All the obvious stuff has been said so far, so I'll add this:
I would want to know all the hidden secrets and answers to the conspiracies of our nation's history. I'm not sure if the President actually has access to this knowledge but he must have the power to get some answers. Maybe all the conspiracies of the last 100 years have been sensationalized and the public really was given the straight truth, but I'd at least like to know one way or the other.
Stupendous outlay? The kid could have picked up 1000 albums/45's for $500 if he knew where to shop. I'm guess he spent no more than $2000 on his collection, which is not a lot for kids. They get a job and have nothing to spend their earnings on except their hobbies if their parents help them out even a little. Heck, my dad probably had a 1000 records by the time he was 15, but now he has them all on his ipod. The circle is complete I suppose.
Sorry to double post, but I'm still only using the Firefox browser when browsing even internal sites. I use a Firefox extension called IE Tab that allows you to switch rendering engines on the fly. Pretty spiffy.
Just this week, they started pushing IE7 out to our computers and advertised it at the cafeteria computers "Try IE7 and Office 2007 Today!"
I don't even have IE7 at home but once I got the message that they were forcing IE7 on me this week I decided to make a change. Now I'm attempting to use Firefox exclusively at work. Before I was using IE6 for the intranet and Firefox for the internet. I'm also discovering that a lot of internal sites do not work with Firefox, just a moment ago I found out our timekeeping site doesn't work. Seriously, the timekeeping site! This site isn't even restricted to corporate IPs, I can access it from home and I'm not allowed to use a standard browser.
Thankfully, some things do work with Firefox, but I need to figure out who runs these sites so I can send them emails...
Thank you so much for this, I got sick of clicking next after the first page. I'm really sick of Slashdot linking to all these hundred page articles with one sentence of each information on each page. Makes me want to RTFA even less.
For one, don't let fear mongering articles like yesterday's scare you into something you didn't plan on doing on Monday. The opinions of some super intelligent professors should be considered, but also remember the position they are in and how disconnected they are from real working world.
I graduated two years ago and went to a school primarily focused on Java, but the classes I took were still great preparation for what I'm doing now. Just because you're using a high level language doesn't mean everything you learned about data structures and algorithms is useless.
Anyways, there are a lot of good recommendations here but don't go overboard on changing your life to realize them. Remember who you are and what YOU want to learn, don't just learn it because Slashdot or some random professors think it would be best for YOUR career.
Looks like the assigned score hasn't been refactored since then. I suppose that's a good sign the book is actually good and doesn't focus on specific technologies.
Well, if anything it makes Fox News look like total idiots for inviting Fred Thompson to their debate instead of Ron Paul, considering Thompson received 1% of the votes and Paul 8%. It is a little disheartening for Paul fans, but it's a long trail so hopefully he'll pick up momentum somewhere.
Here is how I found it repetitive, expanding some on my review.
Combat: You are correct that you can switch weapons up in battle, and I found myself doing that constantly near the end when the game threw 25 guys at you at once for on reason other than to throw 25 guys at you at once. And I admit that when I found out how cool it was to fight with just the assassin's blade by only countering, I had more fun. But, the problem is every large fight seemed to go about the same way. About five guys would approach you, they'd try to surround you so you'd work yourself between them so their angle of attack was less. Then you'd wait until they tried to kill you and then counter them. You could start an attack of your own but you will no doubt get hit after being parried for the fourth time in a row. So you wait and take them out slowly and try to use momentum from killing the guards on the next one and just hope it works. You kill a guard and then another one will approach and eventually all the guards in the area will be dead. That's essentially every skirmish in the game right there. You can start them off differently, and I tried many different starts, but the next 90% is the same.
Missions: Like you said, there are something like five types of missions, and you need to do I think three of them per target to get enough information. Of course you can do them all, but some of them are pretty obnoxious because of the A.I. Pickpocketing and eavesdropping are jokes and just require you to basically sit there and press one button and the right time. Beating someone up is simple, just listen to them talk for a minute about some crap and then follow them into the alley. Then there was a mini-assassination where you take out a target for someone, I think you were timed for that which is not very good gameplay. And I can't even remember if there was another type. Now imagine doing three of these nine times throughout the game. That's 27 times you're just sitting on a park bench or trying to press B at the right moment to pickpocket someone. Repetitive.
Assassinations: Now that you know where your target is, you go there and are "treated" to a five minute cutscene of your target doing bad things so you know you're not making a mistake of killing them. Basically the game injects some morals to make sure you don't kill someone that might possibly be innocent. Usually the target kills someone or spouts out mean things. Then after they're done talking, you try to make your move. Most times you will be seen by the guards and then you'll have to chase your target or maybe you'll get lucky and kill them. Then you're treated to another five minute cutscene of your target explaining why they shouldn't die, blah blah blah (it's a trippy scene, weird stuff and out of place). But you kill them anyway. Then you run away to your hideout. Repeat that nine times for the game.
So those are the three levels of repetitiveness. Repeat each of those nine times and you have the entire game. In my review I say you really only need to do one or two of them to get a feel for what the rest of the game is like because the game doesn't really try anything new later. It's disappointing. I'd go into more but gotta take care of some things. Respond if you'd like and I'll reply again.
Having played through Assassin's Creed, the best thing the game has going for it is its open world. The game is the single most repetitive game I have ever played, partly from how open it is. While its openness is beneficial for exploration (finding and climbing viewpoints is awesome), going from point A to point B should only take X number of minutes, but actually takes 5X because guards are spotting you from a 100 feet away because you're not walking as slow as possible. I really had high hopes for this game and while the first few hours are fun, if you get through them you have basically beaten the game. Here's my full review here.
I've never read Henry Jenkins but I totally agree with him that Metal Gear Solid and Mario 64 are really good sandbox games, even if they aren't the typical open game.
Every time I read about these rovers, I'm impressed. How often is something designed and built for a short period of time that last X times longer that it should? (16x for Spirit and Opportunity for those who are counting!) It's usually the total opposite, designing something to last 20 years and it turns out to last far fewer and that's even with regular maintenance. These rovers are on a dusty planet and haven't been worked on by human hands in a long time. These are really triumphs in technology if you ask me. I'm also similarly impressed with something like Voyager 1 which was launched 30+ years ago and is still communicating with Earth, but that's in the vacuum of space and doesn't really have a lot of unknown variables (besides the recent entry into the termination shock region).
Businesses use support, that's who. Why do you think they actually have to weigh the costs between using Windows or Linux on their servers? To us, it'd be obvious: go Linux, it's free. But support is definitely not free and has to be carefully considered when making decisions that affect small to large businesses.
Microsoft could really care less about the average home user. They don't really care if your experience sucks, they don't really care if you pirate it, and they don't really care if you can't figure something out. They do care about the average business though. They do care if their experience sucks, they do care if they pirate it, and they do care if they can't figure something out. Support is where the real money is.
Unless you're American: in which case, just think of this like the slang you don't understand in Doctor Who, words like 'chav' and 'ASBO'. I watch a lot of Top Gear, and being American, I had no idea what a sleeping policeman was. Once I looked that up, I thought it was brilliant. I now respect your funny sounding words much more and am trying to adopt them into my everyday speech. I think coopay (coupe) is my favorite. Though I don't know what chav means and I think ASBO was that walking Japanese robot that fell over.
Sleeping policeman == speed bump
Oh yeah, very interesting rant and investigation there.
Disclaimer: I loved Jade Empire and am excited for the sequel.
Everything up until the ending was balanced pretty well I thought. And actually, that end-game decision is actually useful in seeing multiple endings with only one play through. I was good the whole game and then saw the good guy ending. I then rolled back a few saves so I could make the other decision and kill my friends or whatever and then got to see the bad guy ending. I don't think that's the proper way to do it honestly, but it was useful in one sense.
I really hope they have another character like Wild Flower in Jade Empire 2. For those who never played it or can't remember, Wild Flower is like a seven year old girl inhabited by a demon. She actually died a while back but the demon took over her body so he could exist in the physical world. It actually worked really well because whenever the demon talked her eyes would go red and she would have a deep, scary voice. You learn later on she has another demon in her body too and they're at war and at a point, you can choose to side with one demon or the other and remove them from the body forever. She was actually one of the deepest characters in the game if you ask me. Very cool.
I'm not sure how much removing the exchange rate would help. For one, the exchange rate I believe is actually useful because people can purchase Linden dollars with real money, if you remove that, you've just created a black market for the exchange similar to World of Warcraft. WoW doesn't list an exchange rate, but for various economic reasons, it still has value. I can go to Ebay and pay X dollars for X amount of gold. The exchange rate isn't written in stone by Blizzard but it still exists. But maybe your point is if the rate wasn't backed by Linden then when people lose a lot of money they can't be blamed because it doesn't necessarily have real monetary value, but then Linden wouldn't be able to make money from selling Linden dollars.
If you could go into a little detail on your system setup that would be great. At home I just run XBMC off my Xbox and stream from my computer, but I'm thinking about something a little more dedicated for the future. Like what are the specs of your Linux XBMC machine, are you running Ubuntu on it, can you recommend any forums or sites to check out. Thanks.
Yeah, I would agree with you on that. But that really makes me wonder if the Wii could handle h.264 if the original Xbox can not reliably? Don't want to start any kind of console war with this question, more just curious. I guess time will tell.
I'm sure you're aware but I would recommend buying an Xbox and install Xbox Media Center on it. It can do everything you want plus more (hard drive built in opens many opportunities), and they're really cheap right now. I run an Xbox at home and use it as my media center, great stuff.
I guess that's a good thing, right? Lots of people here point at the music industry and laugh saying they can't adapt and how they're in the stone age. And here they are using Youtube to their advantage. I'm not saying their tactics weren't sneaky but at least they were interesting looking back and she's obviously famous now (not that I've heard of her).
Slashdot Mirror
All the obvious stuff has been said so far, so I'll add this:
I would want to know all the hidden secrets and answers to the conspiracies of our nation's history. I'm not sure if the President actually has access to this knowledge but he must have the power to get some answers. Maybe all the conspiracies of the last 100 years have been sensationalized and the public really was given the straight truth, but I'd at least like to know one way or the other.
Stupendous outlay? The kid could have picked up 1000 albums/45's for $500 if he knew where to shop. I'm guess he spent no more than $2000 on his collection, which is not a lot for kids. They get a job and have nothing to spend their earnings on except their hobbies if their parents help them out even a little. Heck, my dad probably had a 1000 records by the time he was 15, but now he has them all on his ipod. The circle is complete I suppose.
But if they're a fan of hot grits, you'd better hire them immediately.
Soda companies blamed video games a bit back, and then back peddled on their statement.
http://kotaku.com/335546/soda-companies-blame-videogames-for-fat-kids
Sorry to double post, but I'm still only using the Firefox browser when browsing even internal sites. I use a Firefox extension called IE Tab that allows you to switch rendering engines on the fly. Pretty spiffy.
Just this week, they started pushing IE7 out to our computers and advertised it at the cafeteria computers "Try IE7 and Office 2007 Today!"
I don't even have IE7 at home but once I got the message that they were forcing IE7 on me this week I decided to make a change. Now I'm attempting to use Firefox exclusively at work. Before I was using IE6 for the intranet and Firefox for the internet. I'm also discovering that a lot of internal sites do not work with Firefox, just a moment ago I found out our timekeeping site doesn't work. Seriously, the timekeeping site! This site isn't even restricted to corporate IPs, I can access it from home and I'm not allowed to use a standard browser.
Thankfully, some things do work with Firefox, but I need to figure out who runs these sites so I can send them emails...
Seems like the real seedy bars are the ones selling your information after they scan your license. Spam is coming full circle.
Thank you so much for this, I got sick of clicking next after the first page. I'm really sick of Slashdot linking to all these hundred page articles with one sentence of each information on each page. Makes me want to RTFA even less.
But what about saving U.S. taxpayers $1 million in paper costs? It doesn't seem like much to the federal budget, but every little bit helps.
For one, don't let fear mongering articles like yesterday's scare you into something you didn't plan on doing on Monday. The opinions of some super intelligent professors should be considered, but also remember the position they are in and how disconnected they are from real working world.
I graduated two years ago and went to a school primarily focused on Java, but the classes I took were still great preparation for what I'm doing now. Just because you're using a high level language doesn't mean everything you learned about data structures and algorithms is useless.
Anyways, there are a lot of good recommendations here but don't go overboard on changing your life to realize them. Remember who you are and what YOU want to learn, don't just learn it because Slashdot or some random professors think it would be best for YOUR career.
Looks like the assigned score hasn't been refactored since then. I suppose that's a good sign the book is actually good and doesn't focus on specific technologies.
Well, if anything it makes Fox News look like total idiots for inviting Fred Thompson to their debate instead of Ron Paul, considering Thompson received 1% of the votes and Paul 8%. It is a little disheartening for Paul fans, but it's a long trail so hopefully he'll pick up momentum somewhere.
Here is how I found it repetitive, expanding some on my review.
Combat: You are correct that you can switch weapons up in battle, and I found myself doing that constantly near the end when the game threw 25 guys at you at once for on reason other than to throw 25 guys at you at once. And I admit that when I found out how cool it was to fight with just the assassin's blade by only countering, I had more fun. But, the problem is every large fight seemed to go about the same way. About five guys would approach you, they'd try to surround you so you'd work yourself between them so their angle of attack was less. Then you'd wait until they tried to kill you and then counter them. You could start an attack of your own but you will no doubt get hit after being parried for the fourth time in a row. So you wait and take them out slowly and try to use momentum from killing the guards on the next one and just hope it works. You kill a guard and then another one will approach and eventually all the guards in the area will be dead. That's essentially every skirmish in the game right there. You can start them off differently, and I tried many different starts, but the next 90% is the same.
Missions: Like you said, there are something like five types of missions, and you need to do I think three of them per target to get enough information. Of course you can do them all, but some of them are pretty obnoxious because of the A.I. Pickpocketing and eavesdropping are jokes and just require you to basically sit there and press one button and the right time. Beating someone up is simple, just listen to them talk for a minute about some crap and then follow them into the alley. Then there was a mini-assassination where you take out a target for someone, I think you were timed for that which is not very good gameplay. And I can't even remember if there was another type. Now imagine doing three of these nine times throughout the game. That's 27 times you're just sitting on a park bench or trying to press B at the right moment to pickpocket someone. Repetitive.
Assassinations: Now that you know where your target is, you go there and are "treated" to a five minute cutscene of your target doing bad things so you know you're not making a mistake of killing them. Basically the game injects some morals to make sure you don't kill someone that might possibly be innocent. Usually the target kills someone or spouts out mean things. Then after they're done talking, you try to make your move. Most times you will be seen by the guards and then you'll have to chase your target or maybe you'll get lucky and kill them. Then you're treated to another five minute cutscene of your target explaining why they shouldn't die, blah blah blah (it's a trippy scene, weird stuff and out of place). But you kill them anyway. Then you run away to your hideout. Repeat that nine times for the game.
So those are the three levels of repetitiveness. Repeat each of those nine times and you have the entire game. In my review I say you really only need to do one or two of them to get a feel for what the rest of the game is like because the game doesn't really try anything new later. It's disappointing. I'd go into more but gotta take care of some things. Respond if you'd like and I'll reply again.
Having played through Assassin's Creed, the best thing the game has going for it is its open world. The game is the single most repetitive game I have ever played, partly from how open it is. While its openness is beneficial for exploration (finding and climbing viewpoints is awesome), going from point A to point B should only take X number of minutes, but actually takes 5X because guards are spotting you from a 100 feet away because you're not walking as slow as possible. I really had high hopes for this game and while the first few hours are fun, if you get through them you have basically beaten the game. Here's my full review here.
I've never read Henry Jenkins but I totally agree with him that Metal Gear Solid and Mario 64 are really good sandbox games, even if they aren't the typical open game.
Every time I read about these rovers, I'm impressed. How often is something designed and built for a short period of time that last X times longer that it should? (16x for Spirit and Opportunity for those who are counting!) It's usually the total opposite, designing something to last 20 years and it turns out to last far fewer and that's even with regular maintenance. These rovers are on a dusty planet and haven't been worked on by human hands in a long time. These are really triumphs in technology if you ask me. I'm also similarly impressed with something like Voyager 1 which was launched 30+ years ago and is still communicating with Earth, but that's in the vacuum of space and doesn't really have a lot of unknown variables (besides the recent entry into the termination shock region).
Businesses use support, that's who. Why do you think they actually have to weigh the costs between using Windows or Linux on their servers? To us, it'd be obvious: go Linux, it's free. But support is definitely not free and has to be carefully considered when making decisions that affect small to large businesses.
Microsoft could really care less about the average home user. They don't really care if your experience sucks, they don't really care if you pirate it, and they don't really care if you can't figure something out. They do care about the average business though. They do care if their experience sucks, they do care if they pirate it, and they do care if they can't figure something out. Support is where the real money is.
Sleeping policeman == speed bump
Oh yeah, very interesting rant and investigation there.
Not a book, but a comic. I'm not sure how much it will actually help but it's humorous and gives us non-GUI programmers an insight on their world.
OK-Cancel
Disclaimer: I loved Jade Empire and am excited for the sequel.
Everything up until the ending was balanced pretty well I thought. And actually, that end-game decision is actually useful in seeing multiple endings with only one play through. I was good the whole game and then saw the good guy ending. I then rolled back a few saves so I could make the other decision and kill my friends or whatever and then got to see the bad guy ending. I don't think that's the proper way to do it honestly, but it was useful in one sense.
I really hope they have another character like Wild Flower in Jade Empire 2. For those who never played it or can't remember, Wild Flower is like a seven year old girl inhabited by a demon. She actually died a while back but the demon took over her body so he could exist in the physical world. It actually worked really well because whenever the demon talked her eyes would go red and she would have a deep, scary voice. You learn later on she has another demon in her body too and they're at war and at a point, you can choose to side with one demon or the other and remove them from the body forever. She was actually one of the deepest characters in the game if you ask me. Very cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jade_Empire_characters#Wild_Flower
I'm not sure how much removing the exchange rate would help. For one, the exchange rate I believe is actually useful because people can purchase Linden dollars with real money, if you remove that, you've just created a black market for the exchange similar to World of Warcraft. WoW doesn't list an exchange rate, but for various economic reasons, it still has value. I can go to Ebay and pay X dollars for X amount of gold. The exchange rate isn't written in stone by Blizzard but it still exists. But maybe your point is if the rate wasn't backed by Linden then when people lose a lot of money they can't be blamed because it doesn't necessarily have real monetary value, but then Linden wouldn't be able to make money from selling Linden dollars.
If you could go into a little detail on your system setup that would be great. At home I just run XBMC off my Xbox and stream from my computer, but I'm thinking about something a little more dedicated for the future. Like what are the specs of your Linux XBMC machine, are you running Ubuntu on it, can you recommend any forums or sites to check out. Thanks.
Yeah, I would agree with you on that. But that really makes me wonder if the Wii could handle h.264 if the original Xbox can not reliably? Don't want to start any kind of console war with this question, more just curious. I guess time will tell.
I'm sure you're aware but I would recommend buying an Xbox and install Xbox Media Center on it. It can do everything you want plus more (hard drive built in opens many opportunities), and they're really cheap right now. I run an Xbox at home and use it as my media center, great stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/
I guess that's a good thing, right? Lots of people here point at the music industry and laugh saying they can't adapt and how they're in the stone age. And here they are using Youtube to their advantage. I'm not saying their tactics weren't sneaky but at least they were interesting looking back and she's obviously famous now (not that I've heard of her).
One of the selling points of some stadiums is Wifi all over. Take the San Francisco Giant's baseball stadium.
http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/ballpark/wifi.jsp