Maybe the GP is a cleric in some sort of religion that condemns angles. So he uses Turn 360 Degrees on the console, banishing the angle and turning it into an original Xbox. Then he walks away because the original Xbox is last-gen and he wants to play some new games.
(Note how he never said in which direction he walks away, probably becaue that would implicitly denote one of those accursed angles.)
Must be you. My touch keeps marching on and my pocket is a hellhole that usually rapidly destroys everything I put in there. Like my last two MP3 players.
Plus, unibody notebooks. Those things are rather sturdy. As are their power adapters; I accidentally overheated mine once or twice by failing to notice I'd buried it under stuff. After letting it cool off for a while it resumed work as if nothing ever was.
You could say that Microsoft is a marketing company that happens to make software. In the same vein you could say that Apple is a design company that happens to make computers and gadgets.
Post-NeXT Apple mainly subsists on selling pretty good products with rock-solid design. And it works.
If you think about it, that does put the "the Middle East is where the current big threats are" rhethoric in perspective. Germany was built back up because of its immense geopolitic value. The Iraq and Afghanistan would allow the USA to get a foot in the door with the Middle East; at the very least if those countries were drilled to be staunchly pro-West. For example, the Iraq is an OPEC member; the value of being on very friendly terms with them should be obvious.
The only reason I can think of (in the context of an offensive war) to invade two countries and then not stick around rebuilding them into something useful is because those countries aren't going to be useful anyway.
Of course just about the only time that actually worked was Germany and the USA still have troops stationed here.
I'd say that any plan to make a country friendly through war is unlikely to work unless you're willing to invest at least three decades and a few hundred billion bucks. Your investment into the country (in terms of supplied infrastructure, economic stimulus etc.) needs to greatly outweigh the damage you did during the war and it needs to be delivered over a longer time. Otherwise you're just the jackass who destroyed half the country and then left the rubble behind when it was no longer interesting.
Actually, I am pretty sure that measure is to counter violence, but since when has "weapons control" laws ever resulted in decreased violence? [...] But does that stop murders and mayhem? Nope! It just making the killings more gruesome and painful.
You explicitly said that strict gun laws did not decrease the amount of violence found in Japan and that it did in fact make the murders committed there more gruesome.
Not to mention that declaring all non-perfect solutions to be of negligible effect is a fallacy in itself. We may be unable to completely stop murder but that doesn't mean that measures taken to reduce homicide rates (such as making firearms less available) are automatically pointless.
Firstly, this would require rather tedious screening of everyone with a firearm in order to make sure they don't carry ammunition capable of puncturing the airplane's hull. Those things are expensive and I don't think the airlines would be happy if people with the capability of making holes in them were allowed onboard. I don't know how popular frangible ammunition is in the States but that's probably what the airlines would insist on, at least after a passenger managed to shoot the cabin wall.
Also, what about international flights? Most countries are much less enthusiastic about guns than the States are and you could end up with weird situations like
- being able to leave the States with a gun but not being able to enter it again,
- being able to leave the Staets with a gun but being unable to enter the destination country,
- evildoers coming from the States outgunning everyone else on international flights by default or
- Americans having to deal with wildly different and incompatible security measures between domestic and international flights.
I'd suggest widespread self-defense training. Armed or not, an airplane is harder to take over when you're surrounded by thirty people trained in various martial arts.
I never implied that the FPS genre was unwell. The discussion in this subthread went:
a) They should remake System Shock 1 and 2.
b) There is no need as Bioshock is an adequate replacement.
c) Bioshock is not an adequate replacement for System Shock because of X, Y and Z.
The fact that Bioshock was designed to appeal to a broader market (console gamers in addition to PC gamers) doesn't change the fact that it's missing X, Y and Z and thus doesn't appeal to the people who liked System Shock because of them.
There can be superior implementations of old games. I prefer Morrowind over Daggerfall and Oblivion would be a strong contender for my favorite Elder Scrolls game if they hadn't messed up the UI so badly. (While we're talking about Bethesda games, Fallout 3 is an impressive game and definitely a worthy addition to the series. And yes, I was sceptical at first.)
I don't want all games to be exactly like the ones I played years ago (although I wouldn't mind a version of the Dark Engine that works reliably on modern machines) but I won't accept an "adequate replacement" that shares few, if any, of the distinguishing features of the game it's supposed to replace.
Bioshock is related with System Shock in two ways: It's from the same designers and it's a first-person shooter. Okay, and the people you're up against qualify as insane. Apart from that they're rather different as many elements that distinguished System Shock from other first-person shooters like weapon degradation, equipment scarcity and skill points have been dropped in order to make the game more appealing to people who prefer a simpler gameplay.
Modern games don't have to be as simple as possible, however. Look at the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series for games that aren't afraid to confront the player with scarce supplies and degrading weapons. In fact, I'd say that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the true spiritual successor to the System Shock series.
And, as you may be aware, GSC is alive and well and they have released three games in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series so far, so apparently you can make a successful game without catering to the console crowd.
So why should we be disallowed from voicing our opinion that Bioshock does not fill the same niche System Shock did? It's not unreasonable to wish for a game that does and it's not unreasonable to assume that a company could make such a game without going bankrupt.
It's very dependent on your system and there is no discernible pattern as to which components are compatible and which aren't. For instance, I can play the game on my XP box up until I enter the big elevator in Recreation, at which point it reliably crashes. A friend of mine can play the game partially but never in multiplayer.
The Dark Engine tends to have obscure, user-specific failure modes on post-98 systems. It's a pity.
Thst reminds me of Quake. In Quake everyhing was brown; in that mod everything is black. Seriously, I don't recognize most of the places and the Pfhor look nothing like their original counterparts. That mod really needs to get over its obsession with the color black.
That's like saying that Command & Conquer: Renegade is a perfect adaptation of C&C to a first-person perspective. Yes, it is a (spiritual) sequel of sorts but fans of the original games are quick to point out that the things that made them great have been largely abandoned in the adaptation.
Let's look at Bioshock. First off, skill points. There aren't any; I can perfectly use any weapon, technology and power I find. Okay, so apparently I'm the world's greatest supersoldier who also happens to be a technological genius and wizard prodigy. I'm a Mary Sue, got it. In System Shock 2 (I can't speak authoritatively on the first part since I never got around to playing it much) you had to learn to use stuff. Finding the more powerful weapons didn't mean you could immediately use them and if you wanted high-tier psi powers you had to invest a lot of cyber modules. Most importantly, there weren't enough cyber modules for you to learn everything. You had to decide not just which psi powers to get but whether to go for psi or for better weapons, higher stats etc.
Ammunition and weapons. In Bioshock it's pretty hard to run out of ammo. In System Shock 2, ammunition is scarce until you get the recycler and it's really scarce at the beginning, which makes humble sentry guns positively frightening because you get to choose between confronting them with a pipe wrench or with your six armor-piercing pistol bullets. Most egregiously, Bioshock weapons are indestructable. No matter how often you fire that gun without any cleaning or maintenance at all, it'll always stay in pristine condition. To an avid Shock 2 player that seems completely ludicrous. That kind of shit flies in Halo but in a Shock game I expect scarcity (whether of ammunition, healing supplies or maintenance kits) to be the driving gameplay element. You're in a broken-down environment that has seen massive panic, yet all weapons are in perfect working order? How?
Balancing in general. The first power Bioshock gives you is a lightning attack capable of one-hitting any enemy in contact with water. Which is fairly plentiful in Bioshock. Score one for the player-controlled superhero. Also, hacking for some reason (read: because it would be too difficult with a console gamepad otherwise) happens in a separate screen where the rest of the game doesn't progress until you're finished. In Shock 2 hacking happened in a little popup window in real time. Just because you were busy doing something that didn't mean you were safe from the rest of the game.
Bioshock is a massively dumbed-down System Shock pseudo-sequel. The parts that made System Shock 1 and 2 great (and I can speak on Shock 1 here because I've talked to enough Shock 1 fans about this) are exactly those they removed from Bioshock: Scarcity, complexity and the fact that the game doesn't wait for you.
Bioshock is as if someone took a baroque chair and "streamlined" it by "trimming off all those extraneous decorations". What you get more closely resembles the archetypal chair but it's not going to be popular with fans of baroque furniture.
Shock 2 is more important. Why? Because Shock 1 runs adequately in DOSBox while it's almost impossible to play through Shock 2 nowadays unless you have a vintage 1998 computer running Windows 98 around. The Dark Engine was nifty but it's incredibly bad with regards to upward compatibility.
Yes, I know of OpenDarkEngine but OPDE doesn't look like it'll get to a playable state in appreciable time.
"...In closing, while we do acknowledge that Anonymous does not forgive, we want the record to show that my client did it for the lulz. The defense rests."
Verdict: Innocent, but all lawyers in the room get sent to death row. kthxbai.
FLV is just a container format usually containing MPEG-4 video nowadays. Don't confuse.flv with.swf. You can just access the FLV file with a compatible media player like XBMC or VLC and play it directly without involving Flash at all.
Actually, the three possibilities are discussed fairly neutrally.
Possibility one: Microsoft cheated. Presented as highly likely.
(I tend to agree that it's quite conceivable - other corporations have been caught doing similar things (like the NVIDIA/FutureMark debacle) and JavaScript execution speed is currently the most-hyped performance metric in the browser market.)
Possibility two: Microsoft have relied entirely on SunSpider when testing their JavaScript engine and over-optimized it to a point where it's now a SunSpider VM that happens to run JavaScript and doesn't work well with anything that isn't SunSpider. This is declared unlikely.
(Although I wouldn't put such a blunder past Microsoft, I do think that their tests extend beyond "how fast is SunSpider".)
Possibility three: The engine is legitimately ten times as fast as everyone else in this test but badly-written and so fragile that it experiences major slowdowns on code that meets currently-unknown criteria. Presented as unlikely.
(Note that in the Hacker News analysis the general consensus now seems to be that IE indeed does something with the code that it shouldn't; an earlier theory of broken dead code analysis couldn't stand up to the fact that any change that causes the bytecode to look differently, even if functionally equivalent, causes slowdowns).
Well, it's a browser benchmark and Apple makes a browser. It's not far-fetched to assume that the benchmark might be skewed towards those areas where Safari performs especially well in. The fact that it's used industry-wide would indicate that Apple resisted the temptation and actually made a fairly objective benchamrk.
The bad news is that this is probably the final straw for Cooks Source. We have never been a great money-maker even with all the good we do for businesses.
I find it somewhat amusing that this publication was built around commercial copyright infringement, thus most likely had few costs besides those of publication... and still made little money. But was somehow important to "businesses".
Because the way NASA etc. see the more distant regular matter indicates gravitational lensing while they can't see enough near matter to account for the neccessary mass. IANAAstronomer but I think the distorted galaxies we see in the GP's second image is either an actual image of such lensing or an exaggerated depiction of the same to get the message across.
And in the bottom image, is it not a snake wrapped around and guarding the window to eden?
Yes, but look at where the apple is hanging: Over someone's head. That's clearly Isaac Newton, who lives outside Eden. We're looking through the window from the other side. The snake is there to keep us from leaving Eden for the land of the IBM-compatible where mean-spirited trees will pelt you with fruit. Or something. Early Apple advertising tended to be a bit eclectic.
And does the ad not ask us to circle 42, to imprison the meaning of live, too keep us away from knowledge and wisdom?
That's just Apple trying to maximise their profits by delaying the destruction of Earth. Remember, Earth will be destroyed directly after the question to the answer has been found. By imprisoning the answer, Apple is trying to keep people from arriving at the question, thus abusing a loophole in how the story works in order to keep the Vogons at bay.
Arthur Dent has been asked about his opinion and commented that since he can't die before the whole thing has even started, he won't object if we keep stalling for another century or two. He also likes the fact that the construction workers in front of his house haven't been able to commence tearing it down for the last thirty-two years.
It's clearly a quirk in the map generator. Apparently someone has been everywhere around that area but not near it and voilá, the chunks in the area get generated much later and don't fit in with the rest of the map.
The OP can be happy enough that the chunks have the same biome as the ones south/east of it (Savannah?). After all, there are some random biomes sprinkled around nearby. (Notch really ought to clean up the code that determines which biome a new chunk gets.)
Well, it's either that or someone had entirely too much fun with TNT. OTOH, if someone bombed down that far below the surface they'd had to have hit rock along the way and the surface is clearly the wrong color for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. In the beginning there was the water and the waer was God. And the water said: "Let there be me." And then it was.
Maybe the GP is a cleric in some sort of religion that condemns angles. So he uses Turn 360 Degrees on the console, banishing the angle and turning it into an original Xbox. Then he walks away because the original Xbox is last-gen and he wants to play some new games.
(Note how he never said in which direction he walks away, probably becaue that would implicitly denote one of those accursed angles.)
Must be you. My touch keeps marching on and my pocket is a hellhole that usually rapidly destroys everything I put in there. Like my last two MP3 players.
Plus, unibody notebooks. Those things are rather sturdy. As are their power adapters; I accidentally overheated mine once or twice by failing to notice I'd buried it under stuff. After letting it cool off for a while it resumed work as if nothing ever was.
You could say that Microsoft is a marketing company that happens to make software. In the same vein you could say that Apple is a design company that happens to make computers and gadgets.
Post-NeXT Apple mainly subsists on selling pretty good products with rock-solid design. And it works.
If you think about it, that does put the "the Middle East is where the current big threats are" rhethoric in perspective. Germany was built back up because of its immense geopolitic value. The Iraq and Afghanistan would allow the USA to get a foot in the door with the Middle East; at the very least if those countries were drilled to be staunchly pro-West. For example, the Iraq is an OPEC member; the value of being on very friendly terms with them should be obvious.
The only reason I can think of (in the context of an offensive war) to invade two countries and then not stick around rebuilding them into something useful is because those countries aren't going to be useful anyway.
Of course just about the only time that actually worked was Germany and the USA still have troops stationed here.
I'd say that any plan to make a country friendly through war is unlikely to work unless you're willing to invest at least three decades and a few hundred billion bucks. Your investment into the country (in terms of supplied infrastructure, economic stimulus etc.) needs to greatly outweigh the damage you did during the war and it needs to be delivered over a longer time. Otherwise you're just the jackass who destroyed half the country and then left the rubble behind when it was no longer interesting.
Actually, I am pretty sure that measure is to counter violence, but since when has "weapons control" laws ever resulted in decreased violence? [...] But does that stop murders and mayhem? Nope! It just making the killings more gruesome and painful.
You explicitly said that strict gun laws did not decrease the amount of violence found in Japan and that it did in fact make the murders committed there more gruesome.
Not to mention that declaring all non-perfect solutions to be of negligible effect is a fallacy in itself. We may be unable to completely stop murder but that doesn't mean that measures taken to reduce homicide rates (such as making firearms less available) are automatically pointless.
I see two problems:
Firstly, this would require rather tedious screening of everyone with a firearm in order to make sure they don't carry ammunition capable of puncturing the airplane's hull. Those things are expensive and I don't think the airlines would be happy if people with the capability of making holes in them were allowed onboard. I don't know how popular frangible ammunition is in the States but that's probably what the airlines would insist on, at least after a passenger managed to shoot the cabin wall.
Also, what about international flights? Most countries are much less enthusiastic about guns than the States are and you could end up with weird situations like
- being able to leave the States with a gun but not being able to enter it again,
- being able to leave the Staets with a gun but being unable to enter the destination country,
- evildoers coming from the States outgunning everyone else on international flights by default or
- Americans having to deal with wildly different and incompatible security measures between domestic and international flights.
I'd suggest widespread self-defense training. Armed or not, an airplane is harder to take over when you're surrounded by thirty people trained in various martial arts.
Moderation and point value should be separate. That way I can mod "+1, Troll", "-1, Informative" or "+/- 0, Overrated".
Yeah, if I was forced to watch the Resident Evil movies and had an internet-connected device with me I'd go reading Slashdot too.
I never implied that the FPS genre was unwell. The discussion in this subthread went:
a) They should remake System Shock 1 and 2.
b) There is no need as Bioshock is an adequate replacement.
c) Bioshock is not an adequate replacement for System Shock because of X, Y and Z.
The fact that Bioshock was designed to appeal to a broader market (console gamers in addition to PC gamers) doesn't change the fact that it's missing X, Y and Z and thus doesn't appeal to the people who liked System Shock because of them.
There can be superior implementations of old games. I prefer Morrowind over Daggerfall and Oblivion would be a strong contender for my favorite Elder Scrolls game if they hadn't messed up the UI so badly. (While we're talking about Bethesda games, Fallout 3 is an impressive game and definitely a worthy addition to the series. And yes, I was sceptical at first.)
I don't want all games to be exactly like the ones I played years ago (although I wouldn't mind a version of the Dark Engine that works reliably on modern machines) but I won't accept an "adequate replacement" that shares few, if any, of the distinguishing features of the game it's supposed to replace.
Bioshock is related with System Shock in two ways: It's from the same designers and it's a first-person shooter. Okay, and the people you're up against qualify as insane. Apart from that they're rather different as many elements that distinguished System Shock from other first-person shooters like weapon degradation, equipment scarcity and skill points have been dropped in order to make the game more appealing to people who prefer a simpler gameplay.
Modern games don't have to be as simple as possible, however. Look at the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series for games that aren't afraid to confront the player with scarce supplies and degrading weapons. In fact, I'd say that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the true spiritual successor to the System Shock series.
And, as you may be aware, GSC is alive and well and they have released three games in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series so far, so apparently you can make a successful game without catering to the console crowd.
So why should we be disallowed from voicing our opinion that Bioshock does not fill the same niche System Shock did? It's not unreasonable to wish for a game that does and it's not unreasonable to assume that a company could make such a game without going bankrupt.
It's very dependent on your system and there is no discernible pattern as to which components are compatible and which aren't. For instance, I can play the game on my XP box up until I enter the big elevator in Recreation, at which point it reliably crashes. A friend of mine can play the game partially but never in multiplayer.
The Dark Engine tends to have obscure, user-specific failure modes on post-98 systems. It's a pity.
Thst reminds me of Quake. In Quake everyhing was brown; in that mod everything is black. Seriously, I don't recognize most of the places and the Pfhor look nothing like their original counterparts. That mod really needs to get over its obsession with the color black.
That's like saying that Command & Conquer: Renegade is a perfect adaptation of C&C to a first-person perspective. Yes, it is a (spiritual) sequel of sorts but fans of the original games are quick to point out that the things that made them great have been largely abandoned in the adaptation.
Let's look at Bioshock. First off, skill points. There aren't any; I can perfectly use any weapon, technology and power I find. Okay, so apparently I'm the world's greatest supersoldier who also happens to be a technological genius and wizard prodigy. I'm a Mary Sue, got it. In System Shock 2 (I can't speak authoritatively on the first part since I never got around to playing it much) you had to learn to use stuff. Finding the more powerful weapons didn't mean you could immediately use them and if you wanted high-tier psi powers you had to invest a lot of cyber modules. Most importantly, there weren't enough cyber modules for you to learn everything. You had to decide not just which psi powers to get but whether to go for psi or for better weapons, higher stats etc.
Ammunition and weapons. In Bioshock it's pretty hard to run out of ammo. In System Shock 2, ammunition is scarce until you get the recycler and it's really scarce at the beginning, which makes humble sentry guns positively frightening because you get to choose between confronting them with a pipe wrench or with your six armor-piercing pistol bullets. Most egregiously, Bioshock weapons are indestructable. No matter how often you fire that gun without any cleaning or maintenance at all, it'll always stay in pristine condition. To an avid Shock 2 player that seems completely ludicrous. That kind of shit flies in Halo but in a Shock game I expect scarcity (whether of ammunition, healing supplies or maintenance kits) to be the driving gameplay element. You're in a broken-down environment that has seen massive panic, yet all weapons are in perfect working order? How?
Balancing in general. The first power Bioshock gives you is a lightning attack capable of one-hitting any enemy in contact with water. Which is fairly plentiful in Bioshock. Score one for the player-controlled superhero. Also, hacking for some reason (read: because it would be too difficult with a console gamepad otherwise) happens in a separate screen where the rest of the game doesn't progress until you're finished. In Shock 2 hacking happened in a little popup window in real time. Just because you were busy doing something that didn't mean you were safe from the rest of the game.
Bioshock is a massively dumbed-down System Shock pseudo-sequel. The parts that made System Shock 1 and 2 great (and I can speak on Shock 1 here because I've talked to enough Shock 1 fans about this) are exactly those they removed from Bioshock: Scarcity, complexity and the fact that the game doesn't wait for you.
Bioshock is as if someone took a baroque chair and "streamlined" it by "trimming off all those extraneous decorations". What you get more closely resembles the archetypal chair but it's not going to be popular with fans of baroque furniture.
Shock 2 is more important. Why? Because Shock 1 runs adequately in DOSBox while it's almost impossible to play through Shock 2 nowadays unless you have a vintage 1998 computer running Windows 98 around. The Dark Engine was nifty but it's incredibly bad with regards to upward compatibility.
Yes, I know of OpenDarkEngine but OPDE doesn't look like it'll get to a playable state in appreciable time.
"...In closing, while we do acknowledge that Anonymous does not forgive, we want the record to show that my client did it for the lulz. The defense rests."
Verdict: Innocent, but all lawyers in the room get sent to death row. kthxbai.
FLV is just a container format usually containing MPEG-4 video nowadays. Don't confuse .flv with .swf. You can just access the FLV file with a compatible media player like XBMC or VLC and play it directly without involving Flash at all.
Actually, the three possibilities are discussed fairly neutrally.
Possibility one: Microsoft cheated. Presented as highly likely.
(I tend to agree that it's quite conceivable - other corporations have been caught doing similar things (like the NVIDIA/FutureMark debacle) and JavaScript execution speed is currently the most-hyped performance metric in the browser market.)
Possibility two: Microsoft have relied entirely on SunSpider when testing their JavaScript engine and over-optimized it to a point where it's now a SunSpider VM that happens to run JavaScript and doesn't work well with anything that isn't SunSpider. This is declared unlikely.
(Although I wouldn't put such a blunder past Microsoft, I do think that their tests extend beyond "how fast is SunSpider".)
Possibility three: The engine is legitimately ten times as fast as everyone else in this test but badly-written and so fragile that it experiences major slowdowns on code that meets currently-unknown criteria. Presented as unlikely.
(Note that in the Hacker News analysis the general consensus now seems to be that IE indeed does something with the code that it shouldn't; an earlier theory of broken dead code analysis couldn't stand up to the fact that any change that causes the bytecode to look differently, even if functionally equivalent, causes slowdowns).
Actually, the article's original headline was inflammatory. They changed it after someone pointed out that it doesn't fit the story.
Well, it's a browser benchmark and Apple makes a browser. It's not far-fetched to assume that the benchmark might be skewed towards those areas where Safari performs especially well in. The fact that it's used industry-wide would indicate that Apple resisted the temptation and actually made a fairly objective benchamrk.
The bad news is that this is probably the final straw for Cooks Source. We have never been a great money-maker even with all the good we do for businesses.
I find it somewhat amusing that this publication was built around commercial copyright infringement, thus most likely had few costs besides those of publication... and still made little money. But was somehow important to "businesses".
Because the way NASA etc. see the more distant regular matter indicates gravitational lensing while they can't see enough near matter to account for the neccessary mass. IANAAstronomer but I think the distorted galaxies we see in the GP's second image is either an actual image of such lensing or an exaggerated depiction of the same to get the message across.
And in the bottom image, is it not a snake wrapped around and guarding the window to eden?
Yes, but look at where the apple is hanging: Over someone's head. That's clearly Isaac Newton, who lives outside Eden. We're looking through the window from the other side. The snake is there to keep us from leaving Eden for the land of the IBM-compatible where mean-spirited trees will pelt you with fruit. Or something. Early Apple advertising tended to be a bit eclectic.
And does the ad not ask us to circle 42, to imprison the meaning of live, too keep us away from knowledge and wisdom?
That's just Apple trying to maximise their profits by delaying the destruction of Earth. Remember, Earth will be destroyed directly after the question to the answer has been found. By imprisoning the answer, Apple is trying to keep people from arriving at the question, thus abusing a loophole in how the story works in order to keep the Vogons at bay.
Arthur Dent has been asked about his opinion and commented that since he can't die before the whole thing has even started, he won't object if we keep stalling for another century or two. He also likes the fact that the construction workers in front of his house haven't been able to commence tearing it down for the last thirty-two years.
No, Steve Jobs is a golden cow maker. Someone has to create and satisfly a market for golden cows, y'know. Those things don't appear on their own.
It's clearly a quirk in the map generator. Apparently someone has been everywhere around that area but not near it and voilá, the chunks in the area get generated much later and don't fit in with the rest of the map.
The OP can be happy enough that the chunks have the same biome as the ones south/east of it (Savannah?). After all, there are some random biomes sprinkled around nearby. (Notch really ought to clean up the code that determines which biome a new chunk gets.)
Well, it's either that or someone had entirely too much fun with TNT. OTOH, if someone bombed down that far below the surface they'd had to have hit rock along the way and the surface is clearly the wrong color for that.