Surely BackTrack needs a mention. One stop shop for Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking, Security Analysis and pretty much anything else security-related. It might not qualify as a fully-blown "distro" depending on your definition, but it's a lot more customised than your standard "Clonebuntu" variants.
If you are even remotely interested in Network Security or Penetration Testing, it's a really invaluable tool.
"This file contains random-looking data and we suspect it to contain encrypted data with direct relevance to an ongoing National Security investigation. Please provide the decryption keys for the file '/dev/urandom' immediately or face 5 years in jail!"
Although, perhaps someone could write a tool that replaces/dev/random with some kind of encrypted device volume? Interesting...
No-one is gonna read this far down, but what the hell:)
The Return To Zork one might not be a glitch so much as just evil designers, but if you made a slight mistake on the FIRST SCREEN (cut instead of dig the plant) then you're blocked from completion of the game, but you don't find out until much (much) later!
Dark Age of Camelot is a still-breathing MMO that got roundly whooped by WoW despite having probably the best PvP of any MMO to date. The bane of this game was the sheer number and scale of Line-Of-Sight and NPC-pathing problems. It made certain situations in the game almost unplayable.
There were also a lot of questionable decisions made by the design team that led to some interesting game dynamics. Anyone who's played will remember the MoC3/RR5 Sorc combo, the Large Shield blockrate against Dual-Wield and various other fun bits and pieces.
(I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but I don't care)
How about this as a foolproof electronic voting booth system;
For each candidate, have a lifesize cardboard cutout of them, complete with a sign above their head with their name and political party clearly written. Place in front of each cutout a perspex screen (to stop vandalism), a Big Red Button about 3ft from the floor and a pressure pad on the floor itself. When someone is positioned directly in front of a candidate image AND the Big Red Button is pressed, a vote is cast.
At this point, a large screen should display the name of the candidate you just voted for and their party. If you have selected incorrectly, you have 10 seconds to press the Big Red Button which will then retract your vote. At this point, you can vote again.
This would work well for physically-disabled voters, deaf voters and also partially-sighted voters. Blind voters couldn't use a Voting Machine anyway, so it's no worse than a touchscreen.
It has verification and ease of use on its side (and it would add some much needed fun to the proceedings!).
There is no way that I can think of to verify a vote for a person afterwards that would not be open to abuse.
To be honest, the statistical "noise" introduced into an election by bad technology is going to be overwhelmed by the noise introduced by bad voters.
In my perfect world, the vote would have to be earned through a series of free, independantly-run (as far as this is possible) political science classes and a short examination. If the person shows a basic understanding of the political system, the candidates policies, the differences between the parties and the significance of their vote, they should then (and only then) be allowed to cast a vote.
This would (I believe) bring down the cost of the Election Campaigns (or Naked Attention-Whoring Three Ring Circus as I prefer to call it) and force the candidates to put forward "better" policies. In the current environment, the votes of people with an informed opinion are probably vastly outnumbered by people who vote for a candidate based on the colour of his skin, the amount of TV-time he's put in, a historical (or family) preference for a party or any number of other non-factors.
Plus (and this is a big plus) making the vote conditional on some level of education would probably get rid of 99% of the instances of someone being unable to use a defined method for showing a preference for one of three (or one of X) options.
This might sound like elitist snobbery (and maybe it is!) but it seems to me that a country like the US who takes such pride in its democracy and in the rights of the individual insist on making the "right" to drive conditional on passing a number of aptitude tests while leaving the right to decide the future of their economy, international diplomacy and internal lawmaking as a complete free-for-all.
I'm not sure which I think would be more negligent; letting untrained drivers on the road where they might run over my kids or letting untrained voters into the polling booth where their bigotry or simply their lack of education might impact the lives of every single person on this planet.
Until this problem is solved, we might as well give the presidency based on;
a) A coin toss b) Who has the best hair
Or we could stick our fingers in our ears, yammer about the inalienable right to vote and keep on with the current Pop-Idol-Gone-Wrong election process.
Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny and it's sequels. I spent so many hours playing the first one on my Amiga. I even paid £300 for a 20MB (yes, that's 20 MEG) external HDD so I wouldn't have to swap disks so much. God I loved that game!
Yes, no one should have a gun. That way when the bad guys get their hands one one, we are all totally defenseless and can do nothing but line up like cattle and be slaughtered. I like the sound of that!! Not. Right, I think we need to make an important distinction here. The person who shot the people at VTech was almost certainly NOT a criminal OR a 'bad guy'. I'd imagine it's far more likely that he was just a person with a bad combination of mental instability and personal circumstances. He made a (very) bad choice and used the tools at his disposal to achieve an end. Now the "end" in question doesn't have to be a logical goal or anything because the guy is clearly disturbed and not thinking straight.
Careeer criminals will get hold of guns, but in general career criminals have very little interest in shooting random people. It's not good for business. In a society like the UK where only criminals and Policemen have guns, you are extremely unlikely to be shot unless you are a criminal, involved in drugs or a police officer. A percentage of the population of any society will always have mental problems, impulse and anger control issues and poor judgement. In a society where people can legally own and carry guns, some of those guns will be in the hands of those unstable people. Until that person blows up and starts shooting people, they can be hard to spot.
I know that a ban on gun ownership would never happen in the US. Even if it could be proved beyond doubt (as it has been to many people) that MORE guns = MORE shootings, there would still never be a ban. What about increasing the requirements for legal ownership and forcing owners to carry permits on their person at all times? For example, offer all school-leavers 2 years of National Service with the Armed Forces. If someone has at least 2 years military service (which includes at least basic weapons training and also a great deal of psyche profiling and the like) then they can pass a simple test to be given a gun permit. If someone does NOT have 2 years service, they would need to pass a strenuous (and I mean that...psyche profiling, aptitude tests, theory and anything else people brighter than me can come up with) training program of at least one year before being granted a permit.
Permits should be renewed every 2 years minimum, with eyesight tests and apititude tests as a bare minimum for renewal.
These things are so subjective that they will always cause arguments between 'hardened' gamers. At the end of the day, all that matters is the impact the games had on you and your perception of gaming. With that in mind, here's the list of games that I've wrecked my social life with for the last 20 years or so;
1) Championship Manager 2) Dark Age of Camelot 3) Lords of Chaos 4) Turrican 5) Beneath a Steel Sky
Not sure how many of these you would consider to be groundbreaking, but I'll take Turrican over Mario any day! Lords of Chaos was the first turn-based strategy game I ever played and is still the yardstick for pretty much any strategy game I play now. Beneath a Steel Sky was simply the best-looking, best-scripted, funniest and most challenging "point-and-click" graphical adventure game ever...move over Guybrush! DAOC was my first (and probably last) foray into MMORPGs and I've been playing for 4 years now and I'm still finding new stuff about the game and still enjoying it immensely. Championship Manager..what can I say? I reckon I've spent more hours playing Champ Man (or it's derivatives) in the last 10 years than anything else bar sleeping!!
Some good choices for games in this thread...Tetris, Nethack, Lords of Midnight and a ton of others that might well have changed the gaming landscape for ever...but being innovative and groundbreaking doesn't guarantee a personal impact...just play what's fun!
I've played most of the games listed above (Bards Tale seems to be the big one that I missed). I play MMORPGs now and spend quite a lot of my free time online, but I am pretty sure I will NEVER pass the amount of time that I spent playing (on the C64);
1) Realms of Arkania (D&D-stylee adventure game...isometric turn-based group combat!!!) 2) Turrican (move aside Mario...best platformer EVER!) 3) Lords of Chaos (turn-based strategy game) 4) Exodus (Mastertronic? kind of like Defender but not and with flashing llamas!!) 5) Sensible Soccer (how can no-one have mentioned this?!?!)
So much fun and good memories...gonna load up Dosbox tonight and see if I can find some of these games to play. Oh and Lords of Midnight if I can find it!
In a cyber-world of English companies with.com domains, Irish companies with.co.uk domains, ANY company with a.tv domain, it is quite clear to me that the original ideal of "relevant TLD suffixes" has never worked, and will never work in the future.
That said, it IS a good way of screwing laywers out of their hard-earned cash ($1000 for a letter??? I'll give you 4 for free!!!)
I don't think there is any doubt that illegal download and sharing of copyrighted material lowers the revenue of any royalty holders. That said, the idea that file-sharing software that actually monitors your downloads and makes UNREQUESTED CHANGES to your PC configuration is surely a far more important issue.
Where do we draw the line? Maybe Micro$oft could release a virus that checks for illegal copies of MS products on people's machines and trashes the users hard-drives if pirated software is found...maybe even sends some heavies round to discuss the finer points of free enterprise with the owners kneecaps!
I think legislation might be needed to lay down rules of exactly what can and can't be done to a client PC without user knowledge and permission.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely BackTrack needs a mention. One stop shop for Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking, Security Analysis and pretty much anything else security-related. It might not qualify as a fully-blown "distro" depending on your definition, but it's a lot more customised than your standard "Clonebuntu" variants.
If you are even remotely interested in Network Security or Penetration Testing, it's a really invaluable tool.
"This file contains random-looking data and we suspect it to contain encrypted data with direct relevance to an ongoing National Security investigation. Please provide the decryption keys for the file '/dev/urandom' immediately or face 5 years in jail!"
Although, perhaps someone could write a tool that replaces /dev/random with some kind of encrypted device volume? Interesting...
No-one is gonna read this far down, but what the hell :)
The Return To Zork one might not be a glitch so much as just evil designers, but if you made a slight mistake on the FIRST SCREEN (cut instead of dig the plant) then you're blocked from completion of the game, but you don't find out until much (much) later!
Dark Age of Camelot is a still-breathing MMO that got roundly whooped by WoW despite having probably the best PvP of any MMO to date. The bane of this game was the sheer number and scale of Line-Of-Sight and NPC-pathing problems. It made certain situations in the game almost unplayable.
There were also a lot of questionable decisions made by the design team that led to some interesting game dynamics. Anyone who's played will remember the MoC3/RR5 Sorc combo, the Large Shield blockrate against Dual-Wield and various other fun bits and pieces.
Still loved that game though...
(I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but I don't care)
How about this as a foolproof electronic voting booth system;
For each candidate, have a lifesize cardboard cutout of them, complete with a sign above their head with their name and political party clearly written. Place in front of each cutout a perspex screen (to stop vandalism), a Big Red Button about 3ft from the floor and a pressure pad on the floor itself. When someone is positioned directly in front of a candidate image AND the Big Red Button is pressed, a vote is cast.
At this point, a large screen should display the name of the candidate you just voted for and their party. If you have selected incorrectly, you have 10 seconds to press the Big Red Button which will then retract your vote. At this point, you can vote again.
This would work well for physically-disabled voters, deaf voters and also partially-sighted voters. Blind voters couldn't use a Voting Machine anyway, so it's no worse than a touchscreen.
It has verification and ease of use on its side (and it would add some much needed fun to the proceedings!).
There is no way that I can think of to verify a vote for a person afterwards that would not be open to abuse.
To be honest, the statistical "noise" introduced into an election by bad technology is going to be overwhelmed by the noise introduced by bad voters.
In my perfect world, the vote would have to be earned through a series of free, independantly-run (as far as this is possible) political science classes and a short examination. If the person shows a basic understanding of the political system, the candidates policies, the differences between the parties and the significance of their vote, they should then (and only then) be allowed to cast a vote.
This would (I believe) bring down the cost of the Election Campaigns (or Naked Attention-Whoring Three Ring Circus as I prefer to call it) and force the candidates to put forward "better" policies. In the current environment, the votes of people with an informed opinion are probably vastly outnumbered by people who vote for a candidate based on the colour of his skin, the amount of TV-time he's put in, a historical (or family) preference for a party or any number of other non-factors.
Plus (and this is a big plus) making the vote conditional on some level of education would probably get rid of 99% of the instances of someone being unable to use a defined method for showing a preference for one of three (or one of X) options.
This might sound like elitist snobbery (and maybe it is!) but it seems to me that a country like the US who takes such pride in its democracy and in the rights of the individual insist on making the "right" to drive conditional on passing a number of aptitude tests while leaving the right to decide the future of their economy, international diplomacy and internal lawmaking as a complete free-for-all.
I'm not sure which I think would be more negligent; letting untrained drivers on the road where they might run over my kids or letting untrained voters into the polling booth where their bigotry or simply their lack of education might impact the lives of every single person on this planet.
Until this problem is solved, we might as well give the presidency based on;
a) A coin toss
b) Who has the best hair
Or we could stick our fingers in our ears, yammer about the inalienable right to vote and keep on with the current Pop-Idol-Gone-Wrong election process.
Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny and it's sequels. I spent so many hours playing the first one on my Amiga. I even paid £300 for a 20MB (yes, that's 20 MEG) external HDD so I wouldn't have to swap disks so much. God I loved that game!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realms_of_Arkania:_Blade_of_Destiny
Kim Jong Il
Careeer criminals will get hold of guns, but in general career criminals have very little interest in shooting random people. It's not good for business. In a society like the UK where only criminals and Policemen have guns, you are extremely unlikely to be shot unless you are a criminal, involved in drugs or a police officer. A percentage of the population of any society will always have mental problems, impulse and anger control issues and poor judgement. In a society where people can legally own and carry guns, some of those guns will be in the hands of those unstable people. Until that person blows up and starts shooting people, they can be hard to spot.
I know that a ban on gun ownership would never happen in the US. Even if it could be proved beyond doubt (as it has been to many people) that MORE guns = MORE shootings, there would still never be a ban. What about increasing the requirements for legal ownership and forcing owners to carry permits on their person at all times? For example, offer all school-leavers 2 years of National Service with the Armed Forces. If someone has at least 2 years military service (which includes at least basic weapons training and also a great deal of psyche profiling and the like) then they can pass a simple test to be given a gun permit. If someone does NOT have 2 years service, they would need to pass a strenuous (and I mean that...psyche profiling, aptitude tests, theory and anything else people brighter than me can come up with) training program of at least one year before being granted a permit.
Permits should be renewed every 2 years minimum, with eyesight tests and apititude tests as a bare minimum for renewal.
What do people think?
These things are so subjective that they will always cause arguments between 'hardened' gamers. At the end of the day, all that matters is the impact the games had on you and your perception of gaming. With that in mind, here's the list of games that I've wrecked my social life with for the last 20 years or so;
1) Championship Manager
2) Dark Age of Camelot
3) Lords of Chaos
4) Turrican
5) Beneath a Steel Sky
Not sure how many of these you would consider to be groundbreaking, but I'll take Turrican over Mario any day! Lords of Chaos was the first turn-based strategy game I ever played and is still the yardstick for pretty much any strategy game I play now. Beneath a Steel Sky was simply the best-looking, best-scripted, funniest and most challenging "point-and-click" graphical adventure game ever...move over Guybrush! DAOC was my first (and probably last) foray into MMORPGs and I've been playing for 4 years now and I'm still finding new stuff about the game and still enjoying it immensely. Championship Manager..what can I say? I reckon I've spent more hours playing Champ Man (or it's derivatives) in the last 10 years than anything else bar sleeping!!
Some good choices for games in this thread...Tetris, Nethack, Lords of Midnight and a ton of others that might well have changed the gaming landscape for ever...but being innovative and groundbreaking doesn't guarantee a personal impact...just play what's fun!
I've played most of the games listed above (Bards Tale seems to be the big one that I missed). I play MMORPGs now and spend quite a lot of my free time online, but I am pretty sure I will NEVER pass the amount of time that I spent playing (on the C64);
1) Realms of Arkania (D&D-stylee adventure game...isometric turn-based group combat!!!)
2) Turrican (move aside Mario...best platformer EVER!)
3) Lords of Chaos (turn-based strategy game)
4) Exodus (Mastertronic? kind of like Defender but not and with flashing llamas!!)
5) Sensible Soccer (how can no-one have mentioned this?!?!)
So much fun and good memories...gonna load up Dosbox tonight and see if I can find some of these games to play. Oh and Lords of Midnight if I can find it!
In a cyber-world of English companies with .com domains, Irish companies with .co.uk domains, ANY company with a .tv domain, it is quite clear to me that the original ideal of "relevant TLD suffixes" has never worked, and will never work in the future.
That said, it IS a good way of screwing laywers out of their hard-earned cash ($1000 for a letter??? I'll give you 4 for free!!!)
I don't think there is any doubt that illegal download and sharing of copyrighted material lowers the revenue of any royalty holders. That said, the idea that file-sharing software that actually monitors your downloads and makes UNREQUESTED CHANGES to your PC configuration is surely a far more important issue.
Where do we draw the line? Maybe Micro$oft could release a virus that checks for illegal copies of MS products on people's machines and trashes the users hard-drives if pirated software is found...maybe even sends some heavies round to discuss the finer points of free enterprise with the owners kneecaps!
I think legislation might be needed to lay down rules of exactly what can and can't be done to a client PC without user knowledge and permission.