If you read up on it you do find out that daikatana did sell a good number of games and would have been considered a success by other game standards. However ION storm/Romero had been burning money at such an awesome speed that even this "sucess" was barely enough to cover stated production costs. Note that these often do not include secundary costs. You would have to follow movie production a lot closer then most to learn the differences between the production costs of a project and the total costs involved.
But the real cost was not money but the fact that Romero lost the respect of his customers. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Who is going to buy Daikatana 2? For that matter any ION Storm game or any Romero game?
Daikatana was Romero's project and it sucked donkey balls as a game. I only downloaded it and still felt ripped off. It was so bad that it can't be believed.
Now the difference with Will Wright is that he A: never was going to make us his bitch and B had other successfull games. Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D are not Romero games. In fact judging by the turd that Daikatana was and that Romero has produced nothing else worth while it may be claimed that these ID games became successes despite Romero's involvement, not because.
Play Daikatana. I dare you to disagree that it is bad. Selling an overhyped game however isn't hard, there are always suckers lured in by advertising who are not warned by bad reviews and word of mouth. But the proof is simple. In an industry of sequels there is no Daikatana 2. How many success games have there been without a sequel?
Loggin is the usual user/password combo, nothing special but if you want to transfer money the final step is that they send a code to your mobile phone via a sms message. The code then has to be entered for the transaction to be processed.
You can change your mobile phone easily enough, just change it in the settings but that also requires a sms message with a code. So as long as you got your phone you are safe.
If you lose your phone you will have to disable your account and you will be send by mail a new set of login details.
It seems fairly secure, it would be hard to imagine how to phis it. The only thing that could possibly be done is that they try to get you to change your mobile phone number to one they control.
But this attack and that suphisticated. It still requires people not to check the bloody url. First rule of online banking. ALWAYS handtype the url. Second rule of online banking, see the first rule.
For the postbank that is mijn.postbank.nl not that hard to type and unless someone hacked the mainsite likely to be secure (provided your browser/os/isp ain't been hacked.
Fuck this, I am going to keep my fortune in an old sock.
If you can't use an ISP to "pirate" then why should you use it? At least in holland several ISP's have advertised with "download music/movies/games at high speed" while they had no service to offer these products in a "legal" manner. So where they advertising piracy?
Perhaps in the same way that a fast car ad advertises speeding. What after all is the point of a fast car when you can only drive as fast as everyone else?
ISP's might realize that there intrests are not the interests of the copyright holders. Same as xerox interests are not the interests of book publishers. If xerox made their copiers incapable of copying copyrighted works they might possibly find their entire market share collapsing faster then you can say "cheap chinese clones".
It reminds me a bit of those pay sex phone lines. Nobody likes them, banks hate doing business with porn companies. The phone company hates them because they are a hassle but both the banks and the phone company love the money they bring in. As long as you keep your company "clean" enough to touch they are happy to help you peddle smut.
Same with ISP's, while they would love to be just email and light web browwsing comapnies the momey is in p2p and porn. Nobody is going to need 24/7 super adsl to check their email.
Tiscali at least will fold like wet paper. They do not even have binary newsgroups because usenet is mostly used for piracy according to their helpdesk.
Tiscali heeft 1 nieuwsserver, namelijk news.tiscali.nl. Deze nieuwsserver geeft alleen tekst bestanden weer en ondersteunt dus geen binaries.
Tiscali heeft hier bewust voor gekozen omdat binarie servers veelal gebruikt worden voor het illegaal downloaden van auteursrechtelijke bestanden. Tiscali stimuleert juist de legale verspreiding van auteursrechtelijke bestanden via tiscali.music en tiscali.video.
In dutch but I doubt it will be different for the english branch.
Sadly at the moment it ain't my choice to use them. It ain't my connection and for 1 year getting a second line installed is to expensive but I can't wait to get my xs4all account back.
Oh and did anyone else notice that if this happens then people are being punished without ever having seen a judge or even a police officer. No sworn in official will be involved just people from two companies. Welcome to the justice system of the 21st century.
Same as fascist is rarely used accurately or even such phrases as "police state" or dictatorship.
Language is a tool for war and in war you always take the biggest guns avaialble to you. FUD instead of hype, hype instead of exegerated claims, exegerated claims instead of marketting speak.
Lets be honest here, you were scammed but why? What was it in the e-mail that immidialtly send you to the telephone ready to hand over your credit card number. Why did you not check the paypal site for any confirmation or even just to check the number in question.
Did you check the email headers, were they faked?
You now know that you been had and that it was stupid, you are, judging from your ID, a fairly recent slashdot user but the mere fact that you are here probably means you have heard about phishing scams before especially in concern to paypal and that in general handing over your credit card number is a bad idea.
So why? Was it a very good scam or are even warned people just plain stupid when on the line and in the general buzzle of a normal day you just didn't think it was going to happen to you?
I think the last case is the most frightening because it suggests there is nothing that can be done about this except to develop a 24/7 sense of paranoia. I remember growing up just having your wallet in your back pocket. Now it is standard routine to switch it to the front if I see an immigrant. Oh yes very racist but when you travelled for 2 years through a station (amsterdam lelylaan) wich was constantly pickpocketted by muslims to the extent that now the station has all but one entrance/exit sealed off (and damn any chance of an emergency or that people now have to cross a busy street to reach the trams/parking lot) you either learn to keep an eye on people with a dark skin or are one of the other losers who are confused why they have one less piece of luggage.
Don't get wrong, I use linux as my desktop and keep a windows machine around purely for gaming but linux is not ever going to compete with windows and frankly I that is the reason I use it.
I am reasonably handy and so I prefer a car that I can tinker with myself. Sure sure modern cars are a lot more comfortable but they are a black box. Fine when everything works but when it doesn't you got a ton of scrap iron until some guy comes along with a laptop and charges you a fortune for replacing a part rather then fixing it.
It is not that my linux desktop runs better but rather that when something goes wrong I can fix it. Recently my fileserver after a much delayed upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 (finally got rid of a promise software raid card that is unsupported in 2.6) I had a huge problem with reading some partitions. It stumped me for about a day of trying everything. In hindsight I think what happened was that extended attributes had been enabled without full support making all the files and directories on some partitions take bad values marking them as unreadable/mountable. In the end the fix was simple, set all the extended attributes to nothing with reiserfs tools.
This wasn't however easy to figure out. On several forums nobody knew what the problem was and I had to figure it out myself in the end although there were hints. Each time I was stumped there was still a tool to try, a parameter to look at, something to list so I could google it. Over the day I got more and more details out of the affected partition until I finally realized that the partitions that did not work had these exteneded attributes and then figuring that this was the cause.
A 8+ hour problem but solved.
Now my windows machine, one other task I use it for is reading fan-translated manga. cDisplay is a good tool for this (since been replaced by qcomicbook on linux) and I wanted it to appear in the right click context for directories so I could use it to also browse manga that is not zipped/rarred. Easy enough except it totally upset windows so I deleted it again and now windows opens a search window instead of opening the directory in explorer.
I no longer can edit the file associations and windows has been borked like this for months. I can't examine anything, there is no logging. Google returns nothing.
The problem is far more trivial. I can still right click to explore and by now I gotten used to it. The linux problem meant I could not mount several HD's causing me to fear I had lost close to a terrabyte of data.
But the linux problem I could fix, the windows problem I can not.
Why? Because windows is easier to use then Linux. Yes this sounds contradictive but think of it like this. A car with a handcrank is far less userfriendly then a car with an electric starter. But the handcrank won't be drained by leaving the lights on.
If linux becomes more userfriendly it will also loose that what makes it linux.
Take the constant complaint about linux using clear text configurtion files. These are indeed for the novice a bitch to maintain BUT they are what makes it possible to boot your corrupted system from a floppy and then just hand edit the system back into working order. Even the boot system (lilo) adds complexity for power. Am I the only one who sometimes forgets to replace hda with sda on their one machine with scsi causing lilo to be unable to find the root partition? The solution, give it as a boot parameter.
But this doesn't fit with a nice simple graphical screen with a nice animation showing that activity is going on. Hell on windows you would not even be informed that a critical drive can't be found. Windows just hangs. Easier when it works, useless when it doesn't.
Linux can be technically superior to windows. Some would already claim it is. It can never beat windows in userfriendlyness because if it did so it would no longer be linux but just a windows clone with all the problems that windows has. Lets not forget that a fair amount of windows famed insecurity
I got a primitive thought process, all humans are equal. So I should abandon that and go for the far more modern idea of racial superioty. If you judge it by the spawn of human history then all that nazi crap about the master race is very new.
If you are going to attack a system you can't just spout platitudes.
It can be argued that some countries do well when they get rid of differences between members of its population but only if you are incredibly naive. The dutch golden age is often claimed to be a result of it being an open society welcoming the oppressed from other parts of europe. Well if you think being open and treating all people as equals is the same as not actually killing people for not having the majority religion I suppose your right. In reality the Dutch golden age happened when minorities like the jews were being denied many rights and privileges. As for even smaller groups like chinamen or muslims, I suppose not being lynched just like the protestants is a form of equality.
Same with the US of A, give us your hungry and oppressed provided they are white protestants. Japanese were put into concentration camps, with wich america had lots of experience using them on the indians, based purely on race. Claimed for security but german and italian citizens were not interned. Despite the fact that there has been no evidence of japanese-americans aiding the enemy while plenty of german and italian americans did aid the enemy. As for blacks, they only got the vote in what 1965?
Yet america did pretty well before this emancipation of the non-white races did it not?
Japan itself is one of the least cultural diverse 1st world countries around and it did seem to do pretty good by restricting immigration. Oh and by having an untouchable class. A smaller group then the lowest caste in India to be sure but still repressed. More subtly perhaps and certainly not as widely known but they are there.
Equality for all is a noble pursuit but for its own sake not because it will somehow bring prosperiety. I rather live in a poor country that is equal then a rich country wich is not.
You may or may not feel the same way but just saying something general like abandoning primitive thought is insulting. It to me suggests that you do not realize that some of the most primitive cultures around today are far more democractic (they vote on issues, not personalities) and equal then the so called modern cultures.
As for equality leading to all a country that can be is too dangerous. What if someone proves that by killing group X humanity will be better off. Will that see you working the gas chambers to make sure humanity can fullfill its potential?
Just like not every teenage girl who has sex gets pregnant and not every person who drinks drives a car.
People like you who get infected by spyware just want the world to believe that it is not their fault, that they can't help it, that you are not to blame for your own stupid mistakes.
It is the same mentallity that tries to ban games/movies/books because they make you violent. Blame everyone else but yourselve.
Avoiding spyware and spam has nothing to do with computer knowledge it has to do with common sense. The same common sense that tells you not to enter those fake lotteries that tell you you have won if only you send in your order right now. The same common sense that tells you something is a pyramid scheme. It is what most of us use to tell us something is a scam.
Most of us know when we are being hustled and walk the other way. When you do not that is your fault. Do not expect the rest of us to bend over just because you are too stupid.
If that makes me elitist then good. Your kind seems to think that this is somekind of insult, it is not. It is praise. What ever you call me is fine with me just as long as you never ever claim I am like you.
I don't want to live in a world with thousands of laws limiting everyone because a minority can't protect itself. Bans on smoking because some assholes can't be considerate and not smoke in front of other people. Bans on drinking because some people can't just take a cab home. Bans on games because some people can't control their violence. Bans on software because some people can't stop themselves from downloading everything with the word "free" on it.
Oh and as for mentioning sourceforge. Opensource is not a free lunch. If you can't even spot that you are an ever greater moron then I thought. The really big difference between opensource "free" and spyware "free" is in the advertising. Spyware just tries to hard. Just try to find an opensource project that splashes "free" all over its webpage. Just check out getfirefox.com. One mention of the word free in a regular font size. Now compare this with spyware riddled sites like those "free smilies" sites.
If you can't spot the difference you are an idiot. Nothing to do with computer skills, you will fall for any other scam as well. Your fault and not my problem and no need to turn goverment into a nanny-state.
Jamie King (VP of Development)
Jennifer Gross (Director of Marketing)
Laura Paterson (Director of Marketing)
Navid Khonsari (Director of Development)
Jeff Castaneda (Director of PR)
Chris Carro (Sr. Pr Manager)
Corey Wade (Sr. Product Mgr)
Futaba Hayashi (Sr. Web Designer)
Todd Zuniga (PR Manager)
Ryan Rayhill (PR)
Is it just me or doesn't there seem to be a single coder or designer there? Nobody who actually makes these games? noNow if people from HR are leaving, then their is a reason to be worried. When HR quits update your resume yesterday.
What is this spyware people keep talking about? Now gnu flash is finished perhaps stallman should make it a priority to get an opensource spyware development going as well so we are not left behind.
The article talks about "trailer cash" and that is indeed what this is about. Forget the scum spyware companies, instead consider the real culprit, the end user.
I am not just talking about people still running Windows/IE, that in itself is stupid enough but it can be done safely.
No the trailer cash people are not the victim of shoddy MS coding or brilliant spyware coding, they are the victim of their own greed and stupidity. Greed because the fast majority of spyware programs come from dubious source, P2P programs (and no they ain't using P2P to download the latest linux distro) and "free programs". It is similar to that "test" someone did were people gave away personal information on questionares for tiny rewards.
Smart people know their is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone therefore offers you a free lunch this is probably because they want you to sit through a 3 hour sales pitch before. This is a sales techinigue I was warned about by consumer programs as a kid, that my mother was warned about even my grandfather and it is still going on.
But even worse then the people that install this crap hoping to get something for nothing are the people who actually respond to the ads.
Believe it or not but the entire ad business is about making money. Nobody is going to pay for an ad campaign that doesn't produce results. The sad fact is that these spyware and spam ads are very effective at producing sales results.
It is here that the real problem lies. As long as people keep buying from these kind of ads someone will be serving up these ads.
But frankly I don't see the problem. I guess I have always had a soft spot for scammers. They are such nice evidence of evolution in action. If you been infected by spyware that is natures way of telling you are to stupid to breed.
Pity is that in our society it is the stupid who breed the most. Now with viagra spam they will become even better at it. The stupid are going to overrun this world. Good news for the spyware and spam people. At least these IT jobs ain't being outsourced yet.
All these are classic companies. HOWEVER apart from offcourse atari they are primarly PC game companies. Perhaps even only PC companies. Seirra is so old that the PC is a new fangled invention, bioware and origin and looking glass did all their major titles on the PC but perhaps some games have been ported.
If you have not heard of them you are either very young, not a pc gamer or a filthy console user. Frankly there is no excuse for any of this and you should kill yourselve to atone for your sins.
To be fair, I just started to realise how fucking old you have to be to actually have played Sierra games when Sierra was still going strong. You may be shocked to have never heard of them, I am in shock because I played each and every game mentioned. I am feeling my age.
And as for them being mostly PC companies, well this is payback for the countless articles we get about top ten greatest games ever that forget to mention "consoles only".
Oh well, Looking Glass you will be missed, I bought your games, pity nobody else did.
Why not use gps? That can be so precise nowadays you could even use it for in house navigation.
What do the barcodes offer that GPS does not? And if you are going to use something like barcodes why not rfid instead?
I can understand the logic of barcodes 10-20 years ago but in this day and age it sounds like a project that has been around to long and been surpassed by technology. Am I wrong?
They forgot to ask the one important question
on
The Grumpy Gamer Speaks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What went wrong with the lucasarts adventure games. He himself was there when lucasarts changed from the adventure company into the "let's milk star wars until the cows come home" company.
So why did Lucasarts stop with adventures?
To be honest I think this guy might be too blame with his "getting adventures into the mainstream" crap. Now its RPG he tries to bolt ontop of it to create some frankenstein monster, back then it was 3D.
Yes I know some people loved Grim Fandango and the last monkey island but can it be a coincedence that these were also the last adventures? A long line of 2D adventures, a handfull of 3D and bam, the end of the adventure era.
I am not totally against 3D but that one MI game didn't really do anything with 3D just made it a bitch to control. The sleeper hit The Longest Journey also used 3D but in a 2D world so that 99% of the time it behaved just like a old 2D game but with 3D models. Mmm, 3d April in her undies.
Adventures worked when they were adventures. Easily controlled puzzle games that were fun to play. Who here really thought the fighting scenes in Full Throttle were fun? The 3D world in the last monkey island. For that matter any of the mini arcade games that Sierra always tried to squeeze in?
If the adventure is going to make a comeback it is going to be in the form of the old adventure. Just the adventure and nothing but the adventure. If you look at the small successes that is exactly what happened.
Stop listening to game reviewers who laud every game that does something unusual and simply rely on your gaming audience.
This guy says it himself, there is a market for old scumm games but then totally fails to realize what this means by saying he wants to add RPG elements. Hello! There is a market for old scumm games. That is it! The OLD scumm games. So any new game should NOT try to add anything new. If people wanted that they would be playing the new games.
The whole adventure debacle reminds me of the new coke crap. Except that game developers like this guy seem unable to grasp the fact "people upset with new product, lets give them old product back". Instead he keeps coming up with new recipes while the customers just want their old coke back.
The PS3 is supposed to be able to last longer then previous consoles. For that to happen you need a lot of power now so that in half a decade you won't be joke hardware.
Just compare consoles to PC's to see how quickly they become obsolete. During the hype before launch they consoles all seem like super machines capable of trashing the humble PC but as launch date nears the PC looks better and better and at launch a game PC will easily outperform a console.
The x-box showed it most clearly because it was a PC inside but I still remember people being all excited about a game called starfox and some pathetic 3D chip on the catridge while on the PC we were playing X-wing.
Even the 360 is vulnerable. Granted it is a powerhouse but a game like Oblivion proves that an expensive PC can compete. Right now. What is it going to be like in 2010?
The Cell is supposed to be more future proof. Offcourse wether that will work is anybodies guess. It seems unlikely but Sony probably hopes that by making a huge investment now it won't have to do so again in a couple of years. Developing a new console is risky and costly, if you can somehow afford to skip a generation you may very well trash the competition.
Sony hopes that when MS and Nintendo announce their next generation console their PS3 will still be able to compete. It is not that unreasonable an idea. The PS2 still competes with the 360 in some areas.
It is a gamble but what choice does Sony have? They can't afford to have generation after generation of moderate hits like MS, Sony does not have a cash cow to finance its console division.
SWG isn't even the worsed performer. Both everquests seem to have lost over half their subscriber base since last year, understandble for the original but it seems people didn't leave it for Everquest 2 but instead went to WoW (or just quit cold turkey).
That SWG NGE lost slightly less then half its subscribers is not that amazing. Even those who like the NGE have to admit that it added a whole new bug fest to an already bugged game. It would be like getting you broken fiat replaced by a lada.
What is intresting is how poorly Everquest 2 is doing. I played it for a bit after escaping from SWG (WoW does not appeal to me neither does Eve so don't bug me about those) and it too seems to have been smedleyed. Before I left EQ2 they removed spirit shards taking a lot of the fun out of the game and increased your running speed so you looked like a characters out of a slapstick movie.
At least it is nice to see I am not the only one who thinks sony is ruining the games. Perhaps once they loose them all they will realize that it is pointless trying to emulate Blizzard by making all their games easy, shallow WoW wannabees. Not that their is anything wrong with WoW by itself. Just that it is a product that already exists.
Or maybe this is just the way live works. SOE once was one of the big MMO companies and then they just lost it. Sierra, Lucasarts, Microprose and countless others have gone before them. You really have to wonder how a company that once got MMO's so right its product was likened to crack now can't keep keep a single product from loosing subscribers.
Let's see, 100.000 lost SWG subscribers. That is 1.5 million dollars of lost revenue a month. Was the NGE worth that? Same with EQ2, removing spirit shards and other easing of the game lost them well of 150.000 subscribers. 2 million dollars a month down the drain. You got to wonder about Sony's management that Smedley is still allowed on the premises without being carved up into sushi.
Oh well, blame piracy, oh wait, mmo's don't have piracy. Guess the only excuse is that Sony this time is itself to blame.
This chart measures subscribers. Guild Wars does not have subscribers. Sure they could put it on the chart to make you happy and it would rank at 0 and stay there.
If someone starts a chart with active players or something then Guild Wars has a place.
It ain't just GW wich ain't listed, none of the free muds is either.
Oh and there is a very simple reason GW doesn't have a monthly fee, because they don't have nearly the same infrastructure costs as say a WoW. When Guild Wars starts offering the same MMO level as monthly fee games then you can talk.
Since it is a round trip. So lets put it in human terms, say it is a 5 km walk to the shops. Are you as tired as when you arrive at the shops as you are when you return back home? Only if you spend the night at the shops and get a good nights sleep.
So it can't be tiredness, that would only work for two seperate journeys, not a round trip.
What could work is "fuel" consumption. This is probably the same both ways but again fails because the ant is on a feeding trip. He will be travelling empty on the way to the food source and carrying food on the return trip wich probably cause him to burn more fuel.
Just get out the old car anology. Your "tired" idea translates then to the heat of the engine. a trip on even terrain should see the engine heat up to the same degree but on a round trip to the shops the engine would not cool down to the same level as when you started.
The fuel consumption would also not work because on the return trip your car will be heavier.
So how do we measure distance in a car? Oh wait with a pedometer like device wich same as with the ants will be screwed up if you change the size of your tires.
Funny experiment, chopping legs of ants and giving them stilts. I bet that impresses the girls.
Yes bounty hunter was a long way off BUT on the way you would pick up lots of other skills, I at least did and I found myself quickly hitten the skill point limit. Maxed out if you like. Oh sure I later specialized but that just happened while I was having fun.
I never grinded in SWG except for a short stint of the village because everyone else was and some of the quests looked like fun.
SWG I think was never meant to be about masters. The game was most fun at the mid level where you maybe had a novice proffesion mastered and slowly finding your niche as you played the game. Then again perhaps I was just lucky in finding a really good guild filled with people always coming up with fun stuff to do.
Then again, I must admit I was only in one successfull run on the death watch bunker. I rarely did the extreme high level stuff, so perhaps unlike you I never felt the need to grind a bounty hunter.
Who to please. Although the opinion above is in the minority, at least here on slashdot, it is a valid one. You can't please everyone. Personally I belong in the pre-cu camp but that is my personal taste, the above poster has a different taste. Might as well argue on wether tea should be drunk with or without sugar.
The only defence I got for my taste is that it was a unique game, the above poster could have simply moved to WoW and found the game he wanted. Or even Everquest 2.
As for the grind accusation, well that is partially true. If you wanted to be a jedi pre-nge you had an ungodly grind ahead of you.
For the longest time in SWG the way to unlock jedi was to master a number of random and unknown proffession to master. This lead to a lot of people grinding to jobs they didn't want. For instance you character might require you to master chef and commando and doctor. Not exactly a logical combination.
This unlock method did give the game something unique though. It had lots of experienced players in the end game giving up their high levels in job X and starting over in Y. This made for a very dynamic game with more people in mid level then you will find in other MMO's.
But they changed this and unlocking Jedi became a pure XP grind. You had to convert your various XP points into jedi XP points at a bad exchange rate. This meant a couple of things. First nobody grinding for jedi bothered with learning new jobs. Because of various game mechanics people just grinded the easiest proffesion to master and then grinded XP like mad. They needed a truly unholy amount of XP too. Far more in fact then you needed before to grind different proffesions. And while before you got to experience different types of playing you now had to grind XP in one job.
So before to unlock jedi you played a scout, then became a dancer and then went on to craft weapons for lets say two months. To unlock Jedi after the village was added you just grinded XP in a combat class for six months. Whoo!
Ah! but you don't need to grind a Jedi at all do you? Well no, and before the village if you avoided the jedi/holo grind you could have a really fun game playing the mixed job you wanted and if you wanted a change, well there were plenty of holo grinders around to make sure that the game was very welcome of job changers.
SWG was far more a sandbox game and the holo grind that a lot of people choose helped in that aspect by supplying the game with a load of mid level players. Imagine a WoW or EQ where 50% of the players are NOT at the top level. This would mean that you no longer need to race for the top. That it is the mid level game that is most important.
Sadly SOE never managed the game well, all the "special" stuff was very high level indeed. It ain't just SOE fault, I don't really know of any MMO that adds extra mid level content.
But the NGE changed all this. It is now far more like an EQ or WoW game in that you choose a proffesion and then just ride it to the top and sit there running the same high level content until a new expansion comes out wich adds a few levels.
Offcourse some people prefer it but they are not "right" they just got different tastes. My beef with them is that they already got plenty of games for them. Why did SWG have to become another run off the mill MMO like all the others.
Imagine if I said that America Football would be better if you couldn't touch the balls with your hands, except the goalie, and the goals should be smaller and the balls should be round. Would you not say to me, go play soccer?
SOE turned SWG into a WoW wannabe probably because they wanted the WoW subcriber numbers. That is understandable except that it didn't work and never could work. First of WoW is already WoW and trying to out WoWing WoW is as likely as say out Coca-Colaing Coca-Cola. There is a market for clones but if you really want to stand a chance you usually are better of making a product that is unique or at least offers a safe heaven for people who do not enti
Just because you comply with standards doesn't mean you can do anything extra. For instance a standard if you sublet apartments is that you must have fire extinguishers. If you have them you comply with standards. Does that mean that if you also have say a sprinkler system you do not comply with the standards?
Off course not. Same as driver airbag is standard safety equipment but say adding passenger airbags doesn't mean you don't.
You can go beyond the standard just as long as the standard still works.
That has always been MS problem, not that they added extra's but they didn't have the standards working.
Or put another way, standards are the minimum requirement. Opera is one of the best in this aspect and is usually the easiest browser to develop for if you code to standards. Just check the amount of work arounds that say IE needs if you write design a page to standards like oh say xhtml and CSS2 vs Opera.
Steve Jobs seems to have really understood the meaning of "the lesser of two evils" and "divide and conquer".
He also understands that most people do believe that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" no matter how often it is proven wrong.
Put another way it is a good thing Steve Jobs is an american and not say in charge of China or Russia or america would be in deep shit indeed.
Look at the current story. "We", the consumer, want to pay as little as possible for our entertainment for what I presume are obvious reasons. Steve Jobs offer us movies for $9.99 the movie industry wants a tiered system where they can charge more for "better" movies. We, the consumer, ain't complete idiots and know that this probably means the movie industry sees $9.99 as the absolute minimum and everything that even got 1 star in the grocers gazette is going to be more expensive.
So Steve Jobs is the lesser of two evils, he has divided the consumer and the industry and because the movie industry doesn't like him and we don't like the movie industry Steve jobs must be our friend.
Put it simpler. For extra work I help at a convention stand with building and breaking. Sometimes they have a stand open during those times but they charge about 3 euro for a can. So instead I usually stop at the trainstation little supermarket and buy a bottle of water for 0.75 euro. A great deal. Well no, the real supermarket only charges 0.45 cent but compared to what is charged at the convention hall it is a good deal.
But you can explain that the little supermarket at the station has higher operating costs, stays open far longer and that warrants the extra price. This is true.
But now look at what Steve Jobs offer us. He actually has fewer operating costs. He never overstocks, distribution costs over the net are trivial, wages are a pittance compared to a chain of music shops and yet he charges prices that in the case of music are the same and with movies are actually HIGHER!
It is the VHS to DVD screw allover again. In europe we got different languages so different subtitles. This is was a real problem in the days of VHS when you could have only 1 subtitle. This meant that not only did you need a different product for each language region but also a subset of products wich were labelled imports and had no subtitle. For belgium (dual language) this meant a store had to stock 3 different versions of the same movie. Get it wrong and a customer coming to the store would just not buy it.
DVD changed this. Most big productions for instance are now dutch/french with dual language text on the box and you can choose the french dub, the original english and various subtitles.
Bam, in one fell swoop you elimated a whole logistics nightmare, forgetting for the moment that tapes are more expensive to produce and stock (size/weight) and how is the consumer rewarded, DVD is more expensive then VHS.
The entertainment industry is the only industry were cost savings result in higher prices. Imagine if Henry ford had done that. A T-ford would have cost more then a Spyker and the japanese would have charged a million dollars for a car while McClarens were given away with breakfast cereal.
But when it comes to entertainment/computers normal rules don't apply and Steve Jobs knows it.
$9.99 for a movie is bloody expensive when you realize most DVD's sell for less and Steve Jobs saves a fortune on not having to deal with a physical product.
But at least he charges less then the industry wants so he does us a favor right? No, not really. It is thanks to Steve Jobs that most people now accept that a non-physical product should cost the same as a physical product. Yes he has allowed us to buy a portion of the physical product but depending on the album CD price and the number ofsongs often times the portion price ($0.99 per track) is more expensive per track then if you bought the whole CD. It is like that snack store that sells you a single candybar, cheaper then the package of ten BUT more expen
The USSR took a thirld world country and turned it into a super power beating america in the race into space. Ancient China has one of the oldest still existing cultures and IBM is one of the oldest IT companies and still is an absoluut powerhouse that you would be foolish to ignore. Ask SCO.
By your logic Microsoft will beat NASA to mars, be around for 5000 years and then still be at the top of its business. Well that should teach them.
Oh look, it is basically a kite with a solid body to house the engine and camera. About the size and weight of a big bird. So it will pose the exact same danger of damage that a big bird does. Wich is actually pretty big but hey, as long as you stay up there you should be save. You mention yourselve the answer, this UAV will not fly at the same altitude civilian aircraft are supposed to fly at.
As to ultra lights. Well the biggest danger is again the pilots themselves. Most of them simply aren't very good pilots in the same way most car drivers aren't very good drivers.
If you can't spot a chopper at the end of a runway hovering or not you shouldn't be flying an aircraft. No don't bring speed up. The only reason to care about something at the end of the runway is if you are taking off wich means you start standing still. If you then while waiting for takeoff can't see if the sky is clear ahead of you how the fuck did you pass the eye exam?
Frankly your son has no business being anywhere near these UAV's.
There have been numerous accidents in holland too with ultra lights, each and everyone of them down to pilot error. Flying into a chopper doesn't sound like pilot error, it sounds like pilot stupidity.
Are civilian helicopters painted in better camouflage or somehow have a smaller outline then military ones? Cause when I spend a lot of time around them in the military the last thing you could say about a chopper was that they were hard to notice. They are about the size, if not the length of a semi. How can you miss that?
It sounds a bit like those people who get hit by a tram claiming they never saw it coming. It is yellow, it weight 50 tons and makes a sound like a herd of cats being chainsawed. How can you miss it?
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But the real cost was not money but the fact that Romero lost the respect of his customers. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Who is going to buy Daikatana 2? For that matter any ION Storm game or any Romero game?
Daikatana was Romero's project and it sucked donkey balls as a game. I only downloaded it and still felt ripped off. It was so bad that it can't be believed.
Now the difference with Will Wright is that he A: never was going to make us his bitch and B had other successfull games. Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D are not Romero games. In fact judging by the turd that Daikatana was and that Romero has produced nothing else worth while it may be claimed that these ID games became successes despite Romero's involvement, not because.
Play Daikatana. I dare you to disagree that it is bad. Selling an overhyped game however isn't hard, there are always suckers lured in by advertising who are not warned by bad reviews and word of mouth. But the proof is simple. In an industry of sequels there is no Daikatana 2. How many success games have there been without a sequel?
You can change your mobile phone easily enough, just change it in the settings but that also requires a sms message with a code. So as long as you got your phone you are safe.
If you lose your phone you will have to disable your account and you will be send by mail a new set of login details.
It seems fairly secure, it would be hard to imagine how to phis it. The only thing that could possibly be done is that they try to get you to change your mobile phone number to one they control.
But this attack and that suphisticated. It still requires people not to check the bloody url. First rule of online banking. ALWAYS handtype the url. Second rule of online banking, see the first rule.
For the postbank that is mijn.postbank.nl not that hard to type and unless someone hacked the mainsite likely to be secure (provided your browser/os/isp ain't been hacked.
Fuck this, I am going to keep my fortune in an old sock.
Perhaps in the same way that a fast car ad advertises speeding. What after all is the point of a fast car when you can only drive as fast as everyone else?
ISP's might realize that there intrests are not the interests of the copyright holders. Same as xerox interests are not the interests of book publishers. If xerox made their copiers incapable of copying copyrighted works they might possibly find their entire market share collapsing faster then you can say "cheap chinese clones".
It reminds me a bit of those pay sex phone lines. Nobody likes them, banks hate doing business with porn companies. The phone company hates them because they are a hassle but both the banks and the phone company love the money they bring in. As long as you keep your company "clean" enough to touch they are happy to help you peddle smut.
Same with ISP's, while they would love to be just email and light web browwsing comapnies the momey is in p2p and porn. Nobody is going to need 24/7 super adsl to check their email.
Tiscali heeft 1 nieuwsserver, namelijk news.tiscali.nl. Deze nieuwsserver geeft alleen tekst bestanden weer en ondersteunt dus geen binaries. Tiscali heeft hier bewust voor gekozen omdat binarie servers veelal gebruikt worden voor het illegaal downloaden van auteursrechtelijke bestanden. Tiscali stimuleert juist de legale verspreiding van auteursrechtelijke bestanden via tiscali.music en tiscali.video.
In dutch but I doubt it will be different for the english branch.
Sadly at the moment it ain't my choice to use them. It ain't my connection and for 1 year getting a second line installed is to expensive but I can't wait to get my xs4all account back.
Oh and did anyone else notice that if this happens then people are being punished without ever having seen a judge or even a police officer. No sworn in official will be involved just people from two companies. Welcome to the justice system of the 21st century.
Language is a tool for war and in war you always take the biggest guns avaialble to you. FUD instead of hype, hype instead of exegerated claims, exegerated claims instead of marketting speak.
It is a very old tradition.
Did you check the email headers, were they faked?
You now know that you been had and that it was stupid, you are, judging from your ID, a fairly recent slashdot user but the mere fact that you are here probably means you have heard about phishing scams before especially in concern to paypal and that in general handing over your credit card number is a bad idea.
So why? Was it a very good scam or are even warned people just plain stupid when on the line and in the general buzzle of a normal day you just didn't think it was going to happen to you?
I think the last case is the most frightening because it suggests there is nothing that can be done about this except to develop a 24/7 sense of paranoia. I remember growing up just having your wallet in your back pocket. Now it is standard routine to switch it to the front if I see an immigrant. Oh yes very racist but when you travelled for 2 years through a station (amsterdam lelylaan) wich was constantly pickpocketted by muslims to the extent that now the station has all but one entrance/exit sealed off (and damn any chance of an emergency or that people now have to cross a busy street to reach the trams/parking lot) you either learn to keep an eye on people with a dark skin or are one of the other losers who are confused why they have one less piece of luggage.
Oh well, going offtopic again.
I am reasonably handy and so I prefer a car that I can tinker with myself. Sure sure modern cars are a lot more comfortable but they are a black box. Fine when everything works but when it doesn't you got a ton of scrap iron until some guy comes along with a laptop and charges you a fortune for replacing a part rather then fixing it.
It is not that my linux desktop runs better but rather that when something goes wrong I can fix it. Recently my fileserver after a much delayed upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 (finally got rid of a promise software raid card that is unsupported in 2.6) I had a huge problem with reading some partitions. It stumped me for about a day of trying everything. In hindsight I think what happened was that extended attributes had been enabled without full support making all the files and directories on some partitions take bad values marking them as unreadable/mountable. In the end the fix was simple, set all the extended attributes to nothing with reiserfs tools.
This wasn't however easy to figure out. On several forums nobody knew what the problem was and I had to figure it out myself in the end although there were hints. Each time I was stumped there was still a tool to try, a parameter to look at, something to list so I could google it. Over the day I got more and more details out of the affected partition until I finally realized that the partitions that did not work had these exteneded attributes and then figuring that this was the cause.
A 8+ hour problem but solved.
Now my windows machine, one other task I use it for is reading fan-translated manga. cDisplay is a good tool for this (since been replaced by qcomicbook on linux) and I wanted it to appear in the right click context for directories so I could use it to also browse manga that is not zipped/rarred. Easy enough except it totally upset windows so I deleted it again and now windows opens a search window instead of opening the directory in explorer.
I no longer can edit the file associations and windows has been borked like this for months. I can't examine anything, there is no logging. Google returns nothing.
The problem is far more trivial. I can still right click to explore and by now I gotten used to it. The linux problem meant I could not mount several HD's causing me to fear I had lost close to a terrabyte of data.
But the linux problem I could fix, the windows problem I can not.
Why? Because windows is easier to use then Linux. Yes this sounds contradictive but think of it like this. A car with a handcrank is far less userfriendly then a car with an electric starter. But the handcrank won't be drained by leaving the lights on.
If linux becomes more userfriendly it will also loose that what makes it linux.
Take the constant complaint about linux using clear text configurtion files. These are indeed for the novice a bitch to maintain BUT they are what makes it possible to boot your corrupted system from a floppy and then just hand edit the system back into working order. Even the boot system (lilo) adds complexity for power. Am I the only one who sometimes forgets to replace hda with sda on their one machine with scsi causing lilo to be unable to find the root partition? The solution, give it as a boot parameter.
But this doesn't fit with a nice simple graphical screen with a nice animation showing that activity is going on. Hell on windows you would not even be informed that a critical drive can't be found. Windows just hangs. Easier when it works, useless when it doesn't.
Linux can be technically superior to windows. Some would already claim it is. It can never beat windows in userfriendlyness because if it did so it would no longer be linux but just a windows clone with all the problems that windows has. Lets not forget that a fair amount of windows famed insecurity
If you are going to attack a system you can't just spout platitudes.
It can be argued that some countries do well when they get rid of differences between members of its population but only if you are incredibly naive. The dutch golden age is often claimed to be a result of it being an open society welcoming the oppressed from other parts of europe. Well if you think being open and treating all people as equals is the same as not actually killing people for not having the majority religion I suppose your right. In reality the Dutch golden age happened when minorities like the jews were being denied many rights and privileges. As for even smaller groups like chinamen or muslims, I suppose not being lynched just like the protestants is a form of equality.
Same with the US of A, give us your hungry and oppressed provided they are white protestants. Japanese were put into concentration camps, with wich america had lots of experience using them on the indians, based purely on race. Claimed for security but german and italian citizens were not interned. Despite the fact that there has been no evidence of japanese-americans aiding the enemy while plenty of german and italian americans did aid the enemy. As for blacks, they only got the vote in what 1965?
Yet america did pretty well before this emancipation of the non-white races did it not?
Japan itself is one of the least cultural diverse 1st world countries around and it did seem to do pretty good by restricting immigration. Oh and by having an untouchable class. A smaller group then the lowest caste in India to be sure but still repressed. More subtly perhaps and certainly not as widely known but they are there.
Equality for all is a noble pursuit but for its own sake not because it will somehow bring prosperiety. I rather live in a poor country that is equal then a rich country wich is not.
You may or may not feel the same way but just saying something general like abandoning primitive thought is insulting. It to me suggests that you do not realize that some of the most primitive cultures around today are far more democractic (they vote on issues, not personalities) and equal then the so called modern cultures.
As for equality leading to all a country that can be is too dangerous. What if someone proves that by killing group X humanity will be better off. Will that see you working the gas chambers to make sure humanity can fullfill its potential?
People like you who get infected by spyware just want the world to believe that it is not their fault, that they can't help it, that you are not to blame for your own stupid mistakes.
It is the same mentallity that tries to ban games/movies/books because they make you violent. Blame everyone else but yourselve.
Avoiding spyware and spam has nothing to do with computer knowledge it has to do with common sense. The same common sense that tells you not to enter those fake lotteries that tell you you have won if only you send in your order right now. The same common sense that tells you something is a pyramid scheme. It is what most of us use to tell us something is a scam.
Most of us know when we are being hustled and walk the other way. When you do not that is your fault. Do not expect the rest of us to bend over just because you are too stupid.
If that makes me elitist then good. Your kind seems to think that this is somekind of insult, it is not. It is praise. What ever you call me is fine with me just as long as you never ever claim I am like you.
I don't want to live in a world with thousands of laws limiting everyone because a minority can't protect itself. Bans on smoking because some assholes can't be considerate and not smoke in front of other people. Bans on drinking because some people can't just take a cab home. Bans on games because some people can't control their violence. Bans on software because some people can't stop themselves from downloading everything with the word "free" on it.
Oh and as for mentioning sourceforge. Opensource is not a free lunch. If you can't even spot that you are an ever greater moron then I thought. The really big difference between opensource "free" and spyware "free" is in the advertising. Spyware just tries to hard. Just try to find an opensource project that splashes "free" all over its webpage. Just check out getfirefox.com. One mention of the word free in a regular font size. Now compare this with spyware riddled sites like those "free smilies" sites.
If you can't spot the difference you are an idiot. Nothing to do with computer skills, you will fall for any other scam as well. Your fault and not my problem and no need to turn goverment into a nanny-state.
Is it just me or doesn't there seem to be a single coder or designer there? Nobody who actually makes these games? noNow if people from HR are leaving, then their is a reason to be worried. When HR quits update your resume yesterday.
The article talks about "trailer cash" and that is indeed what this is about. Forget the scum spyware companies, instead consider the real culprit, the end user.
I am not just talking about people still running Windows/IE, that in itself is stupid enough but it can be done safely.
No the trailer cash people are not the victim of shoddy MS coding or brilliant spyware coding, they are the victim of their own greed and stupidity. Greed because the fast majority of spyware programs come from dubious source, P2P programs (and no they ain't using P2P to download the latest linux distro) and "free programs". It is similar to that "test" someone did were people gave away personal information on questionares for tiny rewards.
Smart people know their is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone therefore offers you a free lunch this is probably because they want you to sit through a 3 hour sales pitch before. This is a sales techinigue I was warned about by consumer programs as a kid, that my mother was warned about even my grandfather and it is still going on.
But even worse then the people that install this crap hoping to get something for nothing are the people who actually respond to the ads.
Believe it or not but the entire ad business is about making money. Nobody is going to pay for an ad campaign that doesn't produce results. The sad fact is that these spyware and spam ads are very effective at producing sales results.
It is here that the real problem lies. As long as people keep buying from these kind of ads someone will be serving up these ads.
But frankly I don't see the problem. I guess I have always had a soft spot for scammers. They are such nice evidence of evolution in action. If you been infected by spyware that is natures way of telling you are to stupid to breed.
Pity is that in our society it is the stupid who breed the most. Now with viagra spam they will become even better at it. The stupid are going to overrun this world. Good news for the spyware and spam people. At least these IT jobs ain't being outsourced yet.
If you have not heard of them you are either very young, not a pc gamer or a filthy console user. Frankly there is no excuse for any of this and you should kill yourselve to atone for your sins.
To be fair, I just started to realise how fucking old you have to be to actually have played Sierra games when Sierra was still going strong. You may be shocked to have never heard of them, I am in shock because I played each and every game mentioned. I am feeling my age.
And as for them being mostly PC companies, well this is payback for the countless articles we get about top ten greatest games ever that forget to mention "consoles only".
Oh well, Looking Glass you will be missed, I bought your games, pity nobody else did.
What do the barcodes offer that GPS does not? And if you are going to use something like barcodes why not rfid instead?
I can understand the logic of barcodes 10-20 years ago but in this day and age it sounds like a project that has been around to long and been surpassed by technology. Am I wrong?
So why did Lucasarts stop with adventures?
To be honest I think this guy might be too blame with his "getting adventures into the mainstream" crap. Now its RPG he tries to bolt ontop of it to create some frankenstein monster, back then it was 3D.
Yes I know some people loved Grim Fandango and the last monkey island but can it be a coincedence that these were also the last adventures? A long line of 2D adventures, a handfull of 3D and bam, the end of the adventure era.
I am not totally against 3D but that one MI game didn't really do anything with 3D just made it a bitch to control. The sleeper hit The Longest Journey also used 3D but in a 2D world so that 99% of the time it behaved just like a old 2D game but with 3D models. Mmm, 3d April in her undies.
Adventures worked when they were adventures. Easily controlled puzzle games that were fun to play. Who here really thought the fighting scenes in Full Throttle were fun? The 3D world in the last monkey island. For that matter any of the mini arcade games that Sierra always tried to squeeze in?
If the adventure is going to make a comeback it is going to be in the form of the old adventure. Just the adventure and nothing but the adventure. If you look at the small successes that is exactly what happened.
Stop listening to game reviewers who laud every game that does something unusual and simply rely on your gaming audience.
This guy says it himself, there is a market for old scumm games but then totally fails to realize what this means by saying he wants to add RPG elements. Hello! There is a market for old scumm games. That is it! The OLD scumm games. So any new game should NOT try to add anything new. If people wanted that they would be playing the new games.
The whole adventure debacle reminds me of the new coke crap. Except that game developers like this guy seem unable to grasp the fact "people upset with new product, lets give them old product back". Instead he keeps coming up with new recipes while the customers just want their old coke back.
Just compare consoles to PC's to see how quickly they become obsolete. During the hype before launch they consoles all seem like super machines capable of trashing the humble PC but as launch date nears the PC looks better and better and at launch a game PC will easily outperform a console.
The x-box showed it most clearly because it was a PC inside but I still remember people being all excited about a game called starfox and some pathetic 3D chip on the catridge while on the PC we were playing X-wing.
Even the 360 is vulnerable. Granted it is a powerhouse but a game like Oblivion proves that an expensive PC can compete. Right now. What is it going to be like in 2010?
The Cell is supposed to be more future proof. Offcourse wether that will work is anybodies guess. It seems unlikely but Sony probably hopes that by making a huge investment now it won't have to do so again in a couple of years. Developing a new console is risky and costly, if you can somehow afford to skip a generation you may very well trash the competition.
Sony hopes that when MS and Nintendo announce their next generation console their PS3 will still be able to compete. It is not that unreasonable an idea. The PS2 still competes with the 360 in some areas.
It is a gamble but what choice does Sony have? They can't afford to have generation after generation of moderate hits like MS, Sony does not have a cash cow to finance its console division.
That SWG NGE lost slightly less then half its subscribers is not that amazing. Even those who like the NGE have to admit that it added a whole new bug fest to an already bugged game. It would be like getting you broken fiat replaced by a lada.
What is intresting is how poorly Everquest 2 is doing. I played it for a bit after escaping from SWG (WoW does not appeal to me neither does Eve so don't bug me about those) and it too seems to have been smedleyed. Before I left EQ2 they removed spirit shards taking a lot of the fun out of the game and increased your running speed so you looked like a characters out of a slapstick movie.
At least it is nice to see I am not the only one who thinks sony is ruining the games. Perhaps once they loose them all they will realize that it is pointless trying to emulate Blizzard by making all their games easy, shallow WoW wannabees. Not that their is anything wrong with WoW by itself. Just that it is a product that already exists.
Or maybe this is just the way live works. SOE once was one of the big MMO companies and then they just lost it. Sierra, Lucasarts, Microprose and countless others have gone before them. You really have to wonder how a company that once got MMO's so right its product was likened to crack now can't keep keep a single product from loosing subscribers.
Let's see, 100.000 lost SWG subscribers. That is 1.5 million dollars of lost revenue a month. Was the NGE worth that? Same with EQ2, removing spirit shards and other easing of the game lost them well of 150.000 subscribers. 2 million dollars a month down the drain. You got to wonder about Sony's management that Smedley is still allowed on the premises without being carved up into sushi.
Oh well, blame piracy, oh wait, mmo's don't have piracy. Guess the only excuse is that Sony this time is itself to blame.
If someone starts a chart with active players or something then Guild Wars has a place.
It ain't just GW wich ain't listed, none of the free muds is either.
Oh and there is a very simple reason GW doesn't have a monthly fee, because they don't have nearly the same infrastructure costs as say a WoW. When Guild Wars starts offering the same MMO level as monthly fee games then you can talk.
So it can't be tiredness, that would only work for two seperate journeys, not a round trip.
What could work is "fuel" consumption. This is probably the same both ways but again fails because the ant is on a feeding trip. He will be travelling empty on the way to the food source and carrying food on the return trip wich probably cause him to burn more fuel.
Just get out the old car anology. Your "tired" idea translates then to the heat of the engine. a trip on even terrain should see the engine heat up to the same degree but on a round trip to the shops the engine would not cool down to the same level as when you started.
The fuel consumption would also not work because on the return trip your car will be heavier.
So how do we measure distance in a car? Oh wait with a pedometer like device wich same as with the ants will be screwed up if you change the size of your tires.
Funny experiment, chopping legs of ants and giving them stilts. I bet that impresses the girls.
I never grinded in SWG except for a short stint of the village because everyone else was and some of the quests looked like fun.
SWG I think was never meant to be about masters. The game was most fun at the mid level where you maybe had a novice proffesion mastered and slowly finding your niche as you played the game. Then again perhaps I was just lucky in finding a really good guild filled with people always coming up with fun stuff to do.
Then again, I must admit I was only in one successfull run on the death watch bunker. I rarely did the extreme high level stuff, so perhaps unlike you I never felt the need to grind a bounty hunter.
The only defence I got for my taste is that it was a unique game, the above poster could have simply moved to WoW and found the game he wanted. Or even Everquest 2.
As for the grind accusation, well that is partially true. If you wanted to be a jedi pre-nge you had an ungodly grind ahead of you.
For the longest time in SWG the way to unlock jedi was to master a number of random and unknown proffession to master. This lead to a lot of people grinding to jobs they didn't want. For instance you character might require you to master chef and commando and doctor. Not exactly a logical combination.
This unlock method did give the game something unique though. It had lots of experienced players in the end game giving up their high levels in job X and starting over in Y. This made for a very dynamic game with more people in mid level then you will find in other MMO's.
But they changed this and unlocking Jedi became a pure XP grind. You had to convert your various XP points into jedi XP points at a bad exchange rate. This meant a couple of things. First nobody grinding for jedi bothered with learning new jobs. Because of various game mechanics people just grinded the easiest proffesion to master and then grinded XP like mad. They needed a truly unholy amount of XP too. Far more in fact then you needed before to grind different proffesions. And while before you got to experience different types of playing you now had to grind XP in one job.
So before to unlock jedi you played a scout, then became a dancer and then went on to craft weapons for lets say two months. To unlock Jedi after the village was added you just grinded XP in a combat class for six months. Whoo!
Ah! but you don't need to grind a Jedi at all do you? Well no, and before the village if you avoided the jedi/holo grind you could have a really fun game playing the mixed job you wanted and if you wanted a change, well there were plenty of holo grinders around to make sure that the game was very welcome of job changers.
SWG was far more a sandbox game and the holo grind that a lot of people choose helped in that aspect by supplying the game with a load of mid level players. Imagine a WoW or EQ where 50% of the players are NOT at the top level. This would mean that you no longer need to race for the top. That it is the mid level game that is most important.
Sadly SOE never managed the game well, all the "special" stuff was very high level indeed. It ain't just SOE fault, I don't really know of any MMO that adds extra mid level content.
But the NGE changed all this. It is now far more like an EQ or WoW game in that you choose a proffesion and then just ride it to the top and sit there running the same high level content until a new expansion comes out wich adds a few levels.
Offcourse some people prefer it but they are not "right" they just got different tastes. My beef with them is that they already got plenty of games for them. Why did SWG have to become another run off the mill MMO like all the others.
Imagine if I said that America Football would be better if you couldn't touch the balls with your hands, except the goalie, and the goals should be smaller and the balls should be round. Would you not say to me, go play soccer?
SOE turned SWG into a WoW wannabe probably because they wanted the WoW subcriber numbers. That is understandable except that it didn't work and never could work. First of WoW is already WoW and trying to out WoWing WoW is as likely as say out Coca-Colaing Coca-Cola. There is a market for clones but if you really want to stand a chance you usually are better of making a product that is unique or at least offers a safe heaven for people who do not enti
Off course not. Same as driver airbag is standard safety equipment but say adding passenger airbags doesn't mean you don't.
You can go beyond the standard just as long as the standard still works.
That has always been MS problem, not that they added extra's but they didn't have the standards working.
Or put another way, standards are the minimum requirement. Opera is one of the best in this aspect and is usually the easiest browser to develop for if you code to standards. Just check the amount of work arounds that say IE needs if you write design a page to standards like oh say xhtml and CSS2 vs Opera.
Windows doesn't have grep. Says it all really.
He also understands that most people do believe that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" no matter how often it is proven wrong.
Put another way it is a good thing Steve Jobs is an american and not say in charge of China or Russia or america would be in deep shit indeed.
Look at the current story. "We", the consumer, want to pay as little as possible for our entertainment for what I presume are obvious reasons. Steve Jobs offer us movies for $9.99 the movie industry wants a tiered system where they can charge more for "better" movies. We, the consumer, ain't complete idiots and know that this probably means the movie industry sees $9.99 as the absolute minimum and everything that even got 1 star in the grocers gazette is going to be more expensive.
So Steve Jobs is the lesser of two evils, he has divided the consumer and the industry and because the movie industry doesn't like him and we don't like the movie industry Steve jobs must be our friend.
Put it simpler. For extra work I help at a convention stand with building and breaking. Sometimes they have a stand open during those times but they charge about 3 euro for a can. So instead I usually stop at the trainstation little supermarket and buy a bottle of water for 0.75 euro. A great deal. Well no, the real supermarket only charges 0.45 cent but compared to what is charged at the convention hall it is a good deal.
But you can explain that the little supermarket at the station has higher operating costs, stays open far longer and that warrants the extra price. This is true.
But now look at what Steve Jobs offer us. He actually has fewer operating costs. He never overstocks, distribution costs over the net are trivial, wages are a pittance compared to a chain of music shops and yet he charges prices that in the case of music are the same and with movies are actually HIGHER!
It is the VHS to DVD screw allover again. In europe we got different languages so different subtitles. This is was a real problem in the days of VHS when you could have only 1 subtitle. This meant that not only did you need a different product for each language region but also a subset of products wich were labelled imports and had no subtitle. For belgium (dual language) this meant a store had to stock 3 different versions of the same movie. Get it wrong and a customer coming to the store would just not buy it.
DVD changed this. Most big productions for instance are now dutch/french with dual language text on the box and you can choose the french dub, the original english and various subtitles.
Bam, in one fell swoop you elimated a whole logistics nightmare, forgetting for the moment that tapes are more expensive to produce and stock (size/weight) and how is the consumer rewarded, DVD is more expensive then VHS.
The entertainment industry is the only industry were cost savings result in higher prices. Imagine if Henry ford had done that. A T-ford would have cost more then a Spyker and the japanese would have charged a million dollars for a car while McClarens were given away with breakfast cereal.
But when it comes to entertainment/computers normal rules don't apply and Steve Jobs knows it.
$9.99 for a movie is bloody expensive when you realize most DVD's sell for less and Steve Jobs saves a fortune on not having to deal with a physical product.
But at least he charges less then the industry wants so he does us a favor right? No, not really. It is thanks to Steve Jobs that most people now accept that a non-physical product should cost the same as a physical product. Yes he has allowed us to buy a portion of the physical product but depending on the album CD price and the number ofsongs often times the portion price ($0.99 per track) is more expensive per track then if you bought the whole CD. It is like that snack store that sells you a single candybar, cheaper then the package of ten BUT more expen
By your logic Microsoft will beat NASA to mars, be around for 5000 years and then still be at the top of its business. Well that should teach them.
Lets see, a link with pictures. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5051142.stm
Oh look, it is basically a kite with a solid body to house the engine and camera. About the size and weight of a big bird. So it will pose the exact same danger of damage that a big bird does. Wich is actually pretty big but hey, as long as you stay up there you should be save. You mention yourselve the answer, this UAV will not fly at the same altitude civilian aircraft are supposed to fly at.
As to ultra lights. Well the biggest danger is again the pilots themselves. Most of them simply aren't very good pilots in the same way most car drivers aren't very good drivers.
If you can't spot a chopper at the end of a runway hovering or not you shouldn't be flying an aircraft. No don't bring speed up. The only reason to care about something at the end of the runway is if you are taking off wich means you start standing still. If you then while waiting for takeoff can't see if the sky is clear ahead of you how the fuck did you pass the eye exam?
Frankly your son has no business being anywhere near these UAV's.
There have been numerous accidents in holland too with ultra lights, each and everyone of them down to pilot error. Flying into a chopper doesn't sound like pilot error, it sounds like pilot stupidity.
Are civilian helicopters painted in better camouflage or somehow have a smaller outline then military ones? Cause when I spend a lot of time around them in the military the last thing you could say about a chopper was that they were hard to notice. They are about the size, if not the length of a semi. How can you miss that?
It sounds a bit like those people who get hit by a tram claiming they never saw it coming. It is yellow, it weight 50 tons and makes a sound like a herd of cats being chainsawed. How can you miss it?