Some multiplayer games now have skill matching systems that actually work well. I played Quake Live for awhile, and now am playing Starcraft 2, and both have pretty decent systems of matching you against players of similar skill, so that you always have fun. I was pretty average at both games, but am able to have a blast playing against other average people.
but those of us who were gaming back when you weren't even old enough to use a keyboard generally despise it and hate the current trend of 30 minutes of single player and then repetitive multiplayer.
I'm not sure who are referring to, but I started gaming back in arcades and on the Atari 2600, and I still prefer a well-designed and balanced multiplayer experience to most single-player. It's just a matter of taste, not of age and experience.
A genuine geek who understands that a 40 GB operating system is wasteful and unnecessary and a sign of incompetence and stupidity.
What OS are you referring to?
I recently installed windows 7 professional on my netbook that only has an 8 GB hard drive. I think it took 7 of those 8 gigs? Either way, that's a little high, but fairly reasonable -- If I recall correctly, a default ubuntu install is somewhere around 3GB and Snow Leapord supposedly takes about 5 gigs.
Oh dear. Thunderbird 3 was considerably worse than 2 (slower, uglier UI, they completely broke the search bar). How much worse is version 5 going to be than 3?
In 1997-1999 at UIUC, most everyone I know used AIM. There were a few people using ICQ, but pretty much everyone used AIM. Everyone I know in my age group skipped MSN.
My sister, 4 years younger than me, skipped AIM and went directly to MSN.
So it really depends on your location and time, and could vary greatly depending on exactly when and where you were.
People watch people play Starcraft? Oh this is just a Korean thing...they have weird fascinations with games that other cultures don't.
Nope, not just a Korean thing (Although moreso a Korean thing). Starcraft 2 actually has a pretty big following of people watching it (For a video game). There's a North American pro league, a good number of English-language casters on youtube who get over 100K viewers per game they cast (like Husky), and people like Day[9] who get a huge following casting games and talking about strategy.
Sure, it's small compared to mainstream things like real sports, but it's gotten surprisingly big.
Me: I have no connection Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem. Me: I already did that. Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem. Me: Yeah, that didn't work Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem. Me: Still nothing. Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem. Me: Can I talk to someone else? Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem. Me: *click*
I had an experience like that a year or two ago. I was ready to drop Comcast. But then, more recently, I had a better experience:
My connection was intermittently dropping. I called the support, they sent out a tech support guy. He was 10 minutes later than the time estimate they gave me, for which they gave me a month of free service. He was extremely friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. He fixed the problem, and then signed me up for another free month of service for the hassle. I was impressed.
Oh, Windows has antialiasing, it's just that it tries too hard to force fonts into the pixel grid so while it does make them readable it also makes them look sort of ugly and broken (unless specifically designed for ClearType).
Oh man, the forcing of fonts into the pixel grid is the main reason I stay with windows. Seriously. On Linux, the fonts have to be a lot bigger to be clearly readable than they do on windows, because it doesn't force them into the grid as well. On windows, I can have a lot more stuff on the screen (and still have it clearly readable) than I can on linux, because they do such a great job of forcing their weird fonts into the pixel grid. Every time I plan on switching to Linux (which is about once per year) the thing that brings me back is the fonts. Linux makes me choose between huge fonts or unreadable fonts.
I had one idiot... I mean coworker go to our boss and say, "Things are kinda slow. Do you have something for me to work on?" He was let go on Thursday.
That's so stupid it makes me angry. You have an employee actively looking for more work to do -- why would you let that person go? That's the kind of person you want to keep around. Instead let go the lazy people who sit at their desks watching youtube videos pretending to look busy. If you're really good at getting your work done, you'll almost always run into a slow point somewhere in your job. The proper solution is to let your manager know you've churned through the current work, and then find something proactive to do until you and your manager figure out what's next. Which sounds like what this guy was doing.
Simple. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
That assumes anyone wants to buy a tablet. Almost no one does. They want to "do stuff" and use apps from the itunes app store on something about the size of a book. It conveniently happens that the action of "buying a tablet" is a step on the path to that destination. Buying a tablet about as relevant as buying gas for the car to drive out there and buy it, its just something annoying, tedious, and expensive that you have to do before you have fun.
Anyone who sells something that connects to itunes and is about the size of a book will win. Anyone whom sells a similar sized piece of glass and plastic with some computer chips will not win.
I disagree entirely. Almost everyone that I know that buys one spends very little time thinking about what they stuff might actually "do" and instead want an iPad because that's the new cool gadget. If pressed, they want to use it to send email and surf the web. Which any decent tablet will do, but the others all seem like iPad ripoffs (as I guess they are), so people aren't interested in them. I'm sure there are exceptions to that rule, but not in the people that I talk to. So I think the opposite is true. People want to buy a tablet. The step of "doing stuff" is the part that they aren't sure about yet, and will make up as they go.
(And since the iPad is a decent enough product, people usually find plenty of good stuff to do with it to make it worth it. I'm not here to rip on the iPad, I just think people are first interested in the product, THEN its usefulness)
It has been discussed before, Bing is NOT using Google's results. The algos are optimized in a similar manner often yielding very close results. MS have their own crawlers, search engine, database backends and the latest version of Bing seach is very competitive.
It's also been discussed before the users that have the Bing toolbar installed but make google searches end up reporting search information to microsoft that microsoft then uses in Bing. See this article and this related slashdot discussion.
I agree, except for the "not enough money" part. I'm trying to replace my 1st gen iPhone with a Go phone, and the cheapest one is $79. I might as well just spring $20 more for an iPhone 3Gs.
If $20 up front is too much money for somebody, than I'd suggest somebody doesn't need a cellular plan.
The biggest price difference is not in the actual phone, it's in the data plan that you're required to purchase to go with the phone. My phone bill is expensive enough, do I need to add another $15 every month to it? That right there is the reason I don't own a smartphone, not the up-front price. (Actually, I'd be interested in owning a smartphone without a data plan -- using it as a phone on the cell network, but restricting the "smart" features to only using wi-fi.)
Crap, I have nothing to say other than I accidentally somehow clicked on the moderation for "troll" and Slashdot's fancy ajax UI will now not let me change it. So hopefully me posting this will undo my moderation....
Replying the AC that you might not see due to a score of 0: Perhaps the great firewal is part myth and FUD spun by capitalist media and governments to suit their own ends and backed up by the chinese who want to show the illusion of control?
No, it's real. When I lived there, there were definitely sites that were blocked. I do (or more correctly, DID) homebrew gameboy advance development, and the best site for GBA homebrew development (http://gbadev.org/), was among the sites blocked, which drove me crazy (really? Why is THAT site blocked?) Various blogs and such were also blocked. As far as I can tell, the firewall is there.
I used to live in China, so I personally know quite a few Chinese people. And loads of them have facebook accounts (and use them regularly) And these aren't people necessarily tech-savvy enough to work around the firewall with proxies, etc...they just use facebook.
So, while I doubt this story is completely wrong or made up, I don't understand. Do they block it in some places and not others? Do I just know a few weird outliers that somehow managed to view it despite it being blocked? Is there something more to the story? I don't get it.
This is genius. I've never heard of this guy, George Clarke, but now by mentioning his work at the beginning of the video, he's got a great viral marketing campaign!
Of course he doesn't believe a word of it, but he managed to get word to spread of his silly little video, and thus free advertising for his work. Pure genius!
Is this faster than Blue Waters at NCSA is going to be in 2011?
Nope, Blue Waters is supposed to be significantly faster. According to NCSA's page about Blue Waters, Blue Waters is supposed to have peak performance of 10 petaflops, and sustained performance at 1 petaflop. Tianhe-1A, according to the summary, peaks at about 1.2 petaflops.
Does the win-loss record include skirmishes against AI? Because if not, you can train [tvtropes.org] until you can curb-stomp [tvtropes.org] the maximum number of AIs set up on a team against you, and only then try online.
Training against the AI doesn't sufficiently train you to do anything except beat the AI. (unless you are a REALLY bad player and just need to learn the game mechanics). The AI plays a certain way, significantly different than real-life opponents. Getting good at beating it won't really help you against the real-life people on the ladder.
I can't imagine any similar device without Apple's brand image and iTunes/App store compatibility doing well, at least in countries like the UK where several PAYG Android phones are available for substantially less than the cheapest Touch.
I wish the US were like that. I bought the Touch to use as a pda, but shopped around looking for something similar running android instead (which I'd rather have). Sadly, the only competing device I found that ran android cost about $400, when the Touch cost me $150. I know there are other people like me that would RATHER have an android device without the Apple brand (where's Tepples when you need him....he complains about that all the time), but sadly nobody is offering it.
It's not about the empty part of the screen, it's about having more CONTENT on the screen (the web content, code, etc), and less toolbar bloat. And I'm just a little sad that this was marked offtopic. My point was that it DOESN'T look like windows 7 in one aspect that is important to me. Ah well.
Unfortunately, if you look at the picture of the explorer windows (particularly, the "icon view" dropdown), it still has the ridiculous amount huge UI widgets and wasted space that the default gnome does. Why do they insist on wasting so much screen real estate? I never understood this.
The only thing I use wine for is to play StarCraft, which it does really well.
Seriously? I've never had much luck with it. A few questions (not trying to troll, but Starcraft is one of the reasons I still use Windows):
1. Do you play windowed or full screen? If you do fullscreen, how do you get it to change resolutions? (It always whines for me that it can't change resolutions). If you do windowed, how do you get it to trap the mouse so the mouse scrolling is actually usable?
2. What version of wine are you using? The recent ones I've tried make Starcraft run really slowly, but I've heard that certain older versions work Ok.
3. Do you play on battle.net?
call me when it supports StarCraft II.
Have you tried? I've heard it works. I managed to get as far as the battle.net game menus, but didn't try actually running a game (was at work).
I spent 2 years in China working for a software outsourcing company. Although there were a handful of other Americans at the company, I was the only one that wasn't of Asian descent. It was funny, really -- any time important people toured the company, they'd always stop by my desk to introduce me, even though I wasn't any sort of important role. Just being the "token white guy" got me a decent amount of attention. It was quite odd.
In general, though, being "white" in China still has privileges. I was in one of the most modern cities in China (Shenzhen, near where all your iPods are made) Just a friendly smile would set young women in hysterical giggles. Random people at the bus stop would ask me if I would be their friend. The banks would let me skip the line and go to the VIP counter. My Asian-American friends, on the other hand, didn't get nearly the special treatment. While people would compliment my horrible butchering of the Chinese language, people would ask them why they couldn't speak better. Sadly, I guess that means that racism is still thriving in some parts of the world....
Slashdot Mirror
Some multiplayer games now have skill matching systems that actually work well. I played Quake Live for awhile, and now am playing Starcraft 2, and both have pretty decent systems of matching you against players of similar skill, so that you always have fun. I was pretty average at both games, but am able to have a blast playing against other average people.
but those of us who were gaming back when you weren't even old enough to use a keyboard generally despise it and hate the current trend of 30 minutes of single player and then repetitive multiplayer.
I'm not sure who are referring to, but I started gaming back in arcades and on the Atari 2600, and I still prefer a well-designed and balanced multiplayer experience to most single-player. It's just a matter of taste, not of age and experience.
A genuine geek who understands that a 40 GB operating system is wasteful and unnecessary and a sign of incompetence and stupidity.
What OS are you referring to?
I recently installed windows 7 professional on my netbook that only has an 8 GB hard drive. I think it took 7 of those 8 gigs? Either way, that's a little high, but fairly reasonable -- If I recall correctly, a default ubuntu install is somewhere around 3GB and Snow Leapord supposedly takes about 5 gigs.
Oh dear. Thunderbird 3 was considerably worse than 2 (slower, uglier UI, they completely broke the search bar). How much worse is version 5 going to be than 3?
In 1997-1999 at UIUC, most everyone I know used AIM. There were a few people using ICQ, but pretty much everyone used AIM. Everyone I know in my age group skipped MSN.
My sister, 4 years younger than me, skipped AIM and went directly to MSN.
So it really depends on your location and time, and could vary greatly depending on exactly when and where you were.
People watch people play Starcraft? Oh this is just a Korean thing...they have weird fascinations with games that other cultures don't.
Nope, not just a Korean thing (Although moreso a Korean thing). Starcraft 2 actually has a pretty big following of people watching it (For a video game). There's a North American pro league, a good number of English-language casters on youtube who get over 100K viewers per game they cast (like Husky), and people like Day[9] who get a huge following casting games and talking about strategy.
Sure, it's small compared to mainstream things like real sports, but it's gotten surprisingly big.
Here's how tech support works at Comcast:
Me: I have no connection
Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem.
Me: I already did that.
Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem.
Me: Yeah, that didn't work
Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem.
Me: Still nothing.
Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem.
Me: Can I talk to someone else?
Them: Unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds and plug in your modem.
Me: *click*
I had an experience like that a year or two ago. I was ready to drop Comcast. But then, more recently, I had a better experience:
My connection was intermittently dropping. I called the support, they sent out a tech support guy. He was 10 minutes later than the time estimate they gave me, for which they gave me a month of free service. He was extremely friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. He fixed the problem, and then signed me up for another free month of service for the hassle. I was impressed.
Oh, Windows has antialiasing, it's just that it tries too hard to force fonts into the pixel grid so while it does make them readable it also makes them look sort of ugly and broken (unless specifically designed for ClearType).
Oh man, the forcing of fonts into the pixel grid is the main reason I stay with windows. Seriously. On Linux, the fonts have to be a lot bigger to be clearly readable than they do on windows, because it doesn't force them into the grid as well. On windows, I can have a lot more stuff on the screen (and still have it clearly readable) than I can on linux, because they do such a great job of forcing their weird fonts into the pixel grid. Every time I plan on switching to Linux (which is about once per year) the thing that brings me back is the fonts. Linux makes me choose between huge fonts or unreadable fonts.
I had one idiot... I mean coworker go to our boss and say, "Things are kinda slow. Do you have something for me to work on?" He was let go on Thursday.
That's so stupid it makes me angry. You have an employee actively looking for more work to do -- why would you let that person go? That's the kind of person you want to keep around. Instead let go the lazy people who sit at their desks watching youtube videos pretending to look busy. If you're really good at getting your work done, you'll almost always run into a slow point somewhere in your job. The proper solution is to let your manager know you've churned through the current work, and then find something proactive to do until you and your manager figure out what's next. Which sounds like what this guy was doing.
Simple. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
That assumes anyone wants to buy a tablet. Almost no one does. They want to "do stuff" and use apps from the itunes app store on something about the size of a book. It conveniently happens that the action of "buying a tablet" is a step on the path to that destination. Buying a tablet about as relevant as buying gas for the car to drive out there and buy it, its just something annoying, tedious, and expensive that you have to do before you have fun.
Anyone who sells something that connects to itunes and is about the size of a book will win. Anyone whom sells a similar sized piece of glass and plastic with some computer chips will not win.
I disagree entirely. Almost everyone that I know that buys one spends very little time thinking about what they stuff might actually "do" and instead want an iPad because that's the new cool gadget. If pressed, they want to use it to send email and surf the web. Which any decent tablet will do, but the others all seem like iPad ripoffs (as I guess they are), so people aren't interested in them. I'm sure there are exceptions to that rule, but not in the people that I talk to. So I think the opposite is true. People want to buy a tablet. The step of "doing stuff" is the part that they aren't sure about yet, and will make up as they go.
(And since the iPad is a decent enough product, people usually find plenty of good stuff to do with it to make it worth it. I'm not here to rip on the iPad, I just think people are first interested in the product, THEN its usefulness)
It has been discussed before, Bing is NOT using Google's results. The algos are optimized in a similar manner often yielding very close results. MS have their own crawlers, search engine, database backends and the latest version of Bing seach is very competitive.
It's also been discussed before the users that have the Bing toolbar installed but make google searches end up reporting search information to microsoft that microsoft then uses in Bing. See this article and this related slashdot discussion.
I agree, except for the "not enough money" part. I'm trying to replace my 1st gen iPhone with a Go phone, and the cheapest one is $79. I might as well just spring $20 more for an iPhone 3Gs.
If $20 up front is too much money for somebody, than I'd suggest somebody doesn't need a cellular plan.
The biggest price difference is not in the actual phone, it's in the data plan that you're required to purchase to go with the phone. My phone bill is expensive enough, do I need to add another $15 every month to it? That right there is the reason I don't own a smartphone, not the up-front price. (Actually, I'd be interested in owning a smartphone without a data plan -- using it as a phone on the cell network, but restricting the "smart" features to only using wi-fi.)
Crap, I have nothing to say other than I accidentally somehow clicked on the moderation for "troll" and Slashdot's fancy ajax UI will now not let me change it. So hopefully me posting this will undo my moderation....
Real facebook accounts, or accounts with some Chinese facebook look-alike?
Real. As in, they are my friends on facebook now, which is how we stay in touch.
Replying the AC that you might not see due to a score of 0:
Perhaps the great firewal is part myth and FUD spun by capitalist media and governments to suit their own ends and backed up by the chinese who want to show the illusion of control?
No, it's real. When I lived there, there were definitely sites that were blocked. I do (or more correctly, DID) homebrew gameboy advance development, and the best site for GBA homebrew development (http://gbadev.org/), was among the sites blocked, which drove me crazy (really? Why is THAT site blocked?) Various blogs and such were also blocked. As far as I can tell, the firewall is there.
I used to live in China, so I personally know quite a few Chinese people. And loads of them have facebook accounts (and use them regularly) And these aren't people necessarily tech-savvy enough to work around the firewall with proxies, etc...they just use facebook.
So, while I doubt this story is completely wrong or made up, I don't understand. Do they block it in some places and not others? Do I just know a few weird outliers that somehow managed to view it despite it being blocked? Is there something more to the story? I don't get it.
This is genius. I've never heard of this guy, George Clarke, but now by mentioning his work at the beginning of the video, he's got a great viral marketing campaign!
Of course he doesn't believe a word of it, but he managed to get word to spread of his silly little video, and thus free advertising for his work. Pure genius!
Is this faster than Blue Waters at NCSA is going to be in 2011?
Nope, Blue Waters is supposed to be significantly faster. According to NCSA's page about Blue Waters, Blue Waters is supposed to have peak performance of 10 petaflops, and sustained performance at 1 petaflop. Tianhe-1A, according to the summary, peaks at about 1.2 petaflops.
Does the win-loss record include skirmishes against AI? Because if not, you can train [tvtropes.org] until you can curb-stomp [tvtropes.org] the maximum number of AIs set up on a team against you, and only then try online.
Training against the AI doesn't sufficiently train you to do anything except beat the AI. (unless you are a REALLY bad player and just need to learn the game mechanics). The AI plays a certain way, significantly different than real-life opponents. Getting good at beating it won't really help you against the real-life people on the ladder.
I can't imagine any similar device without Apple's brand image and iTunes/App store compatibility doing well, at least in countries like the UK where several PAYG Android phones are available for substantially less than the cheapest Touch.
I wish the US were like that. I bought the Touch to use as a pda, but shopped around looking for something similar running android instead (which I'd rather have). Sadly, the only competing device I found that ran android cost about $400, when the Touch cost me $150. I know there are other people like me that would RATHER have an android device without the Apple brand (where's Tepples when you need him....he complains about that all the time), but sadly nobody is offering it.
Zelda: The Adventure of Link I dare you name a harder game than that.
Are you even serious? Other than the thunderbird at the very end, that game was quite easy. Some games that are harder:
Battletoads
Blaster Master
Ghosts n Goblins
Snake Rattle n Roll
Ninja Gaiden 3 (the hardest of the series)
Kid Icarus
Castlevania 3
Of those, contrary to popular belief, I think that Snake Rattle n Roll is the hardest. It's the only one I wasn't able to beat on the actual NES....
It's not about the empty part of the screen, it's about having more CONTENT on the screen (the web content, code, etc), and less toolbar bloat. And I'm just a little sad that this was marked offtopic. My point was that it DOESN'T look like windows 7 in one aspect that is important to me. Ah well.
Unfortunately, if you look at the picture of the explorer windows (particularly, the "icon view" dropdown), it still has the ridiculous amount huge UI widgets and wasted space that the default gnome does. Why do they insist on wasting so much screen real estate? I never understood this.
I'll give it a try, thanks!
The only thing I use wine for is to play StarCraft, which it does really well.
Seriously? I've never had much luck with it. A few questions (not trying to troll, but Starcraft is one of the reasons I still use Windows):
1. Do you play windowed or full screen? If you do fullscreen, how do you get it to change resolutions? (It always whines for me that it can't change resolutions). If you do windowed, how do you get it to trap the mouse so the mouse scrolling is actually usable?
2. What version of wine are you using? The recent ones I've tried make Starcraft run really slowly, but I've heard that certain older versions work Ok.
3. Do you play on battle.net?
call me when it supports StarCraft II.
Have you tried? I've heard it works. I managed to get as far as the battle.net game menus, but didn't try actually running a game (was at work).
I spent 2 years in China working for a software outsourcing company. Although there were a handful of other Americans at the company, I was the only one that wasn't of Asian descent. It was funny, really -- any time important people toured the company, they'd always stop by my desk to introduce me, even though I wasn't any sort of important role. Just being the "token white guy" got me a decent amount of attention. It was quite odd.
In general, though, being "white" in China still has privileges. I was in one of the most modern cities in China (Shenzhen, near where all your iPods are made) Just a friendly smile would set young women in hysterical giggles. Random people at the bus stop would ask me if I would be their friend. The banks would let me skip the line and go to the VIP counter. My Asian-American friends, on the other hand, didn't get nearly the special treatment. While people would compliment my horrible butchering of the Chinese language, people would ask them why they couldn't speak better. Sadly, I guess that means that racism is still thriving in some parts of the world....