<span style="color:#323232;">1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
</span><span style="color:#323232;">to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sign (-), and period (.). Note that periods are only allowed when
</span><span style="color:#323232;">they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See
</span><span style="color:#323232;">RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for
</span><span style="color:#323232;">background). No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a
</span><span style="color:#323232;">name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case. The first
</span><span style="color:#323232;">character must be an alpha character. The last character must not be
</span><span style="color:#323232;">a minus sign or period. A host which serves as a GATEWAY should have
</span><span style="color:#323232;">"-GATEWAY" or "-GW" as part of its name. Hosts which do not serve as
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Internet gateways should not use "-GATEWAY" and "-GW" as part of
</span><span style="color:#323232;">their names. A host which is a TAC should have "-TAC" as the last
</span><span style="color:#323232;">part of its host name, if it is a DoD host. Single character names
</span><span style="color:#323232;">or nicknames are not allowed.
</span>
<span style="color:#323232;"> The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> syntax.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Host software MUST handle host names of up to 63 characters and
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> SHOULD handle host names of up to 255 characters.
</span>
I remember the “are the Doom developers Satanists” era. Oh, and there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Trap, when CD-ROMs came out and games incorporating full-motion video had their brief time in the sun. IIRC Congress had a fit about that for a while too.
Thompson charged that the group placed “homosexual-education tapes” in public schools.
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as “murder simulators” to rehearse violent plans.
I don’t know what a Halo battleship is (like…a spaceship in the Halo series?), but basically an amphibious assault ship — can deploy amphibious craft and aircraft — with a deck gun, cruise missiles, SAM array, CIWS, and torpedoes, so kinda an agglomeration of multiple modern-day real-world ship types. Yeah, and then you can either have AI control with you giving orders or you directly control the vehicles.
I think that there should be realistic video games. Not all video games, certainly, but I don’t think that we should avoid ever trying to make video games with a high level of graphical realism.
I don’t particularly have any issue specific to violence. Like, I don’t particularly subscribe to past concerns over the years in various countries that no realistic violence should be portrayed in video games, and humans should be replaced by zombies or blood should be green or whatever.
Whether or not specifically the Grand Theft Auto series should use realistic characters or stick with the more-cartoony representations that it used in the past is, I think, a harder question. I don’t have a hard opinion on it, though personally I enjoyed and played through Grand Theft Auto 3 and never bothered to get through the more-realistic, gritty, Grand Theft Auto 5. Certainly I think that it’s quite possible to make very good games that are not photorealistic. And given the current RAM shortages, if there’s ever been a good time to maybe pull back a bit on more-photorealistic graphics in order to reduce RAM requirements, this seems like a good time.
Yesterday, I was playing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/. That uses mostly untextured polygons for its graphics, and it’s a perfectly fine game. I have other, many more photorealistic, games available, and the hardware to run them, but that happened to be more appealing.
EDIT: I just opened it, and with it running, it increased the VRAM usage on my video card by 1.1 GB. Not very VRAM-dependent. And it is pretty, at least in my eyes.
The good news is that single-player games tend to age well. Down the line, the bugs are as fixed as they’re gonna be. Any expansions are done. Prices may be lower. Mods may have been created. Wikis may have been created. You have a pretty good picture of what the game looks like in its entirety. While there are rare cases that games are no longer available some reason or break on newer OSes with no way to make them run, that’s rare.
With (non-local) multiplayer games, one has a lot less flexibility, since once the crowd has moved on, it’s moved on.
Based on the screenshot in the article, the OLED model has longer playtime; Valve says that the LCD model has “2-8 hours of gameplay” and the OLED “3-13 hours of gameplay”.
Though they do also say that this is “context-dependent”, and I’m sure that you can come up with pathological cases for each. Like, a game that has a nearly all-white screen and runs at 90 Hz is probably relative worst-case for the OLED in terms of battery life, and a game that has a dark screen and runs at a locked framerate of 60 Hz is probably relative worst-case for the LCD.
If they’ve got their heart set on an LCD model, it looks like eBay has a number of secondhand ones.
I don’t own a Steam Deck or intend to — I have more than enough portable electric devices capable of running games that I lug around already — but if I were going to get one, it looks like the OLED model has a 25% larger battery, which would be interesting to me.
Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.
IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).
I mean, it’s fine to do so, as long as you have PC hardware that meets your needs. Valve would be fine with it too. As long as it can run Steam, all good. For Valve, I expect that the Steam Machine is to provide an easy-to-set-up option a la consoles that let them move into the living room for people who have an issue with that. If you can already use/configure a PC and have one, then that option is gonna work too.
So he couldn’t have been younger than 15 at the game’s release (and could have been as old as 25).
That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won’t have been born when it was released. Can’t just assume any more.