If you want to game on a monitor you'll have a computer attached to it and so the existing Steam client will work fine for that, and in any case given the ease of DVI/HDMI conversion the practical difference between a television and a monitor is getting very slim.
There are enough other games on Steam which do need a keyboard and mouse though, everything from other RTS games such as the C&C and RA series, to the more complex FPS games. Valve may be wanting developers to do things for their Big Screen/Controller setups but there are still plenty of games there where controllers are unusable.
SteamOS is Linux based but I doubt it's going to be anything even Stallman would call GNU/Linux.
Everything I've seen makes this sound like it's more aimed at being a 'Console which runs PC games' than a normal computer. I'd expect it to load into a 'Big Picture' mode Steam client, and allow the user to launch their games and specially-modified applications from that which could well run as overlays like the existing Steam browser. Whether this machine even needs a command line is debatable, it shouldn't need GCC (I'd expect a fully binary-based OS) or a full-featured window and compositing desktop like Gnome.
If there's no climate change though then there's no extra damages to pay. If they believe firmly in climate change they weight it heavily in their predictive risk models, if they're certain that climate change is incorrect then they can ignore it in their predictions.
Either way it's going to hurt if you're wrong should other insurers have different predictions. If you think climate change will occur and it doesn't then those who predicted correctly will will been able to sell cheaper than you and you'll have needlessly lost market share, if you predict that it won't and it does then you've underestimated risk and will be paying out a lot more damages than you expected to when setting the price.
Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.
Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.
The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.
The Geonaute's for home/amateur use, the Omnicam is professional broadcast equipment- they're really not suitable replacements for one another. It's like comparing a GoPro Hero and a Red EPIC, both are digital video cameras, both are really nice pieces of kit, but there the similarities end.
Google have an interest in making money and if they happen to make the internet nicer at the same time then that's a nice side benefit. It it made things worse for internet users then they'd still want to do it but they wouldn't shout about it as much.
The only time I had a sysadmin hate me it was more due to me documenting their dangerous incompetence.
After a security hole was found in our multi-million daily users web application I was given a project to look into other potential security issues with the application. After trying SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other fun stuff I started to poke into the application server it was running on, and a quick read through the documentation told me how to get diagnostic information from the system- unless it's been disabled as part of the standard installation process. I try it on my dev server, and get the info- not a problem. I try it on the test server and it's the same. I then try the staging server, which should be a copy of the live service, and start to get scared.
After a quick chat with my manager as I wanted to be covered should the system flag me as an attacker I try it on the live service from an external IP address, again the diagnostics appear. I now had our database schema, the network architecture of the live service, and a lot of configuration details. My manager, who'd been watching over my shoulder as they'd become curious now, suggested we test this properly. I used my non-work mobile and called the sysadmin and, using only the details on screen, convinced him I was a database admin from elsewhere in the company working off-site. He was very helpful, I soon had a nicely unofficial SSH tunnel into the network set up for me, a temporary user account on all of the live servers, and root access to the live database with all of our customer details.
Oddly enough the sysadmin didn't think it fair that we'd 'tricked' him, and said that no one would normally see that information and think to do what I'd just done.
Most sysadmins I've worked with have been very good, and the in-department one I'm working with at the moment is absolutely amazing. It's not the case with all sysadmins though, some of them don't need users running random software as root to make things go stupid.
Have a look at "To The Moon". The game mechanics are so sparse that without the narrative it wouldn't compare positively o a lot of Flash games, but when you add the need to see the story through to the end and the result is something pleasingly memorable.
I'll agree that a good game needs some level of gameplay, but that doesn't mean narrative should take a back seat to it. My personal favourite games tend to be those with very strong narrative even if they don't have exceptional gameplay, games such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planescape Torment, or the Fallout series. It's a matter of personal taste.
Computers can pick totally random numbers, they're called TRNGs (True Random Number Generator) it's a basic requirement of a lot of cryptographic systems as any bias significantly weakens the system. The example Tepples posted with the least significant bit of an audio source is one example, another common one is the thermal noise from measuring temperatures of internal components. If for some reason a machine needs a lot of random numbers, more than these common sources can provide in a given time, then there are actually radioactive decay based random number generators available for computers- set it so there's a 50% chance of a GM tube detecting a decay event in a given (short) time and enjoy some true quantum random numbers, or just have a lot of thermal noise sensors in a single device..
Have a look at any of the discussions about how/dev/random works, or have a read of Random.org
Humans on the other hand can't produce truly random behavior, or at least that's the result of most studies- both clinical and ad hoc. Have a look at Is 17 the most random number? where people were asked to pick a number between 1 and 20. Our brains may actually have a mechanism to choose a totally random outcome from a series of possibilities, there's a lot of uncertainty still on how the brain works at the most fundamental levels, but trying to consicously choose a random decision involves filtering through all of the personal and cultural biases into the conscious mind it's nowhere near random. "A number from one to twenty? Hmm. Eight. Hold on, no, I live at number eight, and have been thinking about going home. Must remember to buy milk. Twenty? Too obvious, it's the top and is a crit on a d20 in D&D, everyone'll choose that. Nineteen? Bah, only thinking of that because I can't use twenty. Thirteen? Well, it would show that I'm not superstitious but it's still too obvious. I'll go for seventeen, no one will choose that!"
In your example the coding and art are loosely coupled, it's easy to split them between different people. I suspect that if you knew programming but had no knowledge of 3d maths and there was a third person who knew 3d maths but not programming then you would have a lot more difficulty. Every minor piece of coding would result in a confused conversation where you don't have enough common domain knowledge to communicate effectively, misunderstandings will come in as assumptions are made on both sides, and problems will arise.
To be fair EA have already had a decent go at selling ads disguised as DLC, there's Sims 3 Stuff Packs for sale called 'Diesel Stuff' which has clothes and objects tied to the Diesel clothing brand, another tied to Ikea, and a really odd (and extra-expensive one) based on a tour by the singer Katy Perry.
This does surprise me. Although the deal has probably been in the pipeline for months I would have thought that Crest would have realised that SimCity is pretty much become a toxic brand at the moment and will taint everything associated with it. Pulling out from the deal, or convincing EA to move the deal to another game would have made a lot of sense.
Although 1313 does sadly look dead I wouldn't be surprised if sequels to their existing SW games were developed by external houses and published under the Disney/LucasFilm name.
Equal parts rose-tinted nostalgia and the fact that no-one's moved the genre forward in a major sense since.
Telltale have done a good job with their games and have managed to get rid of a lot of the annoyances from the Monkey Island era but it's all been small-steps rather anything major, and I think they've not managed to achieve quite the same level of humour as the old games yet but that could just be me getting old.
Txt speak and emoticons are part of the everyday use of language where I live, does my dislike of those make me racist against them too? You do realise people can dislike something that someone, or even a nation, commonly does without disliking the nation or it's population?
One interview I had amused me. On paper it looked okay, a small art dealership was looking for a combined sysadmin/Perl programmer which was pretty much what I was doing then, and the pay was significantly more than I was on at my current place and as I was getting bored in the current job anyway I thought I'd go and have a chat.
Went to the interview and it was one of those where the interviewer wasn't actually technical himself. He had a friend write a page of simple technical questions which I answered without any trouble, also corrected one of the answers he had. The interviewer seemed happy and we started talking about what the job actually involved, and here it started to go wrong. He wanted a basic browse-only shopfront, no actual payment, with basic message board capability, and some everyday web/email/DNS handling. He did vaguely ask how I'd do this but not in any detail at all. Listening to him I knew that I'd be bored by day two, but I did actually like the guy and knew that what he wanted really didn't need a full-time employee. I explained to him that these were basically things which could be done by using pre-existing software with a month of effort to get it up and running in the first place, and a day or so a month afterwards to maintain it. I jotted down the names of some software and companies that could help him, and told him what to ask them for.
He was genuinely amazed. He thought that all of this web-stuff was so complex that it'd be a full-time task to keep his website running, thinking that every new art piece he added to the catalogue would need an entire new page to be written for it. Finding out about CMS was a revelation, and one he was grateful for, and all this took less time than the interview was scheduled for.
In the end he went with one of the companies I'd recommended to him, they did ecommerce stuff and this was bread and butter for them, he was up and running in two weeks with everything he needed, as he let me know in an email. As for me I didn't have a new job but I felt good about myself, and the fact the chap had basically ended the 'interview' by giving me a few weeks worth of wages for saving him a lot in the long run was quite nice too.
I do wonder about the cause and effect here though, would people who work during the day go to the library in the evening if it was open? I do think it'd be worth having one evening a week of later opening hours and seeing how it went, possibly with added incentives of interesting talks from speakers if there's room. I know some of the London museums have done 'special' evening openings recently and from what I've heard those went very nicely, attracting people who travel into London for work and don't really want to have to do their weekly commute at the weekend in order to go to a museum.
This is a personally offensive, childish post, bordering on hate speech against Christians. You are very lucky SlashDot doesn't provide me with a 'report' button in its comment sections.
Well, no one will think that you're the type to throw hissy fits any more.
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If you want to game on a monitor you'll have a computer attached to it and so the existing Steam client will work fine for that, and in any case given the ease of DVI/HDMI conversion the practical difference between a television and a monitor is getting very slim.
There are enough other games on Steam which do need a keyboard and mouse though, everything from other RTS games such as the C&C and RA series, to the more complex FPS games. Valve may be wanting developers to do things for their Big Screen/Controller setups but there are still plenty of games there where controllers are unusable.
SteamOS is Linux based but I doubt it's going to be anything even Stallman would call GNU/Linux.
Everything I've seen makes this sound like it's more aimed at being a 'Console which runs PC games' than a normal computer. I'd expect it to load into a 'Big Picture' mode Steam client, and allow the user to launch their games and specially-modified applications from that which could well run as overlays like the existing Steam browser. Whether this machine even needs a command line is debatable, it shouldn't need GCC (I'd expect a fully binary-based OS) or a full-featured window and compositing desktop like Gnome.
If there's no climate change though then there's no extra damages to pay. If they believe firmly in climate change they weight it heavily in their predictive risk models, if they're certain that climate change is incorrect then they can ignore it in their predictions.
Either way it's going to hurt if you're wrong should other insurers have different predictions. If you think climate change will occur and it doesn't then those who predicted correctly will will been able to sell cheaper than you and you'll have needlessly lost market share, if you predict that it won't and it does then you've underestimated risk and will be paying out a lot more damages than you expected to when setting the price.
Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.
Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.
The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.
The Geonaute's for home/amateur use, the Omnicam is professional broadcast equipment- they're really not suitable replacements for one another. It's like comparing a GoPro Hero and a Red EPIC, both are digital video cameras, both are really nice pieces of kit, but there the similarities end.
Google have an interest in making money and if they happen to make the internet nicer at the same time then that's a nice side benefit. It it made things worse for internet users then they'd still want to do it but they wouldn't shout about it as much.
If you can only take so many years of being a running gag then can we look forward to Yahoo! pulling the plug on itself?
It's just following the new standard for punctuation.
I want a desktop OS on my desktop.
The only time I had a sysadmin hate me it was more due to me documenting their dangerous incompetence.
After a security hole was found in our multi-million daily users web application I was given a project to look into other potential security issues with the application. After trying SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other fun stuff I started to poke into the application server it was running on, and a quick read through the documentation told me how to get diagnostic information from the system- unless it's been disabled as part of the standard installation process. I try it on my dev server, and get the info- not a problem. I try it on the test server and it's the same. I then try the staging server, which should be a copy of the live service, and start to get scared.
After a quick chat with my manager as I wanted to be covered should the system flag me as an attacker I try it on the live service from an external IP address, again the diagnostics appear. I now had our database schema, the network architecture of the live service, and a lot of configuration details. My manager, who'd been watching over my shoulder as they'd become curious now, suggested we test this properly. I used my non-work mobile and called the sysadmin and, using only the details on screen, convinced him I was a database admin from elsewhere in the company working off-site. He was very helpful, I soon had a nicely unofficial SSH tunnel into the network set up for me, a temporary user account on all of the live servers, and root access to the live database with all of our customer details.
Oddly enough the sysadmin didn't think it fair that we'd 'tricked' him, and said that no one would normally see that information and think to do what I'd just done.
Most sysadmins I've worked with have been very good, and the in-department one I'm working with at the moment is absolutely amazing. It's not the case with all sysadmins though, some of them don't need users running random software as root to make things go stupid.
So I may be full of self-loathing but at least I'm effectively immortal.
Have a look at "To The Moon". The game mechanics are so sparse that without the narrative it wouldn't compare positively o a lot of Flash games, but when you add the need to see the story through to the end and the result is something pleasingly memorable.
I'll agree that a good game needs some level of gameplay, but that doesn't mean narrative should take a back seat to it. My personal favourite games tend to be those with very strong narrative even if they don't have exceptional gameplay, games such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planescape Torment, or the Fallout series. It's a matter of personal taste.
Computers can pick totally random numbers, they're called TRNGs (True Random Number Generator) it's a basic requirement of a lot of cryptographic systems as any bias significantly weakens the system. The example Tepples posted with the least significant bit of an audio source is one example, another common one is the thermal noise from measuring temperatures of internal components. If for some reason a machine needs a lot of random numbers, more than these common sources can provide in a given time, then there are actually radioactive decay based random number generators available for computers- set it so there's a 50% chance of a GM tube detecting a decay event in a given (short) time and enjoy some true quantum random numbers, or just have a lot of thermal noise sensors in a single device..
Have a look at any of the discussions about how /dev/random works, or have a read of Random.org
Humans on the other hand can't produce truly random behavior, or at least that's the result of most studies- both clinical and ad hoc. Have a look at Is 17 the most random number? where people were asked to pick a number between 1 and 20. Our brains may actually have a mechanism to choose a totally random outcome from a series of possibilities, there's a lot of uncertainty still on how the brain works at the most fundamental levels, but trying to consicously choose a random decision involves filtering through all of the personal and cultural biases into the conscious mind it's nowhere near random. "A number from one to twenty? Hmm. Eight. Hold on, no, I live at number eight, and have been thinking about going home. Must remember to buy milk. Twenty? Too obvious, it's the top and is a crit on a d20 in D&D, everyone'll choose that. Nineteen? Bah, only thinking of that because I can't use twenty. Thirteen? Well, it would show that I'm not superstitious but it's still too obvious. I'll go for seventeen, no one will choose that!"
That's already been started in 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2728595.stm
In your example the coding and art are loosely coupled, it's easy to split them between different people. I suspect that if you knew programming but had no knowledge of 3d maths and there was a third person who knew 3d maths but not programming then you would have a lot more difficulty. Every minor piece of coding would result in a confused conversation where you don't have enough common domain knowledge to communicate effectively, misunderstandings will come in as assumptions are made on both sides, and problems will arise.
To be fair EA have already had a decent go at selling ads disguised as DLC, there's Sims 3 Stuff Packs for sale called 'Diesel Stuff' which has clothes and objects tied to the Diesel clothing brand, another tied to Ikea, and a really odd (and extra-expensive one) based on a tour by the singer Katy Perry.
This does surprise me. Although the deal has probably been in the pipeline for months I would have thought that Crest would have realised that SimCity is pretty much become a toxic brand at the moment and will taint everything associated with it. Pulling out from the deal, or convincing EA to move the deal to another game would have made a lot of sense.
Although 1313 does sadly look dead I wouldn't be surprised if sequels to their existing SW games were developed by external houses and published under the Disney/LucasFilm name.
Equal parts rose-tinted nostalgia and the fact that no-one's moved the genre forward in a major sense since. Telltale have done a good job with their games and have managed to get rid of a lot of the annoyances from the Monkey Island era but it's all been small-steps rather anything major, and I think they've not managed to achieve quite the same level of humour as the old games yet but that could just be me getting old.
Txt speak and emoticons are part of the everyday use of language where I live, does my dislike of those make me racist against them too? You do realise people can dislike something that someone, or even a nation, commonly does without disliking the nation or it's population?
One interview I had amused me. On paper it looked okay, a small art dealership was looking for a combined sysadmin/Perl programmer which was pretty much what I was doing then, and the pay was significantly more than I was on at my current place and as I was getting bored in the current job anyway I thought I'd go and have a chat.
Went to the interview and it was one of those where the interviewer wasn't actually technical himself. He had a friend write a page of simple technical questions which I answered without any trouble, also corrected one of the answers he had. The interviewer seemed happy and we started talking about what the job actually involved, and here it started to go wrong. He wanted a basic browse-only shopfront, no actual payment, with basic message board capability, and some everyday web/email/DNS handling. He did vaguely ask how I'd do this but not in any detail at all. Listening to him I knew that I'd be bored by day two, but I did actually like the guy and knew that what he wanted really didn't need a full-time employee. I explained to him that these were basically things which could be done by using pre-existing software with a month of effort to get it up and running in the first place, and a day or so a month afterwards to maintain it. I jotted down the names of some software and companies that could help him, and told him what to ask them for.
He was genuinely amazed. He thought that all of this web-stuff was so complex that it'd be a full-time task to keep his website running, thinking that every new art piece he added to the catalogue would need an entire new page to be written for it. Finding out about CMS was a revelation, and one he was grateful for, and all this took less time than the interview was scheduled for.
In the end he went with one of the companies I'd recommended to him, they did ecommerce stuff and this was bread and butter for them, he was up and running in two weeks with everything he needed, as he let me know in an email. As for me I didn't have a new job but I felt good about myself, and the fact the chap had basically ended the 'interview' by giving me a few weeks worth of wages for saving him a lot in the long run was quite nice too.
Why didn't you just Google for 'server side javascript' when you got back to find out if it existed and was something you'd not heard of yourself?
I do wonder about the cause and effect here though, would people who work during the day go to the library in the evening if it was open? I do think it'd be worth having one evening a week of later opening hours and seeing how it went, possibly with added incentives of interesting talks from speakers if there's room. I know some of the London museums have done 'special' evening openings recently and from what I've heard those went very nicely, attracting people who travel into London for work and don't really want to have to do their weekly commute at the weekend in order to go to a museum.
This is a personally offensive, childish post, bordering on hate speech against Christians. You are very lucky SlashDot doesn't provide me with a 'report' button in its comment sections.
Well, no one will think that you're the type to throw hissy fits any more.