Ultima Online has seen a series of changes, each one lowering the risk/reward ratio. Of course each time that happens, it makes players happy (more loot, no pk's!) but now it's so easy it's boring.
These are some things my girlfriend and I have enjoyed playing together.
If she likes Myst, a natural choice of a game to play together is Uru: Ages Beyond Myst - basically Myst Online. The Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights/etc series is another good place for cooperative play with more action than Myst.
If you're both really patient and like strategy, you could try Master of Orion 3 or Alpha Centauri multiplayer. Be prepared for reaaly long play sessions, though. Starcraft would be a faster play experience. In all of these you can choose to team up or compete, as you please.
Some things that you can't directly play together, but could be a lot of fun to play separately and compare notes / help each other solve are Deus Ex 1 and 2 and any of the Zelda games (but especially the Zeldas for N64 and SNES.) These all include a great mix of action and puzzle solving, but Deus Ex WILL require FPS skillz, even on easy settings. There's also a multiplayer Zelda for GBA, but I haven't tried it.
You will notice there is no moderation choice for "I disagree with this post." Someone obviously feeling a great weight of duty for moderation has forgotten this in regards to my post, that is the parent of this one.
The issue that I have is with the advertisements Slashdot is carrying that promote outsourcing programming overseas. I do not need to argue the point that outsourcing is very adverse to the interests of many Slashdot readers, and so it is my position that Slashdot ought not to carry such advertisement.
This is not directly contained in the content of the article, but the issue is related. Since Slashdot is hardly likely to host a referendum on the issue, a thread concerning the varying fortunes of tech industries in different countries is the most appropriate venue available to air these concerns. I invite anyone who disagrees to argue their case other than through the moderation function.
I think it's highly pertinent that I am reading this post alongside a banner promising advice on outsourcing tech work overseas. I'm not at all opposed to tastefully sized, relevant advertising in web pages. Capitalism is good. However, I feel that carrying this advertisement is a bold betrayal of the Slashdot readership. Granted, there are certainly Slashdot readers in India and such places, but a poll would undoubtedly show most readers hailing from first-world nations and having an ever harder time being employed in their field. Only carrying advertisement from the RIAA or SCO could be more galling, but this is on the same level of offensiveness - and the stakes here are people's lives, not just their operating systems.
Nothing stops you. Many of the richest players in UO got that way from scripting their characters to mine ores 24/7 without player intervention. They then ebay the gold gained from selling the metal. Getting caught running an unattended script means being banned, but these people usually have several accounts and make more than enough to offset an occasional account creation fee.
They're greatly amplifying the strengths of the original Deus Ex. Whereas in the first game you influence whether several characters lived or died at various points and had a choice of three endings in the last level, there really wasn't a lot of freedom to pick your objectives. At about midpoint in the game, the storyline makes you switch sides in the conflict, whether you like it or not.
The second time around, you choose your own path by choosing from mutually exclusive goals given by different factions. Also it will be possible to solve the game completely non-violently. Deus Ex 1 was close to allowing that, but in some cases violence could not be avoided.
The AI will also be substantially improved, so you'll find yourself doing things like hiding bodies so as not to alert the guards, or closing the door behind you so as not to be heard from the hallway.
Comparing the frequency of anecdotal reports of EQ addiction vs UO addiction, it would seem to be the game model is more addictive. That's perhaps why Electronic Arts has been trying to push the UO experience ever closer to the (bigger cash cow) EQ experience since they pushed Lord British out of the picture.
AFAIK, the density of matter approached infinity as you went back to the moment of the big bang (since the volume approached 0.) I don't know how long it lasted, but for at least awhile there would have been enough density for sound to propagate.
Re:America needs to rethink some priorities
on
NASA's New Space Wheels
·
· Score: 2, Informative
NASA has fallen behind Europe's ESA/Russian space programs to the point where it is using 1960s rockets compared with ion engines.
Ion engines are great for propulsion in 0 g, because they don't need massive amounts of fuel to sustain constant accelleration through an entire mission. They're useless though for lauch vehicles, since they don't produce enough thrust to even pick the engine up off the ground, much less an engine with a spacecraft on top of it.
In any case, the first vehicle employing an ion drive was NASA's Deep Space 1 probe.
More importantly, this also marks the return of human-run plots. UO's volunteer quest-makers were axed 2 years ago, along with the volunteer customer support and newbie-helpers, when EA got skittish about possible lawsuits like the one brought against AOL by its volunteers. Since that time, UO tried to make do with plots events scripted in code, rather than enacted by DM-like volunteers.
The return of Lord British was the first event enacted by the new Event Moderators - contracted employees doing pretty much what the former volunteers did. At least half of them are former volunteers, only now paid by the hour.
I think this is a very important positive step for UO, as the lack of human intelligence behind plot characters really sucked the soul from the game. Plots scripted by humans (sometimes partly on the spot) was, and will be again, one of the primary differentiating factors that sets UO apart in an increasingly crowded MMOG marketplace.
It's not a very difficult feat to get more performance per dollar than the G4 - it was already abyssmal in that regard. When the G4 was introduced the prices made sense, but they just kept on charging the moon while G4 improved only marginally compared to the P4 improving by leaps and bounds.
The lack of knowledgable people to patch this will be the programmer's revenge. The demo was unplayable for me. Even though I meet/exceed all minimum specs and have mainstream (nVidia, Creative Labs, Intel) hardware and ran it at mimimum settings I got... wait for it... (boy did I ever wait)... 5 SECONDS per FRAME. If more than a few other people have the kind of experience I did, well...
And when it comes to Buddhist doctrine, reincarnation and/or non-rebirth are certainly more comforting "afterlife" theories than the prospect of eternal torment. Once you stop worrying that the slightest mistake on your part could result in infinite pain after death, you can relax a bit.;)
What even most Christians fail to realize about their own faith is that the whole point of Jesus' ministry is that the "slightest mistake" will NOT result in endless torment. I blame the Santa Claus meme for perpetuating that attitude. The moral and ethical expectations Buddhism places on its followers are equivalent to those required by Christianity, except that Christianity does not demand perfection in order to achieve a desirable afterlife.
Cache is also used for program instructions, which can have more speed implications than the data cache in pipelined processors. An instruction waiting for data can be stalled while other instructions get to run, but if you're waiting for instructions from memory, there's nothing the processor can do.
EFI does not eliminate the BIOS
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
All the press likes to pick up the story "Extensible Firmware Interface will make the BIOS obsolete!" The fact is, EFI does not eliminate the BIOS. It is just a more complicated BIOS with a GUI. I'm not at all convinced that most people need that. I can do everything the EFI is supposed to do with just a boot floppy and without the trouble of flashing a motherboard EPROM. It sounds to me like Intel would like to capitalize on the kind of vendor lock-in IBM used to enjoy with a proprietary BIOS.
Last time around, Apple forced people to pay for 10.2 to fix the broken parts of 10.1 (most notably OpenGL.) Let's hope they don't ransom the bug fixes again with 10.3
Is it possible to configure Longhorn to use a no-sidebar no-frills Windows 2000 interface? The only new features I care about are the ones "under the hood."
it would be far more expensive than getting a brand-new notebook from Dell or Gateway. They buy their parts in bulk and can therefore pass the savings on to the consumer.
If by, "pass the savings on to the consumer," you mean, "pocket the difference," you're right.
Availability of the parts, especially motherboards and displays, could easily be a problem though.
Present Itanium offerings are not competing in the same market as Opteron. Opteron is positioned in the Xeon domain. Deerfield - the low-wattage, low-cost version of the Madison Itanium2 core - will be the bellwether for IA64's market penetration outside of very customized supercomputing jobs. It is on Intel's roadmap for Q3. If Intel's conception of "low-cost" coincides with real peoples' idea of low cost, IA64 could within a few years take a signifigant share of the Xeon market segment, where it can sit comfortably until software vendor acceptance grows to the point that IA64 can become a mainstream desktop option. People focus on Intel saying "no 64 bit desktop until 2007" while forgetting that they are intending IA64 not x86-64 on the desktop later in the decade.
It's hard to tell from the limited detail in the articles, but this just sounds like what's been done previously, only with a larger number of molecules. The nature of DNA computation as it exists severely limits the real-world usefulness of DNA computing. It's nothing like a general purpose CPU. It involves (at least) several hours to manufacture a bunch of DNA to do a one-off run of your algorithm. Basically, it would be very adept at the any computing tasks that could be effectively addressed by a beowulf cluster of a few billion Intel 4004s, if there are any such tasks. Photonics is the most likely face of computing in the future, with quantum computing filling the niches that only it can fill.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultima Online has seen a series of changes, each one lowering the risk/reward ratio. Of course each time that happens, it makes players happy (more loot, no pk's!) but now it's so easy it's boring.
These are some things my girlfriend and I have enjoyed playing together.
If she likes Myst, a natural choice of a game to play together is Uru: Ages Beyond Myst - basically Myst Online. The Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights/etc series is another good place for cooperative play with more action than Myst.
If you're both really patient and like strategy, you could try Master of Orion 3 or Alpha Centauri multiplayer. Be prepared for reaaly long play sessions, though. Starcraft would be a faster play experience. In all of these you can choose to team up or compete, as you please.
Some things that you can't directly play together, but could be a lot of fun to play separately and compare notes / help each other solve are Deus Ex 1 and 2 and any of the Zelda games (but especially the Zeldas for N64 and SNES.) These all include a great mix of action and puzzle solving, but Deus Ex WILL require FPS skillz, even on easy settings. There's also a multiplayer Zelda for GBA, but I haven't tried it.
You will notice there is no moderation choice for "I disagree with this post." Someone obviously feeling a great weight of duty for moderation has forgotten this in regards to my post, that is the parent of this one.
The issue that I have is with the advertisements Slashdot is carrying that promote outsourcing programming overseas. I do not need to argue the point that outsourcing is very adverse to the interests of many Slashdot readers, and so it is my position that Slashdot ought not to carry such advertisement.
This is not directly contained in the content of the article, but the issue is related. Since Slashdot is hardly likely to host a referendum on the issue, a thread concerning the varying fortunes of tech industries in different countries is the most appropriate venue available to air these concerns. I invite anyone who disagrees to argue their case other than through the moderation function.
I think it's highly pertinent that I am reading this post alongside a banner promising advice on outsourcing tech work overseas. I'm not at all opposed to tastefully sized, relevant advertising in web pages. Capitalism is good. However, I feel that carrying this advertisement is a bold betrayal of the Slashdot readership. Granted, there are certainly Slashdot readers in India and such places, but a poll would undoubtedly show most readers hailing from first-world nations and having an ever harder time being employed in their field. Only carrying advertisement from the RIAA or SCO could be more galling, but this is on the same level of offensiveness - and the stakes here are people's lives, not just their operating systems.
Nothing stops you. Many of the richest players in UO got that way from scripting their characters to mine ores 24/7 without player intervention. They then ebay the gold gained from selling the metal. Getting caught running an unattended script means being banned, but these people usually have several accounts and make more than enough to offset an occasional account creation fee.
They're greatly amplifying the strengths of the original Deus Ex. Whereas in the first game you influence whether several characters lived or died at various points and had a choice of three endings in the last level, there really wasn't a lot of freedom to pick your objectives. At about midpoint in the game, the storyline makes you switch sides in the conflict, whether you like it or not.
The second time around, you choose your own path by choosing from mutually exclusive goals given by different factions. Also it will be possible to solve the game completely non-violently. Deus Ex 1 was close to allowing that, but in some cases violence could not be avoided.
The AI will also be substantially improved, so you'll find yourself doing things like hiding bodies so as not to alert the guards, or closing the door behind you so as not to be heard from the hallway.
Imagine the implications of DirectX running on non-Intel CPUs.
Comparing the frequency of anecdotal reports of EQ addiction vs UO addiction, it would seem to be the game model is more addictive. That's perhaps why Electronic Arts has been trying to push the UO experience ever closer to the (bigger cash cow) EQ experience since they pushed Lord British out of the picture.
AFAIK, the density of matter approached infinity as you went back to the moment of the big bang (since the volume approached 0.) I don't know how long it lasted, but for at least awhile there would have been enough density for sound to propagate.
NASA has fallen behind Europe's ESA/Russian space programs to the point where it is using 1960s rockets compared with ion engines.
Ion engines are great for propulsion in 0 g, because they don't need massive amounts of fuel to sustain constant accelleration through an entire mission. They're useless though for lauch vehicles, since they don't produce enough thrust to even pick the engine up off the ground, much less an engine with a spacecraft on top of it. In any case, the first vehicle employing an ion drive was NASA's Deep Space 1 probe.
What's the license?
More importantly, this also marks the return of human-run plots. UO's volunteer quest-makers were axed 2 years ago, along with the volunteer customer support and newbie-helpers, when EA got skittish about possible lawsuits like the one brought against AOL by its volunteers. Since that time, UO tried to make do with plots events scripted in code, rather than enacted by DM-like volunteers.
The return of Lord British was the first event enacted by the new Event Moderators - contracted employees doing pretty much what the former volunteers did. At least half of them are former volunteers, only now paid by the hour.
I think this is a very important positive step for UO, as the lack of human intelligence behind plot characters really sucked the soul from the game. Plots scripted by humans (sometimes partly on the spot) was, and will be again, one of the primary differentiating factors that sets UO apart in an increasingly crowded MMOG marketplace.
I think the point of the ads is that Linux is for everybody, not just the geeks.
It's not a very difficult feat to get more performance per dollar than the G4 - it was already abyssmal in that regard. When the G4 was introduced the prices made sense, but they just kept on charging the moon while G4 improved only marginally compared to the P4 improving by leaps and bounds.
The lack of knowledgable people to patch this will be the programmer's revenge. The demo was unplayable for me. Even though I meet/exceed all minimum specs and have mainstream (nVidia, Creative Labs, Intel) hardware and ran it at mimimum settings I got... wait for it... (boy did I ever wait)... 5 SECONDS per FRAME. If more than a few other people have the kind of experience I did, well...
And when it comes to Buddhist doctrine, reincarnation and/or non-rebirth are certainly more comforting "afterlife" theories than the prospect of eternal torment. Once you stop worrying that the slightest mistake on your part could result in infinite pain after death, you can relax a bit. ;)
What even most Christians fail to realize about their own faith is that the whole point of Jesus' ministry is that the "slightest mistake" will NOT result in endless torment. I blame the Santa Claus meme for perpetuating that attitude. The moral and ethical expectations Buddhism places on its followers are equivalent to those required by Christianity, except that Christianity does not demand perfection in order to achieve a desirable afterlife.
Cache is also used for program instructions, which can have more speed implications than the data cache in pipelined processors. An instruction waiting for data can be stalled while other instructions get to run, but if you're waiting for instructions from memory, there's nothing the processor can do.
All the press likes to pick up the story "Extensible Firmware Interface will make the BIOS obsolete!" The fact is, EFI does not eliminate the BIOS. It is just a more complicated BIOS with a GUI. I'm not at all convinced that most people need that. I can do everything the EFI is supposed to do with just a boot floppy and without the trouble of flashing a motherboard EPROM. It sounds to me like Intel would like to capitalize on the kind of vendor lock-in IBM used to enjoy with a proprietary BIOS.
I consider one of the best features of Mozilla to be its lack of support for ActiveX and other such unneccessary security risks.
Last time around, Apple forced people to pay for 10.2 to fix the broken parts of 10.1 (most notably OpenGL.) Let's hope they don't ransom the bug fixes again with 10.3
Is it possible to configure Longhorn to use a no-sidebar no-frills Windows 2000 interface? The only new features I care about are the ones "under the hood."
it would be far more expensive than getting a brand-new notebook from Dell or Gateway. They buy their parts in bulk and can therefore pass the savings on to the consumer.
If by, "pass the savings on to the consumer," you mean, "pocket the difference," you're right.
Availability of the parts, especially motherboards and displays, could easily be a problem though.
Present Itanium offerings are not competing in the same market as Opteron. Opteron is positioned in the Xeon domain. Deerfield - the low-wattage, low-cost version of the Madison Itanium2 core - will be the bellwether for IA64's market penetration outside of very customized supercomputing jobs. It is on Intel's roadmap for Q3. If Intel's conception of "low-cost" coincides with real peoples' idea of low cost, IA64 could within a few years take a signifigant share of the Xeon market segment, where it can sit comfortably until software vendor acceptance grows to the point that IA64 can become a mainstream desktop option. People focus on Intel saying "no 64 bit desktop until 2007" while forgetting that they are intending IA64 not x86-64 on the desktop later in the decade.
It's hard to tell from the limited detail in the articles, but this just sounds like what's been done previously, only with a larger number of molecules. The nature of DNA computation as it exists severely limits the real-world usefulness of DNA computing. It's nothing like a general purpose CPU. It involves (at least) several hours to manufacture a bunch of DNA to do a one-off run of your algorithm. Basically, it would be very adept at the any computing tasks that could be effectively addressed by a beowulf cluster of a few billion Intel 4004s, if there are any such tasks. Photonics is the most likely face of computing in the future, with quantum computing filling the niches that only it can fill.
I have never seen a web site with information that couldn't be presented best in plain HTML.