It Wasn't Columbine! It's Always Been Like This...
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The Columbine tragedy planted the idea of a certain kind of 'bad kid' into the American consciousness. He isn't social, he doesn't play sports, doesn't dress right.
Columbine didn't do this, it's always been the case. Be it geeks & nerds with their computers or not.
For the most part society has always viewed different as being bad.
Look at racism and other ethinc discrimination: they're not my race/colour, so they must be bad!
Sexual orientation: he's gay, so he doesn't get the same rights. He's also open season for a beating.
Same with geeks and nerds: they don't play sports, they like computers, they must be screwed up.
Frankly people I think that as geeks we've had to put up with a hell of a lot less than either one of the two groups I've mentioned! Ya it sucks sometimes, but we still get off easy. I haven't heard of geek-bashing (as in beating to the point of death, or near death), nor have I heard of a geek not being allowed to vote or made to use a back door. It's not right, but it isn't new either.
The problem is societies general intolerance for anything different... not some very disturbed individuals who also happen to be nerdy going postal in a school.
VeriSign stands to lose $100 million if the appeal court decides in favour of Kremen. It is doubly concerned however that the case will be used as a foundation for thousands of similar cases in which the registrar and owner of the.com top-level domain has acted negligently.
Wow, a business being held accountable for their actions? Who would have thought!
Of course VeriSign would have no problem nuking your domain should you fail to pay them for registering your domain name to you. By definition then you are paying for the domain name to be registered to you.
If I purchased a car and the dealership turned around and gave my car to someone else do you think they'd get away with it for long?
If I order food from a restaraunt and they make an error on my order do they turn around and tell my "Tough sh*t"?
Why then, if someone were to pay VeriSign for a service, should VeriSign not be accountable for said paid for service?
I side on the fence that if you care enough about privacy to make it your job to fight it, you clearly have something to hide.
Since you claim to have nothing to hide, and there should be no concern for privacy, please post your full name and address. I'll be by shortly with a few miniature camera's to install in your bedroom, bathroom, and living room. A few taps for the phone, and other assorted recording and monitoring device. Please also pop the hood on your car so I can install the GPS tracking system. Got a cell phone? I'll need your ESN and number please.
What? You don't want to provide that? Not even your name, phone number, and address? Why ever not? I though you didn't think privacy mattered!
I'm seeing a lot of posts in this thread about how wonderful this would be for things like stand alone servers that can now store updates, etc, etc.
I agree, there are some good uses here... but for many of the suggested apps, why can't I do this already? I believe it's called a multisession CD.
I have a CD, I burn a copy and leave the disc open. Vola, I now have a disc I can continue to add data on to: be it maps, server configs, what have you.
Granted this would mean the functionality for automatically saving a game to disc wouldn't be built into software sold on conventional pressed CD's, but for many of the idea's people are suggesting for these special discs this would work just fine... and be much cheaper.
1) Release CD of Music, Software, etc.
2) Place in computer and run program
3) Program reads BIOS, Hardware config, Windows GUI, etc.
4) Program writes this data to CD-R portion
5) Use CD on a different machine -- whoops data doesn't match calling "Piracy Police"
Good plan, but you forgot the most important part:
6) Profit!!
I worry that we're leaving a trial of breadcrumbs for conquering alien races to find us. fight the future.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! No, make the pain stop! You are causing me a Battlefield Earth flashback! Not only did I watch that evil movie, I've read the damned book years before.
Don't you know that's exactly how Psychlo's found Earth in the first place?
Can I believe that I actually know that? Please, shoot me now before the Hubbard cultists get me!
Our domain is productive.com so any email to whatever (at) productive.com comes back to the admin email accounts. As you can probably guess there's quite a few spammers that use productive.com as reply-to.
Given that you just entered the domain name not once, but twice, and your post is likely to be seen my thousands, spidered, and google-cached, I take it that you don't like your mail admin very much, do you?
Am I the only one to see a whole generation being wasted by such games like CS? I know ppl who play it 12 hours a day, god damn it! If someone would compare the degeneration of health/brain etc from CS vs. Grass, I bet CS would win.
Frankly, if you're someone who routinely writes "ppl" in place of "people" you're already demonstrating such severe degeneration of health/brain that you may already be a lost cause.
Sooo...what I wanted to say is that I hope that someone f**k the game-servers up so badly that these trapped gamerz can see what life has to offer!
Might I suggest you take some of the same advice you give to these "gamerz" and check out what life has to offer. It appears to be passing you by.
I am not an electrician! Dont do this unless you know what you're doing! You can get electrocuted by phone lines!!
Unless things are a lot different in Canada you cannot get electrocuted by a phone line. Electric line yes, but not a phone line.
I laughed at the electrocuted part myself. No, not even in Canada will the phone line kill you...
But, you can get one hell of a headache:
I was helping a friend wire a new jack up for his phone. Unfortunately the jack was located under his rather large, heavy desk. After I told him how to wire it up he decided that 'Oh, that's easy! I'll do it.' So, ok, yes, it is easy, go for it. But make sure you don't touch the bare wires. It won't really harm you, but if the phone should ring it can be a tad nasty.
Sure, no problem he says and climbes under the desk. Less then a minute later I suddenly hear a gasp followed by a loud BANG... the bang of his head smashing into the top of the desk.
Seems he touched the wires and was unlucky enough to be doing so when it rang. The sensation surprised him so badly he attemped to leap backwards - hard to do when crouched under a desk. I laughed so hard I could barely finish the job for him! (hey Fred, if you're reading "Hi!":) )
This is a story on ASCII art, right? I just clicked on one of the links from the main page blub and it took me over to a Flash movie.
You mean I have to use Flash to see ASCII? Damn, you kids today have it easy! Back in my day all we had were ASCII Terminal Programs and all we could access was ASCII and... oh, wait...
Besides which said ASCII art turns out to be some crazy ass Japanese porn animation with sound... using ASCII characters (in the above mentioned Flash format). Weird weird weird.
Nihon-go wa dewa arimasen
Or something like that...:)
I think I'm going to record that soundtrack and blast it from my car. Should be interesting to see what looks I get!
What If It's the Only Way?
on
Advergames
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Point being, if someone is willing to have advertisements put in their art, it probably isn't of much artistic value to begin with.
As someone who dabbles in this sort of thing let me add my two cents:
What if it is the only way? Games cost money... or at least time. Lots of time, even for a simple one.
Sure, I can say I'll develop a game for the fun of it (it IS fun), but strictly fun is not going to pay my mortgage. And without doing that I'm not going to be writing much of anything... it's cold outside!
On the other hand, if I make the game involve a product or promotional concept, then someone might be willing to pay me to have the fun of writing a game!
Works all 'round, I have fun writing it, people have fun playing it, I get $$, the client gets increased sales. It's pretty well win win.
Would I rather be able to just write what I want? Sure, I'd also like a Ferrari, and a Jacuzzi, while we're at it.
(actually I do write some things for the heck of it from time to time. Help me stress test one I'm writing right now:) Blockwars. It's a 1-10 person elimination style multiplayer game)
However, another much better method is this: Make a clone of John, keep its brain blank as you grow it (maybe in an accelerated fashion) to John's size, and then transfer John's thoughts to that clone. Of course that requires very advanced brain knowledge to "read" and "write" a brain - assuming that's even possible.
But that would give you immortality (so long as you keep your brain safe).
This would only give you pseudo immortality. Consider:
You have the original and make a copy of it, then place the copy into the new body. For a brief period there are now two copies of you.
Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on.
Personally I'm not sure I like that a whole lot. It might be nice to know that my personality will go on, but it still is not me.
The only way I can see this sort of working is if the mind is transfered rather than copied. Then, arguably, the original doesn't have to die as well. Though this transfer would likely be a copy and wipe, which has the same problem as above.
Does anyone else notice that the scores seem to correlate with distance from the north pole? I've also noticed that the UN "best countries to live in" list often shows the same tendency.
Not really. Check out Russia at 121st place. Or Italy at 40th vs South Africa at 26th.
Mostly it's an issue of developed vs developing: typically developed nations have a better standing than developing... with some disturbing exceptions (ie Italy ranking so low, or Costa Rica beating the United States).
I can only be thankful that I live in the land of Freedom to the south. Such behavior would even make people like John Ashcroft blush.
That's a pretty ignorant statement to be making my American friend.
First off it's an issue regarding a fair trial and juries. But even aside from that:
You claim that this behavior would make Americans blush? Well, start blushing:
If you bother to check out the Reporters Without Bordersworldwide press freedom index you would see that the United States ranks a paltry 17th with a score of 4,75. Meanwhile, Canda ranks 5th (while 1st through 4th are a tie at 0,50 so arguably Canada is 2nd) with a 0,75. And yes, lower is better.
So, just how free is your press in the "land of Freedom to the South"? Apparently not as free as you thought.
And the press is free to call attention to it, and we're free to criticize it. You don't like it, move to North Korea.
Or you could live in the United States. For a country that constantly screams about freedoms, their freedom of the press doesn't rate all that highly.
Sorry to those who feel it is OT. I just really hate it when people make remarks like "move to North Korea". (especially as, I suspect, said person is an American. Though I could be wrong on that).
Oh Come On! Wire the PYRAMIDS?!
on
1KM 802.11b @ 2MB
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Now if they were wiring all the pyramids with net access or something. then that would be cool.
Why? Do you feel that while you are checking out the bowels of Khufu's pad you'll suddenly really need to check your E-Mail on that little PDA?
If the answser is Yes to the above question you need to logout right now and run (don't walk) away from the computer. You are hearby banned from all eletronic gizmo's for the period of 48 hours.
Ok, I know a lot of people are posting that this must be some kind of joke, that it's a stupid idea, etc etc.
Here is why I think this is cool: history, art.
To those of use who have been tinkering since the days before the PC will likely remember demos and what they meant.
They were the cutting edge, pushing technology to the max and sometimes beyond (Future Crew, in the first Unreal demo, came up with trick that allowed them to display a very large number of colours on the screen simultaneously. This was around the EGA and VGA 16 days IIRC. What they did, when they did it, was thought to have been impossible)
When you wanted to see what the next games would be able to do, you watched the latest demos. That was the ultimate demonstration of what the hardware could do.
It was also totally non-commercial. No sponsors, no ads. Just groups of people finding out what their boxes could do... artistically. That was the best part. It wasn't just a technical demonstration, it was art, with incredibly graphics, music, and animations.
One of the few commercial entities to get involved in any way was Advanced Gravis, who gave away Gravis Ultrasound soundcards to demo & game makers, no strings attached, then backed it up with great tech support!
So what does this matter now? It's a great example of what efficient coding can do. Some of these things were under 16k! Inspiration too, check out what can be done if you try.
And, of course, to those of us who remember it's a great chance to look back on something that gave us a lot of joy. I don't know how many hours I spent downloading demos on my C64 and PC... 'borrowing' access to Carleton Universities net access so I could download Second Reality when it first came out... it was fun. It's not really practical to configure the old hardware to play them again... it could take a lot of tweeking.
And hey, if anyone has the Circle A demo for the C64 drop me a mail!
(btw, I realize the demo scene isn't dead, but it doesn't seem to have the same following it once did. Besides, I'm referring to having a collection of all the old demos not just the latest ones)
There is no such thing as a "loosing side". There is such a thing as a "losing side".
Perhaps you were confused becouse "lose" is related to "loss" and "lost", each which has one 'o' and "loose" (as in your mother) rhymes with "caboose", "moose", and "goose". The only exception to this excellent rule of thumb is "choose". It isn't spelled with one 'o', is that "chose" is already a word.
Perhaps you should run your own spell checker before submitting a criticism of another. It's a good practice, because if you don't you may look a little foolish.
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Columbine didn't do this, it's always been the case. Be it geeks & nerds with their computers or not.
For the most part society has always viewed different as being bad.
Look at racism and other ethinc discrimination: they're not my race/colour, so they must be bad!
Sexual orientation: he's gay, so he doesn't get the same rights. He's also open season for a beating.
Same with geeks and nerds: they don't play sports, they like computers, they must be screwed up.
Frankly people I think that as geeks we've had to put up with a hell of a lot less than either one of the two groups I've mentioned! Ya it sucks sometimes, but we still get off easy. I haven't heard of geek-bashing (as in beating to the point of death, or near death), nor have I heard of a geek not being allowed to vote or made to use a back door. It's not right, but it isn't new either.
The problem is societies general intolerance for anything different... not some very disturbed individuals who also happen to be nerdy going postal in a school.
Wow, a business being held accountable for their actions? Who would have thought!
Of course VeriSign would have no problem nuking your domain should you fail to pay them for registering your domain name to you. By definition then you are paying for the domain name to be registered to you.
If I purchased a car and the dealership turned around and gave my car to someone else do you think they'd get away with it for long?
If I order food from a restaraunt and they make an error on my order do they turn around and tell my "Tough sh*t"?
Why then, if someone were to pay VeriSign for a service, should VeriSign not be accountable for said paid for service?
Since you claim to have nothing to hide, and there should be no concern for privacy, please post your full name and address. I'll be by shortly with a few miniature camera's to install in your bedroom, bathroom, and living room. A few taps for the phone, and other assorted recording and monitoring device. Please also pop the hood on your car so I can install the GPS tracking system. Got a cell phone? I'll need your ESN and number please.
What? You don't want to provide that? Not even your name, phone number, and address? Why ever not? I though you didn't think privacy mattered!
Gasp! You must have something to hide!
I agree, there are some good uses here... but for many of the suggested apps, why can't I do this already? I believe it's called a multisession CD.
I have a CD, I burn a copy and leave the disc open. Vola, I now have a disc I can continue to add data on to: be it maps, server configs, what have you.
Granted this would mean the functionality for automatically saving a game to disc wouldn't be built into software sold on conventional pressed CD's, but for many of the idea's people are suggesting for these special discs this would work just fine... and be much cheaper.
2) Place in computer and run program
3) Program reads BIOS, Hardware config, Windows GUI, etc.
4) Program writes this data to CD-R portion
5) Use CD on a different machine -- whoops data doesn't match calling "Piracy Police"
Good plan, but you forgot the most important part:
6) Profit!!
(sorry)
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! No, make the pain stop! You are causing me a Battlefield Earth flashback! Not only did I watch that evil movie, I've read the damned book years before.
Don't you know that's exactly how Psychlo's found Earth in the first place?
Can I believe that I actually know that? Please, shoot me now before the Hubbard cultists get me!
because nothing says 'you're hot!' like a new processor
Well, if the processor is from AMD it does...
Given that you just entered the domain name not once, but twice, and your post is likely to be seen my thousands, spidered, and google-cached, I take it that you don't like your mail admin very much, do you?
Frankly, if you're someone who routinely writes "ppl" in place of "people" you're already demonstrating such severe degeneration of health/brain that you may already be a lost cause.
Sooo...what I wanted to say is that I hope that someone f**k the game-servers up so badly that these trapped gamerz can see what life has to offer!
Might I suggest you take some of the same advice you give to these "gamerz" and check out what life has to offer. It appears to be passing you by.
NASA scientist: We have this energy, see, but it's dark, see, and space is, well, dark, you see, so you can't actually see it, see, but it's there!
My brain hurts.
Unless things are a lot different in Canada you cannot get electrocuted by a phone line. Electric line yes, but not a phone line.
I laughed at the electrocuted part myself. No, not even in Canada will the phone line kill you...
But, you can get one hell of a headache:
I was helping a friend wire a new jack up for his phone. Unfortunately the jack was located under his rather large, heavy desk. After I told him how to wire it up he decided that 'Oh, that's easy! I'll do it.' So, ok, yes, it is easy, go for it. But make sure you don't touch the bare wires. It won't really harm you, but if the phone should ring it can be a tad nasty.
Sure, no problem he says and climbes under the desk. Less then a minute later I suddenly hear a gasp followed by a loud BANG... the bang of his head smashing into the top of the desk.
Seems he touched the wires and was unlucky enough to be doing so when it rang. The sensation surprised him so badly he attemped to leap backwards - hard to do when crouched under a desk. I laughed so hard I could barely finish the job for him! (hey Fred, if you're reading "Hi!" :) )
You mean I have to use Flash to see ASCII? Damn, you kids today have it easy! Back in my day all we had were ASCII Terminal Programs and all we could access was ASCII and... oh, wait...
Besides which said ASCII art turns out to be some crazy ass Japanese porn animation with sound... using ASCII characters (in the above mentioned Flash format). Weird weird weird.
Nihon-go wa dewa arimasen
Or something like that... :)
I think I'm going to record that soundtrack and blast it from my car. Should be interesting to see what looks I get!
As someone who dabbles in this sort of thing let me add my two cents:
What if it is the only way? Games cost money... or at least time. Lots of time, even for a simple one.
Sure, I can say I'll develop a game for the fun of it (it IS fun), but strictly fun is not going to pay my mortgage. And without doing that I'm not going to be writing much of anything... it's cold outside!
On the other hand, if I make the game involve a product or promotional concept, then someone might be willing to pay me to have the fun of writing a game!
Works all 'round, I have fun writing it, people have fun playing it, I get $$, the client gets increased sales. It's pretty well win win.
Would I rather be able to just write what I want? Sure, I'd also like a Ferrari, and a Jacuzzi, while we're at it.
(actually I do write some things for the heck of it from time to time. Help me stress test one I'm writing right now :) Blockwars .
It's a 1-10 person elimination style multiplayer game)
If it's not there, it will be shortly...
This would only give you pseudo immortality. Consider:
You have the original and make a copy of it, then place the copy into the new body. For a brief period there are now two copies of you.
Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on.
Personally I'm not sure I like that a whole lot. It might be nice to know that my personality will go on, but it still is not me.
The only way I can see this sort of working is if the mind is transfered rather than copied. Then, arguably, the original doesn't have to die as well. Though this transfer would likely be a copy and wipe, which has the same problem as above.
No no, you've got it all wrong. That's the 3D projectile ^H^H^H^H^H^H projection feature. All the new screens will have it!
Not really. Check out Russia at 121st place. Or Italy at 40th vs South Africa at 26th.
Mostly it's an issue of developed vs developing: typically developed nations have a better standing than developing... with some disturbing exceptions (ie Italy ranking so low, or Costa Rica beating the United States).
That's a pretty ignorant statement to be making my American friend.
First off it's an issue regarding a fair trial and juries. But even aside from that:
You claim that this behavior would make Americans blush? Well, start blushing:
If you bother to check out the Reporters Without Borders worldwide press freedom index you would see that the United States ranks a paltry 17th with a score of 4,75. Meanwhile, Canda ranks 5th (while 1st through 4th are a tie at 0,50 so arguably Canada is 2nd) with a 0,75. And yes, lower is better.
So, just how free is your press in the "land of Freedom to the South"? Apparently not as free as you thought.
Or you could live in the United States. For a country that constantly screams about freedoms, their freedom of the press doesn't rate all that highly.
Sorry to those who feel it is OT. I just really hate it when people make remarks like "move to North Korea". (especially as, I suspect, said person is an American. Though I could be wrong on that).
Why? Do you feel that while you are checking out the bowels of Khufu's pad you'll suddenly really need to check your E-Mail on that little PDA?
If the answser is Yes to the above question you need to logout right now and run (don't walk) away from the computer. You are hearby banned from all eletronic gizmo's for the period of 48 hours.
Hey, no problem, just have a peek inside my fridge, all sorts of new and exotic life forms growing in there.
I'd be cautious about doing the DNA testing though - I don't know if your gear will freak out at a triple helix strand.
Here is why I think this is cool: history, art.
To those of use who have been tinkering since the days before the PC will likely remember demos and what they meant.
They were the cutting edge, pushing technology to the max and sometimes beyond (Future Crew, in the first Unreal demo, came up with trick that allowed them to display a very large number of colours on the screen simultaneously. This was around the EGA and VGA 16 days IIRC. What they did, when they did it, was thought to have been impossible)
When you wanted to see what the next games would be able to do, you watched the latest demos. That was the ultimate demonstration of what the hardware could do.
It was also totally non-commercial. No sponsors, no ads. Just groups of people finding out what their boxes could do... artistically. That was the best part. It wasn't just a technical demonstration, it was art, with incredibly graphics, music, and animations.
One of the few commercial entities to get involved in any way was Advanced Gravis, who gave away Gravis Ultrasound soundcards to demo & game makers, no strings attached, then backed it up with great tech support!
So what does this matter now? It's a great example of what efficient coding can do. Some of these things were under 16k! Inspiration too, check out what can be done if you try.
And, of course, to those of us who remember it's a great chance to look back on something that gave us a lot of joy. I don't know how many hours I spent downloading demos on my C64 and PC... 'borrowing' access to Carleton Universities net access so I could download Second Reality when it first came out... it was fun. It's not really practical to configure the old hardware to play them again... it could take a lot of tweeking.
And hey, if anyone has the Circle A demo for the C64 drop me a mail!
(btw, I realize the demo scene isn't dead, but it doesn't seem to have the same following it once did. Besides, I'm referring to having a collection of all the old demos not just the latest ones)
It's a nice day outside.
Obviously you're not Canadian. It's winter here. No day is a nice day. Perhaps some are slightly less nasty...
Perhaps you were confused becouse "lose" is related to "loss" and "lost", each which has one 'o' and "loose" (as in your mother) rhymes with "caboose", "moose", and "goose". The only exception to this excellent rule of thumb is "choose". It isn't spelled with one 'o', is that "chose" is already a word.
Perhaps you should run your own spell checker before submitting a criticism of another. It's a good practice, because if you don't you may look a little foolish.
Oh wait...