If they made it so you could put in a request at the auction house for an item, and list an amount that your willing to pay, then people who have product for sale would better know the value of the things they're trying to sell, and they could get an sell their items on the spot, walk away with their cash, and the people who want a resource but dont want to sit all day in the auction house looking for cheeper prices could get their items at a reasonable price.
Civ Call To Power (CTP) I think was a nice step up from Civ 2. Instead of keeping a ton or settlers/workers around you had public works points that you could spend. I never liked the Civ paradigm of keeping a ton of worker units around just sitting there. Then they made CTP 2 which wasn't very good.
1 - not nearly the number of games for Macs as windows. But, much more games for Macs than Linux. 2 - Open source kernel, closed source gui. But, they took care of all the things that open source programers hate to do (printer drivers and printer infrastructure for example) 3 - Mac mini is cheap, its a decent machine, and I already have a monitor, but it they just upgraded the video card a little then I could use it with the 30" monitor if I decide to get one one-day 4 - Always add $100-$200 to the cost of any machine to upgrade ram to a reasonable amount 5 - Next month, its expected that their new OS (Tiger) will come out. It comes with X-Code 2.0 (their developement IDE), so your going to probably want the upgrade. If you wait till then you can save yourself $130. 6 - Instead of a mac-mini, I could get a 12" iBook which has DVI out and I can use it as a portable DVD player as well. If, down the line I get some sort of a Tivo-like device that allows me to offload my shows onto it, then its also my portible TV w/out commercials. And, of course, I could also read files/etc on the go with a pretty portable device. Can also use it as an MP3 player, and my portable HD. 7 - If they release a dual-core processor based iMac, macMini or iBook soon, I think I'd have to buy it in a heartbeat.
Your an idiot in so many ways.
1. "You can only steal a noun". Data/information/code/game are all nouns.
2. "You cannot steal an authors inspiration". This point is not only wrong, but it doesn't make any sense. When you steal the product of someones labor, whether it be a T.V., a house, their artwork (digital or canvas) you are taking something for your pleasure and denying them their just reward. Thief.
3. "Find me a case where someone bootlegging CDs was charged with burglary and I'll retract my statement". Burglary is defined as "The act of entering a building or other premises with the intent to commit theft".
Make a few more stupid and deceptive comments and you might just become Michael Moore
A couple of things about EQ that you missed -
1. That 1-3 day spawn was something I was in line for (over 1 year, 2 months) but thankfully they corrected that problem.
2. The draconian code of conduct is good for those of us who don't like it when some 12 year old smart*ss with a level 20 char sits in a newbie zone and continually kills the level 1's - I tried the EQ PvP and this happened, I tried other games that had PvP and this happened. People call the non-pvp system carebear servers, but I'd rather not have my entertainment interrupted by the whims of some worthless garbage idiot.
4. They were there first - who wants to start over in a new world and have to make new friends whilst leaving old ones behind?
5. Raids - very few other MMORPG really require you to coordinate 60 people to accomplish a difficult challenge.
6. Playbalance - which has been ongoing for the duration of its existance
7. Skill and strategy - if you've played long enough you've surely run into that chanter who's saved your entire group from certain death and made it look easy.
8. Untrivialized economy - Although there is a lot more plat in EQ now than before, its really quite tame compared to AC (I have a friend who has mules stuffed with the most expensive form of currency - forgot what they're called)
9. Exploits are fixed quickly - Again, comparing to AC where that chain of command thing was created and wasn't resolved for a LONG time.
10. Evolving gameplay - instanced zones? Ok, we'll make an expansion that has those and see if people like them. Yup, ok we'll add more of them in the future. Socketed items? Ok, we'll add that too. The EQ of today is virtually unrecognizable from the EQ of day 1. Even the character models were redone and graphics engine was revamped (twice). Though their framerate is still way too low for the polygone count due to their having to store all their character animations/etc compressed and their inability to figure out a way to not render hidden surfaces/areas.
I'm not sure what you mean by uneven advancement so I cant address that. As for your stories of people not coming back to EQ, I'd say I've heard just the opposite. I've heard of a LOT of people that left and came back - multiple times. I'm one of them. I had to quit for almost 2 years (grad school) and I returned to a game that was vastly different. I've left several times because of time considerations but I keep coming back.
Hmmm..... consider an employee that your paying $100k. You have to pay about $45k in taxes just for employing them. Plus you have pay for health care, 401k, and other benefits. Plus you have to pay for unemployment insurance which is really expensive. Plus you have to pay for the lawsuit insurance. Plus you have to pay for whatever-socialist-idea that the state or local legislators came up with. Plus theres a cost associated with finding/hiring new talent and paying severance. Then you have to pay for the building they're in, the power, water, etc, janitors (which are usually contractors or work for the company you rent from and thus dont bring down the average salary). When all is said and done that employee costs about $230k. Average in the CTO's CFO's C-whatever-O's I'm not at all surprised at the $300k. All so they can sit in their cube and post replies to slashdot articles:)
1. Whenever your about to work on something, list out all the parts you need to work on (I did this on a giant white board). Then, when you complete each item cross it off. That 'crossing off' is a reward for your work and when your board is filled with crossed off items you feel a great sense of accomplishment and you realise what you've done in your time. Make sure that every item on the board is an item that would take only a few minutes. Bigger items should be split into subitems. Doing it in a notebook is great when your whole notebook becomes a giant list of crossed off items.
2. Motivation - Motivation is difficult, but once you have it nothing can stand in your way. But motivation is psychological. The only way I've found to create it is to 'convince' yourself that what you are studying or working on is interesting. You have to believe that you will use what your learning for some purpose that your highly motivated about already - thus associating your learning with an exsisting source of motivation. Or you can try to create a new source of motivation by convincing yourself that your project is by itself a great achievement that will satisfy a desire that your have. For example, I've always wanted to have a complete control of computers in a way that noone else in the world could have. So, every project for me was a matter of creating a toolbox of code that I would someday use to be able to create anything I wanted quickly.
1. Summer Games - hey, these computer games are fun
2. Bards Tale - the first game that drew you in and gave you characters to develop. A game that took months to solve.
3. Railroad tycoon - the first game that taught me the meaning of 'where did the time go?'
3. Civilization - the game that cost me $50 but gave me about 100 hours per penny that I played.
4. Doom - First fps that was pretty fun (wolvenstein bored me). First real reflex game that drew me in
5. Command and conquer - first RTS that I really enjoyed
6. Everquest - the game that has taken all my time and turned into an addict. I spend almost all my spare time playing and even when I dont play I'm still playing. I dream about it when I sleep, I plan my next goals out when I'm at work. Totally destroyed any social life that I have, and put in its place a total sense of...... best I can describe it is 'fun'. Add to that a feeling of connection to my characters and abandoning them would feel like abandoning my children.
Lift weights- I really mean this. When you get stronger 3 things will happen -
You will become thinner. Muscle burns calories. Dont worry about muscle turning to fat as you get older.
Other guys will respect you more. Bullies dont pick on guys who can kick their butt.
Girls will like you more. I know you dont want an artificial girl who only looks at your body and not your personality, but at the same time you dont want a girl to have like you DISPITE your body.
Date girls that are plain. It will give you practice, and you'll find that quite often they're better people.
Dont let people- especially teachers - intimidate you. Your opinion is valid. Dont worry about school. After all, your smart and if you cant do it then the rest of the class will totally fail. When someone says "who are you to judge" say "I am JIM, and thats all you need to know!?". Have confidence, be arrogant- you've earned it!
In class you'll be bored- school is geared for average people and your not average. So, do the work really fast, then do other stuff thats fun.
Take responsibility for your education. When a teacher gives you a BS assignment, bring it up to your parents or to your teachers boss- hes not doing his job! (Making a fort from popsicle sticks doesn't teach a thing about history)
Read Ann Rands book "Atlas Shrugged". The lessons you learn there will help you fight a lot of the idiot stuff you'll hear later on in life.
In the next few years your brain is going to change. The chemicals in your brain will cause you to think and feel things that aren't normal or good. Just stay the course and when your in your 20's things will be normal again.
Dont worry about what job you'll be doing for the rest of your life- you cant plan that far in advance. Just get your graduate and masters degrees as quickly as possible and dont worry about it. And DONT bother getting a minor- noone will ever notice. And dont worry too much about your GPA. As long as you get the degree, thats all that counts. And, dont ever start a sentence with 'and'- its improper grammer.
Learn how to spell. You're intelligence will be judged by it. You cannot appear smart making your case if you spell things incorrectly.
Dont drink soda. The sugar will just make you fat and the caffine will just mess with your sleep schedule.
All I can say is "Postal". The only game I've ever returned because it was too violent. You shoot little children and hear them cry "Mommy I cant breath". Truely a disgusting game
1. If your about to loose your city that has the great wall, you might want your cities to have that just in case. It helps your enemy from rolling over you after killing your Great Wall City.
2. So you can sell it and build it again. This gives you cash from production even before you have the capitalism tech.
If you check out the jpeg standard, there really isn't any place to put a buffer overflow. Each of the values in the jpg file correspond to the magnitude of a sin wave that goes into the final image. That sin wave extands to the size of the jpeg. It would be pretty tough to create a program that was so poorly written that you would have a buffer overflow there (of course, this world produces bigger more powerful idiots everyday).
That having been said, the JPG2000 standard on the other hand does have code-like data in it and creating a virus for that may just be possible.
After having tried EQ, AC and AO I can say that EQ has definately been the best. AO had very uninspired spells (every cleric spell was either a heal or rez spell it felt like- nothing new or original). AC was always having server problems (figures from a Microsoft product) so it was completely unplayable - your walking, walking, walking slowely, walking really slowly, stopped....... waiting....... waiting....... you were just hit 100 times from some creature that wasn't around a second ago and your dead.
-Jim
Limiting it to the lifetime of the creator will just shorten the lifetime of that creator. Do we really want to have laws that would cause lots of people to wish for the death of our inventors lives? I can imagine Micro$oft hiring someone to kill off a few people to expire their copywrites
Slashdot Mirror
If they made it so you could put in a request at the auction house for an item, and list an amount that your willing to pay, then people who have product for sale would better know the value of the things they're trying to sell, and they could get an sell their items on the spot, walk away with their cash, and the people who want a resource but dont want to sit all day in the auction house looking for cheeper prices could get their items at a reasonable price.
Civ Call To Power (CTP) I think was a nice step up from Civ 2. Instead of keeping a ton or settlers/workers around you had public works points that you could spend. I never liked the Civ paradigm of keeping a ton of worker units around just sitting there. Then they made CTP 2 which wasn't very good.
1 - not nearly the number of games for Macs as windows. But, much more games for Macs than Linux.
2 - Open source kernel, closed source gui. But, they took care of all the things that open source programers hate to do (printer drivers and printer infrastructure for example)
3 - Mac mini is cheap, its a decent machine, and I already have a monitor, but it they just upgraded the video card a little then I could use it with the 30" monitor if I decide to get one one-day
4 - Always add $100-$200 to the cost of any machine to upgrade ram to a reasonable amount
5 - Next month, its expected that their new OS (Tiger) will come out. It comes with X-Code 2.0 (their developement IDE), so your going to probably want the upgrade. If you wait till then you can save yourself $130.
6 - Instead of a mac-mini, I could get a 12" iBook which has DVI out and I can use it as a portable DVD player as well. If, down the line I get some sort of a Tivo-like device that allows me to offload my shows onto it, then its also my portible TV w/out commercials. And, of course, I could also read files/etc on the go with a pretty portable device. Can also use it as an MP3 player, and my portable HD.
7 - If they release a dual-core processor based iMac, macMini or iBook soon, I think I'd have to buy it in a heartbeat.
So, on these days do the student come to school wearing a bomb belt?
I couldn't believe it when I heard on the radio "This product is so effective it was awarded a U.S. Patent". Do people really fall for that?!
Your an idiot in so many ways. 1. "You can only steal a noun". Data/information/code/game are all nouns. 2. "You cannot steal an authors inspiration". This point is not only wrong, but it doesn't make any sense. When you steal the product of someones labor, whether it be a T.V., a house, their artwork (digital or canvas) you are taking something for your pleasure and denying them their just reward. Thief. 3. "Find me a case where someone bootlegging CDs was charged with burglary and I'll retract my statement". Burglary is defined as "The act of entering a building or other premises with the intent to commit theft". Make a few more stupid and deceptive comments and you might just become Michael Moore
A couple of things about EQ that you missed - 1. That 1-3 day spawn was something I was in line for (over 1 year, 2 months) but thankfully they corrected that problem. 2. The draconian code of conduct is good for those of us who don't like it when some 12 year old smart*ss with a level 20 char sits in a newbie zone and continually kills the level 1's - I tried the EQ PvP and this happened, I tried other games that had PvP and this happened. People call the non-pvp system carebear servers, but I'd rather not have my entertainment interrupted by the whims of some worthless garbage idiot. 4. They were there first - who wants to start over in a new world and have to make new friends whilst leaving old ones behind? 5. Raids - very few other MMORPG really require you to coordinate 60 people to accomplish a difficult challenge. 6. Playbalance - which has been ongoing for the duration of its existance 7. Skill and strategy - if you've played long enough you've surely run into that chanter who's saved your entire group from certain death and made it look easy. 8. Untrivialized economy - Although there is a lot more plat in EQ now than before, its really quite tame compared to AC (I have a friend who has mules stuffed with the most expensive form of currency - forgot what they're called) 9. Exploits are fixed quickly - Again, comparing to AC where that chain of command thing was created and wasn't resolved for a LONG time. 10. Evolving gameplay - instanced zones? Ok, we'll make an expansion that has those and see if people like them. Yup, ok we'll add more of them in the future. Socketed items? Ok, we'll add that too. The EQ of today is virtually unrecognizable from the EQ of day 1. Even the character models were redone and graphics engine was revamped (twice). Though their framerate is still way too low for the polygone count due to their having to store all their character animations/etc compressed and their inability to figure out a way to not render hidden surfaces/areas. I'm not sure what you mean by uneven advancement so I cant address that. As for your stories of people not coming back to EQ, I'd say I've heard just the opposite. I've heard of a LOT of people that left and came back - multiple times. I'm one of them. I had to quit for almost 2 years (grad school) and I returned to a game that was vastly different. I've left several times because of time considerations but I keep coming back.
Hmmm..... consider an employee that your paying $100k. You have to pay about $45k in taxes just for employing them. Plus you have pay for health care, 401k, and other benefits. Plus you have to pay for unemployment insurance which is really expensive. Plus you have to pay for the lawsuit insurance. Plus you have to pay for whatever-socialist-idea that the state or local legislators came up with. Plus theres a cost associated with finding/hiring new talent and paying severance. Then you have to pay for the building they're in, the power, water, etc, janitors (which are usually contractors or work for the company you rent from and thus dont bring down the average salary). When all is said and done that employee costs about $230k. Average in the CTO's CFO's C-whatever-O's I'm not at all surprised at the $300k. All so they can sit in their cube and post replies to slashdot articles :)
NEVER tell me to modify the xyz file in the abc directory!
1. Whenever your about to work on something, list out all the parts you need to work on (I did this on a giant white board). Then, when you complete each item cross it off. That 'crossing off' is a reward for your work and when your board is filled with crossed off items you feel a great sense of accomplishment and you realise what you've done in your time. Make sure that every item on the board is an item that would take only a few minutes. Bigger items should be split into subitems. Doing it in a notebook is great when your whole notebook becomes a giant list of crossed off items. 2. Motivation - Motivation is difficult, but once you have it nothing can stand in your way. But motivation is psychological. The only way I've found to create it is to 'convince' yourself that what you are studying or working on is interesting. You have to believe that you will use what your learning for some purpose that your highly motivated about already - thus associating your learning with an exsisting source of motivation. Or you can try to create a new source of motivation by convincing yourself that your project is by itself a great achievement that will satisfy a desire that your have. For example, I've always wanted to have a complete control of computers in a way that noone else in the world could have. So, every project for me was a matter of creating a toolbox of code that I would someday use to be able to create anything I wanted quickly.
1. Summer Games - hey, these computer games are fun 2. Bards Tale - the first game that drew you in and gave you characters to develop. A game that took months to solve. 3. Railroad tycoon - the first game that taught me the meaning of 'where did the time go?' 3. Civilization - the game that cost me $50 but gave me about 100 hours per penny that I played. 4. Doom - First fps that was pretty fun (wolvenstein bored me). First real reflex game that drew me in 5. Command and conquer - first RTS that I really enjoyed 6. Everquest - the game that has taken all my time and turned into an addict. I spend almost all my spare time playing and even when I dont play I'm still playing. I dream about it when I sleep, I plan my next goals out when I'm at work. Totally destroyed any social life that I have, and put in its place a total sense of...... best I can describe it is 'fun'. Add to that a feeling of connection to my characters and abandoning them would feel like abandoning my children.
All I can say is "Postal". The only game I've ever returned because it was too violent. You shoot little children and hear them cry "Mommy I cant breath". Truely a disgusting game
1. If your about to loose your city that has the great wall, you might want your cities to have that just in case. It helps your enemy from rolling over you after killing your Great Wall City. 2. So you can sell it and build it again. This gives you cash from production even before you have the capitalism tech.
If you check out the jpeg standard, there really isn't any place to put a buffer overflow. Each of the values in the jpg file correspond to the magnitude of a sin wave that goes into the final image. That sin wave extands to the size of the jpeg. It would be pretty tough to create a program that was so poorly written that you would have a buffer overflow there (of course, this world produces bigger more powerful idiots everyday). That having been said, the JPG2000 standard on the other hand does have code-like data in it and creating a virus for that may just be possible.
After having tried EQ, AC and AO I can say that EQ has definately been the best. AO had very uninspired spells (every cleric spell was either a heal or rez spell it felt like- nothing new or original). AC was always having server problems (figures from a Microsoft product) so it was completely unplayable - your walking, walking, walking slowely, walking really slowly, stopped....... waiting....... waiting....... you were just hit 100 times from some creature that wasn't around a second ago and your dead. -Jim
Limiting it to the lifetime of the creator will just shorten the lifetime of that creator. Do we really want to have laws that would cause lots of people to wish for the death of our inventors lives? I can imagine Micro$oft hiring someone to kill off a few people to expire their copywrites