1. Powerlevel a character to very high level, kill monsters, collect loot, sell loot. They may target specific, high-profit monsters, or they may just slaughter everything in a lower level area. 2. Uh, the whole concept of "player economy" is based on trading items for gold and gold for items. Mugging is a problem in real life, but we still need to be able to transfer money to one another. 3. The killing of monsters and collecting of loot is done by the bot.
In some games, tradeskills like fishing are just as good or better than killing monsters, so the farmers do that instead, but the idea is the same.
I agree that he'll be fine whichever he chooses, but your statement that they are all more or less the same in terms of security is very wrong. OpenBSD is not the same as the other BSD's in terms of security. It really, really isn't. If you think so, you're naive. The entire development process revolves around security; code is audited, settings and defaults are carefully crafted. OpenBSD did not start simply because they wanted to include one piece of software and FreeBSD wanted to include another. The whole purpose of OpenBSD is to be the most secure OS on the planet.
To suggest there is no difference is not only untrue, but vaguely insulting to the project.
I don't think aging has much to do with it. As I recall, most of the surface components are replaced after each mission and everything is thoroughly inspected for defects/weaknesses.
My question would be whether the replacement tiles are actually new, or whether they've just been sitting in a warehouse for 40 years like most of the other shuttle spare parts.
The foam issue is something NASA had known about for a while before the Columbia disaster, they just hadn't taken it seriously enough. Kind of the same thing as what happened with Challenger where they knew about the o-ring issue but didn't take it seriously enough either.
It's easy to say in hindsight that they didn't take it seriously enough. But in reality, it's hard to tell which things need to be taken seriously and which are trivial. And you can't just assume everything is serious -- if you take everything seriously, you're never going to get *anything* done. NASA is and always was way, way, way on the 'better safe than sorry' end of the spectrum, even at the time of the O-ring and foam problems. But they have to draw the line at some point, due to the law of diminishing returns. I think they've gone beyond that line in the aftermath of Columbia, personally.
Now, let's see, how popular was that system? Widely criticised by players and reviewers alike. Criticised in this very thread, even. Would I have played WoW nearly as religiously if not for the fact that my friends have been joining the server I am on? No.
I played FFXI. I found it exceedingly drab without my friends. Especially given how ridiculously focused on grouping that game became above level 10-15. I want to group with my friends, not some random group of people which is likely to contain at least one idiot who gets us killed numerous times. Even after I could afford to buy world passes (one is not so expensive. buying 10 starts to hurt pretty quickly) my friends didn't want to leave the characters they had been mucking about on and start again at level 1.
WoW is a breath of fresh air. My friends and I are forming a guild. We group *all the time* even though we don't really need to, we help each other out with quests. It's fantastic. I'll take the lag and moderate downtime gladly as long as they don't fuck around with my social circle.
Just because the company says "We own all this, btw." doesn't make it true or enforcable. If a snow machine leasing company said "All snow created by this machine is our property and must be returned to us at the termination of your lease" there's very little chance it would stand up in court (well, maybe in American courts lately...) no matter how many EULAs they made you sign. There is intentionally a legal divide between the item itself, and anything it is used to create. Black and Decker cannot claim to have any rights to your spice rack you made with their saws and drills, nor can the lumber company you bought the wood from.
It's a little fuzzier in the IP arena right now, but it probably shouldn't be, in my opinion. It's the same deal.
That works with FFXI because of the world pass system, but it doesn't work in WoW, because people will (surprise surprise) join the server their friends are on. Unfortunately, this results in a clustering of players on a bunch of particularly popular servers. The rest of the servers are running just fine, like mine for example. Adding more won't solve the problem instantly (much to Blizzard's dismay, I'm sure). What I think they underestimated was the social factor. Never before have I played a MMORPG where I felt the need to go recruit my friends, even non-gamer friends. But this game is just so enjoyable that it makes me feel like everyone would enjoy it, so I go and try to convince them to join. ahem, I am not an astroturfer even if that sounded like it...:P
But anyway there is no easy solution to this. The only immediate solution is either a gargantuan upgrade of the servers, or asking/requiring people to migrate to new and underpopulated servers (preferably bringing their characters as well)
It's just amazing that they don't forsee the ammount of people. Especially right at launch and the months surrounding when you have most people logging on.
Dude, they have 88 servers. I mean, they were expecting success, sure. But they've sold more copies of the game in the last month than FFXI (as a random example I know the number for) has subscribers.
Besides, even if they believed WoW would be very successful, they can't just assume "Woohoo, my MMORPG entry into the already saturated market will be a wild success! I'm gonna take out a loan and buy $50 million worth of datacenter equipment to host 20,000 servers!" and many MMORPG businesses have been nearly if not entirely bankrupted in the recent past for taking that line of thinking. Blizzard was perhaps a little pessimistic in their expectations for World of Warcraft, I don't think I can blame them.
What does "politically motivated" mean anymore? It's supposed to imply a weak, unsubstantiated allegation, but you admit she had "excellent arguments and ample evidence".
You drew that implication. And it is an implication, not what the phrase means. What the phrase means is simply that the motivation was political -- gee, go figure. I believe the correct implication to draw is that it was not for an altruistic reason that these arguments were brought up. It was not for the good of the people, or because it was the "right thing to do". And if these facts had been discovered about someone who was in favour, then the facts would've been conveniently ignored.
So yes, politically motivated has meaning, though it's more of a comment on the arguer than the argument.
It's not entirely open source, although you're right that it's not a mess at all (which is why I said 'if').
I was just pointing out that users don't *care* what the code looks like if the resulting software gets the job done, and likewise don't care how nice the code is if the software doesn't do everything they want. I develop software for a living, so I know this is true.
I mean, the government put the pavement under his tires, too...
This is one of the things that really gets on my nerves. The government is not supposed to be like some company that demands reimbursement for providing a service to you. The government is you. They didn't pay for the roads. You paid for the roads, with your taxes. The government is simply your agent. You elect them, you fund them, they work for you. Somewhere along the line, this has been forgotten, and the government now acts just like a corporation, and exploits the public just like the corporations do. "What can I get away with today?" seems to be the mentality.
It's not the government's right to do anything unless it's doing it on behalf of the majority of the people. Only in a few very rare cases should it be allowed to do otherwise, and only when it needs to protect the public from themselves. It should only go so far.
I think Apple's products are third rate. OS/X only LOOKS like a powerful mature operating system. On the inside it's as ugly and kludgy as linux.
Yeah, because I care about what's inside. It works great, it looks great, it's easy to configure, it runs reasonably fast, it has few known security problems, let me just throw it all away if the code is a mess of kludgyness.
Last I checked, that's something Apple programmers have to deal with, not me. Even if it were entirely open source, I still wouldn't care.
Uh, hate to break it to you, but those trees are much better than anything you'll see in World of Warcraft. In fact, most of the graphics in World of Warcraft wouldn't be any good at all if they hadn't slapped a slick-looking specular highlight shader onto most of the textures. That's basically the only difference graphically between WoW and Wish, and it's why Wish graphics look so flat in comparison.
WoW is blowing away everything else because the gameplay kicks fucking ass, not because of its graphics.
Dude, learn some fucking reading comprehension. I may not agree with what he said, but you weren't attacking that, you were attacking some bastardized parallel-universe version that exists only in your head. What you quoted and what you replied are completely disjoint and make no sense together.
Your post had an overall message that went something like this:
Listen, 2 + 2 = 5, okay?
What? Everyone knows that apples and oranges are different, and yet you claim that they rain from the sky? What is wrong with you?
Ah, I see. You're living in idealism world. It's a lovely place. Unfortunately, for various reasons both just and unjust, the real world does not work that way. If you expect that all people must help those in more need than themselves (which on its face certainly seems like a very enlightened view), the result is communism. Wonderful in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. People are still very much base animals in some ways, and require direct positive feedback regarding their choices and actions. Communism provides no mechanism for this -- in fact, specifically rewarding any one person for anything is entirely contrary to the whole goal of equality for the masses. Once people refuse to participate in it, the system will break down.
Is it fair that the tsunami killed all those people and destroyed so much? No, of course not. Is it fair that the people who weren't hit by the tsunami should be obligated to suffer as well, even something as small as not buying that next video game? Not unless you truly believe that the world should be communist. Generosity is about sending a gift of your own free will, not doing so because you feel obligated to. Life's not fair... but that's life, and that's how it is.
Do you have a credit card? I'm just curious, because you seem to have some fundamental misconception on how they work. They're not magical-money-cards (even though some people treat them like they are). Just because you have a credit card does not mean you can spend money on it willy-nilly. You are still subject to the normal budgetary constraints in your life. Just because these people are paying $15/month for a game, doesn't mean they can afford even another $1 as a donation. Maybe they can cancel their subscription, but that's pretty idealistic if you expect anyone to actually do that.
Perhaps I misunderstood you, and you're referring to the people who are buying the 'gold' who could make the donation directly. If that's what you're suggesting, then you've missed the point: the people who are buying the gold aren't doing it as a disaster relief effort. They're simply BUYING the gold. They're paying real money, and they want gold for their character. It's a simple business deal. The people doing the donation are the people who are giving their in-game gold, for free, no strings attached, so this guy can sell it and get real money to donate. The people buying the gold probably couldn't care less where the money is going, besides out of their pocket.
Welcome to bizzaro-world. Nintendo is the one console I've seen where non-franchise games seem to do well. I Ninja, Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, P.N.03, and Tales of Symphonia are the majority of the games I've played on my GameCube lately, and they're all non-franchise as far as I can see. Compare this to Playstation 2, for example, where the games of choice at the moment are TOCA 2, Gran Turismo 4, Grand Theft Auto 3 San Andreas, Star Ocean 3, and Elder Scrolls 3, Final Fantasy 12... Maybe that's just me, but franchises certainly aren't what I was thinking about when I bought a GameCube.
If anyone needs to invest in non-franchise games, it's the other two consoles. Hell, even the non-sequels that show up on Playstation 2 and X-Box seem to mostly be things like movie franchises. Ugh.
B.S. Aside from Steam which is nearly universally reviled, the game had a much-vaunted physics engine that turned out to be only a hair better than what Deus Ex had several years ago, the story was trite and unexplained, the game was short, the puzzles would barely challenge a retarded monkey, the AI was abysmal and insulting especially in comparison to the original Half-life, and although the graphics were reasonably good, they were still a step below Doom 3 and certainly not worthy of excessive praise.
The game brought nothing new to the table, it overhyped and underdelivered (late, might I add)
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1. Powerlevel a character to very high level, kill monsters, collect loot, sell loot. They may target specific, high-profit monsters, or they may just slaughter everything in a lower level area.
2. Uh, the whole concept of "player economy" is based on trading items for gold and gold for items. Mugging is a problem in real life, but we still need to be able to transfer money to one another.
3. The killing of monsters and collecting of loot is done by the bot.
In some games, tradeskills like fishing are just as good or better than killing monsters, so the farmers do that instead, but the idea is the same.
I agree that he'll be fine whichever he chooses, but your statement that they are all more or less the same in terms of security is very wrong. OpenBSD is not the same as the other BSD's in terms of security. It really, really isn't. If you think so, you're naive. The entire development process revolves around security; code is audited, settings and defaults are carefully crafted. OpenBSD did not start simply because they wanted to include one piece of software and FreeBSD wanted to include another. The whole purpose of OpenBSD is to be the most secure OS on the planet.
To suggest there is no difference is not only untrue, but vaguely insulting to the project.
I don't think aging has much to do with it. As I recall, most of the surface components are replaced after each mission and everything is thoroughly inspected for defects/weaknesses.
My question would be whether the replacement tiles are actually new, or whether they've just been sitting in a warehouse for 40 years like most of the other shuttle spare parts.
The foam issue is something NASA had known about for a while before the Columbia disaster, they just hadn't taken it seriously enough. Kind of the same thing as what happened with Challenger where they knew about the o-ring issue but didn't take it seriously enough either.
It's easy to say in hindsight that they didn't take it seriously enough. But in reality, it's hard to tell which things need to be taken seriously and which are trivial. And you can't just assume everything is serious -- if you take everything seriously, you're never going to get *anything* done. NASA is and always was way, way, way on the 'better safe than sorry' end of the spectrum, even at the time of the O-ring and foam problems. But they have to draw the line at some point, due to the law of diminishing returns. I think they've gone beyond that line in the aftermath of Columbia, personally.
That's exactly what FFXI did.
Now, let's see, how popular was that system? Widely criticised by players and reviewers alike. Criticised in this very thread, even. Would I have played WoW nearly as religiously if not for the fact that my friends have been joining the server I am on? No.
I played FFXI. I found it exceedingly drab without my friends. Especially given how ridiculously focused on grouping that game became above level 10-15. I want to group with my friends, not some random group of people which is likely to contain at least one idiot who gets us killed numerous times. Even after I could afford to buy world passes (one is not so expensive. buying 10 starts to hurt pretty quickly) my friends didn't want to leave the characters they had been mucking about on and start again at level 1.
WoW is a breath of fresh air. My friends and I are forming a guild. We group *all the time* even though we don't really need to, we help each other out with quests. It's fantastic. I'll take the lag and moderate downtime gladly as long as they don't fuck around with my social circle.
Just because the company says "We own all this, btw." doesn't make it true or enforcable. If a snow machine leasing company said "All snow created by this machine is our property and must be returned to us at the termination of your lease" there's very little chance it would stand up in court (well, maybe in American courts lately...) no matter how many EULAs they made you sign. There is intentionally a legal divide between the item itself, and anything it is used to create. Black and Decker cannot claim to have any rights to your spice rack you made with their saws and drills, nor can the lumber company you bought the wood from.
It's a little fuzzier in the IP arena right now, but it probably shouldn't be, in my opinion. It's the same deal.
That works with FFXI because of the world pass system, but it doesn't work in WoW, because people will (surprise surprise) join the server their friends are on. Unfortunately, this results in a clustering of players on a bunch of particularly popular servers. The rest of the servers are running just fine, like mine for example. Adding more won't solve the problem instantly (much to Blizzard's dismay, I'm sure). What I think they underestimated was the social factor. Never before have I played a MMORPG where I felt the need to go recruit my friends, even non-gamer friends. But this game is just so enjoyable that it makes me feel like everyone would enjoy it, so I go and try to convince them to join. ahem, I am not an astroturfer even if that sounded like it... :P
But anyway there is no easy solution to this. The only immediate solution is either a gargantuan upgrade of the servers, or asking/requiring people to migrate to new and underpopulated servers (preferably bringing their characters as well)
It's just amazing that they don't forsee the ammount of people. Especially right at launch and the months surrounding when you have most people logging on.
Dude, they have 88 servers. I mean, they were expecting success, sure. But they've sold more copies of the game in the last month than FFXI (as a random example I know the number for) has subscribers.
Besides, even if they believed WoW would be very successful, they can't just assume "Woohoo, my MMORPG entry into the already saturated market will be a wild success! I'm gonna take out a loan and buy $50 million worth of datacenter equipment to host 20,000 servers!" and many MMORPG businesses have been nearly if not entirely bankrupted in the recent past for taking that line of thinking. Blizzard was perhaps a little pessimistic in their expectations for World of Warcraft, I don't think I can blame them.
MMORPG's and Burnout and FPS's??? That's all we're left with?
If you stick to mainstream (ie console) gaming, yes.
Darn it - I want a new x-com or MOO or MOO2 (and not that abortion MOO3 either)
Seconded. (and MOO3 left me feeling like a good friend had stabbed me in the back)
What does "politically motivated" mean anymore? It's supposed to imply a weak, unsubstantiated allegation, but you admit she had "excellent arguments and ample evidence".
You drew that implication. And it is an implication, not what the phrase means. What the phrase means is simply that the motivation was political -- gee, go figure. I believe the correct implication to draw is that it was not for an altruistic reason that these arguments were brought up. It was not for the good of the people, or because it was the "right thing to do". And if these facts had been discovered about someone who was in favour, then the facts would've been conveniently ignored.
So yes, politically motivated has meaning, though it's more of a comment on the arguer than the argument.
Psst, the google toolbar already donates your free CPU cycles.
What precisely does a mechanical cantilever have to do with using muscle tissue to operate microscopic machines?
"This work is not entirely new, you know. Once, there was this guy who invented the wheel..."
What a silly thing to say, honestly. It's not entirely new, nothing is, but it's close enough to fall into my definition of new.
It never ceases to amaze me how small a part the 'Autos' actually play in Grand Theft Auto. ;)
It's not entirely open source, although you're right that it's not a mess at all (which is why I said 'if').
I was just pointing out that users don't *care* what the code looks like if the resulting software gets the job done, and likewise don't care how nice the code is if the software doesn't do everything they want. I develop software for a living, so I know this is true.
I mean, the government put the pavement under his tires, too...
This is one of the things that really gets on my nerves. The government is not supposed to be like some company that demands reimbursement for providing a service to you. The government is you. They didn't pay for the roads. You paid for the roads, with your taxes. The government is simply your agent. You elect them, you fund them, they work for you. Somewhere along the line, this has been forgotten, and the government now acts just like a corporation, and exploits the public just like the corporations do. "What can I get away with today?" seems to be the mentality.
It's not the government's right to do anything unless it's doing it on behalf of the majority of the people. Only in a few very rare cases should it be allowed to do otherwise, and only when it needs to protect the public from themselves. It should only go so far.
I think Apple's products are third rate. OS/X only LOOKS like a powerful mature operating system. On the inside it's as ugly and kludgy as linux.
Yeah, because I care about what's inside. It works great, it looks great, it's easy to configure, it runs reasonably fast, it has few known security problems, let me just throw it all away if the code is a mess of kludgyness.
Last I checked, that's something Apple programmers have to deal with, not me. Even if it were entirely open source, I still wouldn't care.
I left it to spin and after about 5 minutes it came up, complete with images. So it wasn't down. Just bandwidth saturation, by the looks of it.
Videogames can make anything fun.
We're talking about EA here.
Uh, hate to break it to you, but those trees are much better than anything you'll see in World of Warcraft. In fact, most of the graphics in World of Warcraft wouldn't be any good at all if they hadn't slapped a slick-looking specular highlight shader onto most of the textures. That's basically the only difference graphically between WoW and Wish, and it's why Wish graphics look so flat in comparison.
WoW is blowing away everything else because the gameplay kicks fucking ass, not because of its graphics.
Dude, learn some fucking reading comprehension. I may not agree with what he said, but you weren't attacking that, you were attacking some bastardized parallel-universe version that exists only in your head. What you quoted and what you replied are completely disjoint and make no sense together.
Your post had an overall message that went something like this:
Listen, 2 + 2 = 5, okay?
What? Everyone knows that apples and oranges are different, and yet you claim that they rain from the sky? What is wrong with you?
*awaits justifications and explanations of why this is nothing like Microsoft*
Ok, here you go.
This is: "Oh no, my little brother in his restricted account could gain access to the administrator account"
Microsoft is: "Oh no, some hax0r in Brazil with no account could gain access to the administrator account"
Ah, I see. You're living in idealism world. It's a lovely place. Unfortunately, for various reasons both just and unjust, the real world does not work that way. If you expect that all people must help those in more need than themselves (which on its face certainly seems like a very enlightened view), the result is communism. Wonderful in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. People are still very much base animals in some ways, and require direct positive feedback regarding their choices and actions. Communism provides no mechanism for this -- in fact, specifically rewarding any one person for anything is entirely contrary to the whole goal of equality for the masses. Once people refuse to participate in it, the system will break down.
Is it fair that the tsunami killed all those people and destroyed so much? No, of course not. Is it fair that the people who weren't hit by the tsunami should be obligated to suffer as well, even something as small as not buying that next video game? Not unless you truly believe that the world should be communist. Generosity is about sending a gift of your own free will, not doing so because you feel obligated to. Life's not fair... but that's life, and that's how it is.
Do you have a credit card? I'm just curious, because you seem to have some fundamental misconception on how they work. They're not magical-money-cards (even though some people treat them like they are). Just because you have a credit card does not mean you can spend money on it willy-nilly. You are still subject to the normal budgetary constraints in your life. Just because these people are paying $15/month for a game, doesn't mean they can afford even another $1 as a donation. Maybe they can cancel their subscription, but that's pretty idealistic if you expect anyone to actually do that.
Perhaps I misunderstood you, and you're referring to the people who are buying the 'gold' who could make the donation directly. If that's what you're suggesting, then you've missed the point: the people who are buying the gold aren't doing it as a disaster relief effort. They're simply BUYING the gold. They're paying real money, and they want gold for their character. It's a simple business deal. The people doing the donation are the people who are giving their in-game gold, for free, no strings attached, so this guy can sell it and get real money to donate. The people buying the gold probably couldn't care less where the money is going, besides out of their pocket.
Welcome to bizzaro-world. Nintendo is the one console I've seen where non-franchise games seem to do well. I Ninja, Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, P.N.03, and Tales of Symphonia are the majority of the games I've played on my GameCube lately, and they're all non-franchise as far as I can see. Compare this to Playstation 2, for example, where the games of choice at the moment are TOCA 2, Gran Turismo 4, Grand Theft Auto 3 San Andreas, Star Ocean 3, and Elder Scrolls 3, Final Fantasy 12... Maybe that's just me, but franchises certainly aren't what I was thinking about when I bought a GameCube.
If anyone needs to invest in non-franchise games, it's the other two consoles. Hell, even the non-sequels that show up on Playstation 2 and X-Box seem to mostly be things like movie franchises. Ugh.
No running out the convenience store for a gallon of milk in that car.
Sounds like that'd probably be a good thing in the long run.
B.S. Aside from Steam which is nearly universally reviled, the game had a much-vaunted physics engine that turned out to be only a hair better than what Deus Ex had several years ago, the story was trite and unexplained, the game was short, the puzzles would barely challenge a retarded monkey, the AI was abysmal and insulting especially in comparison to the original Half-life, and although the graphics were reasonably good, they were still a step below Doom 3 and certainly not worthy of excessive praise.
The game brought nothing new to the table, it overhyped and underdelivered (late, might I add)