Jawas and Gungans already exist as NPCs, which means the rendering is done. While I don't see Jawas as likely (kind of boring from a customization standpoint), Gungans are possible. They are richly populated throughout Naboo and don't have the kind of bad rep in-game as Jar Jar Binks does from the movies.
We know there will be two new races with the JTL space expansion. I wouldn't be surprised to see Neimoidian (Trade Federation) as one of the races. And maybe the Sullustan, since they were prominent as rebels. These seem more likely to me since they are space-faring races and the expansion is space-centric.
It is very apparent that using Windows is like living in a high-crime, blighted neighborhood. You try and try to live a normal life but at any moment something bad could come along.
Why people continue to choose Windows is beyond me. Linux and Mac OS X are more secure and more powerful. And oh yeah, cheaper. Sure you get Windows when you buy a new machine. But that's like offering a poke in the eye with a pointed stick with every purchase.
A subset of XHTML is the way to go, most definately. I pretty much only use ,
and tags these days coupled with CSS. A lot of the XHTML/HTML tags are cruft left over from early HTML days, CSS eliminates a lot of the clutter. The beauty of CSS, of course, is that the way the document looks can be completely changed at any time.
I did not mean that Apple's was independent of Sun, just that Apple is the one who makes it for their platform. Same with IBM's main JVM. They both have a lot invested in keeping Java stable.
But IBM also has the Jikes RVM, which is an open source Java virtual machine. It is separate from the Sun-based JVM that IBM makes.
Java the programming language is well-defined and documented and anyone can write their own compiler/interpreter for it, just as they would for Pascal or BASIC or Lisp.
Java the class libraries are, in my opinion, one of the reasons for the success of Java. They are (for the most part) well thought-out and provide a lot of useful functionality (e.g., network, GUI, data structures) for developers that enables focusing on solving problems instead of doing basic stuff over and over. This is exactly the same type of thing that helped C take off in the 1970s with the standard Unix libraries and why CPAN exists for Perl. These libraries could be replaced and/or clean-room implementations created, which is indeed happening.
The Java virtual machine is the component Sun has been controlling, for good reason. The JVM is what provides the cross-platform execution and consistent behavior. It also defines a lot of Java features that go beyond the language specification such as runtime class loading and heap management. These are powerful aspects of Java and to have inconsistent behavior would be nightmarish for developers (and was, early on).
IBM and Apple are two companies that have developed their own JVMs that behave consistently with Sun's but are not written by Sun. IBM even has an open source JVM separate from their licensed one. There are other JVM projects in existence, at different stages of maturity.
I agree completely that too many major companies have too much invested in Java to let Sun just nuke it or hose it over. Java is in a much more stable state than C#/.NET. Microsoft could announce tomorrow ".NET XP" which could be 180 degrees different from what is today, whereas Sun can't arbitrarily change the fundamentals of Java without losing a lot of support from the major players and individual developers who make Java successful.
Maybe it's a "hotspot" of coming angel activity, as envisioned in Ted Chiang's Hell is an Absence of God (excerpt). Angels show up but in the process wreak all kind of physical havoc due to their immense power of the Divine Spirit. Cool story.
And let's not ignore the Babylon5 mythos, where angels are actually Vorlons (i.e., alien race).
I worked at a company doing cutting-edge stuff and we were always looking for stuff to patent. Our intent was to create a defensive portfolio that would also look enticing to VCs. But we never, ever thought of pursuing patents on the patently obvious (pun intended).
One-click could be argued as a novel business practice. But crap like this is ridiculous. It's like the old joke of adding "with a computer" to anything and calling it novel. I've already moved to Powells for books, but I'll have to intensify my efforts to get others to stop shopping with Amazon.com.
Charles Hirschhorn, founder and CEO of G4, will be the CEO of the combined network. "This merger is a win for G4; a win for TechTV; and a win for our advertising and affiliate partners," said Hirschhorn.
Seems to have left out mention of the viewers. Guess it's not a win for us. Will it be like MSNBC and "The Site" all over again? Screw the intelligent programming, let's pander to product placement and marketing!
CHUI stands for CHaracter User Interface. Pronounced "chew-ee". I like the term for text-based interfaces, as a counterpart to the GUI. A CLI is a command-line interface, which is really somewhat different from a CHUI. Remember all those DOS apps with text-based windows and menus? Curses and Vermont Views are good examples of CHUI libraries.
In Star Wars Galaxies when you die, you get cloned back into a cloning center somewhere in a city. If you store your clone data you can choose which city to clone to. If you do not store your clone data you end up in the nearest cloning center but you wake up with massive wounds, which you heal by sitting in a medical center and hanging out in a cantina (must do both). That can easily be a 15-30 minute penalty.
When SWG originally launched, you had to do the classic "naked run" out to your body to retrieve your items. Or you could give consent to someone to get them for you. There were bugs with bodies disappearing, so SWG was changed to eliminate the need to run out. When you were cloned, you had all your items.
The latest incarnation of SWG has you keeping your items when you clone, but they decay. Die enough and your items become useless. You can avoid the decay by buying insurance on your items beforehand.
During the period of no penalty to death, player-player combat was rampant. It really changed the experience. Kind of fun to do some dueling, but the cities became all dueling, all the time. The day item decay was introduced dueling virtually disappeared. The gaming experience is much more in line with the Star Wars experience now.
I had all of my CDs ripped to 192kbps MP3. When iTunes came out with AAC, I did a bunch of rip testing. I ripped from Donald Fagen's The Nightfly in a bunch of formats and bitrates. I found, for my personal preference, that 128kbps AAC was at least as good as 192kbps MP3, if not better. So I reripped all of my CDs to 128kbps AAC and got more songs onto my 5GB iPod. Now I'm on to ripping all of my old vinyl to AIFF, eventually to end up as AAC. Huzzah!
Elliotte Rusty Harold has a persuasive argument against XML 1.1. He is someone who's opinion should be considered. He writes very thorough, good books on XML and has created the most excellent XOM (same goal as DOM, but easy to use). He also keeps us current on the XML world at Cafe con Leche.
The SWG patches have not always made things easier. Plenty of things (e.g., weapons, creatures and even professions) have been nerfed to eliminate people running around as one-shot killers. These were gameplay balancing patches and have worked pretty well.
A recent patch implemented a cost to dying which caused everything in your inventory to decay. Prior to that people were doing PvP for the hell of it, and the game really suffered. It lost its roleplaying nature. Now that it hurts to die, there is much less of this going on and the galactic civil war is playing out in a more reasonable way, with large enclaves of the various factions.
The patches in SWG have been pretty positive overall for improving gameplay and keeping balance, although occasionally the patches make things worse. The nice thing about SOE is they're flexible enough to undo things once they realize the problem. I think the holocron-based Jedi grinding is one of those mistakes, and this new approach has promise.
English is case-sensitive. Letter cases have meaning. Are Democratic principles the same as democratic priciples to you? Why in the world would you want your programming language to be kluged into being case-insensitive? You lose a whole layer of meaning, in a domain where you need MORE precision than you do in spoken communications.
My Russian is pretty decent, but I need to polish up on my Polish.
JavaScript is the cause. Turn it off, problem solved. Good browsers (everything except MSIE) allow you to selectively disable the parts of JavaScript that cause the worst problems, so if you feel a need to have some JavaScript you can still disable the really bad parts. Did I mention pages tend to load faster without it, as well?
I can't believe there's a market for pop-up blocking software. I can't believe people still use MSIE. Microsoft has obscured how to disable JavaScript.
Seems to me one of the biggest issues is sending enough water. And I've been bothered by politicians who claim launching from the moon is cheaper. While the moon might be a decent staging area, stuff to launch still has to get there from Earth's gravity well before it goes. And the worst is the water--it's dead weight that we can't leave behind.
Mindstorms is all about three things: RCXes, motors and sensors. The RCX is the "brain" that you program. It has inputs and outputs.
You want to buy as many Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention Systems as you can. Each RIS kit comes with an RCX, two motors and various sensors. The kit also includes plenty of wheels, axles and generic blocks for building just about anything. It's a good bargain. I own two kits and probably need more now that they'll be discontinued.
The accessory kits have been somewhat of a disappointment for me, but it is how you get some different sensors. You can order discrete parts directly from Lego but you end up paying a lot.
Pepsi could even pay the full $.99 per song and it probably wouldn't be an issue. This is just part of their advertsing cost. Spend $100 million to get a 1% spike in sales? Probably worth it. I'm sure they've calculated that only about 40% (or whatever) of the actual songs will be redeemed, and no doubt the deal with Apple is to only pay for the songs actually purchased.
It really is mindboggling to consider the huge dollar figures spent to promote charged sugar water.
I don't understand why people feel a burning desire to max out at each profession by countless hours of grinding. That's why the game loses fun for them. If you just do stuff with your character (run missions, sell goods, whatever) eventually you get the experience to level up. But to make becoming a master your objective would get very old, very fast. No wonder people stop playing.
With the player cities there are more places to go and the vehicles now make it easier to travel. These player communities are where the interesting interactions in the game are. They've also (thankfully) nerfed the creature handler stuff so the game is not so much "creature wars".
Japan is well on the way to dominating in the companion robot economy, which has been a theme in much science fiction through the decades. Who doesn't want a machine companion for work or whatever? Meanwhile the U.S. has been focusing on industrial robots to aid in manufacturing. Who has the competitive edge? Certainly Japan has the capabilities to make comparable industrial robots, but now also is way ahead in development of companions.
This strikes me as similar to the dawn of the personal computer era. The companies that focused on big iron and minis thought they were safely in a vibrant economic market. But when the personal computer took off the bigger machines began to fade and eventually the big iron companies had to adapt or die. The personal computer market also happens to be orders of magnitude larger than the big iron market ever was.
I see a lack of innovative planning in the U.S.; it's hard to invest in research on running bipedal robots when you need to increase your stock for the next quarter. It is very ironic to hear talk about American innovation in celebration of the Wright Brothers when we seem to have all but given up on innovative science as an economic force. Thankfully we have a few still willing to push the boundaries, but they are too few.
When I read about this proposed bill I couldn't help but think of things like BearShare and all of those unprotected Windows shares that get hijacked for file swapping.
Since there is no intent to distribute as a requirement for punishment, this is getting very close to an Orwellian thoughtcrime. A law like this would make using an insecure OS like Windows very dangerous indeed.
The second posibility is that it will, in the long run, piss people off. How, you ask? Others have pointed out in the past that SW:G has something no other MMORPG has had before: A specific class that is "better" than all others.
There already is an element of unbalance in the game. Bounty Hunters get a vicious attack (eyeshot) that kills players dead in a hurry and there's no way to effectively heal during the fight. I've seen player imperials with two AT-STs, which have like 70% resistance to all attacks. Plus armor. Plus massive hit points. Plus each shot from an AT-ST does over 1000 damage, which is about 50% more than a player typically has when 100% healthy.
That being said, these things don't really affect the ordinary user. If you don't join a faction or duel others you don't have to worry about these things. It's impossible to run around killing just any player in SWG. I'd say Jedi are going to be marked for death as well as sought out to join parties for missions and attacks on imperial bases. Except a force-sensitive character has to start from scratch and from what I've read can only train in Jedi skills. So you won't see a Jedi Bounty Hunter or even a Jedi Droid Engineer.
I don't think the casual player will notice, except to maybe see some activity around a Jedi once in a while. Which is just like the universe of the movies.
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Jawas and Gungans already exist as NPCs, which means the rendering is done. While I don't see Jawas as likely (kind of boring from a customization standpoint), Gungans are possible. They are richly populated throughout Naboo and don't have the kind of bad rep in-game as Jar Jar Binks does from the movies.
We know there will be two new races with the JTL space expansion. I wouldn't be surprised to see Neimoidian (Trade Federation) as one of the races. And maybe the Sullustan, since they were prominent as rebels. These seem more likely to me since they are space-faring races and the expansion is space-centric.
It is very apparent that using Windows is like living in a high-crime, blighted neighborhood. You try and try to live a normal life but at any moment something bad could come along.
Why people continue to choose Windows is beyond me. Linux and Mac OS X are more secure and more powerful. And oh yeah, cheaper. Sure you get Windows when you buy a new machine. But that's like offering a poke in the eye with a pointed stick with every purchase.
and tags these days coupled with CSS. A lot of the XHTML/HTML tags are cruft left over from early HTML days, CSS eliminates a lot of the clutter. The beauty of CSS, of course, is that the way the document looks can be completely changed at any time.
I did not mean that Apple's was independent of Sun, just that Apple is the one who makes it for their platform. Same with IBM's main JVM. They both have a lot invested in keeping Java stable.
But IBM also has the Jikes RVM, which is an open source Java virtual machine. It is separate from the Sun-based JVM that IBM makes.
Java the programming language is well-defined and documented and anyone can write their own compiler/interpreter for it, just as they would for Pascal or BASIC or Lisp.
Java the class libraries are, in my opinion, one of the reasons for the success of Java. They are (for the most part) well thought-out and provide a lot of useful functionality (e.g., network, GUI, data structures) for developers that enables focusing on solving problems instead of doing basic stuff over and over. This is exactly the same type of thing that helped C take off in the 1970s with the standard Unix libraries and why CPAN exists for Perl. These libraries could be replaced and/or clean-room implementations created, which is indeed happening.
The Java virtual machine is the component Sun has been controlling, for good reason. The JVM is what provides the cross-platform execution and consistent behavior. It also defines a lot of Java features that go beyond the language specification such as runtime class loading and heap management. These are powerful aspects of Java and to have inconsistent behavior would be nightmarish for developers (and was, early on).
IBM and Apple are two companies that have developed their own JVMs that behave consistently with Sun's but are not written by Sun. IBM even has an open source JVM separate from their licensed one. There are other JVM projects in existence, at different stages of maturity.
I agree completely that too many major companies have too much invested in Java to let Sun just nuke it or hose it over. Java is in a much more stable state than C#/.NET. Microsoft could announce tomorrow ".NET XP" which could be 180 degrees different from what is today, whereas Sun can't arbitrarily change the fundamentals of Java without losing a lot of support from the major players and individual developers who make Java successful.
Maybe it's a "hotspot" of coming angel activity, as envisioned in Ted Chiang's Hell is an Absence of God (excerpt). Angels show up but in the process wreak all kind of physical havoc due to their immense power of the Divine Spirit. Cool story.
And let's not ignore the Babylon5 mythos, where angels are actually Vorlons (i.e., alien race).
I worked at a company doing cutting-edge stuff and we were always looking for stuff to patent. Our intent was to create a defensive portfolio that would also look enticing to VCs. But we never, ever thought of pursuing patents on the patently obvious (pun intended).
One-click could be argued as a novel business practice. But crap like this is ridiculous. It's like the old joke of adding "with a computer" to anything and calling it novel. I've already moved to Powells for books, but I'll have to intensify my efforts to get others to stop shopping with Amazon.com.
Seems to have left out mention of the viewers. Guess it's not a win for us. Will it be like MSNBC and "The Site" all over again? Screw the intelligent programming, let's pander to product placement and marketing!
I made it up (as far as I know); guess I wasn't clear on that. I like it better than anything else. Why shouldn't our interfaces be chewy and gooey?
CHUI stands for CHaracter User Interface. Pronounced "chew-ee". I like the term for text-based interfaces, as a counterpart to the GUI. A CLI is a command-line interface, which is really somewhat different from a CHUI. Remember all those DOS apps with text-based windows and menus? Curses and Vermont Views are good examples of CHUI libraries.
In Star Wars Galaxies when you die, you get cloned back into a cloning center somewhere in a city. If you store your clone data you can choose which city to clone to. If you do not store your clone data you end up in the nearest cloning center but you wake up with massive wounds, which you heal by sitting in a medical center and hanging out in a cantina (must do both). That can easily be a 15-30 minute penalty.
When SWG originally launched, you had to do the classic "naked run" out to your body to retrieve your items. Or you could give consent to someone to get them for you. There were bugs with bodies disappearing, so SWG was changed to eliminate the need to run out. When you were cloned, you had all your items.
The latest incarnation of SWG has you keeping your items when you clone, but they decay. Die enough and your items become useless. You can avoid the decay by buying insurance on your items beforehand.
During the period of no penalty to death, player-player combat was rampant. It really changed the experience. Kind of fun to do some dueling, but the cities became all dueling, all the time. The day item decay was introduced dueling virtually disappeared. The gaming experience is much more in line with the Star Wars experience now.
I had all of my CDs ripped to 192kbps MP3. When iTunes came out with AAC, I did a bunch of rip testing. I ripped from Donald Fagen's The Nightfly in a bunch of formats and bitrates. I found, for my personal preference, that 128kbps AAC was at least as good as 192kbps MP3, if not better. So I reripped all of my CDs to 128kbps AAC and got more songs onto my 5GB iPod. Now I'm on to ripping all of my old vinyl to AIFF, eventually to end up as AAC. Huzzah!
Elliotte Rusty Harold has a persuasive argument against XML 1.1. He is someone who's opinion should be considered. He writes very thorough, good books on XML and has created the most excellent XOM (same goal as DOM, but easy to use). He also keeps us current on the XML world at Cafe con Leche.
The SWG patches have not always made things easier. Plenty of things (e.g., weapons, creatures and even professions) have been nerfed to eliminate people running around as one-shot killers. These were gameplay balancing patches and have worked pretty well.
A recent patch implemented a cost to dying which caused everything in your inventory to decay. Prior to that people were doing PvP for the hell of it, and the game really suffered. It lost its roleplaying nature. Now that it hurts to die, there is much less of this going on and the galactic civil war is playing out in a more reasonable way, with large enclaves of the various factions.
The patches in SWG have been pretty positive overall for improving gameplay and keeping balance, although occasionally the patches make things worse. The nice thing about SOE is they're flexible enough to undo things once they realize the problem. I think the holocron-based Jedi grinding is one of those mistakes, and this new approach has promise.
English is case-sensitive. Letter cases have meaning. Are Democratic principles the same as democratic priciples to you? Why in the world would you want your programming language to be kluged into being case-insensitive? You lose a whole layer of meaning, in a domain where you need MORE precision than you do in spoken communications.
My Russian is pretty decent, but I need to polish up on my Polish.
JavaScript is the cause. Turn it off, problem solved. Good browsers (everything except MSIE) allow you to selectively disable the parts of JavaScript that cause the worst problems, so if you feel a need to have some JavaScript you can still disable the really bad parts. Did I mention pages tend to load faster without it, as well?
I can't believe there's a market for pop-up blocking software. I can't believe people still use MSIE. Microsoft has obscured how to disable JavaScript.
I was thinking more of water for the trip itself. It's like a 6-8 month journey one-way. And you'd need some until you had a viable Martian source.
Seems to me one of the biggest issues is sending enough water. And I've been bothered by politicians who claim launching from the moon is cheaper. While the moon might be a decent staging area, stuff to launch still has to get there from Earth's gravity well before it goes. And the worst is the water--it's dead weight that we can't leave behind.
Mindstorms is all about three things: RCXes, motors and sensors. The RCX is the "brain" that you program. It has inputs and outputs.
You want to buy as many Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention Systems as you can. Each RIS kit comes with an RCX, two motors and various sensors. The kit also includes plenty of wheels, axles and generic blocks for building just about anything. It's a good bargain. I own two kits and probably need more now that they'll be discontinued.
The accessory kits have been somewhat of a disappointment for me, but it is how you get some different sensors. You can order discrete parts directly from Lego but you end up paying a lot.
Pepsi could even pay the full $.99 per song and it probably wouldn't be an issue. This is just part of their advertsing cost. Spend $100 million to get a 1% spike in sales? Probably worth it. I'm sure they've calculated that only about 40% (or whatever) of the actual songs will be redeemed, and no doubt the deal with Apple is to only pay for the songs actually purchased.
It really is mindboggling to consider the huge dollar figures spent to promote charged sugar water.
I don't understand why people feel a burning desire to max out at each profession by countless hours of grinding. That's why the game loses fun for them. If you just do stuff with your character (run missions, sell goods, whatever) eventually you get the experience to level up. But to make becoming a master your objective would get very old, very fast. No wonder people stop playing.
With the player cities there are more places to go and the vehicles now make it easier to travel. These player communities are where the interesting interactions in the game are. They've also (thankfully) nerfed the creature handler stuff so the game is not so much "creature wars".
Japan is well on the way to dominating in the companion robot economy, which has been a theme in much science fiction through the decades. Who doesn't want a machine companion for work or whatever? Meanwhile the U.S. has been focusing on industrial robots to aid in manufacturing. Who has the competitive edge? Certainly Japan has the capabilities to make comparable industrial robots, but now also is way ahead in development of companions.
This strikes me as similar to the dawn of the personal computer era. The companies that focused on big iron and minis thought they were safely in a vibrant economic market. But when the personal computer took off the bigger machines began to fade and eventually the big iron companies had to adapt or die. The personal computer market also happens to be orders of magnitude larger than the big iron market ever was.
I see a lack of innovative planning in the U.S.; it's hard to invest in research on running bipedal robots when you need to increase your stock for the next quarter. It is very ironic to hear talk about American innovation in celebration of the Wright Brothers when we seem to have all but given up on innovative science as an economic force. Thankfully we have a few still willing to push the boundaries, but they are too few.
What I, as a gamer, want to see is the Roger and Ebert (or, I guess, Ebert and Roeper now) version of game reviews.
TechTV's X-Play is a pretty good version of that. The hosts actually play the games and are willing to say when games suck.
When I read about this proposed bill I couldn't help but think of things like BearShare and all of those unprotected Windows shares that get hijacked for file swapping.
Since there is no intent to distribute as a requirement for punishment, this is getting very close to an Orwellian thoughtcrime. A law like this would make using an insecure OS like Windows very dangerous indeed.
The second posibility is that it will, in the long run, piss people off. How, you ask? Others have pointed out in the past that SW:G has something no other MMORPG has had before: A specific class that is "better" than all others.
There already is an element of unbalance in the game. Bounty Hunters get a vicious attack (eyeshot) that kills players dead in a hurry and there's no way to effectively heal during the fight. I've seen player imperials with two AT-STs, which have like 70% resistance to all attacks. Plus armor. Plus massive hit points. Plus each shot from an AT-ST does over 1000 damage, which is about 50% more than a player typically has when 100% healthy.
That being said, these things don't really affect the ordinary user. If you don't join a faction or duel others you don't have to worry about these things. It's impossible to run around killing just any player in SWG. I'd say Jedi are going to be marked for death as well as sought out to join parties for missions and attacks on imperial bases. Except a force-sensitive character has to start from scratch and from what I've read can only train in Jedi skills. So you won't see a Jedi Bounty Hunter or even a Jedi Droid Engineer.
I don't think the casual player will notice, except to maybe see some activity around a Jedi once in a while. Which is just like the universe of the movies.