Microsoft invented the XmlHttpRequest functionality
Which comes as quite a surprise to everyone that's been doing the following since the mid 90s.
Create a frame driven page with one main frame and one tiny frame. Whenever you want to perform an asynchronous action:
Load a page in to the small frame.
Have that page call an onload event that accesses a function in large frame.
All "AJAX" (which is just a dressing up of what was already there) does is use the request object which is just a cleaner way of what people have been doing for about ten years anyway.
There were also tricks for doing it with Java. But Microsoft had to supply an alternate mechanism because someone took Java out of the dominant web browser for a while. Can't think who might have done that though.
If spawn camping is "interesting gameplay" I really don't want to see dull gameplay. I'd be interested to hear someone defend this as anything other than weak game design.
OK...
During every major conflict, control of bridges, roads, etc. (choke points) has been critical. If you know where the enemy is coming from, sending his reinforcements in from, etc., then you can most efficiently use your resources.
During Operation Enduring Debacle, terrorists attacked a U.S. mess with mortars because going after the "spawn point" (where reinforcements come from) is often most efficient.
Spawn camping is a good way of killing large numbers of newbies and, occasionally, the odd veteran.
This is pretty much exactly as it is in the real world: Ambush a choke point and you'll wipe out huge numbers of idiots blithely marching though and idiots assigning resources will keep sending more to die - but anyone with half a clue will quickly find a means to address that inherrent problem.
Similarly, in a game like BF2, if people keep on respawning at the point they know they just got killed by someone who's infiltrated it, they deserve to die. Anyone with half a clue will immediately change their spawn point and respawn elsewhere, coming in with full health and full ammo to quickly kill someone they know is low on both and likely focused in just one direction.
Sure, in games where there are only one or two spawn points and it's an absolute point, that may not be the case. BF2 usually has several bases per side (save for the very beginning of rounds or the very end) and will spawn you in any of several different random locations around that point - making it very easy to go and kill the guy who's focused on just one point.
And that's where the balance comes in - the team whose spawn it is can pour out dozens of guys there - all of which can wittle the guy down; they can respawn elsewhere and run in with an absolute advantage; they can get their CO to put a UAV overhead or run a quick scan to pinpoint the camper, etc. All of those tricks give them a massive advantage over one guy who has a long run to get there and runs out of supplies.
Unless of course they don't think to use all those advantages - sure, then they're just sheep to the slaughter. But is that the game's fault due to bad design or theirs for not getting it well enough to be competitive?
Perhaps the problem isn't that the game has fundamentally bad gameplay (to me, it's just an additional interesting dynamic) but rather that those who don't grasp the tactics fall afoul of it just as inexperienced, poorly led troops will in the real world. Of course, just as 95% of drivers consider themselves above average, I'm sure 95% of gamers are unable to accept they may be well below average and thus those that are dying are doing so simply due to their not getting basic tactics.
The point with BF2, and it is a well balanced game, is that no one strategy ever gives you an upper hand against an intelligent enemy - for more than a couple of minutes:
Use armor, the enemy will respawn as anti-tank and you and your crew will die before ever getting a shot off. Use helecopters and the same holds true plus they'll be taking AA vehicles, manning the fixed AA (though I would like to see the game add shoulder mounted SAMs) and lobbing grenades at chopper spawn points. Camp a base, they'll spawn elsewhere and flank you. etc.
A smart player has a whole set of tricks and varies them constantly, as the situation demands, maintaining an overall edge. A stupid one falls victim to the same technique over and over - either from not learning or always being one technique behind a smarter player who varies techniques. But then, if you can't handle playing against constantly evolving smart players, that's what single player with AI difficulty settings is for.
According to checks with Apple Store Specialists, Wolf also said a larger than expected percentage of Windows to Mac converts appear to be purchasing Apple's higher-end systems and that their transition is fueled by the epidemic of viruses and malware on the Windows platform.
Wait, staff at the Apple Store said people find Windows sucks? Surely not!
Next you'll be telling me that Microsoft analysts have noticed that users find Linux has a higher cost of ownership, that Linux fanboys find the exact opposite and that the Bush administration finds most people hate terrorists so much that torture is justified.
1) Find the CFO's home directory. 2) Open up the salaries Excel doc. 3) Scroll to the execs - most likely at the top anyway. 4) Set your screensaver firmly to the off position. 5) Get permission from your boss to leave early.
A good reason to attend school in meatspace is that you can interact with others, form groups, work on tasks.
This is one aspect of the most important concept to realise about university:
It's not about the education you get in terms of attend lecture/pass test. It's the hoops it demonstrates you're capable of jumping through.
Universities are all kinds of imaginative unfair: Grade curves are evil. The guy who figures out that the prof rewords the same question each year and so pulls the past papers and memorizes them despite never attending class will generally do far better than the student who attended every lecture. The five other assholes in your coding group will get the same grade you do, despite their refusing to do any work and you having to pull the work of all of them. The lecturers don't care about any of your perceived slights and will pull evil shit like refuse to allow a retest when they discover one of the four questions on the test was so flawed as to be unanswerable - and that's before they drop everyone's grade in the department by 10% to ensure grade normalization with other departments and thus don't get too closely scrutinized in any audits.
Universities are deeply unfair places.
Real life is worse.
You think it sucks to get your grade bumped by 10% because the department is trying to avoid getting a grading audit? Wait until you get laid off because your boss needs to lower the department budget so no one notices he spent $30,000 on new office furniture for himself.
You think it sucks that the other five leech off your hard work and you have to carry all of them if you want to pass? Try having to carry all of your colleagues if you don't want to get fired for dropping a project. Hell, to make that realistic, your prof should leech your grade too as your boss sure as hell will take credit for your work (I believe this is also known as post-grad research *grins*)
You think it's unfair that your school expects you to resit a year and isn't one of those nice schools that'll take your average grade prior to the year where you had depression? Welcome to the real world where you'll often get, "ADA, *snicker* sure, we apply that. We apply ourselves to firing your depressed ass before you can claim anything under it."
Universities are utterly unfair (with the exception that you don't get fired for hitting on your co-workers) but then that's the whole point. That's the education you're gaining. It's breaking you out of the foolish womb your parents raised you in where everything was fair and teaching you how to deal with every other person on the planet being an idiot or a scumbag.
As an employer, seeing you made it through with decent grades tells me you can get through four years of stupidity and do what you needed to to get through - whereas four years of work at four different companies just tells me you jump ship the moment it gets unfair.
An online degree loses all of that. All it tells me is that you've got the equivalent knowledge of someone who read half a dozen O'Reilly books (given that most university books are written by the profs to leech money off you and therefore several years is worth half a dozen decent books) and took a test to prove you paid attention.
Now it's nice that you have that test certificate and those half dozen books worth of knowledge. But that online degree will never replace the real value of a brick and mortar school - sucking up the stupidity of people with tenure and proving you can do so with the stupidity of people like myself and the others you'll work with.
1. A hero - the person through whose eyes we see the story unfold, set against a larger background.
2. The hero's character flaw - a weakness or defense mechanism that hinders the hero in such a way as to render him/her incomplete.
3. Enabling circumstances - the surroundings the hero is in at the beginning of the story, which allow the hero to maintain his/her character flaw.
4. An opponent - someone who opposes the hero in getting or doing what he/she wants. Not always a villain. For example, in a romantic comedy, the opponent could be the man or woman whom the hero seeks romance with. The opponent is the person who instigates the life-changing event.
5. The hero's ally - the person who spends the most time with the hero and who helps the hero overcome his/her character flaw.
6. The life-changing event - a challenge, threat or opportunity usually instigated by the opponent, which forces the hero to respond in some way that's related to the hero's flaw.
7. Jeopardy - the high stakes that the hero must risk to overcome his/her flaw. These are the dramatic events that lend excitement and challenge to the quest.
Remember, under Prior Art, now you and I have circulated those ideas publicly, any patents that infringe on them can be overturned. Covering the core ideas behind all stories, can we scrap the whole stupid system now and go back to patenting the Humouse?
For $30, given the choice between 30 great rock/metal tracks and 15 great ones with, yay, grungy guys running up and down a stage, I'd rather get twice the amount of music for my money and miss out on the bad videos. On the other hand, were Britney Spears more my thing, I'd likely want the videos, ideally without sound as, let's face it, her success was never about the music.
Plus there's the amount of drive space taken up. Granted videos aren't available for 80% of album tracks but I've already filled clear of 30mb with my own CD collection. Apple doesn't make an iPod big enough to rip an equivalent collection if videos were available too.
So, video's nice and all - espcially for some of the great music videos - but I'd rather save the drive space instead of having every last bland video.
Most of you don't even know what the OSS community used to really be like. It ain't what you see here on/. today.
You're right there Obediah.
Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here bitching on slashdot?
Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a good compiler.
A command line based compiler.
Without an IDE or APIs.
Or a compiler!
On a filthy cracked C64.
We never used to have a computer. We used to have to code on punched hole cards.
The best WE could manage was to beg for compilation time on the mainframe at night!
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."...
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day on OSS, and pay Linus for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
Please keep the petty bitching confined to livejournal.
Isn't that exactly what Slashdot is? A blog site. Run by a guy called Taco and his friends. Albeit very popular, sold to a larger corporation and run as a business.
Is it his fault he came up with the idea and coded his own system long before Live Journal took off, copied the concept and then gave it to the masses? Does that suddenly invalidate his use of his own site for the purpose he came up with first?
I think we get proprietary about Slashdot. Because it's such a great service, we spend so much time with it, we forget it's someone else's and start to see it as our own. Thus, much like someone coming in and bitching all over our own blog, we take it personally. But, we forget, we're in his house. If we don't like it, we're welcome to leave. Hell, he even shares his code so we can make our own. But, no, we'd rather bitch about his use of his own site.
Neverwinter Nights had a fully featured GM system. You could posess NPCs, trigger events, script, even drag a dynamic difficulty slider if the PCs were getting their asses handed to them in a particular fight or were finding it too easy.
And yet, as both a programmer and an on/off DM for fifteen years, it was still damn hard to keep things running.
When an RPG is all in your head, you've got millions of years of evolution helping you respond immediately. The idiots decide to open the door marked "Instant Death" - you can kill them if you want but you can also instantly come back with "Oh, it's sticky. [Makes sound of rolling dice behind screen] You fail to open it."
When you're trying to use a UI, even a great one, and every player's deciding to walk off in a separate direction, doing something stupid, all at once, you're screwed. Just as you hop in the Elf looking character who's really a benevolent gold dragon (it being a pain to script that so it's quicker to just spawn an NPC and posess it), another character decides to start a fight with the bar whilst the loot whore decides to start breaking in to the back rooms that you never filled in because you figured you could run those as one offs later and it wasn't worth spending that much time on.
Plus there's the side that with pen and paper, time's arbitrary. If you want to say, "OK, I'll get to your fight in just a second" or "Just a second, the fight's breaking out. Let's resolve round one before the first bit of conversation." That's entirely reasonable. Similarly, you could spend a six hour session playing through five minutes of players escaping dire peril. In a game that resolves time and everything else by default, with players expecting that, it's no longer an option.
So, in short: Playable GMs in games like NWN are a great addition. It takes a great game and adds wonderful flexability for doing even more. But, even with the amped up reflexes of an RTS player on crack, no GM can pull of everything you can do in your mind and do it in real time.
That said: How much custom interactivity do you really need? I'd suggest a team of half a dozen "actors", a "director" and a programmer and artist could likely add three or four unique encounters/missions a day to a server - even if they had been largely pre-scripted. That's probably enough for word to spread of those events and to get players feeling a lot more than repetetive code was happening or, more importantly, could happen to them.
Mr. Gates believes media storage on hard drives is likely to be the default standard sooner rather than later.
He has a point. As he keeps pointing out to anyone who'll listen, Blu Ray DVDs are incredibly expensive to produce. And they only store ~50GB. That's hardly competitive with modern hard drives.
Much better to go with hard drives like the one Microsoft bundles with the XBox360. For $100 over the basic version, you get a whopping 20GB to do anything you like with.
Why on earth would media get shipped at $3/50GB with restrictive copying policies embedded in the hardware when it could be slowly downloaded and put on to a $100/20GB storage system with restrictive copying policies embedded in Microsoft's software?
Sure, there's the argument that you don't want a whole multichanger full of discs when you could have just one hard drive. But, for the next generation of home consoles, Microsoft's hub has an optional hard drive that's smaller in capacity than a single next gen DVD. Not really a convincing argument.
But you do get the natty wireless controllers bundled in for that $100 that, based on the hype, most people thought they were getting anyway.
How do you successfully turn an interactive experience (playing an Xbox game) into a passive one (watching a movie version of an Xbox game)?
Ah, the genius of it:
Take a PC game and make a movie of it: Bad
Take a dumbed down for consoles version of a PC game and make a movie of the dumbed down version: It has Oscar written all over it.
Personally, I'm waiting for a movie based on the Gameboy Advance port of the Tony Hawk games. Movie based on a video game? Check. Based on an inferior port? Check. Skating movie? Check. Potential role for Christian Slater as a cameo, gleaming his cube for the Old Skool? Check. Authentic isometric sequence similar to Doom's authentic first person sequence? Check. Movie executives getting excited about the soundtrack appealing to the kids where the movie falls down? Check. The portents are all there. Now all they need is to figure out how Cedrick The Entertainer or Bernie Mac can star with Ashton Kutcher.
As was pointed out in the current PC Gamer, during an interview with Ye...
Ye "As a trained psychiatrist, I know how important it is to not expose children to these kinds of things. Many studies support this."
PCG "What about the many studies that show absolutely no correlation can be proved."
Yee "Statistics can be manipulated. I know how important it is. Many studies support this."
PCG "What about the fact that the violent crime rate in teenagers has dropped every single year since the release of the PlayStation and is now at half its peak ten years ago and the lowest it's been since the 70s."
Yee "Statistics can be manipulated. I know how important it is. Many studies support this."
In other words, he's formed his opinion and, whilst quoting statistics that suit him, has absolutely no interest in even exploring the massive weight of evidence to the contrary because statistics can be manipulated.
The amazing thing is he doesn't even seem to be embarassed to feed such a load of clearly self serving bull.
We also have a duty to protect our nation against Communism. And thus it's entirely reasonable to have a law that requires citizens to register, in advance, for each and every piece of Communist literature that comes to them through the mail.
Except, as the judge found in that case, such a "protection" creates a "chilling effect" upon free speech and thus is unconstitutional.
A requirement for videogame stores to respect ESRB ratings is one thing. That has no "chilling effect" upon publishers creating new works.
Demanding a 2inch by 2inch bold logo on the front of a game stating it's 18 changes not just parental awareness (which can be covered by ESRB information displays) but serves to villify such titles, embarassing legitimate customers who don't want to be perceived as "bad" for purchasing them.
Similarly, it is reasonable to ask that publicly displayed adult magazines are placed out of children's reach and have either a non-sexual cover or that that cover is hidden. It is unreasonable and has a "chilling effect" to demand that adult magazines have a bright neon slip cover advertising "ANYONE WHO BUYS THIS IS A SEX ADDICT!" One protects children, the other has a chilling effect on the entirely legal sale of the product to those legally allowed to buy it.
The California law's problem is that it oversteps from being truly about protection of children in to "chilling effect" territory....or at least, that's the argument being put forward. I guess it depends on who you view a great big 18 sticker on the front of every box. Or, more tellingly, how 12 people who've been forced to do jury duty can be made to see it.
Either way, I'm guessing people only want the last few steps of the food process monitored. Hearing exactly which animal's ass the fertilizer that grew the plant that either makes our food or fed our food fell out of just doesn't appeal to me.
Imagine if all information was ultimately hyperlinked together. Do we really need to know that "Flossie's stool was particularly liquid today but was still good enough for the fertilizer company." followed by the discovery that two days after providing her magnificent contribution to our diet she died of dissentry? Mmm. And I thought this was just a zestier than usual big mac.
At what point does it become their obligation to consider negative uses of positive features?
Netgear makes a router that lets me block various domain name fragments. This is a really useful feature as lets users block ads. and kill 90% of advertising. Add in xupiter etc. and you can block out malware manufacturers.
But what happens if I add country, cmt, etc. and start censoring my wife's [admitedly awful] taste in music just because I disagree with it? Do Netgear suddenly become bad for supplying and profiting from hardware that can be used for censorship?
Is the best criteria to use similar to the old VCRs aren't piracy tools argument?: If it has significant non-infringing use, it's valid. Thus Netgear's router, although it can be used for censorship, also has significant non-censoring uses and thus is reasonable to be sold.
That image technology has been around forever. Just watch an episode of CSI.
I was going to make much the same observation and then something occured to me:
Quality of sound is subjective.
It's why every crappy CD player and walkman comes with a Bass Boost. Boosting the bass doesn't make the sound more authentic than the original but, for the average listener with no idea what clear music should sound like, more bass is appealing and a selling gimmick.
Similarly, you upsample, apply smoothing algorithms, apply fractal algorithms, whatever, you may be able to give a perception of clarity, of spacial separation, etc. far in excess of what the original CD had. That doesn't mean it's what the artist and engineers intended, it doesn't mean it's more accurate to the original performance, but you'll still get the average 13 year old telling you that Britney's latest masterpiece sounds even better now.
So, you can make a track sound "better" to an average sampling of listeners without it being more accurate to the environment of the original recording. It's all about their definition of better.
I can ride across town on a bus for a fraction of the cost of doing so in my nice selfish car.
I did it every day when I was a kid and my parents wanted to save money and were willing to give me the "character building" experience... whilst they carried on with the convenience of driving themselves. Once I was paying my own way, even though it was more expensive, I took to driving rather than deal with the hassle.
With digital photography and home printing, when my in laws come to visit and I want to show them pictures I have sitting around of say my new born nephew while he was still in the hospital, I can quickly print up a copy rather than huddle around a screen. When it suddenly occurs to my in laws they'd like a copy for their wallets, twenty minutes later, I can throw out a couple of quick copies. When they want a larger one for framing, I change paper and do that too.
Alternatively, we don't look at the pictures because it's a totally different experience huddling around a monitor than it is sitting and talking whilst a stack of pictures are casually handed around without interrupting the conversation. They decide they'd like copies for their wallets so we either order on line and pay a premium for only wanting two copies or we drive to the nearest store. Then we drive back. Once home, they realise they want a larger copy for framing but the first store doesn't do anything other than 4x6 so we have to find a different place.
But we do save $0.30. Sure, the wasted gallon of gas is currently up around $3.00 and our collective time, across all of our jobs, is billable at $100+/hr for that wasted half hour. But the important thing is we saved $0.30 on print costs.
I also don't keep my own chickens and weave my own clothes. I guess I'm just a bad person.
Would you be interested in going in to partnership? I have a patent pending on my "LALALALICAN'THEARYOU" sound reduction technology.
We could maybe even go further and suggest NASA license the use of celery in place of those pesky ceramic tiles that keep coming off. Seriously, that stuff is impossible to get to burn and mayo (or other dressing) often becomes incredibly tacky/adhesive after a couple of weeks - it may just have the properties they're after.
If 3M can make so much money from a glue that doesn't work, I feel that, given the right marketting, the above ideas can't help but succeed.
invest $0.50 yourself and buy some 3M clearbra made to cover the front surfaces of cars. peel, stick, trim.
Include one pre-cut sticky screen in the packaging along with advertising for Apple's own branded replacements.
Sell packs of 6 replacements (with a recommended replacement of 1/month) for $10.
Because it's the official Apple solution, sold in Apple stores and on pegs next to iPods worldwide, people will pay that crazily over the top price. And now you've trained your users to expect the basic rule of LCD screens everywhere: Expect them to scratch, of course they will, but a $0.50 (or now $1.66 from Apple) little replacable sticker will make it all better - so it's no longer your fault.
Well, thank God for that. I was scared porn might have gone away. Now the government has declared a war on it, we can rely on the same victories seen in the War On Terror and the War On Drugs: a few politicised arrests followed by a massive upsurge.
Of course, this time, if they want to sacrifice America's fine young ladies in a war that can never be won, you'll get a lot more support from me than when they did it with America's fine young men.
It's obvious: Deviant sexuality is clearly where the penis deviates to one side or the other.
It's the perfect solution to teen pregnancies too. Tell kids that having a bendy John-Thomas is "deviant" (despite almost every single male having some degree of deviation) and you can oppress an entire generation in to not having sex. It'll be almost as successful at preventing teen pregnancy and teen STD infection as the other forms of abstinence education have proven to be. Where would we be without Conservatives to save us?!
I used to play Action Quake 2 a lot and I was pretty much a crack shot in that game. I had very little difficulty hitting characters in the head, while we were both moving, with only a couple shots, over 90% of the time. This was, of course, controlled with the mouse.
Alas the skill does not translate to a real pistol. With my actual gun the claim is more like I can put 90% or more of my shots somewhere on a man-sized paper target provided both it and I am stationary and it's not too far away from me, with both hands on the gun, in a stabalised stance.
Given the choice though, if the other guy has a gun, I'd be willing to forego the additional accuracy of a mouse.
Guns don't kill people. People kill people. But guns certainly help. Have you ever tried running up to someone with a mouse and just yelling "bang!"? It's pretty ineffective.
If you think you're going to produce better code by splurging $$$ on a shiny desk, maybe you should give up programming.
You seriously code better if you're in pain from carpal tunnel syndrome, cramping hamstrings and back ache? Personally, I code better if I'm comfortable and can focus on the programming task at hand and not my hands at the programming task. I think you'll find most people do.
Cute at it is to pretend to be l33t on Slashdot and be dismissive of anyone asking sensible questions because they're not hardcore enough... Of those who believe they work better in pain, I'm guessing they fall in to two main camps:
Those who are in denial.
Those who may do a lot better if they spent a little time in a professional LA or New York establishment with theme rooms, got it out of their system, and then got back to programming.
If you take a look at the FBI's statistics, violent crime (and, separately, property crime), in teenagers, has dropped every single year since the release of the original PlayStation - the point where graphics (and hence violence) started to become lifelike.
Arrest Rate For Violent Crimes/100,000 by age
1995 - PSX Released 14 and under: 77.2 15-17: 947.1 18-20: 982.7
1998 - GTA1 Released 14 and under: 59.3 15-17: 661.9 18-20: 811.5
2000 - PS2 Released 14 and under: 55.0 15-17: 549.5 18-20: 709.9
2002 - GTA3 Released 14 and under: 49.1 15-17: 511.7 18-20: 669.2
2003 - Most Recent Year Recorded 14 and under: 50.1 15-17: 504.6 18-20: 645.9
Or, in terms of DEcrease: 14 and under: 35.1% 15-17: 46.7% 18-20: 34.3%
So, since the arrival of the PSX and healthier outlets for violence, there's been a 34.3-46.7% DEcrease in violent crime amongst children and teens?
At what point will those campaigning against them will admit to either deliberately lying or, at best, being woefully ill informed of the actual truth?
Perhaps a question, along with those statistics, worth asking of your congressmen and senators. As they're only politicians, perhaps you could draw them a nice graph.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft invented the XmlHttpRequest functionality
Which comes as quite a surprise to everyone that's been doing the following since the mid 90s.
Create a frame driven page with one main frame and one tiny frame.
Whenever you want to perform an asynchronous action:
Load a page in to the small frame.
Have that page call an onload event that accesses a function in large frame.
All "AJAX" (which is just a dressing up of what was already there) does is use the request object which is just a cleaner way of what people have been doing for about ten years anyway.
There were also tricks for doing it with Java. But Microsoft had to supply an alternate mechanism because someone took Java out of the dominant web browser for a while. Can't think who might have done that though.
If spawn camping is "interesting gameplay" I really don't want to see dull gameplay. I'd be interested to hear someone defend this as anything other than weak game design.
OK...
During every major conflict, control of bridges, roads, etc. (choke points) has been critical. If you know where the enemy is coming from, sending his reinforcements in from, etc., then you can most efficiently use your resources.
During Operation Enduring Debacle, terrorists attacked a U.S. mess with mortars because going after the "spawn point" (where reinforcements come from) is often most efficient.
Spawn camping is a good way of killing large numbers of newbies and, occasionally, the odd veteran.
This is pretty much exactly as it is in the real world: Ambush a choke point and you'll wipe out huge numbers of idiots blithely marching though and idiots assigning resources will keep sending more to die - but anyone with half a clue will quickly find a means to address that inherrent problem.
Similarly, in a game like BF2, if people keep on respawning at the point they know they just got killed by someone who's infiltrated it, they deserve to die. Anyone with half a clue will immediately change their spawn point and respawn elsewhere, coming in with full health and full ammo to quickly kill someone they know is low on both and likely focused in just one direction.
Sure, in games where there are only one or two spawn points and it's an absolute point, that may not be the case. BF2 usually has several bases per side (save for the very beginning of rounds or the very end) and will spawn you in any of several different random locations around that point - making it very easy to go and kill the guy who's focused on just one point.
And that's where the balance comes in - the team whose spawn it is can pour out dozens of guys there - all of which can wittle the guy down; they can respawn elsewhere and run in with an absolute advantage; they can get their CO to put a UAV overhead or run a quick scan to pinpoint the camper, etc. All of those tricks give them a massive advantage over one guy who has a long run to get there and runs out of supplies.
Unless of course they don't think to use all those advantages - sure, then they're just sheep to the slaughter. But is that the game's fault due to bad design or theirs for not getting it well enough to be competitive?
Perhaps the problem isn't that the game has fundamentally bad gameplay (to me, it's just an additional interesting dynamic) but rather that those who don't grasp the tactics fall afoul of it just as inexperienced, poorly led troops will in the real world. Of course, just as 95% of drivers consider themselves above average, I'm sure 95% of gamers are unable to accept they may be well below average and thus those that are dying are doing so simply due to their not getting basic tactics.
The point with BF2, and it is a well balanced game, is that no one strategy ever gives you an upper hand against an intelligent enemy - for more than a couple of minutes:
Use armor, the enemy will respawn as anti-tank and you and your crew will die before ever getting a shot off. Use helecopters and the same holds true plus they'll be taking AA vehicles, manning the fixed AA (though I would like to see the game add shoulder mounted SAMs) and lobbing grenades at chopper spawn points. Camp a base, they'll spawn elsewhere and flank you. etc.
A smart player has a whole set of tricks and varies them constantly, as the situation demands, maintaining an overall edge. A stupid one falls victim to the same technique over and over - either from not learning or always being one technique behind a smarter player who varies techniques. But then, if you can't handle playing against constantly evolving smart players, that's what single player with AI difficulty settings is for.
According to checks with Apple Store Specialists, Wolf also said a larger than expected percentage of Windows to Mac converts appear to be purchasing Apple's higher-end systems and that their transition is fueled by the epidemic of viruses and malware on the Windows platform.
Wait, staff at the Apple Store said people find Windows sucks? Surely not!
Next you'll be telling me that Microsoft analysts have noticed that users find Linux has a higher cost of ownership, that Linux fanboys find the exact opposite and that the Bush administration finds most people hate terrorists so much that torture is justified.
Most women find this poster deeply attractive
1) Find the CFO's home directory.
2) Open up the salaries Excel doc.
3) Scroll to the execs - most likely at the top anyway.
4) Set your screensaver firmly to the off position.
5) Get permission from your boss to leave early.
A good reason to attend school in meatspace is that you can interact with others, form groups, work on tasks.
This is one aspect of the most important concept to realise about university:
It's not about the education you get in terms of attend lecture/pass test. It's the hoops it demonstrates you're capable of jumping through.
Universities are all kinds of imaginative unfair: Grade curves are evil. The guy who figures out that the prof rewords the same question each year and so pulls the past papers and memorizes them despite never attending class will generally do far better than the student who attended every lecture. The five other assholes in your coding group will get the same grade you do, despite their refusing to do any work and you having to pull the work of all of them. The lecturers don't care about any of your perceived slights and will pull evil shit like refuse to allow a retest when they discover one of the four questions on the test was so flawed as to be unanswerable - and that's before they drop everyone's grade in the department by 10% to ensure grade normalization with other departments and thus don't get too closely scrutinized in any audits.
Universities are deeply unfair places.
Real life is worse.
You think it sucks to get your grade bumped by 10% because the department is trying to avoid getting a grading audit? Wait until you get laid off because your boss needs to lower the department budget so no one notices he spent $30,000 on new office furniture for himself.
You think it sucks that the other five leech off your hard work and you have to carry all of them if you want to pass? Try having to carry all of your colleagues if you don't want to get fired for dropping a project. Hell, to make that realistic, your prof should leech your grade too as your boss sure as hell will take credit for your work (I believe this is also known as post-grad research *grins*)
You think it's unfair that your school expects you to resit a year and isn't one of those nice schools that'll take your average grade prior to the year where you had depression? Welcome to the real world where you'll often get, "ADA, *snicker* sure, we apply that. We apply ourselves to firing your depressed ass before you can claim anything under it."
Universities are utterly unfair (with the exception that you don't get fired for hitting on your co-workers) but then that's the whole point. That's the education you're gaining. It's breaking you out of the foolish womb your parents raised you in where everything was fair and teaching you how to deal with every other person on the planet being an idiot or a scumbag.
As an employer, seeing you made it through with decent grades tells me you can get through four years of stupidity and do what you needed to to get through - whereas four years of work at four different companies just tells me you jump ship the moment it gets unfair.
An online degree loses all of that. All it tells me is that you've got the equivalent knowledge of someone who read half a dozen O'Reilly books (given that most university books are written by the profs to leech money off you and therefore several years is worth half a dozen decent books) and took a test to prove you paid attention.
Now it's nice that you have that test certificate and those half dozen books worth of knowledge. But that online degree will never replace the real value of a brick and mortar school - sucking up the stupidity of people with tenure and proving you can do so with the stupidity of people like myself and the others you'll work with.
I'll toss in:
1. A hero - the person through whose eyes we see the story unfold, set against a larger background.
2. The hero's character flaw - a weakness or defense mechanism that hinders the hero in such a way as to render him/her incomplete.
3. Enabling circumstances - the surroundings the hero is in at the beginning of the story, which allow the hero to maintain his/her character flaw.
4. An opponent - someone who opposes the hero in getting or doing what he/she wants. Not always a villain. For example, in a romantic comedy, the opponent could be the man or woman whom the hero seeks romance with. The opponent is the person who instigates the life-changing event.
5. The hero's ally - the person who spends the most time with the hero and who helps the hero overcome his/her character flaw.
6. The life-changing event - a challenge, threat or opportunity
usually instigated by the opponent, which forces the hero to respond in some way that's related to the hero's flaw.
7. Jeopardy - the high stakes that the hero must risk to overcome his/her flaw. These are the dramatic events that lend excitement and challenge to the quest.
Remember, under Prior Art, now you and I have circulated those ideas publicly, any patents that infringe on them can be overturned. Covering the core ideas behind all stories, can we scrap the whole stupid system now and go back to patenting the Humouse?
$0.99 - Just the music.
$1.99 - Music and video.
For $30, given the choice between 30 great rock/metal tracks and 15 great ones with, yay, grungy guys running up and down a stage, I'd rather get twice the amount of music for my money and miss out on the bad videos. On the other hand, were Britney Spears more my thing, I'd likely want the videos, ideally without sound as, let's face it, her success was never about the music.
Plus there's the amount of drive space taken up. Granted videos aren't available for 80% of album tracks but I've already filled clear of 30mb with my own CD collection. Apple doesn't make an iPod big enough to rip an equivalent collection if videos were available too.
So, video's nice and all - espcially for some of the great music videos - but I'd rather save the drive space instead of having every last bland video.
Most of you don't even know what the OSS community used to really be like. It ain't what you see here on /. today.
...
You're right there Obediah.
Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here bitching on slashdot?
Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a good compiler.
A command line based compiler.
Without an IDE or APIs.
Or a compiler!
On a filthy cracked C64.
We never used to have a computer. We used to have to code on punched hole cards.
The best WE could manage was to beg for compilation time on the mainframe at night!
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day on OSS, and pay Linus for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
Please keep the petty bitching confined to livejournal.
Isn't that exactly what Slashdot is? A blog site. Run by a guy called Taco and his friends. Albeit very popular, sold to a larger corporation and run as a business.
Is it his fault he came up with the idea and coded his own system long before Live Journal took off, copied the concept and then gave it to the masses? Does that suddenly invalidate his use of his own site for the purpose he came up with first?
I think we get proprietary about Slashdot. Because it's such a great service, we spend so much time with it, we forget it's someone else's and start to see it as our own. Thus, much like someone coming in and bitching all over our own blog, we take it personally. But, we forget, we're in his house. If we don't like it, we're welcome to leave. Hell, he even shares his code so we can make our own. But, no, we'd rather bitch about his use of his own site.
Neverwinter Nights had a fully featured GM system. You could posess NPCs, trigger events, script, even drag a dynamic difficulty slider if the PCs were getting their asses handed to them in a particular fight or were finding it too easy.
And yet, as both a programmer and an on/off DM for fifteen years, it was still damn hard to keep things running.
When an RPG is all in your head, you've got millions of years of evolution helping you respond immediately. The idiots decide to open the door marked "Instant Death" - you can kill them if you want but you can also instantly come back with "Oh, it's sticky. [Makes sound of rolling dice behind screen] You fail to open it."
When you're trying to use a UI, even a great one, and every player's deciding to walk off in a separate direction, doing something stupid, all at once, you're screwed. Just as you hop in the Elf looking character who's really a benevolent gold dragon (it being a pain to script that so it's quicker to just spawn an NPC and posess it), another character decides to start a fight with the bar whilst the loot whore decides to start breaking in to the back rooms that you never filled in because you figured you could run those as one offs later and it wasn't worth spending that much time on.
Plus there's the side that with pen and paper, time's arbitrary. If you want to say, "OK, I'll get to your fight in just a second" or "Just a second, the fight's breaking out. Let's resolve round one before the first bit of conversation." That's entirely reasonable. Similarly, you could spend a six hour session playing through five minutes of players escaping dire peril. In a game that resolves time and everything else by default, with players expecting that, it's no longer an option.
So, in short: Playable GMs in games like NWN are a great addition. It takes a great game and adds wonderful flexability for doing even more. But, even with the amped up reflexes of an RTS player on crack, no GM can pull of everything you can do in your mind and do it in real time.
That said: How much custom interactivity do you really need? I'd suggest a team of half a dozen "actors", a "director" and a programmer and artist could likely add three or four unique encounters/missions a day to a server - even if they had been largely pre-scripted. That's probably enough for word to spread of those events and to get players feeling a lot more than repetetive code was happening or, more importantly, could happen to them.
Mr. Gates believes media storage on hard drives is likely to be the default standard sooner rather than later.
He has a point. As he keeps pointing out to anyone who'll listen, Blu Ray DVDs are incredibly expensive to produce. And they only store ~50GB. That's hardly competitive with modern hard drives.
Much better to go with hard drives like the one Microsoft bundles with the XBox360. For $100 over the basic version, you get a whopping 20GB to do anything you like with.
Why on earth would media get shipped at $3/50GB with restrictive copying policies embedded in the hardware when it could be slowly downloaded and put on to a $100/20GB storage system with restrictive copying policies embedded in Microsoft's software?
Sure, there's the argument that you don't want a whole multichanger full of discs when you could have just one hard drive. But, for the next generation of home consoles, Microsoft's hub has an optional hard drive that's smaller in capacity than a single next gen DVD. Not really a convincing argument.
But you do get the natty wireless controllers bundled in for that $100 that, based on the hype, most people thought they were getting anyway.
How do you successfully turn an interactive experience (playing an Xbox game) into a passive one (watching a movie version of an Xbox game)?
Ah, the genius of it:
Take a PC game and make a movie of it: Bad
Take a dumbed down for consoles version of a PC game and make a movie of the dumbed down version: It has Oscar written all over it.
Personally, I'm waiting for a movie based on the Gameboy Advance port of the Tony Hawk games. Movie based on a video game? Check. Based on an inferior port? Check. Skating movie? Check. Potential role for Christian Slater as a cameo, gleaming his cube for the Old Skool? Check. Authentic isometric sequence similar to Doom's authentic first person sequence? Check. Movie executives getting excited about the soundtrack appealing to the kids where the movie falls down? Check. The portents are all there. Now all they need is to figure out how Cedrick The Entertainer or Bernie Mac can star with Ashton Kutcher.
As was pointed out in the current PC Gamer, during an interview with Ye...
Ye "As a trained psychiatrist, I know how important it is to not expose children to these kinds of things. Many studies support this."
PCG "What about the many studies that show absolutely no correlation can be proved."
Yee "Statistics can be manipulated. I know how important it is. Many studies support this."
PCG "What about the fact that the violent crime rate in teenagers has dropped every single year since the release of the PlayStation and is now at half its peak ten years ago and the lowest it's been since the 70s."
Yee "Statistics can be manipulated. I know how important it is. Many studies support this."
In other words, he's formed his opinion and, whilst quoting statistics that suit him, has absolutely no interest in even exploring the massive weight of evidence to the contrary because statistics can be manipulated.
The amazing thing is he doesn't even seem to be embarassed to feed such a load of clearly self serving bull.
We also have a duty to protect our nation against Communism. And thus it's entirely reasonable to have a law that requires citizens to register, in advance, for each and every piece of Communist literature that comes to them through the mail.
...or at least, that's the argument being put forward. I guess it depends on who you view a great big 18 sticker on the front of every box. Or, more tellingly, how 12 people who've been forced to do jury duty can be made to see it.
Except, as the judge found in that case, such a "protection" creates a "chilling effect" upon free speech and thus is unconstitutional.
A requirement for videogame stores to respect ESRB ratings is one thing. That has no "chilling effect" upon publishers creating new works.
Demanding a 2inch by 2inch bold logo on the front of a game stating it's 18 changes not just parental awareness (which can be covered by ESRB information displays) but serves to villify such titles, embarassing legitimate customers who don't want to be perceived as "bad" for purchasing them.
Similarly, it is reasonable to ask that publicly displayed adult magazines are placed out of children's reach and have either a non-sexual cover or that that cover is hidden. It is unreasonable and has a "chilling effect" to demand that adult magazines have a bright neon slip cover advertising "ANYONE WHO BUYS THIS IS A SEX ADDICT!" One protects children, the other has a chilling effect on the entirely legal sale of the product to those legally allowed to buy it.
The California law's problem is that it oversteps from being truly about protection of children in to "chilling effect" territory.
On the less humorous level:
Horseshit
Fertilizer
Grass
Cow
Big Mac
and
Horseshit
Fertilizer
Lettuice/Pickle
Big Mac
Or, the less savory, but all too true:
Animal shit
Animal feed
Cow
Big Mac
Either way, I'm guessing people only want the last few steps of the food process monitored. Hearing exactly which animal's ass the fertilizer that grew the plant that either makes our food or fed our food fell out of just doesn't appeal to me.
Imagine if all information was ultimately hyperlinked together. Do we really need to know that "Flossie's stool was particularly liquid today but was still good enough for the fertilizer company." followed by the discovery that two days after providing her magnificent contribution to our diet she died of dissentry? Mmm. And I thought this was just a zestier than usual big mac.
At what point does it become their obligation to consider negative uses of positive features?
Netgear makes a router that lets me block various domain name fragments. This is a really useful feature as lets users block ads. and kill 90% of advertising. Add in xupiter etc. and you can block out malware manufacturers.
But what happens if I add country, cmt, etc. and start censoring my wife's [admitedly awful] taste in music just because I disagree with it? Do Netgear suddenly become bad for supplying and profiting from hardware that can be used for censorship?
Is the best criteria to use similar to the old VCRs aren't piracy tools argument?: If it has significant non-infringing use, it's valid. Thus Netgear's router, although it can be used for censorship, also has significant non-censoring uses and thus is reasonable to be sold.
That image technology has been around forever. Just watch an episode of CSI.
I was going to make much the same observation and then something occured to me:
Quality of sound is subjective.
It's why every crappy CD player and walkman comes with a Bass Boost. Boosting the bass doesn't make the sound more authentic than the original but, for the average listener with no idea what clear music should sound like, more bass is appealing and a selling gimmick.
Similarly, you upsample, apply smoothing algorithms, apply fractal algorithms, whatever, you may be able to give a perception of clarity, of spacial separation, etc. far in excess of what the original CD had. That doesn't mean it's what the artist and engineers intended, it doesn't mean it's more accurate to the original performance, but you'll still get the average 13 year old telling you that Britney's latest masterpiece sounds even better now.
So, you can make a track sound "better" to an average sampling of listeners without it being more accurate to the environment of the original recording. It's all about their definition of better.
I can ride across town on a bus for a fraction of the cost of doing so in my nice selfish car.
I did it every day when I was a kid and my parents wanted to save money and were willing to give me the "character building" experience... whilst they carried on with the convenience of driving themselves. Once I was paying my own way, even though it was more expensive, I took to driving rather than deal with the hassle.
With digital photography and home printing, when my in laws come to visit and I want to show them pictures I have sitting around of say my new born nephew while he was still in the hospital, I can quickly print up a copy rather than huddle around a screen. When it suddenly occurs to my in laws they'd like a copy for their wallets, twenty minutes later, I can throw out a couple of quick copies. When they want a larger one for framing, I change paper and do that too.
Alternatively, we don't look at the pictures because it's a totally different experience huddling around a monitor than it is sitting and talking whilst a stack of pictures are casually handed around without interrupting the conversation. They decide they'd like copies for their wallets so we either order on line and pay a premium for only wanting two copies or we drive to the nearest store. Then we drive back. Once home, they realise they want a larger copy for framing but the first store doesn't do anything other than 4x6 so we have to find a different place.
But we do save $0.30. Sure, the wasted gallon of gas is currently up around $3.00 and our collective time, across all of our jobs, is billable at $100+/hr for that wasted half hour. But the important thing is we saved $0.30 on print costs.
I also don't keep my own chickens and weave my own clothes. I guess I'm just a bad person.
I'll entertain all bids on this technology...
Would you be interested in going in to partnership? I have a patent pending on my "LALALALICAN'THEARYOU" sound reduction technology.
We could maybe even go further and suggest NASA license the use of celery in place of those pesky ceramic tiles that keep coming off. Seriously, that stuff is impossible to get to burn and mayo (or other dressing) often becomes incredibly tacky/adhesive after a couple of weeks - it may just have the properties they're after.
If 3M can make so much money from a glue that doesn't work, I feel that, given the right marketting, the above ideas can't help but succeed.
invest $0.50 yourself and buy some 3M clearbra made to cover the front surfaces of cars. peel, stick, trim.
Include one pre-cut sticky screen in the packaging along with advertising for Apple's own branded replacements.
Sell packs of 6 replacements (with a recommended replacement of 1/month) for $10.
Because it's the official Apple solution, sold in Apple stores and on pegs next to iPods worldwide, people will pay that crazily over the top price. And now you've trained your users to expect the basic rule of LCD screens everywhere: Expect them to scratch, of course they will, but a $0.50 (or now $1.66 from Apple) little replacable sticker will make it all better - so it's no longer your fault.
Well, thank God for that. I was scared porn might have gone away. Now the government has declared a war on it, we can rely on the same victories seen in the War On Terror and the War On Drugs: a few politicised arrests followed by a massive upsurge.
Of course, this time, if they want to sacrifice America's fine young ladies in a war that can never be won, you'll get a lot more support from me than when they did it with America's fine young men.
Hooray Beer and Hooray Republicans!
It's obvious: Deviant sexuality is clearly where the penis deviates to one side or the other.
It's the perfect solution to teen pregnancies too. Tell kids that having a bendy John-Thomas is "deviant" (despite almost every single male having some degree of deviation) and you can oppress an entire generation in to not having sex. It'll be almost as successful at preventing teen pregnancy and teen STD infection as the other forms of abstinence education have proven to be. Where would we be without Conservatives to save us?!
I used to play Action Quake 2 a lot and I was pretty much a crack shot in that game. I had very little difficulty hitting characters in the head, while we were both moving, with only a couple shots, over 90% of the time. This was, of course, controlled with the mouse.
Alas the skill does not translate to a real pistol. With my actual gun the claim is more like I can put 90% or more of my shots somewhere on a man-sized paper target provided both it and I am stationary and it's not too far away from me, with both hands on the gun, in a stabalised stance.
Given the choice though, if the other guy has a gun, I'd be willing to forego the additional accuracy of a mouse.
Guns don't kill people. People kill people. But guns certainly help. Have you ever tried running up to someone with a mouse and just yelling "bang!"? It's pretty ineffective.
If you think you're going to produce better code by splurging $$$ on a shiny desk, maybe you should give up programming.
You seriously code better if you're in pain from carpal tunnel syndrome, cramping hamstrings and back ache? Personally, I code better if I'm comfortable and can focus on the programming task at hand and not my hands at the programming task. I think you'll find most people do.
Cute at it is to pretend to be l33t on Slashdot and be dismissive of anyone asking sensible questions because they're not hardcore enough... Of those who believe they work better in pain, I'm guessing they fall in to two main camps:
Those who are in denial.
Those who may do a lot better if they spent a little time in a professional LA or New York establishment with theme rooms, got it out of their system, and then got back to programming.
Using the FBI's own statistics for unbiased analysis:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/data/violarr.wk1
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/data/arrests.wk1
If you take a look at the FBI's statistics, violent crime (and, separately, property crime), in teenagers, has dropped every single year since the release of the original PlayStation - the point where graphics (and hence violence) started to become lifelike.
Arrest Rate For Violent Crimes/100,000 by age
1995 - PSX Released
14 and under: 77.2
15-17: 947.1
18-20: 982.7
1998 - GTA1 Released
14 and under: 59.3
15-17: 661.9
18-20: 811.5
2000 - PS2 Released
14 and under: 55.0
15-17: 549.5
18-20: 709.9
2002 - GTA3 Released
14 and under: 49.1
15-17: 511.7
18-20: 669.2
2003 - Most Recent Year Recorded
14 and under: 50.1
15-17: 504.6
18-20: 645.9
Or, in terms of DEcrease:
14 and under: 35.1%
15-17: 46.7%
18-20: 34.3%
So, since the arrival of the PSX and healthier outlets for violence, there's been a 34.3-46.7% DEcrease in violent crime amongst children and teens?
At what point will those campaigning against them will admit to either deliberately lying or, at best, being woefully ill informed of the actual truth?
Perhaps a question, along with those statistics, worth asking of your congressmen and senators. As they're only politicians, perhaps you could draw them a nice graph.