Huh? I didn't even play DX:IW until I had DX9. Suspect its some driver you have, not the DX version. If you want incompatibility, try going back to stuff from before DX5, most of it won't work at all (I miss Rocket Jockey). I'm not even sure that DDraw And D3D were separate then.
If Microsoft had lost to Apple there never would have been AMD (at least in the general application PC processor market).
For that matter, we probably wouldn't be nearly as advanced as we are now. I used Apple gear exclusively until around early 1996, and they didn't even start to upgrade their equipment until Microsoft started seriously targeting the home market with Windows 95. Leaving Apple, even for Windows 95 (bleh) and DOS (yea!) was downright liberating. Apple was perfectly content to just re-release slightly upgraded OSs constantly and call them new products, and many of their so-called OS upgrades were nothing but the same finder with a handful of open-source system extensions they stole from the web, re-christened as Apple products. Systems 6-8 were so similar that you could actually mix and match most extensions and control panels from them, and they would boot and run fine.
Be glad that MS decided to push the PC market somewhere, seriously. I've a hunch that without MS, even the much-lauded Apple OS X never would have been created.
Hey, some of those poorly rated small cars are fine... I got smashed in a '97 metro hard enough to break my front axle and seriously damage the left front of the car, neither of the airbags deployed (they were old I guess), and I walked away with just a scraped elbow... all this extra-safety crap on cars now is just crap, you can't go about living in fear of what's going to happen to you if you don't buy it.
Of course, a large chunk of our economy is based on fear these days, so maybe I'm just being unrealistic.
I really do miss that car though, I bought it for $3500 back in '98, its never had a problem, and it got about 36 mpg. Unfortunately, it only had a book value of $700, so it got totalled (I wasn't willing to put more money into the car than I purchased it for).
Agreed on the last bit, console games have been a good bit better than PC games (in fun, quality, and variety) for the past 3 or 4 years from what I can tell, though its been pretty slow the last 6 months or so.
Best PC game from the last few years: Alien Shooter.
Mechwarrior has always felt that way... I think 2 was actually faster paced than 4. Never played 3 though, which actually wasn't an MS game... I think it was developed by Fasa themselves. The only mech games I recall being slow and clunky feeling (not in a bad sense, but in a "realism" sense) were the original 2 earthsiege games. They really felt like walking tank sims.
Actually, MS's MechWarrior games have been quite good, especially their newer Mercenaries title. The MechAssault games, though, are just sub-par FPSs really. My favorite mech game is still StarSiege. I've never figured out what Sierra was thinking when they devolved it into the Tribes crap-fest it is now.
A friend once had a hard disc that stopped even spinning up on boot, and we had messed with it for a bit, then given up. Sometime afterwards we started tossing it back and forth across the room while talking, for quite a bit. Never dropped it, but it got mighty shaken up. Tried booting the damn thing one more time the next day, just for kicks, and it grudgingly loaded one last time. Copied everything off it and it was toast thereafter.
Go play the old Marathon games.
If you look around on www.bungie.org, you can find them freely downloadable.
They've all got quite a bit of story to them, especially Marathon 2: Durandal.
Though they're about the same age as doom 2, they've got some wonderful features (like independent triggers for dual guns), and interesting level designs.
Or go get the system shock games, which are even equally good.
Any of those are better than half-life.
While I am inclined to wonder if eye-balls would write with tiny mechanical hands, if we're going for a dystopian future then...
Nixon's closed source eye-balls will use their lasers to burn the language into everything in sight!
Hmmm... I never realized this wasn't legal. I made a vb program that assembled word-compatible XML files some time ago, complete with image embedding and independently margined sections. Its fairly easy (and I'm a really poor programmer) just by studying the syntax in a saved document.
I suppose that while XML is open, the strange stylesheet formatting and symbols for section breaks and whatnot are considered proprietary, since they have no use outside of winword rendering of the XML file.
Its likely already a dead planet... we can use it to test these new processes. What's the worst that can happen? It gets deader? Can't prove any method that complex without actual trials, I would think.
While I hate the default XP color scheme, I actually like the new start menu... it takes a bit of tweaking, but I find that the "pin to" area is very useful. Incidentally, what is this "watercolor" theme? I didn't have the XP betas, but I did use the Release Candidates for a while, and it wasn't in those.
I remember that thing! It was great, wasn't it sort of a game, but every thing in it was to teach you some mouse motion? Eesh, that's a whole chunk of memory I hadn't remembered in a while... I think I had the original mac lode runner about the same time.
I was ambidextrous until I broke my left arm, two fingers, and nearly severed my thumb about eight years ago. It took two years for the thumb to fully do what I wanted again, but I've never been able to write with the hand again (what I consider being truly ambidextrous)... I can still type, use two keyboards, etc, but the fine control is gone.
I think I heard mutterings of this a week ago or so, but it wasn't much. I really don't care since I've been wishing Yahoo would roll over and die for years, and I try to ignore them.
I strafe constantly when walking, whenever I need to avoid someone or turn a corner, and I tend to stick near walls... I've also been told that I have a habit of holding anything I pick up as if it is a weapon.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, search about the web and find Jets n' Guns, Alien Shooter, or Star Monkey... great games come out all the time, you just gotta look around.
Huh? I didn't even play DX:IW until I had DX9. Suspect its some driver you have, not the DX version. If you want incompatibility, try going back to stuff from before DX5, most of it won't work at all (I miss Rocket Jockey). I'm not even sure that DDraw And D3D were separate then.
If Microsoft had lost to Apple there never would have been AMD (at least in the general application PC processor market).
For that matter, we probably wouldn't be nearly as advanced as we are now. I used Apple gear exclusively until around early 1996, and they didn't even start to upgrade their equipment until Microsoft started seriously targeting the home market with Windows 95. Leaving Apple, even for Windows 95 (bleh) and DOS (yea!) was downright liberating. Apple was perfectly content to just re-release slightly upgraded OSs constantly and call them new products, and many of their so-called OS upgrades were nothing but the same finder with a handful of open-source system extensions they stole from the web, re-christened as Apple products. Systems 6-8 were so similar that you could actually mix and match most extensions and control panels from them, and they would boot and run fine.
Be glad that MS decided to push the PC market somewhere, seriously. I've a hunch that without MS, even the much-lauded Apple OS X never would have been created.
Hey, some of those poorly rated small cars are fine... I got smashed in a '97 metro hard enough to break my front axle and seriously damage the left front of the car, neither of the airbags deployed (they were old I guess), and I walked away with just a scraped elbow... all this extra-safety crap on cars now is just crap, you can't go about living in fear of what's going to happen to you if you don't buy it.
Of course, a large chunk of our economy is based on fear these days, so maybe I'm just being unrealistic.
I really do miss that car though, I bought it for $3500 back in '98, its never had a problem, and it got about 36 mpg. Unfortunately, it only had a book value of $700, so it got totalled (I wasn't willing to put more money into the car than I purchased it for).
Out of curiosity, how do the Toshibas (mainly Tecra Ms if you had 'em) hold up over time?
Get a new T, or an X from the 30 series (32 is a good one).
Agreed on the last bit, console games have been a good bit better than PC games (in fun, quality, and variety) for the past 3 or 4 years from what I can tell, though its been pretty slow the last 6 months or so. Best PC game from the last few years: Alien Shooter.
Mechwarrior has always felt that way... I think 2 was actually faster paced than 4. Never played 3 though, which actually wasn't an MS game... I think it was developed by Fasa themselves. The only mech games I recall being slow and clunky feeling (not in a bad sense, but in a "realism" sense) were the original 2 earthsiege games. They really felt like walking tank sims.
Actually, MS's MechWarrior games have been quite good, especially their newer Mercenaries title. The MechAssault games, though, are just sub-par FPSs really. My favorite mech game is still StarSiege. I've never figured out what Sierra was thinking when they devolved it into the Tribes crap-fest it is now.
A friend once had a hard disc that stopped even spinning up on boot, and we had messed with it for a bit, then given up. Sometime afterwards we started tossing it back and forth across the room while talking, for quite a bit. Never dropped it, but it got mighty shaken up. Tried booting the damn thing one more time the next day, just for kicks, and it grudgingly loaded one last time. Copied everything off it and it was toast thereafter.
Go play the old Marathon games. If you look around on www.bungie.org, you can find them freely downloadable. They've all got quite a bit of story to them, especially Marathon 2: Durandal. Though they're about the same age as doom 2, they've got some wonderful features (like independent triggers for dual guns), and interesting level designs. Or go get the system shock games, which are even equally good. Any of those are better than half-life.
Exactly! The world needs more games like Alien Shooter, and fewer awful-as-all-hell RTSs and WW2 FPSs...
While I am inclined to wonder if eye-balls would write with tiny mechanical hands, if we're going for a dystopian future then... Nixon's closed source eye-balls will use their lasers to burn the language into everything in sight!
Hmmm... I never realized this wasn't legal. I made a vb program that assembled word-compatible XML files some time ago, complete with image embedding and independently margined sections. Its fairly easy (and I'm a really poor programmer) just by studying the syntax in a saved document. I suppose that while XML is open, the strange stylesheet formatting and symbols for section breaks and whatnot are considered proprietary, since they have no use outside of winword rendering of the XML file.
Hail Nixon!
Its likely already a dead planet... we can use it to test these new processes. What's the worst that can happen? It gets deader? Can't prove any method that complex without actual trials, I would think.
Resmirch is awesome!
While I hate the default XP color scheme, I actually like the new start menu... it takes a bit of tweaking, but I find that the "pin to" area is very useful. Incidentally, what is this "watercolor" theme? I didn't have the XP betas, but I did use the Release Candidates for a while, and it wasn't in those.
I remember that thing! It was great, wasn't it sort of a game, but every thing in it was to teach you some mouse motion? Eesh, that's a whole chunk of memory I hadn't remembered in a while... I think I had the original mac lode runner about the same time.
I was ambidextrous until I broke my left arm, two fingers, and nearly severed my thumb about eight years ago. It took two years for the thumb to fully do what I wanted again, but I've never been able to write with the hand again (what I consider being truly ambidextrous)... I can still type, use two keyboards, etc, but the fine control is gone.
Just send Rar files... it can't read inside them, and unlike zips they won't sometimes corrupt files with pre-existing compression.
I think I heard mutterings of this a week ago or so, but it wasn't much. I really don't care since I've been wishing Yahoo would roll over and die for years, and I try to ignore them.
Bonus for Artistic Impression?
I strafe constantly when walking, whenever I need to avoid someone or turn a corner, and I tend to stick near walls... I've also been told that I have a habit of holding anything I pick up as if it is a weapon.
The only superpower I want is the power to "photoshop" reality... to tweak it how I want and make it humorous.