And at an estimated cost of only 350-450M, it's somewhat cheaper than the shuttle. With a better than >95% estimated success rate, it's also probably safer than our current shuttle fleet.
Even better, the upgraded IV-Bs have a LEO payload capacity roughly equal to that of the shuttle. (~48,000 lbs-LEO)
And, they're unmanned and not expected to be re-used. It goes boom, no astronauts go boom with it, and it's not like you were expecting to get the rocket back. Oh, and it can loft a good bit more to GEO than the shuttle can.
None of you have included the effects of competition in your analyses.
Producers in a monopoly set the price that will create the greatest profit, and stick with it.
Producers in a freely competitive market have an entirely *different* set of rules, which have a tendency to decrease the cost of an item until it becomes arbitrarily close to the median variable cost of all producers competing in that market.
Theft/vandalism and other violations of the social contract raise the burden for all producers/retailers, directly increasing the resultant prices.
By most estimates, the cost of these problems is equivalent to >10% of inventory in many consumer goods fields.
Slavery was never supported by law. It was merely not prohibited by law. Those are two entirely different things.
Ahh. So the slaves stayed and worked for their masters because they felt like it? Shit no! They stayed there because the law supported slaveowners by assigning the legal category of 'slave' to certain persons, who were then considered subhuman by law and bound into slavery by social consensus.
I have not yet read the article, but this seems patently ludicrous.
While the line between consoles and PCs may be blurred, PCs are still a far superior gaming platform in most respects.
1. Interface: My mouse 0wnz console controllers for analog input-- no argument.
2. Modifications: The inherent difficuty of modifying or hacking content in consoles is a big bar to user-made content. You may get Counter-Strike ported to xbox... but it won't be independently developed there by a bunch of students with lots of time and a cool idea.
3. Pure mind-bending speed. High-end PCs will *always* trump consoles for pure performance, simply because they cost more and don't operate on a 2-3 year product cycle.
4. Display: Until HDTV becomes completely standard, even low-end monitors blow TV quality out of the water. High-end displays will always be ahead of the broadcast standards.
5. Online play: Consoles won't be caught up to PCs in the next few years... if then.
PC gaming is far from dead and and still offers choices far more varied than games available for consoles, even if the market is smaller and PCs do not plug-and-play as easily as consoles.
I've got a really fast one-commandment legal code!
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 1
I've got a really fast one-commandment legal code, optimized to fit our society.
IIRC, each state's electoral college votes are controlled by that state.
Most states are winner-take-all, some are proportional representation.
Also, I think in some cases the electoral votes are cast directly by the state's representatives, but any representative who decided to ignore things and vote against the state's results probably wouldn't last long.
The cables are snagged and hoisted to the surface at the repair/splice point, IIRC.
There's a Neal Stephenson non-fiction essay about undersea cables and their geopolitical/technical implications around somewhere on the net-- lots of really nice info, rendered in his inimitable style.
"The University of British Colombia today released a long-term research study claiming that discarded toasters showed signs of sentience. By wiring nearly 3500 toasters in paralell, they were able to burn down the administration building. The net result of the toaster parallelization notably increased the intelligence of the campus as a whole, proving that toasters are indeed the building blocks of future genius."
I think you're missing the point-- single-player gaming is being out-competed in the marketplace by multiplayer gaming... because in multiplayer gaming, a great deal of the "content" is generated by the interaction with other players.
Multiplayer games work better with an increasing level of developer support. Patches, servers, matchmaking, all of these are necessary for a smoothly-running multiplayer experience. Also expensive, probably a lot more than you would think. As an example, close to 40% of the gross subscription fees paid by EQ players go directly into paying for the bandwidth they use.
Thus, in order to get the support that multiplayer games need, the move to a subscription-based model is necessary, and good. Better servers, better service, more players. Subscription-based is the best model for supporting true quality in a multiplayer gaming experience.
The overall experience of multiplayer gaming *is* inherently a service, not a product. Look at a large multiplayer community, and you will see that *someone* is paying for the external costs-- either independent server operators, volunteers, and their ilk, or the game developer/publisher.
I'm quite happy to pay a reasonable price for a worthwhile service... and if you don't think that the service is worthwhile, you don't have to purchase it.
The switch to a subscription-based model will expand the possibilities for multiplayer gaming by extending the financial support available for providing an excellent service.
I want to play the kind of games that a cohesive revenue model will allow, and I want to see great game developers rewarded for when they raise the bar on quality, immersiveness, and fun.
Your objections are still FUD. If you don't want to use a service, don't-- make your own games.
Most of the objections raised by Taco and others posting here can be applied equally to EverQuest and all of the other pay2play MMORPGs, or gaming in general.
-Mod support: This requires an active contribution from the developers in any case. Modifying a game that hasn't had mod support written in and documented by the developers would be ridiculously difficult. If developers don't want people to modify the game, they can QUITE easily make it prohibitively difficult to do so. If the developers don't want people modifying the game, it doesn't matter if it's on Steam or not.
-"They can choose when they wish to interrupt us, whether it be from a family meal or our favorite TV shows, to allow them the high likelyhood that we can be reached, as the demographics have clearly been researched on such common behavioral patterns": This is a problem with *any* application you run with priveliges to access the internet. If you don't like what an application does, don't run it. The distribution method is irrelevant.
To bounce around some other threads in this discussion:
-Account Security concerns: Once again, this is a problem with *anything* dealing with identity, authentication, and money on the internet.
-"i still want to know WHY the credit card information": Why does EQ want your credit card #? So they can charge you money to gain access to their servers, obviously.
As for concerns about advertising... *why*? This is obviously being modeled as a continuous revenue stream-- monthly fees. Ads that annoy and alienate players are a net LOSE for their bottom line.
Quite simply, Steam is a response to the realization that online multiplayer is *the* market segment to be in for gaming.
I also think that this is a great idea. I'd *love* to be able to download games for a nominal fee ($10) or so, and not renew the service after the first month if it wasn't worth it.
Bottom line: The scary parts of Steam aren't anything new, and the good stuff might mean a revolution in content distribution for gaming. From a distribution and support perspective, this is brilliant! Imagine clients being patched without user effort and bugs being reported with the system specs instantly available to the support systems. Imagine being able to get a refund for games that simply refuse to run on your system. Imagine raising the bar for the difficulty of cheating so high that it ceases to become an issue. Imagine the mod-distribution possibilities! It's *difficult* to pay attention to all of the half-life mods that are available, let alone download them and get them working.
All-around, this is hardcore win-win for gamers and developers.
The energy required to spin a fan is mostly going into resisting air drag. More blades = lower velocity for the same airflow.
As drag increases by the cube of velocity, with some higher-order turbulence effects, a fan with more blades is more efficient.
Take a look at the 100+ blades driving the compressor in a jet engine next time you get the opportunity.
FALSE. Population density of BangladeshSan Mateo
on
Transparent Aluminium
·
· Score: 1
Your assumptions are false and misleading. The population density of Bangladesh is nearly one and a half times as high as the population density of San Mateo County.
I won't argue with you about Manhattan, but Bangladesh as a whole has a significantly higher population density than most suburban areas. Bangladesh has 3.69 people *per acre*.
Statistics Follow:
Bangladesh: Population 131.26 million Area: 144,000 square kilometers
Conversion of 2.591 km2 per mi2 gives 2,362 persons per square mile living in Bangladesh.
San Mateo County: Population: 717,866 Area: 449.10 square miles
"Show me a soccor mom that can pick up Linux+StarOffice and use it."
"Show me an average person that can learn how to open up attachments with one of your "safe" email programs"
Show me the average non-word-experienced person who can get one of the newer versions of M$ Word to do exactly what they want quickly and simply. Please, try-- I would enjoy watching.
I've been working front-line tech support for a while, and Office is *NOT* user-friendly to people who are unfamiliar with it.
Just watch some poor sap trying to write a resume and running into the auto-format and auto-complete stuff. Once that's involved, it's ridiculously difficult to get the results you want unless you know how to get it to go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: 'Its'
Haha, that one was just too easy. Wayyy to easy.
No!
Luddites wear wooden hats to keep out the mind-control rays.
You see, the real secret is that the aliens have created tin foil that emits its own mind control rays!
ALIENS! TINFOIL! CONSPIRACY! RAYS!
...or by a horse.
The space shuttle is the only heavy freighter and the only means of putting a new ISS component in space.
Titan IV-B, LEO payload capacity 47,800 pounds.
And at an estimated cost of only 350-450M, it's somewhat cheaper than the shuttle. With a better than >95% estimated success rate, it's also probably safer than our current shuttle fleet.
Even better, the upgraded IV-Bs have a LEO payload capacity roughly equal to that of the shuttle. (~48,000 lbs-LEO)
And, they're unmanned and not expected to be re-used. It goes boom, no astronauts go boom with it, and it's not like you were expecting to get the rocket back. Oh, and it can loft a good bit more to GEO than the shuttle can.
None of you have included the effects of competition in your analyses.
Producers in a monopoly set the price that will create the greatest profit, and stick with it.
Producers in a freely competitive market have an entirely *different* set of rules, which have a tendency to decrease the cost of an item until it becomes arbitrarily close to the median variable cost of all producers competing in that market.
Theft/vandalism and other violations of the social contract raise the burden for all producers/retailers, directly increasing the resultant prices.
By most estimates, the cost of these problems is equivalent to >10% of inventory in many consumer goods fields.
Slavery was never supported by law. It was merely not prohibited by law. Those are two entirely different things.
Ahh. So the slaves stayed and worked for their masters because they felt like it? Shit no! They stayed there because the law supported slaveowners by assigning the legal category of 'slave' to certain persons, who were then considered subhuman by law and bound into slavery by social consensus.
Give me a fucking break, you clueless imbecile.
You can kill my gun when you take it from my cold dead fing-...!
Wait...
Never mind.
I've seen a lot of things on Slashdot, but seeing the first post modded redundant is simply ridiculous. :)
Let's look at the potential customers for '500 "nekkid chicks" in my room right now'.
1. Bill Gates: Married.
2. Sultan of Kreplakistan: Already has 500 "nekkid chicks".
There's just no market for it at this point.
L1 isn't stable, so to obtain reasonable stability you have to orbit it and make occasional course corrections.
So... anything at L1 is orbiting. A point. 100,000 miles from anything.
And you expect to be able to fill it up with junk in the foreseeable future?
Worrying about this is like worrying about FedEx not having the extra capacity to ship both *your* package and *my* package.
I have not yet read the article, but this seems patently ludicrous.
While the line between consoles and PCs may be blurred, PCs are still a far superior gaming platform in most respects.
1. Interface: My mouse 0wnz console controllers for analog input-- no argument.
2. Modifications: The inherent difficuty of modifying or hacking content in consoles is a big bar to user-made content. You may get Counter-Strike ported to xbox... but it won't be independently developed there by a bunch of students with lots of time and a cool idea.
3. Pure mind-bending speed. High-end PCs will *always* trump consoles for pure performance, simply because they cost more and don't operate on a 2-3 year product cycle.
4. Display: Until HDTV becomes completely standard, even low-end monitors blow TV quality out of the water. High-end displays will always be ahead of the broadcast standards.
5. Online play: Consoles won't be caught up to PCs in the next few years... if then.
PC gaming is far from dead and and still offers choices far more varied than games available for consoles, even if the market is smaller and PCs do not plug-and-play as easily as consoles.
I've got a really fast one-commandment legal code, optimized to fit our society.
"...don't get caught!"
IIRC, each state's electoral college votes are controlled by that state.
Most states are winner-take-all, some are proportional representation.
Also, I think in some cases the electoral votes are cast directly by the state's representatives, but any representative who decided to ignore things and vote against the state's results probably wouldn't last long.
d00d ur n0t l33t. omg gr4mm4r pwnz j00. n3wb. :P
The cables are snagged and hoisted to the surface at the repair/splice point, IIRC.
There's a Neal Stephenson non-fiction essay about undersea cables and their geopolitical/technical implications around somewhere on the net-- lots of really nice info, rendered in his inimitable style.
"The University of British Colombia today released a long-term research study claiming that discarded toasters showed signs of sentience. By wiring nearly 3500 toasters in paralell, they were able to burn down the administration building. The net result of the toaster parallelization notably increased the intelligence of the campus as a whole, proving that toasters are indeed the building blocks of future genius."
...only if you're talking to a lawyer! :)
The game was "locked" at the lowest difficulty level.
I think you're missing the point-- single-player gaming is being out-competed in the marketplace by multiplayer gaming... because in multiplayer gaming, a great deal of the "content" is generated by the interaction with other players.
Multiplayer games work better with an increasing level of developer support. Patches, servers, matchmaking, all of these are necessary for a smoothly-running multiplayer experience. Also expensive, probably a lot more than you would think. As an example, close to 40% of the gross subscription fees paid by EQ players go directly into paying for the bandwidth they use.
Thus, in order to get the support that multiplayer games need, the move to a subscription-based model is necessary, and good. Better servers, better service, more players. Subscription-based is the best model for supporting true quality in a multiplayer gaming experience.
The overall experience of multiplayer gaming *is* inherently a service, not a product. Look at a large multiplayer community, and you will see that *someone* is paying for the external costs-- either independent server operators, volunteers, and their ilk, or the game developer/publisher.
I'm quite happy to pay a reasonable price for a worthwhile service... and if you don't think that the service is worthwhile, you don't have to purchase it.
The switch to a subscription-based model will expand the possibilities for multiplayer gaming by extending the financial support available for providing an excellent service.
I want to play the kind of games that a cohesive revenue model will allow, and I want to see great game developers rewarded for when they raise the bar on quality, immersiveness, and fun.
Your objections are still FUD. If you don't want to use a service, don't-- make your own games.
Most of the objections raised by Taco and others posting here can be applied equally to EverQuest and all of the other pay2play MMORPGs, or gaming in general.
-Mod support: This requires an active contribution from the developers in any case. Modifying a game that hasn't had mod support written in and documented by the developers would be ridiculously difficult. If developers don't want people to modify the game, they can QUITE easily make it prohibitively difficult to do so. If the developers don't want people modifying the game, it doesn't matter if it's on Steam or not.
-"They can choose when they wish to interrupt us, whether it be from a family meal or our favorite TV shows, to allow them the high likelyhood that we can be reached, as the demographics have clearly been researched on such common behavioral patterns": This is a problem with *any* application you run with priveliges to access the internet. If you don't like what an application does, don't run it. The distribution method is irrelevant.
To bounce around some other threads in this discussion:
-Account Security concerns: Once again, this is a problem with *anything* dealing with identity, authentication, and money on the internet.
-"i still want to know WHY the credit card information": Why does EQ want your credit card #? So they can charge you money to gain access to their servers, obviously.
As for concerns about advertising... *why*? This is obviously being modeled as a continuous revenue stream-- monthly fees. Ads that annoy and alienate players are a net LOSE for their bottom line.
Quite simply, Steam is a response to the realization that online multiplayer is *the* market segment to be in for gaming.
I also think that this is a great idea. I'd *love* to be able to download games for a nominal fee ($10) or so, and not renew the service after the first month if it wasn't worth it.
Bottom line: The scary parts of Steam aren't anything new, and the good stuff might mean a revolution in content distribution for gaming. From a distribution and support perspective, this is brilliant! Imagine clients being patched without user effort and bugs being reported with the system specs instantly available to the support systems. Imagine being able to get a refund for games that simply refuse to run on your system. Imagine raising the bar for the difficulty of cheating so high that it ceases to become an issue. Imagine the mod-distribution possibilities! It's *difficult* to pay attention to all of the half-life mods that are available, let alone download them and get them working.
All-around, this is hardcore win-win for gamers and developers.
The energy required to spin a fan is mostly going into resisting air drag. More blades = lower velocity for the same airflow.
As drag increases by the cube of velocity, with some higher-order turbulence effects, a fan with more blades is more efficient.
Take a look at the 100+ blades driving the compressor in a jet engine next time you get the opportunity.
Your assumptions are false and misleading. The population density of Bangladesh is nearly one and a half times as high as the population density of San Mateo County.
I won't argue with you about Manhattan, but Bangladesh as a whole has a significantly higher population density than most suburban areas. Bangladesh has 3.69 people *per acre*.
Statistics Follow:
Bangladesh:
Population 131.26 million
Area: 144,000 square kilometers
Conversion of 2.591 km2 per mi2 gives 2,362 persons per square mile living in Bangladesh.
San Mateo County:
Population: 717,866
Area: 449.10 square miles
1,599 persons per square mile in SMC.
"Show me a soccor mom that can pick up Linux+StarOffice and use it."
"Show me an average person that can learn how to open up attachments with one of your "safe" email programs"
Show me the average non-word-experienced person who can get one of the newer versions of M$ Word to do exactly what they want quickly and simply. Please, try-- I would enjoy watching.
I've been working front-line tech support for a while, and Office is *NOT* user-friendly to people who are unfamiliar with it.
Just watch some poor sap trying to write a resume and running into the auto-format and auto-complete stuff. Once that's involved, it's ridiculously difficult to get the results you want unless you know how to get it to go away.
...and thousands of people die every year because they drive or ride in automobiles.
You're telling *us* to put things in perspective?
Terrorism is one of the last things I'm afraid of, and I refuse to submit to restrictions imposed by the irrational fear of others.
Lionhead Games is led by Peter Molyneux, who also did Populous and Black&White.
Sid Meier isn't involved with any of those three, AFAIK.