The first Bioshock? awesome. Good story, great weapons, several ways to go about things, I've replayed it probably a dozen times. The second one? Meh, the missions sucked and while the AI is good the main bad guy has a voice that is so smug you want to hunt them down and drive a jackhammer down their throat just so they'll STFU.
I tried SR2, and maybe its because its more of a console game and I'm a PC gamer, but I never could get the damned car to behave. the steering was always sloppy and I felt like I was fighting the game more than the bad guys. Vice City to me had just about the perfect keyboard/mouse handling of any of those GTA style games, although just Cause II is pretty awesome in the steering dept. well except for the jet fighters, I still royally suck at those. The chopper though, I can cream the shit out of a base with the chopper. And the hookshot+parachute is just too damned cool. I bought the first one hoping it was more of the same but the controls in the first one was just lame. AC was good but I really suck at stealth and IMHO those games are stealth city. If you can't kick as in stealth you probably shouldn't play the AC games.
Meh, I have so damned many games now that even trying to play what i have seems like an exercise in futility. damn GOG and Steam and all their little sales,LOL!
Sadly as someone who builds and sells PCs I can tell you why nobody uses the start menu, its because THEY PUT EVERY DAMNED THING ON THE DESKTOP! That's why. I'll get these machines and literally you can't even tell what wallpaper they have for all the damned icons all over the thing.
As long as they have contextual search and Action Center i'll be happy. I can't even remember the last time I fired up start>all programs, its all Action Center and search. But personally i think Win 8 is gonna bomb as its TOO radical. While Win 7 was an easy sell showing the screencaps of Win 8 to over 100 customers so far NOT A SINGLE ONE has had a single nice thing to say about the Win 8 UI, nor has anyone said they'd be willing to run it. the closest I got was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen. is that Android? I've heard of that, its supposed to be nice....what do you mean windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want to run a cell phone on my desktop?".
I think little Rita's reaction says it all. Not a single person i showed Win 8 to liked it, wanted it, or was even interested in trying it. it is just too radical and reminds too many of a cell phone. And I hate to break the news to MSFT, most folks hate their cell phones. Oh sure they won't let the thing go, but they can all name a dozen things, from bad reception to UI quirks that really piss them off. so having your new OS look like a cell phone? Not the way to get folks to love it.
Final prediction: Windows 7 becomes the "new XP" aka the OS that just won't die, Win 8 becomes Vista part II, and I get to spend a year and a half stripping windows 8 off and putting windows 7 on because nobody wants to run it, just as I had to do with Vista and XP. Oh fun, oh joy, thanks MSFT you clueless bunch of PHBs.
Actually I thought FC 1 was pretty good. The AI was pretty smart and would call for backup, the levels were big and could be tackled in several ways, overall I'd say thumbs up. The second one sucked though, just the same 4 missions over and OVER and OVER with AI so thick even the guys you were working for would shoot at you, just bad.
Personally this sounds like a game I'd hate, as it sounds like one long case of step and fetchit. Yuck. The last new game where I truly went "Wow I'm REALLY having fun here!" was Just Cause II. Sure it is about as realistic as spiderman but you know what? It is FUN with a capital f, and with a huge world with tons of things to do frankly I quickly just started ignoring the missions and just going nuts. Firing a grapple into a bike and watching it wrap around a tree like that scene from Jedi? Fun. Having a bad guy shoot at you while your car is on fire, shoot a grapple into his car and the ground so he re-enacts the scene from T3 with the crane, follow by jumping onto a police car at 80MPH, yanking the cop out the car, driving the car off a bridge, and then parachuting away while the bad guys stand on the bridge unable to pursue? that is FUN dammit!
Why is it these game designers constantly seem to forget that what you are playing is a game and is therefor supposed to be fun? Surely they had to let somebody playtest this right? Hell who knows, look at Bioshock II, which took the absolute worst part of Bioshock I, the Little Sister guard scene, and made the whole fucking game around it. All the cool tech in the world doesn't help if the game is about as fun as a trip to the DMV.
As a guy that builds and repairs PCs I've found the average to be about two years and that is with several burns a week. Remember folks we are talking about something that is a whole $20 here, hell I've been seeing the nice slim DVD externals going for around $35, so who cares?
They are cheap folks, you use them until they die, then you chunk them. my first DVD burner lasted nearly 7 years, but it cost nearly $200. given the choice of 7 years for $189 or 2 years for $20? I'll take the 2 for $20 thanks.
Personally I'm all for this! Let them sue hospitals and little old ladies! The ONLY way we'll ever get reform after citizens united is for the patents to become such a pathetically bad joke that it HAS to be changed. When the entire country is gridlocked because like that ep of Southpark you can't do a damned thing without a lawsuit? Then and ONLY then will we get reform.
This does highlight why India and China will slaughter us though. Anyone in tech knows that innovation has ALWAYS been about "standing on the shoulders of giants" and when all those shoulders have been replaced by tollbooths? Well all it takes is for one country that doesn't play those reindeer games and right now we have several. BRIC has a hell of a lot more folks to sell to and they are growing both in affluence and in numbers. With our economy a corpse this isn't the gold mine it was before, soon I wouldn't be surprised if new tech startups just started avoiding us rather than deal with the landmines that are our patents and copyrights.
Hey now, don't forget little Sally! Little Sally thinks having this "Napster stuff" makes her a part of this "Internet thingie" so she is VERY loyal! Hell a single Sally is probably worth THREE Randys and possibly TWO Jims too boot! That means she alone has GOT to be worth a dinner for two at olive garden, surely that is worth shelling out good money for napster, right?
Seriously though Napster has been dead as a doornail for over a decade, why anyone would care anymore is beyond me. It reminds me of one of those oldies bands where the original guys have been dead and gone for ages but they just replaced them with some other guys that had nothing to do with the original and kept going. The "real" Napster died along with AudioGalaxy (remember them? I miss them) at the end of the 90s. This is just some lame service they stuck the Napster name on, kinda like how Yahoo bought the MusicMatch name to stick on their music service (which promptly died) just so it would have a name folks would vaguely remember. Between iTunes, Amazon, and streaming radio is there anybody that actually uses this crap anymore?
Actually at 12.1 it really isn't all squished like the 10 inchers. Check it out as you can see they put a smaller trackpad to give the keys more room and instead of taking space with all the extra function keys they put those on a little strip above the keyboard.
Personally i think its sweet. it only weighs 3 pounds with a 6 cell, the Brazos chip handles more like a CULV than an Atom, while it says that it holds 4Gb a bunch of guys on Amazon have loaded it up with 8Gb and even provide the links (just ordered mine, with my gift card I got 8Gb for it for $33, sweet!) so it'll handle whatever you can throw at it, and depending on what you are doing you can get around 6 hours on win 7 or around 8 on Expressgate.
Plenty of space, speed, graphics, memory, bluetooth support built in, and the whole smash for $340 with 8Gb of RAM? dude that's just too sweet. But comparing it to the old MSFT claky keyboard I use on my desktop she really isn't much smaller, you cut about 1 inch off the really wide backspace and enter keys this old claky has and it would be about even. If you have a Best buy nearby they carry the Atom version, its the 1215N instead of B but both are the same FF so you should be able to see how it fits you. I can say i like it a hell of a lot better than the MSI Wind it replaced. Its keys are more comfortable for my big meathooks and with a wireless mouse seems to be the perfect size of ultrportable for me, but YMMV.
Actually my grandfather would rotate and have to do drill sergeant duty about once out of every three years. while he hated it he had been in foxholes in Europe and Korea and said you have no choice but to break them down so they will learn to follow orders and work as a unit, because as he put it "John Wayne lone wolf crap might look good on the big screen but IRL it got you killed damned quick on the battlefield". He said he saw that first hand in France when a couple thought they would be all macho after they had taken out an MG42 and would just charge on ahead to "Kick Jerry's ass" and ran right into the crosshairs of an 88. he said that thing left nothing but their boots and a fine red mist in the air.
So at least there the rough treatment is being done for a greater good, to help those green ass kids learn the skills to hopefully not come home with a toe tag. this was just a PHB showing he was just a giant douchenozzle. Sadly with the economy in the shitter and going down faster by the day little pricks like this will probably act more and more like giant douches simply because they have 300 applicants for every position and know they can be as big a prick as they want.
Uhhh...you DO know we have these things called app stores, yes?Hell my new Asus came with over a dozen games and the Asus app store if I want more. Then there is Steam, GOG, D2D, tons of places you can get games for little cost without opening your machine to the world which is exactly what we are talking about here.
Those of us old enough remember these same claims made by a similar product, a little thing called ActiveX. it had games, could do work, all kinds of really neat stuff....until it became such a virus laden whore everyone was afraid to go anywhere near the crap. that is what i predict will happen here as well.
As I said to have hardware acceleration you have to have access to the hardware, and the only driver on a modern system that is really low level anymore is the GPU because every frame counts. that will allow Mr Malware vendor to punch yet more holes, it'll be nasty. Just you watch friend, just you watch.
Uhhh...it is completely batshit because we are talking about cases where you can fuck them all you want just not actually take a picture of them, or in some cases look at the one you are fucking? Maybe we should have a "hole in a sheet' law where anything goes as long as the other person is covered by a sheet with a hole in it?
As I said I have a friend in the crime lab and even THEY think its batshit. like I said some of these laws are so badly written I could draw a stick figure, write "nekkid kid' on it and put in the front seat of your car and you could be guilty of possessing child porn and be thrown in jail. does that make ANY sense to you? and before you say bullshit remember they already threw one guy in the PMITA prison for hentai, that is pen and ink drawings by adults for adults, no actually under 18 anything involved. Hell they even busted a guy for a naked Simpsons cartoon and the Simpsons would be in their 40s if they were real!
I'm sorry but this is totally fucked up man. if you REALLY wanted to protect kids we should be sending someone like Seal team 6 into those places in eastern Europe where they make CP, not busting a kid for taking a pic of the girl he/she is sleeping with LEGALLY. I have a simple common sense rule: If you can fuck them you sure as hell ought to be able to take a picture of the one you're screwing.
Actually if you have to support a bunch of different machines performance matters and in my own tests every since 3.6.x in FF has been made of fail. in fact I'd say the 3.0.x builds were the best they had and they had begun their downward slide on the 3.6 but really went to crap town in 4 and above.
In my own tests, which I have to support everything from socket 478 P4s and 754 AMDs to netbooks to the latest multicores I've found FF when it comes to responsiveness is just awful. it will take control of the OS (most of my tests for older hardware were XP with 1Gb to 1.5Gb of RAM) for up to half a minute when launching new tabs and if that tab has even SD video? Better go make a sandwich friend. Compare this to Comodo Dragon or Opera and both run just fine without taking control away from the user, and SD flash plays just fine while still being responsive even on the 1.8GHz Sempron i use at the shop for a low power nettop. Oh and the extensions were identical in Dragon and FF (I couldn't find ABP for Opera nor ForecastFox).
so IMHO (which is what matters to my users since I have to support their asses) it was Dragon and Opera neck and neck, chrome a hair behind (probably the phone home crap sucking resources) and FF was dead last. Hell even IE was more responsive but I don't count IE as my users know IE is a no no. But performance does matter if one cares about power, heat, and battery life. I can really tell a difference on my netbook between FF and Dragon when it comes to power, FF spikes the CPU more often and holds it longer than anything Chromium based.
Hell why not have two and pick the right tool for the job? I got myself one of the new EEE Brazos netbooks (highly recommend BTW, great performance and holds 8Gb of RAM) and one of the things that sold me on it is ExpressGate. With ExpressGate if all I want to do is surf, or chat, or listen to the tunes off my HDD I just push the EG button instead of the on button and in under 6 seconds I have a ChromeOS style net OS that adds about two hours on the battery, depending on what I'm doing.
On the other hand, if I want to fire up Audacity to do some editing? Or Word to work on a doc, or even fire up one of the games I picked up off of GOG? Hit the on button instead and I have Win 7 HP X64 waiting to do whatever I want. And the Brazos chip is a hell of a lot more like a CULV than an Atom, it is really snappy.
So why not have both? Hell you can fire up EG from within Win 7 if you want some "Yo dawg" OS in a OS style action. But it isn't like there aren't plenty of choices out there so in this case you can have your cake and eat it too.
Oh the whole "save teh childrenz!" thing is royally fucked and we have been way past sane for quite awhile. Some examples include the guy who wrote the "pro pedo" book that is now rotting in jail. Nobody accused him of touching anybody, no pics or anything, just his thoughts and opinions on paper. I seem to remember someone writing about a time when people could be arrested for their thoughts. There is also the guy doing prison time for writing his fantasies in his journal which his shrink told him to do, another thoughtcrime. Then there is the guy who went to jail for dirty Jap cartoons, again no kids, just pen and ink. as a friend that works in the state crime lab told me these laws are so badly written you could draw a stick figure and scribble "nekked kid" on it and theoretically be guilty of child pron!
For one a little closer to TFA how is THIS for fucked up: In several states I can marry a girl as young as 14 with their parents permission. I can marry her, bang her any way my little heart desires, again completely legal, but if I take a picture of my wife naked I'd be a child pornographer!
This whole damned thing has become another red scare, only instead of commies we see pervs behind every tree. what we seriously need is some common sense laws but sadly politicians have learned they can stir up the rabble and get more votes by pushing the "save teh childrenz!" button.
If you believe that, which I agree with BTW, then please you yourself vote as well as tell anyone that will listen to vote Green or New Whig. The Greens are for closing the leaking border, putting America first, and stopping the illegal wars, and the New Whigs are made up of former Iraq vets that are tired of seeing our servicemen shot to hell so some multinational can get a new pipeline (you didn't think it was about WMDs, did ya?) and want to bring our boys home.
So please vote for parties that are still for the American people. In my own state the greens have been gaining with every election so change CAN happen, you just have to spread the word and get folks to quit voting for the puppet show. the late great Bill Hicks said it over 20 years ago and it is still true today "I believe the puppet on the left shares my beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has my interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy controlling both puppets!" and no truer words have been spoken.
The parent post is from Alex Belits, a jobless Linux astroturfer. Last time he submitted his resume to anyone was when he tried to be Linus Torvalds bootlicker and was turned down for drool.
See how nicely that fits there loony tunes? Oh and I'm not working for anyone but myself, I am your worst nightmare...I'm a retailer. you see we have tried your product and found your bullshit and lies to be just that so maybe you'd like me to enlighten some of the masses, hmm?,
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses.
Meanwhile i'll go back to enjoying my nice new Asus EEE Windows 7 HP netbook, which I got myself as a little prezzie with some of the profits I made from NOT carrying an inferior product. If you don't like being last? Try putting out a product worth actually stocking. You know what you remind me of? A religious nutball. When someone points out a hole in your dogma you go "La la la, it can't be true! U must be a M$ Ninja!" while we all laugh at your batshit insanity. But hey friend here is a nice video of your hero RMS showing why he is the great one so that should cheer you up.
Uhh....hate to break the news to you friend but MSFT spent 9.5 billion in 2010 alone on R&D, hell they probably have the highest R&D budget of any company out there. So yes MSFT deserves to make money off of that which they spent billions researching.
If it is hardware accelerated then by the very definition it has to have access to the hardware. Again which driver is the most likely to be out of date, flaky, and which bypasses pretty much ALL security because that would slow the living hell out of the hardware? Why that would be the GPU.
Think about it friend, the modern GPU is 500Mhz with anywhere from 256Mb to 1Gb of RAM. That is a hell of a lot more power than most of us had when the nasties were spreading through the systems of the 90s. Now what can a malware writer do if he has access to that amount of hardware? hell most GPUs today are based on only two vendors, ATI or Nvidia, and have firmware which allows features to be flipped on and off. Write the nasty to the firmware? You own the machine and the only way to remove will brick the device.
So to me this is just another case of someone deciding they COULD do something without thinking about whether they SHOULD do something. I mean who in the hell wants to do heavy 3D gaming in a fricking browser? the game will run much faster being installed natively, and the farmville type couldn't give a rat's ass if its 3D or not. Just another dumb idea from the company that seems to be determined to run off all their users, why am I not surprised?
I don't think he/she is a troll because frankly I didn't have a clue whether it ended in.odf or not either. I don't think it matters though because as long as businesses demand.doc you're pretty much stuck with MS Office anyway. that's the thing about de facto standards, once something gets entrenched good luck getting something new in there.
But you try sending your resume in odt or even pdf and if they don't file 13 it they'll send you an email saying "Can you send it to us in a word doc?" and if you don't? Forget it. Protip for all the "Just use PDF" FOSS guys out there: They will never accept PDF and will can your file as ALL the HR depts now use these resume scanning software and guess what format they take? Not odt, not PDF, not even.rtf from what I understand...just.doc. And no they ain't made by MSFT either, it is just businesses use doc so the infrastructure is built around.doc files. That's just the way it is folks.
Don't forget the nightmare that will be security. what is the one driver that really needs to be bare metal? Which driver on a system is the most likely to be flaky? That would be graphics. Personally i'm glad i moved to Comodo Dragon after Moz went nuts with their upgrade schedule.
Except we had an easy way to not shred the constitution and give the president a blank check to kill ANYONE but the POTUS and the ones at the top simply ignored it....trial in absentia. We've had trial in absentia for many decades FOR A REASON and that is so even those who are not currently in our jurisdiction can have their rights. Once he was found guilty in absentia they could have done whatever it took to bring him to justice.
Nope just another case of giving those at the top more power than the constitution ever allowed. Sadly it truly is nothing but a worthless piece of paper, thanks to those like Bush and Obama that simply ignore it. And for those that think it can't happen here? two words...Fred Hampton
That is why I never understood wasting resources dealing with the hackers. As a percentage of the population they are....what? Maybe 6%? All you have to do is place a "This could destroy your device and void your warranty ZOMG!" screen and you've just made sure a good 85%+ of the population will be too spooked to try it.
So while I support having more goodies to play with I honestly don't get the whole cat and mouse with the hackers bit. What is the point? if they were trying to hack the network or fill it with malware? yes i could see it. but the vast majority simply aren't gonna bother as long as you aren't bumraping them on app prices and Amazon has always been about low prices so I doubt that would be a problem. As long as they have Angry Birds cheap I doubt they'll even see 5% hack the things, most just won't bother, so any resources wasted besides the "ZOMG!" screen is just stupid.
Then you really ought to try the new EEE Brazos netbook, because frankly the keys aren't tiny. they took away instead the tapering on the keys so they are flat squares instead of the curved desktop keys and frankly they are REALLY comfortable. the only thing I didn't care for is the trackpad. Oh it works great, i just never have liked trackpads, not when I can pop on a USB wireless mouse and get my accuracy back.
but if you haven't tried one give it a spin. the Brazos APU is a hell of a lot closer to a CULV than to a netbook chip like Atom, you can max it out with 8gb of RAM for $38 off of Amazon, and it has more than enough power to do pretty much whatever. And I really can't say enough about expressgate, that rocks hard! Its like getting TWO netbooks, a full featured Win 7 X64 netbook (which it comes with even though it comes with 2gb of RAM, smart choice ASUS) and you get a ChromeOS style instant on netbook for when you just wanna surf or chat. it is just too damned cool.
Question: what makes this device more appealing to you than a much better priced netbook? I asked because I looked at those and the average I saw with the keyboard dock was around $550. What I got instead was this EEE netbook which lets me run all my x86 software, gets 6 hours on the battery (If I use the full OS, it also has ExpressGate built in that lets me surf, listen to the tunes or watch videos off the HDD, and adds about 2 hours more to the battery) holds 8Gb of RAM, and cost me a whole $300 off of Tigerdirect. Oh and it does excellent HD and supposedly can play HL2 and Far Cry I (although I don't game on a little screen).
So what is it about the tablet FF that makes it worth the extra $250? Because I played with everything from an iPad to these cheapos and I honestly don't get it. I mean sure for specialized jobs like inventory I can see the appeal of an electronic notepad, but the 12.1 inch netbooks are both thin and light AND give me an actual keyboard and let me run x86 software. So I just don't get the appeal.
BTW if anyone is thinking of one? BUY IT. Those Brazos APUs are sweet, run ultra cool while making everything snappy, and ExpressGate rocks for when you just want to do surfing, mail, or chat. It is just 6 seconds from cold start to surfing with ExpressGate, too cool!
Because the Chrome on their test box probably isn't up to date? Chrome X might pass just fine but Chrome Y not. Anybody who has worked corporate knows what a PITA it is to keep everything updated and with test beds you sure don't want the machine you are testing various scenarios and possible fuckups on to be loose on the network without safeguards.
So I bet the version of Chrome on their testbed passes muster but some new feature or tweak on the latter versions throws the fp. It happens.
I'll tell you why I hate the man, I've seen his house. Have you seen it? He is blowing about 20 to 30 TIMES what a family of 12 is blowing on that thing, has a fleet of SUVs, and then expects YOU to take the bus. Fuck off and die Rev Al, you hypocritical bastard, go fuck off and die. The ONLY one I have seen in the ENTIRE AGW mess walk the walk is Ed Begley JR, the only one. He is in a modest house with solar power, drives an electric car, lives as clean a life as he possibly can. HE I respect. Rev Al and his huckster bubble blowing friends can go fuck off.
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The first Bioshock? awesome. Good story, great weapons, several ways to go about things, I've replayed it probably a dozen times. The second one? Meh, the missions sucked and while the AI is good the main bad guy has a voice that is so smug you want to hunt them down and drive a jackhammer down their throat just so they'll STFU.
I tried SR2, and maybe its because its more of a console game and I'm a PC gamer, but I never could get the damned car to behave. the steering was always sloppy and I felt like I was fighting the game more than the bad guys. Vice City to me had just about the perfect keyboard/mouse handling of any of those GTA style games, although just Cause II is pretty awesome in the steering dept. well except for the jet fighters, I still royally suck at those. The chopper though, I can cream the shit out of a base with the chopper. And the hookshot+parachute is just too damned cool. I bought the first one hoping it was more of the same but the controls in the first one was just lame. AC was good but I really suck at stealth and IMHO those games are stealth city. If you can't kick as in stealth you probably shouldn't play the AC games.
Meh, I have so damned many games now that even trying to play what i have seems like an exercise in futility. damn GOG and Steam and all their little sales,LOL!
Sadly as someone who builds and sells PCs I can tell you why nobody uses the start menu, its because THEY PUT EVERY DAMNED THING ON THE DESKTOP! That's why. I'll get these machines and literally you can't even tell what wallpaper they have for all the damned icons all over the thing.
As long as they have contextual search and Action Center i'll be happy. I can't even remember the last time I fired up start>all programs, its all Action Center and search. But personally i think Win 8 is gonna bomb as its TOO radical. While Win 7 was an easy sell showing the screencaps of Win 8 to over 100 customers so far NOT A SINGLE ONE has had a single nice thing to say about the Win 8 UI, nor has anyone said they'd be willing to run it. the closest I got was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen. is that Android? I've heard of that, its supposed to be nice....what do you mean windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want to run a cell phone on my desktop?".
I think little Rita's reaction says it all. Not a single person i showed Win 8 to liked it, wanted it, or was even interested in trying it. it is just too radical and reminds too many of a cell phone. And I hate to break the news to MSFT, most folks hate their cell phones. Oh sure they won't let the thing go, but they can all name a dozen things, from bad reception to UI quirks that really piss them off. so having your new OS look like a cell phone? Not the way to get folks to love it.
Final prediction: Windows 7 becomes the "new XP" aka the OS that just won't die, Win 8 becomes Vista part II, and I get to spend a year and a half stripping windows 8 off and putting windows 7 on because nobody wants to run it, just as I had to do with Vista and XP. Oh fun, oh joy, thanks MSFT you clueless bunch of PHBs.
Actually I thought FC 1 was pretty good. The AI was pretty smart and would call for backup, the levels were big and could be tackled in several ways, overall I'd say thumbs up. The second one sucked though, just the same 4 missions over and OVER and OVER with AI so thick even the guys you were working for would shoot at you, just bad.
Personally this sounds like a game I'd hate, as it sounds like one long case of step and fetchit. Yuck. The last new game where I truly went "Wow I'm REALLY having fun here!" was Just Cause II. Sure it is about as realistic as spiderman but you know what? It is FUN with a capital f, and with a huge world with tons of things to do frankly I quickly just started ignoring the missions and just going nuts. Firing a grapple into a bike and watching it wrap around a tree like that scene from Jedi? Fun. Having a bad guy shoot at you while your car is on fire, shoot a grapple into his car and the ground so he re-enacts the scene from T3 with the crane, follow by jumping onto a police car at 80MPH, yanking the cop out the car, driving the car off a bridge, and then parachuting away while the bad guys stand on the bridge unable to pursue? that is FUN dammit!
Why is it these game designers constantly seem to forget that what you are playing is a game and is therefor supposed to be fun? Surely they had to let somebody playtest this right? Hell who knows, look at Bioshock II, which took the absolute worst part of Bioshock I, the Little Sister guard scene, and made the whole fucking game around it. All the cool tech in the world doesn't help if the game is about as fun as a trip to the DMV.
As a guy that builds and repairs PCs I've found the average to be about two years and that is with several burns a week. Remember folks we are talking about something that is a whole $20 here, hell I've been seeing the nice slim DVD externals going for around $35, so who cares?
They are cheap folks, you use them until they die, then you chunk them. my first DVD burner lasted nearly 7 years, but it cost nearly $200. given the choice of 7 years for $189 or 2 years for $20? I'll take the 2 for $20 thanks.
Personally I'm all for this! Let them sue hospitals and little old ladies! The ONLY way we'll ever get reform after citizens united is for the patents to become such a pathetically bad joke that it HAS to be changed. When the entire country is gridlocked because like that ep of Southpark you can't do a damned thing without a lawsuit? Then and ONLY then will we get reform.
This does highlight why India and China will slaughter us though. Anyone in tech knows that innovation has ALWAYS been about "standing on the shoulders of giants" and when all those shoulders have been replaced by tollbooths? Well all it takes is for one country that doesn't play those reindeer games and right now we have several. BRIC has a hell of a lot more folks to sell to and they are growing both in affluence and in numbers. With our economy a corpse this isn't the gold mine it was before, soon I wouldn't be surprised if new tech startups just started avoiding us rather than deal with the landmines that are our patents and copyrights.
Hey now, don't forget little Sally! Little Sally thinks having this "Napster stuff" makes her a part of this "Internet thingie" so she is VERY loyal! Hell a single Sally is probably worth THREE Randys and possibly TWO Jims too boot! That means she alone has GOT to be worth a dinner for two at olive garden, surely that is worth shelling out good money for napster, right?
Seriously though Napster has been dead as a doornail for over a decade, why anyone would care anymore is beyond me. It reminds me of one of those oldies bands where the original guys have been dead and gone for ages but they just replaced them with some other guys that had nothing to do with the original and kept going. The "real" Napster died along with AudioGalaxy (remember them? I miss them) at the end of the 90s. This is just some lame service they stuck the Napster name on, kinda like how Yahoo bought the MusicMatch name to stick on their music service (which promptly died) just so it would have a name folks would vaguely remember. Between iTunes, Amazon, and streaming radio is there anybody that actually uses this crap anymore?
Actually at 12.1 it really isn't all squished like the 10 inchers. Check it out as you can see they put a smaller trackpad to give the keys more room and instead of taking space with all the extra function keys they put those on a little strip above the keyboard.
Personally i think its sweet. it only weighs 3 pounds with a 6 cell, the Brazos chip handles more like a CULV than an Atom, while it says that it holds 4Gb a bunch of guys on Amazon have loaded it up with 8Gb and even provide the links (just ordered mine, with my gift card I got 8Gb for it for $33, sweet!) so it'll handle whatever you can throw at it, and depending on what you are doing you can get around 6 hours on win 7 or around 8 on Expressgate.
Plenty of space, speed, graphics, memory, bluetooth support built in, and the whole smash for $340 with 8Gb of RAM? dude that's just too sweet. But comparing it to the old MSFT claky keyboard I use on my desktop she really isn't much smaller, you cut about 1 inch off the really wide backspace and enter keys this old claky has and it would be about even. If you have a Best buy nearby they carry the Atom version, its the 1215N instead of B but both are the same FF so you should be able to see how it fits you. I can say i like it a hell of a lot better than the MSI Wind it replaced. Its keys are more comfortable for my big meathooks and with a wireless mouse seems to be the perfect size of ultrportable for me, but YMMV.
Actually my grandfather would rotate and have to do drill sergeant duty about once out of every three years. while he hated it he had been in foxholes in Europe and Korea and said you have no choice but to break them down so they will learn to follow orders and work as a unit, because as he put it "John Wayne lone wolf crap might look good on the big screen but IRL it got you killed damned quick on the battlefield". He said he saw that first hand in France when a couple thought they would be all macho after they had taken out an MG42 and would just charge on ahead to "Kick Jerry's ass" and ran right into the crosshairs of an 88. he said that thing left nothing but their boots and a fine red mist in the air.
So at least there the rough treatment is being done for a greater good, to help those green ass kids learn the skills to hopefully not come home with a toe tag. this was just a PHB showing he was just a giant douchenozzle. Sadly with the economy in the shitter and going down faster by the day little pricks like this will probably act more and more like giant douches simply because they have 300 applicants for every position and know they can be as big a prick as they want.
Uhhh...you DO know we have these things called app stores, yes?Hell my new Asus came with over a dozen games and the Asus app store if I want more. Then there is Steam, GOG, D2D, tons of places you can get games for little cost without opening your machine to the world which is exactly what we are talking about here.
Those of us old enough remember these same claims made by a similar product, a little thing called ActiveX. it had games, could do work, all kinds of really neat stuff....until it became such a virus laden whore everyone was afraid to go anywhere near the crap. that is what i predict will happen here as well.
As I said to have hardware acceleration you have to have access to the hardware, and the only driver on a modern system that is really low level anymore is the GPU because every frame counts. that will allow Mr Malware vendor to punch yet more holes, it'll be nasty. Just you watch friend, just you watch.
Uhhh...it is completely batshit because we are talking about cases where you can fuck them all you want just not actually take a picture of them, or in some cases look at the one you are fucking? Maybe we should have a "hole in a sheet' law where anything goes as long as the other person is covered by a sheet with a hole in it?
As I said I have a friend in the crime lab and even THEY think its batshit. like I said some of these laws are so badly written I could draw a stick figure, write "nekkid kid' on it and put in the front seat of your car and you could be guilty of possessing child porn and be thrown in jail. does that make ANY sense to you? and before you say bullshit remember they already threw one guy in the PMITA prison for hentai, that is pen and ink drawings by adults for adults, no actually under 18 anything involved. Hell they even busted a guy for a naked Simpsons cartoon and the Simpsons would be in their 40s if they were real!
I'm sorry but this is totally fucked up man. if you REALLY wanted to protect kids we should be sending someone like Seal team 6 into those places in eastern Europe where they make CP, not busting a kid for taking a pic of the girl he/she is sleeping with LEGALLY. I have a simple common sense rule: If you can fuck them you sure as hell ought to be able to take a picture of the one you're screwing.
Actually if you have to support a bunch of different machines performance matters and in my own tests every since 3.6.x in FF has been made of fail. in fact I'd say the 3.0.x builds were the best they had and they had begun their downward slide on the 3.6 but really went to crap town in 4 and above.
In my own tests, which I have to support everything from socket 478 P4s and 754 AMDs to netbooks to the latest multicores I've found FF when it comes to responsiveness is just awful. it will take control of the OS (most of my tests for older hardware were XP with 1Gb to 1.5Gb of RAM) for up to half a minute when launching new tabs and if that tab has even SD video? Better go make a sandwich friend. Compare this to Comodo Dragon or Opera and both run just fine without taking control away from the user, and SD flash plays just fine while still being responsive even on the 1.8GHz Sempron i use at the shop for a low power nettop. Oh and the extensions were identical in Dragon and FF (I couldn't find ABP for Opera nor ForecastFox).
so IMHO (which is what matters to my users since I have to support their asses) it was Dragon and Opera neck and neck, chrome a hair behind (probably the phone home crap sucking resources) and FF was dead last. Hell even IE was more responsive but I don't count IE as my users know IE is a no no. But performance does matter if one cares about power, heat, and battery life. I can really tell a difference on my netbook between FF and Dragon when it comes to power, FF spikes the CPU more often and holds it longer than anything Chromium based.
Hell why not have two and pick the right tool for the job? I got myself one of the new EEE Brazos netbooks (highly recommend BTW, great performance and holds 8Gb of RAM) and one of the things that sold me on it is ExpressGate. With ExpressGate if all I want to do is surf, or chat, or listen to the tunes off my HDD I just push the EG button instead of the on button and in under 6 seconds I have a ChromeOS style net OS that adds about two hours on the battery, depending on what I'm doing.
On the other hand, if I want to fire up Audacity to do some editing? Or Word to work on a doc, or even fire up one of the games I picked up off of GOG? Hit the on button instead and I have Win 7 HP X64 waiting to do whatever I want. And the Brazos chip is a hell of a lot more like a CULV than an Atom, it is really snappy.
So why not have both? Hell you can fire up EG from within Win 7 if you want some "Yo dawg" OS in a OS style action. But it isn't like there aren't plenty of choices out there so in this case you can have your cake and eat it too.
Oh the whole "save teh childrenz!" thing is royally fucked and we have been way past sane for quite awhile. Some examples include the guy who wrote the "pro pedo" book that is now rotting in jail. Nobody accused him of touching anybody, no pics or anything, just his thoughts and opinions on paper. I seem to remember someone writing about a time when people could be arrested for their thoughts. There is also the guy doing prison time for writing his fantasies in his journal which his shrink told him to do, another thoughtcrime. Then there is the guy who went to jail for dirty Jap cartoons, again no kids, just pen and ink. as a friend that works in the state crime lab told me these laws are so badly written you could draw a stick figure and scribble "nekked kid" on it and theoretically be guilty of child pron!
For one a little closer to TFA how is THIS for fucked up: In several states I can marry a girl as young as 14 with their parents permission. I can marry her, bang her any way my little heart desires, again completely legal, but if I take a picture of my wife naked I'd be a child pornographer!
This whole damned thing has become another red scare, only instead of commies we see pervs behind every tree. what we seriously need is some common sense laws but sadly politicians have learned they can stir up the rabble and get more votes by pushing the "save teh childrenz!" button.
If you believe that, which I agree with BTW, then please you yourself vote as well as tell anyone that will listen to vote Green or New Whig. The Greens are for closing the leaking border, putting America first, and stopping the illegal wars, and the New Whigs are made up of former Iraq vets that are tired of seeing our servicemen shot to hell so some multinational can get a new pipeline (you didn't think it was about WMDs, did ya?) and want to bring our boys home.
So please vote for parties that are still for the American people. In my own state the greens have been gaining with every election so change CAN happen, you just have to spread the word and get folks to quit voting for the puppet show. the late great Bill Hicks said it over 20 years ago and it is still true today "I believe the puppet on the left shares my beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has my interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy controlling both puppets!" and no truer words have been spoken.
The parent post is from Alex Belits, a jobless Linux astroturfer. Last time he submitted his resume to anyone was when he tried to be Linus Torvalds bootlicker and was turned down for drool.
See how nicely that fits there loony tunes? Oh and I'm not working for anyone but myself, I am your worst nightmare...I'm a retailer. you see we have tried your product and found your bullshit and lies to be just that so maybe you'd like me to enlighten some of the masses, hmm?,
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses.
Meanwhile i'll go back to enjoying my nice new Asus EEE Windows 7 HP netbook, which I got myself as a little prezzie with some of the profits I made from NOT carrying an inferior product. If you don't like being last? Try putting out a product worth actually stocking. You know what you remind me of? A religious nutball. When someone points out a hole in your dogma you go "La la la, it can't be true! U must be a M$ Ninja!" while we all laugh at your batshit insanity. But hey friend here is a nice video of your hero RMS showing why he is the great one so that should cheer you up.
Uhh....hate to break the news to you friend but MSFT spent 9.5 billion in 2010 alone on R&D, hell they probably have the highest R&D budget of any company out there. So yes MSFT deserves to make money off of that which they spent billions researching.
If it is hardware accelerated then by the very definition it has to have access to the hardware. Again which driver is the most likely to be out of date, flaky, and which bypasses pretty much ALL security because that would slow the living hell out of the hardware? Why that would be the GPU.
Think about it friend, the modern GPU is 500Mhz with anywhere from 256Mb to 1Gb of RAM. That is a hell of a lot more power than most of us had when the nasties were spreading through the systems of the 90s. Now what can a malware writer do if he has access to that amount of hardware? hell most GPUs today are based on only two vendors, ATI or Nvidia, and have firmware which allows features to be flipped on and off. Write the nasty to the firmware? You own the machine and the only way to remove will brick the device.
So to me this is just another case of someone deciding they COULD do something without thinking about whether they SHOULD do something. I mean who in the hell wants to do heavy 3D gaming in a fricking browser? the game will run much faster being installed natively, and the farmville type couldn't give a rat's ass if its 3D or not. Just another dumb idea from the company that seems to be determined to run off all their users, why am I not surprised?
I don't think he/she is a troll because frankly I didn't have a clue whether it ended in .odf or not either. I don't think it matters though because as long as businesses demand .doc you're pretty much stuck with MS Office anyway. that's the thing about de facto standards, once something gets entrenched good luck getting something new in there.
But you try sending your resume in odt or even pdf and if they don't file 13 it they'll send you an email saying "Can you send it to us in a word doc?" and if you don't? Forget it. Protip for all the "Just use PDF" FOSS guys out there: They will never accept PDF and will can your file as ALL the HR depts now use these resume scanning software and guess what format they take? Not odt, not PDF, not even .rtf from what I understand...just .doc. And no they ain't made by MSFT either, it is just businesses use doc so the infrastructure is built around .doc files. That's just the way it is folks.
Don't forget the nightmare that will be security. what is the one driver that really needs to be bare metal? Which driver on a system is the most likely to be flaky? That would be graphics. Personally i'm glad i moved to Comodo Dragon after Moz went nuts with their upgrade schedule.
Except we had an easy way to not shred the constitution and give the president a blank check to kill ANYONE but the POTUS and the ones at the top simply ignored it....trial in absentia. We've had trial in absentia for many decades FOR A REASON and that is so even those who are not currently in our jurisdiction can have their rights. Once he was found guilty in absentia they could have done whatever it took to bring him to justice.
Nope just another case of giving those at the top more power than the constitution ever allowed. Sadly it truly is nothing but a worthless piece of paper, thanks to those like Bush and Obama that simply ignore it. And for those that think it can't happen here? two words...Fred Hampton
That is why I never understood wasting resources dealing with the hackers. As a percentage of the population they are....what? Maybe 6%? All you have to do is place a "This could destroy your device and void your warranty ZOMG!" screen and you've just made sure a good 85%+ of the population will be too spooked to try it.
So while I support having more goodies to play with I honestly don't get the whole cat and mouse with the hackers bit. What is the point? if they were trying to hack the network or fill it with malware? yes i could see it. but the vast majority simply aren't gonna bother as long as you aren't bumraping them on app prices and Amazon has always been about low prices so I doubt that would be a problem. As long as they have Angry Birds cheap I doubt they'll even see 5% hack the things, most just won't bother, so any resources wasted besides the "ZOMG!" screen is just stupid.
Then you really ought to try the new EEE Brazos netbook, because frankly the keys aren't tiny. they took away instead the tapering on the keys so they are flat squares instead of the curved desktop keys and frankly they are REALLY comfortable. the only thing I didn't care for is the trackpad. Oh it works great, i just never have liked trackpads, not when I can pop on a USB wireless mouse and get my accuracy back.
but if you haven't tried one give it a spin. the Brazos APU is a hell of a lot closer to a CULV than to a netbook chip like Atom, you can max it out with 8gb of RAM for $38 off of Amazon, and it has more than enough power to do pretty much whatever. And I really can't say enough about expressgate, that rocks hard! Its like getting TWO netbooks, a full featured Win 7 X64 netbook (which it comes with even though it comes with 2gb of RAM, smart choice ASUS) and you get a ChromeOS style instant on netbook for when you just wanna surf or chat. it is just too damned cool.
Question: what makes this device more appealing to you than a much better priced netbook? I asked because I looked at those and the average I saw with the keyboard dock was around $550. What I got instead was this EEE netbook which lets me run all my x86 software, gets 6 hours on the battery (If I use the full OS, it also has ExpressGate built in that lets me surf, listen to the tunes or watch videos off the HDD, and adds about 2 hours more to the battery) holds 8Gb of RAM, and cost me a whole $300 off of Tigerdirect. Oh and it does excellent HD and supposedly can play HL2 and Far Cry I (although I don't game on a little screen).
So what is it about the tablet FF that makes it worth the extra $250? Because I played with everything from an iPad to these cheapos and I honestly don't get it. I mean sure for specialized jobs like inventory I can see the appeal of an electronic notepad, but the 12.1 inch netbooks are both thin and light AND give me an actual keyboard and let me run x86 software. So I just don't get the appeal.
BTW if anyone is thinking of one? BUY IT. Those Brazos APUs are sweet, run ultra cool while making everything snappy, and ExpressGate rocks for when you just want to do surfing, mail, or chat. It is just 6 seconds from cold start to surfing with ExpressGate, too cool!
Because the Chrome on their test box probably isn't up to date? Chrome X might pass just fine but Chrome Y not. Anybody who has worked corporate knows what a PITA it is to keep everything updated and with test beds you sure don't want the machine you are testing various scenarios and possible fuckups on to be loose on the network without safeguards.
So I bet the version of Chrome on their testbed passes muster but some new feature or tweak on the latter versions throws the fp. It happens.
I'll tell you why I hate the man, I've seen his house. Have you seen it? He is blowing about 20 to 30 TIMES what a family of 12 is blowing on that thing, has a fleet of SUVs, and then expects YOU to take the bus. Fuck off and die Rev Al, you hypocritical bastard, go fuck off and die. The ONLY one I have seen in the ENTIRE AGW mess walk the walk is Ed Begley JR, the only one. He is in a modest house with solar power, drives an electric car, lives as clean a life as he possibly can. HE I respect. Rev Al and his huckster bubble blowing friends can go fuck off.