I don't know if this has happened in other parts of the world, but here in Germany a couple of years ago a simple game called "Moorhuhn" started a real craze. The objective was to move the cursor with the mouse and shoot down birds. You know, the quick and simple game that gets you hooked for a long time.
It was downloadable for free from the internet (not anymore) and was played by almost everyone to an extend where severe productivity losses occured since many people played it at work.
So, the type of person to play such games (I guess Minesweeper would be similar) is "Everyone" - how do you categorize this?
I'm sure they're not lying when they say it's an option
I didn't say they were lying, I honestly had no clue what they could do:) Thanks for the links, they were quite insightful. The solution for the Galileo probe was:
Running current though the LED over time can push enough of the doping atoms back into their proper places that the widget will glow again.
So its seems that one approach is to "stress" the suspected culprit hoping that it will start to work. Like starting up a motor again and again... Reading the explanations made me feel better, it seems to be a very complex job trying to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.
Mission engineers think they may be able to partially fix the spectrometer before it arrives in January.
How do they do that?! I mean, they can't reach up there, they can't physically fix anything. They can't turn that screw an inch to the left.
Please, someone who knows, enlighten me... Can it really be done by making changes in the software (given that this is possible)?
I think the problem here is that workers who work alone (with the help of a computer) become lonely. Makes sense. But that is a problem with the surroundings, not with the computer.
I work at the university, couple of hours per day at a computer. Still, the co-workes and I have lunch together, take the time off to grab a coffee, or just wander over into the room next door to have a chat.
So if you feel lonely/depressed, try to work with a group of people (you like - that, of course, is a prerequisite), close to them, maybe in the same room.
And... maybe... don't reload the Slashdot page every minute! (SCNR)
Resell large amounts of online cash into US dollars because people are willing to pay for large amounts of cash
Hmmm... do I smell a business model here?:) Here is the idea: create a company where every employee play some MMORG and accumulates virtual money. Then sell this virtual money for hard cash. It would be interesting to see if this would actually be profitable...
And since I posted this on Slashdot, I can get this idea patented;)
That's because the company doesn't really care what happens to you after you buy their product. [...] all of the shiny features that make you buy the product in the first place.
The scary thing is that you're probably right, although good customer support should be a shiny feature that should be taken into account when buying a product from a company. Personally, I get the feeling that more and more companies realise this and improve customer services. I hope the rest will learn that lesson sooner or later, too.
[...] to obtain 60 quadrillion won in cyber money and exchange it for 1.5 billion won [$1.2 million USD] in real money.
If the amount of money in an MMORG can be increased by hackers, this should result in an inflation - in the world of the MMORG. Good thing that the increased amount of money won't have any effects on the real economy (the amount of money is not changed there)... this could be quite disasterous.
On the other hand: who exchanges the fictional money into real money? The company? If so, the company needs some solid funding, because at one point in time, all the MMORG player could decide to exchange all their MMORG money. I guess that would push any company into bankrupcy.
E-books. Another technology I resented at first and came to love later. But they are really handy when you travel. You can store a large collection of e-books on your PDA. This means that you can choose from a large variety of books and are not restricted to the few (heavy) print editions you would normally tug along. At home, I still prefer to read printed books. You don't have to worry about the battery and it "feels right" (or you can smack flies with it). And yes, a PDA is to my mind the best device for reading e-books. Stand-alone reader are hard to get, rather expensive and can only read e-books. And reading a complete book on a PC is... well, "inconvenient".
Another interesting point are educational e-books and e-libraries. Currently, few publishers are willing to sell e-books. And if they do, they sometimes are sold at prices that match the printed version - even though the production costs are much lower. But if students had access to e-books, they wouldn't have to wait if someone else had the book, they could get it much faster and keep it as long as they need it. Oh, and the bags would be lighter, too.
Again, I would sometimes prefer a paper copy, since I mark interesting passages, add comments and draw pictures if I'm bored. You can do that with some e-book formats, but its not as quick and easy as it is on paper.
Finally, I think e-book piracy will rise, but not to the amount of music or game piracy - simply because there are more people who play games and listen to music than those who read. But this point has been mentioned before... Best method to prevent piracy? Offer many e-books for very low prices. Maybe $3 or less. If you as a publisher are not willing to do that, other people will (either e-book pirates or maybe Apple will once again come forward and offer e-books for $1 each).
My advice: try to read one e-book, just for the experience. If you don't like it, stick with print. But maybe you'll appreciate it. And then we will all be part of a new, huge market the companies can't afford to ignore:)
This and that...
on
Space Legos!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmmm...
You might want to build some of this like that. Lego all the way.
[The game companies] label [efforts to make older games available through downloads and emulators] piracy that could undercut future efforts to reissue such games in the form of classic compilations or to update them as remakes.
Ok, so the plan is to bring out a collection of old games for the Atari XL or the ZX 81 or the C64 in the future? And there will be enough potential customers so that releasing the game into the public domain (or publishing the code) is a bad move financially??
I don't think so. And even if it was true, how many collections of old (8-Bit) games do you know? And how many follow-ups to a classic game have hit the market and made money?
I guess the real problem is that the old companies do not exist anymore, or have been bought out by other companies. And now nobody in the gaming industry knows or cares who has which rights to those games.
And with regard to 'remakes': the Duke Nukem 3D source code has been published under the GPL. Ports have been created. Will this hurt the sales of DNF? Go figure;)
I was wondering what sort of fun could be had with a bluetooth sniffing program
Since Bluetooth offers a service/device discovery mode, you don't need any special software. Simply check for mobile devices in your neighbourhood. Worked like a charm at the last CeBit in Hannover: someone had a BT-Internet Access Point, no password required... I decided not to buy those WLAN voucher and happily surfed with my iPAQ. And of course you can always find a friendly phone that announces its presence and decide to do funny things with it.
A major problem Bluetooth is currently facing is interoperability. During the test it seems that some of the headsets were paired with different phones, but they were mostly Nokia phones (which supposedly do not differ too much when it comes to the BT implementation).
Buying one of those earpieces and trying to pair it with your [fill in brand here unless Nokia] phone could be difficult. Not to mention the BT dongle for the PC. If you were hoping for a hands-free headset that gives you more Counterstrike kills, you'll probably find that your dongle does not support the necessary profiles.
on the Atari 800, it was Decathlon, Track & Field and Summer Games, where you had to hammer the joystick back and forth to play
*hem*hem* Yeah, it was a game similar to Decathlon - joystick wise. I found that you could go fastest if you put your palm on top of the stick and then just move the hand back and forth. The handwrist got less strained.
The problem was that the old Atari joystick had sharp edges at the top, so my skin was peeled off quite nicely.
Then I went out and invested my money in a Competition Pro. Over the years I also owned (still do own) a few of those babies! I see they are missing that particular model... guess I'll have to grab my camera and send them the pic.
A system that uses real money better be designed well. For one, if a bug makes you lose some game money, it's not a big deal. If you lose real money - and the word spreads, which I assume would happen very fast - you as the game designer and publisher have some hard times ahead.
Second, there should be a maximum limit for the amount that can be brought into the game. Otherwise the next mortgage on your house is just around the corner (but not to worry, I just got an email offering me a staggering deal here).
I asked myself the same thing a few years back when the mouse wheel was up'n'coming. Can't live without it now...
But I guess it is easier for the finger to stretch forward and backward, rolling the wheel up and down than to move sideways. Perhaps strained pointing fingers will be the next sign for exessive computer usage (OT: I managed to hurt my hand with an old Atari 2600 joystick. Don't ask).
According to the New Scientist, cloned mammals suffer from some genetic defects. This would open new possibilites for betting: how many races can the horse run - or which clone dies in this race.
The comparison is not quite correct. Yes, you can borrow a book from the library. For free? Depends. You may not have to pay for lending the book, but your tax money was probably used to buy the book in the first place (of course libraries can receive grants - in the form of money or book donations).
Then you go and copy the book. Normally, you have to pay for the copies. This is cheaper than a book from the store. But the quality is inferior since you only have a stack of paper as opposed to a handy book. You can not reproduce a printed book digitally - this is a totally different matter with e-books.
Furthermore, in some countries it is legal to reproduce excerpts (for personal or scientific usage) from a printed book since the author receives additional compensation based on the number of books sold. In Germany, this would be money from the VG Wort.
Just imagine: build a helicopter with a camera and equip it with a 3G mobile phone.
Then you can dial in to the helicopter and control it with another phone in your hand while seeing the video streamed live to your device. This could, of course, already work with GPRS or HSCSD, but with 3G its much more l33t.
And you do not want to receive a call from your mom, which would interrupt your current transmission:/
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if this has happened in other parts of the world, but here in Germany a couple of years ago a simple game called "Moorhuhn" started a real craze. The objective was to move the cursor with the mouse and shoot down birds. You know, the quick and simple game that gets you hooked for a long time.
It was downloadable for free from the internet (not anymore) and was played by almost everyone to an extend where severe productivity losses occured since many people played it at work.
So, the type of person to play such games (I guess Minesweeper would be similar) is "Everyone" - how do you categorize this?
Will Starbucks give you a free CD with the Mozilla code for every Moccha Macademia Nut Frappucino? Both is good stuff anyway...
I'm sure they're not lying when they say it's an option
:) Thanks for the links, they were quite insightful. The solution for the Galileo probe was:
I didn't say they were lying, I honestly had no clue what they could do
Running current though the LED over time can push enough of the doping atoms back into their proper places that the widget will glow again.
So its seems that one approach is to "stress" the suspected culprit hoping that it will start to work. Like starting up a motor again and again... Reading the explanations made me feel better, it seems to be a very complex job trying to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.
The mars rover is in trouble... can the software be recompiled with the new gcc and save the day? If so, thank god the new version came just in time!
Mission engineers think they may be able to partially fix the spectrometer before it arrives in January.
How do they do that?! I mean, they can't reach up there, they can't physically fix anything. They can't turn that screw an inch to the left.
Please, someone who knows, enlighten me... Can it really be done by making changes in the software (given that this is possible)?
I think the problem here is that workers who work alone (with the help of a computer) become lonely. Makes sense. But that is a problem with the surroundings, not with the computer.
I work at the university, couple of hours per day at a computer. Still, the co-workes and I have lunch together, take the time off to grab a coffee, or just wander over into the room next door to have a chat.
So if you feel lonely/depressed, try to work with a group of people (you like - that, of course, is a prerequisite), close to them, maybe in the same room.
And... maybe... don't reload the Slashdot page every minute! (SCNR)
Now all it need is a way to create those WLAN grafittis. And a way to publish all found passwords on a web-page.
And while you're at it, give it the ability to create a map of the signal strenght, too...
Resell large amounts of online cash into US dollars because people are willing to pay for large amounts of cash
:) Here is the idea: create a company where every employee play some MMORG and accumulates virtual money. Then sell this virtual money for hard cash. It would be interesting to see if this would actually be profitable...
;)
Hmmm... do I smell a business model here?
And since I posted this on Slashdot, I can get this idea patented
That's because the company doesn't really care what happens to you after you buy their product. [...] all of the shiny features that make you buy the product in the first place.
The scary thing is that you're probably right, although good customer support should be a shiny feature that should be taken into account when buying a product from a company. Personally, I get the feeling that more and more companies realise this and improve customer services. I hope the rest will learn that lesson sooner or later, too.
[...] to obtain 60 quadrillion won in cyber money and exchange it for 1.5 billion won [$1.2 million USD] in real money.
If the amount of money in an MMORG can be increased by hackers, this should result in an inflation - in the world of the MMORG. Good thing that the increased amount of money won't have any effects on the real economy (the amount of money is not changed there)... this could be quite disasterous.
On the other hand: who exchanges the fictional money into real money? The company? If so, the company needs some solid funding, because at one point in time, all the MMORG player could decide to exchange all their MMORG money. I guess that would push any company into bankrupcy.
E-books. Another technology I resented at first and came to love later. But they are really handy when you travel. You can store a large collection of e-books on your PDA. This means that you can choose from a large variety of books and are not restricted to the few (heavy) print editions you would normally tug along. At home, I still prefer to read printed books. You don't have to worry about the battery and it "feels right" (or you can smack flies with it). And yes, a PDA is to my mind the best device for reading e-books. Stand-alone reader are hard to get, rather expensive and can only read e-books. And reading a complete book on a PC is... well, "inconvenient".
:)
Another interesting point are educational e-books and e-libraries. Currently, few publishers are willing to sell e-books. And if they do, they sometimes are sold at prices that match the printed version - even though the production costs are much lower. But if students had access to e-books, they wouldn't have to wait if someone else had the book, they could get it much faster and keep it as long as they need it. Oh, and the bags would be lighter, too.
Again, I would sometimes prefer a paper copy, since I mark interesting passages, add comments and draw pictures if I'm bored. You can do that with some e-book formats, but its not as quick and easy as it is on paper.
Finally, I think e-book piracy will rise, but not to the amount of music or game piracy - simply because there are more people who play games and listen to music than those who read. But this point has been mentioned before... Best method to prevent piracy? Offer many e-books for very low prices. Maybe $3 or less. If you as a publisher are not willing to do that, other people will (either e-book pirates or maybe Apple will once again come forward and offer e-books for $1 each).
My advice: try to read one e-book, just for the experience. If you don't like it, stick with print. But maybe you'll appreciate it. And then we will all be part of a new, huge market the companies can't afford to ignore
Hmmmm...
You might want to build some of this like that. Lego all the way.
[The game companies] label [efforts to make older games available through downloads and emulators] piracy that could undercut future efforts to reissue such games in the form of classic compilations or to update them as remakes.
;)
Ok, so the plan is to bring out a collection of old games for the Atari XL or the ZX 81 or the C64 in the future? And there will be enough potential customers so that releasing the game into the public domain (or publishing the code) is a bad move financially??
I don't think so. And even if it was true, how many collections of old (8-Bit) games do you know? And how many follow-ups to a classic game have hit the market and made money?
I guess the real problem is that the old companies do not exist anymore, or have been bought out by other companies. And now nobody in the gaming industry knows or cares who has which rights to those games.
And with regard to 'remakes': the Duke Nukem 3D source code has been published under the GPL. Ports have been created. Will this hurt the sales of DNF? Go figure
I was wondering what sort of fun could be had with a bluetooth sniffing program
Since Bluetooth offers a service/device discovery mode, you don't need any special software. Simply check for mobile devices in your neighbourhood. Worked like a charm at the last CeBit in Hannover: someone had a BT-Internet Access Point, no password required... I decided not to buy those WLAN voucher and happily surfed with my iPAQ. And of course you can always find a friendly phone that announces its presence and decide to do funny things with it.
A major problem Bluetooth is currently facing is interoperability. During the test it seems that some of the headsets were paired with different phones, but they were mostly Nokia phones (which supposedly do not differ too much when it comes to the BT implementation).
Buying one of those earpieces and trying to pair it with your [fill in brand here unless Nokia] phone could be difficult. Not to mention the BT dongle for the PC. If you were hoping for a hands-free headset that gives you more Counterstrike kills, you'll probably find that your dongle does not support the necessary profiles.
on the Atari 800, it was Decathlon, Track & Field and Summer Games, where you had to hammer the joystick back and forth to play
*hem*hem* Yeah, it was a game similar to Decathlon - joystick wise. I found that you could go fastest if you put your palm on top of the stick and then just move the hand back and forth. The handwrist got less strained.
The problem was that the old Atari joystick had sharp edges at the top, so my skin was peeled off quite nicely.
Then I went out and invested my money in a Competition Pro. Over the years I also owned (still do own) a few of those babies! I see they are missing that particular model... guess I'll have to grab my camera and send them the pic.
A system that uses real money better be designed well. For one, if a bug makes you lose some game money, it's not a big deal. If you lose real money - and the word spreads, which I assume would happen very fast - you as the game designer and publisher have some hard times ahead.
Second, there should be a maximum limit for the amount that can be brought into the game. Otherwise the next mortgage on your house is just around the corner (but not to worry, I just got an email offering me a staggering deal here).
So now why do I want this mouse?
I asked myself the same thing a few years back when the mouse wheel was up'n'coming. Can't live without it now...
But I guess it is easier for the finger to stretch forward and backward, rolling the wheel up and down than to move sideways. Perhaps strained pointing fingers will be the next sign for exessive computer usage (OT: I managed to hurt my hand with an old Atari 2600 joystick. Don't ask).
Heeeey Macarena
According to the New Scientist, cloned mammals suffer from some genetic defects. This would open new possibilites for betting: how many races can the horse run - or which clone dies in this race.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing (TM)...
The comparison is not quite correct. Yes, you can borrow a book from the library. For free? Depends. You may not have to pay for lending the book, but your tax money was probably used to buy the book in the first place (of course libraries can receive grants - in the form of money or book donations).
Then you go and copy the book. Normally, you have to pay for the copies. This is cheaper than a book from the store. But the quality is inferior since you only have a stack of paper as opposed to a handy book. You can not reproduce a printed book digitally - this is a totally different matter with e-books.
Furthermore, in some countries it is legal to reproduce excerpts (for personal or scientific usage) from a printed book since the author receives additional compensation based on the number of books sold. In Germany, this would be money from the VG Wort.
Just imagine: build a helicopter with a camera and equip it with a 3G mobile phone.
:/
Then you can dial in to the helicopter and control it with another phone in your hand while seeing the video streamed live to your device. This could, of course, already work with GPRS or HSCSD, but with 3G its much more l33t.
And you do not want to receive a call from your mom, which would interrupt your current transmission
...will the glass report itself to be half empty or half full??
...will there be a lightsabre? As a hidden feature?
So, free UMTS for everyone by the end of this year or next summer?
And how about free beer (or cocktails at the beach)?