I think half the point of the 360 was to copy all the stuff XMBC put in it. Of course, they still aren't there, but in terms of being a front end for a media server it does a good job. Of course, its still a walled garden so you can't do things like throw up hulu without some hacking, but if you do your timeshifting off bittorrent its just fine:)
Hey dude, I'll email you when they get it fixed. Its obvious you don't want incremental updates but would rather see it as a finished product only. Some of us like to see the steps in between and marvel at the progress to get this far. Others don't really care about the underlying technology and just want to see a finished "apple like" presentation. There's rooms for all types of course, but/. typically trends toward the "show me what you've got" deal rather than "here's something you can buy right now."
Re:So, my only question regarding Lost is
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Ever since they had the whole "time works differently here" think from season 4 (5?) I figured that was something that was dropped in 1977 and floated down to land in 2004. Of course, that's backwards from the way the time delay worked the rest of the time, so who knows.
You want to know the real answer? There is none. The writers had some vague idea of "dharma initiive" and "others" and "monster" when they started the series, and wrote some mysteries in to explain it. So when that episode was written, the Dharma initiative probably had some ongoing activities (hence the whole website minigame and stuff). Later they retconn'd it to make it like the project ended in the 80's. Given that the show last night said that Ben's original role was supposed to be _three_ episodes long instead of five seasons, there's plenty of shit they made up but didn't really have an answer to. Stuff like "where did the crate come from" is just a loose end they didn't think of or didn't have a good way of clearing it up. When they did have a neat solution to it (the bodies in the cave from season 1, or the polar bear from the testing station), they tied it in and it worked out well. When they didn't have a solution, they just left it as a "mystery" rather than coming up with some tortuous solution. I will say that they could have knocked out a couple more mysteries by extending the "mother/jacob/man in black" stories a couple more episodes - the "ancient others" could have built the tower, made the temple, all that kind of stuff. Didn't seem like any of that was there in their time, and it would have been pretty plausible, but hey, that's their choice.
There's one other possibility, of course, is that there's a spinoff/movie coming up and telling everyone all the answers would ruin it. But damn I hope not. I prefer they leave it unexplained than come up with some bullshit "a wizard did it" explanation for everything.
Halo2 can be played peer-peer. Microsoft is shutting down (has shutdown?) the original Xbox live service presumably to retire legacy support in order to make it easier to bring out new features (I'm guessing its not a hardware cost since most have since migrated to 360, XBL2). So this was more about supporting the matchmaking and whatnot. I can't remember if Halo2 supports LAN or not, but presumably you could play that way, or on one of the internet tunnels like Halo1 had when it came out.
Even better example was Full Spectrum Warrior, which was a game version of a squad training tool for the military. They actually put the full version of the military tool on the disc as an easter egg. Interesting but not as fun as the game, though difficulty wasn't much more than the "hard" setting of the game.
A while back my buddy who is a pilot got me some time on some of the sims they use. The difference is realism of course, but there's no reason home software couldn't do the exact simulation they're running there. These were state of the art 1970's-80's computers delivered for the jets back when they were new(er). Big machines for the time, but no reason it couldn't be crushed by the average netbook nowdays. (Of course, you can't beat the I/O which is a full working cockpit with every dial and switch you can imagine plus a full quarter sphere projected display which was enough to make you want to turn your head to match what your eyes were telling you.)
I don't think whether you're using the data network matters or not. AT&Ts service is abysmal - what good is coverage if you can't use it? I almost always have a signal, yes, but I'll drop a call 3 times sometimes before I'm done. I honestly think the Iphone had something to do with this, as prior to the 3G iphone launch service was a lot better (and why I switched from Sprint in the first place). I'm guessing they took the money from all those new customers but didn't bother investing in upgrading the service. Anyways, just waiting for the first 4G/wimax rollouts to hit my area so I can kiss them goodbye for good.
Sounds like you've been drinking some of that delicious Apple flavored Hater-aid. I went into the apple store the other day and tried it out. It is really nice and is a pretty neat little gadget for just browsing the web while you're hanging out on the couch. Still too high a price for my tastes, and knowing apple it won't ever come down. Still, a "piece of crap" it is not.
Ctrl-Shift-N, problem solved. And if you say "I don't want to use incognito mode" I really have to question caring about some anonymous statistics with an IP and URL in a data warehouse somewhere vs having that URL in your history bar. One of them ties the query to you, one of them doesn't. For myself, Google is my starting point anyways, I don't even bother with URLs since moving to chrome. My major annoyance with web browsers now is that they _don't_ have this feature and I always end up with some "page not found" when I type in my request.
Its the RFID boogeyman! They're going to read my thoughts from space! Seems here the gripe should be about attendance, not about the method of attendance. But hey, if its RFID it must be bad!
The big deal with the Obama case is that the question was "Where were you born?" and Obama filled it in honestly. They're trying to cover it up! This is all part of the conspiracy, man.
Yeah, I also noticed that you can play as other characters besides Mario & Luigi which were _definitely_ not in the original. Also, there seems to be some pixels out of place in the castle, I haven't finished counting the bricks but I'll let you know when I do.
Stop making fun of him, he's not Turing tested yet. In a few years, he'll start noticing some changes and then he'll grow up to be a big boy AI that can interact with the rest of us.
I dunno, I've been a game programmer for going on ten years now for a few different companies, some big, some small. I wouldn't say the programming is the "most difficult" kind - it really varies depending on the task. Writing UI for a game isn't much more difficult than your average VB program or flash game depending on the UI package. Graphics/Physics are lots of math and you do need to be really smart to figure out the optimal ways of doing things to get acceptable performance, but lots of fields have optimization in them (think guidance programs, embedded programs, etc).
I will say that having had a limited professional career prior to doing games I much prefer what I do now. A lot of times the programming is "fun" in that you're generally working on unique problems that not too many people have tackled before. I've done online interaction, AI, sound programming, tools development, physics, graphics, etc. most of which doesn't come up in the seemlingly endless amounts of "read some values in from the web and put them in a DB" type work there is.
There are definitely tradeoffs with other software jobs in terms of inflexible deadlines, publisher demands and all the rest of the headaches we deal with. I can tell you though that when I was 22 and working for a tiny company building my first published title you couldn't pull me away from my desk. The industry thrives and maybe takes advantage of that behavior, of course, but if you stick it out long enough the hours improve, I assure you. (Or you can choose to work somewhere where the hours are better). That said, its not for everyone, so getting a degree focused on games might not be the best idea unless you're sure of what you want to do. Also college won't be as fun as a normal school. (Totally subjective observation knowing lots of Full Sail/Art school type grads and regular four year CS grads).
Not really. I've served on a couple (in San Francisco even) and they pretty much just dismiss you and send you on your way right after the verdict. You can come back for sentencing if you want, but after weeks/months in the courtroom thats pretty much the last thing you want to do.
I guess you could put a note in there or something, but most of the time unless you read up on the statutes in question you don't know how much jail time he's facing or whatnot. And personally, I think to be completely objective its probably better not to know. Your job is to apply the law and answer the question if beyond reasonable doubt did the defendant break the law. That's it. You have to do it objectively and I think knowing that you're personally responsible for sending some guy to jail for 20 years might make some people "iffy" on returning a guilty verdict. Its pretty black and white - there's no "guilty, but only by a little bit". Obviously there are some cases (death penalty, civil suits) where the jury does make the decision on the outcome after the "who won" phase, but for something like this its up to the judge.
I would certainly hope that they give him time served considering he's been in jail a couple of years already. Having read a bunch on this and followed the story my opinion is that he's guilty, but honestly he should have just been fired and fined. Its not like he was trying to defraud the city or personally gain from this or from what I can tell had any malicious intent beyond "these guys are idiots". I wouldn't hire him, but in the grand scheme of things it sounds like he's just a jerk who could still be a productive member of society.
Mod parent up. While the repubs tend to be a little schizoid on the matter (less regulation! think of the children! less regulation! think of the children!) the dems are quite clearly all about the regulation. But the GP's part about "old and fearful" is correct, it should just say "while politicians are old and fearful".
Nonsense. The DRM worked. Its been what, months since the title came out? And just now its cracked? If you've seen other DRM systems and how quickly full cracked torrents show up, this is a fantastic success. Games are like movies in terms of shelf life, in terms of piracy you've pretty much "won" if you can keep a full copy out of the wild for this long. What will be interesting is the results that come back from this - did the title sell as well as other PC titles, did it sell more? Its kind of interesting to have a control set of data in the discussion around piracy. Who knows, maybe they won't see much of any improvement in sales and will drop the expense of developing and deploying these systems. (After all, there is a cost not only in the software, but in the customer good will. Businesses are about making money, if you can measurably show that the good will lost translates to more dollars lost than the losses to piracy, good bye DRM).
Isn't geek-chic the same as always by definition? i.e. pizza/sweat stained cartoon/computer/who farted t-shirt with optional neck beard. Is that so hard?
Why is that worse? Unlike some, I guess I don't really hold the nostalgia for the 8-bit era. I do remember picking up atari boxes and NES games and seeing the awesome box art promising an immersive space adventure or something and ending up with the same old tired platformer with a blob or box. Early PC titles pretty much had the same thing - shiny box, shitty innards. I doubt there's anyone here that if some time traveler from 2010 handed you a hammer in the 80's and told you to smash your copy of MULE to trade for GTA IV and an xbox, you'd swing away with zeal.
There used to be _great_ manuals for games like Jane's ATF that had the 200 page or so spiral bound book describing advanced flight tactics, thrust vectoring, etc. There were keyboard overlays and the like as well. But there were also crappy manuals as well, with maybe some descriptions of the bad guys and guns and whatnot. I'm playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 right now and while there might be a manual I haven't really looked at it. The detailed info on weapons capabilities, upgrades and the like are all in game. And while I've played lots of battlefield-type games and probably would't need the manual anyways, I haven't played games like Braid which arguably had some very different gameplay to it. And yet the beauty of the design for that game is that they taught you how to play and then you were doing really cool things with just the building blocks. Portal had the same experience.
I understand that some people have a material connection to the games themselves, and have massive collections of carts and boxes and manuals laying around. I'm kind of the same way with books, so to each his own. I guess with games I'm more of a purist and will just let the content speak for itself, and not the pretty packaging.
I guess if it shifted it a few hundred feet. A tank sitting right next to where the cruise missile hit is about the same as the missile hitting the tank itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked your first version better, it was more specific. B+ for the first, C- on the second for repetition.
I think half the point of the 360 was to copy all the stuff XMBC put in it. Of course, they still aren't there, but in terms of being a front end for a media server it does a good job. Of course, its still a walled garden so you can't do things like throw up hulu without some hacking, but if you do your timeshifting off bittorrent its just fine :)
Hey dude, I'll email you when they get it fixed. Its obvious you don't want incremental updates but would rather see it as a finished product only. Some of us like to see the steps in between and marvel at the progress to get this far. Others don't really care about the underlying technology and just want to see a finished "apple like" presentation. There's rooms for all types of course, but /. typically trends toward the "show me what you've got" deal rather than "here's something you can buy right now."
Ever since they had the whole "time works differently here" think from season 4 (5?) I figured that was something that was dropped in 1977 and floated down to land in 2004. Of course, that's backwards from the way the time delay worked the rest of the time, so who knows.
You want to know the real answer? There is none. The writers had some vague idea of "dharma initiive" and "others" and "monster" when they started the series, and wrote some mysteries in to explain it. So when that episode was written, the Dharma initiative probably had some ongoing activities (hence the whole website minigame and stuff). Later they retconn'd it to make it like the project ended in the 80's. Given that the show last night said that Ben's original role was supposed to be _three_ episodes long instead of five seasons, there's plenty of shit they made up but didn't really have an answer to. Stuff like "where did the crate come from" is just a loose end they didn't think of or didn't have a good way of clearing it up. When they did have a neat solution to it (the bodies in the cave from season 1, or the polar bear from the testing station), they tied it in and it worked out well. When they didn't have a solution, they just left it as a "mystery" rather than coming up with some tortuous solution. I will say that they could have knocked out a couple more mysteries by extending the "mother/jacob/man in black" stories a couple more episodes - the "ancient others" could have built the tower, made the temple, all that kind of stuff. Didn't seem like any of that was there in their time, and it would have been pretty plausible, but hey, that's their choice.
There's one other possibility, of course, is that there's a spinoff/movie coming up and telling everyone all the answers would ruin it. But damn I hope not. I prefer they leave it unexplained than come up with some bullshit "a wizard did it" explanation for everything.
Max speed = 6Mbps according to their website, so 24 * 31 * 3600 * 6 = 16070400 Mb, which is well beyond 1Tb and even more than 1TB.
Halo2 can be played peer-peer. Microsoft is shutting down (has shutdown?) the original Xbox live service presumably to retire legacy support in order to make it easier to bring out new features (I'm guessing its not a hardware cost since most have since migrated to 360, XBL2). So this was more about supporting the matchmaking and whatnot. I can't remember if Halo2 supports LAN or not, but presumably you could play that way, or on one of the internet tunnels like Halo1 had when it came out.
Even better example was Full Spectrum Warrior, which was a game version of a squad training tool for the military. They actually put the full version of the military tool on the disc as an easter egg. Interesting but not as fun as the game, though difficulty wasn't much more than the "hard" setting of the game.
A while back my buddy who is a pilot got me some time on some of the sims they use. The difference is realism of course, but there's no reason home software couldn't do the exact simulation they're running there. These were state of the art 1970's-80's computers delivered for the jets back when they were new(er). Big machines for the time, but no reason it couldn't be crushed by the average netbook nowdays. (Of course, you can't beat the I/O which is a full working cockpit with every dial and switch you can imagine plus a full quarter sphere projected display which was enough to make you want to turn your head to match what your eyes were telling you.)
I don't think whether you're using the data network matters or not. AT&Ts service is abysmal - what good is coverage if you can't use it? I almost always have a signal, yes, but I'll drop a call 3 times sometimes before I'm done. I honestly think the Iphone had something to do with this, as prior to the 3G iphone launch service was a lot better (and why I switched from Sprint in the first place). I'm guessing they took the money from all those new customers but didn't bother investing in upgrading the service. Anyways, just waiting for the first 4G/wimax rollouts to hit my area so I can kiss them goodbye for good.
Sounds like you've been drinking some of that delicious Apple flavored Hater-aid. I went into the apple store the other day and tried it out. It is really nice and is a pretty neat little gadget for just browsing the web while you're hanging out on the couch. Still too high a price for my tastes, and knowing apple it won't ever come down. Still, a "piece of crap" it is not.
Ctrl-Shift-N, problem solved. And if you say "I don't want to use incognito mode" I really have to question caring about some anonymous statistics with an IP and URL in a data warehouse somewhere vs having that URL in your history bar. One of them ties the query to you, one of them doesn't. For myself, Google is my starting point anyways, I don't even bother with URLs since moving to chrome. My major annoyance with web browsers now is that they _don't_ have this feature and I always end up with some "page not found" when I type in my request.
Its the RFID boogeyman! They're going to read my thoughts from space! Seems here the gripe should be about attendance, not about the method of attendance. But hey, if its RFID it must be bad!
The big deal with the Obama case is that the question was "Where were you born?" and Obama filled it in honestly. They're trying to cover it up! This is all part of the conspiracy, man.
Yeah, I also noticed that you can play as other characters besides Mario & Luigi which were _definitely_ not in the original. Also, there seems to be some pixels out of place in the castle, I haven't finished counting the bricks but I'll let you know when I do.
Stop making fun of him, he's not Turing tested yet. In a few years, he'll start noticing some changes and then he'll grow up to be a big boy AI that can interact with the rest of us.
Bring your own women and deodorant. There be none here matey, none 'cept the robo-ladies and "Pizza Musk".
I dunno, I've been a game programmer for going on ten years now for a few different companies, some big, some small. I wouldn't say the programming is the "most difficult" kind - it really varies depending on the task. Writing UI for a game isn't much more difficult than your average VB program or flash game depending on the UI package. Graphics/Physics are lots of math and you do need to be really smart to figure out the optimal ways of doing things to get acceptable performance, but lots of fields have optimization in them (think guidance programs, embedded programs, etc).
I will say that having had a limited professional career prior to doing games I much prefer what I do now. A lot of times the programming is "fun" in that you're generally working on unique problems that not too many people have tackled before. I've done online interaction, AI, sound programming, tools development, physics, graphics, etc. most of which doesn't come up in the seemlingly endless amounts of "read some values in from the web and put them in a DB" type work there is.
There are definitely tradeoffs with other software jobs in terms of inflexible deadlines, publisher demands and all the rest of the headaches we deal with. I can tell you though that when I was 22 and working for a tiny company building my first published title you couldn't pull me away from my desk. The industry thrives and maybe takes advantage of that behavior, of course, but if you stick it out long enough the hours improve, I assure you. (Or you can choose to work somewhere where the hours are better). That said, its not for everyone, so getting a degree focused on games might not be the best idea unless you're sure of what you want to do. Also college won't be as fun as a normal school. (Totally subjective observation knowing lots of Full Sail/Art school type grads and regular four year CS grads).
> After my first year in the program, I never saw that in my Physics classes.
Wait, so you're saying someone actually became a physics major because "there's money in physics"? :)
Not really. I've served on a couple (in San Francisco even) and they pretty much just dismiss you and send you on your way right after the verdict. You can come back for sentencing if you want, but after weeks/months in the courtroom thats pretty much the last thing you want to do.
I guess you could put a note in there or something, but most of the time unless you read up on the statutes in question you don't know how much jail time he's facing or whatnot. And personally, I think to be completely objective its probably better not to know. Your job is to apply the law and answer the question if beyond reasonable doubt did the defendant break the law. That's it. You have to do it objectively and I think knowing that you're personally responsible for sending some guy to jail for 20 years might make some people "iffy" on returning a guilty verdict. Its pretty black and white - there's no "guilty, but only by a little bit". Obviously there are some cases (death penalty, civil suits) where the jury does make the decision on the outcome after the "who won" phase, but for something like this its up to the judge.
I would certainly hope that they give him time served considering he's been in jail a couple of years already. Having read a bunch on this and followed the story my opinion is that he's guilty, but honestly he should have just been fired and fined. Its not like he was trying to defraud the city or personally gain from this or from what I can tell had any malicious intent beyond "these guys are idiots". I wouldn't hire him, but in the grand scheme of things it sounds like he's just a jerk who could still be a productive member of society.
If you have to tell us its a joke its not funny. {/assholeishstatement}
If by approaching you mean 200 years at the current rate, then yes, you are correct. From a certain point of view.
Mod parent up. While the repubs tend to be a little schizoid on the matter (less regulation! think of the children! less regulation! think of the children!) the dems are quite clearly all about the regulation. But the GP's part about "old and fearful" is correct, it should just say "while politicians are old and fearful".
Nonsense. The DRM worked. Its been what, months since the title came out? And just now its cracked? If you've seen other DRM systems and how quickly full cracked torrents show up, this is a fantastic success. Games are like movies in terms of shelf life, in terms of piracy you've pretty much "won" if you can keep a full copy out of the wild for this long. What will be interesting is the results that come back from this - did the title sell as well as other PC titles, did it sell more? Its kind of interesting to have a control set of data in the discussion around piracy. Who knows, maybe they won't see much of any improvement in sales and will drop the expense of developing and deploying these systems. (After all, there is a cost not only in the software, but in the customer good will. Businesses are about making money, if you can measurably show that the good will lost translates to more dollars lost than the losses to piracy, good bye DRM).
Isn't geek-chic the same as always by definition? i.e. pizza/sweat stained cartoon/computer/who farted t-shirt with optional neck beard. Is that so hard?
Why is that worse? Unlike some, I guess I don't really hold the nostalgia for the 8-bit era. I do remember picking up atari boxes and NES games and seeing the awesome box art promising an immersive space adventure or something and ending up with the same old tired platformer with a blob or box. Early PC titles pretty much had the same thing - shiny box, shitty innards. I doubt there's anyone here that if some time traveler from 2010 handed you a hammer in the 80's and told you to smash your copy of MULE to trade for GTA IV and an xbox, you'd swing away with zeal.
There used to be _great_ manuals for games like Jane's ATF that had the 200 page or so spiral bound book describing advanced flight tactics, thrust vectoring, etc. There were keyboard overlays and the like as well. But there were also crappy manuals as well, with maybe some descriptions of the bad guys and guns and whatnot. I'm playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 right now and while there might be a manual I haven't really looked at it. The detailed info on weapons capabilities, upgrades and the like are all in game. And while I've played lots of battlefield-type games and probably would't need the manual anyways, I haven't played games like Braid which arguably had some very different gameplay to it. And yet the beauty of the design for that game is that they taught you how to play and then you were doing really cool things with just the building blocks. Portal had the same experience.
I understand that some people have a material connection to the games themselves, and have massive collections of carts and boxes and manuals laying around. I'm kind of the same way with books, so to each his own. I guess with games I'm more of a purist and will just let the content speak for itself, and not the pretty packaging.
I guess if it shifted it a few hundred feet. A tank sitting right next to where the cruise missile hit is about the same as the missile hitting the tank itself.