"Compare with WoW, where you might have a 100% chance of getting something if you complete some difficult task."
Have you played the high end game in WoW????? Try this for levels 55-60 tier 0 equipment:
1 dungeon run = 1-3 hours (plus time to get organized and started) Your loot drop rate = 8% If there are more than one person who needs it than your odds are cut in half for the random item roll.
I ran over 75 dungeon runs (keep in mind thats not 75 different dungeons, that's the same 5 over and over) and got only 6/8 tier 0 set items. So if we figure that 150 hours of play time - NONE of what could really be considered "hard". Maybe the first couple runs in each dungeon, but after that it is easy. I swear I could play main healer in UD Strathholme blindfolded.
And that's just for the lowest item set. Once you head into Molten Core for tier 1 you are looking at needing a 40 man group and dealing with a DKP loot system. As for the encounters in MC - they are only hard until you know the strategy and can get the group to execute the strategy properly. It's really more like group choreography than serious tactics. The "how to beat" guides are out there for the boss mobs and most raid leaders will be well informed before they fight the boss for the first time. Instances like Zul Gurub have lengthy quest chains and faction building before you see much of a benefit for going there. High end crafted items require faction building to get the recipes (or waiting for a rare drop) which is extremely time consuming. You will also need to farm monsters for crafting item drops (some with less than a 1% drop rate). You may also need to do a dungeon run to get to the location where you can craft the rare item. WoW has PLENTY of time sinks - they just happen to be stacked at the high end game and almost non-existant in the 1-50 level game.
Ugh. Look - the core of OS X is a BSD/Mach kernal. The primary "behind the scenes" OS functions are BSD. This is what is called Darwin and it is open source. The entire UI and graphics system (AKA Aqua) is proprietary. Darwin = open source. OSX != open source. Simple as that. If OSX were open source, we could compile and run it on any x86 we felt like - but legally WE CAN'T. Why? Because it ISN'T OPEN SOURCE.
Aside from the fact that OS X wouldn't run well on the target hardware - the BIG reason Jobs offer was refused was because they didn't want to impose proprietary non open source software constraints on any aspect of these laptops. They didn't want to make all these kids Apple's or Microsoft's customers. They wanted them to have access to easily extensible software with the code completely available. Any proprietary OS would have been contrary to the goals of the project.
The exact same thing can (and does) happen with patches to normal store bought games with update patches. My friend had it happen on his system with a patch to Star Wars Battlefront. After the patch he suffered crashes and server disconnects after playing for 5-10 minutes. Consistently. He tried all the support recommended stuff (upgrade video, audio drivers etc.) which didn't improve things. The only "remedy" LucasArts would give him was another copy of the game - which would be fine if there was something wrong with the CDs, but there wasn't. Reinstalling just caused the same problems to occur. Most likely it was some bug in the game that affected his particular brand network or video card. A few months later they announced Battlefront 2 - and no more patches were ever released for Battlefront 1. At least my friend did take the time to contact support. Because now he can concretely say their service was bullshit and he'll never buy another game from them. For all you know your problem is a known issue at Valve and they have a quick workaround. Maybe they don't, but how would you know? And by the way - at least in the US you can't sell your used PC games back to a store like you can with consoles. You can get away with it by selling on ebay or other similar sites, but that seems an awful lot of effort for the $10 you might get.
Yeah, I've been wondering if I should pickup a second one before they disappear. In addition to being a great DIVX/XVID player, it is excellent for MAME, 8 bit and 16 bit emulation. I know you can run all that on a computer, but I prefer having the easy to console interface.
Moby Dick despite it's ponderous nature is definately worth reading so that one can truly appreciate the masterpiece that is Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.
"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." - Herman Melville (and Khan)
I bought an Asus Mypal A716 specifically because it has one of the best controls for gaming. Unfortunately the latest faster models from Asus have controls similar to the Dell and HP PDAs. In general the controls on PDAs are not very good for gaming. Mine works well for 8 bit emulation (NES, C64, Sega Master System) but there aren't enough buttons for 16bit systems like SNES. As for native PDA games, the best ones tend to be stylus driven such as puzzle games and RTS. There are some decent RPGs as well.
The rectangles. They are rectangular and generally move in a two dimensional fashion. They have no language but when they bump into each other it goes "bonk". They are available in all colors including ultraviolet. They have a very sophisticated culture entirely based on the nature of two rectangles bonking each other. The invis-ee-ooos. They are invisible. They also have no language and apparently no mass. They're culture is invisible so know one can appreciate it's diversity, including themselves. See what a great RPG you could make with them. It would be very exciting.
"The Tauren (native american) are actually extremely peaceful nature lovers."
And of course stating that the Native Americans were extremely peaceful nature lovers is just as wrong and stereotypical as saying they were cannibalistic, war mongering rapists. It's only bad to stereotype when the stereotype is negative I guess.
"But if the resemblence was concieved at an unconscious level or was just a coincidence, well, that's not racism at all."
In the case of the trolls the language references ("eh mon") where definately concious. For example the "kill two dwarves in the morning"/funny emote is reworked lyrics to the song "Smoke two joints" (and NO the Sublime versions was NOT the original - it was done by a reggae group called the Toyes). I don't consider this to be racist, although it is a bit stereotypical. I think it's just another example of how Blizzard mixes a lot of pop culture elements into World of Warcraft for player amusement.
I find it interesting that my own son (age 9) doesn't like to play "the bad guys" in any of these games. He didn't like City of Villains (despite being a huge City of Heroes fan) because you played bad guys. While he messed around with horde characters in WoW, all of his main toons were alliance. In EQ2 he wouldn't make a character on the Freeport ("evil") side. Maybe at some point when he becomes a teenager this is likely to change and he will make some evil PVP ganking toon and spam "lolrz" everytime he whacks a low level player. *shudder*
And yet Anarchy Online has free ad-supported play for the basic game. If you want the expansions you have to pay to play and subscribers don't see ads. Runescape - the browser based MMO also has free play with ads. Of course the fact that Anarchy Online is somewhat ancient (in MMO years) and looks like crap may be part of the reason you don't see tons of players staying at home starving to death playing it.
Which is especially amusing since the industry typically considers summer to be a low point because everyone is supposed to be outside playing in the sun or on vacation away from their consoles. Summer usually sees the lowest number of new releases.
What are you talking about? Have you seen the Dungeon Siege trailer? Ninjas, zombies, ninja zombies, evil Ray Liotta and King Burt Reynolds? They even got Gimli in there and Ron Perlman! How could you get more awesome-o then that?
... and the movie wouldn't start unless there were 40 people in the seats..
Which means the theater lobby will be full of people shouting "LFG WoW Movie run!" Once the theater is full the movie is likely to only run at about 5 frames per second.
The Wii, of course will be free and retail for exactly $0.00 including tax. I deduce this because Shigeru Miyamoto is a mad man. A happy mad man, but still a mad man.
"I wish happy fun time playing with Wii for all, so I make Wii free."
That "cheap 8-bit DAC" is what sold so many Soundblasters. It still didn't hold a candle to stuff like the Amiga's 4 channel digital audio at the time, but it was way better than trying to simulate effects using an AdLib. The primary reason that they used the same chip as the AdLib was to be compatible with existing (pre-soundblaster) software. This also made it attractive to developers because they could code the music and have it work for both cards while adding sampled sound effects for Soundblaster. I don't know if you remember but before the Soundblaster you had exciting developments such as pushing digitized speech through the internal PC speaker. Oh boy that sure sounded good.
"The question is, is apple using the tags in hierarchical or relational matter?"
Both. As does Creative's interface. They use hierarchical for standard alpha sorting of songs and albums, but use relational for genre sorting. One of the things the Creative patent covers is allowing a single song to be sorted into different playlists based on criteria such as genre or alpha order.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't dual channel memory speed up any memory access? At least that's what the guide to my P4 motherboard says. You can use 1 stick but best performance using a matched pair of DIMMs in dual channel mode.
That's pretty funny. But yeah actually if you wrapped the old program manager in a web browser window I'm sure my support calls would drop significantly. At least the ones that go "Word isn't installed on my computer can you install it please" when in fact they just don't have a shortcut on their desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
"Compare with WoW, where you might have a 100% chance of getting something if you complete some difficult task."
Have you played the high end game in WoW????? Try this for levels 55-60 tier 0 equipment:
1 dungeon run = 1-3 hours (plus time to get organized and started)
Your loot drop rate = 8%
If there are more than one person who needs it than your odds are cut in half for the random item roll.
I ran over 75 dungeon runs (keep in mind thats not 75 different dungeons, that's the same 5 over and over) and got only 6/8 tier 0 set items. So if we figure that 150 hours of play time - NONE of what could really be considered "hard". Maybe the first couple runs in each dungeon, but after that it is easy. I swear I could play main healer in UD Strathholme blindfolded.
And that's just for the lowest item set. Once you head into Molten Core for tier 1 you are looking at needing a 40 man group and dealing with a DKP loot system.
As for the encounters in MC - they are only hard until you know the strategy and can get the group to execute the strategy properly. It's really more like group choreography than serious tactics. The "how to beat" guides are out there for the boss mobs and most raid leaders will be well informed before they fight the boss for the first time.
Instances like Zul Gurub have lengthy quest chains and faction building before you see much of a benefit for going there. High end crafted items require faction building to get the recipes (or waiting for a rare drop) which is extremely time consuming. You will also need to farm monsters for crafting item drops (some with less than a 1% drop rate). You may also need to do a dungeon run to get to the location where you can craft the rare item.
WoW has PLENTY of time sinks - they just happen to be stacked at the high end game and almost non-existant in the 1-50 level game.
I keep hearing this back and forth. Articles saying it's closed, articles saying Apple says it isn't. At this point I'm totally confused on the issue.
Ugh. Look - the core of OS X is a BSD/Mach kernal. The primary "behind the scenes" OS functions are BSD. This is what is called Darwin and it is open source. The entire UI and graphics system (AKA Aqua) is proprietary.
Darwin = open source. OSX != open source. Simple as that. If OSX were open source, we could compile and run it on any x86 we felt like - but legally WE CAN'T. Why? Because it ISN'T OPEN SOURCE.
Mr. Gates is a complete stranger to philanthropy.
Aside from the fact that OS X wouldn't run well on the target hardware - the BIG reason Jobs offer was refused was because they didn't want to impose proprietary non open source software constraints on any aspect of these laptops. They didn't want to make all these kids Apple's or Microsoft's customers. They wanted them to have access to easily extensible software with the code completely available.
Any proprietary OS would have been contrary to the goals of the project.
The exact same thing can (and does) happen with patches to normal store bought games with update patches. My friend had it happen on his system with a patch to Star Wars Battlefront. After the patch he suffered crashes and server disconnects after playing for 5-10 minutes. Consistently. He tried all the support recommended stuff (upgrade video, audio drivers etc.) which didn't improve things. The only "remedy" LucasArts would give him was another copy of the game - which would be fine if there was something wrong with the CDs, but there wasn't. Reinstalling just caused the same problems to occur. Most likely it was some bug in the game that affected his particular brand network or video card. A few months later they announced Battlefront 2 - and no more patches were ever released for Battlefront 1.
At least my friend did take the time to contact support. Because now he can concretely say their service was bullshit and he'll never buy another game from them. For all you know your problem is a known issue at Valve and they have a quick workaround. Maybe they don't, but how would you know?
And by the way - at least in the US you can't sell your used PC games back to a store like you can with consoles. You can get away with it by selling on ebay or other similar sites, but that seems an awful lot of effort for the $10 you might get.
Yeah, I've been wondering if I should pickup a second one before they disappear. In addition to being a great DIVX/XVID player, it is excellent for MAME, 8 bit and 16 bit emulation. I know you can run all that on a computer, but I prefer having the easy to console interface.
Moby Dick despite it's ponderous nature is definately worth reading so that one can truly appreciate the masterpiece that is Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.
"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." - Herman Melville (and Khan)
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!
Stuff like Bookworm, Bejeweled, those kind of puzzle games. Where you use the stylus to tap things.
I bought an Asus Mypal A716 specifically because it has one of the best controls for gaming. Unfortunately the latest faster models from Asus have controls similar to the Dell and HP PDAs.
In general the controls on PDAs are not very good for gaming. Mine works well for 8 bit emulation (NES, C64, Sega Master System) but there aren't enough buttons for 16bit systems like SNES.
As for native PDA games, the best ones tend to be stylus driven such as puzzle games and RTS. There are some decent RPGs as well.
Sure. We have these two exciting cultures:
The rectangles. They are rectangular and generally move in a two dimensional fashion. They have no language but when they bump into each other it goes "bonk". They are available in all colors including ultraviolet. They have a very sophisticated culture entirely based on the nature of two rectangles bonking each other.
The invis-ee-ooos. They are invisible. They also have no language and apparently no mass. They're culture is invisible so know one can appreciate it's diversity, including themselves.
See what a great RPG you could make with them. It would be very exciting.
"Could you really picture a jamaican like culture in control of advance tech? Be honest."
Well there were the good Lectoids from Buckaroo Banzai... you know John Parker?
"The Tauren (native american) are actually extremely peaceful nature lovers."
And of course stating that the Native Americans were extremely peaceful nature lovers is just as wrong and stereotypical as saying they were cannibalistic, war mongering rapists. It's only bad to stereotype when the stereotype is negative I guess.
But when will the squirrel people get their day?
"But if the resemblence was concieved at an unconscious level or was just a coincidence, well, that's not racism at all."
/funny emote is reworked lyrics to the song "Smoke two joints" (and NO the Sublime versions was NOT the original - it was done by a reggae group called the Toyes).
In the case of the trolls the language references ("eh mon") where definately concious. For example the "kill two dwarves in the morning"
I don't consider this to be racist, although it is a bit stereotypical. I think it's just another example of how Blizzard mixes a lot of pop culture elements into World of Warcraft for player amusement.
I find it interesting that my own son (age 9) doesn't like to play "the bad guys" in any of these games. He didn't like City of Villains (despite being a huge City of Heroes fan) because you played bad guys. While he messed around with horde characters in WoW, all of his main toons were alliance. In EQ2 he wouldn't make a character on the Freeport ("evil") side.
Maybe at some point when he becomes a teenager this is likely to change and he will make some evil PVP ganking toon and spam "lolrz" everytime he whacks a low level player. *shudder*
And yet Anarchy Online has free ad-supported play for the basic game. If you want the expansions you have to pay to play and subscribers don't see ads.
Runescape - the browser based MMO also has free play with ads.
Of course the fact that Anarchy Online is somewhat ancient (in MMO years) and looks like crap may be part of the reason you don't see tons of players staying at home starving to death playing it.
Which is especially amusing since the industry typically considers summer to be a low point because everyone is supposed to be outside playing in the sun or on vacation away from their consoles. Summer usually sees the lowest number of new releases.
What are you talking about? Have you seen the Dungeon Siege trailer? Ninjas, zombies, ninja zombies, evil Ray Liotta and King Burt Reynolds? They even got Gimli in there and Ron Perlman!
How could you get more awesome-o then that?
hmmmm. nevermind.
... and the movie wouldn't start unless there were 40 people in the seats..
Which means the theater lobby will be full of people shouting "LFG WoW Movie run!"
Once the theater is full the movie is likely to only run at about 5 frames per second.
And I'll take the opposite end.
The Wii, of course will be free and retail for exactly $0.00 including tax.
I deduce this because Shigeru Miyamoto is a mad man. A happy mad man, but still a mad man.
"I wish happy fun time playing with Wii for all, so I make Wii free."
That "cheap 8-bit DAC" is what sold so many Soundblasters. It still didn't hold a candle to stuff like the Amiga's 4 channel digital audio at the time, but it was way better than trying to simulate effects using an AdLib. The primary reason that they used the same chip as the AdLib was to be compatible with existing (pre-soundblaster) software. This also made it attractive to developers because they could code the music and have it work for both cards while adding sampled sound effects for Soundblaster.
I don't know if you remember but before the Soundblaster you had exciting developments such as pushing digitized speech through the internal PC speaker. Oh boy that sure sounded good.
"The question is, is apple using the tags in hierarchical or relational matter?"
Both. As does Creative's interface. They use hierarchical for standard alpha sorting of songs and albums, but use relational for genre sorting. One of the things the Creative patent covers is allowing a single song to be sorted into different playlists based on criteria such as genre or alpha order.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't dual channel memory speed up any memory access? At least that's what the guide to my P4 motherboard says. You can use 1 stick but best performance using a matched pair of DIMMs in dual channel mode.
That's pretty funny. But yeah actually if you wrapped the old program manager in a web browser window I'm sure my support calls would drop significantly. At least the ones that go "Word isn't installed on my computer can you install it please" when in fact they just don't have a shortcut on their desktop.