"Ok, Mr President, there are the emergency switches, that's the big red button, this button kills an underpaid worker somewhere in the US, and this is your computer, left behind by ex Vice President Dick Cheney."
"Let's take a looksee... Hm. Looks like he's got 3 trojan horses, two copies of Gator, more viruses than you can shake a redneck at, and a dozen porn dialers. And in the trash I see..."
[Jaws drop in amazement]
"...Everything"
"Everything"
[Cheney walks into the room]
"Hi guys, I just came for my... What?"
"The department of Homeland Security was the secret funder of SCO?"
"I um, err. Yes. I mean, no. No. Of course not. We wouldn't, uh..."
"Kim Jong-Il recieved nuclear weapons in exchange for running the Republican Party's vote solicitation call center?"
"No! How dare you attack our patriotism! All of those documents were in English Standard Measurements. They'd never figure out anything useful."
"All public school textbooks are supplied by Haliburton?"
"Their publishing arm gave the best price in a no-bid contract war, with full editorial control to the administration. America's minds need faith-based guidence to excel in a world market."
"You approved Gigli?"
"I was young! I needed the money! How...?"
"You never emptied your trash."
"What do I look like, a janitor? I pay someone good sub-minimum wages to do that."
"No, I mean you never emptied your trash. On your computer."
"You have to? I Uh... Err... Oh. Poopies. Hey-what's-that-over-there!?"
[Cheney slams his hand down on the big red button, and runs for his life]
According to the Microsoft developer specs, you aren't allowed to talk about "Data," "CPUs," or anything else in your games that might suggest the XBox was a PC (except for games like Star Trek where it would be diagetic). We had a game bounce from Microsoft because we "saved data." Having a first party keyboard and mouse would run counter to that mantra.
It's difficult to justify buying a big box if you realize that it is actually a slightly smaller box than you already have.
The Patent office just ran out of excuses for allowing frivilous patents through the process. It is understandable that a patent examiner might not be equipped enough to understand a one-click shopping patent, or a patent about 3rd party payment transactions over a phone network, but not understanding solitare? Even in its currently obfuscated form the patent is flagrantly obvious. Even in 1995 people were talking about how much time is wasted playing computer solitare. It would be like someone patenting the concept of a winged reusable space vehicle after the Columbia explosion, or patenting a vaccuum tube based moving picture box.
The only way this is going to change is if the patent office becomes liable for the total defense costs + 20% of anybody who engaged in a patent fight and had the patent ruled invalid. Expecting the American small businessman to do the patent office's job for them is rediculous. They are charged with being an authority on a particular and significant portion of US law, but have degraded into a rubber-stamp. Anyone who even read this patent would have declared it invalid. The patent office must feel the financial pinch of their mistakes, or they will continue to make them as part of their modus operandi.
It is no longer enough to go hunting against one painfully obvious patent at a time. We must correct the system that is so incompetent as to allow anything at all to be approved with the full protection of the law. That system, the patent office, and the people who work there, just ran out of excuses.
Throughout the lifespan of a console there will be many versions of the hardware. Playstation upgrades improved stability, durability, and cost. The XBox got "security" features. The 'cube uses fewer chips. And then there is the Game Boy.
Compatibility is the common thread throughout. If the current N-Gage is incompatible with the next N-Gage, then it will be unfair to early adopters. But what if they just move the cartridge slot to a reasonable location? Upp battery life? Fix some of the glaring design problems without significantly altering the hardware?
While cell phones may look different on the outside, many of Nokia's revisions use similar or identical guts. An incompatible N-Gage 2 would be a bad idea right now, but an N-Gage SP might be just the ticket.
Yes. It started as a radio series, then veered into *radically different* territory for the second series. It was about the man controlling the universe. It was also written as it was shot, due to be aired later that night, thanks to Adam's terrible lateness. I strongly recommend picking up a copy of the radio scripts.
The industry really needs a good way to keep consumers up to date about titles that are released and a way to test them out. Magazines that consist of nothing but demo CD's, for example, or timed kiosks at stores. Sure, they'd be swamped all of the time, but that's what kiosks are for.
When a new movie is released, there is an entire secondary industry around promoting it's theatre release, a cheap theater release, it sees more hype at rental stores, and finally the television premier nets more airtime. With videogames it is all or nothing, with a store shelf release that will see 1/2 of the profits in the first two months, ultimately culminating in... A store shelf release. The only people telling anyone about a game are the magazines and websites that people who are interested can go to. When was the last time you went to a website to hear hype about LOTR?
We need to get the industry to the point where John Tesh on E! gushing about Half Life 2's amazing graphics and solid storyline. Maybe then the quirky little games can have their spotlight... and their elongated shelf life.
SMH.com.au has a more informed description of what happens. The gold is not "grown," it is "collected." Bacteria break down and carry gold material away from a larger vein, and another group picks it up and deposits it when they get to a chunk or nugget. ABC au also has a good article.
So unless you happen to live near a large, undiscovered underground tract of gold, your chance of growing gold in your backyard like potatoes is just about zero.
I've looked all over the web, and I just can't find the source files for myDoom. The project isn't hosted at SourceForge, the GPL isn't included in the distribution, and Stallman isn't ranting about how it should be renamed GNUDoom. MyDoom doesn't even start with a K or a G. Is it from Mozilla? It's spelled correctly... That's creepy.
I've got some crazy ideas that would make this worm even slower / more bloated / more error-prone, and would love to try and split the community with a fork. It would be so much better if it was recoded in obfuscated Perl on an XML base with full x86, Sparc, NeXT, and Amiga source compatibility. Besides, the current maintainer is a power hungry jerk. When I find out who he is and where his sources are hosted, his project will be obsolete.
Where did you hear that this worm is part of the open source community again?
Why does it need to be self-consistent and completely explained? A good story teller will know what not to tell the audience. You don't, for example, have a 30 second sequence of someone shaking in their bed going "ungh, ungh," and then have another character meet them outside saying "having bad dreams again?"
That desire to have everything nicely rounded up and taped off has prevented the series from taking any real, surprising twists. A prequal, to be artistically successful, needs to make the viewer look at the original movie in a new light. Yoda having been a force for the dark side and repenting, would be a new light. The real Amidala dying and Corde taking her place, being forced through circumstance into a loveless relationship with Anakin, would be a new light. Semperor Palpatine being Luke's true father would be a new light. Saying that Darth Vader has a lot of mitochondria is not a new light. Jar Jar ruining the world is not a new light. Having Darth Vader build C3-PO is almost a new light, but not significant enough to matter.
There is no backstory too small to explain in painful detail in the new series. Even the first movie is completely irrelevant... if things picked up at #2 no plot would be missing.
Flushing out the backstory has been nothing but a mistake for the prequals. The clone army is interesting and relevant, but what does that change? Nothing.
Deal, no more pasting cover letters out of books. However, if you want people to write resumes as if they were going to be read by a human being, you have to respond to them. Script a button on your e-mail client that automatically fires off a "Thank you for your application... While we don't feel this position is a good fit for your skill set we wish you luck in the future." letter when you send that resume to/usr/hr/archiveandignore. Most job seekers will send out dozens or hundreds of resumes before they are accepted for anything. That means most of their time is spent flushing text out to black holes, where their effort (you should spend about 4 hours updating your resume, writing a cover letter, proofreading, etc.) disappears into nothingness. One can only flush so much away without receiving any response at all without starting to "dial it in."
I come to you today, not just as a Sociologist, or a Video Game developer, but as a citizen, a future father, and a voter.
Stop making videogames out to be worse than they are.
There is no excuse for this rampant inflammatory rhetoric. The sky is not falling, Iraq is not full of loose nukes, and Mario is not teaching your children to abuse prostitutes. Night Trap featured significantly less violence than a child would see watching U.S.A.'s up all night, Mortal Kombat's fatalities were no more realistic than what one would see on the Itchy and Scratchy show, Doom did not teach children to field strip a Desert Eagle, and Grand Theft Auto does not advocate the genocide of Hatians.
GTA is a game about criminal misconduct. That doesn't mean that wanton violence is rewarded, it is simply possible. It was possible to cause a nuclear explosion in Sim City, but it came with a price. Arbitrary murder in GTA is punished by a rather unsympathetic police force, and is detrimental to your overall goals.
Selecting one possible scenario out of millions of combinations is misleading. It is true that the player can find a woman, beat them up, and shoot them. It is also true that they can do the same to a man, a child, a police officer, or anyone else in the game. They can find an unfriendly looking cabbie, pull them out of their cab, run them over with their cab, kick the body, shoot the body, and run the body over again. They can also just look for the best cars, and race around the city trying to hit as few people as possible. The player can decide to run everyone over, or try to do tricks on the games many ramps. They can sleep with a prostitute, or they can hang out and listen to the game's extensive radio stations. They can even attack other criminals, making the city a safer place for its citizens. That's not to say that GTA 3 is appropriate for all ages, but to single out one possibility and claim that GTA will cause men to brutalize women is misleading, inflammatory, and irresponsible.
Beyond GTA 3, this disparity between rhetoric and reality causes a mistrust of politicians by the 10-35 year olds of America. It means they're out of touch, in some cases completely. Players feel a strong association with the games that they play. This is partly because of the interactive component of the game, partly because of the secret fantasy escapism, and partly because they require such a large time investment. Making remarks about a title that are fundamentally flawed will in no way endear you to those people who know the game and who play it. Saying that GTA is a game breeding violent cheuvanists is no more likely to be well received than saying that golf is a game for rich white racists. Either way it shows broad, inaccurate generalizations passing as fact, from the mouth of a presidential candidate we are supposed to be able to trust
I disagree with Liberman's assertion that videogames are getting better about violence. Perhaps after a rather odd obsession with red pixels that spawned Time Killers, it may seem that the number of games that feature ONLY violence has gone down. And that I would agree with. But singling out individual games should be done with care, as mistaken assertions about particular titles are incredibly common and detrimental to the cause of less violent games.
Stop making videogames out to be worse than they are. It only makes you look ignorant.
So, in essence, AOL has decided that it's customers can no longer send mail from their AOL email address, unless they're logged into AOL.
I remember this used to be the most baffling thing to newcomers to e-mail. Why would a protocol allow you to pretend to be someone else? Why didn't the SMTP server stamp all outgoing mail with the proper domain?
I understand that images are important in e-mail, but if you are capable of receiving yourname@yourjob.com, then theoretically you should be able to connect to the actual yourjob.com mailserver.
The fact that you haven't had to up to this point is a security hole, not a feature.
Just download mozilla.exe, and patch your system properly.
NPR ran an article about the hole in I.E. friday morning, yet never mentioned that the hole was in Internet Explorer, (just in "the internet"). They also never mentioned that alternatives were available. It's sad when people have become so indoctrinated in a product that they don't even realize that they are using one.
I'd like to point out the fact that nowhere in the article are legal threats mentioned. Just because an assistant director of legal studies makes an economic argument, doesn't mean that the invisible hand is now under the court's jurisdiction.
The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding). For doing what someone with money wants you to do, you recieve a certain reward. The amount of money in circulation is gradually tipped upwards as the population increases, productivity goes up, and old money is accidentally destroyed.
In a standard videogame, closed monetary arrangements are impossible. The players give money to the merchants, who then pay the players to kill monsters? What is the value of an item when nobody wants it? How is the loop closed if items are being generated? At that point you just have massive deflation. Likewise, as players enter or leave the world you have inflation / deflation.
Ok, so you have a closed-loop financial system, a closed-loop item generation and consumption system (that will encourage hording, of course), both of which are keyed to the number of subscribers. Yet special items must still be won, quests must be rewarded. The leveling treadmill will be in effect, but there must be the special blue blade of Nozerath for the adventuring players...
I agree that there needs to be various controls in place, and that developers need to better understand basic economics, but a model of the real world this is not.
Slashdot Mirror
[Dean's transition team enters the Oval Office]
"Ok, Mr President, there are the emergency switches, that's the big red button, this button kills an underpaid worker somewhere in the US, and this is your computer, left behind by ex Vice President Dick Cheney."
"Let's take a looksee... Hm. Looks like he's got 3 trojan horses, two copies of Gator, more viruses than you can shake a redneck at, and a dozen porn dialers. And in the trash I see..."
[Jaws drop in amazement]
"...Everything"
"Everything"
[Cheney walks into the room]
"Hi guys, I just came for my... What?"
"The department of Homeland Security was the secret funder of SCO?"
"I um, err. Yes. I mean, no. No. Of course not. We wouldn't, uh..."
"Kim Jong-Il recieved nuclear weapons in exchange for running the Republican Party's vote solicitation call center?"
"No! How dare you attack our patriotism! All of those documents were in English Standard Measurements. They'd never figure out anything useful."
"All public school textbooks are supplied by Haliburton?"
"Their publishing arm gave the best price in a no-bid contract war, with full editorial control to the administration. America's minds need faith-based guidence to excel in a world market."
"You approved Gigli?"
"I was young! I needed the money! How...?"
"You never emptied your trash."
"What do I look like, a janitor? I pay someone good sub-minimum wages to do that."
"No, I mean you never emptied your trash. On your computer."
"You have to? I Uh... Err... Oh.
Poopies.
Hey-what's-that-over-there!?"
[Cheney slams his hand down on the big red button, and runs for his life]
According to the Microsoft developer specs, you aren't allowed to talk about "Data," "CPUs," or anything else in your games that might suggest the XBox was a PC (except for games like Star Trek where it would be diagetic). We had a game bounce from Microsoft because we "saved data." Having a first party keyboard and mouse would run counter to that mantra.
It's difficult to justify buying a big box if you realize that it is actually a slightly smaller box than you already have.
The Patent office just ran out of excuses for allowing frivilous patents through the process. It is understandable that a patent examiner might not be equipped enough to understand a one-click shopping patent, or a patent about 3rd party payment transactions over a phone network, but not understanding solitare? Even in its currently obfuscated form the patent is flagrantly obvious. Even in 1995 people were talking about how much time is wasted playing computer solitare. It would be like someone patenting the concept of a winged reusable space vehicle after the Columbia explosion, or patenting a vaccuum tube based moving picture box.
The only way this is going to change is if the patent office becomes liable for the total defense costs + 20% of anybody who engaged in a patent fight and had the patent ruled invalid. Expecting the American small businessman to do the patent office's job for them is rediculous. They are charged with being an authority on a particular and significant portion of US law, but have degraded into a rubber-stamp. Anyone who even read this patent would have declared it invalid. The patent office must feel the financial pinch of their mistakes, or they will continue to make them as part of their modus operandi.
It is no longer enough to go hunting against one painfully obvious patent at a time. We must correct the system that is so incompetent as to allow anything at all to be approved with the full protection of the law. That system, the patent office, and the people who work there, just ran out of excuses.
Throughout the lifespan of a console there will be many versions of the hardware. Playstation upgrades improved stability, durability, and cost. The XBox got "security" features. The 'cube uses fewer chips. And then there is the Game Boy.
Compatibility is the common thread throughout. If the current N-Gage is incompatible with the next N-Gage, then it will be unfair to early adopters. But what if they just move the cartridge slot to a reasonable location? Upp battery life? Fix some of the glaring design problems without significantly altering the hardware?
While cell phones may look different on the outside, many of Nokia's revisions use similar or identical guts. An incompatible N-Gage 2 would be a bad idea right now, but an N-Gage SP might be just the ticket.
Of course... their isn't enough software for them, but that's another story. ;-)
I'll say. I'm still trying to get this copy of BackOrifice2000 working.
Yes. It started as a radio series, then veered into *radically different* territory for the second series. It was about the man controlling the universe. It was also written as it was shot, due to be aired later that night, thanks to Adam's terrible lateness. I strongly recommend picking up a copy of the radio scripts.
The books came next. Then the aborted TV series.
The industry really needs a good way to keep consumers up to date about titles that are released and a way to test them out. Magazines that consist of nothing but demo CD's, for example, or timed kiosks at stores. Sure, they'd be swamped all of the time, but that's what kiosks are for.
When a new movie is released, there is an entire secondary industry around promoting it's theatre release, a cheap theater release, it sees more hype at rental stores, and finally the television premier nets more airtime. With videogames it is all or nothing, with a store shelf release that will see 1/2 of the profits in the first two months, ultimately culminating in... A store shelf release. The only people telling anyone about a game are the magazines and websites that people who are interested can go to. When was the last time you went to a website to hear hype about LOTR?
We need to get the industry to the point where John Tesh on E! gushing about Half Life 2's amazing graphics and solid storyline. Maybe then the quirky little games can have their spotlight... and their elongated shelf life.
Yet somehow they all equal BSD...
SMH.com.au has a more informed description of what happens. The gold is not "grown," it is "collected." Bacteria break down and carry gold material away from a larger vein, and another group picks it up and deposits it when they get to a chunk or nugget. ABC au also has a good article.
So unless you happen to live near a large, undiscovered underground tract of gold, your chance of growing gold in your backyard like potatoes is just about zero.
3 over the course of the past day. Looks like it's time to update AVG's AV signatures.
If a man is kicked repeatedly by another man, should he enjoy it when his aggressor is kicked by a third?
Is the suffering of an evil, a good?
Does the death of a hated friend end the friendship, or the hate?
I've looked all over the web, and I just can't find the source files for myDoom. The project isn't hosted at SourceForge, the GPL isn't included in the distribution, and Stallman isn't ranting about how it should be renamed GNUDoom. MyDoom doesn't even start with a K or a G. Is it from Mozilla? It's spelled correctly... That's creepy.
I've got some crazy ideas that would make this worm even slower / more bloated / more error-prone, and would love to try and split the community with a fork. It would be so much better if it was recoded in obfuscated Perl on an XML base with full x86, Sparc, NeXT, and Amiga source compatibility. Besides, the current maintainer is a power hungry jerk. When I find out who he is and where his sources are hosted, his project will be obsolete.
Where did you hear that this worm is part of the open source community again?
Monsanto already patented that business model.
(Quickly registering the name MikeRowesSoftsSucks.com)
Why does it need to be self-consistent and completely explained? A good story teller will know what not to tell the audience. You don't, for example, have a 30 second sequence of someone shaking in their bed going "ungh, ungh," and then have another character meet them outside saying "having bad dreams again?"
That desire to have everything nicely rounded up and taped off has prevented the series from taking any real, surprising twists. A prequal, to be artistically successful, needs to make the viewer look at the original movie in a new light. Yoda having been a force for the dark side and repenting, would be a new light. The real Amidala dying and Corde taking her place, being forced through circumstance into a loveless relationship with Anakin, would be a new light. Semperor Palpatine being Luke's true father would be a new light. Saying that Darth Vader has a lot of mitochondria is not a new light. Jar Jar ruining the world is not a new light. Having Darth Vader build C3-PO is almost a new light, but not significant enough to matter.
There is no backstory too small to explain in painful detail in the new series. Even the first movie is completely irrelevant... if things picked up at #2 no plot would be missing.
Flushing out the backstory has been nothing but a mistake for the prequals. The clone army is interesting and relevant, but what does that change? Nothing.
They are very skilled in staying 'below radar' but in the meantime, companies such as Apple and Google are knocking at their door.
Well, that explains building an antenna in the shape of an oddly miscolored plastic flower.
Deal, no more pasting cover letters out of books. However, if you want people to write resumes as if they were going to be read by a human being, you have to respond to them. Script a button on your e-mail client that automatically fires off a "Thank you for your application... While we don't feel this position is a good fit for your skill set we wish you luck in the future." letter when you send that resume to /usr/hr/archiveandignore. Most job seekers will send out dozens or hundreds of resumes before they are accepted for anything. That means most of their time is spent flushing text out to black holes, where their effort (you should spend about 4 hours updating your resume, writing a cover letter, proofreading, etc.) disappears into nothingness. One can only flush so much away without receiving any response at all without starting to "dial it in."
I come to you today, not just as a Sociologist, or a Video Game developer, but as a citizen, a future father, and a voter.
Stop making videogames out to be worse than they are.
There is no excuse for this rampant inflammatory rhetoric. The sky is not falling, Iraq is not full of loose nukes, and Mario is not teaching your children to abuse prostitutes. Night Trap featured significantly less violence than a child would see watching U.S.A.'s up all night, Mortal Kombat's fatalities were no more realistic than what one would see on the Itchy and Scratchy show, Doom did not teach children to field strip a Desert Eagle, and Grand Theft Auto does not advocate the genocide of Hatians.
GTA is a game about criminal misconduct. That doesn't mean that wanton violence is rewarded, it is simply possible. It was possible to cause a nuclear explosion in Sim City, but it came with a price. Arbitrary murder in GTA is punished by a rather unsympathetic police force, and is detrimental to your overall goals.
Selecting one possible scenario out of millions of combinations is misleading. It is true that the player can find a woman, beat them up, and shoot them. It is also true that they can do the same to a man, a child, a police officer, or anyone else in the game. They can find an unfriendly looking cabbie, pull them out of their cab, run them over with their cab, kick the body, shoot the body, and run the body over again. They can also just look for the best cars, and race around the city trying to hit as few people as possible. The player can decide to run everyone over, or try to do tricks on the games many ramps. They can sleep with a prostitute, or they can hang out and listen to the game's extensive radio stations. They can even attack other criminals, making the city a safer place for its citizens. That's not to say that GTA 3 is appropriate for all ages, but to single out one possibility and claim that GTA will cause men to brutalize women is misleading, inflammatory, and irresponsible.
Beyond GTA 3, this disparity between rhetoric and reality causes a mistrust of politicians by the 10-35 year olds of America. It means they're out of touch, in some cases completely. Players feel a strong association with the games that they play. This is partly because of the interactive component of the game, partly because of the secret fantasy escapism, and partly because they require such a large time investment. Making remarks about a title that are fundamentally flawed will in no way endear you to those people who know the game and who play it. Saying that GTA is a game breeding violent cheuvanists is no more likely to be well received than saying that golf is a game for rich white racists. Either way it shows broad, inaccurate generalizations passing as fact, from the mouth of a presidential candidate we are supposed to be able to trust
I disagree with Liberman's assertion that videogames are getting better about violence. Perhaps after a rather odd obsession with red pixels that spawned Time Killers, it may seem that the number of games that feature ONLY violence has gone down. And that I would agree with. But singling out individual games should be done with care, as mistaken assertions about particular titles are incredibly common and detrimental to the cause of less violent games.
Stop making videogames out to be worse than they are. It only makes you look ignorant.
Jesus suffered for our sins, bereft of worldly possessions.
(He uses OS2 WARP.)
So, in essence, AOL has decided that it's customers can no longer send mail from their AOL email address, unless they're logged into AOL.
I remember this used to be the most baffling thing to newcomers to e-mail. Why would a protocol allow you to pretend to be someone else? Why didn't the SMTP server stamp all outgoing mail with the proper domain?
I understand that images are important in e-mail, but if you are capable of receiving yourname@yourjob.com, then theoretically you should be able to connect to the actual yourjob.com mailserver.
The fact that you haven't had to up to this point is a security hole, not a feature.
Just download mozilla.exe, and patch your system properly.
NPR ran an article about the hole in I.E. friday morning, yet never mentioned that the hole was in Internet Explorer, (just in "the internet"). They also never mentioned that alternatives were available. It's sad when people have become so indoctrinated in a product that they don't even realize that they are using one.
I've seen too many accidents with staple guns to recommend going that route...
As a musician, you are taking out a loan from a person whom you are working for, who reaps the benefits from your labor, and whom you pay back.
Sounds fair. To the employer.
I'd like to point out the fact that nowhere in the article are legal threats mentioned. Just because an assistant director of legal studies makes an economic argument, doesn't mean that the invisible hand is now under the court's jurisdiction.
The real world has a fixed amount of money (reserve banking not withstanding). For doing what someone with money wants you to do, you recieve a certain reward. The amount of money in circulation is gradually tipped upwards as the population increases, productivity goes up, and old money is accidentally destroyed.
In a standard videogame, closed monetary arrangements are impossible. The players give money to the merchants, who then pay the players to kill monsters? What is the value of an item when nobody wants it? How is the loop closed if items are being generated? At that point you just have massive deflation. Likewise, as players enter or leave the world you have inflation / deflation.
Ok, so you have a closed-loop financial system, a closed-loop item generation and consumption system (that will encourage hording, of course), both of which are keyed to the number of subscribers. Yet special items must still be won, quests must be rewarded. The leveling treadmill will be in effect, but there must be the special blue blade of Nozerath for the adventuring players...
I agree that there needs to be various controls in place, and that developers need to better understand basic economics, but a model of the real world this is not.