Doesn't "Google" use as a verb dilute its trademark value? (Something like that happened to Xerox)
Well, with Xerox, weren't there several other companies making copiers? So "making a xerox" might have meant using an Ikon copying machine, so Xerox looses some association as a brand.
However, "to Google" means to go to the Google search engine and look something up. You wouldn't go to any other search engine and "google" somebody, I don't think. Hence, the verb is still tied directly to their "product", and supports their brand.
But which console give you so much possibilites (just in games!) as PC?
This is exactly why PC games sales will never go completely zero. I use my PC for many things OTHER than games. Download/play music, video encoding/editing, email/web, managing my Linux servers... and games. My machine is a beast ANYWAY, because I use it for everything. Making it also a gaming beast just cost me a video card, which (as is so often pointed out) set me back about as much as a console.
So, that's the choice. Want a gaming-only machine? Console's your obvious choice, for exactly the reasons the pro-console people site. Want a multi-purpose computer to do many things AND kick-ass games? There's your PC gamer. There will always be a market.
...but you probably don't appreciate the production costs that go into games.
Amen to that. I've been making a map for Warcraft3 for the past week, and it's insane how complicated a good map is, and I've been leeching much of the material in mine from another. The game as shipped comes with something like fifty complete maps, all beautifully designed and complex, and all the hundreds of units that populate them.
And that doesn't even touch the actual programming of the game itself!
I've come to the conclusion that when a great game sets me back $50, we're getting of really, really lucky.
I can tell you exactly what info the cops want. They want whatever they can get their hands on that will enable them to go home alive after their shift and be with their families.
I can just hear all the people reading this and sniggering. After all, we all know that all cops are assholes and power-mongers, don't we?
All you people who are thinking that, I suggest to take a moment and get to know your local law enforcement. Go on a few ride-alongs with different officers, even check out the local Border Patrol if there is such a thing near you. I worked with the police when I was in college, and the parent post is exactly dead on.
The vast majority of officers are just people like you and me, trynig to enforce the law to keep everybody safe and, at the same time, keep themselves safe. You'll be astounded at what lengths these people go to to try and ensure the safety of everybody, including criminals.
Ever wonder why low-speed pursuits can last for hours? It's because they don't want to blow out the tires and risk harming the passengers or bystanders. Ever wonder why officers will risk their own lives to put an end to a high-speed pursuit? It's because they don't want the car they're chasing, or their own, to crash into an innocent bystander.
The vast majority of law enforcement professionals are good, decent, upstanding citizens who care deeply about our laws, our society, and the people who live in it. In most cases, they actually do deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Isn't a gaming console, in essence, a system tweaked for gaming?
Yes, exactly. However, it's so tweaked that you can do nothing BUT gaming on it. With a PC, even when it's tweaked for gaming, it'll still let me play some music while I post on Slashdot, or whatever.
Those programs are unistalling a security program from your computer so that their spyware will work. Sony is just not letting you play
their game if you have a known cheat tool running on your computer. Huge difference.
Two things.
One, it is different, but not because of why you seem to think it's different. The difference is the spyware programs uninstall things on your system, and EQ might just refuse to run if it detects ShowEQ running. The first is badness, the second is Sony's right to design the game as they choose. The fact that in one case it's a "security program" and the other is a "cheating program" makes no difference at all.
Two, after I buy it, the client isn't really theirs anymore, it's mine. If I want to hex dump it or sniff packets or RAM, it's completely my business. If they want their servers to behave one way or another (ala the Xbox Live situation), that's completely their right. But what happens on my computer and my network is not up to Sony to approve or disapprove.
They can sell me whatever they want, and I can modify it however I want, and their servers can do whatever they want to allow me to connect or not. That's how it lies.
I'm completely at a loss to understand what you mean. When you're opening tabs with different pages in them, you're by definition using a single window. What plug-in are you referring to, and how can I produce this effect to see for myself? Thanks.
It's a completely new engine that's been in development for a long time now. This is not EQ2... this is the good stuff from the first generation of MMORPGs, with a lot of the bad stuff removed, and a ton more really cool stuff added in. I've been following the dev forums, and it's been very exciting.
For example, we all know that in EQ no matter how many 1st level characters attack a 20th level character, he's not even going to feel it, and it would only last as long as it would take him to attack each noob once. In SW:G, a noob certainly can hit and harm a high-level character, he's just less likely to; he'd loose the fight pretty much every time. But if a bunch of noobs gang up on a high-level guy, the big guy's going down, and hard.
Just an example of how the game play will be different. Plus, you can own your own house that you get to place yourself, perhaps with static defenses (like a gun turret); you can own a shop and have an NPC sell product even while you're off-line; 'spawn points' are implimented as 'nests', which tend to spring up in places where there are no players, and then spawn herds/groups of baddies.
Basically, a very dynamic world. I'm very excited to play in it.
I think the secret with spam is to stop spreading your email address around the internet.
This, I disagree with. It's similar to saying "If you're afraid of getting mugged, just stop leaving your house!"
I also disagree with "just close your accounts and open new ones." I like having one, well-known address, and for many people, their businesses and whatnot depend on it. Running from the spam is not the answer.
Which leaves three choices: Live with it, filter it, or get them to stop sending it. The first is getting increasingly difficult. The third seems to be getting a tad easier, but is still not available to the normal man.
Filtering, though, is within reach, and WILL solve the problem. Think long-term: if email clients make it easy to do effective filtering (think Moz's built-in Bayesian), people would no longer read spam, and spammers would no longer make money. Problem solved.
Coat waterslides in this stuff. Imagine screaming down a waterslide that has virtually no friction.
Actually, the coolest part about this would be slowing you down at the bottom. Dumping you into a pool would be too dangerous, I'd think; you'd be going too fast, and the water would hurt.
Imagine, however, that the slide angled upwards right at the end, to let gravity slow you down a little. Done properly, the slide could end up sliding you gently across an almost horizontal surface, ala Slip'n'Slide, and finally dump you into the pool.
On a similar note, what does the customer get out of a flying car?:)
Are you kidding? How many hours a day do you sit in traffic? Even if you limit flying cars to a single vertical height, making it essentially a 2D surface, it would be like driving on a big, empty plain to get to work. Can you imagine there being traffic in that situation?
If so... open up several such plains, until it goes away. A flying car would eliminate traffic jams, period.
...and a collection of movies stolen through P2P networks.
Not completely true. My TiVo has a network card in it, and I encode to DivX a bunch of shows that I record myself. So, with a hardware DivX player, I could burn those shows to a CD and watch them again on my TV.
As far as I'm concerned, that's all completely legal. No P2P 'stealing' involved.
What you're saying is quite simply NOT TRUE because the DMCA is LAW. Unfortunate as that may be, it's still the truth, and modding an XBox is illegal as long as the DMCA remains in effect.
So, putting the network card and bigger drive in my TiVo was also against the law? TiVo hosts their own forum for talking about hacking TiVo; they could, at any time, make a list of people posting to said forum and have them arrested under the DMCA?
TiVo's hope is that the cable companies will license the TiVo software and service for their set-top boxes.
Please say this happens. The TiVo interface and software are beautiful things, a joy in this era of bad interfaces. The only problem I have now is TiVo changing channels on my cable box. Merge the two, and even that goes away.
This would officially change the way TV works. Suddenly, Joe Public will be able to realize the benefits of not having to be home at a specific time to watch their shows; the "cable box" will just record what they like.
How can a proton have definate (or semi definate) shape? Shape can only be observed by sight (and protons are much smaller than the wavelength of light and don't just bounce high energy electo-magentic radiation), or by collision.
I agree with this poster, but especially this part:
"Every time I turn around I think about all the useful skills I could have picked up by staying in school, especially when it comes to serious programming and computer internals."
It's hard to quantify how much it helps day-to-day to know how computers work, all the way down to and inside the hardware. You really UNDERSTAND latency, and what a "32-bit" computer MEANS... after learning OS design for a couple quarters you UNDERSTAND how memory is mapped and files are cached and a million other little things.
In the real world, you call upon this knowledge in subtle ways all the time, and it gives you a greater understanding of, well, everything that's going on in any computer. And that can only help you when you're trying to figure out what the hell's going on in that machine of yours.
Go to college. Not once in your entire life will you regret it.
During the '89 quake in the Bay Area, I was walking across my front lawn, coming home from high school. Ground starts rolling, I look to the street and see cars rocking back and forth, bumping into each other. Normal earthquake stuff.
The fun part was my cat. He had been running across the lawn to greet me, and when the earthquake hit, he tried to LEAVE THE EARTH. He must have bounced five feet into the air, repeatedly, during the whole quake and for a while afterwards. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen.
No... the caption of that picture, from the article, is "A panel of experts debates the third generation of MMOG games. From left to right: Raph Koster (Star Wars Galaxies), Jessica Mulligan (formerly of Ultima Online), Jake Song (Lineage), and Rich Lawrence (Sony Online Entertainment)" I'm just guessing that Jessica is a woman.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, with Xerox, weren't there several other companies making copiers? So "making a xerox" might have meant using an Ikon copying machine, so Xerox looses some association as a brand.
However, "to Google" means to go to the Google search engine and look something up. You wouldn't go to any other search engine and "google" somebody, I don't think. Hence, the verb is still tied directly to their "product", and supports their brand.
Doug
I received 10% of my annual salary, split over two paychecks in December.
Please don't kill me.
Doug
This is exactly why PC games sales will never go completely zero. I use my PC for many things OTHER than games. Download/play music, video encoding/editing, email/web, managing my Linux servers... and games. My machine is a beast ANYWAY, because I use it for everything. Making it also a gaming beast just cost me a video card, which (as is so often pointed out) set me back about as much as a console.
So, that's the choice. Want a gaming-only machine? Console's your obvious choice, for exactly the reasons the pro-console people site. Want a multi-purpose computer to do many things AND kick-ass games? There's your PC gamer. There will always be a market.
Doug
Amen to that. I've been making a map for Warcraft3 for the past week, and it's insane how complicated a good map is, and I've been leeching much of the material in mine from another. The game as shipped comes with something like fifty complete maps, all beautifully designed and complex, and all the hundreds of units that populate them.
And that doesn't even touch the actual programming of the game itself!
I've come to the conclusion that when a great game sets me back $50, we're getting of really, really lucky.
Doug
I can just hear all the people reading this and sniggering. After all, we all know that all cops are assholes and power-mongers, don't we?
All you people who are thinking that, I suggest to take a moment and get to know your local law enforcement. Go on a few ride-alongs with different officers, even check out the local Border Patrol if there is such a thing near you. I worked with the police when I was in college, and the parent post is exactly dead on.
The vast majority of officers are just people like you and me, trynig to enforce the law to keep everybody safe and, at the same time, keep themselves safe. You'll be astounded at what lengths these people go to to try and ensure the safety of everybody, including criminals.
Ever wonder why low-speed pursuits can last for hours? It's because they don't want to blow out the tires and risk harming the passengers or bystanders. Ever wonder why officers will risk their own lives to put an end to a high-speed pursuit? It's because they don't want the car they're chasing, or their own, to crash into an innocent bystander.
The vast majority of law enforcement professionals are good, decent, upstanding citizens who care deeply about our laws, our society, and the people who live in it. In most cases, they actually do deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Doug
Yes, exactly. However, it's so tweaked that you can do nothing BUT gaming on it. With a PC, even when it's tweaked for gaming, it'll still let me play some music while I post on Slashdot, or whatever.
Doug
Two things.
One, it is different, but not because of why you seem to think it's different. The difference is the spyware programs uninstall things on your system, and EQ might just refuse to run if it detects ShowEQ running. The first is badness, the second is Sony's right to design the game as they choose. The fact that in one case it's a "security program" and the other is a "cheating program" makes no difference at all.
Two, after I buy it, the client isn't really theirs anymore, it's mine. If I want to hex dump it or sniff packets or RAM, it's completely my business. If they want their servers to behave one way or another (ala the Xbox Live situation), that's completely their right. But what happens on my computer and my network is not up to Sony to approve or disapprove.
They can sell me whatever they want, and I can modify it however I want, and their servers can do whatever they want to allow me to connect or not. That's how it lies.
Doug
Doug
For example, we all know that in EQ no matter how many 1st level characters attack a 20th level character, he's not even going to feel it, and it would only last as long as it would take him to attack each noob once. In SW:G, a noob certainly can hit and harm a high-level character, he's just less likely to; he'd loose the fight pretty much every time. But if a bunch of noobs gang up on a high-level guy, the big guy's going down, and hard.
Just an example of how the game play will be different. Plus, you can own your own house that you get to place yourself, perhaps with static defenses (like a gun turret); you can own a shop and have an NPC sell product even while you're off-line; 'spawn points' are implimented as 'nests', which tend to spring up in places where there are no players, and then spawn herds/groups of baddies.
Basically, a very dynamic world. I'm very excited to play in it.
Doug
This, I disagree with. It's similar to saying "If you're afraid of getting mugged, just stop leaving your house!"
I also disagree with "just close your accounts and open new ones." I like having one, well-known address, and for many people, their businesses and whatnot depend on it. Running from the spam is not the answer.
Which leaves three choices: Live with it, filter it, or get them to stop sending it. The first is getting increasingly difficult. The third seems to be getting a tad easier, but is still not available to the normal man.
Filtering, though, is within reach, and WILL solve the problem. Think long-term: if email clients make it easy to do effective filtering (think Moz's built-in Bayesian), people would no longer read spam, and spammers would no longer make money. Problem solved.
Doug
Actually, the coolest part about this would be slowing you down at the bottom. Dumping you into a pool would be too dangerous, I'd think; you'd be going too fast, and the water would hurt.
Imagine, however, that the slide angled upwards right at the end, to let gravity slow you down a little. Done properly, the slide could end up sliding you gently across an almost horizontal surface, ala Slip'n'Slide, and finally dump you into the pool.
That would rule.
Doug
Doug
Are you kidding? How many hours a day do you sit in traffic? Even if you limit flying cars to a single vertical height, making it essentially a 2D surface, it would be like driving on a big, empty plain to get to work. Can you imagine there being traffic in that situation?
If so... open up several such plains, until it goes away. A flying car would eliminate traffic jams, period.
Doug
It's all about the TiVo, baby. Get with the times.
Doug
Not completely true. My TiVo has a network card in it, and I encode to DivX a bunch of shows that I record myself. So, with a hardware DivX player, I could burn those shows to a CD and watch them again on my TV.
As far as I'm concerned, that's all completely legal. No P2P 'stealing' involved.
Doug
So, putting the network card and bigger drive in my TiVo was also against the law? TiVo hosts their own forum for talking about hacking TiVo; they could, at any time, make a list of people posting to said forum and have them arrested under the DMCA?
Doug
Please say this happens. The TiVo interface and software are beautiful things, a joy in this era of bad interfaces. The only problem I have now is TiVo changing channels on my cable box. Merge the two, and even that goes away.
This would officially change the way TV works. Suddenly, Joe Public will be able to realize the benefits of not having to be home at a specific time to watch their shows; the "cable box" will just record what they like.
Doug
So... if you can't observe it, it's not there?
Doug
"Every time I turn around I think about all the useful skills I could have picked up by staying in school, especially when it comes to serious programming and computer internals."
It's hard to quantify how much it helps day-to-day to know how computers work, all the way down to and inside the hardware. You really UNDERSTAND latency, and what a "32-bit" computer MEANS... after learning OS design for a couple quarters you UNDERSTAND how memory is mapped and files are cached and a million other little things.
In the real world, you call upon this knowledge in subtle ways all the time, and it gives you a greater understanding of, well, everything that's going on in any computer. And that can only help you when you're trying to figure out what the hell's going on in that machine of yours.
Go to college. Not once in your entire life will you regret it.
Doug
During the '89 quake in the Bay Area, I was walking across my front lawn, coming home from high school. Ground starts rolling, I look to the street and see cars rocking back and forth, bumping into each other. Normal earthquake stuff.
The fun part was my cat. He had been running across the lawn to greet me, and when the earthquake hit, he tried to LEAVE THE EARTH. He must have bounced five feet into the air, repeatedly, during the whole quake and for a while afterwards. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen.
Doug
So... they made Tribes 2 work with the Half-life engine, kinda?
Doug
http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/features.html
The first 'feature' lists IMAP4 (first) as a protocol it supports.
Doug
Yes, all at once is good, but might I suggest www.mozilla.org? I haven't seen a popup for months.
Doug
No... the caption of that picture, from the article, is "A panel of experts debates the third generation of MMOG games. From left to right: Raph Koster (Star Wars Galaxies), Jessica Mulligan (formerly of Ultima Online), Jake Song (Lineage), and Rich Lawrence (Sony Online Entertainment)" I'm just guessing that Jessica is a woman.
Doug
The second one from the left is, in fact, a woman. ;)
Doug