It's really not surprising the phones have gone down - it seems to go pretty far afield. For instance, I told a colleague in Brussels what had happened, and she understandably tried getting hold of friends in London. Everyone's fine, fortunately, but it seems anyone working or living in London is being inundated with calls right now.
The asynchronous nature of stuff like SMSes and email might be an advantage if you're trying to get hold of someone - it's not like a phone call which needs to connect immediately. Alternatively, try phoning a (non-London) friend or relative of the person you're trying to contact, in case they've heard already.
HL2 units are CDs and booklets, nothing more, and valve can mass produce them like crazy.
Hellooo, Mr. Ieshan, 2005 called. Remember that Steam thing?
My copy of Half-Life 2 is just bits and bytes, and my authorisation details in a database somewhere. No physical packaging whatsoever - and I believe this is how many of the ATI vouchers were redeemed.
If the cost per unit allows them to hire talented people and take as long as they like on Half-Life 3, just like 2 was funded by the sales of the original game, then I'll be happy. Plus I've had excellent value for money out of the game so far anyway...;-)
Yup - and there doesn't appear to be any ongoing appreciation of ATi by Valve. After all, the upcoming Lost Coast expansion needs an Nvidia card to run fully, the appropriate ATi hardware not actually being available yet...
If Gabe Newell had his way, he would have spent September 30, 2003, lying low at the Valve office. He was deeply embarrassed by the slipped date and frustrated that the fans were berating Valve on the Internet. In other words, he just wanted September 30, 2003, to quietly pass. Unfortunately, that wasn't a possibility. He had a prior obligation: the Half-Life 2 launch party, which graphics-card manufacturer ATI had scheduled months in advance--fully assuming, of course, that the game would ship on September 30.
ATI, which is rumored to have paid more than $6 million to Valve as part of a broad endorsement deal, planned a massive fete to celebrate the launch of the game and a new ATI graphics card. ATI rented out the entire island of Alcatraz in San Francisco and planned to host the party inside the prison. Newell wanted to pull out of the event but couldn't. It was an obligation to a business partner--a partner that was "none too pleased we missed our date," he says.
Ah, but he was a minor. If you're going to fry someone, fry his parents. I'll bet you that will make a difference to the supervision levels of kids using computers.
You may not have been serious, but luckily for everyone concerned Germany is in the EU - where the prohibition of the death penalty is a condition of entry. Plus it would appear that the West German constitution of 1949 abolished it anyway.
I've never quite understood how supposedly civilised countries can put their citizens to death, for whatever reason. The no-death-penalty, no-extradition-to-face-execution clauses of EU membership make be inordinately proud of being European...
I wonder how the case would have gone had the guy just been selling modded console sans illegal software.
I read the story on the Beeb earlier and thought just that - it really sounds like a case of piracy (cough, sorry, copyright infringement) which has by virtue of Press Release has been trumped up into entirely about modding a console.
Selling consoles with loads of copied games on them is just plain dim-witted and the guy deserved to get caught - but conveniently for the sake of scare-tactics, there had to be that mod-chip as well...
I was pleased to see Darwinia in the list - it's easily the best game I've played this year. And I'm not usually that keyed in to the world of independent games, so I'm definitely looking through the list for other things I might like...
btw: The pictures are just breathtaking... on them it really looks like 4.5kt (which is a testemony of the amazing light collection power of current telescopes and quantum efficiency of CCD arrays)
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the apparent 'explosion' visible in the images is due to sunlight illuminating the plume of dust produced by the impact. Comet nuclei are pretty dark, so I suppose the exposure times were probably cranked right up to see anything of the nucleus itself.
This is all guesswork, of course, but I remember a similar explanation of the 'explosions' visible when the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet fragments hit Jupiter. Mankind has kind of built our own tiny version of that!
Of course, the above could all be utterly incorrect...:-)
I think it contains what are by far the best, and closest pictures of a comet nucleus - and I've no idea if it's from 'final' data yet. I gather there's a lot left to download from the flyby probe, but was it a Huygens-Cassini style relay setup or was impactor data received directly on Earth? If it's the latter, I suppose there isn't much chance of retrieving any more of the close-up data, as the delicate hardware stuck to the impactor's copper mass must have made quite a splat...;-)
It's a big grey area, and I would never do what he did personally, but it's not at all inconceivable that the person is very sane and has an understandable motivation for doing it--shock value, for instance.
I haven't actually looked at the site in question, but it's a pretty fun moral question regardless - can a collection of bits and bytes really be considered 'alive', and can it really 'suffer'?
I think one of the aspects which will make it seem like 'torture' is the apparent response of the computer program, both visual and aural. If all it had was just a plain set of numbers on the screen to indicate the current weightings in its neural network or whatever, I'm sure people would have few objections - I imagine it's more the apparent realistic responses to suffering that the human brain responds to...
There's a really cool game I played recently, Darwinia, which has some characters which really affected me.
*SPOILERS AHOY!*
Visually, they're identical, non-animated green stick men, but the sounds they make are absolutely perfect. Happy chirruping if they're 'happy', mewlings, wails and screams if they're injured or killed - and given there's some utterly fearsome battles in the game against some hundreds of Virus-infected Darwinian clones, it kind of gets to you after a bit. Seeing the clouds of red and green souls rising above a battlefield is bad enough - but the utterly dead, destroyed, no-chance-of-resurrection ghosts of Darwinians killed by a Soul Destroyer are just awful. It's probably the closest a game has ever got to making me cry...
But they're all just aspects of a computer program, with incredibly simplistic AI. Probably even simpler than the Little Computer People of The Fabled Article. But still...;-)
The wiki is a good tool for collaboration. It's encouraging to see Valve step in with an official one. The flip side is that maybe they'll be reluctant to share any details that reverse-engineer too deeply.
You have to have a Source developer licence, they probably check your registered email address.
The email address does appear to be optional, though - and I didn't get any confirmation email when I signed up.
I've yet to see any vandalism, and it's been public for quite a few days already - but hopefully its mention on Slashdot doesn't change anything...;-)
It's definitely not the first HL2 Wiki - the HL2World.com Knowledge Base has been around for ages, but really hasn't got that much in the way of useful content. Most of the entity documentation seems to have been nicked from the HL2 FGD entity definitions, for instance, and nobody's added too much to it.
However, this new Valve-sponsored one seems to have got past that problem. There's a lot of Valve-authored content in there already, and the enthusiast-written stuff seems very promising. I learned more about the ai_goal_assault entity from this article than I've done from everywhere else combined, for example.
The site's semi-affiliated with the good old VERC Collective and that's always been very strictly (and fairly) moderated with a good signal-to-noise ratio, so good things may lie ahead...
See, I have what we call "2.0 surround sound". It "surrounds" me from both corners of my living room.
Ooh, Mr Smartey Technology Man - you've got some highly advanced equipment there!
My telly's got, erm, 1.0 non-surround sound. It hasn't even moved into the stereo age yet...
(As for the millions of independent speakers used in cinemas - does anyone else think most film audio uses them terribly badly? I think it was some Lord of the Rings film where at one point there was a horn sounding at the back of the theatre. It sounded embarrassingly cheesy - I really appreciate high-quality sound, but many of the many-speakers soundtracks often seem a triumph of gimmickry over quality...)
What they really need is (a) more programmers with some highly esoteric combinations of skills, (b) a Mac-Intel box or two, and (c) monetary donations!:-)
I hope that you're right and the developer team is planning on improving the appearance. This sort of thing is important to Macintosh users.
I gather that this is a very big issue to them - I've found the future development plans from the main developers (Patrick Luby, 'pluby', and Edward Peterlin, 'OPENSTEP'):
Implement Aqua widgets and file dialogs - This has been our goal for a long time and I would like to get this done while the OpenOffice.org volunteers are working out all of the bugs in the OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 code.
There's other interesting reading in there as well, including the plans to port to MacOS X-on-Intel, which sound potentially fraught but mainly involve porting OpenOffice.org to GCC4, which will affect other platforms sooner or later too...
Before anyone complains about the lack of Aqua widgets and the continuing Windows 95-like appearance of the program, from experience that's probably the last remaining area to be completed.
Everything else is great, and infinitely superior to the old port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac's X11 - for instance, copy-and-paste works fully (styled text is no problem whatsoever); file associations work correctly; native printing, fonts, anti-aliased line art are just fine. Even more recent, esoteric stuff like Spotlight searches are fine - when I installed Tiger, all my documents got neatly indexed without me lifting a finger.
It's in an application bundle, it stores its settings in ~/Library/ - apart from those grey, rectangular buttons and controls, it's a complete, modern Mac application.
Honestly, don't judge it on first appearances or screenshots (I've found numerous Mac 'ports' of software which seem to concentrate too much on cosmetics rather than functionality) - it's truly wonderful. For anyone looking for a free office suite on their Mac, here it is!
Personally, I think the problems regarding Halo 2's ending are primarily due to how the game was advertised. Instead of being more correctly portrayed as the middle part of a trilogy, with the player unearthing deep secrets about blah blah blah, setting the stage for a final part, it was all about the final defence of Earth against the Covenant onslaught...
I like to think that HG Wells would have approved of Orson Welles' broadcast version, oddly enough set partially in Eastern New England.
(Engage Wikipedia!)
Given that the radio broadcast was in October 1938 and H. G. Wells died in August 1946 it's quite probable that he knew about it - but does anyone know what he actually thought of it?
There seems to be quite a vogue for drama-portrayed-as-fact in the UK at the moment. One decent one I saw recently was Supervolcano, a cheery tale in which millions of Americans get buried in a giant volcanic eruption. Others are a bit weirder (there was a bizarre 'documentary' about dragons on Channel 4; I switched off when it started hypothesising about dragon mating rituals) - but sadly I do think a modernised War of the Worlds would be considered a bit 'done-already'.:-/
As for games-to-films - if it takes this many years to make a film of an also-ran computer game, the ideas behind it have to be pretty special. But Alice just seemed a bit too obvious - plus the whole ultra-dark-return-to-childhood-story's been done before with Return to Oz (which scared the proverbial our of me aged five or so)...
I also think that mods who use negative moderation frequently (or even exclusively as many mods claim to do) should not be given mod privileges as often.
I think there might be something like that already - I only ever moderate posts upwards, and those I do mod up are usually low-rated posts (which I may or may not agree with) which I feel are likely to promote varied, interesting, non-ranting discussion. They often go on to be +5 posts, but that's not my fault.
Anyhow, I've been getting moderation points at least once a week for several months now. Coincidence?;-)
Gmail is not that original. Hotmail had web based mail years before Google. Yea the gave you a bunch of storage and a very good interface but they did not invent web mail. [...] Google news is okay but I see very little that is better than my.yahoo.com. Gee a news site? Again not all that original.
I think an unofficial Google manifesto could be to do things that have already been done, but 'better'.
Whether they actually succeed or not is left as an exercise for the reader, but you have to admit that search engines are no longer ad-riddled, ultra-busy 'portals' since Google came along, and webmail services are no longer providing pitifully small amounts of storage space...
Slashdot Mirror
Capacity being diverted to emergency services, too.
It's really not surprising the phones have gone down - it seems to go pretty far afield. For instance, I told a colleague in Brussels what had happened, and she understandably tried getting hold of friends in London. Everyone's fine, fortunately, but it seems anyone working or living in London is being inundated with calls right now.
The asynchronous nature of stuff like SMSes and email might be an advantage if you're trying to get hold of someone - it's not like a phone call which needs to connect immediately. Alternatively, try phoning a (non-London) friend or relative of the person you're trying to contact, in case they've heard already.
+5 Informative costs $.75
I'm still looking to purchase a hallowed +5 Troll - how much for one of those? Let me guess, I can't afford it...
Something about the haughty tone of this post makes me think the poster is a hearty advocate of abortion...
;-)
Well, you'd be wrong - I feel that abortion is pretty loathsome too...
HL2 units are CDs and booklets, nothing more, and valve can mass produce them like crazy.
;-)
Hellooo, Mr. Ieshan, 2005 called. Remember that Steam thing?
My copy of Half-Life 2 is just bits and bytes, and my authorisation details in a database somewhere. No physical packaging whatsoever - and I believe this is how many of the ATI vouchers were redeemed.
If the cost per unit allows them to hire talented people and take as long as they like on Half-Life 3, just like 2 was funded by the sales of the original game, then I'll be happy. Plus I've had excellent value for money out of the game so far anyway...
Yup - and there doesn't appear to be any ongoing appreciation of ATi by Valve. After all, the upcoming Lost Coast expansion needs an Nvidia card to run fully, the appropriate ATi hardware not actually being available yet...
Oh, and I'm still rather fond of the tale of the terribly expensive 'launch party' funded by ATi...
I don't have a garage, you insensitive clod!
I do have a garage, but I don't have a car, you, erm, non-sensual sod!
Ah, but he was a minor. If you're going to fry someone, fry his parents. I'll bet you that will make a difference to the supervision levels of kids using computers.
You may not have been serious, but luckily for everyone concerned Germany is in the EU - where the prohibition of the death penalty is a condition of entry. Plus it would appear that the West German constitution of 1949 abolished it anyway.
I've never quite understood how supposedly civilised countries can put their citizens to death, for whatever reason. The no-death-penalty, no-extradition-to-face-execution clauses of EU membership make be inordinately proud of being European...
I wonder how the case would have gone had the guy just been selling modded console sans illegal software.
I read the story on the Beeb earlier and thought just that - it really sounds like a case of piracy (cough, sorry, copyright infringement) which has by virtue of Press Release has been trumped up into entirely about modding a console.
Selling consoles with loads of copied games on them is just plain dim-witted and the guy deserved to get caught - but conveniently for the sake of scare-tactics, there had to be that mod-chip as well...
I was pleased to see Darwinia in the list - it's easily the best game I've played this year. And I'm not usually that keyed in to the world of independent games, so I'm definitely looking through the list for other things I might like...
I need that in calories. How many mars bars?
Just for you: 19,730.
btw: The pictures are just breathtaking... on them it really looks like 4.5kt (which is a testemony of the amazing light collection power of current telescopes and quantum efficiency of CCD arrays)
:-)
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the apparent 'explosion' visible in the images is due to sunlight illuminating the plume of dust produced by the impact. Comet nuclei are pretty dark, so I suppose the exposure times were probably cranked right up to see anything of the nucleus itself.
This is all guesswork, of course, but I remember a similar explanation of the 'explosions' visible when the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet fragments hit Jupiter. Mankind has kind of built our own tiny version of that!
Of course, the above could all be utterly incorrect...
Also a pretty cool, official NASA Quicktime movie from the impactor's camera - kind of wobbly and jerky, but nifty nevertheless.
;-)
I think it contains what are by far the best, and closest pictures of a comet nucleus - and I've no idea if it's from 'final' data yet. I gather there's a lot left to download from the flyby probe, but was it a Huygens-Cassini style relay setup or was impactor data received directly on Earth? If it's the latter, I suppose there isn't much chance of retrieving any more of the close-up data, as the delicate hardware stuck to the impactor's copper mass must have made quite a splat...
It's a big grey area, and I would never do what he did personally, but it's not at all inconceivable that the person is very sane and has an understandable motivation for doing it--shock value, for instance.
;-)
I haven't actually looked at the site in question, but it's a pretty fun moral question regardless - can a collection of bits and bytes really be considered 'alive', and can it really 'suffer'?
I think one of the aspects which will make it seem like 'torture' is the apparent response of the computer program, both visual and aural. If all it had was just a plain set of numbers on the screen to indicate the current weightings in its neural network or whatever, I'm sure people would have few objections - I imagine it's more the apparent realistic responses to suffering that the human brain responds to...
There's a really cool game I played recently, Darwinia, which has some characters which really affected me.
*SPOILERS AHOY!*
Visually, they're identical, non-animated green stick men, but the sounds they make are absolutely perfect. Happy chirruping if they're 'happy', mewlings, wails and screams if they're injured or killed - and given there's some utterly fearsome battles in the game against some hundreds of Virus-infected Darwinian clones, it kind of gets to you after a bit. Seeing the clouds of red and green souls rising above a battlefield is bad enough - but the utterly dead, destroyed, no-chance-of-resurrection ghosts of Darwinians killed by a Soul Destroyer are just awful. It's probably the closest a game has ever got to making me cry...
But they're all just aspects of a computer program, with incredibly simplistic AI. Probably even simpler than the Little Computer People of The Fabled Article. But still...
The wiki is a good tool for collaboration. It's encouraging to see Valve step in with an official one. The flip side is that maybe they'll be reluctant to share any details that reverse-engineer too deeply.
Here you go, have some Valve-sponsored Half-Life engine hacking - everything from network protocols to making huge changes to the OpenGL rendering.
I imagine that with the new Wiki, so long as content is useful and doesn't have overtly antisocial or illegal implications, it'll be welcomed...
You have to have a Source developer licence, they probably check your registered email address.
;-)
The email address does appear to be optional, though - and I didn't get any confirmation email when I signed up.
I've yet to see any vandalism, and it's been public for quite a few days already - but hopefully its mention on Slashdot doesn't change anything...
It's definitely not the first HL2 Wiki - the HL2World.com Knowledge Base has been around for ages, but really hasn't got that much in the way of useful content. Most of the entity documentation seems to have been nicked from the HL2 FGD entity definitions, for instance, and nobody's added too much to it.
However, this new Valve-sponsored one seems to have got past that problem. There's a lot of Valve-authored content in there already, and the enthusiast-written stuff seems very promising. I learned more about the ai_goal_assault entity from this article than I've done from everywhere else combined, for example.
The site's semi-affiliated with the good old VERC Collective and that's always been very strictly (and fairly) moderated with a good signal-to-noise ratio, so good things may lie ahead...
See, I have what we call "2.0 surround sound". It "surrounds" me from both corners of my living room.
Ooh, Mr Smartey Technology Man - you've got some highly advanced equipment there!
My telly's got, erm, 1.0 non-surround sound. It hasn't even moved into the stereo age yet...
(As for the millions of independent speakers used in cinemas - does anyone else think most film audio uses them terribly badly? I think it was some Lord of the Rings film where at one point there was a horn sounding at the back of the theatre. It sounded embarrassingly cheesy - I really appreciate high-quality sound, but many of the many-speakers soundtracks often seem a triumph of gimmickry over quality...)
Will that be a huge setback to the project, or will they just be able to check a box and recompile, as Steve Jobs suggested in his keynote?
:-)
Sounds like it'll 'simply' (heh) involve porting to GCC4...
What they really need is (a) more programmers with some highly esoteric combinations of skills, (b) a Mac-Intel box or two, and (c) monetary donations!
I gather that this is a very big issue to them - I've found the future development plans from the main developers (Patrick Luby, 'pluby', and Edward Peterlin, 'OPENSTEP'):
There's other interesting reading in there as well, including the plans to port to MacOS X-on-Intel, which sound potentially fraught but mainly involve porting OpenOffice.org to GCC4, which will affect other platforms sooner or later too...
I'll keep my client running today. Will you?
Mine's chugging away, downloading - there's a fair few seeds already so it hasn't uploaded anything yet!
Here's a nice, friendly Mac BitTorrent client for all you GUI-fiends, and while I'm at it, here's a list of conventional mirrors and translations...
Stands for Java. Five guesses as to what the majority of NeoOfficeJ was written in. First 4 don't count.
;-)
C++, of course!
What do I win...
Before anyone complains about the lack of Aqua widgets and the continuing Windows 95-like appearance of the program, from experience that's probably the last remaining area to be completed.
Everything else is great, and infinitely superior to the old port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac's X11 - for instance, copy-and-paste works fully (styled text is no problem whatsoever); file associations work correctly; native printing, fonts, anti-aliased line art are just fine. Even more recent, esoteric stuff like Spotlight searches are fine - when I installed Tiger, all my documents got neatly indexed without me lifting a finger.
It's in an application bundle, it stores its settings in ~/Library/ - apart from those grey, rectangular buttons and controls, it's a complete, modern Mac application.
Honestly, don't judge it on first appearances or screenshots (I've found numerous Mac 'ports' of software which seem to concentrate too much on cosmetics rather than functionality) - it's truly wonderful. For anyone looking for a free office suite on their Mac, here it is!
Personally, I think the problems regarding Halo 2's ending are primarily due to how the game was advertised. Instead of being more correctly portrayed as the middle part of a trilogy, with the player unearthing deep secrets about blah blah blah, setting the stage for a final part, it was all about the final defence of Earth against the Covenant onslaught...
I like to think that HG Wells would have approved of Orson Welles' broadcast version, oddly enough set partially in Eastern New England.
:-/
(Engage Wikipedia!)
Given that the radio broadcast was in October 1938 and H. G. Wells died in August 1946 it's quite probable that he knew about it - but does anyone know what he actually thought of it?
There seems to be quite a vogue for drama-portrayed-as-fact in the UK at the moment. One decent one I saw recently was Supervolcano, a cheery tale in which millions of Americans get buried in a giant volcanic eruption. Others are a bit weirder (there was a bizarre 'documentary' about dragons on Channel 4; I switched off when it started hypothesising about dragon mating rituals) - but sadly I do think a modernised War of the Worlds would be considered a bit 'done-already'.
As for games-to-films - if it takes this many years to make a film of an also-ran computer game, the ideas behind it have to be pretty special. But Alice just seemed a bit too obvious - plus the whole ultra-dark-return-to-childhood-story's been done before with Return to Oz (which scared the proverbial our of me aged five or so)...
I also think that mods who use negative moderation frequently (or even exclusively as many mods claim to do) should not be given mod privileges as often.
;-)
I think there might be something like that already - I only ever moderate posts upwards, and those I do mod up are usually low-rated posts (which I may or may not agree with) which I feel are likely to promote varied, interesting, non-ranting discussion. They often go on to be +5 posts, but that's not my fault.
Anyhow, I've been getting moderation points at least once a week for several months now. Coincidence?
Gmail is not that original. Hotmail had web based mail years before Google. Yea the gave you a bunch of storage and a very good interface but they did not invent web mail. [...] Google news is okay but I see very little that is better than my.yahoo.com. Gee a news site? Again not all that original.
I think an unofficial Google manifesto could be to do things that have already been done, but 'better'.
Whether they actually succeed or not is left as an exercise for the reader, but you have to admit that search engines are no longer ad-riddled, ultra-busy 'portals' since Google came along, and webmail services are no longer providing pitifully small amounts of storage space...