That "right" is the only one that I'm not too sure on. It seems to be suggesting that game developers have to continue improving a game after they've made a commercial release out of it.
I agree with supporting a game in terms of ironing out balance issues, bugs and so forth, but I'm not sure I like something which says that people should expect me as a developer to make their game better and add more stuff to it over time.
If I had a big title that I was selling nicely for US$40+ a pop then sure, adding a bit of extra worthwhile content for the userbase as a "thank-you" for allowing me to live well makes sense. That said, developer time is a limited resource; I may have any number of other games and projects making demands on my time.
Perhaps this is something that gamers have more "right" to expect from established development houses than from independent publishers?
Well, *my* wind tunnel is 100% OpenSwallow 2001 compliant, and supports remote control through/dev/windtunnel.:-)
There was a Microsoft development that attempted to rival the OpenSwallow development. However, since Microsoft doesn't practice full disclosure of bugs, the insectivorous swallows couldn't catch them and starved. Quite tragic.
Still, there is a moral to the story: Microsoft sucks; Open Source swallows.
Or maybe the Aussies and the NZers killed/displaced the reasonably dark skinned people who were properly adapted for living there, replacing them with light-skinned northern europeans...
British colonial forces in New Zealand were far from saintly. There were needless lives lost. There were people cheated. There were those who never bothered to find out about the culture they were living alongside, causing friction, suffering and loss on both sides. There was a law against Maori people speaking their own language in schools at one point, as part of an attempt at cultural assimilation. That's not something the country is proud of. Still, at least they didn't put bounties on the native population and attempt to wipe them out in the scale of places like Tasmania.
Maori weren't all bright happy peaceful people before the nasty British came along. There were a lot of warring tribes, though many coexisted relatively peacefully. There was occasional cannibalism, and widespread slavery. So it's not like any one ethnicity has clean hands. The same could be said of anywhere in the world.
The Maori are still here. The Europeans are now here too. A lot of Maori are a lighter-skinned now, due to intermarriage with Pakeha (Europeans). Maori get skin cancer too, y'know. And in higher rates than they used to. The hole in the ozone layer has a very real effect.
New Zealand is in a temperate area, with only the northernmost regions in the subtropical zone. My city is on a complementary latitude to places like Chicago and Seattle. Do the weather reports in Chicago warn that there's a "burn time of 10 minutes" or whatever, throughout most of summer?
I don't know about anyone else but I find reading (particularly fiction) to be very tiresome on a desktop computer.
I tend to agree. However, I'd also contend that IF isn't straight-out fiction. The interactive nature of it means that you're getting sections of text piecemeal anyway, rather than just starting at the front of the book and working your way down. That interactivity makes it a lot easier for me. Then again, when you consider that Zork was one of the games that started me down the dark path to typing for the rest of my life, back in the early '80s, perhaps I'm just used to it.
I have played several IF games 6 months ago (I like lovecraftian horror) but would be more likely to continue to do so and move into genres if I owned a laptop or such which I could play them on. I like to snuggle up on the lounge or sit in a park and read not at a desk.
Played "Theatre" then, I assume? Great game, except that I was playing it while sleep-depped and missed the popcorn the first time around. After I'd been floundering for about half an hour, it was kinda nice when one of the other postgrads wandered over, watched for a bit and asked what I was stuck on - turns out that I shared an office with the guy who wrote the game. Truly a serendipitous moment:-)
Altavista used to be my weapon of choice, too. But then I switched to Christopher Walken.
Now I always have someone to talk to when I need to get results.
I must admit, he does tend to make a bit of a song and dance about it, though.
I wonder how the humans scored in general. With one sad exception, they did better than the best AI, but did they all pass the test?
- 1187 at Hunterwasser.
- That's the hotel.
- What?
- Where I live.
- Nice place?
- Yeah, sure, I guess. Is that part of the test?
- Just warming you up, that's all.
I'm fairly certain I know a couple of people who'd fail a VK. Heck, I've seen people on IRC who could fail a Turing Test easily.
So, having taken an extremely directed course of study, and having studied a diverse range of subjects outside of that field, here's my advice:
Ideally a directed course of study is best, but people should be encouraged to take a few courses that are well outside their fundamental area. I don't believe in mandating what those courses are. They should be alternate areas of interest for the student. For me it was poetry and literature. For others it may be film, biology, maths, or history. It is worth doing a little bit of something else though, and it should be encouraged.
I agree entirely. I went to the same university (Hi Jed!), majoring in Computer Science. My course load wasn't quite as insane as his was and I only had a Postrgraduate Diploma in Science at that age.
Generally speaking, my course was fairly directed - mostly Computer Science, with a bit of Calculus to bring up the requisite mathetmatics quota, and some Discrete Maths from fun(!) - and other than that I took a course in Philosophy and/or Cognitive Science each year so that I had something to counterbalance the CompSci. In the end, both of those ended up being beneficial to the other, as they provided different points of view on the same subject matter from time to time (I even had three lectures about Turing machines in Maths, CompSci and Philosophy on the very same day, once - but from different enough perspectives that I actually paid attention to all of them).
If you're striving for expert knowledge in a field, your course of study is going to be quite directed. However, don't write off the usefulness of having another string to your bow. Not only is it a good way of avoiding burning yourself out on living and breathing a subject for four or five years, it can help your understanding to have a different angle to look at things from.
Sir, you are barking up the wrong tree. Metropolis Records sells for less than CD store prices, online (at http://www.industrial-music.com/)
Not in my currency they don't. NZ$50 is about US$20, which taking into account shipping and handling may even be on the generous side, unless I was going to buy in bulk:
Australia/New Zealand:
1-4 USPS AIR MAIL $9.50 + $2.00 each additional
1-4 USPS REGISTERED MAIL $16.50 + $2.00 each additional
If I wanted a copy of, say, "Praise the Fallen" and "Empires" at US$14 (NZ$35) each, I'd be paying US$39.5, or about NZ$100 - $50 a pop.
As it happens, I do. I guess I'll be saving up and trying to find a few more things I want to buy, and hoping that the U.S. going to war doesn't do anything too negatively insane to the currency exchange and shipping rates.
Honestly, I am so disappointed that the story is altered. I don't want to go see what some hollywood producer wants to say -- I want to see what the author has to say.
Peter Jackson, a Hollywood producer? *snicker* Yeah, he's a regular Mr Hollywood. Have you seen his films? None of them say "Hollywood" in the least to me.
And if you thought the story was going to stay verbatim, you're silly. No-one is ever going to make a movie from a book that everyone's happy with. A picture may paint a thousand words, but give a thousand words to a number of painters, and no two paintings will be exactly the same.
In the end, you're a storyteller. You've got a story to tell, and a limited amount of time to tell it in. Peter Jackson knows the story, loves the story, and realises there's a lot of fans out there who love the story just as much as he does (if not more). He's got a story that needs to be told, but he knows he can't tell it exactly the same way as Tolkien did. Different media, different constraints.
Some of those hard decisions are going to piss people off, no matter what he does, but I'm fairly confident that he's trying to make the best damned movies he can. Anything else would be in Bad Taste, and completely Brain Dead. If you want to see what the author has to say, read a book.
That exactly the kind of thing people generally don't want showing up on their monthly bills though. $300 for a massage?!? I don't remember a massage...
I'm reminded of a tale of credit-card woe that happened to a tourist here a little while ago. We have a supermarket chain called "Big Fresh", and this British guy shopped at a branch in the suburb of Shirley.
A few days later he got a call from his wife in Britain.
She'd just received his credit card bill, and really wanted him to explain why he'd just spent $140 on "Big Fresh Shirley"...
The same applies today with music. I was listening to one of my VNV Nation CD backups the other day, and it started skipping. This happened to be a limited edition- it would have been very hard to replace had that been the real CD I'd bought all scratched up and skipping like that. But I was able to go home and make another, then toss out the busted one. Good stuff!
Quite apart from damage to the original media, another point is security. Recently some friends of mine were burgled, and close to 500 CDs were stolen from their three collections. Quite a lot of rare, obscure or just damned-difficult-to-get-in-this-country was taken. One of those guys has recently bought a CD writer, so that he can make copies of CDs to listen to, and store the rest at a secure location in a better neighbourhood. Protecting an investment of thousands of dollars (CDs cost on average about $35, here), where the dollar value of your insurance still won't bring back what you've lost, is fair use if you ask me.
Another case I can think of is a DJ I know who had a large number of CDs stolen from the back of his car in a smash-and-grab a few months back. That music was his livelihood, not just a leisure item. He had to beg and borrow a lot of stuff just to keep working. This kind of thing can be avoided if you have the capability to make backups.
Oh, and VNV Nation are pretty damned nifty, aren't they? Having been sent a few MP3s by friends on the net, and downloading samples off their website, I'm considering tracking down a distributor and importing a few of their CDs. Even though it's likely to cost me about $50 a pop. How weird is that?
I don't know what's wrong or right
I'm just a regular guy with bottled up insides
I ain't never been to church or believed in Jesus Christ
But I'm praying that God's with you when you die
This is your captain calling - with an urgent warning
We're above the Gulf of Arabia - altitude is falling
And I can't hold her up - there's no time for thinking
All hands on deck - this bird is sinking
I seem to remember hearing that this song, and The Cure's "Killing an Arab", were banned from play by U.S. forces in the Gulf at one time or another.
"Cue the music, fade to black; no such thing as no payback - take this line, know where it ends - no return, no make amends - is this the future of is this how it will end?" - PWEI, "Everyting's Cool"
I believe this particular innovation has seen previous use in the field of the collection and collation of marigold metrics - now, after many years of research and development, we will finally get to see how far it and its arithmetic will probably go...
"Cor, 'ave a look at the HumanML on that one! I bet she validates as well-formed, eh? Eh? *nudgenudge* I wouldn't mind parsing 'er markup, nah wot I mean?"
Fritz! They've killed Fritz! Those dirty rotten fairies!"
Heh, I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that:-) Incidentally, did you ever notice that the voice actor for Seann, King of the Mountain Fairies and Leader of the Knights of Stardust also starred in another well-known film that year?
I can just imagine, some time in the future, two chess computers from the same codebase facing off...
ava.tar: "I'm gonna show you a trick the programmers taught me when you weren't around... oh, and another thing: I'm glad you changed your class B IP, you son of a..."
Er, no. Battlezone came out in 1983. I played first-person 3D games on my TRS-80 earlier than that. Not at the level of graphical sophistication that Battlezone had, but both "3D" and "first person" all the same.
*sigh* Does anyone here remember Asylum at all? I'm starting to feel old.
I'm glad Ultima IV was up there, but Zork certainly rated better than No. 39, for me.
Re:How many other places in the world...
on
Bionic Nurses
·
· Score: 1
Christchurch Polytechnic's "S-N" block had both in opposite wings of the same building. A few of guys I knew doing computing there were in a semi-perpetual state of "Hellooo Nurses!".
Such a pity so few of them actually had the social skills to talk to members of the opposite sex, let alone ask them out...
We've got a TRS-80 Model I. Sits about three or four meters from my 1GHz Athlon machine. We don't use it quite so much now that we've got decent emulators for the PC, and a few hundred 5.25" disks' worth of stuff stored on the hard drive as disk images too, thanks to the wonders of a small Level 2 BASIC program and an RS-232 cable. We've got TRSDOS, LDOS, CP/M and MULTIDOS for it, but NEWDOS-80 was always the one we used day in and day out.
Crush, Crumble and Chomp, Dancing Demon, Dunzhin, Hellfire Warrior, Voyage of the Valkyrie, Scott Adams Adventures... those were indeed the days.
</nostalgia>
Slashdot Mirror
That "right" is the only one that I'm not too sure on. It seems to be suggesting that game developers have to continue improving a game after they've made a commercial release out of it.
I agree with supporting a game in terms of ironing out balance issues, bugs and so forth, but I'm not sure I like something which says that people should expect me as a developer to make their game better and add more stuff to it over time.
If I had a big title that I was selling nicely for US$40+ a pop then sure, adding a bit of extra worthwhile content for the userbase as a "thank-you" for allowing me to live well makes sense. That said, developer time is a limited resource; I may have any number of other games and projects making demands on my time.
Perhaps this is something that gamers have more "right" to expect from established development houses than from independent publishers?
Well, *my* wind tunnel is 100% OpenSwallow 2001 compliant, and supports remote control through /dev/windtunnel. :-)
There was a Microsoft development that attempted to rival the OpenSwallow development. However, since Microsoft doesn't practice full disclosure of bugs, the insectivorous swallows couldn't catch them and starved. Quite tragic.
Still, there is a moral to the story: Microsoft sucks; Open Source swallows.
Or maybe the Aussies and the NZers killed/displaced the reasonably dark skinned people who were properly adapted for living there, replacing them with light-skinned northern europeans...
British colonial forces in New Zealand were far from saintly. There were needless lives lost. There were people cheated. There were those who never bothered to find out about the culture they were living alongside, causing friction, suffering and loss on both sides. There was a law against Maori people speaking their own language in schools at one point, as part of an attempt at cultural assimilation. That's not something the country is proud of. Still, at least they didn't put bounties on the native population and attempt to wipe them out in the scale of places like Tasmania.
Maori weren't all bright happy peaceful people before the nasty British came along. There were a lot of warring tribes, though many coexisted relatively peacefully. There was occasional cannibalism, and widespread slavery. So it's not like any one ethnicity has clean hands. The same could be said of anywhere in the world.
The Maori are still here. The Europeans are now here too. A lot of Maori are a lighter-skinned now, due to intermarriage with Pakeha (Europeans). Maori get skin cancer too, y'know. And in higher rates than they used to. The hole in the ozone layer has a very real effect.
New Zealand is in a temperate area, with only the northernmost regions in the subtropical zone. My city is on a complementary latitude to places like Chicago and Seattle. Do the weather reports in Chicago warn that there's a "burn time of 10 minutes" or whatever, throughout most of summer?
Apt, no?
I don't know about anyone else but I find reading (particularly fiction) to be very tiresome on a desktop computer.
I tend to agree. However, I'd also contend that IF isn't straight-out fiction. The interactive nature of it means that you're getting sections of text piecemeal anyway, rather than just starting at the front of the book and working your way down. That interactivity makes it a lot easier for me. Then again, when you consider that Zork was one of the games that started me down the dark path to typing for the rest of my life, back in the early '80s, perhaps I'm just used to it.
I have played several IF games 6 months ago (I like lovecraftian horror) but would be more likely to continue to do so and move into genres if I owned a laptop or such which I could play them on. I like to snuggle up on the lounge or sit in a park and read not at a desk.
Played "Theatre" then, I assume? Great game, except that I was playing it while sleep-depped and missed the popcorn the first time around. After I'd been floundering for about half an hour, it was kinda nice when one of the other postgrads wandered over, watched for a bit and asked what I was stuck on - turns out that I shared an office with the guy who wrote the game. Truly a serendipitous moment :-)
that protects us from the competition.
Benchmarks are our weapon,
with which we carve a path to an overclocked future...
..OK, perhaps I've played Thief too much. I guess I'm too illegit to quit.
AltaVista also allows meta searches, like "which pages link to mine?" Google just doesn't have that. I use it for everything else, though.
It doesn't? http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=www.slashdot.or g
Altavista used to be my weapon of choice, too. But then I switched to Christopher Walken.
Now I always have someone to talk to when I need to get results.
I must admit, he does tend to make a bit of a song and dance about it, though.
Don't worry, at least no-one's trying to shut down your arcology and do nasty things with AI-controlled nanites.
[checks his watch]
Yet. :-)
- 1187 at Hunterwasser.
- That's the hotel.
- What?
- Where I live.
- Nice place?
- Yeah, sure, I guess. Is that part of the test?
- Just warming you up, that's all.
I'm fairly certain I know a couple of people who'd fail a VK. Heck, I've seen people on IRC who could fail a Turing Test easily.
So, having taken an extremely directed course of study, and having studied a diverse range of subjects outside of that field, here's my advice:
Ideally a directed course of study is best, but people should be encouraged to take a few courses that are well outside their fundamental area. I don't believe in mandating what those courses are. They should be alternate areas of interest for the student. For me it was poetry and literature. For others it may be film, biology, maths, or history. It is worth doing a little bit of something else though, and it should be encouraged.
I agree entirely. I went to the same university (Hi Jed!), majoring in Computer Science. My course load wasn't quite as insane as his was and I only had a Postrgraduate Diploma in Science at that age.
Generally speaking, my course was fairly directed - mostly Computer Science, with a bit of Calculus to bring up the requisite mathetmatics quota, and some Discrete Maths from fun(!) - and other than that I took a course in Philosophy and/or Cognitive Science each year so that I had something to counterbalance the CompSci. In the end, both of those ended up being beneficial to the other, as they provided different points of view on the same subject matter from time to time (I even had three lectures about Turing machines in Maths, CompSci and Philosophy on the very same day, once - but from different enough perspectives that I actually paid attention to all of them).
If you're striving for expert knowledge in a field, your course of study is going to be quite directed. However, don't write off the usefulness of having another string to your bow. Not only is it a good way of avoiding burning yourself out on living and breathing a subject for four or five years, it can help your understanding to have a different angle to look at things from.
Sir, you are barking up the wrong tree. Metropolis Records sells for less than CD store prices, online (at http://www.industrial-music.com/)
Not in my currency they don't. NZ$50 is about US$20, which taking into account shipping and handling may even be on the generous side, unless I was going to buy in bulk:
Australia/New Zealand:
If I wanted a copy of, say, "Praise the Fallen" and "Empires" at US$14 (NZ$35) each, I'd be paying US$39.5, or about NZ$100 - $50 a pop.
As it happens, I do. I guess I'll be saving up and trying to find a few more things I want to buy, and hoping that the U.S. going to war doesn't do anything too negatively insane to the currency exchange and shipping rates.
Honestly, I am so disappointed that the story is altered. I don't want to go see what some hollywood producer wants to say -- I want to see what the author has to say.
Peter Jackson, a Hollywood producer? *snicker* Yeah, he's a regular Mr Hollywood. Have you seen his films? None of them say "Hollywood" in the least to me.
And if you thought the story was going to stay verbatim, you're silly. No-one is ever going to make a movie from a book that everyone's happy with. A picture may paint a thousand words, but give a thousand words to a number of painters, and no two paintings will be exactly the same.
In the end, you're a storyteller. You've got a story to tell, and a limited amount of time to tell it in. Peter Jackson knows the story, loves the story, and realises there's a lot of fans out there who love the story just as much as he does (if not more). He's got a story that needs to be told, but he knows he can't tell it exactly the same way as Tolkien did. Different media, different constraints.
Some of those hard decisions are going to piss people off, no matter what he does, but I'm fairly confident that he's trying to make the best damned movies he can. Anything else would be in Bad Taste, and completely Brain Dead. If you want to see what the author has to say, read a book.
That exactly the kind of thing people generally don't want showing up on their monthly bills though.
$300 for a massage?!? I don't remember a massage...
I'm reminded of a tale of credit-card woe that happened to a tourist here a little while ago. We have a supermarket chain called "Big Fresh", and this British guy shopped at a branch in the suburb of Shirley.
A few days later he got a call from his wife in Britain.
She'd just received his credit card bill, and really wanted him to explain why he'd just spent $140 on "Big Fresh Shirley"...
<html hemisphere="south">
You might want to try <html lang="EN-AU-STRINE">, too. But that's only for those who're as pedantic as a tree full of galahs, mate.
The same applies today with music. I was listening to one of my VNV Nation CD backups the other day, and it started skipping. This happened to be a limited edition- it would have been very hard to replace had that been the real CD I'd bought all scratched up and skipping like that. But I was able to go home and make another, then toss out the busted one. Good stuff!
Quite apart from damage to the original media, another point is security. Recently some friends of mine were burgled, and close to 500 CDs were stolen from their three collections. Quite a lot of rare, obscure or just damned-difficult-to-get-in-this-country was taken. One of those guys has recently bought a CD writer, so that he can make copies of CDs to listen to, and store the rest at a secure location in a better neighbourhood. Protecting an investment of thousands of dollars (CDs cost on average about $35, here), where the dollar value of your insurance still won't bring back what you've lost, is fair use if you ask me.
Another case I can think of is a DJ I know who had a large number of CDs stolen from the back of his car in a smash-and-grab a few months back. That music was his livelihood, not just a leisure item. He had to beg and borrow a lot of stuff just to keep working. This kind of thing can be avoided if you have the capability to make backups.
Oh, and VNV Nation are pretty damned nifty, aren't they? Having been sent a few MP3s by friends on the net, and downloading samples off their website, I'm considering tracking down a distributor and importing a few of their CDs. Even though it's likely to cost me about $50 a pop. How weird is that?
I don't know what's wrong or right
I'm just a regular guy with bottled up insides
I ain't never been to church or believed in Jesus Christ
But I'm praying that God's with you when you die
This is your captain calling - with an urgent warning
We're above the Gulf of Arabia - altitude is falling
And I can't hold her up - there's no time for thinking
All hands on deck - this bird is sinking
I seem to remember hearing that this song, and The Cure's "Killing an Arab", were banned from play by U.S. forces in the Gulf at one time or another.
"Cue the music, fade to black; no such thing as no payback - take this line, know where it ends - no return, no make amends - is this the future of is this how it will end?" - PWEI, "Everyting's Cool"
I believe this particular innovation has seen previous use in the field of the collection and collation of marigold metrics - now, after many years of research and development, we will finally get to see how far it and its arithmetic will probably go...
They provide a fresh perspective on the way things should be done and facilitate ingenuity and competition.
I can see the advertising slogan now:
MenuetOS - the fresh maker!
Great, I can just imagine the guys now:
"Cor, 'ave a look at the HumanML on that one! I bet she validates as well-formed, eh? Eh? *nudgenudge* I wouldn't mind parsing 'er markup, nah wot I mean?"
Heh, I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that :-) Incidentally, did you ever notice that the voice actor for Seann, King of the Mountain Fairies and Leader of the Knights of Stardust also starred in another well-known film that year?
I can just imagine, some time in the future, two chess computers from the same codebase facing off...
ava.tar: "I'm gonna show you a trick the programmers taught me when you weren't around... oh, and another thing: I'm glad you changed your class B IP, you son of a ..."
b|4cK\\`0|f: "Hacked by Chinese!"
Don't put a lobster on a plate!
He'll use his magnet to escape!
He'll jump right up and claw your ear,
And then he'll bite your EYE!
Er, no. Battlezone came out in 1983. I played first-person 3D games on my TRS-80 earlier than that. Not at the level of graphical sophistication that Battlezone had, but both "3D" and "first person" all the same.
*sigh* Does anyone here remember Asylum at all? I'm starting to feel old.
I'm glad Ultima IV was up there, but Zork certainly rated better than No. 39, for me.
Christchurch Polytechnic's "S-N" block had both in opposite wings of the same building. A few of guys I knew doing computing there were in a semi-perpetual state of "Hellooo Nurses!".
Such a pity so few of them actually had the social skills to talk to members of the opposite sex, let alone ask them out...
We've got a TRS-80 Model I. Sits about three or four meters from my 1GHz Athlon machine. We don't use it quite so much now that we've got decent emulators for the PC, and a few hundred 5.25" disks' worth of stuff stored on the hard drive as disk images too, thanks to the wonders of a small Level 2 BASIC program and an RS-232 cable. We've got TRSDOS, LDOS, CP/M and MULTIDOS for it, but NEWDOS-80 was always the one we used day in and day out.
Crush, Crumble and Chomp, Dancing Demon, Dunzhin, Hellfire Warrior, Voyage of the Valkyrie, Scott Adams Adventures... those were indeed the days.
</nostalgia>