You see a new house. In front of it is a new 2002 Mustang(tm).
>look mustang
It's shiny and new, is rated #1 in Car Magazine(tm), and gets 37 miles per gallon. It uses Goodyear(tm) tires, which are rated #1 in Autotrader Magazine(tm) for traction, even in wet weather.
>look house
It's a lovely pastel blue house, built by HouseCo(tm), providing you with the finest in custom construction since 1939. It has an alarm.
>look alarm
The alarm is provided by SecureCo(tm), America's top-rated security consultancy agency. This model is the new VK-3000(tm), and provides such essential features as light monitoring, automatic door detection, motion detection in and out of the house, and a baked potato timer.
>look timer
It's time to take the baked potatoes (provided by HEB(tm)) out of the oven (provided by Sears(tm)).
i remember back in the day, we installed Star wars: xwing on a 486 back when 486's were cool, and what pops up? "Say hello to Neon." we looked at each other in confusion: wtf? turns out the.bat file which starts the game runs a.exe which shows the ad. after you exit that prog, the.bat file runs the actual.exe which starts the game. so,we edited the.bat file and took out the line that ran the ad's.exe.
they've been there, but not like that. that was the only time i've seen something like that. haven't seen it since. hope never to see it again.
the 'swine in the federal govt' don't want people advocating the assassination of unethical government employees because they *are* the unethical government employees.
Just because you can't see the thing with your naked eye does not necessarily indicate that your location does not have 'line of sight' with the transmission tower.
what's even scarier is that many things are raising the age limits up to 21. the other day, i saw that UPS won't leave a package unless, as their form says, a person '21 or over' signs for it. 21 or over? what the flying fuck is that shit? since when was 21 the legal age for signing contracts or other binding forms? and it's not just that; while that's the only specific example i can be bothered to come up with right now, there is a general trend in other places to also raise the bar from 18 to 21.
what is this trend? why does it exist? why is it that people under 30 are treated like children and not like the legal adults that they are? it seems to me that the duration of childhood is being (almost) deliberately drawn out, in order to marginalize a group of people or strip them of their rights for a longer period of time. why?
actually you've got a point. everybody's so concerned with protecting their children, they're willing to fuck the rights of themselves, their neighbours, and everybody else. what they don't realize is that they're also fucking over the rights of their children once their children grow up to be adults.
so, for the love of god, THINK OF THE CHILDREN and don't fuck them over by stealing their rights. as a result, i won't have to lose mine either, you rotten bastards.
actually it's not the locks that keep me out... it's the fear of the forensics labs. you sneeze while breaking into somebody's house and you're going to visit bubba in jail. =)
i can't remember what insightful soul put this concept into words -- that fear of punishment keeps more people in line than appeal to reason or morals does.
or, thirdly, expend much more energy than you were in sneaking around. honestly, the biggest gripe is not in the technicality of the bug, but more in the realm of general AI development (imo). they just need less abusable ai patterns for mobs. good old turing test type stuff, except w/rt behaviour.
1. take counterstrike's FPS, round-based combat
2. make a "general" for each team who places specific team members in specific job slots (sergeant, private, squad leader, whatever) and specific places
3. make each round a battle with an if..then..else outcome, which will determine the next battle placement, as in a war. win one battle, advance a trench. lose one, fall back a trench. (wwI) etc.
4. the goal is to win the war; "generals" can get their strategy fix by picking places to defend and places to move/place troops, fps ppl can get their fix by being the troops.
anyway, it's an incomplete idea, but hopefully you can get the basic gist of what i'm saying.
as of 20010223@1835CST, the ftp server that hosts the link for 'propagandistic lies' seems to be disabled, or the account name/pw changed. does anybody have a mirror of the pdf file? i'd be interested in reading it.
unless compliance with such an organization was government-mandated, nobody would submit their products and product specs to it for review. in that case, the review boards would have to "hack" the things in order to find out if they contained content control mechanisms, which not only would be illegal according to the dmca if such mechanisms WERE included, but would also fail to provide assurance beyond a reasonable doubt whether or not said mechanisms were actually present. in other words, without companies willingly submitting specs and items in a compliant fashion, the value of the organization's assurance would be questionable. this would thereby weaken the value of their 'sigil', and essentially invalidate their raison d'être.
if the library of congress had an archive of the alt.binaries.* hierarchy, including all the warez groups, that would be a pretty funny legal quandary. they'd be obligated to put it up (it's the public's archives!) and obligated to take it down (it's copyrighted material!) at the same time... hee hee.
[gossip] l33t b0i: hey dudes, i found a scale!
[gossip] r0x0r m4n: uh, i think thatz like +3dam or something.
[auction] l33t b0i: snake scale for sale, 40 megabux
half life was cool as hell, up until you play Deus Ex, and then go back and play Half-Life again and realize how LIMITED half-life is in terms of story development.
as an example, i played half-life, then deus ex, and then Half-Life: Opposing Forces. while Half-life was fun the first time around, deus ex blew it out of the water. when the time came to play Opposing forces, the total lack of interactivity with objects and the fact that mobs don't spawn until you walk over a triggerpoint was really irritating.
as an example, there was a certain point in opfor that you walk between some trailer-crates and a big nasty slug with legs thingy spawns to your left, while a huge grasshopper-lookin' guy spawns to your right. after being hugely surprised by this, and dying, i reloaded a quicksave game and decided to ambush them from on top of the crates. lo and behold, when i looked down at where he should be, he wasn't there -- i hadn't set off the trigger that loads them.
compare this to deus ex, where mobs all spawn when the level is loaded, and have set patrol points, warning responses, etc. they're there, doing their thing, whether you're there looking at them or not.
more importantly, you can take many different paths to reach your objective. in half-life, you're herded like a cow into a semi; you have two ways to go. the way you came from (everything's been raped and pillaged that way already), and the way they want you to go (preferably over all the nice trigger points they installed.) no other choice. bleh.
i can see the arguments rising in your head already: "but half-life was made years before deus ex!" true, and a fairly irrefutable point. video game progression hadn't gotten to this point of sophistication yet (with potential exceptions such as Thief; it may have come out at roughly the same time, i can't remember.)
anyway, Half-life, Thief, SYstem shock 2, Deus Ex... they were all great games, and you can see a certain progression of development among them. I just hope that developers look back at the things like triggerpoint loading vs mobs that are there doing their jobs all the time (like in real life) all the time, and learn from the lessons of the past in what makes a good game, so that they can make even better games in the future. I look forward to it.
eudas
p.s. oh, btw, even deus ex had its weaknesses. for example, eidos bought out Looking glass's implementation of certain things; i think that they took the Thief/Thief2/System Shock 2 type engine and modified/enhanced it for Deus Ex. However, the Thief/Thief2/SS2 all had a memory leak type bug in common; after a while, you would get one of two symptoms: 1) the program would crash, losing unsaved data (happened to a friend), or 2) the memory leak would eventually cause something to go awry with the sound, making everything fuck up that involved sound (usually creating some god-awful screeching) until you saved, exited, and rebooted the computer. deus ex inherited these bug(s) to some lesser extent... they didn't affect as drastically, but that could have been a symptom of 256mb ram instead of 64... i had more memory for it to eat up, so it took longer to run out. heh.
oh, and the mobs, even though they were there and had persistence, and were somewhat smarter in responses (warning each other, etc) they still had the Thief engine weakness; that is, that if they saw you and went into Active-Warning-Defense mode, they would swarm around a bit (like a hive of bees)... but if you hid, and waited for them to 'lose scent' of you, they would just go back to their previous patterns. if you did this several times, they would still do the same thing. they weren't programmed to figure out patterns and install additional guards in an area where you kept showing up, or even to do something like be more alert than usual after you've tripped the alarm once or twice. i certainly hope that if one trips an alarm on a military base in the real world, they don't just go back to normal sleepy routine after an alarm trips! i'd hope that place would be a beehive until they figured out EXACTLY where that intruder went.
Slashdot Mirror
too many kids thinking that The Matrix has them...
eudas
well, people have always said m$ wants to break into the server market... if you can use the xbox as an apache webserver, than qualifies, i guess...
eudas
just "fix" the a/c so that it looks like it's responding to the external commands of corporate HQ, but only truly obeys local commands from you.
eudas
>north
You see a new house. In front of it is a new 2002 Mustang(tm).
>look mustang
It's shiny and new, is rated #1 in Car Magazine(tm), and gets 37 miles per gallon. It uses Goodyear(tm) tires, which are rated #1 in Autotrader Magazine(tm) for traction, even in wet weather.
>look house
It's a lovely pastel blue house, built by HouseCo(tm), providing you with the finest in custom construction since 1939. It has an alarm.
>look alarm
The alarm is provided by SecureCo(tm), America's top-rated security consultancy agency. This model is the new VK-3000(tm), and provides such essential features as light monitoring, automatic door detection, motion detection in and out of the house, and a baked potato timer.
>look timer
It's time to take the baked potatoes (provided by HEB(tm)) out of the oven (provided by Sears(tm)).
---
eudas
i remember back in the day, we installed Star wars: xwing on a 486 back when 486's were cool, and what pops up? "Say hello to Neon." we looked at each other in confusion: wtf? turns out the .bat file which starts the game runs a .exe which shows the ad. after you exit that prog, the .bat file runs the actual .exe which starts the game. so,we edited the .bat file and took out the line that ran the ad's .exe.
they've been there, but not like that. that was the only time i've seen something like that. haven't seen it since. hope never to see it again.
eudas
heh sounds like Clockwork Orange meets Star Trek, with a little Tipper Gore added in for spice.
eudas
the 'swine in the federal govt' don't want people advocating the assassination of unethical government employees because they *are* the unethical government employees.
eudas
i would, except i don't see banner ads anymore.
thank you, webwasher.
eudas
Just because you can't see the thing with your naked eye does not necessarily indicate that your location does not have 'line of sight' with the transmission tower.
eudas
what's even scarier is that many things are raising the age limits up to 21. the other day, i saw that UPS won't leave a package unless, as their form says, a person '21 or over' signs for it. 21 or over? what the flying fuck is that shit? since when was 21 the legal age for signing contracts or other binding forms? and it's not just that; while that's the only specific example i can be bothered to come up with right now, there is a general trend in other places to also raise the bar from 18 to 21.
what is this trend? why does it exist? why is it that people under 30 are treated like children and not like the legal adults that they are? it seems to me that the duration of childhood is being (almost) deliberately drawn out, in order to marginalize a group of people or strip them of their rights for a longer period of time. why?
it disquiets me, and makes me afraid and angry.
eudas
correct me if i'm wrong but wasn't that just a bit before the DMCA went into full effect?
eudas
actually you've got a point. everybody's so concerned with protecting their children, they're willing to fuck the rights of themselves, their neighbours, and everybody else. what they don't realize is that they're also fucking over the rights of their children once their children grow up to be adults.
so, for the love of god, THINK OF THE CHILDREN and don't fuck them over by stealing their rights. as a result, i won't have to lose mine either, you rotten bastards.
eudas
actually it's not the locks that keep me out... it's the fear of the forensics labs. you sneeze while breaking into somebody's house and you're going to visit bubba in jail. =)
i can't remember what insightful soul put this concept into words -- that fear of punishment keeps more people in line than appeal to reason or morals does.
cheers,
eudas
maybe it's "Ace" Rimmer...
eudas
for that matter, who said that a genetically engineered superman doesn't rule half of asia?...
eudas
or, thirdly, expend much more energy than you were in sneaking around. honestly, the biggest gripe is not in the technicality of the bug, but more in the realm of general AI development (imo). they just need less abusable ai patterns for mobs. good old turing test type stuff, except w/rt behaviour.
eudas
i hear ya. that game rocked.
eudas
i was thinking:
1. take counterstrike's FPS, round-based combat
2. make a "general" for each team who places specific team members in specific job slots (sergeant, private, squad leader, whatever) and specific places
3. make each round a battle with an if..then..else outcome, which will determine the next battle placement, as in a war. win one battle, advance a trench. lose one, fall back a trench. (wwI) etc.
4. the goal is to win the war; "generals" can get their strategy fix by picking places to defend and places to move/place troops, fps ppl can get their fix by being the troops.
anyway, it's an incomplete idea, but hopefully you can get the basic gist of what i'm saying.
eudas
speaking of Stars!, the VGA Planets crowd always thought Stars was a cheap rip-off =).
eudas
as of 20010223@1835CST, the ftp server that hosts the link for 'propagandistic lies' seems to be disabled, or the account name/pw changed. does anybody have a mirror of the pdf file? i'd be interested in reading it.
eudas
unless compliance with such an organization was government-mandated, nobody would submit their products and product specs to it for review. in that case, the review boards would have to "hack" the things in order to find out if they contained content control mechanisms, which not only would be illegal according to the dmca if such mechanisms WERE included, but would also fail to provide assurance beyond a reasonable doubt whether or not said mechanisms were actually present. in other words, without companies willingly submitting specs and items in a compliant fashion, the value of the organization's assurance would be questionable. this would thereby weaken the value of their 'sigil', and essentially invalidate their raison d'être.
eudas
'i saw the end of the world and all i got was this lousy t-shirt'
eudas
p.s. the lameness filter sucks.
eudas
if the library of congress had an archive of the alt.binaries.* hierarchy, including all the warez groups, that would be a pretty funny legal quandary. they'd be obligated to put it up (it's the public's archives!) and obligated to take it down (it's copyrighted material!) at the same time... hee hee.
eudas
[gossip] l33t b0i: hey dudes, i found a scale!
[gossip] r0x0r m4n: uh, i think thatz like +3dam or something.
[auction] l33t b0i: snake scale for sale, 40 megabux
eudas
half life was cool as hell, up until you play Deus Ex, and then go back and play Half-Life again and realize how LIMITED half-life is in terms of story development.
as an example, i played half-life, then deus ex, and then Half-Life: Opposing Forces. while Half-life was fun the first time around, deus ex blew it out of the water. when the time came to play Opposing forces, the total lack of interactivity with objects and the fact that mobs don't spawn until you walk over a triggerpoint was really irritating.
as an example, there was a certain point in opfor that you walk between some trailer-crates and a big nasty slug with legs thingy spawns to your left, while a huge grasshopper-lookin' guy spawns to your right. after being hugely surprised by this, and dying, i reloaded a quicksave game and decided to ambush them from on top of the crates. lo and behold, when i looked down at where he should be, he wasn't there -- i hadn't set off the trigger that loads them.
compare this to deus ex, where mobs all spawn when the level is loaded, and have set patrol points, warning responses, etc. they're there, doing their thing, whether you're there looking at them or not.
more importantly, you can take many different paths to reach your objective. in half-life, you're herded like a cow into a semi; you have two ways to go. the way you came from (everything's been raped and pillaged that way already), and the way they want you to go (preferably over all the nice trigger points they installed.) no other choice. bleh.
i can see the arguments rising in your head already: "but half-life was made years before deus ex!" true, and a fairly irrefutable point. video game progression hadn't gotten to this point of sophistication yet (with potential exceptions such as Thief; it may have come out at roughly the same time, i can't remember.)
anyway, Half-life, Thief, SYstem shock 2, Deus Ex... they were all great games, and you can see a certain progression of development among them. I just hope that developers look back at the things like triggerpoint loading vs mobs that are there doing their jobs all the time (like in real life) all the time, and learn from the lessons of the past in what makes a good game, so that they can make even better games in the future. I look forward to it.
eudas
p.s. oh, btw, even deus ex had its weaknesses. for example, eidos bought out Looking glass's implementation of certain things; i think that they took the Thief/Thief2/System Shock 2 type engine and modified/enhanced it for Deus Ex. However, the Thief/Thief2/SS2 all had a memory leak type bug in common; after a while, you would get one of two symptoms: 1) the program would crash, losing unsaved data (happened to a friend), or 2) the memory leak would eventually cause something to go awry with the sound, making everything fuck up that involved sound (usually creating some god-awful screeching) until you saved, exited, and rebooted the computer. deus ex inherited these bug(s) to some lesser extent... they didn't affect as drastically, but that could have been a symptom of 256mb ram instead of 64... i had more memory for it to eat up, so it took longer to run out. heh.
oh, and the mobs, even though they were there and had persistence, and were somewhat smarter in responses (warning each other, etc) they still had the Thief engine weakness; that is, that if they saw you and went into Active-Warning-Defense mode, they would swarm around a bit (like a hive of bees)... but if you hid, and waited for them to 'lose scent' of you, they would just go back to their previous patterns. if you did this several times, they would still do the same thing. they weren't programmed to figure out patterns and install additional guards in an area where you kept showing up, or even to do something like be more alert than usual after you've tripped the alarm once or twice. i certainly hope that if one trips an alarm on a military base in the real world, they don't just go back to normal sleepy routine after an alarm trips! i'd hope that place would be a beehive until they figured out EXACTLY where that intruder went.
anyway, blah blah blah... i sign off now.
cheers,
eudas