What do we learn? * * Beatles-Beatles is an ugly link spammer who uses Slashdot to increase the PageRank of his own site, on which he hosts a link farm.
SO WHAT???
Every time a story by him gets posted, cue the predictable, righteous, and frankly a bit hysteric posts from all kinds of people frothing at the mouth because of the huge injustice that was just done (to them personally, you'd think).
Oh no, Beatles-beatles got another story posted. Oh, no, they all start with the same few words by the editor!! Oh No, they're all approved by the same editor!! OH NO, he has a link to his site under his name!!! OH NO, HIS SITE HAS OTHER LINKS ON IT!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! WOE IS US!!
Again, tell me exactly WHY I should care he's doing this. BFD - he puts in the effort to find and submit interesting articles. If he makes some money from it, more power to him (and honestly, get a grip on yourselves... how much money CAN he pull from this? $5 a month? $10? Is it coming out of your pocket?) Slashdot exists only because of user content - both the articles and the comments. UNOBTRUSIVELY promoting one's site in return for the content they provide seems fair enough. So many people - including myself - have their site URL in their profile and sig, and no one seems to care much about that. The only promotion I have problems with are the blatant slashvertisments (bob@somecompany tells us that SomeCompany has just released product X).
If you don't like it, start looking for interesting stuff and submit so many articles that beatles-beatles' stuff won't make it through. Stop posting your inane troll post - we get it, and WE DON'T CARE.
I've been thinking of digging up my old Magic Carpet CDs and installing them again... truly one of the more original games I've played, and thoroughly enjoyable. Would be a blast with good graphics... it was sometimes kinda hard to tell what I was flying towards:p
Master of Magic is the first game that always comes to mind whenever "sequels that should be made" is mentioned.
Something with the turn-based depth of the Civilization/MoM games and the real-time battles of Rome:Total War... with all the spells, units, creatures, and items of MoM... and with modern graphics and sound... *drool*
All the elements are there. The Civ formula has been refined countless times. MoM had brilliant content. The whole D&D/LOTR lore is more popular than ever. Total War finally got the real-time strategy battles set up by a turn-based game formula right (too bad the turn-based part didn't have a bit more depth). Put it all together with a good team of developers and artists, and I simply cannot see how it can't be a huge hit.
I find this interesting... would you care to elaborate?
I don't have any game development experience, and only a couple of years of programming experience in a business environment. I have found that projects with a solid set of documentation - be it a requirements doc, or use cases, or anything that maps out in detail what the finished product should accomplish, and which I'm assuming is roughly equivalent to a game design doc - were much more pleasant and easier to work on. It's not the existance of the documents themselves that I want - by the end they're probably 60% inaccurate anyway. It's the fact that at the very beginning of the project someone sat down and came up with a DETAILED vision of what the end product should be like, thinking through a lot of the details, anticipating possible development problems and solving them at design time. The result (given reasonable time and resources - not always a valid assumption) is a good product at design time, which gets refined during development, ending up with a very good or excellent product at release. The alternative - for projects that don't devote as much time to requirements, design doc, etc. - being a bad to mediocre product at design time due to vagueness or too many gaps, which results in a mediocre or (at best) good product after the refinements during development.
I fully agree that the design doc is a living document. I can also see the value in having good rules for adding/dropping features. Implementation details generally don't belong in this type of document. What I don't understand (and since "many of my game design students" seems to imply you have much more experience in the field than me, I hope you can elaborate on) is why you say the design doc is highly overrated, and why writing a 200 page design doc before you start working on the project is a waste of time.
Why? Grandparent post should be marked as flamebait, if anything... I'll bite.
>but keeping this information to themselves is something that has been done in the computer industry since the beginning.
"Something's right because we've always done it this way" is never a valid argument.
>I can't believe the EU would be so fascist as to compel Microsoft to release this information... and with a fine post-dated to Dec 15!!
Better believe it...
>Microsoft should suspend all sales of Windows and Office until this is resolved.
Sure, and lose hundreds of millions of revenue, instead of a few million due to fines. It's not like they're stopping development - they would stop selling software for which most of the costs have already been incurred... that'd just be dumb.
> Europe is much more heavily dependent on windows than the US... they would most definitely feel the pinch.
What are you basing that on? Seems I see a lot more Linux headlines about Germany/Norway/Sweden/whereever than about the States...
> Hell they might be able to talk Apple into joining the boycott...
Yeah, sure. Maybe they'll even convince Apple to curl up and die.
I believe the "interstellar dust" the article refers to comes from comets (presumably from the tail?), which are generally interstellar... not sure why the article feels the need to mention "cometary and interstellar dust" in that case, but:
"Locked within the cometary particles is unique chemical and physical information that could be the record of the formation of the planets and the materials from which they were made," said Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator at the University of Washington, Seattle.
The firewall here stops it, and I'm sure a good percentage of readers are in the same situation. So feel free to post them in the comments, but quit whining that they should replace the links in the article summary. They shouldn't.
I wasn't surprised to see my processor (1.4GHz Athlon) on the list... I WAS surprised to see that it's the OLDEST and slowest on the list though... especially since it still handles everything I throw at it with no problems.
I'm willing to bet a large percentage of slashdotters still use processors that aren't even on the list anymore... and feeling no need to upgrade... am I wrong?
Re:The Colour of Magic is a weird choice...
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Small Gods was indeed amazing... though the night watch books tend to be my favourites.
I'm not at all surprised to see Terry Pratchett on that list. Part of what make his books so enjoyable for me are all the small geeky touches... a magic manual whose name has the acronym MS-DOS (never actually spelled out for you... only noticed it on my second read)... pretty much anything that has to do with Unseen University - most of it rings oh so true for anyone who's ever been at an engineering or science university... All the references to technology, quantum mechanics, evolution, communications (heck, he's practically got an entire networking book in Going Postal)... Our society's technological history (and not only technological, to be fair) can all be found, in the context of a world where magic exists, and IT ALL MAKES SENSE - in its own twisted Discworld fashion.
Yeah, you could say I'm a Terry Pratchett fan:p
And my guess is the Colour of Magic is on the list because it's the first of the Discworld series. You can't really put all of them... they wouldn't fit in a top 20:p
Ahh, just noticed that the poll is from the UK... it makes a lot more sense now. Discworld is - for some reason - not quite as popular on this side of the pond. So if you haven't read any of the Discworld books, do yourself a favour and pick one up - yes, it's technically fantasy, but it's the funniest and most intelligent fantasy you're ever likely to read.
There's no confusion... there's just resentment at such a blatant attempt to shove a meaningless buzzword down our throats.
Sorry. If it's a file manager, call it a file manager. Is the article talking about software that manages types? No? Then why call it a type manager? Just to try to add to the list of buzzwords? Trying to launch a new meme just to stroke one's ego for being able to say "I started that"?
If the author had anything meaningful to say, he should be able to say it without repeating "Type Manager" (capitalized, no less) seven times in the article summary alone.
Re:A "grand award" for colored soap bubbles?
on
Best of What's New 2005
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you'd RTFA, you might find your answer.
The colored bubbles are cool because no one's successfully done it before, getting the dye to spread uniformly over the entire bubble (as opposed to just flowing to the bottom) isn't trivial, and it took the guy about 10 years to actually get it done.
But my guess is the grand award part comes in because of the specific dye they developed in the process. Specifically, this dye disappears after at most half an hour - faster if it's subjected to friction (eg. you can just rub it off your skin, out of your clothes, or whatever it lands on). The article claims (I'm not a chemist, so I don't know how true it is) that this is an entirely new type of dye.
One of the applications they listed was toothpaste that colors the inside of a kid's mouth a bright color until they've brushed the necessary 30 seconds.
All in all, to me it sounds like it deserves it - it's a new concept that opens up entirely new fields of innovation, rather than an iterative improvement over previous technology.
Money SHOULD never be more important than a company/person's integrity.
Unfortunately, money IS more important than a company/person's integrity.
In fact, for public companies integrity is pretty much DEFINED as making as much money as possible ([smallprint]while not breaking any laws[/smallprint]).
Let's make it as hard as possible for hardware makers to develop Linux drivers. That'll help!
OK, so the above sentence is 100% troll, and I don't claim to understand all the subtleties of this debate. But it seems to me that anything that helps Linux get more and better drivers is at least worth considering... basically, at what point does a compromise with the hardware makers become the best option?
Our 10-man PvP Battleground, Warsong Gulch, was a response to this need. It allows smaller groups of people to experience content that is level-neutral and still walk away with great rewards.
I'm sure that was the original intent for Warsong Gulch. The sad truth is that the people most likely to take full advantage of WSG are, again, people in large guilds who get together 10-man teams and farm it for honor and rep.
Ironically, the 40-man Alterac Valley can be a better option for the casual solo gamer to PvP for an hour and walk away with anything other than a bitter taste in their mouth.
I'd be shocked if any "official" response from Blizzard ever touched on anything like this...
Slashdot Mirror
Denying that what happened was suspicious is calling your community stupid.
:p
This is in no way aimed at you specifically, but that might be a very valid point of view
What do we learn? * * Beatles-Beatles is an ugly link spammer who uses Slashdot to increase the PageRank of his own site, on which he hosts a link farm.
SO WHAT???
Every time a story by him gets posted, cue the predictable, righteous, and frankly a bit hysteric posts from all kinds of people frothing at the mouth because of the huge injustice that was just done (to them personally, you'd think).
Oh no, Beatles-beatles got another story posted. Oh, no, they all start with the same few words by the editor!! Oh No, they're all approved by the same editor!! OH NO, he has a link to his site under his name!!! OH NO, HIS SITE HAS OTHER LINKS ON IT!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! WOE IS US!!
Again, tell me exactly WHY I should care he's doing this. BFD - he puts in the effort to find and submit interesting articles. If he makes some money from it, more power to him (and honestly, get a grip on yourselves... how much money CAN he pull from this? $5 a month? $10? Is it coming out of your pocket?) Slashdot exists only because of user content - both the articles and the comments. UNOBTRUSIVELY promoting one's site in return for the content they provide seems fair enough. So many people - including myself - have their site URL in their profile and sig, and no one seems to care much about that. The only promotion I have problems with are the blatant slashvertisments (bob@somecompany tells us that SomeCompany has just released product X).
If you don't like it, start looking for interesting stuff and submit so many articles that beatles-beatles' stuff won't make it through. Stop posting your inane troll post - we get it, and WE DON'T CARE.
HTH.
You mean "-1, Flamebait" will now become "-1, Jailbait"?
Oh wait...
I'm assuming the article is talking about http://getoutfoxed.com/
I have this great mental picture of someone wrong-numbering a gangsta rapper "hey mofo, get off my mofo"...
Verbing weirds the English language...
Yeah, but I first played it maybe 5 years ago... quite a bit later than the days of 320x200 :p
Never tried the red/blue thing though.
I've been thinking of digging up my old Magic Carpet CDs and installing them again... truly one of the more original games I've played, and thoroughly enjoyable. Would be a blast with good graphics... it was sometimes kinda hard to tell what I was flying towards :p
Mod parent way, way up.
Master of Magic is the first game that always comes to mind whenever "sequels that should be made" is mentioned.
Something with the turn-based depth of the Civilization/MoM games and the real-time battles of Rome:Total War... with all the spells, units, creatures, and items of MoM... and with modern graphics and sound... *drool*
All the elements are there. The Civ formula has been refined countless times. MoM had brilliant content. The whole D&D/LOTR lore is more popular than ever. Total War finally got the real-time strategy battles set up by a turn-based game formula right (too bad the turn-based part didn't have a bit more depth). Put it all together with a good team of developers and artists, and I simply cannot see how it can't be a huge hit.
I find this interesting... would you care to elaborate?
I don't have any game development experience, and only a couple of years of programming experience in a business environment. I have found that projects with a solid set of documentation - be it a requirements doc, or use cases, or anything that maps out in detail what the finished product should accomplish, and which I'm assuming is roughly equivalent to a game design doc - were much more pleasant and easier to work on. It's not the existance of the documents themselves that I want - by the end they're probably 60% inaccurate anyway. It's the fact that at the very beginning of the project someone sat down and came up with a DETAILED vision of what the end product should be like, thinking through a lot of the details, anticipating possible development problems and solving them at design time. The result (given reasonable time and resources - not always a valid assumption) is a good product at design time, which gets refined during development, ending up with a very good or excellent product at release. The alternative - for projects that don't devote as much time to requirements, design doc, etc. - being a bad to mediocre product at design time due to vagueness or too many gaps, which results in a mediocre or (at best) good product after the refinements during development.
I fully agree that the design doc is a living document. I can also see the value in having good rules for adding/dropping features. Implementation details generally don't belong in this type of document. What I don't understand (and since "many of my game design students" seems to imply you have much more experience in the field than me, I hope you can elaborate on) is why you say the design doc is highly overrated, and why writing a 200 page design doc before you start working on the project is a waste of time.
Why? Grandparent post should be marked as flamebait, if anything... I'll bite.
>but keeping this information to themselves is something that has been done in the computer industry since the beginning.
"Something's right because we've always done it this way" is never a valid argument.
>I can't believe the EU would be so fascist as to compel Microsoft to release this information... and with a fine post-dated to Dec 15!!
Better believe it...
>Microsoft should suspend all sales of Windows and Office until this is resolved.
Sure, and lose hundreds of millions of revenue, instead of a few million due to fines. It's not like they're stopping development - they would stop selling software for which most of the costs have already been incurred... that'd just be dumb.
> Europe is much more heavily dependent on windows than the US... they would most definitely feel the pinch.
What are you basing that on? Seems I see a lot more Linux headlines about Germany/Norway/Sweden/whereever than about the States...
> Hell they might be able to talk Apple into joining the boycott...
Yeah, sure. Maybe they'll even convince Apple to curl up and die.
Maybe because it DOESN'T WORK?
The firewall here stops it, and I'm sure a good percentage of readers are in the same situation. So feel free to post them in the comments, but quit whining that they should replace the links in the article summary. They shouldn't.
I wasn't surprised to see my processor (1.4GHz Athlon) on the list... I WAS surprised to see that it's the OLDEST and slowest on the list though... especially since it still handles everything I throw at it with no problems.
I'm willing to bet a large percentage of slashdotters still use processors that aren't even on the list anymore... and feeling no need to upgrade... am I wrong?
Small Gods was indeed amazing... though the night watch books tend to be my favourites.
:p
:p
I'm not at all surprised to see Terry Pratchett on that list. Part of what make his books so enjoyable for me are all the small geeky touches... a magic manual whose name has the acronym MS-DOS (never actually spelled out for you... only noticed it on my second read)... pretty much anything that has to do with Unseen University - most of it rings oh so true for anyone who's ever been at an engineering or science university... All the references to technology, quantum mechanics, evolution, communications (heck, he's practically got an entire networking book in Going Postal)... Our society's technological history (and not only technological, to be fair) can all be found, in the context of a world where magic exists, and IT ALL MAKES SENSE - in its own twisted Discworld fashion.
Yeah, you could say I'm a Terry Pratchett fan
And my guess is the Colour of Magic is on the list because it's the first of the Discworld series. You can't really put all of them... they wouldn't fit in a top 20
Ahh, just noticed that the poll is from the UK... it makes a lot more sense now. Discworld is - for some reason - not quite as popular on this side of the pond. So if you haven't read any of the Discworld books, do yourself a favour and pick one up - yes, it's technically fantasy, but it's the funniest and most intelligent fantasy you're ever likely to read.
There's no confusion... there's just resentment at such a blatant attempt to shove a meaningless buzzword down our throats.
Sorry. If it's a file manager, call it a file manager. Is the article talking about software that manages types? No? Then why call it a type manager? Just to try to add to the list of buzzwords? Trying to launch a new meme just to stroke one's ego for being able to say "I started that"?
If the author had anything meaningful to say, he should be able to say it without repeating "Type Manager" (capitalized, no less) seven times in the article summary alone.
If you'd RTFA, you might find your answer.
The colored bubbles are cool because no one's successfully done it before, getting the dye to spread uniformly over the entire bubble (as opposed to just flowing to the bottom) isn't trivial, and it took the guy about 10 years to actually get it done.
But my guess is the grand award part comes in because of the specific dye they developed in the process. Specifically, this dye disappears after at most half an hour - faster if it's subjected to friction (eg. you can just rub it off your skin, out of your clothes, or whatever it lands on). The article claims (I'm not a chemist, so I don't know how true it is) that this is an entirely new type of dye.
One of the applications they listed was toothpaste that colors the inside of a kid's mouth a bright color until they've brushed the necessary 30 seconds.
All in all, to me it sounds like it deserves it - it's a new concept that opens up entirely new fields of innovation, rather than an iterative improvement over previous technology.
I feel like I've stepped into some kind of time warp...
:p
This FEELS like a dupe, even if it isn't
Money SHOULD never be more important than a company/person's integrity.
:p
Unfortunately, money IS more important than a company/person's integrity.
In fact, for public companies integrity is pretty much DEFINED as making as much money as possible ([smallprint]while not breaking any laws[/smallprint]).
OK, that's my dose of cynicism for today
Let's make it as hard as possible for hardware makers to develop Linux drivers. That'll help!
OK, so the above sentence is 100% troll, and I don't claim to understand all the subtleties of this debate. But it seems to me that anything that helps Linux get more and better drivers is at least worth considering... basically, at what point does a compromise with the hardware makers become the best option?
Dammit, that's exactly what I was going to reply with :p
MiB clearly stands for something else here... ...I don't think the real MiBs would ever take the bus!
I didn't have Slashdot in a full screen window, so the headline read:
:p
Overclocked Radeon Card Breaks
1 GHz
Was wondering why an overclocked card breaking is such a big deal
...did you even bother clicking on the link?
- NO new classes, just two new races
- level rise to 70, not 75
Doesn't mean the posted link is automatically 100% correct... but honestly, did you even read it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that is the purpose of "Print Preview" in Windows.
...but also just plain wrong on occasion.
Our 10-man PvP Battleground, Warsong Gulch, was a response to this need. It allows smaller groups of people to experience content that is level-neutral and still walk away with great rewards.
I'm sure that was the original intent for Warsong Gulch. The sad truth is that the people most likely to take full advantage of WSG are, again, people in large guilds who get together 10-man teams and farm it for honor and rep.
Ironically, the 40-man Alterac Valley can be a better option for the casual solo gamer to PvP for an hour and walk away with anything other than a bitter taste in their mouth.
I'd be shocked if any "official" response from Blizzard ever touched on anything like this...