I hate to say it, but as a Worms: Armageddon addict, I tried out Wormux hoping for a better alternative to W:A's central network server and required CD......and it plays like trash. Worms is the Macintosh of games, the user experience has been finely honed and is absolutely a central part of the product. Wormux has bad animations and controls that feel *wrong*, and lots of irritating graphical glitches.
Maybe you can get used to it and enjoy it, but I deleted it after fifteen minutes. Not sure what version I had, but it was current as of a few months ago.
And I was all excited, too.:/ If it really does get better as time goes on, call me in a few years--but I have my doubts about its eventual graphics and sound quality. Free games usually fail there, and those are two things Worms is all about.
The poster's source was (not very clearly) given in his name, webpage, and post subject. It was the quote used for the "Homo Superior" technology in the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. About half the quotes are 'homebrew', about half are quoting from some real-world historic source. This one was from a historic source.
As for where SMAC got the quote from...well, it's referenced properly in the game, but grandparent didn't include that part. Still, SMAC is a good source for all your dystopian/utopian-future quoting needs.
I'm a TFC vet planning to get TF2 soon. Any advice on servers to play, settings to use, or noob behavior to avoid? (Besides the obvious "Always shoot the medic first".)
I bet I'll miss my grenades.
Ah! So "best" means "most challenging", or "least accessible to new players".
Me, I was a bigger fan of IV. And FFTA, for which I will hide my head in shame.
Yeah--For another good example of The Register's tone, just look at any article they've ever posted about Sadville, er, I mean, Second Life. It's not just Wikipedia that draws their ire.
I think their "bash-everything" style is hilarious, and even makes good points.
I don't know if I'm trolling or joking or what, but I'm in the unfortunate position of saying: If people start seeing brownouts because there's too much video on the 'net, I'll happily switch to a service that throttles the heck out of your content as long as I can still use my low-bandwidth telnet stuff.
Does that mean I'm supporting or opposing network neutrality? I don't even know anymore.
What could the IRS do about tax resistance? Well, for one thing, they wouldn't have to throw people in jail, they could just confiscate tax resister's assets. Set a punitive rate of 4x what you owe (or more, I don't know what the real laws are); anyone who doesn't want to lose their house will comply, as will anyone who wants their kids to go to college.
It's not like saying "No I won't give you taxes" will keep the IRS from collecting it involuntarily. And remember, people who have a lot of money--the ones that you most want to resist--have the most to lose.
If only Darklands had been more polished and less buggy!
Single-player gaming certainly isn't dead, it's just very hard to find games that are both complex -and- well-polished.
Fact of life.
Hence, long plotful games where your actions have plot consequences way down the line.
You can do that as simply as building up an epilogue based on what happened in the game (like in Fallout), or you can have something where you can choose to save or not save a city, and then be forced to go there a few hours later and observe just how many people died because you weren't enough of a hero.
Unfortunately, games where you don't know the consequences for a long time after you've committed to an action can be really annoying if you don't want to play through them repeatedly. The rest of the game, in between those important choices, just starts to seem like filler.
I remember Alter Ego in four-color goodness. That was a wonderful game; some parts hit you really hard. I remember being annoyed at not being able to play many of the choices each game, and eventually realised that it was making a very telling statement about life.
Also, a life that you can have wonderful plans for and then go and be an aggressive driver and plunge off a cliff.
Sure, everything I know about huge scale digging machinery I learned from the History Channel. But even in the modern day, digging things out is a huge task. You don't go very far in a day, your machinery takes impeccable maintenance, the mining is prone to accidents or destroyed machinery, you need tons of spare parts--and that's in mountains that we've been practicing digging for a few thousand years! A fully self-sufficient mining operation on EARTH is enormous fantasy at the moment, because there's just no replacement for human versatility. And the nature of the work on the moon (terrifyingly sharp rocks vs. space suit, plus nasty temperature conditions) means that this scale of resource extraction will be out of our league, even with humans, for a while yet. I just don't think subterranean lunar mining is realistic right now--In a hundred years it might be slightly reasonable.
Actual "roleplaying", where you really get into your character's role and play it to the hilt, is strictly impossible without other human players: The plot forces you to pick between saying a small number of things the writers included. The role that these games DO let you get into, is that of an explorer in dangerous territory.
For me, the silver age of computer RPGs was the age where you had to draw your own maps. Wizardry epitomized that age for me, and it was pretty rules lawyering itself. When the rules are simple enough that you can't really abuse the AI or anything, "rules lawyering" is actually fairly realistic... It's fairly in-character for an adventurer to take any possible advantage he can. The place where it gets questionable is when you sit around and farm the monsters for experience points. If that's the player's goal, then no, it's not a roleplaying game at all. If finishing making your maps while trying not to get killed is the player's goal, then hey, it's all good.
But then, I enjoyed early RPGs the same way I enjoyed early text adventures.
Skype's protocol has some pretty nice traffic-shaping evasion stuff built in. It's notoriously hard to block. If its proprietary protocol was better known, then ISPs and telecoms could start to block or slow its traffic...which would dramatically reduce the value of that protocol to users.
(Unless Net Neutrality goes in, but then there's all sorts of legal kerfuffle about telecoms trying to monopolize VoIP anyway.)
I worked under Prof. Mamishev on a different robotics project a couple years back, but heard about this one in class. Took me by surprise to see this on Slashdot, but it always looked like an awesome project.
As far as I can tell, the main advantage of an ornithopter--the reason that birds use that design--is that it doesn't require spinning parts, and it doesn't require literally burning fuel ie high temperatures. Living creatures don't spin very well or very fast and have no ball bearings, so living propellors would be out of the question, and throwing away some of your own mass isn't a good survival strategy, plus high temperatures have all kinds of problems. Bird wings are very useful if you don't have metal or oil, but past that? Probably no advantage at all.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last loose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Given how much time and effort some companies take to make sure their page looks Really Good for their core users, I'm not sure many of them would even want to support a browser that gives users less than the CEO's vision of the perfect webpage. In the web world I've worked in at least, having a broad user base seems to be a lot less important than making a perfect impression on the users who can see it.
(When I asked my boss if I should try and support Firefox, he stared for a few seconds, then laughed. And then I laughed too. And then I cried a little inside.)
Does this shed any more light on coding solutions?
on
Volatility of Human Memory
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been tracking the periphery of AI for quite a while. Even though directly emulating the human brain is probably not the best solution for artificial intelligence, has this research opened any new doors lately?
Team 824, University of Washington & Roosevelt High School. (I'm on the UW side.) The day of the kickoff it's finally sinking in that I just signed away all my weekends for the next month and a half.
Normally I like being busy, but I have a feeling it'll be a big relief when this is over...
Actually, I probably would have said the exact same thing if it was MSIE. It ticks me off that someone would post a bug report on the front page without even any documentation. The idiotic post of a Half-Life 2 bug earlier at least had documentation. Maybe it raised my standards too high?
I don't even -use- Firefox. I use IE. I guess an undocumented report of an IE bug on the front page would be a different matter, but only because the vast majority of people still use IE. (Even the majority of slashdotters!) The issue here is a post, with no documentation, that would scare people off of even trying another browser.
Wow. I can appreciate the importance of anonymous posting of news titles, but not for news stories like this. One person's hearsay, without even real documentation of the errors? Not only is this story useless, it looks like a great way to turn a lot of people off Firefox without just cause.
I can appreciate the need for timely news regarding upgrades, but without any supporting information, this article looks vaguely sneaky and evil in a way I can't quantify. News sources have a responsibility to do a little research before putting something on the front page.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say it, but as a Worms: Armageddon addict, I tried out Wormux hoping for a better alternative to W:A's central network server and required CD... ...and it plays like trash. Worms is the Macintosh of games, the user experience has been finely honed and is absolutely a central part of the product. Wormux has bad animations and controls that feel *wrong*, and lots of irritating graphical glitches.
Maybe you can get used to it and enjoy it, but I deleted it after fifteen minutes. Not sure what version I had, but it was current as of a few months ago.
And I was all excited, too. :/ If it really does get better as time goes on, call me in a few years--but I have my doubts about its eventual graphics and sound quality. Free games usually fail there, and those are two things Worms is all about.
The poster's source was (not very clearly) given in his name, webpage, and post subject. It was the quote used for the "Homo Superior" technology in the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. About half the quotes are 'homebrew', about half are quoting from some real-world historic source. This one was from a historic source. As for where SMAC got the quote from...well, it's referenced properly in the game, but grandparent didn't include that part. Still, SMAC is a good source for all your dystopian/utopian-future quoting needs.
I'm a TFC vet planning to get TF2 soon. Any advice on servers to play, settings to use, or noob behavior to avoid? (Besides the obvious "Always shoot the medic first".) I bet I'll miss my grenades.
Ah! So "best" means "most challenging", or "least accessible to new players". Me, I was a bigger fan of IV. And FFTA, for which I will hide my head in shame.
Yeah--For another good example of The Register's tone, just look at any article they've ever posted about Sadville, er, I mean, Second Life. It's not just Wikipedia that draws their ire. I think their "bash-everything" style is hilarious, and even makes good points.
Because the writer thought that a clean break in the action, or in the theme between two distinct areas, was important.
Or because "downtime" occurs between levels that the player doesn't need to see, whether they're following corridors or going back to base.
I don't know if I'm trolling or joking or what, but I'm in the unfortunate position of saying: If people start seeing brownouts because there's too much video on the 'net, I'll happily switch to a service that throttles the heck out of your content as long as I can still use my low-bandwidth telnet stuff. Does that mean I'm supporting or opposing network neutrality? I don't even know anymore.
What could the IRS do about tax resistance? Well, for one thing, they wouldn't have to throw people in jail, they could just confiscate tax resister's assets. Set a punitive rate of 4x what you owe (or more, I don't know what the real laws are); anyone who doesn't want to lose their house will comply, as will anyone who wants their kids to go to college. It's not like saying "No I won't give you taxes" will keep the IRS from collecting it involuntarily. And remember, people who have a lot of money--the ones that you most want to resist--have the most to lose.
Can someone summarize what NPD is? The summary doesn't say (but it should).
Half sarcasm and half serious: Give me one good reason that someone with a press pass deserves rights that you don't have without it.
If only Darklands had been more polished and less buggy! Single-player gaming certainly isn't dead, it's just very hard to find games that are both complex -and- well-polished. Fact of life.
Hence, long plotful games where your actions have plot consequences way down the line. You can do that as simply as building up an epilogue based on what happened in the game (like in Fallout), or you can have something where you can choose to save or not save a city, and then be forced to go there a few hours later and observe just how many people died because you weren't enough of a hero. Unfortunately, games where you don't know the consequences for a long time after you've committed to an action can be really annoying if you don't want to play through them repeatedly. The rest of the game, in between those important choices, just starts to seem like filler.
I remember Alter Ego in four-color goodness. That was a wonderful game; some parts hit you really hard. I remember being annoyed at not being able to play many of the choices each game, and eventually realised that it was making a very telling statement about life. Also, a life that you can have wonderful plans for and then go and be an aggressive driver and plunge off a cliff.
Sure, everything I know about huge scale digging machinery I learned from the History Channel. But even in the modern day, digging things out is a huge task. You don't go very far in a day, your machinery takes impeccable maintenance, the mining is prone to accidents or destroyed machinery, you need tons of spare parts--and that's in mountains that we've been practicing digging for a few thousand years! A fully self-sufficient mining operation on EARTH is enormous fantasy at the moment, because there's just no replacement for human versatility. And the nature of the work on the moon (terrifyingly sharp rocks vs. space suit, plus nasty temperature conditions) means that this scale of resource extraction will be out of our league, even with humans, for a while yet. I just don't think subterranean lunar mining is realistic right now--In a hundred years it might be slightly reasonable.
Actual "roleplaying", where you really get into your character's role and play it to the hilt, is strictly impossible without other human players: The plot forces you to pick between saying a small number of things the writers included. The role that these games DO let you get into, is that of an explorer in dangerous territory. For me, the silver age of computer RPGs was the age where you had to draw your own maps. Wizardry epitomized that age for me, and it was pretty rules lawyering itself. When the rules are simple enough that you can't really abuse the AI or anything, "rules lawyering" is actually fairly realistic... It's fairly in-character for an adventurer to take any possible advantage he can. The place where it gets questionable is when you sit around and farm the monsters for experience points. If that's the player's goal, then no, it's not a roleplaying game at all. If finishing making your maps while trying not to get killed is the player's goal, then hey, it's all good. But then, I enjoyed early RPGs the same way I enjoyed early text adventures.
Skype's protocol has some pretty nice traffic-shaping evasion stuff built in. It's notoriously hard to block. If its proprietary protocol was better known, then ISPs and telecoms could start to block or slow its traffic...which would dramatically reduce the value of that protocol to users. (Unless Net Neutrality goes in, but then there's all sorts of legal kerfuffle about telecoms trying to monopolize VoIP anyway.)
Lunar hotels? He3 mining? Did someone say Moonbase? http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/moonbase That was one of my favorite games ever...seventeen years ago.
I worked under Prof. Mamishev on a different robotics project a couple years back, but heard about this one in class. Took me by surprise to see this on Slashdot, but it always looked like an awesome project.
As far as I can tell, the main advantage of an ornithopter--the reason that birds use that design--is that it doesn't require spinning parts, and it doesn't require literally burning fuel ie high temperatures. Living creatures don't spin very well or very fast and have no ball bearings, so living propellors would be out of the question, and throwing away some of your own mass isn't a good survival strategy, plus high temperatures have all kinds of problems. Bird wings are very useful if you don't have metal or oil, but past that? Probably no advantage at all.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last loose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
-- U.N. Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Librarian's Preface"
Given how much time and effort some companies take to make sure their page looks Really Good for their core users, I'm not sure many of them would even want to support a browser that gives users less than the CEO's vision of the perfect webpage. In the web world I've worked in at least, having a broad user base seems to be a lot less important than making a perfect impression on the users who can see it. (When I asked my boss if I should try and support Firefox, he stared for a few seconds, then laughed. And then I laughed too. And then I cried a little inside.)
I've been tracking the periphery of AI for quite a while. Even though directly emulating the human brain is probably not the best solution for artificial intelligence, has this research opened any new doors lately?
Team 824, University of Washington & Roosevelt High School. (I'm on the UW side.) The day of the kickoff it's finally sinking in that I just signed away all my weekends for the next month and a half. Normally I like being busy, but I have a feeling it'll be a big relief when this is over...
Actually, I probably would have said the exact same thing if it was MSIE. It ticks me off that someone would post a bug report on the front page without even any documentation. The idiotic post of a Half-Life 2 bug earlier at least had documentation. Maybe it raised my standards too high?
I don't even -use- Firefox. I use IE. I guess an undocumented report of an IE bug on the front page would be a different matter, but only because the vast majority of people still use IE. (Even the majority of slashdotters!) The issue here is a post, with no documentation, that would scare people off of even trying another browser.
Wow. I can appreciate the importance of anonymous posting of news titles, but not for news stories like this. One person's hearsay, without even real documentation of the errors? Not only is this story useless, it looks like a great way to turn a lot of people off Firefox without just cause. I can appreciate the need for timely news regarding upgrades, but without any supporting information, this article looks vaguely sneaky and evil in a way I can't quantify. News sources have a responsibility to do a little research before putting something on the front page.