so why are you still playing your shitty NES/SNES and not come play the exact same game with better graphics and sounds on a newer system?
The newer games tend to have clunkier controls or are otherise less than clean in their execution. The old games, while simpler, are polished and generally more fun. And if the new games are exactly the same aside from graphics and sound, why should I spend the money again for the same game? After all, I play for the GAMEPLAY, not the shiny rendering, and my old game already has the former.
cars don't change all that much, but i still want the new pretty ones.
There's a difference in philosophy there. I don't want the new cars because they're shiny or pretty. I buy a car when my old one no longer works, or there is a substantial breakthrough in the car industry that causes me to want to upgrade. My SNES is like the '91 Laser that's still plugging away good as new with almost 200 000 miles on it. The new cars, currently, have nothing to offer me other than their newness. Same with the games.
...have these law enforcement people heard of SSH or SCP or whatever?
You'd be surprised how little most people in important positions know about the IT infrastructure they use. Still in college and working for [company], I got blank stares when I mentioned SSH or its ilk. Security was firewalls and switches (the latter to prevent sniffing, since everything is damn well cleartext).
The experts said "we can detect sniffers, they're not an issue," yet I KNOW how to sniff without ANY chance being detected. They had fancy locks on raised-floor server rooms, yet the walls and doors didn't extend into the crawlspace.
The networks in most geeks' college apartments are a thousand times more secure than real, critical networks. Most "Security Experts" out there do security "by the book," which doesn't exactly work when everyone knows what the book says. They fall behind the waves of new technology, and seemingly obvious security precautions elude them.
This is why programs like Nullsoft's WASTE are going to be so important in the coming years.
Networks of trust, wherein all communication is encrypted and idle channels are filled with random noise. Privacy may or may not be a right, but that doesn't mean you can't just fight for and have it.
Granted, Big Brother can probably crack most encryption given time and money, but what if EVERYONE is using encryption? Different kinds, as well (geeks using a number of home-grown variants, the masses using Microsoft whatever...). Decrypting everything becomes less and less feasible. Is that a terrorist or some kid playing CounterStrike? An mp3 "pirate" or just a randomly generared noise packet?
Encrypt everything. If they try to outlaw encryption, well... I'll get back to you on that one.
I was seriously underwhelmed back when the PS2 came out. The early games for most consoles, quite frankly, suck. It's much more economical to wait a few months until a) the price comes down a tad and b) some gods-be-damned GAMES come out.
Of course, I'm very cynical of the modern gaming industry in general. The SNES was the last system I genuinely liked (and bought more than a handful games for). Most PS* games look completely uninteresting to me. Even Nintendo's latest offerings seem lackluster (Metroit Prime being a shining example of an exception to that). My favorite RPG is still Final Fantasy IV, my favorite sports game is still Ice Hockey for the NES (Super DodgeBall being a close second)...
Graphics got better, sound got better, but that's it. Innovation is largely dead, and actual fun often takes a back seat to movie tie-ins and deadlines.
I still have my NES and SNES, and I play them far more than I play any of the modern systems to which I have access.
Welcome to America;^) The only reason we don't have a revolution is the large middle class. They're not too well off, but they're scared as all shit of being poor. Life is good enough for them, so they'll never risk losing what they have.
Thus, the middle class sides with the rich, and the poor work at McDonald's, and the RIAA continues to be evil, and the spectre of DRM looms like the Iron Curtain once did, and wars rage, and Playstation owners fail to make use of a neat feature.
We watched that at a LAN party back in the day. (My 1337 Pentium 200mHz humming along to Q2 Weapons Factory.. Ahh...)
It might have been the doritos, or the mountain dew, or the fact that it was 3 in the morning, but, at the time, that was the most hillarious thing I had ever experienced.
Well, there certainly is a grey area in there. My point was just that people lacking social skills or proper bathing habits will not find jobs regardless of their skill, with rare exception left for the super-genius coder who doesn't know what pants are.
I have the people skills and the IT skills. People lacking either will have a harder time finding a good job than I will. Ergo, it benefits me to see that more people lack either one or the other. ^_^ I look out for number one.
I've never had a problem in an arcade, and I've never known anyone who has. They're generally pretty safe places unless the old Galaga machine explodes.
Arcades (good ones) also have food, pool tables, and... people! They're great places to hang out. Who wants to sit in their house all day? That's the second leading cause of obesity (staying out of pie shops is number one.)
If a person chooses to block ADV: emails, it means he DOESN'T WANT THEM! Just because you are a legitimate business doesn't mean people have to care about what you have to offer. You can't force them to listen to you. If you try, you deserve to be punished.
Direct advertising pisses people off. Plain and simple. Notice how over 17 million people have signed up for the national "Do Not Call" list since it started, and hundreds of thousands more sign up every day? Take the hint.
More anti-social geeks means more tech jobs for us social geeks.
Who is IBM going to hire? The smelly, snorting, pale guy who can't relate to anyone, or the equally qualified, good-looking (or at least clean/not fat), sociable, interesting guy? (Or girl.. Diction arguments will make me laugh at you.)
IT or coding skill isn't the primary factor in employment. The big fat gamer guy will smell up the office and scare vendors with his creepy rants on the art of maxing-out stats in Final Fantasy XX-II-1.4.
So yes, we should encourage geeks to be anti-social, physically weak and large, pale, and otherwise poor career candidates. Labour-scarcity-induced-raise, here I come!
You also have to have every machine in every nation you do business with have perfect security also.
Good point, but my solution was designed for... me. I've given up on the spam war. Now, I only care about my personal inbox. I blacklist IP blocks willy-knilly (but not so many that it would make sense to move to a white-list. Yet.). I've NEVER received anything important via email from anyone I didn't already know.
Job offers? They phone me.
Emergency? They page me.
Going out for a beer? They IM me, or they knock on my damn door.
Business? They send it to me via our secure LotusNotes server (yea, yea... IBM is VERY different on the inside than it looks from the outside. We use OS/2 Warp on critical servers too.) Or they email me normally (I know them: they're not blacklisted).
Pleasure? Any girl who propositions me over email (unsolicited, mind you) is probably not very high on my ladder to begin with.
Email is not a way to receive messages from strangers anymore: the spammers have ruined that. Email will likely become a white-list based messaging system and nothing more. It's a pity, but we've already crossed the bridge, and there's nothing left to do but to burn it behind us.
...prolific spammer who used servers in Romania and China.
And then I block email from IP blocks in those countries. I don't know anyone there, I don't do business with anyone there: I personally have no reason to accept email from them. If every nation I have friends in enacts tough anti-span legislation, spam becomes a moot issue to me.
In the Cantina scene in Star Wars (ep IV), Greedo and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) were discussing a debt owed by the latter to Jabba the Hutt. While Greedo was talking, Han shot him under the table, killing him, to avoid paying the debt (among other things). Han Solo was a criminal and a murderer, and part of the movie was his character development from that to the noble, albeit scruffy-looking, Han we knew and loved by the end.
When Lucas "remastered" Star Wars into the super-besto modern version, he added an extra blaster-shot, making it look as though Greedo had shot first and Han was simply defending himself. Murder, after all, isn't politically correct.
Fuck you, George. I'm sure Obi-wan and Darth Vadar had one hell of a walkie-talkie fight.
Now please explain why your past times, are conducted for any better reason?
Aside from reading, the rest of those activities either make my body stronger/faster/not fat, or they leave me with a physical, tangible object in the real world. Physical benefit. ^_^
I suppose my whole point was really just that the whole levelling thing in MMORPGs exists solely to keep people around paying their monies longer.
I played an MMORPG once. The Realm, by sierra. It was a long time ago, but I had fun. I had fun because I never leveled: I wrote a macro that did it for me while I was at school. None of the tedium, all of the fun. Problem was, I did everything there was to do in short order, and then I had no reason to keep playing the game.
These games are supposed to be "Massively Multiplayer," but require no actual interaction with others aside from that necessary to group-level. (Leveling again!) Want to simulate an MMORPG? Play nethack with an IRC window open.
And yes, I am somewhat biased against MMORPGers;^) My slash journal has a tidbit about an old "friend" of mine who was addicted to Asheron's Call.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow..
I didn't think -anyone- could reply to that in an interesting, intelligent, or funny way.
You rock.
Wooooo! WoOOOOooOOOO!
-party-
Wooooo!
so why are you still playing your shitty NES/SNES and not come play the exact same game with better graphics and sounds on a newer system?
The newer games tend to have clunkier controls or are otherise less than clean in their execution. The old games, while simpler, are polished and generally more fun. And if the new games are exactly the same aside from graphics and sound, why should I spend the money again for the same game? After all, I play for the GAMEPLAY, not the shiny rendering, and my old game already has the former.
cars don't change all that much, but i still want the new pretty ones.
There's a difference in philosophy there. I don't want the new cars because they're shiny or pretty. I buy a car when my old one no longer works, or there is a substantial breakthrough in the car industry that causes me to want to upgrade. My SNES is like the '91 Laser that's still plugging away good as new with almost 200 000 miles on it. The new cars, currently, have nothing to offer me other than their newness. Same with the games.
Should have read "not staying out of pie shops..."
;^)
Everyone else seems to have seen it for the typo that it was. I guess you didn't.
...have these law enforcement people heard of SSH or SCP or whatever?
You'd be surprised how little most people in important positions know about the IT infrastructure they use. Still in college and working for [company], I got blank stares when I mentioned SSH or its ilk. Security was firewalls and switches (the latter to prevent sniffing, since everything is damn well cleartext).
The experts said "we can detect sniffers, they're not an issue," yet I KNOW how to sniff without ANY chance being detected. They had fancy locks on raised-floor server rooms, yet the walls and doors didn't extend into the crawlspace.
The networks in most geeks' college apartments are a thousand times more secure than real, critical networks. Most "Security Experts" out there do security "by the book," which doesn't exactly work when everyone knows what the book says. They fall behind the waves of new technology, and seemingly obvious security precautions elude them.
[end rant]
I feel better now ^_^
This is why programs like Nullsoft's WASTE are going to be so important in the coming years.
Networks of trust, wherein all communication is encrypted and idle channels are filled with random noise. Privacy may or may not be a right, but that doesn't mean you can't just fight for and have it.
Granted, Big Brother can probably crack most encryption given time and money, but what if EVERYONE is using encryption? Different kinds, as well (geeks using a number of home-grown variants, the masses using Microsoft whatever...). Decrypting everything becomes less and less feasible. Is that a terrorist or some kid playing CounterStrike? An mp3 "pirate" or just a randomly generared noise packet?
Encrypt everything. If they try to outlaw encryption, well... I'll get back to you on that one.
I was seriously underwhelmed back when the PS2 came out. The early games for most consoles, quite frankly, suck. It's much more economical to wait a few months until a) the price comes down a tad and b) some gods-be-damned GAMES come out.
Of course, I'm very cynical of the modern gaming industry in general. The SNES was the last system I genuinely liked (and bought more than a handful games for). Most PS* games look completely uninteresting to me. Even Nintendo's latest offerings seem lackluster (Metroit Prime being a shining example of an exception to that). My favorite RPG is still Final Fantasy IV, my favorite sports game is still Ice Hockey for the NES (Super DodgeBall being a close second)...
Graphics got better, sound got better, but that's it. Innovation is largely dead, and actual fun often takes a back seat to movie tie-ins and deadlines.
I still have my NES and SNES, and I play them far more than I play any of the modern systems to which I have access.
Welcome to America ;^) The only reason we don't have a revolution is the large middle class. They're not too well off, but they're scared as all shit of being poor. Life is good enough for them, so they'll never risk losing what they have.
Thus, the middle class sides with the rich, and the poor work at McDonald's, and the RIAA continues to be evil, and the spectre of DRM looms like the Iron Curtain once did, and wars rage, and Playstation owners fail to make use of a neat feature.
Business as usual.
Schezar-soft. Only one employee, but we're not about the money.
We're about... I'll get back to you when I write some software.
1. Write Software
2. ???
3. Not about the money
Very true.
After all, it's just text on a screen, and maybe a picture. You can always ALT-TAB out of it. That doesn't work so well for real rape.
We watched that at a LAN party back in the day. (My 1337 Pentium 200mHz humming along to Q2 Weapons Factory.. Ahh...)
It might have been the doritos, or the mountain dew, or the fact that it was 3 in the morning, but, at the time, that was the most hillarious thing I had ever experienced.
Except maybe the weekend orgies every good college has.
Somehow that seems more fun than attacking the darkness.
the term "to hit ac 0" or "thac0" wasnt added until 2nd ed
To Hit Armour Class 0 became THAC0 pretty quickly for us. We needed a noun to use in reference to the concept, and the acronym was pronouncible.
I'm sure many geeks came up with THAC0 independently of one another.
Well, there certainly is a grey area in there. My point was just that people lacking social skills or proper bathing habits will not find jobs regardless of their skill, with rare exception left for the super-genius coder who doesn't know what pants are.
I have the people skills and the IT skills. People lacking either will have a harder time finding a good job than I will. Ergo, it benefits me to see that more people lack either one or the other. ^_^ I look out for number one.
Or is that just BRITISH arcades?
;^).
Yep. Just you limey Brits
I've never had a problem in an arcade, and I've never known anyone who has. They're generally pretty safe places unless the old Galaga machine explodes.
Arcades (good ones) also have food, pool tables, and... people! They're great places to hang out. Who wants to sit in their house all day? That's the second leading cause of obesity (staying out of pie shops is number one.)
If a person chooses to block ADV: emails, it means he DOESN'T WANT THEM! Just because you are a legitimate business doesn't mean people have to care about what you have to offer. You can't force them to listen to you. If you try, you deserve to be punished.
Direct advertising pisses people off. Plain and simple. Notice how over 17 million people have signed up for the national "Do Not Call" list since it started, and hundreds of thousands more sign up every day? Take the hint.
More anti-social geeks means more tech jobs for us social geeks.
Who is IBM going to hire? The smelly, snorting, pale guy who can't relate to anyone, or the equally qualified, good-looking (or at least clean/not fat), sociable, interesting guy? (Or girl.. Diction arguments will make me laugh at you.)
IT or coding skill isn't the primary factor in employment. The big fat gamer guy will smell up the office and scare vendors with his creepy rants on the art of maxing-out stats in Final Fantasy XX-II-1.4.
So yes, we should encourage geeks to be anti-social, physically weak and large, pale, and otherwise poor career candidates. Labour-scarcity-induced-raise, here I come!
Oh, I hope I hope these things become commonplace. Oh, will engineers and geeks make merry in the streets!
You also have to have every machine in every nation you do business with have perfect security also.
Good point, but my solution was designed for... me. I've given up on the spam war. Now, I only care about my personal inbox. I blacklist IP blocks willy-knilly (but not so many that it would make sense to move to a white-list. Yet.). I've NEVER received anything important via email from anyone I didn't already know.
Job offers? They phone me.
Emergency? They page me.
Going out for a beer? They IM me, or they knock on my damn door.
Business? They send it to me via our secure LotusNotes server (yea, yea... IBM is VERY different on the inside than it looks from the outside. We use OS/2 Warp on critical servers too.) Or they email me normally (I know them: they're not blacklisted).
Pleasure? Any girl who propositions me over email (unsolicited, mind you) is probably not very high on my ladder to begin with.
Email is not a way to receive messages from strangers anymore: the spammers have ruined that. Email will likely become a white-list based messaging system and nothing more. It's a pity, but we've already crossed the bridge, and there's nothing left to do but to burn it behind us.
...prolific spammer who used servers in Romania and China.
And then I block email from IP blocks in those countries. I don't know anyone there, I don't do business with anyone there: I personally have no reason to accept email from them. If every nation I have friends in enacts tough anti-span legislation, spam becomes a moot issue to me.
In the Cantina scene in Star Wars (ep IV), Greedo and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) were discussing a debt owed by the latter to Jabba the Hutt. While Greedo was talking, Han shot him under the table, killing him, to avoid paying the debt (among other things). Han Solo was a criminal and a murderer, and part of the movie was his character development from that to the noble, albeit scruffy-looking, Han we knew and loved by the end.
When Lucas "remastered" Star Wars into the super-besto modern version, he added an extra blaster-shot, making it look as though Greedo had shot first and Han was simply defending himself. Murder, after all, isn't politically correct.
Fuck you, George. I'm sure Obi-wan and Darth Vadar had one hell of a walkie-talkie fight.
It's like a sprite comic. Only lamer somehow.
;^))
(Note that I'm a huge fan of 8-bit Theater
Now please explain why your past times, are conducted for any better reason?
;^) My slash journal has a tidbit about an old "friend" of mine who was addicted to Asheron's Call.
Aside from reading, the rest of those activities either make my body stronger/faster/not fat, or they leave me with a physical, tangible object in the real world. Physical benefit. ^_^
I suppose my whole point was really just that the whole levelling thing in MMORPGs exists solely to keep people around paying their monies longer.
I played an MMORPG once. The Realm, by sierra. It was a long time ago, but I had fun. I had fun because I never leveled: I wrote a macro that did it for me while I was at school. None of the tedium, all of the fun. Problem was, I did everything there was to do in short order, and then I had no reason to keep playing the game.
These games are supposed to be "Massively Multiplayer," but require no actual interaction with others aside from that necessary to group-level. (Leveling again!) Want to simulate an MMORPG? Play nethack with an IRC window open.
And yes, I am somewhat biased against MMORPGers
At the end, he references Slashdot for more info ('itself a demonstration of the power of dispersed individuals working together')."
Now, if only we could breed, we would rule the world! Muh ha ha ha!
I attack the darkness.