There is a flaw in what you are saying. Unless what you are selling is a sequel, you need something very original to grab the reviewer's attention. Without that original widget to get reviewers all hyped about, like Rise of Nation's territory system or XIII's daring art direction, the reviewers will blow past your game onto something else. The game we just shipped was a solidly made game that all of the reviewers agreed was a blast to play, but it had nothing original about it. Except in specific circles who considered the game a sequel, it was impossible to build any hype, and the title has already been discounted at many retailers.
Other games, like Warcraft 3 and Doom 3 get lots of press ahead of time because they are sequels to popular games. Half-life 2 needs to be the 2nd coming of your deity of choice if it is going to live up to the hype. Others, like the original Half-Life, Ion Storm's "other game" Deus Ex, and the original Jax and Dexter relied upon simply being high-quality games that were a heck of a lot of fun to play, and received little pre-launch hype but lots of post-release praise. Admittedly, Half-Life brought storytelling to an otherwise hollow experience, Deus Ex gave players more freedom than any FPS before it, and Jax and Dexter... Well... Nevermind about Jax and Dexter.
In this paradigm, then, the road to a successful title is either A: be a sequel, B: do something in an established genre but do it weirdly enough to draw hype, C: make a great game and hope it gets a following.
Suddenly increased, excess web traffic on this website as a result of your actions, shall be at your expense.
I'd say it's pretty clear that this excess web traffic is a result of the actions of whoever wrote these amusingly insane rules. I think CPRR.org's lawyers are screwed.
That's another good reason to prefer free software: you have the source code so you can develop plug ins to read such obscure formats.
I'd say the prevalence of drop-in replacements for the Palm Pilot's Date Book, Phone Book, Note Pad, and To Do List would imply that the format isn't actually that obscure.
If by obscure formats they mean DRM'ed eBooks... What were you expecting buying eBooks? You don't have that option on Linux and if you did, it probably wouldn't be upwardly compatible either. You're saying they've cracked the format? That's most of the work. They could do a Palm app just as easily. And how many people watch DIVX movies on their handheld?
While I would personally prefer an Open Source PDA OS, the reasons this person has given are blown all out of proportion. As a developer, it is easier to get a Linux license for weird hardware, but how does that effect the user? Why is running Zarus software any better than running Palm software from any number of handhelds? How many desktop programs from the legendarily clean and uncluttered Linux desktop would you want to use on a tiny screen? And Linux users are in for a real eventual shock if they think an OS will run on anything forever just because it is Open Source. How quickly has it been adopted to new WinCE devices?
It is great that certain things have already been written and done for Linux handhelds, and that makes them good for power users. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to, as the article implied, AIM over a Palm Pilot. While I reiterate my support for OS OSes, this article is full of FUD.
Gamespot counts articles that make the front page as searches. Therefore, having posted The Guy Game to the front page as the cover story, it should be no surprise that it was the most clicked link.
This technology requires a sender-verified, secure, trackable, unbreakable e-mail system that ensures the sender is who they say they are, the recipient is who they say they are, and the message is exactly what the sender sent. All mail-sending accounts must be registered and accessible in a centralized database, and must contact that database to send mail.
The domain hosts then become responsible for the activities of the spammers, because the discovery of the spammer and their account address becomes trivial. Deal with the problem, or be black holed. Or, alternatively, the spammer can be locked out at the db level.
No where does charging the spammer become necessary. The spammer is simply locked out. E-mail stays free. Nobody gets charged when hacked.
Personally, I would support a domain-sender-message verification system, whereby a message is Md5'd (or some quicker form of hashing) on its way out and stored in a database for each 12 hour period. Upon receiving the mail, the recipient's mail server queries the reported sender's mail server with the message's listed Md5 key. The mail server goes through the databases for the last 3 12 hour periods (in reverse order) and searches for the listed key. If the key matches, it gives a positive response. If not, the message is destroyed.
Bingo, verification that the message originated in the particular domain, and that domain is responsible for the activities of its constituents. If that domain owner refuses to take action, their domain and their IP addresses would be blacklisted.
Email is one of our last few partially anonymous methods of communication. Emailing (and posting) as "Anonymous Coward" is a seriously useful thing and taking it away from people will probably be more disasterous than originally imagined.
There was some drama recently around an anonymous e-mail communication this past few weeks at my roommate's place of employ. What did the sender use? Hotmail.
Hotmail, yahoomail, and other free mail services use ciphers to identify people as human beings, and track IP's to resist automated signup scripts, but the medium is still essentially anonymous. Except for the IP address of the sender, which can be masked via a little wardriving or a trip to the library, the system is as anonymous as the sender wishes.
Most games were shelved for a good reason. I would consider the terrible lateness of the Mac version and the low US sales of the Dreamcast a good reason to shelve Half-Life. Thrill Kill, while fun for about 5 minutes, was a hollow, repetitive game that despite its legendary status wasn't up to snuff (no pun intended). Plus with only 8 characters, you were guaranteed repeats by the 3rd level. Doing a wu-tang sellout was a good use of the engine.
Most game projects get shelved... The reaches development vs released ratio is something between two to one and four to one. Nearly all of those are for quality reasons. Why would someone shelve a game that is going to be good, disheartening your employees and wasting your investment?
I believe that is an airplane and a space shuttle crashing into the Sears Tower. Everyone left alive runs to the Hancock building to boogie down. As for actual gameplay... Who knows?
I also believe that this is the first videogame that Tony Hawk has appeared in, either by image or by proxy. Also the presence of the Reverend Ivan Stang and Timothy Leary means that the game was made in connection with The Church of the Subgenius.
Personally I hope they make this into a full-length movie. With primary filming already in the can, it could probably go down as one of the best terrible movies in history. Pull a Rocky Horror and only show it late on Friday Nights and you could have a winner.
The fact that there are descriptions at all puts it a cut above most spyware. Of course, they would seem less like something nefarious if they they had more than a tenuous grasp of English.
"Now Billy, pay attention! Sigh. You need to learn proper use of subject and predicate, because you'll never amount to anything besides a worthless huckster. What is wrong with the following sentence 'I send you this file in order to have your advice?'"
With thousands of cards to remember, hundreds of deck styles, and perhaps most importantly millions of players, MtG is a good mind sport. Strategies off hand? High Mana decks. Vampire decks. Suicidal creatures decks. Control decks. Land destruction decks. Small damage high volume decks. Swarm decks. Rainbow decks. Green Giants. Deck destruction. Artifact sacrifice. Living lands. Everyone dies. etc, etc, etc. Is your deck fast or slow? Is one more card of type X worth 1/60th of every other card in your deck? Do you concentrate on a perfect opening or a perfect ending? Do you balance resources or creatures? Does enchanting a particular creature make it too much of a target? And that's just the planning phase, coming from what I remember 5 years ago.
This game is deep, and in a much less artificial way than, for example, being able to read out 50 moves in a go game. That's not to say that it is as deep as Go, just that it is deep in a way that is both more interesting to the average player and more likely to be watched by the average viewer (in this country).
Of course they don't teach it to children... Children are so interested in learning about it that they teach themselves. That kind of interest draws quite a large business side, an unfortunate but expected side-effect. And there was a time when Christian Fundamentalists decried all card games, including Bridge, as the devil's work.
The Olympics are not the be-all-end-all of what can be considered a worthy pursuit. The Nagano Olympics had ski shooting. Ski shooting. I rest my case.
...To maintain pro status, he'll have to consistently kick ass at Pro Tour events...
...The place reeks of teenage nerdlings -- 150 duelists, and not a vagina in the place...
...One such conversation is going on behind him. A salt-and-pepper-bearded man with palsy and horrible BO is discussing a duel with a teenage boy who is easily a yard and a half wide:...
No where is it written that the next XBox will play current XBox games.
According to the title the Xbox2 will play current XBox games. No where does the article provide any supporting evidence to this claim, and in fact largely runs counter to it. Nvidia says all but no, an unknown independent analyst agrees, ATI says that it is statistically possible, and some other unknown agrees with them. Microsoft says... Nothing. According to other sources Microsoft is "not guaranteeing" backwards compatibility, and if they decide not to include a hard drive such compatibility may not be possible at all.
nVidia may very well be playing to the press, but that doesn't mean such a thing wouldn't be difficult or expensive. Most systems achieve backwards compatibility by finding uses for the extra hardware. Software emulation for compatibility has never been attempted professionally in the console arena, but amature software emulation tends to lag two systems behind. You can push an XBox to do a meaningful SNES, but Dreamcast emulation is right out. With the right software the SNES could emulate the 2600, but not the NES.
Personally, I don't see why they don't just include a detachable Xbox chipset as a free add-on with an overpriced "premium" system with two controllers, and sell a regular setup with one controller for 100 dollars less.
But, as I mentioned before, no such thing has been announced yet.
I know nobody here reads the articles, but the most disturbing part of the whole procedure is that the testicular material is grafted onto the mouse's back. The mouse must then be constantly producing a thin gelatinous ooze of reproductive material, which is attempting to burrow into anything and everything nearby.
What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free. I make my money by signing you up at my Web site, getting your information, and using that information to figure out what you like."
If Microsoft and headline-grabbing state officials are after him, he argues, it's only because he's so good at what he does, so effective, so...big.
Well, I make money by clubbing you over your head, stealing your wallet, and selling your personally identifying information to Russian mobsters.
You understand, it's just business. And I'm just good at what I do, and I do it big, big, BIG!
Don't forget to fake your return e-mail address. There is nothing like a faked return address to show that you are serious about contacting someone. Might I suggest yourname@optinbig's IP address?
Scammers and corporate spies would love to infect zombie boxes, to cover up their activities. Then there are the people who host files on other people's machines for sake of anonymous storage, such as kiddie porn vendors, black hat h(cr)ackers, and simple file sharers. And there is the straight ID and Credit Card theft that has been a mainstay for some time now. There are also the many people who simply cry "hacked" when their computers are caught doing something illegal.
The problem is larger than just spammers. Such shoddy worksmanship is the mainstay of many types of criminal activities.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a flaw in what you are saying. Unless what you are selling is a sequel, you need something very original to grab the reviewer's attention. Without that original widget to get reviewers all hyped about, like Rise of Nation's territory system or XIII's daring art direction, the reviewers will blow past your game onto something else. The game we just shipped was a solidly made game that all of the reviewers agreed was a blast to play, but it had nothing original about it. Except in specific circles who considered the game a sequel, it was impossible to build any hype, and the title has already been discounted at many retailers.
Other games, like Warcraft 3 and Doom 3 get lots of press ahead of time because they are sequels to popular games. Half-life 2 needs to be the 2nd coming of your deity of choice if it is going to live up to the hype. Others, like the original Half-Life, Ion Storm's "other game" Deus Ex, and the original Jax and Dexter relied upon simply being high-quality games that were a heck of a lot of fun to play, and received little pre-launch hype but lots of post-release praise. Admittedly, Half-Life brought storytelling to an otherwise hollow experience, Deus Ex gave players more freedom than any FPS before it, and Jax and Dexter... Well... Nevermind about Jax and Dexter.
In this paradigm, then, the road to a successful title is either A: be a sequel, B: do something in an established genre but do it weirdly enough to draw hype, C: make a great game and hope it gets a following.
None of these sound so bad.
And would need to cover 140 acres, which is the size of the parking lot...
It's probably still cheaper than covering it in hundreds of thousands of cars.
Suddenly increased, excess web traffic on this website as a result of your actions, shall be at your expense.
I'd say it's pretty clear that this excess web traffic is a result of the actions of whoever wrote these amusingly insane rules. I think CPRR.org's lawyers are screwed.
That's another good reason to prefer free software: you have the source code so you can develop plug ins to read such obscure formats.
I'd say the prevalence of drop-in replacements for the Palm Pilot's Date Book, Phone Book, Note Pad, and To Do List would imply that the format isn't actually that obscure.
If by obscure formats they mean DRM'ed eBooks... What were you expecting buying eBooks? You don't have that option on Linux and if you did, it probably wouldn't be upwardly compatible either. You're saying they've cracked the format? That's most of the work. They could do a Palm app just as easily. And how many people watch DIVX movies on their handheld?
While I would personally prefer an Open Source PDA OS, the reasons this person has given are blown all out of proportion. As a developer, it is easier to get a Linux license for weird hardware, but how does that effect the user? Why is running Zarus software any better than running Palm software from any number of handhelds? How many desktop programs from the legendarily clean and uncluttered Linux desktop would you want to use on a tiny screen? And Linux users are in for a real eventual shock if they think an OS will run on anything forever just because it is Open Source. How quickly has it been adopted to new WinCE devices?
It is great that certain things have already been written and done for Linux handhelds, and that makes them good for power users. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to, as the article implied, AIM over a Palm Pilot. While I reiterate my support for OS OSes, this article is full of FUD.
Gamespot counts articles that make the front page as searches. Therefore, having posted The Guy Game to the front page as the cover story, it should be no surprise that it was the most clicked link.
That sounds like a bad enough premise for me.
This technology requires a sender-verified, secure, trackable, unbreakable e-mail system that ensures the sender is who they say they are, the recipient is who they say they are, and the message is exactly what the sender sent. All mail-sending accounts must be registered and accessible in a centralized database, and must contact that database to send mail.
The domain hosts then become responsible for the activities of the spammers, because the discovery of the spammer and their account address becomes trivial. Deal with the problem, or be black holed. Or, alternatively, the spammer can be locked out at the db level.
No where does charging the spammer become necessary. The spammer is simply locked out. E-mail stays free. Nobody gets charged when hacked.
Personally, I would support a domain-sender-message verification system, whereby a message is Md5'd (or some quicker form of hashing) on its way out and stored in a database for each 12 hour period. Upon receiving the mail, the recipient's mail server queries the reported sender's mail server with the message's listed Md5 key. The mail server goes through the databases for the last 3 12 hour periods (in reverse order) and searches for the listed key. If the key matches, it gives a positive response. If not, the message is destroyed.
Bingo, verification that the message originated in the particular domain, and that domain is responsible for the activities of its constituents. If that domain owner refuses to take action, their domain and their IP addresses would be blacklisted.
Step 1: Release a document in a format that nobody can read.
Step 2: Convince Windows users put money in an escrow account to warranty their good behavior
Step 3: Have Gator send spam through the Windows user's machine to the University of Michigan
Step 4: Profit
Sounds secure to me... Perfect idea. No flaws at all, either social or technical.
Not only is this the perfect solution to the Spam problem, this is the perfect solution to my jobless problem.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some mail from the University of Michigan to mark as spam.
Email is one of our last few partially anonymous methods of communication. Emailing (and posting) as "Anonymous Coward" is a seriously useful thing and taking it away from people will probably be more disasterous than originally imagined.
There was some drama recently around an anonymous e-mail communication this past few weeks at my roommate's place of employ. What did the sender use? Hotmail.
Hotmail, yahoomail, and other free mail services use ciphers to identify people as human beings, and track IP's to resist automated signup scripts, but the medium is still essentially anonymous. Except for the IP address of the sender, which can be masked via a little wardriving or a trip to the library, the system is as anonymous as the sender wishes.
The Allegiance Demo is available here.
Most games were shelved for a good reason. I would consider the terrible lateness of the Mac version and the low US sales of the Dreamcast a good reason to shelve Half-Life. Thrill Kill, while fun for about 5 minutes, was a hollow, repetitive game that despite its legendary status wasn't up to snuff (no pun intended). Plus with only 8 characters, you were guaranteed repeats by the 3rd level. Doing a wu-tang sellout was a good use of the engine.
Most game projects get shelved... The reaches development vs released ratio is something between two to one and four to one. Nearly all of those are for quality reasons. Why would someone shelve a game that is going to be good, disheartening your employees and wasting your investment?
I believe that is an airplane and a space shuttle crashing into the Sears Tower. Everyone left alive runs to the Hancock building to boogie down. As for actual gameplay... Who knows?
I also believe that this is the first videogame that Tony Hawk has appeared in, either by image or by proxy. Also the presence of the Reverend Ivan Stang and Timothy Leary means that the game was made in connection with The Church of the Subgenius.
Personally I hope they make this into a full-length movie. With primary filming already in the can, it could probably go down as one of the best terrible movies in history. Pull a Rocky Horror and only show it late on Friday Nights and you could have a winner.
I blame the conspiracy theorists. They keep giving people ideas.
Nope. That's for the whole device, like the 79 dollar Zire.
His server is running on OpenBSD. It is only a matter of time before some smart a$$ crashes it.
The fact that there are descriptions at all puts it a cut above most spyware. Of course, they would seem less like something nefarious if they they had more than a tenuous grasp of English.
"Now Billy, pay attention! Sigh. You need to learn proper use of subject and predicate, because you'll never amount to anything besides a worthless huckster. What is wrong with the following sentence 'I send you this file in order to have your advice?'"
With thousands of cards to remember, hundreds of deck styles, and perhaps most importantly millions of players, MtG is a good mind sport. Strategies off hand? High Mana decks. Vampire decks. Suicidal creatures decks. Control decks. Land destruction decks. Small damage high volume decks. Swarm decks. Rainbow decks. Green Giants. Deck destruction. Artifact sacrifice. Living lands. Everyone dies. etc, etc, etc. Is your deck fast or slow? Is one more card of type X worth 1/60th of every other card in your deck? Do you concentrate on a perfect opening or a perfect ending? Do you balance resources or creatures? Does enchanting a particular creature make it too much of a target? And that's just the planning phase, coming from what I remember 5 years ago.
This game is deep, and in a much less artificial way than, for example, being able to read out 50 moves in a go game. That's not to say that it is as deep as Go, just that it is deep in a way that is both more interesting to the average player and more likely to be watched by the average viewer (in this country).
Of course they don't teach it to children... Children are so interested in learning about it that they teach themselves. That kind of interest draws quite a large business side, an unfortunate but expected side-effect. And there was a time when Christian Fundamentalists decried all card games, including Bridge, as the devil's work.
The Olympics are not the be-all-end-all of what can be considered a worthy pursuit. The Nagano Olympics had ski shooting. Ski shooting. I rest my case.
CLI
No where is it written that the next XBox will play current XBox games.
According to the title the Xbox2 will play current XBox games. No where does the article provide any supporting evidence to this claim, and in fact largely runs counter to it. Nvidia says all but no, an unknown independent analyst agrees, ATI says that it is statistically possible, and some other unknown agrees with them. Microsoft says... Nothing. According to other sources Microsoft is "not guaranteeing" backwards compatibility, and if they decide not to include a hard drive such compatibility may not be possible at all.
nVidia may very well be playing to the press, but that doesn't mean such a thing wouldn't be difficult or expensive. Most systems achieve backwards compatibility by finding uses for the extra hardware. Software emulation for compatibility has never been attempted professionally in the console arena, but amature software emulation tends to lag two systems behind. You can push an XBox to do a meaningful SNES, but Dreamcast emulation is right out. With the right software the SNES could emulate the 2600, but not the NES.
Personally, I don't see why they don't just include a detachable Xbox chipset as a free add-on with an overpriced "premium" system with two controllers, and sell a regular setup with one controller for 100 dollars less.
But, as I mentioned before, no such thing has been announced yet.
I know nobody here reads the articles, but the most disturbing part of the whole procedure is that the testicular material is grafted onto the mouse's back. The mouse must then be constantly producing a thin gelatinous ooze of reproductive material, which is attempting to burrow into anything and everything nearby.
Eww.
What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free. I make my money by signing you up at my Web site, getting your information, and using that information to figure out what you like."
If Microsoft and headline-grabbing state officials are after him, he argues, it's only because he's so good at what he does, so effective, so...big.
Well, I make money by clubbing you over your head, stealing your wallet, and selling your personally identifying information to Russian mobsters.
You understand, it's just business. And I'm just good at what I do, and I do it big, big, BIG!
Don't forget to fake your return e-mail address. There is nothing like a faked return address to show that you are serious about contacting someone. Might I suggest yourname@optinbig's IP address?
Scammers and corporate spies would love to infect zombie boxes, to cover up their activities. Then there are the people who host files on other people's machines for sake of anonymous storage, such as kiddie porn vendors, black hat h(cr)ackers, and simple file sharers. And there is the straight ID and Credit Card theft that has been a mainstay for some time now. There are also the many people who simply cry "hacked" when their computers are caught doing something illegal.
The problem is larger than just spammers. Such shoddy worksmanship is the mainstay of many types of criminal activities.