Neither a.sxw or a PDF one would be very useful for someone new to PCs - they need some basic knowledge to even view it, and it would get incredibly confusing to try to use the computer and read instructions off it at the same time.
Actually a better solution would be to put the pdf on a floppy and send them off to kinkos. I didn't RTFA so I dunno how long this document is, but I know that for anything of any length it's easier to go up to a print shop instead of waiting for a slow arse home printer to print it off anyway, plus you can get them to hole punch it and put it in a binder, or put it in one of those spiral binding things. The thing about this is, as cheap as floppy disks and CDs are now, one could put a copy of this on floppy and bundle it with some Fedora CDs, tell the person to take the disk up to kinko's and have the document print off and they have everything they need to get started.
I think that was somewhat the point of the article, the shitty software patent system in the US is effecting everyone else i the world.
The problem, at it's heart, I think, is the incongruence of technology and law. On the one hand, lawmakers don't understand technology well enough to write good laws, and on the other hand technology is such a broad topic and a fast moving target that even if there were a bunch of technologically savvy people in position to write technology laws, the way the system exists today by the time a law was written, passed and enacted the lawmakers would be 6 months behind on what needs to be done.
I think one of the major factors to this is that people both in and out of industry don't really understand how blazingly fast technology moves. While 10 years might be reasonable for a phsical invention, having ANYTHING locked up in patents in software is going to stifle innovation horribly.
I'm all for companies who invent new and great things in the world of software to be able to make money on it, they put in the work and they deserve it. But the reality is that software patents really don't seem to necessary. If I invent some super great algorithm and software based around it, and really do keep it a secret untill it's released in my product, by the time my competitors are able to churn out a competing product I already have mindshare and better damn well already be working on the next version of my software.
Of course the corperations won't be happy without a patent, and in some sence it's even justifiable to say that they are right to want some insurance that nobody else can rip off their idea, but if the lawmakers are going to get paid off to allow software patents, I think it should be for a maximum of 1 year. This gives them a head start as a reward for their work, but still allows innovation.
This all of course doesn't address the problem with junk patents, but at least it would go some way to minimizing the damage. I'd much rather we only have to wait for 1 year to be able to have applications which use double click or radio buttons than 10 years.
From the looks at it, the price is work it just for having wireless configured. It's a real PITA.
This does look really nice though, and I'm glad to see that they are using Suse, which seems to be the best "User Oriented" distrobution out there. I'm actually a little suprised that they can make a notebook no more expensive than it is with all supported hardware, as I've noticed Linux compatible hardware tends to be a wee bit more expensive than non-supported hardware.
I do have two concerns though, first off is the quality of the notebook. OS aside, if the hardware isn't robust enough to stand up to lots of abuse, then it won't sell well and someone will probably blame that on Linux. The second concern I have is that while Suse Professional is wonderful, the personal edition seems to really lack some important things (like a compiler. I don't care if your not a developer, if your using linux at some point you will want to install software that has to be compiled for your system).
I think your completely off base here, I'll use myself as a counter example. Every machine I own is x86 hardware running Linux (except my Laptop, wich is an iBook running OS X). I have 1 fairly high-end machine I use as my primary desktop machine. A Pentium 4 1.9gz with 3GB ram and a GeForce FX 5900. Now lets say it's a few months from now and the Doom 3 Linux client is available, so I decide I'd like to play it. For $50 I can go out and buy the game, download the Linux client (AFAIK the Doom 3 Linux client will be much like the NWN Linux Client, buy the windows version and then use an installer downloaded from the net to install on Linux). Now I'm playing Doom 3.
Total Cost to me, a reasonable $50 and about an hour of time invested (driving to the store, back, installation).
Now let's say ID decided not to release a Linux version of Doom 3, but I still really want to play it. Now I have to go Buy doom 3 for $50, plus a version of Windows, we'll say $80 for WinXP Home. Now I need to buy a new hard drive, say $50 for the cheapest drive I could find. Unfortunately now I also need to get an IDE controller card, since all the IDE slots on my computer are already being used ($20 should do for something not great but ok), Now I have to make sure this IDE card doesn't screw up my Linux installation. Now if I don't want to go that route I'm going to have to back up an entire drive in my Linux box, since Windows will eat a Linux parition. So I'm going to have to install Windows and then restore all my data that I backed up. Now when I boot into windows I need to make sure I'm off the net and download all the windows security patches, and while I'm doing that I probably need to buy an antivirus package to make sure I don't get turned into a spam relay.
Now how rediculous does it sound to not be able to afford (money and time wise) XP Home but be able to pay for a legit copy of a game?
That way the market can be flooded with low quality games that suck, because anyone can do it.
This has always been sony's strenght, and is one of the reasons that Sony beat out Sega and Nintendo during the 32bit console wars (the other reasons being mainly Nintendo and Sega both shooting themselves in their respective feet). If you have the money to make a game an dpay sony's licensing fee, then you can make a PS2 game. Sure this leads to a lot of crappy games, but it also is what leads to really Unique and really fun games. Games that Nintendo especially just wouldn't let get made. It's sort of like the million monkey theory, if you make games easier to make, you get more developers, and you have a higher probability of getting someone to make something really unexpected and really fun.
I'm not sure why game developers think that First Person Action is a good thing, it's always seemed like a good way to ruin a perfectly good game to me. The first FPA game I remember playing was Turok on Nintendo 64, which wasn't TOO bad because it was mainly a shooter. More recently Metroid Prime tried to be a full action title from a first person perspective, and it was a real pain. The real problem is a First Person perspective doesn't lend itself well to timing jumps and dealing with a lot of other elements common in an action or platformer game.
Why is it that developers feel the need to periodically scrap everything they've been working on
The reason is that often times the original design of something does not facilitate the structured adding of newer features. Mainly because the $foo is first developed nobody has any idea that people will want to be doing $bar 10 years down the road. Finally someone finds a way to allower $bar by tacking on a few things to $foo with superglue and duck tape. At first this is no big deal $bar is just a small little thing and it doesn't invalidate the design of $foo. Eventually more people use duck tape and superglue to add things to $foo and use duck tape and superglue to add more things to $bar untill what your left with is a big ball of tape and glue supported percariously with popsicle sticks and rubberbands. In this case it can be better to then redesign $foo to provide a better structure for things like $bar to be added without so much cruft. Othertimes it's decided that all the things like $bar should just be given a seperate program/protocol/whatever and $foo should to back to what it was originally.
Let's look at all this in the case of HTTP. Things like Java applets, Flash, even Javascript, are all hacks to get around the limitations of HTTP. Ofcourse I don't think that we are nearing critical mass of things being added onto HTTP, but the problem is certainly comming along. I think the latter of the above solutions is preferable in this case. HTTP is a good protocol and still serves a usefull purpose, what we need though is a second protocol for dynamic content.
Hmm, I thought it was a good way to see how well you can tell based on the content of the email itself. Plus it forces one to get into the mind of the average user who CAN'T tell that a site is a fraud based on the URL or even based on the fact that the page it takes them too looks nothing like the companies website.
The trick isn't that you have to let the casual player get the same goods as the compulsive player, the trick is to make the low level quests just as fun as the upper level quests. The people who really care if they have the +50 Longsword of Doom are the people who will play 18 hours a day. The thing is that walking around killing rats or doing quests where you have to beat up gobilns for the umpteenth time. What I think needs to happen to to make a truly successful MMORPG is this...
Reverse the quest length and complexity, in most games the longer and more involved quests are for the upper level characters. Instead focus on giving lower level characters more story and puzzle intensive quests to make up for the lack of epicness of the quests.
Make a larger variety of low level enemies. While we all know there are all manner of interesting dragons and phantoms and planar beasts in the upper levels, how come every level 1-10 level enemy looks like the same rats, slimes and goblins we've seen over and over again with slighly different colored textures. Create a wider variety of low-level enemies to balanced out the upper level enemies.
No quest level gap. There should be a few quests designed for EVERY level. No "level 1 to 5" stuff , there should be one or more quests (depending on length), that correspond to a given level, and after completing the quests the player should be assured to gain a level. A player should NOT run out of out of character quests to complete and still have to fight random things to level up. I realize this is easier said then done when considering things like soloing vs party play, allowing players to take on quests of higher or lower levels to adjust their difficulty, and making quests with better treasure more difficult, but I think these are some ideas whos time has come.
Although this sounds really nice, one thing I've noticed is that all of the previous versions (just like any lower end machine) have been pretty starved for ram, and with the G5 being a 64 bit processor, this could really exacerbate the problem. Ram prices don't seem to be getting any cheaper, so I wonder if they will raise the price and double the ram, or what. I've not worked on any of the newer generation imacs (last ones I did hardware work on were running OS 7 I think), but they are not really easy to upgrade later IIRC. This might lead some people to think the machines are much less powerful than they really are.
I thought that most of the voice acting in the official Neverwinter Nights campaigns was really good (though I think the PCs could use a bit more than the 2 or 3 catch phrases). I especially liked the voice acting in the cut scenes in the original game. At the same time, a number of the community modules I've seen have some of the WORST voice acting I've ever heard. This brings me to an unintentional point...
While I respect the amount of effort that often goes into recording voice clips, and when well done they can often add to the game, bad voice acting can really take the player out of the game.
I honestly miss the good ol' days when there was no voice acting though. I credit Squaresoft to teaching me to read in my younger years. From age 6 up through highschool I read maybe 2 books total, yet always scored post graduate level on reading tests, and I think this is thanks to my heavy RGP habbit, which required loads of reading.
I honestly don't understand the problem here. You answered your own question, use a live cd. There are plenty of live cd's out, pick one and go with it. If your using dialup, then use a meta-live-cd-distro to roll your own live cd that includes drivers for your modem. You'll never be 100% secure. Even if you use a live cd and keep your side 100% secure (impossible) then what about on the other end?
I agree that Nintendo is stubborn, but their problem is not that every other game is Mario or Zelda, quite the opposite in fact. Nintendo's first party games are consistently high quality and sell well, the problem is that they are too reluctant to take proper advantage of this (though the trend seems to be turning around a bit)
by your line of reasoning, my lung provide a symbiotic benefit to my heart. Much like the bacteria in my intestines. Ergo my lungs are distinct living entities. Since my lungs are made of human DNA then my lungs must be a human, which must b given human rights. Therefore if one of my lungs were to have a problem, it should be illegal to remove it, because it's human.
I, apparently, have a much different reading list than most of slashdot, since I have not ready many of the books listed, nor have some of my most influential books been listed, so here are some books wich I found either influential, or just really good.
Flatland - A Romance of Many Dimentions. - this book was given to all the Calc II students my senior year of highschool (all 5 of us). It's a very interesting book on many levels. The way it introduces the reader to thinking outside the bounderies of what is possible, and the commentary on victorian society make this ~100 page, $4 book a must read for anyone with a few free hours.
Brave New World - This book has been mentioned before, but it's a great warning about what happens if we allow ourselves to be too distracted by the shiney pretty things (tv for example). If you get this, you may consider also getting Brave New World Revisited as a companion, it's a series of essays written by Huxley on many of the topics covered in Brave New World.
The Cathedral and the Bizzare - this is a great book for any CS student. It discusses the development philosophy of open vs closed source software.
Infinity and the Mind - this is a great book about the concept of infinity in all it's forms, mathematically, philosophically, socially, and includes a great discussion of paradoxes, logic, and the incompleteness theorum. I read this book in 3rd grade (though it's aimed more at the highschool level), and I think it's what first started to unleash the geek inside me.
Frankenstien - this book is about a monster, not a monster created by a mad doctor, but a monster tha lives inside the heart of man. A great book to champion diversity.
A Brief History of Time - this book is a great non-mathematical introduction of quantom physics, and some ideas behind quantom gravity. Reading this book made my physics classes a thousand fold easier by being able to understand the concepts before hand and learning the math behind it later.
while it's possible that this game could turn out to be a lot of fun (I'm not betting on it), I doubt it will be able to capture the quaint feeling of the harvest moon games.
While Harvest Moon involved farming, the game was more of a life sim than a farming sim. Growing crops was not inherently challenging, and wasn't intended to be. Instead the challenge came from balancing work, socializing, and recreation. Planting enough crops to be able to pay for that new house edition, or buy a horse, while still having enough free time to go fishing, collect wood, explore the forests and mountains, and chat with the towns people.
The game gives a real feeling of deep down satisfaction and contentment when you finally get that special someone to marry you, have a child, and are running a smooth farming operation while having time to spend with your spouse and child, and getting to attend the fairs and festivles and visit your friends in the town.
Somewhat offtopic, I would love to see a MMORPG version of Harvest Moon, where there would be 1 town for every 30 or so people, and you could travel between towns. People could farm or run other businesses and the players would be the townsfolk.
It seems to me that labeling a game as "christian" is setting it up for failure. While "Christian" themed things may be getting more popular, I highly doubt there is a large intersection between gamers and people who enjoy christian themed things.
Of course the problem is, if you are not going to label it Christian, then what? One could argue that religion should be left out of it, and that there should merely be some effort put into creating games which teach morailty. Of course morality even among christian denominations is highly variable.
I think alot of the problem is that people generally associate christian themed things with being preachy and uptight.
Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, I think that they have good intentions, wanting fun games that do not promote violence or gratuitous sex (though I don't personally see sexual themes as being very common in many games, other than the exaggerated portrail of many female characters). The problem is that by labeling it christian it will be passed up by people who might not otherwise pass it up.
I think a lot of times in america people forget that there are really religions beyond christianity, many of whom would likely be also interested in less violent games.
I think having free weather information is not only a good thing, it could save lives. I live in the midwest, where for a few months a year (tornado season), you can really be taking your ass in your hands if you don't keep up with the weather. I'm sure it's the same in other regions of the country with various other weather patterns (hurricanes in the south-east, snow storms in the north and north east).
I don't own a TV to be able to watch the weather on the local news, (thought I do have a weather radio), and for people like me, it can really be a good thing to have forwarning.
All that aside, this guy sounds like a real asshat because, while I could understand if the companies were doing any work, them wanting to make money, his complaint seems to be "Hey, don't just publish this information in a way anyone can get it for free, obfuscate it first so that we have a product to sell."
Of course, if all else fails you can easily tell the weather with just a rock and a string. First tie the rock to the string then hang it outside from a tree branch. When you want to know what the weather is outside, just look at the rock. If the rock is wet it's raining, if the rock is white it's snowing, if the rock is easy to see it's sunny, if the rock is hard to see it's cloudy. If the string is not perpendicular to the tree branch, it's windy. And if the rock is missing, tornado.
as others have said, get a lawyer. That said, here are my ill-informed and ill-thought-out remarks.
Since you have already given them the code before working out a license you might run into some problems down the road. If you have anything that you wanted to keep a trade secret or something else analogous to that, you may have a hard time now because you handed over the code.
That aside, what it seems like you were asking is for some ideas for fair licenses that still get you money.
I would suggest the license gives the company the right to have a copy of the source code, and they can do whatever inhouse development they want, but they are not allowed to release any source or distribute anything based on the source (or if they do they pay you more money / give you a cut / whatever). This always seemed like a fair compromize between OSS and proprietary software to me. You license the code as a base for any private in house development or use they want to do with it. They get the benefit of having code they can work with, and you are still getting paid for your work.
The problem with advertising in Video Games, I think, is the same problem with advertising on the internet. The problem is that advertisers have failed to understand the consequenes of the shift from passiver entertainment (TV, Radio) to active entertainment (video games, surfing the web). Commercials on TV are annoyining, but I doubt anyone finds them as annoying as those flash ads on certain websites that you have to sit through before continuing on to see various content *cough* IGN *cough* This is because when people watch tv they sit down and wait for information to be beamed to them, while when they surf the web they are actively seeking information.
I think that the whole problem (from the advertisers point of view) is exacerbated by the prevelance of banner-blindness that most people have developed through years of web surfing.
In Game advertising can add realism to a game, and the few examples of it I've seen in good games have never hampered the play experience. At the same time however, I generally don't pay attention enough to the ads that they have any effect.
I think that if in-game advertising is going to become truly useful to the advertisers, it will be in the relm of custom content creation. For a good example, look at The Sims. Some of the most popular custom content for that game were things like Pepsi branded vending machins and Intel computers.
As online connectivity and custom content (especially in PC games, but also now in console games) becomes the norm, I think we will see the successful advertisers generating branded custom content for the most popular games.
I don't think this even has to be such a bad thing, if done correctly it's a trade off, the companies provide something of value (custom game content) in exchange for viewing their ad's.
For example, imagine Neverwinter Nights, a game with a huge community of custom content creators, I don't think it would be a bad thing if Budwiser for example, were to create a free downloadable Tavern set, with some (appropriately fantasy styled) budwiser advertisements.
Another good exmple of this is Tony Hawks Underground, there are copious amounts of advertising for skating brands in the game, and in fact being sponsored by one of them is a major step in the game. I wouldn't see it as a bad thing if $Skateboarding_Company were to release a bunch of branded clothing, boards, and even skate parks for the next THUG game.
While what you say is true, I think there is a way for the parent's suggestion to work. The first thing is that each campaign does not have to be unique. Considering that the average campaign consists of maybe 5 people, 7 at the max. Since there are a LOT of people who have to play any given game for it to be profitable. Because of this it's completely feasible to have a set of maybe 20 or 30 pre-written quests of varying levels that players could take on. Outside of this, add a full standard MMORPG world for players to interact and create their own stories. Offer the standard game at a lower than normal rate, then have the quests as sort of an ala-carte add-on to the game. I don't think a company would have to higher a DM, if there were a way for players to report people who are not RPing well.
just play the first 30 seconds of It's a small world or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then cut it abruptly and allow people to entertain themseleves by singing either of those songs to themselves over and over again for the next several days.
go ahead, try it
it's a small world afterall
it's a small world after....
but I've never been able to get into the swing (pun intended) of Eclipse. NetBeans has always just seemed overall more comfortable to me.
It seems that while eclipse supports some really nice features (refactoring comes to mind), the way it handles the little things just make it seem less refined to me.
It also seems to me that too many of the useful features for eclipse are pay-for plugins.
Other than code refactoring and it's support of swt, can anyone point out any other benefits Eclipse provides over NetBeans or Project Builder?
AFAIK this is true, because funny does not affect your karma, but all the other options do. Perhaps we should have a -1 not-funny or -1 nice try which would not affect karma to counter-balance this?
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Neither a .sxw or a PDF one would be very useful for someone new to PCs - they need some basic knowledge to even view it, and it would get incredibly confusing to try to use the computer and read instructions off it at the same time.
Actually a better solution would be to put the pdf on a floppy and send them off to kinkos. I didn't RTFA so I dunno how long this document is, but I know that for anything of any length it's easier to go up to a print shop instead of waiting for a slow arse home printer to print it off anyway, plus you can get them to hole punch it and put it in a binder, or put it in one of those spiral binding things. The thing about this is, as cheap as floppy disks and CDs are now, one could put a copy of this on floppy and bundle it with some Fedora CDs, tell the person to take the disk up to kinko's and have the document print off and they have everything they need to get started.
On behalf of Lucas and co.
Fuck you, you'll buy what we release and like it.
Thank you, Lucasfilms.
I think that was somewhat the point of the article, the shitty software patent system in the US is effecting everyone else i the world.
The problem, at it's heart, I think, is the incongruence of technology and law. On the one hand, lawmakers don't understand technology well enough to write good laws, and on the other hand technology is such a broad topic and a fast moving target that even if there were a bunch of technologically savvy people in position to write technology laws, the way the system exists today by the time a law was written, passed and enacted the lawmakers would be 6 months behind on what needs to be done.
I think one of the major factors to this is that people both in and out of industry don't really understand how blazingly fast technology moves. While 10 years might be reasonable for a phsical invention, having ANYTHING locked up in patents in software is going to stifle innovation horribly.
I'm all for companies who invent new and great things in the world of software to be able to make money on it, they put in the work and they deserve it. But the reality is that software patents really don't seem to necessary. If I invent some super great algorithm and software based around it, and really do keep it a secret untill it's released in my product, by the time my competitors are able to churn out a competing product I already have mindshare and better damn well already be working on the next version of my software.
Of course the corperations won't be happy without a patent, and in some sence it's even justifiable to say that they are right to want some insurance that nobody else can rip off their idea, but if the lawmakers are going to get paid off to allow software patents, I think it should be for a maximum of 1 year. This gives them a head start as a reward for their work, but still allows innovation.
This all of course doesn't address the problem with junk patents, but at least it would go some way to minimizing the damage. I'd much rather we only have to wait for 1 year to be able to have applications which use double click or radio buttons than 10 years.
From the looks at it, the price is work it just for having wireless configured. It's a real PITA.
This does look really nice though, and I'm glad to see that they are using Suse, which seems to be the best "User Oriented" distrobution out there. I'm actually a little suprised that they can make a notebook no more expensive than it is with all supported hardware, as I've noticed Linux compatible hardware tends to be a wee bit more expensive than non-supported hardware.
I do have two concerns though, first off is the quality of the notebook. OS aside, if the hardware isn't robust enough to stand up to lots of abuse, then it won't sell well and someone will probably blame that on Linux. The second concern I have is that while Suse Professional is wonderful, the personal edition seems to really lack some important things (like a compiler. I don't care if your not a developer, if your using linux at some point you will want to install software that has to be compiled for your system).
I think your completely off base here, I'll use myself as a counter example. Every machine I own is x86 hardware running Linux (except my Laptop, wich is an iBook running OS X). I have 1 fairly high-end machine I use as my primary desktop machine. A Pentium 4 1.9gz with 3GB ram and a GeForce FX 5900. Now lets say it's a few months from now and the Doom 3 Linux client is available, so I decide I'd like to play it. For $50 I can go out and buy the game, download the Linux client (AFAIK the Doom 3 Linux client will be much like the NWN Linux Client, buy the windows version and then use an installer downloaded from the net to install on Linux). Now I'm playing Doom 3.
Total Cost to me, a reasonable $50 and about an hour of time invested (driving to the store, back, installation).
Now let's say ID decided not to release a Linux version of Doom 3, but I still really want to play it. Now I have to go Buy doom 3 for $50, plus a version of Windows, we'll say $80 for WinXP Home. Now I need to buy a new hard drive, say $50 for the cheapest drive I could find. Unfortunately now I also need to get an IDE controller card, since all the IDE slots on my computer are already being used ($20 should do for something not great but ok), Now I have to make sure this IDE card doesn't screw up my Linux installation. Now if I don't want to go that route I'm going to have to back up an entire drive in my Linux box, since Windows will eat a Linux parition. So I'm going to have to install Windows and then restore all my data that I backed up. Now when I boot into windows I need to make sure I'm off the net and download all the windows security patches, and while I'm doing that I probably need to buy an antivirus package to make sure I don't get turned into a spam relay.
Now how rediculous does it sound to not be able to afford (money and time wise) XP Home but be able to pay for a legit copy of a game?
That way the market can be flooded with low quality games that suck, because anyone can do it.
This has always been sony's strenght, and is one of the reasons that Sony beat out Sega and Nintendo during the 32bit console wars (the other reasons being mainly Nintendo and Sega both shooting themselves in their respective feet). If you have the money to make a game an dpay sony's licensing fee, then you can make a PS2 game. Sure this leads to a lot of crappy games, but it also is what leads to really Unique and really fun games. Games that Nintendo especially just wouldn't let get made. It's sort of like the million monkey theory, if you make games easier to make, you get more developers, and you have a higher probability of getting someone to make something really unexpected and really fun.
I'm not sure why game developers think that First Person Action is a good thing, it's always seemed like a good way to ruin a perfectly good game to me. The first FPA game I remember playing was Turok on Nintendo 64, which wasn't TOO bad because it was mainly a shooter. More recently Metroid Prime tried to be a full action title from a first person perspective, and it was a real pain. The real problem is a First Person perspective doesn't lend itself well to timing jumps and dealing with a lot of other elements common in an action or platformer game.
Why is it that developers feel the need to periodically scrap everything they've been working on
The reason is that often times the original design of something does not facilitate the structured adding of newer features. Mainly because the $foo is first developed nobody has any idea that people will want to be doing $bar 10 years down the road. Finally someone finds a way to allower $bar by tacking on a few things to $foo with superglue and duck tape. At first this is no big deal $bar is just a small little thing and it doesn't invalidate the design of $foo. Eventually more people use duck tape and superglue to add things to $foo and use duck tape and superglue to add more things to $bar untill what your left with is a big ball of tape and glue supported percariously with popsicle sticks and rubberbands. In this case it can be better to then redesign $foo to provide a better structure for things like $bar to be added without so much cruft. Othertimes it's decided that all the things like $bar should just be given a seperate program/protocol/whatever and $foo should to back to what it was originally.
Let's look at all this in the case of HTTP. Things like Java applets, Flash, even Javascript, are all hacks to get around the limitations of HTTP. Ofcourse I don't think that we are nearing critical mass of things being added onto HTTP, but the problem is certainly comming along. I think the latter of the above solutions is preferable in this case. HTTP is a good protocol and still serves a usefull purpose, what we need though is a second protocol for dynamic content.
Hmm, I thought it was a good way to see how well you can tell based on the content of the email itself. Plus it forces one to get into the mind of the average user who CAN'T tell that a site is a fraud based on the URL or even based on the fact that the page it takes them too looks nothing like the companies website.
The trick isn't that you have to let the casual player get the same goods as the compulsive player, the trick is to make the low level quests just as fun as the upper level quests. The people who really care if they have the +50 Longsword of Doom are the people who will play 18 hours a day. The thing is that walking around killing rats or doing quests where you have to beat up gobilns for the umpteenth time. What I think needs to happen to to make a truly successful MMORPG is this...
Reverse the quest length and complexity, in most games the longer and more involved quests are for the upper level characters. Instead focus on giving lower level characters more story and puzzle intensive quests to make up for the lack of epicness of the quests.
Make a larger variety of low level enemies. While we all know there are all manner of interesting dragons and phantoms and planar beasts in the upper levels, how come every level 1-10 level enemy looks like the same rats, slimes and goblins we've seen over and over again with slighly different colored textures. Create a wider variety of low-level enemies to balanced out the upper level enemies.
No quest level gap. There should be a few quests designed for EVERY level. No "level 1 to 5" stuff , there should be one or more quests (depending on length), that correspond to a given level, and after completing the quests the player should be assured to gain a level. A player should NOT run out of out of character quests to complete and still have to fight random things to level up. I realize this is easier said then done when considering things like soloing vs party play, allowing players to take on quests of higher or lower levels to adjust their difficulty, and making quests with better treasure more difficult, but I think these are some ideas whos time has come.
Although this sounds really nice, one thing I've noticed is that all of the previous versions (just like any lower end machine) have been pretty starved for ram, and with the G5 being a 64 bit processor, this could really exacerbate the problem. Ram prices don't seem to be getting any cheaper, so I wonder if they will raise the price and double the ram, or what. I've not worked on any of the newer generation imacs (last ones I did hardware work on were running OS 7 I think), but they are not really easy to upgrade later IIRC. This might lead some people to think the machines are much less powerful than they really are.
I thought that most of the voice acting in the official Neverwinter Nights campaigns was really good (though I think the PCs could use a bit more than the 2 or 3 catch phrases). I especially liked the voice acting in the cut scenes in the original game. At the same time, a number of the community modules I've seen have some of the WORST voice acting I've ever heard. This brings me to an unintentional point...
While I respect the amount of effort that often goes into recording voice clips, and when well done they can often add to the game, bad voice acting can really take the player out of the game.
I honestly miss the good ol' days when there was no voice acting though. I credit Squaresoft to teaching me to read in my younger years. From age 6 up through highschool I read maybe 2 books total, yet always scored post graduate level on reading tests, and I think this is thanks to my heavy RGP habbit, which required loads of reading.
I honestly don't understand the problem here. You answered your own question, use a live cd. There are plenty of live cd's out, pick one and go with it. If your using dialup, then use a meta-live-cd-distro to roll your own live cd that includes drivers for your modem. You'll never be 100% secure. Even if you use a live cd and keep your side 100% secure (impossible) then what about on the other end?
I agree that Nintendo is stubborn, but their problem is not that every other game is Mario or Zelda, quite the opposite in fact. Nintendo's first party games are consistently high quality and sell well, the problem is that they are too reluctant to take proper advantage of this (though the trend seems to be turning around a bit)
by your line of reasoning, my lung provide a symbiotic benefit to my heart. Much like the bacteria in my intestines. Ergo my lungs are distinct living entities. Since my lungs are made of human DNA then my lungs must be a human, which must b given human rights. Therefore if one of my lungs were to have a problem, it should be illegal to remove it, because it's human.
I, apparently, have a much different reading list than most of slashdot, since I have not ready many of the books listed, nor have some of my most influential books been listed, so here are some books wich I found either influential, or just really good.
Flatland - A Romance of Many Dimentions. - this book was given to all the Calc II students my senior year of highschool (all 5 of us). It's a very interesting book on many levels. The way it introduces the reader to thinking outside the bounderies of what is possible, and the commentary on victorian society make this ~100 page, $4 book a must read for anyone with a few free hours.
Brave New World - This book has been mentioned before, but it's a great warning about what happens if we allow ourselves to be too distracted by the shiney pretty things (tv for example). If you get this, you may consider also getting Brave New World Revisited as a companion, it's a series of essays written by Huxley on many of the topics covered in Brave New World.
The Cathedral and the Bizzare - this is a great book for any CS student. It discusses the development philosophy of open vs closed source software.
Infinity and the Mind - this is a great book about the concept of infinity in all it's forms, mathematically, philosophically, socially, and includes a great discussion of paradoxes, logic, and the incompleteness theorum. I read this book in 3rd grade (though it's aimed more at the highschool level), and I think it's what first started to unleash the geek inside me.
Frankenstien - this book is about a monster, not a monster created by a mad doctor, but a monster tha lives inside the heart of man. A great book to champion diversity.
A Brief History of Time - this book is a great non-mathematical introduction of quantom physics, and some ideas behind quantom gravity. Reading this book made my physics classes a thousand fold easier by being able to understand the concepts before hand and learning the math behind it later.
while it's possible that this game could turn out to be a lot of fun (I'm not betting on it), I doubt it will be able to capture the quaint feeling of the harvest moon games.
While Harvest Moon involved farming, the game was more of a life sim than a farming sim. Growing crops was not inherently challenging, and wasn't intended to be. Instead the challenge came from balancing work, socializing, and recreation. Planting enough crops to be able to pay for that new house edition, or buy a horse, while still having enough free time to go fishing, collect wood, explore the forests and mountains, and chat with the towns people.
The game gives a real feeling of deep down satisfaction and contentment when you finally get that special someone to marry you, have a child, and are running a smooth farming operation while having time to spend with your spouse and child, and getting to attend the fairs and festivles and visit your friends in the town.
Somewhat offtopic, I would love to see a MMORPG version of Harvest Moon, where there would be 1 town for every 30 or so people, and you could travel between towns. People could farm or run other businesses and the players would be the townsfolk.
It seems to me that labeling a game as "christian" is setting it up for failure. While "Christian" themed things may be getting more popular, I highly doubt there is a large intersection between gamers and people who enjoy christian themed things.
Of course the problem is, if you are not going to label it Christian, then what? One could argue that religion should be left out of it, and that there should merely be some effort put into creating games which teach morailty. Of course morality even among christian denominations is highly variable.
I think alot of the problem is that people generally associate christian themed things with being preachy and uptight.
Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, I think that they have good intentions, wanting fun games that do not promote violence or gratuitous sex (though I don't personally see sexual themes as being very common in many games, other than the exaggerated portrail of many female characters). The problem is that by labeling it christian it will be passed up by people who might not otherwise pass it up.
I think a lot of times in america people forget that there are really religions beyond christianity, many of whom would likely be also interested in less violent games.
I think having free weather information is not only a good thing, it could save lives. I live in the midwest, where for a few months a year (tornado season), you can really be taking your ass in your hands if you don't keep up with the weather. I'm sure it's the same in other regions of the country with various other weather patterns (hurricanes in the south-east, snow storms in the north and north east).
I don't own a TV to be able to watch the weather on the local news, (thought I do have a weather radio), and for people like me, it can really be a good thing to have forwarning.
All that aside, this guy sounds like a real asshat because, while I could understand if the companies were doing any work, them wanting to make money, his complaint seems to be "Hey, don't just publish this information in a way anyone can get it for free, obfuscate it first so that we have a product to sell."
Of course, if all else fails you can easily tell the weather with just a rock and a string. First tie the rock to the string then hang it outside from a tree branch. When you want to know what the weather is outside, just look at the rock. If the rock is wet it's raining, if the rock is white it's snowing, if the rock is easy to see it's sunny, if the rock is hard to see it's cloudy. If the string is not perpendicular to the tree branch, it's windy. And if the rock is missing, tornado.
as others have said, get a lawyer. That said, here are my ill-informed and ill-thought-out remarks.
Since you have already given them the code before working out a license you might run into some problems down the road. If you have anything that you wanted to keep a trade secret or something else analogous to that, you may have a hard time now because you handed over the code.
That aside, what it seems like you were asking is for some ideas for fair licenses that still get you money.
I would suggest the license gives the company the right to have a copy of the source code, and they can do whatever inhouse development they want, but they are not allowed to release any source or distribute anything based on the source (or if they do they pay you more money / give you a cut / whatever). This always seemed like a fair compromize between OSS and proprietary software to me. You license the code as a base for any private in house development or use they want to do with it. They get the benefit of having code they can work with, and you are still getting paid for your work.
The problem with advertising in Video Games, I think, is the same problem with advertising on the internet. The problem is that advertisers have failed to understand the consequenes of the shift from passiver entertainment (TV, Radio) to active entertainment (video games, surfing the web). Commercials on TV are annoyining, but I doubt anyone finds them as annoying as those flash ads on certain websites that you have to sit through before continuing on to see various content *cough* IGN *cough* This is because when people watch tv they sit down and wait for information to be beamed to them, while when they surf the web they are actively seeking information.
I think that the whole problem (from the advertisers point of view) is exacerbated by the prevelance of banner-blindness that most people have developed through years of web surfing.
In Game advertising can add realism to a game, and the few examples of it I've seen in good games have never hampered the play experience. At the same time however, I generally don't pay attention enough to the ads that they have any effect.
I think that if in-game advertising is going to become truly useful to the advertisers, it will be in the relm of custom content creation. For a good example, look at The Sims. Some of the most popular custom content for that game were things like Pepsi branded vending machins and Intel computers.
As online connectivity and custom content (especially in PC games, but also now in console games) becomes the norm, I think we will see the successful advertisers generating branded custom content for the most popular games.
I don't think this even has to be such a bad thing, if done correctly it's a trade off, the companies provide something of value (custom game content) in exchange for viewing their ad's.
For example, imagine Neverwinter Nights, a game with a huge community of custom content creators, I don't think it would be a bad thing if Budwiser for example, were to create a free downloadable Tavern set, with some (appropriately fantasy styled) budwiser advertisements.
Another good exmple of this is Tony Hawks Underground, there are copious amounts of advertising for skating brands in the game, and in fact being sponsored by one of them is a major step in the game. I wouldn't see it as a bad thing if $Skateboarding_Company were to release a bunch of branded clothing, boards, and even skate parks for the next THUG game.
While what you say is true, I think there is a way for the parent's suggestion to work. The first thing is that each campaign does not have to be unique. Considering that the average campaign consists of maybe 5 people, 7 at the max. Since there are a LOT of people who have to play any given game for it to be profitable. Because of this it's completely feasible to have a set of maybe 20 or 30 pre-written quests of varying levels that players could take on. Outside of this, add a full standard MMORPG world for players to interact and create their own stories. Offer the standard game at a lower than normal rate, then have the quests as sort of an ala-carte add-on to the game. I don't think a company would have to higher a DM, if there were a way for players to report people who are not RPing well.
just play the first 30 seconds of It's a small world or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then cut it abruptly and allow people to entertain themseleves by singing either of those songs to themselves over and over again for the next several days.
go ahead, try it
it's a small world afterall
it's a small world after....
but I've never been able to get into the swing (pun intended) of Eclipse. NetBeans has always just seemed overall more comfortable to me.
It seems that while eclipse supports some really nice features (refactoring comes to mind), the way it handles the little things just make it seem less refined to me.
It also seems to me that too many of the useful features for eclipse are pay-for plugins.
Other than code refactoring and it's support of swt, can anyone point out any other benefits Eclipse provides over NetBeans or Project Builder?
AFAIK this is true, because funny does not affect your karma, but all the other options do. Perhaps we should have a -1 not-funny or -1 nice try which would not affect karma to counter-balance this?