When you're done grinding all the yellow exclamation points, the rest of your time in the game is about mindlessly grinding for pieces of virtual gear. That's it. You don't do anything else, because there's nothing else to do. You just play to get gear in order to make it easier to get more gear.
Odd... most of the people in my guild run dungeons for the comraderie; loot is nice, but I like spending time with my guildies.
Games like WoW are boring as hell if you operate as a lone wolf. Find a good guild, and make some friends. Our guild has multiple couples in it, mostly 20-soemthing, but a few of us in our 40s and 50s. We have lots of women, military folk, and hard-core gamers like me.
For people like my wife, who has limited mobility, games like WoW are a god-send.
MMOs are a social network where you play together with friends. Good stuff.
Claiming that "well, they do it too!" is a poor excuse for being a copy-cat. Certainly Microsoft (and Apple) have "borrowed" ideas from other companies -- and Gnome and KDE try to be just like Windows and OS X. Oh, you can say that KDE has such-and-such that Windows doesn't, or that doing something is easier on Gnome -- but in the end, it's pretty much the same old stuff.
We can't make Open Source better if we don't recognize its weaknesses -- and one weakness (among several) is a lack of truly original R&D in mainstream FOSS applications.
No one OS or application is perfect. And so my desktop has two computers on it, one running Vista and the other running Gentoo Linux, giving me the the best of both worlds. And as long as the free software community insists on turning a blind eye towards its own problems (which include a lack of innovation), I'll need both of those computers to get my work done.
All this SUV bashing, but geeks are essentially the same as the person who insists on buying a giant car and doesn't really need it.
Look at all the geeks who constantly upgrade their computers for no reason, who have kilowatt power supplies just to run the latest ATI or NVidia card, who rush out and buy the newest video card as soon as it appears. Same mindset.
Yup... I wonder how much energy all those dual-SLI cards and quad-processors with 8GB of memory use, all for a few more FPS. How many geeks leave their machines running 24/7? Do they consider the chemical waste used in the production and eventual disposal their pet machines?
...and I bough a copy of Vista to update a multiprocessor Opetron workstation, back a month after Vista came out.
I've also upgraded two recent purchases from Windows Business/Home to Windows Ultimate.
In addition to Vista, I run a few Linux systems (Gentoo, Ubuntu), some XP, and an OS X laptop. So when I say "I'm happy with Vista" is based on experience with the alternatives.
Vista is not crap. Vista, in many ways, is a significant improvement over XP. And all other OSs have their own problems and good points. I think some tech people need to grow up and stop being pedantic fanatics.
Just because stealing is easy doesn't mean it is the moral choice.
I did not buy Bioshock, nor will I be buying any of other products with invasive copy protection. I won't be stealing their product, either. I'll live a quite happy life without supporting EA's bad choices, nor will I lower myself to piracy out of personal greed.
I've made a good chunk of my living from writing high-performance software using parallel algorithms, in C, C++, Fortran, and Java.
My clients? Britain, Brazil, Taiwan, and (yes) Omaha, Nebraska, USA.
Over the last quarter century of coding for a living, the greatest interest in advanced algorithms has been shown by my overseas customers. American companies tend to be conservative and bottom-line oriented. "Foreign" nations emphasize a broad education and creative thinking, thus making them more amenable to complex and new ideas, whereas the United States is focused on producing more MBAs -- and that difference influences everything in society, including software design.
Should it have been tested longer before release? Yes.
Is it as bad as people say on boards like this one? No.
I just bought a brand-new HP dv6768se laptop from Best Buy, upgraded the Vista Home to Vista Ultimate, and am sincerely happy with the system. My HP 8020n has been running flawlessly for many months. Both systems were built for Vista, came with Vista, and have run nothing else.
Oh, Vista has its problems -- the annoying slowness of file copies and deletes being chief among them. But I can sit down and make a bitch-list for my Gentoo and Ubuntu systems as well; my friends with Macs have their own pet peeves with OS X. I love my Linux systems; I love my Vista machines. As with everything in life, nothing is perfect, and whether or not you like something or someone is largely based on your desire to be annoyed.
On both of my Windows systems, one a brand-new laptop and the other a 6 month-old desktop system, both running U.S. English versions of Vista Ultimate. I run Windows Update, tell it to check for new updates -- and no SP1 in the list.
Given that both machines are *very* different, I can't fathom why neither can see the update. And yes, I've looked at the Microsoft web site; none of the "can't see SP1" conditions applies to my machines. No, they aren't running SP1 already; I checked that, too.
...I have little doubt of the "darker" side of the Gamespot tale.
My own tale comes from what you might call the Dark Ages, back in the dim days of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, I was a monthly columnist for the now-extinct life-form known as a "programming magazine."
My specialty was comparative reviews of compilers -- back in those days, there existed A LARGE NUMBER OF CHOICES as to which compiler you could use for C or Fortran programming on PCs. And, in a review of Fortran compilers, I stated (correctly) that a certain vendor's product failed miserably at a well-known benchmark.
The vendor pulled several full page adds; I was fired. The editor was quite honest in admitting that my dismissal was entirely based on placating a disturbed source of income.
The purpose of any business -- even television shows, magazines, and commercial web sites -- is to generate REVENUE. They do NOT exist for the greater public good, or for the search for truth, or for any other reason than to make money.
What amazes me is not that someone is fired for telling the truth or expressing an opinion -- what amazes me is how many people EXPECT morals or ethics from profit-oriented entities.
Actually, the way most NDAs and EULAs are written, it could be construed that installing the operating system is a violation. I do know that most of them make it "illegal" for me to even mention what I've installed to my wife and kids. Totally silly, if you ask me, unless they only want sequestered monks to test software.
I was talking about other games, also covered under NDAs. I'm not going to build a new machine for every game I install. And yes, I beta test several, and even work for a couple of game companies at times.
Anything that needs to be really secure -- say, personal financial data or porn -- is on a nicely-secure Linux box or a secured Windows laptop. Yes, Windows can be secure.
As usual, people like you focus on insignificant details so they can ignore the real issue -- in this case, the problem is an End User License Agreement that demands uncontrolled access to my computer and anything associated with it, just to play a very weak semi-shooter game.
I've been playing the beta the last 2 weeks, and I must tell you, this game pretty much rocks. It's like Diablo 2 met Halflife 2 and they had a baby. A demon spawned, zombie killing, FPS if you want to or hack-n-slash or pew-pew with spells if you want to, clickfest of a game. This game is like Diablo 2 in full 3d on crack. It is about as addictive as crack, and you're going to be hearing a lot about it over the next couple weeks.
I played about 10 hours of the game before obliterating it from my disk. The dialog system is tedious, the monsters stupid, the graphics dull and uninspired, the RPG elements meaningless, and the stability horrible. I've got 5-year-old games with better textures. And I'm running a pretty solid multicore system with lots of memory and the latest graphics.
I don't mind in-game ads, as long as they're inobtrusive.
I do mind giving EA and Flagship blanket permission to examine everything on my computer. READ what their "agreement" says -- they can mine your computer for whatever data they want, and give/sell it to whomever pays for it.
I keep sensitive business data, covered by NDAs, on my computer; I don't want anonymous strangers mining through my music, documents, source code, and data. Quite simply, the Hellgate: London agreement is completely unreasonable and dangerous.
Anyone who supports Free Software should understand the principles involved here, and refuse to accept Hellgate London on their computer.
I'll be picking up at least one of these machines -- well, two, since if I buy one for $400, they send another one to a kid somewhere who needs it.
I hope the distribution isn't limited to third-world countries; there are some poor areas right here in the U.S. that could use these machines. Certain Indian reservations come to mind...
I need a computer with decent outdoor screen and great battery life, one that's cheap enough I can afford to let it sink into a swamp without diving in and fighting the alligators and leeches for it (I do wildlife research in Florida). This machine may be just the ticket.
The problem with this articles is that the set of choices is false and confusing. For example, MPI and Java do not really belong in the same conversation; one is a tool for distributing workloads across servers, and the other is a general purpose programming language -- two very different things.
Choice is good. Choosing from a poorly-defined list is bad.
Choice is good if it provides different tools for different tasks. The list provided is somewhat silly, since several of the technologies address completely different issues and applications. There's a reason Sears sell thirty different shapes of hammers -- all nails are not the same.
After considerable deliberation and experimentation, I've shosen OpenMP for most task-parallel applications. The syntax is simple, it operates across C, C++, and Fortran, and it is supported by most major compilers on Linux, Windows, and Sun. The only quirk has been problematic support in GCC 4.2, but that will likely be cleared up within a few months. For cluster work, I tend to use MPI, because it has a long history and good support. I'm sure other tools have good versatility in environments different from those I frequent.
I don't know how to do this but I disagree with those of you who are voting me up in the cnn poll.
Of the four people there only one is dealing with extinction. Dead is dead, anything else is negotiable. Vote for the gorillas. 25 grand and fame that id probably just piss away anyway is not worth a specie.
I don't know if it will help, but I'd feel like crap if I won and the gorillas went extinct.
In the U.S., the transgender crowd would be all over this.:)
I sincerely doubt that a significant percentage of men-palying-women are doing so with evil or perverted intent. It's a toon; I'm not an orc, or a troll, or a gnome (thank god), either, so I don't see what's different about playing a female character.
For me, the choice of character sex is based on aesthetics. Honestly, I gotta look at this character for hundreds of hours, so it might as well be attractive. That said, I play male characters in WoW and LotRO, while my toons in Guild Wars are all female. My wife plays beefy male warriors in GW... now what does that say about role reversal?:)
I use the Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and OneNote on a regular basis for my Windows business work; the *only* one I've had *any* trouble with is Excel. I can blue screen my machines with Excel on a regular basis; unfortunately, one of my paying customers requires Excel 2007 because they invested heavily in it (long before I was contracted), so I haven't got much choice, since.xlsx documents won't open in any FOSS spreadsheet apps.
Complex software designed for diverse interactions will always be vulnerable to some kind of attack, even if it's as simple as someone walking out of a data center with a thumb drive in their pocket. Almost every vulnerability stems from a "feature" implemented to make software easier/flashier/useful. Flexibility and expansiveness carry with them the price of vulnerability, and pretending otherwise is to wear blinders.
Of course developers should do their best to prevent security problems -- but there is only so much that can be done when you also need to implement Really Cool Stuff. Every door you make is a door than can be kicked in, no matter how good your locks. The real world has never offered perfect security because it can't -- why expect engineered items to be safe from all evil?
Treat software and computers with caution, like walking through a major city's downtown at midnight. Sure, it's dangerous at times -- but it can also be exciting. Just don't pretend that danger doesn't exist...
My first experience with Vista was on a 2-yo dual-CPU Opteron box, running 1.6GHz procs, an ATI 1350, and 2GB of RAM. One of my customers wanted to know if their sofwtare would run on Vista. Vista ran great. So when I bought a new system, I picked up a nice Intel Core Duo 2 HP workstation with Vista pre-installed. Works beautifully.
I wouldn't think of putting Vista on my year-old 1.5GB 1.6GHz Turion laptop; if nothing else, the ATI graphics are too wussy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well played. Keep up the good work. :)
Odd... most of the people in my guild run dungeons for the comraderie; loot is nice, but I like spending time with my guildies. Games like WoW are boring as hell if you operate as a lone wolf. Find a good guild, and make some friends. Our guild has multiple couples in it, mostly 20-soemthing, but a few of us in our 40s and 50s. We have lots of women, military folk, and hard-core gamers like me. For people like my wife, who has limited mobility, games like WoW are a god-send. MMOs are a social network where you play together with friends. Good stuff.
Claiming that "well, they do it too!" is a poor excuse for being a copy-cat. Certainly Microsoft (and Apple) have "borrowed" ideas from other companies -- and Gnome and KDE try to be just like Windows and OS X. Oh, you can say that KDE has such-and-such that Windows doesn't, or that doing something is easier on Gnome -- but in the end, it's pretty much the same old stuff.
We can't make Open Source better if we don't recognize its weaknesses -- and one weakness (among several) is a lack of truly original R&D in mainstream FOSS applications.
No one OS or application is perfect. And so my desktop has two computers on it, one running Vista and the other running Gentoo Linux, giving me the the best of both worlds. And as long as the free software community insists on turning a blind eye towards its own problems (which include a lack of innovation), I'll need both of those computers to get my work done.
Yup... I wonder how much energy all those dual-SLI cards and quad-processors with 8GB of memory use, all for a few more FPS. How many geeks leave their machines running 24/7? Do they consider the chemical waste used in the production and eventual disposal their pet machines?
I've also upgraded two recent purchases from Windows Business/Home to Windows Ultimate.
In addition to Vista, I run a few Linux systems (Gentoo, Ubuntu), some XP, and an OS X laptop. So when I say "I'm happy with Vista" is based on experience with the alternatives.
Vista is not crap. Vista, in many ways, is a significant improvement over XP. And all other OSs have their own problems and good points. I think some tech people need to grow up and stop being pedantic fanatics.
The smart choice is: Don't buy the game.
Just because stealing is easy doesn't mean it is the moral choice.
I did not buy Bioshock, nor will I be buying any of other products with invasive copy protection. I won't be stealing their product, either. I'll live a quite happy life without supporting EA's bad choices, nor will I lower myself to piracy out of personal greed.
I've made a good chunk of my living from writing high-performance software using parallel algorithms, in C, C++, Fortran, and Java.
My clients? Britain, Brazil, Taiwan, and (yes) Omaha, Nebraska, USA.
Over the last quarter century of coding for a living, the greatest interest in advanced algorithms has been shown by my overseas customers. American companies tend to be conservative and bottom-line oriented. "Foreign" nations emphasize a broad education and creative thinking, thus making them more amenable to complex and new ideas, whereas the United States is focused on producing more MBAs -- and that difference influences everything in society, including software design.
No, it is not "that bad."
Could it be better? Yes.
Should it have been tested longer before release? Yes.
Is it as bad as people say on boards like this one? No.
I just bought a brand-new HP dv6768se laptop from Best Buy, upgraded the Vista Home to Vista Ultimate, and am sincerely happy with the system. My HP 8020n has been running flawlessly for many months. Both systems were built for Vista, came with Vista, and have run nothing else.
Oh, Vista has its problems -- the annoying slowness of file copies and deletes being chief among them. But I can sit down and make a bitch-list for my Gentoo and Ubuntu systems as well; my friends with Macs have their own pet peeves with OS X. I love my Linux systems; I love my Vista machines. As with everything in life, nothing is perfect, and whether or not you like something or someone is largely based on your desire to be annoyed.
On both of my Windows systems, one a brand-new laptop and the other a 6 month-old desktop system, both running U.S. English versions of Vista Ultimate. I run Windows Update, tell it to check for new updates -- and no SP1 in the list.
Given that both machines are *very* different, I can't fathom why neither can see the update. And yes, I've looked at the Microsoft web site; none of the "can't see SP1" conditions applies to my machines. No, they aren't running SP1 already; I checked that, too.
Suggestions?
...I have little doubt of the "darker" side of the Gamespot tale.
My own tale comes from what you might call the Dark Ages, back in the dim days of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, I was a monthly columnist for the now-extinct life-form known as a "programming magazine."
My specialty was comparative reviews of compilers -- back in those days, there existed A LARGE NUMBER OF CHOICES as to which compiler you could use for C or Fortran programming on PCs. And, in a review of Fortran compilers, I stated (correctly) that a certain vendor's product failed miserably at a well-known benchmark.
The vendor pulled several full page adds; I was fired. The editor was quite honest in admitting that my dismissal was entirely based on placating a disturbed source of income.
The purpose of any business -- even television shows, magazines, and commercial web sites -- is to generate REVENUE. They do NOT exist for the greater public good, or for the search for truth, or for any other reason than to make money.
What amazes me is not that someone is fired for telling the truth or expressing an opinion -- what amazes me is how many people EXPECT morals or ethics from profit-oriented entities.
Actually, the way most NDAs and EULAs are written, it could be construed that installing the operating system is a violation. I do know that most of them make it "illegal" for me to even mention what I've installed to my wife and kids. Totally silly, if you ask me, unless they only want sequestered monks to test software.
I was talking about other games, also covered under NDAs. I'm not going to build a new machine for every game I install. And yes, I beta test several, and even work for a couple of game companies at times.
Anything that needs to be really secure -- say, personal financial data or porn -- is on a nicely-secure Linux box or a secured Windows laptop. Yes, Windows can be secure.
As usual, people like you focus on insignificant details so they can ignore the real issue -- in this case, the problem is an End User License Agreement that demands uncontrolled access to my computer and anything associated with it, just to play a very weak semi-shooter game.
I played about 10 hours of the game before obliterating it from my disk. The dialog system is tedious, the monsters stupid, the graphics dull and uninspired, the RPG elements meaningless, and the stability horrible. I've got 5-year-old games with better textures. And I'm running a pretty solid multicore system with lots of memory and the latest graphics.
Your mileage may vary, of course. :)
The issue isn't the ads themselves -- it's the blanket data mining clause included in the EULA.
I don't care about ads -- I do care about people snooping around on my computer.
I don't mind in-game ads, as long as they're inobtrusive.
I do mind giving EA and Flagship blanket permission to examine everything on my computer. READ what their "agreement" says -- they can mine your computer for whatever data they want, and give/sell it to whomever pays for it.
I keep sensitive business data, covered by NDAs, on my computer; I don't want anonymous strangers mining through my music, documents, source code, and data. Quite simply, the Hellgate: London agreement is completely unreasonable and dangerous.
Anyone who supports Free Software should understand the principles involved here, and refuse to accept Hellgate London on their computer.
I'll be picking up at least one of these machines -- well, two, since if I buy one for $400, they send another one to a kid somewhere who needs it.
I hope the distribution isn't limited to third-world countries; there are some poor areas right here in the U.S. that could use these machines. Certain Indian reservations come to mind...
I need a computer with decent outdoor screen and great battery life, one that's cheap enough I can afford to let it sink into a swamp without diving in and fighting the alligators and leeches for it (I do wildlife research in Florida). This machine may be just the ticket.
The problem with this articles is that the set of choices is false and confusing. For example, MPI and Java do not really belong in the same conversation; one is a tool for distributing workloads across servers, and the other is a general purpose programming language -- two very different things.
Choice is good. Choosing from a poorly-defined list is bad.
Choice is good if it provides different tools for different tasks. The list provided is somewhat silly, since several of the technologies address completely different issues and applications. There's a reason Sears sell thirty different shapes of hammers -- all nails are not the same.
After considerable deliberation and experimentation, I've shosen OpenMP for most task-parallel applications. The syntax is simple, it operates across C, C++, and Fortran, and it is supported by most major compilers on Linux, Windows, and Sun. The only quirk has been problematic support in GCC 4.2, but that will likely be cleared up within a few months. For cluster work, I tend to use MPI, because it has a long history and good support. I'm sure other tools have good versatility in environments different from those I frequent.
From the aftermath technologies blog:
He's right. I voted for the gorillas.
In the U.S., the transgender crowd would be all over this. :)
I sincerely doubt that a significant percentage of men-palying-women are doing so with evil or perverted intent. It's a toon; I'm not an orc, or a troll, or a gnome (thank god), either, so I don't see what's different about playing a female character.
For me, the choice of character sex is based on aesthetics. Honestly, I gotta look at this character for hundreds of hours, so it might as well be attractive. That said, I play male characters in WoW and LotRO, while my toons in Guild Wars are all female. My wife plays beefy male warriors in GW... now what does that say about role reversal? :)
I use the Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and OneNote on a regular basis for my Windows business work; the *only* one I've had *any* trouble with is Excel. I can blue screen my machines with Excel on a regular basis; unfortunately, one of my paying customers requires Excel 2007 because they invested heavily in it (long before I was contracted), so I haven't got much choice, since .xlsx documents won't open in any FOSS spreadsheet apps.
For my personal work, I use Gnumeric on Linux.
You'll never be safe.
Complex software designed for diverse interactions will always be vulnerable to some kind of attack, even if it's as simple as someone walking out of a data center with a thumb drive in their pocket. Almost every vulnerability stems from a "feature" implemented to make software easier/flashier/useful. Flexibility and expansiveness carry with them the price of vulnerability, and pretending otherwise is to wear blinders.
Of course developers should do their best to prevent security problems -- but there is only so much that can be done when you also need to implement Really Cool Stuff. Every door you make is a door than can be kicked in, no matter how good your locks. The real world has never offered perfect security because it can't -- why expect engineered items to be safe from all evil?
Treat software and computers with caution, like walking through a major city's downtown at midnight. Sure, it's dangerous at times -- but it can also be exciting. Just don't pretend that danger doesn't exist...
Guild Wars
No monthly fee, a skill > time spent design, and and very nice graphics even on mid-range systems. You can be as social or solo as you like.
My first experience with Vista was on a 2-yo dual-CPU Opteron box, running 1.6GHz procs, an ATI 1350, and 2GB of RAM. One of my customers wanted to know if their sofwtare would run on Vista. Vista ran great. So when I bought a new system, I picked up a nice Intel Core Duo 2 HP workstation with Vista pre-installed. Works beautifully.
I wouldn't think of putting Vista on my year-old 1.5GB 1.6GHz Turion laptop; if nothing else, the ATI graphics are too wussy.
Every time I search for images on Google, I'm reminded why aliens have never visited this planet. :)