I just come away with the impression it was a showboat for ID's latest engine to entice licencees.
That's exactly what it is. ID makes their big money from licensing their engines, not making games. Carmack has said as much. I swear I remember a post of his stating exactly what you posited; that DOOM 3 is an exhibition for their engine. That's why I hate to see the $55 price tag. They are having the game fans pay the price of the engine development, rather than the game development. A $55 *game* should have a lot of good *gameplay*, regardless of its pretty engine. Sure, a premium for a cool new engine is acceptable, but if the gameplay is sub-par then there should be a corresponding break on the price due to the smaller costs of developing the gameplay (Daikatana's development model notwithstanding).
My workmate was trying to use Moz to access the company's web site. He found that the non-standard backspaces in the path names were causing %20's to be inserted in the location bar, thus causing links to fail. He wrote an email that explained this very well, and explained that the fix is to simply replace all backslashes with regular slashes. He sent this email to the CIO and a guy that helped with the web site.
Our CIO responded: "I think it's a permissions problem. I'll have [dude] look at it and fix it."
I think he was really getting at "independance". And, money is a large part of not being dependant on others. It also affords one the freedom of enjoying a number of activities. The simple fact of life is that it takes money to do pretty much everything. Even if what you enjoy is sitting in your home playing with your children, you've got rent and bills to pay. Having more money makes it easier to provide for the needs of those you care about, and having enough to not worry about getting evicted, and maybe even take an occasional vacation, provides peace of mind and additional opportunity. For most people, middle-age is when you've advanced in your carreer, are earning more money, probably have a savings, and are becoming more freed from the shackles of monetary obligations simply because the obligations are a smaller percentage of your income.
Heck, if money TRUELY is not important, then why do you go to a job? Sorry, but money IS important in life, and as such is one of the larger "points" of life.
3-5 Hours a week, and a "marathon" session of 4-10 hours on a weekend, if I'm lucky, is more accurate. But, a week with 0 play time really brings down the average.
City of Heroes has done a decent job of making it easy to play for 1/2 hour at a time, or group for 1-3 hour sessions, or get on a Team Force for ~5 hours. That's probably as good as an RPG type game can get.
Still, I don't see a problem with a character levelling, say, 1-2 levels per month, in a player's off time. If a person plays for a whole year, that still only gives their main character 24-48 levels. A power gamer can get to 24 in a month (probably a lot less than that), and 48 in a couple, so why not let the people who can only play casually also experience the higher level content, albeit at a much slower rate than a dedicated gamer? I don't see it throwing off any balance, and it will still be the powergamers pushing the content envelope. The recreational gamers simply won't have time to visit all of the areas as they level, but they'll be able to have fun experiencing the high-level skills and whatnot.
Making tradeskills more fun then EQ would definately be nice (SWG is better with this to varying degrees) but to allow it to be automated takes absolutely *all* the prestige and reward for it.
Well, I've paid $75 to Star Wars Online twice now. I haven't had a chance to play the game in a couple months. Instead of my money going down the hole completely, it would be nice if, the next time I logged in, I found that my skills had gone up at 10% or 5% of my average exp/hour while I was logged out. As it is, my char is just where I left him and I feel that I've wasted 2 months of money. I'd feel a LOT less like cancelling my account right now if I knew my char(s) would be more buff when I started playing again, so I could at least explore a little new content.
If you can get that feeling of accomplishment without having to work for it, then bless you. But I can't.
The problem is having TIME to do that. If you only get to play an hour or so a week, and nearly all the good items take (multiple?) 5-10 hour large-group quest sessions, then you'll NEVER get any of the cool stuff. So, what's the incentive to hand over your money? Being able to go from level 12 to 13 in 2 months of play time? Shyeah. Now, of course I'm not suggesting that exp and items just be handed to characters. But, there must be a way that they can better attract and retain the casual gamer.
If all it's gonna do is crap and scream, you can go buy a Betty Baby down at Toys R Us for $30.
[Really moderators, Insightful??? I think he was going for Funny. Just because they said it was the SIZE of an 18 month-old, doesn't mean that's all it DOES. Oh, to have meta-modded the parent...]
I really don't see this as being a problem anyway. It's the specific behavior of each individual that would get them flagged. As long as they weren't extrapolating the behavior of a few individuals to everyone who shopped in that store, and consistantly targeted a given individual no matter which store they shopped in, there would be no way to cry "profiling" or "racism" or "class discrimination".
I'd not use a motor, just a locking mechanism. Something that looks like a knee brace, but freely moves until the locking pin is engaged. The only time it's powered is when the lock changes positions, and you'd only need a solenoid.
If you want to understand the "broad concepts" of computer programming, I'd have to 2nd Knuth's programming series. Specifically, you should learn data structures and their performance, aka O(n) or Big-O (i.e., why looking up an item in a hash or binary tree is much faster than searching through an array or linked list for large data sets, and how large a set you need before you need to implement a more complex data structure).
That topic is enough to keep you busy for awhile, and the most important in having programs that run reasonably. It can be easy to make O(n) mistakes in general program structure, and not know why your program runs so slow.
For other broad "how to program" topics, the topic book is probably a good place to start. Design patterns are a good way to stretch your brain, too (search for Design Patterns and Gang of Four for the seminal work). Learning languages like Lisp, ML, Prolog in addition to OO languages (Scheme being probably about the only true OO language, Ruby is probably good, too) will also expand your mind.
A great place to start might be http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html . It's a book (free online if you want) titled Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and it uses Lisp/Scheme as it's teaching tool. I keep meaning to read it, but I think it covers much that you might learn with Knuth's series. It would at least be a good intro.
I would like to see a few of the samples they used. I'm interested in the sample length and whitespace %. I think 6 spaces would work better when there is ample whitespace and comments. If the code is short and packed tightly, 2-4 spaces would be plenty to keep the nested logic apparent. But, spread it out over 2-3 pages and add comments, and I think I'd have a hard time telling the indent level.
Then again, maybe a test would prove me wrong. That's why I'd like to see a sample:)
The democrats can't see the good in anything, and it is very fucking tiring to listen to.
In their defense, it seems to me that the Democratic party has really been hurt in the last few years because they try to be fair and not mud-sling. The R's, on the other hand, pull out all the stops and character assasinate as SOP, and it works. It's been working for Bush since he ran for governor of Texas and called the incumbant a drug-using lesbian alcoholic the week before the election. It won him the election in a fairly big upset. I think the Ds have learned their lesson and walked off the high-road to join the Rs in the muddy gutters.
Yeah, except the majority of people are too disinterested and lazy to actually use their brains. They want the exciting sound bite, non the in-depth discussion. If you ask most people why they have their particular opinion on a hot topic, they can rarely back it up, they're just parroting an opinion they thought was news.
First, yeah, pretty much. The human brain is very good at retrieving layered information (like in a book, you remember how "deep" things are). Just how much of the lists are you re-reading when you need to find something?
Second, this is kinda weird. It sounds like you're arguing for keeping things in the taskbar, but then you hide 40 out of 47 items in a submenu. The point is that some people don't want to waste screen realestate on active program icons. It's not being suggested that the task bar be eliminated, just that it should be hidden during the 99% of the time you're on the computer and not using it.
You have to move your mouse just to see what's open.
I know what's open. Also, every time I alt-tab to another app, I get a nice preview of all open applications.
You can't see any alerts blinking in the system tray (new email, network activity, CPU usage, bandwidth usage, etc).
Don't use 'em anyway. I like my computer to do what I want when I want it to, I don't like it interrupting what I'm working on. If it's important (i.e. system critical), then pop up a dialog box. Don't go "hey, hey, look at me, look at me!". I hate that shit. If I'm curious about CPU or bandwidth for some reason, I'll pull up an "always on top" app that displays that. Otherwise, don't clutter my workspace with distracting blinkenlights.
Instead of flicking the mouse down to click something (knowing exactly where it is), you have to move the mouse,
Try alt-tab. Much faster than mouse anyway. We'll get to "knowing where it is" shortly.
wait for the taskbar to appear,
Always instantaneous in my experience, even on an old PPro 200 running Win2K Pro. I do turn off all that "animate menus" crap, of course.
locate the button and then click it.
As far as locating / 'knowing where it is' goes, things don't randomly switch around. If I drop my mouse to the taskbar or alt-tab, things are right where I left them. Even after closing one app, I can jump right to another app that's open, with very minimal "is this the right one" thinking. It's very logical and intuitive. Usually it's only after I'm gone for a weekend do I (sometimes) need to remember what all I left open. Even then, tapping alt-tab or popping up the taskbar for a few seconds is sufficient. That leaves the other 99.999999% of the time I spend on the computer not wasting 1/25th of my screen space on information I don't need or want (at best; annoying interruptions at worst).
Exactly. "Non-profit" doesn't mean that the people working for it don't make good money. It could easily be the case that this non-profit is being run by a Disney exec who's getting the IP donated to him so that he can pull down millions of dollars a year in licensing fees. Sounds like a spin-off to me (licensing firework technology isn't anywhere close to Disney's corporate focus, so they set up "one of the family" with a little something on the side).
Don't forget User Mode Linux: http://www.usermodelinux.org/
UML lets you run a whole virtual Linux machine as a process. It's typical to have 10 or more virtual machines running on one computer. After looking at Linux VServer, I'm not sure how the two are different.
There was a fireworks manufacturing company a few miles from where I grew up (it did stuff for Red, White, and Boom in Columbus, OH, among other things). We heard big booms a couple times over the years. My neighbor was part of the response to one, and said that one guy who died was thrown back-first into a telephone pole about 40ft away such that his body was perfectly parallel to the pole, which he stuck to, and you could see his spine. I'm pretty sure he was a dead man anyway. I don't think the human body can survive a cuncusion that can throw it 60ft or more.
What bugs me is how you're supposed to pull out 100K in 200 chunks. Maybe there are accounts that let you pull out 1K or more in a day, but I've not seen them.
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I just come away with the impression it was a showboat for ID's latest engine to entice licencees.
That's exactly what it is. ID makes their big money from licensing their engines, not making games. Carmack has said as much. I swear I remember a post of his stating exactly what you posited; that DOOM 3 is an exhibition for their engine. That's why I hate to see the $55 price tag. They are having the game fans pay the price of the engine development, rather than the game development. A $55 *game* should have a lot of good *gameplay*, regardless of its pretty engine. Sure, a premium for a cool new engine is acceptable, but if the gameplay is sub-par then there should be a corresponding break on the price due to the smaller costs of developing the gameplay (Daikatana's development model notwithstanding).
Well, here's a quick CIO story:
My workmate was trying to use Moz to access the company's web site. He found that the non-standard backspaces in the path names were causing %20's to be inserted in the location bar, thus causing links to fail. He wrote an email that explained this very well, and explained that the fix is to simply replace all backslashes with regular slashes. He sent this email to the CIO and a guy that helped with the web site.
Our CIO responded: "I think it's a permissions problem. I'll have [dude] look at it and fix it."
Yeah, we're worried about our management here.
I believe HUFFYUV encoder is lossless, and gets about 60% compression. Have you tried it?
I think he was really getting at "independance". And, money is a large part of not being dependant on others. It also affords one the freedom of enjoying a number of activities. The simple fact of life is that it takes money to do pretty much everything. Even if what you enjoy is sitting in your home playing with your children, you've got rent and bills to pay. Having more money makes it easier to provide for the needs of those you care about, and having enough to not worry about getting evicted, and maybe even take an occasional vacation, provides peace of mind and additional opportunity. For most people, middle-age is when you've advanced in your carreer, are earning more money, probably have a savings, and are becoming more freed from the shackles of monetary obligations simply because the obligations are a smaller percentage of your income.
Heck, if money TRUELY is not important, then why do you go to a job? Sorry, but money IS important in life, and as such is one of the larger "points" of life.
OK, 1 hour may be a bit unrealistic :)
3-5 Hours a week, and a "marathon" session of 4-10 hours on a weekend, if I'm lucky, is more accurate. But, a week with 0 play time really brings down the average.
City of Heroes has done a decent job of making it easy to play for 1/2 hour at a time, or group for 1-3 hour sessions, or get on a Team Force for ~5 hours. That's probably as good as an RPG type game can get.
Still, I don't see a problem with a character levelling, say, 1-2 levels per month, in a player's off time. If a person plays for a whole year, that still only gives their main character 24-48 levels. A power gamer can get to 24 in a month (probably a lot less than that), and 48 in a couple, so why not let the people who can only play casually also experience the higher level content, albeit at a much slower rate than a dedicated gamer? I don't see it throwing off any balance, and it will still be the powergamers pushing the content envelope. The recreational gamers simply won't have time to visit all of the areas as they level, but they'll be able to have fun experiencing the high-level skills and whatnot.
Making tradeskills more fun then EQ would definately be nice (SWG is better with this to varying degrees) but to allow it to be automated takes absolutely *all* the prestige and reward for it.
Well, I've paid $75 to Star Wars Online twice now. I haven't had a chance to play the game in a couple months. Instead of my money going down the hole completely, it would be nice if, the next time I logged in, I found that my skills had gone up at 10% or 5% of my average exp/hour while I was logged out. As it is, my char is just where I left him and I feel that I've wasted 2 months of money. I'd feel a LOT less like cancelling my account right now if I knew my char(s) would be more buff when I started playing again, so I could at least explore a little new content.
If you can get that feeling of accomplishment without having to work for it, then bless you. But I can't.
The problem is having TIME to do that. If you only get to play an hour or so a week, and nearly all the good items take (multiple?) 5-10 hour large-group quest sessions, then you'll NEVER get any of the cool stuff. So, what's the incentive to hand over your money? Being able to go from level 12 to 13 in 2 months of play time? Shyeah. Now, of course I'm not suggesting that exp and items just be handed to characters. But, there must be a way that they can better attract and retain the casual gamer.
Somebody already told you how to do this, but it's really buried. In case you missed it, turn off the "Use Personalized Menus" option.
That's why you can never figure out how to turn it off, it's name is inane.
3) A robot maid that IS his porn!
If all it's gonna do is crap and scream, you can go buy a Betty Baby down at Toys R Us for $30.
[Really moderators, Insightful??? I think he was going for Funny. Just because they said it was the SIZE of an 18 month-old, doesn't mean that's all it DOES. Oh, to have meta-modded the parent...]
I really don't see this as being a problem anyway. It's the specific behavior of each individual that would get them flagged. As long as they weren't extrapolating the behavior of a few individuals to everyone who shopped in that store, and consistantly targeted a given individual no matter which store they shopped in, there would be no way to cry "profiling" or "racism" or "class discrimination".
Well, yeah, since you're admittantly committing fraud.
how about spending a 48 hour weekend as a DP
Well, is that on the giving end or recieving?
What he did is what's known as "begging the question". He said "X is good because it's obviously the best!".
I'd not use a motor, just a locking mechanism. Something that looks like a knee brace, but freely moves until the locking pin is engaged. The only time it's powered is when the lock changes positions, and you'd only need a solenoid.
If you want to understand the "broad concepts" of computer programming, I'd have to 2nd Knuth's programming series. Specifically, you should learn data structures and their performance, aka O(n) or Big-O (i.e., why looking up an item in a hash or binary tree is much faster than searching through an array or linked list for large data sets, and how large a set you need before you need to implement a more complex data structure).
That topic is enough to keep you busy for awhile, and the most important in having programs that run reasonably. It can be easy to make O(n) mistakes in general program structure, and not know why your program runs so slow.
For other broad "how to program" topics, the topic book is probably a good place to start. Design patterns are a good way to stretch your brain, too (search for Design Patterns and Gang of Four for the seminal work). Learning languages like Lisp, ML, Prolog in addition to OO languages (Scheme being probably about the only true OO language, Ruby is probably good, too) will also expand your mind.
A great place to start might be http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html . It's a book (free online if you want) titled Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and it uses Lisp/Scheme as it's teaching tool. I keep meaning to read it, but I think it covers much that you might learn with Knuth's series. It would at least be a good intro.
I would like to see a few of the samples they used. I'm interested in the sample length and whitespace %. I think 6 spaces would work better when there is ample whitespace and comments. If the code is short and packed tightly, 2-4 spaces would be plenty to keep the nested logic apparent. But, spread it out over 2-3 pages and add comments, and I think I'd have a hard time telling the indent level.
:)
Then again, maybe a test would prove me wrong. That's why I'd like to see a sample
The democrats can't see the good in anything, and it is very fucking tiring to listen to.
In their defense, it seems to me that the Democratic party has really been hurt in the last few years because they try to be fair and not mud-sling. The R's, on the other hand, pull out all the stops and character assasinate as SOP, and it works. It's been working for Bush since he ran for governor of Texas and called the incumbant a drug-using lesbian alcoholic the week before the election. It won him the election in a fairly big upset. I think the Ds have learned their lesson and walked off the high-road to join the Rs in the muddy gutters.
Yeah, except the majority of people are too disinterested and lazy to actually use their brains. They want the exciting sound bite, non the in-depth discussion. If you ask most people why they have their particular opinion on a hot topic, they can rarely back it up, they're just parroting an opinion they thought was news.
Keep track of that in your head, sure.
First, yeah, pretty much. The human brain is very good at retrieving layered information (like in a book, you remember how "deep" things are). Just how much of the lists are you re-reading when you need to find something?
Second, this is kinda weird. It sounds like you're arguing for keeping things in the taskbar, but then you hide 40 out of 47 items in a submenu. The point is that some people don't want to waste screen realestate on active program icons. It's not being suggested that the task bar be eliminated, just that it should be hidden during the 99% of the time you're on the computer and not using it.
I must humbly, but completely, disagree.
You have to move your mouse just to see what's open.
I know what's open. Also, every time I alt-tab to another app, I get a nice preview of all open applications.
You can't see any alerts blinking in the system tray (new email, network activity, CPU usage, bandwidth usage, etc).
Don't use 'em anyway. I like my computer to do what I want when I want it to, I don't like it interrupting what I'm working on. If it's important (i.e. system critical), then pop up a dialog box. Don't go "hey, hey, look at me, look at me!". I hate that shit. If I'm curious about CPU or bandwidth for some reason, I'll pull up an "always on top" app that displays that. Otherwise, don't clutter my workspace with distracting blinkenlights.
Instead of flicking the mouse down to click something (knowing exactly where it is), you have to move the mouse,
Try alt-tab. Much faster than mouse anyway. We'll get to "knowing where it is" shortly.
wait for the taskbar to appear,
Always instantaneous in my experience, even on an old PPro 200 running Win2K Pro. I do turn off all that "animate menus" crap, of course.
locate the button and then click it.
As far as locating / 'knowing where it is' goes, things don't randomly switch around. If I drop my mouse to the taskbar or alt-tab, things are right where I left them. Even after closing one app, I can jump right to another app that's open, with very minimal "is this the right one" thinking. It's very logical and intuitive. Usually it's only after I'm gone for a weekend do I (sometimes) need to remember what all I left open. Even then, tapping alt-tab or popping up the taskbar for a few seconds is sufficient. That leaves the other 99.999999% of the time I spend on the computer not wasting 1/25th of my screen space on information I don't need or want (at best; annoying interruptions at worst).
Exactly. "Non-profit" doesn't mean that the people working for it don't make good money. It could easily be the case that this non-profit is being run by a Disney exec who's getting the IP donated to him so that he can pull down millions of dollars a year in licensing fees. Sounds like a spin-off to me (licensing firework technology isn't anywhere close to Disney's corporate focus, so they set up "one of the family" with a little something on the side).
Don't forget User Mode Linux:
http://www.usermodelinux.org/
UML lets you run a whole virtual Linux machine as a process. It's typical to have 10 or more virtual machines running on one computer. After looking at Linux VServer, I'm not sure how the two are different.
There was a fireworks manufacturing company a few miles from where I grew up (it did stuff for Red, White, and Boom in Columbus, OH, among other things). We heard big booms a couple times over the years. My neighbor was part of the response to one, and said that one guy who died was thrown back-first into a telephone pole about 40ft away such that his body was perfectly parallel to the pole, which he stuck to, and you could see his spine. I'm pretty sure he was a dead man anyway. I don't think the human body can survive a cuncusion that can throw it 60ft or more.
What bugs me is how you're supposed to pull out 100K in 200 chunks. Maybe there are accounts that let you pull out 1K or more in a day, but I've not seen them.
heh. ignore my previous post. I read the wrong date :)
Apparently, being sick has caused more than one brain-fart today.