Okay folks, we've had really big MP games for something like 30 years now, it's time to cull some principles for future development:
1. When online, people will not always play the "game", whatever the game is. They will do stupid stuff. So give them a place to do it. All you need is a barren landscape jutting up against some mountains, and a Zardoz head for the admins to intervene. Think about it. whiner: My warrior class is nerfed developer: The penis is evil. The penis shoots the seed upon the earth that spreads the plague of men. whiner:we're not moving until you meet our demands! developer:the gun is good. every manner of rifle, pistol and ueberweapon shoots out of the mouth
Err.. sorry about that. Anyway, give them somewhere to do stupid things like crash the server.
2. Mass banning tools. Sometimes you need to kick off hundreds of people with one stroke. Griefers have friends too.
3. Riot Cops. Forum whining is an age-old tradiiton. When people want to make their voice known in the game, by pretending that their little virtual world is a democracy, smack them down. Most of those "virtual protesters" aren't gonna be there so much for the point they're making as they are for the thrill of causing havoc and virtually protesting. So why not virtually teargas them? Get out the virtual riot squad, the virtual water cannons and rubber bullets, and take them down. or hell, have some virtual riot control vehicle drive into the crowd, with bodies flying everywhere, and blasting "PLEASE DISPERSE" through everyone's earphones.
Even better, recruit your own pinkerton squads. promise plenty of levelling action for anyone willing to go and kill those protesters. Turn on PvP and let the social dynamics of the game work itself out.
Well Tex, code ain't big enough for the ten thousand of us.
Openness, huh? I always thought open source meant the source was free to be used, modified, imnproved and adapted. It does not, to my recollection, mean that those maintaining a given heap o' code have to take "all comers", or even have to have a formal mechanism in place to consider adding to their number. I don't know what kinds of projects y'all work on, but where I come from, when someone comes up asking to join a project, or asks for collaboration, in the name of "The community", "the open source ideal", or other high-falutin' sounds, it usually boils down to one of a series of options: A) Can you give me lessons? B) Can you spend time working on my project? C) Can I boost my own social position by claiming to work for you guys?
If you have the luxury of an abundance of people who want to work on your free project, you pick the ones who are most capable of doing work with the least amount of management. Going through a list of submitted applications is not the most efficient way to do this. You find who's doing good work, and talk them into working for you.
If someone has a brilliant vision for OSS, that person is usually better served realizing that vision in a dedicate project. Giants on the shoulders of dwarves.
They weren't going to, but legal insisted, citing the liability problems caused by sudden onset of sight, hearing, use of limbs, and so on. This has been a problem in the relic industry ever since St. Helen got sued for "emotional and physical pain" caused by the "sudden and unexpected nature" of the revivification feature of the True Cross suite of relics.
Just check the streets of any major city: applying stickers to cars has been shown to improve perceived performance. Why not the same for mobile phones?
A) COPS race. Any number of players can play. SEt a time limit (say 20) minutes. Pick a city. Score points for who can collect the most instances of:
1. Criminal Activity 2. Law enforcement officials 3. Men with their shirts off 4. Bodily fluids.
B) Product Place-a-thon. THey've probably already figured out they can use the "car passing" technology demoed in the xmas lights hoax and are digital inserting posters, vans, newspapers and any number of other things.
C) Date the drive. Using contextual clues, figure out when the van passed by. Bonus points if you can locate the Van tech's Netstumbler log to corroborate the trip.
Writing/Reading about computer games is a lot like talking about sex. People seem to talk a lot more about sex when they're not getting any. People buy computer games to play computer games; they buy magazines to find out about the computer games that are coming.
The journalistic difference between previews and reviews is that the former often requires a special relationship with the manufacturer, while the latter has stuff that can be bought off the shelf (even if it is sent in advance to journos). To get the previews, the editors need to put on the lipstick and the kneepads. Write a bad preview, and you'll not likely see any goodies from that company again. Stop seeing goodies, and nobody buys your magazines.
While there may be workarounds for many of us, for most people Quicktime is Nagware. From a purely marketing point of view, encoding something in nagware sucks. That means for the majority of your customers, between clicking on the movie and playing it back, they have an ad pop up; an ad for something they've already decided not to purchase, and which annoys them. Fresh from that burst of negativity they see your movie.
for me I also hate QT because I can't seem to figure out how to increase the image size to fill screen. Running on a 1920x1200 15.4" LCD screen means those QT videos are TINY.
A significant percentage of people already have unpatched systems. Hell, just last week I had to reinstall XP on my laptop. I forgot to redownload the security updates and two days later I was getting warnings about W32.spybot being injected into my System32 directory. So, rather than trying to make the security process more automatic, and more uniform, Microsoft decides to screw all of us legitimate XP owners (hell, I own two legitimate copies of XP Pro, and only one PC) by reducing the number of secure machines running their software. Many of the attacks these days have as the goal to compromise machines (for keylogging or further zombie work), and originate from compromised machines; any increase in the number of inadequately secured machines increases the effectiveness of these attacks. Increases in attack effectiveness affect legitimate owners just as much as illegal ones.
Fine, disable every other upload/bugfix what have you for illegal copies of XP, but don't restrict security. Security affects ALL OF US. So once again, a big corporation decides to punish all its clients in a pusillanimous and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to increase their bottom line.
Some corporate decisions merit firing; others merit jail. In my mind, the folks who did this are making themselves and their corporation accessories to any crimes committed. We buy a product; they acknowledge a defect that makes the user vulnerable; then they decide not to take every reasonable step to remedy the defect.
Uh, no offense guys, but I clearly remember dealing with video game companies fifteen years ago, and for the most part, developers ran them like businesses, with clear producer-programmer-art-sound relationships, timelines, deadlines and, yes, even offices. And no surprise, most games out there are indeed "canned" products with low risk, guaranteed sales, but hardly blockbusters.
Yes, the nature of the beast is that there will always be "bedroom programmers doing stuff for peer approval", just as there will always be people writing crappy autobiographical fiction. Most of that won't sell. But come on, how many developers build stuff for peer approval on consoles? Maybe I'm in an alternate universe, but slapping something on a PC is bound to be better received among peers than a bleedin' Xbox.
In any case, even the most creative developers need to adhere to schedules and coordinate among the team. Perhaps the point of TFA is just that: with increase in the technical specs of consoles comes an increase in development expenses, and hence staff. The more people that have to work on the same project, the more formal the interaction has to be. That doesn't mean you can't have "creative vision". It does mean that you can't have the art guys sitting around doing nothing until two weeks before ship date.
I use search engines all the time for linguistics reseach: when I'm reading or translating from one language to another, and I run into an odd usage, I just type the phrase in the magic box and *poof*, I get hundreds of contextual examples. Likewise, if I'm writing in a foreign language, and I need to know if a preposition or a construction is correct (and not simply words), again all I have to do is type it in and see what comes out.
Measuring how the internet changes world languages is only a small part of what the 'net offers those interested in linguistics and linguistic usage. Most of the web data archived on google does not consist of ROTFLMAOs and pwn3ds; it consists of everyday usage, and a good deal of that is from the last decade. Much of linguistics deals precisely with that: how the language is used in a daily basis. That's also how dictionaries come about: they're [i]descriptive[/i] accounts of usage (which is why the high school journalistic trick of beginning an article with "Webster's defines fistula as..." doesn't work. Dictionaries don't lay down the law, they describe it).
Of course, some people have been arguing that this gives room for errors and abuses. Of course it does! just 'cos something doesn't play by the rules doesn't mean it's not in common usage. And just because people don't follow rules of orthography, grammar and style doesn't excuse us from teaching these things, or trying to follow them. After all, language is about communication, and these corruptions hinder our ability to communicate, especially communicating complex thoughts.
So yeah, "to impact" is to make an active verb out of a passive participle, and "to impinge" should be used ihstead. There are plenty of uses of "bonified" out there. Google finds about 20,000 such occurrences. That doesn't make it correct. Nor does that make Google's suggested correction "bonafide" correct either (306,000 occurrences). The correct spelling is [i]bona fide[/i] (1,050,000 occurrences).
And don't worry too much about purely textual forms appearing in speach. LOL is just this decade's SOB. A spoken "I R0XX0R, J00 5UXX0R" shouldn't alarm us too much when we consider all those medical shows where doctors run around yelling "Get me a boron enema STAT!", pompous academics actually say "such economic perturbations may affect the governance of a certain cryptodictatorship, VIZ the United States", and we all drop down to the pharmacist to "Fill an RX", all spoken forms of what are written Latin abbreviations (statim -- immediately, videlicet -- that is, Rx -- Respondeo, although some classicists may insist it's the symbol for Jupiter).
One linguistic area that is interesting is the gradual adoption of worldwide slang. We hear Americans these days using terms like "Bog Standard" and "Arsed".
What's the point of this rant? Teh intardnet is a great resource for linguistic usage, beyond the navel-reflection of IT professionals. Disciplines like linguistics deal in examples of usage, and the internet is a great stockpile of everyday language. Descriptive grammar and descriptive dictionaries are not an excuse for ignoring arbitrary rules. Most of the lingusitic phenomena we see with internet usage are not new.
Bah. I have a 10 pound laptop, plus accessories, an external drive and a leather case, the whole package comes out to around 18 pounds; HT'd 3.0 P4m or whatever runs games okay; it's just when you need to do anything that involves shuffling a lot of memory around that you notice how goddamn slow laptops are. I proudly walk a mile to work each day with that thing slung over my shoulder. You'll never hear me complain about laptop weight.
...cos I'm too busy complaining about perpetually sore shoulders. I sleep terribly at night, and just yesterday I pulled a calf muscle crossing the street.
But it's all worth it when I ask some sucker to "hold my bag for a sec". Nerddom has its price.
I read all five sections at once, intending to stream each chapter through separate phases from character recognition to criticism. Unfortunately, every time the article used "it's" in a predicative sense, everything ground to a halt.
Fortunately, cell reading meant I hardly noticed the claim that hardware would compete with the x86 because, unlike the x86, cell computers need all their software written for the specific hardware.
I like how "hardware-specific" becomes "OS-independent". Great I can plug my HDTV into my G/Fs "electrically powered adult novelty device", and harness the extra computing power to find out we are really alone in the world. Of course, no firmware will stand in the way.
I'm also surprised that, in pandering to all the OS underdogs in the slashdot crowd (Great day for Apple, since they like G5s; Great day for Linux, since many obsessive-compulsive coders work on Linux projects anyway), he left out a true lightweight OS designed from the ground up for just this sort of multitasking: Amiga OS 4.0. To get something like this to actually work, you'll need more than iPod huggers, OSX preachers or Linux fans. You need genuine madwomen and madmen. You need AmigaOS.
Folks, let's do the math:
Phishers do not need to be successful very often. Think sperm here: if conditions are right, most of time only one gets lucky 20% of the time. (Sorry for the anchorman gag)
Consider the facts:
1) Only a few sites transact critical personal data (Credit cards, identity info) without proper security 2) Only a few sites use security certificates that are A) out of date B) for a different site C) otheerwise invalid. 3) only a modest majority of IE users have been trained into clicking "OK" on every security warning they see, especially for sites they know they trust.
If a phisher jacks a DNS, if they're good and have volume, they'll only go for 1); the certification warnings in 2) are worthless. They're worthless for two reasons. First, browser sgives the user the option of proceeding. Second, browsers don't distinguish between unimportant in-the-clear transmissions and stuff that looks like credit card numbers and identity information. Ideally, all browsers should have a cert mismatch not be an "ignorable" offense, but be one that causes the connection to fail. 3) As a backup, any attempt at in-the-clear transmission of numeric data longer than 5 digits should cause a whole storm of scary looking warnings (get rid of the "saturate the user with needless warnings" garbage that does more harm than good) stating that this is a really bad idea if it's anything valuable and to please, for the love of jeebus, reconsider.
I have no doubt they're hammering away at DNSs around the world; and they'll probably get one.
Oh yeah, and Mandatory Email encrpytion should be enabled, dammit.
Well, there's a good deal to comment on there. Perhaps another way to put the article is "I'm getting to old for this crap."
But I will comment on this forecast:
As usual, movie-based games will do poorly. In fact, after the last couple of years, I expect there to be fewer of such games, as some of the brighter managers realize that the niche has such a bad reputation that there's little chance for a blockbuster title.
No offense, but movie-based games have always been crappy, and done poorly: just look back to ET on the 2600. For nearly the last quarter century, companies have been releasing games tied to movies, and they've almost always sucked (okay, I thought the robocop game was kinda cute). But they keep getting churned out. Why? Because people will buy that crap! The quality of gameplay is irrelevant to the people making the decision to buy or not.
That said, there have been some high-budget attempts recently to port the world of a movie into a game. Of course it can't be done. Ultimately, the developers have to meet end-user expectations about the experience that are dictated by the movie, and an incredible static experience, such as a movie, makes a pretty boring dynamic one.
Tie-fighter battles are always cool; just don't give me a light saber.
Okay, well, to most human products, I apply my 10% rule. Of the stuff out there, 90% of it is, crap, the remaining 10% is worthwhile, and only 10% of that (=1%) has any new to say. Mod me redundant.
I got some bad news: Print magazines are a business. They try to make money. How do they do it? Well, one way is to sell to people who actually buy magazines. Who buys these things? Come on, when was the last time anybody actually bought a video game mag? Okay, here's a theory for you: video game press is like porn. Most people, given a choice, would rather participate in the acts depicted than read about them. So what are the barriers to playing video games and what demographics do they entail?
A) Arbitrary limits on time. This affects kids above all. Parents limit video game exposure. Sure, some of you will say, so do spouses/significant others/jealous dogs, but reading about video games pisses them off just as much. B) Situations where playing video games is not appropriate. Teenagers have school, where the magazine format excels, discretely lining the inside of that boring-ass history book. Adults have workplaces; in the working class case, the magazine might still make sense -- though then one would be better served by bringing something everyone can enjoy, such as pornography. For many office types, vid web sites are not yet off limits. C) Where cash is short, web access controlled, and the magazine can be a handy guide to what to expect -- again, the younger crowd excels here.
The other revenue source is of course advertising. Remember, automotive magazines don't shy away from tarnishing their journalistic integrity; many music mags don't either. So why should it surprise anyone that the bulk of video game magazines are basically shills for big companies? That's their business model! So it ain't called EA Weekly; that doesn't mean they don't make a living by pandering to Electronic Arts.
Now, on to the rest of it. I don't care about anybody else's "experience" with the game; give me your evaluation. I don't want some masturbatory prose and long narrative about how the dystopic vision of GTA:SA validated a life spent in the parents' basement, cold, with the body never feeling the heat of a woman. I'd like to hear the "Take" on the game; that can include commentary on the structure, the vision, or whatever. But I don't wanna see an egotistic ass hijack the prose.
Sure, there's a lot to talk about with video games, from the market, to how ideas are realized, to loading them full of Frankfurt School Marxism and making the players fritter away their only real chance to overthrow the oppressive system exposed by the game. So why beat up on perfectly legitimate bits of drivel?
By the way, the word "impactor" offends me on so many levels, it's making me question my sexual orientation.
Yeah, but will someone please tell the three dozen people around the world with my (forwarder-linked) yahoo email address in a readme.txt file and Bagz.G on their hard drive to fix their bloody machines!? New worm? I can't see it. My mailbox is floody with 93kb attachments about Vasia and the Amirecans.
signomi I was replying to the parent and not the grandparent of my comment. I'd just rather not see medieval popes get slandered like that, since they didn't have any problem with nudes and the art they patronized clearly demonstrates this.
In any case, most Americans (myself included) would rather we forget about the nineteenth century, and its legacy of colonialism, imperialism, unrestrained capitalism and generally dismal oppression coupled with prudish public morals and private excesses. The fig leaf as i point elsewhere is because the photograph is of a replica purchased by an observatory in Los Angeles and distributed with the wire story.
Bah, that's a lie. MEdieval popes had no problems with willies. It's only in the modern era that it became a problem.
Although judging from the pictures somebody at some time did do some Hernia Repair on Atlas. The way he's lifting the globe, he's bound to have thrown things outta whack.
If you check the caption on the NYT photo, it's credited to Reuters/Griffith Observatory (the latter is also the source of one of the "uninvolved experts" quoted in the text).
Now, the griffith observatory is currently closed to the public, but if you check their renovation news, you'll see that they're adding in a shiny new replica of the Farnese Atlas. Since they provided the photo, could they have just done a nice studio shot, or maybe one from the replicomat's catalog? After all, the lighting in the danish photo is pretty poor.
Now a real story would be if these were claimed to be from the s photos that the astronomer claimed to use for determining the age of the stars.
"Decidedly Nineteenth Century CE, or possibly 21st Century United States"
This gets a little circular, doesn't it? From those heady days of the nineties, I remember thinking security plenty of times. I remember plenty of companies thinking security too.
Just because Microsoft (or rather their corporate strategists) was thinking "leverage OS monopoly into market domination", doesn't justify a cavalier disregard for what was going on around them; just because Windows 98 had security problems doesn't mean security wasn't an issue. This is especially true when copying technology that's out there: programs that can be run off the internet that affect the local machine's experience? You can't excuse Microsoft from ignoring the steps everyone else was taking (including the cited case of java) by allusion to some Zeitgeist the existence of which is attested only by Microsoft's moves.
In any case, ActiveX is still being distributed, and, it may surprise some slashdotters to realize this, but the vast majority of Windows users use ActiveX controls, and those who actually have security settings on have for the most part been trained by IE's other wonderful security settings (such as "you are moving to a secure page") to click "OK" on every popup they see.
But okay, old news, we all know the Microsoft experience is merely to gaze upon the promised land with the knowledge we'll die in the desert.
Well, it's okay for folks to love your iPod and think Apple is great. And yeah, you can mock companies like creative that think they can steal some market share away by selling a product that doesn't rely on a vertically integrated market for sales.
I'd just like to remind you folks that there was also a time when Apple had the lock on icon-based, desktop-style operating systems for Personal Computers, and their enviable market share was bolstered by vertical integration. Can you blame Creative for seeing the Apple of the portable music world and saying, "hey, with a little less imagination than Apple, we can be Microsoft?"
"Civic dashboard"? hehe. Those aren't nipples, dude, they're where you attach the aftermarket wings.
I think the hacker line is a troll man. Just call script kiddies/crackers/wire defrauders/pirates "hackers" and you automatically generate 25 indignant posts on slashdot from folks like us who remember when hacking meant turning a spare cassette port into an audio device, and a 1200-baud touchscreen vector graphics terminal was a hotrod.
Anyway, yeah, I'm surprised online gambling hasn't been hit earlier: here you have a huge industry that relies on a single technology for all its business, and is completely unregulated. But in such an environment, cyberextortion can be a dangerous game, since unregulated companies can always fall back on "brick and mortar" security. (That is, throw bricks through your window and mortar your house) And most societies in the world have excellent non-governmental agencies who specialize in protection and kneecaps already. A few hits, a little publicity, and problem solved.
In other words, the way to extort money is to promise protection from dDOS attacks. The ones who end up getting the dough will be those who do, whether the name is Cisco or Gotti.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay folks, we've had really big MP games for something like 30 years now, it's time to cull some principles for future development:
1. When online, people will not always play the "game", whatever the game is. They will do stupid stuff. So give them a place to do it. All you need is a barren landscape jutting up against some mountains, and a Zardoz head for the admins to intervene. Think about it.
whiner: My warrior class is nerfed
developer: The penis is evil. The penis shoots the seed upon the earth that spreads the plague of men.
whiner:we're not moving until you meet our demands!
developer:the gun is good.
every manner of rifle, pistol and ueberweapon shoots out of the mouth
Err.. sorry about that. Anyway, give them somewhere to do stupid things like crash the server.
2. Mass banning tools. Sometimes you need to kick off hundreds of people with one stroke. Griefers have friends too.
3. Riot Cops. Forum whining is an age-old tradiiton. When people want to make their voice known in the game, by pretending that their little virtual world is a democracy, smack them down. Most of those "virtual protesters" aren't gonna be there so much for the point they're making as they are for the thrill of causing havoc and virtually protesting. So why not virtually teargas them? Get out the virtual riot squad, the virtual water cannons and rubber bullets, and take them down. or hell, have some virtual riot control vehicle drive into the crowd, with bodies flying everywhere, and blasting "PLEASE DISPERSE" through everyone's earphones. Even better, recruit your own pinkerton squads. promise plenty of levelling action for anyone willing to go and kill those protesters. Turn on PvP and let the social dynamics of the game work itself out.
Well Tex, code ain't big enough for the ten thousand of us.
Openness, huh?
I always thought open source meant the source was free to be used, modified, imnproved and adapted. It does not, to my recollection, mean that those maintaining a given heap o' code have to take "all comers", or even have to have a formal mechanism in place to consider adding to their number.
I don't know what kinds of projects y'all work on, but where I come from, when someone comes up asking to join a project, or asks for collaboration, in the name of "The community", "the open source ideal", or other high-falutin' sounds, it usually boils down to one of a series of options:
A) Can you give me lessons?
B) Can you spend time working on my project?
C) Can I boost my own social position by claiming to work for you guys?
If you have the luxury of an abundance of people who want to work on your free project, you pick the ones who are most capable of doing work with the least amount of management. Going through a list of submitted applications is not the most efficient way to do this. You find who's doing good work, and talk them into working for you.
If someone has a brilliant vision for OSS, that person is usually better served realizing that vision in a dedicate project. Giants on the shoulders of dwarves.
They weren't going to, but legal insisted, citing the liability problems caused by sudden onset of sight, hearing, use of limbs, and so on. This has been a problem in the relic industry ever since St. Helen got sued for "emotional and physical pain" caused by the "sudden and unexpected nature" of the revivification feature of the True Cross suite of relics.
Just check the streets of any major city: applying stickers to cars has been shown to improve perceived performance. Why not the same for mobile phones?
A) COPS race. Any number of players can play. SEt a time limit (say 20) minutes. Pick a city. Score points for who can collect the most instances of:
1. Criminal Activity
2. Law enforcement officials
3. Men with their shirts off
4. Bodily fluids.
B) Product Place-a-thon.
THey've probably already figured out they can use the "car passing" technology demoed in the xmas lights hoax and are digital inserting posters, vans, newspapers and any number of other things.
C) Date the drive. Using contextual clues, figure out when the van passed by. Bonus points if you can locate the Van tech's Netstumbler log to corroborate the trip.
Writing/Reading about computer games is a lot like talking about sex. People seem to talk a lot more about sex when they're not getting any. People buy computer games to play computer games; they buy magazines to find out about the computer games that are coming.
The journalistic difference between previews and reviews is that the former often requires a special relationship with the manufacturer, while the latter has stuff that can be bought off the shelf (even if it is sent in advance to journos). To get the previews, the editors need to put on the lipstick and the kneepads. Write a bad preview, and you'll not likely see any goodies from that company again. Stop seeing goodies, and nobody buys your magazines.
While there may be workarounds for many of us, for most people Quicktime is Nagware. From a purely marketing point of view, encoding something in nagware sucks. That means for the majority of your customers, between clicking on the movie and playing it back, they have an ad pop up; an ad for something they've already decided not to purchase, and which annoys them. Fresh from that burst of negativity they see your movie.
for me I also hate QT because I can't seem to figure out how to increase the image size to fill screen. Running on a 1920x1200 15.4" LCD screen means those QT videos are TINY.
A significant percentage of people already have unpatched systems. Hell, just last week I had to reinstall XP on my laptop. I forgot to redownload the security updates and two days later I was getting warnings about W32.spybot being injected into my System32 directory. So, rather than trying to make the security process more automatic, and more uniform, Microsoft decides to screw all of us legitimate XP owners (hell, I own two legitimate copies of XP Pro, and only one PC) by reducing the number of secure machines running their software. Many of the attacks these days have as the goal to compromise machines (for keylogging or further zombie work), and originate from compromised machines; any increase in the number of inadequately secured machines increases the effectiveness of these attacks. Increases in attack effectiveness affect legitimate owners just as much as illegal ones.
Fine, disable every other upload/bugfix what have you for illegal copies of XP, but don't restrict security. Security affects ALL OF US. So once again, a big corporation decides to punish all its clients in a pusillanimous and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to increase their bottom line.
Some corporate decisions merit firing; others merit jail. In my mind, the folks who did this are making themselves and their corporation accessories to any crimes committed. We buy a product; they acknowledge a defect that makes the user vulnerable; then they decide not to take every reasonable step to remedy the defect.
Uh, no offense guys, but I clearly remember dealing with video game companies fifteen years ago, and for the most part, developers ran them like businesses, with clear producer-programmer-art-sound relationships, timelines, deadlines and, yes, even offices. And no surprise, most games out there are indeed "canned" products with low risk, guaranteed sales, but hardly blockbusters.
Yes, the nature of the beast is that there will always be "bedroom programmers doing stuff for peer approval", just as there will always be people writing crappy autobiographical fiction. Most of that won't sell. But come on, how many developers build stuff for peer approval on consoles? Maybe I'm in an alternate universe, but slapping something on a PC is bound to be better received among peers than a bleedin' Xbox.
In any case, even the most creative developers need to adhere to schedules and coordinate among the team. Perhaps the point of TFA is just that: with increase in the technical specs of consoles comes an increase in development expenses, and hence staff. The more people that have to work on the same project, the more formal the interaction has to be. That doesn't mean you can't have "creative vision". It does mean that you can't have the art guys sitting around doing nothing until two weeks before ship date.
I use search engines all the time for linguistics reseach: when I'm reading or translating from one language to another, and I run into an odd usage, I just type the phrase in the magic box and *poof*, I get hundreds of contextual examples. Likewise, if I'm writing in a foreign language, and I need to know if a preposition or a construction is correct (and not simply words), again all I have to do is type it in and see what comes out.
Measuring how the internet changes world languages is only a small part of what the 'net offers those interested in linguistics and linguistic usage. Most of the web data archived on google does not consist of ROTFLMAOs and pwn3ds; it consists of everyday usage, and a good deal of that is from the last decade. Much of linguistics deals precisely with that: how the language is used in a daily basis. That's also how dictionaries come about: they're [i]descriptive[/i] accounts of usage (which is why the high school journalistic trick of beginning an article with "Webster's defines fistula as..." doesn't work. Dictionaries don't lay down the law, they describe it).
Of course, some people have been arguing that this gives room for errors and abuses. Of course it does! just 'cos something doesn't play by the rules doesn't mean it's not in common usage. And just because people don't follow rules of orthography, grammar and style doesn't excuse us from teaching these things, or trying to follow them. After all, language is about communication, and these corruptions hinder our ability to communicate, especially communicating complex thoughts.
So yeah, "to impact" is to make an active verb out of a passive participle, and "to impinge" should be used ihstead. There are plenty of uses of "bonified" out there. Google finds about 20,000 such occurrences. That doesn't make it correct. Nor does that make Google's suggested correction "bonafide" correct either (306,000 occurrences). The correct spelling is [i]bona fide[/i] (1,050,000 occurrences).
And don't worry too much about purely textual forms appearing in speach. LOL is just this decade's SOB. A spoken "I R0XX0R, J00 5UXX0R" shouldn't alarm us too much when we consider all those medical shows where doctors run around yelling "Get me a boron enema STAT!", pompous academics actually say "such economic perturbations may affect the governance of a certain cryptodictatorship, VIZ the United States", and we all drop down to the pharmacist to "Fill an RX", all spoken forms of what are written Latin abbreviations (statim -- immediately, videlicet -- that is, Rx -- Respondeo, although some classicists may insist it's the symbol for Jupiter).
One linguistic area that is interesting is the gradual adoption of worldwide slang. We hear Americans these days using terms like "Bog Standard" and "Arsed".
What's the point of this rant? Teh intardnet is a great resource for linguistic usage, beyond the navel-reflection of IT professionals. Disciplines like linguistics deal in examples of usage, and the internet is a great stockpile of everyday language. Descriptive grammar and descriptive dictionaries are not an excuse for ignoring arbitrary rules. Most of the lingusitic phenomena we see with internet usage are not new.
Bah. I have a 10 pound laptop, plus accessories, an external drive and a leather case, the whole package comes out to around 18 pounds; HT'd 3.0 P4m or whatever runs games okay; it's just when you need to do anything that involves shuffling a lot of memory around that you notice how goddamn slow laptops are. I proudly walk a mile to work each day with that thing slung over my shoulder. You'll never hear me complain about laptop weight.
...cos I'm too busy complaining about perpetually sore shoulders. I sleep terribly at night, and just yesterday I pulled a calf muscle crossing the street.
But it's all worth it when I ask some sucker to "hold my bag for a sec". Nerddom has its price.
I read all five sections at once, intending to stream each chapter through separate phases from character recognition to criticism. Unfortunately, every time the article used "it's" in a predicative sense, everything ground to a halt.
Fortunately, cell reading meant I hardly noticed the claim that hardware would compete with the x86 because, unlike the x86, cell computers need all their software written for the specific hardware.
I like how "hardware-specific" becomes "OS-independent". Great I can plug my HDTV into my G/Fs "electrically powered adult novelty device", and harness the extra computing power to find out we are really alone in the world. Of course, no firmware will stand in the way.
I'm also surprised that, in pandering to all the OS underdogs in the slashdot crowd (Great day for Apple, since they like G5s; Great day for Linux, since many obsessive-compulsive coders work on Linux projects anyway), he left out a true lightweight OS designed from the ground up for just this sort of multitasking: Amiga OS 4.0. To get something like this to actually work, you'll need more than iPod huggers, OSX preachers or Linux fans. You need genuine madwomen and madmen. You need AmigaOS.
Folks, let's do the math:
Phishers do not need to be successful very often. Think sperm here: if conditions are right, most of time only one gets lucky 20% of the time. (Sorry for the anchorman gag)
Consider the facts:
1) Only a few sites transact critical personal data (Credit cards, identity info) without proper security
2) Only a few sites use security certificates that are A) out of date B) for a different site C) otheerwise invalid.
3) only a modest majority of IE users have been trained into clicking "OK" on every security warning they see, especially for sites they know they trust.
If a phisher jacks a DNS, if they're good and have volume, they'll only go for 1); the certification warnings in 2) are worthless. They're worthless for two reasons. First, browser sgives the user the option of proceeding. Second, browsers don't distinguish between unimportant in-the-clear transmissions and stuff that looks like credit card numbers and identity information. Ideally, all browsers should have a cert mismatch not be an "ignorable" offense, but be one that causes the connection to fail.
3) As a backup, any attempt at in-the-clear transmission of numeric data longer than 5 digits should cause a whole storm of scary looking warnings (get rid of the "saturate the user with needless warnings" garbage that does more harm than good) stating that this is a really bad idea if it's anything valuable and to please, for the love of jeebus, reconsider.
I have no doubt they're hammering away at DNSs around the world; and they'll probably get one.
Oh yeah, and Mandatory Email encrpytion should be enabled, dammit.
But I will comment on this forecast:
No offense, but movie-based games have always been crappy, and done poorly: just look back to ET on the 2600. For nearly the last quarter century, companies have been releasing games tied to movies, and they've almost always sucked (okay, I thought the robocop game was kinda cute). But they keep getting churned out. Why? Because people will buy that crap! The quality of gameplay is irrelevant to the people making the decision to buy or not.
That said, there have been some high-budget attempts recently to port the world of a movie into a game. Of course it can't be done. Ultimately, the developers have to meet end-user expectations about the experience that are dictated by the movie, and an incredible static experience, such as a movie, makes a pretty boring dynamic one.
Tie-fighter battles are always cool; just don't give me a light saber.
Okay, well, to most human products, I apply my 10% rule. Of the stuff out there, 90% of it is, crap, the remaining 10% is worthwhile, and only 10% of that (=1%) has any new to say. Mod me redundant.
I got some bad news:
Print magazines are a business. They try to make money. How do they do it?
Well, one way is to sell to people who actually buy magazines. Who buys these things? Come on, when was the last time anybody actually bought a video game mag? Okay, here's a theory for you: video game press is like porn. Most people, given a choice, would rather participate in the acts depicted than read about them. So what are the barriers to playing video games and what demographics do they entail?
A) Arbitrary limits on time. This affects kids above all. Parents limit video game exposure. Sure, some of you will say, so do spouses/significant others/jealous dogs, but reading about video games pisses them off just as much.
B) Situations where playing video games is not appropriate. Teenagers have school, where the magazine format excels, discretely lining the inside of that boring-ass history book. Adults have workplaces; in the working class case, the magazine might still make sense -- though then one would be better served by bringing something everyone can enjoy, such as pornography. For many office types, vid web sites are not yet off limits.
C) Where cash is short, web access controlled, and the magazine can be a handy guide to what to expect -- again, the younger crowd excels here.
The other revenue source is of course advertising. Remember, automotive magazines don't shy away from tarnishing their journalistic integrity; many music mags don't either. So why should it surprise anyone that the bulk of video game magazines are basically shills for big companies? That's their business model! So it ain't called EA Weekly; that doesn't mean they don't make a living by pandering to Electronic Arts.
Now, on to the rest of it. I don't care about anybody else's "experience" with the game; give me your evaluation. I don't want some masturbatory prose and long narrative about how the dystopic vision of GTA:SA validated a life spent in the parents' basement, cold, with the body never feeling the heat of a woman. I'd like to hear the "Take" on the game; that can include commentary on the structure, the vision, or whatever. But I don't wanna see an egotistic ass hijack the prose.
Sure, there's a lot to talk about with video games, from the market, to how ideas are realized, to loading them full of Frankfurt School Marxism and making the players fritter away their only real chance to overthrow the oppressive system exposed by the game. So why beat up on perfectly legitimate bits of drivel?
By the way, the word "impactor" offends me on so many levels, it's making me question my sexual orientation.
Yeah, but will someone please tell the three dozen people around the world with my (forwarder-linked) yahoo email address in a readme.txt file and Bagz.G on their hard drive to fix their bloody machines!?
New worm? I can't see it. My mailbox is floody with 93kb attachments about Vasia and the Amirecans.
signomi I was replying to the parent and not the grandparent of my comment. I'd just rather not see medieval popes get slandered like that, since they didn't have any problem with nudes and the art they patronized clearly demonstrates this. In any case, most Americans (myself included) would rather we forget about the nineteenth century, and its legacy of colonialism, imperialism, unrestrained capitalism and generally dismal oppression coupled with prudish public morals and private excesses. The fig leaf as i point elsewhere is because the photograph is of a replica purchased by an observatory in Los Angeles and distributed with the wire story.
Bah, that's a lie. MEdieval popes had no problems with willies. It's only in the modern era that it became a problem.
Although judging from the pictures somebody at some time did do some Hernia Repair on Atlas. The way he's lifting the globe, he's bound to have thrown things outta whack.
Copies, eh?
If you check the caption on the NYT photo, it's credited to Reuters/Griffith Observatory (the latter is also the source of one of the "uninvolved experts" quoted in the text).
Now, the griffith observatory is currently closed to the public, but if you check their renovation news, you'll see that they're adding in a shiny new replica of the Farnese Atlas. Since they provided the photo, could they have just done a nice studio shot, or maybe one from the replicomat's catalog? After all, the lighting in the danish photo is pretty poor.
Now a real story would be if these were claimed to be from the s photos that the astronomer claimed to use for determining the age of the stars.
"Decidedly Nineteenth Century CE, or possibly 21st Century United States"
This gets a little circular, doesn't it? From those heady days of the nineties, I remember thinking security plenty of times. I remember plenty of companies thinking security too.
Just because Microsoft (or rather their corporate strategists) was thinking "leverage OS monopoly into market domination", doesn't justify a cavalier disregard for what was going on around them; just because Windows 98 had security problems doesn't mean security wasn't an issue. This is especially true when copying technology that's out there: programs that can be run off the internet that affect the local machine's experience? You can't excuse Microsoft from ignoring the steps everyone else was taking (including the cited case of java) by allusion to some Zeitgeist the existence of which is attested only by Microsoft's moves.
In any case, ActiveX is still being distributed, and, it may surprise some slashdotters to realize this, but the vast majority of Windows users use ActiveX controls, and those who actually have security settings on have for the most part been trained by IE's other wonderful security settings (such as "you are moving to a secure page") to click "OK" on every popup they see.
But okay, old news, we all know the Microsoft experience is merely to gaze upon the promised land with the knowledge we'll die in the desert.
oh come on, sites like that, even the "content" is advertising.
sounds like that programming game.
Well, it's okay for folks to love your iPod and think Apple is great. And yeah, you can mock companies like creative that think they can steal some market share away by selling a product that doesn't rely on a vertically integrated market for sales.
I'd just like to remind you folks that there was also a time when Apple had the lock on icon-based, desktop-style operating systems for Personal Computers, and their enviable market share was bolstered by vertical integration. Can you blame Creative for seeing the Apple of the portable music world and saying, "hey, with a little less imagination than Apple, we can be Microsoft?"
"Civic dashboard"? hehe. Those aren't nipples, dude, they're where you attach the aftermarket wings.
I think the hacker line is a troll man. Just call script kiddies/crackers/wire defrauders/pirates "hackers" and you automatically generate 25 indignant posts on slashdot from folks like us who remember when hacking meant turning a spare cassette port into an audio device, and a 1200-baud touchscreen vector graphics terminal was a hotrod.
Anyway, yeah, I'm surprised online gambling hasn't been hit earlier: here you have a huge industry that relies on a single technology for all its business, and is completely unregulated. But in such an environment, cyberextortion can be a dangerous game, since unregulated companies can always fall back on "brick and mortar" security. (That is, throw bricks through your window and mortar your house) And most societies in the world have excellent non-governmental agencies who specialize in protection and kneecaps already. A few hits, a little publicity, and problem solved.
In other words, the way to extort money is to promise protection from dDOS attacks. The ones who end up getting the dough will be those who do, whether the name is Cisco or Gotti.