Online advertising is a piece of crap as it is. Let's ignore how creepy they get. Those ads are generally not creative, not interesting, and rarely go beyond "BUY THIS" (almost literally). Look at TV ads, they tend to be creative to catch the audience's attention. Everyone has been amused or even entertained by a TV ad, and even at times those ads went into pop culture from being campy, imaginative or inspired, or just hilarious. Not the case with Internet ads, they are just in the middle, doesn't expose the product (would you buy food from internet ads?) and it's simply not appealing. Its only purpose is being very annoying and hope you click by accident. I use twitpic to upload some sort of game development blog, and I was showing a friend some of my progress on his computer, and the ads came to full force(he doesn't have adblock like I do). I was even afraid to scroll (laptop touchpad thingy) because I really didn't want to leave any of my friend's ID on those creepy "free antivirus scan" ads by virtue of failing to scroll (got finger damage and my fingers like to stop during actions, thus I get a lot of clicks when I want to scroll in touchpads). Really, showing ads nowadays only serves to "sponsor" sites you like a lot. They fail as an advertisement medium entirely.
Oh PLEASE, it's the last thing we need, with the incoming tax raises, arbitrary raise of power costs, almost half of the population unemployed, and the fact that we already pay inflated multimedia prices due to some piracy canon, add more pressure in that field and the whole balance of the country will be obliterated. Any more pressure on the average Spaniard and a random African Village (pop.3-4 and no resources) will be more valuable than the whole country.
This is the first time I hear "good news" related to Spain in months. Watching news here is suicidal as of late, so incredibly depressing. Spanish judges are computer illiterate in most cases anyway, so the guy was probably laughing hard at the fact that random data is given arbitrarily high values and cannot fathom computer data (computer = toy) being valuable at all, so that explains the seemingly positive rulings in most cases. Yes there are a few judges not dating from the times of dictatorship, but don't expect them to be the norm.
Several friends from Japan are artists and they like little girl characters from anime and games, and they draw porn of them. This point is fake entirely, they draw it from scratch and proportions are unrealistic on purpose to cater more to the artist's fetish (some like little girls with huge boobs, like Maria from Castlevania (Rondo of Blood)). I have drawn together with them and they surely don't rotoscope anything at all. Specially when the little girls drawn have "distortions" from realism (very little girls tend to be drawn much chubbier than any real little girl, and with shorter legs, wider eyes, etc). I always wondered where this point comes from as it's obviously some excuse to demonize drawn lolita porn.
And yes, I do draw the stuff too. The only "model" I use is the character I want to draw from the original artist for clothing details and such.
Hm? 2chan (actually named Futaba Channel) has been around for AGES, inspiring the creation of 4chan and so. While new boards have been added with time, the basics are still there. I don't get your point, could you explain it in a different way?
Lies. I browse that site very often and you only find the lolicon on weekends in themed threads, and the CP is shunned like in other countries. Even so the porn is relegated to three (four now) general boards, the rest being themed areas such as animal/insect photography, robots, mechanics, idols, general anime, 3D stuff, etc. You are just trying to blow it out of proportion. Read the text on the boards too and you'd understand.
"All this law will do is create a black market for cell phones, which is going to deter a drug dealer about as much as being unable to buy cocaine at CVS would."
This happened in my country some years ago. The law had retroactive effects and required everyone with a prepaid cell phone to register (or face shutdown). Time passed, no difference at all.
"as an iPhone developer" You know, there are so many of you, it's not like anything out of the ordinary. Everyone and their grandma develops for iPhone now. In fact my grandma just submitted her third or fourth app with pictures of kittens.
Who paid this guy? (obvious question, my bad) Good or bad, I won't judge it, but it's certainly not that open. No more than any other OS out there at least.
Yes, Japanese words do not make plural forms the same way, so just adding "s" at the end is pretty much wrong. But then again even Japanese do it when writing English, so it's a very unimportant sort of wrong.
I am amused no one mentioned Doom here, it is definitely a stepstone in game modding. True that most of that modding came after source ports were made, but making a Doom mod is a process that takes relatively little time, and has potentially good results with not much effort. There are mods that, using ACS scripting (a few kilobytes of human-readable code), change Doom gameplay radically. There are bigger mods such as ZDoom Wars (combining FPS + strategy) or All Out War 2: The Second Coming (a team based mod heavily inspired by C&C:Renegade) that put the fun levels up enough to make them "games on their own right" while running on the Doom engine.
Current games never feel as easy to mod as Doom was, even games fully designed to be modded. Just the requirement of 3D modeling limits the possibilities for many potential modders. You can literally make fully featured and beautiful maps/mods in 24 hours. (And, despite kids in general being annoying in games, at times... give an annoying kid a very easy to mod game, and you might be surprised with the results. I only saw such a thing in Doom...and perhaps Dwarf Fortress)
I am Spanish and I can see why so little sales. Games here are way more expensive than in the US, arrive very late (if at all, even before R4 was available), and at times have features removed (slot machines in pokemon titles is a very irritating example). I import several games that aren't available here, and at times I need to hunt titles I enjoyed for months to purchase them legally (The World Ends With You is a good example, I needed months to track it up since the release was like one unit per gaming shop). Continuing the example of TWEWY, I pirated the game first and then once released here, I had to be quite persistent to purchase it. I really would have disregarded the game as garbage if I didn't try it out first, actually. The designs made the game seem poor to me, but it actually is engaging and fresh. Bangaioh Spirits, another one I pirated, was given an European release, and for that it was worth purchasing.
Seriously, gamers from the US complain a lot when a title comes first in Europe (Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow comes to mind) but we get most titles late, more expensive, and at times we don't. (Serious PSX classics such as Final Fantasy Tactics never got a release here, or stuff like Chrono Trigger. DS's release was the first chance to purchase it without ebay). Not to mention removed content or mangled translations (Lufia 2, simply called "Lufia" here, is a perfect example, they destroy the ending several times...and you thought Final Fantasy VI = Final Fantasy III was bad!).
I can easily prove I own a lot of games even if I pirate them first, I just need to take a photo of my games shelf, so don't think I am lying to save face. Expensive and late releases are a pretty good reason to pirate for those without the collector's enthusiasm though.
Even if I am posting on the internets and doing things of "higher profile", I was raised in borderline poverty, and I couldn't afford paid education like most people around me. The jobs I get are obviously too bad to afford it as an adult. If this existed, more unfortunate kids would be able to get a way to pay for their own studies, without having to depend on their daddies being rich. Heck I had fairly decent grades, I could have paid for actual textbooks at least and not cheap B&W copies. And I wasn't the only one, but the other poor kids mostly focused on being bullies and doing pot, they didn't give a shit already.
As game maker, I completely agree. Gamisms are a good thing while reality is usually a burden. Of course it has its place in simulators, and mild levels of realism can be interesting (for example in robots, which I like to articulate in intricate forms), but videogames...they allow us to throw wild levels of nonsense and make them work. Gamisms allow our character to take a fireball to the face or defying death with credits, blessings or potions. It's convenient unless you aim to do a faithful simulation of reality. But I think there aren't as many "fantastic" worlds because they require more imagination at work. Structuring a realistic city and putting it into the game is easier than inventing a different sort of world. You can use your mental image of a city, and the workforce will have less trouble adapting to that idea. In 2D it was easier to do because it was all drawn and required less detail and interaction.
The title is a reference to a game that used complete surreality as a plot device.
...You realize that mostly means a patch for Nautilus and 2/3 more Gnome apps, right? Seeing the comments on this makes it seem like an OS-wide change.
He already pushed Mono into a lot of parts of Gnome...harm is already done De Icaza, you had to realize before pushing it into one of the most widely used Linux desktop enviroments.
I played this quirky little game named Earthbound just this week, and the heroes actually don't steal stuff (it's even pointed out by a NPC at some point). The only situation where you actually "steal" is optional and the owner actually goes "How could you...?".
If it was that easy, I wouldn't set a virtual machine for it:P ActiveX components and IE-specific rendering, IE6-7 or you are out. No user-agent spoofing can alter a rendering engine.
You just need to search Slashdot, when the first screenshots of Windows 7 came out, many compared it to KDE4. Now everyone compares Seven to KDE4...which is unfair, as history shows otherwise. I doubt Aaron Seigo and related folks had inside views of Seven's development. But as the parent implies, it seems defending KDE4 is a risky position here, I wonder why. Qt is free now, and KDE is as much of a windows clone as most window managers out there, with a taskbar and titlebars. Gnome is a windows clone too.
I suffered a collapse recently, not a pleasant thing. My medic told me it was a lack of sodium in my blood that made me weak, so I had to force some more salt into my meals. And haven't had a problem since then. We need our sodium, present in salt, as mostly everyone points out in comments. Politicians get more and more retarded every day. They make wars, they take away freedom...they cause way more *direct* and *tangible* pain than any "witch" they want to "hunt".
I only know my personal experience, unfortunately no one around me knows how to put code together. Anyway, I started with "GWBASIC" I think, then moved to Quickbasic after some months.
My target is just making games, not even commercially, just because I love designing them, doing graphics, music... My hobby, not my professional choice. With BASIC, it was easy, and I had the ability to focus on making a tiny, pretty game instead of focusing on the coding part. And it taught me many things about game logic, how things worked behind the scenes. When I got a big, good enough idea, I jumped from QB to C+Lua+SDL+GL, and, in all honesty, it's not hard, just time consuming (fortunately for me)
The best thing is that, within the constraints of BASIC and a 8086 computer (CGA graphics! 4 putrid colors of WIN!), I learned to optimize code, which is a very valuable thing that, it seems, many game programmers of today weren't exposed to.
Then again, even with such a skill, I can't consider myself (or many wouldn't consider me) a real programmer, I don't feel capable to writing a desktop application, and I ignore the terminology of things. I can build a house and succeed but I am no architect.
Still, what this meant to say is that BASIC can surely teach some things, at least as entryway to "logic" which is the most important weapon of a programmer.
>Fact is, it doesn't make sense for the school to be spying on anyone. That's 1200 students to spy on in the hope that they might catch one of them doing >something naughty. Why would the school do this?
They might be terrorists or pedophiles of course. That's why everyone wants to spy on you.
So this means we are going to see games with movie budgets and no gameplay at all...we already do, but the balance will detriment gameplay even further by reasoning of manpower.
Slashdot Mirror
Online advertising is a piece of crap as it is.
Let's ignore how creepy they get. Those ads are generally not creative, not interesting, and rarely go beyond "BUY THIS" (almost literally).
Look at TV ads, they tend to be creative to catch the audience's attention. Everyone has been amused or even entertained by a TV ad, and even at times those ads went into pop culture from being campy, imaginative or inspired, or just hilarious.
Not the case with Internet ads, they are just in the middle, doesn't expose the product (would you buy food from internet ads?) and it's simply not appealing. Its only purpose is being very annoying and hope you click by accident.
I use twitpic to upload some sort of game development blog, and I was showing a friend some of my progress on his computer, and the ads came to full force(he doesn't have adblock like I do). I was even afraid to scroll (laptop touchpad thingy) because I really didn't want to leave any of my friend's ID on those creepy "free antivirus scan" ads by virtue of failing to scroll (got finger damage and my fingers like to stop during actions, thus I get a lot of clicks when I want to scroll in touchpads).
Really, showing ads nowadays only serves to "sponsor" sites you like a lot. They fail as an advertisement medium entirely.
Oh PLEASE, it's the last thing we need, with the incoming tax raises, arbitrary raise of power costs, almost half of the population unemployed, and the fact that we already pay inflated multimedia prices due to some piracy canon, add more pressure in that field and the whole balance of the country will be obliterated. Any more pressure on the average Spaniard and a random African Village (pop.3-4 and no resources) will be more valuable than the whole country.
This is the first time I hear "good news" related to Spain in months. Watching news here is suicidal as of late, so incredibly depressing.
Spanish judges are computer illiterate in most cases anyway, so the guy was probably laughing hard at the fact that random data is given arbitrarily high values and cannot fathom computer data (computer = toy) being valuable at all, so that explains the seemingly positive rulings in most cases.
Yes there are a few judges not dating from the times of dictatorship, but don't expect them to be the norm.
COLONY DROP! AAAAH!
Several friends from Japan are artists and they like little girl characters from anime and games, and they draw porn of them.
This point is fake entirely, they draw it from scratch and proportions are unrealistic on purpose to cater more to the artist's fetish (some like little girls with huge boobs, like Maria from Castlevania (Rondo of Blood)).
I have drawn together with them and they surely don't rotoscope anything at all. Specially when the little girls drawn have "distortions" from realism (very little girls tend to be drawn much chubbier than any real little girl, and with shorter legs, wider eyes, etc).
I always wondered where this point comes from as it's obviously some excuse to demonize drawn lolita porn.
And yes, I do draw the stuff too. The only "model" I use is the character I want to draw from the original artist for clothing details and such.
Hm? 2chan (actually named Futaba Channel) has been around for AGES, inspiring the creation of 4chan and so. While new boards have been added with time, the basics are still there.
I don't get your point, could you explain it in a different way?
Lies. I browse that site very often and you only find the lolicon on weekends in themed threads, and the CP is shunned like in other countries.
Even so the porn is relegated to three (four now) general boards, the rest being themed areas such as animal/insect photography, robots, mechanics, idols, general anime, 3D stuff, etc.
You are just trying to blow it out of proportion. Read the text on the boards too and you'd understand.
"All this law will do is create a black market for cell phones, which is going to deter a drug dealer about as much as being unable to buy cocaine at CVS would."
This happened in my country some years ago. The law had retroactive effects and required everyone with a prepaid cell phone to register (or face shutdown).
Time passed, no difference at all.
"as an iPhone developer"
You know, there are so many of you, it's not like anything out of the ordinary.
Everyone and their grandma develops for iPhone now.
In fact my grandma just submitted her third or fourth app with pictures of kittens.
Who paid this guy? (obvious question, my bad)
Good or bad, I won't judge it, but it's certainly not that open. No more than any other OS out there at least.
Yes, Japanese words do not make plural forms the same way, so just adding "s" at the end is pretty much wrong.
But then again even Japanese do it when writing English, so it's a very unimportant sort of wrong.
I am amused no one mentioned Doom here, it is definitely a stepstone in game modding.
True that most of that modding came after source ports were made, but making a Doom mod is a process that takes relatively little time, and has potentially good results with not much effort.
There are mods that, using ACS scripting (a few kilobytes of human-readable code), change Doom gameplay radically. There are bigger mods such as ZDoom Wars (combining FPS + strategy) or All Out War 2: The Second Coming (a team based mod heavily inspired by C&C:Renegade) that put the fun levels up enough to make them "games on their own right" while running on the Doom engine.
Current games never feel as easy to mod as Doom was, even games fully designed to be modded. Just the requirement of 3D modeling limits the possibilities for many potential modders. You can literally make fully featured and beautiful maps/mods in 24 hours.
(And, despite kids in general being annoying in games, at times... give an annoying kid a very easy to mod game, and you might be surprised with the results. I only saw such a thing in Doom...and perhaps Dwarf Fortress)
But that's what you use Twitter for!
I am Spanish and I can see why so little sales.
Games here are way more expensive than in the US, arrive very late (if at all, even before R4 was available), and at times have features removed (slot machines in pokemon titles is a very irritating example).
I import several games that aren't available here, and at times I need to hunt titles I enjoyed for months to purchase them legally (The World Ends With You is a good example, I needed months to track it up since the release was like one unit per gaming shop).
Continuing the example of TWEWY, I pirated the game first and then once released here, I had to be quite persistent to purchase it. I really would have disregarded the game as garbage if I didn't try it out first, actually. The designs made the game seem poor to me, but it actually is engaging and fresh.
Bangaioh Spirits, another one I pirated, was given an European release, and for that it was worth purchasing.
Seriously, gamers from the US complain a lot when a title comes first in Europe (Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow comes to mind) but we get most titles late, more expensive, and at times we don't. (Serious PSX classics such as Final Fantasy Tactics never got a release here, or stuff like Chrono Trigger. DS's release was the first chance to purchase it without ebay). Not to mention removed content or mangled translations (Lufia 2, simply called "Lufia" here, is a perfect example, they destroy the ending several times...and you thought Final Fantasy VI = Final Fantasy III was bad!).
I can easily prove I own a lot of games even if I pirate them first, I just need to take a photo of my games shelf, so don't think I am lying to save face. Expensive and late releases are a pretty good reason to pirate for those without the collector's enthusiasm though.
Even if I am posting on the internets and doing things of "higher profile", I was raised in borderline poverty, and I couldn't afford paid education like most people around me. The jobs I get are obviously too bad to afford it as an adult.
If this existed, more unfortunate kids would be able to get a way to pay for their own studies, without having to depend on their daddies being rich.
Heck I had fairly decent grades, I could have paid for actual textbooks at least and not cheap B&W copies. And I wasn't the only one, but the other poor kids mostly focused on being bullies and doing pot, they didn't give a shit already.
As game maker, I completely agree.
Gamisms are a good thing while reality is usually a burden. Of course it has its place in simulators, and mild levels of realism can be interesting (for example in robots, which I like to articulate in intricate forms), but videogames...they allow us to throw wild levels of nonsense and make them work. Gamisms allow our character to take a fireball to the face or defying death with credits, blessings or potions. It's convenient unless you aim to do a faithful simulation of reality.
But I think there aren't as many "fantastic" worlds because they require more imagination at work. Structuring a realistic city and putting it into the game is easier than inventing a different sort of world. You can use your mental image of a city, and the workforce will have less trouble adapting to that idea. In 2D it was easier to do because it was all drawn and required less detail and interaction.
The title is a reference to a game that used complete surreality as a plot device.
...You realize that mostly means a patch for Nautilus and 2/3 more Gnome apps, right?
Seeing the comments on this makes it seem like an OS-wide change.
He already pushed Mono into a lot of parts of Gnome...harm is already done De Icaza, you had to realize before pushing it into one of the most widely used Linux desktop enviroments.
I played this quirky little game named Earthbound just this week, and the heroes actually don't steal stuff (it's even pointed out by a NPC at some point).
The only situation where you actually "steal" is optional and the owner actually goes "How could you...?".
If it was that easy, I wouldn't set a virtual machine for it :P
ActiveX components and IE-specific rendering, IE6-7 or you are out. No user-agent spoofing can alter a rendering engine.
Why yes, any government-related site or service in my country requires the use of IE. Having a little virtual machine for those cases helps.
You just need to search Slashdot, when the first screenshots of Windows 7 came out, many compared it to KDE4. Now everyone compares Seven to KDE4...which is unfair, as history shows otherwise. I doubt Aaron Seigo and related folks had inside views of Seven's development.
But as the parent implies, it seems defending KDE4 is a risky position here, I wonder why. Qt is free now, and KDE is as much of a windows clone as most window managers out there, with a taskbar and titlebars. Gnome is a windows clone too.
I suffered a collapse recently, not a pleasant thing.
My medic told me it was a lack of sodium in my blood that made me weak, so I had to force some more salt into my meals. And haven't had a problem since then.
We need our sodium, present in salt, as mostly everyone points out in comments. Politicians get more and more retarded every day.
They make wars, they take away freedom...they cause way more *direct* and *tangible* pain than any "witch" they want to "hunt".
I only know my personal experience, unfortunately no one around me knows how to put code together.
Anyway, I started with "GWBASIC" I think, then moved to Quickbasic after some months.
My target is just making games, not even commercially, just because I love designing them, doing graphics, music... My hobby, not my professional choice.
With BASIC, it was easy, and I had the ability to focus on making a tiny, pretty game instead of focusing on the coding part. And it taught me many things about game logic, how things worked behind the scenes.
When I got a big, good enough idea, I jumped from QB to C+Lua+SDL+GL, and, in all honesty, it's not hard, just time consuming (fortunately for me)
The best thing is that, within the constraints of BASIC and a 8086 computer (CGA graphics! 4 putrid colors of WIN!), I learned to optimize code, which is a very valuable thing that, it seems, many game programmers of today weren't exposed to.
Then again, even with such a skill, I can't consider myself (or many wouldn't consider me) a real programmer, I don't feel capable to writing a desktop application, and I ignore the terminology of things. I can build a house and succeed but I am no architect.
Still, what this meant to say is that BASIC can surely teach some things, at least as entryway to "logic" which is the most important weapon of a programmer.
>Fact is, it doesn't make sense for the school to be spying on anyone. That's 1200 students to spy on in the hope that they might catch one of them doing
>something naughty. Why would the school do this?
They might be terrorists or pedophiles of course. That's why everyone wants to spy on you.
So this means we are going to see games with movie budgets and no gameplay at all...we already do, but the balance will detriment gameplay even further by reasoning of manpower.