Your post is mostly correct, well worded, and informative; however, the brush strokes are a bit broad. For example:
"While the powers of Europe tore each other up in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, WWI, and WWII, Americans kept stealing land from Indians (and later, from Hawaiians, Filipinos, and other people with fewer guns)"
The Filipino people were being exploited by the Spanish and the Japanese before Americans arrived. Americans "freed" and freed them from foreign oppressors. The first freed has quotes because Americans did indeed take economic advantage of the situation to a certain extent. Americans did indeed formally free them to form their own government and become a completely sovereign nation. I would hardly count the situation in the Philippines in the same category as what occurred with the Native Americans or the Africans.
America became "great" for exactly the reason specified earlier: "not having any unique power due to natural resources, but just by giving individuals the power to control their own destinies more than had been possible on a large scale in any other country."
I will stand by that statement until death (even though I did not originally utter it).
"Arguably though, the best way to avoid putting Afghan civilians and US troops out of harm is to have US troops go back to the US."
You are partially correct. The best way to avoid putting US Troops in harms way is to bring them to the US. However, I suspect that would be a VERY bad thing for Afghan civilians, especially the Afghan women. Islamic philosophy is not kind to women (they are essentially pieces of property that are used for creating more people). I am not sure it would get as bad as Somalia, but I am certain it would become worse for the civilians when the US withdraws.
meh. ok, there are definitely unidentified flying objects. are they aliens or are they of terrestrial origin?
just because these objects can do things that seem to defy physics, that does not automatically imply that they have to be piloted by non-terrestrial beings or that the technology is not of terrestrial origins.
seriously, if someone had to guess and was being rational, which option is the most likely:
Aliens, who have never revealed themselves to the general populace, are flying around.
Some group (probably governmental) is using experimental, possibly unmanned, technology.
There are definitely upsides. I was merely listing a downside which is a killer in some circumstances. Ask COMPTIA about the downsides (about this time last year).
Yes yes yes yes! However, OS X is not so wonderful either. It is a pretty face on a Unix that is not terribly reliable. I have had Wine/Cider games take out video and keyboard access. I have had apps refuse to launch until after a reboot (reboot a Unix? WTF?!) Checking the logs (since there were no error messages) indicates some sort of graphics overlay error.
Somehow, Linux and the associated software got sidetracked from doing kickass things to doing stupid shit. Linux in a command line only environment is still relatively decent though.
It would be interesting to find out how all of this happened though. How did KDE decide to move their entire platform to something radically unstable and unfinished (and distros ship it!). How did Gnome decide to take away choices from users? How did Gentoo get derailed and a "default by the book" install end up with a non-functioning desktop environment? Seriously, there are so many things that have gone terribly wrong that is seems impossible to think the entire community just lost its sense. WTF happened?
"The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions."
Ah. You forgot one other very important thing that make the web so attractive as a platform: Control. "They" have all the control over the app/service. They can changes terms of service, price, availability, etc. at any time they want and you have NO RECOURSE.
I was about to mod you overrated, but I decided to comment instead. It is a vain hope that others may get the idea:
You can NOT just say someone is wrong. Yes, your turn of words were cute; however, had you included a link showing HOW/WHY they were wrong, I would have pushed your comment to five rather than wanting to down-mod it to three as a useless assertion which may or may not be true.
Really, if you want to participate effectively, provide a coherent argument about why what you are disagreeing with is wrong. At a minimum, provide a link. Either one will earn you positive mod points. As it is, you deserve negative mod points.
I would never willingly kill a child. I would not kill an adult either except to save the life of someone they were about to kill. I can see how you and other posters could interpret what I said as wanting to kill the child, however, if I had meant that, I would have said it directly.
Ultimately, there are people crazy enough to do it. They bomb abortion clinics, set fire to Hummer dealerships, blow up federal buildings, etc. As I said, there is now a 20 million dollar bounty on the girls head. I in no way stated that I personally had any desire to be a bounty hunter.
That girl now has a $20 million bounty on her head for her death. All taxpayers have an incentive to kill the child now.
Everything about this case is wrong. Negligence should be proven and whomever was negligent, should have to pay. She had an underlying disorder that was aggravated by a normal, required procedure? Life sucks and shit happens. No, it is not fair. Perhaps the doctors should have realized she had a mitochondrial issue although I fail to see how they would notice this unless there were grossly obvious symptoms beforehand.
Ultimately, I do not understand why this girl deserves better medical care than I do.
Other than default desktop being kind of sucky, the N900 turned out to be more of what I want out of a phone than the 2 iPhones that I have owned. Fixing the desktop is actually really easy, you just select which icons you want to show on the desktop and choose a wallpaper and you are pretty much done.
However, there is much more to the N900 than what you see at first glance. It does pretty much everything my iPhones did but does them better. The camera? Superior. The bluetooth? Vastly superior (stereo headset anyone?). The internet connection sharing? Simple and easy and not locked out by the carrier(s). WiFi hotspot? No need to pirate an app for that. 3.5G data connection? You bet. Does it work everywhere in the world? Well, everywhere that I have been, it works fine and I have been on almost every continent. Do I have a control freak trying to steal back control of my phone on every update? Nope.
Really, the N900 is a network connected Linux based server in your pocket. How cool is that? It just works, as an iPhone kind of does, but, if you are interested, you can do so much more.
Ultimately, I gave my iPhone 2G to my son and later, my iPhone 3GS to my daughter. At first, it was tough to choose between the 3GS and N900. I really liked typing on the 3GS more than on the N900. I bought the 3GS first, so I was used to it. I bought the N900 because I wanted to try it out. I was not happy. It was not an iPhone. It did not work the same way. It was not even very sexy (all curved and wonderful to hold). I tried it out for a few weeks and then went back to my 3GS, hoping to find someone to buy my N900. I then went home for a month and used my 3GS exclusively. I went back to work overseas and decided to try out my N900 again. This time I tried it for a month. I really missed my 3GS the whole time. I kept telling myself, this would not be like this with the 3GS, or that this would work better, but I was always comparing it to my 3GS...
So I went back to my 3GS and discovered it really was not that wonderful after all. The N900 was not always fighting me. Upgrading it was not always a decision I had to carefully consider (was there a jailbreak for it yet?). The connection sharing was awesome, the bluetooth was awesome. Hell, the only thing I found to be truly lacking was the web browser (with multi-touch) and the typing. Everything else was as good or better. I do not miss my 3GS at all anymore and I have no desire for the 4G. IMHO, the N900 is the most superior phone out there for me. It really rocks.
"Plus, helicopters are already vulnerable to small-arms fire, unless they have tons of armor (like the Apache, which is big, expensive, and a fuel hog); this thing obviously doesn't have much armor."
ROFL. Despite your errors, you showed fairly reasonable grammar and spelling skills. Furthermore, you showed that you had given the subject some thought. I would say your thought took you too far though. I suspect the OP is not really a grammar nazi and he is willing to discard some errors, such as yours (speech vs sepak (sic)). The problem is when the errors are so pervasive that they start affecting the actual meaning of what is being said. If I have to try and decide if you meant one thing or another because of errors, then your communication is too tedious to be worthwhile.
Again, your post was fine despite at least one simple error. You were able to communicate effectively and that is what is important. Relax.:)
"Have you seen the prices lately? Pretty fucking uniform - Walmart, Bestbuy, Amazon, all seem to have exactly the same price (or somewhere within 50 cents of each other) on every goddamn CD again, and new releases are hovering steadily around $18. It sounds more like the MafiAA cartel laid low for a few years and went right back to their old tricks again."
The parent poster claimed CDs were something like $13. I have not looked at the price of a CD in over a decade now and they were $18 then. I am sad that I missed the $8-$13 prices, but was that when they were putting root kits and corrupted tracks and such on their CDs? It is good to see that the prices are back to $18 again.:/
What kind of DRM does it come with? I just don't buy games any more because of the hardcore DRM that messes with my computer. Furthermore, constant online checks are right out too as I do not have regular internet access. Further-furthermore, any DRM that says I can only install X number of times is so much not a consideration that I will forever blacklist any publisher or game series that has ever used it (Bye bye Rockstar and Grand Theft Auto, I used to love you.).
I am not a big fan of Jimi Hendrix but the recording of Voodoo Child (Slight Return) is an absolute masterpiece of what you are describing. Every note is hit perfectly, and yet he somehow makes it seem like he is playing with the timing. The overall effect is 11 on the dial.:)
This. I used up all of my mod points yesterday, but this is the real issue. Some people are just selfish and will twist things to their own benefit, even if the cost is greater to the other person or people. People get killed over $5 during a mugging. Surely any rational actor would think that $5 is not worth the other guys life or the risk of getting thrown in prison... and yet it still happens.
"Military checkpoints often lacked APPROACH BARRIERS and SIGNAGE."
Bullshit. I am over here (well, in Kuwait now) and every single checkpoint has at least one Humvee with a HUGE sign on it that says to stay back 100m or you will be shot. Now, approaching somewhere that one of these is parked should surely bring on the feeling of "um, these are guys with guns, perhaps I should approach cautiously.". This is just for informal checkpoints. For actual full time checkpoints, there are signs in half a dozen languages warning you. Sure, you are an ignorant peasant who was never taught to read. Guess what? Too bad. It is not like people are hiding in ditches waiting to ambush these people. Even a moron SHOULD be able to tell that there are armed men ahead. I am sorry, but if you do not comprehend that you might be in danger, then you will die because the men with guns will feel like they are in danger. It is not like the people manning these checkpoints just want target practice... well, perhaps there are a couple psychos out there, but I can guarantee you that most of the people who feel they have to shoot someone else who is approaching relives that moment over and over in their head, wondering if they could have done things differently.
I find myself wondering if you would feel as sorry for these people if you knew that they pushed their children in front of the convoys to stop them so they could destroy the convoy once it stopped. So a soldier is forced to run over a child or stop and get slaughtered. Hm. You do not think that fucks with a soldiers mind? So now, they have run over several children and a car is approaching them, ignoring all signs and warnings. Do they shoot or not? Well, they feel bad about running over a child 2 months ago, so they decide they do not want to kill anymore... and the car blows up when it hits the checkpoint, killing the soldier and everyone around him.
Ok, I will grant you that maybe there should not be a war over there now; however, there is. Everything is so easy, so black and white, when you are not the one over here. In your world, suicide bombers are easy to spot. They are the ones in cars filled with explosives. Well, this is not a movie, you do not get a scene with a shot panning through the back seat of the car. A soldier actually has to walk up to the car and look inside. I bet you can find a video or two showing just exactly that... and then a moment later, there is no sign of the soldier because his body was blown half a kilometer away. This shit is NOT easy and some innocent people WILL get hurt, maimed, or outright killed. Blaming the soldier is fucking stupid and hateful. Take your problems up with the politicians. The soldiers are already suffering enough.
Ah yes. If you can't point the finger at the teacher, then point the finger at the parent. If the teacher can not teach the child, then it is clearly the parents fault... after all, they provided all of the genes.
Never once have I seen anyone point the finger at the child. Believe it or not, "little Johnny" is his own person. No, really. You can dangle rewards in front of him and threaten severe pain behind him and guess what, he still makes his own decisions. Yes, on the average, good parenting will result in a child growing into a happy, healthy, and productive adult. Sometimes, it just does not work that way. I do not know why and I have not heard anyone else claim that they know why.
Hm. There was no way for me to measure the framerate. You could be right that it was that poor, but it does not seem like it was quite that low. You are definitely correct about low-res flat shaded polygons, but the draw distance on Armour-Geddon did not seem very small. It is as awesome as I remember because I still play it from time to time on an emulator. That is why I want to recreate it. There were very few games that were quite as open ended in how you handle getting to the goal.
BTW, thank you for replying. Even though it seems as if you were not impressed by Armour-Geddon, you at least considered what I had said.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
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· Score: 1
"Problem was...anything over four bitplanes on the Amiga started stealing RAM access cycles from the CPU."
Only true if the computer only had chip ram in it. If the Amiga had fast ram installed, the CPU would happily continue working on data in fast ram. The hardware was truly amazing.
Holy cow! Have you never played Armour-Geddon? This was a game in a completely 3D environment. You could use 6 different types of vehicles to move around the very large environment. You could fly a jet fighter, a bomber, or a helicopter. You could drive a heavy tank, a light tank, or a hovercraft. You could use up to 6 vehicles at a time (set a waypoint and then hit F1 through F6 to jump into the drivers seat of another vehicle).
The gameplay was fantastic. You were trying to prevent the computer controlled enemy from gathering enough energy to fry everything on the planet surface. The power gathering was represented by 3d towers that had light beams going from them to the next tower in line until you got to the gathering point of all the towers. These "powerlines" were ditributed all over the surface.
My friends and I played this game for YEARS. I would love to recreate it. We almost perfected beating the game. Our strategy was to run a mission (we created the parameters for it. It was not a mission required by the game) where we would fly a jet equipped with a laser, a night sight, and a drop tank for extra range. We would fly low to avoid radar and start following power lines to junctions, destroying the towers on the way to the junctions (you had to start at the end of the powerline as each tower was more difficult to destroy when it had more power flowing through it). Flown (very!) carefully, a single jet flight could darken most of the map and return.
The next step were bomber missions where we would either pick up missing neutron bomb parts or drop teleport devices. One mission was called the Swooping Bat Mission because we flew a bomber across the landscape (low, to avoid radar) and picked up a bomb part that was surrounded by pyramids. There was no way in other than through the air. The trick was to stall the bomber just above the part so you could pick it up and then punch the engines to full throttle so you could climb enough to miss the sloping slides of the pyramids. (this was so difficult that for months, we were convinced it was impossible to do!)
Near the energy gather point, there is a line of "mountains" (pyramids again) with a valley. We called that cocaine alley because when you flew through it, you could not shoot fast enough to destroy everything. We usually took a laser, a rack of rockets, and a rack of guided missiles. The rockets were to destroy the "stubborn" towers and the missiles were for the jets. You would end up with a LOT of jets chasing you and guided missiles were the best weapon for shooting down other planes... however, (near cocaine alley) I once shot a jet down with a tank using a normal artillery shell!
Meh, this is all tl;dr I am sure. My point is that all of this was possible on my Amiga 500 with only 512k of chip RAM and a 7mhz processor. Your claims about the graphical weakness of the Amiga are not true. How else could a simulated 3D enviroment like that, with such possibilities (shooting down a jet with an artillery shell!), be created?
The Amiga was just plain awesomeness. It had multi-tasking all the way down to its hardware. The Agnus chip could be blitting crap across the screen while the CPU was busy calculating crap elsewhere. Anything that required raw CPU horsepower was slow, but since each chip could do its own thing, you could have tons of crap going on at once.
While I am it, I really really miss DPaint IV. Heh, with its name, you would think it was just a paint program like Microsft Paint. No. That thing had all sorts of tools that I have not seen in any one package since then. It would more realistically be called an animation program. You could make animated brushes and move them through time with just a few keystrokes. It was awesome. I really miss my Amiga. Modern computers are nowhere near as fun and useful and cool.
To add my own anecdote, I have owned a iPhone 2G, an iPhone 3GS, a Nokia N97, and a Nokia N900. I have used all of them except the N97 in various parts of the world. Universally, the Nokia phones get better reception than the iPhones. For anyone who is a fanboy though, keep this in mind: When the iPhones would get horrible reception, the Nokia phones would only get slightly better than horrible reception. In other words, they all seem to generally be in the same league. Signal strength is not a deciding factor for me in my ultimate choice of phone (the N900).
DSL is your answer? Really? I used to have Speakeasy DSL service when I lived in San Diego. Absolutely 100% awesome. Well, I moved to Colorado. Speakeasy is under the impression that no matter where I live (three different locations) the "local" DSLAM is always happens to be about 20km away. Well, I can get 128kb service for $120 at 20km range. Oh look! Comcast offers 10mb service for $60.
Really, my only option other than cable is dialup. 56kb service is still around $10 a month and is half the speed of DSL. Somehow or another, I think a LOT of Canadians are in the same boat that I am in.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post is mostly correct, well worded, and informative; however, the brush strokes are a bit broad. For example:
"While the powers of Europe tore each other up in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, WWI, and WWII, Americans kept stealing land from Indians (and later, from Hawaiians, Filipinos, and other people with fewer guns)"
The Filipino people were being exploited by the Spanish and the Japanese before Americans arrived. Americans "freed" and freed them from foreign oppressors. The first freed has quotes because Americans did indeed take economic advantage of the situation to a certain extent. Americans did indeed formally free them to form their own government and become a completely sovereign nation. I would hardly count the situation in the Philippines in the same category as what occurred with the Native Americans or the Africans.
America became "great" for exactly the reason specified earlier:
"not having any unique power due to natural resources, but just by giving individuals the power to control their own destinies more than had been possible on a large scale in any other country."
I will stand by that statement until death (even though I did not originally utter it).
strike
"Arguably though, the best way to avoid putting Afghan civilians and US troops out of harm is to have US troops go back to the US."
You are partially correct. The best way to avoid putting US Troops in harms way is to bring them to the US. However, I suspect that would be a VERY bad thing for Afghan civilians, especially the Afghan women. Islamic philosophy is not kind to women (they are essentially pieces of property that are used for creating more people). I am not sure it would get as bad as Somalia, but I am certain it would become worse for the civilians when the US withdraws.
strike
meh. ok, there are definitely unidentified flying objects. are they aliens or are they of terrestrial origin?
just because these objects can do things that seem to defy physics, that does not automatically imply that they have to be piloted by non-terrestrial beings or that the technology is not of terrestrial origins.
seriously, if someone had to guess and was being rational, which option is the most likely:
Aliens, who have never revealed themselves to the general populace, are flying around.
Some group (probably governmental) is using experimental, possibly unmanned, technology.
strike
There are definitely upsides. I was merely listing a downside which is a killer in some circumstances. Ask COMPTIA about the downsides (about this time last year).
Regards,
strike
Yes yes yes yes! However, OS X is not so wonderful either. It is a pretty face on a Unix that is not terribly reliable. I have had Wine/Cider games take out video and keyboard access. I have had apps refuse to launch until after a reboot (reboot a Unix? WTF?!) Checking the logs (since there were no error messages) indicates some sort of graphics overlay error.
Somehow, Linux and the associated software got sidetracked from doing kickass things to doing stupid shit. Linux in a command line only environment is still relatively decent though.
It would be interesting to find out how all of this happened though. How did KDE decide to move their entire platform to something radically unstable and unfinished (and distros ship it!). How did Gnome decide to take away choices from users? How did Gentoo get derailed and a "default by the book" install end up with a non-functioning desktop environment? Seriously, there are so many things that have gone terribly wrong that is seems impossible to think the entire community just lost its sense. WTF happened?
"The only thing that makes the web so attractive is the barrier to entry : free, nothing to install, immediate access to the average brains of millions."
Ah. You forgot one other very important thing that make the web so attractive as a platform: Control. "They" have all the control over the app/service. They can changes terms of service, price, availability, etc. at any time they want and you have NO RECOURSE.
Control baby. Control. It is good to be King.
I was about to mod you overrated, but I decided to comment instead. It is a vain hope that others may get the idea:
You can NOT just say someone is wrong. Yes, your turn of words were cute; however, had you included a link showing HOW/WHY they were wrong, I would have pushed your comment to five rather than wanting to down-mod it to three as a useless assertion which may or may not be true.
Really, if you want to participate effectively, provide a coherent argument about why what you are disagreeing with is wrong. At a minimum, provide a link. Either one will earn you positive mod points. As it is, you deserve negative mod points.
Regards,
strike
I would never willingly kill a child. I would not kill an adult either except to save the life of someone they were about to kill. I can see how you and other posters could interpret what I said as wanting to kill the child, however, if I had meant that, I would have said it directly.
Ultimately, there are people crazy enough to do it. They bomb abortion clinics, set fire to Hummer dealerships, blow up federal buildings, etc. As I said, there is now a 20 million dollar bounty on the girls head. I in no way stated that I personally had any desire to be a bounty hunter.
I apologize for the feathers that I ruffled.
strike
I can see how you could easily misinterpret my intent. There is no way I would consider killing a child.
That girl now has a $20 million bounty on her head for her death. All taxpayers have an incentive to kill the child now.
Everything about this case is wrong. Negligence should be proven and whomever was negligent, should have to pay. She had an underlying disorder that was aggravated by a normal, required procedure? Life sucks and shit happens. No, it is not fair. Perhaps the doctors should have realized she had a mitochondrial issue although I fail to see how they would notice this unless there were grossly obvious symptoms beforehand.
Ultimately, I do not understand why this girl deserves better medical care than I do.
Other than default desktop being kind of sucky, the N900 turned out to be more of what I want out of a phone than the 2 iPhones that I have owned. Fixing the desktop is actually really easy, you just select which icons you want to show on the desktop and choose a wallpaper and you are pretty much done.
However, there is much more to the N900 than what you see at first glance. It does pretty much everything my iPhones did but does them better. The camera? Superior. The bluetooth? Vastly superior (stereo headset anyone?). The internet connection sharing? Simple and easy and not locked out by the carrier(s). WiFi hotspot? No need to pirate an app for that. 3.5G data connection? You bet. Does it work everywhere in the world? Well, everywhere that I have been, it works fine and I have been on almost every continent. Do I have a control freak trying to steal back control of my phone on every update? Nope.
Really, the N900 is a network connected Linux based server in your pocket. How cool is that? It just works, as an iPhone kind of does, but, if you are interested, you can do so much more.
Ultimately, I gave my iPhone 2G to my son and later, my iPhone 3GS to my daughter. At first, it was tough to choose between the 3GS and N900. I really liked typing on the 3GS more than on the N900. I bought the 3GS first, so I was used to it. I bought the N900 because I wanted to try it out. I was not happy. It was not an iPhone. It did not work the same way. It was not even very sexy (all curved and wonderful to hold). I tried it out for a few weeks and then went back to my 3GS, hoping to find someone to buy my N900. I then went home for a month and used my 3GS exclusively. I went back to work overseas and decided to try out my N900 again. This time I tried it for a month. I really missed my 3GS the whole time. I kept telling myself, this would not be like this with the 3GS, or that this would work better, but I was always comparing it to my 3GS...
So I went back to my 3GS and discovered it really was not that wonderful after all. The N900 was not always fighting me. Upgrading it was not always a decision I had to carefully consider (was there a jailbreak for it yet?). The connection sharing was awesome, the bluetooth was awesome. Hell, the only thing I found to be truly lacking was the web browser (with multi-touch) and the typing. Everything else was as good or better. I do not miss my 3GS at all anymore and I have no desire for the 4G. IMHO, the N900 is the most superior phone out there for me. It really rocks.
strike
"Plus, helicopters are already vulnerable to small-arms fire, unless they have tons of armor (like the Apache, which is big, expensive, and a fuel hog); this thing obviously doesn't have much armor."
You must be thinking of the Blackhawk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_UH-60_Black_Hawk Helicopter since the Apache http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_AH-64_Apache Helicopter is a (relatively) light, sleek helicopter that is designed for rapid maneuvering.
ROFL. Despite your errors, you showed fairly reasonable grammar and spelling skills. Furthermore, you showed that you had given the subject some thought. I would say your thought took you too far though. I suspect the OP is not really a grammar nazi and he is willing to discard some errors, such as yours (speech vs sepak (sic)). The problem is when the errors are so pervasive that they start affecting the actual meaning of what is being said. If I have to try and decide if you meant one thing or another because of errors, then your communication is too tedious to be worthwhile.
Again, your post was fine despite at least one simple error. You were able to communicate effectively and that is what is important. Relax. :)
strike
I am an asshole by default. I actually have to put forth effort to not be an asshole. It kind of sucks to have such a crappy default. :(
strike
"Have you seen the prices lately? Pretty fucking uniform - Walmart, Bestbuy, Amazon, all seem to have exactly the same price (or somewhere within 50 cents of each other) on every goddamn CD again, and new releases are hovering steadily around $18. It sounds more like the MafiAA cartel laid low for a few years and went right back to their old tricks again."
The parent poster claimed CDs were something like $13. I have not looked at the price of a CD in over a decade now and they were $18 then. I am sad that I missed the $8-$13 prices, but was that when they were putting root kits and corrupted tracks and such on their CDs? It is good to see that the prices are back to $18 again. :/
strike
What kind of DRM does it come with? I just don't buy games any more because of the hardcore DRM that messes with my computer. Furthermore, constant online checks are right out too as I do not have regular internet access. Further-furthermore, any DRM that says I can only install X number of times is so much not a consideration that I will forever blacklist any publisher or game series that has ever used it (Bye bye Rockstar and Grand Theft Auto, I used to love you.).
strike
I am not a big fan of Jimi Hendrix but the recording of Voodoo Child (Slight Return) is an absolute masterpiece of what you are describing. Every note is hit perfectly, and yet he somehow makes it seem like he is playing with the timing. The overall effect is 11 on the dial. :)
Rock on.
"...Or a bullet...."
This. I used up all of my mod points yesterday, but this is the real issue. Some people are just selfish and will twist things to their own benefit, even if the cost is greater to the other person or people. People get killed over $5 during a mugging. Surely any rational actor would think that $5 is not worth the other guys life or the risk of getting thrown in prison... and yet it still happens.
A bullet.
"Military checkpoints often lacked APPROACH BARRIERS and SIGNAGE."
Bullshit. I am over here (well, in Kuwait now) and every single checkpoint has at least one Humvee with a HUGE sign on it that says to stay back 100m or you will be shot. Now, approaching somewhere that one of these is parked should surely bring on the feeling of "um, these are guys with guns, perhaps I should approach cautiously.". This is just for informal checkpoints. For actual full time checkpoints, there are signs in half a dozen languages warning you. Sure, you are an ignorant peasant who was never taught to read. Guess what? Too bad. It is not like people are hiding in ditches waiting to ambush these people. Even a moron SHOULD be able to tell that there are armed men ahead. I am sorry, but if you do not comprehend that you might be in danger, then you will die because the men with guns will feel like they are in danger. It is not like the people manning these checkpoints just want target practice... well, perhaps there are a couple psychos out there, but I can guarantee you that most of the people who feel they have to shoot someone else who is approaching relives that moment over and over in their head, wondering if they could have done things differently.
I find myself wondering if you would feel as sorry for these people if you knew that they pushed their children in front of the convoys to stop them so they could destroy the convoy once it stopped. So a soldier is forced to run over a child or stop and get slaughtered. Hm. You do not think that fucks with a soldiers mind? So now, they have run over several children and a car is approaching them, ignoring all signs and warnings. Do they shoot or not? Well, they feel bad about running over a child 2 months ago, so they decide they do not want to kill anymore... and the car blows up when it hits the checkpoint, killing the soldier and everyone around him.
Ok, I will grant you that maybe there should not be a war over there now; however, there is. Everything is so easy, so black and white, when you are not the one over here. In your world, suicide bombers are easy to spot. They are the ones in cars filled with explosives. Well, this is not a movie, you do not get a scene with a shot panning through the back seat of the car. A soldier actually has to walk up to the car and look inside. I bet you can find a video or two showing just exactly that... and then a moment later, there is no sign of the soldier because his body was blown half a kilometer away. This shit is NOT easy and some innocent people WILL get hurt, maimed, or outright killed. Blaming the soldier is fucking stupid and hateful. Take your problems up with the politicians. The soldiers are already suffering enough.
strike
Ah yes. If you can't point the finger at the teacher, then point the finger at the parent. If the teacher can not teach the child, then it is clearly the parents fault... after all, they provided all of the genes.
Never once have I seen anyone point the finger at the child. Believe it or not, "little Johnny" is his own person. No, really. You can dangle rewards in front of him and threaten severe pain behind him and guess what, he still makes his own decisions. Yes, on the average, good parenting will result in a child growing into a happy, healthy, and productive adult. Sometimes, it just does not work that way. I do not know why and I have not heard anyone else claim that they know why.
strike
Hm. There was no way for me to measure the framerate. You could be right that it was that poor, but it does not seem like it was quite that low. You are definitely correct about low-res flat shaded polygons, but the draw distance on Armour-Geddon did not seem very small. It is as awesome as I remember because I still play it from time to time on an emulator. That is why I want to recreate it. There were very few games that were quite as open ended in how you handle getting to the goal.
BTW, thank you for replying. Even though it seems as if you were not impressed by Armour-Geddon, you at least considered what I had said.
"Problem was...anything over four bitplanes on the Amiga started stealing RAM access cycles from the CPU."
Only true if the computer only had chip ram in it. If the Amiga had fast ram installed, the CPU would happily continue working on data in fast ram. The hardware was truly amazing.
Holy cow! Have you never played Armour-Geddon? This was a game in a completely 3D environment. You could use 6 different types of vehicles to move around the very large environment. You could fly a jet fighter, a bomber, or a helicopter. You could drive a heavy tank, a light tank, or a hovercraft. You could use up to 6 vehicles at a time (set a waypoint and then hit F1 through F6 to jump into the drivers seat of another vehicle).
The gameplay was fantastic. You were trying to prevent the computer controlled enemy from gathering enough energy to fry everything on the planet surface. The power gathering was represented by 3d towers that had light beams going from them to the next tower in line until you got to the gathering point of all the towers. These "powerlines" were ditributed all over the surface.
My friends and I played this game for YEARS. I would love to recreate it. We almost perfected beating the game. Our strategy was to run a mission (we created the parameters for it. It was not a mission required by the game) where we would fly a jet equipped with a laser, a night sight, and a drop tank for extra range. We would fly low to avoid radar and start following power lines to junctions, destroying the towers on the way to the junctions (you had to start at the end of the powerline as each tower was more difficult to destroy when it had more power flowing through it). Flown (very!) carefully, a single jet flight could darken most of the map and return.
The next step were bomber missions where we would either pick up missing neutron bomb parts or drop teleport devices. One mission was called the Swooping Bat Mission because we flew a bomber across the landscape (low, to avoid radar) and picked up a bomb part that was surrounded by pyramids. There was no way in other than through the air. The trick was to stall the bomber just above the part so you could pick it up and then punch the engines to full throttle so you could climb enough to miss the sloping slides of the pyramids. (this was so difficult that for months, we were convinced it was impossible to do!)
Near the energy gather point, there is a line of "mountains" (pyramids again) with a valley. We called that cocaine alley because when you flew through it, you could not shoot fast enough to destroy everything. We usually took a laser, a rack of rockets, and a rack of guided missiles. The rockets were to destroy the "stubborn" towers and the missiles were for the jets. You would end up with a LOT of jets chasing you and guided missiles were the best weapon for shooting down other planes... however, (near cocaine alley) I once shot a jet down with a tank using a normal artillery shell!
Meh, this is all tl;dr I am sure. My point is that all of this was possible on my Amiga 500 with only 512k of chip RAM and a 7mhz processor. Your claims about the graphical weakness of the Amiga are not true. How else could a simulated 3D enviroment like that, with such possibilities (shooting down a jet with an artillery shell!), be created?
The Amiga was just plain awesomeness. It had multi-tasking all the way down to its hardware. The Agnus chip could be blitting crap across the screen while the CPU was busy calculating crap elsewhere. Anything that required raw CPU horsepower was slow, but since each chip could do its own thing, you could have tons of crap going on at once.
While I am it, I really really miss DPaint IV. Heh, with its name, you would think it was just a paint program like Microsft Paint. No. That thing had all sorts of tools that I have not seen in any one package since then. It would more realistically be called an animation program. You could make animated brushes and move them through time with just a few keystrokes. It was awesome. I really miss my Amiga. Modern computers are nowhere near as fun and useful and cool.
strike (sad)
To add my own anecdote, I have owned a iPhone 2G, an iPhone 3GS, a Nokia N97, and a Nokia N900. I have used all of them except the N97 in various parts of the world. Universally, the Nokia phones get better reception than the iPhones. For anyone who is a fanboy though, keep this in mind: When the iPhones would get horrible reception, the Nokia phones would only get slightly better than horrible reception. In other words, they all seem to generally be in the same league. Signal strength is not a deciding factor for me in my ultimate choice of phone (the N900).
strike
DSL is your answer? Really? I used to have Speakeasy DSL service when I lived in San Diego. Absolutely 100% awesome. Well, I moved to Colorado. Speakeasy is under the impression that no matter where I live (three different locations) the "local" DSLAM is always happens to be about 20km away. Well, I can get 128kb service for $120 at 20km range. Oh look! Comcast offers 10mb service for $60.
Really, my only option other than cable is dialup. 56kb service is still around $10 a month and is half the speed of DSL. Somehow or another, I think a LOT of Canadians are in the same boat that I am in.
strike