except that someone eventually will develop space weapons - it would be the height of arrogance to assume that just because the u.s. backs off, everyone will - and we really don't want to get a late start in that race.
that would actually be very useful. there still are sites out there that run
if (getBrowserVersion < 4) { alert("This site requires a modern browser to view.", onclose.redirect("http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx"); }
anyone can make up a chapter list. here's one i saw a while back:
01. The First War Ends 02. OWL Results 03. Up, Up and Away 04. Which Weasley? 05. Ceremonies and Catastrophes 06. Remus and Rita 07. The Welcoming Feast 08. Draco's Dark Mark 09. Crumble From Within 10. Those Who Will Not Return 11. NEWT Classes 12. Secrets and Lies 13. The Half-Blood Prince 14. The Diary of Tom Riddle 15. Dark Childhood 16. The Pride of Slytherin 17. Worldwide Wanderings 18. I Am Lord Voldemort 19. Dementors, Dragons and Dursleys 20. Hermione's Problem 21. Ron's Secret 22. Harry's Heritage 23. Discovery 24. Return to the Chamber 25. Up To No Good 26. Silver And Steel 27. Heart of a Lion 28. Debts Repaid 29. The Betrayer Betrayed 30. The Last Marauder 31. From The Ashes 32. The End of All Hope 33. The Hogwarts Graveyard 34. Never the Same 35. It Works Both Ways
As a bonus, three chapter titles from book 7!
Loyalty And Loss Blood Will Out The Legacy of Lily Potter
> 5) Repeat after me: most customers aren't stupid. They feel lost amid the technology and they are frustrated. Try to explain things in everyday language so that they can feel that the mystery of the technology isn't so overwhelming.
most customers are willfully ignorant. no, i can't fix my car, but i a) learn the terminology - i don't call the wheel the engine or the gas pedal the go-faster button. (all those words like hard drive, modem, etc that the computer gets called. plus the ones who think the monitor is the computer.) b) educate myself on the requirements and realities of ownership and use - i put gas in, i wash it, i have the oil changed, and if i can't get somewhere 100 miles away in 1 hour, i don't blame the manufacturer, i blame my lack of planning.
i had a customer last week who called up, enraged that the wireless network on his laptop no longer worked. turns out he was at his brother's house 30 miles from home.
what, really, do you say to something like that? i mean, i could understand if it was one of those cases where they open up the shiny new laptop and - because a neighbor has an unsecured "plug and play, it's so easy!" router - it gets a network connection immediately. if it were a case like that, i'd understand that he doesn't understand why it Magically Works at home and not 30 miles away.
but how do you make someone understand the signal won't reach 30 miles? i tried the radio station analogy - if you go 100 miles away, you get different radio stations. he blew up and said that i told him it would work anywhere.
i'd meant anywhere in the house.
the base reason for all of this is - he doesn't know jack shit about the technology. not even as much as i know about my car.
> Best buy salary is pretty high... between $14 and $16 an hour
that's not high. that's between 28k and 32k a year, gross. trust me, that's not nearly enough. if your take home gets to $20/hr, that's getting close to comfortable.
few people get to what i would call a "high" pay rate ($40-$50/hr tkhm, which translates to 80k-100k/yr) while they're still hourly.
> 2) Buy a router. £25/$40 buys you a piece of hardware which acts like a firewall and blocks all incoming ports, other than ones you solicit, natch.
and remember to turn off upnp. otherwise, the following happens:
<spiritual descendant of back orifice> hey router, this is a upnp request: forward 31337 to this computer, please! <router> will do, and you have a good day! <sdobo> oh, i will...
you can recolor dyed hair. you can take out metal. you can cover up ink.
i've been growing my hair out for five years. it's now to my waist. i keep it braided at all times and it never interferes with my work. but i can't do anything like the above to make it acceptable at the more conservative places save hack it off. and if i did that, i'd be thirty before it got this long again.
what really sucks about it is that, were i female, it wouldn't be given a second thought.
ambiguity: article> Half of the gamers are now over age 18, and almost a quarter are over age 50.
i read that as "almost a quarter (of all gamers)"; therefore 50% under 18, 25% 18-50, 25% 50+.
you're reading it as "almost a quarter (of the gamers over 18)" are over 50, therefore
parent>.5 *.25 * 100% = 12.5% of gamers are over 50 years old. Which means 50% - 12.5% = 37.5% of gamers are between ages 18 and 50 by the statistic cited. That's basic probability and statistics I used there.
but the problem was stated in non-technical language.
> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.
of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)
>6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
(in short - save points bad. quicksave good.)
this i disagree with. quicksave leads to people playing the game like this: take two steps forward, save, see enemy, restore, take one step forward, ambush enemy, take 2% damage in ensuing fight, restore, take five steps back and launch rockets at enemy's general position.
i watched a friend of mine play through half-life like this - he said it was boring, too tedious, and never challenging. gee, i wonder why.
> points 9-11: immersion, immersion, immersion.
not being able to jump an obstacle - bad. invisible walls - bad. but they're both conventions to aid in two things. a) so you have some fucking clue where to go and b) so the game designers don't have to map every nook and cranny and can concentrate on the parts of the level you're actually supposed to play. as far as heads up displays and such overlays, again, the amount of immersion they break is directly compensated for by the gameplay benefits, as long as they're done well. a giant floating hand telling you where to go? bad. car radar in the 1930s (as in mafia)? good, because it compensates for not having mirrors or a realistic field of view. iff in crosshairs, hell, crosshairs themselves in FPSes (or even disabling the trigger when your gun is aimed at a friendly) - good, compensating for the expertise and eyesight your character is supposed to have.
> 19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES
agreed. if i wanted jumping puzzles, i'd play mario. or i'd play a third person game that lets me see what the fuck i'm DOING - ie oni, jedi outcast/academy, prince of persia:sands of time...
for more, video game design cliches and video game design flaws [although that has more to do with the classic ones, like being killed by falling off the bottom of the screen to a place you just came from.]
> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.
of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)
>
The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.
In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I'm thinking that's going to be a lot of money. Now, it's true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.
20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Look at the little guy. The one on the left. The one who's just a head.
I mean, let's face it: strategy is all that guy's got going for him. He has no limbs and he's already on fire.
And yet, did anyone stop being impressed by Doom III long enough to notice he and the other bad guys were flailing at us with the same straight-line Ulysses S. Grant calvary charge that failed them twelve years ago in Doom 1? Even Far Cry had bad guys that went into spinning seizures when they got confused.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
"Do NOT duck inside those doors, men! Honorable warriors need no cover!"
Chances of that happening...
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
That means the next generation of games will likely play just like this generation. Only shiny.
Article continues after this ad...
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?
Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer who has to piece together evidence to exonerate a black man falsely ac
> I don't want 3 different optical drives in my tower.
i happen to have three different optidrives in my tower. DVD-ROM for dvd playing and sourcing cd copies. CD-RW for cd reading and writing. DVD+-RW for dvd burning.
> The most poignant moment in "Return of the Jedi" occurs when Luke looks at his right hand just after slicing off the mechanized right hand of Darth Vader.
because the mechanized stump reminds him of his own injury. it's a throwback to the previous film, not the previous trilogy.
> Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy.
anakin's own right hand is long gone. dooku took it off between the shoulder and the elbow in ep 2.
> Sure, the jedi can block a few shots a second, but what happens when you up the rate to 30 or 60 shots per second. Why no vulcan cannon-style blasters that fill the whole area with hot plasma death?
that's pretty much what they do in eps 2 and 3 - they overwhelm jedi with close range high volume fire.
Slashdot Mirror
the message is clear. burn it.
[sig reply] i've never heard of anyone conducting a stickup with siege weaponry before! [/sig reply]
except that someone eventually will develop space weapons - it would be the height of arrogance to assume that just because the u.s. backs off, everyone will - and we really don't want to get a late start in that race.
it's a potter torrent potter torrent potter torrent potter torrent potter torrent potter torrent potter torrent potter torrent download download!
a fake a fake! oooh it's a fake!
that's why i said "anyone can make up a list" and posted a list that had been made up.
anyone can make up a chapter list. here's one i saw a while back:
01. The First War Ends
02. OWL Results
03. Up, Up and Away
04. Which Weasley?
05. Ceremonies and Catastrophes
06. Remus and Rita
07. The Welcoming Feast
08. Draco's Dark Mark
09. Crumble From Within
10. Those Who Will Not Return
11. NEWT Classes
12. Secrets and Lies
13. The Half-Blood Prince
14. The Diary of Tom Riddle
15. Dark Childhood
16. The Pride of Slytherin
17. Worldwide Wanderings
18. I Am Lord Voldemort
19. Dementors, Dragons and Dursleys
20. Hermione's Problem
21. Ron's Secret
22. Harry's Heritage
23. Discovery
24. Return to the Chamber
25. Up To No Good
26. Silver And Steel
27. Heart of a Lion
28. Debts Repaid
29. The Betrayer Betrayed
30. The Last Marauder
31. From The Ashes
32. The End of All Hope
33. The Hogwarts Graveyard
34. Never the Same
35. It Works Both Ways
As a bonus, three chapter titles from book 7!
Loyalty And Loss
Blood Will Out
The Legacy of Lily Potter
are we still talking about legos?
(isr, cowboy slows down YOU!)
Well, it was *her* toy...
> I had to locate all the photos, transfer them off ith SSH, organize them, and burn them to CD's.
> And when I got done, the laptop finally completely died (system board failure, I think).
why not just use a laptop hd -> standard ATA adaptor?
> 5) Repeat after me: most customers aren't stupid. They feel lost amid the technology and they are frustrated. Try to explain things in everyday language so that they can feel that the mystery of the technology isn't so overwhelming.
most customers are willfully ignorant. no, i can't fix my car, but i
a) learn the terminology - i don't call the wheel the engine or the gas pedal the go-faster button. (all those words like hard drive, modem, etc that the computer gets called. plus the ones who think the monitor is the computer.)
b) educate myself on the requirements and realities of ownership and use - i put gas in, i wash it, i have the oil changed, and if i can't get somewhere 100 miles away in 1 hour, i don't blame the manufacturer, i blame my lack of planning.
i had a customer last week who called up, enraged that the wireless network on his laptop no longer worked. turns out he was at his brother's house 30 miles from home.
what, really, do you say to something like that? i mean, i could understand if it was one of those cases where they open up the shiny new laptop and - because a neighbor has an unsecured "plug and play, it's so easy!" router - it gets a network connection immediately. if it were a case like that, i'd understand that he doesn't understand why it Magically Works at home and not 30 miles away.
but how do you make someone understand the signal won't reach 30 miles? i tried the radio station analogy - if you go 100 miles away, you get different radio stations. he blew up and said that i told him it would work anywhere.
i'd meant anywhere in the house.
the base reason for all of this is - he doesn't know jack shit about the technology. not even as much as i know about my car.
> Best buy salary is pretty high... between $14 and $16 an hour
that's not high. that's between 28k and 32k a year, gross. trust me, that's not nearly enough. if your take home gets to $20/hr, that's getting close to comfortable.
few people get to what i would call a "high" pay rate ($40-$50/hr tkhm, which translates to 80k-100k/yr) while they're still hourly.
> All NAT routers I've seen need to be specifically set up to forward traffic, unless you set up your computer in a DMZ.
or unless your router is listening to upnp traffic.
> 2) Buy a router. £25/$40 buys you a piece of hardware which acts like a firewall and blocks all incoming ports, other than ones you solicit, natch.
and remember to turn off upnp. otherwise, the following happens:
<spiritual descendant of back orifice> hey router, this is a upnp request: forward 31337 to this computer, please!
<router> will do, and you have a good day!
<sdobo> oh, i will...
"now with firefox, you have tabbed webbrowsing. in soviet russia, webbrowsers would have kept tabs on YOU!" /is so so sorry
you can recolor dyed hair. you can take out metal. you can cover up ink.
i've been growing my hair out for five years. it's now to my waist. i keep it braided at all times and it never interferes with my work. but i can't do anything like the above to make it acceptable at the more conservative places save hack it off. and if i did that, i'd be thirty before it got this long again.
what really sucks about it is that, were i female, it wouldn't be given a second thought.
> if someone made an exact duplicate of all the items in my house, leaving the originals intact, I'd probably shrug and go on about my way.
including your financial records? the computer containing your email and im logs? the Great American Novel you've been writing for 4 years?
ambiguity:
.5 * .25 * 100% = 12.5% of gamers are over 50 years old. Which means 50% - 12.5% = 37.5% of gamers are between ages 18 and 50 by the statistic cited. That's basic probability and statistics I used there.
article> Half of the gamers are now over age 18, and almost a quarter are over age 50.
i read that as "almost a quarter (of all gamers)"; therefore 50% under 18, 25% 18-50, 25% 50+.
you're reading it as "almost a quarter (of the gamers over 18)" are over 50, therefore
parent>
but the problem was stated in non-technical language.
> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.
of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)
>6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
(in short - save points bad. quicksave good.)
this i disagree with. quicksave leads to people playing the game like this: take two steps forward, save, see enemy, restore, take one step forward, ambush enemy, take 2% damage in ensuing fight, restore, take five steps back and launch rockets at enemy's general position.
i watched a friend of mine play through half-life like this - he said it was boring, too tedious, and never challenging. gee, i wonder why.
> points 9-11: immersion, immersion, immersion.
not being able to jump an obstacle - bad. invisible walls - bad. but they're both conventions to aid in two things. a) so you have some fucking clue where to go and b) so the game designers don't have to map every nook and cranny and can concentrate on the parts of the level you're actually supposed to play. as far as heads up displays and such overlays, again, the amount of immersion they break is directly compensated for by the gameplay benefits, as long as they're done well. a giant floating hand telling you where to go? bad. car radar in the 1930s (as in mafia)? good, because it compensates for not having mirrors or a realistic field of view. iff in crosshairs, hell, crosshairs themselves in FPSes (or even disabling the trigger when your gun is aimed at a friendly)
- good, compensating for the expertise and eyesight your character is supposed to have.
> 19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES
agreed. if i wanted jumping puzzles, i'd play mario. or i'd play a third person game that lets me see what the fuck i'm DOING - ie oni, jedi outcast/academy, prince of persia:sands of time...
for more, video game design cliches and video game design flaws [although that has more to do with the classic ones, like being killed by falling off the bottom of the screen to a place you just came from.]
> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.
of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)
>
The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.
In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I'm thinking that's going to be a lot of money. Now, it's true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.
20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Look at the little guy. The one on the left. The one who's just a head.
I mean, let's face it: strategy is all that guy's got going for him. He has no limbs and he's already on fire.
And yet, did anyone stop being impressed by Doom III long enough to notice he and the other bad guys were flailing at us with the same straight-line Ulysses S. Grant calvary charge that failed them twelve years ago in Doom 1? Even Far Cry had bad guys that went into spinning seizures when they got confused.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
"Do NOT duck inside those doors, men! Honorable warriors need no cover!"
Chances of that happening...
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
That means the next generation of games will likely play just like this generation. Only shiny.
Article continues after this ad...
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?
Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer who has to piece together evidence to exonerate a black man falsely ac
except my single dvd +- drive cost much much more than the cd-rw or the dvd-rom.
> I don't want 3 different optical drives in my tower.
i happen to have three different optidrives in my tower. DVD-ROM for dvd playing and sourcing cd copies. CD-RW for cd reading and writing. DVD+-RW for dvd burning.
except that screws up the keyslantings...
> The most poignant moment in "Return of the Jedi" occurs when Luke looks at his right hand just after slicing off the mechanized right hand of Darth Vader.
because the mechanized stump reminds him of his own injury. it's a throwback to the previous film, not the previous trilogy.
> Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy.
anakin's own right hand is long gone. dooku took it off between the shoulder and the elbow in ep 2.
well done young jedi!
/. comment box.
my take on the film is at my LJ; at almost 2000 words, it's too long for a
> Sure, the jedi can block a few shots a second, but what happens when you up the rate to 30 or 60 shots per second. Why no vulcan cannon-style blasters that fill the whole area with hot plasma death?
that's pretty much what they do in eps 2 and 3 - they overwhelm jedi with close range high volume fire.