Okay, here's an "artificial barrier": You're an IT administrator for a bank. You support about 35 mission-critical applications that go to a mainframe. Why keep the mainframe? Because it's the only thing that's gone through the laborous process of being documented, audited, and certified for use. Those certifications could run into the tens of millions of dollars, plus another fifty million to retool your existing infrastructure, minimum. All those applications were written for Windows 95.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and will still work. They're horrible, out of date, and make your butt itch just thinking about them, but they work, and it's cheaper to keep them going than to invest in an all-new infrastructure. But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with the latest and greatest.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
And that costs money, time, effort, and yes... it's a MUCH higher standard to reach for.
Whoever thought this was insightful, isn't.
Your use of "Mainframe" could have client apps written in anything. In fact, you fail to point out what the mainframe is running. If, as you claim in your hypothetical, the mainframe system is the part that's documented, you can always write a conforming client on just about anything, yes, windows included but linux and MacOs as well.
As a real-world proof, I've assisted building a web application that interfaces with a legacy PIC database and replaced proprietary desktop apps with a thin net client. After our work, what OS is required by the millions of users? We don't care, any browser made after 1998 could run the app, on any OS that runs the browser.
If you fail to see this, you deserve to pay Redmond every dime you already obviously do.
That's a gay priest fucking an altar boy. Slashdot is conveying ascii child porn, because I labeled it like that.
If it looks like thoughtcrime, someone, somewhere, won't be comfortable enough with themselves to understand the difference between a thought and a real deed. I don't care what your bible says, a sin in the mind is not a sin in deed. And, more important, that's not how laws work. This is cut and dried free-speech and the decision will be struck. Period. Full stop. We've been here before.
I recently upgraded my 60GB HD to a 350GB HD. Before I removed the 60GB, I performed a backup to a 500GB USB HD. The backup files were 4.5 GB each, perfect for spanning across DVDs. I had 3 movies and ~20 1 hour TV episodes, all in SD. The whole backup folder was about 30GB and the process took roughly 2 hours to complete. After install and format, the restore took about 1 hour and 45 minutes. At the end, all my movies, SingStar songs, and other DLC were perfectly restored.
YMMV, but movies are supposed to survive a successful backup and restore on the same system.
"Because it came from WIRED," should have been enough reason to discard this bullshit from day one. Why not ask some REAL scientists in a REAL peer reviewed scientific journal about what the "cloud" is doing instead of letting a bunch of insular technophiles indulge in masturbatory fantasies about how their "culture jamming" is "shifting paradigms" all while convincing themselves the same shit wasn't going on in the 60's, 70's, 80's and fucking 90's, and is indeed the sort of thing that led to WIRED's kind in the first fucking place. If science and its titular method could both create and survive the atomic bomb, radar, TANG and LSD, it can certainly handle a fucking "cloud" of bits.
The easiest way to remove Apple iTunes DRM is to burn an audio CD with your tracks. Then, rip the CD to MP3. In fact, Apple tells you this explicitly on their website in the tech support section. There are several advantages to this, the number one being, you don't have to run fly-by-night, I-don't-know-this-person, hey-ma-look-at-that-keylogger-go greyware to do it. You just need a fucking CD BURNER.
And I thought/. kids were smarter than this.
Maybe it has something to do with AS moving around 2 million units even with all the bad press? Clashing opinions is the heart of controversy, and AS has that in spades. Some folks love it, some folks hate it, almost everyone interested in video games knows about it. Controversies get discussed. Just because you didn't like it or think it didn't live up to what you imagined it should be doesn't mean there isn't something to talk about.
The game can be played without a PS3. I doubt it's anywhere as fun, but you can certainly play it standalone. You don't need a starter deck, just enough boosters to make a 30 card deck (4 will do it, but it won't be a very versatile deck most likely).
They could certainly do this server-side if they wanted to. 2-way is a bad idea, tho; I wouldn't like to see the other person flipping me off every other move, however. And that's the least stomach churning thing I can think of that a 2-way feed would enable during a bad beatdown.
Is it possible to re-use a single card in multiple decks registered online?
Yes. Your deck is just an electronic list of cards you can show the camera. You can even start your next new deck by copying an existing one. This is what you do to put your first booster pack into your starter deck.
Is there any mechanism online for managing your collection?
Well, not online, that I know of. In game, off-line, you can look at your decks. I don't think there's an in-game list of all the cards you've shown to the camera, just the decks you've built. You can sort them by stats. If a "big list" exists I haven't seen it. I also haven't found a deck analysis tool like the one in the Marvel TCG for PSP. That would be handy. The fact that the game supports updates gives me hope that this will be in at some point.
Is there any mechanism online for trading?
No, unless you consider eBay an online mechanism for trading. Because you have to have the card in a physical form (real or copy) to play it. I suppose you could consider swapping pdfs "trading", but that's not real cricket, is it?
If you trade a card to someone else, can they register it?
If you mean physically hand it to them, then yes, they can now play it and you can't. There is no permanent online registration. You just have to show the card to the camera while building the deck or while playing the game.
Do you both then have the card registered online?
No. See above. My answers only apply to physical cards.
Could you just share your cards with your friends and all have the same cards registered? I ask because of my kids and if they could have their own accounts with the same cards.
Well, yes, two players who use the same PS3 but separate accounts can share a pool of cards for online play, since only one of them is playing at a time. When it comes to the two of them playing against each other in a live game, they both must have a physical copy of the card in an assembled deck to play. The necessity for possessing a real card in live head-to-head is what will keep this game going to a certain extent.
How many cards do you actually get in the box with the game?
You get a working starter deck of 30 cards, which is the same list for everyone, and a booster pack of 8 cards. The booster contains 5 common, 2 uncommon, and 1 rare or ultra-rare card.
How many cards are in a booster pack?
8 cards. See above.
How many boosters would you say you need to buy in order to be competitive online?
None. You can be competitive without even opening your first booster, as the starter deck is very well constructed. All you need is a grasp of what the real goals of the game are and how to achieve them. The boosters add variety and the ability to choose mechanics that you have an affinity for or have subtler interlock, but you don't need them to play and win online. However, it gets a little stale playing the same deck over and over, so variety and experimentation are the real reasons to buy more cards, IMO.
How does the game play offline vs. online? Is it as fun?
I'll let you know later this week when I get my first boosters and have enough cards for my roommate to play me head to head instead of trading games against the comp.
Don't you wonder why they didn't just do a Magic Online or use their existing IP?
A lot of reasons, number one of which is the need to limit the number of cards that need to be recognized by the camera. There are similarities to Magic; the colors (red, green, blue, white, biolith, uncolored) are familiar to MTG players. The attack mechanics are very similar. What's different is that it's constrained to a board and is a battler over territory and not a free form assault on the other player's dome. In MTG, I used to run a squirrel deck that could produce 16+ creatures. This would be difficult to track with the camera.
Thanks for taking the time to answer!
I hope I've helped you come to a decision, whichever way you decide to go.
You obviously haven't tried to buy a booster pack this week. Retailers already dropped the ball by not recognizing that someone is trying to figure out how to tie card-crack to a console and failing to have theme decks and boosters in the store next to the game. They won't be hurt by honest players; they will make money off of those people, and lots of folks want to play with real cards against their friends. The real winner is the consumer, however, because if this DOES dry up and lose support of Sony/WotC, players will still be able to copy the whole set and play that way. But, I personally will only do that if there is no other choice.
Proxies didn't kill MTG, MTG Studio didn't kill MTG Online, so I don't think color copying will kill EoJ for real players. Anyone copying cards just doesn't get why you want cards anyway, so they will go away soon enough, I gather.
I've been playing this game all weekend. I'm pretty sure I've only encountered one copied deck. At this moment, you can be pretty sure it's copied if every card has an interlocking mechanic. The guy I fought had a ton of mana steal/spring cards, and I'm pretty sure it's a net-listed deck. The guy didn't play a single card from the starter deck, which is a pretty big sign to me since the booster supplies have been constrained nearly everywhere. Yes, he won, but it wasn't an easy game, and in the end, he won more because of a misplay on my part than his hot deck. Even if it wasn't a copied deck, it really proved to me that even with a pocket full of cash and boosters, a good player will make you play 30 turns no matter what, at which point you haven't really gained much over the standard deck or playing fair and buying boosters.
That's what is really cool about this game, and it's something that Penny-Arcade mentioned as well. The game isn't like magic where having a string of beatdown will help you. You are trying to take and hold squares on the board; there are many ways to make a very low cost, common creature neutralize the advantage of a huge cost "I win" card. The fact is, a card copier will still have to beat their opponent, and so will a rich kid who bought a whole set and carved a "perfect deck". I've played some of the top ranked players (I'm in the top 100 myself), and they beat my ass with mostly un-boosted standard decks. This is a game of strategy and a struggle over the board, not a queue up of hp/def that you just launch at your opponent's dome.
So, I'm pretty much as regular a player of this game as can exist atm, and I don't really care about copying that much. The game isn't all about rare cards. In fact, I relish the notion that I have a good chance of beating a card copier and making his cheater heart eat itself.
I thought the ideologically correct form of Sony bashing was to point out the exclusives they've lost to Wii/360. Funny how the worm turns in a holy warrior's head.
I want to see a thorough defense of restricting user choice on the net by this time tomorrow. Your essay must have no less than 1,000 words, at least three Zune references, and at least one reference to Ballmer throwing chairs. Bonus points if you make a reference to the Borg.
Which would result in a more entertaining and informative bit of text than your post. Thanks for playing Teh Intarnetz.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, here's an "artificial barrier": You're an IT administrator for a bank. You support about 35 mission-critical applications that go to a mainframe. Why keep the mainframe? Because it's the only thing that's gone through the laborous process of being documented, audited, and certified for use. Those certifications could run into the tens of millions of dollars, plus another fifty million to retool your existing infrastructure, minimum. All those applications were written for Windows 95.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and will still work. They're horrible, out of date, and make your butt itch just thinking about them, but they work, and it's cheaper to keep them going than to invest in an all-new infrastructure. But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with the latest and greatest.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
And that costs money, time, effort, and yes... it's a MUCH higher standard to reach for.
Whoever thought this was insightful, isn't.
Your use of "Mainframe" could have client apps written in anything. In fact, you fail to point out what the mainframe is running. If, as you claim in your hypothetical, the mainframe system is the part that's documented, you can always write a conforming client on just about anything, yes, windows included but linux and MacOs as well.
As a real-world proof, I've assisted building a web application that interfaces with a legacy PIC database and replaced proprietary desktop apps with a thin net client. After our work, what OS is required by the millions of users? We don't care, any browser made after 1998 could run the app, on any OS that runs the browser.
If you fail to see this, you deserve to pay Redmond every dime you already obviously do.
o><
That's a gay priest fucking an altar boy. Slashdot is conveying ascii child porn, because I labeled it like that.
If it looks like thoughtcrime, someone, somewhere, won't be comfortable enough with themselves to understand the difference between a thought and a real deed. I don't care what your bible says, a sin in the mind is not a sin in deed. And, more important, that's not how laws work. This is cut and dried free-speech and the decision will be struck. Period. Full stop. We've been here before.
Explain World of Goo. 90% piracy rate seems to give lie to your logic.
I recently upgraded my 60GB HD to a 350GB HD. Before I removed the 60GB, I performed a backup to a 500GB USB HD. The backup files were 4.5 GB each, perfect for spanning across DVDs. I had 3 movies and ~20 1 hour TV episodes, all in SD. The whole backup folder was about 30GB and the process took roughly 2 hours to complete. After install and format, the restore took about 1 hour and 45 minutes. At the end, all my movies, SingStar songs, and other DLC were perfectly restored.
YMMV, but movies are supposed to survive a successful backup and restore on the same system.
Droids?! We don't allow their kind in here!
"Because it came from WIRED," should have been enough reason to discard this bullshit from day one. Why not ask some REAL scientists in a REAL peer reviewed scientific journal about what the "cloud" is doing instead of letting a bunch of insular technophiles indulge in masturbatory fantasies about how their "culture jamming" is "shifting paradigms" all while convincing themselves the same shit wasn't going on in the 60's, 70's, 80's and fucking 90's, and is indeed the sort of thing that led to WIRED's kind in the first fucking place. If science and its titular method could both create and survive the atomic bomb, radar, TANG and LSD, it can certainly handle a fucking "cloud" of bits.
ben@benmakesmovies.com got hooked into watching a few of the other shorts on Ben Makes Movies? Really? Who'd-a-thunk?
Because when I think of "the little guy", I immediately think of newspapers.
You can rip back into lossless AIFF, you etards.
The easiest way to remove Apple iTunes DRM is to burn an audio CD with your tracks. Then, rip the CD to MP3. In fact, Apple tells you this explicitly on their website in the tech support section. There are several advantages to this, the number one being, you don't have to run fly-by-night, I-don't-know-this-person, hey-ma-look-at-that-keylogger-go greyware to do it. You just need a fucking CD BURNER. And I thought /. kids were smarter than this.
AS = AC, I was up late watching Adult Swim, sorry.
Maybe it has something to do with AS moving around 2 million units even with all the bad press? Clashing opinions is the heart of controversy, and AS has that in spades. Some folks love it, some folks hate it, almost everyone interested in video games knows about it. Controversies get discussed. Just because you didn't like it or think it didn't live up to what you imagined it should be doesn't mean there isn't something to talk about.
Unless you're talking about the English lyrics of the main theme. And I quote:
Some days you go through the rain
Some days you feed on a tree frog
I rest my case.
"There haven't been any PSP titles in the Japanese all console chart top 20 since the launch of the PSP slim/lite."
That's flat out false. Two words: Crisis Core.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=28885...or does that guy bear an unsettling resemblance to Jeff Gannon/Guckert?
Hydrogen sulphide doesn't count, stinky.
You must have granted sovereignty to the bacteria in your stomach. If not, you're just another oppressor of our bactobretheren.
The game can be played without a PS3. I doubt it's anywhere as fun, but you can certainly play it standalone. You don't need a starter deck, just enough boosters to make a 30 card deck (4 will do it, but it won't be a very versatile deck most likely).
Excellent, I was certain I missed it. Thanks a bunch.
They could certainly do this server-side if they wanted to. 2-way is a bad idea, tho; I wouldn't like to see the other person flipping me off every other move, however. And that's the least stomach churning thing I can think of that a 2-way feed would enable during a bad beatdown.
Great questions, man. I'm glad to answer them.
Is it possible to re-use a single card in multiple decks registered online?
Yes. Your deck is just an electronic list of cards you can show the camera. You can even start your next new deck by copying an existing one. This is what you do to put your first booster pack into your starter deck.
Is there any mechanism online for managing your collection?
Well, not online, that I know of. In game, off-line, you can look at your decks. I don't think there's an in-game list of all the cards you've shown to the camera, just the decks you've built. You can sort them by stats. If a "big list" exists I haven't seen it. I also haven't found a deck analysis tool like the one in the Marvel TCG for PSP. That would be handy. The fact that the game supports updates gives me hope that this will be in at some point.
Is there any mechanism online for trading?
No, unless you consider eBay an online mechanism for trading. Because you have to have the card in a physical form (real or copy) to play it. I suppose you could consider swapping pdfs "trading", but that's not real cricket, is it?
If you trade a card to someone else, can they register it?
If you mean physically hand it to them, then yes, they can now play it and you can't. There is no permanent online registration. You just have to show the card to the camera while building the deck or while playing the game.
Do you both then have the card registered online?
No. See above. My answers only apply to physical cards.
Could you just share your cards with your friends and all have the same cards registered? I ask because of my kids and if they could have their own accounts with the same cards.
Well, yes, two players who use the same PS3 but separate accounts can share a pool of cards for online play, since only one of them is playing at a time. When it comes to the two of them playing against each other in a live game, they both must have a physical copy of the card in an assembled deck to play. The necessity for possessing a real card in live head-to-head is what will keep this game going to a certain extent.
How many cards do you actually get in the box with the game?
You get a working starter deck of 30 cards, which is the same list for everyone, and a booster pack of 8 cards. The booster contains 5 common, 2 uncommon, and 1 rare or ultra-rare card.
How many cards are in a booster pack?
8 cards. See above.
How many boosters would you say you need to buy in order to be competitive online?
None. You can be competitive without even opening your first booster, as the starter deck is very well constructed. All you need is a grasp of what the real goals of the game are and how to achieve them. The boosters add variety and the ability to choose mechanics that you have an affinity for or have subtler interlock, but you don't need them to play and win online. However, it gets a little stale playing the same deck over and over, so variety and experimentation are the real reasons to buy more cards, IMO.
How does the game play offline vs. online? Is it as fun?
I'll let you know later this week when I get my first boosters and have enough cards for my roommate to play me head to head instead of trading games against the comp.
Don't you wonder why they didn't just do a Magic Online or use their existing IP?
A lot of reasons, number one of which is the need to limit the number of cards that need to be recognized by the camera. There are similarities to Magic; the colors (red, green, blue, white, biolith, uncolored) are familiar to MTG players. The attack mechanics are very similar. What's different is that it's constrained to a board and is a battler over territory and not a free form assault on the other player's dome. In MTG, I used to run a squirrel deck that could produce 16+ creatures. This would be difficult to track with the camera.
Thanks for taking the time to answer!
I hope I've helped you come to a decision, whichever way you decide to go.
Proxies didn't kill MTG, MTG Studio didn't kill MTG Online, so I don't think color copying will kill EoJ for real players. Anyone copying cards just doesn't get why you want cards anyway, so they will go away soon enough, I gather.
I've been playing this game all weekend. I'm pretty sure I've only encountered one copied deck. At this moment, you can be pretty sure it's copied if every card has an interlocking mechanic. The guy I fought had a ton of mana steal/spring cards, and I'm pretty sure it's a net-listed deck. The guy didn't play a single card from the starter deck, which is a pretty big sign to me since the booster supplies have been constrained nearly everywhere. Yes, he won, but it wasn't an easy game, and in the end, he won more because of a misplay on my part than his hot deck. Even if it wasn't a copied deck, it really proved to me that even with a pocket full of cash and boosters, a good player will make you play 30 turns no matter what, at which point you haven't really gained much over the standard deck or playing fair and buying boosters.
That's what is really cool about this game, and it's something that Penny-Arcade mentioned as well. The game isn't like magic where having a string of beatdown will help you. You are trying to take and hold squares on the board; there are many ways to make a very low cost, common creature neutralize the advantage of a huge cost "I win" card. The fact is, a card copier will still have to beat their opponent, and so will a rich kid who bought a whole set and carved a "perfect deck". I've played some of the top ranked players (I'm in the top 100 myself), and they beat my ass with mostly un-boosted standard decks. This is a game of strategy and a struggle over the board, not a queue up of hp/def that you just launch at your opponent's dome.
So, I'm pretty much as regular a player of this game as can exist atm, and I don't really care about copying that much. The game isn't all about rare cards. In fact, I relish the notion that I have a good chance of beating a card copier and making his cheater heart eat itself.
I thought the ideologically correct form of Sony bashing was to point out the exclusives they've lost to Wii/360. Funny how the worm turns in a holy warrior's head.
I want to see a thorough defense of restricting user choice on the net by this time tomorrow. Your essay must have no less than 1,000 words, at least three Zune references, and at least one reference to Ballmer throwing chairs. Bonus points if you make a reference to the Borg.
Which would result in a more entertaining and informative bit of text than your post. Thanks for playing Teh Intarnetz.