What he says, as he said it, is wrong. People don't play games ONLY for the social interaction. They play them online because they are fun (or entertaining, depending on your definitions) AND for the social interaction.
I love MMOs that have good social interaction and are entertaining, too. If either aspect is missing, I don't find it fun. Obviously, there are those that only seek 1 or the other, but I believe the mainstream gamer seeks both, whether he/she knows it or not.
Take a browse around some XBox Live enabled forums at GameFAQs. You'll find a LOT of people (not some miniscule precent) have their XBL tag in their sig. Sounds to me like XBL is working a lot better than the article suggests.
I'd like to point out that 'gimped' is also in the mainstream vocabulary, meaning 'horribly mangled' and describes exactly what happens when I use the GIMP to edit a picture.
(We'll just ignore the fact that anything I photoshop is gimped, too.)
They're identical except 1 thing: The video card. The WinXPMC PC offers an integrated card where the Open Source PC only offers ATI cards.
Having said that, the difference is only $30 and last I checked, the OEM of WINXPMC was quite a bit higher than that. So yes, there's still a tax, and no, it's not as high as it looked at first.
It's a mindset thing. Americans are taught from birth that it is wrong (and possibly sinful) to say certain words. My mother still cringes when I say 'fuck' and I've said it a LOT.
To me, it's just a word. Like 'blimey'. Nobody screams bloody murder when you say 'blimey', and yet it's used in the same way.
Or let's look at replacement words... 'Frack' and 'frell' are a couple scifi replacements for 'fuck'. They are extremely obvious what they are, and yet nobody cares if they are said.
There are even other, more obvious words... Shit and crap are EXACTLY the same thing. Why is one a 'cuss word' and the other merely another word for excrement?
This bothered me for a few years and I spent those years cursing like a sailor. With reasonable people, it made no difference at all. But lately, it's gotten boring and I've decided to try to keep it to a minimum, mainly for something to do while I'm speaking. (Speech is boring and can use a lot of livening-up.)
It's worth noting that programs like apt-get are more than just an installer. They also do intelligent selection of dependencies and retrieve, install, and configure the whole set. They can also be used to keep everything up to date. A simple 'setup.exe' doesn't compare AT ALL to this.
Obligatory car analogy: This is like a waterhose at the gas station compared to a free, always-available travelling car-detailer.
For those that feel the need to a single file install like that, Slackware, Debian and others all have user-provided 1-file installs for the most popular programs.
In short: You can have your 1-file install and apt-get too, but not on Windows.
Instead of calling it a right, call it a freedom. Freedom IS a right, and being paranoid is one of your freedoms.
And you are correct, nobody can legally take away your paranoia without your consent... Unless they have you institutionalized for it. All bets are off at that point.
First off, Slavery wasn't outlawed because most people thought it was wrong. It was outlawed because the North beat the crap out of the South. If the South had won, we might very well still have slavery today. That's totally conjecture, though.
As for laws changing... Laws don't get removed from the books until a court case is proven against them. When you can get a random group of jurors to say Johnny didn't do anything illegal by downloading songs he didn't pay for, the laws against it (whichever they may be) will hold less power. The more times this happens, the less power they will have.
How many times has this happened? None!? Are you SERIOUS!? I thought we just decided that most people felt this wasn't unethical, let alone illegal??
I think most people recognize that downloading songs you haven't paid for is ethically incorrect, whether it's legal or not.
What's the simple test for ethically correct? Here's mine: If someone did that to me, would it hurt?
This news hit the C64 scene HARD a while ago. The first they did is announce that everyone playing C64 games on emulators was stealing from them since they now owned the name and demanded that they stop. The second thing was to announce an official C64 emulator and that they would sell the old games for it.
I would think their first step should not be to alienate every single interested person in the world. Last I heard, they were completely unrepentant. The Commodore name is going to be a huge money-sink for these people if they don't VERY quickly smarten up and ask their customers what they want.
I think it's even more basic than this. When you were growing up, your parents constantly reinforced 'good' behavior (doing what you were told) and discouraged 'bad' behavior (not doing it.) Regardless of WHY you had to do it, you did it because your parents told you to.
Chimps don't get much of this conditioning. The ones in captivity get even less, I'm sure. There aren't many dangers inside a cage at the zoo.
So from birth, chimps are let do basically anything they want, where humans are pretty much forced to do things.
Is it any surprise that when asked to do things that don't make sense, the unguided monkeys don't do them and the strictly guided humans do? It doesn't surprise me at all.
There's a lot of trial and error involved, but mainly it's a matter of understanding how it's been done in the past and how it could be done.
You start by looking for signs of things you know should exist. It's Microsoft, so they would probably use a file system along the lines of one they already use, like FAT or NTFS. Look for signs like a file table and figure out how they stored the information regarding where things are placed.
With some trial and error, you can determine exactly how things are placed there, and what format is used to describe them. (Meta data.) After you understand the meta data, you write a program to let you access it easier and then you start understanding the data.
I'm not guessing at any of this. This is exactly the process I used to write my Sims skn2obj converter a few years back. Maxis was very very tight-lipped on everything and wouldn't even respond to eep2 or I. He pointed out how close it looked to OBJ format and I took it from there. It turned out the format was relatively close, but there was a lot of extra data that obj didn't handle and everything had been rotated and transformed.
Anywhere, as always, it's a ton of work and guesswork both. (Very rewarding, though, once you get it.)
As for how to break encryption... I assume it's along the same lines, but I've never even tried it.
I had thought libtorrent dead. I'm not sure why, as I see it's been updated very recently now. I'm glad to see this.
libtorrent/rtorrent is linux-only, and bitcomet is Windows-only, so it's not really a situation of alternatives.
http://www.utorrent.com/, on the other hand, is basically the same idea as libtorrent, but on windows. It's written in C++ and is very efficient and lightweight. I used ABC, PTC, and Azureus until I found utorrent and I find utorrent to be much much nicer.
I've finally seen the light, though, and I'm now using Slackware 10.2 as my main OS and Windows for gaming only. rtorrent (or maybe a customized client using libtorrent) is now on my list of things to try.
I'm not saying they don't work in general. PEMDAS is one of the nmemonics taught in almost every school. It doens't get that kind of widespread adoption by not working.
I'm just saying he places a lot more faith in that method than he should. The real difference wasn't the method, it was the teacher. Teachers that truly care about their job, and whether children learn, teach a lot better. I've had a few of these teachers and they truly work magic.
And by the way, the BEST way to learn things is to use them while learning. Taking a problem through (math, english, it doesn't matter) and explaining why each step is used, then forcing the student to try again on their own, this will drive the lesson home. They're going to make mistakes the first time, but that's part of the process. Of all the things I've learned, I remember my mistakes (and their solutions) best.
Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic
on
Artificial Tornadoes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They've already got fairly efficient ways of turning solar energy into power. Turning it into a tornado and then into power probably won't be as effective.
So we'll assume they plan to use already-warm water... From where? The oceans? We've got people complaining about windmills and weather patterns, you think maybe messing with the temperature of the ocean won't be a bigger problem?
I can't see this being anything other than a scam or a 'really cool idea' that just isn't practical.
Umm... Are you SURE they work? "Please Excuse My Poor Aunt Sally" is PEMPAS, not PEMDAS. I think the word you want is 'dear' rather than 'poor.'
Also, you just said the worst teachers are stuck on 1 method, and then give a tale about a teacher that only used one method, but it worked...
I'm a firefox user, but if someone blocked a site against whatever browser I'm using at the moment, I'd go find another site instead. You suggestion wouldn't hurt IE, but only Google, unfortunately.
This isn't hypothetical, by the way. It wasn't that long ago (when using IE) that some of my favorite sites had a lot of downtime issues. I found other sites. And my bank didn't support anything except IE. I very very nearly changed banks, and that's a lot harder than changing browsers. They've smartened up now.
And another one:
4) You've just given them your name, address, and phone number, which they can use for whatever they want because you signed the agreement stating such.
Maybe they'll only use it internally to build data on what customers want, but I wouldn't count on it.
My first thought on this was "Whatever! Another crackpot theory about how the universe has special mystical things happening." But then I stopped and thought "Oh yeah, we thought the earth was flat, once."
My prediction, in the end, is that this will mean nearly nothing in our generation when all is said and done. Just like the earth being round meant nearly nothing back then, the freaky time vortex we live in will have very very little to do with the common man today. Once we invent some magical mystical space transportation, yeah, it'll probably matter, but not until then.
Slashdot Mirror
What he says, as he said it, is wrong. People don't play games ONLY for the social interaction. They play them online because they are fun (or entertaining, depending on your definitions) AND for the social interaction.
I love MMOs that have good social interaction and are entertaining, too. If either aspect is missing, I don't find it fun. Obviously, there are those that only seek 1 or the other, but I believe the mainstream gamer seeks both, whether he/she knows it or not.
Take a browse around some XBox Live enabled forums at GameFAQs. You'll find a LOT of people (not some miniscule precent) have their XBL tag in their sig. Sounds to me like XBL is working a lot better than the article suggests.
I'd like to point out that 'gimped' is also in the mainstream vocabulary, meaning 'horribly mangled' and describes exactly what happens when I use the GIMP to edit a picture.
(We'll just ignore the fact that anything I photoshop is gimped, too.)
They're identical except 1 thing: The video card. The WinXPMC PC offers an integrated card where the Open Source PC only offers ATI cards.
Having said that, the difference is only $30 and last I checked, the OEM of WINXPMC was quite a bit higher than that. So yes, there's still a tax, and no, it's not as high as it looked at first.
It's a mindset thing. Americans are taught from birth that it is wrong (and possibly sinful) to say certain words. My mother still cringes when I say 'fuck' and I've said it a LOT.
To me, it's just a word. Like 'blimey'. Nobody screams bloody murder when you say 'blimey', and yet it's used in the same way.
Or let's look at replacement words... 'Frack' and 'frell' are a couple scifi replacements for 'fuck'. They are extremely obvious what they are, and yet nobody cares if they are said.
There are even other, more obvious words... Shit and crap are EXACTLY the same thing. Why is one a 'cuss word' and the other merely another word for excrement?
This bothered me for a few years and I spent those years cursing like a sailor. With reasonable people, it made no difference at all. But lately, it's gotten boring and I've decided to try to keep it to a minimum, mainly for something to do while I'm speaking. (Speech is boring and can use a lot of livening-up.)
It's worth noting that programs like apt-get are more than just an installer. They also do intelligent selection of dependencies and retrieve, install, and configure the whole set. They can also be used to keep everything up to date. A simple 'setup.exe' doesn't compare AT ALL to this.
Obligatory car analogy: This is like a waterhose at the gas station compared to a free, always-available travelling car-detailer.
For those that feel the need to a single file install like that, Slackware, Debian and others all have user-provided 1-file installs for the most popular programs.
In short: You can have your 1-file install and apt-get too, but not on Windows.
Instead of calling it a right, call it a freedom. Freedom IS a right, and being paranoid is one of your freedoms.
And you are correct, nobody can legally take away your paranoia without your consent... Unless they have you institutionalized for it. All bets are off at that point.
The real solution, and I think everyone will agree with me on this, is to kill all the birds.
First off, Slavery wasn't outlawed because most people thought it was wrong. It was outlawed because the North beat the crap out of the South. If the South had won, we might very well still have slavery today. That's totally conjecture, though.
As for laws changing... Laws don't get removed from the books until a court case is proven against them. When you can get a random group of jurors to say Johnny didn't do anything illegal by downloading songs he didn't pay for, the laws against it (whichever they may be) will hold less power. The more times this happens, the less power they will have.
How many times has this happened? None!? Are you SERIOUS!? I thought we just decided that most people felt this wasn't unethical, let alone illegal??
I think most people recognize that downloading songs you haven't paid for is ethically incorrect, whether it's legal or not.
What's the simple test for ethically correct? Here's mine: If someone did that to me, would it hurt?
This news hit the C64 scene HARD a while ago. The first they did is announce that everyone playing C64 games on emulators was stealing from them since they now owned the name and demanded that they stop. The second thing was to announce an official C64 emulator and that they would sell the old games for it.
I would think their first step should not be to alienate every single interested person in the world. Last I heard, they were completely unrepentant. The Commodore name is going to be a huge money-sink for these people if they don't VERY quickly smarten up and ask their customers what they want.
I'd join! Wait, I think I'm already a member. Are you trying to trick us!?
I think it's even more basic than this. When you were growing up, your parents constantly reinforced 'good' behavior (doing what you were told) and discouraged 'bad' behavior (not doing it.) Regardless of WHY you had to do it, you did it because your parents told you to.
Chimps don't get much of this conditioning. The ones in captivity get even less, I'm sure. There aren't many dangers inside a cage at the zoo.
So from birth, chimps are let do basically anything they want, where humans are pretty much forced to do things.
Is it any surprise that when asked to do things that don't make sense, the unguided monkeys don't do them and the strictly guided humans do? It doesn't surprise me at all.
There's a lot of trial and error involved, but mainly it's a matter of understanding how it's been done in the past and how it could be done.
You start by looking for signs of things you know should exist. It's Microsoft, so they would probably use a file system along the lines of one they already use, like FAT or NTFS. Look for signs like a file table and figure out how they stored the information regarding where things are placed.
With some trial and error, you can determine exactly how things are placed there, and what format is used to describe them. (Meta data.) After you understand the meta data, you write a program to let you access it easier and then you start understanding the data.
I'm not guessing at any of this. This is exactly the process I used to write my Sims skn2obj converter a few years back. Maxis was very very tight-lipped on everything and wouldn't even respond to eep2 or I. He pointed out how close it looked to OBJ format and I took it from there. It turned out the format was relatively close, but there was a lot of extra data that obj didn't handle and everything had been rotated and transformed.
Anywhere, as always, it's a ton of work and guesswork both. (Very rewarding, though, once you get it.)
As for how to break encryption... I assume it's along the same lines, but I've never even tried it.
I had thought libtorrent dead. I'm not sure why, as I see it's been updated very recently now. I'm glad to see this.
libtorrent/rtorrent is linux-only, and bitcomet is Windows-only, so it's not really a situation of alternatives.
http://www.utorrent.com/, on the other hand, is basically the same idea as libtorrent, but on windows. It's written in C++ and is very efficient and lightweight. I used ABC, PTC, and Azureus until I found utorrent and I find utorrent to be much much nicer.
I've finally seen the light, though, and I'm now using Slackware 10.2 as my main OS and Windows for gaming only. rtorrent (or maybe a customized client using libtorrent) is now on my list of things to try.
I'm not saying they don't work in general. PEMDAS is one of the nmemonics taught in almost every school. It doens't get that kind of widespread adoption by not working. I'm just saying he places a lot more faith in that method than he should. The real difference wasn't the method, it was the teacher. Teachers that truly care about their job, and whether children learn, teach a lot better. I've had a few of these teachers and they truly work magic. And by the way, the BEST way to learn things is to use them while learning. Taking a problem through (math, english, it doesn't matter) and explaining why each step is used, then forcing the student to try again on their own, this will drive the lesson home. They're going to make mistakes the first time, but that's part of the process. Of all the things I've learned, I remember my mistakes (and their solutions) best.
They've already got fairly efficient ways of turning solar energy into power. Turning it into a tornado and then into power probably won't be as effective. So we'll assume they plan to use already-warm water... From where? The oceans? We've got people complaining about windmills and weather patterns, you think maybe messing with the temperature of the ocean won't be a bigger problem? I can't see this being anything other than a scam or a 'really cool idea' that just isn't practical.
Umm... Are you SURE they work? "Please Excuse My Poor Aunt Sally" is PEMPAS, not PEMDAS. I think the word you want is 'dear' rather than 'poor.' Also, you just said the worst teachers are stuck on 1 method, and then give a tale about a teacher that only used one method, but it worked...
I don't suppose anyone has a way to still play this? Or even some screenshots? I missed the first news post and it sounds very interesting.
I'm a firefox user, but if someone blocked a site against whatever browser I'm using at the moment, I'd go find another site instead. You suggestion wouldn't hurt IE, but only Google, unfortunately. This isn't hypothetical, by the way. It wasn't that long ago (when using IE) that some of my favorite sites had a lot of downtime issues. I found other sites. And my bank didn't support anything except IE. I very very nearly changed banks, and that's a lot harder than changing browsers. They've smartened up now.
And another one: 4) You've just given them your name, address, and phone number, which they can use for whatever they want because you signed the agreement stating such. Maybe they'll only use it internally to build data on what customers want, but I wouldn't count on it.
My first thought on this was "Whatever! Another crackpot theory about how the universe has special mystical things happening." But then I stopped and thought "Oh yeah, we thought the earth was flat, once." My prediction, in the end, is that this will mean nearly nothing in our generation when all is said and done. Just like the earth being round meant nearly nothing back then, the freaky time vortex we live in will have very very little to do with the common man today. Once we invent some magical mystical space transportation, yeah, it'll probably matter, but not until then.