Wouldn't "not have a clue everyone is talking about" be a great reason to RTFA?
Canned history:
A concept keyboard was demonstrated a bit more than a year ago - rather than traditional keys each key was effectively a mini display so could change what was on each key very easily - a good example would be for games - rather than having to remember that, for example, key 'e' corresponds to "use" how about replacing the icon on the 'e' key with an icon to reflect its current function?
Anyhoo - lots of people jumped on this and said it was the best thing since... oh I don't know - the latest release of Debian or something;) and the company behind it announced that it would be a while til it came to market, but in the meantime they would release a drastically cut down version with three buttons. That would be this thing, although its a good few months late.
Did you ever see the film Demolition Man? In that there is reference to the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library - did make me chuckle when he eventually went into politics:)
See, that just illustrates the other great bane of online gaming - server admins with a god complex and a mental age of 5.
I couldn't even count the amount of times I've been banned from a server for cheating because I popped some idiot admin in the head in Counter-Strike.
Mind you as a general rule the servers with people so petty running things I guess I don't want to play on anyway - after a while I had a list of enough servers with decent admins and honest players to keep myself amused whenever I wanted to play:)
It's the same in the UK - Half Life 2 Episode 1 is £19.99 in the shops here, or $19.99 through Steam which is about £10.60 or so - a little more than half the retail price. Hell, IIRC I paid $60 for the HL2 silver pack which gave me Half Life 2, CS:S, DoD:S and a license for every preceeding Valve game - for about the same price as Half Life 2 on its own was in the shops.
Its something I've actually never understood with all the bitching about the length of HL2Ep1 - its roughly a third of the length of HL2 for roughly a third of the cost - seems fair to me, especially since there are bundled extras too - I for one cannot wait to get my hands on Portal or TF2 with the Ep2 release:)
I think Steam is great - tried all sorts of games that I may not otherwise have had a go at - £10 is squarely in the "impulse buy" zone financially speaking - I'm quite prepared to risk that much and chalk it up to experience if I don't like the game.
Escape from Butcher Bay is a great game. Has absolutely nothing to do with Chronicles of Riddick the movie though - its a prequel to Pitch Black, which in itself is set ten or so years before the movie Chronicles of Riddick.
Portal is being released as part of Half Life 2 Episode 2 (Due Feb next year I think) - Its a standalone expansion to Half Life 2 and the follow on to Episode 1.
Thats right - RC1 was quite good but still not 100% there - still managed uptime better than my previous Win98 box though:)
As for RC2 - well, that became the release version IIRC - by the time we got to that the only problem I had was soundcard, but that was evidently manufacturer related - the next driver release cleaned that right up.
Actually that maximum speed is called 'terminal velocity' - air resistance is just one of the factors that determines what that speed is - so higher up terminal velocity is a lot faster as the air resistance is greatly reduced - this is why the fastest freefall speed on record is of the order of 614 mph (about mach 0.9) - held by a chap called Joseph Kittenger after a jump at 108,000 feet.
Tron2.0 was set up as a sequel to the movie - set in the vaguely present day you played (IIRC) the son of Jeff Bridge's character in the movie and really didn't do as well as I thought it deserved - I personally really enjoyed it and graphically it was phenominal - there are certainly no movie-based reasons they couldn't do a sequel.
Ditto Chronicles of Riddick - this was set in Butcher Bay (where Riddick got his eyes done) so is very much a prequel to both movies and broke cannon within 30seconds of the game starting, which has to be some sort of record*;) Theres no real reason why another game couldn't be done within the timeline of the movies or for that matter afterwards - although the obvious choice would be some other lunacy while Riddick was being hunted down:)
*Note I never got far in the game (its sat on my shelf waiting for me to get around to it) so for all I know what I'm thinking of is resolved later on...
Not this one again - I know this case is a standard-bearer for the insane lawsuits that come to pass in America but this one was actually not without merit - the coffee was served way too hot (180-odd degrees, which is unfit for consumption - it would burn the mouth) and McDonalds knew it was a problem - there were a *lot* of previous cases and the woman got third degree burns over some *very* sensitive areas.
Oh and the court case found her 1/5 responsible for what happened so was granted "only" 4/5 of the granted compensatory damages.
See now the one where a guy that broke into a house, managed to lock himself in the garage and had to spend two weeks subsisting on dog food and a couple of cans of fizzy drinks because the owners were on holiday and then sued that family for a lot of money - thats a better example:)
I pretty much agree with you - certainly a pleasant female voice was always something that brightened up the dark days I spent working that hellish job but also the few male callers that just wanted to be sorted out and would work with you to fix their problems as quickly as possible were just as welcome - in those cases I would almost invariably do everything in my power to get them back up and running as quickly as possible.
In the six months I spent jockeying a helpdesk I got maybe five calls of each type a day, the other 70-75 were people (male and female) that acted as though it was me *personally* screwing the system up to affect them *specifically* and they would really get annoying, rude and obnoxious - and those callers I'd want to get *rid of* as quickly as possible.
Important points to consider - most helpdesks aren't designed to cater for people like us (and believe me I'm not nearly as smart as some of the people that knock around here) - yes we'd all try all the obvious things long before asking for help but 99% of the population wouldn't. And (to quote Dr House) "People lie" - Men in particular will sooner say 'oh I already checked that' than admit to either a) its not occured to them or (perhaps more likely) b) they're not sure they understood what you just meant.
Of course you're right about the bad support people - I consider myself not to be one of them but I certainly had to deal with the wreckage that some of my colleagues left in terms of pissed off users!
Or of course he could in fact mean Battlefield 2, which is a) what he said, and b) not available on OSX, so would make sense as an example of a game he could play on a Mac running XP:)
Why can't they?
As far as I know all a device has to do to be called an MP3 player is be able to play MP3's - and certainly my iPod does a very good job of that!
iTunes can rip to MP3 or AAC and a couple of other formats I think.
Agreed - While killing Book didn't really do much (since he'd hardly been in the film anyway) killing Wash suprised the hell out of me, and changed the colour of the whole movie - from that point on I started to think that maybe The Good Guys wouldn't win - if Wheddon would kill one of the most popular characters in such a brutal and sudden way then who knows what he's got up his sleeve next. It called the rest of the movie into question for me, and that everyone else survived was irrelevent - it meant I no longer had a good idea what to expect from the rest of the film and I *loved* it.
Personally I thought Serenity was an amazing movie with the exception of the first part - I didn't like the beginning much but from the point we catch up to Serenity herself I was in heaven:)
I dunno - I like to think that Book's story was told indirectly through the Operative
I think he was once an operative just like Mal's nemesis in "Serenity" but something happened to shake his faith in the Alliance and its better world - just like the Operative in Serentiy. It wouldn't suprise me especially that somone that believed so much in a better world would take up orders and try to help folks that way instead...
There are a couple of hints throughout the series and movie that support my theory
1, He has a very high Alliance clearance (From the episode "Safe" where an Alliance crusier treats his wounds) 2, He knew what the Alliance would send after Mal, when noone else seemed to recognise the danger that the Operative presented to them (from the movie) 3, From the first episode (also called Serenity) we know that Book is competent enough in a fight to defeat an armed opponent.
Of course this is all reaching, but I kind of like the idea, as then it means all the major threads of the series are tied up:) While its disappointing that Firefly ends here at least it feels a good place to stop, which is a hell of a lot better than before Serenity got made and I thank everyone involved for that.
In the UK they were available in most major bookshops, as were the media novelisations of those comics. Its about as mainstream as any other media tie-in if you ask me.
Depending on location but the legal requirement in my location is that you must yeild to an emergency vehicle where safe to do so - if you are unable to safely get out of an ambulance's way you have no legal right to speed along in front of it.
Personally I'd say that ID software are good at making a fantastic engine with a mediocre game to advertise it, but then the likes of Raven take that fantastic engine and couple it up to an amazing game - such as the Soldier of Fortune games, or Jedi Knight series.
And Raven are coding Q4, not iD so personally I'm pretty hopeful about it...
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Surely that depends on the intensity of the beam?
Wouldn't "not have a clue everyone is talking about" be a great reason to RTFA?
Canned history:
A concept keyboard was demonstrated a bit more than a year ago - rather than traditional keys each key was effectively a mini display so could change what was on each key very easily - a good example would be for games - rather than having to remember that, for example, key 'e' corresponds to "use" how about replacing the icon on the 'e' key with an icon to reflect its current function?
Anyhoo - lots of people jumped on this and said it was the best thing since... oh I don't know - the latest release of Debian or something ;) and the company behind it announced that it would be a while til it came to market, but in the meantime they would release a drastically cut down version with three buttons. That would be this thing, although its a good few months late.
Did you ever see the film Demolition Man? In that there is reference to the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library - did make me chuckle when he eventually went into politics :)
See, that just illustrates the other great bane of online gaming - server admins with a god complex and a mental age of 5.
I couldn't even count the amount of times I've been banned from a server for cheating because I popped some idiot admin in the head in Counter-Strike.
Mind you as a general rule the servers with people so petty running things I guess I don't want to play on anyway - after a while I had a list of enough servers with decent admins and honest players to keep myself amused whenever I wanted to play :)
It's the same in the UK - Half Life 2 Episode 1 is £19.99 in the shops here, or $19.99 through Steam which is about £10.60 or so - a little more than half the retail price. Hell, IIRC I paid $60 for the HL2 silver pack which gave me Half Life 2, CS:S, DoD:S and a license for every preceeding Valve game - for about the same price as Half Life 2 on its own was in the shops.
Its something I've actually never understood with all the bitching about the length of HL2Ep1 - its roughly a third of the length of HL2 for roughly a third of the cost - seems fair to me, especially since there are bundled extras too - I for one cannot wait to get my hands on Portal or TF2 with the Ep2 release :)
I think Steam is great - tried all sorts of games that I may not otherwise have had a go at - £10 is squarely in the "impulse buy" zone financially speaking - I'm quite prepared to risk that much and chalk it up to experience if I don't like the game.
Escape from Butcher Bay is a great game. Has absolutely nothing to do with Chronicles of Riddick the movie though - its a prequel to Pitch Black, which in itself is set ten or so years before the movie Chronicles of Riddick.
Portal is being released as part of Half Life 2 Episode 2 (Due Feb next year I think) - Its a standalone expansion to Half Life 2 and the follow on to Episode 1.
Thats right - RC1 was quite good but still not 100% there - still managed uptime better than my previous Win98 box though :)
As for RC2 - well, that became the release version IIRC - by the time we got to that the only problem I had was soundcard, but that was evidently manufacturer related - the next driver release cleaned that right up.
Actually that maximum speed is called 'terminal velocity' - air resistance is just one of the factors that determines what that speed is - so higher up terminal velocity is a lot faster as the air resistance is greatly reduced - this is why the fastest freefall speed on record is of the order of 614 mph (about mach 0.9) - held by a chap called Joseph Kittenger after a jump at 108,000 feet.
Tron2.0 was set up as a sequel to the movie - set in the vaguely present day you played (IIRC) the son of Jeff Bridge's character in the movie and really didn't do as well as I thought it deserved - I personally really enjoyed it and graphically it was phenominal - there are certainly no movie-based reasons they couldn't do a sequel.
Ditto Chronicles of Riddick - this was set in Butcher Bay (where Riddick got his eyes done) so is very much a prequel to both movies and broke cannon within 30seconds of the game starting, which has to be some sort of record* ;) Theres no real reason why another game couldn't be done within the timeline of the movies or for that matter afterwards - although the obvious choice would be some other lunacy while Riddick was being hunted down :)
*Note I never got far in the game (its sat on my shelf waiting for me to get around to it) so for all I know what I'm thinking of is resolved later on...
Nope - he meant Thieves' Guild. At least I assume he did :)
Unfortunately apparantly not - although I've only found that out while trying to find the original article I saw it in a couple of years back.
The Stella awards is an entertaining place to waste a little time if you're bored at work - all sorts of ridiculous lawsuits
Not this one again - I know this case is a standard-bearer for the insane lawsuits that come to pass in America but this one was actually not without merit - the coffee was served way too hot (180-odd degrees, which is unfit for consumption - it would burn the mouth) and McDonalds knew it was a problem - there were a *lot* of previous cases and the woman got third degree burns over some *very* sensitive areas.
Oh and the court case found her 1/5 responsible for what happened so was granted "only" 4/5 of the granted compensatory damages.
See now the one where a guy that broke into a house, managed to lock himself in the garage and had to spend two weeks subsisting on dog food and a couple of cans of fizzy drinks because the owners were on holiday and then sued that family for a lot of money - thats a better example :)
I pretty much agree with you - certainly a pleasant female voice was always something that brightened up the dark days I spent working that hellish job but also the few male callers that just wanted to be sorted out and would work with you to fix their problems as quickly as possible were just as welcome - in those cases I would almost invariably do everything in my power to get them back up and running as quickly as possible.
In the six months I spent jockeying a helpdesk I got maybe five calls of each type a day, the other 70-75 were people (male and female) that acted as though it was me *personally* screwing the system up to affect them *specifically* and they would really get annoying, rude and obnoxious - and those callers I'd want to get *rid of* as quickly as possible.
Important points to consider - most helpdesks aren't designed to cater for people like us (and believe me I'm not nearly as smart as some of the people that knock around here) - yes we'd all try all the obvious things long before asking for help but 99% of the population wouldn't. And (to quote Dr House) "People lie" - Men in particular will sooner say 'oh I already checked that' than admit to either a) its not occured to them or (perhaps more likely) b) they're not sure they understood what you just meant.
Of course you're right about the bad support people - I consider myself not to be one of them but I certainly had to deal with the wreckage that some of my colleagues left in terms of pissed off users!
man - someone's insurance premiums are going to be scary after paying for this fender bender!
Or of course he could in fact mean Battlefield 2, which is a) what he said, and b) not available on OSX, so would make sense as an example of a game he could play on a Mac running XP :)
You think thats bad? the top return against my name is a serial killer!
Why can't they? As far as I know all a device has to do to be called an MP3 player is be able to play MP3's - and certainly my iPod does a very good job of that! iTunes can rip to MP3 or AAC and a couple of other formats I think.
Agreed - While killing Book didn't really do much (since he'd hardly been in the film anyway) killing Wash suprised the hell out of me, and changed the colour of the whole movie - from that point on I started to think that maybe The Good Guys wouldn't win - if Wheddon would kill one of the most popular characters in such a brutal and sudden way then who knows what he's got up his sleeve next. It called the rest of the movie into question for me, and that everyone else survived was irrelevent - it meant I no longer had a good idea what to expect from the rest of the film and I *loved* it. Personally I thought Serenity was an amazing movie with the exception of the first part - I didn't like the beginning much but from the point we catch up to Serenity herself I was in heaven :)
I dunno - I like to think that Book's story was told indirectly through the Operative
:) While its disappointing that Firefly ends here at least it feels a good place to stop, which is a hell of a lot better than before Serenity got made and I thank everyone involved for that.
I think he was once an operative just like Mal's nemesis in "Serenity" but something happened to shake his faith in the Alliance and its better world - just like the Operative in Serentiy. It wouldn't suprise me especially that somone that believed so much in a better world would take up orders and try to help folks that way instead...
There are a couple of hints throughout the series and movie that support my theory
1, He has a very high Alliance clearance (From the episode "Safe" where an Alliance crusier treats his wounds)
2, He knew what the Alliance would send after Mal, when noone else seemed to recognise the danger that the Operative presented to them (from the movie)
3, From the first episode (also called Serenity) we know that Book is competent enough in a fight to defeat an armed opponent.
Of course this is all reaching, but I kind of like the idea, as then it means all the major threads of the series are tied up
In the UK they were available in most major bookshops, as were the media novelisations of those comics. Its about as mainstream as any other media tie-in if you ask me.
I dunno - its certainly getting progressively worse here in the UK too - there are all sorts of ambulance-chasers in daytime TV ad breaks...
Depending on location but the legal requirement in my location is that you must yeild to an emergency vehicle where safe to do so - if you are unable to safely get out of an ambulance's way you have no legal right to speed along in front of it.
See by my reckoning that means us brits *should* be paying around £170 and about £34 for games.
I'd be amazed if its not £300 and £60 for us though.
lousy sodding rip-off Britian
Personally I'd say that ID software are good at making a fantastic engine with a mediocre game to advertise it, but then the likes of Raven take that fantastic engine and couple it up to an amazing game - such as the Soldier of Fortune games, or Jedi Knight series.
And Raven are coding Q4, not iD so personally I'm pretty hopeful about it...