Sims is a game largely for a different audience than the rest of the games. It seems that many players of the Sims are teenage girls. Maxis was smart to make a game that could cater to them so much. How many teenage girls (or females of any age, for that matter) are there playing Unreal Tournament or Starcraft?
I know there are also other demographics playing the Sims, but I guess that most of them aren't really hardcore gamers, either. Which would largely explain why the franchise sells so very well.
On an Ubuntu system, open the "About Ubuntu" help dialog. If I recall correctly, it says something like "Welcome to Ubuntu 7.04, also known as Feisty Fawn".
In addition, other websites refer to versions by these names. The Skype Linux download page says "Feisty Fawn (7.04)". The Automatix pages are similar. Fortunately, most sites use name as well as the number, but releases are certainly know also by their names after being released. Whether the developers intended it so is another question.
I'm not a native English speaker - it's my third language. I'm fluent, I read books and watch movies in English, and generally know the language well enough. I knew words like "fire", "fox", "access", "office", "word", "vista" or "binder" before encountering the applications named so. However, I only found out what "heron" means today, and what "eft" means back when that version was announced. I'll readily admit that animal names (plant names, too) are the weakest part of my vocabulary in all languages I speak, but I still think it's better to have names that consists of words familiar to most people. As far as I understand, lots of native speakers didn't know what an eft is either.
I've said it before and say it again... these silly names are hurting Ubuntu. When you need to convince a boss that installing Ubuntu on office computers is the way to go, you'd need a more professional sounding name. "Windows XP" or "BeOS 5" sounds fine. But "Ubuntu Hardy Heron" does not. Sure you can use the 7.10 number, but it seems that the Ubuntu community prefers not to use the numbers, and these silly names actually crop up within the OS more.
Good post. And that's exactly the problem. Okay, so the American public is generally uptight about sexual themes. But every major movie has "fuck" in it at least 42 times, and that's not a problem. Not to mention all the violence - any decent blockbuster "needs to have" quite a few shootouts.
Games can provide good social commentary and stories. Just look at Deus Ex, possibly the finest ever example of social commentary in a game. And games can be good character stories - it's beyond silly that ESRB is essentially preventing or limiting cursing and sexual themes in games. I don't want sex in games just for the sake of sex - but sometimes it fits.
I have to give the thumbs up to Eidos (European, so they have a different attitude to most developers) and their portrayal of sexuality in the Hitman games. While there's never any direct sex scene, the games have strong sexual themes, which are very fitting in the series.
Here's the article's introductory part properly translated.
"The reason for yesterday's downtime of the Skype network is research of Russian crackers, as reported by one of our readers.
While searching for a local buffer overflow, a possibility was found to send a long string to the server, overflowing its buffer and causing the server to go down. Its place is taken by another server from the P2P network, the error arises on it in the same way, and so on. As a result, the entire Skype network refused service for several hours and the developer team was forced to turn off authentication.
Quite an optimistic point. I could counter by saying that mass media and communications 50 years ago weren't what they are now. 50 years ago, you could hope that the word wouldn't get out to just about everyone. And you could count on the reports not being detailed and thus, to people not involved, less horrifying. These days, a firebombing would be known to every person in Western countries within a day, and thanks to color TV, the Internet and whatnot, there will be lots of gruesome, horrifying images and videos. That would result in a public outcry like never before - and even governments and the military fear that.
That said, of course I want to believe that you're right, that a greater value is now put on human lives. At the same time, when reading this article, I could imagine a general ordering troops on a suicide mission because a bot is too expensive to risk.
I am definitely among the most dedicated fans of the show. I've always loved the whole mythology-conspiracy arc, but I also think some stand-alone episodes were absolutely brilliant. Episodes such as "Monday", "Drive", "The Pine-Bluff Variant", "Pusher", "Ice" - I think those are all great. And then there's "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", which earned Peter Boyle a much-deserved Emmy. The standalone storylines of X-Files, it turns out, can be quite solid.
Making the movie a standalone plot is probably a good idea to sell more tickets. The show's mythology is complex - if they create a mythology-based movie that airs six years after the show ended on TV, then chances are that only hardcore fans would be able to fully follow the plot. However, I am fairly sure that the script will include a couple references to the mythology arc that the hardcore fans will understand and appreciate.
Not to mention the whole thing with attacking and defensive moves. Silent Hill (or at least the first two games) were about having limited combat possibilities and being unable to easily shoot all enemies. SH3 beefed up combat with adding some more powerful weapons, looks like SH5 might just have a kickass protagonist. Which isn't good for SH.
There's an outcry about many games that have violent scenes and you're the good guy in them. Okay, in San Andreas, you're the bad guy. And that game proves the GP's point very well. The fact that you could gun down cops and blow people's cars up caused some reactions, but not too much. And when it was discovered that a hidden sex scene was in the game, instant media outcry, a widespread desire to ban the game and a resulting adults-only rating.
Still, in most shooters and other 'violent' games you're the good guy. Take Doom 3. That's another game that many protested against because of its violent and gory scenes depicted with great graphics. Fundie groups also wanted a ban, yadda yadda. But that's a game where you're the almost perfect "good guy" - you're saving humanity by fighting the forces of Hell. Apparently, the critics don't care much for that part...
It will remain a major event for gamers as long as developers continue to announce big games there. I believe that GSC said it will announce the next STALKER franchise game at E3. I'm sure other developers will also make some interesting announcements at this years E3, if only by habit. In a couple of years though, it'll be really interesting to see how E3 compares to GDC.
Absolutely. I like OSS as much as the next Slashdotter, but I currently believe that office suites are the single weakest point of OSS. There is no really good free, open-source office suite. The fact that OpenOffice is the most popular/hyped one only goes to show that there is no real alternative.
OO still messes up MS Word XP/2003 format documents. Yes, I know, MS fault for not releasing the specifications and all that, but that often means OO can't be used as effectively. Working with complex tables in OOWriter is nowhere as good as in MS Word. And, while I think Vista is crap, I'm actually in love with Office 2007, I think it's a real improvement over past versions.
Functionality wise, OO isn't on par with Office XP yet (and don't get me started on collaborative features). But even features aside, the performance of OO is nightmarish. I've converted several people to Ubuntu. I had to install AbiWord for those with 128 MB RAM. For 256 MB RAM users OO was usable but became really sluggish with several documents open at once. Office XP does run fairly well on a WinXP machine with 128 MB RAM.
I realize that creating a good office suite is one of the hardest possible projects, but as an OSS user, OpenOffice is the only common program that makes me feel it's considerably inferior to its commercial, proprietary counterpart. Well, I also feel that MonoDevelop is poor compared to Visual Studio, but it's been in development far less and is certainly a less commonly used application.
I really like Valve's surveys. They provide a good insight about what hardware people have... the respondents are obviously gamers, and Valve provides very sober results that counter the claims of some l33t kidz that everyone has 2+ GB of RAM and a dual-core CPU.
This time, I'm impressed by the high amount of people still working on 512 MB RAM, and the relatively high amount of GeForce FX 5200 cards. As many remember, those were a disaster, with Shader 2.0 support on paper while slowing down to 2 FPS maximum as soon as any scene with them is rendered.
Other interesting points are that nVidia users are notoriously bad at upgrading their drivers, and that 96% of multi-GPU users use SLI, with only 4% for ATI Crossfire. Hmm.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, I am obliged to assert my happiness that only 5% are using Vista and call them poor souls.
Hey, while implausible today, both technologically and financially, you've got to have some respect for these guys, they ave guts. The thing might actually be built someday when Earth has a much larger industrial capacity (and nanotubes become cheaper to produce).
If you take a look at Eastern/Central Europe, you'll see that most desktop PCs are without 64-bit support. But the real issue isn't that people here won't spend a large part of their income on a Windows license. They already don't do that. Still, as long as people in these countries continue to use their XP/Vista PCs, with pirated copies of the OS, Microsoft retains dominance. If they can't even pirate it because of the need for 64-bit CPUs, they'll just look for another OS to run.
The real question is how soon the next Windows comes out. If Microsoft returns to frequent releases, and the next OS comes out in 2009, it will see slow adoption, as 64-bit will still be rare on lower-end PCs and poorer countries. If it's another longer dev cycle, with 2011-2012 for the OS, then 64-bit CPUs will be on every PC that could benefit from an OS upgrade anyway. In 2012, there'll probably be as many 32-bit CPUs as there are older Pentium IV-level CPUs now with an under 2GHz clock.
It's still used a lot indeed in Russia and some other Eastern/Central European countries. For me personally, ICQ usage has dropped dramatically over the last 4 years or so in favour of MSN and Skype, but that is because most of my contacts aren't Russian. Interestingly enough, I still have about a dozen ICQ contacts from Russia, and not a single Russian MSN/Skype contact.
It's funny because that's probably the least functional new part of Vista. I know you don't advertise an improved driver model or TCP stack to average people, but when the main advertising point is something of a purely aesthetic value and resource-consuming... *cringe*
The really funny part is how Aero, which is so resource-intensive (and apparently battery-intensive as well) jhas been the main marketing point for Vista.
Exactly so. What is "virtual rape"? I'm not familiar first-hand with Second Life, but "virtual rape" would be entering a series of commands that result in a graphical representation of two people have sex, where presumably the real person controlling the other graphical representation doesn't consent.
If it's so, or anything similar, then I see it as being the same as creating a rape scene via Blender and posting it online. Disturbing? Sure. Illegal? No way. I mean, come on, if stuff like this becomes illegal, then it's just a very small step that remains to prosecution of writers like Stephen King for realistic description of rape/abuse/torture (King's work has the full spectrum, so to speak).
Slashdot Mirror
And if the trojan is mistakenly mailed to a person not linked with terrorism and ruins their PC, can they sue the government for damage successfully?
Sims is a game largely for a different audience than the rest of the games. It seems that many players of the Sims are teenage girls. Maxis was smart to make a game that could cater to them so much. How many teenage girls (or females of any age, for that matter) are there playing Unreal Tournament or Starcraft?
I know there are also other demographics playing the Sims, but I guess that most of them aren't really hardcore gamers, either. Which would largely explain why the franchise sells so very well.
On an Ubuntu system, open the "About Ubuntu" help dialog. If I recall correctly, it says something like "Welcome to Ubuntu 7.04, also known as Feisty Fawn".
In addition, other websites refer to versions by these names. The Skype Linux download page says "Feisty Fawn (7.04)". The Automatix pages are similar. Fortunately, most sites use name as well as the number, but releases are certainly know also by their names after being released. Whether the developers intended it so is another question.
Generic names. Leads to me to another thought.
I'm not a native English speaker - it's my third language. I'm fluent, I read books and watch movies in English, and generally know the language well enough. I knew words like "fire", "fox", "access", "office", "word", "vista" or "binder" before encountering the applications named so. However, I only found out what "heron" means today, and what "eft" means back when that version was announced. I'll readily admit that animal names (plant names, too) are the weakest part of my vocabulary in all languages I speak, but I still think it's better to have names that consists of words familiar to most people. As far as I understand, lots of native speakers didn't know what an eft is either.
I've said it before and say it again... these silly names are hurting Ubuntu. When you need to convince a boss that installing Ubuntu on office computers is the way to go, you'd need a more professional sounding name. "Windows XP" or "BeOS 5" sounds fine. But "Ubuntu Hardy Heron" does not. Sure you can use the 7.10 number, but it seems that the Ubuntu community prefers not to use the numbers, and these silly names actually crop up within the OS more.
Good post. And that's exactly the problem. Okay, so the American public is generally uptight about sexual themes. But every major movie has "fuck" in it at least 42 times, and that's not a problem. Not to mention all the violence - any decent blockbuster "needs to have" quite a few shootouts.
Games can provide good social commentary and stories. Just look at Deus Ex, possibly the finest ever example of social commentary in a game. And games can be good character stories - it's beyond silly that ESRB is essentially preventing or limiting cursing and sexual themes in games. I don't want sex in games just for the sake of sex - but sometimes it fits.
I have to give the thumbs up to Eidos (European, so they have a different attitude to most developers) and their portrayal of sexuality in the Hitman games. While there's never any direct sex scene, the games have strong sexual themes, which are very fitting in the series.
Here's the article's introductory part properly translated.
"The reason for yesterday's downtime of the Skype network is research of Russian crackers, as reported by one of our readers.
While searching for a local buffer overflow, a possibility was found to send a long string to the server, overflowing its buffer and causing the server to go down. Its place is taken by another server from the P2P network, the error arises on it in the same way, and so on. As a result, the entire Skype network refused service for several hours and the developer team was forced to turn off authentication.
Here's the exploit code:"
Quite an optimistic point. I could counter by saying that mass media and communications 50 years ago weren't what they are now. 50 years ago, you could hope that the word wouldn't get out to just about everyone. And you could count on the reports not being detailed and thus, to people not involved, less horrifying. These days, a firebombing would be known to every person in Western countries within a day, and thanks to color TV, the Internet and whatnot, there will be lots of gruesome, horrifying images and videos. That would result in a public outcry like never before - and even governments and the military fear that.
That said, of course I want to believe that you're right, that a greater value is now put on human lives. At the same time, when reading this article, I could imagine a general ordering troops on a suicide mission because a bot is too expensive to risk.
I am definitely among the most dedicated fans of the show. I've always loved the whole mythology-conspiracy arc, but I also think some stand-alone episodes were absolutely brilliant. Episodes such as "Monday", "Drive", "The Pine-Bluff Variant", "Pusher", "Ice" - I think those are all great. And then there's "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", which earned Peter Boyle a much-deserved Emmy. The standalone storylines of X-Files, it turns out, can be quite solid.
Making the movie a standalone plot is probably a good idea to sell more tickets. The show's mythology is complex - if they create a mythology-based movie that airs six years after the show ended on TV, then chances are that only hardcore fans would be able to fully follow the plot. However, I am fairly sure that the script will include a couple references to the mythology arc that the hardcore fans will understand and appreciate.
Not to mention the whole thing with attacking and defensive moves. Silent Hill (or at least the first two games) were about having limited combat possibilities and being unable to easily shoot all enemies. SH3 beefed up combat with adding some more powerful weapons, looks like SH5 might just have a kickass protagonist. Which isn't good for SH.
There's an outcry about many games that have violent scenes and you're the good guy in them. Okay, in San Andreas, you're the bad guy. And that game proves the GP's point very well. The fact that you could gun down cops and blow people's cars up caused some reactions, but not too much. And when it was discovered that a hidden sex scene was in the game, instant media outcry, a widespread desire to ban the game and a resulting adults-only rating. Still, in most shooters and other 'violent' games you're the good guy. Take Doom 3. That's another game that many protested against because of its violent and gory scenes depicted with great graphics. Fundie groups also wanted a ban, yadda yadda. But that's a game where you're the almost perfect "good guy" - you're saving humanity by fighting the forces of Hell. Apparently, the critics don't care much for that part...
It will remain a major event for gamers as long as developers continue to announce big games there. I believe that GSC said it will announce the next STALKER franchise game at E3. I'm sure other developers will also make some interesting announcements at this years E3, if only by habit. In a couple of years though, it'll be really interesting to see how E3 compares to GDC.
Absolutely. I like OSS as much as the next Slashdotter, but I currently believe that office suites are the single weakest point of OSS. There is no really good free, open-source office suite. The fact that OpenOffice is the most popular/hyped one only goes to show that there is no real alternative.
OO still messes up MS Word XP/2003 format documents. Yes, I know, MS fault for not releasing the specifications and all that, but that often means OO can't be used as effectively. Working with complex tables in OOWriter is nowhere as good as in MS Word. And, while I think Vista is crap, I'm actually in love with Office 2007, I think it's a real improvement over past versions.
Functionality wise, OO isn't on par with Office XP yet (and don't get me started on collaborative features). But even features aside, the performance of OO is nightmarish. I've converted several people to Ubuntu. I had to install AbiWord for those with 128 MB RAM. For 256 MB RAM users OO was usable but became really sluggish with several documents open at once. Office XP does run fairly well on a WinXP machine with 128 MB RAM.
I realize that creating a good office suite is one of the hardest possible projects, but as an OSS user, OpenOffice is the only common program that makes me feel it's considerably inferior to its commercial, proprietary counterpart. Well, I also feel that MonoDevelop is poor compared to Visual Studio, but it's been in development far less and is certainly a less commonly used application.
The truth is in there!
While I definitely agree, I'm sure Microsoft's response would be that Vista can run on 512 MB and runs "fine" on 1 GB.
I really like Valve's surveys. They provide a good insight about what hardware people have... the respondents are obviously gamers, and Valve provides very sober results that counter the claims of some l33t kidz that everyone has 2+ GB of RAM and a dual-core CPU. This time, I'm impressed by the high amount of people still working on 512 MB RAM, and the relatively high amount of GeForce FX 5200 cards. As many remember, those were a disaster, with Shader 2.0 support on paper while slowing down to 2 FPS maximum as soon as any scene with them is rendered. Other interesting points are that nVidia users are notoriously bad at upgrading their drivers, and that 96% of multi-GPU users use SLI, with only 4% for ATI Crossfire. Hmm. Of course, since this is Slashdot, I am obliged to assert my happiness that only 5% are using Vista and call them poor souls.
Hey, while implausible today, both technologically and financially, you've got to have some respect for these guys, they ave guts. The thing might actually be built someday when Earth has a much larger industrial capacity (and nanotubes become cheaper to produce).
That, or they got lucky. It's not like certain other journalists that disagree with the Kremlin don't get murdered on Putin's birthday.
If you take a look at Eastern/Central Europe, you'll see that most desktop PCs are without 64-bit support. But the real issue isn't that people here won't spend a large part of their income on a Windows license. They already don't do that. Still, as long as people in these countries continue to use their XP/Vista PCs, with pirated copies of the OS, Microsoft retains dominance. If they can't even pirate it because of the need for 64-bit CPUs, they'll just look for another OS to run.
The real question is how soon the next Windows comes out. If Microsoft returns to frequent releases, and the next OS comes out in 2009, it will see slow adoption, as 64-bit will still be rare on lower-end PCs and poorer countries. If it's another longer dev cycle, with 2011-2012 for the OS, then 64-bit CPUs will be on every PC that could benefit from an OS upgrade anyway. In 2012, there'll probably be as many 32-bit CPUs as there are older Pentium IV-level CPUs now with an under 2GHz clock.
It's still used a lot indeed in Russia and some other Eastern/Central European countries. For me personally, ICQ usage has dropped dramatically over the last 4 years or so in favour of MSN and Skype, but that is because most of my contacts aren't Russian. Interestingly enough, I still have about a dozen ICQ contacts from Russia, and not a single Russian MSN/Skype contact.
Terrorist detected, weapons locked on. Cancel or Allow?
It's funny because that's probably the least functional new part of Vista. I know you don't advertise an improved driver model or TCP stack to average people, but when the main advertising point is something of a purely aesthetic value and resource-consuming... *cringe*
The really funny part is how Aero, which is so resource-intensive (and apparently battery-intensive as well) jhas been the main marketing point for Vista.
Exactly so. What is "virtual rape"? I'm not familiar first-hand with Second Life, but "virtual rape" would be entering a series of commands that result in a graphical representation of two people have sex, where presumably the real person controlling the other graphical representation doesn't consent. If it's so, or anything similar, then I see it as being the same as creating a rape scene via Blender and posting it online. Disturbing? Sure. Illegal? No way. I mean, come on, if stuff like this becomes illegal, then it's just a very small step that remains to prosecution of writers like Stephen King for realistic description of rape/abuse/torture (King's work has the full spectrum, so to speak).