My brother is a mechanic. He tells me it's quite fun when a customer who has screwed their car says they were 'just driving' and the blackbox in their Camry says they were doing 150 km/h.
Cane Toads (Bufos Marinas?) are an obnoxious, brown, warty type of frog (OK, toad) that inhabit vast areas of Australia. Their introduction and proliferation in Australia is a classic example of ecology gone wrong. In the beginning, there were no cane toads in Australia. Sugar cane was introduced to its fair shores, along with the sugar cane came the cane beetle, a nasty, brown insect about 3/4 inch long.
"How do we stop the cane beetle," ask the scientists, "the little fuckers are eating all our sugar cane."
"Ahhh," says someone clever, "Why not look around the world to see what eats cane beetles, then introduce them into Australia and the problemo is solved!"
Wrong.
They found a natural predator in the cane toad, which came from Hawaii of all places. In 1935, 55 pairs (as in 110) cane toads were released in the small North Queensland town of Gordonvale. Unfortunately, Australia did not have any predators that liked to eat the toads, probably due to the poison glands on the back of their neck. Similarly, the cane toads found that there was much more interesting and tasty stuff to eat than boring old cane beetles.
The result was a plague of biblical proportions.
As a consequence, every man, woman and child living north of Sydney has grown up knowing the extreme pleasure of killing cane toads. Motorists swerve to hit them, cricketers hoist them for a six (equivalent of home run for you 'Merkins) over the boundary, weekend gardeners chase them down with a lawn mower.
The following, is some of the many varied ways I have dispatched these nasty little buggers while I lived in Queensland. Perhaps some other Aussies can add to the list, what about you Hawaiians out there?
THE THONG SLAP (TS) The Thong Slap (TS) is not fatal to a cane toad, but is an important component of many of the other means of disposal. To perform a TS, one quickly removes their thong (rubber, sandal-like footwear) and slaps a toad hard on the head. This stuns the toad and stops it from hopping all over the place.
DEATH BY CLUBBING #1) Take golf clubs out into the back yard, usually only a 2-wood, 6-iron and 9-iron. Find a toad and dispatch with club of your choice. If the toad is sitting upright, use the driver. Extra points are awarded for lofted shots over the house and on to the street. Hitting a "slice" tends to result in separate pieces of toad. #2) Take a field hockey stick and dispatch as above. Remember not to raise the head of the stick above shoulder height, otherwise a penalty may ensue. #3) Using a cricket stump, first smash the toad with the blunt end, then reverse the stump and impale it with the pointed end. Shake the toad off the pointed end and repeat if necessary.
DEATH BY GARDEN TOOL A special class devoted to common garden tools. Favorite tools are the shovel (hit with flat side, then chop up with blade), the mattock (chopping only), the pitch fork (see how many you can collect) and the axe (slice and dice).
DEATH BY SPORTING EQUIPMENT Another special class, covering those instruments not involved with clubbing. Some nice effects can be gained with tennis rackets (small toads only - great for perfecting that two-handed backhand), darts (nothing like a moving bullseye) and football boots.
DEATH BY SLICING AND CHOPPING #1) Take you mother's best carving knife outside and see if you *really* can throw it like a Bowie knife. #2) After performing a TS, flip the toad over and use an Xacto knife to practice your vivisection techniques. See how much you can remove and still get the toad to hop away. #3) Perform TS, throw toad into the air and try to hit with a machete. More points are awarded if the pieces are equal in size.
DEATH BY SQUASHING #1) One of my all-time faves: Perform a TS, then throw the toad out onto a bust street. Bet with friends how many cars will miss it before it goes POP. #2) Go to the local cricket field late
Why do you say that texture data would have to be duplicated? If Gigabyte are going to the effort of making these cards, surely they can manage shared memory between GPU's.
"I can't seem to find numbers on the web but I seem to remember a statistic that Mac owners purchase 2-3 times the software (not sure if that also applies to games) than the average PC owner. Even though the market share is 2% the installed base is more like 8-10%"
Because it's easy for Windows users to pirate the software they want?
"Also remember that OpenGL and DirectX are not equivilent. OpenGL deals with 3-d only, DirectX deals with 3-d + keyboard/mouse + sound + much more. Typical monolythic Windows mentality vs Unix specific tools/software abstraction layers."
Compare apples to apples then. OpenGL vs Direct3D. DirectX doesn't force you to use it's sound/input/networking/etc. components if you just want to use D3D.
I'd say you're looking in the wrong places. Even bloody Telstra are doing $60/mo unlimited transfer. Granted that it's on a 256/64 line, but it is definitely better than 56k. Plus, some broadband ISP's are able to lower their prices with government incentives now because of the HiBIS scheme to get us country folk on broadband.
Often the best games running on an id engine were not made by id. It doesn't matter if Doom 3 isn't a good game itself, someone will license it because the fact is that id have experience in building and licensing engines. Isn't this really Valve's first engine, being that Half-Life was built on a modified Quake engine?
Superior in what way, precisely? I know DX includes sound, input, network, etc. but the comparison here is between OpenGL and Direct3D.
Direct3D forces video cards into a certain mould. Direct3D 9 may be a nice spec, but it means that a video card maker can't add functionality beyond that and have it used through D3D.
OpenGL's extension system allows card makers to add new features and it means that developers can use these features as soon as drivers are available, not whenever MS feels like releasing a new revision of D3D. Granted this system means developers may have to do vendor-specific paths until the extension becomes core, but it's there if they want it. Also, I don't believe that D3D has a driver conformance test; you don't really know what you're going to get on different system setups until you try them. OpenGL's conformance test may not be perfect, but it at least helps to even out the differences between systems.
I vote they pay the SomethingAwful guys to decide what should be banned and what should not. Hell, they already do it for free: http://www.somethingawful.com/horrorsofporn/
I could barely tell you the plot of Doom, and couldn't even begin to say what the differences between it and Doom 2 is
When I look at it now, it's pretty much just the maps and the double barrel shotgun that separated the games. Damned if that ever stopped me playing them both to death though.
You forgot Interplay. They killed Black Isle. I understand that game studios get canned all the time, but the thing is that Fallout 3 had a massive following before it was even released - not many games have anywhere near as much fan input during development as it did. I still can't fathom the sheer idiocy that must be required to cancel the only game they had near completion which was damn near guaranteed to be a hit, yet they gave the go ahead on F:BoS 2 before the first was even finished.
OK, I think you've picked two very wrong games to lump together there. I go into a games store, and I see the GTA games. Each of them has different settings, characters, stories, vehicles, etc. Then, I glance over at the fucking Sims Isle. Aren't the dozen or so expansion packs really just adding new graphics to the same old shit?
but keep all the Foster's (Australian for 'roo piss, no matter what a certain actor says about it in TV commercials) for yourselves
Fosters here is roo piss, known fact. I've heard from various sources, however, that Fosters sold in foreign places is actually Crown lager (ie, decent beer).
Potentially Visible Set. Basically what is visible in the map from where, used to avoid rendering huge sections of the map that the player can't even see.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the movie you're thinking of is Pirates of Silicon Valley (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/). Quite good.
My brother is a mechanic. He tells me it's quite fun when a customer who has screwed their car says they were 'just driving' and the blackbox in their Camry says they were doing 150 km/h.
Wake me when CS doesn't play like instagib and make me wait for up to several minutes to respawn...
(Damn the lameness filter!)
First, an introduction.
Cane Toads (Bufos Marinas?) are an obnoxious, brown, warty type of frog (OK, toad) that inhabit vast areas of Australia. Their introduction and proliferation in Australia is a classic example of ecology gone wrong. In the beginning, there were no cane toads in Australia. Sugar cane was introduced to its fair shores, along with the sugar cane came the cane beetle, a nasty, brown insect about 3/4 inch long.
"How do we stop the cane beetle," ask the scientists, "the little fuckers are eating all our sugar cane."
"Ahhh," says someone clever, "Why not look around the world to see what eats cane beetles, then introduce them into Australia and the problemo is solved!"
Wrong.
They found a natural predator in the cane toad, which came from Hawaii of all places. In 1935, 55 pairs (as in 110) cane toads were released in the small North Queensland town of Gordonvale. Unfortunately, Australia did not have any predators that liked to eat the toads, probably due to the poison glands on the back of their neck. Similarly, the cane toads found that there was much more interesting and tasty stuff to eat than boring old cane beetles.
The result was a plague of biblical proportions.
As a consequence, every man, woman and child living north of Sydney has grown up knowing the extreme pleasure of killing cane toads. Motorists swerve to hit them, cricketers hoist them for a six (equivalent of home run for you 'Merkins) over the boundary, weekend gardeners chase them down with a lawn mower.
The following, is some of the many varied ways I have dispatched these nasty little buggers while I lived in Queensland. Perhaps some other Aussies can add to the list, what about you Hawaiians out there?
THE THONG SLAP (TS)
The Thong Slap (TS) is not fatal to a cane toad, but is an important component of many of the other means of disposal. To perform a TS, one quickly removes their thong (rubber, sandal-like footwear) and slaps a toad hard on the head. This stuns the toad and stops it from hopping all over the place.
DEATH BY CLUBBING
#1) Take golf clubs out into the back yard, usually only a 2-wood, 6-iron and 9-iron. Find a toad and dispatch with club of your choice. If the toad is sitting upright, use the driver. Extra points are
awarded for lofted shots over the house and on to the street. Hitting a "slice" tends to result in separate pieces of toad.
#2) Take a field hockey stick and dispatch as above. Remember not to raise the head of the stick above shoulder height, otherwise a penalty may ensue.
#3) Using a cricket stump, first smash the toad with the blunt end, then reverse the stump and impale it with the pointed end. Shake the toad off the pointed end and repeat if necessary.
DEATH BY GARDEN TOOL
A special class devoted to common garden tools. Favorite tools are the shovel (hit with flat side, then chop up with blade), the mattock (chopping only), the pitch fork (see how many you can collect) and the
axe (slice and dice).
DEATH BY SPORTING EQUIPMENT
Another special class, covering those instruments not involved with clubbing. Some nice effects can be gained with tennis rackets (small toads only - great for perfecting that two-handed backhand), darts
(nothing like a moving bullseye) and football boots.
DEATH BY SLICING AND CHOPPING
#1) Take you mother's best carving knife outside and see if you *really* can throw it like a Bowie knife.
#2) After performing a TS, flip the toad over and use an Xacto knife to practice your vivisection techniques. See how much you can remove and still get the toad to hop away.
#3) Perform TS, throw toad into the air and try to hit with a machete. More points are awarded if the pieces are equal in size.
DEATH BY SQUASHING
#1) One of my all-time faves: Perform a TS, then throw the toad out onto a bust street. Bet with friends how many cars will miss it before it goes POP.
#2) Go to the local cricket field late
Most movies are already distributed over bittorrent...
Bonus points to the idiot I saw with a VTEC sticker on an RX7...
Or tentacle rape...
Why do you say that texture data would have to be duplicated? If Gigabyte are going to the effort of making these cards, surely they can manage shared memory between GPU's.
Sure thing, Zaphod.
Hopefully one of the licensees will build a game out of it...
Because it's easy for Windows users to pirate the software they want?
Compare apples to apples then. OpenGL vs Direct3D. DirectX doesn't force you to use it's sound/input/networking/etc. components if you just want to use D3D.
Two, I wish that was an "average" breast.
I'd say you're looking in the wrong places. Even bloody Telstra are doing $60/mo unlimited transfer. Granted that it's on a 256/64 line, but it is definitely better than 56k. Plus, some broadband ISP's are able to lower their prices with government incentives now because of the HiBIS scheme to get us country folk on broadband.
Similar things were said about cd and dvd's. I'm betting that Unreal Tournament 2016 comes out on 6 of these discs...
Something like this, perhaps?
Right, because we all still program in nothing but assembly.
Often the best games running on an id engine were not made by id. It doesn't matter if Doom 3 isn't a good game itself, someone will license it because the fact is that id have experience in building and licensing engines. Isn't this really Valve's first engine, being that Half-Life was built on a modified Quake engine?
Superior in what way, precisely? I know DX includes sound, input, network, etc. but the comparison here is between OpenGL and Direct3D.
Direct3D forces video cards into a certain mould. Direct3D 9 may be a nice spec, but it means that a video card maker can't add functionality beyond that and have it used through D3D.
OpenGL's extension system allows card makers to add new features and it means that developers can use these features as soon as drivers are available, not whenever MS feels like releasing a new revision of D3D. Granted this system means developers may have to do vendor-specific paths until the extension becomes core, but it's there if they want it.
Also, I don't believe that D3D has a driver conformance test; you don't really know what you're going to get on different system setups until you try them. OpenGL's conformance test may not be perfect, but it at least helps to even out the differences between systems.
I vote they pay the SomethingAwful guys to decide what should be banned and what should not. Hell, they already do it for free: http://www.somethingawful.com/horrorsofporn/
I could barely tell you the plot of Doom, and couldn't even begin to say what the differences between it and Doom 2 is
When I look at it now, it's pretty much just the maps and the double barrel shotgun that separated the games. Damned if that ever stopped me playing them both to death though.
You forgot Interplay. They killed Black Isle. I understand that game studios get canned all the time, but the thing is that Fallout 3 had a massive following before it was even released - not many games have anywhere near as much fan input during development as it did. I still can't fathom the sheer idiocy that must be required to cancel the only game they had near completion which was damn near guaranteed to be a hit, yet they gave the go ahead on F:BoS 2 before the first was even finished.
Black Isle is dead. Long live Black Isle!
OK, I think you've picked two very wrong games to lump together there.
I go into a games store, and I see the GTA games. Each of them has different settings, characters, stories, vehicles, etc. Then, I glance over at the fucking Sims Isle. Aren't the dozen or so expansion packs really just adding new graphics to the same old shit?
but keep all the Foster's (Australian for 'roo piss, no matter what a certain actor says about it in TV commercials) for yourselves
Fosters here is roo piss, known fact. I've heard from various sources, however, that Fosters sold in foreign places is actually Crown lager (ie, decent beer).
Potentially Visible Set. Basically what is visible in the map from where, used to avoid rendering huge sections of the map that the player can't even see.