Yeah, that definitely sucks, but that expansiveness is really one of the most basic characteristics of space. If you take that away, are you even making a space game anymore?
And to be fair, most MMO's (and even sandbox-ish games in general) have some issues with travel time, it's just that in space there's much less to look at so it feels even slower.
Although they might not be as well developed as human emotions, anyone who's spent any significant amount of time with an mammal at least as complex as a dog or cat should be convinced that they most certainly can experience states of mind that include things like fear or stress. They are definitely more comfortable in some situations than they are in others. I personally have not spent much time around cows, but it seems rather likely to me that someone who has would easily be able to tell what sorts of situations they find unpleasant.
I guess that's an option for AT&T. But for as much as it sucks that I had to sign a 2 year contract with them to get my phone subsidized, it also restricts them to a degree. If they decide that their network is seeing too much traffic and so they need to add new limitations to my plan, then I have an argument to get out of my contract.
50 bucks isn't a ridiculous price for a video game. Inflation adjusted, we're paying less for games now than we did a decade ago. This despite the fact that games today require waayyyy more people and waaaayyyy more money to make than they did back then. The market has grown to a huge extent, so publishers have been able to continue to make money just by volume, but it's still a risky proposition. The fact that many games now retail for $60 was outrageous to some people, but really we should all be surprised that it didn't happen sooner.
I'm not particularly offended by the general idea of advertising in games. It can certainly be done in ways that significantly damage a game, but it can also be done in a reasonable manner. If that helps keep a decent game company in business, or keeps them from raising their game prices for a couple more years, then I'm ok with that.
While I get what you're saying and see some truth in it, I think it's important to acknowledge that there's lots of different criteria on which to judge a product/service, and something that's just "good enough" by one metric might be significantly better by other metrics. Sometimes that metric is just price, but not always. Going with the MP3 example that you brought up, it's not like the MP3 format was a half-assed project where they didn't get things right, and ended up with a lower quality, but just shipped it anyways. There were considered decisions made to lower the audio quality in exchange for smaller file sizes. MP3 wasn't just "good enough" compared to CD audio, in many real world situations, it's a significantly better option.
And just about everyone one of your examples has a similar counterpoint. Clinics(at least around here) generally have better wait times than hospitals. I can carry a netbook in a bag over my shoulder much more comfortably than my Macbook. I can easily access my google docs from just about any networked computer anywhere.
We're not always just talking about a cheaper model with plastic gears instead of metal, we're often talking about deliberate design decisions which might require sacrifices in one aspect, but knowingly do that in order to increase capability or convenience or whatever in some other way.
It's often impossible to say objectively which option is just plain better/no discussion/case closed. Before you make that sort of value judgment, you need to define what criteria are your personal priorities.
To be fair, in Apple's tougher times, they were selling a lot of crappy products. OSX isn't just more "fashionable" than MacOS 9 was, it's a whole lot better.
I'm sure there are some things to nitpick in this particular case, but for all the different ways of crushing souls that corporations have come up with, there are still plenty of companies out there that see value in having happy employees, and with owners just trying to make an honest buck, rather than squeezing every possible dime out of the world.
I guess the lesson at the end of the day is that there's more than one way to run a business. Imagine that.
Interesting how in the article, they never use the word "impossible". Infact, they actually put forward a handful of possible (although unlikely)ways that this may have occurred.
There's bazillions of things that are unlikely to happen, but the universe is a big place. While we can't predict which particular weird thing we might observe next time, we shouldn't be all that surprised that weirdness is out there.
I don't know who talked you out of that, but you should push them down some stairs. I don't think it'd get you much cooling in the long run, but it'd be awesome to have sitting around your house.
As someone who works in the building design industry I can say with firsthand knowledge, far bigger changes than sticking 6 meters of copper into the slab happens at the last minute all the time. The only reason that you can generally get away with it is that structurally, things are usually designed with such large safety margins that there's not that much to worry about.
Buildings are amazing things, but if you scrape away a few layers of paint and drywall, it's amazing how much of it is just kind of shoved into place without much consideration of the bigger whole.
Ground Source heating/cooling is a pretty nifty technology, and can be applied to a whole house HVAC system, rather than just a computer. It obviously requires more tubing than a single computer would, and in most climate will still require some supplemental heating/cooling for more extreme temperature days, but it's still awesome. It does have some upfront costs though.
This idea to do it for a particular computer is a clever idea. I personally wouldn't want the pipe to actually be moving horizontally through my slab, I'd rather dig as small a diameter hole as is possible, but deeper under the slab, and just have the line penetrate the slab vertically. The deeper you go, the more stable the temperature becomes, and the less hollow copper pipe you've got running through the slab, the less you weaken it.
I'm not going to argue that Apple doesn't market heavily and successfully, but I think there's ample evidence that Apple's success has more to do with just being the latest cool fad. Truckloads of iPods have been selling for something like 8 years now, they've sold over 200 million of the things. Everyone's got one, even my grandparents have a couple. Fads and fashion don't last that long, people are still buying them because they like them, and they like them because they're better than all of alternatives.
Hype isn't completely meaningless, but history is full of zillion dollar marketing campaigns for products that completely flopped. I know you like to think you're better than everyone else by pretending that they're just mindless sheep and you're enlightened somehow, but in reality, people keep buying this stuff because it works for them. The iPhone isn't the perfect device for everybody, but for lots of people, it really is a whole lot better than anything else available. The fact that it looks slick is just a bonus.
Yeah, and I also heard that soon, anytime you want to use your iphone to call your friend, you'll email Apple, and they'll set up a conference call between you, your buddy, and an Apple employee. The Apple employee will record the call (which will be Apple's property), as well as interject occasionally with advertisements for shiny new apple products.
I'd reverse your statement, and say that it's going to be an MMO with fps elements. Planetside, which apparently is one of the models for CCP's new game, would definitely fall into the MMO category in my opinion. The fact that it's from a first person perspective rather than third-person doesn't disqualify it from being an MMO.
There's nothing intrinsic about an MMO that makes it incompatible with first person shooters. This is really just a semantics argument, but I see three basic necessities for me to consider a game an MMO. It has to support a high number of players simultaneously (a couple hundred at least), it has to allow for some sort of continuous player advancement (leveling, new gear, new skills, etc...), and the game universe needs to have some sort of continuity to it.
How the player views the world and interacts with it is a separate issue.
Depending on how you read it, it almost sounds like they were saying that the first laser ever made was the smallest one that had been created, until now. Which seems rather unlikely. But yeah, it was a silly choice of words.
Chrome is still doing all those things, because those things are pretty intrinsic to what a web browser does. That's not to say that there aren't cool new ways out there that we might want to access the internet, but if you make a web browser that does none of those things that Chrome does, well then you haven't really made a web browser.
If the summary was an accurate description of what's going on, then it'd be a pretty interesting and even relevant story for many of us. Not only would it be strange for colleges to be advocating against many of their own graduates, but it'd be even more ridiculous if the government had actually set things up so that there were serious tax advantages for hiring non-Americans over Americans. Per employee taxes should, from a employer's point of view, not change at all based on where a worker is from.
Of course, as others have pointed out, the summary given is not an accurate representation of what these colleges are saying, and that's what's wrong with this story.
I don't know that much about WoW, but this sort of market manipulation happens in EvE as well. But it's usually not as big a deal, because the economy is so decentralized. If someone's relisted all of the red widgets in a system, there's a few thousand other systems I can look in. Plus because players have so much control over the production of most items in game, producers will notice the relisting, and will increase their production of that particular item. It self-corrects pretty well.
Letting things slide is a key to happiness, whether it be in a marriage, a job, or just wandering around observing the world. So many people seem intent on making themselves miserable by stressing out over things that either they have no control over, or which aren't worth worrying about in the first place.
Of course, there's a difference between letting things slide and letting people walk all over you, but that's not a particularly hard line to walk.
Get your ass off the computer chair do stuff with her (she wants you to take part in her activities)
This is very true, but it's also important not to take it too far. If there's something that she really enjoys but you can't stand (or vice-versa), forcing it upon yourself repeatedly just to spend more time together isn't going to work. It'll just make you miserable, and it'll ruin that activity for her because she'll see it making you miserable. I play beach volleyball a couple times per week, it's one of my favorite things to do. I took my wife out there once (back when we were still dating actually), she gave it a shot, and she hated it. She did, however, see how important it is to me to play, so she's got no problem with me continuing to do it. And occasionally she does tag along to watch, but it's really just 'my' activity, not 'our' activity. And that's fine.
On the flip side, I generally do not like going to movie theaters at all, so I encourage my wife to ask her friends to go with her if she wants to see a movie. I'll go about once per year when there's a movie that I think I can stand to sit through (Wall-E was pretty good), but other than that, she knows that 'forcing' me to go is not going to improve the experience for either of us.
And this also has a more mundane aspect to it. I like to sit and play computer games, it helps me relax. She likes to sit and watch reality shows about buying houses and food network and whatever. When we get home afterwork, it's pretty much standard procedure to spend an hour or so after dinner doing our separate activities. There is, as you alluded to, a big difference between doing this for an hour or so each day, and spending eight hours straight playing WoW instead of talking to your wife.
I don't think you're making a particularly valid argument when you equate a handful of battery issues or suing over music downloads to releasing giant clouds of poisonous gas that kill thousands of people.
It sucks if your iPod battery goes up, and it sucks even more if it burns you, but considering that nobody has been killed by one, or even horribly disfigured, or anything that interesting. Apple's handling of the issue hasn't been very good, but to suggest that people should be so outraged about it that they blow up a building is silly.
The counter to that argument is that (just throwing out a random website) for all the people who use various content aggregators to get NYtimes articles instead of going through the NYtimes homepage, there are probably just as many people who have no particular interested in the NYtimes, but get sent to random NYtimes articles by various content aggregators. Does that make sense?
I'm not searching reddit for NYtimes articles in lieu of going to the NYtimes homepage. If a reddit link sends me there, then that's one more page hit than they would've gotten otherwise.
And if readers are finding third-party content aggregators to be a more useful way to find your articles than your own homepage, then maybe you should think seriously about a redesign.
Of course, I've seen no real data to back up any of these positions, so maybe that'd make this whole argument more useful.
Ah, if that's what was up there, you'd want people to see it so that it would deter them from trying an attack. More likely that they're trying to hide the fact that the white house roof is covered with propane tanks, crates full of dynamite, and extra-flammable american flags.
I don't actually expect prices to numerically come down from where they are, but maybe it'll keep them from going up as fast? I'd be happy with that.
If you consider that the average price of video games has been around $50 for a few generations, then it's reasonable to say that games have gotten rather cheap over the years. Especially when you consider how much more cost goes into producing them. And then remember that due to inflation, $50 in 1990 was equivalent to over $80 today.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that definitely sucks, but that expansiveness is really one of the most basic characteristics of space. If you take that away, are you even making a space game anymore?
And to be fair, most MMO's (and even sandbox-ish games in general) have some issues with travel time, it's just that in space there's much less to look at so it feels even slower.
Although they might not be as well developed as human emotions, anyone who's spent any significant amount of time with an mammal at least as complex as a dog or cat should be convinced that they most certainly can experience states of mind that include things like fear or stress. They are definitely more comfortable in some situations than they are in others. I personally have not spent much time around cows, but it seems rather likely to me that someone who has would easily be able to tell what sorts of situations they find unpleasant.
I guess that's an option for AT&T. But for as much as it sucks that I had to sign a 2 year contract with them to get my phone subsidized, it also restricts them to a degree. If they decide that their network is seeing too much traffic and so they need to add new limitations to my plan, then I have an argument to get out of my contract.
50 bucks isn't a ridiculous price for a video game. Inflation adjusted, we're paying less for games now than we did a decade ago. This despite the fact that games today require waayyyy more people and waaaayyyy more money to make than they did back then. The market has grown to a huge extent, so publishers have been able to continue to make money just by volume, but it's still a risky proposition. The fact that many games now retail for $60 was outrageous to some people, but really we should all be surprised that it didn't happen sooner.
I'm not particularly offended by the general idea of advertising in games. It can certainly be done in ways that significantly damage a game, but it can also be done in a reasonable manner. If that helps keep a decent game company in business, or keeps them from raising their game prices for a couple more years, then I'm ok with that.
While I get what you're saying and see some truth in it, I think it's important to acknowledge that there's lots of different criteria on which to judge a product/service, and something that's just "good enough" by one metric might be significantly better by other metrics. Sometimes that metric is just price, but not always. Going with the MP3 example that you brought up, it's not like the MP3 format was a half-assed project where they didn't get things right, and ended up with a lower quality, but just shipped it anyways. There were considered decisions made to lower the audio quality in exchange for smaller file sizes. MP3 wasn't just "good enough" compared to CD audio, in many real world situations, it's a significantly better option.
And just about everyone one of your examples has a similar counterpoint. Clinics(at least around here) generally have better wait times than hospitals. I can carry a netbook in a bag over my shoulder much more comfortably than my Macbook. I can easily access my google docs from just about any networked computer anywhere.
We're not always just talking about a cheaper model with plastic gears instead of metal, we're often talking about deliberate design decisions which might require sacrifices in one aspect, but knowingly do that in order to increase capability or convenience or whatever in some other way.
It's often impossible to say objectively which option is just plain better/no discussion/case closed. Before you make that sort of value judgment, you need to define what criteria are your personal priorities.
To be fair, in Apple's tougher times, they were selling a lot of crappy products. OSX isn't just more "fashionable" than MacOS 9 was, it's a whole lot better.
I'm sure there are some things to nitpick in this particular case, but for all the different ways of crushing souls that corporations have come up with, there are still plenty of companies out there that see value in having happy employees, and with owners just trying to make an honest buck, rather than squeezing every possible dime out of the world.
I guess the lesson at the end of the day is that there's more than one way to run a business. Imagine that.
Interesting how in the article, they never use the word "impossible". Infact, they actually put forward a handful of possible (although unlikely)ways that this may have occurred.
There's bazillions of things that are unlikely to happen, but the universe is a big place. While we can't predict which particular weird thing we might observe next time, we shouldn't be all that surprised that weirdness is out there.
I don't know who talked you out of that, but you should push them down some stairs. I don't think it'd get you much cooling in the long run, but it'd be awesome to have sitting around your house.
As someone who works in the building design industry I can say with firsthand knowledge, far bigger changes than sticking 6 meters of copper into the slab happens at the last minute all the time. The only reason that you can generally get away with it is that structurally, things are usually designed with such large safety margins that there's not that much to worry about.
Buildings are amazing things, but if you scrape away a few layers of paint and drywall, it's amazing how much of it is just kind of shoved into place without much consideration of the bigger whole.
Ground Source heating/cooling is a pretty nifty technology, and can be applied to a whole house HVAC system, rather than just a computer. It obviously requires more tubing than a single computer would, and in most climate will still require some supplemental heating/cooling for more extreme temperature days, but it's still awesome. It does have some upfront costs though.
This idea to do it for a particular computer is a clever idea. I personally wouldn't want the pipe to actually be moving horizontally through my slab, I'd rather dig as small a diameter hole as is possible, but deeper under the slab, and just have the line penetrate the slab vertically. The deeper you go, the more stable the temperature becomes, and the less hollow copper pipe you've got running through the slab, the less you weaken it.
I'm not going to argue that Apple doesn't market heavily and successfully, but I think there's ample evidence that Apple's success has more to do with just being the latest cool fad. Truckloads of iPods have been selling for something like 8 years now, they've sold over 200 million of the things. Everyone's got one, even my grandparents have a couple. Fads and fashion don't last that long, people are still buying them because they like them, and they like them because they're better than all of alternatives.
Hype isn't completely meaningless, but history is full of zillion dollar marketing campaigns for products that completely flopped. I know you like to think you're better than everyone else by pretending that they're just mindless sheep and you're enlightened somehow, but in reality, people keep buying this stuff because it works for them. The iPhone isn't the perfect device for everybody, but for lots of people, it really is a whole lot better than anything else available. The fact that it looks slick is just a bonus.
Yeah, and I also heard that soon, anytime you want to use your iphone to call your friend, you'll email Apple, and they'll set up a conference call between you, your buddy, and an Apple employee. The Apple employee will record the call (which will be Apple's property), as well as interject occasionally with advertisements for shiny new apple products.
I'd reverse your statement, and say that it's going to be an MMO with fps elements. Planetside, which apparently is one of the models for CCP's new game, would definitely fall into the MMO category in my opinion. The fact that it's from a first person perspective rather than third-person doesn't disqualify it from being an MMO.
There's nothing intrinsic about an MMO that makes it incompatible with first person shooters. This is really just a semantics argument, but I see three basic necessities for me to consider a game an MMO. It has to support a high number of players simultaneously (a couple hundred at least), it has to allow for some sort of continuous player advancement (leveling, new gear, new skills, etc...), and the game universe needs to have some sort of continuity to it.
How the player views the world and interacts with it is a separate issue.
Depending on how you read it, it almost sounds like they were saying that the first laser ever made was the smallest one that had been created, until now. Which seems rather unlikely. But yeah, it was a silly choice of words.
Chrome is still doing all those things, because those things are pretty intrinsic to what a web browser does. That's not to say that there aren't cool new ways out there that we might want to access the internet, but if you make a web browser that does none of those things that Chrome does, well then you haven't really made a web browser.
If the summary was an accurate description of what's going on, then it'd be a pretty interesting and even relevant story for many of us. Not only would it be strange for colleges to be advocating against many of their own graduates, but it'd be even more ridiculous if the government had actually set things up so that there were serious tax advantages for hiring non-Americans over Americans. Per employee taxes should, from a employer's point of view, not change at all based on where a worker is from.
Of course, as others have pointed out, the summary given is not an accurate representation of what these colleges are saying, and that's what's wrong with this story.
I don't know that much about WoW, but this sort of market manipulation happens in EvE as well. But it's usually not as big a deal, because the economy is so decentralized. If someone's relisted all of the red widgets in a system, there's a few thousand other systems I can look in. Plus because players have so much control over the production of most items in game, producers will notice the relisting, and will increase their production of that particular item. It self-corrects pretty well.
Letting things slide is a key to happiness, whether it be in a marriage, a job, or just wandering around observing the world. So many people seem intent on making themselves miserable by stressing out over things that either they have no control over, or which aren't worth worrying about in the first place.
Of course, there's a difference between letting things slide and letting people walk all over you, but that's not a particularly hard line to walk.
Yeah that sounds pretty miserable. I'm glad you've figured it out and made some changes.
Get your ass off the computer chair do stuff with her (she wants you to take part in her activities)
This is very true, but it's also important not to take it too far. If there's something that she really enjoys but you can't stand (or vice-versa), forcing it upon yourself repeatedly just to spend more time together isn't going to work. It'll just make you miserable, and it'll ruin that activity for her because she'll see it making you miserable. I play beach volleyball a couple times per week, it's one of my favorite things to do. I took my wife out there once (back when we were still dating actually), she gave it a shot, and she hated it. She did, however, see how important it is to me to play, so she's got no problem with me continuing to do it. And occasionally she does tag along to watch, but it's really just 'my' activity, not 'our' activity. And that's fine.
On the flip side, I generally do not like going to movie theaters at all, so I encourage my wife to ask her friends to go with her if she wants to see a movie. I'll go about once per year when there's a movie that I think I can stand to sit through (Wall-E was pretty good), but other than that, she knows that 'forcing' me to go is not going to improve the experience for either of us.
And this also has a more mundane aspect to it. I like to sit and play computer games, it helps me relax. She likes to sit and watch reality shows about buying houses and food network and whatever. When we get home afterwork, it's pretty much standard procedure to spend an hour or so after dinner doing our separate activities. There is, as you alluded to, a big difference between doing this for an hour or so each day, and spending eight hours straight playing WoW instead of talking to your wife.
I don't think you're making a particularly valid argument when you equate a handful of battery issues or suing over music downloads to releasing giant clouds of poisonous gas that kill thousands of people.
It sucks if your iPod battery goes up, and it sucks even more if it burns you, but considering that nobody has been killed by one, or even horribly disfigured, or anything that interesting. Apple's handling of the issue hasn't been very good, but to suggest that people should be so outraged about it that they blow up a building is silly.
Here's an interesting article about how many people the ipods have hurt, comparing it to other everyday items: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/chill-out-people-ipods-are-less-dangerous-socks
The counter to that argument is that (just throwing out a random website) for all the people who use various content aggregators to get NYtimes articles instead of going through the NYtimes homepage, there are probably just as many people who have no particular interested in the NYtimes, but get sent to random NYtimes articles by various content aggregators. Does that make sense?
I'm not searching reddit for NYtimes articles in lieu of going to the NYtimes homepage. If a reddit link sends me there, then that's one more page hit than they would've gotten otherwise.
And if readers are finding third-party content aggregators to be a more useful way to find your articles than your own homepage, then maybe you should think seriously about a redesign.
Of course, I've seen no real data to back up any of these positions, so maybe that'd make this whole argument more useful.
Ah, if that's what was up there, you'd want people to see it so that it would deter them from trying an attack. More likely that they're trying to hide the fact that the white house roof is covered with propane tanks, crates full of dynamite, and extra-flammable american flags.
I don't actually expect prices to numerically come down from where they are, but maybe it'll keep them from going up as fast? I'd be happy with that.
If you consider that the average price of video games has been around $50 for a few generations, then it's reasonable to say that games have gotten rather cheap over the years. Especially when you consider how much more cost goes into producing them. And then remember that due to inflation, $50 in 1990 was equivalent to over $80 today.