I'm 32. I have 300+ games on my Steam lists, most of which I've completed at one time or another (and my Steam account was made from my original WON copy of Half-Life which saw thousands of hours of play before Steam even came along). Hell, I completed Nonterraqueous before you were even born, and games of that era were nigh-on impossible to complete (especially as most of them had no saves at all, or Pause most of the time).
I never mind being bad at a game, so long as I can attribute it to: bad reactions, bad choices, bad timing, lack of a certain definable skill, lack of patience, etc.
With Magicka, it's lack of patience with a stupid design decision: a lack of time that I can bothered to sit there hacking away at things and hanging on to dear life by a thin thread the whole while, just to reach a checkpoint and so on and so on and so on and do it all in one session to reach a "real" checkpoint that'll write some bytes to disk. You can't experiment to find out the best spells because you end up spending half your life walking back to the big fights to try them out again (and, yes, you could just look them up on an FAQ but in my day, you didn't even have FAQ's).
Sure, I can sit behind a shield that the enemy can't walk past (at least in the early levels), refill it for ever, and pop out only to shoot out a spell you've been building up safely behind the wall for - but after the first battle with 8+ enemies that kinda gets tedious. Asking me to do that several times in a row, without dying, passing through several "save" points, just to get to a save point that will actually save is stupid.
Played it. Liked it. Got frustrated by a single game dynamic that would take a line of code and a button in the options to fix (and I'm nowhere near the only one complaining). To be honest, I'll do what I did with most of the Spectrum games - wait until I can run it in a virtual environment where I can literally reload back two seconds instead of 30 minutes work and retry, retry, retry. It's fun enough to play, so long as you can be bothered to complete it in one HUGE sitting and never want to save/quit.
At the moment, like the stupidly-difficult last missions of Driver and Syndicate, I played the bit I liked, got to the bit that frustrated me and then just left it there, likely forever until I can be bothered to reclaim my disk space.
A game is meant to feel fun and absorbing. A game that promotes itself with "find all the spells and combinations that work" should allow the player to actually do that. Magicka does neither, not because the game is crap, but because of a tiny, silly, stupid design decision that wasn't playtested properly.
Not a physicist but it wouldn't be too hard to guess:
Time FOR YOU only exists in this universe. It doesn't mean that's the only "time" that's even existed. Or will ever exist. Yes, technically, you could have one "time" over there and one over here, or even one "before" another, etc. But you're tinkering in multi-dimensional physics of which almost all our knowledge and predictions are based on mathematics, not perception.
Time is merely a dimension, like up/down, left/right. There are generally reckoned to be nearly a dozen dimensions (in order to make lots of maths that we know about, and which seems to work, be able to work properly), just that we can't perceive them. It's not inconceivable that some of those are time-like dimensions (and thus, time itself could have a history of being created, destroyed, etc. that's consistent with it only existing "once" to beings within it).
When you talk about "time" as a concept, asking what came before is a ridiculous statement, like asking what would a fifth dimension look like to a four-dimensional being - you can't perceive it at all, and are unlikely to understand it ever.
As far as you consider yourself a single being, in a single universe, with 4 dimensions, which has had a single "creation" event, there wasn't a before for you. But the bigger picture, believed to have many billions of universes, some or all of which would conceivably be in a never-ending loop of bang-crunch-bang (and thus, making "time being created with the Big Bang", again, nonsense), with 11-dimensions, branes and all sorts of strange fields and interactions and ways to exist and yet be seperate, etc. your question is inane and unanswerable.
Sorry - I don't see the developer support that you do - there are dozens of people basically saying "I've bought it, I meet the specs, it just doesn't work" and there's nothing but the promise of possibly a future patch once they "lock down the issues". (I have no technical problems in terms of performance, but I've seen the odd crash - just not enough to disturb me yet).
Lots of people cried out for savepoints, which is literally half-a-dozen lines of extra code. "We'll look into it", from the very first day of release - nothing, and no decision, 4 months later. Network multiplayer was borked for most of that time and is STILL the heaviest bandwidth I've ever seen on a game (and still on the "To Do" list that the developers post on Steam forums every now and then).
Yet in that time, there's been 2 entire DLC's. It's called chasing the easy money. That's fine. But *my* money isn't easy, so they won't be getting any more of it.
They might be there on the support forums but they are basically there for reassurance - actually getting anything done is rare. When was the last patch that actually *changed* something? A month ago. What did it change? Mostly crashes. What did the previous SIXTEEN updates fix? Mostly crashes.
Good things to fix, but 17 updates to get rid of some huge, major, quite obvious crashes and yet they focus mainly on two DLC's (three if you count releasing a tiny little weapon to start you off as a DLC - offered for free with early purchases).
And there's no way I'm subjecting three of my friends to the issues that just I've experienced with it (and ignoring the huge numbers of people still reporting "game doesn't even start" or "game crashes" on the forums) and certainly not by giving them another three lots of money.
Wow - thought that was just me. Although Magicka wasn't too bad on my hardware in terms of compatibility, I still got crashes, and those other games are currently sitting uninstalled on my Steam list.
I rarely check the publishers but you're right, there's a common theme there.
1) Slashvertisement. 2) I played the demo - seemed okay, seemed to make good progress, interesting ideas, had to restart from a checkpoint a couple of times but nothing too taxing etc. Bought it on that basis.
Had to re-do everything I'd done in the demo (in fact, in a worse way because there were some vital elements that weren't highlighted in the full game that had been in the demo until they patched them). Then realised that save-"checkpoints" only worked if you didn't quit the game in between.
So you struggle through a level - get right to the end, die. You restart and restart from just before you died but then if you choose to close the game and try again later - bam - right back to the very start of the level. I didn't get past more than about 30 minutes of actual gameplay (after many hours of trying) and the developers have zero interest in changing it because dozens of complaints on the forums.
Yes, if you sit down and wish to play it through in one session after reading up on every spell combination and memorising them all and then just spamming the most powerful ones, you can complete the game in one sitting and never hit the issue. But if you want to PLAY the game and experiment (which is kinda the selling point of the game), then you're stuffed and find yourself re-treading old ground constantly (with extended cutscenes etc. each time) over and over and any progress you make better be a LOT of progress or it won't save between sessions even if you've touched a "save" checkpoint.
And then they sold out and just produce a bucket of odd DLC for it without bothering to fix many of the issues. And that's from someone who had a relatively smooth ride bug-wise because I tried the demo and read the specs beforehand, but it still crashed out on me a couple of times (it doesn't matter "how often", games should not crash out). After the first two days of trying, I literally just left it to linger on my Steam account and haven't tried since.
I never even tried to play it multiplayer because all of my friends steered clear of it but the single-player is all but impossible if you can't dedicate a whole day or two to completing it. Even then, the multiplayer had ridiculous network traffic sizes that made it mostly impossible for four-people on ordinary broadband connections to play together (and there were all sorts of sync issues).
Basically, it was a really, really, cool idea that they buggered up by being too focused on selling instead of fixing. And you should look at the Steam forums and the number of complaints about "my super-duper graphics card can't run this at all".
Actually, the first version of the Gameboy was out for 6 years before the coloured versions arrived. Some consoles don't even last that long, let alone keep selling. What sold it was being something that nobody else really had - a handheld, battery-powered, long-life gaming console with a huge developer base (not to mention the most famous launch title in history).
The Z80 included wasn't so much cut-down as customised - junk they didn't need was thrown out and custom instructions thrown in. Nobody ever complained of a Gameboy game being slow.
The SNES was competitive with its only sensible rival and vastly expandable - just that nobody bothered until the games came with the extras built-in.
The N64 took a strong second-place to the Playstation only but, yes, you could say it was the cart price (and associated development costs) that brought it down. Still sold 33m units, though.
The GBA sold 81m units, and wiped the floor with all its rivals at the time. The DS is still the biggest selling handheld of all time.
The Gamecube? Yeah, they fell down there. The Wii - hell, it's a household name like the Gameboy was/is and they're still selling it 5 years later.
You can paint history however you like but that's a pretty serious run of wins in there, especially when almost every other competitor couldn't come close to their longevity. They sold millions and millions of units, beating off most of their rivals for several decades, and didn't need to force them into people's hands or ending up RMA'ing them until the cows came home.
Of course they save money - mainly because they realised that most people aren't willing to pay for power when it comes to videogames - they pay for the game, not the spec-sheet.
To be honest, from a programming point of view, it's only graphics and physics that should be taking up CPU time in a modern game - almost everything else is just sucking up cycles because of bad programming - the games are basically identical to those from the early era of PC gaming but with better graphics / physics. The Wii came with a chip ideally suited to graphics / physics and a pretty basic general processor too. That's no coincidence.
Nintendo win - they win by not including the crap most people don't want to pay for (I don't care if it's 7 trillion texels per second or not, so long as it looks okay), selling things for a long time (so my games aren't going to be obsolete immediately), providing backwards compatibility even after that, and never selling at a loss expecting people to buy £60 games to prop up their already £100's of console.
Brilliant marketing? Obviously. But they don't do any cheap tricks and nobody with a brain would go out and buy a coloured console when they already have the plain one. It's most to do with the fact that their products JUST KEEP SELLING.
I would be disappointed if they didn't make a ton of cash out of Wii 2.0 but, let's be honest, they deserve it if people buy it. They are a business too, so I expect them to try to make money. The difference is they do it by pushing products that people choose to buy for years afterwards, not five-minute-wonder super-consoles.
Wow - you managed to sit through some US news shows? I can barely tolerate the UK ones (e.g. BBC, etc.) as it is and the US ones are just laughable. Probably why I haven't "consumed" most mainstream news for the last 10+ years.
Here's a hint: If a boxing legend dies on the same day as the Osama news, and I WANT to read about the boxer (despite having basically zero interest in the sport at all normally), let me. Don't shove it down to 15th place under 14 Osama stories. There are TWO stories - one is Osama-related, one is Cooper-related. Merely restating one of them as 14 articles doesn't make me trust your journalistic prioritisation skills at all and makes me not consume ANYTHING you produce in future.
Oh, and if they mention the fecking Royal Wedding again, I will have to stop ever watching that programme/reading that paper/viewing that website. I thought the US at least would have escaped such tripe but apparently not (if anything, it's worse).
What life (and news) needs is a drop-down filter - NOT Royal Wedding, NOT Osama, ah... I might actually find something vaguely interesting now. But when you watch news shows, it's only ever about the stories you already know about, and never in the detail you already know them.
People find the facts they want to and then stop. This is so ground-breaking (*cough*) that it shouldn't be classed as "news" either.
What's more worrying is what people bother to dig ABOUT. People seriously sat down on a fact-finding mission (no matter how contrived) off their own backs to prove their president wasn't American (and, hey America, what happened to all men created equal when it comes to who can be president? Or does that "rule" only apply if you're American, born in America, never set foot outside the borders?).
Meanwhile, they are still running a torture / concentration camp in a foreign country TEN YEARS after a terrorist incident which most inmates can't be linked to (if the US even wanted to bother to put them to trial), to the disgust of almost every nation except themselves. But please, continue arguing about whether his birth certificate is fake or not, not whether he's condoning torture of untested innocents via a supposed legal loophole.
Anybody who cares about someone's opinion of whether he is American or not really needs to get out in the real world a little and find something called "an issue worth debating".
First, anything I put on Facebook was - shock, horror - put on Facebook by me. It's things I would voluntarily choose to put there, and would probably not feel uncomfortable writing on a street-survey, or telling people in the pub. If a person of interest is using it, you'd have to assume that anything on it was absolute junk. We didn't catch the Russian female spy because she gave herself away on Facebook. Anything "private" isn't on Facebook. Just because other people on Facebook have a different opinion on what's private or not, that's their problem, not mine. If the government are trying to use Facebook to identify individuals and do mass statistical / network analysis, they will fail as miserably as the adverts Facebook tries to target at me.
Secondly, if a government agency run by my country wants to know about me and gives my Facebook anything more than a passing glance, I want a refund on my taxes. In fact, fuck it, I'd emigrate just to get out from such an idiotic regime. If other country's governments are looking me up... so what? They won't be able to do anything without my country's co-operation and there's nothing on there that I wouldn't, for example, post on a public website and expect to have visible to everyone (because, duh, that's what I've done!). Not to mention, Europe would have a complete hissy-fit if the US got more access to stuff like that than they do - hell the US wanted the Earth with regards to traveller information and they got the bare legal minimum and even still the EU is planning to stop that too.
Thirdly, if I'm really "someone of interest" to a government agency then pretty much any information is fair game, whether the law says so or not, and you'd have to be stupid to think otherwise. But at that point, it won't be my Facebook they'll be interested in, any more than what restaurant I eat at, or what countries my old holiday photos show I was in. They'll (hopefully, if my tax is being spent anywhere NEAR properly) be interested in things that are actually of importance and would be getting phone records, phone intercepts, internet records, getting bugs onto my PC and trackers on my car and anything else they could do.
If I'm posting something "important" on Facebook, they should know about it not because Facebook store it or were co-operative but because they are inside my damn life so much I can't do anything without them knowing and they watched me post it and know my FB password because of the keylogger on my PC.
So, whether we're talking "1984-style" generic monitoring of everyone, or specific all-out surveillance of my person, Facebook is, was and always should be nothing more than worthless in intelligence terms.
In some countries, military intelligence actually has a meaning. One which does not involve in any way PRIVATES in an army leaking diplomatic cables, people knowing about what goes on inside foreign torture camps (with photos to prove it), or agencies looking up people on Facebook.
Some people think that the black helicopters and miles of underground supercomputers listening to every phone call are a) real and b) actually a decent way to perform intelligence. The sad truth is that those people are precisely the ones who rely on *real* intelligence from foreign countries to actually get their job done.
IRC, maybe, but I don't think ICQ supports is around any more and hasn't been for many opera builds.
That's just my point, though - if you can do IRC, that's 99% of the way there - the rest is a little plugin that does a MSN->IRC or XMPP->IRC conversion in a pretty way.
A damn sight more useful than their "text-to-speech" engine that you haven't been able to install for the last 4 years despite it trying to do it when you click the button.
And Opera Mail is the quickest, easiest, stablest, safest and all-round lowest impact email client I've ever used. And that's coming from someone who's tried everything from Pegasus Mail through to the Mozilla horridness.
Search is instant-narrow, even over 8 years of email from multiple POP/IMAP accounts. Tag a message with a label, every similar message gets the label. Want emails with that label to appear in your inbox, or to be pushed out to a seperate "folder" or both? You can choose. Spam filter is fabulous and easy. Multiple account support without any hassle (literally a dropdown when sending, and multiple accounts / a combined inbox depending on your taste).
Pull all the attachments out (of an email, or a whole account, or your entire email collection) in one click. Instant sorting by date, subject, sender even with thousands of emails.
Seriously, when someone sticks Pidgin into Opera, I have everything I'll ever need. Hell, it even does integrated Bittorrent like any other download.
Which part of "Patching security vulnerabilities doesn't get rid of the trojans/viruses after the fact" made *you* cringe? You don't get rid of trojans/viruses by using an antivirus (their "cleanup" tools are basically useless) - that's just asking for trouble. You wipe clean and restore from known-good image. If this means in any way that you lose data and/or have to have the machine in question down for more than an hour, you have pretty poor systems.
Antivirus is a canary - an intrusion detection system for your hard disk. If it spots a known virus on there, it whoops, or dies. Now, some AV "suites" include actual defences, like firewalls etc. but almost all AV - even the heuristic-searching TSR-style read-intercept ones - can only see what's already been put onto your system and is either there or executing. By then it's too late and your machine is compromised and needs to be re-imaged. That's why people say AV are useless.
When your AV spots something, or keels over and dies because it's been disabled (at least 50% of real-world viruses that I've detected have been because of AV not reporting back because their processes were killed as opposed to them actually DETECTING the virus before it killed them), then it's useful. But that's not a "security" item any more than an IDS. It doesn't STOP anything, it just tells you that it's happened and you need to freeze / analyse / destroy that filesystem image immediately.
Of course there is nothing perfect in actual security, and that includes alternative operating systems, but AV is just the result of poor thinking - "I know - we'll go through our candidates for FBI/CIA/NSA only once a year and make sure they aren't already known spies / terrorists, that'll give us security!" Once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day - AV is just a checksum against known bad files gathered once-per-update (which isn't guaranteed to list viruses even decades old) and run once-per-scheduled-tasks and (if you can suffer the performance hit) on every file access to an already-written / executing file and a quick browse through the process list once-per-whatever.
AV is the movie-prison-searchlight of the security world - so long as the virus ducks at the right times and keeps out of its light it can do anything it likes, including breaking the light entirely.
Which begs the question - why don't you have more fine-grained control so that, for example, Old Program X which wants to install in C:\ and expects to run as administrator CAN do that (or at least have that faked for them with copy-on-write and a chroot-esque arrangement) while everything else still gets the full security.
Windows only presents an all-or-nothing scenario in the majority of cases, and even when you have fine-grained control it's inadequate. Windows KNOWS what the program wants to do - it blocked the program from doing it. But to actually MAKE it work is usually a piss-take of turning stuff off and setting a dozen different exceptions until you work out how to get it to work. I've seen software houses who just advise you to turn stuff off because even they can't work out why it doesn't work on newer versions of Windows (and, yes, they should just rewrite but they won't).
The problem with Windows is NOT people wanting to install some 20-year-old bit of CDROM software for their kids that needs what-it-thinks-is administrator access to the computer. It's Windows not being able to fake that, not being able to isolate such programs, actually making it so the only option to avoid unwanted warnings is to turn everything off, and then having modern web browsers and super-regularly-updated programs also be affected because some parent wants to run a bit of DOS software (which doesn't go on the net and can't be reasonably targeted or exploited because it doesn't even KNOW what Windows is) in an isolated window.
Watch the security mailing lists. Rarely is it some ancient piece of software being exploited in the most prevalent viruses - it's the modern stuff, usually a point-release update or two "old". And most of it slips through the default Windows security anyway.
Most network admins don't give their users anywhere near enough privileges for them to do damage and don't go sharing admin details around, but still they are plagued by viruses and malware (even if the scope is limited). Users are stupid, but Windows is worse for not taking account of that fact.
Tell me - why can't I have programs run in isolated "bottles" which I can stop, delete, revert and restore when they get corrupted, or even on every execution (and where I know that ALL the programs files are contained and will be removed when I say so and not be scatter-shot around my hard disk)?
Why can't programs have a set list of exactly WHERE they can write to and even have fake redirects so when they think they are writing to C:\WINDOWS (or whatever), they are lead to believe they have, they can read back their written files from there, but it makes NO changes to the actual Windows folder whatsoever?
It's the sort of thing you can program in a week or two with filesystem hooks but Windows has gone through at least 4-5 MAJOR upgrades which broke compatibility because of their "fixes" for these problems and still hasn't solved it.
So, 10 years to find one man. One man who kept posting videos worldwide. Who was searched for by every allied nation for all that time. Whose face was in the news for almost all of that time. Who the US (and others) invaded several countries and occupied them for all that time "just" to find. Who had the top military and surveillance equipment used against them and had nothing close to bat back with. Who caused the US to break almost every humanitarian rule in the book (and is still to this day doing so) in order to find a trace of him.
Can hardly call that an achievement really. And even the "mission" to go and get him was the result of a tip-off (by a country with decent intelligence, perhaps) that resulted in one lost helicopter, three injured (presumably innocent) women, two other dead people (presumed combatants) and a hell of a lot of bullets and, ultimately, a death rather than a capture.
And then an incredibly hasty burial at sea (which will be almost impossible to locate, recover or verify anything that's been said). Of a guy that nobody's actually been able to conclusively verify was alive for, what, the past five years or so?
And that's *ONE* guy, who almost certainly has many thousands of followers who are the ones who actually sketched out the details of his vague "attack America" plans and executed them, and who almost certainly would have more than one person willing to replace them.
This isn't an achievement. Even in an "allied" country, I have lost vastly more rights, freedom, respect, honour and integrity just by having my country associated with this sham of a "war" than I ever had taken away by the terrorists, and we've committed far worse acts in our "retaliation" than were ever committed against us.
And nobody quite saw the irony of the US invading a country on the basis that a group that believed there was too much foreign influence in its own country decided to attack.
Nothing can condone 3000 innocent people dying. Even less can condone many more innocent people dying in sanctioned military action but being ignored just because they were born in the wrong country and happened to be in roughly the same country as the terrorists.
Sorry, I see no reason to over-complicate a numbered metric for sake of historical attitudes towards "doing things the hard way" by taking splices of an arc and estimating their swept area to come to a numeral, when all I care about IS the numeral (whether approximate 15-minute intervals and/or split-second accuracy, and with digital displays I can get both in one device without moving parts, the absence of which gives this particular model some of its durability).
Oh, and to be fussy: does your analogue clock have roman numerals on it? Are you sure? What about number 4? (hint: if your clock says "IV", it's tradition-horologically wrong; if it says "IIII", it's historically wrong).
There's nothing wrong with a digital clock. I hesitate to waste the time to teach my child an analogue clock and if/when I do, it will be to avoid such "social embarrassment" more than to improve her numeracy or time-keeping. As far as I'm concerned, the only use for an analogue dial is to show kids how to find North in daylight.
I have that watch. In fact, it's the only type of watch that I've bought since I was a kid. I've had others given to me but always use that EXACT model. The only thing that goes wrong with them is the strap and they are cheap enough to throw away and replace.
I've *never* had a problem buying that model, in the last, what, 15-20 years? It's always the cheapest digital watch available in any high-street store (i.e. not cheapy 50p kiddies things).
- It has a digital display. - It's waterproof. I regularly go swimming with one without even thinking about it any more. - I've never had to replace a battery in one (even the strapless ones I kept are still going). - It has a cheap standard battery if I ever do. - It shows date, day and time on a single display without pressing anything. - It has alarm and stopwatch if you need it. - You can turn all the stupid bleeps and bloops off. - It has a light that's powerful enough to see the display perfectly in complete darkness (later models have an "electroluminscence" display that's even better) and doesn't run your batteries down even with every-day use over a long period and also to semi-illuminate other things in an emergency (I have read an entire novel by that light!) - It keeps good time and is easy to change when timezones changes
Gimme an MSF (radio-sync) version, with electroluminesence and a decent strap and I'll give you a hefty sum and never have to buy another watch again!.
But as a terrorist marker? Not unless you can trace back that watch's serial number to a particular batch - you can buy it EVERYWHERE, even abroad, without any hassle at all. And I don't even think they *have* serial numbers (I've never seen one). It's like saying all the terrorists were wearing shoes. Equally as true. Equally as useless as a marker.
- Got IPv6 connnectivity set up on my computer - Set up all my servers to support it myself. - Been in my firewall scripts for about 3-4 years now.
So I'm WAY ahead of the game compared to most people BUT:
- No ISP gives you it by default. - No server host gives you it by default (mine let me add it by clicking a button in the control panel). - Most dedicated / virtual server hosting places won't set it up for you in their default images (ALL IPv4) - It is of precisely zero use, even to me, because nobody uses it, there's no reason to use it and nobody supports it.
When Slashdot (a highly-geeky site) publishes their AAAA records, then we can discuss the future of the rest of the Internet. In the meantime - NOTHING and I don't even get IPv6-originated spam or automated access attempts.
That's not even *mentioning* the technical problems and amount of upheaval and management necessary (ever changed a complicated iptables script to support ip6tables?) that I decided to do "just because".
The IPv6 net is largely silent, except for techno-geeks pinging it because they can. And it *literally* takes a day to enable it, even for the largest sites.
Do NOT open a document that you're not expecting, that isn't from someone you know, etc. Yeah, you could say that this can be passed legitimately from person to person but come on - this is the first rule of virus protection - don't open documents without screening them (not via some magical software that "knows" if it's bad or not, but by using your brain) first.
The fact that you can even still GET a Word virus whether it executes in macros, integrated Flash or some other ActiveX-based crap, tells you that Microsoft just don't care any more.
I don't get why Farmville is so popular. That truly sucks. In the space of a week, I managed to out-class all my Facebook friends who'd been playing it for years just by doing a quick bit of maths and working out how to make money. It was dull. Yet millions of people play it so often that I've had to remove its posts from my Facebook because of the spamming.
I don't get why WoW is so popular. I never hear anything but complaints about it, and certainly never play games on a subscription basis. And people still tell me they are pissing about £40-50 a month on the damn thing for years at a time.
I grew up with a ZX Spectrum. Maybe you're from a different era. Let me give you a hint. Graphics mean NOTHING. Not even worthy of mention. Not even an "it doesn't even look good", like that's the last saving grace of a crap game. If you count graphics in your evaluation of a game, you're the wrong target for most games. Hint: In a year's time, *every* game's graphics will look crap compared to today's. Does that mean the older games have somehow got "worse" without changing?
A game is either fun and absorbing or not. I spent most of last week playing Altitude (PC) and Batty (Spectrum) with my girlfriend. We didn't care that it wasn't 3D, or high-res, or anti-aliased. It literally did not factor in at all. We honestly spent more times looking at ZX Spectrum colour clash. Didn't mean we didn't enjoy it though. I don't think my girlfriend even noticed that the Spectrum *had* colour clash.
As for "not fun", no you don't see yourself laughing at it, or entertained. But what it does is absorb you. That's a really tricky thing to achieve in a game. Some games are endless restarts of the same chapter, but some manage to absorb you so much that you don't even realise that's what you're doing.
Minecraft is a sandbox game. It's about people building a little virtual world of their own like we were promised for the past 50 years. It's similar to the 3D Construction Kit "game" of many years ago - very few people can make something impressive but everyone enjoys having a go and making their virtual world, even if the graphics are atrocious by modern video card standards. That hardly matters - it's just fun to tinker. 3DCK was literally dithered polygons (and only about half-a-dozen at a time on the Spectrum!) when I first looked at it but immediately thought "whoa, that's something I want to tinker with". There was also something called VU-3D on the Spectrum. Go look it up. I spent hours tinkering with that. Not a "game" as such, in the same way that Minecraft isn't a game.
I play Minecraft - not masses but I've had a couple of long sessions on it, alt-tabbing back and forth between the Minepedia and the game. I actually prefer it without the monsters at night, which some would say is the only interaction in the game.
It's just nice to build a little world and explore it. I actually quite enjoy the times when I've done a big build job and my "character" walks out of the house, down to his little jetty that I made (deliberately facing West), gets in a boat and has a little paddle towards the sunset. And then he turns around, sees the distant light of his little home in the dusk and sculls back on home.
And more annoyingly, I keep finding myself thinking "if only you could craft X or collect Y" and wondering how to go about programming it (I have resisted the temptation to look at the code thus far and, anyway, my Java is rusty - if it's easy to add new things, I'll never escape the damn block-universe).
It doesn't matter how "fun" it is. Personally, I'm pissed off with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at the moment because of the constant restarts from checkpoints. The game is fun, when it flows and absorbs, but otherwise that's just a chore. Whereas Minecraft - you can even be "immortal" if you don't have the monsters at night or fall off a cliff (though finding string is always a problem then, which means my character can't fish from his
Well, I don't "pre-order" anything. But I played this game for more hours than I care to think of when I first saw it and thought "what's all the fuss about". Not so much a game as a sandbox-with-potential.
But the fact is that at no point did my computer struggle to run it. So it can't really be described as a resource hog. Yeah, the graphics aren't fabulous but I come from the ZX Spectrum era and have always held that that means nothing - and the point of the engine is that the graphics are crap to enable millions of blocks to be visible simultaneously.
And it hasn't crashed once, and even between upgrades it successfully converts my old worlds to new formats without a problem. If it had had visible problems in that area, I wouldn't have touched it until they were fixed.
Maybe I only got in on the game after such things were already fixed but to me - it's a game. Even the first version I downloaded is still on my hard drive and still a playable game on it's own. So I parted with a tiny bit of cash to show my appreciation for the game (I always used to register my shareware if I'd used it that much, too) which also got me a guaranteed update for every version of Minecraft that comes out in the future. Considering I was looking on the money more as a donation, I think that's just an extra-added bonus.
Now if I could just stop seeing blocks at night, that'd be great.
Thank God most terrorists / criminals are this dumb. Otherwise we'd probably all be dead.
If you *want* to talk secretly, describing messages that will end up with you in jail if they are discovered, use something a bit better than a schoolboy cipher. Seriously, I was doing better than that when I was 11/12 and programming.
When I have idle moments, I try to "counter-think" terrorists in order to see what I would do if I were one. Almost all of the things I come up with are less risk, more impact, cheaper and easier than the things that are reported in the news. Thankfully, it seems that terrorists, on average, consist mainly of dumb people who can't do that.
It's like the criminals who break into banks and don't covre their faces. Catching them is actually less fun than letting them do the crime and seeing how they try to get away with it.
I'm British. I pay British taxes. My short response to this revelation that we don't subsidise the game industry from public funds any more is:
"Fucking good!"
My full response is:
"What the hell? We PAY people from public funds to write computer games just so we can compete with other country's computer games?"
Of all the myriad taxes, charges, jobs, cuts and everything else going on, this is seriously making the whole UK games industry look like a bunch of whiners.
How about this - you're running a business. It produces a product. That product is FAR from essential. In fact, it's as much luxury as is conceivably possible to the ordinary man. You build it, sell it, make a profit, pay your staff. Like every other business in the world.
And I'm assuming these tax breaks don't even run to business software, or healthcare software, or educational software, or the myriad other types of software which could conceivably be useful? No, just games.
Seriously. You're making yourselves look like arses, in public, in times of austerity - people were smashing up London the other day because the government has made cuts, what do you think they'd do if they thought for a second their tax was going to help write computer video games?
I'm not one to blame everyone on the recession and yell about how bad people have it but this is just ridiculous. Get off your arse and make a product that sells. Yeah, you might conceivably add a job or two if you were giving huge tax breaks by the government, but so would any other industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 32. I have 300+ games on my Steam lists, most of which I've completed at one time or another (and my Steam account was made from my original WON copy of Half-Life which saw thousands of hours of play before Steam even came along). Hell, I completed Nonterraqueous before you were even born, and games of that era were nigh-on impossible to complete (especially as most of them had no saves at all, or Pause most of the time).
I never mind being bad at a game, so long as I can attribute it to: bad reactions, bad choices, bad timing, lack of a certain definable skill, lack of patience, etc.
With Magicka, it's lack of patience with a stupid design decision: a lack of time that I can bothered to sit there hacking away at things and hanging on to dear life by a thin thread the whole while, just to reach a checkpoint and so on and so on and so on and do it all in one session to reach a "real" checkpoint that'll write some bytes to disk. You can't experiment to find out the best spells because you end up spending half your life walking back to the big fights to try them out again (and, yes, you could just look them up on an FAQ but in my day, you didn't even have FAQ's).
Sure, I can sit behind a shield that the enemy can't walk past (at least in the early levels), refill it for ever, and pop out only to shoot out a spell you've been building up safely behind the wall for - but after the first battle with 8+ enemies that kinda gets tedious. Asking me to do that several times in a row, without dying, passing through several "save" points, just to get to a save point that will actually save is stupid.
Played it. Liked it. Got frustrated by a single game dynamic that would take a line of code and a button in the options to fix (and I'm nowhere near the only one complaining). To be honest, I'll do what I did with most of the Spectrum games - wait until I can run it in a virtual environment where I can literally reload back two seconds instead of 30 minutes work and retry, retry, retry. It's fun enough to play, so long as you can be bothered to complete it in one HUGE sitting and never want to save/quit.
At the moment, like the stupidly-difficult last missions of Driver and Syndicate, I played the bit I liked, got to the bit that frustrated me and then just left it there, likely forever until I can be bothered to reclaim my disk space.
A game is meant to feel fun and absorbing. A game that promotes itself with "find all the spells and combinations that work" should allow the player to actually do that. Magicka does neither, not because the game is crap, but because of a tiny, silly, stupid design decision that wasn't playtested properly.
Not a physicist but it wouldn't be too hard to guess:
Time FOR YOU only exists in this universe. It doesn't mean that's the only "time" that's even existed. Or will ever exist. Yes, technically, you could have one "time" over there and one over here, or even one "before" another, etc. But you're tinkering in multi-dimensional physics of which almost all our knowledge and predictions are based on mathematics, not perception.
Time is merely a dimension, like up/down, left/right. There are generally reckoned to be nearly a dozen dimensions (in order to make lots of maths that we know about, and which seems to work, be able to work properly), just that we can't perceive them. It's not inconceivable that some of those are time-like dimensions (and thus, time itself could have a history of being created, destroyed, etc. that's consistent with it only existing "once" to beings within it).
When you talk about "time" as a concept, asking what came before is a ridiculous statement, like asking what would a fifth dimension look like to a four-dimensional being - you can't perceive it at all, and are unlikely to understand it ever.
As far as you consider yourself a single being, in a single universe, with 4 dimensions, which has had a single "creation" event, there wasn't a before for you. But the bigger picture, believed to have many billions of universes, some or all of which would conceivably be in a never-ending loop of bang-crunch-bang (and thus, making "time being created with the Big Bang", again, nonsense), with 11-dimensions, branes and all sorts of strange fields and interactions and ways to exist and yet be seperate, etc. your question is inane and unanswerable.
Sorry - I don't see the developer support that you do - there are dozens of people basically saying "I've bought it, I meet the specs, it just doesn't work" and there's nothing but the promise of possibly a future patch once they "lock down the issues". (I have no technical problems in terms of performance, but I've seen the odd crash - just not enough to disturb me yet).
Lots of people cried out for savepoints, which is literally half-a-dozen lines of extra code. "We'll look into it", from the very first day of release - nothing, and no decision, 4 months later. Network multiplayer was borked for most of that time and is STILL the heaviest bandwidth I've ever seen on a game (and still on the "To Do" list that the developers post on Steam forums every now and then).
Yet in that time, there's been 2 entire DLC's. It's called chasing the easy money. That's fine. But *my* money isn't easy, so they won't be getting any more of it.
They might be there on the support forums but they are basically there for reassurance - actually getting anything done is rare. When was the last patch that actually *changed* something? A month ago. What did it change? Mostly crashes. What did the previous SIXTEEN updates fix? Mostly crashes.
Good things to fix, but 17 updates to get rid of some huge, major, quite obvious crashes and yet they focus mainly on two DLC's (three if you count releasing a tiny little weapon to start you off as a DLC - offered for free with early purchases).
And there's no way I'm subjecting three of my friends to the issues that just I've experienced with it (and ignoring the huge numbers of people still reporting "game doesn't even start" or "game crashes" on the forums) and certainly not by giving them another three lots of money.
Wow - thought that was just me. Although Magicka wasn't too bad on my hardware in terms of compatibility, I still got crashes, and those other games are currently sitting uninstalled on my Steam list.
I rarely check the publishers but you're right, there's a common theme there.
1) Slashvertisement.
2) I played the demo - seemed okay, seemed to make good progress, interesting ideas, had to restart from a checkpoint a couple of times but nothing too taxing etc. Bought it on that basis.
Had to re-do everything I'd done in the demo (in fact, in a worse way because there were some vital elements that weren't highlighted in the full game that had been in the demo until they patched them). Then realised that save-"checkpoints" only worked if you didn't quit the game in between.
So you struggle through a level - get right to the end, die. You restart and restart from just before you died but then if you choose to close the game and try again later - bam - right back to the very start of the level. I didn't get past more than about 30 minutes of actual gameplay (after many hours of trying) and the developers have zero interest in changing it because dozens of complaints on the forums.
Yes, if you sit down and wish to play it through in one session after reading up on every spell combination and memorising them all and then just spamming the most powerful ones, you can complete the game in one sitting and never hit the issue. But if you want to PLAY the game and experiment (which is kinda the selling point of the game), then you're stuffed and find yourself re-treading old ground constantly (with extended cutscenes etc. each time) over and over and any progress you make better be a LOT of progress or it won't save between sessions even if you've touched a "save" checkpoint.
And then they sold out and just produce a bucket of odd DLC for it without bothering to fix many of the issues. And that's from someone who had a relatively smooth ride bug-wise because I tried the demo and read the specs beforehand, but it still crashed out on me a couple of times (it doesn't matter "how often", games should not crash out). After the first two days of trying, I literally just left it to linger on my Steam account and haven't tried since.
I never even tried to play it multiplayer because all of my friends steered clear of it but the single-player is all but impossible if you can't dedicate a whole day or two to completing it. Even then, the multiplayer had ridiculous network traffic sizes that made it mostly impossible for four-people on ordinary broadband connections to play together (and there were all sorts of sync issues).
Basically, it was a really, really, cool idea that they buggered up by being too focused on selling instead of fixing. And you should look at the Steam forums and the number of complaints about "my super-duper graphics card can't run this at all".
The NES: I never used so won't comment.
Actually, the first version of the Gameboy was out for 6 years before the coloured versions arrived. Some consoles don't even last that long, let alone keep selling. What sold it was being something that nobody else really had - a handheld, battery-powered, long-life gaming console with a huge developer base (not to mention the most famous launch title in history).
The Z80 included wasn't so much cut-down as customised - junk they didn't need was thrown out and custom instructions thrown in. Nobody ever complained of a Gameboy game being slow.
The SNES was competitive with its only sensible rival and vastly expandable - just that nobody bothered until the games came with the extras built-in.
The N64 took a strong second-place to the Playstation only but, yes, you could say it was the cart price (and associated development costs) that brought it down. Still sold 33m units, though.
The GBA sold 81m units, and wiped the floor with all its rivals at the time. The DS is still the biggest selling handheld of all time.
The Gamecube? Yeah, they fell down there. The Wii - hell, it's a household name like the Gameboy was/is and they're still selling it 5 years later.
You can paint history however you like but that's a pretty serious run of wins in there, especially when almost every other competitor couldn't come close to their longevity. They sold millions and millions of units, beating off most of their rivals for several decades, and didn't need to force them into people's hands or ending up RMA'ing them until the cows came home.
Of course they save money - mainly because they realised that most people aren't willing to pay for power when it comes to videogames - they pay for the game, not the spec-sheet.
To be honest, from a programming point of view, it's only graphics and physics that should be taking up CPU time in a modern game - almost everything else is just sucking up cycles because of bad programming - the games are basically identical to those from the early era of PC gaming but with better graphics / physics. The Wii came with a chip ideally suited to graphics / physics and a pretty basic general processor too. That's no coincidence.
Nintendo win - they win by not including the crap most people don't want to pay for (I don't care if it's 7 trillion texels per second or not, so long as it looks okay), selling things for a long time (so my games aren't going to be obsolete immediately), providing backwards compatibility even after that, and never selling at a loss expecting people to buy £60 games to prop up their already £100's of console.
Brilliant marketing? Obviously. But they don't do any cheap tricks and nobody with a brain would go out and buy a coloured console when they already have the plain one. It's most to do with the fact that their products JUST KEEP SELLING.
I would be disappointed if they didn't make a ton of cash out of Wii 2.0 but, let's be honest, they deserve it if people buy it. They are a business too, so I expect them to try to make money. The difference is they do it by pushing products that people choose to buy for years afterwards, not five-minute-wonder super-consoles.
Wow - you managed to sit through some US news shows? I can barely tolerate the UK ones (e.g. BBC, etc.) as it is and the US ones are just laughable. Probably why I haven't "consumed" most mainstream news for the last 10+ years.
Here's a hint: If a boxing legend dies on the same day as the Osama news, and I WANT to read about the boxer (despite having basically zero interest in the sport at all normally), let me. Don't shove it down to 15th place under 14 Osama stories. There are TWO stories - one is Osama-related, one is Cooper-related. Merely restating one of them as 14 articles doesn't make me trust your journalistic prioritisation skills at all and makes me not consume ANYTHING you produce in future.
Oh, and if they mention the fecking Royal Wedding again, I will have to stop ever watching that programme/reading that paper/viewing that website. I thought the US at least would have escaped such tripe but apparently not (if anything, it's worse).
What life (and news) needs is a drop-down filter - NOT Royal Wedding, NOT Osama, ah... I might actually find something vaguely interesting now. But when you watch news shows, it's only ever about the stories you already know about, and never in the detail you already know them.
People find the facts they want to and then stop. This is so ground-breaking (*cough*) that it shouldn't be classed as "news" either.
What's more worrying is what people bother to dig ABOUT. People seriously sat down on a fact-finding mission (no matter how contrived) off their own backs to prove their president wasn't American (and, hey America, what happened to all men created equal when it comes to who can be president? Or does that "rule" only apply if you're American, born in America, never set foot outside the borders?).
Meanwhile, they are still running a torture / concentration camp in a foreign country TEN YEARS after a terrorist incident which most inmates can't be linked to (if the US even wanted to bother to put them to trial), to the disgust of almost every nation except themselves. But please, continue arguing about whether his birth certificate is fake or not, not whether he's condoning torture of untested innocents via a supposed legal loophole.
Anybody who cares about someone's opinion of whether he is American or not really needs to get out in the real world a little and find something called "an issue worth debating".
This really is paranoia of the highest kind.
First, anything I put on Facebook was - shock, horror - put on Facebook by me. It's things I would voluntarily choose to put there, and would probably not feel uncomfortable writing on a street-survey, or telling people in the pub. If a person of interest is using it, you'd have to assume that anything on it was absolute junk. We didn't catch the Russian female spy because she gave herself away on Facebook. Anything "private" isn't on Facebook. Just because other people on Facebook have a different opinion on what's private or not, that's their problem, not mine. If the government are trying to use Facebook to identify individuals and do mass statistical / network analysis, they will fail as miserably as the adverts Facebook tries to target at me.
Secondly, if a government agency run by my country wants to know about me and gives my Facebook anything more than a passing glance, I want a refund on my taxes. In fact, fuck it, I'd emigrate just to get out from such an idiotic regime. If other country's governments are looking me up... so what? They won't be able to do anything without my country's co-operation and there's nothing on there that I wouldn't, for example, post on a public website and expect to have visible to everyone (because, duh, that's what I've done!). Not to mention, Europe would have a complete hissy-fit if the US got more access to stuff like that than they do - hell the US wanted the Earth with regards to traveller information and they got the bare legal minimum and even still the EU is planning to stop that too.
Thirdly, if I'm really "someone of interest" to a government agency then pretty much any information is fair game, whether the law says so or not, and you'd have to be stupid to think otherwise. But at that point, it won't be my Facebook they'll be interested in, any more than what restaurant I eat at, or what countries my old holiday photos show I was in. They'll (hopefully, if my tax is being spent anywhere NEAR properly) be interested in things that are actually of importance and would be getting phone records, phone intercepts, internet records, getting bugs onto my PC and trackers on my car and anything else they could do.
If I'm posting something "important" on Facebook, they should know about it not because Facebook store it or were co-operative but because they are inside my damn life so much I can't do anything without them knowing and they watched me post it and know my FB password because of the keylogger on my PC.
So, whether we're talking "1984-style" generic monitoring of everyone, or specific all-out surveillance of my person, Facebook is, was and always should be nothing more than worthless in intelligence terms.
In some countries, military intelligence actually has a meaning. One which does not involve in any way PRIVATES in an army leaking diplomatic cables, people knowing about what goes on inside foreign torture camps (with photos to prove it), or agencies looking up people on Facebook.
Some people think that the black helicopters and miles of underground supercomputers listening to every phone call are a) real and b) actually a decent way to perform intelligence. The sad truth is that those people are precisely the ones who rely on *real* intelligence from foreign countries to actually get their job done.
IRC, maybe, but I don't think ICQ supports is around any more and hasn't been for many opera builds.
That's just my point, though - if you can do IRC, that's 99% of the way there - the rest is a little plugin that does a MSN->IRC or XMPP->IRC conversion in a pretty way.
A damn sight more useful than their "text-to-speech" engine that you haven't been able to install for the last 4 years despite it trying to do it when you click the button.
And Opera Mail is the quickest, easiest, stablest, safest and all-round lowest impact email client I've ever used. And that's coming from someone who's tried everything from Pegasus Mail through to the Mozilla horridness.
Search is instant-narrow, even over 8 years of email from multiple POP/IMAP accounts. Tag a message with a label, every similar message gets the label. Want emails with that label to appear in your inbox, or to be pushed out to a seperate "folder" or both? You can choose. Spam filter is fabulous and easy. Multiple account support without any hassle (literally a dropdown when sending, and multiple accounts / a combined inbox depending on your taste).
Pull all the attachments out (of an email, or a whole account, or your entire email collection) in one click. Instant sorting by date, subject, sender even with thousands of emails.
Seriously, when someone sticks Pidgin into Opera, I have everything I'll ever need. Hell, it even does integrated Bittorrent like any other download.
Opera's had that for ages. Literally 4, 5 or maybe even 6 "major" versions.
Which part of "Patching security vulnerabilities doesn't get rid of the trojans/viruses after the fact" made *you* cringe? You don't get rid of trojans/viruses by using an antivirus (their "cleanup" tools are basically useless) - that's just asking for trouble. You wipe clean and restore from known-good image. If this means in any way that you lose data and/or have to have the machine in question down for more than an hour, you have pretty poor systems.
Antivirus is a canary - an intrusion detection system for your hard disk. If it spots a known virus on there, it whoops, or dies. Now, some AV "suites" include actual defences, like firewalls etc. but almost all AV - even the heuristic-searching TSR-style read-intercept ones - can only see what's already been put onto your system and is either there or executing. By then it's too late and your machine is compromised and needs to be re-imaged. That's why people say AV are useless.
When your AV spots something, or keels over and dies because it's been disabled (at least 50% of real-world viruses that I've detected have been because of AV not reporting back because their processes were killed as opposed to them actually DETECTING the virus before it killed them), then it's useful. But that's not a "security" item any more than an IDS. It doesn't STOP anything, it just tells you that it's happened and you need to freeze / analyse / destroy that filesystem image immediately.
Of course there is nothing perfect in actual security, and that includes alternative operating systems, but AV is just the result of poor thinking - "I know - we'll go through our candidates for FBI/CIA/NSA only once a year and make sure they aren't already known spies / terrorists, that'll give us security!" Once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day - AV is just a checksum against known bad files gathered once-per-update (which isn't guaranteed to list viruses even decades old) and run once-per-scheduled-tasks and (if you can suffer the performance hit) on every file access to an already-written / executing file and a quick browse through the process list once-per-whatever.
AV is the movie-prison-searchlight of the security world - so long as the virus ducks at the right times and keeps out of its light it can do anything it likes, including breaking the light entirely.
Which begs the question - why don't you have more fine-grained control so that, for example, Old Program X which wants to install in C:\ and expects to run as administrator CAN do that (or at least have that faked for them with copy-on-write and a chroot-esque arrangement) while everything else still gets the full security.
Windows only presents an all-or-nothing scenario in the majority of cases, and even when you have fine-grained control it's inadequate. Windows KNOWS what the program wants to do - it blocked the program from doing it. But to actually MAKE it work is usually a piss-take of turning stuff off and setting a dozen different exceptions until you work out how to get it to work. I've seen software houses who just advise you to turn stuff off because even they can't work out why it doesn't work on newer versions of Windows (and, yes, they should just rewrite but they won't).
The problem with Windows is NOT people wanting to install some 20-year-old bit of CDROM software for their kids that needs what-it-thinks-is administrator access to the computer. It's Windows not being able to fake that, not being able to isolate such programs, actually making it so the only option to avoid unwanted warnings is to turn everything off, and then having modern web browsers and super-regularly-updated programs also be affected because some parent wants to run a bit of DOS software (which doesn't go on the net and can't be reasonably targeted or exploited because it doesn't even KNOW what Windows is) in an isolated window.
Watch the security mailing lists. Rarely is it some ancient piece of software being exploited in the most prevalent viruses - it's the modern stuff, usually a point-release update or two "old". And most of it slips through the default Windows security anyway.
Most network admins don't give their users anywhere near enough privileges for them to do damage and don't go sharing admin details around, but still they are plagued by viruses and malware (even if the scope is limited). Users are stupid, but Windows is worse for not taking account of that fact.
Tell me - why can't I have programs run in isolated "bottles" which I can stop, delete, revert and restore when they get corrupted, or even on every execution (and where I know that ALL the programs files are contained and will be removed when I say so and not be scatter-shot around my hard disk)?
Why can't programs have a set list of exactly WHERE they can write to and even have fake redirects so when they think they are writing to C:\WINDOWS (or whatever), they are lead to believe they have, they can read back their written files from there, but it makes NO changes to the actual Windows folder whatsoever?
It's the sort of thing you can program in a week or two with filesystem hooks but Windows has gone through at least 4-5 MAJOR upgrades which broke compatibility because of their "fixes" for these problems and still hasn't solved it.
So, 10 years to find one man. One man who kept posting videos worldwide. Who was searched for by every allied nation for all that time. Whose face was in the news for almost all of that time. Who the US (and others) invaded several countries and occupied them for all that time "just" to find. Who had the top military and surveillance equipment used against them and had nothing close to bat back with. Who caused the US to break almost every humanitarian rule in the book (and is still to this day doing so) in order to find a trace of him.
Can hardly call that an achievement really. And even the "mission" to go and get him was the result of a tip-off (by a country with decent intelligence, perhaps) that resulted in one lost helicopter, three injured (presumably innocent) women, two other dead people (presumed combatants) and a hell of a lot of bullets and, ultimately, a death rather than a capture.
And then an incredibly hasty burial at sea (which will be almost impossible to locate, recover or verify anything that's been said). Of a guy that nobody's actually been able to conclusively verify was alive for, what, the past five years or so?
And that's *ONE* guy, who almost certainly has many thousands of followers who are the ones who actually sketched out the details of his vague "attack America" plans and executed them, and who almost certainly would have more than one person willing to replace them.
This isn't an achievement. Even in an "allied" country, I have lost vastly more rights, freedom, respect, honour and integrity just by having my country associated with this sham of a "war" than I ever had taken away by the terrorists, and we've committed far worse acts in our "retaliation" than were ever committed against us.
And nobody quite saw the irony of the US invading a country on the basis that a group that believed there was too much foreign influence in its own country decided to attack.
Nothing can condone 3000 innocent people dying. Even less can condone many more innocent people dying in sanctioned military action but being ignored just because they were born in the wrong country and happened to be in roughly the same country as the terrorists.
Yeah.
Sorry, I see no reason to over-complicate a numbered metric for sake of historical attitudes towards "doing things the hard way" by taking splices of an arc and estimating their swept area to come to a numeral, when all I care about IS the numeral (whether approximate 15-minute intervals and/or split-second accuracy, and with digital displays I can get both in one device without moving parts, the absence of which gives this particular model some of its durability).
Oh, and to be fussy: does your analogue clock have roman numerals on it? Are you sure? What about number 4? (hint: if your clock says "IV", it's tradition-horologically wrong; if it says "IIII", it's historically wrong).
There's nothing wrong with a digital clock. I hesitate to waste the time to teach my child an analogue clock and if/when I do, it will be to avoid such "social embarrassment" more than to improve her numeracy or time-keeping. As far as I'm concerned, the only use for an analogue dial is to show kids how to find North in daylight.
I have that watch. In fact, it's the only type of watch that I've bought since I was a kid. I've had others given to me but always use that EXACT model. The only thing that goes wrong with them is the strap and they are cheap enough to throw away and replace.
I've *never* had a problem buying that model, in the last, what, 15-20 years? It's always the cheapest digital watch available in any high-street store (i.e. not cheapy 50p kiddies things).
- It has a digital display.
- It's waterproof. I regularly go swimming with one without even thinking about it any more.
- I've never had to replace a battery in one (even the strapless ones I kept are still going).
- It has a cheap standard battery if I ever do.
- It shows date, day and time on a single display without pressing anything.
- It has alarm and stopwatch if you need it.
- You can turn all the stupid bleeps and bloops off.
- It has a light that's powerful enough to see the display perfectly in complete darkness (later models have an "electroluminscence" display that's even better) and doesn't run your batteries down even with every-day use over a long period and also to semi-illuminate other things in an emergency (I have read an entire novel by that light!)
- It keeps good time and is easy to change when timezones changes
Gimme an MSF (radio-sync) version, with electroluminesence and a decent strap and I'll give you a hefty sum and never have to buy another watch again!.
But as a terrorist marker? Not unless you can trace back that watch's serial number to a particular batch - you can buy it EVERYWHERE, even abroad, without any hassle at all. And I don't even think they *have* serial numbers (I've never seen one). It's like saying all the terrorists were wearing shoes. Equally as true. Equally as useless as a marker.
- Got IPv6 connnectivity set up on my computer
- Set up all my servers to support it myself.
- Been in my firewall scripts for about 3-4 years now.
So I'm WAY ahead of the game compared to most people BUT:
- No ISP gives you it by default.
- No server host gives you it by default (mine let me add it by clicking a button in the control panel).
- Most dedicated / virtual server hosting places won't set it up for you in their default images (ALL IPv4)
- It is of precisely zero use, even to me, because nobody uses it, there's no reason to use it and nobody supports it.
When Slashdot (a highly-geeky site) publishes their AAAA records, then we can discuss the future of the rest of the Internet. In the meantime - NOTHING and I don't even get IPv6-originated spam or automated access attempts.
That's not even *mentioning* the technical problems and amount of upheaval and management necessary (ever changed a complicated iptables script to support ip6tables?) that I decided to do "just because".
The IPv6 net is largely silent, except for techno-geeks pinging it because they can. And it *literally* takes a day to enable it, even for the largest sites.
HOW MANY MORE TIMES?
Do NOT open a document that you're not expecting, that isn't from someone you know, etc. Yeah, you could say that this can be passed legitimately from person to person but come on - this is the first rule of virus protection - don't open documents without screening them (not via some magical software that "knows" if it's bad or not, but by using your brain) first.
The fact that you can even still GET a Word virus whether it executes in macros, integrated Flash or some other ActiveX-based crap, tells you that Microsoft just don't care any more.
Read this, then you may continue whining on regardless about how it's the end of the world:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/12/fukushima_ffs/
Because if you haven't read this already, or understood what it's telling you, chances are you just like scaremongering anyway.
"On the 6th of April, the paper conducted a scientific experiment"
No it didn't. There was nothing scientific and any idiot knows that because it has The Sun written across the top in big letters.
And Nintendo have already complained in the press how much crap all these articles are.
I don't get why Farmville is so popular. That truly sucks. In the space of a week, I managed to out-class all my Facebook friends who'd been playing it for years just by doing a quick bit of maths and working out how to make money. It was dull. Yet millions of people play it so often that I've had to remove its posts from my Facebook because of the spamming.
I don't get why WoW is so popular. I never hear anything but complaints about it, and certainly never play games on a subscription basis. And people still tell me they are pissing about £40-50 a month on the damn thing for years at a time.
I grew up with a ZX Spectrum. Maybe you're from a different era. Let me give you a hint. Graphics mean NOTHING. Not even worthy of mention. Not even an "it doesn't even look good", like that's the last saving grace of a crap game. If you count graphics in your evaluation of a game, you're the wrong target for most games. Hint: In a year's time, *every* game's graphics will look crap compared to today's. Does that mean the older games have somehow got "worse" without changing?
A game is either fun and absorbing or not. I spent most of last week playing Altitude (PC) and Batty (Spectrum) with my girlfriend. We didn't care that it wasn't 3D, or high-res, or anti-aliased. It literally did not factor in at all. We honestly spent more times looking at ZX Spectrum colour clash. Didn't mean we didn't enjoy it though. I don't think my girlfriend even noticed that the Spectrum *had* colour clash.
As for "not fun", no you don't see yourself laughing at it, or entertained. But what it does is absorb you. That's a really tricky thing to achieve in a game. Some games are endless restarts of the same chapter, but some manage to absorb you so much that you don't even realise that's what you're doing.
Minecraft is a sandbox game. It's about people building a little virtual world of their own like we were promised for the past 50 years. It's similar to the 3D Construction Kit "game" of many years ago - very few people can make something impressive but everyone enjoys having a go and making their virtual world, even if the graphics are atrocious by modern video card standards. That hardly matters - it's just fun to tinker. 3DCK was literally dithered polygons (and only about half-a-dozen at a time on the Spectrum!) when I first looked at it but immediately thought "whoa, that's something I want to tinker with". There was also something called VU-3D on the Spectrum. Go look it up. I spent hours tinkering with that. Not a "game" as such, in the same way that Minecraft isn't a game.
I play Minecraft - not masses but I've had a couple of long sessions on it, alt-tabbing back and forth between the Minepedia and the game. I actually prefer it without the monsters at night, which some would say is the only interaction in the game.
It's just nice to build a little world and explore it. I actually quite enjoy the times when I've done a big build job and my "character" walks out of the house, down to his little jetty that I made (deliberately facing West), gets in a boat and has a little paddle towards the sunset. And then he turns around, sees the distant light of his little home in the dusk and sculls back on home.
And more annoyingly, I keep finding myself thinking "if only you could craft X or collect Y" and wondering how to go about programming it (I have resisted the temptation to look at the code thus far and, anyway, my Java is rusty - if it's easy to add new things, I'll never escape the damn block-universe).
It doesn't matter how "fun" it is. Personally, I'm pissed off with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at the moment because of the constant restarts from checkpoints. The game is fun, when it flows and absorbs, but otherwise that's just a chore. Whereas Minecraft - you can even be "immortal" if you don't have the monsters at night or fall off a cliff (though finding string is always a problem then, which means my character can't fish from his
Well, I don't "pre-order" anything. But I played this game for more hours than I care to think of when I first saw it and thought "what's all the fuss about". Not so much a game as a sandbox-with-potential.
But the fact is that at no point did my computer struggle to run it. So it can't really be described as a resource hog. Yeah, the graphics aren't fabulous but I come from the ZX Spectrum era and have always held that that means nothing - and the point of the engine is that the graphics are crap to enable millions of blocks to be visible simultaneously.
And it hasn't crashed once, and even between upgrades it successfully converts my old worlds to new formats without a problem. If it had had visible problems in that area, I wouldn't have touched it until they were fixed.
Maybe I only got in on the game after such things were already fixed but to me - it's a game. Even the first version I downloaded is still on my hard drive and still a playable game on it's own. So I parted with a tiny bit of cash to show my appreciation for the game (I always used to register my shareware if I'd used it that much, too) which also got me a guaranteed update for every version of Minecraft that comes out in the future. Considering I was looking on the money more as a donation, I think that's just an extra-added bonus.
Now if I could just stop seeing blocks at night, that'd be great.
Thank God most terrorists / criminals are this dumb. Otherwise we'd probably all be dead.
If you *want* to talk secretly, describing messages that will end up with you in jail if they are discovered, use something a bit better than a schoolboy cipher. Seriously, I was doing better than that when I was 11/12 and programming.
When I have idle moments, I try to "counter-think" terrorists in order to see what I would do if I were one. Almost all of the things I come up with are less risk, more impact, cheaper and easier than the things that are reported in the news. Thankfully, it seems that terrorists, on average, consist mainly of dumb people who can't do that.
It's like the criminals who break into banks and don't covre their faces. Catching them is actually less fun than letting them do the crime and seeing how they try to get away with it.
I'm British. I pay British taxes. My short response to this revelation that we don't subsidise the game industry from public funds any more is:
"Fucking good!"
My full response is:
"What the hell? We PAY people from public funds to write computer games just so we can compete with other country's computer games?"
Of all the myriad taxes, charges, jobs, cuts and everything else going on, this is seriously making the whole UK games industry look like a bunch of whiners.
How about this - you're running a business. It produces a product. That product is FAR from essential. In fact, it's as much luxury as is conceivably possible to the ordinary man. You build it, sell it, make a profit, pay your staff. Like every other business in the world.
And I'm assuming these tax breaks don't even run to business software, or healthcare software, or educational software, or the myriad other types of software which could conceivably be useful? No, just games.
Seriously. You're making yourselves look like arses, in public, in times of austerity - people were smashing up London the other day because the government has made cuts, what do you think they'd do if they thought for a second their tax was going to help write computer video games?
I'm not one to blame everyone on the recession and yell about how bad people have it but this is just ridiculous. Get off your arse and make a product that sells. Yeah, you might conceivably add a job or two if you were giving huge tax breaks by the government, but so would any other industry.