If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
Are you making a suggestion?
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, dear. Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away. Homer: Oh, how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you? Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock. [Lisa looks frustrated, then shruggs and takes his money]
Well, first concentrate it so that it's really, really radioactive. So it'll kill you in 10 minutes, give you cancer in 30 seconds, that kind of thing.
I also I knew where this game had been, and so I set my expectations on a very painful grind. Thus, when I discovered that the grind, while existent, was considerably less painful than I thought, it was a welcome relief.
AAAAAAnd that's the point where the game should have been thrown back.
I swear, any MMPORPG that can be described as a "Grind" this late in the game, should have the entire development team shot. Four years ago they should have been fired. Two years ago they should have been deported. Today there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to make a contentless grind and sell it as entertainment.
Online you get a lot more primary news sources. You get bloggers who were at events, you get links to articles from Taiwan on Chinese oppression of the Falun Gong, you get police reports on criminals. It is biased, it is gritty, it is real, and ironically it is more reliable. 20 years ago if something happened to someone in Taiwan news reporters would be flown out to investigate. Today, with major newspapers you get the newspaper's version of Reuter's version of an article that appeared in an newspaper in Taiwan based upon a phone interview with them. Online, you get to read that guy's blog.
Maybe the decline of the newspaper isn't soley based upon the rise of the internet, but the fall of the newspapers themselves. Maybe the years of forced double-digit profit growth and stripping of all vestigial content really has reduced newspapers to something hollow and not worth reading.
Maybe if the internet wasn't there at all, we would still be talking about the death of the newspaper.
Why do they expect to remain relevant in people's lives if they can't even touch the quality of a public television station in the country that invented Benny Hill?
It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.
Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade, Dada, stagnation in blue, and most everything this guy does. Heck, subspace is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.
'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*
*Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.
Which is a fundamental problem, when it comes right down to it. If you load between islands, that means that each island needs to be far apart that you have a full loading time between them. You also need to have enough time that if the player turns back around, they don't see empty space but rather the island they were just going to. So you need twice a single island load's worth of time between islands. And remember that the island needs to be loaded by the time the player can get a reasonably good look at it, so that's another 1x there...
Now tripling your island's load times is bad enough, but the game frequently has you traveling halfway across the map to get to somewhere... As such your current island unloads, the next one loads, that one unloads, the one after that loads, etc, etc. For a reasonable jaunt around the map you may be hit with 21x the basic load time.
And so you have to give the player something to do during all of that time. Unfortunately, this means more random island encounters you must find, more wind to change the direction of, more underwater treasures to dredge up... More junk to do that slows down the travel further.
I probably would have bit the bullet, shrunk the ocean 80% or so, and added a load pause when the player was within a few feet of the shore. It would have broken immersion, but it would have been a heck of a lot less tedious.
If you're serious, travel to Hong Kong, Bangkok, or any other major Asian city with a lax view of copyrights.
You'll be able to start a large collection of many different styles for not very much money. And on top of that you will have traveled around and have a story for all of your watches. The story really makes the watch.
Also, consider pocketwatches. They're rare enough that you get immediate oddball points for using one, but they're common enough that you can find interesting ones.
This is very much about more than cartoons. The west has been manipulating the middle east for years, and continues to do so to this day. Muslims in the middle east have every right to hate the governments and businesses of the west, as they've been looked down upon and toyed with for years. They have been exploited, we did put basically all of the puppet governments in place, we are continuing to support Israel who is continuing to behave badly. The west has also been scapegoated for so many years that the we are now seen as the cause of a lot of things which do fall on the feet of corrupt or indifferent governments.
But the outcry for violence against westerners by Muslims has been atrocious. "Behead the infidels" "Kill those who make fun of Mohammed," etc. They called for violence, they killed people, they've been killed... it's a stupid situation. And instead of taking it to the people who are actively trying to wring the middle east dry, they attack the Danish. The Danish. The only thing the Danes ever killed anyone with was delicious confectionaries.
It is going to be difficult to convince people that the middle eastern countries are ready to sit at the international table with the rest of the world and behave like civilized people when they're running around threatening to chop people's heads off and burning down embassies over a newspaper cartoon.
The fact that it is a newspaper cartoon makes it all the worse: there might not be a tradition of this in the muslim world, but in the West the newspaper cartoon is officially the lowest, dirtiest, least funny form of political communication. They're always poor in taste and poor in execution. They're the Fox News of cartoons.
And so, of course, we joke about it. That's the western way of expressing displeasure with something. That's our way of letting someone know when they've gotten too serious. You're allowed, in the west, to expose basically any viewpoint so long as it is funny. That's how gay people came to be accepted in our culture, and before that, women. You can expose anyone to anything so long as it is funny.
I think the western view of the situation was well-summed-up by a fark poster "You know what is blasphemous in my religion? Burning down embassies and killing people."
Clearly with the war effort going as well as it has been, and with the troops under the wing of such a glorious leader, it is time to turn our attentions to better teaching the people of the Middle East how to fulfill the promise of democracy and freedom for all.
Yes, a 24 hour US government news agency in the middle east is exactly what we need to raise our profile there. And not just satellite tv, but newspapers, people on street corners talking into cell phones, police officers with funny looking badges visiting schools, secret service agents with vans making people disappear in the middle of the night... Forget I said that last one.
Yes, it is a glorious, democratic future awaiting the middle east, and we just have to show them how. And who better to do it than Haliburton, America's #1 trusted news source? Haliburton, when you need it done right, without the pansy left.
It doesn't seem very "apple-y" to sell something that isn't going to work and not support it. Sure, sell something that only few people will have problems with and have terrible support... they'll do that. But they won't sell something that would be shoddy and not support it. That's why Apple commands a premium. That's why their hardware is more expensive than everyone else's.
And, of course, that's the kicker with profits. Apple could sell some OS's at 150 each, and make 50 of pure cream on each one. Or they could sell hardware + OS for 1.5k each and take in 2 or 3 hundred on each one. As either is servicing the market of people who want OSX, they're selling to roughly the same number of people. And at the same number of people... might as well go for the bigger haul.
Apple's lock-in is through hardware in the same way that Microsoft's lock-in is through software. They realized that when they opened the market to Mac clones.
Of course, the current way Apple really doesn't have to support OSX on vanilla wintel boxes. It will be hacked, people will try it out. And apple gets to disown any messyness with a straight face.
how close is too close (or too far) from the realization of an idea for it to be patented?
Speaking blue sky and not legaleese? I think that you should have an actual physical working prototype to patent something. Patents really should only be issued to people who are bringing things to market. Anything else is abuse of the system.
1. Apple is a hardware company. Hardware is their lock-in.
2. Apple can't support all of the 3rd rate Taiwan parts that go into modern PC's.
3. Apple can pick and choose which standards it supports, leading to a better overall experience.
4. Apple appears to be trying to make the Macintosh the default platform for people, which can run OSX, Linux, and Windows (thanks to X86). Allowing OSX to run on windows platforms would break that plan.
But I also don't think that's how a writer in a videogame can work. Even though I see executives try it over and over again, you can't farm out the text and expect the plot to be any good. You can't even farm out the plot and text and expect the pacing, implementation, and emotional tone to be any good. You need your writer around, for the full development cycle, in-house, as a director. You need someone who will let the artists know what the subtle emotional flavoring a particular area is supposed to have, or the style of the characters from another, etc. You really need a visionary, and most great writers are just that in a way that the average person is not.
I guess he found that out. A few more years in the industry and he could very well become gaming's first great writer... But he needs a little more experience before that happens.
The quests are pretty much the exact some gameplay wrapped up with different names and faces past level 12.
For those people who haven't played it, WoW's quest system is exactly this simple. Your quest is to acquire X number of item Y, and take it to person Z, thus unlocking the next quest. That is it. That is what all of the quests are. Sometimes the person gives you an item right away and tells you to take it halfway around the globe. Sometimes you have to go halfway around the globe to kill a bad guy for an item, which you then take the rest of the way back. Sometimes you have to hang out and kill 50 guys until the 1 in 10 drop rate nets you 5 items, which take you back to the guy who asked for them. But they are all terribly formulaic, and get exceedingly dull.
The quest system is by far the weakest part of WoW.
Seriously, I could sit and play DS or GBA for hours while "playing" WoW.
I actually play Puzzle Pirates while playing World of Warcraft. Browsing Slashdot is also a favorite.
"3. Travel should be easy"
yea, and you should get your mounts at level 30.
You should get your mounts at level 20 or 10. Seriously, why is walking from point A to point B along an empty road for half an hour ever considered viable for inclusion in a game? It's like you're trapped in EA's "The Fairy Tale Adventure" where walking between towns took realistic amounts of time and had realistic encounter densities. (i.e. one every hour)
And if we can't skip the crap, at least let our characters auto-follow the road. It's really annoying while you're trying to read or play another game when you have to keep popping back into WoW to get your character unstuck from a tree while auto-walking.
5. Every class should have lots of things to do.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is true in WoW. When soloing, you have basically one or occasionally two winning strategies. When partying, your role is clear and defined from the first screen of your character creation. Sure, you can choose to heal with heal or you can choose to heal with flash heal, but overall you're pretty pigeonholed.
If you want to change your role, you need to build up an alt from scratch... a generally tedious process that people do again and again.
9. Err on the side of being over-the-top
Part of WoWs style is that everything is larger than life slightly (or more than slightly) cartoony, in a good way. In tabletop gaming, just as you shouldnt hoard your best ideas, you shouldnt be afraid to be over-the-top.
Hmm... I was just feeling the opposite of this. Sure, artistically WoW is a little over the top. But the quests I've done this session included curing a sick girl who went right back to sleep, killing some people because they were stomping on the grass, keeping some courier from getting robbed by highway bandits, and fighting crocodiles for handbags. None of these were particularly "over the top." None even left any impression on the world at all. They barely registered an impression on me.
World of Warcraft has been successful for many reasons, not the least of which is that it took a terribly, terribly slow genre and made it just mostly slow. But we still have quite a ways to go. WoW is still a grind, albeit a slightly less painful than normal one. It still takes hours and hours and hours of play to tick your level up one notch. It still rewards conservative, riskless play rather than running into the enemy's nest with guns blazing. And that quest system... could use a thorough overhaul.
Rockstar's games are all about pushing the boundaries of sex and violence. Hot coffee was an example where they tried something, and pulled back. It was an experiment that didn't work. An experiment that had unintended, unexpected side-effects.
Investors basically rake in money hand over fist when it works out for Rockstar, and lose money when it doesn't. This was one of the latter times.
I really don't care where it came from, the fact that you had to modify the software yourself to get it to do this means that they had taken it out. This is only slightly more of an issue than nude raider patches or naked sims.
No offense to Orson, but I take a touch of dark satisfaction when someone from another medium comes into gaming and falls on their face. It ISN'T easy to create great games. It doesn't just take vision, creativity, and a budget the size of texas. It takes compromises, a willingness to give the player control when the experience warrants, a willingness to take control away from the player when the experience warrants, a sense of the aesthetics of play, a team full of skilled people that you are willing to give control to, an ability to shoot your own ideas in the head when it is time... And even if you create one of the greatest games of all time, it may still fail in the marketplace... just because.
No offense intended to Mr. Card, as if it wasn't for Ender's Game I may not have decided to become a game designer. But there is a big difference between ivory tower thinking about great gaming and the actual down and dirty process of making them.
No, which could be annoying in certain less-common cases. However, applications kept lists of the types of files they could open, and if you wanted to open a file with a different application you just dragged it on top. Save the file within that application, and it changes the creator.
Remember, you're not associating all file types to a particular application (like all JPEG's to Photoshop), just a instance of a file to the application that created it. A JPEG created by Photoshop would have a different creator than a JPEG created by Firefox. If you wanted to change that creator, you either opened it in the other application and saved it out again, or you altered the type / creator using ResEdit (a developer application). This also had the effect of changing the file's icon (assuming the end-user hadn't assigned it one), as the creator application inherently defined the associated icon, similar to how Windows now works.
Of course, this was all invisibly under the hood. The only thing an end-user saw was that text files created by the system opened with the system viewer, and text files created in Word opened in Word. And that windows users sent files over with these weird periods and letters and junk attached to it.
He actually has half of his face in one of the pictures, and his mouth in another. If one were so inclined, you could splice together the two images to create something that looks like this.
Not as great as a mugshot, especially with the slightly different perspectives of the two pictures, but it might do. A little reconstruction by a skilled artist, and you could have a really accurate full-face.
He must have gone to Roland High School. Anyone want to give them a call? (918) 427-7419
I feel bad if this kid really had been planning on getting out, but I've known people who "planned" on getting out for years and never did. And I've been cleaning spyware crap off of people's computers for years.
I remember when Microsoft's competitors got a lot of flack for just trailing MS. The times have changed. Most of the listed new features in Vista are MS playing catch-up with the competition:
Interesting. Not to troll or be offensive, but when was this? I assume this was happening before 92, which is about the time that I became seriously interested in computers... at which point the delta between the Macintosh and Windows 3.1 was tremendous, OS2 was the superior intel-based OS, and the comparisons between Visual Basic and Hypercard were rampant and unfavorable. Were people playing catch-up to the original Basic? Or the first release of Word?
BTW, the Mac OS from 92 still has a lot of things going on under the hood that I would love to see folded into Windows. Like how developers could combine arbitrary files into resources in a single file, thus creating applications that are one file large. Or an underlying file system that is based on a backend database removed from the file heirarchy, allowing users to re-arrange everything arbitrarily without breaking dependencies. As an application you could reference files by their unique ID's or by any number of other metadata, though those other searches could take as long as 1/4th of a second. You could even reference folder contents without knowing the full path. Configuring things to launch on startup was as simple as putting them in the "startup items" folder, and more importantly stopping something from launching at startup was as simple as removing it from the startup items folder... as everything used that folder. And "uninstalling" an application was as simple as throwing it out. File extensions didn't exist, as every file had "type" and "creator" data associated with it behind the scenes. The system therefore just knew what a file was, and just knew which application to use to open it. This also made it easy for applications to ask for a list of all files associated with it, which made finding data that much easier.
Of course, it was hampered by a lot of problems too, like a lack of true multitasking. But it really did have so much going for it which hasn't been copied yet. Please, Please MS look under the hood of OS7 - OSX for the upgrades to your next OS.
Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?
Puzzle Pirates, Everquest, Second Life, Lineage, probably others. Puzzle Pirates and WOW are enough for me.
Other kinds of games are sorely lacking, but MMORPG's are basically covered.
Compatibility with more vertical-market apps such as the one used by your employer.
You shot who in the what now? A: any custom applications that a business requires its employees to use should be on a remote browser anyway B: your employer does not get to decide what OS you use for your home computer, unless they buy it for you C: most of that stuff is super-light and trivial to run under emulation. If not A, B, if not B, C.
Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.
Very true, and quite annoying. However, you'd be surprised how much runs under OSX without additional software. Things like all mice, keyboards, most cameras, all hard drives, etc. Scanners and wireless network components will bite you if you aren't looking, but it isn't too hard to look. There is usually quite a bit out there which is compatible anyway.
This used to be much worse, but with my recent foray back into OSX I've found everything I've needed without many problems. The switch to BSD has been kind to Apple hardware.
Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.
You're kidding, right? I haven't come across a site like this in years. Even my stock broker's site is cross-browser, cross-platform. The last I.E. only site I came across was an internal bug database that was getting junked for a myriad of reasons. Nobody following good coding practices anymore requires I.E. on Windows. The reasons range from general buggyness, to security problems with Active X, to needing to run from Win2k backend servers. And that there are a lot of technologies out there which are faster to work with, cheaper to develop and implement, and all of which happen to be cross-browser.
Slashdot Mirror
If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
Are you making a suggestion?
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa looks frustrated, then shruggs and takes his money]
Well, first concentrate it so that it's really, really radioactive. So it'll kill you in 10 minutes, give you cancer in 30 seconds, that kind of thing.
Step 1: Done.
Oh... I don't feel so well...
I also I knew where this game had been, and so I set my expectations on a very painful grind. Thus, when I discovered that the grind, while existent, was considerably less painful than I thought, it was a welcome relief.
AAAAAAnd that's the point where the game should have been thrown back.
I swear, any MMPORPG that can be described as a "Grind" this late in the game, should have the entire development team shot. Four years ago they should have been fired. Two years ago they should have been deported. Today there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to make a contentless grind and sell it as entertainment.
Years ago my girlfriend got terribly excited and bought Final Fantasy 8 because of the imagery in the commercial.
I believe she actually cried.
Online you get a lot more primary news sources. You get bloggers who were at events, you get links to articles from Taiwan on Chinese oppression of the Falun Gong, you get police reports on criminals. It is biased, it is gritty, it is real, and ironically it is more reliable. 20 years ago if something happened to someone in Taiwan news reporters would be flown out to investigate. Today, with major newspapers you get the newspaper's version of Reuter's version of an article that appeared in an newspaper in Taiwan based upon a phone interview with them. Online, you get to read that guy's blog.
Maybe the decline of the newspaper isn't soley based upon the rise of the internet, but the fall of the newspapers themselves. Maybe the years of forced double-digit profit growth and stripping of all vestigial content really has reduced newspapers to something hollow and not worth reading.
Maybe if the internet wasn't there at all, we would still be talking about the death of the newspaper.
Why do they expect to remain relevant in people's lives if they can't even touch the quality of a public television station in the country that invented Benny Hill?
It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.
Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade, Dada, stagnation in blue, and most everything this guy does. Heck, subspace is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.
'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*
*Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.
The vast, vast ocean was to mask loading times.
Which is a fundamental problem, when it comes right down to it. If you load between islands, that means that each island needs to be far apart that you have a full loading time between them. You also need to have enough time that if the player turns back around, they don't see empty space but rather the island they were just going to. So you need twice a single island load's worth of time between islands. And remember that the island needs to be loaded by the time the player can get a reasonably good look at it, so that's another 1x there...
Now tripling your island's load times is bad enough, but the game frequently has you traveling halfway across the map to get to somewhere... As such your current island unloads, the next one loads, that one unloads, the one after that loads, etc, etc. For a reasonable jaunt around the map you may be hit with 21x the basic load time.
And so you have to give the player something to do during all of that time. Unfortunately, this means more random island encounters you must find, more wind to change the direction of, more underwater treasures to dredge up... More junk to do that slows down the travel further.
I probably would have bit the bullet, shrunk the ocean 80% or so, and added a load pause when the player was within a few feet of the shore. It would have broken immersion, but it would have been a heck of a lot less tedious.
If you're interested in understanding the game biz, Perry's website isn't a bad place to start.
I recommend starting with his memory dump.
Oh, SLURPing!
I thought the story was about LARPing. That would have been much more terrifying.
LED watch == fine programmer
0?
If you're serious, travel to Hong Kong, Bangkok, or any other major Asian city with a lax view of copyrights.
You'll be able to start a large collection of many different styles for not very much money. And on top of that you will have traveled around and have a story for all of your watches. The story really makes the watch.
Other than that, try a
Casio Waveceptor (note, doesn't work in New England)
Fossil PDA Watch
USB Watch
YES watch
MP3 watch
Sleep Tracker Watch (too bad it is so ugly)
Tokyo Flash
Nike Watches (always something interesting)
Also, consider pocketwatches. They're rare enough that you get immediate oddball points for using one, but they're common enough that you can find interesting ones.
This is very much about more than cartoons. The west has been manipulating the middle east for years, and continues to do so to this day. Muslims in the middle east have every right to hate the governments and businesses of the west, as they've been looked down upon and toyed with for years. They have been exploited, we did put basically all of the puppet governments in place, we are continuing to support Israel who is continuing to behave badly. The west has also been scapegoated for so many years that the we are now seen as the cause of a lot of things which do fall on the feet of corrupt or indifferent governments.
But the outcry for violence against westerners by Muslims has been atrocious. "Behead the infidels" "Kill those who make fun of Mohammed," etc. They called for violence, they killed people, they've been killed... it's a stupid situation. And instead of taking it to the people who are actively trying to wring the middle east dry, they attack the Danish. The Danish. The only thing the Danes ever killed anyone with was delicious confectionaries.
It is going to be difficult to convince people that the middle eastern countries are ready to sit at the international table with the rest of the world and behave like civilized people when they're running around threatening to chop people's heads off and burning down embassies over a newspaper cartoon.
The fact that it is a newspaper cartoon makes it all the worse: there might not be a tradition of this in the muslim world, but in the West the newspaper cartoon is officially the lowest, dirtiest, least funny form of political communication. They're always poor in taste and poor in execution. They're the Fox News of cartoons.
And so, of course, we joke about it. That's the western way of expressing displeasure with something. That's our way of letting someone know when they've gotten too serious. You're allowed, in the west, to expose basically any viewpoint so long as it is funny. That's how gay people came to be accepted in our culture, and before that, women. You can expose anyone to anything so long as it is funny.
I think the western view of the situation was well-summed-up by a fark poster
"You know what is blasphemous in my religion? Burning down embassies and killing people."
"how much more can they possibly do?"
Clearly with the war effort going as well as it has been, and with the troops under the wing of such a glorious leader, it is time to turn our attentions to better teaching the people of the Middle East how to fulfill the promise of democracy and freedom for all.
Yes, a 24 hour US government news agency in the middle east is exactly what we need to raise our profile there. And not just satellite tv, but newspapers, people on street corners talking into cell phones, police officers with funny looking badges visiting schools, secret service agents with vans making people disappear in the middle of the night... Forget I said that last one.
Yes, it is a glorious, democratic future awaiting the middle east, and we just have to show them how. And who better to do it than Haliburton, America's #1 trusted news source? Haliburton, when you need it done right, without the pansy left.
("psst. Can I get my five bucks now?")
It doesn't seem very "apple-y" to sell something that isn't going to work and not support it. Sure, sell something that only few people will have problems with and have terrible support... they'll do that. But they won't sell something that would be shoddy and not support it. That's why Apple commands a premium. That's why their hardware is more expensive than everyone else's.
And, of course, that's the kicker with profits. Apple could sell some OS's at 150 each, and make 50 of pure cream on each one. Or they could sell hardware + OS for 1.5k each and take in 2 or 3 hundred on each one. As either is servicing the market of people who want OSX, they're selling to roughly the same number of people. And at the same number of people... might as well go for the bigger haul.
Apple's lock-in is through hardware in the same way that Microsoft's lock-in is through software. They realized that when they opened the market to Mac clones.
Of course, the current way Apple really doesn't have to support OSX on vanilla wintel boxes. It will be hacked, people will try it out. And apple gets to disown any messyness with a straight face.
how close is too close (or too far) from the realization of an idea for it to be patented?
Speaking blue sky and not legaleese? I think that you should have an actual physical working prototype to patent something. Patents really should only be issued to people who are bringing things to market. Anything else is abuse of the system.
1. Apple is a hardware company. Hardware is their lock-in.
2. Apple can't support all of the 3rd rate Taiwan parts that go into modern PC's.
3. Apple can pick and choose which standards it supports, leading to a better overall experience.
4. Apple appears to be trying to make the Macintosh the default platform for people, which can run OSX, Linux, and Windows (thanks to X86). Allowing OSX to run on windows platforms would break that plan.
5. Much better margins on hardware.
I suspect the main answer is 5.
I believe it. He's probably a solid guy.
But I also don't think that's how a writer in a videogame can work. Even though I see executives try it over and over again, you can't farm out the text and expect the plot to be any good. You can't even farm out the plot and text and expect the pacing, implementation, and emotional tone to be any good. You need your writer around, for the full development cycle, in-house, as a director. You need someone who will let the artists know what the subtle emotional flavoring a particular area is supposed to have, or the style of the characters from another, etc. You really need a visionary, and most great writers are just that in a way that the average person is not.
I guess he found that out. A few more years in the industry and he could very well become gaming's first great writer... But he needs a little more experience before that happens.
The quests are pretty much the exact some gameplay wrapped up with different names and faces past level 12.
For those people who haven't played it, WoW's quest system is exactly this simple. Your quest is to acquire X number of item Y, and take it to person Z, thus unlocking the next quest. That is it. That is what all of the quests are. Sometimes the person gives you an item right away and tells you to take it halfway around the globe. Sometimes you have to go halfway around the globe to kill a bad guy for an item, which you then take the rest of the way back. Sometimes you have to hang out and kill 50 guys until the 1 in 10 drop rate nets you 5 items, which take you back to the guy who asked for them. But they are all terribly formulaic, and get exceedingly dull.
The quest system is by far the weakest part of WoW.
Seriously, I could sit and play DS or GBA for hours while "playing" WoW.
I actually play Puzzle Pirates while playing World of Warcraft. Browsing Slashdot is also a favorite.
"3. Travel should be easy"
yea, and you should get your mounts at level 30.
You should get your mounts at level 20 or 10. Seriously, why is walking from point A to point B along an empty road for half an hour ever considered viable for inclusion in a game? It's like you're trapped in EA's "The Fairy Tale Adventure" where walking between towns took realistic amounts of time and had realistic encounter densities. (i.e. one every hour)
And if we can't skip the crap, at least let our characters auto-follow the road. It's really annoying while you're trying to read or play another game when you have to keep popping back into WoW to get your character unstuck from a tree while auto-walking.
5. Every class should have lots of things to do.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is true in WoW. When soloing, you have basically one or occasionally two winning strategies. When partying, your role is clear and defined from the first screen of your character creation. Sure, you can choose to heal with heal or you can choose to heal with flash heal, but overall you're pretty pigeonholed.
If you want to change your role, you need to build up an alt from scratch... a generally tedious process that people do again and again.
9. Err on the side of being over-the-top
Part of WoWs style is that everything is larger than life slightly (or more than slightly) cartoony, in a good way. In tabletop gaming, just as you shouldnt hoard your best ideas, you shouldnt be afraid to be over-the-top.
Hmm... I was just feeling the opposite of this. Sure, artistically WoW is a little over the top. But the quests I've done this session included curing a sick girl who went right back to sleep, killing some people because they were stomping on the grass, keeping some courier from getting robbed by highway bandits, and fighting crocodiles for handbags. None of these were particularly "over the top." None even left any impression on the world at all. They barely registered an impression on me.
World of Warcraft has been successful for many reasons, not the least of which is that it took a terribly, terribly slow genre and made it just mostly slow. But we still have quite a ways to go. WoW is still a grind, albeit a slightly less painful than normal one. It still takes hours and hours and hours of play to tick your level up one notch. It still rewards conservative, riskless play rather than running into the enemy's nest with guns blazing. And that quest system... could use a thorough overhaul.
Rockstar's games are all about pushing the boundaries of sex and violence. Hot coffee was an example where they tried something, and pulled back. It was an experiment that didn't work. An experiment that had unintended, unexpected side-effects.
Investors basically rake in money hand over fist when it works out for Rockstar, and lose money when it doesn't. This was one of the latter times.
I really don't care where it came from, the fact that you had to modify the software yourself to get it to do this means that they had taken it out. This is only slightly more of an issue than nude raider patches or naked sims.
No offense to Orson, but I take a touch of dark satisfaction when someone from another medium comes into gaming and falls on their face. It ISN'T easy to create great games. It doesn't just take vision, creativity, and a budget the size of texas. It takes compromises, a willingness to give the player control when the experience warrants, a willingness to take control away from the player when the experience warrants, a sense of the aesthetics of play, a team full of skilled people that you are willing to give control to, an ability to shoot your own ideas in the head when it is time... And even if you create one of the greatest games of all time, it may still fail in the marketplace... just because.
No offense intended to Mr. Card, as if it wasn't for Ender's Game I may not have decided to become a game designer. But there is a big difference between ivory tower thinking about great gaming and the actual down and dirty process of making them.
No, which could be annoying in certain less-common cases. However, applications kept lists of the types of files they could open, and if you wanted to open a file with a different application you just dragged it on top. Save the file within that application, and it changes the creator.
Remember, you're not associating all file types to a particular application (like all JPEG's to Photoshop), just a instance of a file to the application that created it. A JPEG created by Photoshop would have a different creator than a JPEG created by Firefox. If you wanted to change that creator, you either opened it in the other application and saved it out again, or you altered the type / creator using ResEdit (a developer application). This also had the effect of changing the file's icon (assuming the end-user hadn't assigned it one), as the creator application inherently defined the associated icon, similar to how Windows now works.
Of course, this was all invisibly under the hood. The only thing an end-user saw was that text files created by the system opened with the system viewer, and text files created in Word opened in Word. And that windows users sent files over with these weird periods and letters and junk attached to it.
Notice how the victim of spyware in the article had actually spent 50 bucks for protection software, and was not at all protected.
People expect to spend money on these things and then they'll just work. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable belief to me.
He actually has half of his face in one of the pictures, and his mouth in another. If one were so inclined, you could splice together the two images to create something that looks like
this.
Not as great as a mugshot, especially with the slightly different perspectives of the two pictures, but it might do. A little reconstruction by a skilled artist, and you could have a really accurate full-face.
He must have gone to Roland High School. Anyone want to give them a call? (918) 427-7419
I feel bad if this kid really had been planning on getting out, but I've known people who "planned" on getting out for years and never did. And I've been cleaning spyware crap off of people's computers for years.
I remember when Microsoft's competitors got a lot of flack for just trailing MS. The times have changed. Most of the listed new features in Vista are MS playing catch-up with the competition:
Interesting. Not to troll or be offensive, but when was this? I assume this was happening before 92, which is about the time that I became seriously interested in computers... at which point the delta between the Macintosh and Windows 3.1 was tremendous, OS2 was the superior intel-based OS, and the comparisons between Visual Basic and Hypercard were rampant and unfavorable. Were people playing catch-up to the original Basic? Or the first release of Word?
BTW, the Mac OS from 92 still has a lot of things going on under the hood that I would love to see folded into Windows. Like how developers could combine arbitrary files into resources in a single file, thus creating applications that are one file large. Or an underlying file system that is based on a backend database removed from the file heirarchy, allowing users to re-arrange everything arbitrarily without breaking dependencies. As an application you could reference files by their unique ID's or by any number of other metadata, though those other searches could take as long as 1/4th of a second. You could even reference folder contents without knowing the full path. Configuring things to launch on startup was as simple as putting them in the "startup items" folder, and more importantly stopping something from launching at startup was as simple as removing it from the startup items folder... as everything used that folder. And "uninstalling" an application was as simple as throwing it out. File extensions didn't exist, as every file had "type" and "creator" data associated with it behind the scenes. The system therefore just knew what a file was, and just knew which application to use to open it. This also made it easy for applications to ask for a list of all files associated with it, which made finding data that much easier.
Of course, it was hampered by a lot of problems too, like a lack of true multitasking. But it really did have so much going for it which hasn't been copied yet. Please, Please MS look under the hood of OS7 - OSX for the upgrades to your next OS.
(reply to grandparent)
Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?
Puzzle Pirates, Everquest, Second Life, Lineage, probably others. Puzzle Pirates and WOW are enough for me.
Other kinds of games are sorely lacking, but MMORPG's are basically covered.
Compatibility with more vertical-market apps such as the one used by your employer.
You shot who in the what now? A: any custom applications that a business requires its employees to use should be on a remote browser anyway B: your employer does not get to decide what OS you use for your home computer, unless they buy it for you C: most of that stuff is super-light and trivial to run under emulation. If not A, B, if not B, C.
Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.
Very true, and quite annoying. However, you'd be surprised how much runs under OSX without additional software. Things like all mice, keyboards, most cameras, all hard drives, etc. Scanners and wireless network components will bite you if you aren't looking, but it isn't too hard to look. There is usually quite a bit out there which is compatible anyway.
This used to be much worse, but with my recent foray back into OSX I've found everything I've needed without many problems. The switch to BSD has been kind to Apple hardware.
Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.
You're kidding, right? I haven't come across a site like this in years. Even my stock broker's site is cross-browser, cross-platform. The last I.E. only site I came across was an internal bug database that was getting junked for a myriad of reasons. Nobody following good coding practices anymore requires I.E. on Windows. The reasons range from general buggyness, to security problems with Active X, to needing to run from Win2k backend servers. And that there are a lot of technologies out there which are faster to work with, cheaper to develop and implement, and all of which happen to be cross-browser.