The one in the summary is fine, but the original (better) article is here: http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=032411-5 It talks more in depth about how they actually did the imaging. It's actually quite interesting.
Normally, I'd read The Fine Article just to get a hint of what this story means, but there isn't any links and the summary is vapid and useless. It is a non-story. Allow me to distill its meaning: "A piece of malware (a remote access backdoor ill-defined thingy that probably isn't a trojan) for windows was ported to mac. This is probably bad. Considering Apple's 'growing market share', what could it mean?"
Because what you don't know will hurt you.
Believe me, were I a parent I'd like to know exactly how these microtransaction games worked before I handed a portable money hole to my child. What the base game is, what you can do without spending money, what you can do by spending money, and exactly how the money-spending mechanics work are all must-know pieces of information. Note that this is completely aside from my almost complete (curse you Mann-conomy!) aversion to games with microtransactions. Given the choice (which one ALWAYS HAS) I'll simply do without them.
How the publisher delivers content and what the publisher charges for it is up to the publisher, true. This does not mean the publisher is excused from misleading the child, and the parent is excused for not educating the child on the nature of money.
Saved online and offline. Not many steam games do this though. What's more useful is the control binding saves in the cloud. Rebinding TF2 (and L4D, and L4D2, and Portal, and HL2, and Garry's Mod, and Fallout3... you get the idea) to ESDF is an exercise in frustration.
I have no problem with this, as long as you get offline saves too.
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Case modding certainly isn't cost effective, nor does it stick to its roots, but in my mind that doesn't matter. What matters is that ordinary everyday people are looking at modern PC cases, thinking "That's not cool enough, I can make it better", and then _doing it._ Several of those entries are first or second time builds, done by people who've never even considered this kind of thing before.
Believe it or not, "because it's awesome" _is_ a valid reason to do something. These people are creating art, and they happen to be building high-end computers into it. Get your collective heads out of your collective asses and revel in the beauty of well constructed and beautiful pieces of functional art. DIY is something that our consumerist society is rapidly losing its grip on, and any evidence to the contrary should be welcomed, not decried.
If they're swayed by the big H on your resume, great! Maybe you'll be able to pay off your student loans slightly faster otherwise. Or you could just go to the much cheaper, less pretentious school and get the same degree without the financial insolvency.
Your choice.
Of course it's a publicity stunt. Michael Moore rarely does anything else these days. Regardless, I hope it works. The courts and police systems of the enlightened (hah!) world are predisposed for a very good reason to take all allegations of rape seriously. It's a shame that certain unscrupulous people take advantage of this, but that's how it works. The way I figure, the longer Assange can stay in the global spotlight, the more people are going to read up on "all this wikileaks stuff" and realize exactly what shenanigans their gov'ts are up to. In other words: Yes it's a publicity stunt, but it will help the word get out. As such, I'm for it.
Using Steam (right now, anyway) is like having a digital box full of game install media floating out on the internet somewhere.
It'll go on as many computers as you want, as often as you want, and all games on Steam are supported by Steam as long as Steam is around. I've done three or four installs, and the Steam games have always been the most painless to do. The ONLY real restrictions are the lack of resale and the fact that only one computer can be logged into a certain Steam account at a time. Even that can be got around by putting Steam in "Offline Mode", which makes all games singleplayer only but requires no internet connection.
Yes, it'll all go away when Steam goes away, but by that point I probably won't care anyways. Whether you care or not is a different matter, but I'll point out that there are games now on steam you can't find retail. Maybe Amazon, but Steam will probably be cheaper and faster.
Keep all the physical media you want. All the games I really like never got stamped in the first place, and they're all on Steam.
It was old and useless the instant the internet came online (hah), simply because it's a buzz word that means "internet". Hell, it's a full blown euphemism. It's like the people using it feel like being caught saying "internet" will somehow damage their careers, so they do a dainty dance around the issue, instead of calling it what it is. The only cyber-whatsits I want to hear about anymore are robotic prosthesis and brain interfaces.
At least, compared the number of hours of my life that Flash games and other doohickies waste.
On a more serious note, I think this is a good thing. I find that I'm more inclined to get work done on my lappy if I'm threatened with a low battery, my lappy's inability to effectively run flash anything nonwithstanding.
Losing the disk for the Wii is great, and the search function is something I've pined after for many an evening. However, Netflix has yet to address my biggest concern: Bandwidth usage.
I'd like it if I had more control over how much of my pipes Netflix gets to use. Yes, I know I can diddle my router/modem to fix this, but it needs to be in the interface. Y'see, I play multiplayer FPS games (mostly TF2) during my downtime, which is co-incidentally the same time other people in the house have downtime. They'll load up the Netflix streaming player on their laptops, and my latency will double for thirty seconds. Which wouldn't be so bad, if Netflix didn't continue to hog the entire pipe for three quarters of a second every five seconds after the main load to update its buffer. Mix in the weird lag compensation Valve uses for TF2 and the relatively high latency values I get on my favorite server, and trying to use any strategy but sentry-humping turtling becomes impossible.
Needless to say, this kinda ruins my entertainment. I've come a cease-fire agreement with the other parties in the house about usage periods and times, but the truce remains uneasy.
Yes, I know it's a cliche. Considering the massive variety of ways that users can satisfy their addictions to social networking, there is no reasonable technical solution to the problem. So use a social one.
Yes, I know I'm being simplistic, but complexity isn't a necessary part of having a good idea. Implementing it, on the other hand...
Just a quick counterpoint: The demo of Brutal Legend was awesome. The game, not so much. Also, if you're lucky enough to find a reviewer who hates the things you like, you've found a good measuring stick. Yahtzee tends to hate most of what I like in a game (that's not obviously bad design, etc) so I find I his reviews most helpful for getting a feel for a particular game. He also likes several games I enjoyed deeply and consider fairly unknown, so to me his credentials for reviewing certain types of games are impeccable.
Really? I always attributed it to outright silliness (or perhaps pride) on the publisher's part. I mean, imagine you just made some kind of hardcore cover-based shooter with, oh I don't know dinosaurs as handguns. Work with me here. This hypothetical dino-gun game is your pride and joy, and you want to make a good impression on a small subset of important reviewers. You don't want to bribe them, exactly, but you want them to know that you think highly of your game, and of their capacity as high-power reviewers. So you send them a knickknack of some kind. Like, a model replica of the basic pistol-type weapon. Or a fake dinosaur tooth, or whatever. The point of the exercise is to one-up the other weird knickknacks the other publishers send so that your knickknack (and consequently your game) stick in the reviewer's minds. Bribery might be an element to it, but more valuable is the sticking-in-the-reviewer's-mind part. Ever seen professionals auditioning for a part in theatre? They're all basically excellent choices, but they've all got some kind of gimmick to get the director to remember them better than anyone else. That's the objective, anyways. Same idea, different area. Not bribery, not really.
Remember, if you're criticizing a majority (whites, Christians, Jews/Judaism, conservatives, men, heterosexuals) it's OK, but if you're criticizing a minority (African-Americans, Muslims/Islam, homosexuals, polyamorists) it's a "hate crime" (NewSpeak for unsanctioned thought).
I suppose this seems like nitpicking, but I want to be absolutely clear here: "Hate crime" is not the same as "unsanctioned thought".
"Hate crime" is a criminal action motivated by racism, or similar thought processes. "Hate speech" is similar, but deals with advocating or expressing "hate", rather than action. In the United States, there is no such thing as a thoughtcrime. Yet, anyways. I am free to think whatever I want of whomever or whatever I want, in any kind of terms I choose. Expressing or taking action in regards to these thoughts is a different matter.
The point I am laboriously trying to get across here is that one must know the exact meaning of a loaded word before one uses it. Else that person risks saying things he or she didn't intend, and the consequences may be severe.
I realize this is probably an overreaction (this is the internet, after all) but this kind of willful misuse of loaded words is too dangerous to clear communication to let slide.
Now that the EU has "all but rejected ACTA", how likely is this to impact the enactment of this blatantly evil trade agreement in the US of A?
Speaking as a concerned citizen of the US, can I breathe a little easier now, or is there more that still needs to be done to grind this horrible blight on the internet out of existence?
Where I live? Cars barely respect motercycles. Bicycles are like some kind of bottom-layer caste. Drivers actively ignore cyclists, and altogether too many cyclists reciprocate. Not to mention the incredibly bone-headed moves I've seen countless teens do on bikes. None of whom are wearing helmets of course (I can count on one hand the number of high-school students I've seen wear a helmet properly, and that's counting myself).
Your analogy is bad. Perhaps a better one is "Can Smart Cars and Priuses co-exist?".
Slashdot Mirror
The one in the summary is fine, but the original (better) article is here:
http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=032411-5
It talks more in depth about how they actually did the imaging. It's actually quite interesting.
Normally, I'd read The Fine Article just to get a hint of what this story means, but there isn't any links and the summary is vapid and useless. It is a non-story. Allow me to distill its meaning: "A piece of malware (a remote access backdoor ill-defined thingy that probably isn't a trojan) for windows was ported to mac. This is probably bad. Considering Apple's 'growing market share', what could it mean?"
Bravo slashdot. A new low.
Because what you don't know will hurt you. Believe me, were I a parent I'd like to know exactly how these microtransaction games worked before I handed a portable money hole to my child. What the base game is, what you can do without spending money, what you can do by spending money, and exactly how the money-spending mechanics work are all must-know pieces of information. Note that this is completely aside from my almost complete (curse you Mann-conomy!) aversion to games with microtransactions. Given the choice (which one ALWAYS HAS) I'll simply do without them. How the publisher delivers content and what the publisher charges for it is up to the publisher, true. This does not mean the publisher is excused from misleading the child, and the parent is excused for not educating the child on the nature of money.
Saved online and offline. Not many steam games do this though. What's more useful is the control binding saves in the cloud. Rebinding TF2 (and L4D, and L4D2, and Portal, and HL2, and Garry's Mod, and Fallout3... you get the idea) to ESDF is an exercise in frustration. I have no problem with this, as long as you get offline saves too.
Gosh, I hope you brought a couple big rigs to take the loot home with you. Do you rob open-topped freight trains full of gravel too?
What the hell is wrong with you people? Case modding certainly isn't cost effective, nor does it stick to its roots, but in my mind that doesn't matter. What matters is that ordinary everyday people are looking at modern PC cases, thinking "That's not cool enough, I can make it better", and then _doing it._ Several of those entries are first or second time builds, done by people who've never even considered this kind of thing before.
Believe it or not, "because it's awesome" _is_ a valid reason to do something. These people are creating art, and they happen to be building high-end computers into it. Get your collective heads out of your collective asses and revel in the beauty of well constructed and beautiful pieces of functional art. DIY is something that our consumerist society is rapidly losing its grip on, and any evidence to the contrary should be welcomed, not decried.
If they're swayed by the big H on your resume, great! Maybe you'll be able to pay off your student loans slightly faster otherwise. Or you could just go to the much cheaper, less pretentious school and get the same degree without the financial insolvency. Your choice.
Steel nerves? Check. Rat? Check. Stainless? Certainly not.
Of course it's a publicity stunt. Michael Moore rarely does anything else these days. Regardless, I hope it works. The courts and police systems of the enlightened (hah!) world are predisposed for a very good reason to take all allegations of rape seriously. It's a shame that certain unscrupulous people take advantage of this, but that's how it works. The way I figure, the longer Assange can stay in the global spotlight, the more people are going to read up on "all this wikileaks stuff" and realize exactly what shenanigans their gov'ts are up to. In other words: Yes it's a publicity stunt, but it will help the word get out. As such, I'm for it.
Using Steam (right now, anyway) is like having a digital box full of game install media floating out on the internet somewhere.
It'll go on as many computers as you want, as often as you want, and all games on Steam are supported by Steam as long as Steam is around. I've done three or four installs, and the Steam games have always been the most painless to do. The ONLY real restrictions are the lack of resale and the fact that only one computer can be logged into a certain Steam account at a time. Even that can be got around by putting Steam in "Offline Mode", which makes all games singleplayer only but requires no internet connection.
Yes, it'll all go away when Steam goes away, but by that point I probably won't care anyways. Whether you care or not is a different matter, but I'll point out that there are games now on steam you can't find retail. Maybe Amazon, but Steam will probably be cheaper and faster.
Keep all the physical media you want. All the games I really like never got stamped in the first place, and they're all on Steam.
It was old and useless the instant the internet came online (hah), simply because it's a buzz word that means "internet". Hell, it's a full blown euphemism. It's like the people using it feel like being caught saying "internet" will somehow damage their careers, so they do a dainty dance around the issue, instead of calling it what it is. The only cyber-whatsits I want to hear about anymore are robotic prosthesis and brain interfaces.
At least, compared the number of hours of my life that Flash games and other doohickies waste.
On a more serious note, I think this is a good thing. I find that I'm more inclined to get work done on my lappy if I'm threatened with a low battery, my lappy's inability to effectively run flash anything nonwithstanding.
Losing the disk for the Wii is great, and the search function is something I've pined after for many an evening. However, Netflix has yet to address my biggest concern: Bandwidth usage.
I'd like it if I had more control over how much of my pipes Netflix gets to use. Yes, I know I can diddle my router/modem to fix this, but it needs to be in the interface. Y'see, I play multiplayer FPS games (mostly TF2) during my downtime, which is co-incidentally the same time other people in the house have downtime. They'll load up the Netflix streaming player on their laptops, and my latency will double for thirty seconds. Which wouldn't be so bad, if Netflix didn't continue to hog the entire pipe for three quarters of a second every five seconds after the main load to update its buffer. Mix in the weird lag compensation Valve uses for TF2 and the relatively high latency values I get on my favorite server, and trying to use any strategy but sentry-humping turtling becomes impossible.
Needless to say, this kinda ruins my entertainment. I've come a cease-fire agreement with the other parties in the house about usage periods and times, but the truce remains uneasy.
Woah, that's perfect. Where can I sign up?
Yes, I know it's a cliche. Considering the massive variety of ways that users can satisfy their addictions to social networking, there is no reasonable technical solution to the problem. So use a social one.
Yes, I know I'm being simplistic, but complexity isn't a necessary part of having a good idea. Implementing it, on the other hand...
Just a quick counterpoint: The demo of Brutal Legend was awesome. The game, not so much. Also, if you're lucky enough to find a reviewer who hates the things you like, you've found a good measuring stick. Yahtzee tends to hate most of what I like in a game (that's not obviously bad design, etc) so I find I his reviews most helpful for getting a feel for a particular game. He also likes several games I enjoyed deeply and consider fairly unknown, so to me his credentials for reviewing certain types of games are impeccable.
Really? I always attributed it to outright silliness (or perhaps pride) on the publisher's part. I mean, imagine you just made some kind of hardcore cover-based shooter with, oh I don't know dinosaurs as handguns. Work with me here. This hypothetical dino-gun game is your pride and joy, and you want to make a good impression on a small subset of important reviewers. You don't want to bribe them, exactly, but you want them to know that you think highly of your game, and of their capacity as high-power reviewers. So you send them a knickknack of some kind. Like, a model replica of the basic pistol-type weapon. Or a fake dinosaur tooth, or whatever. The point of the exercise is to one-up the other weird knickknacks the other publishers send so that your knickknack (and consequently your game) stick in the reviewer's minds. Bribery might be an element to it, but more valuable is the sticking-in-the-reviewer's-mind part. Ever seen professionals auditioning for a part in theatre? They're all basically excellent choices, but they've all got some kind of gimmick to get the director to remember them better than anyone else. That's the objective, anyways. Same idea, different area. Not bribery, not really.
Phew, I feel a lot better now. My basement doesn't have any.
Remember, if you're criticizing a majority (whites, Christians, Jews/Judaism, conservatives, men, heterosexuals) it's OK, but if you're criticizing a minority (African-Americans, Muslims/Islam, homosexuals, polyamorists) it's a "hate crime" (NewSpeak for unsanctioned thought).
I suppose this seems like nitpicking, but I want to be absolutely clear here: "Hate crime" is not the same as "unsanctioned thought".
"Hate crime" is a criminal action motivated by racism, or similar thought processes. "Hate speech" is similar, but deals with advocating or expressing "hate", rather than action. In the United States, there is no such thing as a thoughtcrime. Yet, anyways. I am free to think whatever I want of whomever or whatever I want, in any kind of terms I choose. Expressing or taking action in regards to these thoughts is a different matter.
The point I am laboriously trying to get across here is that one must know the exact meaning of a loaded word before one uses it. Else that person risks saying things he or she didn't intend, and the consequences may be severe.
I realize this is probably an overreaction (this is the internet, after all) but this kind of willful misuse of loaded words is too dangerous to clear communication to let slide.
Obviously BP needs to make some re-rebuttles now. Buttles for everybody!
There's something inherently just about a bad summary with a bad link describing the bad behavior of a bad company.
So if a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many flapjacks does it take to shingle a doghouse?
Now that the EU has "all but rejected ACTA", how likely is this to impact the enactment of this blatantly evil trade agreement in the US of A? Speaking as a concerned citizen of the US, can I breathe a little easier now, or is there more that still needs to be done to grind this horrible blight on the internet out of existence?
Where I live? Cars barely respect motercycles. Bicycles are like some kind of bottom-layer caste. Drivers actively ignore cyclists, and altogether too many cyclists reciprocate. Not to mention the incredibly bone-headed moves I've seen countless teens do on bikes. None of whom are wearing helmets of course (I can count on one hand the number of high-school students I've seen wear a helmet properly, and that's counting myself). Your analogy is bad. Perhaps a better one is "Can Smart Cars and Priuses co-exist?".