That's one of the most exclusive, albeit understandable, definitions I have seen. You just excluded pole vaulting, rowing, hurdle jumping, shot put, most forms of timed racing (swimming comes to mind), gymnastics, etc... All told about 3/4 of the olympics.
Simple, they start selling character buffs like UO. Cut Ebay/PlayerAuctions out of the loop, sell and buy items and gold too.
Project Entropia tried this business model, and it was an excellent idea. Unfortunately the rest of PE sucked (although not everyone thinks so, a few 10s of thousands of people still play). In PE there was a direct exchange rate from game credits to real currency, they made their money in small fees on each exchange (like $1 on a deposit, 2% on a withdrawl, something like that). There was no cost to get the game, and no cost to play. If you could play more effectively than about 51% of other players then you got to play for free, above that you MADE money, and below that you paid some each week/month/whenever to supplement your game.
EULA aside, there are plenty of free servers out there to play other MMORPGs on. I know plenty of people who dont pay to play WoW, EQ, UO, etc. The key is the quality. You need great GMs and content designers to have a good game, and that is what you are paying for when you play the game the 'normal' way.
San Andreas HAS STATS. Stamina, Strength, Fat, Sex Appeal, Respect, a skill and rank for each weapon and vehicle type (BMX!), etc. They go up or down based on your actions in the game (exercise at the gym, or just run a lot, to lose Fat and gain Stamina, and eventually gain some Sex Appeal), and affect which dialogue and story options are available to you, as well as if / how well you can use any given weapon or vehicle.
I agree about the enter key. I also notice they added a few more spare keys over on that side of the kb, including an extra key between ?/ and Shift, which should serve to completely screw up my smiley touch typing!
I would be far more interested in system status and activity indicators on various useless keys. Temperature, network and cpu activity and load, filesystem stats, etc.
you should check out the laws governing gift certificates and coupons and such in your area, i dont think something like that can expire so quickly without notice.
Given that they say they are inelligible for the prize I would take that to mean that they ARE counted. The only thing I would consider undetermined is whether the prize would have gone to #499999 or #500001 or no one at all if it had been a freebie.
The first question that comes to mind is... how many of the downloads were free? I have seen so many ads for free songs (giveaways, contests, promotions, etc) on itunes, napster, etc that I have lost count. I wouldn't even hazard a guess at the paid:free ratio, it could be anything, 1:10, 1:1, 10:1...
At $5/gal I will continue my 27 mile commute at 50MPG 3 times a week. at $10/gal I will consider moving closer to work, and probably decide against it. High gas prices will not stop people from commuting or travelling or shipping*, it will stop frivolous car travel like twice-a-day trips to the corner market and 5-times-a-day trips to school/daycare/practice/etc to pick up or drop off the kids. Tally up your gas usage (use simple estimates of short and long trips and city or highway efficiencies) and youll most likely find that the majority of it is not essential to earning your paycheck or procuring the essentials for your family in a well planned manner.
* The cost of transporting freight or packages is currently comprised more of human costs (driver pay) and infrastructure costs (vehicle and facility maintenance) than fuel costs by a large margin. Tripling, or more, the cost of gas would NOT triple the cost of shipping packages. Quintupling the cost of gas might double the cost of shipping, to be more precise than that you would have to own a shipping company.
EBIBM said they owned the copyright, we believe them. Scony says otherwise, they spend a month or two seeing if a Judge will give an injunction against us using them while the multi-year battle with EBIBM takes place.
I disagree. The most content-ful RPG in recent memory has been GTA:SA. Hundreds of hours of branching storyline. The linear central story doesnt even encompass 1/4 of the game. Progress can be made in a dozen different directions (including the much-debated girlfriends). Looking back, Morrowind was also an amazing single player RPG. Oblivion is going to blow the mediocre CRPG competition away; I've already set aside a thousand hours of free time (about what I spent on Morrowind) to waste on it.
Like GTA:SA? Every so often it annoyed me that I couldnt see my exact stamina level, but in general I felt that the visual approximate gauges gave it a much smoother feel than a raw stat rpg (and yes, GTA:SA is a rpg, all other aspects aside).
History 101 requires book A, part 1, $75 new, $50 used History 102 requires book A, part 2, $75 new, $50 used publisher of book A also publishes a 'condensed' version without color illustrations, no useless (charts, graphs, maps all remain) pictures, with both parts in one book, for $25 new, $20 used.
Physics 101 requires book B, as well as subscription to online homework system run by publisher of book B. New book B comes with subscription, $120. Used book B is $50, but requires $30 subscription. publisher provides a complete (and then some, animations, movies, audio recordings, interactive applets for demonstrations) copy of book B online with the $30 subscription, and the labs at school offer nearly unlimited printing (10 pages for a chapter a week doesnt even make a dent)
So, if you're ignorant you paid $270. If you're informed you paid $180. If youre creative you paid $50.
Where do you live? If $1mil fell into my lap today I would own, outright, four 8-unit apartment buildings (2bed/1bath) next month with an income in the neighborhood of $4800/mo (conservative estimate: half occupancy, $400/mo, 1/4 of income to maintenance). 6% gains on $1mil isnt awesome, but it would be reliable and liquid for the next 20 years, and I could live in one or two of the apartments.
Or perhaps youre just trying to even out your time off with the people who call in sick twice a month. Whether they are sick or not is completely irrelevant, they have the same contract (or lack thereof) and the same pay for the same position as you do so they should get the same amount of time off work.
PS: another pet peeve is schedules that dont work on monday/friday, eliminating paid holidays (that every other employee in the office gets) for the most part.
When you are touch typing a blank keyboard is well and good, but for those of us that use computers a lot there are many cases where we need to find a single key quickly, without having to set our hands on the home row first. I use mplayer as my default video player, and it uses pretty much every key on the keyboard to do something, as well as some of them with shift/control/alt modifiers. If I could repaint the keyboard with all the proper symbols on it while watching a movie then it would make the ultimate remote control. In a game like Quake where there are maybe 12 keys then looking at the keyboard is rare, but what about nethack where you often have access to 50+ key commands?
The heavy fog on Songhua Stalemate makes an assault or anti-tank standing in the swamp near a flag a perfect defense against helicopters. You realize it only takes two hits with a rocket or rifle grenade to set any helicopter on fire? There is almost nothing more satisfying than taking down a 6-man BlackHawk with two grenades (one of the few better things is killing a sniper by dropping supplies on his head).
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That's one of the most exclusive, albeit understandable, definitions I have seen. You just excluded pole vaulting, rowing, hurdle jumping, shot put, most forms of timed racing (swimming comes to mind), gymnastics, etc... All told about 3/4 of the olympics.
So is DDR a sport? (thats the arcade game where you have to 'dance' on arrows on the floor in time to the video/music)
What about golf? Or darts? Shuffleboard?
I play on a 1533MHz Athlon XP with a GF FX 5500, 768Mb PC2700, and it plays fine. 20-30 FPS in very intense battles, 40-50 normally.
This was an option in BF1942, and it is still an option in BF2. They simply changed the default settings.
Simple, they start selling character buffs like UO. Cut Ebay/PlayerAuctions out of the loop, sell and buy items and gold too.
Project Entropia tried this business model, and it was an excellent idea. Unfortunately the rest of PE sucked (although not everyone thinks so, a few 10s of thousands of people still play). In PE there was a direct exchange rate from game credits to real currency, they made their money in small fees on each exchange (like $1 on a deposit, 2% on a withdrawl, something like that). There was no cost to get the game, and no cost to play. If you could play more effectively than about 51% of other players then you got to play for free, above that you MADE money, and below that you paid some each week/month/whenever to supplement your game.
EULA aside, there are plenty of free servers out there to play other MMORPGs on. I know plenty of people who dont pay to play WoW, EQ, UO, etc. The key is the quality. You need great GMs and content designers to have a good game, and that is what you are paying for when you play the game the 'normal' way.
San Andreas HAS STATS. Stamina, Strength, Fat, Sex Appeal, Respect, a skill and rank for each weapon and vehicle type (BMX!), etc. They go up or down based on your actions in the game (exercise at the gym, or just run a lot, to lose Fat and gain Stamina, and eventually gain some Sex Appeal), and affect which dialogue and story options are available to you, as well as if / how well you can use any given weapon or vehicle.
I agree about the enter key. I also notice they added a few more spare keys over on that side of the kb, including an extra key between ?/ and Shift, which should serve to completely screw up my smiley touch typing!
I would be far more interested in system status and activity indicators on various useless keys. Temperature, network and cpu activity and load, filesystem stats, etc.
the rendering looks more like 32x32 for the normal size keys, and thats an order of magnitude less pixels to update.
you should check out the laws governing gift certificates and coupons and such in your area, i dont think something like that can expire so quickly without notice.
Whatever you have to tell yourself.
Given that they say they are inelligible for the prize I would take that to mean that they ARE counted. The only thing I would consider undetermined is whether the prize would have gone to #499999 or #500001 or no one at all if it had been a freebie.
entry? promotion? what? im just talking about getting to the number 500 million
The first question that comes to mind is... how many of the downloads were free? I have seen so many ads for free songs (giveaways, contests, promotions, etc) on itunes, napster, etc that I have lost count. I wouldn't even hazard a guess at the paid:free ratio, it could be anything, 1:10, 1:1, 10:1...
At $5/gal I will continue my 27 mile commute at 50MPG 3 times a week. at $10/gal I will consider moving closer to work, and probably decide against it. High gas prices will not stop people from commuting or travelling or shipping*, it will stop frivolous car travel like twice-a-day trips to the corner market and 5-times-a-day trips to school/daycare/practice/etc to pick up or drop off the kids. Tally up your gas usage (use simple estimates of short and long trips and city or highway efficiencies) and youll most likely find that the majority of it is not essential to earning your paycheck or procuring the essentials for your family in a well planned manner.
* The cost of transporting freight or packages is currently comprised more of human costs (driver pay) and infrastructure costs (vehicle and facility maintenance) than fuel costs by a large margin. Tripling, or more, the cost of gas would NOT triple the cost of shipping packages. Quintupling the cost of gas might double the cost of shipping, to be more precise than that you would have to own a shipping company.
Two Words: Good Faith.
EBIBM said they owned the copyright, we believe them. Scony says otherwise, they spend a month or two seeing if a Judge will give an injunction against us using them while the multi-year battle with EBIBM takes place.
sound familiar?
I disagree.
The most content-ful RPG in recent memory has been GTA:SA. Hundreds of hours of branching storyline. The linear central story doesnt even encompass 1/4 of the game. Progress can be made in a dozen different directions (including the much-debated girlfriends).
Looking back, Morrowind was also an amazing single player RPG. Oblivion is going to blow the mediocre CRPG competition away; I've already set aside a thousand hours of free time (about what I spent on Morrowind) to waste on it.
Like GTA:SA? Every so often it annoyed me that I couldnt see my exact stamina level, but in general I felt that the visual approximate gauges gave it a much smoother feel than a raw stat rpg (and yes, GTA:SA is a rpg, all other aspects aside).
the engine 3 engine 3 thing is kinda funny. as to the rest of it, i dont think it will be as obvious at 250kph :)
Or he just shopped creatively:
History 101 requires book A, part 1, $75 new, $50 used
History 102 requires book A, part 2, $75 new, $50 used
publisher of book A also publishes a 'condensed' version without color illustrations, no useless (charts, graphs, maps all remain) pictures, with both parts in one book, for $25 new, $20 used.
Physics 101 requires book B, as well as subscription to online homework system run by publisher of book B. New book B comes with subscription, $120. Used book B is $50, but requires $30 subscription.
publisher provides a complete (and then some, animations, movies, audio recordings, interactive applets for demonstrations) copy of book B online with the $30 subscription, and the labs at school offer nearly unlimited printing (10 pages for a chapter a week doesnt even make a dent)
So, if you're ignorant you paid $270. If you're informed you paid $180. If youre creative you paid $50.
Where do you live? If $1mil fell into my lap today I would own, outright, four 8-unit apartment buildings (2bed/1bath) next month with an income in the neighborhood of $4800/mo (conservative estimate: half occupancy, $400/mo, 1/4 of income to maintenance). 6% gains on $1mil isnt awesome, but it would be reliable and liquid for the next 20 years, and I could live in one or two of the apartments.
Or perhaps youre just trying to even out your time off with the people who call in sick twice a month. Whether they are sick or not is completely irrelevant, they have the same contract (or lack thereof) and the same pay for the same position as you do so they should get the same amount of time off work.
PS: another pet peeve is schedules that dont work on monday/friday, eliminating paid holidays (that every other employee in the office gets) for the most part.
When you are touch typing a blank keyboard is well and good, but for those of us that use computers a lot there are many cases where we need to find a single key quickly, without having to set our hands on the home row first. I use mplayer as my default video player, and it uses pretty much every key on the keyboard to do something, as well as some of them with shift/control/alt modifiers. If I could repaint the keyboard with all the proper symbols on it while watching a movie then it would make the ultimate remote control. In a game like Quake where there are maybe 12 keys then looking at the keyboard is rare, but what about nethack where you often have access to 50+ key commands?
The heavy fog on Songhua Stalemate makes an assault or anti-tank standing in the swamp near a flag a perfect defense against helicopters. You realize it only takes two hits with a rocket or rifle grenade to set any helicopter on fire? There is almost nothing more satisfying than taking down a 6-man BlackHawk with two grenades (one of the few better things is killing a sniper by dropping supplies on his head).