...was playing Fatal Frame in the pitch black of night. No movie has ever terrified me more than the tension that builds up with the ambient soundtrack and the tiny light that tells you something is near, to activate the camera and go into 1st person mode, creeping along to find the ghostly image before it jumps out at you.
Anyone who's played it will no doubt remember the chilling moment while you tiptoe down the Rope Hallway and the red light comes on, looking up and coming face to face with Vengeance.
It's not the only option for some people, but it is for a lot. Even in major cities, sometimes the only choices are DSL and Cable. Satellite's high latency and poor upstream capacity isn't much of an option, and can be very expensive. And now with cable companies offering voice service, and telcos offering tv channels, a lot of people are going to consolidate for deals like the "Triple Play", not shop around a-la-carte.
And I'm sure the major media companies are keeping a *very* close eye on Apple. There's no way in hell they want to give Apple that same kind of leverage in the video industry, and since many of them own the very infrastructure that will be delivering the content it's going to be very interesting to see how it all plays out. It's kind of like watching two lions fighting over a wounded animal, except we're the wounded animal.
Who's network will be distributing that content? Hint, for a lot of broadband users, it's their cable company.
With net neutrality in contention and backbone infrastructure reaching capacity, how far is it of a stretch to assume that you won't see some kind of throttling of video content from a provider who's also trying to sell you their video service on the same wire? For ordinary people who just want their video to look good and get delivered when they want it, once their AppleTV or Netflix or whoever's selling downloadable content turns ugly then they'll blame those companies, not their cable company.
I think the battle between the telcos and VOIP was nothing compared to the bloodbath we're going to witness. The cable companies have the FCC in their pockets. Who do you have?
Their forums are fun for a read and keeping up with the game's goings-on. Though you're right, not really designed very well -- they only just came off the "main" servers so that they dissapeared when the game went down. Kinda funny when the game's whole website died when there was a nodecrash, the first few times.
The most likely reason? Because they're terminating their volunteer service departments who did most of the forum moderations. While this might be an effort to try and erase their image as having players cheating at these levels, it doesn't mean much for those who still trusted CCP and EVE to maintain a fair and effective way to trade in an out-of-game setting (say, from at work). Now who's to trust?
Well, I'm backing whomever gets their shiny plastic discs below 19.95 first. For me the decision isn't the cost of one player, it's the cost of every title I want thereafter.
Eve was the first MMORPG I found that had the kind of "pick up and play" where you could literally jump into some action for a few minutes, accomplish something, and be done with it. Doing a mission doesn't take more than an hour usually; camping a gate, mining for ore, shooting at NPCs can fill half an hour; checking market listings or changing skill training (which is done realtime, no grinding necessary to advance) can be done in minutes.
There are large scale fleet ops, just like there are guild raids in other MMOs that take up hours or days, but these aren't for the casual player either. With Eve you decide how you want to play, and you can do so at your own leisure. I'd say that the two minutes it takes to set a skill to train up while you go off to watch a movie gives a greater accomplishment-per-minute feeling than grinding away on WoW for an hour to earn the XP for 1/100th of a level.
Note that creating items and mining, two of the most popular professions, do not inherently create Money. They use other resources which can then be traded for raw cash, but the amount of "ISK" in the game is actually *reduced* due to the fees and other drains to the economy in the process. Death by explosion can be both a faucet (default insurance pours more money into the economy that wasn't there previously) and a drain (the revived player needs to spend cash on a new clone, new items from NPCs, insure a new ship, etc).
As for raw material rates, there is an artifical cap on the price of minerals due to the availability of NPC items which have a finite price but infinite supply and can be reprocessed into it's components. The price of Tritanium, for instance, is capped at about 3.6 ISK per unit where a 9000 ISK Shuttle will yield about 2500 units of tritanium. In markets that aren't seeded by NPCs, the rates can vary wildly depending on local supply and demand, and that's where the real fortunes are made.
"A website is aiming at blocking (Black) users. This because a fraction of the (Black) users (Can't Read) and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using (White), (Asian) or (Indians). From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are (Black) users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking (Blacks) seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.'
Despite his charisma and intelligence, which should make him a natural leader, he's also a soldier. As such, he's been trained to obey his superiors even when he personally disagreed with the decisions. This made him ineffective "incapable of exercising any influence" as Secretary of State, because his role was as foot soldier for an administration that had no use for tact or strategy.
This administration has shown from the beginning that they're not willing to compromise or negotiate with anyone. As you pointed out, how can anyone of conscience succeed when their bosses are completely unable to play the game by the rules? Powell's only mission was to get us to war, and he did that despite the world's most egotistical hardheads being being opposed to it.
If you're choosing a leader, pick the one that listens to the ones they lead. For all his mistakes, at least he had the conscience to resign with some humanity and humility intact.
Colin Powell resigned as Secretary of State in 2004, and was the first high ranking Republican official to go on to testify on record about all the many mistakes were made leading up to the war, including the lies that were included in his speeches leading up to the invasion.
I'm not aligned either way, but in my opinion he's the *only* Republican that has an ounce of credibility left.
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year?
Talent, ability, training, execution, performance, and a touch of luck.
The artists and the executives make so much money because they can do what they do better than most anyone else, and their audience is willing to compensate them for it. You might not appreciate their "talents", but it is something rare and very, very hard to do successfully. Pop radio spins a playlist on average of about 12 songs. There are hundreds of thousands of artists putting our records every year. I can guarantee you that not all of them are rich; some might not even eat tonight, or are working a day job to support that dream of being one of those 12, someday.
In your post, you complain about the Artists making so much money. You complain about executives who manage multinational corporations making so much money. If there's so much money to be had, why don't you do it and cash in? Why doesn't everyone?
This is the whole purpose of capitalism. It's got built-in meritocracy to reward those who can do things that people appreciate and as an incentive for them to keep doing it. I appreciate listening to my favorite musicians, so I reward them so they keep doing it. I also enjoy having hot, precooked, and tasty pizza delivered to my house. I reward the store and the delivery guy for that service. If that restaraunt could service a couple hundred million homes, then the pizza flippers and delivery guys would be millionaires, too.
The bottom line is that these "artists" get rewarded because their market scales. Sell a hundred records, make a hundred dollars. Sell a million, make a million. Good incentive to make a record that a million people will want to buy, eh?
Title of the article: "Pachter: PS3 Port Caused GTA IV Delay"
Quoted verbatim from the article (emphasis mine): "Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter says Take-Two management has "stumbled badly for the first time" with the delay of GTA IV, and said that he believes difficulties porting the game to the PlayStation 3 are to blame and that the company's new green light policy appears to be a failure."
The only confusing part is how you missed all that.
It's the Subspace emissary, so obviously it's going to involve routing the transporter signal through the tachyon deflector array and inverting the dilithium crystals in the warp core.
Scotty will say it'll take 8 hours, but you he'll be ready in 4.
Just don't let that Crusher kid near it, or they'll come back with their heads on backwards.
Why not just install wool carpets, make everyone take their shoes off and walk around in fuzzy socks. Then, they can touch special metal plates to donate their built-up static charge to the grid.
And for fun, they can make ramps without carpeting, for sliding down. Go back up, build up a charge, discharge and slide down again. I'd be on that all day!
Since the world seems so pent up on taking pre-orders for unreleased games, how about applying that "demo fee" towards some pre-order price?
This way, if we like the game we get first dibs AND that payment is already applied to the purchase price. If we don't like it, MS keeps the money and there's no hard feelings.
It makes it feel more like a rent-to-own than a scam, the difference being that there's now some value besides the soul-crushing sadness that comes from the "honor" of paying for advertising.
A lot of LOST's poor showing was due to the ginormous mid-season break, and a longer than necessary plotline splitting away from the supporting characters that most people cared about.
LOST is a story about survival as a group. As Jack says: "We live together, or we die alone." When they put the main characters apart, fans agreed.
Slashdot Mirror
...was playing Fatal Frame in the pitch black of night. No movie has ever terrified me more than the tension that builds up with the ambient soundtrack and the tiny light that tells you something is near, to activate the camera and go into 1st person mode, creeping along to find the ghostly image before it jumps out at you.
Anyone who's played it will no doubt remember the chilling moment while you tiptoe down the Rope Hallway and the red light comes on, looking up and coming face to face with Vengeance.
It's not the only option for some people, but it is for a lot. Even in major cities, sometimes the only choices are DSL and Cable. Satellite's high latency and poor upstream capacity isn't much of an option, and can be very expensive. And now with cable companies offering voice service, and telcos offering tv channels, a lot of people are going to consolidate for deals like the "Triple Play", not shop around a-la-carte.
And I'm sure the major media companies are keeping a *very* close eye on Apple. There's no way in hell they want to give Apple that same kind of leverage in the video industry, and since many of them own the very infrastructure that will be delivering the content it's going to be very interesting to see how it all plays out. It's kind of like watching two lions fighting over a wounded animal, except we're the wounded animal.
Except you could have written that same statement 10 years ago, and you'd still waiting...
Who's network will be distributing that content? Hint, for a lot of broadband users, it's their cable company.
With net neutrality in contention and backbone infrastructure reaching capacity, how far is it of a stretch to assume that you won't see some kind of throttling of video content from a provider who's also trying to sell you their video service on the same wire? For ordinary people who just want their video to look good and get delivered when they want it, once their AppleTV or Netflix or whoever's selling downloadable content turns ugly then they'll blame those companies, not their cable company.
I think the battle between the telcos and VOIP was nothing compared to the bloodbath we're going to witness. The cable companies have the FCC in their pockets. Who do you have?
Well, it is official, about the volunteers getting the boot.
Their forums are fun for a read and keeping up with the game's goings-on. Though you're right, not really designed very well -- they only just came off the "main" servers so that they dissapeared when the game went down. Kinda funny when the game's whole website died when there was a nodecrash, the first few times.
Kind of ironic they make such a fuss about their economics now, considering today they've announced the closure of their official moderated Trade forums. Their suggestion? For everyone to use a third-party site.
The most likely reason? Because they're terminating their volunteer service departments who did most of the forum moderations. While this might be an effort to try and erase their image as having players cheating at these levels, it doesn't mean much for those who still trusted CCP and EVE to maintain a fair and effective way to trade in an out-of-game setting (say, from at work). Now who's to trust?
It's a sad day for CCP.
Except that the game grinds experience for you, automagically, no hax needed.
Money is a different story. That you still have to *earn*
http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/sr=1-2/qid=11 87710812/ref=sr_1_2/602-4980210-0989442?ie=UTF8&as in=B000JHO4L0
Microsoft Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive
This item is available online and in stores.
I'm backing whomever gets sub $100 first.
Well, I'm backing whomever gets their shiny plastic discs below 19.95 first. For me the decision isn't the cost of one player, it's the cost of every title I want thereafter.
It depends very much on your style of play.
Eve was the first MMORPG I found that had the kind of "pick up and play" where you could literally jump into some action for a few minutes, accomplish something, and be done with it. Doing a mission doesn't take more than an hour usually; camping a gate, mining for ore, shooting at NPCs can fill half an hour; checking market listings or changing skill training (which is done realtime, no grinding necessary to advance) can be done in minutes.
There are large scale fleet ops, just like there are guild raids in other MMOs that take up hours or days, but these aren't for the casual player either. With Eve you decide how you want to play, and you can do so at your own leisure. I'd say that the two minutes it takes to set a skill to train up while you go off to watch a movie gives a greater accomplishment-per-minute feeling than grinding away on WoW for an hour to earn the XP for 1/100th of a level.
Actually, in the EVE Economy, there are very few money "faucets" and many more money "Drains".
Faucets (Isk Generators):
-Bounties on NPCs
-Mission Rewards
-NPC Trading
-Default insurance payouts on uninsured ships
Drains
-Taxes
-Fees
-Office Rentals
-Repairs
-Cloning
-Insurance
-Corp and Alliance Fees
-NPC Trading
Note that creating items and mining, two of the most popular professions, do not inherently create Money. They use other resources which can then be traded for raw cash, but the amount of "ISK" in the game is actually *reduced* due to the fees and other drains to the economy in the process. Death by explosion can be both a faucet (default insurance pours more money into the economy that wasn't there previously) and a drain (the revived player needs to spend cash on a new clone, new items from NPCs, insure a new ship, etc).
As for raw material rates, there is an artifical cap on the price of minerals due to the availability of NPC items which have a finite price but infinite supply and can be reprocessed into it's components. The price of Tritanium, for instance, is capped at about 3.6 ISK per unit where a 9000 ISK Shuttle will yield about 2500 units of tritanium. In markets that aren't seeded by NPCs, the rates can vary wildly depending on local supply and demand, and that's where the real fortunes are made.
"A website is aiming at blocking (Black) users. This because a fraction of the (Black) users (Can't Read) and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using (White), (Asian) or (Indians). From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are (Black) users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking (Blacks) seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.'
Discuss.
Ugh, such rampant commercialism!
That's it, I'm going back to Guitar Hero I to avoid all this unchecked product placement! Now, where's my plastic replica Gibson SG?
Sought for questioning: Bald White Man, Tall, with typical evil genius features. Last heard uttering the phrase "I know how to stop Superman!"
Despite his charisma and intelligence, which should make him a natural leader, he's also a soldier. As such, he's been trained to obey his superiors even when he personally disagreed with the decisions. This made him ineffective "incapable of exercising any influence" as Secretary of State, because his role was as foot soldier for an administration that had no use for tact or strategy.
This administration has shown from the beginning that they're not willing to compromise or negotiate with anyone. As you pointed out, how can anyone of conscience succeed when their bosses are completely unable to play the game by the rules? Powell's only mission was to get us to war, and he did that despite the world's most egotistical hardheads being being opposed to it.
If you're choosing a leader, pick the one that listens to the ones they lead. For all his mistakes, at least he had the conscience to resign with some humanity and humility intact.
Colin Powell resigned as Secretary of State in 2004, and was the first high ranking Republican official to go on to testify on record about all the many mistakes were made leading up to the war, including the lies that were included in his speeches leading up to the invasion.
I'm not aligned either way, but in my opinion he's the *only* Republican that has an ounce of credibility left.
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year?
Talent, ability, training, execution, performance, and a touch of luck.
The artists and the executives make so much money because they can do what they do better than most anyone else, and their audience is willing to compensate them for it. You might not appreciate their "talents", but it is something rare and very, very hard to do successfully. Pop radio spins a playlist on average of about 12 songs. There are hundreds of thousands of artists putting our records every year. I can guarantee you that not all of them are rich; some might not even eat tonight, or are working a day job to support that dream of being one of those 12, someday.
In your post, you complain about the Artists making so much money. You complain about executives who manage multinational corporations making so much money. If there's so much money to be had, why don't you do it and cash in? Why doesn't everyone?
This is the whole purpose of capitalism. It's got built-in meritocracy to reward those who can do things that people appreciate and as an incentive for them to keep doing it. I appreciate listening to my favorite musicians, so I reward them so they keep doing it. I also enjoy having hot, precooked, and tasty pizza delivered to my house. I reward the store and the delivery guy for that service. If that restaraunt could service a couple hundred million homes, then the pizza flippers and delivery guys would be millionaires, too.
The bottom line is that these "artists" get rewarded because their market scales. Sell a hundred records, make a hundred dollars. Sell a million, make a million. Good incentive to make a record that a million people will want to buy, eh?
Title of the article:
"Pachter: PS3 Port Caused GTA IV Delay"
Quoted verbatim from the article (emphasis mine):
"Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter says Take-Two management has "stumbled badly for the first time" with the delay of GTA IV, and said that he believes difficulties porting the game to the PlayStation 3 are to blame and that the company's new green light policy appears to be a failure."
The only confusing part is how you missed all that.
It's the Subspace emissary, so obviously it's going to involve routing the transporter signal through the tachyon deflector array and inverting the dilithium crystals in the warp core.
Scotty will say it'll take 8 hours, but you he'll be ready in 4.
Just don't let that Crusher kid near it, or they'll come back with their heads on backwards.
It's not news for nerds, it's Slashdot.org!
Why not just install wool carpets, make everyone take their shoes off and walk around in fuzzy socks. Then, they can touch special metal plates to donate their built-up static charge to the grid.
And for fun, they can make ramps without carpeting, for sliding down. Go back up, build up a charge, discharge and slide down again. I'd be on that all day!
Since the world seems so pent up on taking pre-orders for unreleased games, how about applying that "demo fee" towards some pre-order price?
This way, if we like the game we get first dibs AND that payment is already applied to the purchase price. If we don't like it, MS keeps the money and there's no hard feelings.
It makes it feel more like a rent-to-own than a scam, the difference being that there's now some value besides the soul-crushing sadness that comes from the "honor" of paying for advertising.
A lot of LOST's poor showing was due to the ginormous mid-season break, and a longer than necessary plotline splitting away from the supporting characters that most people cared about.
LOST is a story about survival as a group. As Jack says: "We live together, or we die alone." When they put the main characters apart, fans agreed.
But will it play Crysis at 60fps?
For the symbolically inclined, the Statue of Liberty's head that goes flying at the end bears a striking resemblance to another cartoon robot.
... could this be next?
Live action Transformers