I concur wholeheartedly. Playing Final Fantasy as a level 41 character got pretty tough when life started to take more of my time. I would log on, spend 2 hours tooling around making money until I found a party, get killed twice in 10 minutes right off the bat because the puller couldn't dodge aggro. Play for an hour, die a few more times before giving up on the idiots, and then I would have to log off and go somewhere. XP gain? None. After spending 3 hours losing 1500 xp (if I was lucky), I would realize again that I can't just take the first party that manages to come together, even if it does take 2 hours, and that I just don't have the time to spend getting a party together.
World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has a monetary loss. You don't lose XP but your equipment gets damaged and you have to pay to repair it. Bad, yes, but money is amazingly easy to get in WoW (I'll go from poor to rich in an hour, blow it all on badass armor, then do it again and get a good weapon).
If I log on to WoW, die in 30 seconds, then have to leave, I'm only out maybe 10 minutes of recovery time, whereas in FFXI, I'd be looking at 20 minutes of time in a good party, which would take 4 hours to get together. I actually noticed that my character got to level 30 fairly fast, go to level 40 very slowly, got to level 41 in a month, then got back to level 40 in another month.
And is it just me, or is this recent trend toward "Sponsored Links" a real pain in the ass? When I see text in an article that is a link I expect it to be relevant, not a redirect to a merchant site.
Not to pimp or anything, but there's a handy way around that. Adwords/sponsored links/whatever use Javascript to replace this and that with links, to do their evil work. All you have to do is stop their javascript from loading.
The first step to undoing this is to download the adblock extension for Firefox. After installation, load up the page, and you'll notice the word 'Adblock' on the right of your status bar in firefox. Click on it, scroll down to the entry from vibrantmedia.com, click, and change to "http://www.vibrantmedia.com/intellitxt/*", hit enter, and reload. Poof, problem solved.
This also works for any plugins you don't want, flash, quicktime, audio, hidden things you can't see, javascript, images, iframes, the whole nine yards. It's the one plugin I always always have installed, no matter what. Definitely get it.
This OS is free Like the autumn wind and leaves Why another though?
Like stars in the sky Open-source OSes shine Too many to count.
Bold and daring though Like the lion in its den HaikuOS lives.
Reflecting the sun Haiku's website shines, I hope The OS does too.
With their lofty goals, Like the eagle, they will soar If success they find.
As the seasons pass I have no time to try out Every new OS.
Promising and new As in spring the world will be? Maybe, maybe not.
One complaint I have The article does not say What HaikuOS is.
A BeOS clone That is what I've determined Kudos! Keep it up.
(Ok, those last two weren't really related to nature, but it's late. Bedtime. For more information on what goes into making better haikus than I have made here, check out the Wikipedia entry on the topic)
I have a better idea for getting rid of spammers - beat them at their own game.
All we have to do is send out millions of legitimate e-mails to everyone, asking how their plants are doing, or what kind of turkey they're going to eat at Christmas. Eventually, people's e-mail will be so clogged up with messages from friends and colleagues that they won't be able to find the spam through it all. Misleading subject lines, such as 'Grow them six inches' or 'girls want more meat', to use examples for the above headlines, could be used to make recipients believe the message is spam, when it's actually well-intentioned correspondance.
Within a few years, people won't be able to locate actual spam from which to purchase products or services, and the spamhounds will shut down, defeated at last.
It's so simple, I don't know why no one's thought of it before.
Also, be sure to check out the Moox Optimized Win32 builds. I installed the Firefox M3 build a while back, and I have to say, Firefox was fast before, but now it's downright snappy.
Be kind to his bandwidth though.
Re:Had to completely uninstall the Preview Release
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
The same thing happened to me when I upgraded my version of the PR. I just quit and re-opened it and it's worked fine ever since.
And once you've got an account ready and it's downloading time, but you loathe the idea of their craptacular bittorrent client, hit suprnova up for a n actual torrent.
Not to troll or anything, but am I the only one that finds this case mod incredibly ugly? I would be embarrased to have this in my room. I didn't read any of the technical details about it, so it may be fantastically well-done in that respect, but I could not bear to look at it long enough to do so.
Case mods should be elegant and/or imaginative, not atrocious.
I'd like to respond to a lot of your points here, because you say a lot about a lot of sutff, and I disagree with pretty much everything.
As far as Counter-Strike goes, I can't stand the game. Not because the game is bad necessarily, but because I'm pretty sure everyone that plays it on public servers is functionally retarded, and LAN games are too much of a pain-in-the-ass to waste my time with. UT2k4 is uninspired, it's essentially UT + UT2k3 but trying to rip off Halo. If I wanted to play UT, I would. If I wanted to play Halo, I would. UT2k4 is interesting, but it doesn't have anything compelling about it as far as I've seen (not to mention I don't feel like sparing 8 gigs of space for the install and the maps you need to add to make it interesting.
And to be honest, I felt Goldeneye was a terrible game when I first played it, and I just couldn't get into it at all. I never did like it, I found the split-screen wasn't detailed enough to make out what the heck was going on, the controls were substandard, and the game wasn't interesting enough. Halo, I find, is the exact opposite.
As far as the types of people who play Halo, you're wrong on a lot of counts. While I'm sure that your description does match some players of Halo, I could say 'Halo players are all German-speaking transvestites' and I'd be as correct. There are people like that that do play those games, but there are a lot of people that are regular people.
A group of us play Halo (and are going to have a 16-player Halo 2 party on Thursday), and we don't fit into that category at all.
Shaun is in his late 20's, is the manager of one of the local EB Games stores. He's hosting. His wife, Sue, who works for one of Canada's largest banks, will be playing, and she's pretty fierce too. I, a 23-year-old call-centre employee who used to work at EB, will attend, even though I hated Goldeneye. Jeff is the assistant manager of the new EB Games store in town, and I know he'll be there with his X-Box. Joey is a film student at the local University, he and his roommates have pretty much every mainstream console ever made, and all the best games for all of them. Dan is taking a masters of biochemistry. Mark, a government employee and father of two, will be bringing his X-Box as well, and Jordan, a composer friend of mine, will be coming as well, though he's not as big a fan of the original Halo as the rest of us are, and Mike, a DJ and graphic artist, will probably come as well.
In short, none of these people are new gamers. We've all played Goldeneye, most people liked it, I didn't like it at all (I felt like I was playing a functionally retarded super-spy in a maze of identical rooms and corridors), but we've all played it. We've also all played FPS online and at LAN parties, we all have high-speed internet connections (I don't know anyone who doesn't anymore). Not a single one of us fit into your categories of Halo 1 players.
To give you an idea of why we like Halo 1 and have been playing it for several years, here are a few things that really make the game for me.
- Vehicles. Say what you want about Unreal 2004, but I hate their vehicles. They're mostly uninspired, they're a pain to drive, they're ugly as sin, and they seem tacked-on. In Halo, they're an integral part of the experience, and they work very well.
- Physics. The ability to send someone flying with a grenade, watching someone launch a Warthog up onto the Red Base with the tank, or seeing one of your just-thrown sticky grenades get blasted back at you by an unexpected rocket explosion (and having it stick onto you instead) makes the world that much more interesting.
- Weapons. The weapon designs are interesting and well-balanced, in that none of those of us who play are completely dominant with any one weapon. The sticky grenades make close-quarters combat much more amusing, the sniper rifle is one of the best I've ever used, the rocket launcher is powerful but limited, the alien weapons are strange but useful, and everything jus
In fact, a squad of Nazi troops took a super large cannon/gun out to an island in the middle of the ocean and tried shooting STRAIGHT UP trying to shoot across the "hollow earth" center to rain shells down on London. It didn't work.
Haha, that's so Wile E. Coyote it's got to be true. I can just see all these comically-drawn Nazis putting a pile of birdseed on a bridge over the Thames, then only moments later, running around as a large shadow quickly envelops them, and then WHAM! Back to the drawing board.
When will the TLA madness end? Oh, the humanity! At least provide definitions, for those god-fearing folk who may be interested but not up-to-date.
JVM: Java Virtual Machine, the virtual environment that every Java bytecode program runs within, abstracting real hardware for the program in question.
GUI: Graphical User Interface
JFC: Java Foundation Classes - the basic classes that are provided to developers upon which, or rather, with which, to build their programs.
API: Application Programming Interface, a defined way for software to interface with other software (i.e. to make library calls)
JIT: Just-In-Time compilation, compiles the program when it is being launched, for the machine it is being launched on, in order to prevent poor performance by compiling every instruction whenever it needs to be done
AOT: Mentioned in the article text, it means Ahead of Time. For details, read the linked story.
CTO: Chief Technology Officer. Name given to an executive in charge of new or current technology.
Fortunately, the kids weren't running as root. They DID have to re-do their project afterwards though. Handy tip, don't use -r unless you REALLY need to. Accidents make it disastrous.
Perhaps, but I don't think those people would buy it if they couldn't pirate it. Some would, I suppose some would bug their parents for the must-haves, but generally speaking, most of the people out there wouldn't buy it anyway.
As it says on his weblog, they are supposedly rearranging the components on the motherboard and hoping that Microsoft and Sony won't notice.
Honestly, I can't believe that a giant like IBM, or any of its decisions, would not forsee someone at Sony tearing open an XBox2 or someone at Microsoft tearing open a PS3, stripping it down to transistors and seeing what makes it tick. If I were working on the XBox2 team I'd have two PS3 preorders in as soon as I could - one so I could have, and one so I could dissect.
This is likely BS meant to start an uproar, or a misinterpretation (i.e. perhaps they are both using G5 processors with slight differences, or the chipset is slightly different). The machines won't be identical beyond what's required by the processors, I'm sure.
It's the ones that take off their mufflers and blare up and down the street at 3 AM because they think they're so cool.
I can't really think of a suitable comparison with Gentoo. Maybe the people who load up vlcplayer and play movies at 2AM with 10% less CPU use, but that doesn't really wake me up, so I don't really know. I'm sure there's a comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
I concur wholeheartedly. Playing Final Fantasy as a level 41 character got pretty tough when life started to take more of my time. I would log on, spend 2 hours tooling around making money until I found a party, get killed twice in 10 minutes right off the bat because the puller couldn't dodge aggro. Play for an hour, die a few more times before giving up on the idiots, and then I would have to log off and go somewhere. XP gain? None. After spending 3 hours losing 1500 xp (if I was lucky), I would realize again that I can't just take the first party that manages to come together, even if it does take 2 hours, and that I just don't have the time to spend getting a party together.
World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has a monetary loss. You don't lose XP but your equipment gets damaged and you have to pay to repair it. Bad, yes, but money is amazingly easy to get in WoW (I'll go from poor to rich in an hour, blow it all on badass armor, then do it again and get a good weapon).
If I log on to WoW, die in 30 seconds, then have to leave, I'm only out maybe 10 minutes of recovery time, whereas in FFXI, I'd be looking at 20 minutes of time in a good party, which would take 4 hours to get together. I actually noticed that my character got to level 30 fairly fast, go to level 40 very slowly, got to level 41 in a month, then got back to level 40 in another month.
If you want casual MMORPGing, go to WoW.
You only weigh 97lbs? Dear god boy, what are you doing on slashdot? Go eat something before it's too late!
And is it just me, or is this recent trend toward "Sponsored Links" a real pain in the ass? When I see text in an article that is a link I expect it to be relevant, not a redirect to a merchant site.
Not to pimp or anything, but there's a handy way around that. Adwords/sponsored links/whatever use Javascript to replace this and that with links, to do their evil work. All you have to do is stop their javascript from loading.
The first step to undoing this is to download the adblock extension for Firefox. After installation, load up the page, and you'll notice the word 'Adblock' on the right of your status bar in firefox. Click on it, scroll down to the entry from vibrantmedia.com, click, and change to "http://www.vibrantmedia.com/intellitxt/*", hit enter, and reload. Poof, problem solved.
This also works for any plugins you don't want, flash, quicktime, audio, hidden things you can't see, javascript, images, iframes, the whole nine yards. It's the one plugin I always always have installed, no matter what. Definitely get it.
They probably don't want to be embarrased.
Slashdot main page
this discussion page
121 errors in the former, 111 in the latter. Nice.
Get out and about once and a while. And when you go out somewhere, talk to girls. It helps.
I got a notebook machine with a desktop processor, and now I can get a desktop machine with a notebook procsesor. Superkeen.
This OS is free
Like the autumn wind and leaves
Why another though?
Like stars in the sky
Open-source OSes shine
Too many to count.
Bold and daring though
Like the lion in its den
HaikuOS lives.
Reflecting the sun
Haiku's website shines, I hope
The OS does too.
With their lofty goals,
Like the eagle, they will soar
If success they find.
As the seasons pass
I have no time to try out
Every new OS.
Promising and new
As in spring the world will be?
Maybe, maybe not.
One complaint I have
The article does not say
What HaikuOS is.
A BeOS clone
That is what I've determined
Kudos! Keep it up.
(Ok, those last two weren't really related to nature, but it's late. Bedtime. For more information on what goes into making better haikus than I have made here, check out the Wikipedia entry on the topic)
Lisa! Get in here! In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
I have a better idea for getting rid of spammers - beat them at their own game.
All we have to do is send out millions of legitimate e-mails to everyone, asking how their plants are doing, or what kind of turkey they're going to eat at Christmas. Eventually, people's e-mail will be so clogged up with messages from friends and colleagues that they won't be able to find the spam through it all. Misleading subject lines, such as 'Grow them six inches' or 'girls want more meat', to use examples for the above headlines, could be used to make recipients believe the message is spam, when it's actually well-intentioned correspondance.
Within a few years, people won't be able to locate actual spam from which to purchase products or services, and the spamhounds will shut down, defeated at last.
It's so simple, I don't know why no one's thought of it before.
--Dan
Also, be sure to check out the Moox Optimized Win32 builds. I installed the Firefox M3 build a while back, and I have to say, Firefox was fast before, but now it's downright snappy.
Be kind to his bandwidth though.
The same thing happened to me when I upgraded my version of the PR. I just quit and re-opened it and it's worked fine ever since.
And once you've got an account ready and it's downloading time, but you loathe the idea of their craptacular bittorrent client, hit suprnova up for a n actual torrent.
Not to troll or anything, but am I the only one that finds this case mod incredibly ugly? I would be embarrased to have this in my room. I didn't read any of the technical details about it, so it may be fantastically well-done in that respect, but I could not bear to look at it long enough to do so.
Case mods should be elegant and/or imaginative, not atrocious.
I'd like to respond to a lot of your points here, because you say a lot about a lot of sutff, and I disagree with pretty much everything.
As far as Counter-Strike goes, I can't stand the game. Not because the game is bad necessarily, but because I'm pretty sure everyone that plays it on public servers is functionally retarded, and LAN games are too much of a pain-in-the-ass to waste my time with. UT2k4 is uninspired, it's essentially UT + UT2k3 but trying to rip off Halo. If I wanted to play UT, I would. If I wanted to play Halo, I would. UT2k4 is interesting, but it doesn't have anything compelling about it as far as I've seen (not to mention I don't feel like sparing 8 gigs of space for the install and the maps you need to add to make it interesting.
And to be honest, I felt Goldeneye was a terrible game when I first played it, and I just couldn't get into it at all. I never did like it, I found the split-screen wasn't detailed enough to make out what the heck was going on, the controls were substandard, and the game wasn't interesting enough. Halo, I find, is the exact opposite.
As far as the types of people who play Halo, you're wrong on a lot of counts. While I'm sure that your description does match some players of Halo, I could say 'Halo players are all German-speaking transvestites' and I'd be as correct. There are people like that that do play those games, but there are a lot of people that are regular people.
A group of us play Halo (and are going to have a 16-player Halo 2 party on Thursday), and we don't fit into that category at all.
Shaun is in his late 20's, is the manager of one of the local EB Games stores. He's hosting. His wife, Sue, who works for one of Canada's largest banks, will be playing, and she's pretty fierce too. I, a 23-year-old call-centre employee who used to work at EB, will attend, even though I hated Goldeneye. Jeff is the assistant manager of the new EB Games store in town, and I know he'll be there with his X-Box. Joey is a film student at the local University, he and his roommates have pretty much every mainstream console ever made, and all the best games for all of them. Dan is taking a masters of biochemistry. Mark, a government employee and father of two, will be bringing his X-Box as well, and Jordan, a composer friend of mine, will be coming as well, though he's not as big a fan of the original Halo as the rest of us are, and Mike, a DJ and graphic artist, will probably come as well.
In short, none of these people are new gamers. We've all played Goldeneye, most people liked it, I didn't like it at all (I felt like I was playing a functionally retarded super-spy in a maze of identical rooms and corridors), but we've all played it. We've also all played FPS online and at LAN parties, we all have high-speed internet connections (I don't know anyone who doesn't anymore). Not a single one of us fit into your categories of Halo 1 players.
To give you an idea of why we like Halo 1 and have been playing it for several years, here are a few things that really make the game for me.
- Vehicles. Say what you want about Unreal 2004, but I hate their vehicles. They're mostly uninspired, they're a pain to drive, they're ugly as sin, and they seem tacked-on. In Halo, they're an integral part of the experience, and they work very well.
- Physics. The ability to send someone flying with a grenade, watching someone launch a Warthog up onto the Red Base with the tank, or seeing one of your just-thrown sticky grenades get blasted back at you by an unexpected rocket explosion (and having it stick onto you instead) makes the world that much more interesting.
- Weapons. The weapon designs are interesting and well-balanced, in that none of those of us who play are completely dominant with any one weapon. The sticky grenades make close-quarters combat much more amusing, the sniper rifle is one of the best I've ever used, the rocket launcher is powerful but limited, the alien weapons are strange but useful, and everything jus
The first step they take is not to tell everyone else what steps they're taking to prevent it.
Security through obscurity isn't good exclusively, but it provides an additional barrier to entry. The less we know, the better things are for them.
--Dan
In fact, a squad of Nazi troops took a super large cannon/gun out to an island in the middle of the ocean and tried shooting STRAIGHT UP trying to shoot across the "hollow earth" center to rain shells down on London. It didn't work.
Haha, that's so Wile E. Coyote it's got to be true. I can just see all these comically-drawn Nazis putting a pile of birdseed on a bridge over the Thames, then only moments later, running around as a large shadow quickly envelops them, and then WHAM! Back to the drawing board.
--Dan
When will the TLA madness end? Oh, the humanity! At least provide definitions, for those god-fearing folk who may be interested but not up-to-date.
JVM: Java Virtual Machine, the virtual environment that every Java bytecode program runs within, abstracting real hardware for the program in question.
GUI: Graphical User Interface
JFC: Java Foundation Classes - the basic classes that are provided to developers upon which, or rather, with which, to build their programs.
API: Application Programming Interface, a defined way for software to interface with other software (i.e. to make library calls)
JIT: Just-In-Time compilation, compiles the program when it is being launched, for the machine it is being launched on, in order to prevent poor performance by compiling every instruction whenever it needs to be done
AOT: Mentioned in the article text, it means Ahead of Time. For details, read the linked story.
CTO: Chief Technology Officer. Name given to an executive in charge of new or current technology.
Now that you know what is going on, RTFA.
--Dan
There's a list on the icecast website.
--Dan
--Dan
Perhaps, but I don't think those people would buy it if they couldn't pirate it. Some would, I suppose some would bug their parents for the must-haves, but generally speaking, most of the people out there wouldn't buy it anyway.
--Dan
The tense of your comment seems to indicate that you kept Windows ME, but got rid of your iPod. Are you sure you're posting on the right website?
--Dan
Well now that I know how to get the music off of it, I guess I could give it back to you now. Problem solved!
--Dan
I'm hoping we will get this support on the Nintendo DS. Having C&C:RA on a portable system would rock my socks.
And for reference, I've played Might and Magic on a console, and I hated it too.
--Dan
As it says on his weblog, they are supposedly rearranging the components on the motherboard and hoping that Microsoft and Sony won't notice.
Honestly, I can't believe that a giant like IBM, or any of its decisions, would not forsee someone at Sony tearing open an XBox2 or someone at Microsoft tearing open a PS3, stripping it down to transistors and seeing what makes it tick. If I were working on the XBox2 team I'd have two PS3 preorders in as soon as I could - one so I could have, and one so I could dissect.
This is likely BS meant to start an uproar, or a misinterpretation (i.e. perhaps they are both using G5 processors with slight differences, or the chipset is slightly different). The machines won't be identical beyond what's required by the processors, I'm sure.
--Dan
It's the ones that take off their mufflers and blare up and down the street at 3 AM because they think they're so cool.
I can't really think of a suitable comparison with Gentoo. Maybe the people who load up vlcplayer and play movies at 2AM with 10% less CPU use, but that doesn't really wake me up, so I don't really know. I'm sure there's a comparison.