? Funny - many levels allow you to RJ into the background scenery and get lost/stuck. I find most places that you RJ into for secrets often have ways to get there legally that you didn't know about. But either way - the fact is that the regular, linear map flow can be seriously screwed up by RJ.
Actually, tailgating an 18 wheeler is generally a good idea, unless there's danger of stuff falling off of it. That thing is not going to be making any sudden movements, even if it hits something solid. At least, in comparison to normal cars.
Well, there are multiple ways to do this. For one thing, I strongly suspect that most sports MMOs will put you in the role of "manager" - you run, train, and groom the players, trade them around with other teams, try and break into the major league of your server, etc.
Alternately, don't do Baseball. Hockey, Rugby, Soccer or Basketball would do just fine with "every player is a player" - and some elite players even could be managers of teams, handling trading, paying out team-XP, etc.
Of course, you could get into lawbreaking - having players bribed, 'roids, drugging the opposition, etc.
Consider how UT has a popular mod that exaggerates the normal "bomb-run" mode into a soccer-like game where there are no guns.
Actually, I'd be more interested in a speedrun in one of the more chaotic FPS games than Quake. Something like Serious Sam. Quake doesn't pit you against hundreds of foes at once the way Sam does. The problem with Sam is that the levels were designed with a total ignorance of rocket jumping, so probably half the game would be skipped through such methods.
The big thing is that in Sam, you almost always have to kill everything in the room to progress, and "everything in the room" can be a very large number. So it would likely be one of the most ultraviolent speedruns ever completed.
Alternately, Abuse would be cool for Speedrunning. The game is pretty much designed for the kind of enemy-evasion you use in speedruns, as Abuse levels usually give the player the option of just retreating. The problem is that retreating will give you an ever-growing mass of hundreds of ants chasing you.
Actually, I do that. But for a different reason - I find that games with a female protagonists overwhelmingly tend to have put way too much thought into the protagonist, and story, and art and ambience and stuff like that. Usually they've forgotten to include a game at such point. Notice how in the games that are the most fun (not necessarily the most immersive and stylish) the protagonist is not only male, but generally an ambiguous non-character (quips and grunts nonwithstanding).
Of course, this generalisation isn't universal - the newer Prince Of Persia has the same "overthought style/underthought gameplay". Likewise, I'm avoiding the new MS Mech game "Lone Wolf" because the game is focussing on this "Lone Wolf" guy - instead of the mechs.
It just seems that some games tend to be artistically full of themselves. A female protagonist is usually a dead give-away (except for online-FPS-games where the male and female player models are just that - nothing but a model you pick).
To me, this reveals a failure of game design. I mean, think about it - there is a part of your game that is so dull that players pay to avoid it. This is a game! If it's not fun, what the hell is the point?
I read players talking of spending hundreds of hours to get to a decent enough level to play with ohter humans. When I play UT2k4, I get to a good enough inventory to join the fight in 10 seconds, tops.
I think a real future would be to make a hyper-compressed MMO - basically, an FPS where you can level-up, manage a large inventory, and only lose a subset of your stuff when you die. Of course, as in anysuch game, balancing would be hell - but I think it would work. You'd get the character-design fun of days of MMO-work in minutes.
Here's the thing - you don't get them. Do you think that peasantry and labourers get any of the tribute in Roman or British empires? Government takes care of the peasantry, but it works for the industrialists. Their tribute of Iraq's oil fields is on it's way. Not to mention access to Afghanistan for a pipeline.
yep. there are tons of other wikis for that kind of personal crap. Portland Pattenrns has a good guide to wikis in there somewhere, wpedia is not hte place to start.
if that's the worst of it, wikipedia has little to worry about. Compare v. c2 which has to struggle under the weight of a deluge of wikispam and complete nonsense.
I would rather simply enforce tighter controls on what it takes to get into the final visible version of wiki, and just have a serious approval process of edits - if a page seems short of information, then the more recent, unreviewed, edited copy can be viewed.
Actually, you'd be surprised. My wife's a teacher and has stood in in a few science classes, and half the kids there want to be CSIs now. Apparently Who music and David Carusoe are all it takes to get kids interested in Science. Who'da thunkit?
Well, that depends on how WPA works... i mean, in WPA, how is the password used? How often is it used? I'm too lazy to look up the details of WPA, but if the password was only used during logon (as opposed to a key that is in constant use) then couldn't a rejection delay be used to avoid dictionary attacks? I mean, if the weak password is only used as a key during the negotiation phase, then a dictionary attack is impossible as it can bounce connections from users that have sent malformed connection info in the past minute. Meanwhile, sniffing is only minimally useful as you can only use it on machines new to the network - machines logging on that have been there before could use a network-provided strong password and only need to use the weak one as a fallback.
So why are weak WPA passwords a problem? Ultimately, any logon system requires a password, and reasonable users must learn to use messy passwords, but expecting users to create and apply 128-bit keys is no solution at all, so short passcodes must be worked with.
I think part of the problem was with the wi-fi standard. In addition to the normal wi-fi higher level standards, there needed to be a standard for consumer electronics for an easy way to deploy security information from the router to the clients. Whether this was a standard connection string protocol that users could jot down, a flash (or floppy) storage thing that the router writes the connection info to, or even simply having the router come with a bucket of ROM chips that plug onto a port on the back of your wi-fi card that contain the connection info - something for deploying complex, router-specific connection info was needed. Instead, we get routers with no default security at all.
Well, it's not like that's that huge a deal - they have to get onto your network to tinker with your router, so you're fine if your network is secure. Just make sure your password is very long, if your network is public. A password of twice normal length is the same complexity to crack as a normal length uname+pwd.
Unless of course you're using an unpatched old Linksys router, which had a bug that allowed access over the WAN.
That's precisely the reason I run WEP on my home network. Yes, it's crackable - but anybody who wants to make the effort can do just as well by going down the hall and finding an unsecured, advertised network. I tried setting up WPA once, but getting windows to play nice was an ordeal (this was pre-sp2).
I'm still annoyed by the name Monad. If they're going to release yet another scripting/command prompt system (well, VBScript was getting a little long in the tooth - hell, it was born that way) they could at least not name it something that is already an existing programming concept. "Monads" are already the term for an important concept if pure-functional programming languages.
Not only that, but there are even 3rd-party knock-off NES's and NES controllers that are still being made today and will run your old NES games. Plus, they usually read both sides of the NES cartridge contacts, meaning that fussy, worn-out cartriges stand a better chance of running.
The biggest problem with intelligent design is its ambiguity. Hardcore creationists consider "intelligent design" in the form of "god is guiding evolution" to be false (they believe no evolution occurs and God created all modern species in a week) and yet advocate it because they believe the ambiguity allows them to push true Creationism.
The fact is this: actual believers in Intelligent Design (like my wife) actually fall on the side _against_ the fundamentalists and teaching Intelligent Design. In the moderate, non-literalist school, Darwinean evolution is simply the physical mechanism of God's will - and as such, teaching evolution in schools is perfectly accurate and consistent with their beliefs.
The hypocracy is quite obvious - if you look at the most vocal advocates of ID, they're all biblical literalists. As biblical literalists, they do not actually believe in the teachings they want tought in schools, they simply want it put forth as a wedge so they can squeeze their actual beliefs in. Only the pop-culture pseudo-scientists seriously advocate ID for it's own sake - the preachers and politicos are all in it as a wedge. If ID was being tought in schools, they'd complain about the lack of teaching pure creationism.
The fastest way to break ID would be to call a poll that includes more than 2 options - instead of ID vs. evolution, do ID vs. creationism vs. evolution. You'd find that teaching ID gets very little support, and the thoroughly absurd concept of outright creationism is actually what they want - but can't ask for because it's ludicrous to teach in science class.
Not that I'm arguing against the thesis, but could you possibly pick 2 less extremist publications? I don't expect you to trust sources in Salon or DailyKOS, so you shouldn't expect other people to subject themselves to rabidly right-wing news sources.
You'd be surprised how resistent many bosses are to firing people. Remember that you, as an employee, are an investment by the company. The amount of time it takes for an employee to get to a "useful" skill level is a massive sunk cost. They don't give you raises because they want to pay you what you're worth - they give you raises so you won't quit.
If you're thinking "all the other developers do too much overtime too, they'll just find another" - then all the developers are probably as pissed as you. At that time you should start thinking about the 5-letter-word that all so-called "libertarians" are terrified of: union. Before you panic, remember that a union doesn't have to be a massive, oligarchial beaurocracy. In some places, it can be as simple as your fellow coders just unanimously agreeing that none of them will do any more unpaid overtime. Your boss can't fire you all - they would effectively lose all their projects, incurring several man-years of work to do.
Agreed. Even ShareAza, which is a nice multinetwork p2p system horribly misbehaves on BT. On the copy on my machine, there was no way to keep-alive the torrent after downloading (the configs intended to do this were broken) so I was incapable of seeding.
Hmmph. Forced priority tagging sounds fine, but I'm betting 95% of apps will consider their own packets "high priority" - or at least the closed-source ones will.
Slashdot Mirror
? Funny - many levels allow you to RJ into the background scenery and get lost/stuck. I find most places that you RJ into for secrets often have ways to get there legally that you didn't know about. But either way - the fact is that the regular, linear map flow can be seriously screwed up by RJ.
Actually, tailgating an 18 wheeler is generally a good idea, unless there's danger of stuff falling off of it. That thing is not going to be making any sudden movements, even if it hits something solid. At least, in comparison to normal cars.
Well, there are multiple ways to do this. For one thing, I strongly suspect that most sports MMOs will put you in the role of "manager" - you run, train, and groom the players, trade them around with other teams, try and break into the major league of your server, etc.
Alternately, don't do Baseball. Hockey, Rugby, Soccer or Basketball would do just fine with "every player is a player" - and some elite players even could be managers of teams, handling trading, paying out team-XP, etc.
Of course, you could get into lawbreaking - having players bribed, 'roids, drugging the opposition, etc.
Consider how UT has a popular mod that exaggerates the normal "bomb-run" mode into a soccer-like game where there are no guns.
Actually, I'd be more interested in a speedrun in one of the more chaotic FPS games than Quake. Something like Serious Sam. Quake doesn't pit you against hundreds of foes at once the way Sam does. The problem with Sam is that the levels were designed with a total ignorance of rocket jumping, so probably half the game would be skipped through such methods.
The big thing is that in Sam, you almost always have to kill everything in the room to progress, and "everything in the room" can be a very large number. So it would likely be one of the most ultraviolent speedruns ever completed.
Alternately, Abuse would be cool for Speedrunning. The game is pretty much designed for the kind of enemy-evasion you use in speedruns, as Abuse levels usually give the player the option of just retreating. The problem is that retreating will give you an ever-growing mass of hundreds of ants chasing you.
Actually, I do that. But for a different reason - I find that games with a female protagonists overwhelmingly tend to have put way too much thought into the protagonist, and story, and art and ambience and stuff like that. Usually they've forgotten to include a game at such point. Notice how in the games that are the most fun (not necessarily the most immersive and stylish) the protagonist is not only male, but generally an ambiguous non-character (quips and grunts nonwithstanding).
Of course, this generalisation isn't universal - the newer Prince Of Persia has the same "overthought style/underthought gameplay". Likewise, I'm avoiding the new MS Mech game "Lone Wolf" because the game is focussing on this "Lone Wolf" guy - instead of the mechs.
It just seems that some games tend to be artistically full of themselves. A female protagonist is usually a dead give-away (except for online-FPS-games where the male and female player models are just that - nothing but a model you pick).
Alternately, one could complain about the shortage of white players in the latest EA NBA licenced title.
Ah, whatever - the Champ in UT2k4 is black, that's good enough for me. Malcolm pwnz.
To me, this reveals a failure of game design. I mean, think about it - there is a part of your game that is so dull that players pay to avoid it. This is a game! If it's not fun, what the hell is the point?
I read players talking of spending hundreds of hours to get to a decent enough level to play with ohter humans. When I play UT2k4, I get to a good enough inventory to join the fight in 10 seconds, tops.
I think a real future would be to make a hyper-compressed MMO - basically, an FPS where you can level-up, manage a large inventory, and only lose a subset of your stuff when you die. Of course, as in anysuch game, balancing would be hell - but I think it would work. You'd get the character-design fun of days of MMO-work in minutes.
Here's the thing - you don't get them. Do you think that peasantry and labourers get any of the tribute in Roman or British empires? Government takes care of the peasantry, but it works for the industrialists. Their tribute of Iraq's oil fields is on it's way. Not to mention access to Afghanistan for a pipeline.
yep. there are tons of other wikis for that kind of personal crap. Portland Pattenrns has a good guide to wikis in there somewhere, wpedia is not hte place to start.
if that's the worst of it, wikipedia has little to worry about. Compare v. c2 which has to struggle under the weight of a deluge of wikispam and complete nonsense.
I would rather simply enforce tighter controls on what it takes to get into the final visible version of wiki, and just have a serious approval process of edits - if a page seems short of information, then the more recent, unreviewed, edited copy can be viewed.
Actually, you'd be surprised. My wife's a teacher and has stood in in a few science classes, and half the kids there want to be CSIs now. Apparently Who music and David Carusoe are all it takes to get kids interested in Science. Who'da thunkit?
Well, that depends on how WPA works... i mean, in WPA, how is the password used? How often is it used? I'm too lazy to look up the details of WPA, but if the password was only used during logon (as opposed to a key that is in constant use) then couldn't a rejection delay be used to avoid dictionary attacks? I mean, if the weak password is only used as a key during the negotiation phase, then a dictionary attack is impossible as it can bounce connections from users that have sent malformed connection info in the past minute. Meanwhile, sniffing is only minimally useful as you can only use it on machines new to the network - machines logging on that have been there before could use a network-provided strong password and only need to use the weak one as a fallback.
So why are weak WPA passwords a problem? Ultimately, any logon system requires a password, and reasonable users must learn to use messy passwords, but expecting users to create and apply 128-bit keys is no solution at all, so short passcodes must be worked with.
I think part of the problem was with the wi-fi standard. In addition to the normal wi-fi higher level standards, there needed to be a standard for consumer electronics for an easy way to deploy security information from the router to the clients. Whether this was a standard connection string protocol that users could jot down, a flash (or floppy) storage thing that the router writes the connection info to, or even simply having the router come with a bucket of ROM chips that plug onto a port on the back of your wi-fi card that contain the connection info - something for deploying complex, router-specific connection info was needed. Instead, we get routers with no default security at all.
Well, it's not like that's that huge a deal - they have to get onto your network to tinker with your router, so you're fine if your network is secure. Just make sure your password is very long, if your network is public. A password of twice normal length is the same complexity to crack as a normal length uname+pwd.
Unless of course you're using an unpatched old Linksys router, which had a bug that allowed access over the WAN.
That's precisely the reason I run WEP on my home network. Yes, it's crackable - but anybody who wants to make the effort can do just as well by going down the hall and finding an unsecured, advertised network. I tried setting up WPA once, but getting windows to play nice was an ordeal (this was pre-sp2).
I'm still annoyed by the name Monad. If they're going to release yet another scripting/command prompt system (well, VBScript was getting a little long in the tooth - hell, it was born that way) they could at least not name it something that is already an existing programming concept. "Monads" are already the term for an important concept if pure-functional programming languages.
Not only that, but there are even 3rd-party knock-off NES's and NES controllers that are still being made today and will run your old NES games. Plus, they usually read both sides of the NES cartridge contacts, meaning that fussy, worn-out cartriges stand a better chance of running.
The biggest problem with intelligent design is its ambiguity. Hardcore creationists consider "intelligent design" in the form of "god is guiding evolution" to be false (they believe no evolution occurs and God created all modern species in a week) and yet advocate it because they believe the ambiguity allows them to push true Creationism.
The fact is this: actual believers in Intelligent Design (like my wife) actually fall on the side _against_ the fundamentalists and teaching Intelligent Design. In the moderate, non-literalist school, Darwinean evolution is simply the physical mechanism of God's will - and as such, teaching evolution in schools is perfectly accurate and consistent with their beliefs.
The hypocracy is quite obvious - if you look at the most vocal advocates of ID, they're all biblical literalists. As biblical literalists, they do not actually believe in the teachings they want tought in schools, they simply want it put forth as a wedge so they can squeeze their actual beliefs in. Only the pop-culture pseudo-scientists seriously advocate ID for it's own sake - the preachers and politicos are all in it as a wedge. If ID was being tought in schools, they'd complain about the lack of teaching pure creationism.
The fastest way to break ID would be to call a poll that includes more than 2 options - instead of ID vs. evolution, do ID vs. creationism vs. evolution. You'd find that teaching ID gets very little support, and the thoroughly absurd concept of outright creationism is actually what they want - but can't ask for because it's ludicrous to teach in science class.
Kewl. How'd it do? Paper or plastic bag?
Not that I'm arguing against the thesis, but could you possibly pick 2 less extremist publications? I don't expect you to trust sources in Salon or DailyKOS, so you shouldn't expect other people to subject themselves to rabidly right-wing news sources.
I still say they need to stop pussyfooting around with this medium-evil crap and go whole hog.
Sim Auschwitz.
Don't need to run wi-fi 24-7. Can just use it once per day to synch.
You'd be surprised how resistent many bosses are to firing people. Remember that you, as an employee, are an investment by the company. The amount of time it takes for an employee to get to a "useful" skill level is a massive sunk cost. They don't give you raises because they want to pay you what you're worth - they give you raises so you won't quit.
If you're thinking "all the other developers do too much overtime too, they'll just find another" - then all the developers are probably as pissed as you. At that time you should start thinking about the 5-letter-word that all so-called "libertarians" are terrified of: union. Before you panic, remember that a union doesn't have to be a massive, oligarchial beaurocracy. In some places, it can be as simple as your fellow coders just unanimously agreeing that none of them will do any more unpaid overtime. Your boss can't fire you all - they would effectively lose all their projects, incurring several man-years of work to do.
Agreed. Even ShareAza, which is a nice multinetwork p2p system horribly misbehaves on BT. On the copy on my machine, there was no way to keep-alive the torrent after downloading (the configs intended to do this were broken) so I was incapable of seeding.
Hmmph. Forced priority tagging sounds fine, but I'm betting 95% of apps will consider their own packets "high priority" - or at least the closed-source ones will.