No, GNU is not strictly speaking an operating system, although the term is vague. Neither is Linux as that is only the kernel and you would find it very hard to operate the kernel without some sort of tool set around it.
That toolset is what GNU, at first at least was. All the thousands of utilities that people think made up the OS once, in the days of the commandline OS.
Today it is far more complex, does a graphical shell, such as OSX, Windows, KDE count as part of the OS, or is it program that is run under the OS? Perhaps to make it clear is that until recently Microsoft had the graphical shell run on top of DOS. In the various GNU/Linux distro's this is still the case although quite a few distro's try to hide this by hiding the kernel output so that the user never sees anything but a number of graphical displays until they are in their favorite window manager.
So depending on your definition of what IS an operating system the statement in the movie that the GNU OS is 25, is correct.
Car anology, you use the steering wheel to operate the wheels, this is obvious and clear cut, but where you draw the line between the part that control the wheels and the wheels themselves? Is there even a line because you could also say that the wheel+wheels together allow you to control the car.
But of course, the trolls now are happily hammering on the fact that Hurd is still a dream and that Richard Stallman is claiming things that aren't true. Well they have to of course because they can't put a dent into the fact that GNU tools are an essential part of linux, BSD, OS-X. We forget just how often we use simple GNU tools every day we use one of these operating systems.
It is like a car nut who thinks the rubber on his wheels is not important.
25 years ago, when nobody had yet heard of Linus Torvald, long before DRM and the RIAA, one guy had a vision of free software, software not controlled by anyone company but by the community. It was a revolutionary idea in a time when you rented all your computer access and most people still thought computers where things in big boxes that bleeped and one company even thought that the market for the PC could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Long before Microsoft and WGA, Richard Stallman saw that free software might be the only way to give us some measure of control over who owned the information age.
That is an achievement and something to celebrate. So, the GNU kernel is still missing in action, that is why this movie talks about both GNU the OS and Linux the kernel working together.
But I suppose it is the nature of trolls to latch onto one tiny details and then blow it out of proportion.
Congrats GNU, here is to the next 25 years of software free from whatever the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wish to impose on us next.
Is Lotro the family friendly MMORPG, the game that doesn't require endless hours to achieve the smallest things OR is it a game that in many ways rivals WoW and even Everquest in the endless grind?
The answer is that Turbine just doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind what it wants Lotro to be.
Level 1-45 are fairly light, LOTS of quests that give good XP and rewards so you constantly feel you are doing new things, going to new places, getting new skills etc etc. Compared to WoW and other MMORPG's getting to the endgame is trivially easy. We are talking 5 days of game time and that is with normal playing for the first time with no grinding for xp.
A mount? Well if you have been a bit frugat, you get your horsey at the right level, np. No endless money grinding for this either.
Crafting, well that is an odd one. The thing is that in Lotro you can't craft for yourself unless you grind VERY HARDCORE. That is PURELY grind to gather resources without gaining XP, else by the time you are a master and can create the best items in a tier, you will be to high level to make any use of them. So does Turbine want people to grind resources OR is this a way to let people do crafting LATER, when they already levelled? Perhaps they just never intended for everyone to be a crafter and where hoping that 1/5 of a kin would craft and the rest would supply.
So far so good, you don't really need to craft early on as it makes no sense, you get better equipment from questing for your level. Later on, you can craft for new characters you create. New players? No, they won't be able to afford to buy crafted gear. But since you can casually quest for XP and items without having to commit for more then an hour for the longest fights it is, by MMORPG standards, a pretty casual game. You don't have to worry for instance about having to kill 100 beasts for 1 item, drop rates are high and often shared in a group meaning a mob drops a quest item for everyone.
And then, things changed.
The level 45 class quest, is the first time players will encounter the dreaded ONE ITEM PER BOSS quest. The class quests require you to collect a list of items from all over the place, there are two quests to do, so two lists, the end items come from one semi-long instance 2-3 hours and one super long instance but that can be done in sessions. The problem is that only one person in the group can get the item and a few of them are shared between classes. Most famous is Slime of Helcham, an easy enough item to obtain, 2 hours, 1 if you got keys. Oh yes keys. They also drop ONE per boss and of course the person who NEEDS them, isn't around next time. With three popular classes needing slime and the fight being, up to that point, one of the thoughest AND one of the most bugged, people easily have to do half a dozen runs just to get it. Then of course, they will also be called upon to aid others in their kin.
Rune winged of Dominance is another item, same instance, but several bosses onwards. If you got keys, it is easy to get to directly, but of course, those who absolutely need keys won't be around when the gates need to be opened. So either you go hardcore and designate people who are key carriers to be online at certain points for opening the doors OR you commit yourself to do it in one run so all the keys will be with the group.
Why does the above matter? Well, it is taking the casual out of the game. In itself there is nothing wrong with being hardcore but there is something wrong with a game that changes its stripes half-way through. You wouldn't want a civilian flight-sim to suddenly turn into a twitch shooter would you, or have your twitch shooter suddenly ask you to remember radio frequencies for every airport?
Another example is reputation grinding, this was added in one of the book updates and is a real mixed beast. Some repuation factions give rep just for killing enemies in certain areas and this is easily obtained, gain rep questing and gain the rewards. But for some there are no enemies
We judge others as how we want to see ourselves. If he is a geek then he must be nice for I am a geek and surely I am nice?
Those of us who defended him simply could not believe that anybody with a brain could be that stupid/arrogant to commit a murder in such a stupid way. Yes stupid, he left WAAAY to many clues, had clear motives and his attempts to make it appear she was still alive were pathetic.
So we are watching a "who-dunnit" and see some clues that he is the killer that are obvious EXCEPT for that tiny clue that he should be smarter then to leave such obvious clues. AHA our TV-detective mind goes, then the obvious is a diversion, so who is setting this guy up? Lets face it, if you followed the trial, the motive of the wife setting him up for murder while she left him, possibly back to russia are obvious. Well, obvious to anyone spoonfed on tv-detectives.
Basically, as geeks we either had to accept that one of us is just another wife-beating killer OR go for conspiracy. Lets face it, slashdot LOVES conspiracies.
But no, sadly the system works, the goverment got it right and a geek is just as likely to be a cowardly killer as anyone else.
The OJ trial was indeed much the same. Black people really didn't want to consider that one of them, an example, had done something like this. Small difference, geeks right now are accepting Reiser is guilty, I don't see black people admit that OJ was guilty as hell.
<irony>i pirated windows vista ultimate edition *waits for laughter to die down* and after a few months, i installed some new RAM. i don't know if it was because i changed the RAM, but after that Microsoft decided that my copy of Windows was legit, and didn't put a permanent message in the lower-right corner of my machine telling me as much, and did not refuse to let me use certain features, such as the Aero graphics enhancements. Although I have disabled it because it is slow as hell when you alt-tab out of games.
personally, i suggest microsoft take a flying leap, and adopt a more "don't charge me 300 euro's for a service pack" attitude (for example, the way OSX does it) before more people get the mind set that piracy is not just about being cheap, but a principel!
</irony>
The activity is trolling, perhaps related to trawling, to throw out a net and drag it across the bottom to see what it brings up.
Trolling in terms of a large stone humanoid makes no rear sense. Perhaps a troll could be someone a bit dimwitted, or ancient, or rockhard but not someone purposefully stirring things up.
And mystical creatures have varied reputations depending on area and even the story involved.
Okay, so they include a 6x glas sphere. How nice, but you need a 500x microscope to read it. The sphere has a large base and it can be opened. Why not include the tool to read the document with the document?
Who is to say that whoever finds it in the future has access to such a powerful microscope? For most of history we haven't.
Nice idea, but geez, think things through, this could be found by the same kind of people who made the original rossate stone. Do you really want them to wait hundreds of years to develop magnifcation good enough to read it?
It has been two thousand years since some girl claimed that she got knocked up by a burning bush rather then her boyfriend and millions of people worship her as a virgin.
One person's cuckoo is another persons prophet. When everyone has forgotten Ron Hubbard was a bad Sci-Fi writer his novels may one day serve as the basis of a religion.
Age of Conan is bleeding customers. I am a lifer from Lotro who tried it out at launch for 3 months, I know many a gamer for Lotro who tried it and then we all came back, one by one as our subscriptions ran out.
Dark and Light managed to launch without being able to run on Ati cards, that is probably the only reason why Age of Conan won't actually earn the title of worsed MMORPG launch in history.
There were so many things wrong with AoC, but most telling perhaps in relation to this article is that they must by now KNOW they have screwed up and are loosing customers and yet announce happily that any new content will have to be payed for.
How about first actually introducing the content promised on the box?
Gaute has his head so far up his ass for the entire development that he still lives in a world where Everquest is the biggest MMORPG and WoW is just a pipedream by some canadian company famous for making clone games. 5 years ago the development started and if you look at AoC it ain't hard to believe that nobody in the dev team has taken any note of what happened in the genre since then.
The game itself is not that bad, it just shouldn't have launched post-WoW.
The game has ONE fast travel option, recall to a single bindable point.
The game has seperate areas, not one large continues world.
The game has a memory leak when you travel from area to area and if you are not running from a raptor disk, loadtimes are LOOOONG.
The areas are roughly laid out in one long string, quests require you to run from one area of the world to the other. No horse, no fast travel, your memory getting corrupted as your switch areas and constant waiting.
Want to travel from an advanced area to your back? Suicide from one end of the map to other was the way to do it but you still had to go through each area between your bank town and your grinding zone.
No fast travel, in 2008.
Worse, one area was a warzone, you constantly were asked to travel through a warzone with hordes of grey enemies around you, BYE BYE immersion, at least a game like Lotro tries to keep the roads clear so you don't have to wonder why you as a hero ignore the barbarians at the gate.
That was fundementally the flaw with the entire game, it just wasn't designed. Things didn't "click".
And then they went about fixing the game and what little potential the game has was ruined.
One of the innovative things about the game was that for once the healing class wasn't a squishy standing in the back. Tempest of Seth was a lethal killer perhaps the most efficient killer in history of MMORPG's.
All heals were whole group HoT's. A ToS would power up her heals with damage, regain mana with damage and heals cost less mana with damage. ToS also had an aura attack that attacked hit all enemies arround for 30 secs and could be kept up near constantly. So ToS benefitted from engaging large hordes of enemies, get a HoT of and then DoTing them to death.
Lethal. So it was nerfed. Reasonable at first sight, IF you saw priests as the classic priests from other games. Players purely in the service of other players. There were complaints and ToS was nerfed and made a lot less fun to play.
The effect? Well perhaps it helps to explain that ToS was limited to one race, each race AFTER the common area tutorial zone had their own zones. So? Suddenly, one race/zone had a real shortage of healers. Healers are always a limited class and even when ToS was powerful they were only a small group. With the nerf, even fewer people wanted to play a healer and voila, back to the old days of me being press-ganged into healing for melee while standing in the back.
No thanks. The game failed to learn from MMORPG's that came before and then copied the worsed elements from them after launch in bugged patches.
AoC (Anarchy online Continued)
Age of Conan, Adventures in customer support.
The secret world is another Funcom developed MMORPG and I am holding my heart for that one. It is being done by the guy from The Longest Journey and Gaute so far hasn't got anything to do with it, but so far Funcom has had two fails, will the 3rd really have a change of being a win?
Do you have ANY idea just how much effort is involved in demolition? Sure, it seems easy from the outside, if you know what you are doing, you can bring a house down with a sledgehammer, but it will be noticed.
The same with controlled explosives, this is not a case of slapping a bit of TNT to a wall and walking out, if you do that, the explosion just goes outside and the building keeps standing. No, you got drill a hole into the structure. If it is still beam you got to apply a chaped charge that cuts it through. Buildings are constructed to be able to withstand the loss of a couple of support beams, so you need to cut them all.
How the hell would you do that without anyone noticing? It would require truck loads of explosives and days of demolition to setup.
No, the conspiracy theories fail NOT because it is impossible to consider the idea that someone might want to fake this but because the logisitics just don't work.
I read one theory, that the cia was controlling the planes, the idea being that they were refuel planes because the planes had no windows.
Right. Because the CIA, a organisation KNOWN to operate civilian aircraft finds it easier to aquire military planes of which there are only a few instead of buying just one of the countless 2nd hand civilian airliners.
Look at the way that red department store in china collapsed, that is know to be an accident and it collapses just the way a controlled demolotion building collapses.
You seem to have the idea that because you saw some demo docu's you now think that if a building collapses like that, it must have been done like that.
It is as another poster said almost impossible to even start to explain how stupid your logic is.
The simplest problem with PvP is balance, the nature of RPG is that people evolve. How would you think counterstrike would be if it was persistent and people were free to choose their side and stick with it, 20 terrorists with nukes, you the special forces guy with a sharp stick. It is called ganking, look it up.
EVE is often held up as an example, despite the fact that is has less then 1/100th the subscribers that WoW has.
EVE works for a very small fraction of players who are willing to go into a world where you either are at the top or so much shark bait for whoever decides to get on your case. Granted, gankers don't seem to be attracted to EVE or get rooted out but it is not something you can just copy and expect to work in a large MMORPG because well, EVE tried that and nobody bought it.
There are a lot of players who want to be able to go AFK in a warzone, good luck doing that in PvP, who do not want to spend all their time online constantly checking their rear for other players sneaking up on them.
There is a REASON quite a few MMORPG's deliberately went the PvE route, it is a hard route because PvP is the easiest way to add endgame contant (congrats, you got the best armor, you done all the quests, got all the XP, now go kill each other over and over) but not every MMORPG subscriber wants it.
I like PvP, in games like Lotro and SWG but I know from experience that a lot of people just don't want it. EVE knows this, it explains why they are one of the smaller MMORPG companies.
I perform a series of intricate quests to impress a lady, facing untold horros, performing deeds of heroism that are the stuff of legend and in the end, she refuses to actually have sex with me.
Take Lord of The rings Online, currently the game is nearing the end of book one, the fellowship of the ring and one of the quests the player can complete is to see the fellowship set out on its journey. Very nice, very touching, good moment. Bit of a problem then that the characters are still there when you exit that scene.
So they moved the characters so the most obvious ones to seperate rooms so you at least not see them constantly, but some are quest givers, how do you hide them completly without re-writing a lot of quests the player might not have done before he send the fellowship on his way?
SWG did it in an odd way, in its "theme-parks" areas from the movies with quests attached you often got a quest to kill someone, that was a spawn made for you a few clicks out in the wilderness. Your kill, didn't respawn, just a problem if there were a lot of people doing the same quest, wich of the spawns is yours.
In LOTRO a bridge has to be repaired for a quest, but obviously that bridge has already been repaired a lot of times and will have to be repaired after you are done with it.
That you claim this is already true in your single player games, that persistent worlds already exist is idiotic and shows you to be a ninny who can't think.
How many people saved the galaxy in Mass Effect? That is right, you did it, I did it, thousands of others did it. In fact long after the 360 crowd had done it, the PC crowd went and did it. For that matter, if you replay the game, you got to complete all the objectives AGAIN!
MMORPG's are currently in the same state as single player games, they remember that you done a quest, they just haven't yet managed to do it in such a way that it doesn't show the same quest giver giving the quest to someone else.
If you encounter the same NPC in Lotro he will have a line thanking you for your help, at the same time you are witnessing someone else being given the quest you just did.
Fixing that is hard, the current MMORPG's are like those movie theme-park rides, the moment the doors close behind you the scene resets for the next visitor. And just as those scenes always look a bit fake because they can't actually damage anything and it all got to be resurrected in a minute or so, so do MMORPG's feel a bit fake.
As fake as RTS where every bloody time you are facing an enemy one tech-tree above you and constantly have to build a base from scratch.
That will send a strong message to the chinese leaders, a country with over a billion people in a world of 6 billion people and a olympic event involving hundreds if not thousands of athletes and their support staff. 40 downloads.
Guess that shows just how much athletes really care about peace and such.
Did I download it? No, but then I don't try to pretend that my sporting event is anything else then an ego trip to prove I am better then everyone else.
Frankly, the truth is nobody really cares about Tibet. Oh we might buy the t-shirt but we also buy t-shirts with the logo of a soda brand or whatever band the music industry pushed on us.
Show me an athlete who refuses his medal to make a point and then I might think the olympics are any different from the soccer world championship.
The game is a mess and one of the messes is items you "have" to buy ingame.
If you want extra inventory space you need to buy bags but most important are horses since the game has very little instant travel.
250 gold for the highest level mounts in total (might be 300 forgot exactly) and 3 gold for your first set of horse and riding skill. Problem? When you reach the level for your first mount you got maybe, if you sold EVERYTHING and saved up constantly and grinding some gold 50 silver.
So paying a gold farmer makes sense. Early prices made your first horse cost 10-15 dollars. Not to bad.
But when the game had launched I did the math from the constant gold spams and a level 80 mount would have set you back 1300 euros.
Prices dropped of course BUT when I left you still looked at several hundred euro's, for a horsy.
I think gold farmers don't so much get 10 bucks from every MMORPG player but a 1000 from people with more money then brains.
Sure, you can say that for some people money == time but seriously, who is willing to pay so much money just for a game that you obviously don't actually want to play?
Now Age of Conan is a bad example as it is an incredibly badly designed MMORPG, want horse mounted combat, try Mount&Blade and give this game a wide birth but I think it is an accurate way of seeing how gold farmers work, they don't even pretend to offer a reasonable product, they basically offer the same service dog-walkers offer. All the fun of having a dog without doing anything with said dog. It is for people that want an epic mount but never play with it.
But I am not entirely suprised by these figures, after all the korean "pay for ingame items" approach makes gold farming a natural extension, if you are paying for items already why not buy gold as well.
For some games, like WoW and AoC it seems logical because if you make a decent wage why not pay someone to grind for you.
But I think most gamers would rather game themselves since gold is hardly cheap if you are still making minimum wage.
If NY works the same as holland then this guy is going to be very busy, the one place whose fish passed all tests?
In holland a newspaper called AD has a feature where they test fries, patat.
The ones that win proudly display the article and do massive business because of it. With so many bad fast food places being tested as being the best is an excellent piece of advertising.
If you were going to buy fish/sushi and you just read this article, where would you go?
This is the nigerian scam we are talking about, the grand-daddy of them all AND the scam would involve the "victim" commiting fraud. This is illegal.
Let me try this on you.
Say a drug dealer sell you 1 kg of cocaine. Are you then a criminal and deserve to go to jail?
Now say that drug dealer is a scammer and sells you a bag of baking powder instead. You however think it is cocaine, would you go to jail for this?
Probably not, because it is NOT a crime to buy baking powder for an insane price. Morally? Maybe, after all, you thought you were dealing in drugs.
But with the nigerian scam you tend to actually have to attempt to commit a crime, fraud to get it all going.
Do you think people who buy "cheap" goods that are obviously stolen should be done for receiving?
The nigerian guy is just upset that this scam is giving his country a bad rep when the victims are hardly victims but instead people who in their greed were ready to defraud the nigerian goverment. Let us not forget what the scam is, these "victims" were ready to steal millions from a 3rd world nation.
Not everyone who falls for a scam deserves sympathy.
The movie industry loves this. Why? Imagine just how much it would be worth to paramount to have a young Kirk, McCoy and Spock available. For that matter, these actors at any age the story call for.
Just how much easier would it be to make James Bond with the same face for decades? Hell, you could make stunt doubles do all the acting, glue on a pretty face and be done with it. Replace them if they ask for to much money but keep the face going.
I got the feeling it was just a few people who complained but the meme got picked up and then it became 'cool' to say that.
Do stuffed animals instantly create a sense of revulsion? Not really else they wouldn't have been around for so long yet this is the ultimate uncanny valley item. As close to the living thing as you can get, fully posed as if it is alive, yet a rotting corpse nonethless.
If you ever dealt with real corpses you would know that they really ain't all this disgusting, it is so easy to get used to it that you might be temped to think that the so called natural revulsion is just media installed reaction.
If the uncanny valley really exist, then please explain realistic paintings that have been around for ages, artisit have tried for hundred of years to create realistic images of human beings and we admire their efforts without any sense of revulsion. Same with statues. Do we feel uneasy at madam Thussauds?
Yes we do NOTICE it when a seemingly realistic thing behaves unrealistic but I have the same sense when I see a car in a computer cut scene that doesn't obey the laws of physics and for instance slides.
It has nothing to do with the uncanny valley, if a real human being was holding a glass of water that didn't spill when tipped over you would get the same feeling.
We know how things work and when they don't we get upset. The trick that cartoons and such pull is that they say right up front by their looks that they are not real and therefor things don't have to work as we expect it.
That was the problem with Final Fantasy, it tried to be a human drama and then didn't use human emotions on the faces of the actors. IF it had been a pure action flick with no close-ups there wouldn't have been a problem. It wasn't the uncanny valley, it was just bad acting, if it had been done by humans who could act we would have felt the same.
AND the dutch toilets are NOT accesibale by the handicapped, this is a legal requirement in the US.
The US seems to have a lot of laws that were introduced to counter a wrong but then go to far because the wrong was ignored for to long. The pendulum in the US swings to extremes.
Nonetheless, these public toilets HAD to be accesible by the handicapped, that made them large enough to be used for other puproses and voila, you have a problem.
Of course, the solution, is terrible simple. Put down a small building with 5 regular toilets, some urninals and an extra large stall and use the money saved to employ half a dozen people to clean them and keep an eye out.
No waiting lines, cleaners who can deal with anything, human supervision, first aid post etc etc. It is easy, it has been tried and tested and we just can't seem to get it. Because goverment salaries have to be cut, you can't cut management, so you cut toilet ladies and then spend a fortune on all kinds of counter measures to people pissing against buildings.
Now, what would it really have cost to have a toilet lady in a simple old fashioned public toilet who just cleanes the place, keeps an eye out on the area?
But no, the public toilets are closed, the toilet ladies fired and people pee against building and then we spend years trying to find high-tech solutions.
Say a single toilet lady makes 100k a year, a nice salary indeed for cleaning. That would have allowed 6 people to have a job, more then enough to keep one place staffed 24/7. No need for a 9/11 link or a 15 minute deadline.
Really, there is such a thing as overthinking a problem.
A good way to avoid war? Right, that is why russia went into Georgia right when the olympics have started, that is why when Adolf Hitler hosten them WW2 did not happen, that is why games have been boycotted or not, why the berlin olympics just went on after the attack.
The olympics are just a sports event, you might as well claim that F1 racing is a good way to avoid war.
You could also claim it for soccer just don't do it after a soccer riot or people might call you silly.
The very fact that China has been allowed to host them shows just how meaningless the olympics are.
The true meaning of the olympics? The same as twin cities, a way for the elite to host a big event where they can go to private parties on the taxpayers expense. Some olympics have been so bad that the locals are still paying for them and in other cases they only benefitted the locals because finally the higherups had a reason to pay some attention to their area. Lissabon 'benefitted' from the Olympics it is said although you got to wonder, if the money had been invested directly, how much more would have been gained?
The entire olympic idea is just a nice bit of marketing spin to make it seem something it is not. If you really want to avoid war, you need to get rid of the olympic idea in the first place.
Because what is the olympic idea really? That YOU are YOUR country. That is facism. Nations competing purely because they are different nations.
Drop the flags from the olympics, just let find the best sport people and ignore what passport they may be carrying.
You are not the police. Are you allowed to put a blue light on your car? No. Are you allowed to stop other drivers on the road? No. Are you allowed to carry a gun? No. (well that may be different for US citizens)Are you allowed to write tickets? No.
Cops ain't citizens, what makes people think the two should be equal in what they can do?
Think about, doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs to citizens, should citizens be allowed to prescribe drugs to doctors?
Surgeons are allowed to cut open citizens, should citizens be allowed to cut open surgeons?
Lawyers are allowed to legal advice to citizens, should citizens be allowed to give legal advice to lawyers?
We have all kinds of rules that say people in proffesion X can do things that people not in the job can do not. Hell, a postman can open mailboxes and even open mail. Good luck doing that as a private citizen. Do you know that there are laws against who can put items in your mailbox?
For that matter, even simpler things like exceptions to wearing a seatbelt exist for people who got to get in and out of cars a lot. WE ARE NOT ALL EQUAL!
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That toolset is what GNU, at first at least was. All the thousands of utilities that people think made up the OS once, in the days of the commandline OS.
Today it is far more complex, does a graphical shell, such as OSX, Windows, KDE count as part of the OS, or is it program that is run under the OS? Perhaps to make it clear is that until recently Microsoft had the graphical shell run on top of DOS. In the various GNU/Linux distro's this is still the case although quite a few distro's try to hide this by hiding the kernel output so that the user never sees anything but a number of graphical displays until they are in their favorite window manager.
So depending on your definition of what IS an operating system the statement in the movie that the GNU OS is 25, is correct.
Car anology, you use the steering wheel to operate the wheels, this is obvious and clear cut, but where you draw the line between the part that control the wheels and the wheels themselves? Is there even a line because you could also say that the wheel+wheels together allow you to control the car.
But of course, the trolls now are happily hammering on the fact that Hurd is still a dream and that Richard Stallman is claiming things that aren't true. Well they have to of course because they can't put a dent into the fact that GNU tools are an essential part of linux, BSD, OS-X. We forget just how often we use simple GNU tools every day we use one of these operating systems.
It is like a car nut who thinks the rubber on his wheels is not important.
25 years ago, when nobody had yet heard of Linus Torvald, long before DRM and the RIAA, one guy had a vision of free software, software not controlled by anyone company but by the community. It was a revolutionary idea in a time when you rented all your computer access and most people still thought computers where things in big boxes that bleeped and one company even thought that the market for the PC could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Long before Microsoft and WGA, Richard Stallman saw that free software might be the only way to give us some measure of control over who owned the information age.
That is an achievement and something to celebrate. So, the GNU kernel is still missing in action, that is why this movie talks about both GNU the OS and Linux the kernel working together.
But I suppose it is the nature of trolls to latch onto one tiny details and then blow it out of proportion.
Congrats GNU, here is to the next 25 years of software free from whatever the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wish to impose on us next.
Is Lotro the family friendly MMORPG, the game that doesn't require endless hours to achieve the smallest things OR is it a game that in many ways rivals WoW and even Everquest in the endless grind?
The answer is that Turbine just doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind what it wants Lotro to be.
Level 1-45 are fairly light, LOTS of quests that give good XP and rewards so you constantly feel you are doing new things, going to new places, getting new skills etc etc. Compared to WoW and other MMORPG's getting to the endgame is trivially easy. We are talking 5 days of game time and that is with normal playing for the first time with no grinding for xp.
A mount? Well if you have been a bit frugat, you get your horsey at the right level, np. No endless money grinding for this either.
Crafting, well that is an odd one. The thing is that in Lotro you can't craft for yourself unless you grind VERY HARDCORE. That is PURELY grind to gather resources without gaining XP, else by the time you are a master and can create the best items in a tier, you will be to high level to make any use of them. So does Turbine want people to grind resources OR is this a way to let people do crafting LATER, when they already levelled? Perhaps they just never intended for everyone to be a crafter and where hoping that 1/5 of a kin would craft and the rest would supply.
So far so good, you don't really need to craft early on as it makes no sense, you get better equipment from questing for your level. Later on, you can craft for new characters you create. New players? No, they won't be able to afford to buy crafted gear. But since you can casually quest for XP and items without having to commit for more then an hour for the longest fights it is, by MMORPG standards, a pretty casual game. You don't have to worry for instance about having to kill 100 beasts for 1 item, drop rates are high and often shared in a group meaning a mob drops a quest item for everyone.
And then, things changed.
The level 45 class quest, is the first time players will encounter the dreaded ONE ITEM PER BOSS quest. The class quests require you to collect a list of items from all over the place, there are two quests to do, so two lists, the end items come from one semi-long instance 2-3 hours and one super long instance but that can be done in sessions. The problem is that only one person in the group can get the item and a few of them are shared between classes. Most famous is Slime of Helcham, an easy enough item to obtain, 2 hours, 1 if you got keys. Oh yes keys. They also drop ONE per boss and of course the person who NEEDS them, isn't around next time. With three popular classes needing slime and the fight being, up to that point, one of the thoughest AND one of the most bugged, people easily have to do half a dozen runs just to get it. Then of course, they will also be called upon to aid others in their kin.
Rune winged of Dominance is another item, same instance, but several bosses onwards. If you got keys, it is easy to get to directly, but of course, those who absolutely need keys won't be around when the gates need to be opened. So either you go hardcore and designate people who are key carriers to be online at certain points for opening the doors OR you commit yourself to do it in one run so all the keys will be with the group.
Why does the above matter? Well, it is taking the casual out of the game. In itself there is nothing wrong with being hardcore but there is something wrong with a game that changes its stripes half-way through. You wouldn't want a civilian flight-sim to suddenly turn into a twitch shooter would you, or have your twitch shooter suddenly ask you to remember radio frequencies for every airport?
Another example is reputation grinding, this was added in one of the book updates and is a real mixed beast. Some repuation factions give rep just for killing enemies in certain areas and this is easily obtained, gain rep questing and gain the rewards. But for some there are no enemies
We judge others as how we want to see ourselves. If he is a geek then he must be nice for I am a geek and surely I am nice?
Those of us who defended him simply could not believe that anybody with a brain could be that stupid/arrogant to commit a murder in such a stupid way. Yes stupid, he left WAAAY to many clues, had clear motives and his attempts to make it appear she was still alive were pathetic.
So we are watching a "who-dunnit" and see some clues that he is the killer that are obvious EXCEPT for that tiny clue that he should be smarter then to leave such obvious clues. AHA our TV-detective mind goes, then the obvious is a diversion, so who is setting this guy up? Lets face it, if you followed the trial, the motive of the wife setting him up for murder while she left him, possibly back to russia are obvious. Well, obvious to anyone spoonfed on tv-detectives.
Basically, as geeks we either had to accept that one of us is just another wife-beating killer OR go for conspiracy. Lets face it, slashdot LOVES conspiracies.
But no, sadly the system works, the goverment got it right and a geek is just as likely to be a cowardly killer as anyone else.
The OJ trial was indeed much the same. Black people really didn't want to consider that one of them, an example, had done something like this. Small difference, geeks right now are accepting Reiser is guilty, I don't see black people admit that OJ was guilty as hell.
<irony>i pirated windows vista ultimate edition *waits for laughter to die down* and after a few months, i installed some new RAM. i don't know if it was because i changed the RAM, but after that Microsoft decided that my copy of Windows was legit, and didn't put a permanent message in the lower-right corner of my machine telling me as much, and did not refuse to let me use certain features, such as the Aero graphics enhancements. Although I have disabled it because it is slow as hell when you alt-tab out of games.
personally, i suggest microsoft take a flying leap, and adopt a more "don't charge me 300 euro's for a service pack" attitude (for example, the way OSX does it) before more people get the mind set that piracy is not just about being cheap, but a principel! </irony>
The activity is trolling, perhaps related to trawling, to throw out a net and drag it across the bottom to see what it brings up. Trolling in terms of a large stone humanoid makes no rear sense. Perhaps a troll could be someone a bit dimwitted, or ancient, or rockhard but not someone purposefully stirring things up. And mystical creatures have varied reputations depending on area and even the story involved.
My porn collection has long since achieved infinity.
Okay, so they include a 6x glas sphere. How nice, but you need a 500x microscope to read it. The sphere has a large base and it can be opened. Why not include the tool to read the document with the document?
Who is to say that whoever finds it in the future has access to such a powerful microscope? For most of history we haven't.
Nice idea, but geez, think things through, this could be found by the same kind of people who made the original rossate stone. Do you really want them to wait hundreds of years to develop magnifcation good enough to read it?
It has been two thousand years since some girl claimed that she got knocked up by a burning bush rather then her boyfriend and millions of people worship her as a virgin.
One person's cuckoo is another persons prophet. When everyone has forgotten Ron Hubbard was a bad Sci-Fi writer his novels may one day serve as the basis of a religion.
Nah, that could never happen.
Age of Conan is bleeding customers. I am a lifer from Lotro who tried it out at launch for 3 months, I know many a gamer for Lotro who tried it and then we all came back, one by one as our subscriptions ran out.
Dark and Light managed to launch without being able to run on Ati cards, that is probably the only reason why Age of Conan won't actually earn the title of worsed MMORPG launch in history.
There were so many things wrong with AoC, but most telling perhaps in relation to this article is that they must by now KNOW they have screwed up and are loosing customers and yet announce happily that any new content will have to be payed for.
How about first actually introducing the content promised on the box?
Gaute has his head so far up his ass for the entire development that he still lives in a world where Everquest is the biggest MMORPG and WoW is just a pipedream by some canadian company famous for making clone games. 5 years ago the development started and if you look at AoC it ain't hard to believe that nobody in the dev team has taken any note of what happened in the genre since then.
The game itself is not that bad, it just shouldn't have launched post-WoW.
No fast travel, in 2008.
Worse, one area was a warzone, you constantly were asked to travel through a warzone with hordes of grey enemies around you, BYE BYE immersion, at least a game like Lotro tries to keep the roads clear so you don't have to wonder why you as a hero ignore the barbarians at the gate.
That was fundementally the flaw with the entire game, it just wasn't designed. Things didn't "click".
And then they went about fixing the game and what little potential the game has was ruined.
One of the innovative things about the game was that for once the healing class wasn't a squishy standing in the back. Tempest of Seth was a lethal killer perhaps the most efficient killer in history of MMORPG's.
All heals were whole group HoT's. A ToS would power up her heals with damage, regain mana with damage and heals cost less mana with damage. ToS also had an aura attack that attacked hit all enemies arround for 30 secs and could be kept up near constantly. So ToS benefitted from engaging large hordes of enemies, get a HoT of and then DoTing them to death.
Lethal. So it was nerfed. Reasonable at first sight, IF you saw priests as the classic priests from other games. Players purely in the service of other players. There were complaints and ToS was nerfed and made a lot less fun to play.
The effect? Well perhaps it helps to explain that ToS was limited to one race, each race AFTER the common area tutorial zone had their own zones. So? Suddenly, one race/zone had a real shortage of healers. Healers are always a limited class and even when ToS was powerful they were only a small group. With the nerf, even fewer people wanted to play a healer and voila, back to the old days of me being press-ganged into healing for melee while standing in the back.
No thanks. The game failed to learn from MMORPG's that came before and then copied the worsed elements from them after launch in bugged patches.
AoC (Anarchy online Continued)
Age of Conan, Adventures in customer support.
The secret world is another Funcom developed MMORPG and I am holding my heart for that one. It is being done by the guy from The Longest Journey and Gaute so far hasn't got anything to do with it, but so far Funcom has had two fails, will the 3rd really have a change of being a win?
Do you have ANY idea just how much effort is involved in demolition? Sure, it seems easy from the outside, if you know what you are doing, you can bring a house down with a sledgehammer, but it will be noticed. The same with controlled explosives, this is not a case of slapping a bit of TNT to a wall and walking out, if you do that, the explosion just goes outside and the building keeps standing. No, you got drill a hole into the structure. If it is still beam you got to apply a chaped charge that cuts it through. Buildings are constructed to be able to withstand the loss of a couple of support beams, so you need to cut them all. How the hell would you do that without anyone noticing? It would require truck loads of explosives and days of demolition to setup. No, the conspiracy theories fail NOT because it is impossible to consider the idea that someone might want to fake this but because the logisitics just don't work. I read one theory, that the cia was controlling the planes, the idea being that they were refuel planes because the planes had no windows. Right. Because the CIA, a organisation KNOWN to operate civilian aircraft finds it easier to aquire military planes of which there are only a few instead of buying just one of the countless 2nd hand civilian airliners. Look at the way that red department store in china collapsed, that is know to be an accident and it collapses just the way a controlled demolotion building collapses. You seem to have the idea that because you saw some demo docu's you now think that if a building collapses like that, it must have been done like that. It is as another poster said almost impossible to even start to explain how stupid your logic is.
PvP is AN answer but not THE answer.
The simplest problem with PvP is balance, the nature of RPG is that people evolve. How would you think counterstrike would be if it was persistent and people were free to choose their side and stick with it, 20 terrorists with nukes, you the special forces guy with a sharp stick. It is called ganking, look it up.
EVE is often held up as an example, despite the fact that is has less then 1/100th the subscribers that WoW has.
EVE works for a very small fraction of players who are willing to go into a world where you either are at the top or so much shark bait for whoever decides to get on your case. Granted, gankers don't seem to be attracted to EVE or get rooted out but it is not something you can just copy and expect to work in a large MMORPG because well, EVE tried that and nobody bought it.
There are a lot of players who want to be able to go AFK in a warzone, good luck doing that in PvP, who do not want to spend all their time online constantly checking their rear for other players sneaking up on them.
There is a REASON quite a few MMORPG's deliberately went the PvE route, it is a hard route because PvP is the easiest way to add endgame contant (congrats, you got the best armor, you done all the quests, got all the XP, now go kill each other over and over) but not every MMORPG subscriber wants it.
I like PvP, in games like Lotro and SWG but I know from experience that a lot of people just don't want it. EVE knows this, it explains why they are one of the smaller MMORPG companies.
I perform a series of intricate quests to impress a lady, facing untold horros, performing deeds of heroism that are the stuff of legend and in the end, she refuses to actually have sex with me.
That certainly is a LOT like real life.
So they moved the characters so the most obvious ones to seperate rooms so you at least not see them constantly, but some are quest givers, how do you hide them completly without re-writing a lot of quests the player might not have done before he send the fellowship on his way?
SWG did it in an odd way, in its "theme-parks" areas from the movies with quests attached you often got a quest to kill someone, that was a spawn made for you a few clicks out in the wilderness. Your kill, didn't respawn, just a problem if there were a lot of people doing the same quest, wich of the spawns is yours.
In LOTRO a bridge has to be repaired for a quest, but obviously that bridge has already been repaired a lot of times and will have to be repaired after you are done with it.
That you claim this is already true in your single player games, that persistent worlds already exist is idiotic and shows you to be a ninny who can't think.
How many people saved the galaxy in Mass Effect? That is right, you did it, I did it, thousands of others did it. In fact long after the 360 crowd had done it, the PC crowd went and did it. For that matter, if you replay the game, you got to complete all the objectives AGAIN!
MMORPG's are currently in the same state as single player games, they remember that you done a quest, they just haven't yet managed to do it in such a way that it doesn't show the same quest giver giving the quest to someone else.
If you encounter the same NPC in Lotro he will have a line thanking you for your help, at the same time you are witnessing someone else being given the quest you just did.
Fixing that is hard, the current MMORPG's are like those movie theme-park rides, the moment the doors close behind you the scene resets for the next visitor. And just as those scenes always look a bit fake because they can't actually damage anything and it all got to be resurrected in a minute or so, so do MMORPG's feel a bit fake.
As fake as RTS where every bloody time you are facing an enemy one tech-tree above you and constantly have to build a base from scratch.
That will send a strong message to the chinese leaders, a country with over a billion people in a world of 6 billion people and a olympic event involving hundreds if not thousands of athletes and their support staff. 40 downloads.
Guess that shows just how much athletes really care about peace and such.
Did I download it? No, but then I don't try to pretend that my sporting event is anything else then an ego trip to prove I am better then everyone else.
Frankly, the truth is nobody really cares about Tibet. Oh we might buy the t-shirt but we also buy t-shirts with the logo of a soda brand or whatever band the music industry pushed on us.
Show me an athlete who refuses his medal to make a point and then I might think the olympics are any different from the soccer world championship.
The game is a mess and one of the messes is items you "have" to buy ingame.
If you want extra inventory space you need to buy bags but most important are horses since the game has very little instant travel.
250 gold for the highest level mounts in total (might be 300 forgot exactly) and 3 gold for your first set of horse and riding skill. Problem? When you reach the level for your first mount you got maybe, if you sold EVERYTHING and saved up constantly and grinding some gold 50 silver.
So paying a gold farmer makes sense. Early prices made your first horse cost 10-15 dollars. Not to bad.
But when the game had launched I did the math from the constant gold spams and a level 80 mount would have set you back 1300 euros.
Prices dropped of course BUT when I left you still looked at several hundred euro's, for a horsy.
I think gold farmers don't so much get 10 bucks from every MMORPG player but a 1000 from people with more money then brains.
Sure, you can say that for some people money == time but seriously, who is willing to pay so much money just for a game that you obviously don't actually want to play?
Now Age of Conan is a bad example as it is an incredibly badly designed MMORPG, want horse mounted combat, try Mount&Blade and give this game a wide birth but I think it is an accurate way of seeing how gold farmers work, they don't even pretend to offer a reasonable product, they basically offer the same service dog-walkers offer. All the fun of having a dog without doing anything with said dog. It is for people that want an epic mount but never play with it.
But I am not entirely suprised by these figures, after all the korean "pay for ingame items" approach makes gold farming a natural extension, if you are paying for items already why not buy gold as well.
For some games, like WoW and AoC it seems logical because if you make a decent wage why not pay someone to grind for you.
But I think most gamers would rather game themselves since gold is hardly cheap if you are still making minimum wage.
In holland a newspaper called AD has a feature where they test fries, patat.
The ones that win proudly display the article and do massive business because of it. With so many bad fast food places being tested as being the best is an excellent piece of advertising.
If you were going to buy fish/sushi and you just read this article, where would you go?
After I gave them bush, they vote for anyone, even a small furry creature. MAhaaa!
This is the nigerian scam we are talking about, the grand-daddy of them all AND the scam would involve the "victim" commiting fraud. This is illegal.
Let me try this on you.
Say a drug dealer sell you 1 kg of cocaine. Are you then a criminal and deserve to go to jail?
Now say that drug dealer is a scammer and sells you a bag of baking powder instead. You however think it is cocaine, would you go to jail for this?
Probably not, because it is NOT a crime to buy baking powder for an insane price. Morally? Maybe, after all, you thought you were dealing in drugs.
But with the nigerian scam you tend to actually have to attempt to commit a crime, fraud to get it all going.
Do you think people who buy "cheap" goods that are obviously stolen should be done for receiving?
The nigerian guy is just upset that this scam is giving his country a bad rep when the victims are hardly victims but instead people who in their greed were ready to defraud the nigerian goverment. Let us not forget what the scam is, these "victims" were ready to steal millions from a 3rd world nation.
Not everyone who falls for a scam deserves sympathy.
Just how much easier would it be to make James Bond with the same face for decades? Hell, you could make stunt doubles do all the acting, glue on a pretty face and be done with it. Replace them if they ask for to much money but keep the face going.
Do stuffed animals instantly create a sense of revulsion? Not really else they wouldn't have been around for so long yet this is the ultimate uncanny valley item. As close to the living thing as you can get, fully posed as if it is alive, yet a rotting corpse nonethless.
If you ever dealt with real corpses you would know that they really ain't all this disgusting, it is so easy to get used to it that you might be temped to think that the so called natural revulsion is just media installed reaction.
If the uncanny valley really exist, then please explain realistic paintings that have been around for ages, artisit have tried for hundred of years to create realistic images of human beings and we admire their efforts without any sense of revulsion. Same with statues. Do we feel uneasy at madam Thussauds?
Yes we do NOTICE it when a seemingly realistic thing behaves unrealistic but I have the same sense when I see a car in a computer cut scene that doesn't obey the laws of physics and for instance slides.
It has nothing to do with the uncanny valley, if a real human being was holding a glass of water that didn't spill when tipped over you would get the same feeling.
We know how things work and when they don't we get upset. The trick that cartoons and such pull is that they say right up front by their looks that they are not real and therefor things don't have to work as we expect it.
That was the problem with Final Fantasy, it tried to be a human drama and then didn't use human emotions on the faces of the actors. IF it had been a pure action flick with no close-ups there wouldn't have been a problem. It wasn't the uncanny valley, it was just bad acting, if it had been done by humans who could act we would have felt the same.
She is the one who ends up paying. You a slashdot editor or something? Good job on the Duke Nukem Forever story earlier.
AND the dutch toilets are NOT accesibale by the handicapped, this is a legal requirement in the US.
The US seems to have a lot of laws that were introduced to counter a wrong but then go to far because the wrong was ignored for to long. The pendulum in the US swings to extremes.
Nonetheless, these public toilets HAD to be accesible by the handicapped, that made them large enough to be used for other puproses and voila, you have a problem.
Of course, the solution, is terrible simple. Put down a small building with 5 regular toilets, some urninals and an extra large stall and use the money saved to employ half a dozen people to clean them and keep an eye out.
No waiting lines, cleaners who can deal with anything, human supervision, first aid post etc etc. It is easy, it has been tried and tested and we just can't seem to get it. Because goverment salaries have to be cut, you can't cut management, so you cut toilet ladies and then spend a fortune on all kinds of counter measures to people pissing against buildings.
600.000 a year a piece?
Now, what would it really have cost to have a toilet lady in a simple old fashioned public toilet who just cleanes the place, keeps an eye out on the area?
But no, the public toilets are closed, the toilet ladies fired and people pee against building and then we spend years trying to find high-tech solutions.
Say a single toilet lady makes 100k a year, a nice salary indeed for cleaning. That would have allowed 6 people to have a job, more then enough to keep one place staffed 24/7. No need for a 9/11 link or a 15 minute deadline.
Really, there is such a thing as overthinking a problem.
A good way to avoid war? Right, that is why russia went into Georgia right when the olympics have started, that is why when Adolf Hitler hosten them WW2 did not happen, that is why games have been boycotted or not, why the berlin olympics just went on after the attack.
The olympics are just a sports event, you might as well claim that F1 racing is a good way to avoid war.
You could also claim it for soccer just don't do it after a soccer riot or people might call you silly.
The very fact that China has been allowed to host them shows just how meaningless the olympics are.
The true meaning of the olympics? The same as twin cities, a way for the elite to host a big event where they can go to private parties on the taxpayers expense. Some olympics have been so bad that the locals are still paying for them and in other cases they only benefitted the locals because finally the higherups had a reason to pay some attention to their area. Lissabon 'benefitted' from the Olympics it is said although you got to wonder, if the money had been invested directly, how much more would have been gained?
The entire olympic idea is just a nice bit of marketing spin to make it seem something it is not. If you really want to avoid war, you need to get rid of the olympic idea in the first place.
Because what is the olympic idea really? That YOU are YOUR country. That is facism. Nations competing purely because they are different nations.
Drop the flags from the olympics, just let find the best sport people and ignore what passport they may be carrying.
Cops ain't citizens, what makes people think the two should be equal in what they can do?
Think about, doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs to citizens, should citizens be allowed to prescribe drugs to doctors?
Surgeons are allowed to cut open citizens, should citizens be allowed to cut open surgeons?
Lawyers are allowed to legal advice to citizens, should citizens be allowed to give legal advice to lawyers?
We have all kinds of rules that say people in proffesion X can do things that people not in the job can do not. Hell, a postman can open mailboxes and even open mail. Good luck doing that as a private citizen. Do you know that there are laws against who can put items in your mailbox?
For that matter, even simpler things like exceptions to wearing a seatbelt exist for people who got to get in and out of cars a lot. WE ARE NOT ALL EQUAL!