But a missile wouldn't require a "command module and lunar module," it would require a suitcase-sized nuclear warhead or a couch-sized modified conventional warhead. Getting a missile properly aimed, etc would be difficult, but any country which has the capacity to get satellite payloads into high-earth orbit should be able to get a missile close enough to the edge of the atmosphere to escape earth's orbit and fall towards the moon. This shouldn't be so hard by 2050, any more than intercontinental ballistic missiles are a rarity today.
That having been said, any system like this on the moon will have to have sufficient fault tollerances to deal with random, regular destruction at the hands of meteors. The designers will need to aviod single fault locations, instead creating a diverse grid that isn't stressed to its maximum. It will have to be self-healing, adaptive, and stay up under all sorts of emergencies.
Understanding a fault-tolerant, redundant, and stable distributed power grid is probably why it will take until 2050.
The law covers the box, the manual, and "accompanying documentation" which would include that which comes on the disk. A cereal box is about 1 page of text long. The manual for Master of Orion 3 was 159 pages long. With additional QA time, expect the translating job to add roughly 30k to a project. Then there is the cost of new plates at a local factory, pressing the region-specific games with French logos, etc. Add in the overhead of subdividing your Canadian market and the additional risks to you if the game is a failure, and the costs (not to mention, burden on your time) add up. For sake of off-the-cuff numbers, let's call the cost of the whole thing 100,000 US dollars.
The reason Japanese games are translated into English is because there is a rather large english market. How large is the market in Quebec? Well, the 2001 census showed that Quebec has a smaller population than New Jersey... just 7.2 million.
I can't say for certain what percentage of the population there buys videogames... but Sony's PS2 sell-through in North America as of September 6th was 14,170,000 units, spread across the roughly 30 million canadians and 300 million Americans. Ignoring Mexico, that averages to 300,000 PS2 units in Quebec. Now, Metal Gear Solid 2 was a smashing success by anyone's estimations, and remains one of the top selling PS2 games of all time. It sold 5 million units worldwide, including the "greatest hits" line. Let's use that to estimate a successful game selling for an average of 40 dollars to 1 out of 10 people who own the console.
In Quebec then, you would be selling 30,000 units... A right good show. Of the 1,200,000 dollars brought in, 600,000 goes to the retailers. Let's estimate the payment to the development house covers 1/2 of what is left, and promotions / marketing / store displays / shipping cost another 1/2. You are left with a tidy 150k to pocket... Except that you have the Quebec-specific translation / debugging / etc expense to cover, which reduces your profit as a publisher to 50 thousand.
If marketing a game is a pretty good proposition in other places around the world (despite game companies going bankrupt as a matter of routine), it isn't so in Quebec. By this theoretical, off the cuff example, the value proposition is cut by 2/3rds for a successful game, and losses are significantly higher on a failure. An average success in any other major market would be a failure in Quebec thanks to this law.
You can only imagine how this would effect numbers for the X-Box or Game Cube.
Because of this, only guaranteed successes will be available in Quebec... No Rez for you. While this would mean making a trip to the local importer in any other country, in Quebec that too is banned. What you are left with is entirely formulaic expected hits, like Tony Hawk 5, and two-year-old surprise hits from other parts of the world, as if Grand Theft Auto was finally released this year. The customer suffers because the games they desire are not available, and the culture suffers because the games that are available are exactly the type of rehash corporate drivel they are trying to keep out.
One can argue that they have the right to enforce their own laws, but the marginalization of the Quebec Gaming Industry is going to be the result.
I find it really sad that one of the cornerstones events in the Star Wars world is going to be portrayed, not in the films, but in short, five minute cartoons.
The Second Renaissance was a cornerstone of the story of The Matrix, yet was released as two 10-minute shorts. It also happened to be better than the sequel proper for the movie.
Honestly, with the quality of the last two Star Wars films, I'd rather have to digest them in 5 minute chunks than all in one sitting. That way the cliches and jarringly bad writing would be spaced out a bit further, giving the viewer time to watch re-runs of Babalyon 5 (or another well written, great, underrated scifi... AKA the Anti-StarWars).
Having done QA for both Computers and every major console I can confidently say that computer games aren't buggy due to lack of effort, they're buggy because testing on all permutations are impossible. Is this game stable on Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, XPSP1, XPSP2? Is this game stable on Catalyst 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and the unreleased 3.8? Pentium 3, 3.1, 4, 4.1? Athalon XP, Thunderbird? Via, nVidia Northbridge? Direct X 8, 9.0, 9.1? The list goes on and on... And these things can't be tested independently of eachother: Total test time and effort is multiplicative of new variables, not additive... And all of this hardware needs to be found. A console QA department can have far fewer people testing than a PC department even if they are testing across all 3 consoles.
I would doubt that games have gotten any less reliable since the internet... somehow I remember getting games to run "back in the day" as an exercise in futility. Perhaps it just seems like there are more problems because people lacked a suitable medium to complain about games. We can all thank Berners-Lee for correcting that problem.
On the other hand, a good thing online patching has added is game balancing. If someone discovers an infinite-hit Dan Combo in Street Fighter Alpha 4, it will stay in and dominate the game until Street Fighter Alpha 5. If someone discovers a way to create a Peasant Sword of Infinite Damage +5 in Everquest, it will be nurfed the following day. Quite frankly, competitive online gaming wouldn't be anywhere near as balanced as it is if it weren't for patching. If serious competition is your thing, online is the place to be... and to a large degree because of patching.
The latest catalyst drivers, 3.8, break 2d rendering in Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the 3.8 didn't ship after we went gold but before we hit shelves. Users tell us it has happened in other games, but I can't confirm this.
One of my favorite trade skill systems of all time was in the original UO. You didn't just mine the ore, you had to find the mountain that had it, then use the pick....then take the ore and smelt it into ingots, then smith it into something.
But you see what the article is talking about? User interaction is limited to making menu selections. Mountain X. Harvest with Y. Smelt At Z. 1% chance of success. The character gains skills, but the player never does. And without required player skill, a game will never make mainstream.
Japanese cooking simulations, silly as they may be, are a good example of how to handle an in-game skill system while relying on the skill of the player. Use left analog stick to slide hand across while using right analog stick to chop. How long have your other vegetables been cooking? Quick, Swizzle those noodles! More customers coming in, better get ready for the rush...
All of this, of course, requires a great deal more development than "Click to add carrots. Click to turn on stove."
What is needed is a Mall system, whereby independent developers produce the games for a title, and are paid based upon the number of subscribers and the percentage of time they spend at that game. Of course, there would need to be lots of oversight, so that the "click name to cast spell" could eventually be replaced by a more complicated "Move mouse in pattern around circle to cast spell" and finally a "move mouse in pattern within the rythim of your chanting into a microphone."
Note all of the above examples require skill on the part of the player, not just the character. People play games to become better themselves, not just to boost the stats of their pet. As long as MMPORPG's focus exclusively on stats building and not on player building, non-core will stay away in droves. That will mean taking some risks, both with client-side cheating and in terms of development models. However, the simplistic "Click Click Click" model to protect against lag and the extremely laggy server side model to protect against cheating have hamstrung development to the point where it isn't worth playing 99% of the MMPORPG's out there. Move back to a skill-based system and players will respond. PlanetSide has proven that.
True... The statement should have included the specific reason that the license is invalid. Still, such an omission is immaterial to the basis for the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration, which continues unabated with the full blessing of the US court system and congressmen.*
*the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration Committee is not responsible for the use of information released in conjunction with any activity, promotional or otherwise. Producing said information in a court of law is a violation of your license and will result in immediate forfeiture of all of your intellectual property, here and in perpetuity. This revocable contract is irrevocable. Taking legal advice from a Slashdot comment modded "Score:4, Funny" will result in getting what you deserve.
I wasn't referring to the shell, I was referring to programs in general under the Windows operating system.
For further information, please see your local Kazaa distributer. Unlike an extension of the command line model, permissions aren't a feature you can "spring" on programmers. Likely if it isn't in the current developer build of Longhorn, it won't make it in by 2005.
Forget the viewers, have you seen Fox News recently? Their fair and balanced reporting standards would be easily satisfied by a debate between Krusty the Clown and Duff Man.
Yes. SCO seems to be under the delusion that assertions made in court are TRUE until proven FALSE. That, for example, if a license is declared invalid the item falling under the license is immediately in the public domain. Or that a company which has allegedly been wronged is entitled to payments during the discovery phase of the trial, rather than after a ruling has been made. Or that claiming copyright infringement is the equivalent of proving copyright infringement.
In the spirit of SCO, I would like to begin the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration! Darl has wronged both me and my family, and owes us his entire estate. How much do I hear for a slightly used 4.2 liter 2002 Jaguar S-Type R?*
*Anyone participating in the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration implicitly agrees that the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration is completely legal and enforceable. All US judges and members of congress are required to take part in the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration. Some restrictions apply, which we will announce at the appropriate time in the future.
Leapfrog doesn't make things for teenagers. The users that Leapfrog is aiming for would tear a GBA to shreds in a few hours.
Actually, Leapfrog says their target market is 4 to 8, not 16 months. With a touch-sensitive screen and an attached pen, the Leapster is likely MORE fragile than the GBA. The GBA, by comparison, has a double-hulled screen and a solid-state design, whose durability should be legendary by now. The GBA is more durable than the old Tiger Electronics LCD games sold towards kids, and is far more durable than any calculator I have ever used. If you think it is fragile, you really need to get your hands on a post 2001 Game Boy.
The GBA-SP is still durable, despite the clamshell design. However, the original GBA continues to be available for kids, probably for that very reason.
Looking at it from the perspective of a parent, I think my son would love one of these.
Does one not have to look at it from the perspective of the son, to determine if he would love one? When you say the GBA's are small with tiny buttons, are you looking at it from your perspective or the perspective of a child 1/3 your size?
When he's a teenager, he'll want something more advanced, but for now this would be great for him.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but by 7 kids have basically given up on educational toys. That is not to say that they give up on toys that have educational value, so much as they reject anything that would associate them with the younger class. Saying "here is this thing that is like the thing made for the older guys but for little kids and full of educational software," is to them like saying "you are a baby," which is exactly what they are attempting to disassociate themselves from.
I'm not saying this isn't a good idea. If I had a kid about to enter kindergarten I would certainly buy one for him or her... And wouldn't buy them a GBA until they were in the 3rd grade or higher (if ever). However, take into consideration your kid's self-image when choosing educational toys for them, or else they will just be rejected. A child is a child to us, but to them a child is a powerless young adult. Buying a 9 year old boy a LeapFrog and a copy of Dora the Explorer will waste $110 dollars and will feed the child's perception that his parents are badly out of touch with his needs and desires. Buying them a GBA and a copy of Advance Wars 2 will do them a lot more good and will cause them to respect their parents judgments. I think this reality of the market is why parents would like a lot more educational software on the GBA, and why people have complained about LeapFrog striking out on their own.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a virus up and running on the development platform already. You have to make sure all of the features work.
Seriously, there has to be some form of protection when you integrate everything so tightly... Now that the command line can export to Excel et al and Excel et all can run commands, one can expect so see a lot more viruses propagate that way unless there is a more comprehensive permissions system added to Windows. Why are potential disease vectors running as root? Why does MSN theoretically have access to all programs and data, even though RAM has been shielded for years?
I applaud Microsoft's desire to better the OS through features they should have had 20 years ago, but with advanced scripting (and a file system that hopefully won't look like a sewer) you need a permissions model, plain and simple. Anything less is asking for trouble.
In Vietnam it probably *is* cheaper to fix Free Software so that it does what they want than to purchase software from Microsoft.
That reminds me of the origins of Star Office. Apparently Sun (a rather large organization) looked at the cost of buying MS Office licenses for all of its workers, looked at the cost of buying the rights to a software suite and modifying it to their needs, and realized that it was cheaper to just do it themselves. Of course, there were other reasons, but the economies of Microsoft just didn't make sense.
It's not just in Vietnam that it is cheaper to fix Free Software than to purchase from Microsoft. Sadly, it will be quite a while before we realize that a universal yearly contribution of 25 dollars to an open-source software project would further the industry far more than contributing 500 dollars to Microsoft every 3 years.
A RAID array is a good backup for hardware failure in an environment where 99.99999% uptime is the goal. However, many failures that would blow your drive are software based... For example, if you are running under Windows XP, one of MS's specially formatted "updates" could wipe out your system. And with no widely available NTFS repair solutions such recovery can become very expensive very quickly. While this may not be as much of an issue on a non-proprietary file system, even Linux sometimes requires a full system re-install. Having that 2nd drive on an ATA chain will save you the few hundred for a good raid card, and will save your data in the event of, for example, a virus that deletes all local data... or accidently typing "apt-get upgrade" twice in a row.
Just set a cron job to mount, copy all, and unmount every week. Short of a rapidly moving brushfire, you should be all set. All this for less than $150 dollars.
Once again I ask: What liabilities are SCO's board members opening themselves up for with these ludicrous litigations and how can I get in on this class-action?
The Borg Sphere was first introduced in the second Next Generation movie. When a Borg Cube goes into its death throes, it spits out a Borg Sphere as a last-ditch effort to stay alive by any means possible, including re-writing history.
There weren't any stock speculators, but otherwise the analogy is pretty accurate.
The power of a good old fashioned pentium and the hardware to support it can be had in many modern consumer devices that cost less than $100, such as palm pilots, graphing calculators, etc. Likewise, encryption chips are available which automate the process and would allow for a much smaller central processor.
However, the article does state that the total cost of the system is $15,000 - $20,000 per intersection. Going the rediculous overkill route and adding in a fanless 800mhz C3 in a Mini-ITX motherboard with a 1GB CF card, a strong IR sender / reciever, and an auto-timesynch radio card would still only bump the price up about 5%, even if they paid full retail. Attaching a Zire would be significantly less than that, and would only require an IR amplifier and a modified power supply.
Of course, what is needed is a challenge - response system that looks something like this
I seem to recall that Sony produced a one-handed controller for the PSOne.
It was put out by ASCII, and it had all of the conventional buttons though no analog sticks. It was uncomfortable to play with, as the D pad was in the middle, surrounded by two buttons on top (repeated twice for left / right handers) and two more trigger buttons underneath. It also had L1 R1 L2 R2 mapped to a little pad just south of the D-Pad.
I had one as a FF7 controller, but gave it to a one-armed game developer.
The pad was pretty miserable overall. It was difficult to both use the D-pad and hold the controller in your hand. The way buttons were mapped around the D-pad ensured that you had to remove your thumb to do nearly anything, making it somewhat useless for games more intense than Bust-a-Move. Still, with some training it was passable.
It still works on the PS2, so long as you don't need the sticks. It would probably be a good way to play FFX.
Let me get this straight... They are releasing inferior hardware because they "don't want to take a loss" on each piece sold. They are also gluing it shut, so you can't make any modifications on the hardware they aren't losing money selling to you.
Distribution of games is apparently going at 60% of sale price. Unlike a real publisher, that 60% doesn't buy you any advertising, hype, or free press copies. At the end of this, the Developer and original Publisher split $20, and Indrema walks away with $30. By comparison, Nintendo's cut is estimated at between 3 and 5 dollars on games on their system. Of course, if you want a front page listing that will cost you as well.
Now, the consumer purchases a $300 PC for... $300. This gives the consumer the ability to purchase full PC games at full PC game prices, without added PC hassles such as word processing or Adobe Photoshop. On top of this, the consumer must pay $10 every month just for the priveledge of using this thing that they bought, or else it goes limp and worthless. Anyone think Divx is getting a soulmate?
So this company gets $3 per sale to advertise a game, $30 per sale in commission, at 6 per year they make $20 per sale in connectivity. They make $53 for every $50 game sold... Minus connectivity charges of course. In exchange for this, the publisher accepts a smaller cut but doesn't have to print manuals. The player gets games nearly on demand, but pays on average $70 per game, pays for duplicate ho-hum hardware that isn't theirs, and doesn't get hard copies of anything.
Why will we buy it? Obviously because us suckers will buy anything.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... Online distribution of games is the wave of the future. Sadly, all waves of the future will be crassly exploited by snake oil salesmen. I see no reason to believe differently here.
I'd like to believe that they are really gamers and they really want to break into the highly competitive console market. I'd also like to believe that they are intelligently positioning themselves to be a niche player, and that their costs will scale perfectly with their userbase. Sadly, neither of these seems likely. Perhaps they should just find a way to hook up the N-Gage up to a TV screen and sell that. I hear they are going cheap these days.
You don't work much in public entertainment, do you?
Apple hasn't had to give a bunch of interviews about why iTunes and iTMS is being perceived as unsuccessful.
No, but Apple has had to give interviews constantly since 1995 to explain that they are doing fine financially and any system you purchase from them will be supported for years to come.
It's a matter of public perception. Why spend X many dollars on a system if it is going under? That makes it useless. But if Billy says that Nintendo is going under because they don't have GTA and Microsoft does, and Nintendo says nothing, it must be true. Of course, by your logic if Nintendo starts bringing out pieces of paper with lots of impressive numbers on it, they must be lying.
People and companies don't explain themselves unless they have explaining to do. I love how they always talk about worldwide terms on the Nintendo side. I don't live worldwide, I live in the US. EA, Activision, THQ, Take-Two, these are not worldwide companies and don't care about the Gamecube's success or failure in Japan. They want consoles in the houses in the US and Europe and Nintendo just isn't delivering.
I'd like to mention here that Activision was extatic about the sales reception our game recieved in Korea, and were looking to release in more territories there. Publishers care about selling games, not about whom they sell them to. Of course, publishers tend to specialize in their own region because that's where they're drawing their talent pool from. If what you want are FPS Computer Games, then westernized companies are the way to go. However, you're ignoring the more console-centric Japanese developers such as Konami, Treasure, Sega, Namco, Capcom, etc, whom any console company also needs to placate.
While you may not live worldwide, they do sell worldwide. And worldwide numbers should matter to gamers buying a system: Sega's systems have routinely tanked in the US, but thanks to sales in Japan US gamers were still treated to Shenmue, several legendary Treasure shooters, great incarnations of Street Fighter, and many others. Even the Sega CD got Lunar 1 and 2 as well as some of Core's finest work. The Jaguar tanked everywhere: and games were completely nonexistent.
If you want to be a small-town gamer and bury your head in the American Sand, that's fine. Eidos et. al has some Legacy of Kain love stored up for you. But you will be missing out on the industry's best fighters, RPG's, twitch arcade games, racers, and many other underrepresented genres.
Nintendo does these interviews to change public perception. Saying that attempting to change public perception automatically validates that perception is as convienient an oversimplification as saying that because you live in America you automatically don't have to care about what happens abroad. If you don't want to have to think about the world around you, that's your prerogative. But don't expect your perceptions to translate to that of EA, Activision, and the rest of the western producers.
Slashdot Mirror
But a missile wouldn't require a "command module and lunar module," it would require a suitcase-sized nuclear warhead or a couch-sized modified conventional warhead. Getting a missile properly aimed, etc would be difficult, but any country which has the capacity to get satellite payloads into high-earth orbit should be able to get a missile close enough to the edge of the atmosphere to escape earth's orbit and fall towards the moon. This shouldn't be so hard by 2050, any more than intercontinental ballistic missiles are a rarity today.
That having been said, any system like this on the moon will have to have sufficient fault tollerances to deal with random, regular destruction at the hands of meteors. The designers will need to aviod single fault locations, instead creating a diverse grid that isn't stressed to its maximum. It will have to be self-healing, adaptive, and stay up under all sorts of emergencies.
Understanding a fault-tolerant, redundant, and stable distributed power grid is probably why it will take until 2050.
You've clearly never distributed a game.
The law covers the box, the manual, and "accompanying documentation" which would include that which comes on the disk. A cereal box is about 1 page of text long. The manual for Master of Orion 3 was 159 pages long. With additional QA time, expect the translating job to add roughly 30k to a project. Then there is the cost of new plates at a local factory, pressing the region-specific games with French logos, etc. Add in the overhead of subdividing your Canadian market and the additional risks to you if the game is a failure, and the costs (not to mention, burden on your time) add up. For sake of off-the-cuff numbers, let's call the cost of the whole thing 100,000 US dollars.
The reason Japanese games are translated into English is because there is a rather large english market. How large is the market in Quebec? Well, the 2001 census showed that Quebec has a smaller population than New Jersey... just 7.2 million.
I can't say for certain what percentage of the population there buys videogames... but Sony's PS2 sell-through in North America as of September 6th was 14,170,000 units, spread across the roughly 30 million canadians and 300 million Americans. Ignoring Mexico, that averages to 300,000 PS2 units in Quebec. Now, Metal Gear Solid 2 was a smashing success by anyone's estimations, and remains one of the top selling PS2 games of all time. It sold 5 million units worldwide, including the "greatest hits" line. Let's use that to estimate a successful game selling for an average of 40 dollars to 1 out of 10 people who own the console.
In Quebec then, you would be selling 30,000 units... A right good show. Of the 1,200,000 dollars brought in, 600,000 goes to the retailers. Let's estimate the payment to the development house covers 1/2 of what is left, and promotions / marketing / store displays / shipping cost another 1/2. You are left with a tidy 150k to pocket... Except that you have the Quebec-specific translation / debugging / etc expense to cover, which reduces your profit as a publisher to 50 thousand.
If marketing a game is a pretty good proposition in other places around the world (despite game companies going bankrupt as a matter of routine), it isn't so in Quebec. By this theoretical, off the cuff example, the value proposition is cut by 2/3rds for a successful game, and losses are significantly higher on a failure. An average success in any other major market would be a failure in Quebec thanks to this law.
You can only imagine how this would effect numbers for the X-Box or Game Cube.
Because of this, only guaranteed successes will be available in Quebec... No Rez for you. While this would mean making a trip to the local importer in any other country, in Quebec that too is banned. What you are left with is entirely formulaic expected hits, like Tony Hawk 5, and two-year-old surprise hits from other parts of the world, as if Grand Theft Auto was finally released this year. The customer suffers because the games they desire are not available, and the culture suffers because the games that are available are exactly the type of rehash corporate drivel they are trying to keep out.
One can argue that they have the right to enforce their own laws, but the marginalization of the Quebec Gaming Industry is going to be the result.
I find it really sad that one of the cornerstones events in the Star Wars world is going to be portrayed, not in the films, but in short, five minute cartoons.
The Second Renaissance was a cornerstone of the story of The Matrix, yet was released as two 10-minute shorts. It also happened to be better than the sequel proper for the movie.
Honestly, with the quality of the last two Star Wars films, I'd rather have to digest them in 5 minute chunks than all in one sitting. That way the cliches and jarringly bad writing would be spaced out a bit further, giving the viewer time to watch re-runs of Babalyon 5 (or another well written, great, underrated scifi... AKA the Anti-StarWars).
net send {1-255},{1-255},{1-255},{1-255} "To disable these pop-ups, do the following..."
'a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond,'
Wow! When they are that young, they don't yet count as teenagers.
Having done QA for both Computers and every major console I can confidently say that computer games aren't buggy due to lack of effort, they're buggy because testing on all permutations are impossible. Is this game stable on Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, XPSP1, XPSP2? Is this game stable on Catalyst 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and the unreleased 3.8? Pentium 3, 3.1, 4, 4.1? Athalon XP, Thunderbird? Via, nVidia Northbridge? Direct X 8, 9.0, 9.1? The list goes on and on... And these things can't be tested independently of eachother: Total test time and effort is multiplicative of new variables, not additive... And all of this hardware needs to be found. A console QA department can have far fewer people testing than a PC department even if they are testing across all 3 consoles.
I would doubt that games have gotten any less reliable since the internet... somehow I remember getting games to run "back in the day" as an exercise in futility. Perhaps it just seems like there are more problems because people lacked a suitable medium to complain about games. We can all thank Berners-Lee for correcting that problem.
On the other hand, a good thing online patching has added is game balancing. If someone discovers an infinite-hit Dan Combo in Street Fighter Alpha 4, it will stay in and dominate the game until Street Fighter Alpha 5. If someone discovers a way to create a Peasant Sword of Infinite Damage +5 in Everquest, it will be nurfed the following day. Quite frankly, competitive online gaming wouldn't be anywhere near as balanced as it is if it weren't for patching. If serious competition is your thing, online is the place to be... and to a large degree because of patching.
The latest catalyst drivers, 3.8, break 2d rendering in Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the 3.8 didn't ship after we went gold but before we hit shelves. Users tell us it has happened in other games, but I can't confirm this.
One of my favorite trade skill systems of all time was in the original UO. You didn't just mine the ore, you had to find the mountain that had it, then use the pick....then take the ore and smelt it into ingots, then smith it into something.
But you see what the article is talking about? User interaction is limited to making menu selections. Mountain X. Harvest with Y. Smelt At Z. 1% chance of success. The character gains skills, but the player never does. And without required player skill, a game will never make mainstream.
Japanese cooking simulations, silly as they may be, are a good example of how to handle an in-game skill system while relying on the skill of the player. Use left analog stick to slide hand across while using right analog stick to chop. How long have your other vegetables been cooking? Quick, Swizzle those noodles! More customers coming in, better get ready for the rush...
All of this, of course, requires a great deal more development than "Click to add carrots. Click to turn on stove."
What is needed is a Mall system, whereby independent developers produce the games for a title, and are paid based upon the number of subscribers and the percentage of time they spend at that game. Of course, there would need to be lots of oversight, so that the "click name to cast spell" could eventually be replaced by a more complicated "Move mouse in pattern around circle to cast spell" and finally a "move mouse in pattern within the rythim of your chanting into a microphone."
Note all of the above examples require skill on the part of the player, not just the character. People play games to become better themselves, not just to boost the stats of their pet. As long as MMPORPG's focus exclusively on stats building and not on player building, non-core will stay away in droves. That will mean taking some risks, both with client-side cheating and in terms of development models. However, the simplistic "Click Click Click" model to protect against lag and the extremely laggy server side model to protect against cheating have hamstrung development to the point where it isn't worth playing 99% of the MMPORPG's out there. Move back to a skill-based system and players will respond. PlanetSide has proven that.
Blogs are every bit as valid a Microsoft Innovation as all of Microsoft's other Innovations.
True... The statement should have included the specific reason that the license is invalid. Still, such an omission is immaterial to the basis for the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration, which continues unabated with the full blessing of the US court system and congressmen.*
*the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration Committee is not responsible for the use of information released in conjunction with any activity, promotional or otherwise. Producing said information in a court of law is a violation of your license and will result in immediate forfeiture of all of your intellectual property, here and in perpetuity. This revocable contract is irrevocable. Taking legal advice from a Slashdot comment modded "Score:4, Funny" will result in getting what you deserve.
I wasn't referring to the shell, I was referring to programs in general under the Windows operating system.
For further information, please see your local Kazaa distributer. Unlike an extension of the command line model, permissions aren't a feature you can "spring" on programmers. Likely if it isn't in the current developer build of Longhorn, it won't make it in by 2005.
Forget the viewers, have you seen Fox News recently? Their fair and balanced reporting standards would be easily satisfied by a debate between Krusty the Clown and Duff Man.
Yes. SCO seems to be under the delusion that assertions made in court are TRUE until proven FALSE. That, for example, if a license is declared invalid the item falling under the license is immediately in the public domain. Or that a company which has allegedly been wronged is entitled to payments during the discovery phase of the trial, rather than after a ruling has been made. Or that claiming copyright infringement is the equivalent of proving copyright infringement.
In the spirit of SCO, I would like to begin the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration! Darl has wronged both me and my family, and owes us his entire estate. How much do I hear for a slightly used 4.2 liter 2002 Jaguar S-Type R?*
*Anyone participating in the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration implicitly agrees that the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration is completely legal and enforceable. All US judges and members of congress are required to take part in the Great Darl McBride Sales-A-Bration. Some restrictions apply, which we will announce at the appropriate time in the future.
Leapfrog doesn't make things for teenagers. The users that Leapfrog is aiming for would tear a GBA to shreds in a few hours.
Actually, Leapfrog says their target market is 4 to 8, not 16 months. With a touch-sensitive screen and an attached pen, the Leapster is likely MORE fragile than the GBA. The GBA, by comparison, has a double-hulled screen and a solid-state design, whose durability should be legendary by now. The GBA is more durable than the old Tiger Electronics LCD games sold towards kids, and is far more durable than any calculator I have ever used. If you think it is fragile, you really need to get your hands on a post 2001 Game Boy.
The GBA-SP is still durable, despite the clamshell design. However, the original GBA continues to be available for kids, probably for that very reason.
Looking at it from the perspective of a parent, I think my son would love one of these.
Does one not have to look at it from the perspective of the son, to determine if he would love one? When you say the GBA's are small with tiny buttons, are you looking at it from your perspective or the perspective of a child 1/3 your size?
When he's a teenager, he'll want something more advanced, but for now this would be great for him.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but by 7 kids have basically given up on educational toys. That is not to say that they give up on toys that have educational value, so much as they reject anything that would associate them with the younger class. Saying "here is this thing that is like the thing made for the older guys but for little kids and full of educational software," is to them like saying "you are a baby," which is exactly what they are attempting to disassociate themselves from.
I'm not saying this isn't a good idea. If I had a kid about to enter kindergarten I would certainly buy one for him or her... And wouldn't buy them a GBA until they were in the 3rd grade or higher (if ever). However, take into consideration your kid's self-image when choosing educational toys for them, or else they will just be rejected. A child is a child to us, but to them a child is a powerless young adult. Buying a 9 year old boy a LeapFrog and a copy of Dora the Explorer will waste $110 dollars and will feed the child's perception that his parents are badly out of touch with his needs and desires. Buying them a GBA and a copy of Advance Wars 2 will do them a lot more good and will cause them to respect their parents judgments. I think this reality of the market is why parents would like a lot more educational software on the GBA, and why people have complained about LeapFrog striking out on their own.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a virus up and running on the development platform already. You have to make sure all of the features work.
Seriously, there has to be some form of protection when you integrate everything so tightly... Now that the command line can export to Excel et al and Excel et all can run commands, one can expect so see a lot more viruses propagate that way unless there is a more comprehensive permissions system added to Windows. Why are potential disease vectors running as root? Why does MSN theoretically have access to all programs and data, even though RAM has been shielded for years?
I applaud Microsoft's desire to better the OS through features they should have had 20 years ago, but with advanced scripting (and a file system that hopefully won't look like a sewer) you need a permissions model, plain and simple. Anything less is asking for trouble.
In Vietnam it probably *is* cheaper to fix Free Software so that it does what they want than to purchase software from Microsoft.
That reminds me of the origins of Star Office. Apparently Sun (a rather large organization) looked at the cost of buying MS Office licenses for all of its workers, looked at the cost of buying the rights to a software suite and modifying it to their needs, and realized that it was cheaper to just do it themselves. Of course, there were other reasons, but the economies of Microsoft just didn't make sense.
It's not just in Vietnam that it is cheaper to fix Free Software than to purchase from Microsoft. Sadly, it will be quite a while before we realize that a universal yearly contribution of 25 dollars to an open-source software project would further the industry far more than contributing 500 dollars to Microsoft every 3 years.
A RAID array is a good backup for hardware failure in an environment where 99.99999% uptime is the goal. However, many failures that would blow your drive are software based... For example, if you are running under Windows XP, one of MS's specially formatted "updates" could wipe out your system. And with no widely available NTFS repair solutions such recovery can become very expensive very quickly. While this may not be as much of an issue on a non-proprietary file system, even Linux sometimes requires a full system re-install. Having that 2nd drive on an ATA chain will save you the few hundred for a good raid card, and will save your data in the event of, for example, a virus that deletes all local data... or accidently typing "apt-get upgrade" twice in a row.
Just set a cron job to mount, copy all, and unmount every week. Short of a rapidly moving brushfire, you should be all set. All this for less than $150 dollars.
Once again I ask: What liabilities are SCO's board members opening themselves up for with these ludicrous litigations and how can I get in on this class-action?
The Borg Sphere was first introduced in the second Next Generation movie. When a Borg Cube goes into its death throes, it spits out a Borg Sphere as a last-ditch effort to stay alive by any means possible, including re-writing history.
There weren't any stock speculators, but otherwise the analogy is pretty accurate.
The power of a good old fashioned pentium and the hardware to support it can be had in many modern consumer devices that cost less than $100, such as palm pilots, graphing calculators, etc. Likewise, encryption chips are available which automate the process and would allow for a much smaller central processor.
However, the article does state that the total cost of the system is $15,000 - $20,000 per intersection. Going the rediculous overkill route and adding in a fanless 800mhz C3 in a Mini-ITX motherboard with a 1GB CF card, a strong IR sender / reciever, and an auto-timesynch radio card would still only bump the price up about 5%, even if they paid full retail. Attaching a Zire would be significantly less than that, and would only require an IR amplifier and a modified power supply.
Of course, what is needed is a challenge - response system that looks something like this
1. Light continually broadcasts date-based challenge
2. Ambulence recieves challenge
3. Ambulence broadcasts response
4. Light turns green
But the hardware to do that in a reasonable length of time isn't a space-agey as you seem to think.
I seem to recall that Sony produced a one-handed controller for the PSOne.
It was put out by ASCII, and it had all of the conventional buttons though no analog sticks. It was uncomfortable to play with, as the D pad was in the middle, surrounded by two buttons on top (repeated twice for left / right handers) and two more trigger buttons underneath. It also had L1 R1 L2 R2 mapped to a little pad just south of the D-Pad.
I had one as a FF7 controller, but gave it to a one-armed game developer.
The pad was pretty miserable overall. It was difficult to both use the D-pad and hold the controller in your hand. The way buttons were mapped around the D-pad ensured that you had to remove your thumb to do nearly anything, making it somewhat useless for games more intense than Bust-a-Move. Still, with some training it was passable.
It still works on the PS2, so long as you don't need the sticks. It would probably be a good way to play FFX.
Let me get this straight... They are releasing inferior hardware because they "don't want to take a loss" on each piece sold. They are also gluing it shut, so you can't make any modifications on the hardware they aren't losing money selling to you.
Distribution of games is apparently going at 60% of sale price. Unlike a real publisher, that 60% doesn't buy you any advertising, hype, or free press copies. At the end of this, the Developer and original Publisher split $20, and Indrema walks away with $30. By comparison, Nintendo's cut is estimated at between 3 and 5 dollars on games on their system. Of course, if you want a front page listing that will cost you as well.
Now, the consumer purchases a $300 PC for... $300. This gives the consumer the ability to purchase full PC games at full PC game prices, without added PC hassles such as word processing or Adobe Photoshop. On top of this, the consumer must pay $10 every month just for the priveledge of using this thing that they bought, or else it goes limp and worthless. Anyone think Divx is getting a soulmate?
So this company gets $3 per sale to advertise a game, $30 per sale in commission, at 6 per year they make $20 per sale in connectivity. They make $53 for every $50 game sold... Minus connectivity charges of course. In exchange for this, the publisher accepts a smaller cut but doesn't have to print manuals. The player gets games nearly on demand, but pays on average $70 per game, pays for duplicate ho-hum hardware that isn't theirs, and doesn't get hard copies of anything.
Why will we buy it? Obviously because us suckers will buy anything.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... Online distribution of games is the wave of the future. Sadly, all waves of the future will be crassly exploited by snake oil salesmen. I see no reason to believe differently here.
I'd like to believe that they are really gamers and they really want to break into the highly competitive console market. I'd also like to believe that they are intelligently positioning themselves to be a niche player, and that their costs will scale perfectly with their userbase. Sadly, neither of these seems likely. Perhaps they should just find a way to hook up the N-Gage up to a TV screen and sell that. I hear they are going cheap these days.
Somehow I remember that one hitting shelves at a clearance price, because its death was already a foregone conclusion.
You don't work much in public entertainment, do you?
Apple hasn't had to give a bunch of interviews about why iTunes and iTMS is being perceived as unsuccessful.
No, but Apple has had to give interviews constantly since 1995 to explain that they are doing fine financially and any system you purchase from them will be supported for years to come.
It's a matter of public perception. Why spend X many dollars on a system if it is going under? That makes it useless. But if Billy says that Nintendo is going under because they don't have GTA and Microsoft does, and Nintendo says nothing, it must be true. Of course, by your logic if Nintendo starts bringing out pieces of paper with lots of impressive numbers on it, they must be lying.
People and companies don't explain themselves unless they have explaining to do. I love how they always talk about worldwide terms on the Nintendo side. I don't live worldwide, I live in the US. EA, Activision, THQ, Take-Two, these are not worldwide companies and don't care about the Gamecube's success or failure in Japan. They want consoles in the houses in the US and Europe and Nintendo just isn't delivering.
I'd like to mention here that Activision was extatic about the sales reception our game recieved in Korea, and were looking to release in more territories there. Publishers care about selling games, not about whom they sell them to. Of course, publishers tend to specialize in their own region because that's where they're drawing their talent pool from. If what you want are FPS Computer Games, then westernized companies are the way to go. However, you're ignoring the more console-centric Japanese developers such as Konami, Treasure, Sega, Namco, Capcom, etc, whom any console company also needs to placate.
While you may not live worldwide, they do sell worldwide. And worldwide numbers should matter to gamers buying a system: Sega's systems have routinely tanked in the US, but thanks to sales in Japan US gamers were still treated to Shenmue, several legendary Treasure shooters, great incarnations of Street Fighter, and many others. Even the Sega CD got Lunar 1 and 2 as well as some of Core's finest work. The Jaguar tanked everywhere: and games were completely nonexistent.
If you want to be a small-town gamer and bury your head in the American Sand, that's fine. Eidos et. al has some Legacy of Kain love stored up for you. But you will be missing out on the industry's best fighters, RPG's, twitch arcade games, racers, and many other underrepresented genres.
Nintendo does these interviews to change public perception. Saying that attempting to change public perception automatically validates that perception is as convienient an oversimplification as saying that because you live in America you automatically don't have to care about what happens abroad. If you don't want to have to think about the world around you, that's your prerogative. But don't expect your perceptions to translate to that of EA, Activision, and the rest of the western producers.
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