I liked it, myself. I'm comfortable with the controls of an FPS, so it made the game easy to control. Just doing point and shoot was useful to throw some bullets up when I needed to quickly, but the VATS thing let me be more precise a lot of the time. I tended to fire manually with a scoped weapon over long distance (since I could do better than the 2 or 3% that VATS was offering), and use the auto-shoot thing for closer shots. I just liked the balance and the range of choice.
I got stuck one place in Oblivion (couldn't jump out from between 2 rocks), but I never fell through the map in that game or in Fallout 3. I haven't really played enough Morrowind to comment on it, but I never really had any problems with the world geometry that I could blame on the engine. I found a couple buggy quests, but not so terribly malformed that they couldn't be completed. I'm sure experiences would differ on both those points, depending on the exact play order and style of a specific gamer.
I bought the game from Steam, and I got Operation Anchorage from the MSN thing. It was a bit of a pain figuring out where to put the files, but it works perfectly well if you're willing to do the manual install.
Kill-stealing is one of those courtesy things in a lot of games, not just DotA. It's stupid how seriously some people take it, but I might be annoyed if someone stole a kill of mine, possibly enough to send them a message reminding them that it's rude.
You talk about "bad people" and "skill-based matchmaking"....so I've got to assume that you're saying that people are hostile assholes because other players are either new players or have inferior skill in the game. I'd say that neither of those is a good reason to do your best to drive someone away from the game, especially if they're a new player. It sounds selfish and short-sighted, and it's the exact situation where I would stay in the game specifically to make peoples' lives miserable. Because what can I say? If someone tried to yell at me enough to get me to leave the game, then they damn well deserve it.
Human cloning? No more than you could call natural reproduction "human cloning". The process is supposed to create gametes through meiosis, the same process that produces the little swimmers between any guy's legs. It's more of a new variety of infertility treatment than anything else...although I'm still a little confused why there's so much work that goes into making sure that people with difficulty procreating can do it anyhow...
There are terms in the card usage agreement that you'll be the only one using it. When you use the card in person, many employees will require photo ID before they swipe the card. Of course that doesn't always happen, and that's why it's so easy to report a missing card and have the spurious charges reversed if it gets stolen. The case with a computer system is more complex, though. A single IP address can even have multiple networks underneath it. It's not even necessarily a single network behind an IP address. My point is that you're far more likely to take exception to someone trying to borrow your credit card than you are if someone wants to use your computer or connect to your router. The credit card, in general, is much more attached to a single person than an internet address is.
The sigs are often more memorable than the usernames, and they tell you a little bit about the account's owner, so I just leave them on. What annoys me is when someone types in a sig at the bottom of their post which says the exact same thing as the sig below it....or when they sign their post with their username =/ I guess I'm just being picky though.
I'd say that the closest equivalent I know of is VMWare ESX, except that ESX is supposed to be dropped down on the bare metal, not installed in the OS. I think Workstation also supports command-line operations on VMs, but I haven't played with it, so I'm not really sure how comparable it is to VBoxHeadless. I don't really think player or server have a headless version, but I know that you can start a machine in Server and connect to the session from a remote machine (either to the console as provided by VMWare Server, or to the remote desktop/SSH/whatever provided by the guest OS)
Asymmetric encryption systems (such as RSA) use key pairs (a set of two prime numbers) to generate the public and private keys. There are other numbers involved, but those two are the most important. Each of those is a large number, but they're only *probably* prime numbers, to cut down on the time generating keys. Since you're talking about huge numbers (my bank encrypts with 1024 bit keys), you don't actually have the time to verify that they're prime *for sure*. Anyhow, the private and public keys are generated in such a way that if you were able to successfully factor the public key, you could trivially derive the private key, which would allow you to unlock the entire communication stream. That's what's meant by "factoring large prime numbers" in this context.
AES encryption is an actual government standard, FIPS-197. It's based on Rijndael encryption, which is capable of using any key that is 128 bits or longer, and divisible by 32 bits. If I remember correctly, the times to encrypt or decrypt should be basically identical, and increase linearly with the size of the key. So I don't know if any software actually implements a Rijndahl-type encryption with over 256 bit keys, but I don't see any reason that it wouldn't be technically possible.
I think that Bnet's protocol works almost like that....the actual communication between clients doesn't really pass through their central server. It's built more on a peer to peer data model. That just makes it more annoying, since it means you've already got most of the networking code in the client anyhow.
I dunno about this. What if my ISP is acting up, and I need to get in a bit of Starcrafty goodness with a couple friends I have over or something? No matter what Blizzard does, there's going to be piracy of their game; it's inescapable, no matter what they do. I'm sure bnetd (or at least something similar) is going to pop up.
The most jarring thing to me is the worry that they won't at least let you meet up with specific people on bnet and form a closed game to at least simulate a LAN game (fat chance, with the lag back to Blizzard's servers =/ )
I have, a couple times. First, when I was issued them as a student. Each student got an envelope with a couple passwords. After that, just every now and again, when I've got the selection on the wrong window or the wrong text box...
The first time I saw that behavior was logging into a Novell Netware machine when I was in 8th grade, so the first time I got my hands on a Linux machine, it really didn't surprise me.....but then again, that's just me.
With a standard client? I'm not really sure. I think that some of the companies used modified BT clients that don't send the *real* data...they send packets of random data. When you first connect, other users begin to offer small amounts of starting data, so that you can become a productive member of the swarm as soon as possible. Anyone that connects under those circumstances could get their IP logged and get in trouble.
It seems like the Quake engines are mostly optimized for indoors rendering, and anything in a Bethesda-style RPG would need to be optimized for large outdoor spaces, with trees, times of day/night, weather, etc.
The hardware is theirs...the particular instance of that hardware is yours. As such, you can do whatever you want with it (at least IMO. Nintendo would probably disagree...), including enabling homebrew applications to run. There's a rather decent port of ScummVM, for instance =)
I think Brainfuck would be so grossly inefficient and difficult to write anything remotely useful that Apple would just kind of chuckle and let it through. It's not like you couldn't write the same thing in Javascript in a hundredth of the time that would execute much more quickly anyhow.
That matches very closely with my math education, but it wasn't typical. A lot of students stopped after Algebra II, since only three years of high school math were required. In college, I actually enjoyed discrete mathematics quite a bit, since it's easy to think in those terms, and it has concrete uses that I was interested in.
I'm pretty sure that they'll find some way to grant the Doctor an extra set of regenerations, or something. It's not like they're going to just *stop* the series because an actor decides to pursue other interests.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked it, myself. I'm comfortable with the controls of an FPS, so it made the game easy to control. Just doing point and shoot was useful to throw some bullets up when I needed to quickly, but the VATS thing let me be more precise a lot of the time. I tended to fire manually with a scoped weapon over long distance (since I could do better than the 2 or 3% that VATS was offering), and use the auto-shoot thing for closer shots. I just liked the balance and the range of choice.
I got stuck one place in Oblivion (couldn't jump out from between 2 rocks), but I never fell through the map in that game or in Fallout 3. I haven't really played enough Morrowind to comment on it, but I never really had any problems with the world geometry that I could blame on the engine. I found a couple buggy quests, but not so terribly malformed that they couldn't be completed. I'm sure experiences would differ on both those points, depending on the exact play order and style of a specific gamer.
I bought the game from Steam, and I got Operation Anchorage from the MSN thing. It was a bit of a pain figuring out where to put the files, but it works perfectly well if you're willing to do the manual install.
Kill-stealing is one of those courtesy things in a lot of games, not just DotA. It's stupid how seriously some people take it, but I might be annoyed if someone stole a kill of mine, possibly enough to send them a message reminding them that it's rude.
You talk about "bad people" and "skill-based matchmaking"....so I've got to assume that you're saying that people are hostile assholes because other players are either new players or have inferior skill in the game. I'd say that neither of those is a good reason to do your best to drive someone away from the game, especially if they're a new player. It sounds selfish and short-sighted, and it's the exact situation where I would stay in the game specifically to make peoples' lives miserable. Because what can I say? If someone tried to yell at me enough to get me to leave the game, then they damn well deserve it.
Human cloning? No more than you could call natural reproduction "human cloning". The process is supposed to create gametes through meiosis, the same process that produces the little swimmers between any guy's legs. It's more of a new variety of infertility treatment than anything else...although I'm still a little confused why there's so much work that goes into making sure that people with difficulty procreating can do it anyhow...
There are terms in the card usage agreement that you'll be the only one using it. When you use the card in person, many employees will require photo ID before they swipe the card. Of course that doesn't always happen, and that's why it's so easy to report a missing card and have the spurious charges reversed if it gets stolen. The case with a computer system is more complex, though. A single IP address can even have multiple networks underneath it. It's not even necessarily a single network behind an IP address. My point is that you're far more likely to take exception to someone trying to borrow your credit card than you are if someone wants to use your computer or connect to your router. The credit card, in general, is much more attached to a single person than an internet address is.
It would've made a better joke if every sprem were "scared". imo.
The sigs are often more memorable than the usernames, and they tell you a little bit about the account's owner, so I just leave them on. What annoys me is when someone types in a sig at the bottom of their post which says the exact same thing as the sig below it....or when they sign their post with their username =/ I guess I'm just being picky though.
I'd say that the closest equivalent I know of is VMWare ESX, except that ESX is supposed to be dropped down on the bare metal, not installed in the OS. I think Workstation also supports command-line operations on VMs, but I haven't played with it, so I'm not really sure how comparable it is to VBoxHeadless. I don't really think player or server have a headless version, but I know that you can start a machine in Server and connect to the session from a remote machine (either to the console as provided by VMWare Server, or to the remote desktop/SSH/whatever provided by the guest OS)
Asymmetric encryption systems (such as RSA) use key pairs (a set of two prime numbers) to generate the public and private keys. There are other numbers involved, but those two are the most important. Each of those is a large number, but they're only *probably* prime numbers, to cut down on the time generating keys. Since you're talking about huge numbers (my bank encrypts with 1024 bit keys), you don't actually have the time to verify that they're prime *for sure*. Anyhow, the private and public keys are generated in such a way that if you were able to successfully factor the public key, you could trivially derive the private key, which would allow you to unlock the entire communication stream. That's what's meant by "factoring large prime numbers" in this context.
AES encryption is an actual government standard, FIPS-197. It's based on Rijndael encryption, which is capable of using any key that is 128 bits or longer, and divisible by 32 bits. If I remember correctly, the times to encrypt or decrypt should be basically identical, and increase linearly with the size of the key. So I don't know if any software actually implements a Rijndahl-type encryption with over 256 bit keys, but I don't see any reason that it wouldn't be technically possible.
I'm not your buffoon, troglodyte!
.....had to finish it.
I think that Bnet's protocol works almost like that....the actual communication between clients doesn't really pass through their central server. It's built more on a peer to peer data model. That just makes it more annoying, since it means you've already got most of the networking code in the client anyhow.
I dunno about this. What if my ISP is acting up, and I need to get in a bit of Starcrafty goodness with a couple friends I have over or something? No matter what Blizzard does, there's going to be piracy of their game; it's inescapable, no matter what they do. I'm sure bnetd (or at least something similar) is going to pop up.
The most jarring thing to me is the worry that they won't at least let you meet up with specific people on bnet and form a closed game to at least simulate a LAN game (fat chance, with the lag back to Blizzard's servers =/ )
I think it was that she's diabetic, and uses insulin, which was tested on animals.
"Well, we're out of ad pop-ups! We only had three bits and we didn't expect such a rush. So what do you want?"
"Well, so my choice is 'or Death by Powerpoint'? I'll have the chicken then, please."
I have, a couple times. First, when I was issued them as a student. Each student got an envelope with a couple passwords. After that, just every now and again, when I've got the selection on the wrong window or the wrong text box...
The first time I saw that behavior was logging into a Novell Netware machine when I was in 8th grade, so the first time I got my hands on a Linux machine, it really didn't surprise me.....but then again, that's just me.
With a standard client? I'm not really sure. I think that some of the companies used modified BT clients that don't send the *real* data...they send packets of random data. When you first connect, other users begin to offer small amounts of starting data, so that you can become a productive member of the swarm as soon as possible. Anyone that connects under those circumstances could get their IP logged and get in trouble.
It seems like the Quake engines are mostly optimized for indoors rendering, and anything in a Bethesda-style RPG would need to be optimized for large outdoor spaces, with trees, times of day/night, weather, etc.
The hardware is theirs...the particular instance of that hardware is yours. As such, you can do whatever you want with it (at least IMO. Nintendo would probably disagree...), including enabling homebrew applications to run. There's a rather decent port of ScummVM, for instance =)
I think Brainfuck would be so grossly inefficient and difficult to write anything remotely useful that Apple would just kind of chuckle and let it through. It's not like you couldn't write the same thing in Javascript in a hundredth of the time that would execute much more quickly anyhow.
That matches very closely with my math education, but it wasn't typical. A lot of students stopped after Algebra II, since only three years of high school math were required. In college, I actually enjoyed discrete mathematics quite a bit, since it's easy to think in those terms, and it has concrete uses that I was interested in.
I'm pretty sure that they'll find some way to grant the Doctor an extra set of regenerations, or something. It's not like they're going to just *stop* the series because an actor decides to pursue other interests.