Well, I can't speak for the other fellow, but I know his statement to be true because after playing WoW since release (as well as in the stress tests), network latency has never been an issue for me, even at peak times.
What it really goes to show is that a lot of people will bitch regardless of what they do.
To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't gone SOE's route and taken down the bitchfest otherwise known as the official forums. The signal-to-noise ratio is so small that scientific notation is a convenient way to write it down.
If you were "immortal" you could just keep working and wouldn't need SS.
Not necessarily. You could still end up decrepit and arthritis-ridden, barely able to care for yourself, and just live that way for the next several hundred years.
It means that Boxer is attempting to kick the Bush administration in the political nadgers at every conceivable opportunity, from being the only Senator to vote against the acceptance of Ohio's electoral votes, to threatening to stonewall Bush's domestic policies, to grilling Condoleezza Rice during the confirmation hearings.
None of these are motivated by any perception of success - there was no way that Ohio's electoral votes wouldn't be accepted; the threat of stonewalling policy reform such as Social Security is irrefutably bad for the country, when working to find a compromise solution for a broken system means every American wins; and Boxer made a public announcement before the confirmation hearings that she intended to make an example of Rice (her fellow Democrats felt no need to make such an announcement, though their questions have been hard-hitting as well).
Her motivation is to increase the stature of the Democratic Party and her own stature within the Party, by playing the political game (which, in the case of Congress, is a "metagame" of sorts for the legislative process). Yes, there are important issues she is raising in the process, but those issues become clouded by her own motivations. People become too focused on political divisions and the political metagame, and are unable to address the issues themselves because of it.
How did this drivel end up modded insightful? It had practically nothing to do with the parent post.
Besides, people have been putting "bomb bomb bomb bomb" in their e-mail sigs and USENET posts for practically forever now. If you think the gubment hasn't figured out ways to separate the investigative wheat from the anarchist chaff, you're fooling yourself.
Adelphia purports to make CableCard available as well. Sorry no link, but it was listed on an insert in a recent cable bill. The rental in my area is $1.75 per month.
Or how about being told by a guide that he can't help you, even though you're stuck in a wall, because it's against policy to assist players unless their problem is one of a few SOE-confirmed bugs.
As a former member of the EQ Guide Program under Verant, before the program was eviscerated by SOE, I can refute this assertion.
Determining that someone is stuck in a wall (such as the portcullises in Permafrost, people were always standing underneath those and getting pushed up into the space above them when they lowered) is incredibly easy. All you had to do was/goto the person in question, and then when you determined that you were stuck there along with them, you either/zoned back in and walked around to find them, or asked for the name of someone nearby to/goto. Then you just/summoned the stuck person, exchanged pleasantries, and were off.
A guide who didn't put even this minimal amount of effort into their work had no business being a guide.
Since then, SOE has indeed dismantled the Guide Program, and hasn't instituted volunteer CS in any of their newer games. Obviously, the old AOL wage lawsuit put the fear of The Man into the industry, because (to my knowledge) there aren't any games out now with volunteer CS. And to be perfectly honest, it has hurt the quality of these games tremendously.
Well, there are some non-first-year concepts at work here. From looking at the Science* article (14 Jan 2005 issue, p 231-235), I gather that the aluminum atoms form a small "jellium" cluster. Within a cluster of this type, the electrical potential is relatively uniform, but there are boundary effects at the edge of the cluster.
In the Al13 cluster, the inner electrons are kept in normal ground states, and combined with the atoms' protons, form a net positive charge. The outer (valence) electrons react to this charge by falling into energy states dependent upon the whole Al13 molecule, not the individual atoms. In fact, the molecule's energy states can resemble those of other atoms, and can behave in the same ways that those other atoms do. Al13, for example, resembles a halogen, and so it binds to varying numbers of iodine atoms covalently.
Now, I'm not actually a chemist (I was brought up in electrical engineering and computer science), so my reading of the details might be wrong, but I think that's how it works.
(* You'll either need a Science subscription, or you'll need to access from the domain of an institution that has a site subscription. The vast majority of US universities do.)
Especially amusing was when the cartridge would heat up and start hosing the quantities of critters defending the keeps. Just a bit frightening heading into a castle and seeing that it's now defended by approximately "1KK" peasants.
I suppose he could have posted his opinion as a comment to the article like the rest of us do, but that would mean descending amongst the ranks of the unwashed masses.
I suppose the only way this could work is if you went in on a subscription with some friends who all play a different game. I would imagine that SONY has some kind of safeguard against this though. It almost certainly violates the EULA.
Art direction is good and all, but is anybody writing games to convey *atmosphere* these days? Take the first two Thief and System Shock games. These games had atmosphere. You felt the panic and dread in SS2 as a former human rounded the corner, lead pipe in hand, swinging at you while moaning, "Kiiilllll mmmeee!" Your heart pounded as you crept up behind that guard and clocked him over the head, picking up his corpse just in time to duck into the shadows before his friend saw you.
These were games you could play at night, with the lights off, and actually scare the crap out of yourself. And it wasn't because of toonish graphics or special effects - it was because of atmosphere.
The problem in that case was that, while AOL was initially very successful, it failed to account for changes in the ISP marketplace (namely, that people don't want to pay for ad-ridden, content-limited dialup when their cable or telephone company offers no-strings-attached broadband for a similar price).
As long as News Corp picks a company that already has good business sense and that keeps a finger on the pulse of the public, I don't see any real downsides to this. See Sony or Vivendi Universal for evidence of that.
Now, the real test will be whether News Corp can hold a game company without trying to micromanage it....
I don't get it either. In fact, it makes sense to me that online communities would be *more* prone to antisocial behavior because of the shield of anonymity and because of the general lack of oversight by authority figures (i.e., weak or no law enforcement).
Slashdot Mirror
"Uh, sorry, dude, I think I made a typo."
Holy crap, well, let's hope he takes some of his policies with him.
...and NOT focus on the real problems here.
Oh, you must mean like social security.
In other words, you want to present the software manufacturers with an "accept-or-not" agreement as well.
I'll give you two guesses what their decision will be in every case, and the first one doesn't count.
So you'd rather risk criminal and civil prosecution for unlawful use of a computer system than agree to Blizzard's terms?
Well, I can't speak for the other fellow, but I know his statement to be true because after playing WoW since release (as well as in the stress tests), network latency has never been an issue for me, even at peak times.
What it really goes to show is that a lot of people will bitch regardless of what they do.
To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't gone SOE's route and taken down the bitchfest otherwise known as the official forums. The signal-to-noise ratio is so small that scientific notation is a convenient way to write it down.
Hey, we won't be ready for immortality in 2258, so what makes this guy think we'll be ready in 25 years?
If you were "immortal" you could just keep working and wouldn't need SS.
Not necessarily. You could still end up decrepit and arthritis-ridden, barely able to care for yourself, and just live that way for the next several hundred years.
It means that Boxer is attempting to kick the Bush administration in the political nadgers at every conceivable opportunity, from being the only Senator to vote against the acceptance of Ohio's electoral votes, to threatening to stonewall Bush's domestic policies, to grilling Condoleezza Rice during the confirmation hearings.
None of these are motivated by any perception of success - there was no way that Ohio's electoral votes wouldn't be accepted; the threat of stonewalling policy reform such as Social Security is irrefutably bad for the country, when working to find a compromise solution for a broken system means every American wins; and Boxer made a public announcement before the confirmation hearings that she intended to make an example of Rice (her fellow Democrats felt no need to make such an announcement, though their questions have been hard-hitting as well).
Her motivation is to increase the stature of the Democratic Party and her own stature within the Party, by playing the political game (which, in the case of Congress, is a "metagame" of sorts for the legislative process). Yes, there are important issues she is raising in the process, but those issues become clouded by her own motivations. People become too focused on political divisions and the political metagame, and are unable to address the issues themselves because of it.
How did this drivel end up modded insightful? It had practically nothing to do with the parent post.
Besides, people have been putting "bomb bomb bomb bomb" in their e-mail sigs and USENET posts for practically forever now. If you think the gubment hasn't figured out ways to separate the investigative wheat from the anarchist chaff, you're fooling yourself.
Just QAM support, or support for decryption with a cable-company-supplied CableCard?
Adelphia purports to make CableCard available as well. Sorry no link, but it was listed on an insert in a recent cable bill. The rental in my area is $1.75 per month.
Or how about being told by a guide that he can't help you, even though you're stuck in a wall, because it's against policy to assist players unless their problem is one of a few SOE-confirmed bugs.
/goto the person in question, and then when you determined that you were stuck there along with them, you either /zoned back in and walked around to find them, or asked for the name of someone nearby to /goto. Then you just /summoned the stuck person, exchanged pleasantries, and were off.
As a former member of the EQ Guide Program under Verant, before the program was eviscerated by SOE, I can refute this assertion.
Determining that someone is stuck in a wall (such as the portcullises in Permafrost, people were always standing underneath those and getting pushed up into the space above them when they lowered) is incredibly easy. All you had to do was
A guide who didn't put even this minimal amount of effort into their work had no business being a guide.
Since then, SOE has indeed dismantled the Guide Program, and hasn't instituted volunteer CS in any of their newer games. Obviously, the old AOL wage lawsuit put the fear of The Man into the industry, because (to my knowledge) there aren't any games out now with volunteer CS. And to be perfectly honest, it has hurt the quality of these games tremendously.
Well, there are some non-first-year concepts at work here. From looking at the Science* article (14 Jan 2005 issue, p 231-235), I gather that the aluminum atoms form a small "jellium" cluster. Within a cluster of this type, the electrical potential is relatively uniform, but there are boundary effects at the edge of the cluster.
In the Al13 cluster, the inner electrons are kept in normal ground states, and combined with the atoms' protons, form a net positive charge. The outer (valence) electrons react to this charge by falling into energy states dependent upon the whole Al13 molecule, not the individual atoms. In fact, the molecule's energy states can resemble those of other atoms, and can behave in the same ways that those other atoms do. Al13, for example, resembles a halogen, and so it binds to varying numbers of iodine atoms covalently.
Now, I'm not actually a chemist (I was brought up in electrical engineering and computer science), so my reading of the details might be wrong, but I think that's how it works.
(* You'll either need a Science subscription, or you'll need to access from the domain of an institution that has a site subscription. The vast majority of US universities do.)
Yeah, it's kind of like The Onion. Except it's lame.
Hey, I liked King's Bounty.
Especially amusing was when the cartridge would heat up and start hosing the quantities of critters defending the keeps. Just a bit frightening heading into a castle and seeing that it's now defended by approximately "1KK" peasants.
I suppose he could have posted his opinion as a comment to the article like the rest of us do, but that would mean descending amongst the ranks of the unwashed masses.
I suppose the only way this could work is if you went in on a subscription with some friends who all play a different game. I would imagine that SONY has some kind of safeguard against this though. It almost certainly violates the EULA.
You are correct.
Next up: Sims Gone Wild - College Spring Break
What next? At this rate, it won't be long before we see Your Rights Online: Ashlee Simpson Booed
Well, that wasn't exactly what I was hoping for.......... but it's close.
Art direction is good and all, but is anybody writing games to convey *atmosphere* these days? Take the first two Thief and System Shock games. These games had atmosphere. You felt the panic and dread in SS2 as a former human rounded the corner, lead pipe in hand, swinging at you while moaning, "Kiiilllll mmmeee!" Your heart pounded as you crept up behind that guard and clocked him over the head, picking up his corpse just in time to duck into the shadows before his friend saw you.
These were games you could play at night, with the lights off, and actually scare the crap out of yourself. And it wasn't because of toonish graphics or special effects - it was because of atmosphere.
The problem in that case was that, while AOL was initially very successful, it failed to account for changes in the ISP marketplace (namely, that people don't want to pay for ad-ridden, content-limited dialup when their cable or telephone company offers no-strings-attached broadband for a similar price).
As long as News Corp picks a company that already has good business sense and that keeps a finger on the pulse of the public, I don't see any real downsides to this. See Sony or Vivendi Universal for evidence of that.
Now, the real test will be whether News Corp can hold a game company without trying to micromanage it....
I don't get it either. In fact, it makes sense to me that online communities would be *more* prone to antisocial behavior because of the shield of anonymity and because of the general lack of oversight by authority figures (i.e., weak or no law enforcement).
An example is end-user training videos such as how to use a mouse.
Hello, computer?