Thank $Deity$ for dupes. I forgot to cancel my pre-order for a 10 ghz P4 CPU. But thanks to this dupe, I did cancel it and instead placed a pre-order on an 80 core CPU. YAY!
Thanks to *cough* downloading *cough* my CD collection grew by about 150+ CDs in the last 4 years. There are plenty of underground, non mainstream bands that put out quality music. Of course, 99% of the CDs I bought are made by bands who play infront of about 500-1000 people max. You just have to look and you will find some awesome music, even today.
If your music reference is MTV or radio, then yes, it's mostly garbage.
When I was in college, we started off learning different assemblers (PC and Mainframe), then we moved to C and C++. The same college, now starts teaching kids some RAD languages, Java, C# and whatnot. IMO, new students no longer learn the basis of the computer, how the CPU works, how compilers work and how interpreted code works.
One of my most memorable classes was the C++ class when the teacher started off by teaching how compilers actually compile your code. Directly from this you could easy see what code to write and what not to write. Those classes have been replaced by Java, where you don't even worry about resource leaks. Hey, garbage collector takes care of it!
To make good programmers, one has to understand the basis of it. Compilers, C and Assembler. If all they learn today, well mostly OOP stuff, they won't learn the basis well. And they will end up writing bloated code left and right.
Microsoft has only been found guilty in EU, USA, Japan and Korea?
I work for one these "big IT" companies you mention, we can not migrate to anything but Windows. It would cost us ridiculous amounts of money to migrate to anything else. This all thanks to the old corporate attitude "Hey, no one was ever fired for buying Microsoft!". I suspect many companies are in our position who have been locked in tight into the Windows mono culture.
But it's not just IT corporations. Why is buying a PC/Laptop without an OS installed like pulling teeth?
There's a some evidence (see? gravity! DARK MATTER!) but it's theoretical,
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but isn't the The Great Attractor more than theoretical proof of something dark that is attracting all those galaxies? Also, why do stars on the outer rim of galaxies revolve so fast around the core? Spiral galaxies do not seem to spin around their core like expected.
Dismissing dark matter as purely theoretical is shortsighted IMO.
Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly."
Unless my memory failed me, I do remember paying 49.99$ for WoW. There is no free software given away.
I like the "NOW is a great time to buy..." argument for anything that improves steadily over time. Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig?
Plenty of times. Usually when new architectures are coming out, Socket 754, 939, 775, AM2 and whatnot. During these times the generation of sockets before the "new" one is pretty cheap. Also the new socket might be a transitional socket like 754 that won't last for long time.
Now is NOT always the best time to buy a new rig.;)
The PartyPoker system goes on-line August 21, 2006. Human decisions are removed from the system. Skynet^H^H^H^HPartyPoker system begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
I converted my mother's Office suit to OOo about a year ago. She doing bio research so her documentation is mostly spreadsheets and your regular documents. She never ever once complained that OOo couldn't do something Office could. Let's face it, the common mortal doesn't use all features of Office, infact they use only a small subset of features.
When all you need are bold, italic, paragraphs, insert a picture here and there, simple formulas and whatnot. Why would one need Office?
There is plenty of normal interaction of MMOG guilds. One of my best friends, I met online in EQ. I've been playing various MMOGs with a group of about 40 or so people for many years now, we get toghether regulary every year for a weekend in some random city. Ironically, lot of "normal" human interaction happens, couples broke up because of infidelity! There is plenty of drama and good times you can have with people playing the same MMOG.
MMOGs help break down age barriers also, you might no socialize with a 50+ year old person (dumb stereotypes like: old man!) but thanks to MMOGs you get to know this person and you realize he is not too different from you, just older.
And if you decide to do some serious gaming like leading guilds, pvp raids, pve raids, you can improve a lot your leadership skills and teamwork. Ability to listen to other people's ideas and opinions vs your.
I am not a biologist, far from it but how can they develop a vaccine for a disease that hasn't appeared yet? I mean this bird flu is supposed to mutate into a dangerous virus that could kill a lot of humans but scientists don't know the final version of the virus yet they developped a vaccine for it?
I'm also interested in the corrupt VM statement. What exactly corrupted?
I am just a code monkey, so bare with me, I don't know the exact details. We had ESX at a certain patch level, one of our VM guys moved a database server from one host to another. The server wouldn't boot back up (Win2k3 + SQL 2005) after the move was complete. We contacted VMWare and they told us to apply a set of patches. The SQL servers were dead though and had to be rebuilt.
Virtualization is one of the best things since sliced bread and I believe it's here to stay.
While I do like virtualization, I think it is still in it's infancy. We migrated this ASP/VB/C++ legacy web application to virtual machines running on VMWare ESX, and after 4 transactions / second the host server was almost dead. The same application, on the same server but running native in Windows 2003, can easily do 35 transactions per second. Granted the application is coded using some archaic COM/RDS model but the performance hit using VMWare was ridiculous. It seems VMWare can't handle high number of context switches and high number of threads.
We have also seen some major latency issues with VMWare ESX's virtual network cards, basically a large file transfer could take up to 50% more time between two virtual servers vs two physical servers. Add to that corrupted VMs during VMotion and we aren't really confident about VMware ESX. Then there is also the limit of 4 virtual network cards per server, some mainframe gateway servers need more than that. No can do! There are clear limitations to it.
While I do beleive virtualization is here to stay, IMO it's not really good for production servers due to insane latency/overhead. I wouldn't say it's the best thing since sliced bread! It is great to test out architectural changes like adding a domain controller, new DNS and all that. It's great for transactional servers that are being tested or have very limited number of connections. It's great for users to test out programs before production migration, adding servers or workstations that are used as consoles, but as soon as you put pressure on VMWare it chokes.
I am hopeing that with Intel's and AMD's new virtualization technology VMWare will be able to beef up the performance of their offerings.
Maybe the problem here isn't other people, but your preconceptions about the way other people should play.
Exactly! Everyone has a certain idea what is immersive and what is not. That's why MMOG are not immersive because someone can break your own immersion but the same time this person sees nothing wrong with it. Even on RP servers there are roleplayers who constantly disagree how other roleplaying groups use dialogs and whanot, what is "acceptable" and what is not.
Is true immersion possible anywhere? Even applying some of your own rules your two suggested games are just as easily broken from immersion as MMOs.
IMO, true immersion is possible in single player games or in games where you can play with a limited number of friends who have about the same idea as you what immersion is and is not (usually pen and paper D&D pals). In single player games, there is no external factor that breaks your immersion, only you. Single player games or tightly controlled multi player games like Neverwinter Nights can give players great immersion.
I remember old Wing Commander games, Ultima games who had rich story and immersed the player into a completely different world.
(1) Players with retarded names. As soon as you log on and see someone with Drizzzzzt DoDurddden as character name, immersion breaks. There are also superb names like Scratch MyBalls or xTerminatorx and so on.
(2) These games have quests that everyone does. Oh wait, he killed the evil knight, wait, me too, him too, good bye immersion. Same thing with dragons that need raids to take down. That dragon will "magically" respawn in 7 days. But wait... didn't we kill it?
(3) As soon as you listen to players around you start to chat about RL stuff, who won what sports game, immersion is gone. Not to mention plenty of retards who use everything from butchered english to d00d/l33t speak: cna ne1 hepl me plz!!?!?!
There is no immersion in MMOGs, if you are looking for immersion, try single player games or NWN/Diablo type games with a group of friends who are into role playing.
Even though WoW is fun (and addicting), if I was playing another game it would be rather annoying to see WoW with just another game engine slapped over it. If you want to play WoW, then it is already there and waiting for you.
Vanguard could use elements that work great in WoW and implement them with their own gameplay elements. For example, WoW has proved that instances are fun and needed. Not to mention instances allow very creative encounters and great rewards for players because the designers control everything (including the number of people involved in the instance). Take away instances and you have good old issues that plagued EQ: boring fights, retarded competition for mobs where by guilds/players camp mobs. It augments the number of support calls and it encourages griefing. Which avenue did Vanguard chose? No instances. Yes they are planning to put boss mob encounters "on demand", sort of semi instance but even then, they will never be able to make awesome and complex encounters like WoW endzones have (well minus MC). You can't have a complex scripted encounter if you can't control the number of people during the encounter (aka no instances) because guilds will "zerg" it. EQ has proved that.
The more and more I look at Vanguard reminds me of EQ with all their faults. Lot of grinding, no instances, heaven for griefers and gold farmers. Most modern games have implemented ideas from other games, WoW is a perfect example of very little innovation but they cherry picked the stuff that worked in other game. Instances from Anarchy Online, fast paced combat from City of Heroes, PvP from DAoC, humor from... well ok, Warcraft, and so on.
Vanguard will be a huge flop. The designers who were responsible for the worse flaws EQ had didn't learn from their own mistakes, they are the ones designing Vanguard.
Well said. It still looks like the world of MMORPG is still 90% dungeons, dragons, and monsters
Fantasy MMOGs are a subgenre that seems to work well. There were many casualties in the non fantasy setting MMOGs. And even craptastic fantasy MMOs like Lineage II seem to do extremely well vs some innovating none fantasy game like Eve Online.
- Anarchy Online: while it had some innovative features like instances it failed, mostly because of Funcom's botched launch. - Star Wars Galaxies: butchered by SOE. - Earth and Beyond: butchered by EA. - City of Heroes/Villains: fun for a few months, game lacks soul and depth. - Matrix Online: Yeah...
The only real successful non fantasy MMOG was Eve Online, and even they have about 100k subscribers. In contrast, fantasy games sell like hotcakes: WoW, EQ2, Lineage II, and others.
A combination of publisher incompetence with retarded game changes/mechanics totally butchered the non fantasy subgenre of MMOGs. It's very unfortunate to see perfect MMO franchises like Matrix and Star Wars fail. I do agree that maybe the crowd of sci-fi MMO players don't want the leveling treadmill style games and game publishers didn't realize this yet. They might want more than kill mob, get N xp, rinse repeat.
There's a LegitCheckControl.dll floating around that you dump into c:\windows\system32 whilst in safe mode, give the PC a reboot and all is well. Windowsupdate etc work fine.
Not that I've tried it or anything...;)
Or simply flag the ActiveX as disabled. No need to download 3d party (unsafe) hacks.
Hmm, wasn't one of the arguments for intelligent design that the fundamental constants had to be "just right" for the universe to exist? If the shifts of other dimensions causes shifts in our universal constants...another nail in the necessity-of-God argument's coffin?
Won't religious fanatics just say that God is testing their faith? Or, that God is currently changing the universe, and infact that is a proof that God does exist? Faith for quite a few people is much stronger than logical reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't we all argue about this already yesterday.
Thank $Deity$ for dupes. I forgot to cancel my pre-order for a 10 ghz P4 CPU. But thanks to this dupe, I did cancel it and instead placed a pre-order on an 80 core CPU. YAY!
Thanks to *cough* downloading *cough* my CD collection grew by about 150+ CDs in the last 4 years. There are plenty of underground, non mainstream bands that put out quality music. Of course, 99% of the CDs I bought are made by bands who play infront of about 500-1000 people max. You just have to look and you will find some awesome music, even today.
If your music reference is MTV or radio, then yes, it's mostly garbage.
Actually, ten years... five years for it to come out and another five years before the price is right so Joe "Pimp My PC" Blow can afford it.
... oh wait a second! ;)
Yup! Just like the 10 GHZ Pentium IV. Can't wait
When I was in college, we started off learning different assemblers (PC and Mainframe), then we moved to C and C++. The same college, now starts teaching kids some RAD languages, Java, C# and whatnot. IMO, new students no longer learn the basis of the computer, how the CPU works, how compilers work and how interpreted code works.
One of my most memorable classes was the C++ class when the teacher started off by teaching how compilers actually compile your code. Directly from this you could easy see what code to write and what not to write. Those classes have been replaced by Java, where you don't even worry about resource leaks. Hey, garbage collector takes care of it!
To make good programmers, one has to understand the basis of it. Compilers, C and Assembler. If all they learn today, well mostly OOP stuff, they won't learn the basis well. And they will end up writing bloated code left and right.
There is no monopoly, it's a bunch of bologna.
;)
Microsoft has only been found guilty in EU, USA, Japan and Korea?
I work for one these "big IT" companies you mention, we can not migrate to anything but Windows. It would cost us ridiculous amounts of money to migrate to anything else. This all thanks to the old corporate attitude "Hey, no one was ever fired for buying Microsoft!". I suspect many companies are in our position who have been locked in tight into the Windows mono culture.
But it's not just IT corporations. Why is buying a PC/Laptop without an OS installed like pulling teeth?
There is no monopoly right?
There's a some evidence (see? gravity! DARK MATTER!) but it's theoretical,
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but isn't the The Great Attractor more than theoretical proof of something dark that is attracting all those galaxies? Also, why do stars on the outer rim of galaxies revolve so fast around the core? Spiral galaxies do not seem to spin around their core like expected.
Dismissing dark matter as purely theoretical is shortsighted IMO.
Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly."
Unless my memory failed me, I do remember paying 49.99$ for WoW. There is no free software given away.
My Radeon 9800 XT overheats, fun to see laser beam like lines during gameplay.
Drivers regulary crash my system.
Crappy Linux support.
I am never buying another ATI card.
I like the "NOW is a great time to buy..." argument for anything that improves steadily over time. Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig?
;)
Plenty of times. Usually when new architectures are coming out, Socket 754, 939, 775, AM2 and whatnot. During these times the generation of sockets before the "new" one is pretty cheap. Also the new socket might be a transitional socket like 754 that won't last for long time.
Now is NOT always the best time to buy a new rig.
The PartyPoker system goes on-line August 21, 2006.
Human decisions are removed from the system.
Skynet^H^H^H^HPartyPoker system begins to learn at a geometric rate.
It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.
In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
It fights back.
OOo is NOT a viable Office alternative.
I converted my mother's Office suit to OOo about a year ago. She doing bio research so her documentation is mostly spreadsheets and your regular documents. She never ever once complained that OOo couldn't do something Office could. Let's face it, the common mortal doesn't use all features of Office, infact they use only a small subset of features.
When all you need are bold, italic, paragraphs, insert a picture here and there, simple formulas and whatnot. Why would one need Office?
There is plenty of normal interaction of MMOG guilds. One of my best friends, I met online in EQ. I've been playing various MMOGs with a group of about 40 or so people for many years now, we get toghether regulary every year for a weekend in some random city. Ironically, lot of "normal" human interaction happens, couples broke up because of infidelity! There is plenty of drama and good times you can have with people playing the same MMOG.
MMOGs help break down age barriers also, you might no socialize with a 50+ year old person (dumb stereotypes like: old man!) but thanks to MMOGs you get to know this person and you realize he is not too different from you, just older.
And if you decide to do some serious gaming like leading guilds, pvp raids, pve raids, you can improve a lot your leadership skills and teamwork. Ability to listen to other people's ideas and opinions vs your.
# Defending yourself against them is really expensive, so some people settle. ... PROFIT!! (For RIAA.)
#
I seriously doubt RIAA makes any profit from 3,000$ dollar settlements. I would bet their lawyers cost more.
It's for humans.
I am not a biologist, far from it but how can they develop a vaccine for a disease that hasn't appeared yet? I mean this bird flu is supposed to mutate into a dangerous virus that could kill a lot of humans but scientists don't know the final version of the virus yet they developped a vaccine for it?
I'm also interested in the corrupt VM statement. What exactly corrupted?
I am just a code monkey, so bare with me, I don't know the exact details. We had ESX at a certain patch level, one of our VM guys moved a database server from one host to another. The server wouldn't boot back up (Win2k3 + SQL 2005) after the move was complete. We contacted VMWare and they told us to apply a set of patches. The SQL servers were dead though and had to be rebuilt.
Virtualization is one of the best things since sliced bread and I believe it's here to stay.
While I do like virtualization, I think it is still in it's infancy. We migrated this ASP/VB/C++ legacy web application to virtual machines running on VMWare ESX, and after 4 transactions / second the host server was almost dead. The same application, on the same server but running native in Windows 2003, can easily do 35 transactions per second. Granted the application is coded using some archaic COM/RDS model but the performance hit using VMWare was ridiculous. It seems VMWare can't handle high number of context switches and high number of threads.
We have also seen some major latency issues with VMWare ESX's virtual network cards, basically a large file transfer could take up to 50% more time between two virtual servers vs two physical servers. Add to that corrupted VMs during VMotion and we aren't really confident about VMware ESX. Then there is also the limit of 4 virtual network cards per server, some mainframe gateway servers need more than that. No can do! There are clear limitations to it.
While I do beleive virtualization is here to stay, IMO it's not really good for production servers due to insane latency/overhead. I wouldn't say it's the best thing since sliced bread! It is great to test out architectural changes like adding a domain controller, new DNS and all that. It's great for transactional servers that are being tested or have very limited number of connections. It's great for users to test out programs before production migration, adding servers or workstations that are used as consoles, but as soon as you put pressure on VMWare it chokes.
I am hopeing that with Intel's and AMD's new virtualization technology VMWare will be able to beef up the performance of their offerings.
How much of that money is coming from MS using it's monopoly and predatory practices?
Maybe the problem here isn't other people, but your preconceptions about the way other people should play.
Exactly! Everyone has a certain idea what is immersive and what is not. That's why MMOG are not immersive because someone can break your own immersion but the same time this person sees nothing wrong with it. Even on RP servers there are roleplayers who constantly disagree how other roleplaying groups use dialogs and whanot, what is "acceptable" and what is not.
Is true immersion possible anywhere? Even applying some of your own rules your two suggested games are just as easily broken from immersion as MMOs.
IMO, true immersion is possible in single player games or in games where you can play with a limited number of friends who have about the same idea as you what immersion is and is not (usually pen and paper D&D pals). In single player games, there is no external factor that breaks your immersion, only you. Single player games or tightly controlled multi player games like Neverwinter Nights can give players great immersion.
I remember old Wing Commander games, Ultima games who had rich story and immersed the player into a completely different world.
How will they tax the average Joe who got his PC hax0red and is being used a zombie for SPAM?
;)
Will be interesting to see them receive a 5 million Euro bill though!
I want immersion in an MMORPG, not another game
... didn't we kill it?
That's impossible for many reasons.
(1) Players with retarded names. As soon as you log on and see someone with Drizzzzzt DoDurddden as character name, immersion breaks. There are also superb names like Scratch MyBalls or xTerminatorx and so on.
(2) These games have quests that everyone does. Oh wait, he killed the evil knight, wait, me too, him too, good bye immersion. Same thing with dragons that need raids to take down. That dragon will "magically" respawn in 7 days. But wait
(3) As soon as you listen to players around you start to chat about RL stuff, who won what sports game, immersion is gone. Not to mention plenty of retards who use everything from butchered english to d00d/l33t speak: cna ne1 hepl me plz!!?!?!
There is no immersion in MMOGs, if you are looking for immersion, try single player games or NWN/Diablo type games with a group of friends who are into role playing.
Even though WoW is fun (and addicting), if I was playing another game it would be rather annoying to see WoW with just another game engine slapped over it. If you want to play WoW, then it is already there and waiting for you.
... well ok, Warcraft, and so on.
Vanguard could use elements that work great in WoW and implement them with their own gameplay elements. For example, WoW has proved that instances are fun and needed. Not to mention instances allow very creative encounters and great rewards for players because the designers control everything (including the number of people involved in the instance). Take away instances and you have good old issues that plagued EQ: boring fights, retarded competition for mobs where by guilds/players camp mobs. It augments the number of support calls and it encourages griefing. Which avenue did Vanguard chose? No instances. Yes they are planning to put boss mob encounters "on demand", sort of semi instance but even then, they will never be able to make awesome and complex encounters like WoW endzones have (well minus MC). You can't have a complex scripted encounter if you can't control the number of people during the encounter (aka no instances) because guilds will "zerg" it. EQ has proved that.
The more and more I look at Vanguard reminds me of EQ with all their faults. Lot of grinding, no instances, heaven for griefers and gold farmers. Most modern games have implemented ideas from other games, WoW is a perfect example of very little innovation but they cherry picked the stuff that worked in other game. Instances from Anarchy Online, fast paced combat from City of Heroes, PvP from DAoC, humor from
Vanguard will be a huge flop. The designers who were responsible for the worse flaws EQ had didn't learn from their own mistakes, they are the ones designing Vanguard.
Well said. It still looks like the world of MMORPG is still 90% dungeons, dragons, and monsters
...
Fantasy MMOGs are a subgenre that seems to work well. There were many casualties in the non fantasy setting MMOGs. And even craptastic fantasy MMOs like Lineage II seem to do extremely well vs some innovating none fantasy game like Eve Online.
- Anarchy Online: while it had some innovative features like instances it failed, mostly because of Funcom's botched launch.
- Star Wars Galaxies: butchered by SOE.
- Earth and Beyond: butchered by EA.
- City of Heroes/Villains: fun for a few months, game lacks soul and depth.
- Matrix Online: Yeah
The only real successful non fantasy MMOG was Eve Online, and even they have about 100k subscribers. In contrast, fantasy games sell like hotcakes: WoW, EQ2, Lineage II, and others.
A combination of publisher incompetence with retarded game changes/mechanics totally butchered the non fantasy subgenre of MMOGs. It's very unfortunate to see perfect MMO franchises like Matrix and Star Wars fail. I do agree that maybe the crowd of sci-fi MMO players don't want the leveling treadmill style games and game publishers didn't realize this yet. They might want more than kill mob, get N xp, rinse repeat.
It's cracked already.
;)
There's a LegitCheckControl.dll floating around that you dump into c:\windows\system32 whilst in safe mode, give the PC a reboot and all is well. Windowsupdate etc work fine.
Not that I've tried it or anything...
Or simply flag the ActiveX as disabled. No need to download 3d party (unsafe) hacks.
Hmm, wasn't one of the arguments for intelligent design that the fundamental constants had to be "just right" for the universe to exist? If the shifts of other dimensions causes shifts in our universal constants...another nail in the necessity-of-God argument's coffin?
Won't religious fanatics just say that God is testing their faith? Or, that God is currently changing the universe, and infact that is a proof that God does exist? Faith for quite a few people is much stronger than logical reason.
Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engine I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.