Well, there goes the classic pose of parents with their babies, with the baby lying on a rug up on their elbows smiling at the camera. Bare butt! 20 years in jail for you!
It did more or less go bankrupt after the 2600 had fully closed up shop. It petered along as little more than a name and a P.O. box, then started getting into publishing and distributing other people's work, and that's where there big money nowadays comes from. Hence buying the guys who built City of Heroes (yes, NCSoft did do a successful MMO) and a few other successful things ahead of their next superhero game, Trek Online, and whatever the secret project is.
A bit of a stretch, but if they can learn from Eve: Online and Star Wars: Galaxies about what to do and not to do with a SF-based MMORPG, they should be ok.
I don't even know if Eve did anything wrong, now that I think about it, aside from mechanical stuff like stability and, of course, lag issues (does the screen still, 4 years later, have to freeze for 2 seconds every time I open a new window?)
SW:G, though, don't get me started. That was a SW wrapper aound a standard MMORPG with very little Star-Warsy about the gameplay whatsoever. Because, if you'll remember from the movies, nothing says Star Wars like running around grasslands killing thousands and thousands of giraffe-thingies, which, for some reason, can give 5 guys with blasters and 1 guy with a flame thrower a good, serious 60-second tussel.
The rich already pay one holy hell of a lot more, even with "equal" tax rates. it's 10% of income, not, say, $1000 per person.
But before you go back to relying on your faulty memetic world models that guide you like pavlovian dogs on how to respond and think, keep in mind these wonder folks of both parties were holding the $700 billion hostage until they kicked in another $110 billion for kickbacks to pet projects and whatnot.
So they were willing to stop a vital thing for personal gain, or were willing to go through with a huge boondoggle as long as they got something out of it.
> "It should prove interesting to see how Abrams' writing staff (Cloverfield, > Lost, Alias) tackles the Star Trek universe and all the continuity and baggage that comes with it."
Not so interesting so far. Apparently 36 year old Kirk, 42 year old Scotty, and 55 year old Bones all gradumicated at about the same time from Star Fleet Academy because some doof wrote a story in 1986 to "helpfully" explain why they're such close buddies, without explaining why the actors are obviously wildly different ages. And we won't even get into 70-something Spock being retconned into yet another magical mid-20's academy student.
I don't know, man. The name of that project sure indicates he was born for government work:
> the impossibly long name of 'Commercial Hydrogen Instrumentation Nomenclature > Affairs Reacquisition Officer -- Onboard Liquid Supplies Using Special > Distillation Resevoir of Oleaginous Oxygen Lysimetrification System'
He worked on that? Lol.
Zomg, look:
Commercial Hydrogen Instrumentation Nomenclature Affairs Reacquisition Officer -- Onboard Liquid Supplies Using Special Distillation Resevoir of Oleaginous Oxygen Lysimetrification System
> You are discounting a large group of people who score below 400's on the > verbal GRE and able to finish the PhD. Those who holding a F-1 or J-1 student visas
A technicality. They probably score way the hell up their in their native languages.
I know plenty of furrin people at work (engineering, ya know) who use a lot more $20 English words than most native English speakers. One German guy using English words I damned well know my brother-in-law would go all glassy-eyed over.
> "...where enemies shouldn't be killed out of hand, but befriended; > where learning, teaching, research and social skills are more important than > killing and conquering? Would people be interested in a game of that nature?"
I would be interested! When you find it, let me know. I will write a FAQ on minimaxing the char.
I imagine it'll go something like this:
Game FAQ for SuperTeacher
== Questions and Answers == 1. What's a FAQ?
GTFO if you don't know this already.
2. What's "struct"?
In this game, you instruct people, among other things, thus "teaching" them. Fanbois have shortened it to "struct", as in "Go to the paisly room and struct the janitor on feces removal."
3. How should I play the game?
Play it however you want, of course! It's all about the fun.
Now, when you're through being a 1o53r, follow these instructions to minimax the power of your SuperTeacher.
4. == I want power...Power...POWER! ===
...but your lameass can't seem to achieve it. That's what I'm here for. First, set the difficulty to "profound" -- no point if you're gonna take it on the easy path. You will, of course, ignore building skills in anything but pure, raw teaching.
(deletia) In Stage II, of course you get the Golden Teacher award for completing it. However, you can get a second one. 1. Do NOT get the award one yet. 2. You will instead get the one in the store room first. Normally you can't since you can't get to the store room until you move on to the next stage, but if you go to the metal shop and kick the kid in the back so he jams his hand on the table saw, he'll scream and fly back hard. Make sure you're 3 steps in front of the drill press, then jump just as you see the 3rd drop of blood squirt from behind him. He'll knock into you so hard you'll fly up through the window into the store room. 3. Get the dusty award. 4. Complete the rest of the normal Golden Teacher award. 5. Bingo! You now have double Golden Teacher +30% = +60% teaching bonus!!!!!
(deletia) In Stage IV, you cannot escape the boss without having at least 40% skill in your calming tree since you need to calm him before you can teach him -- which, of course, busts your devotion to the teaching tree.
But do this:
1. Wait until about 4:30. He should still be there but everyone else should be gone. 2. Back along the wall opposite the classroom door, which will be open. If you stay pinned, you should be out of the aggro trigger for him. 3. Wait until he's on the far side of the teacher's desk. You may have to wait a little while (~10 min.) 4. When he's there, wait until he's about to round the corner to the blackboard side. Once he does he'll immediately turn around. 5. Run into the room, straight, and stand there on the opposite side. He should get stuck on the far side of the desk, snagged. 6. Teach away and claim the boss +teaching bonus without having to have any calming.
(deletia) Congrats! Move on to Stage V -- the end boss, who's blind and deaf like Helen Keller and retarded as well. You should now have a 93.8% chance to one-struct him on how to build a Saturn V!!!!!!!1111!1!111onemel33tone!!1!111
Why Turbine? They have never had a true hit MMO. They may have the technical capability and experience to build one from scratch, but that's not the same thing as truly understanding exciting gameplay.
I'm stunned at the number of MMOs that are still being built around the tank/healer/DPS model. Though City of Heroes has the "tanker" class, they also have a "controller" class specialized around controlling big groups. This frees melee to do a lot more damage.
Kind of odd that all these guys in armor with swords are the wimpy ones, offensively. Hint: Do away with tanks and rely on pure controllers. Make melee single-target savages like the scrapper, as they should be. Not just a "tricky" melee who backstabs, or, gag, an unarmored, unarmed guy who magically punches "real hard". No, real sword and armor leads the melee battle in damage.
> To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the > letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right > combination, and be able to play the game.
They can't be serious!
We know from movies that it still takes millions of tries to figure out that last number in a set of digits like a phone number.
Millions! "Hurry, the computer only needs 1 more number and it's traced your call! Hurry!"
The older of the two girls, when young anyway, looked to be about 5'10" with long dark hair, gorgeous face, and full kissy lips. She'd've probably been a supermodel today.
> "When asked if she is sure she touched the box for Rockefeller, she said, 'I'm absolutely positive.'" > Yeah, just like a lot of users are "absolutely positive" that they did the right thing. No, they > THINK they did the right thing. That's the only thing they are "absolutely positive" of.
Reminds me of that problem with Audi cars (?) that was on 60 minutes about 15 years ago, where some woman plowed through her son and her garage door after starting the car. She was certain she was stepping on the brake and had not stepped on the gas, and even claimed a bent brake footpad lever.
Yet a car's brakes are much stronger than the engine -- a firm brake depression will beat floored engine gas every time. Therefore, regardless of how faulty the gas mechanism may have been, the car wouldn't have gone anywhere had she been stomping on the brake, or even the brake and the gas at the same time, or the fuel injector went full open while the break was depressed.
I can see the lever getting bent AFTER most of the damage had been done in a desparate attempt to stop the car, and then her forgetting (conveniently or not) or never realizing that she had stepped on the gas first.
Also, in the case of voting, I don't know what the "fraud noise level" is, but I do know both parties plan for fraud to contest various election regions, then declare "ahh, nothing bad detected" when it becomes obvious they're gonna win in the count. Could this be preparatory work to be used by party hacks in the case a candidate one party wants doesn't win?
> They also discuss...companion characters. "We want you to think of them > as actual companions on your journeys throughout the game. Your actions > are going to change how your companion characters develop."
"Hey, Jimmy. What happened to your companion? He's got dull, listless eyes, sores on his ass, huge ears like a donkey, and a big yellow streak down his back!"
"I don't know. I've just been playin' like I usually do, running the same missions over and over again, slaughtering those giraffe-thingies by the thousands, in-between 1-shotting n00bs who wander too far from the guards."
There was that study a couple of years ago that showed that top programmers are 4x as productive as the average ones.
So hire a bunch of top programmers and pay 'em twice that rate, and you'll still halve development costs.
Of course, if the guys in charge of The Linux Foundation's estimation were actually top programmers, they'd have relized this. But noooooooo, they're trying to rhetorically prove a point.
I suppose if you hired 4x as many crappy programmers for half that rate, you can pay $20 billion to develop Fedora 9.
Yeah, but here's the story line of Galaxies: Go to that grassland planet with a handful of prefabricated outposts and kill giraffes that take 5 people with laser guns and one with a flamethrower sixty seconds to kill.
And the one thing I actually found interesting, the Dancer class, got hosed with the NGE. Previously, she was happy being a medium-good pistoleer, and had her hacked Naboobian pew-pew (the only ray gun that actually looks like a cool 1950s ray gun!) running around in groups. Then one day she could still dance, but could no longer use any but the level 1 guns anymore.
Ummm...thanks.
Later on I logged back in on a free weekend to find my cantina and all its contents, including 8 twilek fishnet outfits of various colors decorating the stage, along with a stripper pole for each.
Slashdot Mirror
Feh, the "easy listening" music station plays Kid Rock's All Summer Long, and changes:
"We were trying different things
And we were smoking funny things"
into
"We were trying different things
And we were smiling funny things"
The real classic rock station here, anyway, leaves it alone.
Well, there goes the classic pose of parents with their babies, with the baby lying on a rug up on their elbows smiling at the camera. Bare butt! 20 years in jail for you!
It did more or less go bankrupt after the 2600 had fully closed up shop. It petered along as little more than a name and a P.O. box, then started getting into publishing and distributing other people's work, and that's where there big money nowadays comes from. Hence buying the guys who built City of Heroes (yes, NCSoft did do a successful MMO) and a few other successful things ahead of their next superhero game, Trek Online, and whatever the secret project is.
A bit of a stretch, but if they can learn from Eve: Online and Star Wars: Galaxies about what to do and not to do with a SF-based MMORPG, they should be ok.
I don't even know if Eve did anything wrong, now that I think about it, aside from mechanical stuff like stability and, of course, lag issues (does the screen still, 4 years later, have to freeze for 2 seconds every time I open a new window?)
SW:G, though, don't get me started. That was a SW wrapper aound a standard MMORPG with very little Star-Warsy about the gameplay whatsoever. Because, if you'll remember from the movies, nothing says Star Wars like running around grasslands killing thousands and thousands of giraffe-thingies, which, for some reason, can give 5 guys with blasters and 1 guy with a flame thrower a good, serious 60-second tussel.
The rich already pay one holy hell of a lot more, even with "equal" tax rates. it's 10% of income, not, say, $1000 per person.
But before you go back to relying on your faulty memetic world models that guide you like pavlovian dogs on how to respond and think, keep in mind these wonder folks of both parties were holding the $700 billion hostage until they kicked in another $110 billion for kickbacks to pet projects and whatnot.
So they were willing to stop a vital thing for personal gain, or were willing to go through with a huge boondoggle as long as they got something out of it.
Either way, they're all historic-level scum.
stewardesses
tesseradecade
Unfortunately, there isn't a tesseradecade of left-hand-only words longer than "stewardesses" -- just the one.
They should just make it a cartoon and give them all cigar-butt style body/heads and name it Star Trek Kids.
Yeah but he shows no brains, either.
> "It should prove interesting to see how Abrams' writing staff (Cloverfield,
> Lost, Alias) tackles the Star Trek universe and all the continuity and baggage that comes with it."
Not so interesting so far. Apparently 36 year old Kirk, 42 year old Scotty, and 55 year old Bones all gradumicated at about the same time from Star Fleet Academy because some doof wrote a story in 1986 to "helpfully" explain why they're such close buddies, without explaining why the actors are obviously wildly different ages. And we won't even get into 70-something Spock being retconned into yet another magical mid-20's academy student.
I don't know, man. The name of that project sure indicates he was born for government work:
> the impossibly long name of 'Commercial Hydrogen Instrumentation Nomenclature
> Affairs Reacquisition Officer -- Onboard Liquid Supplies Using Special
> Distillation Resevoir of Oleaginous Oxygen Lysimetrification System'
He worked on that? Lol.
Zomg, look:
Commercial
Hydrogen
Instrumentation
Nomenclature
Affairs
Reacquisition
Officer --
Onboard
Liquid
Supplies
Using
Special
Distillation
Resevoir of
Oleaginous
Oxygen
Lysimetrification
System
> You are discounting a large group of people who score below 400's on the
> verbal GRE and able to finish the PhD. Those who holding a F-1 or J-1 student visas
A technicality. They probably score way the hell up their in their native languages.
I know plenty of furrin people at work (engineering, ya know) who use a lot more $20 English words than most native English speakers. One German guy using English words I damned well know my brother-in-law would go all glassy-eyed over.
> "...where enemies shouldn't be killed out of hand, but befriended;
> where learning, teaching, research and social skills are more important than
> killing and conquering? Would people be interested in a game of that nature?"
I would be interested! When you find it, let me know. I will write a FAQ on minimaxing the char.
I imagine it'll go something like this:
Game FAQ for SuperTeacher
== Questions and Answers ==
1. What's a FAQ?
GTFO if you don't know this already.
2. What's "struct"?
In this game, you instruct people, among other things, thus "teaching" them. Fanbois have shortened it to "struct", as in "Go to the paisly room and struct the janitor on feces removal."
3. How should I play the game?
Play it however you want, of course! It's all about the fun.
Now, when you're through being a 1o53r, follow these instructions to minimax the power of your SuperTeacher.
4. == I want power...Power...POWER! ===
(deletia)
In Stage II, of course you get the Golden Teacher award for completing it. However, you can get a second one.
1. Do NOT get the award one yet.
2. You will instead get the one in the store room first. Normally you can't since you can't get to the store room until you move on to the next stage, but if you go to the metal shop and kick the kid in the back so he jams his hand on the table saw, he'll scream and fly back hard. Make sure you're 3 steps in front of the drill press, then jump just as you see the 3rd drop of blood squirt from behind him. He'll knock into you so hard you'll fly up through the window into the store room.
3. Get the dusty award.
4. Complete the rest of the normal Golden Teacher award.
5. Bingo! You now have double Golden Teacher +30% = +60% teaching bonus!!!!!
(deletia)
In Stage IV, you cannot escape the boss without having at least 40% skill in your calming tree since you need to calm him before you can teach him -- which, of course, busts your devotion to the teaching tree.
But do this:
1. Wait until about 4:30. He should still be there but everyone else should be gone.
2. Back along the wall opposite the classroom door, which will be open. If you stay pinned, you should be out of the aggro trigger for him.
3. Wait until he's on the far side of the teacher's desk. You may have to wait a little while (~10 min.)
4. When he's there, wait until he's about to round the corner to the blackboard side. Once he does he'll immediately turn around.
5. Run into the room, straight, and stand there on the opposite side. He should get stuck on the far side of the desk, snagged.
6. Teach away and claim the boss +teaching bonus without having to have any calming.
(deletia)
Congrats! Move on to Stage V -- the end boss, who's blind and deaf like Helen Keller and retarded as well. You should now have a 93.8% chance to one-struct him on how to build a Saturn V!!!!!!!1111!1!111onemel33tone!!1!111
> and total disregard for problems such as his drug use.
Say what?
Which, I suppose, is evidence itself that there's a problem.
> with a 480x320px resolution, with a maximum screen size of 65 inches at 8.5 feet.
That's about 7.4 pixels per inch, or roughly 1/3 cm per pixel. Blocky be thy middle name.
Why Turbine? They have never had a true hit MMO. They may have the technical capability and experience to build one from scratch, but that's not the same thing as truly understanding exciting gameplay.
I'm stunned at the number of MMOs that are still being built around the tank/healer/DPS model. Though City of Heroes has the "tanker" class, they also have a "controller" class specialized around controlling big groups. This frees melee to do a lot more damage.
Kind of odd that all these guys in armor with swords are the wimpy ones, offensively. Hint: Do away with tanks and rely on pure controllers. Make melee single-target savages like the scrapper, as they should be. Not just a "tricky" melee who backstabs, or, gag, an unarmored, unarmed guy who magically punches "real hard". No, real sword and armor leads the melee battle in damage.
> To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the
> letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right
> combination, and be able to play the game.
They can't be serious!
We know from movies that it still takes millions of tries to figure out that last number in a set of digits like a phone number.
Millions! "Hurry, the computer only needs 1 more number and it's traced your call! Hurry!"
Oh, GCC!
I thought they were making yet another Enterprise, the Enterprise-F. I'm like, "enuf is enuf!"
Who the fuck wants a God to exist, anyway, who plans on throwing most people who ever lived into Hell, where they'll suffer for all eternity?
That's the worst possible character, not the best, deserving the title "kind and loving".
Fine restaraunts age their beef, and it has mold all over the outside. They cut off the mold and charge you an arm and a leg for the delicious meat.
The older of the two girls, when young anyway, looked to be about 5'10" with long dark hair, gorgeous face, and full kissy lips. She'd've probably been a supermodel today.
> hyperlinks, the Court reasoned, are analogous to footnotes, rather
> than constituting a 'republication'.
Hyperlinks are analagous to a guy standing on a corner saying, "Hey, over there is another guy who's calling Donald Trump a crook!"
I don't believe that bit of info would fall under a liability law, but IANAL.
> "When asked if she is sure she touched the box for Rockefeller, she said, 'I'm absolutely positive.'"
> Yeah, just like a lot of users are "absolutely positive" that they did the right thing. No, they
> THINK they did the right thing. That's the only thing they are "absolutely positive" of.
Reminds me of that problem with Audi cars (?) that was on 60 minutes about 15 years ago, where some woman plowed through her son and her garage door after starting the car. She was certain she was stepping on the brake and had not stepped on the gas, and even claimed a bent brake footpad lever.
Yet a car's brakes are much stronger than the engine -- a firm brake depression will beat floored engine gas every time. Therefore, regardless of how faulty the gas mechanism may have been, the car wouldn't have gone anywhere had she been stomping on the brake, or even the brake and the gas at the same time, or the fuel injector went full open while the break was depressed.
I can see the lever getting bent AFTER most of the damage had been done in a desparate attempt to stop the car, and then her forgetting (conveniently or not) or never realizing that she had stepped on the gas first.
Also, in the case of voting, I don't know what the "fraud noise level" is, but I do know both parties plan for fraud to contest various election regions, then declare "ahh, nothing bad detected" when it becomes obvious they're gonna win in the count. Could this be preparatory work to be used by party hacks in the case a candidate one party wants doesn't win?
> They also discuss...companion characters. "We want you to think of them
> as actual companions on your journeys throughout the game. Your actions
> are going to change how your companion characters develop."
"Hey, Jimmy. What happened to your companion? He's got dull, listless eyes, sores on his ass, huge ears like a donkey, and a big yellow streak down his back!"
"I don't know. I've just been playin' like I usually do, running the same missions over and over again, slaughtering those giraffe-thingies by the thousands, in-between 1-shotting n00bs who wander too far from the guards."
Yeah, thanks to Slashdot, I have a ton of 'em.
goatse.cx
lemon party
CowboyNeal jokes in the poll
Well, I guess that's just 3 that come to mind. But you can understand the trauma.
There was that study a couple of years ago that showed that top programmers are 4x as productive as the average ones.
So hire a bunch of top programmers and pay 'em twice that rate, and you'll still halve development costs.
Of course, if the guys in charge of The Linux Foundation's estimation were actually top programmers, they'd have relized this. But noooooooo, they're trying to rhetorically prove a point.
I suppose if you hired 4x as many crappy programmers for half that rate, you can pay $20 billion to develop Fedora 9.
It, and the contents were missing, that is. And my house, and all it's stored contents.
Yeah, but here's the story line of Galaxies: Go to that grassland planet with a handful of prefabricated outposts and kill giraffes that take 5 people with laser guns and one with a flamethrower sixty seconds to kill.
And the one thing I actually found interesting, the Dancer class, got hosed with the NGE. Previously, she was happy being a medium-good pistoleer, and had her hacked Naboobian pew-pew (the only ray gun that actually looks like a cool 1950s ray gun!) running around in groups. Then one day she could still dance, but could no longer use any but the level 1 guns anymore.
Ummm...thanks.
Later on I logged back in on a free weekend to find my cantina and all its contents, including 8 twilek fishnet outfits of various colors decorating the stage, along with a stripper pole for each.
"Can I get that stuff back?"
"No", came the official response.
CONNECTION TERMINATED.