That's solved the same as elsewhere - with a web front-end. A coupled RSS-feed and web-front would be a fine way to run a nice hybrid between a web-forum and an IRC chat. You'd get Fark threads from hell.
imho, bug patching shouldn't even be mentioned. That's a given. But the rest - yes, when you play on an MMO server, they're providing you with service beyond the original product. New content, GMs, and the server to play on.
Personally, I think MMOs should go the other way - ditch the box-price altogether... but I guess they need that so that EB will put their box on a shelf.
What I find funny is when RPG fans and console nuts pay through the nose for new content (like the extra maps for Halo). On PC FPS games, you have to beat the players off with a stick to keep them from making content for your platform. I couldn't help but giggle when I heard that players would be paying for a couple new Halo maps - compare v. the mind-boggling number of UT2k4 maps freely downloadable online, piles of which are pro-quality.
Now that this is corrected, it does show that the headline is still wrong. Fox is not "to purchase myspace" - which implies the near future. Fox purchased myspace, past-tense.
Heheh, play Liero, or any of its decendants (NiL, LieroXtreme, Soldat), to experience the ultimate extrapolation of ninja-rope combat. Nothing like dropping a nuke into a small room and cabling out through a hole in the ceiling.
Oh, and Bionic Commando rocked. iirc, it was originally released in Japan as some twisted "return of Hitler" game, but for America release they took all the Nazi stuff out. I could be wrong though.
But yeah, grappling hooks are hella-cool in gaming. Too bad Quake 2 mods ruined them for FPS gaming by constantly making them a) pointlessly overpowered air-rails, or b) horribly overcomplicated.
Simple solution: next parent who tries to blame their kid's killing spree on M-rated video games gets hauled in by the FBI for criminal negligence causing death, for putting the material in their kid's hands. It doesn't matter whether or not the kid was actually effected by the game - it's enough that the parent *believed* that the game would turn their child into a serial killer, and let it happen anyways.
Yeah, that was my reaction too: Oh - a drop down. Whee. I'm sure that a small list of wikizens love this news, but it's hardly a big mainstream thing. A better concept would be to work more in back-end approaches, like a more robust protocol than http - for example, URLs that include back-up sources for 404s, or swarmed p2p for websites. Then provide oss plug-ins for major browsers.
Unfortunately, said leash was made of paper. Nobody's arguing that the kids were in violation of school rules when they hacked their own laptops - what we're arguing against is that a) the school is filing felony charges for a discipline issue b) the school is charging the students instead of their security people, and c) there exists felony charges that can be applied to such a minor crime.
I know. The school could have had just as good an effect by suspending those involved briefly and billing their parents for the board tech's time required to re-image the ibooks. Instead, they decide to jump on the "Cybercrime is teh evil!" bandwagon and go apeshit.
What is it that causes legal-types to completely lose their marbles whenever anything high-tech happens? This seems roughly the equivalent of doodling in a textbook (in eraseable pencil) and sharing a Maxim magazine around in the halls. Hardly a felony.
Hmm - consider Google's tendency to lean towards Windows software (remember the Google toolbar?) it would be more likely that they'd base it on Miranda, a cross-network win32 IM who's UI blows GAIM out of the water. Plus, Miranda has a very Firefox-esque feel to it, using a polished, minimalist GUI and a robust plug-in system.
Alternately, they might throw their chips in with Apple, who are doing sexy things with Jabber on the Tiger release.
Because ICQ is a crufty old monster. Most of the people I know who use ICQ haven't used the official client in years - the official ICQ client is the fugliest piece of software I've ever seen. I use Miranda for both MSN and ICQ, but most of my friends have migrated from ICQ to MSN.
I think this is what happened: ICQ took a strangle-hold of Canada. Backwards Americans missed the boat. Then, Mirabilis/AOL ran ICQ down the tubes by bloating it into a monstrous, crufty piece of crap. As a reaction, users migrated to the IM program that was already residing on their computer (and, at the time, launched automatically when you opened OE).
Well, just like reading old Heinlen or Tolkein, it is better to remember the context of the times they were working in - these were new approaches, new ideas that had never before been considered.
Definitely, deminishing returns is a big thing I've noticed. After all, right now the big buzzword on the last generation of engines was normal mapping. Now, I played UT2k4, and I played old UT and Q3 a lot.
90% of the time, UT2k4 looks the same as the old games but with bigger maps (comes from hybridizing the engine into partially landscape-based) and higher detail. I don't see normal maps. Very rarely do I see sexy reflections. In a fast-paced FPS, you get up close enough to really notice the high-res normal-mapped textures on the players maybe once in a blue moon.
I really don't see why any engine needs to move graphically beyond the level of Quake 3 (other than just pushing more polys). I mean, Doom 3's lighting was cute, but the rest of the innovation was mainly noticeable in cutscenes which would just be prerendered on an older engine anyways.
I mean yes - you can see the difference in up-close screenshots in all of these cases.... but in a fast-paced action game, how often are you going to get a long, hard, up close look at an enemy?
No, seriously - all trolling aside, it's a really good paper. I'm a left-wing atheist and I respect it's journalistic integrity. The fact that it has that name was an explicit wish if it's founder, and it really is unrelated to the actual content of the paper.
They've already switched to another strategy - there's crapflood posts that are simply comments taken from other slashdot articles reposted into new ones. The posts are obvious in that they are totally offtopic and unrelated to their parents, but still read like a slashdot comment.
Come on, why not handle this democratically? It would be too technically difficult to weigh the cards properly by expenditures, but you could give 1 cardholder 1 vote and then simply vote dollars into projects. Each year, just have the site accumulate proposals, and then have the cardholders vote dollars into the proposals at the end of the year.
This is strange in the USA? Sorry, but it just looks damn bizarre to a Canuck. Here in Canada, trash and recycling pick up are always a municipal service, and the garbage men will often simply not collect your trash if it's improperly sorted. You can drive it to the dump, but that's municipal too. No worrying about "incentives" or separate fees, it's part of the municipal taxes (and thus the price is geared to income).
Yes, it seems socialist, but when handled efficiently it is far better than clumsy private systems where you have collectors competing and stepping on each other's toes and not wanting to offend customers by requiring that they sort garbage. Some times the customer is wrong, and the government can afford to tell them that. The city doesn't have to pay incentive fees for recycling.
Beer bottles still work by recycling deposit though, as they're recycled through the beer store. The deposit's small so I often just eat the cost and recycle them anyways if I'm feeling lazy - but I don't drink a lot of beer.
Yes, but TV is free too (sort of). How? Advertisements. Just reapply the same business model here. I download episodes of Lost because I came into the TV season at the 20th episode and decided I liked the show and wanted to watch them in order. If a TV company provided decent free torrents with the commercials and advertisements intact, I'd be there in a second - the free torrent sites are flaky. Even if there was a nominal monthly fee for such a service (say, $5 a month to help the servers run), I'd still be up for it. They'd get the same end result - my eyeballs on their ads, but this way I could watch them in order - TV on demand.
Slashdot Mirror
That's solved the same as elsewhere - with a web front-end. A coupled RSS-feed and web-front would be a fine way to run a nice hybrid between a web-forum and an IRC chat. You'd get Fark threads from hell.
is there anyway to use Thunderbird's spam filter to hide spam in a newsgroup yet?
imho, bug patching shouldn't even be mentioned. That's a given. But the rest - yes, when you play on an MMO server, they're providing you with service beyond the original product. New content, GMs, and the server to play on.
Personally, I think MMOs should go the other way - ditch the box-price altogether... but I guess they need that so that EB will put their box on a shelf.
What I find funny is when RPG fans and console nuts pay through the nose for new content (like the extra maps for Halo). On PC FPS games, you have to beat the players off with a stick to keep them from making content for your platform. I couldn't help but giggle when I heard that players would be paying for a couple new Halo maps - compare v. the mind-boggling number of UT2k4 maps freely downloadable online, piles of which are pro-quality.
Now that this is corrected, it does show that the headline is still wrong. Fox is not "to purchase myspace" - which implies the near future. Fox purchased myspace, past-tense.
Heheh, play Liero, or any of its decendants (NiL, LieroXtreme, Soldat), to experience the ultimate extrapolation of ninja-rope combat. Nothing like dropping a nuke into a small room and cabling out through a hole in the ceiling.
Oh, and Bionic Commando rocked. iirc, it was originally released in Japan as some twisted "return of Hitler" game, but for America release they took all the Nazi stuff out. I could be wrong though.
But yeah, grappling hooks are hella-cool in gaming. Too bad Quake 2 mods ruined them for FPS gaming by constantly making them a) pointlessly overpowered air-rails, or b) horribly overcomplicated.
Simple solution: next parent who tries to blame their kid's killing spree on M-rated video games gets hauled in by the FBI for criminal negligence causing death, for putting the material in their kid's hands. It doesn't matter whether or not the kid was actually effected by the game - it's enough that the parent *believed* that the game would turn their child into a serial killer, and let it happen anyways.
Yeah, that was my reaction too: Oh - a drop down. Whee. I'm sure that a small list of wikizens love this news, but it's hardly a big mainstream thing. A better concept would be to work more in back-end approaches, like a more robust protocol than http - for example, URLs that include back-up sources for 404s, or swarmed p2p for websites. Then provide oss plug-ins for major browsers.
Unfortunately, said leash was made of paper. Nobody's arguing that the kids were in violation of school rules when they hacked their own laptops - what we're arguing against is that a) the school is filing felony charges for a discipline issue b) the school is charging the students instead of their security people, and c) there exists felony charges that can be applied to such a minor crime.
I know. The school could have had just as good an effect by suspending those involved briefly and billing their parents for the board tech's time required to re-image the ibooks. Instead, they decide to jump on the "Cybercrime is teh evil!" bandwagon and go apeshit.
What is it that causes legal-types to completely lose their marbles whenever anything high-tech happens? This seems roughly the equivalent of doodling in a textbook (in eraseable pencil) and sharing a Maxim magazine around in the halls. Hardly a felony.
I've always said that for any game developer, the quickest way to the front page:
Sim Auschwitz.
Still, that might cross the line - I have the feeling that stores might not carry such a title.
Hmm - consider Google's tendency to lean towards Windows software (remember the Google toolbar?) it would be more likely that they'd base it on Miranda, a cross-network win32 IM who's UI blows GAIM out of the water. Plus, Miranda has a very Firefox-esque feel to it, using a polished, minimalist GUI and a robust plug-in system.
Alternately, they might throw their chips in with Apple, who are doing sexy things with Jabber on the Tiger release.
Because ICQ is a crufty old monster. Most of the people I know who use ICQ haven't used the official client in years - the official ICQ client is the fugliest piece of software I've ever seen. I use Miranda for both MSN and ICQ, but most of my friends have migrated from ICQ to MSN.
I think this is what happened: ICQ took a strangle-hold of Canada. Backwards Americans missed the boat. Then, Mirabilis/AOL ran ICQ down the tubes by bloating it into a monstrous, crufty piece of crap. As a reaction, users migrated to the IM program that was already residing on their computer (and, at the time, launched automatically when you opened OE).
Yep, I forget who said it first, but I've always remembered this line:
"If I wanted my web browser to make noise, I'd lick my finger and rub it across the screen - it would sound better."
or something similar.
Well, just like reading old Heinlen or Tolkein, it is better to remember the context of the times they were working in - these were new approaches, new ideas that had never before been considered.
Definitely, deminishing returns is a big thing I've noticed. After all, right now the big buzzword on the last generation of engines was normal mapping. Now, I played UT2k4, and I played old UT and Q3 a lot.
90% of the time, UT2k4 looks the same as the old games but with bigger maps (comes from hybridizing the engine into partially landscape-based) and higher detail. I don't see normal maps. Very rarely do I see sexy reflections. In a fast-paced FPS, you get up close enough to really notice the high-res normal-mapped textures on the players maybe once in a blue moon.
I really don't see why any engine needs to move graphically beyond the level of Quake 3 (other than just pushing more polys). I mean, Doom 3's lighting was cute, but the rest of the innovation was mainly noticeable in cutscenes which would just be prerendered on an older engine anyways.
I mean yes - you can see the difference in up-close screenshots in all of these cases.... but in a fast-paced action game, how often are you going to get a long, hard, up close look at an enemy?
The crazy midnight bomber what bombs at midnight?
Come on - the Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas was better.
No, seriously - all trolling aside, it's a really good paper. I'm a left-wing atheist and I respect it's journalistic integrity. The fact that it has that name was an explicit wish if it's founder, and it really is unrelated to the actual content of the paper.
They've already switched to another strategy - there's crapflood posts that are simply comments taken from other slashdot articles reposted into new ones. The posts are obvious in that they are totally offtopic and unrelated to their parents, but still read like a slashdot comment.
Come on, why not handle this democratically? It would be too technically difficult to weigh the cards properly by expenditures, but you could give 1 cardholder 1 vote and then simply vote dollars into projects. Each year, just have the site accumulate proposals, and then have the cardholders vote dollars into the proposals at the end of the year.
Screw all those games then. You want Serious Sam.
Paid for an MS product? Then you've contributed - you've bought 1000th of a programmer's salary.
This is strange in the USA? Sorry, but it just looks damn bizarre to a Canuck. Here in Canada, trash and recycling pick up are always a municipal service, and the garbage men will often simply not collect your trash if it's improperly sorted. You can drive it to the dump, but that's municipal too. No worrying about "incentives" or separate fees, it's part of the municipal taxes (and thus the price is geared to income).
Yes, it seems socialist, but when handled efficiently it is far better than clumsy private systems where you have collectors competing and stepping on each other's toes and not wanting to offend customers by requiring that they sort garbage. Some times the customer is wrong, and the government can afford to tell them that. The city doesn't have to pay incentive fees for recycling.
Beer bottles still work by recycling deposit though, as they're recycled through the beer store. The deposit's small so I often just eat the cost and recycle them anyways if I'm feeling lazy - but I don't drink a lot of beer.
Well, that's not really fair, as mercury has much, much higher toxicity than lead... but not high enough to cover that gap.
Yes, but TV is free too (sort of). How? Advertisements. Just reapply the same business model here. I download episodes of Lost because I came into the TV season at the 20th episode and decided I liked the show and wanted to watch them in order. If a TV company provided decent free torrents with the commercials and advertisements intact, I'd be there in a second - the free torrent sites are flaky. Even if there was a nominal monthly fee for such a service (say, $5 a month to help the servers run), I'd still be up for it. They'd get the same end result - my eyeballs on their ads, but this way I could watch them in order - TV on demand.