I've always wondered why the US, which has got to be king when it comes to successful ways of marketing personalities and products (Elvis, pop music groups, etc), doesn't have the degree of idol culture that Japan does, where being a celebrity is a *really* big deal.
All the things you talk about (spawn camping, etc) are things that can be frusterating. Nobody wants to have frusterating things done to them.
There are two classes of these kinds of things:
1) Unfixed problems in the game. If there *really is* a single, simple strategy, using knowledge of the game's rules that lets you easily beat anyone using any other strategy, then the game is simply broken. On the other hand, very, very few people play games like this.
2) Strategies that you are not willing to counter. Most people don't mind rocket-jumping in Quake -- it's part of the *game*, a strategy (and one that allows interesting tradeoffs made in real-time -- do I trade some health for an item or a potentially less-guarded route?) On the other hand, I never learned to rocket-jump -- as a result, games where one had to rocket-jump to counter rocket-jumping were frusterating to me. However, most players didn't mind learning to rocket jump. I just wasn't willing to learn how to counter in. I think that what you're thinking of are simple strategies that a newbie may not know how to counter -- and this lack of knowledge means that he will always lose to them. Nobody wants to *lose* all the time, so they call the game stupid and stop playing. People that really immerse themselves in heavy playing often *like* multiple layers of strategy.
I do think that there are some games that do a better job of dealing with this than others. One of my favorite games from this standpoint is Soul Calibur II. A first-time player can sit down, whack buttons rapidly, and probably beat some not-first-time-but-still-newbie players some decent percentage of the time. Plus, their character will do neat things on the screen. Each time someone learns a new feat, the new feat doesn't make them unbeatable -- it just improves their play by some percent. Say you learn your character's throws really well, and can hurl people out of the ring based on where each throw sends them -- that may be a disadvantage to another player, but it isn't going to result in you winning every match. All game designers should keep this sort of thing in mind -- have a learning curve that stretches off into infinity (or something like it) so that the players are always learning something new to get better. On the other hand, make each degree of improvement only help the character sometimes -- it can work splendidly sometimes, but that new strategy can't be simply applied over and over.
eSports also suffers from the stigma of being crushingly boring for any non-gamer to watch for the most part.
I agree that this is currently the case; however, I also think that much of that can be remedied.
For example, take football. I don't play football. Unlike a lot of people, I don't follow football. This makes a typical football game on TV completely boring to me. To help deal with this, the sport's presentation has been highly tuned. There are rapid transitions, never focussing on one thing for too long. There are sportscasters that act excited, to help get you in the mood. There is a running stream of patter and anecdotes going on, interesting factoids, and an explanation of what's going on. I have no idea what, beyond the basic rules of football, someone should do. The sportscasters explain this.
As a result, while watching football may not be my favorite thing in the world to do, it's certainly a viable form of entertainment if there's nothing else on.
Another problem is that it takes people a while to appreciate the higher levels of play. You can't do this with the current video-gaming world, because each new game that comes out changes the rules. You have to have a basic game created, one that keeps being playable for many, many, many years. Sure, you can change the graphics and whatnot, but the rules cannot change aside from minor tweaks (such as those that are occasionally made to football). I don't see any reason that someone couldn't create such a game.
Next, the rules have to be fairly simple. Football is already, IMHO, too complicated for someone to just drop into, and it is still much more straightforward than most of the video games out there. Chess is an immortal game because it's easy to learn. Age of Empires is just not going to work for televised viewing. Also, simple rules make it easier to ensure that your game has no "easy" loopholes or ways to win. Complex rules, sets of fixes upon fixes for loopholes in a game, mean that "cheap" ways to win probably exist.
Next, the game has to be visually pretty (and probably improve each year). Note that visually pretty does not mean technically impressive. It just has to be attractive to watch. Perhaps really good art and design work is important. You have a large number of people watching who have to be entertained not by *playing* the game, but by merely watching it and appreciating the strategy -- they aren't experiencing the actual gameplay component.
Next, I think that team-based play is probably important. In the world of lucrative professional sports, everything is team-based. Football, basketball, soccer, hockey, baseball...fans like being able to speak with knowledge about how well a team is doing, what the trades of various players mean, and so forth. Watching one random guy play doesn't provide that. Also, people can empathize with a team ("I live in New York, and so I want the New York Mets to win!"), but if there's only a single player, the side becomes a hard-to-empathize-with-player. If my *town* had a clan, I might be able to get interested in what they're doing.
Next is the biggest one. Almost all games these days have a twitch component. In FPSes, reaction time is crucial. My first reaction was that this wouldn't work. I've changed my mind. You can have twitch games, but there has to be more-slowly-changing state (other than the score, which changes too slowly). That state has to favor one side or the other, and should be able to completely change within a minute, and at least sometimes stay in one position for several minutes. In most sports, this is handled by the field position of the ball or puck. Why is this important? It's too hard to watch a really good FPS player unless you're equally good and can anticipate to some degree what they're doing. There's too much rapid movement. A kill is in the blink of an eye -- that doesn't build tension. Capture the flag might be more reasonable -- I could see watching a capture the flag game bec
Good point; but I wouldn't say that this is any more useless than sports and the number of people that try to get into pro sports.
Second the newshosting recommendation
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Requiem for Usenet
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· Score: 1
I use the $15/mo newshosting unlimited service. Their retention is not as good as some limited services provided, and I have seen newshosting go down before, but they are comparatively inexpensive for as much data as you can suck down. They have excellent completion (though this is pretty much par for the course for commercial Usenet providers).
The masses have the money. Geeks are not the masses, and not every person that signs up for Internet access any more is doing so because of a geek recommendation.
Frankly, I'm still amazed that home cable/DSL users are still getting their own IP address... I figured long ago, they would have put everyone on a private network and used NAT and/or WWW proxies for access
I figured that this would have happened a while ago as well. My hope is that increased mainstream use of P2P will produce enough demand for open ports and upstream bandwidth to keep ISPs usable for us geeks.
Basically, the Internet as useful for geeks -- peer-to-peer where any machine can run any services, each machine is admined by a competent user, multiple static IP addresses for each machines -- simply does not match up with the Internet demanded by Average Joe, who needs Web access and maybe, if he doesn't use webmail, IMAP/POP service. He also wants a good chunk of his payment going towards paying for some human to read off a flowchart over the phone, because he feels uncomfortable doing his own troubleshooting.
The problem is that the sort of network that a geek would like is very unfortunately the sort of network that a *business* would like, and thus prices on the sort of network that would keep a geek happy are rising...
It's this oft-repeated bit of nonsense, sometimes used by ISPs justifying why they're cutting their Usenet feed, and sometimes by people who, for some odd reason, think that web forums are superior.
I always considered unlimited Usenet access just part of an ISP's package. Until I switched to Comcast and discovered their 2GB/mo or-pay-for-more system. Bleh. Data metering sucks. I figure that if all the masses care about is being able to run a web browser and maybe an email client if they aren't using webmail, we'll get more of this (God, BitTorrent needs to get popular for legitimate uses as fast as possible.)
I poked around at a number of Usenet providers, and finally decided on newshosting.com. I just wanted to throw the name out there for anyone else who might be looking around. Their retention is lower than some other providers, but they have an unlimited plan for $15/mo. It lacks a couple of (from my point of view, not interesting) perks that the non-unlimited plans have, but I'd say that they're definitely worth looking at. Their main disadvantage, IMHO, is the lack of an SSL-tunneled connection.
If that were the case, then they should send out everything as PDF, not as MS-Proprietary-whatever-format that changes even when using various versions of MS-Office.
I'm just going to completely ignore the entire question of whether Microsoft or OO is better and just say that sending out files in Word format (or OO format) is crazy.
Word/OO format is intended for local storage or collaboration (though both rather suck at this -- you still can't edit a document while someone else is working with it and have changes automerged). PDF is intended for publication purposes.
Look at the drawbacks of Word format:
* Macro viruses. Yes, there are kludges to try to fix the problem, like virus scanners, but ultimately you're using a format that can contain active content when there's no reason to do so.
* Costs money to read. Okay, most users will have Microsoft Office (though if they bought, say, a low-priced Dell, they may have an alternative productivity software package). However, there are still people out there who just don't have it.
* Not cross-platform. Okay, again, most people probably don't care whether or not some Linux or BSD or whatever user is inconvenienced. It still irritates some chunk of people.
* Upgrade treadmill. Documents written with a different of Word may not display correctly in your copy. Not the case for PDF.
* Prints correctly. When you render something to PDF, you know what it's going to look like. Everywhere. Not true for Word.
* May leak information. Word (AFAIK) has no "Sanitize" command that strips all extraneous information from a file. All kinds of stuff gets jammed in Word files -- on the Mac, it used to pick up random blocks from the disk due to a bug of one sort or another. History information (I read about one incident where a secretary would always use another, similar document as a template for the next document she was writing. This was not good when sending out bids), information about who wrote what when in the document, etc.
Okay, if you really need to collaborate on authoring a document with a random Internet user, you may just need to use Word. Still, Word is used in a lot of places that it isn't remotely adapted to.
Of course, the OO.org cost is a one-time event. There's some cost associated with conversion. But then you don't have to pay the Gates bill every couple of years.
This is a great thing, as Legos (whoops! I meant "Models built of Lego bricks") have, as of late, descended into lame branding excercises in order to shift product
The problem is that Lego used to be a geek toy, and has since become a mass market toy.
Also, it's not like OSDL (geek haven central) is particularly free of bias. I'm sure that OSRM would probably have a very different take on things.
Frankly, I don't think that patents are a big threat to Linux. Linux is clearly beneficial enough and important enough to enough people now that there are some heavyweights that would be willing to help support legal issues (IBM and Novell, for example, are probably not going to sit and watch as someone tries to claim that a primary product of theirs is illegal).
Linux is an exceedingly unattractive target for litigation for *anyone* other than maybe Microsoft (which has a competitive motive). The core Linux community is bone-dry WRT money relative to similarly influential non-OSS software offerings. There are a large number of large companies who would probably commit to defend Linux if their products were at risk (and a challenge to the legality of the kernel would certainly do so). Linux has a cute mascot and is made by a lot of smart, nice, dedicated volunteers, and is really mediagenic. SCO started out with the Wall Street Journal running articles like "This is One Time You'll Want David to Lose to Goliath" (David being SCO, Goliath being Linux) and wound up with their CEO universally disliked, suffering death threats and a steady stream of negative commentary, more dirt-unveiling background research than I've *ever* seen a politician have to undergo, scads of folks (armed with legal degrees and otherwise) volunteering to find every loophole in SCO's claims and undermine their attacks...it was Not Fun to be SCO. I can't imagine many companies who would want to do this.
The final issue is that while copyright is pretty well respected by most developers out there (it's what lets most of them make a living), software patents are a whole different store. A software patent lawsuit against Linux, given the *huge* number of people involved in the European effort to defend the software world against software patents, might actually be the spark that would prevent people in the US from filing software patents in the future.
More than 150 tech professionals attended a corporate fashion show in Sydney last night as organisers officially dubbed the industry "the worst dressed" in Australia.
Short sleeved shirts, man-made fibres and the wrong coloured socks were some of the most common fashion faux-pas cited by corporate stylist, Melanie Moss, who hosted the event.
"Because the majority of IT people are not in front of customers all the time, they tend to slack off," she said.
Help-desk staff were named as the worst offenders, followed by those working in technology start-ups, many of whom had continued to wear T-shirts to work as a consequence of the casual web culture of the '90s.
You know, clothes have pretty consistently gotten simpler and more comfortable over the years. Maybe this "Melanie Moss" corporate stylist (who, to be blunt, is probably not the most unbiased person to ask about what is appropriate to wear in the workplace) is wrong and the people wearing the clothes are right.
You've got a list of a couple things to do with clothes:
(1) Look more physically attractive to attract the guy/girl who works at the place. (Fair enough, if that's your goal.) I personally think that they aren't likely to care whether you wear Old Navy or Banana Republic, but I'm also not everyone.
(2) Look imposing to try to influence people (especially with out-of-company dealing). Anyone who has to do outside-the-company interfacing probably already has to wear nice clothes. That being said, anyone you're interfacing with is probably also experienced at the game, and isn't too likely to be impacted much by a snazzier set of clothes.
(3) Try to produce a different psychological environment to help put yourself in a "work" mindset. Not a bad idea -- a lot of people that work at home set up home offices just to deal with this particular type of problem. However, I think that there are better ways to do this -- just the fact that you're physically at work should be sufficient, IMHO. Clothes are an expensive way to solve this problem in terms of effort.
None of these reasons are all that compelling to me.
She added that wearing natural fibres was also important. "Polyester doesn't wear well, and gets sweaty and smelly," she said.
That's a little bit Luddite to me. Way to blow away all technological advancement with a single comment, you know?
I think that people are impacted a lot less by what they wear than they think at work. I'd say that how people act matters a lot more: people who are friendly and polite versus people that are irritable and abrupt seem to make far more difference than what the person is wearing. Being good at your job is probably going to be more interesting to your boss than in whether you properly matched your socks.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
So.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just.xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors.xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
Any proxy usage will bypass a.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for.xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a.xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
The only thing that happened was that ICANN (which the *US* actually, y'know, *paid* for for a hell of a long time) retained its authority. ICANN's done a pretty decent job (especially in standing up to seriously stupid -- if influential -- shit like that flowing from Verisign regarding.com wildcards and that flowing from Christian right groups insisting that the whole world conform to US morality standards with a.xxx TLD). ICANN's exceeded *my* expectations right there. Why possibly break something? If they do a bad job, *then* ask to fund an international organization based on the fact that they're sucking.
While I think that the US has done a pretty good job so far of staying hands-off, and I don't think that many countries would do as good a job, it's not impossible that in the future they'll start to abuse their position and do things like.xxx. (Or something else that tries to inject one country's culture into DNS, which is absolutely unacceptable -- banning any domain names containing "nazi" would be another one that I suspect a few countries might try.)
Second, it's great leverage against Verisign.
Remember the.com wildcard problem? Where *all*.com addresses always resolved...just much of the time, to a Verisign-run machine with a webserver with ads? If there is a second DNS infrastructure that can be transferred to in an instant, that would put pressure on Verisign not to abuse the DNS system.
Finally, IIRC, we use the ISO country codes for CCTLDs. That's probably the thing that most countries want to have input on, since it allows them to legitimize claims to country status in the public's eyes. As long as ISO codes are used, the DNS world isn't making any huge political statements -- it shoves the political burden off to ISO (who probably doesn't want that, but it produces separation of red tape and techies, which is a good thing).
Another genre that hasn't got much attention recently is the graphical adventure game -- Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Secret of Monkey Island, etc) and Sierra (King's Quest, etc) used to make terrific games in this genre, but after a burst of interest, around the time CD-ROM drives were introduced, for the Myst series, I haven't heard much about them.
The Lucasarts adventure game team largely got back together and is still producing games, but no longer at Lucasarts.
If you're interested in playing some of the classic Lucasarts games, you can do so in a nice cross-platform environment using the GPL ScummVM. At least one previously-proprietary game (Beneath a Steel Sky) that has even been released under a free license of some sort and is being distributed on the ScummVM website. I'm not a big fan of Sierra's games, but you can play their classic games using Sarien and FreeSCI.
One thing that I really miss in games these days is the healthy portions of humor present in many of these older adventures -- usually not scatological or crude, but just happy and upbeat tidbits in the game that made you laugh while playing.
The games that I really hated involved you having to perform some off-the-wall action to get a result that made no sense what so ever.
Modern text adventures no longer do that. There were a couple of playability problems that have been largely addressed by modern games. Remember that this is a genre that has seen a huge amount of input from many people fixing irritations (much like the OSS community) and has had two decades to polish out imperfections:
* Parsing -- Well, this will never be perfect as long as we lack human-class AI. However, modern parsing is *much* more reasonable than the original games, where you could play "hunt the verb". There are still a few bad games, however, any decent modern TADS-based game is going to be pretty playable -- might take you a little bit to get used to things, but you aren't going to throw your keyboard across the wall because you couldn't figure out what particular command the game wanted you to use. ADRIFT games are another story, and mostly suck badly at this.
* Missed an action somewhere in the game, now cannot win. Game designers have realized that this is frusterating. Modern text-based adventures don't do this. Basically, if you screwed up and you're going to lose, you lose right away.
* Illogical puzzles. Game designers have realized that most people don't want to spend time trying to SMELL OCTOPUS to have a bucket magically fall out of the air. These are pretty much gone. There are some things, though, that it helps to be familiar with the genre to play. For example, people new to RPGs probably don't immediately come up with the idea of talking to everyone in a town to solve a problem (after all, it's not what one would do in real life). People new to FPSes probably don't immediately think that smashing open every crate in the game (especially in random alleyways and houses) is a good way to get medical kits and ammunition. People new to text-based adventures may not think of trying to LOOK UNDER BED or realize that TADS-based games generally consider EXAMINE CLOSET and SEARCH CLOSET to be two different commands (EXAMINE being equivalent to LOOK AT and SEARCH meaning to try to find anything unusual). Most TADS games come with basic starter help like this that comes up if you type HELP.
If you're looking for a good (IMHO) game, I'd suggest downloading a TADS runtime (frob seems to be the latest-and-greatest implementation for Linux, though regrettably it doesn't use emacs keystrokes) and try Babel. That was the first text adventure game that I ever beat without help or hints.
I'd also like to point out the (even smaller than the standard IF community) AIF community, which produces adult games.
If you've played NetHack and its family of games, you're familiar with the gameplay -- objects can interact in many sophisticated ways, the game is fast and lighthearted, and death may often come randomly.
I generally like Angband and its family of games more than the NetHack family. Objects can interact in fewer ways, the game is generally more serious and takes longer, and the emphasis is on the incredibly vast array of items and powers that you can acquire (and must use cleverly to win the game). ToME is like Angband, but much, much worse.
No, because you can still branch the storyline. The point is that you cannot branch the storyline in such a way that you must eventually lose after that point -- the idea is, if you're going to lose because of an action, you must lose immediately.
My understanding is that Tiger has not undergone the degree of review that MD5 and SHA1 have. I've never heard of HAVAL.
My vague understanding is that what the people here have done is made slightly more convenient an *extremely* limited specific attack based on a collision that someone else discovered. Basically, in my understanding, if you start the file/bitstream/whatever that you are hashing with their particular special block, they have a tool that can generate a bitstream that collides with the first one. However, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to have a file that actually starts with this block, unless they're trying to demonstrate the collision.
Now, this is interesting for cryptographers, because there's a few things that were safe to do before that aren't any more. The big one is you can't have a system in which Person A hands Person B a file (of unconstrained content), which Person B then MD5 hashes and signs the hash of and returns to Person A. However, things like:
* Passwords hashed with MD5
* P2P files addressed with an MD5 hash or hash tree
* Linux isos...Are all still safe.
The Slashdot article seems to be mostly frightening because the submitter, "SiliconEntity", is misleading Slashdot readers in an attempt to have a more exciting story.
The spelling wasn't incorrect... not even for the U.S. It was "international", I wouldn't expect them to edit it anymore than I'd expect them to convert kilometres into miles.
Wrong. That is a British spelling. It is incorrect in US English.
Nice use of "most" there.
Slashdot isn't phenomenal when it comes to editing. I appreciate efforts like this to improve the state of things.
Do you really think the slashdot editor responsible was "making it consistent", or do you think he thought "that's spelled wrong. I'll correct it," and just didn't have a fucking clue that it was actually perfectly correct spelling. I know what I'd put my money on.
So, an editor made a correct editorial decision, and you are putting your money on the fact that he's just uninformed? I mean, fair enough, but that's quite a chip on your shoulder.
Not seeking any flames, but as an Australian citizen of this global community, it's easy to see where this attitude gets the US the reputation that that US *is* the global community. When was the last time you saw a www.website.com.us?
Well, for a long time, and during the period that.com got established, the US *was* pretty much the global community. [shrug]
I have a friend who stopped reading Slashdot about a year ago. He really enjoyed it at one point, but the proportion of articles that are simply rabble-rousing has reached simply ridiculous levels. I've finally started using an RSS reader, and Slashdot just doesn't warrant fitting on the thing.
I don't mean that article titles like "Emacs sucks Donkey Balls" show up -- mean that you see summary bodies that strongly imply that, for instance, emacs is going to stop being used by anyone, and deliberately lets users draw wrong conclusions.
The problem with this approach is that it isn't sustainable. Yes, readers that are alarmed and upset make for attentive readers. For a while. After a bit, trying to read Slashdot, I start to feel numb from the sheer amount of useless content flooding by.
On my current front page, I see:
"Unisys: We No Longer Have A Way Out". This article implies that some company has completely switched directions and admitted that Linux is better than Windows. Even without reading the article, I am quite sure that the actual situation is a lot less black-and-white. It's nothing more than a summary intended to let people get a bit of Microsoft-smearing in.
"Hardware: Unsecured Wi-Fi to Become Illegal?" Of course, unsecured Wi-Fi isn't going to become illegal on any kind of significant scale. There would be huge numbers of simply uninformed consumers facing penalties. This article is simply present to get people posting about how the big telcos are trying to suppress independent network access, and so on and so forth. It's trying to get people scared. It's absurd.
"Linux: Linspire CEO Offers S. Korea To Replace Windows" Summary implies that Linux is about to replace Windows across a country. Of course, nothing like that is actually going to happen; this is a PR ploy that at best might generate some revenue for Linspire and a few more Linux users.
There is a *huge* amount of interesting news for nerds out there, if you look across the entire world. There are countless people to interview, who would be more than happy to show up on Slashdot. Technocrat.net covers much of the same stuff as Slashdot, and *they* manage to avoid pointless flame-generating articles. Maybe a GIMP how-to with pretty pictures. A walkthrough of a new programming language. I haven't seen coverage of interesting anime stuff for a bit, and I refuse to believe that the anime world is simply dead. A review of a new Linux distribution.
Instead, I see more and more articles that tend more towards propaganda than interesting news.
You know, I use Windows some of the time at work. And during that time, I've seen Lotus Notes' interface, along with Mozilla's interface, the XP widgets, the 2k widgets, WinAMP's bitmapped interface, and have not seen any users have any problem with it.
I don't really think that a slightly different looking interface is a big problem, to be honest. If you stick users in front of Linux workstations and run the same apps that they have years of experience in (like MS Office), the users are going to be able to function about as well.
The reason Windows users get cranky when moving to Linux is because they have expertise in Windows apps that gets thrown out.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered why the US, which has got to be king when it comes to successful ways of marketing personalities and products (Elvis, pop music groups, etc), doesn't have the degree of idol culture that Japan does, where being a celebrity is a *really* big deal.
All the things you talk about (spawn camping, etc) are things that can be frusterating. Nobody wants to have frusterating things done to them.
There are two classes of these kinds of things:
1) Unfixed problems in the game. If there *really is* a single, simple strategy, using knowledge of the game's rules that lets you easily beat anyone using any other strategy, then the game is simply broken. On the other hand, very, very few people play games like this.
2) Strategies that you are not willing to counter. Most people don't mind rocket-jumping in Quake -- it's part of the *game*, a strategy (and one that allows interesting tradeoffs made in real-time -- do I trade some health for an item or a potentially less-guarded route?) On the other hand, I never learned to rocket-jump -- as a result, games where one had to rocket-jump to counter rocket-jumping were frusterating to me. However, most players didn't mind learning to rocket jump. I just wasn't willing to learn how to counter in. I think that what you're thinking of are simple strategies that a newbie may not know how to counter -- and this lack of knowledge means that he will always lose to them. Nobody wants to *lose* all the time, so they call the game stupid and stop playing. People that really immerse themselves in heavy playing often *like* multiple layers of strategy.
I do think that there are some games that do a better job of dealing with this than others. One of my favorite games from this standpoint is Soul Calibur II. A first-time player can sit down, whack buttons rapidly, and probably beat some not-first-time-but-still-newbie players some decent percentage of the time. Plus, their character will do neat things on the screen. Each time someone learns a new feat, the new feat doesn't make them unbeatable -- it just improves their play by some percent. Say you learn your character's throws really well, and can hurl people out of the ring based on where each throw sends them -- that may be a disadvantage to another player, but it isn't going to result in you winning every match. All game designers should keep this sort of thing in mind -- have a learning curve that stretches off into infinity (or something like it) so that the players are always learning something new to get better. On the other hand, make each degree of improvement only help the character sometimes -- it can work splendidly sometimes, but that new strategy can't be simply applied over and over.
eSports also suffers from the stigma of being crushingly boring for any non-gamer to watch for the most part.
I agree that this is currently the case; however, I also think that much of that can be remedied.
For example, take football. I don't play football. Unlike a lot of people, I don't follow football. This makes a typical football game on TV completely boring to me. To help deal with this, the sport's presentation has been highly tuned. There are rapid transitions, never focussing on one thing for too long. There are sportscasters that act excited, to help get you in the mood. There is a running stream of patter and anecdotes going on, interesting factoids, and an explanation of what's going on. I have no idea what, beyond the basic rules of football, someone should do. The sportscasters explain this.
As a result, while watching football may not be my favorite thing in the world to do, it's certainly a viable form of entertainment if there's nothing else on.
Another problem is that it takes people a while to appreciate the higher levels of play. You can't do this with the current video-gaming world, because each new game that comes out changes the rules. You have to have a basic game created, one that keeps being playable for many, many, many years. Sure, you can change the graphics and whatnot, but the rules cannot change aside from minor tweaks (such as those that are occasionally made to football). I don't see any reason that someone couldn't create such a game.
Next, the rules have to be fairly simple. Football is already, IMHO, too complicated for someone to just drop into, and it is still much more straightforward than most of the video games out there. Chess is an immortal game because it's easy to learn. Age of Empires is just not going to work for televised viewing. Also, simple rules make it easier to ensure that your game has no "easy" loopholes or ways to win. Complex rules, sets of fixes upon fixes for loopholes in a game, mean that "cheap" ways to win probably exist.
Next, the game has to be visually pretty (and probably improve each year). Note that visually pretty does not mean technically impressive. It just has to be attractive to watch. Perhaps really good art and design work is important. You have a large number of people watching who have to be entertained not by *playing* the game, but by merely watching it and appreciating the strategy -- they aren't experiencing the actual gameplay component.
Next, I think that team-based play is probably important. In the world of lucrative professional sports, everything is team-based. Football, basketball, soccer, hockey, baseball...fans like being able to speak with knowledge about how well a team is doing, what the trades of various players mean, and so forth. Watching one random guy play doesn't provide that. Also, people can empathize with a team ("I live in New York, and so I want the New York Mets to win!"), but if there's only a single player, the side becomes a hard-to-empathize-with-player. If my *town* had a clan, I might be able to get interested in what they're doing.
Next is the biggest one. Almost all games these days have a twitch component. In FPSes, reaction time is crucial. My first reaction was that this wouldn't work. I've changed my mind. You can have twitch games, but there has to be more-slowly-changing state (other than the score, which changes too slowly). That state has to favor one side or the other, and should be able to completely change within a minute, and at least sometimes stay in one position for several minutes. In most sports, this is handled by the field position of the ball or puck. Why is this important? It's too hard to watch a really good FPS player unless you're equally good and can anticipate to some degree what they're doing. There's too much rapid movement. A kill is in the blink of an eye -- that doesn't build tension. Capture the flag might be more reasonable -- I could see watching a capture the flag game bec
Good point; but I wouldn't say that this is any more useless than sports and the number of people that try to get into pro sports.
I use the $15/mo newshosting unlimited service. Their retention is not as good as some limited services provided, and I have seen newshosting go down before, but they are comparatively inexpensive for as much data as you can suck down. They have excellent completion (though this is pretty much par for the course for commercial Usenet providers).
The masses have the money. Geeks are not the masses, and not every person that signs up for Internet access any more is doing so because of a geek recommendation.
Frankly, I'm still amazed that home cable/DSL users are still getting their own IP address... I figured long ago, they would have put everyone on a private network and used NAT and/or WWW proxies for access
I figured that this would have happened a while ago as well. My hope is that increased mainstream use of P2P will produce enough demand for open ports and upstream bandwidth to keep ISPs usable for us geeks.
Basically, the Internet as useful for geeks -- peer-to-peer where any machine can run any services, each machine is admined by a competent user, multiple static IP addresses for each machines -- simply does not match up with the Internet demanded by Average Joe, who needs Web access and maybe, if he doesn't use webmail, IMAP/POP service. He also wants a good chunk of his payment going towards paying for some human to read off a flowchart over the phone, because he feels uncomfortable doing his own troubleshooting.
The problem is that the sort of network that a geek would like is very unfortunately the sort of network that a *business* would like, and thus prices on the sort of network that would keep a geek happy are rising...
It's this oft-repeated bit of nonsense, sometimes used by ISPs justifying why they're cutting their Usenet feed, and sometimes by people who, for some odd reason, think that web forums are superior.
I always considered unlimited Usenet access just part of an ISP's package. Until I switched to Comcast and discovered their 2GB/mo or-pay-for-more system. Bleh. Data metering sucks. I figure that if all the masses care about is being able to run a web browser and maybe an email client if they aren't using webmail, we'll get more of this (God, BitTorrent needs to get popular for legitimate uses as fast as possible.)
I poked around at a number of Usenet providers, and finally decided on newshosting.com. I just wanted to throw the name out there for anyone else who might be looking around. Their retention is lower than some other providers, but they have an unlimited plan for $15/mo. It lacks a couple of (from my point of view, not interesting) perks that the non-unlimited plans have, but I'd say that they're definitely worth looking at. Their main disadvantage, IMHO, is the lack of an SSL-tunneled connection.
If that were the case, then they should send out everything as PDF, not as MS-Proprietary-whatever-format that changes even when using various versions of MS-Office.
I'm just going to completely ignore the entire question of whether Microsoft or OO is better and just say that sending out files in Word format (or OO format) is crazy.
Word/OO format is intended for local storage or collaboration (though both rather suck at this -- you still can't edit a document while someone else is working with it and have changes automerged). PDF is intended for publication purposes.
Look at the drawbacks of Word format:
* Macro viruses. Yes, there are kludges to try to fix the problem, like virus scanners, but ultimately you're using a format that can contain active content when there's no reason to do so.
* Costs money to read. Okay, most users will have Microsoft Office (though if they bought, say, a low-priced Dell, they may have an alternative productivity software package). However, there are still people out there who just don't have it.
* Not cross-platform. Okay, again, most people probably don't care whether or not some Linux or BSD or whatever user is inconvenienced. It still irritates some chunk of people.
* Upgrade treadmill. Documents written with a different of Word may not display correctly in your copy. Not the case for PDF.
* Prints correctly. When you render something to PDF, you know what it's going to look like. Everywhere. Not true for Word.
* May leak information. Word (AFAIK) has no "Sanitize" command that strips all extraneous information from a file. All kinds of stuff gets jammed in Word files -- on the Mac, it used to pick up random blocks from the disk due to a bug of one sort or another. History information (I read about one incident where a secretary would always use another, similar document as a template for the next document she was writing. This was not good when sending out bids), information about who wrote what when in the document, etc.
Okay, if you really need to collaborate on authoring a document with a random Internet user, you may just need to use Word. Still, Word is used in a lot of places that it isn't remotely adapted to.
Of course, the OO.org cost is a one-time event. There's some cost associated with conversion. But then you don't have to pay the Gates bill every couple of years.
Animated PNGs aren't possible (yet), alas...
Well, it all depends on your definition of what PNG is.
This is a great thing, as Legos (whoops! I meant "Models built of Lego bricks") have, as of late, descended into lame branding excercises in order to shift product
The problem is that Lego used to be a geek toy, and has since become a mass market toy.
You just need more geek toys.
Also, it's not like OSDL (geek haven central) is particularly free of bias. I'm sure that OSRM would probably have a very different take on things.
Frankly, I don't think that patents are a big threat to Linux. Linux is clearly beneficial enough and important enough to enough people now that there are some heavyweights that would be willing to help support legal issues (IBM and Novell, for example, are probably not going to sit and watch as someone tries to claim that a primary product of theirs is illegal).
Linux is an exceedingly unattractive target for litigation for *anyone* other than maybe Microsoft (which has a competitive motive). The core Linux community is bone-dry WRT money relative to similarly influential non-OSS software offerings. There are a large number of large companies who would probably commit to defend Linux if their products were at risk (and a challenge to the legality of the kernel would certainly do so). Linux has a cute mascot and is made by a lot of smart, nice, dedicated volunteers, and is really mediagenic. SCO started out with the Wall Street Journal running articles like "This is One Time You'll Want David to Lose to Goliath" (David being SCO, Goliath being Linux) and wound up with their CEO universally disliked, suffering death threats and a steady stream of negative commentary, more dirt-unveiling background research than I've *ever* seen a politician have to undergo, scads of folks (armed with legal degrees and otherwise) volunteering to find every loophole in SCO's claims and undermine their attacks...it was Not Fun to be SCO. I can't imagine many companies who would want to do this.
The final issue is that while copyright is pretty well respected by most developers out there (it's what lets most of them make a living), software patents are a whole different store. A software patent lawsuit against Linux, given the *huge* number of people involved in the European effort to defend the software world against software patents, might actually be the spark that would prevent people in the US from filing software patents in the future.
More than 150 tech professionals attended a corporate fashion show in Sydney last night as organisers officially dubbed the industry "the worst dressed" in Australia.
Short sleeved shirts, man-made fibres and the wrong coloured socks were some of the most common fashion faux-pas cited by corporate stylist, Melanie Moss, who hosted the event.
"Because the majority of IT people are not in front of customers all the time, they tend to slack off," she said.
Help-desk staff were named as the worst offenders, followed by those working in technology start-ups, many of whom had continued to wear T-shirts to work as a consequence of the casual web culture of the '90s.
You know, clothes have pretty consistently gotten simpler and more comfortable over the years. Maybe this "Melanie Moss" corporate stylist (who, to be blunt, is probably not the most unbiased person to ask about what is appropriate to wear in the workplace) is wrong and the people wearing the clothes are right.
You've got a list of a couple things to do with clothes:
(1) Look more physically attractive to attract the guy/girl who works at the place. (Fair enough, if that's your goal.) I personally think that they aren't likely to care whether you wear Old Navy or Banana Republic, but I'm also not everyone.
(2) Look imposing to try to influence people (especially with out-of-company dealing). Anyone who has to do outside-the-company interfacing probably already has to wear nice clothes. That being said, anyone you're interfacing with is probably also experienced at the game, and isn't too likely to be impacted much by a snazzier set of clothes.
(3) Try to produce a different psychological environment to help put yourself in a "work" mindset. Not a bad idea -- a lot of people that work at home set up home offices just to deal with this particular type of problem. However, I think that there are better ways to do this -- just the fact that you're physically at work should be sufficient, IMHO. Clothes are an expensive way to solve this problem in terms of effort.
None of these reasons are all that compelling to me.
She added that wearing natural fibres was also important. "Polyester doesn't wear well, and gets sweaty and smelly," she said.
That's a little bit Luddite to me. Way to blow away all technological advancement with a single comment, you know?
I think that people are impacted a lot less by what they wear than they think at work. I'd say that how people act matters a lot more: people who are friendly and polite versus people that are irritable and abrupt seem to make far more difference than what the person is wearing. Being good at your job is probably going to be more interesting to your boss than in whether you properly matched your socks.
It's a bad idea.
.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,
So
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block
Any proxy usage will bypass a
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of
Where did you pull all this from?
.com wildcards and that flowing from Christian right groups insisting that the whole world conform to US morality standards with a .xxx TLD). ICANN's exceeded *my* expectations right there. Why possibly break something? If they do a bad job, *then* ask to fund an international organization based on the fact that they're sucking.
The only thing that happened was that ICANN (which the *US* actually, y'know, *paid* for for a hell of a long time) retained its authority. ICANN's done a pretty decent job (especially in standing up to seriously stupid -- if influential -- shit like that flowing from Verisign regarding
That's a really good solution.
.xxx. (Or something else that tries to inject one country's culture into DNS, which is absolutely unacceptable -- banning any domain names containing "nazi" would be another one that I suspect a few countries might try.)
.com wildcard problem? Where *all* .com addresses always resolved...just much of the time, to a Verisign-run machine with a webserver with ads? If there is a second DNS infrastructure that can be transferred to in an instant, that would put pressure on Verisign not to abuse the DNS system.
While I think that the US has done a pretty good job so far of staying hands-off, and I don't think that many countries would do as good a job, it's not impossible that in the future they'll start to abuse their position and do things like
Second, it's great leverage against Verisign.
Remember the
Finally, IIRC, we use the ISO country codes for CCTLDs. That's probably the thing that most countries want to have input on, since it allows them to legitimize claims to country status in the public's eyes. As long as ISO codes are used, the DNS world isn't making any huge political statements -- it shoves the political burden off to ISO (who probably doesn't want that, but it produces separation of red tape and techies, which is a good thing).
Another genre that hasn't got much attention recently is the graphical adventure game -- Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Secret of Monkey Island, etc) and Sierra (King's Quest, etc) used to make terrific games in this genre, but after a burst of interest, around the time CD-ROM drives were introduced, for the Myst series, I haven't heard much about them.
The Lucasarts adventure game team largely got back together and is still producing games, but no longer at Lucasarts.
If you're interested in playing some of the classic Lucasarts games, you can do so in a nice cross-platform environment using the GPL ScummVM. At least one previously-proprietary game (Beneath a Steel Sky) that has even been released under a free license of some sort and is being distributed on the ScummVM website. I'm not a big fan of Sierra's games, but you can play their classic games using Sarien and FreeSCI.
One thing that I really miss in games these days is the healthy portions of humor present in many of these older adventures -- usually not scatological or crude, but just happy and upbeat tidbits in the game that made you laugh while playing.
The games that I really hated involved you having to perform some off-the-wall action to get a result that made no sense what so ever.
Modern text adventures no longer do that. There were a couple of playability problems that have been largely addressed by modern games. Remember that this is a genre that has seen a huge amount of input from many people fixing irritations (much like the OSS community) and has had two decades to polish out imperfections:
* Parsing -- Well, this will never be perfect as long as we lack human-class AI. However, modern parsing is *much* more reasonable than the original games, where you could play "hunt the verb". There are still a few bad games, however, any decent modern TADS-based game is going to be pretty playable -- might take you a little bit to get used to things, but you aren't going to throw your keyboard across the wall because you couldn't figure out what particular command the game wanted you to use. ADRIFT games are another story, and mostly suck badly at this.
* Missed an action somewhere in the game, now cannot win. Game designers have realized that this is frusterating. Modern text-based adventures don't do this. Basically, if you screwed up and you're going to lose, you lose right away.
* Illogical puzzles. Game designers have realized that most people don't want to spend time trying to SMELL OCTOPUS to have a bucket magically fall out of the air. These are pretty much gone. There are some things, though, that it helps to be familiar with the genre to play. For example, people new to RPGs probably don't immediately come up with the idea of talking to everyone in a town to solve a problem (after all, it's not what one would do in real life). People new to FPSes probably don't immediately think that smashing open every crate in the game (especially in random alleyways and houses) is a good way to get medical kits and ammunition. People new to text-based adventures may not think of trying to LOOK UNDER BED or realize that TADS-based games generally consider EXAMINE CLOSET and SEARCH CLOSET to be two different commands (EXAMINE being equivalent to LOOK AT and SEARCH meaning to try to find anything unusual). Most TADS games come with basic starter help like this that comes up if you type HELP.
If you're looking for a good (IMHO) game, I'd suggest downloading a TADS runtime (frob seems to be the latest-and-greatest implementation for Linux, though regrettably it doesn't use emacs keystrokes) and try Babel. That was the first text adventure game that I ever beat without help or hints.
I'd also like to point out the (even smaller than the standard IF community) AIF community, which produces adult games.
If you've played NetHack and its family of games, you're familiar with the gameplay -- objects can interact in many sophisticated ways, the game is fast and lighthearted, and death may often come randomly.
I generally like Angband and its family of games more than the NetHack family. Objects can interact in fewer ways, the game is generally more serious and takes longer, and the emphasis is on the incredibly vast array of items and powers that you can acquire (and must use cleverly to win the game). ToME is like Angband, but much, much worse.
No, because you can still branch the storyline. The point is that you cannot branch the storyline in such a way that you must eventually lose after that point -- the idea is, if you're going to lose because of an action, you must lose immediately.
Uh.
...Are all still safe.
My understanding is that Tiger has not undergone the degree of review that MD5 and SHA1 have. I've never heard of HAVAL.
My vague understanding is that what the people here have done is made slightly more convenient an *extremely* limited specific attack based on a collision that someone else discovered. Basically, in my understanding, if you start the file/bitstream/whatever that you are hashing with their particular special block, they have a tool that can generate a bitstream that collides with the first one. However, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to have a file that actually starts with this block, unless they're trying to demonstrate the collision.
Now, this is interesting for cryptographers, because there's a few things that were safe to do before that aren't any more. The big one is you can't have a system in which Person A hands Person B a file (of unconstrained content), which Person B then MD5 hashes and signs the hash of and returns to Person A. However, things like:
* Passwords hashed with MD5
* P2P files addressed with an MD5 hash or hash tree
* Linux isos
The Slashdot article seems to be mostly frightening because the submitter, "SiliconEntity", is misleading Slashdot readers in an attempt to have a more exciting story.
The spelling wasn't incorrect... not even for the U.S. It was "international", I wouldn't expect them to edit it anymore than I'd expect them to convert kilometres into miles.
Wrong. That is a British spelling. It is incorrect in US English.
Nice use of "most" there.
Slashdot isn't phenomenal when it comes to editing. I appreciate efforts like this to improve the state of things.
Do you really think the slashdot editor responsible was "making it consistent", or do you think he thought "that's spelled wrong. I'll correct it," and just didn't have a fucking clue that it was actually perfectly correct spelling. I know what I'd put my money on.
So, an editor made a correct editorial decision, and you are putting your money on the fact that he's just uninformed? I mean, fair enough, but that's quite a chip on your shoulder.
Not seeking any flames, but as an Australian citizen of this global community, it's easy to see where this attitude gets the US the reputation that that US *is* the global community. When was the last time you saw a www.website.com.us?
.com got established, the US *was* pretty much the global community. [shrug]
Well, for a long time, and during the period that
I have a friend who stopped reading Slashdot about a year ago. He really enjoyed it at one point, but the proportion of articles that are simply rabble-rousing has reached simply ridiculous levels. I've finally started using an RSS reader, and Slashdot just doesn't warrant fitting on the thing.
I don't mean that article titles like "Emacs sucks Donkey Balls" show up -- mean that you see summary bodies that strongly imply that, for instance, emacs is going to stop being used by anyone, and deliberately lets users draw wrong conclusions.
The problem with this approach is that it isn't sustainable. Yes, readers that are alarmed and upset make for attentive readers. For a while. After a bit, trying to read Slashdot, I start to feel numb from the sheer amount of useless content flooding by.
On my current front page, I see:
"Unisys: We No Longer Have A Way Out". This article implies that some company has completely switched directions and admitted that Linux is better than Windows. Even without reading the article, I am quite sure that the actual situation is a lot less black-and-white. It's nothing more than a summary intended to let people get a bit of Microsoft-smearing in.
"Hardware: Unsecured Wi-Fi to Become Illegal?" Of course, unsecured Wi-Fi isn't going to become illegal on any kind of significant scale. There would be huge numbers of simply uninformed consumers facing penalties. This article is simply present to get people posting about how the big telcos are trying to suppress independent network access, and so on and so forth. It's trying to get people scared. It's absurd.
"Linux: Linspire CEO Offers S. Korea To Replace Windows" Summary implies that Linux is about to replace Windows across a country. Of course, nothing like that is actually going to happen; this is a PR ploy that at best might generate some revenue for Linspire and a few more Linux users.
There is a *huge* amount of interesting news for nerds out there, if you look across the entire world. There are countless people to interview, who would be more than happy to show up on Slashdot. Technocrat.net covers much of the same stuff as Slashdot, and *they* manage to avoid pointless flame-generating articles. Maybe a GIMP how-to with pretty pictures. A walkthrough of a new programming language. I haven't seen coverage of interesting anime stuff for a bit, and I refuse to believe that the anime world is simply dead. A review of a new Linux distribution.
Instead, I see more and more articles that tend more towards propaganda than interesting news.
You know, I use Windows some of the time at work. And during that time, I've seen Lotus Notes' interface, along with Mozilla's interface, the XP widgets, the 2k widgets, WinAMP's bitmapped interface, and have not seen any users have any problem with it.
I don't really think that a slightly different looking interface is a big problem, to be honest. If you stick users in front of Linux workstations and run the same apps that they have years of experience in (like MS Office), the users are going to be able to function about as well.
The reason Windows users get cranky when moving to Linux is because they have expertise in Windows apps that gets thrown out.