More out of the way. Keyboard is laptop stlye and doesnt seperate the f keys, so I'd have to look to see where it is to make sure I'm hitting the right one.
"Maybe there will be things that a new format might allow that isn't possible on a CD now, but I can't think of any overly compelling ones"
For data: Larger storage, better resistance to scratches/damage. For music: 6 channel audio, more audio per disk (imagine a 'top 100 songs of the 90s' disk instead of 10 cd collection)
Because if I saw you sitting in a lab failing to login 10 times I'd probably say something?
Not every machine is single user with no witnesses, not every login console has physical access.
Granted, in desktop machines, I tend to disable passwords for local logins (see/etc/pam.d/) for the exact reason you mention, but in many situations delayed failed logins make sense.
Depends entirely on the gametype. In a team game with objectives, camping isnt even an issue-- If you camp and it doesnt further your objective, you lose anyways. If they camp and its not furthering their objective, you get an easy win. Most team objective games specificly require camping to complete the objective -- Eg, defend your {flag | command point | bomb site }
In deathmatch, camping just tells them where to avoid until they out-stock you. While annoying in some maps (Cant forget thresh whoring MH for half a game on dm4), overall you're better off running paths around the map to aquire every important item as it spawns thus depriving your opponent of the item, rather than sitting around with them knowing exactly where to spam.
Really, camping is just a strategy like any other. Sometimes its a good idea, sometimes its a bad idea. Far too situational to say its always bad. The only real problem that people associate with camping is just people playing an objective game as if the goal was to get the best score on your team, rather than make your team have the best score. Even then, you dont *always* want to work towards objectives. If you have 20 health and a good weapon and no money, why would you waste your weapon rushing to your death? Why not instead try to pick a few strays off so they have to save next round?
The problem with most MMOFPS games is theres no individual skill to them. FPS players like to be challenged and improve, when you remove that it really removes the point of playing. Just look at all the people still playing cs1.6 because of how much more random/un-skilled cs:source is. And 1.6 is bad enough as is at lowering the skill gap.
What/WOULD/ be nice from a FPS(or any game) would be persistance/reputation. Right now I could be as lame as I want, cheat, whatever, and worst case all I have to do is get a new account/name and I'm just yet another random. I'd like people to have to own up to their actions, and people who dont have history would instantly be shunnned (not by a system, but just by people prefering to play against people they know of or can verify some sort of web of trust to, eg they used to play for a team that you know is respectful).
A system like that would work into a MMO framework very well. You also need to keep it balanced, but thats not too hard for current FPS games, and only becomes an issue if you copy more of the RPG and less of the MMO from a MMORPG. To me, all you need to steal from MMORPGs is the community and scale. Not the level grind, not the item farming, just the scale and community. The only 'Items' you should get should be purely visible, say more points to spend customizing your player.
I still have no idea what a freaking podcast is and how it is any different than normal streamed audio. Or what a blog is in comparison to a personal daily-updated website. Or what a...
Podcast: MP3 over RSS. Nothing new, just a term for the people that try to show off their white earbuds as satus symbols. The only 'new' to it is how easy itunes makes it to grab new broadcasts, which I'll admit is an improvement over my old crontab + shellscript that would do this before we had hardware mp3 players.
Blog: absolute bullshit term. Unlike podcasts which actually introduced something somewhat new (using rss to make it easily syndicated improving user experience), 'Blogs' changed nothing. All it was was someone making something easier to use than Newspro and people picking up on it. Theres no difference that I know of between some 14 year olds wordpress site and the Newspro site we ran back in 1998.
Doesn't matter. The type of person to update regularly is very often the type of person who would have already switched to another browser due to IE's lack of updates. The only people a new IE update would really impact would be offices, which while a decent chunk would still not swing the margins enough that you can depend on this tech working.
They used to have something in labs that worked well, I'm not sure what happened to it. Maybe we'll see it as an option for google.com/ig or something similar.
Sounds like a good idea, and as a keyboard cowboy I appreciate it, but the first time I tried to leave a webpage by hitting alt+d to go to the address bar to type a url and got a donation page I was instantly turned off by the idea. While you can do it right, its rarely worth the effort unless you're doing a full out web app, and even then keep it optional.
I'd love a FPS game with dynamicly recreatable terrain, say a game of CTF where every 20 mins teams spend the points they earned rebuilding their base (with basic pathfinding AI making sure there is still a possible route to the flag). It would even be possible on the Source engine if the dynamicly remapped terrain wasn't such marketing BS.
The content producer chose wmv for whatever reason, and it was their choice. Same reason they chose html even though some playforms cant render it, english even though some people dont speak it, etc.
If you're unable to get what you want out of content, thats your fault, not the content producers fault. Choose a playform better suited for your desires, or desire something else. Complaining about not being able to view the video is like complaining that beos doesnt support your ipod-- its something/YOU/ have to deal with, not them.
"(Incidentally, I would buy one --- a simple, portable, useful computer that I don't have to worry too much about breaking would be fantastically useful for me. Particularly if it was an open platform!)
Are there any actual locals here who want to comment?"
As would I. Just having a reliable machine to use to debug my often-broken desktop would be great. Maybe they should sell them with $25 markup to the better of people to help support the cost of giving it away to the less priviledged? (nevermind the fact that the real plan is selling it to their govt)
If you removed them then you would replace them with the BSD counterparts and have a perfectly usable system. For that matter, I doubt you need them at all to run a stardard kde+firefox+thunderbird+minesweeper setup.
I'd rather everyone have a numeric id, but not sequential. Unique id should be the hash of your public key, which is then used for verification/encryption. You then do the rest icq style. I still don't remember my uncles icq uin, nor do I know his aim screenname, but I know if I type his name in the Find User dialog, I'd find his icq account. Long aim screennames are no easier considering aols db is merged with netscape/compuserve/a few other services by now. The number of unused old accounts wasting space is astonishing. I couldn't even register my full name as a screenname because it was already in use.
Unique numeric ids keep people from fighting over that stuff, and rarely have to actually be displayed, you just display the nick they set as the displayname. Then only show the numeric id in case of duplicate names when trying to find people. Even then you dont have to show the full digits, you can use graphical representation of the key. Forgot the name of the tech, but it looked promising when used for PKI.
Microsoft has virtual desktops as of XP PowerTools, a free download from microsoft.com. I'd take dual monitors over virtual desktops any day though, as virtual desktops completely hide a window. If I'm not using it nor monitoring it for updates, why does it matter where it is? Dualies is the way to go, keep irc/aim/what have you on one monitor and game/a movie on the other, easily monitor stuff like this.
On a related note I had the same idea re: notification when I got my Razer Diamondback that has a blue LED in it-- I thought they should use a multicolor LED and have the driver change color based on stuff like getting an im, or whatever else might want to notify you.
You could do it before, and I personally did it before. Crontab + small bash script = automated downloads of Hacker Mind ready for me to listen to at my convenience. Could even script it onto an mp3 player, had one existed yet.
"Podcasting" is not a new concept, its just a bad term (nothing to do with ipods, nothing to do with broadcasting) for something the rest of us have done for years. Sure, a little bit of standards involved is nice, but as long as you had a url for the stream and a timeslot, you didn't really need anything else.
Yeah, it was first in a series of CPL's gamehopping. CPL: Hey, They say painkillers going to be awesome, lets use it as our new game! {painkiller is released, isn't horrible, but lacks balance among other things} CPL:..Oh, but dude, did you see that doom3 trailer? LEETSAUCE! lets have a doom3 tourney instead! its going to be awesome! {doom3 comes out. shadowboxing: not the most fun to watch. gigabyte sized demos: not good for tourneys} CPL:..Whoops. But check out F.E.A.R! The screenshots are so pretty, this is the shizzle, yall. {FEAR comes out, sucks.} CPL:..my bad, but wow, quake4! made by the same people that made the only good DM game(quakeworld)..wait, whats that? Raven software isn't idsoftware? oh..but heretic! that was fun singleplayer, so this must make a good multiplayer game. tourney time!
Meh. Refine something good rather than hopping around to something untested.
Popular definition: Whatever sells the most copies.
IMO theres only been two really good FPS games ever-- Quake and Halflife. Q3 was almost there, but due to its netcode and timing, it just didnt make it.
Quake was great because it was revolutionary, very well balanced, great maps, had good singleplayer, and had really fun mods.
HL had all of that, and its only downside is what valve did to the mods they bought out in the end -- Making a lot of bad changes that the community as a whole didnt want, rather than releasing the sourcecode and letting us fix what still needs to be fixed.
No game since then has had anywhere near matched either of those two games, and thus everyone sticks to HL mods.
I don't understand why people compete in console games, but as for the PC side.. Its whereever the competition is. I assure you if you could get a few thousand people interested in competitive Tux Racer then some tourneys would spring up. Its all about sponsors/eyeballs.
If it wernt for microsoft computers wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are today, you wouldn't have the cheap equipment you have now, the mass amounts of internet based alternatives to boring real life tasks (banking, talking to your grandparents, etc), the hot chick you stalk on myspace, or half the porn you have today.
Just because they didn't contribute patches doesn't mean they didn't contribute. Just the warm feeling of knowing what you wrote became something so much more is nice in itself.
On a gaming site you get more respect for being proven, your complaints are taken as valid rather than just whining. On any other site, nobody really cares. Ingame, a lot of the 'famous' people fakenick just to avoid harassment. Unless you're actually competing, you're better off not letting others even know who you are. People either give you shit for it or start cheating or whatever. Much more fun to ace them as ":)" and let them look up your id later.
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More out of the way. Keyboard is laptop stlye and doesnt seperate the f keys, so I'd have to look to see where it is to make sure I'm hitting the right one.
"Maybe there will be things that a new format might allow that isn't possible on a CD now, but I can't think of any overly compelling ones"
For data: Larger storage, better resistance to scratches/damage.
For music: 6 channel audio, more audio per disk (imagine a 'top 100 songs of the 90s' disk instead of 10 cd collection)
Because if I saw you sitting in a lab failing to login 10 times I'd probably say something?
/etc/pam.d/) for the exact reason you mention, but in many situations delayed failed logins make sense.
Not every machine is single user with no witnesses, not every login console has physical access.
Granted, in desktop machines, I tend to disable passwords for local logins (see
Depends entirely on the gametype. In a team game with objectives, camping isnt even an issue-- If you camp and it doesnt further your objective, you lose anyways. If they camp and its not furthering their objective, you get an easy win.
Most team objective games specificly require camping to complete the objective -- Eg, defend your {flag | command point | bomb site }
In deathmatch, camping just tells them where to avoid until they out-stock you. While annoying in some maps (Cant forget thresh whoring MH for half a game on dm4), overall you're better off running paths around the map to aquire every important item as it spawns thus depriving your opponent of the item, rather than sitting around with them knowing exactly where to spam.
Really, camping is just a strategy like any other. Sometimes its a good idea, sometimes its a bad idea. Far too situational to say its always bad. The only real problem that people associate with camping is just people playing an objective game as if the goal was to get the best score on your team, rather than make your team have the best score. Even then, you dont *always* want to work towards objectives. If you have 20 health and a good weapon and no money, why would you waste your weapon rushing to your death? Why not instead try to pick a few strays off so they have to save next round?
The problem with most MMOFPS games is theres no individual skill to them. FPS players like to be challenged and improve, when you remove that it really removes the point of playing. Just look at all the people still playing cs1.6 because of how much more random/un-skilled cs:source is. And 1.6 is bad enough as is at lowering the skill gap.
/WOULD/ be nice from a FPS(or any game) would be persistance/reputation. Right now I could be as lame as I want, cheat, whatever, and worst case all I have to do is get a new account/name and I'm just yet another random. I'd like people to have to own up to their actions, and people who dont have history would instantly be shunnned (not by a system, but just by people prefering to play against people they know of or can verify some sort of web of trust to, eg they used to play for a team that you know is respectful).
What
A system like that would work into a MMO framework very well. You also need to keep it balanced, but thats not too hard for current FPS games, and only becomes an issue if you copy more of the RPG and less of the MMO from a MMORPG. To me, all you need to steal from MMORPGs is the community and scale. Not the level grind, not the item farming, just the scale and community. The only 'Items' you should get should be purely visible, say more points to spend customizing your player.
I still have no idea what a freaking podcast is and how it is any different than normal streamed audio. Or what a blog is in comparison to a personal daily-updated website. Or what a...
Podcast: MP3 over RSS. Nothing new, just a term for the people that try to show off their white earbuds as satus symbols. The only 'new' to it is how easy itunes makes it to grab new broadcasts, which I'll admit is an improvement over my old crontab + shellscript that would do this before we had hardware mp3 players.
Blog: absolute bullshit term. Unlike podcasts which actually introduced something somewhat new (using rss to make it easily syndicated improving user experience), 'Blogs' changed nothing. All it was was someone making something easier to use than Newspro and people picking up on it. Theres no difference that I know of between some 14 year olds wordpress site and the Newspro site we ran back in 1998.
Doesn't matter. The type of person to update regularly is very often the type of person who would have already switched to another browser due to IE's lack of updates. The only people a new IE update would really impact would be offices, which while a decent chunk would still not swing the margins enough that you can depend on this tech working.
They used to have something in labs that worked well, I'm not sure what happened to it. Maybe we'll see it as an option for google.com/ig or something similar.
Until then you can do them clientside with Google Access Keys (greasemonkey script)
Sounds like a good idea, and as a keyboard cowboy I appreciate it, but the first time I tried to leave a webpage by hitting alt+d to go to the address bar to type a url and got a donation page I was instantly turned off by the idea. While you can do it right, its rarely worth the effort unless you're doing a full out web app, and even then keep it optional.
I'd love a FPS game with dynamicly recreatable terrain, say a game of CTF where every 20 mins teams spend the points they earned rebuilding their base (with basic pathfinding AI making sure there is still a possible route to the flag). It would even be possible on the Source engine if the dynamicly remapped terrain wasn't such marketing BS.
I wonder how it feels about mice with onboard storage (eg, razer copperhead)
Maybe he should cry on a blog about it.
/YOU/ have to deal with, not them.
The content producer chose wmv for whatever reason, and it was their choice. Same reason they chose html even though some playforms cant render it, english even though some people dont speak it, etc.
If you're unable to get what you want out of content, thats your fault, not the content producers fault. Choose a playform better suited for your desires, or desire something else. Complaining about not being able to view the video is like complaining that beos doesnt support your ipod-- its something
NEWSFLASH: Kazaa is still around.
people still use that?
"(Incidentally, I would buy one --- a simple, portable, useful computer that I don't have to worry too much about breaking would be fantastically useful for me. Particularly if it was an open platform!)
Are there any actual locals here who want to comment?"
As would I. Just having a reliable machine to use to debug my often-broken desktop would be great. Maybe they should sell them with $25 markup to the better of people to help support the cost of giving it away to the less priviledged? (nevermind the fact that the real plan is selling it to their govt)
If you removed them then you would replace them with the BSD counterparts and have a perfectly usable system.
For that matter, I doubt you need them at all to run a stardard kde+firefox+thunderbird+minesweeper setup.
I'd rather everyone have a numeric id, but not sequential. Unique id should be the hash of your public key, which is then used for verification/encryption.
You then do the rest icq style. I still don't remember my uncles icq uin, nor do I know his aim screenname, but I know if I type his name in the Find User dialog, I'd find his icq account. Long aim screennames are no easier considering aols db is merged with netscape/compuserve/a few other services by now. The number of unused old accounts wasting space is astonishing. I couldn't even register my full name as a screenname because it was already in use.
Unique numeric ids keep people from fighting over that stuff, and rarely have to actually be displayed, you just display the nick they set as the displayname. Then only show the numeric id in case of duplicate names when trying to find people. Even then you dont have to show the full digits, you can use graphical representation of the key. Forgot the name of the tech, but it looked promising when used for PKI.
"for teen and pre-teen girls?"
pics or stfu
fark you.
Microsoft has virtual desktops as of XP PowerTools, a free download from microsoft.com.
I'd take dual monitors over virtual desktops any day though, as virtual desktops completely hide a window. If I'm not using it nor monitoring it for updates, why does it matter where it is? Dualies is the way to go, keep irc/aim/what have you on one monitor and game/a movie on the other, easily monitor stuff like this.
On a related note I had the same idea re: notification when I got my Razer Diamondback that has a blue LED in it-- I thought they should use a multicolor LED and have the driver change color based on stuff like getting an im, or whatever else might want to notify you.
You could do it before, and I personally did it before. Crontab + small bash script = automated downloads of Hacker Mind ready for me to listen to at my convenience. Could even script it onto an mp3 player, had one existed yet.
"Podcasting" is not a new concept, its just a bad term (nothing to do with ipods, nothing to do with broadcasting) for something the rest of us have done for years. Sure, a little bit of standards involved is nice, but as long as you had a url for the stream and a timeslot, you didn't really need anything else.
Yeah, it was first in a series of CPL's gamehopping.
CPL: Hey, They say painkillers going to be awesome, lets use it as our new game!
{painkiller is released, isn't horrible, but lacks balance among other things}
CPL:..Oh, but dude, did you see that doom3 trailer? LEETSAUCE! lets have a doom3 tourney instead! its going to be awesome!
{doom3 comes out. shadowboxing: not the most fun to watch. gigabyte sized demos: not good for tourneys}
CPL:..Whoops. But check out F.E.A.R! The screenshots are so pretty, this is the shizzle, yall.
{FEAR comes out, sucks.}
CPL:..my bad, but wow, quake4! made by the same people that made the only good DM game(quakeworld)..wait, whats that? Raven software isn't idsoftware? oh..but heretic! that was fun singleplayer, so this must make a good multiplayer game. tourney time!
Meh. Refine something good rather than hopping around to something untested.
Popular definition: Whatever sells the most copies.
IMO theres only been two really good FPS games ever-- Quake and Halflife. Q3 was almost there, but due to its netcode and timing, it just didnt make it.
Quake was great because it was revolutionary, very well balanced, great maps, had good singleplayer, and had really fun mods.
HL had all of that, and its only downside is what valve did to the mods they bought out in the end -- Making a lot of bad changes that the community as a whole didnt want, rather than releasing the sourcecode and letting us fix what still needs to be fixed.
No game since then has had anywhere near matched either of those two games, and thus everyone sticks to HL mods.
I don't understand why people compete in console games, but as for the PC side.. Its whereever the competition is. I assure you if you could get a few thousand people interested in competitive Tux Racer then some tourneys would spring up. Its all about sponsors/eyeballs.
If it wernt for microsoft computers wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are today, you wouldn't have the cheap equipment you have now, the mass amounts of internet based alternatives to boring real life tasks (banking, talking to your grandparents, etc), the hot chick you stalk on myspace, or half the porn you have today.
Just because they didn't contribute patches doesn't mean they didn't contribute. Just the warm feeling of knowing what you wrote became something so much more is nice in itself.
On a gaming site you get more respect for being proven, your complaints are taken as valid rather than just whining. On any other site, nobody really cares. Ingame, a lot of the 'famous' people fakenick just to avoid harassment. Unless you're actually competing, you're better off not letting others even know who you are. People either give you shit for it or start cheating or whatever. Much more fun to ace them as ":)" and let them look up your id later.