My CS bots may have been rudimentary as you say (though out of all bots back then they were regarded as 2nd place on average - they had an awful lot of "minor crap" tweaks for things like radio communication, stealth, basic teamwork, grenades/flashbangs, etc) but they were still far better than the pap in many single player games today. It's very disappointing.
The simulating waves thing I was just imagining in 2D space, not even 3D. I wouldn't want to use pre-made algorithms, just mess around with my own ideas. After I'd tried it myself, then I'd look at more formal solutions. Same with basic physics, seeing if I can model solid and elastic shapes and collisions between them in a 2D environment before looking at more well established code.
Well, the only cracks I used to download were NoCD cracks. Steam meant that I no longer had to do that, so it was a bonus for me. I was just pointing out that if it did go down for good, tools would be made available - whether officially or unofficially - for playing your games offline*. I certainly don't think that the illegal route is positive in any way, and I also generally abhor the concept and basically the necessity** for DRM. But I wish that more companies would introduce Steam like DRM which actually provides many benefits, rather than DRM that only has all the negative sides.
* assuming you had them cached of course - otherwise it's to the torrent trackers with you!
** "keeping honest people honest" type of thing. Maybe just "keeping stupid people honest". It's bizarre the number of people on YouTube who think that saying "I do not own this, I do not intend Copyright infringement" don't realise that it's still copyright infringement whether you say it is or not (though of course intent matters to an extent).
Meh, I know how games work, but I still can get immersed in them. Maybe it's because I know well enough about how they work that I don't really have to have it crowding in on my brain.
It does frustrate me to see really crappy AI in games and know that I could do a better job (spent a few years as a teenager programming bots for Counter-Strike, and also messed about making Quake 3 mods for a while), but a good game is still a good game.
I guess you are right to an extent though. When I was a teenager I used to wonder if I could build some program to simulate waves lapping on a sea shore. I still haven't actually tried that, and I still would be interested to try it.. though actually now that I think about it, I already know how I'd do it. I have problems with not even trying things because I already know how I'd do it.
One other thing I'd been wondering for a while was if I could make a decent AI for Tetris. I decided to do a project combining lots of new factors to me - using Ruby, using QT, building the game Tetris, and doing AI for it, thinking that I could teach the computer to play better than I can myself. I was disappointed when I built the game in an afternoon, and built a working AI algorithm for it in another day (having never looked at any already existing AIs). I think by that point it could play better than me (and I can play better than all my friends). I was hoping the project would last me for a week or two! Since then I haven't been able to think of any home projects that would interest me enough to start them. Perhaps doing some race-car AI, that occasionally interests me - though again I already know I could create an AI driver that can race better than I can round a track by itself (and I got all golds on all the license tests in GT5, twice:p ). Adding in things like overtaking, or figuring out how to get the car to do controlled drifts on dirt tracks would be the interesting parts.. if anyone has any fun ideas for small game/AI projects I'd be happy to hear them!
Not that I play a lot of Scrabble. And not that Scrabble isn't a good game.
I'm primarily a web apps designer/maintainer these days, and I'm enjoying learning more about the history of programming, and looking into lower level stuff like device drivers right now.. but as far as games go, I'm really looking forward to Skyrim and AC: Revelations.
The games I've enjoyed that are closest to programming would be MUDs. I'd often write little scripts/macros to automate away a lot of grinding. The last server I frequented explicitly allowed automation as long as you were able to respond if an admin came to check up on you, just to make sure that you weren't completely AFK. So instead of simply dumping 100 commands into the thing at once - requiring a disconnect and reconnect if you wanted to cancel the buffered command execution - I built macros that chained off of each other that meant I could still chat while my macros were working away finding and killing things, or training stats..
You're right - I haven't had to deal with slow connections since I left home 10 years ago.
What are you doing with the "constant change of machines"? Why don't you copy the cache between machines on a USB drive if you're having problems with slow connections? I think there's even built-in functionality to backup and restore caches from what I remember from like 5 years ago. *checks google* Yes, you can definitely do that. So any complaints about your network speed causing issues are just you being too fuckwitted to buy or borrow a flash drive and transfer your game cache, or even transfer via a switch or WiFi if you have both machines in the same building.
I've actually been exclusively doing console gaming for the last 3 years or so. I haven't given any money to Valve outside of buying the Orange Box and Portal 2 for PS3. But it's not because I don't like Steam - it was just because I didn't want to use Windows any more, and there were too many issues with using the games I liked via WINE.
The point is that it is all made up. The point is that some deity punishing its creation for acting in the way he intended it to act is sick. Creating a whole universe and creating some artificial problem for it just so that you can pretend to save it. That's like getting your friend to stab someone in the back, then having a play fight with your friend where you win and take the victim to hospital, all just for the sake of befriending them. There are better ways to make friends with someone than having them stabbed.
There are already tools out there to crack it all if you're that worried. Personally I think the benefits of Steam vastly outweigh any of those worries. I don't want to go back to the days of installing everything manually and typing in product keys.
I doubt Steam is going down without plenty of warning any more than Amazon would just disappear overnight.
My original comment was meant to say that they essentially bricked a whole load of devices, but I screwed up the tags. No matter how you try to twist things, Google haven't done anything like that. And if they did, I doubt it would be in quite as dramatically ironic fashion. "Plays For Sure" indeed..
A simple fair question is fine - but these 2 posts repeatedly post their pro-MS (and I think pro Facebook, can't remember), anti-Google lines. It's clearly past the stage of ramptant fanboi, and into "we're getting paid to do this".
I admit that I'm quite a fan of Amazon and Google. I used to be a fan of Apple up until about 2000. I don't consider Amazon and Google infallible, but they've never caused me any problems so far, and I think they're having a positive effect on the world.
With MS and Apple, I'm ambivalent (this means of mixed opinion, not neutral opinion in case anyone thinks it's the same as apathetic..). They do make good products sometimes (this used to be pretty rare for MS, though Apple have always made pretty good products, just marketed them wrong while Steve was gone in the 90s I guess), but they also do a lot of what could be termed as Evil when it comes to how they treat consumers.
You shouldn't twist people's words so much (then again, you're quite possibly one of the original posters, so I'm not that surprised). I didn't say that no Google products had been recently discontinued - I asked a genuine question, because I don't know. Please enlighten me. Often these shills just say stuff that has no evidence behind it. I'd rather see some facts rather than strawman half-truths.
PS MS are hardly known for keeping services going indefinitely. Even when that means essentially a whole bunch of devices. You shills use some pretty bizarre arguments..
From what I've seen, if Google discontinue something, it's because 1) nobody is using it, or 2) they're consolidating the functionality into another product.
Could you guys give the Google hating circlejerk a rest for a while? I know you're getting paid for it obviously, but it's getting kind of boring. Couldn't you find a job that doesn't involve trying to brainwash people?
Some of us value the integrity that Google has displayed over what Microsoft does. I view Amazon in the same light as Google. I'd be happy to use either of their services.
What products has Google discontinued recently? I remember they discontinued some really unpopular ones a good few years ago, and then they got rid of Wave recently.
*googles to check what happened to Wave*
Google Wave is no longer being developed as a standalone product You can still log in, edit and export your waves, and wave.google.com will remain in service until there is another way to access your data.
Those bastards! I see why you hate them now! Oh wait, no I don't..
I wasn't referring to open in terms of code, more that it's not locked down in the same way that iOS is.
Innovation in a marketplace isn't driven through encouragement, it's driven through cut-throat competition. The scientific community, and indeed the open-source community are generally built around collaboration, but even there you still have people who look into "competing" ideas (think of different types of string theory), etc. Even if Apple patented their individual designs (which others can license of course), the important part was that they stopped other mobile device designers being lazy. I knew that my phone's touchscreen UI could be better, but I didn't have any way of improving it myself (back when I was using WinMo). We'd probably have ended up with something good from Android even if Apple hadn't come out with the iPhone, but who knows.. I think it's been a really positive time for gadgets.
Nope, I didn't have to deal with prices back then. I also know I'd have preferred the Apple or an Amiga to an IBM compatible. They had way superior interfaces and even hardware for a while.
I won't mourn his passing either, but the result of what he has done has been positive as well as negative. I think it's important to recognise that.
I'm not upset. I know Jobs was a douche - probably even moreso than Gates as you say - but his take on interfaces and wanting to make things user friendly was certainly much needed to counter the awfully lazy designs that MS had been getting away with. Even though MS are clearly trying these days, things like the ribbon and the way they are organising the control panel in Win7 are just making everything even more of a fucking mess. The 98/2000 (or "classic mode" in XP) control panels are tidy and descriptive - a complete breath of fresh air to look at compared to the unholy mess that is the modern Windows Control Panel. I understand why they were wanting to subsection everything - it's one of the basics of UI simplification - but IMO they've been Doing It Wrong as it doesn't seem intuitive at all. Knowing where it is because you already have found what you want and used it for a while doesn't make it "intuitive", it just means you've learned where everything is. When I use a Debian based system or Android, the control panels just are sensibly organised and you can find what you want quickly. Sorry, going off on a total rant.. but you can see that I've learned to appreciate good design just as much as technical prowess these day (not that MS ever had much of either).
Did you miss the point where he created us apparently without sin, but knowing that we were going to.. meh, why am I even bothering.... if you're happy with it, go ahead.
You're right that people would try to abuse the feature, but if say it required 5 off-topic mods, plus individual users having the feature enabled, it wouldn't be so bad.
It wouldn't require changing the database to implement the feature either really. As the page is being rendered by the perl script, offtopic posts could be held in a buffer and spit out at the end.
But really, I doubt Slashdot would even blink when shuffling the occasional comment to the end of the line on a story. I know Slashdot is pretty high traffic, but it's not really any worse an operation than just submitting a new comment. The system could just delete the comment and resubmit it, or even just change the post number to latest post+1. Slashdot and all other high traffic sites these days are memcached, so it's not that big a deal.
You can make for cases of the Jewish idea of hell being the valid one, but then you also have Jesus telling parables of a guy being parched and wanting a sip of water. Again you can make the case that it's just a parable, blah blah, and we all go in circles.. but really for me it comes back to the whole "people just made all this shit up" thing, which explains perfectly the inconsistencies and changing nature of thinking of things like hell over time (from OT to new, and then again to our own time I suppose), and people splitting into thousands of different factions and beliefs per within a supposedly united faith. All very human; no magic explanation or twisted thinking necessary.
I know what you're saying, and I don't think what he said was logically watertight, but basically the idea is that god punishes people for something that he must necessarily have created himself if he's really as important and powerful as the bible claims, and that is quite absurd. As you say, "nothing really has been said", because the whole idea contradicts itself. The only thing that needs to be established there is that punishment is bad, evil doesn't need to be defined as anything other than "something god punishes people for".
It was thinking along those lines that clinched it for me when I was having doubts about my own religion. I was so terrified of going against god's will if he was real. Then I realised that I wouldn't want to worship a god that treated people like that anyway, and that if I was going to go to some eternal hell at his whim then whatever. Then from there I gradually stopped believing, and have been able to see all the ideas for the absurdities that they are. It's amazing the absurd things that you will force yourself to accept if you make the assumption that an un-knowable variable is true (or indeed, false). I wouldn't say that there can't be beings we don't understand or know about, but I think it's pretty obvious that most/all of our gods are man made ideas.
Or someone should do something more long lasting than a punch, like chopping their balls off, and see how funny they find it then.. that would really "fix" their wagon:p
Slashdot Mirror
It's been something like 7 years now, and you still don't know that Steam can play games offline?
Sure. You're not really helping me to find something worth my while though.
My CS bots may have been rudimentary as you say (though out of all bots back then they were regarded as 2nd place on average - they had an awful lot of "minor crap" tweaks for things like radio communication, stealth, basic teamwork, grenades/flashbangs, etc) but they were still far better than the pap in many single player games today. It's very disappointing.
The simulating waves thing I was just imagining in 2D space, not even 3D. I wouldn't want to use pre-made algorithms, just mess around with my own ideas. After I'd tried it myself, then I'd look at more formal solutions. Same with basic physics, seeing if I can model solid and elastic shapes and collisions between them in a 2D environment before looking at more well established code.
Something that nobody else has thought of yet, otherwise it would be obvious..
Well, the only cracks I used to download were NoCD cracks. Steam meant that I no longer had to do that, so it was a bonus for me. I was just pointing out that if it did go down for good, tools would be made available - whether officially or unofficially - for playing your games offline*. I certainly don't think that the illegal route is positive in any way, and I also generally abhor the concept and basically the necessity** for DRM. But I wish that more companies would introduce Steam like DRM which actually provides many benefits, rather than DRM that only has all the negative sides.
* assuming you had them cached of course - otherwise it's to the torrent trackers with you!
** "keeping honest people honest" type of thing. Maybe just "keeping stupid people honest". It's bizarre the number of people on YouTube who think that saying "I do not own this, I do not intend Copyright infringement" don't realise that it's still copyright infringement whether you say it is or not (though of course intent matters to an extent).
Meh, I know how games work, but I still can get immersed in them. Maybe it's because I know well enough about how they work that I don't really have to have it crowding in on my brain.
It does frustrate me to see really crappy AI in games and know that I could do a better job (spent a few years as a teenager programming bots for Counter-Strike, and also messed about making Quake 3 mods for a while), but a good game is still a good game.
I guess you are right to an extent though. When I was a teenager I used to wonder if I could build some program to simulate waves lapping on a sea shore. I still haven't actually tried that, and I still would be interested to try it.. though actually now that I think about it, I already know how I'd do it. I have problems with not even trying things because I already know how I'd do it.
One other thing I'd been wondering for a while was if I could make a decent AI for Tetris. I decided to do a project combining lots of new factors to me - using Ruby, using QT, building the game Tetris, and doing AI for it, thinking that I could teach the computer to play better than I can myself. I was disappointed when I built the game in an afternoon, and built a working AI algorithm for it in another day (having never looked at any already existing AIs). I think by that point it could play better than me (and I can play better than all my friends). I was hoping the project would last me for a week or two! Since then I haven't been able to think of any home projects that would interest me enough to start them. Perhaps doing some race-car AI, that occasionally interests me - though again I already know I could create an AI driver that can race better than I can round a track by itself (and I got all golds on all the license tests in GT5, twice :p ). Adding in things like overtaking, or figuring out how to get the car to do controlled drifts on dirt tracks would be the interesting parts.. if anyone has any fun ideas for small game/AI projects I'd be happy to hear them!
Double word.
Not that I play a lot of Scrabble. And not that Scrabble isn't a good game.
I'm primarily a web apps designer/maintainer these days, and I'm enjoying learning more about the history of programming, and looking into lower level stuff like device drivers right now.. but as far as games go, I'm really looking forward to Skyrim and AC: Revelations.
The games I've enjoyed that are closest to programming would be MUDs. I'd often write little scripts/macros to automate away a lot of grinding. The last server I frequented explicitly allowed automation as long as you were able to respond if an admin came to check up on you, just to make sure that you weren't completely AFK. So instead of simply dumping 100 commands into the thing at once - requiring a disconnect and reconnect if you wanted to cancel the buffered command execution - I built macros that chained off of each other that meant I could still chat while my macros were working away finding and killing things, or training stats..
You're right - I haven't had to deal with slow connections since I left home 10 years ago.
What are you doing with the "constant change of machines"? Why don't you copy the cache between machines on a USB drive if you're having problems with slow connections? I think there's even built-in functionality to backup and restore caches from what I remember from like 5 years ago. *checks google* Yes, you can definitely do that. So any complaints about your network speed causing issues are just you being too fuckwitted to buy or borrow a flash drive and transfer your game cache, or even transfer via a switch or WiFi if you have both machines in the same building.
I've actually been exclusively doing console gaming for the last 3 years or so. I haven't given any money to Valve outside of buying the Orange Box and Portal 2 for PS3. But it's not because I don't like Steam - it was just because I didn't want to use Windows any more, and there were too many issues with using the games I liked via WINE.
The point is that it is all made up. The point is that some deity punishing its creation for acting in the way he intended it to act is sick. Creating a whole universe and creating some artificial problem for it just so that you can pretend to save it. That's like getting your friend to stab someone in the back, then having a play fight with your friend where you win and take the victim to hospital, all just for the sake of befriending them. There are better ways to make friends with someone than having them stabbed.
There are already tools out there to crack it all if you're that worried. Personally I think the benefits of Steam vastly outweigh any of those worries. I don't want to go back to the days of installing everything manually and typing in product keys.
I doubt Steam is going down without plenty of warning any more than Amazon would just disappear overnight.
My original comment was meant to say that they essentially bricked a whole load of devices, but I screwed up the tags. No matter how you try to twist things, Google haven't done anything like that. And if they did, I doubt it would be in quite as dramatically ironic fashion. "Plays For Sure" indeed..
* first line was meant to say "but these 2 posters"
A simple fair question is fine - but these 2 posts repeatedly post their pro-MS (and I think pro Facebook, can't remember), anti-Google lines. It's clearly past the stage of ramptant fanboi, and into "we're getting paid to do this".
I admit that I'm quite a fan of Amazon and Google. I used to be a fan of Apple up until about 2000. I don't consider Amazon and Google infallible, but they've never caused me any problems so far, and I think they're having a positive effect on the world.
With MS and Apple, I'm ambivalent (this means of mixed opinion, not neutral opinion in case anyone thinks it's the same as apathetic..). They do make good products sometimes (this used to be pretty rare for MS, though Apple have always made pretty good products, just marketed them wrong while Steve was gone in the 90s I guess), but they also do a lot of what could be termed as Evil when it comes to how they treat consumers.
You shouldn't twist people's words so much (then again, you're quite possibly one of the original posters, so I'm not that surprised). I didn't say that no Google products had been recently discontinued - I asked a genuine question, because I don't know. Please enlighten me. Often these shills just say stuff that has no evidence behind it. I'd rather see some facts rather than strawman half-truths.
Yeah, I guess you wouldn't be able to feel anything after a decade of being ruptured by Microsoft..
PS MS are hardly known for keeping services going indefinitely. Even when that means essentially a whole bunch of devices. You shills use some pretty bizarre arguments..
From what I've seen, if Google discontinue something, it's because 1) nobody is using it, or 2) they're consolidating the functionality into another product.
Could you guys give the Google hating circlejerk a rest for a while? I know you're getting paid for it obviously, but it's getting kind of boring. Couldn't you find a job that doesn't involve trying to brainwash people?
Some of us value the integrity that Google has displayed over what Microsoft does. I view Amazon in the same light as Google. I'd be happy to use either of their services.
What products has Google discontinued recently? I remember they discontinued some really unpopular ones a good few years ago, and then they got rid of Wave recently.
*googles to check what happened to Wave*
Google Wave is no longer being developed as a standalone product
You can still log in, edit and export your waves, and wave.google.com will remain in service until there is another way to access your data.
Those bastards! I see why you hate them now! Oh wait, no I don't..
I wasn't referring to open in terms of code, more that it's not locked down in the same way that iOS is.
Innovation in a marketplace isn't driven through encouragement, it's driven through cut-throat competition. The scientific community, and indeed the open-source community are generally built around collaboration, but even there you still have people who look into "competing" ideas (think of different types of string theory), etc. Even if Apple patented their individual designs (which others can license of course), the important part was that they stopped other mobile device designers being lazy. I knew that my phone's touchscreen UI could be better, but I didn't have any way of improving it myself (back when I was using WinMo). We'd probably have ended up with something good from Android even if Apple hadn't come out with the iPhone, but who knows.. I think it's been a really positive time for gadgets.
Nope, I didn't have to deal with prices back then. I also know I'd have preferred the Apple or an Amiga to an IBM compatible. They had way superior interfaces and even hardware for a while.
I won't mourn his passing either, but the result of what he has done has been positive as well as negative. I think it's important to recognise that.
I'm not upset. I know Jobs was a douche - probably even moreso than Gates as you say - but his take on interfaces and wanting to make things user friendly was certainly much needed to counter the awfully lazy designs that MS had been getting away with. Even though MS are clearly trying these days, things like the ribbon and the way they are organising the control panel in Win7 are just making everything even more of a fucking mess. The 98/2000 (or "classic mode" in XP) control panels are tidy and descriptive - a complete breath of fresh air to look at compared to the unholy mess that is the modern Windows Control Panel. I understand why they were wanting to subsection everything - it's one of the basics of UI simplification - but IMO they've been Doing It Wrong as it doesn't seem intuitive at all. Knowing where it is because you already have found what you want and used it for a while doesn't make it "intuitive", it just means you've learned where everything is. When I use a Debian based system or Android, the control panels just are sensibly organised and you can find what you want quickly. Sorry, going off on a total rant.. but you can see that I've learned to appreciate good design just as much as technical prowess these day (not that MS ever had much of either).
Did you miss the point where he created us apparently without sin, but knowing that we were going to .. meh, why am I even bothering.... if you're happy with it, go ahead.
You're right that people would try to abuse the feature, but if say it required 5 off-topic mods, plus individual users having the feature enabled, it wouldn't be so bad.
It wouldn't require changing the database to implement the feature either really. As the page is being rendered by the perl script, offtopic posts could be held in a buffer and spit out at the end.
But really, I doubt Slashdot would even blink when shuffling the occasional comment to the end of the line on a story. I know Slashdot is pretty high traffic, but it's not really any worse an operation than just submitting a new comment. The system could just delete the comment and resubmit it, or even just change the post number to latest post+1. Slashdot and all other high traffic sites these days are memcached, so it's not that big a deal.
"Interesting" should cover any positive thing that isn't funny, but still deserves a +1.
+1 Funny comments don't even count towards karma. But they're usually what I aim for.. and occasionally succeed with.
As for someone above saying that we shouldn't have negative moderation at all.. I disagree simply because of all the copypasta trolls..
-per*
always manage to screw up my sentences somehow..
You can make for cases of the Jewish idea of hell being the valid one, but then you also have Jesus telling parables of a guy being parched and wanting a sip of water. Again you can make the case that it's just a parable, blah blah, and we all go in circles.. but really for me it comes back to the whole "people just made all this shit up" thing, which explains perfectly the inconsistencies and changing nature of thinking of things like hell over time (from OT to new, and then again to our own time I suppose), and people splitting into thousands of different factions and beliefs per within a supposedly united faith. All very human; no magic explanation or twisted thinking necessary.
I know what you're saying, and I don't think what he said was logically watertight, but basically the idea is that god punishes people for something that he must necessarily have created himself if he's really as important and powerful as the bible claims, and that is quite absurd. As you say, "nothing really has been said", because the whole idea contradicts itself. The only thing that needs to be established there is that punishment is bad, evil doesn't need to be defined as anything other than "something god punishes people for".
It was thinking along those lines that clinched it for me when I was having doubts about my own religion. I was so terrified of going against god's will if he was real. Then I realised that I wouldn't want to worship a god that treated people like that anyway, and that if I was going to go to some eternal hell at his whim then whatever. Then from there I gradually stopped believing, and have been able to see all the ideas for the absurdities that they are. It's amazing the absurd things that you will force yourself to accept if you make the assumption that an un-knowable variable is true (or indeed, false). I wouldn't say that there can't be beings we don't understand or know about, but I think it's pretty obvious that most/all of our gods are man made ideas.
Or someone should do something more long lasting than a punch, like chopping their balls off, and see how funny they find it then.. that would really "fix" their wagon :p
Nope, the argument says that the people who made up that particular god didn't think their logic through far enough.