I was planning on selling my life as well, but I've read the Blizzard Terms of Service, and it forbade me from selling my six lvl 70 World of Warcraft characters.
Or technically would it be that I'm selling the Absence of Life?
As long as you stick to that, you should be totally fine. this is all you'll ever need for docs. I've yet to run into any standardization issues with javascript when coding for ff/ie. If you stick to the basics there really shouldn't be anything you can't do to break on either firefox or ie.
What are all these standardization issue people keep talking about? Can I see an working example? (this isn't sarcasm, I'm just curious what everybody is referring to - like I missed the party)
We try to obfuscate thing? Maybe they don't understand that men just want to code in front of the couch with a nice cold beer and not have to be bothered by the old lady who just wants to talk about the useless crap that happened to her thruout the day.
There is no conspiracy theory, nobody is hiding anything from anybody. We just. don't. care about useless crap. Whenever men respond with "Nothing much" to your "What did you do today?" - that is a completely valid response. Why do they get so upset?
How about we just use bigass fans to blow them away? As planes get closer to the fans they will hit turbulence, get discouraged and fly elsewhere. If the pentagon wanted to get cheap about it, just make a humongous leaf blower, and direct it towards potential hostiles. Should work real well with boats too.
I think a humongous firehose may be more effective now that I think about it.
Or a really really really big mosquito net around the cities, kinda like the big nets campers use when they want to sit outdoors using folding chairs and not get bit while they are drinking their beers?
Another good idea is to cover the whole city with smoke, reduce visibility. Yeah that should work wonders, and it's probably the cheapest.
Of course the only real way to prevent planes from flying over any given city is to simply position the city higher than the plane. Duh.
In almost all mainstream MMOs, the most dominant race played are the 'most normal' ones. And then after that you have the most 'hardcore' races played by the 'serious' gamers.
In WoW, while NE were popular, humans were clearly the most commonly played race on the Alliance. Dwarves and Gnomes the least played. On the Horde, it was the undead, them being the most 'human' looking, but in a hardcore eeevil fashion. The trolls being the least played race.
EQ had the same pattern - humans being the most commonly played race, trolls and gnomes/dwarves the least.
Also keep in mind that a lot of people were afraid that everybody was going to roll undead during launch - and at first it was true, but as more and more people signed up to play the population evened out after a while, with humans at the top.
But when this game launches, I wouldn't be too suprised to see when a bunch of wow expats playing the opposite faction that they have played in WoW. I myself am looking forward to rolling a dwarf.
Hrm.. that's a lot of Warhammer Online information. Perhaps if you've used CD's instead of hard drives. Lets see... a cd weighs 16 grams... which leads to 115.823133 terabytes... 5.79 LOCs
Hrm, that's still a lot of Warhammer Online information..
and how popular did UO become from that type of gameplay? I'm not about to criticise the pvp system in UO, I used to play UO before Coster implemented Chaos and Order, but getting constantly ganked was a PITA, and the majority of the intial subscribers felt that way too.
So much so that when OWO went over to EA the servers were split into both pvp and pve servers to appease both demographics. And if I recall the pvp servers were a bit on the empty side. From a player perspective the UO pvp was (to coin a popular insult) 'serious business,' but from a business perspective it didn't work at all.
I remember running into people that would mine at the border of the town, just close enough so that guards would kill any would-be gankers, so that they couuld make enough money to get some gear and reagents. Once they got enough money, they would run out of town and try to finally 'play outside', only to get ganked and looted by more powerful players, losing everything. Then they would start again with the whole mining thing.
This brought up a wierd caste-like ecosystem. You had your 'weak' players farming at the bottom of the barrel, and your strong players farming the weak players once they get just enough resources to adventure outside, the weak players being put in their place by losing everything they worked for and handing over their goods to the PKers. Those weak players never had a chance to work on their weapon skill, most of the time you would get killed by ranged attacks - usually from 1 or 2 arrows or a magic missile. The only time they would get skill was from the in-town training dummies, which only got you so much weapon training. (it's been years since I've last played, apologies if I forget the game mechanics)
And then came the harassment stories - an early discussion was about an 10 year old girl playing UO, she was herding sheep and making clothing. Out comes a few PKers, kill her, loot the stuff and walk away. She comes back, is all angry and asks why they would do such a thing. The Pkers responded with insults via sexual remarks and then proceed to kill her again. Sounds pretty typical of what the average preteen boy would do, but still - bad karma that goes unpunished. UO was a harsh place.
The PKing in UO got so bad I recall someone actaully filed a lawsuit against OWO because of it. Again, from a gamer perspective that sounds pretty hilarious in the order of Jack Thompson, but still, it's unfortunate. I guess it was an early indication that UO does definately not prepared for the new genre of gaming.
As the next interation of MMOs started to come into play, there has been an emphasis on combat mechanics and less on actual roleplay, which is unfortunate. But since the majority of players were looking for combat anyways, the point was moot, business dictated that the RP element in MMORPGs were a profitless money sink, and simply stopped developing in that direction altogether.
MMOs today really are not that much different from FPS, instead of a lobby, you have your world - the real gameplay comes from the instances i.e. individual servers. The only difference between a MMO and a FPS is that the company hosts all the instance based servers as opposed to the instances being hosted by players themselves. There's nothing massive about today's MMOs
The problem is that people got so caught up with dueling in WoW that at some point before TBC some of the big wigs over at Blizzard thought it would be a good idea to oblige to the duelers. And once it went mainstream with arena, the masses started to complain that all the other classes that they did not play themselves, were overpowered.
Even just taking a glance over at the pvp forums, you could find a "OMG NERG _OTHERCLASS_ SO OP LOL" for almost every class. People griped at stunlock rogues. People griped at MS warriors. People griped at slsl locks. People griped at disc priests. People griped at holy pallys. Resto druids. Ele shamans. Frost mages. Marksman hunters. Every class has a group of people that they think is overpowered against their class.
What brought this on was simply the fact that the gameplay has taken a major shift from massive Braveheart style battles, to 2-on-2, 3-on-3, 5-on-5 skirmishes and duels. Why? Because the Blizzard sanctioned massive Braveheart style battles never came. (tarren mill doesn't count). The closest they have gotten to that was the 40-on-40 pvp instance Alterac Valley, where they screwed with it so much that I'm pretty positive that it was the end result of an original game designer that was in charge of working on AV being either fired or dismissed in some other fashion before finishing his/her job, leaving it in honor-point-per-hour farming shambles.
To exacerbate matters with dueling was an overemphasis on crowd control - classes who could remove the ability for other players to control their characters brought on a whole slew of dueling gameplay imbalances - sheep, cheapshot/kidneyshot, fear, deathcoil, root, mind control, scattershot, frost trap - you name it. Nevermind that certain spells and abilities are completely useless for pvp - like taunt. Or shackle.
IMO arena-style pvp really took the character balance away from what we all wanted from the very beginning - the epic, massive battles we've witnessed in the Warcraft RTS games. But Blizzard decided to take it in that direction, and it brought them 10 million players, so why should they change anything?
I see a lot of people complaining that it's not a REAL workout, or it's just a gimmick. Knowing that the Wii Fit is sold out almost everywhere, how many of you have actually tried it?
It's just the same old same old group.
You know, the group that complains about the time spent on guitar hero should be better spent on a real guitar.
Or the group that complains about how DDR does not compare to real dancing. You know, comicbook-guy-style criticism.
Most people don't really care, and they especially are not as passionate about voicing their opinions about non-relevant issues.
It's a freakin game. If I had fun playing it - hey that's cool. If I lost weight playing it - hey an added benefit, that's cool too. Is it going to replace gym equipment? Uh.. not really. Is owning the game going to label me in a negative light? I don't see how that's any different from any other geek issues, say, like playing WoW, or magic the gathering, or LARPing..
.. or Guitar Hero
.. or DDR
.. or paintball
.. or coding
Does it have the potential to make sports and outdoor activities obsolete?..
Who the hell thinks like that? And who the hell thinks other people think like that?
I don't get it. I don't know where the animosity comes from. Or people so afraid that other fellow geek peers will *gasp* lose weight or something?
Is the talent pool so limited that being blacklisted from SAG is going to severely limit the quality of the game? Because if it will, then that game is going to suck. I can see where if they wanted to use big name actors it may be a big deal, but otherwise, why should game developers even CARE?
It sounds like developers are using SAG as nothing more than a resource for easy access to voices - kinda like stock photography. Video games don't need voice actors, it's the opposite - voice actors need video games.
When I've started my new job I started hitting the gym. At first it was mostly an hour of cardio, perhaps something like every day for about 3 months. Began moving up to more intensive exercises gradually, starting with the elliptical, then moving to exercise bike, then eventually hitting up the treadmill. Nothing too intensive, just consistent, even if it's a weaksauce 'performance' compared to the other members. (I've eventually worked up to roughly 5 miles in an hour)
I try not to hit the gym during peak hours - that's when all the muscleheads and casual gym attendees show up, trying to out-do each other. Sometimes I get caught up in the act too - cranking out heavier weights than the next guy out of sheer ego - but that's just a waste of time and excessive strain on the body without much improvement. Dumb dumb dumb. I've noticed the biggest improvements when doing consistent exercises with very small, gradual increments. So it's best to keep your ego in check and just keep on trucking at a casual pace. You don't want to damage something that may potentially put you out of commission out for a few weeks at the gym.
It's been about 6 months now and I've been bored strictly with the cardio, so I've been lifting weights more - again gradually increasing intensity. When I don't feel like hitting the weights, I just get back on the treadmill, usually around once a week. The rest of the week is on the weights rotating different muscle groups each day. Nothing too serious, just doing various exercises to keep my heartbeat up.
I started at 210lbs, now I'm at 176lbs. Not too shabby. I've been trying to drop a pound a week, but now that I'm lifting heavier weights I've been focusing less on the scale.
Now it's become such a routine that even if I don't feel like going to the gym, I just go in to get my heartbeat up.
I think the biggest factor to the weight loss itself wasn't the gym, but more the portion control. I try not to eat these humongous single meals anymore. What I do notice is that I have less cravings for specific fatty foods, I have no idea how that change has come about - I still love to eat burgers and fries, I just don't crave it like I used to. Maybe the cardio affected my physiology, *shrug* who knows. Too bad it hasn't affected by nicotine cravings:(
What's pretty funny was when I started seriously playing World of Warcraft as soon as I get home from work. I would log on immediately when I got home, play straight thru the night, then go to bed around 2am because I was tired from raiding, skipping dinner entirely. I think I lost the majority of my weight during that span of time - talk about ironic.
This became such a regular occurrence that I've noticed I was less hungry in the morning when I went to bed hungry, and whenever I went to bed on a full stomach I would wake up starving looking to eat anything - and eating a little too much in the morning. Because of that I've tried to make it a habit not to eat so much at night. Maybe that helps? Probably not:-) *shrug*
I believe most likely that Blizzard isn't going to make any sweeping additions untill they see a proven formula that works. Once they see something that works, then they will jump in, begin development, pump millions to polish it up and resume the top spot.
I pretty sure Blizzard still has their trump card hidden in preparation for the next wave. The 'world pvp' in WoW is a joke, Blizzard is currently just dropping little breadcrumbs in their pvp space to prevent people from defecting too quickly. But right now they still have technical hurdles they have to overcome (how do you have thousands of people in a zone without excessive lag, all the while not causing the servers to die in a fiery mess?), but they have plenty of time, and a good amount of property, and a large enough consumer pool to deliver a desirable product - when the time is right. It's just not at this moment - which sucks for us consumers.
Once WAR comes out and Blizzard sees that they are beginning to lose subscribers, they will release their new world pvp setting beyond just Northrend. Right now they are just waiting for to someone to press the big red button first.
I don't know if planned obsoletion is a good idea especially for game balance. Look at the trouble WoW is running into - the gear difference between 60 and 70 is so enormous that lower levels start buying services from lvl 70s to run them thru instances, inadverdently creating a tertiary economy, unplanned by Blizzard and while-not-technically against the terms of service, defeating the spirit of the game via loopholes.
And then the introduction of new lands (outlands, northrend) causes the previous thriving lands to be barren wastelands sitting there doing nothing but wasting cpu cycles on mobs just roaming around waiting for someone to kill them. That makes old raid instances literally gather dust - even though there may be enough people interested in still seeing those places, there isn't enough critical mass to make it worthwhile, especially since everybody is split up in different servers (Naxx, anyone?).
While Blizzard tried to come up with a series of hotfixes to remedy MMO issues that we've always wanted, they are nothing more than placeholders to keep players busy - simply for the sake of not leaving WoW.
If WAR is to follow the same path, it's pretty much a guarantee that they will fall to the wayside to pick up the scraps that WoW has left behind - kinda like the Lord of the Rings MMO or EQ2. Sure, LOTR/EQ2 may be popular, but it is nowhere near as popular as WoW. They need to do something different. Instead of doing yearly expansions like WoW does, I think it would be more interesting to see more of a microtransation-type upgrade. You know, like an experience that is more... minuature-like.
How about expansions that don't necessarily introduce new lands, but new classes to play? That will retain the individuality of each account holder without the feel of planned obsolesence. New lands can come in free, keeping older players to check out new stuff, new classes for the rest of the less-than-casual MMOers that want/need to have everything. Or expansions to introduce unique game mechanics.
Or new races for their expansions. With a third faction (why shouldn't we be allowed to play skaven?). What makes an MMO memorable is the journey, not the destination. Unfortunately most next-gen MMOs focus on the destination, which acts as the carrot on a stick and keeps players paying for more. This also produces a lot more internet animosity when grouped with people that don't play as hard - the whole idea of "He's bringing the whole team down, kick him from our team and lets pick up someone more worthwhile" is misconstrued and generally led by the most xbox-kiddie-vocal-dickheads you'll run into.
I got a zune recently as well. Second generation 80g. I like the large screen, and it's solidly built. I don't where all the hating is coming from *shrug*
Am I worried about this copyright cop thing? Yeah I guess so, it'll probably mean I'll have to remove the star wars movies (all 6, for the commute).
And the firefly episodes. (Even though I bought 3 copies of the firefly series, was too lazy to encode them so I just picked them off of bittorrent.)
We'll see where it goes. Never had any problems so far, and I like it more than my old ipod. To each his own I suppose.
To look at it another way, Verizon knew the restrictions on the auction, and it bid anyway. If the spectrum wasn't worth that amount of money with the restrictions, they shouldn't have bid for it.
Heh, Google was bidding to remove restrictions, and Verizon was bidding despite restrictions. I know I know - kinda offtopic, but that perspective made me chuckle.
Mod parent up. This is absolutely the case. I've been called to jury duty several times, and have been rejected every time as well.
The selection process is such that even if one side finds a juror that they may think may sway to one side, the other side will simply excuse them. Of course the idea is that once you are all done with the process, you should end up with total middle-of-the-road people that *should be* completely neutral to the case.
But there is another hidden factor involved: how easily does the attorney have a chance against persuading the juror to agree on their arguement? So pretty much you just end up with the dumbest, most gullible people on the jury making the final judgement call. These are the people you would totally not trust for any important decision making. (apologies for being elitist, but you just had to be there)
The last time I had to go, I took a quick look at who they were excusing, and who they kept. They kept the unemployed, the single parent, the person with a criminal record, etc. None of which had any form of education higher than a HS diploma, if that. The lowest common denominator was laughably stereotypical. They booted out the accountants, the doctors, the lawyer, and the tech geeks. If you went to graduate school, there was no chance you wouldn't be dismissed.
Attorneys are not interested in a fair trial; they have money riding on their case. They are looking for people that will listen to their 'vote for me!' speech.
My guess is that the other posts surrounding this thread about being eaten by a grue did not follow the command/response formatting like the above parent threads? *shrug*
Or perhaps someone was just being gracious with karma.:-)
Why? Manufacturers will just remodel it and brand it was as some kind of supplementary device to sell alongside their regular line of laptops, kinda like (incoming obligatory car analogy) subcompact cars geared towards first-time buyers or people that just want something to carry around that's not nearly as costly as compared to their more expensive luxury car/suv brethren. Plus, it gives them a chance to refine the tech to aim for more battery efficiency, and may possibly see it all trickle over to their midline set of products. And if they can do it before their competitors do, then that will be advantageous to them in the longer run. Simply shutting down operations and ignoring a potential market is foolish.
You dream about WoW at night? No offense, but you need a break dude. what's worse? dreaming about WoW at night? Or dreaming about WoW at work?
actaully, don't answer that.
Pr0n chicks in green and blue body-paint with fake elf-ears and horns.
Not nearly as hot as you would think it is.:( Consult a doctor immediately. The kind with the couch. Yes, there is clearly something wrong when you don't consider chicks in green and blue body-paint with fake elf-ears and horns HOT.
Slashdot Mirror
I was planning on selling my life as well, but I've read the Blizzard Terms of Service, and it forbade me from selling my six lvl 70 World of Warcraft characters.
Or technically would it be that I'm selling the Absence of Life?
almost all modern browsers should be compliant to ECMA-262 (3rd ed), well, at least the wikipedia entry tells me that is so
As long as you stick to that, you should be totally fine. this is all you'll ever need for docs. I've yet to run into any standardization issues with javascript when coding for ff/ie. If you stick to the basics there really shouldn't be anything you can't do to break on either firefox or ie.
What are all these standardization issue people keep talking about? Can I see an working example? (this isn't sarcasm, I'm just curious what everybody is referring to - like I missed the party)
"If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you!" - quote from my ex when I asked her what was wrong.
We try to obfuscate thing? Maybe they don't understand that men just want to code in front of the couch with a nice cold beer and not have to be bothered by the old lady who just wants to talk about the useless crap that happened to her thruout the day.
There is no conspiracy theory, nobody is hiding anything from anybody. We just. don't. care about useless crap. Whenever men respond with "Nothing much" to your "What did you do today?" - that is a completely valid response. Why do they get so upset?
I originally meant the alcoholic beverage, but I suppose the software relation may also apply.
This was done with wine, often with humbling results.
How about we just use bigass fans to blow them away? As planes get closer to the fans they will hit turbulence, get discouraged and fly elsewhere. If the pentagon wanted to get cheap about it, just make a humongous leaf blower, and direct it towards potential hostiles. Should work real well with boats too.
I think a humongous firehose may be more effective now that I think about it.
Or a really really really big mosquito net around the cities, kinda like the big nets campers use when they want to sit outdoors using folding chairs and not get bit while they are drinking their beers?
Another good idea is to cover the whole city with smoke, reduce visibility. Yeah that should work wonders, and it's probably the cheapest.
Of course the only real way to prevent planes from flying over any given city is to simply position the city higher than the plane. Duh.
That's never going to change.
In almost all mainstream MMOs, the most dominant race played are the 'most normal' ones. And then after that you have the most 'hardcore' races played by the 'serious' gamers.
In WoW, while NE were popular, humans were clearly the most commonly played race on the Alliance. Dwarves and Gnomes the least played. On the Horde, it was the undead, them being the most 'human' looking, but in a hardcore eeevil fashion. The trolls being the least played race.
EQ had the same pattern - humans being the most commonly played race, trolls and gnomes/dwarves the least.
Also keep in mind that a lot of people were afraid that everybody was going to roll undead during launch - and at first it was true, but as more and more people signed up to play the population evened out after a while, with humans at the top.
But when this game launches, I wouldn't be too suprised to see when a bunch of wow expats playing the opposite faction that they have played in WoW. I myself am looking forward to rolling a dwarf.
89.6 LOCs
Hrm.. that's a lot of Warhammer Online information. Perhaps if you've used CD's instead of hard drives. Lets see... a cd weighs 16 grams... which leads to 115.823133 terabytes... 5.79 LOCs
Hrm, that's still a lot of Warhammer Online information..
and how popular did UO become from that type of gameplay? I'm not about to criticise the pvp system in UO, I used to play UO before Coster implemented Chaos and Order, but getting constantly ganked was a PITA, and the majority of the intial subscribers felt that way too.
So much so that when OWO went over to EA the servers were split into both pvp and pve servers to appease both demographics. And if I recall the pvp servers were a bit on the empty side. From a player perspective the UO pvp was (to coin a popular insult) 'serious business,' but from a business perspective it didn't work at all.
I remember running into people that would mine at the border of the town, just close enough so that guards would kill any would-be gankers, so that they couuld make enough money to get some gear and reagents. Once they got enough money, they would run out of town and try to finally 'play outside', only to get ganked and looted by more powerful players, losing everything. Then they would start again with the whole mining thing.
This brought up a wierd caste-like ecosystem. You had your 'weak' players farming at the bottom of the barrel, and your strong players farming the weak players once they get just enough resources to adventure outside, the weak players being put in their place by losing everything they worked for and handing over their goods to the PKers. Those weak players never had a chance to work on their weapon skill, most of the time you would get killed by ranged attacks - usually from 1 or 2 arrows or a magic missile. The only time they would get skill was from the in-town training dummies, which only got you so much weapon training. (it's been years since I've last played, apologies if I forget the game mechanics)
And then came the harassment stories - an early discussion was about an 10 year old girl playing UO, she was herding sheep and making clothing. Out comes a few PKers, kill her, loot the stuff and walk away. She comes back, is all angry and asks why they would do such a thing. The Pkers responded with insults via sexual remarks and then proceed to kill her again. Sounds pretty typical of what the average preteen boy would do, but still - bad karma that goes unpunished. UO was a harsh place.
The PKing in UO got so bad I recall someone actaully filed a lawsuit against OWO because of it. Again, from a gamer perspective that sounds pretty hilarious in the order of Jack Thompson, but still, it's unfortunate. I guess it was an early indication that UO does definately not prepared for the new genre of gaming.
As the next interation of MMOs started to come into play, there has been an emphasis on combat mechanics and less on actual roleplay, which is unfortunate. But since the majority of players were looking for combat anyways, the point was moot, business dictated that the RP element in MMORPGs were a profitless money sink, and simply stopped developing in that direction altogether.
MMOs today really are not that much different from FPS, instead of a lobby, you have your world - the real gameplay comes from the instances i.e. individual servers. The only difference between a MMO and a FPS is that the company hosts all the instance based servers as opposed to the instances being hosted by players themselves. There's nothing massive about today's MMOs
The problem is that people got so caught up with dueling in WoW that at some point before TBC some of the big wigs over at Blizzard thought it would be a good idea to oblige to the duelers. And once it went mainstream with arena, the masses started to complain that all the other classes that they did not play themselves, were overpowered.
Even just taking a glance over at the pvp forums, you could find a "OMG NERG _OTHERCLASS_ SO OP LOL" for almost every class. People griped at stunlock rogues. People griped at MS warriors. People griped at slsl locks. People griped at disc priests. People griped at holy pallys. Resto druids. Ele shamans. Frost mages. Marksman hunters. Every class has a group of people that they think is overpowered against their class.
What brought this on was simply the fact that the gameplay has taken a major shift from massive Braveheart style battles, to 2-on-2, 3-on-3, 5-on-5 skirmishes and duels. Why? Because the Blizzard sanctioned massive Braveheart style battles never came. (tarren mill doesn't count). The closest they have gotten to that was the 40-on-40 pvp instance Alterac Valley, where they screwed with it so much that I'm pretty positive that it was the end result of an original game designer that was in charge of working on AV being either fired or dismissed in some other fashion before finishing his/her job, leaving it in honor-point-per-hour farming shambles.
To exacerbate matters with dueling was an overemphasis on crowd control - classes who could remove the ability for other players to control their characters brought on a whole slew of dueling gameplay imbalances - sheep, cheapshot/kidneyshot, fear, deathcoil, root, mind control, scattershot, frost trap - you name it. Nevermind that certain spells and abilities are completely useless for pvp - like taunt. Or shackle.
IMO arena-style pvp really took the character balance away from what we all wanted from the very beginning - the epic, massive battles we've witnessed in the Warcraft RTS games. But Blizzard decided to take it in that direction, and it brought them 10 million players, so why should they change anything?
It's really a shame.
It's just the same old same old group.
You know, the group that complains about the time spent on guitar hero should be better spent on a real guitar.
Or the group that complains about how DDR does not compare to real dancing. You know, comicbook-guy-style criticism.
Most people don't really care, and they especially are not as passionate about voicing their opinions about non-relevant issues.
It's a freakin game. If I had fun playing it - hey that's cool. If I lost weight playing it - hey an added benefit, that's cool too. Is it going to replace gym equipment? Uh.. not really. Is owning the game going to label me in a negative light? I don't see how that's any different from any other geek issues, say, like playing WoW, or magic the gathering, or LARPing..
.. or Guitar Hero
.. or DDR
.. or paintball
.. or coding
Does it have the potential to make sports and outdoor activities obsolete?..
Who the hell thinks like that? And who the hell thinks other people think like that?
I don't get it. I don't know where the animosity comes from. Or people so afraid that other fellow geek peers will *gasp* lose weight or something?
Is the talent pool so limited that being blacklisted from SAG is going to severely limit the quality of the game? Because if it will, then that game is going to suck. I can see where if they wanted to use big name actors it may be a big deal, but otherwise, why should game developers even CARE?
It sounds like developers are using SAG as nothing more than a resource for easy access to voices - kinda like stock photography. Video games don't need voice actors, it's the opposite - voice actors need video games.
When I've started my new job I started hitting the gym. At first it was mostly an hour of cardio, perhaps something like every day for about 3 months. Began moving up to more intensive exercises gradually, starting with the elliptical, then moving to exercise bike, then eventually hitting up the treadmill. Nothing too intensive, just consistent, even if it's a weaksauce 'performance' compared to the other members. (I've eventually worked up to roughly 5 miles in an hour)
I try not to hit the gym during peak hours - that's when all the muscleheads and casual gym attendees show up, trying to out-do each other. Sometimes I get caught up in the act too - cranking out heavier weights than the next guy out of sheer ego - but that's just a waste of time and excessive strain on the body without much improvement. Dumb dumb dumb. I've noticed the biggest improvements when doing consistent exercises with very small, gradual increments. So it's best to keep your ego in check and just keep on trucking at a casual pace. You don't want to damage something that may potentially put you out of commission out for a few weeks at the gym.
It's been about 6 months now and I've been bored strictly with the cardio, so I've been lifting weights more - again gradually increasing intensity. When I don't feel like hitting the weights, I just get back on the treadmill, usually around once a week. The rest of the week is on the weights rotating different muscle groups each day. Nothing too serious, just doing various exercises to keep my heartbeat up.
I started at 210lbs, now I'm at 176lbs. Not too shabby. I've been trying to drop a pound a week, but now that I'm lifting heavier weights I've been focusing less on the scale.
Now it's become such a routine that even if I don't feel like going to the gym, I just go in to get my heartbeat up.
I think the biggest factor to the weight loss itself wasn't the gym, but more the portion control. I try not to eat these humongous single meals anymore. What I do notice is that I have less cravings for specific fatty foods, I have no idea how that change has come about - I still love to eat burgers and fries, I just don't crave it like I used to. Maybe the cardio affected my physiology, *shrug* who knows. Too bad it hasn't affected by nicotine cravings :(
What's pretty funny was when I started seriously playing World of Warcraft as soon as I get home from work. I would log on immediately when I got home, play straight thru the night, then go to bed around 2am because I was tired from raiding, skipping dinner entirely. I think I lost the majority of my weight during that span of time - talk about ironic.
This became such a regular occurrence that I've noticed I was less hungry in the morning when I went to bed hungry, and whenever I went to bed on a full stomach I would wake up starving looking to eat anything - and eating a little too much in the morning. Because of that I've tried to make it a habit not to eat so much at night. Maybe that helps? Probably not :-) *shrug*
I believe most likely that Blizzard isn't going to make any sweeping additions untill they see a proven formula that works. Once they see something that works, then they will jump in, begin development, pump millions to polish it up and resume the top spot.
I pretty sure Blizzard still has their trump card hidden in preparation for the next wave. The 'world pvp' in WoW is a joke, Blizzard is currently just dropping little breadcrumbs in their pvp space to prevent people from defecting too quickly. But right now they still have technical hurdles they have to overcome (how do you have thousands of people in a zone without excessive lag, all the while not causing the servers to die in a fiery mess?), but they have plenty of time, and a good amount of property, and a large enough consumer pool to deliver a desirable product - when the time is right. It's just not at this moment - which sucks for us consumers.
Once WAR comes out and Blizzard sees that they are beginning to lose subscribers, they will release their new world pvp setting beyond just Northrend. Right now they are just waiting for to someone to press the big red button first.
I don't know if planned obsoletion is a good idea especially for game balance. Look at the trouble WoW is running into - the gear difference between 60 and 70 is so enormous that lower levels start buying services from lvl 70s to run them thru instances, inadverdently creating a tertiary economy, unplanned by Blizzard and while-not-technically against the terms of service, defeating the spirit of the game via loopholes.
And then the introduction of new lands (outlands, northrend) causes the previous thriving lands to be barren wastelands sitting there doing nothing but wasting cpu cycles on mobs just roaming around waiting for someone to kill them. That makes old raid instances literally gather dust - even though there may be enough people interested in still seeing those places, there isn't enough critical mass to make it worthwhile, especially since everybody is split up in different servers (Naxx, anyone?).
While Blizzard tried to come up with a series of hotfixes to remedy MMO issues that we've always wanted, they are nothing more than placeholders to keep players busy - simply for the sake of not leaving WoW.
If WAR is to follow the same path, it's pretty much a guarantee that they will fall to the wayside to pick up the scraps that WoW has left behind - kinda like the Lord of the Rings MMO or EQ2. Sure, LOTR/EQ2 may be popular, but it is nowhere near as popular as WoW. They need to do something different. Instead of doing yearly expansions like WoW does, I think it would be more interesting to see more of a microtransation-type upgrade. You know, like an experience that is more... minuature-like.
How about expansions that don't necessarily introduce new lands, but new classes to play? That will retain the individuality of each account holder without the feel of planned obsolesence. New lands can come in free, keeping older players to check out new stuff, new classes for the rest of the less-than-casual MMOers that want/need to have everything. Or expansions to introduce unique game mechanics.
Or new races for their expansions. With a third faction (why shouldn't we be allowed to play skaven?). What makes an MMO memorable is the journey, not the destination. Unfortunately most next-gen MMOs focus on the destination, which acts as the carrot on a stick and keeps players paying for more. This also produces a lot more internet animosity when grouped with people that don't play as hard - the whole idea of "He's bringing the whole team down, kick him from our team and lets pick up someone more worthwhile" is misconstrued and generally led by the most xbox-kiddie-vocal-dickheads you'll run into.
I got a zune recently as well. Second generation 80g. I like the large screen, and it's solidly built. I don't where all the hating is coming from *shrug*
Am I worried about this copyright cop thing? Yeah I guess so, it'll probably mean I'll have to remove the star wars movies (all 6, for the commute).
And the firefly episodes. (Even though I bought 3 copies of the firefly series, was too lazy to encode them so I just picked them off of bittorrent.)
We'll see where it goes. Never had any problems so far, and I like it more than my old ipod. To each his own I suppose.
Heh, Google was bidding to remove restrictions, and Verizon was bidding despite restrictions. I know I know - kinda offtopic, but that perspective made me chuckle.
you mean like the comic book guy, or like John Romero?
Mod parent up. This is absolutely the case. I've been called to jury duty several times, and have been rejected every time as well.
The selection process is such that even if one side finds a juror that they may think may sway to one side, the other side will simply excuse them. Of course the idea is that once you are all done with the process, you should end up with total middle-of-the-road people that *should be* completely neutral to the case.
But there is another hidden factor involved: how easily does the attorney have a chance against persuading the juror to agree on their arguement? So pretty much you just end up with the dumbest, most gullible people on the jury making the final judgement call. These are the people you would totally not trust for any important decision making. (apologies for being elitist, but you just had to be there)
The last time I had to go, I took a quick look at who they were excusing, and who they kept. They kept the unemployed, the single parent, the person with a criminal record, etc. None of which had any form of education higher than a HS diploma, if that. The lowest common denominator was laughably stereotypical. They booted out the accountants, the doctors, the lawyer, and the tech geeks. If you went to graduate school, there was no chance you wouldn't be dismissed.
Attorneys are not interested in a fair trial; they have money riding on their case. They are looking for people that will listen to their 'vote for me!' speech.
My guess is that the other posts surrounding this thread about being eaten by a grue did not follow the command/response formatting like the above parent threads? *shrug*
Or perhaps someone was just being gracious with karma. :-)
Why? Manufacturers will just remodel it and brand it was as some kind of supplementary device to sell alongside their regular line of laptops, kinda like (incoming obligatory car analogy) subcompact cars geared towards first-time buyers or people that just want something to carry around that's not nearly as costly as compared to their more expensive luxury car/suv brethren. Plus, it gives them a chance to refine the tech to aim for more battery efficiency, and may possibly see it all trickle over to their midline set of products. And if they can do it before their competitors do, then that will be advantageous to them in the longer run. Simply shutting down operations and ignoring a potential market is foolish.
actaully, don't answer that.