The funny thing is, they wouldn't have had to open the case to find out if it was a bomb or not. Just swab it and run it through a test machine they have.
I fly with a mini tower (the Condor, very sleak looking mini tower) almost all the time - I carry it on in a carryon bag. Sure, they have me take it out at the security check point - I would expect nothing less. But all they do is swab it to make sure there aren't drugs or bombs.
Unless, of course, those swabs don't really do much..
very likely to produce the fat, contented, ignorant kids we have today.
Ripe for the feast! I -knew- we were being fattened up for something.. Watch out, the aliens are going to come eat us! They don't want our natural resouces - they just want to eat fat, tender people.
"The amount of games developed with something else than Windows in mind is not existent."
Except, yanno, the 6.5 million copies of World Of Warcraft. Yeah, most of them are for PC. But there is still a mac version.. 6.5 million is not nonexistant;)
Really? things double in price over there? You're paying 4/500 pounds for a 360? (that's nearly 750/936 or so US dollars)
Somehow that's pretty difficult to believe...
A quick look on amazon confirms that the 360 is selling for £279.99 over there, or about $522 USD.
That's about a 20% markup, not a 100% markup.
Yeah, it's a lot. But sheesh.. too much hyperbole and people start calling you a blowhard.
Considering every console Ninty has made has sold for $199 on launch - the origional Nintendo, adjusted for inflation, was selling for nearly $375 dollars!
Ninty is getting cheaper, and higher quality consoles out now than they ever did. (except, way back when, they were pretty much only competing against the Sega Master System, due to the video game crash of the early 80s.)
Actually, not just the neo geo have been high above the others in terms of price. Other price leaders (and failures) from each generation include:
the Intellivision (selling at approximately $825, adjusted for inflation), the Saturn (roughly $525, adjusted for inflation - Playstation was just about $390 adjusted, the N64 was about $260 adjusted, and the failure of Jaguar was smack dab between them at about $350) and the 3DO from the same generation sold for about $975 adjusted.
The only generation where the price leader outsold all others was the Playstation 2. It launched at about $350 adjusted for inflation - the gamecube at about $212 adjusted, and the Xbox for about $330 adjusted. It sold more units than the Xbox, Gamecube, and Dreamcast combined.
Of course, with nearly double the price, somehow I doubt it will do as well this time around.
Also of note: Nintendo is not taking a loss with the sale of this console (speculatively), compared to the huge losses Microsoft and eventually Sony will be selling for.
Even if it does not sell as many units as the other two - it will make more money. And that's really what counts.
Interesting enough, the NES was, adjusted for inflation, was a little more expensive than the average of the two 360 price points ($350 or so).
Nintendo has been consistantly keeping their price lower and lower each subsequent generation.
Although their sales have been going down each generation - the NES was the best selling nintendo console made (the origional playstation outsold -that- by double, while the N64 sold about half as well as the origional) - if the poll on slashdot is to be extrapolated, the Wii will outsell the PS3 by 3, and the xbox360 by 5.
Of course, the slashdot crowd is not everyman's crowd, so you can probably expect the Wii to sell even better than that, given their slant towards the casual gamer and the non-gamer.
"Overall I give photoshop a "5" (out of ten) for their ergonomics, but I give them a "10" for what their application can do. I consider it partially my responsibility to climb that learning curve to do real work in digital graphics."
This reminded me of my trials and tribulations with 3D graphics applications.
Maya allows you to do some amazing stuff. Arguable, it's much more obtuse than Photoshop.
3D Studio Max allows you to do just as amazing stuff - but it's more obtuse than Maya.
Silo3D, on the other hand, doesn't allow you to do as much - right now it's a simple modeler, though they're adding advanced UV mapping (arguabley one of the most difficult tasks in both of the above) and displacement painting in the next version.
However, it has a very clean interface, and one of the fastest workflows of any modeller I've tried (from blender, to Maya, to 3Dstudio, to softimage). The keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and accessable. The interface is intuitive and accessable. It took me about a week of practicing Silo to get fast in modeling with it. I've been working with maya for about a year now, and it still confuses me sometimes.
It's hard to explain what it is exactly about the interface that makes it so easy to use. It feels more like an art program than an engineering program - using it just feels natural.
(note, although I'm not affiliated with Nevercenter in any way, I am a happy customer of their $109 tool; because there are many who haven't heard of the tool, I'm including this link [nevercenter.com]. If you model with polygons, it really is a must-try, and has a full-featured 30 day trial.)
he was arrested perfectly legally, for vandalism
Read some of the posts above you - writing on a sidewalk with chalk has been declared, by the supreme court, to not be vandalism.
In fact, the NYC law on vandalism states that there has to be intent to damage the property. Chalk does not damage, therefore the vandalism law is not applicable.
One thing the parent fails to mention, is that while one wheel is using current to change the position of the motor, the other wheel is using the opposite motion there to generate current. Curvy roads and such would not escalate it too much, I don't think.
The only time I use this technique is on the lab computers at school.. and even then, I don't go to the lengths that the grandparent does. I just remove the IE icon, replace it with a firefox icon with the same icon.
Seeing as these computers have shared accounts, and are only refreshed when they're rebooted... it saves future users a lot of headaches;) And to think, I do it out of the kindness of my heart.. if ever I got caught, I think the IT department would call for my expulsion.
Part of what else Safedisk does, is encrypt close to every part of the game.
That's right, even if you grab the info with SoftICE or whatever, it's encrypted. That's part of what else the device driver does - decrypt the data.
PC games will never go away, but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease.
Not being able to play a game because my CD drive isn't on the "approved" list, and then being thwarted when I try to mount an ISO of the game... that drives me away from buying computer games. More and more people are turning to piracy because copy-protection schemes turn them off to buying a legitimate copy of the game.
For gamers with CD-ROMs that are incompatible with SecuROM (and other copy protection measures), it is currently more convenient to download and crack pirated versions, than to buy a legitimate copy.
This is a dangerous discrepancy, and is running the game industry into the ground.
"It's about your dentist paying for the right to publicly broadcast music to an audience"
My dentist pipes in a top-40 station. Why should he pay for the right to play this? I could just as easily take out a walkman and listen to this and not pay for it. They payment is already taken into account when the radio station pays for the right to broadcast. Instead of burdening the listener with costs, they pass the costs down through advertisement.
What this ammounts to, is dentists paying an association for the right for the radio station to advertise to the person getting a root canal. It doesn't make sense; as an earlier poster put it, the independant association is paid more than once for the same performance (if said performance is a radio performance). It's ludicris.
Win2k has an excelent compatibility mode you can run games in. I've gotten many of the windows 98 games that many people have had issues running in win2k, to work with the compatibility mode. It's just kinda tricky to turn on.. Even Fallout works in 2k.
"I don't have time to sit and babysit someone that's playing around with something that could potentially bring our network down."
Sasser? Netsky? Blaster?
Frankly, you've got more to worry about simply running windows, than what you'd have to worry about if you had a few linux boxen on the network.
The only issue with this solution, is that many educational institutes (such as mine, a community college - one of three in the country with a high performance computing - clustering - department, no less) which are monocultured to windows, run Novell as their networking software.
And I have yet to find a liveCD which makes things relatively quick to set up to connect to a Novell network, even when you can get at all the settings fairly easy in windows to configure the Novell client.
Medieval: Total War, anyone?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Medieval iteration of this game used religion fantastically. If your populace was too zealous, and you had an unreligious leader as a governer of their province, they would be less loyal. If you had a really zealous governer, and most people in the province were of another religion, you'd better set up missionaries. The more zeal a province had, the more troops a Jihaad or Crusade would gather during its stay in said province. Glossed over and caricatured? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is, they wouldn't have had to open the case to find out if it was a bomb or not. Just swab it and run it through a test machine they have.
I fly with a mini tower (the Condor, very sleak looking mini tower) almost all the time - I carry it on in a carryon bag. Sure, they have me take it out at the security check point - I would expect nothing less. But all they do is swab it to make sure there aren't drugs or bombs.
Unless, of course, those swabs don't really do much..
very likely to produce the fat, contented, ignorant kids we have today.
Ripe for the feast! I -knew- we were being fattened up for something.. Watch out, the aliens are going to come eat us! They don't want our natural resouces - they just want to eat fat, tender people.
One might call it a Modest Invasion.
"he guy used the data without authorization and by making it public" Wouldn't the fact that Amir sold him the data make that moot?
"The amount of games developed with something else than Windows in mind is not existent." Except, yanno, the 6.5 million copies of World Of Warcraft. Yeah, most of them are for PC. But there is still a mac version.. 6.5 million is not nonexistant ;)
One of my favorite NPCs in Oblivion was the Orc guy who sounded like a middle schooler with a thesaurus. It was great!
I love it. "Failure Type: OS Stopped Working." Real informative there!
Indeed! Which is why Sony coming out with a 5/600 dollar price point is simply ludicris.
Really? things double in price over there? You're paying 4/500 pounds for a 360? (that's nearly 750/936 or so US dollars) Somehow that's pretty difficult to believe... A quick look on amazon confirms that the 360 is selling for £279.99 over there, or about $522 USD. That's about a 20% markup, not a 100% markup. Yeah, it's a lot. But sheesh.. too much hyperbole and people start calling you a blowhard.
Considering every console Ninty has made has sold for $199 on launch - the origional Nintendo, adjusted for inflation, was selling for nearly $375 dollars!
Ninty is getting cheaper, and higher quality consoles out now than they ever did. (except, way back when, they were pretty much only competing against the Sega Master System, due to the video game crash of the early 80s.)
Actually, not just the neo geo have been high above the others in terms of price. Other price leaders (and failures) from each generation include:
the Intellivision (selling at approximately $825, adjusted for inflation), the Saturn (roughly $525, adjusted for inflation - Playstation was just about $390 adjusted, the N64 was about $260 adjusted, and the failure of Jaguar was smack dab between them at about $350) and the 3DO from the same generation sold for about $975 adjusted.
The only generation where the price leader outsold all others was the Playstation 2. It launched at about $350 adjusted for inflation - the gamecube at about $212 adjusted, and the Xbox for about $330 adjusted. It sold more units than the Xbox, Gamecube, and Dreamcast combined.
Of course, with nearly double the price, somehow I doubt it will do as well this time around.
Also of note: Nintendo is not taking a loss with the sale of this console (speculatively), compared to the huge losses Microsoft and eventually Sony will be selling for.
Even if it does not sell as many units as the other two - it will make more money. And that's really what counts.
Interesting enough, the NES was, adjusted for inflation, was a little more expensive than the average of the two 360 price points ($350 or so).
Nintendo has been consistantly keeping their price lower and lower each subsequent generation.
Although their sales have been going down each generation - the NES was the best selling nintendo console made (the origional playstation outsold -that- by double, while the N64 sold about half as well as the origional) - if the poll on slashdot is to be extrapolated, the Wii will outsell the PS3 by 3, and the xbox360 by 5.
Of course, the slashdot crowd is not everyman's crowd, so you can probably expect the Wii to sell even better than that, given their slant towards the casual gamer and the non-gamer.
"Overall I give photoshop a "5" (out of ten) for their ergonomics, but I give them a "10" for what their application can do. I consider it partially my responsibility to climb that learning curve to do real work in digital graphics." This reminded me of my trials and tribulations with 3D graphics applications. Maya allows you to do some amazing stuff. Arguable, it's much more obtuse than Photoshop. 3D Studio Max allows you to do just as amazing stuff - but it's more obtuse than Maya. Silo3D, on the other hand, doesn't allow you to do as much - right now it's a simple modeler, though they're adding advanced UV mapping (arguabley one of the most difficult tasks in both of the above) and displacement painting in the next version. However, it has a very clean interface, and one of the fastest workflows of any modeller I've tried (from blender, to Maya, to 3Dstudio, to softimage). The keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and accessable. The interface is intuitive and accessable. It took me about a week of practicing Silo to get fast in modeling with it. I've been working with maya for about a year now, and it still confuses me sometimes. It's hard to explain what it is exactly about the interface that makes it so easy to use. It feels more like an art program than an engineering program - using it just feels natural. (note, although I'm not affiliated with Nevercenter in any way, I am a happy customer of their $109 tool; because there are many who haven't heard of the tool, I'm including this link [nevercenter.com]. If you model with polygons, it really is a must-try, and has a full-featured 30 day trial.)
he was arrested perfectly legally, for vandalism Read some of the posts above you - writing on a sidewalk with chalk has been declared, by the supreme court, to not be vandalism.
In fact, the NYC law on vandalism states that there has to be intent to damage the property. Chalk does not damage, therefore the vandalism law is not applicable.
You may have downloaded it and installed it - but do you have a CD key that will let you register with the Blizzard servers?
One thing the parent fails to mention, is that while one wheel is using current to change the position of the motor, the other wheel is using the opposite motion there to generate current. Curvy roads and such would not escalate it too much, I don't think.
The only time I use this technique is on the lab computers at school.. and even then, I don't go to the lengths that the grandparent does. I just remove the IE icon, replace it with a firefox icon with the same icon. Seeing as these computers have shared accounts, and are only refreshed when they're rebooted... it saves future users a lot of headaches ;) And to think, I do it out of the kindness of my heart.. if ever I got caught, I think the IT department would call for my expulsion.
Part of what else Safedisk does, is encrypt close to every part of the game. That's right, even if you grab the info with SoftICE or whatever, it's encrypted. That's part of what else the device driver does - decrypt the data.
For gamers with CD-ROMs that are incompatible with SecuROM (and other copy protection measures), it is currently more convenient to download and crack pirated versions, than to buy a legitimate copy.
This is a dangerous discrepancy, and is running the game industry into the ground.
What this ammounts to, is dentists paying an association for the right for the radio station to advertise to the person getting a root canal. It doesn't make sense; as an earlier poster put it, the independant association is paid more than once for the same performance (if said performance is a radio performance). It's ludicris.
Trickle-down theory is about as voodoo as casting cure 2 or whatever on it. Even with all these economy-enriching tax cuts to the upper crust, take-home pay is at its lowest percentage of the economy since 1939.
Trickle-down works. To make the rich richer.
Win2k has an excelent compatibility mode you can run games in. I've gotten many of the windows 98 games that many people have had issues running in win2k, to work with the compatibility mode. It's just kinda tricky to turn on.. Even Fallout works in 2k.
"I don't have time to sit and babysit someone that's playing around with something that could potentially bring our network down." Sasser? Netsky? Blaster? Frankly, you've got more to worry about simply running windows, than what you'd have to worry about if you had a few linux boxen on the network.
What's funny, is that my college decided to deactivate boot from CD.
But they forgot to deactivate boot to diskette. Duhr.
The only issue with this solution, is that many educational institutes (such as mine, a community college - one of three in the country with a high performance computing - clustering - department, no less) which are monocultured to windows, run Novell as their networking software.
And I have yet to find a liveCD which makes things relatively quick to set up to connect to a Novell network, even when you can get at all the settings fairly easy in windows to configure the Novell client.
The Medieval iteration of this game used religion fantastically. If your populace was too zealous, and you had an unreligious leader as a governer of their province, they would be less loyal. If you had a really zealous governer, and most people in the province were of another religion, you'd better set up missionaries. The more zeal a province had, the more troops a Jihaad or Crusade would gather during its stay in said province. Glossed over and caricatured? I think not.