But surely that's cheap, demeaning and insulting? It's just an opportunistic advertising plan devised to manipulate people's feelings for commercial advantage. Just as it's not a food company's place to attack people's lifestyles, it's not their place to support it either.
The only problem is that this is a cheat that leaves evidence -- you don't get to take the marked cards away at the end of the night. Because of this, there's a risk that the scam has a very short shelf-life. They got €71k in a singe night, and were caught on the second attempt. Every gambler knows they should quit while they're ahead. No gambler does.
I don't think you need a specific law against cheating at gambling, as long as you already have laws against fraud. Cheating in a for-profit game is fraudulent, because everyone in the game has agreed to play by the same set of rules.
Yes, there are cameras everywhere in a casino. Yes, they can see everyone's hands. No that doesn't have to mean they are cheating. The people who can see the camera monitors are not in communication with the dealers. They go straight to the lawyers apparently.
Wow, lawyers as security guards? That'll cost a pretty penny. I'm surprised the casinos haven't negotiated down to lesser sworn officers-of-the-court... like bailiffs and bounty hunters....
They should take the kickstarter thing even further (and break thru the rut games are in these days)
Player created assets for the game.
Not just objects, assemblages of objects , but quest scripts, tool plugins, tutorials, template of all of the above to make it easier for others to create....
Yes there will be legal issues and a heavy vetting process (and a community to organize for this scheme to be effective), but players have 1000X the creativity and imagination and potential effort that the games employees will have (really important if its to be a persistant MMORPG).
Have you played any FOSS games? They are mostly derivative clones of existing proprietary games, and the weaknesses aren't in the bits copied, but in the original assets. Last time I checked out Freedoom, the enemy sprites didn't go well together, some being cartoony hand-drawn sprites (as per Doom) and others being amateurish prerenders of 3D models. By far the worst thing, though, is level design. You may get some cracking levels out there, but they're bundled in among vast amounts of grinding through poorly designed dross; a problem compounded by the fact that an awful lot of these games just throw a bunch of levels at you for selection, rather than attempting to build in a learning curve with progression through levels according to difficulty.
The key word in the preceding paragraph is "design". Game development isn't just a question of "imagination" - execution counts.
The US already has legislation to stop small investments, which is why KS doesn't offer equity. The US legislation was enacted decades ago not to protect big-money interests, but to close down con artists. The typical scam was to go into a town as a movie maker, get the locals to chip in as "associate producers", then shoot something of such poor quality that it would never see release. The guys at the head of the scam would have paid themselves a salary out of the investment, hired equipment from their own companies etc, and everything would be by the book, fulfilling the contract signed, and therefore not legally fraudulent. The solution was to say that if you don't have credentials as a "competent investor", you are not allowed to invest in a project if you don't personally know the guys you're backing.
The thing I am loving about Star Citizen is that there *is* meat already. The final game is a long way off, but there is already a hangar module where several of the early ships can be seen and interacted with if you have contributed toward the game. By doing this they are keeping backers interested, and also involving us in the development process. We can send feedback, find bugs, etc *way* before any sort of formal open beta would begin.
I have too problems with this.
1: all the information being given to backers is of even more interest to potential backers. They're still asking people to chip in effectively blind, even though there is material they could be demonstrating.
2: A few moving models in a bought-in engine?? That sounds like smoke and mirrors, giving the illusion of progress by doing something that looks impressive, but is essentially trivial.
Yea a quote like this "My agenda is to build the coolest game possible." is nice in theory, but deadlines with budget constraints have an effect of pushing products to market. I'm assuming the Duke Nukem Forever team had similar goals.
Exactly. Back in the early 90s, a bunch of the biggest names in comics decided they were sick of the commercial constraints and lack of creative control they were getting from Marvel and DC, so set out to make a bunch of independent studios all published under a single brand: Image Comics.
When some of the new titles slowed to publishing once every six months, the creators defended themselves by stating they wanted to create the best comic possible, and weren't going to release an inferior product, just to meet a publishing deadline. As you may imagine, this didn't result in a very agreeable experience for the reader...
Most of the arts projects are essentially looking for a platform, and the artists do the campaigning legwork themselves, directing potential backers on their mailing lists to site to pay. But many of the technology projects look to the site to draw investment in.
So there's nothing wrong with arts/vanity projects per se, but there is the problem that mixing the two classes of campaign together means the swarm of vanity projects underserving of marketplace promotion crowds out the minority of projects needing a source of stranger-investors.
Scripting stuff like that is easy though. I don't know what you searched, but there's dozens of ways to fix that particular issue.
...which was part of the problem. The internet was full of solutions, mostly the same one... a solution for X11.
I'm not sure if the problem was just that the internet is getting too big, or if Google's algorithm was working against me by trying to find pages similar to my recent history, thereby biasing towards giving me the same answer rather than different ones.
I must say though that your goals and mine are not necessarily aligned, and yours do not represent the normal use case for Linux as well. If being able to script your OS, or your OS installation, is important to you, then you will likely have a good linux experience. Ditto if you're a programmer.
I'm currently implementing a combination of machine learning, NLP and adaptive learning techniques in Python 2.7 in order to set up a new webservice. The long-term goal is to reimplement it in a lower-level language on a parallel platform for performance (but only once I've got a solid prototype running as a single thread).
So... programmer.
It's been said that the goals of a computer system are for trivial tasks to be easy, and complicated tasks to be possible, and in my opinion Linux embodies this goal more than any other system.
I'd say getting the screen backlight on is a pretty trivial task, and this particular problem has been giving me grief on and off for a decade, depending on the particular distro and laptop hardware combination. To me it beggars belief that this issue has persisted so long, and that for all the talk of trying to get Linux on user Pcs, they can leave such a fundamental problem essentially untouched, just hacking in one hardware version at a time.
Additionally, the Arch Linux wiki is absolutely stellar info, and usually pretty close to what debian does.
Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
The real victim of the 3D card was space combat. The last generation of software rendered space games was all shiny and vacuumy thanks to phong shading. It all went plasticky when the hardware forced gourad on us.
The big turning point in FPSes was that when polygon 3D first came along, the processor cost of rendering multiple bad guys on screen went up by several orders of magnitude over the sprite-based games. Games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and (the best of the lot) Dark Forces kept you on your toes by having to dispatch multiple baddies in quick succession while dodging fire. Each baddie type had fairly simple behaviour. Heck, I'd say that Doom often came off as just Gauntlet with a first-person perspective: lots of beasties running at you as you navigate a simple maze.
But as the numbers of on-screen enemies dropped, each individual enemy had to act more intelligently and more naturally, and provide more of a challenge. Polygon FPSes therefore should be considered as a separate genre from sprite-based FPSes. Unfortunately, reality in violence isn't much fun.
The recent rise in zombie fiction has actually reintroduced something far more Gauntlet-like into the FPS world... but it's too far, cos zombies don't shoot at you...
Of course I automate that with a log on script, but then again so could you. Just offering an anecdotal rebuttal.
I tried that, but the instructions on the net were all wrong, either because they assumed you're using X11, or because they required unsafe account permissions to run. Thankfully some self-important idiot troll decided to prove his superiority by giving me the solution mid-fame (above)...
I spent a heck of a lot of time searching for the solution to this problem on the net, and I all I could find were solutions that didn't work or whose instructions were incomplete. It's hardly fair to blame the user when the only way that you can get a solution is to bait trolls on/. . Most people won't do that, which is one of the reasons people get scared away from Linux.
Thank you for resolving my problem, but please try to put yourself in the shoes of the average insider and realise that it is not "dimwitted" to not know information that is hidden from you.
3DO's problem was the lack of titles at launch and the high price. SteamOS launches with a fairly substantial catalogue behind it, and runs on commodity hardware, meaning expensive "manufacture" is replaced with simple "assembly".
Imagine you were a company offering high end video cards to gamers. Would Valve not be on your list of "people to keep sweet"? The last thing Nvidia would want is Steam recommending the competition to all their users. Besides, Valve will have talked to the manufacturers before chosing which chipset to use in their design.
I was looking forward to the Valve box, but all this talk of linux has put me off. The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm. A valve flavor of linux is more of the same.
So what you're saying is that you're annoyed they're using an open system because you were lokking forward to a new proprietary console OS to help you break free of the propietary console paradigm? **SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 1**
They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.
...which is precisely what I did when I went back to university. I gave all citations with the original URL and an archive.org one. I hoped at the uni would pick up on it and recommend it to the other students, but it never happened....
You really think that sentence was written by a person with a tenuous grasp of the English language. Seriously?
Tenuous grasp, no; but non_native != tenuous_grasp. The blog's at a German university. The choice of "marry" over "combine" is slightly unusual, as the idea of choice falling on something. It's very, very good. But it's still most likely not his first language, so pedantic polemics are uncalled for.
Slashdot Mirror
The best bit is the response by a competing company, Bertolli, who have managed to personify pasta shapes: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/bertolli-makes-most-barilla-chairmans-anti-gay-comments-152758
But surely that's cheap, demeaning and insulting? It's just an opportunistic advertising plan devised to manipulate people's feelings for commercial advantage. Just as it's not a food company's place to attack people's lifestyles, it's not their place to support it either.
The only problem is that this is a cheat that leaves evidence -- you don't get to take the marked cards away at the end of the night. Because of this, there's a risk that the scam has a very short shelf-life. They got €71k in a singe night, and were caught on the second attempt. Every gambler knows they should quit while they're ahead. No gambler does.
I don't think you need a specific law against cheating at gambling, as long as you already have laws against fraud. Cheating in a for-profit game is fraudulent, because everyone in the game has agreed to play by the same set of rules.
It's a game of chance, and awareness off the odds allows you to make judgement calls and improve your chances. "Skill" is a strong word.
Yes, there are cameras everywhere in a casino. Yes, they can see everyone's hands. No that doesn't have to mean they are cheating. The people who can see the camera monitors are not in communication with the dealers. They go straight to the lawyers apparently.
Wow, lawyers as security guards? That'll cost a pretty penny. I'm surprised the casinos haven't negotiated down to lesser sworn officers-of-the-court... like bailiffs and bounty hunters....
They should take the kickstarter thing even further (and break thru the rut games are in these days)
Player created assets for the game. Not just objects, assemblages of objects , but quest scripts, tool plugins, tutorials, template of all of the above to make it easier for others to create....
Yes there will be legal issues and a heavy vetting process (and a community to organize for this scheme to be effective), but players have 1000X the creativity and imagination and potential effort that the games employees will have (really important if its to be a persistant MMORPG).
Have you played any FOSS games? They are mostly derivative clones of existing proprietary games, and the weaknesses aren't in the bits copied, but in the original assets. Last time I checked out Freedoom, the enemy sprites didn't go well together, some being cartoony hand-drawn sprites (as per Doom) and others being amateurish prerenders of 3D models. By far the worst thing, though, is level design. You may get some cracking levels out there, but they're bundled in among vast amounts of grinding through poorly designed dross; a problem compounded by the fact that an awful lot of these games just throw a bunch of levels at you for selection, rather than attempting to build in a learning curve with progression through levels according to difficulty.
The key word in the preceding paragraph is "design". Game development isn't just a question of "imagination" - execution counts.
The US already has legislation to stop small investments, which is why KS doesn't offer equity. The US legislation was enacted decades ago not to protect big-money interests, but to close down con artists. The typical scam was to go into a town as a movie maker, get the locals to chip in as "associate producers", then shoot something of such poor quality that it would never see release. The guys at the head of the scam would have paid themselves a salary out of the investment, hired equipment from their own companies etc, and everything would be by the book, fulfilling the contract signed, and therefore not legally fraudulent. The solution was to say that if you don't have credentials as a "competent investor", you are not allowed to invest in a project if you don't personally know the guys you're backing.
The thing I am loving about Star Citizen is that there *is* meat already. The final game is a long way off, but there is already a hangar module where several of the early ships can be seen and interacted with if you have contributed toward the game. By doing this they are keeping backers interested, and also involving us in the development process. We can send feedback, find bugs, etc *way* before any sort of formal open beta would begin.
I have too problems with this.
1: all the information being given to backers is of even more interest to potential backers. They're still asking people to chip in effectively blind, even though there is material they could be demonstrating.
2: A few moving models in a bought-in engine?? That sounds like smoke and mirrors, giving the illusion of progress by doing something that looks impressive, but is essentially trivial.
Yea a quote like this "My agenda is to build the coolest game possible." is nice in theory, but deadlines with budget constraints have an effect of pushing products to market. I'm assuming the Duke Nukem Forever team had similar goals.
Exactly. Back in the early 90s, a bunch of the biggest names in comics decided they were sick of the commercial constraints and lack of creative control they were getting from Marvel and DC, so set out to make a bunch of independent studios all published under a single brand: Image Comics.
When some of the new titles slowed to publishing once every six months, the creators defended themselves by stating they wanted to create the best comic possible, and weren't going to release an inferior product, just to meet a publishing deadline. As you may imagine, this didn't result in a very agreeable experience for the reader...
I think there's another issue in there:
Most of the arts projects are essentially looking for a platform, and the artists do the campaigning legwork themselves, directing potential backers on their mailing lists to site to pay. But many of the technology projects look to the site to draw investment in.
So there's nothing wrong with arts/vanity projects per se, but there is the problem that mixing the two classes of campaign together means the swarm of vanity projects underserving of marketplace promotion crowds out the minority of projects needing a source of stranger-investors.
That's what I meant: they went too Gauntlet-like in the sense that they are more Gauntlet-like than Doom.
You don't get it -- most users would not have been able to do even what I did. They'd have said it's broken and gone back to Windows.
Of course, then I fear (this being Slashdot) you would have to deal with pendants who ignore subjective "feels like" perspectives...
Now that is a classy troll!
Scripting stuff like that is easy though. I don't know what you searched, but there's dozens of ways to fix that particular issue.
...which was part of the problem. The internet was full of solutions, mostly the same one... a solution for X11.
I'm not sure if the problem was just that the internet is getting too big, or if Google's algorithm was working against me by trying to find pages similar to my recent history, thereby biasing towards giving me the same answer rather than different ones.
I must say though that your goals and mine are not necessarily aligned, and yours do not represent the normal use case for Linux as well. If being able to script your OS, or your OS installation, is important to you, then you will likely have a good linux experience. Ditto if you're a programmer.
I'm currently implementing a combination of machine learning, NLP and adaptive learning techniques in Python 2.7 in order to set up a new webservice. The long-term goal is to reimplement it in a lower-level language on a parallel platform for performance (but only once I've got a solid prototype running as a single thread).
So... programmer.
It's been said that the goals of a computer system are for trivial tasks to be easy, and complicated tasks to be possible, and in my opinion Linux embodies this goal more than any other system.
I'd say getting the screen backlight on is a pretty trivial task, and this particular problem has been giving me grief on and off for a decade, depending on the particular distro and laptop hardware combination. To me it beggars belief that this issue has persisted so long, and that for all the talk of trying to get Linux on user Pcs, they can leave such a fundamental problem essentially untouched, just hacking in one hardware version at a time.
Additionally, the Arch Linux wiki is absolutely stellar info, and usually pretty close to what debian does.
I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
The real victim of the 3D card was space combat. The last generation of software rendered space games was all shiny and vacuumy thanks to phong shading. It all went plasticky when the hardware forced gourad on us.
The big turning point in FPSes was that when polygon 3D first came along, the processor cost of rendering multiple bad guys on screen went up by several orders of magnitude over the sprite-based games. Games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and (the best of the lot) Dark Forces kept you on your toes by having to dispatch multiple baddies in quick succession while dodging fire. Each baddie type had fairly simple behaviour. Heck, I'd say that Doom often came off as just Gauntlet with a first-person perspective: lots of beasties running at you as you navigate a simple maze.
But as the numbers of on-screen enemies dropped, each individual enemy had to act more intelligently and more naturally, and provide more of a challenge. Polygon FPSes therefore should be considered as a separate genre from sprite-based FPSes. Unfortunately, reality in violence isn't much fun.
The recent rise in zombie fiction has actually reintroduced something far more Gauntlet-like into the FPS world... but it's too far, cos zombies don't shoot at you...
Of course I automate that with a log on script, but then again so could you. Just offering an anecdotal rebuttal.
I tried that, but the instructions on the net were all wrong, either because they assumed you're using X11, or because they required unsafe account permissions to run. Thankfully some self-important idiot troll decided to prove his superiority by giving me the solution mid-fame (above)...
I spent a heck of a lot of time searching for the solution to this problem on the net, and I all I could find were solutions that didn't work or whose instructions were incomplete. It's hardly fair to blame the user when the only way that you can get a solution is to bait trolls on /. . Most people won't do that, which is one of the reasons people get scared away from Linux.
Thank you for resolving my problem, but please try to put yourself in the shoes of the average insider and realise that it is not "dimwitted" to not know information that is hidden from you.
3DO's problem was the lack of titles at launch and the high price. SteamOS launches with a fairly substantial catalogue behind it, and runs on commodity hardware, meaning expensive "manufacture" is replaced with simple "assembly".
Imagine you were a company offering high end video cards to gamers. Would Valve not be on your list of "people to keep sweet"? The last thing Nvidia would want is Steam recommending the competition to all their users. Besides, Valve will have talked to the manufacturers before chosing which chipset to use in their design.
Agreed. But since this isn't 2005, and no modern Linux distro ever requires you to see a CLI, much less use one, that's not really an issue.
Having failed to detect that it's running on a laptop, Ubuntu leaves me typing sudo setpci -s 00:02.0 f4.b=0 at a CLI, blind, every time I switch on.
I was looking forward to the Valve box, but all this talk of linux has put me off. The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm. A valve flavor of linux is more of the same.
So what you're saying is that you're annoyed they're using an open system because you were lokking forward to a new proprietary console OS to help you break free of the propietary console paradigm? **SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 1**
Science also relies on scholarship. Legal scribes are not the only scholars.
They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.
...which is precisely what I did when I went back to university. I gave all citations with the original URL and an archive.org one. I hoped at the uni would pick up on it and recommend it to the other students, but it never happened....
You really think that sentence was written by a person with a tenuous grasp of the English language. Seriously?
Tenuous grasp, no; but non_native != tenuous_grasp. The blog's at a German university. The choice of "marry" over "combine" is slightly unusual, as the idea of choice falling on something. It's very, very good. But it's still most likely not his first language, so pedantic polemics are uncalled for.