Slashdot Mirror

As our former glorious leader once said: http://www.g4tv.com/articles/49932/Ten_Minutes_with_CmdrTaco/:

What's the magic Slashdot formula that keeps attracting more people?

I think that the site's slogan pretty much sums it up: "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." It's a very simple motto, and I think that appeals to a lot of people. You can go to CNN and see very straight-laced, spell-checked, fact-checked summary of the day's events. Or you can go somewhere like Slashdot and you can see maybe a little bit more raw discussion of the events, a summary of a different type of news - tech news, but with a different slant than you might get on CNN.

.... killer Roombas spotted. News at eleven.

Nintendo never followed the loss-leader concept with their consoles. All sales of their consoles have been profitable.

rubbish, their latest console the WiiU is sold at a loss.

Mind you, the toys absolutely /sucked/

But I agree; Captain Power was a great show. Its storyline was definitely a step above the average pablum forced unto impressionable young minds at the time: it had an overall story arc that spanned the whole season, main characters who died and an interesting, somewhat scary setting (post-apocalyptic, at the height of the cold war, when the threat of a life-extinguishing nuclear war was still giving young children nightmares). Compare that to the average action-cartoon - where the universe was reset at the end of each episode, the heroes were never at risk and the setting was friendly fantasy - and Captain Power was notably different.

True, the effects, costumes, story and dialogue were notoriously cheesy, but it was a show aimed at 5-10 year old kids. Nonetheless, one can see some of Staczynski's hallmark touches on the series that would later make Babylon 5 so revered (and that nowadays we take for granted in all new TV series). I was always hoping he would sneak a Captain Power reference into B5.

Picture link. Simple effective fun!
The result: The finished license.

Picture link. Simple effective fun!
The result: The finished license.

Noooo...they should embrace the valve model and realize while you will NEVER get rid of piracy you CAN turn a hell of a lot of those pirates into customers by embracing the big three concept, which is make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap.

Yes, I hear it does work quite well.

CmdrTaco doesn't want to edit stuff!

If you want a "very straight-laced, spell-checked, fact-checked summary" go to CNN, says he....

Oh, no, I'm quoting my own sig! :-S

Put all of them up on some old shelving, and serve cake.

In addition, the poor reception to Microsoft's focus on motion gaming

You define "poor reception" as making the world's fastest selling consumer electronics device?

sales of the PS3 are surpassing the 360 this year

PS3 is surpassing Xbox in sales? Not according to NPD, which says Xbox 360 has been outselling other consoles for 5 months now.

Here is an account of Gabe's talk:

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/live-blog-dice-2009-keynote-gabe-newell-valve-software/

> I rather spend $50 and have a great game than small little games for a few dollars.

Fortunately people don't want that $50 over-priced nonsense and show otherwise....

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090219/1124433835.shtml
Valve dropped the price on L4D and sales went up over 200% !

        * 10% off = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
        * 25% off = 245% increase in sales
        * 50% off = 320% increase in sales
        * 75% off = 1470% increase in sales

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/live-blog-dice-2009-keynote-gabe-newell-valve-software/

"Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline."

The new engine is almost certainly the id tech 5. Bethesda bought Id a little over a year ago and there's no reason to buy Id other than Carmack's engines. Apparently the Tech 5 engine wont be licensed outside of a very small circle.

Here's a link to some footage of RAGE which will use the same engine and the game to debut the technology:

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/46674/E3-2010-Live-Hands-On-Rage-Overview-Demo/

Here's another web board gone wrong... G4TV's Forums After aquiring TechTV and then banning anybody who posted they wanted Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton back on The Screen Savers, they had a mess of a forum trying to sell their current programming, which was unlike anything either the video game centric G4 or tech business channel TechTV had aired in the past.

Now, it's a banning offense to claim that Olivia Munn is not the host of Attack of the Show, despite the fact she's made more appearances this year on NBC promoting her upcoming role on a sitcom called Perfect Couples and as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Yep, that's right... there's been an endless series of female guest hosts "filling in" for her ever since the network's E3 specials. Sorry, airing the Stand Up For Cancer event that she was a part of, to promote her NBC series, doesn't count.

Why can't they admit she's moved on to bigger and better things and promote the people that actually are the future of their network?

They are a harbinger of the apocalypse.

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702668/DICE-2010-Video-Design-Outside-The-Box.html

Jesse Schell gave a really interesting presentation on achievements at DICE. You can see the video here: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702668/dice-2010-video-design-outside-the-box.html

They might want to actually finish the game this time around. "And, perhaps worst of all, the Bonus Objective on the final level is listed simply as 'Default Text,' http://g4tv.com/games/xbox-360/37058/Star-Wars-The-Force-Unleashed/review/#ixzz0tZ8Ag9oe

The story I've heard is that the server software that runs XBox 1 and 360 Live services is the same software. So they are not shutting down anything, just dropping support for XBox 1. Supposedly XBox 1 legacy support was holding back new features for the 360, like upping the friend limit past 100.

Even Darth Vader was screwed over by shady movie industry tactics. http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/694518/darth-vader-actor--david-prowse-asks-wheres-my-money.html

It's disgusting they can claim Star Wars never made a profit.

Maybe we could use this drive to make the world better

All the ascii files can be viewed from this site: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702929/Portal-ASCII-Images-Revealed-Portal-2s-First-Screenshot.html

Beware of contracting RPG Radiculopathy.

Yes it is. The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them.

Players have the option of skipping over the scene. At the beginning of the game, there are two ‘checkpoints’ where the player is advised that some people may find an upcoming segment disturbing. These checkpoints can’t be disabled.

Modern Warfare 2 is a fantasy action game designed for intense, realistic game play that mirrors real life conflicts, much like epic, action movies. It is appropriately rated 18 for violent scenes, which means it is intended for those who are 18 and older.

Sure to raise controversy, sure to garner eyeballs and sure to sell copies it looks like. Just the right amount of controversy I guess.

Valve, and other publishers, have released free 360 DLC before by eating the cost of testing and certification.

Microsoft requires all DLC to undergo a certification process they prescribe. It costs money to perform the testing and verification to meet Microsoft's requirements; Valve doesn't have to spend money to release the same content to PCs. This includes - amusingly - handling dependencies, which isn't a problem for Valve because Steam acts as a package manager that ensures everyone has the same platform. The 360 can't do that.

Valve's Gabe Newell:

On the Xbox it's a lot more complicated because you can't guarantee that people have all of the right content given their DLC model, where some people might have some content and others not, which makes it end of up with this weird, complicated thing where this person has this, and this person has this. Where as on the PC we can assume that people have everything. So, we're trying to get that fixed because they're sort of cramping our ability to push more free content into customer's hands when we aren't sure which free content they have right? And the stuff that you're allowed to require customers to have on the Xbox, it's only 8MB. That's the maximum size you can ever change. So, we do that with the first minor update that we do. We're trying to figure out how to manage that.

This isn't a problem exclusive to the 360. PS3 certification problems have delayed DLC for Epic; Newell says Valve won't even attempt PS3 DLC until they hire more developers. Hiring developers costs money.

Actually they got Olivia Munn of Attack of the Show fame to hawk the Bingathon. The ads on Hulu show Olivia getting ready for the Bingathon but don't tell you anything about what it is. One of the spots ends with a prop guy handing her a necklace of frankfurters which she delightfully puts on. I knew what Bing was so I was disgusted by the ad (though I never tire of Olivia) but I can see how Bing stats could SURGE based on those ads.

Oh wait, I'm sorry: ...smoothie!......smoooooothie......*drool*

http://g4tv.com/xplay/videos/9892/Zombie-Public-Service-Announcement.html

There was a piece on G4TV a while back about a game parodying airport security policies. While you might think Apple objected to the concept itself, they rejected it instead for "inappropriate sexual content", without telling the developer what specifically they objected to, leaving him rather confused since the game wasn't sexually explicit at all. It turned out, after some months of guessing and resubmission and trying to contact people, that what had offended Apple was the inclusion of items like underwire bras (which are notorious for setting off metal detectors).

Ran out of chars...

Anyway, Valve has been running pricing experiments on its Steam platform and have come up with some surprising numbers. A limited-time price drop of Left 4 Dead resulted in a 3000% increase in sales income. How can any sane developer/publisher ignore the kind of numbers he shows us? The article cites many more examples, with hard to ignore results.
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote---Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html

I think you are confusing actual research with ...

Then sit back down and shut up while you think about it. While you're sitting there, ostensibly thinking, here is some material to consider:

• Real-time cone-beam CT image reconstruction using a mercury's dual cell-based system (DCBS) and a Sony's Playstation 3 (PS3) cluster
• Playstation 3 Consoles Tackle Black Hole Vibrations
• PS3 boosts protein research plan
• Building Supercomputer Using Playstation 3
• PlayStation Cell Speeds Docking Programs
• Researchers Use PlayStation Cluster to Forge a Web Skeleton Key
• Playstation cluster creates cheap supercomputer
• and so on..

Garbage products like xbox have gone down in flames (pun intended) and MS has to make smoke (no pun intended) and noise to distract from the situation. Same crowd is going on attack against OpenOffice.org and other key products. The universal office format, OpenDocument Format, is getting specialized attackers. Repeat lies often enough that people believe them seems to be an ongoing theme from MS.

Whether 1-, 8-. 16, or 32-node clusters, PS3s are useful in computationally intensive tasks. I'd like to see an add-on for Blender or other 3D software that allows adding a PS3 as a single node cluster. If it's there and you're working with a desktop, why not also use the processors of the otherwise idle gaming machine

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 1)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 2)

Exclusive Hands On: Project Origin

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Behind the Scenes - Engine

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Dev Diary: Design & story.

Enjoy the videos and don't forget to upgrade your PC. :)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 1)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 2)

Exclusive Hands On: Project Origin

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Behind the Scenes - Engine

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Dev Diary: Design & story.

Enjoy the videos and don't forget to upgrade your PC. :)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 1)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 2)

Exclusive Hands On: Project Origin

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Behind the Scenes - Engine

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Dev Diary: Design & story.

Enjoy the videos and don't forget to upgrade your PC. :)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 1)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 2)

Exclusive Hands On: Project Origin

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Behind the Scenes - Engine

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Dev Diary: Design & story.

Enjoy the videos and don't forget to upgrade your PC. :)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 1)

Hands On: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Part 2)

Exclusive Hands On: Project Origin

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Behind the Scenes - Engine

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Dev Diary: Design & story.

Enjoy the videos and don't forget to upgrade your PC. :)

... Except when you leave the black rectangle as a separate layer.

Or draw the black rectangle using Word's image drawing tools, or in a vector image file, and leave the actual text underneath.

Or you forget to delete the embedded unaltered EXIF thumbnail data.

http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/35723/USB_Limits.html?article_key=35723

There are many documented accounts of the use of a Pringles can to construct a directional antenna. Rob Flickenger made one in 2001. Gregory Rehm did one in 2003 and was Slashdotted. G4 TV's Patrick Norton posted one in 2002 on The Screen Savers. Andrew S. Clapp has a lot of technical information on his website as well as several links to others. I wonder if he is, in any way, related to Eric Clapton.

Just use a pringles can to redirect the wireless signal.

BAM. It works.

http://www.g4tv.com/screensavers/features/40546/Pringles_Can_WiFi_Antenna.html

The real question is why is Kevin Paulson pro-scientology ?
Maybe because he worked as a cracker for them ? ???

The concept of "biofeedback gaming" isn't new... anybody remember Pain Pong?

Skinfitz is correct. The term 'code monkey' has nothing to do with race whatsoever. If you care to see a humorous example of American code monkeys, take a look at the G4tv Code Monkeys page.

If you don't feel like humor, here is a Code Monkey as defined by Wikipedia.

Little bit of googling got me to http://www.g4tv.com/cheat/features/51903/Secrets_of_the_Jade_Empire.html and -- Sir Roderick Ponce Von Fontlebottom, The Magnificent Bastard.

Gabe Newell seems to show a lot of fancy towards the episodic method of distributing games. Put that in mind when he remarked to Eurogamer a while back that Episode 1 to Episode 3 "essentially" was Half Life 3. Smaller teams with less to lose permits them to take more risks in game design. Does this mean the real Half Life 3 (not episode 1-3!) will be distributed the same way?

However, on what we know about Episode 3: First of all, Portal takes place in the Half Life universe in the laboratories of Aperture Science. This had to be for an obvious reason since it essentially is a storyline shoe-horn in to a puzzle game. They didn't need to do it, but they did it anyway. Episode 2 spills the info that Aperture Science has a vessel called the Borealis. It "vanished" (i.e. teleportation) but has now been found. Obviously Gordon will have to go there and find the ship and obtain the gadgets and gizmos. This means Gordon will have to travel to the arctic, so Episode 3 will most likely feature snowy areas. And then there is this Gabe Newell quote on Portal (After you launch the player, play the video called "X-Play Review: Portal". Gabe's quote is a little over the halfway mark):
"The character that you play is a character who has importance in the overall half-life universe, and will eventually have a fairly significant relationship with other characters that we're already familiar with".

The way Portal works as an introductory game to educate the players on how to use the Portal gun to interact with the environment is a really clever method to set things up on how it will potentially be used in Episode 3. But I'm actually not so sure however whether Chell will give Gordon the gun, cause he doesn't have the surgically inserted heel springs to prevent injury from falling the large distances. Oh, and GLaDOS will probably be involved somehow...she's "still alive" you know.

Check it out here.

It looks pretty swell if you ask me. It's just snippets of ghost catching (and the occasional sliming) gameplay, but I'm sure there'll be a whole lot more. What is shown looks promising. Next-gen ghost catching never looked so sweet. There's also a main site up for the game already.

Just thought I'd point out he was on The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose was the host (in 2004 according to Google). I'm sure he at least exchanged a death-stare with his rival-to-be, since Digg was somewhere between not announced and "started yesterday" at that point. It was founded the same month as the interview according to Wikipedia (so it must be true...).

The Cell processor definitely has a raw horsepower advantage over the rather standard PowerPC in the 360. 8 cores beats 2 any day.

Well, 7 active (useable) and 1 redundant core in the Cell vs. the 3 (Active) cores in the 360. Point understood about More cores being better. One of the issues I see is that the PS3 has half the system RAM (256 megs) of the 360 (512 megs) so a game like Gears of War that uses all that RAM wouldn't be playable in its current form on the PS3.

Don't discount the whole multiple-DVDs vs. 1 BlueRay, either. Or the fact that the PS3 comes standard with a hard drive, allowing game manufacturers to cache textures to disk before they are needed ("streaming textures"), making gameplay smoother, with richer visuals.

If they actually use that extra space appropriately I can see that. However much of the added space is IMHO wasted. For example in Heavenly Sword there was a reported "10 gigs of Audio alone" and the game is supposed to take 6-10 hours to beat. Contrast that with Oblivion that still fits on a DVD9 despite a HUGE quest with tons of voice acting. The notion just reaks of Lazyness, or improper use of Codecs.

Saddly we'll get lots of those before we see someone really use that space. Hell a DVD9 could hold 83 minutes of VC1 Codec 1080p video (Same used in HD DVD or BluRay) so at what point will we see something that really pushes the boundries and doesn't "just fill the disk to say they did" ?

Then there's the sixaxis controller, which gives some interesting gameplay possibilities. For instance, in the upcoming Ratchet & Clank game, one of the weapons produces a tornado, which you control with the sixaxis, while using the more traditional controls as per usual. You can't do that on a 360.

True. Possibilities are there...

So, I think a more interesting question is, what technically can't be done on a PS3 that you can do on a 360? ("Halo III" is not an appropriate answer here, since that's a marketing thing, not a technical thing. A good point, but not technical.)

The Halo thing is kinda the rub. The Xbox and the Gamecube were both more capable hardware than the PS2 (more ram, better GPU, more CPU, built in HDD and Ethernet in the X-Box)...

They could do everything as good or better than the PS2... Except sell... the way the PS2 did... curious...

I agree that a bad Uwe Boll movie is not news. What actually is news is the interesting number of positive reviews that surfaced when the Postal movie was aired during the Cannes movie festival! Look here:

Twitchfilm review.

Fright review.

The Feed review.

In contrast to the Wired review, I think this is news! (I actually tried to submit a story about it just after the Cannes festival, rejected, bla bla). I think this might mean the Wired comments could be subjective, rather than objective truth (as the badness of preview Uwe Boll movies have been...).

Apparently if you pause Rock Band in the middle of a trade show you've only got a week to have your resignation on Bill's desk.

http://www.g4tv.com/e32007/blog/post/677245/Watch_ Peter_Moores_Rock_Band.html

Maybe if he were better at the game... maybe that's how positions actually get decided at Microsoft now, Rock Band Tournament.

Can't remember who it was (Brainiac, possibly) but a team did a series of tests on media storage. They took a hard drive, CD-ROM and a USB flash drive and exposed them to extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme violence and so on.

Eventually only the chip on the flash drive survived and, when it was hooked up to a new circuit board, all of the data was intact.