And as I explained, the games tend to run together. Frankly I couldn't recall if that item damage was in WoW or if I recalled it from another game.
Anyway, it was pretty trivial, if you die that much (was it about 10% damange meaning you had to die 10 times before it affects you) you are in the wrong group. The repair costs were pretty low so the only effect was that it punished you if you were dying an extreme amount. In my experience it was only an effect on players who didn't just repair after a session and found themselves going into a raid with badly damaged equipment. Then again, this is an MMO staple.
But no I didn't play the game too much. Not because of WoW itself but I just don't play much during the summer. RPG's are for the long winter nights.
Around 1970 the quality of the bikes was so piss poor that factory new machines would often simply not work without extensive work by their new proud owner. So did the japanese with their fastly superior quality bury HD as it deserved too?
Hell no.
But bikes are an odd product. They are bought by 'fans' not just fans of a brand but fans of a the idea of bikes themselves. Having to spend hours working on your brand new bike to get it work is not actually a minus to a HD owner. A nephew of mine is a HD nut and once he finished a bike he loves riding it, on the look out for a new wreck, sorry, rare find to work on.
Most tech goes through this face. Long before polaroid made photographs a snap you had a large group of photographers making photos despite the hassle involved. It wasn't always that cars were black boxes that just start always when you turn the ignition and you never ever look under the hood. Early car drivers had to be their own mechanics. No, that is not right, that sounds like they objected to it. For early car drivers, it was part of the fun.
It ain't just tech, ever had a sister who LOVED horses? They actually enjoy taking care of them, shoveling shit and hauling hay.
Computers are just the same, early adaptors don't mind the nitty gritty, for them it is part of it. As my nephew likes scraping rush, my sister loves shoveling shit, I love messing with obscure setting and compiling my own kernels. Take those "messy" bits away and you ruin the whole experience.
The problem is when the "normal" people get involved. When a tech moves from the early adoptors to the mainstream. When it is no longer a "hobby" but becomes a necessity.
There is a reason we no longer use horses for transportation. There is a reason why no courier service uses HD bikes and there is a reason why MS tries to hide all the settings from the user.
The problem is that in a very real sense some tech moves into the mainstream before it is ready and/or the mainstream audience has the wrong idea about the tech.
If you owned a horse back when it was a mainstream form of transportation you had better accept that the horse had to be properly maintained, the movie idea of driving it hard across the desert into the town, jumping off and heading into the saloon just ain't "real". It requirs rubbing down, watering, feeding. They don't show that on tv.
They don't show you having to exchange the oil of your car, check its tires, replace the lights either.
The computers on tv? They have voice commands, can log onto any service automatically and always have the right file just a keypress away.
Reality is that computers just haven't reached a level of ease that suits the mainstream audience who just wants their product to run with zero maintenance. Is this wrong? Well, could you blame ford for not making its earliest cars as easy to operate as todays cars? Offcourse not. Tech has to develop. It has developped, compared to even the early home computers modern machines are a doddle to administrate.
You need to be your own "admin" of your system, know how it works, why things happen and how you can deal with them. Sure it would be nice if the system was advanced enough to just deal with it but that ain't the case. Yet.
Neither does your car, just ask your local mechanic how often they got to fix cars after their owner put in the wrong fuel. Why doesn't your car warn you before you put in the wrong nozzle? Because the tech ain't ready for it yet. One day it will, just as your car nowadays warns you when the oil is out (the oil light was once an innovation).
Same as your PC will one day warn you accuratly when you are about to download some dangerous software (No I am not talking about UAC or similar crap, that is closer to a sticker on your windscreen telling you to check the oil).
BUT not yet.
Early games required a lot more tweaking then they do nowadays. Believe it or not, once TV's didn't come with an AV button and you had to tune in you
I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.
Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.
That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.
HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.
As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.
The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.
To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.
Windows, pretty on the outside but further examination reveals that it is thick layer of make up applied to an old hag who there for everyone. She is set in her ways and getting her to do anything requires you to spend more money.
OS-X. Extremely pretty but deep down she is an mature lady with a lot of refinement. She however expects only the best so you better deliver. This baby is going to cost you.
Linux, the ugly duckling of the pack, yet she loves you completely without resevervation, she doesn't want your for your money or status. She is open and honest. And if you love her you can turn her into the princes of the ball but unlike the pretty windows, the linux girl stays true to you.
BSD, well, you seen dawn of the dead?
I am KIDDING!
OS/2 A loving hard working wive who raised the kids perfectly, kept the house in excellent condition and always prepared delicious meals followed by amazing sex, yet spurned for a 16 bit bimbo with 32 bit makeup.
Mainframe, you have to wait in line with the other johns, good service but you know thousands of others have been there before you.
The simplest objection some have about WoW is that it is too simple. This is about taste and cannot really be argued.
One of the things is about how death is handled. SWG at one time handled it so bad that players commited suicide as a way to quickly travel back to base. This is not a good thing for a game. There should be at least some suspension of disbelief and everyone in your party jumping into a lavastream after the big fight saying, "see you later" just doesn't do it.
WoW requires you to go back to your body in an invulnerable form from a fixed point and then respawn in the immidiate area of your body. If you don't you suffer a severe hit to your stats for a period of time.
The "punishement" aspects here are obvious. Going back to your corpse is boring, if in a party it requires everyone to wait, and you better hope they wait because what ever killed you will still be there + fresh respawns.
Some people think this is too though while others think it is too weak. Both are right.
If I remember correctly (I haven't played any MMO in months and they tend to blur together) in EQ2 the punishements are slightly more severe, you respawned alive and well similar to were your ghosts spawns in WoW but with a severe hit to your stats and XP. You could lighten the punishement by recovering your "shard" from your place of death.
Think for a second about the difference between WoW and EQ2 right there. In WoW you travel back to your corpse in order to continue meaningfull play in invulenrable mode, it is nothing but a time waster. You died so you don't get to play for a few minutes. Don't die again.
In EQ2 you are back in the game again from the moment you die BUT severely reduced and now faced with the same journey as a WoW player except you are very vulnerable and now got to fight everything between you and your bleeding mangled corpse.
That is not all, your group has not only now lost a valuable member of your party (or a piece of dead weight) but now faces the choice of making their way back to the entrance to pick you up and escort you to your corpse OR going on in reduced state.
A common sight in EQ2 was to see players hitching a ride into a dungeon with later groups to get back to their group waiting inside.
Obviously therefore death is something far more severe in EQ2 then in WoW. Some people like this.
Yeah it can be seen as a waste of time but it can also be seen as a way of getting better players who actively take care of each other. Having played both of them I have noted that EQ2 groups tend to work better together then WoW. In EQ2 EVERYONE in the group shared in your XP penalty. Can you imagine WoW players trying to deal with this? (The shared XP hit was removed from EQ2, as were shard runs apparently)
There is however yet another way of doing death. SWG had an amazing concept that I think was unique. Not all enemies killed you. You had three bars, if one was reduced to zero you were knocked out. It was then up to the enemy to deliver a finishing blow. Not all critters would do that (depending on species) and even if they wanted too it was possible for them to be distracted by your team mates. This added a whole new element to the game. Now there was still the tactical option of "saving" a teammate because a lesser class of healer could recover them on the field then a death character. Any medic could revive a knocked out character while death was only reversible by a highlevel doctor.
This made it actually important to have a few points in medic as a fighter as it allowed you to recover your true medic when they got knocked out. (because of SWG design were actions causes health bar loss a hardworking medic could put themselves in a vulnerable state were a single hit could knock them out)
Needlessly complex OR intresting gameplay? It is a matter of taste. (That is to say nothing of the difference between having a dedicated action/mana bar from wich you perform your actions and having to pay for your actions with your
I need my MMORPG fix but I do NOT need those random loot drop grinds.
WoW players might regonize were I stopped playing WoW. It is in the night elf area, third area, and you got to kill some warlocks with their pets for an item to drop as part of a longer quest.
It didn't drop. My rogue gained two levels in that area while I learned how exactly to get them in the shortest possible time. Simple, conceal, sap caster, kill pet, kill caster. Rince and repeat.
That killed the game for me, right there and then I knew that this was exactly how the game would be for the next 40 levels and then some.
Since I had already paid over the next few weeks I got my char to around 30 (were getting new skills ends and you just get slightly more powerful skills to deal with more powerful critters) and then just stopped.
I couldn't stand the random drop nature of things. EQ2 at least most times TOLD you how much you had to kill. Granted most its quests were Kill 8 X, Kill another 8 X, and again. Once more. Okay, now kill 10 of them. Okay! Now kill 8 x (adjective) X. Congrats, you done part 1, now kill more X.
But at least you could count them.
Get the goddamn fucking randomizer OUT of my MMORPG's. If I kill every single last one of those casters the damn item should just fucking drop.
It was the same with crafting. The chances of actually getting some of the rarer stuff were so random that you just couldn't make plans. By the time some items actually dropped I had gotten so many levels I was way beyond the item I had wanted to grind.
WoW takes to long. Your warning tells me BC does not improve this. I HATE RANDOM DROPS.
If Blizzard had made Star Wars poor Luke would have had to make a dozen trips to the Jawas before R2-D2 dropped.
Then again, if Sony had made Star Wars, you would have had to form a que to rescue Leia, if she was spawning that day.
Mmm, if only Lucas made a MMORPG. Surely that would be tops! Oh wait.
When exactly is Sony going to tell the europeans what exactly the capabilities are of this new system? Right now, still a month away from launch? No.
3 weeks before launch? No.
Two weeks? One week? 5 days? 2 days? 1 day? No.
They say they will (no actuall guarantee) announce it on launch day. So that gives customers how much time to cancel their pre-order incase they don't find the list to satisfaction?
That is right. NO TIME.
Honesty? No, sorry, not this time.
Oh but they said it now right? Well yeah, their lawyer told them too, if people had found out AFTER launch date they would have gotten their ass sued off.
Lets not forget that this is the EU, NOT the US or japan were big money rules. Holland is the EU country that forced Sony to exchange EVERY PSP with ANY defective pixels. (A rule that by the way goes for ALL LCD's, under dutch, and EU law, a product has to be fully functional and defective (sub)pixels are not part of it)
So they announce it now, in a queit way, hope people forget and then claim, well we had a list up on launch day to cover themselves out of deceptive sales lawsuits.
Europeans are always screwed when it comes to launch dates. We are used to that but at least sometimes this results in us actually getting a better product. Patches applied and production problems sorted out. So we get every single console after everyone else has had it but at least we usually get better systems.
Offcourse we also pay more, even if you account for different tax systems. But hey, that is the price to pay for the rest of the world beta-testing the product right?
Now along comes Sony, who already has enough trouble selling the PS3, and they give europe NOT only the usual long delay, the usual unexplained price difference BUT they give a lesser product AND ask us to accept an untested product (untested software emulation vs proven hardware) on top of it all?
I actually think the PS3 might have something intresting in it because of its linux capabilities (although so far it seems Sony has made every effort to kill this possibility) but just how far do they expect people to go?
Did Sony hire a mole from MS or Nintendo? Did they hire someone from the remains of british industry to make their decisions? Has the long japanese working week finally caught up with management and driven them utterly mad?
Yes, in theory it makes sense to reduce costs per unit especially with the PS3 but to screw over the europeans by given them a lesser untested product months after everyone for more money just doesn't seem to make a lot of marketting sense. Especially given that PS3 games at the moment are not exactly setting new sales records.
Oh well, Sony got a couple more weeks. They could still announce that the EU PS3 will not be able to play HD movies. Can't take any risks, can we? Must make sure this product tanks.
Perhaps this is all a cunning plan to avoid those nasty stories about shortages and people fighting over the PS3 at launch. Make it even more expensive, still have no good games out and reduce functionality.
Rememeber the tale of how MS won the desktop from IBM and Apple and the homecomputers? Not because MS was so brilliant but because IBM and Apple and the homecomputers all made really stupid decisions?
That is too simple for Sony's taste. It seems determined to make every boneheaded decision themselves.
It is pitifull. Lets face it, the hardware costs for the PS2 hardware can't be that high, but in order to save a few dollars they are willing to remove a key feature from their product. A key feature that is desperately needed as long as their are no killer PS3 games out while there are plenty of intresting PS2 games out, and in fact still being launched.
I have seen attempts to introduce laws that require older people to take driving exams again to prove they are still fit to drive.
Perhaps as management gets older HR should do re-hire procedures to see if they still qualify. Alternatively, maybe management that has been there longer then a decade should be just humanily put down. Put the sony leadership out of its misery.
Trust me on this, NOBODY wants their NEW book to look used. People don't like it with any product period. They want their product to be in mint condition and if everyone else has been handling that product then they will try to get another one.
Just work in a book/magazine store for a while to see this. Hell, check your own behaviour. Accepted practice is to browse through the first book/magazine in a stack to see if you like it and then pick up one from further down the stack (were nobody has touched it yet) and buy that.
While everyone does it, and you would hardly accept a bookstore that doesn't allow browsing, it leads to one copy nobody wants. A tiny loss on the latest Harry Potter but what to do when a store only has one copy of a book?
It is a cost to the bookstore and ultimately the publisher. In digital format this is offcourse gone. Everyone gets a fresh copy, and it stays fresh.
Mmm, second hand digital books. Fresh and minty as the new version. Another reason the publishers don't like it.
The trojan was spread through usenet in specific pedofile newsgroups. Downloading an image file (wich is how the trojan was diguised) from such a group is NOT something an innocent person would do. Downloading childporn is a crime in most of the western world. End of story. If you download a file from such a group then you are apparently willing to commit a crime.
Oh yeah, "innocent" until proven guilty. Well by that logic the police makes a habbit about arresting innocent people all the time.
There is in the west the idea of a fair trial. I think the mistake made here is that some people think that means fair as in fairplay. The way that in golf a better player should handicap himself to make the game "fair" to a lesser player.
It does not mean that. Instead it means fair as in honest. No false evidence, a chance to defend oneself and such. At no time does it mean that the police should have to handicap itself to give a criminal a chance to get out of a conviction.
The problem is that it is hard to do this. We don't want the police constantly being able to search just anyone and anything they like BUT the countermeasure does lead to criminals using their so called right to privacy to hide evidence. THAT was not the idea but it is the sideeffect.
Privacy is there to protect the innocent NOT the guilty. Sadly it is impossible to have one without the other.
But it is still hard for me not to cheer this guy on. No I don't enjoy the idea of me being snooped upon just because I downloaded something innocent (the trojan was after all NOT real childporn) BUT this guy did get a man arrested who put his 8yr old daughter up for use by pedofiles. (another case mentioned in the article that this guy uncovered)
I am sorry, but that overrules a lot of privacy concerns for me. I am that most rare of slashdot readers. A middle of the roader. A moderate. I believe that communist, capatilists and liberals are ALL wrong. Their ideas are based on the idea that humans are perfect in one way or another when they are not.
This guy showed us that our rules of privacy and allowed methods of police investigation allow very serious criminals to go undetected and unpunished.
You might say that you consider your privacy to be worth the sale of a 8yr old girl. I do not. Maybe I am damned for that to live in a police state. But what is the alternative? A free society OR something much worse then a police state?
Look at russia, they went from a police state but I don't think they are exactly living in a free society either.
We should use this case as an eye-opener. Clearly there is a gap between the type of crimes commited and what the police is allowed to detect. If the police had been allowed to use this guy's methods how many pedofiles might have been arrested who are now still free to commit their crimes?
On the other hand, how much of our private lifes would we all have to give up to make this possible?
It is balancing issue and at the moment I think the balance favors the criminals too much. Consider this,"the innocent may have somethign to fear from the police, but they certainly have something to fear from criminals the police cannot touch".
It will almost certainly be a mess because the other two entertainment industries have also gotten it completlty wrong and the book industry so far has not shown to be any brighter.
The move from physical to digital distribution of a product like music/movies/books has the following clear benefits.
Unlimited production runs from 0 to infinite with NO waste, no production time, no transportation issues.
Infinite back catalog, again with virtually no-costs.
Zero risk of a bad product being shipped with costly recalls/replacement.
Simply put, digital distribution is a dream come true for a publisher. Forget amazon. Forget having to stock your product in thousands of stores in the hope of selling one copy in a fraction of them. Forget shipping back-orders wich are never collected.
Even the simplest most basic decsission a publisher has to make, how many copies do I produce of this in the first run, is GONE!
A publisher could have all its books online in digital form at the fraction of the cost of single high-street retail store. It would never run out of a copy, the logistics of getting the latest harry potter to thousands of stores across a nation would be gone in an instant, all copies would be in mint condition (no longer have you got cracked spines were callous readers have broken your virgin book, and nobody wants a book somebody else has already broken in)
And offcourse the costs of getting books sold would drop dramatically.
So what happens. We get incompatible formats, tiny catalogs, and prices that at times are even HIGHER then the paper version.
WTF?
ebooks are a wonderfull idea, especially to anyone who has ever tried to find an out-of-print book. The publishers will how ever NEVER get it. The internet is now old tech and books were one of the first pieces of digital content that could have made us of it because of the small filesizes and they simply haven't.
Not that you can blame them. Anyone here ever tried MS reader for the.lit format? Talk about a piec of crap software. It doesn't even follow MS own guidelines on how its software should look and feel and that is then supposed to win people over?
I can buy my overpriced paper book, read it anyway I want it, share it as much as I like and then sell it.
Digital? I can read it only on supported readers, can't share it, and selling it is claimed to be illegal.
Oh and the price? Why, exactly the same offcourse. Passing on savings to the customer? Not in the content industry my lad.
This is why ebooks not only will fail but have failed.
The only hope is that as various goverments are getting concerned about the cost of schoolbooks (dutch goverment was thinking about making them free) the idea of forcing these essential books to be published digitally paid by the goverment, would perhaps force publishers to get their heads around the idea that a digital product does not fetch the same price as a physical product.
I read it as, FCC Report - TV Violence Should be Regular wich actually makes sense.
Some theory has it that excessive violence makes people immune to it and more willing to accept it in their lives. FCC training the US to be mindless killers. Oh okay, killers, they already got the mindless part.
Only kidding, americans. Europeans watch the US, watch you making a complete mess of things, and then, do the exact same thing, because HEY, it must work a second time?
Anyway, what used to constantly happen on a dutch tv program called countdown (music program) was the interviewed american/english popstars would say something and then excuse themselves for saying something that couldn't be aired. The dutch interviewer then responding, no problem and just going on.
Did all this cursing turn me into a sick sociopath unfit to live in modern society? Eh, bad example.
I also remember some full frontal nudity in dutch childerens tv. Did that turn me in a sex obssesed adult as I grew up? Damn...
Well, I also saw lots of violence like jackie chan movies. Did that turn me into an atheletic incredibly fit adult who can pull of amazing stunts at the drop of a hat? AHA! The proof, TV does NOT AFFECT US!
Discovery channel has been taking a nosedive in recent years but apart from the incredibly bad programs that have nothing to do with science or discovery they also started this amazing practice of not just bleeping out some words but even pixellating the mouth saying them. What, lipreaders complained?
A nude person, flipping the bird saying fuck will be just one huge pixel. Well, that is just wrong.
You know another thing I noticed. A "violent" show like the a-team also, at least early on (dutch tv is re-airing them, ah the quality of commercial stations) always included a shot of the people climbing out of the carwreck to show they were okay and nobody was hurt.
Compare this with far less "violent" tv like Law & Order wich might give you the idea that mass murderes are an everyday thing. Oh, in the US they are?
I know that in holland (15/16 million people, area about the size of new york state) we got less then 1 murder per day (average hovers around 300). On tv? 300 per day? Well, not exactly but close. At least half a dozen crime tv series per day and one wouldn't be complete without at least on killing.
So violence on TV is excessive.
Same as sex. Why there is more sex in one episode of sesami street then your average slashdotter has in a lifetime! SHOCKING!!! (but not as shocking as that there are people who actually want to have sex with big bird (Pino in holland and he is blue))
If I do object to violence on tv then it is that every damn police series producer seems to have watched silence of the lambs. yeah nice movie but give that damned plot a rest will you OR I might go into excessive violence mode on your ass.
The simple fact is that in mainland europe (except for krauts but what do you expect from nazis) we got a pretty relaxed attitude to sex and violence and profanity and it doesn't create a society any more violent (a society with more sex I think would be extremely welcome).
But ah, thinkofthechilderen. Can childeren be affected by images on tv.
Yes offcourse they can (wait for it), just as they can be anything else that raises them. If the TV becomes the babysitter/caretaker then yes, the child will adopt the values of that caretaker.
Childeren should be raised by their parents. To many parents nowadays put the child in front of the tv and think that is enough. It ain't. If the child picks up bad influences from the tv it is because it spends way to much time in front of it.
Because there is something else I remember from dutch tv apart from the sex and the swearing and the violence. We only had one channel. (waits for the younger readers to stop screaming in terror) Just one tv station, wich often didn't have anything on during the daytime. No I don't mean anything you want to w
So I won't comment on the legal aspects. Ask a lawyer.
The moral aspects are easier, because you don't need a degree to argue ethics. Just an over inflated sense of self importance. Check.
Is it moral to do X? Well, that depends, on you, the society you live in and how willing that society is to beat in your head for violating the morality of that society.
Is it moral to have sex with your childeren and then kill them for your own pleasure? I think the general opinion is not.
Is it moral to kill thousands of childeren each and every year because you like to drive to fast/drunk for your own pleasure? Look at the number of childeren killed year in year out because of dangerous driving and I think that the general opinion is yes. Except offcourse nobody will admit it.
Morality is a complex thing and it seems to have a lot to do with whatever the "people" can be bothered to get upset about. Or rather a small group of people can be bothered to shout very loudly about without anyone else shouting back.
It ain't even consistent. On a small scale people might agree on say restricting road speeds near schools, but if you suggest that the speed across the entire town is brought down to a safe limit, or even worse, put up camera's to enforce the speed limit, then you find yourselve with massive opposition. Or at least very loud and that surely means massive.
At the moment you got a "thinkofthechilderen" movement who is very massive, or at least very loud. They say, that it ain't right to let childeren access places like myspace unrestricted. Are they right? Do they even represent a majority of the people? Do you consider what the majority considers to be right, to be right? Note that the "thinkofthechilderen" group can't seem to be bothered by the deaths in traffic wich outnumber the victims of sexual predators.
I myself got the following problem with this idea.
Not to long ago there was a police request for witnesses in a the free dutch newspaper metro or spits about a rape case. A woman returning from a date late at night had been assaulted and raped walking back alone. A comment by a collegue was that her boyfriend should have walked her back.
In a way he was right except that he shouldn't be. Should women be restricted from were and when they can walk because some men are rapists?
Should childeren be banned from socializing online because some people prey on them online?
The next step in that logic is that they asked for it. This is the old sexist way of thinking wich I definitly think is amoral.
So I don't think childeren should be prevented from accessing spaces like myspace. Restrict the criminals, not the victims.
Is it then moral for you to break restrictions against childeren that can be considered by some to be morally wrong.
Well, obviously not. The only thing that could be wrong if you consider breaking that restriction itself to be a morally wrong act.
Like say, you consider it morally wrong to let someone starve to death but your only option would be to steal the food wich you also consider to be morally wrong. A choice of the lesser of two evils.
But I find it hard to consider a proxy to myspace to be morally wrong on its own. Myspace may be wrong, but not on any moral grounds.
Say you provide the access to these childeren. This results in them posting their details on myspace. Someone else uses these details to hunt one down and rape and kill them. Are you then morally to blaim?
That depends on the morals of the person judging you.
Is the boyfriend in the above real example to blaim for not escorting his girlfriend home? Is society as a whole? Is the girl? Or is it just the rapist and nobody else that should be held accountable for what happened?
If you provide access you provide access for, what I would consider, a in itself harmless actions. There are plenty of safe ways to behave on myspace. You do not make these kids behave in an unsafe manner. Part of living is t
What does he mean with unified? Music and movies? Oh right, ehm, how exactly do I fold my Star Wars laserdisc to fit in a VHS or a BETAMAX or a DVD or a BluRay or a HD-DVD or a UMD or a V2000 or a 8/16/35mm projector?
Music? Oh fuck it I am to lazy to list the tape spool format, the minidisc, the 8track, the minitape, the digital tapes, music on video tape experiments, the cd, the enhanced cd's etc etc etc. Not even to mention the obvious incompatibilities of the various digitals formats.
But that is pendantic? Well, yeah, the format for music is currently the CD and for movies the DVD. This has also been true for a number of years.
And is this a good thing? You also can't MOVE beyond it. The DVD format is what you release movies on so you better make sure your movie doesn't require anything more.
Consoles at least have different makers and at least game makers got a choice. Every generation you can push a direction to go forward and see if it works. There is movement. There is things happening. Excitement, fun, lots and lots of money changing hands.
Just consider what a PC game would be like if it HAD to play on every standard PC sold within the last 3 years. No flightsims, since joysticks and a standard. No enhanced sound because soundcards ain't a standard. No fancy graphics effects because GPU's ain't a standard.
And yet, there is an entire game industry that works awfully well that works just with these limitations. The flash game industry. it works on any computer that can run flash and that is something most computers nowadays can, even linux machines.
Can consoles of today be made to run flash? No reason why not, so there you got your unified gaming platform. Does opera on Wii support flash? Voila, your request has been filled.
Oh, flash isn't capable of doing what you want in your game. Mmmm, maybe you need some specialized hardware, an addon. Something that sets it apart from the rest. Oh wait.
Unified platform sounds nice, it will happen at just about the same time as you no longer need to buy addons for certain games. NEVER. Who could play guitar hero, without a guitar? DDR without a dancepad? Rez without a vibrator?
I hope you are a girl, because I am going to kiss you.
There is however one sentence that should be added.
MS Paint is therefore excellent for beginners, but once those beginners are no longer beginners, you might want to switch to Adobe Photoshop.
Once you learn to ride a bike, the training wheels can come off and soon you might graduate to an "adult" bike.
Once you reached first base you might want to eventually try for second. Maybe even try to steal home plate. Or you might try sex instead of playing ball.
Differently skilled users will prefer different applications. From this follows that as you change in skill, you will want to change applications.
Shocking. Next thing you might find that as you go to school each year you move up a level and teachers gradually increase the difficulty of sums until you forget how to do basic aritmethic (or forget how to spell it) without a calculator.
You are making the classic mistake of petty little armchair dictators everywhere. What is right for you is right for everyone.
You don't want to configure things, so NOBODY wants to configure things so things that can be configured are bad.
I hope that you are a homosexual or your partner is going to extremely frustated. What works for you, will not work for her. (yeah yeah, slashdot and partner, har har)
If what you claimed is true then Harley Davidson would be bankrupt since for a long period of their history their bikes most certainly did NOT work out of the box. Are they bankrupt? Oh, no, they are actually doing fairly well and the bikes from that era were you first needed to put in some major work on your new purchase are actually highly sought after. Covered in rust and in pieces and mixed up with another model? All the better!
You can't switch on discovery channel and not see a program were people that a product that works out of the box and then cut it apart into little bits to configure it to their liking.
So are these persons not people?
No, you think because you don't like something, nobody likes it.
Well, sorry kid, but that is the way fundementalists think. I am X so everyone is X and if they are not they are wrong.
Humanity is far more complex, we want/need different things and we are going to argue about it forever. This is a GOOD thing. It is why things happen. It was the crap western bikes that gave the japanese their chance and is why in a world were you have HD doing extremely well, some people buy honda's because they want a bike that really just fucking drives out of the box and they don't ever have to mess with.
On the other hand, people also still buy bucatti bikes. A brand that never ever managed to create a single piece of equipment with two wheels that just works. (I do not know anything about the reliability of their four wheeled car, except that I want one. Road car that can outrace a F1 car. Fap fap fap.)
And your gnome is the sucks and my e17 is the best thing since sliced bread. It spawns kittens and the idle process is a sexy red head that loves to give blow jobs.
Only bad thing is that if it follow the ubuntu tradition (kubuntu = KDE, edubuntu = Education, xubuntu = XFCE) then you would end up with eubuntu. Mmm, maybe the european union should sponsor it.
Offcourse since ubuntu is a word with meaning and so is "enlightenment" you could just call the distro by the long name and come up with something incredibly deep and meaningfull. Take that lover of a distro named after some nasty tiny little critter known for making the lives of humans a misery.
But in all seriousness, I do think both KDE and Gnome are "wrong" at least for my purposes. Gnome is far too strict for my tastes. KDE is far too fisher price. (So is OS-X by the way, I do not need HUGE ICONS).
But most important for me is this. My desktop machines are rather old, dual P3's from that era in time when motherboards were made only to support a limited amount of memory. At least the mobo's I can afford.
e17 is the ONLY one I ran from a livecd that did NOT want to swap. Installed and running for several days doing all kinds of stuff it only has used 140k swap space on a 768mb machine. That I love because offcourse my HD's are also slow as P3 era HD's were.
Yes e17, especially with the eyecandy switched to make vista look like dos, does suck up the CPU cycles like it was coded by MS, but since I run on a dual who cares. One cpu is enough for what I do on a desktop.
e17 for me delivers what I need. Does gnome deliver what you need?
Linus probably has different requirements. But fundementally I think there is a HUGE difference in philosophy.
Gnome seems to believe that making things simple is the way to adoption. To accept that the new users is going to be new and is going to want things simple so as not to face a vertical wall that is the learning curve.
It sounds sensible, and to a degree it is. It is the beginning of learning. Start simple. Gnome's mistake and everyone else that wants to keep things simple is that the NEXT step in learning is to make things more difficult.
1+1 = 2. Good, 2+3 = 5. You are catching on. 4+5 = 9. Excellent. Lets move on 5+5 = ?, think hard. 10, very good! etc etc etc.
The Gnome philosopjhy would have you doing single digit sums with single digits answers until the day you die because that is EASY. Yeah, it is, but most people want more.
Would you still ride a bicycle with trainer wheels or your parent running behind it? Offcourse not, you ride 1000cc road monster. Not as easy, but you have moved beyond the training wheels and now want MORE.
Gnome is the kiddy desktop. The one were the training wheels are welded to the frame. Does this make it a bad product? No, if that is what you want/need then that is what you need. BUT the nature of human beings is to try to convince that what is right for them is right for others.
That is were flamewars start. Gnome is for the crowd that does not need or want or can handle more control. It is a valid group BUT you will have clashes if you then try to market it to other users.
Offcourse the same goes in reverse, users who need/want or can handle more control trying to convince those who can't to switch to a product that gives them more control.
It is human nature. Gnome is right and it can't understand why KDE just can't see that. KDE thinks it is right and just can't see why gnome won't accept that. Meanwhile e17 spanks them both.
Oh and, vi for the win! Did you know there are distro's (I am looking at you gentoo) where that editor is not only not the default but not even INSTALLED as the base of the OS (on the root partition). Shocking.
Wich means that is MS is copying the evil from disney they are really copying the evil from Steve Jobs/Apple. Not only does this mean that MS ALWAYS copies from Apple but also that Apple is the original evil.
It all makes sense now.
If you think about it, the "desktop" was developed by a copy company yet you can go to jail for copying it.
If you haven't played the game yet, stop reading. Stop reading anyway unless you are in the mood for a rant.
Okay, you were warned. In Neverwinter Nights 2 you have two "dramatic" moments. The opening act has you partnered with two childhood friends. A male fighter and a female wizard. Both like you start at level 1 and get maybe 1 or 2 levels during the opening act.
Your village is attacked because of you are the destined one. How original. Young farm person at just the right age to go out into the world has evil (wich for some reason has been laying low between the events of the opening credits and this moment) attack your peacefull village of your youth.
There are even in pulp fantasy variations of this you know. Conan was a slave his entire youth. Willow was a mature adult (well he had kids).
Oh well, you are attacked and for no very good reasing you get a cutscene were the girl suddenly decides to help her teacher out (who doesn't even look like he needs help) and gets herself killed. Drama!
Well no. It has everything wrong with it that the poster talked about. You first think it is your fault, then find it isn't and therefore feel only frustration. What a way to kick of an RPG that is supposed to have a influence system. Oh, and the lesson? Well listen to warnings and don't get in over your head. Good warning, except that it never has to be apllied in the rest of the game. You never meet anyone more powerfull then you that you can't handle. You never are asked to let someone more experienced handle a battle OR do a tactical retreat. So what is the point?
But that ain't the only one to snuff it. Later another girl joins your party and voila, she gets killed too. Again nothing you can do about it. Drama? No not really, hell the game doesn't even allow drama. If you really cared about her, you would be a little miffed you don't even get to kill her killer. At all, not even after you have no use for him anymore.
Oh, and the people from your village that survived the first attack? Well, they are killed off too. What? You are the desitned hero, so everyone you grew up has to die so that no stories of you running around with no pants as a kid can every ruin your heroic reputation. It is a rule!
Drama is nice and all, but the simple fact is that YOU are supposed to be in control. So if the game removes control, then anything that happens that you are supposed to be in control about just isn't "real".
Drama can happen outside your control (that is really totally outside your control, rather then just having the game take control) OR because of a choice you made.
System Shock 1 & 2 and the first Unreal did it very effective. Every bit of "drama" had already happened. You were in total control of events in your own time but naturally NOT in control over things that had already happened before your time started.
Finding out that the person whose emails you have been finding has died a tragic dead WORKS when it is clear it happened outside your time. You couldn't have gone faster or anything. So you do not feel cheated by the game. It worked for me.
Do you want to know one of the most dramatic moments in games for me? Planescape Torment, the dead nations, has an undead NPC who has lost her name. You can help her find it or give her a new one. The way that extremely short non-combat, non-fedex, non-runaround, non-loot, quest is told just worked for me. The entire area is nothing short of brilliant, undeads who are not just cannon-fodder, but that element is just damned good as it impressed upon me the sadness of an undead existence, destined to only rot away further and further while only memories remain of your former live.
Brilliant. And nobody dies, no cutscenes take away control. Just you, and an NPC and a few simple lines.
From the days of Wing Commander games have attempted to get me to feel drama by snatching defeat from the jaws of my hard won victory. It don't work for me.
I am talking about the RPG effect were the end or even the mid-level game is just one long hack&slash. Offcourse you might have a different opinion, maybe the descende into one long slaughter session is what you call the exitiing bit and you are glad to have gotten that boring talkie stuff.
Not even NWN2 succeeds here. Part of the problem is that the game gets too big. You go from a having a small party whose members are constantly in each others hair providing color, to a HUGE party who members you can barely get to know, whose interaction is extremely random because you have ZERO change of hitting the right combo of party members at the right moment/location.
But an ever worse game was a RPG set in our own medeival times but were magic was real. It started out as a good RPG but soon became nothing more then one long dungeon crawl with zero Rpg elements.
But back to bashing NWN2. If you have played it, you will have seen a loading screen message that tells you that you can interact with your party members enough to change them. What they don't say is that you can change ONE of them. The dwarf can become a monk. About half way through too and then that is it. Zero reaction from him.
Whoopee. Then again, the entire game is not to fleshed out. Only one romance option per gender. No same sex romance. If only they hadn't gone for a every single class as a party member approach and concentraded on a smaller group they could have avoided all that.
BUT I never really came across the need to 'grind' in a PC RPG. Yeah, in a way perhaps the whole bit in NWN2 were you got to do quest after quest to get access to the next area in your quest. Espcially since the "part of Neverwinter blocked of by the guards" bit is getting pretty old by now. Is that city ever not under lockdown?
Yet that is part of the gameplay, sure it is not the best story telling to do all these quests when you feel you should be rushing to get inside but that is the way bad stories work. It is like that eternal sex scene in action movies were the leads suddenly get naked for no reason when they really should be trying to solve the case.
As for ALWAYS playing a newbie. Well yeah, that can get old. Again NWN2 fails here a bit. Since you can create your own character you get the effect of being treated like a kid when your character is a 200 year old elf. Sure, they mature slower but still. Wel at least they were bright enough to make your forster father an elf as well.
As for starting at level 1. Okay, just try to imagine a game where you start at level 20. Problem? Well, if it is D&D beyond that you start to come close to godhood. Monk's are near invulnerable. Fighters slice and dice through anything, magic users don't have a single spell available anymore that does NOT wipe out the entire party (by accident, I SWEAR!) and healers can pull people back from death before they were born.
Sure a TRUE RPG could probably pull it off. In fact there is an other genre of games that already does. It is called an adventure. RPG without the combat. Because what does the combat mean if you are so fucking powerfull that nobody can stand against you. It would have to be an RPG with extreme story telling.
I want one, but in todays world were not a single RPG designer can resist skipping corners by just adding a few extra levels of nothing but boring nasties you already defeated dozen of times, I am not holding my breath.
Even the legendary Planescape Torment had them.
But as for needing to grind up, he is playing the wrong games.
Is it perfect? No. Could you make a game that simply improves on its mistakes? Possibly.
But what are its mistakes, and are they really mistakes or are they fundemental parts of the nature of MMO gaming.
It would be easy to think that you simply visit the WoW forums, note down the complaints of gamers and ex-gamers and then fix these in your game.
But wich to follow? Do you cater to the PvP haters or lovers?
WoW currently caters to both PvP and PvE but that also means neither side gets exactly the dedication they want. So they complain. BUT would a game without one be that successfull? Just how big is the subscriber base that is satisfied with the current combo? People who are satisfied tend not to post on forums. They are to busy having a good time in the game.
Same with the crafting/loot system. Again WoW has sought the middle ground, essentially both systems of getting your equipment are competing with each other. This means that pure crafters have a reduced market while at the same time those who are looting get lots of useless materials they need to sell.
And again, would a game that focusses on one exclusively (SWG had a pure crafting system) be that succesfull?
You could create a MMORPG were levelling up isn't everything. Were grinding to X isn't the primary goal. That would make the RPG crowd perhaps happier but might loose you all the grinding monkeys who no longer have an epenis to wave around.
WoW in many areas seeks the middle road. It works. 8+million people think the bits they like are better then the bits they don't like.
If you are going to change anything in that design you need to realize that you are going to please some but most likely upset a hell of a lot of other players.
Go pure PvP and you MIGHT appease those PvPers who left but you are going to loose for sure every single PvE player. PLUS a significant part of the players who like a bit of both.
Just read every comment here that suggests an obvious improvement and then ask youreselve what the total effect would be.
Then again, until WoW entered the market, people said that the MMORPG market had been saturated and that any new game could only poach from other games.
So is WoW the final MMORPG or is it just a more succesfull EQ waiting to be dethroned by the next comany.
Have you actually ever played Guild Wars? Good, then have you ever thought about the difference in hardware compared to say a WoW or Everquest OR that MMOFPS planetside?
That is right. Guild Wars ain't all that massive.
Guild Wars has a couple of 3D chat rooms were players meet up but were NOTHING happens. From there extremely small groups of players head out into the game world that is unique for each group. This makes it a lot simpler to keep the world going serverside. You only need a machine capable of handling a handfull of players. Not a massive cluster capable of keeping thousands of players in the same space.
Guild Wars is a brilliant design but it ain't a true MMO, it is the reason why they don't need a monthly subscription fee but may it also be the reason why it doesn't equall WoW in its success?
Then there is another problem with Guild Wars. Even in its tiny gamespaces it suffers from some serious warping. Not that much of a problem with auto-targetted magic attacks BUT a real problem for a FPS.
The simple reason that FPS or for that matter direct combat has not made it big into MMO land is because the nature of beast doesn't lend itself to this.
And FPS players are cheap bastards. You expect a company to come up with hardware a great deal more powerfull then needed for WoW but also want it to be free.
You also over estimate the appeal of FPS. The simple fact is that WoW has shown the world that FPS just ain't popular. Just add up all the people that PAY for multiplayer FPS and then look at the 8 million PAYING subscribers for WoW.
I am not even sure that the number of free players of games like counterstrike can reach that number. But who cares anyway. You need paying customers. Not people who want everything for free.
Famous last words. Well actually, the real last words are "but I thought I had a choice?!"
Answer, "you did. You choose wrong."
A liberty once lost is not easily regained. Go ahead. Start a radiostation. Once it was easy, all you needed was the equipment. Now you need a license. Try and get one for a station just powerfull enough to cover your town.
Don't even bother with a tv station. Yet the first tv stations were privately run by individuals.
Now it has hard to find a station NOT owned by some global multi-national. And not to many of those either.
A good thing OR a loss of freedom.
Once you accept that the state can censor the net in even the most limited capacity you have opened the door for every tiny, sensible increase.
Think of it like this:
ME: Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
You: Yes
ME: Would you sleep with me for 2 dollars (canadian)?
You: No, what kind of person do you think I am.
ME: We already established that, now we are just haggling over price.
Censorship is the same, it is an all or nothing deal. Accept the tiniest amount and you accept censorship as a whole.
Say you accept censorship as an optional plugin. But then how do people know about it? So people should have it installed with their new system but turned off by default. Okay, but some people still mis it. How about having it enabled by default? What about "THINK OF THE CHILDEREN" tm.
So make it mandatory in schools. How about at the office? Surely in the offices of anyone in a public position.
And what should be banned? Porn. Pictures or text? What about nudes. Only erotic nudes, but what is erotic? What is pornographic? Cover up statues?
Someone else pointed out that Norwegian childerens tv got naked boobies and you want to censor that.
I am not a liberal but censorship is dangerous.
As for that anti-phising thing. HOW do YOU know that every site ever put into that database will be there for the being a phising site and for nothing else?
Someone controls what you see. Do you control them, FOREVER!
Just consider stuff like hosepipe-bans, rolling black-outs and travelleing advisories.
Is internet access/trafic just another resource with an ultimately finite supply that may at times to be to limited so its distribution would have to be regulated?
We know this is true for other resources. In areas with droughts and insufficient reserves the goverment will regulate what you can and cannot do with the available water. Sure, sometimes the lack of water is because off extremely poor management often by that same goverment BUT that doesn't change the fact that when the reservoirs are low and there is no sign of rain the goverment first ASKS people not to waste water and finally orders them too.
You would have to be a liberal to an extremely silly degree to object to that.
Same with say electricity. Thanks to the believe that private companies run things better we in holland now get problems as well as private companies don't invest enough to cope with extreme situations and foila, nature always throws up extreme situations, often with a general helping of unfortunate coincedences. Who would have thought that in a hot summer, the temperature would be hot, water supplies would be reduced and demand for electricity would go up.
The goverment then first asks people to reduce their electricity consumption and finally just plain orders the consumption to stop, although over here by shutting down industrial users. In the US rolling blackouts seem to be favored.
Bad weather? Well, over he we get advice not to travel because of 5 centimeter snowfall. But that is because nothing ever happens here and we need an excuse to have a nice crisis now and then. "And NOW we go LIVE to our reporter on the street, what is happening Dave?" "Well Alan I can honestly report that right now, LIVE from an average street in Holland, absolutly NOTHING is happening BUT it might and I will here to report it, the MOMENT it happens, LIVE!"
So why is it so silly to presume that internet access through a combination of mismanagement and high demand could also find itself either having to deal with the results of extreme use (blackouts) or restrictions.
In fact, we have already seen this. Ever been in an office were the main pipe has gone down and now 1000 people are on a ISDN link? You bet your ass there is going to be some restrictions on the kind of sites visited.
For that matter have you seen the effects on the net during high profile events like the various terrorist attacks of the last decade? I do know that during the london bombings the dutch 3G (mobile phone) network had troubles dealing with all the demands for live video. So did newswebsites.
BUT is FLU likely to do this?
Ah, well that is the question. You see, the during the 9/11 attack at least the world I was in grinded to a halt. I worked at an ISP at the time (we hosted several of the newswebsites that saw their demand soar) and we didn't get any regular work done that day. We watched the news. So while one demand on the network increased it also lowered and in any case was of to short a duration.
But now imagine a prolonged sudden increase in the demand on traffic. Could it be delivered or would you find that working from home has become impossible. Well, I have my doubts but then, so did those people who thought our various other infra structures would be able to deal with extreme situations.
Is working from home really such a gigantic demand on the work? Especially if you consider that a person like me would for instance first shutdown his constantly running P2P program if the network was to slow. I already do so now.
I suppose it also greatly depends on the type of work. Say a creator like a programmer/writer could just literally work at home and only need the net to send his finished work to the office and get new instructions. A bit of code up and loads of gibberish emails down. More important, no immidiate demand. So an email takes an hour to get through. *sorry email junkies, t
Slashdot Mirror
And as I explained, the games tend to run together. Frankly I couldn't recall if that item damage was in WoW or if I recalled it from another game.
Anyway, it was pretty trivial, if you die that much (was it about 10% damange meaning you had to die 10 times before it affects you) you are in the wrong group. The repair costs were pretty low so the only effect was that it punished you if you were dying an extreme amount. In my experience it was only an effect on players who didn't just repair after a session and found themselves going into a raid with badly damaged equipment. Then again, this is an MMO staple.
But no I didn't play the game too much. Not because of WoW itself but I just don't play much during the summer. RPG's are for the long winter nights.
Around 1970 the quality of the bikes was so piss poor that factory new machines would often simply not work without extensive work by their new proud owner. So did the japanese with their fastly superior quality bury HD as it deserved too?
Hell no.
But bikes are an odd product. They are bought by 'fans' not just fans of a brand but fans of a the idea of bikes themselves. Having to spend hours working on your brand new bike to get it work is not actually a minus to a HD owner. A nephew of mine is a HD nut and once he finished a bike he loves riding it, on the look out for a new wreck, sorry, rare find to work on.
Most tech goes through this face. Long before polaroid made photographs a snap you had a large group of photographers making photos despite the hassle involved. It wasn't always that cars were black boxes that just start always when you turn the ignition and you never ever look under the hood. Early car drivers had to be their own mechanics. No, that is not right, that sounds like they objected to it. For early car drivers, it was part of the fun.
It ain't just tech, ever had a sister who LOVED horses? They actually enjoy taking care of them, shoveling shit and hauling hay.
Computers are just the same, early adaptors don't mind the nitty gritty, for them it is part of it. As my nephew likes scraping rush, my sister loves shoveling shit, I love messing with obscure setting and compiling my own kernels. Take those "messy" bits away and you ruin the whole experience.
The problem is when the "normal" people get involved. When a tech moves from the early adoptors to the mainstream. When it is no longer a "hobby" but becomes a necessity.
There is a reason we no longer use horses for transportation. There is a reason why no courier service uses HD bikes and there is a reason why MS tries to hide all the settings from the user.
The problem is that in a very real sense some tech moves into the mainstream before it is ready and/or the mainstream audience has the wrong idea about the tech.
If you owned a horse back when it was a mainstream form of transportation you had better accept that the horse had to be properly maintained, the movie idea of driving it hard across the desert into the town, jumping off and heading into the saloon just ain't "real". It requirs rubbing down, watering, feeding. They don't show that on tv.
They don't show you having to exchange the oil of your car, check its tires, replace the lights either.
The computers on tv? They have voice commands, can log onto any service automatically and always have the right file just a keypress away.
Reality is that computers just haven't reached a level of ease that suits the mainstream audience who just wants their product to run with zero maintenance. Is this wrong? Well, could you blame ford for not making its earliest cars as easy to operate as todays cars? Offcourse not. Tech has to develop. It has developped, compared to even the early home computers modern machines are a doddle to administrate.
You need to be your own "admin" of your system, know how it works, why things happen and how you can deal with them. Sure it would be nice if the system was advanced enough to just deal with it but that ain't the case. Yet.
Neither does your car, just ask your local mechanic how often they got to fix cars after their owner put in the wrong fuel. Why doesn't your car warn you before you put in the wrong nozzle? Because the tech ain't ready for it yet. One day it will, just as your car nowadays warns you when the oil is out (the oil light was once an innovation).
Same as your PC will one day warn you accuratly when you are about to download some dangerous software (No I am not talking about UAC or similar crap, that is closer to a sticker on your windscreen telling you to check the oil).
BUT not yet.
Early games required a lot more tweaking then they do nowadays. Believe it or not, once TV's didn't come with an AV button and you had to tune in you
I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.
Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.
That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.
HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.
As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.
The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.
To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.
Windows, pretty on the outside but further examination reveals that it is thick layer of make up applied to an old hag who there for everyone. She is set in her ways and getting her to do anything requires you to spend more money.
OS-X. Extremely pretty but deep down she is an mature lady with a lot of refinement. She however expects only the best so you better deliver. This baby is going to cost you.
Linux, the ugly duckling of the pack, yet she loves you completely without resevervation, she doesn't want your for your money or status. She is open and honest. And if you love her you can turn her into the princes of the ball but unlike the pretty windows, the linux girl stays true to you.
BSD, well, you seen dawn of the dead?
I am KIDDING!
OS/2 A loving hard working wive who raised the kids perfectly, kept the house in excellent condition and always prepared delicious meals followed by amazing sex, yet spurned for a 16 bit bimbo with 32 bit makeup.
Mainframe, you have to wait in line with the other johns, good service but you know thousands of others have been there before you.
Okay, I am out, your turn.
The simplest objection some have about WoW is that it is too simple. This is about taste and cannot really be argued.
One of the things is about how death is handled. SWG at one time handled it so bad that players commited suicide as a way to quickly travel back to base. This is not a good thing for a game. There should be at least some suspension of disbelief and everyone in your party jumping into a lavastream after the big fight saying, "see you later" just doesn't do it.
WoW requires you to go back to your body in an invulnerable form from a fixed point and then respawn in the immidiate area of your body. If you don't you suffer a severe hit to your stats for a period of time.
The "punishement" aspects here are obvious. Going back to your corpse is boring, if in a party it requires everyone to wait, and you better hope they wait because what ever killed you will still be there + fresh respawns.
Some people think this is too though while others think it is too weak. Both are right.
If I remember correctly (I haven't played any MMO in months and they tend to blur together) in EQ2 the punishements are slightly more severe, you respawned alive and well similar to were your ghosts spawns in WoW but with a severe hit to your stats and XP. You could lighten the punishement by recovering your "shard" from your place of death.
Think for a second about the difference between WoW and EQ2 right there. In WoW you travel back to your corpse in order to continue meaningfull play in invulenrable mode, it is nothing but a time waster. You died so you don't get to play for a few minutes. Don't die again.
In EQ2 you are back in the game again from the moment you die BUT severely reduced and now faced with the same journey as a WoW player except you are very vulnerable and now got to fight everything between you and your bleeding mangled corpse.
That is not all, your group has not only now lost a valuable member of your party (or a piece of dead weight) but now faces the choice of making their way back to the entrance to pick you up and escort you to your corpse OR going on in reduced state.
A common sight in EQ2 was to see players hitching a ride into a dungeon with later groups to get back to their group waiting inside.
Obviously therefore death is something far more severe in EQ2 then in WoW. Some people like this.
Yeah it can be seen as a waste of time but it can also be seen as a way of getting better players who actively take care of each other. Having played both of them I have noted that EQ2 groups tend to work better together then WoW. In EQ2 EVERYONE in the group shared in your XP penalty. Can you imagine WoW players trying to deal with this? (The shared XP hit was removed from EQ2, as were shard runs apparently)
There is however yet another way of doing death. SWG had an amazing concept that I think was unique. Not all enemies killed you. You had three bars, if one was reduced to zero you were knocked out. It was then up to the enemy to deliver a finishing blow. Not all critters would do that (depending on species) and even if they wanted too it was possible for them to be distracted by your team mates. This added a whole new element to the game. Now there was still the tactical option of "saving" a teammate because a lesser class of healer could recover them on the field then a death character. Any medic could revive a knocked out character while death was only reversible by a highlevel doctor.
This made it actually important to have a few points in medic as a fighter as it allowed you to recover your true medic when they got knocked out. (because of SWG design were actions causes health bar loss a hardworking medic could put themselves in a vulnerable state were a single hit could knock them out)
Needlessly complex OR intresting gameplay? It is a matter of taste. (That is to say nothing of the difference between having a dedicated action/mana bar from wich you perform your actions and having to pay for your actions with your
I need my MMORPG fix but I do NOT need those random loot drop grinds.
WoW players might regonize were I stopped playing WoW. It is in the night elf area, third area, and you got to kill some warlocks with their pets for an item to drop as part of a longer quest.
It didn't drop. My rogue gained two levels in that area while I learned how exactly to get them in the shortest possible time. Simple, conceal, sap caster, kill pet, kill caster. Rince and repeat.
That killed the game for me, right there and then I knew that this was exactly how the game would be for the next 40 levels and then some.
Since I had already paid over the next few weeks I got my char to around 30 (were getting new skills ends and you just get slightly more powerful skills to deal with more powerful critters) and then just stopped.
I couldn't stand the random drop nature of things. EQ2 at least most times TOLD you how much you had to kill. Granted most its quests were Kill 8 X, Kill another 8 X, and again. Once more. Okay, now kill 10 of them. Okay! Now kill 8 x (adjective) X. Congrats, you done part 1, now kill more X.
But at least you could count them.
Get the goddamn fucking randomizer OUT of my MMORPG's. If I kill every single last one of those casters the damn item should just fucking drop.
It was the same with crafting. The chances of actually getting some of the rarer stuff were so random that you just couldn't make plans. By the time some items actually dropped I had gotten so many levels I was way beyond the item I had wanted to grind.
WoW takes to long. Your warning tells me BC does not improve this. I HATE RANDOM DROPS.
If Blizzard had made Star Wars poor Luke would have had to make a dozen trips to the Jawas before R2-D2 dropped.
Then again, if Sony had made Star Wars, you would have had to form a que to rescue Leia, if she was spawning that day.
Mmm, if only Lucas made a MMORPG. Surely that would be tops! Oh wait.
When exactly is Sony going to tell the europeans what exactly the capabilities are of this new system? Right now, still a month away from launch? No.
3 weeks before launch? No.
Two weeks? One week? 5 days? 2 days? 1 day? No.
They say they will (no actuall guarantee) announce it on launch day. So that gives customers how much time to cancel their pre-order incase they don't find the list to satisfaction?
That is right. NO TIME.
Honesty? No, sorry, not this time.
Oh but they said it now right? Well yeah, their lawyer told them too, if people had found out AFTER launch date they would have gotten their ass sued off.
Lets not forget that this is the EU, NOT the US or japan were big money rules. Holland is the EU country that forced Sony to exchange EVERY PSP with ANY defective pixels. (A rule that by the way goes for ALL LCD's, under dutch, and EU law, a product has to be fully functional and defective (sub)pixels are not part of it)
So they announce it now, in a queit way, hope people forget and then claim, well we had a list up on launch day to cover themselves out of deceptive sales lawsuits.
Sony and honesty? Yeah right.
Europeans are always screwed when it comes to launch dates. We are used to that but at least sometimes this results in us actually getting a better product. Patches applied and production problems sorted out. So we get every single console after everyone else has had it but at least we usually get better systems.
Offcourse we also pay more, even if you account for different tax systems. But hey, that is the price to pay for the rest of the world beta-testing the product right?
Now along comes Sony, who already has enough trouble selling the PS3, and they give europe NOT only the usual long delay, the usual unexplained price difference BUT they give a lesser product AND ask us to accept an untested product (untested software emulation vs proven hardware) on top of it all?
I actually think the PS3 might have something intresting in it because of its linux capabilities (although so far it seems Sony has made every effort to kill this possibility) but just how far do they expect people to go?
Did Sony hire a mole from MS or Nintendo? Did they hire someone from the remains of british industry to make their decisions? Has the long japanese working week finally caught up with management and driven them utterly mad?
Yes, in theory it makes sense to reduce costs per unit especially with the PS3 but to screw over the europeans by given them a lesser untested product months after everyone for more money just doesn't seem to make a lot of marketting sense. Especially given that PS3 games at the moment are not exactly setting new sales records.
Oh well, Sony got a couple more weeks. They could still announce that the EU PS3 will not be able to play HD movies. Can't take any risks, can we? Must make sure this product tanks.
Perhaps this is all a cunning plan to avoid those nasty stories about shortages and people fighting over the PS3 at launch. Make it even more expensive, still have no good games out and reduce functionality.
Rememeber the tale of how MS won the desktop from IBM and Apple and the homecomputers? Not because MS was so brilliant but because IBM and Apple and the homecomputers all made really stupid decisions?
That is too simple for Sony's taste. It seems determined to make every boneheaded decision themselves.
It is pitifull. Lets face it, the hardware costs for the PS2 hardware can't be that high, but in order to save a few dollars they are willing to remove a key feature from their product. A key feature that is desperately needed as long as their are no killer PS3 games out while there are plenty of intresting PS2 games out, and in fact still being launched.
I have seen attempts to introduce laws that require older people to take driving exams again to prove they are still fit to drive.
Perhaps as management gets older HR should do re-hire procedures to see if they still qualify. Alternatively, maybe management that has been there longer then a decade should be just humanily put down. Put the sony leadership out of its misery.
Trust me on this, NOBODY wants their NEW book to look used. People don't like it with any product period. They want their product to be in mint condition and if everyone else has been handling that product then they will try to get another one.
Just work in a book/magazine store for a while to see this. Hell, check your own behaviour. Accepted practice is to browse through the first book/magazine in a stack to see if you like it and then pick up one from further down the stack (were nobody has touched it yet) and buy that.
While everyone does it, and you would hardly accept a bookstore that doesn't allow browsing, it leads to one copy nobody wants. A tiny loss on the latest Harry Potter but what to do when a store only has one copy of a book?
It is a cost to the bookstore and ultimately the publisher. In digital format this is offcourse gone. Everyone gets a fresh copy, and it stays fresh.
Mmm, second hand digital books. Fresh and minty as the new version. Another reason the publishers don't like it.
The trojan was spread through usenet in specific pedofile newsgroups. Downloading an image file (wich is how the trojan was diguised) from such a group is NOT something an innocent person would do. Downloading childporn is a crime in most of the western world. End of story. If you download a file from such a group then you are apparently willing to commit a crime.
Oh yeah, "innocent" until proven guilty. Well by that logic the police makes a habbit about arresting innocent people all the time.
There is in the west the idea of a fair trial. I think the mistake made here is that some people think that means fair as in fairplay. The way that in golf a better player should handicap himself to make the game "fair" to a lesser player.
It does not mean that. Instead it means fair as in honest. No false evidence, a chance to defend oneself and such. At no time does it mean that the police should have to handicap itself to give a criminal a chance to get out of a conviction.
The problem is that it is hard to do this. We don't want the police constantly being able to search just anyone and anything they like BUT the countermeasure does lead to criminals using their so called right to privacy to hide evidence. THAT was not the idea but it is the sideeffect.
Privacy is there to protect the innocent NOT the guilty. Sadly it is impossible to have one without the other.
But it is still hard for me not to cheer this guy on. No I don't enjoy the idea of me being snooped upon just because I downloaded something innocent (the trojan was after all NOT real childporn) BUT this guy did get a man arrested who put his 8yr old daughter up for use by pedofiles. (another case mentioned in the article that this guy uncovered)
I am sorry, but that overrules a lot of privacy concerns for me. I am that most rare of slashdot readers. A middle of the roader. A moderate. I believe that communist, capatilists and liberals are ALL wrong. Their ideas are based on the idea that humans are perfect in one way or another when they are not.
This guy showed us that our rules of privacy and allowed methods of police investigation allow very serious criminals to go undetected and unpunished.
You might say that you consider your privacy to be worth the sale of a 8yr old girl. I do not. Maybe I am damned for that to live in a police state. But what is the alternative? A free society OR something much worse then a police state?
Look at russia, they went from a police state but I don't think they are exactly living in a free society either.
We should use this case as an eye-opener. Clearly there is a gap between the type of crimes commited and what the police is allowed to detect. If the police had been allowed to use this guy's methods how many pedofiles might have been arrested who are now still free to commit their crimes?
On the other hand, how much of our private lifes would we all have to give up to make this possible?
It is balancing issue and at the moment I think the balance favors the criminals too much. Consider this,"the innocent may have somethign to fear from the police, but they certainly have something to fear from criminals the police cannot touch".
You have her grab the laptop and you grab the plasma screen. Geez. You call yourselve a geek and cannot even figure out this simple puzzel?
Now if the comment had been "I always knew that a geek would make a great father" then you would have had a point.
It will almost certainly be a mess because the other two entertainment industries have also gotten it completlty wrong and the book industry so far has not shown to be any brighter.
The move from physical to digital distribution of a product like music/movies/books has the following clear benefits.
Simply put, digital distribution is a dream come true for a publisher. Forget amazon. Forget having to stock your product in thousands of stores in the hope of selling one copy in a fraction of them. Forget shipping back-orders wich are never collected.
Even the simplest most basic decsission a publisher has to make, how many copies do I produce of this in the first run, is GONE!
A publisher could have all its books online in digital form at the fraction of the cost of single high-street retail store. It would never run out of a copy, the logistics of getting the latest harry potter to thousands of stores across a nation would be gone in an instant, all copies would be in mint condition (no longer have you got cracked spines were callous readers have broken your virgin book, and nobody wants a book somebody else has already broken in)
And offcourse the costs of getting books sold would drop dramatically.
So what happens. We get incompatible formats, tiny catalogs, and prices that at times are even HIGHER then the paper version.
WTF?
ebooks are a wonderfull idea, especially to anyone who has ever tried to find an out-of-print book. The publishers will how ever NEVER get it. The internet is now old tech and books were one of the first pieces of digital content that could have made us of it because of the small filesizes and they simply haven't.
Not that you can blame them. Anyone here ever tried MS reader for the .lit format? Talk about a piec of crap software. It doesn't even follow MS own guidelines on how its software should look and feel and that is then supposed to win people over?
I can buy my overpriced paper book, read it anyway I want it, share it as much as I like and then sell it.
Digital? I can read it only on supported readers, can't share it, and selling it is claimed to be illegal.
Oh and the price? Why, exactly the same offcourse. Passing on savings to the customer? Not in the content industry my lad.
This is why ebooks not only will fail but have failed.
The only hope is that as various goverments are getting concerned about the cost of schoolbooks (dutch goverment was thinking about making them free) the idea of forcing these essential books to be published digitally paid by the goverment, would perhaps force publishers to get their heads around the idea that a digital product does not fetch the same price as a physical product.
I read it as, FCC Report - TV Violence Should be Regular wich actually makes sense.
Some theory has it that excessive violence makes people immune to it and more willing to accept it in their lives. FCC training the US to be mindless killers. Oh okay, killers, they already got the mindless part.
Only kidding, americans. Europeans watch the US, watch you making a complete mess of things, and then, do the exact same thing, because HEY, it must work a second time?
Anyway, what used to constantly happen on a dutch tv program called countdown (music program) was the interviewed american/english popstars would say something and then excuse themselves for saying something that couldn't be aired. The dutch interviewer then responding, no problem and just going on.
Did all this cursing turn me into a sick sociopath unfit to live in modern society? Eh, bad example.
I also remember some full frontal nudity in dutch childerens tv. Did that turn me in a sex obssesed adult as I grew up? Damn...
Well, I also saw lots of violence like jackie chan movies. Did that turn me into an atheletic incredibly fit adult who can pull of amazing stunts at the drop of a hat? AHA! The proof, TV does NOT AFFECT US!
Discovery channel has been taking a nosedive in recent years but apart from the incredibly bad programs that have nothing to do with science or discovery they also started this amazing practice of not just bleeping out some words but even pixellating the mouth saying them. What, lipreaders complained?
A nude person, flipping the bird saying fuck will be just one huge pixel. Well, that is just wrong.
You know another thing I noticed. A "violent" show like the a-team also, at least early on (dutch tv is re-airing them, ah the quality of commercial stations) always included a shot of the people climbing out of the carwreck to show they were okay and nobody was hurt.
Compare this with far less "violent" tv like Law & Order wich might give you the idea that mass murderes are an everyday thing. Oh, in the US they are?
I know that in holland (15/16 million people, area about the size of new york state) we got less then 1 murder per day (average hovers around 300). On tv? 300 per day? Well, not exactly but close. At least half a dozen crime tv series per day and one wouldn't be complete without at least on killing.
So violence on TV is excessive.
Same as sex. Why there is more sex in one episode of sesami street then your average slashdotter has in a lifetime! SHOCKING!!! (but not as shocking as that there are people who actually want to have sex with big bird (Pino in holland and he is blue))
If I do object to violence on tv then it is that every damn police series producer seems to have watched silence of the lambs. yeah nice movie but give that damned plot a rest will you OR I might go into excessive violence mode on your ass.
The simple fact is that in mainland europe (except for krauts but what do you expect from nazis) we got a pretty relaxed attitude to sex and violence and profanity and it doesn't create a society any more violent (a society with more sex I think would be extremely welcome).
But ah, thinkofthechilderen. Can childeren be affected by images on tv.
Yes offcourse they can (wait for it), just as they can be anything else that raises them. If the TV becomes the babysitter/caretaker then yes, the child will adopt the values of that caretaker.
Childeren should be raised by their parents. To many parents nowadays put the child in front of the tv and think that is enough. It ain't. If the child picks up bad influences from the tv it is because it spends way to much time in front of it.
Because there is something else I remember from dutch tv apart from the sex and the swearing and the violence. We only had one channel. (waits for the younger readers to stop screaming in terror) Just one tv station, wich often didn't have anything on during the daytime. No I don't mean anything you want to w
So I won't comment on the legal aspects. Ask a lawyer.
The moral aspects are easier, because you don't need a degree to argue ethics. Just an over inflated sense of self importance. Check.
Is it moral to do X? Well, that depends, on you, the society you live in and how willing that society is to beat in your head for violating the morality of that society.
Is it moral to have sex with your childeren and then kill them for your own pleasure? I think the general opinion is not.
Is it moral to kill thousands of childeren each and every year because you like to drive to fast/drunk for your own pleasure? Look at the number of childeren killed year in year out because of dangerous driving and I think that the general opinion is yes. Except offcourse nobody will admit it.
Morality is a complex thing and it seems to have a lot to do with whatever the "people" can be bothered to get upset about. Or rather a small group of people can be bothered to shout very loudly about without anyone else shouting back.
It ain't even consistent. On a small scale people might agree on say restricting road speeds near schools, but if you suggest that the speed across the entire town is brought down to a safe limit, or even worse, put up camera's to enforce the speed limit, then you find yourselve with massive opposition. Or at least very loud and that surely means massive.
At the moment you got a "thinkofthechilderen" movement who is very massive, or at least very loud. They say, that it ain't right to let childeren access places like myspace unrestricted. Are they right? Do they even represent a majority of the people? Do you consider what the majority considers to be right, to be right? Note that the "thinkofthechilderen" group can't seem to be bothered by the deaths in traffic wich outnumber the victims of sexual predators.
I myself got the following problem with this idea.
Not to long ago there was a police request for witnesses in a the free dutch newspaper metro or spits about a rape case. A woman returning from a date late at night had been assaulted and raped walking back alone. A comment by a collegue was that her boyfriend should have walked her back.
In a way he was right except that he shouldn't be. Should women be restricted from were and when they can walk because some men are rapists?
Should childeren be banned from socializing online because some people prey on them online?
The next step in that logic is that they asked for it. This is the old sexist way of thinking wich I definitly think is amoral.
So I don't think childeren should be prevented from accessing spaces like myspace. Restrict the criminals, not the victims.
Is it then moral for you to break restrictions against childeren that can be considered by some to be morally wrong.
Well, obviously not. The only thing that could be wrong if you consider breaking that restriction itself to be a morally wrong act.
Like say, you consider it morally wrong to let someone starve to death but your only option would be to steal the food wich you also consider to be morally wrong. A choice of the lesser of two evils.
But I find it hard to consider a proxy to myspace to be morally wrong on its own. Myspace may be wrong, but not on any moral grounds.
Say you provide the access to these childeren. This results in them posting their details on myspace. Someone else uses these details to hunt one down and rape and kill them. Are you then morally to blaim?
That depends on the morals of the person judging you.
Is the boyfriend in the above real example to blaim for not escorting his girlfriend home? Is society as a whole? Is the girl? Or is it just the rapist and nobody else that should be held accountable for what happened?
If you provide access you provide access for, what I would consider, a in itself harmless actions. There are plenty of safe ways to behave on myspace. You do not make these kids behave in an unsafe manner. Part of living is t
What does he mean with unified? Music and movies? Oh right, ehm, how exactly do I fold my Star Wars laserdisc to fit in a VHS or a BETAMAX or a DVD or a BluRay or a HD-DVD or a UMD or a V2000 or a 8/16/35mm projector?
Music? Oh fuck it I am to lazy to list the tape spool format, the minidisc, the 8track, the minitape, the digital tapes, music on video tape experiments, the cd, the enhanced cd's etc etc etc. Not even to mention the obvious incompatibilities of the various digitals formats.
But that is pendantic? Well, yeah, the format for music is currently the CD and for movies the DVD. This has also been true for a number of years.
And is this a good thing? You also can't MOVE beyond it. The DVD format is what you release movies on so you better make sure your movie doesn't require anything more.
Consoles at least have different makers and at least game makers got a choice. Every generation you can push a direction to go forward and see if it works. There is movement. There is things happening. Excitement, fun, lots and lots of money changing hands.
Just consider what a PC game would be like if it HAD to play on every standard PC sold within the last 3 years. No flightsims, since joysticks and a standard. No enhanced sound because soundcards ain't a standard. No fancy graphics effects because GPU's ain't a standard.
And yet, there is an entire game industry that works awfully well that works just with these limitations. The flash game industry. it works on any computer that can run flash and that is something most computers nowadays can, even linux machines.
Can consoles of today be made to run flash? No reason why not, so there you got your unified gaming platform. Does opera on Wii support flash? Voila, your request has been filled.
Oh, flash isn't capable of doing what you want in your game. Mmmm, maybe you need some specialized hardware, an addon. Something that sets it apart from the rest. Oh wait.
Unified platform sounds nice, it will happen at just about the same time as you no longer need to buy addons for certain games. NEVER. Who could play guitar hero, without a guitar? DDR without a dancepad? Rez without a vibrator?
I hope you are a girl, because I am going to kiss you.
There is however one sentence that should be added.
MS Paint is therefore excellent for beginners, but once those beginners are no longer beginners, you might want to switch to Adobe Photoshop.
Once you learn to ride a bike, the training wheels can come off and soon you might graduate to an "adult" bike.
Once you reached first base you might want to eventually try for second. Maybe even try to steal home plate. Or you might try sex instead of playing ball.
Differently skilled users will prefer different applications. From this follows that as you change in skill, you will want to change applications.
Shocking. Next thing you might find that as you go to school each year you move up a level and teachers gradually increase the difficulty of sums until you forget how to do basic aritmethic (or forget how to spell it) without a calculator.
You are making the classic mistake of petty little armchair dictators everywhere. What is right for you is right for everyone.
You don't want to configure things, so NOBODY wants to configure things so things that can be configured are bad.
I hope that you are a homosexual or your partner is going to extremely frustated. What works for you, will not work for her. (yeah yeah, slashdot and partner, har har)
If what you claimed is true then Harley Davidson would be bankrupt since for a long period of their history their bikes most certainly did NOT work out of the box. Are they bankrupt? Oh, no, they are actually doing fairly well and the bikes from that era were you first needed to put in some major work on your new purchase are actually highly sought after. Covered in rust and in pieces and mixed up with another model? All the better!
You can't switch on discovery channel and not see a program were people that a product that works out of the box and then cut it apart into little bits to configure it to their liking.
So are these persons not people?
No, you think because you don't like something, nobody likes it.
Well, sorry kid, but that is the way fundementalists think. I am X so everyone is X and if they are not they are wrong.
Humanity is far more complex, we want/need different things and we are going to argue about it forever. This is a GOOD thing. It is why things happen. It was the crap western bikes that gave the japanese their chance and is why in a world were you have HD doing extremely well, some people buy honda's because they want a bike that really just fucking drives out of the box and they don't ever have to mess with.
On the other hand, people also still buy bucatti bikes. A brand that never ever managed to create a single piece of equipment with two wheels that just works. (I do not know anything about the reliability of their four wheeled car, except that I want one. Road car that can outrace a F1 car. Fap fap fap.)
Humans eh.
I LOVE IT!
And your gnome is the sucks and my e17 is the best thing since sliced bread. It spawns kittens and the idle process is a sexy red head that loves to give blow jobs.
Only bad thing is that if it follow the ubuntu tradition (kubuntu = KDE, edubuntu = Education, xubuntu = XFCE) then you would end up with eubuntu. Mmm, maybe the european union should sponsor it.
Offcourse since ubuntu is a word with meaning and so is "enlightenment" you could just call the distro by the long name and come up with something incredibly deep and meaningfull. Take that lover of a distro named after some nasty tiny little critter known for making the lives of humans a misery.
But in all seriousness, I do think both KDE and Gnome are "wrong" at least for my purposes. Gnome is far too strict for my tastes. KDE is far too fisher price. (So is OS-X by the way, I do not need HUGE ICONS).
But most important for me is this. My desktop machines are rather old, dual P3's from that era in time when motherboards were made only to support a limited amount of memory. At least the mobo's I can afford.
e17 is the ONLY one I ran from a livecd that did NOT want to swap. Installed and running for several days doing all kinds of stuff it only has used 140k swap space on a 768mb machine. That I love because offcourse my HD's are also slow as P3 era HD's were.
Yes e17, especially with the eyecandy switched to make vista look like dos, does suck up the CPU cycles like it was coded by MS, but since I run on a dual who cares. One cpu is enough for what I do on a desktop.
e17 for me delivers what I need. Does gnome deliver what you need?
Linus probably has different requirements. But fundementally I think there is a HUGE difference in philosophy.
Gnome seems to believe that making things simple is the way to adoption. To accept that the new users is going to be new and is going to want things simple so as not to face a vertical wall that is the learning curve.
It sounds sensible, and to a degree it is. It is the beginning of learning. Start simple. Gnome's mistake and everyone else that wants to keep things simple is that the NEXT step in learning is to make things more difficult.
1+1 = 2. Good, 2+3 = 5. You are catching on. 4+5 = 9. Excellent. Lets move on 5+5 = ?, think hard. 10, very good! etc etc etc.
The Gnome philosopjhy would have you doing single digit sums with single digits answers until the day you die because that is EASY. Yeah, it is, but most people want more.
Would you still ride a bicycle with trainer wheels or your parent running behind it? Offcourse not, you ride 1000cc road monster. Not as easy, but you have moved beyond the training wheels and now want MORE.
Gnome is the kiddy desktop. The one were the training wheels are welded to the frame. Does this make it a bad product? No, if that is what you want/need then that is what you need. BUT the nature of human beings is to try to convince that what is right for them is right for others.
That is were flamewars start. Gnome is for the crowd that does not need or want or can handle more control. It is a valid group BUT you will have clashes if you then try to market it to other users.
Offcourse the same goes in reverse, users who need/want or can handle more control trying to convince those who can't to switch to a product that gives them more control.
It is human nature. Gnome is right and it can't understand why KDE just can't see that. KDE thinks it is right and just can't see why gnome won't accept that. Meanwhile e17 spanks them both.
Oh and, vi for the win! Did you know there are distro's (I am looking at you gentoo) where that editor is not only not the default but not even INSTALLED as the base of the OS (on the root partition). Shocking.
Wich means that is MS is copying the evil from disney they are really copying the evil from Steve Jobs/Apple. Not only does this mean that MS ALWAYS copies from Apple but also that Apple is the original evil.
It all makes sense now.
If you think about it, the "desktop" was developed by a copy company yet you can go to jail for copying it.
If you haven't played the game yet, stop reading. Stop reading anyway unless you are in the mood for a rant.
Okay, you were warned. In Neverwinter Nights 2 you have two "dramatic" moments. The opening act has you partnered with two childhood friends. A male fighter and a female wizard. Both like you start at level 1 and get maybe 1 or 2 levels during the opening act.
Your village is attacked because of you are the destined one. How original. Young farm person at just the right age to go out into the world has evil (wich for some reason has been laying low between the events of the opening credits and this moment) attack your peacefull village of your youth.
There are even in pulp fantasy variations of this you know. Conan was a slave his entire youth. Willow was a mature adult (well he had kids).
Oh well, you are attacked and for no very good reasing you get a cutscene were the girl suddenly decides to help her teacher out (who doesn't even look like he needs help) and gets herself killed. Drama!
Well no. It has everything wrong with it that the poster talked about. You first think it is your fault, then find it isn't and therefore feel only frustration. What a way to kick of an RPG that is supposed to have a influence system. Oh, and the lesson? Well listen to warnings and don't get in over your head. Good warning, except that it never has to be apllied in the rest of the game. You never meet anyone more powerfull then you that you can't handle. You never are asked to let someone more experienced handle a battle OR do a tactical retreat. So what is the point?
But that ain't the only one to snuff it. Later another girl joins your party and voila, she gets killed too. Again nothing you can do about it. Drama? No not really, hell the game doesn't even allow drama. If you really cared about her, you would be a little miffed you don't even get to kill her killer. At all, not even after you have no use for him anymore.
Oh, and the people from your village that survived the first attack? Well, they are killed off too. What? You are the desitned hero, so everyone you grew up has to die so that no stories of you running around with no pants as a kid can every ruin your heroic reputation. It is a rule!
Drama is nice and all, but the simple fact is that YOU are supposed to be in control. So if the game removes control, then anything that happens that you are supposed to be in control about just isn't "real".
Drama can happen outside your control (that is really totally outside your control, rather then just having the game take control) OR because of a choice you made.
System Shock 1 & 2 and the first Unreal did it very effective. Every bit of "drama" had already happened. You were in total control of events in your own time but naturally NOT in control over things that had already happened before your time started.
Finding out that the person whose emails you have been finding has died a tragic dead WORKS when it is clear it happened outside your time. You couldn't have gone faster or anything. So you do not feel cheated by the game. It worked for me.
Do you want to know one of the most dramatic moments in games for me? Planescape Torment, the dead nations, has an undead NPC who has lost her name. You can help her find it or give her a new one. The way that extremely short non-combat, non-fedex, non-runaround, non-loot, quest is told just worked for me. The entire area is nothing short of brilliant, undeads who are not just cannon-fodder, but that element is just damned good as it impressed upon me the sadness of an undead existence, destined to only rot away further and further while only memories remain of your former live.
Brilliant. And nobody dies, no cutscenes take away control. Just you, and an NPC and a few simple lines.
From the days of Wing Commander games have attempted to get me to feel drama by snatching defeat from the jaws of my hard won victory. It don't work for me.
Games are NOT movies. LEARN this deve
I am talking about the RPG effect were the end or even the mid-level game is just one long hack&slash. Offcourse you might have a different opinion, maybe the descende into one long slaughter session is what you call the exitiing bit and you are glad to have gotten that boring talkie stuff.
Not even NWN2 succeeds here. Part of the problem is that the game gets too big. You go from a having a small party whose members are constantly in each others hair providing color, to a HUGE party who members you can barely get to know, whose interaction is extremely random because you have ZERO change of hitting the right combo of party members at the right moment/location.
But an ever worse game was a RPG set in our own medeival times but were magic was real. It started out as a good RPG but soon became nothing more then one long dungeon crawl with zero Rpg elements.
But back to bashing NWN2. If you have played it, you will have seen a loading screen message that tells you that you can interact with your party members enough to change them. What they don't say is that you can change ONE of them. The dwarf can become a monk. About half way through too and then that is it. Zero reaction from him.
Whoopee. Then again, the entire game is not to fleshed out. Only one romance option per gender. No same sex romance. If only they hadn't gone for a every single class as a party member approach and concentraded on a smaller group they could have avoided all that.
BUT I never really came across the need to 'grind' in a PC RPG. Yeah, in a way perhaps the whole bit in NWN2 were you got to do quest after quest to get access to the next area in your quest. Espcially since the "part of Neverwinter blocked of by the guards" bit is getting pretty old by now. Is that city ever not under lockdown?
Yet that is part of the gameplay, sure it is not the best story telling to do all these quests when you feel you should be rushing to get inside but that is the way bad stories work. It is like that eternal sex scene in action movies were the leads suddenly get naked for no reason when they really should be trying to solve the case.
As for ALWAYS playing a newbie. Well yeah, that can get old. Again NWN2 fails here a bit. Since you can create your own character you get the effect of being treated like a kid when your character is a 200 year old elf. Sure, they mature slower but still. Wel at least they were bright enough to make your forster father an elf as well.
As for starting at level 1. Okay, just try to imagine a game where you start at level 20. Problem? Well, if it is D&D beyond that you start to come close to godhood. Monk's are near invulnerable. Fighters slice and dice through anything, magic users don't have a single spell available anymore that does NOT wipe out the entire party (by accident, I SWEAR!) and healers can pull people back from death before they were born.
Sure a TRUE RPG could probably pull it off. In fact there is an other genre of games that already does. It is called an adventure. RPG without the combat. Because what does the combat mean if you are so fucking powerfull that nobody can stand against you. It would have to be an RPG with extreme story telling.
I want one, but in todays world were not a single RPG designer can resist skipping corners by just adding a few extra levels of nothing but boring nasties you already defeated dozen of times, I am not holding my breath.
Even the legendary Planescape Torment had them.
But as for needing to grind up, he is playing the wrong games.
Is it perfect? No. Could you make a game that simply improves on its mistakes? Possibly.
But what are its mistakes, and are they really mistakes or are they fundemental parts of the nature of MMO gaming.
It would be easy to think that you simply visit the WoW forums, note down the complaints of gamers and ex-gamers and then fix these in your game.
But wich to follow? Do you cater to the PvP haters or lovers?
WoW currently caters to both PvP and PvE but that also means neither side gets exactly the dedication they want. So they complain. BUT would a game without one be that successfull? Just how big is the subscriber base that is satisfied with the current combo? People who are satisfied tend not to post on forums. They are to busy having a good time in the game.
Same with the crafting/loot system. Again WoW has sought the middle ground, essentially both systems of getting your equipment are competing with each other. This means that pure crafters have a reduced market while at the same time those who are looting get lots of useless materials they need to sell.
And again, would a game that focusses on one exclusively (SWG had a pure crafting system) be that succesfull?
You could create a MMORPG were levelling up isn't everything. Were grinding to X isn't the primary goal. That would make the RPG crowd perhaps happier but might loose you all the grinding monkeys who no longer have an epenis to wave around.
WoW in many areas seeks the middle road. It works. 8+million people think the bits they like are better then the bits they don't like.
If you are going to change anything in that design you need to realize that you are going to please some but most likely upset a hell of a lot of other players.
Go pure PvP and you MIGHT appease those PvPers who left but you are going to loose for sure every single PvE player. PLUS a significant part of the players who like a bit of both.
Just read every comment here that suggests an obvious improvement and then ask youreselve what the total effect would be.
Then again, until WoW entered the market, people said that the MMORPG market had been saturated and that any new game could only poach from other games.
So is WoW the final MMORPG or is it just a more succesfull EQ waiting to be dethroned by the next comany.
Have you actually ever played Guild Wars? Good, then have you ever thought about the difference in hardware compared to say a WoW or Everquest OR that MMOFPS planetside?
That is right. Guild Wars ain't all that massive.
Guild Wars has a couple of 3D chat rooms were players meet up but were NOTHING happens. From there extremely small groups of players head out into the game world that is unique for each group. This makes it a lot simpler to keep the world going serverside. You only need a machine capable of handling a handfull of players. Not a massive cluster capable of keeping thousands of players in the same space.
Guild Wars is a brilliant design but it ain't a true MMO, it is the reason why they don't need a monthly subscription fee but may it also be the reason why it doesn't equall WoW in its success?
Then there is another problem with Guild Wars. Even in its tiny gamespaces it suffers from some serious warping. Not that much of a problem with auto-targetted magic attacks BUT a real problem for a FPS.
The simple reason that FPS or for that matter direct combat has not made it big into MMO land is because the nature of beast doesn't lend itself to this.
And FPS players are cheap bastards. You expect a company to come up with hardware a great deal more powerfull then needed for WoW but also want it to be free.
You also over estimate the appeal of FPS. The simple fact is that WoW has shown the world that FPS just ain't popular. Just add up all the people that PAY for multiplayer FPS and then look at the 8 million PAYING subscribers for WoW.
I am not even sure that the number of free players of games like counterstrike can reach that number. But who cares anyway. You need paying customers. Not people who want everything for free.
Follow the money.
Famous last words. Well actually, the real last words are "but I thought I had a choice?!"
Answer, "you did. You choose wrong."
A liberty once lost is not easily regained. Go ahead. Start a radiostation. Once it was easy, all you needed was the equipment. Now you need a license. Try and get one for a station just powerfull enough to cover your town.
Don't even bother with a tv station. Yet the first tv stations were privately run by individuals.
Now it has hard to find a station NOT owned by some global multi-national. And not to many of those either.
A good thing OR a loss of freedom.
Once you accept that the state can censor the net in even the most limited capacity you have opened the door for every tiny, sensible increase.
Think of it like this:
ME: Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
You: Yes
ME: Would you sleep with me for 2 dollars (canadian)?
You: No, what kind of person do you think I am.
ME: We already established that, now we are just haggling over price.
Censorship is the same, it is an all or nothing deal. Accept the tiniest amount and you accept censorship as a whole.
Say you accept censorship as an optional plugin. But then how do people know about it? So people should have it installed with their new system but turned off by default. Okay, but some people still mis it. How about having it enabled by default? What about "THINK OF THE CHILDEREN" tm.
So make it mandatory in schools. How about at the office? Surely in the offices of anyone in a public position.
And what should be banned? Porn. Pictures or text? What about nudes. Only erotic nudes, but what is erotic? What is pornographic? Cover up statues?
Someone else pointed out that Norwegian childerens tv got naked boobies and you want to censor that.
I am not a liberal but censorship is dangerous.
As for that anti-phising thing. HOW do YOU know that every site ever put into that database will be there for the being a phising site and for nothing else?
Someone controls what you see. Do you control them, FOREVER!
Just consider stuff like hosepipe-bans, rolling black-outs and travelleing advisories.
Is internet access/trafic just another resource with an ultimately finite supply that may at times to be to limited so its distribution would have to be regulated?
We know this is true for other resources. In areas with droughts and insufficient reserves the goverment will regulate what you can and cannot do with the available water. Sure, sometimes the lack of water is because off extremely poor management often by that same goverment BUT that doesn't change the fact that when the reservoirs are low and there is no sign of rain the goverment first ASKS people not to waste water and finally orders them too.
You would have to be a liberal to an extremely silly degree to object to that.
Same with say electricity. Thanks to the believe that private companies run things better we in holland now get problems as well as private companies don't invest enough to cope with extreme situations and foila, nature always throws up extreme situations, often with a general helping of unfortunate coincedences. Who would have thought that in a hot summer, the temperature would be hot, water supplies would be reduced and demand for electricity would go up.
The goverment then first asks people to reduce their electricity consumption and finally just plain orders the consumption to stop, although over here by shutting down industrial users. In the US rolling blackouts seem to be favored.
Bad weather? Well, over he we get advice not to travel because of 5 centimeter snowfall. But that is because nothing ever happens here and we need an excuse to have a nice crisis now and then. "And NOW we go LIVE to our reporter on the street, what is happening Dave?" "Well Alan I can honestly report that right now, LIVE from an average street in Holland, absolutly NOTHING is happening BUT it might and I will here to report it, the MOMENT it happens, LIVE!"
So why is it so silly to presume that internet access through a combination of mismanagement and high demand could also find itself either having to deal with the results of extreme use (blackouts) or restrictions.
In fact, we have already seen this. Ever been in an office were the main pipe has gone down and now 1000 people are on a ISDN link? You bet your ass there is going to be some restrictions on the kind of sites visited.
For that matter have you seen the effects on the net during high profile events like the various terrorist attacks of the last decade? I do know that during the london bombings the dutch 3G (mobile phone) network had troubles dealing with all the demands for live video. So did newswebsites.
BUT is FLU likely to do this?
Ah, well that is the question. You see, the during the 9/11 attack at least the world I was in grinded to a halt. I worked at an ISP at the time (we hosted several of the newswebsites that saw their demand soar) and we didn't get any regular work done that day. We watched the news. So while one demand on the network increased it also lowered and in any case was of to short a duration.
But now imagine a prolonged sudden increase in the demand on traffic. Could it be delivered or would you find that working from home has become impossible. Well, I have my doubts but then, so did those people who thought our various other infra structures would be able to deal with extreme situations.
Is working from home really such a gigantic demand on the work? Especially if you consider that a person like me would for instance first shutdown his constantly running P2P program if the network was to slow. I already do so now.
I suppose it also greatly depends on the type of work. Say a creator like a programmer/writer could just literally work at home and only need the net to send his finished work to the office and get new instructions. A bit of code up and loads of gibberish emails down. More important, no immidiate demand. So an email takes an hour to get through. *sorry email junkies, t