Despite your arguments of freshness, the perma-death model of CS isn't in any way, shape, or form, applicable to WoW. You accept the death model because there was close to zero time investment in creating your character, and because death is not, in fact, permanent. It's only a 10 minute, or what have you, respawn timer until the next match begins. Elsewhere Diablo II's perma-death was discussed, and that is indeed much closer to WoW's scope, but even then I doubt it would really make sense.
In fact, part of what makes it genuinely fun for me is the learning experience of raiding, and that, almost by definition, involves wipe after wipe after wipe to figure out how to get a specific boss down. Other than giving everybody some sort of safe escape mechanic to abort failed attempts, and made bosses much more lenient, in such a way that "failed attempts" doesn't mean "people are dead", I can't see how you'd achieve that. If you *do* give such a safe escape mechanism, then for all intents and purposes you have achieved something that is almost mechanically equivalent to WoW's death except you don't see your character as a ghost.
What makes Nethack is not the randomly generated maps.
It's, on one hand, the fact that the whole world is random. Spell scrolls have different names for each spell in every game. Wands look different. Potions are of different colours.
On the other hand, and more importantly, the game is probably the most convoluted mass of hard-coded behaviour ever. Most items interact with a large portion of all other items in a meaningful manner. In fact, this sort of interaction is key in discovering what items actually do. Want to find out if an item's cursed? drop it on the floor and try to get your dog to voluntarily step on it (it's not cursed if he does). If it's not cursed, feel free to wear it and find out if it does anything unusual. Or zap a wand at the floor to see what it does. If the bugs on the floor stop moving, you're looking at a wand of death -- or perhaps just of sleep. If the bugs go away, it might be teleportation -- or invisibility! You also have to eat, or you'll starve. You'll mostly be eating stuff you kill, but you need to make sure it's both proper food (the gods don't like cannibalism, highly acidic monsters will give you a bad case of heartburn, and tripe rations are really meant for your pet. You might be able to stomach them, but odds are you'll puke, and be even hungrier) and fresh (food decays over time, and one of the first lessons I learnt is that zombies are, by definition, not fresh meat)
Diablo II did not have saved games for hardcore (i.e., perma-death mode) games. You have your character saved so you can stop playing and resume at a later point, but once you die, the game won't allow you to use that character again. Normal mode characters can die all they want, they'll only lose some experience (at most to their present level's floor) and gold.
Apparently the idea is that your Death Knight was recruited by the Lich King from the ranks of either the Horde or the Alliance, but you reneged on his offer at some point in your training as a Death Knight, and decided to rejoin your former friends, and give Arthas a taste of his own medicine. A bit contrived, but it works.
Just to be picky, "use thine old spelling" is wrong. The correct form is "use thy old spelling". Thee/Thine/Thy parallels Me/Mine/My perfectly (I guess you wouldn't get any of those wrong if you spoke a romance language).
"I think it's naive to assume that these are not targeted attacks," said John Bambenek, who is also a researcher at the University of Illinois
I think it's also pretty naïve to assume that it is a targeted attack, as such an assumption shifts the blame enormously. While a targeted attack is arguably more dangerous and more worrisome for a certain group of people, such an attack could happen at any number of stages of fabrication, so the fabrication process itself isn't to blame. Reversely, if a random infection makes it to a device sold as a server accessory, that puts both fabrication and quality assurance at fault, the former allowing the infection, the latter for not detecting it. If that's what happens to enterprise products, one has to wonder how much crud gets through in consumer stuff.
First, XGA/SXGA are resolution specifications, not colour depth specifications.
Second, advertising a 6-bit panel as capable of displaying "millions of colours" is always false advertising, irrespectively of how common a practice it is amongst other vendors.
Finally, not all 6-bit colour dithering is done in the space domain. Some monitors use time-domain dithering, which I think results in better colour fidelity (at the cost of a bit of a flicker, I guess).
Actually, I think that windows could really do with ~/bin, ~/usr/bin, etc (uh, well I guess ~/etc too, yes). Installing software locally to a user would be a Good Thing. There's very little software out there that should actually need root privileges to run, and only that sort of software should be unable to be installed locally to a user. Windows's way of installing system wide and only adding shortcuts to the present user is a mockery of that concept. Of course, the amount of people who actually install stuff in their home directories is pretty small if they actually have root access to their NIX box, but meh.
While I wholeheartedly agree with "tight integration is bad", at the very least Firefox is thoroughly multi-platform, which means the only sane way to do this at all is with some sort of system abstraction layer, which substantially reduces the area exposed to attacks. But that's only a mitigating factor... and a slight one at that.
Yes, maybe. But that doesn't detract from the technology itself being quite cool. From a business perspective, considering how fast content is generated nowadays, tools that start taking steps towards understanding the semantics of that content -- and then putting that understanding to use! -- are quite clearly the next big thing. From a geekier perspective, damn, the concepts at hand are cool. Getting this to work is a major step in knowledge representation and other connected areas in AI.
For once, I do hope MS gets this out the door. I normally don't touch their stuff with a 10' pole, but you gotta give them kudos where they're due.
Working Bruce's explanation into a practical example:
You publish code under the GPL.
People download it, use it, and their usage of the code is bound by the terms of the GPL.
You decide to change the license on the code. Since you're the copyright holder, nothing prevents you from doing that.
More people get your code from your distribution channel. These people are bound by the new license.
The people in point 2, however, agreed to the GPL, not your new license, and you explicitly gave them the right to alter and/or redistribute the code, so they're free to keep on sharing, coming up with a full fledged fork, probaly even selling it.
At least publicly (I won't go into internal politics issues when I'm not sure how those pan out) Wikipedia has a strong NPOV stance. Assuming they're liable for the content (and from my understanding, the moment Jimbo makes edits and then uses his standing in the foundation to keep the edits, that's a pretty strong case for moderation, hence liability), their own portrayal of their contents as being of a neutral, encyclopaedic nature seals the deal on articles being considered opinion pieces.
1. there are no criminal copyright laws in Australia.. only the pathetic "especially egregious acts" wording in the Copyright Act which claims criminal prosecution may be possible.
Now that actually sounds reasonable, provided "especially egregious" starts at about "running a pirate content selling scheme" level or something. Of course, there's still the matter of how far civil charges will take you, which I really couldn't even begin making a decent guess at.
I'm not the biggest fan of the Beatles out there, but I'd hardly call it "elevator music". Sure, some of their material -- especially the later stuff -- is borderline commercial tripe, but there are some pearls in there (at the very least the whole of the Sergeant Pepper's concept album).
AFAIK, Apple thoroughly customized the version of Java that comes bundled with OS X so as to make it look consistent with the rest of the platform. It certainly doesn't look half as jarring as it does on windows.
At least XP has issues booting from USB, not sure about Vista. Either way, what the GP was suggesting was carrying a VM image in the usb key, and booting it up under VMware/Parallels.
Nah. Coming to slashdot asking whether it's time to change from Linux to Windows would see a whole thread of -1 flamebait. If I wanted to ask that question, I'd steer way clear from naming names.
Slashdot Mirror
You're obviously not familiar with the Tauren Marine
(In case you're wondering, it was part of this year's April Fools)
Despite your arguments of freshness, the perma-death model of CS isn't in any way, shape, or form, applicable to WoW. You accept the death model because there was close to zero time investment in creating your character, and because death is not, in fact, permanent. It's only a 10 minute, or what have you, respawn timer until the next match begins. Elsewhere Diablo II's perma-death was discussed, and that is indeed much closer to WoW's scope, but even then I doubt it would really make sense.
In fact, part of what makes it genuinely fun for me is the learning experience of raiding, and that, almost by definition, involves wipe after wipe after wipe to figure out how to get a specific boss down. Other than giving everybody some sort of safe escape mechanic to abort failed attempts, and made bosses much more lenient, in such a way that "failed attempts" doesn't mean "people are dead", I can't see how you'd achieve that. If you *do* give such a safe escape mechanism, then for all intents and purposes you have achieved something that is almost mechanically equivalent to WoW's death except you don't see your character as a ghost.
What makes Nethack is not the randomly generated maps.
It's, on one hand, the fact that the whole world is random. Spell scrolls have different names for each spell in every game. Wands look different. Potions are of different colours.
On the other hand, and more importantly, the game is probably the most convoluted mass of hard-coded behaviour ever. Most items interact with a large portion of all other items in a meaningful manner. In fact, this sort of interaction is key in discovering what items actually do. Want to find out if an item's cursed? drop it on the floor and try to get your dog to voluntarily step on it (it's not cursed if he does). If it's not cursed, feel free to wear it and find out if it does anything unusual. Or zap a wand at the floor to see what it does. If the bugs on the floor stop moving, you're looking at a wand of death -- or perhaps just of sleep. If the bugs go away, it might be teleportation -- or invisibility! You also have to eat, or you'll starve. You'll mostly be eating stuff you kill, but you need to make sure it's both proper food (the gods don't like cannibalism, highly acidic monsters will give you a bad case of heartburn, and tripe rations are really meant for your pet. You might be able to stomach them, but odds are you'll puke, and be even hungrier) and fresh (food decays over time, and one of the first lessons I learnt is that zombies are, by definition, not fresh meat)
Diablo II did not have saved games for hardcore (i.e., perma-death mode) games. You have your character saved so you can stop playing and resume at a later point, but once you die, the game won't allow you to use that character again. Normal mode characters can die all they want, they'll only lose some experience (at most to their present level's floor) and gold.
Apparently the idea is that your Death Knight was recruited by the Lich King from the ranks of either the Horde or the Alliance, but you reneged on his offer at some point in your training as a Death Knight, and decided to rejoin your former friends, and give Arthas a taste of his own medicine. A bit contrived, but it works.
Just to be picky, "use thine old spelling" is wrong. The correct form is "use thy old spelling". Thee/Thine/Thy parallels Me/Mine/My perfectly (I guess you wouldn't get any of those wrong if you spoke a romance language).
From the summary:
"I think it's naive to assume that these are not targeted attacks," said John Bambenek, who is also a researcher at the University of IllinoisI think it's also pretty naïve to assume that it is a targeted attack, as such an assumption shifts the blame enormously. While a targeted attack is arguably more dangerous and more worrisome for a certain group of people, such an attack could happen at any number of stages of fabrication, so the fabrication process itself isn't to blame. Reversely, if a random infection makes it to a device sold as a server accessory, that puts both fabrication and quality assurance at fault, the former allowing the infection, the latter for not detecting it. If that's what happens to enterprise products, one has to wonder how much crud gets through in consumer stuff.
First, XGA/SXGA are resolution specifications, not colour depth specifications.
Second, advertising a 6-bit panel as capable of displaying "millions of colours" is always false advertising, irrespectively of how common a practice it is amongst other vendors.
Finally, not all 6-bit colour dithering is done in the space domain. Some monitors use time-domain dithering, which I think results in better colour fidelity (at the cost of a bit of a flicker, I guess).
Actually, I think that windows could really do with ~/bin, ~/usr/bin, etc (uh, well I guess ~/etc too, yes). Installing software locally to a user would be a Good Thing. There's very little software out there that should actually need root privileges to run, and only that sort of software should be unable to be installed locally to a user. Windows's way of installing system wide and only adding shortcuts to the present user is a mockery of that concept. Of course, the amount of people who actually install stuff in their home directories is pretty small if they actually have root access to their NIX box, but meh.
While I wholeheartedly agree with "tight integration is bad", at the very least Firefox is thoroughly multi-platform, which means the only sane way to do this at all is with some sort of system abstraction layer, which substantially reduces the area exposed to attacks. But that's only a mitigating factor... and a slight one at that.
I trust you mean "the average (mean) person is a millionaire, but the median is dirt-poor."
Yes, maybe. But that doesn't detract from the technology itself being quite cool. From a business perspective, considering how fast content is generated nowadays, tools that start taking steps towards understanding the semantics of that content -- and then putting that understanding to use! -- are quite clearly the next big thing. From a geekier perspective, damn, the concepts at hand are cool. Getting this to work is a major step in knowledge representation and other connected areas in AI.
For once, I do hope MS gets this out the door. I normally don't touch their stuff with a 10' pole, but you gotta give them kudos where they're due.
Working Bruce's explanation into a practical example:
So.. trousers or shirt pocket? Which sort of cancer are you trying to dodge? :)
At least publicly (I won't go into internal politics issues when I'm not sure how those pan out) Wikipedia has a strong NPOV stance. Assuming they're liable for the content (and from my understanding, the moment Jimbo makes edits and then uses his standing in the foundation to keep the edits, that's a pretty strong case for moderation, hence liability), their own portrayal of their contents as being of a neutral, encyclopaedic nature seals the deal on articles being considered opinion pieces.
Sure, I'll take it with a grain of salt. But he does have Moore as a surname, and the other guy pretty much nailed it. :)
Now that actually sounds reasonable, provided "especially egregious" starts at about "running a pirate content selling scheme" level or something. Of course, there's still the matter of how far civil charges will take you, which I really couldn't even begin making a decent guess at.
Jesus who?
I'm not the biggest fan of the Beatles out there, but I'd hardly call it "elevator music". Sure, some of their material -- especially the later stuff -- is borderline commercial tripe, but there are some pearls in there (at the very least the whole of the Sergeant Pepper's concept album).
AFAIK, Apple thoroughly customized the version of Java that comes bundled with OS X so as to make it look consistent with the rest of the platform. It certainly doesn't look half as jarring as it does on windows.
I'll quote myself on that:
They don't have to test the warrant against anything they know beforehand will screw them.At least XP has issues booting from USB, not sure about Vista. Either way, what the GP was suggesting was carrying a VM image in the usb key, and booting it up under VMware/Parallels.
Nah. Coming to slashdot asking whether it's time to change from Linux to Windows would see a whole thread of -1 flamebait. If I wanted to ask that question, I'd steer way clear from naming names.
It may be cliché, but at least you get points for writing it in reverse polish notation