That's why the developers got rid of that arbitrary split in the 2.3 series. Now plug-ins and scripts are organised by functionality instead of categorizing them by the programming language they are implemented in. That's great news! Thanks for the update (still working with 2.2, here).
The role of channels in the UI is not at all intuitively clear
I am not sure if channels can be intuitively clear at all. This is a fair point, and easily the weakest of my concerns. It's just a hurdle that I had to deal with. I think there is room for improvement in how intuitive channel use can be, but it's not an entry-level feature.
What Stroke Selection does, is literally draw along the edge of the selection boundary. Selection is a pixel-based function, so the Gimp can't (and shouldn't) make any guesses about the intended shape of the selection That would track just fine if the ellipse selection tool didn't have an "antialiasing" checkbox....
Could you explain to me how you think I "figured that out in about five seconds" after having "never used that tool before" and decided that it "looks great to me" without trying it? I've been scratching my head over here trying to figure out how you thought I pulled that off. I simply cannot reconcile that with the facts. It leaves me wondering what application you're using.
Since you claim that you can get a smooth, well-aliased circle/ellipse, I guess I'm just left to ask you to demonstrate it. Upload an image that you create somewhere in XCF format.
Mostly, it just doesn't work
Do you have some huge brush spacing or something? I'm assuming that you know what brush spacing is for, and that you're not faulting Gimp for doing something that you told it to do. Again, I've used the gimp and written plugin software for it for a number of years. I'm well familiar with its workings. With a brush spacing of the default 20 or set to 1, the result is the same: a pooly aliased, fuzzy line. The problem isn't with the brush, it's with the selection. Even with "antialiasing" selected, the selection is fundamentally a pixel-by-pixel outline which stroking outlines. Choosing a fuzzy brush will simply blur that alaised outline, not anti-alias it.
The solution is for the selection itself to be sub-pixel. That's a big change, but in the years that the GIMP has been around and this need has been obvious, it's a bit shocking that it wasn't made.
I'm also curious as to what you think of the other concerns that I noted.
Second, having to select a brush rather than a specific line width is an even worse burden on the user.
Picking a brush is worse than typing a number? Absolutely. I want to trace a 2-pixel wide outline that I have as a selection, not sort through all of the brushes to find the 2-pixel wide one, and THEN have to select a fuzzy version of the same brush after trial-and-error. This is where the GIMP sadly seems to have taken a "it's the user's problem" attitude.
No, you're incorrect for several reasons (keep in mind here that I've developed software plugins for the gimp since before version 2.0). Mostly, it just doesn't work. Try it. You'll get a badly aliased stroke that's fuzzy.
Second, having to select a brush rather than a specific line width is an even worse burden on the user. When you're drawing pictures, that might suffice, but when you're doing any kind of serious photo editing, you need specific, fine-grained control.
This is simply a huge limitation in the GIMP that should have been resolved before 2.0 was released, but for some reason has remained all this time.
The GIMP tries to do so much that it's quite hard to make it anything less than daunting for new users. The number of windows and dialogs needed for just the simplest edit are a horror.
That said, there are some basic problems that surpass the complexity.
The arbitrary split between "filters" and "script-fu" which places important items randomly (from the user perspective) into one of the two areas.
The number of dialogs needed to save a file (in some cases: filename dialog, replacement confirmation, export confirmation, and finally format settings).
The selection of color in multiple places (many plugins and tools do not use the default FG/BG)
The role of channels in the UI is not at all intuitively clear
However, most of this pales to the limitations that are inherent in the functionality. One of my biggest gripes is that the anti-aliasing code is sloppy in non-uniformly implemented. Try this: select a circle, and then use Edit->Stroke Selection. Select a 2 pixel stroke line and go. You will get absolutely HORRID aliasing. The same thing happens (though not quite as bad) with the paint tool stroking.
Overall, the GIMP is an amazing and powerful tool, but it has some serious warts.
You are a programmer, not a computer scientist. I'd hire you to write code based on a specification. I wouldn't hire you to design rendering algorithms. It is too bad they didn't teach you the difference between compsci and programming during day one of your CS program. An interesting response, but neither of you is talking about TFA.... If you read what the article has to say, you'll find that it's about the difference between a purely algorithmic approach to CS and a less deterministic, more process-related approach. Personally, I think the guy has a point, but might be going too far in the other direction. He makes an excellent point with respect to an operating system not being a deterministic algorithm with a "result," but a process which expresses a set of processes. It's also true that, at a finer granularity, algorithmic tools are key to any operating system. Both disciplines are essential, but he's right: the parts of CS that aren't pure math tend to get the short end of the stick.
I'd like to point out that this article doesn't try to assert that algorithms are useless or that CS doesn't need math. It only asserts that the focus of CS has been hijacked by pure math.
At the endgame portion (the real game) everyone is of roughly equal power, everyone is maxed in their tradeskill and abilities. Everything before that is just setting up the board so you can play the actual game that starts at that point. Ah, so there's a particular part of the game you happen to like, and you want all other parts of the game removed to increase your enjoyment... No thanks. I just started 3 new characters on the opposite faction from the one I'd been playing. I'm having great fun leveling them, building up a reserve of money from scratch, gaining trade skills from trainers I never new existed, etc. It's a lot of fun. If you don't stop to enjoy about 50-80% of the game, I'm very sorry for you, but the solution is not to remove it.
First. There is no correlation between the TOS and fair play. Just as there is no correlation between obeying the law and doing what is right in the real world. There is a strong correlation in both cases. Correlations are not absolute. There's a strong correlation between how much I enjoy my work day and how much sleep I got, but I've had exceptions on both sides.
Buying and selling gold certainly doesn't hurt anyone. The claim is that it has a secondary impact, making an otherwise fun game into something that people view as their livelihood, reducing the amount of good will and sportsmanship in the game. I don't fully agree with that, but it's a valid argument.
The problem is the grind, not the people violating the TOS. Leveling should be more of an introductory tutorial to the game and your character and should last a couple days. Gold should fall off trees, and everyone should start at maximum skill in tradeskills. Why? Why should the game stop at a point that you choose? I'd like it to go on further, and I'm sure there are many others who feel the same. Why is a tradeskill interesting if everyone has the exact same proficiency in it? Why is buying something that's expensive interesting if everyone is filthy rich? Those might be fine things for a player-vs-player only game where all you want to do is log in and start fighting, but for a truly balanced PVE/PVP game, this simply doesn't work.
Did you read the article? First the CRX goes missing for a long time. Then... The fact of the matter is that you have a man whose behavior indicates he may have been involved in his wife's death, but you also have far too many confusing details. The drop of blood at his house is a non-starter, since its age can't be determined and it's not unlikely that a drop of blood would be spilled in the home at some point during their marriage. Why it would contain both of their blood is an interesting question, but not sufficient to make it evidence in the case.
The strange behavior on the highway is easily explained as the behavior of a man who suddenly realizes he's being tailed (how is it that the police see behavior that's most easily explained as trying to lose a tail and yet say that they don't think he knew they were tailing him?)
The only evidence that really damns him is the car, and while it presents enough circumstantial evidence to make him a likely murderer, the friend who has now admitted to multiple murders and court documents demonstrate was her lover makes for a gap of reasonable doubt that's large enough to drive a truck through. Unless they can come up with more evidence, a body or something of the sort, they're almost certainly better off dropping the case now in the hopes that later evidence will allow for a conviction. If they press the case now, he can't be tried again if they find the body and it turns out he did it.
This case is over. Murderer or not, I can't see how Hans can be convicted by a jury that understands the definition of reasonable doubt, and a sensible DA would take the safer route to a longer term conviction, wouldn't he?
Then again, my information comes from Wired, so what the hell do I know?
In addition to reporting any misbehavior by the police, I hope that the ACLU has enough integrity to also publicly commend any officer that is recorded acting responsibility in a difficult situation. A little positive reinforcement can go a long ways. The ACLU is not in the business of "reporting misbehavior" or "commending" anyone. The ACLU represents people in cases where they perceive a threat to constitutional protections of civil liberties. On that basis, I'd be shocked if they're even reviewing what's recorded on a regular basis. All they can do is wait for a case to arise where someone caught police misbehavior on tape. THEN, they have a role to play.
This is one of the most often misunderstood elements of constitutional law. Everyone seems to think that a bad law can be struck down by the courts. This is not true. A bad law which is enforced in such a way that a case can be made against an example of the enforcement can be struck down by the courts. That's a very different situation.
Careful now, all of you Slashdotties are going to be grossly guilty of hypocrisy if you don't support the twins right to make a mix CD. Unreasoned Bushy-hate [...] Oh for the love of... what are you talking about?!
The lawyer in question is clearly interested in making the PR point that the RIAA won't go up against the daughters of the head of the executive branch because they know that they'd be slitting their own throats. He might even have hoped to establish that the RIAA does not defend their members' copyrights evenly, for use in court.
That said, there's frankly nothing partisan about this, and it bothers me deeply that someone has to rush out and rant about how terrible those [insert party] people are, whenever their pet politician is mentioned.
From that graph, if the ice volume is now as low as it was at the end of the last few ice ages, shouldn't we think the temperature is the same now as it was during the other spikes? Not at all. First off, you're assuming that peak temperatures result in low ice volume, and not the other way around. This isn't very likely. It's far more likely that earlier, more modest rises in temperature result in melting ice, which in turn results in increased temperatures due to a rise in atmospheric water vapor and decreased global albedo (more light from the sun is absorbed into the surface of uniced ground,rather than reflected back into space). This is a much more symbiotic relationship than you suggest, and there's nothing to suggest that melting would stop or slow substantially because global temperature, having already risen over 6 degrees C, did not continue to rise another 3 or so.
As for your bringing the temperature measurements themselves into question, I think the obvious retort to that is that multiple measurements have resulted in roughly the same numbers, so you're fighting an uphill battle against very credible historical data.
So, the question is: given that the major players were all in line, what stopped the temperature from reaching peak this time?
Significant changes in the albedo of Mars have been observed. On the other hand, the monitoring of the Sun's output does not show the increase that would be necessary for it to be the cause of the warming on Mars. The problem with this is that we have two events that are nearly identical in two places at the same time, and two theories which discount the most obvious common element because we don't have a working model for the way that common element could have the observed impact. Occam's Razor is a useful guide here, and suggests that more time spent looking for a common element that fits both systems is worth while. Just as an arbitrary example: the Earth's albedo has also been changing due to ice that has been melting steadily for the last 10,000 years since the last ice age. Has this lead to a recent change in the way the sun's radiation is absorbed by the Earth? It's hard to say. Does the sun's magnetic field have a larger impact on warming that we'd suspected? We don't know.
There's nothing wrong with the CO2-driven model of warming, it's just that it's not the only candidate, and in some areas, it's not the ideal fit to the observations. Actually, what I find most striking about global temperatures is that, for the end of a major ice age, we're experiencing shockingly cool temperatures as compared with the end of the last 4 roughly 100 thousand year ice age cycles. In the other four, the end of an ice age is signaled by a sharp spike in global temperature. At the end of the current ice age, we see a similar spike, which is truncated well below the peaks achieved by the previous warming periods (see above link).
It leaves me wondering what in the last 5,000-10,000 years could have stopped such a powerful rise in temperatures, and has the rest of the rise been merely delayed, or does this signal an early start to the next ice age?
In other words, the problem is that movie makers can't simply make a movie out of a game: they have to find a loosely similar standard Hollywood template and force the game story into that. That's a poor summary. First off, it paints video games as a font of originality being sucked into the shallow world of Hollywood. Both industries (which are tightly coupled) have the same lack of originality for the most part, and both have exceptions to that rule that are rare, but highly notable. The idea that, in making a horror movie out of a horror game, you stick to the established rules of successful horror movies isn't actually that unreasonable. It's just not the way you get a GOOD video game movie.
Does Hollywood actually set out to crush any hint of originality, or is it just that the studio bosses are so conservative that it's impossible to get funding if you can't sum the movie up as "X meets Y", where X and Y were box-office hits the previous summer? I don't think it's either. I think there's a very careful isolation of creativity and money-making from each other. Movies that are unoriginal, but guarantee a certain audience are the first priority because they are the ones that make your money. Movies that are innovative are also fostered because they are the way you find out where the model can change and become more successful. However, because there's higher risk associated with innovation, you carefully isolate innovative movies, and fund them in much smaller numbers. Go look at the movies that are out right now. You'll be able to quickly identify the formula that about half to two-thirds fit into. The other half to third will mostly be close to a formula, but with limited creative alterations. About one film is usually playing in broad circulation at any given time that has something truly creative going on.
This makes good business sense, AND provides creative people with a way to produce great movies. It's the way it's worked for decades, and it's the way we produced everything from Casablanca to King Kong to The Third Man to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Usual Suspects. It also produces movies like Gigli, Leonard Part 6, Prince of Space, and many other bad movies that tried to fit the formula without actually involving any talent.
It's very hard to have a successful movie business. Creating such a thing is a matter of balancing factors that almost none of your audience will appreciate. Frankly, I think Hollywood generally gets a bad rap.
Thus, as someone that works for a company that sells to institutions but not to individuals, it doesn't surprise me in the least that they aren't changing their entire business model. I don't think anyone was suggesting that they change their business model. However, they really should have just thrown out an API by which their pre-existing free consumer service could have been subscribed to by apps like MythTV, should their developers desire to use it. It's about a week of work to design and deploy such a protocol, and another week to set up the e-commerce piece that backs it up. After that you don't advertise or push it at all, it's just a service that either makes money or prevents the loss of money from unfunded bandwidth bleeding. Either way, problem solved.
I was really disapointed to find out that they are planning to migrate to a Qt-based interface instead of their current one or instead of using a more open toolkit such as GTK+. There's nothing "more open" about GTK+. Qt was a commercial toolkit with a semi-proprietary license many years ago, but has long been under the GPL.
This means that I will probably have to stop using it (or maintain a fork) because Qt is banned in my company. Banning the use of apps which utilize a certain toolkit (unless there's some financial or security impact from using that toolkit) is absurd. Find a new company.
Stellarium is right up there with Celestia for outstanding astro simulations. I use the two together when planning a night of stargazing or meteor watching in the mountains, and highly recommend them to anyone. Both have somewhat odd UIs to get used to, but it's one of the rare cases where the app itself is so uniquely useful that the UI is a secondary concern.
I think the "abuse" they're talking about is programs that are pre-configured to hit their service so that everyone on the Net who tries them out hammers their servers.
It seems fair to start charging, but odd that they're just shutting it off. They say they're willing to license to other companies, so presumably they're hoping someone will come along and offer a package to the MythTV folks by licensing the data and re-selling subscriptions.
I don't use MythTV, and so I was surprised to see that it relies on a private third-party source for TV listings. Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner? I can't imagine how that would work. Ultimately, you need information from the studios, and that's going to require a business relationship. TV Guide has such a relationship, as did these folks it seems (or perhaps TV Guide and these folks have a common feed).
I'm a little shocked that these guys didn't just go commercial, though, and build a MythTV add-on that allows you to subscribe to their product.
if you are middle class in a rich western nation, you are rich by world standards
if you can afford to have the leisure time to play a MMORPG, you are a rich person And, of course, Chinese Gold Farmers are rich by comparison to the average peasant in rural China who are rich by comparison to displaced refugees in Sudan.... what's your point, exactly? Or are you just trying to muddy the waters for troll value?
Just to clarify: I bought plat in EQ... so far I've never had to buy gold in WoW, and the prices are actually less reasonable anyway. The most expensive thing I'd want would be an epic flying mount, and I'm willing to wait and farm for that, as the process itself is fun, and I'm not over-committed like I was with EQ.
what is bad about gold farming? well, it allows some rich asshole to buy his way into a game he should have worked hard at. Wow... those are SOME assumptions in your lead-in. I was firmly middle-class, not rich at all, when I bought plat for EverQuest. Why? Because I was playing with a guild which had demands on my time, and at the same time helping several friends get established in the game. It was the best way to trade a commodity that I did have (modest amounts of money for a hobby) for one that I did not have (time to further invest in the game). I spent about what I would have spent on any other hobby, I imagine. My friends didn't complain, as it turns out, nor did anyone in-game consider me an "asshole" at the time.
it destroys the concept of a meritocracy, and replaces it with aristocracy. Fact: I will never be able to afford buying enough gold to match what a dedicated player in these games nets. But it's not a meritocracy with respect to the money... no one assigns any authority to someone on the basis of their in-game money (at best, you get oohs and ahhs for the fancy things you buy). Typically that's only a result of activities that gold can't buy: guild / raid organization; class and situational awareness; etc.
furthermore, what is good about gold farming? well, some guy in china is actually feeding himself on the effort. this matters a whole hell of a lot more than some stupid game and the feelings of the players of that game in my book. real life survival is a whole hell of a lot more important than the romance of a MMORPG It can be argued that this is an important step in the development of a truly globalized economy, as well. You have an excellent point here.
Ask the Dungeons and Dragons franchise how hard it is to bring fantasy hack-n-slash to the big screen. Cheap, but appropriate shot.
Either source could work well, but I agree that neither was/is likely to.
Then again, there's a school of thought that says that 90% (or your favorite made-up percentage) of movies are going to suck no matter how many you make, so you might as well crank them out when possible. I'm not sure that that's quite accurate, but it's probably close enough to merit SciFi continuing to crank out the "scary animal of the week" movies until they hit paydirt.
As for the Diablo movie... take the basic idea that a sole farmer survives the destruction of his home and joins others in a quest to destroy the evil that did it... that's Campbell in a nutshell, so sure it can work. It's just hard to get a writer and director and actors that are good enough to make it work into a room together with a budget.
Whoever gave the green Doom and Resident evil should have been fired. Yes, but not because the source material did or did not lack a basis for the movies. Actually, R.E. was a decent attempt. They tried fairly hard, but simply got trapped by the ugly rules of horror movies. Had they decided to make an atypical horror movie, it might have worked. I liked the characters. I liked some of the story (though some was too obviously formulaic). The ending was nice, though it could have done with slightly less skin which made a scene that should have felt scary and stark feel more like a peep show in a hospital.
The Doom movie was bad writing and bad casting, but there was nothing about the Doom story that lacked for good source material. In fact, the primary problem with the Doom movie was that they removed the interesting parts of the story (the "demons" were the result of experiments with alien DNA, not demons from hell).
I maintain that a good movie could have been made from either source. It simply wasn't and the person who greenlighted either film certainly knew that early on.
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I am not sure if channels can be intuitively clear at all. This is a fair point, and easily the weakest of my concerns. It's just a hurdle that I had to deal with. I think there is room for improvement in how intuitive channel use can be, but it's not an entry-level feature.
Could you explain to me how you think I "figured that out in about five seconds" after having "never used that tool before" and decided that it "looks great to me" without trying it? I've been scratching my head over here trying to figure out how you thought I pulled that off. I simply cannot reconcile that with the facts. It leaves me wondering what application you're using.
Since you claim that you can get a smooth, well-aliased circle/ellipse, I guess I'm just left to ask you to demonstrate it. Upload an image that you create somewhere in XCF format. Mostly, it just doesn't work
Do you have some huge brush spacing or something? I'm assuming that you know what brush spacing is for, and that you're not faulting Gimp for doing something that you told it to do. Again, I've used the gimp and written plugin software for it for a number of years. I'm well familiar with its workings. With a brush spacing of the default 20 or set to 1, the result is the same: a pooly aliased, fuzzy line. The problem isn't with the brush, it's with the selection. Even with "antialiasing" selected, the selection is fundamentally a pixel-by-pixel outline which stroking outlines. Choosing a fuzzy brush will simply blur that alaised outline, not anti-alias it.
The solution is for the selection itself to be sub-pixel. That's a big change, but in the years that the GIMP has been around and this need has been obvious, it's a bit shocking that it wasn't made.
I'm also curious as to what you think of the other concerns that I noted. Second, having to select a brush rather than a specific line width is an even worse burden on the user.
Picking a brush is worse than typing a number? Absolutely. I want to trace a 2-pixel wide outline that I have as a selection, not sort through all of the brushes to find the 2-pixel wide one, and THEN have to select a fuzzy version of the same brush after trial-and-error. This is where the GIMP sadly seems to have taken a "it's the user's problem" attitude.
No, you're incorrect for several reasons (keep in mind here that I've developed software plugins for the gimp since before version 2.0). Mostly, it just doesn't work. Try it. You'll get a badly aliased stroke that's fuzzy.
Second, having to select a brush rather than a specific line width is an even worse burden on the user. When you're drawing pictures, that might suffice, but when you're doing any kind of serious photo editing, you need specific, fine-grained control.
This is simply a huge limitation in the GIMP that should have been resolved before 2.0 was released, but for some reason has remained all this time.
That said, there are some basic problems that surpass the complexity.
However, most of this pales to the limitations that are inherent in the functionality. One of my biggest gripes is that the anti-aliasing code is sloppy in non-uniformly implemented. Try this: select a circle, and then use Edit->Stroke Selection. Select a 2 pixel stroke line and go. You will get absolutely HORRID aliasing. The same thing happens (though not quite as bad) with the paint tool stroking.
Overall, the GIMP is an amazing and powerful tool, but it has some serious warts.
I'd like to point out that this article doesn't try to assert that algorithms are useless or that CS doesn't need math. It only asserts that the focus of CS has been hijacked by pure math.
The strange behavior on the highway is easily explained as the behavior of a man who suddenly realizes he's being tailed (how is it that the police see behavior that's most easily explained as trying to lose a tail and yet say that they don't think he knew they were tailing him?)
The only evidence that really damns him is the car, and while it presents enough circumstantial evidence to make him a likely murderer, the friend who has now admitted to multiple murders and court documents demonstrate was her lover makes for a gap of reasonable doubt that's large enough to drive a truck through. Unless they can come up with more evidence, a body or something of the sort, they're almost certainly better off dropping the case now in the hopes that later evidence will allow for a conviction. If they press the case now, he can't be tried again if they find the body and it turns out he did it.
This case is over. Murderer or not, I can't see how Hans can be convicted by a jury that understands the definition of reasonable doubt, and a sensible DA would take the safer route to a longer term conviction, wouldn't he?
Then again, my information comes from Wired, so what the hell do I know?
This is one of the most often misunderstood elements of constitutional law. Everyone seems to think that a bad law can be struck down by the courts. This is not true. A bad law which is enforced in such a way that a case can be made against an example of the enforcement can be struck down by the courts. That's a very different situation.
The lawyer in question is clearly interested in making the PR point that the RIAA won't go up against the daughters of the head of the executive branch because they know that they'd be slitting their own throats. He might even have hoped to establish that the RIAA does not defend their members' copyrights evenly, for use in court.
That said, there's frankly nothing partisan about this, and it bothers me deeply that someone has to rush out and rant about how terrible those [insert party] people are, whenever their pet politician is mentioned.
As for your bringing the temperature measurements themselves into question, I think the obvious retort to that is that multiple measurements have resulted in roughly the same numbers, so you're fighting an uphill battle against very credible historical data.
So, the question is: given that the major players were all in line, what stopped the temperature from reaching peak this time?
There's nothing wrong with the CO2-driven model of warming, it's just that it's not the only candidate, and in some areas, it's not the ideal fit to the observations. Actually, what I find most striking about global temperatures is that, for the end of a major ice age, we're experiencing shockingly cool temperatures as compared with the end of the last 4 roughly 100 thousand year ice age cycles. In the other four, the end of an ice age is signaled by a sharp spike in global temperature. At the end of the current ice age, we see a similar spike, which is truncated well below the peaks achieved by the previous warming periods (see above link).
It leaves me wondering what in the last 5,000-10,000 years could have stopped such a powerful rise in temperatures, and has the rest of the rise been merely delayed, or does this signal an early start to the next ice age?
This makes good business sense, AND provides creative people with a way to produce great movies. It's the way it's worked for decades, and it's the way we produced everything from Casablanca to King Kong to The Third Man to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Usual Suspects. It also produces movies like Gigli, Leonard Part 6, Prince of Space, and many other bad movies that tried to fit the formula without actually involving any talent.
It's very hard to have a successful movie business. Creating such a thing is a matter of balancing factors that almost none of your audience will appreciate. Frankly, I think Hollywood generally gets a bad rap.
Just shutting it off seems a poor choice.
Stellarium is right up there with Celestia for outstanding astro simulations. I use the two together when planning a night of stargazing or meteor watching in the mountains, and highly recommend them to anyone. Both have somewhat odd UIs to get used to, but it's one of the rare cases where the app itself is so uniquely useful that the UI is a secondary concern.
I think the "abuse" they're talking about is programs that are pre-configured to hit their service so that everyone on the Net who tries them out hammers their servers.
It seems fair to start charging, but odd that they're just shutting it off. They say they're willing to license to other companies, so presumably they're hoping someone will come along and offer a package to the MythTV folks by licensing the data and re-selling subscriptions.
I'm a little shocked that these guys didn't just go commercial, though, and build a MythTV add-on that allows you to subscribe to their product.
if you can afford to have the leisure time to play a MMORPG, you are a rich person And, of course, Chinese Gold Farmers are rich by comparison to the average peasant in rural China who are rich by comparison to displaced refugees in Sudan.... what's your point, exactly? Or are you just trying to muddy the waters for troll value?
The novel has not yet been published.
The author is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman
and he is on the Web at:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/
Just to clarify: I bought plat in EQ... so far I've never had to buy gold in WoW, and the prices are actually less reasonable anyway. The most expensive thing I'd want would be an epic flying mount, and I'm willing to wait and farm for that, as the process itself is fun, and I'm not over-committed like I was with EQ.
Either source could work well, but I agree that neither was/is likely to.
Then again, there's a school of thought that says that 90% (or your favorite made-up percentage) of movies are going to suck no matter how many you make, so you might as well crank them out when possible. I'm not sure that that's quite accurate, but it's probably close enough to merit SciFi continuing to crank out the "scary animal of the week" movies until they hit paydirt.
As for the Diablo movie... take the basic idea that a sole farmer survives the destruction of his home and joins others in a quest to destroy the evil that did it... that's Campbell in a nutshell, so sure it can work. It's just hard to get a writer and director and actors that are good enough to make it work into a room together with a budget.
The Doom movie was bad writing and bad casting, but there was nothing about the Doom story that lacked for good source material. In fact, the primary problem with the Doom movie was that they removed the interesting parts of the story (the "demons" were the result of experiments with alien DNA, not demons from hell).
I maintain that a good movie could have been made from either source. It simply wasn't and the person who greenlighted either film certainly knew that early on.