I have my two all-time favourite computer games loaded on my laptop right now: Fallout and Fallout 2. They run fine on older systems (even much older systems) and are always a blast. They also have a lot of replayability. If you haven't played them before, check them out for sure.
Is a new type of food a ever a "solution" to anything? Was the first guy to use onions in cooking solving a problem that faced his community, or just wanting to try something new?
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them.
That's funny, because there is something about people who talk incessantly about The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives that makes me want to punch them. Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
I think what you are describing is maxing a character out, which is VERY hard to do in Eve. I have been playing for about 3 months and I'm flying a battleship. I'm flying level 3 missions solo (the current generation supports missions up to level 4), and with one other corp mate I've been flying level 4 missions. There is a lot to do in Eve, as TFA says, and not all of it is missions.
If you won't be satisfied unless your character is 100% proficient in _everything_, then Eve probably isn't the game for you. But the breadth of the skill system is a big part of what makes Eve really interesting. Do you want a character who is a high-end expert in cloaking and covert ops? Well, it takes time to get there but it's do-able. Same for anything else. My character isn't competitive with someone who has been playing for 2 years, but that's only fair.
Check out Puzzle Pirates: http://www.puzzlepirates.com/. It sounds like pretty much what you describe: a MMORPG where everything in the game, from sailing the ship to swordfighting to manufacturing is accomplished via Bejewelled-esque puzzle games. It's a great concept, and it works really well.
For the brief period that I played, I got into two ship-to-ship combats. You can have several people on the same ship, in the roles of sailing, carpentry, gunnery, bilge pumping, etc. etc. Each of these tasks is tied to a specific mini-game... you play the sailing game better, you go faster. You play the swordfighting game better, you defeat your enemies.
The only thing that I think keeps Puzzle Pirates from going huge is the cutesiness of the characters, who look like little lego men. If the game was still cute and friendly, but maybe a bit more "serious"-looking, it might attract a much larger fanbase.
Apple might consider implementing ogg support when 1% of the people buying ipods want it. The fact is, virtually nobody has even HEARD of ogg vorbis, much less requiring it for their music player purchases. You need to face the fact that you are in a non-influential minority, and if you want to be have a wide choice of music players, you might want to think about re-ripping all of your cds, because ogg support is at the bottom of the priority list for 99.9% of music player manufacturers and purchasers.
A hundred or a thousand years ago, large portions of the population didn't have time to sit at their desks and play around with "hobbies". If your entire waking life is spent trying to scrape a living out of semi-fertile ground on one leg because you lost the other one to infection after dropping a rock on your toe, your options for being a geek are limited. SCA fantasies notwithstanding, if you lived in the middle ages it didn't matter how smart or creative you were if you were born to the wrong parents. If you had a brain for math and logic, you would be free to think about such things while digging up weeds, but applying them to any sort of nerdy pursuit was way beyond the means of your average (read: non-noble) person.
It's only in the last hundred or so years that our technology and standard of living has allowed non-wealthy people to fulfil their potential regarding intellectual pursuits. Asking what "nerds" did before there were computers and high technology is like asking what fighter pilots did before there were planes... they worked at normal jobs trying to survive, just like everybody else.
But the point is that some people are trying to expand this market. If every movie that came out had a girl with short shorts and a big rack would the movie companies just brush it off and say "well that's for our target audience"? No, they would probably try to expand their fare to make it accessible to more people.
on a side note, I am a male between 12 and 25 and I would like to see a broader spectrum of female characters in games as well. I find the current lack of realistic representation of women insulting just the same as a woman would... but because of what it says about game designers' ideas of my maturity level and interests. Just because I'm a man doesn't mean that my interest can only be held by boobies and thongs.
A really good example of how creepy these characters can be is the soon-to-be-released Polar Express movie (http://polarexpressmovie.warnerbros.com/) starring Tom Hanks. The kids look exactly as the author of the article describes: like animated corpses.
there is a lot of buzz on the cg and 3d animation forums about why this movie looks so bad, but i think the best answer is that they took a great actor (tom hanks) and motion captured his acting so they could apply it to a cg actor that couldn't act as well.
This is wrong, because abundance doesn't mean abundance for all. There will always be people with more than others, who have a vested interest in keeping it that way.
Unfortunately, in the world we live in, the elimination of scarcity doesn't mean the elimination of poverty.
The most revealing part of the article to me was this:
EMI officials say they are pursuing similar deals with other musicians, both superstars and new acts.
Maybe Celine Dion can afford to have part of her touring revnue taken away, but what about smaller acts who likely walk onto the stage already owing the record company hundreds of thousands of dollars?
So now the record companies want to start shaving money off the only place the musicians earn a living? Seriously, how will anyone be able to afford to be a musician?
A big part of the issue here is that a lot, if not all, of the information sifting will be done automatically. Computer systems based on flawed and arbitrary rules will be used to draw correlations between events and render judgements accordingly.
Lets say you park your car in the same general area down the street from the grocery store when you pick up your food each week. Unbeknownst to you, the building across the street from where you park is a meeting-place for known members of an anti-government militia. This kind of thing will go into your database to be linked with other information of equal irrelevance to your real life, and a computer somewhere will assign you a "terrorism probability index." Do you want to be jailed fifteen years down the road because of where you park your car now?
"Is the failure of conventional music sales reinforcement that the RIAA's business plan just doesn't work, or will it just provide them with more ammunition against the P2P crowd?"
Yes.
Not strictly copyright, but still IP related, is the patenting of the SARS genome by the BC Cancer Institute to ensure its availability for all.
Whether doing this was a victory, or the necessity of having to do it a defeat, I leave up to you....
But in his story (the first one in the Good Old Fashioned Future collection) it was used as the basis for an entirely new economy and social system based on gifts. So you would be walking down the street and get a message on your machine saying "enter the laundromat on your right and take the clothes out of the first dryer on the left. Give them to the man with the red hat on the corner." And the man with the red hat would bring them to the person who owned them. And maybe your wife would put out a message on the network that she needed bread and milk, and on your way home a stranger walking down the street towards you would just hand you a bag with the stuff you need.
Here's the text of the letter I sent to Claude Majeau. I doubt it will do much good, but at least I earned the right to complain about it when the new tax is levied.
So, to the rest of you people on Slashdot passively complaining about it, quit whining and do something!
Dear Mr. Majeau:
I am an unsigned musician living in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have recorded several CDs which I sell when I perform my work and give to friends and family. Your proposed taxes on blank recording media, intended to give money back to companies who lose revenues due to copyright violations will have the opposite effect in my case. Why should the taxes added to media that I use to distribute my own work be funneled into the bank accounts of large corporations who are, in effect, my competition?
It is the responsibility of government to levy taxes in order to fund the programs that improve life for the governed, not to levy taxes so that powerful corporations may improve their bottom line. This new tax will punish those who copy their media for personal use on an equal level with those who actively pirate music. This is tantamount to taxing pens and paper on the off-chance that someone might use them to copy out a book. Punishing the entire populace for the transgressions of a few should be beneath the government of a country like Canada.
The proposed tax on portable.mp3 players, in particular, is ridiculous. This tax will nearly double the cost of many popular units. Furthermore, I submit that portable.mp3 players are in no way responsible for the loss of revenue to Canadian artists. Indeed, many bands release their music solely in.mp3 format or make it freely available on the internet. This tax is making it more difficult for independent Canadian bands to get heard, while channeling more money into record companies. Are musicians who do not appear on the Juno awards of so little consequence? If not, why is their money going to be paying for those who do get famous?
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Cameron Widen
5515 Buchanan St.
Burnaby, BC
V5B 2R8
nerdup@shaw.ca
http://www.mp3.com/clockwork_v01
Slashdot Mirror
I have my two all-time favourite computer games loaded on my laptop right now: Fallout and Fallout 2. They run fine on older systems (even much older systems) and are always a blast. They also have a lot of replayability. If you haven't played them before, check them out for sure.
Should read:
"...the lemurs don't walk, per se, but have known to do some very silly jumps."
Should actually read:
"...the lemurs don't walk, per se, but have been known to do some very silly jumps."
Is a new type of food a ever a "solution" to anything? Was the first guy to use onions in cooking solving a problem that faced his community, or just wanting to try something new?
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them.
That's funny, because there is something about people who talk incessantly about The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives that makes me want to punch them. Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
I think what you are describing is maxing a character out, which is VERY hard to do in Eve. I have been playing for about 3 months and I'm flying a battleship. I'm flying level 3 missions solo (the current generation supports missions up to level 4), and with one other corp mate I've been flying level 4 missions. There is a lot to do in Eve, as TFA says, and not all of it is missions.
If you won't be satisfied unless your character is 100% proficient in _everything_, then Eve probably isn't the game for you. But the breadth of the skill system is a big part of what makes Eve really interesting. Do you want a character who is a high-end expert in cloaking and covert ops? Well, it takes time to get there but it's do-able. Same for anything else. My character isn't competitive with someone who has been playing for 2 years, but that's only fair.
Check out Puzzle Pirates: http://www.puzzlepirates.com/. It sounds like pretty much what you describe: a MMORPG where everything in the game, from sailing the ship to swordfighting to manufacturing is accomplished via Bejewelled-esque puzzle games. It's a great concept, and it works really well.
For the brief period that I played, I got into two ship-to-ship combats. You can have several people on the same ship, in the roles of sailing, carpentry, gunnery, bilge pumping, etc. etc. Each of these tasks is tied to a specific mini-game... you play the sailing game better, you go faster. You play the swordfighting game better, you defeat your enemies.
The only thing that I think keeps Puzzle Pirates from going huge is the cutesiness of the characters, who look like little lego men. If the game was still cute and friendly, but maybe a bit more "serious"-looking, it might attract a much larger fanbase.
For an interesting perspective on the esteemed Mr. Boll and the way he operates, check out this report:
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2649
As someone who has worked in the film industry, this story just rings entirely too true.
Apple might consider implementing ogg support when 1% of the people buying ipods want it. The fact is, virtually nobody has even HEARD of ogg vorbis, much less requiring it for their music player purchases. You need to face the fact that you are in a non-influential minority, and if you want to be have a wide choice of music players, you might want to think about re-ripping all of your cds, because ogg support is at the bottom of the priority list for 99.9% of music player manufacturers and purchasers.
A hundred or a thousand years ago, large portions of the population didn't have time to sit at their desks and play around with "hobbies". If your entire waking life is spent trying to scrape a living out of semi-fertile ground on one leg because you lost the other one to infection after dropping a rock on your toe, your options for being a geek are limited. SCA fantasies notwithstanding, if you lived in the middle ages it didn't matter how smart or creative you were if you were born to the wrong parents. If you had a brain for math and logic, you would be free to think about such things while digging up weeds, but applying them to any sort of nerdy pursuit was way beyond the means of your average (read: non-noble) person.
It's only in the last hundred or so years that our technology and standard of living has allowed non-wealthy people to fulfil their potential regarding intellectual pursuits. Asking what "nerds" did before there were computers and high technology is like asking what fighter pilots did before there were planes... they worked at normal jobs trying to survive, just like everybody else.
we have headed into unheard-of territory: the Trupe.
But the point is that some people are trying to expand this market. If every movie that came out had a girl with short shorts and a big rack would the movie companies just brush it off and say "well that's for our target audience"? No, they would probably try to expand their fare to make it accessible to more people. on a side note, I am a male between 12 and 25 and I would like to see a broader spectrum of female characters in games as well. I find the current lack of realistic representation of women insulting just the same as a woman would... but because of what it says about game designers' ideas of my maturity level and interests. Just because I'm a man doesn't mean that my interest can only be held by boobies and thongs.
A really good example of how creepy these characters can be is the soon-to-be-released Polar Express movie (http://polarexpressmovie.warnerbros.com/) starring Tom Hanks. The kids look exactly as the author of the article describes: like animated corpses. there is a lot of buzz on the cg and 3d animation forums about why this movie looks so bad, but i think the best answer is that they took a great actor (tom hanks) and motion captured his acting so they could apply it to a cg actor that couldn't act as well.
This is wrong, because abundance doesn't mean abundance for all. There will always be people with more than others, who have a vested interest in keeping it that way. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, the elimination of scarcity doesn't mean the elimination of poverty.
A big part of the issue here is that a lot, if not all, of the information sifting will be done automatically. Computer systems based on flawed and arbitrary rules will be used to draw correlations between events and render judgements accordingly. Lets say you park your car in the same general area down the street from the grocery store when you pick up your food each week. Unbeknownst to you, the building across the street from where you park is a meeting-place for known members of an anti-government militia. This kind of thing will go into your database to be linked with other information of equal irrelevance to your real life, and a computer somewhere will assign you a "terrorism probability index." Do you want to be jailed fifteen years down the road because of where you park your car now?
"Is the failure of conventional music sales reinforcement that the RIAA's business plan just doesn't work, or will it just provide them with more ammunition against the P2P crowd?" Yes.
Not strictly copyright, but still IP related, is the patenting of the SARS genome by the BC Cancer Institute to ensure its availability for all. Whether doing this was a victory, or the necessity of having to do it a defeat, I leave up to you....
check this out: http://www.believeinsantamovie.com/bisenglish.htm
But in his story (the first one in the Good Old Fashioned Future collection) it was used as the basis for an entirely new economy and social system based on gifts. So you would be walking down the street and get a message on your machine saying "enter the laundromat on your right and take the clothes out of the first dryer on the left. Give them to the man with the red hat on the corner." And the man with the red hat would bring them to the person who owned them. And maybe your wife would put out a message on the network that she needed bread and milk, and on your way home a stranger walking down the street towards you would just hand you a bag with the stuff you need.
Here's the text of the letter I sent to Claude Majeau. I doubt it will do much good, but at least I earned the right to complain about it when the new tax is levied. So, to the rest of you people on Slashdot passively complaining about it, quit whining and do something! Dear Mr. Majeau: I am an unsigned musician living in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have recorded several CDs which I sell when I perform my work and give to friends and family. Your proposed taxes on blank recording media, intended to give money back to companies who lose revenues due to copyright violations will have the opposite effect in my case. Why should the taxes added to media that I use to distribute my own work be funneled into the bank accounts of large corporations who are, in effect, my competition? It is the responsibility of government to levy taxes in order to fund the programs that improve life for the governed, not to levy taxes so that powerful corporations may improve their bottom line. This new tax will punish those who copy their media for personal use on an equal level with those who actively pirate music. This is tantamount to taxing pens and paper on the off-chance that someone might use them to copy out a book. Punishing the entire populace for the transgressions of a few should be beneath the government of a country like Canada. The proposed tax on portable .mp3 players, in particular, is ridiculous. This tax will nearly double the cost of many popular units. Furthermore, I submit that portable .mp3 players are in no way responsible for the loss of revenue to Canadian artists. Indeed, many bands release their music solely in .mp3 format or make it freely available on the internet. This tax is making it more difficult for independent Canadian bands to get heard, while channeling more money into record companies. Are musicians who do not appear on the Juno awards of so little consequence? If not, why is their money going to be paying for those who do get famous?
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Cameron Widen
5515 Buchanan St.
Burnaby, BC
V5B 2R8
nerdup@shaw.ca
http://www.mp3.com/clockwork_v01