Yep, don't ever question the big man in the sky, heathens! Trying to think rationally about things like accountability and responsibility leads to trouble!
Certainly if a god created us, it's our own fault he created us imperfect and put us in a situation where we were statistically guaranteed to screw up eventually!
Clearly, the billions of people who profess to believe in the same god as me couldn't possibly be wrong! We're right, and those other 2 billion guys who beileve that other thing are all just idiots!
I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive, but it was mostly just a joke. The kernel's APIs change quite regularly, and things like the Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide haven't been updated to reflect 3.0.0 yet. Programmers are notorious for enjoying coding, but forgetting to do documentation (myself included).
It's kind of bizarre to praise MS just because there is a worse alternative. For one thing, OSX itself is still pretty open, and Windows 8 is going to have an MS controlled store for Metro apps.
I don't own an iPhone/iPad, or have any interest in one, but I think that Jobs spurned far more innovation than Gates. It always felt like MS were stifling things, but Apple has actually driven some much needed (IMO) innovation in interfaces. There are positives and negatives for everything, but I certainly think there were other companies who would have done a much better job of driving OS innovation through the 90s than MS - for example Novell or HP.
I honestly don't think we'd be worse off if Apple took the lead in the 90s, at least from a technological point of view. I think we still would have ended up with a Linux-like competitor as well. So even if Apple did implement a walled garden in their desktop OS, it wouldn't be the only option.
Anyway - while Steve Jobs could be a douche at times, you have to give him credit for the change he brought to the industry. The state of technology in the late 90s and early 2000s was kind of boring, but Apple shook things up and forced companies to care about the end user experience rather than just ticking feature boxes.
From what I've seen in kernel hacking documentation and tutorials so far, that means "we're probably not going to get around to telling you what happened"..
"Storms" and "attacks" are both verbs. The dust is storming, the bear is attacking. There was an s missing from the headline. It's a Slashdot meme to make jokes about the poor editorial quailty. You need to relax and get over it.
According to my colleague, the option is there for Win7 to do that now. It's apparently the software vendors who need to integrate their apps into it. I doubt Adobe and Oracle will do that without being pushed though, there probably is something in the rules against pushing extra toolbars and such when updating.. they love doing that.
I've built my own in the past, but I couldn't really be bothered this time - especially with wanting water cooling, if I did something wrong and leaked water over everything or something like that then I'd have to foot the bill for that myself, so I don't mind getting it done professionally. Then if something goes wrong I can get them to replace it!
I'm pretty impulsive and focused when I get an idea in my head, so I did a lot of research last night and today and settled on a system from http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/ with a nice quiet case and fans (so it can sit with my flatmate's home theater in the lounge without being a distraction), watercooling, Sabertooth mobo, X6 1100T CPU, 8GB RAM, passively cooled AMD 6750, SSD for OS/apps + HDD for storage.. that should do me without upgrades for a good 3 years judging by past experience:) Maybe the graphics card could do with an upgrade if I got really seriously into my PC gaming again, but that will probably be fine for now. I've switched my Skyrim pre-order to PC instead of PS3, which saves £10 for a start, and will probably be a much better experience by all the accounts I've read here.
Nah the DRM thing is only the PC version, again I was playing on PS3 so I didn't have to deal with that. If I bought it on PC I'd have downloaded a crack to remove the DRM too.
I'll definitely subscribe to the GOG newsletter, I saw that place a while back but since I'd forsaken PC gaming I ended up forgetting about it. Right now I'm planning on buying a new PC though. I've been mostly just using a netbook for my computing the last few years, as some kind of proof to myself that I don't always need to be using the most powerful machine that I can afford. I used to be upgrading my PC every few months to get better gaming performance. The netbook has been fine for web browsing and even works well for web development, but I'm in the mood for getting back into compiled languages right now. I tried compiling the Linux kernel on my netbook at the weekend, and it took several hours:p So it would be nice to have a powerful machine available again to do brute force work when I need it. Plus I can use it as a VM server, webserver, code repository, media server and whatever other geeky urges I've been repressing these last few years. But it will definitely see some gaming usage too!
Well, it would be cool, but really I've not charged my Kindle for a couple of weeks and it's at about 45% battery. I just need to plug it into a USB port every month or two and it's sorted. It would be nice to have the option if you were a hardcore backpacker I suppose, but most people would be fine without. If you were a hardcore backpacker, you'd probably want a separate solar charging rig that can charge any of your devices though, so using a USB adapter from one to the other should work, right?
Ah well, I was playing SR2 on my PS3, maybe it's no good on PC.
I always thought I sucked at stealth games too. In MGS I loved the VR training, but then never felt comfortable playing the missions so I didn't get into it. I tried Thief and I was awful. With Assassin's Creed I thought I might similarly suck, but I got pretty into it and I kick ass now. It takes a few seconds for guards to get really suspicious in the outdoor parts, so you can just run up to them and press square, job done. No need to be really stealthy apart from in certain missions where you're not meant to be discovered - but they aren't that bad if you take your time. Really AC2 has a very Vice City like feel to it with being able to buy property and shops etc. Brotherhood does even more along those lines, and you get to call in assassin strikes on guards - so they can do a lot of the stealthy stuff for you if you want:)
I'm in a similar situation. I have a few games which I mean to go and re-play at some point. That was actually how I finally got into AC after having it on a shelf for something like 3 years. Thankfully my DVD pile is almost done now, and I'm just renting from now on to avoid wasting too much money! Likewise I'm only going to rent single player games in future unless they're very open world like AC or Skyrim. I paid full retail for Uncharted 2 last year, completed it in one 13 hour sitting, and haven't touched it since..
Well, CoD (single player) and Gears of Wars are shit, so I agree there. I'd definitely rather play Zelda than FarCry. I got bored of my Wii though and it's still at my mum's house after taking it there one Christmas..
You think Farcry has huge maps? Have you ever played Operation Flashpoint? You should:p Also, GTA: San Andreas was released that year. Now that is a huge map. I really don't remember being impressed by FarCry considering I would have been playing it in 2005 or 2006..
I played the demo of System Shock 2 and thought it was very cool, though again the unlimited enemies bothered me. You're right that it creates a sense of urgency.. one that I really didn't appreciate when I was 14 or so.. I was used to Quake where you can kill all the enemies. Trying to hack a control panel in real time while zombies kept approaching.. I just wasn't able to do it, I kept dying. I could probably do it now, and I sometimes wonder about downloading it to give it a go again, but I haven't taken the time to do so yet. Nor do I really want to be that stressed out all the time while I'm playing a game. I like difficult missions every now and then, but I also like to be able to just have fun.
I'd forgotten that you couldn't reach it. I hate games with invisible boundaries. I was sure it was linear too, but people reply to me were saying how it was a sandbox style game. Just having 2 or 3 paths to the same location is not sandbox gameplay..
Uncharted manages to do the same kind of linear path thing, but still making it fun though. So it's not just down to whether it's linear or not. It's about the actual gameplay.
I agree, Just Cause II is a lot of fun just for exploring and using the grappling hook/chute combo.
If you haven't played Saints Row 2, it's like the spiritual successor to the GTA 3 series IMO. It keeps the fun in the gameplay and humour that GTA IV seemed to lose somehow. I'm really looking forward to SR3:) I didn't even buy the first because people seemed to act like the fact it had swearing in it was the best point of the game, but I can say that SR2 definitely has fun gameplay. Some missions have you driving a quad bike through flaming hoops and explosive barrels, or spraying people with sewage. You can ride around on a motorbike while wielding a samurai sword, etc.. and the co-op play is good fun.
Haven't played BioShock.. maybe in a few years. It took me until this year to discover that I loved the Assassin's Creed series. I had played the first game briefly a few years ago, but I had read so much negative stuff about it in reviews that I just wasn't looking forward to getting to the actual assassination missions, and I ended up playing other games instead. I gave it another chance this year and it turns out that I loved it. AC2 and brotherhood add in a whole lot of variety to the missions and a bit more realism with the guards searching for you in hiding places etc which made it even better. But just running through a city jumping, climbing, swinging from shit, or fighting 20 guards at once (the combat is actually pretty easy if you are patient - I don't know why the reviews I read were complaining about how difficult it is) is fun in itself.
Thanks.. I think I may even have bought that last year, but I haven't yet gone through the effort to buy a gaming PC (and find somewhere convenient to use it!).
I hate games where you know there are an unexplained and unlimited supply of dumb enemies. I have a real bugbear against strategically dumb enemies with almost godlike seeing, hearing, reactions and aiming skills. I spent a couple of years developing my own CS bot as a teenager, and I put a lot of time into making them react more humanly to sound, movement, flashbangs, smoke grenades, etc. I know that if I made the AI in any of these games, I could do a much better job, because I already did it..
As for crawling through the undergrowth avoiding enemies, sniping, etc, I already did that in Operation Flashpoint, and I haven't found anything that has come close to that since. Operation Flashpoint had so much variety with the missions.. some were black ops, some just infantry vs infantry, some tank missions, helicopter missions, some where you are alone, some where you control a whole platoon. I really recommend trying it if you haven't played it. It's old, but it's great (talking about the very first one, not the Codemasters sequels). I haven't been keeping up with every single FPS since then, but stuff like CoD and Battlefield single players don't come close. They can still be fun, but they don't feel as involved.
Pretty damn expensive tech demo:p I get your point though. Some people are happy playing awful games with pretty graphics of course. Me, I bought Farcry when it was at budget price to see what all the fuss was about, and even then I thought it was a waste of money.
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Evil seems to be defined as anything god doesn't like. So your attempt at misdirection doesn't really detract from what he said.
Yep, don't ever question the big man in the sky, heathens! Trying to think rationally about things like accountability and responsibility leads to trouble!
Certainly if a god created us, it's our own fault he created us imperfect and put us in a situation where we were statistically guaranteed to screw up eventually!
Clearly, the billions of people who profess to believe in the same god as me couldn't possibly be wrong! We're right, and those other 2 billion guys who beileve that other thing are all just idiots!
I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive, but it was mostly just a joke. The kernel's APIs change quite regularly, and things like the Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide haven't been updated to reflect 3.0.0 yet. Programmers are notorious for enjoying coding, but forgetting to do documentation (myself included).
It's kind of bizarre to praise MS just because there is a worse alternative. For one thing, OSX itself is still pretty open, and Windows 8 is going to have an MS controlled store for Metro apps.
I don't own an iPhone/iPad, or have any interest in one, but I think that Jobs spurned far more innovation than Gates. It always felt like MS were stifling things, but Apple has actually driven some much needed (IMO) innovation in interfaces. There are positives and negatives for everything, but I certainly think there were other companies who would have done a much better job of driving OS innovation through the 90s than MS - for example Novell or HP.
I honestly don't think we'd be worse off if Apple took the lead in the 90s, at least from a technological point of view. I think we still would have ended up with a Linux-like competitor as well. So even if Apple did implement a walled garden in their desktop OS, it wouldn't be the only option.
Anyway - while Steve Jobs could be a douche at times, you have to give him credit for the change he brought to the industry. The state of technology in the late 90s and early 2000s was kind of boring, but Apple shook things up and forced companies to care about the end user experience rather than just ticking feature boxes.
Hmm, so he was just being a douche. Thanks.
[citation needed]
From what I've seen in kernel hacking documentation and tutorials so far, that means "we're probably not going to get around to telling you what happened"..
Perhaps. I was trying to give MS the benefit of the doubt, as my colleague typically does. I guess it could be just laziness on MS' part.
"Storms" and "attacks" are both verbs. The dust is storming, the bear is attacking. There was an s missing from the headline. It's a Slashdot meme to make jokes about the poor editorial quailty. You need to relax and get over it.
What talk bout. We no talk that here.
According to my colleague, the option is there for Win7 to do that now. It's apparently the software vendors who need to integrate their apps into it. I doubt Adobe and Oracle will do that without being pushed though, there probably is something in the rules against pushing extra toolbars and such when updating.. they love doing that.
I've built my own in the past, but I couldn't really be bothered this time - especially with wanting water cooling, if I did something wrong and leaked water over everything or something like that then I'd have to foot the bill for that myself, so I don't mind getting it done professionally. Then if something goes wrong I can get them to replace it!
I'm pretty impulsive and focused when I get an idea in my head, so I did a lot of research last night and today and settled on a system from http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/ with a nice quiet case and fans (so it can sit with my flatmate's home theater in the lounge without being a distraction), watercooling, Sabertooth mobo, X6 1100T CPU, 8GB RAM, passively cooled AMD 6750, SSD for OS/apps + HDD for storage.. that should do me without upgrades for a good 3 years judging by past experience :) Maybe the graphics card could do with an upgrade if I got really seriously into my PC gaming again, but that will probably be fine for now. I've switched my Skyrim pre-order to PC instead of PS3, which saves £10 for a start, and will probably be a much better experience by all the accounts I've read here.
Nah the DRM thing is only the PC version, again I was playing on PS3 so I didn't have to deal with that. If I bought it on PC I'd have downloaded a crack to remove the DRM too.
I'll definitely subscribe to the GOG newsletter, I saw that place a while back but since I'd forsaken PC gaming I ended up forgetting about it. Right now I'm planning on buying a new PC though. I've been mostly just using a netbook for my computing the last few years, as some kind of proof to myself that I don't always need to be using the most powerful machine that I can afford. I used to be upgrading my PC every few months to get better gaming performance. The netbook has been fine for web browsing and even works well for web development, but I'm in the mood for getting back into compiled languages right now. I tried compiling the Linux kernel on my netbook at the weekend, and it took several hours :p So it would be nice to have a powerful machine available again to do brute force work when I need it. Plus I can use it as a VM server, webserver, code repository, media server and whatever other geeky urges I've been repressing these last few years. But it will definitely see some gaming usage too!
Well, it would be cool, but really I've not charged my Kindle for a couple of weeks and it's at about 45% battery. I just need to plug it into a USB port every month or two and it's sorted. It would be nice to have the option if you were a hardcore backpacker I suppose, but most people would be fine without. If you were a hardcore backpacker, you'd probably want a separate solar charging rig that can charge any of your devices though, so using a USB adapter from one to the other should work, right?
Ah well, I was playing SR2 on my PS3, maybe it's no good on PC.
I always thought I sucked at stealth games too. In MGS I loved the VR training, but then never felt comfortable playing the missions so I didn't get into it. I tried Thief and I was awful. With Assassin's Creed I thought I might similarly suck, but I got pretty into it and I kick ass now. It takes a few seconds for guards to get really suspicious in the outdoor parts, so you can just run up to them and press square, job done. No need to be really stealthy apart from in certain missions where you're not meant to be discovered - but they aren't that bad if you take your time. Really AC2 has a very Vice City like feel to it with being able to buy property and shops etc. Brotherhood does even more along those lines, and you get to call in assassin strikes on guards - so they can do a lot of the stealthy stuff for you if you want :)
I'm in a similar situation. I have a few games which I mean to go and re-play at some point. That was actually how I finally got into AC after having it on a shelf for something like 3 years. Thankfully my DVD pile is almost done now, and I'm just renting from now on to avoid wasting too much money! Likewise I'm only going to rent single player games in future unless they're very open world like AC or Skyrim. I paid full retail for Uncharted 2 last year, completed it in one 13 hour sitting, and haven't touched it since..
Well, CoD (single player) and Gears of Wars are shit, so I agree there. I'd definitely rather play Zelda than FarCry. I got bored of my Wii though and it's still at my mum's house after taking it there one Christmas..
Make that $199 for the Fire.
$79 if you want the lowest end no-keyboard version (which is my favourite considering I already have a Xoom for my tablet needs).
You think Farcry has huge maps? Have you ever played Operation Flashpoint? You should :p Also, GTA: San Andreas was released that year. Now that is a huge map. I really don't remember being impressed by FarCry considering I would have been playing it in 2005 or 2006..
I played the demo of System Shock 2 and thought it was very cool, though again the unlimited enemies bothered me. You're right that it creates a sense of urgency.. one that I really didn't appreciate when I was 14 or so.. I was used to Quake where you can kill all the enemies. Trying to hack a control panel in real time while zombies kept approaching.. I just wasn't able to do it, I kept dying. I could probably do it now, and I sometimes wonder about downloading it to give it a go again, but I haven't taken the time to do so yet. Nor do I really want to be that stressed out all the time while I'm playing a game. I like difficult missions every now and then, but I also like to be able to just have fun.
I'd forgotten that you couldn't reach it. I hate games with invisible boundaries. I was sure it was linear too, but people reply to me were saying how it was a sandbox style game. Just having 2 or 3 paths to the same location is not sandbox gameplay..
Uncharted manages to do the same kind of linear path thing, but still making it fun though. So it's not just down to whether it's linear or not. It's about the actual gameplay.
You're not rating games, you're rating the graphics engines.
Yes, the graphics are nice in FarCry. The game itself was quite boring to me though. Like I said "awful game, pretty graphics".
I agree, Just Cause II is a lot of fun just for exploring and using the grappling hook/chute combo.
If you haven't played Saints Row 2, it's like the spiritual successor to the GTA 3 series IMO. It keeps the fun in the gameplay and humour that GTA IV seemed to lose somehow. I'm really looking forward to SR3 :) I didn't even buy the first because people seemed to act like the fact it had swearing in it was the best point of the game, but I can say that SR2 definitely has fun gameplay. Some missions have you driving a quad bike through flaming hoops and explosive barrels, or spraying people with sewage. You can ride around on a motorbike while wielding a samurai sword, etc.. and the co-op play is good fun.
Haven't played BioShock.. maybe in a few years. It took me until this year to discover that I loved the Assassin's Creed series. I had played the first game briefly a few years ago, but I had read so much negative stuff about it in reviews that I just wasn't looking forward to getting to the actual assassination missions, and I ended up playing other games instead. I gave it another chance this year and it turns out that I loved it. AC2 and brotherhood add in a whole lot of variety to the missions and a bit more realism with the guards searching for you in hiding places etc which made it even better. But just running through a city jumping, climbing, swinging from shit, or fighting 20 guards at once (the combat is actually pretty easy if you are patient - I don't know why the reviews I read were complaining about how difficult it is) is fun in itself.
Thanks.. I think I may even have bought that last year, but I haven't yet gone through the effort to buy a gaming PC (and find somewhere convenient to use it!).
I hate games where you know there are an unexplained and unlimited supply of dumb enemies. I have a real bugbear against strategically dumb enemies with almost godlike seeing, hearing, reactions and aiming skills. I spent a couple of years developing my own CS bot as a teenager, and I put a lot of time into making them react more humanly to sound, movement, flashbangs, smoke grenades, etc. I know that if I made the AI in any of these games, I could do a much better job, because I already did it..
As for crawling through the undergrowth avoiding enemies, sniping, etc, I already did that in Operation Flashpoint, and I haven't found anything that has come close to that since. Operation Flashpoint had so much variety with the missions.. some were black ops, some just infantry vs infantry, some tank missions, helicopter missions, some where you are alone, some where you control a whole platoon. I really recommend trying it if you haven't played it. It's old, but it's great (talking about the very first one, not the Codemasters sequels). I haven't been keeping up with every single FPS since then, but stuff like CoD and Battlefield single players don't come close. They can still be fun, but they don't feel as involved.
Pretty damn expensive tech demo :p I get your point though. Some people are happy playing awful games with pretty graphics of course. Me, I bought Farcry when it was at budget price to see what all the fuss was about, and even then I thought it was a waste of money.