Comment But check out what it brought back! (Score 1) 165
"They said it was hauled from the Challenger Deep, but I'm positive that beast never swam in terrestrial waters until a week ago."
Comment Re:Crashed drive with a virtualbox image (Score 1) 399
You opened it. You're screwed.
Comment Hoyle Board Games 2007 & 2008 (Score 1) 282
Ah, Hoyle. They couldn't be happy producing a collection of board games. They had to provide a system when you earn ingame money for certain achievements, which you then spend on useless tsochkes.
Fortunately, there was a great big gaping bug in the Chess game. If you put your opponent's King in check, a music sting would play and your opponent would make a "witty" remark.
If you tried to take a second move while the music sting was playing... the game would let you. And then, if the enemy King were still in check... music sting, witty remark, etc.
Get your Queen out and make a kamikaze attack, and you could clean out the whole enemy side about five moves in, getting credit for each kill and then for a lopsided victory.
(You could have gone on to promote 8 pawns, etc, but it was faster just to kill all the enemy pieces then score checkmate.)
Comment Sorry, you've been beaten. (Score 1) 76
Beaten like a redheaded stepchild. Kingdom of Loathing beat them to every aspect of this. Except that it's a little less trivial to just buy your way to success in KoL.
(I know it's been mentioned a couple of times already, but it bears repeating.)
-#1075489
How To Argue That Open Source Software Is Secure? 674
Smidge207 writes "Lately there has been a huge push by Certified Microsoft Professionals and their companies to call (potential) clients and warn them of the dangers of open source. This week I received calls from four different customers saying that they were warned that they are dangerously insecure because they run open source operating systems or software, because 'anyone can read the code and hack you with ease.' Other colleagues in the area also have noticed that three local Microsoft Partners have been trying to strike fear in the minds of companies that respond, 'Yes, we use open source or Linux' when the sales call comes in. I know this is simply a sales tactic by these companies, but how do I fix the damage these tactics cause? I have several customers who now want more than my word about the security of systems that have worked for them flawlessly for 5-6 years, with minimal expense outside of upgrades and patching for security. Does anyone have a good plan or sources of reliable information that can be used to inform the customer?"
Comment Re:Locusts (Score 1) 743
> Good drivers simply don't need to worry about it by definition because they don't drive close enough to trigger such a system.
Except when they leave sane following distance between them and the car in front and some mouth-breathing moron says OH HAI EMPTY SPACE. I SHALL FILL IT.
Or, as happened to me last summer:
Car #1: me.
Car #2: victim
Car #3: asshat.
Car #1 follows car #2 at sane distance.
Car #3 swoops into the gap, and blocks car #1's view of car #2.
Car #2 stops.
Car #3 swoops out of gap, leaving car #1 to ram car #2.
Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games 44
MarkN writes "There's hardly a video game made nowadays that doesn't involve puzzles in some sense. In some games they serve as occasional roadblocks to break up the action, and in the genre of adventure games the whole focus of the game is solving a set of related puzzles. I've written a piece for AdventureClassicGaming describing and categorizing puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games make use of explicitly designed abstract puzzles — they're explicitly designed rather than being randomly or procedurally generated, and abstract in the sense that all you need to do is figure out the right actions to perform, rather than making the performing of those actions be a challenge in and of itself. My classification makes distinctions at two levels: you have self-contained puzzles, which can depend upon using your basic verbs of interaction, solving some minigame based around achieving a particular configuration, or providing an answer to a riddle. On the other side, you have puzzles that require some external key: this could be an item, a piece of information, or an internal change to the game's state triggered somewhere else. From there, I talk about some of the possibilities and pitfalls these puzzles carry, as well as their use in other genres. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on the use and application of puzzles in adventure games, and games in general."
