I wish they would make a Star Trek MMORPG. They could set it in the TNG timeline so it doesn't step on future storylines in movies and series.
What would you do in a Star Trek MMORPG? Instead of powerleveling it would be power ranking.
Step 1. create new character with L337 name.
Step 2. power-promote yourself from cadet to admiral.
Step 3. become an inter-galactic warlord poising your fleet of L337 ships against your friends.
The problem is, in a Star Trek MMORPG you'd have to be some kind of an outlaw or wildcard character like Quark in DS9. You could never be a starfleet officer or any kind of galactic government officer because everything you'd do would theoretically be dictated by an order from a higher commanding officer... how's that fun?
SWG's concept works because you can create a character in a vast star wars like world. You're not bound by orders or uniform oath.:)
What's next? Wookies don't make the wookie sound right? The pull of gravity is off in comparison to the total mass of the planet they're on? Hyperspeed is measured in incorrect units? Light saber power sources have incorrect yields?
Sony is messing with the wrong kind of geek here. Unless they get it just right they're not satisfied. Between Star Wars and Star Trek you can't get a more hardcore geek.
Networks are stuffed full of leeching goits who deliberatly try and minimise the ammount they upload, making P2P much less useful.
The best P2P solutions are ones run where bandwidth is excessive (DC on campuses for example, where 1mb/sec upload was no skin off the nose of the user with 100mb/sec internally)
Kind of off topic, but can you imagine how many people are going to become leeches and begin deliberately trying to minimise how much they upload after ISPs across the world start limiting monthly bandwidth? The trend is starting and there are some ISPs doing this. P2P is going to hurt badly if monthly bandwidth restrictions start coming in because NO ONE and I mean NO ONE is going to consider 1mb/sec upload "no skin off" their back.
I wouldn't call it a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense.
No, it isn't a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense. Bit torrent is perfect for short term kinds of downloads.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say I make games and I release a patch for it once a month. If every one of my hundreds of thousands of users tried to download that patch at the same time, my bandwidth would be slashdotted so to speak. Even if I could handle the load, I'd be consuming gigs and gigs of bandwidth in just a few days.
But if I torrent that file to all my users then the bandwidth consumption spreads across the internet like a virus (for lack of a better word) and I save money. It's also better for the user because they're not relying on a central server to supply the file. If my server goes down 12 hours after the patch is released, the file is still being distributed across the net.
Obviously in 6 months the torrent won't be as reliable a downloading source because the patch is too old and not as many people are patching. After a week, the rush of people grabbing the file at the same time is over and then I release the real thing instead of the torrent on my website so the people who were too late in the patching can get it.
The beauty of torrent is timing. If you have a popular file to share at a specific time, torrent's your application.
If EQ is simply a computer game, then why is there such thing as an "EQ Widows" group?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to deny the fact that there are people out there who get addicted to games, but they are quite a minority in comparison to casual players. Personally, I played UO regularly for 2 years and eventually quit because the changes no longer suited me. I remember some people who fit your stereotype, but most people didn't and that was that.
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with a massively multiplayer game. The consensus for the non-players out there seems to be that it's a drug like heroin and it's not. I really get tired of people who try to claim otherwise. Using your own argument, if EQ et al is such a problem then why are there so many people like me who've played massively multiplayer games and will honestly say its some of the best gaming they've ever done in their life?
Answer: Take MMORPGs with the good and the bad. There's just as many people, if not more, addicted to Quake3. You just don't read about it in the news.
The biggest problem with those is there is no place to put good old fashion pen to paper.
The extra space in a conventional desk is better for more than just pen and paper. I often have stacks of random cds, cups of soda/orange juice/whatever (depending on the time of day and my mood), handy programming textbooks of whatever languages I'm working on at the moment, a couple of USB gravis game controllers for my various console emulators, and a series of other pointless things that go on a desk.
Point being, a computer desk needs desk space! People surround themselves with junk and if you remove that junk it makes you feel naked in a way. If I sat in one of their "chairs of the future" I'd probably get disoriented.
I'll take an executive leather chair w/spacious desk to a chair/desk hybrid any day.
I was a pretty regular UO player for a while, also an EA game, and if there's one thing I can remember more than anything it's how much we all made fun of The SIMS players. Just about everyone who played that game was considered an instant pansy and no one wanted to associate with them. It was almost like that one kid in every high school who comes to school dressed like a 50s child.
There's nothing wrong with dressing like that, or playing the Sims online. But the game just has this bad blood; a bad reputation. Kinda like the bad reputation Everquest seems to be getting with all these anti MMORPG articles popping up.
Piracy these days is like liquor during prohibition. It may be illegal, but that's not stopping the masses. I wish the RIAA would just accept that and stop wasting their money busting harmless college kids who just want to listen to music. The RIAA is fighting for a lost cause.
Tracking by causality, Enterprise takes place AFTER Voyager. The Federation won, invented time travel, and now is fighting itself in a "Temporal Cold War."
Enterprise should be purposefully different in several key ways from the earlier 'treks., and it should feel free to break continuity. Anyone who's been paying attention won't find it any more discontinuous than First Contact.
Exactly. I don't understand why so many people criticize Berman and Braga. I personally feel that since the 1960s the show in all its incarnations has only gotten better. There are very few episodes from TOS to Ent that I didn't like.
I think people are looking the gift horse in the mouth and are expecting too much. You can't have another war with the Dominion. You can't have another starship lost in the Delta quadrant. You can't have another galaxy class starship exploring the alpha quadrant at warp 9. Enterprise and its Temporal Cold War is original and I only for see its involvement in the temporal cold war growing. I'd like to see more of the captain Braxston-style time ship from the future kind of thing.
Think twice before you bomb Berman and Braga. They've written some of the most moving stories over the past decade and I'd vouch for either one of them being a superior story writer than Roddenberry himself.
I'd like a Linux distro that installs even easier than Windows and auto configs my hardware. If it can't auto config my hardware, don't give me a million popups or error messages, just let it go, give me a GUI, and let me start configuring my system from a friendly interface.
I'd like a Linux distro that doesn't require its users to be geeks.
I want to never see the console, I want the gui to be friendly.
Trivialities between KDE and Gnome desktops, Windows vs. Mac, etc are just that: trivial.
The OS that gets used the most is the one thats portable and easy to install.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm tired of reading stories about people being struck down by the exploitation of copyright laws. So I'm glad at least one judge out there realizes that file sharing is not something that should be illegal!
The central issue with pirated media is the fact that the masses simply don't want to pay for it anymore and are circumventing the business model of the distributors. It IS illegal and it borders on unethical but it is what it is. You can either fight it or use it to your advantage. And if I were the music/movie industry I'd start distributing my media for free on the net myself embedded with ads in unintrusive spots. The people would as a result like me and I'd profit from the net instead of having to waste my profits fighting it.
But let's face it, neither option is going to profit the oligopolized music/movie industry as much as it was profiting 20 years ago. Times change. They need to adapt or go out of business. This messing around with legislation just makes it worse and the pirating more rampant.
Remember Napster? Now theres Kazaa, Winmx, Gnutella, direct connect, need I go on?
My hope is that some day all the judges will strike down the greedy music industry et al. They're not fighting because they're "loosing money." They're fighting because they're loosing control. They're loosing control of their oligopoly and price fixing due to this new technology called the internet.
I've always been a strong believer that censoring children from the real world is retarded. Your typical American family would have their children grow up believing that there's nothing wrong with the world. That everything is minivan and soccer games. Children get censored from things like crime, war, sex, and violence. They grow up not understanding how to handle these sorts of things and only become a bigger part of the world's problems.
Whether it be censorship on the internet or parental censorship of a pr0n mag, I think censorship to "protect" our children is a bad idea. Hurts more than it helps.
Not just MS, but software making companies all over the world charge way too much money for software. The number one reason there's so much pirating is because software simply costs too much. But reduced prices or not, I'll still favor Open Source over anything else.
However, they proved that using DNA and enzymes could lead to a exponentially faster computers. If a future scientific discovery allows for the on-the-spot programming of DNA that a DNA computer would need, conventional computers would instantly become obsolete.
I understand why you're not impressed, but this just another step toward the development of serious, powerful bio technology.
Seriously, I'm curious, where did your idea that we must get to Alpha Centauri come from?
Being the closest solar system to our's, (1 to 2 light years or something.. not sure) it is the next step in space exploration beyond our own solar system. I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that there is supposedly something big (planet sized) orbiting the sun in the "Goldilox Zone" which is the area far enough away from the sun, but close enough as well to have a planet able to support human life.
Now, I could have been reading some BS, but the chances of us being the only intellegent life in this galaxy are pretty damn slim and I think there are things out there that we should see.
Also, I never said anything about a colony on a human life-supporting planet. We could colonize a rocky moon of some random planet in that solar system just as easily as we could colonize the moon. The point is, the technology is there, but the initiative is not.
Exploring space and developing new ways of traveling through space is the only way we can ensure that the human race survives the coming centuries or millennia. Some day Earth is going to be devastated by a meteor. Some day our sun will run out of helium to burn and expand into a red giant, boiling away our oceans. If we have colonies in other solar systems, humanity will survive.
The only reason space isn't the top priority of all of the governments of the world today is because we humans as a majority don't really seem to care what happens to our great great great great (and so on) grandchildren. We only care about the here and now. The folks and NASA and the folks in other space programs across the world may be the only ones who care about the future of humanity.
We (the United States) need to stop wasting our money on our already most-powerful military for the purpose of revenge against the middle east and start backing NASA more. Start researching new ways to travel in space, and make a colony in Alpha Century a priority. If we really are the evolved species we claim to be, we'll start caring less about squabbles on this blue marble and more about exploring the universe in which we live.
But again, that's just my 2 cents (and a paper clip)
I live in southeastern Kansas, my provider is called Nautilus. The service has improved over the months, but its all around terrible. Each user is crammed onto a single IP, too. Hundreds of people on the same IP. When some kid gets himself IP banned from a popular service, the entire ISP's customer base suffers.
I've reported them to the BBB and haven't gotten many results. Is it so much to ask for a stable connection and my own IP?
Slashdot Mirror
What would you do in a Star Trek MMORPG? Instead of powerleveling it would be power ranking.
Step 1. create new character with L337 name.
Step 2. power-promote yourself from cadet to admiral.
Step 3. become an inter-galactic warlord poising your fleet of L337 ships against your friends.
:)
The problem is, in a Star Trek MMORPG you'd have to be some kind of an outlaw or wildcard character like Quark in DS9. You could never be a starfleet officer or any kind of galactic government officer because everything you'd do would theoretically be dictated by an order from a higher commanding officer... how's that fun?
SWG's concept works because you can create a character in a vast star wars like world. You're not bound by orders or uniform oath.
What's next? Wookies don't make the wookie sound right? The pull of gravity is off in comparison to the total mass of the planet they're on? Hyperspeed is measured in incorrect units? Light saber power sources have incorrect yields?
Sony is messing with the wrong kind of geek here. Unless they get it just right they're not satisfied. Between Star Wars and Star Trek you can't get a more hardcore geek.
Networks are stuffed full of leeching goits who deliberatly try and minimise the ammount they upload, making P2P much less useful.
The best P2P solutions are ones run where bandwidth is excessive (DC on campuses for example, where 1mb/sec upload was no skin off the nose of the user with 100mb/sec internally)
Kind of off topic, but can you imagine how many people are going to become leeches and begin deliberately trying to minimise how much they upload after ISPs across the world start limiting monthly bandwidth? The trend is starting and there are some ISPs doing this. P2P is going to hurt badly if monthly bandwidth restrictions start coming in because NO ONE and I mean NO ONE is going to consider 1mb/sec upload "no skin off" their back.
I wouldn't call it a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense.
No, it isn't a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense. Bit torrent is perfect for short term kinds of downloads.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say I make games and I release a patch for it once a month. If every one of my hundreds of thousands of users tried to download that patch at the same time, my bandwidth would be slashdotted so to speak. Even if I could handle the load, I'd be consuming gigs and gigs of bandwidth in just a few days.
But if I torrent that file to all my users then the bandwidth consumption spreads across the internet like a virus (for lack of a better word) and I save money. It's also better for the user because they're not relying on a central server to supply the file. If my server goes down 12 hours after the patch is released, the file is still being distributed across the net.
Obviously in 6 months the torrent won't be as reliable a downloading source because the patch is too old and not as many people are patching. After a week, the rush of people grabbing the file at the same time is over and then I release the real thing instead of the torrent on my website so the people who were too late in the patching can get it.
The beauty of torrent is timing. If you have a popular file to share at a specific time, torrent's your application.
If EQ is simply a computer game, then why is there such thing as an "EQ Widows" group?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to deny the fact that there are people out there who get addicted to games, but they are quite a minority in comparison to casual players. Personally, I played UO regularly for 2 years and eventually quit because the changes no longer suited me. I remember some people who fit your stereotype, but most people didn't and that was that.
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with a massively multiplayer game. The consensus for the non-players out there seems to be that it's a drug like heroin and it's not. I really get tired of people who try to claim otherwise. Using your own argument, if EQ et al is such a problem then why are there so many people like me who've played massively multiplayer games and will honestly say its some of the best gaming they've ever done in their life?
Answer: Take MMORPGs with the good and the bad. There's just as many people, if not more, addicted to Quake3. You just don't read about it in the news.
It looks just like one of those home gyms. [snip]
The biggest problem with those is there is no place to put good old fashion pen to paper.
The extra space in a conventional desk is better for more than just pen and paper. I often have stacks of random cds, cups of soda/orange juice/whatever (depending on the time of day and my mood), handy programming textbooks of whatever languages I'm working on at the moment, a couple of USB gravis game controllers for my various console emulators, and a series of other pointless things that go on a desk.
Point being, a computer desk needs desk space! People surround themselves with junk and if you remove that junk it makes you feel naked in a way. If I sat in one of their "chairs of the future" I'd probably get disoriented.
I'll take an executive leather chair w/spacious desk to a chair/desk hybrid any day.
I was a pretty regular UO player for a while, also an EA game, and if there's one thing I can remember more than anything it's how much we all made fun of The SIMS players. Just about everyone who played that game was considered an instant pansy and no one wanted to associate with them. It was almost like that one kid in every high school who comes to school dressed like a 50s child.
There's nothing wrong with dressing like that, or playing the Sims online. But the game just has this bad blood; a bad reputation. Kinda like the bad reputation Everquest seems to be getting with all these anti MMORPG articles popping up.
Why get up all early on a saturday morning when you can sleep in then download your cartoons via Kazaa whenever you want? Indeed the death of an era.
Piracy these days is like liquor during prohibition. It may be illegal, but that's not stopping the masses. I wish the RIAA would just accept that and stop wasting their money busting harmless college kids who just want to listen to music. The RIAA is fighting for a lost cause.
No, it doesn't.
Tracking by causality, Enterprise takes place AFTER Voyager. The Federation won, invented time travel, and now is fighting itself in a "Temporal Cold War."
Enterprise should be purposefully different in several key ways from the earlier 'treks., and it should feel free to break continuity. Anyone who's been paying attention won't find it any more discontinuous than First Contact.
Exactly. I don't understand why so many people criticize Berman and Braga. I personally feel that since the 1960s the show in all its incarnations has only gotten better. There are very few episodes from TOS to Ent that I didn't like.
I think people are looking the gift horse in the mouth and are expecting too much. You can't have another war with the Dominion. You can't have another starship lost in the Delta quadrant. You can't have another galaxy class starship exploring the alpha quadrant at warp 9. Enterprise and its Temporal Cold War is original and I only for see its involvement in the temporal cold war growing. I'd like to see more of the captain Braxston-style time ship from the future kind of thing.
Think twice before you bomb Berman and Braga. They've written some of the most moving stories over the past decade and I'd vouch for either one of them being a superior story writer than Roddenberry himself.
Just my 2 cents. (and a paperclip)
I'd like a Linux distro that installs even easier than Windows and auto configs my hardware. If it can't auto config my hardware, don't give me a million popups or error messages, just let it go, give me a GUI, and let me start configuring my system from a friendly interface.
I'd like a Linux distro that doesn't require its users to be geeks.
I want to never see the console, I want the gui to be friendly.
Trivialities between KDE and Gnome desktops, Windows vs. Mac, etc are just that: trivial.
The OS that gets used the most is the one thats portable and easy to install.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm tired of reading stories about people being struck down by the exploitation of copyright laws. So I'm glad at least one judge out there realizes that file sharing is not something that should be illegal!
The central issue with pirated media is the fact that the masses simply don't want to pay for it anymore and are circumventing the business model of the distributors. It IS illegal and it borders on unethical but it is what it is. You can either fight it or use it to your advantage. And if I were the music/movie industry I'd start distributing my media for free on the net myself embedded with ads in unintrusive spots. The people would as a result like me and I'd profit from the net instead of having to waste my profits fighting it.
But let's face it, neither option is going to profit the oligopolized music/movie industry as much as it was profiting 20 years ago. Times change. They need to adapt or go out of business. This messing around with legislation just makes it worse and the pirating more rampant.
Remember Napster? Now theres Kazaa, Winmx, Gnutella, direct connect, need I go on?
My hope is that some day all the judges will strike down the greedy music industry et al. They're not fighting because they're "loosing money." They're fighting because they're loosing control. They're loosing control of their oligopoly and price fixing due to this new technology called the internet.
I've never tried one, but I know people who have. Why do people do it? To save that $3.25. Greed. People will go out of their way to hoard free stuff.
Morons for not downloading a divx movie on Kazaa instead =P
That's much more effective piracy.
Why not just buy the artist's CD online at your local music store?Because that would require spending money. :)
It seems like Honest Thief is offering to pay record companies from the proceeds from an arguably untested business model
Untested is the key word. I think this idea is worth testing. People have been preaching this sort of thing for a long time; why not try it?
I've always been a strong believer that censoring children from the real world is retarded. Your typical American family would have their children grow up believing that there's nothing wrong with the world. That everything is minivan and soccer games. Children get censored from things like crime, war, sex, and violence. They grow up not understanding how to handle these sorts of things and only become a bigger part of the world's problems.
Whether it be censorship on the internet or parental censorship of a pr0n mag, I think censorship to "protect" our children is a bad idea. Hurts more than it helps.
Eh? According to Dictionary.com, that isn't correct. *shrugs*
Not just MS, but software making companies all over the world charge way too much money for software. The number one reason there's so much pirating is because software simply costs too much. But reduced prices or not, I'll still favor Open Source over anything else.
from the same civilisation that invented writing and the wheel
Many Slashdot story submitters must not have come from this "civilisation", because they obviously don't know how to spell civilization properly.
However, they proved that using DNA and enzymes could lead to a exponentially faster computers. If a future scientific discovery allows for the on-the-spot programming of DNA that a DNA computer would need, conventional computers would instantly become obsolete.
I understand why you're not impressed, but this just another step toward the development of serious, powerful bio technology.
Perhaps I should get into soundless music. That way, no one will have to yell at me from across the hall to turn it down!
Seriously, I'm curious, where did your idea that we must get to Alpha Centauri come from?
Being the closest solar system to our's, (1 to 2 light years or something.. not sure) it is the next step in space exploration beyond our own solar system. I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that there is supposedly something big (planet sized) orbiting the sun in the "Goldilox Zone" which is the area far enough away from the sun, but close enough as well to have a planet able to support human life.
Now, I could have been reading some BS, but the chances of us being the only intellegent life in this galaxy are pretty damn slim and I think there are things out there that we should see.
Also, I never said anything about a colony on a human life-supporting planet. We could colonize a rocky moon of some random planet in that solar system just as easily as we could colonize the moon. The point is, the technology is there, but the initiative is not.
Exploring space and developing new ways of traveling through space is the only way we can ensure that the human race survives the coming centuries or millennia. Some day Earth is going to be devastated by a meteor. Some day our sun will run out of helium to burn and expand into a red giant, boiling away our oceans. If we have colonies in other solar systems, humanity will survive.
The only reason space isn't the top priority of all of the governments of the world today is because we humans as a majority don't really seem to care what happens to our great great great great (and so on) grandchildren. We only care about the here and now. The folks and NASA and the folks in other space programs across the world may be the only ones who care about the future of humanity.
We (the United States) need to stop wasting our money on our already most-powerful military for the purpose of revenge against the middle east and start backing NASA more. Start researching new ways to travel in space, and make a colony in Alpha Century a priority. If we really are the evolved species we claim to be, we'll start caring less about squabbles on this blue marble and more about exploring the universe in which we live.
But again, that's just my 2 cents (and a paper clip)
I live in southeastern Kansas, my provider is called Nautilus. The service has improved over the months, but its all around terrible. Each user is crammed onto a single IP, too. Hundreds of people on the same IP. When some kid gets himself IP banned from a popular service, the entire ISP's customer base suffers.
I've reported them to the BBB and haven't gotten many results. Is it so much to ask for a stable connection and my own IP?