Strange. How many LucasArts Star Wars games have been console-only? I can only think of that horrible fighting game. While the summary is clearly wrong, it seems unlikely that this won't make it to PC.
Wow. That's an awful decision. Of course any decent admin will close down all unneeded services, but why have it all enabled by default? Is there any legitimate reason for that?
Quicker than SSH? What the hell? Are you streaming video over your SSH connection or what?
I think GP is referring to the initial connect handshake. Oh no, it takes an extra 500ms to establish a secure connection. If your network is private enough to feel safe using telnet, you can certainly set up RSA/DSA keys to use SSH without a password, eliminating the time it takes to enter it.
Backwards compatibility is a Good Thing, but it should be compartmentalized. Use an emulator like DOSBox for DOS apps, and tear out all the old ugly FAT16 compatibility hacks from the OS. Add real, elegantly simple DLL versioning like Unix has had for decades, not the half-assed messy attempt at it they have now.
I don't know about the printed version of Britannica, but the online version has far more information than Wikipedia, especially on obscure subjects. Britannica Online has 73 pages on the history of furniture. Wikipedia has a few paragraphs. For serious research, Wikipedia is often useless even as a starting point.
Well, it's an abstraction. I've talked to someone who has extensive real-world experience with sword/knife combat and the injuries that result, and he sketched out a system (in the context of a true medieval RPG) where each limb would have its own status: broken, different levels of bleeding, etc. All of which would have an effect on gameplay; for example, if your arm was damaged, you couldn't fight as well. Like MechWarrior 2, but for people.
It's an interesting idea, and likely something I will be implementing for various reasons, but does it really add enjoyment for the player? Probably not. Just get rid of the absurd situation where a character is nearly dead and can still fight at full capacity, and the traditional global HP isn't a bad abstraction.
That's too bad. There really hasn't been anything like it in the seven years or so since it started being crap. How many MMORPGs have even a half-assed form of player housing, one of the most popular features of UO? There are various ways to prevent the urban sprawl that happened in UO.
Still, Oblivion deserves a lot of credit for creating such a huge world at AAA production values.
See, that's my problem with Oblivion. It's chock-full of *stuff*, some of it very good (the Dark Brotherhood comes to mind), but it's all built on a pretty bland game system that can't do much more than Daggerfall. Quantity over quality. Can you do anything to affect the world? Not really. Building up your character isn't much fun, since there are so few skills to choose from. Oblivion suffers from a severe lack of interesting choices, instead letting you do anything and everything with minimal resistance.
(but then it's probably totally infeasible to record voice for the amount of dialog that U7 contained)
Isn't that a little crazy? There's less dialogue, but that's okay, because they wanted everything to be voice-acted. The NPCs do stupid things and engage each other in the same conversations over and over again, which breaks the suspension of disbelief, but it's cool because it's "Radiant AI". You can't levitate or see more than a few characters on screen, but the graphics are so much prettier. In many ways, Oblivion is a technology upgrade for technology's sake. It's nice that Bethesda is continuing TES, but I just want them to do something interesting with the series.
You're describing what the earlier days of Ultima Online were like (almost, with a little roleplaying and some GM intervention), and what Horizons could have been. Unfortunately, I don't know of any MMOGs in development that are even a shadow of the potential that UO hinted at. The original designer of Horizons, who once had grand ideas and was forced out of the company, is now working on what seems to be a cookie-cutter MMORPG. Seriously, read some of the information about Horizons from the pre-blackout era if you can find it. You'll salivate, and wonder what the fuck happened, and why nobody is doing it today.
We're already paying more per capita for our limited health programs (Medicare and Medicaid) than countries with universal health care pay. It would require at least some restructuring, but yes, we can pay for universal health care for far less than $1 trillion.
I should have read your link before replying. The wiki is out of date; the latest version of Amarok is 1.4.5, which does in fact include music sharing via DAAP (same as iTunes). Haven't tried to get it to interface with iTunes or another copy of Amarok, so I can't say how easy it is to use. It doesn't seem to automatically detect shares on the local network like iTunes does.
How about sharing your playlists over the network, eh?
Fair enough. This isn't something I need/want to do, so I never thought of it.
This, and database-like support for querying song tags
Click the "..." next to the collection search box on Amarok. The interface could be better, but that's a full boolean search. Not surprising, since it's searching a SQLite or MySQL database.
No, I'm talking about Visual Studio 2005, which gives you an enormous warning message when installing on Vista. There was no update when Vista was released to businesses, and now after it's available to everyone, the update is still in beta. It sort of invalidates GP's snide attitude about having "two years (at least) to get their shit together", when Microsoft still doesn't have its shit together.
What are you talking about? You would just need absolute hordes of NPCs. Then you could play spy and counterspy.
Well, I did say interesting possibilities. Relying on hordes of NPCs, it may as well be a single-player or traditionally multiplayer game. Where's the massive?
Feh. This is one of the reasons that Ultima Online was so cool; you could actually play a craftsman exclusively and have fun doing it. Good MMOGs should be closer to a world simulation than a game. I can't imagine how one focused narrowly on espionage could possibly work. As a component in a game like WWII Online, sure. But I'm drawing a blank on interesting possibilities for a game where everyone is a spy.
Kind of makes me want to move overseas so I can work with a good stable OS
Uh, not that there aren't good reasons to move to Europe, but you can run Linux anywhere. If you absolutely must use Office, for example, Crossover is cheap.
Having recently made the jump myself after years of switching back and forth, I'm curious to hear why others who want to run Linux can't or won't. I develop Windows applications professionally, but I can run everything I need under VMware Workstation, which I needed for testing purposes anyway.
Download everything with POP3 using your favorite email client, then zip up the folder. I don't think there's any universal format for email aside from mbox, so this is about as easy as it gets.
Exactly. If you're not keeping backups of your own data, and trusting a free service, you're crazy. But Google is generally quite good at letting you get your data in standard formats. POP3 for Gmail, iCal for Google Calender, various formats for Google Docs & Spreadsheets, etc. I don't trust Google more than I trust any other company, but worrying about vendor lock-in just doesn't make any sense here.
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Strange. How many LucasArts Star Wars games have been console-only? I can only think of that horrible fighting game. While the summary is clearly wrong, it seems unlikely that this won't make it to PC.
Yes indeed. One of my favorite games of all time. I miss the X-Wing series of games. Why aren't they making any more?
Pfft. Everyone knows that girls want RAM.
Wow. That's an awful decision. Of course any decent admin will close down all unneeded services, but why have it all enabled by default? Is there any legitimate reason for that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#The_ARPANET_a nd_nuclear_attacks really. But rather than a "cyber attack", I'd be much more concerned about a fairly easy, inexpensive coordinated attack on the physical network infrastructure.
But you can still type c:\progra~1 into Explorer.
Backwards compatibility is a Good Thing, but it should be compartmentalized. Use an emulator like DOSBox for DOS apps, and tear out all the old ugly FAT16 compatibility hacks from the OS. Add real, elegantly simple DLL versioning like Unix has had for decades, not the half-assed messy attempt at it they have now.
I don't know about the printed version of Britannica, but the online version has far more information than Wikipedia, especially on obscure subjects. Britannica Online has 73 pages on the history of furniture. Wikipedia has a few paragraphs. For serious research, Wikipedia is often useless even as a starting point.
Well, it's an abstraction. I've talked to someone who has extensive real-world experience with sword/knife combat and the injuries that result, and he sketched out a system (in the context of a true medieval RPG) where each limb would have its own status: broken, different levels of bleeding, etc. All of which would have an effect on gameplay; for example, if your arm was damaged, you couldn't fight as well. Like MechWarrior 2, but for people.
It's an interesting idea, and likely something I will be implementing for various reasons, but does it really add enjoyment for the player? Probably not. Just get rid of the absurd situation where a character is nearly dead and can still fight at full capacity, and the traditional global HP isn't a bad abstraction.
If your game is rapidly generating hundreds of connection requests, something is very wrong.
See, that's my problem with Oblivion. It's chock-full of *stuff*, some of it very good (the Dark Brotherhood comes to mind), but it's all built on a pretty bland game system that can't do much more than Daggerfall. Quantity over quality. Can you do anything to affect the world? Not really. Building up your character isn't much fun, since there are so few skills to choose from. Oblivion suffers from a severe lack of interesting choices, instead letting you do anything and everything with minimal resistance. Isn't that a little crazy? There's less dialogue, but that's okay, because they wanted everything to be voice-acted. The NPCs do stupid things and engage each other in the same conversations over and over again, which breaks the suspension of disbelief, but it's cool because it's "Radiant AI". You can't levitate or see more than a few characters on screen, but the graphics are so much prettier. In many ways, Oblivion is a technology upgrade for technology's sake. It's nice that Bethesda is continuing TES, but I just want them to do something interesting with the series.
You're describing what the earlier days of Ultima Online were like (almost, with a little roleplaying and some GM intervention), and what Horizons could have been. Unfortunately, I don't know of any MMOGs in development that are even a shadow of the potential that UO hinted at. The original designer of Horizons, who once had grand ideas and was forced out of the company, is now working on what seems to be a cookie-cutter MMORPG. Seriously, read some of the information about Horizons from the pre-blackout era if you can find it. You'll salivate, and wonder what the fuck happened, and why nobody is doing it today.
We're already paying more per capita for our limited health programs (Medicare and Medicaid) than countries with universal health care pay. It would require at least some restructuring, but yes, we can pay for universal health care for far less than $1 trillion.
I should have read your link before replying. The wiki is out of date; the latest version of Amarok is 1.4.5, which does in fact include music sharing via DAAP (same as iTunes). Haven't tried to get it to interface with iTunes or another copy of Amarok, so I can't say how easy it is to use. It doesn't seem to automatically detect shares on the local network like iTunes does.
No, I'm talking about Visual Studio 2005, which gives you an enormous warning message when installing on Vista. There was no update when Vista was released to businesses, and now after it's available to everyone, the update is still in beta. It sort of invalidates GP's snide attitude about having "two years (at least) to get their shit together", when Microsoft still doesn't have its shit together.
Feh. This is one of the reasons that Ultima Online was so cool; you could actually play a craftsman exclusively and have fun doing it. Good MMOGs should be closer to a world simulation than a game. I can't imagine how one focused narrowly on espionage could possibly work. As a component in a game like WWII Online, sure. But I'm drawing a blank on interesting possibilities for a game where everyone is a spy.
Having recently made the jump myself after years of switching back and forth, I'm curious to hear why others who want to run Linux can't or won't. I develop Windows applications professionally, but I can run everything I need under VMware Workstation, which I needed for testing purposes anyway.
Download everything with POP3 using your favorite email client, then zip up the folder. I don't think there's any universal format for email aside from mbox, so this is about as easy as it gets.
Exactly. If you're not keeping backups of your own data, and trusting a free service, you're crazy. But Google is generally quite good at letting you get your data in standard formats. POP3 for Gmail, iCal for Google Calender, various formats for Google Docs & Spreadsheets, etc. I don't trust Google more than I trust any other company, but worrying about vendor lock-in just doesn't make any sense here.