Yeah, salt just isn't worth much these days. But I tell you what. Since you're a fellow slashdot poster, I'll let you in on a great deal. I'll give you an ochre, 2 hides, an iron, and a junk card for those 6 salts you're holding.
All internet connection arguments aside, let's not lose sight of two simple facts:
- The only people who can play the game right now are pirates.
- The only people who are blocked from playing the game right now are those who legally purchaced the game.
Everyone's watching, to see what you will do
Everyone's looking at you, oh
Everyone's wondering, will you come out tonight
Everyone's trying to get it right, get it right
Everybody's working for the weekend
Everybody wants a little romance
Everybody's goin' off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance, oh
You want a piece of my heart
You better start from the start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go
Arguably the most insipid lyrics ever composed in the English language. I'm not convinced that Loverboy lyrics could pass a musical Turing test. This was obviously generated by a primitive AI, written in Commodore 64 BASIC. (It was the 80s, after all.)
It's been about 4 years since I've had any of my computers hit with a virus. My wife's system was reasonably protected with Windows XP running service pack 3 and fully updated, plus Avast antivirus with an up-to-date database, and browsing with Firefox version 3.5.8. But somehow it still got infected.
It had been a while since I backed up any data off her system, so I didn't just nuke the disk. I cleaned it off by removing the disk from the laptop and running it as an external USB disk on a sandbox system. After scrubbing the disk clean of a plethora of rootkits, viruses, and trogans, I copied the data (pix, docs, game saves) over to another disk. The virus had damaged the OS so severely that I just reinstalled from scratch. This was an Acer laptop that has the XP image sitting on a hidden partition, so the reinstall was surprisingly easy.
The reason it took 10 hours is because I was out of practice, and tried several other unsuccessful methods to remove the virus. In the future, I won't even bother booting a system that I know is infected. It's much easier to clean when you don't boot to it.
This virus was particularly... virulent. It disabled the task manager, the command prompt, and regedit, among other things. It was also present when booting in safe mode. I don't know how non-technical people deal with all this, especially since this system was better protected than probably 90% of the Windows boxes out there.
I don't see what the big deal is. Windows is a perfectly secure operating system as long as you don't access any external media or connect to the internet.
Tech Support: See this button? Don't touch it! It's the history eraser button, you fool!
User: So what'll happen?
Tech Support: That's just it. We don't know. Maybe something bad. Maybe something good. I guess we'll never know, 'cause you're going to guard it. You won't touch it, will you?
They could just rename the game "Activision Ate My Balls." That use should be protected as satire and/or political speech.
I own a decent amount of Activision stock (ATVI), which I purchased primarily for the Blizzard part of the business. It has not performed well over the past year. Cheap entertainment is supposed to be recession-proof, but given the price of video games, they don't seem to qualify as cheap entertainment.
I'm not particularly happy about this move by Activision, ethically, or even from a profit perspective. This will be a ding against them as I reevaluate what to do with this stock.
To better understand Microsoft's commitment to supporting non-Windows products, a more exhaustive analysis of the word "commit" is required. Here's what Merriam-Webster has to say about the definition of commit:
transitive verb 1 a : to put into charge or trust : entrust b : to place in a prison or mental institution c : to consign or record for preservation <commit it to memory> d : to put into a place for disposal or safekeeping e : to refer (as a legislative bill) to a committee for consideration and report
It appears they're focusing on definitions "b" and "d."
The slashdot poll disclaimer should also be taken into consideration:
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Three percent of slashdot readers said Antarctica has the best pizza. It therefore stands to reason that three percent of slashdot readers are Antarctican.
Seriously - there is no justification for extension of copyright being retroactive. People aren't going to be motivated to retroactively create new old works...
Time Lords need creative incentives too, you insensitive clod!
Honestly I think the vast 99.8 % majority of folks could really care less about a C64 emulator on an iPhone.
The market seems to think otherwise. From TFA:
"The developer is now hard at work setting up a meeting with Apple to clarify matters and get C64 back to the retro gaming public who put the app in the top 20 paid games list across most territories inside of two days, and even made it into the top 10 in certain areas before disappearing."
You'd be hard pressed to show me an iPhone App that's more fun than M.U.L.E.
The escape velocity for Earth is only 7 miles per second. With advanced railgun technology, it might be possible to launch a human into the sun at a surprisingly affordable price, once the up-front R&D investment is made. A military grade railgun today can fire a 2kg projectile at 3km/s with 9MJ of energy. To fire a 75kg human at 11.2km/s would require 1.26 GJ of energy, so clearly more research is needed. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if a railgun would work on biological material. It may be necessary to coax the person into a metallic capsule that would be more responsive to the railgun's electrical field.
As an added bonus, this all-electrical solution is also environmentally friendly. No potentially hazardous rocket propellants to deal with, and the energy to fire the railgun could be generated during off-peak hours to further reduce costs. I think this solution would be far more economical than using conventional chemical-based rocket propulsion to launch old people into the sun.
It may be difficult to defend against a patent lawsuit in East Texas, but consider this: If you defeat a Patent Troll in its lair, you get treasure types O,P,Q,X and 1d4+1 emeralds.
I owned a pair of these 2 years ago. I also paid only $480 for the set, purchased directly from eMagin. The main points that I remember about the glasses were:
- The built-in head tracking was fantastic. Very fluid and accurate.
- The 800 x 600 display used OLED technology. The pixels were grainy.
- The unit was not bulky. It fit comfortably on my head and didn't weigh too much.
- The 3D effect was convincing. I didn't experience the vertigo or headaches that some people encounter, even after several hours of playing. (The worst headache of my entire life was from playing a Virtual Boy for 4 hours.)
- The projection mirrors in the glasses were an issue. It was nearly impossible to get the entire display to be in focus. Usually you could get the center to be nicely in focus, but the periphery was slightly blurred.
- The biggest problem was the display was too small. For a truly immersive experience, a head mounted display should cover most of your peripheral vision. The eMagin glasses did not achieve this. The display was only about an inch wide, which meant it literally appeared that you were looking at a monitor floating in front of you, or looking out of a hole cut in a box. If they had stretched the display wider to provide a wider field of vision, the sense of virtual reality would be much more convincing.
I played Morrowind with that set for a few days. It was fun, but the blurred text and lack of peripheral display were bad enough that I decided to return it for a full refund, minus 15% restocking. If I had known they were going to jack the price up to $1200 for the same model, I probably would have held onto it longer.
Still, if I had used this set to play Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth along with a set of 5.1 surround sound headphones, that would probably be sufficient to induce panic attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
It does, at least in the commercial word. Mostly to prevent things like this (60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye) from happening.
Yeah, salt just isn't worth much these days. But I tell you what. Since you're a fellow slashdot poster, I'll let you in on a great deal. I'll give you an ochre, 2 hides, an iron, and a junk card for those 6 salts you're holding.
All internet connection arguments aside, let's not lose sight of two simple facts:
- The only people who can play the game right now are pirates.
- The only people who are blocked from playing the game right now are those who legally purchaced the game.
Which group would you rather be in?
Welcome to Bizarro World...
Everyone's watching, to see what you will do
Everyone's looking at you, oh
Everyone's wondering, will you come out tonight
Everyone's trying to get it right, get it right
Everybody's working for the weekend
Everybody wants a little romance
Everybody's goin' off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance, oh
You want a piece of my heart
You better start from the start
You wanna be in the show
Come on baby lets go
Arguably the most insipid lyrics ever composed in the English language. I'm not convinced that Loverboy lyrics could pass a musical Turing test. This was obviously generated by a primitive AI, written in Commodore 64 BASIC. (It was the 80s, after all.)
It's been about 4 years since I've had any of my computers hit with a virus. My wife's system was reasonably protected with Windows XP running service pack 3 and fully updated, plus Avast antivirus with an up-to-date database, and browsing with Firefox version 3.5.8. But somehow it still got infected.
It had been a while since I backed up any data off her system, so I didn't just nuke the disk. I cleaned it off by removing the disk from the laptop and running it as an external USB disk on a sandbox system. After scrubbing the disk clean of a plethora of rootkits, viruses, and trogans, I copied the data (pix, docs, game saves) over to another disk. The virus had damaged the OS so severely that I just reinstalled from scratch. This was an Acer laptop that has the XP image sitting on a hidden partition, so the reinstall was surprisingly easy.
The reason it took 10 hours is because I was out of practice, and tried several other unsuccessful methods to remove the virus. In the future, I won't even bother booting a system that I know is infected. It's much easier to clean when you don't boot to it.
This virus was particularly... virulent. It disabled the task manager, the command prompt, and regedit, among other things. It was also present when booting in safe mode. I don't know how non-technical people deal with all this, especially since this system was better protected than probably 90% of the Windows boxes out there.
I don't see what the big deal is. Windows is a perfectly secure operating system as long as you don't access any external media or connect to the internet.
(Coming from someone who just spent 10 hours removing the Internet Security 2010 trojan malware from his wife's computer.)
Tech Support: See this button? Don't touch it! It's the history eraser button, you fool!
User: So what'll happen?
Tech Support: That's just it. We don't know. Maybe something bad. Maybe something good. I guess we'll never know, 'cause you're going to guard it. You won't touch it, will you?
They could just rename the game "Activision Ate My Balls." That use should be protected as satire and/or political speech.
I own a decent amount of Activision stock (ATVI), which I purchased primarily for the Blizzard part of the business. It has not performed well over the past year. Cheap entertainment is supposed to be recession-proof, but given the price of video games, they don't seem to qualify as cheap entertainment.
I'm not particularly happy about this move by Activision, ethically, or even from a profit perspective. This will be a ding against them as I reevaluate what to do with this stock.
BTW, for some comic relief, check out the advertisement selection for this Yahoo Directory of Ate My Balls.
I can assure you from personal experience that a wedding ring does operate like a control gate structure.
If this device works as described, this is a huge breakthrough. But the devil is in the details. Hopefully it can be reliably manufactured.
I think we heard these exact same words 50 years ago.
Master Control Program: I've gotten 2,415 times smarter since then.
To better understand Microsoft's commitment to supporting non-Windows products, a more exhaustive analysis of the word "commit" is required. Here's what Merriam-Webster has to say about the definition of commit:
transitive verb 1 a : to put into charge or trust : entrust b : to place in a prison or mental institution c : to consign or record for preservation <commit it to memory> d : to put into a place for disposal or safekeeping e : to refer (as a legislative bill) to a committee for consideration and report
It appears they're focusing on definitions "b" and "d."
The study is interesting enough, but they need to work on their visuals. The game's graphics barely compete with Stellar Fortress for the Atari 2600...
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Three percent of slashdot readers said Antarctica has the best pizza. It therefore stands to reason that three percent of slashdot readers are Antarctican.
Except that AT&T is saying 1.5 Mbps (their cheapest offering) isn't fast enough for Facebook. 1.5 Mbps is 30 times faster than a 56k modem.
Seriously - there is no justification for extension of copyright being retroactive. People aren't going to be motivated to retroactively create new old works...
Time Lords need creative incentives too, you insensitive clod!
Now I have an excuse to get my missiles all chromed-out. Sweet!
Honestly I think the vast 99.8 % majority of folks could really care less about a C64 emulator on an iPhone.
The market seems to think otherwise. From TFA:
"The developer is now hard at work setting up a meeting with Apple to clarify matters and get C64 back to the retro gaming public who put the app in the top 20 paid games list across most territories inside of two days, and even made it into the top 10 in certain areas before disappearing."
You'd be hard pressed to show me an iPhone App that's more fun than M.U.L.E.
(nevermind that it *also* is a code interpreter and accepts outside games...)
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
You'll blow our cover!
SCV reportin' for duty!
I've preemptively gouged my eyes and ears out. Just to be safe.
The escape velocity for Earth is only 7 miles per second. With advanced railgun technology, it might be possible to launch a human into the sun at a surprisingly affordable price, once the up-front R&D investment is made. A military grade railgun today can fire a 2kg projectile at 3km/s with 9MJ of energy. To fire a 75kg human at 11.2km/s would require 1.26 GJ of energy, so clearly more research is needed. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if a railgun would work on biological material. It may be necessary to coax the person into a metallic capsule that would be more responsive to the railgun's electrical field.
As an added bonus, this all-electrical solution is also environmentally friendly. No potentially hazardous rocket propellants to deal with, and the energy to fire the railgun could be generated during off-peak hours to further reduce costs. I think this solution would be far more economical than using conventional chemical-based rocket propulsion to launch old people into the sun.
It may be difficult to defend against a patent lawsuit in East Texas, but consider this: If you defeat a Patent Troll in its lair, you get treasure types O,P,Q,X and 1d4+1 emeralds.
USB 1.0 was introduced in 1994. That was 15 years ago.
I'd say it's very likely we will still have USB in 11 years. But it will be USB 5.0.
I owned a pair of these 2 years ago. I also paid only $480 for the set, purchased directly from eMagin. The main points that I remember about the glasses were:
- The built-in head tracking was fantastic. Very fluid and accurate.
- The 800 x 600 display used OLED technology. The pixels were grainy.
- The unit was not bulky. It fit comfortably on my head and didn't weigh too much.
- The 3D effect was convincing. I didn't experience the vertigo or headaches that some people encounter, even after several hours of playing. (The worst headache of my entire life was from playing a Virtual Boy for 4 hours.)
- The projection mirrors in the glasses were an issue. It was nearly impossible to get the entire display to be in focus. Usually you could get the center to be nicely in focus, but the periphery was slightly blurred.
- The biggest problem was the display was too small. For a truly immersive experience, a head mounted display should cover most of your peripheral vision. The eMagin glasses did not achieve this. The display was only about an inch wide, which meant it literally appeared that you were looking at a monitor floating in front of you, or looking out of a hole cut in a box. If they had stretched the display wider to provide a wider field of vision, the sense of virtual reality would be much more convincing.
I played Morrowind with that set for a few days. It was fun, but the blurred text and lack of peripheral display were bad enough that I decided to return it for a full refund, minus 15% restocking. If I had known they were going to jack the price up to $1200 for the same model, I probably would have held onto it longer.
Still, if I had used this set to play Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth along with a set of 5.1 surround sound headphones, that would probably be sufficient to induce panic attacks.
The technology is close, but not quite there yet.