I dunno, but the "Dummy Guide To...." seem to have done the job on many technical-like things to teach my dad: He now knows his way around the Internet, and isn't 'afraid' to use Windows anymore.
Before he was always shitscared to either delete something by accident, or crashing it; which as he saw it was breaking the computer... permanently:)
I think the Dummy Guides do a good job at not being too condescending, yet also maintain a good humorous writing style (just my opinion, and only from reading parts of the books I gave to my dad).
And other than that I think it's just very important to indeed stress that a lot of personal details/files could potentially be destroyed by viruses/trojans, yet don't make them too scared to use the Net at all: Installing Firefox would be a good start, but I assume you got that one covered;)
Then again, best prevention would probably be when one would be a victim of any such crime; But hax0ring your parent's computer probably takes it one step too far;)
And why shouldn't a government be able to buy them for their people?
I assume that they wanted to reach a 100k goal, as to offset some of the other starting costs; With 1.2 million the plan could be realised, and they could be distributing their 3678 (x2) computers.
This way it would also be easier to attract the attention of more donations towards the project, as at that time there would at least be a product available instead of the few prototypes around now.
As far as I understood the 300 dollars would go towards two computers for them, and one for yourself: Seems like a fair deal to me.
I am really amazed though that this pledge only got 3678 people from their 100k goal: I'd rather give to this (although, admittedly, at the moment I am not in the position to actually be able to contribute), as the billions spend on food the previous years didn't quite help to get people over there back on their feet: Ok, it probably saved alot of lives, but I'd rather teach them how to fish, instead of having to repeatedly buy them fish.
This guy wanted to dress up as the Thing (from the Fantastic Four); But the endresult somehow reminds me of a Cheeto in spandex. Still great effort though.:)
Dunno if you still have any EA games, but for the Battlefield series it works quite well to rename the appropriate.bik files to something else. The.bik files can most of the time be found in the (\mods\bf2) \movies folder.
Renaming them will not cause any purity-conflicts (with Punkbuster for example), and the intro movies won't be shown anymore after this.
Re:Deleted Scenes from the Interview
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I uploaded (personal) movies at both YouTube and Google, and they came up instantly. The file that I uploaded to Google was under 100 MB, so I don't know if this presumed reviewing of content is only taking place once the filesize gets bigger than the 100 MB: But under 100 MB there doesn't seem to be any manual reviewing going on at Google.
I wonder if a picture of Goatse will be making the timecapsule: How vulgar it is, it -does- reflect human nature... or at least that what is displayed on the Net.
And if it -does- make the timecapsule, and somehow this message reaches aliens; Would they assume we're very open to their supposed anal probing?
Probably meant as a joke, but don't underestimate the nonverbal communication which, iirc, makes up of 80 percent of our communication: So having an actual face who tries to resemble human behaviour (or at least a nonverbal reaction to its 'own' opinion), is imo a step up in creating a believable AI.
Next up they could maybe start to use vocalic nonverbal communication, where the tone/pitch/volume of the voice is changing depending on the 'mood/opinion' of the AI; Yet another form of nonverbal communication.
Maybe if the AI starts to ask for a different casemod once every few weeks, we might have driven the object nonverbal communication too far;)
Check out the Wikipedia article for more examples of how nonverbal communication is a very big part of our lives and should not be neglected on the way to 'perfect' AI.
I hope she did the right thing afterwards... and no, it's not sueing the shit out of the company for age-discrimination; I was talking about her just taking her business elsewhere, maybe even informing the company that they lost a (sane) customer,and tell her experience through to a lot of other potential customers...
Imo, that's the only right thing to do (that is, if there are any other providers in her area).
You might want to try Anarchy Online (if you haven't allready), which is a free MMORPG, with a sci-fi setting. I quite enjoyed it, and the benefit of not having to pay for it doesn't leave any 'obligations' to play the game.
I also found the community/players in general quite enjoyable to play/talk with. No too much asshats imo.
Damn, that had me laughing. They can't be serious, can they?
The footage looks freaking sweet (sometimes almost to the point of near-photorealistic quality), and after having played FarCry I can't wait to see how this game will turn out.
But how on earth wouldn't the Xbox360 or PS3 be able to run this game? I would think that, since the PS3 isn't even released and the 360 is pretty much still beginning, that the developers would be able to crank out alot more stuff than which was allready shown off in either games or previews.
Weird shit, but hey, chalk one up for PC's ! Wooyay:D
The abundance of gameguides on the Net is one of the bigger reasons why the adventure, or point-and-click games died.
For me this only became painfully obvious when I was playing Dreamfall: The longest journey, the other day.
This game, on multiple occasions, left me clueless on what to do. Instead of (as in the good ol' days) trying every possibility for hours, I just gave up after five minutes and went for a quick browse to gamefaqs; thus solving the problem at hand but not really getting any satisfaction out of it.
And then to think I had to freaking call a -very- expensive (Nintendo-sponsored) Hotline back in the days everytime I encountered an 'unsolvable' NES problem:)
I very much enjoyed HL2 (even after its delay), but I don't think it was flawless (remember the sound-stutter bug?). But the 'invisible' updating by Steam surely helps in quickly erasing such problems (at least for me), and to this day I think it was worth every penny I paid for it.
I haven't gotten around in buying Episode 1 yet (still busy with Prey), but I will probably buy it once Episode 2 comes along.
We (the Netherlands) also recently went to the chip-embedded biometric passwords: Afaik, it's biometric as the different proportions of your face are stored in there: For example, one is not allowed to laugh/smile/frown when having a passport-photograph taken, as it would mess up the 'default' state of your face.
As (one of) the definitions of biometric is : A measurable, physical characteristic or personal behavioral trait used to recognize the identity, or verify the claimed identity, of an enrollee.
I can see how this would qualify as being such.
This is not entirely new; This is allready known, and used, in several hospitals when painful procedures (eg. wrapping off/on new bandages on burn-wound victims) take place: Just drop the kid behind a console, and while he is busy playing his game, the doctor goes to work: The distraction helps out -a lot- for these kids, and is one thing you -don't- hear good ol' Jack Thompson include in his insane rants.
Besides distraction, there are a lot more applications for 'games' in treatments:
I worked on a project aimed at 'treating' acrophobia (being afraid of heights), by creating virtual environments of high places (eg. a highrise building) and then letting those people gradually experience the different heights and let them slowly grow accustomed to what is actually happening when you are in a high spot (objects getting smaller, less sound of below is coming through 'up there', etc).
The advantage of this method as I experienced it is being able to transfer someone to a high spot without physically going there (later on in the therapy the patients are encouraged to go to pre-arranged spots of varying heights) and being able to 'measure' the reaction of the patient to the different situations. (I was -very- amazed people (acrophobics) could experience the same scare-symptons (by lack of a better word) by only looking at a virtual image/video/game of a high-place: I actually saw a woman faint when she was 'on top' of one of my skyrise buildings *chuckle*).
I also experimented with interactive elements within the map, as to distract the people from actually going up there (it was a simple tracking-game, where the people had to answer questions while slowly walking up the staircase of the different levels of the building), and this seemed to help even more in letting people get acquainted with the heights.
All in all, this has been a very rewarding project to work on, and showed me that games (besides being great entertainment, and (underestimated) learning tools), also do very well in treating some of these illnesses.
...and perhaps education is next on the list of needs.
Very much agree with your post; I might even argue that education also helps in accomplishing the other necesities you pointed out (teaching them to fish, so to speak).
Yes, and I seriously wonder why, everytime (after the announcement of the 300$-project) this story has come up after that, the editor hasn't bothered to keep including the link to that.
When this project is brought up (and it had its share of/. frontpage-posts), I always see a lot of posts of "I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of them just for tinkering", and 300$ gives you AND good karma, and a very funny lil' computer.
By keeping to mention the 300-dollar deal, I think it's easy for the editors to keep people aware of this possibility, and do their little contribution to which is, imo, a very good start in helping the third world countries partially keep up with the rest of the world.
There are allready (a few) mods which do the exact same thing as done in Portal: Fully dynamic, you can create an entry portal, an exit portal, and then they're usable. Sometimes it's still a bit buggy, admittedly: But it definitely works.
Also, Prey has the, imo, great ability to switch the gravity within the game (besides the wallwalking), which created some nice puzzles, and has great possibilities for mods.
I might be opinionated because I bought the game (and currently creating a small mod, based on the movie 'Cube' for it), but it was quickly shown that the dynamic teleporters were possible within the engine.
Erm, if this isn't a good idea to get younger people interested in orchestras (and their possibilities besides "boring" classical pieces), I don't know what is. The link leads to an 8-minute vid of them in action; Great stuff imo.
Ah, good to see that converted to dollars; Also take in account that they probably aren't renting the living quarters they live in, so that also saves a lot on expenses.
I can only hope one day we westerners also get some 24/7 game-channels; While I am not too much a fan of Starcraft, or any other strategy game for that matter, I wouldn't mind being able to watch the best on the FPS-field battle eachother.
Currently I do so by downloading demos of great matches, but I'd enjoy it more when I would be able to watch live events more often; and with better commentary than most of the shoutcasts have to offer at the moment.
Gears of War is imo way overhyped, and even then they didn't do a very good job at it, and didn't get the message across.
I always thought that it would be one of the first release titles available for the Xbox360 (or at least, that's how the marketing/interviews I've seen put it down), but it never quite made that.
Also, seriously: What does this FPS have to offer me, other than other games of the same genre? I've seen lots of footage, and alot of it just seems to be pre-scripted scenes (been there, done that), and once again mechanised-animals/cyborgs... *yawn*
Can anyone tell me what Gears of War has to offer, other than the Unreal3-engine in action?
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, but the "Dummy Guide To ...." seem to have done the job on many technical-like things to teach my dad: He now knows his way around the Internet, and isn't 'afraid' to use Windows anymore. :)
;) ;)
Before he was always shitscared to either delete something by accident, or crashing it; which as he saw it was breaking the computer... permanently
I think the Dummy Guides do a good job at not being too condescending, yet also maintain a good humorous writing style (just my opinion, and only from reading parts of the books I gave to my dad).
And other than that I think it's just very important to indeed stress that a lot of personal details/files could potentially be destroyed by viruses/trojans, yet don't make them too scared to use the Net at all: Installing Firefox would be a good start, but I assume you got that one covered
Then again, best prevention would probably be when one would be a victim of any such crime; But hax0ring your parent's computer probably takes it one step too far
The summary is a bit confusing; 5 dollars for Halo 3 !!!!oneleven!!
From the article:
The basic edition of the game is priced at $59.99 with pre-orders requiring a $5 deposit.
And why shouldn't a government be able to buy them for their people?
I assume that they wanted to reach a 100k goal, as to offset some of the other starting costs; With 1.2 million the plan could be realised, and they could be distributing their 3678 (x2) computers.
This way it would also be easier to attract the attention of more donations towards the project, as at that time there would at least be a product available instead of the few prototypes around now.
As far as I understood the 300 dollars would go towards two computers for them, and one for yourself: Seems like a fair deal to me.
I am really amazed though that this pledge only got 3678 people from their 100k goal: I'd rather give to this (although, admittedly, at the moment I am not in the position to actually be able to contribute), as the billions spend on food the previous years didn't quite help to get people over there back on their feet: Ok, it probably saved alot of lives, but I'd rather teach them how to fish, instead of having to repeatedly buy them fish.
This guy wanted to dress up as the Thing (from the Fantastic Four); But the endresult somehow reminds me of a Cheeto in spandex. Still great effort though. :)
Dunno if you still have any EA games, but for the Battlefield series it works quite well to rename the appropriate .bik files to something else. The .bik files can most of the time be found in the (\mods\bf2) \movies folder.
Renaming them will not cause any purity-conflicts (with Punkbuster for example), and the intro movies won't be shown anymore after this.
I uploaded (personal) movies at both YouTube and Google, and they came up instantly. The file that I uploaded to Google was under 100 MB, so I don't know if this presumed reviewing of content is only taking place once the filesize gets bigger than the 100 MB: But under 100 MB there doesn't seem to be any manual reviewing going on at Google.
I wonder if a picture of Goatse will be making the timecapsule: How vulgar it is, it -does- reflect human nature... or at least that what is displayed on the Net.
And if it -does- make the timecapsule, and somehow this message reaches aliens; Would they assume we're very open to their supposed anal probing?
Questions... Questions... Questions...
Probably meant as a joke, but don't underestimate the nonverbal communication which, iirc, makes up of 80 percent of our communication: So having an actual face who tries to resemble human behaviour (or at least a nonverbal reaction to its 'own' opinion), is imo a step up in creating a believable AI.
;)
Next up they could maybe start to use vocalic nonverbal communication, where the tone/pitch/volume of the voice is changing depending on the 'mood/opinion' of the AI; Yet another form of nonverbal communication.
Maybe if the AI starts to ask for a different casemod once every few weeks, we might have driven the object nonverbal communication too far
Check out the Wikipedia article for more examples of how nonverbal communication is a very big part of our lives and should not be neglected on the way to 'perfect' AI.
I don't do this because I hate startup programs
;)
And because you love confusing the fuck out of your wife
Nice tip btw, as it's been one of the few annoyances Firefox has been giving me.
I hope she did the right thing afterwards... and no, it's not sueing the shit out of the company for age-discrimination; I was talking about her just taking her business elsewhere, maybe even informing the company that they lost a (sane) customer,and tell her experience through to a lot of other potential customers...
Imo, that's the only right thing to do (that is, if there are any other providers in her area).
You might want to try Anarchy Online (if you haven't allready), which is a free MMORPG, with a sci-fi setting. I quite enjoyed it, and the benefit of not having to pay for it doesn't leave any 'obligations' to play the game.
I also found the community/players in general quite enjoyable to play/talk with. No too much asshats imo.
Damn, that had me laughing. They can't be serious, can they?
:D
The footage looks freaking sweet (sometimes almost to the point of near-photorealistic quality), and after having played FarCry I can't wait to see how this game will turn out.
But how on earth wouldn't the Xbox360 or PS3 be able to run this game? I would think that, since the PS3 isn't even released and the 360 is pretty much still beginning, that the developers would be able to crank out alot more stuff than which was allready shown off in either games or previews.
Weird shit, but hey, chalk one up for PC's ! Wooyay
The abundance of gameguides on the Net is one of the bigger reasons why the adventure, or point-and-click games died.
:)
For me this only became painfully obvious when I was playing Dreamfall: The longest journey, the other day.
This game, on multiple occasions, left me clueless on what to do. Instead of (as in the good ol' days) trying every possibility for hours, I just gave up after five minutes and went for a quick browse to gamefaqs; thus solving the problem at hand but not really getting any satisfaction out of it.
And then to think I had to freaking call a -very- expensive (Nintendo-sponsored) Hotline back in the days everytime I encountered an 'unsolvable' NES problem
I very much enjoyed HL2 (even after its delay), but I don't think it was flawless (remember the sound-stutter bug?). But the 'invisible' updating by Steam surely helps in quickly erasing such problems (at least for me), and to this day I think it was worth every penny I paid for it.
I haven't gotten around in buying Episode 1 yet (still busy with Prey), but I will probably buy it once Episode 2 comes along.
Can't have a guitar hero thread without the required link
:)
Frets on Fire is the required link imo
We (the Netherlands) also recently went to the chip-embedded biometric passwords: Afaik, it's biometric as the different proportions of your face are stored in there: For example, one is not allowed to laugh/smile/frown when having a passport-photograph taken, as it would mess up the 'default' state of your face.
As (one of) the definitions of biometric is : A measurable, physical characteristic or personal behavioral trait used to recognize the identity, or verify the claimed identity, of an enrollee.
I can see how this would qualify as being such.
This is not entirely new; This is allready known, and used, in several hospitals when painful procedures (eg. wrapping off/on new bandages on burn-wound victims) take place: Just drop the kid behind a console, and while he is busy playing his game, the doctor goes to work: The distraction helps out -a lot- for these kids, and is one thing you -don't- hear good ol' Jack Thompson include in his insane rants.
Besides distraction, there are a lot more applications for 'games' in treatments:
I worked on a project aimed at 'treating' acrophobia (being afraid of heights), by creating virtual environments of high places (eg. a highrise building) and then letting those people gradually experience the different heights and let them slowly grow accustomed to what is actually happening when you are in a high spot (objects getting smaller, less sound of below is coming through 'up there', etc).
The advantage of this method as I experienced it is being able to transfer someone to a high spot without physically going there (later on in the therapy the patients are encouraged to go to pre-arranged spots of varying heights) and being able to 'measure' the reaction of the patient to the different situations. (I was -very- amazed people (acrophobics) could experience the same scare-symptons (by lack of a better word) by only looking at a virtual image/video/game of a high-place: I actually saw a woman faint when she was 'on top' of one of my skyrise buildings *chuckle*).
I also experimented with interactive elements within the map, as to distract the people from actually going up there (it was a simple tracking-game, where the people had to answer questions while slowly walking up the staircase of the different levels of the building), and this seemed to help even more in letting people get acquainted with the heights.
All in all, this has been a very rewarding project to work on, and showed me that games (besides being great entertainment, and (underestimated) learning tools), also do very well in treating some of these illnesses.
...and perhaps education is next on the list of needs. Very much agree with your post; I might even argue that education also helps in accomplishing the other necesities you pointed out (teaching them to fish, so to speak).
Yes, and I seriously wonder why, everytime (after the announcement of the 300$-project) this story has come up after that, the editor hasn't bothered to keep including the link to that.
/. frontpage-posts), I always see a lot of posts of "I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of them just for tinkering", and 300$ gives you AND good karma, and a very funny lil' computer.
When this project is brought up (and it had its share of
By keeping to mention the 300-dollar deal, I think it's easy for the editors to keep people aware of this possibility, and do their little contribution to which is, imo, a very good start in helping the third world countries partially keep up with the rest of the world.
There are allready (a few) mods which do the exact same thing as done in Portal: Fully dynamic, you can create an entry portal, an exit portal, and then they're usable. Sometimes it's still a bit buggy, admittedly: But it definitely works.
Also, Prey has the, imo, great ability to switch the gravity within the game (besides the wallwalking), which created some nice puzzles, and has great possibilities for mods.
I might be opinionated because I bought the game (and currently creating a small mod, based on the movie 'Cube' for it), but it was quickly shown that the dynamic teleporters were possible within the engine.
Erm, if this isn't a good idea to get younger people interested in orchestras (and their possibilities besides "boring" classical pieces), I don't know what is. The link leads to an 8-minute vid of them in action; Great stuff imo.
Ah, good to see that converted to dollars; Also take in account that they probably aren't renting the living quarters they live in, so that also saves a lot on expenses.
I can only hope one day we westerners also get some 24/7 game-channels; While I am not too much a fan of Starcraft, or any other strategy game for that matter, I wouldn't mind being able to watch the best on the FPS-field battle eachother.
Currently I do so by downloading demos of great matches, but I'd enjoy it more when I would be able to watch live events more often; and with better commentary than most of the shoutcasts have to offer at the moment.
The equatorial bulge developed back when the developing moon was like molasses (and you thought it was cheese!)
It is?
Gears of War is imo way overhyped, and even then they didn't do a very good job at it, and didn't get the message across.
I always thought that it would be one of the first release titles available for the Xbox360 (or at least, that's how the marketing/interviews I've seen put it down), but it never quite made that.
Also, seriously: What does this FPS have to offer me, other than other games of the same genre? I've seen lots of footage, and alot of it just seems to be pre-scripted scenes (been there, done that), and once again mechanised-animals/cyborgs... *yawn*
Can anyone tell me what Gears of War has to offer, other than the Unreal3-engine in action?