Considering some of the replies in here, I totally agree with that one. Either that or there's going to be yet another round of modslapping this evening.:-)
Yeah, Win95 and Win98 lose time often. There's a great feature in the Novell network client that lets you fix the clocks that can help get around that problem. It automatically sets the clock to what the servers are set to, and as long as you keep them properly set, you don't have to worry about some old Win98 machine in the basement losing time and causing someone to miss a meeting.
Arcanum is a perfect example of a great non-linear game with a great overarching storyline AND plenty of room to do your own thing. It doesn't suffer from the open-ended chaos of Daggerfall, and doesn't suffer from the hand-holding linear nature of games such as the FF series. It's even more open-ended than the aforementioned Ultima VI. But I'm not surpised by that. Most Black Isle games have been open ended, such as the masterpieces Fallout 1 and 2. Many of the great minds behind the Fallout series left Black Isle, and ended up together working on Arcanum. I was doubtful of the gaming industry hype around 'the team from Fallout makes a new RPG'... visions of Daikatana flashed in my head. But I was pleasantly suprised.
What I'm most impressed with, regarding Neverwinter Nights, is the ability to create your own world and leave it running on a server. Graphical MUD anyone? With a well-scripted huge world built by a group of friends, they can create their own MMORPG.
Being a moderator should have a random comment order, threaded, all posts shown. IMO, of course:P
I disagree.
I've often seen someone post an interesting or insightful link or point to a story as an AC or at a score of 1, only to have someone post the same exact thing at a starting score of 2. The former is ignored, the latter is moderated up to 5.
Why?
Because, as you say, few moderators browse at -1.
And while I agree entirely that moderators should be forced to read at -1 (I do all the time anyway, moderating or not), I disagree about the order being random. Otherwise people could karmawhore by just cutting and pasting earlier insightful comments and hoping they show up first to a moderator.
This is downright scary. Nothing like looking through the archive to see an old post from a skilled sysadmin friend asking a basic question in the wrong group years ago. Nothing like seeing delusional inane posts you wrote while in high school making you look like an utter twit. Nothing like seeing old usenet posts from friends who have died years ago. This is just too creepy for words.
That's quite possible. I didn't install *Nix on a desktop of mine until a year or so after I started reading/., AND I got an account, forgot about/., and returned many moons later. I fit both of those descriptions.
And, as you point out, this conversation has been mostly beneficial. Just as there are white-hat hackers that cause a positive end result, there are positive trolls that cause good conversation and get some helpful sentiments out there. There's a quote I've heard a few times, that a good troll is indistiguishable from a good post.
Re:Street Dating Explained From the Inside
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Entirely correct, as a fellow EB employee (at least on the weekends). The list of 'street dates' for DVDs in particular is religiously held to. While most game companies allow EB to sell a game that ships early, consoles and DVDs are kept in back locked up. Hell, people can pick up their GCN and X-Box games, and have been able to buy them for days... it's just the console that's been sitting in the back.
I've had customers offer me bribes to get various things (like the Godfather DVD set) early.
Also, your point about having none left is entirely correct. We 'sold out' of GCN weeks ago, and 'sold out' of X-Box preorders months ago. The same thing happened with the PS2 last year, and DC before that... people never seem to learn that they need to preorder these things. The only way to really get an X-Box now is to camp out at a store that doesn't take preorders Wednesday night, or pay a fortune on EBay.
In reference to your other post, our GM is buying us a few cases of Red Bull for Thursday. Encourage your GM to do the same!
I wish I had known about how they work with debit cards, as you pointed out in tip number five.
I've ended up having a large sum of money locked in my checking account over a weekend while PayPal processes it for a few days. I was paying my rent through PayPal, and had twice it taken out (half of that temporarily as a 'lock' as mentioned before). Needing some cash that weekend, I was suprised to see my account so low. After dealing with my bank, I attempted to get a hold of someone at PayPal for hours. Finally getting someone to help me, the person on the line explained the situation, explained his inability to do a thing about it, and accused me of threatening him when I asked for his name. I was upset but understanding until that accusation came out. Didn't know asking for a name, so I could deal with him again in the future, would be mistaken as a threat.
Good lord, I had managed to completely forget that episode.... But just reading that line, now all I can picture is him flying with the helium-filled trashbags over the security wall. Ghaaa.
As long as you're within ten days of the original purchase, you can return it with a receipt. When I worked at an EB, we'd get people returning games all the time because they beat it, didn't like it, whatever... and it was store policy.
Hell, the EB POS software has under the listed return reasons, "Did Not Like"
Hell yeah. Blowing things up can always be a fun job.
A friend of mine works at a nearby arsenal, and every so often has to blow things up under the guise of getting rid of old stockpiles. They've actually got a few rooms like the one described in the article set up. Plenty of ordinances from the fifties or so that are past their expiration date get shoved into such a room, set off, and cleaned up.
While my friend finds his job tedious, it is a great job to impress his nephews. "Uncle Chris blows crap up all day at work!"
One of the problems with PNG's is the size and availability of viewers for the format. If an alternative format is created that's superior, and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available, then it has a chance of being adopted.
I remember first hearing about MP3's as an alternative to WAV files. While the differences are even more vast than those between PNG and GIF, I still maintain that it was the availability of viewers that helped MP3 to become the standard.
We live in a different world than the world that the PNG was introduced to. With more bandwidth, more users on the net, who knows how the PNG would have fared in the modern world with plenty of viewers.
Hell yeah, advertising works wonders. The incredibly popular NeoPets game uses a variety of advertisements to make money.
Often they have various real life products for sale within the game world, that people can use. They also offer people game money for opting in to get tons of spam. Visit Cartoon Network, here's a hundred units of currency. Sign up for this new auction site, here's some new attack for your little pet. Nominate someone to run the Olympic torch for Coke, and here's some new Coke machine for your NeoHome. They've managed to create quite an inventive and cool game, despite the kiddie slant given to everything, and it's still entirely free. Millions of people play it, and they've managed to employ quite a few artists and coders off the advertising revenue and sales of shirts and the like.
A few years ago, the online game I help administrate was looking to go to a pay-for-play system. They had to scour through the database, removing references to various copyrights. They had to work out payment systems, worry about players actually being paying customers that they had an obligation to help, and various other worries. In the end, the administration at the time decided that it wasn't worth the hassle, and the game continues to remain free yet small to this day. We advertise the people who founded the game, who also provide bandwidth and the server space, but no money's moving around the game whatsoever except for a few donations from the players to the providers. Every few years, talk of it going to a pay format or being sold is kicked around, but I don't think that'll ever happen.
You could always try asking the same question on Slashdot Japan. You might get more of an answer. I think the/. readers there read a bit more Japanese.
All these outraged reactions to Julian Dibbel crack me up. The guy is pretentious, too sure of himself, capable of overwriting anything. But just from the couple of samples of his writing that I've seen, he's also unarguably a Geek himself. He celebrates the culture via critique, because he's a full-fledged member of it himself. Dibbel is a geek.
Let's not forget that after Dibbel wrote the Rape in Cyberspace article, he spent a large amount of time on LambdaMOO, eventually writing My Tiny Life... Anyone who thinks Dibbel is anti-geek should read that book. You'd realize that if he were anti-geek, he'd be self-destructive.
For a month or two now Electronics Boutique has had a special offer for preordering the GBA. "We don't want your money, we just want your business" or some tagline like that.
Instead of the usual $10 deposit for a game/system, you just signed up that you'ld like a GBA, a rechargable battery pack, and three games of your choice from the launch titles. So they got dozens of people 'signed up' for pre-orders.
The reason they're doing it without charging, from what I've read, is because Nintendo's trying their usual 'supply issues' speech like they've done with every system.
God, I loved that old feature on Telegard/Renegade and the like. Though most people figured it out when noone responded to their flames, and then made a fake account/logged on as a guest, to find out the truth. But this would work with seti, where there is no 'feedback'. Hell, they've even disabled 'see my last 10 packets' as of late, so as long as they kept on incrementing the person's records to their eyes, it wouldn't matter.
As far as the problem that you present - a broken computer being innocent as compared to malicious data. That really isn't a problem. Not to sound like an arrogant fuckwad, but the end result is the same to seti. Data that's just wrong as a result of a computer going tits-up or data that's wrong from a computer being messed with - it really doesn't matter. They're going to need to reject both.
Yes they do, and suprisingly, parents are finally learning them. While they may not be as recognized as the motion picture rating system, I've seen a far greater number of parents referring to video game rating designations then I have since they first came out.
Read Diamond Age. Those antennaes come at a cost...
Actually, you've got the right author, the wrong story, I think. You're thinking about Snow Crash, an earlier work of his.
But getting back on topic, the 'gargoyles' described in that novel would be incredible. We're quite a few jumps away from researching through the Library of Congress while zipping up to Alaska on a motorcycle, but even some of the stuff that Hiro did offline is but a step or two away. This technology sounds like one of those steps.
Just reading this article made me chuckle, realizing how different it is in the US. JWZ had some pontification about Netscape's internal email being public during legal wars with M$.
At my current job, we've got a couple levels of communication.. the internal discussion boards, and the real secret never talked about in public ancient communications method. While the whining we do isn't about a billion dollar megacorporation that can send a barrel full of lawyers to yank it out, I wonder what exactly determines who has the rights to what discussion in the US. I know it isn't as free as Canada, but where exactly is the line drawn?
They'll only have to pay $50 + court costs, $75... but if you get a lawyer to do a class action suit, then you can actually hit them up for the whole $2.7 million with ONE court case.
As evil as class action suits are in the eyes of many, they're great for just that sort of thing. $75 is a thorn in the side, but a class action suit is a huge lamb-feces encrusted iron spike.
The EB I worked at part time sold out of the Windows limited edition tin, and had a half dozen Linux tins lying around from the day it shipped until recently, when most got handed back to the home office. They probably only sold about one or two copies in the store itself, perhaps the home office decided to sell them online for next to nothing? They do that every so often for various games.
The home office also recently shipped new store layout plans regarding a linux section, so the store finally has a linux section. No Mac section, but a linux games section.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Considering some of the replies in here, I totally agree with that one. Either that or there's going to be yet another round of modslapping this evening. :-)
True. At least it keeps all of the lab computers (many logins during a day) on time, and people who login daily can't drift THAT much.
Yeah, Win95 and Win98 lose time often. There's a great feature in the Novell network client that lets you fix the clocks that can help get around that problem. It automatically sets the clock to what the servers are set to, and as long as you keep them properly set, you don't have to worry about some old Win98 machine in the basement losing time and causing someone to miss a meeting.
Arcanum is a perfect example of a great non-linear game with a great overarching storyline AND plenty of room to do your own thing. It doesn't suffer from the open-ended chaos of Daggerfall, and doesn't suffer from the hand-holding linear nature of games such as the FF series. It's even more open-ended than the aforementioned Ultima VI. But I'm not surpised by that. Most Black Isle games have been open ended, such as the masterpieces Fallout 1 and 2. Many of the great minds behind the Fallout series left Black Isle, and ended up together working on Arcanum. I was doubtful of the gaming industry hype around 'the team from Fallout makes a new RPG'... visions of Daikatana flashed in my head. But I was pleasantly suprised.
What I'm most impressed with, regarding Neverwinter Nights, is the ability to create your own world and leave it running on a server. Graphical MUD anyone? With a well-scripted huge world built by a group of friends, they can create their own MMORPG.
Being a moderator should have a random comment order, threaded, all posts shown. IMO, of course :P
I disagree.
I've often seen someone post an interesting or insightful link or point to a story as an AC or at a score of 1, only to have someone post the same exact thing at a starting score of 2. The former is ignored, the latter is moderated up to 5.
Why?
Because, as you say, few moderators browse at -1.
And while I agree entirely that moderators should be forced to read at -1 (I do all the time anyway, moderating or not), I disagree about the order being random. Otherwise people could karmawhore by just cutting and pasting earlier insightful comments and hoping they show up first to a moderator.
This is downright scary.
Nothing like looking through the archive to see an old post from a skilled sysadmin friend asking a basic question in the wrong group years ago.
Nothing like seeing delusional inane posts you wrote while in high school making you look like an utter twit.
Nothing like seeing old usenet posts from friends who have died years ago. This is just too creepy for words.
That's quite possible. I didn't install *Nix on a desktop of mine until a year or so after I started reading /., AND I got an account, forgot about /., and returned many moons later. I fit both of those descriptions.
And, as you point out, this conversation has been mostly beneficial. Just as there are white-hat hackers that cause a positive end result, there are positive trolls that cause good conversation and get some helpful sentiments out there. There's a quote I've heard a few times, that a good troll is indistiguishable from a good post.
That theory has already been explored.
Entirely correct, as a fellow EB employee (at least on the weekends). The list of 'street dates' for DVDs in particular is religiously held to. While most game companies allow EB to sell a game that ships early, consoles and DVDs are kept in back locked up. Hell, people can pick up their GCN and X-Box games, and have been able to buy them for days... it's just the console that's been sitting in the back.
I've had customers offer me bribes to get various things (like the Godfather DVD set) early.
Also, your point about having none left is entirely correct. We 'sold out' of GCN weeks ago, and 'sold out' of X-Box preorders months ago. The same thing happened with the PS2 last year, and DC before that... people never seem to learn that they need to preorder these things. The only way to really get an X-Box now is to camp out at a store that doesn't take preorders Wednesday night, or pay a fortune on EBay.
In reference to your other post, our GM is buying us a few cases of Red Bull for Thursday. Encourage your GM to do the same!
I wish I had known about how they work with debit cards, as you pointed out in tip number five.
I've ended up having a large sum of money locked in my checking account over a weekend while PayPal processes it for a few days. I was paying my rent through PayPal, and had twice it taken out (half of that temporarily as a 'lock' as mentioned before). Needing some cash that weekend, I was suprised to see my account so low. After dealing with my bank, I attempted to get a hold of someone at PayPal for hours. Finally getting someone to help me, the person on the line explained the situation, explained his inability to do a thing about it, and accused me of threatening him when I asked for his name. I was upset but understanding until that accusation came out. Didn't know asking for a name, so I could deal with him again in the future, would be mistaken as a threat.
Good lord, I had managed to completely forget that episode.... But just reading that line, now all I can picture is him flying with the helium-filled trashbags over the security wall. Ghaaa.
As long as you're within ten days of the original purchase, you can return it with a receipt. When I worked at an EB, we'd get people returning games all the time because they beat it, didn't like it, whatever... and it was store policy.
Hell, the EB POS software has under the listed return reasons, "Did Not Like"
Hell yeah. Blowing things up can always be a fun job.
A friend of mine works at a nearby arsenal, and every so often has to blow things up under the guise of getting rid of old stockpiles. They've actually got a few rooms like the one described in the article set up. Plenty of ordinances from the fifties or so that are past their expiration date get shoved into such a room, set off, and cleaned up.
While my friend finds his job tedious, it is a great job to impress his nephews. "Uncle Chris blows crap up all day at work!"
One of the problems with PNG's is the size and availability of viewers for the format. If an alternative format is created that's superior, and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available, then it has a chance of being adopted.
I remember first hearing about MP3's as an alternative to WAV files. While the differences are even more vast than those between PNG and GIF, I still maintain that it was the availability of viewers that helped MP3 to become the standard.
We live in a different world than the world that the PNG was introduced to. With more bandwidth, more users on the net, who knows how the PNG would have fared in the modern world with plenty of viewers.
Hell yeah, advertising works wonders. The incredibly popular NeoPets game uses a variety of advertisements to make money.
Often they have various real life products for sale within the game world, that people can use. They also offer people game money for opting in to get tons of spam. Visit Cartoon Network, here's a hundred units of currency. Sign up for this new auction site, here's some new attack for your little pet. Nominate someone to run the Olympic torch for Coke, and here's some new Coke machine for your NeoHome. They've managed to create quite an inventive and cool game, despite the kiddie slant given to everything, and it's still entirely free. Millions of people play it, and they've managed to employ quite a few artists and coders off the advertising revenue and sales of shirts and the like.
A few years ago, the online game I help administrate was looking to go to a pay-for-play system. They had to scour through the database, removing references to various copyrights. They had to work out payment systems, worry about players actually being paying customers that they had an obligation to help, and various other worries. In the end, the administration at the time decided that it wasn't worth the hassle, and the game continues to remain free yet small to this day. We advertise the people who founded the game, who also provide bandwidth and the server space, but no money's moving around the game whatsoever except for a few donations from the players to the providers. Every few years, talk of it going to a pay format or being sold is kicked around, but I don't think that'll ever happen.
You could always ask Slashdot Japan.
You could always try asking the same question on Slashdot Japan. You might get more of an answer. I think the /. readers there read a bit more Japanese.
All these outraged reactions to Julian Dibbel crack me up. The guy is pretentious, too sure of himself, capable of overwriting anything. But just from the couple of samples of his writing that I've seen, he's also unarguably a Geek himself. He celebrates the culture via critique, because he's a full-fledged member of it himself. Dibbel is a geek.
Let's not forget that after Dibbel wrote the Rape in Cyberspace article, he spent a large amount of time on LambdaMOO, eventually writing My Tiny Life... Anyone who thinks Dibbel is anti-geek should read that book. You'd realize that if he were anti-geek, he'd be self-destructive.
For a month or two now Electronics Boutique has had a special offer for preordering the GBA. "We don't want your money, we just want your business" or some tagline like that.
Instead of the usual $10 deposit for a game/system, you just signed up that you'ld like a GBA, a rechargable battery pack, and three games of your choice from the launch titles. So they got dozens of people 'signed up' for pre-orders.
The reason they're doing it without charging, from what I've read, is because Nintendo's trying their usual 'supply issues' speech like they've done with every system.
God, I loved that old feature on Telegard/Renegade and the like. Though most people figured it out when noone responded to their flames, and then made a fake account/logged on as a guest, to find out the truth. But this would work with seti, where there is no 'feedback'. Hell, they've even disabled 'see my last 10 packets' as of late, so as long as they kept on incrementing the person's records to their eyes, it wouldn't matter. As far as the problem that you present - a broken computer being innocent as compared to malicious data. That really isn't a problem. Not to sound like an arrogant fuckwad, but the end result is the same to seti. Data that's just wrong as a result of a computer going tits-up or data that's wrong from a computer being messed with - it really doesn't matter. They're going to need to reject both.
Yes they do, and suprisingly, parents are finally learning them. While they may not be as recognized as the motion picture rating system, I've seen a far greater number of parents referring to video game rating designations then I have since they first came out.
Read Diamond Age. Those antennaes come at a cost...
Actually, you've got the right author, the wrong story, I think. You're thinking about Snow Crash, an earlier work of his.
But getting back on topic, the 'gargoyles' described in that novel would be incredible. We're quite a few jumps away from researching through the Library of Congress while zipping up to Alaska on a motorcycle, but even some of the stuff that Hiro did offline is but a step or two away. This technology sounds like one of those steps.
Just reading this article made me chuckle, realizing how different it is in the US. JWZ had some pontification about Netscape's internal email being public during legal wars with M$.
At my current job, we've got a couple levels of communication.. the internal discussion boards, and the real secret never talked about in public ancient communications method. While the whining we do isn't about a billion dollar megacorporation that can send a barrel full of lawyers to yank it out, I wonder what exactly determines who has the rights to what discussion in the US. I know it isn't as free as Canada, but where exactly is the line drawn?
They'll only have to pay $50 + court costs, $75... but if you get a lawyer to do a class action suit, then you can actually hit them up for the whole $2.7 million with ONE court case.
As evil as class action suits are in the eyes of many, they're great for just that sort of thing. $75 is a thorn in the side, but a class action suit is a huge lamb-feces encrusted iron spike.
The EB I worked at part time sold out of the Windows limited edition tin, and had a half dozen Linux tins lying around from the day it shipped until recently, when most got handed back to the home office. They probably only sold about one or two copies in the store itself, perhaps the home office decided to sell them online for next to nothing? They do that every so often for various games.
:-)
The home office also recently shipped new store layout plans regarding a linux section, so the store finally has a linux section. No Mac section, but a linux games section.