Guitar Hero is a great way to find new music you like. I'd like to second that, even though so far I have been familiar with the vast majority of the main stream songs, I have found many of the unlockables to be very enjoyable.
Congratulations on learning about the thoroughly enjoyable music of Rush. It may be 33 years since their first album, but better late than never. When you are at the show watch Geddy Lee closely, as h may not be the best bassist in the world (though probably damn close), but he is the best Bassist/Singer/Synth player in the world, sometimes all at once.
You claimed the "As made famous by" songs were "horrrrrible" when what you meant was that they were not an exact duplicate of the originals. As it turns out at least a few of them were arguably better then the original. I think that does "detract from [your] point." I don't know what is worse, that you claim they have recognizable voice, or that you are wrong. Scott Weiland's voice is as generic as it gets, and Cobain's voice has been copied by so many up and comers, including some Asperger's inflicted Australian, that I thought he was back from the dead about 4 years, and please don't get me started on the cockroach, I mean Rage Against the Machine is a great band, but until the drop de la Rocha they never going to make more than the one song they repeated 10 times on their debut album, and I assume their follow ups as well. But Hey atleast with Rage I agree they did a poor job, they should have picked someone with a lot less vocal ability then they chose.
I don't think you understand the meaning of the term "cover" when referencing music. I think you were looking more for impersonation, and we can only be thankful that Harmonix left that to the Elvises in Vegas.
And even though I was there in the 80's I don't recall any of those songs By "there" I assume you mean "born in" or "really stoned" since there is more than one #1 Main Stream Rock song listed, and most of them were top 10 MSR at some point.
...Ozzy, Cobain, de la Roca or Weiland... Ah yes name the songs where the cover was better than the original, with the possible exception of Killing in the Name, but that had nothing to do with the singing. Come on, this is almost as bad as the complaints about the Megadeth covers not sounding like Mustaine as if that is a bad thing. Ozzy, was never much of a singer, like him or not, de la Roca has one tone at one volume, Weiland, while an interesting front man and the best of the 4 mentioned, not exactly hard to cover well, and as for Cobain... I have to admit that he was responsible for the best thing to happen to music in the past 20 years, and that happened on April 5th, 1994.
And you left out Scott Stevens. I mean he's right up there. I actually thought I might have been a big fan of the Exies after playing GH and then I heard the original.
This is not the first time that a song in a Guitar Hero game is based on a cover version: Though it is the first, or maybe second, time that the cover version in question was less popular than the original. I say second because I happen to be a Kinks fan, though I might be willing to admit that the VH version was more popular. I think if you took a random poll you would find more people that said Radar Love was performed by Golden Earring than by White Lion, but I doubt the equivalent would happen for the other songs.
On the other hand, if it weren't for White Lion we wouldn't be getting to play Radar Love on the 80s Edition of Guitar Hero (though we could be doing Twilight Zone or a number of other Golden Earring songs).
Yes, it is possible to work around the shortcomings of a given system...There are those who would argue that a well-balanced game system's rules make the game easier to play. Again I can't believe I am defending palladium, but you have yet to explain your opinion about it's so called short comings. Different starting conditions of character archetypes is not a shortcoming of the game system. It maybe a reflection of your GM if they were to say, "you have to play a vagabond" when the rest of the party is Glitterboys and the campaign is a run and gun. A GM could certainly do the same in this new version of Starwars RPG, as a matter of fact it's even easier and almost built into the system. Since in this system, as discussed in the review, all rolls are modified by your level, all the GM needs to do is wait until the party is up a few levels and kill your character off, and not let you start at anything other than first level. Level based systems are bad enough as it is, but this twist on the level based system throws character balance (not game or rule balance) right out the window.
Now if you are looking for games that are easy to play you would do better to look at the system used in Atlas' Over The Edge. There is a game that has completely balanced character creation (at least from a numeric stand point) and the simplest rule set of any game I have seen outside of TWERPS.
You had me until you dropped the P-word. Let's compare: Vagabond vs Glitterboy. Balanced, right? There are dozens of reasons to dislike the Palladium system but it's useless to bring up balance. Why is balance so important in an RPG? Roles are not balanced, in reality or fiction. Ars Magica and the Dr. Who Role playing game are far more unbalanced. Heck even the beloved Vampire RPG is more unbalanced than Rifts. As long as your game has good players and a decent GM balance shouldn't have anything to do with fun.
On and it's easy to balance Glitterboys and Vagabonds, just run a scenario were you have to go somewhere glitter boy armor won't fit, or problem solving skills are actually important.
I can't believe you forced me to defend Palladium. Next thing you know I'll be talking about how Steve Jackson's ideas are original and he doesn't steal them from his fans.
that's brilliant! if you could automate the process, the resulting machine could stay in motion.. perpetually!! like a... perpetual...motion.. machine!! First of all the words you are looking for here are Free-Energy and Over Unity. Perpetual motion in and of itself would not be a solution to any energy problem, since without over unity the machine would use as much energy as it produces. But that doesn't matter since the problem here is actually reading comprehension and not scientific theory.
The OP stated,as you quoted (emphasis mine):
The same "fuel" can be burned an infinite amount of times as long as you have energy to convert the exhaust CO2/H2O back into hydrocarbons plus O2. The OP was not saying that this would provide perpetual motion rather conversion of energy state. This statements says that as long as we capture the waist product of fuel use and we have available energy, such as nuclear, we could convert that waste back to it's original usable state.
I'll have to second this and add that any janitor in the United States will tell you that women's bathrooms are generally messier than men's. Allow me to shed a little light of the reasons behind this.
Men generally have one of two tasks in the bathroom, and of those two tasks only one requires any external tools, toilet paper, for completing. Yes only two task, defecation or urination. Women on the other hand have a number of tasks, including those that men have, plus feminine hygiene as well as general cleanliness such as washing of hands. That's correct, I said it, women are more likely to wash there hands or in general clean up when using a public bathroom. But this only explains the higher potential for mess in a women's rest room than the actual cause of it.
Because, in the Unites States at least, women tend to prefer cleaner living spaces than men they tend to do more cleaning in their own homes than men, often times cleaning up after men. When women go into a public rest room the last thing they want to be doing is worrying about picking up, so if the miss the specified receptacle when discarding some refuse they don't even think twice about it and assume someone else will come along to pick it up. Men don't have this issue since they spend very little time cleaning on a regular basis.
I have no studies to back this up, though I am sure they have been completed and you might be able to google it.
You and the rest of the Matrix haters DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE STORY. It's not a mater of understanding. I've never even said that the story behind to movie was bad, though I read it many years ago when studying ancient philosophers, it is after all nothing new. What I think sucked was the movie. You take some of the worst actors to every waste time of the big screen and lead the whole thing with Keanue Reeves. Then you over use special effects for no purpose what so ever and make the actions scenes utterly boring. This is what happens when you have a role that you offer to Jet Li and he turns it down it's so bad.
All the machines ever wanted is to live in peace, but will defend themselves and negotiate if possible. It's genius, and relevant, and classic. I think you don't really know what 'genius', 'relevant' and 'classic' mean. Taking a by gone cliche, mixing in incompatible philosophies and casting Ted in the lead role is neither genius, relevant or classic.
The price of this seems a bit harsh though, it pretty much doubles the retail cost of Windows, are Mac users that desperate for this functionality that its worth it? I don't think you have your math quite right. Parallels cost $79.99 retail while Vista cost up to $399.99, and at least $199.99. This is not doubling the cost. On the other hand, XP is free for most people since there are so many unused XP licenses sitting around, or even better win 2k (which is what I run in one of my parallels installs). You also have to spread the cost of parallels between each of it's installs, since a number of users, such as my self, also have a couple flavors of linux running in it. In theory parallels can be used to run any x86 OS, though I haven't tried to prove that myself.
I'm afraid you might be confusing emulation with virtualization. In theory virtualization should add little to zero overhead. Virtualizing certain aspects such as memory access or CPU usage will have some overhead but virtualizing GPU usage should be negligible. We'll see how well they did when it is released but I would be it will run most software at near direct boot performance. Remember virtualization is Native, it will still be using the same Native machine calls that would be used with direct booting.
Anyway, the first Matrix movie is arguably one of best SciFi movies ever. If you think the first Matrix movie was one of the best SciFi movies ever I'd be happy to argue with you, so I guess you are right. That is unless by best you mean top 2k or so. I mean Plan 9 is arguably one of the best movies ever made, but just because you can argue it doesn't make it true.
I mean you can sum up the Matrix trilogy as: 2 sucked, 3 sucked less, and 1 sucked least, problem is they all sucked no mater how you look at it.
This is probably because Harmonix, or now MTV, owns the rights to the original code, where as Red Octane, now Activision, owns the rights to the Guitar Hero name and most likely some of the UI aspects. So Harmonix keeps the code which they can use as the basis for the up coming Rock Band game, and Activision can get Neversoft to start over but use the recognized name of Guitar Hero. This happens in the game industry alot.
I Played SC for years and watched the videos and screen shots of SC2 very closely and can say that SC2 looks to be SC1 with higher resolution 3D graphics with a few new units added and game balance adjusted for those units, as well as a new single player story line. So I have to agree with the parent commenter.
Of course this is what SC2 should be so I don't really have any problem with it. If SC2 was anything other than that then it wouldn't be SC2, it would be something else with the Star Craft name attached, kind of like what happened to Dark Reign (Arguably the best RTS of it's time).
thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity. The summary of the article is really all you need to read to realize that computer advancements are not about make people more productive. The number of hors worked and the amount of free time enjoyed by people has not changed since the introduction of the Integrated Circuit. The number of useful advancements has not increased and the average cost of products has not decreased.
I still run a large number of applications in emulators because the older software was faster per clock cycle than current software. Being a software engineer I have seen the bloat of software and the unnecessary effect it has on computer hardware. There are a select number of small applications, mostly embedded, that have benefited from More's law, but on the average software has actually gotten slower rather than faster.
Not to mention the fact that I am currently being of little productive value myself as I waste valuable time on this comment.
Please lookup the meaning to Utopia You mean the many thousand word description of Utopia as write by More? Or maybe you are talking about a hundred year old definition of utopia based on common usage of the word following Mores writing.? You clearly misunderstand the origin and meaning of utopia.
More's Utopia, the first ever use of the word, clear describes a society were people pursued both individual and societally beneficial tasks. The citizens of Utopia were describe as having extensive meaning with the increased freedom to pursue philosophical and scientific pursuits, with an equality never realized outside of Utopia. All people had access to the same information, they all shared in the workings of society, and all shared in the knowledge each other had or learned. Read Utopia, and then reading Looking Backward, two very different views of utopian societies, both of which describe a society where people have increased meaning since they are freed from the trappings of current industrial civilizations.
From what I recall, More and other utopian writers never imply people would be force to live a particular way. No one was forced to be a citizen of Utopia or similar societies. Forced control is more an aspect of dystopian societies that utopian. Sure if you chose to be a member of a utopian society you will be held to the same standards as anyone else, but that is not forcing anything on people, except in as much as children always have their belief forced upon them by their parents.
A utopia is a world where no one has any incentive to become a better person (since there's no suffering), in which case, I'm glad no utopia can exist. What is really sad is that there are people that believe they have to suffer to find incentive to improve. Personally I find that to be complete rubbish. There is little if any suffering in my life, and yes I worked hard to get to this point, but I still try to improve myself and the world around me. I could sit back and just live a normal suffering free life, but that would be both boring and denying maximum potential. I'll have to put the "you need to suffer to have incentive" right next to the "you need commerce to have incentive" argument. It's nearly universal that those that make these claims never read More, and have no clue of the origins of the term utopia.
I don't think the original poster is particularly mad at Sony, the just would prefer it if, like most HD out putting equipment such as upscaling DVD players, the PS3 would beable to atleast cross scale a game that is natively 720p to 1080i so his tv, like the majority of 1080i native tvs, could display it in the highest resolution he has available. When 1080i TVs, like the one I happen to own, where being made 720p to 1080i scalers where neither cheap nor fast, and the fast part is the more important. TV manufacturers, including high end TVs like my Mitsubishi, chose to not put the 720p to 1080i cross scaler in their units for good reason. If the cross scaler were to delay the video feed in the scaling process even a little it would cause video and audio to be out of sync, specifically if the audio was being run directly to a receive and not through the TV. This is why GH II had to put a lag control in the game. If the scaling takes place in the unit of origin then the audio and video can remain in sync.
Personally I find the lack of a built in up-scaler (it down scales just fine) in the PS3 annoying as well, but for me it just means not supporting companies than don't take advantage of the 1080 capabilities of the PS3. That is until Sony updates the firmware with a up scaler. It will probably be another year or two before I replace my TV, waiting on 1080p projectors to be reasonably priced, so just like the OP, I too take issue with Sony's decisions.
So Soundwave was supposed to be a 25 foot tall tape recorder? No, Soundwave was intended to be a 6 inch tall robot that transforms into a standard sized portable mini cassette player. But way to misinterpret my statement.
Edgy? Hmm. I don't see it. Robotech, despite the censorship, was edgier as a saturday morning cartoon. Main characters died, adult sexual relations are implied, realistic consequences for violence, interracial (and interspecies!) relationships, transvestite hero in the third generation, etc. Hmm, Transformers had death, all be it of robots, at least in the first movie, including the death of the main character. The Transformers where damaged when shot at and did actually hit once in a while unlike GI Joe or the A-team. And come on, Transformers where Robots in Disguise, which is far more than would could say about Lancers silly get ups, and Bugs bunny was dressing in women's clothes long before Mospeada was created. I'm not saying that the transformers was an adult show, just that it was much edgier than most saturday morning cartoons. And Robotech didn't imply sexual relations any more than Muppet Babies did, since the only implication of sexuality in the whole thing was the birth of the color changing haired girl, Dana to Max and Mira. And as for the interracial thing, once again this was done by the Warner Brothers many years earlier with a Skunk who is in love with a cat.
think the Valkyrie was the only design borrowed for Robotech but pretty much everything else was licensed to FASA for Battletech. Try again. Yes the Valkyries where the only Macros units that were a direct copy of a Transformer character, but all the of the Macros Mecha were designed by members of the team that designed the original Transformer/Diaclone toy line. FASA on the other hand did not license the use of the Macros Mecha designs which is why they stopped using them in later releases of the game and had to use their own, lesser, designs.
I don't ever recall Robotech sharing any time slots with the Smurfs but by the time it was released I was not watching the Smurfs so I could be wrong.
Now I can appreciate the artistic reasons for such a change and I liked the cartoon versions better so I was mainly annoyed with the toys. In most cases the toys where created before the cartoon representation, at least in the early days. Old schoolers like myself find the cartoon to be more annoying than the toys.
It also bothered me how the robots could change mass and dimension on a whim. Again this is a flaw in the cartoon and not the toy line. The toys, as I have mentioned elsewhere, were intended as life size. The Transformers where toy versions of toy sized transformable robots, if that makes sense.
Overall, though, I don't get where the nostalgia for this show comes from. Transformers was an edgy cartoon, specially if you look at the original movie. The humor was actually fairly adult, and the characters where better than most saturday morning crap. Mind you I don't sit around and watch Transformer cartoons now, nor do I have any Transformer toys since I have moved onto assembling Gundams and other Anime models, but really, as children's shows go, transformers was a decent one.
Interest in Transformers gave way to Robotech and that stuff is still cool today. This makes sense being as the Robotech (Macross) Mecha were designed by the same people that designed the original Transformer toy line. But with that being said I don't see anything that makes Robotech any more adult than the transformers.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations on learning about the thoroughly enjoyable music of Rush. It may be 33 years since their first album, but better late than never. When you are at the show watch Geddy Lee closely, as h may not be the best bassist in the world (though probably damn close), but he is the best Bassist/Singer/Synth player in the world, sometimes all at once.
You claimed the "As made famous by" songs were "horrrrrible" when what you meant was that they were not an exact duplicate of the originals. As it turns out at least a few of them were arguably better then the original. I think that does "detract from [your] point." I don't know what is worse, that you claim they have recognizable voice, or that you are wrong. Scott Weiland's voice is as generic as it gets, and Cobain's voice has been copied by so many up and comers, including some Asperger's inflicted Australian, that I thought he was back from the dead about 4 years, and please don't get me started on the cockroach, I mean Rage Against the Machine is a great band, but until the drop de la Rocha they never going to make more than the one song they repeated 10 times on their debut album, and I assume their follow ups as well. But Hey atleast with Rage I agree they did a poor job, they should have picked someone with a lot less vocal ability then they chose.
I don't think you understand the meaning of the term "cover" when referencing music. I think you were looking more for impersonation, and we can only be thankful that Harmonix left that to the Elvises in Vegas.
...Ozzy, Cobain, de la Roca or Weiland... Ah yes name the songs where the cover was better than the original, with the possible exception of Killing in the Name, but that had nothing to do with the singing. Come on, this is almost as bad as the complaints about the Megadeth covers not sounding like Mustaine as if that is a bad thing. Ozzy, was never much of a singer, like him or not, de la Roca has one tone at one volume, Weiland, while an interesting front man and the best of the 4 mentioned, not exactly hard to cover well, and as for Cobain... I have to admit that he was responsible for the best thing to happen to music in the past 20 years, and that happened on April 5th, 1994.And you left out Scott Stevens. I mean he's right up there. I actually thought I might have been a big fan of the Exies after playing GH and then I heard the original.
On the other hand, if it weren't for White Lion we wouldn't be getting to play Radar Love on the 80s Edition of Guitar Hero (though we could be doing Twilight Zone or a number of other Golden Earring songs).
Now if you are looking for games that are easy to play you would do better to look at the system used in Atlas' Over The Edge. There is a game that has completely balanced character creation (at least from a numeric stand point) and the simplest rule set of any game I have seen outside of TWERPS.
On and it's easy to balance Glitterboys and Vagabonds, just run a scenario were you have to go somewhere glitter boy armor won't fit, or problem solving skills are actually important.
I can't believe you forced me to defend Palladium. Next thing you know I'll be talking about how Steve Jackson's ideas are original and he doesn't steal them from his fans.
The OP stated,as you quoted (emphasis mine): The same "fuel" can be burned an infinite amount of times as long as you have energy to convert the exhaust CO2/H2O back into hydrocarbons plus O2. The OP was not saying that this would provide perpetual motion rather conversion of energy state. This statements says that as long as we capture the waist product of fuel use and we have available energy, such as nuclear, we could convert that waste back to it's original usable state.
I'll have to second this and add that any janitor in the United States will tell you that women's bathrooms are generally messier than men's. Allow me to shed a little light of the reasons behind this.
Men generally have one of two tasks in the bathroom, and of those two tasks only one requires any external tools, toilet paper, for completing. Yes only two task, defecation or urination. Women on the other hand have a number of tasks, including those that men have, plus feminine hygiene as well as general cleanliness such as washing of hands. That's correct, I said it, women are more likely to wash there hands or in general clean up when using a public bathroom. But this only explains the higher potential for mess in a women's rest room than the actual cause of it.
Because, in the Unites States at least, women tend to prefer cleaner living spaces than men they tend to do more cleaning in their own homes than men, often times cleaning up after men. When women go into a public rest room the last thing they want to be doing is worrying about picking up, so if the miss the specified receptacle when discarding some refuse they don't even think twice about it and assume someone else will come along to pick it up. Men don't have this issue since they spend very little time cleaning on a regular basis.
I have no studies to back this up, though I am sure they have been completed and you might be able to google it.
I'm afraid you might be confusing emulation with virtualization. In theory virtualization should add little to zero overhead. Virtualizing certain aspects such as memory access or CPU usage will have some overhead but virtualizing GPU usage should be negligible. We'll see how well they did when it is released but I would be it will run most software at near direct boot performance. Remember virtualization is Native, it will still be using the same Native machine calls that would be used with direct booting.
I mean you can sum up the Matrix trilogy as: 2 sucked, 3 sucked less, and 1 sucked least, problem is they all sucked no mater how you look at it.
This is probably because Harmonix, or now MTV, owns the rights to the original code, where as Red Octane, now Activision, owns the rights to the Guitar Hero name and most likely some of the UI aspects. So Harmonix keeps the code which they can use as the basis for the up coming Rock Band game, and Activision can get Neversoft to start over but use the recognized name of Guitar Hero. This happens in the game industry alot.
I Played SC for years and watched the videos and screen shots of SC2 very closely and can say that SC2 looks to be SC1 with higher resolution 3D graphics with a few new units added and game balance adjusted for those units, as well as a new single player story line. So I have to agree with the parent commenter.
Of course this is what SC2 should be so I don't really have any problem with it. If SC2 was anything other than that then it wouldn't be SC2, it would be something else with the Star Craft name attached, kind of like what happened to Dark Reign (Arguably the best RTS of it's time).
I still run a large number of applications in emulators because the older software was faster per clock cycle than current software. Being a software engineer I have seen the bloat of software and the unnecessary effect it has on computer hardware. There are a select number of small applications, mostly embedded, that have benefited from More's law, but on the average software has actually gotten slower rather than faster.
Not to mention the fact that I am currently being of little productive value myself as I waste valuable time on this comment.
More's Utopia, the first ever use of the word, clear describes a society were people pursued both individual and societally beneficial tasks. The citizens of Utopia were describe as having extensive meaning with the increased freedom to pursue philosophical and scientific pursuits, with an equality never realized outside of Utopia. All people had access to the same information, they all shared in the workings of society, and all shared in the knowledge each other had or learned. Read Utopia, and then reading Looking Backward, two very different views of utopian societies, both of which describe a society where people have increased meaning since they are freed from the trappings of current industrial civilizations.
From what I recall, More and other utopian writers never imply people would be force to live a particular way. No one was forced to be a citizen of Utopia or similar societies. Forced control is more an aspect of dystopian societies that utopian. Sure if you chose to be a member of a utopian society you will be held to the same standards as anyone else, but that is not forcing anything on people, except in as much as children always have their belief forced upon them by their parents.
I don't think the original poster is particularly mad at Sony, the just would prefer it if, like most HD out putting equipment such as upscaling DVD players, the PS3 would beable to atleast cross scale a game that is natively 720p to 1080i so his tv, like the majority of 1080i native tvs, could display it in the highest resolution he has available. When 1080i TVs, like the one I happen to own, where being made 720p to 1080i scalers where neither cheap nor fast, and the fast part is the more important. TV manufacturers, including high end TVs like my Mitsubishi, chose to not put the 720p to 1080i cross scaler in their units for good reason. If the cross scaler were to delay the video feed in the scaling process even a little it would cause video and audio to be out of sync, specifically if the audio was being run directly to a receive and not through the TV. This is why GH II had to put a lag control in the game. If the scaling takes place in the unit of origin then the audio and video can remain in sync.
Personally I find the lack of a built in up-scaler (it down scales just fine) in the PS3 annoying as well, but for me it just means not supporting companies than don't take advantage of the 1080 capabilities of the PS3. That is until Sony updates the firmware with a up scaler. It will probably be another year or two before I replace my TV, waiting on 1080p projectors to be reasonably priced, so just like the OP, I too take issue with Sony's decisions.
I don't ever recall Robotech sharing any time slots with the Smurfs but by the time it was released I was not watching the Smurfs so I could be wrong.