I fully agree, most of my users have serious problems just operating windows, let alone doing work on it. If you threw Linux at them, they would just stop using the computer and go back to doing everything on paper.
another thing is that while the liscense costs for all the software that they're getting isn't horrible price-gouging, we don't fucking need it.
I'm in an officer school, the only function for having a database is for keeping track of student information. I already have an access database in place with an oracle database slowly replacing it. I don't need or want SQL and NONE of my users need it, either. we don't need to buy a shit load of liscenses at slightly above prices, what we need is to break that chunk of cash up and give it to the units so that their Sysadmins and IMOs can determine what the unit needs.
I'll give you a little story as an example of how trying to add too many pieces to the puzzle WILL fuck up a supply chain:
earlier this year, I needed 14 computers. I sat down and figured out the paperwork bullshit and forms for it (I'm actually Infantry and have zero training for admin stuff). I priced out how much it would cost for what we needed and found several retailers that we could go through. I sent that stuff up to higher and after about 2 months of that paperwork going through commitee and bueracracy, I got 14 computers that were totally different from what I requested, cost more, lacked software liscenses and hardware that my users needed for them to do their jobs.
anyone higher than brigade levels has no fucking clue what a battalion needs, and even then they don't really know.
this whole package for stuff we don't need irritates me.
anyone that's looking forward to a rehash with almost nothing added should be in for what they expect. if you were looking for a great game featuring everyone's favorite (by default) gun toting female archeologist, you're going to be disappointed.
Republic on the other hand, I haven't gotten hands on yet, but it does look to be a very intriguing game. it's certainly a fairly fresh concept. the gameplay will make or break it, but I'm looking forward to it.
it was indeed an EMP from Smith's ship that disabled the fleet. it's explained in Enter the Matrix. it's a pretty cheesy marketing gimmick to have to buy a game to get the full story.
Once he found out that my best friends were not only an in-game couple, but an actual married couple, he harassed them for about a week about getting together in real life for a foursome with him and his wife.
I really wouldn't call him a celebrity, virtually everyone that I knew in AO hated the guy.
well, the popularly accepted answer is that weather system are formed due to the Earth's somewhat wobbly orbit and the uneven heating of the Earth, due to constant rotation and varied surface composition, which results in areas that hold heat at different rates. Which in turn creates wind currents and areas of different humidity, however the implications of Xth dimentional creatures having a percievable effect on our planes of existence is still a valid possibility.
After all, even in our limited 3-dimentional world, we have still only explored one planet thoroughly.
People that play persistant universe games fall into 3 basic catagories:
Casual gamers that will only play so long as they're having fun. Once they hit the XP treadmill, they'll try something different, like a new character or a completely different game.
Serious gamers that will play even if they're not having fun, because they enjoy the friends that they've made in the game. These poor bastards willl trudge through the XP treadmill and some will even make the top level, but most will simply hang around the upper levels, without much real hope of gaining the top level since they'd rather play with friends than do XP.
Fanatical gamers will play until they hit top level, then once they don't have a goal to shoot for in that game, they'll find another game and race through that one, too.
the first and third group fit perfectly in with the concept of a fee that'll let them play all the SOE games. Casual gamers always want something interesting and fanatical gamers reach end-game too quick. I know more than a few high levels in AO, EQ, AC and DAOC that are running wild in more than one of those games.
too bad about the no Star Wars: Galaxies bit. Lucas could have made a mint with the cross-promotion. Instead he's going to have to compete with his own dev company.
As with all online RPGs, Mythica's dev and support will determine whether or not it's a good game, though right now it looks pretty good and has a lot of potential, simply with the fact that they're covering untrodden ground.
The Titans expansion is going to change the balance of the game dramatically. Right now the new race, Atlanteans, are grossly over-powered but should present an interesting challenge in online play.
the quote's modded funny, but it's pretty insightful, too. people will do what it takes to get a game, if it's fun. people will make mods, hacks and ports to get their hands on it and play it on their favorite system. but if it's not fun, no one's gonna play it. it's a really simple concept, but some people just don't get it.
Talk about sour grapes (or would that be sour eggs?) sdem made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of being a productive or cooperative member of the troll community. Fyodor took him out with the full blessing and permission of the high council. This was not a vigilante operation.
not a vigilante operation? it doesn't matter how high up in the slashdot heirarchy you are, you don't hold any legal ability to bless off on cracking someone's box any more than the Yakuza has the authority to execute someone.
well, considering how you have to stop Horne from escaping, no you can't finish the game without firing a shot. I however, agree that the Kung Fu Edition V3.00 is bar none, the best mod for Max Payne and I though it was fucking amazing
in case you're wondering about my comment about the bit about the insane action move with the shotgun, it's an exploit in the code I found where if you're holding a two-handed firearm that has good knockback (jackhammer is preferred here) you can shoot someone, slamming them into the wall and then follow up fast with a take-down, do the takedown and finish them with another shotgun blast.
precisely what extra lines of code does dreamweaver add?
I could be wrong, but I don't recall seeing much, if any extraneous code in pages done with dreamweaver. I donno, maybe you like playing with layouts for a couple hours trying to get it to look exactly like you want it to, but I would much rather use a WYSIWYG and get it over with.
One: the sheer amount of them causes the genre to kill itself off
Two: several winners will emerge and the rest will die slow deaths
or Three: the genre will continously reinvent itself and only those companies with the bankroll to come out with a new game every year or two will even bother with the concept anymore.
Wouldn't Zion's consistent hacking into the Matrix leave imperfections in the code? The perfect operating system is only perfect because it can flawlessly handle billions of plugged-in users at once while perfectly predicting their behaviors both in and outside of the Matrix... Can there be an argument that the Matrix was not built to properly handle intruders via pirated signals?
not necessarily. the hacking itself seemed to be mostly information gathering, which would be basically the same as someone using an exploit to read sensitive material, not actually breaking the rules, just using imperfections that were pre-existing to do things that ordinary users couldn't. the Matrix was made to handle intruders, hence the Agents. until Neo learned to manipulate the Matrix (gained root, if you want to use that analogy) the Agents were uncontested. anyone that tried to fight them died. once Neo was in control, then the Agent daemons just weren't enough to stop him.
if I had any misunderstandings of the law in as far as the election process, I wouldn't have mentioned that Bush legally won.
however, legally winning and winning fairly are two seperate things. especially when the government claims to be a democracy, yet is not constitutionally required to even have a popular election, much less abid by it.
Operation: Inner Space did that. the game took place on your hard drive, clearing out your computer of "infected files" with a spaceship and a shitload of imaginative weapons. you collected money and bought upgrades for your ship. you could also customize the hell out of it, to including making a new one entirely from scratch.
it came out in 1995 or so, so the graphics are pretty dated, but the game's great amounts of fun for when you just want to fly around and blast things.
Sixth, after the election, NUMEROUS privately-sponsored recounts were held, and every single one of them came to the conclusion that Bush won the election, fair and square.
that's not entirely true. at least not in terms of popular vote. bush lost the popular election by about 500,000 people. however he carried the right states and had the right amount of electorial college votes.
so it wasn't really fair or square, however it was entirely legal.
the vast majority of dvorak's work is lofty, overcomplicated solutions to problems that don't really exist. personally, I think he's a moron and a whiner.
creating a new keyboard layout for no other reason than having a new vehicle for fame doesn't do any of us any good. qwerty is successful and the mainstay of layouts for keyboards for the simple reason that it works and is pre-existing.
ziff-davis's poster boy is no visionary. may his crummy keyboard layout die.
that's a point that one of my writers keeps bringing up to defend his Anarchy Online addiction, however FPS games rarely need to have time sinks or have people experience the XP treadmill to be successful. in various FPS, the clans that form tend to perputate themselves.
while they vary wildly in devotion to the game, the way the game is set up (battles for land) players will rapidly lose track of time in trying to get their faction ahead in the land grab and wind up burning hours at a time. combine that with an active clan that wants its members on several times a week and the biggest problem with populating the servers is going to be burnout, which happens in all persistant world RPGs as well.
not on an imaginary system, I've seen my share of 64 player servers and tribes 2 expanded that out to 128 players, and I've been on servers that had that upwards of 100 people in massed battles.
those same massed battles are what makes me look forward to getting my copy of planetside.
Has anyone looked into how much the music companies are spending on lawyers and such to stop piracy? At some point it seems like they are using more money trying to stop piracy (not to mention people that quit buying cds because the record industry is run by assholes) than they would gain by having it stopped.
I think they passed that point about 2 months after they started giving a shit about piracy.
Is AI driving that much harder than walking?
on
New Halo 2 Details
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, the player doesn't have to worry about being the driver anymore. AI controlled marines will now also take command of vehicles. But, watch out... they seem to have gotten their licenses from a box of Cracker Jacks. They'll drive erratically and in fairly dangerous ways. Much like drivers on the LA freeway during rush hour.
Virtually every game I've seen that has both driving and walking AI characters, the ones driving are either total pussies or complete psychos behind the wheel. Battlefield 1942, the entire GTA series, Operation Flashpoint, the botpilot mod for Tribes 2, all of them are either a danger to themselves and their own team or they're so timid that they can't bring themselves to do anything useful.
I would think that the path-finding AI involved would remain precisely the same as on foot. The only additional processes involved would be trying to compensate for a larger bounding box and not trying to roll the thing.
anyone else got any ideas on what's going on with this crazy bots?
If you check around, there's a wealth of games that don't break the surface of the mainstream, simply because the bean-counters tell people that they won't make much money and so they never get much in the way of advertising money.
however, if you look at a few of the companies on top, you'll find a good number of quality games, at fairly low prices. right now, I'd say that the up-coming Sam and Max and Full Throttle games from Lucasarts are going to generate a lot more publicity within the genre as well as Dreamcatcher's continued offerings to adventure gamers everywhere.
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I fully agree, most of my users have serious problems just operating windows, let alone doing work on it. If you threw Linux at them, they would just stop using the computer and go back to doing everything on paper.
another thing is that while the liscense costs for all the software that they're getting isn't horrible price-gouging, we don't fucking need it.
I'm in an officer school, the only function for having a database is for keeping track of student information. I already have an access database in place with an oracle database slowly replacing it. I don't need or want SQL and NONE of my users need it, either. we don't need to buy a shit load of liscenses at slightly above prices, what we need is to break that chunk of cash up and give it to the units so that their Sysadmins and IMOs can determine what the unit needs.
I'll give you a little story as an example of how trying to add too many pieces to the puzzle WILL fuck up a supply chain:
earlier this year, I needed 14 computers. I sat down and figured out the paperwork bullshit and forms for it (I'm actually Infantry and have zero training for admin stuff). I priced out how much it would cost for what we needed and found several retailers that we could go through. I sent that stuff up to higher and after about 2 months of that paperwork going through commitee and bueracracy, I got 14 computers that were totally different from what I requested, cost more, lacked software liscenses and hardware that my users needed for them to do their jobs.
anyone higher than brigade levels has no fucking clue what a battalion needs, and even then they don't really know.
this whole package for stuff we don't need irritates me.
Republic on the other hand, I haven't gotten hands on yet, but it does look to be a very intriguing game. it's certainly a fairly fresh concept. the gameplay will make or break it, but I'm looking forward to it.
it was indeed an EMP from Smith's ship that disabled the fleet. it's explained in Enter the Matrix. it's a pretty cheesy marketing gimmick to have to buy a game to get the full story.
Once he found out that my best friends were not only an in-game couple, but an actual married couple, he harassed them for about a week about getting together in real life for a foursome with him and his wife.
I really wouldn't call him a celebrity, virtually everyone that I knew in AO hated the guy.
you'd better have BAWLS!
The gamer's choice for over caffination.
well, the popularly accepted answer is that weather system are formed due to the Earth's somewhat wobbly orbit and the uneven heating of the Earth, due to constant rotation and varied surface composition, which results in areas that hold heat at different rates. Which in turn creates wind currents and areas of different humidity, however the implications of Xth dimentional creatures having a percievable effect on our planes of existence is still a valid possibility.
After all, even in our limited 3-dimentional world, we have still only explored one planet thoroughly.
People that play persistant universe games fall into 3 basic catagories:
Casual gamers that will only play so long as they're having fun. Once they hit the XP treadmill, they'll try something different, like a new character or a completely different game.
Serious gamers that will play even if they're not having fun, because they enjoy the friends that they've made in the game. These poor bastards willl trudge through the XP treadmill and some will even make the top level, but most will simply hang around the upper levels, without much real hope of gaining the top level since they'd rather play with friends than do XP.
Fanatical gamers will play until they hit top level, then once they don't have a goal to shoot for in that game, they'll find another game and race through that one, too.
the first and third group fit perfectly in with the concept of a fee that'll let them play all the SOE games. Casual gamers always want something interesting and fanatical gamers reach end-game too quick. I know more than a few high levels in AO, EQ, AC and DAOC that are running wild in more than one of those games.
too bad about the no Star Wars: Galaxies bit. Lucas could have made a mint with the cross-promotion. Instead he's going to have to compete with his own dev company.
namely Mythica and the Titans expansion for Age of Mythology
As with all online RPGs, Mythica's dev and support will determine whether or not it's a good game, though right now it looks pretty good and has a lot of potential, simply with the fact that they're covering untrodden ground.
The Titans expansion is going to change the balance of the game dramatically. Right now the new race, Atlanteans, are grossly over-powered but should present an interesting challenge in online play.
the quote's modded funny, but it's pretty insightful, too. people will do what it takes to get a game, if it's fun. people will make mods, hacks and ports to get their hands on it and play it on their favorite system. but if it's not fun, no one's gonna play it. it's a really simple concept, but some people just don't get it.
Talk about sour grapes (or would that be sour eggs?) sdem made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of being a productive or cooperative member of the troll community. Fyodor took him out with the full blessing and permission of the high council. This was not a vigilante operation.
not a vigilante operation? it doesn't matter how high up in the slashdot heirarchy you are, you don't hold any legal ability to bless off on cracking someone's box any more than the Yakuza has the authority to execute someone.
well, considering how you have to stop Horne from escaping, no you can't finish the game without firing a shot. I however, agree that the Kung Fu Edition V3.00 is bar none, the best mod for Max Payne and I though it was fucking amazing
in case you're wondering about my comment about the bit about the insane action move with the shotgun, it's an exploit in the code I found where if you're holding a two-handed firearm that has good knockback (jackhammer is preferred here) you can shoot someone, slamming them into the wall and then follow up fast with a take-down, do the takedown and finish them with another shotgun blast.
precisely what extra lines of code does dreamweaver add?
I could be wrong, but I don't recall seeing much, if any extraneous code in pages done with dreamweaver. I donno, maybe you like playing with layouts for a couple hours trying to get it to look exactly like you want it to, but I would much rather use a WYSIWYG and get it over with.
One: the sheer amount of them causes the genre to kill itself off
Two: several winners will emerge and the rest will die slow deaths
or Three: the genre will continously reinvent itself and only those companies with the bankroll to come out with a new game every year or two will even bother with the concept anymore.
Wouldn't Zion's consistent hacking into the Matrix leave imperfections in the code? The perfect operating system is only perfect because it can flawlessly handle billions of plugged-in users at once while perfectly predicting their behaviors both in and outside of the Matrix... Can there be an argument that the Matrix was not built to properly handle intruders via pirated signals?
not necessarily. the hacking itself seemed to be mostly information gathering, which would be basically the same as someone using an exploit to read sensitive material, not actually breaking the rules, just using imperfections that were pre-existing to do things that ordinary users couldn't. the Matrix was made to handle intruders, hence the Agents. until Neo learned to manipulate the Matrix (gained root, if you want to use that analogy) the Agents were uncontested. anyone that tried to fight them died. once Neo was in control, then the Agent daemons just weren't enough to stop him.
nice flamebait.
if I had any misunderstandings of the law in as far as the election process, I wouldn't have mentioned that Bush legally won.
however, legally winning and winning fairly are two seperate things. especially when the government claims to be a democracy, yet is not constitutionally required to even have a popular election, much less abid by it.
Operation: Inner Space did that. the game took place on your hard drive, clearing out your computer of "infected files" with a spaceship and a shitload of imaginative weapons. you collected money and bought upgrades for your ship. you could also customize the hell out of it, to including making a new one entirely from scratch.
it came out in 1995 or so, so the graphics are pretty dated, but the game's great amounts of fun for when you just want to fly around and blast things.
Sixth, after the election, NUMEROUS privately-sponsored recounts were held, and every single one of them came to the conclusion that Bush won the election, fair and square.
that's not entirely true. at least not in terms of popular vote. bush lost the popular election by about 500,000 people. however he carried the right states and had the right amount of electorial college votes.
so it wasn't really fair or square, however it was entirely legal.
ah soo. thanks for the insight. in that case, I apologize to Dr. Dvorak and Dr. Dealey.
I still think John Dvorak is an ass, though.
the vast majority of dvorak's work is lofty, overcomplicated solutions to problems that don't really exist. personally, I think he's a moron and a whiner.
creating a new keyboard layout for no other reason than having a new vehicle for fame doesn't do any of us any good. qwerty is successful and the mainstay of layouts for keyboards for the simple reason that it works and is pre-existing.
ziff-davis's poster boy is no visionary. may his crummy keyboard layout die.
nice heinlein reference
that's a point that one of my writers keeps bringing up to defend his Anarchy Online addiction, however FPS games rarely need to have time sinks or have people experience the XP treadmill to be successful. in various FPS, the clans that form tend to perputate themselves.
while they vary wildly in devotion to the game, the way the game is set up (battles for land) players will rapidly lose track of time in trying to get their faction ahead in the land grab and wind up burning hours at a time. combine that with an active clan that wants its members on several times a week and the biggest problem with populating the servers is going to be burnout, which happens in all persistant world RPGs as well.
not on an imaginary system, I've seen my share of 64 player servers and tribes 2 expanded that out to 128 players, and I've been on servers that had that upwards of 100 people in massed battles.
those same massed battles are what makes me look forward to getting my copy of planetside.
Has anyone looked into how much the music companies are spending on lawyers and such to stop piracy? At some point it seems like they are using more money trying to stop piracy (not to mention people that quit buying cds because the record industry is run by assholes) than they would gain by having it stopped.
I think they passed that point about 2 months after they started giving a shit about piracy.
Well, the player doesn't have to worry about being the driver anymore. AI controlled marines will now also take command of vehicles. But, watch out... they seem to have gotten their licenses from a box of Cracker Jacks. They'll drive erratically and in fairly dangerous ways. Much like drivers on the LA freeway during rush hour.
Virtually every game I've seen that has both driving and walking AI characters, the ones driving are either total pussies or complete psychos behind the wheel. Battlefield 1942, the entire GTA series, Operation Flashpoint, the botpilot mod for Tribes 2, all of them are either a danger to themselves and their own team or they're so timid that they can't bring themselves to do anything useful.
I would think that the path-finding AI involved would remain precisely the same as on foot. The only additional processes involved would be trying to compensate for a larger bounding box and not trying to roll the thing.
anyone else got any ideas on what's going on with this crazy bots?
If you check around, there's a wealth of games that don't break the surface of the mainstream, simply because the bean-counters tell people that they won't make much money and so they never get much in the way of advertising money.
however, if you look at a few of the companies on top, you'll find a good number of quality games, at fairly low prices. right now, I'd say that the up-coming Sam and Max and Full Throttle games from Lucasarts are going to generate a lot more publicity within the genre as well as Dreamcatcher's continued offerings to adventure gamers everywhere.