Translation: Your dumb as shit but it is okay since the adults are even dumber.
Hidden subtext: It don't matter since all the tech jobs are outsourced anyway but you can't outsource the burger key at the McD.
Then again is this really new? Society has always needed far fewer bright people then it needs dumb fucks to do the low end jobs. High tech jobs can be outsourced, the guy picking up the trash has to be local. Worse if we get people who can understand credit card offers how are credit card companies going to peddle their wares? It reminds me a bit of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where a bright young woman is cloned for an escort agency and at the same time 500 lonely ad-agency executives are cloned to keep the laws of demand and supply working.
Or to put it another way, just how many bright people can a society afford before you run out of dumbfucks to do the hard work?
I see no mention of the fact they never liked each other. For a long time it seems that Pixar was doing all it could to get out of the deal it had with Disney to produce 5 movies. Now that it is close to get its freedom all of a sudden they want to be bought up?
Has disney made the u-turn or has pixar? Pixar succeeded because it was not disney, what makes the people think that it will not die a quick death when smothered by the disney giant?
[Developer to Steve Jobs]: The new iPhoto allows us to exchange information between users.
[SJ]: How does it work?
[D]: Well it is a bit like RSS.
[SJ to World]: iPhoto use RSS.
[D]: Shit.
Anyone who has done developement probably been in this situation where you learn from the press release or sales pitch that you apperently coded feature X or used standard Y and now you got all weekend to make it happen.
Presuming no evil intentions this looks a lot like a developer was tasked with adding something that to him looked a lot like RSS so he looked at RSS and then just adopted it to his needs without ever worrying about straying from the format, he used RSS as an example to work from NOT as a guideline. Why should he if iPhoto was never meant to work with other readers?
Then someone in marketing read the buzzword RSS and all of sudden iPhoto is RSS compliant and the poor developer is left to clean up the mess.
Either that or Apple is pure evil. Nah, can't be. We surely can't have two evil computer companies in the world.
We all know how good they are at searching slashdot for old articles.
Oh and to remain on topic. DS sells because A. it is fun B it can be played on the road C it is fun D it can be played without a tv when dad wants to watch baseball E it is fun.
Nintendo sells handhelds and does it well because they are (repeat from above)
At least this doesn't have annoying kids so that is a plus. I watched the eps they released so far already and it is okay. No it is not going to astound you and it is not going to make non-trekkies into fans of the series.
But as a person who preffered Star Trek TOS it is a pretty decent effort. They really try to recreate the feel of the original series.
The acting is... adequate? Passable. Yeah that is it, it is good enough.
If you like cheesy stuff and are fan of the old series give this a try. It won't be the next big thing but I seen far worse. That norwegian star trek/babylon 5 "comedy" for one.
Leave out the "we" in the future okay? No need to make it any easier for them. Oh and this isn't a witch hunt. It is a "keep the childeren safe from X" where X this time is XXX.
Apparently they want to know how many google for porn because that will tell them how many people google for porn. How they will determine how many kids google for porn I don't know. Perhaps they just want to make it impossible to google for porn because that is the only way to keep the childeren safe.
Won't somebody think of the childeren is a nice way to say surrender all your adult rights and privileges and reduce society to the level of a kindergarden.
Some people actually do like a real challenge and taking real risk.
How can you challenge yourselve if there is no risk?
Of course the real problem with MMORPG games is that it is often no fun to be a low level character as you don't want to repeat the tutorial level. If I have to go the Trial Isle of EQ2 once more I am going to scream!
But imagine a game that has lots and lots of content at low level. Where if you have to start over you do not have to redo the same quest you already did a 100 times but can start in a new town with new quests and new skills.
Then dead would matter less. Yes it would be difficult to do in a game especially since most players can't get their head around the idea that it is not the levelling up that matters but having fun.
If you can have as much fun in a game at level 1 as at level 1000th then what does it matter if at level 800 you buy the farm. As long as the fight was good.
The other big MMO company SOE has seen the light and dumbed down both SWG and EQ2. SWG used to have decay when you died wich could be a nuisance since repair was risky. Off course a player run economy meant that none of your items were irreplacable. Just expensive.
EQ2 had only the punishement of having to go get your spirit shard while suffering reduced stats. The XP debt was no problem, fighting your way back to your spirit usually took care of it. There is no decay or other penalty, now even the shard has been removed. Neither do team members share in your xp debt anymore.
WoW has been a real wakeup call to the MMORPG industry. Do you know that pre-wow people talked about the market having been saturated and that any new game could only hope to lure existing players away from other games? Kinda proved that wrong. WoW showed that instead a good game can create its own market.
Of course smedley seems to think this means that the way to be successfull is to make every game into a WoW clone. I predict that the same will happen as with PC games in general. A over abundance of simple FPS games with more specilist titles surviving in the margins. There are still hardcore flightsims to be found, just not on the shelves, you gotta search the net for them.
Same with hardcore MMORPG's, they will continue to be produced but they will be a niche market. The mass market will go for the WoW angle. It is what sells. You can hardly blame game publishers from wanting to make a profit.
If a guy says he is going to kill himself by say jumping of a bridge, when do I turn from a bystander into a criminal?
I know it is usually illegal to assit in a suicide. But what exactly is the law?
Say a slashdot poster, lets call him "Emo_Kiddy", said he was thinking of ending his live. If I do nothing and just ignore him is that a crime? Do I have a duty to report this?
What if I suggest a few handy links with sure fire tips of how to kill yourselve.
Am I allowed to call him a pussy who is to weakwilled to do it anyway? Dare him?
Call me a nasty heartless person but I seen to many teenagers who claim they are going to kill themselves and never do. So this kid actually had the balls to do it (or made a fatal misjudgement on getting attention). Does this force the rest of society to be at their constant beck and call everytime some emokid seeks attention?
To bad for the kid that he saw no other way out but is that really the problem of the rest of the world?
I am going to kill myself, if you have read this you are now obligated to stop me. Don't and slashdot will be shut down. Nice. Could put a whole new twist to trolling for ops in a forum/irc channel. 'give me ops' 'no' 'I am going to kill myself' 'Oh okay, your an op'.
Oh well, time to visit sexylosers and see if there is a new suicide girl comic.
It really depends on the documentaries themselves. Some are crap and some are good and others are just meh. I remember watching quite a few dealing with things like military hardware or space exploration that were 100% perfect unless you happened to know that the US != the entire world. Helicopters can't have ejection seats is a nice example. America doesn't, russia does.
How many times have you been told that the germans first used sloped armour when it was in fact copied by the german of captured russian tanks?
To be fair. It is not like discovery channel is hiding these facts. It also airs those docu's that tell a more complete world history. It just doesn't screen out the ones that are american centric.
Does it matter? Well I know that a program that says helicopters can't have ejection seat is telling lies. I then got to ask myself wich other lies is it telling I don't know about. If I tell you two facts and you know one of them is a lie then what reason have you got to believe the other one?
The mythbusters are prone to this problem as well. I know that a couple of the myths they bust are either false or just plain badly done. A poor example? The jaws special. Jaws was not a normal shark yet the entire docu through they try to reduce the shark from the size it is in the movie/book to real sizes because no shark so big ever existed. Wich is a lie. They have existed, the jaw bones exist to prove it. The movie/book never claims Jaws is normal. It is a freak and making it normal sized is pointless. Either examine Jaws or examine real sharks.
They do this often where they 'rewrite' myths till they no longer make sense.
It is not a bad program, just don't trust it to get all the facts straight.
Programs like the American Chopper are not docu's. They don't tell me anything but they are in a way just like those programs were you follow someone travelling around the globe showing you new things. American chopper ofcourse thought me nothing new. I already knew all americans are fat.
Your avatar has certain stats. Depending on the stats you may loose control over your character. High level hookers cannot resist a job offer. Masochist will crumple in a fight. Seduction can be used to remove control in a nice way and rape in a not so nice way.
This is not "pure" roleplay, you really can be a rape victim within the game and there is nothing you can do about it EXCEPT in the same way that we stop it in real life. The game seems to record all actions and create crimes wich more moral players can solve.
This is an intresting way to do PvP. the most intresting chance however is not that they added the option of rape but that they really seem to try to create a player run justice system.
There would seem to be definite disadvantages to being a griefer in this game.
While the fact that female player characters who join the demon cult can produce healing milk is just a bit kinky the game also has a use for aborted fetusses. A virgin fetus (first fetus of a woman) is a valuable ingredient for some magic according to the manual.
The glorydays of the BBC are past, even then it was merely turning out some nice series but a horrible news service that was biased as hell and understrict control by the goverment. They had to admit several times that they withheld news or misrepresented the news according to the wishes of the goverment. And that is just the ones found out.
Offtopic as hell but I hate people who glorify the BBC without actually ever having to live with it as the only news source.
He thinks that buying a more costly ad == higher sales. Yup because no product with a HUGE marketing campaign has ever failed and every product launched on a word of mouth basis has been a dismal failure.
See that box of ads next to your google search resuls mister Nielsen? I got a little secret to tell you. Not all of them paid the same amount to be there. Neither do people just select the top result. They look at the ads to see wich one best seems to meet their needs.
Successfull advertising != spending all your profits on it.
The apple and orange comment is also very true as he talks about content being leeched before going to b2b sites. Does B2B sites have content nowadays? I thought this was going to be an article about new sites having their stories hotlinked by google and people no longer visiting the sites on their own.
This is true. When was the last time you actually entered or selected a bookmark of a newssite vs following/. story link or a google result?
As for the alternatives. Yup, sounds like spam to me. It thought I had seen the end of the goddamn newsletter and having to explain again and again why it is not a good idea to send everyone who ever submitted their email a 1mb html mail.
Apperently some companies spend all the profits on a sale on paying for pay per click advertising. Mmm, okay. Seems a bit odd to me but the net is an odd place.
Next he claims that just when you are making money after you hyped your article with a massive advertising campaign your competitor will do the same because he doesn't want to loose forcing you to run an ad campaign again.
Wow. How odd. Lucky nothing like that happens in the real world.
Coca Cola has just the one ad campaign in the late 1900's (or is that 1800's) and has been coasting ever since.
OF COURSE NOT Gee whiz. News flash, if you sell your product through paid advertising then you got to keep paying to advertise. More and more and more and every time there will be some new upstart who runs an ad campaign for a similar product forcing you to do it again.
What the fuck do search engines got to do with it? This is just plain old advertising.
No this fucktard has just learned that pay-per-click advertising has better statistics (you can actually tie the ad to the sale) and then used some magic math to prove that ad costs can sky rocket. Someone tell Intel. How much are they spending on that new logo again?
But you can tell this guy is a nutjob. He seems to think that because software/service X is available for free this will stop competition. Gee, look at my tagline for two free editors. Now google for other text editors. How many do you find? Rounded to the nearest hundred.
The bubble is over, there is no new economy, all the same old rules still apply. Oh and it says a lot about Jakob Nielsen that quality of your product doesn't seem to enter into equation. The only determining factor in how many people come to your site is how much you pay for ads and the only factor in how much you sell is your site.
Eheh. Explain this to google please. Exactly where did google advertise? Thank you.
Of course even an idiot gets some things right. Who here uses slashdot own search or uses google to search slashdot for old stories (oh and the third option for editors "Search old stories? What for?"). It is far easier to google with a question the find an answer site. Gamefaqs.com is about the only site I search directly.
If you don't want people to search you via google then A disable google from indexing you or B improve your goddamn site so the fucking search works properly.
Oh and if you don't like paying several dollar per google ad click, then don't. Word of mouth can work wonders if you are selling quality. There are plenty of companies that never advertise. They survive because they are the best and everyone knows it or they are so common people don't even think about it anymore. Anyone else. Welcome to the world of the ad agency sucking every last dollar out of you that they can. It is their way of making a living.
I click a link in a slashdot article to an external site and slashdot is notified about this. Mmm, okay. I can see that it might be considered usefull for deteriming how people use their website.
It could enable a user comments vs people who actuall RTFA statistic. Knowing slashdot it would crash on a divide by zero error offcourse.
But wait a minute, a infinite number of pings? So the story submitter himself can also add his pings? Knowing the quality of slashdot editors (HA!) any story submitter would know who read what links in his article. Do I want him to know?
Imagine that someone puts a goatse.cx link on a forum. You don't of course admit that you been tricked but the next post is a record of all the pings the link submitter received proving that all of slashdot wanks to the goatse man.
The abuse of this feature is clear and the benefits? If slashdot really cared to know wich external links are followed or not then that is their business isn't it?
Do I really want websites to know wich external links I follow? I think this is a solution looking for a problem and in the few cases where a website needs to know the users need for privacy is superior.
Bad mozilla. This is something I would have expected of MS or the old Netscape. Now go sit in a corner and don't come out until you stop adding crap features that tattle on me without informing me.
A rape victim is also sadly a witness. While it would be nice if we could just get rapist on technical details often to proof that it is rape the jury or judge needs to hear the victims account. Often it is a vital piece of the evidence, even with complete physical evidence a victims account is still needed because it makes clear the terrible nature of the crime.
So what happens when the victim takes this drug and has artificial manipulation of her memories?
Some comment that the drug does not erase the memory but only doesn't make it a traumatic memory.
Well, that is part of the defence by the doctor involved. The other part? That he doesn't care about how well his victims will be able to testify.
This is not even like he is curing the symptom not the disease, he is merely numbing the symptom. The disease, rapist, is left unharmed and can strike again and again.
This is nasty stuff. It reminds me of all those Sci-Fi stories where you have a civilisation so perfect and peacefull that they become unable to deal with violence. Cue someone taking advantage of it. If rape is no longer traumatic should it even be a crime? We already got judges around the world judging rape as natural for a healthy human male. Now they can just say, "Oh take a pill you hysteric girl." Far fetched? Check up on the practice of rape victims being the ones punished. No I am not talking about muslim countries. I am talking western countries who did stuff like lock rape victims up in mental wards and or sterelize them.
We need pain, it is an incentive to stop whatever is causing the pain. The cure is not to make rape memories less traumatic. The cure is to elimanate rape. Yes it is very bad for the victim but we need her trauma to convict the criminals and prevent them from being able to do it over and over again.
This is wrong. Hopefully smarter people then me will realize this and impose very strict guidelines on the use. Or maybe we should improve our legal system that rape victims do not have to wait years and years and keep their memories fresh before the trials and re-trials are finally over.
You do not need to know much about how a car works to be able to drive it. So what would you consider essential information?
The controls? Obvious really but how much? Should I know WHY I can't turn the wheel as fast at speed as when I am stationary? Perhaps knowing something about wheels would stop some damn drivers at our company from turning the fucking wheels of our truck (a real one) when stationary. Argh, personal rant, sorry about that.
The principles of friction? Kinda handy to know that you can loose traction, daily people seem to forget this and die.
Fluid under pressure? Or whatever causes aqua plaining, an equally effective killer.
Perhaps exactly what is used for fuel? Might stop some people from submerging their cars during floods because they apprentlyn think engines don't need air.
How about lubrication? Might stop people from dunking their brakes and then being suprised they don't work as well anymore.
To be able to operate a car well you really need to know an awfull lot of stuff. Oh sure not in exact detail just as I don't need to know wether my PC is big endian or little endian I do not need to know the exact air to gas mixture in my engine. Just that it needs air and a lot of it.
I use the word "operate" because there is a huge difference between operating a car and just driving it. To make use of your car driving is enoug. To continue to make full use of your car you need to do more. You need to be able to take car of it, to meet its demands.
So with computers. Anyone can surf and browse and run apps and install crap. It is when they have to do so for more then 1 day that the problems emerge. What people need to know is that a computer needs to be taken care of in the same way as you take care of a car.
How you teach people this. I be damned if I know. About 3 weaks ago some dipshit fueled a van (small truck?) with diesel because trucks run on diesels don't they. Well not this one dipshit and it says so on the fucking fuel opening.
Is this the same behavior that leads to the installation of spyware? Perhaps it was the reason about 3 years ago a developer who took over from me at a job deciced that in order to be able to remotely connect to the database the easiest option was to disable the hardware firewall completly.
Frankly I don't bother anymore with trying to explain things to people. I feel like a doctor telling a person coughing up his lungs in chuncks that he might want to cut back on smoking. Except I am not doctor and I don't remember taking an oath.
That everytime I am in a gamestore wich is a lot since I got friends at two of them is that each time the 360 has crashed is crashing or is rebooting. Well no not every time. Just enough for me to think, "Ah, MS".
Same with the dutch trams in amsterdam, some marketing genius at MS has deciced to allow MS OS to be used to display ads on LCD screens inside the trams. Good advertising for MS, their distinctive error messages seen by millions each day.
If you consider that other consoles including the often abused DS just run for months on end the constant problems with the 360 do not make me hopefull. Of course these were the very first units and are abused but still, it just doesn't look good.
But this argument is never going to be settled. Fanboys vs Fanboys. What one considers a must have game another considers a tired sequel.
At least it explains the people standing rock still at all those Americas Army assault missions. They got no movement keys!
Problem is not with refesh
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It is with the back button. Try it with gmail and opera. It doesn't work as expected. Refresh don't matter, gmail does a "loading" thing and if your on a fast con you don't really see the refreshing anyway.
But the back button is the accepted way to back out of an unwanted action and if it is not handled as expected or at least disabled AND warned about then people get confused.
I do not and most web developers don't because we usually HATE the back button as it can really mess with your web apps. Use the fucking cancel button already.
Nonetheless your website has to work as expected.
I used non-refreshing pages for a long time. One of them was a long list of songs where I wished to cue songs to be played. Rather then load it each time you "selected" a song by clicking on an image and javascript would then request a new image wich was a script wich queed the song and returned an image to indicate it had been queed.
Granted AJAX goes a lot further and is very nice BUT I hardly see it as a web 2.0
Ofcourse I never was any good at getting millions needed to finance an upstart either.
If Web 2.0 gets the investment money flowing again then good luck to it. The bubble at least had the economy running. Something like the second law of thermodynamics, energy is never lost? Neither is money. For everyone who lost money in the bubble someone else earned it. Me! And frankly that is all that matters.
It is a way to get another bubble
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Oh okay maybe that is over cynical. However what was the first bubble? Was it perhaps that the world believed that somehow a combination of tech was going to change the way we lived our lives?
Well yeah. EVERYONE had to have a website. Didn't matter what you sold you had to sell it online as well. Billions were invested in making everything available online. Clothes, food, pets, toys. Some made sense (porn) most did not.
Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived. The new economy because the old one was just not the way to do it anymore. You actually had companies loosing stock value because they had not announced an internet strategy. Profits? Who cares.
In hindsight of course it all seems perfectly silly. Snail mail disappearing as email takes over. Eheh, tell that to the poor guy slumping a ton of mail with all the christmas cards. Brick and Mortar stores a thing of the past? Oh sure, tell your girlfriend that there is no need to go shopping with her, she can just browse on the laptop while you play Battlefield 2 and it will be just the same.
So the bubble burts, a few companies survived and things more or less went back to business as usual (wich it always does).
Ah, but surely the failure was because the tech was not ready for it? Well now we know better and we are ready for another try. Instead of portals now the buzzword seems to be social networks. Whatever those may be. It is again a combination of tech that has been around for a while but been buzzed up and vague promises about a social revolution.
Bloggs probably are part of it as well.
So what is it? Old tech in a sexy skin and hype. Is it bad? Hell no! I loved the bubble. Fat paychecks, easy going atmosphere and nobody in charge who had a clue as to what it was what you were doing. Websites with a dozen visitors written in code that would crash at the 1000th post and running on sun hardware and oracle databases. The job ads promising a company car have appeared again. Just hope that the geeks this time get proper regonistion and the sex from gullible girls that we so richly deserve.
The second stage after delivering the payload in the orbit will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in the sea or land, he said adding, "This is only in its conceptual stage."
Reminds of that recovery mission by the nasa (the one before this weekend) where it ended up halfway to china.
India rocket science. Oh yeah there is an image that doesn't have a tiny bit of a mismatch. Offcourse by now they probably turning out more rocket scientist then the rest of the world but I was raised by "It ain't half hot mum" and old prejudices die hard. BTW the idea of English rocket scientist is just as funny.
And what the hell is up with the figures quoted?
"we need to bring down the cost to access to space to 1/10th of the current per kg cost -- that is something like $500 to$1,000 per kg,"
Now matter how you put that it doesn't seem like the current costs can be that high. The end line:
The present cost of the space transportation system hovers somewhere between$12,000 to$15,000 per kg.
Doesn't make it much clearer but no matter how you look at it doesn't seem that expensive now does it? Sure sattelites can be more massive then you think and weigh easily in at a metric ton but 15million is hardly going to break the bank now is it?
So what the fuck is up with this? What are the real prices and what are the prices they hope for? I mean you could read it as as little as 500 dollars per kg. That is cheap.
Sounds like one of those advanced concept plans the NASA and ESA etc put out when it has been a slow month and there are no cute mars robots to keep the press intrested. Very nice but I seen such stuff promised since I was a kid and we are still stuck with the old rockets and space shuttle. GIVE ME MY MOONBASE!
Download it, play it, do boring training, join a combat mission, bam your death.
AND that is supposed to get me to join up? They used to tell you that it would make a man out of you, that you would get to see the world, that you would get an education (Says a lot about schools when the army puts up posters inside promising to give you an education once you are released from school).
Now they basically say, you are going to get capped by some camper. Woohoo! Sign me up! I wanna be that guy in saving private ryan looking for his arms. Geez, lure me in with promises of how the chicks love a guy in uniform (wich they do, the rich guy who got his daddy to assign him a post with the reserves while the poor guys get killed).
Oh and if anyone is going to claim realism in that game I can only say it explains why the war on terror is going so bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: Your dumb as shit but it is okay since the adults are even dumber.
Hidden subtext: It don't matter since all the tech jobs are outsourced anyway but you can't outsource the burger key at the McD.
Then again is this really new? Society has always needed far fewer bright people then it needs dumb fucks to do the low end jobs. High tech jobs can be outsourced, the guy picking up the trash has to be local. Worse if we get people who can understand credit card offers how are credit card companies going to peddle their wares? It reminds me a bit of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where a bright young woman is cloned for an escort agency and at the same time 500 lonely ad-agency executives are cloned to keep the laws of demand and supply working.
Or to put it another way, just how many bright people can a society afford before you run out of dumbfucks to do the hard work?
Has disney made the u-turn or has pixar? Pixar succeeded because it was not disney, what makes the people think that it will not die a quick death when smothered by the disney giant?
[Developer to Steve Jobs]: The new iPhoto allows us to exchange information between users.
[SJ]: How does it work?
[D]: Well it is a bit like RSS.
[SJ to World]: iPhoto use RSS.
[D]: Shit.
Anyone who has done developement probably been in this situation where you learn from the press release or sales pitch that you apperently coded feature X or used standard Y and now you got all weekend to make it happen.
Presuming no evil intentions this looks a lot like a developer was tasked with adding something that to him looked a lot like RSS so he looked at RSS and then just adopted it to his needs without ever worrying about straying from the format, he used RSS as an example to work from NOT as a guideline. Why should he if iPhoto was never meant to work with other readers?
Then someone in marketing read the buzzword RSS and all of sudden iPhoto is RSS compliant and the poor developer is left to clean up the mess.
Either that or Apple is pure evil. Nah, can't be. We surely can't have two evil computer companies in the world.
Oh and to remain on topic. DS sells because A. it is fun B it can be played on the road C it is fun D it can be played without a tv when dad wants to watch baseball E it is fun.
Nintendo sells handhelds and does it well because they are (repeat from above)
But as a person who preffered Star Trek TOS it is a pretty decent effort. They really try to recreate the feel of the original series.
The acting is... adequate? Passable. Yeah that is it, it is good enough.
If you like cheesy stuff and are fan of the old series give this a try. It won't be the next big thing but I seen far worse. That norwegian star trek/babylon 5 "comedy" for one.
At least this is in a proper language.
Confession!
Leave out the "we" in the future okay? No need to make it any easier for them. Oh and this isn't a witch hunt. It is a "keep the childeren safe from X" where X this time is XXX.
Apparently they want to know how many google for porn because that will tell them how many people google for porn. How they will determine how many kids google for porn I don't know. Perhaps they just want to make it impossible to google for porn because that is the only way to keep the childeren safe.
Won't somebody think of the childeren is a nice way to say surrender all your adult rights and privileges and reduce society to the level of a kindergarden.
How can you challenge yourselve if there is no risk?
Of course the real problem with MMORPG games is that it is often no fun to be a low level character as you don't want to repeat the tutorial level. If I have to go the Trial Isle of EQ2 once more I am going to scream!
But imagine a game that has lots and lots of content at low level. Where if you have to start over you do not have to redo the same quest you already did a 100 times but can start in a new town with new quests and new skills.
Then dead would matter less. Yes it would be difficult to do in a game especially since most players can't get their head around the idea that it is not the levelling up that matters but having fun.
If you can have as much fun in a game at level 1 as at level 1000th then what does it matter if at level 800 you buy the farm. As long as the fight was good.
Without risk there is no challenge.
EQ2 had only the punishement of having to go get your spirit shard while suffering reduced stats. The XP debt was no problem, fighting your way back to your spirit usually took care of it. There is no decay or other penalty, now even the shard has been removed. Neither do team members share in your xp debt anymore.
WoW has been a real wakeup call to the MMORPG industry. Do you know that pre-wow people talked about the market having been saturated and that any new game could only hope to lure existing players away from other games? Kinda proved that wrong. WoW showed that instead a good game can create its own market.
Of course smedley seems to think this means that the way to be successfull is to make every game into a WoW clone. I predict that the same will happen as with PC games in general. A over abundance of simple FPS games with more specilist titles surviving in the margins. There are still hardcore flightsims to be found, just not on the shelves, you gotta search the net for them.
Same with hardcore MMORPG's, they will continue to be produced but they will be a niche market. The mass market will go for the WoW angle. It is what sells. You can hardly blame game publishers from wanting to make a profit.
I know it is usually illegal to assit in a suicide. But what exactly is the law?
Say a slashdot poster, lets call him "Emo_Kiddy", said he was thinking of ending his live. If I do nothing and just ignore him is that a crime? Do I have a duty to report this?
What if I suggest a few handy links with sure fire tips of how to kill yourselve.
Am I allowed to call him a pussy who is to weakwilled to do it anyway? Dare him?
Call me a nasty heartless person but I seen to many teenagers who claim they are going to kill themselves and never do. So this kid actually had the balls to do it (or made a fatal misjudgement on getting attention). Does this force the rest of society to be at their constant beck and call everytime some emokid seeks attention?
To bad for the kid that he saw no other way out but is that really the problem of the rest of the world?
I am going to kill myself, if you have read this you are now obligated to stop me. Don't and slashdot will be shut down. Nice. Could put a whole new twist to trolling for ops in a forum/irc channel. 'give me ops' 'no' 'I am going to kill myself' 'Oh okay, your an op'.
Oh well, time to visit sexylosers and see if there is a new suicide girl comic.
How many times have you been told that the germans first used sloped armour when it was in fact copied by the german of captured russian tanks?
To be fair. It is not like discovery channel is hiding these facts. It also airs those docu's that tell a more complete world history. It just doesn't screen out the ones that are american centric.
Does it matter? Well I know that a program that says helicopters can't have ejection seat is telling lies. I then got to ask myself wich other lies is it telling I don't know about. If I tell you two facts and you know one of them is a lie then what reason have you got to believe the other one?
The mythbusters are prone to this problem as well. I know that a couple of the myths they bust are either false or just plain badly done. A poor example? The jaws special. Jaws was not a normal shark yet the entire docu through they try to reduce the shark from the size it is in the movie/book to real sizes because no shark so big ever existed. Wich is a lie. They have existed, the jaw bones exist to prove it. The movie/book never claims Jaws is normal. It is a freak and making it normal sized is pointless. Either examine Jaws or examine real sharks.
They do this often where they 'rewrite' myths till they no longer make sense.
It is not a bad program, just don't trust it to get all the facts straight.
Programs like the American Chopper are not docu's. They don't tell me anything but they are in a way just like those programs were you follow someone travelling around the globe showing you new things. American chopper ofcourse thought me nothing new. I already knew all americans are fat.
This is not "pure" roleplay, you really can be a rape victim within the game and there is nothing you can do about it EXCEPT in the same way that we stop it in real life. The game seems to record all actions and create crimes wich more moral players can solve.
This is an intresting way to do PvP. the most intresting chance however is not that they added the option of rape but that they really seem to try to create a player run justice system.
There would seem to be definite disadvantages to being a griefer in this game.
3....2.....1 Ah hello Jack Thompson.
Mr Blobby. Google for it.
The glorydays of the BBC are past, even then it was merely turning out some nice series but a horrible news service that was biased as hell and understrict control by the goverment. They had to admit several times that they withheld news or misrepresented the news according to the wishes of the goverment. And that is just the ones found out.
Offtopic as hell but I hate people who glorify the BBC without actually ever having to live with it as the only news source.
See that box of ads next to your google search resuls mister Nielsen? I got a little secret to tell you. Not all of them paid the same amount to be there. Neither do people just select the top result. They look at the ads to see wich one best seems to meet their needs.
Successfull advertising != spending all your profits on it.
The apple and orange comment is also very true as he talks about content being leeched before going to b2b sites. Does B2B sites have content nowadays? I thought this was going to be an article about new sites having their stories hotlinked by google and people no longer visiting the sites on their own.
This is true. When was the last time you actually entered or selected a bookmark of a newssite vs following /. story link or a google result?
As for the alternatives. Yup, sounds like spam to me. It thought I had seen the end of the goddamn newsletter and having to explain again and again why it is not a good idea to send everyone who ever submitted their email a 1mb html mail.
Next he claims that just when you are making money after you hyped your article with a massive advertising campaign your competitor will do the same because he doesn't want to loose forcing you to run an ad campaign again.
Wow. How odd. Lucky nothing like that happens in the real world.
Coca Cola has just the one ad campaign in the late 1900's (or is that 1800's) and has been coasting ever since.
OF COURSE NOT Gee whiz. News flash, if you sell your product through paid advertising then you got to keep paying to advertise. More and more and more and every time there will be some new upstart who runs an ad campaign for a similar product forcing you to do it again.
What the fuck do search engines got to do with it? This is just plain old advertising.
No this fucktard has just learned that pay-per-click advertising has better statistics (you can actually tie the ad to the sale) and then used some magic math to prove that ad costs can sky rocket. Someone tell Intel. How much are they spending on that new logo again?
But you can tell this guy is a nutjob. He seems to think that because software/service X is available for free this will stop competition. Gee, look at my tagline for two free editors. Now google for other text editors. How many do you find? Rounded to the nearest hundred.
The bubble is over, there is no new economy, all the same old rules still apply. Oh and it says a lot about Jakob Nielsen that quality of your product doesn't seem to enter into equation. The only determining factor in how many people come to your site is how much you pay for ads and the only factor in how much you sell is your site.
Eheh. Explain this to google please. Exactly where did google advertise? Thank you.
Of course even an idiot gets some things right. Who here uses slashdot own search or uses google to search slashdot for old stories (oh and the third option for editors "Search old stories? What for?"). It is far easier to google with a question the find an answer site. Gamefaqs.com is about the only site I search directly.
If you don't want people to search you via google then A disable google from indexing you or B improve your goddamn site so the fucking search works properly.
Oh and if you don't like paying several dollar per google ad click, then don't. Word of mouth can work wonders if you are selling quality. There are plenty of companies that never advertise. They survive because they are the best and everyone knows it or they are so common people don't even think about it anymore. Anyone else. Welcome to the world of the ad agency sucking every last dollar out of you that they can. It is their way of making a living.
It could enable a user comments vs people who actuall RTFA statistic. Knowing slashdot it would crash on a divide by zero error offcourse.
But wait a minute, a infinite number of pings? So the story submitter himself can also add his pings? Knowing the quality of slashdot editors (HA!) any story submitter would know who read what links in his article. Do I want him to know?
Imagine that someone puts a goatse.cx link on a forum. You don't of course admit that you been tricked but the next post is a record of all the pings the link submitter received proving that all of slashdot wanks to the goatse man.
The abuse of this feature is clear and the benefits? If slashdot really cared to know wich external links are followed or not then that is their business isn't it?
Do I really want websites to know wich external links I follow? I think this is a solution looking for a problem and in the few cases where a website needs to know the users need for privacy is superior.
Bad mozilla. This is something I would have expected of MS or the old Netscape. Now go sit in a corner and don't come out until you stop adding crap features that tattle on me without informing me.
A rape victim is also sadly a witness. While it would be nice if we could just get rapist on technical details often to proof that it is rape the jury or judge needs to hear the victims account. Often it is a vital piece of the evidence, even with complete physical evidence a victims account is still needed because it makes clear the terrible nature of the crime.
So what happens when the victim takes this drug and has artificial manipulation of her memories?
Some comment that the drug does not erase the memory but only doesn't make it a traumatic memory.
Well, that is part of the defence by the doctor involved. The other part? That he doesn't care about how well his victims will be able to testify.
This is not even like he is curing the symptom not the disease, he is merely numbing the symptom. The disease, rapist, is left unharmed and can strike again and again.
This is nasty stuff. It reminds me of all those Sci-Fi stories where you have a civilisation so perfect and peacefull that they become unable to deal with violence. Cue someone taking advantage of it. If rape is no longer traumatic should it even be a crime? We already got judges around the world judging rape as natural for a healthy human male. Now they can just say, "Oh take a pill you hysteric girl." Far fetched? Check up on the practice of rape victims being the ones punished. No I am not talking about muslim countries. I am talking western countries who did stuff like lock rape victims up in mental wards and or sterelize them.
We need pain, it is an incentive to stop whatever is causing the pain. The cure is not to make rape memories less traumatic. The cure is to elimanate rape. Yes it is very bad for the victim but we need her trauma to convict the criminals and prevent them from being able to do it over and over again.
This is wrong. Hopefully smarter people then me will realize this and impose very strict guidelines on the use. Or maybe we should improve our legal system that rape victims do not have to wait years and years and keep their memories fresh before the trials and re-trials are finally over.
The DS is strapped to a pedastal and has permanant power. If you let it hang loose it would walk out of the stores.
To be able to operate a car well you really need to know an awfull lot of stuff. Oh sure not in exact detail just as I don't need to know wether my PC is big endian or little endian I do not need to know the exact air to gas mixture in my engine. Just that it needs air and a lot of it.
I use the word "operate" because there is a huge difference between operating a car and just driving it. To make use of your car driving is enoug. To continue to make full use of your car you need to do more. You need to be able to take car of it, to meet its demands.
So with computers. Anyone can surf and browse and run apps and install crap. It is when they have to do so for more then 1 day that the problems emerge. What people need to know is that a computer needs to be taken care of in the same way as you take care of a car.
How you teach people this. I be damned if I know. About 3 weaks ago some dipshit fueled a van (small truck?) with diesel because trucks run on diesels don't they. Well not this one dipshit and it says so on the fucking fuel opening.
Is this the same behavior that leads to the installation of spyware? Perhaps it was the reason about 3 years ago a developer who took over from me at a job deciced that in order to be able to remotely connect to the database the easiest option was to disable the hardware firewall completly.
Frankly I don't bother anymore with trying to explain things to people. I feel like a doctor telling a person coughing up his lungs in chuncks that he might want to cut back on smoking. Except I am not doctor and I don't remember taking an oath.
Same with the dutch trams in amsterdam, some marketing genius at MS has deciced to allow MS OS to be used to display ads on LCD screens inside the trams. Good advertising for MS, their distinctive error messages seen by millions each day.
If you consider that other consoles including the often abused DS just run for months on end the constant problems with the 360 do not make me hopefull. Of course these were the very first units and are abused but still, it just doesn't look good.
But this argument is never going to be settled. Fanboys vs Fanboys. What one considers a must have game another considers a tired sequel.
By the end of this year we will know more.
At least it explains the people standing rock still at all those Americas Army assault missions. They got no movement keys!
But the back button is the accepted way to back out of an unwanted action and if it is not handled as expected or at least disabled AND warned about then people get confused.
I do not and most web developers don't because we usually HATE the back button as it can really mess with your web apps. Use the fucking cancel button already.
Nonetheless your website has to work as expected.
I used non-refreshing pages for a long time. One of them was a long list of songs where I wished to cue songs to be played. Rather then load it each time you "selected" a song by clicking on an image and javascript would then request a new image wich was a script wich queed the song and returned an image to indicate it had been queed.
Granted AJAX goes a lot further and is very nice BUT I hardly see it as a web 2.0
Ofcourse I never was any good at getting millions needed to finance an upstart either.
If Web 2.0 gets the investment money flowing again then good luck to it. The bubble at least had the economy running. Something like the second law of thermodynamics, energy is never lost? Neither is money. For everyone who lost money in the bubble someone else earned it. Me! And frankly that is all that matters.
Well yeah. EVERYONE had to have a website. Didn't matter what you sold you had to sell it online as well. Billions were invested in making everything available online. Clothes, food, pets, toys. Some made sense (porn) most did not.
Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived. The new economy because the old one was just not the way to do it anymore. You actually had companies loosing stock value because they had not announced an internet strategy. Profits? Who cares.
In hindsight of course it all seems perfectly silly. Snail mail disappearing as email takes over. Eheh, tell that to the poor guy slumping a ton of mail with all the christmas cards. Brick and Mortar stores a thing of the past? Oh sure, tell your girlfriend that there is no need to go shopping with her, she can just browse on the laptop while you play Battlefield 2 and it will be just the same.
So the bubble burts, a few companies survived and things more or less went back to business as usual (wich it always does).
Ah, but surely the failure was because the tech was not ready for it? Well now we know better and we are ready for another try. Instead of portals now the buzzword seems to be social networks. Whatever those may be. It is again a combination of tech that has been around for a while but been buzzed up and vague promises about a social revolution.
Bloggs probably are part of it as well.
So what is it? Old tech in a sexy skin and hype. Is it bad? Hell no! I loved the bubble. Fat paychecks, easy going atmosphere and nobody in charge who had a clue as to what it was what you were doing. Websites with a dozen visitors written in code that would crash at the 1000th post and running on sun hardware and oracle databases. The job ads promising a company car have appeared again. Just hope that the geeks this time get proper regonistion and the sex from gullible girls that we so richly deserve.
The second stage after delivering the payload in the orbit will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in the sea or land, he said adding, "This is only in its conceptual stage."
Reminds of that recovery mission by the nasa (the one before this weekend) where it ended up halfway to china.
India rocket science. Oh yeah there is an image that doesn't have a tiny bit of a mismatch. Offcourse by now they probably turning out more rocket scientist then the rest of the world but I was raised by "It ain't half hot mum" and old prejudices die hard. BTW the idea of English rocket scientist is just as funny.
And what the hell is up with the figures quoted?
"we need to bring down the cost to access to space to 1/10th of the current per kg cost -- that is something like $500 to$1,000 per kg,"
Now matter how you put that it doesn't seem like the current costs can be that high. The end line:
The present cost of the space transportation system hovers somewhere between$12,000 to$15,000 per kg.
Doesn't make it much clearer but no matter how you look at it doesn't seem that expensive now does it? Sure sattelites can be more massive then you think and weigh easily in at a metric ton but 15million is hardly going to break the bank now is it?
So what the fuck is up with this? What are the real prices and what are the prices they hope for? I mean you could read it as as little as 500 dollars per kg. That is cheap.
Sounds like one of those advanced concept plans the NASA and ESA etc put out when it has been a slow month and there are no cute mars robots to keep the press intrested. Very nice but I seen such stuff promised since I was a kid and we are still stuck with the old rockets and space shuttle. GIVE ME MY MOONBASE!
AND that is supposed to get me to join up? They used to tell you that it would make a man out of you, that you would get to see the world, that you would get an education (Says a lot about schools when the army puts up posters inside promising to give you an education once you are released from school).
Now they basically say, you are going to get capped by some camper. Woohoo! Sign me up! I wanna be that guy in saving private ryan looking for his arms. Geez, lure me in with promises of how the chicks love a guy in uniform (wich they do, the rich guy who got his daddy to assign him a post with the reserves while the poor guys get killed).
Oh and if anyone is going to claim realism in that game I can only say it explains why the war on terror is going so bad.