While most of what you say is true, there exists a definition for the term "virus" and a definition for the term "spyware", and what you described sounds more like a virus than spyware. That's all I'm trying to say. I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a lot of work trying to remove viruses or anything like that.
Argh, even worst was trying to get her to read what the error messages said to me! You know how even English-speaking people reading English error messages tend to paraphrase the error messages, rather than reading them out literally, right? "It says it couldn't play the video file" they might say, and you don't know if the actual error message was "application performed an illegal operation" or "could not find appropriate codec". Well, compound this with the translation that there are multiple ways to translate a sentence, and imagine a computer illiterate Japanese girl who only has English as a second language trying to paraphrase what the error messages are saying.
Change your operating system's language to the language you are interested in learning.
I'm interested in learning Japanese, and so I've made a couple of Japanese friends. Often, they ask me to fix their computer problems. Let me tell you, I have no freaking clue what WinXP is asking me, when it asks me in Japanese. Now remember that the person I'm helping isn't very computer literate, and now imagine me trying to ask her "Which one of these checkboxes say something like 'Launch folder windows in a seperate process'?" when she doesn't know what the words "launch", "folder", and "process" means, and she thinks "windows" refers to the OS, and not a GUI widget. It was a troubleshooting nightmare.
There is a new extreme piece of spyware which seems to have surfaced in the last month.
[...] some of the things that it does include generating randomly named dll's
restarting processes that have been killed, runs IE even in safe mode, drags in a whole raft of other spyware to confuse things and leaves the PC it infects after unsuccessful removal unable to connect to the internet
What is the point of writing a spyware program that causes its host unable to connect to the Internet? That sounds more like a virus than Spyware to me.
I wouldn't start playing Doom in an arcade because I would just be like "well I wont get very far since the game's so long".
Recently I got into playing this game called "Ghost Squad", and after about a week, I beat it. I didn't realize it at first, but the game was only 3 levels long. I felt really disapointed, and probably won't be playing the game very much at all anymore (perhaps I'd occasionally try to beat it using only the pistol or something).
Contrast this with "Warzaid", which is perhaps 15 levels long, of which I've only managed to get to the 3rd level. I keep playing this because I haven't figured out the trick to beating it yet. I've stopped playing DDR, because even though it has something like one hundred or two hundred songs, I've beaten them all. DrumMania, which has about 80 or so song, still has some unbeaten songs, so I keep playing it.
There are some games I won't play because I can't get very far. An example of this is "SVC Chaos", a fighting game, where I couldn't even beat the first guy. That game was just plain too hard for me, so I'm not gonna play it until a console port comes out and I can practice a bit. But games which are short, I may play a couple dozen times until I've beaten them, and never play it again.
I have Namco Museum for my Gameboy Advance (it was at home) but still, even though I could have played Galaga for free at home I must have put $2.00 in quarters into that machine while I was there.
You can download a DDR emulator, but because (at the time) I hadn't beaten every song yet, and because there were just so many songs, I could have easily spent $20 in a weekday on DDR alone. Make that $100 if it's a saturday.
Re:what about a commercial game like this
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Games Knoppix
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· Score: 1
If there's one thing I hate, it's having to reboot my computer. I'd tolerate it if it I just had to reboot after installing a software, but to reboot every frigging time to play some game would annoy me a lot.
Prior to this, Microsoft claimed that no personal information is collected at all during the update process: It would send you a list of all the patches, and the client would decide which ones to install (not the server side).
On the bright side, Microsoft is making Macs veeerrrry attractive to end users.
Usually when an end user complains about some aspect of Windows, and you suggest to them "why don't you use a Mac?", they'll probably scoff at you or get pissed at you for your "sarcasm". I can say "usually" because probably 90% of "end users" use Microsoft OSes.
People complain about XP2 being 400 megs. At 400 megs, that's like a whole new OS, they say. But look at the Fedora Core 1 user who has to download 4000 megs for Fedora Core 2! THAT's like a whole new OS.
Maybe it was the way I was raised but I often hug my friends male and female.
I spent the last 3 years of highschool at an all boy's school, so by the time I started being interested enough in girls to ask them out, it became difficult to do so.
Forming female friends in University was not as easy as I had hoped. It's not so much that girls would outright reject being my friend, as that I wouldn't know how to get around the long awkward silences that often occur when something one of us says doesn't really interest the other person.
Of the female friends I've gathered, not all of them would be willing to hug me either (in fact, I have one friend who doesn't want any physical contact with me at all, which I find strange and amusing enough that I tease her about it and "threaten" to touch her on the shoulder one day or something).
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I didn't hug any of the guys at my highschool, and possibly didn't hug my mom or during that period either ('cause it was uncool), so it wouldn't be too surprising for me to hear someone not having physical contact for three years.
Third, it is ok to play once significant other has fallen asleep, but never...I repeat...NEVER let her go to bed by herself. If you do you are just asking for it.
Heed this piece of advice! I was doing a 18 credit semester in University (where most people do 12 to 15 credits per semester), moderating a 400+ user bulletin board during a particularly troll infested period, and working on a web-app which at the time had about 200 active users (now 1400 users). I had long since given up video games for the last 3 months, and even then, I simply didn't have enough time to get everything I wanted done. So I did my moderating/PHP coding in the 11PM to 4AM period and I let my girlfriend go to bed alone. I had asked her about it, if it bothered her and if she wanted to, I could go sleep with her, but she seemed to understand that it was an extremely busy period in my life, and went to sleep alone. Months later, I found out it was just slowly pissing her off more and more. We're no longer together (not even on speaking terms it seems), I've failed half of my courses in University and I resigned from my position as a moderator.
Perhaps slightly offtopic, but if you'll probably lose more weight if you play DDR "competitively" than "leisurely". That is to say, I know a lot of people who consistently play DDR on the easiest setting even though it's obvious they're skillful enough to move on to harder difficulties.
With that in mind, I'm mentioning this DDR site called NNR (http://nnr.ca) which is intended to be a DDR score tracker and skill analysis and improvement webapp, but you could probably use it as a exercise log of sorts, as well as motivation to keep pushing yourself to your limits.
From what I've read, Tachyons are "unpleasant" to most scientists, in that they might refute a certain version of String Theory, for example, because it requires the existence of Tachyons to works.
I remember when I first played a Thief 1 demo that came on a CD that came with some magazine. A friend and I decided to try out the game, and we were simply blown away by the (at the time) amazingly realistic AI.
When we shot a guard a couple of times, he actually realized he was losing and decided to run away, unlike every other grunt I've seen in every other FPS who just kept running at you. To make things worst, as he was running, he shouted "Help! Help! Thief." We knew we were screwed unless we could silence him, so we took out our sword and chased after him.
He ran into a door, and closed it behind him. This, in itself, was another impressive detail, but we our jaws dropped when we tried to open the door and discovered he locked it!
We stood around the door, not sure what to do when all of a sudden it flung open and five guards came running out and pummeled us to death.
This was the first time I had experienced actually intelligent behaviour from a computer controlled character.
In fact, the simpler the configuration is, the less likely it is for a user to make a configuration mistake that will lead to a security hole.
Based on this logic, Windows should be one of the most secure OSes of all: It almost never asksthe user to make a configuration decision. All the default settings are there already! Linux distributions I've used, though, tends to ask you crazy questions like what's your subnet?
Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics...
If you take "master" to mean "get the highest possible score" and "the basics" to mean "the easiest song on the game", it took me 3 years (non-consecutive) before I got all perfects on a song on Basic, nevermind 10 hours.
Syndicate was one of my favorite games, and I often dreamed of Bullfrog making a first person shooter based on the Syndicate world. I don't see how this game is influenced on Syndicate though. Looks more like Rez to me.
So should the military teach combat by showing Rambo movies?
Actually, this might not be a bad idea. Most army recruits are young males, and as such, most of them have probably seen a couple of action movies. Pointing out irrealistic sequences in those movies would probably be a good way to correct misconceptions the general public might have about tactics.
One example that immediately comes to mind is showing them a clip of someone ducking behind a table during a gun fight and telling the recruits that wood will not stop bullets from killing you, and so they should NOT do what the protagonist in this film is doing.
I've actually rated everything I own, and while Amazon's recommendations are sometimes useful, it's never "freaked" me out.
It seems that all it pretty much does is recommends stuff by the same artist (for music) or star/director (for movies).
And in the case of games, I seem to have played everything reasonable it could recommend to me. Now, in desperation, it's recommending me games that were designed for Windows 3.1 even.
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While most of what you say is true, there exists a definition for the term "virus" and a definition for the term "spyware", and what you described sounds more like a virus than spyware. That's all I'm trying to say. I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a lot of work trying to remove viruses or anything like that.
Argh, even worst was trying to get her to read what the error messages said to me! You know how even English-speaking people reading English error messages tend to paraphrase the error messages, rather than reading them out literally, right? "It says it couldn't play the video file" they might say, and you don't know if the actual error message was "application performed an illegal operation" or "could not find appropriate codec". Well, compound this with the translation that there are multiple ways to translate a sentence, and imagine a computer illiterate Japanese girl who only has English as a second language trying to paraphrase what the error messages are saying.
Change your operating system's language to the language you are interested in learning.
I'm interested in learning Japanese, and so I've made a couple of Japanese friends. Often, they ask me to fix their computer problems. Let me tell you, I have no freaking clue what WinXP is asking me, when it asks me in Japanese. Now remember that the person I'm helping isn't very computer literate, and now imagine me trying to ask her "Which one of these checkboxes say something like 'Launch folder windows in a seperate process'?" when she doesn't know what the words "launch", "folder", and "process" means, and she thinks "windows" refers to the OS, and not a GUI widget. It was a troubleshooting nightmare.
There is a new extreme piece of spyware which seems to have surfaced in the last month. [...] some of the things that it does include generating randomly named dll's restarting processes that have been killed, runs IE even in safe mode, drags in a whole raft of other spyware to confuse things and leaves the PC it infects after unsuccessful removal unable to connect to the internet
What is the point of writing a spyware program that causes its host unable to connect to the Internet? That sounds more like a virus than Spyware to me.
I wouldn't start playing Doom in an arcade because I would just be like "well I wont get very far since the game's so long".
Recently I got into playing this game called "Ghost Squad", and after about a week, I beat it. I didn't realize it at first, but the game was only 3 levels long. I felt really disapointed, and probably won't be playing the game very much at all anymore (perhaps I'd occasionally try to beat it using only the pistol or something).
Contrast this with "Warzaid", which is perhaps 15 levels long, of which I've only managed to get to the 3rd level. I keep playing this because I haven't figured out the trick to beating it yet. I've stopped playing DDR, because even though it has something like one hundred or two hundred songs, I've beaten them all. DrumMania, which has about 80 or so song, still has some unbeaten songs, so I keep playing it.
There are some games I won't play because I can't get very far. An example of this is "SVC Chaos", a fighting game, where I couldn't even beat the first guy. That game was just plain too hard for me, so I'm not gonna play it until a console port comes out and I can practice a bit. But games which are short, I may play a couple dozen times until I've beaten them, and never play it again.
I have Namco Museum for my Gameboy Advance (it was at home) but still, even though I could have played Galaga for free at home I must have put $2.00 in quarters into that machine while I was there.
You can download a DDR emulator, but because (at the time) I hadn't beaten every song yet, and because there were just so many songs, I could have easily spent $20 in a weekday on DDR alone. Make that $100 if it's a saturday.
If there's one thing I hate, it's having to reboot my computer. I'd tolerate it if it I just had to reboot after installing a software, but to reboot every frigging time to play some game would annoy me a lot.
Unfortunately, there are an infinite amount of numbers between 1.0 and 2.0. =/
(half of a ring, see this picture of graphite crystal structure)
Thank you, that picture clarified everything for me. </sarcasm>
Prior to this, Microsoft claimed that no personal information is collected at all during the update process: It would send you a list of all the patches, and the client would decide which ones to install (not the server side).
On the bright side, Microsoft is making Macs veeerrrry attractive to end users.
Usually when an end user complains about some aspect of Windows, and you suggest to them "why don't you use a Mac?", they'll probably scoff at you or get pissed at you for your "sarcasm". I can say "usually" because probably 90% of "end users" use Microsoft OSes.
An out of the box Fedora Core 2
People complain about XP2 being 400 megs. At 400 megs, that's like a whole new OS, they say. But look at the Fedora Core 1 user who has to download 4000 megs for Fedora Core 2! THAT's like a whole new OS.
I wouldn't be surprised if five year olds would prefer chocolate over visits from friends.
Maybe it was the way I was raised but I often hug my friends male and female.
I spent the last 3 years of highschool at an all boy's school, so by the time I started being interested enough in girls to ask them out, it became difficult to do so.
Forming female friends in University was not as easy as I had hoped. It's not so much that girls would outright reject being my friend, as that I wouldn't know how to get around the long awkward silences that often occur when something one of us says doesn't really interest the other person.
Of the female friends I've gathered, not all of them would be willing to hug me either (in fact, I have one friend who doesn't want any physical contact with me at all, which I find strange and amusing enough that I tease her about it and "threaten" to touch her on the shoulder one day or something).
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I didn't hug any of the guys at my highschool, and possibly didn't hug my mom or during that period either ('cause it was uncool), so it wouldn't be too surprising for me to hear someone not having physical contact for three years.
Third, it is ok to play once significant other has fallen asleep, but never...I repeat...NEVER let her go to bed by herself. If you do you are just asking for it.
Heed this piece of advice! I was doing a 18 credit semester in University (where most people do 12 to 15 credits per semester), moderating a 400+ user bulletin board during a particularly troll infested period, and working on a web-app which at the time had about 200 active users (now 1400 users). I had long since given up video games for the last 3 months, and even then, I simply didn't have enough time to get everything I wanted done. So I did my moderating/PHP coding in the 11PM to 4AM period and I let my girlfriend go to bed alone. I had asked her about it, if it bothered her and if she wanted to, I could go sleep with her, but she seemed to understand that it was an extremely busy period in my life, and went to sleep alone. Months later, I found out it was just slowly pissing her off more and more. We're no longer together (not even on speaking terms it seems), I've failed half of my courses in University and I resigned from my position as a moderator.
I know far too many people, mean and women, where their life is all about what the other person wants.
No need to get redundant there.
Perhaps slightly offtopic, but if you'll probably lose more weight if you play DDR "competitively" than "leisurely". That is to say, I know a lot of people who consistently play DDR on the easiest setting even though it's obvious they're skillful enough to move on to harder difficulties.
With that in mind, I'm mentioning this DDR site called NNR (http://nnr.ca) which is intended to be a DDR score tracker and skill analysis and improvement webapp, but you could probably use it as a exercise log of sorts, as well as motivation to keep pushing yourself to your limits.
Yeah, it was a shamely plug...
From what I've read, Tachyons are "unpleasant" to most scientists, in that they might refute a certain version of String Theory, for example, because it requires the existence of Tachyons to works.
On the other hand, viruses can no longer spoof the sender, so the infected computer can be immediately identified and thus, hopefully, "cured".
I remember when I first played a Thief 1 demo that came on a CD that came with some magazine. A friend and I decided to try out the game, and we were simply blown away by the (at the time) amazingly realistic AI.
When we shot a guard a couple of times, he actually realized he was losing and decided to run away, unlike every other grunt I've seen in every other FPS who just kept running at you. To make things worst, as he was running, he shouted "Help! Help! Thief." We knew we were screwed unless we could silence him, so we took out our sword and chased after him.
He ran into a door, and closed it behind him. This, in itself, was another impressive detail, but we our jaws dropped when we tried to open the door and discovered he locked it!
We stood around the door, not sure what to do when all of a sudden it flung open and five guards came running out and pummeled us to death.
This was the first time I had experienced actually intelligent behaviour from a computer controlled character.
It would be cool if there were some really bad traffic jams from time to time.
Actually, the way I'm imagining it in my head, I think this feature would actually make the game a lot less fun.
In fact, the simpler the configuration is, the less likely it is for a user to make a configuration mistake that will lead to a security hole.
Based on this logic, Windows should be one of the most secure OSes of all: It almost never asksthe user to make a configuration decision. All the default settings are there already! Linux distributions I've used, though, tends to ask you crazy questions like what's your subnet?
Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics...
If you take "master" to mean "get the highest possible score" and "the basics" to mean "the easiest song on the game", it took me 3 years (non-consecutive) before I got all perfects on a song on Basic, nevermind 10 hours.
Syndicate was one of my favorite games, and I often dreamed of Bullfrog making a first person shooter based on the Syndicate world. I don't see how this game is influenced on Syndicate though. Looks more like Rez to me.
So should the military teach combat by showing Rambo movies?
Actually, this might not be a bad idea. Most army recruits are young males, and as such, most of them have probably seen a couple of action movies. Pointing out irrealistic sequences in those movies would probably be a good way to correct misconceptions the general public might have about tactics.
One example that immediately comes to mind is showing them a clip of someone ducking behind a table during a gun fight and telling the recruits that wood will not stop bullets from killing you, and so they should NOT do what the protagonist in this film is doing.
I've actually rated everything I own, and while Amazon's recommendations are sometimes useful, it's never "freaked" me out.
It seems that all it pretty much does is recommends stuff by the same artist (for music) or star/director (for movies).
And in the case of games, I seem to have played everything reasonable it could recommend to me. Now, in desperation, it's recommending me games that were designed for Windows 3.1 even.