have you ever PLAYED a Mario or Zelda game? They're fun and know no age.
sure there is a lot of potential unoriginality in tried and true game franchises, but there are also guaranteed results, and in the case of Zelda and Mario, the results are ALWAYS great.
I see the fact that they'll have Mario and Zelda titles on release to be a very good thing. Mario and Zelda are part of what make Nintendo consoles great.
There are lots and lots of titles on XBox and PS2, but 99/100 of those suck. in fact the only good games for xbox are halo and halo 2. If xbox didn't have Halo it wouldn't have anything. A more powerful graphics processor does not make a good game console on its own. A networked crappy game is still a crappy game.
I know maybe 8 people with Xboxes, and all of them have modded their box to play MAME and NES/SNES games. They rarely use their XBoxes for XBox games, and two of those eight people sold all their xbox games because they were never played.
Games make the console. Nintendo has them, more good fun games than any other game company to this day.
agreed, there are so many things that women are better at than men, but in our society they're all considered 'lesser' abilities. The ability to nurse a baby. To give birth to a baby. The ability to empathize better than men.
all are very important traits that women defeat men at every day of every year. its a shame that these abilities are considered less important than physical strength and the ability to add two numbers together...
I know of a guy that does this in Dallas, selling billiard supplies. Pool cues, billiard balls, tables, all kinds of stuff.
According to him, he works about 10 hours a day, seven days a week. That amount of time pays for his house, feeds everyone in it (wife and two kids, none of whom work) and drives three Hummer H2s all different colors.
well when all the penguins down there cluster themselves into a giant beowulf penguin named guido to push the giant iceburg away from the family home of dave the tv repair penguin, then maybe you'll see the significance.
that's because, compared to many other countries, we ARE stupid and ethnocentric.
I told a colleague at work that I was planning on learning French. He ERUPTED at me and told me how useless anything French was... He hates France because they wouldn't help us in Iraq. They wouldn't help because they had a pretty good feeling that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they turned out to be right. Apparently being correct is good reason to hate a country... I don't see the logic but oh well.
Reminds me of the book of Jeremiah in the bible. Jeremiah was a prophet, he told people what was coming, they didn't listen, and when he turned out to be correct, they killed him. I guess people hate the phrase "I told ya so."
the word "wiki" has always put me off. I didnt' bother to even visit a "wiki" because that word reminded me of things like "flooz" and "Beenz" - useless marketing words that meant nothing and weren't creative.
once i bothered to go to wikipedia and realized that it is an encyclopedia composed entirely of user-contributed articles, i kinda had a feeling it wouldn't work. i didn't think it would work for the same reason that IRC and message boards are now all but useless. the same goes for everything2.com.
The fact that they're forking makes them even more useless. If they were based on facts, there would be no need to fork anything. Even if one of the forks is designed to be the truth wiki, how the hell do i know which one it is? They all claim to be encyclopedic, which one is actually a reference and not a site full of opinion?
Wikipedia and Everything2 are both full of opinion, rhetoric and useless data someone feels that they should shove down my optic nerve at the expense of some other information i've learned somewhere else. They're venues for flamewars disguised as articles, and if you can't trust one article on a particular wiki, you can't trust any.
i've visited both only a handful of times each, and i hope to limit my exposure to both to little more than that.
(and by the way, forking isn't bad. forking for stupid reasons is only bad because of the stupid reasons, not because something forked)
People and companies that see their lucrative source of income starting to dwindle get desperate. Desperate companies (SCO) and organizations (RIAA, MPAA) make drastic moves, and those drastic moves are always overhanded.
record companies employ illegal tactics to enforce their view of the world, expecially when they think they see recognizeable dips in their revenue. Nevermind that they're not actually losing money - the perception of loss is all it takes.
right now they're saying to themselves (as justification for illegal activities) "desperate times call for desperate measures".
These are not desperate times, and those are overly-desperate measures. They're weak, and owned by the music, not the other way 'round.
copyrights are granted by default. For example, this post is copyright(c) 2004, Naikrovek, and I don't need to say that to get copyright.
If I were making this post or publishing work that I'd done for some government or company, then the copyright goes to that government or company, because that published work was written by an extension of the government or company (me) and is thier property.
If that guy invented CDs and DVDs (or the technology behind them) did so as part of his job, he will get nothing. Gallileo got nothing but prison time for his discoveries. Archimedes got nothing for his discoveries. Not fair, but a reality.
Well I think that if the leap from GameBoy SP to Nintendo DS is any indication, the Gamecube -> Revolution leap will be amazing.
There seems to be a few fresh thinkers inside Nintendo. That's why the DS is such a leap over previous portable game systems. If that same thinking goes into the Revolution then I'm sure we'll see some good innovations.
And how has the spam industry responded to this tidal wave of public hostility? It has issued this statement: "Gosh, if these people really don't want us to email them, then there's no point in our emailing them! We'd only be making them hate us more, and that's just plain stupid! We'll try to come up with a less offensive way to do business."
No, wait, that's what the spammers would say in Bizarro World, where everything is backward, and Superman is bad, and spammers contain human DNA. Here on Earth, the spammers are claiming they have a constitutional right to email people who do not want to be emailed. They base this claim on Article VX, Section iii, row 5, seat 2, of the U.S. Constitution, which states: "If anybody ever invents the Internet, Congress shall pass no law prohibiting salespeople from using it to completely fill your inbox."
proper capitalization on message boards is for weenies. i've never liked capitalization and i'm not going to start liking it now. that said, you can chide me and my capitalization all you want, i don't really care.
also note that i capitalized "TV" in my original post. proof that i have successfully found a way to create capitalized letters at will.:) have a nice day.
its interesting, but more for reasons of simulacra than reasons of handicapped people participating in normal life.
anyone can feel normal in a place where normal is clearly defined, in online games. simulate your own existance online, walk, talk, fight, dance, equally as good as anyone else. I'm not handicapped but I imagine that this feeling is intensely pleasurable to someone that can't participate fully in the real world because of physical limitations.
I have a great deal of respect for those of us that are limited in ways that others are not. personally, i don't think i could cope with the things that these folks deal with on a daily basis.
i find physically challenged folks extremely inspiring. if they find MMORPGs inspiring then that's awesome.
Aircraft the size of bees that get the energy they need by feeding themselves a diet of dead flies could be buzzing around the battlefields and motorways of the future, thanks to research in southwest England.
The aircraft, up to 15cm long and equipped with sensors and cameras, could have a number of uses in civilian life and modern warfare, including reconnaissance missions, traffic monitoring or fire and rescue operations.
By "digesting" its own fuel, the aircraft could become autonomous and operate without the need for refuelling, changing batteries or recharging from the mains.
The research is being carried out by scientists from the University of Bath and the University of the West of England who are working on different aspects of the technologies involved.
The University of Bath researchers are studying the complex aerodynamics needed to fly very small unmanned aircraft. The smaller an aircraft is made, the slower is its speed and the more it is vulnerable to high winds. This means that existing micro air vehicles can only fly for short periods at low speed and are too large to carry out fine manoeuvres.
But the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath is now carrying out five research projects over the next two years to find ways of overcoming these problems.
One approach they are working on is to get the micro air vehicles to flap their wings in a similar way to insects such as bees, flies or birds. By studying animals' motion, the researchers hope to match the efficiency of nature and keep smaller aeroplanes in the sky for long enough to carry out their tasks.
Professor Ismet Gursul from the University of Bath's Department of Mechanical Engineering says, "In general this kind of low speed aerodynamics is not as efficient as high-speed aerodynamics so you could never achieve the same efficiency as you would get for high speed civil transport aircraft.
"Insects and birds are as efficient as they could be, so we look at how they are doing this and try to imitate their flapping mechanisms"
Like insects and birds, it is just possible that such micro aircraft might one day even be able to feed themselves. Researchers at the University of the West of England are creating a new breed of autonomous robot that will carry out specific tasks and even "feed" themselves while working.
The research team have built a robot which can move and transmit sensor data over a radio link (over 30m inside the lab) powered solely by unrefined food including dead flies and apples.
The robot, known as Ecobot II, uses a Microbial Fuel Cell as its only power source. In the Microbial Fuel Cell microbes are used to extract electricity directly from food - in this case flies or apple.
Professor Chris Melhuish, Director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the University of the West of England, says, "We are interested in developing robots that are intelligent and autonomous which means they do the right thing at the right time and without human intervention. One of the big problems with autonomy is that of energy; they have to get their energy from somewhere.
"To do this they need to get energy from their environment which could include sunlight or water, but in our case it is organic matter".
The 1kg Ecobot doesn't move at any significant rate, about 30 metres per hour, but its ability to power itself by digesting its fuel is a major advance in the way such units have been designed so far.
Insect-sized aircraft could be possible in the future, says Professor Melhuish, "The biological fuel cell would have to be made into a soft system which might, in the future, be able to do some sort of movement at a small level, a small insect level."
well in my homedown, the house i grew up in was in a depression. rain kinda puddled around my house. my dad did an EXCELLENT job of waterproofing the walls and stuff so that wasn't a problem.
The City of Abingdon, Illinois, doesn't like rainwater in their sewers, so they pump it out - and right into customer's homes. since my house was the lowest in town, all the rainwater from the sewers (and sewage that was carried with it) went into my basement. the entire town's turds and femine hygene products wound up in our basement after every heavy rain. The city would not stop pumping, even after legal action was taken. Apparently a city can do whatever it wants to protect city assets. Such is the case in Abingdon, Illinois, anyway.
My father took an old tire inner-tube, cut it from an "O" shape into a "C" shape, rubber cemented and wirewrapped the ends, waterproofing and airproofing them. then, we waited for a rain. when it began to rain hard, we shoved this tube down into the main house drain. in the basement, where the drainpipes left the house, there was a drain grate - we took the grate off, shoved the innertube down into the pipe that led outside, and inflated it. no more of my city's sewage found its way into our house! Yahoo! no more weekends spent hosing toilet paper off our basement walls... But the story does not end here.
When we blocked our sewer, we just diverted the problem. someone else had to deal with it now. then that person figured it out, and the next had a problem. eventually everyone connected to that pump blocked their sewage drains somehow, and the next time it rained, the city's pump kicked in, but that sewage had nowhere to go. The pipe outside our house (which later we learned had been cracked by a nearby tree root) failed, and our front yard erupted with the same familiar sewage. Since the pipe was between our house and the street the city declared the problem to be ours, and went on their merry way. our sewage made it out through that pipe okay, but when it rained, and with the route into every other house blocked, the sewage piled up in our front yard several times a month.
Legal action proved fruitless. My father started attending city council meetings and raising a "stink" about the problem. The city asked him to stop attending city council meetings. He did not comply. He would pull cops over (!) and ask them when the pipe would be patched. He would knock on the mayor's door and ask about the pipe at least once a week. He would bring the issue up with his dentist (also the mayor). He basically performed a very gentle and 100% polite campaign to annoy the decision makers into doing the right thing. None of that worked. This went on for 10 years.
I don't know the rest of the story, but from what I've heard he got a little help from some organization who had a lot of members in the city council. Next day the pipe was dug up, replaced, dirt put back on and new grass planted. My guess is that the Freemasons helped him but I don't know.
A year later, after all that work, my father died.
Slashdot Mirror
i never understood this. why do you have to go 9km/s to escape the Earth's gravity?
if you can move upwards at an inch a day, eventually you would leave gravitational pull, woudln't you? why is the 9km/s significant?
have you ever PLAYED a Mario or Zelda game? They're fun and know no age.
sure there is a lot of potential unoriginality in tried and true game franchises, but there are also guaranteed results, and in the case of Zelda and Mario, the results are ALWAYS great.
I see the fact that they'll have Mario and Zelda titles on release to be a very good thing. Mario and Zelda are part of what make Nintendo consoles great.
There are lots and lots of titles on XBox and PS2, but 99/100 of those suck. in fact the only good games for xbox are halo and halo 2. If xbox didn't have Halo it wouldn't have anything. A more powerful graphics processor does not make a good game console on its own. A networked crappy game is still a crappy game.
I know maybe 8 people with Xboxes, and all of them have modded their box to play MAME and NES/SNES games. They rarely use their XBoxes for XBox games, and two of those eight people sold all their xbox games because they were never played.
Games make the console. Nintendo has them, more good fun games than any other game company to this day.
thumb trackball.
kind of a d-pad + the analog control into one...
just a thought.
agreed, there are so many things that women are better at than men, but in our society they're all considered 'lesser' abilities. The ability to nurse a baby. To give birth to a baby. The ability to empathize better than men.
all are very important traits that women defeat men at every day of every year. its a shame that these abilities are considered less important than physical strength and the ability to add two numbers together...
I know of a guy that does this in Dallas, selling billiard supplies. Pool cues, billiard balls, tables, all kinds of stuff.
According to him, he works about 10 hours a day, seven days a week. That amount of time pays for his house, feeds everyone in it (wife and two kids, none of whom work) and drives three Hummer H2s all different colors.
Its possible if you know how to do it.
well when all the penguins down there cluster themselves into a giant beowulf penguin named guido to push the giant iceburg away from the family home of dave the tv repair penguin, then maybe you'll see the significance.
This is not News for Nerds, this is Rumors for Nerds.
It is well known, as you know.
So, instead of breaking it, she'll rip it out and eat it. Good move.
:) awesome.
that's because, compared to many other countries, we ARE stupid and ethnocentric.
I told a colleague at work that I was planning on learning French. He ERUPTED at me and told me how useless anything French was... He hates France because they wouldn't help us in Iraq. They wouldn't help because they had a pretty good feeling that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they turned out to be right. Apparently being correct is good reason to hate a country... I don't see the logic but oh well.
Reminds me of the book of Jeremiah in the bible. Jeremiah was a prophet, he told people what was coming, they didn't listen, and when he turned out to be correct, they killed him. I guess people hate the phrase "I told ya so."
the word "wiki" has always put me off. I didnt' bother to even visit a "wiki" because that word reminded me of things like "flooz" and "Beenz" - useless marketing words that meant nothing and weren't creative.
once i bothered to go to wikipedia and realized that it is an encyclopedia composed entirely of user-contributed articles, i kinda had a feeling it wouldn't work. i didn't think it would work for the same reason that IRC and message boards are now all but useless. the same goes for everything2.com.
The fact that they're forking makes them even more useless. If they were based on facts, there would be no need to fork anything. Even if one of the forks is designed to be the truth wiki, how the hell do i know which one it is? They all claim to be encyclopedic, which one is actually a reference and not a site full of opinion?
Wikipedia and Everything2 are both full of opinion, rhetoric and useless data someone feels that they should shove down my optic nerve at the expense of some other information i've learned somewhere else. They're venues for flamewars disguised as articles, and if you can't trust one article on a particular wiki, you can't trust any.
i've visited both only a handful of times each, and i hope to limit my exposure to both to little more than that.
(and by the way, forking isn't bad. forking for stupid reasons is only bad because of the stupid reasons, not because something forked)
People and companies that see their lucrative source of income starting to dwindle get desperate. Desperate companies (SCO) and organizations (RIAA, MPAA) make drastic moves, and those drastic moves are always overhanded.
record companies employ illegal tactics to enforce their view of the world, expecially when they think they see recognizeable dips in their revenue. Nevermind that they're not actually losing money - the perception of loss is all it takes.
right now they're saying to themselves (as justification for illegal activities) "desperate times call for desperate measures".
These are not desperate times, and those are overly-desperate measures. They're weak, and owned by the music, not the other way 'round.
It is very easy: http://search.cpan.org/~kwitknr/GD-Barcode-1.15/Ba rcode.pm
especially easy if you know Perl...
It would be rediculously easy to take this, make it a CGI webpage, and publish it for the world to use.
Nah. The moral of that sentence is that I miss my dad.
copyrights are granted by default. For example, this post is copyright(c) 2004, Naikrovek, and I don't need to say that to get copyright.
If I were making this post or publishing work that I'd done for some government or company, then the copyright goes to that government or company, because that published work was written by an extension of the government or company (me) and is thier property.
If that guy invented CDs and DVDs (or the technology behind them) did so as part of his job, he will get nothing. Gallileo got nothing but prison time for his discoveries. Archimedes got nothing for his discoveries. Not fair, but a reality.
Well I think that if the leap from GameBoy SP to Nintendo DS is any indication, the Gamecube -> Revolution leap will be amazing.
There seems to be a few fresh thinkers inside Nintendo. That's why the DS is such a leap over previous portable game systems. If that same thinking goes into the Revolution then I'm sure we'll see some good innovations.
yes. but relative to a big chunk of land, new york weighs little, and while it would slow the earth down, it is probably an immeasureable amount.
still, i'm going to lose some weight, so i can help the earth pick back up some spin.
quoted from http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/column ists/dave_barry/6649728.htm?1c
and twisted to change the subject to spam.
===
People do not like spam.
And how has the spam industry responded to this tidal wave of public hostility? It has issued this statement: "Gosh, if these people really don't want us to email them, then there's no point in our emailing them! We'd only be making them hate us more, and that's just plain stupid! We'll try to come up with a less offensive way to do business."
No, wait, that's what the spammers would say in Bizarro World, where everything is backward, and Superman is bad, and spammers contain human DNA. Here on Earth, the spammers are claiming they have a constitutional right to email people who do not want to be emailed. They base this claim on Article VX, Section iii, row 5, seat 2, of the U.S. Constitution, which states: "If anybody ever invents the Internet, Congress shall pass no law prohibiting salespeople from using it to completely fill your inbox."
proper capitalization on message boards is for weenies. i've never liked capitalization and i'm not going to start liking it now. that said, you can chide me and my capitalization all you want, i don't really care.
:) have a nice day.
also note that i capitalized "TV" in my original post. proof that i have successfully found a way to create capitalized letters at will.
you're not meeting the right children i guess. kids have their ways but very few are actually obnoxious.
its interesting, but more for reasons of simulacra than reasons of handicapped people participating in normal life.
anyone can feel normal in a place where normal is clearly defined, in online games. simulate your own existance online, walk, talk, fight, dance, equally as good as anyone else. I'm not handicapped but I imagine that this feeling is intensely pleasurable to someone that can't participate fully in the real world because of physical limitations.
I have a great deal of respect for those of us that are limited in ways that others are not. personally, i don't think i could cope with the things that these folks deal with on a daily basis.
i find physically challenged folks extremely inspiring. if they find MMORPGs inspiring then that's awesome.
...exactly what i was thinking.
not all 11 year olds are unintelligent. in fact, they're surprisingly intelligent when you spend a bit of time with them.
i wasn't stupid when i was 11, i was fixing TVs and my friends' game consoles.
don't be so quick to demean children. they're not stupid.
well there's this thing that happens when a 60ft wave comes along: self-preservation.
if i were holding a camera when i saw a wave like that, i would drop it and run, screw the damn picture.
Aircraft the size of bees that get the energy they need by feeding themselves a diet of dead flies could be buzzing around the battlefields and motorways of the future, thanks to research in southwest England.
The aircraft, up to 15cm long and equipped with sensors and cameras, could have a number of uses in civilian life and modern warfare, including reconnaissance missions, traffic monitoring or fire and rescue operations.
By "digesting" its own fuel, the aircraft could become autonomous and operate without the need for refuelling, changing batteries or recharging from the mains.
The research is being carried out by scientists from the University of Bath and the University of the West of England who are working on different aspects of the technologies involved.
The University of Bath researchers are studying the complex aerodynamics needed to fly very small unmanned aircraft. The smaller an aircraft is made, the slower is its speed and the more it is vulnerable to high winds. This means that existing micro air vehicles can only fly for short periods at low speed and are too large to carry out fine manoeuvres.
But the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath is now carrying out five research projects over the next two years to find ways of overcoming these problems.
One approach they are working on is to get the micro air vehicles to flap their wings in a similar way to insects such as bees, flies or birds. By studying animals' motion, the researchers hope to match the efficiency of nature and keep smaller aeroplanes in the sky for long enough to carry out their tasks.
Professor Ismet Gursul from the University of Bath's Department of Mechanical Engineering says, "In general this kind of low speed aerodynamics is not as efficient as high-speed aerodynamics so you could never achieve the same efficiency as you would get for high speed civil transport aircraft.
"Insects and birds are as efficient as they could be, so we look at how they are doing this and try to imitate their flapping mechanisms"
Like insects and birds, it is just possible that such micro aircraft might one day even be able to feed themselves. Researchers at the University of the West of England are creating a new breed of autonomous robot that will carry out specific tasks and even "feed" themselves while working.
The research team have built a robot which can move and transmit sensor data over a radio link (over 30m inside the lab) powered solely by unrefined food including dead flies and apples.
The robot, known as Ecobot II, uses a Microbial Fuel Cell as its only power source. In the Microbial Fuel Cell microbes are used to extract electricity directly from food - in this case flies or apple.
Professor Chris Melhuish, Director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the University of the West of England, says, "We are interested in developing robots that are intelligent and autonomous which means they do the right thing at the right time and without human intervention. One of the big problems with autonomy is that of energy; they have to get their energy from somewhere.
"To do this they need to get energy from their environment which could include sunlight or water, but in our case it is organic matter".
The 1kg Ecobot doesn't move at any significant rate, about 30 metres per hour, but its ability to power itself by digesting its fuel is a major advance in the way such units have been designed so far.
Insect-sized aircraft could be possible in the future, says Professor Melhuish, "The biological fuel cell would have to be made into a soft system which might, in the future, be able to do some sort of movement at a small level, a small insect level."
Source: University of the West of England
well in my homedown, the house i grew up in was in a depression. rain kinda puddled around my house. my dad did an EXCELLENT job of waterproofing the walls and stuff so that wasn't a problem.
The City of Abingdon, Illinois, doesn't like rainwater in their sewers, so they pump it out - and right into customer's homes. since my house was the lowest in town, all the rainwater from the sewers (and sewage that was carried with it) went into my basement. the entire town's turds and femine hygene products wound up in our basement after every heavy rain. The city would not stop pumping, even after legal action was taken. Apparently a city can do whatever it wants to protect city assets. Such is the case in Abingdon, Illinois, anyway.
My father took an old tire inner-tube, cut it from an "O" shape into a "C" shape, rubber cemented and wirewrapped the ends, waterproofing and airproofing them. then, we waited for a rain. when it began to rain hard, we shoved this tube down into the main house drain. in the basement, where the drainpipes left the house, there was a drain grate - we took the grate off, shoved the innertube down into the pipe that led outside, and inflated it. no more of my city's sewage found its way into our house! Yahoo! no more weekends spent hosing toilet paper off our basement walls... But the story does not end here.
When we blocked our sewer, we just diverted the problem. someone else had to deal with it now. then that person figured it out, and the next had a problem. eventually everyone connected to that pump blocked their sewage drains somehow, and the next time it rained, the city's pump kicked in, but that sewage had nowhere to go. The pipe outside our house (which later we learned had been cracked by a nearby tree root) failed, and our front yard erupted with the same familiar sewage. Since the pipe was between our house and the street the city declared the problem to be ours, and went on their merry way. our sewage made it out through that pipe okay, but when it rained, and with the route into every other house blocked, the sewage piled up in our front yard several times a month.
Legal action proved fruitless. My father started attending city council meetings and raising a "stink" about the problem. The city asked him to stop attending city council meetings. He did not comply. He would pull cops over (!) and ask them when the pipe would be patched. He would knock on the mayor's door and ask about the pipe at least once a week. He would bring the issue up with his dentist (also the mayor). He basically performed a very gentle and 100% polite campaign to annoy the decision makers into doing the right thing. None of that worked. This went on for 10 years.
I don't know the rest of the story, but from what I've heard he got a little help from some organization who had a lot of members in the city council. Next day the pipe was dug up, replaced, dirt put back on and new grass planted. My guess is that the Freemasons helped him but I don't know.
A year later, after all that work, my father died.
That's my flood story.