Am I missing something? Diablo and Diablo II were fun the first time through, because everything was new. After that first time, you have the oppurtunity to do it all over again, only with monsters that hit harder, are harder to kill, and give more experience for being killed. After the first run, the game becomes nothing more than hack & slash & watching the progress bar.
After that, it becomes a mind-numbing search for runes or ultra-rare items. These things don't have a set way of popping up, so there's no Grand Adventure associated with them. I couldn't tell you how many times that I killed Baal, just looking for good stuff. C'mon... killing Baal is supposed to be the pinnacle of the game, not a chore that you have to do to get good stuff.
I think that a killer thing in MMORPGs would be completely unique items, that would be powerful, but in different ways. They'd be more powerful than any sort of magical weapon, yet they'd all be different. The only way to get them would be to complete a unique quest, something that could only be done once by one (or a group) of players. If it were a group, then there should be some sort of analysis done by the program, and the number of unique items would be given in accordance with the people there, and items would pertain to each individual's skills. If someone else tried to do this unique quest, all they'd see is remains of the completed quest. Those unique items would become something of legend.
Another thing... I would make it insanely difficult to resurrect someone. I would also make it easier to die. It may seem like a stupid idea, since no one likes to die, but it would keep the player base fresh. You wouldn't have 200,000 level gazillion wizards, you'd have maybe a legendary hero that somehow got to level 40 without being killed.
Lastly, I would make age count. Days and nights pass fairly quickly in MMORPGs, so why not age the character? As the character grows older, they'll see a strength gain, and then a strength loss according to the peaking age of that race. RPG's wouldn't be RPG's without having the tired old hero, sitting in the bar, reminiscing on grand adventures... adventures that no one else had had.
That's actually not too bad of an idea, from a teaching / apprenticeship viewpoint. Many older programmers know the ins and outs of code and languages, and are also familiar with the work environment and its hazards. The young ones typically come in four flavors, all ignorant of the environment:
Talented, but arrogant.
Talented, amiable
Dumb as rocks, but arrogant
Dumb as rocks, amiable.
Usually, it's the third one on the list that gets promoted to the PHB position, the fourth one will be let go.
Anyways... We get the old ones to teach the young ones how to really cooperate in the environment, especially with the stupid arrogant SOB PHB's. (There are exceptions to that rule, but few and far between.)
I find it difficult to believe that you actually needed a tape to restore your linux system. If you had played your cards right, you would have had a boot CD (or floppy) that would generate a RAMfs, loading the minimal set of tools needed (ksh/bash, mount, chroot).
All that's necessary then is to mount the disk, chroot to it, check the logs to see what is borked, roll it back, and reboot. You might not even need to do that. I'm betting that in all likelihood, you were running X on that system, and thought that the system was "hosed" because X wasn't working. I only say this becase of your propensity to go to windows from Linux. If you knew any better, you'd just go through your inittab, remove X, boot, and be done with your problem altogether.
Surprise! Servers run perfectly fine without a windowing system.
MS's security updates are available in other locations, which are accessable from other browsers. It sucks because they aren't all in the same place, but I bet it does comply with the terms.
There's another icon on the desktop that opens Internet Explorer, no matter what your default browser is set to. It looks like a big blue "e," and is labelled "Internet Explorer."
Most of the price on the high end cards is hyper-inflated anyways. I remember back when the original GeForce came out, it was listed at $199, or something like that. Now, $199 seems like a reasonable amount to plunk down on a gfx card.
The features offered by the newest $500 card compared to the features of the previous generation's really don't compare to the features that the original GeForce offered over the TNT2 or Rage3D. The price has risen to that extreme because there are suckers out there that are willing to pay that amount of money. I remember buying the original Radeon when it broke into the market for only $140. I thought that was expensive at the time.
If you go by the number of transistors in the chip, and the amount of instructions it supports, yada yada, you still don't have a good excuse. A decent AMD CPU will run you $110, which is an actual processor with the equivalent number of transistors, and way more supported instructions.
The price of high end gfx cards these days is rediculous.
Eh, don't knock.NET unless you know what you are talking about. Most everything in.NET is stateless, unless you actually use it. If you use Visual Studio.NET to design your ASP.NET apps, it will generate the page state as a hidden form element that gets posted. That is how it preserves state.
You have the option of using a state server, with it either being the web server, a separate web server, or the database itself, but sessions are typically minimized (unless you fill them up with garbage yourself.)
I don't mean to be harsh or anything, but I am familiar with both Java and.NET, and I'm not much of a fan of people making suggestions based on their own misconceptions.
Don't forget the true reason! Scaling each part is all nice and stuff, but the really great part abount decoupling is the ability to update different portions at any time without having to break the application while integrating. If you update the database, then all you have to do is update the associated Javabean, without having to break the pages that use that bean.
500,000+ lines, eh? If you had written that same application in Java or VB.NET, how many lines would you have saved?
The GUI builder for VB is severely lacking too. The only option you have of building components is to embed an existing component, and then write some VB glue around it. The other choice you have is to write an ActiveX control in VC++ or Delphi. I bet a majority of that code is spent setting sizes upon a form resize event, making up for form scaling that is standard in every other IDE package, setting on/off values in a grid, binding data to grids, yada yada yada.
If you were working with an OO language with a decent IDE, that program would probably have been cut to around 200,000 lines of code, if not less. Inheritance is a very powerful tool, but it is something that is not understood very well by your standard VB programmer.
Another portion that springs massive amounts of code to life is VB's lack of good error handling. In order to catch errors, you have to use a fricken GOTO statement. Who the heck uses GOTO statements in higher level languages anymore? It's considered bad style for God's sake. The error handling is so bad that once an exception is handled, there's no going back to regular execution within the same function/procedure unless you write it all over again in the handler, or you call the function/procedure recursively.
Yet another problem with VB is the lack of run-time designing. Another is the limit on the number of controls that go on a form. Another is the shitty menu editor. Another is.... You get the picture? VB is not meant to be used in any sort of enterprise environment, but it is sold as such by MS because they make money off of it. There are plenty of PHB suckers out there who glom on to buzzwords. VB was one of the buzzwords.
In the workforce of today, when it comes to tools, you are usually given a choice of one or the other. If you go with one tool for a particular project, you will not be able to go with a different tool for a different project. Standardization is a part of a structured and organized operation, and programming languages is one of those things that get standardized.
I would go with Java, if I had to, just because you have a lot more uses for it. Not only can you write web applications using JSP, EJB, Applets, etc, but you also are allowed to write full blown applications. PHP doesn't give you that option.
heh. With Linux, I can expect a kernel upgrade every few weeks or so.
With Microsoft, I expect one. When I go to Windows Update for the first time, it notices that I have an Athlon, and then downloads the Athlon compiled Kernel.
It's like... Windows: Whoop-dee-fucking-doo, I get the same kernel compiled for the Athlon. With Linux, I get a kernel that's been worked over for security and efficiency, which I can then compile specifically for an Athlon-XP.
heh. All it would have to do is change one or two strings in the registry, such as changing the default path to Internet Explorer to "C:\pro\IE" instead of "C:\program files\I..." You wouldn't believe how many programs depend on that one key.
Changing a key or two wouldn't necessitate a reinstall, but it would generate a whole lot of tech support phone calls.
Not to mention that chipping in to the club is cheap. I pitched in something like $50 a year ago, and I don't even use Mandrake. I did at one point, because I was trying out different distros, but I went with Gentoo.
I'll still chip in money when I can, mostly because I see Mandrake as being the learner's edition, and that the ease of use & install that they promote may help evangelize the Linux desktop. I would for Suse too, but I disagree with their distribution method... They have an ftp with the full install of their distro up, but you have to download every single file. It's very blah.
I would mainly agree, with exception of the 802.11G wireless cards. There are no linux drivers for the (is it broadcom?) chip, and there's been absolutely no news of there being one. It is really frustrating that I need to route my linux machine through a windows machine, in order for it to get to the 'G network.
I'm sure you've all read stories about characters in the AD&D worlds that have small adventures, but don't actually battle things. I would like a game to closely mimic this. Say, a theif would get equivalent experience to killing monsters by picking locks and pockets. The harder / bigger the individual you pick/pickpocket, the more experience you gain.
Another issue that I have with current RPG's is the difficulty of raising a magic based character. Magical ability should be more a mixture of magical ability and experience, and not just dependant on the level. If I practice casting certain spells, I should be able to get more profficient at casting them. I also should gain enough experience to gain levels.
When "training" in the stories of classic RPG's, the sorcerors and wizards hardly see battle, rather they are underlings in a guild-like environment. They run errands, get taught specifics on spells, and learn the patience and fortitude required for magic. Learning magic by killing monsters is rediculous.
I think that the guilds in existance are good, but they need ranks and responsibilities. If you are a grand master, you can expect to spend most of your time teaching apprentices, whereas if you are a journeyman, you can expect to be performing your skill in the field. There could be grading scales for how well your character does in certain areas, all based upon your inborn skills and personal memory (which I think ought to be a fairly random thing). I don't know anyone in real life that got to choose what they would be good at, and what they would suck at. An RPG just lets you lead a different life than the one you live now.
Another good way to gain experience and levels, I think, is to have the moderators recognize how well you play your role. If you play the role of the inexperiences and slightly slow witted blacksmith, than you should be rewarded. I'm tired of people getting into RPG's, just to walk around 5P34K1NG in 13375P33K.
I don't think that.NET is really a MS centric product at this point. If you write code with an ODBC provider in mind, then it will run in Mono or Pnet. In fact, Mono boasts the number of database providers supported, being 11 compared to MS's 4 (plus whatever ODBC drivers exist).
The client side code is cross browser compliant, the tags for every ASP.NET component are "javascript," and not "jscript." Jscript was left behind with ASP.
The.NET framework also has Oracle specific classes in ADO.NET. I don't know where you get your facts, or if you just invent them.
MS has provided Windows developers another option to develop with. It is better than PHP, as it prevents the typical spaghetti mess associated with PHP. It is comparable to JSP, yet JSP is and will always be run out of a virtual machine... which is extra overhead.
With the existance of Mono, dotGNU, and Pnet, Microsoft has lost quite a bit of control of.NET. Sure, they can provide their own libraries (as they do with Windows.Forms), but there's nothing that prevents the OSS community from cloning those libraries with their own implementation. With the.NET alternatives, you have yet another option to go with, which is never a bad thing.
.NET is a great tool to work with, as is Java. There's no reason to shun it, just because it was created by Microsoft. The moment MS submitted a spec for ISO, which is the C# language itself, they opened the doors for everyone to clone everything of theirs. With the way that the compilers work, JIT and whatnot, I wouldn't be surprised if Java took a back seat to.NET (MS or non, doesn't matter) technology in the long run.
Um... everything done with.NET is done with Javascript (EMCA script). VBScript is now dead for browsers. There may be web developers that will explicitly put VBScript in the client page, but the standard is EMCA script, which is an open standard.
Those claims are based on the inaccurate perception that the success of Mono depends on.NET compatibility and that Mono applications are.NET applications.
Actually, the point of the paper is "Those claims are based on the inaccurate perception that the success of Linux depends on Mono and that Linux applications are Mono applications. I've seen discussion here about.NET, and how it really hasn't dented the market just yet.
Linux will carry on whether Mono is successful, shut down, or becomes reticent..NET isn't really making waves, but then again Java hasn't really done that either. Sure, there may be thousands of developers out there that like both C# and Java, but I'd still say that the largest chunk of development is still done in C/C++. I don't think that much is going to change in the near or far future.
The backwards compatibility is binary compatibility, I believe. This means that anything that is compiled for 1.0 will run in 1.1, and to an extent, that which is compiled in 1.1 will run in 1.0.
Your problem was probably caused by Cassini using 1.0 to try running your 1.1 application, where the issue is foward compatility, not backward compatibility. If your Cassini was running 1.1, then it would probably be working with 1.0 apps that you throw at it.
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Am I missing something? Diablo and Diablo II were fun the first time through, because everything was new. After that first time, you have the oppurtunity to do it all over again, only with monsters that hit harder, are harder to kill, and give more experience for being killed. After the first run, the game becomes nothing more than hack & slash & watching the progress bar.
After that, it becomes a mind-numbing search for runes or ultra-rare items. These things don't have a set way of popping up, so there's no Grand Adventure associated with them. I couldn't tell you how many times that I killed Baal, just looking for good stuff. C'mon... killing Baal is supposed to be the pinnacle of the game, not a chore that you have to do to get good stuff.
I think that a killer thing in MMORPGs would be completely unique items, that would be powerful, but in different ways. They'd be more powerful than any sort of magical weapon, yet they'd all be different. The only way to get them would be to complete a unique quest, something that could only be done once by one (or a group) of players. If it were a group, then there should be some sort of analysis done by the program, and the number of unique items would be given in accordance with the people there, and items would pertain to each individual's skills. If someone else tried to do this unique quest, all they'd see is remains of the completed quest. Those unique items would become something of legend.
Another thing... I would make it insanely difficult to resurrect someone. I would also make it easier to die. It may seem like a stupid idea, since no one likes to die, but it would keep the player base fresh. You wouldn't have 200,000 level gazillion wizards, you'd have maybe a legendary hero that somehow got to level 40 without being killed.
Lastly, I would make age count. Days and nights pass fairly quickly in MMORPGs, so why not age the character? As the character grows older, they'll see a strength gain, and then a strength loss according to the peaking age of that race. RPG's wouldn't be RPG's without having the tired old hero, sitting in the bar, reminiscing on grand adventures... adventures that no one else had had.
That's actually not too bad of an idea, from a teaching / apprenticeship viewpoint. Many older programmers know the ins and outs of code and languages, and are also familiar with the work environment and its hazards. The young ones typically come in four flavors, all ignorant of the environment:
Usually, it's the third one on the list that gets promoted to the PHB position, the fourth one will be let go.
Anyways... We get the old ones to teach the young ones how to really cooperate in the environment, especially with the stupid arrogant SOB PHB's. (There are exceptions to that rule, but few and far between.)
Think of the market that they'd have if they ported their crap to Linux!
Oh wait... that would involve a user actively installing it, not automatically whenever they choose "Ok" in a dialogue box.
You can legally disobey a company. I'd say that's a civil version of disobedience. No?
I find it difficult to believe that you actually needed a tape to restore your linux system. If you had played your cards right, you would have had a boot CD (or floppy) that would generate a RAMfs, loading the minimal set of tools needed (ksh/bash, mount, chroot).
All that's necessary then is to mount the disk, chroot to it, check the logs to see what is borked, roll it back, and reboot. You might not even need to do that. I'm betting that in all likelihood, you were running X on that system, and thought that the system was "hosed" because X wasn't working. I only say this becase of your propensity to go to windows from Linux. If you knew any better, you'd just go through your inittab, remove X, boot, and be done with your problem altogether.
Surprise! Servers run perfectly fine without a windowing system.
MS's security updates are available in other locations, which are accessable from other browsers. It sucks because they aren't all in the same place, but I bet it does comply with the terms.
There's another icon on the desktop that opens Internet Explorer, no matter what your default browser is set to. It looks like a big blue "e," and is labelled "Internet Explorer."
This music thing though... that's pretty shady.
Most of the price on the high end cards is hyper-inflated anyways. I remember back when the original GeForce came out, it was listed at $199, or something like that. Now, $199 seems like a reasonable amount to plunk down on a gfx card.
The features offered by the newest $500 card compared to the features of the previous generation's really don't compare to the features that the original GeForce offered over the TNT2 or Rage3D. The price has risen to that extreme because there are suckers out there that are willing to pay that amount of money. I remember buying the original Radeon when it broke into the market for only $140. I thought that was expensive at the time.
If you go by the number of transistors in the chip, and the amount of instructions it supports, yada yada, you still don't have a good excuse. A decent AMD CPU will run you $110, which is an actual processor with the equivalent number of transistors, and way more supported instructions.
The price of high end gfx cards these days is rediculous.
Eh, don't knock .NET unless you know what you are talking about. Most everything in .NET is stateless, unless you actually use it. If you use Visual Studio .NET to design your ASP.NET apps, it will generate the page state as a hidden form element that gets posted. That is how it preserves state.
You have the option of using a state server, with it either being the web server, a separate web server, or the database itself, but sessions are typically minimized (unless you fill them up with garbage yourself.)
I don't mean to be harsh or anything, but I am familiar with both Java and .NET, and I'm not much of a fan of people making suggestions based on their own misconceptions.
Don't forget the true reason! Scaling each part is all nice and stuff, but the really great part abount decoupling is the ability to update different portions at any time without having to break the application while integrating. If you update the database, then all you have to do is update the associated Javabean, without having to break the pages that use that bean.
500,000+ lines, eh? If you had written that same application in Java or VB.NET, how many lines would you have saved?
The GUI builder for VB is severely lacking too. The only option you have of building components is to embed an existing component, and then write some VB glue around it. The other choice you have is to write an ActiveX control in VC++ or Delphi. I bet a majority of that code is spent setting sizes upon a form resize event, making up for form scaling that is standard in every other IDE package, setting on/off values in a grid, binding data to grids, yada yada yada.
If you were working with an OO language with a decent IDE, that program would probably have been cut to around 200,000 lines of code, if not less. Inheritance is a very powerful tool, but it is something that is not understood very well by your standard VB programmer.
Another portion that springs massive amounts of code to life is VB's lack of good error handling. In order to catch errors, you have to use a fricken GOTO statement. Who the heck uses GOTO statements in higher level languages anymore? It's considered bad style for God's sake. The error handling is so bad that once an exception is handled, there's no going back to regular execution within the same function/procedure unless you write it all over again in the handler, or you call the function/procedure recursively.
Yet another problem with VB is the lack of run-time designing. Another is the limit on the number of controls that go on a form. Another is the shitty menu editor. Another is .... You get the picture? VB is not meant to be used in any sort of enterprise environment, but it is sold as such by MS because they make money off of it. There are plenty of PHB suckers out there who glom on to buzzwords. VB was one of the buzzwords.
Fortunately, VB has been put to sleep.
In the workforce of today, when it comes to tools, you are usually given a choice of one or the other. If you go with one tool for a particular project, you will not be able to go with a different tool for a different project. Standardization is a part of a structured and organized operation, and programming languages is one of those things that get standardized.
I would go with Java, if I had to, just because you have a lot more uses for it. Not only can you write web applications using JSP, EJB, Applets, etc, but you also are allowed to write full blown applications. PHP doesn't give you that option.
PHP is great! It serves up pages even during a /. attack... It even serves up the "MySQL died" type pages rather well.
heh. With Linux, I can expect a kernel upgrade every few weeks or so.
With Microsoft, I expect one. When I go to Windows Update for the first time, it notices that I have an Athlon, and then downloads the Athlon compiled Kernel.
It's like ... Windows: Whoop-dee-fucking-doo, I get the same kernel compiled for the Athlon. With Linux, I get a kernel that's been worked over for security and efficiency, which I can then compile specifically for an Athlon-XP.
I was more referring to the Broadcom chip, as I stated in the original post. Thanks for the link though.
The 16% is people that have changed from "I'm not going to use Linux plans" to "I'm going to use Linux plans."
There's always a positive spin to things.
heh. All it would have to do is change one or two strings in the registry, such as changing the default path to Internet Explorer to "C:\pro\IE" instead of "C:\program files\I..." You wouldn't believe how many programs depend on that one key.
Changing a key or two wouldn't necessitate a reinstall, but it would generate a whole lot of tech support phone calls.
Gates probably hates them because he thinks that they wrote his biography 1970 years in advance.
Not to mention that chipping in to the club is cheap. I pitched in something like $50 a year ago, and I don't even use Mandrake. I did at one point, because I was trying out different distros, but I went with Gentoo.
I'll still chip in money when I can, mostly because I see Mandrake as being the learner's edition, and that the ease of use & install that they promote may help evangelize the Linux desktop. I would for Suse too, but I disagree with their distribution method... They have an ftp with the full install of their distro up, but you have to download every single file. It's very blah.
I would mainly agree, with exception of the 802.11G wireless cards. There are no linux drivers for the (is it broadcom?) chip, and there's been absolutely no news of there being one. It is really frustrating that I need to route my linux machine through a windows machine, in order for it to get to the 'G network.
I'm sure you've all read stories about characters in the AD&D worlds that have small adventures, but don't actually battle things. I would like a game to closely mimic this. Say, a theif would get equivalent experience to killing monsters by picking locks and pockets. The harder / bigger the individual you pick/pickpocket, the more experience you gain.
Another issue that I have with current RPG's is the difficulty of raising a magic based character. Magical ability should be more a mixture of magical ability and experience, and not just dependant on the level. If I practice casting certain spells, I should be able to get more profficient at casting them. I also should gain enough experience to gain levels.
When "training" in the stories of classic RPG's, the sorcerors and wizards hardly see battle, rather they are underlings in a guild-like environment. They run errands, get taught specifics on spells, and learn the patience and fortitude required for magic. Learning magic by killing monsters is rediculous.
I think that the guilds in existance are good, but they need ranks and responsibilities. If you are a grand master, you can expect to spend most of your time teaching apprentices, whereas if you are a journeyman, you can expect to be performing your skill in the field. There could be grading scales for how well your character does in certain areas, all based upon your inborn skills and personal memory (which I think ought to be a fairly random thing). I don't know anyone in real life that got to choose what they would be good at, and what they would suck at. An RPG just lets you lead a different life than the one you live now.
Another good way to gain experience and levels, I think, is to have the moderators recognize how well you play your role. If you play the role of the inexperiences and slightly slow witted blacksmith, than you should be rewarded. I'm tired of people getting into RPG's, just to walk around 5P34K1NG in 13375P33K.
I don't think that .NET is really a MS centric product at this point. If you write code with an ODBC provider in mind, then it will run in Mono or Pnet. In fact, Mono boasts the number of database providers supported, being 11 compared to MS's 4 (plus whatever ODBC drivers exist).
The client side code is cross browser compliant, the tags for every ASP.NET component are "javascript," and not "jscript." Jscript was left behind with ASP.
The .NET framework also has Oracle specific classes in ADO.NET. I don't know where you get your facts, or if you just invent them.
MS has provided Windows developers another option to develop with. It is better than PHP, as it prevents the typical spaghetti mess associated with PHP. It is comparable to JSP, yet JSP is and will always be run out of a virtual machine... which is extra overhead.
With the existance of Mono, dotGNU, and Pnet, Microsoft has lost quite a bit of control of .NET. Sure, they can provide their own libraries (as they do with Windows.Forms), but there's nothing that prevents the OSS community from cloning those libraries with their own implementation. With the .NET alternatives, you have yet another option to go with, which is never a bad thing.
.NET is a great tool to work with, as is Java. There's no reason to shun it, just because it was created by Microsoft. The moment MS submitted a spec for ISO, which is the C# language itself, they opened the doors for everyone to clone everything of theirs. With the way that the compilers work, JIT and whatnot, I wouldn't be surprised if Java took a back seat to .NET (MS or non, doesn't matter) technology in the long run.
Um... everything done with .NET is done with Javascript (EMCA script). VBScript is now dead for browsers. There may be web developers that will explicitly put VBScript in the client page, but the standard is EMCA script, which is an open standard.
Those claims are based on the inaccurate perception that the success of Mono depends on .NET compatibility and that Mono applications are .NET applications.
Actually, the point of the paper is "Those claims are based on the inaccurate perception that the success of Linux depends on Mono and that Linux applications are Mono applications. I've seen discussion here about .NET, and how it really hasn't dented the market just yet.
Linux will carry on whether Mono is successful, shut down, or becomes reticent. .NET isn't really making waves, but then again Java hasn't really done that either. Sure, there may be thousands of developers out there that like both C# and Java, but I'd still say that the largest chunk of development is still done in C/C++. I don't think that much is going to change in the near or far future.
What, were you bourne in a C-shell? 0 is success, non-zero is failure (plus or minix, doesn't matter).
The backwards compatibility is binary compatibility, I believe. This means that anything that is compiled for 1.0 will run in 1.1, and to an extent, that which is compiled in 1.1 will run in 1.0.
Your problem was probably caused by Cassini using 1.0 to try running your 1.1 application, where the issue is foward compatility, not backward compatibility. If your Cassini was running 1.1, then it would probably be working with 1.0 apps that you throw at it.