I could have been polite, but this crops up a lot in conversations about PC/Console gamesn and sometimes I loose patience with it. Consoles tend to have very powerful CPU's, for a short time that make them seemingly more capable then PC's and some people then say the PC days are numbered.
They handily ignore that the rest of the systems hardware is severely limited, such as HD speed. Final Fantasy Online for the PS2 requires an HD to be added for instance.
Memory is currently the biggest constraint. Most console games are designed to have their art/content streamed of the CD/DVD while you are playing and pull tricks to make the actual content displayed limited.
For instance GTA on the PSP (never played it on other consoles) limits what type of cars drive around each section of town. Sure, you might explain it design wise, you won't find my super-cars in the ghetto but it is of course to save memory.
BUT as clever a trick as it is, it is also a clear limitation, IF gta was PC only you would have had a persitent world. That car crash you caused? Would still be there if you drove away from it and then back because the PC would have the memory to keep it.
People forget just how much memory is consumed in a modern MMORPG not so much by the enviroment or the enemies themselves but by people wearing a ton of different outfits, each a real hit in the amount of textures that have to be loaded.
Knowing all this, when a person then claim as X-box was equal to PC of that era, I get a bit tired of it all. Yes, it had a similar CPU to an UNDERPOWERED PC at the time. Yes, it gained a bit of performance from the fact it didn't run windows but to be fair, windows ain't a CPU hog and its capacity to soak up memory tend to fade when the average GAMER at the time had 512mb minimum.
Each generation of consoles I keep hoping that they finally add a decent of memory just for once. Oh sure, they add really speedy memory but guess what, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. It increases the FPS a tiny bit but doesn't make up for having to stream content from the HD (and a HD that is typically a very low performance one as well).
I would love to see MMORPG's to make it across to the consoles, MMO's are all about people and there are a LOT of console owners out there. With an infusion of millions of potential new gamers even smaller MMORPG's are bound to gain some new players.
It would also be nice to see some MMORPG's developed to be played with a gamepad and use voicechat by default for communication.
But sadly, each new console generation is the same story over and over again, an potential intresting CPU limited by the rest of the hardware and console fanboys unable to accept that their shiny new toy just can't run certain PC games.
What is even more amazing is that game companies themselves can't see this either. SOE wanted Star Wars Galaxy for the PS2, they kept that idea up well after players knew you needed 2 gigs to play it.
Funcom has plans to bring Age of Conan to the 360, a game that runs well only with 3+gigs and a very fast HD like a raptor.
Lets not forget that episodes 1-3 were not exactly cheap to produce. If Lucas had sold out, he would have had the movies made in hong-kong on a shoe-string budget and then raked in the cash based on the brand alone. THAT is selling out.
What he did instead is forget what made the original movies such a success, not just with kids but with adults as well (it was my mom that introduced me to Star Wars and she was an adult mother when it was released) and instead attempted to make the movie appeal to kids without understand what kids want.
Basically, he ignored his matured fanbase and tried to appeal to a new demographic that just didn't exist.
Lets face it, kids today got better entertainment then 3 films that are nothing but a punch and judy show (KIDS: look out punch BEHIND you PUNCH: where KIDS: BEHIND YOU), the jedis never being able to spot the baddie until it is way to late.
It might have worked as high fantasy with a doomed ending with just a tiny bit of hope remaining but that doesn't work in a kiddy movie.
I like the ending of episode three were you see the would be rebels dispersing, but everything before was just... Well not bad exactly, just that the actors could not act, Lucas can't write or direct and just who was the story aimed at anyway?
The most obvious failure? Nobody quotes the new star wars to honor it. "These are not the droids you are looking for" "I am your father" "I find your lack of faith disturbing" "It is a trap".
Where are the episode 1-3 quotes?
George Lucas one had luck producing a movie, it is known by fans that this was not his own creation, his wife for instance seems to have played a large role. Other directors did ESB. He should go back to producing but frankly, his most crowning achievement, getting Star Wars made in the 70's is no longer anything complex with the fortune he has know and the standard high special effects movie we got know. People forgot just how ground breaking A New Hope was from a producers job. That is gone now. Lucas has nothing to do but sign the checks and so he gets involved with other things that were previously left to others.
Lucas did not make A New Hope, he produced it. He did make episode 1-3. That's the problem.
The article links to a science quiz. Lets review the questions shall we?
The center of the Earth is very hot.
No shit sherlock, plenty of movies with volcanoes and magma/lava in it. Fail to know this and you have a room temperature IQ.
All radioactivity is man-made.
No, there is lots around and of course radio-active materials are found in nature. We are exposed constantly to radiation but I suppose people might not know this OR mis-understand the question. You might have picked up that the sun is an exploding nuke or that uranium is mined or heard the term background radiation.
It is the fathers gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
Father of course, basic biology, comes up often enough, but I suppose you might have forgotten. It ain't an issue most of the time and out of sight out of mind.
Lasers work by focusing sound waves.
Seems pretty obvious to anyone who ever seen a laser LIGHT. I suppose the way the question is asked could confuse you. You might be swayed into thinking that by focussing sound you can create light. If anybody on slashdot fell for it, go kill yourself.
Electrons are smaller than atoms.
Duh, they are after all part of atoms, so they have to be smaller. If you know what an atom/electon is then you need to know this. If you do not, well there is nothing wrong with only having a swimming pre-school diploma.
Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
Bacteria obviously but this is one of the questions people really might not know. Viruses and bacteria are often mixed up in the media.
The universe began with a huge explosion.
Fact? We do not absolutely know this yet, yes there was a big bang, probably BUT was that the beginning. A loaded question. If you think it was created by god 6000 years ago, you are wrong.
The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.
Obviously, just ask anyone living near a fault. Millions of years might be debated by the insane but that the continents move can and has been measured.
Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
True of course, the proof is getting stronger every year with more missing links being found. A deeply dividing question apparently in the US.
Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?
Oh come on. If you fail this one after 3rd rock from the Sun you don't need to go out and kill yourself, you are already legally braindead.
How long does it take for the Earth to go around the sun?
Tsk, giving the answer for the previous question in the next one? Sad to say, I know people that would fail this question and yes, they are indeed the type that you absolutely do NOT want to vote because they lack any capacity to make conclusions based on observations.
10 or 11 right: You are a geek!
No, you have an average IQ. Welcome to the human race
8 or 9 right: You will receive a lovely chemistry set as a parting gift
You are retarded, you should have people taking care of you.
7: You need to bring a (Newtonian?) apple to bribe the teacher
You are severely retarded
6 or less: Like a scientist knows, it's good to learn from mistakes
You are dead. Random guessing would have served you better.
That you are supposed to be a geek to know the answer to these questions says it all. Come on, they are general knowledge questions, but yet usatoday seems to think that knowing these makes you the top of the bill, a genius equall to Einstein.
No, not everyone needs to know everything but this is stuff like not knowing that we need air to breath, that water is wet and fire hot.
Our society has slipped into a state where is is considered normal to know every detail about Paris Hilton's life but not why a year is a year.
I commented on the person who posted about the MZ thing, I can't replicate it.
I just seen to many people get into trouble with all types of downloads that were.exe in "disguise".
As an other user has pointed out, MS should have build in protections agains the user changing the extension rather then just hide it. Yes, it seems more userfriendly but isn't. If you have cleaned a dozen times after a "movie.avi.exe" infection you might feel the same.
If it works (tried it, the file was openened in Notepad on Vista 64) that would be absolutely braindead. You could make any filetype into a executable? Ouch. Thank god my desktop is Linux and I just game on windows. The permissions on Unix make more and more sense.
Of course, buffer overflows are a frequent problem but what you describe is even worse. You can at least hope that programs like notepad are going to be safe from buffer overflow attacks but if an ordinary text file can really just be an executable in disguise...
Btw, I also tried renaming some executables to.txt and that also opened them in notepad. This behavior is what I have always come to expect.
What you describe would be a real security nightmare.
The license trap is simple, HOW do you make an MMO game feel like the movies/book.
To bodly go where no man has gone before? Eh, this is a MMORPG. Not only has everyone already been there, you probably have to que for the boss.
Just how many Galaxy class starships are there going to be? How many horny vulcans and carebear klingon players are going to be running around?
How do you make space combat feel like naval engagements rather then sluggish fighters most Star Trek games have so far chosen to emulate?
It can be done, the original Star Trek RPG games were proper Star Trek (25th anniversary and Judgement Rites) but later games just wore Star Trek as a skin mod. But MMORPG have had a hard time with it so far.
Star Wars Galaxies had lots of bugs to be sure but the major gripe was that it just wasn't Star Wars. For me the real killer was that Storm Troopers were insanely hard to kill while of course in the movies they die if you sneeze at them. I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi. For that matter Han Solo wouldn't have been stopped and searched and nobody treated my noble character as a princess. Nobody ran away from my earlier Wookie either.
Matrix Online was a dud, never played it so can't say if it was like the movies.
Am playing Lord of the Rings Online and again, one of the things that make the game a bit of a hit and miss is that you just don't feel like one of the heroes from the book. Did Boromir constantly drop his weapon when fighting the orcs? Get knocked out every 30 seconds? Cower in fear? Fear, oh dear that was a stupid idea. You get Hope in safe areas where you don't need it but during the most tricky fights, hope is hard to come by and easily tripped. Oh yes, that makes me feel like a hero, slash half my health have me popping hope tokens on a 1hr cool down and spend most of the time cowering unable to move. Who is the hero NOW? PvP is even worse as monster players start at the highest level but a bit weaker but with killing other players gain ranks. Your average creep is now significantly more powerful then a freep. Yes, Lord of the Rings Online where the forces of darkness did not dare to move until they obtained a significant numerical advancement and sees small forces defeated by half a dozen free people has orcs/wargs/spiders that are more powerful then elves, by the truckload. Whoo!
It is tempting to ride on an existing license but hard to live up to the expectations people have of that license. So far from watching this game and knowing the previous games the company has done I see no reason but to expect this to be one of the biggest disappointments in MMORPG history. Yes City of Heroes was a success and a nice twist on the genre BUT it is hardly a good basis for a Star Trek MMORPG.
Why? Name me an MMORPG that exists on the PC that could ever hope to fit inside the tiny amount of memory consoles have. Exactly, just one Final Fantasy. Ever seen that game? It is clear why it runs on consoles, the world is rather "smallish".
If you look at other games like WoW or Lotro or Everquest etc etc with each update the potential memory requirements just goes up and up.
Console games tend to get around the tiny memory on the hardware by having highly predicatable scenes where the designer limits what has to be loaded at anyone time.
But how are you going to do that in a MMO where you might have dozens of players on screen all with their own artwork?
SWG was supposed to be for the PS2, a game that ran best with 2gigs. Age of Conan is meant for the 360 a game that really needs 3 gig. Mind you, that is MAIN memory we are talking about, anyone actually play AoC with a less then 512mb videocard? Remember, 360 has 512mb TOTAL memory.
But of course, consoles don't run windows. True, but is the game of say Lotro quickly after launch reaches 900mb or so, what does that have to do with windows?
Looking at the trailer and the few real in game shots, we might be dealing with a MMO with very tiny areas. Tricky, where is the sense of scale then, the MASSIVE in MMO? Afterall a dozen people on a 100m square unexplored planet would be a bit silly.
It is high time MMO's cross over onto the consoles, but right now these consoles are so limited that I can't see it happen unless you get around the typical reasons why PC MMO's are such memory hogs.
How does that make Ubuntu perceived as something different from Linux? I think you are running with your own warped perception of Linux/Ubuntu and going of on a trip that nobody else is making.
Read the forums, use Ubuntu, it never ever pretend to be anything else then a Linux distro. It isn't Linspire or pulling an OSX where you have to go dig (not that deep) for its BSD roots.
Straight from the front page of ubuntu.com "Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more."
You want to believe people who use Ubuntu care about brand perception. Nobody cares about that and all the users I know that use variour forms of Linux can ultimately boil their choice down to, this was the one someone else introduced them too.
Go ahead, sit on your marketing cloud, but I have yet to come across a single Ubuntu user (well apart from you) who is under any delusion that there is any difference. Hell, most Ubuntu users are very well aware that they are really using debian.
But you confirmed once again to me that all people who use marketing terms in general conversation should be shot on sight.
The most basic security measure in a OS is that you know what type of file you are dealing with. Am I about to open a harmless text file OR about to run a executable I just downloaded from a russian site?
How do you know? By the extension, so what does MS do? They hide the extension of files. Whopee! Then they allow executables to choose their own icon INCLUDING those that look just like the system own icons for other filetypes.
Can you say braindead? Can you say asking for trouble?
And for what? So that the file-explorer looks a bit cleaner? Hardly because what does MS then do in detail mode, add a column to list the type that is often nothing more then just saying "this is an EXTENSION file". WHOOPEE!
In other views it saves a grand total of 4 characters at the cost of a hell of a lot of basic security.
But MS is so concerned by the clean look that for a shortcut they add ' - shortcut' a grand total of 11 characters AND a icon on top of the icon.
IF MS is EVER going to learn about basic security they would add a similar tiny icon to be displayed over files that are executable. Can be done easily, but MS doesn't think about security, they want a simple clean look that doesn't require the user to use any brain cells even if that user then creates heaps of trouble for himself.
It is the same with allowing emails to contain executable code etc etc. Shinyness over security or even usability.
Because the real reason windows is such a bad product is that it tries to cater to people with your attitude.
The problem with that however is that computers are still fairly complex pieces of machinery. It is not so much that a computer is so complex, countless hopeless people use computers numerous times each day. I see people who have trouble opening a web page operaring unix machinery. Modern copiers for instance run on a unix system, factory machines rarely run on Windows.
The advantage with these systems is that they have one task and that task is the only thing they do and all their hardware is pre-selected and pre-configured.
Most of the trouble with PC's comes from the fact that so many people have different configurations and desires as to how they should operate. Easy of use goes out of the window when you want flexibility. Good luck programming a wizard that can deal with every network setup people have dreamed up in their homes.
At a given point, sooner or later the user when he is going to do something more then the most basic tasks on the most basic setup is going to have to get his head around more advanced concepts like IP address. So it is better if he is introduced to it gently overtime rather then having to learn it all at once when he has a task to complete.
Time for the famous car analogy. When do you teach a new driver how to break. When the car is standing still, when he first got it moving forward OR when it is approaching a concrete pillar at 120 km an hour in a snowstorm?
That is the entire idea between anti-slip courses, prepare ahead of time in a safe enviroment when the driver can take it slow and there is no real pressure so that when the time comes, he has some chance of knowing what to do. Sure, car dealers LOVE to hide the fact that their cars can slip, but a prudent driver nonetheless learns about it.
Same with OS'es that LOVE to pretend running a computer is oh so easy. Everything is automatically taken care off, you don't need to learn anything how it works. Until a virus destroys all their work, a failing drive that has been warning for months collapses with all their family photos on it, or they have to give up in dispair because they are trying to get a game to work and nobody seems willing to explain to them what IP means.
Most people have at decent enough intelligence to master any number of concepts, barring those suffering from a mental handicap, users can learn the basic concepts about computers and should do so, just as they learn the basic concepts of any number of things to help operate them efficiently.
Creating an OS that pretends you don't need to know anything about computers to use them, don't need to think is the same as producing a car that pretends it can never loose traction. Of course, that is not good marketing. But everytime you read a story about some car being wrapped around a tree when there was no reason (no alcohol, no excessive speeding) that is what caused it. A driver who thought his car would magically stick to the road when it didn't.
Same with every "my soundcard don't work in X", "I can't connect to Y" complaint. Do you realize how silly it is to just go out, pick up the first soundcard you find, plug it in and expect it to work? That would be like just buying a random piece of electrical equipment and expecting you can just plug it in, from the net (get it? Different voltages exist around the world and it is thanks to regulation and basic education that people 'know' this and can expect stores to carry the right equipment.)
Do you need to know what voltage your radio uses to listen to it? No, not directly, but those who do know are better of from not frying their equipment on holiday or buying dodgy gear.
Ubuntu is a nice version of GNU/Linux, it doesn't use GNU/Linux it IS GNU/Linux. The notion that you need less knowledge to use it then other versions is dangerous, it may work fine for a pre-installed system being used in a way someone else predicted and catered
Lotro is sometimes unfairly said to have no endgame content. It does, plenty. Levelling up is pretty fast but by that time there will be plenty of content left lying around, quests you never done, entire books you yet got to see and raids to complete. What was missing for sometime was direct incentive to do so but this has changed as well.
Still, people indeed RUSH to the endgame without ever actually learning to play the game. SOLO SOLO SOLO! MUST SOLO THIS MUST SOLO THAT! If there is group content then it MUST have a guardian, a minstrel and a hunter (tank, healer, dps) and they won't move without it. They never learn to play without a minstrel, they never find out just how a champion (melee dps class) can tank.
A good captain (buff class) can keep a single melee class on his feet. Two captains can keep a fellowship alive. IF they use all their skills. But do they? Captains are worsed played class in the game. In some areas the biggest debuff is fear and the captain can cure fear for the entire group every thirty seconds. So why must I constantly point this out? Why do hunters never cure poison unless you force them at gunpoint? Why do so few captains use shield-brother and even fewer guardians use protect?
They are all essential group skills that really make a difference. Protect gives a massive buff to evade/parry/block, two guardians who protect each other become unstoppable killing machines as most of their skills open up when they evade/parry/block. Shied-brother by a captain allows him to heal that person with one of his few melee attacks, increase their damage and improve their healing. Considering how few melee attacks the captain has NOT using it means he will be spending more time on auto-attack.
Or what of all the players specced for DPS, not power? A lot of classes are real power drains. So they do max damage for 30 seconds, great when soloing, but when in a long group battle that last 2 minutes they end up useless. Sure, lore-masters can restore power but not for an entire group. BUT I NEED MY DPS. Yes you do and the way to get DPS in a two-minute battle is NOT to be on auto-attack for 3/4 of it.
You can easily spot the ex-WoW/EQ players in Lotro. They are 4/6 and then spend an hour looking for a guardian and a minstel for book 1. That is a very low level instance. Granted it is the first even remote hard one but it can still be easily completed by ANY combination of classes. Provided you work as a team ANY combo of classes, of a level that can obtain the quest can complete it.
One of the prime examples of this low-dependence on optimal group layout is for instance drakes. Do you need a minstrel or a guardian in one area filled with purely with big dragons? Hell no. 6 hunters. The poor drakes die so fast there is no time for them to do any serious damage, the ranged attack is often evaded by agile hunters, it does only single target damage as opposed to the dragons AoE melee attacks and decent hunters can 'ping-pong' the dragons between them by shifting stances to dictate who is going to do the most agro. All on 'strength' stance. Then the person who gets hit shifts to 'endurance', looses agro, uses natural regen to regain health and switch back to 'strength' when ready.
The above tactic really works, it allowed you to get a crafting item by the bucket load and getting such a group together is worse then trying to get a PUG 3 raid PvMP event. It is almost impossible to get people to accept that such a strategy can work and that having a guardian or minstrel with you will only make it harder (less dps, more damage being taken). 5 hunters already do so much damage that the guardian barely has time to reach the enemy, with 6 you can land kills with a bit of luck before the enemy has even turned around.
Even the boss can be killed quickly, 6 heart-seekers == 12k+ damage for an opening move.
I fear part of the problem is the craze for "solo" content. In both Lotro and WoW and Age of Conan, you can essentially solo your way through most of the gam
Just check your ANY and ALL date the user submits for validity. That INCLUDES images. In this case, simply recode the image and foila, it will strip the padded info and all is well.
A country has three groups, the goverment (or the powers that be), the people (that is you and me) and the press.
In a democracy the idea is that the people tell the goverment how the goverment should rule them. There is an inherent problem in this. For instance, when it comes to law enforcement. I basically tell my goverment to throw my ass in jail if I do what I want to do but that I don't want anyone else doing. This is already trouble enough.
But the people and the goverment are seperated, we need a third party. I got my day-job, I can't spend all my time watching the powers that be. For that matter politicians can't talk to everyone, wouldn't it be nice if there was some third party they could use as a go between, both for informing the people AND for getting info on what the people are thinking?
Well, that is the job of the press. They watch the goverment and tell its watchdogs (the people) what they are up to. At the same time they watch the people and tell goverment what the people are up to. It works, for a while.
But sooner or later corruption sets in. Not outright simply corruption in the form of brown envelops under bathroom doors but "who is going to get the interview with the minister", which reporters get an invite to a news event? It has gotten so bad the Russian reporters during the first clinton election commented they felt right back at home, the exact same measures were in place in the US as had been in the USSR all the way up to ONLY pre-approved questions being allowed and reporters who couldn't be counted on to only ask those pre-approved question were banned.
How has it happened? Because we, the silly people didn't see anything wrong with letting the media/press become ever more commercial and we rather watch Big Brother and election night. But that is not where it started, it started the first time the beep in front of the news was changed into a jingle. When a 20 minute news segment has a 5 minute intro and a 5 minute outro and a 5 minute recap and preview in the middle. The remaining 5 minutes? Human interest stories.
I remember during the first gulf war a SIX minute segment about the royal family in holland visiting some art exhibition. That is when I really knew the system was screwed beyond repair.
Another example happened years ago, Shell wanted to sink an old oil platform claiming it to be EMPTY of hazardous material. Greenpeace went aboard and measured X amount of hazardous material. Then Shell said Greenpeace was wrong and it was only 1/2X. Not a single reporter in ANY COUNTRY (it was a major story at least around the North Sea) picked up on the fact that 1/2X is still an infinite amount more then EMPTY. It came as little suprise to me that Kok (then prime-minister in holland) later came on the board of Shell. The reporters, still around, still missing the obvious either because they are too stupid, they think the public can't handle complicated stories OR they have been corrupted.
Of course, there are bigger examples, but these 2 for me because of their simplicity show just how bad the press has gotten, because we the people let them and with them gone we have lost the tool to both monitor goverment AND to inform goverment of our views.
Take Mass Effect. The puzzle game to unlock containers, scan deposits and break into computers. Decent enough little mini-game but by the end weren't you sick to death of it?
And ME only takes 30 or so hours to complete.
A MMORPG has to last for months if not years. Just how are you going to create anything that is fun to do for so long?
Age of Conan tried to update combat to make it less boring, so instead of pressing a button to execute a skill you now press a button to execute a skill followed by a number of other buttons a bit like DDR except that the pattern is always the same. So Skill A is followed by 312 for instance. In PvP combat it was tricky because you need to be in range when the final button is pressed but in PvE (fighting against the computer) it adds NOTHING! In fact players with a macro keyboard just macro the combo's and find themselves playing yet another Everquest clone.
Vanguard has a diplomacy mini-game. Intresting enough until you start doing some math about how many games you need to play to actually achieve anything and loose all hope.
Same with crafting mini-games. Fun enough in their own right the 100th time they loose all appeal.
I think Star Wars Galaxies still did it the best. It had a mini-game for crafting but if you had a good result you could safe it as a recipe and use it over and over again in a factory. So mini-game that put in a bit of challenge but without hammering the player to death with it.
But then SWG was a game that required players to make their own fun and we all know how that ended.
The problem is simple, the more thightly scripted content is the longer it takes to design but the shorter it lasts. If a single player game like ME takes years to develop for 30 hours of gameplay then just how many decades does a game have to spend in production to give 30 months of gameplay?
Perhaps the answer lies in making the game focus on strategy, FPS games like the famous counterstrike were played for years with only limited content. Perhaps if MMORPG's battles were less like puzzles (do the right thing with the right class at the right time and WIN) but more like strategy, (okay, we have no class X but we got skill Z, how can we use that?) people would play the game differently and enjoy the gameplay. Could you imagine a MMORPG where not every LFG message has people begging for a healer?
Lotro does that in the beginning. If you want and try you can survive almost until till the end game with odd groups lacking "essential" classes. How about an all hunter party, dragons don't stand a chance. Guardians protecting each other? Takes a while but near invulnerable.
Sadly, I fear that many people just don't have the mindset to play in a game that would focus on challgenging gameplay over memorisation.
Do we really need more pages indexed (not sites perse) when google is already overflowing? No.
What we need is a search engine that gives us ACCURATE results and filters out all the filler websites with no content.
For instance, if I am searching for "[GAMENAME] cheat" is get countless results all from sites that just include every damn game on their site with the word cheat but no actual cheats. These types of sites should be filtered.
For simple searches google seems to have picked up on the fact that Wikipedia is the new search engine. It is often the top result and in fact often I don't even bother with google anymore, just head straight to wikipedia.
The problem is simply that search engine don't yet understand WHAT we are looking for. They just list the sites that have the words we want on a page and then sort them by some system but this system is easily fooled as any search user can tell you.
Quil doesn't seem to be even worse then google at this. Don't impress us with number of results, impress me by making the first page actually give me the type of sites I am looking for.
What caused the bubble wasn't luxury. Things like snacks and food and special staff doesn't really cost all the much. What costs is things like marketting campaigns, executive bonusses, over-staffing, splurging on hardware and accomodation.
If they have the correct number of staff, don't give the CEO a 1 million dollar christmas bonus, don't launch a 10 million dollar ad campaign, buy all SUN gear or have their headquarters in the center of an attractive city they aren't going to burn through 30+ million all that face. Muffins can be bought from the local baker. Strawberries can come from the supermarket.
And for this small daily investment you get much happier employees.
The alternative? The dutch company blokker (retailer) has a no-frills police. No water-cooler for instance, no soft-drinks machine (not even one you got to pay for) nothing extra. Who wants to work there? Nobody. In fact I happen to know they had to hugely overpay for their IT because nobody wants to work for them internally and even people in warehouses are leaving for greener pastures.
Basic rule of business, spend money on things that give you a return on it. Being frugal can easily cost you far more then the pennies you save.
She is still with him, a guy who for decades now has been pooring every penny he earned into a boy dream. No woman would put with that kind of adolescent behavior unless the sex is very good indeed.
Overheard an interview on dutch radio yesterday when two crimonologists were telling of their exprience with crime research to celebrate 100years of the field.
One researcher in the field apparently claimed "Nothing works" before killing himself (didn't catch his name).
It seemed to be the general consensus, some groups commit crime, we understand a few of the causes but not yet all but are powerless to really affect it.
It doesn't matter if you hang everyone or send them of with a stern look, crime figures all over the world are roughly similar.
The most effective way to stop crime? Tech that stops the crime before it can happen. You can't stop people from wanting to be criminals and you can't stop them once they are but if they can't actually commit the crime you stopped them nonetheless.
But all in all, people been looking for a solution for a 100 years and still there isn't one.
The most obvious sign they are bad at PR? Everyone knows it is PR. PR is like secret agencies, if you know about it, it ain't very secret/good.
MS used plenty of PR to launch Vista and it didn't work. Linux keeps being a threat on the server and Apple sells a LOT of machines and only seems to be selling more and more.
Pepsi ain't Vista. There is very little reason to choose one soft drink over the other except taste. Nobody, not even the soft drinks companies themselves, would dare to claim there is a quality difference. Pepsi challenge doesn't try to suggest that Coca-Cola is unhygenic or causes disease or ruins the economy. It is ALL about PR and so the Pepsi challenge makes sense.
But Vista shouldn't be about taste, you should choose an OS for ease of use, quality, stability and flexibility. this ain't things you sell with pure PR, these are things you sell with facts.
And it is here that MS clearly fails with its PR. I recently installed Vista on my game machine for Age of Conan (dud OS for a dud game) and to be honest, I do notice that it has far less freezes with Aero then under xp. With freezes I mean that the desktop keeps redrawing even under load, something that often didn't happen under previous Windows versions. Sure, it ain't linux (my desktop OS) but it is better. But did MS promote Aero for its better response time under load? No, they focus on the look. Whoo! Because when I run a game full screen or a browser full screen I care about a transparent border that is then hidden.
PR should only be used subtly and to boost solid points and to closs over weaknesses but when an entire launch is all PR and everyone knows it you done it very bad indeed.
But E3 is a well known games trade show that any gamer knows about. Since this story is in the game section the slashdot editors probably didn't think they needed to explain what E3 is.
What next, explain what the hell NASA is?
Maybe they should mention when they found water on mars they don't mean the candy?
and E3 stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo, bit to long for a headline and anyway then you would have been trolling about how it doesn't include music or video but just games despite the fact the former come in electronics as well.
Slashdot Mirror
They handily ignore that the rest of the systems hardware is severely limited, such as HD speed. Final Fantasy Online for the PS2 requires an HD to be added for instance.
Memory is currently the biggest constraint. Most console games are designed to have their art/content streamed of the CD/DVD while you are playing and pull tricks to make the actual content displayed limited.
For instance GTA on the PSP (never played it on other consoles) limits what type of cars drive around each section of town. Sure, you might explain it design wise, you won't find my super-cars in the ghetto but it is of course to save memory.
BUT as clever a trick as it is, it is also a clear limitation, IF gta was PC only you would have had a persitent world. That car crash you caused? Would still be there if you drove away from it and then back because the PC would have the memory to keep it.
People forget just how much memory is consumed in a modern MMORPG not so much by the enviroment or the enemies themselves but by people wearing a ton of different outfits, each a real hit in the amount of textures that have to be loaded.
Knowing all this, when a person then claim as X-box was equal to PC of that era, I get a bit tired of it all. Yes, it had a similar CPU to an UNDERPOWERED PC at the time. Yes, it gained a bit of performance from the fact it didn't run windows but to be fair, windows ain't a CPU hog and its capacity to soak up memory tend to fade when the average GAMER at the time had 512mb minimum.
Each generation of consoles I keep hoping that they finally add a decent of memory just for once. Oh sure, they add really speedy memory but guess what, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. It increases the FPS a tiny bit but doesn't make up for having to stream content from the HD (and a HD that is typically a very low performance one as well).
I would love to see MMORPG's to make it across to the consoles, MMO's are all about people and there are a LOT of console owners out there. With an infusion of millions of potential new gamers even smaller MMORPG's are bound to gain some new players.
It would also be nice to see some MMORPG's developed to be played with a gamepad and use voicechat by default for communication.
But sadly, each new console generation is the same story over and over again, an potential intresting CPU limited by the rest of the hardware and console fanboys unable to accept that their shiny new toy just can't run certain PC games.
What is even more amazing is that game companies themselves can't see this either. SOE wanted Star Wars Galaxy for the PS2, they kept that idea up well after players knew you needed 2 gigs to play it.
Funcom has plans to bring Age of Conan to the 360, a game that runs well only with 3+gigs and a very fast HD like a raptor.
Sad really.
Lets not forget that episodes 1-3 were not exactly cheap to produce. If Lucas had sold out, he would have had the movies made in hong-kong on a shoe-string budget and then raked in the cash based on the brand alone. THAT is selling out.
What he did instead is forget what made the original movies such a success, not just with kids but with adults as well (it was my mom that introduced me to Star Wars and she was an adult mother when it was released) and instead attempted to make the movie appeal to kids without understand what kids want.
Basically, he ignored his matured fanbase and tried to appeal to a new demographic that just didn't exist.
Lets face it, kids today got better entertainment then 3 films that are nothing but a punch and judy show (KIDS: look out punch BEHIND you PUNCH: where KIDS: BEHIND YOU), the jedis never being able to spot the baddie until it is way to late.
It might have worked as high fantasy with a doomed ending with just a tiny bit of hope remaining but that doesn't work in a kiddy movie.
I like the ending of episode three were you see the would be rebels dispersing, but everything before was just... Well not bad exactly, just that the actors could not act, Lucas can't write or direct and just who was the story aimed at anyway?
The most obvious failure? Nobody quotes the new star wars to honor it. "These are not the droids you are looking for" "I am your father" "I find your lack of faith disturbing" "It is a trap".
Where are the episode 1-3 quotes?
George Lucas one had luck producing a movie, it is known by fans that this was not his own creation, his wife for instance seems to have played a large role. Other directors did ESB. He should go back to producing but frankly, his most crowning achievement, getting Star Wars made in the 70's is no longer anything complex with the fortune he has know and the standard high special effects movie we got know. People forgot just how ground breaking A New Hope was from a producers job. That is gone now. Lucas has nothing to do but sign the checks and so he gets involved with other things that were previously left to others.
Lucas did not make A New Hope, he produced it. He did make episode 1-3. That's the problem.
No shit sherlock, plenty of movies with volcanoes and magma/lava in it. Fail to know this and you have a room temperature IQ.
No, there is lots around and of course radio-active materials are found in nature. We are exposed constantly to radiation but I suppose people might not know this OR mis-understand the question. You might have picked up that the sun is an exploding nuke or that uranium is mined or heard the term background radiation.
Father of course, basic biology, comes up often enough, but I suppose you might have forgotten. It ain't an issue most of the time and out of sight out of mind.
Seems pretty obvious to anyone who ever seen a laser LIGHT. I suppose the way the question is asked could confuse you. You might be swayed into thinking that by focussing sound you can create light. If anybody on slashdot fell for it, go kill yourself.
Duh, they are after all part of atoms, so they have to be smaller. If you know what an atom/electon is then you need to know this. If you do not, well there is nothing wrong with only having a swimming pre-school diploma.
Bacteria obviously but this is one of the questions people really might not know. Viruses and bacteria are often mixed up in the media.
Fact? We do not absolutely know this yet, yes there was a big bang, probably BUT was that the beginning. A loaded question. If you think it was created by god 6000 years ago, you are wrong.
Obviously, just ask anyone living near a fault. Millions of years might be debated by the insane but that the continents move can and has been measured.
True of course, the proof is getting stronger every year with more missing links being found. A deeply dividing question apparently in the US.
Oh come on. If you fail this one after 3rd rock from the Sun you don't need to go out and kill yourself, you are already legally braindead.
Tsk, giving the answer for the previous question in the next one? Sad to say, I know people that would fail this question and yes, they are indeed the type that you absolutely do NOT want to vote because they lack any capacity to make conclusions based on observations.
No, you have an average IQ. Welcome to the human race
You are retarded, you should have people taking care of you.
You are severely retarded
You are dead. Random guessing would have served you better.
That you are supposed to be a geek to know the answer to these questions says it all. Come on, they are general knowledge questions, but yet usatoday seems to think that knowing these makes you the top of the bill, a genius equall to Einstein.
No, not everyone needs to know everything but this is stuff like not knowing that we need air to breath, that water is wet and fire hot.
Our society has slipped into a state where is is considered normal to know every detail about Paris Hilton's life but not why a year is a year.
Star Trek has ALWAYS made the space battles like naval engagements. Why do think their are called Photon TORPEDOES and not missles?
StarFLEET not StarWING
Geez, you would think people on slashdot would know the trek universe.
And I mean WOW. You are saying that your 360 can run a game 4 years old.
Then you go on to claim that you ran WoW on a 64mb PC? What does the HD have to do with it? MEMORY!
What are you smoking? Cause I would like some of it.
He does. In a train.
Or two pictures next to each other, one a traffic jam of cars, the other a single bus on a nice empty road.
I commented on the person who posted about the MZ thing, I can't replicate it.
I just seen to many people get into trouble with all types of downloads that were .exe in "disguise".
As an other user has pointed out, MS should have build in protections agains the user changing the extension rather then just hide it. Yes, it seems more userfriendly but isn't. If you have cleaned a dozen times after a "movie.avi.exe" infection you might feel the same.
o_O
If it works (tried it, the file was openened in Notepad on Vista 64) that would be absolutely braindead. You could make any filetype into a executable? Ouch. Thank god my desktop is Linux and I just game on windows. The permissions on Unix make more and more sense.
Of course, buffer overflows are a frequent problem but what you describe is even worse. You can at least hope that programs like notepad are going to be safe from buffer overflow attacks but if an ordinary text file can really just be an executable in disguise...
Btw, I also tried renaming some executables to .txt and that also opened them in notepad. This behavior is what I have always come to expect.
What you describe would be a real security nightmare.
The license trap is simple, HOW do you make an MMO game feel like the movies/book.
To bodly go where no man has gone before? Eh, this is a MMORPG. Not only has everyone already been there, you probably have to que for the boss.
Just how many Galaxy class starships are there going to be? How many horny vulcans and carebear klingon players are going to be running around?
How do you make space combat feel like naval engagements rather then sluggish fighters most Star Trek games have so far chosen to emulate?
It can be done, the original Star Trek RPG games were proper Star Trek (25th anniversary and Judgement Rites) but later games just wore Star Trek as a skin mod. But MMORPG have had a hard time with it so far.
Star Wars Galaxies had lots of bugs to be sure but the major gripe was that it just wasn't Star Wars. For me the real killer was that Storm Troopers were insanely hard to kill while of course in the movies they die if you sneeze at them. I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi. For that matter Han Solo wouldn't have been stopped and searched and nobody treated my noble character as a princess. Nobody ran away from my earlier Wookie either.
Matrix Online was a dud, never played it so can't say if it was like the movies.
Am playing Lord of the Rings Online and again, one of the things that make the game a bit of a hit and miss is that you just don't feel like one of the heroes from the book. Did Boromir constantly drop his weapon when fighting the orcs? Get knocked out every 30 seconds? Cower in fear? Fear, oh dear that was a stupid idea. You get Hope in safe areas where you don't need it but during the most tricky fights, hope is hard to come by and easily tripped. Oh yes, that makes me feel like a hero, slash half my health have me popping hope tokens on a 1hr cool down and spend most of the time cowering unable to move. Who is the hero NOW? PvP is even worse as monster players start at the highest level but a bit weaker but with killing other players gain ranks. Your average creep is now significantly more powerful then a freep. Yes, Lord of the Rings Online where the forces of darkness did not dare to move until they obtained a significant numerical advancement and sees small forces defeated by half a dozen free people has orcs/wargs/spiders that are more powerful then elves, by the truckload. Whoo!
It is tempting to ride on an existing license but hard to live up to the expectations people have of that license. So far from watching this game and knowing the previous games the company has done I see no reason but to expect this to be one of the biggest disappointments in MMORPG history. Yes City of Heroes was a success and a nice twist on the genre BUT it is hardly a good basis for a Star Trek MMORPG.
Unless you have reason to believe they are lying the eye candy is part of the game.
Thanks for trolling, try again.
If you look at other games like WoW or Lotro or Everquest etc etc with each update the potential memory requirements just goes up and up.
Console games tend to get around the tiny memory on the hardware by having highly predicatable scenes where the designer limits what has to be loaded at anyone time.
But how are you going to do that in a MMO where you might have dozens of players on screen all with their own artwork?
SWG was supposed to be for the PS2, a game that ran best with 2gigs. Age of Conan is meant for the 360 a game that really needs 3 gig. Mind you, that is MAIN memory we are talking about, anyone actually play AoC with a less then 512mb videocard? Remember, 360 has 512mb TOTAL memory.
But of course, consoles don't run windows. True, but is the game of say Lotro quickly after launch reaches 900mb or so, what does that have to do with windows?
Looking at the trailer and the few real in game shots, we might be dealing with a MMO with very tiny areas. Tricky, where is the sense of scale then, the MASSIVE in MMO? Afterall a dozen people on a 100m square unexplored planet would be a bit silly.
It is high time MMO's cross over onto the consoles, but right now these consoles are so limited that I can't see it happen unless you get around the typical reasons why PC MMO's are such memory hogs.
Just remember why Deus Ex 2 sucked so much.
Ubuntu, Linux for Human beings.
How does that make Ubuntu perceived as something different from Linux? I think you are running with your own warped perception of Linux/Ubuntu and going of on a trip that nobody else is making.
Read the forums, use Ubuntu, it never ever pretend to be anything else then a Linux distro. It isn't Linspire or pulling an OSX where you have to go dig (not that deep) for its BSD roots.
Straight from the front page of ubuntu.com "Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more."
You want to believe people who use Ubuntu care about brand perception. Nobody cares about that and all the users I know that use variour forms of Linux can ultimately boil their choice down to, this was the one someone else introduced them too.
Go ahead, sit on your marketing cloud, but I have yet to come across a single Ubuntu user (well apart from you) who is under any delusion that there is any difference. Hell, most Ubuntu users are very well aware that they are really using debian.
But you confirmed once again to me that all people who use marketing terms in general conversation should be shot on sight.
How do you know? By the extension, so what does MS do? They hide the extension of files. Whopee! Then they allow executables to choose their own icon INCLUDING those that look just like the system own icons for other filetypes.
Can you say braindead? Can you say asking for trouble?
And for what? So that the file-explorer looks a bit cleaner? Hardly because what does MS then do in detail mode, add a column to list the type that is often nothing more then just saying "this is an EXTENSION file". WHOOPEE!
In other views it saves a grand total of 4 characters at the cost of a hell of a lot of basic security.
But MS is so concerned by the clean look that for a shortcut they add ' - shortcut' a grand total of 11 characters AND a icon on top of the icon.
IF MS is EVER going to learn about basic security they would add a similar tiny icon to be displayed over files that are executable. Can be done easily, but MS doesn't think about security, they want a simple clean look that doesn't require the user to use any brain cells even if that user then creates heaps of trouble for himself.
It is the same with allowing emails to contain executable code etc etc. Shinyness over security or even usability.
Because the real reason windows is such a bad product is that it tries to cater to people with your attitude.
The problem with that however is that computers are still fairly complex pieces of machinery. It is not so much that a computer is so complex, countless hopeless people use computers numerous times each day. I see people who have trouble opening a web page operaring unix machinery. Modern copiers for instance run on a unix system, factory machines rarely run on Windows.
The advantage with these systems is that they have one task and that task is the only thing they do and all their hardware is pre-selected and pre-configured.
Most of the trouble with PC's comes from the fact that so many people have different configurations and desires as to how they should operate. Easy of use goes out of the window when you want flexibility. Good luck programming a wizard that can deal with every network setup people have dreamed up in their homes.
At a given point, sooner or later the user when he is going to do something more then the most basic tasks on the most basic setup is going to have to get his head around more advanced concepts like IP address. So it is better if he is introduced to it gently overtime rather then having to learn it all at once when he has a task to complete.
Time for the famous car analogy. When do you teach a new driver how to break. When the car is standing still, when he first got it moving forward OR when it is approaching a concrete pillar at 120 km an hour in a snowstorm?
That is the entire idea between anti-slip courses, prepare ahead of time in a safe enviroment when the driver can take it slow and there is no real pressure so that when the time comes, he has some chance of knowing what to do. Sure, car dealers LOVE to hide the fact that their cars can slip, but a prudent driver nonetheless learns about it.
Same with OS'es that LOVE to pretend running a computer is oh so easy. Everything is automatically taken care off, you don't need to learn anything how it works. Until a virus destroys all their work, a failing drive that has been warning for months collapses with all their family photos on it, or they have to give up in dispair because they are trying to get a game to work and nobody seems willing to explain to them what IP means.
Most people have at decent enough intelligence to master any number of concepts, barring those suffering from a mental handicap, users can learn the basic concepts about computers and should do so, just as they learn the basic concepts of any number of things to help operate them efficiently.
Creating an OS that pretends you don't need to know anything about computers to use them, don't need to think is the same as producing a car that pretends it can never loose traction. Of course, that is not good marketing. But everytime you read a story about some car being wrapped around a tree when there was no reason (no alcohol, no excessive speeding) that is what caused it. A driver who thought his car would magically stick to the road when it didn't.
Same with every "my soundcard don't work in X", "I can't connect to Y" complaint. Do you realize how silly it is to just go out, pick up the first soundcard you find, plug it in and expect it to work? That would be like just buying a random piece of electrical equipment and expecting you can just plug it in, from the net (get it? Different voltages exist around the world and it is thanks to regulation and basic education that people 'know' this and can expect stores to carry the right equipment.)
Do you need to know what voltage your radio uses to listen to it? No, not directly, but those who do know are better of from not frying their equipment on holiday or buying dodgy gear.
Ubuntu is a nice version of GNU/Linux, it doesn't use GNU/Linux it IS GNU/Linux. The notion that you need less knowledge to use it then other versions is dangerous, it may work fine for a pre-installed system being used in a way someone else predicted and catered
Lotro is sometimes unfairly said to have no endgame content. It does, plenty. Levelling up is pretty fast but by that time there will be plenty of content left lying around, quests you never done, entire books you yet got to see and raids to complete. What was missing for sometime was direct incentive to do so but this has changed as well.
Still, people indeed RUSH to the endgame without ever actually learning to play the game. SOLO SOLO SOLO! MUST SOLO THIS MUST SOLO THAT! If there is group content then it MUST have a guardian, a minstrel and a hunter (tank, healer, dps) and they won't move without it. They never learn to play without a minstrel, they never find out just how a champion (melee dps class) can tank.
A good captain (buff class) can keep a single melee class on his feet. Two captains can keep a fellowship alive. IF they use all their skills. But do they? Captains are worsed played class in the game. In some areas the biggest debuff is fear and the captain can cure fear for the entire group every thirty seconds. So why must I constantly point this out? Why do hunters never cure poison unless you force them at gunpoint? Why do so few captains use shield-brother and even fewer guardians use protect?
They are all essential group skills that really make a difference. Protect gives a massive buff to evade/parry/block, two guardians who protect each other become unstoppable killing machines as most of their skills open up when they evade/parry/block. Shied-brother by a captain allows him to heal that person with one of his few melee attacks, increase their damage and improve their healing. Considering how few melee attacks the captain has NOT using it means he will be spending more time on auto-attack.
Or what of all the players specced for DPS, not power? A lot of classes are real power drains. So they do max damage for 30 seconds, great when soloing, but when in a long group battle that last 2 minutes they end up useless. Sure, lore-masters can restore power but not for an entire group. BUT I NEED MY DPS. Yes you do and the way to get DPS in a two-minute battle is NOT to be on auto-attack for 3/4 of it.
You can easily spot the ex-WoW/EQ players in Lotro. They are 4/6 and then spend an hour looking for a guardian and a minstel for book 1. That is a very low level instance. Granted it is the first even remote hard one but it can still be easily completed by ANY combination of classes. Provided you work as a team ANY combo of classes, of a level that can obtain the quest can complete it.
One of the prime examples of this low-dependence on optimal group layout is for instance drakes. Do you need a minstrel or a guardian in one area filled with purely with big dragons? Hell no. 6 hunters. The poor drakes die so fast there is no time for them to do any serious damage, the ranged attack is often evaded by agile hunters, it does only single target damage as opposed to the dragons AoE melee attacks and decent hunters can 'ping-pong' the dragons between them by shifting stances to dictate who is going to do the most agro. All on 'strength' stance. Then the person who gets hit shifts to 'endurance', looses agro, uses natural regen to regain health and switch back to 'strength' when ready.
The above tactic really works, it allowed you to get a crafting item by the bucket load and getting such a group together is worse then trying to get a PUG 3 raid PvMP event. It is almost impossible to get people to accept that such a strategy can work and that having a guardian or minstrel with you will only make it harder (less dps, more damage being taken). 5 hunters already do so much damage that the guardian barely has time to reach the enemy, with 6 you can land kills with a bit of luck before the enemy has even turned around.
Even the boss can be killed quickly, 6 heart-seekers == 12k+ damage for an opening move.
I fear part of the problem is the craze for "solo" content. In both Lotro and WoW and Age of Conan, you can essentially solo your way through most of the gam
NEVER EVER TRUST ANY DATA THE USER SUBMITS!
In a democracy the idea is that the people tell the goverment how the goverment should rule them. There is an inherent problem in this. For instance, when it comes to law enforcement. I basically tell my goverment to throw my ass in jail if I do what I want to do but that I don't want anyone else doing. This is already trouble enough.
But the people and the goverment are seperated, we need a third party. I got my day-job, I can't spend all my time watching the powers that be. For that matter politicians can't talk to everyone, wouldn't it be nice if there was some third party they could use as a go between, both for informing the people AND for getting info on what the people are thinking?
Well, that is the job of the press. They watch the goverment and tell its watchdogs (the people) what they are up to. At the same time they watch the people and tell goverment what the people are up to. It works, for a while.
But sooner or later corruption sets in. Not outright simply corruption in the form of brown envelops under bathroom doors but "who is going to get the interview with the minister", which reporters get an invite to a news event? It has gotten so bad the Russian reporters during the first clinton election commented they felt right back at home, the exact same measures were in place in the US as had been in the USSR all the way up to ONLY pre-approved questions being allowed and reporters who couldn't be counted on to only ask those pre-approved question were banned.
How has it happened? Because we, the silly people didn't see anything wrong with letting the media/press become ever more commercial and we rather watch Big Brother and election night. But that is not where it started, it started the first time the beep in front of the news was changed into a jingle. When a 20 minute news segment has a 5 minute intro and a 5 minute outro and a 5 minute recap and preview in the middle. The remaining 5 minutes? Human interest stories.
I remember during the first gulf war a SIX minute segment about the royal family in holland visiting some art exhibition. That is when I really knew the system was screwed beyond repair.
Another example happened years ago, Shell wanted to sink an old oil platform claiming it to be EMPTY of hazardous material. Greenpeace went aboard and measured X amount of hazardous material. Then Shell said Greenpeace was wrong and it was only 1/2X. Not a single reporter in ANY COUNTRY (it was a major story at least around the North Sea) picked up on the fact that 1/2X is still an infinite amount more then EMPTY. It came as little suprise to me that Kok (then prime-minister in holland) later came on the board of Shell. The reporters, still around, still missing the obvious either because they are too stupid, they think the public can't handle complicated stories OR they have been corrupted.
Of course, there are bigger examples, but these 2 for me because of their simplicity show just how bad the press has gotten, because we the people let them and with them gone we have lost the tool to both monitor goverment AND to inform goverment of our views.
Take Mass Effect. The puzzle game to unlock containers, scan deposits and break into computers. Decent enough little mini-game but by the end weren't you sick to death of it?
And ME only takes 30 or so hours to complete.
A MMORPG has to last for months if not years. Just how are you going to create anything that is fun to do for so long?
Age of Conan tried to update combat to make it less boring, so instead of pressing a button to execute a skill you now press a button to execute a skill followed by a number of other buttons a bit like DDR except that the pattern is always the same. So Skill A is followed by 312 for instance. In PvP combat it was tricky because you need to be in range when the final button is pressed but in PvE (fighting against the computer) it adds NOTHING! In fact players with a macro keyboard just macro the combo's and find themselves playing yet another Everquest clone.
Vanguard has a diplomacy mini-game. Intresting enough until you start doing some math about how many games you need to play to actually achieve anything and loose all hope.
Same with crafting mini-games. Fun enough in their own right the 100th time they loose all appeal.
I think Star Wars Galaxies still did it the best. It had a mini-game for crafting but if you had a good result you could safe it as a recipe and use it over and over again in a factory. So mini-game that put in a bit of challenge but without hammering the player to death with it.
But then SWG was a game that required players to make their own fun and we all know how that ended.
The problem is simple, the more thightly scripted content is the longer it takes to design but the shorter it lasts. If a single player game like ME takes years to develop for 30 hours of gameplay then just how many decades does a game have to spend in production to give 30 months of gameplay?
Perhaps the answer lies in making the game focus on strategy, FPS games like the famous counterstrike were played for years with only limited content. Perhaps if MMORPG's battles were less like puzzles (do the right thing with the right class at the right time and WIN) but more like strategy, (okay, we have no class X but we got skill Z, how can we use that?) people would play the game differently and enjoy the gameplay. Could you imagine a MMORPG where not every LFG message has people begging for a healer?
Lotro does that in the beginning. If you want and try you can survive almost until till the end game with odd groups lacking "essential" classes. How about an all hunter party, dragons don't stand a chance. Guardians protecting each other? Takes a while but near invulnerable.
Sadly, I fear that many people just don't have the mindset to play in a game that would focus on challgenging gameplay over memorisation.
What we need is a search engine that gives us ACCURATE results and filters out all the filler websites with no content.
For instance, if I am searching for "[GAMENAME] cheat" is get countless results all from sites that just include every damn game on their site with the word cheat but no actual cheats. These types of sites should be filtered.
For simple searches google seems to have picked up on the fact that Wikipedia is the new search engine. It is often the top result and in fact often I don't even bother with google anymore, just head straight to wikipedia.
The problem is simply that search engine don't yet understand WHAT we are looking for. They just list the sites that have the words we want on a page and then sort them by some system but this system is easily fooled as any search user can tell you.
Quil doesn't seem to be even worse then google at this. Don't impress us with number of results, impress me by making the first page actually give me the type of sites I am looking for.
If they have the correct number of staff, don't give the CEO a 1 million dollar christmas bonus, don't launch a 10 million dollar ad campaign, buy all SUN gear or have their headquarters in the center of an attractive city they aren't going to burn through 30+ million all that face. Muffins can be bought from the local baker. Strawberries can come from the supermarket.
And for this small daily investment you get much happier employees.
The alternative? The dutch company blokker (retailer) has a no-frills police. No water-cooler for instance, no soft-drinks machine (not even one you got to pay for) nothing extra. Who wants to work there? Nobody. In fact I happen to know they had to hugely overpay for their IT because nobody wants to work for them internally and even people in warehouses are leaving for greener pastures.
Basic rule of business, spend money on things that give you a return on it. Being frugal can easily cost you far more then the pennies you save.
Nice trolling but it is the other way around.
She is still with him, a guy who for decades now has been pooring every penny he earned into a boy dream. No woman would put with that kind of adolescent behavior unless the sex is very good indeed.
One researcher in the field apparently claimed "Nothing works" before killing himself (didn't catch his name).
It seemed to be the general consensus, some groups commit crime, we understand a few of the causes but not yet all but are powerless to really affect it.
It doesn't matter if you hang everyone or send them of with a stern look, crime figures all over the world are roughly similar.
The most effective way to stop crime? Tech that stops the crime before it can happen. You can't stop people from wanting to be criminals and you can't stop them once they are but if they can't actually commit the crime you stopped them nonetheless.
But all in all, people been looking for a solution for a 100 years and still there isn't one.
The most obvious sign they are bad at PR? Everyone knows it is PR. PR is like secret agencies, if you know about it, it ain't very secret/good.
MS used plenty of PR to launch Vista and it didn't work. Linux keeps being a threat on the server and Apple sells a LOT of machines and only seems to be selling more and more.
Pepsi ain't Vista. There is very little reason to choose one soft drink over the other except taste. Nobody, not even the soft drinks companies themselves, would dare to claim there is a quality difference. Pepsi challenge doesn't try to suggest that Coca-Cola is unhygenic or causes disease or ruins the economy. It is ALL about PR and so the Pepsi challenge makes sense.
But Vista shouldn't be about taste, you should choose an OS for ease of use, quality, stability and flexibility. this ain't things you sell with pure PR, these are things you sell with facts.
And it is here that MS clearly fails with its PR. I recently installed Vista on my game machine for Age of Conan (dud OS for a dud game) and to be honest, I do notice that it has far less freezes with Aero then under xp. With freezes I mean that the desktop keeps redrawing even under load, something that often didn't happen under previous Windows versions. Sure, it ain't linux (my desktop OS) but it is better. But did MS promote Aero for its better response time under load? No, they focus on the look. Whoo! Because when I run a game full screen or a browser full screen I care about a transparent border that is then hidden.
PR should only be used subtly and to boost solid points and to closs over weaknesses but when an entire launch is all PR and everyone knows it you done it very bad indeed.
What next, explain what the hell NASA is?
Maybe they should mention when they found water on mars they don't mean the candy?
and E3 stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo, bit to long for a headline and anyway then you would have been trolling about how it doesn't include music or video but just games despite the fact the former come in electronics as well.