As a player of GW, I can tell you that it is sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the MMORPG market, even 'tho it isn't entirely a MMORPG in and of itself.
There was recently a festival event which took place in a new player area, and I talked to quite a few new players who have joined in the last 3 months. Many more than I expected, to be honest. For those that don't play, it's not so much because of the no-monthly fee thing which is why it's so good, it's that it has the best developed combat engine in the multiplayer RPG genre out there.
To one degree or another. We all stand on the backs of giants. The reality is, in all genres, there are these people who think that somehow, someway we can achieve something that is not derivative, however, generally speaking these people tend to have huge massive egos and think that the only person who can achieve this is themselves.
But when you focus on what games have similar, you tend to completly miss what makes them unique.
I mean, it's probably not good at all for MS. But I would think that people choosing to purchase a PS2 in this late stage of the game, probably won't buy a PS3 at/near launch. Before the 360 came out, sales of the X-Box 1 dropped.
Actually, on the other hand, this probably just people replacing broken PS2s. Which such a huge userbase, you'll see substantial turn-around for replacement systems. I know, myself that I need to purchase a new PS2 because my original one died (and I don't want to give up my game library).
Oh. And I have no plans on purchasing a PS3. Too expensive, and I'm having serious doubts that it's going to be the leader of the next generation. (And if it's not the leader, it won't get the 3rd party games. And the 3rd party games are the only reason to have a PlayStation)
You're completly misunderstanding. Actually no you're not..you're just not cynical enough.
Net Neutrality only concerns itself with the source of a packet. QoS rules can still be applied, but they need to be applied without regard to the source of the packet. Why the telcos are so big on killing net neutrality, is exactly so ISPs can give their/their allies internet applications huge advantages over competitors. In fact, everybody knows this. This is why there are actually changes to various anti-trust regs that are being pushed along with killing net neutrality.
The one thing I have to say is, if internet companies have to pay to send their content over telco pipes, then the telcos should pay the content providers for providing the content that makes people want to have internet connections.
The first half of the game is great. Terrific. The story moves along, has interesting characters, great scenes. The whole nine yards.
Then the story just falls apart. When the linearity of the game is removed, the writers need to stop character interaction, because you may not actually have a character when you get a different one. As well, you don't actually have a storyline anymore. The game is reduced to a series of individual character scenes.
If you can't get to level 5 in Guild Wars:Factions within like..20 minutes, something is seriously wrong. Grab a couple of henchies (The second quest in the game, in fact, that usually brings you to level 3, shows you to do this), then go do the main two quests for your primary class, that should bring you up to level 5 right there in about 20-30 minutes.
Pulling that off with their existing base will prove a challenge.
Not as much as you'd think, and that was part of my point. There's nothing anti-business, per se, about the Democratic base, as it exists right now. There's things about how there needs to be a balance or society and the economy will have serious problems in the long run, but that's not anti-business. That's just being pragmatic.
The problem with just abandoning the poor, is what do you expect the poor to do? Find jobs? There's not enough jobs to go around, unfortunately. (Again, that's something I'd like to change). The reason we care about the poor, New Deal-style, is to allow a capitalist economy to exist in the first place, through making people not have to be so desperate about things.
Right now the DNC has as their chairman someone who's very fiscally conservative. And he was widely supported by the people who really ARE the base right now. So take that for what it's worth.
My apologies. The intention wasn't to say that only the left side of things supports net neutrality. Only to respond to what McCurry said about an "Anti-corporate jihad" going on between "liberals and centrists".
In reality, this is one of those issues that there's two sides. You have the DC/WallStreet community vs. The Rest Of Us.
The biggies I can see are VoIP and Streaming Audio/Video. Those are the obvious ones.
However, from comments the telco industry has made, it seems that they're going to play hardball with this. So more than likely any business who tries to operate via the internet will need to pay the telcos to be able to do it.
The problem I see isn't with for example, EBay being charged. The problem I see is the sucessor to Ebay getting charged, and because of that is unable to get off the ground.
#1. Yes, DailyKos is a Democratic site. But at the same time, the DKos community is pretty much committed to lessening the influence of a whole wide variety of interest groups from the political process and increasing the power that the individual citizen has, on both sides of the aisle. From Unions straight through to Corporations.
#2. Generally speaking, wider "left" political blogsophere supports net neutrality very strongly. And the reason for that, is actually a traditionally centrist viewpoint, namely in order to maximize the effect and forces of a free and open market. Eliminating net neutrality is a great threat to putting a full stop to innovation in business and technology on the internet. It stops new players and technologies from taking those first baby steps out.
You have one area of business with high barriers to entry and a few companies, and you have another area of business with much lower barriers to entry and new companies forming every day?
Actually, that's a common mistake, and in fact one that's commonly made at all levels of analysis. It's made by people who really have no f'n clue of how the real world works.
"As employees create more output they are worth more to the company and will get more compensation".
This isn't blanketly wrong, there's certain economic situations where this is true. They're just very rare. Think small businesses that are fighting to keep their head afloat, in a huge market where their output is not matching demand. And that the management of said business decided to reward their employees for their hard work.
However..when reading that. Doesn't that sound like a magical land where trees are candy canes and street lights lollipops?
Right.
The problem is our typical view of productivity. We look at it almost in a vacumn more or less. It happens on its own. As well, certain aspects of employment are generally ignored.
Companies do not hire because they are making more money. Companies higher because they have X units of labor that need to be done. However, they want to pay as little per unit of labor as they can to get that work done. In an economy without full employment, it's a competitive market for job-seekers. This forces wages down as more people are looking for jobs.
Increased productivity for individual workers, in the long run, makes this problem worse. Sure. If those units of work are being done by 10% less people, then technically they can afford to pay 10% more (or so). However. Why should they? In such an economy, because people are activly looking for work, they can bid down wages.
It literally becomes a situation where people are more productive and less rewarded for it.
As for your complaints to customer service, did you ever hear the phrase "shit rolls downhill?". That's because the stress that their employers are putting on the employees is going to come out at you. I know the response. It's their job to "remain professional".
Why should they? Why should they offer good service to a society that does not reward them for their hard work?
The problem is, there is no reliable measure of what's "quality" and what isn't in terms of what's modern. Are you saying with a straight face that, for example, kids should be exposed to Britney Spears rather than Beethoven? What determines quality? Simple popularity, or some other measure? Or are you music. What I'm saying is that we should teach our youth to be informed critics of culture as a arguing that art, music and film critics should now determine the education of our kids? Should GameSpot and IGN set the nation's high school curriculum?
I'd argue Williams and Uematsu right along Beethoven as an introduction to instrumentalwhole. To realize that not everything new is good, but not everything new is bad. And some things that are old are just archaic.
It's scary to me - as a gamer - that there are such uncreative and potentially illiterate people as yourself out there encouraging others to be just as uncreative and illiterate. And people wonder why games themselves have gotten so uncreative lately - from creative minds come creative games. And if you don't read, you're not exercising your imagination on a regular basis.
Movies, TV and Video Games, in fact, trigger my imagination a WHOLE lot more than the average work of literature does. While I will agree that the more fantastical stories are good for the creative parts of the soul, your typical literary snob will put down any such work. Personally, for reading for enjoyment I prefer Pratchett and Rushdie (Nice combo huh?). The wordplay and puns that both authors put together keep me thinking activly and enjoyably for hours.
In any case. I can't believe that nobody ever watches a movie and doesn'timagines what happens "off-screen" or after the fact. Playing a game is a whole different ball of wax, of course. It's more active thinking. Being aware of your surroundings. Constantly reorientating yourself to new points of views.
And why am I illiterate? Because I don't read the "Classics"? Sorry. I spend most of my day reading NON-FICTION (Read:The only thing to truly increase your mind).
In fact, that's my big beef with this. Reading Moby Dick is no better than reading Snow Crash, for example. Both are forms of mental masturbation. (Again, I don't think that's a bad thing) So is Video Games, for that matter. It's ALL mental masturbation. I'd understand their PoV if they were saying that we should all read...hmm..Cobra II or The World is Flat (although I'd argue that the latter is fiction. Ha!)
But they're not. They're saying that new culture should be wiped out. And I think that's just hypocritical.
Actually the signal-to-noise ratio is a lot better than it used to be. I spend most of my time reading non-fiction materal online. Most of that material didn't exist 10 years ago.
As a whole, non-fiction books really only became widely accessable over the 20th century.
Yes. I'm saying that ALL fiction is "noise". I'm not saying that people shouldn't partake in noise. Whatever makes you feel good and doesn't hurt others..right? What bugs me, is you have all these cranks that say we should go read some "classic" of literature. It's ALL mental masturbation. Just different types.
And by the way. When I'm playing a FPS, I'm activly searching the environment, looking for enemies, escape routes, power ups, etc. I don't play FPS too often, to be honest, but they're definatly a mental exercise.
To me, most books I read really end up lulling my brain down to a lower thought level. There are exceptions but these are not so much in the story, but in the style of writing. (And a wide variety of genres they are too. Pratchett and Rushdie. But if you think about it. They have a LOT in common)
Yes, it forces me to create the world that is being described. But that's automatic. Not very much mental. If I'm watching a TV show, I'm often trying to figure out what's going to happen next. (I don't watch much TV 'tho). Same with movies. And with Video Games, I'm activly thinking about the system of the game, what's going to come next and what I'm going to do about it. (I'm a systems person. I'll look at a game and see the numbers that arn't shown)
Yet, reading fiction, even the greatest work of "Literature", is no more informative than making a sandcaste. I'm not saying it's wrong. If it floats your boat, whatever.
But I'm tired of this stuff. The alternative is informative non-fiction. Period. Mentioning "Moby Dick" ruins the entire argument.
That the kid would pick up the video game, for a number of reasons. Our society is too "traditionalist" as a whole, revering the "classics" while ignoring the quality that's both modern..and thus more relevent, that's under our noses.
As well, reading is much too passive an activity. It encourages mental passiveness, instead of being aware and engaged in our surroundings.
Finally, the reason why people read the "canon", is so that they'd have something to discuss with their peers during less important moments. It's a way to connect with those around us. Video Games, natch, pop culture as a whole serves the same purpose in the modern world.
I couldn't find any either. But I don't see a special technical reason why you couldn't install one on Linux. I know that you can get things such as various types of security and scanning software that will run in the background...how is this any different from an invisible IRC client? It's not.
While it's true that Windows machines are overwhelmingly the ones affected, this is simply a factor of marketshare.
Once OS X gets a good marketshare, you'll see a ton of little aps that have zombie clients attached to them.
There are OS X botnets, and although I've never heard of any, I'd be there's probably a few proof of concept Linux botnets hanging out in hacker circles.
Any OS that allows user installation of software is equally suspect to a zombie takeover.
If you want to eliminate zombies, we need to replace PCs with web-surfing applicances. You don't have that appliance (which is massively encrypted, and lacks ANY local saving options), you can't get on the Internet.
But that just sucks. So we live with the status quo. Such is life.
Any non-Read Only OS is vulnurable to malicious software. Each OS has enough "security holes" (Otherwise known as features), to allow auto-running of malicious software without the knowledge of the average user.
#1. Don't blame Windows. Most botnets spread through software downloaded installs. 99.999% of computer installs today are vulnurable. The exception, of course, is the LiveCD type OS run directly from a CD in a read-only format. Your choice of OS is no protection. If you run malicious software, your computer is a zombie. Period.
#2. The problem is E-mail. Don't want spam? Don't use e-mail. That seems harsh, but it's true. E-mail is an open protocol, and as such, is ripe for such abuses. It's about time to come up with a new type of server based messaging. I'm not saying let the spammers win. What I'm saying is remove their audience.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest hole existing right now is the user. Any thought otherwise is simply whistling in the wind.
Once a user runs software, if that software is malicious, that computer is compromised. Period.
As a player of GW, I can tell you that it is sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the MMORPG market, even 'tho it isn't entirely a MMORPG in and of itself.
There was recently a festival event which took place in a new player area, and I talked to quite a few new players who have joined in the last 3 months. Many more than I expected, to be honest. For those that don't play, it's not so much because of the no-monthly fee thing which is why it's so good, it's that it has the best developed combat engine in the multiplayer RPG genre out there.
To one degree or another. We all stand on the backs of giants. The reality is, in all genres, there are these people who think that somehow, someway we can achieve something that is not derivative, however, generally speaking these people tend to have huge massive egos and think that the only person who can achieve this is themselves.
But when you focus on what games have similar, you tend to completly miss what makes them unique.
No need to buy out Sega.
It's already been confirmed that the VC system will be able to play Genesis games. Turbo-Graphix 16 as well.
I mean, it's probably not good at all for MS. But I would think that people choosing to purchase a PS2 in this late stage of the game, probably won't buy a PS3 at/near launch. Before the 360 came out, sales of the X-Box 1 dropped.
Actually, on the other hand, this probably just people replacing broken PS2s. Which such a huge userbase, you'll see substantial turn-around for replacement systems. I know, myself that I need to purchase a new PS2 because my original one died (and I don't want to give up my game library).
Oh. And I have no plans on purchasing a PS3. Too expensive, and I'm having serious doubts that it's going to be the leader of the next generation. (And if it's not the leader, it won't get the 3rd party games. And the 3rd party games are the only reason to have a PlayStation)
You're completly misunderstanding. Actually no you're not..you're just not cynical enough.
Net Neutrality only concerns itself with the source of a packet. QoS rules can still be applied, but they need to be applied without regard to the source of the packet. Why the telcos are so big on killing net neutrality, is exactly so ISPs can give their/their allies internet applications huge advantages over competitors. In fact, everybody knows this. This is why there are actually changes to various anti-trust regs that are being pushed along with killing net neutrality.
The one thing I have to say is, if internet companies have to pay to send their content over telco pipes, then the telcos should pay the content providers for providing the content that makes people want to have internet connections.
FFVI is really weird.
The first half of the game is great. Terrific. The story moves along, has interesting characters, great scenes. The whole nine yards.
Then the story just falls apart. When the linearity of the game is removed, the writers need to stop character interaction, because you may not actually have a character when you get a different one. As well, you don't actually have a storyline anymore. The game is reduced to a series of individual character scenes.
Dude...
If you can't get to level 5 in Guild Wars:Factions within like..20 minutes, something is seriously wrong. Grab a couple of henchies (The second quest in the game, in fact, that usually brings you to level 3, shows you to do this), then go do the main two quests for your primary class, that should bring you up to level 5 right there in about 20-30 minutes.
Pulling that off with their existing base will prove a challenge.
Not as much as you'd think, and that was part of my point. There's nothing anti-business, per se, about the Democratic base, as it exists right now. There's things about how there needs to be a balance or society and the economy will have serious problems in the long run, but that's not anti-business. That's just being pragmatic.
The problem with just abandoning the poor, is what do you expect the poor to do? Find jobs? There's not enough jobs to go around, unfortunately. (Again, that's something I'd like to change). The reason we care about the poor, New Deal-style, is to allow a capitalist economy to exist in the first place, through making people not have to be so desperate about things.
Right now the DNC has as their chairman someone who's very fiscally conservative. And he was widely supported by the people who really ARE the base right now. So take that for what it's worth.
My apologies. The intention wasn't to say that only the left side of things supports net neutrality. Only to respond to what McCurry said about an "Anti-corporate jihad" going on between "liberals and centrists".
In reality, this is one of those issues that there's two sides. You have the DC/WallStreet community vs. The Rest Of Us.
Offhand....
The biggies I can see are VoIP and Streaming Audio/Video. Those are the obvious ones.
However, from comments the telco industry has made, it seems that they're going to play hardball with this. So more than likely any business who tries to operate via the internet will need to pay the telcos to be able to do it.
The problem I see isn't with for example, EBay being charged. The problem I see is the sucessor to Ebay getting charged, and because of that is unable to get off the ground.
#1. Yes, DailyKos is a Democratic site. But at the same time, the DKos community is pretty much committed to lessening the influence of a whole wide variety of interest groups from the political process and increasing the power that the individual citizen has, on both sides of the aisle. From Unions straight through to Corporations.
#2. Generally speaking, wider "left" political blogsophere supports net neutrality very strongly. And the reason for that, is actually a traditionally centrist viewpoint, namely in order to maximize the effect and forces of a free and open market. Eliminating net neutrality is a great threat to putting a full stop to innovation in business and technology on the internet. It stops new players and technologies from taking those first baby steps out.
You have one area of business with high barriers to entry and a few companies, and you have another area of business with much lower barriers to entry and new companies forming every day?
Which is the important one to protect here?
Actually, that's a common mistake, and in fact one that's commonly made at all levels of analysis. It's made by people who really have no f'n clue of how the real world works.
"As employees create more output they are worth more to the company and will get more compensation".
This isn't blanketly wrong, there's certain economic situations where this is true. They're just very rare. Think small businesses that are fighting to keep their head afloat, in a huge market where their output is not matching demand. And that the management of said business decided to reward their employees for their hard work.
However..when reading that. Doesn't that sound like a magical land where trees are candy canes and street lights lollipops?
Right.
The problem is our typical view of productivity. We look at it almost in a vacumn more or less. It happens on its own. As well, certain aspects of employment are generally ignored.
Companies do not hire because they are making more money. Companies higher because they have X units of labor that need to be done. However, they want to pay as little per unit of labor as they can to get that work done. In an economy without full employment, it's a competitive market for job-seekers. This forces wages down as more people are looking for jobs.
Increased productivity for individual workers, in the long run, makes this problem worse. Sure. If those units of work are being done by 10% less people, then technically they can afford to pay 10% more (or so). However. Why should they? In such an economy, because people are activly looking for work, they can bid down wages.
It literally becomes a situation where people are more productive and less rewarded for it.
As for your complaints to customer service, did you ever hear the phrase "shit rolls downhill?". That's because the stress that their employers are putting on the employees is going to come out at you. I know the response. It's their job to "remain professional".
Why should they? Why should they offer good service to a society that does not reward them for their hard work?
Why should they?
We live in a society where your worth as a human being is directly gauged by how much money you make.
What do you expect?
Terry Pratchett probably does more insight into humanity in 10 pages than the entire literary "canon" combined :(
The problem is, there is no reliable measure of what's "quality" and what isn't in terms of what's modern. Are you saying with a straight face that, for example, kids should be exposed to Britney Spears rather than Beethoven? What determines quality? Simple popularity, or some other measure? Or are you music. What I'm saying is that we should teach our youth to be informed critics of culture as a arguing that art, music and film critics should now determine the education of our kids? Should GameSpot and IGN set the nation's high school curriculum?
I'd argue Williams and Uematsu right along Beethoven as an introduction to instrumentalwhole. To realize that not everything new is good, but not everything new is bad. And some things that are old are just archaic.
It's scary to me - as a gamer - that there are such uncreative and potentially illiterate people as yourself out there encouraging others to be just as uncreative and illiterate. And people wonder why games themselves have gotten so uncreative lately - from creative minds come creative games. And if you don't read, you're not exercising your imagination on a regular basis.
Movies, TV and Video Games, in fact, trigger my imagination a WHOLE lot more than the average work of literature does. While I will agree that the more fantastical stories are good for the creative parts of the soul, your typical literary snob will put down any such work. Personally, for reading for enjoyment I prefer Pratchett and Rushdie (Nice combo huh?). The wordplay and puns that both authors put together keep me thinking activly and enjoyably for hours.
In any case. I can't believe that nobody ever watches a movie and doesn'timagines what happens "off-screen" or after the fact. Playing a game is a whole different ball of wax, of course. It's more active thinking. Being aware of your surroundings. Constantly reorientating yourself to new points of views.
And why am I illiterate? Because I don't read the "Classics"? Sorry. I spend most of my day reading NON-FICTION (Read:The only thing to truly increase your mind).
In fact, that's my big beef with this. Reading Moby Dick is no better than reading Snow Crash, for example. Both are forms of mental masturbation. (Again, I don't think that's a bad thing) So is Video Games, for that matter. It's ALL mental masturbation. I'd understand their PoV if they were saying that we should all read...hmm..Cobra II or The World is Flat (although I'd argue that the latter is fiction. Ha!)
But they're not. They're saying that new culture should be wiped out. And I think that's just hypocritical.
Actually the signal-to-noise ratio is a lot better than it used to be. I spend most of my time reading non-fiction materal online. Most of that material didn't exist 10 years ago.
As a whole, non-fiction books really only became widely accessable over the 20th century.
Yes. I'm saying that ALL fiction is "noise". I'm not saying that people shouldn't partake in noise. Whatever makes you feel good and doesn't hurt others..right? What bugs me, is you have all these cranks that say we should go read some "classic" of literature. It's ALL mental masturbation. Just different types.
And by the way. When I'm playing a FPS, I'm activly searching the environment, looking for enemies, escape routes, power ups, etc. I don't play FPS too often, to be honest, but they're definatly a mental exercise.
To me, most books I read really end up lulling my brain down to a lower thought level. There are exceptions but these are not so much in the story, but in the style of writing. (And a wide variety of genres they are too. Pratchett and Rushdie. But if you think about it. They have a LOT in common)
Yes, it forces me to create the world that is being described. But that's automatic. Not very much mental. If I'm watching a TV show, I'm often trying to figure out what's going to happen next. (I don't watch much TV 'tho). Same with movies. And with Video Games, I'm activly thinking about the system of the game, what's going to come next and what I'm going to do about it. (I'm a systems person. I'll look at a game and see the numbers that arn't shown)
Yet, reading fiction, even the greatest work of "Literature", is no more informative than making a sandcaste. I'm not saying it's wrong. If it floats your boat, whatever.
But I'm tired of this stuff. The alternative is informative non-fiction. Period. Mentioning "Moby Dick" ruins the entire argument.
That the kid would pick up the video game, for a number of reasons. Our society is too "traditionalist" as a whole, revering the "classics" while ignoring the quality that's both modern..and thus more relevent, that's under our noses.
As well, reading is much too passive an activity. It encourages mental passiveness, instead of being aware and engaged in our surroundings.
Finally, the reason why people read the "canon", is so that they'd have something to discuss with their peers during less important moments. It's a way to connect with those around us. Video Games, natch, pop culture as a whole serves the same purpose in the modern world.
I couldn't find any either. But I don't see a special technical reason why you couldn't install one on Linux. I know that you can get things such as various types of security and scanning software that will run in the background...how is this any different from an invisible IRC client? It's not.
While it's true that Windows machines are overwhelmingly the ones affected, this is simply a factor of marketshare.
Once OS X gets a good marketshare, you'll see a ton of little aps that have zombie clients attached to them.
There are OS X botnets, and although I've never heard of any, I'd be there's probably a few proof of concept Linux botnets hanging out in hacker circles. Any OS that allows user installation of software is equally suspect to a zombie takeover.
If you want to eliminate zombies, we need to replace PCs with web-surfing applicances. You don't have that appliance (which is massively encrypted, and lacks ANY local saving options), you can't get on the Internet.
But that just sucks. So we live with the status quo. Such is life.
Any non-Read Only OS is vulnurable to malicious software. Each OS has enough "security holes" (Otherwise known as features), to allow auto-running of malicious software without the knowledge of the average user.
Of all the common comments...
#1. Don't blame Windows. Most botnets spread through software downloaded installs. 99.999% of computer installs today are vulnurable. The exception, of course, is the LiveCD type OS run directly from a CD in a read-only format. Your choice of OS is no protection. If you run malicious software, your computer is a zombie. Period.
#2. The problem is E-mail. Don't want spam? Don't use e-mail. That seems harsh, but it's true. E-mail is an open protocol, and as such, is ripe for such abuses. It's about time to come up with a new type of server based messaging. I'm not saying let the spammers win. What I'm saying is remove their audience.