Keep in mind the submitter is simply reporting what Fox News posted...the submitter is not claiming the news story is right, just that it's out there. Fox News in general, and James Prendergast/Americans for Technology Leadership specifically is publishing the propaganda. And to go further, it's obviously a FUD piece directly from Microsoft (Microsoft is a founding member of the organization Americans for Technology Leadership).
Just like US and European based companies, Asian companies that make their money licensing proprietary software think open source is bad. Remarkable coincidence. In the meantime, Fox News publishes an opinion piece in the guise of a news story from an organization whose has a founding member named Microsoft. Guess what? The organization says OpenDocument is a very bad decision for Massachusetts. Bonkers, I would have never called that one.
I appreciate your write up here. Yes, there are players that absolutely love EVE and there are players who don't. One can find plenty of examples of both on the web. And it is probably that way for every major game. So my rant is from the perspective of one player who doesn't like EVE. In my original posting, I did not go into many other aspects of the game which I feel also lack good game play, mainly because it would take too long (yes I know, not really fair to bash the game and then give no details).
However, I must respond to your comment about the skill system as well as comments by others. My statement was that it would take more than 3 years to be fully trained on all of the skills needed to be an expert in battleship piloting. I did not say it would take three years to gain the skill to fly a battleship nor to be proficient at it. The calculation is simple and there's no mistake in my math. Take all the skills you need to be an expert, add the skill points necessary to be fully trained at level 5, and divide by the skill training rate for category of skill. The time required to fully train every related skill is more than three years, even if your learning skills are maxed out (the three years includes the time to train the learning skills, but this is fair because the time to train the others skills without the learning skills is longer than the combined time of training learning skills and the other skills -- while this aside might sound confusing, EVE players will know what I mean by this). The only variable I did not include in my calculation is the effect of higher level implants. The higher level implants were left out mainly because of their impossibly high price it's highly unlikely I would even be able to afford one (much less more than one).
Another skill area being glossed over here by various posters is the need for peripheral skills. I have the skills necessary to fly a battleship and I trained the basic skills within 4 months. However, you need far more than the basic command skills and weapon skills to be effective. For example, after training the basic heavy laser skill, to be effective you also have to train the skills that extend your power, distance, tracking speed, cpu usage, energy usage, firing rate, etc. So just being able to mount the laser is not enough, you also have to train a myriad list of other skills to be effective. And each subsequent skill is in a "higher" class, meaning that training time is double, triple, quadruple, etc., longer than the basic skill. The same lengthy string of necessary peripheral skills applies to every area, including piloting, electronic warfare, trading, manufacturing, mining, on and on and on. All in all the time it takes to train the basics is nothing compared to the rest of the related skills you need to be "fully trained". And the way the game is set up, significant development of the peripheral skills is essential to besting experienced players in combat (because you can bet the experienced player has also been training all of the peripheral skills as well, so his weapons shoot further with more power and faster reload time, etc., that that of a newbie).
The fundamental problem with this approach is that it is absolutely impossible for someone starting the game now to ever catch up with a player that started the game a year or more ago. New players have no hope of ever being on par with older players, except that most of them don't figure that out for 6 months or so (like me). That's why I predict that you will not see a significant increase in players that stick with the game for a year or more. You may see a lot of new players that play for a while and then quit. And you may even see an increase in the total number of players (but possibly only because these are simply more people playing online games these days). I will be surprised, however, if you see a corresponding increase in long term players.
I've had professors here who would spend 20 minutes trying to work out a mistake they'd made in one equation[...]
Lol I have to agree. I don't know how much time has been wasted in classes I have taken because the example used by the professor didn't work and they spend the whole class trying to fix it (usually without success). I believe I can say with some certainty that comes from a professor who isn't prepared for class and tries to make it up as they go. Of course, the other extreme is a professor that hasn't changed their presentation in 10 years. While I for one would place some blame on high schools for doing a poor job in general prepping students for college, I would also agree that the majority of universities have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to providing a quality education.
You are right, of course. It is about personal preference. I decided to try EVE based on number of positive web reviews but obviously I have been disappointed. However, I am still looking for an excellent 3D, first person perspective, space related game. If you know of any, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Parsec, the one game that looked ideal now appears to be dead.
I have been playing EVE Online for 6 months and it's not all it's cracked up to be. There are some players that absolutely love it. However, the ability to create content and the great graphics in the game does not make up for some fundamental flaws in game play. The problem is that the game boils down to spending hours just traveling or just mining, both tedious activities in the game. Combat can also be tedious in most cases, since it usually becomes showing up at some location and slugging it out. I could deal with those aspects if your skill was in some way tied to your activities, but they are not. Skills are trained simply by turning the training on. Even the skill training system is flawed. There are approximately 200 or so different skills. To be come an expert in combat related skills, for example, it takes about 100 separate skills, training one at a time. I calculated how long it would take me to be fully trained on captaining a battleship, with all the necessary skills for both weapons use, piloting, and maneuvering. With the current system, it would take more than 3 years in real time to finish the training. I'll be surprised if the game lasts another three years. Experienced players (i.e. players who have been playing EVE for a long while) basically can attack inexperienced players with impunity. I have been killed four times so far just for the fun of it by an experienced player in what is supposed to be safe space. Yes, the experienced player is immediately killed by the NPC cops but that's the only penalty. They can make up the loss in an hour, it takes me a week to regain the equipment I lose. Sad to say, I am disappointed in EVE enough to stop playing. I hope some EVE admins read Slashdot, because the way the game works, I would bet you are losing more new players than you would imagine.
How long will the US legislators (and US citizens) put up with such a corrupt political process? Tactics like these is an affront to government by the people, since the broadcast flag has already been rejected by the current legislative body. If the MPAA were to be successful in this effort, they would literally be hijacking our law making process and twisting to their own selfish ends. I am continually amazed at the audacity of businesses when they become involved in the political process. If our legislators don't out and out reject the broadcast flag simply on the merits of the tactics employed by the MPAA then I say it's time for new legislators.
Note to Chinese government...censorship of the Internet is a lost cause, give it up. If you want to be the next economic superpower, you are going to have to deal with dissenting ideas found on the Internet. You'd do better to work out an ongoing public discussion forum on incorporating the best ideas into the public and private sectors instead of trying to censor access.
The last great communistic/socialistic/whatever government on the planet. This is akin to the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain. Now we have the Digital Curtain (I just made that up, heh, or maybe I read it and subconsciously made it my own -- who knows...).
Wonder how long they can stand up to the onslaught of information not controlled by the state?
Except that it also has a tabbed view of all media files found on your computer and allows you to manually check and delete the found files. This program does not know anything about legally ripped vs. illegally downloaded files. It simply finds and lists media files and provides a way for paranoid parents to delete said files enmass.
This is not a intelligent tool, this is just the next step in the music and video industry's plan to brainwash uninformed people.
As Slashdot posters loves to say, "Nothing to see here, move along..."
For those who insist that Microsoft has not stymied but rather advanced personal computing, here's the best evidence yet that it ain't so. Had Microsoft been a real innovator, they would have invested in Internet technologies to their benefit back in 1995 and as such we would have likely been 10 years further down the road in terms of development and capabilities. But Microsoft, because of their monopoly position, chose to try and tighten their control across the OS and application space even further in an attempt to relegate the Internet phenomenon to an also ran status. Not only have they failed in this goal, they failed despite their best efforts (both legal and illegal). In spite of Microsoft's efforts the Internet is emerging as the dominant and preferred platform with open standards, open file formats, open source software, and uncontrolled by any single company.
It's the mostly that's the problem. And besides, when one has to wait on a particular distro to provide their flavor of a given program (which generally you do), it's no longer mostly. As long as Linux programs have to be tailored to specific distros, Linux has a problem.
Ha. Learn something new everyday. I didn't even know there was a difference (thought it was those pesky Englishmen trying to spell things weirdly as usual)...
The original AC post seemed to be saying a cable stretched from Earth to the Moon might be possible. It is not, as I explained in a short but informative statement. From your link: To suspend a kilogram of cable or payload just above the surface of the Moon would require 1000 kg of counterweight, 26,000 km beyond L1. (A smaller counterweight on a longer cable, e.g. 100 kg at a distance of 230,000 km - more than halfway to Earth - would have the same balancing effect.)
So, to have a practical Lunar elevator, you have to go past the Lagrange points by some distance, and add a counter weight to be able to lift some amount of mass off the surface of the Moon. Assuming a 100 kg counterweight, the elevator would extend almost half way to the Earth. Duh. Read your own link next time before you post something just to appear "informed".
I don't play WoW but if they didn't change the logic of the code, then doesn't this mean that Zul'Gurub will end up a wasteland? (once the spell is let loose it will continue to affect players like it was doing thoughout the game before the hotfix?) So if you go to Zul'Gurub you will always lose significant damage points, or die, everytime? Who would go?
I assume you mean a space elevator stretching from the Moon to the Earth? If you lived on the Moon, you'd see the Earth spinning about once per day, so a given point on the Earth's surface does not stay in the same place from the Moon's perspective.
A Moon based space elevator would reach almost halfway to the Earth since the Moon only rotates once per month. However, it wouldn't help get stuff from the Earth to the Moon, since the boost out of the Earth's gravitational field is 90% or more of the energy required. However, the combination of an Earth elevator, ion propulsion, and a Moon elevator would make it much cheaper. Look for this in about 50 years.
Yahoo has been doing something like this for quite some time. Many years ago, Yahoo was the place to go to find the best price on products you could purchase over the net. However, they evolved into a search that only showed the prices from businesses that had a relationship with Yahoo. Mind you, they still claimed to find the best price on the web but in truth they only included companies with an arrangement with Yahoo (and those companies rarely had the lowest price) It may be business, but it's not trustworthy. So for me Yahoo lost my trust years ago. Now they are just one source for information and no more trustworthy than the next source.
According to Opera, their revenue was equally split between advertising, the fee, and search engines (not sure what this is -- does Opera run their own search engine?). Considering that no more than 3% of Opera users ever paid the fee, and considering you can still pay for premium support, it doesn't sound like it will take much to make up the difference. I, for example, never tried Opera becuase of the fee. Now I will install it and use it or Firefox, depending on which one gives the best experience (IE lost any chance of consideration as long as it is the security problem that it is -- and as far as I can see Microsoft will keep IE tightly integrated into the OS and thereby maintain it as the premium vector for security issues in Windows. It's bad enough I can't remove it, I'm surely not going to use it). I would bet that many others will do the same for Opera.
Slashdot Mirror
Dead from a BSOD, no doubt.
Keep in mind the submitter is simply reporting what Fox News posted...the submitter is not claiming the news story is right, just that it's out there. Fox News in general, and James Prendergast/Americans for Technology Leadership specifically is publishing the propaganda. And to go further, it's obviously a FUD piece directly from Microsoft (Microsoft is a founding member of the organization Americans for Technology Leadership).
Just like US and European based companies, Asian companies that make their money licensing proprietary software think open source is bad. Remarkable coincidence. In the meantime, Fox News publishes an opinion piece in the guise of a news story from an organization whose has a founding member named Microsoft. Guess what? The organization says OpenDocument is a very bad decision for Massachusetts. Bonkers, I would have never called that one.
I appreciate your write up here. Yes, there are players that absolutely love EVE and there are players who don't. One can find plenty of examples of both on the web. And it is probably that way for every major game. So my rant is from the perspective of one player who doesn't like EVE. In my original posting, I did not go into many other aspects of the game which I feel also lack good game play, mainly because it would take too long (yes I know, not really fair to bash the game and then give no details).
However, I must respond to your comment about the skill system as well as comments by others. My statement was that it would take more than 3 years to be fully trained on all of the skills needed to be an expert in battleship piloting. I did not say it would take three years to gain the skill to fly a battleship nor to be proficient at it. The calculation is simple and there's no mistake in my math. Take all the skills you need to be an expert, add the skill points necessary to be fully trained at level 5, and divide by the skill training rate for category of skill. The time required to fully train every related skill is more than three years, even if your learning skills are maxed out (the three years includes the time to train the learning skills, but this is fair because the time to train the others skills without the learning skills is longer than the combined time of training learning skills and the other skills -- while this aside might sound confusing, EVE players will know what I mean by this). The only variable I did not include in my calculation is the effect of higher level implants. The higher level implants were left out mainly because of their impossibly high price it's highly unlikely I would even be able to afford one (much less more than one).
Another skill area being glossed over here by various posters is the need for peripheral skills. I have the skills necessary to fly a battleship and I trained the basic skills within 4 months. However, you need far more than the basic command skills and weapon skills to be effective. For example, after training the basic heavy laser skill, to be effective you also have to train the skills that extend your power, distance, tracking speed, cpu usage, energy usage, firing rate, etc. So just being able to mount the laser is not enough, you also have to train a myriad list of other skills to be effective. And each subsequent skill is in a "higher" class, meaning that training time is double, triple, quadruple, etc., longer than the basic skill. The same lengthy string of necessary peripheral skills applies to every area, including piloting, electronic warfare, trading, manufacturing, mining, on and on and on. All in all the time it takes to train the basics is nothing compared to the rest of the related skills you need to be "fully trained". And the way the game is set up, significant development of the peripheral skills is essential to besting experienced players in combat (because you can bet the experienced player has also been training all of the peripheral skills as well, so his weapons shoot further with more power and faster reload time, etc., that that of a newbie).
The fundamental problem with this approach is that it is absolutely impossible for someone starting the game now to ever catch up with a player that started the game a year or more ago. New players have no hope of ever being on par with older players, except that most of them don't figure that out for 6 months or so (like me). That's why I predict that you will not see a significant increase in players that stick with the game for a year or more. You may see a lot of new players that play for a while and then quit. And you may even see an increase in the total number of players (but possibly only because these are simply more people playing online games these days). I will be surprised, however, if you see a corresponding increase in long term players.
Such is my opinion.
I've had professors here who would spend 20 minutes trying to work out a mistake they'd made in one equation[...]
Lol I have to agree. I don't know how much time has been wasted in classes I have taken because the example used by the professor didn't work and they spend the whole class trying to fix it (usually without success). I believe I can say with some certainty that comes from a professor who isn't prepared for class and tries to make it up as they go. Of course, the other extreme is a professor that hasn't changed their presentation in 10 years. While I for one would place some blame on high schools for doing a poor job in general prepping students for college, I would also agree that the majority of universities have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to providing a quality education.
You are right, of course. It is about personal preference. I decided to try EVE based on number of positive web reviews but obviously I have been disappointed. However, I am still looking for an excellent 3D, first person perspective, space related game. If you know of any, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Parsec, the one game that looked ideal now appears to be dead.
I have been playing EVE Online for 6 months and it's not all it's cracked up to be. There are some players that absolutely love it. However, the ability to create content and the great graphics in the game does not make up for some fundamental flaws in game play. The problem is that the game boils down to spending hours just traveling or just mining, both tedious activities in the game. Combat can also be tedious in most cases, since it usually becomes showing up at some location and slugging it out. I could deal with those aspects if your skill was in some way tied to your activities, but they are not. Skills are trained simply by turning the training on. Even the skill training system is flawed. There are approximately 200 or so different skills. To be come an expert in combat related skills, for example, it takes about 100 separate skills, training one at a time. I calculated how long it would take me to be fully trained on captaining a battleship, with all the necessary skills for both weapons use, piloting, and maneuvering. With the current system, it would take more than 3 years in real time to finish the training. I'll be surprised if the game lasts another three years. Experienced players (i.e. players who have been playing EVE for a long while) basically can attack inexperienced players with impunity. I have been killed four times so far just for the fun of it by an experienced player in what is supposed to be safe space. Yes, the experienced player is immediately killed by the NPC cops but that's the only penalty. They can make up the loss in an hour, it takes me a week to regain the equipment I lose. Sad to say, I am disappointed in EVE enough to stop playing. I hope some EVE admins read Slashdot, because the way the game works, I would bet you are losing more new players than you would imagine.
How long will the US legislators (and US citizens) put up with such a corrupt political process? Tactics like these is an affront to government by the people, since the broadcast flag has already been rejected by the current legislative body. If the MPAA were to be successful in this effort, they would literally be hijacking our law making process and twisting to their own selfish ends. I am continually amazed at the audacity of businesses when they become involved in the political process. If our legislators don't out and out reject the broadcast flag simply on the merits of the tactics employed by the MPAA then I say it's time for new legislators.
Microsoft officially chooses HD-DVD over Blu-Ray Tuesday September 27, @08:36AM Rejected
Note to Chinese government...censorship of the Internet is a lost cause, give it up. If you want to be the next economic superpower, you are going to have to deal with dissenting ideas found on the Internet. You'd do better to work out an ongoing public discussion forum on incorporating the best ideas into the public and private sectors instead of trying to censor access.
We'll be the first species to rendezvous with the two Voyager spacecraft...and you'll be seeing at least one of them in the Smithsonian eventually.
The last great communistic/socialistic/whatever government on the planet. This is akin to the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain. Now we have the Digital Curtain (I just made that up, heh, or maybe I read it and subconsciously made it my own -- who knows...).
Wonder how long they can stand up to the onslaught of information not controlled by the state?
Except that it also has a tabbed view of all media files found on your computer and allows you to manually check and delete the found files. This program does not know anything about legally ripped vs. illegally downloaded files. It simply finds and lists media files and provides a way for paranoid parents to delete said files enmass.
This is not a intelligent tool, this is just the next step in the music and video industry's plan to brainwash uninformed people.
As Slashdot posters loves to say, "Nothing to see here, move along..."
For those who insist that Microsoft has not stymied but rather advanced personal computing, here's the best evidence yet that it ain't so. Had Microsoft been a real innovator, they would have invested in Internet technologies to their benefit back in 1995 and as such we would have likely been 10 years further down the road in terms of development and capabilities. But Microsoft, because of their monopoly position, chose to try and tighten their control across the OS and application space even further in an attempt to relegate the Internet phenomenon to an also ran status. Not only have they failed in this goal, they failed despite their best efforts (both legal and illegal). In spite of Microsoft's efforts the Internet is emerging as the dominant and preferred platform with open standards, open file formats, open source software, and uncontrolled by any single company.
Let's keep it that way, shall we?
mostly crossplatform
It's the mostly that's the problem. And besides, when one has to wait on a particular distro to provide their flavor of a given program (which generally you do), it's no longer mostly. As long as Linux programs have to be tailored to specific distros, Linux has a problem.
Ha. Learn something new everyday. I didn't even know there was a difference (thought it was those pesky Englishmen trying to spell things weirdly as usual)...
The original AC post seemed to be saying a cable stretched from Earth to the Moon might be possible. It is not, as I explained in a short but informative statement. From your link: To suspend a kilogram of cable or payload just above the surface of the Moon would require 1000 kg of counterweight, 26,000 km beyond L1. (A smaller counterweight on a longer cable, e.g. 100 kg at a distance of 230,000 km - more than halfway to Earth - would have the same balancing effect.)
So, to have a practical Lunar elevator, you have to go past the Lagrange points by some distance, and add a counter weight to be able to lift some amount of mass off the surface of the Moon. Assuming a 100 kg counterweight, the elevator would extend almost half way to the Earth. Duh. Read your own link next time before you post something just to appear "informed".
Fortunately for you, the Astronomy police were at lunch at the time...
Love that song. And it doesn't matter no more cause I'm Microsoft free (at least at home). Yeah, baby!
Ah, understand. Thanks.
I don't play WoW but if they didn't change the logic of the code, then doesn't this mean that Zul'Gurub will end up a wasteland? (once the spell is let loose it will continue to affect players like it was doing thoughout the game before the hotfix?) So if you go to Zul'Gurub you will always lose significant damage points, or die, everytime? Who would go?
I assume you mean a space elevator stretching from the Moon to the Earth? If you lived on the Moon, you'd see the Earth spinning about once per day, so a given point on the Earth's surface does not stay in the same place from the Moon's perspective.
A Moon based space elevator would reach almost halfway to the Earth since the Moon only rotates once per month. However, it wouldn't help get stuff from the Earth to the Moon, since the boost out of the Earth's gravitational field is 90% or more of the energy required. However, the combination of an Earth elevator, ion propulsion, and a Moon elevator would make it much cheaper. Look for this in about 50 years.
Yahoo has been doing something like this for quite some time. Many years ago, Yahoo was the place to go to find the best price on products you could purchase over the net. However, they evolved into a search that only showed the prices from businesses that had a relationship with Yahoo. Mind you, they still claimed to find the best price on the web but in truth they only included companies with an arrangement with Yahoo (and those companies rarely had the lowest price) It may be business, but it's not trustworthy. So for me Yahoo lost my trust years ago. Now they are just one source for information and no more trustworthy than the next source.
According to Opera, their revenue was equally split between advertising, the fee, and search engines (not sure what this is -- does Opera run their own search engine?). Considering that no more than 3% of Opera users ever paid the fee, and considering you can still pay for premium support, it doesn't sound like it will take much to make up the difference. I, for example, never tried Opera becuase of the fee. Now I will install it and use it or Firefox, depending on which one gives the best experience (IE lost any chance of consideration as long as it is the security problem that it is -- and as far as I can see Microsoft will keep IE tightly integrated into the OS and thereby maintain it as the premium vector for security issues in Windows. It's bad enough I can't remove it, I'm surely not going to use it). I would bet that many others will do the same for Opera.
Free beer with every copy of Opera is best.