Model rockets are still pretty amazing, and pretty cheap. Just keep the engines until you're ready to use them. I would have killed for a radio controlled helicopter as a kid, and they're darned affordable these days.
For video games, Mindrover is still a programming and logic classic.
Although a joint marketing agreement was drafted to document the best practices for using technology in education, it was never executed, said Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa. "As such, the joint marketing agreement became irrelevant; no such marketing agreement was ever agreed to, and no money was ever spent," he said.
You'll notice he doesn't deny attempting to pay 400k dollars to ditch Linux, he simply states that the plan to do so fell through.
Puzzle Pirates. Play puzzles to bilge, sail, build clothing, etc. It's a (vaguely) player driven economy with a mostly laid back group of people. And, of course, there is Viva Pinata.
I think the original poster's goals are unreachable with current technology and techniques. You can't befriend a game in any more substantive a fashion than you can befriend your television... lots of games have tried various ways of simulating human interactions, but humans are notoriously complex. Emotional simulation systems quickly break down into either simplistic grinding or laughable parodies of humanity. If you attempt to replace those computer entities with actual other online human beings... Let's just say that you can't rely upon other human beings in online games to act like human beings.
The closest thing to what the grandparent poster asked for is the sims. It's a good example of how simplified human interactions have to be made in order to work in a simulated environment.
The telco probably doesn't care very much about *this* city. The telco is probably attempting to prevent thousands of other US cities from waking up and saying "We can do that?"
I constantly have clients asking if they should avoid Vista, how to avoid Vista, and if their prior Vista purchase was a mistake. This never happened with XP.
From a public perception standpoing, Vista generally stands in the way of buying a new computer, rather than an enticement. I'd consider that a failure.
Actually, that division is currently making money.
As a game developer, I'd hate to see MS shut down their Xbox division. They basically took some great developers, gave them a real budget, and said "do what you want." So far MS corporate has avoided messing with the console games division, keeping them from becoming another MS Bob.
On consoles, Microsoft is basically responsible for: Digital game sales, digital movie rentals, add-on downloads, HDD's on consoles, cross-title friends lists, and the general concept of a cross-title global experience. While they're also responsible for the most godawfully painful log-in/log-out scenarios of any console manufacturer, they did a lot of things right and really pushed Sony and Nintendo kicking and screaming into an online world.
We live in a world where we have to automatically upgrade adobe PDF, java, windows, iTunes, firewalls, antiviruses, antispam, smartphones, wmv codecs, xvid codecs, divx codecs, everything HP ever produced, video game consoles, etc. Of course people automatically update their routers: it's what we've been conditioned to do.
The federal budget is a fixed size, which currently has a massive deficit and a huge debt. McCain proposed funding drops of 10-20 million dollars, which is a drop in the bucket of our overall deficit. Additionally, with his comments towards Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan we can be pretty sure that we wouldn't be out of any of those expenditures any time soon, with the potential added fiscal bonus of an Iranian invasion.
Hence, when he wants to extend the temporary Bush tax cuts on the very rich, (which were initially proposed as a trickle-down stimulus package, and proved ineffective), he is effectively shifting the fixed-pie tax burden from the rich to the poor. Reducing tax rates doesn't magically reduce expenditures, it simply time-shifts the tax burden. In this case, permanently implementing Bush's tax cut for the wealthy simply ensures that they are going to shoulder less of the burden long-term, and that will fall upon the shoulders of the middle and lower classes.
So yes, beware of anyone who says they're going to lower taxes during a time of severe budget deficits, without telling you how. It's a shell game. Remember that 500 dollar "economic stimulus" check? That bill came out to more than 150 billion dollars, of which each of us will probably pay an extra 25 dollars in taxes per year *indefinitely* to pay interst on.
8 years ago, your personal share of the National Debt was 15,000 dollars. Now, it is up to 35,000 dollars. Assuming you have a wife and two kids, your family owes 140,000 dollars. Between 1,400 and 3,000 of your last year's federal taxes went JUST to servicing the debt.
Now is not the time to be pooping around with tax breaks on those who can pay in a shell game that shortchanges middle and lower classes. The fact that they didn't get us out of the 80's recession or the current one just proves again that trickle-down economics doesn't work.
I used to think that way, and helped with the Nader campaign in 2000. When Bush won, my thought was "This guy is going to be just like Clinton, or pretty close anyway."
Damn was I wrong. Apparently the Republican administration viewed every international issue as a problem to be solved by bomb-bomb-bombing. Clinton generally avoided international confligrations. I was furious when Clinton compromised down to Don't Ask - Don't Tell, but Bush's push for a homophobic constitution has that beat. Don't get me started on relative deficit levels, the Axis-of-evil and amazing bungling of international relations, and two major crisis which he had been warned about and failed to act upon. Also, having to jam shampoo into 3oz containers to get onto a plane is weak and pointless.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure any 3rd party candidate is right for now. A Libertarian "hands off" approach would simply facilitate the economy imploding further. A Green Party candidate would never be able to stomach the smoke stacks required to get us moving again. And things aren't yet bad enough to start setting fire to buildings.
1. The value of our money, which has been plummeting as other countries diversified out of it. This has contributed greatly to the economic dip which started in 2006 / 2007. 2. Our ability to set international agendas to our benefit. 3. Which leads into our now-gone ability to enter into foreign entangelements without footing the entire bill. 4. Our ability to sell domestic goods at a high price and import foreign goods at a low one. 5. Our ability to attract tourist dollars and command a premium for "Made In America" goods. 6. General civic pride: Let's not be the laughing stock of the Nucular countries, shall we?
As a small example, in the past 8 years we've seen the emergence of a euro-traded (instead of dollar-traded) international oil market. This exposes the US economy to more of the reprocussions of regular international currency fluctuations, and is a contributing factor in why gas pushed over 120 dollars per barrel this past year.
Sadly, it doesn't seem that way. The WSJ article seems to be talking about currency speculation... I.E. buying gold from someone low and selling it high. Gold farming proper has no buy portion, and is merely grinding and harvesting from within the game.
This does seem to indicate that the door is open to potential future taxes on gold farmers, as well as a potential shift of gold farming activity to korea, vietnam, or other countries in the region. But for now, this sounds like a tax on buy low / sell high people, rather than the earn-in-game-and-sell people.
Either spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to an operating system that doesn't cost any money to license, or spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to an operating system that doesn't scale with your existing hardware base, costs money, and can be end-of-lifed like the operating system it is replacing. In that view, Linux looks pretty good.
I think the part that you're missing is that windows 3.x is no longer aquirable for these applications, and as such new hardware will need to be re-engineered for a newer operating system. In this case, a free and unencumbered OS might be the right way to go... either Linux, BSD, or FreeDOS.
They also use the windows default sounds... Incorrectly! The ATM's use the "Error Beep" to confirm proper operation. After years of conditioning, it drives me nuts.
Your alternative standard of choice (ogg, aac, wmv, flac) isn't the basic standard. It may be superior in many ways (size, sound quality, openness), but everyone has an MP3 player. As Sony proved several years back, you can't have a hardware player that doesn't play MP3's. It can play MP3's *and* another standard, but if it doesn't at least play MP3's it won't work with most people's equipment.
For those people who are aware enough to want AAC, get an AAC player. This branding is for those people who bought a car stereo which will play those newfangled computer disks or ipod thingies, and are confused by DRM about what will play on them.
BTW, MP3-only players are still cheaper to produce, as AAC, FLAC, and OGG require significantly more processing power.
The intelligence-rewarding sections of the game all need to be tightly scripted. Otherwise you run the risk of having impossible situations. Similarly, the AI in most of these situations needs to be excessively predictable, so that the player can put together the component levers, bells, and whistles in their mind and see how the rue-goldberg machine would function.
Also, are we talking about the same types of games here? Most games are about simple escapism and the sorts of Human adrenaline rushes that one doesn't get sitting behind a desk all day. They're not about outthinking your opponent, so much as feeling a sense of control and accomplishment over the virtual world.
Pure escapist games do well because a lot of people want pure escapism. Someday, Puzzle Quest will be as big as Super Smash Brothers Brawl, but that is not today.
Re:An example of great game A.I.
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When working on the RTS Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, we had a difficulty setting that was truly insane. The enemy wasn't a computer pretending to be a human, it was an impenetrable black wall of impending dismemberment. If you really wanted to defeat it, you had to pile-on 7 vs 1, with at least 3 top-notch players overseeing the operation. Those were long, intense, brutal battles... Helping to bringing down that beast was a real badge of achievement. Unfortunately we had to cut it back a bit before release for technical reasons, but the ability is still there.
A realistic FPS would have the enemy sneak up behind you and stab you before knew they were there. A realistic racing game would end in firey death the moment you accidentally rode up on the curb. A realistic tactical squad shooter would have your men pinned down by heavy opposition fire until they called in an airstrike on you. A realistic war game would involve lots, and lots, of digging.
This is a long way of saying that AI isn't about promoting hyperrealism, but rather is in service of making the game fun.
That having been said, I'd kill for 3D pathing that doesn't suck. If I need to do another escort mission with some idiot who can't walk around a boulder in the middle of the road, I'm going back to Tetris and I'm never leaving.
Is that 99.9% uptime or 99.9% planned uptime? Many companies refer (rather facetiously) to *planned* uptime, which means that you can have unlimited downtime so long as it isn't unplanned.
You could say the same thing about any ongoing endeavor. Verizon could sell network access at 100 dollars for build-out + 50 dollars a month upkeep. ESPN could charge 30 dollar development + 10 dollars per month for access to their content online. You don't see ISP's (successfully) charging 4 months worth of fees to cover their cost of building out their data centers, do you?
It's all how you recoup your initial and ongoing development expenses. Those should be together under the same heading! Unless a player can choose which software to buy, and who separately to recieve service from, keeping those costs separate only serves to keep the barrier to entry high.
BTW, Anarchy Online didn't drop the initial fee because they recouped, they did so because they realized that a high initial outlay as lock-in wasn't working, and that they needed a much more consumer-friendly entry point.
I never understood paying for MMO software. So you pay 50 dollars, for the priviledge of paying 15 dollars a month?
Pick one way of charging, and stick with it. Either lower the barrier to entry and only have monthly fees, or lower the abandonment rate and only have up-front fees. But don't double dip.
*Note: I have played several MMO's at various points in my life.
Slashdot Mirror
Model rockets are still pretty amazing, and pretty cheap. Just keep the engines until you're ready to use them. I would have killed for a radio controlled helicopter as a kid, and they're darned affordable these days.
For video games, Mindrover is still a programming and logic classic.
Actually, read between the lines:
Although a joint marketing agreement was drafted to document the best practices for using technology in education, it was never executed, said Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa. "As such, the joint marketing agreement became irrelevant; no such marketing agreement was ever agreed to, and no money was ever spent," he said.
You'll notice he doesn't deny attempting to pay 400k dollars to ditch Linux, he simply states that the plan to do so fell through.
Puzzle Pirates. Play puzzles to bilge, sail, build clothing, etc. It's a (vaguely) player driven economy with a mostly laid back group of people. And, of course, there is Viva Pinata.
I think the original poster's goals are unreachable with current technology and techniques. You can't befriend a game in any more substantive a fashion than you can befriend your television... lots of games have tried various ways of simulating human interactions, but humans are notoriously complex. Emotional simulation systems quickly break down into either simplistic grinding or laughable parodies of humanity. If you attempt to replace those computer entities with actual other online human beings... Let's just say that you can't rely upon other human beings in online games to act like human beings.
The closest thing to what the grandparent poster asked for is the sims. It's a good example of how simplified human interactions have to be made in order to work in a simulated environment.
Note the 60 mile operation is for pure battery, not hybrid Stirling operation.
A better article is here.
The telco probably doesn't care very much about *this* city. The telco is probably attempting to prevent thousands of other US cities from waking up and saying "We can do that?"
Why do you think of a folder as a directory?
Just because it isn't your metaphor of choice doesn't mean it isn't an equally valid metaphor.
I constantly have clients asking if they should avoid Vista, how to avoid Vista, and if their prior Vista purchase was a mistake. This never happened with XP.
From a public perception standpoing, Vista generally stands in the way of buying a new computer, rather than an enticement. I'd consider that a failure.
Actually, that division is currently making money.
As a game developer, I'd hate to see MS shut down their Xbox division. They basically took some great developers, gave them a real budget, and said "do what you want." So far MS corporate has avoided messing with the console games division, keeping them from becoming another MS Bob.
On consoles, Microsoft is basically responsible for: Digital game sales, digital movie rentals, add-on downloads, HDD's on consoles, cross-title friends lists, and the general concept of a cross-title global experience. While they're also responsible for the most godawfully painful log-in/log-out scenarios of any console manufacturer, they did a lot of things right and really pushed Sony and Nintendo kicking and screaming into an online world.
We live in a world where we have to automatically upgrade adobe PDF, java, windows, iTunes, firewalls, antiviruses, antispam, smartphones, wmv codecs, xvid codecs, divx codecs, everything HP ever produced, video game consoles, etc. Of course people automatically update their routers: it's what we've been conditioned to do.
The federal budget is a fixed size, which currently has a massive deficit and a huge debt. McCain proposed funding drops of 10-20 million dollars, which is a drop in the bucket of our overall deficit. Additionally, with his comments towards Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan we can be pretty sure that we wouldn't be out of any of those expenditures any time soon, with the potential added fiscal bonus of an Iranian invasion.
Hence, when he wants to extend the temporary Bush tax cuts on the very rich, (which were initially proposed as a trickle-down stimulus package, and proved ineffective), he is effectively shifting the fixed-pie tax burden from the rich to the poor. Reducing tax rates doesn't magically reduce expenditures, it simply time-shifts the tax burden. In this case, permanently implementing Bush's tax cut for the wealthy simply ensures that they are going to shoulder less of the burden long-term, and that will fall upon the shoulders of the middle and lower classes.
So yes, beware of anyone who says they're going to lower taxes during a time of severe budget deficits, without telling you how. It's a shell game. Remember that 500 dollar "economic stimulus" check? That bill came out to more than 150 billion dollars, of which each of us will probably pay an extra 25 dollars in taxes per year *indefinitely* to pay interst on.
8 years ago, your personal share of the National Debt was 15,000 dollars. Now, it is up to 35,000 dollars. Assuming you have a wife and two kids, your family owes 140,000 dollars. Between 1,400 and 3,000 of your last year's federal taxes went JUST to servicing the debt.
Now is not the time to be pooping around with tax breaks on those who can pay in a shell game that shortchanges middle and lower classes. The fact that they didn't get us out of the 80's recession or the current one just proves again that trickle-down economics doesn't work.
I used to think that way, and helped with the Nader campaign in 2000. When Bush won, my thought was "This guy is going to be just like Clinton, or pretty close anyway."
Damn was I wrong. Apparently the Republican administration viewed every international issue as a problem to be solved by bomb-bomb-bombing. Clinton generally avoided international confligrations. I was furious when Clinton compromised down to Don't Ask - Don't Tell, but Bush's push for a homophobic constitution has that beat. Don't get me started on relative deficit levels, the Axis-of-evil and amazing bungling of international relations, and two major crisis which he had been warned about and failed to act upon. Also, having to jam shampoo into 3oz containers to get onto a plane is weak and pointless.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure any 3rd party candidate is right for now. A Libertarian "hands off" approach would simply facilitate the economy imploding further. A Green Party candidate would never be able to stomach the smoke stacks required to get us moving again. And things aren't yet bad enough to start setting fire to buildings.
The world's opinion of us effects:
1. The value of our money, which has been plummeting as other countries diversified out of it. This has contributed greatly to the economic dip which started in 2006 / 2007.
2. Our ability to set international agendas to our benefit.
3. Which leads into our now-gone ability to enter into foreign entangelements without footing the entire bill.
4. Our ability to sell domestic goods at a high price and import foreign goods at a low one.
5. Our ability to attract tourist dollars and command a premium for "Made In America" goods.
6. General civic pride: Let's not be the laughing stock of the Nucular countries, shall we?
As a small example, in the past 8 years we've seen the emergence of a euro-traded (instead of dollar-traded) international oil market. This exposes the US economy to more of the reprocussions of regular international currency fluctuations, and is a contributing factor in why gas pushed over 120 dollars per barrel this past year.
"Red Warrior needs food... Badly"
Sadly, it doesn't seem that way. The WSJ article seems to be talking about currency speculation... I.E. buying gold from someone low and selling it high. Gold farming proper has no buy portion, and is merely grinding and harvesting from within the game.
This does seem to indicate that the door is open to potential future taxes on gold farmers, as well as a potential shift of gold farming activity to korea, vietnam, or other countries in the region. But for now, this sounds like a tax on buy low / sell high people, rather than the earn-in-game-and-sell people.
Either spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to an operating system that doesn't cost any money to license, or spend a whole lot of time and money getting it ported over to an operating system that doesn't scale with your existing hardware base, costs money, and can be end-of-lifed like the operating system it is replacing. In that view, Linux looks pretty good.
I think the part that you're missing is that windows 3.x is no longer aquirable for these applications, and as such new hardware will need to be re-engineered for a newer operating system. In this case, a free and unencumbered OS might be the right way to go... either Linux, BSD, or FreeDOS.
They also use the windows default sounds... Incorrectly! The ATM's use the "Error Beep" to confirm proper operation. After years of conditioning, it drives me nuts.
At least do a little legwork.
Your alternative standard of choice (ogg, aac, wmv, flac) isn't the basic standard. It may be superior in many ways (size, sound quality, openness), but everyone has an MP3 player. As Sony proved several years back, you can't have a hardware player that doesn't play MP3's. It can play MP3's *and* another standard, but if it doesn't at least play MP3's it won't work with most people's equipment.
For those people who are aware enough to want AAC, get an AAC player. This branding is for those people who bought a car stereo which will play those newfangled computer disks or ipod thingies, and are confused by DRM about what will play on them.
BTW, MP3-only players are still cheaper to produce, as AAC, FLAC, and OGG require significantly more processing power.
The intelligence-rewarding sections of the game all need to be tightly scripted. Otherwise you run the risk of having impossible situations. Similarly, the AI in most of these situations needs to be excessively predictable, so that the player can put together the component levers, bells, and whistles in their mind and see how the rue-goldberg machine would function.
Also, are we talking about the same types of games here? Most games are about simple escapism and the sorts of Human adrenaline rushes that one doesn't get sitting behind a desk all day. They're not about outthinking your opponent, so much as feeling a sense of control and accomplishment over the virtual world.
Pure escapist games do well because a lot of people want pure escapism. Someday, Puzzle Quest will be as big as Super Smash Brothers Brawl, but that is not today.
When working on the RTS Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, we had a difficulty setting that was truly insane. The enemy wasn't a computer pretending to be a human, it was an impenetrable black wall of impending dismemberment. If you really wanted to defeat it, you had to pile-on 7 vs 1, with at least 3 top-notch players overseeing the operation. Those were long, intense, brutal battles... Helping to bringing down that beast was a real badge of achievement. Unfortunately we had to cut it back a bit before release for technical reasons, but the ability is still there.
A realistic FPS would have the enemy sneak up behind you and stab you before knew they were there. A realistic racing game would end in firey death the moment you accidentally rode up on the curb. A realistic tactical squad shooter would have your men pinned down by heavy opposition fire until they called in an airstrike on you. A realistic war game would involve lots, and lots, of digging.
This is a long way of saying that AI isn't about promoting hyperrealism, but rather is in service of making the game fun.
That having been said, I'd kill for 3D pathing that doesn't suck. If I need to do another escort mission with some idiot who can't walk around a boulder in the middle of the road, I'm going back to Tetris and I'm never leaving.
Could you search for sources of wireless transmissions to find out which doors / windows are armed and which ones aren't?
Gmail might have a better uptime than Exchange, but at least Exchange has push-email.
Why is push better in practical terms than, say, a 1-minute pull?
Is that 99.9% uptime or 99.9% planned uptime? Many companies refer (rather facetiously) to *planned* uptime, which means that you can have unlimited downtime so long as it isn't unplanned.
You could say the same thing about any ongoing endeavor. Verizon could sell network access at 100 dollars for build-out + 50 dollars a month upkeep. ESPN could charge 30 dollar development + 10 dollars per month for access to their content online. You don't see ISP's (successfully) charging 4 months worth of fees to cover their cost of building out their data centers, do you?
It's all how you recoup your initial and ongoing development expenses. Those should be together under the same heading! Unless a player can choose which software to buy, and who separately to recieve service from, keeping those costs separate only serves to keep the barrier to entry high.
BTW, Anarchy Online didn't drop the initial fee because they recouped, they did so because they realized that a high initial outlay as lock-in wasn't working, and that they needed a much more consumer-friendly entry point.
I never understood paying for MMO software. So you pay 50 dollars, for the priviledge of paying 15 dollars a month?
Pick one way of charging, and stick with it. Either lower the barrier to entry and only have monthly fees, or lower the abandonment rate and only have up-front fees. But don't double dip.
*Note: I have played several MMO's at various points in my life.
Other things I'm hoping is in this update:
XNA peer-created games.
Party options. Having a game-independent 8 player group-up is pretty nice for those of us scattered to the winds.
Hopes:
I'm hoping they cache the Xbox live arcade game list. The "Display 'em as you find 'em" current thing is pretty terrible.