An expresso is a very fast espresso, ie. an espresso that has been accelerated to 0.9c or higher. A little known fact about the LHC is that it doubles as the world's most powerful coffee accelerator.
So I outbid SourceForge on the slashdot and sourceforge TLDs and have those point to my company's website. Awesome, I'll just sign up with Akamai and wath those new customers roll in...
Yeah. It's not quite as stupid, but the story does.. well... it sounds like something you'd find in a semi-generic action movie. Actually, the game very much feels like one - cars exploding as if they ran on hydrogen, things breaking in exactly the one possible way to allow the player to reach his destination in a climactic escape scene... Oh, not to forget the selective character shield; you can be one tap on the shoulder away from death, but during cutscenes your character will happily take blows that hurl him through the room without taking as much as a scratch. You can also lose about ten liters of blood without suffering any ill effects during a certain scene even though normally much smaller injuries will kill you.
One thing that distinguishes the German version game from an action movie, however, are the third-rate voice actors. Even direct-to-TV action movies usually get better voice acting. Don't know if that's the case with the English version, as well.
Yup. I've put some thought into how I would grade games and I've come up with pretty much the opposite of what's common today: 100% equals the best possible game technology and human storytelling can make. In short, absolute perfection. Yes, that would mean that those games that regularly get 100% at "traditional" reviews would end up somewhere in the 60-80% range with good games netting maybe 40-60%. You couldn't call a game bad unless it was somewhere below 20%.
I would probbly last for three reviews before either some publisher tries to sue me, a bunch of fanboys DDoSes the server for days or I get talked into abandoning my review practices because of <insert pile of money here>.
...and I think it's pretty true to the movie it's based on. I know the movie is not what the gme is (spposed to be) based on, but feeling-wise it does fit.
I can also see where the game is annoying - sometimes you go quite long distances without healing items so you might end up in a battle where you die if anything hurts you just a little bit - and if you don't want to do the battle twenty times over you have to either replay the previous part of the game or skip to the next scene.
Also, it feels badly tested; for example, if during a cutscene the camera is away from your body and passes by items on the ground the game will offer you to pick them up. Also, sometimes the game doesn't make much sense; for example, during the car escape scene there are cars parked in the middle of the street with no fleeing people around that might explain them. Getting to the car is convoluted in itself.
The game does have potential for being unintentionally funny, though. In one cutscene a homing smoking crack in the floor races towards the player. Once, the (heavily injured) player stood on a burning item when the cutscene was triggered; when the camera came back to the player he was already lying on the ground, burning. The game's deadpan delivery of this made the scene exceptionally funny.
Overall, it's a nice game but definitely not great. I can understand why Atari doesn't get rave reviews although I do think 3/10 is a bit low. I'd place it more around a 6.
Even if one accepts that a US American website (even with a known-international user base) always uses degrees Fahrenheit for temperatures, "degrees" is quite inaccurate as it's a heavily overloaded unit. I actually mistook the figure in the headline for an angle (reading the "cool" as something only understandable after reading TFA) until I read the clarification at the end. When using degrees for temperature, always specify which kind of degrees so people don't have to guess what they're dealing with. There's too many kinds of degrees that commonly occur as two-digit numbers.
Also, when giving temperatures always offer conversions into all formats readers can be expected to need. Slashdot is a US American site, so Fahrenheit is neccessary. Many users come from countries that aren't the USA or Belize so Celsius is neccessary as well. Kelvin is only useful when talking about very low temperatures and all other systems fill narrow niches at best, but C and F should always be given.
Doesn't matter where your server is located; a website should always try to accomodate for its user base.
That's what slow switchovers are for. You start by adding small metric numbers next to the imperial ones and teaching metric in school. At a certain date the metric ones become the big ones. Later the imperial units are dropped completely. This happens over a span of 20-30 years. Shouldn't panic people much because there's lots of coverage and lots of time to get acquainted to the new units.
Similarly, I once registered 101 point something on a doctor's thermometer, and he just asked me what I'd been doing in the previous hour. I told him that I'd been playing tennis and had a hot shower. He just nodded, and went on to other things, since I'd explained the slightly elevated temperature. He did take my temperature again 10 or 15 minutes later, and when it was lower, he ignored it.
I thought "Holy shit, three degrees difference from tennis and a hot shower?" The I remembered that Fahrenheit degrees are "smaller". In Celsius, three degrees above average is solidly in "serious fever" terrain and pretty close to "organ failure".
I'd say you missed the point. What you're saying is true technically, but as always we humans have the wonderful gift of understanding context and so in practice there wasn't a single person who didn't know instantly from the summary that it meant 70F.
Actually, I assumed that the text talked about the angle betwen the leaf and the rest of the plant until I read the clarification. If it had been made clear that temperature was the thing talked about right on I would have inferred that Fahrenheit is meant - on American sites I use if (temperature.isRidiculous()) temperature.system = "F" as a fallback algirothm for weird temperatures, but that's still not reliable when talking about high (> 50 C) or low (
Temperature is one thing where you really have to specify your unit because not only can one confuse which system you're using but also confuse what kind of measurement you're talking about.
Yup. Look at Visual Basic and PHP. Both have an abysmal reputation and both are extremely widespread because they have excellent support for getting things done. The result might not be pretty, but it works (even correctly, if you know what you're doing) and it's fast to implement. That featureset happens to be compelling in many cases.
Does this mean it consumes 2 GB of RAM to display "Hello World" ???
So does C(++) because of all the memory leaks, every BASIC dialect because of interpreter overhead, Dotnet/Mono because it includes half of Windows, Python and Ruby because of all the objects, Lisp to store all the braces and Perl just because it can. PHP doesn't because nobody has tried it yet. ASM also doesn't because it always drops the processor back to 8080 emulation mode and can't address 2 GiB of RAM.
The One True Language, beloved by all (Objective-C) also uses 2 GiB of RAM for "Hello World", but just because it needs to use that memory to cure cancer and feed starving children.
I find it mostly annoying because it will try to match even if matching doesn't make sense. I don't use a search bar because keyworded bookmarks deliver the same functionality without taking up real estate. When I type ". foobar" I want to perform a Google search for "foobar". I don't want to hear about sites I visited last week that contain the word "foobar" in the title. That information is useless to me at that point and the suddenly appearing dropdown list distracts me.
No, "how is the Awesome Bar supposed to know about your specific use case" is no excuse. If the Awseome Bar is smart enough to know better than I do what I'm looking for it's smart enough to handle keyworded bookmarks properly. Otherwise it's yet another "smart" feature that ends up annoying people who actually know what they're doing. I expect a smart user interface to be there when I need it and not be there when I don't. Yes, I expect either massive configurability r precognition-level DWIM. Given that Firefox is supposed to sport the former I'm pretty disappointed it doesn't.
I set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 in order to completely get rid of the autocomplete (as a dumb URL bar appeals to me more than the Awesome Bar), but apparently Firefox has a hard minimum of 1 for that value so I still get useless dropdown lists. Mozilla really went out of their way to make the Awesome Bar as annoying as possible. If there was a version of Firefox 2 that runs on Gecko 1.9 and supports regular Fx2 extensions I'd switch in an instant.
You know what would be awesome? A browser somewhat like Firefox but built modular so you don't have to use features like this and can just disable them. Maybe it could use some kind of plugin mechanism
Seriously, what happened to Firefox? This kind of stuff is exactly what the extension mechanism is good for: Put it into an extension, bundle it with the browser and let those who hate it turn it off.
Dunno. My mobile phone is not important enough for me to figure out how to activate the vibration mode or whether it even has one. I do believe it's digital in some way, but I'm not sure. It's probaby wireless, though.
I think it's worth pointing out that the two methods (purchasing and cracking) aren't mutually exclusive. When a company adopts draconian (or just plain stupid) licensing tactics, you can still purchase the software (for legal, moral, etc reasons) and then proceed to download a crack for your copy or just a cracked one via "the usual places". It's not ideal and not perfect, but at least you can run the software you paid for.
However, I don't feel like reinforcing their notion that draconian DRM makes sense by giving them money for it. I will buy lightly DRMed games because that kind of DRM is ust a minor nuisance and can often be defeated without having to crack anything. I won't buy games that (for example) impose restrictions on how many times you can install them, especiall if the DRM itself is somethimes causing so much trouble you have to invalidate your install to rectify things.
I'm voting with my Euros. If EA wants to slap absurd DRM on their games I won't buy them. I can still play them over at a friend's place or do something else. Valve offers a lot of nice games at much more favorable conditions.
In the case of Mass Effect I'd really like to give BioWare/Demiurge money because they deserve it, but their scumbag of a distributor makes it unlikely they will ever see as much as a Cent from me. If they release a new version (maybe bundled with all downloadable content so far) without ridiculous DRM I might consider paying them. Buying the game now would just send the wrong kind of signal.
He wasn't big into mass-producing bootlegs, though, so I don't really see how comparing a high-profile thief with a random person doing non-profit copyright infringement makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you wait for long enough, eventually all urban myths will crystallize into fiction.
An expresso is a very fast espresso, ie. an espresso that has been accelerated to 0.9c or higher. A little known fact about the LHC is that it doubles as the world's most powerful coffee accelerator.
Maybe the LHC will allow them to find a way to construct such a "tinyradiation" device.
I would also like to point out that Hawking radiation is emitted by black holes, in case anyone wonders.
So I outbid SourceForge on the slashdot and sourceforge TLDs and have those point to my company's website. Awesome, I'll just sign up with Akamai and wath those new customers roll in...
I'd be happy to register microsoft.con, sourceforge.nat, icann.orq...
Yeah. It's not quite as stupid, but the story does.. well... it sounds like something you'd find in a semi-generic action movie. Actually, the game very much feels like one - cars exploding as if they ran on hydrogen, things breaking in exactly the one possible way to allow the player to reach his destination in a climactic escape scene... Oh, not to forget the selective character shield; you can be one tap on the shoulder away from death, but during cutscenes your character will happily take blows that hurl him through the room without taking as much as a scratch. You can also lose about ten liters of blood without suffering any ill effects during a certain scene even though normally much smaller injuries will kill you.
One thing that distinguishes the German version game from an action movie, however, are the third-rate voice actors. Even direct-to-TV action movies usually get better voice acting. Don't know if that's the case with the English version, as well.
What do they want to enhance? Will you be able to talk every NPC into having sex with you now?
Yup. I've put some thought into how I would grade games and I've come up with pretty much the opposite of what's common today: 100% equals the best possible game technology and human storytelling can make. In short, absolute perfection. Yes, that would mean that those games that regularly get 100% at "traditional" reviews would end up somewhere in the 60-80% range with good games netting maybe 40-60%. You couldn't call a game bad unless it was somewhere below 20%.
I would probbly last for three reviews before either some publisher tries to sue me, a bunch of fanboys DDoSes the server for days or I get talked into abandoning my review practices because of <insert pile of money here>.
...and I think it's pretty true to the movie it's based on. I know the movie is not what the gme is (spposed to be) based on, but feeling-wise it does fit.
I can also see where the game is annoying - sometimes you go quite long distances without healing items so you might end up in a battle where you die if anything hurts you just a little bit - and if you don't want to do the battle twenty times over you have to either replay the previous part of the game or skip to the next scene.
Also, it feels badly tested; for example, if during a cutscene the camera is away from your body and passes by items on the ground the game will offer you to pick them up. Also, sometimes the game doesn't make much sense; for example, during the car escape scene there are cars parked in the middle of the street with no fleeing people around that might explain them. Getting to the car is convoluted in itself.
The game does have potential for being unintentionally funny, though. In one cutscene a homing smoking crack in the floor races towards the player. Once, the (heavily injured) player stood on a burning item when the cutscene was triggered; when the camera came back to the player he was already lying on the ground, burning. The game's deadpan delivery of this made the scene exceptionally funny.
Overall, it's a nice game but definitely not great. I can understand why Atari doesn't get rave reviews although I do think 3/10 is a bit low. I'd place it more around a 6.
So that's how Microsoft won the OS monopoly...
Even if one accepts that a US American website (even with a known-international user base) always uses degrees Fahrenheit for temperatures, "degrees" is quite inaccurate as it's a heavily overloaded unit. I actually mistook the figure in the headline for an angle (reading the "cool" as something only understandable after reading TFA) until I read the clarification at the end. When using degrees for temperature, always specify which kind of degrees so people don't have to guess what they're dealing with. There's too many kinds of degrees that commonly occur as two-digit numbers.
Also, when giving temperatures always offer conversions into all formats readers can be expected to need. Slashdot is a US American site, so Fahrenheit is neccessary. Many users come from countries that aren't the USA or Belize so Celsius is neccessary as well. Kelvin is only useful when talking about very low temperatures and all other systems fill narrow niches at best, but C and F should always be given.
Doesn't matter where your server is located; a website should always try to accomodate for its user base.
That's what slow switchovers are for. You start by adding small metric numbers next to the imperial ones and teaching metric in school. At a certain date the metric ones become the big ones. Later the imperial units are dropped completely. This happens over a span of 20-30 years. Shouldn't panic people much because there's lots of coverage and lots of time to get acquainted to the new units.
Temperature is one thing where you really have to specify your unit because not only can one confuse which system you're using but also confuse what kind of measurement you're talking about.
In 451.
Yup. Look at Visual Basic and PHP. Both have an abysmal reputation and both are extremely widespread because they have excellent support for getting things done. The result might not be pretty, but it works (even correctly, if you know what you're doing) and it's fast to implement. That featureset happens to be compelling in many cases.
The One True Language, beloved by all (Objective-C) also uses 2 GiB of RAM for "Hello World", but just because it needs to use that memory to cure cancer and feed starving children.
I find it mostly annoying because it will try to match even if matching doesn't make sense. I don't use a search bar because keyworded bookmarks deliver the same functionality without taking up real estate. When I type ". foobar" I want to perform a Google search for "foobar". I don't want to hear about sites I visited last week that contain the word "foobar" in the title. That information is useless to me at that point and the suddenly appearing dropdown list distracts me.
No, "how is the Awesome Bar supposed to know about your specific use case" is no excuse. If the Awseome Bar is smart enough to know better than I do what I'm looking for it's smart enough to handle keyworded bookmarks properly. Otherwise it's yet another "smart" feature that ends up annoying people who actually know what they're doing. I expect a smart user interface to be there when I need it and not be there when I don't. Yes, I expect either massive configurability r precognition-level DWIM. Given that Firefox is supposed to sport the former I'm pretty disappointed it doesn't.
I set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 in order to completely get rid of the autocomplete (as a dumb URL bar appeals to me more than the Awesome Bar), but apparently Firefox has a hard minimum of 1 for that value so I still get useless dropdown lists. Mozilla really went out of their way to make the Awesome Bar as annoying as possible. If there was a version of Firefox 2 that runs on Gecko 1.9 and supports regular Fx2 extensions I'd switch in an instant.
You know what would be awesome? A browser somewhat like Firefox but built modular so you don't have to use features like this and can just disable them. Maybe it could use some kind of plugin mechanism
Seriously, what happened to Firefox? This kind of stuff is exactly what the extension mechanism is good for: Put it into an extension, bundle it with the browser and let those who hate it turn it off.
Damn straight I have a problem. I just ran out of coffee! Now help me fix that.
I agree. The last thing I want to see when I turn my coffee maker on is Hot Coffee!
Dunno. My mobile phone is not important enough for me to figure out how to activate the vibration mode or whether it even has one. I do believe it's digital in some way, but I'm not sure. It's probaby wireless, though.
I'm voting with my Euros. If EA wants to slap absurd DRM on their games I won't buy them. I can still play them over at a friend's place or do something else. Valve offers a lot of nice games at much more favorable conditions.
In the case of Mass Effect I'd really like to give BioWare/Demiurge money because they deserve it, but their scumbag of a distributor makes it unlikely they will ever see as much as a Cent from me. If they release a new version (maybe bundled with all downloadable content so far) without ridiculous DRM I might consider paying them. Buying the game now would just send the wrong kind of signal.
He wasn't big into mass-producing bootlegs, though, so I don't really see how comparing a high-profile thief with a random person doing non-profit copyright infringement makes sense.