I think the scary lesson that most new MMOs learn too late is that everything is secondary in an MMO. Large chunks of your audience won't care about or will be annoyed by trade skills, but you really have to have them and do them well in order to keep certain segments of your user-base interested.
Same goes for PvP, raiding, grouping, the economy, etc.
In the end, there are dozens of aspects of the game that the average gamer simply expects to be there. If it's not, then they'll walk away from your game.
All of New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut), Florida, and Delaware are also wholy included (though Vermont has a tiny sliver to the south-west that is not).
Most of New York and all of the most populace parts of California (SF, LA, SD, etc.) are covered.
This is a truly egregious expansion of non-Constitutional authority.
Well yes, they're resourceful, but why doesn't anyone ask the obvious question: wouldn't it be easier and less annoying to hack on a platform that enjoyed the attention? Netbooks, TiVos and many other platforms have had a loose, but affirming relationship with those who modify their hardware and software. Why not hack on those platforms instead of the ones promulgated by companies that take an anti-consumer stance toward their most dedicated users?
He's right, though. Sure, he takes his conclusion too far, but it's clear that the last major economic hit the market took (2000-2001) wiped out a huge chunk of open source development and free Web services (I worked for Highwired.net at the time, which was a fee service for high schools to publish their school newspapers online and it died the instant the music stopped).
The thing is that there is a real economic win in open source software, so it's not going anywhere soon. Companies like IBM (among many other) pour lots of money into open source because it's a way to reduce development costs and improve many aspects of the software lifecycle.
Google's open source work isn't going anywhere either.
But, I certainly could see many open source projects folding as their contributors re-focus on their careers. Those who work on open source AS a day job will be the majority after the shakeout is over.
who knows what else has been elevated to truth by circular reasoning? (smart alec answers to *that* question are welcome:))
We grow up with a warm, fuzzy feeling that tells us that there's History and Truth and then there's opinion and consensus. We instinctively believe that this are distinct things. They're not. Wikipedia is a repository of consensus, and as such at least as accurate as any other repository of consensus.
As a participant in the process of achieving consensus, Wikipedia will certainly affect its establishment, but that's true for all participants. The only way to participate without modifying the consensus would be to archive all sources of information and communication and to store them without commentary. Even providing a way to search that information introduces bias and value judgements.
That is to say, Wikipedia is the best, most accurate view of the whole of human knowledge to date, but that's a far cry from praise.
Wikipedia: Where consistent opinions are correct opinions.
I don't think Wikipedia takes a stand on correctness at all. At least I've never seen any such stand.
Wikipedia is meant as a repository for consensus. If you have a problem with the consensus, you should try to change it, but Wikipedia isn't the place to do that.
There's some real danger in what you're suggesting. Wikipedia works well because it accepts no authoritative truth. In fact, nothing on Wikipedia is "the truth." Instead, it is simply a re-stating of the consensus. If Mr. Lanier had wanted incorrect information stripped from his article, he could simply have said, "there's no source for this, please remove it." If there WAS a source, and no other source disputed it, then his problem isn't with Wikipedia, it's with the fact that consensus and his sense of truth already had a dispute.
If we attempt to create an authority (be it academic, governmental, or any other source) for truth, then all we do is limit the scope of our consensus building and make manipulation of the consensus that much easier.
I think you got it wrong. They're talking about the idea of privateering. They're opposed to hiring pirates as mercenaries to fight other countries by proxy. I, for one, am glad to see Microsoft take a stand on this serious issue! In fact, I'm going to go give out duplicated copies of Windows XP to all my friends to show my support!
1:50 or 1:100 works for servers if you have a plan when you start. I've seen shops that need 1:20 because they started rolling out servers without a plan, and kept doing reactionary admin. Of course, that's true for both Windows and Linux, but I think Windows is ever so slightly more resilient in the face of half-starts, in that you have a fixed platform from which it's harder to stray. Once you have a Linux shop with 5 different software update strategies on 3 distributions with no centralized upgrade plan and developers who are hostile to some fraction of your installed base of distributions it gets much uglier.
I think this is probably going to be a good thing in the long run. This case should move past the state level, as a federal decision on this would set national precedent. The question might even have to go to the SCOTUS, since it's not really clear how states interact with the Internet, and this might get surreal enough to touch on things like foreign relations and the ability for the executive branch to make treaties.
Interestingly, phone service and physical mail have both gone through several iterations of increasing and decreasing scope and centralization within organizations, so my above examples are a bit simplistic, but overall I think they hold up. We're at the start of what will be a century-plus period of understanding the role of computer-based communications in the business world, and as that grows and changes, Google will continue to grow and change and others will compete with them in interesting and perhaps successful ways.
I'm not waving a Google flag, here, just reacting to the idea that a single outage makes for a useless corporate service (which, if true, would have every company in the world running their own fleet of planes and drilling for their own oil).
You can't count on the USPS to deliver your mail...sorry buddy.
You can't count on Verizon to run your telecommunications...sorry buddy.
Every service you use was, at one point, decentralized and every large corporation ran it themselves. Then someone did a better job and companies slowly released the reins. Does Verizon's phone service go down? Yep. Does the USPS lose mail? Yep. Goes Google mail go down? Yep. But, in the end we've decided that we'd rather rely on these external services than continue to try to run increasingly large services with ever-diminishing returns for the individual business.
Indeed they do, and since I've never worked for a company that has had zero email outages (including my own home mail server before I moved to google.com/a), I'd have to say that my Google Apps experience has been as good as or better than the experience I've had with any other mail service that I've used for at least a year.
I think you're over-generalizing, here. No Country for Old Men certainly did not have actors who looked unrealistically smooth-featured. Neither did Memento, Donnie Darko, just about any U.S./U.K. film (e.g. Snatch) except for the Star Wars prequels, Hotel Rwanda, and many, many others.
What you're reacting to is the trend in makeup for big-budget "Hollywood films." Movies like Star Trek and Harry Potter work hard to create a "polished" and uniform look which is expensive to achieve. It's a barrier to entry for new studios as it requires makeup, lighting, optics and many other elements which are very expensive. However, when it comes to that, I don't think Superman or Pretty Woman were any different, and those movies were certainly not recent. Go back further. I think Gone with the Wind was in a similar boat, as was Breakfast at Tiffany's. Is this a new trend, or just the attempt to portray a blemish-free world in our modern fiction?
The reason that makeup is so heavy is that, when you're looking at a 3-story tall closeup in a theater, "average skin" looks like the surface of the moon, and it can be very distracting.
How, that said, there is a tendency to go overboard, and yes I think most movies could do with more realism in makeup. But, I disagree that these people look like teens. They look good for their age, but then they're actors in Hollywood, so one imagines that's a hiring criteria.
I can't help but think of the current case of the 15 year old girl who is being charged with the crime of distributing pictures of herself to an underage audience. She's actually facing jail time and a life of registration as a sex offender. Next time you think something like this is a good idea, ask yourself: what's a sex offender, exactly?
I agree, and moreso. The world of open source projects that are solid as a rock, but remain 0.x for years has conditioned me to believe that 1.0 *is* the polished, long-lived release. Not always true, but certainly enough to banish the stigma (if there was one).
I'm almost certain that this is incorrect. I've had many systems that I've run Firefox on where I've clicked on the flashblock icon only to realize that I didn't have flash installed, and thus nothing happened.
To quote their site:
"Flashblock [...] blocks ALL Flash content from loading."
That's "from loading" not "from running more than an instant," so unless this is incorrect, and my experiences are somehow also misleading, I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
Seriously, get flashblock from the Firefox addons site. You need it. Badly. The number of sites with the equivalent of the pixel.gif tracking or the Google Analytics type JavaScript tracking, but as a small Flash plugin are growing astronomically, and Adobe has no reason to favor your privacy over their customer's demands. These little apps aren't there to serve your needs or improve you're browsing experience, and they just should never run. If you want to run a Flash app, that's fine: click on it to run it.
I use Flashblock and I've been watching Hulu and YouTube and enjoying all sorts of sites that use Flash. I'm also instantly aware of any site that's too lazy to present a standard Web page when I see a giant "click to run" button over the whole page, and I find another site. This is part of the process, and is an important way that neophyte Web developers learn that they can't just throw up Flash and not worry about Web standards.
What you suggest is easier to crack, and the worst part is that it can't be generated automatically. The benefit of captcha is that it's a one-way function for a computer. It can generate a captcha, but (until it's broken) can't read back the information that it put into it. Generating an understandable English phrase and the questions to go with it would be as hard as solving the generated questions.
One of the other major items to have come out of Blizzcon is the possibility in the near future (post-Wrath-release) of PvE arenas where teams would square off against bosses from instances who would gain or lose ranking just like players and thus harder bosses would match up against better teams.
No final word yet, and it's still in the idea phase.
Slashdot Mirror
Story is very, very secondary in an MMO
I think the scary lesson that most new MMOs learn too late is that everything is secondary in an MMO. Large chunks of your audience won't care about or will be annoyed by trade skills, but you really have to have them and do them well in order to keep certain segments of your user-base interested.
Same goes for PvP, raiding, grouping, the economy, etc.
In the end, there are dozens of aspects of the game that the average gamer simply expects to be there. If it's not, then they'll walk away from your game.
Questions I ask of every new-kid-on-the-block MMO:
That first one is really the show-stopper for most games.
All of New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut), Florida, and Delaware are also wholy included (though Vermont has a tiny sliver to the south-west that is not).
Most of New York and all of the most populace parts of California (SF, LA, SD, etc.) are covered.
This is a truly egregious expansion of non-Constitutional authority.
Well yes, they're resourceful, but why doesn't anyone ask the obvious question: wouldn't it be easier and less annoying to hack on a platform that enjoyed the attention? Netbooks, TiVos and many other platforms have had a loose, but affirming relationship with those who modify their hardware and software. Why not hack on those platforms instead of the ones promulgated by companies that take an anti-consumer stance toward their most dedicated users?
He's right, though. Sure, he takes his conclusion too far, but it's clear that the last major economic hit the market took (2000-2001) wiped out a huge chunk of open source development and free Web services (I worked for Highwired.net at the time, which was a fee service for high schools to publish their school newspapers online and it died the instant the music stopped).
The thing is that there is a real economic win in open source software, so it's not going anywhere soon. Companies like IBM (among many other) pour lots of money into open source because it's a way to reduce development costs and improve many aspects of the software lifecycle.
Google's open source work isn't going anywhere either.
But, I certainly could see many open source projects folding as their contributors re-focus on their careers. Those who work on open source AS a day job will be the majority after the shakeout is over.
who knows what else has been elevated to truth by circular reasoning? (smart alec answers to *that* question are welcome :))
We grow up with a warm, fuzzy feeling that tells us that there's History and Truth and then there's opinion and consensus. We instinctively believe that this are distinct things. They're not. Wikipedia is a repository of consensus, and as such at least as accurate as any other repository of consensus.
As a participant in the process of achieving consensus, Wikipedia will certainly affect its establishment, but that's true for all participants. The only way to participate without modifying the consensus would be to archive all sources of information and communication and to store them without commentary. Even providing a way to search that information introduces bias and value judgements.
That is to say, Wikipedia is the best, most accurate view of the whole of human knowledge to date, but that's a far cry from praise.
Wikipedia: Where consistent opinions are correct opinions.
I don't think Wikipedia takes a stand on correctness at all. At least I've never seen any such stand.
Wikipedia is meant as a repository for consensus. If you have a problem with the consensus, you should try to change it, but Wikipedia isn't the place to do that.
There's some real danger in what you're suggesting. Wikipedia works well because it accepts no authoritative truth. In fact, nothing on Wikipedia is "the truth." Instead, it is simply a re-stating of the consensus. If Mr. Lanier had wanted incorrect information stripped from his article, he could simply have said, "there's no source for this, please remove it." If there WAS a source, and no other source disputed it, then his problem isn't with Wikipedia, it's with the fact that consensus and his sense of truth already had a dispute.
If we attempt to create an authority (be it academic, governmental, or any other source) for truth, then all we do is limit the scope of our consensus building and make manipulation of the consensus that much easier.
I think you got it wrong. They're talking about the idea of privateering. They're opposed to hiring pirates as mercenaries to fight other countries by proxy. I, for one, am glad to see Microsoft take a stand on this serious issue! In fact, I'm going to go give out duplicated copies of Windows XP to all my friends to show my support!
1:50 or 1:100 works for servers if you have a plan when you start. I've seen shops that need 1:20 because they started rolling out servers without a plan, and kept doing reactionary admin. Of course, that's true for both Windows and Linux, but I think Windows is ever so slightly more resilient in the face of half-starts, in that you have a fixed platform from which it's harder to stray. Once you have a Linux shop with 5 different software update strategies on 3 distributions with no centralized upgrade plan and developers who are hostile to some fraction of your installed base of distributions it gets much uglier.
I think this is probably going to be a good thing in the long run. This case should move past the state level, as a federal decision on this would set national precedent. The question might even have to go to the SCOTUS, since it's not really clear how states interact with the Internet, and this might get surreal enough to touch on things like foreign relations and the ability for the executive branch to make treaties.
Interestingly, phone service and physical mail have both gone through several iterations of increasing and decreasing scope and centralization within organizations, so my above examples are a bit simplistic, but overall I think they hold up. We're at the start of what will be a century-plus period of understanding the role of computer-based communications in the business world, and as that grows and changes, Google will continue to grow and change and others will compete with them in interesting and perhaps successful ways.
I'm not waving a Google flag, here, just reacting to the idea that a single outage makes for a useless corporate service (which, if true, would have every company in the world running their own fleet of planes and drilling for their own oil).
You can't count on the USPS to deliver your mail...sorry buddy.
You can't count on Verizon to run your telecommunications...sorry buddy.
Every service you use was, at one point, decentralized and every large corporation ran it themselves. Then someone did a better job and companies slowly released the reins. Does Verizon's phone service go down? Yep. Does the USPS lose mail? Yep. Goes Google mail go down? Yep. But, in the end we've decided that we'd rather rely on these external services than continue to try to run increasingly large services with ever-diminishing returns for the individual business.
Indeed they do, and since I've never worked for a company that has had zero email outages (including my own home mail server before I moved to google.com/a), I'd have to say that my Google Apps experience has been as good as or better than the experience I've had with any other mail service that I've used for at least a year.
I think you're over-generalizing, here. No Country for Old Men certainly did not have actors who looked unrealistically smooth-featured. Neither did Memento, Donnie Darko, just about any U.S./U.K. film (e.g. Snatch) except for the Star Wars prequels, Hotel Rwanda, and many, many others.
What you're reacting to is the trend in makeup for big-budget "Hollywood films." Movies like Star Trek and Harry Potter work hard to create a "polished" and uniform look which is expensive to achieve. It's a barrier to entry for new studios as it requires makeup, lighting, optics and many other elements which are very expensive. However, when it comes to that, I don't think Superman or Pretty Woman were any different, and those movies were certainly not recent. Go back further. I think Gone with the Wind was in a similar boat, as was Breakfast at Tiffany's. Is this a new trend, or just the attempt to portray a blemish-free world in our modern fiction?
The reason that makeup is so heavy is that, when you're looking at a 3-story tall closeup in a theater, "average skin" looks like the surface of the moon, and it can be very distracting.
How, that said, there is a tendency to go overboard, and yes I think most movies could do with more realism in makeup. But, I disagree that these people look like teens. They look good for their age, but then they're actors in Hollywood, so one imagines that's a hiring criteria.
Adolescent?! The guy's 28 years old. Check IMDB, at 28, he's the youngest member of the cast which averages in the mid-30s.
You've been watching too much 90210, and may have actually come to believe that good looking mid-to-late 20s actors are teens. ;-)
I can't help but think of the current case of the 15 year old girl who is being charged with the crime of distributing pictures of herself to an underage audience. She's actually facing jail time and a life of registration as a sex offender. Next time you think something like this is a good idea, ask yourself: what's a sex offender, exactly?
I agree, and moreso. The world of open source projects that are solid as a rock, but remain 0.x for years has conditioned me to believe that 1.0 *is* the polished, long-lived release. Not always true, but certainly enough to banish the stigma (if there was one).
I'm almost certain that this is incorrect. I've had many systems that I've run Firefox on where I've clicked on the flashblock icon only to realize that I didn't have flash installed, and thus nothing happened.
To quote their site:
"Flashblock [...] blocks ALL Flash content from loading."
That's "from loading" not "from running more than an instant," so unless this is incorrect, and my experiences are somehow also misleading, I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
Seriously, get flashblock from the Firefox addons site. You need it. Badly. The number of sites with the equivalent of the pixel.gif tracking or the Google Analytics type JavaScript tracking, but as a small Flash plugin are growing astronomically, and Adobe has no reason to favor your privacy over their customer's demands. These little apps aren't there to serve your needs or improve you're browsing experience, and they just should never run. If you want to run a Flash app, that's fine: click on it to run it.
I use Flashblock and I've been watching Hulu and YouTube and enjoying all sorts of sites that use Flash. I'm also instantly aware of any site that's too lazy to present a standard Web page when I see a giant "click to run" button over the whole page, and I find another site. This is part of the process, and is an important way that neophyte Web developers learn that they can't just throw up Flash and not worry about Web standards.
What you suggest is easier to crack, and the worst part is that it can't be generated automatically. The benefit of captcha is that it's a one-way function for a computer. It can generate a captcha, but (until it's broken) can't read back the information that it put into it. Generating an understandable English phrase and the questions to go with it would be as hard as solving the generated questions.
I actually search for all of my Web needs on YouTube first. I find that it really reduces the number of Wikipedia links I have to surf past ;-)
Here's the article: http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/10/08/pve-arenas/
This prompted me to post some of the thoughts friends and I have been batting around about blending of PvE and PvP: http://www.3d6.net/aarons_essays/2008/10/bringing-pvp-and-pve-together.html
One of the other major items to have come out of Blizzcon is the possibility in the near future (post-Wrath-release) of PvE arenas where teams would square off against bosses from instances who would gain or lose ranking just like players and thus harder bosses would match up against better teams.
No final word yet, and it's still in the idea phase.