There are several hundred hyperlinks on the main page alone! And quite a few more on every sub-page. Why, the total must run into the tens of thousands! If they start charging on a per-hyperlink basis,/.'s going to be fucked.
The/. team should follow Kuro5hin's excellent example these past few days, and cut back on the hyperlinks. =P
Irony # 1: Paying M$ money (buying XBox) in order to run Linux on it. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank. I guess techies will find any excuse to conveniently forget why they hate MS - just offer them tech candy and they submit.
Irony # 2: Doing #1, then thinking somehow you've won a victory for Open Source. And then, posting on/. about how ironic aforesaid misunderstood course of action is. Joke's on you, my friend.
Then I'll be in a clean, white cylinder with a lot of hot women scientists in suspended animation beds who will wake up 6 months later with no knowledge of what I was doing to them while they were asleep... muahaha...
Where do I sign up?
...there are perks to being the navigator who has to stay awake and go stir-crazy during the trip...
-Kasreyn
moderators: learn to appreciate my sense of humor! Or... er... mod me down. Yeah, or that, too!
Now, FedEx has problems too, but UPS == avoid! I have a friend who worked there and he was always telling me about how packages would be damaged by co-workers tossing them around in their haste to get more packages moved. They have a bunch of anal, peppy manager-types who exhort everyone to work faster, and they time everyone's speed. Go too slow and you get criticized or lose the job. So packages get tossed and squished.
If you're shipping something they can't break, then go with UPS. Great for shipping clothing and most foods, because it's reasonably cheap. But don't trust them with electronics, glassware, or art. Use FedEx for that.
What kind of funky, retard-grade crack are moderators smoking these days, anyway?
If you wanted to mod him down, "overrated" would be a more logical reason. It's hard to be redundant when the comment you're posting is the first comment on the story. Maybe if moderators would stop reading at "highest rated first"...
I wouldn't call Minesweeper great art. But I can and do call Final Fantasy 4 (2 in the U.S.) a work of art. What is the difference?
Some types of video games have as much plot, story, and character development as a novel. Some have as much original and beautiful music as a symphony. Though these traits are shown at their highest watermark in (IMHO) games like FF4, there are many, many other games which include what I'd call impressive art. Acid Tetris and Dune 2 contain great music, if you ask me. Adn I'm sure there are others who, like me, replay Unreal primarily for the sheer beauty of its fantastical world and compelling soundtrack. Other games might not be as "beautiful" per se, but are rendered with amazing craftsmanship and attention to detail, like Half-Life, and this craftsmanship makes them art in my eyes.
Quite frankly, when people are busy arguing whether something is "art" or not, I have one criteria: is it a work of skill, created by a heartfelt dedication or effort on the part of a talented craftsman(woman)? To me, if this case is met, it is a small step to saying something is art. I see video game design, plot/script writing, image editing, graphic design, painting, and music composition all as art forms. Why should something that is a grand amalgamation of these, be considered less than art?
-Kasreyn
Correct, Adams is a cynic humorist, not Voltaire.
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2
Read Candide by Voltaire if you want to see what true satire is. Try to find a version with a foreword to explain the time it was written in and what Voltaire was mocking. Adams is just a very funny humorist, though the "very funny" is IMHO only.
Nanites would have to have built-in speed checks.
on
The Dangers of Nanotech
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Think about it, if a nanite that could construct more of itself went rogue and began making more rogue nanites like itself, it would overwhelm the area before humans could even draw five measured breaths. Unless, that is, it is built so that it cannot replicate more often than every x time period - and what if that measure "breaks"?
The only protection would seem to be to have security nanite completely saturated in the surroundings (ie., the entire world), and then what if a security nanite breaks or goes Rogue? Which nanites watch others, and which watch the watchers? There needs to be a more concrete answer to this before we go releasing nanites into the wild.
...in an open source project with a task as broad as "make an MMORPG", how do you guys decide what KIND of MMORPG to devote your energies to? Fantasy? Sci-Fi? Historical? Western? Horror? Noir? There are so many options.
My question is, what is the decision-making process you folks go through to get all the development troops working on the same code, when some of them want to code in Elves and others want to code in Stormtroopers? And how is/was the Elves vs Stormtroopers decision reached?
"In Australia a court case with international ramifications will decide if DVDs are software or films. If they are designated as software, rental prices will go through the roof, if they are films their distribution cannot be limited under copyright laws."
Here's the decision we'll get: It's both!
rental prices will go through the roof,
yup
cannot be limited under copyright laws.
that too! Sounds like a win/win for the movie industry here.
And clearly have never used DOS. The actual error message, the bland, high-handed, and uncaring epithet of the insane god of your reality, is, and I quote:
If they're hiring more because "Oh no, we're catching a ton of flak over these recent patents, we need to make sure bad patents don't get through", then that's great. That's good.
But if it's, "Dangit, we don't have enough people to rubberstamp corporate patents FAST enough! GWB needs us to Do Our Part for the economy by letting every patent through, find more rubberstamps!", then it'll only make things worse.
Half the articles on/. are "Damn the man, fight the RIAA, down with Microsoft!".
The other half are "here's how you, too, can buy into consumerism and give your money to entertainment megacorps, who will use it to buy fascist laws!"
Maybe a bit of consistency would remove this bad taste in my mouth, eh?
Frankly, I'll believe Tom's first. He at least can claim to be an independant agent (though I'm sure I'm about to get 50 replies telling me about his secret AMD funding), so I think he might be a bit more impartial than the "AMDzone".
I can hardly imagine how there could be this large a difference. Either the systems were NOT the same (hardware-wise), or the burn-out chip was poor quality, or AMDzone is lying, or Tom's is mistaken/lying, or this has been misreported.
I see no way in which you could "mistake" as to whether or not a processor burst into flames upon cooler removal. That sort of thing is pretty much an either-or that anyone with eyes can determine.
Look, I don't care how much you guys believe in capitalism, Adam Smith, and market forces. As long as big companies can buy laws to support their monopolies, they can legislate their way out of any situation where normal capitalist forces would stop them.
I'm just wondering how in hell the "Open Monopoly" intends to survive laws like the SSSCA (they WILL try again). I hardly think sitting around and patting yourselves on the back is a good way to bring Linux or whatever to market dominance. I'm all in favor of Linux winning out here, but we are not living in some perfect, pure capitalist economist's vision, where the best product wins out every time.
MAPS is the voice of the community speaking, as with one voice, and they are quoting Monty Python at that: "I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!!" You're free to find an ISP that doesn't use MAPS, and failing that, to start your OWN ISP that doesn't use MAPS. The rest of us, who don't like spam, will gladly blacklist you so we don't have to deal with your spam, and go on with our lives. Yes, MAPS is using pressure. Why is this a bad thing? Societies always do this to enforce behavioral norms. MAPS and its subscribers are exerting to try to enforce the behavioral norm, "do not spam". If you spam, this pressure will be brought to bear in an effort to dissuade you from doing so.
This is democracy at work, like it or not.
Suppose there's only two or three ISPs where you live. Imagine if they all subscribe to MAPS. What's your fucking solution now?
Here's a hypothetical for YOU: Say I'm Jeffrey Dahmer. I like to kill people, drill holes in their heads so as to have sex with their corpses, and then eat their bodies. But for some strange reason, society is against this and exerts pressure upon me to try to prevent me from carrying out my desired course of action. They threaten imprisonment, disenfranchisement, and execution for the things I think are my right to do. So what's my solution?
The only "solutions" are to go with society or against it. If you go against society like Dahmer did, you'll be sent to jail for life. If you go against society like spammers do, you'll be blackholed. You do not have a constitutional right to email.
Either they're a jackbooted Schutzstaffel officer stealing Einstein's violin, or they're Bruce Willis, saving the day once more (in a tank top no less), then crackin' open a cold one and getting the girl.
...It is called "Civilization III". I think Civ III will have many of the elements of strategy that modern RTS games are missing, so much that it might even start to tread over the line into a "turn-based strategy" game.
BTW, I agree that many RTS games lack strategy. The killer strat in Command & Conquer: Red Alert was "Build tanks. Build nothing but tanks. Build lots of tanks. Then go crush the other guy." The dominant strategy in Warcraft 2 is, "Build Ogre-Mages. Build nothing but Ogre-Mages. Build lots of Ogre-Mages. Then go crush the other guy."
I think Starcraft has a bit of this in it (Carrier or Battlecruiser "Victory Fleet" tactics), but SC also has strategy. There are units that counter each other. A huge Zergling swarm can be deadly, and will overrun Dragoons, but the same Protoss's Reavers will demolish the 'lings cost-effectively. I think it's well balanced with enough give and take that it retains at least a semblance of tactics by means of unit counters. These unit counters force you to build a force comprised of many different unit types, kind of a "combined forces" army.
The other thing strategy games need, to have more intelligent tactics, is more intelligent units! Let's face it, micromanagement is difficult and the more you micro, the less attention you can pay to your bases. A strategy game with more intelligent units would mean you can send them on specialized, pre-programmed missions while your attention is devoted to your economy and map control. This would be more like a real war, with a commander who delegates authority between thinking sub-commanders, rather than C&C type games where you just hurl clumps of stupid troops at each other, and win by attrition.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several hundred hyperlinks on the main page alone! And quite a few more on every sub-page. Why, the total must run into the tens of thousands! If they start charging on a per-hyperlink basis, /.'s going to be fucked.
/. team should follow Kuro5hin's excellent example these past few days, and cut back on the hyperlinks. =P
The
-Kasreyn
Irony # 1: Paying M$ money (buying XBox) in order to run Linux on it. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank. I guess techies will find any excuse to conveniently forget why they hate MS - just offer them tech candy and they submit.
/. about how ironic aforesaid misunderstood course of action is. Joke's on you, my friend.
Irony # 2: Doing #1, then thinking somehow you've won a victory for Open Source. And then, posting on
-Kasreyn
"-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity."
I'm certainly not going to pay money to join a snobbish organization full of people who can't even spell "tolerance" correctly.
But you did. Sucker!
Then I'll be in a clean, white cylinder with a lot of hot women scientists in suspended animation beds who will wake up 6 months later with no knowledge of what I was doing to them while they were asleep... muahaha...
Where do I sign up?
...there are perks to being the navigator who has to stay awake and go stir-crazy during the trip...
-Kasreyn
moderators: learn to appreciate my sense of humor! Or... er... mod me down. Yeah, or that, too!
Now, FedEx has problems too, but UPS == avoid! I have a friend who worked there and he was always telling me about how packages would be damaged by co-workers tossing them around in their haste to get more packages moved. They have a bunch of anal, peppy manager-types who exhort everyone to work faster, and they time everyone's speed. Go too slow and you get criticized or lose the job. So packages get tossed and squished.
If you're shipping something they can't break, then go with UPS. Great for shipping clothing and most foods, because it's reasonably cheap. But don't trust them with electronics, glassware, or art. Use FedEx for that.
-Kasreyn
Do you want it to put on music that matches your mood? Or do you want it to put on music to move you to another mood?
Imagine a biofeedback mp3 playlist owned by a depressive person that puts on happy music when he's feeling low. Could be one way of looking at it.
-Kasreyn
Torn... between hate... for three lame "artists"... and evil megacorp coalition... uggh... which to hate... which to root for...
BRAIN... EXPLODING...
-Kasreyn
What kind of funky, retard-grade crack are moderators smoking these days, anyway?
If you wanted to mod him down, "overrated" would be a more logical reason. It's hard to be redundant when the comment you're posting is the first comment on the story. Maybe if moderators would stop reading at "highest rated first"...
-Kasreyn
The other criteria I have as to whether something is art:
Does it try to make you *feel* something?
This should be considered part of the above post.
-Kasreyn
I wouldn't call Minesweeper great art. But I can and do call Final Fantasy 4 (2 in the U.S.) a work of art. What is the difference?
Some types of video games have as much plot, story, and character development as a novel. Some have as much original and beautiful music as a symphony. Though these traits are shown at their highest watermark in (IMHO) games like FF4, there are many, many other games which include what I'd call impressive art. Acid Tetris and Dune 2 contain great music, if you ask me. Adn I'm sure there are others who, like me, replay Unreal primarily for the sheer beauty of its fantastical world and compelling soundtrack. Other games might not be as "beautiful" per se, but are rendered with amazing craftsmanship and attention to detail, like Half-Life, and this craftsmanship makes them art in my eyes.
Quite frankly, when people are busy arguing whether something is "art" or not, I have one criteria: is it a work of skill, created by a heartfelt dedication or effort on the part of a talented craftsman(woman)? To me, if this case is met, it is a small step to saying something is art. I see video game design, plot/script writing, image editing, graphic design, painting, and music composition all as art forms. Why should something that is a grand amalgamation of these, be considered less than art?
-Kasreyn
Read Candide by Voltaire if you want to see what true satire is. Try to find a version with a foreword to explain the time it was written in and what Voltaire was mocking. Adams is just a very funny humorist, though the "very funny" is IMHO only.
-Kasreyn
To Kill a Mockingbird.
'Nuff said. Just re-read it today...
-Kasreyn
Think about it, if a nanite that could construct more of itself went rogue and began making more rogue nanites like itself, it would overwhelm the area before humans could even draw five measured breaths. Unless, that is, it is built so that it cannot replicate more often than every x time period - and what if that measure "breaks"?
The only protection would seem to be to have security nanite completely saturated in the surroundings (ie., the entire world), and then what if a security nanite breaks or goes Rogue? Which nanites watch others, and which watch the watchers? There needs to be a more concrete answer to this before we go releasing nanites into the wild.
-Kasreyn
...in an open source project with a task as broad as "make an MMORPG", how do you guys decide what KIND of MMORPG to devote your energies to? Fantasy? Sci-Fi? Historical? Western? Horror? Noir? There are so many options.
My question is, what is the decision-making process you folks go through to get all the development troops working on the same code, when some of them want to code in Elves and others want to code in Stormtroopers? And how is/was the Elves vs Stormtroopers decision reached?
-Kasreyn
"In Australia a court case with international ramifications will decide if DVDs are software or films. If they are designated as software, rental prices will go through the roof, if they are films their distribution cannot be limited under copyright laws."
Here's the decision we'll get: It's both!
rental prices will go through the roof,
yup
cannot be limited under copyright laws.
that too! Sounds like a win/win for the movie industry here.
-Kasreyn
Scientists can measure ALL the dark matter in the universe, but can't build a fortune-telling weight machine that can get my weight right.
Pfft.
-Kasreyn
And clearly have never used DOS. The actual error message, the bland, high-handed, and uncaring epithet of the insane god of your reality, is, and I quote:
"Bad command or file name."
(bows down in worship)
-Kasreyn
If they're hiring more because "Oh no, we're catching a ton of flak over these recent patents, we need to make sure bad patents don't get through", then that's great. That's good.
But if it's, "Dangit, we don't have enough people to rubberstamp corporate patents FAST enough! GWB needs us to Do Our Part for the economy by letting every patent through, find more rubberstamps!", then it'll only make things worse.
-Kasreyn
Half the articles on /. are "Damn the man, fight the RIAA, down with Microsoft!".
The other half are "here's how you, too, can buy into consumerism and give your money to entertainment megacorps, who will use it to buy fascist laws!"
Maybe a bit of consistency would remove this bad taste in my mouth, eh?
-Kasreyn
Either the systems were NOT the same (hardware-wise)
/. article is a joke.
do you not understand?
If the tests weren't run on the same frickin' hardware then they have no relation to each other, and this entire
-Kasreyn
Frankly, I'll believe Tom's first. He at least can claim to be an independant agent (though I'm sure I'm about to get 50 replies telling me about his secret AMD funding), so I think he might be a bit more impartial than the "AMDzone".
I can hardly imagine how there could be this large a difference. Either the systems were NOT the same (hardware-wise), or the burn-out chip was poor quality, or AMDzone is lying, or Tom's is mistaken/lying, or this has been misreported.
I see no way in which you could "mistake" as to whether or not a processor burst into flames upon cooler removal. That sort of thing is pretty much an either-or that anyone with eyes can determine.
-Kasreyn
Look, I don't care how much you guys believe in capitalism, Adam Smith, and market forces. As long as big companies can buy laws to support their monopolies, they can legislate their way out of any situation where normal capitalist forces would stop them.
I'm just wondering how in hell the "Open Monopoly" intends to survive laws like the SSSCA (they WILL try again). I hardly think sitting around and patting yourselves on the back is a good way to bring Linux or whatever to market dominance. I'm all in favor of Linux winning out here, but we are not living in some perfect, pure capitalist economist's vision, where the best product wins out every time.
-Kasreyn
MAPS is the voice of the community speaking, as with one voice, and they are quoting Monty Python at that: "I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!!" You're free to find an ISP that doesn't use MAPS, and failing that, to start your OWN ISP that doesn't use MAPS. The rest of us, who don't like spam, will gladly blacklist you so we don't have to deal with your spam, and go on with our lives. Yes, MAPS is using pressure. Why is this a bad thing? Societies always do this to enforce behavioral norms. MAPS and its subscribers are exerting to try to enforce the behavioral norm, "do not spam". If you spam, this pressure will be brought to bear in an effort to dissuade you from doing so.
This is democracy at work, like it or not.
Suppose there's only two or three ISPs where you live. Imagine if they all subscribe to MAPS. What's your fucking solution now?
Here's a hypothetical for YOU: Say I'm Jeffrey Dahmer. I like to kill people, drill holes in their heads so as to have sex with their corpses, and then eat their bodies. But for some strange reason, society is against this and exerts pressure upon me to try to prevent me from carrying out my desired course of action. They threaten imprisonment, disenfranchisement, and execution for the things I think are my right to do. So what's my solution?
The only "solutions" are to go with society or against it. If you go against society like Dahmer did, you'll be sent to jail for life. If you go against society like spammers do, you'll be blackholed. You do not have a constitutional right to email.
-Kasreyn
Either they're a jackbooted Schutzstaffel officer stealing Einstein's violin, or they're Bruce Willis, saving the day once more (in a tank top no less), then crackin' open a cold one and getting the girl.
So hard to decide...
-Kasreyn
...It is called "Civilization III". I think Civ III will have many of the elements of strategy that modern RTS games are missing, so much that it might even start to tread over the line into a "turn-based strategy" game.
BTW, I agree that many RTS games lack strategy. The killer strat in Command & Conquer: Red Alert was "Build tanks. Build nothing but tanks. Build lots of tanks. Then go crush the other guy." The dominant strategy in Warcraft 2 is, "Build Ogre-Mages. Build nothing but Ogre-Mages. Build lots of Ogre-Mages. Then go crush the other guy."
I think Starcraft has a bit of this in it (Carrier or Battlecruiser "Victory Fleet" tactics), but SC also has strategy. There are units that counter each other. A huge Zergling swarm can be deadly, and will overrun Dragoons, but the same Protoss's Reavers will demolish the 'lings cost-effectively. I think it's well balanced with enough give and take that it retains at least a semblance of tactics by means of unit counters. These unit counters force you to build a force comprised of many different unit types, kind of a "combined forces" army.
The other thing strategy games need, to have more intelligent tactics, is more intelligent units! Let's face it, micromanagement is difficult and the more you micro, the less attention you can pay to your bases. A strategy game with more intelligent units would mean you can send them on specialized, pre-programmed missions while your attention is devoted to your economy and map control. This would be more like a real war, with a commander who delegates authority between thinking sub-commanders, rather than C&C type games where you just hurl clumps of stupid troops at each other, and win by attrition.
Comments?
-Kasreyn