Now that you've brought up TF2, I must say that no, OP don't buy it. I paid only something like 7 bucks, and I regret it more than the mini bike (not actually me in the picture) I blew all my savings on when I was a kid. Not only you have to deal with Valve's bullshit with Steam, but it's just not as good as its popularity might lead you to believe.
You're looking for Rainbow Six (pre-Lockdown, so most likely Raven Shield) and SWAT 4. And also Operation Flashpoint, and to a degree Armed Assault. I don't recall there being an actual stamina counter in R6, but running around like a headless chicken in any of these games will get your ass killed in an instant. There are of course plenty of "realistic" mods for other games, but this is pretty much as good as it gets.
Meh, Q3 works just fine. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to find a good DM or CTF game without the idiotic excessive mod... Still, I'd appreciate if you could send an invite to mobby.6kl gmail com so I could try it out, and perhaps challenge you to a duel;)
Anyway, my suggestions are Q3 and UT99. They're not free, but should be very cheap by now and are as fun as ever. There aren't too many servers or other players, but then this isn't Battlefield so you only need one other player for some good 1-on-1 DM action.
Then there are a few actually free games, which are mostly derived from other mainstream titles. These include the original Enemy Territory, FEAR Combat, Crysis Wars and at least one other I can't remember. They're supposed to be pretty good though I haven't played any of them. Then there are a bunch of other free games, where you often have to pay real life money to buy equipment. That's pretty retarded in itself, but they also seem to such hardcore in all other ways so I'd avoid those.
It's already happening with XP, just read through this thread. Suddenly, it's not just a bloated version of Win2k for morons, but a lightweight and stable OS, while Vista/Win7 is the new bloated OS for morons. Also, DRM. Obviously, there was no product activation in XP, but now there is! DRM.
I must say I find this both fascinating and terrifying. Fascinating because it's interesting to observe people's resistance to change. And terrifying because, well, am I really that old that I'm just one of a few people here who remembers what happened during previous MS releases? Obviously, you (the parent poster) do, but the population in general seems to have early Alzheimer's. Shit, when Win98 was new some people were afraid they won't be able to have more than one explorer window open, and how it's the worst thing for productivity since Program Manager was discontinued.
I've tried the beta, and it's pretty nice. I'm slowly discovering some problems, but they're small details like where did NTFS metadata go, and why won't explorer show total file size in a folder, and a few other things which are most likely just bugs. XP still gets the job done, but it just feels old and clunky while doing it.
It looks like they're assigning keys from a small pool so they're not unique for each person/installation. Both the 32 and 64 bit ISOs are also everywhere, so you can grab any torrent (the hashes match) and then try to register with one of the following keys:
Of course, the public beta won't get you any free stuff from MS for bug reports so you might as well just rearm it a couple of times and then get the RTM version or install GNU/Linux in disgust.
Your points regarding PPC 2002 are completely valid, but I also got plenty of value out of the device. Closing and switching between apps could be easily solved with one of the task manager apps, and many programs included an explicit "Exit" option. Pocket Word (and other office apps) were indeed useless, especially once you also consider that the files had to be converted on the desktop first so if somebody sent you email with a.doc attached, you couldn't view/edit it. Again though, SoftMaker Office solved all that since it supported desktop file formats and had all the features of the desktop versions.
I still have my Asus A600 right here on my desk, and I occasionally use it for games of PocketUFO or as an ebook reader (the transflective screen is great outdoors. Not that I'm outdoors too often) It's quite good for PIM tasks too, probably better than my much newer WM6 smartphone, but that could probably be explained by its lack of a touchscreen. Speaking of the smartphone, why the fuck does it take at least ten times as long to boot as the PDA? Hopefuly it has something to do with initializing the GSM receiver. Other than that though, I'm perfectly happy with it, WM6 isn't nearly as bad as some peope make it sound.
I think you're missing the real genious here. What Apple/Steve did is simplify the computing experience so that it "just works". If you were to type an email in Vista, you'd have to use the confusing keyboad which has way too many buttons. A common keyboard has about a hundred too many.
Instead, you just flick the wheel around until you get to the character you need, like you would with a safe. That's it, there's just one device you interface with, and everything is a single fluid motion around the wheel. As is often the case, you're just stuck with your old obsolete ways, while Steve has seen the light and wants to share with us all.
Most of the Razer mice are symmetrical. I'm not a lefty, but considering my Diamondback is perfectly symmetrical, I think it would work for you just as well as it does for me. The two buttons currently under my pinky would be under your thumb and thus more accessible, while the other two side buttons would become less useful, but overall it's the same. The Diamondback has 7 buttons, and it looks like they're still available in some places, though there are a few similar models to choose from if not.
Yep, I think that's pretty much it. My friend's copy of HL2 is now useless because Valve decided he's in the wrong region, but this had little effect on his willingness to fork over more money for Left4Dead. What's amazing though is that people will often use some lame excuse to explain why they keep using the DRM services. Again with Steam for instance, sure it won't let me play two of my games at the same time, but that's ok, it does (forced) automatic updates! Goddammit, is it that much harder to click "update now"?
I think Apple could survive for a while if they stockpiled on enough black turtlenecks. However, I'm afraid the RDF will pose a greater risk as its effect will steadily diminish after death, in a manner similar to radioactive decay. So the main question at this point is what's the RDF's half-life?
>...whoops, the steering wheel on my Pontiac caught on fire. [*] >[*] BTW, this actually happened to me on a 5 year old >1986 Pontiac Grand Prix while I was driving it.
Well that's quite an unfortunate incident. Have you ever figured out what caused it? Perhaps there's been a recall for this issue, like with the whole heated washer fluid fire thing.
There's more hilarity to this story, apparently the terrorists were supplied with the SIM cards by Indian police:
One of the two Indian men arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks was a counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission. ... The implications of Ahmed's involvement that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the SIM cards used in the attacks added to the growing list of questions over India's ill-trained security forces, which are widely blamed for not thwarting the attacks.
This is important. This news suggests that he's at least somewhat immune to the RDF and stupid trendy shit in general. He also appears to be a smoker. I must say all this is pleasantly surprising, quite unlike his cabinet nominations.
So are the Crysis benchmarks flawed or is it not possible to get the performance I claim? I don't see how it could be the latter, since I never specified the exact settings I'm using, you just assumed High Q. at 1680x1050. That might have been a little dishonest of me, but I'm not writing a research paper here, and in any case I'm fairly certain that that's about (read +/- a few fps) what I got in the benchmarks. And if it's the former, then yeah that's possible, but I never claimed otherwise.
As for your second post, I think you're a little confused. The whole post was about Bully, another Rockstar game. I was using it to show why I'm not surprised that GTA4 is such a shitty port. For the record, Bully was released on 25 October 2006 for PS2, and 24 October 2008 for PC. Two years.
Well GTA hasn't finished downloading yet (seed fuckers! Err, I mean, come on Steam!) but having played Bully, I'm not surprised at all.
I'll start with what was my first experience after installing and starting the game. At the first start I actually got stuck in the menus for a while because of the retarded default bindings. Who the hell sets Left Alt as "action" or "confirm"? What's wrong with the Enter key? I think returning to the previous menu used also something stupid, like left shift, though it seems that I've successfully repressed that memory. Thankfully you can change most of the keys, but still, did they even try playing it once with the defaults? Of course, there's also no mouse in the menus.
Since it took them almost two years to port, it looks like ass now, but also runs like that as well. Seriously, Crysis is much smoother (and much much prettier) than this piece of shit. I'm talking about 30fps and sometimes 10fps on a 2.8 Q6600 and 8800GT, while Crysis averages at about 35 in benchmarks on the same hardware. While almost everything is just ugly, the crosshairs in aiming mode are horrendous. They stretch to most of the screen (at 1680x1050 at least), but it looks like they're actually the size of regular FPS crosshairs like those in Q3 and UT, making them very pixilated and jaggy.
Now back to input and controls. Not only are the defaults retarded, but you're also supposed to repeatedly press some of the buttons just to move on a skateboard, for instance. Since one of the keys is alt while Tab opens the map, from time to time the game gets unexpectedly minimized. Aiming's extremely awkward as well, since you have to wrestle with auto aiming as well as almost unusable mouse sensitivity, which no amount of dicking around with the Razer drivers or game settings could fix.
Of course it also crashed a few times for no good reason. I think I've had much more complaints about it while playing, but this should be enough to demonstrate the point.
Opera had spellcheck since about forever, just not one that would underline the incorrect words like Word does. And it also isn't nearly buggy enough to require frequent automatic updates, so clicking the occasional prompt once a new version is available (detected automatically) worked just fine.
However, I'm disappointed that they finally bent over and decided to include HTML mail.
Even if a KIA does last longer than a BMW, is it really a good thing? It's like the recent study that showed that deeply religious people tend to live longer. Even if that is the case (and I have some doubts about their (and your) claim), it's hardly a life worth living if you spend every weekend stuck in a church and the rest of the life fearing of pissing of the invisible man in the sky and going to hell. Same thing with the KIA, except hell is already here every time you have to drive it.
PS Do I get some sort of award for an bad analogy as well as bringing up religion in a completely unrelated topic?
and Bin Laden's typing his myspace profile on it right now. Go get him!
Seriously though, what are we supposed to tell you? Contact somebody higher up the chain, preferably by phone. Yeah it may be hard, but so is delivering a $2k package to a 3rd world shithole.
Click here instead. Here's another version. This video's pretty shitty in terms of both visual quality and cinematography, but at least it seems legit. It shows Samsung's foldable OLED scren prototype, built into a smartphone-ish form factor. I don't recall any specifics, and unfortunately searching for it just returns a bunch of identical blog posts.
The concept is pretty exciting, but can't help but wonder about the durability of this thing, the regular wiring in the laptop screens seems to fail due to folding often enough as it is.
I assume it's something used to express disbelief at a situation or fact, much like "facepalm". Except, well, accomplished with a book one happens to be holding at the moment.
I was going to post exactly the same thing. The only reason this is on slashdot is that the IPHONE is involved, and so the story is automatically valid news and not a slashvertisement.
My two year old Garmin also does pretty much exactly what the OP's describing, it will show an icon and play a sound when you're approaching a speed trap. Of course, since it doesn't have any wireless capability, the listed speed traps are mostly stationary speed cameras. I'd imagine newer models would be able to update the database often enough to catch all the cops hiding behind the bushes.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you've brought up TF2, I must say that no, OP don't buy it. I paid only something like 7 bucks, and I regret it more than the mini bike (not actually me in the picture) I blew all my savings on when I was a kid. Not only you have to deal with Valve's bullshit with Steam, but it's just not as good as its popularity might lead you to believe.
You're looking for Rainbow Six (pre-Lockdown, so most likely Raven Shield) and SWAT 4. And also Operation Flashpoint, and to a degree Armed Assault. I don't recall there being an actual stamina counter in R6, but running around like a headless chicken in any of these games will get your ass killed in an instant. There are of course plenty of "realistic" mods for other games, but this is pretty much as good as it gets.
Meh, Q3 works just fine. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to find a good DM or CTF game without the idiotic excessive mod... Still, I'd appreciate if you could send an invite to mobby.6kl gmail com so I could try it out, and perhaps challenge you to a duel ;)
Anyway, my suggestions are Q3 and UT99. They're not free, but should be very cheap by now and are as fun as ever. There aren't too many servers or other players, but then this isn't Battlefield so you only need one other player for some good 1-on-1 DM action.
Then there are a few actually free games, which are mostly derived from other mainstream titles. These include the original Enemy Territory, FEAR Combat, Crysis Wars and at least one other I can't remember. They're supposed to be pretty good though I haven't played any of them. Then there are a bunch of other free games, where you often have to pay real life money to buy equipment. That's pretty retarded in itself, but they also seem to such hardcore in all other ways so I'd avoid those.
Perl is not dead, Parrot is. Though I've heard it might in fact be just resting.
It's already happening with XP, just read through this thread. Suddenly, it's not just a bloated version of Win2k for morons, but a lightweight and stable OS, while Vista/Win7 is the new bloated OS for morons. Also, DRM. Obviously, there was no product activation in XP, but now there is! DRM.
I must say I find this both fascinating and terrifying. Fascinating because it's interesting to observe people's resistance to change. And terrifying because, well, am I really that old that I'm just one of a few people here who remembers what happened during previous MS releases? Obviously, you (the parent poster) do, but the population in general seems to have early Alzheimer's. Shit, when Win98 was new some people were afraid they won't be able to have more than one explorer window open, and how it's the worst thing for productivity since Program Manager was discontinued.
I've tried the beta, and it's pretty nice. I'm slowly discovering some problems, but they're small details like where did NTFS metadata go, and why won't explorer show total file size in a folder, and a few other things which are most likely just bugs. XP still gets the job done, but it just feels old and clunky while doing it.
It looks like they're assigning keys from a small pool so they're not unique for each person/installation. Both the 32 and 64 bit ISOs are also everywhere, so you can grab any torrent (the hashes match) and then try to register with one of the following keys:
7XRCQ-RPY28-YY9P8-R6HD8-84GH3
RFFTV-J6K7W-MHBQJ-XYMMJ-Q8DCH
482XP-6J9WR-4JXT3-VBPP6-FQF4M
D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9
JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4
4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH
QXV7B-K78W2-QGPR6-9FWH9-KGMM7
6JKV2-QPB8H-RQ893-FW7TM-PBJ73
GG4MQ-MGK72-HVXFW-KHCRF-KW6KY
TQ32R-WFBDM-GFHD2-QGVMH-3P9GC
Of course, the public beta won't get you any free stuff from MS for bug reports so you might as well just rearm it a couple of times and then get the RTM version or install GNU/Linux in disgust.
Your points regarding PPC 2002 are completely valid, but I also got plenty of value out of the device. Closing and switching between apps could be easily solved with one of the task manager apps, and many programs included an explicit "Exit" option. Pocket Word (and other office apps) were indeed useless, especially once you also consider that the files had to be converted on the desktop first so if somebody sent you email with a .doc attached, you couldn't view/edit it. Again though, SoftMaker Office solved all that since it supported desktop file formats and had all the features of the desktop versions.
I still have my Asus A600 right here on my desk, and I occasionally use it for games of PocketUFO or as an ebook reader (the transflective screen is great outdoors. Not that I'm outdoors too often) It's quite good for PIM tasks too, probably better than my much newer WM6 smartphone, but that could probably be explained by its lack of a touchscreen. Speaking of the smartphone, why the fuck does it take at least ten times as long to boot as the PDA? Hopefuly it has something to do with initializing the GSM receiver. Other than that though, I'm perfectly happy with it, WM6 isn't nearly as bad as some peope make it sound.
What you're looking for is called VMware Workstation.
I think you're missing the real genious here. What Apple/Steve did is simplify the computing experience so that it "just works". If you were to type an email in Vista, you'd have to use the confusing keyboad which has way too many buttons. A common keyboard has about a hundred too many.
Instead, you just flick the wheel around until you get to the character you need, like you would with a safe. That's it, there's just one device you interface with, and everything is a single fluid motion around the wheel. As is often the case, you're just stuck with your old obsolete ways, while Steve has seen the light and wants to share with us all.
Most of the Razer mice are symmetrical. I'm not a lefty, but considering my Diamondback is perfectly symmetrical, I think it would work for you just as well as it does for me. The two buttons currently under my pinky would be under your thumb and thus more accessible, while the other two side buttons would become less useful, but overall it's the same. The Diamondback has 7 buttons, and it looks like they're still available in some places, though there are a few similar models to choose from if not.
Yep, I think that's pretty much it. My friend's copy of HL2 is now useless because Valve decided he's in the wrong region, but this had little effect on his willingness to fork over more money for Left4Dead. What's amazing though is that people will often use some lame excuse to explain why they keep using the DRM services. Again with Steam for instance, sure it won't let me play two of my games at the same time, but that's ok, it does (forced) automatic updates! Goddammit, is it that much harder to click "update now"?
I think Apple could survive for a while if they stockpiled on enough black turtlenecks. However, I'm afraid the RDF will pose a greater risk as its effect will steadily diminish after death, in a manner similar to radioactive decay. So the main question at this point is what's the RDF's half-life?
> ...whoops, the steering wheel on my Pontiac caught on fire. [*]
>[*] BTW, this actually happened to me on a 5 year old
>1986 Pontiac Grand Prix while I was driving it.
Well that's quite an unfortunate incident. Have you ever figured out what caused it? Perhaps there's been a recall for this issue, like with the whole heated washer fluid fire thing.
> I now drive a Toyota.
Oh, I'm sorry.
There's more hilarity to this story, apparently the terrorists were supplied with the SIM cards by Indian police:
Indian police arrest 2 men in Mumbai investigation
This is important. This news suggests that he's at least somewhat immune to the RDF and stupid trendy shit in general. He also appears to be a smoker. I must say all this is pleasantly surprising, quite unlike his cabinet nominations.
So are the Crysis benchmarks flawed or is it not possible to get the performance I claim? I don't see how it could be the latter, since I never specified the exact settings I'm using, you just assumed High Q. at 1680x1050. That might have been a little dishonest of me, but I'm not writing a research paper here, and in any case I'm fairly certain that that's about (read +/- a few fps) what I got in the benchmarks. And if it's the former, then yeah that's possible, but I never claimed otherwise.
As for your second post, I think you're a little confused. The whole post was about Bully, another Rockstar game. I was using it to show why I'm not surprised that GTA4 is such a shitty port. For the record, Bully was released on 25 October 2006 for PS2, and 24 October 2008 for PC. Two years.
Well GTA hasn't finished downloading yet (seed fuckers! Err, I mean, come on Steam!) but having played Bully, I'm not surprised at all.
I'll start with what was my first experience after installing and starting the game. At the first start I actually got stuck in the menus for a while because of the retarded default bindings. Who the hell sets Left Alt as "action" or "confirm"? What's wrong with the Enter key? I think returning to the previous menu used also something stupid, like left shift, though it seems that I've successfully repressed that memory. Thankfully you can change most of the keys, but still, did they even try playing it once with the defaults? Of course, there's also no mouse in the menus.
Since it took them almost two years to port, it looks like ass now, but also runs like that as well. Seriously, Crysis is much smoother (and much much prettier) than this piece of shit. I'm talking about 30fps and sometimes 10fps on a 2.8 Q6600 and 8800GT, while Crysis averages at about 35 in benchmarks on the same hardware. While almost everything is just ugly, the crosshairs in aiming mode are horrendous. They stretch to most of the screen (at 1680x1050 at least), but it looks like they're actually the size of regular FPS crosshairs like those in Q3 and UT, making them very pixilated and jaggy.
Now back to input and controls. Not only are the defaults retarded, but you're also supposed to repeatedly press some of the buttons just to move on a skateboard, for instance. Since one of the keys is alt while Tab opens the map, from time to time the game gets unexpectedly minimized. Aiming's extremely awkward as well, since you have to wrestle with auto aiming as well as almost unusable mouse sensitivity, which no amount of dicking around with the Razer drivers or game settings could fix.
Of course it also crashed a few times for no good reason. I think I've had much more complaints about it while playing, but this should be enough to demonstrate the point.
Opera had spellcheck since about forever, just not one that would underline the incorrect words like Word does. And it also isn't nearly buggy enough to require frequent automatic updates, so clicking the occasional prompt once a new version is available (detected automatically) worked just fine.
However, I'm disappointed that they finally bent over and decided to include HTML mail.
Even if a KIA does last longer than a BMW, is it really a good thing? It's like the recent study that showed that deeply religious people tend to live longer. Even if that is the case (and I have some doubts about their (and your) claim), it's hardly a life worth living if you spend every weekend stuck in a church and the rest of the life fearing of pissing of the invisible man in the sky and going to hell. Same thing with the KIA, except hell is already here every time you have to drive it.
PS Do I get some sort of award for an bad analogy as well as bringing up religion in a completely unrelated topic?
and Bin Laden's typing his myspace profile on it right now. Go get him!
Seriously though, what are we supposed to tell you? Contact somebody higher up the chain, preferably by phone. Yeah it may be hard, but so is delivering a $2k package to a 3rd world shithole.
Click here instead. Here's another version. This video's pretty shitty in terms of both visual quality and cinematography, but at least it seems legit. It shows Samsung's foldable OLED scren prototype, built into a smartphone-ish form factor. I don't recall any specifics, and unfortunately searching for it just returns a bunch of identical blog posts.
The concept is pretty exciting, but can't help but wonder about the durability of this thing, the regular wiring in the laptop screens seems to fail due to folding often enough as it is.
Simple: don't show something that can't be realisticly accomplished.
You use Opera.
> What is this Facebook you speak of?
I assume it's something used to express disbelief at a situation or fact, much like "facepalm". Except, well, accomplished with a book one happens to be holding at the moment.
I was going to post exactly the same thing. The only reason this is on slashdot is that the IPHONE is involved, and so the story is automatically valid news and not a slashvertisement.
My two year old Garmin also does pretty much exactly what the OP's describing, it will show an icon and play a sound when you're approaching a speed trap. Of course, since it doesn't have any wireless capability, the listed speed traps are mostly stationary speed cameras. I'd imagine newer models would be able to update the database often enough to catch all the cops hiding behind the bushes.