The thing about it is that in daily life, it won't matter, but if you want to fly or cross a border or go into half a dozen places, the ID in your pocket will function exactly like those Speedpass attachments you put on your car to get through the tollbooth quickly.
Casinos, venues, maybe even major retailer chains - the entrances will have readers embedded in them as well - you don't seriously think that commercial interestes won't utilize this since it's perfectly legal to scan the ID tags that you have on your person. And you'd never know when it was read, either. Is a huge concern, because first it will start with the government but then it will get out of control.
"Person 45502A7 spent 45 minutes in Nordstrom's and then stopped to look in the windows of (list of stores, noting how many seconds you stayed still)..." Or.. "person 45502A7 is in front of store #17. (sends advert on your cellhpone for that store)" Basically it would be like having a GPS installed on you out in public. They might as well put a tag on my ear like some wild animal. Nothing good can come from this.
I'm certainly not getting one. If I have to, I'll definately find a way to blow up the chip inside - like hitting the card with a stungun or simmilar.
I remmber a show several years ago on the birth of the computer industry and on it they had Wozniak(Apple co-founder) commenting that "Microsoft makes second-rate junk for the masses" or sometihng to that effect.
And it still holds true today.
Just say no, bite the bullet, and learn to use *IX. It's like learning to drive stick. A bit of a problem, but once you do, a whole new world opens up to your driving experience.(plus, like *IX, a manual gearbox is cheaper to maintain as well as "hack" if things get wierd.(ie - can't push=start an automatic, for instance)
Ubuntuu is nice, but I like Xandros because it's backed by a company that well, answers emails and fixes stuff in a timely manner. Easy as pie to install as well.(you're paying for having everything in one place and the installers, which honestly, $60 is well worth it, IMO)
A simple online search will lead you to several sites that offer commercially available MP3s for download without DRM. The same music, the same bands. Just no DRM. And these sites are growing at an insane rate as peolpe are getting fed up with DRM. Afterall, if I pay $1 for a song from a CD, it should be useable like anything else I own, just like how I can do anything from making a telephone answering machine message to a mix for my car or even make a mobile out of the CD I buy.
And that's not counting the hundreds of bands that aren't even with a major label. One co-worker of mine is the bass player for a quite well known indie band and they still aren't with a major label yet. They do tours in Europe to packed venues and yet do fine without a record deal.(or DRM as a result).
In fact, there's so much music that's NOT released by the major labels(dare I say Cartels?) that it's astounding. Just get out and look for it - and enjoy, bcause most of it is also free.
Of course, it's *not* happening in the U.S. - so... same old crud here as usual. Sigh.
Sometimes I really wonder how long this country has at the rate we are going. Just take a look at Democracy Now or any alternative site - or better yet, just go to news.yahoo.ca/ for a slightly less baised mainstream news look at the U.S.(far less filtering than the stuf we get from Reuters/CNN/Fox/etc main newsfeeds). The sad thing is that it's the working class what will take the brunt of any retaliation for what we are doing - be it military, terrorist, economic, or otherwise.
They seem to be missing quite a few gems fro the early days, including the very first 2.5D game ever, Alternate Relality: The City. Wizardry was just coming out. But in 1985, there was a new pseudo-3d game with a persistent state(actual time went by), shops, weather, nighttime, and so on. It also had the typical player inventory, levels, spells, and such. Oh - and banks, gambling, and so on, as well as morality(if you were evil, good guys came after you!). Plus, a really nice, convoluted plot that we didn't see done better until Marathon.
It was way ahead of its competition.
But it never gets any mention despite being still worth playing if you have an emulator.
You'll probably now notice that suddeny our government wants Iran to "help" stabalize Iraq.
?Que?
Evidently they launched either a spy satellite or a GPS type satellite - that would be my guess - and it has our side suddenly concerned that their military forces are as easy to spot and track as Iran's are.
Same old song and dance. When our leaders think they can be the bully, they are - when they get called on it - they whine like puppies and start talking "diplomacy".
All this teaches countries to do is to get nukes asap so that they won't be invaded by the U.S. Seems a bit self-defeating to me, considering the alternative of talking to them and agreeing to disagree - but live together.(and as a result, no nukes are needed)
It's amazing how the second that California wants to ban the 100+ year old technology that suddenly a solution is found.
The reality is that they know for decades how to make longer-lasting and more efficient bulbs. Just look at the average stoplight. They last for up to ten years with needint to be replaced.
I as talking with a friend online last night and the PS3 came up. It eventually came around to the price and two things came up.
1:$600 in PC upgrades results in an astounding increase in gaming potential for most people. Far more than any PS3. Why should we spend $600 for a box that's merely comparable to the old gaming rig we want to upgrade anyways?
2:If Sony ditched the Blu-Ray player or made it an optiona add-on, the PS3 would barely cost $250, if that. $300 is a hard price-point, like $30,000 is for car buyers. It's hard to justify more than that much for somethng unless there's a real need for it.(let alone $600 or a $60,000 car). The Wii sells well because it's inexpensive and fun. The PS3 is expensive and games are slow to arrive.
3: One more - Me? I bought a PS2 this holliday season for my son. Cheap, effective, and it has Guitar Hero and GT4 and so on. Its a great toy for him and didn't break the bank.
Please change the warp to distance for structures and gates to 5km. As it is now, 0km removes all of the risk from the equation, which while that sounds good, it also means that the biggest ships in the game effectively have no speed penalty.
When the warp-to distance was 15km, those big, slow ships were hard pressed to get around without major support. Now, they warp to the gate and presto-they're gone. Sure, you can sit on the other side and wait for them, but that just encourages gate-camping(simmialr to zone-camping in most other games).
The solution people have come up with is to fit big ships to go silly fast and ram into you - to bounce you away from the gate before you can jump. This seems to be completely counter to the playstyle of the game. Changing it to 5km, or better yet, making how close you can warp to something skill-based would be a good change.
P.S. If it's a skill, it should be very hard to learn - and definately restricted to non-trial accounts.
While his comments are technically valid, I have this "Who cares?" take on it.
If he wants a version of *IX with all the goodies and that's well-supported, and that holds his hand, he has to go to a mainstream commercial product like OSX. You get what you pay for(or don't in this case), afterall. Seriously, he sounds like some whining newbie. OH CRAP - MY FREE HALF-BAKED OS BLEW UP!!!
That said, Ubuntu is slightly tighter, IME. I also like Xandros mostly because it's, again, backed by a company with email and real people. RedHat is "Old Hat" at this point.
I recently put together a system for a client and one of the three drives was DOA from the factory. Western Digital, 250gig - the exact ones you use in raid arrays for servers/drive arrays.
Booted up - but the heads never moved. Probably something broken inside with the armature or stepper motor.
So, yes, it happens all the time. The business I work for repalces drivs in their data center every day. Now, they have something like a thousand drives in there, but that's an astonishing rate when you think about it. A year is about all you get out of a drive today before you are on borrowed time. Two years is common for home users, IME.
As for data protection, four things are key: #1: Make a CD or DVD with all of your installers. AV, firewall, acrobat, divx, and all the rest - so you can get the machine ready to install you main aps from a clean boot in an hour or so. Also include all of your data recovery software and utilities, plus sound and video drivers.
#2: Weekly backup of email and documents and such(use the tool of your choice) - this should be 20-30MB at most per week. A fe miutes at most out of your schedule. Save it to a USB drive that you leave in one of the rear slots. This can be a 128MB "free" drive that you see coming with a spindle of CDs or whatever. In my case, it's a 512MB card, now, since my email and such is included, and it's grown quite large.
Now, obviously, if you have a 4 gig flash-drive, this solves #1 and #2. If it's an 8 gig model, you can install Windows(to boot/recover with) and still have enough room to partition it for data backup. But even 128MB is better than nothing, since the data is good for more than a decade.
#3:Go out and buy a good surge protector. By this, I mean an IsoBar strip.(more like a metal brick - heh). It works. Most everything else doesn't. If you can nail the issues related to power as a cause for failure, or mitigate them to the level of "freak accident", you're that much better off. A UPS is of course, better, but the number of people running without either is astounding.
#4: Raid 1 is a godsend for the average user. MTTF for both drives at once is amazingly high - on the order of 1/100K+ per day versus something closer to 1/250 or higher for a single drive. Given that a drive to run as a mirror is $60-$80 these days, it's infinately cheaper than data recovery costs if you have a drive crash on you.
$60 now or ~$2000 to have Drivesavers recover it(no joke - it's that expensive.)
I know of only one or two RPGs that offered a perfect balance of progression and I'm not a newbie.
1:X-Com. The premise wasn't that you were a newbie so much as you had to do a lot of intel and missions to research and then develop new technologies. But there wasn't anytihng to say, keep you from getting ahold of an enemy grenade in the first few levels and shooting it to cause a massive chain-reaction. ie - you could in effect, still blowit up/pull the trigger. It also was one of the first games to have a fog of war element - and when it was dark, hearing things moving around...
2:Elite/Escape Velocity(2-d near-clone) Only your money kept you from getting the bigger guns. Everythng else was up to you. No levels or skills to train. Levelling was done via factions and standing and how wanted you were/bounty. (ie - can't get into pirate strongholds when you're best friends with the police)
3: Ratchet and Clank - again, I'm poor but my skills are the same. Got enough money? Grab a big weapon and enjoy. The game gets harder as you go on, which makes you WANT the bigger guns, but you don't need it - not really.
There are others, but the "levels" are handled through money and research/development. If you get ahold of a big weapon, it's yours. You might use it poorly until you train or get stronger, but it doesn't feel like you are nerfed at the beginning, either(or they hide it so well you don't notice). They also tend to use lack of intel and/or money as the limiters, which is better all around as well.
I almost completely agree with him. The one exception is joining a group of people(a clan/etc), but that's still hollow compared to a typical Lan party. I have made some very nice friends in online games, but they aren't FPS - they are multiplayer games that last for months or years(or are MMO types). Totally different expeience - you get to hear abot their gripes, thier work, and so on... so it's easy to connect to them.
Still... Go to a Lan party or play with your best friends is much better - and it's hard to go back to the typical online gaming for the next few weeks. It does feel hollow and not as real. I can see where he's coming from.
This at first seems like a money-grab, but imagine for a minute if the RIAA went away entirely and got out of users' lives. Imagine if you could freely copy any music from any artist for free.
To me it seems like it's a far better option tan paying Itunes or some other site $1 a song. Instead, just tax the media and get rid of DRM entirely. The artists get some money and the RIAA gets out of our hair.(which is what it's about - getting some money for the songs, which is fair).
$75 for an Ipod licensing fee is dirt cheap compared to what several thousand MP3s would cost.
I forgot in my earlier comment/posting to explain why 6-12 months ago was a critical point in time.
- BoB, as mentioned, was two and a half areas in 0.0 space down in the south-west(the top , Querious - see the eve political map) was somewhat contested.
- The new big patch that was a year in the making came out. And it allowed two major changes.
1: Big ships. Before this, the biggest ship you could have was a Battleship. Big, nasty, but not really effective by itself because so many people had them. PvP was pretty well balanced. But they introduced Dreadnaughts and Freighters. These cost 10-20 times the cost of a battleship but allowed you to move cargo around in massive amounts and lay siege to stations.
2: They introduced player controlled and owned stations. Before this, there were often only 2-3 NPC stations in an entire area and that was it. Now, with player-owned stations, you effectively could claim an area for real - as if you really owned it. Of course, the dreadnaughts had the big weapons needed to take on these player built installations.
The jump BoB recieved was huge - it put them always a step or two ahead of everyone else. I really wish I had a map of the game a year ago - there were 5-6 groups in the areas BoB is currently expanding into down south. They had been fighting over the areas for two years, more or less. BoB comes in and in 5-6 months flattens everything. This clearly wasn't possible without DeV help, and we all knew it, but there wasn't any proof at the time.
- Then they released another patch this last fall - 5 months ago. This broke it entirely.
1:They intoduced motherships and carriers. These ships have the ability to do way more damage than anything before them in the right hands AND they can jump from any system to another, bypassing enemy lines. Want to get from the east of the map to the south? Done. What was risky and took time - now you can jump in an entire fleet behind enemy lines with little risk.
BoB, yet again, got a jump on the rest of us by a month or two and it went from 5-6 smaller groups fighting down south to... *BoB*. This combo of patches, knowing exactly what skills to train and have before the patch, plus early access to the ships - they steamrolled over a large section of EvE before we could really react.
In short, being beat to the punch tme after time because a group of players are in bed with the developers takes all the fun out of it - especially when you are *paying* for the privelege of getting beat so badly.
And CCP deletes posts like this routinely. They also delete in-game petitions routinely under the claim that they server got too full - so try submitting again(after the third time in a row - this gets very old)
My take on CCPs response is that they are flat out lying and will run the game like they want - Developers cheating and all. There's nothing illegal about what they are doing, afterall.
rsmith-mac is 100% correct. Our entire alliance was kicked out of Stain - the area down south that is grey(it's BoBs - make no mistake about it now). So we went from owners of a small but great region to a bunch of smaller groups all mostly up in the northern areas - as far from BoB as we could manage.
Look at the map. The Blue and contested areas down south are BoB. The dark green Dusk and Dawn areas at the top are also BoB-or their alts and allies.
BoB a YEAR ago was Fountain(contested), Delve, and Period Basis. Now, it's uncontested, and is several areas larger. Three areas to Seven and three more by proxy up north.
The areas in the far east of the map - all *six* of them weren't there two months ago - so redraw the map withut those and it's an apalling amount of area. It's the area north of the big Red Alliance area with a few small colored blobs in it.
BoB is funding mercenaries and groups to keep the groups near it from getting access to it. ths would be Pure, Roadkill, Ratel, Smash, Curse, and Red Alliance. It's not likely to work, because we are all banding together on this, but the problem is that they have an insane amount of power, players, and blueprints.
Getting back to the debacle in Stain. Our alliance was at war with them and one of their allies in the area and doing pretty well. This was about the exact time these incidents happened, in fact.
- Dreadnaughts just came out - the big ships. These are "Tech 1" - which means that the plans aren't rare, but the money to make them is astounding. And they can be insured for 99.9% repayment if they get blown up(Tech 2 ships cannot).
We all started trying to get these ships, most of which required weeks to learn skills and get items built to make them. But BoB, surprize - they had the ships weeks before anyone else in the game. And proceeded to do huge damage to us. Eventually we just got ground under by their economic mmight - which it turns out was started and created three years ago by DevS cheating/aiding their friends.
It's the snowball effect - they were always a few weeks or months ahead of everyone else and guess what - that translates into a huge advantage three years alter that threatens to ruin the whole game.
P.S. 0.0 is effectively EvE because if you are in the center of the map, mining and gringing for a few pennies a day is all you can do. It's effectively the "newbie" area(s) on WoW and most MMORPG games.
1: In Eve, unlike most other games, all of the real money is to be made in the manufacture of high-end limited items("Tech Level 2"). These require blueprints which are limited-run and essentially unobtainable in many cases, short of random luck(lottery - literally that - a lottery for a precious few per month out of the hundreds of thousands of accounts).
The Devs abused their positions by making it very easy for their friends to get these and then allowing the blueprints to be horded and not produced except for their own groups. For almost every item in the game prior to the last patch, there is a blueprint for it, somewhere. But since only a handful of some of these items exist and all most are in the hands of BoB and other dev-aided groups... You can see the problem. Because these allow them to effectively make as much mony as they want, since they are the only source of the items.
In plainer english - the Devs in question enabled their alliance to become a monopoly for many in-game items through cheating and unfair advantage. These blueprints, while remaining in existance, are stll churning out insane profits for the groups - even long after the Dev in question might have stopped playing. They kick the Dev's accuont, but the blueprint is still being used by his friends - and guess where the devs NEXT character joins up with?(they have to pay the game to test it - It's part of their job, afterall)
So, yes, it makes the other players mad.
Also, CCP refuses to re-release many of these blueprints, even years later, so the tiny trickle of critical parts still remains in the hands of a few individuals.
2:The Devs in question knew about special spawns, events, and locations. I have one player in my group/alliance who spent almost 18 hours with eqipment and probes to scan for a special spot where valuable items might be found(part of the game - supposedly there are thousands of these spots to be found in each region). Now imagine if a group had a list of locations given to them - no searching, no time wasted - right off the bat... clean up. I've seen it all - people in places they shouldn't be, entire systems that never appear on the market listings/info, blueprints selling for a silly low price for an hour or two only, people with faction/agent standings that are impossible to achieve(because nobody else can USE them at all)... and it goes on and on.
There's no effort to keep their own house clean. The best we legitimate players can manage is to just ignore them.
Now, it used to not be so bad - I was part of that aforementioned alliance that threatened BoB for a while and it was a close fight for a while. But recently, they have grown so huge that there's nothing to stop them - not really. And it all stems from them having silly levels of help and cheating by Devs in their early days - putting them effectively always a good few steps ahead of everyone else.
We just can't ignore BoB anymore - or as most peolpe have started calling them "Blob".
This is a forgotten gem that was the very first RTS multiplayer game that could be played with up to 16 people at once.
IIRC, the game dates from about 1990-1991. It had color, sound, and all the goodies of a modern game.
Side note - the third party AI - or "Bots" were the very first use of the term and the first implimentation of in-game AI routines to provide payers with real-time opponents. To this date, much of modern AI routines in games are based upon this work. BTW - they are almost as good as human players at times. No mean feat, considering they were largely perfected by 1992/1993.
Why haven't most people heard of it? It was originally made for Macintosh and was easily a decade ahead of the P.C. genre/competition. The game effectively died when the creator went to work for Apple Computer - where he still works. As long as he remains employed there, it's permanently shelved lest Apple get its hands on the code.
Eventually people made a PC clone of it, but that was nearly a decade later.
- First 16 player RTS game(shooter, too, technically, but Spectre may have been first there)
- First game to not need a dedicated server to play on(used token-ring technology)
- First game with user-programmable AIs in it to play against.(as well as the first online game to use third party plug-in modules)
- First game with a dedicated internet-based connecton/opponent finder. Essentially Gamespy-like but years earlier.
- One of the first games to use AI mapmaking programs and tools. (Iirc, Doom had one first but it wasn't point-and click easy)
- One of the first games used by the military for training purposes(as opposed to just entertainment).
- first RTS multiplayer game to use real-time "fog of war"(screen was greyed out beyond what you could see - not just what you hadn't explored)
www.winbolo.com - it still is quite playable today.
All of this talk about installation problems and driver issues and DRM and all the other hurdles to install a workable OS - and even then, a chunk just doesn't work right...
It sounds exactly like switching to most UNIX platforms. Same frustration, same problems. So my take on this is if you have to bite the bullet, why not just switch now and leave the crud behind once and for all? At least with most UNIX installs, you get good solutions to problems - that usually fix it the first time - and it's low-cost or free.
ie - same headache, but for 1/5th the duration.
Microsoft - shoot - who knows when the programs will work right or the bugs will be gone? Vista SP2 or SP3 is a *LONG* time from now.
I've played EVE for about two years now and while it's true that such things invariably happen, it's also great as a game.
Anything in-game goes. If you can find a way to do it in-game, the devs take a pretty blind eye to it. Selling ISK(EVE currency) for real money, hacking computers, and so on are of course, all wrong and illegal, and CCP rigorously tries to stop it as much as they can. But, in-game, if you can scam someone, such is life. There are good factions who hunt down pirates, pirates, and everything inbetween. It's the ultimate "sandbox". It's dangerous but incredibly mepowering as a player at the same time.
Most problems like this are minor at best. So someone gets intel or a nice gift or gimmie due to GM favoritism. It's been that way since MUDs and BBBs'. With 30,000 players online at times now, and a total player base of several hundred thousand - all on one server - it's a very minor blip. The thing's so huge almost nothing really makes a difference anymore. Not even a blip in most cases.
Compare EVE to WoW or other games where player cheating nearly took the game's economic system down with it. EVE is remarkably robust - nearly indestructable. So the same things that affect most games and are a huge problem aren't a big deal - and in some cases are encouraged.(evil grin)
And it costs a lot less than WoW and most other games. The App is free to download and they give you a nice discount - like 1 year for $99 last I checked.
I'd be perfectly happy if they just made a dozen or more expansions for it. Same exact thing as Guitar Hero II, but with new bands and music. Who wouldn't buy a new Guitar Hero II "rock-pack"(or name it something simmilar - doesn't really matter) every year? New groups, new challenges. Same basic great game. No real need to turn it over to a whole new company, either.
http://realestate.theemiratesnetwork.com/developme nts/dubai/world_islands.php
Wouldn't it be so much cheaper to just MAKE your own country? Just find a place 30-40 miles from nowhere and make your own island(s). Under international laws, a nation can only be considered as such if it has physical land - and buolding your own island seems to be infinately easier than paying the ubsurd price for this abandoned(and burnt out since the fire) platform.
Why not just run a ramdisk? No problems with read/write cycles.
Optimally, you'd have a 4 gig ramdisk for the OS and the flash drive/whatever for the apps. You only need a few gig for Windows and the associated swap-space. Sure, you'd need to have it monitor the status of the battery, but how many years do lithium batteries last? Have the OS save to a partition on the flash drive when it shuts down and load it in when it starts up. It could last for decades this way.
I had a laptop almost 15 years ago that did this, in fact. 1Meg(heh) ramdisk and it was silly fast. With solid-state drives, though, there would be no chance of data loss from losing power(or at most the clock rolls back to your last bootup).
One thing that they also forget is that this isn't a case of Cd-audio being copied and shared, but MP3s.
128K MP3 isn't close to the original(640K). It's closer to taping something off of the radio, which is why even 70 cents a copy seems high to me. Doubly so considering all of the recent $19.95 a month all you want legal download sites that have popped up recently.
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The thing about it is that in daily life, it won't matter, but if you want to fly or cross a border or go into half a dozen places, the ID in your pocket will function exactly like those Speedpass attachments you put on your car to get through the tollbooth quickly.
Casinos, venues, maybe even major retailer chains - the entrances will have readers embedded in them as well - you don't seriously think that commercial interestes won't utilize this since it's perfectly legal to scan the ID tags that you have on your person. And you'd never know when it was read, either. Is a huge concern, because first it will start with the government but then it will get out of control.
"Person 45502A7 spent 45 minutes in Nordstrom's and then stopped to look in the windows of (list of stores, noting how many seconds you stayed still)..." Or.. "person 45502A7 is in front of store #17. (sends advert on your cellhpone for that store)" Basically it would be like having a GPS installed on you out in public. They might as well put a tag on my ear like some wild animal. Nothing good can come from this.
I'm certainly not getting one. If I have to, I'll definately find a way to blow up the chip inside - like hitting the card with a stungun or simmilar.
I remmber a show several years ago on the birth of the computer industry and on it they had Wozniak(Apple co-founder) commenting that "Microsoft makes second-rate junk for the masses" or sometihng to that effect.
And it still holds true today.
Just say no, bite the bullet, and learn to use *IX. It's like learning to drive stick. A bit of a problem, but once you do, a whole new world opens up to your driving experience.(plus, like *IX, a manual gearbox is cheaper to maintain as well as "hack" if things get wierd.(ie - can't push=start an automatic, for instance)
Ubuntuu is nice, but I like Xandros because it's backed by a company that well, answers emails and fixes stuff in a timely manner. Easy as pie to install as well.(you're paying for having everything in one place and the installers, which honestly, $60 is well worth it, IMO)
A simple online search will lead you to several sites that offer commercially available MP3s for download without DRM. The same music, the same bands. Just no DRM. And these sites are growing at an insane rate as peolpe are getting fed up with DRM. Afterall, if I pay $1 for a song from a CD, it should be useable like anything else I own, just like how I can do anything from making a telephone answering machine message to a mix for my car or even make a mobile out of the CD I buy.
And that's not counting the hundreds of bands that aren't even with a major label. One co-worker of mine is the bass player for a quite well known indie band and they still aren't with a major label yet. They do tours in Europe to packed venues and yet do fine without a record deal.(or DRM as a result).
In fact, there's so much music that's NOT released by the major labels(dare I say Cartels?) that it's astounding. Just get out and look for it - and enjoy, bcause most of it is also free.
Let's just hope some odd message doesn't turn something like bread mold into the next Aids pandemic.
Tinkering with genetics in any way is asking for a big can of cosmic whup-ass from Mother Nature.
Of course, it's *not* happening in the U.S. - so... same old crud here as usual. Sigh.
Sometimes I really wonder how long this country has at the rate we are going. Just take a look at Democracy Now or any alternative site - or better yet, just go to news.yahoo.ca/ for a slightly less baised mainstream news look at the U.S.(far less filtering than the stuf we get from Reuters/CNN/Fox/etc main newsfeeds). The sad thing is that it's the working class what will take the brunt of any retaliation for what we are doing - be it military, terrorist, economic, or otherwise.
They seem to be missing quite a few gems fro the early days, including the very first 2.5D game ever, Alternate Relality: The City. Wizardry was just coming out. But in 1985, there was a new pseudo-3d game with a persistent state(actual time went by), shops, weather, nighttime, and so on. It also had the typical player inventory, levels, spells, and such. Oh - and banks, gambling, and so on, as well as morality(if you were evil, good guys came after you!). Plus, a really nice, convoluted plot that we didn't see done better until Marathon.
It was way ahead of its competition.
But it never gets any mention despite being still worth playing if you have an emulator.
You'll probably now notice that suddeny our government wants Iran to "help" stabalize Iraq.
?Que?
Evidently they launched either a spy satellite or a GPS type satellite - that would be my guess - and it has our side suddenly concerned that their military forces are as easy to spot and track as Iran's are.
Same old song and dance. When our leaders think they can be the bully, they are - when they get called on it - they whine like puppies and start talking "diplomacy".
All this teaches countries to do is to get nukes asap so that they won't be invaded by the U.S. Seems a bit self-defeating to me, considering the alternative of talking to them and agreeing to disagree - but live together.(and as a result, no nukes are needed)
It's amazing how the second that California wants to ban the 100+ year old technology that suddenly a solution is found.
The reality is that they know for decades how to make longer-lasting and more efficient bulbs. Just look at the average stoplight. They last for up to ten years with needint to be replaced.
I as talking with a friend online last night and the PS3 came up. It eventually came around to the price and two things came up.
1:$600 in PC upgrades results in an astounding increase in gaming potential for most people. Far more than any PS3. Why should we spend $600 for a box that's merely comparable to the old gaming rig we want to upgrade anyways?
2:If Sony ditched the Blu-Ray player or made it an optiona add-on, the PS3 would barely cost $250, if that. $300 is a hard price-point, like $30,000 is for car buyers. It's hard to justify more than that much for somethng unless there's a real need for it.(let alone $600 or a $60,000 car). The Wii sells well because it's inexpensive and fun. The PS3 is expensive and games are slow to arrive.
3: One more - Me? I bought a PS2 this holliday season for my son. Cheap, effective, and it has Guitar Hero and GT4 and so on. Its a great toy for him and didn't break the bank.
Please change the warp to distance for structures and gates to 5km. As it is now, 0km removes all of the risk from the equation, which while that sounds good, it also means that the biggest ships in the game effectively have no speed penalty.
When the warp-to distance was 15km, those big, slow ships were hard pressed to get around without major support. Now, they warp to the gate and presto-they're gone. Sure, you can sit on the other side and wait for them, but that just encourages gate-camping(simmialr to zone-camping in most other games).
The solution people have come up with is to fit big ships to go silly fast and ram into you - to bounce you away from the gate before you can jump. This seems to be completely counter to the playstyle of the game. Changing it to 5km, or better yet, making how close you can warp to something skill-based would be a good change.
P.S. If it's a skill, it should be very hard to learn - and definately restricted to non-trial accounts.
While his comments are technically valid, I have this "Who cares?" take on it.
If he wants a version of *IX with all the goodies and that's well-supported, and that holds his hand, he has to go to a mainstream commercial product like OSX. You get what you pay for(or don't in this case), afterall. Seriously, he sounds like some whining newbie. OH CRAP - MY FREE HALF-BAKED OS BLEW UP!!!
That said, Ubuntu is slightly tighter, IME. I also like Xandros mostly because it's, again, backed by a company with email and real people. RedHat is "Old Hat" at this point.
I recently put together a system for a client and one of the three drives was DOA from the factory. Western Digital, 250gig - the exact ones you use in raid arrays for servers/drive arrays.
Booted up - but the heads never moved. Probably something broken inside with the armature or stepper motor.
So, yes, it happens all the time. The business I work for repalces drivs in their data center every day. Now, they have something like a thousand drives in there, but that's an astonishing rate when you think about it. A year is about all you get out of a drive today before you are on borrowed time. Two years is common for home users, IME.
As for data protection, four things are key:
#1: Make a CD or DVD with all of your installers. AV, firewall, acrobat, divx, and all the rest - so you can get the machine ready to install you main aps from a clean boot in an hour or so. Also include all of your data recovery software and utilities, plus sound and video drivers.
#2: Weekly backup of email and documents and such(use the tool of your choice) - this should be 20-30MB at most per week. A fe miutes at most out of your schedule. Save it to a USB drive that you leave in one of the rear slots. This can be a 128MB "free" drive that you see coming with a spindle of CDs or whatever. In my case, it's a 512MB card, now, since my email and such is included, and it's grown quite large.
Now, obviously, if you have a 4 gig flash-drive, this solves #1 and #2. If it's an 8 gig model, you can install Windows(to boot/recover with) and still have enough room to partition it for data backup. But even 128MB is better than nothing, since the data is good for more than a decade.
#3:Go out and buy a good surge protector. By this, I mean an IsoBar strip.(more like a metal brick - heh). It works. Most everything else doesn't. If you can nail the issues related to power as a cause for failure, or mitigate them to the level of "freak accident", you're that much better off. A UPS is of course, better, but the number of people running without either is astounding.
#4: Raid 1 is a godsend for the average user. MTTF for both drives at once is amazingly high - on the order of 1/100K+ per day versus something closer to 1/250 or higher for a single drive. Given that a drive to run as a mirror is $60-$80 these days, it's infinately cheaper than data recovery costs if you have a drive crash on you.
$60 now or ~$2000 to have Drivesavers recover it(no joke - it's that expensive.)
I know of only one or two RPGs that offered a perfect balance of progression and I'm not a newbie. 1:X-Com. The premise wasn't that you were a newbie so much as you had to do a lot of intel and missions to research and then develop new technologies. But there wasn't anytihng to say, keep you from getting ahold of an enemy grenade in the first few levels and shooting it to cause a massive chain-reaction. ie - you could in effect, still blowit up/pull the trigger. It also was one of the first games to have a fog of war element - and when it was dark, hearing things moving around... 2:Elite/Escape Velocity(2-d near-clone) Only your money kept you from getting the bigger guns. Everythng else was up to you. No levels or skills to train. Levelling was done via factions and standing and how wanted you were/bounty. (ie - can't get into pirate strongholds when you're best friends with the police) 3: Ratchet and Clank - again, I'm poor but my skills are the same. Got enough money? Grab a big weapon and enjoy. The game gets harder as you go on, which makes you WANT the bigger guns, but you don't need it - not really. There are others, but the "levels" are handled through money and research/development. If you get ahold of a big weapon, it's yours. You might use it poorly until you train or get stronger, but it doesn't feel like you are nerfed at the beginning, either(or they hide it so well you don't notice). They also tend to use lack of intel and/or money as the limiters, which is better all around as well.
I almost completely agree with him. The one exception is joining a group of people(a clan/etc), but that's still hollow compared to a typical Lan party. I have made some very nice friends in online games, but they aren't FPS - they are multiplayer games that last for months or years(or are MMO types). Totally different expeience - you get to hear abot their gripes, thier work, and so on... so it's easy to connect to them.
Still...
Go to a Lan party or play with your best friends is much better - and it's hard to go back to the typical online gaming for the next few weeks. It does feel hollow and not as real. I can see where he's coming from.
This at first seems like a money-grab, but imagine for a minute if the RIAA went away entirely and got out of users' lives. Imagine if you could freely copy any music from any artist for free.
To me it seems like it's a far better option tan paying Itunes or some other site $1 a song. Instead, just tax the media and get rid of DRM entirely. The artists get some money and the RIAA gets out of our hair.(which is what it's about - getting some money for the songs, which is fair).
$75 for an Ipod licensing fee is dirt cheap compared to what several thousand MP3s would cost.
I forgot in my earlier comment/posting to explain why 6-12 months ago was a critical point in time.
- BoB, as mentioned, was two and a half areas in 0.0 space down in the south-west(the top , Querious - see the eve political map) was somewhat contested.
- The new big patch that was a year in the making came out. And it allowed two major changes.
1: Big ships. Before this, the biggest ship you could have was a Battleship. Big, nasty, but not really effective by itself because so many people had them. PvP was pretty well balanced. But they introduced Dreadnaughts and Freighters. These cost 10-20 times the cost of a battleship but allowed you to move cargo around in massive amounts and lay siege to stations.
2: They introduced player controlled and owned stations. Before this, there were often only 2-3 NPC stations in an entire area and that was it. Now, with player-owned stations, you effectively could claim an area for real - as if you really owned it. Of course, the dreadnaughts had the big weapons needed to take on these player built installations.
The jump BoB recieved was huge - it put them always a step or two ahead of everyone else. I really wish I had a map of the game a year ago - there were 5-6 groups in the areas BoB is currently expanding into down south. They had been fighting over the areas for two years, more or less. BoB comes in and in 5-6 months flattens everything. This clearly wasn't possible without DeV help, and we all knew it, but there wasn't any proof at the time.
- Then they released another patch this last fall - 5 months ago. This broke it entirely.
1:They intoduced motherships and carriers. These ships have the ability to do way more damage than anything before them in the right hands AND they can jump from any system to another, bypassing enemy lines. Want to get from the east of the map to the south? Done. What was risky and took time - now you can jump in an entire fleet behind enemy lines with little risk.
BoB, yet again, got a jump on the rest of us by a month or two and it went from 5-6 smaller groups fighting down south to... *BoB*. This combo of patches, knowing exactly what skills to train and have before the patch, plus early access to the ships - they steamrolled over a large section of EvE before we could really react.
In short, being beat to the punch tme after time because a group of players are in bed with the developers takes all the fun out of it - especially when you are *paying* for the privelege of getting beat so badly.
And CCP deletes posts like this routinely. They also delete in-game petitions routinely under the claim that they server got too full - so try submitting again(after the third time in a row - this gets very old)
My take on CCPs response is that they are flat out lying and will run the game like they want - Developers cheating and all. There's nothing illegal about what they are doing, afterall.
http://www.eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/Latest.jp g
rsmith-mac is 100% correct. Our entire alliance was kicked out of Stain - the area down south that is grey(it's BoBs - make no mistake about it now). So we went from owners of a small but great region to a bunch of smaller groups all mostly up in the northern areas - as far from BoB as we could manage.
Look at the map. The Blue and contested areas down south are BoB. The dark green Dusk and Dawn areas at the top are also BoB-or their alts and allies.
BoB a YEAR ago was Fountain(contested), Delve, and Period Basis. Now, it's uncontested, and is several areas larger. Three areas to Seven and three more by proxy up north.
The areas in the far east of the map - all *six* of them weren't there two months ago - so redraw the map withut those and it's an apalling amount of area. It's the area north of the big Red Alliance area with a few small colored blobs in it.
BoB is funding mercenaries and groups to keep the groups near it from getting access to it. ths would be Pure, Roadkill, Ratel, Smash, Curse, and Red Alliance. It's not likely to work, because we are all banding together on this, but the problem is that they have an insane amount of power, players, and blueprints.
Getting back to the debacle in Stain. Our alliance was at war with them and one of their allies in the area and doing pretty well. This was about the exact time these incidents happened, in fact.
- Dreadnaughts just came out - the big ships. These are "Tech 1" - which means that the plans aren't rare, but the money to make them is astounding. And they can be insured for 99.9% repayment if they get blown up(Tech 2 ships cannot).
We all started trying to get these ships, most of which required weeks to learn skills and get items built to make them. But BoB, surprize - they had the ships weeks before anyone else in the game. And proceeded to do huge damage to us. Eventually we just got ground under by their economic mmight - which it turns out was started and created three years ago by DevS cheating/aiding their friends.
It's the snowball effect - they were always a few weeks or months ahead of everyone else and guess what - that translates into a huge advantage three years alter that threatens to ruin the whole game.
P.S. 0.0 is effectively EvE because if you are in the center of the map, mining and gringing for a few pennies a day is all you can do. It's effectively the "newbie" area(s) on WoW and most MMORPG games.
The problem really comes down to two points:
1: In Eve, unlike most other games, all of the real money is to be made in the manufacture of high-end limited items("Tech Level 2"). These require blueprints which are limited-run and essentially unobtainable in many cases, short of random luck(lottery - literally that - a lottery for a precious few per month out of the hundreds of thousands of accounts).
The Devs abused their positions by making it very easy for their friends to get these and then allowing the blueprints to be horded and not produced except for their own groups. For almost every item in the game prior to the last patch, there is a blueprint for it, somewhere. But since only a handful of some of these items exist and all most are in the hands of BoB and other dev-aided groups... You can see the problem. Because these allow them to effectively make as much mony as they want, since they are the only source of the items.
In plainer english - the Devs in question enabled their alliance to become a monopoly for many in-game items through cheating and unfair advantage. These blueprints, while remaining in existance, are stll churning out insane profits for the groups - even long after the Dev in question might have stopped playing. They kick the Dev's accuont, but the blueprint is still being used by his friends - and guess where the devs NEXT character joins up with?(they have to pay the game to test it - It's part of their job, afterall)
So, yes, it makes the other players mad.
Also, CCP refuses to re-release many of these blueprints, even years later, so the tiny trickle of critical parts still remains in the hands of a few individuals.
2:The Devs in question knew about special spawns, events, and locations. I have one player in my group/alliance who spent almost 18 hours with eqipment and probes to scan for a special spot where valuable items might be found(part of the game - supposedly there are thousands of these spots to be found in each region). Now imagine if a group had a list of locations given to them - no searching, no time wasted - right off the bat... clean up. I've seen it all - people in places they shouldn't be, entire systems that never appear on the market listings/info, blueprints selling for a silly low price for an hour or two only, people with faction/agent standings that are impossible to achieve(because nobody else can USE them at all)... and it goes on and on.
There's no effort to keep their own house clean. The best we legitimate players can manage is to just ignore them.
Now, it used to not be so bad - I was part of that aforementioned alliance that threatened BoB for a while and it was a close fight for a while. But recently, they have grown so huge that there's nothing to stop them - not really. And it all stems from them having silly levels of help and cheating by Devs in their early days - putting them effectively always a good few steps ahead of everyone else.
We just can't ignore BoB anymore - or as most peolpe have started calling them "Blob".
This is a forgotten gem that was the very first RTS multiplayer game that could be played with up to 16 people at once. IIRC, the game dates from about 1990-1991. It had color, sound, and all the goodies of a modern game. Side note - the third party AI - or "Bots" were the very first use of the term and the first implimentation of in-game AI routines to provide payers with real-time opponents. To this date, much of modern AI routines in games are based upon this work. BTW - they are almost as good as human players at times. No mean feat, considering they were largely perfected by 1992/1993. Why haven't most people heard of it? It was originally made for Macintosh and was easily a decade ahead of the P.C. genre/competition. The game effectively died when the creator went to work for Apple Computer - where he still works. As long as he remains employed there, it's permanently shelved lest Apple get its hands on the code. Eventually people made a PC clone of it, but that was nearly a decade later. - First 16 player RTS game(shooter, too, technically, but Spectre may have been first there) - First game to not need a dedicated server to play on(used token-ring technology) - First game with user-programmable AIs in it to play against.(as well as the first online game to use third party plug-in modules) - First game with a dedicated internet-based connecton/opponent finder. Essentially Gamespy-like but years earlier. - One of the first games to use AI mapmaking programs and tools. (Iirc, Doom had one first but it wasn't point-and click easy) - One of the first games used by the military for training purposes(as opposed to just entertainment). - first RTS multiplayer game to use real-time "fog of war"(screen was greyed out beyond what you could see - not just what you hadn't explored) www.winbolo.com - it still is quite playable today.
All of this talk about installation problems and driver issues and DRM and all the other hurdles to install a workable OS - and even then, a chunk just doesn't work right... It sounds exactly like switching to most UNIX platforms. Same frustration, same problems. So my take on this is if you have to bite the bullet, why not just switch now and leave the crud behind once and for all? At least with most UNIX installs, you get good solutions to problems - that usually fix it the first time - and it's low-cost or free. ie - same headache, but for 1/5th the duration. Microsoft - shoot - who knows when the programs will work right or the bugs will be gone? Vista SP2 or SP3 is a *LONG* time from now.
I've played EVE for about two years now and while it's true that such things invariably happen, it's also great as a game.
Anything in-game goes. If you can find a way to do it in-game, the devs take a pretty blind eye to it. Selling ISK(EVE currency) for real money, hacking computers, and so on are of course, all wrong and illegal, and CCP rigorously tries to stop it as much as they can. But, in-game, if you can scam someone, such is life. There are good factions who hunt down pirates, pirates, and everything inbetween. It's the ultimate "sandbox". It's dangerous but incredibly mepowering as a player at the same time.
Most problems like this are minor at best. So someone gets intel or a nice gift or gimmie due to GM favoritism. It's been that way since MUDs and BBBs'. With 30,000 players online at times now, and a total player base of several hundred thousand - all on one server - it's a very minor blip. The thing's so huge almost nothing really makes a difference anymore. Not even a blip in most cases.
Compare EVE to WoW or other games where player cheating nearly took the game's economic system down with it. EVE is remarkably robust - nearly indestructable. So the same things that affect most games and are a huge problem aren't a big deal - and in some cases are encouraged.(evil grin)
And it costs a lot less than WoW and most other games. The App is free to download and they give you a nice discount - like 1 year for $99 last I checked.
I'd be perfectly happy if they just made a dozen or more expansions for it. Same exact thing as Guitar Hero II, but with new bands and music. Who wouldn't buy a new Guitar Hero II "rock-pack"(or name it something simmilar - doesn't really matter) every year? New groups, new challenges. Same basic great game. No real need to turn it over to a whole new company, either.
http://realestate.theemiratesnetwork.com/developme nts/dubai/world_islands.php
Wouldn't it be so much cheaper to just MAKE your own country? Just find a place 30-40 miles from nowhere and make your own island(s). Under international laws, a nation can only be considered as such if it has physical land - and buolding your own island seems to be infinately easier than paying the ubsurd price for this abandoned(and burnt out since the fire) platform.
Why not just run a ramdisk? No problems with read/write cycles. Optimally, you'd have a 4 gig ramdisk for the OS and the flash drive/whatever for the apps. You only need a few gig for Windows and the associated swap-space. Sure, you'd need to have it monitor the status of the battery, but how many years do lithium batteries last? Have the OS save to a partition on the flash drive when it shuts down and load it in when it starts up. It could last for decades this way. I had a laptop almost 15 years ago that did this, in fact. 1Meg(heh) ramdisk and it was silly fast. With solid-state drives, though, there would be no chance of data loss from losing power(or at most the clock rolls back to your last bootup).
One thing that they also forget is that this isn't a case of Cd-audio being copied and shared, but MP3s. 128K MP3 isn't close to the original(640K). It's closer to taping something off of the radio, which is why even 70 cents a copy seems high to me. Doubly so considering all of the recent $19.95 a month all you want legal download sites that have popped up recently.