If we're speculating that Martian life might have been transported here in the past, what's to say that the reverse hasn't also transpired? Given the amount of material that has been shuttled between the two, I'd almost be surprised if at least some Earth-borne microbial life *hadn't* made the trip to Mars at some point. Not to say that there couldn't be native Martian cellular life as well, but if Earth-borne life had made it to Mars and propagated at some point in the past, then a sample-return mission might actually be carrying organisms that could thrive pretty darn well on Earth - given that they, or their ancestors, already had in the past. And a billion years or so on that desolate rock could only have made them tougher...
There were some very intersting comments in the article about virtual economies and ecologies, and the UO team's experiences with hyperinflation, hoarding, economic collapse, and various emergent properties of the MMORPG that couldn't have been predicted ahead of time. But the best quote in the article was this:
"I found [UO] at once mildly addictive and boring, like the dances I used to go to in high school."
It's too bad that non-Slashdot authors can't be modded up as "insightful".
>Has anyone ever been able to kill Lord British in any Ultimas?
Yes, in several actually.
* In U3 you can lure Lord British outside by sneaking around the moat to a boat hidden on the left side of the castle. Head to the front of the castle, attack the guards, and then wait for LB to run outside. BOOM! Quite satisfying. Unfortunately, he reappears the next time you reenter the castle.
* In U6 you can "kill" LB in his sleep with a glass sword. It's just a bug though, it doesn't really "kill" him per se, he just doesn't wake up.
* In U7 you really can kill LB dead in two different ways. One, you can use the Black Sword to suck his soul (heh heh), and two, if you wait until he's standing right at the entrance to the courtyard, and then double-click on the sign right above his head, the sign falls on his head, killing him deader'n'dead. That was a special easter egg snuck in in honor of a sign at Origin headquarters that really did fall on Garriott's head, sending him to the hospital for stitches right about the time they were finishing up U6.
Carnegie Mellon has a fence which gets painted almost every day, it seems. Nearly anything goes, and while a lot of times it's used for frat party announcements, it also enjoys some other uses from time to time. They claim on campus that it is "the world's most painted object". I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were.
As much as I'd like to criticize the crassness of the whole Russian enterprise, at least it's *something* positive for space tourism, which is more than NASA has ever generated. God knows we'd be waiting around till our nose hair reached down to our armpits before they'd okay such a thing. Maybe because the Russians are doing this, they'll skirt some of the legal issues associated with the American legal system, i.e. five billion pounds of paperwork. After all, if these folks have the money and want to do it, and are prepared to accept the risks, and don't get in the way of the real astronauts and their work - and if the Russians are willing to pony up for whatever resources the "guests" use - then why the heck not?
>Imagine if the AYBABTU trolls get ahold of this. All Your Base
>will no longer be limited to the online world--we'll see it on the
>side of buildings, hanging from bridges, everywhere.
Just wait until Space Invader starts distributing them to his minions...
I thought coral material was alive. Even if it were just skeletal material deposits, I'd think there would be an issue of rejection to be overcome. I'm curious about how they addressed this, and whether the resulting complications would balance against the simplicity of just using the person's own tissues (i.e. a toe).
I first "saw" the Web at a technical conference held by the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh in August 1994, right as I was starting as a graduate student at CMU. The first time I saw Mosaic, it was like, "wow, that's it - that's the interface we've been waiting for, it's going to change everything." I think there were something like 10000 sites on the entire Web at that point; not much more. Our class (of 10) had a "home page" contest, which I actually won, for little more reason than that I had multiple pages linked together, and had more topical links than anyone else.:-) What was it then, HTML 2.0? No Javascript, no DHTML, just straight-text early-day HTML and a little CGI on the side.
Why is it that about half the time, I feel like we had more content then than we do now?
Oh well, just another old geezer reminiscing about the good old days, I guess. Of course, back then, Usenet still had a S/N ratio > 0, too...
> We've heard things like this before, but not as strongly worded
Well, really, we have. And that was 2 years ago. And not much has changed - except a couple more Mars probes have been lost, and the budget has gotten a little smaller. Sigh...
Does anyone bother reading the articles any more?
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 4
You know, aside from the obvious "yet-another-patent"-ness of this, there actually are some interesting points to be made, that if anyone (!) had bothered to read the actual article(s), they might have picked up on.
For instance, "Magnequench" is not some Johnny-come-lately. They started as a division of GE back in the mid-'80s. The magnet technology was originally discovered in 1982, and they've had a production plant in operation since 1986. They have physical plants in both the US and China. They actually produce the products that they are suing over, as opposed to a lot of the business-method parasites usually discussed in these forums.
And incidentally, in 1995 the whole shebang was acquired by a Chinese holding company. Yes, a Chinese company suddenly has the potential to drastically affect a large portion of the American computer-manufacturing market. Does anyone think *that* might have interesting repurcussions worth discussing?
And FYI, here is the link to Magnequench's patent guide, which actually lists all of their patents (see especially 5172751), including their so-called philosophy, in case anyone feels like doing more than just barking today.
That's exactly what I thought of! I couldn't think of the name of it for anything; thank goodness for Slashdot and IMDB. Salvage I was a short-lived mutant of the original 1978 TV movie, Salvage, which really was about someone building a cheap rocket in their backyard - to go to the Moon, no less. They built it out of salvaged junk. And ironically, I think (man it's been a long time since I saw it) that the rocket cost about a quarter-million dollars to build. I wonder if that's where the guy got the idea - he would've been about 20 when it was released.
(Incidentally - "Off Topic"?? Since when did the concept of life-imitating-art-imitating-life become too highbrow for Slashdot? Geez, is it metamod time again already?)
>1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it express?
>Assume you have some C or perl staring at you, any random block of code in any random print-out.
>What does it express? Why should that code be protected expression?
I've been reading Doug Hofsteader's "Godel, Escher, Bach" recently, and he describes all communications as consisting of at least two components: an outer "trigger" message (which identifies the communication as a communication, as opposed to random noise), and the inner, or actual semantic message. A computer program consists of both of these. The "outer" message in code form establishes that this is a computer program, that it works in certain contexts (i.e. a C program won't likely run on my old TI calculator that doesn't have a C compiler), and so on. The "inner" message of the program is the semantic meaning - in the case of DeCSS, that it is "meant" to be used to decrypt DVD streams; that is its intent. Nevertheless, that meaning is *implicit* - it is never stated explicitly within the code itself, other than via the social context the code is distributed within. In a real sense, the computer program itself is not what is being banned; it is the implicit message of DVD decryption. After all, the MPAA would readily ban *all* possible incarnations of the semantic knowledge of how to decrypt their DVDs, not just a given C or Perl program.
What I'm driving at is that, in a sense, this case has little to do with the code itself. In fact, the code can be readily transformed into nothing more or less than a set of functional equations - pure mathematics. It can further be thought of as being devoid of its supposed semantic meaning, or even invested with a different semantic meaning, say as an example of code techniques, or an an entry to an Obfuscated Code contest (and in this case, that's somewhat apropos). The code could even be thought of AS A FORM OF POLITICAL PROTEST - after all, isn't that exactly what a DeCSS T-shirt is?? The T-shirt certainly isn't meant to be used to help decrypt a DVD by hand, is it? So what is *its* semantic meaning? And if it *is* a form of political protest, then how can its expression be constitutionally limited??
>2. What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in its most modern, digital,
>uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form?...perhaps there are others.
First, the argument about requiring access in "the most modern... form" is irrelevant. Given the direction of the MPAA and others, it is clear that soon, all new works *would* or *could* be made available only in ways that would prevent practically all fair use; therefore, it doesn't matter whether there are older forms of current works or not.
Second, to me, the most striking and necessary applications of fair use are for satire and parody. Some of the best pieces of literature, music, and fiction in the Western world have been direct parodies of other works. Parody and satire have repeatedly been used to bring about social and political change. And if in the future new works are made available only in formats that *prevent* the application of fair use (by preventing copying of even small pieces of a copyrighted work, like designs, themes, graphic patterns, and so on), then we will have lost a significant tool for understanding our own culture. That is simply not a good price to pay in exchange for corporate IP rights. DMCA is simply bad law, and a bad deal.
There are probably multiple applications of this to gaming, some good, and some not-so-good. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this story was all the criticisms that were leveled at Myst for its use of sound effects-based puzzles. People pointed out, rightly, that some people either couldn't hear the sound, or couldn't process the stereo properly, and so the game's design inherently eliminated those people from playing. Not that no games should ever use sound as a cue, but the point was that if it is made solely integral to a puzzle or obstacle, then you're immediately prohibiting those people with various disabilities that might prevent them from utilizing the game in the same way as others from enjoying it, or indeed (certainly in the case of Myst) from even being able to complete it at all.
It could also be used for some secondary cues though. One game which popped to mind was Thief, which used stereo sound and surround-sound to enhance the gameplay (tremendously) by giving environmental cues to the location of guards as the sounds of their footsteps propagated through various materials. One could imagine a next-generation Thief-like game that used surround-lights to indicate the ambient level of shadow where the character was standing. Since that is already determinable from the existing screen, the extra light would just serve as a mood-enhancing option, or possibly as an extra sensory input (just as use of surround-sound with Thief enhanced gameplay over just using plain stereo, but didn't eliminate stereo-sound users from playing the game).
1. The primary reason CERT usually delays releasing security holes to the public is so that government agencies can know about them before they become widely known as exploits. How will their selling this information to corporations affect the security of those government agencies? Was this even a concern in their decision? Isn't that their primary reason for *existing*?
2. Along the same lines as above, this "service" is only "valuable" if it really does provide "early" information. All it takes is one mischievous (or pissed) net admin who gets the early releases from his boss at one of these companies, and the information would be released to everyone, regardless of whether the prescribed interval has passed or not. So... how does this "service" protect the security of the companies who pay for it, either, now that anybody and their brother among their customer base could be a potential security threat? Will the companies that sign on have to sign agreements or waivers to promise not to tell anyone about the security holes CERT tells them about? And if so... how screwed up is that??
Incidentally, the copyrights on CERT advisories are held by Carnegie Mellon University, unless I'm mistaken. Does a cut of the proceeds to this go to them? If so (being a CMU grad myself), well, okay then.:-)
One more thing, the ISA has a FAQ (which doesn't address any of the above).
>When I was in high school the chemistry teacher tried to show me this
>'periodic table' thing. It was totally useless. All it did was tell
>you where certain elements were. It didn't do anything useful,
>like showing you how to create a bomb in your basement.
THANK you. Actually, the period chart is the first thing I thought of when reading that article: "Damn, scientists have found we're only made up of a couple dozen fundamental elements. What a crock! That can't POSSIBLY explain our level of complexity. They must all be wrong!" Etc...
Geez. I can't believe Luddite crap like this gets the editorial thumbs up here. Maybe Slashdot needs a new topic of "PseudoScience" for crappy articles like this.
>That quote, spoken by Ronald Reagan in 1986 (and paraphrased from a WW2 U.S. airman)
Er, not quite. The quote is from the poem "High Flight", by John Gillespie McGee, Jr., an American pilot flying with the Royal Canadian Air Force, who was killed during a training mission in 1941. The poem is supposed to symbolize the transcendence of flight, regardless of nationality. Reagan may have quoted the poem, but it had been used for years in many contexts. And I can't think of a better application of a poem named "High Flight" than for the first flight of Man off his home world.
>Beating wizrobes with bombs when you don't have the wand is quite frustrating, isn't it?
Well, yes, but that's actually part of the trick - you can sneak into the 6th dungeon fairly early on and snatch the wand, bypassing most of the combat. That can be used like a sword on just about everything, except those darn Darknut knight guys... those just about require bombs. Beating a room full of blue Darknuts with just the bombs on your back can be incredibly frustrating! Still, it can be done.
Unfortunately, it's not so easy to steal the wand in the second quest - there are other items you have to retrieve first, as I recall. But you can still get to it a lot earlier than you'd think.
>It makes me happy to see that somebody else wasted their precious youth
>in the same way that I did.
My brothers and I played the original Zelda to death. One thing we loved was the flexibility - you could skip certain items or visit the dungeons out of order to grab special weapons, and that allowed you to play the game in a somewhat different order or fashion than the designer intended.
At one point we decided to see if we could play through the game without getting the final sword. Turns out you can, the enemies just take 2X hits. Harder, but not impossible. Then we decided to see if we could do it without the intermediate sword either. Again, you can, but everything takes 4X hits.
However, at some point it occurred to me that maybe, you could play through the game without any sword *at all*. It seemed impossible, since the first thing you do on the first screen of the game is pick up the first (wooden) sword. Also, you start with no other items, weapons or money. However, there are certain places where you can find coins, and certain items you can buy to get started...
In short, it turns out you *can* play through the entire game, in *both* quests, without ever getting a sword at all. It requires quite a bit of creativity and figuring out alternate weapons to use against different monsters, but in every instance it is possible to find an alternate way to pass each game obstacle. The only thing you can't do is defeat Ganon at the end of the game, as that really does require a sword (though any sword, so even the initial wooden sword works there). But you can go through the entire game, right up to the last room, without any sword at all.
I was impressed that there was so much flexibility built into the game - in most games, creature X can only be defeated by weapon Y, there's only one path to each item, one possible order you can do things in, etc. Zelda, in contrast, was *very* well designed to allow alternate solutions to just about everything, right up to the extreme of never using a primary weapon at all.
So if anyone is in search of a challenge (i.e. buggered bored:-), here's one from the annals of Classic Games: "beat" Zelda (that is, get to the last room with Ganon) without ever picking up a sword.
>I didn't play Uo (at least not for more than ten minutes), but I seem to recall that
>soon after it went on line there were massive complaints about the servers not
>staying up, bugs in the software - [snip]
Actually Origin's problems with UO started long before the game was released. Originally UO (which "alpha" tested in April of '96) was supposed to be released by October of that year. I actually spoke with the project lead at a convention during that time, and they were sure they would make that schedule. In actuality, it took another year-and-more to get even the buggiest first product out the door. In the meantime, they had to drop support and development resources from practically everything else - and notably from Ultima 9 - as a result of the development fiasco that UO became. And of course after UO was released, the situation just seemed to spiral out of control. But that was what I meant by saying that UO was at the root of their problems: long before UO was actually released, the standalone Ultima series was already doomed.
>Maybe that, in the long term, was the right decision.
Maybe - if by "right decision" you mean the death of their premiere product line. Make no mistake, they've made a buttload of money off of UO - probably more than they ever would have made from any number of titles in the standalone series. On the other hand, the company is now effectively *dead* outside of that one product, and their entire fan base of 20+ years was alienated and moved on. "Right decision"? *shrug* You make the call. I certainly have my opinion.
Actually, the answer is "Ultima Underworld", though Origin would never admit it.:-)
And there are good arguments to be made for several of the others in the cardinal series as well. Ultima 7 was probably the most in-depth "world" they ever did. Serpent Isle is probably the longest and most intense CRPG in the series, though riddled with too many bugs to make it very playable. Ultima 5 also gets votes for its plot and the level of interactivity with the game world, which was pretty darn nice way back in 1987. But Underworld gets my vote for being most revolutionary and influential - unless you want to argue about the original Ultima title itself or something.
> The fact is that only fun games can make serious money.
Heh... if that were true, we wouldn't have Barbie on the top of the charts. And Deer Hunter. And Millionaire. And...
Unfortunately it's getting harder and harder to have shelf space unless you belong to an EA. 'Net distribution still isn't big enough of a factor to offset that; look at what happened with FireTeam (I'd include a link, but developer Multitude has shut down).
Mind you, it's still possible to have quality and originality come out of an EA. SSX is a hell of a lot of fun, for instance. But it's more evolution than revolution. The truly original stuff always comes from a Bullfrog or an Origin, who have the guts to take a chance to begin with. And once they're 0wn3d, the ability and/or incentive for that goes away.
As far as the fate of Origin goes, they're as much to blame for what happened as EA. One thing sealed the fate of Origin, and that was UO. Everything went onto the pyre of UO, and everything else went to the back burner. Had U9 actually been ready by late '96/early '97 like it was supposed to, things would have worked out very differently for them, one would suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're speculating that Martian life might have been transported here in the past, what's to say that the reverse hasn't also transpired? Given the amount of material that has been shuttled between the two, I'd almost be surprised if at least some Earth-borne microbial life *hadn't* made the trip to Mars at some point. Not to say that there couldn't be native Martian cellular life as well, but if Earth-borne life had made it to Mars and propagated at some point in the past, then a sample-return mission might actually be carrying organisms that could thrive pretty darn well on Earth - given that they, or their ancestors, already had in the past. And a billion years or so on that desolate rock could only have made them tougher...
There were some very intersting comments in the article about virtual economies and ecologies, and the UO team's experiences with hyperinflation, hoarding, economic collapse, and various emergent properties of the MMORPG that couldn't have been predicted ahead of time. But the best quote in the article was this:
"I found [UO] at once mildly addictive and boring, like the dances I used to go to in high school."
It's too bad that non-Slashdot authors can't be modded up as "insightful".
>Has anyone ever been able to kill Lord British in any Ultimas?
Yes, in several actually.
* In U3 you can lure Lord British outside by sneaking around the moat to a boat hidden on the left side of the castle. Head to the front of the castle, attack the guards, and then wait for LB to run outside. BOOM! Quite satisfying. Unfortunately, he reappears the next time you reenter the castle.
* In U6 you can "kill" LB in his sleep with a glass sword. It's just a bug though, it doesn't really "kill" him per se, he just doesn't wake up.
* In U7 you really can kill LB dead in two different ways. One, you can use the Black Sword to suck his soul (heh heh), and two, if you wait until he's standing right at the entrance to the courtyard, and then double-click on the sign right above his head, the sign falls on his head, killing him deader'n'dead. That was a special easter egg snuck in in honor of a sign at Origin headquarters that really did fall on Garriott's head, sending him to the hospital for stitches right about the time they were finishing up U6.
Carnegie Mellon has a fence which gets painted almost every day, it seems. Nearly anything goes, and while a lot of times it's used for frat party announcements, it also enjoys some other uses from time to time. They claim on campus that it is "the world's most painted object". I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were.
Indeed. Sounds like someone over at Something Awful needs to whip up another of those war posters:
"When you download Microsoft,
you're downloading COMMUNISM!"
[er, warning, attention: humor attempted above.]
As much as I'd like to criticize the crassness of the whole Russian enterprise, at least it's *something* positive for space tourism, which is more than NASA has ever generated. God knows we'd be waiting around till our nose hair reached down to our armpits before they'd okay such a thing. Maybe because the Russians are doing this, they'll skirt some of the legal issues associated with the American legal system, i.e. five billion pounds of paperwork. After all, if these folks have the money and want to do it, and are prepared to accept the risks, and don't get in the way of the real astronauts and their work - and if the Russians are willing to pony up for whatever resources the "guests" use - then why the heck not?
>will no longer be limited to the online world--we'll see it on the
>side of buildings, hanging from bridges, everywhere.
Just wait until Space Invader starts distributing them to his minions...
I thought coral material was alive. Even if it were just skeletal material deposits, I'd think there would be an issue of rejection to be overcome. I'm curious about how they addressed this, and whether the resulting complications would balance against the simplicity of just using the person's own tissues (i.e. a toe).
I first "saw" the Web at a technical conference held by the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh in August 1994, right as I was starting as a graduate student at CMU. The first time I saw Mosaic, it was like, "wow, that's it - that's the interface we've been waiting for, it's going to change everything." I think there were something like 10000 sites on the entire Web at that point; not much more. Our class (of 10) had a "home page" contest, which I actually won, for little more reason than that I had multiple pages linked together, and had more topical links than anyone else. :-) What was it then, HTML 2.0? No Javascript, no DHTML, just straight-text early-day HTML and a little CGI on the side.
Why is it that about half the time, I feel like we had more content then than we do now?
Oh well, just another old geezer reminiscing about the good old days, I guess. Of course, back then, Usenet still had a S/N ratio > 0, too...
> We've heard things like this before, but not as strongly worded
Well, really, we have. And that was 2 years ago. And not much has changed - except a couple more Mars probes have been lost, and the budget has gotten a little smaller. Sigh...
You know, aside from the obvious "yet-another-patent"-ness of this, there actually are some interesting points to be made, that if anyone (!) had bothered to read the actual article(s), they might have picked up on.
For instance, "Magnequench" is not some Johnny-come-lately. They started as a division of GE back in the mid-'80s. The magnet technology was originally discovered in 1982, and they've had a production plant in operation since 1986. They have physical plants in both the US and China. They actually produce the products that they are suing over, as opposed to a lot of the business-method parasites usually discussed in these forums.
And incidentally, in 1995 the whole shebang was acquired by a Chinese holding company. Yes, a Chinese company suddenly has the potential to drastically affect a large portion of the American computer-manufacturing market. Does anyone think *that* might have interesting repurcussions worth discussing?
And FYI, here is the link to Magnequench's patent guide, which actually lists all of their patents (see especially 5172751), including their so-called philosophy, in case anyone feels like doing more than just barking today.
That's exactly what I thought of! I couldn't think of the name of it for anything; thank goodness for Slashdot and IMDB. Salvage I was a short-lived mutant of the original 1978 TV movie, Salvage, which really was about someone building a cheap rocket in their backyard - to go to the Moon, no less. They built it out of salvaged junk. And ironically, I think (man it's been a long time since I saw it) that the rocket cost about a quarter-million dollars to build. I wonder if that's where the guy got the idea - he would've been about 20 when it was released.
(Incidentally - "Off Topic"?? Since when did the concept of life-imitating-art-imitating-life become too highbrow for Slashdot? Geez, is it metamod time again already?)
>1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it express?
...perhaps there are others.
>Assume you have some C or perl staring at you, any random block of code in any random print-out.
>What does it express? Why should that code be protected expression?
I've been reading Doug Hofsteader's "Godel, Escher, Bach" recently, and he describes all communications as consisting of at least two components: an outer "trigger" message (which identifies the communication as a communication, as opposed to random noise), and the inner, or actual semantic message. A computer program consists of both of these. The "outer" message in code form establishes that this is a computer program, that it works in certain contexts (i.e. a C program won't likely run on my old TI calculator that doesn't have a C compiler), and so on. The "inner" message of the program is the semantic meaning - in the case of DeCSS, that it is "meant" to be used to decrypt DVD streams; that is its intent. Nevertheless, that meaning is *implicit* - it is never stated explicitly within the code itself, other than via the social context the code is distributed within. In a real sense, the computer program itself is not what is being banned; it is the implicit message of DVD decryption. After all, the MPAA would readily ban *all* possible incarnations of the semantic knowledge of how to decrypt their DVDs, not just a given C or Perl program.
What I'm driving at is that, in a sense, this case has little to do with the code itself. In fact, the code can be readily transformed into nothing more or less than a set of functional equations - pure mathematics. It can further be thought of as being devoid of its supposed semantic meaning, or even invested with a different semantic meaning, say as an example of code techniques, or an an entry to an Obfuscated Code contest (and in this case, that's somewhat apropos). The code could even be thought of AS A FORM OF POLITICAL PROTEST - after all, isn't that exactly what a DeCSS T-shirt is?? The T-shirt certainly isn't meant to be used to help decrypt a DVD by hand, is it? So what is *its* semantic meaning? And if it *is* a form of political protest, then how can its expression be constitutionally limited??
>2. What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in its most modern, digital,
>uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form?
First, the argument about requiring access in "the most modern... form" is irrelevant. Given the direction of the MPAA and others, it is clear that soon, all new works *would* or *could* be made available only in ways that would prevent practically all fair use; therefore, it doesn't matter whether there are older forms of current works or not.
Second, to me, the most striking and necessary applications of fair use are for satire and parody. Some of the best pieces of literature, music, and fiction in the Western world have been direct parodies of other works. Parody and satire have repeatedly been used to bring about social and political change. And if in the future new works are made available only in formats that *prevent* the application of fair use (by preventing copying of even small pieces of a copyrighted work, like designs, themes, graphic patterns, and so on), then we will have lost a significant tool for understanding our own culture. That is simply not a good price to pay in exchange for corporate IP rights. DMCA is simply bad law, and a bad deal.
There are probably multiple applications of this to gaming, some good, and some not-so-good. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this story was all the criticisms that were leveled at Myst for its use of sound effects-based puzzles. People pointed out, rightly, that some people either couldn't hear the sound, or couldn't process the stereo properly, and so the game's design inherently eliminated those people from playing. Not that no games should ever use sound as a cue, but the point was that if it is made solely integral to a puzzle or obstacle, then you're immediately prohibiting those people with various disabilities that might prevent them from utilizing the game in the same way as others from enjoying it, or indeed (certainly in the case of Myst) from even being able to complete it at all.
It could also be used for some secondary cues though. One game which popped to mind was Thief, which used stereo sound and surround-sound to enhance the gameplay (tremendously) by giving environmental cues to the location of guards as the sounds of their footsteps propagated through various materials. One could imagine a next-generation Thief-like game that used surround-lights to indicate the ambient level of shadow where the character was standing. Since that is already determinable from the existing screen, the extra light would just serve as a mood-enhancing option, or possibly as an extra sensory input (just as use of surround-sound with Thief enhanced gameplay over just using plain stereo, but didn't eliminate stereo-sound users from playing the game).
2. Along the same lines as above, this "service" is only "valuable" if it really does provide "early" information. All it takes is one mischievous (or pissed) net admin who gets the early releases from his boss at one of these companies, and the information would be released to everyone, regardless of whether the prescribed interval has passed or not. So... how does this "service" protect the security of the companies who pay for it, either, now that anybody and their brother among their customer base could be a potential security threat? Will the companies that sign on have to sign agreements or waivers to promise not to tell anyone about the security holes CERT tells them about? And if so... how screwed up is that??
Incidentally, the copyrights on CERT advisories are held by Carnegie Mellon University, unless I'm mistaken. Does a cut of the proceeds to this go to them? If so (being a CMU grad myself), well, okay then. :-)
One more thing, the ISA has a FAQ (which doesn't address any of the above).
>When I was in high school the chemistry teacher tried to show me this
>'periodic table' thing. It was totally useless. All it did was tell
>you where certain elements were. It didn't do anything useful,
>like showing you how to create a bomb in your basement.
THANK you. Actually, the period chart is the first thing I thought of when reading that article: "Damn, scientists have found we're only made up of a couple dozen fundamental elements. What a crock! That can't POSSIBLY explain our level of complexity. They must all be wrong!" Etc...
Geez. I can't believe Luddite crap like this gets the editorial thumbs up here. Maybe Slashdot needs a new topic of "PseudoScience" for crappy articles like this.
>That quote, spoken by Ronald Reagan in 1986 (and paraphrased from a WW2 U.S. airman)
Er, not quite. The quote is from the poem "High Flight", by John Gillespie McGee, Jr., an American pilot flying with the Royal Canadian Air Force, who was killed during a training mission in 1941. The poem is supposed to symbolize the transcendence of flight, regardless of nationality. Reagan may have quoted the poem, but it had been used for years in many contexts. And I can't think of a better application of a poem named "High Flight" than for the first flight of Man off his home world.
>While I applaud the fact that you exploring the playability of your
:-)
>games to the extreme, HOW MUCH FREE TIME DO YOU REALLY HAVE?
Let's see, I think that was around the time of my sophomore year in college. So the answer then was - quite a bit.
>Beating wizrobes with bombs when you don't have the wand is quite frustrating, isn't it?
:-)
Well, yes, but that's actually part of the trick - you can sneak into the 6th dungeon fairly early on and snatch the wand, bypassing most of the combat. That can be used like a sword on just about everything, except those darn Darknut knight guys... those just about require bombs. Beating a room full of blue Darknuts with just the bombs on your back can be incredibly frustrating! Still, it can be done.
Unfortunately, it's not so easy to steal the wand in the second quest - there are other items you have to retrieve first, as I recall. But you can still get to it a lot earlier than you'd think.
>It makes me happy to see that somebody else wasted their precious youth
>in the same way that I did.
Hear hear!
Hey, finally a real use for my mp3 player :-)
My brothers and I played the original Zelda to death. One thing we loved was the flexibility - you could skip certain items or visit the dungeons out of order to grab special weapons, and that allowed you to play the game in a somewhat different order or fashion than the designer intended.
:-), here's one from the annals of Classic Games: "beat" Zelda (that is, get to the last room with Ganon) without ever picking up a sword.
At one point we decided to see if we could play through the game without getting the final sword. Turns out you can, the enemies just take 2X hits. Harder, but not impossible. Then we decided to see if we could do it without the intermediate sword either. Again, you can, but everything takes 4X hits.
However, at some point it occurred to me that maybe, you could play through the game without any sword *at all*. It seemed impossible, since the first thing you do on the first screen of the game is pick up the first (wooden) sword. Also, you start with no other items, weapons or money. However, there are certain places where you can find coins, and certain items you can buy to get started...
In short, it turns out you *can* play through the entire game, in *both* quests, without ever getting a sword at all. It requires quite a bit of creativity and figuring out alternate weapons to use against different monsters, but in every instance it is possible to find an alternate way to pass each game obstacle. The only thing you can't do is defeat Ganon at the end of the game, as that really does require a sword (though any sword, so even the initial wooden sword works there). But you can go through the entire game, right up to the last room, without any sword at all.
I was impressed that there was so much flexibility built into the game - in most games, creature X can only be defeated by weapon Y, there's only one path to each item, one possible order you can do things in, etc. Zelda, in contrast, was *very* well designed to allow alternate solutions to just about everything, right up to the extreme of never using a primary weapon at all.
So if anyone is in search of a challenge (i.e. buggered bored
>I didn't play Uo (at least not for more than ten minutes), but I seem to recall that
>soon after it went on line there were massive complaints about the servers not
>staying up, bugs in the software - [snip]
Actually Origin's problems with UO started long before the game was released. Originally UO (which "alpha" tested in April of '96) was supposed to be released by October of that year. I actually spoke with the project lead at a convention during that time, and they were sure they would make that schedule. In actuality, it took another year-and-more to get even the buggiest first product out the door. In the meantime, they had to drop support and development resources from practically everything else - and notably from Ultima 9 - as a result of the development fiasco that UO became. And of course after UO was released, the situation just seemed to spiral out of control. But that was what I meant by saying that UO was at the root of their problems: long before UO was actually released, the standalone Ultima series was already doomed.
>Maybe that, in the long term, was the right decision.
Maybe - if by "right decision" you mean the death of their premiere product line. Make no mistake, they've made a buttload of money off of UO - probably more than they ever would have made from any number of titles in the standalone series. On the other hand, the company is now effectively *dead* outside of that one product, and their entire fan base of 20+ years was alienated and moved on. "Right decision"? *shrug* You make the call. I certainly have my opinion.
>(BTW, the answer is obviously "Ultima IV")
:-)
Actually, the answer is "Ultima Underworld", though Origin would never admit it.
And there are good arguments to be made for several of the others in the cardinal series as well. Ultima 7 was probably the most in-depth "world" they ever did. Serpent Isle is probably the longest and most intense CRPG in the series, though riddled with too many bugs to make it very playable. Ultima 5 also gets votes for its plot and the level of interactivity with the game world, which was pretty darn nice way back in 1987. But Underworld gets my vote for being most revolutionary and influential - unless you want to argue about the original Ultima title itself or something.
Heh... if that were true, we wouldn't have Barbie on the top of the charts. And Deer Hunter. And Millionaire. And...
Unfortunately it's getting harder and harder to have shelf space unless you belong to an EA. 'Net distribution still isn't big enough of a factor to offset that; look at what happened with FireTeam (I'd include a link, but developer Multitude has shut down).
Mind you, it's still possible to have quality and originality come out of an EA. SSX is a hell of a lot of fun, for instance. But it's more evolution than revolution. The truly original stuff always comes from a Bullfrog or an Origin, who have the guts to take a chance to begin with. And once they're 0wn3d, the ability and/or incentive for that goes away.
As far as the fate of Origin goes, they're as much to blame for what happened as EA. One thing sealed the fate of Origin, and that was UO. Everything went onto the pyre of UO, and everything else went to the back burner. Had U9 actually been ready by late '96/early '97 like it was supposed to, things would have worked out very differently for them, one would suppose.
"We have a lot to learn from creatures in the natural world. They have been working on difficult problems much longer than we have."