I saw the proposals for this (they were all publically available on the website), and I must say the Google/Earthlink proposal was definitely the best looking proposal as far as being polished. They'd obviously put some serious work and time on it, while the other proposals mostly looked like some guy did them in Word one night. And a few were seriously ratty. If you were going for professionalism and thought that the proposal was a good indicator of what you might expect, then Google/Earthlink was the easy choice even if they weren't the big names they are.
I realize this has nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of the actual deployment, but I bet it had quite a strong effect.
I think what they're saying here is that if you're backing up an entire hosting site, or an entire company set of documents, information, etc, that you will find a lot of redundant content. Then you add normal streaming compression on top of that.
So I can believe the 25x (as a generous/marketing figure) in this specific use case. It wouldn't work at all for compressing single files for distribution elsewhere because it requires that you have all the other documents as context.
This would be very annoying to do on the fly as well (what if your 'base' document that 12000 other documents are similar to changes?), but again is well suited for backup or read-only media.
And of course, yes, this is all my wishful thinking. I'd love SOE to go down and I'd love to see Bioware have a chance at doing a decent Star Wars MMORPG. So of course I think it could happen, even if it isn't.
Sony Online Entertainment (as taken separate from the rest of Sony) basically got lucky - or at least had great timing. They took a text MUD and made it 3D at just the right time. So Everquest got hugely popular. At the time they read the market perfectly.
Unfortunately, then they took this as license to use those tired old mechanics and punish the user for existing in everything they've made since. All the while trumpeting how brilliant their design (do what MUDs did in 1990) is in every interview and how they don't need to change anything.
So after World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies I guess everyone's finally realized how hollow they were all along.
First of all, they could just be flat out lying. That happens all the time in this industry, like the Nintendo head denying outright that there were any plans to introduce a new, better, Nintendo DS - and then they announce the DS Lite the next month. They can't possibly say they're going to pull the Star Wars license from SOE until they have a replacement.
But even if they're telling the truth, it would make perfect sense for them to make another completely different Star Wars MMO with Bioware (in fact it has to be, because you don't want the SWG stench attached to it) and then 'fully support' SWG while letting it die the slow painful death it deserves.
All Bioware has to do to make a better game is start with 'How can we make this fun?' instead of 'How can we drag this out?'
As a serious photographer, I've completely ditched film for DSLR. The convenience is just incredibly liberating, and the quality is there. People claim that digital hasn't caught up with film yet (they keep jacking the number of megapixels up as the number of available megapixels goes up), but I don't see it. Take a shot from a Canon 20D or a Nikon D200 (so as not to drag the $4000 cameras into it), take a 35mm slide, blow them up to the same size, and your digital shot will look as good or better than the 35mm. The sensors are as smooth as Velvia now (and certainly perform much better at higher ISO than film does) and more sensitive (especially compared to slide film, which is brutally limiting in its exposure range). I can't tell you how many pros I've heard the same from. Digital's won the quality war at 35mm, and always had the convenience advantage. And since Nikon's users are primarily pros and enthusiasts (they're big in low-end digital cameras, but not really film point and shoots), this is where the money is going.
There are a few good reasons you might still be using film for 35mm. First is obviously the huge up-front cost, though digital is cheaper in the long run if you take as many photos as I do. Second is if you know a certain film (Velvia!) better than the back of your own hand and don't want a new learning curve. Third would be if you love the darkroom stuff you can do with black and white. You can do the same in photoshop, but it's not as visceral. E6 color development is just nasty, I can't see anyone being nostalgic for that! Bad reasons would be technophobia and snobbery. Some people are proud of the fact that slide film takes a lot more exposure skill than digital does, so using slide film means you're old-skool hardcore.
So now the battle is fought at medium format, and as long as those Leaf/Hasselblad/Phase One backs cost $35K film will be alive and well. And beyond that of course you've got large format, which would be prohibitively costly digitally for now. And large format people tend to revel in their old equipment, so film will never die there. People still make cyanotypes and daguerreotypes! Though I don't think people do much photography on asphalt any more.
Mind Wide Open summarized this pretty well. Active scans of people working on a problem or engaged in a specific endeavor have shown repeatedly that extra brain activity is not a good thing. It means you're floundering. The more activity the worse you're doing. Your best results are when just that tiny minimum necessary bit of the brain lights up.
Thinking of several pronounced introverts I know I'd have to say this applies; sure they're thinking a lot, but what they're doing is obsessing on little problems and turning them into full-blown crises which they can mull over and over again for maximum horrorific effect.
Of course there are real introverted geniuses. I guess they just channel it better.
Well it's nice to see the cutepet.org guys have made the leap from drawing furry video game porn to doing weekly Sunday comics. The Chugworth dude must be jealous as hell.
This is just blowing smoke, typical of Kutaragi's usual stunts like the whole 'Playstation is a banned supercomputer' flap they manufactured a while back. Remember the outrageous claims for the PS2? The mind-blowing tech demos with effects you never saw in actual games? Well it gets the job done - press coverage about how mind blowingly powerful the yet unreleased console might be.
Any console can do 120 fps. A NES can do 120 fps if the game is simple enough (Tetris) and you really cared to. It's just a matter of how you divy up your power (and what output rates you decide to support). But usually they 'spend' that budget on better looking graphics instead. It's quite often your memory bandwidth that brings you to your knees if you want, oh, actual polygons and textures.
So yeah, I look forward to 'Now Loading...' at 120 fps.
A blown Windows upgrade may be a good thing for Linux server prospects, but seems like much more of a desktop opening for Mac OSX.
Linux isn't ready as a desktop for the vast majority of people (i.e., my parents) and probably never will be as long as Linux users can't understand why it isn't. I use Linux extensively, but I'm a hardcore geek, and I certainly wouldn't inflict it on my parents. Perhaps if I pre-installed and preconfigured everything they might possibly want to use, like Thunderbird. Or I could just buy them a Mac Mini and not get any more phone calls.
Maybe this will give you some opportunity among Windows users of a techie mindset who are leery of the Mac entry cost. The 'hey, it's free to try!' is a huge win.
Great, so he argues that the designers should force me to experience the things that I hate the very most about MMORPGs. I love being able to play with just my friends, because in my experience 90% of other people on a given online anything suck. Occasionally I will attempt to group with other people, and occasionally I will find a good one, but good god, don't force me to play with B0N3D3WD and PL4T3D00D.
I like teleportation because I really don't want to waste my real time spending a half hour running across a massive continent to get somewhere (maybe the first time, okay) just because you really want me to have to see the trees that you placed out there and you want to slow down my consumption of content with another useless treadmill.
The funny thing is that I mostly agree with his 1-4 premises, but then he just uses those to justify lazy designer/implementer decisions. If I read him correctly, City of Heroes sucks horribly (and just happens to be fun as hell) and Star Wars Galaxies really is a much better game (that just happens to be a tedious grind).
Let's not forget what I want here. I want long term gratification through increased skills and bling bling, but more importantly small chunks of immediate gratification. I don't have time to devote eight hours a day to an MMORPG. If you insist on making my hour of play unfun because of your silly ideas of how I should be playing, I will indeed cancel my subscription.
I don't think a sigh is really warranted. The game wasn't that compelling, and the market is oversaturated with MMORPGs with little sign of letup. A couple more need to bite the dust. Or, if you don't agree with that, maybe you'll agree that a lot more are/going/ to bite the dust.
I think Max Payne 2 is a great example of this. It's only 10-12 hours through the first time (if you're not a fps stud and blow through in 6-8). But not a single moment of that is wasted - it's just move shoot kill story move shoot kill story. No stupid puzzles. You never have to backtrack through half a level just to flip a stupid switch. No stupid cut and paste levels. It's just pure goodness. When it was over, I went back and played it again at harder level.
You might think $50 is a bit much for 10 hours, but I don't really mind paying that much for something this good with no filler - and if you looked around you could get it for $35.
_Next Generation_ was a video game print magazine with insightful, intelligent, forward looking articles. The game reviews weren't really special, but it was the sort of magazine that could and did sit down and interview Joe Liebermann for 8 pages on the evils of video games.
It died, because 13 year old video game players don't want to read that stuff, they want to read Gamefan gushing about SUPAR L33T FLARE FX or 'SOCOM Cheats Revealed!'
Slashdot Mirror
I saw the proposals for this (they were all publically available on the website), and I must say the Google/Earthlink proposal was definitely the best looking proposal as far as being polished. They'd obviously put some serious work and time on it, while the other proposals mostly looked like some guy did them in Word one night. And a few were seriously ratty. If you were going for professionalism and thought that the proposal was a good indicator of what you might expect, then Google/Earthlink was the easy choice even if they weren't the big names they are.
I realize this has nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of the actual deployment, but I bet it had quite a strong effect.
I think what they're saying here is that if you're backing up an entire hosting site, or an entire company set of documents, information, etc, that you will find a lot of redundant content. Then you add normal streaming compression on top of that.
So I can believe the 25x (as a generous/marketing figure) in this specific use case. It wouldn't work at all for compressing single files for distribution elsewhere because it requires that you have all the other documents as context.
This would be very annoying to do on the fly as well (what if your 'base' document that 12000 other documents are similar to changes?), but again is well suited for backup or read-only media.
And of course, yes, this is all my wishful thinking. I'd love SOE to go down and I'd love to see Bioware have a chance at doing a decent Star Wars MMORPG. So of course I think it could happen, even if it isn't.
Sony Online Entertainment (as taken separate from the rest of Sony) basically got lucky - or at least had great timing. They took a text MUD and made it 3D at just the right time. So Everquest got hugely popular. At the time they read the market perfectly.
Unfortunately, then they took this as license to use those tired old mechanics and punish the user for existing in everything they've made since. All the while trumpeting how brilliant their design (do what MUDs did in 1990) is in every interview and how they don't need to change anything.
So after World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies I guess everyone's finally realized how hollow they were all along.
First of all, they could just be flat out lying. That happens all the time in this industry, like the Nintendo head denying outright that there were any plans to introduce a new, better, Nintendo DS - and then they announce the DS Lite the next month. They can't possibly say they're going to pull the Star Wars license from SOE until they have a replacement.
But even if they're telling the truth, it would make perfect sense for them to make another completely different Star Wars MMO with Bioware (in fact it has to be, because you don't want the SWG stench attached to it) and then 'fully support' SWG while letting it die the slow painful death it deserves.
All Bioware has to do to make a better game is start with 'How can we make this fun?' instead of 'How can we drag this out?'
As a serious photographer, I've completely ditched film for DSLR. The convenience is just incredibly liberating, and the quality is there. People claim that digital hasn't caught up with film yet (they keep jacking the number of megapixels up as the number of available megapixels goes up), but I don't see it. Take a shot from a Canon 20D or a Nikon D200 (so as not to drag the $4000 cameras into it), take a 35mm slide, blow them up to the same size, and your digital shot will look as good or better than the 35mm. The sensors are as smooth as Velvia now (and certainly perform much better at higher ISO than film does) and more sensitive (especially compared to slide film, which is brutally limiting in its exposure range). I can't tell you how many pros I've heard the same from. Digital's won the quality war at 35mm, and always had the convenience advantage. And since Nikon's users are primarily pros and enthusiasts (they're big in low-end digital cameras, but not really film point and shoots), this is where the money is going.
There are a few good reasons you might still be using film for 35mm. First is obviously the huge up-front cost, though digital is cheaper in the long run if you take as many photos as I do. Second is if you know a certain film (Velvia!) better than the back of your own hand and don't want a new learning curve. Third would be if you love the darkroom stuff you can do with black and white. You can do the same in photoshop, but it's not as visceral. E6 color development is just nasty, I can't see anyone being nostalgic for that! Bad reasons would be technophobia and snobbery. Some people are proud of the fact that slide film takes a lot more exposure skill than digital does, so using slide film means you're old-skool hardcore.
So now the battle is fought at medium format, and as long as those Leaf/Hasselblad/Phase One backs cost $35K film will be alive and well. And beyond that of course you've got large format, which would be prohibitively costly digitally for now. And large format people tend to revel in their old equipment, so film will never die there. People still make cyanotypes and daguerreotypes! Though I don't think people do much photography on asphalt any more.
Mind Wide Open summarized this pretty well. Active scans of people working on a problem or engaged in a specific endeavor have shown repeatedly that extra brain activity is not a good thing. It means you're floundering. The more activity the worse you're doing. Your best results are when just that tiny minimum necessary bit of the brain lights up.
Thinking of several pronounced introverts I know I'd have to say this applies; sure they're thinking a lot, but what they're doing is obsessing on little problems and turning them into full-blown crises which they can mull over and over again for maximum horrorific effect.
Of course there are real introverted geniuses. I guess they just channel it better.
Well it's nice to see the cutepet.org guys have made the leap from drawing furry video game porn to doing weekly Sunday comics. The Chugworth dude must be jealous as hell.
This is just blowing smoke, typical of Kutaragi's usual stunts like the whole 'Playstation is a banned supercomputer' flap they manufactured a while back. Remember the outrageous claims for the PS2? The mind-blowing tech demos with effects you never saw in actual games? Well it gets the job done - press coverage about how mind blowingly powerful the yet unreleased console might be.
Any console can do 120 fps. A NES can do 120 fps if the game is simple enough (Tetris) and you really cared to. It's just a matter of how you divy up your power (and what output rates you decide to support). But usually they 'spend' that budget on better looking graphics instead. It's quite often your memory bandwidth that brings you to your knees if you want, oh, actual polygons and textures.
So yeah, I look forward to 'Now Loading...' at 120 fps.
A blown Windows upgrade may be a good thing for Linux server prospects, but seems like much more of a desktop opening for Mac OSX.
Linux isn't ready as a desktop for the vast majority of people (i.e., my parents) and probably never will be as long as Linux users can't understand why it isn't. I use Linux extensively, but I'm a hardcore geek, and I certainly wouldn't inflict it on my parents. Perhaps if I pre-installed and preconfigured everything they might possibly want to use, like Thunderbird. Or I could just buy them a Mac Mini and not get any more phone calls.
Maybe this will give you some opportunity among Windows users of a techie mindset who are leery of the Mac entry cost. The 'hey, it's free to try!' is a huge win.
Great, so he argues that the designers should force me to experience the things that I hate the very most about MMORPGs. I love being able to play with just my friends, because in my experience 90% of other people on a given online anything suck. Occasionally I will attempt to group with other people, and occasionally I will find a good one, but good god, don't force me to play with B0N3D3WD and PL4T3D00D.
I like teleportation because I really don't want to waste my real time spending a half hour running across a massive continent to get somewhere (maybe the first time, okay) just because you really want me to have to see the trees that you placed out there and you want to slow down my consumption of content with another useless treadmill.
The funny thing is that I mostly agree with his 1-4 premises, but then he just uses those to justify lazy designer/implementer decisions. If I read him correctly, City of Heroes sucks horribly (and just happens to be fun as hell) and Star Wars Galaxies really is a much better game (that just happens to be a tedious grind).
Let's not forget what I want here. I want long term gratification through increased skills and bling bling, but more importantly small chunks of immediate gratification. I don't have time to devote eight hours a day to an MMORPG. If you insist on making my hour of play unfun because of your silly ideas of how I should be playing, I will indeed cancel my subscription.
I don't think a sigh is really warranted. The game wasn't that compelling, and the market is oversaturated with MMORPGs with little sign of letup. A couple more need to bite the dust. Or, if you don't agree with that, maybe you'll agree that a lot more are /going/ to bite the dust.
I think Max Payne 2 is a great example of this. It's only 10-12 hours through the first time (if you're not a fps stud and blow through in 6-8). But not a single moment of that is wasted - it's just move shoot kill story move shoot kill story. No stupid puzzles. You never have to backtrack through half a level just to flip a stupid switch. No stupid cut and paste levels. It's just pure goodness. When it was over, I went back and played it again at harder level.
You might think $50 is a bit much for 10 hours, but I don't really mind paying that much for something this good with no filler - and if you looked around you could get it for $35.
Now shorter BAD games for $50, that would suck.
_Next Generation_ was a video game print magazine with insightful, intelligent, forward looking articles. The game reviews weren't really special, but it was the sort of magazine that could and did sit down and interview Joe Liebermann for 8 pages on the evils of video games.
It died, because 13 year old video game players don't want to read that stuff, they want to read Gamefan gushing about SUPAR L33T FLARE FX or 'SOCOM Cheats Revealed!'
The articles referred to here
are just horrible, horrible verbal
masturbation using excessive links
as lube. He makes some definite
points but they are almost completely
overwhelmed by style over substance.
Which, after reading the articles, is
what he seems to be advocating, more
interested in stylistic experiments than
improved content. I'm not sure if this is
really an improvement over
current game journalism even as
stunted as it is.
I'm sorry is this annoying? Yes it is!
This isn't aimed at anyone in particular - yes, I'm replying to a message, but it applies to the whole forum.
But you people are still easier to troll than a school of starving tuna. From the very first comment here to the last.
Check for the "<HEE HEE HEE>" "</HEE HEE HEE>" tags before replying.