Well, I certainly don't argue that you can easily spend mass amounts of money to support a PC gaming habit, but just because you can doesn't mean you have to in order to play games decently.
A friend of mine just bought a used machine for $50 from a surplus store, put in a new video card, some more memory, and bought a 60 gig Ultra ATA/133 on sale and has a machine capable of playing Battlefield Vietnam at 1024x768 medium detail for around $250 or thereabouts.
Err? All the highest end cards still come in AGP. You don't -have- to upgrade everything to upgrade your video card. If I were making the switch to PCI express and a new video card, I'd just buy a new computer honestly.
Well you certainly paid an extreme amount of money if that is US dollars. I think you were massively ripped off.
I have a system that can run everything at nearly the highest settings that would cost about $1000 to build today. It has a year old motherboard and cpu. The video card I recently upgraded.
Where did you buy your system from?
Re:Does hibernation slow or stop aging?
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Hibernating must be a pretty profound state if it really means that you don't have to eat or use the bathroom for up to 7 months.
That seems like that would slow down the systems that cause aging as well.
Then again, their implementation of hibernation will probably come out nothing like that, it'll probably be some kind of constant drug/nutrition feed.
An interesting question is, would you be willing to go into a matrix-esque environment for those months, where you could go to movies, read books, interact with people on earth (speed of light limitations would make this really trippy), to pass to the time while your body sleeps?
Maybe cheesy lost-in-space-esque adventuring families will actually occur somehow naturally someday as the solution to this problem.
Re:Body deterioration due to lack of movement
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 1
The hibernation concept you think might help defeat that to some degree. Your body is deteriotating itself in the course of normal functioning, you slow down the functioning and you slow down the deteriotation?
I'm going to have to agree you on the whole concept of advertising there, but then again, would they have gotten the money in the first place if it weren't for the names concept?
The site says they paid $1.8 million, compensating his legal fees. I wonder how much, if any, he personally saw.
Can you even imagine... $1.8 million in legal fees?
Making $250 an hour by most standards seems pretty extreme.. And if everybody involved was making that that'd be 7200 man hours to prove that putting a barbie in a blender is free speech. What's up with that?
That'd be a seriously overpaid 10 man legal team working 10 hours a day for almost 3 months straight.
Good point, but I think the overall impact would be way lower then actually sending the real material. But yea, it'd still be bad.
The site would most likely immediately go down. How many of those sites do you think sit unpassword protected? Seems like it'd be next to nil. Lots of people would get the email after the site went down, having almost no impact on them at all.
Also, the process of discovering such a site would pretty much mean one way or another you're now entangled with child porn, which is the main thing. You are right though that he could mitigate the risk of storing the material with the trade off of diluting the actual attack.
I donno, that's interesting, but I think the risk factor still plays an important role. Just by threatening something like child porn, you've greatly increased your risk of being caught and punished.
If I threatened that you better give me $50 or I'll shine your shoe while you wait, I don't think I'd face very significant punishment relatively. So the level of the threat, even if it's a bluff, matters I think.
The guy doing the extorting now has to actually have child porn and has to send it himself. The risk if he gets caught is -way- greater then if he were just cooridinating simple DDOS attacks. He'll get all kinds of scrutiny from all kinds of groups that oridinally wouldn't bother. If he's in some totally untouchable country, he's in the unique position that now if the locals find out they'll probably actually care.
I think the extra risk this behavior exposes the perpetrator to will go a long way to self regulate this trend.
There are a few things that I think make this decision logical (enough) for SOE.
1) Huge Everquest installed base. As a whole, they've probably been marginally following WoW, but they are naturally going to be very aware of EQ2. If WoW were to come out first and start getting acclaim and siphoning users off of EQ before EQ2 had a chance to do the same, a lot of people who are currently only kinda aware of WoW would suddenly be -very- aware. By beating WoW to market, they get all the early natural transition people.
2) Long term hook associated with MMORPGs, changes the rules a bit. Unless EQ2 is also a massively sucking game, a lot of people are simply going to get hooked as long as it's at least somewhat better then EQ. Once hooked you don't really care so much if there is a better game, because all the stuff you've built up is there, so whatever is released first is going to have a long term advantage as a result. (.. obviously a problem EQ2 is going to have against itself?? I don't know how they are dealing with that )
3) Blizzard has the weird advantage that it seems like, at least from my perspective, that every gamer knows a few WoW beta testers. They are already totally hooked and play it basically as if it were a released game. There is this huge existing sentiment that EQ2 is going to suck relative to WoW no matter what, so what difference does it make if they wait to make it better?
Hook up any standard camcorder that also records in IR frequency pointing away from the TV with a wide angle lens. Rig it to some kind of IR controlled video selector switch so that when it receives any 'off' from this thing's database it switches to a 10 second delayed buffered feed from itself. The person using this device would appear to anybody watching the TV as having a blinking light aimed almost directly at the camera.
Ok.. thats kinda expensive.. I suppoes a piece of ducttape would suffice.
That'd actually be the more effective variant from some kind of anti-TV activist standpoint. If TVs were just randomly all put to max volume all over the place, they could damage themselves and would -require- their IR ports be blocked, making them more inconvenient for everybody, and overall less likely to even be used in the first place.
This is kinda pedantic, but for what it's worth, the article said it takes around a minute for it to transmit all the codes in it's little database, so it's unlikely you'll be able to get the totally desired timing effect to -really- piss everybody off. Also it seems like it'd be pretty hard to use this thing discretely if you have to point it at a TV for half a minute on average.
Then you'll just have to buy the product too and use it as TV-B-On and have IR wars.
I like the idea of TVs going off all over the place, from a kind of very mild anarchist perspective... But I'm going to have to agree, if you -really- can't handle the TVs so much that you think you have the right to turn them all off, then I also have the right for me not to handle that smug look on your face, allowing me to turn that off too, with a blunt object.
It sounds like annoying crap on paper, but ads have been in many games for a long long time, they've just been static and moronicly fake. A race track with 15,000 Sobe beverage ads?
If this leads to basically a more dynamic and realistic version of that for games where it is appropriate (sports/racing games in particular) the market might actually respond to it as a cool feature.
Other ads could be much more borderline. Playing Splinter Cell 3 and you turn on a TV and it just happens to have an ad for the next episode of survivor.. You play a week later and it's an ad for the simpsons. A crumpled magazine on the floor changes from a picture of a coke can to gum. Such subtlety that crosses over into immersion without being abrasively intrusive is going to be an interesting gray area.
If they are a moron about it though, and have a full screen pop up ad for the Star Wars trilogy DVD between rounds of counterstrike, they'll self destruct their new ad delivery vehicle.
I'm surprised this came as a surprise to anybody. The main reason to buy it on Steam early is to be able to play Counter Strike:Source right now. I feel I've already gotten my $50 of entertainment value from that just alone, HL2 is going to be like ultra icing on mega cake. If you don't like Counter Strike, then.. well.. what can ya say.
Is the retail version going to have Half Life : Source (the original game on the new engine) available?
Just physically change the structure of the cartridge a tiny bit for each region so it doesn't fit, by subtracting or adding a notch in the corners, forcing people to either use awkward adaptors ( doubly awkward for a portable platform ) or physically destroying the complementing notch in their gameboy, most likely voiding their warranty. This level of discouragement is probably enough.
My hunch on why they don't bother with any lockouts is that there isn't as much of a blockbuster game driven economy with gameboy games. There is very rarely a game that comes out that everybody goes nuts and has to go buy like on console systems. Pokemon would be the closest thing to that, and it's extremely language bound. Furthermore, it's very link oriented, discouraging people from buying a game they won't be able to link to hardly anybody with later.
My point is that the parents who make a big deal out of preventing their children from exposure are creating a void without neccesarily putting anything there, and that the parents that instead try to fill their kids' lives with something positive are indirectly pushing TV out of it because there is simply no room.
Also, with the nvidia drivers, you can use alt-` (right above tab) to switch desktops. There is even a setting somewhere in the nview software to change alt-tab behavior to iterate through desktops.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I certainly don't argue that you can easily spend mass amounts of money to support a PC gaming habit, but just because you can doesn't mean you have to in order to play games decently.
A friend of mine just bought a used machine for $50 from a surplus store, put in a new video card, some more memory, and bought a 60 gig Ultra ATA/133 on sale and has a machine capable of playing Battlefield Vietnam at 1024x768 medium detail for around $250 or thereabouts.
Some pages on the topic of Einstein's statements about god and religon:
p ersonal.html i n.html
http://condor.stcloudstate.edu/~lesikar/einstein/
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_einste
http://www.skeptic.com/archives50.html
http://www.2think.org/einstein.shtml
Err? All the highest end cards still come in AGP. You don't -have- to upgrade everything to upgrade your video card. If I were making the switch to PCI express and a new video card, I'd just buy a new computer honestly.
Well you certainly paid an extreme amount of money if that is US dollars. I think you were massively ripped off.
I have a system that can run everything at nearly the highest settings that would cost about $1000 to build today. It has a year old motherboard and cpu. The video card I recently upgraded.
Where did you buy your system from?
Hibernating must be a pretty profound state if it really means that you don't have to eat or use the bathroom for up to 7 months.
That seems like that would slow down the systems that cause aging as well.
Then again, their implementation of hibernation will probably come out nothing like that, it'll probably be some kind of constant drug/nutrition feed.
An interesting question is, would you be willing to go into a matrix-esque environment for those months, where you could go to movies, read books, interact with people on earth (speed of light limitations would make this really trippy), to pass to the time while your body sleeps?
We'll hibernate their entire social network too.
Maybe cheesy lost-in-space-esque adventuring families will actually occur somehow naturally someday as the solution to this problem.
The hibernation concept you think might help defeat that to some degree. Your body is deteriotating itself in the course of normal functioning, you slow down the functioning and you slow down the deteriotation?
I'm going to have to agree you on the whole concept of advertising there, but then again, would they have gotten the money in the first place if it weren't for the names concept?
1. Send nasty letters to people
2. Apologize
3. Profit
The site says they paid $1.8 million, compensating his legal fees. I wonder how much, if any, he personally saw.
... $1.8 million in legal fees?
Can you even imagine
Making $250 an hour by most standards seems pretty extreme.. And if everybody involved was making that that'd be 7200 man hours to prove that putting a barbie in a blender is free speech. What's up with that?
That'd be a seriously overpaid 10 man legal team working 10 hours a day for almost 3 months straight.
Man.. why didn't I become a lawyer?
Good point, but I think the overall impact would be way lower then actually sending the real material. But yea, it'd still be bad.
The site would most likely immediately go down. How many of those sites do you think sit unpassword protected? Seems like it'd be next to nil. Lots of people would get the email after the site went down, having almost no impact on them at all.
Also, the process of discovering such a site would pretty much mean one way or another you're now entangled with child porn, which is the main thing. You are right though that he could mitigate the risk of storing the material with the trade off of diluting the actual attack.
I donno, that's interesting, but I think the risk factor still plays an important role. Just by threatening something like child porn, you've greatly increased your risk of being caught and punished.
If I threatened that you better give me $50 or I'll shine your shoe while you wait, I don't think I'd face very significant punishment relatively. So the level of the threat, even if it's a bluff, matters I think.
"Which makes me wonder. Maybe it's a reverse Joe Job. Send an extortion threat to the mafia and sign it CmdrTaco, hmmmmm..."
I'm kinda amazed I've never heard or thought of that entire concept... Are there any famous examples of it ?
The guy doing the extorting now has to actually have child porn and has to send it himself. The risk if he gets caught is -way- greater then if he were just cooridinating simple DDOS attacks. He'll get all kinds of scrutiny from all kinds of groups that oridinally wouldn't bother. If he's in some totally untouchable country, he's in the unique position that now if the locals find out they'll probably actually care.
I think the extra risk this behavior exposes the perpetrator to will go a long way to self regulate this trend.
There are a few things that I think make this decision logical (enough) for SOE.
1) Huge Everquest installed base. As a whole, they've probably been marginally following WoW, but they are naturally going to be very aware of EQ2. If WoW were to come out first and start getting acclaim and siphoning users off of EQ before EQ2 had a chance to do the same, a lot of people who are currently only kinda aware of WoW would suddenly be -very- aware. By beating WoW to market, they get all the early natural transition people.
2) Long term hook associated with MMORPGs, changes the rules a bit. Unless EQ2 is also a massively sucking game, a lot of people are simply going to get hooked as long as it's at least somewhat better then EQ. Once hooked you don't really care so much if there is a better game, because all the stuff you've built up is there, so whatever is released first is going to have a long term advantage as a result. (.. obviously a problem EQ2 is going to have against itself?? I don't know how they are dealing with that )
3) Blizzard has the weird advantage that it seems like, at least from my perspective, that every gamer knows a few WoW beta testers. They are already totally hooked and play it basically as if it were a released game. There is this huge existing sentiment that EQ2 is going to suck relative to WoW no matter what, so what difference does it make if they wait to make it better?
Hook up any standard camcorder that also records in IR frequency pointing away from the TV with a wide angle lens. Rig it to some kind of IR controlled video selector switch so that when it receives any 'off' from this thing's database it switches to a 10 second delayed buffered feed from itself. The person using this device would appear to anybody watching the TV as having a blinking light aimed almost directly at the camera.
Ok.. thats kinda expensive.. I suppoes a piece of ducttape would suffice.
That'd actually be the more effective variant from some kind of anti-TV activist standpoint. If TVs were just randomly all put to max volume all over the place, they could damage themselves and would -require- their IR ports be blocked, making them more inconvenient for everybody, and overall less likely to even be used in the first place.
This is kinda pedantic, but for what it's worth, the article said it takes around a minute for it to transmit all the codes in it's little database, so it's unlikely you'll be able to get the totally desired timing effect to -really- piss everybody off. Also it seems like it'd be pretty hard to use this thing discretely if you have to point it at a TV for half a minute on average.
Then you'll just have to buy the product too and use it as TV-B-On and have IR wars.
I like the idea of TVs going off all over the place, from a kind of very mild anarchist perspective... But I'm going to have to agree, if you -really- can't handle the TVs so much that you think you have the right to turn them all off, then I also have the right for me not to handle that smug look on your face, allowing me to turn that off too, with a blunt object.
The article does mention it at the very bottom.. but just as a reminder, this product is also TV-B-On
It sounds like annoying crap on paper, but ads have been in many games for a long long time, they've just been static and moronicly fake. A race track with 15,000 Sobe beverage ads?
If this leads to basically a more dynamic and realistic version of that for games where it is appropriate (sports/racing games in particular) the market might actually respond to it as a cool feature.
Other ads could be much more borderline. Playing Splinter Cell 3 and you turn on a TV and it just happens to have an ad for the next episode of survivor.. You play a week later and it's an ad for the simpsons. A crumpled magazine on the floor changes from a picture of a coke can to gum. Such subtlety that crosses over into immersion without being abrasively intrusive is going to be an interesting gray area.
If they are a moron about it though, and have a full screen pop up ad for the Star Wars trilogy DVD between rounds of counterstrike, they'll self destruct their new ad delivery vehicle.
I'm surprised this came as a surprise to anybody. The main reason to buy it on Steam early is to be able to play Counter Strike:Source right now. I feel I've already gotten my $50 of entertainment value from that just alone, HL2 is going to be like ultra icing on mega cake. If you don't like Counter Strike, then.. well.. what can ya say.
Is the retail version going to have Half Life : Source (the original game on the new engine) available?
Just physically change the structure of the cartridge a tiny bit for each region so it doesn't fit, by subtracting or adding a notch in the corners, forcing people to either use awkward adaptors ( doubly awkward for a portable platform ) or physically destroying the complementing notch in their gameboy, most likely voiding their warranty. This level of discouragement is probably enough.
My hunch on why they don't bother with any lockouts is that there isn't as much of a blockbuster game driven economy with gameboy games. There is very rarely a game that comes out that everybody goes nuts and has to go buy like on console systems. Pokemon would be the closest thing to that, and it's extremely language bound. Furthermore, it's very link oriented, discouraging people from buying a game they won't be able to link to hardly anybody with later.
My point is that the parents who make a big deal out of preventing their children from exposure are creating a void without neccesarily putting anything there, and that the parents that instead try to fill their kids' lives with something positive are indirectly pushing TV out of it because there is simply no room.
Also, with the nvidia drivers, you can use alt-` (right above tab) to switch desktops. There is even a setting somewhere in the nview software to change alt-tab behavior to iterate through desktops.