Yahya Ibn Tuma - Slashdot User

Comment Played it well before the Megacorp era..... (Score 0, Troll) 189

by Yahya Ibn Tuma on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @06:02AM (#30829848) Attached to: Looking Back At Dungeons & Dragons

I played D&D, AD&D well before the "One Hasbro to rule them all" era. I survived the "Mazes and Monsters" era. Nowadays, D&D et al. is just a MMOG, MMORPG anti-game shitfest with books like Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies.

Comment Re:Wachowski Input... (Score 1) 144

by Yahya Ibn Tuma on Monday July 27, 2009 @12:27PM (#28839039) Attached to: How The Matrix Online Went Wrong

Surely there must have been key comic book industry writers that were approved by the Wachowskis to generate game content.

There was. Paul Chadwick (writer of the comic book series Concrete)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Chadwick

I won't get into discussing how to quantify the developers contributions to the writing of The Matrix Online because it's totally impossible now.

Comment Re:MxO an example of Rampant Corporate Stupidity.. (Score 2, Interesting) 144

by Yahya Ibn Tuma on Monday July 27, 2009 @09:02AM (#28835831) Attached to: How The Matrix Online Went Wrong

That kind of hassle, instead of just clicking a button online to cancel, is a sure way to make sure I'll never play another game from your company again for the rest of my life.

From that statement, I know you played MxO during the classic period of Time Warner-AOL(March-May 2005). If you think AOL(and AIM) was/is God's gift to the internet, The Matrix Online is/was the game for you.

All of this nonsense was brought to you by Jace Hall (AKA Jason Hall) here's his IMDB page:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0995727/

Notice that he lists producer credits for StarCraft(1998) and World of Warcraft(2004) in spite of the fact he worked for Monolith Productions and/or Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment during those time periods. I smell a rank con-artist. I suppose by some miracle he *could* have had a hand in the production of those games, but I don't think so.

Comment MxO an example of Rampant Corporate Stupidity... (Score 5, Interesting) 144

by Yahya Ibn Tuma on Monday July 27, 2009 @07:09AM (#28835013) Attached to: How The Matrix Online Went Wrong

It was all wrong from the start. The whole "game" was thrown together by a bunch of idiots who sacrificed gaming to the stupidity of corporate synergism.

Seriously, during the Warner Bros. era, MxO had a cancellation policy similar to AOL at it's worst(i.e. they employed the same gimmicks and tricks that AOL did to "retain" customers), BECAUSE AOL,WB,MONOLITH PRODUCTIONS AND MXO WERE ONE AND THE SAME BACK THEN.

I've experienced MxO under Warner Brothers *and* under Sony Online Entertainment, and, hands down, Warner Brothers was the worst MMOG,MMORPG company that ever existed.

I say this because of that stupid "SOE destroyed MxO" meme that plagues discussions regarding the game. Hardly. The Matrix Online lasted 88 days before Time Warner-AOL threw in the towel, and never had over 40,000 paying customers at the height of it's power and influence. Sony kept it going for nearly four years in spite of it being an unpopular game.

How The Matrix Online Went Wrong 144

Posted by Soulskill on Monday July 27, 2009 @06:17AM from the not-like-this dept.

As the July 31st deadline for The Matrix Online's closure looms, Gamer Limit is running a story discussing the game's shortcomings, as well as some of the decisions that led to its failure. Quoting: "I honestly thought the writers must have absolutely hated the remaining cast of The Matrix Trilogy or something, because they constantly seemed to go out of their way to phase out existing characters in favor of newer ones. The cast overall basically made me, as a player, feel distant from the main storyline and made the entire game feel like a Matrix side story instead of the continuation it was meant to be. ... When MxO first launched there was an entire team dedicated to playing the game as Agents and other key characters as a means to further in-game events and directly interact with players, giving players the feeling that they truly were making a difference. After the SOE buyout of the game the LESIG team was reduced to playing minor characters before eventually being phased out and replaced with a Live Event Team (LET) comprised purely of volunteers."

Comment Incompetence?, or passive-agressive attack? (Score 1) 384

by Yahya Ibn Tuma on Friday December 05, 2008 @05:53AM (#26000621) Attached to: Players Furious Over Buggy GTA IV PC Release

Rockstar has had a serious contempt for PC gaming since 2005 or so. On the other hand, It just might be run-of-the-mill incompetence of programmers who can't program.

"Dark Flow" Outside Observable Universe 583

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:47AM from the here-comes-galactus dept.

DynaSoar writes "NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable. The material is pulling clusters of galaxies towards a region of space known not to contain sufficient matter to create the effect. They can only speculate on what the material is and how space might differ there: 'In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.'"

Journal Journal: CEO murdered by mob of sacked workers

Journal by Yahya Ibn Tuma on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:44AM

Ok, you PC retards had better not complain about 'angry white males ever again...

Students Are Always Half Right In Pittsburgh 881

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @11:26PM from the think-of-the-children dept.

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have enacted a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work. District spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said, the 50 percent minimum gives children a chance to catch up and a reason to keep trying. If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester. The district and teachers union issued a joint memo to ensure staff members' compliance with the policy, which was already on the books but enforced only at some schools. At this rate, it won't be long before schools institute double extra credit Mondays and Fridays to ensure students don't take three day weekends.

Ensemble Studios' Canceled Project Was Halo MMO 118

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @09:14PM from the best-of-both-cash-cows dept.

simoniker writes "Following the recent announcement that Microsoft-owned Age Of Empires creator Ensemble Studios would close after the completion of Halo Wars, Gamasutra has discovered that a now-canceled Halo MMO was in development at the studio, unearthing prototype UI and level screenshots of the Ensemble-developed project. The prototype art, which was at one point made available on an Ensemble-linked online artist portfolio website, further confirms previous rumors that the studio was working on an MMO based on the Bungie-created sci-fi franchise." We discussed the future closing of Ensemble Studios a couple weeks ago. The set of pictures which seem to be screenshots and graphic models from the canceled Halo MMO has been posted on Flickr. In other Halo news, Bungie may be teasing the announcement of the next game on their website.

The Supercomputer Race 158

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @07:45PM from the greased-lightning dept.

CWmike writes "Every June and November a new list of the world's fastest supercomputers is revealed. The latest Top 500 list marked the scaling of computing's Mount Everest — the petaflops barrier. IBM's 'Roadrunner' topped the list, burning up the bytes at 1.026 petaflops. A computer to die for if you are a supercomputer user for whom no machine ever seems fast enough? Maybe not, says Richard Loft, director of supercomputing research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The Top 500 list is only useful in telling you the absolute upper bound of the capabilities of the computers ... It's not useful in terms of telling you their utility in real scientific calculations. The problem with the rankings: a decades-old benchmark called Linpack, which is Fortran code that measures the speed of processors on floating-point math operations. One possible fix: Invoking specialization. Loft says of petaflops, peak performance, benchmark results, positions on a list — 'it's a little shell game that everybody plays. ... All we care about is the number of years of climate we can simulate in one day of wall-clock computer time. That tells you what kinds of experiments you can do.' State-of-the-art systems today can simulate about five years per day of computer time, he says, but some climatologists yearn to simulate 100 years in a day."

Google Pushes Back Against US Copyright Treaty 233

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @06:37PM from the don't-upset-the-google dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Internet companies led by Google joined groups representing Web users to challenge the Bush administration's bid to toughen international enforcement against copyright pirates. The companies said the US courts and Congress are still working out the correct balance between protecting copyrights and the free exchange of information on the Web and a treaty could be counterproductive. 'There's this assumption that what is good for Disney is what's good for America, but that's an oversimplification,' said Jonathan Band, an intellectual property lawyer representing libraries and high-tech companies. 'There's also what's good for Yahoo and Google.' The US, Japan, Canada and other nations said last year that they would begin negotiations on an agreement aimed at cracking down on counterfeiting of such goods as watches and pharmaceuticals, and the piracy of copyrighted materials, such as software and music recordings. A leaked draft of the deal showed that the treaty could force Internet service providers to cooperate with copyright holders."

Popup Study Confirms Most Users Are Idiots 568

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @05:40PM from the at-my-office-they-all-are dept.

danieltdp writes "Testing students at a University, psychologists made many of them click on a dialog box that in effect said: 'You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By clicking yes you are failing the Windows Darwin Test.' Nearly half of them said all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs."

SpaceX's Fourth Launch Attempt RSN 71

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @05:01PM from the houston-we-have-a-boredom dept.

jcgam69 writes "SpaceX's Falcon 1 is on the pad in the South Pacific Kwajalein Atoll ready for its fourth launch attempt, according to a blog post over the weekend from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The countdown is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 23, between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. PDT, though the launch window will extend through Thursday if need be."

Saturn's Rings May Be Very Old 125

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @04:23PM from the even-older-than-bob dept.

Kristina from Science News writes "Combining computer simulations with data about the way starlight shines through Saturn's rings suggests the individual grains are big and thus could have been around a good 4 billion years, not the mere 10 million to 100 million previously suspected. What may have thrown earlier observations off is the chance that the grains aren't evenly distributed, but clump here and spread out there."

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