Before my easy answer, a not so easy question. How much is your time worth if you were doing contract programming in general? If you have no idea, and you're relatively inexperienced, $25 might be a good place to start.
The easy answer is you should charge $25 an hour for any time spent on implementing features, bug fixes, and changed, that this company requests. This is a job, it's irrelevant whether you would have done the work anyway.
Of course if they ask you to do something that is company specific, or doesn't make sense for the project as a whole, you should probably not put that in the main open source project.
Outside of your job, you can continue to do open source programming, on this project, or on any other.
I think it's great a company wants to pay you to make specific improvements to open source software. I think it's great that an open source programmer is going to make some money through open source.
You should be able to deal with a lot of your scalability issues by putting some kind of cache in front of your system, like Squid.
But it sounds like every page on your site is really dynamic. And thus uncachable.oy
But you want to replace it with a mostly static site, so obviously, not all that dynamic stuff is required.
Before you chuck the baby out with the bathwater:
- Can you revise your existing java site to serve most pages as essentially static?
- If so, will putting some cheap squid cache boxes in front of your main servers do the trick?
The only reason this article is newsworthy is because of Dot Bomb flashback syndrome. We'd all like to live in the magical world where employers spend tonnes on us because we're so damned valuable. The article seems to suggest it's cost effective to spend a lot of money to get the 99.9th percentile of coder, but is it really? Are you really just getting the 85% percentile of coder, but calling them the 99.9th percent to foster a sense of l33tness?
I mean it's a nice office and all, but this isn't really news. It's one guy who made a cool office.
Not much chance any of us will be getting cool offices any time soon.
- CDs are much slower than hard disks. Today's games push system specs and speed. This would make the game slower. - Because people like to multitask. The trend is towards letting people check their IMs/e-mail, without having to quit their games. Everquest for example used to disallow swapping out on purpose. A client hack came out to let you swap out and run in a window, EQ responded by adding functionality to let you swap out and run in a window. Do what your clients want. - Because no one else does. Introducing a new gaming concept like "reboot your PC to play my game" is screaming make-reviewers-diss-my-game or confuse-customers. For many not-computer-savy people introducing any new system can be confusing to them. What about the people who don't know how to set up their CMOS to boot off a CD? What about people who leave the CD in the drive and then their grandmother wants to check her e-mail, but she can't, and she keeps getting this game when she reboots.
This could be fun for a geeky gamer company though, that doesn't care about making a game that's truly competitive in the cut throat games market. Perhaps the next version of Tux Racer could try this.
Anecdotal claims are that the 1.25Ghz G4 15" runs cooler than the 1.0Ghz G4 (new motorola chip, smaller fab). This would suggest that the 1Ghz G4 12" would run cooler than the 867Mhz 12"
I'm really not impressed with this lawsuit. White wolf has built their products on the mythos and stories that came before them. Anyone who's played Vampire and read Anne Rice will see striking similarities there.
I'm glad Dugeons and Dragons didn't sue Lord of the Rings when that movie came out. Oh wait, sorry, Dungeons and Dragons is a huge rip off of Lord of the Rings. My mistake.
To wax geek for a moment, this seems kind of like the movie equivalent of a one-click-shopping lawsuit.
Anyway, my overall prediction is no money will be paid out, White Wolf is just doing this for publicity. Whatever. Glad I stopped playing their games.
This is the second time White Wolf has pissed me off, the first time being their desertion of Ars Magica after stealing part of its mythos and inserting it in their World of Darkness games.
Modern P2P clients rely on hashes for efficiency. For example, the EDonkey network (see EMule for an open souce spyware free client) allows you to download from multiple clients simultaneously, it's a lot like bittorrent. Changing the MD5 checksum would make these networks less efficient.
It's mainly a PR thing I think. It's to combat the idea of the innocent college kid who doesn't really know what the hell he's doing, and suddenly he's in court.
"This is not an innocent college kid", the RIAA will say. "Check out these MD5 hashes. This kid has been downloading music from pirate Web sites, and illegal services like Napster, for 3 years."
"There is no way to measure the number of illegal music files this crimelord has distributed. We estimate our economic damages from him personally at 3.2 billion dollars. Just look at these hashes you're honor, they're scientifilicious. This one dates back to the stone age, proving our theory that people can steal music before they are born."
It is generally believed amongst file traders that it is legal to download an mp3 for a song, when you own the CD. In other words, you don't need to rip and encode songs from your own CD. However, this may not be true (I am not a lawyer).
The RIAA is using MD5 hashes as a basis for proof that the individual in question downloaded the files they are sharing, instead of ripping them from their own CD collection. This is supposed to show the individual is a willing participant in stealing and distributing music, instead of someone who is just sharing what they already own. But, see above.
I think this is mostly just a FUD tactic. They can talk to the media about how their MD5 hashes prove so-and-so is a big mean pirate hacker. MD5 hash certainly sounds scary, especially when the technology is described by the media as a tool used by hackers.
Get a masters in CS and take professional writing courses.
That sounds like a nice basis for a serious career technical writing, I really think it will serve you better than a masters in professional writing. You will be in a great position to apply for serious positions at egghead companies that are willing to pay well.
I'm actually a PS2 gamecube owner, not a fan of the x box!
For a corporate environment, I think gamecube is really not a good idea, it is after all a wimpy kids console. Are the games kick ass and fun? Hot damn yes. But, that's how it's perceived.
I do think the PS2 has overall better games than the X-Box but I think the X-box has enough good games to keep a corporate game room well stocked. I think that Halo is in itself a good enough reason to make it the official console of your corporate game room. X-box does have better eye candy also (slightly, but it is better) which goes nicely with the big TVs.
I would recommend going with consoles over PCs. They are more personable. The games are easier, and more suited to short gaming breaks. They're also more personable, everyone can see what you're playing. As a bonus, it is unlikely anyone will surf for porn on your 36" TVs.
Make sure you have at least one big-ass TV. After that you can put in somewhat smaller TVs.
For chairs - go with couches and lounge chairs. Think comfee. At the same time make it clear this is not a junk room.
For game management, buy a few CD binders, have a physical sign out list. This will stop the games from walking.
Set an initial game purchasing budget of how many dollars, then have a monthly budget for continual purchasing of new games. Allow interested employees to submit requests to whomever is in charge of game purchasing.
Online play is certainly possible but I don't see any need for it, this is for your employees playing together and having fun. I'm pretty sure you can netowork X-boxes and have massive Halo tournements without going online.
In terms of what platform, I would recommend you choose either PS2 or X-Box. There isn't really a need for multiple platforms. This isn't supposed to be the room where people get to play specific titles for specific platforms, this is the games room. The X-Box for example has lots of great games, it should be fine if you go with all X-boxes. Because of Halo, I think this may be the best choice.
There are so many things that keep players interested in playing MMORPGs, I'll start with the cooler ones and work back to the basics:
1. An evolving epic story line: The assumption that MMORPGs are static is terribly flawed. There is no reason for MMORPGs to be static. A successful MMORPG will generate huge revenue, and some of this revenue should be employed for continual content production. In general this has failed in the marketplace, because of a lack of workable tools for content production, and a quality content production process. Consider if you will if you got three of the best sci fi or fantasy novelists working for your MMORPG company. Give each of these novelists a team of 10 workers and powerful content creation tools. Proceed with a plan of monthly, or even weekly, or evey daily launches of updated content. You will find no lack of subscribers eager to receive, digest, and interact with this content. It's easy to ignore this simple, yet exceptional truth, because the quality of content production in MMORPGs to date has been so poor.
2. A player involved story line: this is a corollary to the previous point. Rather than setting forth and implementing a story line that is completely planned and static, leave the option open for player interaction. Perhaps there is a war between two gods, one will win one will die, and the outcome will depend on a server basis on what the players do. What god do they support? The result - a unique permanent change to the game world that distinguishes it from others. An accomplishment that individual players can relate to, "I helped the blood god defeat the maiden of tears, and now the desert of Sune lives in eternal darkness". You of course have to be careful about what effects you put in, but in general players will be excited by anything that is measurable and permanent that they have an opportunity to contribute to.
Ok now for the really boring ones.
3. Sword of N+1
This simple tactic is used constantly. All playes strive for the magic long sword +N. But, 6 months later, there is a sword of N+1. This is a surprisingly effective tactic.
4. Social networks
The best way to keep your players is for them to develop social networks that keep them playing. The killer app of MMORPGs is the friends they meet and adventure with.
Sontag: We own all the files of this code with the complete development tree all the way back to the original 1969 version. We have researched all the tapes and all versions of the code. The code in question comes the exact version of the Unix System V code that we licenced in our contract to SGI. This version was available to SGI and was never in BSD or other releases. And the to-the-letter copy of this code is in Linux. We are raising awareness about such flagrant violations.
This seems to be possibly the most useful assertion SCO has made. I think there is general agreement that if a person introduces code into the GPL, but does not hold the copyright on that code, that that code is not actually covered by the GPL. Instead, it is covered by copyright law.
I don't think it's likely that SCO can prove that all the code from System V that was licensed under the BSD license was in fact owned by SCO and not licensed under BSD by SCO. However, if they can prove this, it would seem that they would in fact own the code, as the BSD license would not be valid.
FAQs are primarly useful in static quests, quests where you need to find 11 items in 7 zones dropped by 14 creatures. You can follow them like an instruction manual, bam.
This isn't necessarily a problem, the original questers have fun solving the quest before it's spoiled. Many people (myself included) enjoy completing quests without the slightest application of ingenuity. At that point the quest becomes a simple timesink with a rewards, but the reward is still fun.
You can make quests more dynamic by having more variable quest components. Instead of needing Harpy's Feathers and Eye of Newt for the quest potion, why not pick one item from quest item group A, and one item from quest item group B. At this point we're getting more into the area of automagically generated quests, which are cool.
I think there is also value in fixed rewards for variable quests though. Quests can become part of community understanding, which increases their value. For example, the epic quests in Everquest, for cool class specific items. Take one of those quests, make 25% of the content more dynamic, you'll have more interesting quests.
But keep in mind not everyone likes quests. You will soon have players complaing about "stupid quests" or "boring quests" or even "broken" (I can't solve it) "quests" if their real advancement is held up by a dynamic quest made just for them.
Interesting article, but I think they're kind of missing the point. People aren't forced on the leveling treadmill, they jump on voluntarily. People hop on the leveling treadmill because they want more power, for its own sake or for the social status that comes with leveling.
It's possible to level by constantly facing new opponents, taking on the most challenging opponents available, and trying new things.
It's generally more efficient to go to a place that is "good" for your character to level. It's often more efficient to face weaker opponents, because it adds consistency to your hunting experience. Consistency is what allows you to play for eight hours straight, with a group of less than competant adventuring mates, while watching TV. It's less fun, it's less challenging, it's slower, but at the end of the day you're higher level and that's what counts, not whether you "had fun" along the way.
People complain about the leveling treadmill because they find it boring (it's still fun because leveling is constantly reaching goals, and every goal reached is fun). Sometimes people don't know what they really want though. It's easy to go completely off track in responding to these complaints. Lets look at what people really want:
- They want to be able to gain power consistently, constantly reaching short term goals - They want to be able to come home from work, tired, play for a few hours, and reach some goals - They want this entire experience to be easy
You can make this process as interactive, and fun, and mission based, and private dungeoned as you want, but it will still end up being a leveling treadmill of some sort. People are going to skip and ignore your NPC text, power through your dungeon to save the princess to go on to the next quest, do whatever they can to 'ding' as soon as possible. The fundamental goal is to gain power, over their peers, more quickly, and everything else is gravy.
That is fine though, I think we can make better MMORPGs with less repetitive leveling treadmills. Make people experience different content to level, literally force them. They may not care, they may not appreciate, they may even complain (don't fall into the trap of making this new content "hard" they still want "easy"), but at the end of the day they may have more fun.
Nintendo has improved things so much since the N64. The Gamecube is a really great machine, with a set of killer gamecube specific titles (already mentioned in this thread), that cause people to buy gamecubes just so they can play those titles. I know I did.
However, Sony got so much market share with the PS1, back when all the other console manufacturers had their heads far up their asses, that it's pretty hard to come back and gain ground. Still, I'm sure they have, compare the market share of the N64 to the PS1, and I think you'll see the Gamecube is doing a lot better.
The GBA and the level of integration they offer with it is exceptional. The new Playstation hand held is Sony trying to copy them, and I'm sure it's going to kick ass (I have a PS2 and I'll buy one of the Sony handhelds for sure). None the less I'm already convinced that my Gameboy Advance SP is going to remain my favorite hand held console. I don't need a killer CPU, and larger screen, for my portable player. I don't need portable movies and music (esp. since DRM will make sure I have to pay $15-30 for each disk). I need something small, sexy, long battery life, with great games - that's the gameboy advance SP.
The GBA SP is great also because it plays Gameboy Color and Gameboy games as well. Very smart. Gameboy Player lets you play all those on your TV (Great purchase, strong incentive to buy a cube, GBA games are great and are great to play on a TV. Friends have come over to my house and spent 60+ hours playing Golden Sun on my gameboy player). Unfortunately everything from the N64 and back is lost, but I'm sure the next edition of the GameCube will support GameCube games. Nintendo has recognized how great for Sony it has been that the PS2 plays PS1 games (I love that I can play dance dance revolution PS1 games on my PS2, plus super puzzle fighter).
The one area Nintendo does seem to still mess up on, is their high licensing fees, which discourage development by destroying profit for game makers. I don't know why Nintendo doesn't wake up and halve those. It would work great, games would drop $5 and developer profits would increase $5. Customers and developers both happier, more units sold, maybe less money for Nintendo in the short term but a better chance for market share growth.
The gamecube is the fun family console. If I was buying one console system for my 12-or-under kids I would buy a gamecube probably. They're also a great secondary console for houses that already have a PS2 or XBox and want to get in on Nintendo games. With Cubes being cheap and coming bundled often with killer games like Metroid Prime, Gamecube is in a great position to be that second console. I'm pretty sure that's where the future of the gamecube really lies, being the second console for grownups, and the first console for kids. They won't beat Sony any time soon, but hopefully they'll obtain a growing market share.
Like many geeks I'm interested in getting some kind of component PC to handle my audio and video. This product is interesting, but it doesn't quite provide what's needed (which doesn't detract from the product, just means it doesn't meet my needs).
I'm looking for a component PC that:
- runs linux (not some customized version, just regular debian)
- has audio and svideo in/out
- has cute little component system type nobs and a remote
- plays my mp3 collection and can be controlled by the remote
- plays my video collection and can be controlled by the remote
- can record video to the hard disk like a PVR or ideally a TiVo (ideally with an mpeg4 encoder built in)
I think we're close but I haven't seen something that quite does this. In particular I think the missing component is runs debian and integrates with remote. This may seem a bit weird but, besides all the audio and video stuff, I expect to do a lot more with my linux PC and I don't want to be stuck with non-debian linux.
But 802.11g is useless for gaming. 802.11b is already much faster than a broadband Internet connection, so what is all that bandwidth for?
Only theoretical use I can see is for people running Linux on their X-bosen. Oh yeah, and selling to dumbasses. I guess this won't be the last higher priced pointless 802.11g item we'll see on the market.
As previously discussed, this does not allow you to maintain state if the user leaves and subsequently returns to your site.
It also disallows web caches like SQUID which are used to improve performance. Your cookieless session manager dies the second anyone follows a static link that does not include the session ID encoded into the URL. This is not an issue for small sites, but for large sites it is.
I prefer to let my customers surf the way they want to, without the inconvenience of restarting their session from scratch.
I prefer to not buy more web servers because I can't use a web cache, or provide my surfers with a slower web surfing experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Before my easy answer, a not so easy question. How much is your time worth if you were doing contract programming in general? If you have no idea, and you're relatively inexperienced, $25 might be a good place to start.
The easy answer is you should charge $25 an hour for any time spent on implementing features, bug fixes, and changed, that this company requests. This is a job, it's irrelevant whether you would have done the work anyway.
Of course if they ask you to do something that is company specific, or doesn't make sense for the project as a whole, you should probably not put that in the main open source project.
Outside of your job, you can continue to do open source programming, on this project, or on any other.
I think it's great a company wants to pay you to make specific improvements to open source software. I think it's great that an open source programmer is going to make some money through open source.
You should be able to deal with a lot of your scalability issues by putting some kind of cache in front of your system, like Squid.
But it sounds like every page on your site is really dynamic. And thus uncachable.oy
But you want to replace it with a mostly static site, so obviously, not all that dynamic stuff is required.
Before you chuck the baby out with the bathwater:
- Can you revise your existing java site to serve most pages as essentially static?
- If so, will putting some cheap squid cache boxes in front of your main servers do the trick?
This technique really works, if you can do it.
The only reason this article is newsworthy is because of Dot Bomb flashback syndrome. We'd all like to live in the magical world where employers spend tonnes on us because we're so damned valuable. The article seems to suggest it's cost effective to spend a lot of money to get the 99.9th percentile of coder, but is it really? Are you really just getting the 85% percentile of coder, but calling them the 99.9th percent to foster a sense of l33tness?
I mean it's a nice office and all, but this isn't really news. It's one guy who made a cool office.
Not much chance any of us will be getting cool offices any time soon.
- CDs are much slower than hard disks. Today's games push system specs and speed. This would make the game slower.
- Because people like to multitask. The trend is towards letting people check their IMs/e-mail, without having to quit their games. Everquest for example used to disallow swapping out on purpose. A client hack came out to let you swap out and run in a window, EQ responded by adding functionality to let you swap out and run in a window. Do what your clients want.
- Because no one else does. Introducing a new gaming concept like "reboot your PC to play my game" is screaming make-reviewers-diss-my-game or confuse-customers. For many not-computer-savy people introducing any new system can be confusing to them. What about the people who don't know how to set up their CMOS to boot off a CD? What about people who leave the CD in the drive and then their grandmother wants to check her e-mail, but she can't, and she keeps getting this game when she reboots.
This could be fun for a geeky gamer company though, that doesn't care about making a game that's truly competitive in the cut throat games market. Perhaps the next version of Tux Racer could try this.
The new 12" is not out yet.
Anecdotal claims are that the 1.25Ghz G4 15" runs cooler than the 1.0Ghz G4 (new motorola chip, smaller fab). This would suggest that the 1Ghz G4 12" would run cooler than the 867Mhz 12"
I'm really not impressed with this lawsuit. White wolf has built their products on the mythos and stories that came before them. Anyone who's played Vampire and read Anne Rice will see striking similarities there.
I'm glad Dugeons and Dragons didn't sue Lord of the Rings when that movie came out. Oh wait, sorry, Dungeons and Dragons is a huge rip off of Lord of the Rings. My mistake.
To wax geek for a moment, this seems kind of like the movie equivalent of a one-click-shopping lawsuit.
Anyway, my overall prediction is no money will be paid out, White Wolf is just doing this for publicity. Whatever. Glad I stopped playing their games.
This is the second time White Wolf has pissed me off, the first time being their desertion of Ars Magica after stealing part of its mythos and inserting it in their World of Darkness games.
Modern P2P clients rely on hashes for efficiency. For example, the EDonkey network (see EMule for an open souce spyware free client) allows you to download from multiple clients simultaneously, it's a lot like bittorrent. Changing the MD5 checksum would make these networks less efficient.
It's mainly a PR thing I think. It's to combat the idea of the innocent college kid who doesn't really know what the hell he's doing, and suddenly he's in court.
"This is not an innocent college kid", the RIAA will say. "Check out these MD5 hashes. This kid has been downloading music from pirate Web sites, and illegal services like Napster, for 3 years."
"There is no way to measure the number of illegal music files this crimelord has distributed. We estimate our economic damages from him personally at 3.2 billion dollars. Just look at these hashes you're honor, they're scientifilicious. This one dates back to the stone age, proving our theory that people can steal music before they are born."
It is generally believed amongst file traders that it is legal to download an mp3 for a song, when you own the CD. In other words, you don't need to rip and encode songs from your own CD. However, this may not be true (I am not a lawyer).
The RIAA is using MD5 hashes as a basis for proof that the individual in question downloaded the files they are sharing, instead of ripping them from their own CD collection. This is supposed to show the individual is a willing participant in stealing and distributing music, instead of someone who is just sharing what they already own. But, see above.
I think this is mostly just a FUD tactic. They can talk to the media about how their MD5 hashes prove so-and-so is a big mean pirate hacker. MD5 hash certainly sounds scary, especially when the technology is described by the media as a tool used by hackers.
Here is some un-asked for advice.
Get a masters in CS and take professional writing courses.
That sounds like a nice basis for a serious career technical writing, I really think it will serve you better than a masters in professional writing. You will be in a great position to apply for serious positions at egghead companies that are willing to pay well.
I'm actually a PS2 gamecube owner, not a fan of the x box!
For a corporate environment, I think gamecube is really not a good idea, it is after all a wimpy kids console. Are the games kick ass and fun? Hot damn yes. But, that's how it's perceived.
I do think the PS2 has overall better games than the X-Box but I think the X-box has enough good games to keep a corporate game room well stocked. I think that Halo is in itself a good enough reason to make it the official console of your corporate game room. X-box does have better eye candy also (slightly, but it is better) which goes nicely with the big TVs.
But by all means, PS2 is also a fine choice.
I would recommend going with consoles over PCs. They are more personable. The games are easier, and more suited to short gaming breaks. They're also more personable, everyone can see what you're playing. As a bonus, it is unlikely anyone will surf for porn on your 36" TVs.
Make sure you have at least one big-ass TV. After that you can put in somewhat smaller TVs.
For chairs - go with couches and lounge chairs. Think comfee. At the same time make it clear this is not a junk room.
For game management, buy a few CD binders, have a physical sign out list. This will stop the games from walking.
Set an initial game purchasing budget of how many dollars, then have a monthly budget for continual purchasing of new games. Allow interested employees to submit requests to whomever is in charge of game purchasing.
Online play is certainly possible but I don't see any need for it, this is for your employees playing together and having fun. I'm pretty sure you can netowork X-boxes and have massive Halo tournements without going online.
In terms of what platform, I would recommend you choose either PS2 or X-Box. There isn't really a need for multiple platforms. This isn't supposed to be the room where people get to play specific titles for specific platforms, this is the games room. The X-Box for example has lots of great games, it should be fine if you go with all X-boxes. Because of Halo, I think this may be the best choice.
There are so many things that keep players interested in playing MMORPGs, I'll start with the cooler ones and work back to the basics:
1. An evolving epic story line: The assumption that MMORPGs are static is terribly flawed. There is no reason for MMORPGs to be static. A successful MMORPG will generate huge revenue, and some of this revenue should be employed for continual content production. In general this has failed in the marketplace, because of a lack of workable tools for content production, and a quality content production process. Consider if you will if you got three of the best sci fi or fantasy novelists working for your MMORPG company. Give each of these novelists a team of 10 workers and powerful content creation tools. Proceed with a plan of monthly, or even weekly, or evey daily launches of updated content. You will find no lack of subscribers eager to receive, digest, and interact with this content. It's easy to ignore this simple, yet exceptional truth, because the quality of content production in MMORPGs to date has been so poor.
2. A player involved story line: this is a corollary to the previous point. Rather than setting forth and implementing a story line that is completely planned and static, leave the option open for player interaction. Perhaps there is a war between two gods, one will win one will die, and the outcome will depend on a server basis on what the players do. What god do they support? The result - a unique permanent change to the game world that distinguishes it from others. An accomplishment that individual players can relate to, "I helped the blood god defeat the maiden of tears, and now the desert of Sune lives in eternal darkness". You of course have to be careful about what effects you put in, but in general players will be excited by anything that is measurable and permanent that they have an opportunity to contribute to.
Ok now for the really boring ones.
3. Sword of N+1
This simple tactic is used constantly. All playes strive for the magic long sword +N. But, 6 months later, there is a sword of N+1. This is a surprisingly effective tactic.
4. Social networks
The best way to keep your players is for them to develop social networks that keep them playing. The killer app of MMORPGs is the friends they meet and adventure with.
Sontag: We own all the files of this code with the complete development tree all the way back to the original 1969 version. We have researched all the tapes and all versions of the code. The code in question comes the exact version of the Unix System V code that we licenced in our contract to SGI. This version was available to SGI and was never in BSD or other releases. And the to-the-letter copy of this code is in Linux. We are raising awareness about such flagrant violations.
This seems to be possibly the most useful assertion SCO has made. I think there is general agreement that if a person introduces code into the GPL, but does not hold the copyright on that code, that that code is not actually covered by the GPL. Instead, it is covered by copyright law.
I don't think it's likely that SCO can prove that all the code from System V that was licensed under the BSD license was in fact owned by SCO and not licensed under BSD by SCO. However, if they can prove this, it would seem that they would in fact own the code, as the BSD license would not be valid.
I bought my GBA so I could get a flash card, and play NES roms. It does that. I'm very happy.
FAQs are primarly useful in static quests, quests where you need to find 11 items in 7 zones dropped by 14 creatures. You can follow them like an instruction manual, bam.
This isn't necessarily a problem, the original questers have fun solving the quest before it's spoiled. Many people (myself included) enjoy completing quests without the slightest application of ingenuity. At that point the quest becomes a simple timesink with a rewards, but the reward is still fun.
You can make quests more dynamic by having more variable quest components. Instead of needing Harpy's Feathers and Eye of Newt for the quest potion, why not pick one item from quest item group A, and one item from quest item group B. At this point we're getting more into the area of automagically generated quests, which are cool.
I think there is also value in fixed rewards for variable quests though. Quests can become part of community understanding, which increases their value. For example, the epic quests in Everquest, for cool class specific items. Take one of those quests, make 25% of the content more dynamic, you'll have more interesting quests.
But keep in mind not everyone likes quests. You will soon have players complaing about "stupid quests" or "boring quests" or even "broken" (I can't solve it) "quests" if their real advancement is held up by a dynamic quest made just for them.
Interesting article, but I think they're kind of missing the point. People aren't forced on the leveling treadmill, they jump on voluntarily. People hop on the leveling treadmill because they want more power, for its own sake or for the social status that comes with leveling.
It's possible to level by constantly facing new opponents, taking on the most challenging opponents available, and trying new things.
It's generally more efficient to go to a place that is "good" for your character to level. It's often more efficient to face weaker opponents, because it adds consistency to your hunting experience. Consistency is what allows you to play for eight hours straight, with a group of less than competant adventuring mates, while watching TV. It's less fun, it's less challenging, it's slower, but at the end of the day you're higher level and that's what counts, not whether you "had fun" along the way.
People complain about the leveling treadmill because they find it boring (it's still fun because leveling is constantly reaching goals, and every goal reached is fun). Sometimes people don't know what they really want though. It's easy to go completely off track in responding to these complaints. Lets look at what people really want:
- They want to be able to gain power consistently, constantly reaching short term goals
- They want to be able to come home from work, tired, play for a few hours, and reach some goals
- They want this entire experience to be easy
You can make this process as interactive, and fun, and mission based, and private dungeoned as you want, but it will still end up being a leveling treadmill of some sort. People are going to skip and ignore your NPC text, power through your dungeon to save the princess to go on to the next quest, do whatever they can to 'ding' as soon as possible. The fundamental goal is to gain power, over their peers, more quickly, and everything else is gravy.
That is fine though, I think we can make better MMORPGs with less repetitive leveling treadmills. Make people experience different content to level, literally force them. They may not care, they may not appreciate, they may even complain (don't fall into the trap of making this new content "hard" they still want "easy"), but at the end of the day they may have more fun.
Nintendo has improved things so much since the N64. The Gamecube is a really great machine, with a set of killer gamecube specific titles (already mentioned in this thread), that cause people to buy gamecubes just so they can play those titles. I know I did.
However, Sony got so much market share with the PS1, back when all the other console manufacturers had their heads far up their asses, that it's pretty hard to come back and gain ground. Still, I'm sure they have, compare the market share of the N64 to the PS1, and I think you'll see the Gamecube is doing a lot better.
The GBA and the level of integration they offer with it is exceptional. The new Playstation hand held is Sony trying to copy them, and I'm sure it's going to kick ass (I have a PS2 and I'll buy one of the Sony handhelds for sure). None the less I'm already convinced that my Gameboy Advance SP is going to remain my favorite hand held console. I don't need a killer CPU, and larger screen, for my portable player. I don't need portable movies and music (esp. since DRM will make sure I have to pay $15-30 for each disk). I need something small, sexy, long battery life, with great games - that's the gameboy advance SP.
The GBA SP is great also because it plays Gameboy Color and Gameboy games as well. Very smart. Gameboy Player lets you play all those on your TV (Great purchase, strong incentive to buy a cube, GBA games are great and are great to play on a TV. Friends have come over to my house and spent 60+ hours playing Golden Sun on my gameboy player). Unfortunately everything from the N64 and back is lost, but I'm sure the next edition of the GameCube will support GameCube games. Nintendo has recognized how great for Sony it has been that the PS2 plays PS1 games (I love that I can play dance dance revolution PS1 games on my PS2, plus super puzzle fighter).
The one area Nintendo does seem to still mess up on, is their high licensing fees, which discourage development by destroying profit for game makers. I don't know why Nintendo doesn't wake up and halve those. It would work great, games would drop $5 and developer profits would increase $5. Customers and developers both happier, more units sold, maybe less money for Nintendo in the short term but a better chance for market share growth.
The gamecube is the fun family console. If I was buying one console system for my 12-or-under kids I would buy a gamecube probably. They're also a great secondary console for houses that already have a PS2 or XBox and want to get in on Nintendo games. With Cubes being cheap and coming bundled often with killer games like Metroid Prime, Gamecube is in a great position to be that second console. I'm pretty sure that's where the future of the gamecube really lies, being the second console for grownups, and the first console for kids. They won't beat Sony any time soon, but hopefully they'll obtain a growing market share.
This device is not just an x86 box it has a number of peripherels:
- LCD display
- remote
- various knobs
Unless these are supported on debian by existing linux multimedia software, it's not that useful.
Like many geeks I'm interested in getting some kind of component PC to handle my audio and video. This product is interesting, but it doesn't quite provide what's needed (which doesn't detract from the product, just means it doesn't meet my needs).
I'm looking for a component PC that:
- runs linux (not some customized version, just regular debian)
- has audio and svideo in/out
- has cute little component system type nobs and a remote
- plays my mp3 collection and can be controlled by the remote
- plays my video collection and can be controlled by the remote
- can record video to the hard disk like a PVR or ideally a TiVo (ideally with an mpeg4 encoder built in)
I think we're close but I haven't seen something that quite does this. In particular I think the missing component is runs debian and integrates with remote. This may seem a bit weird but, besides all the audio and video stuff, I expect to do a lot more with my linux PC and I don't want to be stuck with non-debian linux.
802.11b is fine, sure why not.
But 802.11g is useless for gaming. 802.11b is already much faster than a broadband Internet connection, so what is all that bandwidth for?
Only theoretical use I can see is for people running Linux on their X-bosen. Oh yeah, and selling to dumbasses. I guess this won't be the last higher priced pointless 802.11g item we'll see on the market.
All of us have years of our lives that are gone forever, it's the nature of time.
Your worth as a human being is not measured in how much work you've accomplished at school, work, or otherwise.
You have the rest of your life to do whatever you want, be positive about what you can do for the rest of your life. You can still kick ass.
how can I obtain historical data for research purposes ?
Translation:
How can I build the largest pr0n collectin ever?
As previously discussed, this does not allow you to maintain state if the user leaves and subsequently returns to your site.
It also disallows web caches like SQUID which are used to improve performance. Your cookieless session manager dies the second anyone follows a static link that does not include the session ID encoded into the URL. This is not an issue for small sites, but for large sites it is.
I prefer to let my customers surf the way they want to, without the inconvenience of restarting their session from scratch.
I prefer to not buy more web servers because I can't use a web cache, or provide my surfers with a slower web surfing experience.
I'll keep using cookies.
Cookies can be persistant, enabling you to identify the same user when they leave and later return to your site.
This does not change the fact that the Swedes are dumbasses.