If they turned Civ4 into a RTS... I don't even know what to say. It might be a good RTS, but none of civs core fanbase would want to play it.
You're right, they woudn't want to play it. But they'd buy it. Just like die-hard StarWars fans will see Ep3, inwardly knowing that it will suck, no matter how "un-Civ" civ4 turns out to be, the die-hards *will* buy it.
It's sad, but true. Gaming companies do *not* need to cater to the core fans to make a successful sequel (measured in profits, not fun-ness). In fact, a strong argument could be made that paying attention to your hard-core fans is detrimental to wide-spread success.
That being said, I really, really, really hope that Civ4 is like Civ3+Alpha Centauri. If any RTS elements are included (and I have a stinking suspicion that there will be), I hope that the real-time will be pausable, as seen in Gettysburgh! and Rise of Nations.
So why should anyone expect a person owning a PC to pay for each play of a video game. We optimized that out long ago.
You're trolling, right? Fine. I'll take the "informative" karma.
Perhaps the parent should have said "arcade game". From the article: One early customer is Incredible Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of coin-operated video games like the Golden Tee golf game. It has selected Peppercoin 2.0 to process credit card transactions in its future lineup of games, which will be able to take credit card swipes.
Big huge games was founded by Brian Reynolds who did work on the Civ sequal and Alpha Centauri.
That's a bit disingenuous. Brian Reynolds was lead designer on civ2 and on alpha centauri. No offense to you the poster, but saying that he "did work" on those smash-hit titles, is like saying Enrico Fermi "did work" on the atomic bomb.
Personally, I thought Rise of Nations was a bit boring. It was more Gettyburgh and less Civ. I want to play Civ. Pollution and riots and, well, civ-style micromanagement is part of playing civ. Still, as long as they don't make civ4 a RTS, I'll be bying it.
Sorry, North America has well more than 2 countries in it, your oh so enlightened country obviously has problem with basic math.
Actually I think that the proper name for the collection of extra-USA provinces in North America is "America Lite".
USANorth and USASouth (in an effort to boost tourism from the anti-America sector, sometimes respectively referred to as "Canada" and "Mexico") are territories of the United States, sure, but technically they count as part of the country. Same goes for USASouthSouth, those teeny places south of USASouth, whose names I can't be bothered to Google.
Multiple provinces, but really, technically, only one country. You know, sort of like the European Union.
At first I thought it was inefficient to have to press C-x C-s to save a file, then I realized that it was less keypresses than ESC:wq!.
Well, you're more than welcome to map C-x C-s (in any mode) to be ":wq!". Or you chould type "Shift-Z Shift-Z", if doing keymapping is too troublesome.
Personally, I like that it's more than three keystrokes to save. Having to type "ESC:wq (or:q!)" (especially the last two) requires more thought (do I *really* want to save/exit this document?) than C-x C-c. I guess it's just what you're used to.
I had a friend send me a Google Mail invite to a yahoo address. It never arrived.
I'm certain that he used the correct address. I can understand "bulking" gmail invites (don't believe it's an honest mistake, but can understand it's possible) as I have had legitimate invites to mailing lists/web sites get placed into the bulk folder.
I got nothing in my Yahoo account. I was very careful to check the bulk foldler, but nothing ever showed up. Lucky for me, I was able to get the URL for the invite from his sent folder and signed up that way.
I had the *same* thing happen to me! I had better luck proving my citizenship, though. A copy of my (Italian) birth certificate, my naturalization papers, my social security card, and my passport (from when I was a baby), and *poof* everything was better.
Oddly enough, I couldn't e-file my taxes for three or four years. Kept getting rejected for having bad data. Turns out the government thought that my birthday was four months later than it actually was (they entered a date in the wrong field).
this is not the kind of thing you can knock up in your back room Not to be pedantic, but I believe that the phrase used to describe hurriedly putting something together is "knock out".
Although, I'm certain that there is quite a bit of knocking-up done in back room medical settings...
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
Excellent analogy. It would certainly be more prestigious to say "I discovered the 10th planet" than to say "I discovered a very large chunk of orbital rock, one of the Kuiper-belt objects."
In practice though, I don't believe that there is much done in science that is actually based solely on Science. There is a lot of politics and emotion that comes into play. Witness arguments over who discovered a new element, whether or not it actually is a new element, and even what to name it.
To be pendantic, it's AD 400 *or* 400 CE. The "Anno Domini" means "In the year of our Lord", hence "In the year of our Lord, 400" is written as AD 400.
They just sit there, willingly running anything given to them. It's akin to a dumbass in front of a linux machine, and someone tells them to type in "rm -rf/" as root. It's not the technology's fault, but the user's.
I would argue that the person saying "type in rm -rf/" is the d umbass, not the untrained person who trustingly followed directions.
(ack. missed a tag. sorry).In summary, the documentation is so bad, I can't even make a decent evaluation of whether the language is any good. The *first* thing the PHP crowd needs to fix is the documentation. It ought to be rewritten from scratch.
Uhm, huh? Is this a troll? The only *really* good thing PHP has going for it is the online documentation. The user comments make PHP bearable to use. They explicitly provide real-world examples of how to do things and how to work around kludgey PHP interfaces and bugs. PHP's documentation makes a so-so product into a good product. Perl is a really good procut that would be a lot better if it had something similar. It's online FAQ is good, but somehow seems to never contain *MY* frequently asked questions.
Uhm, huh? Is this a troll? The only *really* good thing PHP has going for it is the online documentation. The user comments make PHP bearable to use. They explicitly provide real-world examples of how to do things and how to work around kludgey PHP interfaces and bugs. PHP's documentation makes a so-so product into a good product. Perl is a really good procut that would be a lot better if it had something similar. It's online FAQ is good, but somehow seems to never contain *MY* frequently asked questions.
Fan fiction, music inspired by, and other derivative works are all perfectly legal, even if done for profit.
I'm not certain that's the case. You definitely have to obtain permission (obtain a license) to, say, make a screenplay version of a novel, even if you don't copy any of the dialogue verbatim.
"Stealing" a plot is also definitely a no-no. I can't re-create the movie StarWars shot-by-shot, only changing the characters' names and re-arranging the dialogue. (unless it's parody, which is usually protected speech). Similar themes are fine (Matrix "borrows" from Dark City and Johnny Mnemonic, for example); blatant copying is not allowed.
Didn't Sony get into trouble with this issue regarding Underworld?
To say that releasing under the Creative Commons is less restricive is certainly disingenuous. While this statement is true, it totally disregards *how* lenient it is.
Basically, anyone, anywhere, can take this work and do anything (noncommercial) with the work. Write a screenplay. Make a rap version of it. Write fanfic. Anything.
Although some franchises turn a blind eye to such activies (startrek fanfic, for example, is allowed to exist), Doctorow is, literally, giving us all a license to whatever we want.
In today's world of "sue first, ask questions later", this move is amazing and should be applauded. Good job! I hope that this proves to be a success, both from a creative perspective and an economic one.
I currently boot from a 64MB Lexar CF card I bought in 2000. I use it for disaster recovery and cleaning up viruses on family members computers. All of the new computers I'ved peeked into lately have a BIOS option that allows for USB booting.
Now if I could boot a PC from ~firewire~, *that* would be cool.
Perhaps you could help me with this question. Why are the Indians in call centers so adamant on handling the call themselves? *I* know that they can't handle my question, and some times it seems that *they* know that they can't handle the question, but *EVERY* single call I've placed to what appears to be an Indian call center, whether it be for customer support on a credit card or telephone or for a technical support call for a computer problem, results in the call person obstinately following the call script, even when the script doesn't apply to the situation (it's hard to insert a CD into a computer when the power supply doesn't work). Only then do they say that a supervisor will call me back, which is what I wanted in the first place.
It isn't so much that Americans don't quite care for Indians working in America--it's that we're *outsourcing* our jobs that really irks us. At least when a programming job is given to an Indian H1-B instead of to an American, there is a theoretical competition for the job. And even if it is a non-American, some of that money does go back into our economy in the form of taxes and rent and buying stuff.
Outsourcing our jobs overseas doesn't really do anything for America. The top.0001% of the population who are the CEOs and company owners like it a lot, but what about the common working person?
My personal gripe is that our jobs are being outsourced overseas *and* we're giving financial aid to the countries who are getting our jobs. Shouldn't the financial aid be decreased?
I had an 85 Cavalier. The best thing about the car was the digital speedometer. At 85 miles an hour, it would start flashing and refuse to go an higher (if only it were 88).
It was really, really bright, very, very easy to read. A glance, and *poof* I knew how fast I was going. As opposed to my Eclipse where it's more like "uhm, oh, there's the 60 mark, so I must be doing about 68." It doesn't take very long, granted, but it's definitely not a eyes-flick-down-flick-back-up movement.
"Uhm, gee, officer, I only thought I was doing 85."
Find me one cellular company -- just ONE -- whose cheapest phone doesn't have some basic games onboard.
Nextel. Their cheapest phone doesn't have games. You can "download" features such as voice record and voice activated dialing.
I think that shortly after all the cell phone companies switch to flat rate "all you can eat" usage, we will see a shift to requiring users to pay to "unlock" features of a phone (rather than require them to just by a new phone).
I have a DirecTivo. I set it up the week of Christmas, in the dark. I didn't have the correct mounting bracket (actually, I'm renting it from a friend), so I used duct tape to secure the dish in place. I am shocked at how effective this kludge actually works. I made one adjustment (after I hooked up the second tuner) and it's been fine ever since.
We've had several major storms, only one caused artifacting in the signal on a few of the channels. I can only imagine that a real mounting bracket would eliminate that problem.
YMMV, of course, but I've had absolutely no complaints about the reception.
Hmm, around 150 unsolicited emails in a single day. I don't dare look at them because of the web bugs, scams, etc. that are present.
How is that even possible? I've had a yahoo account since, well, the first day they offered a free email account. I get about 150 spams a day... in my Bulk folder. I get about five a day in my Inbox.
Two months ago it was more like ten a day in my inbox. Spam filtering *does* work and I point to Yahoo as one way that seems to work well. With the addition of filtering (I am, admittedly, too lazy to take the time to add a filter to catch the remaining four or five a day which tend to all come from the same set of spammers) spam really can be dropped to a manageable level.
Also, Yahoo, by default, turns off images and javascript and crap in the emails in your inbox. You *have* to turn them on. 5 a day slipping through the filter is still five too many, but it's a far cry from the deluge that you seem to imply to be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
If they turned Civ4 into a RTS... I don't even know what to say. It might be a good RTS, but none of civs core fanbase would want to play it.
You're right, they woudn't want to play it. But they'd buy it. Just like die-hard StarWars fans will see Ep3, inwardly knowing that it will suck, no matter how "un-Civ" civ4 turns out to be, the die-hards *will* buy it.
It's sad, but true. Gaming companies do *not* need to cater to the core fans to make a successful sequel (measured in profits, not fun-ness). In fact, a strong argument could be made that paying attention to your hard-core fans is detrimental to wide-spread success.
That being said, I really, really, really hope that Civ4 is like Civ3+Alpha Centauri. If any RTS elements are included (and I have a stinking suspicion that there will be), I hope that the real-time will be pausable, as seen in Gettysburgh! and Rise of Nations.
So why should anyone expect a person owning a PC to pay for each play of a video game. We optimized that out long ago.
You're trolling, right? Fine. I'll take the "informative" karma.
Perhaps the parent should have said "arcade game". From the article: One early customer is Incredible Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of coin-operated video games like the Golden Tee golf game. It has selected Peppercoin 2.0 to process credit card transactions in its future lineup of games, which will be able to take credit card swipes.
HAND!
Big huge games was founded by Brian Reynolds who did work on the Civ sequal and Alpha Centauri.
That's a bit disingenuous. Brian Reynolds was lead designer on civ2 and on alpha centauri. No offense to you the poster, but saying that he "did work" on those smash-hit titles, is like saying Enrico Fermi "did work" on the atomic bomb.
Personally, I thought Rise of Nations was a bit boring. It was more Gettyburgh and less Civ. I want to play Civ. Pollution and riots and, well, civ-style micromanagement is part of playing civ. Still, as long as they don't make civ4 a RTS, I'll be bying it.
Sorry, North America has well more than 2 countries in it, your oh so enlightened country obviously has problem with basic math.
Actually I think that the proper name for the collection of extra-USA provinces in North America is "America Lite".
USANorth and USASouth (in an effort to boost tourism from the anti-America sector, sometimes respectively referred to as "Canada" and "Mexico") are territories of the United States, sure, but technically they count as part of the country. Same goes for USASouthSouth, those teeny places south of USASouth, whose names I can't be bothered to Google.
Multiple provinces, but really, technically, only one country. You know, sort of like the European Union.
At first I thought it was inefficient to have to press C-x C-s to save a file, then I realized that it was less keypresses than ESC :wq!.
:wq (or :q!)" (especially the last two) requires more thought (do I *really* want to save/exit this document?) than C-x C-c. I guess it's just what you're used to.
Well, you're more than welcome to map C-x C-s (in any mode) to be ":wq!". Or you chould type "Shift-Z Shift-Z", if doing keymapping is too troublesome.
Personally, I like that it's more than three keystrokes to save. Having to type "ESC
I had a friend send me a Google Mail invite to a yahoo address. It never arrived.
I'm certain that he used the correct address. I can understand "bulking" gmail invites (don't believe it's an honest mistake, but can understand it's possible) as I have had legitimate invites to mailing lists/web sites get placed into the bulk folder.
I got nothing in my Yahoo account. I was very careful to check the bulk foldler, but nothing ever showed up. Lucky for me, I was able to get the URL for the invite from his sent folder and signed up that way.
I had the *same* thing happen to me! I had better luck proving my citizenship, though. A copy of my (Italian) birth certificate, my naturalization papers, my social security card, and my passport (from when I was a baby), and *poof* everything was better.
Oddly enough, I couldn't e-file my taxes for three or four years. Kept getting rejected for having bad data. Turns out the government thought that my birthday was four months later than it actually was (they entered a date in the wrong field).
and put an R in the governors seat for the -> first time since the civil war -,
If memory serves, there was this governor by the name of Reagan. I seem to recall that he was a Republican. IHBT?
this is not the kind of thing you can knock up in your back room
Not to be pedantic, but I believe that the phrase used to describe hurriedly putting something together is "knock out".
Although, I'm certain that there is quite a bit of knocking-up done in back room medical settings...
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
Excellent analogy. It would certainly be more prestigious to say "I discovered the 10th planet" than to say "I discovered a very large chunk of orbital rock, one of the Kuiper-belt objects."
In practice though, I don't believe that there is much done in science that is actually based solely on Science. There is a lot of politics and emotion that comes into play. Witness arguments over who discovered a new element, whether or not it actually is a new element, and even what to name it.
Yes, but... you can *die* from infections. Henson (Muppets guy) died from a frickin' strep throat infection. Take your meds.
To be pendantic, it's AD 400 *or* 400 CE. The "Anno Domini" means "In the year of our Lord", hence "In the year of our Lord, 400" is written as AD 400.
They just sit there, willingly running anything given to them. It's akin to a dumbass in front of a linux machine, and someone tells them to type in "rm -rf /" as root. It's not the technology's fault, but the user's.
/" is the d umbass, not the untrained person who trustingly followed directions.
I would argue that the person saying "type in rm -rf
(ack. missed a tag. sorry) .In summary, the documentation is so bad, I can't even make a decent evaluation
of whether the language is any good. The *first* thing the PHP crowd needs to
fix is the documentation. It ought to be rewritten from scratch.
Uhm, huh? Is this a troll? The only *really* good thing PHP has going for it is the online documentation. The user comments make PHP bearable to use. They explicitly provide real-world examples of how to do things and how to work around kludgey PHP interfaces and bugs. PHP's documentation makes a so-so product into a good product. Perl is a really good procut that would be a lot better if it had something similar. It's online FAQ is good, but somehow seems to never contain *MY* frequently asked questions.
Uhm, huh? Is this a troll? The only *really* good thing PHP has going for it is the online documentation. The user comments make PHP bearable to use. They explicitly provide real-world examples of how to do things and how to work around kludgey PHP interfaces and bugs. PHP's documentation makes a so-so product into a good product. Perl is a really good procut that would be a lot better if it had something similar. It's online FAQ is good, but somehow seems to never contain *MY* frequently asked questions.
Fan fiction, music inspired by, and other derivative works are all perfectly legal, even if done for profit.
I'm not certain that's the case. You definitely have to obtain permission (obtain a license) to, say, make a screenplay version of a novel, even if you don't copy any of the dialogue verbatim.
"Stealing" a plot is also definitely a no-no. I can't re-create the movie StarWars shot-by-shot, only changing the characters' names and re-arranging the dialogue. (unless it's parody, which is usually protected speech). Similar themes are fine (Matrix "borrows" from Dark City and Johnny Mnemonic, for example); blatant copying is not allowed.
Didn't Sony get into trouble with this issue regarding Underworld?
To say that releasing under the Creative Commons is less restricive is certainly disingenuous. While this statement is true, it totally disregards *how* lenient it is.
Basically, anyone, anywhere, can take this work and do anything (noncommercial) with the work. Write a screenplay. Make a rap version of it. Write fanfic. Anything.
Although some franchises turn a blind eye to such activies (startrek fanfic, for example, is allowed to exist), Doctorow is, literally, giving us all a license to whatever we want.
In today's world of "sue first, ask questions later", this move is amazing and should be applauded. Good job! I hope that this proves to be a success, both from a creative perspective and an economic one.
I currently boot from a 64MB Lexar CF card I bought in 2000. I use it for disaster recovery and cleaning up viruses on family members computers. All of the new computers I'ved peeked into lately have a BIOS option that allows for USB booting.
Now if I could boot a PC from ~firewire~, *that* would be cool.
Perhaps you could help me with this question. Why are the Indians in call centers so adamant on handling the call themselves? *I* know that they can't handle my question, and some times it seems that *they* know that they can't handle the question, but *EVERY* single call I've placed to what appears to be an Indian call center, whether it be for customer support on a credit card or telephone or for a technical support call for a computer problem, results in the call person obstinately following the call script, even when the script doesn't apply to the situation (it's hard to insert a CD into a computer when the power supply doesn't work).
Only then do they say that a supervisor will call me back, which is what I wanted in the first place.
It isn't so much that Americans don't quite care for Indians working in America--it's that we're *outsourcing* our jobs that really irks us. At least when a programming job is given to an Indian H1-B instead of to an American, there is a theoretical competition for the job. And even if it is a non-American, some of that money does go back into our economy in the form of taxes and rent and buying stuff.
.0001% of the population who are the CEOs and company owners like it a lot, but what about the common working person?
Outsourcing our jobs overseas doesn't really do anything for America. The top
My personal gripe is that our jobs are being outsourced overseas *and* we're giving financial aid to the countries who are getting our jobs. Shouldn't the financial aid be decreased?
I had an 85 Cavalier. The best thing about the car was the digital speedometer. At 85 miles an hour, it would start flashing and refuse to go an higher (if only it were 88).
It was really, really bright, very, very easy to read. A glance, and *poof* I knew how fast I was going. As opposed to my Eclipse where it's more like "uhm, oh, there's the 60 mark, so I must be doing about 68." It doesn't take very long, granted, but it's definitely not a eyes-flick-down-flick-back-up movement.
"Uhm, gee, officer, I only thought I was doing 85."
Find me one cellular company -- just ONE -- whose cheapest phone doesn't have some basic games onboard.
Nextel. Their cheapest phone doesn't have games. You can "download" features such as voice record and voice activated dialing.
I think that shortly after all the cell phone companies switch to flat rate "all you can eat" usage, we will see a shift to requiring users to pay to "unlock" features of a phone (rather than require them to just by a new phone).
I have a DirecTivo. I set it up the week of Christmas, in the dark. I didn't have the correct mounting bracket (actually, I'm renting it from a friend), so I used duct tape to secure the dish in place. I am shocked at how effective this kludge actually works. I made one adjustment (after I hooked up the second tuner) and it's been fine ever since.
We've had several major storms, only one caused artifacting in the signal on a few of the channels. I can only imagine that a real mounting bracket would eliminate that problem.
YMMV, of course, but I've had absolutely no complaints about the reception.
Hmm, around 150 unsolicited emails in a single day. I don't dare look at them because of the web bugs, scams, etc. that are present.
How is that even possible? I've had a yahoo account since, well, the first day they offered a free email account. I get about 150 spams a day... in my Bulk folder. I get about five a day in my Inbox.
Two months ago it was more like ten a day in my inbox. Spam filtering *does* work and I point to Yahoo as one way that seems to work well. With the addition of filtering (I am, admittedly, too lazy to take the time to add a filter to catch the remaining four or five a day which tend to all come from the same set of spammers) spam really can be dropped to a manageable level.
Also, Yahoo, by default, turns off images and javascript and crap in the emails in your inbox. You *have* to turn them on. 5 a day slipping through the filter is still five too many, but it's a far cry from the deluge that you seem to imply to be the case.
Filtering *does* work.
remove the %20 from the url (slasdot place a space in his posted url) or you could go via this link