True, so it would be perfectly reasonable to take away all their achievements, and ban them from getting any new ones. But banning them from even playing the single player game is just being mean.
The thing that keeps me up at night is running out of affordable fuel. Without it, we can't run the tractors and combines to work the land, we can't run the trucks to transport the food to the cities, we can't maintain the electricity and gas grids, we can't maintain the flood control systems, we can't stock hospitals, etc., etc.
I don't have the brains or the means to develop an alternative to fossil fuels. But I can sure use the power of capitalism to encourage others to do so. And if that ends up being green as well as saving our civilization, that's a nice bonus.
IANAL, but I did have a law class at university where they stated that running software is in practice considered to fall under copyright, as code is copied to memory before execution.
Of course, this is a total perversion of all intentions behind copyright, but that isn't something that lawyers seem to care about...
Sequels aren't a problem at all (and I personally haven't heard any complaining about remakes). The problem is cheap sequels that don't add anything substantial, but which just try to make you pay twice (trice,...) for the same damn game.
If you can get a hold of it, you may want to check out I-War. I have no idea if it's aged well or not, but back in the day it was pretty amazing. Very deep gameplay (including Newtonian physics, as in the game you're referring to), good story, and graphics that, at the time, were absolutely gorgeous. Had more fun with that one than with Freespace.
I'm not an accountant, so I may well be way off here, but maybe it also has to do with not upsetting shareholders with losses on ip.
As long as you have intellectual property, that's an asset on your balance. If you've arbitrarily valued your Steamboat Willy copyright at, say, $50,000,000 USD, that's a sizable loss when the copyright on it expires. A loss that you can avoid by having the copyright term extended. Easy way to keep the shareholders happy, even with property that doesn't actually generate any real money anymore.
Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another.
Now, now. I think we can all agree that this is strong evidence for lack of morality causing magnetism.
Have you checked out something like XML DB? I haven't used it much myself, but it sounds like it may meet your needs. It comes bundled with the XE database, which is free as in beer. (But XE has some limitations that the enterprise product doesn't have, of course.)
Quite the opposite. The imperial units are the base 2 ones. After all, kilo means 1000, not 1024, both in the original Greek and in the SI system that most of the world uses.
The HDD manufacturers were right (albeit for all the wrong reasons, of course). Good for Apple and Cannonical for recognizing this. I hope the rest of the world follows suit and becomes (SI, IEEE, ISO/IEC) standards compliant.
There are some things you should never be able to forget - the definitions and meanings of probability, mean, median, standard deviation and variance come to mind. You find yourself in situations everyday where you need to apply some of these things. Am I wrong about this? Do people forget basic definitions so easily?
Yes and yes. I can't read music either, even though that's another thing I learned in high school. Turns out that if I don't use it, I can forget pretty much any skill. Particularly if that skill was learned over a couple of weeks, and I never had to revisit it.
Do you really regularly use standard deviation outside of a professional context? What for, if I may ask? The fact that most people have never even heard of the concept suggests that it's really not all that critical.
(That's not to say that it isn't ridiculous that a doctor who bases his diagnoses on the concept doesn't have a solid grasp on it.)
Exactly. And try to get your game reviewed by some people. Then they can tell others how much it reminds them of that oldie that you got your inspiration from. Much classier than just making a game called "Pocman" or "Super Vittorio Bros."
Take a page from Trine. It's obviously inspired by Lost Vikings, but it's not a straight ripoff, and they don't (need to) market themselves as such. In the meantime, every other review of the game mentions Lost Vikings, and I'm sure that's how they get many of their sales. It's how how they got mine, in any case.
...to handle writing scientific reports on Linux, and AbiWord wasn't up to the job (Note to trolls: please don't bother with shill posts for TeX/LaTex. I'm sure it's very good, but I've got work to do.)
Excuse me but would you also consider someone who tells a carpenter that a hammer is a much better tool for driving nails than a stapler a troll because you can't be bothered taking three seconds to figure out what end of the hammer to hold?
LaTeX is usually the right tool for the job if that job happens to involve writing a lot of equations, but the learning curve makes grown men (MSc students) weep.
It's called "not having copyright," and it was good enough to give us Shakespeare and Milton.
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Too true, sadly. To be fair, most programming languages make this much harder than it should be. Even in a relatively modern language like java, which by default uses unicode for strings, you have a "char" datatype that can't actually completely represent all unicode characters. As a result, you have all kinds of libraries that assume that one char = one character, while this is not true. But you'll never find out until you have people using your application with, say, Han characters outside the BMP.
And I shudder to think how few applications can probably handle different writing directions, like the right-to-left of Hebrew.
Don't get me started. It's ridiculous how even big multinationals (emphasis on multi and national) can't get such a simple thing right.
Itunes on Windows is another good example. Originally it used Windows' "Location" setting, which is braindead, as location does not imply language. After much complaining about this on the Apple forums, they decided to fix it by having the user choose a language during installation. This is an improvement, but still idiotic, as they should have used Windows' "Language used in menus and dialogs" setting.
What's worst though, is that despite setting the language in iTunes, every feature that uses the iTunes Store still uses geo-ip to determine the language! So even though I've explicitly told iTunes that I want to use English, I still get Dutch in various places!
Researchers at the University of Rochester believe that a 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean in a million years or so, connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.
That's just completely, utterly, false. Why don't you also claim you need to buy the official WotC dice? It's about as true as the rest you're saying.
As a group, the only WotC products you need are the original 3 core books, same as with 3E. You'd think this would be obvious from the fact that thousands were playing the game before all the other products you mention were even released.
Yes, if you specifically want to play a class from PHB2, then you need PHB2, duh. If you specifically wanted to play a warlock in 3E, you needed Complete Arcane. This is no different.
There's no reason to buy the "Power" books, unless you'd like more options for your characters. Same as with the "Complete" books in 3.5, and the spatbooks in 3.0. And Complete Martial is not at all a Paladin Supplement. It doesn't have any significant content for paladins, and it's explicitly not marketed as a paladin supplement.
As to the official mini's: these are not at all required, and I've never before heard anyone claim that they were. The same is true for a D&D Insider subscription. That's basically a subscription to Dungeon and Dragon magazines plus some online tools. Do you feel Dungeon and Dragon magazines were required to play 3E? I should hope not.
And what's that nonsense about 4E being a complete surprise? WotC announced 4E 10 months in advance. They even published previewbooks! And anyone paying attention had noticed that Wizards had been experimenting with radically new mechanics for D&D for at least a year before that, so it was only an open secret that WotC was working on a new edition.
All in all, your post is nothing more than a troll.
Ouch. I feel for you. SS1 really is a brilliant game, but I'm not sure I could stand the interface again either.
Do give X-Com a try. It's a lot of fun, and the interface (IMO) is not too awful. If it does turn out that the interface is too big an obstacle, you could still try X-COM: Apocalypse, which uses a newer engine.
I prefer just simple "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Very Hard" settings. Ideally with "Normal" being a little easy, so I get to feel good about myself when I choose "Hard":-). (Only half joking here. The psychology really does matter.)
The problem with letting the computer decide what the challenge level is, is that it doesn't have a clue about my preferences. It only knows how well I'm doing, not whether or not I enjoy being challenged. This is not enough information to determine if I'm having fun or not. Doubly so if the system is flawed. For instance, Oblivion takes only your level into account, not your skill, or even your character's skills. This means that if you level up by, for instance, trading, you are constantly hounded by all kinds of nasty critters that you have no hope of defeating with your puny combat stats. Obviously, that's no fun at all.
Also, in some games it's really inappropriate to change the world for no apparent reason, other than that the player is doing well or poorly. Morrowind (sans expansions) was a remarkable consistent world, and that helped to make it incredibly engrossing. In Oblivion, where you were effectively never getting ahead, and where eventually even the highway robbers were equiped with a king's random in magic items in order to challenge you, I never felt close to having the same level of immersion.
Agreed. The common opinion that games only improve on the audiovisuals is simply untrue. It's amazing how limited or downright crappy the interfaces of many older games are compared to those of more recent titles.
Slashdot Mirror
And inaccurate as well, at least insofar as the article having 3 rather than 4 pages.
True, so it would be perfectly reasonable to take away all their achievements, and ban them from getting any new ones. But banning them from even playing the single player game is just being mean.
Hear ye, hear ye!
The thing that keeps me up at night is running out of affordable fuel. Without it, we can't run the tractors and combines to work the land, we can't run the trucks to transport the food to the cities, we can't maintain the electricity and gas grids, we can't maintain the flood control systems, we can't stock hospitals, etc., etc.
I don't have the brains or the means to develop an alternative to fossil fuels. But I can sure use the power of capitalism to encourage others to do so. And if that ends up being green as well as saving our civilization, that's a nice bonus.
IANAL, but I did have a law class at university where they stated that running software is in practice considered to fall under copyright, as code is copied to memory before execution.
Of course, this is a total perversion of all intentions behind copyright, but that isn't something that lawyers seem to care about...
Sequels aren't a problem at all (and I personally haven't heard any complaining about remakes). The problem is cheap sequels that don't add anything substantial, but which just try to make you pay twice (trice, ...) for the same damn game.
For the record, "veerworp" would be feather-toss in Dutch. ;-)
Not that I don't like bitching about IE, but it would also be nice if Mozilla would fully support HTML4.
Exactly. That's why cStack would be a perfect name for an office suite, and cTree for a web browser.
If you can get a hold of it, you may want to check out I-War. I have no idea if it's aged well or not, but back in the day it was pretty amazing. Very deep gameplay (including Newtonian physics, as in the game you're referring to), good story, and graphics that, at the time, were absolutely gorgeous. Had more fun with that one than with Freespace.
I'm not an accountant, so I may well be way off here, but maybe it also has to do with not upsetting shareholders with losses on ip.
As long as you have intellectual property, that's an asset on your balance. If you've arbitrarily valued your Steamboat Willy copyright at, say, $50,000,000 USD, that's a sizable loss when the copyright on it expires. A loss that you can avoid by having the copyright term extended. Easy way to keep the shareholders happy, even with property that doesn't actually generate any real money anymore.
Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another.
Now, now. I think we can all agree that this is strong evidence for lack of morality causing magnetism.
Have you checked out something like XML DB? I haven't used it much myself, but it sounds like it may meet your needs. It comes bundled with the XE database, which is free as in beer. (But XE has some limitations that the enterprise product doesn't have, of course.)
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.
What's next? Imperial units for us Europeans?
Quite the opposite. The imperial units are the base 2 ones. After all, kilo means 1000, not 1024, both in the original Greek and in the SI system that most of the world uses.
The HDD manufacturers were right (albeit for all the wrong reasons, of course). Good for Apple and Cannonical for recognizing this. I hope the rest of the world follows suit and becomes (SI, IEEE, ISO/IEC) standards compliant.
There are some things you should never be able to forget - the definitions and meanings of probability, mean, median, standard deviation and variance come to mind. You find yourself in situations everyday where you need to apply some of these things. Am I wrong about this? Do people forget basic definitions so easily?
Yes and yes. I can't read music either, even though that's another thing I learned in high school. Turns out that if I don't use it, I can forget pretty much any skill. Particularly if that skill was learned over a couple of weeks, and I never had to revisit it.
Do you really regularly use standard deviation outside of a professional context? What for, if I may ask? The fact that most people have never even heard of the concept suggests that it's really not all that critical.
(That's not to say that it isn't ridiculous that a doctor who bases his diagnoses on the concept doesn't have a solid grasp on it.)
Exactly. And try to get your game reviewed by some people. Then they can tell others how much it reminds them of that oldie that you got your inspiration from. Much classier than just making a game called "Pocman" or "Super Vittorio Bros."
Take a page from Trine. It's obviously inspired by Lost Vikings, but it's not a straight ripoff, and they don't (need to) market themselves as such. In the meantime, every other review of the game mentions Lost Vikings, and I'm sure that's how they get many of their sales. It's how how they got mine, in any case.
"Acreage"? Really? What's wrong with "surface area"? Should we now call length "footage", and volume "gallonage"?
At the very least use SI square meterage. ;-)
...to handle writing scientific reports on Linux, and AbiWord wasn't up to the job (Note to trolls: please don't bother with shill posts for TeX/LaTex. I'm sure it's very good, but I've got work to do.)
Excuse me but would you also consider someone who tells a carpenter that a hammer is a much better tool for driving nails than a stapler a troll because you can't be bothered taking three seconds to figure out what end of the hammer to hold?
LaTeX is usually the right tool for the job if that job happens to involve writing a lot of equations, but the learning curve makes grown men (MSc students) weep.
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Too true, sadly. To be fair, most programming languages make this much harder than it should be. Even in a relatively modern language like java, which by default uses unicode for strings, you have a "char" datatype that can't actually completely represent all unicode characters. As a result, you have all kinds of libraries that assume that one char = one character, while this is not true. But you'll never find out until you have people using your application with, say, Han characters outside the BMP.
And I shudder to think how few applications can probably handle different writing directions, like the right-to-left of Hebrew.
Don't get me started. It's ridiculous how even big multinationals (emphasis on multi and national) can't get such a simple thing right.
Itunes on Windows is another good example. Originally it used Windows' "Location" setting, which is braindead, as location does not imply language. After much complaining about this on the Apple forums, they decided to fix it by having the user choose a language during installation. This is an improvement, but still idiotic, as they should have used Windows' "Language used in menus and dialogs" setting.
What's worst though, is that despite setting the language in iTunes, every feature that uses the iTunes Store still uses geo-ip to determine the language! So even though I've explicitly told iTunes that I want to use English, I still get Dutch in various places!
Wow! This is a revolution!
That's just completely, utterly, false. Why don't you also claim you need to buy the official WotC dice? It's about as true as the rest you're saying.
As a group, the only WotC products you need are the original 3 core books, same as with 3E. You'd think this would be obvious from the fact that thousands were playing the game before all the other products you mention were even released.
Yes, if you specifically want to play a class from PHB2, then you need PHB2, duh. If you specifically wanted to play a warlock in 3E, you needed Complete Arcane. This is no different.
There's no reason to buy the "Power" books, unless you'd like more options for your characters. Same as with the "Complete" books in 3.5, and the spatbooks in 3.0. And Complete Martial is not at all a Paladin Supplement. It doesn't have any significant content for paladins, and it's explicitly not marketed as a paladin supplement.
As to the official mini's: these are not at all required, and I've never before heard anyone claim that they were. The same is true for a D&D Insider subscription. That's basically a subscription to Dungeon and Dragon magazines plus some online tools. Do you feel Dungeon and Dragon magazines were required to play 3E? I should hope not.
And what's that nonsense about 4E being a complete surprise? WotC announced 4E 10 months in advance. They even published preview books! And anyone paying attention had noticed that Wizards had been experimenting with radically new mechanics for D&D for at least a year before that, so it was only an open secret that WotC was working on a new edition.
All in all, your post is nothing more than a troll.
Ouch. I feel for you. SS1 really is a brilliant game, but I'm not sure I could stand the interface again either.
Do give X-Com a try. It's a lot of fun, and the interface (IMO) is not too awful. If it does turn out that the interface is too big an obstacle, you could still try X-COM: Apocalypse, which uses a newer engine.
I prefer just simple "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Very Hard" settings. Ideally with "Normal" being a little easy, so I get to feel good about myself when I choose "Hard" :-). (Only half joking here. The psychology really does matter.)
The problem with letting the computer decide what the challenge level is, is that it doesn't have a clue about my preferences. It only knows how well I'm doing, not whether or not I enjoy being challenged. This is not enough information to determine if I'm having fun or not. Doubly so if the system is flawed. For instance, Oblivion takes only your level into account, not your skill, or even your character's skills. This means that if you level up by, for instance, trading, you are constantly hounded by all kinds of nasty critters that you have no hope of defeating with your puny combat stats. Obviously, that's no fun at all.
Also, in some games it's really inappropriate to change the world for no apparent reason, other than that the player is doing well or poorly. Morrowind (sans expansions) was a remarkable consistent world, and that helped to make it incredibly engrossing. In Oblivion, where you were effectively never getting ahead, and where eventually even the highway robbers were equiped with a king's random in magic items in order to challenge you, I never felt close to having the same level of immersion.
Agreed. The common opinion that games only improve on the audiovisuals is simply untrue. It's amazing how limited or downright crappy the interfaces of many older games are compared to those of more recent titles.