This article is mistagged as a 'worm', it should be tagged as a 'logic bomb'.
A worm is a piece of software that is able to propagate itself without interaction from a user. A logic bomb is a piece of software or a function in a piece of software that activates when certain conditions are met.
Whilst I'm a man of science and don't believe in religion myself, I do think that religion will stay even when science is able to explain everything
1) It comforts those people who fear death. This is the main reason for most people to adopt a religion.
2) It helps some people cope with the fact that each and every one of us is insignificant in the larger scope of things. I.e. the 'God-warrior' complex. It lets the poor, unintelligent and people without a goal in life feel like they are number one. I came to this conclusion when seeing that Wife Trading show with the 'dark-sided' woman.
3) It serves a biological need. Recently there has been more evidence of brain structures that are responsible for being more 'receptive' of religious dogma. Since there is biology behind it, we must assume that if religion was bad for humanity, then evolution would've gotten rid of it. One of the major traits of religion is that it brought people together into a group. And groups do better in natural selection then single individuals. Even if religion doesn't fulfill this role anymore, since natural selection is out of the picture for humanity nowadays, we're still stuck with the biological legacy.
I personally think that the more science explains, a larger part of people will go 'extremist' on religion. See the growing group of New Age followers, Muslim extremism and the sharp incline of Christian fanatics in the US.
Well a lot of airports and such have free WiFi, and a lot of hotels offer internet in their rooms. On the move you should be fine by relying on internet cafe's strewn throughout the city.
Otherwise if you're dead set on getting an GRPS dongle for your own laptop, it might not be a bad idea to just wait and buy a pre-paid one in Germany itself.
I've gone from MSX Basic to Turbo Basic to Turbo C. Now I can code in all kinds of languages, assembly, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, etc..
I do think that BASIC has value as a first language because it gives back results immediately. Sure, nowadays there are other script languages, so you don't have to go through compiling and all the other complexity. BASIC is valuable because it's just that: basic. You don't have to worry as a first-timer about libraries, include files, functions and everything else. You get down to the very basics like variables and program flow.
And after a lot of years of BASIC programming I knew the limitations of the language (which largely depends on the interpreter). That's when I switched over to Turbo C. And to be honest it didn't took me long at all to learn C because I was a pretty reasonable BASIC programmer.
What I _do_ object against is stuff like Visual Basic. That's taking a limited language which is simple and jamming it into a place where it shouldn't belong. To let Visual Basic work, they stuffed all kinds of non-original basic stuff in there which make it more complex then something like Visual C. Their idea was "lets make making real application easy with Basic, because Basic is easy right?". It doesn't work like that.
I also think that Java is not a language that people should start programming in to be honest. Object oriented programming is NOT something people should learn before they had a taste of procedural programming. Fun fact. I went back to my old school to see about taking some night classes to get my CS degree. (I dropped out at the time and I've learned a LOT more on the job then what they were teaching.) At their open house classes I asked about procedural programming and if they still taught it. They scoffed and said nobody uses that anymore. This when I've been a Linux kernel developer for 10+ years now which is 100% procedural ANSI C. It's all Java they teach nowadays.
In closing. I think a good programmer is somebody who explores. If I have a Windows application that does something cool, I take it through a disassembler to see what makes it tick. I look up DOT NET C# code snippets to see what it's all about. I look through COBOL and ALGOL source code to see what constructs people used in the past. I patch ARM assembly code to fix bugs. I do all those things and not rigidly stick to a single programming environment. A good programmer is a state of mind, not the language he works in.
It's funny how a lot of Americans are shouting "Dey took our jerbs!", but when you actually offer them the jobs that illegal immigrants are doing, i.e. scrubbing toilets for low wages, then suddenly they are too good for that kind of work.
Illegal immigrants do not take away high-pay jobs, and those actual high pay jobs are routinely shipped off to India and alike anyway. Those immigrants are greasing the wheels of the economy, doing jobs that nobody else wants to do.
I see it in my own country (Netherlands) where we have to ship in seasonal workers to harvest asparagus crops because they just can't get the local people to do the hard work.
It'll be interesting to see the effects of this plan.
1) But proprietary software needs support as well. So there's no real difference here between open source and non-open source.
2) That's application training, and regardless if it's open source software or not, people will need training. Again no real difference.
3) Many companies do NOT let you review source code. SOME companies allow you to license the source code for a LOT of money.
4) This is silly.. Would you say Windows is 'well established'? They fudged up the successor to XP for a long time, otherwise you have to change to the latest flavor of Windows in 3-5 years. In fact, they will actually not SELL it to you anymore! No such problems with open source.
5) True, a lot of stuff isn't available in open source. However developing your own apps in-house is not necessarily a bad thing as you say it. I've seen plenty of big time commercial packages just fail again and again due to bugs or in the end just not fitting it's purpose for what it was bought for. The advantage of in-house custom made, means it should fit 100%, you have debugging in your own hands, can be cheaper in the long-run, you don't have to worry about the product being discontinued and if it's good, you might even sell it to other similar companies.
So I will have do disagree with your final conclusion. I'm not saying open source is ALWAYS cheaper, but you'll have to look better into the situation before you can make that assessment.
I have ~6TB on external USB drives and I've been doing this for a few years now. I have a few words of caution about NTFS. If you get an USB drive that for example spins down or if you turn your USB drive off without properly dismounting it (or if Windows crashes), you might see this line:
Delayed write failed!
And on two occasions that meant that Windows fucked up the file allocation table or whatever it's called under NTFS and I lost the _entire_ disk.
Windows loves getting its fingers into that table whenever you mount a USB filesystem. It's not like it tries to keep its write cache empty. Nooo.. every file access needs to be continuously recorded in that thing.
Anyway, be careful when you use NTFS on a USB drive. Alternatively use EXT3, which you can still mount under Windows using:
this looks like a remake of what I used to play more than a decade ago
This! I mean it's wonderful that many talented coders donate their efforts into games like this. But what we need is some open source designers, graphic artists and such.
The game may be fun, but when I look at the screenshots, all I see is the same blocky maps and ugly textures that I've seen 10 years ago.Due to this, I myself and probably a lot of others are not even going to download it and give it a try. It might be the most _fun_ game on the planet, but it does need a visual 'hook' to lure people in to try the game.
Same with Spring (TA clone). It's great that people put time and effort into something that could be really fun, but installation troubles, bad graphics and stupid UI design turned me off so badly that I didn't want to go further.
Take something like 'Plants vs. Zombies'. The technical aspects of the game are extremely simple. Images: some stretching, fading and 4 frame animations, not even 3D. But the _game_ is wonderful and everybody I know has played it. Not because it's fun, because you don't know if it is until you're at least halfway through the game, but because the game _looks_ fun and they paid a lot of attention to details like the user interface and such.
Read the Saboteur article a few threads back?
on
Pirates as a Marketplace
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Seeing as EA still treats their customers like crap. (See the Saboteur article even just a few posts back.) I'm _still_ not being anything from EA, so no DLC for me either.
Les'see Last thing I bought was 6 copies of the Zero Hour expansion for me and my friends (Command and Conquer 3). Which turned out to be a fucking piece of crap. Thing was full of bugs. You used to play with your friends, building up your forces for 3 hours, and when you wanted to start moving in for the kill the fucking thing would de-sync and crash.
And EA did _nothing_ to fix the bugs. And this trend continued, and results will be the same for stuff like the Saboteur game.
Do you feel that the pirates raised the reputation of your app in any way and thus lead to more sales?
I mean, look at Photoshop. Every 15 year old has an illegal copy of Photoshop on his computer. But this just means that in 10 years, every 25 year old has a proficiency in using Photoshop, leading to businesses using Photoshop as the de facto standard. This means huge sales Photoshop.
Are you seeing any of this back for your application?
It's 'funny' how a consumer can rack up a fine of a couple of million for sharing a few MP3's, to "send out a clear signal to copyright infringers". But for a repeat offender like Microsoft a fine of a few million (which is peanuts really) is somehow too high. It's great how the American justice system has its priorities straight like that. (Not only the American justice system btw, huzzah for lobbyists).
1) Alone in the dark. The first incarnation of this. The graphics were horrible but the immersion was immense. This game had me actually scared of what was coming next.
2) Half-life 1. Much more so then Half-life 2.
3) Alien vs. Predator. Where you play the squishy marine, and you just gone inside a long tunnel. You end up in a chamber where one of you fallen comrades is, only to find he's been encapsulated into a wall. Then your motion sensor goes berzerk, and you start running.. back through that long tunnel. When you look back now and then the walls and ceiling are crawling with predators trying to catch up with you. Every now and then you have to hit a switch to close a door. _This_ was some fucking immersion, nearly had a heart attack, but I'm still happy I made it out of that tunnel alive.
4) Some incarnation of Splinter Cell. I played the whole game with the self-imposed restriction that I wouldn't kill a single character. Turns out there were 2 situations in there where I was obligated to kill a key figure. However by stocking up on stun gas grenades I was able to defeat one 'boss' by stunning him (after _many many_ tries). Come the cutscene, he was dead;)
5) System Shock 2. Oh god.. I'm alone on a huge space ship.. Somebody hold me!
There are a number of other games that I can't recall the name of, but immersion seems to be independent of graphics to me, as long as the graphics don't hinder your immersion. To reach immersion I think you need to heed the following points:
- Don't put anything in the game that will irritate the user. I'm talking interface here, so go for a minimal, but useful HUD. Use sane controls that can be reconfigured by the user to his/her liking. Make sure you take out the bugs.
- Make it a whole. Make sure there is a backstory and that the character and his/her actions fit into it. Let the user find out that there is a whole galaxy out there with strange and wondrous things. You don't have to show it all, but make some references to things that 'happened' without going into too much detail. Leave the gamer with questions. This is the reason why Star Wars was so popular as a genre.
- No jumping puzzles.
- Make the game challenging. Make it 'hard' without actually even having be hard. But give the gamer a sense of accomplishment. You don't do this by making him have to shoot 30.000 of identical aliens btw.
- Give the user choices. _REAL_ choices, not a 'good' and 'evil' choice that end up with the same result anyway. Give the user some actual influence in the game. World of Warcraft is an example of how not to do this. Everybody is 'special' but you are indistinguishable from all the other players.
- _NO JUMPING PUZZLES_, no really
- If you do introduce puzzles, make them logical. On the other end of the spectrum is Monkey Island, where you have to combine the extendable rubber hand with the pepper shaker so you can make the skeleton sneeze to blow out the candle so the room goes dark so that you can safely steel the treasure without the skeleton seeing it. It's just not logical.:)
- Make the player care for the main character and cohorts. You can do this by not making him invulnerable. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of horrible games that implement the 'one glance from an enemy and you are dead' principle, but that is not good either.
- Personal development. RPG's are fun because you get to 'build' your own character by improving those things you enjoy/think are important. So introduce some RPG bits to your FPS. Classic examples are Deus Ex and Bioshock. Don't let players have it all, make them choose.
I can think of a lot more things, but graphics is not one of the components that define immersion in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the hell would put a printer online anyway without a firewall or some kind of IP whitelist?
I mean it's not going to be the first time that hackers will jump into your network from a "bit too intelligent for it's own good" printer.
Also, as a busy system administrator, do we really want another device to add to our security patch weeklies?
I'm sure the fair and honest Haliburton people will find a way to mine it exclusively and give the locals a fair share.
This article is mistagged as a 'worm', it should be tagged as a 'logic bomb'.
A worm is a piece of software that is able to propagate itself without interaction from a user. A logic bomb is a piece of software or a function in a piece of software that activates when certain conditions are met.
People no longer learning C programming?
More work for me! :)
I've been playing too much Borderlands.. While reading the article a voice kept screaming in my head: "Strip the flash! Salt the wounds!"
Whilst I'm a man of science and don't believe in religion myself, I do think that religion will stay even when science is able to explain everything
1) It comforts those people who fear death. This is the main reason for most people to adopt a religion.
2) It helps some people cope with the fact that each and every one of us is insignificant in the larger scope of things. I.e. the 'God-warrior' complex. It lets the poor, unintelligent and people without a goal in life feel like they are number one. I came to this conclusion when seeing that Wife Trading show with the 'dark-sided' woman.
3) It serves a biological need. Recently there has been more evidence of brain structures that are responsible for being more 'receptive' of religious dogma. Since there is biology behind it, we must assume that if religion was bad for humanity, then evolution would've gotten rid of it. One of the major traits of religion is that it brought people together into a group. And groups do better in natural selection then single individuals. Even if religion doesn't fulfill this role anymore, since natural selection is out of the picture for humanity nowadays, we're still stuck with the biological legacy.
I personally think that the more science explains, a larger part of people will go 'extremist' on religion. See the growing group of New Age followers, Muslim extremism and the sharp incline of Christian fanatics in the US.
Well a lot of airports and such have free WiFi, and a lot of hotels offer internet in their rooms. On the move you should be fine by relying on internet cafe's strewn throughout the city.
Otherwise if you're dead set on getting an GRPS dongle for your own laptop, it might not be a bad idea to just wait and buy a pre-paid one in Germany itself.
PS..
GOTO's have their place, even in modern programming languages. Fuck C for not having a 'break [n]'. :)
I've gone from MSX Basic to Turbo Basic to Turbo C. Now I can code in all kinds of languages, assembly, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, etc..
I do think that BASIC has value as a first language because it gives back results immediately. Sure, nowadays there are other script languages, so you don't have to go through compiling and all the other complexity. BASIC is valuable because it's just that: basic. You don't have to worry as a first-timer about libraries, include files, functions and everything else. You get down to the very basics like variables and program flow.
And after a lot of years of BASIC programming I knew the limitations of the language (which largely depends on the interpreter). That's when I switched over to Turbo C. And to be honest it didn't took me long at all to learn C because I was a pretty reasonable BASIC programmer.
What I _do_ object against is stuff like Visual Basic. That's taking a limited language which is simple and jamming it into a place where it shouldn't belong. To let Visual Basic work, they stuffed all kinds of non-original basic stuff in there which make it more complex then something like Visual C. Their idea was "lets make making real application easy with Basic, because Basic is easy right?". It doesn't work like that.
I also think that Java is not a language that people should start programming in to be honest. Object oriented programming is NOT something people should learn before they had a taste of procedural programming. Fun fact. I went back to my old school to see about taking some night classes to get my CS degree. (I dropped out at the time and I've learned a LOT more on the job then what they were teaching.) At their open house classes I asked about procedural programming and if they still taught it. They scoffed and said nobody uses that anymore. This when I've been a Linux kernel developer for 10+ years now which is 100% procedural ANSI C. It's all Java they teach nowadays.
In closing. I think a good programmer is somebody who explores. If I have a Windows application that does something cool, I take it through a disassembler to see what makes it tick. I look up DOT NET C# code snippets to see what it's all about. I look through COBOL and ALGOL source code to see what constructs people used in the past. I patch ARM assembly code to fix bugs. I do all those things and not rigidly stick to a single programming environment. A good programmer is a state of mind, not the language he works in.
It's funny how a lot of Americans are shouting "Dey took our jerbs!", but when you actually offer them the jobs that illegal immigrants are doing, i.e. scrubbing toilets for low wages, then suddenly they are too good for that kind of work.
Illegal immigrants do not take away high-pay jobs, and those actual high pay jobs are routinely shipped off to India and alike anyway. Those immigrants are greasing the wheels of the economy, doing jobs that nobody else wants to do.
I see it in my own country (Netherlands) where we have to ship in seasonal workers to harvest asparagus crops because they just can't get the local people to do the hard work.
It'll be interesting to see the effects of this plan.
It also might trigger the 'interoperability' exemption of the DMCA. After all, cracking the program is only used to let the game work properly..
I always wondered, would a laser be defeated if you gave the missile a mirror paint coat?
1) But proprietary software needs support as well. So there's no real difference here between open source and non-open source.
2) That's application training, and regardless if it's open source software or not, people will need training. Again no real difference.
3) Many companies do NOT let you review source code. SOME companies allow you to license the source code for a LOT of money.
4) This is silly.. Would you say Windows is 'well established'? They fudged up the successor to XP for a long time, otherwise you have to change to the latest flavor of Windows in 3-5 years. In fact, they will actually not SELL it to you anymore! No such problems with open source.
5) True, a lot of stuff isn't available in open source. However developing your own apps in-house is not necessarily a bad thing as you say it. I've seen plenty of big time commercial packages just fail again and again due to bugs or in the end just not fitting it's purpose for what it was bought for. The advantage of in-house custom made, means it should fit 100%, you have debugging in your own hands, can be cheaper in the long-run, you don't have to worry about the product being discontinued and if it's good, you might even sell it to other similar companies.
So I will have do disagree with your final conclusion. I'm not saying open source is ALWAYS cheaper, but you'll have to look better into the situation before you can make that assessment.
I have ~6TB on external USB drives and I've been doing this for a few years now. I have a few words of caution about NTFS. If you get an USB drive that for example spins down or if you turn your USB drive off without properly dismounting it (or if Windows crashes), you might see this line:
Delayed write failed!
And on two occasions that meant that Windows fucked up the file allocation table or whatever it's called under NTFS and I lost the _entire_ disk.
Windows loves getting its fingers into that table whenever you mount a USB filesystem. It's not like it tries to keep its write cache empty. Nooo.. every file access needs to be continuously recorded in that thing.
Anyway, be careful when you use NTFS on a USB drive. Alternatively use EXT3, which you can still mount under Windows using:
http://www.ext2fsd.com/
(Note that these experiences are under Windows XP, I have no clue if Vista or 7 does any better, I assume not.)
this looks like a remake of what I used to play more than a decade ago
This! I mean it's wonderful that many talented coders donate their efforts into games like this. But what we need is some open source designers, graphic artists and such.
The game may be fun, but when I look at the screenshots, all I see is the same blocky maps and ugly textures that I've seen 10 years ago.Due to this, I myself and probably a lot of others are not even going to download it and give it a try. It might be the most _fun_ game on the planet, but it does need a visual 'hook' to lure people in to try the game.
Same with Spring (TA clone). It's great that people put time and effort into something that could be really fun, but installation troubles, bad graphics and stupid UI design turned me off so badly that I didn't want to go further.
Take something like 'Plants vs. Zombies'. The technical aspects of the game are extremely simple. Images: some stretching, fading and 4 frame animations, not even 3D. But the _game_ is wonderful and everybody I know has played it. Not because it's fun, because you don't know if it is until you're at least halfway through the game, but because the game _looks_ fun and they paid a lot of attention to details like the user interface and such.
Seeing as EA still treats their customers like crap. (See the Saboteur article even just a few posts back.) I'm _still_ not being anything from EA, so no DLC for me either.
Les'see Last thing I bought was 6 copies of the Zero Hour expansion for me and my friends (Command and Conquer 3). Which turned out to be a fucking piece of crap. Thing was full of bugs. You used to play with your friends, building up your forces for 3 hours, and when you wanted to start moving in for the kill the fucking thing would de-sync and crash.
And EA did _nothing_ to fix the bugs. And this trend continued, and results will be the same for stuff like the Saboteur game.
So fuck you EA. Fuck you.
I just send out some emails to my representatives. If you're an European, I urge you to do the same.
Do you feel that the pirates raised the reputation of your app in any way and thus lead to more sales?
I mean, look at Photoshop. Every 15 year old has an illegal copy of Photoshop on his computer. But this just means that in 10 years, every 25 year old has a proficiency in using Photoshop, leading to businesses using Photoshop as the de facto standard. This means huge sales Photoshop.
Are you seeing any of this back for your application?
If I buy myself new hardware with a spanking new top-of-the-line CPU and just re-install Windows XP, then I still get to see "a dramatic improvement".
That's not due to the version of Windows I dump on it, but the new hardware which happens to be a lot faster.
The TRUE question here is, do companies want to upgrade their CURRENT hardware, just to be able to run a new OS...
Hehe I was an avid user of Sidekick. And yes, 'joe' happens to be my unix editor of choice.
The image of a smegma producing sail yacht is now stuck in my head!
Where's the brain bleach when you need it!
It's 'funny' how a consumer can rack up a fine of a couple of million for sharing a few MP3's, to "send out a clear signal to copyright infringers". But for a repeat offender like Microsoft a fine of a few million (which is peanuts really) is somehow too high. It's great how the American justice system has its priorities straight like that. (Not only the American justice system btw, huzzah for lobbyists).
Actually, I've played most games that have been released on the PC, including the most recent ones.
My examples merely show that even 'bad graphics' games can be immersive, as long as they don't get in the way. :)
A valid opinion.. I guess I get frustrated too quickly with those games and these days gamefaqs.com just seconds away.
Maybe I'm too weak-willed for such games nowadays.
There are a few games that really got to me:
1) Alone in the dark. The first incarnation of this. The graphics were horrible but the immersion was immense. This game had me actually scared of what was coming next.
2) Half-life 1. Much more so then Half-life 2.
3) Alien vs. Predator. Where you play the squishy marine, and you just gone inside a long tunnel. You end up in a chamber where one of you fallen comrades is, only to find he's been encapsulated into a wall. Then your motion sensor goes berzerk, and you start running.. back through that long tunnel. When you look back now and then the walls and ceiling are crawling with predators trying to catch up with you. Every now and then you have to hit a switch to close a door. _This_ was some fucking immersion, nearly had a heart attack, but I'm still happy I made it out of that tunnel alive.
4) Some incarnation of Splinter Cell. I played the whole game with the self-imposed restriction that I wouldn't kill a single character. Turns out there were 2 situations in there where I was obligated to kill a key figure. However by stocking up on stun gas grenades I was able to defeat one 'boss' by stunning him (after _many many_ tries). Come the cutscene, he was dead ;)
5) System Shock 2. Oh god.. I'm alone on a huge space ship.. Somebody hold me!
There are a number of other games that I can't recall the name of, but immersion seems to be independent of graphics to me, as long as the graphics don't hinder your immersion. To reach immersion I think you need to heed the following points:
- Don't put anything in the game that will irritate the user. I'm talking interface here, so go for a minimal, but useful HUD. Use sane controls that can be reconfigured by the user to his/her liking. Make sure you take out the bugs.
- Make it a whole. Make sure there is a backstory and that the character and his/her actions fit into it. Let the user find out that there is a whole galaxy out there with strange and wondrous things. You don't have to show it all, but make some references to things that 'happened' without going into too much detail. Leave the gamer with questions. This is the reason why Star Wars was so popular as a genre.
- No jumping puzzles.
- Make the game challenging. Make it 'hard' without actually even having be hard. But give the gamer a sense of accomplishment. You don't do this by making him have to shoot 30.000 of identical aliens btw.
- Give the user choices. _REAL_ choices, not a 'good' and 'evil' choice that end up with the same result anyway. Give the user some actual influence in the game. World of Warcraft is an example of how not to do this. Everybody is 'special' but you are indistinguishable from all the other players.
- _NO JUMPING PUZZLES_, no really
- If you do introduce puzzles, make them logical. On the other end of the spectrum is Monkey Island, where you have to combine the extendable rubber hand with the pepper shaker so you can make the skeleton sneeze to blow out the candle so the room goes dark so that you can safely steel the treasure without the skeleton seeing it. It's just not logical. :)
- Make the player care for the main character and cohorts. You can do this by not making him invulnerable. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of horrible games that implement the 'one glance from an enemy and you are dead' principle, but that is not good either.
- Personal development. RPG's are fun because you get to 'build' your own character by improving those things you enjoy/think are important. So introduce some RPG bits to your FPS. Classic examples are Deus Ex and Bioshock. Don't let players have it all, make them choose.
I can think of a lot more things, but graphics is not one of the components that define immersion in my book.
PS.
(no jumping puzzles)