Not directly; the real world cash values of ISK and property in-game is derived from trades between players, for the most part. CCP's primary income comes from subscriptions and novelty items sales, much like WoW. (It's just that CCP accepts in-game currency as a subscription fee proxy, which makes it seems like CCP is getting a windfall from value destruction, when it’s simply value they already received a long time ago.)
I'm also seeing similar book apps in the App Store which give the player a chance to pick starting stats to influence gameplay progression. (One I found involved the player RPing as a dragon, hoarding treasure and defending territory from other dragons and human kings and wizards. I forgot the name, though.)
Your post is why I stopped posting to Slashdot and have focused on more modern sites like Hacker News. You deserve a +5, Informative, but I don't participate here enough to get mod points.
The rationale for giving the the boxes wasn't to support an advertiser's market base, but to insure the government had guaranteed viewer capacity when mandating nationwide broadcasts like emergency messages or State of the Union addresses and so on. It's not just the advertisers who have a vested interest in having everyone watch TV...
> Seriously though, attempting to legitimize them as "Graphic Novels" is just spin
Actually, this was invented as a form of spin. In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he illustrates how Will Eisner's early attempts to make serious fare (like A Contract With God) would be marginalized, despite being one of the first comics long enough to be a book, rather than a magazine, which most comics were up until then.
The amount of work involved in upgrading a Mac has, usually, been excessive.
This has only been true historically with the consumer models. The models that Apple designates for "professional" usually upgrade much easier. My current G5 has full access from a side door (as well as the current Mac Pro line) and even my old LC and 4400 had easily accessible PDS and PCI slots when the case is slid off. (My iMac G4 was the only machine I had I couldn't upgrade myself.) It's just that, as the "ease of use" brand in the industry, Apple's more famous machines are the all-in-one and laptop units that have the more cramped assembly and design.
It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied. Economics - a far softer science with a (so far) vastly greater impact on human society - gets a staggering amount of leeway by comparison.
Because of its scope and visibility, disciplines like Economics can get away with the Big Lie effect. Climatology, which is more subtle and relatively young, suffers from the Cassandra problem instead. Sad, but true...
Notice that including the article text, the linked comments there and the comments here, you are the only one who explicitly referred to the original documentation that spelled out this tradition: the RFCs. Both RFC 1178 (which is only mentioned as a tag on the article) and your quoting 2100 are the only references to this. It seems most 'Net users don't have a sense of history any more... I haven't even heard much in the way of the creation of now RFC lately.
Oh my goodness, did they really write it in assembler? I always imagined they already used high-level languages at that time.
I don't remember high level languages being considered "proper" for commercial development until the late 80's at the earliest. When the Mac was first introduced in the mid-80's, it was still considered important to write all the system and OS code in 68k assembler, with apps only begrudgingly being written in Pascal. And on the PC side, games and certain networking heavy apps were still written in x86 at late as the mid-90's. It was only with C, which was originally considered a "high level assembler" did many development houses consider such programming "real" development. (And even into the late 90's, I still saw inline assembler used in places for "performance reasons," an idea not taken seriously anymore by most due to how compilers have advanced in recent years.)
however I don't understand how my television can't compensate for that and limit accordingly.
Some can and do. My parents (back when I was in college) had a nice feature on their TV set called "Smart Sound" that did do normalization across TV channels and commercial breaks just fine and we always left it on. However, apparently it wasn't a popular enough (or noticed enough) feature of TVs to stay on the market, as both I and my parents have gone through 3-4 sets since then, and we haven't seen a similar feature since.
So are you telling me there are no tentacles, no schoolgirls, and no bulging muscles?
And why do I want to watch this again?
Well, there are the space ninjas as well as a French stewardess character...
Despite the cerebral nature of the series, there are plenty of action sequences towards the end of its run, as a "space terrorism" plot kicks in. (With a surprising conclusion which would offend the sensibilities of American neo-cons.)
Yeah. Pity it came out in the States just as the anime fad was dying down. Not enough people saw it, and Bandai was forced to scale back on the production values of the DVDs mid-run. (The DVDs don't look good on the shelf as a result.) It didn't help that many discs were scratched and the plastic sleeve was shrinked too small for the boxes. The show was the "2001" of anime and it deserved a better fate than it got. (Did they even make a box set for it?)
I'm surprised no wargaming types suggested this one; I sunk almost 200 hours into this thing. Even though the storyline had less of The Funny that the first game was infamous for, the game had a somewhat richer and more approachable system than the first game did. Much of the "secret" content is somewhat more obtainable than in the first game. (Though I admit unlocking the Land of Carnage was a PITA.)
That said, I still think Nippon Ichi games are grossly underdocumented in their instruction manuals... There's usually a lot of stuff in the game that's not explained, pretty much forcing players to use cheat sheets. (Paper Mario, it isn't.)
But it's actually a pretty good way to hide malicious code.
Yup, the only time in the Mac's history where viruses were a concern (the System 6 era, thereabouts) was due to this mechanism. The Finder used a resource file to maintain app bindings, and many UI definition resources (like MDEF and WDEF) contained executable code to draw the UI. Apple mostly patched this problem by moving the Finder to using a database instead a resource file in System 7.
One thing I'd like to see from Apple is denying code execution from the resource fork. There's no legitimate reason to have code from there executing at this point.
On Intel Macs, sure. But executable code resources are still needed by the Classic layer on PPC systems, which is the only way to run 68k-era apps under OS X. (Yes, they're still out there... mostly one-shot, vertical market stuff.)
I don't know much about how NT's streams work, but it sounds like they could be arbitrarily many from what you're saying. On the Mac, there are two: data and resource.
HFS+ supports arbitrary forks just like NTFS's streams, but I have yet to encounter a Mac app that used one.
Apple is trying very hard to phase out the resource fork completely because it screws with interoperability.
Resource data can be "flattened" to provide interoperability, especially combined with OS X's "bundle folder" concept. However, Apple shot themselves in the foot trying to deprecate both file metadata (read, creator and type codes) and resource forks at the same time soon after Jobs' return. This lead to a backlash from both users and developers, with them accusing Apple of trying to throw away the baby (metadata) with the bathwater (legacy data storage). Even to this day, many users mistakenly think that the Mac OS uses the resource fork to store creator, type, Finder info and rich date stamp information, when the only relationship the two concepts had with each other was removed by System 7 during the Finder resource-to-database transition.
Now the resource fork is mainly used for storing custom icons on files.
And custom metadata for workflows (like older version control, IPTC keywords, window placement, toolbar visiblity, etc), especially by apps like Photoshop and Finder's Folder Actions support, IIRC. Hopefully these final uses will go away when Spotlight finally becomes ready for primetime and acts more like BeOS supposedly did. As much as I think the resource fork was an elegant solution to many file system problems, I doesn't scale well on modern systems (24-bit offsets, live memory address writing) and really should be replaced by a universal container format or micro-database system.
But the original Macintosh File System wasn't. It allowed the full 255, but the Finder limited it to 63. Now what do you look like? (-;
Seriously, though, during the OS 7 era, it was not uncommon to write something like that through some kind of 1337 abbreviation or MacRoman character substitution. I used to use "lower case delta" for documentation and read me files, "latin small f with hook" for folder names, and "Pi" for makefiles/projects. This originated from similar shortcuts in the command-line-like scripting windows used in MPW.
And why doesn't/. support HTML entites or Unicode yet? Hmmm...
It's about time the issue of captioning is getting press. I'm hearing-impaired and captions are vital to me.
What's tragic is that people like you should not have been suffering in the first place. Voice-only communication in games is a recent phenomenon. For most of it's history, games required sub-titles since that was all there was room for! None of this fancy-smancy voice MP3/PCM/WAV data takes all sorts of migs and megs of memories that cost mucho dinero to produce.
I can hear just fine, but I'm now surprised that I'm apparently a minority when it comes to turning on subtitles in my games. Even heavily voice acted games like Final Fantasy X & X-2 benefit from subtitles (there's even a mechanic that depends on it) and for other games like Dark Alliance, I leave titles on so I don't have to worry about waiting for dialog to finish before I skip ahead to the next bit to text...
The Hollywood-ization of video gaming appears to have become a Devil's Bargain with regard to the medium's recent success...
I was actually hoping that the move to Intel was going to mean lower hardware prices now that under the hood there is no discernible difference in parts from bargain basement PCs.
That was never actually a possibility. The typical G4 or G5 costs about half the typical cost of a Pentium 4 or Core. The PowerPC line of processors evolved into being "embedded" style processors instead of "general purpose" processors, which was part of the reason Apple jumped ship. There are more PowerPC processors installed in cars (and now, video game consoles) than were ever installed in Macs.
Besides, even now, Apple Intel system still use "unorthodox" hardware since they use EFI boot chips instead of BIOS, so they still require custom hardware development. (EFI won't be common on the PC side until Vista finally ships.)
This card based arcade game system blows, sure it's good for the arcade,
Believe it or not, the card system isn't just to get the $20 up front. In many municipalities (like Schuamburg, IL, which has a GW location), there are laws on the books to strongly curtail coin-operated machinery. Originally written to restrict underage access to coin-op cigarette machines, they were heavily re-inforced in the early 80's as a moral panic about video games and juvinile deliquency (first of many )-:) spread through the popular consciousness. I first heard about this because Schuamburg used to also have a card reader arcade in Woodfield as part of the defunct Mars 2112 restaurant.
Well, I used to. A few years ago, when I was still selling/buying internationally on eBay, I was been the "victim" of Customs one too many times. Since most of my trading on eBay is for media and similar small stuff, they tend to be more easily searched/opened by Customs since there's an active piracy/counterfeiting market in such goods. Even though I've only ever bid/sold legit goods, they still tend to be intercepted by ignorant or undertrained package checkers. I have received empty packing envelopes and have had my goods stopped at the border (requiring the recipient to visit a Customs office before release) one too many times.
And this was all before 9/11, I imagine things have only gotten worse since then with the more paranoid "mail bomb" checking that goes on now... I'm not even shipping to or buying from Canada, anymore.
I have to say this is a strange article. Most of that conduct seems pretty reasonable and normal.
It seems to me that you missed the point of the article. To a person from 30-40 years ago, the e-mail address would look like some secret code made by the governemnt, the iPods and cellphones would look like alien brainwashing devices, and the groups of smokers would look like impromptu public demonstrations by Communists or Anarchists.
That said, this phenomenon is reciprocal. Think of how dated past notions of "futuristic" technology (think, Buck Rogers or the first Star Trek series) seem nowadays, and the strange sense of fashion people from the 60's and 70's have compared to us.
Anybody remember the book where right at the beginning it told you that the good ending was on
That one would be Inside UFO 54-40, which was my first introduction to the series. As you might guess, I really skewed my perception of the franchise. I did get more into the Lone Wolf books mentioned elsewhere under this article; I completed volumes 1 through 12 before not being able to find the books locally anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Not directly; the real world cash values of ISK and property in-game is derived from trades between players, for the most part. CCP's primary income comes from subscriptions and novelty items sales, much like WoW. (It's just that CCP accepts in-game currency as a subscription fee proxy, which makes it seems like CCP is getting a windfall from value destruction, when it’s simply value they already received a long time ago.)
Project Aon is an effort to post the old Lone Wolf game books to the webpage medium...
http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home
I'm also seeing similar book apps in the App Store which give the player a chance to pick starting stats to influence gameplay progression. (One I found involved the player RPing as a dragon, hoarding treasure and defending territory from other dragons and human kings and wizards. I forgot the name, though.)
Your post is why I stopped posting to Slashdot and have focused on more modern sites like Hacker News. You deserve a +5, Informative, but I don't participate here enough to get mod points.
Sarcasm failure detected, Keptin!
Behold, the mighty Whoosh!
The rationale for giving the the boxes wasn't to support an advertiser's market base, but to insure the government had guaranteed viewer capacity when mandating nationwide broadcasts like emergency messages or State of the Union addresses and so on. It's not just the advertisers who have a vested interest in having everyone watch TV...
> Seriously though, attempting to legitimize them as "Graphic Novels" is just spin
Actually, this was invented as a form of spin. In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he illustrates how Will Eisner's early attempts to make serious fare (like A Contract With God) would be marginalized, despite being one of the first comics long enough to be a book, rather than a magazine, which most comics were up until then.
The amount of work involved in upgrading a Mac has, usually, been excessive.
This has only been true historically with the consumer models. The models that Apple designates for "professional" usually upgrade much easier. My current G5 has full access from a side door (as well as the current Mac Pro line) and even my old LC and 4400 had easily accessible PDS and PCI slots when the case is slid off. (My iMac G4 was the only machine I had I couldn't upgrade myself.) It's just that, as the "ease of use" brand in the industry, Apple's more famous machines are the all-in-one and laptop units that have the more cramped assembly and design.
It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied. Economics - a far softer science with a (so far) vastly greater impact on human society - gets a staggering amount of leeway by comparison.
Because of its scope and visibility, disciplines like Economics can get away with the Big Lie effect. Climatology, which is more subtle and relatively young, suffers from the Cassandra problem instead. Sad, but true...
Notice that including the article text, the linked comments there and the comments here, you are the only one who explicitly referred to the original documentation that spelled out this tradition: the RFCs. Both RFC 1178 (which is only mentioned as a tag on the article) and your quoting 2100 are the only references to this. It seems most 'Net users don't have a sense of history any more... I haven't even heard much in the way of the creation of now RFC lately.
Oh my goodness, did they really write it in assembler? I always imagined they already used high-level languages at that time.
I don't remember high level languages being considered "proper" for commercial development until the late 80's at the earliest. When the Mac was first introduced in the mid-80's, it was still considered important to write all the system and OS code in 68k assembler, with apps only begrudgingly being written in Pascal. And on the PC side, games and certain networking heavy apps were still written in x86 at late as the mid-90's. It was only with C, which was originally considered a "high level assembler" did many development houses consider such programming "real" development. (And even into the late 90's, I still saw inline assembler used in places for "performance reasons," an idea not taken seriously anymore by most due to how compilers have advanced in recent years.)
Well I'll be snookered... it's true!
http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=hormone+imbalance&t=1000
however I don't understand how my television can't compensate for that and limit accordingly.
Some can and do. My parents (back when I was in college) had a nice feature on their TV set called "Smart Sound" that did do normalization across TV channels and commercial breaks just fine and we always left it on. However, apparently it wasn't a popular enough (or noticed enough) feature of TVs to stay on the market, as both I and my parents have gone through 3-4 sets since then, and we haven't seen a similar feature since.
Well, there are the space ninjas as well as a French stewardess character...
Despite the cerebral nature of the series, there are plenty of action sequences towards the end of its run, as a "space terrorism" plot kicks in. (With a surprising conclusion which would offend the sensibilities of American neo-cons.)
Sure, space garbage collectors sounds a little esoteric, but the concept was enough to make a manga and anime out of it.
I'm surprised no wargaming types suggested this one; I sunk almost 200 hours into this thing. Even though the storyline had less of The Funny that the first game was infamous for, the game had a somewhat richer and more approachable system than the first game did. Much of the "secret" content is somewhat more obtainable than in the first game. (Though I admit unlocking the Land of Carnage was a PITA.)
That said, I still think Nippon Ichi games are grossly underdocumented in their instruction manuals... There's usually a lot of stuff in the game that's not explained, pretty much forcing players to use cheat sheets. (Paper Mario, it isn't.)
But it's actually a pretty good way to hide malicious code.
Yup, the only time in the Mac's history where viruses were a concern (the System 6 era, thereabouts) was due to this mechanism. The Finder used a resource file to maintain app bindings, and many UI definition resources (like MDEF and WDEF) contained executable code to draw the UI. Apple mostly patched this problem by moving the Finder to using a database instead a resource file in System 7.
One thing I'd like to see from Apple is denying code execution from the resource fork. There's no legitimate reason to have code from there executing at this point.
On Intel Macs, sure. But executable code resources are still needed by the Classic layer on PPC systems, which is the only way to run 68k-era apps under OS X. (Yes, they're still out there... mostly one-shot, vertical market stuff.)
I don't know much about how NT's streams work, but it sounds like they could be arbitrarily many from what you're saying. On the Mac, there are two: data and resource.
HFS+ supports arbitrary forks just like NTFS's streams, but I have yet to encounter a Mac app that used one.
Apple is trying very hard to phase out the resource fork completely because it screws with interoperability.
Resource data can be "flattened" to provide interoperability, especially combined with OS X's "bundle folder" concept. However, Apple shot themselves in the foot trying to deprecate both file metadata (read, creator and type codes) and resource forks at the same time soon after Jobs' return. This lead to a backlash from both users and developers, with them accusing Apple of trying to throw away the baby (metadata) with the bathwater (legacy data storage). Even to this day, many users mistakenly think that the Mac OS uses the resource fork to store creator, type, Finder info and rich date stamp information, when the only relationship the two concepts had with each other was removed by System 7 during the Finder resource-to-database transition.
Now the resource fork is mainly used for storing custom icons on files.
And custom metadata for workflows (like older version control, IPTC keywords, window placement, toolbar visiblity, etc), especially by apps like Photoshop and Finder's Folder Actions support, IIRC. Hopefully these final uses will go away when Spotlight finally becomes ready for primetime and acts more like BeOS supposedly did. As much as I think the resource fork was an elegant solution to many file system problems, I doesn't scale well on modern systems (24-bit offsets, live memory address writing) and really should be replaced by a universal container format or micro-database system.
HFS was limited to 31 characters.
But the original Macintosh File System wasn't. It allowed the full 255, but the Finder limited it to 63. Now what do you look like? (-;
Seriously, though, during the OS 7 era, it was not uncommon to write something like that through some kind of 1337 abbreviation or MacRoman character substitution. I used to use "lower case delta" for documentation and read me files, "latin small f with hook" for folder names, and "Pi" for makefiles/projects. This originated from similar shortcuts in the command-line-like scripting windows used in MPW.
And why doesn't /. support HTML entites or Unicode yet? Hmmm...
It's about time the issue of captioning is getting press. I'm hearing-impaired and captions are vital to me.
What's tragic is that people like you should not have been suffering in the first place. Voice-only communication in games is a recent phenomenon. For most of it's history, games required sub-titles since that was all there was room for! None of this fancy-smancy voice MP3/PCM/WAV data takes all sorts of migs and megs of memories that cost mucho dinero to produce.
I can hear just fine, but I'm now surprised that I'm apparently a minority when it comes to turning on subtitles in my games. Even heavily voice acted games like Final Fantasy X & X-2 benefit from subtitles (there's even a mechanic that depends on it) and for other games like Dark Alliance, I leave titles on so I don't have to worry about waiting for dialog to finish before I skip ahead to the next bit to text...
The Hollywood-ization of video gaming appears to have become a Devil's Bargain with regard to the medium's recent success...
I was actually hoping that the move to Intel was going to mean lower hardware prices now that under the hood there is no discernible difference in parts from bargain basement PCs.
That was never actually a possibility. The typical G4 or G5 costs about half the typical cost of a Pentium 4 or Core. The PowerPC line of processors evolved into being "embedded" style processors instead of "general purpose" processors, which was part of the reason Apple jumped ship. There are more PowerPC processors installed in cars (and now, video game consoles) than were ever installed in Macs.
Besides, even now, Apple Intel system still use "unorthodox" hardware since they use EFI boot chips instead of BIOS, so they still require custom hardware development. (EFI won't be common on the PC side until Vista finally ships.)
This card based arcade game system blows, sure it's good for the arcade,
Believe it or not, the card system isn't just to get the $20 up front. In many municipalities (like Schuamburg, IL, which has a GW location), there are laws on the books to strongly curtail coin-operated machinery. Originally written to restrict underage access to coin-op cigarette machines, they were heavily re-inforced in the early 80's as a moral panic about video games and juvinile deliquency (first of many )-:) spread through the popular consciousness. I first heard about this because Schuamburg used to also have a card reader arcade in Woodfield as part of the defunct Mars 2112 restaurant.
Please, think in the other 95% of the world.
Well, I used to. A few years ago, when I was still selling/buying internationally on eBay, I was been the "victim" of Customs one too many times. Since most of my trading on eBay is for media and similar small stuff, they tend to be more easily searched/opened by Customs since there's an active piracy/counterfeiting market in such goods. Even though I've only ever bid/sold legit goods, they still tend to be intercepted by ignorant or undertrained package checkers. I have received empty packing envelopes and have had my goods stopped at the border (requiring the recipient to visit a Customs office before release) one too many times.
And this was all before 9/11, I imagine things have only gotten worse since then with the more paranoid "mail bomb" checking that goes on now... I'm not even shipping to or buying from Canada, anymore.
I have to say this is a strange article. Most of that conduct seems pretty reasonable and normal.
It seems to me that you missed the point of the article. To a person from 30-40 years ago, the e-mail address would look like some secret code made by the governemnt, the iPods and cellphones would look like alien brainwashing devices, and the groups of smokers would look like impromptu public demonstrations by Communists or Anarchists.
That said, this phenomenon is reciprocal. Think of how dated past notions of "futuristic" technology (think, Buck Rogers or the first Star Trek series) seem nowadays, and the strange sense of fashion people from the 60's and 70's have compared to us.
That one would be Inside UFO 54-40, which was my first introduction to the series. As you might guess, I really skewed my perception of the franchise. I did get more into the Lone Wolf books mentioned elsewhere under this article; I completed volumes 1 through 12 before not being able to find the books locally anymore.
So, in other words, it's all over the rumor sites then? (-;