So, even though I'm a HSBC user, I can use HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds TSB, Halifax etc. ATMs for free.
Sadly, it doesn't work inside the banks themselves, with the non-automatic teller non-machines.
I do like to keep them on their toes, and keep their brains from atrophying, which is why I always inadvertently present them with nice little puzzles to keep the brain cells ticking over. Like the time I tried paying stuff into my Natwest account in an HSBC bank. Or the time I had a cheque with just the amount in words written in the 'payable to' line. Or when I tried using someone else's credit card to pay a cheque into my own Nationwide account...
Fortunately, it's just paying stuff in where I've made an arse of it. The cashiers tend to treat me with affectionate pity, rather than as a criminal.
I'm the world's most incompetent bank customer, and ATMs are just wasted on me!
Kind of like the Dual-Core Processor, Soundblaster Audigy 2 and multiple-processor graphics card I'm using now?
Nah, they're much more useful and general-purpose than the Amiga chips. Plus they conform to standard, extensible APIs...
I reckon what really killed the Amiga was that everything was done at too low a level. To get any real power out of the machine, your software would be talking directly to the hardware, and that meant that any hardware upgrades would have to be register-compatible with the old stuff for the old software to run.
The Amiga was an interesting machine, but the precise implementation was a bit of a dead-end. Kind of like 3Dfx with their Glide API - too hardware-specific...
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a beginner who isn't "hesitant".
I have. And believe me, they're the worst kind possible.:-)
You're giving them a guided tour of some web application, carefully describing what all the different sections do and so on. They're sat there with the mouse, not listening at all - but instead clicking on anything and everything that looks like it might be vaguely link-like.
"This button is for deleting messages. You select - "
(Click click click!)
"You've just deleted the instruction manual. I'll show you how to retrieve it from the trash."
(Clickety-click!)
"Noooo!"
You see them trying to start Lotus Notes.
Double-click on icon.
Nothing appears to happen in the first two seconds or so. Double-click on icon again, just in case.
Still nothing, so double-click on icon again, and swear at computer.
Ten minutes later, roughly fifteen copies of Lotus Notes finally untangle themselves enough for one of them to display a password prompt.
The fact that I brought up Lotus Notes as an example probably indicates that this wasn't the very small child - at least with a child you can confiscate the mouse and/or keyboard. Instead, he's in his mid-sixties, and the kind of boss that you really wonder what their purpose of existence is. Fortunately, he's not my boss. Hah!
Can't stop from posting something in favor of Atari, especially the 1040ST and the Falcon 030. The only 2 computers I've ever owned that fit the bill as "music computers."
I had an ST myself, and while I never used it for music stuff (apart from farting about in Quartet), I always wondered why the MIDI ports were there. Yes, they helped the ST become a favourite machine for music work, but which Atari engineer decided to put them into the design in the first place, and why?
Were there any other home computers that had them first, as a kind of precedent? For a bargain-basement design like the ST's, the non-essential, specialised MIDI ports seem a bit of a frivolity, so was someone at Atari a big fan of music production, and somehow predicted the machine's future?
I mean, I doubt you have some deep insights into the workings of the Doom 3 engine that allow you to make an informed judgement about its ability to display outdoor terrain...
Well, not really, but just the impression I got from every Doom 3 movie and screenshot so far.:-)
As for the outdoors scenes, an escape from Castle Wolfenstein where freedom doesn't start at the castle walls could be fun. Cue glorious chases through snowbound mountain passes, forests and checkpoints, with the whole place swarming with Nazis...
Dungeons, yes, but the ability to render a wide variety of stuff is always appreciated. With a sufficiently capable engine, you can surprise the player - they aren't seeing some environment, effect or object interaction and ticking it off against the list of game capabilities...
Not unless I try a demo first and it's totally different from the last one. The last one was such boring crap I didn't even play past the first level.
What? You missed the demo's second level? The one with all the utterly generic zombies? I bet that would have completely changed your opinion!;-)
I found the demo a bit unimpressive as well. You start off escaping from a cell in a supposed Nazi stronghold, but once you've killed the handful of soldiers guarding the place it never feels like you're not supposed to be there. Some serious sneaking around, with guard reinforcements to be avoided and evaded, would have made it way more atmospheric...
Is anyone else a bit disappointed by the choice of the Doom 3 engine? Yes, it might be brilliant for shiny, plastic-looking, ultra-atmospheric, cramped space-dungeons, but for naturalistic, realistic and expansive real-world scenes it's probably going to be a bit shite. Something like, um, Source might be way better, but admittedly it's highly unlikely that Id would license someone else's engine!
The official website should be a showcase for the game, getting us revved up and excited for its release, giving us the lowdown on everything that anyone would wan't to know.
Love them or loathe them, Bungie seem pretty good at that PR thing. Id communicate through occasional updates on their finger service, Valve through emails and posts on other people's forums, and leave their ownsites as unsullied, unused shop windows with a few smatterings of out-of-date news and screenshots.
Shouldn't the games magazines be looking into reviewing things in a much shorter timeframe? Much of the magazine can be prepared in advance, but hot news and reviews done at the last minute?
Newspapers and news weeklies seem to cope okay, games sites on the web manage to write reviews in less than a couple of months... Plus, it seems ridiculous that a game can go from gold master, through duplication to the stores in significantly less time than it takes to publish the sodding review in a magazine...
I've frequently used Firefox (and the full-featured Mozilla) on a 64MB, 166MHz Pentium running Windows 98.
It's not the fastest thing ever, but it's completely usable. Perhaps it's a little slower than Internet Explorer on the same machine, but it's really not worth bothering about. Firefox is snappy, it doesn't get stuck in endless hourglass-waving pauses, and it starts pretty quickly too.
It feels considerably faster on that PC than Firefox does on my modern iBook, where it takes an age to start and even longer to display dialogue boxes and suchlike - it's why I've stuck with Safari. Maybe there is room for improvement on the Windows version of Firefox, but I'd rather the effort went into other platforms as well.
You joke, but the complete absence of a human voice for Gordon Freeman seems totally deliberate.
If you rummage around in Half-Life's pak0.pak datafile, you'll find a couple of pain noises for Freeman which sound like normal human gasps and grunts, just like you get in every other FPS, but I don't think they ever actually get used.
I'm surprised other game developers haven't jumped on board the 'you are the protagonist' route that Half-Life took, what with its absence of speech from the player's character, the lack of third-person cutscenes, etc, etc...
In terms of voice acting in games, some of my favourite is from System Shock 2. Shodan, anyone?
"In an unprecedented dive, the U.S. Navy bathyscaphe Trieste reached the bottom at 1:06 pm on January 23, 1960 with U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard."
Valve might have decided that some DRM system which prevents users from getting at the game files would be a waste of time - that it would be cracked sooner or later anyway. Plus, it wouldn't exactly be modder-friendly.
I gather that if you pre-load something over Steam, be it a purchase-only product like Condition Zero or a pre-release like Codename: Gordon, you receive an encrypted version of the cache file. There's presumably no magical decryption key permanently hidden within the software, akin to a DVD player, instead you receive that key when you purchase a licence for the software or the product is officially released. The cache file is then fully decrypted and the key can be discarded.
Slashdot Mirror
I've gone you one better, as I use quadruple ROT13. So there.
Now that's just being unrealistic. How could anyone ever decrypt something like that?
Interestingly, Windows 98 won't be supported.
:-)
I'll be in the weird situation of having a game that will run on my PC in Linux, but not on my games-only Windows installation.
Makes a change!
It is interesting to note that they recommend using a faster algorithm.
I'm disappointed they didn't recommend my favourite, triple-ROT13.
Virtually unbreakable...
I think a rat (its only friend) crawled into its left leg and died.
I have a horrible feeling it's still there.
Sadly, it seems nobody else found the idea of a zero-g, man-eating, wobbling blob of orange-specked vomit terribly amusing...
:-)
I'm just too funny for the moderators. Yes, that's it!
So, even though I'm a HSBC user, I can use HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds TSB, Halifax etc. ATMs for free.
Sadly, it doesn't work inside the banks themselves, with the non-automatic teller non-machines.
I do like to keep them on their toes, and keep their brains from atrophying, which is why I always inadvertently present them with nice little puzzles to keep the brain cells ticking over. Like the time I tried paying stuff into my Natwest account in an HSBC bank. Or the time I had a cheque with just the amount in words written in the 'payable to' line. Or when I tried using someone else's credit card to pay a cheque into my own Nationwide account...
Fortunately, it's just paying stuff in where I've made an arse of it. The cashiers tend to treat me with affectionate pity, rather than as a criminal.
I'm the world's most incompetent bank customer, and ATMs are just wasted on me!
(Sorry, I'm on a roll...)
Some people are being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster. Hillary's legs are being digested.
(Beg pardon. Must stop!)
Best...name...ever.
(Cue throbbing spherical blob o' puke floating in front of camera...)
I, for one, welcome our new gelatinous diced carrot overlords!
(Sorry, it had to be done!)
Kind of like the Dual-Core Processor, Soundblaster Audigy 2 and multiple-processor graphics card I'm using now?
Nah, they're much more useful and general-purpose than the Amiga chips. Plus they conform to standard, extensible APIs...
I reckon what really killed the Amiga was that everything was done at too low a level. To get any real power out of the machine, your software would be talking directly to the hardware, and that meant that any hardware upgrades would have to be register-compatible with the old stuff for the old software to run.
The Amiga was an interesting machine, but the precise implementation was a bit of a dead-end. Kind of like 3Dfx with their Glide API - too hardware-specific...
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a beginner who isn't "hesitant".
:-)
I have. And believe me, they're the worst kind possible.
You're giving them a guided tour of some web application, carefully describing what all the different sections do and so on. They're sat there with the mouse, not listening at all - but instead clicking on anything and everything that looks like it might be vaguely link-like.
"This button is for deleting messages. You select - "
(Click click click!)
"You've just deleted the instruction manual. I'll show you how to retrieve it from the trash."
(Clickety-click!)
"Noooo!"
You see them trying to start Lotus Notes.
Double-click on icon.
Nothing appears to happen in the first two seconds or so. Double-click on icon again, just in case.
Still nothing, so double-click on icon again, and swear at computer.
Ten minutes later, roughly fifteen copies of Lotus Notes finally untangle themselves enough for one of them to display a password prompt.
The fact that I brought up Lotus Notes as an example probably indicates that this wasn't the very small child - at least with a child you can confiscate the mouse and/or keyboard. Instead, he's in his mid-sixties, and the kind of boss that you really wonder what their purpose of existence is. Fortunately, he's not my boss. Hah!
Can't stop from posting something in favor of Atari, especially the 1040ST and the Falcon 030. The only 2 computers I've ever owned that fit the bill as "music computers."
I had an ST myself, and while I never used it for music stuff (apart from farting about in Quartet), I always wondered why the MIDI ports were there. Yes, they helped the ST become a favourite machine for music work, but which Atari engineer decided to put them into the design in the first place, and why?
Were there any other home computers that had them first, as a kind of precedent? For a bargain-basement design like the ST's, the non-essential, specialised MIDI ports seem a bit of a frivolity, so was someone at Atari a big fan of music production, and somehow predicted the machine's future?
I mean, I doubt you have some deep insights into the workings of the Doom 3 engine that allow you to make an informed judgement about its ability to display outdoor terrain...
:-)
Well, not really, but just the impression I got from every Doom 3 movie and screenshot so far.
As for the outdoors scenes, an escape from Castle Wolfenstein where freedom doesn't start at the castle walls could be fun. Cue glorious chases through snowbound mountain passes, forests and checkpoints, with the whole place swarming with Nazis...
Dungeons, yes, but the ability to render a wide variety of stuff is always appreciated. With a sufficiently capable engine, you can surprise the player - they aren't seeing some environment, effect or object interaction and ticking it off against the list of game capabilities...
Not unless I try a demo first and it's totally different from the last one. The last one was such boring crap I didn't even play past the first level.
;-)
What? You missed the demo's second level? The one with all the utterly generic zombies? I bet that would have completely changed your opinion!
I found the demo a bit unimpressive as well. You start off escaping from a cell in a supposed Nazi stronghold, but once you've killed the handful of soldiers guarding the place it never feels like you're not supposed to be there. Some serious sneaking around, with guard reinforcements to be avoided and evaded, would have made it way more atmospheric...
Is anyone else a bit disappointed by the choice of the Doom 3 engine? Yes, it might be brilliant for shiny, plastic-looking, ultra-atmospheric, cramped space-dungeons, but for naturalistic, realistic and expansive real-world scenes it's probably going to be a bit shite. Something like, um, Source might be way better, but admittedly it's highly unlikely that Id would license someone else's engine!
The official website should be a showcase for the game, getting us revved up and excited for its release, giving us the lowdown on everything that anyone would wan't to know.
A potential example of that - Bungie Studios' site.
Love them or loathe them, Bungie seem pretty good at that PR thing. Id communicate through occasional updates on their finger service, Valve through emails and posts on other people's forums, and leave their own sites as unsullied, unused shop windows with a few smatterings of out-of-date news and screenshots.
Plees have regard for speeking-impared peoples. And also riting-impared. This is an outage!
:-)
I'm wondering if the spell-checking-as-standard in Mail.app and Safari text-area boxes has anything to do with it.
Honestly, my spelling was good before I got a Mac, but now it's utterly prefect!
... Except Gmail isn't finished yet.
Magazines typically have a 75-90 day lead time.
Isn't that... Like... Ages?
Shouldn't the games magazines be looking into reviewing things in a much shorter timeframe? Much of the magazine can be prepared in advance, but hot news and reviews done at the last minute?
Newspapers and news weeklies seem to cope okay, games sites on the web manage to write reviews in less than a couple of months... Plus, it seems ridiculous that a game can go from gold master, through duplication to the stores in significantly less time than it takes to publish the sodding review in a magazine...
I've frequently used Firefox (and the full-featured Mozilla) on a 64MB, 166MHz Pentium running Windows 98.
It's not the fastest thing ever, but it's completely usable. Perhaps it's a little slower than Internet Explorer on the same machine, but it's really not worth bothering about. Firefox is snappy, it doesn't get stuck in endless hourglass-waving pauses, and it starts pretty quickly too.
It feels considerably faster on that PC than Firefox does on my modern iBook, where it takes an age to start and even longer to display dialogue boxes and suchlike - it's why I've stuck with Safari. Maybe there is room for improvement on the Windows version of Firefox, but I'd rather the effort went into other platforms as well.
Nah. The prize is a year's subscription to Wikipedia!
Heh, nice to see one of the old masters being influenced by an apprentice...
You joke, but the complete absence of a human voice for Gordon Freeman seems totally deliberate.
If you rummage around in Half-Life's pak0.pak datafile, you'll find a couple of pain noises for Freeman which sound like normal human gasps and grunts, just like you get in every other FPS, but I don't think they ever actually get used.
I'm surprised other game developers haven't jumped on board the 'you are the protagonist' route that Half-Life took, what with its absence of speech from the player's character, the lack of third-person cutscenes, etc, etc...
In terms of voice acting in games, some of my favourite is from System Shock 2. Shodan, anyone?
From the linked Wikipedia article:
"In an unprecedented dive, the U.S. Navy bathyscaphe Trieste reached the bottom at 1:06 pm on January 23, 1960 with U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard."
It could always be one of those things known as a 'joke', too.
After all, the calculator in the video demonstration has '1.337' on it!
If there's one nerd in-joke, there's probably more...
Valve might have decided that some DRM system which prevents users from getting at the game files would be a waste of time - that it would be cracked sooner or later anyway. Plus, it wouldn't exactly be modder-friendly.
I gather that if you pre-load something over Steam, be it a purchase-only product like Condition Zero or a pre-release like Codename: Gordon, you receive an encrypted version of the cache file. There's presumably no magical decryption key permanently hidden within the software, akin to a DVD player, instead you receive that key when you purchase a licence for the software or the product is officially released. The cache file is then fully decrypted and the key can be discarded.
How's that for non-evil DRM?
Anything I pay for doesn't get used for business. Period.
Clothes?