Seriously though, a lot of people here in my office were excited when this game came out - our building's in it, meaning that you can wait outside and blow away anyone who looks like an exec.
Furthermore, even at best you'd only being replacing the combatants with machines. 90% of people killed in (or as a result of) war since WWII have been civilians.
Fair point, and this reply applies equally well to sanchny's similar post.
I wouldn't want to stop this guy (or other guys with similarly weird hobbies) doing their thing, let alone slashdot his site (as someone above suggests) to "punish" him for his socially unacceptable pasttime. If that's the way you floats your boat, then that's the way you floats your boat.
However, all this is fine in theory, but I found actually meeting the guy and being confronted with the sheer obsessiveness of his obsession a little unsettling and, well, freaky.
Don't know if this is relevant, but I met him when he came over to install Dune 2 on a friend's machine so they could play over the Uni network. He never installed Dune 2 in the end, I think it was just a ruse, a way of meeting people so he could talk about his planes. For those interested, google Cyberconian Airlines. Don't know if it's still running.
of all the many flavours of geekdom, I think flight sim geeks seem to be the most pathalogically geeky. There was this guy at my university who had a website where you could book flights on his virtual airline. He'd designed the livery of this airline and had made skins for his fleet of planes. If you booked a ticket (don't know if anyone did) he would fly the route and, if you wanted, give you a VHS tape of the view from the seat, to prove that he'd done it. He was one of the scariest people I'd ever met.
nahhh, surely not. castling can be identified as king moving x,y -> x,y where difference between the two x values > 1.
Pawn promotion and en passant caputures are rare enough that the most efficient thing would be, in situations where they were possible, use an extra 3 bytes (like another move) to specify piece taken / promoted to.
Not that I know anything in particular. Please let me know if I'm wrong.
Where will we get our next incoming crop of Hackers? Give them a sandbox to play in.
Even before hackers lay hands on their first keyboard, they are, typically speaking, going to have that anti-authoritarian/ contrary/ obstinate/ rebellious "hacker" mindset that would rebel totally against being forced to use some "safe" toy language just because some old guy with a computer license said they weren't allowed to play with the real thing. This wouldn't work on general society, let alone some of the most individualistic, anarchic members of it.
Re:Problem Exists Between Pump And Customer
on
Five-second Pints
·
· Score: 1
Are you talking about the US? I thought you guys were pretty good on customer service. I thought it was just a London thing. I always thought that it was, at least partly, a product of our class system. Bar work = manual "unskilled" job -> no respect from customer -> minimal job satisfaction & low wages.
In Europe, staff are generally much better. They are also older, and better paid. And people respect them as contributing something worthwhile and important to society.
Hell, I'd work behind a bar if it started at 20k (~$30k) a year. But it don't.
"You will never see someone drop dead because they bet a few hundred on a game."
Yeah, but you WILL see someone drop dead if they can't afford to feed/shelter themsleves adequately because they spent all their money on gambling.
"those on drugs typically do not have jobs"
LOL. That's just SO not true. Most people have jobs. People who take drugs are like other people, except they take drugs.
The only part of your post I do agree with is about how gambling is mathematically educational. Like when I bet on horses. I don't know anything about horses, but I sure dig the numbers.
This was popular for a bit in Wales (Britain). People were converting their deisel-engined cars to run on cooking oil. They weren't so concerned with the environmental footprint as the massively reduced cost (diesel and petrol being massively taxed in the UK).
However, the stupid stupid government said that if they were using cooking oil as a motor fuel then they had to pay tax on it, same as if they were using diesel, and threatened to charge them with tax evasion. So everyone stopped. And, yet again, I found myself shouting at my TV, consumed by incoherent rage at the stupidity of our laws and the people who enforce them.
My guess is that movies and games are going to get closer until they are not so much two separate media but a continuum, with totally traditional, non-interactive linear films at one end, totally freeform, nonlinear games at the other end, and all this other stuff in between. It's the in-between bits that we've only just started exploring. But I reckon you won't get 'the game of the film' or 'the film of the game', but just the 'game/film/generical entertainment thingy', possibly with a user-definable level of interactivity. For all those of you who have ever shouted at your TV screen when the character in an otherwise OK movie make a really dumb move, this is a Good Thing.
My other prediction is that most of the stuff produced by the big studios will be mindless pap as always, but also, as always, people will continue to produce the odd title that is genuinely fun or beautiful or thought-provoking.
Problem Exists Between Pump And Customer
on
Five-second Pints
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In my (extensive) experience, the bottleneck in English beer-delivery systems is generally the staff. Used to be, when I was a lad, publicans were mature, dedicated professionals who spent their entire life pulling pints. It doesn't matter how long a tap takes to pour a pint if the operator has enough parallel-processing capacity to pour more than one drink at the same time, also, if they are even vaguely competent, they can take your money and put it through the till while the beer is pouring.
Unfortunately, most pub staff (in London, anyway) these days are students or foreign travellers who are just filling in for a feew weeks/months and have no dedication or commitment - they're far more interested in taking cigarette breaks, chatting with their off-duty mates, taking mobile calls whilst working, etc, etc.
I realise this makes me sound like a red-faced old reactionary bigot, but it is one of my pet peeves. It is impossible to over-stress how much of an improvement to my quality of life a general raise in the standard of London bar staff would represent. Faster taps my arse. Let's get some real professionals behind the bar.
Man, that is the best idea I have read on/. for a long time.
As a windows user, I'm sure I've got used to many of these "features" to the point at which I no longer even notice how much of my time they're wasting. But some things, like the autoselect thingy, never fail to start me swearing at the screen. A big, red button labeled "TOGGLE IDIOT MODE" would make me very very happy.
I read about this in the paper on the way to work. And the article ended, yet again, saying "this is encouraging for people who still hope to find life on Mars". I understand that extremophile microbes demonstrate that our conception of a life-supporting environment has heretofore been a little narrow, but recent discoveries keep turning up organisms that live in hot, high-pressure envirtonments, kind of the exact opposite of the conditions on Mars. So how does this help the Martian life lobby? Given these recent findings, wouldn't we be better off looking for monocellular life somewhere like Venus, say?
How long before someone goes andregisters fakester.com? Then Bugs bunny, Jesus, et al. can all go and get acoounts there, and everyone's happy. Problem solved.
Have to find a way to stop people signing on with thier real names and pretending they're made up, though.
How's it end? With, like, a whole bunch of crazy shit... so no surprise there. There's actually a sequel - the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy, set in a variety of alternate universes, each one more confusing than the last. I actually preferred it to the original, but wouldn't recommend it if you get hug up on things like "plot" and "structure".
Mac Casino. I played it ten years ago, but it's probably significantly older than that. Not that being ancient makes it a bad game per se; it could have been reasonably cool; you had slots, roulette, blackjack (I think), and you could go from table to table, trying to increase your funds.
The only problem with it was that they forgot to reseed the randomiser function when you loaded the game, rendering the whole thing utterly useless.
Dude,
I think you're thinking of the "Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Anton Wilson. If you're not, then let my know - I quite *like* books written by ADD-suffering dyslexics, and if there's another one out there that I haven't read, I'd like to know.
Cheers.
Surely those yellow eartags can't be much more painful than having one's ears pierced, as humans do voluntarily to themselves?
Can't imagine branding's much fun, though.
A "potential terrorist target"? Hell, why not label every single building in London?
Yeah, exactly. I could have saved a lot of time and just drawn a big red ring round the entire map. Note that I did this job because my boss (think PHB, but English) told me to do it, not becuase I thought it was in any way a meaningful or productive way to spend my time.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the thought of fighting for the soul of a "troubled teenager" kinda turns me on...
Tried that, been there. She dumped me.
That's my little brother, you insensitive clod!
Seriously though, a lot of people here in my office were excited when this game came out - our building's in it, meaning that you can wait outside and blow away anyone who looks like an exec.
That'll teach you, virtual boss-looking-guy!
People complained that the Reloaded trailer contained almost all of the "money shots."
Man, you guys in the US must have seen a totally different edit. I didn't even know there was a hardcore version.
Furthermore, even at best you'd only being replacing the combatants with machines. 90% of people killed in (or as a result of) war since WWII have been civilians.
Fair point, and this reply applies equally well to sanchny's similar post.
I wouldn't want to stop this guy (or other guys with similarly weird hobbies) doing their thing, let alone slashdot his site (as someone above suggests) to "punish" him for his socially unacceptable pasttime. If that's the way you floats your boat, then that's the way you floats your boat.
However, all this is fine in theory, but I found actually meeting the guy and being confronted with the sheer obsessiveness of his obsession a little unsettling and, well, freaky.
Don't know if this is relevant, but I met him when he came over to install Dune 2 on a friend's machine so they could play over the Uni network. He never installed Dune 2 in the end, I think it was just a ruse, a way of meeting people so he could talk about his planes. For those interested, google Cyberconian Airlines. Don't know if it's still running.
of all the many flavours of geekdom, I think flight sim geeks seem to be the most pathalogically geeky. There was this guy at my university who had a website where you could book flights on his virtual airline. He'd designed the livery of this airline and had made skins for his fleet of planes. If you booked a ticket (don't know if anyone did) he would fly the route and, if you wanted, give you a VHS tape of the view from the seat, to prove that he'd done it. He was one of the scariest people I'd ever met.
nahhh, surely not. castling can be identified as king moving x,y -> x,y where difference between the two x values > 1. Pawn promotion and en passant caputures are rare enough that the most efficient thing would be, in situations where they were possible, use an extra 3 bytes (like another move) to specify piece taken / promoted to.
Not that I know anything in particular. Please let me know if I'm wrong.
Where will we get our next incoming crop of Hackers? Give them a sandbox to play in.
Even before hackers lay hands on their first keyboard, they are, typically speaking, going to have that anti-authoritarian/ contrary/ obstinate/ rebellious "hacker" mindset that would rebel totally against being forced to use some "safe" toy language just because some old guy with a computer license said they weren't allowed to play with the real thing. This wouldn't work on general society, let alone some of the most individualistic, anarchic members of it.
Are you talking about the US? I thought you guys were pretty good on customer service. I thought it was just a London thing. I always thought that it was, at least partly, a product of our class system. Bar work = manual "unskilled" job -> no respect from customer -> minimal job satisfaction & low wages.
In Europe, staff are generally much better. They are also older, and better paid. And people respect them as contributing something worthwhile and important to society.
Hell, I'd work behind a bar if it started at 20k (~$30k) a year. But it don't.
"You will never see someone drop dead because they bet a few hundred on a game."
Yeah, but you WILL see someone drop dead if they can't afford to feed/shelter themsleves adequately because they spent all their money on gambling.
"those on drugs typically do not have jobs"
LOL. That's just SO not true. Most people have jobs. People who take drugs are like other people, except they take drugs.
The only part of your post I do agree with is about how gambling is mathematically educational. Like when I bet on horses. I don't know anything about horses, but I sure dig the numbers.
This was popular for a bit in Wales (Britain). People were converting their deisel-engined cars to run on cooking oil. They weren't so concerned with the environmental footprint as the massively reduced cost (diesel and petrol being massively taxed in the UK).
However, the stupid stupid government said that if they were using cooking oil as a motor fuel then they had to pay tax on it, same as if they were using diesel, and threatened to charge them with tax evasion.
So everyone stopped. And, yet again, I found myself shouting at my TV, consumed by incoherent rage at the stupidity of our laws and the people who enforce them.
My guess is that movies and games are going to get closer until they are not so much two separate media but a continuum, with totally traditional, non-interactive linear films at one end, totally freeform, nonlinear games at the other end, and all this other stuff in between. It's the in-between bits that we've only just started exploring. But I reckon you won't get 'the game of the film' or 'the film of the game', but just the 'game/film/generical entertainment thingy', possibly with a user-definable level of interactivity.
For all those of you who have ever shouted at your TV screen when the character in an otherwise OK movie make a really dumb move, this is a Good Thing.
My other prediction is that most of the stuff produced by the big studios will be mindless pap as always, but also, as always, people will continue to produce the odd title that is genuinely fun or beautiful or thought-provoking.
In Communist China, the Standards define YOU!
Sorry.
In my (extensive) experience, the bottleneck in English beer-delivery systems is generally the staff. Used to be, when I was a lad, publicans were mature, dedicated professionals who spent their entire life pulling pints. It doesn't matter how long a tap takes to pour a pint if the operator has enough parallel-processing capacity to pour more than one drink at the same time, also, if they are even vaguely competent, they can take your money and put it through the till while the beer is pouring.
Unfortunately, most pub staff (in London, anyway) these days are students or foreign travellers who are just filling in for a feew weeks/months and have no dedication or commitment - they're far more interested in taking cigarette breaks, chatting with their off-duty mates, taking mobile calls whilst working, etc, etc.
I realise this makes me sound like a red-faced old reactionary bigot, but it is one of my pet peeves. It is impossible to over-stress how much of an improvement to my quality of life a general raise in the standard of London bar staff would represent. Faster taps my arse. Let's get some real professionals behind the bar.
Thanks for letting me share.
Man, that is the best idea I have read on /. for a long time.
As a windows user, I'm sure I've got used to many of these "features" to the point at which I no longer even notice how much of my time they're wasting. But some things, like the autoselect thingy, never fail to start me swearing at the screen.
A big, red button labeled "TOGGLE IDIOT MODE" would make me very very happy.
I read about this in the paper on the way to work. And the article ended, yet again, saying "this is encouraging for people who still hope to find life on Mars". I understand that extremophile microbes demonstrate that our conception of a life-supporting environment has heretofore been a little narrow, but recent discoveries keep turning up organisms that live in hot, high-pressure envirtonments, kind of the exact opposite of the conditions on Mars. So how does this help the Martian life lobby? Given these recent findings, wouldn't we be better off looking for monocellular life somewhere like Venus, say?
...i would hate to see it turn into a worthless connection of inside jokes and half-baked platitudes and simple-minded social consciences.
Yeah, we've got Slashdot for that.
How long before someone goes andregisters fakester.com? Then Bugs bunny, Jesus, et al. can all go and get acoounts there, and everyone's happy. Problem solved.
Have to find a way to stop people signing on with thier real names and pretending they're made up, though.
I thought it was something to do with goats? Goats created the Saharah by their ceaseless, unstoppable munching of the undergrowth?
How's it end? With, like, a whole bunch of crazy shit... so no surprise there.
There's actually a sequel - the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy, set in a variety of alternate universes, each one more confusing than the last. I actually preferred it to the original, but wouldn't recommend it if you get hug up on things like "plot" and "structure".
Glad to be of help.
Mac Casino. I played it ten years ago, but it's probably significantly older than that. Not that being ancient makes it a bad game per se; it could have been reasonably cool; you had slots, roulette, blackjack (I think), and you could go from table to table, trying to increase your funds.
The only problem with it was that they forgot to reseed the randomiser function when you loaded the game, rendering the whole thing utterly useless.
Dude, I think you're thinking of the "Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Anton Wilson. If you're not, then let my know - I quite *like* books written by ADD-suffering dyslexics, and if there's another one out there that I haven't read, I'd like to know. Cheers.
Surely those yellow eartags can't be much more painful than having one's ears pierced, as humans do voluntarily to themselves? Can't imagine branding's much fun, though.
A "potential terrorist target"? Hell, why not label every single building in London?
Yeah, exactly. I could have saved a lot of time and just drawn a big red ring round the entire map. Note that I did this job because my boss (think PHB, but English) told me to do it, not becuase I thought it was in any way a meaningful or productive way to spend my time.
11/9 surely?
/. I try to speak American. It's more polite, surely.
Yeah, in our language. However, on