Target's detectors seem to pretty routinely go off. Microcenter too. I'd say I set them off about once a month. Sometimes there has been reasons, like stuff I've bought at other stores or the occasional electronic devices. But frequently it just goes off for no apparent reason.
Usually I just turn around, glance blankly and innocently for a security guard with a look of "Okay, what now?"
I've never actually had my stuff gone through at Target. I've never been hassled. At Target I've been waved through every single time. At microcenter they usually take a cursory glance at my recipt, and wave me off. Admittedly, I usually buy about 100 dollars worth of stuff at Microcenter, and I don't exactly look shifty.
I think most people accept that these things just don't work, and that their deterrent factor is more mental than pragmatic.
Oddly enough, that's not a real controller. If you look closely, it has 3 joysticks, a D-pad, and no face buttons. There also isn't a Z-button of any sort, which one would expect to find on a GC controller. The sticks in the bottom appear convex, which is the style for the old PS1 analog sticks before they became dual shocks. That there is only one set of L/R buttons with no Z trigger implies Xbox, but nothing else looks like an Xbox controller.
On the other hand, no system manufacturer has released a stick in quite that contour or (probably faked) shade of blue, so it is a 3rd party joypad (or an amalgomation of 3rd party joypads) of some sort.
In this case, though, the idea is valid. EB, Gamestop, and the rest of the specialty retailers are getting creamed by Walmart, Target, Kmart, Toys R Us, Best Buy, and the rest of the superstores. I can't specify numbers, but one could ignore the specialty retailers and still have quite healthy sales.
In other words, EB / Gamestop / etc aren't competing with eachother, they're competing with the superstores. And they're losing. And they're in danger of disappearing.
I've not been terribly happy with EB in the past 10 years, and their employees have been legendarily unhappy with corporate policies. I would much rather Funco have taken over EB, and not the reverse. But Funco was even more of a specialty store, catering to the used NES game crowd.
In my not-so-humble opinion, EB / Gamespot need to work on getting more space, bigger aisles, and not cluttering their stores like they were libraries. Their stores are an intimidating wall of noise, noise which continues inside. Even if they're not going to go full Apple store sleek, they should at least go Suncoast. Simplifying their inventory might be a first step. I don't see how it would be possible for EB to reduce service any, short of slapping every customer that walks in the door. But reducing the noise and helping people to find good games (recommended section?) should be their first steps.
It's not a crime, but it is inappropriate behavior for a chat room monitor in a children's chat room to ask for their phone number, amongst other steps. I'm not saying that he should go to jail, I'm just saying that when he crossed that smaller line he should have known that it was inconsistent with his position in the company. Perhaps "let go of" would be more appropriate.
Was a complete and utter failure? While it didn't sell out in the first 10 minutes, it still sold quite respectably. 150 million dollars in sales in the first weeks is not a failure. It hit the 500,000 mark in 2 days, which is a bit ahead of the GBA and DS's launch week to hit that mark.
Plus, it's already engendering certain emotions not otherwise seen in the gaming community. (not since Rez, anyway). Of course, GGA has a good writeup. Anything that can make gaming not dorky is a success in my book, independent of sales.
I don't own a PSP and I don't plan to any time soon. But the system has quickly grabbed a respectable user base, and become a real part of the gaming landscape. They're giving the big N at least a run for their money, and they have a real chance at grabbing the pocket-sized crown. Kudos to Sony for doing what Sega, NEC, Tiger, Bandai, SNK Playmore, and Atari couldn't.
Which section of the penal code is that? Whenever I try to look up Texas penal code 43.21, all I get is a message saying "The page you have attempted to load contains obscene or patently offensive material."
It sounds like an interesting case. "The article" is short enough that anything could be going on, but it sounds like over the course of 2 years he formed a relationship with the girl. Maybe. And then a co-worker stopped this, somehow.
And now she's suing for the surprisingly small sum of 25k. Not 25 million, 25 thousand. Which is still a lot of money, but in the realm of litigenous bastards it's pretty modest.
Of course, I do think the guy should be fired, there is no question of that. But the question is was this "safe for children?" Can someone below the age of consent consent to meeting for sex after they'll be above the age of consent? Is it preying on someone if they've had a relationship for 2 years? Is this a lawsuit about false advertising, or will the courts be forced to quantify the damages that one year of a virtual relationship can do to someone one year under the age of consent?
It's a big, grey splotch, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in court.
It should be pointed out, though, that the bedrock of Nintendo's large profits have been thanks to GameBoy-related sales. With the PSP looking stronger than the DS currently, it is questionable whether or not this will continue, or whether the significantly cheaper and more durable GBA will continue to rule the market.
Not that the 64 or the 'Cube lost money over it's lifetime, but the GBA has really been key to Nintendo's profits for a while. I'm not saying Nintendo is dying. Nintendo has been a master of making money as the second (or third) console platform, with profit-based payouts to suppliers and the like. I'm just saying their position isn't as assured as before. At some point they may have to start dipping into their bags and bags of money to reinvent themselves.
You realize that you're implying the existence of skill in MMPORPG's, right?
In permadeath games people behave far more conservatively. You die, your character dies, everything you've built up dies. So you're not going to go for the massive boss pile-on unless you're sure you're going to win. And where is the fun of that? Ultimately this means that the level 60 monkey will have to have even more time on his hands, and the game will seem boring and uneventful that whole time.
Of course, there are shades of gray. The question is what is the punishment for death, and is it appropriate? In Diablo, you had to go get your stuff. This was a pain in the tail, and generally made people not want to die. This also meant you were vulnerable until you went back and got your stuff. 20 minute setback. In other games, you have to buy death insurance to keep your stuff, or pay for an escape pod, or the like (10 minute setback). Losing half your gold is another example (1 minute - 10 hour setback). Losing all of your experience, and equipment, and progress (1 minute - 2 year setback) seems harsh in comparison.
What's wrong with linear gameplay? Why would having a great physics engine imply nonlinear play?
As a developer, pseudolinear play is a pain in the arse. Sandbox / true nonlinear play is appropriate for certain areas in Tenchu, for example, where your goal is to kill everyone in a level and it doesn't matter how that happens. I love sandbox games, but you have to make the entire game around such things. HL isn't. Most of HL is getting from point A to point B without getting killed, in order to drive the plot forward. Giving the player 1,000 ways to do it will just mean the player takes their sandbuggy, jumps the fence, and the level is over. It's a different type of game.
If you give the player 3 different ways to do something (which I'm calling pseudolinear), you're now making each level three times. You also have the problem that it isn't always clear what to accept or ignore. And, trust me on this one, players will find a way to wedge themselves into a position they can't get out of.
If you want nonlinear or pseudolinear play, try Deus Ex 2. Honestly it was a bit of a mess because it was too nonlinear, what with all the keycards and lock picking and getting people to let you in places and blowing things up, etc. But it was an OK game. Deus Ex 2 also used the Havoc physics engine (although an earlier iteration). Not surprisingly, the solutions to puzzles that used physics, basically had one way to solve them. Pile up boxes, move things over, jump on top.
I love nonlinear play. But with certain goal structures too much nonlinearity is inappropriate. HL2 is one of them.
While I know that Lanning and the Oddworld people have had major headaches in the past and I respect their desire for creative vision in a videogame setting, I've always seen them as a movie production company in games. Their characters and cinematics have always been strong, and their gameplay has always been just OK. Generally where their gameplay shined was in regions that were setting up or paying off cinematic visual moments. I'm actually looking forward to this transition, with all due respect to the people who are being laid off and their families, as I'm quite excited by the prospect of an Oddworld Movie.
There has been a lot that has changed in cars since the 1950's. Fuel injection, antilock disk brakes, one wheel steering, semiautomatic transmissions, GPS, etc, etc. Yes, they tend to converge, but so what? If one car company has antilock brakes, why not take that to all of them? We're not talking about an entertainment product here, we're talking about a car.
Drugs, too. There are many things wrong with the drug industry right now, but it is a completely different set of problems than the gaming industry is facing.
But back to entertainment products. There is a lot to be worried about in the consolidation of game studios. It's worse than you imagine: when you combine four studios you generally don't get the four same studios and an evil taskmanager that prevents them from being creative. You get four studios with the soul and sense of personal responsibility sucked out. You get four studios where each teammember is so overtaxed that they only have time to do the normal thing. Even without the evil taskmanager looking over their shoulder, the spirit usually goes away.
Growing your company is a dangerous thing in the gaming industry. Many companies have grown themselves into oblivion.
On the other hand, Techmo and THQ have consistently managed to eek out a living on smaller titles. Some of the most profitable movies in the past year have been little comedies with tiny budgets and 40 million takes. Heck, even Sin City was filmed on 50 million, hardly a blockbuster budget. I think movie studios are realizing that unless something is a sure thing, it's better to fund two or three maybies. Gaming is no different, as it's nigh-on impossible to convince publishers to pony up 20 million for a project unless something is proven. But how many gaming concepts require 20 million dollar budgets to explore? You also don't need to spend as much of that budget building an engine as before, as A: every company has their own engine already built up over several projects, and B: if you don't, you can buy one of the really expensive-to-develop ones. There is middleware for everything from lip-sync to physics engines, some of it cheap, some of it expensive, and some of it free.
And unlike other media, startup game developers have always been a part of the ecosystem. When a house is bought up and eventually bled dry, another one pops up somewhere with an innovative shareware title or a cellphone game (or, in the case of Turbine, cash from a big lawsuit settlement), and lands a development deal on a first-string platform. In this industry development houses are born, grow, get bought out, get used up, and die. It's the natural cycle of things....Or maybe it's something that I've had to accept for so long that I've just learned to accept it.
and too bad it was never used in hl2 to enable creativity in the player. never, not once. every time the player just has to do something envisioned before.
HL2 is a linear FPS with a strong story line element, not Sim City. Besides, there were quite a few interesting sequences that took advantage of the physics. Moving objects so that you could walk around on the sand. Squishing bad guys with shipping crates from a tower. All of the floating / weight puzzles.
Arguably the best thing in the game was the gravity gun, and that was completely physics based. The second best thing was blowing things up and watching the physics-driven debris take out baddies all around. The third best thing was rolling garbage into the hanging tongues, but maybe that's just me getting petty revenge. And, of course, there were the driving sequences.
I certainly had a lot of points where I moved things around to get better cover, or to cause more debris to fly. If anything the seamless nature of the integration makes it a success. The game wasn't about physics any more than it was about health or guns, but it used both with reasonable subtly and to good effect.
Word of mouth is geometric, not linear. If 5 people bookmark you this week, 6 will next week, and 7 the week after. And unless you, say, get posted to the front page of Slashdot, you'll need to wait a while to get those numbers up.
A lot of good sites are abandoned before they can reach their full potential.
I've had doctors tell me that if you have a bad wound in need of stitches but you don't have anything handy, superglue it. It dries fast and strong, and while it may not be terribly accurate it will stop the bleeding. And like the superglue that gets on your fingertips, it eventually goes away on it's own.
1) The marketing executive at the company will become the arch nemisis and will be renamed "Dean." Everyone will vow revenge against that crusty old Dean.
2) Since kids love the token animals these days, the movie will prominintely feature a bright orange bobcat which will help Carmack solve rendering issues by throwing exclamation points and making witty, insightful banter.
3) As most people don't understand what happens in software development, and really could care less anyway, the game development process will be symbolized by a race across America. Romero, played by Burt Reynolds, will be racing in the Ice Cream Truck with Dom DeLuise.
The best desktop expansion you can do for windows is get additional monitors. Most video cards will allow you to plug in a second monitor, usually one analog and one DVI. A cheap DVI connector and a used monitor can be had for about 30 bucks. Add a cheap PCI secondary video card, Two DVI connectors, and three new monitors and you have all of the desktop that you'll ever need for about 150.
I had pretty much constant problems with the multiple virtual desktop setup in XP, but the multiple monitor support in applications is pretty good these days.
Hmm... I must say that Nintendo did a lot of brand damage itself. That blinking red light still haunts my dreams. It's just blinking. No. No. No. Will it work this time? No. No. No. Load the game? No. No. No. Load the game! No. No. No.
I cleaned you, I washed you, I bloodied my fingers rubbing erasers across your contact points. (...No No No...) And this is the way you repay me!? (...No No No...) WORK DAMN YOU WORK!
The Register is a lot of things. It's entertaining. It's funny. It's timely. Sometimes it's even informative. But a reputable news source? From a site that brings you the Bastard Operator from Hell? The group that used to sell hazardous nuclear keychains? That Punctuates! Every! Article! On! Yahoo! In! An! Annoying! Fashion!?
They're news satire. They're a slightly more reputable news source than the Daily Show. If someone wants to quote them as a reputable news source, that's totally acceptable and probably not a bad idea, as The Register doesn't let anything get in the way of the timelyness of a scoop. Especially not journalistic integrity. But to quote The Register without even reading the article? No one can blame a satarical news source if someone else quotes them without being arsed to read the article.
there's not a whole lot of business plans that will fly on ad revenue alone, and meetup's niche is too small.... I doubt you or I could even pay the hosting costs for such a site on ad revenue alone, let alone paying support and maintenance.
But save maintenance (which shouldn't be too much once things are up and running) costs and income scale with userbase. They should be able to get hosting that meets their needs for 40 bucks a month. If not, they should be able to split a colo for the cost of a common server and 50 dollars a month. It probably wouldn't pay the guy's rent, but the site certainly should pay for itself. You could probably premium the ads, as you can target with lazer-like efficiency what your users are interested in.
But going pay is a bad idea. Social Networking sites thrive when there is no cost to sign up. Without the volume of groups, there is no reason for anyone to try going there to find groups. And do they really drive enough traffic to be worth the 20 dollars a month? Will they in a year once all of the groups have moved back to plain websites? My guess is no. Plus, when you have paying customers your support costs go way up, as you actually have to start supporting people. At least when you're ad supported you can ignore their cries for help.
I always liked Craigslist's compromise... Charge those people least likely to be inconvienienced by charging, and keep everything else free. I don't know if that is directly relevant here, but the reason why Craigslist continues to thrive is all of the free postings. If it were charged, I'm sure the volume of everything would go down, the relevance would go down, the eyeballs would leave, and the site would fall alongside all of the other online classifieds.
3 Antivirus related processes 1 browsing related processes 3 Java-related processes 4 processes related to VMWare 4 processes related to serving SSH through CYGWIN for remote access 10 hardware-specific processes 1 bittorrent client 3 processes related to Kerio Personal Firewall 6 copies of svchost, serving DLL's to unknown applications 3 closed but crashed copies of wmplayer 15+ OS processes 1 Macrovision copy protection process (!!!) A copy of ABC that shouldn't actually be running right now.
While five of those are duds, overall 54 is a very acceptable number... given that this is both desktop and server, and has a lot of unique hardware attached.
What's more important is that the page file is currently only 1/2 of the available RAM, and the CPU usage history hasn't spiked to 100% (or even 50%) under this light usage. Oddly enough, 10% of my processor is going to print spooling, despite having no printer activity currently. But printers drivers have always been a bit flakey, and I do have three real printers and a few virtual printers attached to this machine.
I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms.
Software is designed to do a lot more these days. Team sizes have gone up significantly. Unfortunately, when you have 10 or 100 (or 1000) people working on a piece of software, it can't be made as "tight" as one person trying to squeeze it all onto a machine with 16k of ram. The interface artist wants to include transition animations to give the users a spatial mapping thereby increasing the ease of picking up an application. The Logic coders want the applications to serve the user only with the data that is relevant to them. The backend coders want the application to run on four platforms, supporting any number of hardware and software interfaces. And management wants all of this to be done cheaply and quickly. Alone, any of these things could be optimized well, but integrated into a massive platform which outsizes one person it gets difficult to find and fix all of the bottlenecks. Add to that the additional layers of abstraction that have made coding much, much easier than it once was, and you have a different beast.
Plus, those 16k of ram applications had terrible interfaces. I remember my father worked on a text editor which shipped with a manual the size of a brick. It had no help functions, no obvious mapping between keys and input, if you gave it input it didn't understand it just didn't do anything... It was like VI, but less user friendly.
If software ingenuity progressed anywhere near the rate of hardware, we would have infallible voice and character recognition, true A.I. and the concept of computer crashes and security problems would be a thing of the past.
We have great voice and character recognition (Dragon rocks), but without a lifetime of experiences powering it they fall short of what people expect. "True" A.I. is impossible until we understand how Natural Intelligence functions, a hurdle neuroscientists have yet to overcome. Crashes and bugs are a factor of any engineering project, be it computer programming or building bridges. And as computer power has increased, so has the power afforded to hackers. But it is a lot harder to get a good virus going these days.
But what do we have? Abstraction layers that let you program a 3D game or a 2D word processor in an afternoon. Inline spelling and grammar correction. Graphical processing suites that can instantly change a photograph into a convincing watercolor. 3D CAD applications that can create functional hardware for extreme circumstances, and rapid prototyping machines to build parts. Atonomous agents which look for RSS feeds of desirable files, and distributed download clients which gather them. Unlimited levels of Undo. 100% fault-tolerant remote communication between any two machines in the world. Machines running virtually inside of other machines. Bayesian spam filtering. Heck, if we're talking 1982 computing, add the concepts of protected memory space, (gasp!) multitasking, and multithreading to that list. And audio / video compression and streaming, or for that matter graphics and pretty much everything that has become standard for the internet. Searches we perform routinely today would have been considered intense data mining operations 20 years ago.
While it may not have been the direction our forefathers believed (promised?) computing would go, it has still been a very interesting past 20 years.
Data mining of personal data for faster searching. Voice recognition. Meaning-aware grammar correction. Adaptive context-sensitive help. Automatic data discover, adaptation, and importation.
Editing together home movies. Splicing together TV programs. Recording and compressing home video camera feeds in the background while using your computer. 3D spacial reconstruction from video feeds.
Programs that check for buffer overflows. Personal servers for remote mail / HDD / system access. Intelligent firewalling. Behavioral virus scanners. Crash-proof sandboxing. External system emulation.
3D computer interfaces driving 3d display devices. Adaptive, intelligent, intent-aware computer interfaces. Actual fast booting.
I'm not saying that the above will all happen, or that your point is without merit. But we still have a long way to go before we have run out of good uses for computer power.
The Bush family has close ties with the Saudi Royal Family, including Osama Bin Laden. Does that mean GW is a terrorist? The sins of the father do not pass down to the child in western civilization. Why should we apply a different standard elsewhere?
He's made anti-american statements. He's never said "Death to the Infidels," he's just said in more colorful language that the US needs to get out of the middle east. By this point, who hasn't made anti-american statements? Quite frankly, his colorful metaphors if spoken by a white sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley wouldn't surprise anyone. I know this is going to get taken totally out of context, but Terrorism basically is the extension of gurrilla warfare against a vastly superior force. Why us Americans don't realize that the reason terrorists keep attacking the US is because of activities Jerusalem (right or wrong) is taking on our behalf with our funding is beyond me. But by that logic, Osama Bin Laden was not behind 9/11, but rather the unfair settlements and war reparations laid upon Germany at the end of WW1.
As for being barred from France for suspicion of collaboration... If suspicion is what you want, there is plenty to go around. Quite frankly, if you haven't met up with and talked to some shady characters you aren't a mover and shaker in this world. Certainly you aren't a good professor of Muslim Studies if you haven't interviewed at least a few people from the "Death to the Infidels" side of things.
So he's said some things against US foreign policy, and knows some people who knows some people who are very anti-american. So, what, we're going to deny visas to everyone from the middle east? On the other side of the equation, this man was offered a professorship at one of the US's most prestigious universities. We're not talking about someone who was coming over to help his cousin Ramy run a car lot. We're talking about a respected professor who was offered a position at Notre Dame. Even if suspicions without any evidence were enough to block people from entering the US, which it shouldn't, that he was being offered a professorship at one of the world's top universities should at least imply that they have faith in him as a person and as a citizen. Furthermore, being a professor he naturally should be granted more freedom with his words. While he isn't a US citizen yet, his ability to speak freely as a professor should have higher weight. Apparently Notre Dame has deemed that his speech has merit, and the government should accept that assessment.
And quite frankly, most professors I know have time to do little else besides research and teach and grade papers and write grant proposals etc. They generally don't have time to engage in any activity, let alone a terrorist activity.
It's just frightening how much our government is doing on technicalities. Instead of trying to uphold the concepts of academic freedom, they simply say that it doesn't apply to non US citizens. Instead of trying to uphold our legal obligations to prisoners of war, say that it doesn't apply as they are "enemy combatants." Instead of granting our citizens full protection under the constitution to due process, we revoke our citizens' rights on suspicion of terrorist activities. It seems like to them the founding principles of this country are technicalities that are in the way of creating a more perfect police state. Really, the technicality is that the protections of the constitution only applied to US citizens. A lot of us are starting to feel in danger of becoming 2/5ths of a citizen.
Tariq Ramadan is an extreme example of the paranoia and terrible decision making that has come out of our government in the years since 9/11. His is also a very human example, and one which we can all relate to / fear will happen to us. It is a miscarriage of justice. That the concept of justice only applies to US citizens is just a technicality.
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Target's detectors seem to pretty routinely go off. Microcenter too. I'd say I set them off about once a month. Sometimes there has been reasons, like stuff I've bought at other stores or the occasional electronic devices. But frequently it just goes off for no apparent reason.
Usually I just turn around, glance blankly and innocently for a security guard with a look of "Okay, what now?"
I've never actually had my stuff gone through at Target. I've never been hassled. At Target I've been waved through every single time. At microcenter they usually take a cursory glance at my recipt, and wave me off. Admittedly, I usually buy about 100 dollars worth of stuff at Microcenter, and I don't exactly look shifty.
I think most people accept that these things just don't work, and that their deterrent factor is more mental than pragmatic.
Oddly enough, that's not a real controller. If you look closely, it has 3 joysticks, a D-pad, and no face buttons. There also isn't a Z-button of any sort, which one would expect to find on a GC controller. The sticks in the bottom appear convex, which is the style for the old PS1 analog sticks before they became dual shocks. That there is only one set of L/R buttons with no Z trigger implies Xbox, but nothing else looks like an Xbox controller.
On the other hand, no system manufacturer has released a stick in quite that contour or (probably faked) shade of blue, so it is a 3rd party joypad (or an amalgomation of 3rd party joypads) of some sort.
Anyone recognize it?
In this case, though, the idea is valid. EB, Gamestop, and the rest of the specialty retailers are getting creamed by Walmart, Target, Kmart, Toys R Us, Best Buy, and the rest of the superstores. I can't specify numbers, but one could ignore the specialty retailers and still have quite healthy sales.
In other words, EB / Gamestop / etc aren't competing with eachother, they're competing with the superstores. And they're losing. And they're in danger of disappearing.
I've not been terribly happy with EB in the past 10 years, and their employees have been legendarily unhappy with corporate policies. I would much rather Funco have taken over EB, and not the reverse. But Funco was even more of a specialty store, catering to the used NES game crowd.
In my not-so-humble opinion, EB / Gamespot need to work on getting more space, bigger aisles, and not cluttering their stores like they were libraries. Their stores are an intimidating wall of noise, noise which continues inside. Even if they're not going to go full Apple store sleek, they should at least go Suncoast. Simplifying their inventory might be a first step. I don't see how it would be possible for EB to reduce service any, short of slapping every customer that walks in the door. But reducing the noise and helping people to find good games (recommended section?) should be their first steps.
It's not a crime, but it is inappropriate behavior for a chat room monitor in a children's chat room to ask for their phone number, amongst other steps. I'm not saying that he should go to jail, I'm just saying that when he crossed that smaller line he should have known that it was inconsistent with his position in the company. Perhaps "let go of" would be more appropriate.
Was a complete and utter failure? While it didn't sell out in the first 10 minutes, it still sold quite respectably. 150 million dollars in sales in the first weeks is not a failure. It hit the 500,000 mark in 2 days, which is a bit ahead of the GBA and DS's launch week to hit that mark.
Plus, it's already engendering certain emotions not otherwise seen in the gaming community. (not since Rez, anyway). Of course, GGA has a good writeup. Anything that can make gaming not dorky is a success in my book, independent of sales.
I don't own a PSP and I don't plan to any time soon. But the system has quickly grabbed a respectable user base, and become a real part of the gaming landscape. They're giving the big N at least a run for their money, and they have a real chance at grabbing the pocket-sized crown. Kudos to Sony for doing what Sega, NEC, Tiger, Bandai, SNK Playmore, and Atari couldn't.
Which section of the penal code is that? Whenever I try to look up Texas penal code 43.21, all I get is a message saying "The page you have attempted to load contains obscene or patently offensive material."
It sounds like an interesting case. "The article" is short enough that anything could be going on, but it sounds like over the course of 2 years he formed a relationship with the girl. Maybe. And then a co-worker stopped this, somehow.
And now she's suing for the surprisingly small sum of 25k. Not 25 million, 25 thousand. Which is still a lot of money, but in the realm of litigenous bastards it's pretty modest.
Of course, I do think the guy should be fired, there is no question of that. But the question is was this "safe for children?" Can someone below the age of consent consent to meeting for sex after they'll be above the age of consent? Is it preying on someone if they've had a relationship for 2 years? Is this a lawsuit about false advertising, or will the courts be forced to quantify the damages that one year of a virtual relationship can do to someone one year under the age of consent?
It's a big, grey splotch, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in court.
It should be pointed out, though, that the bedrock of Nintendo's large profits have been thanks to GameBoy-related sales. With the PSP looking stronger than the DS currently, it is questionable whether or not this will continue, or whether the significantly cheaper and more durable GBA will continue to rule the market.
Not that the 64 or the 'Cube lost money over it's lifetime, but the GBA has really been key to Nintendo's profits for a while. I'm not saying Nintendo is dying. Nintendo has been a master of making money as the second (or third) console platform, with profit-based payouts to suppliers and the like. I'm just saying their position isn't as assured as before. At some point they may have to start dipping into their bags and bags of money to reinvent themselves.
Last I heard he was being given a cameo in Episode 3.
Of course, we'll have to see if Episode 3 is a step up for him...
You realize that you're implying the existence of skill in MMPORPG's, right?
In permadeath games people behave far more conservatively. You die, your character dies, everything you've built up dies. So you're not going to go for the massive boss pile-on unless you're sure you're going to win. And where is the fun of that? Ultimately this means that the level 60 monkey will have to have even more time on his hands, and the game will seem boring and uneventful that whole time.
Of course, there are shades of gray. The question is what is the punishment for death, and is it appropriate? In Diablo, you had to go get your stuff. This was a pain in the tail, and generally made people not want to die. This also meant you were vulnerable until you went back and got your stuff. 20 minute setback. In other games, you have to buy death insurance to keep your stuff, or pay for an escape pod, or the like (10 minute setback). Losing half your gold is another example (1 minute - 10 hour setback). Losing all of your experience, and equipment, and progress (1 minute - 2 year setback) seems harsh in comparison.
What's wrong with linear gameplay? Why would having a great physics engine imply nonlinear play?
As a developer, pseudolinear play is a pain in the arse. Sandbox / true nonlinear play is appropriate for certain areas in Tenchu, for example, where your goal is to kill everyone in a level and it doesn't matter how that happens. I love sandbox games, but you have to make the entire game around such things. HL isn't. Most of HL is getting from point A to point B without getting killed, in order to drive the plot forward. Giving the player 1,000 ways to do it will just mean the player takes their sandbuggy, jumps the fence, and the level is over. It's a different type of game.
If you give the player 3 different ways to do something (which I'm calling pseudolinear), you're now making each level three times. You also have the problem that it isn't always clear what to accept or ignore. And, trust me on this one, players will find a way to wedge themselves into a position they can't get out of.
If you want nonlinear or pseudolinear play, try Deus Ex 2. Honestly it was a bit of a mess because it was too nonlinear, what with all the keycards and lock picking and getting people to let you in places and blowing things up, etc. But it was an OK game. Deus Ex 2 also used the Havoc physics engine (although an earlier iteration). Not surprisingly, the solutions to puzzles that used physics, basically had one way to solve them. Pile up boxes, move things over, jump on top.
I love nonlinear play. But with certain goal structures too much nonlinearity is inappropriate. HL2 is one of them.
While I know that Lanning and the Oddworld people have had major headaches in the past and I respect their desire for creative vision in a videogame setting, I've always seen them as a movie production company in games. Their characters and cinematics have always been strong, and their gameplay has always been just OK. Generally where their gameplay shined was in regions that were setting up or paying off cinematic visual moments. I'm actually looking forward to this transition, with all due respect to the people who are being laid off and their families, as I'm quite excited by the prospect of an Oddworld Movie.
...Or maybe it's something that I've had to accept for so long that I've just learned to accept it.
There has been a lot that has changed in cars since the 1950's. Fuel injection, antilock disk brakes, one wheel steering, semiautomatic transmissions, GPS, etc, etc. Yes, they tend to converge, but so what? If one car company has antilock brakes, why not take that to all of them? We're not talking about an entertainment product here, we're talking about a car.
Drugs, too. There are many things wrong with the drug industry right now, but it is a completely different set of problems than the gaming industry is facing.
But back to entertainment products. There is a lot to be worried about in the consolidation of game studios. It's worse than you imagine: when you combine four studios you generally don't get the four same studios and an evil taskmanager that prevents them from being creative. You get four studios with the soul and sense of personal responsibility sucked out. You get four studios where each teammember is so overtaxed that they only have time to do the normal thing. Even without the evil taskmanager looking over their shoulder, the spirit usually goes away.
Growing your company is a dangerous thing in the gaming industry. Many companies have grown themselves into oblivion.
On the other hand, Techmo and THQ have consistently managed to eek out a living on smaller titles. Some of the most profitable movies in the past year have been little comedies with tiny budgets and 40 million takes. Heck, even Sin City was filmed on 50 million, hardly a blockbuster budget. I think movie studios are realizing that unless something is a sure thing, it's better to fund two or three maybies. Gaming is no different, as it's nigh-on impossible to convince publishers to pony up 20 million for a project unless something is proven. But how many gaming concepts require 20 million dollar budgets to explore? You also don't need to spend as much of that budget building an engine as before, as A: every company has their own engine already built up over several projects, and B: if you don't, you can buy one of the really expensive-to-develop ones. There is middleware for everything from lip-sync to physics engines, some of it cheap, some of it expensive, and some of it free.
And unlike other media, startup game developers have always been a part of the ecosystem. When a house is bought up and eventually bled dry, another one pops up somewhere with an innovative shareware title or a cellphone game (or, in the case of Turbine, cash from a big lawsuit settlement), and lands a development deal on a first-string platform. In this industry development houses are born, grow, get bought out, get used up, and die. It's the natural cycle of things.
and too bad it was never used in hl2 to enable creativity in the player. never, not once. every time the player just has to do something envisioned before.
HL2 is a linear FPS with a strong story line element, not Sim City. Besides, there were quite a few interesting sequences that took advantage of the physics. Moving objects so that you could walk around on the sand. Squishing bad guys with shipping crates from a tower. All of the floating / weight puzzles.
Arguably the best thing in the game was the gravity gun, and that was completely physics based. The second best thing was blowing things up and watching the physics-driven debris take out baddies all around. The third best thing was rolling garbage into the hanging tongues, but maybe that's just me getting petty revenge. And, of course, there were the driving sequences.
I certainly had a lot of points where I moved things around to get better cover, or to cause more debris to fly. If anything the seamless nature of the integration makes it a success. The game wasn't about physics any more than it was about health or guns, but it used both with reasonable subtly and to good effect.
3.5) be persistent
Word of mouth is geometric, not linear. If 5 people bookmark you this week, 6 will next week, and 7 the week after. And unless you, say, get posted to the front page of Slashdot, you'll need to wait a while to get those numbers up.
A lot of good sites are abandoned before they can reach their full potential.
I've had doctors tell me that if you have a bad wound in need of stitches but you don't have anything handy, superglue it. It dries fast and strong, and while it may not be terribly accurate it will stop the bleeding. And like the superglue that gets on your fingertips, it eventually goes away on it's own.
1) The marketing executive at the company will become the arch nemisis and will be renamed "Dean." Everyone will vow revenge against that crusty old Dean.
2) Since kids love the token animals these days, the movie will prominintely feature a bright orange bobcat which will help Carmack solve rendering issues by throwing exclamation points and making witty, insightful banter.
3) As most people don't understand what happens in software development, and really could care less anyway, the game development process will be symbolized by a race across America. Romero, played by Burt Reynolds, will be racing in the Ice Cream Truck with Dom DeLuise.
The best desktop expansion you can do for windows is get additional monitors. Most video cards will allow you to plug in a second monitor, usually one analog and one DVI. A cheap DVI connector and a used monitor can be had for about 30 bucks. Add a cheap PCI secondary video card, Two DVI connectors, and three new monitors and you have all of the desktop that you'll ever need for about 150.
I had pretty much constant problems with the multiple virtual desktop setup in XP, but the multiple monitor support in applications is pretty good these days.
Hmm... I must say that Nintendo did a lot of brand damage itself. That blinking red light still haunts my dreams. It's just blinking. No. No. No. Will it work this time? No. No. No. Load the game? No. No. No. Load the game! No. No. No.
I cleaned you, I washed you, I bloodied my fingers rubbing erasers across your contact points. (...No No No...) And this is the way you repay me!? (...No No No...) WORK DAMN YOU WORK!
No. No. No.
(sob)
The Register is a lot of things. It's entertaining. It's funny. It's timely. Sometimes it's even informative. But a reputable news source? From a site that brings you the Bastard Operator from Hell? The group that used to sell hazardous nuclear keychains? That Punctuates! Every! Article! On! Yahoo! In! An! Annoying! Fashion!?
They're news satire. They're a slightly more reputable news source than the Daily Show. If someone wants to quote them as a reputable news source, that's totally acceptable and probably not a bad idea, as The Register doesn't let anything get in the way of the timelyness of a scoop. Especially not journalistic integrity. But to quote The Register without even reading the article? No one can blame a satarical news source if someone else quotes them without being arsed to read the article.
Why not do that here, instead of linking directly to them and beating the everliving fuck out of their servers?
And how are we supposed to Karma Whore if they beat us to the PA link?
All that leaves us is Simpsons references. Sweet, sweet Simpsons references. Gahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
there's not a whole lot of business plans that will fly on ad revenue alone, and meetup's niche is too small.... I doubt you or I could even pay the hosting costs for such a site on ad revenue alone, let alone paying support and maintenance.
But save maintenance (which shouldn't be too much once things are up and running) costs and income scale with userbase. They should be able to get hosting that meets their needs for 40 bucks a month. If not, they should be able to split a colo for the cost of a common server and 50 dollars a month. It probably wouldn't pay the guy's rent, but the site certainly should pay for itself. You could probably premium the ads, as you can target with lazer-like efficiency what your users are interested in.
But going pay is a bad idea. Social Networking sites thrive when there is no cost to sign up. Without the volume of groups, there is no reason for anyone to try going there to find groups. And do they really drive enough traffic to be worth the 20 dollars a month? Will they in a year once all of the groups have moved back to plain websites? My guess is no. Plus, when you have paying customers your support costs go way up, as you actually have to start supporting people. At least when you're ad supported you can ignore their cries for help.
I always liked Craigslist's compromise... Charge those people least likely to be inconvienienced by charging, and keep everything else free. I don't know if that is directly relevant here, but the reason why Craigslist continues to thrive is all of the free postings. If it were charged, I'm sure the volume of everything would go down, the relevance would go down, the eyeballs would leave, and the site would fall alongside all of the other online classifieds.
54 isn't really a lot. Currently running are
3 Antivirus related processes
1 browsing related processes
3 Java-related processes
4 processes related to VMWare
4 processes related to serving SSH through CYGWIN for remote access
10 hardware-specific processes
1 bittorrent client
3 processes related to Kerio Personal Firewall
6 copies of svchost, serving DLL's to unknown applications
3 closed but crashed copies of wmplayer
15+ OS processes
1 Macrovision copy protection process (!!!)
A copy of ABC that shouldn't actually be running right now.
While five of those are duds, overall 54 is a very acceptable number... given that this is both desktop and server, and has a lot of unique hardware attached.
What's more important is that the page file is currently only 1/2 of the available RAM, and the CPU usage history hasn't spiked to 100% (or even 50%) under this light usage. Oddly enough, 10% of my processor is going to print spooling, despite having no printer activity currently. But printers drivers have always been a bit flakey, and I do have three real printers and a few virtual printers attached to this machine.
I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms.
Software is designed to do a lot more these days. Team sizes have gone up significantly. Unfortunately, when you have 10 or 100 (or 1000) people working on a piece of software, it can't be made as "tight" as one person trying to squeeze it all onto a machine with 16k of ram. The interface artist wants to include transition animations to give the users a spatial mapping thereby increasing the ease of picking up an application. The Logic coders want the applications to serve the user only with the data that is relevant to them. The backend coders want the application to run on four platforms, supporting any number of hardware and software interfaces. And management wants all of this to be done cheaply and quickly. Alone, any of these things could be optimized well, but integrated into a massive platform which outsizes one person it gets difficult to find and fix all of the bottlenecks. Add to that the additional layers of abstraction that have made coding much, much easier than it once was, and you have a different beast.
Plus, those 16k of ram applications had terrible interfaces. I remember my father worked on a text editor which shipped with a manual the size of a brick. It had no help functions, no obvious mapping between keys and input, if you gave it input it didn't understand it just didn't do anything... It was like VI, but less user friendly.
If software ingenuity progressed anywhere near the rate of hardware, we would have infallible voice and character recognition, true A.I. and the concept of computer crashes and security problems would be a thing of the past.
We have great voice and character recognition (Dragon rocks), but without a lifetime of experiences powering it they fall short of what people expect. "True" A.I. is impossible until we understand how Natural Intelligence functions, a hurdle neuroscientists have yet to overcome. Crashes and bugs are a factor of any engineering project, be it computer programming or building bridges. And as computer power has increased, so has the power afforded to hackers. But it is a lot harder to get a good virus going these days.
But what do we have? Abstraction layers that let you program a 3D game or a 2D word processor in an afternoon. Inline spelling and grammar correction. Graphical processing suites that can instantly change a photograph into a convincing watercolor. 3D CAD applications that can create functional hardware for extreme circumstances, and rapid prototyping machines to build parts. Atonomous agents which look for RSS feeds of desirable files, and distributed download clients which gather them. Unlimited levels of Undo. 100% fault-tolerant remote communication between any two machines in the world. Machines running virtually inside of other machines. Bayesian spam filtering. Heck, if we're talking 1982 computing, add the concepts of protected memory space, (gasp!) multitasking, and multithreading to that list. And audio / video compression and streaming, or for that matter graphics and pretty much everything that has become standard for the internet. Searches we perform routinely today would have been considered intense data mining operations 20 years ago.
While it may not have been the direction our forefathers believed (promised?) computing would go, it has still been a very interesting past 20 years.
Data mining of personal data for faster searching. Voice recognition. Meaning-aware grammar correction. Adaptive context-sensitive help. Automatic data discover, adaptation, and importation.
Editing together home movies. Splicing together TV programs. Recording and compressing home video camera feeds in the background while using your computer. 3D spacial reconstruction from video feeds.
Programs that check for buffer overflows. Personal servers for remote mail / HDD / system access. Intelligent firewalling. Behavioral virus scanners. Crash-proof sandboxing. External system emulation.
3D computer interfaces driving 3d display devices. Adaptive, intelligent, intent-aware computer interfaces. Actual fast booting.
I'm not saying that the above will all happen, or that your point is without merit. But we still have a long way to go before we have run out of good uses for computer power.
The Bush family has close ties with the Saudi Royal Family, including Osama Bin Laden. Does that mean GW is a terrorist? The sins of the father do not pass down to the child in western civilization. Why should we apply a different standard elsewhere?
He's made anti-american statements. He's never said "Death to the Infidels," he's just said in more colorful language that the US needs to get out of the middle east. By this point, who hasn't made anti-american statements? Quite frankly, his colorful metaphors if spoken by a white sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley wouldn't surprise anyone. I know this is going to get taken totally out of context, but Terrorism basically is the extension of gurrilla warfare against a vastly superior force. Why us Americans don't realize that the reason terrorists keep attacking the US is because of activities Jerusalem (right or wrong) is taking on our behalf with our funding is beyond me. But by that logic, Osama Bin Laden was not behind 9/11, but rather the unfair settlements and war reparations laid upon Germany at the end of WW1.
As for being barred from France for suspicion of collaboration... If suspicion is what you want, there is plenty to go around. Quite frankly, if you haven't met up with and talked to some shady characters you aren't a mover and shaker in this world. Certainly you aren't a good professor of Muslim Studies if you haven't interviewed at least a few people from the "Death to the Infidels" side of things.
So he's said some things against US foreign policy, and knows some people who knows some people who are very anti-american. So, what, we're going to deny visas to everyone from the middle east? On the other side of the equation, this man was offered a professorship at one of the US's most prestigious universities. We're not talking about someone who was coming over to help his cousin Ramy run a car lot. We're talking about a respected professor who was offered a position at Notre Dame. Even if suspicions without any evidence were enough to block people from entering the US, which it shouldn't, that he was being offered a professorship at one of the world's top universities should at least imply that they have faith in him as a person and as a citizen. Furthermore, being a professor he naturally should be granted more freedom with his words. While he isn't a US citizen yet, his ability to speak freely as a professor should have higher weight. Apparently Notre Dame has deemed that his speech has merit, and the government should accept that assessment.
And quite frankly, most professors I know have time to do little else besides research and teach and grade papers and write grant proposals etc. They generally don't have time to engage in any activity, let alone a terrorist activity.
It's just frightening how much our government is doing on technicalities. Instead of trying to uphold the concepts of academic freedom, they simply say that it doesn't apply to non US citizens. Instead of trying to uphold our legal obligations to prisoners of war, say that it doesn't apply as they are "enemy combatants." Instead of granting our citizens full protection under the constitution to due process, we revoke our citizens' rights on suspicion of terrorist activities. It seems like to them the founding principles of this country are technicalities that are in the way of creating a more perfect police state. Really, the technicality is that the protections of the constitution only applied to US citizens. A lot of us are starting to feel in danger of becoming 2/5ths of a citizen.
Tariq Ramadan is an extreme example of the paranoia and terrible decision making that has come out of our government in the years since 9/11. His is also a very human example, and one which we can all relate to / fear will happen to us. It is a miscarriage of justice. That the concept of justice only applies to US citizens is just a technicality.