"I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly."
You know, 'statistical anomaly' is NOT what I want to hear from solar physicists about my particular sun.
But if the spammer makes several accounts on the system they could approve their own changes. Then again they would have to have a few different email addresses to pull this off, and they probabily don't know how to set that up.
The days of spammers being idiots with mail programs is long gone. Now they're rich enough idiots that they can higher smart people to outsmart the screens. It's kind of like a virus brededing ground, they fiddle with local copies of Bayesian Filters and what not until they're slime oozes through, and is hopefully not completely unreadable.
(Oddly, my crappy homebrew webmail is pretty attachment blind, so I get a view of some types of crap that they stick in there that a human using outlook or whatnot wouldn't see. Some literary passages are being in there, since it adds bulky content harder to filter on....)
Anyway, I think comment boards and what not are safe for the time being because they don't share a common simple interface, but it wouldn't be a PhD level AI project that could scan blogspace, looking for likely comments boards, and things like this and Wiki.
No, that's exactly on-topic, I think, or at least this subthread.
It's amazing how scripted 3D human movement is in 90% of games. Take Soul Caliber 2; during some of Voldo's victory poses (and you think they could take the time to do victory poses right, since they can be easily 100% scripted without interference from either player) his weapon passes right through the floor! That's just wrong. Essentially, what we need (well, not need, but it's a worthwhile goal) is "rag doll physics" in everything. Polygon/limb-specific damage shouldn't even be an issue. If a character walks, that should reflect his (or her) legs and feet moving against the floor, using the arms for balance...
it's going to be rough for a while, because suddenly walking and jumping go from easily recorded and replayed events to challenging AI problems (and if we're not careful, everything's gonna walk around like that Honda ASIMO 'bot) But I think just like N64 era games had "stairs" that were just hills with vaguely stair like textures, this gen's scripted movement will seem like an anachronism.
GTA has started to address this, at least in terms of car physics. Despite the fact that it has special camera angles (and behaviors?) for certain jumps, all the vehicle stuff is based on an essential core physics model. GTA is also interesting for overlaying a scripted adventure on a world that doesn't feel like it's exclusively been created for the player...although RAM limitations means vehicles and pedestrians aren't nearly as persistent as they should be, and it's not like a UO virtual economy or anything, it has the flavor of a 'real', persistent, and self-consistent place. With absolutely NO traffic laws:-)
Heh. I think there was once an EGM "Top 100" (1997?) list that put Tetris at the very top, and hypothesized when aliens came down and offered to exchange technologies, we'd be able to come up with "uhh...frisbee, and microwave popcorn, and, oh yeah, Tetris"...
There was also this old New Yorker cartoon that showed a view of the whole planet with a sign "Einstein Lived Here"...which I thought was kind of silly, any alien with space travel enough to actually see that would have had their own Einstein...and probably a guy who got them past what Einstein thought were the absolute limits...
Anyone know about the John Perry Barlow quote, "I keep thinking about the Aborigines, who decided very early on, like 50,000 years ago, that they had five tools and that was all they needed and they didn't develop any more." Google didn't come up with very much on that, anyone got a cite on what the five tools are?
Heh...the final frame of those.mpgs look mighty scary, like the sun is ready to blow apart...
But I think people are pretty blsae about power and communication grid issues, as long as they're resolvable once this blows over. I think people are jittery about "extinction level event" kinda stuff...
For the record, there was a game called "Worms?" for the C=64 and Atari by Electronic Arts in 1983. It was the game described in the article, where you would tell worms what to do when they encountered a "novel" situation in terms of their hex grid. Unfortnately I can't find a link.
Nothing to do with the "Worms" games that came out for PC and various consoles later.
Yeah, I don't find the PDA example very good, just because I entered all my crap in a PalmPilot in 1997 and its been in my hip-pocket ever since (ok, I've upgraded a few times), with only very occassional needs to think about it, providing me todo's and datebook and phonebook whenever I needed it...present in a way that a simple notebook wouldn't be.
It's been years since I've read that book, but I think a more interesting viewpoint is what happens in terms of effeciency in the workplace. Now, instead of a dedicated secretarial pool, everyone just hacks up their own documents in MS Word. I guess it's an improvement. Still, a productivity gains factor is a harsh mistress.
Yeah? How does it feel to know that no matter how good a job is done, the average employee can be fired repeatedly for no reason?
You need to be careful with your imagery. I have this image of the same company firing the same employee again and again, and no, they can't do that. (Unless they get hired agan each time.)
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but if you're at all neurotic, it's tough to really know how much you'll need to be comfortable. Especially with the possibility of completely uncapped health costs. That's the big thing I think I miss in the USA not having single payer healthcare. I figure it's no big trick to pay for food and rent for the rest of my lifespan, but healthcare? Forget it.
Lack of resizability is an anti-feature in IE, not a problem with websites.
I dunno if I agree about that:
I could think of some weak reasons why it might be useful to at least have the option of specifying a fixed font size. A well-designed site will be resizable, a poorly-designed site won't be.
Well, at least they avoided one of the more frequent sins with this kind of design: the font size is easily resizable. (Ctrl+scroll wheel in IE or View|Text Size|)
there are two 'paths' displayed on the mission select screen, with unlockable bonus games in the middle, and you can switch between 'em at any time, so it's nice that you have at least one option if you get stuck.
Overall, though, my impression of the game isn't great. I think the best descrition for all the parts is "cluttered".
I'm under the impression that Factor 5 is more about game technology (sound, etc) than about game making. That's not an insult, just the impression I've got. (I'd appreciate correction or clarification.)
Well, it's hard to "correct" an impression/opinion like that, but I think that these are some of the best overall gaming experiences I've had. A lot of that it is the "magic" of the original Star Wars universe, but I find the missions to be well-designed challenges and the control to be excellent. These are hardly "tech demos"!
I am withholding opinion on the ground stuff 'til I pick up my copy, though Hoth seemed more or less ok. I was under the impression that there were two big branches "Luke" and "Wedge", with the former having more of the new stuff from the movies and on foot, and the latter having new space based missions. Is that still the case I pray?
Nah, for me, it's just a lot harder to give a damn to stuff that is so firmly "extended universe" only. I don't want to re-enact the movies, but that's the technology (spacehsips, mostly) that I want to play with, and none of this later crap will do.
How big is the book? Is it only like 6 times the length of that article? It sounds kind of interesting, but not sure if it's worth the bother if there's not a lot to it...
cheapest mobile AIM + webbrowsing?
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 0
Anyone have a canidate for the cheapest AIM + web browsing mobile device? (including a reasonably economical plan...)
Game Boy added non-total drops, I mean how you could press down and the block would go faster, but not just warp to the bottom.
Later versions (like the one for the N64, what was it) had a nice "shadow" feature that showed you where the current block would drop if you zipped it down, rather useful.
Yeah, Diddy Kong Racing is such a good game...not quite as good a Kart racer as Mario Kart 64, but with decent Karts, planes, hovercraft, decent graphics, a terrific "quest" mode with great boss races, non-random and stackable powerups...the only problem is that sometimes races can be decided in the first quarter of the first lap.
Alas, I never grew up with MULE, and unfortunately, it's kind of hard for 2 or 3 people to pick up and play...we tried it 4 player on a Dreamcast NES emulator, and there just wasn't enough explanation of what was going on, what we should try to do.
I guess games back then were either simple pick up and play, or you were expected to read the instruction manual.
Interestingly though, Doom, from around the same time, is still quite playable and the graphics aren't TOO bad - obviously nothing like UT2K3 or the Doom III screenshots, but not as bad as a comparison between the aforementioned A-10 game and FS2003
Yeah, DOOM has held up pretty well, thanks to its good use of Sprites. These Sprites were great, they let them put thousands of bad guys on screen, and then they could leave the bodies to mark where you've been, rather than sweeping them away (which is the lamest thing about almost any modern FPS; bodies always get neatly swept away)
Seriously, I'd pay for and play a solid, 16-player port of DOOM II before any online FPS currently available for PS2. SOCOM sucks on so many levels.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly."
You know, 'statistical anomaly' is NOT what I want to hear from solar physicists about my particular sun.
But if the spammer makes several accounts on the system they could approve their own changes. Then again they would have to have a few different email addresses to pull this off, and they probabily don't know how to set that up.
The days of spammers being idiots with mail programs is long gone. Now they're rich enough idiots that they can higher smart people to outsmart the screens. It's kind of like a virus brededing ground, they fiddle with local copies of Bayesian Filters and what not until they're slime oozes through, and is hopefully not completely unreadable.
(Oddly, my crappy homebrew webmail is pretty attachment blind, so I get a view of some types of crap that they stick in there that a human using outlook or whatnot wouldn't see. Some literary passages are being in there, since it adds bulky content harder to filter on....)
Anyway, I think comment boards and what not are safe for the time being because they don't share a common simple interface, but it wouldn't be a PhD level AI project that could scan blogspace, looking for likely comments boards, and things like this and Wiki.
No, that's exactly on-topic, I think, or at least this subthread.
:-)
It's amazing how scripted 3D human movement is in 90% of games. Take Soul Caliber 2; during some of Voldo's victory poses (and you think they could take the time to do victory poses right, since they can be easily 100% scripted without interference from either player) his weapon passes right through the floor! That's just wrong. Essentially, what we need (well, not need, but it's a worthwhile goal) is "rag doll physics" in everything. Polygon/limb-specific damage shouldn't even be an issue. If a character walks, that should reflect his (or her) legs and feet moving against the floor, using the arms for balance...
it's going to be rough for a while, because suddenly walking and jumping go from easily recorded and replayed events to challenging AI problems (and if we're not careful, everything's gonna walk around like that Honda ASIMO 'bot) But I think just like N64 era games had "stairs" that were just hills with vaguely stair like textures, this gen's scripted movement will seem like an anachronism.
GTA has started to address this, at least in terms of car physics. Despite the fact that it has special camera angles (and behaviors?) for certain jumps, all the vehicle stuff is based on an essential core physics model. GTA is also interesting for overlaying a scripted adventure on a world that doesn't feel like it's exclusively been created for the player...although RAM limitations means vehicles and pedestrians aren't nearly as persistent as they should be, and it's not like a UO virtual economy or anything, it has the flavor of a 'real', persistent, and self-consistent place. With absolutely NO traffic laws
Heh. I think there was once an EGM "Top 100" (1997?) list that put Tetris at the very top, and hypothesized when aliens came down and offered to exchange technologies, we'd be able to come up with "uhh...frisbee, and microwave popcorn, and, oh yeah, Tetris"...
There was also this old New Yorker cartoon that showed a view of the whole planet with a sign "Einstein Lived Here"...which I thought was kind of silly, any alien with space travel enough to actually see that would have had their own Einstein...and probably a guy who got them past what Einstein thought were the absolute limits...
Anyone know about the John Perry Barlow quote, "I keep thinking about the Aborigines, who decided very early on, like 50,000 years ago, that they had five tools and that was all they needed and they didn't develop any more." Google didn't come up with very much on that, anyone got a cite on what the five tools are?
Heh...the final frame of those .mpgs look mighty scary, like the sun is ready to blow apart...
But I think people are pretty blsae about power and communication grid issues, as long as they're resolvable once this blows over. I think people are jittery about "extinction level event" kinda stuff...
"IT MUST BE THE SHOES!"
I think that's more properly given as "it's gotta be the shoes!"
HTH.
For the record, there was a game called "Worms?" for the C=64 and Atari by Electronic Arts in 1983. It was the game described in the article, where you would tell worms what to do when they encountered a "novel" situation in terms of their hex grid. Unfortnately I can't find a link.
Nothing to do with the "Worms" games that came out for PC and various consoles later.
I think the really tough part in following this advice is fears about retirement and health care concerns.
Yeah, I don't find the PDA example very good, just because I entered all my crap in a PalmPilot in 1997 and its been in my hip-pocket ever since (ok, I've upgraded a few times), with only very occassional needs to think about it, providing me todo's and datebook and phonebook whenever I needed it...present in a way that a simple notebook wouldn't be.
It's been years since I've read that book, but I think a more interesting viewpoint is what happens in terms of effeciency in the workplace. Now, instead of a dedicated secretarial pool, everyone just hacks up their own documents in MS Word. I guess it's an improvement. Still, a productivity gains factor is a harsh mistress.
Lake Erie's fine to swim in, or at least I know it was in 1996. Some ok public beaches East of Cleveland.
Yeah? How does it feel to know that no matter how good a job is done, the average employee can be fired repeatedly for no reason?
You need to be careful with your imagery. I have this image of the same company firing the same employee again and again, and no, they can't do that. (Unless they get hired agan each time.)
Yeah, but if you're at all neurotic, it's tough to really know how much you'll need to be comfortable. Especially with the possibility of completely uncapped health costs. That's the big thing I think I miss in the USA not having single payer healthcare. I figure it's no big trick to pay for food and rent for the rest of my lifespan, but healthcare? Forget it.
Lack of resizability is an anti-feature in IE, not a problem with websites.
I dunno if I agree about that:
I could think of some weak reasons why it might be useful to at least have the option of specifying a fixed font size. A well-designed site will be resizable, a poorly-designed site won't be.
Well, at least they avoided one of the more frequent sins with this kind of design: the font size is easily resizable. (Ctrl+scroll wheel in IE or View|Text Size|)
Got this last night...
there are two 'paths' displayed on the mission select screen, with unlockable bonus games in the middle, and you can switch between 'em at any time, so it's nice that you have at least one option if you get stuck.
Overall, though, my impression of the game isn't great. I think the best descrition for all the parts is "cluttered".
I'm under the impression that Factor 5 is more about game technology (sound, etc) than about game making. That's not an insult, just the impression I've got. (I'd appreciate correction or clarification.)
Well, it's hard to "correct" an impression/opinion like that, but I think that these are some of the best overall gaming experiences I've had. A lot of that it is the "magic" of the original Star Wars universe, but I find the missions to be well-designed challenges and the control to be excellent. These are hardly "tech demos"!
I am withholding opinion on the ground stuff 'til I pick up my copy, though Hoth seemed more or less ok. I was under the impression that there were two big branches "Luke" and "Wedge", with the former having more of the new stuff from the movies and on foot, and the latter having new space based missions. Is that still the case I pray?
Nah, for me, it's just a lot harder to give a damn to stuff that is so firmly "extended universe" only. I don't want to re-enact the movies, but that's the technology (spacehsips, mostly) that I want to play with, and none of this later crap will do.
How big is the book? Is it only like 6 times the length of that article? It sounds kind of interesting, but not sure if it's worth the bother if there's not a lot to it...
Anyone have a canidate for the cheapest AIM + web browsing mobile device? (including a reasonably economical plan...)
Game Boy added non-total drops, I mean how you could press down and the block would go faster, but not just warp to the bottom.
Later versions (like the one for the N64, what was it) had a nice "shadow" feature that showed you where the current block would drop if you zipped it down, rather useful.
Yeah, Diddy Kong Racing is such a good game...not quite as good a Kart racer as Mario Kart 64, but with decent Karts, planes, hovercraft, decent graphics, a terrific "quest" mode with great boss races, non-random and stackable powerups...the only problem is that sometimes races can be decided in the first quarter of the first lap.
Alas, I never grew up with MULE, and unfortunately, it's kind of hard for 2 or 3 people to pick up and play...we tried it 4 player on a Dreamcast NES emulator, and there just wasn't enough explanation of what was going on, what we should try to do.
I guess games back then were either simple pick up and play, or you were expected to read the instruction manual.
Yeah, I worked on upping the irony and sarcasm skills of my younger cousins.
I think the all time favorite was taunt was "man...you guys put the 'uck' back into suck".
Interestingly though, Doom, from around the same time, is still quite playable and the graphics aren't TOO bad - obviously nothing like UT2K3 or the Doom III screenshots, but not as bad as a comparison between the aforementioned A-10 game and FS2003
Yeah, DOOM has held up pretty well, thanks to its good use of Sprites. These Sprites were great, they let them put thousands of bad guys on screen, and then they could leave the bodies to mark where you've been, rather than sweeping them away (which is the lamest thing about almost any modern FPS; bodies always get neatly swept away)
Seriously, I'd pay for and play a solid, 16-player port of DOOM II before any online FPS currently available for PS2. SOCOM sucks on so many levels.