I can't read dutch, but even if survilance is worse, I doubdt that the risk of it beeing abused in the same way....
The risk is always the same. The difference is that in the US, there's plenty of evidence that it is already being abused. In Netherland it's still only the risk that it may happen. (Or is it?)
It's great that he's created the perfect alibi, and keeping himself out of accidental incarceration on Gitmo, but the real message here is that government institutions are way too sloppy, and that if you do not give up your privacy like this, you may be risking all sorts of harassment and worse. Innocent people do get locked up because of mistakes, malice, or a combination of both.
For folks trying for this contest, I'd keep the cutscenes short, give the player as many choices as you can manage, and make your NPCs memorable. Less is more for these sorts of things. Don't plan an epic module spanning dozens of areas.
Sounds like excellent advise. Although I've got no idea what I'm talking about, I'd like to add making not just your NPCs, but also your locations memorable. It's a world design contest, after all. Large swaths of land don't do a thing. Exactly the right cure little grove, impressive cliff, cottage in the forest, etc, does.
Although I'd love to develop games, I won't be joining the contest. I think my skills would be more apropriate as a Java programmer, and I have no experience whatsoever with modding. Also, I'm not really in a position to move to the other side of the pond, what with my SO already having a well-paying job on this side.
You're right. This contest is targeted at selecting skills they need for developing a MMORPG. The submissions themselves are not necessarily intended to be played by more than one player, they're intended to show off design skills. And scripting, and stuff like that. Apparently BioWare has decided it's important that candidates know how to include a good cutscene, for whatever reason.
Now this is truly funny. Not buying from them is a violation of the law? I suspect it's a publicity campaign. Lawsuits are very popular for that sort of thing, nowadays.
Depends on what you call "action oriented". If you mean "twitch", then yes, they're opposites, but if you mean "as opposed to story-oriented", then it's not. Icewind Dale was action oriented, Baldur's Gate story oriented. Same engine, same mechanics.
I don't see what benefits the Unreal Engine provides versus a home-grown system except:
Seems to me the rather obvious benefit of using the Unreal Engine over any home-grown system is that it's there already. Developing your own system takes time and money. Writing your own engine is pretty silly these days, unless you really must have some new feature that nobody else has done yet.
Firefox on its own already uses entirely too much memory.
And then there's that memory leak. I often have to restart firefox because the memory leak is eating all my resources. I'm think I'm going to start using Opera for all my regular browsing, and only use firefox when I need Web Developer or any of those many other brilliant extensions. Firefox iis simply a terrible memory hog, and I don't think that's ever going to change.
Do you hear that sound?? That's the sound of all the dead drummers from the Tap spinning in their graves after you made that comment.
I think it's bass players for Metallica.
Actually, if you mean Metallica is a parody of what a band should be, you may be on to something... Ever since Cliff died they have seriously sucked IMNSHO.
I kinda liked...And Justice for All and the black album, but after that, yeah.
It gives background for why I am excited each time we find another planet (the more earth like the better). Each time we find a planet it shows how many there are and increases the probability that we are just 1 of countless inhabited planets. I think most if not all of us want to know how we, and the universe, came to be. A religious person will look forward to seeing his "god" after he dies and learning all the answers. I don't believe there is any "god" to meet after death (that doesn't necessarily mean I don't believe in life after death). My answers for the universe will need to come before I die. Meeting an alien race could bring that answer, or at least bring us a lot closer to understanding it.
I am a religious person, but I also look forward to finding as many answers as possible in this life. Whatever I believe about a life after death, I can't possibly be sure it's true, but I can be sure about things we discover in this life. If nothing else, it can tell us a lot about the nature of God's creation and God himself, should he indeed exist.
Discovery of life on other planets will definitely not be an unwelcome shock to me. It will teach us a lot about the origin of life, and that can definitely change the way I see God, but I believe that that change will bring me closer to the truth.
It depends on what you call a religion. If by religion you mean the practise of worshipping, then you're right (although in that case you might consider certain cases of fandom religion). But if you mean a set of beliefs about supernatural phenomena, then the belief that all of them are false is just as much a body of belief as the belief that some are true and some are false.
In that sense, only agnosticism, where you're unsure about the existence of all supernatural phenomena, is not a religion. Although in a sense, you might consider the conviction that you cannot possibly know the truth about them (which incidentally happens to be what I believe), still a belief about those supernatural phenomena.
In any case, atheistic fanatics like Richard Dawkins can get quite religious in their crusade against different beliefs.
You want a good PC built by somebody else, for $50-100 the local shop will give you some advice on what you want, and put it together.
I wouldn't blindly trust the local shop, unless they're known to be good at this sort of thing. Some local shops are brilliant, others suck. Do a bit of research. Or do a bit of research into the hardware itself. I know next to nothing about hardware, but with a helpful website and some advice from friends, I'm confident I can put together a good gaming machine for myself. If you get stuck, then go to the local shop, and by now you know enough to tell if their advice makes sense.
It's absurd that a $50 video game takes more computing power than my $10,000 point of sale system, or my $500 accounting package.
Is it? How much real time 3D rendering do your point of sale system and accounting package do? Because that's the issue here: the graphics card.
It's absurd that you have to buy a $2000 PC to play $50 games, when a $200 console will work even better.
Unless you want to play games that are state-of-the-art and aimed at ridiculously high graphics (like Oblivion when it just appeared), any bog standard PC with a decent $100 graphics card will do. A good graphics card doesn't have to be expensive. You just have to make sure that it really is a good graphics card, and not something that was never intended for what you want to do with it.
How does Vista give you any less control over the software you run than XP? I've been seeing a lot of vague claims about how Vista is so much worse than predecessors, and I'm really not finding anything conclusive to back that up. Windows Genuine Advantage and some HD-DVD stuff are hardly the end of the world if you've already bought into the notion that proprietary software and encrypted media are OK.
According to the EULA, Vista can delete any files it doesn't like. Ofcourse this is intended to protect all sorts of DRM schemes, but there's no check, no possibility of appeal, nothing. If Vista decides to delete something you like, you're out of luck. You are not the booss of your own PC anymore. In fact, I believe the EULA says that explicitly.
And if you are really into controlling your software, why would you want to wrap DX10 anyway? The games in question are undoubtedly closed-source.
What does that have to do with it? If I chose to run that game, then the OS should let me. OpenSource means I can change the software, but there's tons of software out there where I'm happy enough if I can simply use it.
I will probably get modded into oblivion for the subject alone, but hear me out...
I don't see why you would. Nor do I understand why you've been modded offtopic; the usefulness of these projects is very relevant to news about these projects.
I think WINE is a waste of effort on the part of the development team. Not to say they haven't done some really cool things, but to me, hacking together a system to run Windows apps on Linux seems counter-intuitive to the whole IDEA of Linux/OSS/FSF and the vast community of supporters.
So you can run Outlook, IE, some games or whatever, from a community that gripes about innovation, that isn't all that striking an accomplishment to me. By doing so the message, to me at least, to developers of "Windows Only Software" is "Go ahead, make Windows software instead of Linux native apps. We'll show you. We'll just run it in WINE!" Way to go, you just validated their business plan/model. They have no reason to make a Linux native app.
These DX10 guys and WINE and the Cedega people... Why do you want Linux to be seen as a "Me too!" platform? If the effort in these projects was spent creating Linux native applications that blew Windows software away, Linux would achieve broader acceptance more quickly and MS would sh_t themselves.
You want hobbyists to completely rewrite multimillion dollar games (like Oblivion, World of Warcraft, etc) completely from scratch? Are you insane? If the efforts to implement the Windows API had been used to completely reverse engineer big games like that, we'd have only a handful of really old games and as many lawsuits. But with Wine or Cedega (and hopefully one day with this new project), I can take any recent game, try it, and there's a decent chance it works.
For a lot of people, the only problem with linux is that they can't play their favourite games. Once they can, they're more likely to use Linux exclusively, demand for Windows will drop, and the linux market will become more attractive to the big game developers. And that's what we need in order to get people to write games for linux.
I am not religious, I am an Atheist. I have no "God" to look forward to meeting (I don't believe anyone else does either but anyway).
That's very cute and all, but what does your personal belief have to do with the discovery of a planet?
My biggest hope is that before I die we will have proof of alien life, hopefully a spaceship will land in Times Square so there will be know question about it. This is a very exciting time, every time Scientists make a new discovery like this I feel that much closer to my dream.
I don't hope they land on Times Square, because I think that will create quite a big mess. I'd prefer if they sent some friendly messages first.
I would be willing to bet that humans could live in 2.5 G. The human body is incredibly resilient, especially when it has grown up in a new environment. There are people living everywhere from sea level to several miles up, and in environments ranging from yearly average temperatures of over 30C to under 0C.
But temperature is noot quite the same thing as gravity. Due to having only 2 legs, humans are already badly built for Earth's gravity, leading to knee, hip, trombosis and a multitude of other problems. I'm sure humans can learn to function in 2.5 G, but they won't get very old there. And people raised on Earth moving to that planet will need some serious revalidation therapy before they will be able to function, if that's going to be possible at all.
I think humans are better built for Martian gravity.
The first one seems to suggest that Opera is just as fine as Firefox for viewing the site. It's just rather more explicitly anti-IE than just sticking to the standards, but it's not firefox-only. (Although I admit I haven't actually checked it with Opera.
The second one is a download page for a firefox-specific extension, but the site itself works fine with any browser. The extension itself doesn't seem to have anything to do with the site, but is intended to work with the iTunes webstore, which you can already access in other ways.
On the RPG front, the last game I played was FF7. That game was so popular, we talked about it in bars. But after 40-60 hours of collecting orbs and attaching them to weapons, I realized Yuffie was stronger than everyone, and the orbs didn't do jack.
Have you played Planescape:Torment? If you haven't, you've got no right to complain about lack of innovation. (Ofcourse Torment was released 7 years ago already, so it's another CRPG with that kind of quality is long overdue.)
WOW is nothing more than Ultima VI - that was 15 years ago.
Wat Ultima VI massive multiplayer? See, that's something new. Not invented by WoW ofcourse, but according to quite a lot of people, WoW did it better than its predecessors.
People who play WOW are fascinated by the idea that they can level up, grow their stats, carry weapons and armor. No kidding! WOW proves that Ultima in 1992 had the right idea.
No. Levels and classes are stupid. They're okay for tactical hack and slash games like nethack and WoW, but not for RPGs.
I find it frustrating when i find, however rarely, the firefox only sites. They are growing in numbers, and are annoying as hell for people that use IE. The only reason to create Firefox only sites is just to piss people off.
Really? They work in Firefox only, and not in other standards-compliant web browsers? I'd love to see how they did that.
Slashdot Mirror
The risk is always the same. The difference is that in the US, there's plenty of evidence that it is already being abused. In Netherland it's still only the risk that it may happen. (Or is it?)
It's great that he's created the perfect alibi, and keeping himself out of accidental incarceration on Gitmo, but the real message here is that government institutions are way too sloppy, and that if you do not give up your privacy like this, you may be risking all sorts of harassment and worse. Innocent people do get locked up because of mistakes, malice, or a combination of both.
Sounds like excellent advise. Although I've got no idea what I'm talking about, I'd like to add making not just your NPCs, but also your locations memorable. It's a world design contest, after all. Large swaths of land don't do a thing. Exactly the right cure little grove, impressive cliff, cottage in the forest, etc, does.
Although I'd love to develop games, I won't be joining the contest. I think my skills would be more apropriate as a Java programmer, and I have no experience whatsoever with modding. Also, I'm not really in a position to move to the other side of the pond, what with my SO already having a well-paying job on this side.
You're right. This contest is targeted at selecting skills they need for developing a MMORPG. The submissions themselves are not necessarily intended to be played by more than one player, they're intended to show off design skills. And scripting, and stuff like that. Apparently BioWare has decided it's important that candidates know how to include a good cutscene, for whatever reason.
Now this is truly funny. Not buying from them is a violation of the law? I suspect it's a publicity campaign. Lawsuits are very popular for that sort of thing, nowadays.
Depends on what you call "action oriented". If you mean "twitch", then yes, they're opposites, but if you mean "as opposed to story-oriented", then it's not. Icewind Dale was action oriented, Baldur's Gate story oriented. Same engine, same mechanics.
Seems to me the rather obvious benefit of using the Unreal Engine over any home-grown system is that it's there already. Developing your own system takes time and money. Writing your own engine is pretty silly these days, unless you really must have some new feature that nobody else has done yet.
I think my boss would love it if I was a bit more obsessive-compulsive.
A friend claims he managed to keep Dogmeat alive. He was upset that the sequel blindly assumed Dogmeat had died.
And then there's that memory leak. I often have to restart firefox because the memory leak is eating all my resources. I'm think I'm going to start using Opera for all my regular browsing, and only use firefox when I need Web Developer or any of those many other brilliant extensions. Firefox iis simply a terrible memory hog, and I don't think that's ever going to change.
I think it's bass players for Metallica.
I kinda liked ...And Justice for All and the black album, but after that, yeah.
I am a religious person, but I also look forward to finding as many answers as possible in this life. Whatever I believe about a life after death, I can't possibly be sure it's true, but I can be sure about things we discover in this life. If nothing else, it can tell us a lot about the nature of God's creation and God himself, should he indeed exist.
Discovery of life on other planets will definitely not be an unwelcome shock to me. It will teach us a lot about the origin of life, and that can definitely change the way I see God, but I believe that that change will bring me closer to the truth.
It depends on what you call a religion. If by religion you mean the practise of worshipping, then you're right (although in that case you might consider certain cases of fandom religion). But if you mean a set of beliefs about supernatural phenomena, then the belief that all of them are false is just as much a body of belief as the belief that some are true and some are false.
In that sense, only agnosticism, where you're unsure about the existence of all supernatural phenomena, is not a religion. Although in a sense, you might consider the conviction that you cannot possibly know the truth about them (which incidentally happens to be what I believe), still a belief about those supernatural phenomena.
In any case, atheistic fanatics like Richard Dawkins can get quite religious in their crusade against different beliefs.
I wouldn't blindly trust the local shop, unless they're known to be good at this sort of thing. Some local shops are brilliant, others suck. Do a bit of research. Or do a bit of research into the hardware itself. I know next to nothing about hardware, but with a helpful website and some advice from friends, I'm confident I can put together a good gaming machine for myself. If you get stuck, then go to the local shop, and by now you know enough to tell if their advice makes sense.
Is it? How much real time 3D rendering do your point of sale system and accounting package do? Because that's the issue here: the graphics card.
Unless you want to play games that are state-of-the-art and aimed at ridiculously high graphics (like Oblivion when it just appeared), any bog standard PC with a decent $100 graphics card will do. A good graphics card doesn't have to be expensive. You just have to make sure that it really is a good graphics card, and not something that was never intended for what you want to do with it.
According to the EULA, Vista can delete any files it doesn't like. Ofcourse this is intended to protect all sorts of DRM schemes, but there's no check, no possibility of appeal, nothing. If Vista decides to delete something you like, you're out of luck. You are not the booss of your own PC anymore. In fact, I believe the EULA says that explicitly.
And if you are really into controlling your software, why would you want to wrap DX10 anyway? The games in question are undoubtedly closed-source.What does that have to do with it? If I chose to run that game, then the OS should let me. OpenSource means I can change the software, but there's tons of software out there where I'm happy enough if I can simply use it.
I don't see why you would. Nor do I understand why you've been modded offtopic; the usefulness of these projects is very relevant to news about these projects.
You want hobbyists to completely rewrite multimillion dollar games (like Oblivion, World of Warcraft, etc) completely from scratch? Are you insane? If the efforts to implement the Windows API had been used to completely reverse engineer big games like that, we'd have only a handful of really old games and as many lawsuits. But with Wine or Cedega (and hopefully one day with this new project), I can take any recent game, try it, and there's a decent chance it works.
For a lot of people, the only problem with linux is that they can't play their favourite games. Once they can, they're more likely to use Linux exclusively, demand for Windows will drop, and the linux market will become more attractive to the big game developers. And that's what we need in order to get people to write games for linux.
That's very cute and all, but what does your personal belief have to do with the discovery of a planet?
I don't hope they land on Times Square, because I think that will create quite a big mess. I'd prefer if they sent some friendly messages first.
It's a cute quote, but a pretty bad analogy.
But temperature is noot quite the same thing as gravity. Due to having only 2 legs, humans are already badly built for Earth's gravity, leading to knee, hip, trombosis and a multitude of other problems. I'm sure humans can learn to function in 2.5 G, but they won't get very old there. And people raised on Earth moving to that planet will need some serious revalidation therapy before they will be able to function, if that's going to be possible at all.
I think humans are better built for Martian gravity.
I disagree. 50 independent nation states would probably be too busy with each other to invade nations in other parts of the world.
The first one seems to suggest that Opera is just as fine as Firefox for viewing the site. It's just rather more explicitly anti-IE than just sticking to the standards, but it's not firefox-only. (Although I admit I haven't actually checked it with Opera.
The second one is a download page for a firefox-specific extension, but the site itself works fine with any browser. The extension itself doesn't seem to have anything to do with the site, but is intended to work with the iTunes webstore, which you can already access in other ways.
Have you played Planescape:Torment? If you haven't, you've got no right to complain about lack of innovation. (Ofcourse Torment was released 7 years ago already, so it's another CRPG with that kind of quality is long overdue.)
Wat Ultima VI massive multiplayer? See, that's something new. Not invented by WoW ofcourse, but according to quite a lot of people, WoW did it better than its predecessors.
No. Levels and classes are stupid. They're okay for tactical hack and slash games like nethack and WoW, but not for RPGs.
Are you crazy? I'm not touching that anymore. I've finally got Windows to not mess up my passwords by putting accents all over the place.
Really? They work in Firefox only, and not in other standards-compliant web browsers? I'd love to see how they did that.