for the last couple generations (which is when consoles went fully 3D) at the launch of a console, the games looked better than pc games. It took pcs a couple of years to catch up.
The thing is, consoles used low resolutions. 320*240 to 512*384 mostly. Even now, only a few games support 640*480. Compare this to pcs where the expected resolution is 1024x768 to 1600x1200 and you can see that consoles have been "cheating" all along.
They got away with it because TVs weren't capable of greater resolutions and the native interpolation made things look smoother (blurrier, but smoother).
With the advent of HDTVs, next-gen offerings will all have to support HDTV which means a significantly increased strain on the console engines. Will this mean PCs will catch up quicker? We'll see...
Slashdotters will be Slashdotters and will come up with far-fetched theories about how this meshes with Google's existing products and how it makes financial sense.
But the fact is this is all wild *Speculation*. In fact, it does not make sense for google to get into VOIP and there are several more plausible reasons for google to look into buying fiber.
Think about that for a second, take a deep breath, move on.
The apple mini is not powerful enough to decode fullscreen HD movies. It just isn't.
I'd love iTunes to sell movies but it isn't happening in the near future. Maybe it'll happen 5 or 6 years from now but I doubt it.
I admit, I was very skeptical about eXeem but after giving it a quick try, i'm pleasantly surprised. Of course, I'm going to uninstall it immediately and clean my computer from the filth that is cydoor but i'm getting eXeem lite as soon as it comes out.
If people flock to it, this'll be the greatest p2p app yet.
Re:What about private channels?
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 1
mod parent up. Everything he said is right on the money.
how about spending $5000 for an extra 20 servers? Is that unreasonable too?
Stop pulling ludicrous numbers out of your ass to substantiate a moronic argument. Blizzard can have a game in beta for as long as they want, whether it's private or open. It takes a 7-years old to calculate the numbers of servers needed for x numbers of boxed copies they ship. It takes either an incompetent not to cap the number of users per server or a greedy bastard to play the guessing game.
let's ship 600k units and plan only enough servers for 200000 for the first 3 months, 400000k for the first 6, etc. that way, we can earn x more amount of dollars. That's roughly equivalent to borrowing money from a bank and gambling it in Las Vegas hoping to hit the jackpot. If you win, great, but if you lose, then DESERVE to get raped and don't complain.
Now would be the time for people to cancel accounts and demand refunds. But it won't happen because half the gamers are stupid fanboys nowadays.
That may be true. the same mechanisms that make gambling addictive also make MMORPGs addictive. (kill mobs with x% chance they'll drop something for example).
Didn't we establish that copernic desktop search was the best some time ago? I gave google desktop a try but it wouldn't play nice with Internet Download Manager and Netlimiter (both excellent applications) so it had to go.
I'm very pleased with Copernic by the way. Great interface, fast indexing and only 2.8 Mb on memory. Google desktop search was several times that.
every single time someone complains about the state of broadband in the U.S, an aussie pops up with the usual "in my country, we need to use tam-tams and we're charged $200 a month for them"
I ain't got nothing against australian folks but it's a noticeable pattern and it gets tiring. Yes, we know you get shafted over there. We know you have obscenely small caps, your bandwidth sucks and your pings are sky high. You have my sympathies.
Anyhow, the situation IS bad in the u.s. 7 years ago, average cable speeds were better than they are today. Of course, there is more coverage today. Still, i'm not happy.
Five years ago, the best connection you could get was Optimum Online in the NY area (8 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up).
Today, the best is a 10mbps/10Mbps available in a very tiny part of california formerly provided by winfirst). The second best is...Optimum Online with the same speeds as before.
If you're tired of comparisons with south korea, take france. 3 years ago, the best THEY had was 512/256 Kbps. Today, 2 Isps are already offering 8-20 Mbps in select urban areas. The prices are less than what you pay here for your regular cable or DSL. We don't have that here...
What's worse, the next generation of broadband will be woefully inadecuate. We need 100Mbps/100Mbps connections. Period. we need enough bandwidth to support multiple streams of HDTV, Full screen high quality videoconferencing and a hundred other things. I'm sick and tired of 200 and 300 Kbps wmv and rm streams when I want to watch news. Aren't you?
In fact, we need those 100 Mbps to be scalable to 10Gbps. Yeah, it might sound insane but no more insane than 400 Gb Hds. Guess what, mine is full to the brim. those 10 Gbps will be put to good use and should serve us for the next 30 years or so.
It's called Fiber To The Home. In the long run, it's the only thing that's good enough. Everything else is stalling.
So enough talk about broadband over powerlines, DSL 2, wireless broadband and other crap. Start laying fiber to that last mile so we can all have decent broadband. AND MAKE IT SYMMETRICAL YOU GREEDY BASTARDS!
Where is a government when you need one...I wonder if all the money spent in Iraq would've been enough to hook up all the U.S population with fiber. Food for thought
I'd like to believe that but it's untrue and you know it. No isps will lose significant amounts of customers based on whether they cooperated with the **AA or not. This is all wildly wishful thinking.
This friend of mine who lives in France was shocked when I told him that I pay $45 for 3Mbps/384 Kbps dsl. Over there, there are 2 Isps offering 8, 15 and 20 Mbps dsl for between 15 and 30 euros (all taxes included).
Two years ago, the best you could get over there was 512 Kbps and they were starting to roll 1Mbps connections in select regions.
Part of the reason why I came to the U.S in the first place were superior broadband speeds. I feel betrayed now.
Maybe the 3 of you who answered understood me wrong.
I'm pointing out the fact that the GRIND becomes unacceptable after 1000 hours of play or so. Depending on how much you play, that's somewhere from around 2-3 months to a little less than a year.
If you plan on playing less time than that before dumping the game, you'll probably get your money's worth. But a vast amount of people stay much past that. Because they are attached to their character, their guild and their ingame friends.
Don't forget that the lifespan of an MMORPG with all its extensions can easily exceed 6 years. Logging in 100 hours of play is nothing.
MMORPGs are a seemingly great concept on paper but then again, so is communism. Neither works well in the harsh, unforgiving real world we live in.
"How could this be?" You ask. A massive virtual world where a player can live out a fantasy. Be a Tolkien Wizard or Camelot knight or a Marvel superhero. A world where every character is intelligent , A world where you can form parties, fight epic battles and duels, explore and interact with beautiful and surreal locales. A world constantly changing and evolving where you can make friends and enemies, A world where you can ride Dragons, fly or teleport to distant places. It's like a dream come true.
Two reasons:
1- These games are made by companies who want to make money.
2- These games are populated by humans.
A few major issues with each:
I- Company side
Because the companies want to make money, they have to ensure that a majority of players will play their game as long as possible. This inevitably leads to "THE GRIND".
No matter what mmorpg you are playing, you will end up spending more and more time performing repetitive, unrewarding tasks to accumulate "points". Points can be Exp, Gold, Traits, Armor, Abilities, Completing certain quests,etc. Whether it's fishing moat carps in FFXI or making potions in WoW or defeating 10 Thugs in City of Heroes.
The Grind is usually not very apparent at first, But as the months go by, You will end up spending the HUGE majority of your time performing these menial tasks (or if you figure out how, scripting them). Out of 8 hours of play, you might spend an hour doing something new, exciting and fun. This is a fact.
II- Player side
Because the world is populated by humans, your fantasy world will be a dump. I'm not just talking about beggars, griefers, cheaters and assholes. Those are but the tip of the iceberg.
I'm talking about people who talk and shout Out Of Character AOLspeak/leetspeak, about people who think there is fun in the race to get to Lvl 99, people who inadvertently start WORKING in the game instead of having fun. I'm also talking about the idiots. The huge number of idiots populating the world. Allakhazam forums are ripe with complaints about this or that class of idiots. Many of those who complain are idiots themselves.
The same way communism ideals did not survive to greedy politians, powerhungry generals, lazy coworkers and overall human selfishness, MMORPGs ideals do not survive to companies and players.
Gozu, former MMORPG player of FFXI, CoH and WoW fame.
NOTE: None of what I said necessarily applies to text mmorpgs (MUDs).
Slashdot Mirror
The assymetry has gone too far...There should be at least 1 Mbps upload. Preferably 8Mbps.
Parent is mostly right.
for the last couple generations (which is when consoles went fully 3D) at the launch of a console, the games looked better than pc games. It took pcs a couple of years to catch up.
The thing is, consoles used low resolutions. 320*240 to 512*384 mostly. Even now, only a few games support 640*480. Compare this to pcs where the expected resolution is 1024x768 to 1600x1200 and you can see that consoles have been "cheating" all along.
They got away with it because TVs weren't capable of greater resolutions and the native interpolation made things look smoother (blurrier, but smoother).
With the advent of HDTVs, next-gen offerings will all have to support HDTV which means a significantly increased strain on the console engines. Will this mean PCs will catch up quicker? We'll see...
Slashdotters will be Slashdotters and will come up with far-fetched theories about how this meshes with Google's existing products and how it makes financial sense.
But the fact is this is all wild *Speculation*. In fact, it does not make sense for google to get into VOIP and there are several more plausible reasons for google to look into buying fiber.
Think about that for a second, take a deep breath, move on.
It offers the best sound quality, yes. And it uses very little bandwidth (1.5 to 5 KBps). If you're talking prices, then I don't know.
The apple mini is not powerful enough to decode fullscreen HD movies. It just isn't. I'd love iTunes to sell movies but it isn't happening in the near future. Maybe it'll happen 5 or 6 years from now but I doubt it.
I admit, I was very skeptical about eXeem but after giving it a quick try, i'm pleasantly surprised. Of course, I'm going to uninstall it immediately and clean my computer from the filth that is cydoor but i'm getting eXeem lite as soon as it comes out.
If people flock to it, this'll be the greatest p2p app yet.
mod parent up. Everything he said is right on the money.
how about spending $5000 for an extra 20 servers? Is that unreasonable too?
Stop pulling ludicrous numbers out of your ass to substantiate a moronic argument. Blizzard can have a game in beta for as long as they want, whether it's private or open. It takes a 7-years old to calculate the numbers of servers needed for x numbers of boxed copies they ship. It takes either an incompetent not to cap the number of users per server or a greedy bastard to play the guessing game.
let's ship 600k units and plan only enough servers for 200000 for the first 3 months, 400000k for the first 6, etc. that way, we can earn x more amount of dollars. That's roughly equivalent to borrowing money from a bank and gambling it in Las Vegas hoping to hit the jackpot. If you win, great, but if you lose, then DESERVE to get raped and don't complain.
Now would be the time for people to cancel accounts and demand refunds. But it won't happen because half the gamers are stupid fanboys nowadays.
Makes me sick.
That may be true. the same mechanisms that make gambling addictive also make MMORPGs addictive. (kill mobs with x% chance they'll drop something for example).
hahaha.
hahahaha.
haha.
*wipes tears off his eyes*
Why is panix offering 128Kbps ISDN for $50 a month? Who actually uses this?
Where is *Linux* Starter edition?
(and don't give me crap about Linspire. That's for people already familiar with Windows)
No, I want a linux equivalent to this Windows Starter edition.
Come one all of you linux activists, get on it. I'll contribute whatever I can.
Didn't we establish that copernic desktop search was the best some time ago? I gave google desktop a try but it wouldn't play nice with Internet Download Manager and Netlimiter (both excellent applications) so it had to go.
I'm very pleased with Copernic by the way. Great interface, fast indexing and only 2.8 Mb on memory. Google desktop search was several times that.
every single time someone complains about the state of broadband in the U.S, an aussie pops up with the usual "in my country, we need to use tam-tams and we're charged $200 a month for them"
I ain't got nothing against australian folks but it's a noticeable pattern and it gets tiring. Yes, we know you get shafted over there. We know you have obscenely small caps, your bandwidth sucks and your pings are sky high. You have my sympathies.
Anyhow, the situation IS bad in the u.s. 7 years ago, average cable speeds were better than they are today. Of course, there is more coverage today. Still, i'm not happy.
Five years ago, the best connection you could get was Optimum Online in the NY area (8 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up).
Today, the best is a 10mbps/10Mbps available in a very tiny part of california formerly provided by winfirst). The second best is...Optimum Online with the same speeds as before.
If you're tired of comparisons with south korea, take france. 3 years ago, the best THEY had was 512/256 Kbps. Today, 2 Isps are already offering 8-20 Mbps in select urban areas. The prices are less than what you pay here for your regular cable or DSL. We don't have that here...
What's worse, the next generation of broadband will be woefully inadecuate. We need 100Mbps/100Mbps connections. Period. we need enough bandwidth to support multiple streams of HDTV, Full screen high quality videoconferencing and a hundred other things. I'm sick and tired of 200 and 300 Kbps wmv and rm streams when I want to watch news. Aren't you?
In fact, we need those 100 Mbps to be scalable to 10Gbps. Yeah, it might sound insane but no more insane than 400 Gb Hds. Guess what, mine is full to the brim. those 10 Gbps will be put to good use and should serve us for the next 30 years or so.
It's called Fiber To The Home. In the long run, it's the only thing that's good enough. Everything else is stalling. So enough talk about broadband over powerlines, DSL 2, wireless broadband and other crap. Start laying fiber to that last mile so we can all have decent broadband. AND MAKE IT SYMMETRICAL YOU GREEDY BASTARDS! Where is a government when you need one...I wonder if all the money spent in Iraq would've been enough to hook up all the U.S population with fiber. Food for thought
You're wrong. See, you made the assumption that I was trying to make a reasoned argument. I just wanted to make fun of drug laws.
and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly.
:p
By this reasoning, you could also argue that manufacturing illegal drugs is also too easy and outlawing them is pointless and silly. Oh wait..it is
I'd like to believe that but it's untrue and you know it. No isps will lose significant amounts of customers based on whether they cooperated with the **AA or not. This is all wildly wishful thinking.
Relax. As I said, it was just part of it. Think of it as the icing on the cake.
This friend of mine who lives in France was shocked when I told him that I pay $45 for 3Mbps/384 Kbps dsl. Over there, there are 2 Isps offering 8, 15 and 20 Mbps dsl for between 15 and 30 euros (all taxes included).
Two years ago, the best you could get over there was 512 Kbps and they were starting to roll 1Mbps connections in select regions.
Part of the reason why I came to the U.S in the first place were superior broadband speeds. I feel betrayed now.
...Will we have flying cars?
MythTV is great and is very popular within the linux community and other enlightened power users but it isn't thriving in the world at large.
Maybe the 3 of you who answered understood me wrong. I'm pointing out the fact that the GRIND becomes unacceptable after 1000 hours of play or so. Depending on how much you play, that's somewhere from around 2-3 months to a little less than a year. If you plan on playing less time than that before dumping the game, you'll probably get your money's worth. But a vast amount of people stay much past that. Because they are attached to their character, their guild and their ingame friends. Don't forget that the lifespan of an MMORPG with all its extensions can easily exceed 6 years. Logging in 100 hours of play is nothing.
MMORPGs are a seemingly great concept on paper but then again, so is communism. Neither works well in the harsh, unforgiving real world we live in.
"How could this be?" You ask. A massive virtual world where a player can live out a fantasy. Be a Tolkien Wizard or Camelot knight or a Marvel superhero. A world where every character is intelligent , A world where you can form parties, fight epic battles and duels, explore and interact with beautiful and surreal locales. A world constantly changing and evolving where you can make friends and enemies, A world where you can ride Dragons, fly or teleport to distant places. It's like a dream come true.
Two reasons:
1- These games are made by companies who want to make money.
2- These games are populated by humans.
A few major issues with each:
I- Company side
Because the companies want to make money, they have to ensure that a majority of players will play their game as long as possible. This inevitably leads to "THE GRIND".
No matter what mmorpg you are playing, you will end up spending more and more time performing repetitive, unrewarding tasks to accumulate "points". Points can be Exp, Gold, Traits, Armor, Abilities, Completing certain quests,etc. Whether it's fishing moat carps in FFXI or making potions in WoW or defeating 10 Thugs in City of Heroes.
The Grind is usually not very apparent at first, But as the months go by, You will end up spending the HUGE majority of your time performing these menial tasks (or if you figure out how, scripting them). Out of 8 hours of play, you might spend an hour doing something new, exciting and fun. This is a fact.
II- Player side
Because the world is populated by humans, your fantasy world will be a dump. I'm not just talking about beggars, griefers, cheaters and assholes. Those are but the tip of the iceberg.
I'm talking about people who talk and shout Out Of Character AOLspeak/leetspeak, about people who think there is fun in the race to get to Lvl 99, people who inadvertently start WORKING in the game instead of having fun. I'm also talking about the idiots. The huge number of idiots populating the world. Allakhazam forums are ripe with complaints about this or that class of idiots. Many of those who complain are idiots themselves.
The same way communism ideals did not survive to greedy politians, powerhungry generals, lazy coworkers and overall human selfishness, MMORPGs ideals do not survive to companies and players.
Gozu, former MMORPG player of FFXI, CoH and WoW fame.
NOTE: None of what I said necessarily applies to text mmorpgs (MUDs).
Thanks for the recommendation but I was looking forward to a more...fruitful dialogue :p
Do email me eh?