God, I hated Myst, too. I'm still bitter about it all these years later. I mean, I'm no good at the kinds of puzzles that Myst had, and I solved them all in no time flat. The much-vaunted maze was NO problem at all. And by the time I got to "Whatever you do, DON'T PUT THE PAGE IN THE GREEN BOOK" (or whatever it was), my intelligence had been insulted so many times that I gave the damn thing away.
I had the same reaction to this that I did when I first heard about the wheel mouse: "what a dumb idea. I'm never going to use it."
Of course now, x years later, I can't live without that little wheel. It's made a huge difference in the way I use my computer, no lie. (And of course it's great in games.)
Limit Hold 'Em is a game of patterns. There are a lot of variables to take into account--position, pot odds, expected value, number of bets/raises already in, your cards, and many many more. You make playing decisions based on all of these variables. For example, in late position with few callers you can consider playing cards that you would fold in early position. Then there's bluffing and semi-bluffing.
Look at "Positively Fifth Street" by James McManus. He talks a little bit about the Alberta project and the rationale behind it.
I use it because my company has a product that runs on SCO Unix (among many other Unix and Unix-like platforms). As far as I know, though, we have no customers that use SCO Unix, even though we religiously test with our one ancient, creaking SCO box.
I haven't seen an LCD yet that was really good for certain types of games, like driving games and shooters. For work, yeah, I'd rather have an LCD. For games...unless there's something out there that won't ghost at all, I'll stick with the CRT.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how Marble Madness makes the transition; I remember that game as being pretty challenging with the trackball. I can't imagine what it will be like without it.
Preach it! An attitude like...was it Jason who said "People call us sell-outs. Did we sell out? Sure--we sell out every arena we play in, every night"?...an attitude like this shows exactly where the emphasis is for these guys. I don't blame them for being successful; I blame them for not trying anymore. Laying down a bunch of random crap in ProTools and stringing it together any which wat does not an album make.
When "Metallica" came out, my first reaction was, "Is this a joke?" The years have softened my vitriol somewhat, but only somewhat, and I still find the album basically unlistenable. Leave us not mention the albums they made after that, which I had the good sense not to buy.
Blame Bob Rock, the Producer Whose Touch Turns Gold To Shit.
Looks like OCR mistranslation to me; it should probably be "disgorge any". Note that a lot of the periods (e.g. multiple incidences of skindex,net) are rendered as commas.
There's no ocean, but Madison has a couple of really nice lakes with things that pass for beaches. The "pretty girls in bikinis" part is certainly there. (I know, it doesn't compare to the ocean; I'm from Hawaii and miss the ocean a lot.)
There are also places to downhill ski and snowboard, as well as snowmobile trails and cross-country skiing. That pretty much takes care of winter sports; I'm not mentioning hockey and skating because--wonder of wonders--you can do those year-round.
The Bay area is overcrowded and overpriced, and while Madison is making serious inroads towards both of those goals, it isn't there yet. Plus there's those pesky earthquake, which, as I mentioned, Madison just doesn't have. And in the Bay, can you really ignore San Francisco and Oakland? Here in Madison, I can pretend that Chicago doesn't exist.
But that's neither here nor there; Madison isn't the podunk porno-filled cowtown that the Times made it out to be. It's got everything a big city has without having to actually be a big city.
Far from being too far from "big cities where big things happen", Madison is in pretty much the perfect location.
Milwaukee is an hour away. Chicago is two hours away. Minneapolis is not much more than that.
The University of Wisconsin is in Madison, so you've got all of the resources of a college town. If you're into sports, the UW has excellent teams in a variety of them, and you're only a few hours away from professional sports in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Chicago, and the Twin Cities.
If you like bookstores, Madison has a ton of them, and not just big chains like Borders and B&N. There are a wide variety of used book stores downtown, including one that specializes in science fiction and fantasy.
We don't get earthquakes. In Madison, I've heard the tornado warning siren exactly once in the last dozen years. Flooding is pretty much never an issue.
Madison has a good symphony and a viable opera. We also have art-house movie theaters. Madison has or is close to several very good experimental and straight theater groups. We also have an award-winning alternative newsweekly, Isthmus.
To sum up: no disasters. Lots of books. Art. Theater. University. Cities close by if you want them, cities ignorable if you'd rather ignore them.
Frankly, if this guy can't find intellectual stimulation in Madison, he won't find it anywhere. Least of all in Las Vegas.
It can backfire. I got a call once from a magazine salesman and when he asked me what magazines I liked to read, I said "I don't read too much...since the accident. I just can't get used to using Braille." He said, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that" and ended the call.
I now receive solicitations from blindness organizations.
Re:But what does it actually sound like???
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 1
It probably was before 1.0, actually. If 1.0 has a date of July 17, 2002, then I definitely tried it before 1.0. But I recall when I tried it that it was being touted as superior to mp3, which it was definitely not at the time. I don't remember when that was, though. I'll have to try it again sometime. Thanks.
Re:But what does it actually sound like???
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 1
That's a good point. The one time I tried Ogg encoding I encoded the same song on the same computer at the same bitrates as both an mp3 and an ogg. Maybe I did something wrong, but the ogg sounded like it was playing through a tin can at the bottom of a well--there was a noticeable flanging and echoing, like a REALLY bad Windows Media file-- and the mp3 sounded almost indistinguishable from the real CD. My ears are far from golden, but I'd rather hear the evidence.
I was on the line once and told someone to right-click an icon. She said, and I swear to God I am not making this up, "What do you want me to write on?"
Re:How the heck do you pronounce "Qatar"?
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 1
I had a college roommate who was from Qatar. He always pronounced it "Ka-TAR".
I worked at a school district in the upper midwest; we were an almost entirely-Dell shop. We had around 6000 network nodes when I left, and 3,000+ of those were Dells. We loved the Dells; in contrast to the Apples, they never broke down. In fact, the only time I needed to get a Dell machine repaired was when I blew out a motherboard with some faulty RAM. We hated installing new machines, but we always knew that we could plug the Dells in and they would work.
Yeah, no, this was a bunch of people from whom I took shit for years. On "the day", the guy didn't get to the "-ss" in "hey, fatass" before I took it to him. It wasn't random.
But you're right. It worked for me, but it can be taken too far. Seriously, it was like every movie cliche you've ever seen: suddenly, I was "okay".
I know that not everyone can do this, but what I did was to pick the biggest one and beat the crap out of him. I just took a book to his head one day. It sounds like a cliche, but nobody touched me after that, and the teacher who caught me doing it was the nerdy science teacher. All he said was "Good job. Just don't let me catch you again."
Their pick for "Worst Episode" was on last night in my hometown. It was just fine, and their comment about it probably having been the best thing on at the time is absolutely true.
But is that one REALLY worse than the episode with the grease? The one they weren't even going to SHOW, for God's sake (IIRC)?
You know, if we had done what should have been done in the early '70s and started colonizing the moon, all this could have been avoided. Shuttle's damaged? We'll fix her once she's landed on Luna and send her home.
Also, it's too bad that there's not going to be a "Feynman moment" at the inevitable hearings into what happened to Columbia. Remember the Challenger hearings, when he pulled the O-Ring out of his glass of water?
I used to work in a School District IT department. Computers were thrown at everything as if they were a cure-all, when the real problem was that the teachers were awful. It seemed that the ones who were yelling the loudest about needing computers in the classroom were the same ones who put up signs saying "Welcome Student's" and the same ones--English teachers, mind you!--who were saying, without a trace of irony, "Yeah, me and her are going across the street for lunch."
We need to turn out smarter teachers and give them incentives to perform, like better pay, long before we think about having a computer for every student.
Slashdot Mirror
Why have a separate room? Why not just play in your offices, say over the lunch hour, and save a few minutes to talk about it afterwards?
I dunno, I thought the incredibly over-hammed "Whatever you do, don't touch the green book!" from the brothers in Myst was worse.
And the Scottish guy in RTZ was worse, too. "I've only got ONE MILK COW, and SHE only eats CARROTS! So just GO AWAY!"
Overall, though, yeah, the quality of acting in RTZ was pretty dismal. But Rebecca Snoot was pretty.
I have misplaced my pants.
God, I hated Myst, too. I'm still bitter about it all these years later. I mean, I'm no good at the kinds of puzzles that Myst had, and I solved them all in no time flat. The much-vaunted maze was NO problem at all. And by the time I got to "Whatever you do, DON'T PUT THE PAGE IN THE GREEN BOOK" (or whatever it was), my intelligence had been insulted so many times that I gave the damn thing away.
I had the same reaction to this that I did when I first heard about the wheel mouse: "what a dumb idea. I'm never going to use it."
Of course now, x years later, I can't live without that little wheel. It's made a huge difference in the way I use my computer, no lie. (And of course it's great in games.)
Like anything, all it requires is a killer app.
Limit Hold 'Em is a game of patterns. There are a lot of variables to take into account--position, pot odds, expected value, number of bets/raises already in, your cards, and many many more. You make playing decisions based on all of these variables. For example, in late position with few callers you can consider playing cards that you would fold in early position. Then there's bluffing and semi-bluffing.
Look at "Positively Fifth Street" by James McManus. He talks a little bit about the Alberta project and the rationale behind it.
I use it because my company has a product that runs on SCO Unix (among many other Unix and Unix-like platforms). As far as I know, though, we have no customers that use SCO Unix, even though we religiously test with our one ancient, creaking SCO box.
I haven't seen an LCD yet that was really good for certain types of games, like driving games and shooters. For work, yeah, I'd rather have an LCD. For games...unless there's something out there that won't ghost at all, I'll stick with the CRT.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how Marble Madness makes the transition; I remember that game as being pretty challenging with the trackball. I can't imagine what it will be like without it.
Preach it! An attitude like...was it Jason who said "People call us sell-outs. Did we sell out? Sure--we sell out every arena we play in, every night"?...an attitude like this shows exactly where the emphasis is for these guys. I don't blame them for being successful; I blame them for not trying anymore. Laying down a bunch of random crap in ProTools and stringing it together any which wat does not an album make.
When "Metallica" came out, my first reaction was, "Is this a joke?" The years have softened my vitriol somewhat, but only somewhat, and I still find the album basically unlistenable. Leave us not mention the albums they made after that, which I had the good sense not to buy.
Blame Bob Rock, the Producer Whose Touch Turns Gold To Shit.
Looks like OCR mistranslation to me; it should probably be "disgorge any". Note that a lot of the periods (e.g. multiple incidences of skindex,net) are rendered as commas.
There's no ocean, but Madison has a couple of really nice lakes with things that pass for beaches. The "pretty girls in bikinis" part is certainly there. (I know, it doesn't compare to the ocean; I'm from Hawaii and miss the ocean a lot.)
There are also places to downhill ski and snowboard, as well as snowmobile trails and cross-country skiing. That pretty much takes care of winter sports; I'm not mentioning hockey and skating because--wonder of wonders--you can do those year-round.
The Bay area is overcrowded and overpriced, and while Madison is making serious inroads towards both of those goals, it isn't there yet. Plus there's those pesky earthquake, which, as I mentioned, Madison just doesn't have. And in the Bay, can you really ignore San Francisco and Oakland? Here in Madison, I can pretend that Chicago doesn't exist.
But that's neither here nor there; Madison isn't the podunk porno-filled cowtown that the Times made it out to be. It's got everything a big city has without having to actually be a big city.
Far from being too far from "big cities where big things happen", Madison is in pretty much the perfect location.
Milwaukee is an hour away. Chicago is two hours away. Minneapolis is not much more than that.
The University of Wisconsin is in Madison, so you've got all of the resources of a college town. If you're into sports, the UW has excellent teams in a variety of them, and you're only a few hours away from professional sports in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Chicago, and the Twin Cities.
If you like bookstores, Madison has a ton of them, and not just big chains like Borders and B&N. There are a wide variety of used book stores downtown, including one that specializes in science fiction and fantasy.
We don't get earthquakes. In Madison, I've heard the tornado warning siren exactly once in the last dozen years. Flooding is pretty much never an issue.
Madison has a good symphony and a viable opera. We also have art-house movie theaters. Madison has or is close to several very good experimental and straight theater groups. We also have an award-winning alternative newsweekly, Isthmus.
To sum up: no disasters. Lots of books. Art. Theater. University. Cities close by if you want them, cities ignorable if you'd rather ignore them.
Frankly, if this guy can't find intellectual stimulation in Madison, he won't find it anywhere. Least of all in Las Vegas.
It can backfire. I got a call once from a magazine salesman and when he asked me what magazines I liked to read, I said "I don't read too much...since the accident. I just can't get used to using Braille." He said, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that" and ended the call.
I now receive solicitations from blindness organizations.
It probably was before 1.0, actually. If 1.0 has a date of July 17, 2002, then I definitely tried it before 1.0. But I recall when I tried it that it was being touted as superior to mp3, which it was definitely not at the time. I don't remember when that was, though. I'll have to try it again sometime. Thanks.
That's a good point. The one time I tried Ogg encoding I encoded the same song on the same computer at the same bitrates as both an mp3 and an ogg. Maybe I did something wrong, but the ogg sounded like it was playing through a tin can at the bottom of a well--there was a noticeable flanging and echoing, like a REALLY bad Windows Media file-- and the mp3 sounded almost indistinguishable from the real CD. My ears are far from golden, but I'd rather hear the evidence.
I was on the line once and told someone to right-click an icon. She said, and I swear to God I am not making this up, "What do you want me to write on?"
I had a college roommate who was from Qatar. He always pronounced it "Ka-TAR".
(I know you have no idea who I am.)
I worked at a school district in the upper midwest; we were an almost entirely-Dell shop. We had around 6000 network nodes when I left, and 3,000+ of those were Dells. We loved the Dells; in contrast to the Apples, they never broke down. In fact, the only time I needed to get a Dell machine repaired was when I blew out a motherboard with some faulty RAM. We hated installing new machines, but we always knew that we could plug the Dells in and they would work.
Yeah, no, this was a bunch of people from whom I took shit for years. On "the day", the guy didn't get to the "-ss" in "hey, fatass" before I took it to him. It wasn't random.
But you're right. It worked for me, but it can be taken too far. Seriously, it was like every movie cliche you've ever seen: suddenly, I was "okay".
Which, in a way, could be worse.
I know that not everyone can do this, but what I did was to pick the biggest one and beat the crap out of him. I just took a book to his head one day. It sounds like a cliche, but nobody touched me after that, and the teacher who caught me doing it was the nerdy science teacher. All he said was "Good job. Just don't let me catch you again."
Their pick for "Worst Episode" was on last night in my hometown. It was just fine, and their comment about it probably having been the best thing on at the time is absolutely true.
But is that one REALLY worse than the episode with the grease? The one they weren't even going to SHOW, for God's sake (IIRC)?
You know, if we had done what should have been done in the early '70s and started colonizing the moon, all this could have been avoided. Shuttle's damaged? We'll fix her once she's landed on Luna and send her home.
Also, it's too bad that there's not going to be a "Feynman moment" at the inevitable hearings into what happened to Columbia. Remember the Challenger hearings, when he pulled the O-Ring out of his glass of water?
I used to work in a School District IT department. Computers were thrown at everything as if they were a cure-all, when the real problem was that the teachers were awful. It seemed that the ones who were yelling the loudest about needing computers in the classroom were the same ones who put up signs saying "Welcome Student's" and the same ones--English teachers, mind you!--who were saying, without a trace of irony, "Yeah, me and her are going across the street for lunch."
We need to turn out smarter teachers and give them incentives to perform, like better pay, long before we think about having a computer for every student.
I would rather see STV again than watch First Contact or Insurrection. Or, indeed, most of Generations.
STV is worth it for the scene where Kirk says "I NEED my pain." Nothing in Berman Trek has equalled it.