I don't have any proof, it's all subjective. YMMV. Adding more potentional hits, however, is not guaranteed to make things better. It might makes things worse.
Massive simplification: If you have a dataset that's twice as large, you're going to get twice as many pages that might be right. The searching mechanism will be under more difficulty trying to determine which is the best one to return and in what order it should be. This is going to really work the ranking algorithm, if its not up to snuff, its going to return you pages in the wrong order of helpfulness, and the page that might have been exactly what you wanted and returned on the first page under the smaller dataset might end up bumped onto page 4.
Google, everyone knows, uses a PageRank algorithm, so other pages do the picking for it. As the dataset gets bigger, results could actually improve, as more sites add to the reputation of others. As I said, I don't know if Yahoo! has ever published how it picks pages. The larger set could make things worse, it could makes things better. But because I have been finding Google better at ranking results than Yahoo! so far, I'm erring on the side of caution.
...now it'll be even harder to find anything on Yahoo! Google keeps and holds its users because searches *work*. When I search for something, Google has a very high chance of giving me what I want in 4 pages or so. Yahoo! isn't as good at getting me the information I want. The problem might even be made *worse* with all these pages. Yahoo! has never said, AFAIK, how it ranks pages, but Google does it better. With this wealth of data, the ranking system is going to be under much more scrutiny at picking the right pages.
Except that software patents are being discussed at the European level. If a ruling is made at EU level, then that'll stick for every country in the EU. EU rulings on things like trade supercede those at an individual country level.
It seems the only people who print stories about Jack Thompson are gaming sites. How about we just ignore him? He's obviously been terribly ineffective at a mainstream media and lobbying level. It's only when people like Hilary Clinton start shouting that anyone listens.
He feeds on people hating him. I worry that games journalists are feeding off him too. IGN, Gamespot, Slashdot, Kotaku all need to stop running stories on him, then he'll have nothing left.
The most interesting part of this deal is that Vonage are cutting a little niche around cell phone providers, just like they have done landline providers.
But I'm interested to know whether we're going to see Vonage take an agressive pricing stance against cell phone providers as they did the landline behemoths, or whether they're going to join the cartel, and effectively price consumers as much as possible, because, hey, the other guys are doing it too.
I guess we'll have to see what happens when WiMax becomes a more realistic prospect price-wise.
Please indulge my curiosity, I'm quite interested to understand how this would all work, and you seem way more educated about this stuff than me:) Quite aside from the storage space and the load time; where exactly in memory is all this hi-res crap going to go? Would you just thrash the HD over and over? The 360 won't have enough RAM for it AFAIK...
I agree, JSR was the better game. As you said, it was tighter and more strongly realised. The retrospective doesn't make convincing arguments for why the writer thought the Xbox edition was better (bar him not actually playing both games properly).
The level design in JSR was artful, but JSRF got too big and the grinds too messy. There was never a clear path to grind; you spent a lot more time skating (rather than grinding) in JSRF compared to JSR.
Sega made a mistake here, but was it concious? Did they try to go for bigger = better and just plain fail? I don't feel that JSRF was trying to appeal to anyone new, I think they just tried some new things that didn't work, and it was too late to fix it. If you've spent 8 months on level design that's OKish, rather than scrap it and reduce the size, you're going to release.
I get the feeling Sega didn't get it right, because they tried too hard to out-do themselves.
Re:, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Gri
on
The Ultimate MMORPG
·
· Score: 1
Dude, I read this, and I wanted to scream "HALLELUJAH!"
Seriously, this is what it should be. Pretty much everything you said revolved around making a world, and then handing it over. Persistance is killing MMOs right now. As you rightly pointed out, when you achieve nothing but a number, you really just achieve nothing.
I love the idea of giving the player's something to lose, and something to risk. Use the politics system, put it to a vote! "Do we march on [enemy city]? Our losses could be grave, and our resources depleted, but the threat is imminent" Resources could well be the bargining chip here; if you fail, you lose a lot of vendor goods from your town, as you used them all up in the assault, leaving you open to counter-attack. Increase the chance of success of defence the further beaten back you are (ie make the final city something massively strong), make the game a to-and-fro of sweet victory and terrible defeat. The raids that go on in WoW are simply stupid, and players just kicking around looking for something to do.
Someone will make this game. I'm thinking NC Soft, seeing as they seem to have some of the mechanics named here, like politics, or it's going to need one of the industries visionaries; maybe Will Wright, maybe Peter Molyneux (provided these two guys don't lose sight of the game). However, first we have to get through the WoW "me-too" phase, as everyone plays "catch up" (not that there's a lot to catch up to, just a very polished gameplay turd. There's not even the old bastion of when an RPG gets boring, a story to keep you going). That will be painful, and protracted, because of the extended turnaround of these games.
MMOs are going to wither in the next three or four years, and then experience a rebirth, perhaps on the consoles.
If there is one game that gets closest to these qualities, I'm thinking of Zelda, or even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A living world, that's simply handed to you, and you're told "Do something about it." In Zelda, you help the township, open the portals, fight Ganon, whatever. But Miyamoto-san always pays careful attention to making sure whatever you do always has a physical effect on the world at hand; the people are happy, the skies darken, the castle starts to look more ominous. GTA lets you shape the world in your vision. Grab that low-rider, pimp it out, and take your ho through all the hoods you've conquered. Why? Because you can, because it's yours. GTA gives you ownership of a world like few other games.
MMOs are little more than quest-giving playgrounds. Until these "worlds" become worlds, and not talking heads giving you money for menial tasks, we aren't going to escape this rut.
You think you should kill people simply because there's no more room at the inn?!
"John, we've run out of cells in the jail and the governor wants action!" "Guess I'll fire up ol' Electric Betsy"
If they have committed the horrible crimes that was "worth" the death penalty, they should be locked up for life. It doesn't matter why or who does it, it's stilll murder. There is no excuse, and no human or government ever has the right to take that of another. This is especially true seeing as the statistical evidence makes indicates that the death penalty acts as no deterrent. If you are seriously going to kill someone, the difference between the deterrent of spending your whole life in jail and that of being executed is none.
There is no reason, apart from putting a number on a person's head ("Hmmm, it'll cost us $18 000 a year to keep this guy in jail. Killing him will be cheaper") to not use life sentences instead. And, to be frank, putting a price tag on human life is a disgusting act (although it's taken us *this long* to get somewhere towards helping Africa).
Signigicant changes?! Seriously, dude, read what you wrote. I'm rather hoping you're joking and get modded funny.
"3. Has a web browser built in"
Quick, call the innovation police! We've got a *hot* one!
"8. The system tray now auto-hides itself..."
Damn, now I know what they've been putting all those PhDs on in the last ten years.
Microsoft has had ten years. That's almost half of my life. The best they can manage is process and user isolation, something that was cracked in UNIX before I was born? They are not significant changes. They are catch up, reactionary hole-filling to the cracks in the system. Rather than paper over the thin walls, Apple has been busy building a whole new house, with all those features as standard (even plug and play: try putting in a printer or mouse and see what happens)
The OP asked for *innovation*. I put it to you again: where is it?
Running a Mac + Windows is perfect sense. I would love to see Apple grow some real balls and even offer a dual boot configurer for Windows out the box, and really stick it to them.
My Dad is technically literate, and only cares about what he has to get done. This is the market Apple can now take with ease, if they allow Windows on a Mac, and actually *market* it! Why?
My Dad was scared to switch to Mac. He was scared he wouldn't understand it and he was scared he wouldn't be compatible with his business apps. Many businesses run horrible proprietary apps, especially in government. Let my Dad learn at his own pace how to use OS X, and let him know he can go back to Windows at any time if he feels out of his depth or needs to do something he doesn't yet know how/cannot. Switching is no longer this change of religion, it's an OS upgrade, and one many many more will be willing to take with a Windows security blanket.
The techies can keep their games on Windows (that's what excites me the most), but for the Apple stock price? The tech-literate are the way forward.
And consumers really love it when you show they aren't scared of the competition, especially in the US, I've noticed.
He hated them all. He hates every movie, as far as I can tell, apart from Lord of the Rings. I read his reviews so my expectations are lowered, and I come out feeling "it wasn't that bad" with every movie I see. Makes me happy.
A first read of the summary makes it look like that Wired is retracting some stories, and correcting others. This is not the case:
"Wired News is not retracting any of these stories."
Seems to me the journo just got a little burned out and put it a little padding rather than made up MOG lies. However, the whole Spyware article was based on unverifiable quotes, which is cause for some concern.
May I suggest you start importing fellow Future publication Edge from the UK? The commentary seems to describe almost word for word what Edge does. It seems like Future USA are simply using this site as a toe in the water for a full-blown launch of an Edge-style magazine. If it's successful, they'll spin it into paper format.
Otherwise it'll be canned within the year.
Future have been very bad at treating their web sites. The other staff treat the journalists like any other, but the suits see the medium as the easiest to cut when the money gets low. See: Future Gamer; Daily Radar US and Daily Radar UK. I don't expect this to be any different.
I'm referring to the Yahoo! that has a front page which is entirely made of links, and the Yahoo! that has half page adverts. They simply don't seem to understand...
MSN is a nightmare, no doubt about that one. I don't understand you comment about Google, I find it excellent.
Will Yahoo eat this up?
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The Flickr guys say that they'll remain separate. I fail to see how much say Ludicorp have left seeing as this appears to be a total buyout.
Yahoo! will do what they have always done, and subsume the functionality into their own, and slap it's own design on to boot. Unfortunately, unlike the Borg, Yahoo! does not look cool. The design of Yahoo! is as poor (both in ugliness and usability) today as it has always been. One of Flickr's many strengths (apart from the obvious technological ones) is that the designers always seemed to recognise the importance of *white space*. Flickr makes my photos look good. It looks professional, but it doesn't take the focus away from the photo. If Yahoo! forces the its unique brand of boring, cluttered onto the site, the usability and visual appeal is going to go down the drain. And isn't visual appeal part of why we take photos?
Geocities was no looker that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul.
Why on earth is this modded funny? Liverpool is not near Sellafield. Liverpool fans do not steal things, even stereotypically. If we are going for stereotypes, Liverpudlians steal.
As for the Royal Mail, it actually does very well. I've never lost a letter with them. Mail arrives the next day with first class postage. I live 10 minutes from Sacramento. It takes USPS 3-4 days to send a letter to LA. I have had 1 Gamefly package out of the 6 I have sent them go missing. It takes Apple and FedEx 2 days to deliver something from Sacramento. Not exactly world class on either front.
If we're going to get all stereotypical on my home land, let's at least use some that actually make sense or exist in the first place. Like we were too busy drinking tea or something.
Because he also holds The Times, my favourite quality broadsheet, oft voted Newspaper of the Year? If I remember correctly, they came out for Labour, not the Conservatives, last General Election.
Murdoch holds what he can. He doesn't care what it reports, as long as it sells. To compare Fox News to The Times or even The Sun is unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any proof, it's all subjective. YMMV. Adding more potentional hits, however, is not guaranteed to make things better. It might makes things worse.
Massive simplification: If you have a dataset that's twice as large, you're going to get twice as many pages that might be right. The searching mechanism will be under more difficulty trying to determine which is the best one to return and in what order it should be. This is going to really work the ranking algorithm, if its not up to snuff, its going to return you pages in the wrong order of helpfulness, and the page that might have been exactly what you wanted and returned on the first page under the smaller dataset might end up bumped onto page 4.
Google, everyone knows, uses a PageRank algorithm, so other pages do the picking for it. As the dataset gets bigger, results could actually improve, as more sites add to the reputation of others. As I said, I don't know if Yahoo! has ever published how it picks pages. The larger set could make things worse, it could makes things better. But because I have been finding Google better at ranking results than Yahoo! so far, I'm erring on the side of caution.
...now it'll be even harder to find anything on Yahoo! Google keeps and holds its users because searches *work*. When I search for something, Google has a very high chance of giving me what I want in 4 pages or so. Yahoo! isn't as good at getting me the information I want. The problem might even be made *worse* with all these pages. Yahoo! has never said, AFAIK, how it ranks pages, but Google does it better. With this wealth of data, the ranking system is going to be under much more scrutiny at picking the right pages.
OK, now we're fighting over semantics :)
:)
Fair point
Except that software patents are being discussed at the European level. If a ruling is made at EU level, then that'll stick for every country in the EU. EU rulings on things like trade supercede those at an individual country level.
Yes. If the submitter (obviously English) actually RTFA, he would notice it actually says University of California, Los Angeles.
I'm English, and I knew that (even before I studied at UC Davis)
It seems the only people who print stories about Jack Thompson are gaming sites. How about we just ignore him? He's obviously been terribly ineffective at a mainstream media and lobbying level. It's only when people like Hilary Clinton start shouting that anyone listens.
He feeds on people hating him. I worry that games journalists are feeding off him too. IGN, Gamespot, Slashdot, Kotaku all need to stop running stories on him, then he'll have nothing left.
We don't all need a bad guy, people.
Oh, colour my face red :/
:)
Mod grandparent down
The most interesting part of this deal is that Vonage are cutting a little niche around cell phone providers, just like they have done landline providers.
But I'm interested to know whether we're going to see Vonage take an agressive pricing stance against cell phone providers as they did the landline behemoths, or whether they're going to join the cartel, and effectively price consumers as much as possible, because, hey, the other guys are doing it too.
I guess we'll have to see what happens when WiMax becomes a more realistic prospect price-wise.
Yes, while this is true of Jabra headsets, it might not be true of the Crapposan you bought from Taiwan off eBay.
I guess there must be some headsets out there that are always in a state ready to be paired, or this attack would never work.
Please indulge my curiosity, I'm quite interested to understand how this would all work, and you seem way more educated about this stuff than me :) Quite aside from the storage space and the load time; where exactly in memory is all this hi-res crap going to go? Would you just thrash the HD over and over? The 360 won't have enough RAM for it AFAIK...
I agree, JSR was the better game. As you said, it was tighter and more strongly realised. The retrospective doesn't make convincing arguments for why the writer thought the Xbox edition was better (bar him not actually playing both games properly).
The level design in JSR was artful, but JSRF got too big and the grinds too messy. There was never a clear path to grind; you spent a lot more time skating (rather than grinding) in JSRF compared to JSR.
Sega made a mistake here, but was it concious? Did they try to go for bigger = better and just plain fail? I don't feel that JSRF was trying to appeal to anyone new, I think they just tried some new things that didn't work, and it was too late to fix it. If you've spent 8 months on level design that's OKish, rather than scrap it and reduce the size, you're going to release.
I get the feeling Sega didn't get it right, because they tried too hard to out-do themselves.
Dude, I read this, and I wanted to scream "HALLELUJAH!"
Seriously, this is what it should be. Pretty much everything you said revolved around making a world, and then handing it over. Persistance is killing MMOs right now. As you rightly pointed out, when you achieve nothing but a number, you really just achieve nothing.
I love the idea of giving the player's something to lose, and something to risk. Use the politics system, put it to a vote! "Do we march on [enemy city]? Our losses could be grave, and our resources depleted, but the threat is imminent" Resources could well be the bargining chip here; if you fail, you lose a lot of vendor goods from your town, as you used them all up in the assault, leaving you open to counter-attack. Increase the chance of success of defence the further beaten back you are (ie make the final city something massively strong), make the game a to-and-fro of sweet victory and terrible defeat. The raids that go on in WoW are simply stupid, and players just kicking around looking for something to do.
Someone will make this game. I'm thinking NC Soft, seeing as they seem to have some of the mechanics named here, like politics, or it's going to need one of the industries visionaries; maybe Will Wright, maybe Peter Molyneux (provided these two guys don't lose sight of the game). However, first we have to get through the WoW "me-too" phase, as everyone plays "catch up" (not that there's a lot to catch up to, just a very polished gameplay turd. There's not even the old bastion of when an RPG gets boring, a story to keep you going). That will be painful, and protracted, because of the extended turnaround of these games.
MMOs are going to wither in the next three or four years, and then experience a rebirth, perhaps on the consoles.
If there is one game that gets closest to these qualities, I'm thinking of Zelda, or even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A living world, that's simply handed to you, and you're told "Do something about it." In Zelda, you help the township, open the portals, fight Ganon, whatever. But Miyamoto-san always pays careful attention to making sure whatever you do always has a physical effect on the world at hand; the people are happy, the skies darken, the castle starts to look more ominous. GTA lets you shape the world in your vision. Grab that low-rider, pimp it out, and take your ho through all the hoods you've conquered. Why? Because you can, because it's yours. GTA gives you ownership of a world like few other games.
MMOs are little more than quest-giving playgrounds. Until these "worlds" become worlds, and not talking heads giving you money for menial tasks, we aren't going to escape this rut.
You think you should kill people simply because there's no more room at the inn?!
"John, we've run out of cells in the jail and the governor wants action!"
"Guess I'll fire up ol' Electric Betsy"
If they have committed the horrible crimes that was "worth" the death penalty, they should be locked up for life. It doesn't matter why or who does it, it's stilll murder. There is no excuse, and no human or government ever has the right to take that of another. This is especially true seeing as the statistical evidence makes indicates that the death penalty acts as no deterrent. If you are seriously going to kill someone, the difference between the deterrent of spending your whole life in jail and that of being executed is none.
There is no reason, apart from putting a number on a person's head ("Hmmm, it'll cost us $18 000 a year to keep this guy in jail. Killing him will be cheaper") to not use life sentences instead. And, to be frank, putting a price tag on human life is a disgusting act (although it's taken us *this long* to get somewhere towards helping Africa).
Signigicant changes?! Seriously, dude, read what you wrote. I'm rather hoping you're joking and get modded funny.
"3. Has a web browser built in"
Quick, call the innovation police! We've got a *hot* one!
"8. The system tray now auto-hides itself..."
Damn, now I know what they've been putting all those PhDs on in the last ten years.
Microsoft has had ten years. That's almost half of my life. The best they can manage is process and user isolation, something that was cracked in UNIX before I was born? They are not significant changes. They are catch up, reactionary hole-filling to the cracks in the system. Rather than paper over the thin walls, Apple has been busy building a whole new house, with all those features as standard (even plug and play: try putting in a printer or mouse and see what happens)
The OP asked for *innovation*. I put it to you again: where is it?
Running a Mac + Windows is perfect sense. I would love to see Apple grow some real balls and even offer a dual boot configurer for Windows out the box, and really stick it to them.
My Dad is technically literate, and only cares about what he has to get done. This is the market Apple can now take with ease, if they allow Windows on a Mac, and actually *market* it! Why?
My Dad was scared to switch to Mac. He was scared he wouldn't understand it and he was scared he wouldn't be compatible with his business apps. Many businesses run horrible proprietary apps, especially in government. Let my Dad learn at his own pace how to use OS X, and let him know he can go back to Windows at any time if he feels out of his depth or needs to do something he doesn't yet know how/cannot. Switching is no longer this change of religion, it's an OS upgrade, and one many many more will be willing to take with a Windows security blanket.
The techies can keep their games on Windows (that's what excites me the most), but for the Apple stock price? The tech-literate are the way forward.
And consumers really love it when you show they aren't scared of the competition, especially in the US, I've noticed.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,, 14931-1615203,00.html
He hated them all. He hates every movie, as far as I can tell, apart from Lord of the Rings. I read his reviews so my expectations are lowered, and I come out feeling "it wasn't that bad" with every movie I see. Makes me happy.
The Matrix!
Oh... hang on...
A first read of the summary makes it look like that Wired is retracting some stories, and correcting others. This is not the case:
"Wired News is not retracting any of these stories."
Seems to me the journo just got a little burned out and put it a little padding rather than made up MOG lies. However, the whole Spyware article was based on unverifiable quotes, which is cause for some concern.
May I suggest you start importing fellow Future publication Edge from the UK? The commentary seems to describe almost word for word what Edge does. It seems like Future USA are simply using this site as a toe in the water for a full-blown launch of an Edge-style magazine. If it's successful, they'll spin it into paper format.
Otherwise it'll be canned within the year.
Future have been very bad at treating their web sites. The other staff treat the journalists like any other, but the suits see the medium as the easiest to cut when the money gets low. See: Future Gamer; Daily Radar US and Daily Radar UK. I don't expect this to be any different.
I'm referring to the Yahoo! that has a front page which is entirely made of links, and the Yahoo! that has half page adverts. They simply don't seem to understand...
MSN is a nightmare, no doubt about that one. I don't understand you comment about Google, I find it excellent.
The Flickr guys say that they'll remain separate. I fail to see how much say Ludicorp have left seeing as this appears to be a total buyout.
Yahoo! will do what they have always done, and subsume the functionality into their own, and slap it's own design on to boot. Unfortunately, unlike the Borg, Yahoo! does not look cool. The design of Yahoo! is as poor (both in ugliness and usability) today as it has always been. One of Flickr's many strengths (apart from the obvious technological ones) is that the designers always seemed to recognise the importance of *white space*. Flickr makes my photos look good. It looks professional, but it doesn't take the focus away from the photo. If Yahoo! forces the its unique brand of boring, cluttered onto the site, the usability and visual appeal is going to go down the drain. And isn't visual appeal part of why we take photos?
Geocities was no looker that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul.
Yahoo! stopped that cadaver kicking.
Yeah, I was going for the stereotype. I have plenty of Liverpudlian mates. They're all good guys. I know more shady types from other places...
Why on earth is this modded funny? Liverpool is not near Sellafield. Liverpool fans do not steal things, even stereotypically. If we are going for stereotypes, Liverpudlians steal.
As for the Royal Mail, it actually does very well. I've never lost a letter with them. Mail arrives the next day with first class postage. I live 10 minutes from Sacramento. It takes USPS 3-4 days to send a letter to LA. I have had 1 Gamefly package out of the 6 I have sent them go missing. It takes Apple and FedEx 2 days to deliver something from Sacramento. Not exactly world class on either front.
If we're going to get all stereotypical on my home land, let's at least use some that actually make sense or exist in the first place. Like we were too busy drinking tea or something.
Labour v2.0 == Conservatives v1.0 is for another debate, but I won't deny it :)
Because he also holds The Times, my favourite quality broadsheet, oft voted Newspaper of the Year? If I remember correctly, they came out for Labour, not the Conservatives, last General Election.
Murdoch holds what he can. He doesn't care what it reports, as long as it sells. To compare Fox News to The Times or even The Sun is unfair.