Indeed. I would probably give Eve another go if a few things were done:
An overhaul of the beginning of the game. A specific quest line for each major aspect of the game (basic flight, combat, mining, trading, crafting, etc), able to be completed independently (after flight of course) such that a combat player could ignore mining and trading.
Add a customizable interface. The default interface is cluttered and ugly. I play WoW. I would probably not continue playing WoW if not for the custom interface addons, which make gameplay much better.
Overhaul resource gathering. This is a simple one. Copy the base mechanic from Star Wars Galaxies: Allow the creation of mining stations which automatically gather resources, and you merely have to swing by and pick them up.
Make flight FUN! Honestly, this was the biggest reason I dropped Eve right off the bat. I went in expecting Freelancer style flight with more realistic physics. I got a flight system that was as entertaining as navigating around Myst.
Work out a way for new players to catch up to "the big guys." With the way Eve levels skill points, it is impossible for a new player to catch up to a 3 year old vet. In WoW, a player who starts today would have a single character on par with a 4 year old player in a matter of 6 months.
Do you really believe roads are not a natural monopoly?
No more so than land is. Most of the time, there's more that one route to get to wherever you're going.
-jcr
True, there is more than one route to where you are going. There are planes and trains. As such, there is not a monopoly on transportation.
But roads are a natural monopoly. It requires co-ordination to prevent traffic jams due to construction (what if every provider for Philadelphia decided to repair their roads at the same time...practically shutting down half of the city's traffic).
While certain services such as telephones and power may be able to get by with multiple companies providing the service over one set of lines, and non-original providers leasing the use of the equipment. However, for obvious reasons, this doesn't exactly work well for water -- you can't packet-switch h20.
WTF? Did I miss something fundamental? (reads again) Nope. WTF?
Let us say that I own a big, long pipe, that I use to transport water (that I pump) from my well at one end, to customers at the other end. Billing is pretty simple, I know how much water I pumped, and how much water each customer used. The two numbers will be very, very similar. (different only by rounding error, etc)
But now, you want to use my big, long pipe. 'Tis pretty simple, really. You note how much water you pump into the pipe, I note how much water I pump into the pipe.... how is this not "packet switching h2O"?
Water can be "packet switched" in units as small as a single molecule!
Flawed arguement. Yes, your situation will work fine with only one customer. However, once you start adding additional customers, things get far more complicated.
Suppose you have a small town. There are 30 houses on the east side, and 60 houses on the west side. There are two water providers for this town, which any resident can choose from. Provider A is on the east side, Provider B is on the west side. Each supplier provides water for 15 houses on the east, and 30 on the west.
All the houses with provider A use 100 gallons a month. All the houses with provider B use 70 gallons a month. Now, you are right in that billing is simple, due to water meters. But now for the real questions:
How do you know that company A's customers are not using primarily B's water? If company A pumped 2000 gallons into the system, and company B pumped over 5000 (likely, as the larger drop in pressure will occur closer to B's facility), how do the two companies resolve this difference in supply? Simple calculations and sharing of information right? What happens if there are 5 or more providers in one area? The system will become insanely complicated.
What if a pipe breaks on a street where there are customers from both companies? Who is responsible for fixing it?
If company A owns all the pipe, and the others lease from them, what can be done about company A underselling the water (thus getting more customers) and covering the costs with the leases? (Notice that this is a problem with current internet services)
What if the water supply becomes tainted? You've just doubled your investigation time and costs for every additional company providing water.
Sure, these problems could all be worked out. But I can guarantee that water prices would go up as a result.
Depending on how you look at it...they would be different religions. Also..atheism/agnosticism is not a religion, but a lack thereof, so cannot count in this discussion.
Going by size alone: OSX = Buddhism Windows = Christianity Linux = Judaism
Going by historical relation: Unix = Orthodox Judaism Linux = Reformed Judaism OSX = Catholicism Windows = Mormonism
Blizz is the perfect example of a company that does PC gaming right. (Setting aside dick legal moves)
They manage to maintain windows and mac ports for all of their games. Their games scale well with old hardware.
WoW ran on my 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 64MB Geforce4 Go Dell laptop. Sure, the graphics couldn't be turned up too high, but the resolution was nice with a decent framerate.
WoW runs on my crappy, black-friday-special $300 compaq laptop, with Intel integrated graphics. Not as well as the Dell (which has since died), but well enough that I can run with a multitude of addons. On Vista. With 1GB of RAM.
The problem is that publishers are approaching the development platforms wrong. If you are going to release for PC + console, create the PC version FIRST, then tune and optimize for the console.
I'll bet you a nickel that GTA4 would be able to run on my crap laptop if they created the PC version first.
Yes, this happens a lot. My family got our second computer (a 166 MMX) for about 1/3 of retail value because of issues like this. The problem with the system...blown power supply fuse. The machine was less than 6 months old. The original owner just went out and bought a new machine.
Your analogy of the blown tire fits with my situation: a blown fuse is more like a blown tire. A failed HD (or fried MB) is more like a busted head gasket. Relatively expensive to fix, and if you have an old model, it's probably more practical to buy a new one.
Nowadays...it's almost cheaper to buy a new PC than to have a "professional" (assuming you don't know anybody that will fix it for free) to repair/clean your PC.
Wrong. Whether or not they check the reciepts was a store-by-store policy.
I worked at CC for a little extra holiday cash once. The store was one of the biggest sellers on the east coast. You can bet your ass that every customer's receipt and contents of their bag was checked on their way out. On black friday. Our store took loss prevention VERY seriously.
I personally stopped about $1,500 of merch from leaving the store, and I only did the door checks ~4 hours a week (Filling in for people on lunch breaks, etc). In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. Bastards are reaping what they sowed.
It wasn't just the commission based sales force. My friend worked in the stock room for several years, and was making a pretty decent wage, and was up for a promotion within a month (his current supervisor was stepping down).
He was one of those victims of the "we raised your pay too much so now we're gonna fire you."
He wasn't even allowed to re-apply because "he was too qualified."
Firing my friend in that manner lost them a lot of business. I also boycotted Circuit City when that happened. As did all of my other friends, and our families. All in all, that added up to about 50 people.
I suspect that this situation was not unique, and was undoubtedly the killing blow through the heart of the weakened CC.
(yes, copyrights are in fact rights, granted by law)
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but here goes.
It is not the job of the government to enforce copyright. It is the job of the copyright holder. Hiring MediaSentry is perfectly acceptable, PROVIDED THEY DO NOT BREAK THE LAW DOING SO. If they would get a PI license and stop gaming the courts, there wouldn't be as much of a problem.
On a related note, THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT GRANT RIGHTS. Read the god damn Declaration of Independence.
On a slight tangent: We are long overdue for a revolution. I give it 50 years, and we'll either be fighting another civil war, or sitting complacently on our couches watching the idiot box.
Guess the linux users should just suck it up and pay the little bit extra, just to show support to the platform.
Ditch the webcam, same price. Small price to pay to show the support for the linux option.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Agreed. I often want a lot of my data stored for simple convenience, but incognito lets me browse "undesirable" sites without clearing all of my data after the fact.
As soon as Stumbleupon is released for Chrome, it could very well be my primary browser.
Or that they can detect a turned on cell phone by getting a headache near one.
I agree with the vast majority of your post, although homeopathy may work for some (not an expert in medicine, so won't argue it). However, the quoted line is entirely plausible.
Some electronic devices emit a frequency when on, and people with sensitive hearing can detect this.
While I certainly can't do this with cellphones, I was able (not so much now, as my hearing has degraded somewhat) to detect a muted TV from about 30-40 feet away.
It would not shock me in the least if there are people with super-sensitive hearing to get a headache from a barely supersonic pitch emitted from a cellphone, as I'm sure there is at least a few frequencies emitted that are less than 40 kHz. I know in my prime I could hear almost 30 kHz
I also have a new $600 laptop that came preloaded with Vista. The manufacturer does not provide XP drivers. Does this ISO builder automagically turn Vista drivers into XP drivers? No?
That includes: Publishing industries (includes software) Motion picture and sound recording industries Broadcasting and telecommunications Information and data processing services
Construction comes in at 4.1% Manufacturing comes in at 11.7%
By the way, Hitler was elected by the popular vote by spouting populist nonsense. You mean like most American elections?
*ducks*
Thank god the Constitution was well thought out, written to prevent a dictatorship. Germany's pre-WWII constitution had some pretty serious flaws. Everything Hitler did was "legal" under German law.
Gonna give up some karma for this one...
Ever wondered why educated people are far less likely to have a gun in the house? Because you're a bunch of cowards who watch the news and hear the continual propaganda that "OMG GUNS KILL MILLIONS WEEKLY!!111."
Truly educated people would realize that the problem isn't guns, it is crime. The two are not co-related, as the UK is learning the hard way.
UK bans guns, crime goes up. The problem in the US is gang violence. Eliminate that (ending drug prohibition would help), and you'll see a drastic drop in crime, not just "gun violence."
Acrobat, on the other hand, is a bloated pile of garbage. When was the last time you used Acrobat? If you disable the "load on start" stuff, Acrobat 8 is pretty damn snappy, despite all the "bloated" features.
A typical text PDF that is 400 pages long (Oracle documentation, 8 MB) loads in about a second. A 1000 page scanned book (85 MB downloaded from Google books) loads in less than 5 seconds.
All the poo-pooing elitist crap about "Acrobat being bloated" is little more than trolling for mod points (since it's obviously just group-think anymore).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I would probably give Eve another go if a few things were done:
An overhaul of the beginning of the game. A specific quest line for each major aspect of the game (basic flight, combat, mining, trading, crafting, etc), able to be completed independently (after flight of course) such that a combat player could ignore mining and trading.
Add a customizable interface. The default interface is cluttered and ugly. I play WoW. I would probably not continue playing WoW if not for the custom interface addons, which make gameplay much better.
Overhaul resource gathering. This is a simple one. Copy the base mechanic from Star Wars Galaxies: Allow the creation of mining stations which automatically gather resources, and you merely have to swing by and pick them up.
Make flight FUN! Honestly, this was the biggest reason I dropped Eve right off the bat. I went in expecting Freelancer style flight with more realistic physics. I got a flight system that was as entertaining as navigating around Myst.
Work out a way for new players to catch up to "the big guys." With the way Eve levels skill points, it is impossible for a new player to catch up to a 3 year old vet. In WoW, a player who starts today would have a single character on par with a 4 year old player in a matter of 6 months.
Do you really believe roads are not a natural monopoly?
No more so than land is. Most of the time, there's more that one route to get to wherever you're going.
-jcr
True, there is more than one route to where you are going. There are planes and trains. As such, there is not a monopoly on transportation.
But roads are a natural monopoly. It requires co-ordination to prevent traffic jams due to construction (what if every provider for Philadelphia decided to repair their roads at the same time...practically shutting down half of the city's traffic).
While certain services such as telephones and power may be able to get by with multiple companies providing the service over one set of lines, and non-original providers leasing the use of the equipment. However, for obvious reasons, this doesn't exactly work well for water -- you can't packet-switch h20.
WTF? Did I miss something fundamental? (reads again) Nope. WTF?
Let us say that I own a big, long pipe, that I use to transport water (that I pump) from my well at one end, to customers at the other end. Billing is pretty simple, I know how much water I pumped, and how much water each customer used. The two numbers will be very, very similar. (different only by rounding error, etc)
But now, you want to use my big, long pipe. 'Tis pretty simple, really. You note how much water you pump into the pipe, I note how much water I pump into the pipe.... how is this not "packet switching h2O"?
Water can be "packet switched" in units as small as a single molecule!
Flawed arguement. Yes, your situation will work fine with only one customer. However, once you start adding additional customers, things get far more complicated.
Suppose you have a small town. There are 30 houses on the east side, and 60 houses on the west side. There are two water providers for this town, which any resident can choose from. Provider A is on the east side, Provider B is on the west side. Each supplier provides water for 15 houses on the east, and 30 on the west.
All the houses with provider A use 100 gallons a month. All the houses with provider B use 70 gallons a month. Now, you are right in that billing is simple, due to water meters. But now for the real questions:
How do you know that company A's customers are not using primarily B's water? If company A pumped 2000 gallons into the system, and company B pumped over 5000 (likely, as the larger drop in pressure will occur closer to B's facility), how do the two companies resolve this difference in supply? Simple calculations and sharing of information right? What happens if there are 5 or more providers in one area? The system will become insanely complicated.
What if a pipe breaks on a street where there are customers from both companies? Who is responsible for fixing it?
If company A owns all the pipe, and the others lease from them, what can be done about company A underselling the water (thus getting more customers) and covering the costs with the leases? (Notice that this is a problem with current internet services)
What if the water supply becomes tainted? You've just doubled your investigation time and costs for every additional company providing water.
Sure, these problems could all be worked out. But I can guarantee that water prices would go up as a result.
Doh! That's supposed to be debuting.
[citation needed]
The new Nvidia is debuing at $499
Cheapest competing AMD (Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB) card I could find was $480
Depending on how you look at it...they would be different religions. Also..atheism/agnosticism is not a religion, but a lack thereof, so cannot count in this discussion.
Going by size alone:
OSX = Buddhism
Windows = Christianity
Linux = Judaism
Going by historical relation:
Unix = Orthodox Judaism
Linux = Reformed Judaism
OSX = Catholicism
Windows = Mormonism
Time AND labor. Money means nothing if there's no labor to back it.
Heirs to large fortunes notwithstanding...
Agreed. Publishers are entirely at fault here.
Blizz is the perfect example of a company that does PC gaming right. (Setting aside dick legal moves)
They manage to maintain windows and mac ports for all of their games. Their games scale well with old hardware.
WoW ran on my 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 64MB Geforce4 Go Dell laptop. Sure, the graphics couldn't be turned up too high, but the resolution was nice with a decent framerate.
WoW runs on my crappy, black-friday-special $300 compaq laptop, with Intel integrated graphics. Not as well as the Dell (which has since died), but well enough that I can run with a multitude of addons. On Vista. With 1GB of RAM.
The problem is that publishers are approaching the development platforms wrong. If you are going to release for PC + console, create the PC version FIRST, then tune and optimize for the console.
I'll bet you a nickel that GTA4 would be able to run on my crap laptop if they created the PC version first.
Yes, this happens a lot. My family got our second computer (a 166 MMX) for about 1/3 of retail value because of issues like this. The problem with the system...blown power supply fuse. The machine was less than 6 months old. The original owner just went out and bought a new machine.
Your analogy of the blown tire fits with my situation: a blown fuse is more like a blown tire. A failed HD (or fried MB) is more like a busted head gasket. Relatively expensive to fix, and if you have an old model, it's probably more practical to buy a new one.
Nowadays...it's almost cheaper to buy a new PC than to have a "professional" (assuming you don't know anybody that will fix it for free) to repair/clean your PC.
Wrong. Whether or not they check the reciepts was a store-by-store policy.
I worked at CC for a little extra holiday cash once. The store was one of the biggest sellers on the east coast. You can bet your ass that every customer's receipt and contents of their bag was checked on their way out. On black friday. Our store took loss prevention VERY seriously.
I personally stopped about $1,500 of merch from leaving the store, and I only did the door checks ~4 hours a week (Filling in for people on lunch breaks, etc). In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. Bastards are reaping what they sowed.
It wasn't just the commission based sales force. My friend worked in the stock room for several years, and was making a pretty decent wage, and was up for a promotion within a month (his current supervisor was stepping down).
He was one of those victims of the "we raised your pay too much so now we're gonna fire you."
He wasn't even allowed to re-apply because "he was too qualified."
Firing my friend in that manner lost them a lot of business. I also boycotted Circuit City when that happened. As did all of my other friends, and our families. All in all, that added up to about 50 people.
I suspect that this situation was not unique, and was undoubtedly the killing blow through the heart of the weakened CC.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/21-Crysis
Enough said.
I don't have cable in this remote area, and satellite is ridiculously expensive.
Bullshit. I link you: http://www.usdirect.com/packages/
$29.99 for 45 channels, and they will include any station you can recieve OTA, with better quality.
Perfectly reasonable if you watch TV enough to bitch so much about it.
(yes, copyrights are in fact rights, granted by law)
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but here goes.
It is not the job of the government to enforce copyright. It is the job of the copyright holder. Hiring MediaSentry is perfectly acceptable, PROVIDED THEY DO NOT BREAK THE LAW DOING SO. If they would get a PI license and stop gaming the courts, there wouldn't be as much of a problem.
On a related note, THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT GRANT RIGHTS. Read the god damn Declaration of Independence.
On a slight tangent: We are long overdue for a revolution. I give it 50 years, and we'll either be fighting another civil war, or sitting complacently on our couches watching the idiot box.
Please do direct me to where I can obtain WoW for $1.99.
I am looking to split a character off onto another account, and that would certainly speed up my purchase.
Guess the linux users should just suck it up and pay the little bit extra, just to show support to the platform.
Ditch the webcam, same price. Small price to pay to show the support for the linux option.
Agreed. I often want a lot of my data stored for simple convenience, but incognito lets me browse "undesirable" sites without clearing all of my data after the fact.
As soon as Stumbleupon is released for Chrome, it could very well be my primary browser.
Or that they can detect a turned on cell phone by getting a headache near one.
I agree with the vast majority of your post, although homeopathy may work for some (not an expert in medicine, so won't argue it). However, the quoted line is entirely plausible.
Some electronic devices emit a frequency when on, and people with sensitive hearing can detect this.
While I certainly can't do this with cellphones, I was able (not so much now, as my hearing has degraded somewhat) to detect a muted TV from about 30-40 feet away.
It would not shock me in the least if there are people with super-sensitive hearing to get a headache from a barely supersonic pitch emitted from a cellphone, as I'm sure there is at least a few frequencies emitted that are less than 40 kHz. I know in my prime I could hear almost 30 kHz
That's not the problem he's referring to.
I also have a new $600 laptop that came preloaded with Vista. The manufacturer does not provide XP drivers. Does this ISO builder automagically turn Vista drivers into XP drivers? No?
Guess I'm stuck using Vista until then.
Bzzt, wrong answer.
Proof:
http://www.bea.gov/industry/gpotables/gpo_action.cfm
http://www.bea.gov/industry/gpotables/gpo_action.cfm?anon=75039&table_id=22077&format_type=0
All information: 4.6% of annual GDP
That includes:
Publishing industries (includes software)
Motion picture and sound recording industries
Broadcasting and telecommunications
Information and data processing services
Construction comes in at 4.1%
Manufacturing comes in at 11.7%
*ducks*
Thank god the Constitution was well thought out, written to prevent a dictatorship. Germany's pre-WWII constitution had some pretty serious flaws. Everything Hitler did was "legal" under German law.
Truly educated people would realize that the problem isn't guns, it is crime. The two are not co-related, as the UK is learning the hard way.
UK bans guns, crime goes up.
The problem in the US is gang violence. Eliminate that (ending drug prohibition would help), and you'll see a drastic drop in crime, not just "gun violence."
http://rebirthoffreedom.org/freedom/guns/uk-gun-ban/
A typical text PDF that is 400 pages long (Oracle documentation, 8 MB) loads in about a second.
A 1000 page scanned book (85 MB downloaded from Google books) loads in less than 5 seconds.
All the poo-pooing elitist crap about "Acrobat being bloated" is little more than trolling for mod points (since it's obviously just group-think anymore).
No need to attach large objects to torment them. Simply include some printouts of certain... "artwork"
Imagine the poor sap that opens it and gets an eyeful of tubgirl.
Not all of us live in fancy cities. They just won't run fiber to my mud hut. :(