Hilarious. If only I had mod points to spare right now.
For those of you who don't get the joke, I suggest you take a look at the following website and get a life before a ninja comes and chops your head off!
http://www.realultimatepower.net/
The article fails to specify what is meant by "anti-aging". Is it keeping a very old living being alive longer? Or does it also have the added benefit of decreasing visible and physical signs of aging to the subject in question? If all that this drug can do is keep a very very old-looking person alive a bit longer, but not feel or look as old as they are, I say big deal. If I'm that old and weak, I'd probably want to die soon anyway.
Question: is it waterproof? Man, I can't wait to take one of these babies in the pool to play marco polo! Then we'll FINALLY get to have a proper showdown between man and machine! USA! USA!
I heard that singing to plants helps thenm grow and reduce their stress levels. Now all we need to do is to perform some experiments and figure out what type of singing/music genre provides the best stress relief. I'm thinking reggae would do the trick personally... >_>
Honestly, I'm wondering why this is on Slashdot. I come here to read news, not some editorial guesses at what might be news in the future. "News for Nerd. Stuff that matters." ===> and this article doesn't matter...
I don't think it's a bad thing that the game is old-school either, but I think the newer generation of gamers won't be able to appreciate it as much, since they're eyes are fixated on games with purrrty graphics. Actually the game is modeled after FFVI (FF3 US), but has enough features that make the game unique in its own right. Unfortunately it's still deep in development. I wish it wasn't, but its really hard for me to find time when I work full-time and go to grad school, and the rest of the people working on it with me don't have all the time in the world either. The link is in my sig, but I'll post it here again in case anyone is interested in keeping up with it. We've got artwork, music samples, (very) early screenshots, and a narrative that is used as a guide to the game's story up on the site.
I work on an indie game in my (not so copious) free time. It's open-source and 100% free (as in freedom, and in beer). I do it mostly because I enjoy doing it and it lets me learn many new things. I also consider it my gift back to the OSS community, which has already given me so much.
Of course since I have zero budget and very little time on my hands, it's not going to be a flashy game that will compete with the likes of WoW or something. Rather, it's something reminsic of the SNES-era RPGs, which were the most fun IMO. If a user is introduced into indie RPGs by means of free games, then surely sooner or later they're going to play one that they think absolutely rocks, and thus hopefully they'll begin to look at non-free indie games with more curious eyes.
Well, I don't think they would make such a claim without at least some sort of evidence. And we all know that Intel is a corporation that doesn't like to play nice with the other kids. During my senior year of undergrad my computer architecture professor consistently refered to Intel as "the evil empire", so who knows. I'd like to see AMD present some hard evidence though.
It relies on human-powered vehicles. We all know that anyone who is cool/stupid (pick one) enough to play this game is not going to have the stamina it requires. They'll all pedal about 30 feet before they fall off their bikes and pass out on the sidewalk.
I have never been a fan of learning how to do something by reading about it. The only way to learn good game programming, IMO, is to actually try doing it. That's how I started with the game in my sig and its been working so far. While not a book, may I recommend you take a look at the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library? It's free, cross-platform, and is really easy to learn to use. It's written in C, but there are extensions to it in other languages. Good luck!
The so-called software patent directive, rejected by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, would have given companies EU-wide patent protection for computerized inventions ranging from programs for complex CAT scanners to ABS car-brake systems.
FYI: At the time I was an undergraduate student and I had almost no money to spend at all, especially wasting money to buy hardware to fix an O/S that should work in the first place. I'm pretty sure I tried activating the firewall too, but I think it screwed up something with the campus network and I couldn't do anything online with it enabled. And furthemore I certainly didn't have any "junk PC" laying around to download updates and then install them to my other PC. Not bad suggestions you all gave that could have fixed my problem, but not everyone has those kinds of options at their disposal.
This is what brought me to Linux in the first place. The story takes place in February 2004. After an old hard drive failed on my PC and I bought a replacement, I re-installed Windows XP Pro and proceeded about my business, but within half an hour of getting online I got a typical windows error message pop-up about so-and-so process unexpectadly terminating, then Windows said it had to restart and gave me a 60-second countdown to save my work. I was like WTF!?!? So after several reboots and having the same virus compromise my system, I reformat, re-install XP, and then the second I get online I start downloading Windows updates....but the virus is too fast! It sees the Windows update process and goes "Woops, you don't want to do that now do you?" and kills the critical updates, along with my system again. Then I go to plan C, which is installing Norton Antivirus BEFORE updating Windows. Only problem is, the antivirus software has to be downloaded from my campus nextwork. So I re-format, re-install, and literally browse-and-click as fast as my hand could move the mouse to install that antivirus software. And it worked. Or so I thought. The virus then started automatically deactivating the AV software while I was using the computer, and I would continually re-activate it. But I couldn't keep this up forever. I mean, isn't the point of having a computer to be able to do something PRODUCTIVE with it instead of fighting viruses? Well, after the AV had been deactivated for more than 2 minutes the virus would kill that Windows process again and force yet another shutdown. I went battling this virus/these viruses for 2 damn weeks trying everything I could. God forbid, I even went to the DOS command-line to try some things, but to no avail.
And that frustration, my nerds, is what brought me out of the shadows and into the light that is GNU/Linux/OSS. It was the second best thing that happened to me in my life. I thank yee, virus writers, who allowed me to cast off the shackles of M$ and come to know the true meaning of computing and hacking. *salutes*
By the way, for those interested in GPGPU research/ideas, there's a pretty nice site here: http://www.gpgpu.org. It has some sample code, slides from conferences presentations, a forum, etc. It's a pretty nice site for information. I was interested in GPGPUs a few months ago and read through the material on that site heavily, but in the end I didn't have the time to try anything cool out because you'll need to learn how to use a language like Cg or steam to program your GPGPU.
I'm deeply thankful from the bottom of my heart for emulators of old systems. It's true. I find myself playing the good old games a lot (mostly NES and SNES) more than the newer, shinier games. Maybe it's the nostalgia factor that brings me back time and time again. But it's probably because I share the exact same sentiments as the article. Games are not designed to be fun anymore. They are designed to make companies hoards of money. Those two business models are disgustingly different, and hence so are the games they produce.
I'm sure there are others like me out there who have let their passion take them far enough to the point where they make their own game in the "old-school" style. Of course I doubt anyone is out there making loads of money off of making new games that look like they could have been released in the 90s, but I bet there are quite a few like me who spend their spare time working on their game as a hobby.
On a side-note, I bet you kids these days wouldn't give such "ancient" looking games a second glance, since they've been suckered into the game media hype machine of "better-looking game = better game". *grumble grumble* Rotten kids!!!! Why I remember back in my day, we only had one button on our joypads, and that was damn well enough for us!
Well now I'm almost positive that the search engine integrated into IE is MSN's own. And since IE is embedded into Windows, this has a good chance of reducing traffic for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. So can we expect to see a possible lawsuit for these unfair business practices, which Microsoft is infamous for?
Now I'm even *less* motivated to exercise than before, which I thought was impossible. Maybe I could get really strong leg muscles implanted (like those of a cheetah) and then I wouldn't need to be stuck in traffic for 30-60 minutes a day. I'd just run to work at 60+ MPH!!! Abusing technology is what American's do best after all.... >_>
I agree. It's easy to bitch about poor design than it is to make a good design yourself. I feel this guy's pain though. I've had my fair share of having to deal with poorly designed/documented software before. A few weeks ago I had to compile this benchmark suite where there was no makefile, no documentation, the only comments in the code were "/********/" to seperate sections of code, and to top it all off, the file extensions were ".cp". So I was like great, is this C code or C++ code? I wasn't able to tell from browsing two files so I said to myself "well, if it's C++ there has to be a class in there somewhere, right?". So I did a `cat *.cp | grep class` and came up empty handed, so I used the c compiler. It was only after the compilation failed with a strange error that I looked up and discovered that the code was trying to referencing something in the c++ library.
Anyway, due to experiences like that where someone's lack of intelligible design cost me time that it shouldn't have (for god's sake, write your own makefiles!!!) that I become so.....irate when I have to deal with someone else's poorly designed code. I take those painful experiences in mind when I design my own code now though.
I really like Nintendo's approach here. Who cares about having all that computational power if neither Sony nor Microsoft (admitably) don't seem to care much for the games that would use it, instead opting for a more general entertainment purpose? Certainly this would be a very attractive choice for independent game developers to boost their sales and popularity of their titles, but what about game developers that want to distribute their games not-for-profit? I've been working on my own free (as in beer), open-source game for nearly a year now. I'd love the idea of seeing it played on a next-gen console one day, but I still wouldn't want to make people pay to play it. Would Nintendo still charge a "minimal fee" for games distributed on the Revolution? Or would they allow an exception for developers who wish to create and distribute games free-of-charge?
However - and this is barely arguable - it's all been downhill ever since FFVI.
I concur. In my opinion, FFVI and Chrono Trigger (among other notable SNES titles) were the apex of RPG gaming. Now it seems to me like game producers (especially at S-E) are putting less and less empathsis on the story and gameplay, instead opting to always try to be the RPG with the "next-generation" graphics in order to further capatilize on their already erroding franchise. I so appall this game design mentality that I starting creating my own RPG game akin to FFVI, what I still consider to be the best RPG ever. Sometimes you must take a few steps backwards in order to move forward again. I hope someone at S-E realizes this before it is too late to save Final Fantasy (or what remains of it).
The "startling" part about it is that here we have a CEO who stated something that does nothing to help his business (on the contrary it actually hurts it) and it is the truth. Good lord, this is something to write home about folks! Mr. Gates and Mr. Balmer, are you taking notes?
Joking aside, I say more power to you Otellini. In the business world, truth is in a very short supply and it's good to see a business man who won't resort to lying, deceit, and FUD to try and boost his company's sales. *salutes*
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have a copy of this transaction? I'm looking for some good humor tonight, and this just might fit the bill. :)
Hilarious. If only I had mod points to spare right now. For those of you who don't get the joke, I suggest you take a look at the following website and get a life before a ninja comes and chops your head off! http://www.realultimatepower.net/
The article fails to specify what is meant by "anti-aging". Is it keeping a very old living being alive longer? Or does it also have the added benefit of decreasing visible and physical signs of aging to the subject in question? If all that this drug can do is keep a very very old-looking person alive a bit longer, but not feel or look as old as they are, I say big deal. If I'm that old and weak, I'd probably want to die soon anyway.
Question: is it waterproof? Man, I can't wait to take one of these babies in the pool to play marco polo! Then we'll FINALLY get to have a proper showdown between man and machine! USA! USA!
I heard that singing to plants helps thenm grow and reduce their stress levels. Now all we need to do is to perform some experiments and figure out what type of singing/music genre provides the best stress relief. I'm thinking reggae would do the trick personally... >_>
Honestly, I'm wondering why this is on Slashdot. I come here to read news, not some editorial guesses at what might be news in the future. "News for Nerd. Stuff that matters." ===> and this article doesn't matter...
I don't think it's a bad thing that the game is old-school either, but I think the newer generation of gamers won't be able to appreciate it as much, since they're eyes are fixated on games with purrrty graphics. Actually the game is modeled after FFVI (FF3 US), but has enough features that make the game unique in its own right. Unfortunately it's still deep in development. I wish it wasn't, but its really hard for me to find time when I work full-time and go to grad school, and the rest of the people working on it with me don't have all the time in the world either. The link is in my sig, but I'll post it here again in case anyone is interested in keeping up with it. We've got artwork, music samples, (very) early screenshots, and a narrative that is used as a guide to the game's story up on the site.
Hero of Allacrost - Main Site
Sourceforge Page
I work on an indie game in my (not so copious) free time. It's open-source and 100% free (as in freedom, and in beer). I do it mostly because I enjoy doing it and it lets me learn many new things. I also consider it my gift back to the OSS community, which has already given me so much.
Of course since I have zero budget and very little time on my hands, it's not going to be a flashy game that will compete with the likes of WoW or something. Rather, it's something reminsic of the SNES-era RPGs, which were the most fun IMO. If a user is introduced into indie RPGs by means of free games, then surely sooner or later they're going to play one that they think absolutely rocks, and thus hopefully they'll begin to look at non-free indie games with more curious eyes.
Well, I don't think they would make such a claim without at least some sort of evidence. And we all know that Intel is a corporation that doesn't like to play nice with the other kids. During my senior year of undergrad my computer architecture professor consistently refered to Intel as "the evil empire", so who knows. I'd like to see AMD present some hard evidence though.
It relies on human-powered vehicles. We all know that anyone who is cool/stupid (pick one) enough to play this game is not going to have the stamina it requires. They'll all pedal about 30 feet before they fall off their bikes and pass out on the sidewalk.
I have never been a fan of learning how to do something by reading about it. The only way to learn good game programming, IMO, is to actually try doing it. That's how I started with the game in my sig and its been working so far. While not a book, may I recommend you take a look at the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library? It's free, cross-platform, and is really easy to learn to use. It's written in C, but there are extensions to it in other languages. Good luck!
The so-called software patent directive, rejected by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, would have given companies EU-wide patent protection for computerized inventions ranging from programs for complex CAT scanners to ABS car-brake systems.
PWNED!!!
FYI: At the time I was an undergraduate student and I had almost no money to spend at all, especially wasting money to buy hardware to fix an O/S that should work in the first place. I'm pretty sure I tried activating the firewall too, but I think it screwed up something with the campus network and I couldn't do anything online with it enabled. And furthemore I certainly didn't have any "junk PC" laying around to download updates and then install them to my other PC. Not bad suggestions you all gave that could have fixed my problem, but not everyone has those kinds of options at their disposal.
This is what brought me to Linux in the first place. The story takes place in February 2004. After an old hard drive failed on my PC and I bought a replacement, I re-installed Windows XP Pro and proceeded about my business, but within half an hour of getting online I got a typical windows error message pop-up about so-and-so process unexpectadly terminating, then Windows said it had to restart and gave me a 60-second countdown to save my work. I was like WTF!?!? So after several reboots and having the same virus compromise my system, I reformat, re-install XP, and then the second I get online I start downloading Windows updates....but the virus is too fast! It sees the Windows update process and goes "Woops, you don't want to do that now do you?" and kills the critical updates, along with my system again. Then I go to plan C, which is installing Norton Antivirus BEFORE updating Windows. Only problem is, the antivirus software has to be downloaded from my campus nextwork. So I re-format, re-install, and literally browse-and-click as fast as my hand could move the mouse to install that antivirus software. And it worked. Or so I thought. The virus then started automatically deactivating the AV software while I was using the computer, and I would continually re-activate it. But I couldn't keep this up forever. I mean, isn't the point of having a computer to be able to do something PRODUCTIVE with it instead of fighting viruses? Well, after the AV had been deactivated for more than 2 minutes the virus would kill that Windows process again and force yet another shutdown. I went battling this virus/these viruses for 2 damn weeks trying everything I could. God forbid, I even went to the DOS command-line to try some things, but to no avail.
And that frustration, my nerds, is what brought me out of the shadows and into the light that is GNU/Linux/OSS. It was the second best thing that happened to me in my life. I thank yee, virus writers, who allowed me to cast off the shackles of M$ and come to know the true meaning of computing and hacking. *salutes*
I for one, welcome our new pigeon clicking overlords... >_>
By the way, for those interested in GPGPU research/ideas, there's a pretty nice site here: http://www.gpgpu.org. It has some sample code, slides from conferences presentations, a forum, etc. It's a pretty nice site for information. I was interested in GPGPUs a few months ago and read through the material on that site heavily, but in the end I didn't have the time to try anything cool out because you'll need to learn how to use a language like Cg or steam to program your GPGPU.
I'm deeply thankful from the bottom of my heart for emulators of old systems. It's true. I find myself playing the good old games a lot (mostly NES and SNES) more than the newer, shinier games. Maybe it's the nostalgia factor that brings me back time and time again. But it's probably because I share the exact same sentiments as the article. Games are not designed to be fun anymore. They are designed to make companies hoards of money. Those two business models are disgustingly different, and hence so are the games they produce.
I'm sure there are others like me out there who have let their passion take them far enough to the point where they make their own game in the "old-school" style. Of course I doubt anyone is out there making loads of money off of making new games that look like they could have been released in the 90s, but I bet there are quite a few like me who spend their spare time working on their game as a hobby.
On a side-note, I bet you kids these days wouldn't give such "ancient" looking games a second glance, since they've been suckered into the game media hype machine of "better-looking game = better game". *grumble grumble* Rotten kids!!!! Why I remember back in my day, we only had one button on our joypads, and that was damn well enough for us!
What the hell man there's no sound in that video! What a cheap production. I mean come on, do they think there's no sound in space or something???
.....wait a minute...
Well now I'm almost positive that the search engine integrated into IE is MSN's own. And since IE is embedded into Windows, this has a good chance of reducing traffic for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. So can we expect to see a possible lawsuit for these unfair business practices, which Microsoft is infamous for?
Now I'm even *less* motivated to exercise than before, which I thought was impossible. Maybe I could get really strong leg muscles implanted (like those of a cheetah) and then I wouldn't need to be stuck in traffic for 30-60 minutes a day. I'd just run to work at 60+ MPH!!! Abusing technology is what American's do best after all.... >_>
I agree. It's easy to bitch about poor design than it is to make a good design yourself. I feel this guy's pain though. I've had my fair share of having to deal with poorly designed/documented software before. A few weeks ago I had to compile this benchmark suite where there was no makefile, no documentation, the only comments in the code were "/********/" to seperate sections of code, and to top it all off, the file extensions were ".cp". So I was like great, is this C code or C++ code? I wasn't able to tell from browsing two files so I said to myself "well, if it's C++ there has to be a class in there somewhere, right?". So I did a `cat *.cp | grep class` and came up empty handed, so I used the c compiler. It was only after the compilation failed with a strange error that I looked up and discovered that the code was trying to referencing something in the c++ library.
Anyway, due to experiences like that where someone's lack of intelligible design cost me time that it shouldn't have (for god's sake, write your own makefiles!!!) that I become so.....irate when I have to deal with someone else's poorly designed code. I take those painful experiences in mind when I design my own code now though.
I'm contemplating e-mailing this to my advising slave driver^H^H^H^H^H^H^H professor...
I really like Nintendo's approach here. Who cares about having all that computational power if neither Sony nor Microsoft (admitably) don't seem to care much for the games that would use it, instead opting for a more general entertainment purpose? Certainly this would be a very attractive choice for independent game developers to boost their sales and popularity of their titles, but what about game developers that want to distribute their games not-for-profit? I've been working on my own free (as in beer), open-source game for nearly a year now. I'd love the idea of seeing it played on a next-gen console one day, but I still wouldn't want to make people pay to play it. Would Nintendo still charge a "minimal fee" for games distributed on the Revolution? Or would they allow an exception for developers who wish to create and distribute games free-of-charge?
However - and this is barely arguable - it's all been downhill ever since FFVI.
I concur. In my opinion, FFVI and Chrono Trigger (among other notable SNES titles) were the apex of RPG gaming. Now it seems to me like game producers (especially at S-E) are putting less and less empathsis on the story and gameplay, instead opting to always try to be the RPG with the "next-generation" graphics in order to further capatilize on their already erroding franchise. I so appall this game design mentality that I starting creating my own RPG game akin to FFVI, what I still consider to be the best RPG ever. Sometimes you must take a few steps backwards in order to move forward again. I hope someone at S-E realizes this before it is too late to save Final Fantasy (or what remains of it).
The "startling" part about it is that here we have a CEO who stated something that does nothing to help his business (on the contrary it actually hurts it) and it is the truth . Good lord, this is something to write home about folks! Mr. Gates and Mr. Balmer, are you taking notes?
Joking aside, I say more power to you Otellini. In the business world, truth is in a very short supply and it's good to see a business man who won't resort to lying, deceit, and FUD to try and boost his company's sales. *salutes*