I know plenty of smart people that smoke, but less than dumb people that smoke.
I have a different theory - in the 1970s-1980s some jobs gave employees extra "smoke breaks" if they smoked. Since these were mostly nonsalaried workers, we can assume most have lower IQs. Since children of smokers tend to be smokers, this could be heredity and a product of 1970s era job practices.
There are people around the world that honestly believe they can sense non-ionizing radiation and basically do live in a Faraday cage. I'd love to see a test though, with random people coming up to them, some with cell phones and some without, and see if they detect it.
Except junkies sharing needles is a major spreader of HIV/AIDS. Putting a condom on a needle seems a tad counterproductive.
Incidentally, I've known two people that have contracted STDs, one is gay and is HIV positive from screwing around, and the other was a punker that moonlighted as a gigolo while in high school (and he contracted gonorrhea that way - he was also on most forms of drug and probably sharing needles, but all I know from hearsay is he went to rehab and cleaned up after high school). I imagine prostitutes of any kind are a major purveyor of STDs because their job is to screw around and in many cases, neither the prostitute or the john/jane is tested.
The cure is much simpler - avoid drugs and transfusions and only have sex with virgins who also have not used drugs or had transfusions (yes, I know the chances of getting HIV is very low through transfusions these days, but you can't take any chances, right?).
Um, the basic mechanics for Thief actually came from Castle Wolfenstein and its sequel. Wolfenstein 3D actually eschewed the stealth aspect and became one of the best known early shooters.
Ultima Underworld was the first textured first person RPG (with some shooting, but I don't remember it all that well because my PC wasn't good enough to play it so I always played on friend's machines), but at least you cite designer Doug Church'sand Paul Neurath's later games, System Shock (Neurath only on SS2) and Deus Ex.
that said, I do still remember IV more fondly than any other in the Ultima series
heh, so do I because the ankh that came with the game fell out of my bedside drawer and I still haven't picked it up (I'm not even sure why it was there... apparently I tossed it there when I moved in over a decade ago).
I actually remember 3 most fondly because my friends and I built mod tools (for 2, initially, but the format was the same for the first three games) and were trading adventures. Ultima 4 broke the file formats and nobody really picked up the reins for modifying the tools. The game itself was pretty good, but I never considered it the masterpiece that some people do (the series was perhaps getting long of tooth for me due to the overkill of playing both the designed adventures and the ones we wrote).
Wow... not sure how they can cram that into 10, but here's my take on it and the parent:
I'm not sure about Starship, but Star Raiders wasn't that good of a game and Elite was far more fun. My memories of Star Raiders was the anemic turning speed, frustrating controls, and jumpy graphics. Certainly not in my top 100, much less 10. My favorite space trading game of that era was actually Sun Dog: Frozen Legacy, which narrowly edged out Elite.
Zork was fun, definitely defined and drove the text adventure genre. It was predated by Adventure/Underground Adventure on mainframes. As for influential, a little known text adventure called Softporn Adventure may win that one - it was later converted to graphics and released as Leisure Suit Larry, a series that still exists today (well, Zork sorta does too - even though the last official version was 1997, a browser based MMORPG apparently exists).
Ultima (or Akalabeth if you really want to push it - Akalabeth wasn't really that good, but it did set the framework for Ultima) and Wizardry were sadly skipped, as were precursors, hack, rogue, nethack, Larn, etc. Sadly, single player RPGs are skipped entirely, including some that largely saved the genre (Fallout) and some that are considered classics (the SSI gold box games). At least Stormfront (a studio that worked with SSI) got some credit with NWN.
Also the mentioned Wolfenstein 3D, but forgot the precursors, Wolfenstein 1 and 2, which defined stealth based action games. I should sic the undead Silas Warner on them. Ultima Underworld blew my mind well before Doom - too bad my PC at the time couldn't handle it and I could only play at a friend's house.
RTS is completely missed... I'd start with The Ancient Art of War, though that lacked resource management that became a staple of later RTS's. I actually didn't play the original except much later on emulator, though I did play the Ancient Art of War at Sea in the 1980s. Broadsides also had some RTS-at-sea elements. You could argue RTS and God game genres started on Consoles with Utopia (Intellivision) , however.
There were plenty of side scrollers before Turrican, some even good ones. If I had to name a genre defining side scroller I'd start with Choplifter! (the first computer game to ever get ported to video game) or Karateka (the precursor to the Prince of Persia series), but if you want to go with a Japanese-ish one, try Thexder (1985 in Japan on NECs, 1987 on varous platforms in the US). I also loved the cartoony game Drol (1984).
Puzzle games don't start and end with Tetris and Mine Sweeper. Long before those we had Lode Runner and Boulder Dash, both incredibly popular and incredibly fun. Lode Runner holds the distinction of being the other computer game ported to the arcade.
Donkey Kong was a video game - they were avoiding video games.
No comment on M.U.L.E. - I saw this game in stores, but I never actually played it. I heard it was fun, but I never got a pirate copy and always had something higher on my list to buy. Probably a tragic oversight, though I've played similar games since.
No mention of Diablo - that pretty much defined the action RPG genre. For a game that originally was planned as a graphical turn-based nethack it certainly came out much different.
It seems every list like this has Doom at #1 and Half Life somewhere in the top 10. Funny that those and Duke Nukem 3D rank 1,2, and 3 in the games that give me the worst motion sickness. I did manage to get through Doom (barfing twice in the process), but never the others. I never did figure out the cause - some mix of graphics swim due to the viewing angle and bobbing, I think - Rise of the Triad and Descent gave no issues, but Marathon did. UT does not, but HL does. Most 3rd person like Tomb Raider do not, but Darkened Skye did (the game that used a Skittles license, lol). The engine doesn't seem to matter - I've had problems with Unreal Engine games that are not UT. Anyhow, my point is these can't really be in my personal top 10 because they make me violently ill and I can't enjoy them.
I think the highly influential arcade game Sabotage (aka Paratrooper, aka Parachute) deserves an honorable mention. I spent many an hour in a gradeschool lab playing that one.
From what I heard, the military reversed its policy on SECURED USB drives, but most USB drives are unsecured, which is kinda like having sex without a condom or sharing a needle - the more you do it, the higher chance you'll come down with a disease. While a secured drive isn't going to guarantee you won't get an infection, it does improve the odds.
Incidentally, all of the botnet outbreaks at my work that I know of were from people bringing in unsecured rootkit infected USB Fobs, which led to a company-wide ban that still includes secured FOBs. They've also completely isolated VPN connections so the only way to access the environment is with tools like Remote Desktop Connection or web (e.g. no local file access or printing, which we used to be able to do). They've also disabled most file sharing programs and remote access programs inside the firewall (ftp, sftp, ssh, telnet, torrents, etc).
Or they could just make the chips radiation hardened to begin with... oh, wait, you're talking about "magic" technologies like in the movies. Yeah - anti-EMP adaptive technology because radiation hardening is too easy and you need something that can kill the baddies, right?
wow... you _liked_ the writing for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout (3)? I found the writing mediocre and the quests linear. I really despise quests that always have the same ending no matter who you are and how you play it. I think the games look good, but I have a hard time playing them through ONCE, much less more than once (in fact, I failed to finish Morrowind or Fallout 3) - contrast that to Fallout 1 and 2, which I probably played through 10 times each.
My biggest problem with Bethesda games are the rigid quests. Even when they give the semblance of being flexible, they always have the same ending. For instance, in Morrowind (or was it Oblivion... I forget) there are some female bandits that always prey on men. If you are male, you get preyed upon, fight them and kill them. If you are female you get a choice to join them, then the guard entraps you and YOUR ONLY CHOICE is to fight them and kill them.
Essentially, there is little or no variance based on class, sex, intelligence, etc to the outcome of any quest, just in how you get there. In contrast, in Fallout 2 if you were an idiot, you spoke like an idiot (and it was hilarious) - your dialogs and outcomes varied. Male and Female characters had different options in some conversations - it was worth replaying the game as both where in Bethesda games it makes no difference. The cut-and-dry morality bugs me, too - blow up the nuke or not? Obviously blowing up the nuke is the bad option and not blowing it up is the good option. To be neutral, you have to do equal numbers of good and evil actions. In Fallout 2, by contrast, you could get yourself into a shotgun wedding and the only way to get rid of the useless person was divorce, murder (or death in combat), or selling them to slavers. Obviously there are better and worse options, but really, which one is good? They all seem bad to me, but some are obviously more bad. Other times there are only essentially good choices, but some of them have long term consequences - for instance, to free someone from slavers, do you kill the slavers, buy the slaves, or sneak in and set them free? In Fallout 3 you did have a similar choice, but it was very rigidly structured - always 2 choices, and always the same outcome.
Actually, it literally translates to "Until nothing more remains" if I remember my German correctly, but more was probably dropped as redundant, even though it is still OK in English. "Remains" and "is left" mean the same thing in English. You could also say "Until nothing is left over" if you want to throw another word in and mean the same thing.
There are numerous similar stories in the US and a disowned splinter church in Texas (I believe), so you can probably find similar stories online (I saw one in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago).
Point: Scientology is a cult built on top of a pyramid (almost a Ponzi) scheme, but technically speaking, religion as a whole is cults built on a pyramid scheme. Take the Catholic Church - it is a cult (by definition, a cult is a group that share similar beliefs) and built on a pyramid scheme (at least, if you look at if from a non-believer's point of view - investors at the bottom are continually suckered into the pyramid with the promise of an imaginary made up thing called a "soul" being saved [this is why it is sort of Ponzi] and the money trickles up to the top of the pyramid, the pope in Rome). Note that usually the top of the pyramid doesn't donate most of their gains to charitable causes like churches usually do, but you can't say they don't flaunt the wealth, too - just look at the mass of gold built into their Cathedrals.
Counterpoint: If you look at the same thing from a believer's point of view, people invest in the church to help others in need and they get an eternity in paradise for doing so (or lost bad thetans and ascend or whatever), while non-believers burn in hell (or the bad thetans cause evil on earth... not sure what happens when you die in that one). The money thing is a non-issue - there are vows of poverty to make sure that investment goes to the people in need (or money is invested in the church). Also, if there is no such invisible man in the sky, prove it. Christianity has written evidence that God does exist, had a son, and that son performed various miracles before leaving for a weekend in hell with the exiled angel Satan and came back to life on earth for a few days and then went to heaven, body and all. Scientology has similar evidence for their religion in their books. Having opulent buildings is a way to attract new followers and show they have the wealth and power to accommodate people who are in need.
Personally, I'm extremely skeptical about both, and have plenty of proof that at least some of the old testament is really a collection of stories from earlier religions (for instance, the story of Noah is from the Assyrian tale of Gilgamesh and the creation story is similar to several from religions older than Christianity) and Scientology is based on a bunch of writings L Ron Hubbard wrote while descending into schizophrenia, but hey, each to their own. Not sure about the new testament bible though - that is not based on pre-existing text. Strangely enough, the part of the Bible that I'm most skeptical about is a fundamental part of three major religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
AFAIK, not too many schools teach Creationism outside of Kansas, and that brought about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which actually stopped such an effort in Florida.
yep - as the analogy goes, 9 women can't have a baby in a month, but 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months.
These are all separate projects with the same timeline. The problem is when you add people, the experienced people have to take time away from their project to train the inexperienced people. If a project is already close to deadline, you basically have a bunch of slow workers (those ramping up) and an expert who has to help those workers instead of doing the work. Sometimes this is a significant effort, other times not as much. In the IT field, usually it is a lot of work though, since getting time to document your work is usually not given.
True enough - the more you tell a cracker the software is uncrackable, the more embarrassing it is when they crack it, and even worse if it is in the first 24 hours. In my pre-teens and early teens the harder it was to crack, the more fun and challenging it was to crack. In my mid-teens I kind of fell out of that scene though... too little time (unlike most teens, I was almost always busy with some activity - sports, music, RPG groups, etc).
Here's what I have to say: nVidia bought the proprietary PhysX hardware acceleration. At that point it was a separate card, now it is integrated into GPU technologies. nVidia wants to push the technology to recoup their investment.
PhysX wasn't popular as a separate card and few game developers would want to include a solution that doesn't apply for all cards unless they have a fallback. Most write to the DirectX API because it works on all consumer graphics cards (and even being an OpenGL fan, their ponderous movement has made Microsoft the technology driver). If they want to support PhysX, they need to devote a team to implementing hardware accelerated physics and a team to either GPU shader based or CPU physics. Its an unwanted double effort.
Unlike DirectX vs OpenGL where OpenGL developers can capture maybe 10% more users at best (and have to suffer an API that is ponderously updated), the graphics card market is much more competitive. About 30% of game players use ATI according to steam. If that were 5 or 10% it may be acceptable, but 30% is a lot of income. Intel GMA (integrated graphics) actually leads the market, but they don't really make game capable hardware yet (and I am still skeptical about Larrabee - I'll believe it when I see it and it isn't a $1400 card).
Physics is coming and is needed in hardware for realistic realtime cloth and hair (for example). I would prefer it to be a "shader" with access to the vertex and texture buffers (to access height or bump maps)
AMD is pushing bullet, and while the current released version of bullet is still software (as is Open Dynamics Engine last I checked, #4 on the list), the dev version is OpenCL based. I'm not currently working on anything that needs physics, but when I do I will likely look into this. It is the first non-proprietary library to offer hardware accelerated physics that I know of.
I'm going to quibble with you here, and there is a distinction to be made, but the game industry blurs the lines quite a bit so the distinction is more difficult than it would be for music or movies.
The RIAA and MPAA are there for one reason - to make sure PUBLISHERS get money. A publisher doesn't create anything, so they rely on license enforcement and sales to make all of their money. The main interest publishers have in collecting info on you is to know what kind of stuff you'll buy and know what to publish. A publisher's job is similar to a store manager knowing what you're going to buy and when so they can stock up.
The publisher usually buys content from a studio based on what people demand. Studio concepts for recording and motion picture industries diverge here - a movie studio often has in-house talent, pays everyone before expenses, etc. A recording industry usually hires talent by contract, pays themselves before expenses, etc (in exchange for a reciprocal license - the artist is allowed to play their music and sell related merchandise at their shows).
The reason I make that distinction is in-game ads would be put there to benefit the studio, not the publisher. In the case of games, however, often publishers own studios so indirectly they could be claiming a take or even forcing the marketing. In game ads are a lot like product placement on film sets - the studio gets paid for that, not the publisher.
Realistically, he is a businessman, not a gamer, and just had to look at the Blizzard part of the business - they built three worlds and the lore to go with them and then milked the crap out of them (Diablo 1-2 + expansions and upcoming sequel, Starcraft 1 + expansions and upcoming sequel, Warcraft 1-3 + World of Warcraft and expansions). It would not surprise me in the least if the undisclosed MMORPG (the Jeff Kaplan raid centric project rumored to be a shooter of some kind) is based on Starcraft property, though I've heard rumor it isn't (well, I suppose one new IP every 15 years or so works in their business model - less if you consider Starcraft to not be a XXXcraft game or Diablo part of their original IP [it was acquired]). I don't think they have developed any IP outside of the big three since they were called Silicon and Synapse (and then the mostly bought it). If you think the rest of the industry is any different, look at the Microsoft-Bungie relationship - Microsoft basically said Bungie was going to make Halo games forever. Bungie said they would do one more, then would either have a huge exodus or split from Microsoft (they split and will publish using Microsoft as part of their agreement, as I recall). EA is no better. If you want original, wait for one of the big 3 to buy a small studio (big 4 if you consider Bethesda's parent, or the same-old, same-old model).
While it sucks that all he wants to do is have developers crank out unending sequels, Activision-Blizzard can afford to buy new IP whenever they want to and shelve studios when the old IP money dries up. It's sad, sorry business, but in many ways you can blame Hollywood big studios and their success in doing exactly the same thing. If James Cameron (the movies equivalent of what John Carmack is to games - both have whiz bang effects and action and poor to mediocre plots, but make millions catering to audiences that want just that - a plot as brain dead as a rollercoaster ride, but as fun as a rollercoaster ride as well) wasn't doing Avatar, the movie never would have been made because its much more lucrative to milk a franchise - just look at Batman or Superman or Star Wars or Die Hard. You can probably tell I wasn't too high on the anti-tech, neo-hippie Avatar plot that was about as intellectually stimulating as drinking draino, but it was pretty (to sum it up, the tree hugging blue giant smurfs are good, the white people minus the main protagonists are evil - its the Ewoks vs the Republic all over again, minus the fur).
I should also point out that some of the best and worst games of all times were sequels - for instance Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog were considered terrible games, but the Ocarina of Time and most of the other Sonic games were fantastic (incidentally, I thought the original Zelda was lame, but a lot of people liked it...).
Say what you will about that, but I disagree - after a high school friend of mine blew his brains out with a 38 to the head, I spent two weeks depressed and the first thing I was able to get myself to do after that is help a church group tear down a house. Best release I ever had was deflecting that anger with a sledgehammer.
Incidentally, I'm sure I can conclusively prove that aggressive, less caring kids are attracted to violent video games by their study, and therefore there is no conclusive evidence that violent video games cause kids to be aggressive and less caring.
I completely agree, one of the problems here is not being in the mindset of the user. What does "uninitialized data" really mean to a user? Even to me as a programmer it lacks specificity - I want to know what isn't initialized so I can fix it. As for non-programmers, uninitialized data means exactly what to them? To my wife that means "blah blah blah" what do I click to make this work? I remember my own struggles with programmer specific errors like "Syntax Error" and "Bus Error" - these terms mean nothing unless you've had computer training (and often not until you've hit them and put significant work into fixing the problem, either with print statements or learning a debugger).
MS had this problem in Word once upon a time, using the obscure "Revert Document." I had a student crying because she lost 6 hours of work on her thesis due to that one and a couple of others that lost 45 minutes to an hour of work. In my opinion, that number should have been zero and that should have been caught in QA testing, if not earlier.
Speaking of low level radiation, and specifically non-ionizing radiation like cell phones, popsci has an article about a guy that is hypersensitive to it. The online article is four pages (I think the print article was 10-12) and it does cover a lot of ground, including arguments from both sides. I kinda skimmed over it, myself, but if you care about this sort of thing it may be worth a read.
for example, suicides can't be buried on consecrated ground and will go to hell
You mean Catholicism, as few Christian religions outside of Catholicism abide by that, and not even all Catholics do - an Irish Catholic high school friend of mine was buried on consecrated ground (at his family's burial plot) after his suicide.
As for statistics, I always question them - 71.314159 of them are made up and we all know the real reason people commit suicide is D&D - Jack Chick says it's true, so it must be. In fact, the person I mentioned above played D&D and is the only person I know that committed suicide, so statistically speaking, 100% of suicide deaths that I know of are by D&D players.
Of course, what I failed to mention is that group was made up of essentially 12 people and the other 11 are still living, all but two currently married, many have kids, and only one has ever been divorced and he didn't want the divorce, his ex-wife did.. The other one that is not married is more-or-less a male slut, though he won't admit it (but c'mon - the guy has FOUR girlfriends right now - is it a wonder why his facebook status is always "its complicated"?).
Of course the sample rates you state probably don't have a 99% margin of error like mine do (that group would skew a lot of statistics if used as the sample - low divorce rate, low obesity rate, high IQ, etc), but I think there are a large number of contributing factors to suicide, so trying to categorize it is difficult. The guy I mentioned above was smart, probably ADHD, and had an abusive father and if I had to describe someone just like him, it'd be Kurt Kobain - in fact, I predicted Kurt would kill himself 5 years before he did (the scattershot thought process, the attitude, and the manic-ness were very similar - even their methods - I believe both used a 38 to the head - quick and final).
Well, no - since the GUI would have been patented in the 1970s and at that time the law gave protection for 17 years from the date of publication (and usually took 3 years to get published - current law is 20 years from filing). GUIs didn't really become popular until the late 1980s and that would have been near the end of any patent for it, so it may have delayed the GUI, but not killed it. Some hardware patents Xerox showed off such as the mouse would have already been near end of patent by the 1980s (invented in the 1960s).
I'm not saying software patents don't suck - I don't think people should be able to patent, say, how to do the Navier Stokes equations for fluid dynamics in software and on graphics hardware, which has been done multiple times (and the methods are trivially obvious in some cases - one hardware accelerated patent I saw was essentially implementing an expired software patent in hardware). OTOH, if you INVENTED the Navier Stokes equations, then sure - allow a patent that can apply to software. I also don't think an idea itself should be patentable, either - for instance, I remember Woz talking about when he made characters display on a screen and then later getting sued by a TV manufacturer that had patented the idea - there needs to be some practical plan to implement it.
Except patent trolls file in east Texas, not Delaware. Most patent trolls create a shell office in Texas just so they can file cases there - in fact, I believe setting up shell offices was Texas' biggest growth industries during the recession.
yes, its taking advantage of a number of router issues that date back to the stone ages of computing
1) the default username is admin. In many cases you either can't change the username or changes in username are ignored. In fact, the only time I've been able to both change the username and had it not be ignored was with a custom linux reconfig on the Linksys WRT54G.
2) while not as common these days, enabling remote admin was common on older routers. I actually haven't seen this configured as enabled on any router in the past 10 years (I've configured DLink, Belkin, Linksys, and Cisco routers and a Linksys switch, and all had it disabled by default) - I don't think this botnet will infect a ton of machines just because of this, but people with older routers are more likely to have issues.
3) the default password is admin. This has been the standard password for routers and even early BBS software dating to the late 1970s or possibly early 1980s. If I remember correctly, it was the default for Citadel BBS software, amongst others.
Well I do know what I'm doing and didn't much care for Ubuntu, but it probably depends on what it is used for. My brother on the other hand, loves Ubuntu - easy to use from an end-user's perspective, so YMWV.
I had issues installing graphics drivers in a VM for hardware accelerated graphics (yes, the VM is set up for it), issues with getting developer packages installed, issues finding certain packages (admittedly, they were non-GPL and I did manage to install them by pointing to another server, but it was a hassle) - it was a total pain in the butt. I spent 1/4 the time with setting up my dev environment on OpenSuSE than I did with Ubuntu and the graphics driver worked in the VM as soon as I set it up.
In any case, I didn't have any issues installing Ubuntu like the grandparent, that was simple - getting the packages I need was the pain. One project I work on has a lot of non-GPL packages that need installing (and most are BSD or similarly licensed). I also work on Linux in a commercial environment, but I don't do installations on that, just end user (SuSE and Red Hat).
I don't know about the JS editor, but have you tried IE7 or IE8 compatibility view with sharepoint briefcases? I seem to recall my wife had the same issue and that got her around it. Go to the page you want and you should see an icon that looks like a ripped piece of paper after the URL or use the tools menu compatibility view and add the url. You may need to reload the page (F5) afterward.
As for IE6, I have to use it at work - it is the lowest common denominator browser we support. I also use Firefox 3.0 even though it nags me continuously about updating (until recently, Firefox 2.0.14 as well, but we dropped that support recently). We also support Safari, but not Opera or Chrome - both work quite well, however (some of us like to use our product in unsupported browsers - I'm in chrome right now, for instance, and I have my test stuff up in another tab). Until recently, some parts of our product worked in IE6 only. Most of our software works on IE6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Chrome (unsupported), Opera (unsupported), Konqueror (unsupported), but we do have issues with any SVG viewer other than Adobe (which Adobe doesn't even support anymore). I've heard Webkit is getting close - a couple more bugfixes and we can support Safari. Firefox has a ways to go yet, and built-in IE support is non-existent. I've heard the google SVG plugin thing for IE also is missing features we need.
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I know plenty of smart people that smoke, but less than dumb people that smoke.
I have a different theory - in the 1970s-1980s some jobs gave employees extra "smoke breaks" if they smoked. Since these were mostly nonsalaried workers, we can assume most have lower IQs. Since children of smokers tend to be smokers, this could be heredity and a product of 1970s era job practices.
There are people around the world that honestly believe they can sense non-ionizing radiation and basically do live in a Faraday cage. I'd love to see a test though, with random people coming up to them, some with cell phones and some without, and see if they detect it.
In America we call these frivolous lawsuits.
Except junkies sharing needles is a major spreader of HIV/AIDS. Putting a condom on a needle seems a tad counterproductive.
Incidentally, I've known two people that have contracted STDs, one is gay and is HIV positive from screwing around, and the other was a punker that moonlighted as a gigolo while in high school (and he contracted gonorrhea that way - he was also on most forms of drug and probably sharing needles, but all I know from hearsay is he went to rehab and cleaned up after high school). I imagine prostitutes of any kind are a major purveyor of STDs because their job is to screw around and in many cases, neither the prostitute or the john/jane is tested.
The cure is much simpler - avoid drugs and transfusions and only have sex with virgins who also have not used drugs or had transfusions (yes, I know the chances of getting HIV is very low through transfusions these days, but you can't take any chances, right?).
Um, the basic mechanics for Thief actually came from Castle Wolfenstein and its sequel. Wolfenstein 3D actually eschewed the stealth aspect and became one of the best known early shooters.
Ultima Underworld was the first textured first person RPG (with some shooting, but I don't remember it all that well because my PC wasn't good enough to play it so I always played on friend's machines), but at least you cite designer Doug Church'sand Paul Neurath's later games, System Shock (Neurath only on SS2) and Deus Ex.
heh, so do I because the ankh that came with the game fell out of my bedside drawer and I still haven't picked it up (I'm not even sure why it was there... apparently I tossed it there when I moved in over a decade ago).
I actually remember 3 most fondly because my friends and I built mod tools (for 2, initially, but the format was the same for the first three games) and were trading adventures. Ultima 4 broke the file formats and nobody really picked up the reins for modifying the tools. The game itself was pretty good, but I never considered it the masterpiece that some people do (the series was perhaps getting long of tooth for me due to the overkill of playing both the designed adventures and the ones we wrote).
Wow... not sure how they can cram that into 10, but here's my take on it and the parent:
I'm not sure about Starship, but Star Raiders wasn't that good of a game and Elite was far more fun. My memories of Star Raiders was the anemic turning speed, frustrating controls, and jumpy graphics. Certainly not in my top 100, much less 10. My favorite space trading game of that era was actually Sun Dog: Frozen Legacy, which narrowly edged out Elite.
Zork was fun, definitely defined and drove the text adventure genre. It was predated by Adventure/Underground Adventure on mainframes. As for influential, a little known text adventure called Softporn Adventure may win that one - it was later converted to graphics and released as Leisure Suit Larry, a series that still exists today (well, Zork sorta does too - even though the last official version was 1997, a browser based MMORPG apparently exists).
Ultima (or Akalabeth if you really want to push it - Akalabeth wasn't really that good, but it did set the framework for Ultima) and Wizardry were sadly skipped, as were precursors, hack, rogue, nethack, Larn, etc. Sadly, single player RPGs are skipped entirely, including some that largely saved the genre (Fallout) and some that are considered classics (the SSI gold box games). At least Stormfront (a studio that worked with SSI) got some credit with NWN.
Also the mentioned Wolfenstein 3D, but forgot the precursors, Wolfenstein 1 and 2, which defined stealth based action games. I should sic the undead Silas Warner on them. Ultima Underworld blew my mind well before Doom - too bad my PC at the time couldn't handle it and I could only play at a friend's house.
RTS is completely missed... I'd start with The Ancient Art of War, though that lacked resource management that became a staple of later RTS's. I actually didn't play the original except much later on emulator, though I did play the Ancient Art of War at Sea in the 1980s. Broadsides also had some RTS-at-sea elements. You could argue RTS and God game genres started on Consoles with Utopia (Intellivision) , however.
There were plenty of side scrollers before Turrican, some even good ones. If I had to name a genre defining side scroller I'd start with Choplifter! (the first computer game to ever get ported to video game) or Karateka (the precursor to the Prince of Persia series), but if you want to go with a Japanese-ish one, try Thexder (1985 in Japan on NECs, 1987 on varous platforms in the US). I also loved the cartoony game Drol (1984).
Puzzle games don't start and end with Tetris and Mine Sweeper. Long before those we had Lode Runner and Boulder Dash, both incredibly popular and incredibly fun. Lode Runner holds the distinction of being the other computer game ported to the arcade.
Donkey Kong was a video game - they were avoiding video games.
No comment on M.U.L.E. - I saw this game in stores, but I never actually played it. I heard it was fun, but I never got a pirate copy and always had something higher on my list to buy. Probably a tragic oversight, though I've played similar games since.
No mention of Diablo - that pretty much defined the action RPG genre. For a game that originally was planned as a graphical turn-based nethack it certainly came out much different.
It seems every list like this has Doom at #1 and Half Life somewhere in the top 10. Funny that those and Duke Nukem 3D rank 1,2, and 3 in the games that give me the worst motion sickness. I did manage to get through Doom (barfing twice in the process), but never the others. I never did figure out the cause - some mix of graphics swim due to the viewing angle and bobbing, I think - Rise of the Triad and Descent gave no issues, but Marathon did. UT does not, but HL does. Most 3rd person like Tomb Raider do not, but Darkened Skye did (the game that used a Skittles license, lol). The engine doesn't seem to matter - I've had problems with Unreal Engine games that are not UT. Anyhow, my point is these can't really be in my personal top 10 because they make me violently ill and I can't enjoy them.
I think the highly influential arcade game Sabotage (aka Paratrooper, aka Parachute) deserves an honorable mention. I spent many an hour in a gradeschool lab playing that one.
From what I heard, the military reversed its policy on SECURED USB drives, but most USB drives are unsecured, which is kinda like having sex without a condom or sharing a needle - the more you do it, the higher chance you'll come down with a disease. While a secured drive isn't going to guarantee you won't get an infection, it does improve the odds.
Incidentally, all of the botnet outbreaks at my work that I know of were from people bringing in unsecured rootkit infected USB Fobs, which led to a company-wide ban that still includes secured FOBs. They've also completely isolated VPN connections so the only way to access the environment is with tools like Remote Desktop Connection or web (e.g. no local file access or printing, which we used to be able to do). They've also disabled most file sharing programs and remote access programs inside the firewall (ftp, sftp, ssh, telnet, torrents, etc).
Or they could just make the chips radiation hardened to begin with... oh, wait, you're talking about "magic" technologies like in the movies. Yeah - anti-EMP adaptive technology because radiation hardening is too easy and you need something that can kill the baddies, right?
wow... you _liked_ the writing for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout (3)? I found the writing mediocre and the quests linear. I really despise quests that always have the same ending no matter who you are and how you play it. I think the games look good, but I have a hard time playing them through ONCE, much less more than once (in fact, I failed to finish Morrowind or Fallout 3) - contrast that to Fallout 1 and 2, which I probably played through 10 times each.
My biggest problem with Bethesda games are the rigid quests. Even when they give the semblance of being flexible, they always have the same ending. For instance, in Morrowind (or was it Oblivion... I forget) there are some female bandits that always prey on men. If you are male, you get preyed upon, fight them and kill them. If you are female you get a choice to join them, then the guard entraps you and YOUR ONLY CHOICE is to fight them and kill them.
Essentially, there is little or no variance based on class, sex, intelligence, etc to the outcome of any quest, just in how you get there. In contrast, in Fallout 2 if you were an idiot, you spoke like an idiot (and it was hilarious) - your dialogs and outcomes varied. Male and Female characters had different options in some conversations - it was worth replaying the game as both where in Bethesda games it makes no difference. The cut-and-dry morality bugs me, too - blow up the nuke or not? Obviously blowing up the nuke is the bad option and not blowing it up is the good option. To be neutral, you have to do equal numbers of good and evil actions. In Fallout 2, by contrast, you could get yourself into a shotgun wedding and the only way to get rid of the useless person was divorce, murder (or death in combat), or selling them to slavers. Obviously there are better and worse options, but really, which one is good? They all seem bad to me, but some are obviously more bad. Other times there are only essentially good choices, but some of them have long term consequences - for instance, to free someone from slavers, do you kill the slavers, buy the slaves, or sneak in and set them free? In Fallout 3 you did have a similar choice, but it was very rigidly structured - always 2 choices, and always the same outcome.
Actually, it literally translates to "Until nothing more remains" if I remember my German correctly, but more was probably dropped as redundant, even though it is still OK in English. "Remains" and "is left" mean the same thing in English. You could also say "Until nothing is left over" if you want to throw another word in and mean the same thing.
There are numerous similar stories in the US and a disowned splinter church in Texas (I believe), so you can probably find similar stories online (I saw one in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago).
Point: Scientology is a cult built on top of a pyramid (almost a Ponzi) scheme, but technically speaking, religion as a whole is cults built on a pyramid scheme. Take the Catholic Church - it is a cult (by definition, a cult is a group that share similar beliefs) and built on a pyramid scheme (at least, if you look at if from a non-believer's point of view - investors at the bottom are continually suckered into the pyramid with the promise of an imaginary made up thing called a "soul" being saved [this is why it is sort of Ponzi] and the money trickles up to the top of the pyramid, the pope in Rome). Note that usually the top of the pyramid doesn't donate most of their gains to charitable causes like churches usually do, but you can't say they don't flaunt the wealth, too - just look at the mass of gold built into their Cathedrals.
Counterpoint: If you look at the same thing from a believer's point of view, people invest in the church to help others in need and they get an eternity in paradise for doing so (or lost bad thetans and ascend or whatever), while non-believers burn in hell (or the bad thetans cause evil on earth... not sure what happens when you die in that one). The money thing is a non-issue - there are vows of poverty to make sure that investment goes to the people in need (or money is invested in the church). Also, if there is no such invisible man in the sky, prove it. Christianity has written evidence that God does exist, had a son, and that son performed various miracles before leaving for a weekend in hell with the exiled angel Satan and came back to life on earth for a few days and then went to heaven, body and all. Scientology has similar evidence for their religion in their books. Having opulent buildings is a way to attract new followers and show they have the wealth and power to accommodate people who are in need.
Personally, I'm extremely skeptical about both, and have plenty of proof that at least some of the old testament is really a collection of stories from earlier religions (for instance, the story of Noah is from the Assyrian tale of Gilgamesh and the creation story is similar to several from religions older than Christianity) and Scientology is based on a bunch of writings L Ron Hubbard wrote while descending into schizophrenia, but hey, each to their own. Not sure about the new testament bible though - that is not based on pre-existing text. Strangely enough, the part of the Bible that I'm most skeptical about is a fundamental part of three major religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
AFAIK, not too many schools teach Creationism outside of Kansas, and that brought about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which actually stopped such an effort in Florida.
yep - as the analogy goes, 9 women can't have a baby in a month, but 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months.
These are all separate projects with the same timeline. The problem is when you add people, the experienced people have to take time away from their project to train the inexperienced people. If a project is already close to deadline, you basically have a bunch of slow workers (those ramping up) and an expert who has to help those workers instead of doing the work. Sometimes this is a significant effort, other times not as much. In the IT field, usually it is a lot of work though, since getting time to document your work is usually not given.
True enough - the more you tell a cracker the software is uncrackable, the more embarrassing it is when they crack it, and even worse if it is in the first 24 hours. In my pre-teens and early teens the harder it was to crack, the more fun and challenging it was to crack. In my mid-teens I kind of fell out of that scene though... too little time (unlike most teens, I was almost always busy with some activity - sports, music, RPG groups, etc).
Here's what I have to say:
nVidia bought the proprietary PhysX hardware acceleration. At that point it was a separate card, now it is integrated into GPU technologies. nVidia wants to push the technology to recoup their investment.
PhysX wasn't popular as a separate card and few game developers would want to include a solution that doesn't apply for all cards unless they have a fallback. Most write to the DirectX API because it works on all consumer graphics cards (and even being an OpenGL fan, their ponderous movement has made Microsoft the technology driver). If they want to support PhysX, they need to devote a team to implementing hardware accelerated physics and a team to either GPU shader based or CPU physics. Its an unwanted double effort.
Unlike DirectX vs OpenGL where OpenGL developers can capture maybe 10% more users at best (and have to suffer an API that is ponderously updated), the graphics card market is much more competitive. About 30% of game players use ATI according to steam. If that were 5 or 10% it may be acceptable, but 30% is a lot of income. Intel GMA (integrated graphics) actually leads the market, but they don't really make game capable hardware yet (and I am still skeptical about Larrabee - I'll believe it when I see it and it isn't a $1400 card).
Physics is coming and is needed in hardware for realistic realtime cloth and hair (for example). I would prefer it to be a "shader" with access to the vertex and texture buffers (to access height or bump maps)
AMD is pushing bullet, and while the current released version of bullet is still software (as is Open Dynamics Engine last I checked, #4 on the list), the dev version is OpenCL based. I'm not currently working on anything that needs physics, but when I do I will likely look into this. It is the first non-proprietary library to offer hardware accelerated physics that I know of.
I'm going to quibble with you here, and there is a distinction to be made, but the game industry blurs the lines quite a bit so the distinction is more difficult than it would be for music or movies.
The RIAA and MPAA are there for one reason - to make sure PUBLISHERS get money. A publisher doesn't create anything, so they rely on license enforcement and sales to make all of their money. The main interest publishers have in collecting info on you is to know what kind of stuff you'll buy and know what to publish. A publisher's job is similar to a store manager knowing what you're going to buy and when so they can stock up.
The publisher usually buys content from a studio based on what people demand. Studio concepts for recording and motion picture industries diverge here - a movie studio often has in-house talent, pays everyone before expenses, etc. A recording industry usually hires talent by contract, pays themselves before expenses, etc (in exchange for a reciprocal license - the artist is allowed to play their music and sell related merchandise at their shows).
The reason I make that distinction is in-game ads would be put there to benefit the studio, not the publisher. In the case of games, however, often publishers own studios so indirectly they could be claiming a take or even forcing the marketing. In game ads are a lot like product placement on film sets - the studio gets paid for that, not the publisher.
Realistically, he is a businessman, not a gamer, and just had to look at the Blizzard part of the business - they built three worlds and the lore to go with them and then milked the crap out of them (Diablo 1-2 + expansions and upcoming sequel, Starcraft 1 + expansions and upcoming sequel, Warcraft 1-3 + World of Warcraft and expansions). It would not surprise me in the least if the undisclosed MMORPG (the Jeff Kaplan raid centric project rumored to be a shooter of some kind) is based on Starcraft property, though I've heard rumor it isn't (well, I suppose one new IP every 15 years or so works in their business model - less if you consider Starcraft to not be a XXXcraft game or Diablo part of their original IP [it was acquired]). I don't think they have developed any IP outside of the big three since they were called Silicon and Synapse (and then the mostly bought it). If you think the rest of the industry is any different, look at the Microsoft-Bungie relationship - Microsoft basically said Bungie was going to make Halo games forever. Bungie said they would do one more, then would either have a huge exodus or split from Microsoft (they split and will publish using Microsoft as part of their agreement, as I recall). EA is no better. If you want original, wait for one of the big 3 to buy a small studio (big 4 if you consider Bethesda's parent, or the same-old, same-old model).
While it sucks that all he wants to do is have developers crank out unending sequels, Activision-Blizzard can afford to buy new IP whenever they want to and shelve studios when the old IP money dries up. It's sad, sorry business, but in many ways you can blame Hollywood big studios and their success in doing exactly the same thing. If James Cameron (the movies equivalent of what John Carmack is to games - both have whiz bang effects and action and poor to mediocre plots, but make millions catering to audiences that want just that - a plot as brain dead as a rollercoaster ride, but as fun as a rollercoaster ride as well) wasn't doing Avatar, the movie never would have been made because its much more lucrative to milk a franchise - just look at Batman or Superman or Star Wars or Die Hard. You can probably tell I wasn't too high on the anti-tech, neo-hippie Avatar plot that was about as intellectually stimulating as drinking draino, but it was pretty (to sum it up, the tree hugging blue giant smurfs are good, the white people minus the main protagonists are evil - its the Ewoks vs the Republic all over again, minus the fur).
I should also point out that some of the best and worst games of all times were sequels - for instance Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog were considered terrible games, but the Ocarina of Time and most of the other Sonic games were fantastic (incidentally, I thought the original Zelda was lame, but a lot of people liked it...).
Say what you will about that, but I disagree - after a high school friend of mine blew his brains out with a 38 to the head, I spent two weeks depressed and the first thing I was able to get myself to do after that is help a church group tear down a house. Best release I ever had was deflecting that anger with a sledgehammer.
Incidentally, I'm sure I can conclusively prove that aggressive, less caring kids are attracted to violent video games by their study, and therefore there is no conclusive evidence that violent video games cause kids to be aggressive and less caring.
I completely agree, one of the problems here is not being in the mindset of the user. What does "uninitialized data" really mean to a user? Even to me as a programmer it lacks specificity - I want to know what isn't initialized so I can fix it. As for non-programmers, uninitialized data means exactly what to them? To my wife that means "blah blah blah" what do I click to make this work? I remember my own struggles with programmer specific errors like "Syntax Error" and "Bus Error" - these terms mean nothing unless you've had computer training (and often not until you've hit them and put significant work into fixing the problem, either with print statements or learning a debugger).
MS had this problem in Word once upon a time, using the obscure "Revert Document." I had a student crying because she lost 6 hours of work on her thesis due to that one and a couple of others that lost 45 minutes to an hour of work. In my opinion, that number should have been zero and that should have been caught in QA testing, if not earlier.
Speaking of low level radiation, and specifically non-ionizing radiation like cell phones, popsci has an article about a guy that is hypersensitive to it. The online article is four pages (I think the print article was 10-12) and it does cover a lot of ground, including arguments from both sides. I kinda skimmed over it, myself, but if you care about this sort of thing it may be worth a read.
You mean Catholicism, as few Christian religions outside of Catholicism abide by that, and not even all Catholics do - an Irish Catholic high school friend of mine was buried on consecrated ground (at his family's burial plot) after his suicide.
As for statistics, I always question them - 71.314159 of them are made up and we all know the real reason people commit suicide is D&D - Jack Chick says it's true, so it must be. In fact, the person I mentioned above played D&D and is the only person I know that committed suicide, so statistically speaking, 100% of suicide deaths that I know of are by D&D players.
Of course, what I failed to mention is that group was made up of essentially 12 people and the other 11 are still living, all but two currently married, many have kids, and only one has ever been divorced and he didn't want the divorce, his ex-wife did.. The other one that is not married is more-or-less a male slut, though he won't admit it (but c'mon - the guy has FOUR girlfriends right now - is it a wonder why his facebook status is always "its complicated"?).
Of course the sample rates you state probably don't have a 99% margin of error like mine do (that group would skew a lot of statistics if used as the sample - low divorce rate, low obesity rate, high IQ, etc), but I think there are a large number of contributing factors to suicide, so trying to categorize it is difficult. The guy I mentioned above was smart, probably ADHD, and had an abusive father and if I had to describe someone just like him, it'd be Kurt Kobain - in fact, I predicted Kurt would kill himself 5 years before he did (the scattershot thought process, the attitude, and the manic-ness were very similar - even their methods - I believe both used a 38 to the head - quick and final).
Well, no - since the GUI would have been patented in the 1970s and at that time the law gave protection for 17 years from the date of publication (and usually took 3 years to get published - current law is 20 years from filing). GUIs didn't really become popular until the late 1980s and that would have been near the end of any patent for it, so it may have delayed the GUI, but not killed it. Some hardware patents Xerox showed off such as the mouse would have already been near end of patent by the 1980s (invented in the 1960s).
I'm not saying software patents don't suck - I don't think people should be able to patent, say, how to do the Navier Stokes equations for fluid dynamics in software and on graphics hardware, which has been done multiple times (and the methods are trivially obvious in some cases - one hardware accelerated patent I saw was essentially implementing an expired software patent in hardware). OTOH, if you INVENTED the Navier Stokes equations, then sure - allow a patent that can apply to software. I also don't think an idea itself should be patentable, either - for instance, I remember Woz talking about when he made characters display on a screen and then later getting sued by a TV manufacturer that had patented the idea - there needs to be some practical plan to implement it.
Except patent trolls file in east Texas, not Delaware. Most patent trolls create a shell office in Texas just so they can file cases there - in fact, I believe setting up shell offices was Texas' biggest growth industries during the recession.
yes, its taking advantage of a number of router issues that date back to the stone ages of computing
1) the default username is admin. In many cases you either can't change the username or changes in username are ignored. In fact, the only time I've been able to both change the username and had it not be ignored was with a custom linux reconfig on the Linksys WRT54G.
2) while not as common these days, enabling remote admin was common on older routers. I actually haven't seen this configured as enabled on any router in the past 10 years (I've configured DLink, Belkin, Linksys, and Cisco routers and a Linksys switch, and all had it disabled by default) - I don't think this botnet will infect a ton of machines just because of this, but people with older routers are more likely to have issues.
3) the default password is admin. This has been the standard password for routers and even early BBS software dating to the late 1970s or possibly early 1980s. If I remember correctly, it was the default for Citadel BBS software, amongst others.
Well I do know what I'm doing and didn't much care for Ubuntu, but it probably depends on what it is used for. My brother on the other hand, loves Ubuntu - easy to use from an end-user's perspective, so YMWV.
I had issues installing graphics drivers in a VM for hardware accelerated graphics (yes, the VM is set up for it), issues with getting developer packages installed, issues finding certain packages (admittedly, they were non-GPL and I did manage to install them by pointing to another server, but it was a hassle) - it was a total pain in the butt. I spent 1/4 the time with setting up my dev environment on OpenSuSE than I did with Ubuntu and the graphics driver worked in the VM as soon as I set it up.
In any case, I didn't have any issues installing Ubuntu like the grandparent, that was simple - getting the packages I need was the pain. One project I work on has a lot of non-GPL packages that need installing (and most are BSD or similarly licensed). I also work on Linux in a commercial environment, but I don't do installations on that, just end user (SuSE and Red Hat).
I don't know about the JS editor, but have you tried IE7 or IE8 compatibility view with sharepoint briefcases? I seem to recall my wife had the same issue and that got her around it. Go to the page you want and you should see an icon that looks like a ripped piece of paper after the URL or use the tools menu compatibility view and add the url. You may need to reload the page (F5) afterward.
As for IE6, I have to use it at work - it is the lowest common denominator browser we support. I also use Firefox 3.0 even though it nags me continuously about updating (until recently, Firefox 2.0.14 as well, but we dropped that support recently). We also support Safari, but not Opera or Chrome - both work quite well, however (some of us like to use our product in unsupported browsers - I'm in chrome right now, for instance, and I have my test stuff up in another tab). Until recently, some parts of our product worked in IE6 only. Most of our software works on IE6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Chrome (unsupported), Opera (unsupported), Konqueror (unsupported), but we do have issues with any SVG viewer other than Adobe (which Adobe doesn't even support anymore). I've heard Webkit is getting close - a couple more bugfixes and we can support Safari. Firefox has a ways to go yet, and built-in IE support is non-existent. I've heard the google SVG plugin thing for IE also is missing features we need.