What I'm trying to say is that the "downfall" of these series was not the gameplay so much as the fact that everything that has massively succeeded lately has been multiplayer. Think WoW, Second Life, etc. The first "innovator" game in each DX and Thief series was quite successful, but the sequels didn't maintain interest as well as the original.
I am fairly sure that the sequel games in both of these series, however, did well with fans of the original games. I suspect that their downfall came because they just failed to attract new players who haven't already played the originals. Do a google search for '"thief 3" multiplayer' or '"invisible war" multiplayer' and you'll find out that while Ion Storm DID release a half-ass patch for the original Deus Ex, neither of these sequel games supported multiplayer and people DID seem to be interested in it.
What Half-Life did differently was to add a pretty compelling non-halfass multiplayer option on top of their single-player story games. So fans played the game, then played multiplayer and got their friends to play multiplayer, and the series continued to live long after the initial single-player replay value was worn out. Valve did that part really well. And I think that's where the Thief and DX series fell flat; they're like the adventure games of old - after you play them through once, the fun factor drops sharply for everybody but the most hardcore fans, because you already know the story and there isn't much left to do besides what? Play weird self-imposed challenges a la Nethack?
(Note: I am actually a fan of all three series and am quite happy to go back and replay DX, DX2, any of the Thief games, and both HL games in their single-player formats every now and then. It's exactly like watching a favorite movie, only more time-consuming and more in-depth.)
At least, I liked the story. The gameplay was inferior to Deus Ex, and the whole thing was shorter and a little more straightforward, but in some ways it had an equivalent atmosphere. I'd still love to see the whole thing (DX1 + DX2) done as a movie, or novelized. It's fantastic escapist entertainment.
In any case, the loading zones in both Thief3 and DX2 never bothered me. The framerate issues were a bit more of a problem, but I was willing to reduce graphic levels to play through the stories as they were compelling enough. The truth is, I think that both games suffered from the fact that they lack multiplayer modes, not so much because of the other factors. Half Life is in the same general story-driven genre and succeeds largely because of its extensive multiplayer community. Take it out, and I think that HL/HL2 would be in the same boat as these other games.
Personally, it doesn't bother me much 'cuz I'm not a multiplayer gamer, but I've heard these from my Quake/Unreal/Doom/HL-playing gamer friends. I think the lack of multiplayer worked the first time around because of the sheer innovativeness, but a lot of people ultimately want the social aspect. If they just want mindless thrill or action, they watch a movie - it's easier.
I found myself forced to do a kernel upgrade over the weekend, and module-assistant made it shockingly trivial to install my IPW2100 wireless drivers, as well as my ATI drivers, on an HP NC8000 laptop. This was a huge change from the last few times, when I had to manually compile and install those drivers.
Well, as I said in another post on this topic, I don't know how pre-OS code would be sophisticated enough to be snooping around in OS-land programs, especially when the OS could be any of a dozen variants from Windows to Unix. Still, I'm willing to be educated otherwise, and if I were indeed in charge of securing networks somewhere (I'm not), I'd actually bother to research that possibility out before dismissing it.
In the meantime, I'm just saying that it seems exceedingly unlikely.
Unless you're presuming that the code responsible for your leak is sophisticated enough to tell what might be useful data and what isn't, then you should be able to detect traffic leaving your system before you start doing anything important on it. I.e. a clean-slate install will have weird traffic leaving it even though you aren't actually using that system yet. Why would my clean Windows install have SSL traffic leaving it if I haven't so much as thrown Office on it yet?
And if you presume that the system will "sleep" until awakened at a later point, well, that would presume that there are other breaks in your security (most likely social ones) to determine when that later point was. I just don't think this is really a very practical concern.
Your second would presume that every installation is being monitored by some sort of in-country team that has access to the physical infrastructure necessary to retrieve these signals, which is even more implausible than the original scenario.
I just can't imagine it not being prohibitively costly and risky to do anything besides sending out traffic over the 'net back to China. Maybe I'm not imaginative enough, in which case I'm willing to be enlightened:-)
Presumably the leak mechanism wouldn't be sophisticated enough to know WHEN to ship stuff out. I mean, it seems a stretch to me to think that something installed at the hardware level pre-OS is going to be sophisticated enough to do keyword analysis on the keyboard in order to determine when to burst out some traffic or whatever - but even so, you'd think that you could just fire up the system and type a bunch of juicy stuff and watch the traffic for anything weird.
I don't think there's any real substance to this sort of paranoia.
...you can install traffic monitors on a network and I'm pretty sure any weird traffic going out wouldn't be too hard to pick up on. I've done this for more benign purposes, such as discreetly determining whether someone was using office computers to do P2P after noticing a bandwidth problem. So I don't think it would be that hard to do.
When I read the article, I was struck by the fact that they're trying to use voluntary DOS attacks against spammers. I've NEVER heard of this company before, and I imagine Joe Average User hasn't either. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more Joe Average Users out there with compromised systems on a botnet than there are people participating in the Blue Security net - probably by a couple factors of 10. Besides, do we really need another million computers wasting bandwidth on such an obviously failure-destined approach to spam-fighting? It just seems lose-lose all around to me.
I don't train every day, but I probably train an average of 90 minutes/day over the course of a week. I tend to take every other day or two days off.
I do aikido 1-2x/week, aim for three gym days (weights and cardio), and run once or twice a week.
I'm not married, but have lived with my girlfriend for two years now. However, I'm guessing that a big advantage I have over you is that my girlfriend is also heavily into staying fit - she's a TKD black belt working on her second dan at the moment, so we tend to motivate each other to stay in shape. That sort of feedback loop helps a lot.
If you get your wife into working out, you can do it together and it makes it a lot easier to stay on top of. If she's already working out, join her;-)
I program 8hrs/day, write another hour or two/day on my own. And I also do aikido, can run a couple of miles if my shins are cooperating, weight train, etc. It takes time, sure, but just because you don't take the time doesn't mean that it's impossible or even very difficult if you actually try it.
...when my 40gb laptop hard drive was failing not long ago, I coaxed another week out of it by repeatedly dropping it from about a meter whenever it failed to spin up.
Go figure, huh? So maybe banging your head on the wall a few times will be good for you in this future.
The article goes on to discuss how Einstein had all the benefits of other great physicists. But wait, he dropped out of high school, barely made it into college, and couldn't even find a job. He taught himself calculus, and developed special relativity on his own.
It's fair to point out that, although Einstein did drop out of high school and failed the liberal arts portions of his college entrance exams, he went back and finished high school, and passed the exams later. There is no evidence to indicate that he didn't learn calculus at school (some sources say he started studying at 12, but calculus was being taught to students only three years older, so he was advanced but not exactly mind-blowing, and no indication that he "taught himself" calculus. He did work out some advanced calculus stuff later, though.) During his time in the Zurich Polytechnic school going for a four-year teaching degree in mathematics and physics, he undoubtedly improved his studies even further. While he did study above and beyond the "call of duty," he almost certainly learned physics/calculus the same way we all do, albeit perhaps at a faster pace.
Whatever happened to old-fashioned selecting crops? If you plant enough of them and grow them for a few years, you'll be able to get seeds that are suited for your area, if I'm not mistaken. Is it just the shortcut factor that makes the GM appealing in this case?
Not that I'm against genetic modification in principle, but I'm just curious if it's really that much superior to simple selection.
From the article: "...one hard drive contained approximately 40 full-length motion videos..."
As opposed to what? Videos of still images? Someone sitting there with a photo album and a camcorder, I guess...goes to show you what people will do when they don't have a scanner...
Representatives Spike and Brutus, of giant Microsoft's Redmond, Wash.-based IE7 team, took a business trip - complete with their beloved baseball bats - down to tiny Mozilla's Mountain View, Calif. offices to deliver the news of Microsoft's latest image acquisition...
I was going to make a similar comment, although I agree with the original post that these acronyms are lame. I didn't hear about AJAX 'til the beginning of this year, and LAMP has been around for a number of years already, although that P part 's exact meaning continues to be debated.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm trying to say is that the "downfall" of these series was not the gameplay so much as the fact that everything that has massively succeeded lately has been multiplayer. Think WoW, Second Life, etc. The first "innovator" game in each DX and Thief series was quite successful, but the sequels didn't maintain interest as well as the original.
I am fairly sure that the sequel games in both of these series, however, did well with fans of the original games. I suspect that their downfall came because they just failed to attract new players who haven't already played the originals. Do a google search for '"thief 3" multiplayer' or '"invisible war" multiplayer' and you'll find out that while Ion Storm DID release a half-ass patch for the original Deus Ex, neither of these sequel games supported multiplayer and people DID seem to be interested in it.
What Half-Life did differently was to add a pretty compelling non-halfass multiplayer option on top of their single-player story games. So fans played the game, then played multiplayer and got their friends to play multiplayer, and the series continued to live long after the initial single-player replay value was worn out. Valve did that part really well. And I think that's where the Thief and DX series fell flat; they're like the adventure games of old - after you play them through once, the fun factor drops sharply for everybody but the most hardcore fans, because you already know the story and there isn't much left to do besides what? Play weird self-imposed challenges a la Nethack?
(Note: I am actually a fan of all three series and am quite happy to go back and replay DX, DX2, any of the Thief games, and both HL games in their single-player formats every now and then. It's exactly like watching a favorite movie, only more time-consuming and more in-depth.)
...I actually liked DX2.
At least, I liked the story. The gameplay was inferior to Deus Ex, and the whole thing was shorter and a little more straightforward, but in some ways it had an equivalent atmosphere. I'd still love to see the whole thing (DX1 + DX2) done as a movie, or novelized. It's fantastic escapist entertainment.
In any case, the loading zones in both Thief3 and DX2 never bothered me. The framerate issues were a bit more of a problem, but I was willing to reduce graphic levels to play through the stories as they were compelling enough. The truth is, I think that both games suffered from the fact that they lack multiplayer modes, not so much because of the other factors. Half Life is in the same general story-driven genre and succeeds largely because of its extensive multiplayer community. Take it out, and I think that HL/HL2 would be in the same boat as these other games.
Personally, it doesn't bother me much 'cuz I'm not a multiplayer gamer, but I've heard these from my Quake/Unreal/Doom/HL-playing gamer friends. I think the lack of multiplayer worked the first time around because of the sheer innovativeness, but a lot of people ultimately want the social aspect. If they just want mindless thrill or action, they watch a movie - it's easier.
*deposits $0.02*
I found myself forced to do a kernel upgrade over the weekend, and module-assistant made it shockingly trivial to install my IPW2100 wireless drivers, as well as my ATI drivers, on an HP NC8000 laptop. This was a huge change from the last few times, when I had to manually compile and install those drivers.
It is MUCH easier than it used to be.
Well, as I said in another post on this topic, I don't know how pre-OS code would be sophisticated enough to be snooping around in OS-land programs, especially when the OS could be any of a dozen variants from Windows to Unix. Still, I'm willing to be educated otherwise, and if I were indeed in charge of securing networks somewhere (I'm not), I'd actually bother to research that possibility out before dismissing it.
In the meantime, I'm just saying that it seems exceedingly unlikely.
That isn't the point.
Unless you're presuming that the code responsible for your leak is sophisticated enough to tell what might be useful data and what isn't, then you should be able to detect traffic leaving your system before you start doing anything important on it. I.e. a clean-slate install will have weird traffic leaving it even though you aren't actually using that system yet. Why would my clean Windows install have SSL traffic leaving it if I haven't so much as thrown Office on it yet?
And if you presume that the system will "sleep" until awakened at a later point, well, that would presume that there are other breaks in your security (most likely social ones) to determine when that later point was. I just don't think this is really a very practical concern.
Your first point is the best.
Your second would presume that every installation is being monitored by some sort of in-country team that has access to the physical infrastructure necessary to retrieve these signals, which is even more implausible than the original scenario.
I just can't imagine it not being prohibitively costly and risky to do anything besides sending out traffic over the 'net back to China. Maybe I'm not imaginative enough, in which case I'm willing to be enlightened:-)
Presumably the leak mechanism wouldn't be sophisticated enough to know WHEN to ship stuff out. I mean, it seems a stretch to me to think that something installed at the hardware level pre-OS is going to be sophisticated enough to do keyword analysis on the keyboard in order to determine when to burst out some traffic or whatever - but even so, you'd think that you could just fire up the system and type a bunch of juicy stuff and watch the traffic for anything weird.
I don't think there's any real substance to this sort of paranoia.
...you can install traffic monitors on a network and I'm pretty sure any weird traffic going out wouldn't be too hard to pick up on. I've done this for more benign purposes, such as discreetly determining whether someone was using office computers to do P2P after noticing a bandwidth problem. So I don't think it would be that hard to do.
When I read the article, I was struck by the fact that they're trying to use voluntary DOS attacks against spammers. I've NEVER heard of this company before, and I imagine Joe Average User hasn't either. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more Joe Average Users out there with compromised systems on a botnet than there are people participating in the Blue Security net - probably by a couple factors of 10. Besides, do we really need another million computers wasting bandwidth on such an obviously failure-destined approach to spam-fighting? It just seems lose-lose all around to me.
...they could use a card dedicated to keeping their server up when Slashdot finds it. It's already down for me.
I mean... Wii. Um. Okay. It just doesn't have the same ring.
From the Segway guy, this wheelchair can climb stairs and tackle pebbly paths.:-P
I don't train every day, but I probably train an average of 90 minutes/day over the course of a week. I tend to take every other day or two days off.
I do aikido 1-2x/week, aim for three gym days (weights and cardio), and run once or twice a week.
I'm not married, but have lived with my girlfriend for two years now. However, I'm guessing that a big advantage I have over you is that my girlfriend is also heavily into staying fit - she's a TKD black belt working on her second dan at the moment, so we tend to motivate each other to stay in shape. That sort of feedback loop helps a lot.
If you get your wife into working out, you can do it together and it makes it a lot easier to stay on top of. If she's already working out, join her;-)
I program 8hrs/day, write another hour or two/day on my own. And I also do aikido, can run a couple of miles if my shins are cooperating, weight train, etc. It takes time, sure, but just because you don't take the time doesn't mean that it's impossible or even very difficult if you actually try it.
...to press submit, but figured I might as well live a little.
YES, WORLD, MY MIND IS IN THE GUTTER!;-)
...have some bizarre fetishes.
...when my 40gb laptop hard drive was failing not long ago, I coaxed another week out of it by repeatedly dropping it from about a meter whenever it failed to spin up.
Go figure, huh? So maybe banging your head on the wall a few times will be good for you in this future.
...says:
"The next Slashdot story is visible early to free day pass visitors; sponsored by Verizon Business."
Amusing timing.
It's fair to point out that, although Einstein did drop out of high school and failed the liberal arts portions of his college entrance exams, he went back and finished high school, and passed the exams later. There is no evidence to indicate that he didn't learn calculus at school (some sources say he started studying at 12, but calculus was being taught to students only three years older, so he was advanced but not exactly mind-blowing, and no indication that he "taught himself" calculus. He did work out some advanced calculus stuff later, though.) During his time in the Zurich Polytechnic school going for a four-year teaching degree in mathematics and physics, he undoubtedly improved his studies even further. While he did study above and beyond the "call of duty," he almost certainly learned physics/calculus the same way we all do, albeit perhaps at a faster pace.
That occurred to me, but I wasn't sure how glow-in-the-dark plants would be very useful against global warming. ;-)
Whatever happened to old-fashioned selecting crops? If you plant enough of them and grow them for a few years, you'll be able to get seeds that are suited for your area, if I'm not mistaken. Is it just the shortcut factor that makes the GM appealing in this case?
Not that I'm against genetic modification in principle, but I'm just curious if it's really that much superior to simple selection.
From the article: "...one hard drive contained approximately 40 full-length motion videos..."
As opposed to what? Videos of still images? Someone sitting there with a photo album and a camcorder, I guess...goes to show you what people will do when they don't have a scanner...
Representatives Spike and Brutus, of giant Microsoft's Redmond, Wash.-based IE7 team, took a business trip - complete with their beloved baseball bats - down to tiny Mozilla's Mountain View, Calif. offices to deliver the news of Microsoft's latest image acquisition...
I was going to make a similar comment, although I agree with the original post that these acronyms are lame. I didn't hear about AJAX 'til the beginning of this year, and LAMP has been around for a number of years already, although that P part 's exact meaning continues to be debated.:-)
Are these better than new technologies somehow?