"Since most companies AFAIK work on a approx. 3 year replacement lifecycle"
My experience is that companies large and small do not have OS replacement lifecycles. Hardware lifecycles, sure. A set time on OS lifecycles won't work. Vista's been delayed for over a year, and XP before it. It would be folly for any IT director to state that they will be moving from Vista to Microsoft's next generation OS in 2010. It takes up too much time and resources for large corporations to be changing operating systems every 3 years. They will want to stay on a single platform for as long as possible.
And because Microsoft has the monopoly in that department, it means their OS lifecycles are dependent upon a single company, not the IT director's desires for a X-year OS lifecycle. That's the point. Nothing moot there...
to expand upon this point, all Microsoft has to do (and have set into motion) is enact an end-of-life for XP then people will be forced to upgrade to Vista. With real monopoly power, it doesn't matter if Vista is poor. The masses *will* be assimilated.
"iTunes is on the fast track to become a huge outlet of music, and the longer they can keep the FairPlay show on the road, the more powerful they'll get."
Yup, and this is the same tactic MS has used for its products. Set aside a kitty fund to stagnate lawsuits while in the meantime growing market share *and* making more than enough money to re-fund the kitty...
Although it's abit pricier than the models listed in TFA ($199 with 2-year contract), it does everything those phones do and more. Since it runs Windows Mobile 2003 (or later), it can run Skype to make the calls, it has WiFi built-in, and of course does EV-DO. Add in its bluetooth support and basically this thing does it everything you need (except run Linux I guess)
The downside to this model is its relatively short battery life, but it's even got a slide out qwerty keypad so texting isn't half bad...
I can see pointing a(ny color) laser at something a long way away as being kind of cool, but is that all they're primarily purchased for by non-gun-toting people? (I reckon some might use 'em as sights on a rifle or something) Is there some kind of geeky use of a laser I'm missing out on?
Hmm, I've never had any problems playing Poodle Hat on anything. I've ripped the CD and have been listening to it on my computer and mp3 player for years now... *shrug*
I think the average age of an adult has increased significantly. What's the definition of "adult"?
Is someone who's 25 but does nothing but go to work, then game until sleeping 5 days a week count as an adult? If they haven't changed their habits since they were in school then gaming til bedtime I'd be hesitant to call them an adult. Agewise, they're an adult, but something's missing...
However, I leave open the definition of "functions of the character".
How does one manifest/materialize the statistic/function of dex? If a mob's hopping all around trying to make you miss, and your dex is too low to keep up, what's preventing the game designers from incorporating your character's lack of dexterity into its ability to track and whack a mob? To me, it's still well within the functions and definitions of the character. They've just chosen to extend how it works.
If that disqualifies it from your definition of an RPG, fair enough, but to me it's still well within the RPG definition. (EQ did stuff like this with runspeed abilities you could tweak at high levels that would allow you to run away from or chase down mobs (without having a runspeed modifying spell cast on you) that normally you wouldn't be fast enough for. I'm not sure if you consider EQ to be within the RPG genre, but seems like a decent example to me.)
I think that if they were to stick with the standard way of creating an MMO, they'd have to lean too heavily upon their brand name to stand out. They're trying to be different -- for better or worse. The market will decide. (and I'm really curious to see how it reacts...)
"It's hard for me to imagine the mindset that sees this as a good thing. "Less people will like the game! Yippee! We'll make less money!"
I don't think every gaming programmer is out there for the bottom line. I'd venture to say there are a lot of them plying their trade for the love of it (which of course can be abit idealistic).
"Realism is not the goal of a game (especially a fantasy game!). The goal is fun..."
I basically agree with you here. However, I think you'd hear the word "realism" used by the designers when describing the mobs AI and gameplay. Why else would they make a mob that moves away/around when you attack it? The way I see it, they're trying to inject a little realism into the (fantasy) experience.
"Anyway, the entire point of an RPG is that the fighting skills belong to the character, not the player. What you're looking for is an MMOFPS, like Planetside. Those are cool in their own way, but that's never been what D&D has been about."
Perhaps this is how they're trying to get their game to stand out from the rest of the pack? The review sort of reinforced that this game seems to be (in some respects) in between the types of MMOs we're used to. After having played MMOs for many years, I kind of see this as a breath of fresh air (but fully acknowledge that the jury's out on whether this style of MMO will be financially sound in the long run). Hopefully it does well enough to either inspire or build other similarly engineered that are able to appease the player-skilled crowd *and* the character-skilled crowd. It's a difficult balance but with time maybe it can be done?
And as for SCA, I like the idea of it, but it's not my bag...:)
"In other words, you're going to do a lot of missing. This gets frustrating very very quickly. In fact, it's gets just boring after a while."
What's interesting to me is the philosophy behind this statement.
Perhaps it's a little more realistic to believe one will miss alot during a battle? Maybe it's boring because we've all been spoiled by automatic action gaming that doesn't require much in the way of character dexterity while fighting? I'd like to think that if one maneuvers their character well during a fight, they'll land more hits. And while it still may be abit boring to those used to rapid XP gain, I think it's truer to the original aspects of the tabletop D&D I used to play.
"They jump around, move out of range, and generally do their best not to get killed. That means that in addition to repeatedly clicking on your opponent you're going to be trying to follow their movements. It's all too dang chaotic to be truly fun."
Sounds more realistic to me. Perhaps this game will filter out the less diehard players and leave only the more serious gamers? I wonder if the MMO player-base has grown enough to sustain a game like this where it requires more skill and dedication (as in you'd have to be pretty dedicated to play this game if it's as boring as you've said it is)? Actually, I'd like to think it has, and additionally, I'd like to think that this game wouldn't change much to accomodate the people who want a fantasy MMO where you don't have to be particularly good, you just have to know when to hit the attack key...
I personally hope that this fighting model for MMO takes off and is incorporated in more games...
No worries... The only money I put in was cash I'd made from the RedHat ascension. I didn't lose any real money*. I cashed out a loooong time ago. I still keep 2 shares of Juniper though as a reminder... I bought 'em at $120 or something silly and now they're at what, $20?.:)
* - real money defined as money I'd earned from my regular 9-5 job.
Back during the.com bubble bust, I was looking to invest in a company with some of my RedHat stock money I'd made (post IPO). A coworker who had been dabbling in trading heard my question. He suggested I invest into SGI. I looked 'em up and they were somewhere around $10. Having just invested in a stock that I bought at $50 and sold at double the price, I wasn't too keen on buying such an inexpensive stock. He just shook his head knowingly and looked at me with a big smile and said:
"When there's blood in the streets, buy!"
So i finally got around to buying it at $12/share. That was its peak. I waited and waited, but only lost and lost. I sold most of it at something like $5/share.
Two lessons learned:
1) Some companies have more blood than you think they do. 2) I am not (nor was ever) a real stock trader.
To hear that SGI's only now announcing the possibility of bankruptcy tells me they had years worth of blood left...
(My friend never sold his stock and AFAIK still holds his shares!)
I had an old friend/acquaintance (who was very well placed in the networking community) once tell me he could bring the internet to its knees in a matter of half an hour with some poisoned routing tables or somewhat similar at the router/peering points. Granted this was years ago, but as I recall being told it was one of the 'nets darker secrets -- e.g. a handful (or more) of people knew about the security hole, but it was baked into how things were being done within the IOSes of the routers that the peering points used. Perhaps this hole has been fixed by now, but I seriously doubt that people with enough dedication couldn't find another similar type of hole.
Unfortunately, I don't think the end user/consumer is able to much about it because this pertains to the provider/peering level.
Oh yeah! I never did play the game, but I definitely remember a Cyberstrike influx into Tanarus for awhile (and they were great teamplayers/tacticians).
Sorry to hear about that, but to me it reinforces how Smed moves on with things (and isn't afraid to hurt any feelings along the way... kinda like Steve Jobs eh?)
Smed's not too concerned about the poor lonely nerds -- he's concerned with good/great gameplay in a MMO environment (now whether or not he's attained that is a topic left for others to debate/flame).
Here's a great (and I believe true) story regarding his vision (and kind of how this gamble led him to where he is today):
He was hired to retool/redesign a game way back in '95 (maybe before that, it's so long ago now...). He told his superiors one thing, but designed another -- Armorgeddon (now Tanarus)*. He was looking, way back then, at what the future of gaming was and took the risk. The game wasn't supposed to incorporate online play. It worked for him. The beta period had thousands of die-hard fans and then it went subscription and held on well for a year or so, by which time he'd been congratulated/rewarded and the company owning Tanarus got bought out by Sony.
Tanarus development was dumped for Everquest. EQ has its own history, but was certainly groundbreaking.
I visited Verant's (their name before being bought out by Sony) studios in San Diego the day EQ came out of beta and went live. It was bustling in the cubicle farm they had then, but one thing I remember distinctly was meeting an online acquaintance of mine (also from Hawaii) Danny Han (aka Blackbird in Tanarus) with another guy sitting by themselves in a conference room literally with pens and papers talking about their newest (and shh-shh) project/game they were going to make -- Star Wars Galaxies. I thought that was WAY cool and wished them luck. It certainly seemed ambitious at the time (because this was before anyone knew just how successful EQ was going to be financially), but everything worked out in spades. EQ quickly became a cash cow and SWG was built/licensed and released (followed by EQ 2).
I think that after all this time (and it *has* been all this time for many of us) the genre's gotten stale. I think Smed's doing the right thing, and I think it's going to be great, but I do expect it to have its growing pains.
I never got to meet Smed when I visited San Diego back in the day. He happened to be out of his office in a meeting or something. Oh well. I was going to ask him about putting some developers back onto Tanarus because it was starting to rot, but he was looking to the future come hell, high water, or disappointment to those of us who'd become hooked to his latest project to be deemed 'complete'...
He's a great guy, but he doesn't wallow in past projects. He sees something then goes for it.
Chris aka Tatyana of DoW/ArmedLemmings in Tanaus - Hailhammer Thunderstrike in EQ (FV/roleplaying server)
* - Tanarus was where many of us learned about his motivations. The game had (still has really) so much promise, but technologically it was/is dated. The gameplay aspect still has a lot of life in it where wonderful things could be done to it, but that doesn't/didn't interest him. Still, I'm grateful that he brought it (with other programmers of course) into existence...
This idea of generating electricty via temperature differential goes back to at least 1816 when the Stirling Engine was patented in Scotland. They have some neat handheld size gadgets that can use this principle. Neat gadgets!
It's great to see a huge energy implementation using that principle.
I live in the SF bay area and although we've had earthquakes I've never paid attention to 'em so I missed 'em. Me and my geocaching-type friends would find this a fun thing to do. Find some area that's high probability and just chill for a day. (We chill anyway, but hey an earthquake would be a nice way to.. umm... shake things up abit)
Whoa! That's the same voice guy that's done all those Visa commercials all these years... He's been around for a lot longer than I realized! Doesn't he get tired of doing that stuff?
I believe that one of the reasons for not having live coverage is to be able to screen anything unexplainable from the public until they've had time to process it.
Imagine if we got another 'Face on Mars' controversy or some streak in a frame of one of the pictures that came back.
It's almost the same thing as delaying live TV shows in case another wardrobe malfunction occurs...
Delaying coverage just makes sense though personally I'd like to see live coverage...
to anyone here in the IT biz. Maybe it's something the IT people here have buried their heads in the sand about it, but anyone who sits on their laurels (knowledge) in the IT industry is bound to be finding their position slowly eroded away by the improvements in tech.
One upside to the new/improving tech eroding the need for IT jobs that springs to mind is the opportunity for someone to start a 'Personal Technologist' business. Anyone who can master Blackberrys, PDAs, iPods/mp3 players, etc would be in big demand from all the PHBs with the gadgets but without the time or inclination to RTFM. I think that'd be a natural progression for most IT people I know...
I can't imagine the technology is that far off to stream video content to one of these things via satellite. I suppose the big hold up will be getting all the rights sorted out...
They market this new feature of the iPod which really isn't anything too spiffy compared to the Archos. (http://www.archos.com/products/overview/gmini_400.html?sid=j22ky2jsbjy33jsby433yk). But, with their massive spin machine, they'll enlarge their market share with this baby step, and then take the next step in hardware offerings by saying the next new iPod will play video.
This product is mostly old tech with great spin (and the Apple brand name).
I think it's a nifty move on Apple's part, but I'm wondering just how successful this one's gonna be (and how long it is until they unveil the next step -- video capability)...
Slashdot Mirror
"Since most companies AFAIK work on a approx. 3 year replacement lifecycle"
My experience is that companies large and small do not have OS replacement lifecycles. Hardware lifecycles, sure. A set time on OS lifecycles won't work. Vista's been delayed for over a year, and XP before it. It would be folly for any IT director to state that they will be moving from Vista to Microsoft's next generation OS in 2010. It takes up too much time and resources for large corporations to be changing operating systems every 3 years. They will want to stay on a single platform for as long as possible.
And because Microsoft has the monopoly in that department, it means their OS lifecycles are dependent upon a single company, not the IT director's desires for a X-year OS lifecycle. That's the point. Nothing moot there...
to expand upon this point, all Microsoft has to do (and have set into motion) is enact an end-of-life for XP then people will be forced to upgrade to Vista. With real monopoly power, it doesn't matter if Vista is poor. The masses *will* be assimilated.
"iTunes is on the fast track to become a huge outlet of music, and the longer they can keep the FairPlay show on the road, the more powerful they'll get."
Yup, and this is the same tactic MS has used for its products. Set aside a kitty fund to stagnate lawsuits while in the meantime growing market share *and* making more than enough money to re-fund the kitty...
If the model ain't broke, don't fix it.
The downside to this model is its relatively short battery life, but it's even got a slide out qwerty keypad so texting isn't half bad...
Here's a link to it...
Hmm, I've never had any problems playing Poodle Hat on anything. I've ripped the CD and have been listening to it on my computer and mp3 player for years now... *shrug*
I think the average age of an adult has increased significantly. What's the definition of "adult"?
Is someone who's 25 but does nothing but go to work, then game until sleeping 5 days a week count as an adult? If they haven't changed their habits since they were in school then gaming til bedtime I'd be hesitant to call them an adult. Agewise, they're an adult, but something's missing...
I agree with your definition.
However, I leave open the definition of "functions of the character".
How does one manifest/materialize the statistic/function of dex? If a mob's hopping all around trying to make you miss, and your dex is too low to keep up, what's preventing the game designers from incorporating your character's lack of dexterity into its ability to track and whack a mob? To me, it's still well within the functions and definitions of the character. They've just chosen to extend how it works.
If that disqualifies it from your definition of an RPG, fair enough, but to me it's still well within the RPG definition. (EQ did stuff like this with runspeed abilities you could tweak at high levels that would allow you to run away from or chase down mobs (without having a runspeed modifying spell cast on you) that normally you wouldn't be fast enough for. I'm not sure if you consider EQ to be within the RPG genre, but seems like a decent example to me.)
I think that if they were to stick with the standard way of creating an MMO, they'd have to lean too heavily upon their brand name to stand out. They're trying to be different -- for better or worse. The market will decide. (and I'm really curious to see how it reacts...)
"It's hard for me to imagine the mindset that sees this as a good thing. "Less people will like the game! Yippee! We'll make less money!"
:)
I don't think every gaming programmer is out there for the bottom line. I'd venture to say there are a lot of them plying their trade for the love of it (which of course can be abit idealistic).
"Realism is not the goal of a game (especially a fantasy game!). The goal is fun..."
I basically agree with you here. However, I think you'd hear the word "realism" used by the designers when describing the mobs AI and gameplay. Why else would they make a mob that moves away/around when you attack it? The way I see it, they're trying to inject a little realism into the (fantasy) experience.
"Anyway, the entire point of an RPG is that the fighting skills belong to the character, not the player. What you're looking for is an MMOFPS, like Planetside. Those are cool in their own way, but that's never been what D&D has been about."
Perhaps this is how they're trying to get their game to stand out from the rest of the pack? The review sort of reinforced that this game seems to be (in some respects) in between the types of MMOs we're used to. After having played MMOs for many years, I kind of see this as a breath of fresh air (but fully acknowledge that the jury's out on whether this style of MMO will be financially sound in the long run). Hopefully it does well enough to either inspire or build other similarly engineered that are able to appease the player-skilled crowd *and* the character-skilled crowd. It's a difficult balance but with time maybe it can be done?
And as for SCA, I like the idea of it, but it's not my bag...
"In other words, you're going to do a lot of missing. This gets frustrating very very quickly. In fact, it's gets just boring after a while."
What's interesting to me is the philosophy behind this statement.
Perhaps it's a little more realistic to believe one will miss alot during a battle? Maybe it's boring because we've all been spoiled by automatic action gaming that doesn't require much in the way of character dexterity while fighting? I'd like to think that if one maneuvers their character well during a fight, they'll land more hits. And while it still may be abit boring to those used to rapid XP gain, I think it's truer to the original aspects of the tabletop D&D I used to play.
"They jump around, move out of range, and generally do their best not to get killed. That means that in addition to repeatedly clicking on your opponent you're going to be trying to follow their movements. It's all too dang chaotic to be truly fun."
Sounds more realistic to me. Perhaps this game will filter out the less diehard players and leave only the more serious gamers? I wonder if the MMO player-base has grown enough to sustain a game like this where it requires more skill and dedication (as in you'd have to be pretty dedicated to play this game if it's as boring as you've said it is)? Actually, I'd like to think it has, and additionally, I'd like to think that this game wouldn't change much to accomodate the people who want a fantasy MMO where you don't have to be particularly good, you just have to know when to hit the attack key...
I personally hope that this fighting model for MMO takes off and is incorporated in more games...
No worries... The only money I put in was cash I'd made from the RedHat ascension. I didn't lose any real money*. I cashed out a loooong time ago. I still keep 2 shares of Juniper though as a reminder... I bought 'em at $120 or something silly and now they're at what, $20?. :)
* - real money defined as money I'd earned from my regular 9-5 job.
Back during the .com bubble bust, I was looking to invest in a company with some of my RedHat stock money I'd made (post IPO). A coworker who had been dabbling in trading heard my question. He suggested I invest into SGI. I looked 'em up and they were somewhere around $10. Having just invested in a stock that I bought at $50 and sold at double the price, I wasn't too keen on buying such an inexpensive stock. He just shook his head knowingly and looked at me with a big smile and said:
"When there's blood in the streets, buy!"
So i finally got around to buying it at $12/share. That was its peak. I waited and waited, but only lost and lost. I sold most of it at something like $5/share.
Two lessons learned:
1) Some companies have more blood than you think they do.
2) I am not (nor was ever) a real stock trader.
To hear that SGI's only now announcing the possibility of bankruptcy tells me they had years worth of blood left...
(My friend never sold his stock and AFAIK still holds his shares!)
Yes, there is a threat posed by cyberterrorism.
I had an old friend/acquaintance (who was very well placed in the networking community) once tell me he could bring the internet to its knees in a matter of half an hour with some poisoned routing tables or somewhat similar at the router/peering points. Granted this was years ago, but as I recall being told it was one of the 'nets darker secrets -- e.g. a handful (or more) of people knew about the security hole, but it was baked into how things were being done within the IOSes of the routers that the peering points used. Perhaps this hole has been fixed by now, but I seriously doubt that people with enough dedication couldn't find another similar type of hole.
Unfortunately, I don't think the end user/consumer is able to much about it because this pertains to the provider/peering level.
and if you've been around since Cyberstrike, you'll know that MANY verbal sticks have been produced over the years with no discernable effect... :(
(I totally agree with your original point btw)
Oh yeah! I never did play the game, but I definitely remember a Cyberstrike influx into Tanarus for awhile (and they were great teamplayers/tacticians).
Sorry to hear about that, but to me it reinforces how Smed moves on with things (and isn't afraid to hurt any feelings along the way... kinda like Steve Jobs eh?)
Smed's not too concerned about the poor lonely nerds -- he's concerned with good/great gameplay in a MMO environment (now whether or not he's attained that is a topic left for others to debate/flame).
Here's a great (and I believe true) story regarding his vision (and kind of how this gamble led him to where he is today):
He was hired to retool/redesign a game way back in '95 (maybe before that, it's so long ago now...). He told his superiors one thing, but designed another -- Armorgeddon (now Tanarus)*. He was looking, way back then, at what the future of gaming was and took the risk. The game wasn't supposed to incorporate online play. It worked for him. The beta period had thousands of die-hard fans and then it went subscription and held on well for a year or so, by which time he'd been congratulated/rewarded and the company owning Tanarus got bought out by Sony.
Tanarus development was dumped for Everquest. EQ has its own history, but was certainly groundbreaking.
I visited Verant's (their name before being bought out by Sony) studios in San Diego the day EQ came out of beta and went live. It was bustling in the cubicle farm they had then, but one thing I remember distinctly was meeting an online acquaintance of mine (also from Hawaii) Danny Han (aka Blackbird in Tanarus) with another guy sitting by themselves in a conference room literally with pens and papers talking about their newest (and shh-shh) project/game they were going to make -- Star Wars Galaxies. I thought that was WAY cool and wished them luck. It certainly seemed ambitious at the time (because this was before anyone knew just how successful EQ was going to be financially), but everything worked out in spades. EQ quickly became a cash cow and SWG was built/licensed and released (followed by EQ 2).
I think that after all this time (and it *has* been all this time for many of us) the genre's gotten stale. I think Smed's doing the right thing, and I think it's going to be great, but I do expect it to have its growing pains.
I never got to meet Smed when I visited San Diego back in the day. He happened to be out of his office in a meeting or something. Oh well. I was going to ask him about putting some developers back onto Tanarus because it was starting to rot, but he was looking to the future come hell, high water, or disappointment to those of us who'd become hooked to his latest project to be deemed 'complete'...
He's a great guy, but he doesn't wallow in past projects. He sees something then goes for it.
Chris aka Tatyana of DoW/ArmedLemmings in Tanaus - Hailhammer Thunderstrike in EQ (FV/roleplaying server)
* - Tanarus was where many of us learned about his motivations. The game had (still has really) so much promise, but technologically it was/is dated. The gameplay aspect still has a lot of life in it where wonderful things could be done to it, but that doesn't/didn't interest him. Still, I'm grateful that he brought it (with other programmers of course) into existence...
It's great to see a huge energy implementation using that principle.
Two words:
Earthquake party!
I live in the SF bay area and although we've had earthquakes I've never paid attention to 'em so I missed 'em. Me and my geocaching-type friends would find this a fun thing to do. Find some area that's high probability and just chill for a day. (We chill anyway, but hey an earthquake would be a nice way to.. umm... shake things up abit)
Hmm strange I don't see any posts linking the story title to the department...
Nature Trail to Hell was the last (and best IMO) track on Weird Al's "In 3D" album!
"Coming this Christmas to a theatre near you......."
Whoa! That's the same voice guy that's done all those Visa commercials all these years... He's been around for a lot longer than I realized! Doesn't he get tired of doing that stuff?
Imagine if we got another 'Face on Mars' controversy or some streak in a frame of one of the pictures that came back.
It's almost the same thing as delaying live TV shows in case another wardrobe malfunction occurs...
Delaying coverage just makes sense though personally I'd like to see live coverage...
to anyone here in the IT biz. Maybe it's something the IT people here have buried their heads in the sand about it, but anyone who sits on their laurels (knowledge) in the IT industry is bound to be finding their position slowly eroded away by the improvements in tech.
One upside to the new/improving tech eroding the need for IT jobs that springs to mind is the opportunity for someone to start a 'Personal Technologist' business. Anyone who can master Blackberrys, PDAs, iPods/mp3 players, etc would be in big demand from all the PHBs with the gadgets but without the time or inclination to RTFM. I think that'd be a natural progression for most IT people I know...
I can't imagine the technology is that far off to stream video content to one of these things via satellite. I suppose the big hold up will be getting all the rights sorted out...
-Chris
This is a really savvy move by Apple.
0 .html?sid=j22ky2jsbjy33jsby433yk). But, with their massive spin machine, they'll enlarge their market share with this baby step, and then take the next step in hardware offerings by saying the next new iPod will play video.
They market this new feature of the iPod which really isn't anything too spiffy compared to the Archos. (http://www.archos.com/products/overview/gmini_40
This product is mostly old tech with great spin (and the Apple brand name).
I think it's a nifty move on Apple's part, but I'm wondering just how successful this one's gonna be (and how long it is until they unveil the next step -- video capability)...
-Chris