This is just a new take on old ideas.
It use to be done with cameras, the math is rather simple you primarily need the speed of the ball and of the wheel.
The reason you don't see this used most places is that casinos have protected themselves against it by installing "bumps" in the wheel. As the ball slows down it will hit the bumps and its speed and direction will be messed up. Making the initial speeds worthless, to the point that casinos are now automating the wheels so it can be spun at the press of a button.
That UK casinos do not have theses is interesting.
As a historic note, it use to be that roulette allowed you to place bets almost all time the ball was moving. People started to be able to do the math as the ball was slowing down in thier heads. So the requirements that all bets be placed early in the spin was instituted.
They will continue what they currently do, since the yearly credit report is just a small part.
What theses services mostly do is continually monitor your credit status and inform you as things change, this is thier special service.
I would guess that they continue the same routine since most people will not know that you can now get your credit report for free, same as is currently done with the states that already require this.
If it becomes widly know then expect that they will change to advertising it as a security feature and to watch for identity theft.
What you are looking for is D&D online.
Thier they are having a single central city where everyone interacts with everyone else.
Then when you form a party you go off into your parties goes off into its own seperate server instance.
guild wars is having a free marking test this weekend. check out the forums at ign.com for info.
I did the last one they had and it was ok, you downloaded a small application then walked away as it downloaded the majority of the game, so don't do this if you only have a dail-up connection.
Also they put the characters at a fairly high level so you get a feeling for them.
I hate PK, and I'm thrilled to see that WoW doesn't encourage it.
Except that the devs of WoW consider PvP to be 1/3 of the core game. Once you reach the upper levels, where an ever increasing amount of people are, PvP is the primary activity. Raids are another big one, but guess where they have raid information stored, the pvp directory.
BTW, the upcoming hero/skill system PvP based.
For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China
And before that it was Japan, and Europe and Africa and the Soviet Union and a few other places now it is China that gets to fill in the blank.
Figured I had finally found something that could be pointed out where President Bush had actually lied.
However he never said anything like that in 2000 or any other year he was running for president. He was criticied in 2000 for wanting to increase the power of the deparment of education.
Maybe sometime in the future people will find something that he lied about.
He ceased allow federal funds to be allowed on new embryonic steam cell lines, totally different from saying that new steam cell lines were not funded.
The only firm numbers for a MMORPG around are ones that SOE released for EQ1 for Forbes magazine.
They say they yearly bring in around $45 million and spend around $14 million on costs.
Not a bad profit.
The main difference is that thiers is a copy verses the original work.
As for the high prices for original works that is just supply and demand for a rare single item. I have some cheap,but good, posters of Monet but would love to have originals, so would alot of others who have more spendable money then I do. Same as I would love to have first editions of various books. This is not branding. Branding would thoses forger making thier own original art then advertising it as inspired or done in the style of someother artist in order to sell it for a higher price then thier work alone could do.
Now if you want to see what makes a real mockery look at modern art and vaccum machines in plastic boxes.
According to VU/blizzard they made 75,000 copies of the CE. Now considering they have an indication on how many they would sell based on pre-orders how many think that VU went and said "We could sell 100,000 copies but lets limit it to 75,000"?
BTW check out ebay, people are selling the CE in the $200+ range.
Comparing Doom3 to Farcry was a joke. farcry was had multiple paths, better weapons, a better atmosphere(after the first couple of scares in doom 3 that was over) and was just more fund.
So how does HL2 compare to Farcry?
The price of the game at launch covers the costs to develop them game over the last n years.
With MMORPGs that is rarly the case. As a general rule the software company is going to get between $15-$18 per box sold in the store, rest going to the store and the distributer. Most MMORPGs cost around $20 million to make, EQ2 cost in the $30 million range for initial setup and development, CoH cost in the $15 million range.
So to break even on a $20 million game at $15 a box back is going to require 1,333,334 boxes to sell. With a MMORPG the chance of that happening is close to 0%; EQ1,DaOC,UO,AC have not done it for the original packaging.
Where the money and why everyone is making an MMORPG is for the monthly fees, figure that you are making $5 each month(have never seen multiple actual figures for this so low number) after costs and that is the equivalent of selling 4 games a year, great money.
Also for the time value of money for an average game that is close to 13%, for a decent MMORPG it is close to 20% and some are reporting 30%.
For some other actual numbers EQ takes in around $45 million a year in total revenue(expansion packs,monthly fees, other deals) and they spend an average of $14 million on all costs.
The point is, humans have never created a structure that can last even the previous standard of 10,000 years.
Except for Yucca Mtn this is a really worthless argument. The materials that will be stored there already exist, and are being stored in human made structures. So if Yucca is not used the materials will still be stored in human made strucutures, and the ones they will be in are less designed to stand the sands of time then Yucca Mtn.
So under is it better to store the material in a single location that has some some though going into it to prevent people getting into it and for long time storage, or in 1000s of human made structures that designed for short storage, some that are even out in the open or covered by tents.
Now in the event that a process is developed to reprocess the material and make it inert then it would still be better to move all current materials to a central place so that a factory can be built thier to process it.
They already do it on the official board, anything that gets far to negative gets purged. Do not see that changing come retail, and that is when the flaws start coming out.
Every dev is going to do that. However I think Sony has it correct with EQ2 they censor the boards but move all censored messages to a single board where you can read all of them, along with the reason they were censored.
Did a summer of construction work doing something similar to what Verizon is doing. It was the responsibility of the housing areas owner to mark off the lines, we were responsible if the line was within 1 foot(2 feet up and down) of where it was suppose to be beyond that, or if not marked, the housing areas.
We had all the maps, people come in with detectors,etc and overall they don't work that good. We still broke lots of gas,sewer, phone and tv cable lines.
Most of thoses maps are really bad and just show a line from one place to the other. Most of the sewer and gas were old and not on maps or off by multiple feet.
The other problem was depth of the pipes, gas was suppose to of been buried 9+ feet(most of our stuff was suppose to be at 4 feet) and we would bump into stuff. Since you use a backhoe until you get close to something that is marked(then it is by hand shovel) if it was off by feet it usally got broke. And while detectors can tell you have something in the general area, it cannot tell you the depth.
The other problem was telephone and cable TV. In places that were developed when they were brought in it was usally not bad, since they used this machine with a knife to cut a slit and place it in. However in new places they would just place the cable(especially phone) on the ground and let the grass sod over it up. In thoses places the cable moves around.
Also PVC is usally not the problem(since that is usally newer and may be better marked) it is the old ceramic gas and sewer pipes.
While the official date is the 23, boxes are already shipping to resellers.
Have not seen anything on when the open marketing is going to stop and they are going to take down the servers, wipe them and put them back up.(I presume they are still planning to do a wipe of characters for retail) However based on other MMORPGs that will usally happen on Thursday or Friday, and the servers will be up and running by Sunday.
What happens is that stores "accidently" sell copies to friends, store employees, in addition to friends of the game devs,etc. before the actual release and they start to play. So come the offical release date you can expect to see a bunch of level 20+ characters already on the servers.
I don't see them doing any different with WoW, however they could be the different one if you go by what happened with half-life 2, but thier was alot of politics with that so I don't think VU will do the same with WoW.
Installed it on my 2 computers at home, no problems and no indication. Since I already have firewalls, the sp2 one was turned off the first thing.
At work we have had 2 problems on home computers, had a few others but that was because they already were running a firewall and left the SP2 on one, disable that it started working. The first one could not get links to work anymore using outlook express and internet explorer(no firefox comments). The other was a problem with a power outage in the middle of the install, which required some work to remove and then reinstall.
Since the RFID tags will not be on the consumer bottles it will not effect the person who gets thier perscription and sends that to Canada for one of thier pharamcies to fill.
Would possible effect a US phamacy that purchases bulk amounts of pills from Canada for future resale, but not sure how many do that. Besides the purpose of this is to stop counterfiets and for a company doing that they would have to trust the source.
The full title is _pastwatch:The flood_. Did not think that had been published yet, will have go order it when I get home. Thanks.
The only reason to bring up the title is that he also has a book called _pastwatch:redepmtion of christopher columbus_ which was also a good book. A mixture of time travel, columbus, and the aztecs. One of the better alternate history books.
The key thing here is that WoW is in a BETA.
So is guild wars, and it will probably not be released until feb of next year. WoW will be playable by this up coming weekend, not much is going to change between now and then(1 major patch) so if you don't like WoW now not much chance it is going to change.
Also GW will ship on CD, that is how they are going to make money. They are going to be releaseing a few expansion packs a year on the basis that they will make thier money selling thoses instead of the monthly fee.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just a new take on old ideas.
It use to be done with cameras, the math is rather simple you primarily need the speed of the ball and of the wheel.
The reason you don't see this used most places is that casinos have protected themselves against it by installing "bumps" in the wheel. As the ball slows down it will hit the bumps and its speed and direction will be messed up. Making the initial speeds worthless, to the point that casinos are now automating the wheels so it can be spun at the press of a button.
That UK casinos do not have theses is interesting.
As a historic note, it use to be that roulette allowed you to place bets almost all time the ball was moving. People started to be able to do the math as the ball was slowing down in thier heads. So the requirements that all bets be placed early in the spin was instituted.
They will continue what they currently do, since the yearly credit report is just a small part.
What theses services mostly do is continually monitor your credit status and inform you as things change, this is thier special service.
I would guess that they continue the same routine since most people will not know that you can now get your credit report for free, same as is currently done with the states that already require this.
If it becomes widly know then expect that they will change to advertising it as a security feature and to watch for identity theft.
Check out D&D online. They are focusing more on player skill based while character capability will still matter.
What you are looking for is D&D online.
Thier they are having a single central city where everyone interacts with everyone else.
Then when you form a party you go off into your parties goes off into its own seperate server instance.
guild wars is having a free marking test this weekend. check out the forums at ign.com for info.
I did the last one they had and it was ok, you downloaded a small application then walked away as it downloaded the majority of the game, so don't do this if you only have a dail-up connection.
Also they put the characters at a fairly high level so you get a feeling for them.
I hate PK, and I'm thrilled to see that WoW doesn't encourage it.
Except that the devs of WoW consider PvP to be 1/3 of the core game. Once you reach the upper levels, where an ever increasing amount of people are, PvP is the primary activity. Raids are another big one, but guess where they have raid information stored, the pvp directory.
BTW, the upcoming hero/skill system PvP based.
For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China
And before that it was Japan, and Europe and Africa and the Soviet Union and a few other places now it is China that gets to fill in the blank.
All the young people were taked over by our new modified water spider overlords.
Figured I had finally found something that could be pointed out where President Bush had actually lied.
However he never said anything like that in 2000 or any other year he was running for president. He was criticied in 2000 for wanting to increase the power of the deparment of education.
Maybe sometime in the future people will find something that he lied about.
He ceased allow federal funds to be allowed on new embryonic steam cell lines, totally different from saying that new steam cell lines were not funded.
I found the easiest and quickest way to deal with them is to set up and appointment and never show up.
The only firm numbers for a MMORPG around are ones that SOE released for EQ1 for Forbes magazine.
They say they yearly bring in around $45 million and spend around $14 million on costs.
Not a bad profit.
The main difference is that thiers is a copy verses the original work.
As for the high prices for original works that is just supply and demand for a rare single item. I have some cheap,but good, posters of Monet but would love to have originals, so would alot of others who have more spendable money then I do. Same as I would love to have first editions of various books. This is not branding. Branding would thoses forger making thier own original art then advertising it as inspired or done in the style of someother artist in order to sell it for a higher price then thier work alone could do.
Now if you want to see what makes a real mockery look at modern art and vaccum machines in plastic boxes.
According to VU/blizzard they made 75,000 copies of the CE. Now considering they have an indication on how many they would sell based on pre-orders how many think that VU went and said "We could sell 100,000 copies but lets limit it to 75,000"?
BTW check out ebay, people are selling the CE in the $200+ range.
Comparing Doom3 to Farcry was a joke.
farcry was had multiple paths, better weapons, a better atmosphere(after the first couple of scares in doom 3 that was over) and was just more fund.
So how does HL2 compare to Farcry?
The price of the game at launch covers the costs to develop them game over the last n years.
With MMORPGs that is rarly the case. As a general rule the software company is going to get between $15-$18 per box sold in the store, rest going to the store and the distributer. Most MMORPGs cost around $20 million to make, EQ2 cost in the $30 million range for initial setup and development, CoH cost in the $15 million range.
So to break even on a $20 million game at $15 a box back is going to require 1,333,334 boxes to sell. With a MMORPG the chance of that happening is close to 0%; EQ1,DaOC,UO,AC have not done it for the original packaging.
Where the money and why everyone is making an MMORPG is for the monthly fees, figure that you are making $5 each month(have never seen multiple actual figures for this so low number) after costs and that is the equivalent of selling 4 games a year, great money.
Also for the time value of money for an average game that is close to 13%, for a decent MMORPG it is close to 20% and some are reporting 30%.
For some other actual numbers EQ takes in around $45 million a year in total revenue(expansion packs,monthly fees, other deals) and they spend an average of $14 million on all costs.
The point is, humans have never created a structure that can last even the previous standard of 10,000 years.
Except for Yucca Mtn this is a really worthless argument. The materials that will be stored there already exist, and are being stored in human made structures. So if Yucca is not used the materials will still be stored in human made strucutures, and the ones they will be in are less designed to stand the sands of time then Yucca Mtn.
So under is it better to store the material in a single location that has some some though going into it to prevent people getting into it and for long time storage, or in 1000s of human made structures that designed for short storage, some that are even out in the open or covered by tents.
Now in the event that a process is developed to reprocess the material and make it inert then it would still be better to move all current materials to a central place so that a factory can be built thier to process it.
They already do it on the official board, anything that gets far to negative gets purged. Do not see that changing come retail, and that is when the flaws start coming out.
Every dev is going to do that. However I think Sony has it correct with EQ2 they censor the boards but move all censored messages to a single board where you can read all of them, along with the reason they were censored.
Did a summer of construction work doing something similar to what Verizon is doing. It was the responsibility of the housing areas owner to mark off the lines, we were responsible if the line was within 1 foot(2 feet up and down) of where it was suppose to be beyond that, or if not marked, the housing areas.
We had all the maps, people come in with detectors,etc and overall they don't work that good. We still broke lots of gas,sewer, phone and tv cable lines.
Most of thoses maps are really bad and just show a line from one place to the other. Most of the sewer and gas were old and not on maps or off by multiple feet.
The other problem was depth of the pipes, gas was suppose to of been buried 9+ feet(most of our stuff was suppose to be at 4 feet) and we would bump into stuff. Since you use a backhoe until you get close to something that is marked(then it is by hand shovel) if it was off by feet it usally got broke. And while detectors can tell you have something in the general area, it cannot tell you the depth.
The other problem was telephone and cable TV. In places that were developed when they were brought in it was usally not bad, since they used this machine with a knife to cut a slit and place it in. However in new places they would just place the cable(especially phone) on the ground and let the grass sod over it up. In thoses places the cable moves around.
Also PVC is usally not the problem(since that is usally newer and may be better marked) it is the old ceramic gas and sewer pipes.
While the official date is the 23, boxes are already shipping to resellers.
Have not seen anything on when the open marketing is going to stop and they are going to take down the servers, wipe them and put them back up.(I presume they are still planning to do a wipe of characters for retail) However based on other MMORPGs that will usally happen on Thursday or Friday, and the servers will be up and running by Sunday.
What happens is that stores "accidently" sell copies to friends, store employees, in addition to friends of the game devs,etc. before the actual release and they start to play. So come the offical release date you can expect to see a bunch of level 20+ characters already on the servers.
I don't see them doing any different with WoW, however they could be the different one if you go by what happened with half-life 2, but thier was alot of politics with that so I don't think VU will do the same with WoW.
you mean like this?
Installed it on my 2 computers at home, no problems and no indication. Since I already have firewalls, the sp2 one was turned off the first thing.
At work we have had 2 problems on home computers, had a few others but that was because they already were running a firewall and left the SP2 on one, disable that it started working. The first one could not get links to work anymore using outlook express and internet explorer(no firefox comments). The other was a problem with a power outage in the middle of the install, which required some work to remove and then reinstall.
Time foil hat time on this one.
Since the RFID tags will not be on the consumer bottles it will not effect the person who gets thier perscription and sends that to Canada for one of thier pharamcies to fill.
Would possible effect a US phamacy that purchases bulk amounts of pills from Canada for future resale, but not sure how many do that. Besides the purpose of this is to stop counterfiets and for a company doing that they would have to trust the source.
The full title is _pastwatch:The flood_. Did not think that had been published yet, will have go order it when I get home. Thanks.
The only reason to bring up the title is that he also has a book called _pastwatch:redepmtion of christopher columbus_ which was also a good book. A mixture of time travel, columbus, and the aztecs.
One of the better alternate history books.
The key thing here is that WoW is in a BETA.
So is guild wars, and it will probably not be released until feb of next year. WoW will be playable by this up coming weekend, not much is going to change between now and then(1 major patch) so if you don't like WoW now not much chance it is going to change.
Also GW will ship on CD, that is how they are going to make money. They are going to be releaseing a few expansion packs a year on the basis that they will make thier money selling thoses instead of the monthly fee.