Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off..
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
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· Score: 1
Fact: Rocket Jumping was originally a bug. IT was a 'quirk' in the wya the physics worked in Quake 1,
No, it was not a bug. A 'bug' is when the code is broken in some way. A 'quirk' is when the code works correctly, but in an unexpected way. Rocket jumping was a quirk of the physics, but it was not a bug.
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Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off..
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
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· Score: 1
i don't think that topspin, backspin and slicing were part of the original tennis design specs.
I don't argue that some "unexpected" attributes of a game are fair and should stay in. For example, Carmack went on record as saying that he didn't foresee rocket jumping. I think most would agree (Carmack included) that rocket jumping was a valid skill that didn't harm the spirit of the game.
But that doesn't mean that all unexpected features are good. It has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. The spirit of the game of Quake is a test of reflexes, spacial memory and (to some degree) strategy. If a feature breaks the play balance by giving a player an unfair advantage by practicing a skill not in the spirit, then it should be eliminated, like imperfections in a tennis court.
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Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off..
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure that "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" is really true anymore, (was it ever?) There are lots of valid privacy and technology issues out there.
Since when is privacy "news for nerds"? At least Quake is technology related. I wouldn't mind at all if the political crap went away on this site (especially when the people running the site rarely have any idea what they're talking about).
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Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off..
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
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· Score: 4
Nobody exploited cheats in a game. They took the game to another level by understand the game throughly.
OK, maybe I shouldn't call them cheats. But they are bugs in the game that cause the game to behave in a way that it wasn't designed.
You would complain too if you were a good tennis player and someone decided to make the court bigger, the size of the ball smaller and different material.
This is more like if someone found out that a particular spot on the court had an imperfection that caused the ball to skew, and then practiced hitting that exact spot. And then complains when someone comes along and fixed the imperfection: "Hey man, what about all the hours I put in to hit that exact spot???".
A court imperfection is not part of the spirit of the game of tennis, and these exploits were not part of the spirit of the game of Quake.
I have to admit, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want that. What "killer" Mac apps are not available for the PC that you would want to run an emulator to use?
And these two numbers, hours tested and how many doing the testing are orders of magnitude greater for Linux than for any Microsoft OS. So while Microsoft spends orders of magnitude more dollars on "Quality Assurance" programs, Linux comes out more stable. You tell me. Which is the better indicator of product reliability?
You don't know what you're talking about. For some bizarre reason, Linux advocates simultaneously claim that Microsoft is the worst run software company in the world, and then go on to use Microsoft to prove the "superior" OSS development model.
There are other software companies, you know. Ones that make Linux quality look like the crap that it is. Yes, I said crap. Only in comparison to, say, Win/95 is Linux stable and reliable. It is riddled with security holes and has many bugs. You personally just don't see them because you don't stress your box in any sort of way.
Linux is not even close to the best version of Unix. Take a look at AIX sometime, or even Solaris. Got news for you: commercial Unix blows Linux out of the water. Or heck, look at the AS/400 if you want to see reliability.
The bottom line is that the OSS development model is far from proven, and in fact, has very few examples of producing top quality software. Apache is one. And I can't think of another. Almost all the best software is closed source and commercial. And one of the reasons is having a QA and testing staff.
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Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off..
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
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· Score: 3
Top players have been practicing these moves over and over and over again in order to raise their playing level and stand a chance at $100.000 tournaments...
Er, the changes are applied equally for everyone. Here's a hint: if your m@d skilz depend on exploiting cheats in the game, you're probably not that good.
You beat me to it. There is NO WAY the developer is the best person to assure quality. In fact, that person is very often the absolute worst.
Nice of you to put in that comment about OSS projects, but I have to disagree. I've found most OSS projects to be far inferior in quality to commercial projects (and to the people who can't read, that does not mean that all OSS has inferior quality to commercial software).
The solution to privacy has finally been found! We've all suspected for a long time that open source is that answer to everything, and here is the proof.
What we need to do is all open up our privacy! There is too much privacy hoarding in this society. After all, more eyes mean shallow bugs in your life.
After all, we know there is no such thing as intellectual property, and what is privacy except personal intellectual property?
Think of the benefits! You may like your shaving cream, but that's just because you haven't had the benefit of open source privacy. There would be legions of helpful people that would help you fix that bug by letting you know of better shaving cream solutions... for free!
The solution has been under our nose for years. Slashdot can now retire the privacy categories.
(Now, if only the price of DVD writers (and blanks) would come down so that I can afford to back up all those gigabytes of cheap hard drive I have.)
Speaking of backups, I found a great service the other day that's finally allowed me to back up lots of storage. Connected.com allows unlimited online storage... for only $15/month. I think it's only Windows only, but I upload a tar/gz from my Linux box periodically. It does specifically say that it's not intended to be abused by huge amounts of multimedia content.:)
It also does a good job of comparing the contents of files, so if you have a database or a mail file, it will only upload the blocks of the file that actually change.
Highly recommended. My mother-in-law is even using it over a dial-up modem, and it works great.
It's why Windows has such a bad reputation - novices, much like yourself, think that it doesn't happen and wonder why their Windows installation breaks after 3 months of messing it up.
Uh, duh. Apparently you have no clue, but are trying to pretend that you do. Yes, some (badly written) software leaves behind registry crap. But so what? Do you think the operating system scans for dead registry entries and executes code based on them?
The original assertion was that "look at all the crap windows users go through (hacking the registry and other nonsense)". I have installed literally hundreds of Windows applications. Again, I have never had to hack the Registry to remove crap that was causing the system to fail. Dead registry crap doesn't kill the system any more than leaving dead directories under Linux will kill the Kernel.
I'm sure someone out of the thousands of people who see this can find some example (particularly badly behaved device drivers, which can be badly behaved on any O/S). But again, the original assertion is clearly false.
On the other hand, I have had badly written RPMs go out and kill configuration files that they shouldn't.
Often the demoware writers will "hide" a registry key somewhere which they look for later, so that you can't do multiple demo installs (particularly for time-limited demos).
That's a designed-in feature, not a bug. You may not like it, but blame it on the application software, not on Windows. Ditto to your other arguments.
Just look at all the crap windows users go through (hacking the registry and other nonsense) to purge software from their machines even after "uninstalling" it.
I have never in my life had to hack the registry to purge software even after uninstalling it. If you're going to troll, at least try to have a grain of truth at the center. I hate incompetent trolls.
I know that if I were involved in this sort of case, I'd want as much publicity as possible... this is scary.
...which is exactly why gag orders are necessary. Guess what? Trials are meant to be tried in court, not in the media. Or have you forgotten about what happened in a certain case involving Orenthal J. Simpson?
Why should a company be forced to support a competitor (in this case, a competitor in the surprising-news market)? Apple have no duty to support any web site at all.
No one's forcing Apple to do anything. However, there is a principle involved that editorial content should not be contaminated by advertising, and that it's unethical to try and influence honest journalism.
Apple has the perfect right to do this. I don't argue that, but it's not the same thing as "supporting a competitor" or "taking one's business elsewhere". These magazines are not printing lies, they're printing true information that Apple doesn't like.
Do you really want a world where all editorial content has to be approved by a particular business? That's the world Apple wants.
It's not evil to choose what product your business buys in order to advertise. It is evil to present something as "journalism" if your content is distorted to make your customers (the advertisers) happy. Understand now?
I didn't say it was not a two-edged relationship. Magazines have the ultimate responsibility to keep advertising and editorial departments separate, and to tell companies like Apple to shove it when they try and influence editorial policy.
But that does not make it smell any less on Apple's part. Once again, Apple has the perfect right to put their money anywhere they want. And hopefully this will clue in consumers to the fact that Apple is not a company they want to do business with, for this reason and a 100 historical reasons.
Why should apple advertise with someone who is doing something they don't agree with?
So Ford should stop advertising in Time because they are making Ford look bad?
Yes, they have a perfect right to put their advertising dollars where they see fit. But don't kid yourself that it's not "evil" to use advertising dollars to influence editorial content.
And i'll say it again. Apple's historical behavior is far worse than Microsoft ever dreamed of being. The only reason no one cares about Apple's shinanigans is that they have been so incompetent at become a monopoly.
Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft used their advertising dollars to try and influence editorial content?
I detest Apple-the-company, but ironically I'm excited about Apple's products for the first time since, well, 1984 (the release of the Mac). The Open Source community really, really needs to take what is good about OS/X (such as the XML-based configurations, perhaps the rendering system) and get the good ideas. Otherwise I may be tempted to someday get a Unix-based Mac. I really want a Unix-based desktop system that has a reasonable set of business applications, but not at that price (figuratively and literally).
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Re:People transcend their parents every generation
on
The Limits of Software
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· Score: 1
ways that make the operation of a program as tangible to an inquisitive four year old as the eviscerated remains of his clockwork toys.
See, that's what I'm talking about. You're coloring the world through your own filter. You're making an assumption that all children enjoy taking things apart to figure out how they work, and that simply is not true. Yes, most people on Slashdot probably enjoy understanding how things work, but the vast majority of the population couldn't care less. People are different, and have different skills, interests and thought processes.
For example, my wife loves to cook. I hate to cook. I know that I could learn to do it if I really tried, but I have zero interest in learning. It's not because I wasn't given an easy-bake oven as a child, it's simply because I have no interest in it. Conversely, my wife has zero interest in learning how computers work. Absolutely zero. She's extremely intelligent and could learn if she wanted, but she will never care. She learns exactly as much as she needs to know in order to operate a computer, and that's it.
You don't have to be an expert at programming, but having an idea about how a computer does its job certainly helps using it. [...] With ever growing computer use, tell me which way is more efficient...
If that's true for a particular system or program, then it's a failure of the user interface. You absolutely should not have to know how the computer works in order to use it. Now, I don't know the general solution to the problem. Interfaces are still evolving. CrApple has probably come the closest, but interfaces are still too complicated.
I do know this... the solution is NOT to demand that everyone learn programming.
Let's make it our objective for 2100 that over half of the population of the world have a computer and know how to program.
That's like that middle ages guy saying, "Let's make it our goal that by 2000 half the world knows how to read and knows how to operate printing presses, binding machines and book distribution.
I agree that it's important that people become computer "literate", but it's NOT important that everyone learn to program. I make this point because it comes up far too much on Slashdot, particularly in the context of education ("Let's teach every student how to program!"). It's an important point that is lost on many Slashdotters... the vast majority of the population are not interested in engineering, and never will be. And that's OK. Everyone doesn't have to know or care how the hammer is forged to drive a nail.
I guess the question is whether the old process gives you different results than a new process. For example, there is no question that the death of the manual typewriter has caused novels to balloon in size due the ease of generating words. I think this is overall more positive, since an author can now concentrate on telling the "whole" story, rather than run into finger fatigue even though he/she may have more to say. On the other hand, they are more fat as well.
When it comes to film, I don't see anything film would give you that digital won't do, once the performance characteristics are solved.
I've had an ongoing project to scan all the photographs in my family's albums. The primary reason is for history. When there's only one copy of the prints, that means that they only are available to one branch of the family. Once they are digital, the life of them will expand immeasurably as they can be live on. Of course, there is still the question of storage lifetimes (I keep lots of backups and always keep them in "live" storage).
That's why I really want a digital camera with film performance. I would still like to create prints, but with proper attention, digital is forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact: Rocket Jumping was originally a bug. IT was a 'quirk' in the wya the physics worked in Quake 1,
No, it was not a bug. A 'bug' is when the code is broken in some way. A 'quirk' is when the code works correctly, but in an unexpected way. Rocket jumping was a quirk of the physics, but it was not a bug.
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i don't think that topspin, backspin and slicing were part of the original tennis design specs.
I don't argue that some "unexpected" attributes of a game are fair and should stay in. For example, Carmack went on record as saying that he didn't foresee rocket jumping. I think most would agree (Carmack included) that rocket jumping was a valid skill that didn't harm the spirit of the game.
But that doesn't mean that all unexpected features are good. It has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. The spirit of the game of Quake is a test of reflexes, spacial memory and (to some degree) strategy. If a feature breaks the play balance by giving a player an unfair advantage by practicing a skill not in the spirit, then it should be eliminated, like imperfections in a tennis court.
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Since when is privacy "news for nerds"? At least Quake is technology related. I wouldn't mind at all if the political crap went away on this site (especially when the people running the site rarely have any idea what they're talking about).
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Nobody exploited cheats in a game. They took the game to another level by understand the game throughly.
OK, maybe I shouldn't call them cheats. But they are bugs in the game that cause the game to behave in a way that it wasn't designed.
You would complain too if you were a good tennis player and someone decided to make the court bigger, the size of the ball smaller and different material.
This is more like if someone found out that a particular spot on the court had an imperfection that caused the ball to skew, and then practiced hitting that exact spot. And then complains when someone comes along and fixed the imperfection: "Hey man, what about all the hours I put in to hit that exact spot???".
A court imperfection is not part of the spirit of the game of tennis, and these exploits were not part of the spirit of the game of Quake.
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I have to admit, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want that. What "killer" Mac apps are not available for the PC that you would want to run an emulator to use?
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And these two numbers, hours tested and how many doing the testing are orders of magnitude greater for Linux than for any Microsoft OS. So while Microsoft spends orders of magnitude more dollars on "Quality Assurance" programs, Linux comes out more stable. You tell me. Which is the better indicator of product reliability?
You don't know what you're talking about. For some bizarre reason, Linux advocates simultaneously claim that Microsoft is the worst run software company in the world, and then go on to use Microsoft to prove the "superior" OSS development model.
There are other software companies, you know. Ones that make Linux quality look like the crap that it is. Yes, I said crap. Only in comparison to, say, Win/95 is Linux stable and reliable. It is riddled with security holes and has many bugs. You personally just don't see them because you don't stress your box in any sort of way.
Linux is not even close to the best version of Unix. Take a look at AIX sometime, or even Solaris. Got news for you: commercial Unix blows Linux out of the water. Or heck, look at the AS/400 if you want to see reliability.
The bottom line is that the OSS development model is far from proven, and in fact, has very few examples of producing top quality software. Apache is one. And I can't think of another. Almost all the best software is closed source and commercial. And one of the reasons is having a QA and testing staff.
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Top players have been practicing these moves over and over and over again in order to raise their playing level and stand a chance at $100.000 tournaments ...
Er, the changes are applied equally for everyone. Here's a hint: if your m@d skilz depend on exploiting cheats in the game, you're probably not that good.
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You beat me to it. There is NO WAY the developer is the best person to assure quality. In fact, that person is very often the absolute worst.
Nice of you to put in that comment about OSS projects, but I have to disagree. I've found most OSS projects to be far inferior in quality to commercial projects (and to the people who can't read, that does not mean that all OSS has inferior quality to commercial software).
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The solution to privacy has finally been found! We've all suspected for a long time that open source is that answer to everything, and here is the proof.
What we need to do is all open up our privacy! There is too much privacy hoarding in this society. After all, more eyes mean shallow bugs in your life.
After all, we know there is no such thing as intellectual property, and what is privacy except personal intellectual property?
Think of the benefits! You may like your shaving cream, but that's just because you haven't had the benefit of open source privacy. There would be legions of helpful people that would help you fix that bug by letting you know of better shaving cream solutions... for free!
The solution has been under our nose for years. Slashdot can now retire the privacy categories.
--
(Now, if only the price of DVD writers (and blanks) would come down so that I can afford to back up all those gigabytes of cheap hard drive I have.)
Speaking of backups, I found a great service the other day that's finally allowed me to back up lots of storage. Connected.com allows unlimited online storage ... for only $15/month. I think it's only Windows only, but I upload a tar/gz from my Linux box periodically. It does specifically say that it's not intended to be abused by huge amounts of multimedia content. :)
It also does a good job of comparing the contents of files, so if you have a database or a mail file, it will only upload the blocks of the file that actually change.
Highly recommended. My mother-in-law is even using it over a dial-up modem, and it works great.
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It's why Windows has such a bad reputation - novices, much like yourself, think that it doesn't happen and wonder why their Windows installation breaks after 3 months of messing it up.
Uh, duh. Apparently you have no clue, but are trying to pretend that you do. Yes, some (badly written) software leaves behind registry crap. But so what? Do you think the operating system scans for dead registry entries and executes code based on them?
The original assertion was that "look at all the crap windows users go through (hacking the registry and other nonsense)". I have installed literally hundreds of Windows applications. Again, I have never had to hack the Registry to remove crap that was causing the system to fail. Dead registry crap doesn't kill the system any more than leaving dead directories under Linux will kill the Kernel.
I'm sure someone out of the thousands of people who see this can find some example (particularly badly behaved device drivers, which can be badly behaved on any O/S). But again, the original assertion is clearly false.
On the other hand, I have had badly written RPMs go out and kill configuration files that they shouldn't.
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Often the demoware writers will "hide" a registry key somewhere which they look for later, so that you can't do multiple demo installs (particularly for time-limited demos).
That's a designed-in feature, not a bug. You may not like it, but blame it on the application software, not on Windows. Ditto to your other arguments.
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Just look at all the crap windows users go through (hacking the registry and other nonsense) to purge software from their machines even after "uninstalling" it.
I have never in my life had to hack the registry to purge software even after uninstalling it. If you're going to troll, at least try to have a grain of truth at the center. I hate incompetent trolls.
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(Speed in MHz)/(power in watts)
Just out of curiosity, why do you care at all about the watts? For a laptop I can maybe see, but for a desktop system it is totally irrelevent.
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I know that if I were involved in this sort of case, I'd want as much publicity as possible... this is scary.
...which is exactly why gag orders are necessary. Guess what? Trials are meant to be tried in court, not in the media. Or have you forgotten about what happened in a certain case involving Orenthal J. Simpson?
--
Why should a company be forced to support a competitor (in this case, a competitor in the surprising-news market)? Apple have no duty to support any web site at all.
No one's forcing Apple to do anything. However, there is a principle involved that editorial content should not be contaminated by advertising, and that it's unethical to try and influence honest journalism.
Apple has the perfect right to do this. I don't argue that, but it's not the same thing as "supporting a competitor" or "taking one's business elsewhere". These magazines are not printing lies, they're printing true information that Apple doesn't like.
Do you really want a world where all editorial content has to be approved by a particular business? That's the world Apple wants.
--
It's not evil to choose what product your business buys in order to advertise. It is evil to present something as "journalism" if your content is distorted to make your customers (the advertisers) happy. Understand now?
I didn't say it was not a two-edged relationship. Magazines have the ultimate responsibility to keep advertising and editorial departments separate, and to tell companies like Apple to shove it when they try and influence editorial policy.
But that does not make it smell any less on Apple's part. Once again, Apple has the perfect right to put their money anywhere they want. And hopefully this will clue in consumers to the fact that Apple is not a company they want to do business with, for this reason and a 100 historical reasons.
Understand now?
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Microsoft *DOES* use advertizing dollars to influence editoral content.
Perhaps, but think about the arrogance it takes to announce that you're spending money to influence content!
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Why should apple advertise with someone who is doing something they don't agree with?
So Ford should stop advertising in Time because they are making Ford look bad?
Yes, they have a perfect right to put their advertising dollars where they see fit. But don't kid yourself that it's not "evil" to use advertising dollars to influence editorial content.
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And i'll say it again. Apple's historical behavior is far worse than Microsoft ever dreamed of being. The only reason no one cares about Apple's shinanigans is that they have been so incompetent at become a monopoly.
Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft used their advertising dollars to try and influence editorial content?
I detest Apple-the-company, but ironically I'm excited about Apple's products for the first time since, well, 1984 (the release of the Mac). The Open Source community really, really needs to take what is good about OS/X (such as the XML-based configurations, perhaps the rendering system) and get the good ideas. Otherwise I may be tempted to someday get a Unix-based Mac. I really want a Unix-based desktop system that has a reasonable set of business applications, but not at that price (figuratively and literally).
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ways that make the operation of a program as tangible to an inquisitive four year old as the eviscerated remains of his clockwork toys.
See, that's what I'm talking about. You're coloring the world through your own filter. You're making an assumption that all children enjoy taking things apart to figure out how they work, and that simply is not true. Yes, most people on Slashdot probably enjoy understanding how things work, but the vast majority of the population couldn't care less. People are different, and have different skills, interests and thought processes.
For example, my wife loves to cook. I hate to cook. I know that I could learn to do it if I really tried, but I have zero interest in learning. It's not because I wasn't given an easy-bake oven as a child, it's simply because I have no interest in it. Conversely, my wife has zero interest in learning how computers work. Absolutely zero. She's extremely intelligent and could learn if she wanted, but she will never care. She learns exactly as much as she needs to know in order to operate a computer, and that's it.
--
You don't have to be an expert at programming, but having an idea about how a computer does its job certainly helps using it. [...] With ever growing computer use, tell me which way is more efficient...
If that's true for a particular system or program, then it's a failure of the user interface. You absolutely should not have to know how the computer works in order to use it. Now, I don't know the general solution to the problem. Interfaces are still evolving. CrApple has probably come the closest, but interfaces are still too complicated.
I do know this... the solution is NOT to demand that everyone learn programming.
--
Let's make it our objective for 2100 that over half of the population of the world have a computer and know how to program.
That's like that middle ages guy saying, "Let's make it our goal that by 2000 half the world knows how to read and knows how to operate printing presses, binding machines and book distribution.
I agree that it's important that people become computer "literate", but it's NOT important that everyone learn to program. I make this point because it comes up far too much on Slashdot, particularly in the context of education ("Let's teach every student how to program!"). It's an important point that is lost on many Slashdotters... the vast majority of the population are not interested in engineering, and never will be. And that's OK. Everyone doesn't have to know or care how the hammer is forged to drive a nail.
--
Let's get the ISPs to run Quake Servers! That's the way to reduce latency; run it right at the router level!
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I guess the question is whether the old process gives you different results than a new process. For example, there is no question that the death of the manual typewriter has caused novels to balloon in size due the ease of generating words. I think this is overall more positive, since an author can now concentrate on telling the "whole" story, rather than run into finger fatigue even though he/she may have more to say. On the other hand, they are more fat as well.
When it comes to film, I don't see anything film would give you that digital won't do, once the performance characteristics are solved.
I've had an ongoing project to scan all the photographs in my family's albums. The primary reason is for history. When there's only one copy of the prints, that means that they only are available to one branch of the family. Once they are digital, the life of them will expand immeasurably as they can be live on. Of course, there is still the question of storage lifetimes (I keep lots of backups and always keep them in "live" storage).
That's why I really want a digital camera with film performance. I would still like to create prints, but with proper attention, digital is forever.
--