But I'm not sure that this results in it being a better game machine.
For instance: GBA got backward compatibility, which is good. However, it's also tempting to blame the GBA's poor resolution and limited sound capabilities on the fact that, as a cost-cutting measure, backward compatibility was implemented with similar hardware.
As another example: The Commodore 64 was a great home gaming machine back in 1982-1984. It was also perhaps a decent productivity machine. Then the Commodore 128 came out and it had three goals: backward compatibility, better productivity features, and CP/M.
The result was a machine with a mostly-unused second CPU, a second display system used for EGA-style computer monitors, and a mostly-compatible C64 mode, with not a single enhancement to the game machine functionality that had contributed so much to the C64's success.
I wouldn't say the analogy's perfect, but it reflects my concern that as more features are added to a gaming machine, it starts to lose its focus. In retrospect I'd have gladly given up PS2's (unreliable) DVD playback capability and its backward compatibility in exchange for things like four-player controller ports built in, or a little more muscle for actual playing of games.
The "technical reason it cannot be done" is because it would cost hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a money pit. It can be done, but the cost to do it now would be massive. Gargantuan. Phenomenal. All to keep a team of, say, five people safe and happy living in total isolation at a claustrophobic bunker a quarter million miles away from the nearest source of air, water, food, emergency medical care.
This is not to say that things which are expensive are not worth doing - but there is a balance. Cost vs. yield, risk vs. reward. Right now, cost and risk are still very high. Prohibitively high. Going to the moon and back was a fantastic stunt, one that ought to be regarded as a landmark of importance for the rest of human history - but that's all it was, a stunt. Consider each moon launch (carrying about 16 tons to the lunar surface) required a 3000 ton rocket and a shitload of rocket fuel. A $6.5 billion rocket program (in the 1960's - so that'd be around $30 billion today) yielded 10 trips to the moon with that payload. Technology has improved since then, so most likely lots of processes will be less expensive (obtaining and storing rocket fuel, I'm sure - computer systems obviously - better materials, etc. - but still the same basic technology.) But the process would need to be orders of magnitude less expensive to be feasible to support a space colony needing regular shipments of food, air, water, and so on to survive.
As for technology benefits - sure, those could potentially be accelerated a bit by hefty expenditures into development needed for a moon base. But here's the thing: technology advances anyway. Competition drives it to happen, as do various artificial factors. There will come a point where this natural progression of technology will make it practical to establish a long-term presence on the Moon. Maybe this means some kind of linear accelerator launch system, or some other system that hasn't been made practical yet. But we're not there yet. Creating a livable habitat anywhere outside of the atmosphere is not trivial, it's very complex and very expensive. Doing it a quarter million miles away only makes it more expensive and more dangerous.
Then there's this other wacky idea: we take the hundreds of billions of dollars that would have gone into the development of a moonbase, put the R&D allocations into the projects that would've gotten funding if the moonbase were actually happening - get the science and technology yields from project R&D, but then don't launch any rockets to the moon or build a moon base. Wouldn't that give us the same result for less money?
And what's with these "vehicles that don't require combustion"? Electric cars already exist, they're just not cost-effective or practical for people's usual daily requirements. Neither of those metrics have any meaning in the context of a moon program.
All this talk of moon bases is just wishful thinking at this point. There's a big difference between launching two men and several tons of gear to the moon's surface, and launching enough men and enough gear and enough supplies to build and sustain a permanent base. Our launching capability needs to be much more efficient before it's a practical possibility. The foundation of space flight needs to be improved before we start building moon bases.
"And for what?" - There has to be a definite return for all this expenditure. We're not ready to go to Mars, and we won't immediately be ready for a trip to Mars just by virtue of having one bunker on the Moon. Going to Mars is probably at least 15 years off. So what good does it do us to have the moon-base now?
Right, but you've still got this long excavation project going on under the surface of the moon, all to build a base that can't function without regular resupply from the Earth. And for what, exactly? A better view of Venus? Unlike a space station it wouldn't even have the advantage of being a microgravity environment in which microgravity experiments could be done. And yet there'd still be the health issues caused by reduced gravity. And what if the fissures around the cavern don't seal? What if they seal, but then the seals rupture later on? Does moon rock actually block or reflect cosmic rays?
Even with the ability to build the shelter by excavation the project sure as hell isn't cheap. The residents are still dependent upon resupply for survival, productivity, and rescue. A mere 37 years ago the ability just to go there, and get back alive, represented the absolute peak of our capabilities. Is it really so silly to think that it might not quite be time yet to move there?
I found it almost comical when I learned that people like the L5 society were actually serious about advocating space colonies, decades ago. (In their case, this means full orbiting cities at Lagrange points...) It just seemed impractical to the point of silliness. Someday, sure, but not now.
Colonizing the moon, even if it just means a permanent base of some kind on the moon, is similarly impractical - though on the moon, at least, there may be a reasonable amount of raw materials to build from. But ferrying people and supplies back and forth would be crazy-expensive. And suppose something goes wrong? Are the people there just hosed or what? Anyone who's living up there for any prolonged amount of time will basically be subsidized by the government for a very expensive and complex life-support system. Food, air, fuel, raw materials, and so on will all have to be provided to sustain the colony. That also means a lot of rocket traffic (and the cheaper ones put out toxic exhaust, not water like the hydrogen rockets.) going up to the moon, a lot of disposable rockets being wasted in space, and a lot of space junk being produced as a result.
The benefits of such an endeavor have the be a lot less abstract to be worth the waste. In time, technology will reach the point where we can do this much more cheaply - that will be the time when it really makes sense to do it. We can accelerate the process a bit by throwing money at the problem, but that can only get us so far...
Right. Palm doesn't own the OS, and the OS sucks. I don't know why you say the hardware sucks, though. (Then again, I'm running a Tungsten T2) But if Palm made a new OS, started over, discarding some or all of backward compatibility, then why would they need PalmSource?
The name recognition and the reasonable degree of success of Palm projects like the Treo could enable Palm to take leadership of the platform, if they were willing to cut off PalmSource.
Palm is already working a new version of Palm OS with Linux as the kernel, effectively creating their own "OS X" story. Whether they'll be as successful as OS X is remains to be seen.
So what?
I mean, PalmSource has already made OS6 but nobody's using it. Almost everything (on the ARM devices) is still running under an emulated M68K, as it has been for about four years.
Maybe Apple will show Palm how you change processors on a platform. Oh, I wish. The thought of somebody buying Palm, somebody with maybe some drive to see it amount to something, is just too tempting.
That's funny, I have the opposite problem when people talk about Ace Combat...
Why anybody would get so excited about flying little planes around when there's robots to build and go beat on is beyond me, though...
And no, I didn't know AC4 was going to be on XBox as well. Looks like the PS3 vs. XBox 360 question is still open, for me. Network support could be a deciding factor, so I hope Sony's got their shit together. (But Nintendo Revolution is already a given. Gotta get one of those...)
The only way to get out of the current predicament is to seek a truce with Bin Laden. He has his sleepers right here on our own soil. It's like someone planting land mines in your own back yard and you're about to have a cook out. To stop the lemmmings from attacking, the piped piper must agree to stop playing his flute.
And when the upper hand is on the other foot, you need to know when to hold 'em and when to get the hell out of Dodge. When Darmok and Jalad were at Tanagra, they didn't count their chickens before the fat lady sang, and they didn't bake their cakes before the oven was fully preheated to 350 degrees.
On a more serious note: Suppose we "seek a truce" with Bin Laden. What do you suppose that means? What demands do we have to bow to in order for this to happen? And what happens to everyone else who wants to see the USA crumble? If we negotiate with a terrorist, we've legitimized him. If we seek a truce, that's a sign of weakness, a sign that we've recognized him as an equal and his attacks as a threat we can't control. So let's say Al Qaeda gets a big payoff, an end to US involvement in the mid-east, a televised appearance by Bush saying how great it is that these people have struggled for so long for their beliefs, etc... That might stop the attacks, maybe? Then maybe they'll attack someone else. We'll have funded and endorsed someone dangerous (imagine that!) and then be stuck - either we attack them, ending the truce (but with him now better-funded!) or we don't, to preserve the truce, in which case it'll appear as though we're really endorsing their actions. Then maybe someone else will attack us, hoping to be well paid and legitimized in exchange for a cessation of hostilities.
No, I don't think that'll work at all. I think we need to foster good-will to the extent we can, but at the same time a lot of the civility in the world is based on the reality that rash actions carry consequences. Lots of people are bound to hate the US, but how many are going to bomb a building or attack a carrier? Only those willing to die and/or incur our wrath. Likewise, lots of people want more territory for their country, but how many invade their neighbors? Only those motivated enough to deal not only with resistance from their neighbors, but also whatever UN response occurs. If we give the message that this is no longer true when dealing with the US, we will mark ourselves a target.
So, what kind of pr0n do you have on your system? We should share. I have 10 gigs of solid BDSM.
Actually most of it is my collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. I have almost the first 5 seasons complete (six if you count the KTMA season). A lot of what's left is anime of the giant robot variety, versions of Star Wars movies that weren't fucked up by chimps goofing around with Photoshop back in 1997, and so on.
Most of my porn I don't think I'd bother to re-download. I'd just find different porn to download.:) I mean, "Teenage Twins" was fun and all, but it's no treasure. And if something I found once turns out to be hard to find again, most likely it's not worth the effort.
As for the backup, the question is still "where to?" I could solve that question with more money - and should, really. But this is exactly my point - when presented with the options (spend a couple hundred to double my storage, or spend a couple hundred to backup my data) I go with the first every time. But even upgrades aren't often on the agenda, my money's going elsewhere.
So to recap, I'm smart enough to run Linux and do some useful things with it (just got my wireless card running and talking to my Nintendo DS) but somehow still not smart enough to allocate funds to building some kind of backup strategy...:)
The OS already can be set up to do this. The premise of the article is flawed; and based on a premise that I reject. Chances are, if you're smart enough to run Linux, then you're probably smart enough to backup your important files.
I don't know about this. I wasn't "smart enough" to backup my important files (anything that didn't come straight from a Debian package is important.) and one of my hard drives died - I panicked, I replaced it, I extracted all the data from the dead drive that I could (first through several misguided attempts with an incorrect method, then again after learning the right way to do it) and slowly my system returned to normal.
And where am I, a year or two later? Still no RAID, still no backups, just hundreds of gigs I'd hate to have to download all over again if I lost it.
So no, I don't think being a Linux user automatically makes you smart enough that you will inevitably do backups. For starters, one needs something to backup that data to.
If there was one game out there that could make my ears perk up and get me to actually look forward to the PS3, it's a new AC title on a more powerful system. Here's hoping they really take advantage of that power. Oh, and if the release of AC4 results in Kotobukiya putting out more Armored Core kits, all the better.
The AC game for the PSP could have got me buying a PSP, if it hadn't been a big AI training game.
So for the love of music and all things musical, go out and buy a massively DRM encumbered CD today! Better yet, buy two...for the alternative is unthinkable!
The advantage of buying two is that it provides a practical way for two people to listen to the music, at the same time! You could even give the second copy to a friend, so that they may listen to their copy whenever they like: but under no circumstances are you to listen to their copy! Your best bet is to bring your own copy with you, and listen to that. This serves two goals. First, it will drown out the sound of your friend's CD, to which you do not have access and which he is not permitted to use as a public exhibition. Second, it will allow you to hear the music to which you otherwise would not have access.
They've a record of human rights violations, which is definitely evil by any stretch. I mean, shooting dead protesters [...]
I'd say that's evil. I mean, it's not like they feel it since they're already dead, but do they really need to continue carrying out their anger against these people into the afterlife? That's just unreasonable.
First let me say this about the idea that a revised DS would have an analog stick. Ha. That's a good one. I mean, what would they do? Have the D-pad and the analog stick? Make the DS nice and cluttered, wouldn't it? Or they could drop the D-Pad - and then see how well the GBA titles, DS puzzle games, etc. play. Anything already written for the DS assuming the presence of a D-Pad would play like crap without a D-Pad. So stop trying to pass off wishful thinking as a credible rumor.
But about the parent post's comments about analog...
First, analog control or no analog control has nothing to do with whether the controller is cluttered. Whether the controller has both analog and a D-pad might be a hint, though...
Second, how do you figure analog control is harder for people to use? You push forward, the character moves forward, just like a D-pad. The difference is you get a lot more precision. You push farther, the character goes faster. I'd say that's a lot more intuitive than a D-pad plus the Y button, and a lot easier to deal with than the touchscreen. I think it could save a lot of frustration in Super Mario 64 to have the analog control the game was designed for. But the problem with analog sticks on game controllers is that they're great for some games but not so much for others. Games like Advance Wars or Tetris where it's more common to need to say "go 5 squares right" rather than "go right quickly" do much better on a D-pad. With GBA backward compatibility and the goal of supporting a good variety of games on the DS, a D-pad was really the only choice. The touchscreen as an analog controller is interesting (I always thought the "mouse-look" functionality in Metroid Prime: Hunters was well done - better FPS view control than an analog stick IMO) but awkward in the original hardware because of the placement of things. I think the touchscreen's much better suited for other things...
You know, it's cool in a way when fan groups make TOS-inspired fan films, replicating cheesy old special effects, or (in the case of Starship Exeter) using some actual, physical models rather than going to CGI for every little thing. (Sadly, they seem to be going to CGI now...) But I really wish they'd do something a little more challenging. Phase 2, and later the original Star Trek movie, tried to take the original show in new directions. Better effects to portray a more tangible world and vaster dangers in it. New characters. But still with strong ties to the original material.
Take Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for instance. It was basically an adaptation of "The Changeling", so the story's quite basic. It shows its 1970's aesthetic in the earth-tones in some of the sets and costumes, which now look dated. It had huge budget and deadline problems, which resulted in the theatrical release being flawed and accounted for some of the movie's dryness and padding. But the thing was a work of art. The Enterprise never before or since (including the sequel Star Trek films) looked more beautiful. The abstract "cloud" art seems like nothing special, but it was a labor of love by talented artists. Considerable time, attention, and money was spent giving the classically flat, cheap world of TOS some depth. One can write off the advantages of better special effects as "flash without substance" but in fact they do count for something. Never in TOS did they succeed in portraying an alien threat as being so vast as to be truly humbling.
Obviously one advantage of replicating the original Star Trek in fan film form is that the original was cheaply produced, so to some extent the fan films are also cheap to produce... But I find it disappointing. All this creative energy, all this effort, could be channeled into making something new and unique. "The New Voyages" even gives a nod to TMP's tagline, "The Human Adventure" and all that, but set, costume, and prop design is at best replicas. Character portrayal at best aspires to mimickry (less so on Exeter, though.) Meanwhile there's about 13 years of blank space in between TMP and Wrath of Khan in which somebody could write a script around another refit Constitution class (or Enterprise Class, or Starship II class, if you prefer) and create their own vision for what "Phase 2" could have been.
Perhaps my logic is flawed, and mimicking TMP is no more creative a goal than mimicking the original Star Trek - merely a more expensive enterprise (pun intended). I guess I feel that TMP was the turning point for Star Trek's future potential. They were willing to pour money into it hoping for a repeat of Star Wars success, but that failed so they went low-budget and low-brow for the next ten years. It was the first "do-over", the first attempt to re-define Trek for a new run, but that attempt gave way to the version given in the sequels. The sequels offered some good innovations as well (Excelsior, Klingon Bird of Prey) but they never again attempted to make Trek more than it had become. As a Star Trek fan, that is what I think would make a cool fan film. As a modeler, that is the period of Star Trek that I think would be most engaging.
The pronunciation is actually more how most American speakers would say "Sulu" IMO. When Americans make the "r" sound they tend to drag it out (at least in my experience.) The "r" in Japanese is sort of like the "r" in Spanish, a flick of the tongue almost like a "d". The "l" sound in English (as I speak it anyway) is closer to this than "r".
I looked briefly at that page and I kind of thought their Sulu didn't look Japanese... But, really, the whole idea of them recasting well-established characters just strikes me as weird anyway. That simply is not done, unless the character is a British secret agent (and I think it'd be keen if the different James Bonds were treated as different people - with "007" and "James Bond" being just code names handed down the line...) or a timelord.
It's surprising to me. I mean, I read a lot of sci-fi model-making related forums, and discussion there turns to "Starship Exeter" from time to time, I would have thought there'd be some mention of this thing, too, since it's doing the same sort of thing... Though without doing any actual miniatures, I'm guessing (whereas Exeter started with some miniatures and then switched to CGI - you can see some of Tom Sasser's excellent, though unused work on his site http://www.thomasmodels.com/
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was like "Oracle's gonna lay off Steve Jobs? 2000 times?)
But I'm not sure that this results in it being a better game machine.
For instance: GBA got backward compatibility, which is good. However, it's also tempting to blame the GBA's poor resolution and limited sound capabilities on the fact that, as a cost-cutting measure, backward compatibility was implemented with similar hardware.
As another example: The Commodore 64 was a great home gaming machine back in 1982-1984. It was also perhaps a decent productivity machine. Then the Commodore 128 came out and it had three goals: backward compatibility, better productivity features, and CP/M.
The result was a machine with a mostly-unused second CPU, a second display system used for EGA-style computer monitors, and a mostly-compatible C64 mode, with not a single enhancement to the game machine functionality that had contributed so much to the C64's success.
I wouldn't say the analogy's perfect, but it reflects my concern that as more features are added to a gaming machine, it starts to lose its focus. In retrospect I'd have gladly given up PS2's (unreliable) DVD playback capability and its backward compatibility in exchange for things like four-player controller ports built in, or a little more muscle for actual playing of games.
The "technical reason it cannot be done" is because it would cost hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a money pit. It can be done, but the cost to do it now would be massive. Gargantuan. Phenomenal. All to keep a team of, say, five people safe and happy living in total isolation at a claustrophobic bunker a quarter million miles away from the nearest source of air, water, food, emergency medical care.
This is not to say that things which are expensive are not worth doing - but there is a balance. Cost vs. yield, risk vs. reward. Right now, cost and risk are still very high. Prohibitively high. Going to the moon and back was a fantastic stunt, one that ought to be regarded as a landmark of importance for the rest of human history - but that's all it was, a stunt. Consider each moon launch (carrying about 16 tons to the lunar surface) required a 3000 ton rocket and a shitload of rocket fuel. A $6.5 billion rocket program (in the 1960's - so that'd be around $30 billion today) yielded 10 trips to the moon with that payload. Technology has improved since then, so most likely lots of processes will be less expensive (obtaining and storing rocket fuel, I'm sure - computer systems obviously - better materials, etc. - but still the same basic technology.) But the process would need to be orders of magnitude less expensive to be feasible to support a space colony needing regular shipments of food, air, water, and so on to survive.
As for technology benefits - sure, those could potentially be accelerated a bit by hefty expenditures into development needed for a moon base. But here's the thing: technology advances anyway. Competition drives it to happen, as do various artificial factors. There will come a point where this natural progression of technology will make it practical to establish a long-term presence on the Moon. Maybe this means some kind of linear accelerator launch system, or some other system that hasn't been made practical yet. But we're not there yet. Creating a livable habitat anywhere outside of the atmosphere is not trivial, it's very complex and very expensive. Doing it a quarter million miles away only makes it more expensive and more dangerous.
Then there's this other wacky idea: we take the hundreds of billions of dollars that would have gone into the development of a moonbase, put the R&D allocations into the projects that would've gotten funding if the moonbase were actually happening - get the science and technology yields from project R&D, but then don't launch any rockets to the moon or build a moon base. Wouldn't that give us the same result for less money?
And what's with these "vehicles that don't require combustion"? Electric cars already exist, they're just not cost-effective or practical for people's usual daily requirements. Neither of those metrics have any meaning in the context of a moon program.
All this talk of moon bases is just wishful thinking at this point. There's a big difference between launching two men and several tons of gear to the moon's surface, and launching enough men and enough gear and enough supplies to build and sustain a permanent base. Our launching capability needs to be much more efficient before it's a practical possibility. The foundation of space flight needs to be improved before we start building moon bases.
"And for what?" - There has to be a definite return for all this expenditure. We're not ready to go to Mars, and we won't immediately be ready for a trip to Mars just by virtue of having one bunker on the Moon. Going to Mars is probably at least 15 years off. So what good does it do us to have the moon-base now?
What happens when a bad president gets elected? Who honestly think that can't happen?
Yeah! I mean, just look at...
Right now Bush may be good...
Wait... you lost me. These two sentences refer to ideas that connect together, but I don't think it's the way you think they do.
Right, but you've still got this long excavation project going on under the surface of the moon, all to build a base that can't function without regular resupply from the Earth. And for what, exactly? A better view of Venus? Unlike a space station it wouldn't even have the advantage of being a microgravity environment in which microgravity experiments could be done. And yet there'd still be the health issues caused by reduced gravity. And what if the fissures around the cavern don't seal? What if they seal, but then the seals rupture later on? Does moon rock actually block or reflect cosmic rays?
Even with the ability to build the shelter by excavation the project sure as hell isn't cheap. The residents are still dependent upon resupply for survival, productivity, and rescue. A mere 37 years ago the ability just to go there, and get back alive, represented the absolute peak of our capabilities. Is it really so silly to think that it might not quite be time yet to move there?
Ah, but photos can be faked! It's all a trick, I tell ya, a big trick!
I found it almost comical when I learned that people like the L5 society were actually serious about advocating space colonies, decades ago. (In their case, this means full orbiting cities at Lagrange points...) It just seemed impractical to the point of silliness. Someday, sure, but not now.
Colonizing the moon, even if it just means a permanent base of some kind on the moon, is similarly impractical - though on the moon, at least, there may be a reasonable amount of raw materials to build from. But ferrying people and supplies back and forth would be crazy-expensive. And suppose something goes wrong? Are the people there just hosed or what? Anyone who's living up there for any prolonged amount of time will basically be subsidized by the government for a very expensive and complex life-support system. Food, air, fuel, raw materials, and so on will all have to be provided to sustain the colony. That also means a lot of rocket traffic (and the cheaper ones put out toxic exhaust, not water like the hydrogen rockets.) going up to the moon, a lot of disposable rockets being wasted in space, and a lot of space junk being produced as a result.
The benefits of such an endeavor have the be a lot less abstract to be worth the waste. In time, technology will reach the point where we can do this much more cheaply - that will be the time when it really makes sense to do it. We can accelerate the process a bit by throwing money at the problem, but that can only get us so far...
Right. Palm doesn't own the OS, and the OS sucks. I don't know why you say the hardware sucks, though. (Then again, I'm running a Tungsten T2) But if Palm made a new OS, started over, discarding some or all of backward compatibility, then why would they need PalmSource?
The name recognition and the reasonable degree of success of Palm projects like the Treo could enable Palm to take leadership of the platform, if they were willing to cut off PalmSource.
Palm is already working a new version of Palm OS with Linux as the kernel, effectively creating their own "OS X" story. Whether they'll be as successful as OS X is remains to be seen.
So what?
I mean, PalmSource has already made OS6 but nobody's using it. Almost everything (on the ARM devices) is still running under an emulated M68K, as it has been for about four years.
Maybe Apple will show Palm how you change processors on a platform. Oh, I wish. The thought of somebody buying Palm, somebody with maybe some drive to see it amount to something, is just too tempting.
That's funny, I have the opposite problem when people talk about Ace Combat...
Why anybody would get so excited about flying little planes around when there's robots to build and go beat on is beyond me, though...
And no, I didn't know AC4 was going to be on XBox as well. Looks like the PS3 vs. XBox 360 question is still open, for me. Network support could be a deciding factor, so I hope Sony's got their shit together. (But Nintendo Revolution is already a given. Gotta get one of those...)
The only way to get out of the current predicament is to seek a truce with Bin Laden. He has his sleepers right here on our own soil. It's like someone planting land mines in your own back yard and you're about to have a cook out. To stop the lemmmings from attacking, the piped piper must agree to stop playing his flute.
And when the upper hand is on the other foot, you need to know when to hold 'em and when to get the hell out of Dodge. When Darmok and Jalad were at Tanagra, they didn't count their chickens before the fat lady sang, and they didn't bake their cakes before the oven was fully preheated to 350 degrees.
On a more serious note: Suppose we "seek a truce" with Bin Laden. What do you suppose that means? What demands do we have to bow to in order for this to happen? And what happens to everyone else who wants to see the USA crumble? If we negotiate with a terrorist, we've legitimized him. If we seek a truce, that's a sign of weakness, a sign that we've recognized him as an equal and his attacks as a threat we can't control. So let's say Al Qaeda gets a big payoff, an end to US involvement in the mid-east, a televised appearance by Bush saying how great it is that these people have struggled for so long for their beliefs, etc... That might stop the attacks, maybe? Then maybe they'll attack someone else. We'll have funded and endorsed someone dangerous (imagine that!) and then be stuck - either we attack them, ending the truce (but with him now better-funded!) or we don't, to preserve the truce, in which case it'll appear as though we're really endorsing their actions. Then maybe someone else will attack us, hoping to be well paid and legitimized in exchange for a cessation of hostilities.
No, I don't think that'll work at all. I think we need to foster good-will to the extent we can, but at the same time a lot of the civility in the world is based on the reality that rash actions carry consequences. Lots of people are bound to hate the US, but how many are going to bomb a building or attack a carrier? Only those willing to die and/or incur our wrath. Likewise, lots of people want more territory for their country, but how many invade their neighbors? Only those motivated enough to deal not only with resistance from their neighbors, but also whatever UN response occurs. If we give the message that this is no longer true when dealing with the US, we will mark ourselves a target.
So, what kind of pr0n do you have on your system? We should share. I have 10 gigs of solid BDSM.
:) I mean, "Teenage Twins" was fun and all, but it's no treasure. And if something I found once turns out to be hard to find again, most likely it's not worth the effort.
:)
Actually most of it is my collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. I have almost the first 5 seasons complete (six if you count the KTMA season). A lot of what's left is anime of the giant robot variety, versions of Star Wars movies that weren't fucked up by chimps goofing around with Photoshop back in 1997, and so on.
Most of my porn I don't think I'd bother to re-download. I'd just find different porn to download.
As for the backup, the question is still "where to?" I could solve that question with more money - and should, really. But this is exactly my point - when presented with the options (spend a couple hundred to double my storage, or spend a couple hundred to backup my data) I go with the first every time. But even upgrades aren't often on the agenda, my money's going elsewhere.
So to recap, I'm smart enough to run Linux and do some useful things with it (just got my wireless card running and talking to my Nintendo DS) but somehow still not smart enough to allocate funds to building some kind of backup strategy...
The OS already can be set up to do this. The premise of the article is flawed; and based on a premise that I reject. Chances are, if you're smart enough to run Linux, then you're probably smart enough to backup your important files.
I don't know about this. I wasn't "smart enough" to backup my important files (anything that didn't come straight from a Debian package is important.) and one of my hard drives died - I panicked, I replaced it, I extracted all the data from the dead drive that I could (first through several misguided attempts with an incorrect method, then again after learning the right way to do it) and slowly my system returned to normal.
And where am I, a year or two later? Still no RAID, still no backups, just hundreds of gigs I'd hate to have to download all over again if I lost it.
So no, I don't think being a Linux user automatically makes you smart enough that you will inevitably do backups. For starters, one needs something to backup that data to.
If there was one game out there that could make my ears perk up and get me to actually look forward to the PS3, it's a new AC title on a more powerful system. Here's hoping they really take advantage of that power. Oh, and if the release of AC4 results in Kotobukiya putting out more Armored Core kits, all the better.
The AC game for the PSP could have got me buying a PSP, if it hadn't been a big AI training game.
So for the love of music and all things musical, go out and buy a massively DRM encumbered CD today! Better yet, buy two...for the alternative is unthinkable!
The advantage of buying two is that it provides a practical way for two people to listen to the music, at the same time! You could even give the second copy to a friend, so that they may listen to their copy whenever they like: but under no circumstances are you to listen to their copy! Your best bet is to bring your own copy with you, and listen to that. This serves two goals. First, it will drown out the sound of your friend's CD, to which you do not have access and which he is not permitted to use as a public exhibition. Second, it will allow you to hear the music to which you otherwise would not have access.
Is there a number we can call to confirm that a warrant is actually valid?
Yes - fortunately, though, it's printed on the warrant itself so there's no need to remember it.
They've a record of human rights violations, which is definitely evil by any stretch. I mean, shooting dead protesters [...]
I'd say that's evil. I mean, it's not like they feel it since they're already dead, but do they really need to continue carrying out their anger against these people into the afterlife? That's just unreasonable.
First let me say this about the idea that a revised DS would have an analog stick. Ha. That's a good one. I mean, what would they do? Have the D-pad and the analog stick? Make the DS nice and cluttered, wouldn't it? Or they could drop the D-Pad - and then see how well the GBA titles, DS puzzle games, etc. play. Anything already written for the DS assuming the presence of a D-Pad would play like crap without a D-Pad. So stop trying to pass off wishful thinking as a credible rumor.
But about the parent post's comments about analog...
First, analog control or no analog control has nothing to do with whether the controller is cluttered. Whether the controller has both analog and a D-pad might be a hint, though...
Second, how do you figure analog control is harder for people to use? You push forward, the character moves forward, just like a D-pad. The difference is you get a lot more precision. You push farther, the character goes faster. I'd say that's a lot more intuitive than a D-pad plus the Y button, and a lot easier to deal with than the touchscreen. I think it could save a lot of frustration in Super Mario 64 to have the analog control the game was designed for. But the problem with analog sticks on game controllers is that they're great for some games but not so much for others. Games like Advance Wars or Tetris where it's more common to need to say "go 5 squares right" rather than "go right quickly" do much better on a D-pad. With GBA backward compatibility and the goal of supporting a good variety of games on the DS, a D-pad was really the only choice. The touchscreen as an analog controller is interesting (I always thought the "mouse-look" functionality in Metroid Prime: Hunters was well done - better FPS view control than an analog stick IMO) but awkward in the original hardware because of the placement of things. I think the touchscreen's much better suited for other things...
Yes, but when they release the new Minnie Mouse her button will provide 4-way scrolling action.
Hey, that sounds like a good idea for a film! I bet people would like to watch other people fucking on the screen! I'm a-gonna win the next Sundance!
You know, it's cool in a way when fan groups make TOS-inspired fan films, replicating cheesy old special effects, or (in the case of Starship Exeter) using some actual, physical models rather than going to CGI for every little thing. (Sadly, they seem to be going to CGI now...) But I really wish they'd do something a little more challenging. Phase 2, and later the original Star Trek movie, tried to take the original show in new directions. Better effects to portray a more tangible world and vaster dangers in it. New characters. But still with strong ties to the original material.
Take Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for instance. It was basically an adaptation of "The Changeling", so the story's quite basic. It shows its 1970's aesthetic in the earth-tones in some of the sets and costumes, which now look dated. It had huge budget and deadline problems, which resulted in the theatrical release being flawed and accounted for some of the movie's dryness and padding. But the thing was a work of art. The Enterprise never before or since (including the sequel Star Trek films) looked more beautiful. The abstract "cloud" art seems like nothing special, but it was a labor of love by talented artists. Considerable time, attention, and money was spent giving the classically flat, cheap world of TOS some depth. One can write off the advantages of better special effects as "flash without substance" but in fact they do count for something. Never in TOS did they succeed in portraying an alien threat as being so vast as to be truly humbling.
Obviously one advantage of replicating the original Star Trek in fan film form is that the original was cheaply produced, so to some extent the fan films are also cheap to produce... But I find it disappointing. All this creative energy, all this effort, could be channeled into making something new and unique. "The New Voyages" even gives a nod to TMP's tagline, "The Human Adventure" and all that, but set, costume, and prop design is at best replicas. Character portrayal at best aspires to mimickry (less so on Exeter, though.) Meanwhile there's about 13 years of blank space in between TMP and Wrath of Khan in which somebody could write a script around another refit Constitution class (or Enterprise Class, or Starship II class, if you prefer) and create their own vision for what "Phase 2" could have been.
Perhaps my logic is flawed, and mimicking TMP is no more creative a goal than mimicking the original Star Trek - merely a more expensive enterprise (pun intended). I guess I feel that TMP was the turning point for Star Trek's future potential. They were willing to pour money into it hoping for a repeat of Star Wars success, but that failed so they went low-budget and low-brow for the next ten years. It was the first "do-over", the first attempt to re-define Trek for a new run, but that attempt gave way to the version given in the sequels. The sequels offered some good innovations as well (Excelsior, Klingon Bird of Prey) but they never again attempted to make Trek more than it had become. As a Star Trek fan, that is what I think would make a cool fan film. As a modeler, that is the period of Star Trek that I think would be most engaging.
Yeah, that was in the pilot. Majel Barrett played her, IIRC.
The pronunciation is actually more how most American speakers would say "Sulu" IMO. When Americans make the "r" sound they tend to drag it out (at least in my experience.) The "r" in Japanese is sort of like the "r" in Spanish, a flick of the tongue almost like a "d". The "l" sound in English (as I speak it anyway) is closer to this than "r".
I looked briefly at that page and I kind of thought their Sulu didn't look Japanese... But, really, the whole idea of them recasting well-established characters just strikes me as weird anyway. That simply is not done, unless the character is a British secret agent (and I think it'd be keen if the different James Bonds were treated as different people - with "007" and "James Bond" being just code names handed down the line...) or a timelord.
It's surprising to me. I mean, I read a lot of sci-fi model-making related forums, and discussion there turns to "Starship Exeter" from time to time, I would have thought there'd be some mention of this thing, too, since it's doing the same sort of thing... Though without doing any actual miniatures, I'm guessing (whereas Exeter started with some miniatures and then switched to CGI - you can see some of Tom Sasser's excellent, though unused work on his site http://www.thomasmodels.com/
So anyone know any good asteroids that are rich in copper? ;-)
Well, there's Axis, but they're kind of hard to deal with...