Can someone please tell me what went wrong with me? My administrative actions have been to kill rubbish and explain people why the articles were deleted. That's all I ever tried to do. And here I am, being accused of being power-hungry. What went wrong? Seriously? I'm not asking this rhetorically or just to prove my own point. I'm just curious. I'd appreciate any answers. What went wrong?
Ultima died years ago. If brought back with the panache found at its pinnacle (IV-VII), it would far surpass any current-day RPG.
Hah! I'd actually say that while Ultima series was still going, it was leading the way for others to follow. When it was, ahem, brought to conclusion (to put it politely), all other games were left on their own, and started to slowly overtake the Ultima series. And now, we've gone beyond.
Seriously - among the first few conclusive thoughts I had about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was "okayyyy, now they've finally surpassed Ultima VII, far and wide, on every possible area." Better graphics, better music, better world (although still suffering from the same problem as Ultimas - the better the graphics, the more cramped the game area becomes), better NPCs, better side quests, better backstory, better writing all around, and far better game engine. (Well, most of the time.)
If Ultimas were to be brought back, the implemetors would have to think hard and deep on how to redefine the genre yet again - because we expect each new Ultima title to do nothing less! They should incorporate all of the advances that the other game series have been making over the years and then surpass all of that. It can be done - there are a lot of obvious and not-so-obvious problems in modern CRPGs that just cry to be fixed. For example, if you really think about it, all of the latter Ultimas have tiny game worlds and a tiny number of NPCs - we have planets inhabited by a few people. And meanwhile, you can literally see all of Cyrodiil in Oblivion if you know where to go and the weather is right. Yawn. Make a giant world with tons of people. Imagine the lively-looking streets and big crowds from Assassin's Creed, but give all of the people some personality. Use the increased processing power in modern PCs and consoles for something worthwhile for a chance.
"Perfection is achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Proponents of certain usage scenarios might argue the makers of notepad.exe took away a little bit too much.
An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way*.
There are certain things Emacs does in a mediocre way. I have no idea why they decided to build a crappy web browser on top of Emacs, for example, and in retrospect I think Gnus is a bit silly idea too. But what comes to tasks that actually involve text editing, those "gazillion things" have been constantly improved and work nearly perfectly.
Would you want to build a separate text editor for C++ and Java? Would it be fun if the C++ editor had code highlighting but the Java editor implementors just never got around to do it? Or if C++ editor lacked automatical indenting, yet Java folks had added it? Wouldn't the first thought be something along the lines of "Damn! This is all just text, and syntax highlighting mechanisms don't differ that much from language to language. Couldn't we just write ONE editor component and ONE highlighter?"
What I'm saying is that it's silly to build an all-encompassing application, but it's not so silly to build an application that handles related tasks in an extensible manner. Making separate tools for separate tasks is okay, but making separate tools for very very similar tasks is just stupid.
You could consider investing in more reliable cellulose-based storage media.
More reliable? People rip the magnetic, semiconductor and optical media as being unreadable in a few centuries, but this "reliable" cellulose-based storage media is not much better! Moisture, mold, exposure to sunlight and heat tends to kill this thing. I've seen these celluloid things go into a not-so-mint-anymore condition after mere 10 years on non-optimal attic conditions, while CDs were just fine! Talk about flimsy!
I guess we need to build a Temple of Dystopias and carve our important anti-dystopian message on the stone walls. (Granite, not some flimsy crap like marble.) I'm sure that can be read in a few thousand years, provided nothing really major happens!
You can either develop Linux desktop applications on C#... or just develop desktop applications on Java that, coincidentally, work in Linux just fine. The reason why no one makes "Linux desktop applications" in Java is that it's much easier to just screw the platform dependence and go cross-platform. What you lack in platform integration you make up with less headaches when you do choose to deploy the applications across different platforms...
Last I checked, I think Gtk+ and GNOME bindings exist for Java too. But with Sun improving the Gtk+/GNOME native look and feel support in JRE itself, and more and more cross-platform desktop application building and desktop integration stuff coming in the future (JSR-296 Swing application framework stuff looks pretty cool, for starters), who would want to tie the app to Gtk+ and GNOME specifically when you can, right now, build apps that can already pretty much pass for GNOME apps?
Since the original video had the developers of AOL's Neverwinter Nights, will this new video feature the developers of the current generation's cutting edge MMORPG?
Don't copy those World of Warcraft CDs! Every time you copy a World of Warcraft CD, Vivendi loses money! A lot of money!
Whuh? I don't think any Datassette model had specific switch for metal tapes. Not even Load-It. If you wanted expensive storage, there was always the floppy drive. =)
And every C64 user probably knows this: Mysterious switches don't make stuff load faster, you need a tape/disk turbo for that. =)
If you want a good story, why not read a book, or watch a film? These are better ways of experiencing a story.
Have you even looked at Thief and Thief II, as referenced by the grandparent? Hint: They're not games that have cutscenes and action sequences, and where you cut the action away, you get the "story" in all of its gruesome glory.
They're not frigging Metal Gear Solid clones. They're not frigging Final Fantasy clones. Those games are atrocities against using games as a narrative medium, I tell you.
Sure, Thief series has missions. There are opening cutscenes that tell a part of the story. But a very big part of the story happens in the games themselves. You hear people talk about things, you read letters and books and whatnot. You find items in weird places and put one plus one together. You piece the whole story together based on what you see and hear and read as you go along. On slightly newer games, Metroid Prime series is pretty close to Thief as far as figuring out the backstory goes.
It's a way to tell a story in a way that it doesn't conflict with the raison d'etre of games - doing whatever it says in the package. In Thief series, you get to steal stuff, sneak in dark corridors and bash guards on the head with the blackjack. There's a story, but it doesn't get in the way of playing the game, yet that doesn't mean the story would be somehow insignificant or simplistic.
There are all sorts of tricks for sticking stories into games, but they're rarely anything more than a leveling mechanism, and at worst they're pretty obvious.
There are all sorts of tricks for sticking stories into books, but they're rarely anything more than a way to give a way for the reader to guess the ending based on clues the author leaves along the way, and at worst it's pretty predictable.
There are all sorts of tricks for sticking stories into films, but they're rarely anything more than a way to string action scenes and special effects shots together, and at worst it's pretty formulaic.
Records are records, and if they decide that they absolutely must have it for such and such, it's not something you can completely prevent.
Records are records, but information that could be used to harm an individual in any way must be defended. The risk for that is just too great.
I don't mind if any employer wanted my Slashdot user name just to see what I post here (well, they'd have good time hunting some of the boring comments I've posted as AC). What I post is publicly available information. If they wanted my password, I'd be a little bit worried if they would suddenly start spamming corporate propaganda under my name - that would be a little bit awkward, now wouldn't it?
Speaking of YouTube -- and maybe this is a disastrous idea -- but what if Wikipedia relied on a service like YouTube? Obviously that's not going to work (advertising, comments, flash player etc...), but think about it: Hosting videos and filtering inappropriate stuff is what they are good at.
It would fail. YouTube isn't concerned about supporting free licenses. Sure, you can upload Creative Commons videos in YT, but you won't get a nice big logo in the video description that says "this is a Creative Commons -licensed video, and you can reuse it".
Speaking of reuse, YouTube isn't particularly friendly toward people who want to download videos either for further reuse. If you want to download anyone else's videos but yours, you need third-party tools, possibly in violation of YouTube TOS last I checked. Not that anyone cares.
And most importantly, YouTube isn't concerned about copyright and proper licensing the way Wikimedia projects are. If someone posts copyright violations, they'll get deleted eventually, through a community-driven process, because everyone realises that dealing with real lawsuits is not fun and efficient. YouTube won't act on anything except a DMCA claim from the copyright holder. In other words, Wikimedia way is "Hey, this image is obviously not free to use, and is copied from a website X that says 'all rights reserved'." "Hey, you're right! Let's nuke it." YouTube way is "Well, it's not *your* site, so why don't you mind your own damn business?"
YouTube has the hardware for some heavy-duty video delivery, but if we used them as a video host, we'd need to bring in our own culture too.
Another three hundred derivative and mostly unoriginal versions of 2Fort, including at least one where every texture is porn.
Ooh, I know this one! We'll get 2forts in Hell: Reloaded! It's 2fort! But it is in Hell!
Yeah, 2forts is such a famous map that it has been subject to talentless duplication since the original Team Fortress came out, so this release doesn't really change anything. =) It just redefines talentless duplication. Yeah. Porn textures. That would be one way to duplicate talentlessly.
It's going to be something like: BankofAmericaElementium
Bah, if the corporate interests get to name it, then it's obviously going to be Aureipalatium or something, because some companies just love to do that sort of things and have previous experience on the practice. =)
Most of my favourites are the stuff that is left in some Nintendo games (Zeldas in particular) - debug or beta versions of some levels that the developers somehow left in. Not that I've seen them personally, and the website I was about to point people to is dead. *sigh*
OK, suppose Microsoft would just show the "real" prices of the content. How do you propose MS will account for different currencies and inflation in various parts of the world? The points system masks all this: If you buy a points card, you'll get a certain amount of stuff.
You can't ditch the account system entirely and go for pay-as-you-buy, because not everyone is willing, or even able, to pay with credit cards. (I for one can't buy a damn thing on most interesting online game stores. Nintendo and Microsoft? Just go to the nearby supermarket and grab a points card.)
And if you start using "real" currencies, there will be a lot of nasty people in official-looking suits who will be telling Microsoft "oh, I see you allow people to deposit money on accounts - this means you will have to be living up to the standards of the rest of the banking world." Microsoft doesn't want this to happen. Yes, it's kind of evil. Sometimes, evil gets the job done: they just want to sell people some make-believe credits which people can exchange for make-believe games and stuff, and bringing in the bureaucracy associated with the banking would make life difficult for both Microsoft and their customers.
In short: The points system sucks, but the other current alternatives are more complicated and probably suck even more. Who should we thank for this? Probably the banks as a whole, for not developing a standardised, open international electronic currency system. We should get that done first. I first tried e-cash back in mid-1990s, and while the system worked pretty well (basically, I could deposit money to the e-cash account through a local bank), there was just nothing worthwhile to buy back then (wow, I could buy... desktop wallpapers). Now there is.
Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!)
Funny, I had a similar problem in a DOS program called Trans64, used to transfer data between a PC and Commodore 1541 disk drive through a link cable plugged to the PC printer port. The cable worked just fine if I wanted to transfer small individual files, but if I wanted to transfer whole floppies, it got about halfway before it bombed with a weird error. The thing is, if I kept wiggling the mouse while the data was transferred, the transfer did complete successfully...
(This was on a Pentium 166MHz machine with Windows 95 and PS/2 mouse and probably just as obsolete printer port with probably some weird sort of a cable that was not supported by anything else but Trans64. If that matters in any way.)
TDM has been in closed development for so long, I refuse to believe it even exists.
Eh? There's two alpha levels released not terribly long ago. They're actually out there, downloadable and playable, right now - quite unlike DNF =) If the stuff in those alphas is of any indication, the thing is well on its way.
It's a total conversion mod that makes the game look and behave nothing like the original Doom 3 - of course it takes preposterous amounts of time to complete. Just try unpacking the alpha levels without saying "holy damn that's a lot of textures". =)
...those who can't wait should check out The Dark Mod for Doom 3 - a toolkit for building Thief 1/2 style missions in a reasonably modern game engine. The two alpha missions so far looked extremely good.
Wonder which will be released first, TDM or Thief 4?
Thus demonstrating the distance between Open Source and Free Software in a way RMS never could.
Actually, speaks much more about the distance between software and art.
As every open source fan knows, there's no point in buying a software product in itself. There is a point in paying for art and high-quality entertainment, however. I buy games because they're the form of entertainment I enjoy the most.
I don't pay for tools to do my work -it's pointless, because the tools to do the work are already out there, free-as-in-beer-and-speech. I am willing to pay for experiences, though.
There's absolutely no reason why game companies couldn't do what id Software is doing: The (retail sales) profit comes from the data and the game experience, not the software. Gamers don't generally care about engines, they care about the game experience. There's already so many great open-source components that you could build awesome games around them and not spend a bloody penny on the technology licensing. Maybe the open source engines don't yet employ the latest and greatest technological tricks, but you sure can build solid games around them.
I believe that in our global culture we have place for both art and entertainment that is "traditionally" copyrighted and "closed", and "free" art (like awesome GPLed games). But the game industry uses a lot of open source now, and I'm hoping one day game makers realise that there's no point in keeping engines closed - any more than, say, it makes sense to pay for a text editor, when there's bazillion open source ones out there for all conceivable uses.
I got some Slackware dist in summer 1996 (probably 3.0). I had a modem connection to the Internet, and Linux came from InfoMagic's 6 CD sets. (The 6 CDs included Slackware, Red Hat and Debian, and still enough space for Sunsite archive and tons more! I hear you may need a few more CDs if you want to put the same material in the same package these days.)
Basically, I had heard of Linux a long time before, and what I wanted to do at the time was to run the same free software that I was starting to enjoy on Win95 and MS-DOS: Emacs, GCC (I was learning C and was using DJGPP) and TeX.
I had some rudimentary Unix knowledge from some book I got from the library (I can't remember much, but it was probably about some commercial Unix brands) so it wasn't really all that painful.
But don't be alarmed - I suggest a trip to one of my favourite blogs, Paleo-Future, where they've catalogued several genuine funky visions of these futuristic computer things. Just search for "computer" in the blog archive, click away, and be amazed. =)
Operation Flashpoint: The game allows you to save once during the mission. For some reasons I couldn't quite comprehend, very rarely, the wrecked stuff from the game before I loaded the saved game carried over to the loaded game - I suppose the game just didn't clear up some data it was supposed to clear. Anyway, there was this one mission in which you're supposed to destroy the first tank in the advancing tank column using mines and a LAW to block the road, then go kill the rest of the people or flee, failing that.
I lay the mines on the road, then picked up the LAW and went to the roadside bushes, and saved. I destroyed the first tank, then got killed. Loaded up the saved game.
The destroyed tank was there, blocking the road.
And there came the Russian commander who was driving there ahead of the tank column. Finding the road blocked by the destroyed tank, he stops the car... gets out of the car... and scratches his head.
From that point onward, I never ever doubted the ability of the AI programmers to create believable character behaviour.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Wolves are the heraldic symbol of the city of Kvatch. I like wolves, and tried to avoid killing them in the game - yet, at one time, a wolf was following my horse. When I arrived to the camp near the city, the citizens unfortunately killed the wolf on their own. Very sad! But when I came back to the area later, I noticed that the citizens of Kvatch, bored as they were in the camp, had apparently stuffed the wolf. In other words, the corpse was in the standing position (undoubtedly the neutral position for the 3D model, and the game forgot to restore the dead posture).
Tomb Raider: Anniversary: Not a big glitch, but amused me anyway. In the lost valley, there's one spot where you can land - barely enough leg space. Lara stuck in the leaping position and was pushed by the game upward, up, up, up, and I couldn't do anything. I opened the menu. Closed it. Then, Lara suddenly remembered a few not-so-obscure theorems by good ol' Sir Isaac. *splat*.
Tomb Raider: Underworld: Not played this game too far yet, but the Mexico level had a really weird bug - I drove around with the motorcycle, but there was this one spot where Lara froze in air, while the motorcycle kept going and finally hit the wall. Pretty weird.
Could probably remember more, but I need to get going.
Ok, so it's an April Fools Joke.... but damn it's well implemented.
That's what they said about GMail too!
They shouldn't restrict the statement to World of Warcraft though since WoW was just following the XBox achievement model.
Yeah, why not add XBL Gamertags to the profile too? (One of the things that Microsoft didn't mess up.) And there's plenty of cool non-gaming services the/. profiles could link to - think of all these newfangled "social networking" thingies that seem to be in vogue these days. That would also live up to the unspoken motto of/. development: "Kicking and screaming, and screaming and kicking, to the Web 2.0 era!" =)
Slashdot Mirror
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Oh, I'm a good example of a Wikipedia administrator now? A Person In Charge? Defending the articles against incursions of newbies? The eeevil?
Because I haven't been doing much anything lately in English Wikipedia. Mostly because the community has changed too much and we'd need a complete rethinking of some of our processes. Deletion processes are a joke and nobody can keep track of what's going. And even I can't keep stuff on page without some inanely over-complicated sourcing, which annoys the hell out of me because I'm not a source person. English Wikipedia just feels too rule-heavy right now for me, so I'm sticking to smaller wikis. But apparently even absence can create criticism.
Can someone please tell me what went wrong with me? My administrative actions have been to kill rubbish and explain people why the articles were deleted. That's all I ever tried to do. And here I am, being accused of being power-hungry. What went wrong? Seriously? I'm not asking this rhetorically or just to prove my own point. I'm just curious. I'd appreciate any answers. What went wrong?
Ultima died years ago. If brought back with the panache found at its pinnacle (IV-VII), it would far surpass any current-day RPG.
Hah! I'd actually say that while Ultima series was still going, it was leading the way for others to follow. When it was, ahem, brought to conclusion (to put it politely), all other games were left on their own, and started to slowly overtake the Ultima series. And now, we've gone beyond.
Seriously - among the first few conclusive thoughts I had about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was "okayyyy, now they've finally surpassed Ultima VII, far and wide, on every possible area." Better graphics, better music, better world (although still suffering from the same problem as Ultimas - the better the graphics, the more cramped the game area becomes), better NPCs, better side quests, better backstory, better writing all around, and far better game engine. (Well, most of the time.)
If Ultimas were to be brought back, the implemetors would have to think hard and deep on how to redefine the genre yet again - because we expect each new Ultima title to do nothing less! They should incorporate all of the advances that the other game series have been making over the years and then surpass all of that. It can be done - there are a lot of obvious and not-so-obvious problems in modern CRPGs that just cry to be fixed. For example, if you really think about it, all of the latter Ultimas have tiny game worlds and a tiny number of NPCs - we have planets inhabited by a few people. And meanwhile, you can literally see all of Cyrodiil in Oblivion if you know where to go and the weather is right. Yawn. Make a giant world with tons of people. Imagine the lively-looking streets and big crowds from Assassin's Creed, but give all of the people some personality. Use the increased processing power in modern PCs and consoles for something worthwhile for a chance.
"Perfection is achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Proponents of certain usage scenarios might argue the makers of notepad.exe took away a little bit too much.
An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way*.
There are certain things Emacs does in a mediocre way. I have no idea why they decided to build a crappy web browser on top of Emacs, for example, and in retrospect I think Gnus is a bit silly idea too. But what comes to tasks that actually involve text editing, those "gazillion things" have been constantly improved and work nearly perfectly.
Would you want to build a separate text editor for C++ and Java? Would it be fun if the C++ editor had code highlighting but the Java editor implementors just never got around to do it? Or if C++ editor lacked automatical indenting, yet Java folks had added it? Wouldn't the first thought be something along the lines of "Damn! This is all just text, and syntax highlighting mechanisms don't differ that much from language to language. Couldn't we just write ONE editor component and ONE highlighter?"
What I'm saying is that it's silly to build an all-encompassing application, but it's not so silly to build an application that handles related tasks in an extensible manner. Making separate tools for separate tasks is okay, but making separate tools for very very similar tasks is just stupid.
You could consider investing in more reliable cellulose-based storage media.
More reliable? People rip the magnetic, semiconductor and optical media as being unreadable in a few centuries, but this "reliable" cellulose-based storage media is not much better! Moisture, mold, exposure to sunlight and heat tends to kill this thing. I've seen these celluloid things go into a not-so-mint-anymore condition after mere 10 years on non-optimal attic conditions, while CDs were just fine! Talk about flimsy!
I guess we need to build a Temple of Dystopias and carve our important anti-dystopian message on the stone walls. (Granite, not some flimsy crap like marble.) I'm sure that can be read in a few thousand years, provided nothing really major happens!
The most important question will be, of course, this: Will it have a new, more rounded interface?
*sigh*
You can either develop Linux desktop applications on C#... or just develop desktop applications on Java that, coincidentally, work in Linux just fine. The reason why no one makes "Linux desktop applications" in Java is that it's much easier to just screw the platform dependence and go cross-platform. What you lack in platform integration you make up with less headaches when you do choose to deploy the applications across different platforms...
Last I checked, I think Gtk+ and GNOME bindings exist for Java too. But with Sun improving the Gtk+/GNOME native look and feel support in JRE itself, and more and more cross-platform desktop application building and desktop integration stuff coming in the future (JSR-296 Swing application framework stuff looks pretty cool, for starters), who would want to tie the app to Gtk+ and GNOME specifically when you can, right now, build apps that can already pretty much pass for GNOME apps?
Since the original video had the developers of AOL's Neverwinter Nights, will this new video feature the developers of the current generation's cutting edge MMORPG?
Don't copy those World of Warcraft CDs! Every time you copy a World of Warcraft CD, Vivendi loses money! A lot of money!
Somehow "the Fudruckers at the End of the Universe" just doesn't ring right too me....
Or the hobbits looking for Gandalf in the Bree McDonald's. (I mean, I'd have to go check that I didn't accidentally pick up Bored of the Rings.)
..was there to make my C64 games load faster...
Whuh? I don't think any Datassette model had specific switch for metal tapes. Not even Load-It. If you wanted expensive storage, there was always the floppy drive. =)
And every C64 user probably knows this: Mysterious switches don't make stuff load faster, you need a tape/disk turbo for that. =)
If you want a good story, why not read a book, or watch a film? These are better ways of experiencing a story.
Have you even looked at Thief and Thief II, as referenced by the grandparent? Hint: They're not games that have cutscenes and action sequences, and where you cut the action away, you get the "story" in all of its gruesome glory.
They're not frigging Metal Gear Solid clones. They're not frigging Final Fantasy clones. Those games are atrocities against using games as a narrative medium, I tell you.
Sure, Thief series has missions. There are opening cutscenes that tell a part of the story. But a very big part of the story happens in the games themselves. You hear people talk about things, you read letters and books and whatnot. You find items in weird places and put one plus one together. You piece the whole story together based on what you see and hear and read as you go along. On slightly newer games, Metroid Prime series is pretty close to Thief as far as figuring out the backstory goes.
It's a way to tell a story in a way that it doesn't conflict with the raison d'etre of games - doing whatever it says in the package. In Thief series, you get to steal stuff, sneak in dark corridors and bash guards on the head with the blackjack. There's a story, but it doesn't get in the way of playing the game, yet that doesn't mean the story would be somehow insignificant or simplistic.
There are all sorts of tricks for sticking stories into games, but they're rarely anything more than a leveling mechanism, and at worst they're pretty obvious.
There are all sorts of tricks for sticking stories into books, but they're rarely anything more than a way to give a way for the reader to guess the ending based on clues the author leaves along the way, and at worst it's pretty predictable.
There are all sorts of tricks for sticking stories into films, but they're rarely anything more than a way to string action scenes and special effects shots together, and at worst it's pretty formulaic.
See where this goes?
Records are records, and if they decide that they absolutely must have it for such and such, it's not something you can completely prevent.
Records are records, but information that could be used to harm an individual in any way must be defended. The risk for that is just too great.
I don't mind if any employer wanted my Slashdot user name just to see what I post here (well, they'd have good time hunting some of the boring comments I've posted as AC). What I post is publicly available information. If they wanted my password, I'd be a little bit worried if they would suddenly start spamming corporate propaganda under my name - that would be a little bit awkward, now wouldn't it?
Speaking of YouTube -- and maybe this is a disastrous idea -- but what if Wikipedia relied on a service like YouTube? Obviously that's not going to work (advertising, comments, flash player etc...), but think about it: Hosting videos and filtering inappropriate stuff is what they are good at.
It would fail. YouTube isn't concerned about supporting free licenses. Sure, you can upload Creative Commons videos in YT, but you won't get a nice big logo in the video description that says "this is a Creative Commons -licensed video, and you can reuse it".
Speaking of reuse, YouTube isn't particularly friendly toward people who want to download videos either for further reuse. If you want to download anyone else's videos but yours, you need third-party tools, possibly in violation of YouTube TOS last I checked. Not that anyone cares.
And most importantly, YouTube isn't concerned about copyright and proper licensing the way Wikimedia projects are. If someone posts copyright violations, they'll get deleted eventually, through a community-driven process, because everyone realises that dealing with real lawsuits is not fun and efficient. YouTube won't act on anything except a DMCA claim from the copyright holder. In other words, Wikimedia way is "Hey, this image is obviously not free to use, and is copied from a website X that says 'all rights reserved'." "Hey, you're right! Let's nuke it." YouTube way is "Well, it's not *your* site, so why don't you mind your own damn business?"
YouTube has the hardware for some heavy-duty video delivery, but if we used them as a video host, we'd need to bring in our own culture too.
Another three hundred derivative and mostly unoriginal versions of 2Fort, including at least one where every texture is porn.
Ooh, I know this one! We'll get 2forts in Hell: Reloaded! It's 2fort! But it is in Hell!
Yeah, 2forts is such a famous map that it has been subject to talentless duplication since the original Team Fortress came out, so this release doesn't really change anything. =) It just redefines talentless duplication. Yeah. Porn textures. That would be one way to duplicate talentlessly.
It's going to be something like: BankofAmericaElementium
Bah, if the corporate interests get to name it, then it's obviously going to be Aureipalatium or something, because some companies just love to do that sort of things and have previous experience on the practice. =)
Most of my favourites are the stuff that is left in some Nintendo games (Zeldas in particular) - debug or beta versions of some levels that the developers somehow left in. Not that I've seen them personally, and the website I was about to point people to is dead. *sigh*
As for the rest, I really recommend people to check out this guy's anti-walkthroughs and findings. A lot of this stuff is absolutely brilliant.
MS needs to ditch the points system.
OK, suppose Microsoft would just show the "real" prices of the content. How do you propose MS will account for different currencies and inflation in various parts of the world? The points system masks all this: If you buy a points card, you'll get a certain amount of stuff.
You can't ditch the account system entirely and go for pay-as-you-buy, because not everyone is willing, or even able, to pay with credit cards. (I for one can't buy a damn thing on most interesting online game stores. Nintendo and Microsoft? Just go to the nearby supermarket and grab a points card.)
And if you start using "real" currencies, there will be a lot of nasty people in official-looking suits who will be telling Microsoft "oh, I see you allow people to deposit money on accounts - this means you will have to be living up to the standards of the rest of the banking world." Microsoft doesn't want this to happen. Yes, it's kind of evil. Sometimes, evil gets the job done: they just want to sell people some make-believe credits which people can exchange for make-believe games and stuff, and bringing in the bureaucracy associated with the banking would make life difficult for both Microsoft and their customers.
In short: The points system sucks, but the other current alternatives are more complicated and probably suck even more. Who should we thank for this? Probably the banks as a whole, for not developing a standardised, open international electronic currency system. We should get that done first. I first tried e-cash back in mid-1990s, and while the system worked pretty well (basically, I could deposit money to the e-cash account through a local bank), there was just nothing worthwhile to buy back then (wow, I could buy... desktop wallpapers). Now there is.
Or Richard Garriot is goign to be mad (and/or send an army of lawyers after you).
But you're free to blow up the Eagle or reduce the components of Luna 23 to omnigel. =)
Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!)
Funny, I had a similar problem in a DOS program called Trans64, used to transfer data between a PC and Commodore 1541 disk drive through a link cable plugged to the PC printer port. The cable worked just fine if I wanted to transfer small individual files, but if I wanted to transfer whole floppies, it got about halfway before it bombed with a weird error. The thing is, if I kept wiggling the mouse while the data was transferred, the transfer did complete successfully...
(This was on a Pentium 166MHz machine with Windows 95 and PS/2 mouse and probably just as obsolete printer port with probably some weird sort of a cable that was not supported by anything else but Trans64. If that matters in any way.)
TDM has been in closed development for so long, I refuse to believe it even exists.
Eh? There's two alpha levels released not terribly long ago. They're actually out there, downloadable and playable, right now - quite unlike DNF =) If the stuff in those alphas is of any indication, the thing is well on its way.
It's a total conversion mod that makes the game look and behave nothing like the original Doom 3 - of course it takes preposterous amounts of time to complete. Just try unpacking the alpha levels without saying "holy damn that's a lot of textures". =)
...those who can't wait should check out The Dark Mod for Doom 3 - a toolkit for building Thief 1/2 style missions in a reasonably modern game engine. The two alpha missions so far looked extremely good.
Wonder which will be released first, TDM or Thief 4?
Thus demonstrating the distance between Open Source and Free Software in a way RMS never could.
Actually, speaks much more about the distance between software and art.
As every open source fan knows, there's no point in buying a software product in itself. There is a point in paying for art and high-quality entertainment, however. I buy games because they're the form of entertainment I enjoy the most.
I don't pay for tools to do my work -it's pointless, because the tools to do the work are already out there, free-as-in-beer-and-speech. I am willing to pay for experiences, though.
There's absolutely no reason why game companies couldn't do what id Software is doing: The (retail sales) profit comes from the data and the game experience, not the software. Gamers don't generally care about engines, they care about the game experience. There's already so many great open-source components that you could build awesome games around them and not spend a bloody penny on the technology licensing. Maybe the open source engines don't yet employ the latest and greatest technological tricks, but you sure can build solid games around them.
I believe that in our global culture we have place for both art and entertainment that is "traditionally" copyrighted and "closed", and "free" art (like awesome GPLed games). But the game industry uses a lot of open source now, and I'm hoping one day game makers realise that there's no point in keeping engines closed - any more than, say, it makes sense to pay for a text editor, when there's bazillion open source ones out there for all conceivable uses.
I got some Slackware dist in summer 1996 (probably 3.0). I had a modem connection to the Internet, and Linux came from InfoMagic's 6 CD sets. (The 6 CDs included Slackware, Red Hat and Debian, and still enough space for Sunsite archive and tons more! I hear you may need a few more CDs if you want to put the same material in the same package these days.)
Basically, I had heard of Linux a long time before, and what I wanted to do at the time was to run the same free software that I was starting to enjoy on Win95 and MS-DOS: Emacs, GCC (I was learning C and was using DJGPP) and TeX.
I had some rudimentary Unix knowledge from some book I got from the library (I can't remember much, but it was probably about some commercial Unix brands) so it wasn't really all that painful.
As another user pointed out, that is a hoax.
But don't be alarmed - I suggest a trip to one of my favourite blogs, Paleo-Future, where they've catalogued several genuine funky visions of these futuristic computer things. Just search for "computer" in the blog archive, click away, and be amazed. =)
Operation Flashpoint: The game allows you to save once during the mission. For some reasons I couldn't quite comprehend, very rarely, the wrecked stuff from the game before I loaded the saved game carried over to the loaded game - I suppose the game just didn't clear up some data it was supposed to clear. Anyway, there was this one mission in which you're supposed to destroy the first tank in the advancing tank column using mines and a LAW to block the road, then go kill the rest of the people or flee, failing that.
I lay the mines on the road, then picked up the LAW and went to the roadside bushes, and saved. I destroyed the first tank, then got killed. Loaded up the saved game.
The destroyed tank was there, blocking the road.
And there came the Russian commander who was driving there ahead of the tank column. Finding the road blocked by the destroyed tank, he stops the car... gets out of the car... and scratches his head.
From that point onward, I never ever doubted the ability of the AI programmers to create believable character behaviour.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Wolves are the heraldic symbol of the city of Kvatch. I like wolves, and tried to avoid killing them in the game - yet, at one time, a wolf was following my horse. When I arrived to the camp near the city, the citizens unfortunately killed the wolf on their own. Very sad! But when I came back to the area later, I noticed that the citizens of Kvatch, bored as they were in the camp, had apparently stuffed the wolf. In other words, the corpse was in the standing position (undoubtedly the neutral position for the 3D model, and the game forgot to restore the dead posture).
Tomb Raider: Anniversary: Not a big glitch, but amused me anyway. In the lost valley, there's one spot where you can land - barely enough leg space. Lara stuck in the leaping position and was pushed by the game upward, up, up, up, and I couldn't do anything. I opened the menu. Closed it. Then, Lara suddenly remembered a few not-so-obscure theorems by good ol' Sir Isaac. *splat*.
Tomb Raider: Underworld: Not played this game too far yet, but the Mexico level had a really weird bug - I drove around with the motorcycle, but there was this one spot where Lara froze in air, while the motorcycle kept going and finally hit the wall. Pretty weird.
Could probably remember more, but I need to get going.
Ok, so it's an April Fools Joke.... but damn it's well implemented.
That's what they said about GMail too!
They shouldn't restrict the statement to World of Warcraft though since WoW was just following the XBox achievement model.
Yeah, why not add XBL Gamertags to the profile too? (One of the things that Microsoft didn't mess up.) And there's plenty of cool non-gaming services the /. profiles could link to - think of all these newfangled "social networking" thingies that seem to be in vogue these days. That would also live up to the unspoken motto of /. development: "Kicking and screaming, and screaming and kicking, to the Web 2.0 era!" =)