You see I am weird RPG player, while I don't like the fake rpg's like Final Fantasy, wich are closer to to an action adventure, I also like a bit of handhelding.
When you consider Planescape Torment to be the best RPG ever or if you prefer First Person 3D non-party System Shock then Morrowind comes as a bit of a shock.
Yes its visualls are stunning especially if you had a proper PC. It was also EMPTY. If you leave early on new years day and see the entire city before you devoid of live that is what Morrowind was like.
It was not the lack of direction, I could deal with that. It was the lack of focused content. That is not very clear is it. Oh okay, shops with goods that were relevant to your level.
If you ever played a more focussed RPG you will know that at stages you will encounter shops wich sell you goods that are oddly enough at your current level. Weird eh? Morrowind designers didn't know what shop you were going to encounter when and I ended up stealing the best bow very early on in the game. (Yes I am a thieving basartd) I probably shouldn't have done that but I wandered into the city saw it and stole it.
For the entire rest of the game I never looted a better bow.
The same really with the rest of the equipment, I just got bored checking every single store in the game only to find them all selling the exact same thing. Nice that the game is so large but their are times when size doesn't matter. Do I really need a city that exist of a dozen shopping centers all with stores with the same goods?
That was I think the problem, not a lack of direction but to much empty or wasted space. I am a male, I do not enjoy shopping. Just give me a small square with all the key shops neatly arranged for minimum walking distance.
I am also frankly tired of having to break into peoples houses to find quest givers. Geez, what happened to the idea of the PnP RPG where a band of adventures sit in a inn and are approached by a mysterious stranger? Most CRPG's think people with lost family members hide in the toilet waiting for an adventurer to come by (Neverwinter Nights I am talking to you).
Ah well it will be intresting to see how they tackle it this time. I just wonder what kind of PC I will need for it if even a 360 has troubles with the frame rates. Then again if memory is the bottle neck we could have the same situation as with morrowind.
The original morrowind had a lot of loading on the PC because it had been designed with the limited x-box memory in mind. The expansions made full use of your PC's memory and had far less loading. Hopefully the PC version will not be similarly crippled this time.
Oh and any news on nudity? One of the prequels had fully nude models on the equipment screen! I want my nudy elves!
Is that current MMORPG games split their userbase. The more complex the game becomes, think Star Wars Galaxies, the more room their is for extremely specialised characters the more chance you have that your on the wrong server.
You could easily find yourselve on a server with no Image Designers for instance. It always seem that the most imaginative players who organized all the fun things were on servers that I was not on.
The reason for splitting the userbase over different servers is off course obvious if you ever played SWG, everyone centered on one city and that meant that the central hub could become unplayable.
Of course SWG was never supposed to have a hub, just that some bad design decissions and an unwillingness to update the game meant that coronet became the unofficial hub. Now that the NGE has happened coronet is in fact pretty much deserted. What I am complaining about them not updating and then I complain about the update? Well all I would have wanted is for them to make sharnaffs hit with disease to reflect them being overhunted. Disease was bitch and critters that had it were extremely unpopular to hunt. It could have helped spread people out across the universe. Simply make any overhunted critter go diseased and voila, the end of everyone hunting the same. NGE cured that but in the same way decapitation will cure a headache.
Anyway back to the problem of splitting the userbase up among servers. It means you could easily find yourselve on server with a total population of perhaps 10.000. Substract the people who already given up or for whom the character is an alt while they are playing most of the time on another server and you soon realize that the real population on a server is at best a few thousand.
Guild Wars does something similar and like WoW splits the users among continents but does allow you to vist an international hub where everyone from all the continents can meet (usually a pretty empty place). WoW of course does not allow european users to play with american users. Neither does it give european customers a free trial but europeans are used to being screwed.
But the small populations are not just a distortion, they make the games far more vulnerable when a group decides to leave. It can easily mean that a small guild leaving suddenly pulls the rug out under the player run economy. On the SWG I played there was one crafter player who made good stuff for an good price. She (not sure if she was a real female but I always judge people by their avatar unless their behaviour is a complete mismatch) was also easy to sell to offering an okay price with no hassle and not always demanding you rattle of every stat.
For many of us she was the supplier of food buffs and later also armour. Then she left and I was for the first time forced to start looking for my essential supplies. God what a mess that was. Still is.
Same with other proffesions, we had 1 image designer. If he was on holiday or something that service was removed.
If SWG had been one big universe with the game enforcing users to spread out across the planets I think it would have been a far greater success. To many new players on free trials choose the recommended least loaded server and found themselves in ghost towns.
An MMO is hardly massive when you got a max of a few hundred people online at the same time.
The revenue per player may be intresting for your bank, it is the number of people online with you that matters to users. WoW showed us that people who believed the market had topped out were very very wrong. Now remains to be seen wether WoW itself has topped out the market or that another MMORPG game with a different approach might rival its success or even leave it behind.
I still think there is room for a complex deep MMORPG that SWG tried to be. It will be extremely difficult but the simple fact is that people are still hanging on to the complex MMO's even with the lure of WoW. Successfull as WoW is it is not everybody's cup of thee. To much fixatio
but wait did the MS apologist not say that the 8 day delay between exploit and patch was because MS needed to test the patch completely and make sure it worked fully?
oh this does not count as it was a different problem and can't be exploited (yet) and just because it is in the same code I am a meanie for thinking MS should have fixed WMF once and for all?
8 days should have been enough time for MS to completly check the code involved and use every attack possible. The fact that MS obviously hasn't bothered shows they still don't understand security. OF course hackers are going to try to find new exploits in WMF code since they know MS and that if there is one bug there must be others.
Oh well, at least the MS apologists get their daily excersise again. Wonder what drivel they come up with this time.
Anyone else get the feeling this guy taco is whining that we the readers expect him to do the job of being an editor? Edit the goddamn submitted stories to link to the real pages and not just some mindless blog wich then links to the true story. That is your fucking job. Edit. Editors EDIT. It is not rocket science.
You get a new submission, you read the submission, follow the links, check facts and then start the job of editing.
The first job is perhaps to check if the story is a story. This is subjective but I would suggest that you get it horribly wrong to many times. Still it is your site and all the lame crap is what makes/./..
Then you could check if the sites being linked can handle it. If not, use caching. Not that hard and would help people to RTFA.
If a story links to 1 page wich in turn links deeper get those links out there and classify the links. Something like this "Reader A discovered this <blog url> blog wich reports on <real story>".
If you read real editted publications you might have seen something like this "the idiot [CmdTaco] complained that people [slashdot readers] expected him to do his job [editing]". An extreme example where a real editor uses his leet editing skills to clarify a text by including stuff the reader might not know in []. The often sued [sic] is there to show the editor knows there is a error but that it is left in on purpose for reasons of humor or accuracy.
For instance you really should have linked to the story that had so much discussion about the submitter and not the story itself. Frankly your own submission sucks as bad as all the submission you do not edit.
As for the messenger not being important or worthy of discussion, grow up and enter the real world. We are all judged on our reputation and your own site uses this. Why else bother with the whole karma idea? People with bad karma get bumped down and will be read less. People with a history of bad story submission will be less trusted. My reputation is used to determine wether my replies gets seen or not why should story submissions be any different?
The messenger determines the trustworthyness of the story. Simply put I am more ready to believe a story linking to a BBC.CO.UK url then a myspace.com url. Call me crazy. If there is one link and it goes to an ad filled page with absolutely no information or worse idiot ramblings with a link to the real story then I got to question why neither the submitter nor the editor just skipped the blog crap.
It happens way to often to just be coincedence. CmdrTaco claims it is not corruption well that leaves only the option of incompetence.
Anyway does anyone really believe that god got worried about the postings here or could it be that ad revenue is down? If there is anything we learned from the internet it is that companies only respond to protests by their users when they are feeling the result in their wallets.
Don't whine that people expect an editor to edit. Change your jobtitle if you don't like it.
You do not have to throw away the submission or remove the submitter, just make it clear. That is the editors job. I really can't understand that we, your readers, have to explain this to you.
Lets edit your own submission shall we? First thing any good editor would have done is explain who the fuck you are. No not everyone here knows. How should they? The submitter doesn't deem it worthy of mention but an editors job is to help his readers understand a story.
Second he would have linked to the storys you mention as examples. Helps us judge what your talking about. For instance I am not quit clear wether this entire argument is about the links in the articles OR the link under the submitters name. Personally I don't give a crap about the link under the submitters name since I never follow it, why should I? I am upset about the crappy links in the articles themselves.
As for making it more presentable. Well it is not an easy
Designing an MMORPG must be a bitch. It doesn't matter wich choice you make it will always upset someone who will bitterly complain that your game wich they have no intention of really paying for anyway is not exactly like the game they are paying for.
Look at the reactions so far to DDO. It ain't WoW. Well no fucking shit sherlock. It never tried to be. In fact if you looked at the design docs it is very clear that they pretty much designed the game to be not WoW.
The world doesn't need another WoW or EQ or Guild Wars or Age of Camelot or Lineage because all these games already exist.
We get countless articles bemoaning that games are just endless sequels with no originilaty but beware the company that actually tries to do something different.
So DDO does not have PvP. Must every MMORPG game have PvP? It reminds me of a few years ago when every game had to have a multiplayer mode no matter how silly. Or the days of the bubble when even the local bakery had to have a website.
DDO also seems to want to get rid of the level grind. Levels are the bane of MMORPG games. Why? How much trouble do you have in forming a team for Capture the Flag in quake? Oh none? Just join and your in a group? Might this because there is no level in quake and anyone can group with anyone else?
Now imagine quake where the longer you have had the game the more damage you do with your weapons. How attractive would it be to buy the game 3 months after launch? Yet this is exactly what happens in games like EQ1/2 and SWG NGE has added it as well. If your a real newbie then good luck. You will maybe wonder where the hell everyone is. Well they are in the high level areas wondering why there are no new players. Grouping up with a high level was added to EQ2 with the high level then lowering his level to yours but it is a pain. You got to find a really nice person who is willing to help you level up and that is exactly what they will be doing, trying to get you to level up as fast as possible. You even get more XP when being mentored to make the grind faster. The notion that its is the journey that matters not arriving seems not to exist in MMORPG land. Perhaps I am just a weirdo who likes to quest and doesn't care if it is at level 1 or level 1000th.
Levels create yet more problems. If you have crafting then high levels usually have no need for low level crafters items. Low level crafters can only gain XP by grinding low level items. CUE SWG and its "bought" crafter levels where a player would get money being a combat class to then pay for grinding to master crafter. No new player wanted to be a pure crafter could make it work. You would simply go bankrupt.
DDO seems to have dropped crafting altogether. Bad news for those who like a player run economy but at least it saves them a lot of problems. Since no game has ever gotten it right before.
PvP is yet another Level nightmare. Obviously a level 10 is goint to beat a level 1. Great fun for the level 10 especially if the level 1 was AFK because noobs just deserve it you know (there may be nice PvP fans but I never seen one). PvP fans want to race to the highest level and then wack their e-penis at lower level players. Nothing a PvPer enjoys more then challenging players in the starter area to duels.
DDO so far has 10 levels. Or does it? With 4 mini levels it could be said to have 40 levels. What of course really matters is how much difference there is between levels. Lets just say that a level 1 ddo player will get his ass handed back to him by a level 10 in the same way as a level 1 EQ player will get his ass handed to him by a level 60 EQ player. Oh and the ruleset for DDO allows for far higher classes. If they come you will have peasant players and virtual gods trying to exist in the same world.
Will it avoid the level grinding trap of other MMORPG games or will it to have endless walktrhoughs for levelling up the fastest and then complaining there is not enough high level content and there just don't seem to be new players
Not mine of course. I am not an expert but I do work as a rigger and so spend time around real audio freaks and MP3 SUCKS. It is bad. It is very very bad, it is so bad that you cannot believe how bad it is.
Proof? Hook up your iPod to a real sound system and blast it through a concert hall. YIKES!
You will truly not believe it. I cannot hear the difference between normal audio equipment but when it is amplified by the kind of equipment that can blow fuses you really do hear that is not a complete sound.
So what does it sound like really? Well it sounds exactly like those really really cheap radios you used to get free with things amplified in a drum.
So asking wether an iPod sounds good is a stupid question. All DAP players suck because the content they reproduce sucks. The hardware itself also doesn't have the quality needed either.
BUT DOES THIS MATTER. No.
It is not meant to be played to a thousand people, it is meant to power a couple of small earbud speakers and considering all the limitations involved both in the hardware and in you it is okay. Yeah sure some people will swear that they can hear the difference between Player X and Player Y well good luck to them. For the majority of people there is no difference and if you need to ask you are one of those people. Do not try to claim you are audiofreak by asking other people. Audiofreaks never listen to other people.
Note that the above is a bit extreme, you can do a successfull presentation from a laptop with powerpoint and mp3 audio but you are pushing it. Do not play music this way to an audio fanatics audience. Please note that their is also a hell of difference between the sound needed for a presentation and that for the party afterwards. If you think of holding one afterwards check with the sound engineer before and ask if the setup is small enough to be played from your sound source. They don't mind if you ask not simply tell them to do it and then complain it sounds bad. They are used to people thinking consumer hardware is good enough. Personally I had to explain more then once that a companies own top of the line projector was just not going to cut it for a conference hall. Their can be carried in a suitcase. Ours sits in a large trunk and can only be lifted with hydraulics.
If you read the article it is only if you hide your identity. It is an intresting move. It could be seen as part of the move to a trusted internet.
Currently the internet is not trusted. I don't really know who you are and you don't know who I am and we can pester each other without really being able to do anything about it.
Total open internet doesn't work. That is clear from slashdot alone else why would we have moderation and bans? If you ever run a website you will quickly learn that you will need to secure your site from many attacks.
There is something about being anonymous that can bring out the worst in people and with the internet it doesn't matter how small a group it is, they still number in the millions because of the global reach. Or put another way I don't need to worry about some kid from Japan gatecrashing my Dutch LUG. That same kid however can easily try attacking the website and I can't grab him by the throath and show what happens to little punks.
So lets move to a totally un-anonymous internet where who you are is known. Post a troll on slashdot and be assured someone from your hometown will come by and teach you a lesson.
Nice idea no? No. Because for all the trolls and flamers and idiots and time wasters there are also those people who contribute stuff they can get in trouble for but we would really like to know. Oh they ain't many, every slashdot story has trolls versus only a handfull that have inside information BUT some people find that the trolls are worth it.
And yet should that mean anyone can do anything they want and not have to fear being punished for it? Saying that people should be able to harras, threathen or even annoy while hiding behind anonymity is al very good until you are at the receiving end.
I happen to know one of the people who claims to be one of the gnaa members. Yes he is as sad in real live as well but that is not the real funny thing. He sometimes gets "attacked" himself and then bitterly complains about how people are costing him bandwidth from a DOS (yeah a DOS not even a DDOS). A lot of people are for freedom but only if it is them being free, the moment someone else uses freedom against them it is time to get the law involved.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This says you are free to speak. Strictly speaking it does not say you do not have to face consequences of what you say. (Shouting fire in a crowded theather example) It certainly does not say you have the right do speak anonymous. The amendment was clearly not written by lawyers. Not good ones anyway.
Of course it also was written a long time ago when if you wanted to say something you had to either own a press or stand up in front of your audience. The tech to speak from another continent without ever having to show yourselve was unheard perhaps even undreamed of.
This law has a lot of nasty possibilities but as someone who has had to clean to many websites after a visit by a person with the intent to annoy I am torn in two. The majority of me knows this is going to lead to trouble and the other part of me has a list of IP's in his firewall that he would loved to have traced by the feds and their users put in a wooden chair with leather straps and a link to another kind of net.
Should at least make for some intresting bash.org posts when someone convinces an annoying kid they are about to be arrested for talking in caps.
It is not about the history of game controllers at all. Others already pointed that out however.
The author seems to have some idea in his head about how all games have buttons you press to do something. Except he can't seem to get it across what is A bad about this B what the alternative is.
Somehow the new revolution controllers is apparently different except that you still press buttons. Oh but now you can move the entire controller to the side instead of a analog stick and you will move. Eh, yeah so what? It is just an analog stick that requires more muscles to use.
Game controller, device for controlling the action represented on the screen. The revolution just used positioning where others have used joysticks. In fact the idea of moving the controller itself is nothing new. Check 3D helmets. There was a joystick that was just a stick that worked with tilt detection.
As for the whole, Oh my god 12 buttons I am so confused, bit. Geez come on. Realize one simple thing. There will always be people confused by everything. Designing something to be fool proof is never going to work because there will always be a greater fool and you will piss of the people with a working brain cell.
Will the revolution controller work? Well as the article hints at it is at least going to be a problem. Cross ports are not going to work without additional hardware. Play game X for 49.95 in High Def on the PS3 or in low res for 49.95 + 99.95 for the controller add-on on the revolution. MMmm.
I am not saying that the revolution will fail. As a hardcore PC gamer/Handheld Gamer I only recently discovered playing with a gamepad on Broken Sword 3 and Onimusha3 (French guy and ninja slay demons across time) and it was amazing how different it plays then with a keyboard mouse setup. You can sit back in your chair and while I missed some of the control I have with PC controls it was defintly intresting.
The revolution might be similar. It is however not going to succeed just on the controller. Nobody bought the DS because it has two screens but because it has some really fun games. Will nintendo be able to do on a big console what they did with the handhelds?
Frankly I think Nintendo will have one big problem. If they sell their games for the same price as PS3/360 games people are going to judge it on its lack of HD. To cheap however and people will think it is crap. It will have a real struggle being seen as selling fun games that do not look as good but are more fun to play without people thinking simple/fun should mean costing less.
The biggest problem I seen when people looking at the DS? They compare the prices for the games with the PSP games and find them to expensive. You can tell them Advance Wars is brilliant but all people see is cartoony graphics and ask how come this costs the same as that full 3D PSP game. To be fair how do you explain that GTA Liberty City costs the same?
2006 will be an intresting year no doubt but I think Nintendo has a lot of work to do. You can complain all you want about same old games using same old controls but it sells.
This is not lack of demand but lack of supplies. At the moment we don't know what demand is. Could be that it tops at say 2 million (just a wild guess) and until unit 2.000.001 ships we won't know. Or rather a week later when it is still sitting unsold in the shop.
The only bad thing about it is that the PS3 is getting nearer. As the campaign for it ramps up some people not yet lucky enough to get a 360 might decide to wait to see what the PS3 will be like.
This about lack of production capacity, not lack of demand. The moment 360 consoles start to be easily available in stores then we can start judging on how good the launch has been. It is kinda odd that MS is having so much trouble with production but then MS not getting production right is nothing new. It is a new business for them after all. Sony has assembled hardware all its live. If Sony is going to get it wrong as well then it will be news.
Commenting and Documenting both take time. Wich you often don't have, so you don't do it or worse do it badly.
If somebody asks you to code something (and you can get away with it) tell them this, "okay that is X hours for just the code and X*3 for the code and proper documentation."
Yes I made the *3 up. You know why? Because I have always had the misfortune on working on the kinds of projects where I either didn't get the time needed or the guy before me didn't do the documentation.
If you want to take a ride in your car you should walk around it making sure it is in proper working order like all the lights working. It is a law and enforced by people with guns. Now how many of you do it?
Okay, nobody. So now you are under time pressure, you are underpayed and overworked and you got a choice, either deliver on time or tell your boss your still writing documentation on the installer.
When I was still young and fresh I thought that following procedures is the way to do it. Boy was I wrong. The secret? Code fast and ugly and make sure you have moved on before the shit hits the fan. Oh and never ever be lumbered with a maintenance project. I never even seen documentation wich was up-to-date.
The entire discussion on wether or not to document is wrong. The discussion should be wether you will allot enough time to non-coding work. It applies to so many things, peer review of code, sharing and re-use of selfmade libraries, layout standards, knowledge sharing, etc etc.
The larger the company the more time can successfully be spend on non-coding things that however are always badly reviewed during your evalutation. Oh yeah very nice you tought everyone else how to code securely and made sure nobody else has bugs in their code. Now how many lines did you write? Oh, no pay rise for you.
So simply ask this of the people in favor of proper documentation. How will they find the time?
And ask the non documentation people if they will do the maintenance on their own projects 10 years in to the future.
My experience? I needly predict I need X to write code and then Y to write the proper documentation. I deliver the code and get the next project and if I protest that I am still working on the documentation then I am told that it can wait. I am still waiting. Oh and the risk of doing it properly? You get lumbered with writing maintenance and writing the documentation for everyone else because your good at it but a slow coder. ARGH!
Just comment the basics, point out in a readme.txt where to start reading and tell them wich bar in the neighbourhood serves hard liquor during lunch. Oh and if you comment some code out come back later and delete it. Can be very confusing if you have to wade through a problem where 2/3's is old code.
Because that is what the article is about. INSTALLING windows on a clean machine. I bet you a months salery that a user installing windows on my P4 machine will have a lot more trouble then say Suse or Mandrake (or whatever it is called now).
Even the newbie users can make sense out of Windows text only early installation part he is going to be fucked pretty soon. No not because his new windows XP install will get infected before he can patch. In fact he will very safe indeed. You see my gigabyte network card does NOT have a driver in Windows XP. You gotta download it. How do you download a driver if you got no network driver?
Linux of course comes with the driver in the kernel.
As for actually using the desktop, well considering how many times I am asked to fix peoples windows computers I would say that not that many users can do it.
But frankly I don't care that much. As long as I am free to choose my OS you are free to choose yours. Mess with my choice however and your machine will be owned as fast as only a windows machine can be.
If I get a item that is 50% less for 50% of the cost I basically get the same deal. However if I buy a nokia battery that normally sells for 100 and instead accidently buy a fake for 80 and it then explodes I might feel that it is not such a good deal.
Yeah "fakes" can work. In a way the PC your sitting behind right now is a "fake". Unless your a rich bastard sitting behind a IBM or Apple machine.
This article is however not about those kind of fakes. It is where the buyer presumes he is buying the real deal often for the real price. That is not good.
Same with software, you can hold a lengthy argument about software piracy but when I pay full price for a software package I would expect to get a real offical copy.
By all means, make cheap memory or hd or mp3 players but don't try to pass it of as a superior product and charge the same money.
Nah, I am kidding. I have heard this before. The light from a LCD is "different". It is rarely entirely smooth and since a lot of apps, like this website seem to delight in making a pure white background you are essentially staring in a lamp. CRT's tend to be smoother and have less of the discoulering.
I don't know if it is the backlight, the uneven coloring, the fact that you can almost but not quite focus on the raster. Perhaps it is just to bright. Or maybe I am just getting old and should no longer spend hours staring at a glow tube. Eh glow panel.
The article is just a bit over my head but I don't think it says how wrong the original conclusion was just they think cannabilsm was not as common as the previous study suggested.
But how much? Did we eat each other daily? Weekly? On special holidays? It can't have been to common anyway. If you eat more of a food source then is grown your run out. or put another way. Even if you farmed humans you would be hard put to serve baby more then once per year. Presuming of course that factory farming is really a recent invention.
Anyway wasn't cannabilism more ritual then food source? Eat the X of a vanguished enemy to gain his X. God forbid to think what the chinese would serve after the battle.
Oh well whatever the truth just don't accept an invitation to the donner party. Or board an airplane with an Uruguayan rugby team. Well unless you are feeling peckish.
Misundestanding HD=harddisk NOT High Def
on
Comparing Xbox Launches
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· Score: 3, Interesting
And a HD harddisk has a definite advantages in that you can do patches AND release content via the internet.
Even the revolution is getting more storage to support Nintendo's internet shop of old games. Wich I think proves that Nintendo has taken note from x-box live that a networked console can be a good thing.
It will be intresting to see what is going to happen with MMO games. They all seem to require a HD and Sony's biggest MMO's are PC only because of Memory limits on the current consoles.
MMO games have huge draw for game companies. Impossible to pirate and continued income. Blizzards accountant must be having a constant hardon. 4 million subscribers or so? that is 60 million dollars coming in each and every months. Most game companies would drool at reaching that in just single sales. Blizzard gets it each month. Why do you think Sony did a nutter with Star Wars Galaxies (and also dumbed down EQ2)?
I think that all the gaming platforms should be counted. You can't just say. Oh PC is hard or expensive so it is not a gaming platform. You may not like it as a platform but that doesn't make it a platform. Think of it like this. Porches are cars but very expensive to repair/maintain so should they be excluded from a list of cars?
Oh and you can play an awfull lot of cheap games on a cheaper PC. Remember that shocking article that said there are more female gamers then male in certain age groups? Well they don't play games requiring a SLI setup costing an arm and leg. They play "simpler" flash games on old Dells.
I just don't think it is good for the gaming industry to seperate the PC from other consoles. Yes it is more expensive but if we judge on price how on earth can you compare the PSP with the DS (PSP 2x more expensive).
Especially since so many games nowadays are cross platform INCLUDING the PC.
Oh and as for the common hardware, don't forget that both the PS3 and 360 are available in 2 versions. With and without HD. Oh and the original x-box? Live and not-live versions. Want to play game X? Upgrade hardware. Sure nowhere near the level of a pc (or the cost) but still, not exactly as simple as it used to be.
I recently succumbed and downloaded the HD version of a music clip (yeah I am a pirate, keel haul me you landlubber) and wow it looked good. It was a bit of a shock to find that it didn't actually fit my monitor but even scaled down it looked yummy. Only problem? about 12 minutes takes up 2 gb. Ouch
And one nice thing about laptops is that they come with widescreen pre-installed. All of sudden that 30gb drive doesn't look all that big.
It has always been the problem with solid state memory. The moment they increase the storage by 2 HD companies increase by ten and half the price.
Sure HD's are vulnerable, they may even suck your battery dry faster then an Itanium BUT they make up for it by being bloody big.
or to answer the question in the post. When did you last tap out a drive? Yesterday and I bought 2 sata drives each 320gb. Granted in part to retire an old Promise raid (yeah yeah I know, stupid) so I can finally upgrade my linux server to 2.6 but also because I maxed out all my disks.
Granted I wouldn't use a laptop as a fileserver BUT I am not going to accept a laptop with less storage then my bloody iPod. Not unless there are some very real advantages and multiple of them.
Far cheaper, far less power consumption, an awfull lot faster. I need at least 2 to make up for a huge loss in data storage. Oh and it better not be like flash wich craps out after using it to much. Geez learned that the hardway when I used my flash mp3 player as a backup solution.
You see poor people who cannot afford the latest hardware (or the powerbill the latest hardware generataes) DO NOT have to tune linux down to run on obsolete hardware. All that is needed is ONE (1) geek to do it and put his efforts online. THAT is the secret of Linux/Opensource/The internet.
Some crazy fin writes an OS and I get a cheap desktop that doesn't blue screen and actually performs a lot better then certain commercial OS'es and does not costs me a sackfull of money to get the latest bugfixes.
The Internet has made a huge impact on the way the world works. No not because of internet shopping but in that communities can be build with a far larger catching area. It doesn't matter how obscure your interest are, with the global internet their are bound to be other weirdos out there who are intrested in the same things as you.
As someone who actually had an interest in anime/manga before the internet (yeah I am old so what?) I am still at times amazed by the huge change the internet has made. Previously you had to really seek out a club that probably had only 1-2 members per province and would have real trouble getting their message out. With the internet I can google and find hundreds of sites specializing in every type of manga/anime.
It would probably be quit hard to find enough people in your own town to build an OS. In fact linux shows this. Not that many other fins involved but because of the internet it doesn't matter. Weirdos allover can easily find each other.
So a knoppix live cd made by persons from all over the globe can be easily found by anyone else on the planet. Same with firewall on a floppy distro's. Just check distrowatch to see how many tiny little 1 man distro's there are that nevertheless manage to reach a global audience.
MS must really be getting desperate if now they are even trying to spread fud about the capacity for Linux to run on cheap hardware.
Linux is made by people for people. It does not have to be succesfull, it does not have to be worth it. There are countless people out there who are happy to spend all their free time producing special versions of Linux and give away their work for free.
This allows for Linux distro's to be easily available in the most obscure languages possible since all it requires is one(1) person with a passion and there is no need for a cost benefit study.
Linux runs on X because. Not because anything just because. Windows CE only runs on X when someone decides it is worth their time and effort and money.
Yes some companies have decided that they want to try making money from Linux. Good luck to them and they add valuable extra's to the effort but they are not Linux. They are a small subset of the global effort. Not a coordinated effort. Just hundreds of thousands of people who want software to do what they want and screw it being complex. That is part of the enjoyment. You don't think someone modding a GBA to run as a webserver has anyother motive then "Because"?
Linux is people who grow their own food, Linux is people that take 20 years to build their own plane, Linux is people who climb up a mountain nobody cares about, Linux is all these efforts being able to benefit all the others. Or not. because it don't matter. If all the effort to put Linux on PPC never ever generates a single bit of usefull code it don't matter because Linux does not ever have to make a profit to survive.
Even if Linux died, so what? Linux ain't Linux, Linux is an idea and BSD or god forbid Hurd could easily take over. because Linux is not new. It is in fact ancient. Linux is civilisation. Each generation building on the achievements of their elders and sharing their knowledge with the next generation.
The idea that you keep new ideas locked up is not how mankind has progressed.
I do not have to figure out how to pump water or filter it or store it or even figure out that I need it to survive. Others have done it before me and shared it with the world at large. I do not have to figure out h
The X-box was "new". It was fresh. It meant a new player in a market that had been neatly carved in two.
It also stood a chance of actually happening unlike some stuff like the phantom and other console vaporware wich never had the kinda backing needed to take on Sony.
MS took some intresting decisions. It used existing hardware with minor modifications to simplify and speed up development wich in theory should have made it cheaper but in the end made it a more limited machine with a lot of security flaws (from MS viewpoint) meaning it was hacked to hell and back.
The PS2 continues to be pushed to new heights, the X-box is maxed out. It is kinda sad when a system over 1.5 years older (ps2 early 2000, x-box late 2001) continues to be as powerfull as your new release.
Nonetheless the new kid on the block powered some chances. Despite the fact that none of the current generation seem to include a HD by default it seems that it is going to be an almost essential add-on. Live for better or worse was also a sorta wakeup call especially for Nintendo.
All of the console industry seems to have decided that Japan is THE market. If you don't sell there then you are a failure. It is an odd way to decide a failure because it seems to ignore that if company A sells extremely well in area A then company B is simply going to have less chance since many people do not want 2 consoles. In economic size europe (or everybit of the world that is not japan or north america) is bigger but ofcourse also more expensive to produce for (language barriers, lots of different laws (Sony was "forced" to exchange every PSP even with 1 subpixel error in Holland for instance, something they refused to do in the rest of the world)).
The X-box did okay in america and europe and was considered a failure in Japan. Sales figures are hard to trust but most people seem to have decided that sales wise Sony took the absolute lead with MS and Nintendo fighting for 2nd and 3rd place with Nintendo perhaps being the only one to make a clear profit on their console/software.
The 360 is the first of the new generation wich already shows you one intresting oddity about the console market. The PSP/DS are not counted as consoles. They cost as much as a console PSP is more expensive then a PS2 and the DS is more expensive then a Gamecube and the games retail at the same price as the bigger consoles. Nintendo has certainly proven that you can survive on just handheld sales.
But nevermind, this is game country were normal business rules do not apply. The 360 is in almost every aspect the X-box V2. Although its internal hardware is not a off the shelf as the PC like original it is neither as specialist as the PS3. The exact same thing is happening with the PS3 being claimed to be a bitch to develop for and the 360 being easier. Since we already know the PS2 turned out to haven hidden powers and the x-box was quickly maxed it will be intresting to see what happens this time. Will the 360 continue to get better games, will the PS3 be underused at launch?
What is different is that for the first time in history Europe got a launch before Japan. This might be seen as a snub to the japanese or could be due to the fact that certain european countries like for instance holland have their gift holiday earlier in the month of december (the 5th to be precise) and that japan does not have as strong a tradition of giving expensive presents in december. (or so I am told)
Nonetheless it seems the 360 is yet again not exactly setting Japan alight. The causes could be many but since MS claimed that Japan was an important market they have themselves made it look like the 360 is not the success they hoped for.
In fact even america and europe are not certain yet. Sure they are sold out but so are McClaren F1's. Current sales figures are just to low to decide on success or failure yet. I don't think there is anything artificial about it. Almost every new product has shortages on launch. Just try to buy a new popular car at la
I mean, I can understand some game movies. They are usually made about BIG games that had a lot of influence. I played bloodrayne 2. It is not in that class. Not by a longshot.
Now I don't want to get all the bloodrayne fans at me but lets be honest here. It was a cheap action game surviving on sex and gore. Not that there is anything wrong with it but compare it to Tomb Raider, Dungeon & Dragons, Doom, Super Mario, Street Fighter it becomes clear that Bloodrayne does not belong in that list.
So I don't know how you could ruin it. Hot girl, in skimpy customes slaughtering men and equally scantily glad females in gory ways with plenty of blood soaked skin. Throw in some stuff about vampires and you should be done. It does not have a strong intelligent lead, it does not have an extremely complex game history, it does not play on mars and have expensive CGI demons, it does not have simple fun gameplay that cannot translate to a script, it does not have a cast of two dozen players who have to be squeezed in.
And yet the reviews all seem to conclude that even this game to movie can be ruined. No I haven't seen it. I am weak and am still recoverning from the last Star Wars Nasty.
But I am thinking that we are all wrong. Uwe Boll is not the next Ed Woods. Ed Wood knew he was a hack and as far as I know all his movies were cheap to make. Uwe Boll must either be a millionaire or he actually does make enough on his movies to fund his next project. The only reason I can see someone invest in a movie produced/directed by a known failure is if it is for tax reasons.
People who says movies and games are coming together are right. Uwe Boll is doing it. Sadly what we hoped would be a loving encounter under moonlight has turned into a rape scene.
Oh well, at least this reinforces my believe that it is okay to pirate movies and steal actors money. People with no morals about appearing in movies like this deserve to starve to death.
There is always a risk when creating a community that some asshole will disrupt it. Should we therefore lock ourselves up in single person cells and never risk getting something we don't want?
So what if some idiots would use this to push mislabelled files. So you get a weird sound file once in a while, this is nothing new happened with napster and that didn't stop it.
Plus there is tiny little difference here. The person pushing the weird file will be closeby. 99.99% of the internet assholes are pussies who would never run the risk of an angry person coming over and pushing their face through a wall.
As for virusses. As long as the software is not written by MS it should be fine. Shouldn't be too hard to write a player that does not suffer from bugger overruns and as far as I know MP3 does not allow system calls to be embedded.
It sounds like a nice idea. I doubt it will take off in all but the hippest places for the same reason that I can rarely find anyone with a PSP or DS or even GBA cabel. Not that many people have this kinda gadget and because nobody has it nobody buys it because nobody has it.
It reminds me of the napster days when you could requests a persons share list. I always checked out what other stuff a person had if I found a rare song I had been looking for. You never know, if you both like the same weird stuff you might like the other stuff he/she has.
The RIAA will do a nutter of course but screw them.
I am a gamer and linux user so the only real option is to get a dedicated Windows machine to do it for me. I pretty much ignored XP as 98se was good enough. All kidding about blue screens aside if you ONLY install games on it and do not do any other stuff with it then 98se was an okay OS. Just reboot between gaming sessions.
XP was ewh
It offered no real improvement at the time but sadly over time it seemed I was just going to have to upgrade. I didn't want another 95 horror where I had stuck with a DOS gaming machine for so long that the eventual shift to 95 was a horrid upgrade nightmare of catching up with a year and half of bug fixes.
2K3 was just being hacked into being a desktop OS. Someone I knew made a install script that did it all for you and gave you a pretty lean OS that doesn't crash as often as 98se while skipping on the more Fisher Price aspects of XP.
Only problem? A tiny handfull of games seem to insist they don't run on it when they do. Had to learn far more about.msi scripts then I ever wanted to know to hack them and insert the 2k3 string in their accepted OS list.
Pure stupidity. Everyone knows that MS recycles its code endlessly and that with XP they in fact made a deliberate merging of the NT and 9X code bases. Or put another way. There is no real difference between the current windows desktop OS'es. The current wmf shitfest showed that clearly.
Anyway it seems to have been a short trend. I don't remember coming across it recently. Perhaps game companies figured with Vista being just around the corner limiting their game installers is going to cost them a lot of support when people get Vistad when they buy a new machine.
Anyway my solution, make sure that it is not just a stupid install script that has decided your OS is not good enough. You will be suprised how much code can be shared between windows versions.
Not that I would recommend the google pack. It is not a game and that is the only thing windows is good for. All the other apps can be better run on a mac. If you want cutesy handhelding desktop helpers get the OS that was designed for it. Windows = Gaming, Mac = Kiddy desktop, Linux = Nerds, BSD = Necrophiliacs, OS/2 = Doing actual work with your OS instead of messing around wasting the bosses time, Unix = Nerds with money, AS/400 = Nerds with a shitload of money.
Is it me or does google seem to become more and more like yahoo? You know, the portal with everything and the kitchen sink we fled to the clean single purpose google? Perhaps I am alone in wishing they would just improve their search engine to return less crap results and perhaps even ban sites with endless keyword lists. Getting rid of those horrid "game" sites that have a page for every game ever made with 0 content would be a nice start. Next those shop sites wich link to every product with zero info would help.
The only exception could be the vid card wich is what the original question started with anyway.
It is only because there is currently a shift going on from AGP to PCI-Express that he can't just buy the latest vid card and be happy.
Upgrades you can do simply. Adding more HD space. Adding optional extras like a dedicated soundcard or adding a burner. These are expansions though not really upgrade as the original hardware will not change.
Memory is trickier. If you got a free slot adding more is easy enough but I rarely found it economical to ditch the old memory and add new strips. ALWAYS get a new computer with all the memory in as few slots as possible. Memory upgrades make a big difference but are costly when you first go to throw memory away.
CPU upgrade, well no. NEVER. Ever. Unless your really really thight and bought the cheapest CPU possible and can now get the most powerfull of the same make for a cheap price it just ain't worth it. Overclock the succer, save up and when it does a Itanium buy a whole new setup. Primary reason? You will often find that the most powerfull processor in your old hardware will be limited by the rest of the computer.
As for wether you should move to PCI-Express. The same problem existed when we moved from regular PCI to AGP. I would just bite the bullet and get a new machine. Give the old one away or use it as a server (get to know linux?).
Buying a top of the line new vid card with agp hardware is I think not worth it. Either just save up or learn to be happy with your current hardware. I always find that compromised upgrades tend to be more expensive because you need to do them far more often.
Getting a spanking new machine could last you 2-3 years. That new agp vid card at most a year.
The Marthin Luther King example can indeed be seen as both being about racism and the fight against it. The original Planet of the Apes was using the sci-fi trick of turning the roles around to give its message.
Star Trek (the episodes that are not pure action or particle of the week thrillers) does this a couple of times. I am reminded of the color difference episode where we meet two races locked in a fight to the death, the one being black/white and the other being white/black.
TNG had an episode to show how stupid judging people on their sexual preferences is but showing a race that is purely homosexual (a 1 gender species that still used two people to procreate is off course the ultimate same sex race) with the sexual weirdos being those who tended to have heterosexual feelings.
This is indeed the eye of the beholder, it took me a while to figure it out even what the problem was. Apparently blacks are apes.
Slashdot Mirror
When you consider Planescape Torment to be the best RPG ever or if you prefer First Person 3D non-party System Shock then Morrowind comes as a bit of a shock.
Yes its visualls are stunning especially if you had a proper PC. It was also EMPTY. If you leave early on new years day and see the entire city before you devoid of live that is what Morrowind was like.
It was not the lack of direction, I could deal with that. It was the lack of focused content. That is not very clear is it. Oh okay, shops with goods that were relevant to your level.
If you ever played a more focussed RPG you will know that at stages you will encounter shops wich sell you goods that are oddly enough at your current level. Weird eh? Morrowind designers didn't know what shop you were going to encounter when and I ended up stealing the best bow very early on in the game. (Yes I am a thieving basartd) I probably shouldn't have done that but I wandered into the city saw it and stole it.
For the entire rest of the game I never looted a better bow.
The same really with the rest of the equipment, I just got bored checking every single store in the game only to find them all selling the exact same thing. Nice that the game is so large but their are times when size doesn't matter. Do I really need a city that exist of a dozen shopping centers all with stores with the same goods?
That was I think the problem, not a lack of direction but to much empty or wasted space. I am a male, I do not enjoy shopping. Just give me a small square with all the key shops neatly arranged for minimum walking distance.
I am also frankly tired of having to break into peoples houses to find quest givers. Geez, what happened to the idea of the PnP RPG where a band of adventures sit in a inn and are approached by a mysterious stranger? Most CRPG's think people with lost family members hide in the toilet waiting for an adventurer to come by (Neverwinter Nights I am talking to you).
Ah well it will be intresting to see how they tackle it this time. I just wonder what kind of PC I will need for it if even a 360 has troubles with the frame rates. Then again if memory is the bottle neck we could have the same situation as with morrowind.
The original morrowind had a lot of loading on the PC because it had been designed with the limited x-box memory in mind. The expansions made full use of your PC's memory and had far less loading. Hopefully the PC version will not be similarly crippled this time.
Oh and any news on nudity? One of the prequels had fully nude models on the equipment screen! I want my nudy elves!
You could easily find yourselve on a server with no Image Designers for instance. It always seem that the most imaginative players who organized all the fun things were on servers that I was not on.
The reason for splitting the userbase over different servers is off course obvious if you ever played SWG, everyone centered on one city and that meant that the central hub could become unplayable.
Of course SWG was never supposed to have a hub, just that some bad design decissions and an unwillingness to update the game meant that coronet became the unofficial hub. Now that the NGE has happened coronet is in fact pretty much deserted. What I am complaining about them not updating and then I complain about the update? Well all I would have wanted is for them to make sharnaffs hit with disease to reflect them being overhunted. Disease was bitch and critters that had it were extremely unpopular to hunt. It could have helped spread people out across the universe. Simply make any overhunted critter go diseased and voila, the end of everyone hunting the same. NGE cured that but in the same way decapitation will cure a headache.
Anyway back to the problem of splitting the userbase up among servers. It means you could easily find yourselve on server with a total population of perhaps 10.000. Substract the people who already given up or for whom the character is an alt while they are playing most of the time on another server and you soon realize that the real population on a server is at best a few thousand.
Guild Wars does something similar and like WoW splits the users among continents but does allow you to vist an international hub where everyone from all the continents can meet (usually a pretty empty place). WoW of course does not allow european users to play with american users. Neither does it give european customers a free trial but europeans are used to being screwed.
But the small populations are not just a distortion, they make the games far more vulnerable when a group decides to leave. It can easily mean that a small guild leaving suddenly pulls the rug out under the player run economy. On the SWG I played there was one crafter player who made good stuff for an good price. She (not sure if she was a real female but I always judge people by their avatar unless their behaviour is a complete mismatch) was also easy to sell to offering an okay price with no hassle and not always demanding you rattle of every stat.
For many of us she was the supplier of food buffs and later also armour. Then she left and I was for the first time forced to start looking for my essential supplies. God what a mess that was. Still is.
Same with other proffesions, we had 1 image designer. If he was on holiday or something that service was removed.
If SWG had been one big universe with the game enforcing users to spread out across the planets I think it would have been a far greater success. To many new players on free trials choose the recommended least loaded server and found themselves in ghost towns.
An MMO is hardly massive when you got a max of a few hundred people online at the same time.
The revenue per player may be intresting for your bank, it is the number of people online with you that matters to users. WoW showed us that people who believed the market had topped out were very very wrong. Now remains to be seen wether WoW itself has topped out the market or that another MMORPG game with a different approach might rival its success or even leave it behind.
I still think there is room for a complex deep MMORPG that SWG tried to be. It will be extremely difficult but the simple fact is that people are still hanging on to the complex MMO's even with the lure of WoW. Successfull as WoW is it is not everybody's cup of thee. To much fixatio
oh this does not count as it was a different problem and can't be exploited (yet) and just because it is in the same code I am a meanie for thinking MS should have fixed WMF once and for all?
8 days should have been enough time for MS to completly check the code involved and use every attack possible. The fact that MS obviously hasn't bothered shows they still don't understand security. OF course hackers are going to try to find new exploits in WMF code since they know MS and that if there is one bug there must be others.
Oh well, at least the MS apologists get their daily excersise again. Wonder what drivel they come up with this time.
You get a new submission, you read the submission, follow the links, check facts and then start the job of editing.
The first job is perhaps to check if the story is a story. This is subjective but I would suggest that you get it horribly wrong to many times. Still it is your site and all the lame crap is what makes /. /..
Then you could check if the sites being linked can handle it. If not, use caching. Not that hard and would help people to RTFA.
If a story links to 1 page wich in turn links deeper get those links out there and classify the links. Something like this "Reader A discovered this <blog url> blog wich reports on <real story>".
If you read real editted publications you might have seen something like this "the idiot [CmdTaco] complained that people [slashdot readers] expected him to do his job [editing]". An extreme example where a real editor uses his leet editing skills to clarify a text by including stuff the reader might not know in []. The often sued [sic] is there to show the editor knows there is a error but that it is left in on purpose for reasons of humor or accuracy.
For instance you really should have linked to the story that had so much discussion about the submitter and not the story itself. Frankly your own submission sucks as bad as all the submission you do not edit.
As for the messenger not being important or worthy of discussion, grow up and enter the real world. We are all judged on our reputation and your own site uses this. Why else bother with the whole karma idea? People with bad karma get bumped down and will be read less. People with a history of bad story submission will be less trusted. My reputation is used to determine wether my replies gets seen or not why should story submissions be any different?
The messenger determines the trustworthyness of the story. Simply put I am more ready to believe a story linking to a BBC.CO.UK url then a myspace.com url. Call me crazy. If there is one link and it goes to an ad filled page with absolutely no information or worse idiot ramblings with a link to the real story then I got to question why neither the submitter nor the editor just skipped the blog crap.
It happens way to often to just be coincedence. CmdrTaco claims it is not corruption well that leaves only the option of incompetence.
Anyway does anyone really believe that god got worried about the postings here or could it be that ad revenue is down? If there is anything we learned from the internet it is that companies only respond to protests by their users when they are feeling the result in their wallets.
Don't whine that people expect an editor to edit. Change your jobtitle if you don't like it.
You do not have to throw away the submission or remove the submitter, just make it clear. That is the editors job. I really can't understand that we, your readers, have to explain this to you.
Lets edit your own submission shall we? First thing any good editor would have done is explain who the fuck you are. No not everyone here knows. How should they? The submitter doesn't deem it worthy of mention but an editors job is to help his readers understand a story.
Second he would have linked to the storys you mention as examples. Helps us judge what your talking about. For instance I am not quit clear wether this entire argument is about the links in the articles OR the link under the submitters name. Personally I don't give a crap about the link under the submitters name since I never follow it, why should I? I am upset about the crappy links in the articles themselves.
As for making it more presentable. Well it is not an easy
Designing an MMORPG must be a bitch. It doesn't matter wich choice you make it will always upset someone who will bitterly complain that your game wich they have no intention of really paying for anyway is not exactly like the game they are paying for.
Look at the reactions so far to DDO. It ain't WoW. Well no fucking shit sherlock. It never tried to be. In fact if you looked at the design docs it is very clear that they pretty much designed the game to be not WoW.
The world doesn't need another WoW or EQ or Guild Wars or Age of Camelot or Lineage because all these games already exist.
We get countless articles bemoaning that games are just endless sequels with no originilaty but beware the company that actually tries to do something different.
So DDO does not have PvP. Must every MMORPG game have PvP? It reminds me of a few years ago when every game had to have a multiplayer mode no matter how silly. Or the days of the bubble when even the local bakery had to have a website.
DDO also seems to want to get rid of the level grind. Levels are the bane of MMORPG games. Why? How much trouble do you have in forming a team for Capture the Flag in quake? Oh none? Just join and your in a group? Might this because there is no level in quake and anyone can group with anyone else?
Now imagine quake where the longer you have had the game the more damage you do with your weapons. How attractive would it be to buy the game 3 months after launch? Yet this is exactly what happens in games like EQ1/2 and SWG NGE has added it as well. If your a real newbie then good luck. You will maybe wonder where the hell everyone is. Well they are in the high level areas wondering why there are no new players. Grouping up with a high level was added to EQ2 with the high level then lowering his level to yours but it is a pain. You got to find a really nice person who is willing to help you level up and that is exactly what they will be doing, trying to get you to level up as fast as possible. You even get more XP when being mentored to make the grind faster. The notion that its is the journey that matters not arriving seems not to exist in MMORPG land. Perhaps I am just a weirdo who likes to quest and doesn't care if it is at level 1 or level 1000th.
Levels create yet more problems. If you have crafting then high levels usually have no need for low level crafters items. Low level crafters can only gain XP by grinding low level items. CUE SWG and its "bought" crafter levels where a player would get money being a combat class to then pay for grinding to master crafter. No new player wanted to be a pure crafter could make it work. You would simply go bankrupt.
DDO seems to have dropped crafting altogether. Bad news for those who like a player run economy but at least it saves them a lot of problems. Since no game has ever gotten it right before.
PvP is yet another Level nightmare. Obviously a level 10 is goint to beat a level 1. Great fun for the level 10 especially if the level 1 was AFK because noobs just deserve it you know (there may be nice PvP fans but I never seen one). PvP fans want to race to the highest level and then wack their e-penis at lower level players. Nothing a PvPer enjoys more then challenging players in the starter area to duels.
DDO so far has 10 levels. Or does it? With 4 mini levels it could be said to have 40 levels. What of course really matters is how much difference there is between levels. Lets just say that a level 1 ddo player will get his ass handed back to him by a level 10 in the same way as a level 1 EQ player will get his ass handed to him by a level 60 EQ player. Oh and the ruleset for DDO allows for far higher classes. If they come you will have peasant players and virtual gods trying to exist in the same world.
Will it avoid the level grinding trap of other MMORPG games or will it to have endless walktrhoughs for levelling up the fastest and then complaining there is not enough high level content and there just don't seem to be new players
Proof? Hook up your iPod to a real sound system and blast it through a concert hall. YIKES!
You will truly not believe it. I cannot hear the difference between normal audio equipment but when it is amplified by the kind of equipment that can blow fuses you really do hear that is not a complete sound.
So what does it sound like really? Well it sounds exactly like those really really cheap radios you used to get free with things amplified in a drum.
So asking wether an iPod sounds good is a stupid question. All DAP players suck because the content they reproduce sucks. The hardware itself also doesn't have the quality needed either.
BUT DOES THIS MATTER. No.
It is not meant to be played to a thousand people, it is meant to power a couple of small earbud speakers and considering all the limitations involved both in the hardware and in you it is okay. Yeah sure some people will swear that they can hear the difference between Player X and Player Y well good luck to them. For the majority of people there is no difference and if you need to ask you are one of those people. Do not try to claim you are audiofreak by asking other people. Audiofreaks never listen to other people.
Note that the above is a bit extreme, you can do a successfull presentation from a laptop with powerpoint and mp3 audio but you are pushing it. Do not play music this way to an audio fanatics audience. Please note that their is also a hell of difference between the sound needed for a presentation and that for the party afterwards. If you think of holding one afterwards check with the sound engineer before and ask if the setup is small enough to be played from your sound source. They don't mind if you ask not simply tell them to do it and then complain it sounds bad. They are used to people thinking consumer hardware is good enough. Personally I had to explain more then once that a companies own top of the line projector was just not going to cut it for a conference hall. Their can be carried in a suitcase. Ours sits in a large trunk and can only be lifted with hydraulics.
I am the LAW! Plus a helmet that never comes off is a bonus for slashdotters. Not allowed to have sex is not a big deal either :P
Currently the internet is not trusted. I don't really know who you are and you don't know who I am and we can pester each other without really being able to do anything about it.
Total open internet doesn't work. That is clear from slashdot alone else why would we have moderation and bans? If you ever run a website you will quickly learn that you will need to secure your site from many attacks.
There is something about being anonymous that can bring out the worst in people and with the internet it doesn't matter how small a group it is, they still number in the millions because of the global reach. Or put another way I don't need to worry about some kid from Japan gatecrashing my Dutch LUG. That same kid however can easily try attacking the website and I can't grab him by the throath and show what happens to little punks.
So lets move to a totally un-anonymous internet where who you are is known. Post a troll on slashdot and be assured someone from your hometown will come by and teach you a lesson.
Nice idea no? No. Because for all the trolls and flamers and idiots and time wasters there are also those people who contribute stuff they can get in trouble for but we would really like to know. Oh they ain't many, every slashdot story has trolls versus only a handfull that have inside information BUT some people find that the trolls are worth it.
And yet should that mean anyone can do anything they want and not have to fear being punished for it? Saying that people should be able to harras, threathen or even annoy while hiding behind anonymity is al very good until you are at the receiving end.
I happen to know one of the people who claims to be one of the gnaa members. Yes he is as sad in real live as well but that is not the real funny thing. He sometimes gets "attacked" himself and then bitterly complains about how people are costing him bandwidth from a DOS (yeah a DOS not even a DDOS). A lot of people are for freedom but only if it is them being free, the moment someone else uses freedom against them it is time to get the law involved.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This says you are free to speak. Strictly speaking it does not say you do not have to face consequences of what you say. (Shouting fire in a crowded theather example) It certainly does not say you have the right do speak anonymous. The amendment was clearly not written by lawyers. Not good ones anyway.
Of course it also was written a long time ago when if you wanted to say something you had to either own a press or stand up in front of your audience. The tech to speak from another continent without ever having to show yourselve was unheard perhaps even undreamed of.
This law has a lot of nasty possibilities but as someone who has had to clean to many websites after a visit by a person with the intent to annoy I am torn in two. The majority of me knows this is going to lead to trouble and the other part of me has a list of IP's in his firewall that he would loved to have traced by the feds and their users put in a wooden chair with leather straps and a link to another kind of net.
Should at least make for some intresting bash.org posts when someone convinces an annoying kid they are about to be arrested for talking in caps.
The author seems to have some idea in his head about how all games have buttons you press to do something. Except he can't seem to get it across what is A bad about this B what the alternative is.
Somehow the new revolution controllers is apparently different except that you still press buttons. Oh but now you can move the entire controller to the side instead of a analog stick and you will move. Eh, yeah so what? It is just an analog stick that requires more muscles to use.
Game controller, device for controlling the action represented on the screen. The revolution just used positioning where others have used joysticks. In fact the idea of moving the controller itself is nothing new. Check 3D helmets. There was a joystick that was just a stick that worked with tilt detection.
As for the whole, Oh my god 12 buttons I am so confused, bit. Geez come on. Realize one simple thing. There will always be people confused by everything. Designing something to be fool proof is never going to work because there will always be a greater fool and you will piss of the people with a working brain cell.
Will the revolution controller work? Well as the article hints at it is at least going to be a problem. Cross ports are not going to work without additional hardware. Play game X for 49.95 in High Def on the PS3 or in low res for 49.95 + 99.95 for the controller add-on on the revolution. MMmm.
I am not saying that the revolution will fail. As a hardcore PC gamer/Handheld Gamer I only recently discovered playing with a gamepad on Broken Sword 3 and Onimusha3 (French guy and ninja slay demons across time) and it was amazing how different it plays then with a keyboard mouse setup. You can sit back in your chair and while I missed some of the control I have with PC controls it was defintly intresting.
The revolution might be similar. It is however not going to succeed just on the controller. Nobody bought the DS because it has two screens but because it has some really fun games. Will nintendo be able to do on a big console what they did with the handhelds?
Frankly I think Nintendo will have one big problem. If they sell their games for the same price as PS3/360 games people are going to judge it on its lack of HD. To cheap however and people will think it is crap. It will have a real struggle being seen as selling fun games that do not look as good but are more fun to play without people thinking simple/fun should mean costing less.
The biggest problem I seen when people looking at the DS? They compare the prices for the games with the PSP games and find them to expensive. You can tell them Advance Wars is brilliant but all people see is cartoony graphics and ask how come this costs the same as that full 3D PSP game. To be fair how do you explain that GTA Liberty City costs the same?
2006 will be an intresting year no doubt but I think Nintendo has a lot of work to do. You can complain all you want about same old games using same old controls but it sells.
The only bad thing about it is that the PS3 is getting nearer. As the campaign for it ramps up some people not yet lucky enough to get a 360 might decide to wait to see what the PS3 will be like.
This about lack of production capacity, not lack of demand. The moment 360 consoles start to be easily available in stores then we can start judging on how good the launch has been. It is kinda odd that MS is having so much trouble with production but then MS not getting production right is nothing new. It is a new business for them after all. Sony has assembled hardware all its live. If Sony is going to get it wrong as well then it will be news.
If somebody asks you to code something (and you can get away with it) tell them this, "okay that is X hours for just the code and X*3 for the code and proper documentation."
Yes I made the *3 up. You know why? Because I have always had the misfortune on working on the kinds of projects where I either didn't get the time needed or the guy before me didn't do the documentation.
If you want to take a ride in your car you should walk around it making sure it is in proper working order like all the lights working. It is a law and enforced by people with guns. Now how many of you do it?
Okay, nobody. So now you are under time pressure, you are underpayed and overworked and you got a choice, either deliver on time or tell your boss your still writing documentation on the installer.
When I was still young and fresh I thought that following procedures is the way to do it. Boy was I wrong. The secret? Code fast and ugly and make sure you have moved on before the shit hits the fan. Oh and never ever be lumbered with a maintenance project. I never even seen documentation wich was up-to-date.
The entire discussion on wether or not to document is wrong. The discussion should be wether you will allot enough time to non-coding work. It applies to so many things, peer review of code, sharing and re-use of selfmade libraries, layout standards, knowledge sharing, etc etc.
The larger the company the more time can successfully be spend on non-coding things that however are always badly reviewed during your evalutation. Oh yeah very nice you tought everyone else how to code securely and made sure nobody else has bugs in their code. Now how many lines did you write? Oh, no pay rise for you.
So simply ask this of the people in favor of proper documentation. How will they find the time?
And ask the non documentation people if they will do the maintenance on their own projects 10 years in to the future.
My experience? I needly predict I need X to write code and then Y to write the proper documentation. I deliver the code and get the next project and if I protest that I am still working on the documentation then I am told that it can wait. I am still waiting. Oh and the risk of doing it properly? You get lumbered with writing maintenance and writing the documentation for everyone else because your good at it but a slow coder. ARGH!
Just comment the basics, point out in a readme.txt where to start reading and tell them wich bar in the neighbourhood serves hard liquor during lunch. Oh and if you comment some code out come back later and delete it. Can be very confusing if you have to wade through a problem where 2/3's is old code.
Because that is what the article is about. INSTALLING windows on a clean machine. I bet you a months salery that a user installing windows on my P4 machine will have a lot more trouble then say Suse or Mandrake (or whatever it is called now).
Even the newbie users can make sense out of Windows text only early installation part he is going to be fucked pretty soon. No not because his new windows XP install will get infected before he can patch. In fact he will very safe indeed. You see my gigabyte network card does NOT have a driver in Windows XP. You gotta download it. How do you download a driver if you got no network driver?
Linux of course comes with the driver in the kernel.
As for actually using the desktop, well considering how many times I am asked to fix peoples windows computers I would say that not that many users can do it.
But frankly I don't care that much. As long as I am free to choose my OS you are free to choose yours. Mess with my choice however and your machine will be owned as fast as only a windows machine can be.
Yeah "fakes" can work. In a way the PC your sitting behind right now is a "fake". Unless your a rich bastard sitting behind a IBM or Apple machine.
This article is however not about those kind of fakes. It is where the buyer presumes he is buying the real deal often for the real price. That is not good.
Same with software, you can hold a lengthy argument about software piracy but when I pay full price for a software package I would expect to get a real offical copy.
By all means, make cheap memory or hd or mp3 players but don't try to pass it of as a superior product and charge the same money.
I don't know if it is the backlight, the uneven coloring, the fact that you can almost but not quite focus on the raster. Perhaps it is just to bright. Or maybe I am just getting old and should no longer spend hours staring at a glow tube. Eh glow panel.
But how much? Did we eat each other daily? Weekly? On special holidays? It can't have been to common anyway. If you eat more of a food source then is grown your run out. or put another way. Even if you farmed humans you would be hard put to serve baby more then once per year. Presuming of course that factory farming is really a recent invention.
Anyway wasn't cannabilism more ritual then food source? Eat the X of a vanguished enemy to gain his X. God forbid to think what the chinese would serve after the battle.
Oh well whatever the truth just don't accept an invitation to the donner party. Or board an airplane with an Uruguayan rugby team. Well unless you are feeling peckish.
Even the revolution is getting more storage to support Nintendo's internet shop of old games. Wich I think proves that Nintendo has taken note from x-box live that a networked console can be a good thing.
It will be intresting to see what is going to happen with MMO games. They all seem to require a HD and Sony's biggest MMO's are PC only because of Memory limits on the current consoles.
MMO games have huge draw for game companies. Impossible to pirate and continued income. Blizzards accountant must be having a constant hardon. 4 million subscribers or so? that is 60 million dollars coming in each and every months. Most game companies would drool at reaching that in just single sales. Blizzard gets it each month. Why do you think Sony did a nutter with Star Wars Galaxies (and also dumbed down EQ2)?
Oh and you can play an awfull lot of cheap games on a cheaper PC. Remember that shocking article that said there are more female gamers then male in certain age groups? Well they don't play games requiring a SLI setup costing an arm and leg. They play "simpler" flash games on old Dells.
I just don't think it is good for the gaming industry to seperate the PC from other consoles. Yes it is more expensive but if we judge on price how on earth can you compare the PSP with the DS (PSP 2x more expensive).
Especially since so many games nowadays are cross platform INCLUDING the PC.
Oh and as for the common hardware, don't forget that both the PS3 and 360 are available in 2 versions. With and without HD. Oh and the original x-box? Live and not-live versions. Want to play game X? Upgrade hardware. Sure nowhere near the level of a pc (or the cost) but still, not exactly as simple as it used to be.
And one nice thing about laptops is that they come with widescreen pre-installed. All of sudden that 30gb drive doesn't look all that big.
It has always been the problem with solid state memory. The moment they increase the storage by 2 HD companies increase by ten and half the price.
Sure HD's are vulnerable, they may even suck your battery dry faster then an Itanium BUT they make up for it by being bloody big.
or to answer the question in the post. When did you last tap out a drive? Yesterday and I bought 2 sata drives each 320gb. Granted in part to retire an old Promise raid (yeah yeah I know, stupid) so I can finally upgrade my linux server to 2.6 but also because I maxed out all my disks.
Granted I wouldn't use a laptop as a fileserver BUT I am not going to accept a laptop with less storage then my bloody iPod. Not unless there are some very real advantages and multiple of them.
Far cheaper, far less power consumption, an awfull lot faster. I need at least 2 to make up for a huge loss in data storage. Oh and it better not be like flash wich craps out after using it to much. Geez learned that the hardway when I used my flash mp3 player as a backup solution.
Some crazy fin writes an OS and I get a cheap desktop that doesn't blue screen and actually performs a lot better then certain commercial OS'es and does not costs me a sackfull of money to get the latest bugfixes.
The Internet has made a huge impact on the way the world works. No not because of internet shopping but in that communities can be build with a far larger catching area. It doesn't matter how obscure your interest are, with the global internet their are bound to be other weirdos out there who are intrested in the same things as you.
As someone who actually had an interest in anime/manga before the internet (yeah I am old so what?) I am still at times amazed by the huge change the internet has made. Previously you had to really seek out a club that probably had only 1-2 members per province and would have real trouble getting their message out. With the internet I can google and find hundreds of sites specializing in every type of manga/anime.
It would probably be quit hard to find enough people in your own town to build an OS. In fact linux shows this. Not that many other fins involved but because of the internet it doesn't matter. Weirdos allover can easily find each other.
So a knoppix live cd made by persons from all over the globe can be easily found by anyone else on the planet. Same with firewall on a floppy distro's. Just check distrowatch to see how many tiny little 1 man distro's there are that nevertheless manage to reach a global audience.
MS must really be getting desperate if now they are even trying to spread fud about the capacity for Linux to run on cheap hardware.
Linux is made by people for people. It does not have to be succesfull, it does not have to be worth it. There are countless people out there who are happy to spend all their free time producing special versions of Linux and give away their work for free.
This allows for Linux distro's to be easily available in the most obscure languages possible since all it requires is one(1) person with a passion and there is no need for a cost benefit study.
Linux runs on X because. Not because anything just because. Windows CE only runs on X when someone decides it is worth their time and effort and money.
Yes some companies have decided that they want to try making money from Linux. Good luck to them and they add valuable extra's to the effort but they are not Linux. They are a small subset of the global effort. Not a coordinated effort. Just hundreds of thousands of people who want software to do what they want and screw it being complex. That is part of the enjoyment. You don't think someone modding a GBA to run as a webserver has anyother motive then "Because"?
Linux is people who grow their own food, Linux is people that take 20 years to build their own plane, Linux is people who climb up a mountain nobody cares about, Linux is all these efforts being able to benefit all the others. Or not. because it don't matter. If all the effort to put Linux on PPC never ever generates a single bit of usefull code it don't matter because Linux does not ever have to make a profit to survive.
Even if Linux died, so what? Linux ain't Linux, Linux is an idea and BSD or god forbid Hurd could easily take over. because Linux is not new. It is in fact ancient. Linux is civilisation. Each generation building on the achievements of their elders and sharing their knowledge with the next generation.
The idea that you keep new ideas locked up is not how mankind has progressed.
I do not have to figure out how to pump water or filter it or store it or even figure out that I need it to survive. Others have done it before me and shared it with the world at large. I do not have to figure out h
It also stood a chance of actually happening unlike some stuff like the phantom and other console vaporware wich never had the kinda backing needed to take on Sony.
MS took some intresting decisions. It used existing hardware with minor modifications to simplify and speed up development wich in theory should have made it cheaper but in the end made it a more limited machine with a lot of security flaws (from MS viewpoint) meaning it was hacked to hell and back.
The PS2 continues to be pushed to new heights, the X-box is maxed out. It is kinda sad when a system over 1.5 years older (ps2 early 2000, x-box late 2001) continues to be as powerfull as your new release.
Nonetheless the new kid on the block powered some chances. Despite the fact that none of the current generation seem to include a HD by default it seems that it is going to be an almost essential add-on. Live for better or worse was also a sorta wakeup call especially for Nintendo.
All of the console industry seems to have decided that Japan is THE market. If you don't sell there then you are a failure. It is an odd way to decide a failure because it seems to ignore that if company A sells extremely well in area A then company B is simply going to have less chance since many people do not want 2 consoles. In economic size europe (or everybit of the world that is not japan or north america) is bigger but ofcourse also more expensive to produce for (language barriers, lots of different laws (Sony was "forced" to exchange every PSP even with 1 subpixel error in Holland for instance, something they refused to do in the rest of the world)).
The X-box did okay in america and europe and was considered a failure in Japan. Sales figures are hard to trust but most people seem to have decided that sales wise Sony took the absolute lead with MS and Nintendo fighting for 2nd and 3rd place with Nintendo perhaps being the only one to make a clear profit on their console/software.
The 360 is the first of the new generation wich already shows you one intresting oddity about the console market. The PSP/DS are not counted as consoles. They cost as much as a console PSP is more expensive then a PS2 and the DS is more expensive then a Gamecube and the games retail at the same price as the bigger consoles. Nintendo has certainly proven that you can survive on just handheld sales.
But nevermind, this is game country were normal business rules do not apply. The 360 is in almost every aspect the X-box V2. Although its internal hardware is not a off the shelf as the PC like original it is neither as specialist as the PS3. The exact same thing is happening with the PS3 being claimed to be a bitch to develop for and the 360 being easier. Since we already know the PS2 turned out to haven hidden powers and the x-box was quickly maxed it will be intresting to see what happens this time. Will the 360 continue to get better games, will the PS3 be underused at launch?
What is different is that for the first time in history Europe got a launch before Japan. This might be seen as a snub to the japanese or could be due to the fact that certain european countries like for instance holland have their gift holiday earlier in the month of december (the 5th to be precise) and that japan does not have as strong a tradition of giving expensive presents in december. (or so I am told)
Nonetheless it seems the 360 is yet again not exactly setting Japan alight. The causes could be many but since MS claimed that Japan was an important market they have themselves made it look like the 360 is not the success they hoped for.
In fact even america and europe are not certain yet. Sure they are sold out but so are McClaren F1's. Current sales figures are just to low to decide on success or failure yet. I don't think there is anything artificial about it. Almost every new product has shortages on launch. Just try to buy a new popular car at la
Now I don't want to get all the bloodrayne fans at me but lets be honest here. It was a cheap action game surviving on sex and gore. Not that there is anything wrong with it but compare it to Tomb Raider, Dungeon & Dragons, Doom, Super Mario, Street Fighter it becomes clear that Bloodrayne does not belong in that list.
So I don't know how you could ruin it. Hot girl, in skimpy customes slaughtering men and equally scantily glad females in gory ways with plenty of blood soaked skin. Throw in some stuff about vampires and you should be done. It does not have a strong intelligent lead, it does not have an extremely complex game history, it does not play on mars and have expensive CGI demons, it does not have simple fun gameplay that cannot translate to a script, it does not have a cast of two dozen players who have to be squeezed in.
And yet the reviews all seem to conclude that even this game to movie can be ruined. No I haven't seen it. I am weak and am still recoverning from the last Star Wars Nasty.
But I am thinking that we are all wrong. Uwe Boll is not the next Ed Woods. Ed Wood knew he was a hack and as far as I know all his movies were cheap to make. Uwe Boll must either be a millionaire or he actually does make enough on his movies to fund his next project. The only reason I can see someone invest in a movie produced/directed by a known failure is if it is for tax reasons.
People who says movies and games are coming together are right. Uwe Boll is doing it. Sadly what we hoped would be a loving encounter under moonlight has turned into a rape scene.
Oh well, at least this reinforces my believe that it is okay to pirate movies and steal actors money. People with no morals about appearing in movies like this deserve to starve to death.
So what if some idiots would use this to push mislabelled files. So you get a weird sound file once in a while, this is nothing new happened with napster and that didn't stop it.
Plus there is tiny little difference here. The person pushing the weird file will be closeby. 99.99% of the internet assholes are pussies who would never run the risk of an angry person coming over and pushing their face through a wall.
As for virusses. As long as the software is not written by MS it should be fine. Shouldn't be too hard to write a player that does not suffer from bugger overruns and as far as I know MP3 does not allow system calls to be embedded.
It sounds like a nice idea. I doubt it will take off in all but the hippest places for the same reason that I can rarely find anyone with a PSP or DS or even GBA cabel. Not that many people have this kinda gadget and because nobody has it nobody buys it because nobody has it.
It reminds me of the napster days when you could requests a persons share list. I always checked out what other stuff a person had if I found a rare song I had been looking for. You never know, if you both like the same weird stuff you might like the other stuff he/she has.
The RIAA will do a nutter of course but screw them.
XP was ewh
It offered no real improvement at the time but sadly over time it seemed I was just going to have to upgrade. I didn't want another 95 horror where I had stuck with a DOS gaming machine for so long that the eventual shift to 95 was a horrid upgrade nightmare of catching up with a year and half of bug fixes.
2K3 was just being hacked into being a desktop OS. Someone I knew made a install script that did it all for you and gave you a pretty lean OS that doesn't crash as often as 98se while skipping on the more Fisher Price aspects of XP.
Only problem? A tiny handfull of games seem to insist they don't run on it when they do. Had to learn far more about .msi scripts then I ever wanted to know to hack them and insert the 2k3 string in their accepted OS list.
Pure stupidity. Everyone knows that MS recycles its code endlessly and that with XP they in fact made a deliberate merging of the NT and 9X code bases. Or put another way. There is no real difference between the current windows desktop OS'es. The current wmf shitfest showed that clearly.
Anyway it seems to have been a short trend. I don't remember coming across it recently. Perhaps game companies figured with Vista being just around the corner limiting their game installers is going to cost them a lot of support when people get Vistad when they buy a new machine.
Anyway my solution, make sure that it is not just a stupid install script that has decided your OS is not good enough. You will be suprised how much code can be shared between windows versions.
Not that I would recommend the google pack. It is not a game and that is the only thing windows is good for. All the other apps can be better run on a mac. If you want cutesy handhelding desktop helpers get the OS that was designed for it. Windows = Gaming, Mac = Kiddy desktop, Linux = Nerds, BSD = Necrophiliacs, OS/2 = Doing actual work with your OS instead of messing around wasting the bosses time, Unix = Nerds with money, AS/400 = Nerds with a shitload of money.
Is it me or does google seem to become more and more like yahoo? You know, the portal with everything and the kitchen sink we fled to the clean single purpose google? Perhaps I am alone in wishing they would just improve their search engine to return less crap results and perhaps even ban sites with endless keyword lists. Getting rid of those horrid "game" sites that have a page for every game ever made with 0 content would be a nice start. Next those shop sites wich link to every product with zero info would help.
It is only because there is currently a shift going on from AGP to PCI-Express that he can't just buy the latest vid card and be happy.
Upgrades you can do simply. Adding more HD space. Adding optional extras like a dedicated soundcard or adding a burner. These are expansions though not really upgrade as the original hardware will not change.
Memory is trickier. If you got a free slot adding more is easy enough but I rarely found it economical to ditch the old memory and add new strips. ALWAYS get a new computer with all the memory in as few slots as possible. Memory upgrades make a big difference but are costly when you first go to throw memory away.
CPU upgrade, well no. NEVER. Ever. Unless your really really thight and bought the cheapest CPU possible and can now get the most powerfull of the same make for a cheap price it just ain't worth it. Overclock the succer, save up and when it does a Itanium buy a whole new setup. Primary reason? You will often find that the most powerfull processor in your old hardware will be limited by the rest of the computer.
As for wether you should move to PCI-Express. The same problem existed when we moved from regular PCI to AGP. I would just bite the bullet and get a new machine. Give the old one away or use it as a server (get to know linux?).
Buying a top of the line new vid card with agp hardware is I think not worth it. Either just save up or learn to be happy with your current hardware. I always find that compromised upgrades tend to be more expensive because you need to do them far more often.
Getting a spanking new machine could last you 2-3 years. That new agp vid card at most a year.
Star Trek (the episodes that are not pure action or particle of the week thrillers) does this a couple of times. I am reminded of the color difference episode where we meet two races locked in a fight to the death, the one being black/white and the other being white/black.
TNG had an episode to show how stupid judging people on their sexual preferences is but showing a race that is purely homosexual (a 1 gender species that still used two people to procreate is off course the ultimate same sex race) with the sexual weirdos being those who tended to have heterosexual feelings.
This is indeed the eye of the beholder, it took me a while to figure it out even what the problem was. Apparently blacks are apes.