A security hole on its own has zero value. Take for instance those 1 dollar number locks you can get for your luggage. I can tell you how to break them but big deal. Not because a wire cutter will also work (that would leave evidence that the lock has been broken) but because the attached value is to small.
A security hole would gets its value from the attached object. A how-to on bypassing shed locks is less value then a how-to on bypassing a bank safe.
Next would come how easy it is to exploit the security hole. This one seems to require people to open an excell sheet. This obviously makes it off lesser value then say an exploit that works when a user opens a gif file via IE. Even more valauble would be an exploit that does not require the user to do anything but can attack any computer just hooked up to the net.
Would there be money in it? You bet. Once you got an exploit using it to install a botnet is childsplay and botnets are big business. If you can deliver a 10.000 zombie network there are people willing to pay you hard cash in exchange. Even for just renting it.
However you would hardly do this over e-bay. There are very few legit uses for a botnet and therefore your potential customers would prefer a less public way of trading it.
But it does happen. It is one of the reasons we see so few destructive virusses vs the ones that turn a pc into a zombie. Used to be different. Once the majority of virusses either joked or destroyed your machine. Now you just got a zombie. Do I have proof?
No of course not. Just stories tall tales from the server room and hints that should a company that hosts pay sites wish to do some advertising that they might know ways that do not involve constantly trying to find the next provider willing to be placed on a ban list for spam.
Spam sells, ISP's are unwilling to hosts spammers, so the only question is, will spammers pay for a botnet that can do their spamming. Does the pope shit in the woods?
Doesn't it crack anyone up that germany of all countries has the gall to tell the rest of the world what is right or not? For that matter japan? Yet both want a seat on the security council. Lets see, we have had two world wars both started by the germans. How about eh. NO.
Application denied forever. Comeback in a thousand years and maybe we lets you back.
England? Read up on their empire and it is their politics that led to the whole mess in the middle east with how the formation of Israel was handled, they should have created a palistine at the same time or at least given Israel better borders (the whole golan heights issue is because it gives syria a very easy front to attack from and a very difficult for Israel to defend). Oh and who created the situation between India and Pakistan.
So the axis nations are out. Maybe france? Can you say vietnam? No thanks and that leaves out the US as well. China is out for obvious reasons. Russia? Oh boy no.
Maybe a small country like say my own the netherlands? Nope, indonesia and our other former colonies show that we are just hitlers on a miniature scale and anyway our behaviour during WW2 was appaling.
The belgians? Please they got a goverment so corrupt that it makes the italians look capable.
Australians? Maybe after they do somthing to right the wrong committed against the natives.
It doesn't exactly leave anyone? Sooner or later pretty much every country has done stuff in the last century that shows that if a country/society/ethnic group has a change they will murder rape and slaughter those they think of as less important.
The only reason some countries at the moment behave is because they would get their asses kicked if they didn't. Nazi sympathy in germany is still sky high but the russians would never tolerate them getting in a position of power to the power that be in germany sit on it at the moment but still refuse to deport war criminals or lock them up.
No kiddo, no country can take the moral highground. Wich isn't going to stop anyone of course because rule one of real life. It ain't bad if it is you doing it.
Why those bitcommet users, they just cheat to get content they didn't pay for. HOW DARE THEY, I should call the MPAA/RIAA depending on what you are sharing. The number of private trackers that share legal content can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I mean why would say a linux distro give a fuck who gets their content and at what share ratio? There are probably enough die hard fans to keep the seeds populated without enforcing it with ratios.
Although ofcourse there are legit uses for bittorrent and it is even used by some commercial companies the majority shall we say of content shared via bittorrent does not agree with some peoples interpretations of copyright laws.
Personally I am an anime fan wich means fansubs wich are in a grey area because the japanese companies that own the copyrights in general don't give a toss about smelly gajins. I do however find it ironic(?) that most of the fansub groups put stuff like "XXX is proud to present". I mean WTF? Professional subbers don't claim they produced the program, just the subs and since making translations is a grey area of the law itself (it is not proper law that forbids it, real law has to be judged by a court (wich explains why so many introduced laws are tossed out again by real judges who control the real law not the one made up by politicians) and so far this has not happened to my knowledge).
Private trackers on pirated games is funny. Especially the ones who justify it because else people steal their content without giving back. Hilarious.
I "heat" them by putting them in boiling water for a time but that is just at home. How the hell do you heat a can in a vending machine? For obvious reasons you can't microwave it and getting it warm by induction takes a long time wich would mean the cans are constantly hot wich doesn't sound like it does much for the taste. Ever tried coffee that has been in a hot pot over the weekend? It will wake you up.
I can tell you that some of the stuff they drink in japan is just vile. Not ordinary vile, I mean making people throw vile. I got no taste buds and can stomache just about anything but other people sometimes make the mistake of wanting a taste if I drink some weird can I found in the local tiny china town (more street corner but lets not get technical).
Especially if the drink contains milk it can severely upset dutch stomachs as it is extremely long lasting milk you get in cheap containers that most people just can't drink. "Fresh" milk vs the kind that you can keep outside the fridge for months (mostly because no bugger will drink it).
Of course I can't read the japanese or chinese ingredients so it is always a discovery. As for coffee in a can. Well it just confirms that japanese are weird.
At first I though this while HFCS stuff was just americans using weird words again in their determination to screw the english language but no. What after all is the problem with just using sugar from sugarbeets? The stuff is hardly expensive. In fact if what is being said here is true it forms the same role in europe as it corn does in the US. A hugely subsidised product that companies like coca cola can have virtually for free. EU sugar is even being dumped to 3rd world countries, ruining their local economy, just to get rid of the surplus.
Guess we at least lucked out in the taste department. Also shows that farmers should all be rounded up and shot. EU, US and Japan, farmers are a tiny minority yet seem to control national politics. Weird.
Wich can be raided by police should it suddenly have a new version out denying the holocaust (an offense in much of europe).
A new version takes years to come out and will have a lot of peer review and can be reviewed just once by the rest of the world and then either accepted or rejected. You do not have to keep a constant watch to check if some crackpot is not scribbling new entries in your encyclopedia and if they are you send your kid to bed without diner.
Then again all the safety measures also tend to enforce a certain accepted thinking approach with no room for the more wild theories and ideas. I wonder if a wikipedia article in centuries past on the arrangeent of the heavenly bodies would have been a problem.
After all I seem to conclude that the holocaust is real but how do I know? Only because that is what I have been told. Just like people were once told that the sun circled the earth. For both of wich I got no absolute proof. I don't even have proof WW2 really happened. Oh sure yeah there is a very big war cemetry were I grew up but who says they are real graves?
That is the problem with the "true" version of an event not directly experienced by you. You got to take somebody's word for it and somehow I am not that willing to take the word of someone unwilling to show his/hers full credentials. Wikipedia is usefull but only for totally non-discussable things like say looking up what that the name NASA is an acronym (forgot the word a while ago).
F1 and other motor sports absolutly leaped on the capabilty of modern communication to allow the driver to communicate with the pit crew. At speeds your average street car could only reach by being dropped from a plane.
Then their is motor cycle riding course. How do you communicate with your instructor? Two way radio. This in a vehicle that requires and extra task namely of keeping upright. With the extra handicap that by the difinition of driving instruction that you are not very good at it yet.
Police motor cycle cops also use two way radio to communicate during high speed pursuits.
So basically a lot of people drive and talk at the same time. From trained proffesionals who should know about road safety to the most elite drivers in the world to newbies.
Personally I think it depends on the person. I seen people drive that shouldn't be allowed to even if their eyes were glued to the windscreen and others who can do a myriad of tasks and still be full aware of everything on the road and more important perhaps, the side of the road. If you ever road shotgun on a truck in the innercity you will know how important it is to keep track of kids playing in gardens. Trucks seem to have a magnetic field that pulls everyone in.
Now I tuned my car to the max stripping all the boring bits off like roof, lights etc and powerslide my way around corners at 200 miles per hour (grand prix legends) but do you think that is tolerated? NOooooo. I guess the police here is still pissed they had to give up their porches and take it out on anyone who think the speed limit is meant to be a minimum.
Aeon Flux was not a music video and it was played on MTV. So Aeon Flux was one of the non-music video broadcasts that turned MTV into what it is today. What it is today I leave up to people who actually still watch it. I can't blame MTV for me growing old.
This is a recon device. When you want to know what is around a corner but do not want to stick you head around it. Mirrors work but still require you to be close.
Imagine the following police situation. Shots have been fired in a house and the neighbours call the cops. When they arrive all is silent. So they can just knock on the door but that has the risk of getting a bullet in your chest. Instead of just waiting outside with a full swat team you throw one of these suckers through the window and see what is inside.
If someone starts shooting then you no longer need to see, it is clear what it happening and you can do your stuff. It is basically an upgrade to the mirror that everyone not wanting to get killed in a combat situation has used. Just check WW1 trench equipent. They even had periscopes to avoid having to stick their head where it could be blown off.
For the first month. Maybe two. When you are still new to the world and everything is new and a challenge. When you tame your first bantha, get your first landspeeder, make your first firework.
The first time you go in a group to dathomir and engage a lair of rancors. Well at least if you go in a good group (non buffed to the max group that can solo a rancor lair)
And that last bit is the problem. As you learned the game you found out that in the beginning you were hopelessly crippling yourselve. Your "action" points (health action mind) depleted only because you hadn't bought the proper buffs. Without buffs taking on a bunny could be a challenge. With them you could stand in a circle of enraged giant rancors and kick their but.
But this also ruined the fun. Gone were the carefully prepared expeditions. Do you know that at one point nobody went to dathomir without a medic in the group? When I left EVERYBODY including dancers and musicians were making the dathomir village run (if you don't know don't ask) 2x a day. (oh alright if you must know, to become a jedi you had to trade regular xp you gained by doing your chosen proffesion in the village. a 15 minute drive across dathomir wich turned the most hostile planet into a freaking highway)
Unlike other MMO games there was usually no problem in finding a group. Finding the members of the group was another matter. SWG may be the first MMO game to come up with the concept of the solo group. You see a high level combat character could easily handle the thoughest missions BUT was unable to get them when alone. You had to be in a group of about 5 to get the best missions (payout) so people grouped just to get missions wich they then did on their own. WEIRD.
After a while SOE realized the game was not going well and started changing things. One of them was the addition of dungeons. Not a bad idea in itself except that SOE populated them by enemies wich insane hitpoints and resists. So it became less exploring a carefull crafted story line in a dangerous location and more a constant 5 minute kicking contest. Most people just created a macro to trigger their best attacks and went to make coffee while clearing a room.
Remember those early usermade doom levels? Were every room had a dozen endbosses? Those levels that absolutly sucked? That is SWG "high level" content. Do a corvette mission once with a non maxed out combat character you will be death before you know it.
And that was SWG's biggest failure. It provided nothing in the middle. Once you had gone past the initial learning period it had a big void and then only the high level endgame were you either created a tricked out combat specialist and copied exactly the perfect template or you just didn't have a chance.
Same with crafting, nobody had any use for a mid level crafter. From almost the very beginning if you wanted to make money creating stuff you first had to grind to max level and then recoup your money by selling your high level goods. I tried chef and couldn't even give away my low level stuff.
Strangely enough it wasn't really the combat that was boring. What was boring was that sony decided that high level meant giving just 1 million hitpoints and 100% resists (yes 100% meaning they NEVER took damage) on all but one type of damage and if your proffesion didn't do that kind of damage, then though luck.
This meant that the end fights always became just a matter of having a good buff and then just beating away for 20 minutes. As a tka I even had "fights" were I would engage a night elder wich I couldn't damage but to keep her attention while a rifle specialist attacked her mind pool. Both of us used macro's and we chatted about how much it sucked we didn't get in the WoW beta.
SWG tried a lot but it also failed in a lot of areas. I think that they forgot during the initial design to hire somebody from out side to review it and give an unbiased opinion. There were just to many problems for the game to have a chance of success. What SOE is doing now is fixing symptoms not causes.
MMO's like everquest while having a share of kiddies (or mental retards, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference) are still havens of silent intellect compared to much of the net.
Certainly compared to one MMOFPS Joint Operations by Novalogic. I was an early beta tester and it was fun. Then they opened the beta more and more and wow. The designers had made a mistake. They had spotted the obvious kiddie dream of just gunning down their own team and disabled that. However satchel bomb could be dropped anywhere (including vehicles) and then remotely detonated. So cue endless hours of fun of not so good players running into a helicopter (the slightly better ones waiting to pick up some other players) then take off and blow up. If the explosion did not kill you you died in the fall or had a long long swim ahead of you.
Free gaming lowers the barrier and doing that invites people that will be in the game for no other reasing then to upset other people.
Frankly I sony does it pretty well. Just charge a month and allow people to cancel right away so they are not billed again unless they decide to resubscribe and they can just game for 1 month.
It is how I play now. I usually get tired off a game then cancel it only to come back 2-3 months later to play some more.
As for advertising paying for an MMO, Anarchy Online has shifted to that model. It is not exactly a shining example of success.
Oh and I not some snobbish people hater. I am old enough to remember that ALL fps online games were without password for the server. Then clans added them for their own servers. Then it became common to see more password only servers as a game got older. Now it is rare to see open servers at a games launch.
The Longest Journy, april the star is an a-cup as well.
Star Wars Galaxies lets you roll your own from plump to straight as a board.
Sure sure, that is only 3 and one is ancient BUT it comes to mind because she was in her undies and that was so not appropriate. Anyway.
As also said in the article males are usually protrayed as super buffed machos as well.
What seems most rare is non-thin characters either male or female. The tech guy in F.E.A.R. is the only one that springs to mind.
Super big breasts is I am afraid more or less and american male obsession and if then a stereotype. What about the perfect skinned, perfect weight, perfect hair, perfect clothes that examples that media sets both real females and males eh?
Hollywood is called the dream machine and that is what games are as well. Fantasy. Nobody wants to be an ugly gnome. Watch twins and ask yourselve who you would rather be. Hell even in a hollywood movie the ugly guy got the plain girlfriend while the macho got the blond.
Now I am back to playing my ranger female in Guild Wars, whose B-cup jiggles so nice when she shoots her arrows.
Game reviewers all want "the exclusive" first review and so seem to manage to review a 300+ hour monster RPG like Baldur's Gate in a day. So what does that matter? It is not like car reviewers drive a car for 10 years before giving them their review? Well no.
But car reviewers, the real ones, use science to test things like actuall fuel usage. And crash tests and such. Real car reviews are lengthy articles wich take a lot of time to do but that is okay because cars are a very big industry.
Sure you got the fluffy "reviews" were some airhead did a testdrive but these are not reviews, they are impressions.
Games and Cars are not like movies. Use the word "review" in a different context "I will review your work" and you will see that it implies a certain amount of test. This is not needed for a movie review. You do not need to check if the movie will properly play in the cinema the consumer will visit or wether it won't blow up if the user exists the theather to go take a leak. "Bugs" can be found in movies but they don't really matter if they aren't obvious at first glance. No movie has ever crashed a projector. No movie has ever failed frozen because the user missed a vital clue in the first ten minutes.
So for a movie an impression is good enough. For games it is not.
PC-Gamer even tried to give a indication of how the game would perform on different systems but can you imagine the time this takes? Just installing it on 3 systems for a fair perfomance test can take longer then it takes to watch a movie.
Even if game reviewers had the time to fully test a game most are just to hungup on their own opinion, or impressed with big name people to do a real job. Everyone must surely remember Black & White? Molyneux or what is his name could do no wrong. Even after Dungeon Master. I actually seen reviews of Dungeon Master 2 that said that this was what version 1 should have been. Eh right so why did you give the original a 9.5 score? The guy is an old hat but of late his games have been lacking. But writing that in your review does not seem to be done.
For me the point where I stopped buying game mags was when I read a review for two soldier sims, Operation Flashpoint and one of the bigger names. OF was not liked because it had a rather akward interface and a bad save system. Instead the other sim was raved about because of its "real" tactics and weapons. Except that what is the point of having a "real" sniper rifle that can kill at 2km range if the maps can't be bigger then a few hundred meters. Compared to OFP gigantic mission areas it seemed clear to me that the reviewer was talking crap and mistaking openaired doom for a soldier sim.
Of course that was just my opinion against the reviewers but the point is that the way the review was written it was clear the reviewer was only looking at the surface, not the true depth of the game. He had not played the games at any length.
So when a game like "The Longest Journey" gets high review scores but totally bombs at launch it is because like me many gamers don't believe reviews. Instead TLJ went on to become a sleeper making its money as word spread amongst gamers that it was good.
With the internet word of mouth spreads at the speed of light across continents. Who needs reviews?
We know that reviewers are either corrupt or stupid. I use review sites more as a release schedule then anything else.
By definition EVERY direction FROM the north pole is south. If you stand ON the north pole and walk in any direction your compass will show that you are heading south the northpole at your back.
DRM crippled CD's have with us for a number of years now. Granted the actual music company that tries it changes but it seems clear none of them have simply accepted that DRM is only damaging them.
They keep hoping that this time the consumers will be ready for it. Someday, they will be right.
The PSP is a very different product from the DS. About the only thing they share is their insane size. For its tiny screen the DS sure is a big clunk compared to the gba.
However the PSP also can display movies(if you don't mind that the lcd is not exactly super responsive), and do such things as play music.
But more important the games are totally different. Lots of action racers for the PSP with exactly 1 puzzle game (in dutch stores) while the DS has mostly "cute" games with relative slow pace. Personally the moment Animal Crossing hits the stores here I will be a gadget whore with a PSP, video iPod and DS.
Don't discount nintendo, right ehm but don't discount sony either. Nintendo did on the console market and paid for it big time when sony came from nowhere with the PS1 and stole Nintendo's thunder and then repeated it with the PS2. So far it is 2 - 0 and an undecided (PSP vs DS) in the Sony vs Nintendo competion with the outsider MS lurking in the shadows.
As for the revolution. Well I am perhaps a bit too old but I realize that I am still using the same old interfaces for my gaming that I used 10+ yrs ago. Still find it sad that one of the best games I played, System Shock, had a whole bit in the readme.txt about virtual reality helmets being supported. Not that I ever actually ever seen one in real live.
I seen control gloves, I seen special keyboards, voice control all being touted as being the next big thing and it has come to naught. There was even a special joystick that could be wielded like a sword.
From Doom to Doom3 I still use the same exact key layout. Mouse+wasd+1-10 keys still hasn't been beat.
Consoles is about games. More importantly it is about getting those "must have" titles that sell your console. Once your console is bought selling b-class titles is easier but getting people to cough up the initial console cost + game title that is the big challenge. Why do you think consoles are so often bundled?
The 360 verdict so far is that sure it has the prettiest pictures of the consoles although compared to a PC (yeah a top of the line pc costing x times more but don't forget, the 360 will have to compete for a number of years unable to improve while pc's will be undergoing some mayor upgrades in the form of dual cores and 64 bit computing) but that the games are a severe case of meh.
Personally my money is on the PS3, why? Because Nintendo tried the casual gamer with the gamecube and bombed. Yeah it was cheap, yeah it was a lot more "friendly" looking, yeah it had the "inovative" capabitly to hook up your gba for extra gameplay and yeah it didn't sell. So why are they again going for the same strategy And why do you think this time it will work?
From my own limited experience the lack of empathy can lead to causing harm to others BUT not in an intentional way. Even if they may not understand that other people can feel pain they do not go out of their way to cause pain either. An autist is not "evil" and can almost by definition never be a sadist.
A sadist perhaps is a person who has reversed empathy, he/she gets off on the pain of others. An autist doesn't "get" that others can feel pain so would have no motivation to cause harm.
I am not exactly a privacy freak, I am generally on the side of such things as surveilance camera's in risk zones or black boxes in cars. But this has nothing to do with safety. It is just noziness (or however you spell it). Companies and people butting into my private life. It is none of you business what I am doing at my PC right now no matter how general. The article has been updated to show you can in fact adjust the setting but this better include a setting that NO-ONE not microsoft not my friends, NOBODY can know what I do with my system and when.
Imagine if your car phoned home telling everyone who wanted to know when your driving and when not, would that be acceptable? So why do all the MS apologist accept this here?
No this is privacy invasion with no re-deeming function. If I want to tell other people what I am doing I will bloody well tell them.
This would be like an answering machine that told people I am in the shower, or on the toilet or whatever. NONE OF YOU FREAKING BUSINESS, if I am not online to tell you what I am doing (or answer the phone) then I don't want you to know.
Oh well, guess some people have different ideas about privacy.
It sure is handy even if it leads to me currently having an embarrising amount of tabs.
It is a live saver however because the one thing that killed windows/IE for me years ago was that just as you found the site with the real free porn, eh I mean real usefull bit of info IE or windows or both crashed forcing you to start searching from the start again.
Opera on Linux went through a bit of problems at first but the crashes didn't matter, just restart and continue were you left off.
If only MS had at any point in its history realized that people are not upset about crashes, they are upset about lost work, they would not now be..... eh top IT company with a strangle hold on the desktop, office software and internet browser market......
It says best product, NOT best selling product. If you ever worked with OS/2 (read lucky to have the right expensive hardware) then you would have found it a good product for business uses. Certainly an awfull lot better then the crashfest that was windows 95 let alone Windows NT 4.0 desktop.
No OS/2 was the typical case where MS somehow manages to sell the entire wold on an inferior product. Don't ask me how they manage it time and time again, if I knew I would have Bill Gates billions in stead of Bill.
Same can really be said about Firefox, although I prefer Opera (it is pure tabbed browsing and doesn't constantly forget that and open new windows instead except for help screens), good product but loosing in market share to the totally inferior IE.
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A security hole would gets its value from the attached object. A how-to on bypassing shed locks is less value then a how-to on bypassing a bank safe.
Next would come how easy it is to exploit the security hole. This one seems to require people to open an excell sheet. This obviously makes it off lesser value then say an exploit that works when a user opens a gif file via IE. Even more valauble would be an exploit that does not require the user to do anything but can attack any computer just hooked up to the net.
Would there be money in it? You bet. Once you got an exploit using it to install a botnet is childsplay and botnets are big business. If you can deliver a 10.000 zombie network there are people willing to pay you hard cash in exchange. Even for just renting it.
However you would hardly do this over e-bay. There are very few legit uses for a botnet and therefore your potential customers would prefer a less public way of trading it.
But it does happen. It is one of the reasons we see so few destructive virusses vs the ones that turn a pc into a zombie. Used to be different. Once the majority of virusses either joked or destroyed your machine. Now you just got a zombie. Do I have proof?
No of course not. Just stories tall tales from the server room and hints that should a company that hosts pay sites wish to do some advertising that they might know ways that do not involve constantly trying to find the next provider willing to be placed on a ban list for spam.
Spam sells, ISP's are unwilling to hosts spammers, so the only question is, will spammers pay for a botnet that can do their spamming. Does the pope shit in the woods?
Application denied forever. Comeback in a thousand years and maybe we lets you back.
England? Read up on their empire and it is their politics that led to the whole mess in the middle east with how the formation of Israel was handled, they should have created a palistine at the same time or at least given Israel better borders (the whole golan heights issue is because it gives syria a very easy front to attack from and a very difficult for Israel to defend). Oh and who created the situation between India and Pakistan.
So the axis nations are out. Maybe france? Can you say vietnam? No thanks and that leaves out the US as well. China is out for obvious reasons. Russia? Oh boy no.
Maybe a small country like say my own the netherlands? Nope, indonesia and our other former colonies show that we are just hitlers on a miniature scale and anyway our behaviour during WW2 was appaling.
The belgians? Please they got a goverment so corrupt that it makes the italians look capable.
Australians? Maybe after they do somthing to right the wrong committed against the natives.
It doesn't exactly leave anyone? Sooner or later pretty much every country has done stuff in the last century that shows that if a country/society/ethnic group has a change they will murder rape and slaughter those they think of as less important.
The only reason some countries at the moment behave is because they would get their asses kicked if they didn't. Nazi sympathy in germany is still sky high but the russians would never tolerate them getting in a position of power to the power that be in germany sit on it at the moment but still refuse to deport war criminals or lock them up.
No kiddo, no country can take the moral highground. Wich isn't going to stop anyone of course because rule one of real life. It ain't bad if it is you doing it.
Why those bitcommet users, they just cheat to get content they didn't pay for. HOW DARE THEY, I should call the MPAA/RIAA depending on what you are sharing. The number of private trackers that share legal content can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I mean why would say a linux distro give a fuck who gets their content and at what share ratio? There are probably enough die hard fans to keep the seeds populated without enforcing it with ratios.
Personally I am an anime fan wich means fansubs wich are in a grey area because the japanese companies that own the copyrights in general don't give a toss about smelly gajins. I do however find it ironic(?) that most of the fansub groups put stuff like "XXX is proud to present". I mean WTF? Professional subbers don't claim they produced the program, just the subs and since making translations is a grey area of the law itself (it is not proper law that forbids it, real law has to be judged by a court (wich explains why so many introduced laws are tossed out again by real judges who control the real law not the one made up by politicians) and so far this has not happened to my knowledge).
Private trackers on pirated games is funny. Especially the ones who justify it because else people steal their content without giving back. Hilarious.
I "heat" them by putting them in boiling water for a time but that is just at home. How the hell do you heat a can in a vending machine? For obvious reasons you can't microwave it and getting it warm by induction takes a long time wich would mean the cans are constantly hot wich doesn't sound like it does much for the taste. Ever tried coffee that has been in a hot pot over the weekend? It will wake you up.
Especially if the drink contains milk it can severely upset dutch stomachs as it is extremely long lasting milk you get in cheap containers that most people just can't drink. "Fresh" milk vs the kind that you can keep outside the fridge for months (mostly because no bugger will drink it).
Of course I can't read the japanese or chinese ingredients so it is always a discovery. As for coffee in a can. Well it just confirms that japanese are weird.
Guess we at least lucked out in the taste department. Also shows that farmers should all be rounded up and shot. EU, US and Japan, farmers are a tiny minority yet seem to control national politics. Weird.
A new version takes years to come out and will have a lot of peer review and can be reviewed just once by the rest of the world and then either accepted or rejected. You do not have to keep a constant watch to check if some crackpot is not scribbling new entries in your encyclopedia and if they are you send your kid to bed without diner.
Then again all the safety measures also tend to enforce a certain accepted thinking approach with no room for the more wild theories and ideas. I wonder if a wikipedia article in centuries past on the arrangeent of the heavenly bodies would have been a problem.
After all I seem to conclude that the holocaust is real but how do I know? Only because that is what I have been told. Just like people were once told that the sun circled the earth. For both of wich I got no absolute proof. I don't even have proof WW2 really happened. Oh sure yeah there is a very big war cemetry were I grew up but who says they are real graves?
That is the problem with the "true" version of an event not directly experienced by you. You got to take somebody's word for it and somehow I am not that willing to take the word of someone unwilling to show his/hers full credentials. Wikipedia is usefull but only for totally non-discussable things like say looking up what that the name NASA is an acronym (forgot the word a while ago).
Then their is motor cycle riding course. How do you communicate with your instructor? Two way radio. This in a vehicle that requires and extra task namely of keeping upright. With the extra handicap that by the difinition of driving instruction that you are not very good at it yet.
Police motor cycle cops also use two way radio to communicate during high speed pursuits.
So basically a lot of people drive and talk at the same time. From trained proffesionals who should know about road safety to the most elite drivers in the world to newbies.
Personally I think it depends on the person. I seen people drive that shouldn't be allowed to even if their eyes were glued to the windscreen and others who can do a myriad of tasks and still be full aware of everything on the road and more important perhaps, the side of the road. If you ever road shotgun on a truck in the innercity you will know how important it is to keep track of kids playing in gardens. Trucks seem to have a magnetic field that pulls everyone in.
Now I tuned my car to the max stripping all the boring bits off like roof, lights etc and powerslide my way around corners at 200 miles per hour (grand prix legends) but do you think that is tolerated? NOooooo. I guess the police here is still pissed they had to give up their porches and take it out on anyone who think the speed limit is meant to be a minimum.
Aeon Flux was not a music video and it was played on MTV. So Aeon Flux was one of the non-music video broadcasts that turned MTV into what it is today. What it is today I leave up to people who actually still watch it. I can't blame MTV for me growing old.
Imagine the following police situation. Shots have been fired in a house and the neighbours call the cops. When they arrive all is silent. So they can just knock on the door but that has the risk of getting a bullet in your chest. Instead of just waiting outside with a full swat team you throw one of these suckers through the window and see what is inside.
If someone starts shooting then you no longer need to see, it is clear what it happening and you can do your stuff. It is basically an upgrade to the mirror that everyone not wanting to get killed in a combat situation has used. Just check WW1 trench equipent. They even had periscopes to avoid having to stick their head where it could be blown off.
The first time you go in a group to dathomir and engage a lair of rancors. Well at least if you go in a good group (non buffed to the max group that can solo a rancor lair)
And that last bit is the problem. As you learned the game you found out that in the beginning you were hopelessly crippling yourselve. Your "action" points (health action mind) depleted only because you hadn't bought the proper buffs. Without buffs taking on a bunny could be a challenge. With them you could stand in a circle of enraged giant rancors and kick their but.
But this also ruined the fun. Gone were the carefully prepared expeditions. Do you know that at one point nobody went to dathomir without a medic in the group? When I left EVERYBODY including dancers and musicians were making the dathomir village run (if you don't know don't ask) 2x a day. (oh alright if you must know, to become a jedi you had to trade regular xp you gained by doing your chosen proffesion in the village. a 15 minute drive across dathomir wich turned the most hostile planet into a freaking highway)
Unlike other MMO games there was usually no problem in finding a group. Finding the members of the group was another matter. SWG may be the first MMO game to come up with the concept of the solo group. You see a high level combat character could easily handle the thoughest missions BUT was unable to get them when alone. You had to be in a group of about 5 to get the best missions (payout) so people grouped just to get missions wich they then did on their own. WEIRD.
After a while SOE realized the game was not going well and started changing things. One of them was the addition of dungeons. Not a bad idea in itself except that SOE populated them by enemies wich insane hitpoints and resists. So it became less exploring a carefull crafted story line in a dangerous location and more a constant 5 minute kicking contest. Most people just created a macro to trigger their best attacks and went to make coffee while clearing a room.
Remember those early usermade doom levels? Were every room had a dozen endbosses? Those levels that absolutly sucked? That is SWG "high level" content. Do a corvette mission once with a non maxed out combat character you will be death before you know it.
And that was SWG's biggest failure. It provided nothing in the middle. Once you had gone past the initial learning period it had a big void and then only the high level endgame were you either created a tricked out combat specialist and copied exactly the perfect template or you just didn't have a chance.
Same with crafting, nobody had any use for a mid level crafter. From almost the very beginning if you wanted to make money creating stuff you first had to grind to max level and then recoup your money by selling your high level goods. I tried chef and couldn't even give away my low level stuff.
Strangely enough it wasn't really the combat that was boring. What was boring was that sony decided that high level meant giving just 1 million hitpoints and 100% resists (yes 100% meaning they NEVER took damage) on all but one type of damage and if your proffesion didn't do that kind of damage, then though luck.
This meant that the end fights always became just a matter of having a good buff and then just beating away for 20 minutes. As a tka I even had "fights" were I would engage a night elder wich I couldn't damage but to keep her attention while a rifle specialist attacked her mind pool. Both of us used macro's and we chatted about how much it sucked we didn't get in the WoW beta.
SWG tried a lot but it also failed in a lot of areas. I think that they forgot during the initial design to hire somebody from out side to review it and give an unbiased opinion. There were just to many problems for the game to have a chance of success. What SOE is doing now is fixing symptoms not causes.
But yeah the study does kind of suck. Could it be possible the hamster is depressed about constantly being dropped in a bucket? Would depress me.
MMO's like everquest while having a share of kiddies (or mental retards, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference) are still havens of silent intellect compared to much of the net.
Certainly compared to one MMOFPS Joint Operations by Novalogic. I was an early beta tester and it was fun. Then they opened the beta more and more and wow. The designers had made a mistake. They had spotted the obvious kiddie dream of just gunning down their own team and disabled that. However satchel bomb could be dropped anywhere (including vehicles) and then remotely detonated. So cue endless hours of fun of not so good players running into a helicopter (the slightly better ones waiting to pick up some other players) then take off and blow up. If the explosion did not kill you you died in the fall or had a long long swim ahead of you.
Free gaming lowers the barrier and doing that invites people that will be in the game for no other reasing then to upset other people.
Frankly I sony does it pretty well. Just charge a month and allow people to cancel right away so they are not billed again unless they decide to resubscribe and they can just game for 1 month.
It is how I play now. I usually get tired off a game then cancel it only to come back 2-3 months later to play some more.
As for advertising paying for an MMO, Anarchy Online has shifted to that model. It is not exactly a shining example of success.
Oh and I not some snobbish people hater. I am old enough to remember that ALL fps online games were without password for the server. Then clans added them for their own servers. Then it became common to see more password only servers as a game got older. Now it is rare to see open servers at a games launch.
Guild Wars, necromancer an a-cup.
The Longest Journy, april the star is an a-cup as well.
Star Wars Galaxies lets you roll your own from plump to straight as a board.
Sure sure, that is only 3 and one is ancient BUT it comes to mind because she was in her undies and that was so not appropriate. Anyway.
As also said in the article males are usually protrayed as super buffed machos as well.
What seems most rare is non-thin characters either male or female. The tech guy in F.E.A.R. is the only one that springs to mind.
Super big breasts is I am afraid more or less and american male obsession and if then a stereotype. What about the perfect skinned, perfect weight, perfect hair, perfect clothes that examples that media sets both real females and males eh?
Hollywood is called the dream machine and that is what games are as well. Fantasy. Nobody wants to be an ugly gnome. Watch twins and ask yourselve who you would rather be. Hell even in a hollywood movie the ugly guy got the plain girlfriend while the macho got the blond.
Now I am back to playing my ranger female in Guild Wars, whose B-cup jiggles so nice when she shoots her arrows.
Game reviewers all want "the exclusive" first review and so seem to manage to review a 300+ hour monster RPG like Baldur's Gate in a day. So what does that matter? It is not like car reviewers drive a car for 10 years before giving them their review? Well no.
But car reviewers, the real ones, use science to test things like actuall fuel usage. And crash tests and such. Real car reviews are lengthy articles wich take a lot of time to do but that is okay because cars are a very big industry.
Sure you got the fluffy "reviews" were some airhead did a testdrive but these are not reviews, they are impressions.
Games and Cars are not like movies. Use the word "review" in a different context "I will review your work" and you will see that it implies a certain amount of test. This is not needed for a movie review. You do not need to check if the movie will properly play in the cinema the consumer will visit or wether it won't blow up if the user exists the theather to go take a leak. "Bugs" can be found in movies but they don't really matter if they aren't obvious at first glance. No movie has ever crashed a projector. No movie has ever failed frozen because the user missed a vital clue in the first ten minutes.
So for a movie an impression is good enough. For games it is not.
PC-Gamer even tried to give a indication of how the game would perform on different systems but can you imagine the time this takes? Just installing it on 3 systems for a fair perfomance test can take longer then it takes to watch a movie.
Even if game reviewers had the time to fully test a game most are just to hungup on their own opinion, or impressed with big name people to do a real job. Everyone must surely remember Black & White? Molyneux or what is his name could do no wrong. Even after Dungeon Master. I actually seen reviews of Dungeon Master 2 that said that this was what version 1 should have been. Eh right so why did you give the original a 9.5 score? The guy is an old hat but of late his games have been lacking. But writing that in your review does not seem to be done.
For me the point where I stopped buying game mags was when I read a review for two soldier sims, Operation Flashpoint and one of the bigger names. OF was not liked because it had a rather akward interface and a bad save system. Instead the other sim was raved about because of its "real" tactics and weapons. Except that what is the point of having a "real" sniper rifle that can kill at 2km range if the maps can't be bigger then a few hundred meters. Compared to OFP gigantic mission areas it seemed clear to me that the reviewer was talking crap and mistaking openaired doom for a soldier sim.
Of course that was just my opinion against the reviewers but the point is that the way the review was written it was clear the reviewer was only looking at the surface, not the true depth of the game. He had not played the games at any length.
So when a game like "The Longest Journey" gets high review scores but totally bombs at launch it is because like me many gamers don't believe reviews. Instead TLJ went on to become a sleeper making its money as word spread amongst gamers that it was good.
With the internet word of mouth spreads at the speed of light across continents. Who needs reviews?
We know that reviewers are either corrupt or stupid. I use review sites more as a release schedule then anything else.
By definition EVERY direction FROM the north pole is south. If you stand ON the north pole and walk in any direction your compass will show that you are heading south the northpole at your back.
ten-foot pole. Thank you.
They keep hoping that this time the consumers will be ready for it. Someday, they will be right.
However the PSP also can display movies(if you don't mind that the lcd is not exactly super responsive), and do such things as play music.
But more important the games are totally different. Lots of action racers for the PSP with exactly 1 puzzle game (in dutch stores) while the DS has mostly "cute" games with relative slow pace. Personally the moment Animal Crossing hits the stores here I will be a gadget whore with a PSP, video iPod and DS.
Don't discount nintendo, right ehm but don't discount sony either. Nintendo did on the console market and paid for it big time when sony came from nowhere with the PS1 and stole Nintendo's thunder and then repeated it with the PS2. So far it is 2 - 0 and an undecided (PSP vs DS) in the Sony vs Nintendo competion with the outsider MS lurking in the shadows.
As for the revolution. Well I am perhaps a bit too old but I realize that I am still using the same old interfaces for my gaming that I used 10+ yrs ago. Still find it sad that one of the best games I played, System Shock, had a whole bit in the readme.txt about virtual reality helmets being supported. Not that I ever actually ever seen one in real live.
I seen control gloves, I seen special keyboards, voice control all being touted as being the next big thing and it has come to naught. There was even a special joystick that could be wielded like a sword.
From Doom to Doom3 I still use the same exact key layout. Mouse+wasd+1-10 keys still hasn't been beat.
Consoles is about games. More importantly it is about getting those "must have" titles that sell your console. Once your console is bought selling b-class titles is easier but getting people to cough up the initial console cost + game title that is the big challenge. Why do you think consoles are so often bundled?
The 360 verdict so far is that sure it has the prettiest pictures of the consoles although compared to a PC (yeah a top of the line pc costing x times more but don't forget, the 360 will have to compete for a number of years unable to improve while pc's will be undergoing some mayor upgrades in the form of dual cores and 64 bit computing) but that the games are a severe case of meh.
Personally my money is on the PS3, why? Because Nintendo tried the casual gamer with the gamecube and bombed. Yeah it was cheap, yeah it was a lot more "friendly" looking, yeah it had the "inovative" capabitly to hook up your gba for extra gameplay and yeah it didn't sell. So why are they again going for the same strategy And why do you think this time it will work?
A sadist perhaps is a person who has reversed empathy, he/she gets off on the pain of others. An autist doesn't "get" that others can feel pain so would have no motivation to cause harm.
Imagine if your car phoned home telling everyone who wanted to know when your driving and when not, would that be acceptable? So why do all the MS apologist accept this here?
No this is privacy invasion with no re-deeming function. If I want to tell other people what I am doing I will bloody well tell them.
This would be like an answering machine that told people I am in the shower, or on the toilet or whatever. NONE OF YOU FREAKING BUSINESS, if I am not online to tell you what I am doing (or answer the phone) then I don't want you to know.
Oh well, guess some people have different ideas about privacy.
It is a live saver however because the one thing that killed windows/IE for me years ago was that just as you found the site with the real free porn, eh I mean real usefull bit of info IE or windows or both crashed forcing you to start searching from the start again.
Opera on Linux went through a bit of problems at first but the crashes didn't matter, just restart and continue were you left off.
If only MS had at any point in its history realized that people are not upset about crashes, they are upset about lost work, they would not now be ..... eh top IT company with a strangle hold on the desktop, office software and internet browser market......
Where was I going with this?
No OS/2 was the typical case where MS somehow manages to sell the entire wold on an inferior product. Don't ask me how they manage it time and time again, if I knew I would have Bill Gates billions in stead of Bill.
Same can really be said about Firefox, although I prefer Opera (it is pure tabbed browsing and doesn't constantly forget that and open new windows instead except for help screens), good product but loosing in market share to the totally inferior IE.
Live ain't fair.