On the one hand, I agree that throwing books away (or writing in them, or breaking the spine, or such activities) is wrong. Books are not utility objects that should be discarded. At worst, you should give them away, either in such a BookCrossing deal or to the salvation army or something. Or hock 'm on eBay.
Of course, it *is* Piers Anthony, and doing so must constitute some sort of crime, if there is any justice in the world. What if someone jabbed that McFlurry spoon into their skull? You might be responsible.
*Most* books that are suitable for human usage, though, should not be tossed out.
Soooo many books that are probably being tossed in the garbage at McDonalds, I want to scream.
Well, I work at a Helpdesk, so me wanting to scream is nothing special, but still.
Anyway, the idea of keeping your books is that, if you desire something to read, you can reach into a shelf and there you will find treasure. As well as being able to look upon a story with either new insights into the story (multi-volume fantasy epics like Steven Erikson's, frex) or new insights into yourself.
Well, Finchsync is a program that allows you to sync your contacts with Thunderbird, and apparently your appointments with Sunbird (though that was broken last time I tried it).
Quite apart from the fact that civilized countries have free voicemail included with their service, a quick google search for answering machines popped up:
In Black and White you have enemy gods, in Spore you have enemy cities, and in both cases your critters do battle. You have little direct control over your subjects, and the game is more or less open-ended. Designing orgamisms is a (fun!) gameplay gimmick, not in itself gameplay. I see parallels here, and it has me slightly worried, insofar as I worry about these things.
Mind you, I think it *appears* great, and the video demo was fun (had me in stitches a few times; that diplomatic 'first contact' bit was great, as were the creature designs), but there has to be gameplay. We didn't see a whole lot of the gameplay mechanics in the video, probably because they weren't done yet. Talk of 'procedurally generated' and 'emergent behaviour' is all nice, but such claims were made earlier.
I am also worried about the lack of (talk about) synchronous multiplayer. At some point I'd want to pop my civilization online, have colonial wars and biological exchanges with critters actually being watched by another player. Hell, leave the world available online for others, so that when I get back there might be a whole range of critters on my world I wasn't aware of. Just disable the planet-pounders.
Black and White was a great toy, but not a particularly good game. I wonder if Spore will do better. This mindless optimism, however, is never a good idea for any game, by any developer.
"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. A franchise, after all, is exploiting an existing idea, and is all about "same". A game like Spore, should it be succesful, will be succesful because it is unique, not because there are a zillion and one Spore-a-likes.
On whether the game will be succesful; it's essentially a new gametype (or mix thereof) by an industry vet, it's being hyped to hell and back, and it's got the backing of EA. I hear echoes of Black and White, and the echoes do not sound good.
A discussion for development language and framework for a relatively simple client application was raging, with the main contenders being Java, C#.NET and C++. Everyone had already come up with pros and cons of each of these, but no end to the deadlock came.
Until a lone coder, sick at the lack of progress on this front, turned up with version 0.1 in the language of his choice.
Iain M. Banks' gelsuits are, if I'm not mistaken, fields, not materials.
Besides, being in a gas giant atmospheres in a suit like this (if it could withstand it) would quickly lose its charm once you figured out you could barely move at all due to the strain of moving about.
Re:What's the... point?
on
Africa, The MMOG
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think *you* are the point of making a game like this.
Africa is a friggin' continent, for god's sake, several times larger than the US, with a lot (!!) more history. I am assuming you are from the US, here, for reasons that should be obvious. If, all over Africa, there were nothing other than millions starving to death or dying of AIDS, if everyone were killing everyone else, it would be a complete wasteland within the decade. And it's not. Mythology might be heavily animal-based, but so it is with American Indians. Not surprising, when you're living among so damn many of them.
As for your jibe concerning LOTR, there's a difference to fantasy in an imaginary world, like LOTR, Krull or Star Wars, and fantasy based on mythology, like American Gods, Chronicles of Narnia or even The Iliad. Fantasy has many levels. If you look at Neil Gaiman's books, they tend to be about our world, with legends and mythology made flesh. Something like that would work well in 'the cradle of humanity'.
The execution of the whole deal would be tricky, though, you're right. It's too easy to fall into triteness, rather than actual interesting cultural exchange.
Let's start by assuming that at least some of the audience of Blizzard games is young, immature, and homophobic. Sound reasonable so far?
No.
If they're young and immature, they can be shaped. Any type of phobia in children is the result of poorly hidden fears in people around them. Increasingly hiding things poorly does not cure the condition.
Unfortunately, series die out when "key people" leave, because its new products will be entirely derivative and bland. Besides which, it takes money to make money, and if you're approaching the depths, you cannot develop a game without attracting investors. You cannot attract investors with a company that's gone from earning to burning money.
* What is a computer? (Hardware: monitor, computer-case, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. Software: Operating system, programs you can use, the Internet) * How do these components work? (shows you a "user interface", contains the actual computer, allows you to type in text and commands, let's you move the cursor around) * Explain the terms just used (What is a user-interface?, what's in a computer?, What's a cursor?) Do not expect terms to be obvious.
What you want is for people to know the use of a harddrive, of system memory, *cards (sound, network, graphics, etc), of various drives, of the keyboard (shortcuts!) and of the mouse. Explain it in terms of responsibility: the monitor shows you a 'user interface'. Graphics cards are used by the computer to show a user interface; some cards are very good at showing graphics intensive games, so the card can usually be replaces. The mouse makes the cursor move around, and is used to click on things (explain clicking!). Etcetera.
All in all, keep it very basic. Look at a computer as a user would, and look where questions might arise. Answer those questions while pointing to components they can look at, or by having them do stuff with the computer. Include pictures, so that if they're brave enough to open the side of the case, they can see the DIMMs and processor and harddrives and such.
Explain the basic uses of Macintosh and/or Windows. Explaining concurrent tasks is important. Point them to a Knoppix CD, assuring them their computer will be safe. But keep the focus on Windows-only or Windows and Macintosh, since that is what they will be using anyway.
Point out that other software than the defaults exist, and can be used just as well. Explain why the defaults exist. Point them to Firefox (PLEASE! I do tech support. Spyware kills my soul.) Explain the use of the most common programs in program-independant ways.
Watching TV is kindof stupid, but then I don't get the video iPod either.
MP3 is good. After all, I'm carrying my phone around anyway. If it can play MP3 and store a decent amount on some standard memory card, then w00t. When you're called, music is put on hold and you can use the headset to take a handsfree call (and look like an idiot, talking to yourself).
Anyway, if they make a cheap phone, it means you are not going to buy a more expensive phone. If you do buy a more expensive phone, you are more likely to get a subscription or prepay deal with it, meaning you earn the operators more money.
So I recently found out about an older device, the Siemens SimPAD. It runs on WinCE, but can, apparently, be hacked to run Linux. It only has client-capable USB (so you can't attach, say, a USB flash drive), but it has a PCMCIA slot, so you can attach all sorts of wonderful goodies to it.
Might be worth checking out for those on a budget. I'm wanting one to play with, myself, assuming I can find it cheap somewhere.
Region coding is not an *en*coding. It's basically the drive looking at a set of values in a specific place to get the regions the disc has, and comparing it to the region setting in the drive, and then saying "Yes" or "No" when you want to play it.
The trick is that, working at 80-90% average, you're still making a very healthy salary compared to others. Part of being efficient is knowing when to turn off the computer and take a week off. And knowing when to stop reading Slashdot and get back to work to meet time goals.
Just to feed the trolls, for once: You wouldn't know the truth if it came up, kicked you in the nuts, gave you a ten hour lecture on morality, medical science and hyperbole, and then kicked you in the nuts again.
This guy was talking about using stem cells, not necessarily embryonic stem cells. That means they take a few cells from your own body. And stem cell treatments have been tried a few times now; I've not heard of conclusive results either way. Ideally, embryonic stem cells would be used.
Furthermore, what do you think happens in fertility clinics? They make a few hundred several-cell embryo's, try until the woman is preggers, and they they have to destroy the remaining embryo's (or freeze them for later use by the couple), regardless of whether the parents would consent to this medical waste being used to save lives.
Hell, what do you think happens when a woman has her period? MENSTRUATION IS MURDER!
Comparing XMPP to SIP is incredibly wrong. XMPP is a messaging and presence protocol, with a focus on clarity and extensibility, while SIP is a protocol designed to (per the name) initiate sessions for transport protocols. (Though yes, it does support messaging and presence indication)
Answering a phone with SIP may be just one packet, but before that there's quite a bit of negotiation, same as with Jingle. The difference is that, while SIP requires its own extensive library to run, Jingle is lightweight because it is built on the XMPP, which you're running anyway for your IM-client. Jingle is a Jabber/XMPP thing, not a generic plug'n'play solution.
Added to that, XMPP is not bound to TCP. It can be implemented over UDP, HTTP, whatever.
Incorrect. SIP is a signalling protocol, same as Jingle.
To set up a connection to a SIP-capable device you typically use: - SIP to signal intent to communicate (and to accept or refuse or redirect, etc) - SDP to describe the coming transport session (which port, where do I send the data, which codec do I use, etc) - RTP to use that SDP data to make the actual connection and send the encoded data.
Jingle replaces the SIP/SDP steps. Summary of operation, Romeo tries to call Juliet: - Romeo initiates a call to Juliet, sends back either "refuse", "redirect" (to a cellphone client, say) or "provisionally accept". - Romeo offers up several candidate transports that it can use. It either does this all at once (burst) or one by one (dribble), which is specified in the initation message. - Juliet offers up several candidate transports (RTP, G.711 codec, frex) that it can use. - Once concensus is reached over a suitable transport, Jingle switches to "in progress" and RTP takes over. If concensus is impossible the connection ends. - Finally, Jingle politely closes (and confirms) to end the conversation.
The two processes achieve the same endgoal: getting VoIP data from A to B. An advantages here is that SIP isn't very lightweight in terms of correct implementations, while Jingle can be 'spoken' by any client that can do XMPP as long as you add the statemachine.
Too many? Most are proprietary, or not suitable for IM (because of lack of quality NAT traverssal, frex). SIP could work but is cumbersome when all you want to do is get an RTP voice stream going. Having a standard that is clear, concise and tailormade for IM applications is useful.
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand, I agree that throwing books away (or writing in them, or breaking the spine, or such activities) is wrong. Books are not utility objects that should be discarded. At worst, you should give them away, either in such a BookCrossing deal or to the salvation army or something. Or hock 'm on eBay.
Of course, it *is* Piers Anthony, and doing so must constitute some sort of crime, if there is any justice in the world. What if someone jabbed that McFlurry spoon into their skull? You might be responsible.
*Most* books that are suitable for human usage, though, should not be tossed out.
Soooo many books that are probably being tossed in the garbage at McDonalds, I want to scream.
Well, I work at a Helpdesk, so me wanting to scream is nothing special, but still.
Anyway, the idea of keeping your books is that, if you desire something to read, you can reach into a shelf and there you will find treasure. As well as being able to look upon a story with either new insights into the story (multi-volume fantasy epics like Steven Erikson's, frex) or new insights into yourself.
That would be mini-SD. I currently have a card like that which holds 2GB. Bought it on eBay.
There is also microSD, or Transflash, which is smaller yet again (about 50-75%?) and weighs in at a maximum of 1GB at the moment.
Well, Finchsync is a program that allows you to sync your contacts with Thunderbird, and apparently your appointments with Sunbird (though that was broken last time I tried it).
I don't think 'once' can be claled a pattern.
In Black and White you have enemy gods, in Spore you have enemy cities, and in both cases your critters do battle. You have little direct control over your subjects, and the game is more or less open-ended. Designing orgamisms is a (fun!) gameplay gimmick, not in itself gameplay. I see parallels here, and it has me slightly worried, insofar as I worry about these things.
Mind you, I think it *appears* great, and the video demo was fun (had me in stitches a few times; that diplomatic 'first contact' bit was great, as were the creature designs), but there has to be gameplay. We didn't see a whole lot of the gameplay mechanics in the video, probably because they weren't done yet. Talk of 'procedurally generated' and 'emergent behaviour' is all nice, but such claims were made earlier.
I am also worried about the lack of (talk about) synchronous multiplayer. At some point I'd want to pop my civilization online, have colonial wars and biological exchanges with critters actually being watched by another player. Hell, leave the world available online for others, so that when I get back there might be a whole range of critters on my world I wasn't aware of. Just disable the planet-pounders.
Black and White was a great toy, but not a particularly good game. I wonder if Spore will do better. This mindless optimism, however, is never a good idea for any game, by any developer.
"Innovative" and "franchise" are incompatible terms. A franchise, after all, is exploiting an existing idea, and is all about "same". A game like Spore, should it be succesful, will be succesful because it is unique, not because there are a zillion and one Spore-a-likes.
On whether the game will be succesful; it's essentially a new gametype (or mix thereof) by an industry vet, it's being hyped to hell and back, and it's got the backing of EA. I hear echoes of Black and White, and the echoes do not sound good.
A discussion for development language and framework for a relatively simple client application was raging, with the main contenders being Java, C#.NET and C++. Everyone had already come up with pros and cons of each of these, but no end to the deadlock came.
:)
Until a lone coder, sick at the lack of progress on this front, turned up with version 0.1 in the language of his choice.
I hope we're not going to regret this
Iain M. Banks' gelsuits are, if I'm not mistaken, fields, not materials.
Besides, being in a gas giant atmospheres in a suit like this (if it could withstand it) would quickly lose its charm once you figured out you could barely move at all due to the strain of moving about.
I think *you* are the point of making a game like this.
Africa is a friggin' continent, for god's sake, several times larger than the US, with a lot (!!) more history. I am assuming you are from the US, here, for reasons that should be obvious. If, all over Africa, there were nothing other than millions starving to death or dying of AIDS, if everyone were killing everyone else, it would be a complete wasteland within the decade. And it's not. Mythology might be heavily animal-based, but so it is with American Indians. Not surprising, when you're living among so damn many of them.
As for your jibe concerning LOTR, there's a difference to fantasy in an imaginary world, like LOTR, Krull or Star Wars, and fantasy based on mythology, like American Gods, Chronicles of Narnia or even The Iliad. Fantasy has many levels. If you look at Neil Gaiman's books, they tend to be about our world, with legends and mythology made flesh. Something like that would work well in 'the cradle of humanity'.
The execution of the whole deal would be tricky, though, you're right. It's too easy to fall into triteness, rather than actual interesting cultural exchange.
If they're young and immature, they can be shaped. Any type of phobia in children is the result of poorly hidden fears in people around them. Increasingly hiding things poorly does not cure the condition.
Unfortunately, series die out when "key people" leave, because its new products will be entirely derivative and bland. Besides which, it takes money to make money, and if you're approaching the depths, you cannot develop a game without attracting investors. You cannot attract investors with a company that's gone from earning to burning money.
* What is a computer? (Hardware: monitor, computer-case, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. Software: Operating system, programs you can use, the Internet)
* How do these components work? (shows you a "user interface", contains the actual computer, allows you to type in text and commands, let's you move the cursor around)
* Explain the terms just used (What is a user-interface?, what's in a computer?, What's a cursor?) Do not expect terms to be obvious.
What you want is for people to know the use of a harddrive, of system memory, *cards (sound, network, graphics, etc), of various drives, of the keyboard (shortcuts!) and of the mouse. Explain it in terms of responsibility: the monitor shows you a 'user interface'. Graphics cards are used by the computer to show a user interface; some cards are very good at showing graphics intensive games, so the card can usually be replaces. The mouse makes the cursor move around, and is used to click on things (explain clicking!). Etcetera.
All in all, keep it very basic. Look at a computer as a user would, and look where questions might arise. Answer those questions while pointing to components they can look at, or by having them do stuff with the computer. Include pictures, so that if they're brave enough to open the side of the case, they can see the DIMMs and processor and harddrives and such.
Explain the basic uses of Macintosh and/or Windows. Explaining concurrent tasks is important. Point them to a Knoppix CD, assuring them their computer will be safe. But keep the focus on Windows-only or Windows and Macintosh, since that is what they will be using anyway.
Point out that other software than the defaults exist, and can be used just as well. Explain why the defaults exist. Point them to Firefox (PLEASE! I do tech support. Spyware kills my soul.) Explain the use of the most common programs in program-independant ways.
Watching TV is kindof stupid, but then I don't get the video iPod either.
MP3 is good. After all, I'm carrying my phone around anyway. If it can play MP3 and store a decent amount on some standard memory card, then w00t. When you're called, music is put on hold and you can use the headset to take a handsfree call (and look like an idiot, talking to yourself).
Anyway, if they make a cheap phone, it means you are not going to buy a more expensive phone. If you do buy a more expensive phone, you are more likely to get a subscription or prepay deal with it, meaning you earn the operators more money.
Might be worth checking out for those on a budget. I'm wanting one to play with, myself, assuming I can find it cheap somewhere.
Region coding is not an *en*coding. It's basically the drive looking at a set of values in a specific place to get the regions the disc has, and comparing it to the region setting in the drive, and then saying "Yes" or "No" when you want to play it.
The content is precisely the same.
The trick is that, working at 80-90% average, you're still making a very healthy salary compared to others. Part of being efficient is knowing when to turn off the computer and take a week off. And knowing when to stop reading Slashdot and get back to work to meet time goals.
Just to feed the trolls, for once:
You wouldn't know the truth if it came up, kicked you in the nuts, gave you a ten hour lecture on morality, medical science and hyperbole, and then kicked you in the nuts again.
This guy was talking about using stem cells, not necessarily embryonic stem cells. That means they take a few cells from your own body. And stem cell treatments have been tried a few times now; I've not heard of conclusive results either way. Ideally, embryonic stem cells would be used.
Furthermore, what do you think happens in fertility clinics? They make a few hundred several-cell embryo's, try until the woman is preggers, and they they have to destroy the remaining embryo's (or freeze them for later use by the couple), regardless of whether the parents would consent to this medical waste being used to save lives.
Hell, what do you think happens when a woman has her period? MENSTRUATION IS MURDER!
(jackass)
First post.
In other news, Slashdot has a day pass system where you can see the early stories.
Or not...
Slashdot confuses me!
Comparing XMPP to SIP is incredibly wrong. XMPP is a messaging and presence protocol, with a focus on clarity and extensibility, while SIP is a protocol designed to (per the name) initiate sessions for transport protocols. (Though yes, it does support messaging and presence indication)
Answering a phone with SIP may be just one packet, but before that there's quite a bit of negotiation, same as with Jingle. The difference is that, while SIP requires its own extensive library to run, Jingle is lightweight because it is built on the XMPP, which you're running anyway for your IM-client. Jingle is a Jabber/XMPP thing, not a generic plug'n'play solution.
Added to that, XMPP is not bound to TCP. It can be implemented over UDP, HTTP, whatever.
That would be because there was no standard VoIP negotiation protocol for XMPP.
When we first heard of XMPP at the place where I'm at now we implemented it for signalling. Nice to see it's an actual JEP now.
Incorrect. SIP is a signalling protocol, same as Jingle.
To set up a connection to a SIP-capable device you typically use:
- SIP to signal intent to communicate (and to accept or refuse or redirect, etc)
- SDP to describe the coming transport session (which port, where do I send the data, which codec do I use, etc)
- RTP to use that SDP data to make the actual connection and send the encoded data.
Jingle replaces the SIP/SDP steps. Summary of operation, Romeo tries to call Juliet:
- Romeo initiates a call to Juliet, sends back either "refuse", "redirect" (to a cellphone client, say) or "provisionally accept".
- Romeo offers up several candidate transports that it can use. It either does this all at once (burst) or one by one (dribble), which is specified in the initation message.
- Juliet offers up several candidate transports (RTP, G.711 codec, frex) that it can use.
- Once concensus is reached over a suitable transport, Jingle switches to "in progress" and RTP takes over. If concensus is impossible the connection ends.
- Finally, Jingle politely closes (and confirms) to end the conversation.
The two processes achieve the same endgoal: getting VoIP data from A to B. An advantages here is that SIP isn't very lightweight in terms of correct implementations, while Jingle can be 'spoken' by any client that can do XMPP as long as you add the statemachine.
Too many? Most are proprietary, or not suitable for IM (because of lack of quality NAT traverssal, frex).
SIP could work but is cumbersome when all you want to do is get an RTP voice stream going. Having a standard that is clear, concise and tailormade for IM applications is useful.