Ghetto? What the hell dude? If you're clever enough and have the dedication to put together a MAME cabinet that plays hundreds of games - why do you feel the need to put it down like that?
I used to own an arcade version of the "Main Event" - a pretty cool four player wrestling game. I loved it. Problem was - it was the same game and the cabinet took up a lot of room just for one game. Who the hell has room to collect several cabinets? Sorry if we're all not flush with cash and square footage like you...
Are people really going to accept some artificial limit on the number of times you can listen to a song or view a video? You know there's a great deal of money behind the idea in order to put us all in line, but come on now.
Half the fun of discovering/enjoying new music is turning your friends on to it. For me anyway...
I understand the need for these distribution companies to cling to the idea of control and taxing our enjoyment habits, but they need to dig deeper when they think about a possible business model that will work for the artists, themselves, and most importantly the consumer...
Sounds like a cool game you're talking about, but the game I played was more of a every-battlemech-for-himself kind of thing. There wasn't a comm channel to talk to anyone either. Basically you could walk/run in any direction, fire laser cannons, and missiles. You could see your various shielding being compromised as you took on damage until you eventually blew up in a cloud of smoke. Then you would respawn.
Just like the advent of the VCR, people immediately got what they wanted in terms of porn - without having to go to a theatre. Watching porn at home is much more preferable to most people than doing so in public.
With arcade games, the home systems initially (Atari 7800, Ninendto, up to the PS1) were simply not as good as the arcade versions. The PS2 however, produces games that are pretty much on par (and sometimes better if you read the article) than it's arcade counterparts.
Arcade games need to provide people with something they simply can't get at home - and in my opinion it has to do with the user interface. Arcades should attempt to shift the focus to virtual reality type games - ones where you're sitting in an actual vehicle or cockpit - something where the hardware to produce the experience simply could not be replicated in the home environment. I played some wacky Mech game at the local Jillians, where we all were sitting in these darkened close-door pods and seeing nothing but first person view. The game was $10 for 7 minutes of action and then we all got to watch a video reply of all the action in 3rd person view. It struck me as a step in the right direction...
Oh and BTW if porn theatres want to get customers back, they'd also better provide a VR experience that we can't get at home;-)
I thought this re-index would finally pick up our "description" meta tag and actually use it. Nope. Instead we still get the same concatenated list of links that are in our left nav bar as our description when people find us in google search results. They have a "decription" listed, but it looks like something they made up themselves?
Guess I better call the whaaaaambulance:-(
BTW - can you believe that a large number of visitors we get come from people who do a search on "goofball.com". Wow.
I do feel his pain a little as I'm currently slogging through a pile of resumes myself. Hiring is a pain basically. You have limited exposure (a phone call and an interview or two) to someone before making a big decision that you may be stuck with. I've unfortunately been fooled during interviews before - guy speaks well, appears to be a respectable masters CS graduate of Columbia U - only to have him 6 months later coming in to work in ripped clothes, neglecting showers, and babbling to himself about not taking his lithium. I've got other stories too. Basically now, I always start by trying to hire people I've worked with in the past, because I'm tired of getting burned by strangers.
Oh and from the article, what's up with this line?
This immediately brings to mind the time at the end of a college party we ended up placing bets on how long it would take an egg to explode in a microwave.
I know it's dumb, but I sometimes I wish I could go back to those days of having such little responsibilities and being entertained so easily...
I cannot tell you the number of times I've been struggling to finish something late in the day (and thinking I won't leave work until I do), only to give up, feel defeated for a little while, only to come in the next morning a solve it in 10 minutes.
Red Hat is addressing SCO's flailing attempts to scare people (and suck money) with about as much effort as is deserved for such an obviously groundless lawsuit - by providing some lip service agreement to their customers that they'll bear the brunt if the customer is ever sued.
To echo some earlier posters, yes it is legally useless, but my guess is that they feel they can offer it since they'll know they'll never need to follow through. As in... "Sure, if God ever showed up on earth to judge you, I'd take the blame for your sins.".
Specifically, it says: 15 Aug 2003: Amazon.com powered by Mason
Since mid-2002, Mason has been Amazon.com's official website templating system, powering the main Amazon.com site as well as partner sites. As one engineer at Amazon writes, "Mason elegantly solves the problem of large-scale web development, giving Amazon.com web developers the power of industry-standard Perl and the simplicity of re-usable components. This has made it easy to manage and evolve a very large mission-critical global codebase, and has halved the ramp-up time for new developers."
Amazon.com runs completely on HTML::Mason, which is 100% Perl. All development for the site is done in Perl. Would that qualify as a "large project"?
Why is it that people always make the same kinds of blanket statements about Perl? "It's not for big projects". "It's not for ecommerce systems". Why is not for large projects?
I live in NY - work in NYC every day. The NY Post is known as the "rag" newspaper here. No one who really puts any thought into life really takes anything it has to say seriously, except for perhaps the sports section. It is generally right-wing, blockheaded, and sensationalist wherever possible.
This one quote in the Post article regarding GTA Vice City sums it up for me, saying the game "is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy". That's it. Enough. I have 2 small children and I have played both GTA games (never letting them see it of course). Anyone who could equate sinister premeditated child molestation with an adult playing a video game that harms no one should be fired from their job as a reporter. Period.
We all know the game is not what you'd want kids to see, but neither is porn. Is that against the law? Should the platform in which something is viewed or experienced dictate the way in which its content is judged? Ridiculous.
The GTA games are so great for just the very reason that they are such complete departures from reality, where anything can happen - and guess what? No one gets hurt for real.
I didn't claim supporting MySQL over Postgres (or anything else for that matter) will "make the world a better place". I have had a surprisingly good experience with using MySQL for some decent sized applications. I've also used Oracle extensively and although it's clearly superior in most respects, there is a giant price tag associated with that.
And next time, you might want to try to learn to read and speak English properly before arbitrarily deciding that I'm pissing on your database of choice troll boy.
All that's missing - to go along with the defects per lines of code comparision - is a comparison of features and performance benchmarking to other commercially built database products. Now that would be the complete comparison.
As strong proponent of MySQL, I'd be very curious to see how it stacks up in those regards.
Anyone have a good suggestion as to what to use for creating CD inserts for jewel cases? I use eroaster and I've ended up writing a script that parses the CD songlist and creates a printable text document. I'm pretty sure eroaster is not writing the song/artist track info to the CD:-(
Here comes my shameless plug, but that's exactly what we do at Goofball.com. One year, unlimited pages / media downloads, for a flat fee.
And we have a tradmark on the phrase "Give the Gift of..." (Goofball). Ok, no we don't. Just trying to feel what's it's like to be insert-your-Bezos-or-McBride-reference here...
Not trying to be a wiseguy, but Half Life is a mod of what exactly? I remember buying a copy of the game Half-Life a couple of years ago our of the box.
Did anyone ever play the "TW Creeper" mod for the original Quake? As nice as the 1st person shooters have gotten - Counterstrike is so much more realistic and several orders of magnitude more impressive in terms of rendering graphics - I still haven't found more enjoyment in a multiplayer 1st person shooter than that old modded version of Quake. Sounds silly I guess...
Full Article Text for the Unregistered
on
NYT on Game Mods
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Games Made for Remaking
RALEIGH, N.C.
IMAGINE buying the latest "Lord of the Rings" DVD and discovering that the cameras, lights, special effects and editing tools used in its making had been included at no extra charge. Or finding your favorite CD's crammed with virtual recording studios, along with implicit encouragement from the producer to remix the music, record your own material and post it all on the Internet.
It might seem far-fetched - except to computer game developers.
For years, players have found ways to hack into the digital DNA, the primary computer code that operates some of their favorite games, and alter its rules. Consequently, weapons can be made more lethal, explosions flashier and more thunderous. And game characters can acquire godlike invulnerability or have their steely-eyed glares swapped for the hapless glaze of, say, a Homer Simpson.
In recent years, players dedicated to modifying store-bought computer games have morphed into an underground movement - mod makers, as they often call themselves. Now they are showing signs of breaking into the mainstream as game developers are increasingly willing to give away the very software tools they use to construct the games, including them on the disc with the game itself.
As a result, working alone or in teams, the mod makers are spending hundreds of hours tweaking or completely redrawing popular games to be played on their own terms. The payoff is fun and bragging rights, and just maybe a career in the multibillion-dollar electronic game industry.
Those various motivations drew hundreds of mod makers to a game company's weekend seminar at North Carolina State University on the finer points of animation and building virtual worlds, allowing them to compare notes on poly modeling and the intricacies of static mesh.
"I've been wanting to make video games ever since I was 9 years old," said Dan Jones, 23, who drove 17 hours from Siloam Springs, Ark., to be here. He said that when his grade-school classmates were doodling comic-book heroes, he was sketching side-scrolling video-game environments inspired by Nintendo's Mario Brothers.
Mr. Jones, a recent graduate of John Brown University in Siloam Springs, where he majored in digital media, is working with two friends to build a medieval third-person action game. His path as a mod maker, Mr. Jones said during a lunch break, was inevitable: "There are a lot of creative people who have grown up playing video games and stuff. You kind of want to make what you already know."
Another mod maker, Maegan Walling, 26, added, "People are taking the tools that someone else made and using them as sort of a paintbrush to define their own canvas." Ms. Walling joined friends and classmates from Full Sail Real World Education, a multimedia training center in Winter Park, Fla., for a road trip to Raleigh. "They are really, really expressing their own creativity and defining the ideal environment for their own game play. I would go as far to say that it is an art."
Whether mods are art is debatable. But a group of major computer-game makers agree that mods are good for the industry. For one thing, they create a rich secondary market for aging games being bought for raw materials. And some designers say that game makers can inspire loyalty, and sales, by creating games that remain fresh by lending themselves to modification or even serving as the basis for entirely different games.One company in particular, Epic Games - the co-producer of Unreal Tournament, the best-selling first-person-shooter franchise that is a favorite among mod makers - is flinging open its doors to modifications and complete game makeovers called conversions.
And some mod makers, like Blake Politeski, are making names for themselves with downloadable hit mods like his Infection, a horror and survival game that was built out of Unr
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is light on any real technical details. John C. Dvorak, although obviously a pretty astute individual, has been part of PC Magazine or some other end-user (i.e. barely technical) related publication for quite some time. Although I have found some of his positions on technical and business ethics of interest, his technically oriented editorial contributions have typically been geared for the person who is just getting into understanding a PC, certainly not people in the/. community.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to own an arcade version of the "Main Event" - a pretty cool four player wrestling game. I loved it. Problem was - it was the same game and the cabinet took up a lot of room just for one game. Who the hell has room to collect several cabinets? Sorry if we're all not flush with cash and square footage like you ...
perl -e"\$_=q#: 13_2: 12/'{>: 8_4) (_4: 6/2'-2; 3;-2'\2: 5/7\_/\7: 12m m::#;s#:#\n#g;s#(\D)(\d+)#\$1x\$2#ge;print"
Ok - then what about caffiene soap? Will it make my arteries extra squeaky clean?
Half the fun of discovering/enjoying new music is turning your friends on to it. For me anyway ...
I understand the need for these distribution companies to cling to the idea of control and taxing our enjoyment habits, but they need to dig deeper when they think about a possible business model that will work for the artists, themselves, and most importantly the consumer ...
Your game sounded a little better ...
With arcade games, the home systems initially (Atari 7800, Ninendto, up to the PS1) were simply not as good as the arcade versions. The PS2 however, produces games that are pretty much on par (and sometimes better if you read the article) than it's arcade counterparts.
Arcade games need to provide people with something they simply can't get at home - and in my opinion it has to do with the user interface. Arcades should attempt to shift the focus to virtual reality type games - ones where you're sitting in an actual vehicle or cockpit - something where the hardware to produce the experience simply could not be replicated in the home environment. I played some wacky Mech game at the local Jillians, where we all were sitting in these darkened close-door pods and seeing nothing but first person view. The game was $10 for 7 minutes of action and then we all got to watch a video reply of all the action in 3rd person view. It struck me as a step in the right direction ...
Oh and BTW if porn theatres want to get customers back, they'd also better provide a VR experience that we can't get at home ;-)
Guess I better call the whaaaaambulance :-(
BTW - can you believe that a large number of visitors we get come from people who do a search on "goofball.com". Wow.
Oh and from the article, what's up with this line?
A little over 2 minutes. And it didn't explode like we'd thought. I was like all hard boiled and mutated looking ...
I know it's dumb, but I sometimes I wish I could go back to those days of having such little responsibilities and being entertained so easily ...
I cannot tell you the number of times I've been struggling to finish something late in the day (and thinking I won't leave work until I do), only to give up, feel defeated for a little while, only to come in the next morning a solve it in 10 minutes.
To echo some earlier posters, yes it is legally useless, but my guess is that they feel they can offer it since they'll know they'll never need to follow through. As in ... "Sure, if God ever showed up on earth to judge you, I'd take the blame for your sins.".
Don't know where you got your info from, but here's where I got mine:
MasonHQ.com
Specifically, it says: 15 Aug 2003: Amazon.com powered by Mason Since mid-2002, Mason has been Amazon.com's official website templating system, powering the main Amazon.com site as well as partner sites. As one engineer at Amazon writes, "Mason elegantly solves the problem of large-scale web development, giving Amazon.com web developers the power of industry-standard Perl and the simplicity of re-usable components. This has made it easy to manage and evolve a very large mission-critical global codebase, and has halved the ramp-up time for new developers."
Amazon.com runs completely on HTML::Mason, which is 100% Perl. All development for the site is done in Perl. Would that qualify as a "large project"?
Why is it that people always make the same kinds of blanket statements about Perl? "It's not for big projects". "It's not for ecommerce systems". Why is not for large projects?
This one quote in the Post article regarding GTA Vice City sums it up for me, saying the game "is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy". That's it. Enough. I have 2 small children and I have played both GTA games (never letting them see it of course). Anyone who could equate sinister premeditated child molestation with an adult playing a video game that harms no one should be fired from their job as a reporter. Period.
We all know the game is not what you'd want kids to see, but neither is porn. Is that against the law? Should the platform in which something is viewed or experienced dictate the way in which its content is judged? Ridiculous.
The GTA games are so great for just the very reason that they are such complete departures from reality, where anything can happen - and guess what? No one gets hurt for real.
And next time, you might want to try to learn to read and speak English properly before arbitrarily deciding that I'm pissing on your database of choice troll boy.
As strong proponent of MySQL, I'd be very curious to see how it stacks up in those regards.
Oh the shame ...
Anyone have a good suggestion as to what to use for creating CD inserts for jewel cases? I use eroaster and I've ended up writing a script that parses the CD songlist and creates a printable text document. I'm pretty sure eroaster is not writing the song/artist track info to the CD :-(
And we have a tradmark on the phrase "Give the Gift of ..." (Goofball). Ok, no we don't. Just trying to feel what's it's like to be insert-your-Bezos-or-McBride-reference here ...
I still don't think I'd classify Half-Life out of the box as a "mod" though ...
Not trying to be a wiseguy, but Half Life is a mod of what exactly? I remember buying a copy of the game Half-Life a couple of years ago our of the box.
Did anyone ever play the "TW Creeper" mod for the original Quake? As nice as the 1st person shooters have gotten - Counterstrike is so much more realistic and several orders of magnitude more impressive in terms of rendering graphics - I still haven't found more enjoyment in a multiplayer 1st person shooter than that old modded version of Quake. Sounds silly I guess ...
RALEIGH, N.C.
IMAGINE buying the latest "Lord of the Rings" DVD and discovering that the cameras, lights, special effects and editing tools used in its making had been included at no extra charge. Or finding your favorite CD's crammed with virtual recording studios, along with implicit encouragement from the producer to remix the music, record your own material and post it all on the Internet.
It might seem far-fetched - except to computer game developers.
For years, players have found ways to hack into the digital DNA, the primary computer code that operates some of their favorite games, and alter its rules. Consequently, weapons can be made more lethal, explosions flashier and more thunderous. And game characters can acquire godlike invulnerability or have their steely-eyed glares swapped for the hapless glaze of, say, a Homer Simpson.
In recent years, players dedicated to modifying store-bought computer games have morphed into an underground movement - mod makers, as they often call themselves. Now they are showing signs of breaking into the mainstream as game developers are increasingly willing to give away the very software tools they use to construct the games, including them on the disc with the game itself.
As a result, working alone or in teams, the mod makers are spending hundreds of hours tweaking or completely redrawing popular games to be played on their own terms. The payoff is fun and bragging rights, and just maybe a career in the multibillion-dollar electronic game industry.
Those various motivations drew hundreds of mod makers to a game company's weekend seminar at North Carolina State University on the finer points of animation and building virtual worlds, allowing them to compare notes on poly modeling and the intricacies of static mesh.
"I've been wanting to make video games ever since I was 9 years old," said Dan Jones, 23, who drove 17 hours from Siloam Springs, Ark., to be here. He said that when his grade-school classmates were doodling comic-book heroes, he was sketching side-scrolling video-game environments inspired by Nintendo's Mario Brothers.
Mr. Jones, a recent graduate of John Brown University in Siloam Springs, where he majored in digital media, is working with two friends to build a medieval third-person action game. His path as a mod maker, Mr. Jones said during a lunch break, was inevitable: "There are a lot of creative people who have grown up playing video games and stuff. You kind of want to make what you already know."
Another mod maker, Maegan Walling, 26, added, "People are taking the tools that someone else made and using them as sort of a paintbrush to define their own canvas." Ms. Walling joined friends and classmates from Full Sail Real World Education, a multimedia training center in Winter Park, Fla., for a road trip to Raleigh. "They are really, really expressing their own creativity and defining the ideal environment for their own game play. I would go as far to say that it is an art."
Whether mods are art is debatable. But a group of major computer-game makers agree that mods are good for the industry. For one thing, they create a rich secondary market for aging games being bought for raw materials. And some designers say that game makers can inspire loyalty, and sales, by creating games that remain fresh by lending themselves to modification or even serving as the basis for entirely different games.One company in particular, Epic Games - the co-producer of Unreal Tournament, the best-selling first-person-shooter franchise that is a favorite among mod makers - is flinging open its doors to modifications and complete game makeovers called conversions.
And some mod makers, like Blake Politeski, are making names for themselves with downloadable hit mods like his Infection, a horror and survival game that was built out of Unr
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is light on any real technical details. John C. Dvorak, although obviously a pretty astute individual, has been part of PC Magazine or some other end-user (i.e. barely technical) related publication for quite some time. Although I have found some of his positions on technical and business ethics of interest, his technically oriented editorial contributions have typically been geared for the person who is just getting into understanding a PC, certainly not people in the /. community.