...gets from this story is that it's "just" a social media app, "just" a stupid way to put filters on your crappy cell phone pics.
Sure is. And it's going to make their founders mountains of cash. If it were so easy, why didn't you come up with it? Eh? Is making money beneath you, snobby Slashdot User?
at this: "It would be interesting to repeat this analysis using Facebook data, but there is no reason to believe the results would be substantially different."
Yes, because the millions of smartphones out there with a camera and a Facebook app (as opposed to a flickr app) aren't going to skew the results at all.
Flickr is for people who like photography; ergo, the data is going to be skewed heavily towards actual cameras.
Facebook is for people sharing themselves with their friends and the world. One only has to peruse a random person's Facebook profile picture page to find hundreds of self-snaps taken in the bathroom, or at the pub, or on a train, or whatever.
Kodak, in my opinion, failed because they neglected to make quality products in their particular niche (easy to use, inexpensive, easy to share). They offshored their production, so Kodak cameras were notoriously hit-or-miss in regards to actually working right. They missed the highend market (then again Kodak was never known for that anyway), letting Sony, Pentax, Canon, and Nikon beat them there. They failed to leverage their gigantic photo paper experience into anything worthwhile (I own a Kodak printer that, as I type this, refuses to print due to some bizarre error I don't have time to diagnose).
In short, Kodak failed because Kodak fucked up. Photography isn't going anywhere. Hell, film photography isn't going anywhere. Kodak just stood still and let the world pass them by.
It's a pretty geeky issue to get worked up about. Most people won't notice until Youtube gets pulled. By then it'll be on the books for months, and we won't have any recourse to get rid of it. And it's not like the Congress Critters are listening anyway. It's an election year, after all, and they need Hollywood donations....
Oh well, the internet was fun while it lasted. I guess I'll go outside now.
Was salivated over for its eye candy, not necessarily for its gameplay. It's a benchmarking tool. Then again, people who downloaded it for benchmarking certainly had no qualms over blowing thousands for a top of the line gaming rig....
As someone who classifies himself as a "geek", albeit one terribly bad at math and logic, I thought it was a pretty good read. I do wish I had some more "hello, this is information theory presented in an engaging manner" books, though.
...perhaps I'm getting to the point in my life where I don't want to fight with hundreds of abstract, obscure symbols in order to enjoy a game.
Oh, a question mark is an eye? That's funny, I thought it was a question mark.
I've tried Dwarf Fortress probably half a dozen times, and got insanely frustrated with the interface before deleting the directory in a rage. A shame, too, because I'm a sucker for open-ended sandboxes. i'm willing to put up with batshit-insane interfaces (See: Jeskola Buzz, Second Life, QuakeBSP), but if what I'm staring at, for entertainment, looks like a dot matrix printer exploded, im' outta here.
>>Whatever happened to providing a useful service and having your clients pay you for it?
As a Twitpic user, you are not a client, you are the sellable resource. Most companies we use online do not think of you as a client in their business plan; you are the valuable resource they sell to their actual clients, advertisers and data miners.
...protests about Facebook on Facebook tend to work out very well. It's just like those "don't buy gas on day X" chain letters that get bounced around whenever gas prices take a hike upwards.
I think the problem with ATITD is that there isn't any real competition. The only economy is based on helping "everyone else" achieve "some far-off goal", which, to the average player, is a crock of shit.
There's no incentive to profit from the inequal distribution of resources on the map; it's all very hold hands and love everyone. Which is great, but there isn't any room for conflict there.
Steam only works on PC games. If you notice, a Gamestop stocks only the top... 10 or so PC games (in a tiny shelf hidden from everything else). That's because they can't resell them. They have more PS2 games than they do PC.
Seriously, about 60% of the store is resold merchandise. They stopped being a games retailer and became a pawn shop years ago. When will they buy my gold watch?
Anecdotally, my best friend from high school pulls down six figures at an international oil firm. He's an engineer, finds natural gas all day. He's one of the smartest guys I know. He pulls down 24 hour shift routinely.
What does he do in his very limited spare time? Runs raids in WoW with all of his fellow engineers. He has multiple accounts, each with multiple Level 80s on them.
Somehow I think your stereotype of "FATBALL LIVES AT HOME WITH MOMMY LOL" falls flat.
If you signed your name on an actual contract, you're liable for the contract. If, on the other hand, you're an idiot and sign it with your Second Life avatar (or Slashdot ID for that matter), I would imagine the contract is at least called into heavy question.
I did contract work in SL for 3 years. I always signed my name on real, mailed-over contracts. I had to do work with other contractors, though, who in a fit of privacy histrionics, refused to divulge any part of their private life to these real-world companies they were working for, and thus "signed" a "contract" inside the virtual world.
Not surprisingly, they either didn't last long doing contract work or got so heavily ostracized for their insanity they never got another call again.
In short, don't be a moron. Get a real contract, in real paper, and sign it with your real name (and make sure they do too!)
I recently purchased an Nvidia 9800 for around 129 bucks. It came with two Call of Duty games, so I imagine the card is significantly cheaper than that.
It runs everything without so much as a single complaint, on max details.
And is it just me, or does FSAA have little real effect on visual quality? I never have it on, and even with it on (such as in WoW), I can't notice a bit of difference on a 19" LCD monitor. Turning FSAA can save you tons of money (and framerates!)
The difference is SL is wealth generation is based on the creation of new assets and the flexing of your creativity. Entropia's money-creating scheme is more akin to a casino; the house generally always wins.
The end result may be the same (perhaps 10-20% of all of the creative people in SL actually see a significant profit, and perhaps 10-20% of Entropia's players are the same way), but I'd rather take my chances with creative output that I own the rights to instead of a grindfest stacked against me.
Disclaimer: I'm a semi-dormant SL guru and virtual worlds developer since 2003.
Programmers spend a lot of time coming up with algorithms that simulate randomness for AI or cloud generation or landscapes or whatever... if the processor was just wonky to begin with it'd make certain things a lot more natural looking.
It's interesting that AI in games is always touted as being "ultra-realistic", but always ends up being insanely easy to trip up. Having something "close enough" would add just enough realism/randomness to situations to perhaps make games and environment more dynamic.
I wouldn't want these things processing my bank balance, though, unless it rounded up.
...to fail in 2009. Not all of them, obviously. Second Life will continue to trundle along (although they've lost about 3000 servers the last few months due to a rather unfortunate series of "gotcha" price increases), mostly due to its user content.
There's an entire industry of virtual worlds stuff, and almost every single startup in this space does the exact same thing: Take Second Life, remove the user content, add in dancing, music, and social networking embedding. Voila! Instant startup. We're talking dozens of companies doing the exact same thing over and over again.
So those guys are dead.
PS3's Home is dead on arrival (no user content). Google Lively's already dead. Any "enterprise" use of virtual worlds is in the research phase (or just using open source alternatives like OpenSim).
Anyone investing in virtual worlds tech in 2009 is a chump, sorry.
...in that it's been reduced to such a simple game that there's nothing to do. It's a simulation game without any simulation.
Any game that touts a "simulation" of an entire galaxy that doesn't even let carnivores and herbivores interact on planet surfaces has gotten nearly everything wrong.
Maxis's previous game SimLife had more complex systems interacting than Spore does. And Sim Life came out in 1993.
The most interesting games, to me, are the ones that have multiple systems that interact with each other with simple, but easily combine-able mechanics. Simcity's a good example... traffic effects land value which effects what goes on the land which effects your tax revenue, and so on. Those kinds of games offer tons of replayibility, because you're constantly changing systems that affect other systems.
Anyways, just my two cents. Spore might be popular, but it was my biggest gaming disappointment in half a decade.
...I just gotta say they missed most of the fun of the game.
Granted, I have one character, a level 36 Warlock, that's taken me something like 3 months to get up to. But you know what? I'm probably having a bit more fun and getting more for my money than the people who have to powerlevel to 80 as fast as possible.
It makes PvP harder for me (as I can't compete with people who twink their guys out with the best gear), and I generally don't go into the instances/raids (I solo most of the time, and my guild is more social than goal-driven), but I get to actually enjoy the art, the people, the economy, and the experience.
Getting to 80 as fast as possible is like trying to ride every single ride at Cedar Point as fast and as efficiently as possible, as opposed to a group of friends who go on what they want when they want.
...when it actually gets released. Anything Molyneaux says about his games, even showing pre-release demos or whatnot, is complete and utter bullshit. Remember the original Fable, which promised such a dynamic world that you could cut down forests and have them stay cut? Or planting a tree and watching it grow? Or how your actions changed the world forever? Yeah, not so much. You could get a haircut, though.
Slashdot Mirror
...gets from this story is that it's "just" a social media app, "just" a stupid way to put filters on your crappy cell phone pics.
Sure is. And it's going to make their founders mountains of cash. If it were so easy, why didn't you come up with it? Eh? Is making money beneath you, snobby Slashdot User?
Utility lines perhaps, or the railroad still technically owns the right of way.
at this: "It would be interesting to repeat this analysis using Facebook data, but there is no reason to believe the results would be substantially different."
Yes, because the millions of smartphones out there with a camera and a Facebook app (as opposed to a flickr app) aren't going to skew the results at all.
Flickr is for people who like photography; ergo, the data is going to be skewed heavily towards actual cameras.
Facebook is for people sharing themselves with their friends and the world. One only has to peruse a random person's Facebook profile picture page to find hundreds of self-snaps taken in the bathroom, or at the pub, or on a train, or whatever.
Kodak, in my opinion, failed because they neglected to make quality products in their particular niche (easy to use, inexpensive, easy to share). They offshored their production, so Kodak cameras were notoriously hit-or-miss in regards to actually working right. They missed the highend market (then again Kodak was never known for that anyway), letting Sony, Pentax, Canon, and Nikon beat them there. They failed to leverage their gigantic photo paper experience into anything worthwhile (I own a Kodak printer that, as I type this, refuses to print due to some bizarre error I don't have time to diagnose).
In short, Kodak failed because Kodak fucked up. Photography isn't going anywhere. Hell, film photography isn't going anywhere. Kodak just stood still and let the world pass them by.
They took our Kodachrome away, and nobody cared.
It's a pretty geeky issue to get worked up about. Most people won't notice until Youtube gets pulled. By then it'll be on the books for months, and we won't have any recourse to get rid of it. And it's not like the Congress Critters are listening anyway. It's an election year, after all, and they need Hollywood donations....
Oh well, the internet was fun while it lasted. I guess I'll go outside now.
Was salivated over for its eye candy, not necessarily for its gameplay. It's a benchmarking tool. Then again, people who downloaded it for benchmarking certainly had no qualms over blowing thousands for a top of the line gaming rig....
A mod thing is in the works, and has been given to several community mod makers to work over to make sure it functions properly.
As someone who classifies himself as a "geek", albeit one terribly bad at math and logic, I thought it was a pretty good read. I do wish I had some more "hello, this is information theory presented in an engaging manner" books, though.
...perhaps I'm getting to the point in my life where I don't want to fight with hundreds of abstract, obscure symbols in order to enjoy a game.
Oh, a question mark is an eye? That's funny, I thought it was a question mark.
I've tried Dwarf Fortress probably half a dozen times, and got insanely frustrated with the interface before deleting the directory in a rage. A shame, too, because I'm a sucker for open-ended sandboxes. i'm willing to put up with batshit-insane interfaces (See: Jeskola Buzz, Second Life, QuakeBSP), but if what I'm staring at, for entertainment, looks like a dot matrix printer exploded, im' outta here.
>>Whatever happened to providing a useful service and having your clients pay you for it?
As a Twitpic user, you are not a client, you are the sellable resource. Most companies we use online do not think of you as a client in their business plan; you are the valuable resource they sell to their actual clients, advertisers and data miners.
Well, that's stupid. Now, when the cops ask people for help, they won't get any. GG cops.
...protests about Facebook on Facebook tend to work out very well. It's just like those "don't buy gas on day X" chain letters that get bounced around whenever gas prices take a hike upwards.
I think the problem with ATITD is that there isn't any real competition. The only economy is based on helping "everyone else" achieve "some far-off goal", which, to the average player, is a crock of shit.
There's no incentive to profit from the inequal distribution of resources on the map; it's all very hold hands and love everyone. Which is great, but there isn't any room for conflict there.
Source is nearly 5 years old at this point, without any "major" updates. There have been a few upgrades with L4D and TF2, but nothing apocalyptic.
I agree, it's a wonderful engine, but IGN obviously wanted engines that were eye candy, physics, and eye candy, roughly in that order.
Steam only works on PC games. If you notice, a Gamestop stocks only the top... 10 or so PC games (in a tiny shelf hidden from everything else). That's because they can't resell them. They have more PS2 games than they do PC.
Seriously, about 60% of the store is resold merchandise. They stopped being a games retailer and became a pawn shop years ago. When will they buy my gold watch?
Anecdotally, my best friend from high school pulls down six figures at an international oil firm. He's an engineer, finds natural gas all day. He's one of the smartest guys I know. He pulls down 24 hour shift routinely.
What does he do in his very limited spare time? Runs raids in WoW with all of his fellow engineers. He has multiple accounts, each with multiple Level 80s on them.
Somehow I think your stereotype of "FATBALL LIVES AT HOME WITH MOMMY LOL" falls flat.
What does that have to do with anything? The summary is stupid; the lawsuit is over a product that enhances cybersex, not the cybersex itself.
In short, virtual dildos. Yes, it's big money. Well, it was. Now the poor guy is fighting a ton of copyright infringement lawsuits as well.
If you signed your name on an actual contract, you're liable for the contract. If, on the other hand, you're an idiot and sign it with your Second Life avatar (or Slashdot ID for that matter), I would imagine the contract is at least called into heavy question.
I did contract work in SL for 3 years. I always signed my name on real, mailed-over contracts. I had to do work with other contractors, though, who in a fit of privacy histrionics, refused to divulge any part of their private life to these real-world companies they were working for, and thus "signed" a "contract" inside the virtual world.
Not surprisingly, they either didn't last long doing contract work or got so heavily ostracized for their insanity they never got another call again.
In short, don't be a moron. Get a real contract, in real paper, and sign it with your real name (and make sure they do too!)
Anything else is just roleplay.
I recently purchased an Nvidia 9800 for around 129 bucks. It came with two Call of Duty games, so I imagine the card is significantly cheaper than that.
It runs everything without so much as a single complaint, on max details.
And is it just me, or does FSAA have little real effect on visual quality? I never have it on, and even with it on (such as in WoW), I can't notice a bit of difference on a 19" LCD monitor. Turning FSAA can save you tons of money (and framerates!)
...automatically assumed to have copyright attributed to the author?
I had no idea Twitter had some mystical "copyright-defeating aura" about its service.
The difference is SL is wealth generation is based on the creation of new assets and the flexing of your creativity. Entropia's money-creating scheme is more akin to a casino; the house generally always wins.
The end result may be the same (perhaps 10-20% of all of the creative people in SL actually see a significant profit, and perhaps 10-20% of Entropia's players are the same way), but I'd rather take my chances with creative output that I own the rights to instead of a grindfest stacked against me.
Disclaimer: I'm a semi-dormant SL guru and virtual worlds developer since 2003.
...is gaming applications.
Programmers spend a lot of time coming up with algorithms that simulate randomness for AI or cloud generation or landscapes or whatever... if the processor was just wonky to begin with it'd make certain things a lot more natural looking.
It's interesting that AI in games is always touted as being "ultra-realistic", but always ends up being insanely easy to trip up. Having something "close enough" would add just enough realism/randomness to situations to perhaps make games and environment more dynamic.
I wouldn't want these things processing my bank balance, though, unless it rounded up.
...to fail in 2009. Not all of them, obviously. Second Life will continue to trundle along (although they've lost about 3000 servers the last few months due to a rather unfortunate series of "gotcha" price increases), mostly due to its user content.
There's an entire industry of virtual worlds stuff, and almost every single startup in this space does the exact same thing: Take Second Life, remove the user content, add in dancing, music, and social networking embedding. Voila! Instant startup. We're talking dozens of companies doing the exact same thing over and over again.
So those guys are dead.
PS3's Home is dead on arrival (no user content). Google Lively's already dead. Any "enterprise" use of virtual worlds is in the research phase (or just using open source alternatives like OpenSim).
Anyone investing in virtual worlds tech in 2009 is a chump, sorry.
...in that it's been reduced to such a simple game that there's nothing to do. It's a simulation game without any simulation.
Any game that touts a "simulation" of an entire galaxy that doesn't even let carnivores and herbivores interact on planet surfaces has gotten nearly everything wrong.
Maxis's previous game SimLife had more complex systems interacting than Spore does. And Sim Life came out in 1993.
The most interesting games, to me, are the ones that have multiple systems that interact with each other with simple, but easily combine-able mechanics. Simcity's a good example... traffic effects land value which effects what goes on the land which effects your tax revenue, and so on. Those kinds of games offer tons of replayibility, because you're constantly changing systems that affect other systems.
Anyways, just my two cents. Spore might be popular, but it was my biggest gaming disappointment in half a decade.
...I just gotta say they missed most of the fun of the game.
Granted, I have one character, a level 36 Warlock, that's taken me something like 3 months to get up to. But you know what? I'm probably having a bit more fun and getting more for my money than the people who have to powerlevel to 80 as fast as possible.
It makes PvP harder for me (as I can't compete with people who twink their guys out with the best gear), and I generally don't go into the instances/raids (I solo most of the time, and my guild is more social than goal-driven), but I get to actually enjoy the art, the people, the economy, and the experience.
Getting to 80 as fast as possible is like trying to ride every single ride at Cedar Point as fast and as efficiently as possible, as opposed to a group of friends who go on what they want when they want.
Which group has more "fun"?
...when it actually gets released. Anything Molyneaux says about his games, even showing pre-release demos or whatnot, is complete and utter bullshit. Remember the original Fable, which promised such a dynamic world that you could cut down forests and have them stay cut? Or planting a tree and watching it grow? Or how your actions changed the world forever? Yeah, not so much. You could get a haircut, though.