As far as I know, all information Google stores is associated with a cookie on your machine. So deleting the relevant cookie(s)/should/ cause a new one to be generated which has no association with the old profile Google has stored.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
There have already been quite a few video games which make the player depressed as a part of their storytelling. The most obvious example is Final Fantasy VII, where Aeris dies. If nothing else, this certainly shows that it is possible for someone to empathize with characters portrayed in a game, and I would assert that tragic events occurring to its characters is the most common way any fiction book depresses the reader.
Another example might be Planescape: Torment, which uses a question as the inspiration for its plot: "what can change the heart of a man?" While the effectiveness of the storytelling can certainly be debated, it is clear that the subject, at least, is a fairly deep and potentially depressing one.
It is perhaps also worth mentioning, for those who have not read the article, that Dirda does concede that games could be art, or perhaps will be considered art in the future:
Dirda said the game showed him that video games "obviously have artistic value" and will likely become more of a recognized art form.
A small amount of scandals and people like you who swallow any sensationalist piece of news out there really cast things in an unfair light.
I think the problem is that the scandals get press coverage while good science typically does not. For example, there was a lot of talk a few years back about how the peppered moth study was flawed. However, there was almost no coverage of a later study which verified the claims of the original.
Another related reason is that the studies which the public is most often exposed to are funded by biased parties: political organizations, pharmaceutical companies, etc. In these cases, even if the data is valid it is often not presented in an unbiased manner. And I suspect all of these factors are reinforced by our seemingly natural tendency to believe conspiracy theories.
Some late generation DOS games (including one of the Ultimas, I believe) required 625k or more of free memory to run. And in a system with 640k of total memory, getting this much contiguous free space was extremely difficult. The order in which TSRs were loaded had a significant impact on how much memory the system was left with, himem.sys and emm386 had to be configured correctly, etc. In hindsight, it's somewhat interesting that installing/running DOS games often required what today might be considered hacker-level system knowledge.
1. I don't click through ads. Ever. If I visit a website it is to use the functionality of that website, not purchase a loosely related product. 2. If ads are sufficiently annoying, I won't return to a website. There are a number of websites I actually like that I no longer visit because the advertisements became too obtrusive or annoying, and for one reason or another, blocking them didn't work terribly well. 3. By blocking ads I am reducing my own level of annoyance and therefore increasing the chance I will return to that site to view its content. At the same time, I am not depriving the webmaster of any revenue because I wouldn't have clicked through the ads anyway.
Also, there are a few websites I visit where the advertisements are annoying to the point where I'd normally just stop visiting the site but which don't have a suitable replacement. Google Groups is in this category. Its ad bar is so large as to make viewing news extremely difficult on lower resolution monitors (the ad bar is larger than the tree view pane and almost larger than the content pane at 1024x768). If an ad-free usenet aggregator existed I'd switch in a heartbeat. And for the record, I can't just use a standalone newsreader--port 119 has been blocked by my IT department.
I keep a GMail account mostly to receive large attachments from others. But it's too limited to by my primary email interface. With Thunderbird/IMAP/procmail I can create a hierarchy of folders by topic and intelligently route new mail into those folders, read/write email and news offline, and still search, etc, as GMail allows me to do. GMail could add these features (all but offline support, obviously), but Google's focus on search as the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything suggests that they don't consider it a priority. And that's fine... I'll just keep using Thunderbird.
When I first heard of Auto Assault I envisioned it as something like the Car Wars RPG. Instead, the game was a fairly straightforward RPG action game with cars as avatars. I think the game would have held my interest longer if there had been more customization options, more complex missions (multi-player 'convoy' escort quests, infiltration quests involving both time in and out of the vehicle, etc), and a way to get out of the darn vehicle. In short: I don't want to be a car, I just want to drive one.
Well yeah. But the D20 system seems to be developing towards something that suits CRPGs more easily, and computers can handle a few extra rolls quite easily. It's special cases and inconsistencies they stink at. What I don't like about the 3e+ rules for D&D is that they made the dice rolling fairly consistent, which is nice for both players and computers, but the process still feels a bit complex for P&P and at the same time lacks the perks available to a CRPG system (more authenticity). By the same token, I've used other systems (those I mentioned above) that were easier to comprehend, more fun to use, and felt more authentic. I'll concede, however, that D&D is pretty much stuck with the broad strokes of its ruleset because that's what makes it D&D to many people: AC and HP for combat and a class-oriented design. I think WoTC is likely afraid to change things too much for fear of alienating its playerbase (though quick successive edition releases isn't helping there either--the campaign I'm involved in has no plans of moving to 4e).
Guess I'll have to wait and see, but I don't really see the point of maintaining a class-based system if there is little distinction between the classes. Why not just give up and move to a skill-based system? Also, your description of how AC is implemented seems a bit too simple for my tastes. I'd prefer if armor provided a defense rating and a damage mitigation rating, so a physical attack could be broken into three checks: did the attack penetrate the player's defenses, if so, did it penetrate his armor, and if so, mitigate damage based on the armor rating and possibly the type of attack. I know AD&D kind of worked this way, bu the math behind it was way to screwy to be workable.
I guess we'll never see it in D&D, but one of the RPG combat systems I like best (of the RPGs I've played) is the one in Top Secret. Each body part has its own hit points and could be individually attacked, injured, and disabled. RoleMaster is quite good as well, and the critical tables it uses are a lot of fun. Both provide more detail than D&D and do so in a simple manner so things flow smoothly, making combat more a role playing experience and less a series of dice rolls. The new 3e+ D&D rules do go a long way towards simplifying combat by making things far more consistent (which is good), but the result also feels inexplicably bland. Or perhaps I just have some nostalgia for the older rulesets.
It depends on the type of gameplay you enjoy, more than anything else. WoW is an all-grind game that does a decent job of making the pre-endgame grinding fun through quests and such. So if you like 1-10 you should like 70-80. But endgame totally changes things (or it did when I played). Once you hit endgame there are no more soloable quests, and the instance content that people actually play is geared for raids. There are good 5-man instances, but they're more difficult and the drops are worse so people don't like to do them. Battlegrounds is where I spend most of my time at endgame (partially because of the reduced time commitment they require), but PvP is very gear-dependent and I simply couldn't compete with the run of the mill stuff I had.
As alternatives, I suggest Guild Wars as a fun replacement with no monthly fee, or LotRO if you prefer a classic MMOG experience (Guild Wars is almost entirely instanced), but want a more relaxed, less raid-oriented atmosphere.
The performance of the "patched SD" mentioned near the bottom show SD to be slightly better than CFS on the test system. However, a few FPS one way or the another really amounts to testing "noise" -- it doesn't mean anything. If there are any problems with 3D, it obviously isn't common to all systems, which suggests to me that the scheduler isn't the problem. Not unless the problem systems have some background job running that the others don't, which is messing up CFS in some way (and this seems unlikely).
Environment Minister David Parker drew public attention to the company in December when he test drove a Land Rover around Parliament's forecourt that was powered by Aquaflow's blend of algae biofuel and diesel (5% algae fuel and 95% conventional fuel) just a year after it was developed.
The wording here isn't clear to me whether the 5% algae mix was simply to get it to run in a Land Rover, if it was an early demo and that's the best they could do at the time, or if only 5% of this new jet fuel will actually be derived from algae. I imagine this small quantity would still make a substantial dent in overall yearly fossil fuel consumption by the airline industry, but I'm not sure I'd call a 5% mix "bio-fuel."
And within a decade, the two high-speed ISPs in your area won't let any OS that hasn't been digitally signed by Microsoft Corp or Apple Inc anywhere near its last mile because free or cracked operating systems fail its Trusted Network Connect [slashdot.org] tests.
So corporate customers running UNIX will, what, pay extra for the right to internet access from their servers? What about academic institutions? Or cellphones and the myriad other devices that connect to the internet for one reason other another? What about the individuals for whom the trusted verification process mysteriously fails?
As disturbing as your suggestion is, I think it must be considered in light of recent trends regarding draconian technology, Microsoft, etc. For example, despite the RIAA's best attempts, the traditional sales model for music publishers seems to be crumbling. Also, a surprising number of normal people simply aren't upgrading to MS Vista. In fact, I don't know a single person who has done so (even considering the geek circles I travel in, I was never able to say that for any prior MS operating system). And Net Neutrality is being defended to the point where it may actually be preserved. In short, I think there's a chance that the inertia of popular practice concerning the internet will simply defy attempts to restrict it in such a manner, unless the new technology can be integrated seamlessly and flawlessly into all relevant devices. And given the success of IPv6 so far (ie. essentially none), this doesn't seem terribly likely.
P.S. I'm not suggesting that IPv6 is bad in any way. It's simply an example of a supposedly seamless but all-encompassing change that is taking a (not so?) surprising amount of time to gain traction.
It's just another algorithmic approach to combinatorial optimization with centralized management, which till I see a Big O notation, and some papers, I withhold comment on the computer model.
There has been a ton of research for applying ant colony optimization to the traveling salesman problem (I have a book on the subject), but last I heard the swarm approach still wasn't as fast as the some of the traditional heuristic algorithms. It's incredibly simple from a conceptual standpoint and seems very promising, but unless things have changed recently, we still have a ways to go before it's truly the best computational means for finding a solution to these problems.
My first thought: I have noted throughout my career that the worst IT people are those who are in it for the money or treat it as just a job. I think that's true of just about every career other than sales (where being in it for the money can actually help). Pursuing a career that you aren't passionate about is also a good way to ensure a mid-life crisis.
Good luck. Now the guide menu has ads on the top and bottom of the screen, and the ad bar on the bottom highlights just like a channel, making per-channel scrolling difficult. I think the Guide display is down to around 6 lines per page, with the rest as ads. It's almost as bad as the broadcast channel guide. Which reminds me... why are the Guide entries often wrong? Are the broadcasters not notifying Comcast or whoever that their programming has changed? The auto-record features don't work so well if the thing you're attempting to record never airs.
People can be idiots, but from what you are telling me, I think those drivers are acting somewhat rationally. Their behavior is a bit extreme, but their thought process is that they have identified you as a slow driver and they don't want to be behind slow drivers.
I disagree. In my experience, these are the drivers that don't look past the car immediately in front of them. They are also the drivers that honk in traffic jams. They may think they're driving faster, but all they're actually doing is driving erratically. Interestingly, such behavior is also the cause of congestion bubbles, from the interaction of vehicles with different braking and acceleration rates. In my experience, it's the quick braking and acceleration that has the most dramatic effect, since it is more likely to force other nearby drivers to react.
With the decentralized nature of usenet, I'd think it would be the ideal forum for posting such things. Even if most people today have never heard of it, for some unfathomable reason.
WoW is still an RPG, where gear and character builds can overcome skill. It's a horrible choice for competative play, especially with sponsors promoting the 'skill' of the victor.
Exactly. Guild Wars, however, was designed with competitive play in mind. Is it just visibility that has prevented sponsors from approaching the top Guild Wars teams?
Soon enough they'll both offer fiber connections to your house and offer you TV, Phone and internet.
I've got a friend who was lucky enough to be living in one of the initial roll-out areas for this service. If it's offered near me I'll switch in a heartbeat.
While most DSL providers don't bother trying to track the amount of data you're moving through your connection, they are overselling the available bandwidth based on an average of all users in an area (connections to the DSLAM in the CO or RT) just like any other provider.
Good point. But isn't the theoretical limit of cable relatively low? That is, doesn't a cable loop typically top out at under 10MB/s, given that most of the bandwidth is reserved for television, etc? I suppose the correct choice really depends on a lot of variables: distance from the CO, the number of neighbors with the service, etc. That said, it still seems like cable providers (particularly Comcast) tend to be more restrictive in their rules than DSL providers. For this reason alone I'd be inclined to choose DSL if the cost/benefit weren't horribly skewed in favor of cable broadband (and that certainly isn't the case here... I live about 3 blocks from the local phone switch).
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, all information Google stores is associated with a cookie on your machine. So deleting the relevant cookie(s) /should/ cause a new one to be generated which has no association with the old profile Google has stored.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
There have already been quite a few video games which make the player depressed as a part of their storytelling. The most obvious example is Final Fantasy VII, where Aeris dies. If nothing else, this certainly shows that it is possible for someone to empathize with characters portrayed in a game, and I would assert that tragic events occurring to its characters is the most common way any fiction book depresses the reader.
Another example might be Planescape: Torment, which uses a question as the inspiration for its plot: "what can change the heart of a man?" While the effectiveness of the storytelling can certainly be debated, it is clear that the subject, at least, is a fairly deep and potentially depressing one.
It is perhaps also worth mentioning, for those who have not read the article, that Dirda does concede that games could be art, or perhaps will be considered art in the future:
Dirda said the game showed him that video games "obviously have artistic value" and will likely become more of a recognized art form.
A small amount of scandals and people like you who swallow any sensationalist piece of news out there really cast things in an unfair light.
I think the problem is that the scandals get press coverage while good science typically does not. For example, there was a lot of talk a few years back about how the peppered moth study was flawed. However, there was almost no coverage of a later study which verified the claims of the original.
Another related reason is that the studies which the public is most often exposed to are funded by biased parties: political organizations, pharmaceutical companies, etc. In these cases, even if the data is valid it is often not presented in an unbiased manner. And I suspect all of these factors are reinforced by our seemingly natural tendency to believe conspiracy theories.
Some late generation DOS games (including one of the Ultimas, I believe) required 625k or more of free memory to run. And in a system with 640k of total memory, getting this much contiguous free space was extremely difficult. The order in which TSRs were loaded had a significant impact on how much memory the system was left with, himem.sys and emm386 had to be configured correctly, etc. In hindsight, it's somewhat interesting that installing/running DOS games often required what today might be considered hacker-level system knowledge.
1. I don't click through ads. Ever. If I visit a website it is to use the functionality of that website, not purchase a loosely related product.
2. If ads are sufficiently annoying, I won't return to a website. There are a number of websites I actually like that I no longer visit because the advertisements became too obtrusive or annoying, and for one reason or another, blocking them didn't work terribly well.
3. By blocking ads I am reducing my own level of annoyance and therefore increasing the chance I will return to that site to view its content. At the same time, I am not depriving the webmaster of any revenue because I wouldn't have clicked through the ads anyway.
Also, there are a few websites I visit where the advertisements are annoying to the point where I'd normally just stop visiting the site but which don't have a suitable replacement. Google Groups is in this category. Its ad bar is so large as to make viewing news extremely difficult on lower resolution monitors (the ad bar is larger than the tree view pane and almost larger than the content pane at 1024x768). If an ad-free usenet aggregator existed I'd switch in a heartbeat. And for the record, I can't just use a standalone newsreader--port 119 has been blocked by my IT department.
I keep a GMail account mostly to receive large attachments from others. But it's too limited to by my primary email interface. With Thunderbird/IMAP/procmail I can create a hierarchy of folders by topic and intelligently route new mail into those folders, read/write email and news offline, and still search, etc, as GMail allows me to do. GMail could add these features (all but offline support, obviously), but Google's focus on search as the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything suggests that they don't consider it a priority. And that's fine... I'll just keep using Thunderbird.
When I first heard of Auto Assault I envisioned it as something like the Car Wars RPG. Instead, the game was a fairly straightforward RPG action game with cars as avatars. I think the game would have held my interest longer if there had been more customization options, more complex missions (multi-player 'convoy' escort quests, infiltration quests involving both time in and out of the vehicle, etc), and a way to get out of the darn vehicle. In short: I don't want to be a car, I just want to drive one.
1. Send it via certified mail to yourself and leave the envelope sealed when it arrives.
2. Post it to Usenet.
There are other more official options as well, but both of these should be sufficient to associate a date with something.
Well yeah. But the D20 system seems to be developing towards something that suits CRPGs more easily, and computers can handle a few extra rolls quite easily. It's special cases and inconsistencies they stink at. What I don't like about the 3e+ rules for D&D is that they made the dice rolling fairly consistent, which is nice for both players and computers, but the process still feels a bit complex for P&P and at the same time lacks the perks available to a CRPG system (more authenticity). By the same token, I've used other systems (those I mentioned above) that were easier to comprehend, more fun to use, and felt more authentic. I'll concede, however, that D&D is pretty much stuck with the broad strokes of its ruleset because that's what makes it D&D to many people: AC and HP for combat and a class-oriented design. I think WoTC is likely afraid to change things too much for fear of alienating its playerbase (though quick successive edition releases isn't helping there either--the campaign I'm involved in has no plans of moving to 4e).
Guess I'll have to wait and see, but I don't really see the point of maintaining a class-based system if there is little distinction between the classes. Why not just give up and move to a skill-based system? Also, your description of how AC is implemented seems a bit too simple for my tastes. I'd prefer if armor provided a defense rating and a damage mitigation rating, so a physical attack could be broken into three checks: did the attack penetrate the player's defenses, if so, did it penetrate his armor, and if so, mitigate damage based on the armor rating and possibly the type of attack. I know AD&D kind of worked this way, bu the math behind it was way to screwy to be workable.
I guess we'll never see it in D&D, but one of the RPG combat systems I like best (of the RPGs I've played) is the one in Top Secret. Each body part has its own hit points and could be individually attacked, injured, and disabled. RoleMaster is quite good as well, and the critical tables it uses are a lot of fun. Both provide more detail than D&D and do so in a simple manner so things flow smoothly, making combat more a role playing experience and less a series of dice rolls. The new 3e+ D&D rules do go a long way towards simplifying combat by making things far more consistent (which is good), but the result also feels inexplicably bland. Or perhaps I just have some nostalgia for the older rulesets.
From the article (emphasis mine): "... thieves have stolen a three-tonne meteorite..."
It depends on the type of gameplay you enjoy, more than anything else. WoW is an all-grind game that does a decent job of making the pre-endgame grinding fun through quests and such. So if you like 1-10 you should like 70-80. But endgame totally changes things (or it did when I played). Once you hit endgame there are no more soloable quests, and the instance content that people actually play is geared for raids. There are good 5-man instances, but they're more difficult and the drops are worse so people don't like to do them. Battlegrounds is where I spend most of my time at endgame (partially because of the reduced time commitment they require), but PvP is very gear-dependent and I simply couldn't compete with the run of the mill stuff I had.
As alternatives, I suggest Guild Wars as a fun replacement with no monthly fee, or LotRO if you prefer a classic MMOG experience (Guild Wars is almost entirely instanced), but want a more relaxed, less raid-oriented atmosphere.
The performance of the "patched SD" mentioned near the bottom show SD to be slightly better than CFS on the test system. However, a few FPS one way or the another really amounts to testing "noise" -- it doesn't mean anything. If there are any problems with 3D, it obviously isn't common to all systems, which suggests to me that the scheduler isn't the problem. Not unless the problem systems have some background job running that the others don't, which is messing up CFS in some way (and this seems unlikely).
From the article:
Environment Minister David Parker drew public attention to the company in December when he test drove a Land Rover around Parliament's forecourt that was powered by Aquaflow's blend of algae biofuel and diesel (5% algae fuel and 95% conventional fuel) just a year after it was developed.
The wording here isn't clear to me whether the 5% algae mix was simply to get it to run in a Land Rover, if it was an early demo and that's the best they could do at the time, or if only 5% of this new jet fuel will actually be derived from algae. I imagine this small quantity would still make a substantial dent in overall yearly fossil fuel consumption by the airline industry, but I'm not sure I'd call a 5% mix "bio-fuel."
And within a decade, the two high-speed ISPs in your area won't let any OS that hasn't been digitally signed by Microsoft Corp or Apple Inc anywhere near its last mile because free or cracked operating systems fail its Trusted Network Connect [slashdot.org] tests.
So corporate customers running UNIX will, what, pay extra for the right to internet access from their servers? What about academic institutions? Or cellphones and the myriad other devices that connect to the internet for one reason other another? What about the individuals for whom the trusted verification process mysteriously fails?
As disturbing as your suggestion is, I think it must be considered in light of recent trends regarding draconian technology, Microsoft, etc. For example, despite the RIAA's best attempts, the traditional sales model for music publishers seems to be crumbling. Also, a surprising number of normal people simply aren't upgrading to MS Vista. In fact, I don't know a single person who has done so (even considering the geek circles I travel in, I was never able to say that for any prior MS operating system). And Net Neutrality is being defended to the point where it may actually be preserved. In short, I think there's a chance that the inertia of popular practice concerning the internet will simply defy attempts to restrict it in such a manner, unless the new technology can be integrated seamlessly and flawlessly into all relevant devices. And given the success of IPv6 so far (ie. essentially none), this doesn't seem terribly likely.
P.S. I'm not suggesting that IPv6 is bad in any way. It's simply an example of a supposedly seamless but all-encompassing change that is taking a (not so?) surprising amount of time to gain traction.
It's just another algorithmic approach to combinatorial optimization with centralized management, which till I see a Big O notation, and some papers, I withhold comment on the computer model.
There has been a ton of research for applying ant colony optimization to the traveling salesman problem (I have a book on the subject), but last I heard the swarm approach still wasn't as fast as the some of the traditional heuristic algorithms. It's incredibly simple from a conceptual standpoint and seems very promising, but unless things have changed recently, we still have a ways to go before it's truly the best computational means for finding a solution to these problems.
Are you suggesting that NASA has approved the use of Windows on mission critical systems?
My first thought:
I have noted throughout my career that the worst IT people are those who are in it for the money or treat it as just a job.
I think that's true of just about every career other than sales (where being in it for the money can actually help). Pursuing a career that you aren't passionate about is also a good way to ensure a mid-life crisis.
Good luck. Now the guide menu has ads on the top and bottom of the screen, and the ad bar on the bottom highlights just like a channel, making per-channel scrolling difficult. I think the Guide display is down to around 6 lines per page, with the rest as ads. It's almost as bad as the broadcast channel guide. Which reminds me... why are the Guide entries often wrong? Are the broadcasters not notifying Comcast or whoever that their programming has changed? The auto-record features don't work so well if the thing you're attempting to record never airs.
People can be idiots, but from what you are telling me, I think those drivers are acting somewhat rationally. Their behavior is a bit extreme, but their thought process is that they have identified you as a slow driver and they don't want to be behind slow drivers.
I disagree. In my experience, these are the drivers that don't look past the car immediately in front of them. They are also the drivers that honk in traffic jams. They may think they're driving faster, but all they're actually doing is driving erratically. Interestingly, such behavior is also the cause of congestion bubbles, from the interaction of vehicles with different braking and acceleration rates. In my experience, it's the quick braking and acceleration that has the most dramatic effect, since it is more likely to force other nearby drivers to react.
With the decentralized nature of usenet, I'd think it would be the ideal forum for posting such things. Even if most people today have never heard of it, for some unfathomable reason.
WoW is still an RPG, where gear and character builds can overcome skill. It's a horrible choice for competative play, especially with sponsors promoting the 'skill' of the victor.
Exactly. Guild Wars, however, was designed with competitive play in mind. Is it just visibility that has prevented sponsors from approaching the top Guild Wars teams?
Soon enough they'll both offer fiber connections to your house and offer you TV, Phone and internet.
I've got a friend who was lucky enough to be living in one of the initial roll-out areas for this service. If it's offered near me I'll switch in a heartbeat.
While most DSL providers don't bother trying to track the amount of data you're moving through your connection, they are overselling the available bandwidth based on an average of all users in an area (connections to the DSLAM in the CO or RT) just like any other provider.
Good point. But isn't the theoretical limit of cable relatively low? That is, doesn't a cable loop typically top out at under 10MB/s, given that most of the bandwidth is reserved for television, etc? I suppose the correct choice really depends on a lot of variables: distance from the CO, the number of neighbors with the service, etc. That said, it still seems like cable providers (particularly Comcast) tend to be more restrictive in their rules than DSL providers. For this reason alone I'd be inclined to choose DSL if the cost/benefit weren't horribly skewed in favor of cable broadband (and that certainly isn't the case here... I live about 3 blocks from the local phone switch).
perhaps this should be a marketing point for DSL providers. "DSL: the bandwidth you pay for is really yours."