Er. Iron Storm wasn't set in WWI, it was set in an alternate history where WWI never fully ended and was protracted for decades after it ended in our reality. I think the games takes place in 1965 or something similar, and there are choppers and high-tech weapons and vehicles along with the WWI stuff.
Unfortunately, the game DID suck, but the setting was pretty good and I was disappointed.
ad 2) cut&paste works fine, even with images and spreadsheets. Did you try OpenOffice or Koffice ? Probably not. If your Gnome has problems with it, that does not mean that *all* X-based UIs have problems with it. I guess that it works right even inside Gnome (although I do not use it myself), the standards for drag&drop are in place for very long time already. Interoperability between different applications could be better, but that holds for Windows and Mac as well. If you paste something from Excell into Photoshop, you are going to get less-than-stellar result too, because the application just does not expect that kind of data.
I just tried this (even though I can't think of any reason for anyone to possibly need this feature) on my copy of Excel 98 and Photoshop 5.5 for MacOS 9. Now, remember these pieces of software are both *old*, both purchased in 1999 I believe. Here's the result It does exactly what anyone would expect it to do! Since Excel data can't be formatted into data Photoshop can edit, it pastes it as a bitmapped image into the Photoshop image. If I paste the exact same cells into Word 98, it'll use the editable version and format it as a table.
Note that Excel and Photoshop aren't made by the same company... this is all governed by the OS and I'd get the exact same results if I pasted into, say, Corel Painter or Aldus Superpaint 3.0 (released 1991.) (In fact, out of curiousity I did try Aldus Superpaint 3.0 and, indeed, it works exactly as expected again.)
This is how copy and paste should work. When Linux can do this, I might consider it.
I might have considered buying and playing the games if the cartoon show on Cartoon Network wasn't so GOD DAMNED BORING!
The show consists of about 13 confusingly named and non-distinct characters TALKING to each other in front of various wacky-looking backgrounds. Sure it looks at first glance like it has high production values until you realize there's hardly any animation... usually the camera pulls far enough away, or is at a handy angle, where they don't have to lipsynch with the speech.
Not only is the cartoon BORING, but it seems to MOCK the viewer with how boring it actually is... for instance, I saw an episode (the last one I ever watched) where the entire time they talked about how someone needs to go on this grand adventure and find some magical object or some damn thing... of course, no one in the cartoon GOES, they just TALK about it!
Grah. I've seen boring media in my life, but.hack//sign takes the cake and eats it, too. If they were trying to sell a video game with it... no thanks. I have boring video games already.
In a rear-ender collision, the person in back is almost 100% actually *at* fault, that's why they get the ticket by default.
One of the rules of the road is that you must stay a minimum safe distance from the car in front of you. If you're closer to that car than you can come to a dead stop, and therefore hit them, there's the ticket.
Of course, that's not the say that the guy in the first car did nothing wrong... if they did, and it can be proved, then the cop should be giving *both* cars a ticket for it.
The solution is simple, fortunately: Know the stopping distance of your vehicle and respect it.
I don't see why it would be. Your cell phone has a little sticker on it that says it's under FCC law that says it has to accept any radio interference it comes across, right? Even if that interference disrupts its functioning? Most wireless devices, if not all, carry this condition on them, and I'd be *very* surprised if cell phones are an exception.
As long as you're only blocking calls on your own property (i.e. the signal doesn't leak out the doorway into the street), then I don't see how this would be illegal at all.
I stand by what I said. When we have an article about min-maxing posted, then I welcome the great-grandparent to duplicate his post in that article where it is more relevant, but here it has nothing to do with anything.
It might be interesting, but it's certainly not insightful and it's definately off-topic.
Yes, a Mary Sue character might min-max. But they're just as likely not to. The two behaviors aren't related.
I couldn't even get through Stranger in a Strange Land. Did anyone in this topic just read the games.slashdot.org topic about Mary Sues in RP games? Yeah, uh, let's see here Heinlein, there's a famous lawyer who's rich and, oh yeah, he's surrounded by three super-attractive women all the time and, yup, he's famous and, hey look, a boy raised on Mars by an alien race just falls in his freakin' lap. Talk about Mary Sue.
I've been MUDding for years, and I've never seen anyone put serious effort into RP on a MMORPG. The best I've come across is Horizons, where people will actually shut up (sometimes) if you correct them on saying OOC stuff over IC channels... but it's still nowhere CLOSE to a good RP MUD.
That said, if you know a MMORPG where people actually RP, I'd really love to hear about it so I can give it a try.
Ok, I'm sorry, but you're utterly missing the point here.
What you're describing is min-maxing... creating characters specifically to ensure that their stats are as high as possible and they can beat other characters in combat. This is a problem because it produces hundreds of characters who are the same race, class and have the same skill set.
What the article is talking about is Mary Sues... they have *nothing* to do with stats, skills, or race in a game. They only have to do with the story telling aspects of the game. How the character acts, behaves and speaks. The coded combat system has nothing to do with Mary Sues whatsoever.
Seriously, if you haven't played a text-based RP MUD, MUSH or freeform chat before, this article simply does not apply to you... your comments here are moderated incorrectly because, really, all they are is off-topic.
And moderators: Please make sure you know the topic before you moderate.
Well, that's one of the reason that free-form RP sucks donkey balls. To be frank.
Play on a MUD like Eternal Struggle where the code of the MUD provides structure to the game, and players like this will be much less of a problem. (But not gone! The article *is* right when it says they'll always be around. We can minimize, but we can't eliminate.)
Most of the time, when we get 'free form' chatroom-type RPers on the MUD, the first thing they say is, "wow, this is SO much better!" Some of the structure is coded in, some of it is printed in numerous help files and webpages, but the point is that it *has* all the structure that free-form lacks, and that's what makes it more fun to play.
I'll admit when I see with my own two eyes what you're talking about.
I've never *NEVER* seen a Windows XP machine (that didn't have a hardware or driver problem) hard-lock. NEVER. I administer 150 of them every day for the last year in an environment with stupid users and dirty power, and I've NEVER seen control-alt-delete *not* work in Windows XP.
Then again, you said it bluescreens from time to time... so your problem is probably either a driver or hardware issue. Assuming your hardware is clean, check your driver versions, look online for known problems, and update if needed. Video card drivers can hard-lock the screen under certain circumstances. And when that happens, it's the fault of the driver maker, not Microsoft. And these problems can be solved... you need to expend the effort to *fix* it instead of just rebooting and whining about it on Slashdot.
And, if you wanted, you could probably use Remote Desktop Connection from another XP machine to try to kill the process... given, it probably won't work, but did you *try* that before declaring "there's NOTHING I can do."?
No one's claiming that Windows is perfect. Or that MacOS X is perfect or that Linux is perfect or that BeOS is perfect or what have you. Every OS has its problems. What they're saying is that the attitude around here at Slashdot is that Windows is: 1) Unstable 2) Slow 3) Insecure
The simple fact of the matter is that, since Windows XP, Windows is no more unstable than Linux, no slower than Linux, and no less secure than Linux. (The reason people say Linux is more secure is because they don't log in as 'root.' Uh... DUH! Just use Windows without logging in as 'administrator' and you get the exact same benefits.)
Anyway, it pisses me off. If you Slashdot people want to be anti-Windows, that's fine, but come up with some new and original arguments because those three aren't cutting it anymore.
So run Toast. Just because OS X supports CD burning in the OS doesn't mean all those CD burning packages suddenly just vaporized and disappeared. In fact, OS X is really friendly about asking what you want to do with the blank CD when you insert it... just put in the CD, select "open with Toast" and you're set.
Just be glad it wasn't moderated (+4 Funny) by a series of moderators whose idea of humor is hearing the exact same joke (which was pretty lame to begin with) 15,000 times in a row.
I've always assumed their logic went like this when you're editing a single line and you hit the up arrow key: The user wants to go up a line, but there isn't any line above this one. To get them as close as possible, let's move the insertion point to the beginning of this line and then they can hit 'return' to create a new line to go up to. (If that makes any sense.)
Microsoft/Unix reasoning seems to go: There's no line above this one, so it's not possible to move up. Beep it like an error and do nothing.
I can see it both ways. I prefer Apple's because I grew up with it and hitting 'down arrow' as a quick way to get to the end of a line is a muscle-memory by now.
I would bet he got OS X to trash "itself" by fooling around in all sorts of system files and generally doing stuff he wasn't really supposed to. I'm no Unix geek (I'm a MacOS dork), but from everything I've heard Apple chose some different pathnames for OS X from what people expect in other Unix OSes and it can mess people up... maybe he moved a configuration file into the wrong path and deleted the original. You could probably end up with a trashed OS by fiddling with permissions too much.
As a rule, OS X doesn't trash "itself." If your copy stopped booting or running correctly, it's because of something you did to it. If you ran OS X without ever enabling root, or using SUDO, then you'd be fine right now.
This is exactly the argument. MacOS stopped be spatial at version 7 when they added aliases (shortcuts) precisely because they realized that a spatial browser can be kludgy at some things. The best solution is to create a file browser that has spatial elements, and also allows non-spatial elements... *exactly* what Apple did with OS 9.
To be frank, I haven't tried Gnome 2.6, but if it's entirely spatial then, yes, it will be awkward. They need to follow Apple's example and mix in non-spatial elements until you can really scream with it.
And tabbed folders a "kludge?" Spring-loaded folders "hard-to-use?" Did you even *use* these technologies?
If you read the article the grandparent linked, you'll see he also comes to the conclusion that a *pure* spatial file browser is pretty awkward to work with. (Example: MacOS pre-7. Adding aliases (shortcuts) pretty much ruins the spatial metaphor.)
He proposes that the ideal file browser would have a 'base' appearance of a spatial browser, but also allow customized non-spatial views. For instance, you can have 'spatial' window that displays the root level of your drive open at the same time as a non-spatial 'query' window showing the last 25 modified files. The windows would be visually distinct, so you could tell at a glance which was spatial and which was not.
Personally, I liked the MacOS 9 approach... spatial (mostly), with aliases, tabbed folders, and an easy way to drill-down in folders without cluttering the desktop. (Double-click-hold... this mode lets you hover over folders and open them instantly. When you release the mouse button, the folders in the background disappear leaving only the one you want.)
Pity Apple threw this interface in the toilet for OS X, it worked really, really well. (What the article is *really* about... the author at Ars is upset, like I am, that Apple would just throw 15 years of OS evolution down the window.)
First of all, even if "Acts of Gord" was a reputable source of factual information (it's not, it's a humor site), it *only* mentions Nintendo machines. What about Intellivision? How about Coleco? Atari?
The page you linked to doesn't support your argument. If your argument was "Nintendo never sells hardware for below cost," then that official statement (posted on a humor site!) might be relevant in some way.
There are two things that can cause a BSOD in Windows XP:
1) Buggy drivers. 2) Faulty hardware.
I don't know what brand of camera you have, but if you don't have any problems with any other USB devices, I'd say the problem lies with 1).
Point here is that you can't blame your camera problems on Microsoft... it's either the camera maker's software, or something about your hardware, that caused the BSOD.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, IE runs just fine in MacOS X... in fact, it's a pretty good browser if a little slow.
Not that it fundamentally changes your point, but you can't assume that IE -> Windows.
Plus you should take into account that Slashdot looks terrible in a Mozilla-based browser with all kinds of annoying visual errors.
Er. Iron Storm wasn't set in WWI, it was set in an alternate history where WWI never fully ended and was protracted for decades after it ended in our reality. I think the games takes place in 1965 or something similar, and there are choppers and high-tech weapons and vehicles along with the WWI stuff.
Unfortunately, the game DID suck, but the setting was pretty good and I was disappointed.
I just tried this (even though I can't think of any reason for anyone to possibly need this feature) on my copy of Excel 98 and Photoshop 5.5 for MacOS 9. Now, remember these pieces of software are both *old*, both purchased in 1999 I believe. Here's the result It does exactly what anyone would expect it to do! Since Excel data can't be formatted into data Photoshop can edit, it pastes it as a bitmapped image into the Photoshop image. If I paste the exact same cells into Word 98, it'll use the editable version and format it as a table.
Note that Excel and Photoshop aren't made by the same company... this is all governed by the OS and I'd get the exact same results if I pasted into, say, Corel Painter or Aldus Superpaint 3.0 (released 1991.) (In fact, out of curiousity I did try Aldus Superpaint 3.0 and, indeed, it works exactly as expected again.)
This is how copy and paste should work. When Linux can do this, I might consider it.
Yeah, but here's the problem:
.hack//sign takes the cake and eats it, too. If they were trying to sell a video game with it... no thanks. I have boring video games already.
I might have considered buying and playing the games if the cartoon show on Cartoon Network wasn't so GOD DAMNED BORING!
The show consists of about 13 confusingly named and non-distinct characters TALKING to each other in front of various wacky-looking backgrounds. Sure it looks at first glance like it has high production values until you realize there's hardly any animation... usually the camera pulls far enough away, or is at a handy angle, where they don't have to lipsynch with the speech.
Not only is the cartoon BORING, but it seems to MOCK the viewer with how boring it actually is... for instance, I saw an episode (the last one I ever watched) where the entire time they talked about how someone needs to go on this grand adventure and find some magical object or some damn thing... of course, no one in the cartoon GOES, they just TALK about it!
Grah. I've seen boring media in my life, but
In a rear-ender collision, the person in back is almost 100% actually *at* fault, that's why they get the ticket by default.
One of the rules of the road is that you must stay a minimum safe distance from the car in front of you. If you're closer to that car than you can come to a dead stop, and therefore hit them, there's the ticket.
Of course, that's not the say that the guy in the first car did nothing wrong... if they did, and it can be proved, then the cop should be giving *both* cars a ticket for it.
The solution is simple, fortunately: Know the stopping distance of your vehicle and respect it.
I don't see why it would be. Your cell phone has a little sticker on it that says it's under FCC law that says it has to accept any radio interference it comes across, right? Even if that interference disrupts its functioning? Most wireless devices, if not all, carry this condition on them, and I'd be *very* surprised if cell phones are an exception.
As long as you're only blocking calls on your own property (i.e. the signal doesn't leak out the doorway into the street), then I don't see how this would be illegal at all.
I stand by what I said. When we have an article about min-maxing posted, then I welcome the great-grandparent to duplicate his post in that article where it is more relevant, but here it has nothing to do with anything.
It might be interesting, but it's certainly not insightful and it's definately off-topic.
Yes, a Mary Sue character might min-max. But they're just as likely not to. The two behaviors aren't related.
At the risk of making a "me too" post, me too.
I couldn't even get through Stranger in a Strange Land. Did anyone in this topic just read the games.slashdot.org topic about Mary Sues in RP games? Yeah, uh, let's see here Heinlein, there's a famous lawyer who's rich and, oh yeah, he's surrounded by three super-attractive women all the time and, yup, he's famous and, hey look, a boy raised on Mars by an alien race just falls in his freakin' lap. Talk about Mary Sue.
Job is excellent in comparison.
I've been MUDding for years, and I've never seen anyone put serious effort into RP on a MMORPG. The best I've come across is Horizons, where people will actually shut up (sometimes) if you correct them on saying OOC stuff over IC channels... but it's still nowhere CLOSE to a good RP MUD.
That said, if you know a MMORPG where people actually RP, I'd really love to hear about it so I can give it a try.
Ok, I'm sorry, but you're utterly missing the point here.
What you're describing is min-maxing... creating characters specifically to ensure that their stats are as high as possible and they can beat other characters in combat. This is a problem because it produces hundreds of characters who are the same race, class and have the same skill set.
What the article is talking about is Mary Sues... they have *nothing* to do with stats, skills, or race in a game. They only have to do with the story telling aspects of the game. How the character acts, behaves and speaks. The coded combat system has nothing to do with Mary Sues whatsoever.
Seriously, if you haven't played a text-based RP MUD, MUSH or freeform chat before, this article simply does not apply to you... your comments here are moderated incorrectly because, really, all they are is off-topic.
And moderators: Please make sure you know the topic before you moderate.
Well, that's one of the reason that free-form RP sucks donkey balls. To be frank.
Play on a MUD like Eternal Struggle where the code of the MUD provides structure to the game, and players like this will be much less of a problem. (But not gone! The article *is* right when it says they'll always be around. We can minimize, but we can't eliminate.)
Most of the time, when we get 'free form' chatroom-type RPers on the MUD, the first thing they say is, "wow, this is SO much better!" Some of the structure is coded in, some of it is printed in numerous help files and webpages, but the point is that it *has* all the structure that free-form lacks, and that's what makes it more fun to play.
(Shameless promo: Eternal Struggle MUD. Disclaimer: I write code there.)
I'll admit when I see with my own two eyes what you're talking about.
I've never *NEVER* seen a Windows XP machine (that didn't have a hardware or driver problem) hard-lock. NEVER. I administer 150 of them every day for the last year in an environment with stupid users and dirty power, and I've NEVER seen control-alt-delete *not* work in Windows XP.
Then again, you said it bluescreens from time to time... so your problem is probably either a driver or hardware issue. Assuming your hardware is clean, check your driver versions, look online for known problems, and update if needed. Video card drivers can hard-lock the screen under certain circumstances. And when that happens, it's the fault of the driver maker, not Microsoft. And these problems can be solved... you need to expend the effort to *fix* it instead of just rebooting and whining about it on Slashdot.
And, if you wanted, you could probably use Remote Desktop Connection from another XP machine to try to kill the process... given, it probably won't work, but did you *try* that before declaring "there's NOTHING I can do."?
No one's claiming that Windows is perfect. Or that MacOS X is perfect or that Linux is perfect or that BeOS is perfect or what have you. Every OS has its problems. What they're saying is that the attitude around here at Slashdot is that Windows is:
1) Unstable
2) Slow
3) Insecure
The simple fact of the matter is that, since Windows XP, Windows is no more unstable than Linux, no slower than Linux, and no less secure than Linux. (The reason people say Linux is more secure is because they don't log in as 'root.' Uh... DUH! Just use Windows without logging in as 'administrator' and you get the exact same benefits.)
Anyway, it pisses me off. If you Slashdot people want to be anti-Windows, that's fine, but come up with some new and original arguments because those three aren't cutting it anymore.
Get a grip. It's a software company, not the freakin' Nazis.
So run Toast. Just because OS X supports CD burning in the OS doesn't mean all those CD burning packages suddenly just vaporized and disappeared. In fact, OS X is really friendly about asking what you want to do with the blank CD when you insert it... just put in the CD, select "open with Toast" and you're set.
Just be glad it wasn't moderated (+4 Funny) by a series of moderators whose idea of humor is hearing the exact same joke (which was pretty lame to begin with) 15,000 times in a row.
I've always assumed their logic went like this when you're editing a single line and you hit the up arrow key: The user wants to go up a line, but there isn't any line above this one. To get them as close as possible, let's move the insertion point to the beginning of this line and then they can hit 'return' to create a new line to go up to. (If that makes any sense.)
Microsoft/Unix reasoning seems to go: There's no line above this one, so it's not possible to move up. Beep it like an error and do nothing.
I can see it both ways. I prefer Apple's because I grew up with it and hitting 'down arrow' as a quick way to get to the end of a line is a muscle-memory by now.
I would bet he got OS X to trash "itself" by fooling around in all sorts of system files and generally doing stuff he wasn't really supposed to. I'm no Unix geek (I'm a MacOS dork), but from everything I've heard Apple chose some different pathnames for OS X from what people expect in other Unix OSes and it can mess people up... maybe he moved a configuration file into the wrong path and deleted the original. You could probably end up with a trashed OS by fiddling with permissions too much.
As a rule, OS X doesn't trash "itself." If your copy stopped booting or running correctly, it's because of something you did to it. If you ran OS X without ever enabling root, or using SUDO, then you'd be fine right now.
"Is this a joke?"
"No, Ma'am. The FBI does not have a sense of humor that we are aware of."
Best Men In Black quote, you just reminded me of it.
The battle against the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact was pretty good. Didn't last very long, though.
I can't stand the thought of tens of thousands of Starcraft players sharing the server with me.
I R KILLD ELF KEKEKEKKE
Uh... no thanks, Blizzard.
This is exactly the argument. MacOS stopped be spatial at version 7 when they added aliases (shortcuts) precisely because they realized that a spatial browser can be kludgy at some things. The best solution is to create a file browser that has spatial elements, and also allows non-spatial elements... *exactly* what Apple did with OS 9.
To be frank, I haven't tried Gnome 2.6, but if it's entirely spatial then, yes, it will be awkward. They need to follow Apple's example and mix in non-spatial elements until you can really scream with it.
And tabbed folders a "kludge?" Spring-loaded folders "hard-to-use?" Did you even *use* these technologies?
If you read the article the grandparent linked, you'll see he also comes to the conclusion that a *pure* spatial file browser is pretty awkward to work with. (Example: MacOS pre-7. Adding aliases (shortcuts) pretty much ruins the spatial metaphor.)
He proposes that the ideal file browser would have a 'base' appearance of a spatial browser, but also allow customized non-spatial views. For instance, you can have 'spatial' window that displays the root level of your drive open at the same time as a non-spatial 'query' window showing the last 25 modified files. The windows would be visually distinct, so you could tell at a glance which was spatial and which was not.
Personally, I liked the MacOS 9 approach... spatial (mostly), with aliases, tabbed folders, and an easy way to drill-down in folders without cluttering the desktop. (Double-click-hold... this mode lets you hover over folders and open them instantly. When you release the mouse button, the folders in the background disappear leaving only the one you want.)
Pity Apple threw this interface in the toilet for OS X, it worked really, really well. (What the article is *really* about... the author at Ars is upset, like I am, that Apple would just throw 15 years of OS evolution down the window.)
Uh, no.
First of all, even if "Acts of Gord" was a reputable source of factual information (it's not, it's a humor site), it *only* mentions Nintendo machines. What about Intellivision? How about Coleco? Atari?
The page you linked to doesn't support your argument. If your argument was "Nintendo never sells hardware for below cost," then that official statement (posted on a humor site!) might be relevant in some way.
There are two things that can cause a BSOD in Windows XP:
1) Buggy drivers.
2) Faulty hardware.
I don't know what brand of camera you have, but if you don't have any problems with any other USB devices, I'd say the problem lies with 1).
Point here is that you can't blame your camera problems on Microsoft... it's either the camera maker's software, or something about your hardware, that caused the BSOD.
I know how to use Google and I'm not finding it. Can you cite a source, perhaps, and help us out?