Google stopped working after last storm that broke my ISP's router. Google slowed down to a crawl when I was delaying paying my ISP bills. Google stopped working when the Ethernet plug got loose in the hub. Google stopped working when power supply in my firewall box died. Google stopped working while the ISP network was down for maintenance. Google stopped working when the local DNS got poisoned. Google stopped working when a neighbor was driving his car with broken ignition near the WiFi accesspoint.
Common home networks are too unreliable to base your desktop and mostly everything you do on them.
XUL is a language for writing GUI looks with room for hooks. It's not all that much better than HTML for it. Both for XUL and for HTML you need the same Javascript backend, and if given JS backend to HTML includes xmlhttprequest() for dynamically changing the HTML content (through DOM tree), it's called AJAX. The kludginess of the solution lies in less-than-perfect reliablity of xmlhttprequest and hideous access to the DOM tree in JS. (e1=document.getElementById('e1'); e2=document.createNode('H1'); e2.value=reqResult; e1.parentNode.replaceChild(e1,e2); e2.id='e1';)
With XUL it would look just the same, very similar DOM tree with the same hideous access methods, same unreliable xmlhttprequest and only different tag names. It could look differently, it could be more sleek as a GUI because it was meant to be a GUI in the first place, but it would be just as kludgy inside.
The fun part is that most of modern day games work just fine on Win98SE. So, another 8 years till XP is dropped? Another fun part: The new version (Vista) isn't out yet, and they already want to drop support for current version (XP). So how long will they support Vista after its successor is released? And 50% of nowadays PCs aren't even capable of running Vista. How many people will try alternatives? Linux, MacOS X...
Most fancy filesystems like ReiserFS are optimized for performance with lots and lots of tiny files where the disk reads little at a time, seeking, sorting, assembling, slicing etc take most of the time. Here you have few big files, so performance is your least worry - the harddrive read/write speed will be the bottleneck, and all the seeks, directory reads etc will be scarce and fast. Therefore the filesystem won't change much in the means of speed. (it MAY break a lot in the department, like, say compressed filesystems, but won't speed it up above what the harddisk does, and most of filesystems will perform just the same in the means of speed.) What you can do is to optimize the filesystem for capacity, reducing its overhead and allowing to get closer to "advertised disk capacity".
Just use tune[23]fs to reduce number of inodes significantly on the ext3fs. Or look for -simple- filesystems that don't do tricks in optimization of speed (because these usually waste diskspace), just store your files in a straightforward manner.
Sell the suits to X-Prize winners. Once space tourism gets profitable, there will be market for that too. Fuel depot - just put one in the orbit and put a big billboard with prices for the fuels and distance to nearest competitor gas station.;) A lunar-capable all-terrain vehicle, well, lunar space tourism would have to take off first, but I can imagine the market, plus it wouldn't be so hard to make I think. A long-term rechargeable power system, enough of demand for that on Earth already. A micro reentry vehicle, double the number of passengers on tourist space flights once they know there's a safety boat onboard. And a maneuverable solar sail. Well, this one will be tricky, though "solar surfing" sounds like a damn catchy name for a sport:)
> China (the government, not it's citizens) doesn't give a rats-ass about science.
Yes.
> To the government, going to the moon is all political.
No. A lot has changed in Chineese government thinking over last 20 or so years. Science is still just a tool to their goals for them, they don't fund science for science, they fund science for purposes. But they realized the importance of money and shifted lots of weight from propaganda and ideology towards business. Chineese to the moon, important for politics for sure, but they go there to look for He3, for mineral riches, for profit as well. Sure it would require enormous investments, incredible amount of work and really deep budget cuts (in safety, workers' rights etc) to make it profitable, but the Chineese are able to pull it out, or at least give it a shot, even failing. In that country, the government is able to redirect huge amounts of resources from the citizens, private businesses, state-owned industries etc towards any goal they desire. For now it's the "brain power", quality of science and technology that is the bottleneck, not lack of funding and resources. And while you need to keep pumping resources (money, parts, materials, low-level staff) into any project in progress and it's going to eat them up over time. China has enough of it not to worry though. Meantime all the investments into the science team, into modern technologies etc remain once made, and further investments add up. China is building it. For now it's weak, but it WILL get stronger and will be able to make good use of the nearly unlimited resources. Then just beware... No, they won't bomb you. They will buy you.
Why wouldn't it be more like standardizing on torx vs. phillips head, or standard vs. metric?
Because screw heads are about as good at driving screws. Different computer languages perform differently at same tasks. You can glue two pieces of something with Perl and if it's paper/logs it will work great, if it's heavy number crunching with gigabytes of data passed every second, it will fall apart. You need to fuse it with welding torch of raw ANSI C or at worst C++. On the other hand you may try to make heavy steel paperclips weighting a pound each using C to clip webpages together, or put them in convenient sleeves and binders of PHP.
Standarizing on ONE language is a VERY bad idea unless your set of purposes is very narrow. Standarize on about 4. One heavyweight: C vs C++ vs Java vs... One rapid development: Perl vs Python vs PHP vs Ruby... One shell: Bash vs CSH vs MS-DOS batch vs msh vs TCL vs..., One prototyping: Matlab vs Octave vs...
And use them to fulfill the tasks well. Write a fast, very dirty prototype to see if it has right to work at all. Write separate programs that together build the large app using heavyweight. Glue them together with shells. Patch easy non-mission-critical large but easy parts with rapid development. Then you'll standarize on one paper glue, one screwdriver head, one brand of pb-free solder, which is a good thing. Don't force everyone to use Perl to drive factory machinery or C to process logs!
Nope. Not 100% XP and linear roll. 100% constitution (strength, to hit etc) and (some, maybe atan()?) roll. Your character gets tired and doing stuff gets increasingly difficult. You still do a wonder of slaying the dragon, no matter if you do it fresh and refreshed or after a week without sleep. So you go slaying fresh and rested because it's easier that way.
As for accumulating XP while offline doing "daily job", nope. Your character has some daily job that keeps it from starving, from LOSING their XP (forgetting things and skills). The fact you have your XP on the same level as when you left off the game 2 weeks ago is thanks to that "secret life". Otherwise you should be 5% XP aback.
I predict the shuttle will retire way before 2010. I just hope that astronauts will survive the process of early retirement of the shuttle, though this hope is bleak.
Following this reasoning, they shouldn't ever release WoW, Matrix Online etc. They are all separate codebases. Furthermore, there should be only one MMORPG ever made, by anyone.
Would it sprout into 100 different codebases, as long as each of them has userbase making given branch profitable, it's fine and should stay that way. If any branch is getting dry, either try to fix it, or cut it. But don't cut live branches.
Sony failed to understand that profitablity of games is strongly influenced by variety: I won't buy 15 boxes of Half-Life 2. I will buy one, and 14 other games. And someone else won't buy Half-Life 2 at all, but some will buy other games by Valve. Now what if I wanted to buy Half-Life 2, preordered it, and Valve would say they cancelled it, but here's Counter-Strike, have it and enjoy it. Now I don't feel appealed to the idea of battling terrorists in tiny areas, I want an immersive, dark single-user game. I don't care if Counter-Strike is good or bad, it's not what I asked for! Sure I might buy both. Or I might not, but my neighbor would buy CS while never touching HL2. This or that way, profit from selling two boxes, not one goes to Valve. But now I'm pissed off and I discourage everyone I know from doing any business with Valve. For me it's crap.
Real quality of both games aside, the changes were way too big to call it "upgrade". It was total replacement of what the players paid for with something they didn't ask for. Would the new version draw a new user base or not, we won't know. But Sony killed a milk cow to make steaks without regard that the users were vegetarians.:P This was a good opportunity for codebase split, creating two separate codebases, at least one profitable. Instead they killed one profitable codebase and created one which was pulled rapidly down by the death of the previous one.
Yeah, but just try pirating DOOM for NES:) The cartridge format allowed Nintendo to do some extra tricks that are impossible with "pure media", like putting additional hardware besides memory chips. AFAIK, because DOOM required way more CPU power than the NES CPU was able to generate, the DOOM cartridge contained entire 'minicomputer' with RAM and CPU, that was practically taking over the system and doing all the 3D calculations, texturing and such, while all the main NES CPU was doing was feeding ready video streamed from the cartridge to the screen, and user input to the cartridge.
Didn't you think that thanks to station logos, thanks to image borders with wide-screen movies, thanks to ticker scrollers and all that persistent stuff there will be a hundred of burn-ins in your screen in 2 years? And that due to normal usage the quality will degenerate severely by that time? And that a new HDTV will cost a quarter what your costs now? If you're worried about burn-in, you're a pathetic loser. Use, enjoy, exploit to full extent, discard when it's degraded beyond use and then buy a new one. That's how rational world works. I know of schools that kept modern state-of-the-art computers they got locked away from students "because they could break them" until the computers were obsolete. So either accept burn-in as natural way of things and enjoy your HDTV until you replace it with more durable model, or keep usage to minimum and live with a brand-new-like, zero burn-in, crystal-sharp picture CRT HDTV you switch on once in a blue moon while everyone else will be using superior quality non-degrading plasmas costing half the price.
Did anyone actually RTFA? Crap!
on
Off With Their HUDS!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Read the citation only if you wish to see how horrible drone-journalism it is. Otherwise just look at the highlight:
It is only recently that console developers have begun to address the hi-def revolution taking place in living rooms around the globe. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, over 12 million high-definition televisions (HDTVs) were sold in the United States between 1998 and 2004, and the market continues to grow rapidly; research firm Strategy Analytics has predicted HDTVs in almost 30 million American homes by 2008. With the advent of a new generation of consoles, developers are finally taking advantage of the ultra-sharp screen resolutions and theater quality sound offered by these increasingly common home entertainment systems. However, millions of high-definition televisions have an Achilles heel that can hinder developers as well: burn-in.
Coming Next to Slashdot: Fanless PCs, because PC fans contribute to drafts in your room and may cause cold, flu etc.
In FPS it creates a serious feeling of oppression in the opponent - they fear conrontation with you and as result are less of a danger and an easier prey. I remember a longer session of Shadow Warrior with friends over LAN. I killed one a few times in a row, despite being a weaker player, but that was enough that when the next time I showed up with a rocket launcher and he only had some machinegun, he just turned to run. Thing is I had some 4 rockets and that's all, I wasted them all really soon, missing him, and then the game fell back to default weapon, katana. But as I was running after him, he feeling my breath on his back, he kept running, and you see, a guy with the weakest hand-to-hand weapon chasing one with a pretty powerful machinegun, and the other one running his ass off! I finally got to him and sliced him to pieces. Some gameplay later and a few of his successful frags against me the situation repeated. He had even weaker weapon. But this time when I ran out of ammo and he saw no rockets whizzing by, he turned around and made me into a pulp. We both had a bit of laugh about that.
Well, if you mix random chemicals without the manual (chemistry book), it would be likely like in your scenario. Or more like: Mix chemicals X and Y. Nothing happens. Heat them. Bubbles appear. (so what?) Add chemical Z. Some cheesy stuff lands on the bottom. Add P and Q. It starts stinking. Filter out the cheesy stuff. Boggle. Either you understand the parts of chemistry and get desired results, or you don't and you get random results. Usually boring. You need to learn to achieve something. My scenario was a likely mission containing a simple task of making nitroglycerine. It would behave like that once you mixed the proper ingredients in proper proportions.
Heh, Virtual Fighter, PS. Some 5 hours of training with a friend, really elite player, but using the mad doctor and his crazy fighting style. It took me 1h to master a technique to PWN any enemy in the game (including my friend), then him 4h to develop a counter-technique to finally stop losing to me and get back the (well deserved) leadership. And then the deep jawdrop in the arcade salon, when I picked the doctor and went through the whole game, beating the shit off all my opponents:) And a crowd gathered around me "Look! He's finishing the game with the doc!"
Pick a niche style/mode if you want to have a moment of fame for yourself too:)
Unless you find a cheat. I managed some impressive score in some flash-based game by running it on very slow, old machine, resizing the browser window to some narrow column shape etc. Nothing illegal, just marginal, rare conditions. Scratch the CD, the race track will fail to load, you'll be in the middle of open field with just the start/finish gate and you'll beat the race in 15 seconds, taking 3s to finish a lap by circling the gate post. Happens. How are they going to stop it?
Well, I took a measure of strength of a MIT graduate theoretical physicist like Gordon Freeman. Sure he might be somewhat more fit, training in the hazard course etc, but still there's no way he could break such a palette to pieces in two hits. Most optimistic count would be half the time it took me, that is some 10 minutes.
Yep. Leave the burner fire 10% too strong. Boom. Load. Put the hot cyllinder on cold, wet damp metal table. The glass breaks. Boom. Load. You walk by and knock the table. The cyllinder falls. Boom. Load. You heat it too long, it starts boiling. Boom. Load. You stop it from boiling earlier and go for mission. You leave the cyllinder at the gate and shoot it from a distance. Sizzle, poof. Whoops, load and test if it's really explosive next time.:)
With high enough critical failure rate kids would be taught experimenting with explosives should be best left to computer screen. Just after each death, display "Remember, there's no 'load' in real life!":)
Calculated, well, yes. At least some, most of the non-organic chemistry and some of organic chemistry, sure. But you'd still need a database of effects, like what burns, what explodes, what produces blue fire and what green fire, what gas will make people laugh silly and which one to inject in the corridor to thwart voice-based authentication by raising pitch of voice. True -some- of these things could be calculated too, but I doubt XBox360 has enough of computational power for that yet.
Re:Computer Games Taught Me Everything I Know...
on
All Aboard the Nerd Boat
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Proper use of chainsaw? Kid, these games overrate chainsaws.
Under influence of HL2 I bought a crowbar. A beautiful, long, heavy crowbar. Just the same as you find in HL2, I even made the grip red.
Later that year I got opportunity to buy massive amounts of damaged wooden palettes really cheap. I bought 30. Wood for the fireplace for autumn evenings before we start central heating! Okay, I have a crowbar, that will take a moment. Gordon Freeman needed 2 hits to break such a palette to bits, such a pile would take him maybe 20 seconds.
Bullshit. It takes good 20 minutes to break a palette to pieces using a crowbar, and you're covered with sweat afterwards.
So I took the chainsaw instead. Okay, cutting the palette into 9 pieces that fit in the fireplace (5 cuts) takes about 3 minutes. It's tiring like hell too, but still vastly easier than breaking it using a crowbar. It took a whole afternoon to cut the pile of palettes with the chainsaw and I was dead tired after that.
I really regret I didn't have a rocket launcher or at least sachel charges. That would make it sooo much easier!
Slashdot Mirror
Worse.
Google stopped working after last storm that broke my ISP's router.
Google slowed down to a crawl when I was delaying paying my ISP bills.
Google stopped working when the Ethernet plug got loose in the hub.
Google stopped working when power supply in my firewall box died.
Google stopped working while the ISP network was down for maintenance.
Google stopped working when the local DNS got poisoned.
Google stopped working when a neighbor was driving his car with broken ignition near the WiFi accesspoint.
Common home networks are too unreliable to base your desktop and mostly everything you do on them.
XUL is a language for writing GUI looks with room for hooks. It's not all that much better than HTML for it. Both for XUL and for HTML you need the same Javascript backend, and if given JS backend to HTML includes xmlhttprequest() for dynamically changing the HTML content (through DOM tree), it's called AJAX.
The kludginess of the solution lies in less-than-perfect reliablity of xmlhttprequest and hideous access to the DOM tree in JS. (e1=document.getElementById('e1'); e2=document.createNode('H1'); e2.value=reqResult; e1.parentNode.replaceChild(e1,e2); e2.id='e1';)
With XUL it would look just the same, very similar DOM tree with the same hideous access methods, same unreliable xmlhttprequest and only different tag names. It could look differently, it could be more sleek as a GUI because it was meant to be a GUI in the first place, but it would be just as kludgy inside.
The fun part is that most of modern day games work just fine on Win98SE. So, another 8 years till XP is dropped?
Another fun part: The new version (Vista) isn't out yet, and they already want to drop support for current version (XP). So how long will they support Vista after its successor is released? And 50% of nowadays PCs aren't even capable of running Vista. How many people will try alternatives? Linux, MacOS X...
Most fancy filesystems like ReiserFS are optimized for performance with lots and lots of tiny files where the disk reads little at a time, seeking, sorting, assembling, slicing etc take most of the time. Here you have few big files, so performance is your least worry - the harddrive read/write speed will be the bottleneck, and all the seeks, directory reads etc will be scarce and fast. Therefore the filesystem won't change much in the means of speed. (it MAY break a lot in the department, like, say compressed filesystems, but won't speed it up above what the harddisk does, and most of filesystems will perform just the same in the means of speed.) What you can do is to optimize the filesystem for capacity, reducing its overhead and allowing to get closer to "advertised disk capacity".
Just use tune[23]fs to reduce number of inodes significantly on the ext3fs. Or look for -simple- filesystems that don't do tricks in optimization of speed (because these usually waste diskspace), just store your files in a straightforward manner.
Sell the suits to X-Prize winners. Once space tourism gets profitable, there will be market for that too. Fuel depot - just put one in the orbit and put a big billboard with prices for the fuels and distance to nearest competitor gas station. ;) A lunar-capable all-terrain vehicle, well, lunar space tourism would have to take off first, but I can imagine the market, plus it wouldn't be so hard to make I think. A long-term rechargeable power system, enough of demand for that on Earth already. A micro reentry vehicle, double the number of passengers on tourist space flights once they know there's a safety boat onboard. And a maneuverable solar sail. Well, this one will be tricky, though "solar surfing" sounds like a damn catchy name for a sport :)
> China (the government, not it's citizens) doesn't give a rats-ass about science.
Yes.
> To the government, going to the moon is all political.
No.
A lot has changed in Chineese government thinking over last 20 or so years. Science is still just a tool to their goals for them, they don't fund science for science, they fund science for purposes. But they realized the importance of money and shifted lots of weight from propaganda and ideology towards business. Chineese to the moon, important for politics for sure, but they go there to look for He3, for mineral riches, for profit as well. Sure it would require enormous investments, incredible amount of work and really deep budget cuts (in safety, workers' rights etc) to make it profitable, but the Chineese are able to pull it out, or at least give it a shot, even failing. In that country, the government is able to redirect huge amounts of resources from the citizens, private businesses, state-owned industries etc towards any goal they desire. For now it's the "brain power", quality of science and technology that is the bottleneck, not lack of funding and resources. And while you need to keep pumping resources (money, parts, materials, low-level staff) into any project in progress and it's going to eat them up over time. China has enough of it not to worry though. Meantime all the investments into the science team, into modern technologies etc remain once made, and further investments add up. China is building it. For now it's weak, but it WILL get stronger and will be able to make good use of the nearly unlimited resources. Then just beware... No, they won't bomb you. They will buy you.
Why wouldn't it be more like standardizing on torx vs. phillips head, or standard vs. metric?
Because screw heads are about as good at driving screws. Different computer languages perform differently at same tasks. You can glue two pieces of something with Perl and if it's paper/logs it will work great, if it's heavy number crunching with gigabytes of data passed every second, it will fall apart. You need to fuse it with welding torch of raw ANSI C or at worst C++. On the other hand you may try to make heavy steel paperclips weighting a pound each using C to clip webpages together, or put them in convenient sleeves and binders of PHP.
Standarizing on ONE language is a VERY bad idea unless your set of purposes is very narrow. Standarize on about 4.
One heavyweight:
C vs C++ vs Java vs...
One rapid development:
Perl vs Python vs PHP vs Ruby...
One shell:
Bash vs CSH vs MS-DOS batch vs msh vs TCL vs...,
One prototyping:
Matlab vs Octave vs...
And use them to fulfill the tasks well. Write a fast, very dirty prototype to see if it has right to work at all. Write separate programs that together build the large app using heavyweight. Glue them together with shells. Patch easy non-mission-critical large but easy parts with rapid development.
Then you'll standarize on one paper glue, one screwdriver head, one brand of pb-free solder, which is a good thing. Don't force everyone to use Perl to drive factory machinery or C to process logs!
Nope. Not 100% XP and linear roll.
100% constitution (strength, to hit etc) and (some, maybe atan()?) roll. Your character gets tired and doing stuff gets increasingly difficult. You still do a wonder of slaying the dragon, no matter if you do it fresh and refreshed or after a week without sleep. So you go slaying fresh and rested because it's easier that way.
As for accumulating XP while offline doing "daily job", nope. Your character has some daily job that keeps it from starving, from LOSING their XP (forgetting things and skills). The fact you have your XP on the same level as when you left off the game 2 weeks ago is thanks to that "secret life". Otherwise you should be 5% XP aback.
I predict the shuttle will retire way before 2010. I just hope that astronauts will survive the process of early retirement of the shuttle, though this hope is bleak.
Following this reasoning, they shouldn't ever release WoW, Matrix Online etc. They are all separate codebases. Furthermore, there should be only one MMORPG ever made, by anyone.
:P This was a good opportunity for codebase split, creating two separate codebases, at least one profitable. Instead they killed one profitable codebase and created one which was pulled rapidly down by the death of the previous one.
Would it sprout into 100 different codebases, as long as each of them has userbase making given branch profitable, it's fine and should stay that way. If any branch is getting dry, either try to fix it, or cut it. But don't cut live branches.
Sony failed to understand that profitablity of games is strongly influenced by variety: I won't buy 15 boxes of Half-Life 2. I will buy one, and 14 other games. And someone else won't buy Half-Life 2 at all, but some will buy other games by Valve. Now what if I wanted to buy Half-Life 2, preordered it, and Valve would say they cancelled it, but here's Counter-Strike, have it and enjoy it. Now I don't feel appealed to the idea of battling terrorists in tiny areas, I want an immersive, dark single-user game. I don't care if Counter-Strike is good or bad, it's not what I asked for!
Sure I might buy both. Or I might not, but my neighbor would buy CS while never touching HL2. This or that way, profit from selling two boxes, not one goes to Valve. But now I'm pissed off and I discourage everyone I know from doing any business with Valve. For me it's crap.
Real quality of both games aside, the changes were way too big to call it "upgrade". It was total replacement of what the players paid for with something they didn't ask for. Would the new version draw a new user base or not, we won't know. But Sony killed a milk cow to make steaks without regard that the users were vegetarians.
Yeah, but just try pirating DOOM for NES :)
The cartridge format allowed Nintendo to do some extra tricks that are impossible with "pure media", like putting additional hardware besides memory chips. AFAIK, because DOOM required way more CPU power than the NES CPU was able to generate, the DOOM cartridge contained entire 'minicomputer' with RAM and CPU, that was practically taking over the system and doing all the 3D calculations, texturing and such, while all the main NES CPU was doing was feeding ready video streamed from the cartridge to the screen, and user input to the cartridge.
At first I looked at the topic and was sure it's a typo
IF dark matter exists, then it's like this...
Reminds me Homer, author of Illiad and Odyssey. We don't know if he existed, but we know he was blind.
Didn't you think that thanks to station logos, thanks to image borders with wide-screen movies, thanks to ticker scrollers and all that persistent stuff there will be a hundred of burn-ins in your screen in 2 years? And that due to normal usage the quality will degenerate severely by that time? And that a new HDTV will cost a quarter what your costs now?
If you're worried about burn-in, you're a pathetic loser.
Use, enjoy, exploit to full extent, discard when it's degraded beyond use and then buy a new one. That's how rational world works. I know of schools that kept modern state-of-the-art computers they got locked away from students "because they could break them" until the computers were obsolete. So either accept burn-in as natural way of things and enjoy your HDTV until you replace it with more durable model, or keep usage to minimum and live with a brand-new-like, zero burn-in, crystal-sharp picture CRT HDTV you switch on once in a blue moon while everyone else will be using superior quality non-degrading plasmas costing half the price.
Read the citation only if you wish to see how horrible drone-journalism it is. Otherwise just look at the highlight:
It is only recently that console developers have begun to address the hi-def revolution taking place in living rooms around the globe. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, over 12 million high-definition televisions (HDTVs) were sold in the United States between 1998 and 2004, and the market continues to grow rapidly; research firm Strategy Analytics has predicted HDTVs in almost 30 million American homes by 2008. With the advent of a new generation of consoles, developers are finally taking advantage of the ultra-sharp screen resolutions and theater quality sound offered by these increasingly common home entertainment systems. However, millions of high-definition televisions have an Achilles heel that can hinder developers as well: burn-in.
Coming Next to Slashdot: Fanless PCs, because PC fans contribute to drafts in your room and may cause cold, flu etc.
In FPS it creates a serious feeling of oppression in the opponent - they fear conrontation with you and as result are less of a danger and an easier prey.
I remember a longer session of Shadow Warrior with friends over LAN. I killed one a few times in a row, despite being a weaker player, but that was enough that when the next time I showed up with a rocket launcher and he only had some machinegun, he just turned to run. Thing is I had some 4 rockets and that's all, I wasted them all really soon, missing him, and then the game fell back to default weapon, katana. But as I was running after him, he feeling my breath on his back, he kept running, and you see, a guy with the weakest hand-to-hand weapon chasing one with a pretty powerful machinegun, and the other one running his ass off! I finally got to him and sliced him to pieces.
Some gameplay later and a few of his successful frags against me the situation repeated. He had even weaker weapon. But this time when I ran out of ammo and he saw no rockets whizzing by, he turned around and made me into a pulp. We both had a bit of laugh about that.
Well, if you mix random chemicals without the manual (chemistry book), it would be likely like in your scenario. Or more like: Mix chemicals X and Y. Nothing happens. Heat them. Bubbles appear. (so what?) Add chemical Z. Some cheesy stuff lands on the bottom. Add P and Q. It starts stinking. Filter out the cheesy stuff. Boggle.
Either you understand the parts of chemistry and get desired results, or you don't and you get random results. Usually boring. You need to learn to achieve something.
My scenario was a likely mission containing a simple task of making nitroglycerine. It would behave like that once you mixed the proper ingredients in proper proportions.
Heh, Virtual Fighter, PS. Some 5 hours of training with a friend, really elite player, but using the mad doctor and his crazy fighting style. It took me 1h to master a technique to PWN any enemy in the game (including my friend), then him 4h to develop a counter-technique to finally stop losing to me and get back the (well deserved) leadership. :) And a crowd gathered around me "Look! He's finishing the game with the doc!"
:)
And then the deep jawdrop in the arcade salon, when I picked the doctor and went through the whole game, beating the shit off all my opponents
Pick a niche style/mode if you want to have a moment of fame for yourself too
Unless you find a cheat.
I managed some impressive score in some flash-based game by running it on very slow, old machine, resizing the browser window to some narrow column shape etc. Nothing illegal, just marginal, rare conditions. Scratch the CD, the race track will fail to load, you'll be in the middle of open field with just the start/finish gate and you'll beat the race in 15 seconds, taking 3s to finish a lap by circling the gate post. Happens. How are they going to stop it?
Unless XBox360 DRM protection lives up to its promises.
Snowflake's chance in hell?
Well, I took a measure of strength of a MIT graduate theoretical physicist like Gordon Freeman. Sure he might be somewhat more fit, training in the hazard course etc, but still there's no way he could break such a palette to pieces in two hits. Most optimistic count would be half the time it took me, that is some 10 minutes.
I thought Owned, PWND, 0WN0R3D etc was the dirty word of the day in gaming.
Now I can imagine a kid yelling I T0TALLY UZ3D U N00B!!!!!11 but why?
Yep. Leave the burner fire 10% too strong. Boom. Load. Put the hot cyllinder on cold, wet damp metal table. The glass breaks. Boom. Load. You walk by and knock the table. The cyllinder falls. Boom. Load. You heat it too long, it starts boiling. Boom. Load. You stop it from boiling earlier and go for mission. You leave the cyllinder at the gate and shoot it from a distance. Sizzle, poof. Whoops, load and test if it's really explosive next time. :)
:)
With high enough critical failure rate kids would be taught experimenting with explosives should be best left to computer screen. Just after each death, display "Remember, there's no 'load' in real life!"
Calculated, well, yes. At least some, most of the non-organic chemistry and some of organic chemistry, sure. But you'd still need a database of effects, like what burns, what explodes, what produces blue fire and what green fire, what gas will make people laugh silly and which one to inject in the corridor to thwart voice-based authentication by raising pitch of voice. True -some- of these things could be calculated too, but I doubt XBox360 has enough of computational power for that yet.
Proper use of chainsaw? Kid, these games overrate chainsaws.
Under influence of HL2 I bought a crowbar. A beautiful, long, heavy crowbar. Just the same as you find in HL2, I even made the grip red.
Later that year I got opportunity to buy massive amounts of damaged wooden palettes really cheap. I bought 30. Wood for the fireplace for autumn evenings before we start central heating! Okay, I have a crowbar, that will take a moment. Gordon Freeman needed 2 hits to break such a palette to bits, such a pile would take him maybe 20 seconds.
Bullshit. It takes good 20 minutes to break a palette to pieces using a crowbar, and you're covered with sweat afterwards.
So I took the chainsaw instead.
Okay, cutting the palette into 9 pieces that fit in the fireplace (5 cuts) takes about 3 minutes. It's tiring like hell too, but still vastly easier than breaking it using a crowbar. It took a whole afternoon to cut the pile of palettes with the chainsaw and I was dead tired after that.
I really regret I didn't have a rocket launcher or at least sachel charges. That would make it sooo much easier!
Damned games LIE!