I didn't even think about NOLF until you mentioned it, and it's one of my favorite games ever. IIRC, I was truly surprised at how everything turned out, which almost never happens. The weapons were fun, the maps were good, and I liked Cate Archer.
Another one that was overlooked was Rise of the Triad. Back in the early days of multiplayer games, this was the one we fired up on the LAN most often.
Hmmm...well, it was meant to convey my utter disdain for Valve and Steam. In completely dismissing the possibility that they could do something right by allowing opt-in, I wanted to communicate the fact that I believe that they can in fact do nothing right now (unless of course they abandon Steaming Pile of Crap).
I think your summary of my post is overly superficial. I was asking a question to which I wanted to know the answer, and I had no way of knowing it other than asking. To summarize that as "But I'm not sure. This in no way affects me," is a bit disingenuous: what if I had been asking whether the date of the Pearl Harbor attack was Dec. 7 1941 or 1942? The answer doesn't affect me either way, but I would have still wanted to know.
That's fine in a large community; you can always go somewhere else. In a smaller community, it can hamper your ability to find a server where you won't be harassed.
Is participation in this survey voluntary? I'm sure it's not; part of the Steam license probably says "we're going to gather data on you and you can't say boo about it." But I'd like to know for sure; I stopped playing HL when Steam came out.
Of course, but all these other guys kindly pointed out exactly what I would have said. To reiterate, he is in the background in that picture. It is indeed a "two people in the same crowd" story.
To say that he's "inches away" is like looking at a photograph of the pre 9/11 New York skyline and marveling that the towers were "just inches apart".
The real photo is not a picture of them together. It is a picture of them in the same place at the same time. Yes, there's a difference--Kerry is basically background in that picture; he's not talking to Hanoi Jane, he's not looking at her, nothing.
I attended a Republican convention once. One of the many speakers was Pat Robertson. By your logic, I therefore believe everything that Pat Robertson believes. Pete DuPont spoke at the same rally. By your logic, Pete DuPont and Pat Robertson therefore have no differences.
Don't we deprive soldiers enough as it is? We've got members of our Armed Forces who have to go on welfare and use food stamps to feed their families. Instead of this kind of research, why don't we pay them more so that we don't have to figure out new and innovative ways to screw them?
CD adds lag and uses system resources. Playing any game--we ran a Half-Life Firearms server--with and without Cheating-Death, you notice a difference, even if your ping stays mostly the same.
It works fine. It catches cheaters.
What it can't catch is people who exploit bugs in-game. Firearms, for example, had several exploits that we knew were out there, but didn't know how to reproduce or stop. You need to have good, trustworthy admins who aren't afraid to wield the ban stick. And they need to watch people.
...and, of course, if I had bothered to read all of the posts before I hit "Reply to This", I would have seen that several people have posted excellent links to more on the Venera landers.
The Russians didn't launch men into space because their rockets were notoriously underpowered for all their size. I'm assuming that I remember that correctly; it's been a while since I studied the subject.
The Russians also put landers on Venus and sent back pictures of the surface.
I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't verify it right now, but in "Behind Deep Blue," Feng-Hsiung Hsu, who built those chess processors, claims that you could fit a Deep Blue-class machine into something the size of a PocketPC today.
a basic "rescue" OS with capabilities for controlling the computer in a totally novolatile storage
Yeah, that's more the kind of thing I was asking about. It would be an absolute fallback, only in case of dire emergencies.
You keep a last-known-good copy in flash, and if that gets corrupted, you restore from a ROM that contains a Mark I-Mod 0 copy.
I'm neither a rocket scientist nor a computer scientist, so maybe this is a dumb question, but how come there's not some sort of ROM somewhere in the rover itself that contains a backup of the system in its initial state? Obviously, you'd only use it in a worst-case scenario, but you could restore it and then there'd at least be something and they could reapply all the patches one by one.
About 45 minutes into it, I asked my wife if there was going to be any story. Her response was, "This is the story." I'm with you, it was just a horrible, boring, pointless movie.
However, I think it does deserve the editing award, because it was well put-together.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure doesn't glorify being stupid. The main thrust of the story is that yes, they start out stupid, but if they don't get smart, fast, the whole world is doomed. How does that glorify being stupid? They just needed a push in the right direction--Rufus just gave them the time machine. He didn't tell them what to do with it.
I don't know if this screener had it or not, but the people I know who get screeners have said that their names show up occasionally onscreen when the movie is playing. Maybe that's just from some studios; it's only started this year.
Given that, I can't possibly see how an actual recipient of a screener would be dumb enough to circulate something with their name on it.
I think you're ignoring the fact that if the patch had been available outside of Steam, there wouldn't have been a problem. Sure, okay, the cXg people should have set up a lot earlier. I can see your point. But under the old system, they could have generated a few dozen CDs with the patch on and updated each machine as needed, without flooding their connection. Steam is a solution in search of a problem; it fixes something that wasn't broken.
When I was working for one of the school districts around here, I plugged a 4Mbps token ring card into the 16Mbps network. Then I left the site. I had just started, and nobody had told me what would happen if you did that.
I used to drink a liter of Mt. Dew everyh morning, then more at lunch. I didn't do this for very long, a couple of months at most. I was never big on caffeinated beverages before then--I can't stand the taste of coffee, colas were not my thing.
I just stopped. Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, you'll feel like complete and utter crap. I missed three days of work. THREE DAYS. On the second day, I couldn't even get out of bed, I felt so horrible. The only reason I went back to work on the fourth day was that I couldn't afford any more sick days.
IMNSHO, anything that does that to you when you stop isn't worth starting in the first place. If you can't stay awake without it, don't. Sleep instead. Nothing in your job is worth it.
I will always remember Broken Arrow with fondness, because I saw it immediately after I saw the absolutely horrendous "Barb Wire". And I mean immediately--we left the theater and said "We need to see another movie right away to get that out of our heads" and we turned around and walked right back in and got tickets to Broken Arrow.
Compared to "Barb Wire", it's a friggin' masterpiece.
Well, that's the spoiler. The greatest writer on earth couldn't have come up with something that didn't sound trite or banal or cliched, and the fact that she chose to handle it that way was really great.
I just didn't want to up and reveal that; it's better if you discover it for yourself.
About 45 minutes into "Master and Commander", I turned to my wife and said "Is there going to be a story in here somewhere?"
We're never given any reason to care one way or another about anything that Jack Aubrey does. They've got to catch the French ship--so? Why should I, as a moviegoer, care about that for its own sake? We're never given a stake in anything that happens onscreen. I kept waiting, mostly in vain, for something to happen that would make me give a damn.
There were a few good moments--any scene involving Midshipman Blakeney, for example, whose part apparently grew as the producers realized what a good actor that guy was--but overall there was just nothing there for me.
My wife tried to argue that that was the whole point of the movie, that there IS no point to war, that the movie isn't supposed to make any sense. That we're not supposed to care, because they're not doing anything that we care about, and the movie was made that way intentionally. Me, I think she was just staring at Russell Crowe and making stuff up so that I wouldn't insist that we walk out.
(Actually, Russell Crowe was pretty good. I don't generally enjoy his movies, but in this one he was passable. In one scene, though, he reminded me so much of the guy who plays Captain Feathersword on "The Wiggles" that it took me right out of the movie for pretty much the entire time.)
The script for "Lost In Translation" was pure genius. If there was ever a movie that deserved a screenwriting award, it's this one--just for what he tells her at the end. (Yes, I'm trying desperately to avoid a spoiler.) That was certainly one of the greatest moments in movies this year.
Sofia Coppola deserves an Oscar for the script, and a nomination for Best Director. I'm not so sure she deserves to win, though; there were some problems with the flow and pacing, and definitely some scenes that didn't need to be there. (For example, after the nth long sequence of Scarlett Johansson wandering around, I was thinking "We get the message, already.") On the other hand, the performance that she got from Bill Murray was just incredible, so it could go either way.
It will be a shame when Bill Murray doesn't win the Oscar, because his was literally the performance of a lifetime. I was overwhelmed. There were so many moments when he could have spilled over into being "that Bill Murray character", and didn't. He showed remarkable restraint that I didn't think he was capable of. He deserves the award. I doubt he'll get it.
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I didn't even think about NOLF until you mentioned it, and it's one of my favorite games ever. IIRC, I was truly surprised at how everything turned out, which almost never happens. The weapons were fun, the maps were good, and I liked Cate Archer.
Another one that was overlooked was Rise of the Triad. Back in the early days of multiplayer games, this was the one we fired up on the LAN most often.
Hmmm...well, it was meant to convey my utter disdain for Valve and Steam. In completely dismissing the possibility that they could do something right by allowing opt-in, I wanted to communicate the fact that I believe that they can in fact do nothing right now (unless of course they abandon Steaming Pile of Crap).
I think your summary of my post is overly superficial. I was asking a question to which I wanted to know the answer, and I had no way of knowing it other than asking. To summarize that as "But I'm not sure. This in no way affects me," is a bit disingenuous: what if I had been asking whether the date of the Pearl Harbor attack was Dec. 7 1941 or 1942? The answer doesn't affect me either way, but I would have still wanted to know.
That's fine in a large community; you can always go somewhere else. In a smaller community, it can hamper your ability to find a server where you won't be harassed.
Is participation in this survey voluntary? I'm sure it's not; part of the Steam license probably says "we're going to gather data on you and you can't say boo about it." But I'd like to know for sure; I stopped playing HL when Steam came out.
Have you even looked at the picture?
Of course, but all these other guys kindly pointed out exactly what I would have said. To reiterate, he is in the background in that picture. It is indeed a "two people in the same crowd" story.
To say that he's "inches away" is like looking at a photograph of the pre 9/11 New York skyline and marveling that the towers were "just inches apart".
The real photo is not a picture of them together. It is a picture of them in the same place at the same time. Yes, there's a difference--Kerry is basically background in that picture; he's not talking to Hanoi Jane, he's not looking at her, nothing.
I attended a Republican convention once. One of the many speakers was Pat Robertson. By your logic, I therefore believe everything that Pat Robertson believes. Pete DuPont spoke at the same rally. By your logic, Pete DuPont and Pat Robertson therefore have no differences.
Yeah, but it's a tradeoff--you only need one hand to hold it. Uh, the PC, that is.
Don't we deprive soldiers enough as it is? We've got members of our Armed Forces who have to go on welfare and use food stamps to feed their families. Instead of this kind of research, why don't we pay them more so that we don't have to figure out new and innovative ways to screw them?
CD adds lag and uses system resources. Playing any game--we ran a Half-Life Firearms server--with and without Cheating-Death, you notice a difference, even if your ping stays mostly the same.
It works fine. It catches cheaters.
What it can't catch is people who exploit bugs in-game. Firearms, for example, had several exploits that we knew were out there, but didn't know how to reproduce or stop. You need to have good, trustworthy admins who aren't afraid to wield the ban stick. And they need to watch people.
...and, of course, if I had bothered to read all of the posts before I hit "Reply to This", I would have seen that several people have posted excellent links to more on the Venera landers.
Sigh. It's not my day.
The Russians didn't launch men into space because their rockets were notoriously underpowered for all their size. I'm assuming that I remember that correctly; it's been a while since I studied the subject.
The Russians also put landers on Venus and sent back pictures of the surface.
I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't verify it right now, but in "Behind Deep Blue," Feng-Hsiung Hsu, who built those chess processors, claims that you could fit a Deep Blue-class machine into something the size of a PocketPC today.
a basic "rescue" OS with capabilities for controlling the computer in a totally novolatile storage Yeah, that's more the kind of thing I was asking about. It would be an absolute fallback, only in case of dire emergencies. You keep a last-known-good copy in flash, and if that gets corrupted, you restore from a ROM that contains a Mark I-Mod 0 copy.
I'm neither a rocket scientist nor a computer scientist, so maybe this is a dumb question, but how come there's not some sort of ROM somewhere in the rover itself that contains a backup of the system in its initial state? Obviously, you'd only use it in a worst-case scenario, but you could restore it and then there'd at least be something and they could reapply all the patches one by one.
About 45 minutes into it, I asked my wife if there was going to be any story. Her response was, "This is the story." I'm with you, it was just a horrible, boring, pointless movie.
However, I think it does deserve the editing award, because it was well put-together.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure doesn't glorify being stupid. The main thrust of the story is that yes, they start out stupid, but if they don't get smart, fast, the whole world is doomed. How does that glorify being stupid? They just needed a push in the right direction--Rufus just gave them the time machine. He didn't tell them what to do with it.
I don't know if this screener had it or not, but the people I know who get screeners have said that their names show up occasionally onscreen when the movie is playing. Maybe that's just from some studios; it's only started this year.
Given that, I can't possibly see how an actual recipient of a screener would be dumb enough to circulate something with their name on it.
I think you're ignoring the fact that if the patch had been available outside of Steam, there wouldn't have been a problem. Sure, okay, the cXg people should have set up a lot earlier. I can see your point. But under the old system, they could have generated a few dozen CDs with the patch on and updated each machine as needed, without flooding their connection. Steam is a solution in search of a problem; it fixes something that wasn't broken.
According to the Inquirer, Valve released a patch in the middle of the event, and BAM! You can kiss all that bandwidth goodbye.
When I was working for one of the school districts around here, I plugged a 4Mbps token ring card into the 16Mbps network. Then I left the site. I had just started, and nobody had told me what would happen if you did that.
BOY, did I find out!
I used to drink a liter of Mt. Dew everyh morning, then more at lunch. I didn't do this for very long, a couple of months at most. I was never big on caffeinated beverages before then--I can't stand the taste of coffee, colas were not my thing.
I just stopped. Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, you'll feel like complete and utter crap. I missed three days of work. THREE DAYS. On the second day, I couldn't even get out of bed, I felt so horrible. The only reason I went back to work on the fourth day was that I couldn't afford any more sick days.
IMNSHO, anything that does that to you when you stop isn't worth starting in the first place. If you can't stay awake without it, don't. Sleep instead. Nothing in your job is worth it.
I will always remember Broken Arrow with fondness, because I saw it immediately after I saw the absolutely horrendous "Barb Wire". And I mean immediately--we left the theater and said "We need to see another movie right away to get that out of our heads" and we turned around and walked right back in and got tickets to Broken Arrow.
Compared to "Barb Wire", it's a friggin' masterpiece.
Well, that's the spoiler. The greatest writer on earth couldn't have come up with something that didn't sound trite or banal or cliched, and the fact that she chose to handle it that way was really great.
I just didn't want to up and reveal that; it's better if you discover it for yourself.
About 45 minutes into "Master and Commander", I turned to my wife and said "Is there going to be a story in here somewhere?"
We're never given any reason to care one way or another about anything that Jack Aubrey does. They've got to catch the French ship--so? Why should I, as a moviegoer, care about that for its own sake? We're never given a stake in anything that happens onscreen. I kept waiting, mostly in vain, for something to happen that would make me give a damn.
There were a few good moments--any scene involving Midshipman Blakeney, for example, whose part apparently grew as the producers realized what a good actor that guy was--but overall there was just nothing there for me.
My wife tried to argue that that was the whole point of the movie, that there IS no point to war, that the movie isn't supposed to make any sense. That we're not supposed to care, because they're not doing anything that we care about, and the movie was made that way intentionally. Me, I think she was just staring at Russell Crowe and making stuff up so that I wouldn't insist that we walk out.
(Actually, Russell Crowe was pretty good. I don't generally enjoy his movies, but in this one he was passable. In one scene, though, he reminded me so much of the guy who plays Captain Feathersword on "The Wiggles" that it took me right out of the movie for pretty much the entire time.)
The script for "Lost In Translation" was pure genius. If there was ever a movie that deserved a screenwriting award, it's this one--just for what he tells her at the end. (Yes, I'm trying desperately to avoid a spoiler.) That was certainly one of the greatest moments in movies this year.
Sofia Coppola deserves an Oscar for the script, and a nomination for Best Director. I'm not so sure she deserves to win, though; there were some problems with the flow and pacing, and definitely some scenes that didn't need to be there. (For example, after the nth long sequence of Scarlett Johansson wandering around, I was thinking "We get the message, already.") On the other hand, the performance that she got from Bill Murray was just incredible, so it could go either way.
It will be a shame when Bill Murray doesn't win the Oscar, because his was literally the performance of a lifetime. I was overwhelmed. There were so many moments when he could have spilled over into being "that Bill Murray character", and didn't. He showed remarkable restraint that I didn't think he was capable of. He deserves the award. I doubt he'll get it.