it seems to me that the psyche knows the difference between phases of a video game and actually facing mortality. I find it hard to believe that "video game death" can in any way be related to real world psychological patterns surrounding death - for one, there are actually no consequences in the video game world, thus no real fear nor moral struggle. Well, yes there are consequences. Not nearly as terminal as actually dying, but the FPS games I play are all about points and team work. You die - you give the other team points and you cost your team needed resources. In the case of Search and Destroy, you have cost the team resources until the end of the round - you don't respawn. In the rest of the formats the lost is temporary.
In the big picture, dying is consequential - it can cause you to lose the game.
Some corporate business still think they need a class C (or worse, class B) address space for their systems. Firewalls and NAT routing these days eliminates the need for some greedy corporate tycoon to grab all those IP_ADDRs. If corporations (and individuals to a less extent) were more conservative, it would be a very long time before we ran out of IP4 space.
Pardon my French, but C'est juste stupide merde! How stupid can someone be. Offering free shipping is not discounting a book. If you walk into a book store to buy a book, they do not charge you shipping on top of the cover price. So free shipping is NOT giving any additional discounts.
... unless the manufacturer has made sure that there are Vista drivers for all the parts in the computer...
You may have hit the nail on the head: If the mfgr has drivers for Vista on their hardware, then the hardware MUST BE Vista ready. Right?
I, too, will start buying music from EMI (or any other record label) once they make a formal split with RIAA. I don't download music and I rarely buy CDs, but just so they get the tenor of the message, people will start buying more music.
Vista has a higher required system spec, it has more security
Ah, let's see why business would need this: most business run some office product and a browser, maybe a few other apps, but that's about it. Security? The PC sets in a locked office building behind a firewall. Yep, we really need more security built into the PC, don't we. Not! For those notebook PCs that idiots take on the road with millions of people's data on the HD and lose, well that's another story. Why would you think you needed millions of people's data on your friggin' notebook? SSL into your database if you need access to some data. Yeah, those morons need more security and fork-lift upgrade of their brains.
I don't like Windows, period. But I have to live with Windows because it's the worlds defacto O/S. I can get by on Linux and OpenOffice is fantastic. But for some things, there just isn't any alternative. I would love to see M$FT crumble under it's own weight, but I'm sure it won't and we will all be stuck with their crap.
It might be useful at the south pole research stations.... With 27 megawatts of thermal output, you could get a lot more electrical output and keep more of an area warm. Oh, sure, as if we didn't have enough problems with Global Warming, now you want heat up the ice caps even more! Geez!
This is not an advertisement, but shop online at Dell and you can get Windows XP Home/Pro installed on your new PC instead of Vista. Just ask for it. Dell is one of the few companies that are willing to provide their clients with what they want. Sure, Dell has to say, "We recommend Vista", but they don't force it down your throat.
I don't care much for Windows, but unfortunately we sometimes don't have a choice. I am an avid on-line gamer and since all the games are currently ported to either Windows with a smaller share also ported to Mac, I don't have the option of running Call of Duty on Ubuntu or any other Linux distro.
Typically, and find no reason that Alienware would be different, the graphics engine (GPU) is integrated with the Mother Board on laptops. Good luck unsoldering it and soldering in a new one.
I'm a Senior Technical Consultant for a major Reseller in the Midwest. I deal with high end systems on a daily basis and know what works or doesn't work.
So when I recently ordered a new PC for my wife from Dell I was given the option to get Vista or XP. I obviously chose XP. I'm not saying Vista is bad - it does have it's good qualities. After all it does look pretty.
But for home use and gaming - especially gaming - Vista is, as they say, "Not ready for prime-time."
Rank and perks come pretty fast as you conquer challenges and amass kills, but unfortunately there isn't any isolation between high ranking players and noobs (newbies, first time players). The perks (buffs, you called them) give you more choices of weapons and abilities. One of the perks is endurance and another is stopping power. Put these two together and you can do some real damage.
The lack of balance between high ranked players and the lowly private is what keeps me from giving COD4 multiplayer 5 stars. But then again, life comes at you from all different directions and it isn't always fair. So, when I can best a high ranked player I feel I have really accomplished something.
I've been playing the COD series since its inception. Hooked? Yeah, I guess you can say that.
COD4, like all previous versions, was not designed as much for Single Player action as it was for Multi-Player, IMHO. All the SP versions are short. Most veteran COD players finish COD4 SP in under 7 hours, if they even play the SP version. What makes the game awesome is the MP experience. I for one, played a couple of maps to get accoustomed to the game and then switched over to MP where I've been ever since. In just over a week since its release for the PC, over 3,700 servers have been spun up. That's pretty significant. Even on the old versions (I still play United Offensive - a lot) there are thousands of servers running.
I'll have to admit that COD2 wasn't all that great. I tried it but never felt like it was all that exciting and I wasn't to happy with the avatar movements or the game play in general. Infinity Ward fixed most of that with the COD4 release. The addition of ranked servers is a big plus too. It also has its downside.
Being that most of the servers are ranked, someone that has absolutely no life can easily obtain maximum rank in a few short days. Now they have all the "perks" and power that most the other players are missing. This gives them an unfair advantage in the game. If you get three or four players on a map that have really high ranks, they ruin the game play for everyone else. Sort of a bad thing.
I haven't done any engineering work in over 17 years - not since peace broke out at the end of the '80s and we stopped making weapons systems, but if I recall the period of 100 Hz is 10 msec so a 50 nsec pulse is equivalent to 20 MHz.
Maybe we really don't want this company designing EMP pulse devices (and that is basically what it is) for the police since it sounds like they don't know what they are doing.
And I for one would not want my head just inches from a device putting out 10KW. It needs to be a directed wave pulse otherwise it is going to stop the police car too.
What do you call thousands of relatively simple animals that form a collective brain?
Politicians. Incorrectly stated. The correct statement is
What do you call thousands of collective animals that form a relatively simple brain?
Politicians.
isn't there a risk that this thing might block an artery? and paralyze or kill you? Most likely, yes. But you must sign a release form at the hospital absolving them of any wrong doing should something go wrong. They are putting your life and health at risk, but heaven forbid they should be responsible for anything.
I assume that "hanging in there" means that the system isn't top notch, but is adequate to play a decent round. That's fine if you are a casual/weekend gamer. For us hardcore gamers a few thousand dollars is well worth it. I play 40+ hours a week (mostly COD:UO MP) and I can definitely tell the difference between "hanging in there" and beating the crap out of everyone.
I had a Chem set as a kid and I don't recall being able to produce any C4 with it. I made some nasty smelling stuff and could change a liquids color, but other than learning a few scientific facts it was pretty simple stuff. The real terrorists have college degrees in chemistry and know how to make really deadly stuff. This is WAAAAAY over the top.
I don't think so. Yes, some are absolutely worthless crap, but that's to be expected since almost anyone can write a game now days. Comparing any modern game to pong is like comparing a Bugatti Veyron (world's fastest production car) to a Model T Ford - light years apart.
Today we have extremely good Artificial Intelligence and adaptive game play: if you are getting through the obstacles too easily, the game starts making them hard for you. The graphics are simply awesome on some games - almost lifelike. And the new graphics engines that allow you to interact with your environment make game play so much more fun and challenging than bouncing a square light back and forth on the screen.
Using Pong as a milestone in gaming is obscene. No one is going to argue that Pong was an innovation. Ahead of its time? No, nothing is "ahead of its time". Things happen when they happen because that is when they were supposed to happen. Maybe not everyone can see the reason for such and such, but some one does see it as viable, gets a better idea and moves on. So, everything has a time and place. It may only be a stepping stone to higher ground, but it happens for a purpose.
Okay, unhealthy obsessions? Yes, some games are very addictive. And what causes an addiction? Something that makes you feel good or something that you really enjoy. If a game makes you feel good and you enjoy it, what's the harm? Playing for 48 hours straight is the harm. But just like a good whiskey, moderation is the key. Playing a few hours a night or reading instead of watching mindless TV IMHO is better for me. My mind is very active in a game and I am constantly being challenged. You don't get that with the dumb shows on primetime TV today. After a few rounds on a good server, I'll sit down and relax by watching the History, Discovery, or Military Channels.
So, in my opinion, grab the Half-Life 2 series (HL2, Episode One and Episode Two) or Call of Duty: United Offensive and prepare to get you butt kicked, but you'll love it.
What's really interesting? Modern radios are more susceptible to this behavior than older, tube-driven radios/amplifiers!
Not all that interesting. 200-300 volts at the plate of a tube verses 3-5 volts at the collector of a transistor being excited by a few hundred milliwatts from a transmitter? Pretty easy to see which one is going to be susceptible to the RF emissions.
russellh wrote on Thursday October 18
Microsoft should build windows around the linux kernel and be done with it. There are a lot of really neat ideas posted on/. and find this one to be one of the best. Microsoft could do a lot for the compute world by using a Linux kernel. But alas, the problem then becomes one of protecting (hording) their applications so they won't run on other Linux distros. For example, they have time and resources to develop a really knockout app that everyone needs/wants only to find that it is easily converted to run on SuSE or Ubuntu - oops, sales of the app take a nosedive and they can't recover their R&D.
Fantastic idea, but in Microsoft's eyes, not viable. They need a convoluted, obscure operating system that their apps will only run on.
s p oneil(795792) wrote on Oct 18@7:35AM: no way of knowing what may have mangled the light their telescopes see by the time it reaches us There are no black holes - the blacked out regions of space they are seeing are the cloaking shields on space aliens' ships coming to get us.
OSX automatic updating, always asks permission before downloading, specifying what the downloads are for and allowing you to choose only a selection of them. Security related downloads are in separate packages and clearly marked. At any rate no installation can take place without the user giving the root password. This is far from being a bother to me, it raises my trust in the updates and allows me to forgo updates I really don't want, which are never the security updates. A blogger who worked on the vista GUI said they had an OS box on their table throughout the process of designing the vista GUI, why didn't they learn from it? Ditto for Windows - read the contents of the textbox before you click "Next" the next time: "Nofify me but don't automatically download or install them." In other words, you do not have to allow Windows to update your system automatically if you don't want to. Now, I'm not a Windows fan, but let's be fair about this.
Let's see. HDD manufacturers are creating larger and larger hard drives for the desktop and laptop [notebook] for what purpose? So we can store more and more movies and music CDs? Which means they want us to COPY the DVDs and CDs that we purchase. Isn't that tantamount to piracy?
Slashdot Mirror
In the big picture, dying is consequential - it can cause you to lose the game.
Some corporate business still think they need a class C (or worse, class B) address space for their systems. Firewalls and NAT routing these days eliminates the need for some greedy corporate tycoon to grab all those IP_ADDRs. If corporations (and individuals to a less extent) were more conservative, it would be a very long time before we ran out of IP4 space.
Pardon my French, but C'est juste stupide merde! How stupid can someone be. Offering free shipping is not discounting a book. If you walk into a book store to buy a book, they do not charge you shipping on top of the cover price. So free shipping is NOT giving any additional discounts.
... unless the manufacturer has made sure that there are Vista drivers for all the parts in the computer...You may have hit the nail on the head: If the mfgr has drivers for Vista on their hardware, then the hardware MUST BE Vista ready. Right?
I, too, will start buying music from EMI (or any other record label) once they make a formal split with RIAA. I don't download music and I rarely buy CDs, but just so they get the tenor of the message, people will start buying more music.
Even if Google isn't "evil", do you really want Google to store your personal data. Slash dot article: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/1313259
NOT ME!
Ah, let's see why business would need this: most business run some office product and a browser, maybe a few other apps, but that's about it. Security? The PC sets in a locked office building behind a firewall. Yep, we really need more security built into the PC, don't we. Not! For those notebook PCs that idiots take on the road with millions of people's data on the HD and lose, well that's another story. Why would you think you needed millions of people's data on your friggin' notebook? SSL into your database if you need access to some data. Yeah, those morons need more security and fork-lift upgrade of their brains.
I don't like Windows, period. But I have to live with Windows because it's the worlds defacto O/S. I can get by on Linux and OpenOffice is fantastic. But for some things, there just isn't any alternative. I would love to see M$FT crumble under it's own weight, but I'm sure it won't and we will all be stuck with their crap.
Oh, sure, as if we didn't have enough problems with Global Warming, now you want heat up the ice caps even more! Geez!
This is not an advertisement, but shop online at Dell and you can get Windows XP Home/Pro installed on your new PC instead of Vista. Just ask for it. Dell is one of the few companies that are willing to provide their clients with what they want. Sure, Dell has to say, "We recommend Vista", but they don't force it down your throat.
I don't care much for Windows, but unfortunately we sometimes don't have a choice. I am an avid on-line gamer and since all the games are currently ported to either Windows with a smaller share also ported to Mac, I don't have the option of running Call of Duty on Ubuntu or any other Linux distro.
Typically, and find no reason that Alienware would be different, the graphics engine (GPU) is integrated with the Mother Board on laptops. Good luck unsoldering it and soldering in a new one.
I'm a Senior Technical Consultant for a major Reseller in the Midwest. I deal with high end systems on a daily basis and know what works or doesn't work.
So when I recently ordered a new PC for my wife from Dell I was given the option to get Vista or XP. I obviously chose XP. I'm not saying Vista is bad - it does have it's good qualities. After all it does look pretty.
But for home use and gaming - especially gaming - Vista is, as they say, "Not ready for prime-time."
Rank and perks come pretty fast as you conquer challenges and amass kills, but unfortunately there isn't any isolation between high ranking players and noobs (newbies, first time players). The perks (buffs, you called them) give you more choices of weapons and abilities. One of the perks is endurance and another is stopping power. Put these two together and you can do some real damage.
The lack of balance between high ranked players and the lowly private is what keeps me from giving COD4 multiplayer 5 stars. But then again, life comes at you from all different directions and it isn't always fair. So, when I can best a high ranked player I feel I have really accomplished something.
I've been playing the COD series since its inception. Hooked? Yeah, I guess you can say that.
COD4, like all previous versions, was not designed as much for Single Player action as it was for Multi-Player, IMHO. All the SP versions are short. Most veteran COD players finish COD4 SP in under 7 hours, if they even play the SP version. What makes the game awesome is the MP experience. I for one, played a couple of maps to get accoustomed to the game and then switched over to MP where I've been ever since. In just over a week since its release for the PC, over 3,700 servers have been spun up. That's pretty significant. Even on the old versions (I still play United Offensive - a lot) there are thousands of servers running.
I'll have to admit that COD2 wasn't all that great. I tried it but never felt like it was all that exciting and I wasn't to happy with the avatar movements or the game play in general. Infinity Ward fixed most of that with the COD4 release. The addition of ranked servers is a big plus too. It also has its downside.
Being that most of the servers are ranked, someone that has absolutely no life can easily obtain maximum rank in a few short days. Now they have all the "perks" and power that most the other players are missing. This gives them an unfair advantage in the game. If you get three or four players on a map that have really high ranks, they ruin the game play for everyone else. Sort of a bad thing.
I'll rate COD4 4 stars out of 5.
I haven't done any engineering work in over 17 years - not since peace broke out at the end of the '80s and we stopped making weapons systems, but if I recall the period of 100 Hz is 10 msec so a 50 nsec pulse is equivalent to 20 MHz.
Maybe we really don't want this company designing EMP pulse devices (and that is basically what it is) for the police since it sounds like they don't know what they are doing.
And I for one would not want my head just inches from a device putting out 10KW. It needs to be a directed wave pulse otherwise it is going to stop the police car too.
I assume that "hanging in there" means that the system isn't top notch, but is adequate to play a decent round. That's fine if you are a casual/weekend gamer. For us hardcore gamers a few thousand dollars is well worth it. I play 40+ hours a week (mostly COD:UO MP) and I can definitely tell the difference between "hanging in there" and beating the crap out of everyone.
Hell, guys, my vid card cost more thatn $500.
I had a Chem set as a kid and I don't recall being able to produce any C4 with it. I made some nasty smelling stuff and could change a liquids color, but other than learning a few scientific facts it was pretty simple stuff. The real terrorists have college degrees in chemistry and know how to make really deadly stuff. This is WAAAAAY over the top.
I don't think so. Yes, some are absolutely worthless crap, but that's to be expected since almost anyone can write a game now days. Comparing any modern game to pong is like comparing a Bugatti Veyron (world's fastest production car) to a Model T Ford - light years apart.
Today we have extremely good Artificial Intelligence and adaptive game play: if you are getting through the obstacles too easily, the game starts making them hard for you. The graphics are simply awesome on some games - almost lifelike. And the new graphics engines that allow you to interact with your environment make game play so much more fun and challenging than bouncing a square light back and forth on the screen.
Using Pong as a milestone in gaming is obscene. No one is going to argue that Pong was an innovation. Ahead of its time? No, nothing is "ahead of its time". Things happen when they happen because that is when they were supposed to happen. Maybe not everyone can see the reason for such and such, but some one does see it as viable, gets a better idea and moves on. So, everything has a time and place. It may only be a stepping stone to higher ground, but it happens for a purpose. Okay, unhealthy obsessions? Yes, some games are very addictive. And what causes an addiction? Something that makes you feel good or something that you really enjoy. If a game makes you feel good and you enjoy it, what's the harm? Playing for 48 hours straight is the harm. But just like a good whiskey, moderation is the key. Playing a few hours a night or reading instead of watching mindless TV IMHO is better for me. My mind is very active in a game and I am constantly being challenged. You don't get that with the dumb shows on primetime TV today. After a few rounds on a good server, I'll sit down and relax by watching the History, Discovery, or Military Channels.
So, in my opinion, grab the Half-Life 2 series (HL2, Episode One and Episode Two) or Call of Duty: United Offensive and prepare to get you butt kicked, but you'll love it.
Not all that interesting. 200-300 volts at the plate of a tube verses 3-5 volts at the collector of a transistor being excited by a few hundred milliwatts from a transmitter? Pretty easy to see which one is going to be susceptible to the RF emissions.
Microsoft should build windows around the linux kernel and be done with it.
There are a lot of really neat ideas posted on
Fantastic idea, but in Microsoft's eyes, not viable. They need a convoluted, obscure operating system that their apps will only run on.
With all the Vista bashing in this thread, I'd like to say something nice about it: It looks pretty.
Let's see. HDD manufacturers are creating larger and larger hard drives for the desktop and laptop [notebook] for what purpose? So we can store more and more movies and music CDs? Which means they want us to COPY the DVDs and CDs that we purchase. Isn't that tantamount to piracy?
I guess the RIAA will be suing Hitachi next.