In purely numeric terms the probabilities might seem extremely small, but there are that many Die Hard movies because Bad Shit(TM) keeps happening to Mc Clain. If it did not, no (or not as many) Die Hard movies would have been made, and we would not be having this conversation right now. Thus, the repeated occurrences of the Mc Clain vs Bad Shit struggle is a prerequisite to our discussion, which has obviously been fulfilled, as evidenced by posts #20244661 and this post.
This, in turn, reminds me of Terminator 3. I recently watched it with Rifftrax but I can't find the file^H^H^H^H DVD now to make a screenshot. Anyway, here's what caught my attention: during the cemetery scene, Kate pulls out a handgun from the coffin and aims it at Arnie, threatening to shoot him. She gets all pissy, and eventually does shoot him in the face. During the whole scene, she does not put her finger on the trigger. This seems to be the complete opposite of most movies.
I know all the standard safety rules, but it felt weird to see her with her finger not on the trigger. First of all, she looked very serious about shooting him, as confirmed by the shot. I also doubt that she'd even know or consider the rules in the situation. Finally, although I haven't been through any firearm training (and I don't own any, so relax), I'd think that from a self defense point of view, it would be better to have the finger on the trigger to minimize reaction time, especially on such short range. Any expert opinions?
I can't quite answer this myself since I haven't seen a single full episode of Star Trek, but here's a blog on just this topic. I'm not a regular reader, but apparently there's an old version of the blog somewhere with more Star Trek posts.
I should have probably RTFA first... The 180 are not square, but cubic metres, making the whole comparison to appartments/houses pointless. However, since I'm making yet another post anyway, I'll mention that the standard 45' containers are around 86m^3 inside, so two containers give us almost the needed volume.
A large 6 room apartment might have around 180 m2, or perhaps a 4 room house. A moderate 3 room apartment might be around 100m2. That should be a little more useful than 18-wheeler trailers for imagining livable space;)
I don't think so. From my experience, joint stereo produces better results at identical bitrates, or lowers the file size. This is achieved by leaving more free bits to encode the unique data rather than completely duplicating the two channels. Apparently, there used to be a bug in LAME which caused noise to appear on certain tracks when listened to on good equipment, but that should have been fixed long ago.
I have. Well, sort of. Of course, I didn't really expect it to be a good movie, but I secretly hoped it could be good in the same way Postal the game was. Maybe something like Road House (except with all the ghey carefully removed): rather stupid, cheap, and cheesy, but also super violent and funny. Apparently, the movie easily scored on the "stupid" part and failed on the "funny", which is pretty much what I thought was the realist expectation.
That's some rather shitty performance right there, although Prius drivers migh actually be amazed!. Probably costs as much as five regular 7 series BMWs, too. My verdict: DO NOT WANT.
Is there any game that hasn't been completely "figured out"? Well, maybe checkers? Oh, wait... Ok, back to PC/video games. In an FPS game, you learn the maps to get to the weapons/objective as quickly as possible. If you don't follow that path, you will be badly outgunned and that == fail. In racing game there's only one correct racing line for each track. In a flight sim there's a whole bunch of checklists you'll have to follow to get anywhere. Shit, even in Pacman there are 5 patterns which you memorize to "win".
That is not to say that the build orders are unimportant, but there's more to it than simply remembering to build a gas extractor as soon as you get 9 drones, follow it up with another drone and a spawning pool. One has to be able to keep track of the base while attacking the enemy halfway across the map, cooperate with teammates, and quickly react to changes in your strategic situation.
Now to address the GP's point (which doesn't really seem to be related to your reply), I found the "open ended" nature of the last Warhammer 40k game (was that Dark Crusade?) to have a rather negative effect on the single player campaign. From the description of the upgrades system (you could upgrade your commander unit in DC) to the selection of the next battle from a map, this sounds pretty similar to what we'll see in SC2. Being able to buy upgrades was ok, but having to deal with the changing situation on planet(s) got annoying very fast. Sure, there was a shitload of separate maps giving you huge time wasting potential, but the worst part was that once you've conquered one region, you could be attacked there and be forced to defend it.
It's probably possible to make a more open-ended type RTS which doesn't completely suck, but I'm yet to see one. On the other hand, I've seen plenty where this aspect fails badly, like in the WH40k game mentioned above, or UFO: Afterlight. I'd say that both of those games are ok or even good overall, but the open ended components just don't work properly. While the UFO isn't really an RTS, the concept is similar: the planet is divided into regions which can be attacked separately. Once yours, all kinds of alien scum can attack it, and you can be forced to defend the same damn thing several times in a row. It can work in one of the Total War games, but not here when you start with a fixed type/amount of units.
I knew of course that the base was portable since I've used it that way several times, and even the QuickSpecs call it Mobile Expansion Unit. I just didn't realize (because I've never used one of them) that docking stations are much more stationary devices which are probably not supposed to be carried around while attached to the laptop. I don't think I've ever seen the MEU called "Slice" anywhere, so that's an interesting piece of trivia.
If you, or anyone you know were involved in the M300 development, I think you guys did a pretty good job, since I'm still using one;-)
Screw the optical drive. The Armada M300 I've already mentioned somewhere above doesn't have one (it's in the docking station), and there was exactly one (1) situation when I wished I had it. I don't even use the one in the docking station either, I now just pop the CD/DVD into one of my desktop drives and use the network share to access it. Skipping the CD/DVD drive means thinner laptop plus lower cost and weight, so I'm all for it.
The 8GB flash drive is a much more limiting factor though, as it means I won't be able to store as much pr0n and warez^W^Wuseful business data.
The $450 BestBuy laptop will not be a lightweight 10" machine though. The cheapest LifeBook P7230 which costs ~$1,600 w/ rebates, and it has a 1.2 Ghz Core Solo, 1 Gig of RAM and an Intel GFX chip. The only thing it has significantly more of is the HDD, but then it's not a solid state thingie.
Looking at the Eee's specs, it's significantly better than the old Compaq Armada M300 I currently have. My M300 was originally equipped with a 6GB hard drive, so the 8GB or 16GB models would actually be an improvement, if I hadn't upgraded it with an 80GB Seagate drive:). Assuming the 10" screen will be at least 1024x768, it would be an excellent replacement for the armada, whose battery is beginning to crap out. Faster processor, double the RAM amount and battery life, more USB ports, built in wireless, and a webcam all for just $299.
Despite my excitement, whether the 10" Eee is a rip off or not depends on the needs and expectations of the user. I almost always carry my M300 with me, and I mainly use it for web surfing, some office tasks, light coding work and some gaming. This is exactly what I'd want the Eee to do, and I'm sure it'll handle these tasks just fine (by gaming I meant an occasional game of Starcraft or Doom deathmatch). If, on the other hand, the laptop will always remain on the table at home, and is expected to run Vista, then yeah, an additional $100 will get you a much more suitable machine.
Ok... I now see that there are quite a few replies already, but I'll still post this in case I covered something that hasn't been mentioned yet.
Re: C&C3 on an older machine, or laptop?
on
Protoss For a Day
·
· Score: 1
I also played C&C3 on a 4-year old PC. Works perfectly fine on medium to high details (I think shadows were off, but shader quality was on medium and textures on high). The computer is a P4 2.8, 1GB RAM, 6600GT. If it weren't for the Intel graphics, I'd be quite confident that it'd run fine on your laptop, but as it is I'm not so sure.
I love those things too, and if I weren't an unemployed college student, I'd be trying to get my hands on one.
IIRC, only the US versions (which were probably the majority) were severely underpowered. The European ones weren't exactly speed demons either, but they had around 170 hp as opposed to the 120 hp in the American ones. 170 hp is actually a pretty good result for a 2.8l engine from the early 80s. Our '85 Ford Scorpio had a 2.8l Cologne V6 which produced around 150 hp. And for additional comparison, the Porsche 924 ranged from 110 hp in early US models to 170 in the '88 Turbo version. This power reduction, as well as softer and higher suspension (and the 85mph speedo!) were appearantly a result of idiotic federal regulations at the time.
Still, more powere is (almost) never a bad idea though, so I'd love to see something more powerful in the new DMC.
> Satirisation and ridicule are useless and unconstructive. Valid criticism in any democratic state should not be done with insult to the human dignity.
Hey, napkin-arse, guess what? You're so wrong with your statement, it almost overflows into the "Correct statements" category! Were you by chance on a re-education trip to Russia, China, or North Korea recently? That would certainly explain you idiotic attitude to the whole "freedom of expression" thingie, the whole concept of which has apparently has been erased from your memory in the Paycheck/Spotless Mind style.
Even if satire is useless, which it is not, people in a free society are expected to be free to satirize as much as they want, even if some dumbasses in the parliament (or on/.) think it's mean to them.
> Insulting people is not equal to criticism.
No, but a lot fun can be had when both are done at the same time, and there ain't a goddamn thing you can do about it!
You can actually have a real torrent client on your phone (well, not really if it's one of those useless eye-phones that is), with an application like WinMobile Torrent. It seems to have all the main features of a torrent client, including multiple tracker support, partial downloads, priorities, etc.
Well that depends on whether the AC poster is male, or female with a strap-on. While the former makes him gay, the latter is just weird. It doesn't make her gay, but makes one question Mohammed's orientation if the whole thing was consensual.
My Armada M300 (which I still use) has a cylindrical battery which attaches to the rear of the laptop, covering the rear ports. When the lid is closed, it might, very remotely, look like (part) of the hinge. Here's the HP/Compaq page with an illustration, and a here's a photo with the docking station and the battery visible. It's also possible to replace either the floppy or the CDROM in the docking station with a battery, but I was never able to find one.
Slashdot Mirror
In purely numeric terms the probabilities might seem extremely small, but there are that many Die Hard movies because Bad Shit(TM) keeps happening to Mc Clain. If it did not, no (or not as many) Die Hard movies would have been made, and we would not be having this conversation right now. Thus, the repeated occurrences of the Mc Clain vs Bad Shit struggle is a prerequisite to our discussion, which has obviously been fulfilled, as evidenced by posts #20244661 and this post.
> I gotta agree with causes two and three, how do genetics come into play?
;)
Mommy happens to be, among other things, daddy's sister? Although I'm not expecting you to understand this
This, in turn, reminds me of Terminator 3. I recently watched it with Rifftrax but I can't find the file^H^H^H^H DVD now to make a screenshot. Anyway, here's what caught my attention: during the cemetery scene, Kate pulls out a handgun from the coffin and aims it at Arnie, threatening to shoot him. She gets all pissy, and eventually does shoot him in the face. During the whole scene, she does not put her finger on the trigger. This seems to be the complete opposite of most movies.
I know all the standard safety rules, but it felt weird to see her with her finger not on the trigger. First of all, she looked very serious about shooting him, as confirmed by the shot. I also doubt that she'd even know or consider the rules in the situation. Finally, although I haven't been through any firearm training (and I don't own any, so relax), I'd think that from a self defense point of view, it would be better to have the finger on the trigger to minimize reaction time, especially on such short range. Any expert opinions?
I can't quite answer this myself since I haven't seen a single full episode of Star Trek, but here's a blog on just this topic. I'm not a regular reader, but apparently there's an old version of the blog somewhere with more Star Trek posts.
I should have probably RTFA first... The 180 are not square, but cubic metres, making the whole comparison to appartments/houses pointless. However, since I'm making yet another post anyway, I'll mention that the standard 45' containers are around 86m^3 inside, so two containers give us almost the needed volume.
A large 6 room apartment might have around 180 m2, or perhaps a 4 room house. A moderate 3 room apartment might be around 100m2. That should be a little more useful than 18-wheeler trailers for imagining livable space ;)
> I can think of more than 10% of either of them that I'd like. Not speaking musically...
Which >10% would that be?
I don't think so. From my experience, joint stereo produces better results at identical bitrates, or lowers the file size. This is achieved by leaving more free bits to encode the unique data rather than completely duplicating the two channels. Apparently, there used to be a bug in LAME which caused noise to appear on certain tracks when listened to on good equipment, but that should have been fixed long ago.
I have. Well, sort of. Of course, I didn't really expect it to be a good movie, but I secretly hoped it could be good in the same way Postal the game was. Maybe something like Road House (except with all the ghey carefully removed): rather stupid, cheap, and cheesy, but also super violent and funny. Apparently, the movie easily scored on the "stupid" part and failed on the "funny", which is pretty much what I thought was the realist expectation.
You don't need to outrun a shark, only the other guy who happens to be in the water nearby.
That's some rather shitty performance right there, although Prius drivers migh actually be amazed!. Probably costs as much as five regular 7 series BMWs, too. My verdict: DO NOT WANT.
and a black guy who'll volunteer to do the most dangerous part.
Is there any game that hasn't been completely "figured out"? Well, maybe checkers? Oh, wait... Ok, back to PC/video games. In an FPS game, you learn the maps to get to the weapons/objective as quickly as possible. If you don't follow that path, you will be badly outgunned and that == fail. In racing game there's only one correct racing line for each track. In a flight sim there's a whole bunch of checklists you'll have to follow to get anywhere. Shit, even in Pacman there are 5 patterns which you memorize to "win".
That is not to say that the build orders are unimportant, but there's more to it than simply remembering to build a gas extractor as soon as you get 9 drones, follow it up with another drone and a spawning pool. One has to be able to keep track of the base while attacking the enemy halfway across the map, cooperate with teammates, and quickly react to changes in your strategic situation.
Now to address the GP's point (which doesn't really seem to be related to your reply), I found the "open ended" nature of the last Warhammer 40k game (was that Dark Crusade?) to have a rather negative effect on the single player campaign. From the description of the upgrades system (you could upgrade your commander unit in DC) to the selection of the next battle from a map, this sounds pretty similar to what we'll see in SC2. Being able to buy upgrades was ok, but having to deal with the changing situation on planet(s) got annoying very fast. Sure, there was a shitload of separate maps giving you huge time wasting potential, but the worst part was that once you've conquered one region, you could be attacked there and be forced to defend it.
It's probably possible to make a more open-ended type RTS which doesn't completely suck, but I'm yet to see one. On the other hand, I've seen plenty where this aspect fails badly, like in the WH40k game mentioned above, or UFO: Afterlight. I'd say that both of those games are ok or even good overall, but the open ended components just don't work properly. While the UFO isn't really an RTS, the concept is similar: the planet is divided into regions which can be attacked separately. Once yours, all kinds of alien scum can attack it, and you can be forced to defend the same damn thing several times in a row. It can work in one of the Total War games, but not here when you start with a fixed type/amount of units.
> Way to read the story. Your "him" is a "her".
Ahh, so that is how they knew something fishy was going on!
Thanks for the correction!
;-)
I knew of course that the base was portable since I've used it that way several times, and even the QuickSpecs call it Mobile Expansion Unit. I just didn't realize (because I've never used one of them) that docking stations are much more stationary devices which are probably not supposed to be carried around while attached to the laptop. I don't think I've ever seen the MEU called "Slice" anywhere, so that's an interesting piece of trivia.
If you, or anyone you know were involved in the M300 development, I think you guys did a pretty good job, since I'm still using one
Screw the optical drive. The Armada M300 I've already mentioned somewhere above doesn't have one (it's in the docking station), and there was exactly one (1) situation when I wished I had it. I don't even use the one in the docking station either, I now just pop the CD/DVD into one of my desktop drives and use the network share to access it. Skipping the CD/DVD drive means thinner laptop plus lower cost and weight, so I'm all for it.
The 8GB flash drive is a much more limiting factor though, as it means I won't be able to store as much pr0n and warez^W^Wuseful business data.
The $450 BestBuy laptop will not be a lightweight 10" machine though. The cheapest LifeBook P7230 which costs ~$1,600 w/ rebates, and it has a 1.2 Ghz Core Solo, 1 Gig of RAM and an Intel GFX chip. The only thing it has significantly more of is the HDD, but then it's not a solid state thingie.
:). Assuming the 10" screen will be at least 1024x768, it would be an excellent replacement for the armada, whose battery is beginning to crap out. Faster processor, double the RAM amount and battery life, more USB ports, built in wireless, and a webcam all for just $299.
Looking at the Eee's specs, it's significantly better than the old Compaq Armada M300 I currently have. My M300 was originally equipped with a 6GB hard drive, so the 8GB or 16GB models would actually be an improvement, if I hadn't upgraded it with an 80GB Seagate drive
Despite my excitement, whether the 10" Eee is a rip off or not depends on the needs and expectations of the user. I almost always carry my M300 with me, and I mainly use it for web surfing, some office tasks, light coding work and some gaming. This is exactly what I'd want the Eee to do, and I'm sure it'll handle these tasks just fine (by gaming I meant an occasional game of Starcraft or Doom deathmatch). If, on the other hand, the laptop will always remain on the table at home, and is expected to run Vista, then yeah, an additional $100 will get you a much more suitable machine.
Ok... I now see that there are quite a few replies already, but I'll still post this in case I covered something that hasn't been mentioned yet.
> (or gay and proud)...
Keep saying that, and a unicorn will fuck you up.
I also played C&C3 on a 4-year old PC. Works perfectly fine on medium to high details (I think shadows were off, but shader quality was on medium and textures on high). The computer is a P4 2.8, 1GB RAM, 6600GT. If it weren't for the Intel graphics, I'd be quite confident that it'd run fine on your laptop, but as it is I'm not so sure.
I love those things too, and if I weren't an unemployed college student, I'd be trying to get my hands on one.
IIRC, only the US versions (which were probably the majority) were severely underpowered. The European ones weren't exactly speed demons either, but they had around 170 hp as opposed to the 120 hp in the American ones. 170 hp is actually a pretty good result for a 2.8l engine from the early 80s. Our '85 Ford Scorpio had a 2.8l Cologne V6 which produced around 150 hp. And for additional comparison, the Porsche 924 ranged from 110 hp in early US models to 170 in the '88 Turbo version. This power reduction, as well as softer and higher suspension (and the 85mph speedo!) were appearantly a result of idiotic federal regulations at the time.
Still, more powere is (almost) never a bad idea though, so I'd love to see something more powerful in the new DMC.
> Satirisation and ridicule are useless and unconstructive. Valid criticism in any democratic state should not be done with insult to the human dignity.
/.) think it's mean to them.
Hey, napkin-arse, guess what? You're so wrong with your statement, it almost overflows into the "Correct statements" category! Were you by chance on a re-education trip to Russia, China, or North Korea recently? That would certainly explain you idiotic attitude to the whole "freedom of expression" thingie, the whole concept of which has apparently has been erased from your memory in the Paycheck/Spotless Mind style.
Even if satire is useless, which it is not, people in a free society are expected to be free to satirize as much as they want, even if some dumbasses in the parliament (or on
> Insulting people is not equal to criticism.
No, but a lot fun can be had when both are done at the same time, and there ain't a goddamn thing you can do about it!
You can actually have a real torrent client on your phone (well, not really if it's one of those useless eye-phones that is), with an application like WinMobile Torrent. It seems to have all the main features of a torrent client, including multiple tracker support, partial downloads, priorities, etc.
No, I believe it was "Fat Bastard"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uRslmSM7R8A
Well that depends on whether the AC poster is male, or female with a strap-on. While the former makes him gay, the latter is just weird. It doesn't make her gay, but makes one question Mohammed's orientation if the whole thing was consensual.
My Armada M300 (which I still use) has a cylindrical battery which attaches to the rear of the laptop, covering the rear ports. When the lid is closed, it might, very remotely, look like (part) of the hinge. Here's the HP/Compaq page with an illustration, and a here's a photo with the docking station and the battery visible. It's also possible to replace either the floppy or the CDROM in the docking station with a battery, but I was never able to find one.