I don't know about enforcement, but when I registered my primary domain, I had to submit a form, by email, justifying why I should be granted that domain.
I think by that point they were rubber-stamping them, but it was read and approved by a human.
I definitely saw rejected applications a couple of years prior to that, for both GTLDs from Network Solutions, and for.uk from the UK Naming Committee.
Once you have an analogue controller that allows you to turn around and aim at an arbitrary tiny spot of your choice within a fraction of a second, you can come back.
Why on earth would this be relevent to an RPG, rather than an FPS?
As far as I can tell, the combat is still dependent on *my* twitch shooter skills as much as *my character's* combat skills. So whatever wonderful story, exploring and interacting experiences are on offer, I'm not going to get to see them.
Combat doesn't *have* to be turn-based, I've learned to work with Dragon Age, for example. But it *should* be based on my character's abilities tied to my decision making, e.g. I choose to shoot a bow at the orc over there, the character's archery skill determines if I hit. If my accuracy at pointing something in the right direction with my right thumb is involved, it's an FPS, and I'm not interested in playing it.
I'm still baffled as to why this series is held up as the crown of "hard-core" RPGs, when it's such a hybrid...
And I really dislike the mailing list. Please set up a forum instead. To use a mailing list, I have to set up another filter, or start another email account as well as registering with the list.
Nay, nay and thrice nay!
A web forum I have to read with *your* choice of UI and functionality.
A mailing list I can read with *my* choice of UI and functionality.
not storing passwords as plaintext but as (salted) hash - a preventative measure for in case you do get hacked
This. How anyone is still writing code that does this baffles me beyond all belief. I despair every time I click on a "forgot my password" link and get an email with a copy of my plain-text password...
Where I live, they have now opened a 99p shop, which is much more popular than the traditional one pound shop for cheap stuff, even though it's actually more annoying to end up with 7 or 8p in coppers as change...
Around my way, they're actively marketing themselves against the pound shop, as being better value!
They also have huge, supposedly-professionally printed advertising in the windows proclaiming that you get "alot more for your money". This makes me want to go in and try to buy an alot at as a pet, but I suspect their cashiers don't read Hyperbole-and-a-Half...
Commodore BASIC, as with most 8-bit micro built-in languages, was interpreted, not compiled. If you're old enough to have cut your teeth on such a beastie, you're old enough to know (and to care about) the difference;)
The BBC Micro is the only device of that era I can remember being otherwise. You could augment the interpreted BASIC programs with in-line assembler - which would have saved me many hours spent with the Big Book of 6502 Opcodes on my VIC-20, before I could afford an assembler.
Graphics are already "realistic enough" for most people, and trying to move things closer to photorealistic gameplay is probably not worth it, since the return they get is minimal, while the effort required is exorbitant. Instead, spending it on improved gameplay or other elements is a better return on their investment.
Why do they even *have* to be "realistic", at least for every game?
I'm replaying Oddworld: Abe's Oddesey at the moment. It's a 1998 PS1 title, and while the graphics are somewhat blocky, there is a definite artistic style to them that means it's still a joy to play.
Compare that to something that was *trying* to be realistic a year or two (or three) ago, which is just going to look like crap against current technology.
What could someone with actual artistic vision do with a modern console?
This is similar to how routers on the internet know where to route packets: all participants maintain a shared data structure.
Or, er, not. Link-state protocols, like OSPF or IS-IS, have a coherent view of the network *within a single autonomous system*.
The wider, BGP-speaking Internet is a very long way from being a single view of anything, because each router is making its own best-path selection, and hence deciding which routes to send to its neighbours.
Simple: JRPGs, as a genre, are outdated and most young gamers don't have the patience to put up with them when there are so many more enjoyable games out there.
That most young gamers aren't interested, I'll give you.
That there are better games out there? Maybe some 2D platformers (but they are just as "outdated"), or whatever you put the 3D explorer / platformers into (I'm thinking Zelda, Metroid Prime).
If I had to stick exclusively with one genre of game, though, turn-based RPGs (which mostly points towards JRPGs these days) would certainly be it!
The coffee was hot. Don't you understand, it was too hot to drink immediately. That's unheard of. She had no responsibility not to spill a hot drink on herself and no reasonable person ever expects coffee too hot to drink.
As an almost totally unrelated rant, I get served coffee too hot to drink pretty much everywhere. I assume this is due to the coffee being made at a temperature based on it being contaminated with (cooler) milk or cream, rather than being served as the good Lord intended:)
"Games" and "first-person shooters" are *not* equivalent, as many of those complaining about putting a cross-hair exactly where there want seem to think.
I'd be quite happy for the genre to fade into obscurity on consoles and go back to PCs / mouse / keyboard, leaving console developers to concentrate on things that interest me.
There's a couple of drivers for this, both technical and more social (or at least at layers 8+ in the stack).
Part of the reason so many providers get away with one IP address per subscriber is going back to the beginning of dial-up access, where the idea of needing more than a single address per connection was close to unthinkable. IPv6 starts in a world where every end-site is full of networked devices, all needing a v6 address, and comes with an standards document that strongly suggests (not quite mandates) that each end-site (be that an office or a house) should ideally get a/48, but could be a/56 if you want. Even a/64 gets you 64 bits - that's an IPv4 Internet squared! - of host addresses. Allocating a/128 to an end site doesn't even get a mention.
Technically, lots of routers are assuming/64 as the network size, as does a lot of the way DHCP works for v6, especially in terms of prefix-delegation. ISPs are going to have to work quite hard, and give themselves a lot of un-needed support nightmares, to provide end-users with anything longer than a/64.
I had the same concerns as you originally that despite the potentially of the protocol, all the ISPs who want the Internet to work like TV would manage to cripple it, but the more I look at it, the less likely I see this being.
In any case, I think that in the US, the real bandwidth crisis is in upload speeds. They've been practically flat for ten years. To really enable the Next-Gen Buzzword-Compliant Economy-2.0, you need to return to the original peer-centric model of the Internet where every node can act as a host. It's a scary future that neither Telecoms nor Politicians feel comfortable with, but quite frankly I consider it a major strategic requirement for future economic security.
QFT, same in the UK. Even ignoring Web2.0 buzz, my backups from home take forever to complete. I can get a nice solid 14Mb/s downstream (which I actually get, and can fill 24/7), but only 864Kb/s upstream (currently free through my employer, but would cost me ~£20/month if I was paying). I can go to 2Mb/s symmetric for £70-100/month, 10Mb/s symmetric is £500+/month. Mental.
Kids are so used to using computers from an early age that a class on word processing in high school is analogous to a class on "How to use a pencil". They already know the basics. So the answer isn't putting in more stuff that they won't like, and is much harder to do than edit a paragraph in word.
Actually, most of them don't know how to word process. Everyone thinks they know how to use Word, so don't need to be taught it, but most of them don't know how to use it worth a damn. Things like why styles are good rather than just applying arbitrary naked formatting, page breaks rather than 'press return until you're on a new page', outlines, headings, ToC/ToF, autonumbering of figures, etc.
Having kids complete a "computing" or "IT skills" course able to produce documents that can be maintained by other people and that don't look like shit would be a valuable skill to bring to the workplace.
How you make that interesting is another matter...
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?
Aside from the minor issue that there's still no web interface for any of these forums (Slashdot included) that comes within a hundred miles of a decent newsreader client... Hell, none of them get within a hundred miles of 'trn', which is, what, 20 years old now?
Yes, some of them you can get as an email feed, which is sort-of OK with a decent threading email client, but then you hit the culture-clash between the people expecting email conventions, and the people expecting it to work like a web forum.
Right now, we are very close to having 4 day work week purely because most of production systems are more efficient and require less human labor.
No, we're not. We really should be, but we're not.
How many CEOs do you know who would choose the same amount of productivity for less employee time (maybe less employee cost), over more productivity? Growth is the only metric that counts, it seems.
How may workers do you know who would campaign for a four-day week at the same pay over a five-day week for more pay?
I've worked for Ford, as a contractor. The UK folks were hostile enough to the concept of driving anything that wasn't made by Ford; the US folks gave the impression that I'd have been beaten to death in the car park had I arrived in my Nissan.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and if you don't, they can ask you to leave or have you removed for trespassing if you refuse.
What they can't do is hold you down and force a shirt onto you.
I don't know about enforcement, but when I registered my primary domain, I had to submit a form, by email, justifying why I should be granted that domain.
I think by that point they were rubber-stamping them, but it was read and approved by a human.
I definitely saw rejected applications a couple of years prior to that, for both GTLDs from Network Solutions, and for .uk from the UK Naming Committee.
Once you have an analogue controller that allows you to turn around and aim at an arbitrary tiny spot of your choice within a fraction of a second, you can come back.
Why on earth would this be relevent to an RPG, rather than an FPS?
As far as I can tell, the combat is still dependent on *my* twitch shooter skills as much as *my character's* combat skills. So whatever wonderful story, exploring and interacting experiences are on offer, I'm not going to get to see them.
Combat doesn't *have* to be turn-based, I've learned to work with Dragon Age, for example. But it *should* be based on my character's abilities tied to my decision making, e.g. I choose to shoot a bow at the orc over there, the character's archery skill determines if I hit. If my accuracy at pointing something in the right direction with my right thumb is involved, it's an FPS, and I'm not interested in playing it.
I'm still baffled as to why this series is held up as the crown of "hard-core" RPGs, when it's such a hybrid...
And I really dislike the mailing list. Please set up a forum instead. To use a mailing list, I have to set up another filter, or start another email account as well as registering with the list.
Nay, nay and thrice nay!
A web forum I have to read with *your* choice of UI and functionality.
A mailing list I can read with *my* choice of UI and functionality.
No contest.
not storing passwords as plaintext but as (salted) hash - a preventative measure for in case you do get hacked
This. How anyone is still writing code that does this baffles me beyond all belief. I despair every time I click on a "forgot my password" link and get an email with a copy of my plain-text password...
Where I live, they have now opened a 99p shop, which is much more popular than the traditional one pound shop for cheap stuff, even though it's actually more annoying to end up with 7 or 8p in coppers as change...
Around my way, they're actively marketing themselves against the pound shop, as being better value!
They also have huge, supposedly-professionally printed advertising in the windows proclaiming that you get "alot more for your money". This makes me want to go in and try to buy an alot at as a pet, but I suspect their cashiers don't read Hyperbole-and-a-Half...
Commodore BASIC, as with most 8-bit micro built-in languages, was interpreted, not compiled. If you're old enough to have cut your teeth on such a beastie, you're old enough to know (and to care about) the difference ;)
The BBC Micro is the only device of that era I can remember being otherwise. You could augment the interpreted BASIC programs with in-line assembler - which would have saved me many hours spent with the Big Book of 6502 Opcodes on my VIC-20, before I could afford an assembler.
Now that Gearbox has finally put this beast to rest, I wonder what they could do with the license starting from scratch?
A nice 2D platformer rather than *another* FPS (*yawn*)?
A game with nuggets of self-mocking humour rather than a wave of misogynist (and frankly somewhat creepy) nonsense?
Does no-one actually remember Duke Nukem's origins? Am I the only one who still laughs at "Why I'm So Great"?
YOU are complicit in the wonton inhumane and completely barbaric treatment of beings as human as you..
I'm forcing inmates to eat Chinese food?
Hint: the word you're looking for is "wanton".
Graphics are already "realistic enough" for most people, and trying to move things closer to photorealistic gameplay is probably not worth it, since the return they get is minimal, while the effort required is exorbitant. Instead, spending it on improved gameplay or other elements is a better return on their investment.
Why do they even *have* to be "realistic", at least for every game?
I'm replaying Oddworld: Abe's Oddesey at the moment. It's a 1998 PS1 title, and while the graphics are somewhat blocky, there is a definite artistic style to them that means it's still a joy to play.
Compare that to something that was *trying* to be realistic a year or two (or three) ago, which is just going to look like crap against current technology.
What could someone with actual artistic vision do with a modern console?
This is similar to how routers on the internet know where to route packets: all participants maintain a shared data structure.
Or, er, not. Link-state protocols, like OSPF or IS-IS, have a coherent view of the network *within a single autonomous system*.
The wider, BGP-speaking Internet is a very long way from being a single view of anything, because each router is making its own best-path selection, and hence deciding which routes to send to its neighbours.
Great graphics, music, characters, story. Horrible, horrible combat.
I was very annoyed, I had to give up in frustration a *long* time before seeing the end - and I really wanted to play the game through to completion.
Simple: JRPGs, as a genre, are outdated and most young gamers don't have the patience to put up with them when there are so many more enjoyable games out there.
That most young gamers aren't interested, I'll give you.
That there are better games out there? Maybe some 2D platformers (but they are just as "outdated"), or whatever you put the 3D explorer / platformers into (I'm thinking Zelda, Metroid Prime).
If I had to stick exclusively with one genre of game, though, turn-based RPGs (which mostly points towards JRPGs these days) would certainly be it!
Mine's on there. East Mersea Oyster Fisheries :)
Credits to the school and to my geography teacher don't appear until you read all the way through to the last of the East Mersea entries, though.
The coffee was hot. Don't you understand, it was too hot to drink immediately. That's unheard of. She had no responsibility not to spill a hot drink on herself and no reasonable person ever expects coffee too hot to drink.
As an almost totally unrelated rant, I get served coffee too hot to drink pretty much everywhere. I assume this is due to the coffee being made at a temperature based on it being contaminated with (cooler) milk or cream, rather than being served as the good Lord intended :)
This.
"Games" and "first-person shooters" are *not* equivalent, as many of those complaining about putting a cross-hair exactly where there want seem to think.
I'd be quite happy for the genre to fade into obscurity on consoles and go back to PCs / mouse / keyboard, leaving console developers to concentrate on things that interest me.
Sixxs, with the AICCU client. Works from behind NAT without forwarding prot41 or anything else, tunneling protocol is dynamic using TIC and AYIYA.
There's a couple of drivers for this, both technical and more social (or at least at layers 8+ in the stack).
Part of the reason so many providers get away with one IP address per subscriber is going back to the beginning of dial-up access, where the idea of needing more than a single address per connection was close to unthinkable. IPv6 starts in a world where every end-site is full of networked devices, all needing a v6 address, and comes with an standards document that strongly suggests (not quite mandates) that each end-site (be that an office or a house) should ideally get a /48, but could be a /56 if you want. Even a /64 gets you 64 bits - that's an IPv4 Internet squared! - of host addresses. Allocating a /128 to an end site doesn't even get a mention.
Technically, lots of routers are assuming /64 as the network size, as does a lot of the way DHCP works for v6, especially in terms of prefix-delegation. ISPs are going to have to work quite hard, and give themselves a lot of un-needed support nightmares, to provide end-users with anything longer than a /64.
I had the same concerns as you originally that despite the potentially of the protocol, all the ISPs who want the Internet to work like TV would manage to cripple it, but the more I look at it, the less likely I see this being.
No. I played Donkey Kong in the arcade when it came out, I've played a lot of video games since, and I've never heard it.
Is it a localised thing? (I'm in the UK)
QFT, same in the UK. Even ignoring Web2.0 buzz, my backups from home take forever to complete. I can get a nice solid 14Mb/s downstream (which I actually get, and can fill 24/7), but only 864Kb/s upstream (currently free through my employer, but would cost me ~£20/month if I was paying). I can go to 2Mb/s symmetric for £70-100/month, 10Mb/s symmetric is £500+/month. Mental.
Actually, most of them don't know how to word process. Everyone thinks they know how to use Word, so don't need to be taught it, but most of them don't know how to use it worth a damn. Things like why styles are good rather than just applying arbitrary naked formatting, page breaks rather than 'press return until you're on a new page', outlines, headings, ToC/ToF, autonumbering of figures, etc.
Having kids complete a "computing" or "IT skills" course able to produce documents that can be maintained by other people and that don't look like shit would be a valuable skill to bring to the workplace.
How you make that interesting is another matter...
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?
Aside from the minor issue that there's still no web interface for any of these forums (Slashdot included) that comes within a hundred miles of a decent newsreader client... Hell, none of them get within a hundred miles of 'trn', which is, what, 20 years old now? Yes, some of them you can get as an email feed, which is sort-of OK with a decent threading email client, but then you hit the culture-clash between the people expecting email conventions, and the people expecting it to work like a web forum.
Right now, we are very close to having 4 day work week purely because most of production systems are more efficient and require less human labor.
No, we're not. We really should be, but we're not.
How many CEOs do you know who would choose the same amount of productivity for less employee time (maybe less employee cost), over more productivity? Growth is the only metric that counts, it seems.
How may workers do you know who would campaign for a four-day week at the same pay over a five-day week for more pay?
Both sides still put too much value on Stuff...
I've worked for Ford, as a contractor. The UK folks were hostile enough to the concept of driving anything that wasn't made by Ford; the US folks gave the impression that I'd have been beaten to death in the car park had I arrived in my Nissan.