The answer to that might be another bard-type class.
Class 1 is great against small-to-medium sized mobs. It's focused on buffing the party and debuffing lots of targets at once (perhaps even to the point where the skills get more effective the more enemies there are). Against bosses, the buffs are nice-ish but the debuffs simply don't cut it (for example because the bosses have strong resistances or because the buffs lower applicable stats by absolute values).
Class 2 is great against few big enemies. It's focused on delivering strong debuffs or damage effects on single targets with skills that just aren't suited well for mass combat. Against bosses, this class shines because it has skills that ignore resistance or because its buffs lower the target's values proportionally. Maybe the debuffs stack.
The aim is to give people the following choices:
- Take one of each. This will mean one useless slot during the majority of the raid and at the boss but the other slot should make up for it.
- Take one of class 1 and one DD. This makes the majority of the raid easier but you have one wasted slot at the end. Good if you can handle the boss but the regular mobs are annoying.
- Take one of class 2 and one DD. This makes the majority of the raid harder but gives you an extra edge against the boss. Good if you can handle the regular mobs but not the bosses.
- Take two of class 1. Even harder bosses, even easier mobs.
- Take two of class 2. Even easier bosses, even harder mobs.
- Take two DDs. This leaves you flexible, giving you constant effectivity regardless of the situation. Of course, you might end up missing the special oomph the bard classes can provide.
Not every class needs to be useful all the time. Make it worth the party's time to drag around a character who's a dead weight in certain situations by making him very useful in others.
This idea isn't even limited to traditional combat classes. How about a class that can raise the drop rate? They might be next to useless in combat but people will still want to have one in the party because it's the fastest way to get some decent gear.
You do realize that most modern OO languages use some extended form of the C syntax? Off the hand I can only think of OCaml as a non-C-like OO language. Okay, and Object Pascal (aka Delphi).
Of course websites have the distinct drawback of requiring an internet connection. I use an iPod touch. Same APIs and capabilities as the iPhone, same app store. No ability to use web apps if you don't have a WLAN to connect to. And even if I switched to an iPhone, I'd need a ludicrously expensive plan to cover all the data traffic I'm generating just by accessing my apps.
A web app identical in capabilities to a regular app would impose additional usage costs on me (starting with a 700 EUR phone). And it's not even cheaper - the only thing I actually bought on Apple's store was a firmware upgrade. Everything else on my iPod is freeware, shows ads not obtrusive enough to annoy me or has restrictions I don't mind. Expenses: Zero.
Not every user is like me but on the iPhone/iPod touch platform there's a lot of connectivity-relevant usage scenarios, from "I can easily afford an unlimited flatrate for my iPhone" to "I use an iPod touch". Not every one of them would be happy to have their apps require an internet connection - in fact, everyone hated it when Apple had the exact same idea; JavaScript performance was not the reason.
If they come up with a way of letting me interact with websites without me having to use the internet, I'm listening. Until they have finished bending logic into a Slinky I'm going to stick with native apps.
In short, the web wins where it competes on a nontechnical level. People aren't using the internet for matchmaking because HTML + serverside scripting is such an attractive way of implementing it, they do it because the internet gives them a convenient way of networking with people.
On the other hand, Mopzilla is arguing here that the WWW is always superior when compared to other ways of implementing applications. They're arguing that the web "has always won" as an application framework. Apart from webmail, there isn't much substance to that. Web-based calendars/scheduling software? Web-based IMs? Web based imaging software? There's probably tons of examples for those but none I hve heard of because they're irrelevant for the regular user. I know of 280 Slides (even if I had to google the first part of the name) but that doesn't change the fact that I do presentations in Keynote. I know Google has some kind of office suite but it's no OpenOffice.
Add to that the fact that web apps tend to integrate horribly and I don't see anything but hot air in that guy's comment. Things would be slightly better if those web apps were built against a common toolkit that esures at least a modicum of consistency (note: Mozilla offers exactly that and they'd be very happy if all those apps would be built on XUL) but that still doesn't change the fact that an interface that conforms to one device's look and feel will look completely alien on another.
Either you use some kind of data-centric layout-less interface description language that produces pseudo-integrated ugly interfaces everywhere or you have to write one interface for every device (there goes write-once-run-everywhere) or you just accept that your app will look out of place on most devices. Apps that don't look the part don't make the sale.
Thus, your online banking information is also public data as you most likely don't have a privacy service agreement with your ISP. Granted, you send it via SSL but if someone gets around that he's perfectly justified to take it.
Read up on headphone technology. In-ear headphones (the ones that you shove into your ear canal) are available in "open" and "closed" configurations. Closed in-ears block virtually all noise around you while open ones merely reduce the amplitude a bit, typically by about 3 dB. If you listen to your music at a sane volume that means you can still hear much of what's going on around you.
Okay, there are a lot of FOSS FPSes out there... But what many posters here have noticed, they seem to be mostly Q3A clones. What about people who aren't competitive-level Quake players? Is there anything else out there? I mean, Warsow, Nexuiz and Cube may be great games but I'd like something different. Perhaps something with a decent singleplayer mode.
The only thing I can think of is Aleph One/M1A1 and while Bungie certainly knew how to make a good game I think it's kind of sad that in the FOSS FPS domain the choice seems to boil down to a Doom contemporary and a number of Quake 3 derivatives.
I could really go for a decent System Shock 2 clone right now, if only because the original is almost impossible to play properly these days.
The problem is that Microsoft doesn't really support third-party IFS drivers. They have APIs for that but they don't offer any help and as a result most IFSes (includeing the two available for ext2) are nowhere near the quality you'd expect from a file system driver. I'd much rather trust my data to FAT32 than to an ext2 partition regularly written to by Windows.
Oh, and IIRC the ext2 IFSes don't support fsck; you have to do that on a Linux box. And they don't support block sizes >128 KB so you have to use non-default parameters when formatting, which the IFSes also don't support.
Of course Nokia could theoretically write their own Windows implementation of ext2 from scratch - but the result would be that now they have another Windows driver and a handful of userland programs to maintain and their customer are stuck with a file system that virtually ensures they can never put the data on a computer that doesn't run their software. In short, a customer service nightmare.
Or they just use FAT32 and their customers silently accept that you just can't store very large files on flash cards.
Exactly. Very repetitive music that covers much of the spectrum can be seen as a more enjoyable form of pink noise. The effect is to mask all other sounds you receive and to create an environment where no aural cues interrupt your attention. Once your brain has realized it's not going to receive interesting data from your ears it stops wasting focus on interpreting it.
There are very good reasons why people would need this. The "uniform noise environment" point has already been made. One poster noted that tinnitus sufferers need some kind of aural stimulus or they get hit by a distracting high-pitched squeal. Then there's a condition called hyperacusis - the sufferer is overly sensitive to sound, being easily distracted or perceiving sound as too loud earlier than most. A variant of this makes it hard to ignore any sound, even quiet ones - they automatically command the sufferer's attention. You can imagine what this does to the sufferer's concentration when someone nearby talks.
Developers need to dedicate as much mental capacity as possible to a given task, especially since they need to keep many different bits of information in their head at any time. This makes noise insulation a good idea. Noise-dampening headphones (in-ear phones or the big earmuff-types) can reduce reasonable external noise to a point where music or white noise at a sane volume will completely cancel most of it.
If music privileges are to be taken away, I recommend issuing passive noise-canceling gear to focus-oriented workers or installing pink noise generators to provide at least some form of noise suppression.
1. Get rid of the headphones.
2. File complaints about the telephone staff in the cubicle next to you talking all day.
3. Repeat step 2 until they cave in to your demand to allow all employees to wear heavy-duty noise protection gear.
4. Secretly integrate wireless headphones into noise protection gear.
Alternatively, omit step 4 and just give the telephone staff dirty looks every day while putting on your airport-grade earmuffs.
Maybe you mean that the ratio of "had aggression directed at them" to "was killed by said aggression" is higher for policemen - but even if we assume that everyone who is ever angry at a policeman immediately ends up killing the cop, the data still shows that fewer policemen die. If we assume that aggression against policemen is more likely to be fatal, the only possible conclusion is that policemen don't draw aggression as much.
In short, you argue that policemen are more well-liked by everyone than, say, timber cutters. I don't see how that meshes with their job being especially dangerous.
They're virtually identical to what I usually hear about dealing with US cops: Reduce any interaction to the neccessary minimum, never mention anything you don't absolutely need to mention, never get out of or into a car unless told to, never touch them under any circumstances. Deviating from that behavior means you're fair game to either arrest or to have a criminal investigation constructed against out of anything you said.
The US border is rights-less. You're not inside the USA proper and have no rights under US law. In short: Be double-careful or the border guards can screw you over in ways that would get their asses put in jail were you inside the country. Unless they manage to commit a gross human rights violation, expect the border guards to get away with everything they do.
In short: Only cross the US border when really neccessary, in either direction.
Okay, you've got me interested. I'm definitely looking forward to Twilight coming on German free-TV now so I can riff it with friends.
I definitely expect some extremely bad stuff here, though. If Twilight isn't worse than The Core, Battlefield Earth and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians I'm going to be disappointed.
That didn't stop the resurrected Comodore from offering a Giana Sisters-themed computer case (that was kick-ass) and a company called Spellbound (including the creator of the original game) from releasing a sequel to the game for the Nintendo DS.
By the way, that sequel is pretty good. I really like the music.
Clones are not neccessarily pointless, even if we assume that no new features are added. One instance of good clones is when the clone brings a game to platforms it wasn't originally released for.
Bad idea. It wouldn't take long until someone decides to fire at the "virtual" civilians or find out if the IFF keeps him from shooting his "virtual" teammates and if he can overcome it by starting a salvo and then rapidly turning.
And assume people found out about this (perhaps by virtue of the drones teabagging killed enemies): They'd have to immediately cancel the project before someone hostile to the Army makes his way into the game and intentionally goes on a rampage.
Letting random civilians remotely control military hardware is a phenomenally bad idea.
Probably the same problem as on every other OS: It's damn slow. One reason why I'm eagerly awaiting HTML5 is that it might mean we could get online video without runtime-induced stuttering.
Consider that until CS3, Photoshop for Mac was a Carbon app (read: written using the OS 8/OS 9/OS X transition toolkit). Even with OS 9 being dead since 2002, Adobe still sreamed bloody murder over Apple stopping to fully support Carbon with Leopard, even though Apple has said since OS X was first released that Carbon was a legacy framework.
Adobe really doesn't like rewriting things they don't absolutely have to rewrite.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to that might be another bard-type class.
Class 1 is great against small-to-medium sized mobs. It's focused on buffing the party and debuffing lots of targets at once (perhaps even to the point where the skills get more effective the more enemies there are). Against bosses, the buffs are nice-ish but the debuffs simply don't cut it (for example because the bosses have strong resistances or because the buffs lower applicable stats by absolute values).
Class 2 is great against few big enemies. It's focused on delivering strong debuffs or damage effects on single targets with skills that just aren't suited well for mass combat. Against bosses, this class shines because it has skills that ignore resistance or because its buffs lower the target's values proportionally. Maybe the debuffs stack.
The aim is to give people the following choices:
- Take one of each. This will mean one useless slot during the majority of the raid and at the boss but the other slot should make up for it.
- Take one of class 1 and one DD. This makes the majority of the raid easier but you have one wasted slot at the end. Good if you can handle the boss but the regular mobs are annoying.
- Take one of class 2 and one DD. This makes the majority of the raid harder but gives you an extra edge against the boss. Good if you can handle the regular mobs but not the bosses.
- Take two of class 1. Even harder bosses, even easier mobs.
- Take two of class 2. Even easier bosses, even harder mobs.
- Take two DDs. This leaves you flexible, giving you constant effectivity regardless of the situation. Of course, you might end up missing the special oomph the bard classes can provide.
Not every class needs to be useful all the time. Make it worth the party's time to drag around a character who's a dead weight in certain situations by making him very useful in others.
This idea isn't even limited to traditional combat classes. How about a class that can raise the drop rate? They might be next to useless in combat but people will still want to have one in the party because it's the fastest way to get some decent gear.
You do realize that most modern OO languages use some extended form of the C syntax? Off the hand I can only think of OCaml as a non-C-like OO language. Okay, and Object Pascal (aka Delphi).
Of course websites have the distinct drawback of requiring an internet connection. I use an iPod touch. Same APIs and capabilities as the iPhone, same app store. No ability to use web apps if you don't have a WLAN to connect to. And even if I switched to an iPhone, I'd need a ludicrously expensive plan to cover all the data traffic I'm generating just by accessing my apps.
A web app identical in capabilities to a regular app would impose additional usage costs on me (starting with a 700 EUR phone). And it's not even cheaper - the only thing I actually bought on Apple's store was a firmware upgrade. Everything else on my iPod is freeware, shows ads not obtrusive enough to annoy me or has restrictions I don't mind. Expenses: Zero.
Not every user is like me but on the iPhone/iPod touch platform there's a lot of connectivity-relevant usage scenarios, from "I can easily afford an unlimited flatrate for my iPhone" to "I use an iPod touch". Not every one of them would be happy to have their apps require an internet connection - in fact, everyone hated it when Apple had the exact same idea; JavaScript performance was not the reason.
If they come up with a way of letting me interact with websites without me having to use the internet, I'm listening. Until they have finished bending logic into a Slinky I'm going to stick with native apps.
In short, the web wins where it competes on a nontechnical level. People aren't using the internet for matchmaking because HTML + serverside scripting is such an attractive way of implementing it, they do it because the internet gives them a convenient way of networking with people.
On the other hand, Mopzilla is arguing here that the WWW is always superior when compared to other ways of implementing applications. They're arguing that the web "has always won" as an application framework. Apart from webmail, there isn't much substance to that. Web-based calendars/scheduling software? Web-based IMs? Web based imaging software? There's probably tons of examples for those but none I hve heard of because they're irrelevant for the regular user. I know of 280 Slides (even if I had to google the first part of the name) but that doesn't change the fact that I do presentations in Keynote. I know Google has some kind of office suite but it's no OpenOffice.
Add to that the fact that web apps tend to integrate horribly and I don't see anything but hot air in that guy's comment. Things would be slightly better if those web apps were built against a common toolkit that esures at least a modicum of consistency (note: Mozilla offers exactly that and they'd be very happy if all those apps would be built on XUL) but that still doesn't change the fact that an interface that conforms to one device's look and feel will look completely alien on another.
Either you use some kind of data-centric layout-less interface description language that produces pseudo-integrated ugly interfaces everywhere or you have to write one interface for every device (there goes write-once-run-everywhere) or you just accept that your app will look out of place on most devices. Apps that don't look the part don't make the sale.
Thus, your online banking information is also public data as you most likely don't have a privacy service agreement with your ISP. Granted, you send it via SSL but if someone gets around that he's perfectly justified to take it.
No, a hippocrite is someone who uses one set of values to judge himself and another to judge hippopotami.
Read up on headphone technology. In-ear headphones (the ones that you shove into your ear canal) are available in "open" and "closed" configurations. Closed in-ears block virtually all noise around you while open ones merely reduce the amplitude a bit, typically by about 3 dB. If you listen to your music at a sane volume that means you can still hear much of what's going on around you.
Very long. Most independent artists aren't content industry corporations.
Okay, there are a lot of FOSS FPSes out there... But what many posters here have noticed, they seem to be mostly Q3A clones. What about people who aren't competitive-level Quake players? Is there anything else out there? I mean, Warsow, Nexuiz and Cube may be great games but I'd like something different. Perhaps something with a decent singleplayer mode.
The only thing I can think of is Aleph One/M1A1 and while Bungie certainly knew how to make a good game I think it's kind of sad that in the FOSS FPS domain the choice seems to boil down to a Doom contemporary and a number of Quake 3 derivatives.
I could really go for a decent System Shock 2 clone right now, if only because the original is almost impossible to play properly these days.
Details, please. How does one player manage to kill off a game?
The problem is that Microsoft doesn't really support third-party IFS drivers. They have APIs for that but they don't offer any help and as a result most IFSes (includeing the two available for ext2) are nowhere near the quality you'd expect from a file system driver. I'd much rather trust my data to FAT32 than to an ext2 partition regularly written to by Windows.
Oh, and IIRC the ext2 IFSes don't support fsck; you have to do that on a Linux box. And they don't support block sizes >128 KB so you have to use non-default parameters when formatting, which the IFSes also don't support.
Of course Nokia could theoretically write their own Windows implementation of ext2 from scratch - but the result would be that now they have another Windows driver and a handful of userland programs to maintain and their customer are stuck with a file system that virtually ensures they can never put the data on a computer that doesn't run their software. In short, a customer service nightmare.
Or they just use FAT32 and their customers silently accept that you just can't store very large files on flash cards.
Which is specifically why it won't be used.
Exactly. Very repetitive music that covers much of the spectrum can be seen as a more enjoyable form of pink noise. The effect is to mask all other sounds you receive and to create an environment where no aural cues interrupt your attention. Once your brain has realized it's not going to receive interesting data from your ears it stops wasting focus on interpreting it.
There are very good reasons why people would need this. The "uniform noise environment" point has already been made. One poster noted that tinnitus sufferers need some kind of aural stimulus or they get hit by a distracting high-pitched squeal. Then there's a condition called hyperacusis - the sufferer is overly sensitive to sound, being easily distracted or perceiving sound as too loud earlier than most. A variant of this makes it hard to ignore any sound, even quiet ones - they automatically command the sufferer's attention. You can imagine what this does to the sufferer's concentration when someone nearby talks.
Developers need to dedicate as much mental capacity as possible to a given task, especially since they need to keep many different bits of information in their head at any time. This makes noise insulation a good idea. Noise-dampening headphones (in-ear phones or the big earmuff-types) can reduce reasonable external noise to a point where music or white noise at a sane volume will completely cancel most of it.
If music privileges are to be taken away, I recommend issuing passive noise-canceling gear to focus-oriented workers or installing pink noise generators to provide at least some form of noise suppression.
1. Get rid of the headphones.
2. File complaints about the telephone staff in the cubicle next to you talking all day.
3. Repeat step 2 until they cave in to your demand to allow all employees to wear heavy-duty noise protection gear.
4. Secretly integrate wireless headphones into noise protection gear.
Alternatively, omit step 4 and just give the telephone staff dirty looks every day while putting on your airport-grade earmuffs.
When people are killed, they tend to die.
Maybe you mean that the ratio of "had aggression directed at them" to "was killed by said aggression" is higher for policemen - but even if we assume that everyone who is ever angry at a policeman immediately ends up killing the cop, the data still shows that fewer policemen die. If we assume that aggression against policemen is more likely to be fatal, the only possible conclusion is that policemen don't draw aggression as much.
In short, you argue that policemen are more well-liked by everyone than, say, timber cutters. I don't see how that meshes with their job being especially dangerous.
They're virtually identical to what I usually hear about dealing with US cops: Reduce any interaction to the neccessary minimum, never mention anything you don't absolutely need to mention, never get out of or into a car unless told to, never touch them under any circumstances. Deviating from that behavior means you're fair game to either arrest or to have a criminal investigation constructed against out of anything you said.
The US border is rights-less. You're not inside the USA proper and have no rights under US law. In short: Be double-careful or the border guards can screw you over in ways that would get their asses put in jail were you inside the country. Unless they manage to commit a gross human rights violation, expect the border guards to get away with everything they do.
In short: Only cross the US border when really neccessary, in either direction.
A semantics nazi would point out that the signature is not part of the post proper (as evidenced by the option to not display any signatures).
You, sir, are hereby found to be insufficiently national socialistic.
Well, though luck. Online informations work exactly like Unix file permissions: They're either 700 or 744, there are no other possibilities.
Okay, you've got me interested. I'm definitely looking forward to Twilight coming on German free-TV now so I can riff it with friends.
I definitely expect some extremely bad stuff here, though. If Twilight isn't worse than The Core, Battlefield Earth and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians I'm going to be disappointed.
That didn't stop the resurrected Comodore from offering a Giana Sisters-themed computer case (that was kick-ass) and a company called Spellbound (including the creator of the original game) from releasing a sequel to the game for the Nintendo DS.
By the way, that sequel is pretty good. I really like the music.
Isn't FarmVille actually the clone? We had an article about that game recently and from what I could gather Farm Town preceded it.
Clones are not neccessarily pointless, even if we assume that no new features are added. One instance of good clones is when the clone brings a game to platforms it wasn't originally released for.
Bad idea. It wouldn't take long until someone decides to fire at the "virtual" civilians or find out if the IFF keeps him from shooting his "virtual" teammates and if he can overcome it by starting a salvo and then rapidly turning.
And assume people found out about this (perhaps by virtue of the drones teabagging killed enemies): They'd have to immediately cancel the project before someone hostile to the Army makes his way into the game and intentionally goes on a rampage.
Letting random civilians remotely control military hardware is a phenomenally bad idea.
Probably the same problem as on every other OS: It's damn slow. One reason why I'm eagerly awaiting HTML5 is that it might mean we could get online video without runtime-induced stuttering.
Consider that until CS3, Photoshop for Mac was a Carbon app (read: written using the OS 8/OS 9/OS X transition toolkit). Even with OS 9 being dead since 2002, Adobe still sreamed bloody murder over Apple stopping to fully support Carbon with Leopard, even though Apple has said since OS X was first released that Carbon was a legacy framework.
Adobe really doesn't like rewriting things they don't absolutely have to rewrite.