If he did, MS would have made ONE version of the 360. Does he really think he can get away for 7 years with a console without a harddisk for that long? Does he really think DVD's are going to be a big enough storage option for that long?
MS has set themselves up to have a constant stream of 360 setups that won't be good enough to play new releases. A game will need a HD, a game will need HD-DVD and whatever else MS WILL decide to add in the future. Make NO mistake about it. MS will find it impossible to resist to release newer 'better' versions of the 360.
Then there is the hardware itself, current generation consoles are obsolete already compared to the PC. Even a modest PC gaming rig will have more video memory then consoles have for TOTAL memory.
Does this matter? Can you say MMORPG? That is one big cash machine in the game industry but so far there has been little luck getting it too run on consoles. That is because in a MMORPG you never really know what is going to happen next. They are memory hogs because they need to have lots of data loaded all the time.
In a more traditional game, no matter how large the level, it is more or less up to the designer WHAT is actually in that level. In a MMORPG (or for that matter a modded game like The Sims or Oblivion) the contents of a level can skyrocket simply because of varation.
I can come across several dozen people each in outfits with their own textures.
Stream load that!
It is one of the reasons why user mods to games like The Sims and Oblivion and Never Winter Nights seem to always include higher resolution textures and more style choices. Why didn't the company include them from the start? Because their minimum requirements would have skyrocketed. My 'pimped' oblivion makes the original look like morrowind but the cost in hardware is extreem.
We all seen how PC games that got the console treatment had to be butchered to deal with the limitations of obsolete hardware. Deus Ex 2 anyone? Why can't I access the huge amount of user mods on the console versions of Oblivion? Where is the user commonity of the Console version of The Sims?
7 years is a long time for the 360 but more importantly Microsoft. Sony is a different company then MS, it (used to be at least) is a hardware company. MS is a software company, and I think MS will find it impossible to resist pushing updates.
The proof? The lifespan of the x-box. It was DEAD the moment the 360 was released, Sony is still actively working on the PS2. This despite the fact that the x-box was a younger machine.
Hardware limitations aside, MS is just not a company that can support a product for so long without new must have features being slipped in. When they see that PC gaming (in which they after all have a very important role) is overtaking their console gaming division in capabilities they WILL release a new 360 with more memory or something, effectivly ending the life of previous models.
But hey, if they don't that is good new too, I am looking forward as a PC snob of half a decade of looking down on console gamers and their quant old relics again.
Give me your email and I will see you get some pointers on how to deal with your eh.. weakness. Don't worry it happens to all men, or so I hear. Not me offcourse.
No monthy python references and no point about smoking bans, instead I want to talk about his idea.
Does the mturk system allow you to test an idea. No.
The answer should be bloody obvious, it is the yes-man problem and the fact that most suck at a self criticism. The yes-man problem comes from the fact that you PAY for answers that you "approve", therefore the people trying to answer will have a motivation to tell you what they think you want to hear.
Then comes your own capability to see an answer that goes against what you want to hear as being correct. This is a flaw we all have and it bites us in the ass constantly, we just don't want to hear we are wrong. Not even if you are paying for it. To touch on the asked question, you still have smokers denying the dangers of smoking even as they are dying of cancer. It doesn't matter how "right" the doctor and anyone else is, they don't want to hear.
Finally comes the trickiest, even if you know the answer (and then why are you asking it) what makes you think mturk workers know the answer. From what I read about it they are not exactly the brightest bulbs or they wouldn't be working for pennies. I would suggest that you are tapping a very odd barrel of workers here. Most definitly a cross section of society as most people would see the salary and laugh.
The idea itself is not without merit, but at best you could use it as cheap editor, very cheap, to find obvious flaws in your article. Perhaps slashdot should use it to correct spelling errors, RTFA and dupe detection. As way to come up with the "truth", no. Might as well hold an election and simply go with the hype of the day.
This isn't Nintendo Japan, this is Nintendo United States of America. The article briefly mentions it, Nintendo of America NOA.
This is an important difference, this story is nothing new, and if you are willing too google a bit you can easily find other examples of NOA censoring games. INCLUDING N games, Nintendo of America EVEN censored Nintendo games from japan. http://www.filibustercartoons.com/Nintendo.php (google NOA censoring) for instance shows several games in their original japanese release and the censored US release.
It is a US thing. Although the rest of the world seems eager to catch up. Remember kids, nudity is bad, violence against those who are different is good, as long as you don't say it out loud.
They observed that female avatars were less guarding about their personal space then males, a behaviour apparently the same as in real life.
The flaw? Female avatars do NOT have to be controlled by a female user.
Would a male playing a female mimick this behaviour? IF that is the case, that would make a far more intresting study. If it isn't then their measurements are flawed since they cannot tell what sex a user really is.
For instance, much is made of the fact that the woman is a doctor, from a family of doctors who apparently are well off, so she is not a gold digger.
Except that they met while she worked as a translator for a dating service. A dating service involving a russian female and an american male, can you say mail order bride?
Mail order brides are just a small step away from the human trade, I am not saying that ALL of them are criminal, but it is a grey area.
Why does a doctor work for such an agency? That automatically sends alarm bells ringing.
On the other hand, why was he living out of his car? And why remove a seat to do so? If he was that poor that he could not afford to rent even a single room, surely he could not afford to vandalise his car either.
The fact that the father warned his son of suspicious stangers sound weird as well. Who would want to follow him? Mail order bride agencies are often shady but they are in the business of getting russian women hooked up for a fee, not murder or trailing people. Fake russian papers, sure, operations on american soil, no.
Then there is the money he carried. Why would he need to carry the money with him? Russia doesn't have banks? Russians prefer to be paid in dollars? Did he also have his plane ticket already since he claims it was for his russian employers (was he going to mail the cash?)
Truly, truth is stranger then fiction. If you tried turning this into a manuscript your editor would tell you to stop being silly.
I just wish reporters would start to actually question what people told them.
If anything characterizes the 21st century, its our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people, said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.
Or put more simply three people are involved here who think "ME ME ME". The caller, who couldn't wait to call, the answerer who couldn't wait to answer the call and the person being annoyed who thinks he has to the right to be undisturbed by other people.
First the caller, 99% of calls are unneeded and could easily have waited until a later time. People keep bringing up emergency calls, I am willing to bet my entire income for the rest of my life that if you measured all the calls that are of a real emergency nature (911 or even telling someone their wife is about to give birth) that would not even come to a whole percentage of mobile phone calls. You do NOT have to call that other person at night when you see them next day. You may want too, and technology has made it possible but their is NO NEED. Learn to understand the difference between NEED and DESIRE.
Then there is the person answering. YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT. The entire rest of the world does NOT have to be put on hold for your convenience. Sometimes you got to make choices what to do, and this means you can't be doing something else. Lets say you think you should answer the phone in a theather, should the actors do the same? Do you want your doctor to answers his wifes call while he is working on your hearth? So why do you NEED to answer that phone NOW. I think this is part of a larger social disfunction. Take MMO's you see people complain that they take large chunks of time, and that people get upset if you leave in the middle of a raid. Well yeah, but how many of you would walk out of the middle of a say a football game? If you are in any kind of a race, do you really expect all the others to stop because your phone is ringing? I think the mobile phone is just a symptom of the larger development that some people think, the world revolves around me (they are wrong, it revolves around me) and that everyone else should fit themselves to their need.
But finally there is also the person who is offended. There is NO law, NO right, to be undisturbed. Yes there are some laws that forbid certain disturbances, anti-honking laws for instance that dictate you can only use your car horn for alerting of impending danger, but talking in public is not among them. People are free to talk in public transport. You get people who get upset by headphones being too loud who complain that they can't hear themselves talking. Eh, your talking and the headphone are BOTH interfering with my peace and quiet. Unless we introduce a law to SHUT THE FUCK UP and produce NO noise whatsoever, public transport is NOT a place of peace and quiet. Your desire for peace and quiet is NOT a right. You are just as much an asshole for wanting everyone else to be silent as the person making a noise.
It is often said that human beings are social animals, so lets see some social animals shall we? Ooh, what a lot of fighting and squabiling in even small groups. We are NOT ants who really work together, we are a pack of monkeys who are constantly fighting over everything but without a leader who can just beat the crap out of anyone who really gets out of line.
Modern techonology just brings it out more. We also allowed the controlling elements of our society to become weak and feeble. We think we are mature adults who don't need a big brother watching us, while we behave as little spoiled brats.
A simple solution exists to this whole mobile phone dilemma. Since REAL emergency calls are so rare, it would have been very easy to put in as part of the system a protocol for dealing with them. In restricted areas you would broadcast a signal "emergency only". The caller would have to send the signal that it is an emer
You seem obsessed with the US of A. Explain your troll in the light that inconsidered cell phone use is HATED in all other parts of the world as well. I know it may come as a shock, but america is NOT the world. Furthermore this exact same anti-cellphone hatred appears everywhere else. The companies mentioned in the Times article sell SOME of their products to US customers, they main dealings are however in their country of origin. England and India respectivly.
Basic logic people. If it rains I carry an umbrella, this does not lead to, if I carry an umbrella, it rains. It does not even mean that it can't be raining if I am not carrying an umbrella.
You mention chess. Alright, Deep Blue. Lets challenge deep blue. Half way through the game, we switch the board, introduce a new rule. Jumble the pieces up and tell it to pick them up and put them in the correct place again.
NOT a challenge for a human being. Deep Blue? Will fail totally, unable to even understand the commands.
AI is NOT the same thing as doing a simple task over and over again really fast. Laser range finders are nothing new, ACTING upon that information, THAT is the challenge. Especially when that information is not constant and reliable.
Kasparov showed that when he switched styles constantly, Deep Blue was unable to cope. That Kasparov went on to beat Deep Blue is often forgotten. It however showed very clearly that Deep Blue had been setup by HUMANS to beat Kasparov, when he became another player by changing style, the computer could not cope, it had no AI to deal with this.
It reminds me of futurama and robot blurns ball. Putting a howitzer on the field does NOT prove robots are good pitchers. IF Deep Blue could be put in front of a `checkers board and pick that game up in seconds, like a human could, then switch to TicTacToe and then play some poker ALL without human input, then I would be impressed.
You link computing power with intelligence, clearly this means you now NOTHING about programming. Doom does NOT become F.E.A.R. by simply running it on a faster CPU.
SOMEBODY has to write the program that becomes the AI. It REALLY does not matter that much how fast the underlying hardware is that executes that program, the simple fact is that AI code right now just ain't that smart. Not even if an AI can take weeks to calculate can it come anywhere close to what a human can do in terms of reasoning with the input available.
A smart program that is just very slow would be an amazing breakthrough and if that happened then all we need to do is wait for computers to get faster, but right now the AI code just ain't there. If it was, it would long since have been given a supercomputer to run on.
These robots in the challenge have a simple task that any human can do, "see" the enviroment, and act upon that information. For years this has been attempted and the systems just ain't getting any better despite the fact that computing power has skyrocketed. Simply put, no code exists that can take a video image and turn that reliably, consistently in information that tells the decision making software what the enviroment is like.
For instance, the detection systems have problems with blue colored cars against asfalt. Consider a human being, put a car painted blue against a background painted the exact same color in blue lighting so it totally blends in. WOuldn't fool a human for a second since we would still see the windshields and through it the interior of the car and reason out that there must be car there even if we cannot see the bodywork.
Same with an other obstacle, a barrier hanging in the air, the teams actually complained about this because they thought all the barriers would be on the ground. This shows you why AI programming is so bad, the programmers are morons, the barrier involved is very common at road blocks. The car, designed and programmed to only scan the ground is unable to determine that a barrier might higher up.
Worse, when it hits it, it can't react to it. The cars have to be stopped, not one of the cars, not even that best was able to simply stop, backup and try a different course.
You can throw more GHZ at it, but all that will give you is faster dumbness.
What happens when a computer has the same complexity as the brain? You will have a very fast, braindead piece of machinery. It is the programming that matters.
Your anology to flying is flawed, we knew that things could fly, gliders had been around for ages, all that was needed for a power source that had good enough power to weight ratio. We do NOT have the AI code or any idea how to make it. Compare it to say faster then light travel. We don't know how, so claiming that if only we develop an infinite source of energy we can do it, is flawed.
There is NO economy, you can steal to your hearts content and amass a fortune without ever having to spend a dime. This is barely acceptable for a single player game, but in multiplayer it would simply be unworkable.
They would have to do a lot of work to turn say Oblivion into an MMO. For one thing, just how long it took them to develop it, huge land? My ass, it is tiny by MMO standards.
The thing about thinking of cool things for an MMO is to then try to fit them in the game, this includes thinking on how they affect the economy, how they can be exploited, and wether they are still fun to do after six months.
Take pickpocketing, how much loot should be dropped. If you are really good should be you be able to pickpocket the king? Instantly turning you superrich? Then how do we provide you with a money drain. Once you pickpocketed everyone, what do you do next? Won't this be out of balance with other players who have to form huge armies to storm the castle to get the same loot?
LOTRO has pickpocketing for burglars, one of the things they did was to give burglars a seperate loot table, so they would NOT be stealing the loot you get from the kill. Subtle detail, but can you imagine how other players would feel if all the mobs had been picked clean?
But you do seem to have an issue with people escaping reality. Sorry mate, but that is entertainment for you. 6 billion people can't be wrong. ALL entertainment is about escaping reality. It is why people read books, watch movies, even listen to music.
HOW you do it, well that is matter of taste, some people swoon for a romantic movie where people never have morning breath, some people thrill to action movies where people never are hold accountable for their actions. It varies and same with game players, some prefer to play roles different from what they are, other prefer to turn into a super soldier and win a war single handed.
Tastes differ.
The biggest problem MMO's face it the translation from SINGLE player to MULTI player. MMO's do not have savepoints or a pause.
Think a moment about this. When the phone rings and forces you to escape your break from reality, you can save any single player game. YOu can ever drop out of a simple multiplayer deathmatch, but do so while grouped with other people and you are wasting their time while they wait.
MS Flightsimulator is a game that allows you to fly all over the world, if you fancy it, you can do a transatlanctic crossing in realtime. Might be a bit boring, but who are we too judge. However the game does NOT dictate that you do those 8 hours in one sitting. You can save when you want, pause when you want so if you fly those 8 hours in a single day, a weekend or a year, the game does NOT care. It even provides speed increases so you can it in less time.
An MMO can't do that. By its nature it can't just stop the world to suit the schedule of a single player.
This really ain't all that odd, if you are taking part in a soccer match, the referee won't hold up the entire game because your phone is ringing. And sorry if you are running a marathon, leaving it to walk your dog will get you disqualified.
Ultimately gamers must themselves decide what time they are willing to commit, but then also accept the consequences. Do not expect to be taken on a raid if you can only spare 5 minutes. On the other hand accept that the number of people who can spare hours on end, are going to be a minority.
Again, this ain't odd, even in most real clubs, the amount of time invested in club activities varies widely. Yet in real life we accept that if you can only spare an hour a week for a club, you do NOT run for a leadership position.
Choices, make them but also learn to live by them.
That is why I posted it. FUN is being able to do things to be challenged, to do something that is hard to do.
Fun is NOT mindlessly killing the same thing over and over. The self made quest I described is long and hard BUT it has one massive goal that at the end YOU managed to pull off.
Compare this with more casual games where you spend the same amount of time, but do it just travelling around. A new area in LOTRO is evendim, it is a map dominated by a HUGE lake in the center. Several quests have you crossing that lake, there is nothing in it and swimming is slow. You basically aim your character for the distant shore, start swimming and come back 5 minutes later to see if you arrived yet.
I rather have that lake crossing be an hour long hard battle, and do it ONCE, then those constant swims as quests send you there and back again.
But hey different tastes will always happen. We shall see if A this game does supply true casual gaming (I doubt it) and B if it is a success.
The problem with the idea of a casual MMO
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Tabula Rasa Goes Live
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It doesn't work. You can kick a ball for 5 minutes and call it casual soccer. You can't run a 5 minute run and call it a marathon.
Somethings just take time and a adventure is one of them.
One part of an adventure is that you go into dangerous lands, far from your home and safety, battling against increasing odds until finally you reach your goal.
That takes time.
Doesn't mean ALL games have to long drawn out affairs, but a chess game without the full set of piece just ain't a chess game, playing patience with only 10 cards will go a lot quicker but is hardly to be called a game anymore.
Take for instance distance, how far should a target zone be from a player. A 1 minute hop? A five minute walk? A 30 minute hike? A days worth of travelling? Or a venture that takes even the most rabid player days to accomplish.
WHAT give the richer gameplay. Sadly most MMO's seem to think 30 minute hike that has maybe 1 minute worth of gameplay but feels like days is the best option.
Lord of the Rings Online suffers from this, the entire world seems far too small, to the point of being silly. Enemy camps are so close to city they are within arrow range of each others. With the front a few minutes walk away, live continues on peacefully in bree. etc etc.
At the same time quests have you going all over the place.
The worsed of what I listed above, long travel but no sense of adventure.
Back to an old maligned game, Star Wars Galaxies, pre-doc-buffs. Live was dangerous back then and equipment expensive. Once in a while, some brave idiots, eh adventures, set out to hunt rancors, gathering people at a space port for a dangerous mission. Travelling there was a short trip through space (instant travel) but the space ship only left once every 30 minutes. This gave a real sense of preparing for a journey. Miss that ride and you would not make it.
Once you arrived you were on a planet so dark and hostile it had only two small outposts. Some rich but clueless companions would attempt to mount their speederbikes, the more experienced would call them idiots and tell them to put it away or loose it. Speederbikes just serve as extra roughage on Dathomir. Forget about being dismounted, you could loose that expensive vehicle in an instant. Disabled and now probably miles from your mates. You hunt rancors on foot.
Now it depended, were you after money OR were you looting for resources, back then people still cared and that meant a trip to rancor valley. An well deserved name, for a large area to the NW. Better have picked the right spaceport to travel to, or now you had a long distance to traverse to catch up with your group.
If you were lucky, you could buy some last minute supplies from the local bazaar at outrageous prices (I know they were outragous, I put them on there, Ah, sweet money) but with a 30 minute wait there was no hopping back for supplies. You were either ready or left behind. Catch up? Sure kid. You do that.
Then you sat out on a long journey, trying to avoid most things, fightig when needed trying to not attract more. Resting from time to time to wait out poisons and re-orgnaize equipment. If the medic was running out you hoped the ranger was good enough to have the biggest camp available so he could craft new stims with the harvested materials. If not. Well, continue on with what available, to costly to return now.
And then rancor valley, every way you looked, rancors, with just a handfull of giant beasts who you could count on not to attack you, they provided safety of a sort, since they would attack any rancors that came close, as long as you made sure not to accidently attack them.
Then the long hunt would begin, trying to find the right ones, perhaps circling out a young one for a beast master to train. Avoiding the most lethal ones and always on the look out for some force users like nightwitches and more dangerous foes.
Once you were done with the hunt. Well know you have to make your way back, low on supplies
Animals did NOT carry either money OR items. Except rancors, they had the odd piece of equipment. That was clearly there because, well they had eaten whatever was wearing it at the time:)
Ah SWG's, nice idea, lousy execution.
Tabula Rasa? An average Joe game? But I am not an average Joe, oh well next game please.
Players who do not want to learn the meaning of gold farming. Well, that surely is up to the support staff to keep gold farmers out isn't it? Has this game got some magic defence against them? Else players will learn soon enough what gold farming means.
As for damage per second, the moment the game has a boss that doesn't drop with a single shot, players will know the meaning of that too. They realize it the moment they note that with character A it takes 30 seconds of shooting and with B it takes four and half ours (that is my captain from lotro speaking).
Don't get me wrong, I think there is room for a different MMO, but I also heard it all before. DELIVER! So far I heard nobody who just played the game claim it was any better then everything else. And no, being sci-fi ain't enough for me. I frankly don't give a hoot about the setting. GAMEPLAY! Give me more, give me better and give me stuff to do. Frankly give me back SWG. Pre doc-buff.
I am sorry, but I do not want to pay $0.99 for a DRMed music file that I can only use on so many systems, etc.
Three statements in one sentence always leads to problems. The WMA files from Napster, as you later admit yourselve, are DRMed and run on only so many systems. Your claims of the DRM being easy to strip are meaningless, you can do it with equal ease with iTunes music. IF you are willing to violate US law as a US citizen, then both formats can be easily converted to non-drm formats (mp3) that plays on the fast majority of systems.
So we are left with your complaint that music at iTunes costs 0.99 per song.
How does this cost work out in the long run. The iTunes song is yours for "life". If napster closes, there goes your music collection. ALL your downloaded music, GONE. For good.
Ah but your ripped it (and made yourselve a criminal by doing so) although you do claim that if you stop paying the subscription, you will delete those MP3's. Right. Sure, I believe that. There must be an honest person among us. Perhaps you are it.
But what if you don't cancel, but Napster goes out of business. YOU may still be willing to pay, but you can't. Bye bye collection.
As for spreading the good word, IT IS AGAINST US LAW and the RIAA does prosecute people. You may not agree with the law, but civil disobedience sucks when you are the one being made an example off.
I just wish you had left the DRM part out of your argument and concentrated simply on value for money. Is 15 bucks per month enough to rent music (It isn't unlike a library card and I think most of accept that) OR do we pay perhaps more per song but it is our song.
Currently both models suck. 99 cents for a few megabytes of data is idiotic next to the cost of production. Loosing all your songs because a company goes out of business in a format that doesn't work on the majority of players sucks as well.
Frankly the entire industry is screwed up. The music industry has become so obsesses with fat profits, that they are unable to see that by simply lowering the price they can make theft totally undesirable.
Say that for 15 bucks per month you could download ANY music you wanted in the format you desired. WHY BOTHER WITH FILESHARING THEN? Oh sure, there will be small percentage who will do so anyway, but it should be almost trivial to get most of the western world to sign up just by putting ALL music in the system, ALL means ALL, including "bootlegs" classical music and rare recordings.
A bug free or complete MMO does NOT exist. Although new standards are being set, quit frankly we can only say that MMO's are improving at the moment because what came before was so god awfull.
I am not just talking Ultima Online or Everquest or Star Wars Galaxies here. WoW was a bugged piece of crap as well, it is only in comparison with what came before that it seemed okay. Really, go through to patch notes and see just how much had to be fixed.
Same thing with Lord of the Rings Online, reviewed as the least bugged MMO in history. Does that mean it is bug free? No, it is like how windows users say XP is stable, as in it didn't crash once, during the posting of their comment.
Now we got an MMO company saying they need more time. Is that good or bad? Frankly no MMO ever launched on time, so it being delayed is about as much news as that the sun came up this morning. Will they really be fixing things that need to be fixed so the forums won't be filled with bugs within a day of launch? It is possible. Unlikely, but it is possible.
Since MMO companies have a long history of launching with bugs, how serious are the bugs still in the game that force it to be delayed. Game crippling bugs? Why are they still there after all this time? Is it gameplay instead that is flawed? Wouldn't be the first time that an MMO went through years of development only to realize at the last moment the game just didn't work.
I seen some comments in other forums that the game balancing ain't complete yet, but perhaps, just perhaps this company is finally trying to achieve what nobody has done before. A bug free MMO launch.
No, I don't believe it either, but hey, it is possible.
Not when all you have to do is paint your car blue and it can't be detected, or the contestant claim that obstacles should be on the ground and NOT of a railroad crossing type (bar hanging in the air).
Oh yeah, that is some excellent tech,it only works if we can blue. And it is apparently totally acceptable that the car only looks at the ground, not up in the air (how will it deal with tunners/bridges/powerlines?
Yes, it is cute and all, but frankly we have been seeing this tech for a long time now and it just does not seem to be getting any better. None of the robots seem capable of really "seeing" their enviroment. They have sensors that switch between states if something pre-exepected comes in range. Not nearly good enough for real life use.
We have robot systems that can work in controlled enviroments, but that ain't the contest here. Remember what we are trying to do here, get vehicles to drive around urban settings in times of war. The unexpected is expected. How will any of these things cope if they can't even deal with normal things that just weren't explicitly listed?
They only started using base 10 relatively recently. I can't tell you the exact date things started to change, somewhere in the 90's but I am 100% certain that the first HD's for home computing labelled in base 2. They had to offcourse because it is only logical as EVERYONE else used that as well.
Then some marketting genius probably noticed that their new disk was just shy of somemagic number in base 2, but reached it in base 10. But in the early days HD makers simply respected convention.
Computers were working with powers of 2 LONG before HD's were invented.
It is just the way things are done, and it seems pretty clear why HD makers use base 10 instead of what is widely accepted, it makes their drives seem bigger.
I can't think of a single OS in 20 years of computing that does not go 1024 bytes is 1 kilobyte.
Imagine if the entire world car used miles but suddenly the petrol industry decided to use kilometers instead. It would then look as if their distance per gallon was a lot better then it really is.
It is a fraud and Seagate knows it, else they would have let it come to court. Stop being such a tool.
Cause and effect, did WoW make you a good leader because you were a succesfull guild leader OR where you a succesfull guild leader because you were already a good leader?
Winning the olympics improves your condition, why yeah, but some might say that having an excellent condition comes BEFORE you win the olympics.
I must admit, I like PUG's (Pick up groups, grouping with strangers) because they can be a lot of fun to see how different people play. You get some amazing idiots. The biggest I am currently faced with is pulling in Lotro. The hardest quests in Lotro don't require pulling, you are clearing an area, not trying to kill X of Y. Since the enemies are either far enough apart to not alert each other, OR so close you pull everything anyway, the best attack is to charge in with melee.
There is another reason for this. In LOTRO hunters are NOT good at melee. They are very good at damage, in fact they are the primary nuke class. This means that if a hunter pulls and criticals that the guardian (tank) has a hell of a job getting agro back. Meanwhile the minstrel (healer) has to spam heal to keep the hunter alive, creating even more agro.
Worse, most mobs in LOTRO consist of melee AND ranged, YOU CAN'T PULL RANGED, they simply shoot back. Ranged damage is often far more lethal, especially since a lot of people are incapable of spotting it. Most guardians can see it if a enemy starts beating up the support players but are unable to spot if they are being killed very fast by a hail of arrows.
Worse, the guardian and champion who both like enemies to be clumped together now got to pull the melee of the puller, then run to the archer to force it in melee mode, hoping the melee stays on them
DO NOT PULL
DO NOT PULL
DO NOT PULL
It is fun to see the players that know this, who have managed to learn that NOT all games play the same and when a certain tactic should be used and when it should not.
But I very much doubt that MMO's can teach you this. The reason? I seen to many player who sucked at level 1 and still suck at level 50. The good ones just stay good.
You can see a similar thing in IT, while the number of people who grow up with computers is on the increase, the number of people who actually know how they work is decreasing. It is getting almost impossible to hire developers who REALLY understand programming. I have had to deal with programmers who didn't even understand basic logic. They could use it, but only as long they got it right by accident, they could not spot bugs introduced by logical errors. The most bizarre case had to do with 0 == false. That does NOT mean 1 == true. Even if you accept that it sure as hell don't mean true == 1.
Let me just confirm my suspicion with you, do you in real life before you started working take the leadership role in say your class? A club? I think so.
Calling your enemies dogs and infidels, inferior beings who deserve to die because God said so? That has worked very well in the past and is still actively used.
Getting your own side to view the enemy as less then human, yeah lets blame that on the americans and video games, it is not like that hasn't happened since mankind decided there was US and THEM.
Slashdot Mirror
If he did, MS would have made ONE version of the 360. Does he really think he can get away for 7 years with a console without a harddisk for that long? Does he really think DVD's are going to be a big enough storage option for that long?
MS has set themselves up to have a constant stream of 360 setups that won't be good enough to play new releases. A game will need a HD, a game will need HD-DVD and whatever else MS WILL decide to add in the future. Make NO mistake about it. MS will find it impossible to resist to release newer 'better' versions of the 360.
Then there is the hardware itself, current generation consoles are obsolete already compared to the PC. Even a modest PC gaming rig will have more video memory then consoles have for TOTAL memory.
Does this matter? Can you say MMORPG? That is one big cash machine in the game industry but so far there has been little luck getting it too run on consoles. That is because in a MMORPG you never really know what is going to happen next. They are memory hogs because they need to have lots of data loaded all the time.
In a more traditional game, no matter how large the level, it is more or less up to the designer WHAT is actually in that level. In a MMORPG (or for that matter a modded game like The Sims or Oblivion) the contents of a level can skyrocket simply because of varation.
I can come across several dozen people each in outfits with their own textures.
Stream load that!
It is one of the reasons why user mods to games like The Sims and Oblivion and Never Winter Nights seem to always include higher resolution textures and more style choices. Why didn't the company include them from the start? Because their minimum requirements would have skyrocketed. My 'pimped' oblivion makes the original look like morrowind but the cost in hardware is extreem.
We all seen how PC games that got the console treatment had to be butchered to deal with the limitations of obsolete hardware. Deus Ex 2 anyone? Why can't I access the huge amount of user mods on the console versions of Oblivion? Where is the user commonity of the Console version of The Sims?
7 years is a long time for the 360 but more importantly Microsoft. Sony is a different company then MS, it (used to be at least) is a hardware company. MS is a software company, and I think MS will find it impossible to resist pushing updates.
The proof? The lifespan of the x-box. It was DEAD the moment the 360 was released, Sony is still actively working on the PS2. This despite the fact that the x-box was a younger machine.
Hardware limitations aside, MS is just not a company that can support a product for so long without new must have features being slipped in. When they see that PC gaming (in which they after all have a very important role) is overtaking their console gaming division in capabilities they WILL release a new 360 with more memory or something, effectivly ending the life of previous models.
But hey, if they don't that is good new too, I am looking forward as a PC snob of half a decade of looking down on console gamers and their quant old relics again.
Give me your email and I will see you get some pointers on how to deal with your eh.. weakness. Don't worry it happens to all men, or so I hear. Not me offcourse.
No monthy python references and no point about smoking bans, instead I want to talk about his idea.
Does the mturk system allow you to test an idea. No.
The answer should be bloody obvious, it is the yes-man problem and the fact that most suck at a self criticism. The yes-man problem comes from the fact that you PAY for answers that you "approve", therefore the people trying to answer will have a motivation to tell you what they think you want to hear.
Then comes your own capability to see an answer that goes against what you want to hear as being correct. This is a flaw we all have and it bites us in the ass constantly, we just don't want to hear we are wrong. Not even if you are paying for it. To touch on the asked question, you still have smokers denying the dangers of smoking even as they are dying of cancer. It doesn't matter how "right" the doctor and anyone else is, they don't want to hear.
Finally comes the trickiest, even if you know the answer (and then why are you asking it) what makes you think mturk workers know the answer. From what I read about it they are not exactly the brightest bulbs or they wouldn't be working for pennies. I would suggest that you are tapping a very odd barrel of workers here. Most definitly a cross section of society as most people would see the salary and laugh.
The idea itself is not without merit, but at best you could use it as cheap editor, very cheap, to find obvious flaws in your article. Perhaps slashdot should use it to correct spelling errors, RTFA and dupe detection. As way to come up with the "truth", no. Might as well hold an election and simply go with the hype of the day.
But I must have wandered into the 108th upperclass twit of the year show.
Just luck I suppose we are not in any danger of the world deadliest joke in these parts.
This isn't Nintendo Japan, this is Nintendo United States of America. The article briefly mentions it, Nintendo of America NOA.
This is an important difference, this story is nothing new, and if you are willing too google a bit you can easily find other examples of NOA censoring games. INCLUDING N games, Nintendo of America EVEN censored Nintendo games from japan. http://www.filibustercartoons.com/Nintendo.php (google NOA censoring) for instance shows several games in their original japanese release and the censored US release.
It is a US thing. Although the rest of the world seems eager to catch up. Remember kids, nudity is bad, violence against those who are different is good, as long as you don't say it out loud.
They observed that female avatars were less guarding about their personal space then males, a behaviour apparently the same as in real life.
The flaw? Female avatars do NOT have to be controlled by a female user.
Would a male playing a female mimick this behaviour? IF that is the case, that would make a far more intresting study. If it isn't then their measurements are flawed since they cannot tell what sex a user really is.
For instance, much is made of the fact that the woman is a doctor, from a family of doctors who apparently are well off, so she is not a gold digger.
Except that they met while she worked as a translator for a dating service. A dating service involving a russian female and an american male, can you say mail order bride?
Mail order brides are just a small step away from the human trade, I am not saying that ALL of them are criminal, but it is a grey area.
Why does a doctor work for such an agency? That automatically sends alarm bells ringing.
On the other hand, why was he living out of his car? And why remove a seat to do so? If he was that poor that he could not afford to rent even a single room, surely he could not afford to vandalise his car either.
The fact that the father warned his son of suspicious stangers sound weird as well. Who would want to follow him? Mail order bride agencies are often shady but they are in the business of getting russian women hooked up for a fee, not murder or trailing people. Fake russian papers, sure, operations on american soil, no.
Then there is the money he carried. Why would he need to carry the money with him? Russia doesn't have banks? Russians prefer to be paid in dollars? Did he also have his plane ticket already since he claims it was for his russian employers (was he going to mail the cash?)
Truly, truth is stranger then fiction. If you tried turning this into a manuscript your editor would tell you to stop being silly.
I just wish reporters would start to actually question what people told them.
If anything characterizes the 21st century, its our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people, said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.
Or put more simply three people are involved here who think "ME ME ME". The caller, who couldn't wait to call, the answerer who couldn't wait to answer the call and the person being annoyed who thinks he has to the right to be undisturbed by other people.
First the caller, 99% of calls are unneeded and could easily have waited until a later time. People keep bringing up emergency calls, I am willing to bet my entire income for the rest of my life that if you measured all the calls that are of a real emergency nature (911 or even telling someone their wife is about to give birth) that would not even come to a whole percentage of mobile phone calls. You do NOT have to call that other person at night when you see them next day. You may want too, and technology has made it possible but their is NO NEED. Learn to understand the difference between NEED and DESIRE.
Then there is the person answering. YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT. The entire rest of the world does NOT have to be put on hold for your convenience. Sometimes you got to make choices what to do, and this means you can't be doing something else. Lets say you think you should answer the phone in a theather, should the actors do the same? Do you want your doctor to answers his wifes call while he is working on your hearth? So why do you NEED to answer that phone NOW. I think this is part of a larger social disfunction. Take MMO's you see people complain that they take large chunks of time, and that people get upset if you leave in the middle of a raid. Well yeah, but how many of you would walk out of the middle of a say a football game? If you are in any kind of a race, do you really expect all the others to stop because your phone is ringing? I think the mobile phone is just a symptom of the larger development that some people think, the world revolves around me (they are wrong, it revolves around me) and that everyone else should fit themselves to their need.
But finally there is also the person who is offended. There is NO law, NO right, to be undisturbed. Yes there are some laws that forbid certain disturbances, anti-honking laws for instance that dictate you can only use your car horn for alerting of impending danger, but talking in public is not among them. People are free to talk in public transport. You get people who get upset by headphones being too loud who complain that they can't hear themselves talking. Eh, your talking and the headphone are BOTH interfering with my peace and quiet. Unless we introduce a law to SHUT THE FUCK UP and produce NO noise whatsoever, public transport is NOT a place of peace and quiet. Your desire for peace and quiet is NOT a right. You are just as much an asshole for wanting everyone else to be silent as the person making a noise.
It is often said that human beings are social animals, so lets see some social animals shall we? Ooh, what a lot of fighting and squabiling in even small groups. We are NOT ants who really work together, we are a pack of monkeys who are constantly fighting over everything but without a leader who can just beat the crap out of anyone who really gets out of line.
Modern techonology just brings it out more. We also allowed the controlling elements of our society to become weak and feeble. We think we are mature adults who don't need a big brother watching us, while we behave as little spoiled brats.
A simple solution exists to this whole mobile phone dilemma. Since REAL emergency calls are so rare, it would have been very easy to put in as part of the system a protocol for dealing with them. In restricted areas you would broadcast a signal "emergency only". The caller would have to send the signal that it is an emer
You seem obsessed with the US of A. Explain your troll in the light that inconsidered cell phone use is HATED in all other parts of the world as well. I know it may come as a shock, but america is NOT the world. Furthermore this exact same anti-cellphone hatred appears everywhere else. The companies mentioned in the Times article sell SOME of their products to US customers, they main dealings are however in their country of origin. England and India respectivly.
Your entire troll shotdown by a simple RTFA.
It says NOTHING about his sexual activity.
Basic logic people. If it rains I carry an umbrella, this does not lead to, if I carry an umbrella, it rains. It does not even mean that it can't be raining if I am not carrying an umbrella.
REAL men create their own universes, this second hand stuff is just for kiddies.
Grow a pair, GOD.
You mention chess. Alright, Deep Blue. Lets challenge deep blue. Half way through the game, we switch the board, introduce a new rule. Jumble the pieces up and tell it to pick them up and put them in the correct place again.
NOT a challenge for a human being. Deep Blue? Will fail totally, unable to even understand the commands.
AI is NOT the same thing as doing a simple task over and over again really fast. Laser range finders are nothing new, ACTING upon that information, THAT is the challenge. Especially when that information is not constant and reliable.
Kasparov showed that when he switched styles constantly, Deep Blue was unable to cope. That Kasparov went on to beat Deep Blue is often forgotten. It however showed very clearly that Deep Blue had been setup by HUMANS to beat Kasparov, when he became another player by changing style, the computer could not cope, it had no AI to deal with this.
It reminds me of futurama and robot blurns ball. Putting a howitzer on the field does NOT prove robots are good pitchers. IF Deep Blue could be put in front of a `checkers board and pick that game up in seconds, like a human could, then switch to TicTacToe and then play some poker ALL without human input, then I would be impressed.
You link computing power with intelligence, clearly this means you now NOTHING about programming. Doom does NOT become F.E.A.R. by simply running it on a faster CPU.
SOMEBODY has to write the program that becomes the AI. It REALLY does not matter that much how fast the underlying hardware is that executes that program, the simple fact is that AI code right now just ain't that smart. Not even if an AI can take weeks to calculate can it come anywhere close to what a human can do in terms of reasoning with the input available.
A smart program that is just very slow would be an amazing breakthrough and if that happened then all we need to do is wait for computers to get faster, but right now the AI code just ain't there. If it was, it would long since have been given a supercomputer to run on.
These robots in the challenge have a simple task that any human can do, "see" the enviroment, and act upon that information. For years this has been attempted and the systems just ain't getting any better despite the fact that computing power has skyrocketed. Simply put, no code exists that can take a video image and turn that reliably, consistently in information that tells the decision making software what the enviroment is like.
For instance, the detection systems have problems with blue colored cars against asfalt. Consider a human being, put a car painted blue against a background painted the exact same color in blue lighting so it totally blends in. WOuldn't fool a human for a second since we would still see the windshields and through it the interior of the car and reason out that there must be car there even if we cannot see the bodywork.
Same with an other obstacle, a barrier hanging in the air, the teams actually complained about this because they thought all the barriers would be on the ground. This shows you why AI programming is so bad, the programmers are morons, the barrier involved is very common at road blocks. The car, designed and programmed to only scan the ground is unable to determine that a barrier might higher up.
Worse, when it hits it, it can't react to it. The cars have to be stopped, not one of the cars, not even that best was able to simply stop, backup and try a different course.
You can throw more GHZ at it, but all that will give you is faster dumbness.
What happens when a computer has the same complexity as the brain? You will have a very fast, braindead piece of machinery. It is the programming that matters.
Your anology to flying is flawed, we knew that things could fly, gliders had been around for ages, all that was needed for a power source that had good enough power to weight ratio. We do NOT have the AI code or any idea how to make it. Compare it to say faster then light travel. We don't know how, so claiming that if only we develop an infinite source of energy we can do it, is flawed.
There is NO economy, you can steal to your hearts content and amass a fortune without ever having to spend a dime. This is barely acceptable for a single player game, but in multiplayer it would simply be unworkable.
They would have to do a lot of work to turn say Oblivion into an MMO. For one thing, just how long it took them to develop it, huge land? My ass, it is tiny by MMO standards.
The thing about thinking of cool things for an MMO is to then try to fit them in the game, this includes thinking on how they affect the economy, how they can be exploited, and wether they are still fun to do after six months.
Take pickpocketing, how much loot should be dropped. If you are really good should be you be able to pickpocket the king? Instantly turning you superrich? Then how do we provide you with a money drain. Once you pickpocketed everyone, what do you do next? Won't this be out of balance with other players who have to form huge armies to storm the castle to get the same loot?
LOTRO has pickpocketing for burglars, one of the things they did was to give burglars a seperate loot table, so they would NOT be stealing the loot you get from the kill. Subtle detail, but can you imagine how other players would feel if all the mobs had been picked clean?
But you do seem to have an issue with people escaping reality. Sorry mate, but that is entertainment for you. 6 billion people can't be wrong. ALL entertainment is about escaping reality. It is why people read books, watch movies, even listen to music.
HOW you do it, well that is matter of taste, some people swoon for a romantic movie where people never have morning breath, some people thrill to action movies where people never are hold accountable for their actions. It varies and same with game players, some prefer to play roles different from what they are, other prefer to turn into a super soldier and win a war single handed.
Tastes differ.
The biggest problem MMO's face it the translation from SINGLE player to MULTI player. MMO's do not have savepoints or a pause.
Think a moment about this. When the phone rings and forces you to escape your break from reality, you can save any single player game. YOu can ever drop out of a simple multiplayer deathmatch, but do so while grouped with other people and you are wasting their time while they wait.
MS Flightsimulator is a game that allows you to fly all over the world, if you fancy it, you can do a transatlanctic crossing in realtime. Might be a bit boring, but who are we too judge. However the game does NOT dictate that you do those 8 hours in one sitting. You can save when you want, pause when you want so if you fly those 8 hours in a single day, a weekend or a year, the game does NOT care. It even provides speed increases so you can it in less time.
An MMO can't do that. By its nature it can't just stop the world to suit the schedule of a single player.
This really ain't all that odd, if you are taking part in a soccer match, the referee won't hold up the entire game because your phone is ringing. And sorry if you are running a marathon, leaving it to walk your dog will get you disqualified.
Ultimately gamers must themselves decide what time they are willing to commit, but then also accept the consequences. Do not expect to be taken on a raid if you can only spare 5 minutes. On the other hand accept that the number of people who can spare hours on end, are going to be a minority.
Again, this ain't odd, even in most real clubs, the amount of time invested in club activities varies widely. Yet in real life we accept that if you can only spare an hour a week for a club, you do NOT run for a leadership position.
Choices, make them but also learn to live by them.
That is why I posted it. FUN is being able to do things to be challenged, to do something that is hard to do.
Fun is NOT mindlessly killing the same thing over and over. The self made quest I described is long and hard BUT it has one massive goal that at the end YOU managed to pull off.
Compare this with more casual games where you spend the same amount of time, but do it just travelling around. A new area in LOTRO is evendim, it is a map dominated by a HUGE lake in the center. Several quests have you crossing that lake, there is nothing in it and swimming is slow. You basically aim your character for the distant shore, start swimming and come back 5 minutes later to see if you arrived yet.
I rather have that lake crossing be an hour long hard battle, and do it ONCE, then those constant swims as quests send you there and back again.
But hey different tastes will always happen. We shall see if A this game does supply true casual gaming (I doubt it) and B if it is a success.
It doesn't work. You can kick a ball for 5 minutes and call it casual soccer. You can't run a 5 minute run and call it a marathon.
Somethings just take time and a adventure is one of them.
One part of an adventure is that you go into dangerous lands, far from your home and safety, battling against increasing odds until finally you reach your goal.
That takes time.
Doesn't mean ALL games have to long drawn out affairs, but a chess game without the full set of piece just ain't a chess game, playing patience with only 10 cards will go a lot quicker but is hardly to be called a game anymore.
Take for instance distance, how far should a target zone be from a player. A 1 minute hop? A five minute walk? A 30 minute hike? A days worth of travelling? Or a venture that takes even the most rabid player days to accomplish.
WHAT give the richer gameplay. Sadly most MMO's seem to think 30 minute hike that has maybe 1 minute worth of gameplay but feels like days is the best option.
Lord of the Rings Online suffers from this, the entire world seems far too small, to the point of being silly. Enemy camps are so close to city they are within arrow range of each others. With the front a few minutes walk away, live continues on peacefully in bree. etc etc.
At the same time quests have you going all over the place.
The worsed of what I listed above, long travel but no sense of adventure.
Back to an old maligned game, Star Wars Galaxies, pre-doc-buffs. Live was dangerous back then and equipment expensive. Once in a while, some brave idiots, eh adventures, set out to hunt rancors, gathering people at a space port for a dangerous mission. Travelling there was a short trip through space (instant travel) but the space ship only left once every 30 minutes. This gave a real sense of preparing for a journey. Miss that ride and you would not make it.
Once you arrived you were on a planet so dark and hostile it had only two small outposts. Some rich but clueless companions would attempt to mount their speederbikes, the more experienced would call them idiots and tell them to put it away or loose it. Speederbikes just serve as extra roughage on Dathomir. Forget about being dismounted, you could loose that expensive vehicle in an instant. Disabled and now probably miles from your mates. You hunt rancors on foot.
Now it depended, were you after money OR were you looting for resources, back then people still cared and that meant a trip to rancor valley. An well deserved name, for a large area to the NW. Better have picked the right spaceport to travel to, or now you had a long distance to traverse to catch up with your group.
If you were lucky, you could buy some last minute supplies from the local bazaar at outrageous prices (I know they were outragous, I put them on there, Ah, sweet money) but with a 30 minute wait there was no hopping back for supplies. You were either ready or left behind. Catch up? Sure kid. You do that.
Then you sat out on a long journey, trying to avoid most things, fightig when needed trying to not attract more. Resting from time to time to wait out poisons and re-orgnaize equipment. If the medic was running out you hoped the ranger was good enough to have the biggest camp available so he could craft new stims with the harvested materials. If not. Well, continue on with what available, to costly to return now.
And then rancor valley, every way you looked, rancors, with just a handfull of giant beasts who you could count on not to attack you, they provided safety of a sort, since they would attack any rancors that came close, as long as you made sure not to accidently attack them.
Then the long hunt would begin, trying to find the right ones, perhaps circling out a young one for a beast master to train. Avoiding the most lethal ones and always on the look out for some force users like nightwitches and more dangerous foes.
Once you were done with the hunt. Well know you have to make your way back, low on supplies
Animals did NOT carry either money OR items. Except rancors, they had the odd piece of equipment. That was clearly there because, well they had eaten whatever was wearing it at the time :)
Ah SWG's, nice idea, lousy execution.
Tabula Rasa? An average Joe game? But I am not an average Joe, oh well next game please.
Players who do not want to learn the meaning of gold farming. Well, that surely is up to the support staff to keep gold farmers out isn't it? Has this game got some magic defence against them? Else players will learn soon enough what gold farming means.
As for damage per second, the moment the game has a boss that doesn't drop with a single shot, players will know the meaning of that too. They realize it the moment they note that with character A it takes 30 seconds of shooting and with B it takes four and half ours (that is my captain from lotro speaking).
Don't get me wrong, I think there is room for a different MMO, but I also heard it all before. DELIVER! So far I heard nobody who just played the game claim it was any better then everything else. And no, being sci-fi ain't enough for me. I frankly don't give a hoot about the setting. GAMEPLAY! Give me more, give me better and give me stuff to do. Frankly give me back SWG. Pre doc-buff.
I am sorry, but I do not want to pay $0.99 for a DRMed music file that I can only use on so many systems, etc.
Three statements in one sentence always leads to problems. The WMA files from Napster, as you later admit yourselve, are DRMed and run on only so many systems. Your claims of the DRM being easy to strip are meaningless, you can do it with equal ease with iTunes music. IF you are willing to violate US law as a US citizen, then both formats can be easily converted to non-drm formats (mp3) that plays on the fast majority of systems.
So we are left with your complaint that music at iTunes costs 0.99 per song.
How does this cost work out in the long run. The iTunes song is yours for "life". If napster closes, there goes your music collection. ALL your downloaded music, GONE. For good.
Ah but your ripped it (and made yourselve a criminal by doing so) although you do claim that if you stop paying the subscription, you will delete those MP3's. Right. Sure, I believe that. There must be an honest person among us. Perhaps you are it.
But what if you don't cancel, but Napster goes out of business. YOU may still be willing to pay, but you can't. Bye bye collection.
As for spreading the good word, IT IS AGAINST US LAW and the RIAA does prosecute people. You may not agree with the law, but civil disobedience sucks when you are the one being made an example off.
I just wish you had left the DRM part out of your argument and concentrated simply on value for money. Is 15 bucks per month enough to rent music (It isn't unlike a library card and I think most of accept that) OR do we pay perhaps more per song but it is our song.
Currently both models suck. 99 cents for a few megabytes of data is idiotic next to the cost of production. Loosing all your songs because a company goes out of business in a format that doesn't work on the majority of players sucks as well.
Frankly the entire industry is screwed up. The music industry has become so obsesses with fat profits, that they are unable to see that by simply lowering the price they can make theft totally undesirable.
Say that for 15 bucks per month you could download ANY music you wanted in the format you desired. WHY BOTHER WITH FILESHARING THEN? Oh sure, there will be small percentage who will do so anyway, but it should be almost trivial to get most of the western world to sign up just by putting ALL music in the system, ALL means ALL, including "bootlegs" classical music and rare recordings.
A bug free or complete MMO does NOT exist. Although new standards are being set, quit frankly we can only say that MMO's are improving at the moment because what came before was so god awfull.
I am not just talking Ultima Online or Everquest or Star Wars Galaxies here. WoW was a bugged piece of crap as well, it is only in comparison with what came before that it seemed okay. Really, go through to patch notes and see just how much had to be fixed.
Same thing with Lord of the Rings Online, reviewed as the least bugged MMO in history. Does that mean it is bug free? No, it is like how windows users say XP is stable, as in it didn't crash once, during the posting of their comment.
Now we got an MMO company saying they need more time. Is that good or bad? Frankly no MMO ever launched on time, so it being delayed is about as much news as that the sun came up this morning. Will they really be fixing things that need to be fixed so the forums won't be filled with bugs within a day of launch? It is possible. Unlikely, but it is possible.
Since MMO companies have a long history of launching with bugs, how serious are the bugs still in the game that force it to be delayed. Game crippling bugs? Why are they still there after all this time? Is it gameplay instead that is flawed? Wouldn't be the first time that an MMO went through years of development only to realize at the last moment the game just didn't work.
I seen some comments in other forums that the game balancing ain't complete yet, but perhaps, just perhaps this company is finally trying to achieve what nobody has done before. A bug free MMO launch.
No, I don't believe it either, but hey, it is possible.
Not when all you have to do is paint your car blue and it can't be detected, or the contestant claim that obstacles should be on the ground and NOT of a railroad crossing type (bar hanging in the air).
Oh yeah, that is some excellent tech,it only works if we can blue. And it is apparently totally acceptable that the car only looks at the ground, not up in the air (how will it deal with tunners/bridges/powerlines?
Yes, it is cute and all, but frankly we have been seeing this tech for a long time now and it just does not seem to be getting any better. None of the robots seem capable of really "seeing" their enviroment. They have sensors that switch between states if something pre-exepected comes in range. Not nearly good enough for real life use.
We have robot systems that can work in controlled enviroments, but that ain't the contest here. Remember what we are trying to do here, get vehicles to drive around urban settings in times of war. The unexpected is expected. How will any of these things cope if they can't even deal with normal things that just weren't explicitly listed?
They only started using base 10 relatively recently. I can't tell you the exact date things started to change, somewhere in the 90's but I am 100% certain that the first HD's for home computing labelled in base 2. They had to offcourse because it is only logical as EVERYONE else used that as well.
Then some marketting genius probably noticed that their new disk was just shy of somemagic number in base 2, but reached it in base 10. But in the early days HD makers simply respected convention.
Computers were working with powers of 2 LONG before HD's were invented.
It is just the way things are done, and it seems pretty clear why HD makers use base 10 instead of what is widely accepted, it makes their drives seem bigger.
I can't think of a single OS in 20 years of computing that does not go 1024 bytes is 1 kilobyte.
Imagine if the entire world car used miles but suddenly the petrol industry decided to use kilometers instead. It would then look as if their distance per gallon was a lot better then it really is.
It is a fraud and Seagate knows it, else they would have let it come to court. Stop being such a tool.
Or were you already a leader type?
Cause and effect, did WoW make you a good leader because you were a succesfull guild leader OR where you a succesfull guild leader because you were already a good leader?
Winning the olympics improves your condition, why yeah, but some might say that having an excellent condition comes BEFORE you win the olympics.
I must admit, I like PUG's (Pick up groups, grouping with strangers) because they can be a lot of fun to see how different people play. You get some amazing idiots. The biggest I am currently faced with is pulling in Lotro. The hardest quests in Lotro don't require pulling, you are clearing an area, not trying to kill X of Y. Since the enemies are either far enough apart to not alert each other, OR so close you pull everything anyway, the best attack is to charge in with melee.
There is another reason for this. In LOTRO hunters are NOT good at melee. They are very good at damage, in fact they are the primary nuke class. This means that if a hunter pulls and criticals that the guardian (tank) has a hell of a job getting agro back. Meanwhile the minstrel (healer) has to spam heal to keep the hunter alive, creating even more agro.
Worse, most mobs in LOTRO consist of melee AND ranged, YOU CAN'T PULL RANGED, they simply shoot back. Ranged damage is often far more lethal, especially since a lot of people are incapable of spotting it. Most guardians can see it if a enemy starts beating up the support players but are unable to spot if they are being killed very fast by a hail of arrows.
Worse, the guardian and champion who both like enemies to be clumped together now got to pull the melee of the puller, then run to the archer to force it in melee mode, hoping the melee stays on them
DO NOT PULL
DO NOT PULL
DO NOT PULL
It is fun to see the players that know this, who have managed to learn that NOT all games play the same and when a certain tactic should be used and when it should not.
But I very much doubt that MMO's can teach you this. The reason? I seen to many player who sucked at level 1 and still suck at level 50. The good ones just stay good.
You can see a similar thing in IT, while the number of people who grow up with computers is on the increase, the number of people who actually know how they work is decreasing. It is getting almost impossible to hire developers who REALLY understand programming. I have had to deal with programmers who didn't even understand basic logic. They could use it, but only as long they got it right by accident, they could not spot bugs introduced by logical errors. The most bizarre case had to do with 0 == false. That does NOT mean 1 == true. Even if you accept that it sure as hell don't mean true == 1.
Let me just confirm my suspicion with you, do you in real life before you started working take the leadership role in say your class? A club? I think so.
Calling your enemies dogs and infidels, inferior beings who deserve to die because God said so? That has worked very well in the past and is still actively used.
Getting your own side to view the enemy as less then human, yeah lets blame that on the americans and video games, it is not like that hasn't happened since mankind decided there was US and THEM.