Forbin

Started listening to the overthinking it podcast. http://www.overthinkingit.com/ It's alright. A bit sloppy, but also comfortable as they've got about 3 years worth of shows out.

I was fully expecting a Kasavin after that Robert name drop.

The developer commentary for Portal 2 Co-op says that Big Dog was an inspiration for the walking animation for the bots. I'd say mostly P-Body.

I still don't see why people are celebrating the hackers that have stolen their personal information.

They added a part to the end of 1 that shows a robot bringing you back into the facility when you collapse after escaping the facility. AzlAc2WwEI8

Yeah when people weren't exploiting the item physics it was very interesting. I just know they have some metrics to back up the fact that almost nobody would miss them. JoW-CutQcT8

They mention that in the dev commentary. It's the reason that they had a simple navigation puzzle right before one of those chambers. To remind players that they could use the portal gun traditionally for navigation.

Giant bomb's podcast feed just got a Portal 2 spoilercast. It's Ryan Davies basically interviewing the guys at Valve.

http://i.imgur.com/avwUB.jpg (spoiler level: low)

I've got at least 2 achievements in commentary mode.No level select is a shame though.

They've got a taste of blood: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/22/drone

I pretty much disagree, other than the find the one portal spot aspect. And most of the time I enjoyed that or at least didn't care. The co-op has more of the Portal 1 style puzzles, as the conceit is that the players actually want to participate in the testing it doesn't feel weird. (ending spoiler)

Very nice, it sort of is right up McCloud's alley. I really like the pallet on page 2 as well.

Even if it doesn't open that much earlier (I still think potato acceleration + greater time removals will change that), I like being part of a big event. It's somewhat rare that these things happen, and it's fun to contribute when you can.

Just be happy you're logging hours in the game. I've come infuriatingly close to the gold medal in Audiosurf.

holy carp

If you buy it on PS3, you'll get a free steam version that will work on both your Mac and your PC

Not sure if it's anyone out of house, and I think Valve has done this extremely well. I just think it highlights how powerful advertising can be, and how easily someone can disguise themselves as an average consumer.

All those ARG user accounts going rogue should give people an idea of how viral marketing operates these days. People embed themselves in communities, build up a level of trust, and then start selling their product through word of mouth. In this case there's no mystery that an ARG is advertisement. But while people are focused on the puzzle of how these people are being "abducted by Glados", they should remember they were never people to begin with.

Has less to do with the limited hardware diversity, and more to do with the fact that people like Microsoft force your game to be of a certain quality to get certified. This studio just took on more than they could achieve.Not only was the defect queue huge, they left out key features they'd initially planned for like multiplayer.

I agree that black hats in general are skilled enough to find anything a white hat can. But don't under estimate the population of script kiddies. Most people out there exploiting shit are just reusing what other people have learned.

What from my posts makes you think it's an issue of me "getting" that? I understand the theory, but I generally disagree with it. I think that when people provide their findings privately to companies, that it's usually the best route.My personal opinion is that people with malicious intent benefit more from the publishing of security holes than the general public does. So if you're going to do it, you should be damn sure the company you're trying to help is not doing their job.

Strange that this just got bumped. I was just thinking about our talk about media literacy while listening to the latest HAWPcast. They talk about the approachability of artistic movies.

I'm saying it's debatable. It would almost certainly hurt their sales, because it would inconvenience their customers. I don't want to have to enter my password that often. I've worked on medical software that deals with PHI and challenges you for passwords all the time, it can certainly be used as a security measure, but it's a usability nightmare. The best option would be to add a preference under your account security asking to be challenged every time you purchase a game (which would take effect the next time you typed your password). But I still don't see it as a clear cut decision. And decisions, even ones that seem obvious, on major projects like Steam take time. That's what I take issue with. People that work on their own, have no idea how long it takes to settle debates, and move forward with a release plan. It's not just bureaucracy, it's due process. You see it all the time where someone complains that some minor feature they want, should just be implemented because "it's just a couple lines of code". They're the backseat drivers and armchair quarterbacks of the development world. Nobody appreciates that developers have limited time, and a huge list of things they need to do sorted by severity and priority. If someone told me to change something of this scale on my current project in production, it would take me at least a day just to put my current environment to rest and setup a view of the code of the main branch in order to get started. It'd probably take a week or two of development to ensure all our modules were updated and rebuilt. Then QA would want a month to regression test that I hadn't blown up the whole site with my major refactor. And we'd have to figure out when the release window would be, and if we have time with the operations team to get it deployed to our staging and production environments. But before any of this would be able to take place, the management would have to agree that it's something worth doing. So is it so surprising that when Valve is currently pushing out Steam Guard, that it's not an obvious conclusion for the management team that they should pull resources off projects they're currently working on. Should it be fixed? Yes. Is it surprising that it wasn't hotfixed within 4 months given the complexity, the severity, the alternatives and the fact that they're working on launching their service to a new platform? No. Would I rather I know about it than not? Probably. But I would rather not know about it, and in turn not have the whole NETSEC community know about it and have people start making tools to break in to other peoples accounts, while Valve is giving a reasonable amount of time to address the issue.