Am I the only one who finds the phrasing here deeply hilarious? It sounds like you'd just be walking down the street, and some psycho throws a dirty picture at you, and BAM! Masturbation!
Want to disrupt a PTA meeting? Break in with a few 8x10 glossies. BAM! Masturbation!
Trying to infiltrate a secret base? Just tape pornography all over your body! The instant one of the guards looks at you, BAM! Masturbation!
How well is this working out? I don't have a child (or a wife, or a girlfriend, stfu) but I've been thinking more and more that if I ever do, there's no way I'm pushing them through the same school system that I barely got through intact.
I upgrade when things get too slow. When I do upgrade, I tend to upgrade to the Latest And Greatest, thus ensuring that (1) I get to feel really badass for a few months, and (2) I don't need to upgrade for a long time.
Right now I'm still using my increasingly old (3 years, I think) dualproc Athlon 1800+. I've replaced the graphics card and the second hard drive (the mass storage one, because my old 60gb IBM drives both died horrible deaths). The computer's getting a bit on in years, and I'm starting to feel a bit of pressure in the latest games, but I got through Doom 3 without too much trouble and so I figure I'm good for another year.
I'm definitely waiting until Windows x64 is out, and you can get a dual Opteron board with PCI Express. After that . . . well, we'll see.
Same one. Although they're both semi-dead - zidrav is open-source and rarely modified, and the solar winds clone was abandoned when I realized my code sucked horribly. Way overdesigned. Plus I got a job.:P
And it's impossible to be taught and learn away from school?
I tried college twice. Miserable failure both times. I got sick of the glacially slow classes and the other students (and teachers!) that knew less than I did.
So I found smart people to chat with and got a job where I could be around people who knew what they were doing. That's how I learned, and I make very significant money.
(Which I'm going to give up to start my own company in a few years, but I never said I was smart, just intelligent.)
I don't believe any such OS *can* exist for home users.
Think about it. I send HappyFunScreenSaver.exe to someone. He runs it. The OS locks down and puts it in a chrooted jail, and HappyFunScreenSaver.exe prints "Oh No! It looks like I'm in jail! I can't run from inside jail. If you want to play the HappyFunScreenSaver game, just type in your password so I can get out of jail!"
Note that this "type in your password" option is going to have to exist somewhere in the OS. It's a user OS. The user's going to want to play Half-life 2. The user's going to want to download AIM and ICQ and MSN and Y! and Kazaa Lite. (Can you imagine Kazaa Lite trying to apply for "trusted code" status? Yeah, right.)
So the user types in their password, the OS says "Oh, okay, the user really wants this to have full access", and badabing badaboom, HappyFunScreenSaver.exe (also known as SubSeven Version 2.0) has full access to their system.
I don't care how many warnings you put up. I don't care if you put big red flashing lights on the dialog, or play an air horn, or send small electrical shocks through the mouse if it looks like they'll click on "Authorize". The user wants their Kazaa Lite, and they won't use an OS that restricts that.
And the user wants their HappyFunScreenSaver.
Also, saying that users won't need to patch is just dumb. What if an exploit is discovered that lets HappyFunScreenSaver not need access? Boom! What if we find a hole in the GUI layer, that has the same result? Bammo! What if there's a bug in the web browser, and it puts a program in their startup, or on their desktop, or in their "My Documents", any of which can clearly contain malware? Zappo!
Well, considering that this is spanning about ten years of always having two or three computers around, it's not really that bad of a track record. Things break. That's life.
I mostly care whether stuff breaks if it does so at a bad time, when I don't have a spare. Since I rarely keep spare motherboards around, the recent frying of my mobo is sort of a problem.:P
They shouldn't be necessary, or if they are necessary, it should be in big flashing letters when you start the game. The player shouldn't need to hunt through the documentation to figure out WTF is going on.
And note that I did hunt through the documentation, and somehow didn't see that.:P
"Additionally, newbies are always lost in the first instance they arrive in the city"
Yeah, no kidding. I just tried iCLOD.
Okay. Links on the side of the screen. Let's see what they do.
"Clicking this link costs $5 and uses 5 minutes of time."
Fuck. Wasn't even useful. Let's try this one.
"Clicking this link costs $10 and uses 10 minutes of time."
Fuck! Okay, okay, $10 isn't much and neither is 10 minutes. Let's see what I can do.
Hey, I could get a job here! This one looks neat.
Except it's midnight and it won't let me. Bah. Well, I can get a cup of coffee.
Except, surprise, it's midnight and it won't let me. Grrr. Maybe I should go find a place to sleep. I don't see one here. I'll go explore.
Nope. None here.
Or here.
Or here.
"Superior room". I can't afford that. Let's keep looking.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no (note: there should be about 20 no's here.)
Ah, a hostel! That'll do. Except, wait, I have to be female apparently. Fuck. Keep looking.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no . ..
Ah, a Standard Room. Okay. Better than nothing. Eight hours, gone. Plus three hours spent looking for a place to sleep.
Now I can get a job. I wonder if there were any good jobs that I missed. Well, there's this nice database of places I've visited, that . . . has no job info. What am I supposed to do, write down job stats on a piece of paper? Fuck it, I'll just take the first job I can.
Eight more hours gone.
Woo. I've almost paid for my room. I haven't paid for it entirely. I haven't paid for the $15 of misclicks. I haven't paid for the $60 of upkeep I apparently get every day. And I've still got five hours for the day. I can't sleep, I can't work, and all the interesting places to "play" seem to be closed. Even if I could afford them, and, at this rate, I can't.
I've had three hard drives die (two IBM, one Seagate). I've had two NICs fail, and another onboard ethernet port. I've fried a CPU. I've had one SCSI card stop POSTing, and one sound card stop being recognized. I've lost two CD-R drives, had to replace my computer case once, and had two power supplies die on me. I've given away a pair of semi-functional monitors. I've had two motherboards die on me too - the last one with some very impressive blackening of the power connectors.
Except that Microsoft isn't stupid, and they realize that SCO's case holds absolutely zero merit.
Although I'd love to see Microsoft and IBM battle it out. It'd be like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. We'd have to evacuate Tokyo, of course, but the movie sales alone would make it profitable.
Well, during my time at the beta, I found that while I could *usually* get back to my corpse without a problem, once in a while I took a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a cluster of bad guys. Which was really really painful, and often I either didn't have a teleport item or it hadn't recharged yet.
And you don't move *that* extra fast, it's like twice as fast at most.:P At low levels 5% xp was actually faster to get by fighting things.;)
Well, technically, CoH has a debt limit - I think it's half your total level. Some people end up permanently debt-limit capped because they suck, and/or are scrappers.:) In FFXI it is actually possible to die your way back to lv5 (at which point it stops taking away xp), but in CoH nothing of the sort can happen.
One other issue I see with WoW is that your team members have to sit around waiting for you to run back. In CoH you can be resurrected on the spot, although I'll admit as a healer with Resurrect I might have a skewed view of how common this is.
But yeah, there's a difference. I used to say CoH was the easiest on player death, but it looks like WoW has beaten them.;) I suppose things like this just depend on which playerbase you're trying to attract - some people want a challenge, others want a cakewalk. Neither style is really intrinsically better, they just lend to different game types.
I can't think of any way to combine them in a single game either, because the players who want a challenge are going to want to be more powerful compared to those who are just breezing through. Bah.
Ah, but he's not saying "it should take less time". I would agree that WoW's penalty is quite a bit easier than CoH's. Well . . . most of the time. If you end up dead in a very nasty area it can be easier to resurrect back at the graveyard, and I forget if that's a 5% or a 10% xp penalty. CoH's penalty is a flat 5%. You'd also have to take into account how long a level actually is, of course - that's why the 10% xp penalty in FFXI is so incredibly brutal at high levels. (And why they have high-level raise spells.)
"Pushing F6" - yes, that takes time, but basically none. I realize that these are all "on a scale", so to speak, but my point is that WoW's scale really isn't all that different from CoH's in many cases.
Since, really, if you get killed, you're probably not getting killed in the middle of creatures ten levels lower than you are.
no death penalty other than travelling as a ghost back to your corpse
So, uh. "Getting killed and having to spend time making experience back is bad. But getting killed and having to spend time running back to your corpse is good!"
Both of them take time. How are they fundamentally different?
Would you really want to play a game where death is absolutely meaningless? Just get killed, who cares!
Freenet's a cool idea, but it's too glacially slow. I've been considering setting up eMule-over-Tor at some point. I think it'd be reasonably fast (e.g. only 1/6 as fast as not-over-Tor) and still pretty much 100% secure. Especially once there's a lot of people using it.
As an added bonus, eMule-over-Tor could be added to eMule itself, and you could easily flag which files are "Tor only" and leave the base eMule protocols to handle all the other files.
. . . because it's a lot cheaper than a comparatively-sized TV screen, and I can hook all my game consoles into it.
I suppose I might plug an antenna into it someday.
Maybe.
I've got precisely one friend in the area with a TV. He got it for his PS2. Now he's got a wall projector for his PS2 also, so the TV's turned into a monitor for a computer of his with a TV-out port. It's surprising how good UT2k4 looks on a TV, as long as you don't need to read text.
As a completely unrelated aside, my mp3 player chose this moment to start playing "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Chumbawamba, which has, as part of the bridge, the title and some guy saying "Misinformation!" in the background. I find this highly appropriate.
Yankee's study concluded that, in large enterprises, a significant Linux deployment or total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four times more expensive - and take three times as long to deploy - as an upgrade from one version of Windows to a newer release.
It's more expensive short-term to switch operating systems than to not switch? Shocker.
And nine out of 10 enterprise customers said that such a change wouldn't provide any tangible business gains.
And one of them said it would.
Did any of them say Windows was actually better? I doubt it - if any of them had, they would have mentioned it.
Training for IT employees was significantly higher for Linux than for Windows - on average, 15% more expensive. The reasons: training materials were less readily available, and customers spent more on training to compensate for the lack of internal knowledge about Linux.
There are more Windows admins out there. This surprises who?
So you've got #1, which basically says "If you're already running Windows, stick with it!" You've got #2, which says "If you're already running Windows, stick with it!" And you've got #3, which says "Right now, there's more people running Windows!"
Am I the only one who hears an undertone of "Please, please, for the love of God, keep using Windows"?
Microsoft's marketing, right now, is focused entirely on "Don't switch to Linux". Perhaps this is because many companies still use Windows. Or perhaps it's because they can't come up with plausible reasons to switch *from* Linux. But don't worry - we'll be seeing their first attempts in a year or two, I'll wager.
Slashdot Mirror
"That is, it causes masturbation"
Am I the only one who finds the phrasing here deeply hilarious? It sounds like you'd just be walking down the street, and some psycho throws a dirty picture at you, and BAM! Masturbation!
Want to disrupt a PTA meeting? Break in with a few 8x10 glossies. BAM! Masturbation!
Trying to infiltrate a secret base? Just tape pornography all over your body! The instant one of the guards looks at you, BAM! Masturbation!
Just stay away from mirrors.
How well is this working out? I don't have a child (or a wife, or a girlfriend, stfu) but I've been thinking more and more that if I ever do, there's no way I'm pushing them through the same school system that I barely got through intact.
So how well does the home-schooling thing work?
I upgrade when things get too slow. When I do upgrade, I tend to upgrade to the Latest And Greatest, thus ensuring that (1) I get to feel really badass for a few months, and (2) I don't need to upgrade for a long time.
Right now I'm still using my increasingly old (3 years, I think) dualproc Athlon 1800+. I've replaced the graphics card and the second hard drive (the mass storage one, because my old 60gb IBM drives both died horrible deaths). The computer's getting a bit on in years, and I'm starting to feel a bit of pressure in the latest games, but I got through Doom 3 without too much trouble and so I figure I'm good for another year.
I'm definitely waiting until Windows x64 is out, and you can get a dual Opteron board with PCI Express. After that . . . well, we'll see.
Oh, neat, I remember you :) I always kinda wondered where you'd gone. :P
;) (If you ever were . . . I can't even remember now, heh.)
If you're still doing programming you should come back to #c++
Actually, after dropping out of Oberlin, I went off to a different college and dropped out of it also. ;)
:P
Who is this anyway?
Same one. Although they're both semi-dead - zidrav is open-source and rarely modified, and the solar winds clone was abandoned when I realized my code sucked horribly. Way overdesigned. Plus I got a job. :P
And it's impossible to be taught and learn away from school?
I tried college twice. Miserable failure both times. I got sick of the glacially slow classes and the other students (and teachers!) that knew less than I did.
So I found smart people to chat with and got a job where I could be around people who knew what they were doing. That's how I learned, and I make very significant money.
(Which I'm going to give up to start my own company in a few years, but I never said I was smart, just intelligent.)
I don't believe any such OS *can* exist for home users.
Think about it. I send HappyFunScreenSaver.exe to someone. He runs it. The OS locks down and puts it in a chrooted jail, and HappyFunScreenSaver.exe prints "Oh No! It looks like I'm in jail! I can't run from inside jail. If you want to play the HappyFunScreenSaver game, just type in your password so I can get out of jail!"
Note that this "type in your password" option is going to have to exist somewhere in the OS. It's a user OS. The user's going to want to play Half-life 2. The user's going to want to download AIM and ICQ and MSN and Y! and Kazaa Lite. (Can you imagine Kazaa Lite trying to apply for "trusted code" status? Yeah, right.)
So the user types in their password, the OS says "Oh, okay, the user really wants this to have full access", and badabing badaboom, HappyFunScreenSaver.exe (also known as SubSeven Version 2.0) has full access to their system.
I don't care how many warnings you put up. I don't care if you put big red flashing lights on the dialog, or play an air horn, or send small electrical shocks through the mouse if it looks like they'll click on "Authorize". The user wants their Kazaa Lite, and they won't use an OS that restricts that.
And the user wants their HappyFunScreenSaver.
Also, saying that users won't need to patch is just dumb. What if an exploit is discovered that lets HappyFunScreenSaver not need access? Boom! What if we find a hole in the GUI layer, that has the same result? Bammo! What if there's a bug in the web browser, and it puts a program in their startup, or on their desktop, or in their "My Documents", any of which can clearly contain malware? Zappo!
Well, considering that this is spanning about ten years of always having two or three computers around, it's not really that bad of a track record. Things break. That's life.
:P
I mostly care whether stuff breaks if it does so at a bad time, when I don't have a spare. Since I rarely keep spare motherboards around, the recent frying of my mobo is sort of a problem.
Not just MMORPGs - all games. I pretty much never crack open the manual on any game at this point. :P
They shouldn't be necessary, or if they are necessary, it should be in big flashing letters when you start the game. The player shouldn't need to hunt through the documentation to figure out WTF is going on.
:P
And note that I did hunt through the documentation, and somehow didn't see that.
"Additionally, newbies are always lost in the first instance they arrive in the city"
.
Yeah, no kidding. I just tried iCLOD.
Okay. Links on the side of the screen. Let's see what they do.
"Clicking this link costs $5 and uses 5 minutes of time."
Fuck. Wasn't even useful. Let's try this one.
"Clicking this link costs $10 and uses 10 minutes of time."
Fuck! Okay, okay, $10 isn't much and neither is 10 minutes. Let's see what I can do.
Hey, I could get a job here! This one looks neat.
Except it's midnight and it won't let me. Bah. Well, I can get a cup of coffee.
Except, surprise, it's midnight and it won't let me. Grrr. Maybe I should go find a place to sleep. I don't see one here. I'll go explore.
Nope. None here.
Or here.
Or here.
"Superior room". I can't afford that. Let's keep looking.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no (note: there should be about 20 no's here.)
Ah, a hostel! That'll do. Except, wait, I have to be female apparently. Fuck. Keep looking.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no . .
Ah, a Standard Room. Okay. Better than nothing. Eight hours, gone. Plus three hours spent looking for a place to sleep.
Now I can get a job. I wonder if there were any good jobs that I missed. Well, there's this nice database of places I've visited, that . . . has no job info. What am I supposed to do, write down job stats on a piece of paper? Fuck it, I'll just take the first job I can.
Eight more hours gone.
Woo. I've almost paid for my room. I haven't paid for it entirely. I haven't paid for the $15 of misclicks. I haven't paid for the $60 of upkeep I apparently get every day. And I've still got five hours for the day. I can't sleep, I can't work, and all the interesting places to "play" seem to be closed. Even if I could afford them, and, at this rate, I can't.
This "game" sucks.
I've never had my RAM go bad.
I've had three hard drives die (two IBM, one Seagate). I've had two NICs fail, and another onboard ethernet port. I've fried a CPU. I've had one SCSI card stop POSTing, and one sound card stop being recognized. I've lost two CD-R drives, had to replace my computer case once, and had two power supplies die on me. I've given away a pair of semi-functional monitors. I've had two motherboards die on me too - the last one with some very impressive blackening of the power connectors.
But I've never once had RAM fail.
Maybe I'm just lucky.
I tried emailing them at that address, but the email bounced. I don't think they got it. :(
Oh, wait, there's a police car pulling up outside. Maybe they got it after all. I'll let you know how it turns out.
1: Install every piece of spyware on the planet
:)
Does this *already* sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
Except that Microsoft isn't stupid, and they realize that SCO's case holds absolutely zero merit.
Although I'd love to see Microsoft and IBM battle it out. It'd be like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. We'd have to evacuate Tokyo, of course, but the movie sales alone would make it profitable.
Well, during my time at the beta, I found that while I could *usually* get back to my corpse without a problem, once in a while I took a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a cluster of bad guys. Which was really really painful, and often I either didn't have a teleport item or it hadn't recharged yet.
:P At low levels 5% xp was actually faster to get by fighting things. ;)
And you don't move *that* extra fast, it's like twice as fast at most.
Well, technically, CoH has a debt limit - I think it's half your total level. Some people end up permanently debt-limit capped because they suck, and/or are scrappers. :) In FFXI it is actually possible to die your way back to lv5 (at which point it stops taking away xp), but in CoH nothing of the sort can happen.
;) I suppose things like this just depend on which playerbase you're trying to attract - some people want a challenge, others want a cakewalk. Neither style is really intrinsically better, they just lend to different game types.
One other issue I see with WoW is that your team members have to sit around waiting for you to run back. In CoH you can be resurrected on the spot, although I'll admit as a healer with Resurrect I might have a skewed view of how common this is.
But yeah, there's a difference. I used to say CoH was the easiest on player death, but it looks like WoW has beaten them.
I can't think of any way to combine them in a single game either, because the players who want a challenge are going to want to be more powerful compared to those who are just breezing through. Bah.
Ah, but he's not saying "it should take less time". I would agree that WoW's penalty is quite a bit easier than CoH's. Well . . . most of the time. If you end up dead in a very nasty area it can be easier to resurrect back at the graveyard, and I forget if that's a 5% or a 10% xp penalty. CoH's penalty is a flat 5%. You'd also have to take into account how long a level actually is, of course - that's why the 10% xp penalty in FFXI is so incredibly brutal at high levels. (And why they have high-level raise spells.)
"Pushing F6" - yes, that takes time, but basically none. I realize that these are all "on a scale", so to speak, but my point is that WoW's scale really isn't all that different from CoH's in many cases.
Since, really, if you get killed, you're probably not getting killed in the middle of creatures ten levels lower than you are.
no death penalty other than travelling as a ghost back to your corpse
So, uh. "Getting killed and having to spend time making experience back is bad. But getting killed and having to spend time running back to your corpse is good!"
Both of them take time. How are they fundamentally different?
Would you really want to play a game where death is absolutely meaningless? Just get killed, who cares!
Freenet's a cool idea, but it's too glacially slow. I've been considering setting up eMule-over-Tor at some point. I think it'd be reasonably fast (e.g. only 1/6 as fast as not-over-Tor) and still pretty much 100% secure. Especially once there's a lot of people using it.
As an added bonus, eMule-over-Tor could be added to eMule itself, and you could easily flag which files are "Tor only" and leave the base eMule protocols to handle all the other files.
Argh. Preview doesn't work because I reflexively hit submit.
It's a lot cheaper than a comparatively-sized COMPUTER screen.
There.
Who needs spellcheck, I'd rather have coherency-check.
I'm going to buy a TV in a few months . . .
. . . because it's a lot cheaper than a comparatively-sized TV screen, and I can hook all my game consoles into it.
I suppose I might plug an antenna into it someday.
Maybe.
I've got precisely one friend in the area with a TV. He got it for his PS2. Now he's got a wall projector for his PS2 also, so the TV's turned into a monitor for a computer of his with a TV-out port. It's surprising how good UT2k4 looks on a TV, as long as you don't need to read text.
Who needs TV itself?
As a completely unrelated aside, my mp3 player chose this moment to start playing "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Chumbawamba, which has, as part of the bridge, the title and some guy saying "Misinformation!" in the background. I find this highly appropriate.
Yankee's study concluded that, in large enterprises, a significant Linux deployment or total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four times more expensive - and take three times as long to deploy - as an upgrade from one version of Windows to a newer release.
It's more expensive short-term to switch operating systems than to not switch? Shocker.
And nine out of 10 enterprise customers said that such a change wouldn't provide any tangible business gains.
And one of them said it would.
Did any of them say Windows was actually better? I doubt it - if any of them had, they would have mentioned it.
Training for IT employees was significantly higher for Linux than for Windows - on average, 15% more expensive. The reasons: training materials were less readily available, and customers spent more on training to compensate for the lack of internal knowledge about Linux.
There are more Windows admins out there. This surprises who?
So you've got #1, which basically says "If you're already running Windows, stick with it!" You've got #2, which says "If you're already running Windows, stick with it!" And you've got #3, which says "Right now, there's more people running Windows!"
Am I the only one who hears an undertone of "Please, please, for the love of God, keep using Windows"?
Microsoft's marketing, right now, is focused entirely on "Don't switch to Linux". Perhaps this is because many companies still use Windows. Or perhaps it's because they can't come up with plausible reasons to switch *from* Linux. But don't worry - we'll be seeing their first attempts in a year or two, I'll wager.