1. People getting in and out of cars? We only saw this to a limited extent(cops getting out of cars, carjackigns, etc). How about taxis that pickup/drop off people at random? Done.
2. Different behaviors for different kind of peds? Some would be cowardly, some would be valiant, and some would be just downright crazy, all gang members aside. Not exactly, but much better than GTA where they just randomly walk from nowhere to nowhere, until someone shoots them.
3. yes, more indoor locations. Done. Including a brothel.;)
4. I haven't gotten to it yet [skipped] the entry area to the junkyard. This one doesn't belong with the other three.:) It's not really a suggestion for the next GTA, is it?
No, they use dynamic DCP (disappearning cars and pedastrians), since noone would notice that on the crappy TV anyway.
So, for example, when you're close to a person, you see their mode, when you're farther away or just turn around and then back, you don't see anyone anymore.
This is one of the main complaints of GTA players.
Graphically they should do something like Mercedes-Bezn World Racing. And physically the next Driv3r version should work great (judging from the trailers).
The truth is, though, modern PCs (and next gen consoles) can already do quite a bit more than GTA does. Almost two years ago when GTA3 came out on PCs it was impressive graphically, despite the fact that the engine was very poorly coded performance-wise.
In John Carmack's opinion, in 10 years it should be possible to do a completely realistic real-time rendering of a generic environment (visual realism only). To stay relevant Rockstar will need to completely blow us away with their GTA4 title, since it will not come out in two years.
And if they fail to deliver, there will be updated Driv3r, next version of Mafia (which will probably look better in any case) and what not.
Since we already established that black holes contain code, we need to find out where copyrights for any of that code rightfully belong to SCO. It makes perfect sense to go and check, doesn't it?
Ten year old boy spends a few days with teenage girl, with no intimacy during that whole time, and has obsessed about her for years afterwards? A young impressionable slave spends a few days with the Queen from a different planet and has obsessed about her for years afterwards. Well, what do you want him to obsess about?:) And honestly, he really starts obsessing about her ONLY AFTER seeing her again. What is unrealistic about that? I was just as obsessed about my gf when I was in love (not that I liked that afterwards). That's how teenagers act.:)
As for truly/deeply, you have a point here, but then he was a Jedi Knight, may be that was how he really felt/knew how to express the feelings. And when they kissed, it didn't look as idiotic as Viggo kissing Liv. Sorry, but PJ should film slapstick comedy, not lofty epic sagas. He lowers almost every significant episode he can find, and the coronation is just another example. Just look how tastefully Lucas handled the wedding of Anakin and Padme. Compare it with everyone in ROTK smiling idiotically (Aragorn, Legolas, Elrond) and those stupid dirty peasants applauding like Aragorn is a chieftain of some small village.
Burly Brawl was a dynamic 8-minute action masterpiece, brilliantly set to music. Every move and every shot was carefully orcestrate, creating an unprecedented spectacle. Pellennor episode was a boring rehash of what looked like some unused shots from the Helm's Deep battle. What do we have there - a bird-eye view of the Mordor army, an imbecilic battle briefing by Theoden (you go to the left, you go to the right, I go in the centre, let's die!), a sappy attack of the Rohirrim (see HD), a few pieces of CGI flying into the CGI city and back, some stupid orc bravado, trademark PJ swinging camera, inducing motion sickness, a remake of "Legolas and the Troll" and some green mold quickly ending the whole thing. I simply fail to see anything remotedly interesting in the whole episode. Compare it with Last Samurai and I don't know how anyone can claim Pelennor battle was anything but a poorly put together technology demo.
The crappiness of the Matrix 2 is irrelevant, but still, I don't agree with you here. The action was top-notch, the story was just as interesting as in the Matrix, acting and everything else was good. Sound and music effects were great, as usual. It is very common to bash M2 and M3, but after a number of viewings I personally find them very well done and enjoyable. Especially good is the story, although it does take a few viewings to let it all settle in your head.;)
As Christ-on-a-bike noticed, my point was that even though the distance actually was at most few hundred miles, it appeared as if the posts stretched some huge distance because of unwarranted grandeur, dragging out endlessly and unrealistic combination of distance (1 km between posts) and delay (5-10 seconds between the fire was lit at neighbouring posts).
And even ignoring the unrealistic execution, we are left with the total uselessness of the sequence. It doesn't help to move the story along, other than giving a formal explanation of why Rohan comes to Gondor. Of course, this was handled in the book much more elegantly. Jackson invented another stupid character arc - after Helm's Deep King Theoden again changes his mind and decides that he doesn't really want to fight again, even though he now has ~30 times as many soldiers as he had in HD. To resolve the arc PJ chooses an unrealistic solution, which starts with stupid scene of Pippin accidentally (even though that was his goal anyway) lighting the fire. This spoils the supposed monumentality of the beacon sequence. And it's not like we really cared about Theoden coming to Gondor, since we were not shown the Mordor army, were not introduced to the Gondorian people and could not really believe Theoden would not come (especially since the only goal of Gandalf's trip is apparently to light these stupid beacons).
Simply said, it was wrong in every imaginable way. As for the story being fantasy, that still doesn't warrant arbitrarily unrealistic events. I can believe in magic, Elves and a huge Eye for the duration of the movie, but I can't believe for a second (and I was not immersed in the movie enough to blindly accept it) that Gondor would set up signal posts in the mountains. Again, that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Thing about it.
As for the overall impression, I admit, those who went to the film conditioned to love everything they saw (for any reason), could be very impressed with the sequence. But they would love everything, as illustrated by the fact that many people simply refuse to admit there were ANY flaws in ROTK. And if you wasn't conditioned (I wasn't after the TTT fiasco), the scene would either look quite ordinary or, worse, unrealistic.
Finally someone got it.:) And to the snow and ice we also need to add a few simple facts: - Pippin lit the first fire in the afternoon - the night passed and the final fire was lit in the morning - in those continuous scenes where we saw two or more fires being lit, the delay was a few seconds at most - the average visible distance between the posts is a kilometer or so
Simple calculations help us arrive at the truly ridiculous estimate of 5000 miles.:)
Not to mention that the movie, as usual, is spliced from different versions. For example first you see the Eagles attack the Nazgul and apparently they either lose or win. After a few scenes you see another scene with at least 7 Nazgul beasts (one is in Pelennor) happily flying and no sign of Eagles. And this is just one of the major glitches.
In my opinion, editing in the movie was sub par, as well as acting and script. Directing was not spectacular, to say the least. Effects were impressive, but impressive does not necessarily equate with the best. And that orc chieftain alone disqualifies the movie from an Oscar for best effects.
When I am in the mood to rewatching some battles/fights, I might turn to SW2 finale, Matrix 2 Burly Brawl, Chateau fight or Highway chase, or even to FOTR Amon-Hen fight. But I would never rewatch mishaps called Helm's Deep or Pelennor fields battles, unless I am obligated to do so. TTT nad ROTK battles are crap compared to the better examples. And don't let me even started on Braveheart, War and Peace and even Gladiator. A note to PJ from the Mgmt should read: "A battle simulation computer program does not a film make".
And I would take Anakin and Padme over Aragorn and Arwen any day. At least the first was a believable story with decent acting, not some contrived attempt to give Liv more screentime. Don't even get me started on that lameness called coronation (read the book to understand the definition of "lost chance").
P.S. I am eagerly awaiting my -1: Flaimbait from clueless PJ fanboys. But this is neither flaimbait, nor troll.
In terms of cinematography, the footage of the fires calling Rohan to Gondor's aid was fantastic.
It was fantastic if you are willing to ignore the fact that Rohan is apparently 5000+ km away from Gondor, the fact that some of the posts were located above the clouds, where even professional climbers with modern equipment would have difficulties climbing to and where the fires would not be visible anyway, as well as the fact that Pip's role is a blatant copy of Gimli's with Horn of Hornburg. Not to mention that fact that flying on the helicopter and shooting some random mountains and later slapping some CGI fires there does not qualify as fantastic cinematography.
I know from experience that posting anything against PJ is an instant (-1: Troll) here, but I have excellent karma anyway.
ROTK getting 11 Oscars is clearly a travesty. You may like the movie, but you can't ignore the fact that the dialog sucked balls every time it was not directly lifted from the book. During the 3 hours we would listed to extremely pointless, contrived and out of place speeches over and over again. Coumpounded by the fact that there have been no actor work worth mentioning. Most actors either don't know how to act or were extremely limited by the director in doing so. Face it, they simply repeated what we already saw one and two years ago, if even that. Third, the special effects were lame. Yes, technically it was quality work, but just like Unreal 2 was a flop, so were visual effects in ROTK. Brilliant technology, no soul and no original ideas. A Minas Tirith landing pad lifted from Star Wars, an Orc chieftain lifted from Total Recall and the finale lifted from Terminator 2.
But I can live with that. What is completely unacceptable is that among these 11 awards one was apparently for the best adaptation. You can praise PJ for a "brilliant" fantasy movie as much as you want, but to call this even a decent adaptation would be a blatant lie. The script was a lame attempt at improving a great story by three lame-ass wannabe writers. Pretty much every change done was simply killing the story (with a few exceptions). I only need to point out to two pillars of idiocy on which the whole movie stands - the Yet Another Crazy King (tm) and Sam-I-ate-lembas story. That was just fucking pathetic.
So fuck the Oscars, we all know they are not intended to be a fair representation of film quality, but fuck them anyway.
I particularly like the following part: "Cedars-Sinai is apparently the best-staffed hospital in the world, since several hundred different doctors and nurses were reportedly on duty at the time Mr. Gere was allegedly brought in for treatment."
And the recording of a radio announcer breaking up (300 Kb, Real Audio) as he attempted to read one of the versions of the "gerbil in the anus" article as a straight news story.
Absolutely. And with a little tweaking it should be possible to open Slashdot story in the main window, while RTFAing in the small one. Then may be people will stop asking questions which were clearly answered in the article.
A very good point, AC. To be more precise, this is more like boxes and planks in Max Payne and the like. Or even furniture in some really ancient games, probably even HL1. The world is still rock solid, but now it has some interactive insets. We had lamps, displays, windows, that could be destroyed for a long time. Then programmers added chairs and boxes that you could move. Now Valve is using the same ideas in HL2. I admit, they are doing it quite well (in demo levels), but Max Payne 2 already did it in fall 2003. Yes, a year ago it was novel and innovative, but it no longer is. Especially since HL2 uses Havoc engine for its physics...
If we are talking about destructibe levels, it's Worms 3D all the way.:) Yes, it is basically voxel-based levels, but it's done really well. There is also Silent Storm TBS with non-real-time (but much more accurate) destructible levels.
It should be possible to slap something like this onto an FPS. Call it Stalingrad and allow non-deterministic destruction of the persistent level as the game progresses. This gimmick alone would sell enough copies to make it worthwhile.
I don't think we speak about the same things when we talk about the story. Take Max Payne 1/2 or Mafia, for example. They had a story, but besides the style that story provided and settings for the next shooting/driving/stealth/whatever episode it was pretty much irrelevant.
Of course, if you are doing a game about humans vs. humans, (not humans vs. aliens or humans vs. zombies), you need a story wrapper for the events. But in FPS/RTS/some other S games the fun does not come from witnessing a rich storyline. At least for me, you might have been touched and moved by that bitch shooting Max Payne in MP2 or by that bastard killing Mona.
Of course, there is a catch. You don't need a story, but you still need the settings and the style. You need to design huge believable levels and carefully design gameplay around these levels, which is difficult and also time consuming. Sometimes it might even look like a story, but it isn't. And Stephen King will not help you make a great FPS, besides providing a believable setting, like a haunted house or a zombie infected city (but id did just find with Dangerous Dave all by themselves).:)
That's a logical fallacy. The items are valuable not because they can be lost, but because you invest your time in them. Basically the value is equal to the time necessary to recreate it. The actual ability to lose them doesn't even enter the proposition.
As an aside, this fallacy is surprisingly common in the real world as well. Many people, including some famous philosophers, argued that life is valuable only because we will eventually die. This idea led to a widespread (disingenuous) belief that immortality is bad, since we will stop valuing our lives, once we don't have to fear their loss. Needless to say, this is completely false.
Eventually someone will make a Linux distribution customised for municipal administrations. One that will be possible to deploy quickly in any city of the world. What is needed is for these governments to realise the importance of contributing back their solutions. If Munich solves their migration problems, they should share the solutions with Paris, Beijing, Bangalore and Austin...
It is often repeated on Slashdot that benefits of Linux other than low costs should somehow more important to businesses and other organisations. But why? Simply because in the past cheap products were usually of lower quality? But that is no longer true with information-based products with low marginal costs (cost of duplicating). And you also forget that decreasing costs seems to be the most popular way to achieve competitive advantage. And it surely is the simpliest one.
With all the outsourcing going on in the US, companies seem to be determined to decrease the costs as much as possible. Why then do you want to make the emphasis on how Linux better solves the organisation's problems? Haven't you read the recent article about technical support? Companies do not want the best, they want the cheapest. Linux (BSD) is the cheapest, so why not promote it as such. If you don't like the word "cheap", say that Linux will allow to lower the costs. After all, multimillion dollar ERP systems do the same - they decrease costs. Teleconferencing systems decrease the costs. VoIP systems decrease the costs. I.e. they are cheaper. So is Linux, don't feel ashamed of that.
Buffet is full of shit. Two points he misses (if he actually says it) are that 1) the goal is not to maximize the money, but the total utility and that 2) the marginal utility of spending on poor is much higher than that of spending on Warren.
So the optimal decision today would be to take (every year) a trillion dollars or so (the GDP of the USA alone is 10+ trillion) and spend it to help the poorest two billions people. That would be 1.36 dollars per capita per day, which will basically double their income. To do that citizens of developed countries would need to decrease their consumption by 5% at most.
But those money would be able to a) buy world peace b) end world hunger c) nearly eliminate most deseases d) make Earth a much better place e) earn people of developed countries the gratitude of the rest of the world
And the worst part is that the hardware design is random and not improving at all (no Moore's law for you), it takes 9 months to produce, 25 years to install necessary software and then you need to pay at least a few thousands dollards every month in maintenance fees. Not to mention it overheats (or something) if operated for more than 8 hours a day...
Thank you, but I'd rather pay Intel for mass producing computers with skilled engineers in bunny suits.
Yeah, I've noticed that too. You have my respect for being polite and not replying with anything harsher than putting me on a foe list.:)
Politically our views are different, but I can understand your views. I can't agree with them though. I value human lives of people about the same, regardless of their nationality. You, apparently value American lives at least 100 times more than the lives of the foreigners (see the VC/US casualties). To me this is quite repulsive, but I can understand why you think so.
As for my insults, there are a few reasons:
- semi-anonymous forums tend to let people behave more openly. I would definitely be polite to you in person - closely linked to that is the fact that insulting other people can be lots of fun sometimes and can lead to exciting flamewars. Unfortunately, it doesn't work when the other side refuses to participate, by being polite like you were. No fun for me.:( - even though your Slashdot user identity (i.e. that part of you that I have direct communication with) was/is quite rational, polite and possibly smart, I tend to generally view most of religious people as stupid. - I don't think that everyone who disagrees with me is always evil/stupid. However, in some cases I actually am so sure to think in such way. Some examples are religion, UFO, evolution, dinasaurs, Moon landing, etc. Again, I might be wrong in a handful of cases and a few people holding opposing beliefs might be genuinly smart, but misled only in this particular case. But from the game theory point it is worth to presume they are idiots and act accordingly. - as for persuading, I know that most people can't be persuaded, because they have serious reasoning problems and are generally stupid. Whether this is the case for you, I don't know, but the optimal strategy is to presume it is so at the slightest suspicon.
As one so eloquently put it "While you may on rare occasion fail to give a fair shake to one who deserves it, you free up years of your life that would otherwise be wasted on imbeciles."
Please, tell me, what are the chances (realistically) that I can, by being polite and presenting the most strongest arguments, persuade you that your so-called Lord doesn't exist (and never did) and killing Vietnamese people was wrong and the soldiers fought for the unjust cause? I tend to lean to the opinion that in order to safely harbour the religion and shauvinism memes you need to be able to easily ignore strong arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you played Mafia (2002)?
;)
:) It's not really a suggestion for the next GTA, is it?
1. People getting in and out of cars? We only saw this to a limited extent(cops getting out of cars, carjackigns, etc). How about taxis that pickup/drop off people at random?
Done.
2. Different behaviors for different kind of peds? Some would be cowardly, some would be valiant, and some would be just downright crazy, all gang members aside.
Not exactly, but much better than GTA where they just randomly walk from nowhere to nowhere, until someone shoots them.
3. yes, more indoor locations.
Done. Including a brothel.
4. I haven't gotten to it yet
[skipped]
the entry area to the junkyard.
This one doesn't belong with the other three.
No, they use dynamic DCP (disappearning cars and pedastrians), since noone would notice that on the crappy TV anyway.
So, for example, when you're close to a person, you see their mode, when you're farther away or just turn around and then back, you don't see anyone anymore.
This is one of the main complaints of GTA players.
Graphically they should do something like Mercedes-Bezn World Racing. And physically the next Driv3r version should work great (judging from the trailers).
The truth is, though, modern PCs (and next gen consoles) can already do quite a bit more than GTA does. Almost two years ago when GTA3 came out on PCs it was impressive graphically, despite the fact that the engine was very poorly coded performance-wise.
In John Carmack's opinion, in 10 years it should be possible to do a completely realistic real-time rendering of a generic environment (visual realism only). To stay relevant Rockstar will need to completely blow us away with their GTA4 title, since it will not come out in two years.
And if they fail to deliver, there will be updated Driv3r, next version of Mafia (which will probably look better in any case) and what not.
Motion blur was in the GTA3.
Since we already established that black holes contain code, we need to find out where copyrights for any of that code rightfully belong to SCO. It makes perfect sense to go and check, doesn't it?
Ten year old boy spends a few days with teenage girl, with no intimacy during that whole time, and has obsessed about her for years afterwards? :) And honestly, he really starts obsessing about her ONLY AFTER seeing her again. What is unrealistic about that? I was just as obsessed about my gf when I was in love (not that I liked that afterwards). That's how teenagers act. :)
A young impressionable slave spends a few days with the Queen from a different planet and has obsessed about her for years afterwards. Well, what do you want him to obsess about?
As for truly/deeply, you have a point here, but then he was a Jedi Knight, may be that was how he really felt/knew how to express the feelings. And when they kissed, it didn't look as idiotic as Viggo kissing Liv. Sorry, but PJ should film slapstick comedy, not lofty epic sagas. He lowers almost every significant episode he can find, and the coronation is just another example. Just look how tastefully Lucas handled the wedding of Anakin and Padme. Compare it with everyone in ROTK smiling idiotically (Aragorn, Legolas, Elrond) and those stupid dirty peasants applauding like Aragorn is a chieftain of some small village.
Burly Brawl was a dynamic 8-minute action masterpiece, brilliantly set to music. Every move and every shot was carefully orcestrate, creating an unprecedented spectacle.
;)
Pellennor episode was a boring rehash of what looked like some unused shots from the Helm's Deep battle. What do we
have there - a bird-eye view of the Mordor army, an imbecilic battle briefing by Theoden (you go to the left, you go to the right, I go in the centre, let's die!), a sappy attack of the Rohirrim (see HD), a few pieces of CGI flying into the CGI city and back, some stupid orc bravado, trademark PJ swinging camera, inducing motion sickness, a remake of "Legolas and the Troll" and some green mold quickly ending the whole thing. I simply fail to see anything remotedly interesting in the whole episode. Compare it with Last Samurai and I don't know how anyone can claim Pelennor battle was anything but a poorly put together technology demo.
The crappiness of the Matrix 2 is irrelevant, but still, I don't agree with you here. The action was top-notch, the story was just as interesting as in the Matrix, acting and everything else was good. Sound and music effects were great, as usual. It is very common to bash M2 and M3, but after a number of viewings I personally find them very well done and enjoyable. Especially good is the story, although it does take a few viewings to let it all settle in your head.
As Christ-on-a-bike noticed, my point was that even though the distance actually was at most few hundred miles, it appeared as if the posts stretched some huge distance because of unwarranted grandeur, dragging out endlessly and unrealistic combination of distance (1 km between posts) and delay (5-10 seconds between the fire was lit at neighbouring posts).
And even ignoring the unrealistic execution, we are left with the total uselessness of the sequence. It doesn't help to move the story along, other than giving a formal explanation of why Rohan comes to Gondor. Of course, this was handled in the book much more elegantly. Jackson invented another stupid character arc - after Helm's Deep King Theoden again changes his mind and decides that he doesn't really want to fight again, even though he now has ~30 times as many soldiers as he had in HD. To resolve the arc PJ chooses an unrealistic solution, which starts with stupid scene of Pippin accidentally (even though that was his goal anyway) lighting the fire. This spoils the supposed monumentality of the beacon sequence. And it's not like we really cared about Theoden coming to Gondor, since we were not shown the Mordor army, were not introduced to the Gondorian people and could not really believe Theoden would not come (especially since the only goal of Gandalf's trip is apparently to light these stupid beacons).
Simply said, it was wrong in every imaginable way. As for the story being fantasy, that still doesn't warrant arbitrarily unrealistic events. I can believe in magic, Elves and a huge Eye for the duration of the movie, but I can't believe for a second (and I was not immersed in the movie enough to blindly accept it) that Gondor would set up signal posts in the mountains. Again, that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Thing about it.
As for the overall impression, I admit, those who went to the film conditioned to love everything they saw (for any reason), could be very impressed with the sequence. But they would love everything, as illustrated by the fact that many people simply refuse to admit there were ANY flaws in ROTK. And if you wasn't conditioned (I wasn't after the TTT fiasco), the scene would either look quite ordinary or, worse, unrealistic.
Finally someone got it. :) And to the snow and ice we also need to add a few simple facts:
:)
- Pippin lit the first fire in the afternoon
- the night passed and the final fire was lit in the morning
- in those continuous scenes where we saw two or more fires being lit, the delay was a few seconds at most
- the average visible distance between the posts is a kilometer or so
Simple calculations help us arrive at the truly ridiculous estimate of 5000 miles.
Not to mention that the movie, as usual, is spliced from different versions. For example first you see the Eagles attack the Nazgul and apparently they either lose or win. After a few scenes you see another scene with at least 7 Nazgul beasts (one is in Pelennor) happily flying and no sign of Eagles. And this is just one of the major glitches.
In my opinion, editing in the movie was sub par, as well as acting and script. Directing was not spectacular, to say the least. Effects were impressive, but impressive does not necessarily equate with the best. And that orc chieftain alone disqualifies the movie from an Oscar for best effects.
When I am in the mood to rewatching some battles/fights, I might turn to SW2 finale, Matrix 2 Burly Brawl, Chateau fight or Highway chase, or even to FOTR Amon-Hen fight. But I would never rewatch mishaps called Helm's Deep or Pelennor fields battles, unless I am obligated to do so. TTT nad ROTK battles are crap compared to the better examples. And don't let me even started on Braveheart, War and Peace and even Gladiator. A note to PJ from the Mgmt should read: "A battle simulation computer program does not a film make".
And I would take Anakin and Padme over Aragorn and Arwen any day. At least the first was a believable story with decent acting, not some contrived attempt to give Liv more screentime. Don't even get me started on that lameness called coronation (read the book to understand the definition of "lost chance").
P.S. I am eagerly awaiting my -1: Flaimbait from clueless PJ fanboys. But this is neither flaimbait, nor troll.
In terms of cinematography, the footage of the fires calling Rohan to Gondor's aid was fantastic.
It was fantastic if you are willing to ignore the fact that Rohan is apparently 5000+ km away from Gondor, the fact that some of the posts were located above the clouds, where even professional climbers with modern equipment would have difficulties climbing to and where the fires would not be visible anyway, as well as the fact that Pip's role is a blatant copy of Gimli's with Horn of Hornburg. Not to mention that fact that flying on the helicopter and shooting some random mountains and later slapping some CGI fires there does not qualify as fantastic cinematography.
I know from experience that posting anything against PJ is an instant (-1: Troll) here, but I have excellent karma anyway.
ROTK getting 11 Oscars is clearly a travesty. You may like the movie, but you can't ignore the fact that the dialog sucked balls every time it was not directly lifted from the book. During the 3 hours we would listed to extremely pointless, contrived and out of place speeches over and over again. Coumpounded by the fact that there have been no actor work worth mentioning. Most actors either don't know how to act or were extremely limited by the director in doing so. Face it, they simply repeated what we already saw one and two years ago, if even that. Third, the special effects were lame. Yes, technically it was quality work, but just like Unreal 2 was a flop, so were visual effects in ROTK. Brilliant technology, no soul and no original ideas. A Minas Tirith landing pad lifted from Star Wars, an Orc chieftain lifted from Total Recall and the finale lifted from Terminator 2.
But I can live with that. What is completely unacceptable is that among these 11 awards one was apparently for the best adaptation. You can praise PJ for a "brilliant" fantasy movie as much as you want, but to call this even a decent adaptation would be a blatant lie. The script was a lame attempt at improving a great story by three lame-ass wannabe writers. Pretty much every change done was simply killing the story (with a few exceptions). I only need to point out to two pillars of idiocy on which the whole movie stands - the Yet Another Crazy King (tm) and Sam-I-ate-lembas story. That was just fucking pathetic.
So fuck the Oscars, we all know they are not intended to be a fair representation of film quality, but fuck them anyway.
Needless to say, Richard doesn't have anything to do with hamsters.
I particularly like the following part: "Cedars-Sinai is apparently the best-staffed hospital in the world, since several hundred different doctors and nurses were reportedly on duty at the time Mr. Gere was allegedly brought in for treatment."
And the recording of a radio announcer breaking up (300 Kb, Real Audio) as he attempted to read one of the versions of the "gerbil in the anus" article as a straight news story.
Absolutely. And with a little tweaking it should be possible to open Slashdot story in the main window, while RTFAing in the small one. Then may be people will stop asking questions which were clearly answered in the article.
Because in most countries we drive on the right side of the road. Only in the UK and its sattellites they drive on the wrong side.
A very good point, AC. To be more precise, this is more like boxes and planks in Max Payne and the like. Or even furniture in some really ancient games, probably even HL1. The world is still rock solid, but now it has some interactive insets. We had lamps, displays, windows, that could be destroyed for a long time. Then programmers added chairs and boxes that you could move. Now Valve is using the same ideas in HL2. I admit, they are doing it quite well (in demo levels), but Max Payne 2 already did it in fall 2003. Yes, a year ago it was novel and innovative, but it no longer is. Especially since HL2 uses Havoc engine for its physics...
:) Yes, it is basically voxel-based levels, but it's done really well. There is also Silent Storm TBS with non-real-time (but much more accurate) destructible levels.
If we are talking about destructibe levels, it's Worms 3D all the way.
It should be possible to slap something like this onto an FPS. Call it Stalingrad and allow non-deterministic destruction of the persistent level as the game progresses. This gimmick alone would sell enough copies to make it worthwhile.
I don't think we speak about the same things when we talk about the story. Take Max Payne 1/2 or Mafia, for example. They had a story, but besides the style that story provided and settings for the next shooting/driving/stealth/whatever episode it was pretty much irrelevant.
:)
Of course, if you are doing a game about humans vs. humans, (not humans vs. aliens or humans vs. zombies), you need a story wrapper for the events. But in FPS/RTS/some other S games the fun does not come from witnessing a rich storyline. At least for me, you might have been touched and moved by that bitch shooting Max Payne in MP2 or by that bastard killing Mona.
Of course, there is a catch. You don't need a story, but you still need the settings and the style. You need to design huge believable levels and carefully design gameplay around these levels, which is difficult and also time consuming. Sometimes it might even look like a story, but it isn't. And Stephen King will not help you make a great FPS, besides providing a believable setting, like a haunted house or a zombie infected city (but id did just find with Dangerous Dave all by themselves).
That's a logical fallacy. The items are valuable not because they can be lost, but because you invest your time in them. Basically the value is equal to the time necessary to recreate it. The actual ability to lose them doesn't even enter the proposition.
As an aside, this fallacy is surprisingly common in the real world as well. Many people, including some famous philosophers, argued that life is valuable only because we will eventually die. This idea led to a widespread (disingenuous) belief that immortality is bad, since we will stop valuing our lives, once we don't have to fear their loss. Needless to say, this is completely false.
Eventually someone will make a Linux distribution customised for municipal administrations. One that will be possible to deploy quickly in any city of the world. What is needed is for these governments to realise the importance of contributing back their solutions. If Munich solves their migration problems, they should share the solutions with Paris, Beijing, Bangalore and Austin...
It is often repeated on Slashdot that benefits of Linux other than low costs should somehow more important to businesses and other organisations. But why? Simply because in the past cheap products were usually of lower quality? But that is no longer true with information-based products with low marginal costs (cost of duplicating). And you also forget that decreasing costs seems to be the most popular way to achieve competitive advantage. And it surely is the simpliest one.
With all the outsourcing going on in the US, companies seem to be determined to decrease the costs as much as possible. Why then do you want to make the emphasis on how Linux better solves the organisation's problems? Haven't you read the recent article about technical support? Companies do not want the best, they want the cheapest. Linux (BSD) is the cheapest, so why not promote it as such. If you don't like the word "cheap", say that Linux will allow to lower the costs. After all, multimillion dollar ERP systems do the same - they decrease costs. Teleconferencing systems decrease the costs. VoIP systems decrease the costs. I.e. they are cheaper. So is Linux, don't feel ashamed of that.
Buffet is full of shit. Two points he misses (if he actually says it) are that
1) the goal is not to maximize the money, but the total utility and that
2) the marginal utility of spending on poor is much higher than that of spending on Warren.
So the optimal decision today would be to take (every year) a trillion dollars or so (the GDP of the USA alone is 10+ trillion) and spend it to help the poorest two billions people. That would be 1.36 dollars per capita per day, which will basically double their income. To do that citizens of developed countries would need to decrease their consumption by 5% at most.
But those money would be able to
a) buy world peace
b) end world hunger
c) nearly eliminate most deseases
d) make Earth a much better place
e) earn people of developed countries the gratitude of the rest of the world
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but this seems like a complicated perpetual motion machine to me.
Like sailing vessels, right?
And the worst part is that the hardware design is random and not improving at all (no Moore's law for you), it takes 9 months to produce, 25 years to install necessary software and then you need to pay at least a few thousands dollards every month in maintenance fees. Not to mention it overheats (or something) if operated for more than 8 hours a day...
Thank you, but I'd rather pay Intel for mass producing computers with skilled engineers in bunny suits.
Yeah, I've noticed that too. You have my respect for being polite and not replying with anything harsher than putting me on a foe list. :)
:(
Politically our views are different, but I can understand your views. I can't agree with them though. I value human lives of people about the same, regardless of their nationality. You, apparently value American lives at least 100 times more than the lives of the foreigners (see the VC/US casualties). To me this is quite repulsive, but I can understand why you think so.
As for my insults, there are a few reasons:
- semi-anonymous forums tend to let people behave more openly. I would definitely be polite to you in person
- closely linked to that is the fact that insulting other people can be lots of fun sometimes and can lead to exciting flamewars. Unfortunately, it doesn't work when the other side refuses to participate, by being polite like you were. No fun for me.
- even though your Slashdot user identity (i.e. that part of you that I have direct communication with) was/is quite rational, polite and possibly smart, I tend to generally view most of religious people as stupid.
- I don't think that everyone who disagrees with me is always evil/stupid. However, in some cases I actually am so sure to think in such way. Some examples are religion, UFO, evolution, dinasaurs, Moon landing, etc. Again, I might be wrong in a handful of cases and a few people holding opposing beliefs might be genuinly smart, but misled only in this particular case. But from the game theory point it is worth to presume they are idiots and act accordingly.
- as for persuading, I know that most people can't be persuaded, because they have serious reasoning problems and are generally stupid. Whether this is the case for you, I don't know, but the optimal strategy is to presume it is so at the slightest suspicon.
As one so eloquently put it "While you may on rare occasion fail to give a fair shake to one who deserves it, you free up years of your life that would otherwise be wasted on imbeciles."
Please, tell me, what are the chances (realistically) that I can, by being polite and presenting the most strongest arguments, persuade you that your so-called Lord doesn't exist (and never did) and killing Vietnamese people was wrong and the soldiers fought for the unjust cause? I tend to lean to the opinion that in order to safely harbour the religion and shauvinism memes you need to be able to easily ignore strong arguments.