The nineteen-hundreds only ended nine years ago - so unless you are under the age of ten, you should be banned from using that other term. Then again, when you say "the nineteen-hundreds" it makes you think of Alexander Graham Bell in his stovepipe hat spilling battery acid and shouting "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you."
Of course, that actually happened in the eighteen hundreds...
That is because people usually talk about the different centuries as "centuries", not "hundreds". The 19th Century was the 1800's.
The need to acquire things, more than any other single thing, comes down to one basic human need; to feel as though we are, in some way, superior to our fellow man.
...
It's not about a rat pressing a lever and getting a food pellet, at all. It's about the rat thinking that he has bigger genitals than other rats.
I don't think that is the point at all. If you've ever met a real life compulsive hoarder it's not about being the best. It's more about not loosing some fragment of the past, or being frustrated by not having something they previously had.
When it gets into a really bad state hoarding can ruin a life, or a family. Imagine someone who collects EVERYTHING. It can get so bad that people need to record all the TV they watch, and keep every item of post or junk mail, it can even lead to hoarding their own faeces, urine, hair clippings and other things.
Clearly this is not about being the best, it seems more deeply rooted. An evolutionary throwback when people didn't have much stuff and maybe hoarding food, would get you through the period when there is no food to eat.
Are there any other professions where analogies are used as much?
I don't think I've ever had a doctor, mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc. ever use an anology with me. They just explain the facts.
I've never had a problem explaining, in simple terms, to people who have no idea, how a computer works.
I think it's time for the whole industry to grow up and stop using analogies to explain every thing, and just explain everything as it is.
Or you are going to start having tech queries like this: "I need a cool-box that can hold more food than my filing-cabinet but is half the size. I don't think my oven is hot enough. Oh and I poured water into my steering wheel."
I used to play Quake 2 a lot, back when I had dial-up. And I know the annoyance of the LPB's;)
But I found a great server with some very high-skilled players, with both low and high ping. They took the time to teach me the tricks. One was simply leading your target, even with insta-hit weapons like the rail-gun, you just need to lead the lag between you.
It's probably why I'm one of the few people on the servers of modern games who doesn't cry when someone's ping starts to reach 3 figures. I just compensate for the lag and kill them anyway.
Speed throttling would just lead to jumpy game play as my connection speed would be constantly changing to that of the worst, this would make it much harder to play. I'd rather a constant connection than a varying one any day.
Incorrect. To literally sugarcoat means to coat with sugar. The alternative, to figuratively sugarcoat (i.e. the figure of speech) is to make appear more pleasant or acceptable.
Not really, there are 2 definitions of literally: actually, and figuratively.
A western, and English, site chose 4 games that would appeal to the readers of the blog, and have a decent enough sample size to be able to draw any sort of conclusion.
How would it serve the article to talk about how, say Dragon Swords MUD, 100% of the players felt the setting was *teh gay!* because they only got one response?
I can't imagine that there are going to be enough English speaking people playing the popular MMOs of the eastern world, and who know of that site, and are filling in questionnaires to make the data viable to analyse.
It is just a blog, and written as such. Maybe for the pedants they should have included a bit more information, like the general locations of their respondents, number of respondents for each game, and possibly how certain demographics would be under-represented by their methods of data gathering. (They might do, I haven't looked at the site past the article.) But, to me, the blog is a nice casual look at the data they have.
Maybe it's time for some American websites to come up with an absurd TOS and send a report of all the IPs that have accessed your site in violation of the TOS to the police each day.
You didn't teach your parents to use their PCs as much as you taught them how to cope with a terrable UI. There should always be instant feedback to a user's actions, otherwise it starts causing confusion.
I think user interface design is a facinating subject, but, sadly, it is often dismissed by programmers as the user's inability to use technology and not a problem with their UI.
The UseIT alertbox is an excelent source of articles on UI (primarally web based). There is also this interesting look at the 2000 Florida "butterfly ballot".
Good for privacy of course, but as so much of the web is ad-funded is this really going to be good for the web as a whole?
I'm going to say yes.
There was a time before there were adverts all over the web, I'm sure it will work just as well as it used to. We'll just have sites that people want, as opposed to over-bloated sites with more advertising than content. Without adverts and tracking, those articles that are spread over 10 pages when 1 will do (just so there looks like lots of hits) will disappear, or just return back to 1 page articles.
Let's say you create a game on the assumption that 500,000 people will want to play the game, based on demographics and popularity of similar games. You want to sell it for $50 each so that's a $25,000,000 budget - pretty good! Although that has to pay for quite a lot of stuff. Not just salaries for a large team for several years, but business overheads, engine licensing, and then you need to make enough profit to cover your next game which might be a flop.
Your game is awesome and indeed garners 500,000 players very fast. Unfortunately only 20% of those people pay for the game (this figure seems reasonable sadly)...
Well the problem with that is clearly their target was not 500,000 units but 100,000 and should have been budgeted accordingly, it shouldn't have been a case of how many people will end up owning a copy of the game but rather how many people will buy it.
Piracy doesn't need to be included in the initial budget of a game. It is just as easy to assume these people do not exist. It doesn't cost you anything when someone makes a copy of your game, it is not like physical theft from a shop which means the store owner has one less unit to sell to a customer. You can still sell all the games you want, to all the people who are going to buy the game.
People talk about "lost sales" when they talk about piracy. There are no lost sales, the people who have pirated a game were never going to buy it anyway.
How many hours of vacation-time does your employer give you? 80? 120?
Ah... one thing that is great about living in Europe, 4 weeks minimum annual leave. I get 168 hours leave (not including the 8 public holidays), and that is by no means exceptional.
...I thought this would be obvious to anyone you actually thought about my post...
Sigh... I guess my points were just lucky that they coincided with yours and that I didn't pick a completely different subject like Japanese poetry to reply with, but clearly my response demonstrates that I thought about what you posted. Don't be such an ass.
Looking at the other replies to your post it appears that many people agree with me, and also "weren't thinking about your post". If you'd thought about what you had written, you would have seen that you didn't mention anything about changing prices of any current vendor items, or hint that these would be necessary for your utopia. Please remember that people can only respond to what you write and not what you think.
Here are some thing they could do:
1) Don't let anyone mine/pick anything that there skill level makes gray to them.
2) put some random drift into movement.
3) limit the price you can sell something for on the AH to 10 times what a vendor would pay
4) don't allow the transfer of more then 100GP a time. Maybe a one time unlimited amount per month.
Each of these would negatively affect my normal play.
There are many times when the ingredients you need can come from things that are grey level.
I would find it frustrating to constantly have to adjust my direction, especially if I'm flying somewhere and just want to pop up and grab a drink.
this is just silly, the vendor prices don't match their in-game worth, this would stifle the economy. If someone wants to by my grey titled [Broken I.W.I.N button] for hundreds of gold then they can and should.
I've lent friends and guild-mates loads more than this so they can get mounts, etc.
If people are botting and it's annoying you, just report them. If it doesn't bother you then just leave them be. It is easy enough to make money in WOW, even if you sell everything you pick up to a vendor, just doing daily quests you can make over 200g a day. If lots of people are botting and farming, and if it's ingredients I need, then they will push the price down on the AH undercutting one another. And that is good for me too.
If the Texas State Senate and the Governor are dumb enough to sign this bill into law they're going to see all the companies leave for RTP, Phonenix, etc.
Best start packing then. If you'd bothered to read TFA you'd see that it's already been signed by the governor.
From the article:
NPD: Now that's currently a bill, not a law, correct? Or has it been passed?
Driver: No, it's been passed. The governor signed it.
But, I suppose, if you'd read (and understood) the article and other links in the summary you wouldn't be so irate.
The level of control is much better with games like Crammond's GP games than with "sims" because it is not a simulation, or precise control. If you tried to control an actual high-speed car with digital controls that meant you were either full lock or straight ahead, or full throttle or no throttle you would spin the car every time you tried to change direction, and most of the time you tried to accelerate or brake.
Crammond's games (and pretty much every single racing game I've played) use poetic licence, things like unrealistically low centre of gravity on the cars, and friction models that aren't so sensitive to the extremes you get with keyboard controls.
The next big problem with a proper sim, is that (generally) you and all the people you play with are not professional drivers. Putting a bunch of amateur drivers in high-performance cars is asking for trouble. In an F1 car they would probably destroy the engine before they got the car to move. It would be no fun in a F1 game having to spend weeks/months learning how to drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I could ever use this rule, because I would be worring over the inconsistancies depending on how the quote was pitched.
7 days will take 14 Weeks, but one week will take 2 months (8 weeks).
Or a 4 week project will take 8 months, but a 1 month project will take 2 years.
The nineteen-hundreds only ended nine years ago - so unless you are under the age of ten, you should be banned from using that other term. Then again, when you say "the nineteen-hundreds" it makes you think of Alexander Graham Bell in his stovepipe hat spilling battery acid and shouting "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you."
Of course, that actually happened in the eighteen hundreds...
That is because people usually talk about the different centuries as "centuries", not "hundreds". The 19th Century was the 1800's.
The need to acquire things, more than any other single thing, comes down to one basic human need; to feel as though we are, in some way, superior to our fellow man.
...
It's not about a rat pressing a lever and getting a food pellet, at all. It's about the rat thinking that he has bigger genitals than other rats.
I don't think that is the point at all. If you've ever met a real life compulsive hoarder it's not about being the best. It's more about not loosing some fragment of the past, or being frustrated by not having something they previously had.
When it gets into a really bad state hoarding can ruin a life, or a family. Imagine someone who collects EVERYTHING. It can get so bad that people need to record all the TV they watch, and keep every item of post or junk mail, it can even lead to hoarding their own faeces, urine, hair clippings and other things.
Clearly this is not about being the best, it seems more deeply rooted. An evolutionary throwback when people didn't have much stuff and maybe hoarding food, would get you through the period when there is no food to eat.
I don't think a Buddhist would choose to be offended.
Are there any other professions where analogies are used as much?
I don't think I've ever had a doctor, mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc. ever use an anology with me. They just explain the facts.
I've never had a problem explaining, in simple terms, to people who have no idea, how a computer works.
I think it's time for the whole industry to grow up and stop using analogies to explain every thing, and just explain everything as it is.
Or you are going to start having tech queries like this: "I need a cool-box that can hold more food than my filing-cabinet but is half the size. I don't think my oven is hot enough. Oh and I poured water into my steering wheel."
I used to play Quake 2 a lot, back when I had dial-up. And I know the annoyance of the LPB's ;)
But I found a great server with some very high-skilled players, with both low and high ping. They took the time to teach me the tricks. One was simply leading your target, even with insta-hit weapons like the rail-gun, you just need to lead the lag between you.
It's probably why I'm one of the few people on the servers of modern games who doesn't cry when someone's ping starts to reach 3 figures. I just compensate for the lag and kill them anyway.
Speed throttling would just lead to jumpy game play as my connection speed would be constantly changing to that of the worst, this would make it much harder to play. I'd rather a constant connection than a varying one any day.
We'd just end up with MRL (MRL Reading Light).
What is terribly depressing about this, is that it is already going on in Britain. Just go visit Middlesbrough.
Incorrect.
To literally sugarcoat means to coat with sugar.
The alternative, to figuratively sugarcoat (i.e. the figure of speech) is to make appear more pleasant or acceptable.
Not really, there are 2 definitions of literally: actually, and figuratively.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/literally
Just another auto-antonym.
I always like the Kennedy quote too: "We choose to go... not because it is easy, but because it is hard..."
I don't think it is strange (or a fail) at all.
A western, and English, site chose 4 games that would appeal to the readers of the blog, and have a decent enough sample size to be able to draw any sort of conclusion.
How would it serve the article to talk about how, say Dragon Swords MUD, 100% of the players felt the setting was *teh gay!* because they only got one response?
I can't imagine that there are going to be enough English speaking people playing the popular MMOs of the eastern world, and who know of that site, and are filling in questionnaires to make the data viable to analyse.
It is just a blog, and written as such. Maybe for the pedants they should have included a bit more information, like the general locations of their respondents, number of respondents for each game, and possibly how certain demographics would be under-represented by their methods of data gathering. (They might do, I haven't looked at the site past the article.) But, to me, the blog is a nice casual look at the data they have.
That is quite an interesting thought.
Maybe it's time for some American websites to come up with an absurd TOS and send a report of all the IPs that have accessed your site in violation of the TOS to the police each day.
You didn't teach your parents to use their PCs as much as you taught them how to cope with a terrable UI. There should always be instant feedback to a user's actions, otherwise it starts causing confusion.
I think user interface design is a facinating subject, but, sadly, it is often dismissed by programmers as the user's inability to use technology and not a problem with their UI.
The UseIT alertbox is an excelent source of articles on UI (primarally web based). There is also this interesting look at the 2000 Florida "butterfly ballot".
Danger, Geoff Hamilton!
I'm going to say yes.
There was a time before there were adverts all over the web, I'm sure it will work just as well as it used to. We'll just have sites that people want, as opposed to over-bloated sites with more advertising than content. Without adverts and tracking, those articles that are spread over 10 pages when 1 will do (just so there looks like lots of hits) will disappear, or just return back to 1 page articles.
It's not like people look at banner adverts any more anyway.
Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.
Well the problem with that is clearly their target was not 500,000 units but 100,000 and should have been budgeted accordingly, it shouldn't have been a case of how many people will end up owning a copy of the game but rather how many people will buy it.
Piracy doesn't need to be included in the initial budget of a game. It is just as easy to assume these people do not exist. It doesn't cost you anything when someone makes a copy of your game, it is not like physical theft from a shop which means the store owner has one less unit to sell to a customer. You can still sell all the games you want, to all the people who are going to buy the game.
People talk about "lost sales" when they talk about piracy. There are no lost sales, the people who have pirated a game were never going to buy it anyway.
Ah... one thing that is great about living in Europe, 4 weeks minimum annual leave. I get 168 hours leave (not including the 8 public holidays), and that is by no means exceptional.
I can't believe the phrase "going forward" is reaching slashdot summarys now.
A little part of me dies each time I hear that phrase, and working for a FTSE 50 insurance company I barely survive each day.
Sigh... I guess my points were just lucky that they coincided with yours and that I didn't pick a completely different subject like Japanese poetry to reply with, but clearly my response demonstrates that I thought about what you posted. Don't be such an ass.
Looking at the other replies to your post it appears that many people agree with me, and also "weren't thinking about your post". If you'd thought about what you had written, you would have seen that you didn't mention anything about changing prices of any current vendor items, or hint that these would be necessary for your utopia. Please remember that people can only respond to what you write and not what you think.
Each of these would negatively affect my normal play.
If people are botting and it's annoying you, just report them. If it doesn't bother you then just leave them be. It is easy enough to make money in WOW, even if you sell everything you pick up to a vendor, just doing daily quests you can make over 200g a day. If lots of people are botting and farming, and if it's ingredients I need, then they will push the price down on the AH undercutting one another. And that is good for me too.
Google is so up to date that the first hit is now this slashdot article with your post as the page preview.
Best start packing then. If you'd bothered to read TFA you'd see that it's already been signed by the governor.
From the article:
But, I suppose, if you'd read (and understood) the article and other links in the summary you wouldn't be so irate.
The level of control is much better with games like Crammond's GP games than with "sims" because it is not a simulation, or precise control. If you tried to control an actual high-speed car with digital controls that meant you were either full lock or straight ahead, or full throttle or no throttle you would spin the car every time you tried to change direction, and most of the time you tried to accelerate or brake.
Crammond's games (and pretty much every single racing game I've played) use poetic licence, things like unrealistically low centre of gravity on the cars, and friction models that aren't so sensitive to the extremes you get with keyboard controls.
The next big problem with a proper sim, is that (generally) you and all the people you play with are not professional drivers. Putting a bunch of amateur drivers in high-performance cars is asking for trouble. In an F1 car they would probably destroy the engine before they got the car to move. It would be no fun in a F1 game having to spend weeks/months learning how to drive.