A robots.txt file is not a contract or a technical restriction, but rather the standard means of communicating behaviors that contradict the inherent technical structure of the internet. If someone ignores your robots.txt file, that in and of itself is not a violation of anything. But it does mean that you have properly stated your policy. Your policy may not have the force of law (and by many accounts, it shouldn't), but if you don't state that policy in the proper form it can be assumed to have no force, rather than just that the enforcability of the policy must be examined.
As an example, having a website is like having a store. If you leave the front door of your store open, with the lights on, and someone inside, entering is not a tresspass. If you put a small lock on that door, no matter how easy to pick, entering that store becomes tresspass. If you put a huge sign on the door that says "door lock is broken, private property, KEEP OUT," then entering that store is very probably tresspass, unless you're blind. Putting up a huge sign on the door that says "DO NOT ENTER", but doing so in braille, will probably not count as sufficient warning.
I can't imagine how a robot can enter into a contract with someone else if the person didn't go to the trouble of creating a message in a form the robot can understand. If you were that robot, writing in english would sound something like:
I don't see what would make Google phone more viable for direct marketing than iPhone or a regular cell that can run Google Maps mobile on it already.
A phone knows where you are (through cell-tower triangulation).
Google knows, through your searches, what you're looking for.
Let's say you've been running searches for a few night on how to get a book published. Later that week, an SMS ad alerts you to the presence of a corporate training center that you happen to be walking by.
Or get a little more creative. Google knows you contact someone through g-mail and orkut a lot. The gPhone knows that they visit a particular resturant on a regular basis. The next time you walk by this resturant, that resturant sends you a targeted message letting you know that your friend is there.
Or there is a book exerpt you've looked up online. When you walk by a Barnes 'n Noble, google checks the local stock with them, then lets you know the price.
Or maybe google has figured out your anniversary date through a combination of Gmail and google calendar. When you walk by a Zales, the sales associates are alerted to your upcoming event, and hops out of the store to sell you up.
With databases of information about what people write about in their Gmails, their searches, their maps, books they've looked up, friends on the various systems, their blogs, their IM's, and whatever other data google desktop collects, you can be sure that they have a lot more targeted information at hand than any other advertiser could dream of, and can use it more creatively.
Don't just be light, be as little as possible. There is a reason why backpackers look a little dirty.
Only bring one change of clothes at most. You can wash and dry one while wearing the other. A bar of soap is effective for both personal hygene and clothing laundering.
Foldable plastic outer shells are good for keeping out the rain, staying really warm, and being light and super carryable.
Headlamps are great. Get a white LED lamp that takes AA batteries. You'll be able to get AA batteries almost anywhere, but available outlets are harder to find.
Ground mats are nice, but you can live without them. In fact, most of the "high tech" junk that the yuppie backpacking places like REI and Any Mountain sells are just that: junk.
Your iPod is not necessary. If you really must, get a cheap AA-powered compact world radio, and listen to the local flavor.
Always bring a secret place to hide your real supply of cash and cards. Zippered belts are great.
Don't bring with you anything you aren't ready to lose or ditch.
PC games = retail sales + download sales + recurring subscriptions + ad-based revenue + Korean microtransactions. Heck, World of Warcraft's recurring subscriptions alone count for an estimated 100 million dollars Per Month. Again, WoW is making a bit over A BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, not including box sales, and it only accounts for an estimated 50% of paid MMPORPG subscriptions out there.
If US videogame sales are estimated at 10 billion dollars per year, it's not unreasonable to imagine 5 billion dollars coming from MMPORPG subscriptions, online purchases, the softer retail sales, and (yes) computer upgrades to facilitate gaming (are there really any other kinds?)
Oddly enough, this is probably a very good move for the quality of what Haliburton does. Getting your guiding officer closer to the conditions on the ground should help with getting problems fixed. Even if he's not all that interested in making things perfect, he should at least be able to curb the abuses that don't directly help his (ahem, his company's) bottom line.
If Halliburton was above reproach, this wouldn't be an issue. But right now moving the CEO of your company overseas is bad PR for a company accused of war profiteering.
BTW, a more thorough review of his talk is here, which seems a bit different than the other article represents it as.
I think it's important to note that no matter what your platform of choice is, an intelligent multi-platform release strategy can definitely help offset development costs or simply pad your war chests. I can see how declining PC income could add incentive to look into alternative income streams, and the console market is a great way to do that (with an intelligently created port strategy). Something had opened their eyes a bit, and this drove them to find things they probably should have been doing anyway with or without piracy.
And perhaps ID is in shock about Doom III and Quake IV's numbers, whatever they are. They were not the culture-smashing phenomenons that ID has created in the past, and quite frankly with good reason: ID's previous games were extensions of the company's strengths into new realms that nobody else was occupying. When Wolfenstein first came out, they were basically standing alone. Nobody had created anything remotely Doom-like before Doom. When Quake III came out, the concept of a tournament FPS was completely unknown. And when Doom 3 came out it was... an above-average game which received above average sales. And Quake IV was probably much below that, judging by the discount curve. That quick of a change will send any developer into shock.
And yes, piracy is a much larger problem on PC's than on consoles. The "50% of sales are lost to piracy" number is a bit ludicrous, but I'd be willing to believe that 50% of all retail games installed on PC's are pirated. The usual piracy protection schemes out there are both easily broken and increasingly intrusive, and with game prices as astronomical as they are the incentive to pirate remains high for many in the that medium's target demographic.
And there are a few games I've worked on that I'm happy to see pirated. At least then SOMEBODY played them.
In other words, your web page should work for any browser that supports HTML. It should work regardless of whether CSS and/or Javascript is enabled.
Define "work". A web page without formatting is going to be useless to anyone who isn't a part-time web developer. To them, it's just going to be one big, messy looking freak out... akin to a television show whose cable descrambler broke. Sure all the "information" is there, somewhere, but in such a horrible format that a human being can't use it.
Web pages are dynamic these days. Saying that the only acceptable model is staticly defined strict XHTML mixed with an additional layer of tableless CSS is foolish zelotry. With so much happening dynamically based upon end-user created pages, along with the somewhat annoying usage of Flash, Powerpoint, or PDF for important information, you really can't create a comprehensive index without being a little flexible.
Saying that Google shouldn't take into account scripting when scanning pages is like saying they shouldn't index the PDF's that are online. Sure, it may not conform to what you believe is "good web coding standards," but the reality is that they're out there.
I find it coldly comforting that those who are afforded no rights as US citizens are also afforded no rights as non-us citizens under international law.
When you start arguing the technical definition of who or who should not be afforded human rights, you're doing so because you want to take humanity away from people. My aunt was born in a dirty bathroom in a forced US-based prison camp because her parents had the poor choice to not be white, and therefore not be "pure" US citizens. Now we have people detained indefinitely without trial because they had the poor choice to be born dark skinned in an ugly part of the world. In, I might add, utter violation of both domestic and international law.
Criminals have rights because until they're actually convicted of things, they're just people like you and me.
Ideal: Person A has a brilliant, rare idea. Person A invests years in refining and expanding said idea. Person A goes out and patents said idea. Person A opens a business with said idea, reaping customer praise and financial reward.
The patent has encouraged creativity and expanded the market.
Reality: Person A has a somewhat obvious idea. Companys B, C, D, and E without investing in refining or developing the idea run out and patent said idea. Patent is granted to Company B (and sometimes C,D,and E too). Company B sits on patent, preventing anyone else from opening said business in order to protect the large profit margins on their current offering. 15 years later Company B sells the rights to said patent to Clearinghouse F. Clearinghouse F takes the broadest possible view of said patent, and sues everyone in the business. Years of fun in courthouse G ensues.
The patent has prevented the use of the idea or object patented, and has been used to bleed money from companies who do produce things.
The guy created something that involves robots, beer, catapults, remote controls, and dangerously fast moving projectiles. He spent a lot of time creating an overly complicated and somewhat destructive method to do something trivially easy.
Videos of this is what the internet was created for!
I'm glad Miyamoto discussed topics more pertinent to the developers than gamers. I would much rather have a conference with substance, than let the GDC turn into a media blitz for industry shaking announcements.
Thank you for saying this. GDC is not E3. It's not for the press, it's not for the public, it's not for big announcements. It's for us developers to get together and discuss shader implementations, development methodologies, and gossip about the interworkings of company politics. In the language of sociology, it's "backstage." It's a big conference for us to get together and be relaxed and honest about where we are and the gritty, boring details about what we need to do to get somewhere better.
Once you turn it into E3-2.0 (CES 3.0?), you're taking that relaxed exchange of ideas and destroying it. Reggie would never have said what he said if he thought there was an E3 level of attention on him. You'd never see game developers divulging all the little secrets of design and development they've learned over the years. Really, on a business level the whole thing shouldn't exist, as the entire event is just one big festival of helping your competitors to make better games.
But it does exist, it does persist. Please don't hijack the developer's conference into a public-facing press event. It's for us for a reason. It's us with our pants down. You don't want to see us with our pants down. Trust me on this one.
As a corporation, e-voting should have been a slam dunk for them.
And if they decided to invest some money in developing a secure e-voting system (let's say, 3 year's e-voting profits), they could own the market indefinitely into the future. They already do, but they're at risk of losing it due to shoddy implementation. Most people would kill for that kind of market position.
This isn't rocket science. Even Austrailia can do it.
To further this statement, the Atari 7800 was backwards compatibile with the 2600 and the Genesis was backwards compatible with the Sega Mastersystem. I believe these were the first instances of this in gaming.
However, for the vast majority of people who use Apple products that simplicity and ease of use is absolutely everything. Computers are hideously complicated compared to type writers and calculators. They are magical black boxes which perplex and baffle non-techies young and old. To have availible something that removes vast amounts of that complexity is valuable.
You never really remove complexity from someone's life. You merely open up avenues for other complexity to exist. If someone isn't staring at the guts of a computer trying to figure it out, they can focus on figuring out how telemetry works. Or how to create the perfectly textured purple in tempura paints. Or how to navigate New York's fabulous subway system.
Jobs sells stuff that lets people focus on the things that are important to them, rather than on the details of what's running behind the scenes. Think of it as a class abstraction with a simple interface vs directly interacting with variable values in c. Sure, the latter is more "hardcore," but it means you're not spending your time doing more important things.
Agreed. And Kotaku has no right to future insider information.
This isn't about rights, it's about relationships.
So Kotaku posts Sony's fluffy PR pieces an hour after everyone else, but in exchange gets to post any real news days before anyone else is "allowed" to? Sounds like a good deal to me.
Severing all relationships with an information portal is the nuclear option. Sony resorted to the nuclear option over a rumor that was already in the public eye anyway. Sure, Kotaku could have avoided publishing the rumor, so that Sony would have a bigger bang. And Sony had every right to sever the relationship.
But the relationship between Sony and the gamer is what should be receiving their highest attention. Their relationship to Kotaku should be secondary to Kotaku's audience's relationship to Sony. This reaction is not helping that currently rocky relationship at all.
The thing that people forget is that HL2's art direction was amazing. I can't think of another title in recent memory that had a higher level of visual cohesiveness on a reasonable polybudget. For example, darkness consistently equals safety throughout the game, whereas any point you're exposed to sunlight is a location shrouded in danger. This is consistent both internally and externally. No-one, to my knowledge, has followed this color styling, yet it is an effective technique at making the player feel like an unwelcome outcast.
You can see how minimalist this tree really is. They only gave it just enough branches to cover the illusion, but not so many that it holds up to actual inspection. Another shot of said tree, from a more common angle. By not wasting any polys, they really can afford to put more on-screen. Heck, look at leaves. Artificially close, they are a big smear. But from the distance you normally see them, they can stick thousands of these things on screen, and they look beautiful.
Love the look of brick? Notice how in this shot they've burned the bump maps and damage maps and everything into the same texture? The increases the repetition in texture, but if you vary your geometry sufficiently the player will never notice. All they'll notice is a lot more is going on on-screen than they're used to. This technique looks terrible for big-open walls, but Half Life studiosly avoids big open walls within proximity of the player.
Anyhow - what are the changes of a *bug* causing this behaviour?
Not out of the question, actually. If the machine is coded to start at slot indeces 0,0,0,0,0, or they bring an image of the wheel up before they actually initialize the variables (which I would assume to be wiped to 0 by default), it could simply be displaying a neutral uninitialized state. And what would be the most important number on the wheel, which you would start with when programming it?
Jackpot's are probably all the first position on the wheel. The slot may simply be starting from a default position, or might be at some point working with uninitialized data.
It's definitely possible. Konami has shipped worse.
Slashdot Mirror
A robots.txt file is not a contract or a technical restriction, but rather the standard means of communicating behaviors that contradict the inherent technical structure of the internet. If someone ignores your robots.txt file, that in and of itself is not a violation of anything. But it does mean that you have properly stated your policy. Your policy may not have the force of law (and by many accounts, it shouldn't), but if you don't state that policy in the proper form it can be assumed to have no force, rather than just that the enforcability of the policy must be examined.
As an example, having a website is like having a store. If you leave the front door of your store open, with the lights on, and someone inside, entering is not a tresspass. If you put a small lock on that door, no matter how easy to pick, entering that store becomes tresspass. If you put a huge sign on the door that says "door lock is broken, private property, KEEP OUT," then entering that store is very probably tresspass, unless you're blind. Putting up a huge sign on the door that says "DO NOT ENTER", but doing so in braille, will probably not count as sufficient warning.
I can't imagine how a robot can enter into a contract with someone else if the person didn't go to the trouble of creating a message in a form the robot can understand. If you were that robot, writing in english would sound something like:
"No lea este postre."
"Eet post dit niet."
or perhaps
"iete trasformandosi in un penguin. arrestilo."
I don't see what would make Google phone more viable for direct marketing than iPhone or a regular cell that can run Google Maps mobile on it already.
A phone knows where you are (through cell-tower triangulation).
Google knows, through your searches, what you're looking for.
Let's say you've been running searches for a few night on how to get a book published. Later that week, an SMS ad alerts you to the presence of a corporate training center that you happen to be walking by.
Or get a little more creative. Google knows you contact someone through g-mail and orkut a lot. The gPhone knows that they visit a particular resturant on a regular basis. The next time you walk by this resturant, that resturant sends you a targeted message letting you know that your friend is there.
Or there is a book exerpt you've looked up online. When you walk by a Barnes 'n Noble, google checks the local stock with them, then lets you know the price.
Or maybe google has figured out your anniversary date through a combination of Gmail and google calendar. When you walk by a Zales, the sales associates are alerted to your upcoming event, and hops out of the store to sell you up.
With databases of information about what people write about in their Gmails, their searches, their maps, books they've looked up, friends on the various systems, their blogs, their IM's, and whatever other data google desktop collects, you can be sure that they have a lot more targeted information at hand than any other advertiser could dream of, and can use it more creatively.
Don't just be light, be as little as possible. There is a reason why backpackers look a little dirty.
Only bring one change of clothes at most. You can wash and dry one while wearing the other. A bar of soap is effective for both personal hygene and clothing laundering.
Foldable plastic outer shells are good for keeping out the rain, staying really warm, and being light and super carryable.
Headlamps are great. Get a white LED lamp that takes AA batteries. You'll be able to get AA batteries almost anywhere, but available outlets are harder to find.
Ground mats are nice, but you can live without them. In fact, most of the "high tech" junk that the yuppie backpacking places like REI and Any Mountain sells are just that: junk.
Your iPod is not necessary. If you really must, get a cheap AA-powered compact world radio, and listen to the local flavor.
Always bring a secret place to hide your real supply of cash and cards. Zippered belts are great.
Don't bring with you anything you aren't ready to lose or ditch.
I'd make fewer generalizations, but I have less time to address this than I would like.
It must be because I have less money in my pocket and fewer scruples, but I'll just leave it at this.
PC games != retail sales.
PC games = retail sales + download sales + recurring subscriptions + ad-based revenue + Korean microtransactions. Heck, World of Warcraft's recurring subscriptions alone count for an estimated 100 million dollars Per Month. Again, WoW is making a bit over A BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, not including box sales, and it only accounts for an estimated 50% of paid MMPORPG subscriptions out there.
If US videogame sales are estimated at 10 billion dollars per year, it's not unreasonable to imagine 5 billion dollars coming from MMPORPG subscriptions, online purchases, the softer retail sales, and (yes) computer upgrades to facilitate gaming (are there really any other kinds?)
Oddly enough, this is probably a very good move for the quality of what Haliburton does. Getting your guiding officer closer to the conditions on the ground should help with getting problems fixed. Even if he's not all that interested in making things perfect, he should at least be able to curb the abuses that don't directly help his (ahem, his company's) bottom line.
If Halliburton was above reproach, this wouldn't be an issue. But right now moving the CEO of your company overseas is bad PR for a company accused of war profiteering.
BTW, a more thorough review of his talk is here, which seems a bit different than the other article represents it as.
I think it's important to note that no matter what your platform of choice is, an intelligent multi-platform release strategy can definitely help offset development costs or simply pad your war chests. I can see how declining PC income could add incentive to look into alternative income streams, and the console market is a great way to do that (with an intelligently created port strategy). Something had opened their eyes a bit, and this drove them to find things they probably should have been doing anyway with or without piracy.
And perhaps ID is in shock about Doom III and Quake IV's numbers, whatever they are. They were not the culture-smashing phenomenons that ID has created in the past, and quite frankly with good reason: ID's previous games were extensions of the company's strengths into new realms that nobody else was occupying. When Wolfenstein first came out, they were basically standing alone. Nobody had created anything remotely Doom-like before Doom. When Quake III came out, the concept of a tournament FPS was completely unknown. And when Doom 3 came out it was... an above-average game which received above average sales. And Quake IV was probably much below that, judging by the discount curve. That quick of a change will send any developer into shock.
And yes, piracy is a much larger problem on PC's than on consoles. The "50% of sales are lost to piracy" number is a bit ludicrous, but I'd be willing to believe that 50% of all retail games installed on PC's are pirated. The usual piracy protection schemes out there are both easily broken and increasingly intrusive, and with game prices as astronomical as they are the incentive to pirate remains high for many in the that medium's target demographic.
And there are a few games I've worked on that I'm happy to see pirated. At least then SOMEBODY played them.
In other words, your web page should work for any browser that supports HTML. It should work regardless of whether CSS and/or Javascript is enabled.
Define "work". A web page without formatting is going to be useless to anyone who isn't a part-time web developer. To them, it's just going to be one big, messy looking freak out... akin to a television show whose cable descrambler broke. Sure all the "information" is there, somewhere, but in such a horrible format that a human being can't use it.
Web pages are dynamic these days. Saying that the only acceptable model is staticly defined strict XHTML mixed with an additional layer of tableless CSS is foolish zelotry. With so much happening dynamically based upon end-user created pages, along with the somewhat annoying usage of Flash, Powerpoint, or PDF for important information, you really can't create a comprehensive index without being a little flexible.
Saying that Google shouldn't take into account scripting when scanning pages is like saying they shouldn't index the PDF's that are online. Sure, it may not conform to what you believe is "good web coding standards," but the reality is that they're out there.
SCO is still around?
I mean, this started out as gripping, then became fun to watch the train wreck. But it's over. Someone please let SCO know that they've lost.
I find it coldly comforting that those who are afforded no rights as US citizens are also afforded no rights as non-us citizens under international law.
When you start arguing the technical definition of who or who should not be afforded human rights, you're doing so because you want to take humanity away from people. My aunt was born in a dirty bathroom in a forced US-based prison camp because her parents had the poor choice to not be white, and therefore not be "pure" US citizens. Now we have people detained indefinitely without trial because they had the poor choice to be born dark skinned in an ugly part of the world. In, I might add, utter violation of both domestic and international law.
Criminals have rights because until they're actually convicted of things, they're just people like you and me.
Glad to hear things have changed.
Clearly my parents were guilty.
Ideal:
Person A has a brilliant, rare idea. Person A invests years in refining and expanding said idea. Person A goes out and patents said idea. Person A opens a business with said idea, reaping customer praise and financial reward.
The patent has encouraged creativity and expanded the market.
Reality:
Person A has a somewhat obvious idea. Companys B, C, D, and E without investing in refining or developing the idea run out and patent said idea. Patent is granted to Company B (and sometimes C,D,and E too). Company B sits on patent, preventing anyone else from opening said business in order to protect the large profit margins on their current offering. 15 years later Company B sells the rights to said patent to Clearinghouse F. Clearinghouse F takes the broadest possible view of said patent, and sues everyone in the business. Years of fun in courthouse G ensues.
The patent has prevented the use of the idea or object patented, and has been used to bleed money from companies who do produce things.
What's with the haters in this thread?
The guy created something that involves robots, beer, catapults, remote controls, and dangerously fast moving projectiles. He spent a lot of time creating an overly complicated and somewhat destructive method to do something trivially easy.
Videos of this is what the internet was created for!
You could add a friction pad to the outer edge of the throwing arm. That should add a spiraling motion, relative to the velocity of the can.
I'm glad Miyamoto discussed topics more pertinent to the developers than gamers. I would much rather have a conference with substance, than let the GDC turn into a media blitz for industry shaking announcements.
Thank you for saying this. GDC is not E3. It's not for the press, it's not for the public, it's not for big announcements. It's for us developers to get together and discuss shader implementations, development methodologies, and gossip about the interworkings of company politics. In the language of sociology, it's "backstage." It's a big conference for us to get together and be relaxed and honest about where we are and the gritty, boring details about what we need to do to get somewhere better.
Once you turn it into E3-2.0 (CES 3.0?), you're taking that relaxed exchange of ideas and destroying it. Reggie would never have said what he said if he thought there was an E3 level of attention on him. You'd never see game developers divulging all the little secrets of design and development they've learned over the years. Really, on a business level the whole thing shouldn't exist, as the entire event is just one big festival of helping your competitors to make better games.
But it does exist, it does persist. Please don't hijack the developer's conference into a public-facing press event. It's for us for a reason. It's us with our pants down. You don't want to see us with our pants down. Trust me on this one.
As a corporation, e-voting should have been a slam dunk for them.
And if they decided to invest some money in developing a secure e-voting system (let's say, 3 year's e-voting profits), they could own the market indefinitely into the future. They already do, but they're at risk of losing it due to shoddy implementation. Most people would kill for that kind of market position.
This isn't rocket science. Even Austrailia can do it.
To further this statement, the Atari 7800 was backwards compatibile with the 2600 and the Genesis was backwards compatible with the Sega Mastersystem. I believe these were the first instances of this in gaming.
However, for the vast majority of people who use Apple products that simplicity and ease of use is absolutely everything. Computers are hideously complicated compared to type writers and calculators. They are magical black boxes which perplex and baffle non-techies young and old. To have availible something that removes vast amounts of that complexity is valuable.
You never really remove complexity from someone's life. You merely open up avenues for other complexity to exist. If someone isn't staring at the guts of a computer trying to figure it out, they can focus on figuring out how telemetry works. Or how to create the perfectly textured purple in tempura paints. Or how to navigate New York's fabulous subway system.
Jobs sells stuff that lets people focus on the things that are important to them, rather than on the details of what's running behind the scenes. Think of it as a class abstraction with a simple interface vs directly interacting with variable values in c. Sure, the latter is more "hardcore," but it means you're not spending your time doing more important things.
Agreed. And Kotaku has no right to future insider information.
This isn't about rights, it's about relationships.
So Kotaku posts Sony's fluffy PR pieces an hour after everyone else, but in exchange gets to post any real news days before anyone else is "allowed" to? Sounds like a good deal to me.
Severing all relationships with an information portal is the nuclear option. Sony resorted to the nuclear option over a rumor that was already in the public eye anyway. Sure, Kotaku could have avoided publishing the rumor, so that Sony would have a bigger bang. And Sony had every right to sever the relationship.
But the relationship between Sony and the gamer is what should be receiving their highest attention. Their relationship to Kotaku should be secondary to Kotaku's audience's relationship to Sony. This reaction is not helping that currently rocky relationship at all.
Online cheating?
E-commerce?
Because it's easier to stop the end user from discovering weaknesses in your protection schemes if they can't run arbitrary code?
Because if you could run arbitrary code, people wouldn't need to pay licensing fees to MS to release games on the Xbox 360?
The thing that people forget is that HL2's art direction was amazing. I can't think of another title in recent memory that had a higher level of visual cohesiveness on a reasonable polybudget. For example, darkness consistently equals safety throughout the game, whereas any point you're exposed to sunlight is a location shrouded in danger. This is consistent both internally and externally. No-one, to my knowledge, has followed this color styling, yet it is an effective technique at making the player feel like an unwelcome outcast.
You can see how minimalist this tree really is. They only gave it just enough branches to cover the illusion, but not so many that it holds up to actual inspection. Another shot of said tree, from a more common angle. By not wasting any polys, they really can afford to put more on-screen. Heck, look at leaves. Artificially close, they are a big smear. But from the distance you normally see them, they can stick thousands of these things on screen, and they look beautiful.
Love the look of brick? Notice how in this shot they've burned the bump maps and damage maps and everything into the same texture? The increases the repetition in texture, but if you vary your geometry sufficiently the player will never notice. All they'll notice is a lot more is going on on-screen than they're used to. This technique looks terrible for big-open walls, but Half Life studiosly avoids big open walls within proximity of the player.
They even used a distinct pallete of blacks, muted browns, and light blues. This was far before anyone else was using anything but super-saturated primary colors.
Ignoring any technical accomplishments, this is an achievement of strong visual composition and consistent, solid art direction.
Anyhow - what are the changes of a *bug* causing this behaviour?
Not out of the question, actually. If the machine is coded to start at slot indeces 0,0,0,0,0, or they bring an image of the wheel up before they actually initialize the variables (which I would assume to be wiped to 0 by default), it could simply be displaying a neutral uninitialized state. And what would be the most important number on the wheel, which you would start with when programming it?
Jackpot's are probably all the first position on the wheel. The slot may simply be starting from a default position, or might be at some point working with uninitialized data.
It's definitely possible. Konami has shipped worse.
It wasn't capped when I signed up, though that was promotion for their 3g line.
I would assume there is actually *some* cap way, way up there, but I've never seen it.