If you liked it, or get curious about it, you may want to look at the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer which is released tomorrow in Europe and in a couple of weeks in the US. Many of the same people who worked on PS:T have worked on this. Also if you just loved the Planescape setting, there is Rogue Dao's Planescape Trilogy for NWN2, first episode will be out in a month or so.
I thought NWN2 was a good game, but it was a resource hog and did contain bugs that turned some people off it. Now that it has been out a year and 8 or so major patches have been out, it is polished enough that you should definitely consider picking it up. They have promised that Mask of the Betrayer will have a much more dark and personal storyline and much more polish too.
Re:Read between the lines
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: 1
Re:Read between the lines (Score:1, Troll) by LarsWestergren (9033)
Heh, Halo fanboys are really touchy it seems...:)
Re:Read between the lines
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: 0, Troll
>>From a certain point of view, Halo 3 is without a doubt the biggest game of the year. >That would be the point of view of Xbox 360 owners only, correct?
Exactly... and even there it is debatable. For XBox360 owners with taste, the biggest games of the year are Bioshock or Mass Effect. PC DEVELOPERS! COME BACK TO US! ALL IS FORGIVEN! *sobs*
Re:You know if I had a dollar for every time...
on
Is id Abandoning Linux?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't know how many time these sales numbers have to be refuted, but since even the journalists get it wrong, I guess I won't have to stop anytime soon:
A) These numbers do not include online sales. The Steam servers were overloaded when Bioshock was released, and Direct2Drive also had good sales. B) These numbers are for US only. In many European countries for instance PC sales have a much larger market share.
With even the 10th console game outselling the two top PC games combined, I can't help but wonder how (if) the smaller PC game studios turn a profit.
So if another market B is bigger, that automatically means market A can't make a profit? I hear more Coca Cola bottles are sold than games. Oh noes! The gaming industry is ruined!
Oops, I was a bit too quick to post there, that was an added enhancement. The original RFE for error bars is here. Target was recently set to release 3.0 (which won't be released until somewhere in 2008 I believe). As they say in the list, if you want it, vote for it instead of filling Bugzilla with noise.
I got really excited when I read your post. Error bars were the sole reason I reinstalled MS Office last week. Unfortunately, I just ran Calc and checked out the new chart tool. Nothing seems to have changed, other than a new, fancy interface. It still lacks the ability to use a data range as error bars for a range of data points, and still lacks the ability to display a trendline equation on the graph.
I was curious and looked through OOo's Bugzilla, and it seems this issue was started on today! Either a nice coincidence, or they read Slashdot.:)
I already modded in this topic too... oh well, just a +1 funny.
I have to agree with the anonymous coward above.... You are one of the people who I have had the most respect for on all of Slashdot... this was a big disappointment.
You probably don't care, so let's go to the refutation of your claim:
From Wikipedia: "Carl Wunsch, professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, was originally featured in the programme. Afterwards he said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed.[23][5] He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two."
"In the part of The Great Climate Change Swindle where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous--because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important--diametrically opposite to the point I was making--which is that global warming is both real and threatening."
You can also check out the "responses to scientists" part of the Wikipedia article to see how he deals with being questioned.
So: Is BioShock art? "I would hesitate to go that far," he said after a short pause.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
Yes, of course, Any game that has solid enough writing that you care about characters or the world has that ability. For me, Planescape: Torment, Sanitarium, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 (death of vampire villain Bohdi "No! It's mine! This life is mine!"), and FF7 are just a few examples that come to mind.
Re:fun yes; groundbreaking no
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table?
Maybe someone asked you politely, would you please?;)
Funny how it works... on slashdot you find more people taking exception to homophobes than misogynists.
Hey, don't blame me, when it comes to political correctness, I'm ready to take offense any time!;)
And this particular case was just a juvenile phrase.
Well, I'm sure he didn't MEAN anything bad by it, but does the casual acceptance of it by most people make it all right? In the 19th century most people didn't bat an eyelid at the casual antisemitism. That was the point I was trying to make.
I first heard the phrase the year 2000 (I'm not an native English speaker). An American exchange student I had just helped a lot with her computer at a Matlab lab at Adelaide Uni said "Thank you. This computer is SO GAY!" I was so surprised I just said "Huh." and left it at that. But the more I thought about it later the angrier I got, and I thought about some great comebacks - "No, that's an inanimate object. I'M gay!".
I still just don't get it how people can get their mind around using a word for other human beings to describe something as "worthless" or "something I don't like" and don't reflect about what they are doing.
I hope you will be contributing the code to OOo and AbiWord to support this tag as you seem to care about it so much (it is an optional tag that can be ignored).
Contribute to getting Microsoft "standards" and technologies even deeper entrenched into the open source world where I don't want them? No, I prefer to spend the few programming hours I can spare on real open source projects and standards thanks.
Sweden has a low corruption index, but there is evidence of irregularities there. See, I just used evidence to trump the statistics in the article...
No, the article doesn't say that. It says "We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal."
Good that you mention Sweden though. The "irregularities" you mention were that Microsoft Sweden offered bribes to close business partners to vote "yes" to accept a suggested standard SIS had carefully evaluated over months and decided was worthless.
Appending "Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality." to the end of an article strongly implying causality in every sense [...]
It wasn't the article that said that, it was the Slashdot summary. A bit of a weasel word though, it should be clarified as "correlation doesn't always prove causality, but in this case we believe based on evidence A, B, C that..." or removed.
[...]doesn't absolve the reporter from the false conclusions he/she implies throughout the rest of the article.
Speaking of weasel words... What conclusions do you believe are false then, and why?
That the correlation was run at ALL implies that someone was 'looking for something' - suspect 1.
We HAVE to look for SOMETHING, both in statistics and other science. It is pretty much impossible to do as Shelock Holmes said - "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment." How do you know that you have all the evidence if you don't even know what you are looking for?
Sorry, this is FUD passed off as news supported by phony statistics.
You may not agree with the conclusions, but how are the statistics phony?
Now what about America's Army? While it isn't an explicit combat trainer, it is a game called "America's Army" put out by the U.S. Army itself. It's not just any video game, it's official advertising for the Army, their P.R. for what being in the Army is like and what kind of exciting things you'll be able to do. Look at how in the game no matter which team you are on, your side is always the U.S. Army and the other side is the evil terrorists.
And the only option you have is to start killing.... When the Swedish Department of Defense created a training sim on the other hand, it emphasized talking to people and avoiding conflict. Crazy, huh?
It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java;
Not in the business world, where Swing clients are probably second only after Visual Basic. Sun is also currently putting a lot of effort into improving the JVM desktop experience.
Also a while ago, someone notable in the Java world (Gafter? Bloch? Can't seem to find the link) blogged about how he had discovered that one of the core textbook examples taught the last 30 years in the courses about proving code was in fact incorrect...
"We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant."
Why don't more software developers take a leaf out of Knuth, who "only proved it correct, not tried it" [grammar]?
Yeah, that's great and all, but this is something you can only do for small algorithms. Proving correctness of large systems takes huge amounts of time and resources, so for most developers this is just not feasible. Also a while ago, someone notable in the Java world (Gafter? Bloch? Can't seem to find the link) blogged about how he had discovered that one of the core textbook examples taught the last 30 years in the courses about proving code was in fact incorrect... The assumptions no longer held for 64 bit systems. If the experts can't get 5 lines of code right, what use is it in practice?
He made the effort to develop his mind such that he could be confident in his own ability to combine memorised results with logical deductions - the key skills of programming, spelling and pretty much any other ability you'll ever attempt to acquire.
Oh, so the easy solution is to become a genius, then all problems will be trivial. That's very smart of you AC, wonder why no one thought of that before?
Offhand I don't find it hard to see parallels between the mindsets of the "get Microsoft off our backs" camp (well-represented amongst Slashdot readership) and the political movement that rejects bloated, intrusive, overbearing government...
Why not leftist - corporations have too much power and limit our freedom? Or classic free market liberal - corporations which abuse monopoly positions interferes with a functioning free market?
So yeah, if you're sick of Microsoft then maybe you're a techno-Lib?
No. Sounds to me like the old "Well, you say you are an atheist, but since you somehow seem like a nice and moral person I'm going to say that you worship God with your behavior and count you as a Christian". I.e. raking all stuff you like into your own camp to strengthen your own belief instead of admitting that others may have a point.
As usual they publicly deny that there is ever in the works for another platform but the XBox/XBox360, probably part of their deal with Microsoft.
However, both Kotor and Jade Empire eventually came to PC. One of the editors at Gamespy or Gamespot (forgot which) in a Mass Effect preview mentioned something about "If we could only get them to commit to a PC release date". To me that sounds that it WILL come, they just don't know when. Don't know if that's wishful thinking though, or if the editor had inside information they "accidentally" let slip.
I'm just happy that there are so damn many good PC games available! Perhaps the Steam ad was unnecessary, but as I replied above, if you know of any better, post it. Last time I tried to use Gametap for instance, they just threw a "service not available where you live" error page into my face when I tried to sign up. If they had worded it a bit more nicely, for instance "We are sorry, but we have not been given the rights by the publishers to distribute these games internationally..." it would have been ok, but as it was they were just rude.
I know Steam is far from perfect, but so far it has been good deal for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotting....
Always great that PS: T is acknowledged.
If you liked it, or get curious about it, you may want to look at the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer which is released tomorrow in Europe and in a couple of weeks in the US. Many of the same people who worked on PS:T have worked on this. Also if you just loved the Planescape setting, there is Rogue Dao's Planescape Trilogy for NWN2, first episode will be out in a month or so.
I thought NWN2 was a good game, but it was a resource hog and did contain bugs that turned some people off it. Now that it has been out a year and 8 or so major patches have been out, it is polished enough that you should definitely consider picking it up. They have promised that Mask of the Betrayer will have a much more dark and personal storyline and much more polish too.
Re:Read between the lines
(Score:1, Troll)
by LarsWestergren (9033)
Heh, Halo fanboys are really touchy it seems...
>>From a certain point of view, Halo 3 is without a doubt the biggest game of the year.
>That would be the point of view of Xbox 360 owners only, correct?
Exactly... and even there it is debatable. For XBox360 owners with taste, the biggest games of the year are Bioshock or Mass Effect. PC DEVELOPERS! COME BACK TO US! ALL IS FORGIVEN! *sobs*
I don't know how many time these sales numbers have to be refuted, but since even the journalists get it wrong, I guess I won't have to stop anytime soon:
A) These numbers do not include online sales. The Steam servers were overloaded when Bioshock was released, and Direct2Drive also had good sales.
B) These numbers are for US only. In many European countries for instance PC sales have a much larger market share.
With even the 10th console game outselling the two top PC games combined, I can't help but wonder how (if) the smaller PC game studios turn a profit.
So if another market B is bigger, that automatically means market A can't make a profit? I hear more Coca Cola bottles are sold than games. Oh noes! The gaming industry is ruined!
Oops, I was a bit too quick to post there, that was an added enhancement. The original RFE for error bars is here. Target was recently set to release 3.0 (which won't be released until somewhere in 2008 I believe). As they say in the list, if you want it, vote for it instead of filling Bugzilla with noise.
I got really excited when I read your post. Error bars were the sole reason I reinstalled MS Office last week. Unfortunately, I just ran Calc and checked out the new chart tool. Nothing seems to have changed, other than a new, fancy interface. It still lacks the ability to use a data range as error bars for a range of data points, and still lacks the ability to display a trendline equation on the graph.
:)
I was curious and looked through OOo's Bugzilla, and it seems this issue was started on today! Either a nice coincidence, or they read Slashdot.
I already modded in this topic too... oh well, just a +1 funny.
You probably don't care, so let's go to the refutation of your claim:
From Wikipedia: "Carl Wunsch, professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, was originally featured in the programme. Afterwards he said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed.[23][5] He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two."
You can also check out the "responses to scientists" part of the Wikipedia article to see how he deals with being questioned.
So: Is BioShock art? "I would hesitate to go that far," he said after a short pause.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
Yes, of course, Any game that has solid enough writing that you care about characters or the world has that ability. For me, Planescape: Torment, Sanitarium, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 (death of vampire villain Bohdi "No! It's mine! This life is mine!"), and FF7 are just a few examples that come to mind.
Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table?
;)
Maybe someone asked you politely, would you please?
Funny how it works... on slashdot you find more people taking exception to homophobes than misogynists.
;)
Hey, don't blame me, when it comes to political correctness, I'm ready to take offense any time!
And this particular case was just a juvenile phrase.
Well, I'm sure he didn't MEAN anything bad by it, but does the casual acceptance of it by most people make it all right? In the 19th century most people didn't bat an eyelid at the casual antisemitism. That was the point I was trying to make.
I first heard the phrase the year 2000 (I'm not an native English speaker). An American exchange student I had just helped a lot with her computer at a Matlab lab at Adelaide Uni said "Thank you. This computer is SO GAY!" I was so surprised I just said "Huh." and left it at that. But the more I thought about it later the angrier I got, and I thought about some great comebacks - "No, that's an inanimate object. I'M gay!".
I still just don't get it how people can get their mind around using a word for other human beings to describe something as "worthless" or "something I don't like" and don't reflect about what they are doing.
But pretty gay of Acer to not even support their own software on OS's they wrote it for
Or to use an older (19th century) derogatory slang in the same vein, they jewed him.
What do you think Walpurgiss, perhaps it was a little Negro of them?
VERY well said, thank you. Agree with previous posters, this was the best post on the topic yet.
I hope you will be contributing the code to OOo and AbiWord to support this tag as you seem to care about it so much (it is an optional tag that can be ignored).
Contribute to getting Microsoft "standards" and technologies even deeper entrenched into the open source world where I don't want them? No, I prefer to spend the few programming hours I can spare on real open source projects and standards thanks.
Pfft.. Real men code websites in Java and ASP. Scalability and performance are for pussies. My server to chugs at 10 hits/minute and it likes it.
Funny, but many banks and stock markets run their trading on the Java platform. At JavaOne 2007 for instance, Anna Ewing, Nasdaq CIO talked about handling hundreds of thousands transactions per second with millisecond deadline requirements.
Sweden has a low corruption index, but there is evidence of irregularities there. See, I just used evidence to trump the statistics in the article...
No, the article doesn't say that. It says "We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal."
Good that you mention Sweden though. The "irregularities" you mention were that Microsoft Sweden offered bribes to close business partners to vote "yes" to accept a suggested standard SIS had carefully evaluated over months and decided was worthless.
Appending "Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality." to the end of an article strongly implying causality in every sense [...]
It wasn't the article that said that, it was the Slashdot summary. A bit of a weasel word though, it should be clarified as "correlation doesn't always prove causality, but in this case we believe based on evidence A, B, C that..." or removed.
[...]doesn't absolve the reporter from the false conclusions he/she implies throughout the rest of the article.
Speaking of weasel words... What conclusions do you believe are false then, and why?
That the correlation was run at ALL implies that someone was 'looking for something' - suspect 1.
We HAVE to look for SOMETHING, both in statistics and other science. It is pretty much impossible to do as Shelock Holmes said - "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment." How do you know that you have all the evidence if you don't even know what you are looking for?
Sorry, this is FUD passed off as news supported by phony statistics.
You may not agree with the conclusions, but how are the statistics phony?
Now what about America's Army? While it isn't an explicit combat trainer, it is a game called "America's Army" put out by the U.S. Army itself. It's not just any video game, it's official advertising for the Army, their P.R. for what being in the Army is like and what kind of exciting things you'll be able to do. Look at how in the game no matter which team you are on, your side is always the U.S. Army and the other side is the evil terrorists.
And the only option you have is to start killing.... When the Swedish Department of Defense created a training sim on the other hand, it emphasized talking to people and avoiding conflict. Crazy, huh?
Insightful ?
Why the hell did you && your mod think I put 'v3' in parenthesis ?
To clarify which version you were talking about. Not an unreasonable assumption I think.
So I misunderstood you - no reason to get angry.
If SUN wanted acceptance instead of l33t, GPL(v3) would have been the order of the day.
How could they have chosen this as the license already when it was finalized just a few months ago?
Java? Wide uptake? Surely, you jest.
No, hardly.
It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java;
Not in the business world, where Swing clients are probably second only after Visual Basic. Sun is also currently putting a lot of effort into improving the JVM desktop experience.
Also a while ago, someone notable in the Java world (Gafter? Bloch? Can't seem to find the link) blogged about how he had discovered that one of the core textbook examples taught the last 30 years in the courses about proving code was in fact incorrect...
Found it... Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken. I like his final paragraph:
"We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant."
Why don't more software developers take a leaf out of Knuth, who "only proved it correct, not tried it" [grammar]?
Yeah, that's great and all, but this is something you can only do for small algorithms. Proving correctness of large systems takes huge amounts of time and resources, so for most developers this is just not feasible. Also a while ago, someone notable in the Java world (Gafter? Bloch? Can't seem to find the link) blogged about how he had discovered that one of the core textbook examples taught the last 30 years in the courses about proving code was in fact incorrect... The assumptions no longer held for 64 bit systems. If the experts can't get 5 lines of code right, what use is it in practice?
He made the effort to develop his mind such that he could be confident in his own ability to combine memorised results with logical deductions - the key skills of programming, spelling and pretty much any other ability you'll ever attempt to acquire.
Oh, so the easy solution is to become a genius, then all problems will be trivial. That's very smart of you AC, wonder why no one thought of that before?
Offhand I don't find it hard to see parallels between the mindsets of the "get Microsoft off our backs" camp (well-represented amongst Slashdot readership) and the political movement that rejects bloated, intrusive, overbearing government...
Why not leftist - corporations have too much power and limit our freedom?
Or classic free market liberal - corporations which abuse monopoly positions interferes with a functioning free market?
So yeah, if you're sick of Microsoft then maybe you're a techno-Lib?
No. Sounds to me like the old "Well, you say you are an atheist, but since you somehow seem like a nice and moral person I'm going to say that you worship God with your behavior and count you as a Christian". I.e. raking all stuff you like into your own camp to strengthen your own belief instead of admitting that others may have a point.
As usual they publicly deny that there is ever in the works for another platform but the XBox/XBox360, probably part of their deal with Microsoft.
However, both Kotor and Jade Empire eventually came to PC. One of the editors at Gamespy or Gamespot (forgot which) in a Mass Effect preview mentioned something about "If we could only get them to commit to a PC release date". To me that sounds that it WILL come, they just don't know when. Don't know if that's wishful thinking though, or if the editor had inside information they "accidentally" let slip.
shut up, tool.
I'm just happy that there are so damn many good PC games available! Perhaps the Steam ad was unnecessary, but as I replied above, if you know of any better, post it. Last time I tried to use Gametap for instance, they just threw a "service not available where you live" error page into my face when I tried to sign up. If they had worded it a bit more nicely, for instance "We are sorry, but we have not been given the rights by the publishers to distribute these games internationally..." it would have been ok, but as it was they were just rude.
I know Steam is far from perfect, but so far it has been good deal for me.