Re:Receiving Threatening Phone Calls Is Cool?!
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well the way it worked was you told it when you would accept calls. So you could set it for hours you knew you wouldn't be doing stuff important, and could change it at anytime. You also could set it for "any time" which included like 2 in the morning which is great because your mind isn't totally functioned. As for your second complaint, you had the option of turning on or off the "Majestic Greeting" to make it more real. The voice acting was very good in my opinion and sometimes I would get real calls tat I mistook for in-game (this only happened once, cause they asked for the wrong person...). But generally you could tell that it was in-game because there was no room to respond, they were just long monologues (sometimes threatening, but nothing too bad). The game is meant for 18+ so I had no problem with the swearing and such.
Cheers,
jw
Could have been a great game
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I got in on this game when it was in its 2nd episode I think. The pilot was of course quite good but after that each part of an episode got too easy. The cycle became:
1) Watch video
2) Look for clue in video
3) Go to website (or do something else) related to that clue
4) Wait a day in "standby" mode
And so on. At first it was really cool to go through all the conspiracy websites (which I was into anyways before I got into the game) but it got so that you realized these weren't at all central to the game itself.
As the poster themself mentioned, it was pretty damn cool/spooky at times to get calls and voicemails at odd hours. One of them even mentioned coming to my house! I almost looked forward to that...but I suppose that would hvae been too much.
The game was positioned as being for people with normal jobs and outside lives, which explained the relatively short play time increments, but they shouldn't have been so easy. It really could have been such an incredible game, consdiering it used email, video, AIM, phones, and fax machines as elements of play to get you into it...oh well. I think the boxed version would be pretty cool for people without high bandwidth connections like me who mised clues because so many frames were dropped in videos.
Sir ACC is one of (if not the most) my favorite authors (I paid $38 in a bidding war on eBay for a first edition paperback of Childhood's End). So I almost had a heart attack when I found out his dog's name is Pepsi because that's why my dog's name is;) Of course, his is a Chihuaha, but I suppose that's forgiveable since he's so damn brilliant.
Nice dude. Looks quite thought out and organized. One hopes that the DOJ doesn't simply ignore it as the speak of some "Linux freak" or somesuch nonsense. They really need to take this seriously and hopefully the rest of us can (or I should say, "will") do someting similar. There are an insane number of/. readers who should be able to influence decisions such as this. There's got to be something that 1million+ people can do! (That's just a guess, I'm member 444K and something, and I have no doubt that I wasn't the last to join).
There couldn't possibly me any other computer geeks out there with bad handwriting;) My signature has become the first letter of my first name and then a somewhat recognizable first letter to my last name (which has 8 letters in it) followed by a line. This is probably why my CS professor has started more and more to require assignments to be typed. Why anyone would turn in a *written* assignment anyhow is beyond me:P
Why should the language be constrained? In theory, AI researchers are trying to get computers to communicate (in certain aspects) naturally with humans. Constraining the language, by defintion, doesn't allow the human users to use their *natural* language to communicate and so might as well just use the artificial "languages" used for text based RPGs. Sure, the computer may fool the human, but possibly because the program could use the artificial language easier than human can.
Sweet, it has a name! Of course my idea wasn't quite as complex and has many more limits than what you said. But its pretty nifty to know that this is an actual technique, used in some form another.
I once saw a bumper sticker that said "A University needs a football program as much as a fish needs a bicycle." That says it all. I honestly don't have references to back this up, but as far as I know most athletic programs *lose* money for the school (I'm certain at UNR, where I attend, they do) but nonetheless they give a name for the school that helps attracts quality professors. At least one would hope.
Places like MIT, Caltech, and Harvard are the few places with incredible academic programs but virtually nonexistant athletic programs (the popular stuff I mean, that makes it to ESPN) that can charge large sums of money because the education itself is so good. How many times do you hear about a company spinning off of an MIT research program. Meanwhile, UNLV had an incredible basketball program which most likely attracted students and professors to the school. However, last I check, the Computer Science program isn't even Accredited there!
On the related note of fractals and their generation; A few years ago while playing around with GWBASIC (!!!) on a Tandy 1000 Color I discovered you could generate sierpinksi gadgets (there's a picture of a 3D one that I managed to find at http://www.angelfire.com/mo3/mysteriesofscience/ga mes.html) by choosing 3 coordinates on the screen (for the vertices) and then choosing a random point somewhere else. Then, choosing between 3 random numbers (or anything that has 3 equally probable events) and plotting the point halfway between the current point and the vertex corresponding to the chosen number, a sierpinski gadget slowly "fades" in.
To make it look even better, you can choose a color for each vertex. I also found you can do similar things with other shapes (pentagons, squares, etc.) Perhaps this algorithm is a well known way to generate the Sierpinksi Gadget. The amazing thing is how *small* the code is!
pseudocode (possibly with mistakes...its been a while)
Sierpinski
Choose 3 equidistant points on the screen: {x[0],y[0]},{x[1],y[1]},{x[2],y[2]}
Choose random coordinate on screen (x,y)
while no user input
choose random number n from {0,1,2}
plot ((x+x[n]/2), (y+y[n])/2))
loop
Why is this only rated a 2? This seems to be the most relevant posting yet, considering that it actually clarifies what the license is saying, rather than how people have chosen to see it. Why is this article even here actually? Yesterday's posting should have killed the issue (somebody else already posted a link to the actual EULA in the comments).
Re:It's not like they haven't announced the patch
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1
What do you think the patch is for? Even Slashdotters' much-adored Apache software isn't immune to the occasional oversight. The difference is that, as yet, almost everyone who runs Apache is a responsible administrator who already knows the importance of keeping things up-to-date.
Amazing to think that something other than Microsoft products could possibly have bugs! This just rocks my world. Really though, its good to see someone who can acknowledge that the mighty *n*x OSs are not flawless. Granted, Linux has proved to me enourmously more stable than Windows in most instances, it is by no means perfect, nor are the applications that run on it (and the other UNIX variants).
I had my phase of "Microsoft is the evil empire, pumping out more and more shoddy code every day" until I actually became a Windows developer (hey, go where the money is) and have found that programs that crash aren't the fault of Microsoft, but rather oversights on my part. Naturally, since most programmers can write bug-free code to start with, I'm obviously in the minority here. Maybe I'm just not good enough to write code that uses some ridiculously obscure and untested API call so I can proclaim "Ah ha! You're in for it now M$!"
Really folks, Linux and *BSD (and various other variante) are excellent and well crafted OSs but the average (and not *necessarily* unintelligent) user likes to use Microsoft products for the same reason that makes AOL the most popular ISP (or close to it) around. John L User doesn't like to have to edit.rc and.conf files all day long so that they're video card and PCI cards will work correctly with their OS of choice. Anyhow, now that I've gone way off topic here I essentially wanted to say that I agree with the poster that said that Microsoft is doing all it can to make people aware of the bug (go figure, its a buffer overflow problem, that *never* happens...especially never ever in Linux software!) in their webserver and there is no excuse to be an "unconnected" web administrator.
I've been planning for a while (and this would work for anyone with 8 characters in their last time) to get a tatoo of my last name in binary digits in the form of an 8x8 matrix. Thought this would look damn cool. A tad obscure, but hey.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the way it worked was you told it when you would accept calls. So you could set it for hours you knew you wouldn't be doing stuff important, and could change it at anytime. You also could set it for "any time" which included like 2 in the morning which is great because your mind isn't totally functioned. As for your second complaint, you had the option of turning on or off the "Majestic Greeting" to make it more real. The voice acting was very good in my opinion and sometimes I would get real calls tat I mistook for in-game (this only happened once, cause they asked for the wrong person...). But generally you could tell that it was in-game because there was no room to respond, they were just long monologues (sometimes threatening, but nothing too bad). The game is meant for 18+ so I had no problem with the swearing and such.
Cheers,
jw
I got in on this game when it was in its 2nd episode I think. The pilot was of course quite good but after that each part of an episode got too easy. The cycle became:
1) Watch video
2) Look for clue in video
3) Go to website (or do something else) related to that clue
4) Wait a day in "standby" mode
And so on. At first it was really cool to go through all the conspiracy websites (which I was into anyways before I got into the game) but it got so that you realized these weren't at all central to the game itself.
As the poster themself mentioned, it was pretty damn cool/spooky at times to get calls and voicemails at odd hours. One of them even mentioned coming to my house! I almost looked forward to that...but I suppose that would hvae been too much.
The game was positioned as being for people with normal jobs and outside lives, which explained the relatively short play time increments, but they shouldn't have been so easy. It really could have been such an incredible game, consdiering it used email, video, AIM, phones, and fax machines as elements of play to get you into it...oh well. I think the boxed version would be pretty cool for people without high bandwidth connections like me who mised clues because so many frames were dropped in videos.
Cheers,
jw
Sir ACC is one of (if not the most) my favorite authors (I paid $38 in a bidding war on eBay for a first edition paperback of Childhood's End). So I almost had a heart attack when I found out his dog's name is Pepsi because that's why my dog's name is ;) Of course, his is a Chihuaha, but I suppose that's forgiveable since he's so damn brilliant.
Cheers,
jw
Nice dude. Looks quite thought out and organized. One hopes that the DOJ doesn't simply ignore it as the speak of some "Linux freak" or somesuch nonsense. They really need to take this seriously and hopefully the rest of us can (or I should say, "will") do someting similar. There are an insane number of /. readers who should be able to influence decisions such as this. There's got to be something that 1million+ people can do! (That's just a guess, I'm member 444K and something, and I have no doubt that I wasn't the last to join).
Cheers,
jw
I was too lazy to do the search while I already had the post window open...0 21 7&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/15/165
Cheers,
jw
I think we get this question about once a month or so. I'd imagine searching through the Ask Slashdot history should turn up something.
Cheers,
jw
There couldn't possibly me any other computer geeks out there with bad handwriting ;) My signature has become the first letter of my first name and then a somewhat recognizable first letter to my last name (which has 8 letters in it) followed by a line. This is probably why my CS professor has started more and more to require assignments to be typed. Why anyone would turn in a *written* assignment anyhow is beyond me :P
Hmm...that was pointless..
Cheers,
jw
Why should the language be constrained? In theory, AI researchers are trying to get computers to communicate (in certain aspects) naturally with humans. Constraining the language, by defintion, doesn't allow the human users to use their *natural* language to communicate and so might as well just use the artificial "languages" used for text based RPGs. Sure, the computer may fool the human, but possibly because the program could use the artificial language easier than human can.
;)
...or I could be talking out my ass
Cheers,
jw
Perhaps they think these are accurate portrayals of us evil Americans :P Big pointy heads and sickly yellow skin. Mmmm...
Cheers,
jw
Sweet, it has a name! Of course my idea wasn't quite as complex and has many more limits than what you said. But its pretty nifty to know that this is an actual technique, used in some form another.
Seriously, I need to get back to work now..
Cheers,
jw
I once saw a bumper sticker that said "A University needs a football program as much as a fish needs a bicycle." That says it all. I honestly don't have references to back this up, but as far as I know most athletic programs *lose* money for the school (I'm certain at UNR, where I attend, they do) but nonetheless they give a name for the school that helps attracts quality professors. At least one would hope.
Places like MIT, Caltech, and Harvard are the few places with incredible academic programs but virtually nonexistant athletic programs (the popular stuff I mean, that makes it to ESPN) that can charge large sums of money because the education itself is so good. How many times do you hear about a company spinning off of an MIT research program. Meanwhile, UNLV had an incredible basketball program which most likely attracted students and professors to the school. However, last I check, the Computer Science program isn't even Accredited there!
I thought I had a point somewhere in there...
Cheers,
jw
On the related note of fractals and their generation; A few years ago while playing around with GWBASIC (!!!) on a Tandy 1000 Color I discovered you could generate sierpinksi gadgets (there's a picture of a 3D one that I managed to find at http://www.angelfire.com/mo3/mysteriesofscience/ga mes.html) by choosing 3 coordinates on the screen (for the vertices) and then choosing a random point somewhere else. Then, choosing between 3 random numbers (or anything that has 3 equally probable events) and plotting the point halfway between the current point and the vertex corresponding to the chosen number, a sierpinski gadget slowly "fades" in.
To make it look even better, you can choose a color for each vertex. I also found you can do similar things with other shapes (pentagons, squares, etc.) Perhaps this algorithm is a well known way to generate the Sierpinksi Gadget. The amazing thing is how *small* the code is!
pseudocode (possibly with mistakes...its been a while)
Sierpinski
Choose 3 equidistant points on the screen: {x[0],y[0]},{x[1],y[1]},{x[2],y[2]}
Choose random coordinate on screen (x,y)
while no user input
choose random number n from {0,1,2}
plot ((x+x[n]/2), (y+y[n])/2))
loop
Cheers,
jw
Why is this only rated a 2? This seems to be the most relevant posting yet, considering that it actually clarifies what the license is saying, rather than how people have chosen to see it. Why is this article even here actually? Yesterday's posting should have killed the issue (somebody else already posted a link to the actual EULA in the comments).
What do you think the patch is for? Even Slashdotters' much-adored Apache software isn't immune to the occasional oversight. The difference is that, as yet, almost everyone who runs Apache is a responsible administrator who already knows the importance of keeping things up-to-date.
.rc and .conf files all day long so that they're video card and PCI cards will work correctly with their OS of choice. Anyhow, now that I've gone way off topic here I essentially wanted to say that I agree with the poster that said that Microsoft is doing all it can to make people aware of the bug (go figure, its a buffer overflow problem, that *never* happens...especially never ever in Linux software!) in their webserver and there is no excuse to be an "unconnected" web administrator.
Amazing to think that something other than Microsoft products could possibly have bugs! This just rocks my world. Really though, its good to see someone who can acknowledge that the mighty *n*x OSs are not flawless. Granted, Linux has proved to me enourmously more stable than Windows in most instances, it is by no means perfect, nor are the applications that run on it (and the other UNIX variants).
I had my phase of "Microsoft is the evil empire, pumping out more and more shoddy code every day" until I actually became a Windows developer (hey, go where the money is) and have found that programs that crash aren't the fault of Microsoft, but rather oversights on my part. Naturally, since most programmers can write bug-free code to start with, I'm obviously in the minority here. Maybe I'm just not good enough to write code that uses some ridiculously obscure and untested API call so I can proclaim "Ah ha! You're in for it now M$!"
Really folks, Linux and *BSD (and various other variante) are excellent and well crafted OSs but the average (and not *necessarily* unintelligent) user likes to use Microsoft products for the same reason that makes AOL the most popular ISP (or close to it) around. John L User doesn't like to have to edit
I've been planning for a while (and this would work for anyone with 8 characters in their last time) to get a tatoo of my last name in binary digits in the form of an 8x8 matrix. Thought this would look damn cool. A tad obscure, but hey.