Yeah, but WipeoutXL for all intents and purposes is a Sports game. Most sports games can successfully put advertisements in the game becasue we are accustomed to seeing such adverts in actual sporting events. A much larger challenge would be successfully putting in-game advertising into a non-sports game.
"Last time I checked, my boss didn't tell me to make a program, then told me he'd fire me if I opened a book or looked up the data I needed through the newsgroups."
Maybe, but if you're a C programmer and need to look up malloc every time you use it, you won't get very far in your job. A certain amount of memorization is expected for core topics. In my experience, the things I've had to know for closed book tests (in my major) were things that I probably need to know without looking up anyways.
In theory, they'd be easier to dodge since you now have a course of action in three dimensions instead of two (and really only one dimension on some roads). I would hate to see rush hour with flying cars, but where I live (semi-rural area), I'd welcome them.
I did read the article and several others as they came out over yesterday (since this isn't exactly a new story). You are correct that this wasn't some judgement call made by an airline employee, but that would ruin the joke wouldn't it?
I was watching that show Airline that follows around SW Airlines employees and they wouldn't let a couple fly becasue they had too much to drink. Could that be the REAL reason Kennedy wasn't allowed to fly?
"in American English, you have only one word for Indians"
Well, I keep on trying to use the word Injun to describe Native Americans, but everyone always gets mad at me. Something about politcial correctness or insensitivity or something.
I can proudly say I never watched it. One of my gripes about the first one was that it all went downhill after the helicopter goes into the tunnel. It could've been a great movie until that moment and then it landed somewhere around mediocre.
When MI2 came out, my then roomate went to see it. I asked him how it was and he said, "It was great! The whole movie was like the last 15 minutes of the first one!" I knew then that this is a movie I will never watch.
My Palm is a $150 alarm clock. About the only thing I use it for are the audible reminers that I can set up timers for. Oh yeah, I also play Sokoban a lot on it. This would not be feasible with a laptop.
This is an interesting argument. The connectivity already present in the Ngage will give it a leg up on any multiplayer games, but Nintendo and Sony could always counter by making some sort of cell-phone adapter. This would make their games just as networkable. While I do think the Ngage has potential, I think that it will be the one continually playing catch-up until its demise (which may be a long way off if Nokia plays their cards right).
I think the Alien hive mentality is far closer to the faction of Liberals who slather the words "discrimination", "racism", and "hate speech" on anything they don't agree with.
However, when it comes down to it, the terms Liberal and Conservative do not accurately describe members of each political group. There are wide varieties of each. Unfortunately, each side seems to be defined by its extremists.
Wait just a minute here. You're criticising the Yankspankers for not GPLing his project, but then you're talking about what works as opensource and you mention a company that only GPLs older products? Why aren't Quake III and Doom 3 opensource yet? I thought that game engines "just fit perfectly" into the opensource model. It seems to me that OLDER game engines fit into this model (at least that's iD's take on it). Your argument is very valid, but your heavy mentioning of iD shows a bit of a bias on your part that's really not fair to the Yankspankers. For all we know they might GPL this engine after it gets to be the age of the Quake III engine.
"Does she have local dialup numbers in nearly all parts of the US?"
No, but this AOL PC isn't what you'd want to take on a trip with you. You have a specific scenario that is not what this computer is intended for. Now if it were an AOL laptop you'd have a valid point.
I think a good idea would be to separate players out into divisions and conferences.
As a new player, you could start out in a low division, but then to go up a division, you would have to be eligible (be on-line for long enough) and also complete a set of tasks that show that you are a good enough player now to qualify for the next higher division. Maybe have some adventure (or set of adventures) that require certain quick-thinking and problem solving skills to prove that you are now a better player and good enough to move up divisions. Ther would probably have to be a mechanism for forcing players up a division in order to keep them from being a big fish in a small pond.
A conference is formed to put certain players in direct competition with certain other players in the same division. You might not be the best guy on-line, but you could have a fair shot at being the best guy in your conference. This is not the same thing as a guild. A guild is typically more of a friendly establishment. Conference members are usually rivalries (think Georgia/Florida, Texas/Oklahoma, Ohio State/Michigan, etc).
As you become a better player, you would be able to get into better conferences. In NCAA football (where I'm taking this example from), there is a vote amongst conference members to determine who can join or who gets kicked out of a conference. This happens because most conferences would want to be the l33t conference by having the best l33t players in it. Now the best way to determine which conference is better than which other conference is get those conferences to compete with each other on a regular basis.
This system isn't perfect and it does require a good mechanism for competition amongst similarly qualified players, but I think it would be better than deciding who is best by who sits around and plays for hours on monotonous adventures just to get their level up.
Re:basic... very basic.
on
You've Got PC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"a ISP on par with AOL in terms of service"
Well, the $10 a month ISP my grandmother uses now is a lot better than AOL in terms of service. Do you know of any cheaper ISPs I can use with the abysmal service of AOL I can use for an accurate comparison?
This sort of thing fizzled out in the past. Remember the big money off for agreeing to commitments to ISPs? I don't think this will help AOL any more than it helped MSN or CompuServe.
"Have you ever been in a position of hiring someone for a job?"
Yes, on three occasions. I've had to lead searches for qualified applicants for interviews in IT (desktop support stuff with occasional testing and programming). I can tell you that when you're being grilled about stupid esoterical knowledge, it's usually to see how you handle not knowing the answers. If you're already assuming that they have a "we're only interviewing a woman because we have to" attitude, I'd imagine that you probably failed this part miserably. Also, if you're being grilled about such knowledge frequently, maybe you should take the time to learn it since it would obviously help your interview.
"What about the sharing who's gonna pick up the kids from daycare after work when you have a coding deadline or a server go down? Bet it's the wife! And she's got her own job, too!"
My wife does have a job too. I'd love to share who picks up the kids from daycare, but her schedule is not as flexible so I end up doing it most of the time (just like I usually end up taking the kids to the doctor, the dog to the vet, or any other odd job that may happen during business hours). We do share family duties. I'm usually do all things kitchen-related, she handles laundry and we split the rest. If you're not happy about the level of housekeeping that your husband is doing, then maybe you should take that up with him instead of making sweeping generalizations.
"Maybe you'll start understanding why women don't pursue such a family-unfriendly industry."
That explains it. Just like how women don't go into family-unfriendly industries like nursing where hours are long (often 50+ per week) and at odd times, leaving less time to spend as a family.
Because PC is not Pc. Therefore MAC cannot be Mac. If MACs were the dominant platform, we'd be talking about Pcs and Macs. You need to brush up on your sales logic.
I've used a wide variety of controllers from the old 2600 to newer X-Box controllers and have never once had the controlled "slip" out of my hand. Maybe the people having this problem need to put away the Doritos while gaming.
I could see a rubber coating as potentially more comfortable but even that will not be true if you're playing for long stretches of time as the rubber is more likely to wear a blister on your hand (as did a wrech that I dipped in similar stuff a few years ago that I used for automotive work).
"I interface with lots of people who basically think you have two choices - owning "a computer", or owning "a Mac" (as though owning a Mac wasn't a real computer)."
I find this a bit annoying, but I would blame the software manufacturers and salesmen more than the ignorant users. How many times do you hear of a piece of software running of PC or MAC when they really mean it runs on Windows or OS X (or 9 or whatever)? I remember back when a Novell rep tried to claim that multiplatform meant Windows 98 AND Windows NT (x86 only of course). While it's good to see our previous file and print server overlords overcome such ignorance, the average user still has not. To them there is PC and Mac and as long as software reps perpetuate this view, it won't go away.
No, "double" would be 100% increase in performance. Claiming double when getting 70-90% is just as dishonest in my opinion as hard drive manufacturers that claim they have 100GB disks but claim that a GB is 1000000 bytes.
Slashdot Mirror
That was Howard Dean? I though it was Ric Flair disguised as Howard Dean.
Yeah, but WipeoutXL for all intents and purposes is a Sports game. Most sports games can successfully put advertisements in the game becasue we are accustomed to seeing such adverts in actual sporting events. A much larger challenge would be successfully putting in-game advertising into a non-sports game.
...but I still can't do something primitive like use my mouse to talk to the computer.
"Last time I checked, my boss didn't tell me to make a program, then told me he'd fire me if I opened a book or looked up the data I needed through the newsgroups."
Maybe, but if you're a C programmer and need to look up malloc every time you use it, you won't get very far in your job. A certain amount of memorization is expected for core topics. In my experience, the things I've had to know for closed book tests (in my major) were things that I probably need to know without looking up anyways.
In theory, they'd be easier to dodge since you now have a course of action in three dimensions instead of two (and really only one dimension on some roads). I would hate to see rush hour with flying cars, but where I live (semi-rural area), I'd welcome them.
I did read the article and several others as they came out over yesterday (since this isn't exactly a new story). You are correct that this wasn't some judgement call made by an airline employee, but that would ruin the joke wouldn't it?
I was watching that show Airline that follows around SW Airlines employees and they wouldn't let a couple fly becasue they had too much to drink. Could that be the REAL reason Kennedy wasn't allowed to fly?
"in American English, you have only one word for Indians" Well, I keep on trying to use the word Injun to describe Native Americans, but everyone always gets mad at me. Something about politcial correctness or insensitivity or something.
And if anybody gets on of these scarce PSPs, please send me your box so I can sell it on Ebay for $400.
I can proudly say I never watched it. One of my gripes about the first one was that it all went downhill after the helicopter goes into the tunnel. It could've been a great movie until that moment and then it landed somewhere around mediocre.
When MI2 came out, my then roomate went to see it. I asked him how it was and he said, "It was great! The whole movie was like the last 15 minutes of the first one!" I knew then that this is a movie I will never watch.
My Palm is a $150 alarm clock. About the only thing I use it for are the audible reminers that I can set up timers for. Oh yeah, I also play Sokoban a lot on it. This would not be feasible with a laptop.
This is an interesting argument. The connectivity already present in the Ngage will give it a leg up on any multiplayer games, but Nintendo and Sony could always counter by making some sort of cell-phone adapter. This would make their games just as networkable. While I do think the Ngage has potential, I think that it will be the one continually playing catch-up until its demise (which may be a long way off if Nokia plays their cards right).
I think the Alien hive mentality is far closer to the faction of Liberals who slather the words "discrimination", "racism", and "hate speech" on anything they don't agree with.
However, when it comes down to it, the terms Liberal and Conservative do not accurately describe members of each political group. There are wide varieties of each. Unfortunately, each side seems to be defined by its extremists.
...Scrabble on ESPN.
Wait just a minute here. You're criticising the Yankspankers for not GPLing his project, but then you're talking about what works as opensource and you mention a company that only GPLs older products? Why aren't Quake III and Doom 3 opensource yet? I thought that game engines "just fit perfectly" into the opensource model. It seems to me that OLDER game engines fit into this model (at least that's iD's take on it). Your argument is very valid, but your heavy mentioning of iD shows a bit of a bias on your part that's really not fair to the Yankspankers. For all we know they might GPL this engine after it gets to be the age of the Quake III engine.
Guy 1-We'll just turn off the monorail.
Guy 2-We can't! It's solar powered!
Guy 1-Solar power?! When will they ever learn?
"Does she have local dialup numbers in nearly all parts of the US?"
No, but this AOL PC isn't what you'd want to take on a trip with you. You have a specific scenario that is not what this computer is intended for. Now if it were an AOL laptop you'd have a valid point.
I think a good idea would be to separate players out into divisions and conferences.
As a new player, you could start out in a low division, but then to go up a division, you would have to be eligible (be on-line for long enough) and also complete a set of tasks that show that you are a good enough player now to qualify for the next higher division. Maybe have some adventure (or set of adventures) that require certain quick-thinking and problem solving skills to prove that you are now a better player and good enough to move up divisions. Ther would probably have to be a mechanism for forcing players up a division in order to keep them from being a big fish in a small pond.
A conference is formed to put certain players in direct competition with certain other players in the same division. You might not be the best guy on-line, but you could have a fair shot at being the best guy in your conference. This is not the same thing as a guild. A guild is typically more of a friendly establishment. Conference members are usually rivalries (think Georgia/Florida, Texas/Oklahoma, Ohio State/Michigan, etc).
As you become a better player, you would be able to get into better conferences. In NCAA football (where I'm taking this example from), there is a vote amongst conference members to determine who can join or who gets kicked out of a conference. This happens because most conferences would want to be the l33t conference by having the best l33t players in it. Now the best way to determine which conference is better than which other conference is get those conferences to compete with each other on a regular basis.
This system isn't perfect and it does require a good mechanism for competition amongst similarly qualified players, but I think it would be better than deciding who is best by who sits around and plays for hours on monotonous adventures just to get their level up.
"a ISP on par with AOL in terms of service"
Well, the $10 a month ISP my grandmother uses now is a lot better than AOL in terms of service. Do you know of any cheaper ISPs I can use with the abysmal service of AOL I can use for an accurate comparison?
This sort of thing fizzled out in the past. Remember the big money off for agreeing to commitments to ISPs? I don't think this will help AOL any more than it helped MSN or CompuServe.
"Have you ever been in a position of hiring someone for a job?" Yes, on three occasions. I've had to lead searches for qualified applicants for interviews in IT (desktop support stuff with occasional testing and programming). I can tell you that when you're being grilled about stupid esoterical knowledge, it's usually to see how you handle not knowing the answers. If you're already assuming that they have a "we're only interviewing a woman because we have to" attitude, I'd imagine that you probably failed this part miserably. Also, if you're being grilled about such knowledge frequently, maybe you should take the time to learn it since it would obviously help your interview. "What about the sharing who's gonna pick up the kids from daycare after work when you have a coding deadline or a server go down? Bet it's the wife! And she's got her own job, too!" My wife does have a job too. I'd love to share who picks up the kids from daycare, but her schedule is not as flexible so I end up doing it most of the time (just like I usually end up taking the kids to the doctor, the dog to the vet, or any other odd job that may happen during business hours). We do share family duties. I'm usually do all things kitchen-related, she handles laundry and we split the rest. If you're not happy about the level of housekeeping that your husband is doing, then maybe you should take that up with him instead of making sweeping generalizations. "Maybe you'll start understanding why women don't pursue such a family-unfriendly industry." That explains it. Just like how women don't go into family-unfriendly industries like nursing where hours are long (often 50+ per week) and at odd times, leaving less time to spend as a family.
Because PC is not Pc. Therefore MAC cannot be Mac. If MACs were the dominant platform, we'd be talking about Pcs and Macs. You need to brush up on your sales logic.
I've used a wide variety of controllers from the old 2600 to newer X-Box controllers and have never once had the controlled "slip" out of my hand. Maybe the people having this problem need to put away the Doritos while gaming.
I could see a rubber coating as potentially more comfortable but even that will not be true if you're playing for long stretches of time as the rubber is more likely to wear a blister on your hand (as did a wrech that I dipped in similar stuff a few years ago that I used for automotive work).
"I interface with lots of people who basically think you have two choices - owning "a computer", or owning "a Mac" (as though owning a Mac wasn't a real computer)."
I find this a bit annoying, but I would blame the software manufacturers and salesmen more than the ignorant users. How many times do you hear of a piece of software running of PC or MAC when they really mean it runs on Windows or OS X (or 9 or whatever)? I remember back when a Novell rep tried to claim that multiplatform meant Windows 98 AND Windows NT (x86 only of course). While it's good to see our previous file and print server overlords overcome such ignorance, the average user still has not. To them there is PC and Mac and as long as software reps perpetuate this view, it won't go away.
Are you supposed to be Shatner or that kid in the wheelchair in Malcom in the Middle?
No, "double" would be 100% increase in performance. Claiming double when getting 70-90% is just as dishonest in my opinion as hard drive manufacturers that claim they have 100GB disks but claim that a GB is 1000000 bytes.