This has been on my mind over the last year, so I'm curious what insight others might have:
I've noticed a growing trend of people replacing the word "bug" with "glitch," in ever increasingly frequency. Anyone else noticed this? I am active in an open source fps (http://sauerbraten.org/), and paying attention to questions and comments by new users has really highlighted this trend. What's the cause in this shift? World of Warcraft? (Don't laugh - a game with that kind of userbase can have an impact, at the scale they operate at).
I found a post on this blog that notes a greasemonkey script to hide the searchwikified results, as well as a link to a google groups thread that shows a url tweak that will skip the feature in your searches (and can be used to make your iGoogle homepage searchwiki free).
It can be a lot of fun to just sit and watch someone play nethack. Just type telnet nethack.alt.org into any old command line, and you can connect up to play, but also to observer a game in progress. Try to match up your window size to the player you wish to observer (listed in the game info). It's great fun to watch people are often far, far better than you, getting far, far further in the game than you ever will:P And my god, the speed these guys progress at. Yikes!
This thread will (has) descend into alternative recommendations, so I'll take a moment to pimp a multiplayer variant of Angband, being MAngband ( http://www.mangband.org/ ). A realtime non-turnbased roguelike sounds kooky, but it actually works out pretty darned well (and Morgoth in realtime is a very frightening experience).
On a side note, I always appreciate roguelike-related threads on slashdot, as it is a rare opporunity for my username to have any sense of context.
Wow. Very impressive. Torrent, anyone?
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is quite an impressive bit of work, and kudos to dude for posting the mp3 version of his archived.wavs. Seeing the whole page of awesome music (and the sub pages of Japanese, Arabic, and Greek stuff as well) really makes me want to see this all packaged up as a torrent - and sooner than later. Spidey sense says many of these will be drawing unwanted interest.
This band seems to be following the script of the semi-movie-semi-mockumentary Hong Kong film "The Heavenly Kings," in which the band decides to upload their main song to P2P networks, then complain of the leak in a press release as a method of getting coverage, hype, and attention.
Never was quite clear just how much of the film is real, and how much is fictional (the actors in the movie did in fact start a cheezy boy band, as depicted in the film, and seemed to, on one hand, draw inspiration for the film from their experiences, at the very least).
Anyhoo, the second I read the blrb, I instantly realized these guys have probably watched the film in question.
Whoa wait, you grew up in Barrows? That's a small town, and most readers probably don't get the significance of that local - Barrows is the northernmose town in America. And by northernmost, I mean "on the northern coast." Barrows is the extreme extreme far north of the States - 55 is a toasty warm day for this lot.
This is particularly interesting in the open-source cross-platform FPS "Sauerbraten/Cube2": The enemy is always depicted in red, and your team always depicted in blue (relative to you).
On the other hand, I keep seeing people (on their forum) not explicitly saying that it *isnt* the last HOPE. There was some speculation that perhaps this is the final HOPE at the current digs/location, but I couldn't get any firm details on that front. Any additional info would be useful.
Oddly enough, a sufficient amount of time has passed to let the ghost of oldschool Duke Nukem fade away. The result is that, much in the same way that TF2 took so freaking long that the people originally looking forward to it grew up, got jobs, had kids, joined the Masons, and died - leaving a largely new batch of people who weren't that familiar with the original context the game arose from. So to with DNF, I suspect. Let's be honest here - the average 22 year old kid who sees a review of DNF on some game site in six months isnt going to have the 12 years of expectation and context that the rest of us might have. The result? I suspect DNF will actually do just fine. We all went from growing expectations over time, to mocking it, to effectively forgetting about it and moving on. DNF is now a game for a new wodge of users, who won't be all that familiar with its history. DNF has gone on long enough that, like TF2, the clock has actually kind of reset.
renders like crap, too
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
And to add insult to injury, the page renders poorly on my box, further enhancing the pain:
"By the time we got there, the lineup was gone, but a couple of helpful Apple blueshirts told us what was what: It turns out that the lineup wasn't for the widely -- and wildly -- rumored 3G iPhone. The store got a shipment of current iPhones this morning, apparently a rare occurrence these days, and when word got out, some touchscreen-hungry folks got in line to snatch up the few that came in."
The Guide has already established that Goonhilly and Jodrell Bank perform poorly in real-world situations such as detecting large-scale near-earth-orbit objects. Despite a proposed upgrade, I still have to come down on the side of the STFC review and agree that throwing good money after bad doesn't make any sense.
Wow! I can't believe my above comment, which started with a +1 underrated, got pounded down with multiple offtopics. That's insane! I'm chuckling at the irony here: my missive to encourage people to spend their mod points on other comments in the discussion seems to have encouraged them to instead shut me up:P
Guys, time to toss those mod points a little further afield. Browsing at (3), I'm currently getting 17 (3+) comments, and 6 of those are from the submitter NewYorkCountryLawyer! Now I'm as interested as the rest of you in his comments, but my spidey sense tells me people are modding his comments up because of who he is, and less because of the content of any one of his comments. He's a conversational guy, and makes frequent small comments like the rest of us - we can't just mod up every one of em! Keep the conversation broad and varied - spread those points around!
CD-check is just a really basic, broad-spectrum, anti-casual-pirating deal in most cases. It's become increasingly common to patch it out at some point in a game's lifecycle. You want to have it present during the bulk of your sales (ie, early on) but particularly with a game that has a significant online component (that is, vocal users), you also want to get rid of it sooner than later (of course, Blizzard is a special case, and mmo's are a different story).
Last game I worked on, we had the CD-check already removed for the 1.1 patch (which itself was completed before the game even hit the shelves), and we released it in less than two weeks from the date the game appeared on the shelves.
The easy to circumvent things like this really are just there to discourage casual copying amongst average Joe's. While of course this and pretty much anything else can be gotten around, the people who do, know how to do, or would make the effort to do, these kinds of things are a subset of the larger market. So, studios/publishers will add in some of the basic old school protections as a kind of first order protection.
These kinds of things are kind of annoying, but the idea is to not have a Tribes 1 experience (zero, and I mean *zero*, copy protection of any kind: you could literally drag-and-drop the install folder into ICQ, so to speak, and send the whole thing to your buddy). It was sad to see the sales-vs-players numbers for Tribes 1: seventy thousand copies sold with 350,000 players online has got to bring a tear to the eye.
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like to have a job where if what's immediately in front of me is blocked, then I am blocked from working. I battle to keep my workweek hour-count at something reasonable, and have never once lacked for (way too much) to do. Tool isn't working? No worries, I've got a huge list of things to do using other tools. Hardware problem? I've got an extra box. Power failure in my wing? Sounds good: Ive got loads of people I need to meet with to hash out problems and sync up with. Fire alarm goes off in the building? I'll hang out in the parking lot with my coworkers and have some impromptu talks on things I'm working on (thank god this happens less often now that we have heat sensing, instead of smoke sensing, fire alarms).
The idea of having a job where a blocking problem means its time to browse websites, or percieving that my job would allow for that, is totally foreign to me. Seriously - are you honestly saying that in these situations that there is literally *nothing* work related for you to do?
(for those noting the time of day that I'm posting this response, I'm on vacation right now:P )
Wow, I gotta admit - that is a very large collection of what amounts to mini essays by a very very large number of people, from a very diverse range of disciplines and backrounds. I really recommend randomly clicking through large number of pages they have, all filled with thoughts and essays from a whole wodge of people in, and in orbit around, science. I accidentally blew through an hour on that list.
Even with the size of the merger, the combined company will still be smaller than the industry giant EA /me shrugs
Dice it up how you will. The New York times, for example, notes that:
The two companies said that their combined revenue for 2007 would be $3.8 billion. The combined company will challenge Electronic Arts, with projected 2007 revenue of about $3.7 billion...
I'll stick with my original comment that in particular, EA "may have" just dropped into second place, and as well stick with the spirit of my post in general: that EA now has company, so to speak.
Click the link. I'm thinking in terms of Blizzard as a generaly well-thought-of company in the eyes of the average gamer, vs. EA (of the ea-spouse fame, my link in the post) as increasingly being percieved as mean, tough, and evil. I suspect EA might be hitting that point where they have been too big for too long, which the public has an odd aversion to - sometimes, we seem not not like it when someone does too well, for too long, when mixed with some mean-ness (ie, the ea-spouse thing).
That Blizzard is a large company, and sometimes does nasty large company things, certainly no-one would dispute. But I think the public has a softer impression of them at present, as opposed to EA, which could open up an interesting hearts-and-minds/public-perception opportunity for them (such as Google was able to achieve in spades, for example). On the other hand, of course, MMO's are legendary for making pretty much any sainted developer look like an evil bastard over time (due, I think, to the rough and tumble necessities of running an MMO and failing the often impossible task of bridging reality and player's desires).
Many news-sites are actually reporting this as a merger between Vivendi and Activision (perhaps more of a semantic distinction, but it does serve to remind that Blizzard is owned by someone, and is not an independant self-owned development studio, in the strictly on-paper sense).
This is a fascinating move for one very important reason: EA. This merger combines a hugely profitable juggernaut of game-making (Blizzard) with what is probably the largest publisher out there (Activision). Electronic Arts suddenly got not only competition, but may have just dropped into second place, all in one fell swoop.
This is a great move for Blizzard: there is no other development company that is such a proven success, having long passed the point of "one hit wonder" or "a lucky run," and they now have access to, in light of how bankable they are, absolutely vast wodges of capital for their future plans. This is an awesome move for Activision: a publisher (with some developer in there too) that has quietly grown over the last decade to become one of the largest now has pretty much the ultimate triple-A development juggernaut at its core. This last bit is a key point, as it reflects EA. EA is large publisher wrapped around a large and important development house. Vivendi and Activision have now stepped up to that level and type of operation, and can be expected to give EA a run for its money.
What particularly pleases me is how this could be seen as providing a "good guys" team to stand against EA's often-percieved "bad guys" team, which should be an interesting public dynamic to watch:P
Good god, how many times are they going to try to sell me Blade Runner? Blade Runner, Blade Runner Director's Cut, Blade Runner Extended Cut, Blade Runner Extended Directors Edition, Blade Runner Complete Extended Director's Updated Cut, Blade Runner Extreme High Def Director's Extended Complete Uber Extras Extended Director's Extended Extension, Blade Runner High Def Reduced Calorie Low Saturation With Extended Extras Edition....
Year stamps.
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This has always bugged me since (my personal) day one: why don't slashdot articles display a year, along with the month and day, in their date? Every now and then I happen upon a link to an article on slashdot (or search back) and have to try to guess at what year the article is from. What gives?
Slashdot Mirror
This has been on my mind over the last year, so I'm curious what insight others might have:
I've noticed a growing trend of people replacing the word "bug" with "glitch," in ever increasingly frequency. Anyone else noticed this? I am active in an open source fps (http://sauerbraten.org/), and paying attention to questions and comments by new users has really highlighted this trend. What's the cause in this shift? World of Warcraft? (Don't laugh - a game with that kind of userbase can have an impact, at the scale they operate at).
I found a post on this blog that notes a greasemonkey script to hide the searchwikified results, as well as a link to a google groups thread that shows a url tweak that will skip the feature in your searches (and can be used to make your iGoogle homepage searchwiki free).
It can be a lot of fun to just sit and watch someone play nethack. Just type telnet nethack.alt.org into any old command line, and you can connect up to play, but also to observer a game in progress. Try to match up your window size to the player you wish to observer (listed in the game info). It's great fun to watch people are often far, far better than you, getting far, far further in the game than you ever will :P And my god, the speed these guys progress at. Yikes!
This thread will (has) descend into alternative recommendations, so I'll take a moment to pimp a multiplayer variant of Angband, being MAngband ( http://www.mangband.org/ ). A realtime non-turnbased roguelike sounds kooky, but it actually works out pretty darned well (and Morgoth in realtime is a very frightening experience).
On a side note, I always appreciate roguelike-related threads on slashdot, as it is a rare opporunity for my username to have any sense of context.
This is quite an impressive bit of work, and kudos to dude for posting the mp3 version of his archived .wavs. Seeing the whole page of awesome music (and the sub pages of Japanese, Arabic, and Greek stuff as well) really makes me want to see this all packaged up as a torrent - and sooner than later. Spidey sense says many of these will be drawing unwanted interest.
This band seems to be following the script of the semi-movie-semi-mockumentary Hong Kong film "The Heavenly Kings," in which the band decides to upload their main song to P2P networks, then complain of the leak in a press release as a method of getting coverage, hype, and attention.
Never was quite clear just how much of the film is real, and how much is fictional (the actors in the movie did in fact start a cheezy boy band, as depicted in the film, and seemed to, on one hand, draw inspiration for the film from their experiences, at the very least).
Anyhoo, the second I read the blrb, I instantly realized these guys have probably watched the film in question.
http://www.lovehkfilm.com/reviews_2/heavenly_kings.htm
Because E3 isnt about either of those two groups. Its about press and retailers.
Whoa wait, you grew up in Barrows? That's a small town, and most readers probably don't get the significance of that local - Barrows is the northernmose town in America. And by northernmost, I mean "on the northern coast." Barrows is the extreme extreme far north of the States - 55 is a toasty warm day for this lot.
This is particularly interesting in the open-source cross-platform FPS "Sauerbraten/Cube2": The enemy is always depicted in red, and your team always depicted in blue (relative to you).
On the other hand, I keep seeing people (on their forum) not explicitly saying that it *isnt* the last HOPE. There was some speculation that perhaps this is the final HOPE at the current digs/location, but I couldn't get any firm details on that front. Any additional info would be useful.
Oddly enough, a sufficient amount of time has passed to let the ghost of oldschool Duke Nukem fade away. The result is that, much in the same way that TF2 took so freaking long that the people originally looking forward to it grew up, got jobs, had kids, joined the Masons, and died - leaving a largely new batch of people who weren't that familiar with the original context the game arose from. So to with DNF, I suspect. Let's be honest here - the average 22 year old kid who sees a review of DNF on some game site in six months isnt going to have the 12 years of expectation and context that the rest of us might have. The result? I suspect DNF will actually do just fine. We all went from growing expectations over time, to mocking it, to effectively forgetting about it and moving on. DNF is now a game for a new wodge of users, who won't be all that familiar with its history. DNF has gone on long enough that, like TF2, the clock has actually kind of reset.
And to add insult to injury, the page renders poorly on my box, further enhancing the pain:
http://i27.tinypic.com/b47tbc.jpg
http://dvice.com/archives/2008/05/mystery_lineup.php
"By the time we got there, the lineup was gone, but a couple of helpful Apple blueshirts told us what was what: It turns out that the lineup wasn't for the widely -- and wildly -- rumored 3G iPhone. The store got a shipment of current iPhones this morning, apparently a rare occurrence these days, and when word got out, some touchscreen-hungry folks got in line to snatch up the few that came in."
The Guide has already established that Goonhilly and Jodrell Bank perform poorly in real-world situations such as detecting large-scale near-earth-orbit objects. Despite a proposed upgrade, I still have to come down on the side of the STFC review and agree that throwing good money after bad doesn't make any sense.
Wow! I can't believe my above comment, which started with a +1 underrated, got pounded down with multiple offtopics. That's insane! I'm chuckling at the irony here: my missive to encourage people to spend their mod points on other comments in the discussion seems to have encouraged them to instead shut me up :P
Guys, time to toss those mod points a little further afield. Browsing at (3), I'm currently getting 17 (3+) comments, and 6 of those are from the submitter NewYorkCountryLawyer! Now I'm as interested as the rest of you in his comments, but my spidey sense tells me people are modding his comments up because of who he is, and less because of the content of any one of his comments. He's a conversational guy, and makes frequent small comments like the rest of us - we can't just mod up every one of em! Keep the conversation broad and varied - spread those points around!
Geez, caps AND bold AND bolded caps - so I take it I can assume that we've discovered your hot-button topic?
CD-check is just a really basic, broad-spectrum, anti-casual-pirating deal in most cases. It's become increasingly common to patch it out at some point in a game's lifecycle. You want to have it present during the bulk of your sales (ie, early on) but particularly with a game that has a significant online component (that is, vocal users), you also want to get rid of it sooner than later (of course, Blizzard is a special case, and mmo's are a different story).
Last game I worked on, we had the CD-check already removed for the 1.1 patch (which itself was completed before the game even hit the shelves), and we released it in less than two weeks from the date the game appeared on the shelves.
The easy to circumvent things like this really are just there to discourage casual copying amongst average Joe's. While of course this and pretty much anything else can be gotten around, the people who do, know how to do, or would make the effort to do, these kinds of things are a subset of the larger market. So, studios/publishers will add in some of the basic old school protections as a kind of first order protection.
These kinds of things are kind of annoying, but the idea is to not have a Tribes 1 experience (zero, and I mean *zero*, copy protection of any kind: you could literally drag-and-drop the install folder into ICQ, so to speak, and send the whole thing to your buddy). It was sad to see the sales-vs-players numbers for Tribes 1: seventy thousand copies sold with 350,000 players online has got to bring a tear to the eye.
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like to have a job where if what's immediately in front of me is blocked, then I am blocked from working. I battle to keep my workweek hour-count at something reasonable, and have never once lacked for (way too much) to do. Tool isn't working? No worries, I've got a huge list of things to do using other tools. Hardware problem? I've got an extra box. Power failure in my wing? Sounds good: Ive got loads of people I need to meet with to hash out problems and sync up with. Fire alarm goes off in the building? I'll hang out in the parking lot with my coworkers and have some impromptu talks on things I'm working on (thank god this happens less often now that we have heat sensing, instead of smoke sensing, fire alarms).
:P )
The idea of having a job where a blocking problem means its time to browse websites, or percieving that my job would allow for that, is totally foreign to me. Seriously - are you honestly saying that in these situations that there is literally *nothing* work related for you to do?
(for those noting the time of day that I'm posting this response, I'm on vacation right now
Wow, I gotta admit - that is a very large collection of what amounts to mini essays by a very very large number of people, from a very diverse range of disciplines and backrounds. I really recommend randomly clicking through large number of pages they have, all filled with thoughts and essays from a whole wodge of people in, and in orbit around, science. I accidentally blew through an hour on that list.
Dice it up how you will. The New York times, for example, notes that: The two companies said that their combined revenue for 2007 would be $3.8 billion. The combined company will challenge Electronic Arts, with projected 2007 revenue of about $3.7 billion...
I'll stick with my original comment that in particular, EA "may have" just dropped into second place, and as well stick with the spirit of my post in general: that EA now has company, so to speak.
Click the link. I'm thinking in terms of Blizzard as a generaly well-thought-of company in the eyes of the average gamer, vs. EA (of the ea-spouse fame, my link in the post) as increasingly being percieved as mean, tough, and evil. I suspect EA might be hitting that point where they have been too big for too long, which the public has an odd aversion to - sometimes, we seem not not like it when someone does too well, for too long, when mixed with some mean-ness (ie, the ea-spouse thing).
That Blizzard is a large company, and sometimes does nasty large company things, certainly no-one would dispute. But I think the public has a softer impression of them at present, as opposed to EA, which could open up an interesting hearts-and-minds/public-perception opportunity for them (such as Google was able to achieve in spades, for example). On the other hand, of course, MMO's are legendary for making pretty much any sainted developer look like an evil bastard over time (due, I think, to the rough and tumble necessities of running an MMO and failing the often impossible task of bridging reality and player's desires).
Many news-sites are actually reporting this as a merger between Vivendi and Activision (perhaps more of a semantic distinction, but it does serve to remind that Blizzard is owned by someone, and is not an independant self-owned development studio, in the strictly on-paper sense).
:P
This is a fascinating move for one very important reason: EA. This merger combines a hugely profitable juggernaut of game-making (Blizzard) with what is probably the largest publisher out there (Activision). Electronic Arts suddenly got not only competition, but may have just dropped into second place, all in one fell swoop.
This is a great move for Blizzard: there is no other development company that is such a proven success, having long passed the point of "one hit wonder" or "a lucky run," and they now have access to, in light of how bankable they are, absolutely vast wodges of capital for their future plans. This is an awesome move for Activision: a publisher (with some developer in there too) that has quietly grown over the last decade to become one of the largest now has pretty much the ultimate triple-A development juggernaut at its core. This last bit is a key point, as it reflects EA. EA is large publisher wrapped around a large and important development house. Vivendi and Activision have now stepped up to that level and type of operation, and can be expected to give EA a run for its money.
What particularly pleases me is how this could be seen as providing a "good guys" team to stand against EA's often-percieved "bad guys" team, which should be an interesting public dynamic to watch
Difficult to say if it is related to the events described above, but the editor Tim Tracy appears to be leaving Gamespot as well.
His (exceedingly brief) post on the site blog: http://www.gamespot.com/users/TimT/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25233420
A comment or two on destructiod.com http://www.destructoid.com/gamespot-drops-reviewer-to-appease-eidos-w-r-hearst-rolls-in-his-grave-56683.phtml
Good god, how many times are they going to try to sell me Blade Runner? Blade Runner, Blade Runner Director's Cut, Blade Runner Extended Cut, Blade Runner Extended Directors Edition, Blade Runner Complete Extended Director's Updated Cut, Blade Runner Extreme High Def Director's Extended Complete Uber Extras Extended Director's Extended Extension, Blade Runner High Def Reduced Calorie Low Saturation With Extended Extras Edition ....
This has always bugged me since (my personal) day one: why don't slashdot articles display a year, along with the month and day, in their date? Every now and then I happen upon a link to an article on slashdot (or search back) and have to try to guess at what year the article is from. What gives?