Classy Slashdot, real classy. You post a news item about the youngest female chess champion and spend half the summary wondering about why the best female players are not typically as good at chess as the best men. Admittedly, it's only verbatim reposting of part of TFA (thanks NYT for also being classy!). Would another part not have done? Say,
Ms. Hou said that she received training and financial support from the Chinese government. She studies chess four to five hours a day, and also attends high school. She said that she sometimes fell behind in her work, but her teachers understood and tried to help her out.
or if you really wanted to talk about men
The record among men is held by Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985, when he was 22.
Now, I don't have a problem with the facts, if the top women are indeed not as good at chess as the top men. But it seems rather small to spend half the summary pontificating on that rather than telling us a bit more about the champion.
No one really knows why Slashdot posts summaries that are at best disingenuous and at worst deliberately inflammatory. One theory, common among top Slashdotters is that inflammatory stories get more comments than report-the-facts posts.
Rant over, I really need to lighten up. Merry Christmas all!
Whatever happens to Assange, I'm sure that the people who will take over operations of wikileaks soon are getting the message loud and clear: Do not mess with those of us in power, or there will be a committed campaign coming at you from all sides, from the police, to press releases, to your personal life.
Sounds like the Church of Scientology. Which is
to say, fucking scary.
While this answer will almost certainly not suit the OP, it may be of interest to other folk looking to archive their email. Using python and a combination of imaplib and some basic file I/O you can save the original text of messages. My rationale for this was firstly that it's probably less problematic than converting between various email client formats; and secondly that it's a decent way to learn some python!;)
My rather basic implementation just dumps every email from an (IMAP) folder sequentially. I rely on grep for searching. However, it does have the prerequisite of the email being stored on a mailserver accessible via IMAP.
Audio interview on BBC R4 Media Show. The Assange segment starts about 2/3 through from memory, but the first bit on Bloody Sunday is interesting and worth a listen too.
Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.
(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous/. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)
Great explanation, thanks for that! I remember encountering euphoria demos a while back and being seriously impressed with them. How taxing is it? I wish I could phrase that question in a more meaningful way, I'm just curious as to how well these things run, especially when you have 3 separate engines running at once!
Also, were you not developing a concept American Football game to showcase what the engine could do? What became of that?
Having played the beta, my short review of APB is: drive here, shoot stuff, repeat. Oops! Seems like I broke the embargo on reviews which was initially set at 10 freakin' days after release! To their credit (I guess), they rolled that back to merely release day.
A more nuanced look at the game shows they have in fact done some things quite nicely. The "All Points Bulletin" mechanic works very nicely. You'll be doing a mission when up pops up a notification that a comparable group from the opposing faction has been sent to stop you. It changes the dynamic of the mission and gives you a jolt of adrenaline as you listen out for the roar of the car engine signifying your would-be assassins drawing close. However, these adversarial matchups aren't without their problems. Say 50% of the time they work and you get a comparable strength team sent against you, resulting in a pitched battle that culminates in either narrow victory or defeat. Perfect! Well, the other 50% of the time you get a team that is woefully underpowered, say one wee neophyte against our group of four. Or massively overpowered, so you "call for backup", which works maybe 10% of the time. Perhaps the opposition are a full map away and have no way of intercepting you in time. Or they are already at the objective and virtually impossible to budge. The latter gets irritating as there are a few excellent camping spots should you get a VIP 'escort' mission. Oh, and I lied about the proportions. Things go right about 25% of the time rather than 50%.
Despite these problems, the gameplay is fun if you have a good group that you are in touch with through some kind of voice comms. The problem is that there is very little variety. Perhaps I've been spoiled by Saints Row 2 in this regard, but there seem to be about 3 basic types of mission which leads to the game getting boring quickly - pitched battles or not.
There is also a HUGE amount of customisation, if you're into that sort of thing. I won't say more about this as I'm not buying a game to play dress up...
...Which brings me to my next point: pricing. Pinning down the pricing details wasn't easy, although I did eventually find it on Kotaku or similar. I'll quote from RPS again:
You can purchase a retail version of APB either in-store or via digital download at standard retail price (SRP $49.99/£34.99/€49.99). The game includes 50 hours of action game play out of the box plus unlimited time in APB’s social districts customising, socialising and trading on the marketplace.
Once your game time is up, you have flexibility to top up your action game time from as little as $6.99 (£5.59, €6.29) for an additional 20 hours, while more frequent players can switch to a 30-day unlimited package for only $9.99 (£7.99, €8.99) with discounts available for 90 and 180 days.
The retail package also contains a bonus 100 RTW points towards your next purchases.
An additional benefit to this evolutionary model is the ability for you to convert your own customisations and rewards to tradable products to give to friends or clan-mates or to place on the Marketplace to earn more RTW points (convertible to game time) or in-game cash. Check back later for more details
The problem is, you are paying full retail price plus a decent fraction of 10 of your local denomination (£/$/€) monthly, for what? Progression seems limited - you can gain prestige with local NPC types to do more missions, but your character doesn't seem to get much stronger as with more traditional MMOs. It's not even like EVE where you can claim a small section of the virtual world for your particular gang. Frankly, I'm not sure it is worth paying for a glorified matchmaking service, but that is a judgment call each individual gamer needs to m
I'm surprised more game companies aren't taking advantage of streaming and even static online video. If you look around youtube, most of the game videos are "Let's Play's" or other fan material, not official content. Maybe they don't think it's worth the effort.
Check out the Just Cause 2 "Anatomy of a Stunt" videos:
I've also seen it said (in a comment on here perhaps?) that it is preferable not to use pinyin romanisation as that doesn't help as much with making the correct sounds. Whatever it was pointed at GR as an alternative. Don't take that as gospel though as I may have no idea what I'm talking about!
Don't take this the wrong way; it is intended to help you convey meaning better. That said: think about how you phrase your sentences. The way you typed it it sounds as though you are being hesitant and, well, insincere. I'm sure your intention was to sincerely thank him.
Cool, a blog.. thanks...
is only one (albeit important) step away from:
Gee... a blog... thanks.
Without the nuance of spoken words it can be difficult to gauge tone and intent. Why did you use the trailing periods / ellipses ("...")?
It's easy to get away with stealing 4-5 dollars, and if you do it often enough you make a tidy profit...
If someone loses diamonds or thousands of dollars they're going to come looking for it, and your chances of getting away with it are pretty slim.
That and it's easier to resolve the cognitive dissonance of stealing a little while still believing that you are an honest person. Think "Oh, it's only a buck or two, it probably won't make a difference anyway" (or even "this guy makes 10x what I do; he won't miss it") versus "I'm not the sort of person who would steal thousands of dollars!".
I applaud your restraint and patience in trying to inform; but I don't see this guy admitting being wrong or having a bad attitude now. Shame, really. Of course, it'll eventually bite him hard in the bum if he responds like that to everyone who tries to help him. Hopefully the wakeup he gets won't be too harsh.
If replying to your own post is bad form, replying to it twice must be, I dunno... punishable by death. I'm an arse because I forgot to mention that you can get the original source of the music from GTA 1 along with the *entire game* (as well as Wild Metal and GTA2) as a free download from Rockstar Classic. Kudos to them.
A pox on me for not checking my links. The "4 Letter Love" link is horribly sped up. Sadly, it seems to have the best quality of encoding. The next best I could find was this one, but it sounds like ass in places.
Funnily enough, the topic of video game music came up in conversation the other day. The right music can put a great finishing touch to round of a game. I'm sure everyone is familiar with Braid, but Hardw[a]r had some pretty decent music to go with the setting of the future on Titan.
Additionally, if a game is good it creates a pleasurable association with the music present. Sounds obvious, but I still listen to the music from the original GTA because it reminds me of the fun I had. That and some of the songs were hilarious - listen to The Ballad Of Chapped Lips Calquhoun*, or 4 Letter Love by 'Stikki Fingers'). I loved playing Total Annihilation too, and thought the orchestral compositions by Jeremy Soule were great. For 10 years I had no idea they were synthesized! Doesn't detract from them, of course, I just assumed that because they sounded so *good* they must be recorded from real instruments.
Lastly, to this day I have a certain fondness for ragtime music (of all things!) that stems from days spent playing Virtual Pool.
/nostalgia
* If you remember the lyric "the menfolk found their women scary, 'cause they were so big and hairy", this is the song. If you don't, well, that lyric sets the tone.
I wasn't aware of bombings on Scotland or Wales, just England, so I apologize if I offended any limeys.
Yep, and Northern Ireland too. Clydebank, part of Glasgow (ish), where a significant amount of shipbuilding went on was particularly badly hit. There is allegedly still an unexploded bomb in the basement or foundations of a hospital a few miles away from where I live.
No need to apologise, just thought I'd inform you as your sig implies you like to learn new things.
I know, it's just serendipitous rendering on Chrome's part, but part of me wants to believe that the submitter was actually channelling their inner Ballmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Classy Slashdot, real classy. You post a news item about the youngest female chess champion and spend half the summary wondering about why the best female players are not typically as good at chess as the best men. Admittedly, it's only verbatim reposting of part of TFA (thanks NYT for also being classy!). Would another part not have done? Say,
Ms. Hou said that she received training and financial support from the Chinese government. She studies chess four to five hours a day, and also attends high school. She said that she sometimes fell behind in her work, but her teachers understood and tried to help her out.
or if you really wanted to talk about men
The record among men is held by Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985, when he was 22.
Now, I don't have a problem with the facts, if the top women are indeed not as good at chess as the top men. But it seems rather small to spend half the summary pontificating on that rather than telling us a bit more about the champion.
No one really knows why Slashdot posts summaries that are at best disingenuous and at worst deliberately inflammatory. One theory, common among top Slashdotters is that inflammatory stories get more comments than report-the-facts posts.
Rant over, I really need to lighten up. Merry Christmas all!
As usual, Red Dwarf has it covered: White Hole, from Meltdown.
Whatever happens to Assange, I'm sure that the people who will take over operations of wikileaks soon are getting the message loud and clear: Do not mess with those of us in power, or there will be a committed campaign coming at you from all sides, from the police, to press releases, to your personal life.
Sounds like the Church of Scientology. Which is to say, fucking scary.
While this answer will almost certainly not suit the OP, it may be of interest to other folk looking to archive their email. Using python and a combination of imaplib and some basic file I/O you can save the original text of messages. My rationale for this was firstly that it's probably less problematic than converting between various email client formats; and secondly that it's a decent way to learn some python! ;)
My rather basic implementation just dumps every email from an (IMAP) folder sequentially. I rely on grep for searching. However, it does have the prerequisite of the email being stored on a mailserver accessible via IMAP.
I love a good point-by-point rebuttal of quackery. Ben Goldacre would be proud.
I don't know how much of the content at the links below is repeated in TFA, but I thought these were good:
Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.
(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous /. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)
Who. Are. These. People?
And what's their contact info?
And why does William Shatner want to know, anyhow?
Great explanation, thanks for that! I remember encountering euphoria demos a while back and being seriously impressed with them. How taxing is it? I wish I could phrase that question in a more meaningful way, I'm just curious as to how well these things run, especially when you have 3 separate engines running at once!
Also, were you not developing a concept American Football game to showcase what the engine could do? What became of that?
Having played the beta, my short review of APB is: drive here, shoot stuff, repeat. Oops! Seems like I broke the embargo on reviews which was initially set at 10 freakin' days after release! To their credit (I guess), they rolled that back to merely release day.
A more nuanced look at the game shows they have in fact done some things quite nicely. The "All Points Bulletin" mechanic works very nicely. You'll be doing a mission when up pops up a notification that a comparable group from the opposing faction has been sent to stop you. It changes the dynamic of the mission and gives you a jolt of adrenaline as you listen out for the roar of the car engine signifying your would-be assassins drawing close. However, these adversarial matchups aren't without their problems. Say 50% of the time they work and you get a comparable strength team sent against you, resulting in a pitched battle that culminates in either narrow victory or defeat. Perfect! Well, the other 50% of the time you get a team that is woefully underpowered, say one wee neophyte against our group of four. Or massively overpowered, so you "call for backup", which works maybe 10% of the time. Perhaps the opposition are a full map away and have no way of intercepting you in time. Or they are already at the objective and virtually impossible to budge. The latter gets irritating as there are a few excellent camping spots should you get a VIP 'escort' mission. Oh, and I lied about the proportions. Things go right about 25% of the time rather than 50%.
Despite these problems, the gameplay is fun if you have a good group that you are in touch with through some kind of voice comms. The problem is that there is very little variety. Perhaps I've been spoiled by Saints Row 2 in this regard, but there seem to be about 3 basic types of mission which leads to the game getting boring quickly - pitched battles or not.
There is also a HUGE amount of customisation, if you're into that sort of thing. I won't say more about this as I'm not buying a game to play dress up...
...Which brings me to my next point: pricing. Pinning down the pricing details wasn't easy, although I did eventually find it on Kotaku or similar. I'll quote from RPS again:
The problem is, you are paying full retail price plus a decent fraction of 10 of your local denomination (£/$/€) monthly, for what? Progression seems limited - you can gain prestige with local NPC types to do more missions, but your character doesn't seem to get much stronger as with more traditional MMOs. It's not even like EVE where you can claim a small section of the virtual world for your particular gang. Frankly, I'm not sure it is worth paying for a glorified matchmaking service, but that is a judgment call each individual gamer needs to m
I'm surprised more game companies aren't taking advantage of streaming and even static online video. If you look around youtube, most of the game videos are "Let's Play's" or other fan material, not official content. Maybe they don't think it's worth the effort.
Check out the Just Cause 2 "Anatomy of a Stunt" videos:
#1 of the series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc38RBNz0xI
Just Cause 2 user channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialJustCause2
I wouldn't know whether to mod you funny, insightful, or troll.
Aw hell, I'm a fan of all three!
Do you have to keep it away from newts?
Renaming (or deleting, if you're feeling adventurous) your clientregistry.blob file should let you work around this bug.
Note: this is also the approved fix for when the system fucks up and you *do* have an internet connection,as happened to me just yesterday. Sigh...
I /flushdna all the time. Hasn't had any noticeable effect except clogging my toilet.
...?!
I'd recommend you see a doctor about that.
This MMO was the subject of a previous /. story, and since others have commented on other useful techniques, I'll leave you with this:
Zon (http://www.massively.com/2008/06/04/zon-the-mmo-that-teaches-you-to-speak-chinese/)
I've also seen it said (in a comment on here perhaps?) that it is preferable not to use pinyin romanisation as that doesn't help as much with making the correct sounds. Whatever it was pointed at GR as an alternative. Don't take that as gospel though as I may have no idea what I'm talking about!
Don't take this the wrong way; it is intended to help you convey meaning better. That said: think about how you phrase your sentences. The way you typed it it sounds as though you are being hesitant and, well, insincere. I'm sure your intention was to sincerely thank him.
Cool, a blog.. thanks...
is only one (albeit important) step away from:
Gee... a blog... thanks.
Without the nuance of spoken words it can be difficult to gauge tone and intent. Why did you use the trailing periods / ellipses ("...")?
It's easy to get away with stealing 4-5 dollars, and if you do it often enough you make a tidy profit... If someone loses diamonds or thousands of dollars they're going to come looking for it, and your chances of getting away with it are pretty slim.
That and it's easier to resolve the cognitive dissonance of stealing a little while still believing that you are an honest person. Think "Oh, it's only a buck or two, it probably won't make a difference anyway" (or even "this guy makes 10x what I do; he won't miss it") versus "I'm not the sort of person who would steal thousands of dollars!".
I applaud your restraint and patience in trying to inform; but I don't see this guy admitting being wrong or having a bad attitude now. Shame, really. Of course, it'll eventually bite him hard in the bum if he responds like that to everyone who tries to help him. Hopefully the wakeup he gets won't be too harsh.
N/T
If replying to your own post is bad form, replying to it twice must be, I dunno... punishable by death. I'm an arse because I forgot to mention that you can get the original source of the music from GTA 1 along with the *entire game* (as well as Wild Metal and GTA2) as a free download from Rockstar Classic. Kudos to them.
I'll shut up now.
A pox on me for not checking my links. The "4 Letter Love" link is horribly sped up. Sadly, it seems to have the best quality of encoding. The next best I could find was this one, but it sounds like ass in places.
Funnily enough, the topic of video game music came up in conversation the other day. The right music can put a great finishing touch to round of a game. I'm sure everyone is familiar with Braid, but Hardw[a]r had some pretty decent music to go with the setting of the future on Titan.
Additionally, if a game is good it creates a pleasurable association with the music present. Sounds obvious, but I still listen to the music from the original GTA because it reminds me of the fun I had. That and some of the songs were hilarious - listen to The Ballad Of Chapped Lips Calquhoun*, or 4 Letter Love by 'Stikki Fingers'). I loved playing Total Annihilation too, and thought the orchestral compositions by Jeremy Soule were great. For 10 years I had no idea they were synthesized! Doesn't detract from them, of course, I just assumed that because they sounded so *good* they must be recorded from real instruments.
Lastly, to this day I have a certain fondness for ragtime music (of all things!) that stems from days spent playing Virtual Pool.
* If you remember the lyric "the menfolk found their women scary, 'cause they were so big and hairy", this is the song. If you don't, well, that lyric sets the tone.
I wasn't aware of bombings on Scotland or Wales, just England, so I apologize if I offended any limeys.
Yep, and Northern Ireland too. Clydebank, part of Glasgow (ish), where a significant amount of shipbuilding went on was particularly badly hit. There is allegedly still an unexploded bomb in the basement or foundations of a hospital a few miles away from where I live.
No need to apologise, just thought I'd inform you as your sig implies you like to learn new things.
For anyone else interested, start reading here:
There sure are a lot of mentions of the word "applications" in the summary.
http://img34.imageshack.us/i/applications.jpg
I know, it's just serendipitous rendering on Chrome's part, but part of me wants to believe that the submitter was actually channelling their inner Ballmer.
They bombed the ever loving shit out of England,
*taps mog007 on the shoulder*
The rest of the UK that was bombed the shit out of would like to have a word with you.