So your / the EU's solution to disciplining Microsoft is to steal (yes, that's what they're asking) their flagship product and say it's not yours anymore?
Guess I'll avoid the EU. If they can do that to corporations, imagine what they'll do to their populace.
Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them...
That point is so overplayed. Having sex with a hooker to get your health back is so horribly inefficient. In the time it takes to find a hooker, find a suitable place for her, wait for her to do her thing, then have her get out of your car and back on the road, I could have driven across town to one of the hospitals and picked up a health pack -and- hit up Ammu-nation for an armored vest.
And the money is frankly a joke, they only carry a couple hundred at most as I recall. It's the typical MMOG farming concept; stop playing the story for an hour, do firefighter missions over and over; by the time you hit level 12 you're making some serious cash that'll last you quite some time. Vice City had buildings that would automatically generate revenue for you too, if you need cash just go for a cruise around town and swing by your buildings.
The hooker thing is really getting to be an outdated point.
I would love to see Slashback return, if only to follow up on the deal with the Coming February 9th showing up in the Halo 2 credits on legendary. I've been poking around but haven't found anything about that.
If someone can put me out of my misery, please do.
Incorrect. I don't know for sure about the timing of the JP launch, but in North America the PC version came out about six months prior to the PS2 launch, as I recall. (For some reason I think it was swapped in Japan, PS2 came first, then PC, but I have no idea why I think that.)
Hey Jackass, there are people in this country too. And guess what, they donate money to the organizations over there too. You know those other big pieces of land around the world we call countries? Yeah, most of them gave money too.
Why do you expect the American government to foot the bill to care for these people? A product of living one's life having money handed from my paycheck to your pocket, no doubt.
"Glaring an[d] obvious?" Do you make it a habit to open every WAV file you come across in a text editor? I don't know about you but I prefer listening to them in a media player, I can't get quite the same richness of sound reading it through notepad.
When you create a character in FFXI, one of the last steps is to choose your world (you type it in freeform or leave it blank for random.) If you enter a world name, it prompts you for a 'password' (the world pass ID) to get on the world.
Once you have created on a world, you cannot move, except in rare cases where SE starts a world migration (has happened once in the past year, that I know of, when two more servers were added.) In that case though, you still get moved to a random new world (assuming there's more than one world being added), SE just divides up the incoming players and puts them on the worlds as they see fit.
The way to get onto a specific world when creating is, as people have said, getting a world pass. The pass costs something like 1500 gil, not a very significant amount to any but the newest of players. Just spend half an hour, if that, farming wind or fire crystals outside one of the starter towns, go back and sell the stack at the AH, you'll have 2k-4k gil right there.
One last thing to note is that apparently the randomness of world assignment goes away after you've spent some time on a server, I've been told (and seen it happen) that once you play on a specific server for a while, all your new characters will end up there (I created four characters one day, furious that I couldn't get put on a server _other_ than Gilgamesh:-P), making world passes your only option. Getting passes usually isn't too hard though, just ask in a random FFXI forum and someone will usually help you out.
I played Anarchy Online years ago when it first came out, I can't even remember exactly when that was now, I guess I started back in 2000, perhaps earlier. I loved the game at the time, it was a beautiful game, pretty decent atmosphere, and character customization was outstanding. I could spend days on end just exploring the planet, not even bothering with the leveling treadmill. Great game. I eventually stopped playing AO in preference to other MMOGs and eventually canceled my subscription.
A few months ago, I signed up again, as they were giving away the core game and the first two expansions (there are three now overall I believe, Notum Wars (land control), Shadowlands (new second world) and Alien Invasion (new plot booster and features, I guess.) Longing for the AO of old, I promptly jumped off the edge of Jobe (a floating city) and landed on the planet (luckily for me there was a bug in falling damage that prompted the devs to disable the feature a few months prior, so I survived the fall from the stratosphere.:-P) I got to the surface and found that wow, there's no one here. Everyone's playing in the Shadowlands now, Funcom had essentially abandoned the surface altogether, the same unexpected zone borders were there, some cities were inaccessible by foot, the usual stuff that we'd been complaining about and Funcom had been promising to fix.
Where they're giving away just the core game, these users will be limited to playing on the surface of Rubi-Ka, no access to the Shadowlands or even fighting for control of the land. I obviously don't know what their motives are in the end, but it'd seem to me that this may well be an attempt to get Rubi-Ka populated again, to bring the planet back to life. In a larger sense, it could also be creating a stronger social class system, as the paying users can look down on the poor planet-bound players from high above in their Jobe luxury apartments.
The free deal sounds great, but I think I may have to keep my paid account so I can do just that.:-P (Shadowlands added some interesting player customization enhancements as well though, including new jobs.)
Hah, quite true. I knew a guy who wanted to turn the living room of his cottage into a replica of the TNG bridge I think it was, multiple TVs were included in that. =p
So let's start figuring out what characters would vote for whom.:-P I mean, it'd seem pretty straightforward to me that Sam Fisher would be a die-hard Bush fan, but beyond that it seems pretty hazy. What would Spongebob care anyway, he lives in a pineapple in the sea, I don't think he's got to be too concerned about taxation and homeland security. He'd probably be more concerned about underwater nuclear bomb tests though, which I guess would put him in the Kerry camp.
No one can watch every episode of the original Star Trek series in the order in which they were broadcast in one weekend, it's a temporal impossibility. Even if you say each episode was only 40 minutes long, 80 episodes @ 40 minutes each is 3,200 minutes, compared to 2,880 minutes in two days. (Although I'll shoot myself in the foot and say that if you consider the weekend to start at 5pm on Friday, that adds another 420 minutes, giving you time enough to watch all the episodes with 100 minutes for bathroom breaks and such. But still.:-P)
Also, anyone else notice that IE has trouble selecting text on that page? It always selects, for me, everything from the top of the page down to where the cursor is. Annoying. (And yes, Firefox does just fine. Unfortunately I have to use IE at work.)
...the best thing that could ever happen to FFXI would be to drop the PS2 players... Yes, I'm being selfish in saying this, but FFXI on the PC doesn't come close to looking as nice as most other PC MMOG's I've played (Dark Age of Camelot, Earth and Beyond, and the beauteous Anarchy Online) due to the fact that the developers have to keep the PS2 in mind with its limited resources. But that's just my opinion.
Had Sony not ditched the firewire ports on PS2 back with the previous revision, it seems that they might have been able to issue some sort of BIOS patch that'd allow you to use firewire external hard drives instead, but with those ports gone, I guess that idea's dead. Perhaps if those USB ports are capable of USB 2.0 (assuming they can even function as standard USB ports, I've never used them before) that could live on. Laptop hard drives might have been a solution too, but last I knew 40GB models were a bit pricey, and Sony sounds to be cool to the idea anyway.
I think the intent of the submitter was to create exactly this, a massive argument of people trying to figure out how the PS3 will farm realtime graphics rendering over internet connections, other people trying to tell them that ISN'T what it means and so on and so forth. So far, they did an excellent job, this is by far the most entertaining set of comments to a post I've seen in ages.
The best part is, if Microsoft made a hand-held music player that only supported WMA (and maybe WMV too, but either way, only letting it play Microsoft's formats) the government would probably step in and start ordering them to support MP3 and AAC and RM and so forth.
(Incidentally, I recall seeing Microsoft hardware floating around Best Buy for a while about a year ago, are they still making / rebranding hardware?)
Holy crap! Big Business will know how many times a Coke ad flashes by your screen while you spin around to blast an imp with your shotgun! Next thing you know the game will be FORCING you to buy the product!
Please. Besides, you could just stand in front of an ad for some company and tape down one of your keys to make you spin around endlessly, jacking up their numbers.:-P I recently came back to Anarchy Online and noticed that some of the billboards which had previously featured fake in-game ads now have ads for Alienware. Does it bother me? Nope. Would it bother me if Bronto Burger was suddenly replaced by McDonald's? Well, maybe, I like annoying people at the Bronto farm, but otherwise, nope. Is it really going to ruin your gameplay to see ads for potentially real products?
Although the part about working the products into the dialogue sounds interesting. Would they get the actors to re-record the entire sentence, or just the particular word, resulting in the Die-Hard-on-network-TV effect?
You're suggesting terrorists at one time didn't exist? As long as there've been two people there've been disagreements, add in a splash of religion, a sprinkle of opposing cultures and some overzealous folk, you've got yourself some terrorists.
Like so many other things, it's sad to think that in ten years our kids will think terrorism began in the 1990's.
...how about some details of what it actually does? I know wild speculation and paranoia is the cornerstone of YRO, perhaps justifying said speculations and paranoia would help turn more people on to the 'cause'.
1) The disc and packaging are recyclable, according to the site.
2) What 'program?' There's no 'program' mentioned on the site. It's simply a technology preview. The only program is in the submittor's paranoid delusions... So far, anyway.
Besides, I would assume the disc destroys itself due to some reaction with oxygen. We all know that encryption and self-destruction systems can be broken when they're on computers, now it's time for the chemists or whomever to have some fun breaking this system.:-P
I wouldn't get my knickers too twisted either, it seems that there are a couple different companies out there that make this kind of thing, but has your local video store started using them yet? Did the DVD you bought at Best Buy last week go up in flames in six hours? No? Calm down then.
Slashdot Mirror
So your / the EU's solution to disciplining Microsoft is to steal (yes, that's what they're asking) their flagship product and say it's not yours anymore?
Guess I'll avoid the EU. If they can do that to corporations, imagine what they'll do to their populace.
And government is Good and Just why...?
Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them...
That point is so overplayed. Having sex with a hooker to get your health back is so horribly inefficient. In the time it takes to find a hooker, find a suitable place for her, wait for her to do her thing, then have her get out of your car and back on the road, I could have driven across town to one of the hospitals and picked up a health pack -and- hit up Ammu-nation for an armored vest.
And the money is frankly a joke, they only carry a couple hundred at most as I recall. It's the typical MMOG farming concept; stop playing the story for an hour, do firefighter missions over and over; by the time you hit level 12 you're making some serious cash that'll last you quite some time. Vice City had buildings that would automatically generate revenue for you too, if you need cash just go for a cruise around town and swing by your buildings.
The hooker thing is really getting to be an outdated point.
So VB is not the language for you. Have a nice day.
*shrug*
Clinton '08!
I would love to see Slashback return, if only to follow up on the deal with the Coming February 9th showing up in the Halo 2 credits on legendary. I've been poking around but haven't found anything about that.
If someone can put me out of my misery, please do.
Incorrect. I don't know for sure about the timing of the JP launch, but in North America the PC version came out about six months prior to the PS2 launch, as I recall. (For some reason I think it was swapped in Japan, PS2 came first, then PC, but I have no idea why I think that.)
Hey Jackass, there are people in this country too. And guess what, they donate money to the organizations over there too. You know those other big pieces of land around the world we call countries? Yeah, most of them gave money too.
Why do you expect the American government to foot the bill to care for these people? A product of living one's life having money handed from my paycheck to your pocket, no doubt.
"Glaring an[d] obvious?" Do you make it a habit to open every WAV file you come across in a text editor? I don't know about you but I prefer listening to them in a media player, I can't get quite the same richness of sound reading it through notepad.
Mod parent down. Waaaaaay down. Knee-jerk bad. :-P
When you create a character in FFXI, one of the last steps is to choose your world (you type it in freeform or leave it blank for random.) If you enter a world name, it prompts you for a 'password' (the world pass ID) to get on the world.
:-P), making world passes your only option. Getting passes usually isn't too hard though, just ask in a random FFXI forum and someone will usually help you out.
Once you have created on a world, you cannot move, except in rare cases where SE starts a world migration (has happened once in the past year, that I know of, when two more servers were added.) In that case though, you still get moved to a random new world (assuming there's more than one world being added), SE just divides up the incoming players and puts them on the worlds as they see fit.
The way to get onto a specific world when creating is, as people have said, getting a world pass. The pass costs something like 1500 gil, not a very significant amount to any but the newest of players. Just spend half an hour, if that, farming wind or fire crystals outside one of the starter towns, go back and sell the stack at the AH, you'll have 2k-4k gil right there.
One last thing to note is that apparently the randomness of world assignment goes away after you've spent some time on a server, I've been told (and seen it happen) that once you play on a specific server for a while, all your new characters will end up there (I created four characters one day, furious that I couldn't get put on a server _other_ than Gilgamesh
Drop them all you want, they're still going to the cluster though, so the traffic's still there, half of it at least.
Just like Bush did to NPR, our fine damn-near-falling-over-to-the-left 'publicly funded' (i.e. taken from our paychecks) network? Oh, wait...
I played Anarchy Online years ago when it first came out, I can't even remember exactly when that was now, I guess I started back in 2000, perhaps earlier. I loved the game at the time, it was a beautiful game, pretty decent atmosphere, and character customization was outstanding. I could spend days on end just exploring the planet, not even bothering with the leveling treadmill. Great game. I eventually stopped playing AO in preference to other MMOGs and eventually canceled my subscription.
:-P) I got to the surface and found that wow, there's no one here. Everyone's playing in the Shadowlands now, Funcom had essentially abandoned the surface altogether, the same unexpected zone borders were there, some cities were inaccessible by foot, the usual stuff that we'd been complaining about and Funcom had been promising to fix.
:-P (Shadowlands added some interesting player customization enhancements as well though, including new jobs.)
A few months ago, I signed up again, as they were giving away the core game and the first two expansions (there are three now overall I believe, Notum Wars (land control), Shadowlands (new second world) and Alien Invasion (new plot booster and features, I guess.) Longing for the AO of old, I promptly jumped off the edge of Jobe (a floating city) and landed on the planet (luckily for me there was a bug in falling damage that prompted the devs to disable the feature a few months prior, so I survived the fall from the stratosphere.
Where they're giving away just the core game, these users will be limited to playing on the surface of Rubi-Ka, no access to the Shadowlands or even fighting for control of the land. I obviously don't know what their motives are in the end, but it'd seem to me that this may well be an attempt to get Rubi-Ka populated again, to bring the planet back to life. In a larger sense, it could also be creating a stronger social class system, as the paying users can look down on the poor planet-bound players from high above in their Jobe luxury apartments.
The free deal sounds great, but I think I may have to keep my paid account so I can do just that.
Hah, quite true. I knew a guy who wanted to turn the living room of his cottage into a replica of the TNG bridge I think it was, multiple TVs were included in that. =p
So let's start figuring out what characters would vote for whom. :-P I mean, it'd seem pretty straightforward to me that Sam Fisher would be a die-hard Bush fan, but beyond that it seems pretty hazy. What would Spongebob care anyway, he lives in a pineapple in the sea, I don't think he's got to be too concerned about taxation and homeland security. He'd probably be more concerned about underwater nuclear bomb tests though, which I guess would put him in the Kerry camp.
:-p)
(Slow, slow day at work.
No one can watch every episode of the original Star Trek series in the order in which they were broadcast in one weekend, it's a temporal impossibility. Even if you say each episode was only 40 minutes long, 80 episodes @ 40 minutes each is 3,200 minutes, compared to 2,880 minutes in two days. (Although I'll shoot myself in the foot and say that if you consider the weekend to start at 5pm on Friday, that adds another 420 minutes, giving you time enough to watch all the episodes with 100 minutes for bathroom breaks and such. But still. :-P)
Also, anyone else notice that IE has trouble selecting text on that page? It always selects, for me, everything from the top of the page down to where the cursor is. Annoying. (And yes, Firefox does just fine. Unfortunately I have to use IE at work.)
Agreed. The FOSS 'movement' (what a romantic notion) can produce more than enough shoddy software by themselves!
...the best thing that could ever happen to FFXI would be to drop the PS2 players... Yes, I'm being selfish in saying this, but FFXI on the PC doesn't come close to looking as nice as most other PC MMOG's I've played (Dark Age of Camelot, Earth and Beyond, and the beauteous Anarchy Online) due to the fact that the developers have to keep the PS2 in mind with its limited resources. But that's just my opinion.
Had Sony not ditched the firewire ports on PS2 back with the previous revision, it seems that they might have been able to issue some sort of BIOS patch that'd allow you to use firewire external hard drives instead, but with those ports gone, I guess that idea's dead. Perhaps if those USB ports are capable of USB 2.0 (assuming they can even function as standard USB ports, I've never used them before) that could live on. Laptop hard drives might have been a solution too, but last I knew 40GB models were a bit pricey, and Sony sounds to be cool to the idea anyway.
I think the intent of the submitter was to create exactly this, a massive argument of people trying to figure out how the PS3 will farm realtime graphics rendering over internet connections, other people trying to tell them that ISN'T what it means and so on and so forth. So far, they did an excellent job, this is by far the most entertaining set of comments to a post I've seen in ages.
Bravo
The best part is, if Microsoft made a hand-held music player that only supported WMA (and maybe WMV too, but either way, only letting it play Microsoft's formats) the government would probably step in and start ordering them to support MP3 and AAC and RM and so forth.
(Incidentally, I recall seeing Microsoft hardware floating around Best Buy for a while about a year ago, are they still making / rebranding hardware?)
Holy crap! Big Business will know how many times a Coke ad flashes by your screen while you spin around to blast an imp with your shotgun! Next thing you know the game will be FORCING you to buy the product!
:-P I recently came back to Anarchy Online and noticed that some of the billboards which had previously featured fake in-game ads now have ads for Alienware. Does it bother me? Nope. Would it bother me if Bronto Burger was suddenly replaced by McDonald's? Well, maybe, I like annoying people at the Bronto farm, but otherwise, nope. Is it really going to ruin your gameplay to see ads for potentially real products?
Please. Besides, you could just stand in front of an ad for some company and tape down one of your keys to make you spin around endlessly, jacking up their numbers.
Although the part about working the products into the dialogue sounds interesting. Would they get the actors to re-record the entire sentence, or just the particular word, resulting in the Die-Hard-on-network-TV effect?
You're suggesting terrorists at one time didn't exist? As long as there've been two people there've been disagreements, add in a splash of religion, a sprinkle of opposing cultures and some overzealous folk, you've got yourself some terrorists.
Like so many other things, it's sad to think that in ten years our kids will think terrorism began in the 1990's.
...how about some details of what it actually does? I know wild speculation and paranoia is the cornerstone of YRO, perhaps justifying said speculations and paranoia would help turn more people on to the 'cause'.
1) The disc and packaging are recyclable, according to the site.
:-P
2) What 'program?' There's no 'program' mentioned on the site. It's simply a technology preview. The only program is in the submittor's paranoid delusions... So far, anyway.
Besides, I would assume the disc destroys itself due to some reaction with oxygen. We all know that encryption and self-destruction systems can be broken when they're on computers, now it's time for the chemists or whomever to have some fun breaking this system.
I wouldn't get my knickers too twisted either, it seems that there are a couple different companies out there that make this kind of thing, but has your local video store started using them yet? Did the DVD you bought at Best Buy last week go up in flames in six hours? No? Calm down then.