I think it odder that people equate a game ban to the type of spew that people randomly throw out these days to being some harsh punishment. There were times in days past when being an asshole would get you killed. Literally. Piss enough people off, and someone was going to kill you, and before there was a very set code of laws nothing really came of it. Even more recently you'd get your ass kicked for a lot of the stuff people say nonchalantly on the internet. The phrase "them's fighting words" once really did have some meaning.
Overall, just be happy that it's gotten to a point where for the most part you're looking at a forum ban. Words DO have consequences behind them - be happy that the consequences are now as minor as they are.
I honestly don't have as much of a problem with it in gaming as I do in other areas. Reason is simple: I personally rarely play really old games. Now I realize that many people do and have no issues with them voting with their wallet, but for me, once a game is past, say, 5 years old, I ain't cranking it up anymore. I also know exactly where I'm playing those games: on a Windows PC. That's it - no other options.
Compare with movies and/or music: I'll watch or listen to those, respectively, decades after they were made. I also may do things completely whacky with the files - like play them on my phone or generic mp3 player or XMBC (running on either a hacked Xbox or a hacked AppleTV - got both running in different rooms of the house). Overall, with movies and music, DRM screwing me over in a way that I dislike isn't just a possiblity, it's a near certainty.
With games, as long as the game I buy works for me for at least 2-3 years, I've probably got all that I need out of it anyways.
Besides, the price cuts that Steam can offer due to digital distribution are just insane. Check there on the weekends and you can often get last year's blockbuster titles on sale for $10 or less.
A fair point, but even on Windows I'd be using LibreOffice;). I really do like open source apps and would likely still use them for the most part regardless of platform. I just want a good solid and simple underlying OS for it all to sit on. Linux doesn't seem to be happy occupying that position, and hence they rock the boat. Microsoft is changing stuff too, but realistically, I still have the same bar at the bottom, file manager, and window layout as I had back in Windows 95.
I once did. These days (KDE4 onwards) the flow of the software seems off though. I may look at it again, but I just haven't liked it when I've tried it out periodically lately.
Not really. I personally find the autocomplete features in Visual Studio insanely useful.
Most of my university programming was done in C/C++/Java in a Solaris environment. I run a Linux desktop at home and still do a decent amount of tinkery programming there, and I do maintain some PHP code at work. At home, I tend to use Emacs. At work, on Windows, I tend to use Scite for PHP.
Those, compared to Visual Studio, are downright painful to code in. If I need to find the name for a random function I have to pull out a quick reference or go to a website. If I want to see all the functions available under an object in C#, I just type the name plus period and then wait a half a second. A little list of all of them pops up next to the cursor. Then once I type the function name, boom - little scrollable list of all the different overload options pops up for that function. All this is done live, which means it even works for some random OSS library I might be used (ie, I've been using MigraDoc and PdfSharp a lot lately, and it's great there).
Beyond that, the whole RAD environment is just amazing for getting events associate with GUI actions. Doing all that by hand in code isn't that difficult, but man oh man is it TEDIOUS. Why waste the effort when I can double click on a button on a form and it automatically generates a function the runs on the click event?
For GUI applications, I've simply seen NOTHING that rivals Visual Studio. Now if I'm coding something without a UI (ie, a script that just processes numbers or does backend work), then it's not as valuable, but overall, while I like USING Linux more, I like developing in Windows a lot more.
Because in the context of this discussion, game developers ARE the end user. You're doing the equivalent of going to a carpenter's forum where they're discussing which brand of hammer is better and then screaming that the home owner isn't going to care. That's all well and good, but the home owner isn't the user of the products being discussed.
In all actuality it did. Back in those days pretty much all games were built for Glide. If you didn't have a Voodoo card you didn't REALLY have a 3d accelerator. Eventually when other hardware started catching up and a more general purpose API was needed, 3dfx supported those without issue.
EVENTUALLY poor hardware and a poor decision to go to first-party manufactured cards killed 3dfx, but Glide certainly wasn't one of their mess ups.
Did you not read my post? I don't like the way the whole setup of Gnome Shell 3 behaves. Saying that the minimize function was depreciated because it's no longer relevant in Gnome Shell isn't helping the case.
Most of my problems with Linux are rooted in Gnome. The only thing I don't really like about Ubuntu 10.10 was the title bar button order changes, which as I said, were quickly changed back. Gnome 3 has been out for evaluation for a LONG time now though, and I dislike virtually everything about it - even moreso as time goes on. Ubuntu is going in their own direction which I admittedly do find more appealing than sticking with Gnome as is, but I'm not sure if it'll be sufficient to keep me there. Then again, I may still be able to cobble something together that meets my needs (I'm already running a fairly non-standard setup). We'll see.
This is the main thing pissing me off about the direction of Linux. Too much being different for the sake of being different. Ubuntu moved the buttons on me - ticked, ok, but whatever. I can use gconf to switch them back. Now Gnome is looking into the horrible travesty that is Gnome Shell 3, and recently has decided (in one of the most WTF moves in history) to kill off Minimize and Maximize buttons. Yes, Ubuntu is going with Unity instead of Gnome Shell, but we'll see how that goes. It still was a long ways from ready last time I tried it.
Overall, I think my Linux desktop experience may have peaked with Ubuntu 10.10. I've been a full-time user for 2 years now (and a dual-booter/occasional user for 12 years now), and at this point, I'm really looking at the possibility of just going back to Windows. Palladium/Trusted Computing seems to be dead in the water, and at least Microsoft isn't shaking stuff up just for the heck of it.
It's not the fact that you claim you have a girlfriend that makes me think that your post is fake, but that you claim she stomped off "game in hand" for a refund. Having heard enough stories in my time to tell when creativity starts to take the place of reality, I detect some falsehood there - a bit of embellishment at a minimum.
Solution to that was pretty simple: carry multiple mages in your party. I played a mage PC, and carried Morrigan throughout the whole game. Once both had crushing prison controlling 2 mages was cake. If there was a third you basically just blasted the heck out of them and kept them moving as much as possible (cast Horror and such). They went down quickly.
As a matter of fact the only encounter I really had trouble with was Ser Cauthrien right after rescuing Anora. Just too many guys to try to get under control with Cauthrien mowing through my party. I think I replayed that encounter at least 2 dozen times before completing it. Most everything else though was pretty straightforward.
I swear, with the crap that Gnome is doing with Gnome Shell and now this nonsense, I'm tempted to go back to Windows. I've been on Ubuntu as a full time user for nearly 2 years now, but it seems that just when Linux started getting polished up to a usable state, somewhere along the line idealists have taken over and are striving not to make things work, and work well, but rather, to do things "a new way". Doesn't matter if it's good, bad, or whatever - we just have to be "different" for the sake of doing so.
It sucks. Apple is building locked down stuff, Microsoft is building shoddy stuff with security holes, and Linux is making UI and design decisions that make me really question whether or not the batch of hypothetical monkeys at a bunch of typewriters are making design decisions.
Given the whole accretion disk theory of planet formation - didn't the whole damned planet come from just a bunch of meteorites clumping together and falling to an ever larger body?
It certainly wasn't a tragedy or anything, but when I was a kid after Hurricane Hugo we went for over 45 days without power. Now, granted, that was a little over 20 years ago, but it'd still fall into the realm of what I'd call modern. I had a computer and video game systems I was praying for power to run:).
Overall though, you make due. We'd go to my uncle's house about a quarter mile away and use his hand powered water pump to fill buckets with water. Certain buckets were set aside and used for cooking (on propane powered camp stoves) - others for washing (spongebaths don't give you nice freshly showered feeling, but you still can stay relatively clean and keep water usage to a minimum).
I personally just don't get how people who live in disaster prone areas don't stock up on at least the basic stuff needed to survive for a while without outside contact. Down here in South Carolina snow storms, aren't really an issue, but hurricanes most certainly are. I keep a decent supply of water, a first aid kit, flashlights, batteries, candles, gasoline, propane, a generator, canned goods, a chainsaw, and a camp stove out in the garage. Barely takes up a small corner out there and a total investment of less than $1,000. It's cheap insurance.
Same here. I'm guessing he's using non-US dialect or something. For a second I was imagining some James Bond phone with a cutting torch coming out of the top:).
Speaking of phone lines, can my 56K Dialup modem be made to work through my cellphone? I'm thinking of an emergency use, like with the egyptians who have lost internet. The challenge would be connecting the POTS line from the modem to the cellphone's input. (Maybe this cable would work - http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/7830/ [thinkgeek.com]
Not sure if it applies to all Android devices, but my Fascinate has software built int to allow you to use the cellular capability as a modem for the purposes of a data connection. You'd need a dial-up ISP to connect to, but the capability is there.
I don't think he's referring to the edge of the "observable universe". The article states that the universe is 250x the size of the obserable universe. Hence, the universe itself, outside of being observable, has a limited size. That naturally leads to a question of "what happens a the end".
Numerous analogies have always been used to describe this. Most have already been brought up in this thread (circles, etc). The most famous is that of a balloon. To a 3d observer, a balloon's surface is of limited space. To the ant though, the surface of balloon is endless.
That observation never quite sat with me though. It works for an ant - incapable of reason, but swap out the situation for a PERSON sitting on another circular surface (like, say, a planet), and we have figured out quite readily that our surface is unending but finite - it's obvious - go in another direction and you end up circling back.
By the same token, you can't just easily dismiss a perceived infinity of the universe via analogy as a meaningless question. There must be a logical mechanic behind it. Either the universe literally ends with a wall (highly unlikely), it truly is infinite, or, there is some mechanism by which you "double back" and circle back to your previous position. Just personally, I've never seen a truly convincing mechanic for explaining just how the last one would work. The infinity mechanic makes more sense. Not that I'm saying that the universe is definitely infinite. I'm just saying that before I truly embrace that ideas I need a working model of how it would work as perceived infinity, outside of an analogy or "it just works that way".
Slashdot Mirror
I think it odder that people equate a game ban to the type of spew that people randomly throw out these days to being some harsh punishment. There were times in days past when being an asshole would get you killed. Literally. Piss enough people off, and someone was going to kill you, and before there was a very set code of laws nothing really came of it. Even more recently you'd get your ass kicked for a lot of the stuff people say nonchalantly on the internet. The phrase "them's fighting words" once really did have some meaning.
Overall, just be happy that it's gotten to a point where for the most part you're looking at a forum ban. Words DO have consequences behind them - be happy that the consequences are now as minor as they are.
I honestly don't have as much of a problem with it in gaming as I do in other areas. Reason is simple: I personally rarely play really old games. Now I realize that many people do and have no issues with them voting with their wallet, but for me, once a game is past, say, 5 years old, I ain't cranking it up anymore. I also know exactly where I'm playing those games: on a Windows PC. That's it - no other options.
Compare with movies and/or music: I'll watch or listen to those, respectively, decades after they were made. I also may do things completely whacky with the files - like play them on my phone or generic mp3 player or XMBC (running on either a hacked Xbox or a hacked AppleTV - got both running in different rooms of the house). Overall, with movies and music, DRM screwing me over in a way that I dislike isn't just a possiblity, it's a near certainty.
With games, as long as the game I buy works for me for at least 2-3 years, I've probably got all that I need out of it anyways.
Besides, the price cuts that Steam can offer due to digital distribution are just insane. Check there on the weekends and you can often get last year's blockbuster titles on sale for $10 or less.
A fair point, but even on Windows I'd be using LibreOffice ;). I really do like open source apps and would likely still use them for the most part regardless of platform. I just want a good solid and simple underlying OS for it all to sit on. Linux doesn't seem to be happy occupying that position, and hence they rock the boat. Microsoft is changing stuff too, but realistically, I still have the same bar at the bottom, file manager, and window layout as I had back in Windows 95.
I once did. These days (KDE4 onwards) the flow of the software seems off though. I may look at it again, but I just haven't liked it when I've tried it out periodically lately.
That may have been the worst segue into a "your mom" joke that I've ever seen.
Not really. I personally find the autocomplete features in Visual Studio insanely useful.
Most of my university programming was done in C/C++/Java in a Solaris environment. I run a Linux desktop at home and still do a decent amount of tinkery programming there, and I do maintain some PHP code at work. At home, I tend to use Emacs. At work, on Windows, I tend to use Scite for PHP.
Those, compared to Visual Studio, are downright painful to code in. If I need to find the name for a random function I have to pull out a quick reference or go to a website. If I want to see all the functions available under an object in C#, I just type the name plus period and then wait a half a second. A little list of all of them pops up next to the cursor. Then once I type the function name, boom - little scrollable list of all the different overload options pops up for that function. All this is done live, which means it even works for some random OSS library I might be used (ie, I've been using MigraDoc and PdfSharp a lot lately, and it's great there).
Beyond that, the whole RAD environment is just amazing for getting events associate with GUI actions. Doing all that by hand in code isn't that difficult, but man oh man is it TEDIOUS. Why waste the effort when I can double click on a button on a form and it automatically generates a function the runs on the click event?
For GUI applications, I've simply seen NOTHING that rivals Visual Studio. Now if I'm coding something without a UI (ie, a script that just processes numbers or does backend work), then it's not as valuable, but overall, while I like USING Linux more, I like developing in Windows a lot more.
DirectX, OpenGL.... why should the end user care?
Because in the context of this discussion, game developers ARE the end user. You're doing the equivalent of going to a carpenter's forum where they're discussing which brand of hammer is better and then screaming that the home owner isn't going to care. That's all well and good, but the home owner isn't the user of the products being discussed.
In all actuality it did. Back in those days pretty much all games were built for Glide. If you didn't have a Voodoo card you didn't REALLY have a 3d accelerator. Eventually when other hardware started catching up and a more general purpose API was needed, 3dfx supported those without issue.
EVENTUALLY poor hardware and a poor decision to go to first-party manufactured cards killed 3dfx, but Glide certainly wasn't one of their mess ups.
Did you not read my post? I don't like the way the whole setup of Gnome Shell 3 behaves. Saying that the minimize function was depreciated because it's no longer relevant in Gnome Shell isn't helping the case.
Most of my problems with Linux are rooted in Gnome. The only thing I don't really like about Ubuntu 10.10 was the title bar button order changes, which as I said, were quickly changed back. Gnome 3 has been out for evaluation for a LONG time now though, and I dislike virtually everything about it - even moreso as time goes on. Ubuntu is going in their own direction which I admittedly do find more appealing than sticking with Gnome as is, but I'm not sure if it'll be sufficient to keep me there. Then again, I may still be able to cobble something together that meets my needs (I'm already running a fairly non-standard setup). We'll see.
This is the main thing pissing me off about the direction of Linux. Too much being different for the sake of being different. Ubuntu moved the buttons on me - ticked, ok, but whatever. I can use gconf to switch them back. Now Gnome is looking into the horrible travesty that is Gnome Shell 3, and recently has decided (in one of the most WTF moves in history) to kill off Minimize and Maximize buttons. Yes, Ubuntu is going with Unity instead of Gnome Shell, but we'll see how that goes. It still was a long ways from ready last time I tried it.
Overall, I think my Linux desktop experience may have peaked with Ubuntu 10.10. I've been a full-time user for 2 years now (and a dual-booter/occasional user for 12 years now), and at this point, I'm really looking at the possibility of just going back to Windows. Palladium/Trusted Computing seems to be dead in the water, and at least Microsoft isn't shaking stuff up just for the heck of it.
You did, but I'm betting anyone needing screen reader didn't.
When the hell did they let out Jared Loughner?
Your reply doesn't even parse correctly as a response to his statement.
Sure there were lots of DLC quests, but the guy back at the camp was the only one that asked about the credit card info.
By your logic only an insane person would have questioned a statement made in the 70's that leisure suits were the fashion of the future.
Trends come and go. Comparing a recent jump in numbers isn't all that useful for determining the long term viability of a medium.
and NPCs asking for my credit card left and right.
ONCE in the entire game is "left and right"?????
It's not the fact that you claim you have a girlfriend that makes me think that your post is fake, but that you claim she stomped off "game in hand" for a refund. Having heard enough stories in my time to tell when creativity starts to take the place of reality, I detect some falsehood there - a bit of embellishment at a minimum.
Solution to that was pretty simple: carry multiple mages in your party. I played a mage PC, and carried Morrigan throughout the whole game. Once both had crushing prison controlling 2 mages was cake. If there was a third you basically just blasted the heck out of them and kept them moving as much as possible (cast Horror and such). They went down quickly.
As a matter of fact the only encounter I really had trouble with was Ser Cauthrien right after rescuing Anora. Just too many guys to try to get under control with Cauthrien mowing through my party. I think I replayed that encounter at least 2 dozen times before completing it. Most everything else though was pretty straightforward.
I swear, with the crap that Gnome is doing with Gnome Shell and now this nonsense, I'm tempted to go back to Windows. I've been on Ubuntu as a full time user for nearly 2 years now, but it seems that just when Linux started getting polished up to a usable state, somewhere along the line idealists have taken over and are striving not to make things work, and work well, but rather, to do things "a new way". Doesn't matter if it's good, bad, or whatever - we just have to be "different" for the sake of doing so.
It sucks. Apple is building locked down stuff, Microsoft is building shoddy stuff with security holes, and Linux is making UI and design decisions that make me really question whether or not the batch of hypothetical monkeys at a bunch of typewriters are making design decisions.
Given the whole accretion disk theory of planet formation - didn't the whole damned planet come from just a bunch of meteorites clumping together and falling to an ever larger body?
It certainly wasn't a tragedy or anything, but when I was a kid after Hurricane Hugo we went for over 45 days without power. Now, granted, that was a little over 20 years ago, but it'd still fall into the realm of what I'd call modern. I had a computer and video game systems I was praying for power to run :).
Overall though, you make due. We'd go to my uncle's house about a quarter mile away and use his hand powered water pump to fill buckets with water. Certain buckets were set aside and used for cooking (on propane powered camp stoves) - others for washing (spongebaths don't give you nice freshly showered feeling, but you still can stay relatively clean and keep water usage to a minimum).
I personally just don't get how people who live in disaster prone areas don't stock up on at least the basic stuff needed to survive for a while without outside contact. Down here in South Carolina snow storms, aren't really an issue, but hurricanes most certainly are. I keep a decent supply of water, a first aid kit, flashlights, batteries, candles, gasoline, propane, a generator, canned goods, a chainsaw, and a camp stove out in the garage. Barely takes up a small corner out there and a total investment of less than $1,000. It's cheap insurance.
Same here. I'm guessing he's using non-US dialect or something. For a second I was imagining some James Bond phone with a cutting torch coming out of the top :).
Speaking of phone lines, can my 56K Dialup modem be made to work through my cellphone? I'm thinking of an emergency use, like with the egyptians who have lost internet. The challenge would be connecting the POTS line from the modem to the cellphone's input. (Maybe this cable would work - http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/7830/ [thinkgeek.com]
Not sure if it applies to all Android devices, but my Fascinate has software built int to allow you to use the cellular capability as a modem for the purposes of a data connection. You'd need a dial-up ISP to connect to, but the capability is there.
I don't think he's referring to the edge of the "observable universe". The article states that the universe is 250x the size of the obserable universe. Hence, the universe itself, outside of being observable, has a limited size. That naturally leads to a question of "what happens a the end".
Numerous analogies have always been used to describe this. Most have already been brought up in this thread (circles, etc). The most famous is that of a balloon. To a 3d observer, a balloon's surface is of limited space. To the ant though, the surface of balloon is endless.
That observation never quite sat with me though. It works for an ant - incapable of reason, but swap out the situation for a PERSON sitting on another circular surface (like, say, a planet), and we have figured out quite readily that our surface is unending but finite - it's obvious - go in another direction and you end up circling back.
By the same token, you can't just easily dismiss a perceived infinity of the universe via analogy as a meaningless question. There must be a logical mechanic behind it. Either the universe literally ends with a wall (highly unlikely), it truly is infinite, or, there is some mechanism by which you "double back" and circle back to your previous position. Just personally, I've never seen a truly convincing mechanic for explaining just how the last one would work. The infinity mechanic makes more sense. Not that I'm saying that the universe is definitely infinite. I'm just saying that before I truly embrace that ideas I need a working model of how it would work as perceived infinity, outside of an analogy or "it just works that way".