His comment was a little rambling so I found it hard to understand, but I got the impression that he is talking about "Pay to Win" attracting psychopaths; whereas a fair fight (say games like Quake 3 where every player is equal, or indeed Chess) which is PvP, attracts normal people looking for a challenge. Same thing with cheaters = psychopaths enjoy going on, cheating and beating other people over and over again - whereas normal people would find this fun for a few matches then deeply boring. Of course whether any of this is true or not...
I enjoy a good game of Quake 3 and I'd hope I'm not a psychopath, indeed I work at a school and occasionally we'll have a game of Quake with the students. I've never been into the PubG / Battle Royale kind of games as every game seemed to be 15 minutes of wandering around picking up loot only to die to an unseen sniper in 5 seconds.
Of course as others pointed out, the real reason behind this ban is probably censorship. Either old people fearing what they don't understand, or they don't want the poor lower caste individuals knowing too much "truth" outside their village. I wonder if they'll start censoring websites critical of the State, Caste and Hinduism next - then we will know for sure.
Why is it that a lot of rich old men seem to be unnaturally interested in the fluids of young teenage boys? Especially those on the Religious Right. The more they preach Jesus and Moral Values, the more likely they are to have an interest in these young boys. Injecting their blood is one of the least perverse things these guys are doing.
In 50 years time American workers will go back to living in Company barracks, and being paid with company scrip. They will be working 6am - 9pm, monday to saturday, with a half day on Sunday generously provided. Any sick days will not get paid, and there will be no vacation pay. There will be vacations allowed, but due to the cost of living in the company barracks nobody will take any off, as nobody will have a bank balance over $1000 USD. A handful of cartels will control all of this, and any upstarts will get squashed immediately. e.g. New guy has idea for a new car? Well he cannot buy rubber, steel etc because only the Big Cartel can buy from the rubber suppliers (if they disobey, they no longer get any Cartel orders) - and the State will allow this as long as the campaign contributions flow in.
And the Americans will still rant on about how great their system is, and how the free market cures everything. I like it when they say - those fancy Euros and their 5 weeks vacation and 40 hour workweeks, what pussies, Our US GDP is twice theirs! How does that high GDP serve them when they are sleeping at the office most nights?
It is sad really, I feel for the US workers but they are all so selfish and so ignorant they will never organise or vote differently. A guy bullied them back in high school? Well we need the free market so he can work like a slave in a crap job, and I can feel superior than him for being paid $4 an hour more than him
Ultimately, you hire people from Microsoft and other large companies (plus MBA's etc), and you act surprised when your company behaves like these large companies? What happened to the community of enthusiastic developers like "the old days"? Remember when Microsoft were being praised for being a "little startup" that took down IBM? look what they became.. Someone should come up with a name for the cycle of - company produces good product and grows; "management" get brought in to improve profits; product suffers. users jump to a new product developed by a different company. this company grows and brings in "management" to improve profits.....
You can tell Google have been infiltrated by morons because a) They have hired ex-Microsoft employees; b) they listen to these idiotic UX "experts" and have gotten rid of vertical scrollbars; because everyone needs to know gestures now as gestures are so much more intuitive than something you can see on a screen...
A personal rant about Google here (tl;dr Google software is becoming as much as a pain as MS software) - I do the IT for a School and Google are getting just as user hostile as MS ever were. Their attitude is now "what we want matters more than what the users want" (Google got big by providing what users wanted, and Microsoft is getting smaller for ignoring this - e.g. MS browser share is now 3%. 3%! can you imagine that 15 years ago?).
I ended up recommending Bing to my users a few months ago because Google kept prompting users to fill in a Captcha every time they did a search - which sounds fair enough but a Captcha involving picking street signs, 10 - 15 times, for each page of search results? Is that the best they can come up with?
Our Proxy IP address was showing "Bot-like activity" - I have checked our logs for evidence of malware or other bogus searches (found none) - I can see how a thousand searches an hour for "Fortnite Skins" seems like bot activity, so I can't criticise them for this too much - but why isn't there any human support where I can inform them that we are a school and our search profile might be different? our IP address is even on an educational-only ISP. Instead you just get to an FAQ telling you to run a virus scan because their algorithms are never wrong, never mismatch search patterns; basically they do not care.
Ultimately it is their software, their servers and they can do what they want. Such it is that I can also switch our default search provider over to Bing, and inform my users that Google software is basically just as bad as Microsoft software.
I think the only thing that isn't dying is this story; I've read an article talking about how Death itself will be cured "any day now" for the past 20 years, and we are still nowhere near closer to a cure than when Indiana Jones set out looking for the Holy Grail. We can't even cure Male Pattern Baldness, where the cure has been 5 years away for 50 years.
One other thing, if a cure does come out I'll be glad to take it; if only to find out what discoveries they make out in the Universe. It is strange to see that the average Slashdot poster has such a bad life that they would welcome Death; is the stereotype about the average Slashdot user true? or is it simply because the average Slashdot user comes from the USA and so would only be working for that 300 years anyway?
What is it with these websites pushing through terrible "redesigns"?
They get pages and pages of user hatred, and yet these CEO's seem to blindly trust these UI "Experts" anyway? Here's a hint - if your UI Expert says "Users don't know what they want; they will stick with it - they did with Youtube" - fire them. Users stuck with Youtube despite the UI changes (Youtube was heavily entrenched) - not because of them. Reddit is going through a similar thing now - redesigns that appear to have been implemented by people who have no idea what the site is about, who it is for, and how it is used - it is almost as if they are designing to a hipster tablet template (oh right, it is because that is what they are doing).
At least Slashdot had the brains to dump Beta (at least I haven't seen it in years despite almost never logging in)
Or - and it just occured to me - is it some kind of monetization experiment all of these sites are pushing through? (it all makes sense)
Lots of oldies on Slashdot still.:-) I am from the "Era" when people had just 1 shared family PC, connected to a dial-up phone line. I am 32 and don't consider myself particularly old. I have been reading Slashdot since about 2001 so I remember all the oldies talking about programming old mainframes, building hobby computers, getting their first AT PC etc. My first PC was a Cyrix M2 300 which makes me a virtual newcomer, or so I thought.
There are also many mods available for TA such as TA Esc that add a new tech level and many more units; the engine in TA is spectacular; each shot is modelled as a projectile with newtonian physics, so that hits/misses are calculated based on shot speed/angle etc rather than being purely hardcoded like in starcraft.
One downside to TA is the singleplayer story; Starcraft had a truly epic story with multiple sides, good character motivation etc - TA didn't really have that, it just had "here is a mission, kill the other side" - as two automated robotic armies who have been fighting for so long, they forget why they fight - there isn't much scope for heroes in a story like that
I find Bing terrible for unintended porn... I work at a school, never had a problem with Google Safesearch bringing up unwanted images, but searching for "teenage boy" in Bing even with safety on strict has probably put me on some Government list...
Those tiny mice are quite popular where I work, but then I do work in a school where most of the users have tiny hands:p Probably the only real use for them. I prefer a larger mouse even though I have small hands myself.
I keep getting a weird issue where Windows will behave as if the CTRL key is stuck down on the keyboard, even when it isn't (and so trying to switch app in the taskbar just selects multiple). I get this on basically every computer I've used, so it can't be a hardware problem. Anyone else get this?
Seems they are having bandwidth problems, anyone have a mirror? Anyone know if the passwords leaked were part of a particular service (I read something about Yahoo Voice) or are they just a random selection of normal e-mail accounts? I work at a school and am trying to decide whether to e-mail my users with advice about changing their passwords or not (judging by outgoing smtp over half of them have yahoo accounts.. I wonder why it is so popular?)
I was an ordinary helpdesk drone and I had access to all of my customers e-mails. I worked for a large UK DSL ISP. Infact, I would semi-regularly have customers phoning me up asking me to read out their e-mails, as if I was some sort of human "speaking clock".
"Do I have any e-mails from 'sonnyjim'? Oh, could you read it out to me? See, I'm not at my computer and sonnyjim is my son who's in Australia..."
I would do so if I was happy with the customers identity. I don't recall anyone ever abusing this facility. From what I saw, the contents of every mailbox I went into wouldn't make riveting reading - it's not all "carry on" affairs in there. We had better things to do, like browsing BBC news and reading Slashdot.
haha, so every time you close the lid on your laptop you have to carefully check it to make sure nothing's running that might disrupt the process? and you're happy with doing that? you can't deny that the behaviour there is broken.
Indeed, a lot of spam to my mail server comes from China, Korea, or India. I see the occasional spam come from the USA, but it's a very small amount. Same with Canada. The hostnames I often see seem to belong to residential addresses - DSL connections etc. It seems a damn botnet is responsible for sending all the "Acai berry" and Viagra/Cialis spams to my domain.
I don't shitcan the mails from "bad" countries outright, but I do increase the "weight" / probability it might be spam. I've also whitelisted Britain, so no e-mail coming from UK IP addresses will get filtered (I am based in the UK)
Setting this up on an SMTP proxy box running ASSP took a day, and has reduced spam on my network by 90-95% - it's a no brainer, really.
It's bizzare - what if you word you've chosen is important to convey a message (or a subtle pun?)
Why don't they just put double-spaces inbetween words - you can still track people by seeing where the double-spaces appear, and the message itself isn't as distorted. How did this idea get out of somebody's lunchtime daydream?
This is amazing. Additionally to that he actually made a Tesla Coil in the same style as the Soviet Tesla Coil from red alert 2! complete with Engineer suit!
Do people actually do this in America? I wouldn't be able to work the next day after only 2-3 hours sleep (my brain would be so asleep I would end up causing myself more work in botched jobs)
Yeah, it's quite amazing really, even more so when the Firehose had 4-5 different submissions all based upon this story, and they chose the worst (poorly worded, factual errors, "Micro$oft", inflammatory headline) of them all!
I do like a good MS bash every so often (stress relief from dealing with their products) but I do prefer it to be at least semi-intellectual, rather than just throwing around silly insults...
Oh yeah, and my cheap Chinese £20 Ipod knockoff is still functioning well... plays.ogg too..
I recently purchased a "realtek" NIC that turned out to be a pirated NIC. that's right - pirated hardware! it had the realtek logo on it, it was listed as Linux compatible, but when I went into the Linux driver directory, it contained a text document saying "use NDISWRAPPER".
I ended up googling the chip's serial number and learned it was an unlicenced knock-off from somewhere in China. First time I've ever seen anything like it.
Slashdot Mirror
His comment was a little rambling so I found it hard to understand, but I got the impression that he is talking about "Pay to Win" attracting psychopaths; whereas a fair fight (say games like Quake 3 where every player is equal, or indeed Chess) which is PvP, attracts normal people looking for a challenge.
Same thing with cheaters = psychopaths enjoy going on, cheating and beating other people over and over again - whereas normal people would find this fun for a few matches then deeply boring. Of course whether any of this is true or not...
I enjoy a good game of Quake 3 and I'd hope I'm not a psychopath, indeed I work at a school and occasionally we'll have a game of Quake with the students. I've never been into the PubG / Battle Royale kind of games as every game seemed to be 15 minutes of wandering around picking up loot only to die to an unseen sniper in 5 seconds.
Of course as others pointed out, the real reason behind this ban is probably censorship. Either old people fearing what they don't understand, or they don't want the poor lower caste individuals knowing too much "truth" outside their village. I wonder if they'll start censoring websites critical of the State, Caste and Hinduism next - then we will know for sure.
Why is it that a lot of rich old men seem to be unnaturally interested in the fluids of young teenage boys?
Especially those on the Religious Right. The more they preach Jesus and Moral Values, the more likely they are to have an interest in these young boys. Injecting their blood is one of the least perverse things these guys are doing.
In 50 years time American workers will go back to living in Company barracks, and being paid with company scrip. They will be working 6am - 9pm, monday to saturday, with a half day on Sunday generously provided. Any sick days will not get paid, and there will be no vacation pay.
There will be vacations allowed, but due to the cost of living in the company barracks nobody will take any off, as nobody will have a bank balance over $1000 USD.
A handful of cartels will control all of this, and any upstarts will get squashed immediately. e.g. New guy has idea for a new car? Well he cannot buy rubber, steel etc because only the Big Cartel can buy from the rubber suppliers (if they disobey, they no longer get any Cartel orders) - and the State will allow this as long as the campaign contributions flow in.
And the Americans will still rant on about how great their system is, and how the free market cures everything.
I like it when they say - those fancy Euros and their 5 weeks vacation and 40 hour workweeks, what pussies, Our US GDP is twice theirs! How does that high GDP serve them when they are sleeping at the office most nights?
It is sad really, I feel for the US workers but they are all so selfish and so ignorant they will never organise or vote differently. A guy bullied them back in high school? Well we need the free market so he can work like a slave in a crap job, and I can feel superior than him for being paid $4 an hour more than him
tldr = Google are becoming the new Microsoft.
Ultimately, you hire people from Microsoft and other large companies (plus MBA's etc), and you act surprised when your company behaves like these large companies? What happened to the community of enthusiastic developers like "the old days"?
Remember when Microsoft were being praised for being a "little startup" that took down IBM? look what they became..
Someone should come up with a name for the cycle of - company produces good product and grows; "management" get brought in to improve profits; product suffers. users jump to a new product developed by a different company. this company grows and brings in "management" to improve profits.....
You can tell Google have been infiltrated by morons because a) They have hired ex-Microsoft employees; b) they listen to these idiotic UX "experts" and have gotten rid of vertical scrollbars; because everyone needs to know gestures now as gestures are so much more intuitive than something you can see on a screen...
A personal rant about Google here (tl;dr Google software is becoming as much as a pain as MS software) - I do the IT for a School and Google are getting just as user hostile as MS ever were. Their attitude is now "what we want matters more than what the users want" (Google got big by providing what users wanted, and Microsoft is getting smaller for ignoring this - e.g. MS browser share is now 3%. 3%! can you imagine that 15 years ago?).
I ended up recommending Bing to my users a few months ago because Google kept prompting users to fill in a Captcha every time they did a search - which sounds fair enough but a Captcha involving picking street signs, 10 - 15 times, for each page of search results? Is that the best they can come up with?
Our Proxy IP address was showing "Bot-like activity" - I have checked our logs for evidence of malware or other bogus searches (found none) - I can see how a thousand searches an hour for "Fortnite Skins" seems like bot activity, so I can't criticise them for this too much - but why isn't there any human support where I can inform them that we are a school and our search profile might be different? our IP address is even on an educational-only ISP.
Instead you just get to an FAQ telling you to run a virus scan because their algorithms are never wrong, never mismatch search patterns; basically they do not care.
Ultimately it is their software, their servers and they can do what they want. Such it is that I can also switch our default search provider over to Bing, and inform my users that Google software is basically just as bad as Microsoft software.
I think the only thing that isn't dying is this story; I've read an article talking about how Death itself will be cured "any day now" for the past 20 years, and we are still nowhere near closer to a cure than when Indiana Jones set out looking for the Holy Grail.
We can't even cure Male Pattern Baldness, where the cure has been 5 years away for 50 years.
One other thing, if a cure does come out I'll be glad to take it; if only to find out what discoveries they make out in the Universe. It is strange to see that the average Slashdot poster has such a bad life that they would welcome Death; is the stereotype about the average Slashdot user true? or is it simply because the average Slashdot user comes from the USA and so would only be working for that 300 years anyway?
What is it with these websites pushing through terrible "redesigns"?
They get pages and pages of user hatred, and yet these CEO's seem to blindly trust these UI "Experts" anyway? Here's a hint - if your UI Expert says "Users don't know what they want; they will stick with it - they did with Youtube" - fire them. Users stuck with Youtube despite the UI changes (Youtube was heavily entrenched) - not because of them.
Reddit is going through a similar thing now - redesigns that appear to have been implemented by people who have no idea what the site is about, who it is for, and how it is used - it is almost as if they are designing to a hipster tablet template (oh right, it is because that is what they are doing).
At least Slashdot had the brains to dump Beta (at least I haven't seen it in years despite almost never logging in)
Or - and it just occured to me - is it some kind of monetization experiment all of these sites are pushing through? (it all makes sense)
Lots of oldies on Slashdot still. :-)
I am from the "Era" when people had just 1 shared family PC, connected to a dial-up phone line. I am 32 and don't consider myself particularly old. I have been reading Slashdot since about 2001 so I remember all the oldies talking about programming old mainframes, building hobby computers, getting their first AT PC etc.
My first PC was a Cyrix M2 300 which makes me a virtual newcomer, or so I thought.
Tommy Sotomayor is right, many of these parents care more about their weave than their children's education
There are also many mods available for TA such as TA Esc that add a new tech level and many more units; the engine in TA is spectacular; each shot is modelled as a projectile with newtonian physics, so that hits/misses are calculated based on shot speed/angle etc rather than being purely hardcoded like in starcraft.
One downside to TA is the singleplayer story; Starcraft had a truly epic story with multiple sides, good character motivation etc - TA didn't really have that, it just had "here is a mission, kill the other side" - as two automated robotic armies who have been fighting for so long, they forget why they fight - there isn't much scope for heroes in a story like that
I find Bing terrible for unintended porn... I work at a school, never had a problem with Google Safesearch bringing up unwanted images, but searching for "teenage boy" in Bing even with safety on strict has probably put me on some Government list...
Those tiny mice are quite popular where I work, but then I do work in a school where most of the users have tiny hands :p
Probably the only real use for them.
I prefer a larger mouse even though I have small hands myself.
I keep getting a weird issue where Windows will behave as if the CTRL key is stuck down on the keyboard, even when it isn't (and so trying to switch app in the taskbar just selects multiple). I get this on basically every computer I've used, so it can't be a hardware problem.
Anyone else get this?
Seems they are having bandwidth problems, anyone have a mirror?
Anyone know if the passwords leaked were part of a particular service (I read something about Yahoo Voice) or are they just a random selection of normal e-mail accounts?
I work at a school and am trying to decide whether to e-mail my users with advice about changing their passwords or not (judging by outgoing smtp over half of them have yahoo accounts.. I wonder why it is so popular?)
I was an ordinary helpdesk drone and I had access to all of my customers e-mails. I worked for a large UK DSL ISP.
Infact, I would semi-regularly have customers phoning me up asking me to read out their e-mails, as if I was some sort of human "speaking clock".
"Do I have any e-mails from 'sonnyjim'? Oh, could you read it out to me? See, I'm not at my computer and sonnyjim is my son who's in Australia..."
I would do so if I was happy with the customers identity.
I don't recall anyone ever abusing this facility. From what I saw, the contents of every mailbox I went into wouldn't make riveting reading - it's not all "carry on" affairs in there. We had better things to do, like browsing BBC news and reading Slashdot.
haha, so every time you close the lid on your laptop you have to carefully check it to make sure nothing's running that might disrupt the process? and you're happy with doing that?
you can't deny that the behaviour there is broken.
What's the problem with rejecting the SMTP session, with the error displaying the SMTP error code along with your phone number/error message in it?
Indeed, a lot of spam to my mail server comes from China, Korea, or India.
I see the occasional spam come from the USA, but it's a very small amount. Same with Canada.
The hostnames I often see seem to belong to residential addresses - DSL connections etc. It seems a damn botnet is responsible for sending all the "Acai berry" and Viagra/Cialis spams to my domain.
I don't shitcan the mails from "bad" countries outright, but I do increase the "weight" / probability it might be spam.
I've also whitelisted Britain, so no e-mail coming from UK IP addresses will get filtered (I am based in the UK)
Setting this up on an SMTP proxy box running ASSP took a day, and has reduced spam on my network by 90-95% - it's a no brainer, really.
It's bizzare - what if you word you've chosen is important to convey a message (or a subtle pun?)
Why don't they just put double-spaces inbetween words - you can still track people by seeing where the double-spaces appear, and the message itself isn't as distorted.
How did this idea get out of somebody's lunchtime daydream?
Yes, I don't think my workplace would be too happy if those of us in the IT department were to disrobe :)
The only pink I would be seeing would be in my mailbox tray :(
You got your iPhone back, right? :)
You weren't foolish at all
This is amazing.
Additionally to that he actually made a Tesla Coil in the same style as the Soviet Tesla Coil from red alert 2!
complete with Engineer suit!
http://tesladownunder.com/Red%20Alert%20Tesla.htm
Do people actually do this in America?
I wouldn't be able to work the next day after only 2-3 hours sleep (my brain would be so asleep I would end up causing myself more work in botched jobs)
Yeah, it's quite amazing really, even more so when the Firehose had 4-5 different submissions all based upon this story, and they chose the worst (poorly worded, factual errors, "Micro$oft", inflammatory headline) of them all!
I do like a good MS bash every so often (stress relief from dealing with their products) but I do prefer it to be at least semi-intellectual, rather than just throwing around silly insults...
Oh yeah, and my cheap Chinese £20 Ipod knockoff is still functioning well... plays .ogg too..
Indeed.
I recently purchased a "realtek" NIC that turned out to be a pirated NIC.
that's right - pirated hardware! it had the realtek logo on it, it was listed as Linux compatible, but when I went into the Linux driver directory, it contained a text document saying "use NDISWRAPPER".
I ended up googling the chip's serial number and learned it was an unlicenced knock-off from somewhere in China.
First time I've ever seen anything like it.
My kingdom for a mod point, high shcool teahesr VB to get the kids to grips with the very basi (If statements, arrays etc)
This basic launguage got me started today.