Yeah, Penn & Teller (on an episode of Bullshit! last year) debunked magnet therapy too. It doesn't do anything whatsoever (surprise) aside from a placebo affect which they were able to duplicate via a series of phoney (and ridiculous looking) treatments in a random mall.
People WANT this stuff to work, and thus are easily tricked into thinking it really does.
You might be interested to know about Children of the Nile. It's a city building game due later this year that's being made by many of the creators of the Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus series that's completely 3D (you can zoom down into the streets and follow people around) and based in ancient Egypt.
I run a tracker that hosts a number of game related files (here) and have a "headless downloader" for each one. That is, you run btdownloadheadless.py on a.torrent on your server and let it continue running. You can set the max upload speed, etc, so that it doesn't use up your entire pipe. It acts as if it's just another seed/client.
What I do is put the source file onto the server, create the.torrent, then start a downloader on that with a max upload of 100 - 200k/sec. That ensures that there is always at least one seed for each file, and it helps provide some additional upload bandwidth. I am surprised more trackers don't do this, even if they just set the max upload at 5k/sec or something it would help a lot.
When they say initial orders of 2.5 million copies, they are talking about orders from STORES. Not consumers. Blizzard always does that with their press releases and most take it to mean that millions of copies have been preordered by consumers when that's just not the case.
The critics are loving it. Normally I don't care for little mini-game compilations because they tend to get boring quickly, but it sounds like this one has some interesting twists and good 'ol Nintendo polish.
Cold Hard Numbers (via Business 2.0 Magazine)
on
Lucky Wander Boy
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· Score: 4, Informative
Here's what the September 2002 issue of Business 2.0 magazine had to say about this myth.
Videogames Vs. Hollywood You've probably heard that the videogame business is now bigger than the movie industry. Don't believe the hype. The reality: Videogame sales last year still trailed Hollywood box-office receipts (not to mention books and music). Throw in revenues from VHS and DVD sales and rentals, and game software becomes a distant also-ran.
Share of the entertainment dollar, 2001 (TOTAL: $59 Billion)
Video (VHS and DVD): 28% Books: 28% Movies (box office): 14% Music: 19% Videogames: 11%
Hollywood makes FAR more than the gaming industry. Always has and will for at least a long time yet. This myth about the gaming industry making more than Hollywood began because it was reported that the game industry had surpased BOX OFFICE receipts (true, BARELY). This turned into, "Games are bigger than movies!"
Nope, isn't even close. Once you include DVD sales/rentals and such, Hollywood is way above and beyond the gaming industry.
Perhaps now there will be a little bit of warning. When you start seeing the first referrals from slashdot on your web server, those are the subscribers -- the advance guard before the real assault.
I don't think that's going to help the situation much at all. Really, how many people watch their referrals so closely that they would notice the Slashdot subscriber hits right away and still have time to take some sort of action before it shows up on/. proper?
Plain and simple,/. needs to implement a google-like caching system for sites that are likely to get crushed. I don't think Fred from Fred's Snowflake Pictures Homepage is going to get pissed about/. caching their site which doesn't have ads or anything in the first place. Most likely it's preferable to getting hit with a bandwidth overage charge.
Doesn't sound funny at all, actually...
on
Presenting The CDR-ROM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"It may sound funny, but if AOL started sending out CD's like this I might just start keeping them around."
Back when AOL used to send out 3.5" floppy discs a lot of people wanted to get as many as possible. They'd format the discs, rip off the label, put their own label on and use it later.
I remember seeing sites that listed a bunch of methods on how to get more. Thanks to AOL you never had to buy floppys again! But unfortunately, as everyone knows, they switched to CDs and now everyone would rather see less of 'em. If they were rewritable that would probably be a different story for many -- and thus even if CDR-ROM was an option AOL might not do it for this very reason.
Someone is sleeping at the wheel or just saw Jeff Bezos' name and thought, "OMG, didn't he basically invent the Internet!? Plus he predicted that the Segway was going to change the world! Now where's my big approval stamp?"
I picked up the book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, last year and found it to be incredibly interesting. It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward. It goes through the rise and fall of the video game industry (which crashed hard in the early 80s), the coin shortage caused by Space Invaders, the beginnings of Atari (and their fall), Nintendo and Sega. The author interviewed countless people from that era - it has tons of first-hand information/quotes from the folks that started the industry (Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, etc) scattered all throughout the book where appropriate. And you'll find out that Atari wasn't all too squeaky clean when they started - their warehouse always reeking of recently smoked pot.;) Oh, and that Steve Jobs actually got his start there.
This may sound like an ad, but the author deserves it. If you're interested in learning about how things began and what it was like at Atari/etc in the early days, then you'll love this book.
Last year's release, Neverwinter Nights by BioWare, is the game to get if you want some good D&D action. In fact, the multiplayer mode is just like playing tabletop D&D but via your computer and the Internet. Multiplayer supports a Dungeon Master who can modify the world in real time. He can take complete control of monsters/characters, place monsters into the world on the fly, further the story depending on the actions of the players, etc. There are also tons of mods out there now.
I remember it being announced and thought they were crazy. It really felt like Brad McQuaid and team just went with the first idea they had after they knew Everquest was a hit. "Hey, let's try a massively multiplayer RTS!"
My question: Why did it take them 4 years to figure out that it wasn't going to be any good?
If not, then you must not have heard about Ultima 9? Made by a guy with a solid reputation (Ultima!) and was heralded by Origin/EA for it's cutting-edge graphics technology. It released and was one of the biggest disasters in recent memory. It was so buggy that Origin remastered the game with all the patches and sent them out to registered users who bought Ultima 9. They also shut down the message boards shortly after release because of the massive amount of complaints.
Some info from Blue Planet(the Discovery special)
on
Every Species on Earth
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The ocean is a long, long ways from being completely explored. Especially the very deepest parts - in fact, everytime that they take a sub way down there, they find at least one new species. Every single trip! It's the place to be if you're a scientist and want to actually discover something new. Sure, the Rainforest has a ton of stuff yet, but mostly just tiny insects and such. That's not nearly as interesting as discovering a 10 pound fish that gives off a blue glow, or a bed of never before seen plant life that's able to sustain itself without photosynthasis.
Pretty much anything can influence someone, but it depends on how you were raised whether or not you're going to actually want to copy it or do something similar. When MOST people play a game like Doom, they would never ever even consider doing anything remotely close to that in real life. But some people don't have that type of conscious or morals(or ability to distinquish between reality and fiction), and when they see a movie or play a game and enjoy it, sometimes they go and do it themselves. It's possible they were influenced by it...it gave them an idea. That's all it takes when someone hasn't been raised right or fell off the wagon along the way for some other reason. But games/movies/music/etc are not to blame, the parents are. If the kid is going to be influenced by something like that, they shouldn't be playing/seeing/reading it in the first place.
It should also be noted that video games are a popular scape goat because they are relatively new. Books had the same problem back in the day. And most of you can probably remember all the hooplah when rap and the like became popular.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Penn & Teller (on an episode of Bullshit! last year) debunked magnet therapy too. It doesn't do anything whatsoever (surprise) aside from a placebo affect which they were able to duplicate via a series of phoney (and ridiculous looking) treatments in a random mall.
People WANT this stuff to work, and thus are easily tricked into thinking it really does.
You might be interested to know about Children of the Nile. It's a city building game due later this year that's being made by many of the creators of the Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus series that's completely 3D (you can zoom down into the streets and follow people around) and based in ancient Egypt.
I run a tracker that hosts a number of game related files (here) and have a "headless downloader" for each one. That is, you run btdownloadheadless.py on a .torrent on your server and let it continue running. You can set the max upload speed, etc, so that it doesn't use up your entire pipe. It acts as if it's just another seed/client.
.torrent, then start a downloader on that with a max upload of 100 - 200k/sec. That ensures that there is always at least one seed for each file, and it helps provide some additional upload bandwidth. I am surprised more trackers don't do this, even if they just set the max upload at 5k/sec or something it would help a lot.
What I do is put the source file onto the server, create the
When they say initial orders of 2.5 million copies, they are talking about orders from STORES. Not consumers. Blizzard always does that with their press releases and most take it to mean that millions of copies have been preordered by consumers when that's just not the case.
Conker Video: http://www.gamerfeed.com/index.php?story=3097
Grabbed by the Ghoulies Videos:
http://www.gamerfeed.com/index.php?story=3099
While you can't really determine much from those short videos, it sure looks like Rare has some interesting stuff on their hands.
The critics are loving it. Normally I don't care for little mini-game compilations because they tend to get boring quickly, but it sounds like this one has some interesting twists and good 'ol Nintendo polish.
Sierra (when they were still named Online Systems) published a game called Softporn Adventures.
;)
Here's an image of the box.
Here it is emulated. 100% text! Softporn indeed.
Here's what the September 2002 issue of Business 2.0 magazine had to say about this myth.
Videogames Vs. Hollywood
You've probably heard that the videogame business is now bigger than the movie industry. Don't believe the hype. The reality: Videogame sales last year still trailed Hollywood box-office receipts (not to mention books and music). Throw in revenues from VHS and DVD sales and rentals, and game software becomes a distant also-ran.
Share of the entertainment dollar, 2001 (TOTAL: $59 Billion)
Video (VHS and DVD): 28%
Books: 28%
Movies (box office): 14%
Music: 19%
Videogames: 11%
Hollywood makes FAR more than the gaming industry. Always has and will for at least a long time yet. This myth about the gaming industry making more than Hollywood began because it was reported that the game industry had surpased BOX OFFICE receipts (true, BARELY). This turned into, "Games are bigger than movies!"
Nope, isn't even close. Once you include DVD sales/rentals and such, Hollywood is way above and beyond the gaming industry.
Perhaps now there will be a little bit of warning. When you start seeing the first referrals from slashdot on your web server, those are the subscribers -- the advance guard before the real assault.
/. proper?
/. needs to implement a google-like caching system for sites that are likely to get crushed. I don't think Fred from Fred's Snowflake Pictures Homepage is going to get pissed about /. caching their site which doesn't have ads or anything in the first place. Most likely it's preferable to getting hit with a bandwidth overage charge.
I don't think that's going to help the situation much at all. Really, how many people watch their referrals so closely that they would notice the Slashdot subscriber hits right away and still have time to take some sort of action before it shows up on
Plain and simple,
"It may sound funny, but if AOL started sending out CD's like this I might just start keeping them around."
Back when AOL used to send out 3.5" floppy discs a lot of people wanted to get as many as possible. They'd format the discs, rip off the label, put their own label on and use it later.
I remember seeing sites that listed a bunch of methods on how to get more. Thanks to AOL you never had to buy floppys again! But unfortunately, as everyone knows, they switched to CDs and now everyone would rather see less of 'em. If they were rewritable that would probably be a different story for many -- and thus even if CDR-ROM was an option AOL might not do it for this very reason.
Here is an image of the patent.
Someone is sleeping at the wheel or just saw Jeff Bezos' name and thought, "OMG, didn't he basically invent the Internet!? Plus he predicted that the Segway was going to change the world! Now where's my big approval stamp?"
I picked up the book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, last year and found it to be incredibly interesting. It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward. It goes through the rise and fall of the video game industry (which crashed hard in the early 80s), the coin shortage caused by Space Invaders, the beginnings of Atari (and their fall), Nintendo and Sega. The author interviewed countless people from that era - it has tons of first-hand information/quotes from the folks that started the industry (Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, etc) scattered all throughout the book where appropriate. And you'll find out that Atari wasn't all too squeaky clean when they started - their warehouse always reeking of recently smoked pot. ;) Oh, and that Steve Jobs actually got his start there.
This may sound like an ad, but the author deserves it. If you're interested in learning about how things began and what it was like at Atari/etc in the early days, then you'll love this book.
Last year's release, Neverwinter Nights by BioWare, is the game to get if you want some good D&D action. In fact, the multiplayer mode is just like playing tabletop D&D but via your computer and the Internet. Multiplayer supports a Dungeon Master who can modify the world in real time. He can take complete control of monsters/characters, place monsters into the world on the fly, further the story depending on the actions of the players, etc. There are also tons of mods out there now.
Because two .coms are better than one.
Here's another article in honor of Valentine's Day - A guide on how to get your Valentine hooked on gaming!
http://www.gametab.com/features/valentines.1/
I remember it being announced and thought they were crazy. It really felt like Brad McQuaid and team just went with the first idea they had after they knew Everquest was a hit. "Hey, let's try a massively multiplayer RTS!"
My question: Why did it take them 4 years to figure out that it wasn't going to be any good?
I honestly can't tell if that's sarcasm of not.
If not, then you must not have heard about Ultima 9? Made by a guy with a solid reputation (Ultima!) and was heralded by Origin/EA for it's cutting-edge graphics technology. It released and was one of the biggest disasters in recent memory. It was so buggy that Origin remastered the game with all the patches and sent them out to registered users who bought Ultima 9. They also shut down the message boards shortly after release because of the massive amount of complaints.
Yep, and it's at Jillians to be precise.
How much of the earth's population has access to TV?
There are 6.2 billion people on the planet now, by the way.
The ocean is a long, long ways from being completely explored. Especially the very deepest parts - in fact, everytime that they take a sub way down there, they find at least one new species. Every single trip! It's the place to be if you're a scientist and want to actually discover something new. Sure, the Rainforest has a ton of stuff yet, but mostly just tiny insects and such. That's not nearly as interesting as discovering a 10 pound fish that gives off a blue glow, or a bed of never before seen plant life that's able to sustain itself without photosynthasis.
But I'm looking at my calendar and it appears that April 1st is nearly a month away yet.
The light on your modem flashes when you're receiving data. It's no more telling than that.
Parents.
Pretty much anything can influence someone, but it depends on how you were raised whether or not you're going to actually want to copy it or do something similar. When MOST people play a game like Doom, they would never ever even consider doing anything remotely close to that in real life. But some people don't have that type of conscious or morals(or ability to distinquish between reality and fiction), and when they see a movie or play a game and enjoy it, sometimes they go and do it themselves. It's possible they were influenced by it...it gave them an idea. That's all it takes when someone hasn't been raised right or fell off the wagon along the way for some other reason. But games/movies/music/etc are not to blame, the parents are. If the kid is going to be influenced by something like that, they shouldn't be playing/seeing/reading it in the first place.
It should also be noted that video games are a popular scape goat because they are relatively new. Books had the same problem back in the day. And most of you can probably remember all the hooplah when rap and the like became popular.
Perhaps they should do something about it closer to the source?
Are there laws in China against sending spam in the first place?