Google: Lightweight pages, which is good for 56K users such as myself that are always downloading something off eDonkey. Very powerful search results, outputted in a simple and easy to read manner. Non-intrusive advertising. Small, simple, powerful.
Yahoo: Medium weight pages, due mostly to ads and other crap on their service that they're advertising. I remember they had popups, don't know if they do now. (Thank you, Firebird devs!) Search results that mimic but aren't as polished as Google. Has everything one could think of, excels at nothing.
Yahoo can't hold a candle to Google. Yahoo is a web portal. Google is a tool for searching. When I want to search, which do I use?
That said, the only way I think Google can become more useful is if they added a dictionary and thesaurus to their search box. I.E. "dictionary:crusade". Oh, and improve the Zietgeist. Other than that, Google shall remain the God of searching unless they muck it up.
All I see Yahoo doing is using this to add more crap to a site with already too much crap on it, truth be told. Simplicity is highly underrated.
Star Trek: Western in space. Kinda campy but did have its moments. Very memorable characters. Fanbase: Big enough to get a few movies going after its cancelation. Noteworthy: The fans loved the show and movies enough to get an entire freakin' space shuttle renamed. Nae bad.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Pretty deep plots. Much deeper than much of what is shown on TV, which really doesn't say much. Very memorable characters. Very powerful episodes. (Remember the one where the crew find a probe and Picard spends a lifetime on a dieing planet?) Had many people who aren't fans of scifi watching. Noteworthy: Roddenbery died during this series.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Very deep storyline spanning many seasons. Characters not as memorable as those on TNG, but memorable none the less.
Star Trek: Voyager: Unmemorable characters, superficial plots, enough gaps in the plot to make Spock have a stroke. The previously immortal and near unbeatable borg were made to look like a bunch of pussies in this. Time travel became more cliche than it previously was. It's crap, Jim.
Star Trek: Enterprise New 'hip' series that shits on the pre-federation history laid out by the previous series and movies. Superficial. Unmemorable characters. Plots so shallow not even an infant could drown in them. Superficial. Tries to grab your attention with random semi-nudity. Predictable. Superficial. Theme song sucks. Superficial.
As somebody who used to be a HUGE Trek fan 10 years ago - good. The horse is laying in the middle of the field, four broken legs, broken ribs, and is oozing blood out of its ears. Just shoot it and get it over with. I hate seeing my childhood fave raped for ratings.
Berman and Braga can kiss the fattest part of my ass.
I don't even bother obscuring my address most of the time due to a handy free (as in beer and speech) little utility over at Spamgourmet.com. It allows you infinite disposable email addresses that forwards to an address you specify.
How it works: When some site/etc is asking for your email address and you just *know* they're going to spam you, give them a spamgourmet address. -
Once you get five emails you won't get any more mails forwarded from the slashdot identifier. Been using it for over a year and looking at my user page I've been saved from over 600 spams. By giving my real email address out to only sources I trust and using a spamgourmet address for all the rest my email box is totally free of spam. I'd highly suggest it.
Not completely on topic, but it's how I give out my address 95% of the time and it works for me.
Don't got it, that was back in the days of Win98 so I've been through quite a lot of crashes and OS upgrades since then. (Win98 > Win2K > GNU/Linux) Plus I don't even have any of my PS games anymore.
If anyone wants to grab a screenshot then head on over to zophar.net and grab a FF9 movie viewing utility that they had. Pop in the last FF9 disk and load the huge movie for the ending, when she runs into Zidane's arms start going through frame by frame. The picture itself is blurry, I ended up having to clarify the picture a little bit in photoshop to make sure I wasn't nuts. But yes, it is there.
(1) In Final Fantasy VIII when you use scan on Selphie (is that her name? All I really remember is that the game sucked) it won't allow you to rotate the camera to see up her dress. You can with every other character, just not her.
(2) However, you can see up Garnet's dress in the ending of Final Fantasy IX. Was looking for a desktop background when I found this, going through frame by frame for that perfect shot. When she runs down and jumps in Zidane's arms he swings her around and for one frame you can see up her dress. No underwear, lotsa bush. Almost made up for having to play through that slow assed game.
Not at all. I can beat Metroid3 in 1:19 with 100% on a real SNES, standard controller. It's not that hard if you know the right tricks, have fast thumbs, know the map like the back of your hand, and keep the run button depressed at all times. All you have to do to get that good is play through it a couple dozen times.
Met3 is basically made for speed runs. Samus has a ton of abilities that most regular players would rarely use, but in the hands of someone who *really* knows what they're doing she's absolutely unholy. Watch any good Met3 speedrunner go up the escape shaft from Met1 for an example.
It is not a technology's place to limit how you may and may not use it. This is one of the greatest strengths of Free Software - that you have the freedom to do with your programs whatever you want with them. (Even give a copy to a friend!)
Though I note that such restrictions are not new. Doesn't MS VisualC++ have something in their UA that states that you can't use their product to create a word processor or something to the sort? And God forbid you benchmark a.NET product.
Use Free Software. Your computer is your own to do with as you wish, as are the programs on it. Don't accept any limitations.
int ReadsTooMuchStallman = TRUE, StillGottaPoint = TRUE, NeedsMoreCoffee=TRUE;
Agreed. I don't understand why Croft is held up as a great heroine in gaming when there are so many better female characters out there.
Aran definitely takes the #1 spot. I remember spending countless hours getting lost in Metroid, and when I finally beat it my big bad bounty hunter turned out to be a woman! And this was back in the early days of the NES, which says a lot. Throughout the sequels you wern't thinking "mmm girly", but enjoyed the character as someone who could tear through a room full of enemies in no time flat. Samus isn't a fuck toy, she's a character you respect. (Besides, who would want to screw her? She'll screw you back, and I don't want to know what her screw attack could do to my apartment.)
Another personal favorite is Rydia from Final Fantasy IV. For those who haven't played the game - In the beginning your main character unknowingly kills her single mother and ends up taking her with him on his journey to overthrow the most powerful nation in the world. During the game she grows up and shows an incredible amount of passion and empathy as you watch your party members die off one after another. ("Stop it! I've had enough! They're all dead! Dead! And here we stand bickering amongst ourselves?! Are their deaths for nothing?") She's a very powerful character that makes you fall in love with her emotionally. Plus she has the most powerful black and summon magic in the game, so she is far from a helpless little creature. She can deal out damage with the big boys.;)
Terra and Celes from FF6 (especially Celes)... Chun-Li from Street Fighter II, Sonya from Mortal Kombat... The list goes on and on of heroines that get your respect as characters who are more than pixels with tits.
But hey, Laura Croft has breasts the size of watermelons so of course she's going to be the one that everybody talks about.
Switched completely to Linux a few months ago and Opera was the only killer app that I *HAD* to have through the switch. Mouse gestures, speed, well laid out keyboard shortcuts, etc. I'd go on but I'd be preaching to the choir.
After reading a lot of Stallman's writings I decided to let go of even Opera and totally switch to Free software. I was very apprehensive because Opera was the second coming of Jesus as far as I was concerned.
Went to Mozilla.org, Decided against getting the full fledged mozilla because I remembered it being bloated as all hell, got Firebird instead. Downloaded a ton of plugins, fixed everything to where it felt right.
I'm a total convert. Firebird will kick oh so much ass by the time it hits 1.0. It's design is as simple as IE, which is the #1 reason people cite IE as their favorite browser. It's small, almost as fast as Opera, all the features that I loved in Opera are available through plugins, and all the features I didn't use aren't in Firebird because I didn't install them. I have since fallen in love with tabbed browsing. Used to think that browsing three or four sites at once was kinda stupid, but once I got used to tabs in Firebird I began to see myself doing the exact same thing.;)
The Mozilla project has come a VERY long ways since it first came to be. If you've tried Mozilla out earlier and were disappointed, get it now. Get Firebird. Get Thunderbird. Install plugins to your hearts content. You will be very well surprised.
And hey, you'll be using Free software so that's a huge plus, in my eyes.
It is possible to make money giving stuff away for free, but you have to be very precise about how you do it. You just need to give out enough of your product to make the public want the stuff you need to pay for.
A good example of this is the IRL company 'Primerica'. They're a financial managment service that gives out financial evaluations for free. That is, they will take what you make, how much you want to retire off of, how much debt you have, etc and figure out a way to make everything managable and possible. However, they make money off debt consolidation so you can pay off your bills faster, insurance, etc. You go in, get everything sorted for free, and then hopefully you'll get your loans and such from them. They're making a very large profit from this strategy, from what I can tell.
Another good example is a band who releases low-bitrate MP3s for download off their website. You get the songs and can tell if you like them or not. However, if you want the versions that don't sound poor with all the case artwork and such then you'll buy the CD.(This is what got me to buy both of Rilo Kiley's CDs.)
I've noticed that the reason a lot of these companies fail at selling stuff by giving other stuff away is because they give out the wrong stuff for free. It's like crack - give them just enough to give them the need for your product and you're set.
Kinda like Google's expert search. Can search google for free, but if you need help finding that one obscure thing then you can pay to have others with a lot more experience do it for you.
I'm rambling. Damn, do I love coffee.
I'd like to reply to all your responses but I need to leave for work in a few so I'll keep it down to the main points.
3) Just because Saddam didn't have nukes with "Hi, There!" written on the side doesn't mean he wasn't trying his hardest to get them. Would you rather we waited until he actually had working nuclear weapons to try to stop him? I think the lives lost in this conflict would have been insignificant compared to the lives that would have been lost if we had tried to remove Saddam after he had actually gotten his hands on nukes.
By all accounts I've heard of Saddam's missiles could go at most a few hundred miles. The worst he could do even if he had nukes is turn 5 miles of Israel into a crater. (And rain radioactive particles a few hundred miles downwind for a few days.) Saddam was by no means a threat to anyone other than his immediate neighbors.
This whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth. First off, Clinton tried to do what Bush has now done, and the Republicans cried foul saying that Clinton was trying to get America's minds off his dick. (Which is most likely the case.) Now, if Saddam is/was really such a huge threat then why wasn't Clinton getting bipartisan support back then while Bush gets it now?
Moreover, North Korea may have nuclear capabilities by now, and is actively firing off test missiles into the Sea of Japan. All things considered, their military technology makes Iraq look like the stone age. While not much is known publicly about their military capabilities, I personally believe it fair to say that they either currently have the ability or soon will have the ability to build a ICBM capable of striking somewhere in the North American continent. I doubt that many would argue with me when I say that N. Korea is a huge potential threat not only to all of Asia, but also possibly America.
Why the hell haven't we turned Korea into a crater by now if we're attacking potential threats?
The whole thing seems off. I'm not going to get into any of the usual accusations because lord knows we've all heard them by now. But for every reason given for the war on Iraq there is at least 5 nations that have it much worse, and a lot of oil companies with old ties to people in the Bush administration are getting some very sweet contracts...
Even beyond that, there were many reasons we waited until Pearl Harbor before we got involved. I'll leave it to the reader to crack open a few history books so I don't have to type a few novels out. (Lord knows I've already written a short story on this one reply alone.);)
We still are looking for Osama, he still is a top priority
"Osama Bin Laden is no longer a priority" - George W. Bush (paraphrased from memory)
6) Yes, I agree that Saddam must be treated humanely, but if, after a trial, he is proven guilty of everything the rest of the world thinks he has done, I also support execution.
Death is too good for that man. Let him rot in a cell for the rest of his natural life.
7) I'm pretty sure no one at the CIA was involved in training Osama.
A poster below you actually said some very interesting things about this, and I think I'll let his experience speak for me.
If the world is eventually rid of countries that are willing to harbor terrorist, then planning attacks without a base of operations or a country willing to supply them with weapons will be a lot harder.
(Real quick, running out of time) Timothy McVeigh is an American who was trained by the American army. America sure the hell doesn't support having its federal buildings bombed, and yet he got the tools to do it and made OKC go boom.Terrorism is not a country. Terrorism is not a static object. Terrorism is a metho
Woke up, saw news, had karma to burn, felt like saying something, dunno why. Here goes.
(1) I am sick of all the people here, on Fark, and on countless other sites mindlessly bitching about the conservitives and/or the liberals. All politicians are going for the $ no matter what party you support, both sides are insane, and the majority of people are centrists with a slight leaning one side or another. Extremists from both sides are equally mindless, and as always are the ones to make the most noise. Nobody cares about your blind following, please either say something with an ounce of intelligence behind it or STFU. Duckspeak is annoying.
(Side note: All you people adding intelligent debate and thoughts reguardless of your political affiliation: keep it up! People who help the good content to noise ratio are the unsung heroes of the internet.)
(2) I am very glad Saddam is found. One less asshole in the world to worry about. However...
(3) Until I hear of nukes with "Hi, there!" painted on the sides being dragged out of Iraq, we have still invaded Iraq for no good reason. The only reason the UN went along with this little war is because US intelligence lied about WMD and thus believed that they posed a serious threat to neighboring nations. No WMD = unjustified war = unjustified deaths on both sides.
(4) A clarification of #2: Again, I am glad that he's taken care of. However, it is not America's place or anyone else's to say "I disagree with that X nation is doing, bomb them". If we have the right to bomb another nation to "free the people" then why doesn't China have the right to start WW3 with us in order to "free the poor American people from the totalarian fist of the Bush regime" or such other bollocks? Only if a nation has the power to pose a severe threat to neighboring nations or the world at large should drastic military action be taken against them.
(5) Where the fuck is Osama?!?! He flew those planes into our buildings, not Saddam. Why the hell is he no longer a high priority? I've had a close friend die in the WTC and you're telling me that capturing the man directly responsible for my friend's death isn't a priority?!!!
(6) I sure hope they don't do anything stupid like torturing Saddam. Should we treat him inhumanely a _LOT_ of people will be severely pissed, a lot of them nuts enough to do insane crap like fly planes into our buildings. What we receive 10 years from now will be a direct mirror of our actions now, after all.
(7) Speaking of Osama, shouldn't we be going after the top brass at the CIA for training him? I mean, they basically started the largest terrorist movement in the world..
(8) The war on terrorism can never end, for it is not a static entity. A war on Iraq can end. A war on an action anyone can do can not end. The Bush administration has started a war that will never end, a war that they can exploit to give them a lot of power they are not intended to have (and have done so). This situation scares me.
(9) It saddens me that I have yet to hear anyone question "Where will this take us in 10 years? Or 20?" We are repeating past mistakes and worrying only about the immediate future, it seems. The amount of debt we are leaving to future generations through this war alone makes me afraid of our impact on the future. Let alone the legal precidents we have set, loss of rights, new (probably unconstitutional) laws, nations we've pissed off, etc.
(10) I need coffee. Damn parents calling me at 6am telling me to turn on the TV when they know damn well that I don't own a TV and haven't for years... grr...
As someone whose recently moved over to Linux totally I can say 100% for certain that Linux will never be ready for the masses.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The more I learn the more I have fun geeking around in it. But sweet jesus, I've been trying to get GAIM to compile for the past two weeks off and on. It keeps switching from GTK hating me to GAIM hating me. Been bitching with ZSNES like crazy trying to get it to work at greater than 10fps (1ghz system, mind you). Given up on upgrading to KDE3, using KDE2. Tried other window managers and wasn't happy with them.
In the past month I've spent roughly 80 hours mucking with my distro to get everything working well enough to where I can just leave it alone and not mess with it for awhile. Now while I love being able to modify my OS to where it feels just right in virtually every way imaginable (and bash rocks), that is the one and only thing I miss about Windows. Everything worked. You didn't have to worry about dependancy after dependancy after dependancy just to get one stupid program installed and working. Drivers were easy as all hell to install. You didn't have to muck with your freakin' kernel trying to get a half-working driver kinda working. Windows took care of all that crap for you. Not well, but it did. In Linux I'm taking care of the OS.
This isn't something that can be fixed with a bigger better RPM thingy or pretty GUI. This is both a great strength and weakness of Li/Unix and OSS in general. Everyone has their opinions on how things should work, and thus you have a billion different ways to do things (and a trillion different dependencies... ugh.)
I love the penguin to death but I've been hacking away in bash for the past month trying to get my system working just as well as it once did in Windows. And I'm a very computer literate geek who loves reading source code and actually _reads the fucking manual_. Linux is ready for the average user? Bullshit. To say that is arrogance. No way in hell would I install it for my mom. Poor woman's already had one stroke.
I'm a big webcomic fan for the fact that you will find a LOT of comics online that no publisher in his right mind would consider going near. I don't think I've laughed at a mainstream print comic since I was six. But get online and you're looking at a whole 'nother ballpark.
A perfect example of this is Sexy Losers, my personal favorite. (Warning, comic so NSFW it's not even remotely funny.) The most quoted strip - Girl is about to commit suicide. Guy asks her if he can have sex with her before she jumps. She calls him a pervert. Guy says "Well, I'll just have to wait until your body washes ashore, then." Man, I wish they'd print *that* next to Garfield.
Online comics can go, do, and say things that 99% of publishers wouldn't consider printing, and as such tend to be a lot more origional than the rest. Yes, the vast majority of webcomics are total and complete crap, but every now and then you come across afewgems that drag you in and make you read each and every comic several times over. (I am specifically talking about Venus Envy which I linked to above in the word "a", I never dreamed I would become a huge fan over a comic about freakin' transsexuals, for christ's sakes.)
I do not own a TV. Haven't watched TV in over a year. Opiate for the masses, indeed. Can't understand how anybody could vedge away.
However, if I had one and was given a choice between the PS2, Gamecube, and X-Box, I'd most definitely take a PS2. Here you have a simply massive game libary that spans two systems worth of modern classics, a DVD player, and a cheap CD player all in a very small black box for $200. If Sony didn't keep up with backwards compatibility the game libary for the PS3 would be on par with the X-Box 2 and whatever Nintendo came out with next, and lord knows that both will also do the "entertainment center in a small box" thing, thus leveling the playing field quite a bit.
Sony would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't do that, and they're smart enough to know. Nintendo has done the same with the Game Boy, and it's payed off very nicely.
Who would you rather hire - some kid who knows how to muck around with a computer or an A+ certified tech? If you're going to do anything serious in the repair industry then you should get A+ certified. The test is dead simple, but very valuable. Although I've never found a use for it (yet, other than to pad my resume), I know that should Joe User muck up his computer 2 weeks after I fix it and he sues me that the judge will take my certified experience with a lot more weight than if I wasn't.
"..jump through your television directly into.. the F/A-18 Hornet.. load up with precision guided munitions and bring the forces of freedom to bear on the Iraqi regime of terror."
I am so sick and tired of this "raa raa we are American we are the second coming of Jesus with an 8 inch dick" hyper-BS propeganda. Wasn't the Iraq war about weapons of mass destruction? Where's the WMD? Why haven't I heard of any WMD being found without it being debunked 2 days later? Shrubya got a hard on for Iraq, the boys at the top spat in the face of the UN and pissed everyone off, and in the end we went in to find WMD. But then you find nothing and suddenly everyone forgets about the WMD that everyone was so afraid of. In the blink of an eye the mindless flag-waving faux-patriots went from "Oh dear God, Saddam's going to kill us all!" to "We're freeing the people of Iraq because we're nice guys, isn't it great?"
Orwell's 1984 is overquoted so much today that it's unreal. And yet every single time I look at the news I am so starkly reminded of it. We are at war with Oceanina. We have always been at war with Oceaninia, and the earth itself will open wide and swallow us all if we didn't bomb Iraq to hell so we could free the people from the very beginning. What the hell is this? When exactly did I start having to defend the fact that what happened a year ago actually happened? Nobody says crap about WMD, it's all about freeing the people. Screw the Iraqis, until we find a big assed nuke with "Hi there!" painted on the side we've just taken out a government for no good reason other than "they pissed us off". But nobody cares. We freed some people! We are America, our farts smell of petunias. Everytime I hear someone state that we had the right to bomb the hell out of a nation of people "just because we're the U.S." my faith in humanity dims.
This game sickens me. Here is a video game based off government propeganda and bad news reporting. Take the most basic BS about this war, toss it into a 3D engine, and BOOM - you've undoubtedly got millions of idiots willing to shell out $50 so they can stop watching CNN and start blowing the hell out of some brown guy in the privacy of their own home. Gotta love the Iraqi war. If the face of freedom is a nice big bomb, then I must have really got some lovin' back when Lisa Campbell racked me in the nads back in the 8th grade.
I love the principles that America was founded on. That's why I'm ashamed to call myself an American.
I really need a fattie. Too bad the shnizt's illegal.
What the hell, I got karma to burn. You know, I really want to kick that guys ass. Doesn't even really have to be a full out fight, just give me one shot. Just one little shot and I'll knock him out, easy.
SCO has lawyers. Linux has a bunch of geeks with thousands of hours of experience with the bloodiest video games on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Google: Lightweight pages, which is good for 56K users such as myself that are always downloading something off eDonkey. Very powerful search results, outputted in a simple and easy to read manner. Non-intrusive advertising. Small, simple, powerful.
Yahoo: Medium weight pages, due mostly to ads and other crap on their service that they're advertising. I remember they had popups, don't know if they do now. (Thank you, Firebird devs!) Search results that mimic but aren't as polished as Google. Has everything one could think of, excels at nothing.
Yahoo can't hold a candle to Google. Yahoo is a web portal. Google is a tool for searching. When I want to search, which do I use?
That said, the only way I think Google can become more useful is if they added a dictionary and thesaurus to their search box. I.E. "dictionary:crusade". Oh, and improve the Zietgeist. Other than that, Google shall remain the God of searching unless they muck it up.
All I see Yahoo doing is using this to add more crap to a site with already too much crap on it, truth be told. Simplicity is highly underrated.
Star Trek:
Western in space. Kinda campy but did have its moments. Very memorable characters. Fanbase: Big enough to get a few movies going after its cancelation. Noteworthy: The fans loved the show and movies enough to get an entire freakin' space shuttle renamed. Nae bad.
Star Trek: The Next Generation:
Pretty deep plots. Much deeper than much of what is shown on TV, which really doesn't say much. Very memorable characters. Very powerful episodes. (Remember the one where the crew find a probe and Picard spends a lifetime on a dieing planet?) Had many people who aren't fans of scifi watching. Noteworthy: Roddenbery died during this series.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Very deep storyline spanning many seasons. Characters not as memorable as those on TNG, but memorable none the less.
Star Trek: Voyager:
Unmemorable characters, superficial plots, enough gaps in the plot to make Spock have a stroke. The previously immortal and near unbeatable borg were made to look like a bunch of pussies in this. Time travel became more cliche than it previously was. It's crap, Jim.
Star Trek: Enterprise
New 'hip' series that shits on the pre-federation history laid out by the previous series and movies. Superficial. Unmemorable characters. Plots so shallow not even an infant could drown in them. Superficial. Tries to grab your attention with random semi-nudity. Predictable. Superficial. Theme song sucks. Superficial.
As somebody who used to be a HUGE Trek fan 10 years ago - good. The horse is laying in the middle of the field, four broken legs, broken ribs, and is oozing blood out of its ears. Just shoot it and get it over with. I hate seeing my childhood fave raped for ratings.
Berman and Braga can kiss the fattest part of my ass.
I don't even bother obscuring my address most of the time due to a handy free (as in beer and speech) little utility over at Spamgourmet.com. It allows you infinite disposable email addresses that forwards to an address you specify.
How it works: When some site/etc is asking for your email address and you just *know* they're going to spam you, give them a spamgourmet address. -
identifier.#ofemailstoaccept.userhandle@spamgour met.com
I.E.
slashdot.5.user@spamgourmet.net
Once you get five emails you won't get any more mails forwarded from the slashdot identifier. Been using it for over a year and looking at my user page I've been saved from over 600 spams. By giving my real email address out to only sources I trust and using a spamgourmet address for all the rest my email box is totally free of spam. I'd highly suggest it.
Not completely on topic, but it's how I give out my address 95% of the time and it works for me.
Insightful? The hell?! :D
Don't got it, that was back in the days of Win98 so I've been through quite a lot of crashes and OS upgrades since then. (Win98 > Win2K > GNU/Linux) Plus I don't even have any of my PS games anymore.
If anyone wants to grab a screenshot then head on over to zophar.net and grab a FF9 movie viewing utility that they had. Pop in the last FF9 disk and load the huge movie for the ending, when she runs into Zidane's arms start going through frame by frame. The picture itself is blurry, I ended up having to clarify the picture a little bit in photoshop to make sure I wasn't nuts. But yes, it is there.
...Is the fact that I know the following:
(1) In Final Fantasy VIII when you use scan on Selphie (is that her name? All I really remember is that the game sucked) it won't allow you to rotate the camera to see up her dress. You can with every other character, just not her.
(2) However, you can see up Garnet's dress in the ending of Final Fantasy IX. Was looking for a desktop background when I found this, going through frame by frame for that perfect shot. When she runs down and jumps in Zidane's arms he swings her around and for one frame you can see up her dress. No underwear, lotsa bush. Almost made up for having to play through that slow assed game.
No, I don't have a girlfriend. How can you tell?
Not at all. I can beat Metroid3 in 1:19 with 100% on a real SNES, standard controller. It's not that hard if you know the right tricks, have fast thumbs, know the map like the back of your hand, and keep the run button depressed at all times. All you have to do to get that good is play through it a couple dozen times.
Met3 is basically made for speed runs. Samus has a ton of abilities that most regular players would rarely use, but in the hands of someone who *really* knows what they're doing she's absolutely unholy. Watch any good Met3 speedrunner go up the escape shaft from Met1 for an example.
It is not a technology's place to limit how you may and may not use it. This is one of the greatest strengths of Free Software - that you have the freedom to do with your programs whatever you want with them. (Even give a copy to a friend!)
.NET product.
Though I note that such restrictions are not new. Doesn't MS VisualC++ have something in their UA that states that you can't use their product to create a word processor or something to the sort? And God forbid you benchmark a
Use Free Software. Your computer is your own to do with as you wish, as are the programs on it. Don't accept any limitations.
int ReadsTooMuchStallman = TRUE, StillGottaPoint = TRUE, NeedsMoreCoffee=TRUE;
So what about those of us that dump tons of sugar in their coffee? Would that negate the whole thing?
;)
C'mon, I can't be the only one here who has been asked if they want some coffee with their sugar and cream.
Agreed. I don't understand why Croft is held up as a great heroine in gaming when there are so many better female characters out there.
Aran definitely takes the #1 spot. I remember spending countless hours getting lost in Metroid, and when I finally beat it my big bad bounty hunter turned out to be a woman! And this was back in the early days of the NES, which says a lot. Throughout the sequels you wern't thinking "mmm girly", but enjoyed the character as someone who could tear through a room full of enemies in no time flat. Samus isn't a fuck toy, she's a character you respect. (Besides, who would want to screw her? She'll screw you back, and I don't want to know what her screw attack could do to my apartment.)
Another personal favorite is Rydia from Final Fantasy IV. For those who haven't played the game - In the beginning your main character unknowingly kills her single mother and ends up taking her with him on his journey to overthrow the most powerful nation in the world. During the game she grows up and shows an incredible amount of passion and empathy as you watch your party members die off one after another. ("Stop it! I've had enough! They're all dead! Dead! And here we stand bickering amongst ourselves?! Are their deaths for nothing?") She's a very powerful character that makes you fall in love with her emotionally. Plus she has the most powerful black and summon magic in the game, so she is far from a helpless little creature. She can deal out damage with the big boys. ;)
Terra and Celes from FF6 (especially Celes)... Chun-Li from Street Fighter II, Sonya from Mortal Kombat... The list goes on and on of heroines that get your respect as characters who are more than pixels with tits.
But hey, Laura Croft has breasts the size of watermelons so of course she's going to be the one that everybody talks about.
I stand corrected, and shall pass this on to my cousin. Thank you, you may have just saved her a world of pain.
Here ya go. Should work until they add that to Moz, I notice it's on their "to do" list. :)
Sorry bout that. Had it formatted right, but submitted it as HTML formatted. Whoops.
Switched completely to Linux a few months ago and Opera was the only killer app that I *HAD* to have through the switch. Mouse gestures, speed, well laid out keyboard shortcuts, etc. I'd go on but I'd be preaching to the choir.
;)
After reading a lot of Stallman's writings I decided to let go of even Opera and totally switch to Free software. I was very apprehensive because Opera was the second coming of Jesus as far as I was concerned.
Went to Mozilla.org, Decided against getting the full fledged mozilla because I remembered it being bloated as all hell, got Firebird instead. Downloaded a ton of plugins, fixed everything to where it felt right.
I'm a total convert. Firebird will kick oh so much ass by the time it hits 1.0. It's design is as simple as IE, which is the #1 reason people cite IE as their favorite browser. It's small, almost as fast as Opera, all the features that I loved in Opera are available through plugins, and all the features I didn't use aren't in Firebird because I didn't install them. I have since fallen in love with tabbed browsing. Used to think that browsing three or four sites at once was kinda stupid, but once I got used to tabs in Firebird I began to see myself doing the exact same thing.
The Mozilla project has come a VERY long ways since it first came to be. If you've tried Mozilla out earlier and were disappointed, get it now. Get Firebird. Get Thunderbird. Install plugins to your hearts content. You will be very well surprised.
And hey, you'll be using Free software so that's a huge plus, in my eyes.
It is possible to make money giving stuff away for free, but you have to be very precise about how you do it. You just need to give out enough of your product to make the public want the stuff you need to pay for. A good example of this is the IRL company 'Primerica'. They're a financial managment service that gives out financial evaluations for free. That is, they will take what you make, how much you want to retire off of, how much debt you have, etc and figure out a way to make everything managable and possible. However, they make money off debt consolidation so you can pay off your bills faster, insurance, etc. You go in, get everything sorted for free, and then hopefully you'll get your loans and such from them. They're making a very large profit from this strategy, from what I can tell. Another good example is a band who releases low-bitrate MP3s for download off their website. You get the songs and can tell if you like them or not. However, if you want the versions that don't sound poor with all the case artwork and such then you'll buy the CD.(This is what got me to buy both of Rilo Kiley's CDs.) I've noticed that the reason a lot of these companies fail at selling stuff by giving other stuff away is because they give out the wrong stuff for free. It's like crack - give them just enough to give them the need for your product and you're set. Kinda like Google's expert search. Can search google for free, but if you need help finding that one obscure thing then you can pay to have others with a lot more experience do it for you. I'm rambling. Damn, do I love coffee.
I'd like to reply to all your responses but I need to leave for work in a few so I'll keep it down to the main points.
By all accounts I've heard of Saddam's missiles could go at most a few hundred miles. The worst he could do even if he had nukes is turn 5 miles of Israel into a crater. (And rain radioactive particles a few hundred miles downwind for a few days.) Saddam was by no means a threat to anyone other than his immediate neighbors.
This whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth. First off, Clinton tried to do what Bush has now done, and the Republicans cried foul saying that Clinton was trying to get America's minds off his dick. (Which is most likely the case.) Now, if Saddam is/was really such a huge threat then why wasn't Clinton getting bipartisan support back then while Bush gets it now?
Moreover, North Korea may have nuclear capabilities by now, and is actively firing off test missiles into the Sea of Japan. All things considered, their military technology makes Iraq look like the stone age. While not much is known publicly about their military capabilities, I personally believe it fair to say that they either currently have the ability or soon will have the ability to build a ICBM capable of striking somewhere in the North American continent. I doubt that many would argue with me when I say that N. Korea is a huge potential threat not only to all of Asia, but also possibly America.
Why the hell haven't we turned Korea into a crater by now if we're attacking potential threats?
The whole thing seems off. I'm not going to get into any of the usual accusations because lord knows we've all heard them by now. But for every reason given for the war on Iraq there is at least 5 nations that have it much worse, and a lot of oil companies with old ties to people in the Bush administration are getting some very sweet contracts...
Even beyond that, there were many reasons we waited until Pearl Harbor before we got involved. I'll leave it to the reader to crack open a few history books so I don't have to type a few novels out. (Lord knows I've already written a short story on this one reply alone.) ;)
"Osama Bin Laden is no longer a priority" - George W. Bush (paraphrased from memory)
Death is too good for that man. Let him rot in a cell for the rest of his natural life.
A poster below you actually said some very interesting things about this, and I think I'll let his experience speak for me.
(Real quick, running out of time) Timothy McVeigh is an American who was trained by the American army. America sure the hell doesn't support having its federal buildings bombed, and yet he got the tools to do it and made OKC go boom.Terrorism is not a country. Terrorism is not a static object. Terrorism is a metho
You make a very excellent point. A bleak one, but excellent none the less.
Mods - mod parent up, eh? That should be + 5 informative, not 0 Anonymous Coward.
Woke up, saw news, had karma to burn, felt like saying something, dunno why. Here goes.
(1) I am sick of all the people here, on Fark, and on countless other sites mindlessly bitching about the conservitives and/or the liberals. All politicians are going for the $ no matter what party you support, both sides are insane, and the majority of people are centrists with a slight leaning one side or another. Extremists from both sides are equally mindless, and as always are the ones to make the most noise. Nobody cares about your blind following, please either say something with an ounce of intelligence behind it or STFU. Duckspeak is annoying.
(Side note: All you people adding intelligent debate and thoughts reguardless of your political affiliation: keep it up! People who help the good content to noise ratio are the unsung heroes of the internet.)
(2) I am very glad Saddam is found. One less asshole in the world to worry about. However...
(3) Until I hear of nukes with "Hi, there!" painted on the sides being dragged out of Iraq, we have still invaded Iraq for no good reason. The only reason the UN went along with this little war is because US intelligence lied about WMD and thus believed that they posed a serious threat to neighboring nations. No WMD = unjustified war = unjustified deaths on both sides.
(4) A clarification of #2: Again, I am glad that he's taken care of. However, it is not America's place or anyone else's to say "I disagree with that X nation is doing, bomb them". If we have the right to bomb another nation to "free the people" then why doesn't China have the right to start WW3 with us in order to "free the poor American people from the totalarian fist of the Bush regime" or such other bollocks? Only if a nation has the power to pose a severe threat to neighboring nations or the world at large should drastic military action be taken against them.
(5) Where the fuck is Osama?!?! He flew those planes into our buildings, not Saddam. Why the hell is he no longer a high priority? I've had a close friend die in the WTC and you're telling me that capturing the man directly responsible for my friend's death isn't a priority?!!!
(6) I sure hope they don't do anything stupid like torturing Saddam. Should we treat him inhumanely a _LOT_ of people will be severely pissed, a lot of them nuts enough to do insane crap like fly planes into our buildings. What we receive 10 years from now will be a direct mirror of our actions now, after all.
(7) Speaking of Osama, shouldn't we be going after the top brass at the CIA for training him? I mean, they basically started the largest terrorist movement in the world..
(8) The war on terrorism can never end, for it is not a static entity. A war on Iraq can end. A war on an action anyone can do can not end. The Bush administration has started a war that will never end, a war that they can exploit to give them a lot of power they are not intended to have (and have done so). This situation scares me.
(9) It saddens me that I have yet to hear anyone question "Where will this take us in 10 years? Or 20?" We are repeating past mistakes and worrying only about the immediate future, it seems. The amount of debt we are leaving to future generations through this war alone makes me afraid of our impact on the future. Let alone the legal precidents we have set, loss of rights, new (probably unconstitutional) laws, nations we've pissed off, etc.
(10) I need coffee. Damn parents calling me at 6am telling me to turn on the TV when they know damn well that I don't own a TV and haven't for years... grr...
Mai's bouncing, in case any non-gamers want to see the offending material. SFW, slightly hypnotizing.
As someone whose recently moved over to Linux totally I can say 100% for certain that Linux will never be ready for the masses. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The more I learn the more I have fun geeking around in it. But sweet jesus, I've been trying to get GAIM to compile for the past two weeks off and on. It keeps switching from GTK hating me to GAIM hating me. Been bitching with ZSNES like crazy trying to get it to work at greater than 10fps (1ghz system, mind you). Given up on upgrading to KDE3, using KDE2. Tried other window managers and wasn't happy with them. In the past month I've spent roughly 80 hours mucking with my distro to get everything working well enough to where I can just leave it alone and not mess with it for awhile. Now while I love being able to modify my OS to where it feels just right in virtually every way imaginable (and bash rocks), that is the one and only thing I miss about Windows. Everything worked. You didn't have to worry about dependancy after dependancy after dependancy just to get one stupid program installed and working. Drivers were easy as all hell to install. You didn't have to muck with your freakin' kernel trying to get a half-working driver kinda working. Windows took care of all that crap for you. Not well, but it did. In Linux I'm taking care of the OS. This isn't something that can be fixed with a bigger better RPM thingy or pretty GUI. This is both a great strength and weakness of Li/Unix and OSS in general. Everyone has their opinions on how things should work, and thus you have a billion different ways to do things (and a trillion different dependencies... ugh.) I love the penguin to death but I've been hacking away in bash for the past month trying to get my system working just as well as it once did in Windows. And I'm a very computer literate geek who loves reading source code and actually _reads the fucking manual_. Linux is ready for the average user? Bullshit. To say that is arrogance. No way in hell would I install it for my mom. Poor woman's already had one stroke.
A perfect example of this is Sexy Losers, my personal favorite. (Warning, comic so NSFW it's not even remotely funny.) The most quoted strip - Girl is about to commit suicide. Guy asks her if he can have sex with her before she jumps. She calls him a pervert. Guy says "Well, I'll just have to wait until your body washes ashore, then." Man, I wish they'd print *that* next to Garfield.
Online comics can go, do, and say things that 99% of publishers wouldn't consider printing, and as such tend to be a lot more origional than the rest. Yes, the vast majority of webcomics are total and complete crap, but every now and then you come across a few gems that drag you in and make you read each and every comic several times over. (I am specifically talking about Venus Envy which I linked to above in the word "a", I never dreamed I would become a huge fan over a comic about freakin' transsexuals, for christ's sakes.)
I do not own a TV. Haven't watched TV in over a year. Opiate for the masses, indeed. Can't understand how anybody could vedge away.
However, if I had one and was given a choice between the PS2, Gamecube, and X-Box, I'd most definitely take a PS2. Here you have a simply massive game libary that spans two systems worth of modern classics, a DVD player, and a cheap CD player all in a very small black box for $200. If Sony didn't keep up with backwards compatibility the game libary for the PS3 would be on par with the X-Box 2 and whatever Nintendo came out with next, and lord knows that both will also do the "entertainment center in a small box" thing, thus leveling the playing field quite a bit.
Sony would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't do that, and they're smart enough to know. Nintendo has done the same with the Game Boy, and it's payed off very nicely.
Who would you rather hire - some kid who knows how to muck around with a computer or an A+ certified tech? If you're going to do anything serious in the repair industry then you should get A+ certified. The test is dead simple, but very valuable. Although I've never found a use for it (yet, other than to pad my resume), I know that should Joe User muck up his computer 2 weeks after I fix it and he sues me that the judge will take my certified experience with a lot more weight than if I wasn't.
From my exercise journal, thanks for giving me the inspiration to write something I've been meaning to write.
Orwell's 1984 is overquoted so much today that it's unreal. And yet every single time I look at the news I am so starkly reminded of it. We are at war with Oceanina. We have always been at war with Oceaninia, and the earth itself will open wide and swallow us all if we didn't bomb Iraq to hell so we could free the people from the very beginning. What the hell is this? When exactly did I start having to defend the fact that what happened a year ago actually happened? Nobody says crap about WMD, it's all about freeing the people. Screw the Iraqis, until we find a big assed nuke with "Hi there!" painted on the side we've just taken out a government for no good reason other than "they pissed us off". But nobody cares. We freed some people! We are America, our farts smell of petunias. Everytime I hear someone state that we had the right to bomb the hell out of a nation of people "just because we're the U.S." my faith in humanity dims.
This game sickens me. Here is a video game based off government propeganda and bad news reporting. Take the most basic BS about this war, toss it into a 3D engine, and BOOM - you've undoubtedly got millions of idiots willing to shell out $50 so they can stop watching CNN and start blowing the hell out of some brown guy in the privacy of their own home. Gotta love the Iraqi war. If the face of freedom is a nice big bomb, then I must have really got some lovin' back when Lisa Campbell racked me in the nads back in the 8th grade.
I love the principles that America was founded on. That's why I'm ashamed to call myself an American.
I really need a fattie. Too bad the shnizt's illegal.
What the hell, I got karma to burn. You know, I really want to kick that guys ass. Doesn't even really have to be a full out fight, just give me one shot. Just one little shot and I'll knock him out, easy.
SCO has lawyers. Linux has a bunch of geeks with thousands of hours of experience with the bloodiest video games on earth.
-1 Offtopic.