What else save Tits, guns and the ability to wreak mayhem (I think you forgot fast cars) gives such a large % of a human-brain-based (and therefore lizard-brain-cortex-based) populace the feeling (e.g. illusion, but who cares) of raw _power_?
Answer that one, get yourself a VC to back you up, and you might be the forth contender in the next such article:-)
I think almost none of the comments here are looking at the big picture. There _IS_ a very large new concept here, and that is that an MMORPG can have an economy, and a currency, with a GDP, and with a real exchange rate.
This is sorta the case for Project Entropia.
To a degree this exists whether the company endorses it as in Entropia, or forbids it as in Everquest. Obviously, this calls for monetary tracking, for employing professional finance personel, treating game money with the same severity and same law enforcement as real money in real banks is treated, a "Central Bank" to set an interest rate, etc.
But the real issue nobody mentioned is this:
THIS IS STILL A CLOSED ECONOMY.
For every dollar someone makes, another player loses it. Loses more than that dollar actually, because the company operating the MMORPG also needs to draw revenue.
The BIG question, and if anyone of you slashdotters can answer it he might just be the bizillionaire of tomorrow, is how to convert this into an open economy. In English, how to make your cyberspace export. Or rather, not how, but WHAT.
If you can make foreign money flow in, export some service people are willing to pay hard coin for, theoretically, everyone down to the last player and operating company can actually profit financially from participating in the world.
And since I came to it, and I don't intend to become said zillionaire, I'll give a shot at being a visionary:
Here's when this will really kick in: When we will have, I'm guessing, a couple of decades down the road, Neural linking tech.
When you'll get trashed in a car accident, and find yourself a paraplegic, or missing 4 limbs, or having all but your brain dead. Then you'd be offered to live in a jar, but to experience life in something similar to an MMORPG. Probbably closer to the SIMS than to UO. And since you won't have the option of living outside, you'd be able to create as much intelectual property as you like inside this world. And THAT is when these worlds will be able to export their product (the IP) and.. become real economies.
A CPU that goes 200MHz faster than the last one.
A harddrive that has another 40 Gigs per platter.
A CF card that has another 2 gigs on it.
Woohoo. Yip Yip. Horaaay.
I read/. to get more news on the lines of this, which will make a 4Gig CF card (as well as a 40Gig CF card for that matter) stack with the punchcards in your local compy museum.
Yep. And since they plan to stay there over a year, that'd be more than the 10 to 40 Billion we need to get an elevator up and running and trash the rocket engines concept altogether.
At least that was what the US government would be doing if getting people in space was what it really wanted to do.
Frankly, if I'd been ruling the world, I'd shift technology, research and humanity as a whole into high gear _BEFORE_ salvaging Iraq and removing Saddam's testacles, but hey, that's just me.
>> The only thing that runs well on all flavours of MS OSes from DOS to XP is viruses!
You overrate viruses. Take it from someone who works at an AV company and who spent 2 years in the virus analysis team, roughly 90% of them fail to do part or all of what their writer intended to do.
Viruses are not an exclusion to your law-of-patchiness.
>> Who really cares if the R9800 gives me 400 fps in Quake 3 when the R9600 gives me 300?
If that were the difference, you'd be right. Furthermore, I'm not saying someone who just dished out cash for a 9600 or a GF4Ti4x00 should upgrade it to 300-400$ card.
But if you're buying a new box or upping a 2-3 year-old one, buying a 200$ card today is plain lame.
>> My question is "why buy a top of the line card when the mid-range cards are just as good for all intents and purposes?"
There's your mistake right there. Suppose you go buy a 100$-200$ card. Does your "all intents and purposes" include games based on D3 and HL2 engines at noticeable visual quality enhancement (read: HIGH RESOLUTIONS like 1280 and up, and I'm not going into the FSAA/AF arguement) at frame rates that carry some slack for them heavy conditions?
Well, my 9700Pro can run UT2003 at 1600x on ~60fps.No FSAA and No AF. That's decent. This means that a 9600 owner will not be playing at 1600x at a LAN party. He'd prefer lower res and better stability (we all know frame rates dive when there's a big mess in view in the game). And he'll probbably go as low as 800x600 or 1024 tops on the new engines.
My point: The difference IS NOT betwee 300fps and 400 fps. The difference is whether you're gonna be playing at 800x600 (god forbid any lower) or at 1280x1024 6 months from now. That's what you're paying for.
So this card that you buy today should run at least reasonably well on next generation engines at high res. And GF4Ti/GFFX5200/GFFX5600/Rad9600 cards just WON'T. EVEN IF THEY DO in Q3.
But if all you ever intend to play is Q3 and Q3-engine-based-games, then by all means you're right.
>>I'm not saying a fast video card isn't worth it. But it will be just as fast a year from now when it's half the price and games are actually coming out where the difference in speed is even noticible
Again, you're right from your perspective (that of a Ti owner). But this statement is right for every point in time, including "a year from now". Someone who needs/wants to buy a new box/card TODAY will find that buying a 200$ card today will send him shopping again 6 months from now (or settle for low-Q) if he wants to play the latest games.
If you don't game, a good'ol 10$ ATI Rage 8 Meg card will do. A 40$ Radeon9000 will do just fine as well.
If you DO game and on a limited budget, you're much better off buying a Rad9800Pro (or even a 9700 pro which can be found for ~270$) and the cheapest Athlon you can find (a 1600+to2000+ will do just fine), than you are of paying that same money for a Radeon 9600/9200 (or nVidia equivalent) and a bombshell CPU. Also, I didn't notice any significant performance boost when I upped my Mobo for DDR400 & AGPx8. Turned out I upped it for nothing, there were no bottlenecks there, even when playing at 1600x1200x2FSAAx4AF.
Besides, Housing such a card allows you to play everything at 1600x1200. That in itself is worth the cash.
A fast CPU can give you an increase of 10%. A fast GPU can give you an increase of 400%. So YES, It's worth the cash. Save up on everything else, not on this.
Of course, if your question was aimed at "why buy a 5900Ultra for 400$ when a R9700 sells for 270$" then you're completely right. A waste of 130$.
10 to 40 Billion Dollars. Damn, That's PEANUTS. When the Swiss government decides to bore a tunnel through their 'natural barrier', they whip out a checkbook and write a 50 to 100, with 9 zeros on the right. IN ADVANCE.
I can think of some computer companies that could dish out that kind of funding out of their do-good account. Not to mention out of their VC investments. Doesn't need to be in advance, just needs to be persistent, and spread out over a decade or two. Where's all the tech-evangellists and hardcore visionaries when you need them? Dean Kamen? Mr. Gates? Anybody?
Besides, Why would an Energy-Tech-Solutions company like GE _NOT_ want to invest in something like this? That kind of investment would return itself hundredfold. And buy them a reputation for the next eon or two. Sorta like llyod's bought a name by paying up for the Titanic. 100 years since, and we still revere them.
I believe it's just a matter of time. The power companies are like the people in that flic from a few years back, 'Rat Race'. They're all standing in place, laughing at the idea. And yet, the realization is dawning. Sooner or later, one of them will employ a decision maker who'se mind will make an audible CLICK, and he'll bolt for it.
Admittedly, I never have. Off the bat, I am somewhat reluctant to believe I'd be willing to double my hardware expenses over a GUI (I assume Photoshop or Quake look the same under all OS's).
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this soup I've never tasted is no good. I'm saying no matter how good it is (an it might very well be mighty good) I won't be willing to pay 1500U$D for it. (even if it's not directly for the OS but for overpriced hardware that differs from x86 only in its ability to run this OS, AFAIAC)
I'm not flaming the G5. Techwise, It's cool enough. I'm flaming Apple's competitiveness (or utter lack thereof).
Half that much will buy me either a nice cozy Athlon-based, Rad9700Pro-Equipped game box, stuffed with 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe a nice dualie Athlon-based box with a 760 chipset for video encoding, or some other variants I can think of. Slightly more will buy me an 'Intel Inside' sticker on the case.
Twice half as much, hence same as what said G5'll cost will also buy me a black AseTek Vapochill case, phase change and all, that makes the G5's noise level, cooling and general sexiness look like an 80-year-old wartnosed hag next to Nicole Kidman. And I'll probbably have enough left to throw in a small SCSI 36Gig 10K-spindle dual-HD stripe (3'll kill the PCI).
So WHY exactly would someone buy that G5, other than to prove something to the big wide world by showing off his mac? And spare me the "I'm into Graphics" bit. Wake up and smell the Hummus. All adobe software runs just fine on Windows nowadays.
Not having a 6-digit income nor a wealthy parent, I find myself settling for the "half as much" solution. And if I wanted a 64-bit desktop, I'd simply wait till September. Hammer's here.
Half that much will buy me either a nice cozy Athlon-based, Rad9700Pro-Equipped game box, stuffed with 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe a nice dualie Athlon-based box with a 760 chipset for video encoding, or some other variants I can think of. Slightly more will buy me an 'Intel Inside' sticker on the case.
Twice half as much, hence same as what said G5'll cost will also buy me a black AseTek Vapochill case, phase change and all, that makes the G5's noise level, cooling and general sexiness look like an 80-year-old wartnosed hag next to Nicole Kidman. And I'll probbably have enough left to throw in a small SCSI 36Gig 10K-spindle dual-HD stripe (3'll kill the PCI).
So WHY exactly would someone buy that G5, other than to prove something to the big wide world by showing off his mac? And spare me the "I'm into Graphics" bit. Wake up and smell the Hummus. All adobe software runs just fine on Windows nowadays.
I just can't wait for Intel to soak up ye'ol Fritz chip and lop it on-die.
Hey, I mean why go to jail for sharing MP3's and get myself violated there when I can have a bunch of hardware engineers violate me right here where I sit?
Go DMCA! Onward Stalin!
This is from a local LUG - most/all common knowledge, but the last part hit me as interesting:
"The SCO that bought Xenix is not the SCO that is suing IBM. The SCO that is suing is actually Caldera. They changed the name to capitalize on SCO's name recognition as they were making money from "SCO UNIX" which they had bought a source license* (but not the patents
and copyrights) from Novell.
-snip-
* This was fairly common around 1990. AT&T sold many source licenses for UNIX. SCO bought one, Everex (ESIX) bought one, Interactive Systems
(later owned by Kodak and sold to SUN) bought one, etc.
.. end LUG quote.... and then some comment here on/. said this:
"The SCO Group, and only The SCO Group, has *sole* right to sub-license any and all source code from all of the folowing UNIXs; SCO UnixWare and SCO OpenServer, Suns Solaris, IBMs AIX, SGIs IRIX, HPs UX, Fujitsus ICL DRS/NX, Siemens SINIX, Data Generals DG-UX, and Sequents DYNIX/Ptx. "
Can anyone confirm this to be true/false? These two contradict quite well. It means it could just as well be SUN who'se suing IBM and/or hoeing down the OS community. Although I suspect SUN isn't into the shoot-myself-in-the-face-with-a-howitzer-business- model. Yet.
--
Slashdot Mirror
What else save Tits, guns and the ability to wreak mayhem (I think you forgot fast cars) gives such a large % of a human-brain-based (and therefore lizard-brain-cortex-based) populace the feeling (e.g. illusion, but who cares) of raw _power_?
:-)
Answer that one, get yourself a VC to back you up, and you might be the forth contender in the next such article
I think almost none of the comments here are looking at the big picture. There _IS_ a very large new concept here, and that is that an MMORPG can have an economy, and a currency, with a GDP, and with a real exchange rate.
This is sorta the case for Project Entropia.
To a degree this exists whether the company endorses it as in Entropia, or forbids it as in Everquest. Obviously, this calls for monetary tracking, for employing professional finance personel, treating game money with the same severity and same law enforcement as real money in real banks is treated, a "Central Bank" to set an interest rate, etc.
But the real issue nobody mentioned is this:
THIS IS STILL A CLOSED ECONOMY.
For every dollar someone makes, another player loses it. Loses more than that dollar actually, because the company operating the MMORPG also needs to draw revenue.
The BIG question, and if anyone of you slashdotters can answer it he might just be the bizillionaire of tomorrow, is how to convert this into an open economy. In English, how to make your cyberspace export. Or rather, not how, but WHAT.
If you can make foreign money flow in, export some service people are willing to pay hard coin for, theoretically, everyone down to the last player and operating company can actually profit financially from participating in the world.
And since I came to it, and I don't intend to become said zillionaire, I'll give a shot at being a visionary:
Here's when this will really kick in: When we will have, I'm guessing, a couple of decades down the road, Neural linking tech.
When you'll get trashed in a car accident, and find yourself a paraplegic, or missing 4 limbs, or having all but your brain dead. Then you'd be offered to live in a jar, but to experience life in something similar to an MMORPG. Probbably closer to the SIMS than to UO. And since you won't have the option of living outside, you'd be able to create as much intelectual property as you like inside this world. And THAT is when these worlds will be able to export their product (the IP) and.. become real economies.
-- Leshotim Nitna Hanevua (ancient hebrew proverb)
A CPU that goes 200MHz faster than the last one.
/. to get more news on the lines of this, which will make a 4Gig CF card (as well as a 40Gig CF card for that matter) stack with the punchcards in your local compy museum.
A harddrive that has another 40 Gigs per platter.
A CF card that has another 2 gigs on it.
Woohoo. Yip Yip. Horaaay.
I read
Yep. And since they plan to stay there over a year, that'd be more than the 10 to 40 Billion we need to get an elevator up and running and trash the rocket engines concept altogether.
At least that was what the US government would be doing if getting people in space was what it really wanted to do.
Frankly, if I'd been ruling the world, I'd shift technology, research and humanity as a whole into high gear _BEFORE_ salvaging Iraq and removing Saddam's testacles, but hey, that's just me.
>> The only thing that runs well on all flavours of MS OSes from DOS to XP is viruses!
You overrate viruses. Take it from someone who works at an AV company and who spent 2 years in the virus analysis team, roughly 90% of them fail to do part or all of what their writer intended to do.
Viruses are not an exclusion to your law-of-patchiness.
THG did a nice rundown a while ago on (still-)existing audio chipsets on Mobos and sound cards, comparing bells&whistles, CPU usage and IIRC quality.
Cheers.
"It wasn't me, society is to blame!!!" ..
"Okay, we'll take them instead".
-- Monty Python
>> Who really cares if the R9800 gives me 400 fps in Quake 3 when the R9600 gives me 300?
If that were the difference, you'd be right.
Furthermore, I'm not saying someone who just dished out cash for a 9600 or a GF4Ti4x00 should upgrade it to 300-400$ card.
But if you're buying a new box or upping a 2-3 year-old one, buying a 200$ card today is plain lame.
>> My question is "why buy a top of the line card when the mid-range cards are just as good for all intents and purposes?"
There's your mistake right there. Suppose you go buy a 100$-200$ card. Does your "all intents and purposes" include games based on D3 and HL2 engines at noticeable visual quality enhancement (read: HIGH RESOLUTIONS like 1280 and up, and I'm not going into the FSAA/AF arguement) at frame rates that carry some slack for them heavy conditions?
Well, my 9700Pro can run UT2003 at 1600x on ~60fps.No FSAA and No AF. That's decent. This means that a 9600 owner will not be playing at 1600x at a LAN party. He'd prefer lower res and better stability (we all know frame rates dive when there's a big mess in view in the game). And he'll probbably go as low as 800x600 or 1024 tops on the new engines.
My point: The difference IS NOT betwee 300fps and 400 fps. The difference is whether you're gonna be playing at 800x600 (god forbid any lower) or at 1280x1024 6 months from now. That's what you're paying for.
So this card that you buy today should run at least reasonably well on next generation engines at high res. And GF4Ti/GFFX5200/GFFX5600/Rad9600 cards just WON'T. EVEN IF THEY DO in Q3.
But if all you ever intend to play is Q3 and Q3-engine-based-games, then by all means you're right.
>>I'm not saying a fast video card isn't worth it. But it will be just as fast a year from now when it's half the price and games are actually coming out where the difference in speed is even noticible
Again, you're right from your perspective (that of a Ti owner). But this statement is right for every point in time, including "a year from now".
Someone who needs/wants to buy a new box/card TODAY will find that buying a 200$ card today will send him shopping again 6 months from now (or settle for low-Q) if he wants to play the latest games.
Just my 2 Iraqi dinars.
I utterly disagree.
If you don't game, a good'ol 10$ ATI Rage 8 Meg card will do. A 40$ Radeon9000 will do just fine as well.
If you DO game and on a limited budget, you're much better off buying a Rad9800Pro (or even a 9700 pro which can be found for ~270$) and the cheapest Athlon you can find (a 1600+to2000+ will do just fine), than you are of paying that same money for a Radeon 9600/9200 (or nVidia equivalent) and a bombshell CPU. Also, I didn't notice any significant performance boost when I upped my Mobo for DDR400 & AGPx8. Turned out I upped it for nothing, there were no bottlenecks there, even when playing at 1600x1200x2FSAAx4AF.
Besides, Housing such a card allows you to play everything at 1600x1200. That in itself is worth the cash.
A fast CPU can give you an increase of 10%.
A fast GPU can give you an increase of 400%.
So YES, It's worth the cash. Save up on everything else, not on this.
Of course, if your question was aimed at "why buy a 5900Ultra for 400$ when a R9700 sells for 270$" then you're completely right. A waste of 130$.
10 to 40 Billion Dollars.
Damn, That's PEANUTS. When the Swiss government decides to bore a tunnel through their 'natural barrier', they whip out a checkbook and write a 50 to 100, with 9 zeros on the right. IN ADVANCE.
I can think of some computer companies that could dish out that kind of funding out of their do-good account. Not to mention out of their VC investments. Doesn't need to be in advance, just needs to be persistent, and spread out over a decade or two.
Where's all the tech-evangellists and hardcore visionaries when you need them? Dean Kamen? Mr. Gates? Anybody?
Besides, Why would an Energy-Tech-Solutions company like GE _NOT_ want to invest in something like this? That kind of investment would return itself hundredfold. And buy them a reputation for the next eon or two. Sorta like llyod's bought a name by paying up for the Titanic. 100 years since, and we still revere them.
I believe it's just a matter of time. The power companies are like the people in that flic from a few years back, 'Rat Race'. They're all standing in place, laughing at the idea. And yet, the realization is dawning. Sooner or later, one of them will employ a decision maker who'se mind will make an audible CLICK, and he'll bolt for it.
And then it gets happy and we all prosper.
That's because most AA and SAMs out there are 30-year-old tech, with 30-year-old computers, algorithms, etc.
:-P
Try outmaneuvering a Python-4
That's only 15-year-old-tech.
Now try putting some contemporary computing power and thrust tech into those babies.
Tech keeps getting better, in exponential steps. Humans stay the same. In fact, they grow old, retire, and you gotta train new ones all over.
Sooner or later, tech will eat human for lunch.
Do the math.
Uhm, no.
What apple sells for 799$ does NOT line up with a 2 Gig Athlon, A NForce2-based Mobo, A Gig of Ram and a Radeon9700Pro GPU.
Not by a long shot.
If you wanna edit video, It doesn't match up either. Think oof a more modest GPU, but with Tyans Athlon MP MoBo and TWO of said Athlon CPU.
So YES, Apple DOES have an 800$ solution, but a PC solution for the same cash beats the living daylight out of the Apple price-equivalent.
Sorry, in bang for buck, Apple's a dead horse.
Admittedly, I never have.
Off the bat, I am somewhat reluctant to believe I'd be willing to double my hardware expenses over a GUI (I assume Photoshop or Quake look the same under all OS's).
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this soup I've never tasted is no good. I'm saying no matter how good it is (an it might very well be mighty good) I won't be willing to pay 1500U$D for it. (even if it's not directly for the OS but for overpriced hardware that differs from x86 only in its ability to run this OS, AFAIAC)
I'm not flaming the G5. Techwise, It's cool enough. I'm flaming Apple's competitiveness (or utter lack thereof).
Half that much will buy me either a nice cozy Athlon-based, Rad9700Pro-Equipped game box, stuffed with 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe a nice dualie Athlon-based box with a 760 chipset for video encoding, or some other variants I can think of. Slightly more will buy me an 'Intel Inside' sticker on the case.
Twice half as much, hence same as what said G5'll cost will also buy me a black AseTek Vapochill case, phase change and all, that makes the G5's noise level, cooling and general sexiness look like an 80-year-old wartnosed hag next to Nicole Kidman. And I'll probbably have enough left to throw in a small SCSI 36Gig 10K-spindle dual-HD stripe (3'll kill the PCI).
So WHY exactly would someone buy that G5, other than to prove something to the big wide world by showing off his mac?
And spare me the "I'm into Graphics" bit. Wake up and smell the Hummus. All adobe software runs just fine on Windows nowadays.
Not having a 6-digit income nor a wealthy parent, I find myself settling for the "half as much" solution.
And if I wanted a 64-bit desktop, I'd simply wait till September. Hammer's here.
Half that much will buy me either a nice cozy Athlon-based, Rad9700Pro-Equipped game box, stuffed with 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe a nice dualie Athlon-based box with a 760 chipset for video encoding, or some other variants I can think of. Slightly more will buy me an 'Intel Inside' sticker on the case.
Twice half as much, hence same as what said G5'll cost will also buy me a black AseTek Vapochill case, phase change and all, that makes the G5's noise level, cooling and general sexiness look like an 80-year-old wartnosed hag next to Nicole Kidman. And I'll probbably have enough left to throw in a small SCSI 36Gig 10K-spindle dual-HD stripe (3'll kill the PCI).
So WHY exactly would someone buy that G5, other than to prove something to the big wide world by showing off his mac?
And spare me the "I'm into Graphics" bit. Wake up and smell the Hummus. All adobe software runs just fine on Windows nowadays.
I just can't wait for Intel to soak up ye'ol Fritz chip and lop it on-die. Hey, I mean why go to jail for sharing MP3's and get myself violated there when I can have a bunch of hardware engineers violate me right here where I sit? Go DMCA! Onward Stalin!
This is from a local LUG - most/all common knowledge, but the last part hit me as interesting: "The SCO that bought Xenix is not the SCO that is suing IBM. The SCO that is suing is actually Caldera. They changed the name to capitalize on SCO's name recognition as they were making money from "SCO UNIX" which they had bought a source license* (but not the patents and copyrights) from Novell. -snip- * This was fairly common around 1990. AT&T sold many source licenses for UNIX. SCO bought one, Everex (ESIX) bought one, Interactive Systems (later owned by Kodak and sold to SUN) bought one, etc.
.. end LUG quote. ... and then some comment here on /. said this:
- model. Yet.
--
"The SCO Group, and only The SCO Group, has *sole* right to sub-license any and all source code from all of the folowing UNIXs; SCO UnixWare and SCO OpenServer, Suns Solaris, IBMs AIX, SGIs IRIX, HPs UX, Fujitsus ICL DRS/NX, Siemens SINIX, Data Generals DG-UX, and Sequents DYNIX/Ptx. "
Can anyone confirm this to be true/false? These two contradict quite well. It means it could just as well be SUN who'se suing IBM and/or hoeing down the OS community. Although I suspect SUN isn't into the shoot-myself-in-the-face-with-a-howitzer-business