,000,000.00 well spent to find out that indeed, they did not have WMD.
The reasons people give and the reasons people do aren't necessarily the same things, you know. War was not the only option.
heh...compared to what they do here. :)
Hmm..I've been looking through the posts and no one has said much about the other side of the coin.
Isn't anybody else here curious about death?
I for one would really like to find out what actually happens once life ends. Is it heaven? hell? or is it just nothing? like in a coma or deep dreamless sleep. Does it maybe depend on what you believe will happen?
I'm sure most of you would like to postpone finding out as long as possible. After all, you only find out once and there's no turning back after that. But still, I'm terribly curious and have been wondering and wanting to find out about it since my pre-adolescent years.
I think one of the reasons religion is so popular is because many people don't want to accept the nothing outcome. What would that be anyway? It's hard to imagine an afterlife of non-consciousness. At least with heaven, or even hell, there's something at least somewhat familiar for us to look forward to.
More on-topic, I think in reality, instead of immortality in the traditional sense, where your physical body starts to last forever and will never deteriorate, what's more plausible (and more likely to happen sooner) is the preservation of the mind. After all, I think the single most important thing about immortality is the preservation of our consciousness.
How would this be done? I tend to imagine a Matrix-esque system when I think about immortal consciousness. Whole systems of computers or somesuch machines storing the memories and representing the thoughts of a person's mind. Of course along with that there would be the sensory input and some kind of output system as well. A stagnant mind seems pretty meaningless to me.
I can certainly see something like this happening. It's more 'when' than 'if'.
Of course, then arises the question of whether it's really us who are immortal, or just a copy of us. Would that really be immortality?
Well, considering that they are refering to the highly anticipated titles, it's no surprise that all the games stated were sequels. Games like Doom 3 and Half Life 2 have had a long time to sit out in the press and get lots of publicity before they were released.
On the other hand, games like Far Cry and Chronicles of Riddick had no where near as much hype. No previous exposure to the game universe (unless you count the movies) and both games were from unknown first time developers. But that doesn't mean they didn't turn out to be good games. They were great games in fact. Only thing is, not many knew enough about them to be excited about them beforehand.
Sequels will almost always receive more attention. If it's a sequel to something that has been proven and people know to be good, then at least there's something to expect. Big name developers are also capable of garnering such hype.
If you want non-sequels which are good games just look around a little. Hype isn't exactly the best way to figure out which games to buy. For those complaining about lack of originality, try Katamari Damacy. True, innovation is getting rarer but if you look around you'll find some gems.
Overall, I'd say it's been a good year for games(well,gamers actually), sequels or not.
"Retail distribution costs are VERY HIGH; manufacturing, distribution, advertisement, retail promotion, shelf-space agreements, and other overhead add up to a significant portion of a game's budget"
...
Which is why I would prefer to use a content distributer like Steam to get this game. If I'm paying for a game, I would much rather have a significant portion of that money go directly to the developers, the ones who actually spent years making the game, than towards paying for the distribution itself. It's like paying for shipping when what you want is the product. More money to the developers and perhaps they might charge less(yeah right). But at least this would help ease the burnout and suffering the devs went through to get this game to us. (Check out the GameSpot article. 24 pages long but a very interesting read.)
I'm not saying Steam is perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. Authentication for copies bought through conventional retail means however,
I would have thought it would be just one button labeled "Alive/Dead"
If he donates anonymously, how will we be able to complain about it. ;)
Besides, how would anyone know if he did make anonymous donations? Maybe he has, but it was anonymous so we couldn't attribute it to him.
Actually i think a good game for the doom3 engine would be Alien vs Predator, or maybe just Alien.
Claustrophobic indoor environment, lack of lighting... sounds just right for an Alien game.
mmm..imagine AVP2 in the doom3 engine. though hopefully, wall crawling would be in 3rd person.
"the coin will roll smoothly in slot machines etc. Try it!"
/.
casino advertisers have invaded
=)
"Or better yet n-gonal wheels where n is an incredibly large number?"
umm...that would be a round wheel.
Wow...when did gaming get so political?
I always thought games were for fun...
"What's not changing is that it's still a sad waste of time"
You mean in the same way watching sports is a waste of time?
Hmm..being offered something evil and forbidden, something you shouldn't take because otherwise you might get hooked on it forever.
Sounds familliar.
Just say no, kids.
"I'm not so sure, this was obviously done by a WINDOWS hacker. Most of the Linux hackers I know have no freaking idea about MS Windows internals"
All it takes is one, my dear friend.
You know what, I think slashdot should come up with some easy way for story submitters(or maybe also for the average joe /.) to provide torrents for situations like this. I mean /.ers are basically the ones who can benefit most from something like this.
Think about it, instantly having torrent files for interesting videos and stuff and no more bitching about not getting to WTFV.
How hard could it be? Just have to come up with some bot or script to automatically create torrent files after given the link to the file. Well, I have no idea how bit torrent works though, so i'm not too sure how plausible this idea is. But it does sound like it's possible.
Methinks a suggestion to slashdot overlords is warranted. Or has this already been suggested but no one has bothered/it's too hard/it's impossible to do something like this?
"So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power? All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters."
I speculate that one of the reasons would be pride.
Imagine how you would feel if your house was being raided daily by strangers inspecting every inch of your house and taking pictures and stuff. How long would you be able to tolerate it?
Now imagine how long someone who has been living like a king most of his life would tolerate it. And, if kicking inspectors out his palaces would not necessarily instantly incite a war or some similarly bad consequence for him, why not do it. Of course we have seen that eventually his decision was a bad one but if you look at it, it probably was an attractive, if only for a short term, course of action.
But, anyway, like I said, I'm only speculating.
"they get to go after illegal porn (where $illegal is something like snuff films, or child porn, etc)"
Just so you know, in Malaysia, all porn is illegal.
I agree though, that going after porn should be a higher priority. Since porn is outlawed, only outlaws have porn. And most of these people who sell porn aren't very much concerned about who it goes to as long as they make some money.
I remember hearing from someone once that there were guys selling porn for about the equivalent of US$0.50 a CD, in front of a school! It makes sense that the police are first concentrating more on cracking down on something so easily available to minors.
Fox News then?
I can't find 'Programmer' on that list.
"There may not be as much free content, but I sincerely doubt that the real quality stuff will disappear."
Are you sure? I don't really know what "real quality stuff" you are referring to, so it would be premature for me to jump to conclusions but it'd like to know what "real quality stuff" you have free and unhindered access to, which don't feature at least some form of advertising. If you haven't noticed, even google, slashdot(quality? hmm...questionable) and free porn sites(now that's quality) feature ads.
Now let's say that there are those websites out there which feature good content for free and are capable of sustaining themsleves even without ads. Don't you think that if they were to allow revenue from ads to help maintain their sites, they'd have more money left over to spend on other improvements? Instead of spending x amount of their budjet on maintainence, with ads they would have extra left over to: help improve content, upgrade thier servers, save for a rainy day or the ocassional slashdotting.
You're right in pointing out that banner ads are relatively young. I guess you could consider this a form of evolution. Why are banner ads so prevalent after just being introduced not so long ago? Because it's something which works, one of the better solutions for web masters to avoid having to charge users to maintain their website.
Frankly, I'm glad that there are ads. I just like most others, like free stuff, more so if it's quality free stuff. I think ads are probably among the less obtrusive ways to help provide such stuff. Personally, ads don't bother me much. I can go through pages barely even noticing ads, even if their smack in the middle of an article i'm trying to read. As long as it doesn't block what i'm trying to see, i treat as just another part of the background. If you're bothered by popups, start using browsers which block these like Opera or Mozilla or go get a pop-up blocker.
In short, it's a good thing that ads are here, probably to stay. Just treat them the way you do TV ads; ignore 'em.
No no, it'll be good. Considering that most of us are guys, silicone implants aren't very useful to us, well directly at least.
;)
But metal..ah hah. Penis Enhancement that works!
I always find it amusing when someone like Google has a problem rousing someone from slashdot to rise up and speak for the wisdom and intelligence of the people who work google.
/., it certainly seems as though the general consensus is that that is what they do.
How about when Microsoft has a problem then? Don't they employ suitably intelligent people who are quite capable themselves. Considering that MS can afford to pay top dollar why would they choose to hire inadequate people. From my days of perusing
Why the double standard? Why doesn't anyone seem to want to point out that the microsoft employees might very be as capable as google employees?
Because google is very widely used by many people around the world? hmm..
Because google does very well in business and makes alot of money? hmm..
Because google is the no.1 choice of most people despite there being strong competition from many other search engines? hmm..hmm..hmm....
Excuse me for my offtopic rant but i thought i'd like to point that out.