Applying a no-disc crack is ALWAYS just unzipping a replacement executable over the original. Either that, or the warezed release bundles the cracked files right into the installer.
It's so easy, even norms can do it. They learn it once, then every other game is exactly the same. The only curveball you might see is for sloppily packaged games that "hide" their binaries in a/bin folder. OOOOOH!:P
According to Wikipedia, Elite IV could actually be out this year! Yep, right after Duke Nukem Forever.
*crickets*
Seriously though, engineering would have been a fun thing to do, if only I hadn't had tunnel vision in my teens... back then, I never thought I would grow tired of programming and fed up with the industry. I could sure use a Flux Capacitor right about now.
#2. How many Apple users don't already have local root access ?
I'm honestly asking, because I have very little experience with Macs in the workplace. How often will one see a Mac user that doesn't have root access ? In the Windows world, it's very common with Active Directory networks and locked-down corporate desktops... is the same true of Apple shops ?
I always found it counter-productive... the gov't is willing to bring these people over for work, offer them specialized resources to help with their assimilation, yet they don't want them working for the gov't itself.
It's like they WANT megacorporations to overthrow the gov't - they've got all the hard workers and more money than should be legal. This litigious bullshit will only last so long, eventually it will be most cost-effective to skip the courts and privatize human rights.
Not quite... wrought is the past tense of work. When used in "wrought havoc" it does form a correct phrase, though the meaning is slightly different from "wreaked havoc".
You and everyone else who's criticizing me, read carefully:
Bounces should never be relayed, EVER! If your server generates a bounce, it should be for your own users and no one else. Relaying bounces is what we call "backscatter", it is incorrect and that's the bounce-spam you're seeing - although a surprising portion of such bounces are forgeries themselves, to sneak around keyword filters that often whitelist legit-looking bounces.
Here's a pair of examples to illustrate:
A. A spammer sends mail to my server, with a forged return address. My spam filters reject the mail at the SMTP level, either because the sender or receiver are unknown, or that particular netblock is being throttled. The message is dropped, and the SMTP connection silently closes. The message is destroyed and no bounce ever occurs. If this were a legit mail server, it would send a bounce to the sender, informing them of the non-delivery. The bounce is created by the sending server, not mine.
B. One of my users sends mail to a non-existent address. My server gets rejected by the destination server, and I send a bounce to MY user informing them of non-delivery.
I don't have any other scenarios, because I require all my users to authenticate. For machine-generated mail, I enforce strict rules for the sender. If it doesn't point to one of my domains (or a handful of authorized outsiders), it gets logged and discarded. That means someone uploading a PHP script (or exploiting one) can't use my server to send forged mail, and the firewall ensures they can't do manual SMTP over raw sockets.
It's really not that hard to run a tight server. The problem is there are a lot of stupid lazy bastards posing as sysadmins.
As rightly you should, since they are stupid. My server doesn't create backscatter spam, it either accepts or rejects the sender/recipient/server immediately, before the message body is ever processed. An error is presented to the sending server, and delivery is aborted.
The only instance where I do generate a bounce is when I'm sending mail and I get such an error, because that means one of MY users screwed up, and they should be informed of the problem. This happens a lot with mailing lists, people move around, or they go on vacation/sick leave and their mailbox gets full... it's important that the list manager receives these errors so they can clean up their list, but the bounce messages originate from my server for delivery to my users. They don't ever get relayed to remote mail servers.
That's how bounces are supposed to work, IMO. If you're having delayed failures than return bounces after the fact, you need to turn those delayed failures into instant failures. Either you accept the mail, or you don't - no need for a grace period.
True, but the greylisting culls a surprisingly large number of those, and the deep-analysis spam filter catches a high percentage of the remainder.
If a bit of backscatter spam gets through, well, tough! Bouncebacks exist for a reason, and if a spammer goes to such great lengths that they can get through my many filters, that's something I can live with. I'd rather let 1% of spam through, than block 100% of legitimate bouncebacks.
You're right on both counts. The Creative 4.1s were overpriced garbage, and the Logitech X-530s are budget wonders. Like you said: loud, pretty decent sound and cheap as dirt.
I still do much of my work on an old set of Altec Lansing ACS54's. The sub is poop, so I have a custom sub and crossover, but the rest of it goes through those cheap little gaming speakers. They're phenomenal! I mean, my Alesis monitors are nicer, but considering the Alesis cost 10x as much as the Altecs, that's to be expected.
There are good deals at all price points, the hard part is finding them.
Simple method would be a tower case with an LCD built into the side Yep, that's what I do (mentioned a few posts earlier). I have a big ATX cube with a carrying handle, and an LCD panel mounted to a ghetto side-panel. A while back I tried using gel batteries for temporary power, but it was too heavy for the limited run-time (~15 mins per 7ah slab). I don't really need it operational on the go, I just plug in when I get there.
Assembler isn't that much different from C or any other simple language. An assembler is essentially a preprocessor for machine code. It adds human elements to the code to make it more manageable. You can define jump labels, functions, constants, macros - same as any other.
Any decent asm programmer has a bunch of standby routines to call upon, much like a good application developer will have a few custom libraries with shared code. To build a game like SMB3, you would build a few basic libraries for graphics, sound and input, then tie them together with some very straightforward loops and branches. The game logic for SMB3 is simple and deterministic, everything behaves according to fixed patterns, there's no A.I. or pathfinding to worry about.
This is quickly descending into an "us vs them" debate. Self-modifying code is a tool, knowing where to use it is even more important than knowing how to use it.
Self-mod code was appropriate for what I was doing at the time. I needed my cost to be as tight and fast as possible, and throwing more hardware at it simply wasn't an option - I was already using crazy-fast SGI machines.
Conversely, using the phrase "grow up and learn" to a veteran software developer, now that's real mature!:P If you think my work consists of a series of disjointed hacks, cobbled together with random luck in-between coke bumps... well I'm afraid there's nothing I could say to open your eyes.
What I did back in the day, was nothing more than extreme instruction-level optimization. Today's compilers do a pretty good job of it, and the CPU decoder does a whole lot more, so hand-tuning is rarely needed, and quite frankly today's hardware is so fast, it doesn't matter anywhere near as much as it did back in the 90s. My current processor is theoretically 800 times faster than the one that ran my old music software. It isn't worth my time to spend 8 hours tweaking 300 bytes of machine code because the sub-optimal code is already fast enough and probably less than 20% away from "perfect code".
What typically happened back then, I would write a prototype in a high-level language (which meant C or Pascal), then convert critical parts into watertight assembler. Particularly for sound and graphics loops, the speed gains were anything from 50% to 5000%.
Key example: bilinear image scaling, on a 486, was very slow. To scale a 320x200 image up to 640x480 took roughly one second in plain old C. The assembler version could run at 20 frames per second, and yes, I used self-mod loops in that one. The non-self-mod version ran at quarter-speed, due to the heavy nested loops in the convolution matrix - that's just how bilinear is done. The self-mod unrolled the loops on-the-fly, used precalculated offsets, and juggled the coefficients in fixed-decimal while avoiding register thrashing.
Sure, it was unmaintainable, but these were small, tight, purpose built functions. There is only one correct algorithm to do bilinear image scaling, it's not a business rule or a kernel driver - it's true computer science that has been tried and proven. I just coded it to be as fast as I possibly could.
If by "paid okay" you mean "less money than an unskilled immigrant laborer", you're absolutely correct!
Programmers in the 80s and 90s used to make a zillion dollars, and many of us took pride in the quality of our work.
Programmers in the 21st century earn less than the secretary, have unrealistic deadlines and get blamed for everything.
I think part of the problem is that it's near-impossible for a layperson to gauge whether a developer is good or not, so they assume we're all idiots and treat us as such.
Whoever modded the parent Flamebait needs to take their meds. Disagreement != Flamebait.
I have to agree, the original Unreal was kind of disappointing. Nice graphics but where was the plot ? There was that interesting moment, right at the start, when you enter some building and the lights go dark one-by-one... then you kill whatever the hell was in there, and go back outside to shoot at more buff aliens throughout the entire game. It felt very forced and poorly thought out. But it was damned gorgeous for the time and it made the Voodoo do things never seen before.
Crysis seems to trigger a love-it or hate-it response, often for the same reasons.
I liked it because it was short, fast-paced and offered many paths to victory. You could drive along the road and face roadblocks, or you could hop on a boat, perch on an island and snipe from a safe distance. Sometimes I just ran like hell and avoided combat entirely.
The flight level was painful, mostly due to the terrible controls and sluggish response, which made the battles take far too long. All the land missions though, I thought they were pretty cool.
I haven't played any multiplayer maps, but I've played through the single player campaign twice, each time in a single sitting - one long ass afternoon:) It's extremely rare for me to play a game start-to-finish, I get bored too easily...
Yep it's true, those tiny little plugs are a horrible design. If you're crafty, you can replace the weird jacks with good 1/8th monos, maybe add a small o-ring around the cables, to tweak the "Y" height.
My gripe isn't so much with the soldering job, but the replacement cable some of them use. It's bad enough that thousands of people shell $200 for the Cardas cable, promising better sound... it's just plain retarded when a monumentally stoned mixing engineer blows $1000+ on boutique interconnects, chops off one end and solders those into the headphones.
Or maybe I've listened to too much music and damaged my ears, so I can't hear the "difference". Yeah, right!
It's funny, just a few days ago my Mass Effect started acting up, and I was close to the end already, so I went looking for a crack... god, there are tons of fake ones out there, or half-working ones that don't let you save (demo executable?).
I eventually found a home-made (vs warez-released) crack, by some guy name Gniarf on some random forum, that works 100%. I don't know who Gniarf is or how he pulled it off, but if a random dude on a forum is able to crack the DRM in Mass Effect, it seems to me like EA wasted a shitload of money on that DRM for absolutely nothing.
What did EA gain from the DRM ? A bunch of frustrated customers who got clobbered by the 10-day activation, as many had predicted. Would it have sold less copies without DRM ? Doubtful, seeing how quickly the fix was produced. It's not even a race anymore, the cracks come out so fast, I wonder why the game houses even pretend to put up a fight. Dead horse much ?
I'm allergic to stupid loudmouthed inbreds. Can I sue to have them all killed and incinerated ?
I can demonstrate the effects idiots have on me, and the violent "allergic" reactions I suffer in their presence. Most of them involve uncontrollable flailing while handling sharp cutlery.
Here's some more random correlative evidence: I love me some bumper stickers, and I'm a self-declared asshole, particularly to other assholes.
Road rage is contagious... it takes one irresponsible prick to start it, then all the other testosterone hounds jump in. It's not in most people's nature to be aggressive on the road, but in response to a fast-moving threat I find it perfectly justified to fight back.
I think it's normal to curse at every other car on the freeway... you're actually going easy on the other 50% who are probably idiots too. Let's face it: bad drivers put your health and safety in immediate danger, and their vehicles become weapons.
Road rage is a reality of life, and I sometimes make a point of drawing attention if I'm really pissed off at someone, either by cutting them off (payback) or by tailgating like a psychopath... but it takes a lot to bring me to such vengeful anger.
I draw the line at wackos who get out of the vehicle and physically attack others, that's just nuts! As much as I'd love to crush people's skulls over their driving habits, it's just not necessary and won't solve anything. There are billions of idiots in the world, we can't kill them all.
Sexism aside, that article reads like a want-ad. Seems to me like Ingres is in desperate need of more estrogen, and that lone female coder has grown tired of chatting up the HR bimbos.
If women write better code, does that mean we shouldn't hire bulldykes ? Talk amongst yourselves!
Yep, ETQW is an interesting game reminiscent of Battlefield to some degree, but it only serves to highlight my deeply-rooted sociopathy, because I fail miserably vs the computer, even on easy difficulty:( I haven't even ventured online yet, I already know I'll get creamed.
Comparatively, I enjoyed UT3 a bit more, largely due to its simplicity: grab orb, make a run for it, capture node / destroy enemy node. No support classes, just Speedball 2 with guns:)
Good one, but seriously.. fire up one of the many horrible Wii games out there, and you'll see that great graphics can save a crap game, but crap graphics on a crap game will make you want to throw chairs.
What makes the Wii so much fun is that it has a couple dozen absolutely fantastic games that make up for the hundreds of shitty ones. It's like the SNES all over again!
I loves me a good plot, with rich writing and character development, but I also loves me some 27" max-detail graphical virtuosity. Mass Effect is getting a lot of love from me right now, because it delivers a healthy balance of plot and visuals.
Crysis, of course, is a rather sexual experience at 1920x1200. Every now and then I'll perch myself atop a cliff and gaze at the breathtaking imagery... then I go back into cloak mode and snipe the mofos back to hell! I'm not a big FPS fan, but Crysis is one of the few titles that give me a sense of immersion, like I'm actually a gun wielding superhero instead of some synthetic alien cannon fodder.
Would I play Crysis if it looked like ass ? Probably not, because that particular experience hinges on the realistic graphics and all the fine details.
Would I play Quake if it looked like ass ? Hell yes, I would! In fact I did, it was called Quake 1-2-3... They're ghetto by today's standards, but the action was solid and I happily pissed away countless hours railing goddamned teenagers on instagib maps. Just give me a pixel to shoot at and I'm set!
I'm trying to think of a gorgeous game that sucked... memory is failing me right now, but there have been many. Actually, at the risk of getting flamed to death, I'd say Oblivion was one such stinker (for me). The graphics were pretty nice for its time, but I found the actual gameplay sluggish and clumsy. The sandbox concept worked well, but I spent most of my time walking around those stupid hell dimensions looking for stuff to kill, and then dicking around towns waiting for some NPC to come out of hiding at a specific time of day. Much like GTA, I quickly got bored of the storyline and started playing randomly, killing innocents and all the guards I could handle. I stopped playing it after maybe two weeks... epic fail.
Self-modifying assembly is a long-lost art. If you have a strong stomach, a long long time ago I used to use QuickBasic as a ghetto scripting tool, loading in various assembler modules to do the dirty work. I later switched to Pascal.
Back then, most of my hardware-control loops used self-modifying bits and bobs... sometimes to save a byte, sometimes to avoid a fetch. A few times I used true self-modifying code where the outer loops would reprogram the inner loops on-the-fly. It was the most CPU-efficient way to do realtime multichannel sound synthesis on a 486, and of course it gave me the opportunity to refer to it as a dynamic synth compiler:) The bitches were all over me, dawg!
All that lovely code died a quick, silent death when Windows 95 came along. It wreaked all sorts of havoc and Windows would kill the app as soon as it tried to self-mod. It's a shame I didn't keep up with the skills, I could be one rich despicable virus writer today:)
It's times like this I miss the 90's, I still have that 386 programming manual somewhere safe.
Slashdot Mirror
eh ?
/bin folder. OOOOOH! :P
Applying a no-disc crack is ALWAYS just unzipping a replacement executable over the original. Either that, or the warezed release bundles the cracked files right into the installer.
It's so easy, even norms can do it. They learn it once, then every other game is exactly the same. The only curveball you might see is for sloppily packaged games that "hide" their binaries in a
*crickets*
Seriously though, engineering would have been a fun thing to do, if only I hadn't had tunnel vision in my teens... back then, I never thought I would grow tired of programming and fed up with the industry. I could sure use a Flux Capacitor right about now.
Okay, so this is a local root escalation.
#1. How many Apple boxes are used for servers ?
aaaaand
#2. How many Apple users don't already have local root access ?
I'm honestly asking, because I have very little experience with Macs in the workplace. How often will one see a Mac user that doesn't have root access ? In the Windows world, it's very common with Active Directory networks and locked-down corporate desktops... is the same true of Apple shops ?
If that's not racism, I don't know what is.
I always found it counter-productive... the gov't is willing to bring these people over for work, offer them specialized resources to help with their assimilation, yet they don't want them working for the gov't itself.
It's like they WANT megacorporations to overthrow the gov't - they've got all the hard workers and more money than should be legal. This litigious bullshit will only last so long, eventually it will be most cost-effective to skip the courts and privatize human rights.
Not quite... wrought is the past tense of work. When used in "wrought havoc" it does form a correct phrase, though the meaning is slightly different from "wreaked havoc".
/My language beats your language
I'll spare you the full details, there's a good writeup at http://www.takeourword.com/Issue048.html
You and everyone else who's criticizing me, read carefully:
Bounces should never be relayed, EVER! If your server generates a bounce, it should be for your own users and no one else. Relaying bounces is what we call "backscatter", it is incorrect and that's the bounce-spam you're seeing - although a surprising portion of such bounces are forgeries themselves, to sneak around keyword filters that often whitelist legit-looking bounces.
Here's a pair of examples to illustrate:
A. A spammer sends mail to my server, with a forged return address. My spam filters reject the mail at the SMTP level, either because the sender or receiver are unknown, or that particular netblock is being throttled. The message is dropped, and the SMTP connection silently closes. The message is destroyed and no bounce ever occurs. If this were a legit mail server, it would send a bounce to the sender, informing them of the non-delivery. The bounce is created by the sending server, not mine.
B. One of my users sends mail to a non-existent address. My server gets rejected by the destination server, and I send a bounce to MY user informing them of non-delivery.
I don't have any other scenarios, because I require all my users to authenticate. For machine-generated mail, I enforce strict rules for the sender. If it doesn't point to one of my domains (or a handful of authorized outsiders), it gets logged and discarded. That means someone uploading a PHP script (or exploiting one) can't use my server to send forged mail, and the firewall ensures they can't do manual SMTP over raw sockets.
It's really not that hard to run a tight server. The problem is there are a lot of stupid lazy bastards posing as sysadmins.
As rightly you should, since they are stupid. My server doesn't create backscatter spam, it either accepts or rejects the sender/recipient/server immediately, before the message body is ever processed. An error is presented to the sending server, and delivery is aborted.
The only instance where I do generate a bounce is when I'm sending mail and I get such an error, because that means one of MY users screwed up, and they should be informed of the problem. This happens a lot with mailing lists, people move around, or they go on vacation/sick leave and their mailbox gets full... it's important that the list manager receives these errors so they can clean up their list, but the bounce messages originate from my server for delivery to my users. They don't ever get relayed to remote mail servers.
That's how bounces are supposed to work, IMO. If you're having delayed failures than return bounces after the fact, you need to turn those delayed failures into instant failures. Either you accept the mail, or you don't - no need for a grace period.
True, but the greylisting culls a surprisingly large number of those, and the deep-analysis spam filter catches a high percentage of the remainder.
If a bit of backscatter spam gets through, well, tough! Bouncebacks exist for a reason, and if a spammer goes to such great lengths that they can get through my many filters, that's something I can live with. I'd rather let 1% of spam through, than block 100% of legitimate bouncebacks.
You're right on both counts. The Creative 4.1s were overpriced garbage, and the Logitech X-530s are budget wonders. Like you said: loud, pretty decent sound and cheap as dirt.
I still do much of my work on an old set of Altec Lansing ACS54's. The sub is poop, so I have a custom sub and crossover, but the rest of it goes through those cheap little gaming speakers. They're phenomenal! I mean, my Alesis monitors are nicer, but considering the Alesis cost 10x as much as the Altecs, that's to be expected.
There are good deals at all price points, the hard part is finding them.
Assembler isn't that much different from C or any other simple language. An assembler is essentially a preprocessor for machine code. It adds human elements to the code to make it more manageable. You can define jump labels, functions, constants, macros - same as any other.
Any decent asm programmer has a bunch of standby routines to call upon, much like a good application developer will have a few custom libraries with shared code. To build a game like SMB3, you would build a few basic libraries for graphics, sound and input, then tie them together with some very straightforward loops and branches. The game logic for SMB3 is simple and deterministic, everything behaves according to fixed patterns, there's no A.I. or pathfinding to worry about.
This is quickly descending into an "us vs them" debate. Self-modifying code is a tool, knowing where to use it is even more important than knowing how to use it.
:P If you think my work consists of a series of disjointed hacks, cobbled together with random luck in-between coke bumps... well I'm afraid there's nothing I could say to open your eyes.
Self-mod code was appropriate for what I was doing at the time. I needed my cost to be as tight and fast as possible, and throwing more hardware at it simply wasn't an option - I was already using crazy-fast SGI machines.
Conversely, using the phrase "grow up and learn" to a veteran software developer, now that's real mature!
What I did back in the day, was nothing more than extreme instruction-level optimization. Today's compilers do a pretty good job of it, and the CPU decoder does a whole lot more, so hand-tuning is rarely needed, and quite frankly today's hardware is so fast, it doesn't matter anywhere near as much as it did back in the 90s. My current processor is theoretically 800 times faster than the one that ran my old music software. It isn't worth my time to spend 8 hours tweaking 300 bytes of machine code because the sub-optimal code is already fast enough and probably less than 20% away from "perfect code".
What typically happened back then, I would write a prototype in a high-level language (which meant C or Pascal), then convert critical parts into watertight assembler. Particularly for sound and graphics loops, the speed gains were anything from 50% to 5000%.
Key example: bilinear image scaling, on a 486, was very slow. To scale a 320x200 image up to 640x480 took roughly one second in plain old C. The assembler version could run at 20 frames per second, and yes, I used self-mod loops in that one. The non-self-mod version ran at quarter-speed, due to the heavy nested loops in the convolution matrix - that's just how bilinear is done. The self-mod unrolled the loops on-the-fly, used precalculated offsets, and juggled the coefficients in fixed-decimal while avoiding register thrashing.
Sure, it was unmaintainable, but these were small, tight, purpose built functions. There is only one correct algorithm to do bilinear image scaling, it's not a business rule or a kernel driver - it's true computer science that has been tried and proven. I just coded it to be as fast as I possibly could.
If by "paid okay" you mean "less money than an unskilled immigrant laborer", you're absolutely correct!
Programmers in the 80s and 90s used to make a zillion dollars, and many of us took pride in the quality of our work.
Programmers in the 21st century earn less than the secretary, have unrealistic deadlines and get blamed for everything.
I think part of the problem is that it's near-impossible for a layperson to gauge whether a developer is good or not, so they assume we're all idiots and treat us as such.
Whoever modded the parent Flamebait needs to take their meds. Disagreement != Flamebait.
I have to agree, the original Unreal was kind of disappointing. Nice graphics but where was the plot ? There was that interesting moment, right at the start, when you enter some building and the lights go dark one-by-one... then you kill whatever the hell was in there, and go back outside to shoot at more buff aliens throughout the entire game. It felt very forced and poorly thought out. But it was damned gorgeous for the time and it made the Voodoo do things never seen before.
Crysis seems to trigger a love-it or hate-it response, often for the same reasons.
:) It's extremely rare for me to play a game start-to-finish, I get bored too easily...
I liked it because it was short, fast-paced and offered many paths to victory. You could drive along the road and face roadblocks, or you could hop on a boat, perch on an island and snipe from a safe distance. Sometimes I just ran like hell and avoided combat entirely.
The flight level was painful, mostly due to the terrible controls and sluggish response, which made the battles take far too long. All the land missions though, I thought they were pretty cool.
I haven't played any multiplayer maps, but I've played through the single player campaign twice, each time in a single sitting - one long ass afternoon
Yep it's true, those tiny little plugs are a horrible design. If you're crafty, you can replace the weird jacks with good 1/8th monos, maybe add a small o-ring around the cables, to tweak the "Y" height.
My gripe isn't so much with the soldering job, but the replacement cable some of them use. It's bad enough that thousands of people shell $200 for the Cardas cable, promising better sound... it's just plain retarded when a monumentally stoned mixing engineer blows $1000+ on boutique interconnects, chops off one end and solders those into the headphones.
Or maybe I've listened to too much music and damaged my ears, so I can't hear the "difference". Yeah, right!
It's funny, just a few days ago my Mass Effect started acting up, and I was close to the end already, so I went looking for a crack... god, there are tons of fake ones out there, or half-working ones that don't let you save (demo executable?).
I eventually found a home-made (vs warez-released) crack, by some guy name Gniarf on some random forum, that works 100%. I don't know who Gniarf is or how he pulled it off, but if a random dude on a forum is able to crack the DRM in Mass Effect, it seems to me like EA wasted a shitload of money on that DRM for absolutely nothing.
What did EA gain from the DRM ? A bunch of frustrated customers who got clobbered by the 10-day activation, as many had predicted. Would it have sold less copies without DRM ? Doubtful, seeing how quickly the fix was produced. It's not even a race anymore, the cracks come out so fast, I wonder why the game houses even pretend to put up a fight. Dead horse much ?
I'm allergic to stupid loudmouthed inbreds. Can I sue to have them all killed and incinerated ?
I can demonstrate the effects idiots have on me, and the violent "allergic" reactions I suffer in their presence. Most of them involve uncontrollable flailing while handling sharp cutlery.
Here's some more random correlative evidence: I love me some bumper stickers, and I'm a self-declared asshole, particularly to other assholes.
Road rage is contagious... it takes one irresponsible prick to start it, then all the other testosterone hounds jump in. It's not in most people's nature to be aggressive on the road, but in response to a fast-moving threat I find it perfectly justified to fight back.
I think it's normal to curse at every other car on the freeway... you're actually going easy on the other 50% who are probably idiots too. Let's face it: bad drivers put your health and safety in immediate danger, and their vehicles become weapons.
Road rage is a reality of life, and I sometimes make a point of drawing attention if I'm really pissed off at someone, either by cutting them off (payback) or by tailgating like a psychopath... but it takes a lot to bring me to such vengeful anger.
I draw the line at wackos who get out of the vehicle and physically attack others, that's just nuts! As much as I'd love to crush people's skulls over their driving habits, it's just not necessary and won't solve anything. There are billions of idiots in the world, we can't kill them all.
Sexism aside, that article reads like a want-ad. Seems to me like Ingres is in desperate need of more estrogen, and that lone female coder has grown tired of chatting up the HR bimbos.
If women write better code, does that mean we shouldn't hire bulldykes ? Talk amongst yourselves!
Yep, ETQW is an interesting game reminiscent of Battlefield to some degree, but it only serves to highlight my deeply-rooted sociopathy, because I fail miserably vs the computer, even on easy difficulty :( I haven't even ventured online yet, I already know I'll get creamed.
:)
Comparatively, I enjoyed UT3 a bit more, largely due to its simplicity: grab orb, make a run for it, capture node / destroy enemy node. No support classes, just Speedball 2 with guns
Good one, but seriously.. fire up one of the many horrible Wii games out there, and you'll see that great graphics can save a crap game, but crap graphics on a crap game will make you want to throw chairs.
What makes the Wii so much fun is that it has a couple dozen absolutely fantastic games that make up for the hundreds of shitty ones. It's like the SNES all over again!
I fail to see why we can't have both.
I loves me a good plot, with rich writing and character development, but I also loves me some 27" max-detail graphical virtuosity. Mass Effect is getting a lot of love from me right now, because it delivers a healthy balance of plot and visuals.
Crysis, of course, is a rather sexual experience at 1920x1200. Every now and then I'll perch myself atop a cliff and gaze at the breathtaking imagery... then I go back into cloak mode and snipe the mofos back to hell! I'm not a big FPS fan, but Crysis is one of the few titles that give me a sense of immersion, like I'm actually a gun wielding superhero instead of some synthetic alien cannon fodder.
Would I play Crysis if it looked like ass ? Probably not, because that particular experience hinges on the realistic graphics and all the fine details.
Would I play Quake if it looked like ass ? Hell yes, I would! In fact I did, it was called Quake 1-2-3... They're ghetto by today's standards, but the action was solid and I happily pissed away countless hours railing goddamned teenagers on instagib maps. Just give me a pixel to shoot at and I'm set!
I'm trying to think of a gorgeous game that sucked... memory is failing me right now, but there have been many. Actually, at the risk of getting flamed to death, I'd say Oblivion was one such stinker (for me). The graphics were pretty nice for its time, but I found the actual gameplay sluggish and clumsy. The sandbox concept worked well, but I spent most of my time walking around those stupid hell dimensions looking for stuff to kill, and then dicking around towns waiting for some NPC to come out of hiding at a specific time of day. Much like GTA, I quickly got bored of the storyline and started playing randomly, killing innocents and all the guards I could handle. I stopped playing it after maybe two weeks... epic fail.
Self-modifying assembly is a long-lost art. If you have a strong stomach, a long long time ago I used to use QuickBasic as a ghetto scripting tool, loading in various assembler modules to do the dirty work. I later switched to Pascal.
:) The bitches were all over me, dawg!
:)
Back then, most of my hardware-control loops used self-modifying bits and bobs... sometimes to save a byte, sometimes to avoid a fetch. A few times I used true self-modifying code where the outer loops would reprogram the inner loops on-the-fly. It was the most CPU-efficient way to do realtime multichannel sound synthesis on a 486, and of course it gave me the opportunity to refer to it as a dynamic synth compiler
All that lovely code died a quick, silent death when Windows 95 came along. It wreaked all sorts of havoc and Windows would kill the app as soon as it tried to self-mod. It's a shame I didn't keep up with the skills, I could be one rich despicable virus writer today
It's times like this I miss the 90's, I still have that 386 programming manual somewhere safe.