And by free, i mean it's really free. Not like "it's free but you have to..."
It's not free. There is no monthly fee, but there is a one time cost of the full game that you have to pay. Free would be if you could download the client, not need a serial number, just logon and play forever.
This game is clearly superior to World of Warcraft and runs on a seemless world. It's worth your money to try it!
That totally depends on what type of play style you like. I've played Guild Wars betas and I've played World of Warcraft. I found them to be very different experiences. Wow is much more of a typical MMO with all that entails (good and bad). Guild Wars is a bit of a different animal. It really had more of a Diablo feel to it. Definately a substantial evolution on Diablo but still feels very different from a regular MMO. So for a lot of people that is a boon, since they don't enjoy the standard MMO style of play. Most of the players I ran into who loved the game came out of the Diablo set. I was actually amazed to see all these people who were still playing Diablo in 2005. I would imagine Guild Wars will totally devour that player set. I really didn't like the way you had to load out your skills before each quest. Being limited to 8 at a time just seemed to make some of the skills kind of pointless. I realize this is a major aspect of the play and you might find maximizing your skill combos to be a lot of fun. I also really didn't like being "walled in" to the environments. Not being able to slide down a slope but rather being required to take the long path down drove me nuts. I think Guild Wars is an interesting new game and a lot of people will really like it. I just think it's hard to compare directly to something like World of Warcraft or hell, Everquest. Similar, yet different.
Windows has had symbolic links for ages. As for your Win95 = Mac 89. Did the MacOS have preemptive multitasking in '89? No it didn't. Did the finder even get parallel multitasking capability before System 8 (i.e. copying t2o files at once), not it didn't. When was system 8 released? 1997.
"3: You can take away functionality and later charge more for it and call it a "feature" with good marketing. And everyone's eating it up."
This has never been proven to be the case in the console market. Console expansions have been around since the old days for Atari and Intellivision (i.e. Starpath supercharger, IntelliVoice) all the through the Sega CD and 32x to the PS2 hard drive. Yet none of these has seen a great deal of support. More developers are going to target the base platform. That being said, since the current Xbox HD has not really been used for too much and could probably at this point be replaced by flash memory, I believe the next gen Xbox hard drive option will be used primarily for functions beyond gaming. Microsoft probably wants to use this option to turn it into a mini media center. Figure things like WebTV, PVR functionality, music playback. This would be a logical step if MS has been paying any attention to what people have been using modded Xboxes for (aside from piracy of course).
I mean this really isn't strong enough punishment. It doesn't return any value to those damaged (the media companies). I mean come on, what we really need is a large scale public spectacle where these offenders can battle it out man to man. The entertainment industry can recoup their losses by promoting this gladitorial combat! If the government wants to act draconian and have the population ignore it they really need to keep us fed, inebriated and entertained. Bring on the bread and circuses!
Sure I would gladly welcome a post suggesting that Nintendo should use Eniac as its platform. All I am saying is that I am tired of the invasion of the Mac fanboys here. It doesn't matter whether its Linux, BSD, Apple, Windows or whatever. Any post saying "they should just use this and everything would work properly" is stupid. If I have to hear another "why would you do this? all you need is a Mac mini" I'm going to vomit. And then to see posts like that modded +5 insightful just illustrates the high volume of dweebism that persists in the Slashdot community.
"Whining about it does nothing except prove that your testicles have gone missing."
And I guess posting as Anonymous Coward is the proper way of displaying how big your balls are?
Oh you bring a tear to my eye. Oh how you bring back the memories of Slashdot of years past. You know, Slashdot before the Legion of Jobs showed up and proclaimed that Apple had an answer to everything. Yes. Bring me back my old Slashdot. Please, please bring back:
1. Make it with Linux 2. ?? 3. Profit!
Bring back the good old days, when BSD was dead and Red Hat was king. (and yes I AM serious)
This is a common practice in magazine publishing. It's called a controlled subscription vs. a paid. Magazines generally do NOT make money off of paid subscriptions, they make money off of advertising. Overall paid subscription numbers have been dropping for years. The advertisers do not care whether a subscriber is paid or not, what they want is a large subscriber base that you can validate as being interested in your product. So when Gamespot takes your name down when you get their discount card, they can consider you to be a game playing and purchasing reader of Game Informer. Which is exactly who the advertisers want to reach. One of the companies I work for is a regional magazine publishing company and most of the publications operate this way. For example the regionl business publication is given away free to chambers of commerce, lawyers, high profile businesses etc.
I love getting modded redundant when I reply to a post that had NO replies when I submitted it. Maybe next time I should just type one sentence instead. Oh well, here's hoping for an offtopic as well!
"Do they have permission from the person who wrote the lectures to share it?" asks one IP attorney, referring to lectures recorded on iPods
Doesn't this apply just as well to ANY recordable media? Is it so hard to share something recorded on tape? Record on tape, rip to mp3 and upload to illegalcollegelecturetorrents.com. I really, really hate when IP lawyers get all busted out of shape by something like an iPod when audio recording has been around in classrooms for ages. Maybe it's because now they will be able to make high quality digital versions of the lectures that won't degrade with repeated copying! Oh no!
Ok, it sounds like a horrible hoary mess and I am very scared now. I'm going to crawl back into the cozy and unstructured mess that is QuarkXpress 4 and hide. Eeek!
I suppose if you ignored all the other computers out there (i.e. Amiga)- System 7 did introduce true (well not preemptive, but not the icky System 6 way) multitasking.
Really that isn't true. Civ 3 changed a number of factors which made strategy you may have used in the earlier games not as effective. The addition of culture and empire borders in Civ 3 changes the dynamic significantly. In particular it is much harder to just take over the world with military might. Especially since captured cities citizens still possess a nationalistic relationship to the defeated nation, and have a tendency to rebel. In the original Civilization there was only one time that I didn't win by military might. I wanted to take the game all the way through to the space ship launch. Seeing as I usually killed everyone by about 1200ad I hadn't even seen most of the later developments. So to do this, I killed everyone except India and boxed Ghandi in his last city while I built everything up for the flight to Alpha Centauri. And of course in Civ 3 they took out Fundamentalist governments due to game balance issues. Bah. That was the only government I used in the earlier games. Nothing like launching a religious war against the rest of the planet.
Developers themselves commonly refer to this as cheating. At the harder difficulty levels it's easier from a coding viewpoint to tweak things like unit cost or resource availability for the computer player rather than making an AI that is harder to beat while operating within the same ruleset as the human player.
FrameMaker wasn't exactly what you would call a competitor to Quark. Framemaker is a SGML based publishing tool primarily used for technical documents. The latest versions are heavily XML based.
Uh yeah. And I'm sure the combined power of Adobe and Macromedia will be able to force all of that nasty php and perl off the web and replace it with the power of proprietary ColdFusion!
"Exactly. Which is why talking about an "X86 platform" is irrelevant."
How? Hmmm? Is it irrelevant to someone considering deploying a mixture of say, Solaris and Linux? Considering both run on x86? Versus say going with Sparcs to run Solaris? Is it irrelevant to someone considering a 64 bit system to run Linux on? Considering they might be looking at x86 vs Itanium vs Power? Is it irrelevant to a budget strapped IT Director who wants to leverage commodity level pricing on the x86 platform to deploy Linux or UNIX?
Do you really think because it isn't an issue to most consumers that it is irrelevant? Why the hell would companies court the business enterprise market if as you imply, it's irrelevant? Why would Novell buy Suse to compete ON x86 against Windows? Why would Sun choose to port Solaris to x86 hardware if there is no point? x86 is a HARDWARE platform, Windows is a SOFTWARE platform. x86 benefits from low cost and the ability to run multiple operating sytems - SOFTWARE platforms. While this might be irrelevant in whatever industry you are involved in, it sure as hell is in IT.
Intel and AMD make money from their hardware no matter what operating system is used. It is to both of their advantages to work with Microsoft as well as Linux development companies (i.e. IBM, Novell) to maximize x86 hardware usage. I guess you could say that on the consumer level Windows could be considered "the platform". On the business and server side of things that isn't the case. Windows is one of several operating systems running on x86.
Yeah whatever. The RIAA didn't make up the term. It's been used for well over 25 years in the software community to refer to acts of digital copyright infringement. Hell, plenty of "warez" groups have played up the pirate theme. Saying that something isn't illegal when it is by current law is just stupid. Copyright infringement is illegal under US law and most other countries. Stating that does not mean I agree with the RIAAs actions or the law itself. P2P is not a protocol, it's a term used that covers a number of protocols. Bittorent does need protection, or rather needs to be shown as a legitimate (i.e. has significant non-infringing usage) just as much as the VCR did in the '80s. Why? Because the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been trying to make P2P protocols and applications made illegal. Showing significant non-infringing usage goes a long way to helping make sure we never see laws affecting P2P.
Slashdot Mirror
And by free, i mean it's really free. Not like "it's free but you have to..."
It's not free. There is no monthly fee, but there is a one time cost of the full game that you have to pay. Free would be if you could download the client, not need a serial number, just logon and play forever.
This game is clearly superior to World of Warcraft and runs on a seemless world. It's worth your money to try it!
That totally depends on what type of play style you like. I've played Guild Wars betas and I've played World of Warcraft. I found them to be very different experiences. Wow is much more of a typical MMO with all that entails (good and bad). Guild Wars is a bit of a different animal. It really had more of a Diablo feel to it. Definately a substantial evolution on Diablo but still feels very different from a regular MMO. So for a lot of people that is a boon, since they don't enjoy the standard MMO style of play.
Most of the players I ran into who loved the game came out of the Diablo set. I was actually amazed to see all these people who were still playing Diablo in 2005. I would imagine Guild Wars will totally devour that player set.
I really didn't like the way you had to load out your skills before each quest. Being limited to 8 at a time just seemed to make some of the skills kind of pointless. I realize this is a major aspect of the play and you might find maximizing your skill combos to be a lot of fun.
I also really didn't like being "walled in" to the environments. Not being able to slide down a slope but rather being required to take the long path down drove me nuts.
I think Guild Wars is an interesting new game and a lot of people will really like it. I just think it's hard to compare directly to something like World of Warcraft or hell, Everquest. Similar, yet different.
Windows Symbolic and Hard Links
Yes it's not well documented. But it is there.
Seriously, City of Heroes has much hotter babes with skimpy outfits than either of these two.
Windows has had symbolic links for ages.
As for your Win95 = Mac 89. Did the MacOS have preemptive multitasking in '89? No it didn't. Did the finder even get parallel multitasking capability before System 8 (i.e. copying t2o files at once), not it didn't. When was system 8 released? 1997.
I believe GP is reffering to the product activation copy protection that Adobe has started putting in its products (i.e. Photoshop CS).
"3: You can take away functionality and later charge more for it and call it a "feature" with good marketing. And everyone's eating it up."
This has never been proven to be the case in the console market. Console expansions have been around since the old days for Atari and Intellivision (i.e. Starpath supercharger, IntelliVoice) all the through the Sega CD and 32x to the PS2 hard drive. Yet none of these has seen a great deal of support. More developers are going to target the base platform.
That being said, since the current Xbox HD has not really been used for too much and could probably at this point be replaced by flash memory, I believe the next gen Xbox hard drive option will be used primarily for functions beyond gaming. Microsoft probably wants to use this option to turn it into a mini media center. Figure things like WebTV, PVR functionality, music playback. This would be a logical step if MS has been paying any attention to what people have been using modded Xboxes for (aside from piracy of course).
I mean this really isn't strong enough punishment. It doesn't return any value to those damaged (the media companies). I mean come on, what we really need is a large scale public spectacle where these offenders can battle it out man to man.
The entertainment industry can recoup their losses by promoting this gladitorial combat!
If the government wants to act draconian and have the population ignore it they really need to keep us fed, inebriated and entertained.
Bring on the bread and circuses!
Sure I would gladly welcome a post suggesting that Nintendo should use Eniac as its platform.
All I am saying is that I am tired of the invasion of the Mac fanboys here. It doesn't matter whether its Linux, BSD, Apple, Windows or whatever. Any post saying "they should just use this and everything would work properly" is stupid. If I have to hear another "why would you do this? all you need is a Mac mini" I'm going to vomit. And then to see posts like that modded +5 insightful just illustrates the high volume of dweebism that persists in the Slashdot community.
"Whining about it does nothing except prove that your testicles have gone missing."
And I guess posting as Anonymous Coward is the proper way of displaying how big your balls are?
Oh you bring a tear to my eye. Oh how you bring back the memories of Slashdot of years past. You know, Slashdot before the Legion of Jobs showed up and proclaimed that Apple had an answer to everything.
Yes. Bring me back my old Slashdot. Please, please bring back:
1. Make it with Linux
2. ??
3. Profit!
Bring back the good old days, when BSD was dead and Red Hat was king.
(and yes I AM serious)
This is a common practice in magazine publishing. It's called a controlled subscription vs. a paid. Magazines generally do NOT make money off of paid subscriptions, they make money off of advertising. Overall paid subscription numbers have been dropping for years. The advertisers do not care whether a subscriber is paid or not, what they want is a large subscriber base that you can validate as being interested in your product. So when Gamespot takes your name down when you get their discount card, they can consider you to be a game playing and purchasing reader of Game Informer. Which is exactly who the advertisers want to reach.
One of the companies I work for is a regional magazine publishing company and most of the publications operate this way. For example the regionl business publication is given away free to chambers of commerce, lawyers, high profile businesses etc.
I love getting modded redundant when I reply to a post that had NO replies when I submitted it.
Maybe next time I should just type one sentence instead.
Oh well, here's hoping for an offtopic as well!
"Do they have permission from the person who wrote the lectures to share it?" asks one IP attorney, referring to lectures recorded on iPods
Doesn't this apply just as well to ANY recordable media? Is it so hard to share something recorded on tape?
Record on tape, rip to mp3 and upload to illegalcollegelecturetorrents.com.
I really, really hate when IP lawyers get all busted out of shape by something like an iPod when audio recording has been around in classrooms for ages.
Maybe it's because now they will be able to make high quality digital versions of the lectures that won't degrade with repeated copying! Oh no!
Ok, it sounds like a horrible hoary mess and I am very scared now. I'm going to crawl back into the cozy and unstructured mess that is QuarkXpress 4 and hide.
Eeek!
I suppose if you ignored all the other computers out there (i.e. Amiga)- System 7 did introduce true (well not preemptive, but not the icky System 6 way) multitasking.
just to make the whole computer game/board game connection completely confusing some makes Sid Meier's Civilization: the board game.
Really that isn't true. Civ 3 changed a number of factors which made strategy you may have used in the earlier games not as effective.
The addition of culture and empire borders in Civ 3 changes the dynamic significantly. In particular it is much harder to just take over the world with military might. Especially since captured cities citizens still possess a nationalistic relationship to the defeated nation, and have a tendency to rebel.
In the original Civilization there was only one time that I didn't win by military might. I wanted to take the game all the way through to the space ship launch. Seeing as I usually killed everyone by about 1200ad I hadn't even seen most of the later developments. So to do this, I killed everyone except India and boxed Ghandi in his last city while I built everything up for the flight to Alpha Centauri.
And of course in Civ 3 they took out Fundamentalist governments due to game balance issues. Bah. That was the only government I used in the earlier games. Nothing like launching a religious war against the rest of the planet.
Developers themselves commonly refer to this as cheating. At the harder difficulty levels it's easier from a coding viewpoint to tweak things like unit cost or resource availability for the computer player rather than making an AI that is harder to beat while operating within the same ruleset as the human player.
FrameMaker wasn't exactly what you would call a competitor to Quark. Framemaker is a SGML based publishing tool primarily used for technical documents. The latest versions are heavily XML based.
Uh yeah. And I'm sure the combined power of Adobe and Macromedia will be able to force all of that nasty php and perl off the web and replace it with the power of proprietary ColdFusion!
I love the Power Glove... it's so bad.
Make that sure as hell isn't in IT.
"Exactly. Which is why talking about an "X86 platform" is irrelevant."
How? Hmmm? Is it irrelevant to someone considering deploying a mixture of say, Solaris and Linux? Considering both run on x86? Versus say going with Sparcs to run Solaris?
Is it irrelevant to someone considering a 64 bit system to run Linux on? Considering they might be looking at x86 vs Itanium vs Power?
Is it irrelevant to a budget strapped IT Director who wants to leverage commodity level pricing on the x86 platform to deploy Linux or UNIX?
Do you really think because it isn't an issue to most consumers that it is irrelevant? Why the hell would companies court the business enterprise market if as you imply, it's irrelevant?
Why would Novell buy Suse to compete ON x86 against Windows? Why would Sun choose to port Solaris to x86 hardware if there is no point?
x86 is a HARDWARE platform, Windows is a SOFTWARE platform. x86 benefits from low cost and the ability to run multiple operating sytems - SOFTWARE platforms.
While this might be irrelevant in whatever industry you are involved in, it sure as hell is in IT.
Intel and AMD make money from their hardware no matter what operating system is used. It is to both of their advantages to work with Microsoft as well as Linux development companies (i.e. IBM, Novell) to maximize x86 hardware usage.
I guess you could say that on the consumer level Windows could be considered "the platform". On the business and server side of things that isn't the case. Windows is one of several operating systems running on x86.
Now this really should be posted on Fark. They would have a field day with it.
Yeah whatever. The RIAA didn't make up the term. It's been used for well over 25 years in the software community to refer to acts of digital copyright infringement. Hell, plenty of "warez" groups have played up the pirate theme.
Saying that something isn't illegal when it is by current law is just stupid. Copyright infringement is illegal under US law and most other countries. Stating that does not mean I agree with the RIAAs actions or the law itself.
P2P is not a protocol, it's a term used that covers a number of protocols. Bittorent does need protection, or rather needs to be shown as a legitimate (i.e. has significant non-infringing usage) just as much as the VCR did in the '80s. Why? Because the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been trying to make P2P protocols and applications made illegal. Showing significant non-infringing usage goes a long way to helping make sure we never see laws affecting P2P.