These are just the usual suspects. Every country has them, mine isn't free of them, sorry.
The good news is that aside from the parts of the media already well known for being less than acurate and very sensationalist in everything, the media is offering a slightly more interesting picture this time.
The one thing that bothers me, however, is that apparently the police have shut down his website, where the young man had published his diaries and other texts, stuff that would give a much clearer picture as to his motivation. Luckily, some media are reprinting excerpts, and they do make for interesting reading. Needless to say, games have a very minor part.
This is the Wii's biggest letdown--you don't need to stand up, leap around, or otherwise leave the warm embrace of your couch.
Actually, that's a huge advantage. It's cool that the game allows it (wireless controler) but doesn't enforce it. I would hate to come home after work, exhausted and tired, and have the game console force me to jump around. Sometimes I want to, sometimes I don't - and if the console respects that, bonus points for playing nice with me.
Is it possible that this is a passing phase for the USA? Is the religious right being supported by people who will be dead in 10 years? Or does this run right down through the younger generations?
The people running things are both smart and fanatical enough to know that the easily corrupted minds of the children are where they need to implant their memes. There's a movie named "Jesus Camp" out about now - if you are even a little bit clear thinking, the trailer alone will make you burn with rage and want to kill some of those xian fanatics, even if you are a peaceful dude otherwise.
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he'd rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house.
Now ask him if he'd rather live next to a bearded muslim who may or may not help him set up his wireless, or an atheist conspiracy theorist who might or might not be working on a plan to blow up the entire neighbourhood with his self-made nuclear reactor.
Setting up a wireless and planning a terror strike has very little, if anything, to do with religion. One massively overblown terror group is based on religion. There are a whole lot of other terror groups based on race or political opinion. And last I checked, wireless routers have no prejudice for your belief. A link between religion and technological know-how is a hypothesis at best.
Does anyone know just how much computing power the constant (re-)generation of textures takes? How long the load times are?
I guess procedural textures have their place. They look to have some fractals inside, and it appears they are great for wood, stone, grass, etc. - basically the same things that 3D animation software has been using procedural textures for since at least 1999.
To be honest, his strategy for initially winning the war was really damn good.
Sure. Give me the worlds biggest and most modern army against a 3rd world country after 10 years of sanctions and weapons inspections and I'll show you a victory, too.
Start and end with your own fucked up country, please.
The world doesn't need and doesn't want the US coming in and telling everyone how things work. In fact, if you just stayed at home, the world would be a better place. Not perfect, but certainly better.
Only bad for MS fanboys. Ok, and the Sony ones. Aside from that, there's the Wii coming our way on schedule, there's new stuff from Apple across the board, and if you look at the world aside the top-5 or so, there are tons of cool gadgets.
They've finally found a way to embrace and extend Linux.
Yeah, I know. GPL, blabla, development will go on, blabla.
Let's face it: If MS/Novell can drive Redhat out of business and/or split their version off from mainstream Linux with a big corporate following, then the free remainder of Linux will have the same relevance as *BSD.
And they don't have to succeed over an extended period of time. Piledriving Linux in time for the next (post-Vista) Windos release so companies are forced over to that would work well enough to put Linux back 10 years.
MS is playing for time, never forget that. Every week that passes is another $100 mio. or so in their pockets.
Look, IE7 is largely incompatible with IE6. So lots of websites will have to be redesigned now. If they have to be reworked anyways, you can do it with proper HTML and CSS support, getting rid of the proprietary IE crap. Which means Firefox, Opera, etc. will work just as well.
How strongly is Apple really aligned with the customers?
My MacBook Pro has a region-locked DVD drive - the first such that I've encountered in years. No workaround on the 'net as well, because it's in the firmware.
Doesn't sound like consumer alignement to me, sorry.
I'm really forced to wonder if the Slashdot group-think would hate Diebold as much as they do if Gore won in 2000 or Kerry won in 2004. I sincerely doubt it. If anything, they'd probably be considered as heroes in that case.
You're assuming that the combination Diebold-Voting-AND-Gore/Kerry-Victory is a possible combination in the solution matrix. As in all things logic, if your initial assumptions are wrong, there is no proper result.
So we're really talking about priviledge seperation (invented by OpenBSD 4 or so years ago) here?
Good. At least they've learnt to steal the good stuff.
Re:Yerp. Figure it Out, Already.
on
Game Breakers
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· Score: 1
Good point, I all but forgot about Monkey Island. Yes, that should serve as a better "see, it can be done" example.
Re:Yerp. Figure it Out, Already.
on
Game Breakers
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· Score: 1
While I am not a huge fan of "spawn points", I definitely see why they may be somewhat necessary.
Not so sure about that. Remember the old Larry games? Ok, they were adventures and not FPSs - but one thing that was great about them was that it was very, very hard to get a GAME OVER result. If you made a Big And Horrible Mistake, you were ridiculed, punched and abused - and put back in the game about where you left off, so you could continue and try again.
Re:what things should be done...
on
Game Breakers
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· Score: 1
I'm curious as to what sorts of things should/shouldn't be done in an FPS.. any thoughts on that?
Just one right of the top of my head: Know when to stop with the realism.
Yes, in real life I have no crosshairs, and in real life I have no ammo counter. But in the reality of your storyline, I'm not a computer dude sitting at his desk with things on his mind, either - I'm a trained special forces whatever. My 10-year sniper veteran character doesn't need a crosshair, I 2-hours game-experience player do.
Finally! An article that explains how I felt when I played the expansion of Incubation. I loved Incubation itself, so I was looking forward to the expansion... turned out that they changed gameplay so dramatically that I hated it after the first level, tried to force myself to continue, remembering how great the first part was, but I just couldn't. To this day, I never played it beyond level 3 or so.
What was the change? In Incubation, you could always react to the enemies and single mistakes, while painful, were not ultimately fatal. In the expansion they added spiders that spawned ("crawled out of sewers") close enough to your team to reach it on the same turn and that sprayed poison that insta-killed everyone in all surrounding fields - with bad luck, half your team. A single mistake, such as not setting enough people on guard, suddenly meant game-over. Since everything else in the game had more or less stayed the same, that one thing totally broke expectations and learnt behaviour.
So, what are gamebreakers? When the game behaves inconsistent with regards to itself. When things suddenly work or stop working without a convincing reason. A game that mixes cinematics with gameplay in a consistent, well-done matter is no problem. A game that has no cinematics at all, and then bores you with 10 minutes of movie near the end sucks.
After some years of fighting the war, I've come to agree with parent.
There are a lot of very innovative anti-spam techniques out there. Teergrubing, greylisting, blacklists, baysian filters, now we get OCR and what-have-you.
Problem is: Every filter is a tool for the spammer. Since the filters are readily available (and have to be), the spammer can just take them and tweak his spam until it passes.
I'm with parent. Let's make the problem obvious. Let the world drown in spam for a couple of days, a week or two. We can all live without mail for a while. But mum and dad and even congresscritter Joe Stupid will finally get it: We're having a real problem here.
Then tell them that we already know the criminals. Spamhaus and others have lists of them, often with physical address. We know who they are. Get the stupid fucks in congress to arrest the top 50 spammers and lock them away for 10 years.
No, that won't solve spam. There are still spammers in eastern europe and those we don't get will go into hiding. But it'll drive the risk and costs of spam up, maybe to the level of making it unprofitable.
But I'd go a step further: Round up each and every company that advertised through spam as well. Put them on trail and prove whether or not they knowingly sent spam. If they did, fine them a couple millions and throw their CEOs in the hole for a year or two.
That'll take care of the other end of the spammer business, the customers.
Finally, go through the spammer and spam-company records and find every stupid moron who ever bought from them by replying to spam. Yeah, I know, we won't get them all because you often can't seperate them from those who just went to the website through Google. But try to get a bundle of them and put them on trail for aiding the spammers. Make them pay the idiot tax and make it public.
That'd eliminate the final point, because it'll drive the amount of people who actually reply to spam down, making it even less profitable.
If all that doesn't work, I'm still in favour of the death penalty for the top spammers - not every little marketing dude who ignorantly thought a "newsletter" would be cool - we all make mistakes, but people spamming on the order of millions a day year in and out are the kind of human beings that deserve to get their breathing permission withdrawn.
Excellent point, and so true. My company will soon be #2 in our local market, and for all I care, #2 is way more comfortable than #1. Among other things, #1 has to deal with a lot of regulation and anti-trust issues.
Maybe it's just that Google has enough money to throw it around, knowing well that most of its projects will never get a positive cash flow, but taking risks is the only way to stumble upon the next big thing.
Slashdot Mirror
These are just the usual suspects. Every country has them, mine isn't free of them, sorry.
The good news is that aside from the parts of the media already well known for being less than acurate and very sensationalist in everything, the media is offering a slightly more interesting picture this time.
The one thing that bothers me, however, is that apparently the police have shut down his website, where the young man had published his diaries and other texts, stuff that would give a much clearer picture as to his motivation. Luckily, some media are reprinting excerpts, and they do make for interesting reading. Needless to say, games have a very minor part.
This is the Wii's biggest letdown--you don't need to stand up, leap around, or otherwise leave the warm embrace of your couch.
Actually, that's a huge advantage. It's cool that the game allows it (wireless controler) but doesn't enforce it. I would hate to come home after work, exhausted and tired, and have the game console force me to jump around. Sometimes I want to, sometimes I don't - and if the console respects that, bonus points for playing nice with me.
Is it possible that this is a passing phase for the USA? Is the religious right being supported by people who will be dead in 10 years? Or does this run right down through the younger generations?
The people running things are both smart and fanatical enough to know that the easily corrupted minds of the children are where they need to implant their memes. There's a movie named "Jesus Camp" out about now - if you are even a little bit clear thinking, the trailer alone will make you burn with rage and want to kill some of those xian fanatics, even if you are a peaceful dude otherwise.
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he'd rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house.
Now ask him if he'd rather live next to a bearded muslim who may or may not help him set up his wireless, or an atheist conspiracy theorist who might or might not be working on a plan to blow up the entire neighbourhood with his self-made nuclear reactor.
Setting up a wireless and planning a terror strike has very little, if anything, to do with religion. One massively overblown terror group is based on religion. There are a whole lot of other terror groups based on race or political opinion. And last I checked, wireless routers have no prejudice for your belief. A link between religion and technological know-how is a hypothesis at best.
Interesting, but low on details.
Does anyone know just how much computing power the constant (re-)generation of textures takes? How long the load times are?
I guess procedural textures have their place. They look to have some fractals inside, and it appears they are great for wood, stone, grass, etc. - basically the same things that 3D animation software has been using procedural textures for since at least 1999.
To be honest, his strategy for initially winning the war was really damn good.
Sure. Give me the worlds biggest and most modern army against a 3rd world country after 10 years of sanctions and weapons inspections and I'll show you a victory, too.
Nation Building should be our NUMBER ONE priority
Start and end with your own fucked up country, please.
The world doesn't need and doesn't want the US coming in and telling everyone how things work. In fact, if you just stayed at home, the world would be a better place. Not perfect, but certainly better.
Only bad for MS fanboys. Ok, and the Sony ones. Aside from that, there's the Wii coming our way on schedule, there's new stuff from Apple across the board, and if you look at the world aside the top-5 or so, there are tons of cool gadgets.
They've finally found a way to embrace and extend Linux.
Yeah, I know. GPL, blabla, development will go on, blabla.
Let's face it: If MS/Novell can drive Redhat out of business and/or split their version off from mainstream Linux with a big corporate following, then the free remainder of Linux will have the same relevance as *BSD.
And they don't have to succeed over an extended period of time. Piledriving Linux in time for the next (post-Vista) Windos release so companies are forced over to that would work well enough to put Linux back 10 years.
MS is playing for time, never forget that. Every week that passes is another $100 mio. or so in their pockets.
Such as not announcing a verdict on the weekend before the U.S. elections.
Why? Now at least we know for fact that americans are willing to kill people in order to win an election.
...which is exactly why it'll never be used. Takes all the fun out of a national election if you can't fake it anymore, doesn't it?
With US elections a few days away - did anyone really expect something different? The date alone was certainly not a coincidence.
I wonder if this is MS digging the grave of IE.
Look, IE7 is largely incompatible with IE6. So lots of websites will have to be redesigned now. If they have to be reworked anyways, you can do it with proper HTML and CSS support, getting rid of the proprietary IE crap. Which means Firefox, Opera, etc. will work just as well.
How strongly is Apple really aligned with the customers?
My MacBook Pro has a region-locked DVD drive - the first such that I've encountered in years. No workaround on the 'net as well, because it's in the firmware.
Doesn't sound like consumer alignement to me, sorry.
So where's the download link? How can software matter if I can't get it? ;-)
I'm really forced to wonder if the Slashdot group-think would hate Diebold as much as they do if Gore won in 2000 or Kerry won in 2004. I sincerely doubt it. If anything, they'd probably be considered as heroes in that case.
You're assuming that the combination Diebold-Voting-AND-Gore/Kerry-Victory is a possible combination in the solution matrix. As in all things logic, if your initial assumptions are wrong, there is no proper result.
So we're really talking about priviledge seperation (invented by OpenBSD 4 or so years ago) here?
Good. At least they've learnt to steal the good stuff.
Good point, I all but forgot about Monkey Island. Yes, that should serve as a better "see, it can be done" example.
While I am not a huge fan of "spawn points", I definitely see why they may be somewhat necessary.
Not so sure about that. Remember the old Larry games? Ok, they were adventures and not FPSs - but one thing that was great about them was that it was very, very hard to get a GAME OVER result. If you made a Big And Horrible Mistake, you were ridiculed, punched and abused - and put back in the game about where you left off, so you could continue and try again.
I'm curious as to what sorts of things should/shouldn't be done in an FPS.. any thoughts on that?
Just one right of the top of my head: Know when to stop with the realism.
Yes, in real life I have no crosshairs, and in real life I have no ammo counter. But in the reality of your storyline, I'm not a computer dude sitting at his desk with things on his mind, either - I'm a trained special forces whatever. My 10-year sniper veteran character doesn't need a crosshair, I 2-hours game-experience player do.
Finally! An article that explains how I felt when I played the expansion of Incubation. I loved Incubation itself, so I was looking forward to the expansion... turned out that they changed gameplay so dramatically that I hated it after the first level, tried to force myself to continue, remembering how great the first part was, but I just couldn't. To this day, I never played it beyond level 3 or so.
What was the change? In Incubation, you could always react to the enemies and single mistakes, while painful, were not ultimately fatal. In the expansion they added spiders that spawned ("crawled out of sewers") close enough to your team to reach it on the same turn and that sprayed poison that insta-killed everyone in all surrounding fields - with bad luck, half your team. A single mistake, such as not setting enough people on guard, suddenly meant game-over. Since everything else in the game had more or less stayed the same, that one thing totally broke expectations and learnt behaviour.
So, what are gamebreakers? When the game behaves inconsistent with regards to itself. When things suddenly work or stop working without a convincing reason. A game that mixes cinematics with gameplay in a consistent, well-done matter is no problem. A game that has no cinematics at all, and then bores you with 10 minutes of movie near the end sucks.
It's not exactly sandboxed, but it has to ask permission from a "request broker" before changing anything in the rest of the system,
So it still can change, but it has to wait for a "go ahead" first?
Sounds like all you need to do is find an exploit that allows you to NOP that part and have it do its thing no matter what the broker says.
I hope I'm mistaken and this wouldn't work, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS did something as utterly incompetent as this.
After some years of fighting the war, I've come to agree with parent.
There are a lot of very innovative anti-spam techniques out there. Teergrubing, greylisting, blacklists, baysian filters, now we get OCR and what-have-you.
Problem is: Every filter is a tool for the spammer. Since the filters are readily available (and have to be), the spammer can just take them and tweak his spam until it passes.
I'm with parent. Let's make the problem obvious. Let the world drown in spam for a couple of days, a week or two. We can all live without mail for a while. But mum and dad and even congresscritter Joe Stupid will finally get it: We're having a real problem here.
Then tell them that we already know the criminals. Spamhaus and others have lists of them, often with physical address. We know who they are. Get the stupid fucks in congress to arrest the top 50 spammers and lock them away for 10 years.
No, that won't solve spam. There are still spammers in eastern europe and those we don't get will go into hiding. But it'll drive the risk and costs of spam up, maybe to the level of making it unprofitable.
But I'd go a step further: Round up each and every company that advertised through spam as well. Put them on trail and prove whether or not they knowingly sent spam. If they did, fine them a couple millions and throw their CEOs in the hole for a year or two.
That'll take care of the other end of the spammer business, the customers.
Finally, go through the spammer and spam-company records and find every stupid moron who ever bought from them by replying to spam. Yeah, I know, we won't get them all because you often can't seperate them from those who just went to the website through Google. But try to get a bundle of them and put them on trail for aiding the spammers. Make them pay the idiot tax and make it public.
That'd eliminate the final point, because it'll drive the amount of people who actually reply to spam down, making it even less profitable.
If all that doesn't work, I'm still in favour of the death penalty for the top spammers - not every little marketing dude who ignorantly thought a "newsletter" would be cool - we all make mistakes, but people spamming on the order of millions a day year in and out are the kind of human beings that deserve to get their breathing permission withdrawn.
Excellent point, and so true. My company will soon be #2 in our local market, and for all I care, #2 is way more comfortable than #1. Among other things, #1 has to deal with a lot of regulation and anti-trust issues.
Maybe it's just that Google has enough money to throw it around, knowing well that most of its projects will never get a positive cash flow, but taking risks is the only way to stumble upon the next big thing.