A didn't initiate the dot. It just recorded it in passing just like B did. So no information was transmitted between the two points, they both just observed a passing dot. You are calling A's observation of the passing dot "sending a message" but that's incorrect, and it's what is leading to the false conclusion that A is sending a message to B at faster than the speed of light.
The only way for A to send a message to B using the dot is to send a message to the person holding the laser pointer, telling them to move the dot to B. However the time taken to transmit this "message" from A to B would be the time to send the message from A to the holder of the pointer, and then from the holder of the pointer to B. A, B, and the laser pointer form a triangle, and the distance from A to the pointer and back to B must be greater than the distance from A to B, thus the amount of time it takes for the message to travel the path from A to pointer to B must be greater than the time it would take light to travel from A to B. Thus, the information is transmitted from A to B at less than the speed of light between these two points.
I seem to remember from my physics classes oh-so-many years ago that an infinite amount of energy would be required to accelerate a physical object to the speed of light. It takes exponentially more energy to accelerate a physical object to speeds approaching the speed of light; so the faster you want to go, the exponentially more energy you need to do it, and the curve reaches infinity at the speed of light.
In other words, nothing can be accelerated to faster than the speed of light, in any time frame. It is prevented by the requirement of an infinite amount of energy to get it up to that speed, and since it is impossible in a finite amount of time to expend an infinite amount of energy (even if the universe had an infinite amount of energy available at your disposal, which I am not sure it does), it is simply impossible.
So you can't accelerate to past the speed of light in any time frame, the equations don't allow it. However, you can get very close to the speed of light with an incredibly huge amount of energy, much more than would be practically available to anyone, which would still let you get pretty far in a short amount of time (in your frame of reference). Your example is a good one though; observers with telescopes would still see you taking a much longer time to do it than would appear in your time frame.
In fact, I believe if I remember correctly, if you were somehow able to sit on a beam of light and go its speed (not possible), then the rest of the universe would be standing still. It wouldn't just be going really slow, it would have stopped completely. Which I believe means that for light, there is no such thing as time. It is in the place where it started and the place where it ended up, at the same instant. So nothing can go faster than light because light is already infinitely fast, it gets from where it was going to where it ends up in its frame of reference instantaneously. It's just other frames of reference that see it going more slowly than that due to time dilation.
Anyway, this is all just from foggy memory of physics classes last taken nearly 20 years ago, I could be totally wrong.
You cannot seriously be suggesting that the USA exercises some kind of ethical standard in deciding which country to deal with and for what purposes. The counter examples to this are simply too numerous and easy to find to even bother listing here. And if you're trying to compare the USA's foreign policies favorably with China... excuse me??? Read any news headlines whatsoever in the past, oh, FORTY YEARS?!?!
I so agree with this. Can we get a feature that lets us mark news articles as flamebait, and then a preference which lets us not see any article marked as flamebait more than say 100 times. I think that the volume of stories that show up for me on Slashdot would be cut by 3/4 or so...
OMG who the fuck cares. Seriously. This whole Pluto thing has got to be the most ridiculous "news" event of my entire life. The only redeeming quality of it all is that it gives Stephen Colbert something to make fun of.
Could have had much lower than 893, but I didn't bother to sign up for a UID in the first week or so they were offered. If I had known the cache that low UIDs would carry, I would have signed up the minute they announced login ids on Slashdot instead of playing Half Life or Starcraft or whatever it was I was doing back in 1998.
Of course a low Slashdot id is nothing compared to a single-letter domain name. My friend signed up for 'x.com' back when they first made single letter domains available (1995? 1996?) and he sold it a couple of years later for 500 grand and a bunch of stock in the company that became Paypal. He's a millionnaire now.
All I got was a lousy sub-1000 slashdot id... any takers on that?
What you are saying is obviously false. If it were that easy to reproduce the TiVo hardware, and run TiVo's additions to the GPL'd software that it uses on it, then someone would have done it already.
Once again, you're completely missing the point. The developer gets to choose how their code is going to be used. The developer may not want to release their source code so that some hardware manufacturer can lock users into a certain version of the software using DRM mechanisms. The developer may not want the end users of the software to have to spend hundreds of dollars to develop a compatible hardware platform for the source code to run on, rather than using the hardware that they already bought for the express purpose of running the modified version of the GPL'd software in question. The developer will then choose to license their software under GPLv3.
The developer may also not care about these issues, in which case they can use the GPLv2.
It's really very, very simple:
1. Developer writes some great code that they want to share with the world. 2. Developer decides that if they're going to release the code for free for anyone to use, that they want to ensure that all end-users always have the freedom to modify the code, use the modified version, and re-distribute it. 3. Developer releases the code under GPL because it guarantees exactly what the developer wants. 4. Company decides to use the GPL'd software in its product, and uses DRM mechanisms to ensure that modified versions of the GPL'd software can't be run on it. 5. Developer realizes that this violates their intention when they released the code under copyright with GPL restrictions: the end-user can't modify the code and use the modified version. At least, not in a meaningful way (yes, they can buy new hardware or spend extra effort to port the code to some new platform or something like that, but that's not what the developer intended that the user would have to do, and from the user's perspective, it sure doesn't feel like they can modify and use the modified software, since they can't even use it on the platform which it was written to run on!). 6. If developer used GPLv3 they can sue the company for copyright infringement and force the company to respect the license. If the developer used GPLv2 then too bad for them, they didn't protect their code as well as they thought they did because the GPLv2 doesn't address this issue.
Thus we see the value of the GPLv3. It allows developers to protect their code from exploit in a way that they care about. If they don't care about that, they use GPLv2.
I agree with the guy that you don't agree with. In fact I think you are entirely missing the point of the GPL, in several different ways:
1. You're missing the point of the spirit of the GPL, which are the restrictions which it is trying to place on the redistributors of its software. The GPL is a license which allows a developer to ensure that the software that they have written and released always be useable in a certain way by end-users; which includes always being modifiable by those end-users. You are taking a much too narrow view on the meaning of the word "modifiable". It doesn't matter if I can modify the software but can't run it. That's not modifiable. Modifiable in the GPL sense means being able to modify it and use the modified version on the same platform that the original version ran on - which is a much more meaningful definition of modifiable.
2. You're missing the point of software licenses altogether: you seem to suggest that they're somehow meant to serve the end-users. They're not. A software license is a way for the developer of the software to choose how their code is to be used. They've done the work of creating the code, and they're willing to give it away for free - as long as they get some guarantees about how it's going to be used, so that they don't feel grossly exploited. A company which uses a piece of GPL'd software and applies DRM mechanisms to ensure that it can never be modified (by the useful definition of modified that I just gave in point 1) is *EXPLOITING* the GPL. And the developer has every right to try to stop that. The GPLv3 gives them the ability to do that. It's the developer's choice entirely to decide to use the GPLv3 or not. And if they use it, you have very little right to complain that they're not releasing their code under a "free" enough (i.e. "exploitable" enough) license. It's their code, they can release it however they want.
Now of course, just as the developer has every right to put whatever restrictions they want on the source code they release (and many developers find the spirit of the GPLv2 to their liking, and many will find the GPLv3 even better), it is also your right to decide not to use that software because you don't like the license. The greater community will through the collective tension between end-users' desire to get what they want, and GPL developers' desire not to be ripped off, decide which license will win out. So far the GPL has been a huge win obviously, it is hugely successful and appreciated by developers and many end-users alike. And the GPLv3 will be the same.
It's a 2002 Honda CBR 600 F4i. It is also fuel injected, I don't know how that relates to fuel economy. I find that on long trips where I am doing 95% highway riding at a steady speed, I get just over 40 MPG. In heavy traffic city street situations it's less than 35 MPG. My average mileage is probably a bit better than 35 MPG, but not much. I am disappointed, I feel like the bike should do better than that. However a CBR600 F4i is gentle enough in power delivery to make cracking the throttle open just about anywhere a safe proposition (unlike my old Triumph Daytona 955 which threw me off a few times when I gave it too much gas), and as a result, I pin the throttle open quite frequently. Blast off. Maybe that's part of the reason that my fuel economy is so bad...
You can get used to a lower range, easily. My Honda motorcycle has a range of about 150 miles. It doesn't bother me one bit. Every one of those miles is 1000x more fun than any car-driven mile, even if I do have to fuel up once per week instead of once every other week.
Fuel economy could be better though. 35 MPG isn't much better than many cars.
It's not equivalent to buying a book, ripping out pages, and reselling the book with a label indicating that pages are missing.
It's equivalent to buying a book, and then reprinting it with certain portions removed, then selling your versions of the book in exchange for unedited versions.
The distinction may be subtle, but it is important. In the first case, you are not copying anything. Copyright does not apply.
In the second case, you are copying the work; the book you are selling the customer has content copied from the original work. This is subject to copyright law, and the judge (rightfully so in my opinion) ruled it as copyright infringement.
Although the two acts may seem equivalent on some level, it's not possible for the law to be written such that every nuance of equivalence between legal and illegal acts be expressed. It's a shortcoming of laws that they can't be perfect. We just have to live with the law, unless we want to specifically make what this store is doing legal. Which is fine, but it isn't legal until the laws are changed to make it legal.
Claiming that the act in question shouldn't be against the law is one thing, but it's not the right way to address the situation. We should change the law. As it stands, the judge was right in his interpretation.
And with regards to DJ remixes... commercially sold remixes have been subject to tons of lawsuits in the past, most all won by the original artist. So I'm not quite sure what your point is there.
The number of digits in our hands or feet multiplied by 100 then multiplied by the ratio of the circumference to the diamater of a circle equals the number of genes in our bodies.
Sounds like a coincidence to me. How about another:
The total number of eyes you have multiplied by the total number of thumbs you have equals the total number of limbs you have.
Most people play games to have fun. If it's fun, it won't matter exactly what the constraints are on the type of animals you can create. But I thought that would be obvious???
Weren't the Voodoo-based cards there first? I specifically remember the Canopus Pure3D, which didn't do any 2D at all - you had to daisy-chain it with your normal video card, and it took over when you were running 3d games. Tomb Raider looked awesome (for the time) on it. I knew SGI was doomed even before that, when I told my friend who worked there (this was probably early 1995) that someone was going to come up with 3d accelerator cards for PCs that would eat SGIs lunch. How come SGI couldn't see this when it was plainly obvious that it was gonna happen?
1. It's far too early to call the XBOX 360 a failed project or a success.
2. Many non-Microsoft-fanboys think the XBOX 360 is quite good.
3. The PS3 isn't released yet and it's already failed in a couple of ways - it's very late, it's costing Sony $billions, they've reduced the feature set to try to get the project under control, and the announced controllers are a terrible, terrible joke.
I hope the PS3 is good, I have nothing against it (except the ridiculous controller design), but the criticisms you level at the XBOX 360 are just pointless.
Nothing like generalizing an entire 300,000,000 population is there? There are outward-looking and inward-looking people in every country, even yours, believe it or not.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter has made me say "WOW!", on many, many occasions. The graphics are just unbelievable. The gameplay is decent - the only bad part is having to manage 3 or 4 different sets of units (managing a support team, an Apache helicopter, a tank, and a flying spy robot all at the same time can be frustrating, especially when they all do stupid stupid things unless micro managed). But there were many moments when the graphics of that game just blew me away. "WOW!" is an understatement.
I own a PS2 and my friend owns and XBOX and XBOX360. I have to say that I didn't want to like the XBOX at all but ended up liking it better; it just has a more fluid "feel" than the PS2 - games load faster, play faster and with fewer hiccups, the graphics are better etc. And the XBOX360 carries on that same satisfying feel to a much more powerful system. I would buy an XBOX360 in a heartbeat if I had a home theatre system capable of taking advantage of it. I do not intend to buy a PS3, especially if the controller is as incredibly whack as the previews seem to indicate.
If you're referring to the phrase "God bless America", then I don't think you do. So other's comments about the subjunctive case for all the proof you need that everything you have written on this subject was a complete was of time.
You have not convinced me. These are not non-issues; the grandparent is correct, distributing software on multiple flavors of Unix, and supporting it, is a serious issue, even if getting the code to compile in the first place is not so hard (as long as you know how to tell which system calls are "safe" in terms of portability, and which aren't).
Thanks for the tip. At that price I'll probably bite. I was in Fry's and the copies on the shelves were $49.99 but I didn't look at any of their flyers to see if there was one of Fry's "instant rebate" dealies on it.
The review doesn't describe *any* differences between DS2 and DS1. Which I guess is OK since DS1 was fun already.
DS1 was a very easy game. You don't have to aim or exercise much skill, you just have to follow along as the game more or less plays itself. As long as you don't stray too far outside of the realm that you are supposed to be in at any given point in your character's development, the creatures around you will be easy to kill and will provide more than enough experience to quickly level up and move on to harder creatures (which aren't really harder at all since your character is now more capable). It's repetitive but satisfying.
By far the most fun I had with DS1 was when playing multiplayer with my friend, when we would purposefully move early out into harder areas and try to figure out how to, using cooperation, kill creatures that would be far too difficult for either one of us to kill on our own. Usually the strategy involved having one character be chased around while the other laid into the creature, and then switching roles, until the creature was dead. Sometimes we could lure creatures into spots where they couldn't hit us but we could hit them (like from a ledge above them), which was fun too.
I personally much prefer games where you have to aim and dodge to games where you don't, but the DS series is still fun. I just wish these games didn't cost $50, or take so long (years) to drop down to lower prices.
No, he probably did what I sometimes do: as a subscriber to Slashdot, I get to see the articles before they're published, presumably so that I can get a "sneak peek" and also so that I can submit bugs about the editorial text before the content is published. Sometimes I see an article I want to comment on, and I know that if I get an early comment it's more likely to be read and (hopefully) modded up. So I type up my post in an emacs buffer, and refresh the Slashdot homepage every couple of minutes until the story goes from red (not posted yet) to green (posted and ready to receive comments). Then it's simple to copy-and-paste the text.
Slashdot Mirror
A didn't initiate the dot. It just recorded it in passing just like B did. So no information was transmitted between the two points, they both just observed a passing dot. You are calling A's observation of the passing dot "sending a message" but that's incorrect, and it's what is leading to the false conclusion that A is sending a message to B at faster than the speed of light.
The only way for A to send a message to B using the dot is to send a message to the person holding the laser pointer, telling them to move the dot to B. However the time taken to transmit this "message" from A to B would be the time to send the message from A to the holder of the pointer, and then from the holder of the pointer to B. A, B, and the laser pointer form a triangle, and the distance from A to the pointer and back to B must be greater than the distance from A to B, thus the amount of time it takes for the message to travel the path from A to pointer to B must be greater than the time it would take light to travel from A to B. Thus, the information is transmitted from A to B at less than the speed of light between these two points.
I seem to remember from my physics classes oh-so-many years ago that an infinite amount of energy would be required to accelerate a physical object to the speed of light. It takes exponentially more energy to accelerate a physical object to speeds approaching the speed of light; so the faster you want to go, the exponentially more energy you need to do it, and the curve reaches infinity at the speed of light.
In other words, nothing can be accelerated to faster than the speed of light, in any time frame. It is prevented by the requirement of an infinite amount of energy to get it up to that speed, and since it is impossible in a finite amount of time to expend an infinite amount of energy (even if the universe had an infinite amount of energy available at your disposal, which I am not sure it does), it is simply impossible.
So you can't accelerate to past the speed of light in any time frame, the equations don't allow it. However, you can get very close to the speed of light with an incredibly huge amount of energy, much more than would be practically available to anyone, which would still let you get pretty far in a short amount of time (in your frame of reference). Your example is a good one though; observers with telescopes would still see you taking a much longer time to do it than would appear in your time frame.
In fact, I believe if I remember correctly, if you were somehow able to sit on a beam of light and go its speed (not possible), then the rest of the universe would be standing still. It wouldn't just be going really slow, it would have stopped completely. Which I believe means that for light, there is no such thing as time. It is in the place where it started and the place where it ended up, at the same instant. So nothing can go faster than light because light is already infinitely fast, it gets from where it was going to where it ends up in its frame of reference instantaneously. It's just other frames of reference that see it going more slowly than that due to time dilation.
Anyway, this is all just from foggy memory of physics classes last taken nearly 20 years ago, I could be totally wrong.
You cannot seriously be suggesting that the USA exercises some kind of ethical standard in deciding which country to deal with and for what purposes. The counter examples to this are simply too numerous and easy to find to even bother listing here. And if you're trying to compare the USA's foreign policies favorably with China ... excuse me??? Read any news headlines whatsoever in the past, oh, FORTY YEARS?!?!
I so agree with this. Can we get a feature that lets us mark news articles as flamebait, and then a preference which lets us not see any article marked as flamebait more than say 100 times. I think that the volume of stories that show up for me on Slashdot would be cut by 3/4 or so ...
Your comment is stupid and I am glad to see that it has not been modded up.
OMG who the fuck cares. Seriously. This whole Pluto thing has got to be the most ridiculous "news" event of my entire life. The only redeeming quality of it all is that it gives Stephen Colbert something to make fun of.
Viola.
... any takers on that?
Could have had much lower than 893, but I didn't bother to sign up for a UID in the first week or so they were offered. If I had known the cache that low UIDs would carry, I would have signed up the minute they announced login ids on Slashdot instead of playing Half Life or Starcraft or whatever it was I was doing back in 1998.
Of course a low Slashdot id is nothing compared to a single-letter domain name. My friend signed up for 'x.com' back when they first made single letter domains available (1995? 1996?) and he sold it a couple of years later for 500 grand and a bunch of stock in the company that became Paypal. He's a millionnaire now.
All I got was a lousy sub-1000 slashdot id
What you are saying is obviously false. If it were that easy to reproduce the TiVo hardware, and run TiVo's additions to the GPL'd software that it uses on it, then someone would have done it already.
Once again, you're completely missing the point. The developer gets to choose how their code is going to be used. The developer may not want to release their source code so that some hardware manufacturer can lock users into a certain version of the software using DRM mechanisms. The developer may not want the end users of the software to have to spend hundreds of dollars to develop a compatible hardware platform for the source code to run on, rather than using the hardware that they already bought for the express purpose of running the modified version of the GPL'd software in question. The developer will then choose to license their software under GPLv3.
The developer may also not care about these issues, in which case they can use the GPLv2.
It's really very, very simple:
1. Developer writes some great code that they want to share with the world.
2. Developer decides that if they're going to release the code for free for anyone to use, that they want to ensure that all end-users always have the freedom to modify the code, use the modified version, and re-distribute it.
3. Developer releases the code under GPL because it guarantees exactly what the developer wants.
4. Company decides to use the GPL'd software in its product, and uses DRM mechanisms to ensure that modified versions of the GPL'd software can't be run on it.
5. Developer realizes that this violates their intention when they released the code under copyright with GPL restrictions: the end-user can't modify the code and use the modified version. At least, not in a meaningful way (yes, they can buy new hardware or spend extra effort to port the code to some new platform or something like that, but that's not what the developer intended that the user would have to do, and from the user's perspective, it sure doesn't feel like they can modify and use the modified software, since they can't even use it on the platform which it was written to run on!).
6. If developer used GPLv3 they can sue the company for copyright infringement and force the company to respect the license. If the developer used GPLv2 then too bad for them, they didn't protect their code as well as they thought they did because the GPLv2 doesn't address this issue.
Thus we see the value of the GPLv3. It allows developers to protect their code from exploit in a way that they care about. If they don't care about that, they use GPLv2.
I agree with the guy that you don't agree with. In fact I think you are entirely missing the point of the GPL, in several different ways:
1. You're missing the point of the spirit of the GPL, which are the restrictions which it is trying to place on the redistributors of its software. The GPL is a license which allows a developer to ensure that the software that they have written and released always be useable in a certain way by end-users; which includes always being modifiable by those end-users. You are taking a much too narrow view on the meaning of the word "modifiable". It doesn't matter if I can modify the software but can't run it. That's not modifiable. Modifiable in the GPL sense means being able to modify it and use the modified version on the same platform that the original version ran on - which is a much more meaningful definition of modifiable.
2. You're missing the point of software licenses altogether: you seem to suggest that they're somehow meant to serve the end-users. They're not. A software license is a way for the developer of the software to choose how their code is to be used. They've done the work of creating the code, and they're willing to give it away for free - as long as they get some guarantees about how it's going to be used, so that they don't feel grossly exploited. A company which uses a piece of GPL'd software and applies DRM mechanisms to ensure that it can never be modified (by the useful definition of modified that I just gave in point 1) is *EXPLOITING* the GPL. And the developer has every right to try to stop that. The GPLv3 gives them the ability to do that. It's the developer's choice entirely to decide to use the GPLv3 or not. And if they use it, you have very little right to complain that they're not releasing their code under a "free" enough (i.e. "exploitable" enough) license. It's their code, they can release it however they want.
Now of course, just as the developer has every right to put whatever restrictions they want on the source code they release (and many developers find the spirit of the GPLv2 to their liking, and many will find the GPLv3 even better), it is also your right to decide not to use that software because you don't like the license. The greater community will through the collective tension between end-users' desire to get what they want, and GPL developers' desire not to be ripped off, decide which license will win out. So far the GPL has been a huge win obviously, it is hugely successful and appreciated by developers and many end-users alike. And the GPLv3 will be the same.
It's a 2002 Honda CBR 600 F4i. It is also fuel injected, I don't know how that relates to fuel economy. I find that on long trips where I am doing 95% highway riding at a steady speed, I get just over 40 MPG. In heavy traffic city street situations it's less than 35 MPG. My average mileage is probably a bit better than 35 MPG, but not much. I am disappointed, I feel like the bike should do better than that. However a CBR600 F4i is gentle enough in power delivery to make cracking the throttle open just about anywhere a safe proposition (unlike my old Triumph Daytona 955 which threw me off a few times when I gave it too much gas), and as a result, I pin the throttle open quite frequently. Blast off. Maybe that's part of the reason that my fuel economy is so bad ...
You can get used to a lower range, easily. My Honda motorcycle has a range of about 150 miles. It doesn't bother me one bit. Every one of those miles is 1000x more fun than any car-driven mile, even if I do have to fuel up once per week instead of once every other week.
Fuel economy could be better though. 35 MPG isn't much better than many cars.
Your analogy is flawed.
... commercially sold remixes have been subject to tons of lawsuits in the past, most all won by the original artist. So I'm not quite sure what your point is there.
It's not equivalent to buying a book, ripping out pages, and reselling the book with a label indicating that pages are missing.
It's equivalent to buying a book, and then reprinting it with certain portions removed, then selling your versions of the book in exchange for unedited versions.
The distinction may be subtle, but it is important. In the first case, you are not copying anything. Copyright does not apply.
In the second case, you are copying the work; the book you are selling the customer has content copied from the original work. This is subject to copyright law, and the judge (rightfully so in my opinion) ruled it as copyright infringement.
Although the two acts may seem equivalent on some level, it's not possible for the law to be written such that every nuance of equivalence between legal and illegal acts be expressed. It's a shortcoming of laws that they can't be perfect. We just have to live with the law, unless we want to specifically make what this store is doing legal. Which is fine, but it isn't legal until the laws are changed to make it legal.
Claiming that the act in question shouldn't be against the law is one thing, but it's not the right way to address the situation. We should change the law. As it stands, the judge was right in his interpretation.
And with regards to DJ remixes
Hm let's see ...
...
The number of digits in our hands or feet multiplied by 100 then multiplied by the ratio of the circumference to the diamater of a circle equals the number of genes in our bodies.
Sounds like a coincidence to me. How about another:
The total number of eyes you have multiplied by the total number of thumbs you have equals the total number of limbs you have.
Spooky
Most people play games to have fun. If it's fun, it won't matter exactly what the constraints are on the type of animals you can create. But I thought that would be obvious???
Weren't the Voodoo-based cards there first? I specifically remember the Canopus Pure3D, which didn't do any 2D at all - you had to daisy-chain it with your normal video card, and it took over when you were running 3d games. Tomb Raider looked awesome (for the time) on it. I knew SGI was doomed even before that, when I told my friend who worked there (this was probably early 1995) that someone was going to come up with 3d accelerator cards for PCs that would eat SGIs lunch. How come SGI couldn't see this when it was plainly obvious that it was gonna happen?
Your statements are ridiculous on many levels.
1. It's far too early to call the XBOX 360 a failed project or a success.
2. Many non-Microsoft-fanboys think the XBOX 360 is quite good.
3. The PS3 isn't released yet and it's already failed in a couple of ways - it's very late, it's costing Sony $billions, they've reduced the feature set to try to get the project under control, and the announced controllers are a terrible, terrible joke.
I hope the PS3 is good, I have nothing against it (except the ridiculous controller design), but the criticisms you level at the XBOX 360 are just pointless.
Nothing like generalizing an entire 300,000,000 population is there? There are outward-looking and inward-looking people in every country, even yours, believe it or not.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter has made me say "WOW!", on many, many occasions. The graphics are just unbelievable. The gameplay is decent - the only bad part is having to manage 3 or 4 different sets of units (managing a support team, an Apache helicopter, a tank, and a flying spy robot all at the same time can be frustrating, especially when they all do stupid stupid things unless micro managed). But there were many moments when the graphics of that game just blew me away. "WOW!" is an understatement.
I own a PS2 and my friend owns and XBOX and XBOX360. I have to say that I didn't want to like the XBOX at all but ended up liking it better; it just has a more fluid "feel" than the PS2 - games load faster, play faster and with fewer hiccups, the graphics are better etc. And the XBOX360 carries on that same satisfying feel to a much more powerful system. I would buy an XBOX360 in a heartbeat if I had a home theatre system capable of taking advantage of it. I do not intend to buy a PS3, especially if the controller is as incredibly whack as the previews seem to indicate.
If you're referring to the phrase "God bless America", then I don't think you do. So other's comments about the subjunctive case for all the proof you need that everything you have written on this subject was a complete was of time.
You have not convinced me. These are not non-issues; the grandparent is correct, distributing software on multiple flavors of Unix, and supporting it, is a serious issue, even if getting the code to compile in the first place is not so hard (as long as you know how to tell which system calls are "safe" in terms of portability, and which aren't).
Thanks for the tip. At that price I'll probably bite. I was in Fry's and the copies on the shelves were $49.99 but I didn't look at any of their flyers to see if there was one of Fry's "instant rebate" dealies on it.
The review doesn't describe *any* differences between DS2 and DS1. Which I guess is OK since DS1 was fun already.
DS1 was a very easy game. You don't have to aim or exercise much skill, you just have to follow along as the game more or less plays itself. As long as you don't stray too far outside of the realm that you are supposed to be in at any given point in your character's development, the creatures around you will be easy to kill and will provide more than enough experience to quickly level up and move on to harder creatures (which aren't really harder at all since your character is now more capable). It's repetitive but satisfying.
By far the most fun I had with DS1 was when playing multiplayer with my friend, when we would purposefully move early out into harder areas and try to figure out how to, using cooperation, kill creatures that would be far too difficult for either one of us to kill on our own. Usually the strategy involved having one character be chased around while the other laid into the creature, and then switching roles, until the creature was dead. Sometimes we could lure creatures into spots where they couldn't hit us but we could hit them (like from a ledge above them), which was fun too.
I personally much prefer games where you have to aim and dodge to games where you don't, but the DS series is still fun. I just wish these games didn't cost $50, or take so long (years) to drop down to lower prices.
He didn't say it wasn't an issue. He just said it was a side issue.
No, he probably did what I sometimes do: as a subscriber to Slashdot, I get to see the articles before they're published, presumably so that I can get a "sneak peek" and also so that I can submit bugs about the editorial text before the content is published. Sometimes I see an article I want to comment on, and I know that if I get an early comment it's more likely to be read and (hopefully) modded up. So I type up my post in an emacs buffer, and refresh the Slashdot homepage every couple of minutes until the story goes from red (not posted yet) to green (posted and ready to receive comments). Then it's simple to copy-and-paste the text.
Your experiences with SOCOM2 are par for the course. It doesn't matter what networking hardware you have. The game and the servers are bugged.