Exec (Amiga's kernel) had Preemptive multitasking. In 1985. That beats Windows NT by 7 years (1993, if I recall correctly), Windows 95 by around 10, and cooperative multitasking in MacOS by about 4 (an add-in called Multifinder in 1988). It was the first available home computer OS that could run multiple applications at the same time without suspending the current application.
Amiga did not have protected memory, however, which allowed programs to run over their memory space and crash the OS (I personally found it crash prone, but I found macOS with multifinder crash prone, too).
Anyway, you asked what was special about it, and that should answer it.
Alan Moore did it to make the "heroes" seem more human and have human flaws, lusts, and desires. The mid-1980s was also an awakening from years of comic book oppression under the CCA - in fact, many scenes are direct attacks against the CCA, IMO.
I remember many stores wouldn't even carry non-CCA comics, and the stores that did put them in a special section of the store where you needed to be 18 to go into (note that not all of these were pornographic or even overly violent - just not CCA approved). To really appreciate the irony, the copy of Watchmen I read was bought by a friend from the back room of a head shop/porn store/news stand, but I regularly bought Heavy Metal from the front room since it was considered an art magazine (and some issues had FAR more sex and nudity in less pages than Watchmen)... Within a couple of years, however, Watchmen did start appearing in the front display of that store and in other stores (apparently it became literally important...).
In this guy's case, though, he's putting his job at risk if he becomes an anonymous whistleblower. Put simply, if there is only one current IT guy in charge of installing software and suddenly the BSA says a lot of software he is in charge of installing is pirated, who is the finger going to point to by internal management? If I were running the company I'd fire that IT guy immediately.
At my current job I'd handle it a bit differently - I'd go to HR, tell them the issue and tell them that it was likely the employee that formerly did it, along with a list of potentially illegal items, and have them talk to management and purchasing and find out what is and is not illegal. Since the company is cooperating and didn't knowingly infringe (or if they did, the HR person can call in the BSA), any lawsuit or firing could be redirected to the guy that used to do that job or corrupt management and since HR knows that I was looking out for the company's best interests. If they fired me anyway, I'd call the BSA and tell them I was fired in retaliation for reporting piracy and give a list of infringing products (and then reap the BSA reward and probably a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit). It doesn't sound like this particular company is at fault, since it sounds like only the one guy did the piracy and told the employees they had legal licenses for other stuff.
seems to me this is not the first time Remedy has been late with a game...
let's face it, though - I'm all for the Blizzard philosophy rather than the EA philosophy - I'd rather have the game done right but late than to get a bug ridden game with playability issues on time. I don't mean to smear EA specifically, because a lot of companies do it (actually, nearly all publishers do it), but they are the one I have firsthand experience with.
From what they say, latency won't be much of an issue (they say it will be better than on a LAN), but don't expect 60+ FPS, and I'm sure it will be lossy compression. The idea is to place server farms close to the destination (and possibly dedicating the pipe), eliminating most lag.
But let's look at real scenarios, assuming streaming video - 480p with 32 bit color at 30 frames per second (like the old, nearly dead NTSC TVs in the US, but using prog scan instead of interlacing): 640*480*4(color)*30FPS*8(bits not bytes used in internet connection speeds)=294912000bits/sec, so for uncompressed 480i you need a 300 megabit pipe. They are fitting that into a 1.5 megabit pipe. That means 20:1 compression (or 40:1 if you want 60FPS like some gamers demand). While 20:1 lossless is possible, and may be even be possible in realtime using a highly distributed, high power network, chances are it is lossy compression.
Another scenario suggests even higher levels of compression - 1080i would be 1920/2(interlaced)*1080*4*30*8=995328000bits/s for uncompressed streaming, and to fit that into a 5Mbps pipe means a whopping 200:1 compression (AFAIK this is not possible in realtime with lossless compression). You also can't do predictive encoding (using future frames), but if you can get the camera information from the game itself you likely could get better quality encoding - it depends entirely on how they have it set up.
What I'm getting to is that video compression will likely be the bane of this venture, not bandwidth. If you can live with lots of artifacts (especially at higher resolutions), it may be a good alternative to the upgrade grind, but if you need 60+FPS and perfect images to see a dot you can snipe at, don't expect this to work for you, at least in the short term.
IBM had an excellent 4th quarter last year, but for a while last year they were behind HP (I think it was second quarter). Overall IBM had about 32% marketshare last year (36% was 4th quarter) to HP's 29.5% (29% 4th quarter) according to this blog
In any case you seem to be undercutting Sun, which was around 10% (9% for 4th quarter), though that may have changed in 2009. There is also speculation (on that blog) that IBM may sell the hardware part of the business to Fujitsu, but I don't know how successful such a merger would be, as both Sun and FSC have been bleeding marketshare the last few years.
you should have kept going - not sure if you're Brit, but I've got a few British friends and a British coworker, so I hear lots of them......then I was walking on the pavement, which I believe you yanks call a sidewalk......then I was in my flat, which you yanks call an apartment......I had me some mince, chips, then a biscuit, and you yanks would say I had chopped beef and fries, then had a cookie... (my coworker said that one intentionally once, not quite like that, but close).
some other weird ones I know (mostly car related because I tend to be in a car when I hear them) boot and bonnet (trunk and hood), silencer (muffler), car park (parking lot), and flyover (overpass). Oh yeah - and a plaster (band-aid) and banger and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes). Also many of the common ones, but that is overkill (e.g. loo)
Location doesn't mean much - a friend of mine's mom got bitten by a likely brown recluse spider in central Minnesota (about 400 miles north of their habitat) and they never caught that spider, either, but the venom was necrotic which is a fairly good identifier. It is suspected that the spider hitchhiked a ride with fruit.
Anyhow, it is very unlikely that this was related due to the nature of that venom - sounds like he went to the hospital and they likely found nerve regrowth or something like that. Nerves do regrow (when I was a kid I heard they didn't, but that was proven wrong), but nerve regrowth is rare in the spine because spinal fluids prohibit it.
Actually, what he said is probably correct - in most cases, CEOs are very separated from day-to-day operations and have to rely on managers to relay that information. He probably didn't have a lot of control over initial quality because that wasn't his job - his job was negotiating contracts, keeping all managers on track, setting deadlines, etc.
It's a hard call on whether he was useless as a CEO - I'd have to have a much better insider picture and also know whether Namco/Bandai forced the release date rather than letting them release it "when it's done" like Blizzard, and also which managers gave it a go.
I know forced releases all too well from a contract job I had with an indie studio - when the CEO of that studio (who had several previous hit games) insisted they have 3-4 months to fix some major bugs and polish the game instead of the two months the publisher demanded, the publisher fired the studio and gave the game code to an internal studio. That studio pretty much released the bug ridden game as-is, and it got low to mediocre reviews (mostly due to bugs we knew about). Fortunately for them (the studio), the game had been commissioned, and they were able to disassociate themselves from the game. Unfortunately for me, I lost a fun contract job where I got to write GLIDE (the old 3dfx API) code (hey, it beats business software, which I work on now in my day job).
or the Dragonflies, and they are thinking of them by avoiding the male mosquitoes. If you think mosquito SDI will even have a tiny impact on their population, move somewhere like northern Wisconsin or pretty much anywhere in Minnesota during a rainy summer. Your mini laser will probably burn out its barrel just nailing a small percentage of the females.
THAC0 was just a convention that allowed for simple addition (or subtraction) to figure out the chance to hit, so yes, I liked it for early D&D because it sped the game up. Technically we were not stuck with it because 1st edition AD&D used a lookup table that did basically the same thing - you'd cross-reference a base chance to hit against armor type, add in any bonuses and get a target number.
Now if you really meant to ask if I thought it was bad comparatively to 3 or 4 then yes;)
If I really wanted to combine mathematical challenge with gaming, I'd try to find Bionic Commando (pen and paper - and yes it existed) - I sold mine years ago, but I remember the back of the book was all differential equations (and at the time I didn't have that math, but I've since had it long ago).
Sorry, but while most of the gear meets the spec, the graphics card (a GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB) is far below the quad SLI triple GPU-on-a-card, 32GB of shared GDDR8 RAM (for Ray Tracing, of course) on a special bus with 120TB/sec throughput minimum spec for the next version of Crysis.
Actually, it's the Guild Wars Live Team with the nerf bat (Linsey is only one member of that), so you can't blame her for everything - it's not like the Izzy days. I still am waiting for them to make skills like Magnetic Aura and Swirling Aura useful (Magnetic is used in raptor baby farming sometimes, but generally it's awful), but I don't think it'll ever happen. Even my 'in' to ANet isn't much help since he won't talk shop unless we're discussing shader tech (which we do occasionally).
Pretty much all builds run on Mesmer are Cryway based these days, with Visions of Regret, Ineptitude, or Mantra of Recovery as the elite. Real mesmers tend to be preferred because they can fast cast the hex and have more utility skills, but yes, you do see some others standing in as criers. A Visions of Regret mesmer with Sabway (a bunch of necros) can rip through most areas of PvE in HM.
Sins were heavily nerfed before the PvE/PvP skill split because they destroyed casters in PvP and could even drop warriors. They completely misbalanced Randoms and AB for a while, and could quickly down the Guild Lord as well (so were popular solo or duo gankers in HA and GvG, which kinda defeats the word [ganker = gang killer]).
heh - close - I lived on the Canadian border that year (US side) and did in fact get mostly Canadian broadcasts (there was one US station in range - an NBC affiliate). I think the US affiliate near my parents house also canned season 4 though - those early "non-network" networks were pretty flaky.
God - Homeboys From Outer Space... why did you remind me...
Golf (a game I hate, thanks to working at a golf course as a teenager), has an easy answer - handicapping.
heh - you too? My first job was working a golf course with a membership fee that was about 10x what I made that summer. My memory of it was constantly getting stiffed for tips by rich geezers (and stuffy waitresses when I worked the restaurant). In fact, the only place I got tipped well was the bar, and that was only for a short time after I turned 18 (which happened just before school started - and let's just say working until 4AM on [Saturday and] Sunday and reeking of smoke and needing to leave for high school at 7AM on Monday wasn't working out for me - I barely had time to get home and shower, much less sleep, and since I was then 18 they didn't have to follow child labor laws that prohibited such shifts).
You obviously haven't played high end PvE in Guild Wars - Mesmers are the easiest way to find parties in the Deep, Urgoz's lair (though Monk is good there, too, which is what I've run there), and for a long time Slaver's Exile, but that has shifted more to 3/4 man Assassin and Ranger groups. I actually don't play much high end, but I'm in a guild with people that do and they talk about it incessantly (and I do listen in on our ventrilo channel quite a bit, even though most of my gaming time is dedicated to Empire: Total War and Fallout 3).
In fact, the three classes that most people consider the worst for PvE (Assassins, Mesmers, and Paragons) are in the most demand in high end PvE - Assassins for permaform (permanent shadowform which is immunity to all damage), Mesmers for Cry of Pain spamming (armor ignoring, interrupting damage), and paragons for massive armor and damage reduction buffs (in fact, many people in my guild still consider Imbagon the only good Paragon build).
yeah - now if they'd stop lifting plots that have been done 100x already like the bow hunting episode it may even be interesting. TV has had the horrible habit of lifting plots from bad movies - that episode was directly lifted from movies like Hard Target (and basing an episode on something that Jean Claude Van Damme was in makes me want to smack Joss with a catfish) just to name one, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it several more times in both movies and TV. Ugly Betty also has this habit - direct lifting from like Serendipity (the Prado vs Prada handbag) and the Devil Wears Prada (the whole show is based on that book/movie) - it makes me want to smack the uncreative writers with a wet tuna.
I didn't think Lost had an official plan for an end until they announced that it would wrap up in two seasons (last year?).
The only US show that I remember that had a definitive 5 season plan from beginning to end was Babylon 5 and that almost got ruined by cancellation (actually, it did get ruined for me, because I didn't have cable, so I've never did see the final 2 seasons).
Technically Life on Mars has not officially been canceled in the US, but ABC did say they won't be renewing it, so it's as good as dead. The "non-canceled cancelation" was probably a reaction to fan issues caused by shows that were actually canceled mid-season (specifically Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone).
I actually liked both the BBC and US versions of Life on Mars for different reasons. I still don't know which boss I like better - Harvey Keitel in the US and Philip Glenister in the UK - both are great in that role for different reasons. I think I like Micheal Imperioli's Ray better than the UK one (I forget his name), but both are hilarious 1970s sexists (and you could so not get away with some of the stuff they say if it weren't based in the 1970s...). It's funny that the two things I dislike most about the US version are the revolving door of partially developed side characters (say, for instance, the hippie neighbor) and the bit too slowly developing relation between Gene and Sam (which really was the central aspect of the UK version).
The problem is that most of the budgets were set with 3-5% unemployment and now there is 7-8% or more nationwide. That may not seem like much, but 4-5% less Income tax adds up to billions of dollars of budget shortfall for both state and federal budgets. Lawmakers then have the burden of either cutting spending or increasing taxes or both, and they also need money to provide stimulus for all those unemployed workers to try to restart the economy.
So lawmakers are really trying to shift the tax burden onto less people to keep existing services, not intentionally trying to increase taxes with the economy down. We still need people to deliver the mail and keep the wait at the DMV to only 2 hours instead of 40.
The problem is, the way the tax codes are from each state it is actually impossible for mail order and internet companies to pay them without added infrastructure.
And it's not just state tax - you need to tax for the county/parish/etc the person lives in, as well.
Take Minnesota for example. There is a 6.5% statewide sales tax. If you live in Hennepin County, you need to pay an additional.15% sales tax for the Twins Stadium levy. Now the impossible part - Minnesota also has a $770 Use Tax exemption. Let's say I buy a $300 item through an internet site or catalog - how do I know whether to tax the person or not? Minnesota also requires this to be filed as a separate form (in fact, only 22 of the 48 states with Use Tax have a line item on the state Sales Tax for it).
I personally would sue my state for double taxation if they pass such a law without provision for exempting me from Use Tax (which none of these proposals have ever had from what I've seen). I'd much prefer the voluntary Streamlined Sales Tax Project. I already do pay my Use Tax, so I'd love an easier way to do it.
OpenGL works fantastically if you just want the base API set for a version. The problems occur when you try to use relatively new features that are available in DirectX, but not in a released version of OpenGL. When a year and a half year old feature (DX10 was in the Vista betas I believe) for DirectX hasn't even shown up on some OpenGL graphics cards and won't be supported in the near future, I can see full well why developers choose DirectX - OpenGL is feature following and two years behind on full support for some features (and this will not do in the game world, where devs often push the bleeding edge).
Case in point. Programmer wants to use geometry shaders, which came out when Vista did in DirectX 10 (more than a year ago). Geometry Shaders were added to OpenGL as EXT_geometry_shader, and supported by nVidia but EXTs don't need to be supported by graphics card manufacturers, and ATI chose not to support it. Then OGL 3.0 was announced and... Geometry Shaders became an "official" EXT (it still isn't ARB and therefore not required), and still no ATI driver support for it (though I believe Apple's driver for ATI hardware does support it, just not ATI's).
The real failing is last year's attempt to create a new OpenGL 3.0 (not the one that really should be called 2.6 that was released) because CAD and gaming disagreed with what should and should not go in the new spec. This would have put OpenGL on pace with DirectX 10, but instead we got a train wreck of minor updates to 2.5.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is set to release DirectX 11 within the next few months (I've heard rumors that it will be on hardware by the middle of this year) with multithreaded rendering, dynamic tessellation (which I predicted was coming in the next release when DX10 came out), a new shader model (Shader Model 5), and some new compression schemes (like shader compression). I expect we'll see some of those features in OpenGL in 2016 (yes I'm being cynical).
The reality is having a refresh greater than 60Hz is pretty pointless with an LCD because there is no phosphor being strobe blasted with scanlines where the eye can detect the flicker and most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.
The only use I can think of for 120Hz on a TV is because traditional movies are recorded at 24 frames per second (12 for cartoons, but they double frame) and TV at 30FPS, and since 120/24=5 and 120/30=4 you don't have to double any frame like you would for 60Hz (and 75 is worse...). Still, you are repeating the same frame either 4 or 5 times and since LCDs don't flicker it's overkill (if you slowed refresh for that movie down to 24FPS it'd look just as good). While some professional digital cameras are recording 120FPS or more, it takes a ton of memory to store continuous video at that frequency and I don't foresee that being an issue in the near future (it's certainly more useful from a video editing viewpoint than a TV watching viewpoint).
true - it'd be nice if they had some phone number you could call to activate it like Windows in case you didn't want to use the service for privacy reasons, but since games tend to be less of a sure thing than Windows (well, at least until Vista...) or MS Office releases, I don't think the game companies always have that luxury (maybe Activision Blizzard could do it, but companies like Midway or NCSoft are struggling too much as it is).
Privacy issues aside, I've actually had some pleasant surprises with Steam lately, like when a friend dropped by and we were able to play left4dead between my desktop and laptop and all he had to do was log in (since I had it downloaded on both machines but I only had one license). I also can switch steam to offline mode on my laptop and still play the games, which some intrusive DRMs don't allow (I forget the game, but I had at least one that checked back with the mothership every time it started, so it was no fun when I was on the road with no internet). It's also nice to be able to switch between my laptop and desktop and not have to worry that I only have a 3 or 5 install limit. Since I typically don't back up games that is an issue - I average about 1 system wipe a year due to hardware failure, and my laptop had two wipes within two months because they had failed to set a bios setting when it was sent in the first time and Windows update wouldn't work. They also forgot to install the restore partition the first time (is it any wonder why I don't have any respect for repair people...).
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Exec (Amiga's kernel) had Preemptive multitasking. In 1985. That beats Windows NT by 7 years (1993, if I recall correctly), Windows 95 by around 10, and cooperative multitasking in MacOS by about 4 (an add-in called Multifinder in 1988). It was the first available home computer OS that could run multiple applications at the same time without suspending the current application.
Amiga did not have protected memory, however, which allowed programs to run over their memory space and crash the OS (I personally found it crash prone, but I found macOS with multifinder crash prone, too).
Anyway, you asked what was special about it, and that should answer it.
Alan Moore did it to make the "heroes" seem more human and have human flaws, lusts, and desires. The mid-1980s was also an awakening from years of comic book oppression under the CCA - in fact, many scenes are direct attacks against the CCA, IMO.
I remember many stores wouldn't even carry non-CCA comics, and the stores that did put them in a special section of the store where you needed to be 18 to go into (note that not all of these were pornographic or even overly violent - just not CCA approved). To really appreciate the irony, the copy of Watchmen I read was bought by a friend from the back room of a head shop/porn store/news stand, but I regularly bought Heavy Metal from the front room since it was considered an art magazine (and some issues had FAR more sex and nudity in less pages than Watchmen)... Within a couple of years, however, Watchmen did start appearing in the front display of that store and in other stores (apparently it became literally important...).
In this guy's case, though, he's putting his job at risk if he becomes an anonymous whistleblower. Put simply, if there is only one current IT guy in charge of installing software and suddenly the BSA says a lot of software he is in charge of installing is pirated, who is the finger going to point to by internal management? If I were running the company I'd fire that IT guy immediately.
At my current job I'd handle it a bit differently - I'd go to HR, tell them the issue and tell them that it was likely the employee that formerly did it, along with a list of potentially illegal items, and have them talk to management and purchasing and find out what is and is not illegal. Since the company is cooperating and didn't knowingly infringe (or if they did, the HR person can call in the BSA), any lawsuit or firing could be redirected to the guy that used to do that job or corrupt management and since HR knows that I was looking out for the company's best interests. If they fired me anyway, I'd call the BSA and tell them I was fired in retaliation for reporting piracy and give a list of infringing products (and then reap the BSA reward and probably a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit).
It doesn't sound like this particular company is at fault, since it sounds like only the one guy did the piracy and told the employees they had legal licenses for other stuff.
seems to me this is not the first time Remedy has been late with a game...
let's face it, though - I'm all for the Blizzard philosophy rather than the EA philosophy - I'd rather have the game done right but late than to get a bug ridden game with playability issues on time. I don't mean to smear EA specifically, because a lot of companies do it (actually, nearly all publishers do it), but they are the one I have firsthand experience with.
well, Remedy is based in Finland and Rockstar _Vancouver_ should be pretty obvious...
Seasons or Quarters are easier to predict than months - software is notorious for slipping schedules.
From what they say, latency won't be much of an issue (they say it will be better than on a LAN), but don't expect 60+ FPS, and I'm sure it will be lossy compression. The idea is to place server farms close to the destination (and possibly dedicating the pipe), eliminating most lag.
But let's look at real scenarios, assuming streaming video - 480p with 32 bit color at 30 frames per second (like the old, nearly dead NTSC TVs in the US, but using prog scan instead of interlacing): 640*480*4(color)*30FPS*8(bits not bytes used in internet connection speeds)=294912000bits/sec, so for uncompressed 480i you need a 300 megabit pipe. They are fitting that into a 1.5 megabit pipe. That means 20:1 compression (or 40:1 if you want 60FPS like some gamers demand). While 20:1 lossless is possible, and may be even be possible in realtime using a highly distributed, high power network, chances are it is lossy compression.
Another scenario suggests even higher levels of compression - 1080i would be 1920/2(interlaced)*1080*4*30*8=995328000bits/s for uncompressed streaming, and to fit that into a 5Mbps pipe means a whopping 200:1 compression (AFAIK this is not possible in realtime with lossless compression). You also can't do predictive encoding (using future frames), but if you can get the camera information from the game itself you likely could get better quality encoding - it depends entirely on how they have it set up.
What I'm getting to is that video compression will likely be the bane of this venture, not bandwidth. If you can live with lots of artifacts (especially at higher resolutions), it may be a good alternative to the upgrade grind, but if you need 60+FPS and perfect images to see a dot you can snipe at, don't expect this to work for you, at least in the short term.
IBM had an excellent 4th quarter last year, but for a while last year they were behind HP (I think it was second quarter). Overall IBM had about 32% marketshare last year (36% was 4th quarter) to HP's 29.5% (29% 4th quarter) according to this blog
In any case you seem to be undercutting Sun, which was around 10% (9% for 4th quarter), though that may have changed in 2009. There is also speculation (on that blog) that IBM may sell the hardware part of the business to Fujitsu, but I don't know how successful such a merger would be, as both Sun and FSC have been bleeding marketshare the last few years.
you should have kept going - not sure if you're Brit, but I've got a few British friends and a British coworker, so I hear lots of them... ...then I was walking on the pavement, which I believe you yanks call a sidewalk... ...then I was in my flat, which you yanks call an apartment... ...I had me some mince, chips, then a biscuit, and you yanks would say I had chopped beef and fries, then had a cookie... (my coworker said that one intentionally once, not quite like that, but close).
some other weird ones I know (mostly car related because I tend to be in a car when I hear them) boot and bonnet (trunk and hood), silencer (muffler), car park (parking lot), and flyover (overpass). Oh yeah - and a plaster (band-aid) and banger and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes). Also many of the common ones, but that is overkill (e.g. loo)
Location doesn't mean much - a friend of mine's mom got bitten by a likely brown recluse spider in central Minnesota (about 400 miles north of their habitat) and they never caught that spider, either, but the venom was necrotic which is a fairly good identifier. It is suspected that the spider hitchhiked a ride with fruit.
Anyhow, it is very unlikely that this was related due to the nature of that venom - sounds like he went to the hospital and they likely found nerve regrowth or something like that. Nerves do regrow (when I was a kid I heard they didn't, but that was proven wrong), but nerve regrowth is rare in the spine because spinal fluids prohibit it.
Actually, what he said is probably correct - in most cases, CEOs are very separated from day-to-day operations and have to rely on managers to relay that information. He probably didn't have a lot of control over initial quality because that wasn't his job - his job was negotiating contracts, keeping all managers on track, setting deadlines, etc.
It's a hard call on whether he was useless as a CEO - I'd have to have a much better insider picture and also know whether Namco/Bandai forced the release date rather than letting them release it "when it's done" like Blizzard, and also which managers gave it a go.
I know forced releases all too well from a contract job I had with an indie studio - when the CEO of that studio (who had several previous hit games) insisted they have 3-4 months to fix some major bugs and polish the game instead of the two months the publisher demanded, the publisher fired the studio and gave the game code to an internal studio. That studio pretty much released the bug ridden game as-is, and it got low to mediocre reviews (mostly due to bugs we knew about). Fortunately for them (the studio), the game had been commissioned, and they were able to disassociate themselves from the game. Unfortunately for me, I lost a fun contract job where I got to write GLIDE (the old 3dfx API) code (hey, it beats business software, which I work on now in my day job).
or the Dragonflies, and they are thinking of them by avoiding the male mosquitoes. If you think mosquito SDI will even have a tiny impact on their population, move somewhere like northern Wisconsin or pretty much anywhere in Minnesota during a rainy summer. Your mini laser will probably burn out its barrel just nailing a small percentage of the females.
THAC0 was just a convention that allowed for simple addition (or subtraction) to figure out the chance to hit, so yes, I liked it for early D&D because it sped the game up. Technically we were not stuck with it because 1st edition AD&D used a lookup table that did basically the same thing - you'd cross-reference a base chance to hit against armor type, add in any bonuses and get a target number.
Now if you really meant to ask if I thought it was bad comparatively to 3 or 4 then yes ;)
If I really wanted to combine mathematical challenge with gaming, I'd try to find Bionic Commando (pen and paper - and yes it existed) - I sold mine years ago, but I remember the back of the book was all differential equations (and at the time I didn't have that math, but I've since had it long ago).
Sorry, but while most of the gear meets the spec, the graphics card (a GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB) is far below the quad SLI triple GPU-on-a-card, 32GB of shared GDDR8 RAM (for Ray Tracing, of course) on a special bus with 120TB/sec throughput minimum spec for the next version of Crysis.
Actually, it's the Guild Wars Live Team with the nerf bat (Linsey is only one member of that), so you can't blame her for everything - it's not like the Izzy days. I still am waiting for them to make skills like Magnetic Aura and Swirling Aura useful (Magnetic is used in raptor baby farming sometimes, but generally it's awful), but I don't think it'll ever happen. Even my 'in' to ANet isn't much help since he won't talk shop unless we're discussing shader tech (which we do occasionally).
Pretty much all builds run on Mesmer are Cryway based these days, with Visions of Regret, Ineptitude, or Mantra of Recovery as the elite. Real mesmers tend to be preferred because they can fast cast the hex and have more utility skills, but yes, you do see some others standing in as criers. A Visions of Regret mesmer with Sabway (a bunch of necros) can rip through most areas of PvE in HM.
Sins were heavily nerfed before the PvE/PvP skill split because they destroyed casters in PvP and could even drop warriors. They completely misbalanced Randoms and AB for a while, and could quickly down the Guild Lord as well (so were popular solo or duo gankers in HA and GvG, which kinda defeats the word [ganker = gang killer]).
heh - close - I lived on the Canadian border that year (US side) and did in fact get mostly Canadian broadcasts (there was one US station in range - an NBC affiliate). I think the US affiliate near my parents house also canned season 4 though - those early "non-network" networks were pretty flaky.
God - Homeboys From Outer Space... why did you remind me...
Golf (a game I hate, thanks to working at a golf course as a teenager), has an easy answer - handicapping.
heh - you too? My first job was working a golf course with a membership fee that was about 10x what I made that summer. My memory of it was constantly getting stiffed for tips by rich geezers (and stuffy waitresses when I worked the restaurant). In fact, the only place I got tipped well was the bar, and that was only for a short time after I turned 18 (which happened just before school started - and let's just say working until 4AM on [Saturday and] Sunday and reeking of smoke and needing to leave for high school at 7AM on Monday wasn't working out for me - I barely had time to get home and shower, much less sleep, and since I was then 18 they didn't have to follow child labor laws that prohibited such shifts).
You obviously haven't played high end PvE in Guild Wars - Mesmers are the easiest way to find parties in the Deep, Urgoz's lair (though Monk is good there, too, which is what I've run there), and for a long time Slaver's Exile, but that has shifted more to 3/4 man Assassin and Ranger groups. I actually don't play much high end, but I'm in a guild with people that do and they talk about it incessantly (and I do listen in on our ventrilo channel quite a bit, even though most of my gaming time is dedicated to Empire: Total War and Fallout 3).
In fact, the three classes that most people consider the worst for PvE (Assassins, Mesmers, and Paragons) are in the most demand in high end PvE - Assassins for permaform (permanent shadowform which is immunity to all damage), Mesmers for Cry of Pain spamming (armor ignoring, interrupting damage), and paragons for massive armor and damage reduction buffs (in fact, many people in my guild still consider Imbagon the only good Paragon build).
yeah - now if they'd stop lifting plots that have been done 100x already like the bow hunting episode it may even be interesting. TV has had the horrible habit of lifting plots from bad movies - that episode was directly lifted from movies like Hard Target (and basing an episode on something that Jean Claude Van Damme was in makes me want to smack Joss with a catfish) just to name one, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it several more times in both movies and TV. Ugly Betty also has this habit - direct lifting from like Serendipity (the Prado vs Prada handbag) and the Devil Wears Prada (the whole show is based on that book/movie) - it makes me want to smack the uncreative writers with a wet tuna.
I didn't think Lost had an official plan for an end until they announced that it would wrap up in two seasons (last year?).
The only US show that I remember that had a definitive 5 season plan from beginning to end was Babylon 5 and that almost got ruined by cancellation (actually, it did get ruined for me, because I didn't have cable, so I've never did see the final 2 seasons).
Technically Life on Mars has not officially been canceled in the US, but ABC did say they won't be renewing it, so it's as good as dead. The "non-canceled cancelation" was probably a reaction to fan issues caused by shows that were actually canceled mid-season (specifically Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone).
I actually liked both the BBC and US versions of Life on Mars for different reasons. I still don't know which boss I like better - Harvey Keitel in the US and Philip Glenister in the UK - both are great in that role for different reasons. I think I like Micheal Imperioli's Ray better than the UK one (I forget his name), but both are hilarious 1970s sexists (and you could so not get away with some of the stuff they say if it weren't based in the 1970s...). It's funny that the two things I dislike most about the US version are the revolving door of partially developed side characters (say, for instance, the hippie neighbor) and the bit too slowly developing relation between Gene and Sam (which really was the central aspect of the UK version).
The problem is that most of the budgets were set with 3-5% unemployment and now there is 7-8% or more nationwide. That may not seem like much, but 4-5% less Income tax adds up to billions of dollars of budget shortfall for both state and federal budgets. Lawmakers then have the burden of either cutting spending or increasing taxes or both, and they also need money to provide stimulus for all those unemployed workers to try to restart the economy.
So lawmakers are really trying to shift the tax burden onto less people to keep existing services, not intentionally trying to increase taxes with the economy down. We still need people to deliver the mail and keep the wait at the DMV to only 2 hours instead of 40.
The problem is, the way the tax codes are from each state it is actually impossible for mail order and internet companies to pay them without added infrastructure.
And it's not just state tax - you need to tax for the county/parish/etc the person lives in, as well.
Take Minnesota for example. There is a 6.5% statewide sales tax. If you live in Hennepin County, you need to pay an additional .15% sales tax for the Twins Stadium levy. Now the impossible part - Minnesota also has a $770 Use Tax exemption. Let's say I buy a $300 item through an internet site or catalog - how do I know whether to tax the person or not? Minnesota also requires this to be filed as a separate form (in fact, only 22 of the 48 states with Use Tax have a line item on the state Sales Tax for it).
I personally would sue my state for double taxation if they pass such a law without provision for exempting me from Use Tax (which none of these proposals have ever had from what I've seen). I'd much prefer the voluntary Streamlined Sales Tax Project. I already do pay my Use Tax, so I'd love an easier way to do it.
OpenGL works fantastically if you just want the base API set for a version. The problems occur when you try to use relatively new features that are available in DirectX, but not in a released version of OpenGL. When a year and a half year old feature (DX10 was in the Vista betas I believe) for DirectX hasn't even shown up on some OpenGL graphics cards and won't be supported in the near future, I can see full well why developers choose DirectX - OpenGL is feature following and two years behind on full support for some features (and this will not do in the game world, where devs often push the bleeding edge).
Case in point. Programmer wants to use geometry shaders, which came out when Vista did in DirectX 10 (more than a year ago). Geometry Shaders were added to OpenGL as EXT_geometry_shader, and supported by nVidia but EXTs don't need to be supported by graphics card manufacturers, and ATI chose not to support it. Then OGL 3.0 was announced and... Geometry Shaders became an "official" EXT (it still isn't ARB and therefore not required), and still no ATI driver support for it (though I believe Apple's driver for ATI hardware does support it, just not ATI's).
The real failing is last year's attempt to create a new OpenGL 3.0 (not the one that really should be called 2.6 that was released) because CAD and gaming disagreed with what should and should not go in the new spec. This would have put OpenGL on pace with DirectX 10, but instead we got a train wreck of minor updates to 2.5.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is set to release DirectX 11 within the next few months (I've heard rumors that it will be on hardware by the middle of this year) with multithreaded rendering, dynamic tessellation (which I predicted was coming in the next release when DX10 came out), a new shader model (Shader Model 5), and some new compression schemes (like shader compression). I expect we'll see some of those features in OpenGL in 2016 (yes I'm being cynical).
The reality is having a refresh greater than 60Hz is pretty pointless with an LCD because there is no phosphor being strobe blasted with scanlines where the eye can detect the flicker and most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.
The only use I can think of for 120Hz on a TV is because traditional movies are recorded at 24 frames per second (12 for cartoons, but they double frame) and TV at 30FPS, and since 120/24=5 and 120/30=4 you don't have to double any frame like you would for 60Hz (and 75 is worse...). Still, you are repeating the same frame either 4 or 5 times and since LCDs don't flicker it's overkill (if you slowed refresh for that movie down to 24FPS it'd look just as good). While some professional digital cameras are recording 120FPS or more, it takes a ton of memory to store continuous video at that frequency and I don't foresee that being an issue in the near future (it's certainly more useful from a video editing viewpoint than a TV watching viewpoint).
true - it'd be nice if they had some phone number you could call to activate it like Windows in case you didn't want to use the service for privacy reasons, but since games tend to be less of a sure thing than Windows (well, at least until Vista...) or MS Office releases, I don't think the game companies always have that luxury (maybe Activision Blizzard could do it, but companies like Midway or NCSoft are struggling too much as it is).
Privacy issues aside, I've actually had some pleasant surprises with Steam lately, like when a friend dropped by and we were able to play left4dead between my desktop and laptop and all he had to do was log in (since I had it downloaded on both machines but I only had one license). I also can switch steam to offline mode on my laptop and still play the games, which some intrusive DRMs don't allow (I forget the game, but I had at least one that checked back with the mothership every time it started, so it was no fun when I was on the road with no internet). It's also nice to be able to switch between my laptop and desktop and not have to worry that I only have a 3 or 5 install limit. Since I typically don't back up games that is an issue - I average about 1 system wipe a year due to hardware failure, and my laptop had two wipes within two months because they had failed to set a bios setting when it was sent in the first time and Windows update wouldn't work. They also forgot to install the restore partition the first time (is it any wonder why I don't have any respect for repair people...).