Man, #2 is not funny. I'm getting off Coke AGAIN (Yes, Coca-cola) and it's a real friggin pain. The first day or so without isn't too bad, but the 3rd and 4th day really f---in suck. Headaches, muscles pains, general feelings of blah.
Last time, I had decided I could manage to have it for lunch when I went out and it'd all be okay. I was wrong. I was up to 4 cans a day again within weeks.
So I'm off again. For almost a week now. -sigh-
And no, this isn't meant to be funny. Soda really IS addictive. (Well, the caffeine in it, anyhow.)
That's true... I had forgotten about them, and they have all the expense except the cartidge itself. (They were just paper or a like a credit card, if I remember right.)
If they can manage to get the pictures off their camera and into an email, they can use Explorer to copy the files somewhere else. Simply set it up for them in advance and it'll be just like using their MyDocs folder.
I'm assuming they are using Windows XP, though. If you try to set all that up on 98, me, or linux for them... Well, may God have mercy on your soul.
They make a big deal about the Gameboy retro games being more expensive than Wii's retro games will be. That makes sense, though, as the actual COST of a Wii retro game is a lot less.
That really does depend on how you look at it. Either way, they would have been seen to 'do evil'.
A) Comply with the Chinese government. You are supporting their 'evil' ways.
B) Refuse to comply and (evilly) deprive every Chinese citizen of what is arguably the world's best search engine, not to mention all their other projects that are doing quite well.
It's a no-win situation. I personally feel the chose the 'more evil' way, though. Make it VERY clear that Google doesn't want to abandon China and lay out your terms clearly. Then pull out if the terms aren't met. People will still hate you, and call you a 'cyber terrorist' or whatever, but you'll have done the best you can to fight for their freedoms.
I suppose you could try ignoring them as a third option, but it would have ended up like B.
Not many people consult their lawyer before uploading MP3's to Kazaa.
Not many people consult their lawyer before robbing a bank.... before going to the super market.
Just because people don't routinely consult a lawyer about it does not mean it is right or wrong to do. (Or legal or illegal.)
The difference here is that we aren't talking about a person, we're talking about a group. They have a responsibility to themselves and everyone that downloads Debian. That responsiblity is to make sure that everything they distribute is legal. They even have an entire department (SPI, apparently) dedicated to helping them figure these things out. They chose NOT to use that department this time, and the department told them it was wrong when they finally found out. Their 'leader' (DPL, apparently) then flew off the hook and accused the SPI of trying to take over control of the project.
When looked at this way, it's pretty simple. DPL is over-reacting and SPI is forced to over-react to protect themselves as well. They can't continue saying 'we advised Debian' if the actions Debian takes are not based on their legal advice. It's harmful to them, plain and simple.
I'd paid for it, let me just have it!
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 1
I know I'm going to get modded flamebait for this, but...
What's with this "I threw money at you, let me just have everything" attitude? Games are not about just having everything instantly, they have ALWAYS been about working towards a goal. Even Pong had a goal... Get the ball past the other paddle. If that happened every single time and you could never lose, would you have bothered?
So there's the 2 ends of the spectrum... A click-through movie where there is no challenge and you are guaranteed to win, and a tough-as-nails-devote-your-life-to-it game where you work for EVERYTHING meager bit.
Neither of them are fun.
Instead, you need middle ground. You need a certain amount of stuff to come to your with little or no effort, and a certain amount that needs serious work to obtain. That's what most games -try- to do.
If everyone was level 60 in a day in World of Warcraft, would they keep playing? If it took everyone a minimum of a year to get lev 60, would they play? The latter, some people would... But the former, no way. You'd get a month out of most people (even if they only played a week, they'd want to THINK they were going to continue) and you'd get a very few that don't know when to call it quits. But you wouldn't last long at all.
For people that 'don't have enough time' and feel the game should just hand everything to them on a silver platter... That's what cheat codes are for. Learn to enjoy them.
It's not that I have all the time in the world. Far from it. I simply pick and choose the BEST games to play instead of playing all of them, as I did when I was jobless and being a mooch. If games are important to you, you can set aside the time. If they aren't... You won't.
The problem is that if we (as gamers and other computer users) ignore him, he'll manage to convince people that he is right and we won't be there to provide the counterbalance.
We can't afford to ignore him, but we CAN afford to make as much fun of him as possible and make sure EVERYONE knows just exactly how preposterous everything he says is. This means everything from simple 'gamers have a tendency to copy their games' to 'gamers are evil, disgusting creatures that would as soon shoot you in the face as look at you' and everything in-between. His tamest-sounding speech is poison to the minds of anyone involved with law. Every single thing that he gets someone to believe is a blow to the freedom of gamers around the USA. (Luckily, he hasn't spread world-wide yet.)
We cannot afford to be lax because the only 'experts' in this field are us. If we ignore him, he gets to run rampant.
"Did you know that 93% of statistics are made up on the spot?"
5950 to 7675 (3dmark scores) is over 28%. There were better and worse scores than that, but since that was the overall 3dmark core, I figured it would be good to go with.
Yes, there are individual tests that are lower than 20%, but to say 'at most 20%' when there are no games designed to USE that kind of hardware and the current benchmarks ALREADY show higher results... That's just wrong.
If you'd said 'better than 30%' I'd still have checked my facts before posting, but I never would have actually posted because for the most part, you'd be right. I'm surprised to see such a low increase when SLI normally gets about 60-80% more. (That's not a hard number, I made it up from my experiences and the benchmarks I've seen in the past.)
I splurged for a 5900 ultra when they first came out and I was very disappointed. I took my changes one more time and bought the 7800gtx when it came out, and I've been very happy with it. This could be just another situation where everything wasn't optimized correctly and it didn't perform like it should.
Even worse is the fact that they probably do not actually mean what they said.
'2 - 2.5x more powerful' is what they said... They probably actually MEAN '2 - 2.5x as powerful'. It's quite a difference.
If you make the GC a 1 for power, the first statement makes the Wii a 3.0 or 3.5. The second statement (the one they probably mean) would make the the Wii a 2.0 or 2.5. Quite some difference.
In the end, numbers like these mean nothing because you cannot trust the speaker to:
A) Know WTF he's talking about and B) Know WTF he's actually saying
Man, it took me a bit to understand that, but that's about exactly right. I believe in God -and- evolution, and don't understand how people can flat refuse to believe God is powerful enough to use evolution as his tool.
I decided to switch from Slackware 10.2 to Kubuntu when the company bought new computers for the tech department. They bought new Dells (don't hate me, I didn't really have a choice) and the Kubuntu install went very well on mine and my co-worker's computers, with the singular exception that I had to install in safe graphics mode and then update the video drivers to ATI's hardware accelerated stuff.
I also installed dapper beta on an OLD Compaq Armada 500mhz a few weeks ago, and it went smooth as silk.
But when he tried to install them on the old Dell he WAS using, and another computer (I don't know anything about it) it failed in the graphical department completely. Not even safe mode worked.
So, 3 out of 5 computers worked with it... and only 2 without a significant hitch. (Well, he didn't have it plugged into the internet at first and it appeared to hang until he plugged in a cable, then had an apt source missing later, but that was fixable and not Kubuntu's problem, really.)
Not exactly the best results in the world... But it's definitely coming along.
I think maybe you should take some time to read up on Opportunity Cost
As for the contest and its prizes...
I'm a coder and I've followed game development (even though I'm not in the industry, even as a hobby) for quite a few years and I've never heard of this contest. It's pretty safe to say that they only thing you get out of this contest other than some questionable prizes is a really nice line on your resume and bragging rights.
Well, Ender's AI Game on the computer wasn't exactly 'specific to the user'... The majority of the game was identical for each user, with only a few things pulled from his psyche to do whatever it was they wanted it to do. (The instructors didn't even seem to know.)
At the end, yes, there was areas that nobody had seen another child enter, but they -assumed- that they were unique to him. There was no proof of that.
A similar scenario could have been made by having the player enter pictures of certain figures in their life, and choosing some of those figures at the end according to how they handled other situations.
I'm not saying it's not more complicated (on a personal scale) than current games, just not so infinitely wonderful as you initially imagine.
Having said all that, I am also waiting for the day that 'RPG' means you don your cybervisor and wiimote^H^H^H^H^H^H^H controller and really feel like you are out slaying (and being slayed by) dragons.
Actually, Mr Grammar Nazi, what he said was correct, it probably just wasn't what he meant.
Exploits that are found and patched DO bring about a new version of the software. It's usually mixed in with a bunch of other patches, but it's there.
Maybe you should calm down and simply laugh at people that have no idea what they are saying, instead of pointlessly screaming at them. They don't CARE or they'd have made sure they had it right the first time.
"Making a game" isn't about just writing some code and making a game work. It's about bringing your idea to life. Most people don't have enough drive/need to succeed at either (I'm in that category so far, sadly), but they are more likely to have enough drive to put behind their own vision.
This looks like a seriously interesting game to me. So why do I just go play?
Because you have to buy the cards like Magic The Gathering, and each card is WAY too expensive. I do not care about the 'grand prize' that I have absolutely no chance of winning. I simply want to obtain the entire collection and have fun figuring out the puzzles.
If they'd made it a lot cheaper, I'd play. But then, with no cash reward, I suspect a lot of other people wouldn't have played, so it wouldn't exist anyhow.
Oh well, maybe some nice website will pirate all the cards for me after the contest is over. -sigh-
Maybe because some people prefer the tedium of MMO grinding to the tedium to MMO writing.
I've wanted to write my own game for YEARS. But that dream is only a dream. I like the planning, I like the thought of having my own game and doing what I want with it, but the reality isn't nearly so rosy.
As soon as your project gains even a little fan-base, you've suddenly got a group of people telling you:
A) Your game sucks because it's not (insert reason/other-game-name) B) Your game needs to do this. Yesterday. C) They hate you because you don't listen to them on YOUR game. D) Everything is peachy and wonderful and they have nothing to say, really, except they want to waste your time and if you don't respond, they turn into C.
This is, of course, assuming you work alone. If you work FOR someone, or WITH someone, you've gained at least half a boss.
Life in game-dev land is NOT ALL ROSES.
Add in the fact that the average career of a game dev is 5 years and you've got a recipe for disaster.
More power to the game devs that make all the games I love playing, but I no longer want to be one of them. I'd much rather pay whatever I have to and just have FUN playing them games. Ultimately, they come up with more ideas that my single brain could ever create anyhow.
Eh... That site is pretty messy. I'm not even sure they proofed what they wrote.
CWEB is a combination of C++, TeX, and CWEB.
Oooh, it's recursive.
The FAQ is hidden under articles and is a PDF. WTF? I can't even find out what it IS without starting loading up a freaking PDF? C'mon. No serious programmer stores ANYTHING they might have to actually look at in PDF if they can possibly help it.
I admit the idea of a programming language with built-in documentation and the idea of programming as 'do what the user wants with the computer' instead of 'tell the computer what to do' is a neat idea, but I'm worried that the authors of 'Literate Programming' can't make a good website for it. Or even the fans. Anybody!
Slashdot Mirror
Man, #2 is not funny. I'm getting off Coke AGAIN (Yes, Coca-cola) and it's a real friggin pain. The first day or so without isn't too bad, but the 3rd and 4th day really f---in suck. Headaches, muscles pains, general feelings of blah.
Last time, I had decided I could manage to have it for lunch when I went out and it'd all be okay. I was wrong. I was up to 4 cans a day again within weeks.
So I'm off again. For almost a week now. -sigh-
And no, this isn't meant to be funny. Soda really IS addictive. (Well, the caffeine in it, anyhow.)
No, Moore's law says nothing about price going down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
That's true... I had forgotten about them, and they have all the expense except the cartidge itself. (They were just paper or a like a credit card, if I remember right.)
If they can manage to get the pictures off their camera and into an email, they can use Explorer to copy the files somewhere else. Simply set it up for them in advance and it'll be just like using their MyDocs folder.
I'm assuming they are using Windows XP, though. If you try to set all that up on 98, me, or linux for them... Well, may God have mercy on your soul.
They make a big deal about the Gameboy retro games being more expensive than Wii's retro games will be. That makes sense, though, as the actual COST of a Wii retro game is a lot less.
No cartridge/cd
No box
No shipping
No marketting
Hmm... that's a lot of savings right there.
That really does depend on how you look at it. Either way, they would have been seen to 'do evil'.
A) Comply with the Chinese government. You are supporting their 'evil' ways.
B) Refuse to comply and (evilly) deprive every Chinese citizen of what is arguably the world's best search engine, not to mention all their other projects that are doing quite well.
It's a no-win situation. I personally feel the chose the 'more evil' way, though. Make it VERY clear that Google doesn't want to abandon China and lay out your terms clearly. Then pull out if the terms aren't met. People will still hate you, and call you a 'cyber terrorist' or whatever, but you'll have done the best you can to fight for their freedoms.
I suppose you could try ignoring them as a third option, but it would have ended up like B.
Not many people consult their lawyer before uploading MP3's to Kazaa.
... before going to the super market.
Not many people consult their lawyer before robbing a bank.
Just because people don't routinely consult a lawyer about it does not mean it is right or wrong to do. (Or legal or illegal.)
The difference here is that we aren't talking about a person, we're talking about a group. They have a responsibility to themselves and everyone that downloads Debian. That responsiblity is to make sure that everything they distribute is legal. They even have an entire department (SPI, apparently) dedicated to helping them figure these things out. They chose NOT to use that department this time, and the department told them it was wrong when they finally found out. Their 'leader' (DPL, apparently) then flew off the hook and accused the SPI of trying to take over control of the project.
When looked at this way, it's pretty simple. DPL is over-reacting and SPI is forced to over-react to protect themselves as well. They can't continue saying 'we advised Debian' if the actions Debian takes are not based on their legal advice. It's harmful to them, plain and simple.
I know I'm going to get modded flamebait for this, but...
What's with this "I threw money at you, let me just have everything" attitude? Games are not about just having everything instantly, they have ALWAYS been about working towards a goal. Even Pong had a goal... Get the ball past the other paddle. If that happened every single time and you could never lose, would you have bothered?
So there's the 2 ends of the spectrum... A click-through movie where there is no challenge and you are guaranteed to win, and a tough-as-nails-devote-your-life-to-it game where you work for EVERYTHING meager bit.
Neither of them are fun.
Instead, you need middle ground. You need a certain amount of stuff to come to your with little or no effort, and a certain amount that needs serious work to obtain. That's what most games -try- to do.
If everyone was level 60 in a day in World of Warcraft, would they keep playing? If it took everyone a minimum of a year to get lev 60, would they play? The latter, some people would... But the former, no way. You'd get a month out of most people (even if they only played a week, they'd want to THINK they were going to continue) and you'd get a very few that don't know when to call it quits. But you wouldn't last long at all.
For people that 'don't have enough time' and feel the game should just hand everything to them on a silver platter... That's what cheat codes are for. Learn to enjoy them.
It's not that I have all the time in the world. Far from it. I simply pick and choose the BEST games to play instead of playing all of them, as I did when I was jobless and being a mooch. If games are important to you, you can set aside the time. If they aren't... You won't.
It auto-redirects. You have to go to the page, then click print.
The problem is that if we (as gamers and other computer users) ignore him, he'll manage to convince people that he is right and we won't be there to provide the counterbalance.
We can't afford to ignore him, but we CAN afford to make as much fun of him as possible and make sure EVERYONE knows just exactly how preposterous everything he says is. This means everything from simple 'gamers have a tendency to copy their games' to 'gamers are evil, disgusting creatures that would as soon shoot you in the face as look at you' and everything in-between. His tamest-sounding speech is poison to the minds of anyone involved with law. Every single thing that he gets someone to believe is a blow to the freedom of gamers around the USA. (Luckily, he hasn't spread world-wide yet.)
We cannot afford to be lax because the only 'experts' in this field are us. If we ignore him, he gets to run rampant.
"Did you know that 93% of statistics are made up on the spot?"
5950 to 7675 (3dmark scores) is over 28%. There were better and worse scores than that, but since that was the overall 3dmark core, I figured it would be good to go with.
Yes, there are individual tests that are lower than 20%, but to say 'at most 20%' when there are no games designed to USE that kind of hardware and the current benchmarks ALREADY show higher results... That's just wrong.
If you'd said 'better than 30%' I'd still have checked my facts before posting, but I never would have actually posted because for the most part, you'd be right. I'm surprised to see such a low increase when SLI normally gets about 60-80% more. (That's not a hard number, I made it up from my experiences and the benchmarks I've seen in the past.)
I splurged for a 5900 ultra when they first came out and I was very disappointed. I took my changes one more time and bought the 7800gtx when it came out, and I've been very happy with it. This could be just another situation where everything wasn't optimized correctly and it didn't perform like it should.
Even worse is the fact that they probably do not actually mean what they said.
'2 - 2.5x more powerful' is what they said... They probably actually MEAN '2 - 2.5x as powerful'. It's quite a difference.
If you make the GC a 1 for power, the first statement makes the Wii a 3.0 or 3.5. The second statement (the one they probably mean) would make the the Wii a 2.0 or 2.5. Quite some difference.
In the end, numbers like these mean nothing because you cannot trust the speaker to:
A) Know WTF he's talking about
and
B) Know WTF he's actually saying
Man, it took me a bit to understand that, but that's about exactly right. I believe in God -and- evolution, and don't understand how people can flat refuse to believe God is powerful enough to use evolution as his tool.
I decided to switch from Slackware 10.2 to Kubuntu when the company bought new computers for the tech department. They bought new Dells (don't hate me, I didn't really have a choice) and the Kubuntu install went very well on mine and my co-worker's computers, with the singular exception that I had to install in safe graphics mode and then update the video drivers to ATI's hardware accelerated stuff.
I also installed dapper beta on an OLD Compaq Armada 500mhz a few weeks ago, and it went smooth as silk.
But when he tried to install them on the old Dell he WAS using, and another computer (I don't know anything about it) it failed in the graphical department completely. Not even safe mode worked.
So, 3 out of 5 computers worked with it... and only 2 without a significant hitch. (Well, he didn't have it plugged into the internet at first and it appeared to hang until he plugged in a cable, then had an apt source missing later, but that was fixable and not Kubuntu's problem, really.)
Not exactly the best results in the world... But it's definitely coming along.
I think maybe you should take some time to read up on Opportunity Cost
As for the contest and its prizes...
I'm a coder and I've followed game development (even though I'm not in the industry, even as a hobby) for quite a few years and I've never heard of this contest. It's pretty safe to say that they only thing you get out of this contest other than some questionable prizes is a really nice line on your resume and bragging rights.
So you're saying that Firefox isn't greasing the right palms and needs to work to keep these exploits a secret longer.
No thanks.
Well, Ender's AI Game on the computer wasn't exactly 'specific to the user'... The majority of the game was identical for each user, with only a few things pulled from his psyche to do whatever it was they wanted it to do. (The instructors didn't even seem to know.)
At the end, yes, there was areas that nobody had seen another child enter, but they -assumed- that they were unique to him. There was no proof of that.
A similar scenario could have been made by having the player enter pictures of certain figures in their life, and choosing some of those figures at the end according to how they handled other situations.
I'm not saying it's not more complicated (on a personal scale) than current games, just not so infinitely wonderful as you initially imagine.
Having said all that, I am also waiting for the day that 'RPG' means you don your cybervisor and wiimote^H^H^H^H^H^H^H controller and really feel like you are out slaying (and being slayed by) dragons.
Actually, Mr Grammar Nazi, what he said was correct, it probably just wasn't what he meant.
Exploits that are found and patched DO bring about a new version of the software. It's usually mixed in with a bunch of other patches, but it's there.
Maybe you should calm down and simply laugh at people that have no idea what they are saying, instead of pointlessly screaming at them. They don't CARE or they'd have made sure they had it right the first time.
"Making a game" isn't about just writing some code and making a game work. It's about bringing your idea to life. Most people don't have enough drive/need to succeed at either (I'm in that category so far, sadly), but they are more likely to have enough drive to put behind their own vision.
Eh, those are the same number, and the same as the number in the article. And they all identify the correct book.
1584503718 is "GNU/Linux Application Programming" by M. Tim Jones.
I suspect you could use any words from the summary and get a +? funny modifier with the soviet bit. Here's, let's try it.
In Soviet Russia, the rave throws you!
This looks like a seriously interesting game to me. So why do I just go play?
Because you have to buy the cards like Magic The Gathering, and each card is WAY too expensive. I do not care about the 'grand prize' that I have absolutely no chance of winning. I simply want to obtain the entire collection and have fun figuring out the puzzles.
If they'd made it a lot cheaper, I'd play. But then, with no cash reward, I suspect a lot of other people wouldn't have played, so it wouldn't exist anyhow.
Oh well, maybe some nice website will pirate all the cards for me after the contest is over. -sigh-
Maybe because some people prefer the tedium of MMO grinding to the tedium to MMO writing.
I've wanted to write my own game for YEARS. But that dream is only a dream. I like the planning, I like the thought of having my own game and doing what I want with it, but the reality isn't nearly so rosy.
As soon as your project gains even a little fan-base, you've suddenly got a group of people telling you:
A) Your game sucks because it's not (insert reason/other-game-name)
B) Your game needs to do this. Yesterday.
C) They hate you because you don't listen to them on YOUR game.
D) Everything is peachy and wonderful and they have nothing to say, really, except they want to waste your time and if you don't respond, they turn into C.
This is, of course, assuming you work alone. If you work FOR someone, or WITH someone, you've gained at least half a boss.
Life in game-dev land is NOT ALL ROSES.
Add in the fact that the average career of a game dev is 5 years and you've got a recipe for disaster.
More power to the game devs that make all the games I love playing, but I no longer want to be one of them. I'd much rather pay whatever I have to and just have FUN playing them games. Ultimately, they come up with more ideas that my single brain could ever create anyhow.
TFA explains the procedure needed to legally ship guns across state lines. It isn't fun, but it's legal.
Eh... That site is pretty messy. I'm not even sure they proofed what they wrote.
Oooh, it's recursive.
The FAQ is hidden under articles and is a PDF. WTF? I can't even find out what it IS without starting loading up a freaking PDF? C'mon. No serious programmer stores ANYTHING they might have to actually look at in PDF if they can possibly help it.
I admit the idea of a programming language with built-in documentation and the idea of programming as 'do what the user wants with the computer' instead of 'tell the computer what to do' is a neat idea, but I'm worried that the authors of 'Literate Programming' can't make a good website for it. Or even the fans. Anybody!