Every time a sequel for a popular game comes out, fans (and detractors) will cry out if it uses the same gameplay as the previous game. "There's nothing new!"
Really? I can't remember many examples of this.
Doom 2, perhaps... but then people were specifically complaining that the game didn't have as many new weapons as they'd hoped it might. They weren't upset that the basic gameplay was the same.
But if the developers change it up, then the fans will cry foul, saying they're "ruining the experience" or "fixing what isn't broken".
Generally this is because the changes that are made are not to the things the fans thought were wrong with the first game.
For example, look at the complaints around Deus Ex: Invisible War. What did people complain about? Primarily the user interface, the unified ammo, and the tiny environments. Were any of these things that had been wrong with the first game? No; hence complaints about "fixing things that weren't broken". There was plenty broken in the original Deus Ex, and fans would have been perfectly happy with those things being fixed in the sequel. Unfortunately most of them (such as the game balance) were actually made worse by the changes.
Again, look at System Shock. Observe the magnitude of the changes in System Shock 2. It's a very different game in many ways; the interface is fundamentally different, making it less of a traditional 3D RPG and more of an FPS. Do you see fans griping about the changes? Nope -- mostly they loved it, because while it was different, it was just as deep -- and a lot of the changes, such as the new control scheme, were clearly improvements. Then compare those same fans' reactions to Bioshock...
Only n00bs want to read them in an Office clone. Real hackers read Office 2007 files by pulling the XML out of the ZIP container and reading that. In emacs or vi.
(Cue Yorkshiremen with comments about TECO, cat, raw binary, and how their fathers used to beat them with an abacus.)
Ugh. Why do people write Python one-liners? The whole point of Python is that it's nicely formatted and readable. If you want one-liners, you should choose a language that was designed for writing one-liners in.
You are aware that there is an attack for MD5 when the length isn't specified though? There is a demo that will produce forged pdf documents with a given md5 hash.
Where can I find this? It isn't showing up on Google, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about it.
The best attack on MD5 I can find is the well-known ability to generate two different documents with the same checksum. But that one doesn't allow you to choose what the checksum will be, so it's no use in this case: if you didn't create the legitimate package, you can't create a malicious one with the same MD5 unless you have a better attack.
So, of the people who are currently going frothy at the lips with outrage at this game, exactly how many of them have actually seen it, let alone played it?
Something tells me this is the usual rent-a-rage that the conservative press wheels out whenever they get tired of being outraged at immigration and welfare.
hopefully this will lead to more modern-looking open-source games. That's the reason the regular gamer won't play open-source.
No, that would be because open-source games tend to have poor artwork, horrible animation, tediously derivative gameplay and level design, and no plot.
For some reason, people with talent in these areas and an interest in giving their work away for free tend to concentrate on making mods for commercial games. Perhaps it's because they want their work to be free-as-in-beer rather than free-as-in-copyleft.
I can remember the time when "dynamic shadows" weren't basics but rather bleeding edge, something you'd need a killer machine for to pull off at all. Maybe 'cause it ain't been a year ago or so.
What? Dynamic shadows were bleeding-edge about 5 years ago. Doom 3 has run fine on run-of-the-mill hardware since about 2006.
You seem to be mistaking "OS" for "desktop OS". Many other devices run Linux -- particularly many of those routers people use to get on the Internet these days.
If being open-source made you less secure, you'd think those would be a big target for malware, given how they're all directly connected to the network, usually always on even if the computers behind them are switched off, and basically never updated. But somehow the crackers still go after Windows instead.
Oh, please. Retelling an existing story in a new way is something humans have been doing for as long as stories have existed! It's a basic practice of all cultures.
Are you really going to argue that (for example) Shakespeare's Hamlet would have been better if he'd called it something different to avoid "raping" the memories of the fans of the previous Hamlet play he was reimagining?
If you don't like the new version, the old version still exists. Your memory is only "raped" if you choose to mess with it yourself in your desperation to find something to be outraged about.
Indeed; and, reading TFA, I observe that the main reason they're preferring Scala on the backend is that it's made it easier for them to improve the architecture, by (for example) providing better concurrency primitives than Ruby did at the time they started switching.
No reason for Ruby fanboys to get defensive over anything here; they make it clear that they still love Ruby for front-end stuff, but that Scala works better for a different kind of task.
Indeed. On browsers where every tab runs in the same process (*cough*Firefox*cough*) this means that all web browsing halts for an eternity on every Slashdot page load. Nicely nullifying one of the main advantages of tabs (set a bunch of pages loading in the background while you read).
Mind you, other sites are just as bad. The BBC website stopped being usable when they started insisting on loading multiple Flash media players on every single article. Guys, if I wanted to watch TV I'd switch on the TV. (Mental note: must get round to hacking blacklist functionality into Flashblock, which irritatingly only does whitelists ATM.)
It would be so much easier if the Unicode folks had thought to classify all their characters for us, so we could tell at a glance what was a printable character and what was a control character that might do undesirable things. They could have stuck all that information in some kind of Character Database. Then, I dunno, maybe the Perl folks would have been able to figure out some way of making that information available to programmers, possibly even as a straightforward extension to regular expression syntax. Then it might have been feasible to extend Slash so it supported more characters safely!
Just about everything in version 2. Version 1 was decent, if nothing special. Version 2 simply doesn't work properly; everything's locked away behind a clunky and tedious web interface, and once you get a guest running it's buggy -- it couldn't even scroll windows right in a Windows guest when I tried it.
That's round about when I jumped ship to VirtualBox, which is (a) also free, (b) Free too, and (c) works properly. Of course, it doesn't run on FreeBSD...
Don't most people just sleep or hibernate their computer these days anyway?
No.
And it's not just the free software community that is obsessed with boot time. Microsoft is too; that's why Windows goes to a desktop as quickly as possible, before it's even finished loading everything. (Of course, they have even more reason to care, since you so often need to reboot Windows to install updates.)
How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter?
By making a game based on your own creative ideas, instead of slavishly cloning someone else's ideas.
Look at Counter-Strike, for example. Arguably the most popular online FPS of all time. Observe how un-similar the gameplay is to Quake or Unreal Tournament. That was innovation.
What will the next innovation be? I don't know. If I did know, it wouldn't be innovative when it came. But I'll know it when I see it, because it will be something that's new and exciting, and it won't just be more of the same gameplay we've been seeing since the invention of modern deathmatch gameplay nearly two decades ago.
And reasonably so. The people putting their free time into making this game are making the game they personally want to play. They don't owe anyone anything, and there's no reason why they should change their game just because someone says they should.
Conversely, the rest of us have no obligation to admire their work or to heap unconditional praise on it. We're into freedom, right? The freedom to contribute, criticise, enjoy, or ignore, as each individual prefers.
If we think it's fun, we can say so, and I'm sure the developers are encouraged that so many people are doing just that. But likewise, if we think it's derivative, then we have every right to say so and move on without contributing whatever ideas we ourselves might have.
Your maths is spot on, but your English comprehension could use some work. "The turn of a century" means "the period of a few years before and after the start of a century". There's no standard definition of how many years it covers, but it's normally taken to be at least 10 years and sometimes as many as 20; either way, 1999 definitely falls within the turn of the 21st century.
Mac users claimed that, yeah. Never mind that Mac OS didn't even get basic features like memory protection or preemptive multitasking till 2001 -- it had neither in 1995, let alone 1988. (Win95 had both, of course.)
The reason Apple could auto-detect floppy disks is that Apple controlled the hardware. RTFA if you can't guess why that's significant.
Right, and then people would post comments to Slashdot saying "Why does Windows always check the floppy drive when it boots? It shouldn't do anything like that unless I tell it to. Linux boots faster because it doesn't do pointless tests like this. This is why Windows sucks."
This was not a crucial feature. It wasn't even an important feature. Why slow down everyone's boot time just to save a little time later on for the minority who occasionally tried to access a floppy drive when there wasn't a disk in it?
I know its not the msway but a would regkey you could manually set have been that hard?
It would have taken time and resources. Which other feature would you like them to have dropped so they could implement a regkey that maybe a few thousand people worldwide would ever even have known about, for a non-critical feature relating to hardware that was already on the verge of obsolescence?
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I can't remember many examples of this.
Doom 2, perhaps ... but then people were specifically complaining that the game didn't have as many new weapons as they'd hoped it might. They weren't upset that the basic gameplay was the same.
Generally this is because the changes that are made are not to the things the fans thought were wrong with the first game.
For example, look at the complaints around Deus Ex: Invisible War. What did people complain about? Primarily the user interface, the unified ammo, and the tiny environments. Were any of these things that had been wrong with the first game? No; hence complaints about "fixing things that weren't broken". There was plenty broken in the original Deus Ex, and fans would have been perfectly happy with those things being fixed in the sequel. Unfortunately most of them (such as the game balance) were actually made worse by the changes.
Again, look at System Shock. Observe the magnitude of the changes in System Shock 2. It's a very different game in many ways; the interface is fundamentally different, making it less of a traditional 3D RPG and more of an FPS. Do you see fans griping about the changes? Nope -- mostly they loved it, because while it was different, it was just as deep -- and a lot of the changes, such as the new control scheme, were clearly improvements. Then compare those same fans' reactions to Bioshock ...
Only n00bs want to read them in an Office clone. Real hackers read Office 2007 files by pulling the XML out of the ZIP container and reading that. In emacs or vi.
(Cue Yorkshiremen with comments about TECO, cat, raw binary, and how their fathers used to beat them with an abacus.)
Ugh. Why do people write Python one-liners? The whole point of Python is that it's nicely formatted and readable. If you want one-liners, you should choose a language that was designed for writing one-liners in.
=> Styx's heaviest throes Yerevan's seamen pecks moll
Literally half the length, and the logic is easier to follow. Save Python for jobs where it's the right tool.
Where can I find this? It isn't showing up on Google, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about it.
The best attack on MD5 I can find is the well-known ability to generate two different documents with the same checksum. But that one doesn't allow you to choose what the checksum will be, so it's no use in this case: if you didn't create the legitimate package, you can't create a malicious one with the same MD5 unless you have a better attack.
So, of the people who are currently going frothy at the lips with outrage at this game, exactly how many of them have actually seen it, let alone played it?
Something tells me this is the usual rent-a-rage that the conservative press wheels out whenever they get tired of being outraged at immigration and welfare.
Yes -- in 1990.
And that's the point -- both absolute pacifists and absolute militarists are wrong most of the time.
Yeah, they're common in every single country that participates in the World Series.
No, that would be because open-source games tend to have poor artwork, horrible animation, tediously derivative gameplay and level design, and no plot.
For some reason, people with talent in these areas and an interest in giving their work away for free tend to concentrate on making mods for commercial games. Perhaps it's because they want their work to be free-as-in-beer rather than free-as-in-copyleft.
What? Dynamic shadows were bleeding-edge about 5 years ago. Doom 3 has run fine on run-of-the-mill hardware since about 2006.
You seem to be mistaking "OS" for "desktop OS". Many other devices run Linux -- particularly many of those routers people use to get on the Internet these days.
If being open-source made you less secure, you'd think those would be a big target for malware, given how they're all directly connected to the network, usually always on even if the computers behind them are switched off, and basically never updated. But somehow the crackers still go after Windows instead.
Oh, please. Retelling an existing story in a new way is something humans have been doing for as long as stories have existed! It's a basic practice of all cultures.
Are you really going to argue that (for example) Shakespeare's Hamlet would have been better if he'd called it something different to avoid "raping" the memories of the fans of the previous Hamlet play he was reimagining?
If you don't like the new version, the old version still exists. Your memory is only "raped" if you choose to mess with it yourself in your desperation to find something to be outraged about.
Indeed; and, reading TFA, I observe that the main reason they're preferring Scala on the backend is that it's made it easier for them to improve the architecture, by (for example) providing better concurrency primitives than Ruby did at the time they started switching.
No reason for Ruby fanboys to get defensive over anything here; they make it clear that they still love Ruby for front-end stuff, but that Scala works better for a different kind of task.
Indeed. On browsers where every tab runs in the same process (*cough*Firefox*cough*) this means that all web browsing halts for an eternity on every Slashdot page load. Nicely nullifying one of the main advantages of tabs (set a bunch of pages loading in the background while you read).
Mind you, other sites are just as bad. The BBC website stopped being usable when they started insisting on loading multiple Flash media players on every single article. Guys, if I wanted to watch TV I'd switch on the TV. (Mental note: must get round to hacking blacklist functionality into Flashblock, which irritatingly only does whitelists ATM.)
It would be so much easier if the Unicode folks had thought to classify all their characters for us, so we could tell at a glance what was a printable character and what was a control character that might do undesirable things. They could have stuck all that information in some kind of Character Database. Then, I dunno, maybe the Perl folks would have been able to figure out some way of making that information available to programmers, possibly even as a straightforward extension to regular expression syntax. Then it might have been feasible to extend Slash so it supported more characters safely!
Ah, who am I kidding.
Just about everything in version 2. Version 1 was decent, if nothing special. Version 2 simply doesn't work properly; everything's locked away behind a clunky and tedious web interface, and once you get a guest running it's buggy -- it couldn't even scroll windows right in a Windows guest when I tried it.
That's round about when I jumped ship to VirtualBox, which is (a) also free, (b) Free too, and (c) works properly. Of course, it doesn't run on FreeBSD...
Great if you can get it to work. Which is still sometimes non-trivial on Linux, despite much progress in recent years.
No.
And it's not just the free software community that is obsessed with boot time. Microsoft is too; that's why Windows goes to a desktop as quickly as possible, before it's even finished loading everything. (Of course, they have even more reason to care, since you so often need to reboot Windows to install updates.)
By making a game based on your own creative ideas, instead of slavishly cloning someone else's ideas.
Look at Counter-Strike, for example. Arguably the most popular online FPS of all time. Observe how un-similar the gameplay is to Quake or Unreal Tournament. That was innovation.
What will the next innovation be? I don't know. If I did know, it wouldn't be innovative when it came. But I'll know it when I see it, because it will be something that's new and exciting, and it won't just be more of the same gameplay we've been seeing since the invention of modern deathmatch gameplay nearly two decades ago.
Because they'd almost certainly be ignored.
And reasonably so. The people putting their free time into making this game are making the game they personally want to play. They don't owe anyone anything, and there's no reason why they should change their game just because someone says they should.
Conversely, the rest of us have no obligation to admire their work or to heap unconditional praise on it. We're into freedom, right? The freedom to contribute, criticise, enjoy, or ignore, as each individual prefers.
If we think it's fun, we can say so, and I'm sure the developers are encouraged that so many people are doing just that. But likewise, if we think it's derivative, then we have every right to say so and move on without contributing whatever ideas we ourselves might have.
Your maths is spot on, but your English comprehension could use some work. "The turn of a century" means "the period of a few years before and after the start of a century". There's no standard definition of how many years it covers, but it's normally taken to be at least 10 years and sometimes as many as 20; either way, 1999 definitely falls within the turn of the 21st century.
No downside?! What do you call all these damn locusts with scorpions' tails, then?
So you say. I have yet to meet such a person, even among people who've been using Macs since the 1980s.
Mac users claimed that, yeah. Never mind that Mac OS didn't even get basic features like memory protection or preemptive multitasking till 2001 -- it had neither in 1995, let alone 1988. (Win95 had both, of course.)
The reason Apple could auto-detect floppy disks is that Apple controlled the hardware. RTFA if you can't guess why that's significant.
Right, and then people would post comments to Slashdot saying "Why does Windows always check the floppy drive when it boots? It shouldn't do anything like that unless I tell it to. Linux boots faster because it doesn't do pointless tests like this. This is why Windows sucks."
This was not a crucial feature. It wasn't even an important feature. Why slow down everyone's boot time just to save a little time later on for the minority who occasionally tried to access a floppy drive when there wasn't a disk in it?
It would have taken time and resources. Which other feature would you like them to have dropped so they could implement a regkey that maybe a few thousand people worldwide would ever even have known about, for a non-critical feature relating to hardware that was already on the verge of obsolescence?