Puzzle Pirates seems to be the revolutionary game of the year. And a lot of the players I meet in there are definitely not gamers. These are mostly people who used to play stuff like yahoo games, but now they play YPP instead.
I was skeptical at first, but I looked at the screenshots. That is really freakin' slick. Should make managing a database much easier. I think I just might try it out when it hits the portage tree, if it hasn't already.
You were doing great up until you got to that part about the "RTFM Crowd". You definitely mispercieve them. When someone says RTFM what they are actually saying in fewer words is "You aren't going to learn by me doing it for you. Only by reading the manual and by doing it yourself will you understand what you are doing and become proficient." They WANT more people to use linux. Can you imagine a *nix zealot telling someone to use windows? no! They just realize it would be a waste of time to explain some things better of learned on your own. The gentoo forums I think are a great example of what's great about linux. If you have a specific question it always gets answered promptly and helpfully. If you ask a broad question like "how do I install this?" You get a helpful hint and a link to the appropriate manual.
When someone says RTFM they are saying, I'm not going to type the answer to you because it is already written down. Go read it.
They want to be able to go to a third party software/driver website, follow the 'click here for Linux version' hyperlink, download the file, then double-click to install it.
This is what they want to do, but it's also what they shouldn't be doing. The fact that people can do this is the reason there is so much malware out there. Linux done right will force the non geek to have a great system, somethign windows can never do. Linux at this point isn't any harder than windows, if you get a geek to set it up for you. What we need is a distro called grandma linux. The WM will be just a bunch of huge icons on a single desktop. One will say E-mail one will say Web Browser, one will say Word Processor, Instant Messenger, etc. Which applications these things actually launch will be decided at install time, which grandma wont do. Stability, compatibility and ease of use will be priority one. There will be also one more big button, Add more Big Buttons. It will run a custom app that will be super grpahical and pretty providing a list of installable apps. This is also great for the corporate desktop, because you can give the secretary just the few apps she's allowed and nothing more.
There is no reason someone can't make this. In fact, this is the kind of thing that just isn't possible on windows, but is exactly what the world needs. You know what, I'm putting this on my CS projects queue. When I'm done with everything else I'm going to make that wm and that distro. All will be laid to burnination.
If you RTFA he says that he's pretty much only talking about CS and other FPS games where the sniper rifle is the "finger of god".
Right or wrong, what this guy is saying is nothing new. And as history has shown, the games aren't going to change.
The one point he misses in cs is that the extremely good players can get an aug or an m4 and get across the map and complete the objective without getting killed by snipers. What the sniper rifle does in CS is give the incredibly unskilled players the role of weeding out the average players and each other. The above average cs player will have the bomb planted so fast you'll still be reloading your awm. Kevlar, helmet, flash, aug, five seven, all hostages have been rescued.
Sure, you may have a better kill ratio. But our team has won ever game, hmmmm. One more thing, the "problem" he describes only exists on public servers. In any sort of real CS game with serious play, sniping is almost nil if you are on the offense team (T on DE map, CT on CS map). In a match the only thing that anyone cares about is which team wins, on the pub people only care about kill ratio. When people care about their team winning they put the sniper rifles away. That's not a game flaw, that's a people flaw.
This is why NS is gaining a lot of ground and becoming the Half-Life mod of choice. Heck, it IS the mod of choice. It hides the kill ratio. All anyone cares about in a game of NS is the team winning, and all the non-n00bs play as such.
Freshman year I paid for cable. That was a mistake. I barely used any of it, my roomate used it all the time. I had to pay half. Oh well. I never paid for cable again. It's my 4th year of college now, and TV is dead to me. I only watch it in two ways. Way 1, when I go home for a break or something I'll watch some sports and some cartoons to kill the time. Way 2, download shows like family guy, or get DVDs of tv shows and watch them. Tivo isn't even worth it. Heck a home brewed linux tivo isn't worth it.
TV is dead to me. I get all my information from the internet and I get all my video entertainment from DVDs and the internet. It's not just video games. It's push vs. pull technology. I just wont use anything that is push anymore.
My favorite game packaging has always been NES games. The box of the game was cardboard and discardable. It was just to sell the game anyway, not to store it in. Every game had black plastic sleeve. 1st party games has the nintendo logo on the sleeve. 3rd party did not. Towards the end of the NES they started selling sleeveless games and it really cheezed me off. The SNES had little plastic covers for games, but the N64 didn't. The Gameboy used to have plastic cases you could put games in. I've still got some, they are awesome.
What was even better that catrdiged containers was the smell. Remember the smell when you opened up a brand nes NES game? It was like nothing else. New car smell is pale in comparison to new NES cartridge smell. It is similar, yet much better than the smell of a new pack of baseball cards. Nowadays with games on disc there just isn't that great aroma of catridge manufacturing plant anymore. Oh, how I long for those days.
I'm not the only one who remembers the smell... right?
http://tron.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/TRON/ITRON/home-e.htm l
Itron, the #1 operating system in the world. Untouchable in the embedded world. Linux is nice because it makes interoperability with the desktop smooth if you have the same OS on both. But in terms of quality ITRON is #1 for a reason other than marketing (which is the reason Windows is #1).
I have a green only apple//e monitor plugged into my apple//e. And I've got one of those apple rgb monitors plugged into an apple//gs. I also have a Mac Plus with 2MB of RAM. That thing IS a monitor. My roomate has a pretty old VGA CRT he uses as a second monitor. It's at least 10 years old.
I played it when Tycho mentioned it. It was ok, but like most CCGs he who spends the most money and has the best cards wins. Skill in playing the game is not a major factor in winning. Luck and money are the primary determiners. It's pretty neat because it plays like a simplified Master of Orion. But its really just another CCG in disguise. They didn't fool me after I played it 3 or 4 times.
If there is anyone who can succesfully emulate the DOS CD-ROM version of Mechwarrior 2, please tell me how you did it! I've tried every dos emulator in the universe. The only way I can make it work is to get an old PC and install a real version of DOS on it. I need to play this game bad, it's been so long...
It's no wonder that lego is losing money. They seem to be putting a heck of a lot of their resources into stuff like Bionicle. Have you seen those things? There are like 10 pieces, they are not standard brick, and you can only make one thing out of them.
Bring back castle lego at a reasonable price and we'll talk. I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle. The big black square one. Now all they make is bionicle, harry potter, and some star wars. It's not the same as it was.
It used to be a toy of building. Now it's just a toy you build.
There is support for SATA drives. In face it was a 2.4 kernel patch also. Now it's official and full on in 2.6. The trick is that you actually have to configure your kernel to include the support for your particular controller. So for me with my Abit NF7-S I have to include support for Silicon Image disk controllers in my config.
So yeah official native SATA support is in there, and it works well too!
The gentoo livecd is high quality. And on any gentoo system you can emerge the tools used to create the livecds. Create your own custom livecd and go at it. Of course knoppix and such can do it, but the knoppix installer is very primitive and set in stone. By making a custom gentoo livecd you can actually make the system the way you want it to be.
So I played with it for about 15 minutes and I found out a few things. First of all, it is really anonymous. There is no freakin' way to find out who anyone is. All you know are the IP addresses of the people who are directly connected to you on the network. You don't know which files they have or anything. And when you download or upload something you have no idea who is at the other end.
Here are the problems. First off, it is slow and unstable. Not to be unexpected for a non mature project. Another problem is the lack of search results. Searching for led zeppelin, a common band, returned 2 results when I was connected to 20 nodes. That's kind of sad. Last problem is that there are so few features. This is a raw bare bones client. Someone needs to make another client that has more stuff, like DC++ did for direct connect. For now I'll stick to DC for everyday quick p2p and WinMX for those rare hard to find files.
My computer crime teacher, who worked for the feds and is in the know, told us all about FinCEN. Apparently, any financial transaction of $10,000 or over is reported to the feds and kept on record. FinCEN has the most powerful unclassified information gathering computers there are. With just the name of a person they can find out just about anything they need to by just looking at financial ties and transactions. All this new law means is that FinCEN will be working directly with the FBI and such instead of waiting for the courts to approve each and every thing. It's not best thing that can happen, but at least its not as bad as it could be. One day everything will be all fixed. One day.
This kind of thing can even happen at places like RIT. I once recieved a friendly visit from a campus safety officer. He told me the neighbors upstairs had some sort of personal firewall running and that it gave them a message that someone was hacking their computers. The IP address was that of my, my roomate and our friend across the street. Of coruse I was like wtf? It turned out that whenever we played a LAN game of half-life using IPX it set their firewalls off because we were all behind the same switch. It was quite hilarious. Thankfully the situation was rectified quickly because there are indeed smart computer types at RIT. Stupid art majors.
I really wanted to get in on the mini iPod when I first hear the rumour. But now I find out its going to cost $250. Screw that. I was looking to pay maybe $100.
One day somebody will make a cell-phone/digcam/mp3/pda/802.11x/bluetooth/AIM/vi deo playing/linux device that will fit in my pocket. Lots of people have come close, like the Hiptop/Sidekick. But nobody is quite there yet.
Descent 3 always had adaptive AI. I remember when I first played it. I had played the prequels so I went into 3 with the same strategy I always had. It got me through quite a bit of the game, but it wasn't easy. Early in the game I was able to fly around really fast picking enemies off one at a time. As I played more they started to run away, regroup and attack in force. I countered that strategy by using bigger guns to destroy them. They then started to change formation to minimize the damage I could do to their whole group. While Descent 2 was the pinnacle of the series Descent 3 had revolutionary AI.
Also, I think that the sea battle AI in puzzle pirates could possibly be adaptive in some way. A couple updates ago they allowed brigands (computer controlled boats full of booty) to fire canonballs. Since then it has been widely agreed upon by players that they have increased in difficulty each and every day. There was an update last night, so we'll have to see what happened. I'm still a little unsure of this because if the AI was adaptive in some way, wouldn't they tell us?
Why isn't Puzzle Pirates on the list? How about Star Chamber? And why did Samurai make the list? It's just a computerized version of an already existing board game, not very original if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
Puzzle Pirates seems to be the revolutionary game of the year. And a lot of the players I meet in there are definitely not gamers. These are mostly people who used to play stuff like yahoo games, but now they play YPP instead.
Ibm XT keyboard is king. That's why it is specifically supported in the linux kernel.
chaclick! chaclick! chaclick!
I was skeptical at first, but I looked at the screenshots. That is really freakin' slick. Should make managing a database much easier. I think I just might try it out when it hits the portage tree, if it hasn't already.
You were doing great up until you got to that part about the "RTFM Crowd". You definitely mispercieve them. When someone says RTFM what they are actually saying in fewer words is "You aren't going to learn by me doing it for you. Only by reading the manual and by doing it yourself will you understand what you are doing and become proficient." They WANT more people to use linux. Can you imagine a *nix zealot telling someone to use windows? no! They just realize it would be a waste of time to explain some things better of learned on your own. The gentoo forums I think are a great example of what's great about linux. If you have a specific question it always gets answered promptly and helpfully. If you ask a broad question like "how do I install this?" You get a helpful hint and a link to the appropriate manual.
When someone says RTFM they are saying, I'm not going to type the answer to you because it is already written down. Go read it.
Linux at this point isn't any harder than windows, if you get a geek to set it up for you. What we need is a distro called grandma linux. The WM will be just a bunch of huge icons on a single desktop. One will say E-mail one will say Web Browser, one will say Word Processor, Instant Messenger, etc. Which applications these things actually launch will be decided at install time, which grandma wont do. Stability, compatibility and ease of use will be priority one. There will be also one more big button, Add more Big Buttons. It will run a custom app that will be super grpahical and pretty providing a list of installable apps.
This is also great for the corporate desktop, because you can give the secretary just the few apps she's allowed and nothing more.
There is no reason someone can't make this. In fact, this is the kind of thing that just isn't possible on windows, but is exactly what the world needs. You know what, I'm putting this on my CS projects queue. When I'm done with everything else I'm going to make that wm and that distro. All will be laid to burnination.
If you RTFA he says that he's pretty much only talking about CS and other FPS games where the sniper rifle is the "finger of god".
Right or wrong, what this guy is saying is nothing new. And as history has shown, the games aren't going to change.
The one point he misses in cs is that the extremely good players can get an aug or an m4 and get across the map and complete the objective without getting killed by snipers. What the sniper rifle does in CS is give the incredibly unskilled players the role of weeding out the average players and each other. The above average cs player will have the bomb planted so fast you'll still be reloading your awm. Kevlar, helmet, flash, aug, five seven, all hostages have been rescued.
Sure, you may have a better kill ratio. But our team has won ever game, hmmmm. One more thing, the "problem" he describes only exists on public servers. In any sort of real CS game with serious play, sniping is almost nil if you are on the offense team (T on DE map, CT on CS map). In a match the only thing that anyone cares about is which team wins, on the pub people only care about kill ratio. When people care about their team winning they put the sniper rifles away. That's not a game flaw, that's a people flaw.
This is why NS is gaining a lot of ground and becoming the Half-Life mod of choice. Heck, it IS the mod of choice. It hides the kill ratio. All anyone cares about in a game of NS is the team winning, and all the non-n00bs play as such.
Use Teamspeak and do a conference call without the telephone and without paying money.
My Puzzle Pirates crew uses it, it freakin' rocks!
http://www.teamspeak.org
Freshman year I paid for cable. That was a mistake. I barely used any of it, my roomate used it all the time. I had to pay half. Oh well. I never paid for cable again. It's my 4th year of college now, and TV is dead to me. I only watch it in two ways. Way 1, when I go home for a break or something I'll watch some sports and some cartoons to kill the time. Way 2, download shows like family guy, or get DVDs of tv shows and watch them. Tivo isn't even worth it. Heck a home brewed linux tivo isn't worth it.
TV is dead to me. I get all my information from the internet and I get all my video entertainment from DVDs and the internet. It's not just video games. It's push vs. pull technology. I just wont use anything that is push anymore.
Fuck you TV networks you lose.
'nuff said
My favorite game packaging has always been NES games. The box of the game was cardboard and discardable. It was just to sell the game anyway, not to store it in. Every game had black plastic sleeve. 1st party games has the nintendo logo on the sleeve. 3rd party did not. Towards the end of the NES they started selling sleeveless games and it really cheezed me off. The SNES had little plastic covers for games, but the N64 didn't. The Gameboy used to have plastic cases you could put games in. I've still got some, they are awesome.
What was even better that catrdiged containers was the smell. Remember the smell when you opened up a brand nes NES game? It was like nothing else. New car smell is pale in comparison to new NES cartridge smell. It is similar, yet much better than the smell of a new pack of baseball cards. Nowadays with games on disc there just isn't that great aroma of catridge manufacturing plant anymore. Oh, how I long for those days.
I'm not the only one who remembers the smell... right?
http://tron.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/TRON/ITRON/home-e.htm l
Itron, the #1 operating system in the world. Untouchable in the embedded world. Linux is nice because it makes interoperability with the desktop smooth if you have the same OS on both. But in terms of quality ITRON is #1 for a reason other than marketing (which is the reason Windows is #1).
I have a green only apple //e monitor plugged into my apple //e. And I've got one of those apple rgb monitors plugged into an apple //gs. I also have a Mac Plus with 2MB of RAM. That thing IS a monitor. My roomate has a pretty old VGA CRT he uses as a second monitor. It's at least 10 years old.
I played it when Tycho mentioned it. It was ok, but like most CCGs he who spends the most money and has the best cards wins. Skill in playing the game is not a major factor in winning. Luck and money are the primary determiners. It's pretty neat because it plays like a simplified Master of Orion. But its really just another CCG in disguise. They didn't fool me after I played it 3 or 4 times.
Looks like goopy clay to me...
If there is anyone who can succesfully emulate the DOS CD-ROM version of Mechwarrior 2, please tell me how you did it! I've tried every dos emulator in the universe. The only way I can make it work is to get an old PC and install a real version of DOS on it. I need to play this game bad, it's been so long...
It's no wonder that lego is losing money. They seem to be putting a heck of a lot of their resources into stuff like Bionicle. Have you seen those things? There are like 10 pieces, they are not standard brick, and you can only make one thing out of them.
Bring back castle lego at a reasonable price and we'll talk. I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle. The big black square one. Now all they make is bionicle, harry potter, and some star wars. It's not the same as it was.
It used to be a toy of building. Now it's just a toy you build.
There is support for SATA drives. In face it was a 2.4 kernel patch also. Now it's official and full on in 2.6. The trick is that you actually have to configure your kernel to include the support for your particular controller. So for me with my Abit NF7-S I have to include support for Silicon Image disk controllers in my config.
So yeah official native SATA support is in there, and it works well too!
The gentoo livecd is high quality. And on any gentoo system you can emerge the tools used to create the livecds. Create your own custom livecd and go at it. Of course knoppix and such can do it, but the knoppix installer is very primitive and set in stone. By making a custom gentoo livecd you can actually make the system the way you want it to be.
So I played with it for about 15 minutes and I found out a few things. First of all, it is really anonymous. There is no freakin' way to find out who anyone is. All you know are the IP addresses of the people who are directly connected to you on the network. You don't know which files they have or anything. And when you download or upload something you have no idea who is at the other end.
Here are the problems. First off, it is slow and unstable. Not to be unexpected for a non mature project. Another problem is the lack of search results. Searching for led zeppelin, a common band, returned 2 results when I was connected to 20 nodes. That's kind of sad. Last problem is that there are so few features. This is a raw bare bones client. Someone needs to make another client that has more stuff, like DC++ did for direct connect. For now I'll stick to DC for everyday quick p2p and WinMX for those rare hard to find files.
My computer crime teacher, who worked for the feds and is in the know, told us all about FinCEN. Apparently, any financial transaction of $10,000 or over is reported to the feds and kept on record. FinCEN has the most powerful unclassified information gathering computers there are. With just the name of a person they can find out just about anything they need to by just looking at financial ties and transactions. All this new law means is that FinCEN will be working directly with the FBI and such instead of waiting for the courts to approve each and every thing. It's not best thing that can happen, but at least its not as bad as it could be. One day everything will be all fixed. One day.
This kind of thing can even happen at places like RIT. I once recieved a friendly visit from a campus safety officer. He told me the neighbors upstairs had some sort of personal firewall running and that it gave them a message that someone was hacking their computers. The IP address was that of my, my roomate and our friend across the street. Of coruse I was like wtf? It turned out that whenever we played a LAN game of half-life using IPX it set their firewalls off because we were all behind the same switch. It was quite hilarious. Thankfully the situation was rectified quickly because there are indeed smart computer types at RIT. Stupid art majors.
I really wanted to get in on the mini iPod when I first hear the rumour. But now I find out its going to cost $250. Screw that. I was looking to pay maybe $100.
i deo playing/linux device that will fit in my pocket. Lots of people have come close, like the Hiptop/Sidekick. But nobody is quite there yet.
One day somebody will make a cell-phone/digcam/mp3/pda/802.11x/bluetooth/AIM/v
Descent 3 always had adaptive AI. I remember when I first played it. I had played the prequels so I went into 3 with the same strategy I always had. It got me through quite a bit of the game, but it wasn't easy. Early in the game I was able to fly around really fast picking enemies off one at a time. As I played more they started to run away, regroup and attack in force. I countered that strategy by using bigger guns to destroy them. They then started to change formation to minimize the damage I could do to their whole group. While Descent 2 was the pinnacle of the series Descent 3 had revolutionary AI.
Also, I think that the sea battle AI in puzzle pirates could possibly be adaptive in some way. A couple updates ago they allowed brigands (computer controlled boats full of booty) to fire canonballs. Since then it has been widely agreed upon by players that they have increased in difficulty each and every day. There was an update last night, so we'll have to see what happened. I'm still a little unsure of this because if the AI was adaptive in some way, wouldn't they tell us?
Why isn't Puzzle Pirates on the list? How about Star Chamber? And why did Samurai make the list? It's just a computerized version of an already existing board game, not very original if you ask me.
http://www.teamspeak.org