It's digusting that game companies are using the sensationalism of sex to get people interested in their games.
Why, it's almost as bad as journalists using the sensationalism of sex to get people interested in their articles.
It's like the whole Janet Jackson superbowl thing: Any normal person saw a low res blur for a split second. The outraged moral majority had to spend hours scouring the net to download and print a good half dozen different pictures of what bothered them so much.
E3, probably the most well known video game trade show was assaulted by the U.S. Army in a promotion for America's Army. Soldiers rappelled out of a real Blackhawk helicopter with real rifles and rushed the show.
They performed the same stunt, last year, right as I was about to cross the street to walk in. A guy in full green camoflage, green and black facepaint and carrying a machine gun walked up to me and told me to please stand back for a few minutes. Applying my rule of never arguing with people holding real machineguns, I did as he asked.
Sadly, given my never argue rule, I never did get to ask why the in God's name the US Army thought it was intelligent to wear GREEN camoflage in Los Angeles of all places. Concrete gray mixed with a dirty smog brown, perhaps. Green though...?
I guess the Army finally listened to Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam: We've got a special man in the audience today right now. Its Mr. Leo. He's a fashion consultant for the Army. 'Why thank you Adrian. I'm just very happy to be here. I want to tell you something. You know, this whole camoflague thing for me doesn't work very well.' Why is that? 'Well you...because you go into the jungle I can't see you. You know, its like wearing stripes and plaid. For me, I want to do something different. If you go into the jungle, make a statement. If you're going to fight, clash.
No, I haven't done it, but I read what it says just above where you sign on the entry cards.
To be fair, they also have a box to check if you've ever committed Moral Turpitude. I looked it up once, because I liked the word. Turns out the dictionary example was "Selling falsely coloured margarine". I'll be sure to avoid that one.
1. Move to Columbia 2. Sue the US under the WTO for not allowing its citizens to buy your drugs. 3. Profit
There comes a point when countries should have the right to enforce their own laws. If you don't permit gambling anywhere in your country, you shouldn't be forced to permit it via the web either.
Where the US falls down though is that it does allow gambling. If they wanted to say "OK, no gambling in the US. Nevada has to stop right now." that would be one thing. But they're not - they're permitting it, they're just keeping the lucrative revenue controlled.
Well, the sort of thing Customs do is get from the manufacturer the serial number ranges that they assign to different countries
Yeah, because they really do care that much...
Here's a genuine conversation from the days of 128bit SSL being US only, at Philadelphia airport:
"Did you pack your own bags today, Sir?" "No, my work packed it for me." "Have you been with your bags at all times, since they were packed?" "No, they were sitting around an office building all day." "And what's in the bags, Sir?" "This laptop. It has 128 bit encryption on it. It's currently regarded as a US military secret and can't be exported to anywhere else in the world." "Well I don't know anything about that." "It means it's illegal to take it out of the U.S." "Sir, you're causing a scene. Please move along." "But it's illega-" "Please move along."
Granted, that was in the days before nail clippers and breast milk became terrorist weapons.
...are we going to get the MAN'S printer??? Sexist bastards!
OK, way too much time spent on unix today. My immediate thought was "There is no manual entry for 'printer'".
However it does lead on to another thought - how to finally move Linux on to the average home desktop. Clearly it too needs to be more female-friendly. And I know just the way to do it...
To go with the man command, there needs to be a woman command. It should pull the man entry, then pull google's "I'm feeling lucky" entries to replace every word in it. The end result is something that doesn't really tell you anything useful, takes way longer to get to the point than man would do, but gives the user a reassuring feeling that they've really shared with the command.
Given all the creative types on slashdot, I'm sure we could have a script working within the afternoon, in all the main distributions by the end of the week and Microsoft finally bannished within the month.
Anyone else think we're nearing the end of the analog phone system?
No. This market segment probably never used telephones anyway. AOL users just drooled in bland confusion at their complicated number pads, while Mac users couldn't understand why the peripheral had more than one button.
If E3 this year is anything like last year's, remember the fact that Vampire uses the same engine.
The queue for Halflife was crazy, stretching around the booth and back again. Vampire on the other hand had hardly anyone interested in it. Knowing it was the same engine, I got about an hour with the guys, going wherever I wanted in the game, getting every last question I could think of answered - while the people who queued for twice as long for the H2 demo got a fraction of that.
The problem is, that's an offline game. They're specifically patenting providing card games over a network.
Probably the best case for prior art would go to a MUD with a multiplayer card game in it. Many of them date back well before this patent and a lot of them had coders with too much time on their hands creating cool games.
He reminds me of a guy I knew in highschool who was in to wargames. Apparently he didn't like superglue so the idiot actually tried to solder his lead miniatures together once the milliput he first tried didn't work.
You just have to run a rotovator over the soil to break it up, then a plough to make nice grooves every six inches for me to sew the seeds in. Once you do that, sure, I'll volunteer.
"The player is rewarded for attacking a woman, pushing her to the ground, kicking her repeatedly and then ultimately killing her, shooting her over and over again."
Has he actually ever seen GTA? Beyond someone giving him an outraged briefing?
There is absolutely no difference in reward between assaulting a male and assaulting a female. You can't assault them differently, you don't get more or less money, there is no difference.
Now, were it to only allow you to assault a given gender or race, that'd be one thing. If different, more rewarding attacks became available when attacking a woman, too. If women paid more... if women were easier to assualt yet still had the same reward...
GTA may be amoral, it may even reward immoral actions. Regardless, it has absolutely no specific focus on violence against women. Violence, yes. Violence [in any way] specifically against women, no.
Trying to claim it teaches a specific kind of violence, in order to gain sympathy and votes... At best that's missing the point. At worst...?
Sniper rifles in most games are, as the article describes, fingers of God. Point them at where you know a target's going to be, click fire as the target moves under the crosshairs, he's dead. Then near-instant repeat.
A couple of really simple additions would level the playing field, bringing sniper rifles back to more realistic levels...
Variable Cones Of Fire Most sniper rifles aren't that fast to fire. Ghost Recon does a great job of this with a cone of fire that expands the more you move. Those things fire large caliber rounds to try negating wind effect so have the thing recoil heavily, throwing the cone of fire waaay off for a second or two.
Slow Reloading Now add a slow reloading animation for WWII era rifles. You end up with a weapon that can be devastating but can't clip off entire squads in a couple of seconds. Again, Ghost Recon does a great job: Modern rifles do use clips but, because of their large caliber, you only get half a dozen shots before you have to slowly change clips.
Wind Just like golf games, add wind effects. Put a wind gauge or whatever on the screen. Now the sniper requires genuine skill to factor in the wind speed and distance of shot as the crosshairs are now just a guide.
Combine a cone of fire that widens as the player moves and now it takes real skill to balance tracking a shot to compensate for wind changes with moving it smoothly enough to not lose your accuracy.
Wind can also become a balancing factor. Make it a server config option. Sick of snipers? Make it a very windy, gusty day. Feel like there aren't enough snipers, calm the wind right down.
Slow Focusing Have you ever tried moving your eyes, from something close to something far away, really quickly. It takes a moment to adjust. Make the responsiveness of scopes somewhat slower and you take out the ability to sit zoomed largely out, watching the wide angle, then zoom in for the kill. All of a sudden you need a spotter, just like many real world sniper teams who watches the wide angle, tells you where people are coming from, and guides your shots.
Mix all of those in and a sniper rifle can still be truly lethal. But it takes a genuinely skilled marksman, with a smooth aim, the ability to factor in wind and distance, and a spotter working with him - and he kills one at a time. The unbalanced 4:1 ratios stop and normal players stand a genuine chance while rushing them.
You don't have the option to check the "No thanks, I pay by the MB for my downloads" button. You don't even know about the large download until after it's done!! That's the offensive part.
It's called site blocking on your router. If your computer can't connect through your router to unicast's servers, they can't push anything on you.
Whenever I get a site with ads that bug me, I just add it to my router's list. With partial names (ads. ads1. adclient. adserv. etc.) and the names of a few of the worst offenders (gator, doubleclick, linksynergy, netflix, x10), my list is only about 20 entries long yet I block probably 95% of ad traffic. Very, very rarely I'll have to disable blocking while I visit a specific site but, otherwise, it's just a peaceful ad-free existence.
At about $30 for a cheap router these days, it's worth it for the ad-based agravation it saves alone, let alone the other services it offers.
Granted, the typical web user probably doesn't know what a router is (or had a geek friend set theirs up so they could just share a cable modem connection) but, for those who do, it's a godsend. Actually, I kind of prefer it that way: When only a few people used Tivo, the TV companies hated it but did nothing - when more people started using it, they had to change their ads and bury more in shows. If relatively few people use site blocking on their router, it means the ads companies won't find workarounds and I'll be left alone.
>>Later this week all of the IT department at my company (50-80 people) is having a dinner with the company President and VP/CIO. One major reason for this is so that they can get a better understanding of what is going on in IT and how it impacts the company overall.
Isn't that what managers are for? It's not your job to inform CxOs that there are problems.
Surely you can't expect the Chief Information Officer to know what's happening within the Information Technology department! That's crazy talk!
The last four months of my life have been, literally, a living hell. Panic attacks to the point of screaming and shaking in fear, tranquilizers by the tubfull. Welcome to the world of [what was diagnosed as] Generalized Anxiety Disorder and it's fun big brother, Acute Panic Disorder.
The reason I mention them is because they have many of the same physical symptoms as ADHD: Trouble sleeping, racing thoughts, inability to focus, irritability/easy to upset, etc.
It was only when that connection was made, in the last week or so, that I appear to be finding my way out of it...
You see, I had what most people would call ADHD when I was a kid. Pretty much every symptom, which are pretty much the same symptoms as anxiety disorder and panic disorder in adults, I had.
Then, it being the 70s in England and Ritalin not being as popular, my mother looked around for other remedies and found the reports on Yellow 5 allergies. She took me off Yellow 5 (tartrazine) and I started to chill out. The scientists may be divided on whether it's a factor but the emprical evidence suggests it was for me at least.
It's only been in the last week or so that we put two and two together. I was ordered off caffeine the moment I got ill. I swapped to Minute Maid lemonade from diet Coke. The stuff is full of Yellow 5 - the problems snowballed.
Since Sunday I've been off anything with Yellow 5 (or Blue 1). What do you know? The physical symptoms are getting better by the day.
The point of all of this is that Yellow 5 and ADHD may or may not be related, who cares. What does seem to be the case though is that a Yellow 5 allergy can manifest with the same symptoms as ADHD or Anxiety Disorder.
All the tranquilizers in the world, SSRIs, you name it, weren't going to help when I had the equivalent of someone slipping me speed or an acid tab in every can of soda. Ditching the soda (and other things that have Yellow 5) has already had a profound affect in, what, 72 hours?
My advice would be - try cutting out Yellow 5. It might not make a difference but it will only take two weeks to find out so it doesn't really cost you anything much and you can try it in conjunction with her other treatments. But can you really afford not to try it? Imagine if the ADHD was a misdiagnosis and you'd put her through all the Ritalin and everything else when just changing out the lemonade and Sunny Delight she drinks could cure it?
Yeah, it's an unproven theory at the moment (then again, people once argued smoking wasn't bad for you too). But it risks nothing to try it and there's one person who'll serve as empirical evidence right here.
It seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up." Except for the frying part.
It's regularly quoted that the London Underground, in summer, gets so hot it would be illegal to transport animals to slaughter on it. That's OK though, they're just transporting humans and we don't have the same animal cruelty protections.
Slashdot Mirror
It's digusting that game companies are using the sensationalism of sex to get people interested in their games.
Why, it's almost as bad as journalists using the sensationalism of sex to get people interested in their articles.
It's like the whole Janet Jackson superbowl thing: Any normal person saw a low res blur for a split second. The outraged moral majority had to spend hours scouring the net to download and print a good half dozen different pictures of what bothered them so much.
AMD's scoring isn't based on MHz, but speed.
Which is contradictory to most people's belief that AMD's scoring is based on too much acid.
Pretty much the entire $20 "budget" line at Target/Walmart seems to be targeted to blind gamers already.
Britney's Dance Beat is similarly targeted to the deaf.
E3, probably the most well known video game trade show was assaulted by the U.S. Army in a promotion for America's Army. Soldiers rappelled out of a real Blackhawk helicopter with real rifles and rushed the show.
They performed the same stunt, last year, right as I was about to cross the street to walk in. A guy in full green camoflage, green and black facepaint and carrying a machine gun walked up to me and told me to please stand back for a few minutes. Applying my rule of never arguing with people holding real machineguns, I did as he asked.
Sadly, given my never argue rule, I never did get to ask why the in God's name the US Army thought it was intelligent to wear GREEN camoflage in Los Angeles of all places. Concrete gray mixed with a dirty smog brown, perhaps. Green though...?
I guess the Army finally listened to Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam:
We've got a special man in the audience today right now. Its Mr. Leo. He's a fashion consultant for the Army. 'Why thank you Adrian. I'm just very happy to be here. I want to tell you something. You know, this whole camoflague thing for me doesn't work very well.' Why is that? 'Well you...because you go into the jungle I can't see you. You know, its like wearing stripes and plaid. For me, I want to do something different. If you go into the jungle, make a statement. If you're going to fight, clash.
As usual, there should be a qualifier as to what is meant by fastest.
When complete it will be capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second.
Screw that. How many fps can it manage in Quake III?
PS. ...and no employers really don't value "keeping abreast of industry trends" (reading /., the Reg, &c)
Dude, like totally. I got so fired for "keeping 'abreast' of industry trends" during work hours.
I figured they were all doing it after my manager told me he was synergizing his middle management.
Before being a sysadmin, I drove two trucks.
Is that even legal? Do you like lean out of one window and in the window of the other? I'm guessing they must have been automatics, right?
Damn those teamsters. They'll try and get away with anything!
Pretty neat skill though. Kudos.
No, I haven't done it, but I read what it says just above where you sign on the entry cards.
To be fair, they also have a box to check if you've ever committed Moral Turpitude. I looked it up once, because I liked the word. Turns out the dictionary example was "Selling falsely coloured margarine". I'll be sure to avoid that one.
1. Move to Columbia
2. Sue the US under the WTO for not allowing its citizens to buy your drugs.
3. Profit
There comes a point when countries should have the right to enforce their own laws. If you don't permit gambling anywhere in your country, you shouldn't be forced to permit it via the web either.
Where the US falls down though is that it does allow gambling. If they wanted to say "OK, no gambling in the US. Nevada has to stop right now." that would be one thing. But they're not - they're permitting it, they're just keeping the lucrative revenue controlled.
Well, the sort of thing Customs do is get from the manufacturer the serial number ranges that they assign to different countries
Yeah, because they really do care that much...
Here's a genuine conversation from the days of 128bit SSL being US only, at Philadelphia airport:
"Did you pack your own bags today, Sir?"
"No, my work packed it for me."
"Have you been with your bags at all times, since they were packed?"
"No, they were sitting around an office building all day."
"And what's in the bags, Sir?"
"This laptop. It has 128 bit encryption on it. It's currently regarded as a US military secret and can't be exported to anywhere else in the world."
"Well I don't know anything about that."
"It means it's illegal to take it out of the U.S."
"Sir, you're causing a scene. Please move along."
"But it's illega-"
"Please move along."
Granted, that was in the days before nail clippers and breast milk became terrorist weapons.
...are we going to get the MAN'S printer??? Sexist bastards!
OK, way too much time spent on unix today. My immediate thought was "There is no manual entry for 'printer'".
However it does lead on to another thought - how to finally move Linux on to the average home desktop. Clearly it too needs to be more female-friendly. And I know just the way to do it...
To go with the man command, there needs to be a woman command. It should pull the man entry, then pull google's "I'm feeling lucky" entries to replace every word in it. The end result is something that doesn't really tell you anything useful, takes way longer to get to the point than man would do, but gives the user a reassuring feeling that they've really shared with the command.
Given all the creative types on slashdot, I'm sure we could have a script working within the afternoon, in all the main distributions by the end of the week and Microsoft finally bannished within the month.
Rather than buy it with virtual money, why not outsource it to slashdot, the ultimate free consultancy service:
1) Set up consultancy firm
2) Ask slashdot
3) Profit
Now, Taco, that $100 gets me a guaranteed first post, modded to 5, that can't be modded down, right?
Hey, don't knock a filter that can correctly sort mail in to two piles fifty percent of the time. CoinToss 1.0 has been a real innovation!
Anyone else think we're nearing the end of the analog phone system?
No. This market segment probably never used telephones anyway. AOL users just drooled in bland confusion at their complicated number pads, while Mac users couldn't understand why the peripheral had more than one button.
If E3 this year is anything like last year's, remember the fact that Vampire uses the same engine.
The queue for Halflife was crazy, stretching around the booth and back again. Vampire on the other hand had hardly anyone interested in it. Knowing it was the same engine, I got about an hour with the guys, going wherever I wanted in the game, getting every last question I could think of answered - while the people who queued for twice as long for the H2 demo got a fraction of that.
The problem is, that's an offline game. They're specifically patenting providing card games over a network.
Probably the best case for prior art would go to a MUD with a multiplayer card game in it. Many of them date back well before this patent and a lot of them had coders with too much time on their hands creating cool games.
He reminds me of a guy I knew in highschool who was in to wargames. Apparently he didn't like superglue so the idiot actually tried to solder his lead miniatures together once the milliput he first tried didn't work.
*fears*
I'll volunteer.
You just have to run a rotovator over the soil to break it up, then a plough to make nice grooves every six inches for me to sew the seeds in. Once you do that, sure, I'll volunteer.
"The player is rewarded for attacking a woman, pushing her to the ground, kicking her repeatedly and then ultimately killing her, shooting her over and over again."
Has he actually ever seen GTA? Beyond someone giving him an outraged briefing?
There is absolutely no difference in reward between assaulting a male and assaulting a female. You can't assault them differently, you don't get more or less money, there is no difference.
Now, were it to only allow you to assault a given gender or race, that'd be one thing. If different, more rewarding attacks became available when attacking a woman, too. If women paid more... if women were easier to assualt yet still had the same reward...
GTA may be amoral, it may even reward immoral actions. Regardless, it has absolutely no specific focus on violence against women. Violence, yes. Violence [in any way] specifically against women, no.
Trying to claim it teaches a specific kind of violence, in order to gain sympathy and votes... At best that's missing the point. At worst...?
The problem's with their implementation.
Sniper rifles in most games are, as the article describes, fingers of God. Point them at where you know a target's going to be, click fire as the target moves under the crosshairs, he's dead. Then near-instant repeat.
A couple of really simple additions would level the playing field, bringing sniper rifles back to more realistic levels...
Variable Cones Of Fire
Most sniper rifles aren't that fast to fire. Ghost Recon does a great job of this with a cone of fire that expands the more you move. Those things fire large caliber rounds to try negating wind effect so have the thing recoil heavily, throwing the cone of fire waaay off for a second or two.
Slow Reloading
Now add a slow reloading animation for WWII era rifles. You end up with a weapon that can be devastating but can't clip off entire squads in a couple of seconds. Again, Ghost Recon does a great job: Modern rifles do use clips but, because of their large caliber, you only get half a dozen shots before you have to slowly change clips.
Wind
Just like golf games, add wind effects. Put a wind gauge or whatever on the screen. Now the sniper requires genuine skill to factor in the wind speed and distance of shot as the crosshairs are now just a guide.
Combine a cone of fire that widens as the player moves and now it takes real skill to balance tracking a shot to compensate for wind changes with moving it smoothly enough to not lose your accuracy.
Wind can also become a balancing factor. Make it a server config option. Sick of snipers? Make it a very windy, gusty day. Feel like there aren't enough snipers, calm the wind right down.
Slow Focusing
Have you ever tried moving your eyes, from something close to something far away, really quickly. It takes a moment to adjust. Make the responsiveness of scopes somewhat slower and you take out the ability to sit zoomed largely out, watching the wide angle, then zoom in for the kill. All of a sudden you need a spotter, just like many real world sniper teams who watches the wide angle, tells you where people are coming from, and guides your shots.
Mix all of those in and a sniper rifle can still be truly lethal. But it takes a genuinely skilled marksman, with a smooth aim, the ability to factor in wind and distance, and a spotter working with him - and he kills one at a time. The unbalanced 4:1 ratios stop and normal players stand a genuine chance while rushing them.
You don't have the option to check the "No thanks, I pay by the MB for my downloads" button. You don't even know about the large download until after it's done!! That's the offensive part.
It's called site blocking on your router. If your computer can't connect through your router to unicast's servers, they can't push anything on you.
Whenever I get a site with ads that bug me, I just add it to my router's list. With partial names (ads. ads1. adclient. adserv. etc.) and the names of a few of the worst offenders (gator, doubleclick, linksynergy, netflix, x10), my list is only about 20 entries long yet I block probably 95% of ad traffic. Very, very rarely I'll have to disable blocking while I visit a specific site but, otherwise, it's just a peaceful ad-free existence.
At about $30 for a cheap router these days, it's worth it for the ad-based agravation it saves alone, let alone the other services it offers.
Granted, the typical web user probably doesn't know what a router is (or had a geek friend set theirs up so they could just share a cable modem connection) but, for those who do, it's a godsend. Actually, I kind of prefer it that way: When only a few people used Tivo, the TV companies hated it but did nothing - when more people started using it, they had to change their ads and bury more in shows. If relatively few people use site blocking on their router, it means the ads companies won't find workarounds and I'll be left alone.
>>Later this week all of the IT department at my company (50-80 people) is having a dinner with the company President and VP/CIO. One major reason for this is so that they can get a better understanding of what is going on in IT and how it impacts the company overall.
Isn't that what managers are for? It's not your job to inform CxOs that there are problems.
Surely you can't expect the Chief Information Officer to know what's happening within the Information Technology department! That's crazy talk!
The last four months of my life have been, literally, a living hell. Panic attacks to the point of screaming and shaking in fear, tranquilizers by the tubfull. Welcome to the world of [what was diagnosed as] Generalized Anxiety Disorder and it's fun big brother, Acute Panic Disorder.
The reason I mention them is because they have many of the same physical symptoms as ADHD: Trouble sleeping, racing thoughts, inability to focus, irritability/easy to upset, etc.
It was only when that connection was made, in the last week or so, that I appear to be finding my way out of it...
You see, I had what most people would call ADHD when I was a kid. Pretty much every symptom, which are pretty much the same symptoms as anxiety disorder and panic disorder in adults, I had.
Then, it being the 70s in England and Ritalin not being as popular, my mother looked around for other remedies and found the reports on Yellow 5 allergies. She took me off Yellow 5 (tartrazine) and I started to chill out. The scientists may be divided on whether it's a factor but the emprical evidence suggests it was for me at least.
It's only been in the last week or so that we put two and two together. I was ordered off caffeine the moment I got ill. I swapped to Minute Maid lemonade from diet Coke. The stuff is full of Yellow 5 - the problems snowballed.
Since Sunday I've been off anything with Yellow 5 (or Blue 1). What do you know? The physical symptoms are getting better by the day.
The point of all of this is that Yellow 5 and ADHD may or may not be related, who cares. What does seem to be the case though is that a Yellow 5 allergy can manifest with the same symptoms as ADHD or Anxiety Disorder.
All the tranquilizers in the world, SSRIs, you name it, weren't going to help when I had the equivalent of someone slipping me speed or an acid tab in every can of soda. Ditching the soda (and other things that have Yellow 5) has already had a profound affect in, what, 72 hours?
My advice would be - try cutting out Yellow 5. It might not make a difference but it will only take two weeks to find out so it doesn't really cost you anything much and you can try it in conjunction with her other treatments. But can you really afford not to try it? Imagine if the ADHD was a misdiagnosis and you'd put her through all the Ritalin and everything else when just changing out the lemonade and Sunny Delight she drinks could cure it?
Yeah, it's an unproven theory at the moment (then again, people once argued smoking wasn't bad for you too). But it risks nothing to try it and there's one person who'll serve as empirical evidence right here.
It seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up." Except for the frying part.
It's regularly quoted that the London Underground, in summer, gets so hot it would be illegal to transport animals to slaughter on it. That's OK though, they're just transporting humans and we don't have the same animal cruelty protections.