1) Point out to her that her computer is as likely to stop working on its own as a rock is likely to hit her on the head on its own. It's not completely impossible, but it's very unlikely. 2) Tell her that if she keeps breaking her computer, you're going to start charging her (or simply stop providing support altogether). 3) Warn her of the dangers that lurk deep within the tubes of the internets (basically, scare her). Point out that these dangers are completely subject to 1 and 2 above. (She has to do something to be "infected" and if she does it, you will refuse to help or will charge for your time and effort).
My family and friends have all been put on notice that I charge "dinner" for setup, but don't provide support unless they use a Mac or pay me money (or more dinners - note the plural). Macs aren't as trouble free as you might assume, but they're easier to fix than a Windows box. I'm always very clear about possible dangers and try to educate people, but there's only so much you can do. Scaring them goes a long way toward keeping them out of trouble in most cases.
'Twas a joke. Laugh. The other reply poster got it.
As for Blue Man Group, they have a kickass version of Baba O'Riley done with those tube-backpacks-that-shoot-streamers and a guy with a mallet bashing the guts of a piano.
Had IBM been successful in keeping the PC proprietary, I don't know what computers we would be using today. Maybe DEC alphas or Sparcstations. Or maybe we'd be paying $10000 a pop to IBM.
I use a Mac. The more things change, the more people still buy the same ol' "locked-in" stuff. And yet, it works so well that I don't feel like I paid too much. A lot, but not too much. Vendor lock-in isn't as bad as most paranoid/.-ers would have you believe.
That's a catchy little rhyme, there, but I have some problems with it.
1) Marketing lies all the time. That's a given. You don't have to tell us what we already knew. 2) It's not restricted to Redmond as you seem to imply.
As others have pointed out, most routers do allow administrative access through the wireless interface. What they don't allow is firmware updates to be initiated by the wireless interface, because that would probably brick the router.
Actually, I am old enough to "remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS", and I'm going to disagree with you. The reason lies in the times before the PSX existed.
Remember back in the 16-bit days, when there were a whopping 4 revisions of the SNES, mainly to update board designs for newer parts from different suppliers? And Sega had the Genesis with several dozen revisions, some of which completely broke compatibility with early games? Yeah, this all sounds familiar. And Sega was chasing a similar phantom at the time - cartridge pirates in Hong Kong.
For the SNES, Rev. A was at the Japanese launch in June 1991. The Rev. B SNES was a bugfix revision ready for the US launch in November 1991. The Rev. C was released in mid-life in about 1994, presumably due to chip/supplier changes, though it did break the Game Genie for some games. Rev. D was released with the case redesign at the end of the product life cycle (circa 1996) and was all about cheap parts redesigned into the board.
For the Genesis, well, there were several revisions of each major release, with each major release typically accompanied by a case redesign. There were at least 4 case designs, and there were games which were widely known not to work on newer-release consoles. (Populous was one of the games that I can remember with this problem.) This is at least partly to blame for the relatively weak emulation support for the Genesis even now. It just wasn't a stable hardware platform. That's to say nothing of the fact that the hardware was kinda sketchy anyway.
Nintendo is all about having a stable platform because they know that if they don't, people won't buy their crap when they break compatibility. They always have been. And they're wise to do the same now, despite Sony's current "dominance" of the market (I put that in quotation marks because Sony hasn't dominated anything in my living room for a long time). Sony will eventually shoot themselves in the foot much as Sega did, and Nintendo will still be there, making good games and good profits. Speaking of that, does anyone remember when Sega released the Saturn for "way more than anyone is going to pay for a game console," as the industry pundits said in 1995? I do. I remember Sony spanking the Saturn's overpriced bugginess into oblivion. I feel a similar beatdown approaching the PS3.
If companies would package their products to include tech specs and schematics, people who don't want to mess with their purchased property wouldn't have to, but the people who want to modify, repair, or extend their purchased property could do so with ease.
And don't give me the old, tired, whiny excuse that people would simply build their own from the specs they got from a friend. It's not true. As you alluded to, most people aren't hobbyists and don't want to be bothered to build their own. And there isn't a problem from a commercial competitor, either, since patents and copyrights are there to protect against this exact form of abuse. There are adequate legal protections against ripoffs.
Companies should be required to include specs with every electronic and mechanical device they sell, whether it's as small as a wristwatch, or as large as a car.
I used to be a checkout clerk at a grocery store. My personal policy is: if I use self-checkout, there had better be a paycheck waiting for me at the other end of it. Since every store so far has refused to pay me for doing work for them at a self-checkout, I've refused to use the self-checkout in every store, despite long lines in regular lanes and empty lanes at the self-checkout.
I work, you pay. No pay? No work. It's really quite simple. Even if they discounted the items I buy, I might use it, since that would be a payback of a sort. 10% sounds about right.
Because cell phone networks are private networks built with private funds. The PSTN (POTS) system was built on common land (right-of-ways) with a large percentage of the cost subsidized by the government. Cell-phone networks were built as either a) an ILEC's towers as endpoints on the PSTN that bridge it to wireless users or b) a CLEC's private network with an upstream ILEC. In the case of (a), the towers are private equipment and are not part of the PSTN. In the case of (b), the provider doesn't even have a stake in the PSTN and owns the whole network, and isn't subject to any of the rules that prevent collusion because what they have is theoretically completely unique (and therefore nobody can collude with them because nobody has the same type of system).
In other words, you're comparing apples to oranges. The PSTN and all the stuff that uses its copper and fiber could be subject to collusion because it's a common and known entity. Private networks are not, and can't be regulated that way. The bright side of this is that the PSTN can't be held hostage without a lot of government help. It's only now (and not 50 years ago) that we're seeing enough "help" from the government to bring this about, and it may not last. We can only hope.
While I have played the nationstates.net game, I have not read Jennifer Government, and that's not where I got the notion from.
Controlling the economy is of utmost importance to everyone. The rich want to stay rich and in power and the poor want to get rich and take power. You can't have power without money. (Money is war in convenient quantified-token form, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) So when someone decimates the economy of scarce items, whoever is in control and striving for control loses a HUGE investment of time and effort, as well as their entire goal of control. It's only logical to assume that the losers will strike out violently in this scenario.
Of course, they can't win. Someone with enough power (a device, a method, a support structure and organization, whatever) to destroy the economy in such a manner would be virtually untouchable. Especially when they use that power for philanthropy and get a power-base of epic proportions. At that point, it turns into an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation for the formerly power-hungry control freaks.
I've played a translated ROM version of it, and I just finished up the bit where you get the 3rd airship (you destroy them like you're James Fricking Bond in that game). I quit playing when I couldn't find the time to play. I figure I'll pick it back up and finish it one of these days.
Though it didn't seem very hard to me, others have said this is the most difficult FF ever. I'd be inclined to believe them if I weren't so good at mapping out how memory is used by old console games. You know, stuff like 06FB = 1A to keep my lead party character from getting poisoned, petrified, or zombified, and to keep me floating, hasted, and regenning. (No, that's not really a functional mapping, and at 06xx on the NES, it's more likely to be a hard stat like Agility or Max HP than a fight stat like poison.) And freeze-states tend to make everything easier too.
If I find the time to finish it, I won't need to remember what you said about that version. I'll experience it firsthand, though without the as much difficulty overcoming it.
Right now, Nintendo is poised to release the Power Glove again (the Wii-mote). But while you know it's the same idea, you also know that technology and design have improved to the point where it won't suck this time. So there's a recycle period of approximately 18 years (3 console generations). The Virtual Boy was released in 1995. We've had the GBA and DS since then (portables only, since the VB was supposed to be the next-big-thing for portable games). So we need one more full product change. We're also only 11 years into the cycle. Expect a revamped Virtual-Boy-done-right product in 2013 to replace the successor to the DS.
You don't expect our future corporate masters to go quietly into the night, do you? They'll get their governmental thugs to enforce their right to profit, and failing that, they'll build their own "security forces" to ensure the safety of their business models.
That's why people who cannot fight for themselves love guns. They are the pussies weapon of choice.
Guns are known as "the great equalizer" for a reason. You don't have to be a "pussy" to be at a distinct disadvantage in a fight. A gun "equalizes" everyone, since, if everyone had one, they would all be equally able (skill notwithstanding) to fend for themselves.
The major difference between a gunfight and some other type of fight is that there's little defense, if any. A gun is pretty much going to tear through anything less than heavy wood or metal, whereas a knife can be stopped by blocking the arm swinging it and is easily dodged (since it's not moving at near the speed of sound).
FF4 was pretty lame in the villain department. Zemus/Zeromus hated Earthlings so he wanted to destroy them by using the power of the crystals or something. No backstory was given for why he hated them. So your criticism stands.
But FF6 is a different matter entirely. Kefka starts as a general in the Imperial army. The Empire is greedy for land and power (obviously, or it wouldn't be The Empire). So Kefka is already a powerful goon in the goon army. He's also a prick. So he hatches a plan to not only usurp the emperorship, but also to take over the world and rule it to his greedy ends. In the process, he "blows a lot of shit up and kills people". It also seems that he's mentally unstable, and by that, I mean that he's batshit-fucking-loco. All of this qualifies as both motive and personality.
As for gameplay, well, it's all about deciding what happens and when. FF6 is quite a bit less challenging than FF4 in this department. FF4 definitely had the best balance of any FF game. It was the first FF game that wasn't strictly turn-based, but had attack timers (the Active Time Battle system), and yet it hadn't degraded into the realm of FF6-and-up where by the end of the game every attack does 9999 damage. You actually could get to the end of the game and have your ass handed to you by the enemies you met wandering the final corridors of the game. And yet, every step of the way you were constantly getting it handed to you, so it wasn't a matter of the rest of the game being too easy. And my experiences are based on the US version, which is based on the Japanese "easytype" version! Now that's gameplay!
Actually, Final Fantasy defined the genre. (Don't start with DQ/DW, since those were fundamentally different "back in the day".) Final Fantasy 2 and 3 set the pace. Final Fantasy 4 took that torch and ran with it. And when it ran, it ran. FF5 merely continued the work that FF4 started, while setting the stage for the "OMG OPTIONS!" games made for the PSX. FF6 was the pinnacle of storytelling and party configuration.
FF7 was a tech demo and an unfinished, poorly-told story, and is where the series started falling apart. Did anyone understand the FF7 storyline on the first (or even the second) time through the game? Yeah, me either. The characters were awful. By the end of FF7 I was hoping that Sephiroth would win and wipe out all these whiny asshats and their little angst, too. The only thing that was revolutionary was the ZOMG 3D graphics, and even they were poorly done and grainy.
FF8 and FF9 were more of the same pre-rendered BS with half-done stories written by crackheads. FF8 had an interesting (though annoying) magic system. FF9 was completely unremarkable. I gave up on Final Fantasy after that, so I can't comment on FF10. Maybe it truly is better, but I'm more inclined to believe that it's about as "better" as FF7.
This fanboyism and weird love for FF7 is just another example of the rift between gamers who remember what games were like before Sony destroyed the industry by making it "cool" and gamers who remember their "first Playstation". This is not a rant about how all games were better or how we only had 2D and we liked it uphill both ways forty miles butt naked in the snow. It's a rant about how Sony threw money at dev houses to steal them from Nintendo and produced a whole generation of EA-style overhyped, underdelivered, shoddy, games that cater to people who buy games because of how "cool" a game is. FF7 is "cool". I only wish that Squaresoft had actually bothered to finish the game and make it "good" as well.
Not really. Up until this game was released in the US, most US gamers were disinterested in RPG's because they were "slow" and "tedious" and "boring". But then some of us didn't get to the video store quickly enough one weekend, and the only thing left to rent was Final Fantasy II. See, all the RPG players had already rented it, played it, bought it, and loved it, so it was almost always in stock. And on those weekends where all the "good stuff" (I look back and shudder at what was "good stuff" sometimes) was already checked out, FF2 was just sitting there with a vocal minority of players nudging you in the back of your mind, telling you "rent it! rent it!" And that weekend was the weekend I became a Final Fantasy Fanboy.
I played the game for a couple of hours that night, and I got as far as Kaipo. The next day, I didn't have much time to play, but I got to Octomamm (who promptly kicked my butt). Then I had to take the game back (short rentals were the norm in those days). But I was hooked. Unfortunately, by the time I discovered how good it was, the game was out of production. Fortunately, FF3 wasn't far behind. As luck would have it, FF3 was even better than FF2. Too bad that set an unreachable mark for Squaresoft and everything since then has been disappointing.
I'm not joking. It just makes much more sense to me to:
newImage.initWithContentsOfFile(fileName);
This tells me: - I'm working with an image, not a pointer to an image (or I would've used ->). - initWithContentsOfFile() is a member function, not a member variable.
I get none of that from Obj-C, though that's probably just because I'm not familiar with it. But that doesn't mean that the language isn't unreadable. Why? Well, I can honestly say that I've tried to learn Obj-C's syntax. I learned C-syntax early, and I'm most familiar with it. But that didn't prevent me from learning Pascal syntax, BASIC syntax, COBOL (ugh) syntax, or any number of other languages of various types (programming, scripting, document description, etc.). But Obj-C was the nut that wouldn't crack. I've tried multiple times, each time thinking, "Hey, maybe I just didn't try hard enough." I always end up thinking something else. Something more along the lines of, "Who wrote this crap? Why do they hate me? What moron thought this was a logical way of writing code?" I don't like to fail, but Obj-C has beaten me every time I've tried it. I get kinda angry and depressed about that. Perhaps that's worthy of a "Troll" mod.
What are the square brackets around the statement for? And now that I look at it again, it's entirely possible that I'm not looking at a method call at all and that perhaps this is part of a function prototype or something. Which brings me back to my "angry-Matt" comments above. I stand by my assertion that Obj-C is not readable.
Slashdot Mirror
No, teal is a color. Teal'c is an alien.
1) Point out to her that her computer is as likely to stop working on its own as a rock is likely to hit her on the head on its own. It's not completely impossible, but it's very unlikely.
2) Tell her that if she keeps breaking her computer, you're going to start charging her (or simply stop providing support altogether).
3) Warn her of the dangers that lurk deep within the tubes of the internets (basically, scare her). Point out that these dangers are completely subject to 1 and 2 above. (She has to do something to be "infected" and if she does it, you will refuse to help or will charge for your time and effort).
My family and friends have all been put on notice that I charge "dinner" for setup, but don't provide support unless they use a Mac or pay me money (or more dinners - note the plural). Macs aren't as trouble free as you might assume, but they're easier to fix than a Windows box. I'm always very clear about possible dangers and try to educate people, but there's only so much you can do. Scaring them goes a long way toward keeping them out of trouble in most cases.
'Twas a joke. Laugh. The other reply poster got it.
As for Blue Man Group, they have a kickass version of Baba O'Riley done with those tube-backpacks-that-shoot-streamers and a guy with a mallet bashing the guts of a piano.
Do you have any idea how much schedule 40 pipe it takes to get those calls to India and back?
A significant amount less than it would if you used sturdier schedule-80. (Hint: it's the thickness of the pipe wall.)
tube switches
You mean valves? The controls are orange if you buy that particular brand. To get blue, you would need to buy Siemens or JCI valves.
Had IBM been successful in keeping the PC proprietary, I don't know what computers we would be using today. Maybe DEC alphas or Sparcstations. Or maybe we'd be paying $10000 a pop to IBM.
/.-ers would have you believe.
I use a Mac. The more things change, the more people still buy the same ol' "locked-in" stuff. And yet, it works so well that I don't feel like I paid too much. A lot, but not too much. Vendor lock-in isn't as bad as most paranoid
In the Land of Redmond where Marketing lies.
That's a catchy little rhyme, there, but I have some problems with it.
1) Marketing lies all the time. That's a given. You don't have to tell us what we already knew.
2) It's not restricted to Redmond as you seem to imply.
As others have pointed out, most routers do allow administrative access through the wireless interface. What they don't allow is firmware updates to be initiated by the wireless interface, because that would probably brick the router.
Actually, I am old enough to "remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS", and I'm going to disagree with you. The reason lies in the times before the PSX existed.
Remember back in the 16-bit days, when there were a whopping 4 revisions of the SNES, mainly to update board designs for newer parts from different suppliers? And Sega had the Genesis with several dozen revisions, some of which completely broke compatibility with early games? Yeah, this all sounds familiar. And Sega was chasing a similar phantom at the time - cartridge pirates in Hong Kong.
For the SNES, Rev. A was at the Japanese launch in June 1991. The Rev. B SNES was a bugfix revision ready for the US launch in November 1991. The Rev. C was released in mid-life in about 1994, presumably due to chip/supplier changes, though it did break the Game Genie for some games. Rev. D was released with the case redesign at the end of the product life cycle (circa 1996) and was all about cheap parts redesigned into the board.
For the Genesis, well, there were several revisions of each major release, with each major release typically accompanied by a case redesign. There were at least 4 case designs, and there were games which were widely known not to work on newer-release consoles. (Populous was one of the games that I can remember with this problem.) This is at least partly to blame for the relatively weak emulation support for the Genesis even now. It just wasn't a stable hardware platform. That's to say nothing of the fact that the hardware was kinda sketchy anyway.
Nintendo is all about having a stable platform because they know that if they don't, people won't buy their crap when they break compatibility. They always have been. And they're wise to do the same now, despite Sony's current "dominance" of the market (I put that in quotation marks because Sony hasn't dominated anything in my living room for a long time). Sony will eventually shoot themselves in the foot much as Sega did, and Nintendo will still be there, making good games and good profits. Speaking of that, does anyone remember when Sega released the Saturn for "way more than anyone is going to pay for a game console," as the industry pundits said in 1995? I do. I remember Sony spanking the Saturn's overpriced bugginess into oblivion. I feel a similar beatdown approaching the PS3.
Don't worry about it. Foreigners aren't generally as sensitive to smell as post-WW2 Americans are.
If companies would package their products to include tech specs and schematics, people who don't want to mess with their purchased property wouldn't have to, but the people who want to modify, repair, or extend their purchased property could do so with ease.
And don't give me the old, tired, whiny excuse that people would simply build their own from the specs they got from a friend. It's not true. As you alluded to, most people aren't hobbyists and don't want to be bothered to build their own. And there isn't a problem from a commercial competitor, either, since patents and copyrights are there to protect against this exact form of abuse. There are adequate legal protections against ripoffs.
Companies should be required to include specs with every electronic and mechanical device they sell, whether it's as small as a wristwatch, or as large as a car.
You actually use the self-checkouts? Wow.
I used to be a checkout clerk at a grocery store. My personal policy is: if I use self-checkout, there had better be a paycheck waiting for me at the other end of it. Since every store so far has refused to pay me for doing work for them at a self-checkout, I've refused to use the self-checkout in every store, despite long lines in regular lanes and empty lanes at the self-checkout.
I work, you pay. No pay? No work. It's really quite simple. Even if they discounted the items I buy, I might use it, since that would be a payback of a sort. 10% sounds about right.
Because cell phone networks are private networks built with private funds. The PSTN (POTS) system was built on common land (right-of-ways) with a large percentage of the cost subsidized by the government. Cell-phone networks were built as either a) an ILEC's towers as endpoints on the PSTN that bridge it to wireless users or b) a CLEC's private network with an upstream ILEC. In the case of (a), the towers are private equipment and are not part of the PSTN. In the case of (b), the provider doesn't even have a stake in the PSTN and owns the whole network, and isn't subject to any of the rules that prevent collusion because what they have is theoretically completely unique (and therefore nobody can collude with them because nobody has the same type of system).
In other words, you're comparing apples to oranges. The PSTN and all the stuff that uses its copper and fiber could be subject to collusion because it's a common and known entity. Private networks are not, and can't be regulated that way. The bright side of this is that the PSTN can't be held hostage without a lot of government help. It's only now (and not 50 years ago) that we're seeing enough "help" from the government to bring this about, and it may not last. We can only hope.
5 weeks: A free face stabbing
They're going to be rich if they can hook it up to a web interface.
While I have played the nationstates.net game, I have not read Jennifer Government, and that's not where I got the notion from.
Controlling the economy is of utmost importance to everyone. The rich want to stay rich and in power and the poor want to get rich and take power. You can't have power without money. (Money is war in convenient quantified-token form, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) So when someone decimates the economy of scarce items, whoever is in control and striving for control loses a HUGE investment of time and effort, as well as their entire goal of control. It's only logical to assume that the losers will strike out violently in this scenario.
Of course, they can't win. Someone with enough power (a device, a method, a support structure and organization, whatever) to destroy the economy in such a manner would be virtually untouchable. Especially when they use that power for philanthropy and get a power-base of epic proportions. At that point, it turns into an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation for the formerly power-hungry control freaks.
Or DIE as in a six-sided mechanical random number generation device.
Or DEAD as in 57005.
I've played a translated ROM version of it, and I just finished up the bit where you get the 3rd airship (you destroy them like you're James Fricking Bond in that game). I quit playing when I couldn't find the time to play. I figure I'll pick it back up and finish it one of these days.
Though it didn't seem very hard to me, others have said this is the most difficult FF ever. I'd be inclined to believe them if I weren't so good at mapping out how memory is used by old console games. You know, stuff like 06FB = 1A to keep my lead party character from getting poisoned, petrified, or zombified, and to keep me floating, hasted, and regenning. (No, that's not really a functional mapping, and at 06xx on the NES, it's more likely to be a hard stat like Agility or Max HP than a fight stat like poison.) And freeze-states tend to make everything easier too.
If I find the time to finish it, I won't need to remember what you said about that version. I'll experience it firsthand, though without the as much difficulty overcoming it.
Yes, but you probably won't recognize it.
Right now, Nintendo is poised to release the Power Glove again (the Wii-mote). But while you know it's the same idea, you also know that technology and design have improved to the point where it won't suck this time. So there's a recycle period of approximately 18 years (3 console generations). The Virtual Boy was released in 1995. We've had the GBA and DS since then (portables only, since the VB was supposed to be the next-big-thing for portable games). So we need one more full product change. We're also only 11 years into the cycle. Expect a revamped Virtual-Boy-done-right product in 2013 to replace the successor to the DS.
How will we adapt to such abundance?
With violence.
You don't expect our future corporate masters to go quietly into the night, do you? They'll get their governmental thugs to enforce their right to profit, and failing that, they'll build their own "security forces" to ensure the safety of their business models.
That's why people who cannot fight for themselves love guns. They are the pussies weapon of choice.
Guns are known as "the great equalizer" for a reason. You don't have to be a "pussy" to be at a distinct disadvantage in a fight. A gun "equalizes" everyone, since, if everyone had one, they would all be equally able (skill notwithstanding) to fend for themselves.
The major difference between a gunfight and some other type of fight is that there's little defense, if any. A gun is pretty much going to tear through anything less than heavy wood or metal, whereas a knife can be stopped by blocking the arm swinging it and is easily dodged (since it's not moving at near the speed of sound).
Uhh... you haven't played FF6, have you?
FF4 was pretty lame in the villain department. Zemus/Zeromus hated Earthlings so he wanted to destroy them by using the power of the crystals or something. No backstory was given for why he hated them. So your criticism stands.
But FF6 is a different matter entirely. Kefka starts as a general in the Imperial army. The Empire is greedy for land and power (obviously, or it wouldn't be The Empire). So Kefka is already a powerful goon in the goon army. He's also a prick. So he hatches a plan to not only usurp the emperorship, but also to take over the world and rule it to his greedy ends. In the process, he "blows a lot of shit up and kills people". It also seems that he's mentally unstable, and by that, I mean that he's batshit-fucking-loco. All of this qualifies as both motive and personality.
As for gameplay, well, it's all about deciding what happens and when. FF6 is quite a bit less challenging than FF4 in this department. FF4 definitely had the best balance of any FF game. It was the first FF game that wasn't strictly turn-based, but had attack timers (the Active Time Battle system), and yet it hadn't degraded into the realm of FF6-and-up where by the end of the game every attack does 9999 damage. You actually could get to the end of the game and have your ass handed to you by the enemies you met wandering the final corridors of the game. And yet, every step of the way you were constantly getting it handed to you, so it wasn't a matter of the rest of the game being too easy. And my experiences are based on the US version, which is based on the Japanese "easytype" version! Now that's gameplay!
Actually, Final Fantasy defined the genre. (Don't start with DQ/DW, since those were fundamentally different "back in the day".) Final Fantasy 2 and 3 set the pace. Final Fantasy 4 took that torch and ran with it. And when it ran, it ran. FF5 merely continued the work that FF4 started, while setting the stage for the "OMG OPTIONS!" games made for the PSX. FF6 was the pinnacle of storytelling and party configuration.
FF7 was a tech demo and an unfinished, poorly-told story, and is where the series started falling apart. Did anyone understand the FF7 storyline on the first (or even the second) time through the game? Yeah, me either. The characters were awful. By the end of FF7 I was hoping that Sephiroth would win and wipe out all these whiny asshats and their little angst, too. The only thing that was revolutionary was the ZOMG 3D graphics, and even they were poorly done and grainy.
FF8 and FF9 were more of the same pre-rendered BS with half-done stories written by crackheads. FF8 had an interesting (though annoying) magic system. FF9 was completely unremarkable. I gave up on Final Fantasy after that, so I can't comment on FF10. Maybe it truly is better, but I'm more inclined to believe that it's about as "better" as FF7.
This fanboyism and weird love for FF7 is just another example of the rift between gamers who remember what games were like before Sony destroyed the industry by making it "cool" and gamers who remember their "first Playstation". This is not a rant about how all games were better or how we only had 2D and we liked it uphill both ways forty miles butt naked in the snow. It's a rant about how Sony threw money at dev houses to steal them from Nintendo and produced a whole generation of EA-style overhyped, underdelivered, shoddy, games that cater to people who buy games because of how "cool" a game is. FF7 is "cool". I only wish that Squaresoft had actually bothered to finish the game and make it "good" as well.
Not really. Up until this game was released in the US, most US gamers were disinterested in RPG's because they were "slow" and "tedious" and "boring". But then some of us didn't get to the video store quickly enough one weekend, and the only thing left to rent was Final Fantasy II. See, all the RPG players had already rented it, played it, bought it, and loved it, so it was almost always in stock. And on those weekends where all the "good stuff" (I look back and shudder at what was "good stuff" sometimes) was already checked out, FF2 was just sitting there with a vocal minority of players nudging you in the back of your mind, telling you "rent it! rent it!" And that weekend was the weekend I became a Final Fantasy Fanboy.
I played the game for a couple of hours that night, and I got as far as Kaipo. The next day, I didn't have much time to play, but I got to Octomamm (who promptly kicked my butt). Then I had to take the game back (short rentals were the norm in those days). But I was hooked. Unfortunately, by the time I discovered how good it was, the game was out of production. Fortunately, FF3 wasn't far behind. As luck would have it, FF3 was even better than FF2. Too bad that set an unreachable mark for Squaresoft and everything since then has been disappointing.
That sounds like a good idea. And now, I'm going to insult you for your supposed promiscuity while wishing you a safe trip.
Take care, ho!
I'm not joking. It just makes much more sense to me to:
newImage.initWithContentsOfFile(fileName);
This tells me:
- I'm working with an image, not a pointer to an image (or I would've used ->).
- initWithContentsOfFile() is a member function, not a member variable.
I get none of that from Obj-C, though that's probably just because I'm not familiar with it. But that doesn't mean that the language isn't unreadable. Why? Well, I can honestly say that I've tried to learn Obj-C's syntax. I learned C-syntax early, and I'm most familiar with it. But that didn't prevent me from learning Pascal syntax, BASIC syntax, COBOL (ugh) syntax, or any number of other languages of various types (programming, scripting, document description, etc.). But Obj-C was the nut that wouldn't crack. I've tried multiple times, each time thinking, "Hey, maybe I just didn't try hard enough." I always end up thinking something else. Something more along the lines of, "Who wrote this crap? Why do they hate me? What moron thought this was a logical way of writing code?" I don't like to fail, but Obj-C has beaten me every time I've tried it. I get kinda angry and depressed about that. Perhaps that's worthy of a "Troll" mod.
What are the square brackets around the statement for? And now that I look at it again, it's entirely possible that I'm not looking at a method call at all and that perhaps this is part of a function prototype or something. Which brings me back to my "angry-Matt" comments above. I stand by my assertion that Obj-C is not readable.
Oh, trauma to the groin, boys
Trauma to the groin!
Nothing's quite as funny
As a trauma to the groin.
There is no wit more pretty,
There is no joke divine,
Nor limerick delicious as
A trauma to the groin!
Heywood Banks is a genius.