I wandered onto the site just as it launched, lucky me. I got 2 matches under my belt. The tutorial is really handy for new players. The game servers seemed stable, everything looked pretty good and polished, even though it looks like a 10 year old game.
I was surprised at how nice the social networking stuff was implemented, it seems really easy to see which friends are online and join their games, and see people you recently played with.
I have a similar problem, a google search for my name reveals over 40,000 hits to a gay porn actor. Seriously. My issue is that I simply can't build any reputation as a good blog writer, website designer, etc. because anything to do with my name is buried under gay porn. So far I've been using a pseudonym, but it's hard to get taken seriously doing that.
This isn't anything new, I remember "Fighting Legends" from about 7 years ago which went belly up when Maximum Charisma went bankrupt. It was a bummer for me at the time cus I sunk a lot of time into the game. I recall some rumors about a fan created server being made but I don't think anything came of that.
In general, I don't play a lot of games over and over again, and in the case of MMO's the gameplay is not usually something I enjoy a lot. I play MMO's for the people I play with, and if a game's failing, most those people are leaving already and that just encourages me to stop too.
I own a couple domains that I'm currently using exclusively for e-mail. I used 1and1.com, it provides e-mail forwarding to my g-mail account for 5 bucks a year. Plus, my g-mail account can mask the "from" on outgoing e-mails so it looks like I'm using my domain to everyone on the outside.
There are incredibly good 3d games around that stand the test of time. Personally I've recently been going back and playing some games considered "ugly" by today's graphics standards, and they're still amazing.
Examples like Psychonauts, Shadow of the Collossus, Mario 64, Half-Life, Fahrenheit. These are more "modern" games that don't look very pretty anymore, and yet I've been having a great time playing them and I don't see how even more time past will change that. I suspect some games like Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Portal, etc. will also stand up later on, not for their graphics, but for the unique elements they bring.
According to this German news site (link : http://www.eurogamer.de/article.php?article_id=230133 ), Andrew Green wasn't correct, and Dead Space has not gone through the German classification system yet.
However, knowing their past, I would be surprised if it did pass classification.
I share my bandwidth with 2 other guys, comcast gave us an "unoffical bandwidth cap" of 100 gb's up/down a month, and we've broken that every month so the last week or soof every month our internet is horribly slow.
I track my (not roommates) bandwidth, and I'm around 20gb a month with light video usage, but I can get close to 30+ if I watch a lot of hulu and youtube. I also download full games, and that can pretty quickly destroy my monthly cap, especially with games like Age of Conan which was over 20 gbs.
I had the privilege of taking a quantum mechanics course from Carl Weiman 2 years ago while he was teaching at the University of Colorado. It was by far the best college course I've taken, he had the perfect mix of well versed lecturing with "clicker" quizzes throughout the class, homework that was appropriate for the material, and tests which rewarded understanding of the material and not memorization.
The best part really was that by the end of the course, he gave his lecture on Bose Einstein Condensate which he won the Nobel prize for, and all the students could understand what he was talking about from learning things throughout the semester, it was incredibly rewarding.
Compare that to my next physics courses which were basically applied calculus, except they left out the important part of what the **** any of it meant and how it applied to... anything really. His course overshadowed the rest of my physics courses and in the end, because of the huge disparity in teaching styles, made the rest of my studies quite grating and rather uninteresting.
DPS is not the issue here. The game has many "procs" (each hit has a %chance of adding an effect like poison or extra damage), so after 30 seconds the genders may be doing the same "damage" but the males will have more procs than females.
Also, the game uses combos which require several regular attacks to initiate, a male will be able to fire off combos faster than females, many of which debuff or do additional damage that higher "damage per hit" will not make up for.
I've been following this bug since it was first made apparent by some female assassins. At first we thought it was limited to the assassin class, but they were just the first to notice it, it turns out ALL classes who dual weild weapons are affected by the gender bug.
Here is a youtube video which clearly showcases the difference: http://youtube.com/watch?v=k-C4z-pTrII&feature=related
Players who were in the beta of the game say (while breaking their NDA sadly) that this bug was in the beta for months, but was never addressed.
Funcom's response as of over a week ago was along the lines of "We'll look into it, they should be the same speed". There has been no communication on the bug since then.
I think it's great that this bug is getting mainstream attention now, it's a very serious imbalance that Funcom needs to take responsibility of.
The moon is visible to every person with sight on earth, throw some incredibly pricey coca-cola ads on that baby and put the money toward more space funding.
>>The scariest thing about a criminal prosecution for CP related charges, is to have a "computer illiterate Jury" that can be swayed by a load of crap for a Prosecutor and/or the ignorance of a Detective
^ I completely agree with that, I was worried throughout the trial that I would have to educate the jury on simple terms they used in the trial and how the defendant was found with the CP on his computer. Luckily though, it was pretty much moot, since it was obvious that he intentionally was viewing the material, and even admitted as much to his wife. I believe the only reason they plead not guilty was because of the 2 "creating, producing, making" charges (you can't plead guilty to some and not to other charges in this state). So, it never came to discussing technical details in the end. What annoyed me was that the defending lawyer admitted to not knowing anything about computers, and if he had known even a little, he could've tried to create more reasonable doubt in his closing arguments, his defense in the end was pretty weak.
Actually, the defendant did have some software to completely erase data hidden on a hard drive, but because his wife took the tower halfway through him viewing the stuff, he got caught with it. Plus this was 6 years ago when the guy was running windows 95 on his HP, I don't think he really knew much about this stuff.
My juror experience in a computer forensics trial
on
Windows Forensic Analysis
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Just a couple weeks ago I was a juror in a child pornography case, I was in the unique position of being the only geek on the jury in this case that was all about computer evidence.
The case was simple, the defendant had been caught by his wife viewing the explicit material, the wife took the computer tower to the police along with several floppy disks (this was 6 years ago). The defendant had deleted all the materials, but the forensics expert found the recently viewed material still on the hard drive.
The computer forensics expert detailed how he recovered the material, by imaging the hard drive and recovering the access dates. The floppies also contained some explicit materials, again which were deleted but then recovered, apparently it was impossible to recover the access dates on the floppy files, the forensic expert testified that some of the dates were in fact accurate, and some not, when from my brief overview, it was obvious that most of the dates were innacurate, so basically the forensics expert screwed up and didn't know what he was talking about in regards to the dates recovered from the floppy.
The interesting part of the case was that the defendent was charged with 53 counts of "sexual exploitation of children, possession" (having child porn) and 2 counts of "sexual exploitation of children, creating, making, or preparing". Those last 2 counts were charged because the defendant copied the pictures onto a floppy disk, not because he filmed it or put it on a website, he was making a backup of the files. I'm relieved to say that the jury agreed that making a backup of the files is not the same as "creating, making, or preparing", but we did find the guy guilty for possession.
For anyone thinking about getting into this field, you're likely to have to view a lot of really f*ing disgusting photos, then look at them closely and document everything about those photos. You really are going to need a good stomach for viewing that stuff, I know I probably couldn't do it because just seeing the photos submitted as evidence was enough to almost make me sick, I couldn't imagine having that guys job and have to be exposed to those things all the time.
Anyone else notice at the very very end, when they're at coney island, in the background you see something fall from the sky into the ocean near a boat. To me this is them trying to say the monster came from space, chilled out in the ocean for about a month, then came out and smashed stuff up.
It really makes me sick that we're at the point where people mistake everyday things for bombs and have homeland security called in. I can't even ride my universities bus holding a wired up circuit board (for a class) without people looking at me like I'm about to blow them up.
Slashdot Mirror
I wandered onto the site just as it launched, lucky me. I got 2 matches under my belt. The tutorial is really handy for new players. The game servers seemed stable, everything looked pretty good and polished, even though it looks like a 10 year old game.
I was surprised at how nice the social networking stuff was implemented, it seems really easy to see which friends are online and join their games, and see people you recently played with.
I have a similar problem, a google search for my name reveals over 40,000 hits to a gay porn actor. Seriously. My issue is that I simply can't build any reputation as a good blog writer, website designer, etc. because anything to do with my name is buried under gay porn. So far I've been using a pseudonym, but it's hard to get taken seriously doing that.
This isn't anything new, I remember "Fighting Legends" from about 7 years ago which went belly up when Maximum Charisma went bankrupt. It was a bummer for me at the time cus I sunk a lot of time into the game. I recall some rumors about a fan created server being made but I don't think anything came of that.
In general, I don't play a lot of games over and over again, and in the case of MMO's the gameplay is not usually something I enjoy a lot. I play MMO's for the people I play with, and if a game's failing, most those people are leaving already and that just encourages me to stop too.
I own a couple domains that I'm currently using exclusively for e-mail. I used 1and1.com, it provides e-mail forwarding to my g-mail account for 5 bucks a year. Plus, my g-mail account can mask the "from" on outgoing e-mails so it looks like I'm using my domain to everyone on the outside.
That sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
There are incredibly good 3d games around that stand the test of time. Personally I've recently been going back and playing some games considered "ugly" by today's graphics standards, and they're still amazing.
Examples like Psychonauts, Shadow of the Collossus, Mario 64, Half-Life, Fahrenheit. These are more "modern" games that don't look very pretty anymore, and yet I've been having a great time playing them and I don't see how even more time past will change that. I suspect some games like Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Portal, etc. will also stand up later on, not for their graphics, but for the unique elements they bring.
According to this German news site (link : http://www.eurogamer.de/article.php?article_id=230133 ), Andrew Green wasn't correct, and Dead Space has not gone through the German classification system yet.
However, knowing their past, I would be surprised if it did pass classification.
I share my bandwidth with 2 other guys, comcast gave us an "unoffical bandwidth cap" of 100 gb's up/down a month, and we've broken that every month so the last week or soof every month our internet is horribly slow.
I track my (not roommates) bandwidth, and I'm around 20gb a month with light video usage, but I can get close to 30+ if I watch a lot of hulu and youtube. I also download full games, and that can pretty quickly destroy my monthly cap, especially with games like Age of Conan which was over 20 gbs.
I had the privilege of taking a quantum mechanics course from Carl Weiman 2 years ago while he was teaching at the University of Colorado. It was by far the best college course I've taken, he had the perfect mix of well versed lecturing with "clicker" quizzes throughout the class, homework that was appropriate for the material, and tests which rewarded understanding of the material and not memorization.
The best part really was that by the end of the course, he gave his lecture on Bose Einstein Condensate which he won the Nobel prize for, and all the students could understand what he was talking about from learning things throughout the semester, it was incredibly rewarding.
Compare that to my next physics courses which were basically applied calculus, except they left out the important part of what the **** any of it meant and how it applied to... anything really. His course overshadowed the rest of my physics courses and in the end, because of the huge disparity in teaching styles, made the rest of my studies quite grating and rather uninteresting.
DPS is not the issue here. The game has many "procs" (each hit has a %chance of adding an effect like poison or extra damage), so after 30 seconds the genders may be doing the same "damage" but the males will have more procs than females.
Also, the game uses combos which require several regular attacks to initiate, a male will be able to fire off combos faster than females, many of which debuff or do additional damage that higher "damage per hit" will not make up for.
I've been following this bug since it was first made apparent by some female assassins. At first we thought it was limited to the assassin class, but they were just the first to notice it, it turns out ALL classes who dual weild weapons are affected by the gender bug.
Here is a youtube video which clearly showcases the difference:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k-C4z-pTrII&feature=related
Players who were in the beta of the game say (while breaking their NDA sadly) that this bug was in the beta for months, but was never addressed.
Funcom's response as of over a week ago was along the lines of "We'll look into it, they should be the same speed". There has been no communication on the bug since then.
I think it's great that this bug is getting mainstream attention now, it's a very serious imbalance that Funcom needs to take responsibility of.
The moon is visible to every person with sight on earth, throw some incredibly pricey coca-cola ads on that baby and put the money toward more space funding.
>>The scariest thing about a criminal prosecution for CP related charges, is to have a "computer illiterate Jury" that can be swayed by a load of crap for a Prosecutor and/or the ignorance of a Detective
^ I completely agree with that, I was worried throughout the trial that I would have to educate the jury on simple terms they used in the trial and how the defendant was found with the CP on his computer. Luckily though, it was pretty much moot, since it was obvious that he intentionally was viewing the material, and even admitted as much to his wife. I believe the only reason they plead not guilty was because of the 2 "creating, producing, making" charges (you can't plead guilty to some and not to other charges in this state). So, it never came to discussing technical details in the end. What annoyed me was that the defending lawyer admitted to not knowing anything about computers, and if he had known even a little, he could've tried to create more reasonable doubt in his closing arguments, his defense in the end was pretty weak.
Actually, the defendant did have some software to completely erase data hidden on a hard drive, but because his wife took the tower halfway through him viewing the stuff, he got caught with it. Plus this was 6 years ago when the guy was running windows 95 on his HP, I don't think he really knew much about this stuff.
Just a couple weeks ago I was a juror in a child pornography case, I was in the unique position of being the only geek on the jury in this case that was all about computer evidence.
The case was simple, the defendant had been caught by his wife viewing the explicit material, the wife took the computer tower to the police along with several floppy disks (this was 6 years ago). The defendant had deleted all the materials, but the forensics expert found the recently viewed material still on the hard drive.
The computer forensics expert detailed how he recovered the material, by imaging the hard drive and recovering the access dates. The floppies also contained some explicit materials, again which were deleted but then recovered, apparently it was impossible to recover the access dates on the floppy files, the forensic expert testified that some of the dates were in fact accurate, and some not, when from my brief overview, it was obvious that most of the dates were innacurate, so basically the forensics expert screwed up and didn't know what he was talking about in regards to the dates recovered from the floppy.
The interesting part of the case was that the defendent was charged with 53 counts of "sexual exploitation of children, possession" (having child porn) and 2 counts of "sexual exploitation of children, creating, making, or preparing". Those last 2 counts were charged because the defendant copied the pictures onto a floppy disk, not because he filmed it or put it on a website, he was making a backup of the files. I'm relieved to say that the jury agreed that making a backup of the files is not the same as "creating, making, or preparing", but we did find the guy guilty for possession.
For anyone thinking about getting into this field, you're likely to have to view a lot of really f*ing disgusting photos, then look at them closely and document everything about those photos. You really are going to need a good stomach for viewing that stuff, I know I probably couldn't do it because just seeing the photos submitted as evidence was enough to almost make me sick, I couldn't imagine having that guys job and have to be exposed to those things all the time.
*stop reading if yer a spoilers nazi*
Anyone else notice at the very very end, when they're at coney island, in the background you see something fall from the sky into the ocean near a boat. To me this is them trying to say the monster came from space, chilled out in the ocean for about a month, then came out and smashed stuff up.
It really makes me sick that we're at the point where people mistake everyday things for bombs and have homeland security called in. I can't even ride my universities bus holding a wired up circuit board (for a class) without people looking at me like I'm about to blow them up.