Submitter here. I submitted this not because it's breaking news, but because I spent a while searching slashdot for it after finding those pages, and found nothing. I wanted to see what people more intelligent than me would make of it, not how people less intelligent than me would pick holes in its worth as an article.
That's the weirdest fucking typo I've made in a while. I'm probably going to obsess for hours over it too - it's a pretty bad mistake. Thanks for pointing it out though mate.
What a clown you are! Everyone knows you aren't meant to connect Windows XP to the internet! It's like putting your figure in a power socket! EndElitismSection
A line about great-great-great grandchildren visiting you FTA got me thinking. Most talk of paradoxes is theoretical bullshit involving going to the past, with the speaker/thinker including themselves as the protagonist.
Flip this around. If a distant relative came back to visit you (and you had some sort of verification such as DNA), would you have the balls to cut your dick off just to see if they disappeared right there in front of you?
Interesting, but fails to account for the intensely devout poverty stricken Christians who make up a far more significant proportion of the wider population of America (continent). The phrase I used a while back was "grassroots Christian movement from the favelas of Rio". You won't see people like that burning Qatar flags when Al Jazeera runs a tape of Bin Laden calling for death to the west/America.
Where are the "peaceful" muslims?
They're at home living their lives, while the nutters are out dancing for the international news crews at the embassies. Would you want to go out into one of those riots if you weren't going to fit in 100%?
We all remember the China pilot arrest thing right? And the ensuing hackfest?
Mark my words, it's starting again. This time is going to be bigger though. It's going to make that war look like nothing more than a crapflood!
I haven't been this excited since I last went out in public!!!
I've been playing online games for a while - I wholly agree with you. My point here depends on my experience that gamers quickly form into cliques which they play with routinely. This occurs even in rigidly disciplined games like Halo 2 on the xbox, where even with set goals and time limits, griefers and hackers make the "public" multiplayer experience feel almost like babysitting other peoples' kids. Even in a game like this all the interesting people were to be found (or not) playing custom matches, either having met through a community website or in a game.
The thing about the client being in the hands of the enemy is more related to the design of the software, which is a different matter completely. Cheaters are found in every kind of game. I'm not talking about games giving the client more control than that of the player character's movements, I'm talking about the structure of time spent gaming. You spawn, you warp/walk/whatever to the place where people go to play FPS deathmatches. You pick up a gun/paintball rifle/whatever and join a team. At this point, yes, there'd be some arbitrary "JOIN RED TEAM" decision, or there could be a WoW-style perma-side system. The devil is in the details: You'd need a minimum play time in this kind of thing to prevent griefers from being able to screw with games efficiently etc.
Before the Slashdot Barbecue Kings start jumping up and down on the charred remains of this idea, I want to point out that this kind of thing is in no way analagous to making money from skill at other kinds of game. Making money in SL isn't tied to advertising or tournaments, it's in producing content that other gamers enjoy.
It's still a tough dance to do, but I just want to help us all by steering away from references to "Fatality" and the MLG.
Game industry, I hear your cries begging me personally for advice on what you should do about this problem. Fear not, for here is my wisdom:
We're sick of sequels, but we're not receptive to things that feel too new. You need to create hybrid games that use popular elements from existing related games. For example, most people don't play Grand Theft Auto $number because of a love of all things criminal. What keeps us coming back to those games is the overwhelming freedom they give you. We're not playing MMORPGs out of our love of Tolkienesque fantasy, but because MMORPG coop gameplay is fun.
We need network-capable, non-linear gameplay that puts trust in players, instead of making us choose "DEATHMATCH MODE", or "RACE MODE" before entering the world. Games need to evolve so that players can hang out and decide for themselves how they want to use the engine. Your job as game programmers should to provide us with tools to enjoy ourselves, not to write us a rigid schedule which inevitably leads to an "end point" when apparently at the whim of some game designer we are to stop playing.
To endulge in the time-honored Slashdot tradition of the stretched analogy, isn't this kind of like inventing a whole new end of the candle to burn? The consumers pay for their bandwidth, the content providers pay for theirs. Where is the freeloading? Normally these ideas make me fume with rage at their sheer evilness. This is odd. I can't actually fathom the logic of this one.
Can somebody help me out so that I can move on to righteous hatred of Verizon?
For the sake of simplifying the argument into a single narrow viewpoint, which I can later defend to the death (don't we all love to do that?):
Go to which ever place is most likely to yield the most short term benefits. In the long term, we can go to both. It's only right now, in terms of specific missions, that we have to choose.
I predict many a boring paper being submitted arguing the case one way or the other.
Sorry I'm a little late to the barbecue. I couldn't find this point made yet.
It was a survey of non linux users, for fuck's sake. I'm 90% convinced that the title is as it is solely to inflame. The comments here generally state that it is in fact good enough for linux users, which may be accurate, but only relevant in the context of this STUPID MISLEADING TITLE which has nothing to do with anything.
Anyone who's played a lot of split-screen or LAN games with friends knows this. With my friends, I used to play a lot of FPS and racers. Something primal about hunting each other down makes everyone tense, and I think maybe the attitude that surfaces as a result is some kind of self-defense. Racing games are much more focused on technique - in an FPS, not being able to fire straight doesn't preclude participation, but poor racing technique makes a race a very lonely ordeal. That, and there's something poetic about a beautiful racing line. Even at +200km/h, it's almost soothing. For the sake of fun competition, the faster driver (usually the owner of the game) used to stop and wait every so often so as "proper racing" could continue. That being said, long before any of us got into FPS, a lot of our races used to eventually degenerate into ramming and spinning matches. Bizarrely, there was always this divide that during races we used to just talk about the race in hand, whereas in deathmatches, conversation consisted mostly of shouts, moans and orders. It makes sense: an FPS is much more twitchy, and takes up a lot of your brain's system resources. Also, it's an environment we happen to have specific hardcoded instructions for - war.
The real surprise is that the good behaviour survives the transition to internet gaming, where I was given to believing that there was no honour whatsoever.
I've got a brilliant business idea based on this. Basically, I want to move a step or two ahead in the predictions game. Fittingly inspired by google - meta-analysis:
Instead of trying to predict what the stock market will do, which is difficult, and you have to compete against thousands and thousands of analysts, you just try to predict what the analysts will do, and take advantage of the ripples they cause.
Think about it. Slashdotters have been giving it grassroots promotion for years. It's such an ingrained part of our religion that buying a copy for me will be the Slashdot equivalent of a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Does anyone here know about its status elsewhere? A mere slashdotting may not be enough in the economy of the game market.
Ah yes! That's that company who've never received a penny from me or anybody I know, yet whose marvelous Windows skinning program seems to be somehow installed in full version mode on all our computers!
They actually have a very interesting business plan: create decent minimalist software with a big focus on letting users create content for it, thus allowing for the creation of a hugely attractive library at no cost. It's very cool, and a sure sign of the effect of the internet on proprietary software.
That being said, another possible path would have been to make the software a free download, and force theme downloads through it as a client, and integrate a "you have to have paid to get access" system. Problem is, this would probably mean they'd have to make the themes themselves instead. Would the lost revenue be made up by the fact that people would actually have to pay for at least something?
Easy. Commence impression: Ohmygod this is bad because ohmygod greenhouse gases! and also because the heat and the icecaps will drown us ohmygod! and then the heat and all the water evaporating ohmygod! We're all going to die and IT'S ALL $FOO's FAULT ohmygod!
This is the sort of hysterical train of thought required to believe some of the crap that gets said about climate change. Several points of view on both sides of the argument are self-contradictory to the point of religiousness.
This is the three millionth such idea I've seen here on Slashdot. There's clearly a lot of possible choices for wikipedia, and it's clear that one needs to be chosen. Why are we not seeing it move quickly towards a fix, as an open source software project would? Technically, wikipedia is software too, but it doesn't seem to consider itself as such, as if mere "software" is too low a title for such a prestigious social movement, and those filthy users can just fuck off if they think we aren't 100% perfect as we are!
I think those pessimistic views reflect an inherent ignorance about the world. The media often paints a rather bleak picture of the rest of the world, whereas most people get along fine, though could always use a little help
In my opinion, this is where all this bitching comes from. It pains me to say this about my absolute favorite site on all the internets, but the bigoted ethnocentricity here on slashdot is overwhelming at times. Here is some stuff we have at 'insightful' right now (I like lists):
the orphans in Africa and child prostitutes in Cambodia are in greater need than any child is of a laptop
it's politically correct to attack the digital divide when the food, running water, electricity and semi-functional government divide is a far more serious threat to life, liberty, property and the future in these countries.
When a whole lot of people don't even have food, what have computers got to do with anything?
Shouldn't we focus of give everychild in the UNITED STATES/EU a laptop BEFORE we give a massive amount of funds that will be stolen by warlords
Rather than giving children laptops, why dont we work to stabilize thier countrys by helping people become better farmers, teachers, doctors.
sheesh, the UN is worried about LAPTOPS? starvation, genocide, nukes in the hands of feeble lunatics. seems the people need food, guns and intervention to deal with these issues
Therefore, the title should read, US Citizens Backing the $100 Laptop (Involuntarily)
Seems like starving third world children will benefit the least from the technology. They need food not laptops.
This is one of those few occasions where the average slashdotter sounds a little like average Joe American, which makes sense since this subject is only borderline tech-related. To those of you who are either modding or replying in response to this attitude, I salute you. I know I shouldn't want to take such comfort in the sanctity of the hive mind, but it really leaves me cold when I feel like an outsider on Slashdot. This is the only place I've ever felt like "just another one of the group", which for such a huge mass of people, is kind of odd. Come on guys, we're supposed to be about freedom in technology, and about a belief in sharing for the sake of a greater good. This project encompasses all of our most favorite ideals, why are so many of us so vocally hostile towards it? Because we truly think the rest of the world consists of starving orphans and "warlords"? Or is it actually because everybody else in the UN openly resents America and Britain, the two main nationalities here, meaning we have to act snotty about them?
why do you expect that evolution will be any different?
Because there are enough others thinking it that the groupthink bit of peoples' brains kicks in and overrides others. It's that simple.
The real issue at hand in my opinion is how this I.D. bullshit has kicked up a lot of the "we're so smart" veneer that we've built up over recent centuries, and shown that we're still fundamentally moronic apes whose primary use for ideas is still as a way to set out our social alliances rather than as an end in themselves.
here is where I live. I've annotated my location quite clearly on a map of ULTIMATE SEA LEVEL RISE DESTRUCTION! I'm not worried either. In fact, I'm looking forward to it. You see, I figure I'll have to act out one of those cool disaster-action movies, and I'll probably get a cut through my shirt on my upper arm, and a dirty face. I imagine that even if I have to make some tough decision, like whether or not to go back for the dog, at the end when everyone's ok, the dog will suddenly turn up, and there'll be a barbecue or something and I'll give the dog a burger.
Pffft, those crazy scientists and their insistence on silly ideas like "Dark Matter" and "Evidence". The Evangelist crowd has had a dark-matter-free theory for gravity for years: Intelligent Falling. Now it's just a case of getting this information into schools so that students can make an informed decision based on all the evidence. I feel sick after saying that, I don't know how anyone could do it seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Submitter here. I submitted this not because it's breaking news, but because I spent a while searching slashdot for it after finding those pages, and found nothing. I wanted to see what people more intelligent than me would make of it, not how people less intelligent than me would pick holes in its worth as an article.
That's the weirdest fucking typo I've made in a while. I'm probably going to obsess for hours over it too - it's a pretty bad mistake. Thanks for pointing it out though mate.
What a clown you are! Everyone knows you aren't meant to connect Windows XP to the internet! It's like putting your figure in a power socket!
EndElitismSection
A line about great-great-great grandchildren visiting you FTA got me thinking. Most talk of paradoxes is theoretical bullshit involving going to the past, with the speaker/thinker including themselves as the protagonist.
Flip this around. If a distant relative came back to visit you (and you had some sort of verification such as DNA), would you have the balls to cut your dick off just to see if they disappeared right there in front of you?
Interesting, but fails to account for the intensely devout poverty stricken Christians who make up a far more significant proportion of the wider population of America (continent). The phrase I used a while back was "grassroots Christian movement from the favelas of Rio". You won't see people like that burning Qatar flags when Al Jazeera runs a tape of Bin Laden calling for death to the west/America.
Where are the "peaceful" muslims?
They're at home living their lives, while the nutters are out dancing for the international news crews at the embassies. Would you want to go out into one of those riots if you weren't going to fit in 100%?
We all remember the China pilot arrest thing right? And the ensuing hackfest?
Mark my words, it's starting again. This time is going to be bigger though. It's going to make that war look like nothing more than a crapflood!
I haven't been this excited since I last went out in public!!!
I've been playing online games for a while - I wholly agree with you. My point here depends on my experience that gamers quickly form into cliques which they play with routinely. This occurs even in rigidly disciplined games like Halo 2 on the xbox, where even with set goals and time limits, griefers and hackers make the "public" multiplayer experience feel almost like babysitting other peoples' kids. Even in a game like this all the interesting people were to be found (or not) playing custom matches, either having met through a community website or in a game.
The thing about the client being in the hands of the enemy is more related to the design of the software, which is a different matter completely. Cheaters are found in every kind of game. I'm not talking about games giving the client more control than that of the player character's movements, I'm talking about the structure of time spent gaming. You spawn, you warp/walk/whatever to the place where people go to play FPS deathmatches. You pick up a gun/paintball rifle/whatever and join a team. At this point, yes, there'd be some arbitrary "JOIN RED TEAM" decision, or there could be a WoW-style perma-side system. The devil is in the details: You'd need a minimum play time in this kind of thing to prevent griefers from being able to screw with games efficiently etc.
Before the Slashdot Barbecue Kings start jumping up and down on the charred remains of this idea, I want to point out that this kind of thing is in no way analagous to making money from skill at other kinds of game. Making money in SL isn't tied to advertising or tournaments, it's in producing content that other gamers enjoy.
It's still a tough dance to do, but I just want to help us all by steering away from references to "Fatality" and the MLG.
Game industry, I hear your cries begging me personally for advice on what you should do about this problem. Fear not, for here is my wisdom:
We're sick of sequels, but we're not receptive to things that feel too new. You need to create hybrid games that use popular elements from existing related games. For example, most people don't play Grand Theft Auto $number because of a love of all things criminal. What keeps us coming back to those games is the overwhelming freedom they give you. We're not playing MMORPGs out of our love of Tolkienesque fantasy, but because MMORPG coop gameplay is fun.
We need network-capable, non-linear gameplay that puts trust in players, instead of making us choose "DEATHMATCH MODE", or "RACE MODE" before entering the world. Games need to evolve so that players can hang out and decide for themselves how they want to use the engine. Your job as game programmers should to provide us with tools to enjoy ourselves, not to write us a rigid schedule which inevitably leads to an "end point" when apparently at the whim of some game designer we are to stop playing.
To endulge in the time-honored Slashdot tradition of the stretched analogy, isn't this kind of like inventing a whole new end of the candle to burn? The consumers pay for their bandwidth, the content providers pay for theirs. Where is the freeloading?
Normally these ideas make me fume with rage at their sheer evilness. This is odd. I can't actually fathom the logic of this one.
Can somebody help me out so that I can move on to righteous hatred of Verizon?
For the sake of simplifying the argument into a single narrow viewpoint, which I can later defend to the death (don't we all love to do that?):
Go to which ever place is most likely to yield the most short term benefits. In the long term, we can go to both. It's only right now, in terms of specific missions, that we have to choose.
I predict many a boring paper being submitted arguing the case one way or the other.
Sorry I'm a little late to the barbecue. I couldn't find this point made yet.
It was a survey of non linux users, for fuck's sake. I'm 90% convinced that the title is as it is solely to inflame. The comments here generally state that it is in fact good enough for linux users, which may be accurate, but only relevant in the context of this STUPID MISLEADING TITLE which has nothing to do with anything.
Anyone who's played a lot of split-screen or LAN games with friends knows this. With my friends, I used to play a lot of FPS and racers. Something primal about hunting each other down makes everyone tense, and I think maybe the attitude that surfaces as a result is some kind of self-defense. Racing games are much more focused on technique - in an FPS, not being able to fire straight doesn't preclude participation, but poor racing technique makes a race a very lonely ordeal. That, and there's something poetic about a beautiful racing line. Even at +200km/h, it's almost soothing. For the sake of fun competition, the faster driver (usually the owner of the game) used to stop and wait every so often so as "proper racing" could continue. That being said, long before any of us got into FPS, a lot of our races used to eventually degenerate into ramming and spinning matches.
Bizarrely, there was always this divide that during races we used to just talk about the race in hand, whereas in deathmatches, conversation consisted mostly of shouts, moans and orders. It makes sense: an FPS is much more twitchy, and takes up a lot of your brain's system resources. Also, it's an environment we happen to have specific hardcoded instructions for - war.
The real surprise is that the good behaviour survives the transition to internet gaming, where I was given to believing that there was no honour whatsoever.
I've got a brilliant business idea based on this. Basically, I want to move a step or two ahead in the predictions game. Fittingly inspired by google - meta-analysis:
Instead of trying to predict what the stock market will do, which is difficult, and you have to compete against thousands and thousands of analysts, you just try to predict what the analysts will do, and take advantage of the ripples they cause.
Think about it. Slashdotters have been giving it grassroots promotion for years. It's such an ingrained part of our religion that buying a copy for me will be the Slashdot equivalent of a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Does anyone here know about its status elsewhere? A mere slashdotting may not be enough in the economy of the game market.
Pffft. What a crock of shit.
It's not released yet, and the jokes go "...when DNF is released".
Ergo, the DNF joke LIVES!
Ah yes! That's that company who've never received a penny from me or anybody I know, yet whose marvelous Windows skinning program seems to be somehow installed in full version mode on all our computers!
They actually have a very interesting business plan: create decent minimalist software with a big focus on letting users create content for it, thus allowing for the creation of a hugely attractive library at no cost. It's very cool, and a sure sign of the effect of the internet on proprietary software.
That being said, another possible path would have been to make the software a free download, and force theme downloads through it as a client, and integrate a "you have to have paid to get access" system. Problem is, this would probably mean they'd have to make the themes themselves instead. Would the lost revenue be made up by the fact that people would actually have to pay for at least something?
Easy. Commence impression:
Ohmygod this is bad because ohmygod greenhouse gases! and also because the heat and the icecaps will drown us ohmygod! and then the heat and all the water evaporating ohmygod! We're all going to die and IT'S ALL $FOO's FAULT ohmygod!
This is the sort of hysterical train of thought required to believe some of the crap that gets said about climate change. Several points of view on both sides of the argument are self-contradictory to the point of religiousness.
Oh no! You didn't close the [joke] tag properly! Everything you've said or typed since you wrote this post has been a joke!
Close it quick!
This is the three millionth such idea I've seen here on Slashdot. There's clearly a lot of possible choices for wikipedia, and it's clear that one needs to be chosen. Why are we not seeing it move quickly towards a fix, as an open source software project would?
Technically, wikipedia is software too, but it doesn't seem to consider itself as such, as if mere "software" is too low a title for such a prestigious social movement, and those filthy users can just fuck off if they think we aren't 100% perfect as we are!
In my opinion, this is where all this bitching comes from. It pains me to say this about my absolute favorite site on all the internets, but the bigoted ethnocentricity here on slashdot is overwhelming at times. Here is some stuff we have at 'insightful' right now (I like lists):
- the orphans in Africa and child prostitutes in Cambodia are in greater need than any child is of a laptop
- it's politically correct to attack the digital divide when the food, running water, electricity and semi-functional government divide is a far more serious threat to life, liberty, property and the future in these countries.
- When a whole lot of people don't even have food, what have computers got to do with anything?
- Shouldn't we focus of give everychild in the UNITED STATES/EU a laptop BEFORE we give a massive amount of funds that will be stolen by warlords
- Rather than giving children laptops, why dont we work to stabilize thier countrys by helping people become better farmers, teachers, doctors.
- sheesh, the UN is worried about LAPTOPS? starvation, genocide, nukes in the hands of feeble lunatics. seems the people need food, guns and intervention to deal with these issues
- Therefore, the title should read, US Citizens Backing the $100 Laptop (Involuntarily)
- Seems like starving third world children will benefit the least from the technology. They need food not laptops.
This is one of those few occasions where the average slashdotter sounds a little like average Joe American, which makes sense since this subject is only borderline tech-related. To those of you who are either modding or replying in response to this attitude, I salute you.I know I shouldn't want to take such comfort in the sanctity of the hive mind, but it really leaves me cold when I feel like an outsider on Slashdot. This is the only place I've ever felt like "just another one of the group", which for such a huge mass of people, is kind of odd. Come on guys, we're supposed to be about freedom in technology, and about a belief in sharing for the sake of a greater good. This project encompasses all of our most favorite ideals, why are so many of us so vocally hostile towards it? Because we truly think the rest of the world consists of starving orphans and "warlords"? Or is it actually because everybody else in the UN openly resents America and Britain, the two main nationalities here, meaning we have to act snotty about them?
why do you expect that evolution will be any different?
Because there are enough others thinking it that the groupthink bit of peoples' brains kicks in and overrides others. It's that simple.
The real issue at hand in my opinion is how this I.D. bullshit has kicked up a lot of the "we're so smart" veneer that we've built up over recent centuries, and shown that we're still fundamentally moronic apes whose primary use for ideas is still as a way to set out our social alliances rather than as an end in themselves.
here is where I live. I've annotated my location quite clearly on a map of ULTIMATE SEA LEVEL RISE DESTRUCTION!
I'm not worried either. In fact, I'm looking forward to it. You see, I figure I'll have to act out one of those cool disaster-action movies, and I'll probably get a cut through my shirt on my upper arm, and a dirty face. I imagine that even if I have to make some tough decision, like whether or not to go back for the dog, at the end when everyone's ok, the dog will suddenly turn up, and there'll be a barbecue or something and I'll give the dog a burger.
Pffft, those crazy scientists and their insistence on silly ideas like "Dark Matter" and "Evidence".
The Evangelist crowd has had a dark-matter-free theory for gravity for years: Intelligent Falling.
Now it's just a case of getting this information into schools so that students can make an informed decision based on all the evidence.
I feel sick after saying that, I don't know how anyone could do it seriously.