I don't see the inventory on there now. Really, although nethack has a ton of commands, most of them are used only rarely, I can easily see a popup for rarely used commands. I'd also implement an inventory popup (all of this is on the touchscreen BTW), where you click the button and get a list of your inventory. Then just click the inventory item to use it (or do whatever action you specified). From the looks of the screenshot however you should be able to fit all or nearly all of the common commands easily enough on the bottom screen. Just because it's nethack doesn't mean it has to be arcane.
The arrow pad on the screen in that picture worries me. Don't tell me the game doesn't recognise the D-Pad? Also, the keyboard on there looks a bit dodgy, why not just list out the available actions instead of forcing people to memorize the keys again? I know there's a lot of available actions (it is nethack after all), but it seems like you should be able to get them to fit on there somehow.
It's trivially easy to download the videos off of Youtube. That's one thing that makes it great, even people still stuck on modems can use it. There's even a Firefox Plugin to let you download the videos.
No, actaully it's a good percentage of Americans, in particular the ones that don't play video games, don't pay attention to them, and only hear about them when their newsanchor tells them that Doom caused those Columbine kids to go on a killing spree and lets hear what our special guest Jack Thompson has to say.
By the way, this group includes pretty much everybody involved with the lawmaking process at all levels of government.
It's funny because back in the NES and SNES days Nintendo was just about as abusive as you can get with their near monopoly status. Just as retailers who had to stock those things and ended up just eating the cost of any returned units because Nintendo wouldn't take returns or offer a refund.
More than that, it destroys the safety mechanism too. You have to replace both the blade and the big block/wire thing that stops it. Granted, even at (probably) $200 for the block thing and $50 for the blade, it's way cheaper than a visit to the hospital to sew a finger back on.
I thought the manufacturers were just relucatant to give 10% of the gross of every saw they sold to the guy who patented it. Basically, they liked the idea, but they'd have to increase the price of their saws by 5% or so to compete, and that's a lot of markup in a relatively competative marketplace.
Basically, it would have been like the guy who invented seatbelts requiring a licensing fee of $500 for each car they're installed in (back in the 50s).
To me, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are a lot like SVHS compared to regular VHS. They don't offer any particular new features that your average person is going to notice (they don't have the right equipment), but they are more difficult to set up (very few TVs had S-V jacks when SVHS was still big), far more expensive, and seemingly aimed at the high end videophlies. In the end S-V decks were just a niche market while plain old crappy VHS kept on chugging. It took a major technological overhaul to get people to switch (much like what it took to get people to switch from Cassette tapes to CDs).
The industry certainly isn't helping the problem by coming up with new and inventive DRM obsticles that they'll force the consumer to hurdle. Nor will they win a lot of friends by burning early adopters.
Ultimately if we get to the point where the DRM doesn't matter and the HD-DVD/Blu Ray decks are only slightly more expensive than regular DVD decks, and the cost for premanufactured discs is the same either way, then it will be adopted (but nowhere near as fast as DVDs were adopted), but if the costs are higher or there is some onerous DRM to contend with, then the technology is going to be stillborn like SVHS.
Yeah, but the article is talking about Gamespot and IGN and the like. Getting a 5 out of 10 from them is like them saying it's the worst game ever made, and a game store clerk is justified in stabbing you in the face if you pick up the box.
The end result is that peppering the users with security warnings is the same as no security at all. Eventually people will glaze over and just keep clicking continue without reading the things (if in fact they could even read them to begin with, I mean if MSIEXEC.DLL asks for permission do run something, do I let it? The average home user has no idea what that is.)
I'd imagine that ISPs would have to buy small chunks of multicast addresses and then resell them to people. Unfortunatly that will probably kill the idea before it even gets started, since ISPs will no doubt charge and arm and a leg for a Multicast IP and Bittorrent users generally want to avoid drawing too much attention from their ISP. It might make sense if there is just a pool of multicast groups that's managed by a central server for all Bittorrent users, but even that sounds like a non-starter. Multicast is just difficult to get right.
It's interesting how a brutal authoritarian regime has more legitmacy than a publicly held company just because they've managed to hold on to political power for a couple of decades. It's not like the government of Camaroon is really acting in the peoples interest or anything, they're just guys who are stealing everything they can get their hands on while keeping the people opressed. At least Verisign has some accountability.
The thing is, the kind of informants this is supposed to protect are the kind that can't afford to be seen in public talking to a reporter. Like when the administration is doing something illegal and unethical, but they've classified it to prevent the public from knowing, the person who reports it can be executed for treason if the information leaks out, even if they were completely justified in what they did. The Valarie Plame affair should have reinforced that the current administration is not above petty repaisals either.
The US uses mm/dd/yy because that's the way it's spoken in English: August Second Two Thousand Six. Saying "The Second Day of August Two Thousand Six" sounds clunky to American ears.
While I do agree that the Shrill Anti-SUV crowd tends to tar hunters and other people who need a 4wd vehicle with good ground clearance for their offroad work unfairly, the guy bought a Lincoln Navigator. No actual outdoorsman would buy one of those, that guy had it entirely for the bling factor. Even if he did have a large family, your average Station Wagon is a far better choice for getting them around from an environmental impact standpoint and works just as well. Even a minivan would be less obnoxious, especially if he has 4 or 5 kids.
The thing is, with mainstream news sources like that, their audience IS an idiot, at least with regards to that specific discussion area. If the news was talking about Dog Breeding or Wedding Planning then your average Slashdotter would be an idiot too. Well, idiot isn't really the right word, but the result is that they're completely uninformed about whatever you're talking about so you have to start at the beginning, and since you only have 2-5 minutes to talk about it, well, there's just not much room for giving people an in-depth understanding of the problem.
Unfortunatly, the CoV Masterminds have lots of issues, mostly with pets not being any smarter than regular mobs.
On the other hand, a game designed from the ground up to have a small squad of soldiers under your command could be really cool. As you level up you could either upgrade their equipment, have more out at a time, or upgrade their class completely (get a Siege tank or something). Performance will be an issue though, especially in high level PvP if everyone has a dozen squadmembers and you have battles with 75 people on each side. Masterminds already have performance issues in CoV, and they max out at 6-8 pets.
I've been thinking about World of Starcraft for a bit, and the problem can be summed up in a single word: Zerg. How do you make a PC Zerg character that isn't Kerrigan or the Hive Mind? Forcing everyone to be either a Human or a Protoss fighting the Zerg just doesn't make it Starcraft.
Who would want to play as a Zergling? Although it could be really cool if you started out as a Zergling and then mutated up to the more advanced forms.:)
Ultimately though it will also be really hard to make a MMO of Starcraft without making the individual tasks seem like a contrivance. Blizzard would really have to break the MMO mold (which IMHO would not be a bad thing at all) if they wanted to do it right.
Also, it's quite likely that WEP is more than enough to keep their neighbors out. WPA is better, but getting embedded wireless devices to support it is a PITA. Heck, even trivial-to-crack 40 bit WEP is plenty strong to keep out pretty much everybody who tries to freeload off of you.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the inventory on there now. Really, although nethack has a ton of commands, most of them are used only rarely, I can easily see a popup for rarely used commands. I'd also implement an inventory popup (all of this is on the touchscreen BTW), where you click the button and get a list of your inventory. Then just click the inventory item to use it (or do whatever action you specified). From the looks of the screenshot however you should be able to fit all or nearly all of the common commands easily enough on the bottom screen. Just because it's nethack doesn't mean it has to be arcane.
The arrow pad on the screen in that picture worries me. Don't tell me the game doesn't recognise the D-Pad? Also, the keyboard on there looks a bit dodgy, why not just list out the available actions instead of forcing people to memorize the keys again? I know there's a lot of available actions (it is nethack after all), but it seems like you should be able to get them to fit on there somehow.
It's trivially easy to download the videos off of Youtube. That's one thing that makes it great, even people still stuck on modems can use it. There's even a Firefox Plugin to let you download the videos.
No, actaully it's a good percentage of Americans, in particular the ones that don't play video games, don't pay attention to them, and only hear about them when their newsanchor tells them that Doom caused those Columbine kids to go on a killing spree and lets hear what our special guest Jack Thompson has to say.
By the way, this group includes pretty much everybody involved with the lawmaking process at all levels of government.
It's funny because back in the NES and SNES days Nintendo was just about as abusive as you can get with their near monopoly status. Just as retailers who had to stock those things and ended up just eating the cost of any returned units because Nintendo wouldn't take returns or offer a refund.
More than that, it destroys the safety mechanism too. You have to replace both the blade and the big block/wire thing that stops it. Granted, even at (probably) $200 for the block thing and $50 for the blade, it's way cheaper than a visit to the hospital to sew a finger back on.
I thought the manufacturers were just relucatant to give 10% of the gross of every saw they sold to the guy who patented it. Basically, they liked the idea, but they'd have to increase the price of their saws by 5% or so to compete, and that's a lot of markup in a relatively competative marketplace.
Basically, it would have been like the guy who invented seatbelts requiring a licensing fee of $500 for each car they're installed in (back in the 50s).
Woo! It saves that 0.1% of my modern CPU that is going for UDP checksum calculations and uh, well UDP doesn't exactly require a lot of processing...
To me, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are a lot like SVHS compared to regular VHS. They don't offer any particular new features that your average person is going to notice (they don't have the right equipment), but they are more difficult to set up (very few TVs had S-V jacks when SVHS was still big), far more expensive, and seemingly aimed at the high end videophlies. In the end S-V decks were just a niche market while plain old crappy VHS kept on chugging. It took a major technological overhaul to get people to switch (much like what it took to get people to switch from Cassette tapes to CDs).
The industry certainly isn't helping the problem by coming up with new and inventive DRM obsticles that they'll force the consumer to hurdle. Nor will they win a lot of friends by burning early adopters.
Ultimately if we get to the point where the DRM doesn't matter and the HD-DVD/Blu Ray decks are only slightly more expensive than regular DVD decks, and the cost for premanufactured discs is the same either way, then it will be adopted (but nowhere near as fast as DVDs were adopted), but if the costs are higher or there is some onerous DRM to contend with, then the technology is going to be stillborn like SVHS.
Yeah, but the article is talking about Gamespot and IGN and the like. Getting a 5 out of 10 from them is like them saying it's the worst game ever made, and a game store clerk is justified in stabbing you in the face if you pick up the box.
The end result is that peppering the users with security warnings is the same as no security at all. Eventually people will glaze over and just keep clicking continue without reading the things (if in fact they could even read them to begin with, I mean if MSIEXEC.DLL asks for permission do run something, do I let it? The average home user has no idea what that is.)
ICANN?
I'd imagine that ISPs would have to buy small chunks of multicast addresses and then resell them to people. Unfortunatly that will probably kill the idea before it even gets started, since ISPs will no doubt charge and arm and a leg for a Multicast IP and Bittorrent users generally want to avoid drawing too much attention from their ISP. It might make sense if there is just a pool of multicast groups that's managed by a central server for all Bittorrent users, but even that sounds like a non-starter. Multicast is just difficult to get right.
It's interesting how a brutal authoritarian regime has more legitmacy than a publicly held company just because they've managed to hold on to political power for a couple of decades. It's not like the government of Camaroon is really acting in the peoples interest or anything, they're just guys who are stealing everything they can get their hands on while keeping the people opressed. At least Verisign has some accountability.
It was hard to read that article over the sound of the grinding axe.
The thing is, the kind of informants this is supposed to protect are the kind that can't afford to be seen in public talking to a reporter. Like when the administration is doing something illegal and unethical, but they've classified it to prevent the public from knowing, the person who reports it can be executed for treason if the information leaks out, even if they were completely justified in what they did. The Valarie Plame affair should have reinforced that the current administration is not above petty repaisals either.
The US uses mm/dd/yy because that's the way it's spoken in English: August Second Two Thousand Six. Saying "The Second Day of August Two Thousand Six" sounds clunky to American ears.
If you let all of those other people wake up first there won't be any hot water left for your shower.
While I do agree that the Shrill Anti-SUV crowd tends to tar hunters and other people who need a 4wd vehicle with good ground clearance for their offroad work unfairly, the guy bought a Lincoln Navigator. No actual outdoorsman would buy one of those, that guy had it entirely for the bling factor. Even if he did have a large family, your average Station Wagon is a far better choice for getting them around from an environmental impact standpoint and works just as well. Even a minivan would be less obnoxious, especially if he has 4 or 5 kids.
The thing is, with mainstream news sources like that, their audience IS an idiot, at least with regards to that specific discussion area. If the news was talking about Dog Breeding or Wedding Planning then your average Slashdotter would be an idiot too. Well, idiot isn't really the right word, but the result is that they're completely uninformed about whatever you're talking about so you have to start at the beginning, and since you only have 2-5 minutes to talk about it, well, there's just not much room for giving people an in-depth understanding of the problem.
Man, Coke must be a much younger product than I thought.
Unfortunatly, the CoV Masterminds have lots of issues, mostly with pets not being any smarter than regular mobs.
On the other hand, a game designed from the ground up to have a small squad of soldiers under your command could be really cool. As you level up you could either upgrade their equipment, have more out at a time, or upgrade their class completely (get a Siege tank or something). Performance will be an issue though, especially in high level PvP if everyone has a dozen squadmembers and you have battles with 75 people on each side. Masterminds already have performance issues in CoV, and they max out at 6-8 pets.
I've been thinking about World of Starcraft for a bit, and the problem can be summed up in a single word: Zerg. How do you make a PC Zerg character that isn't Kerrigan or the Hive Mind? Forcing everyone to be either a Human or a Protoss fighting the Zerg just doesn't make it Starcraft.
:)
Who would want to play as a Zergling? Although it could be really cool if you started out as a Zergling and then mutated up to the more advanced forms.
Ultimately though it will also be really hard to make a MMO of Starcraft without making the individual tasks seem like a contrivance. Blizzard would really have to break the MMO mold (which IMHO would not be a bad thing at all) if they wanted to do it right.
This means the 360 might start picking up popularity in Asia, especially in China and Taiwan.
Also, it's quite likely that WEP is more than enough to keep their neighbors out. WPA is better, but getting embedded wireless devices to support it is a PITA. Heck, even trivial-to-crack 40 bit WEP is plenty strong to keep out pretty much everybody who tries to freeload off of you.