Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
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· Score: 1
Actually I'm involved with a project where we rely on realtime collaborative editing - it's a web project with semi-regular VoIP meetings and we use a collaborative editor for meeting summaries and simultaneous brainstorming. That works fairly well, save for the fact that the market for free cross-platform collaborative editors is extremely small. In fact, the only one we've been able to reliably get going is Gobby and that's Windows/Linux only. An actually working browser-based open source collaborative editor would be a godsend.
We would've loved Wave if Google had ever actually delivered it. We don't want to put project data on third-party servers so using Google's server was not an option. The open source server never happened because Google didn't want to share some of the components*. The result is that Wave is, to us, a framework that never made it to the release stage.
* Why does this suddenly remind me of Second Life? That's another product that would've seen wider use had the developers ever bothered to follow up on their promises.
That, plus in reality it takes a long time for a lot of torrents, as opposed to just sticking in a disk, hitting "play".
That's the best-case scenario. Worst-case is sticking in a disk, hitting "play", getting an error message, figuring out what the error message means, determining the DRM compatibility levels of all your equipment, finding proper replacement parts for whatever's outdated, locating reasonably good deals for those parts and potentially waiting for the parts to be delivered.
My argument is that they won't do that. Maybe they'll get a tighter DRM model for 3D movies but I doubt that - 720p still doesn't have full market penetration and not everyone with an HD-capable TV has a fully HDCP-compatible rig. With a new model we'd see the industry abandoning one model we haven't even fully adopted which might cause reluctant adoption of 3D TVs - after all, we just recently upgraded to HD-compatible TV sets so why pay lots of money for a 3D TV now instead of waiting five years until the next incompatible DRM model comes out and the tech has become cheaper?
And no, TV sets with an upgradable firmware won't fly. Most people still aren't technical enough to install a device firmware or configure their TV set to talk to the internet via the home network. The difference between "you'll need to buy a new TV set" and "you'll need to upgrade the firmware" is that the minority of techies who do know what a firmware is can save some money on the latter one. Potentialls, provided that the manufacturer really does come out with a new firmware.
And given the price of a new TV set most people aren't going to be keen about replacing theirs after just two years. Especially not the early adopters - those are often people who look for quality and who will happily shell out 3000 EUR für a TV set. 3000 EUR every two years is unacceptable for even most videophiles and without the early adopters to recommend the technology there's less grassroots marketing as well.
Of course they can push a new, incompatible standard every few years. I just doubt it's a good business plan. Of course they'd be happy to blame the lack of sales on piracy even if the market numbers prove that only 5% of all households are actually capable of playing their new movie...
You could have one shared PSU. Nobody says that the cable connecting the individual boxes must be optical-only; you could have the PSU transform it down to 48 V DC, doing DC-to-DC conversion down to 5 V/12 V in each box. This could let you make the power cords for each box thinner, allowing you to use a combined data/power cable and connector. Then just spec out the power distribution such that daisy-chained devices will be connected to the PSU in parallel so that one breaking device won't take down everything else; also, make hotplugging mandatory.
Voila, an easily extendable multi-box computer using only one additional wire per additional box. As an added bonus you could completely destroy your GPU and (assuming the OS supports it) the rest of the computer will happily hum along in a headless configuration until you've replaced the GPU box.
That would kill Blu-Ray. People flocked from VHS to DVD in droves because it didn't just offer higher quality, it offered greatly improved convenience as well. Look at the DVD-to-Blu-Ray switch: Many people are still happily using their DVDs, content with what they have. Blu-Ray only offers a modest increase in quality with no convenience increase and isn't quite as universally loved as DVD.
Of course, Blu-Ray requires you to have compatible equipment. That's a bother (and another reason why some people don't want to upgrade) but once you have your equipment and have figured out how to make HDMI work the way you want it, you're set.
Now imagine they arbitrarily invalidated parts of your equipment. "Sorry, but to see this movie you'll need to replace the TV set you paid 3,000 Euros for last year with one compatible with HDCP 4.1 Home Cinema or higher." The only things many people would replace would be their Blu-Ray player with a PC and the physical media with The Pirate Bay. If they don't know how to work it they'll get their children to do it.
People expect a certain level of convenience. If you ask them to become home cinema technicians in order to watch a movie they simply won't bother to purchase any more movies from you.
Well, I'm comparing reality to the usual "SSDs are going to completely displace HDDs within the next ten years". If we want HDDs to be gone within ten years we need SSDs to be superior in most regards within the next two or three years.
Of course I'm of the opinion that HDDs are going to stick with us for a long time just like tape does - they're very good at large writes, which SSDs aren't, so people who often do large writes are going to stick with HDDs. (All of this is apart from the usual issues of storage space and longevity.)
As for price drops: I'm not sure whether SSDs can sustain this kind of growth. It's unlikely that Intel et al. are not already using fairly advanced lithography so shrinking down the flash chips isn't going to be easy. Remember that price is just one advantage of HDDs; storage space is the other. It's unlikely that we're going to see a 3 TB SSD within the next five years.
Not until someone starts pumping some research Dollars into that technology. Right now, SSDs are developing at a glacial pace. If they seriously want to displace HDDs they'll need four times the density, four times the longevity and one quarter the price. Or the same properties as today and one tenth the price.
SSDs are great for certain applications and less great for others. Unfortunately for the SSD makers, the main application many users have is "I need lots of cheap storage", which current SSDs are horrible for.
I originally played Fourth and Fifth Edition and quit shortly before Sixth came out in 1999, only stopping by to buy a few Unglued and Unhinged boosters (both are official parody sets), until I finally got back into the game around 2008. So yeah, I know this feeling of "what the hell are they playing with these days?" - although this was less prominent before Wizards replaced the power creep with a mad dash starting with Shards of Alara (which is now five sets back).
If you want to see a nicely balanced modern set, take a look at the Kamigawa block. The cards there can be fairly powerful and even downright devastating if you specialize on Kamigawa cards but compensate for that by costing more mana. I think it's pretty balanced but many modern players didn't like the set because they felt that everything was too expensive.
As for you not knowing those cards: That was actually the point. I was giving examples of more recent cards you could buy/trade for in order to build somewhat competitive decks with mostly old cards. Well, except for Black Vise and Underworld Dreams. You might have known the latter one; it was printed in Legends in 1994 - although after that it hasn't been reprinted for nine years so it was pretty obscure until 2003 when several core sets reprited it.
As for shadow: Shadow is more like flying than landwalk. Creatures with shadow can only block and be blocked by other creatures with shadow. They pretty much fight on their own battlefield. Since nowadays the keyword has fallen out of favor they're essentially unblockable for a modest mana cost at the expense of being unable to block themselves. Shadow appeared in the Tempest set in 1998. A well-built wall deck that relies on shadow creatures to deal damage can actually outlast some modern decks and is especially nice in Two-Headed Giant if your mate has a slow but nasty deck. While not dirt-cheap, most Soltari aren't really expensive either.
For the most part, Magic has become more powerful - cards often don't cost nearly what they would've cost fifteen years ago and some modern keywords are really nasty. On the other hand, some cards have rarely been reprinted because they were deemed too good. Things like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell and Lightning Bolt are actually better than their modern equivalents. Also, some useful older keywords have fallen out of favor, which only made them stronger... although I think the only "lost" keyword you have access to is banding, which just isn't that useful.
Yeah, Magic has changed A LOT. Especially with Magic 2010 when they completely overhauled everything and, among other things, got rid of mana burn because it apparently made the game too complex. When playing against opponents with enough money and/or booster luck it's absolutely possible to see this abomination out on turn eight or so. (Yes, that thing is ridiculous. I won't touch the entire block because of cards like that.)
Here are some tis on how to semi-cheaply build workable decks without having to buy half a display worth of cards. If you don't intend on getting back into the game feel free to disregard them.
One powerful thing you do have are removal spells. Early white had a lot of these and they still kick ass. Nobody can do squat about an uncountered Wrath of God and any white deck with a full playset of Swords to Plowshares in it will not be popular with your opponents. If you play white a lot one fairly simple deck you can build with a lot of old cards is a traditional wall deck with a few removal spells and Stuffy Doll and Pariah's Shield tossed in. Keep your opponents at bay until any damage they deal to you is returned to them. For added complexity add Guilty Conscience to create an infinite damage loop and use any removal spell on Stuffy Doll to break it (as unbroken infinite loops force the game into a draw). Beware blue opponents who might counter that remover.
Also nice is Armored Ascension. It makes any creature awesome and can turn Stuffy Doll into a fearsome attacker nobody wants to block with anything sensible. Also (newer than your collection but still quite old), creatures with the shadow keyword. Since nobody plays with shadow anymore most Soltari become really cheap unblockable creatures. If you have a few of these you can forgo any other attackers in favor of more walls.
If blue is your forte just invest in a playset of Forced Fruition and mix it with all variants of Counterspell and Boomerang you can get your hands on, especially those two (both haven't been around in undiluted form for a while). Slow down your opponent until FF is out and then keep them from destroying it. Watch as they mill themselves to death. Bonus points for going blue-black and playing Megrim or Liliana's Caress. (Note: The latter is more useful, being cheaper and working through life-loss instead of damage but it's also about twenty times as expensive on the open market. Money-wise, Megrim is extremely cheap for what it can do.) Oh yeah, just remembered: Black Vise and Underworld Dreams go really well with Forced Fruition and might already be in your possession.
If you feel cheap, bind a Counterspell into an Isochron Scepter so you're not even limited by your hand. I think that card lacks style, though.
Note that both of these decks do especially well in Two-Headed Giant (aka two-on-two with shared life) and extremely poorly in free-for all. In Two-Headed Giant your mate can attack (white) or block (blue) for you until your deck has come out. In free-for-all t
You mean Apple fanboys. I own a Mac and I don't see the iPad as revolutionary, merely a previously-unexplored market niche. No, it doesn't fill the Tablet PC niche; those are essentially graphics tablets with built-in notebooks while the iPad is a scaled-up PDA. Of course it's never going to displace real PCs.
How do you install System Shock 2 on an X-Box 360? There are games that aren't supported by $CONSOLE but that people still want to play.
If you want to do dualbooting right, just move all of your data to one of the Linux partitions and erase them from the Windows partition. Then uninstall the corresponding programs. Once you're unable to check your mail/chat/etc. in Windows you'll have a much smaller incentive to stay ther for longer than neccessary.
Remember that many big movies are leaked before they even hit the cinemas. Without copyright the only way to prevent someone distributing your movie before you can is to be fairly paranoid about security. For example you couldn't afford to send preview copies to reviewers; instead you'd have to bring the reviewers to facilities you control in order to ensure they don't get their hands at a high-quality copy.
The NDA is a good point, too. Whether or not it'd become that much more expensive, it would certainly be more of a hassle to be creative in a world without copyright. All the more reason to shorten it to a more respectable length.
Copyright gives and incentive to produce the original: I get a limited monopoly so I can easily recoup the production costs.
No copyright would make that difficult: Where do I make the money to create further works? Without copyright people can distribute my work for free and I'd have to resort to things like ridiculous amounts of product placement to attempt to make up the costs. Production becomes harder and fewer people produce less. Society loses.
Of course, what we have today doesn't work either: Copyright in perpetuity (which we effectively have) means I don't have much incentive to create new works as I can sell my old works indefinitely. Production becomes easier but again fewer people produce less. Society loses again.
The most sensible approach is a balanced, short-term copyright. If I make a movie and I get, say, ten years to monetize it that should be ample time to recoup my expenses - and since I can't milk that cash cow forever I need to make my next movie within a decade at most or risk running out of money. Society wins as I'm incentivized to constantly produce new material and old works enter the public domain reasonably fast so others can build off them.
Escape Velocity Nova had a particularly well-executed demo: You can't buy half of the ship parts on the market (a bummer but I can deal), you can't use mods (the same) and all of the main storylines stop dead halfway through. The last one was the kicker as the most engaging and personal storyline is also the one most easily stumbled into. In this storyline you become the victim of a psychic enslavement device and the way it's told you develop a very personal grudge against the main antagonist very quickly.
And then it just stops. And you have a very good incentive to pay for the game: You want to get the full version just so you can continue the storyline and finally wipe that smug look off the antagonist's face. (I don't want to spoil anything but that storyline's ending is very satifying.)
Seriously, that's how you make a demo: Get the player involved to a degree where he's willing to pay just to see what happens next. That requires some very good storytelling (or cheap psychological tricks to get the player worked up) but it works much better than "here we show you three maps of our game, devoid of any context. Buy our game".
I admit I only called VII's storyline compelling because I didn't want to make the sentence unreadably cluttered with parentheses. The main advantage is that it isn't quite as convoluted as some others. In retrospect, portraying FFVII and FFT (aka "Final Fantasy for adults") as equals was a really bad idea, though.
As for the characters... Well, Square always puts one character with a Dark Past(TM) in your party. VII expored what happens when there's only one party member who doesn't have one (and then they went and killed her off). On a meta-level it's actually pretty amusing to see these people bounce their tragic pasts off another like a particularly well-armed self-help group. However, the characters are so well-received either in spite or precisely because of that.
Cloud Strife: He's a crossdresser with a sword. Okay, that's mostly the fangirls interpreting him in ways Square never wanted but he's still popular precisely because he's incredibly easy to ship with anything. Okay, and the crossdressing thing is a fun character trait in a world otherwise dominated by various shades of "this tragic thing happened in my past" and "I seek revenge on X for Y".
Sephiroth: Estrogen bait. I think he may be compensating for something but hey, even the fangirls agree that the guy's got issues. Still a fun character if one cranks the drama to eleven and portrays him in the most hammy way possible.
Aeris: The normal one. Enjoyable because she's in the minority of JRPG party members who are not deranged, traumatized or walking stereotypes.
Tifa: Mammaries with fists. The attempt to be to men what Sephiroth is to women.
Vincent: He's a vampire with guns. More importantly, he's a vampire who isn't emo all the time. He would've been better with a few action movie hero one-liners, though.
The rest of the bunch are rather generic, though, like Thief Girl, Angry Man, Fuzzy Thing and Retired Warrior (Yuffie, Barret, Cait Sith and Cid, respectively). Bonus points for consistency, though; even the Fuzzy Thing has a dark secret. That does take some determination.
I do agree that the materia grinding could get to you if you wanted master materias but at least the materia system by itself was fairly easy to grasp and worked pretty well. There are much worse magic systems around.
If you can find a compatible GPU, that is. Even back then shutter glasses were notoriously hard to get working with anything but the three or four supported cards from the glasses' manufacturer. Unless you can find something like a working ASUS or Elsa GPU from that time and build a system around it it's highly unlikely that you'll get the glasses to work without having to reverse-engineer them and write your own driver.
Well, I actually know nobody who actually prefers VIII over VII. That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, I just know a couple FFVII fans and none for FFVIII. The newer games are certainly popular but looking at the amount of fanworks and spinoffs it's pretty clear that VII takes the lead among the 3D FFs.
I know that VII isn't the alpha and omega of Final Fantasy. (In my opinion the original Tactics still easily beats every other FF. Blindfolded. Without using Cid.) It just happens to be immensely popular, mostly because of the characters. And I see people still playing it despite the graphics looking more like Starfox than anything you'd expect of the Playstation.
My whole point here is that graphics excite people in the short term but other assets like interesting characters, an engaging storyline and good gameplay (all of which VII and Tactics have) are what makes them come back - and buy the sequel/spinoff. Even if it's as horrible as FFTA.
To reference the GGP: I know people who occasionally play FFX. They do it for the Drown^H^H^H^H^HBlitzball mini-game, completely ignoring the rest of it. Those who get out FFVII usually do so in order to play through it again.
You are aware that Final Fantasy VII is the one that's still generating spinoffs? The one everybody loved even though most ingame characters had no textures save for the eyes and the FMV versions of them still looked worse than the FFVIII ingame characters? Seriously, Final Fantasy is VII, XI and "those other games". There has to be more to it than "OMG we're suddenly in 3D" because, well, FFVII looked pretty crappy even back then.
The problem is that we need a lot of money to fight software patents. We'd need to out-lobby the BSA and all of its members or somehow get key players like Microsoft or IBM to decide to destroy half their patent portfolios.
Maybe we could do it by building a massive patent troll and suing the entire industry at once but I'd still expect that to require a couple dozen million Dollars at least.
I'm not familiar with American units. Can you tell my what 30.000 square feet are in Prussian hubes? And the pound - which town did America base their pounds on? I'd guess Hannover due to the close ties between Hannover and the Crown but I'd be grateful if you could clarify and give a conversion ratio to German Customs Union pounds.
You are aware that U+00A4 (CURRENCY SIGN) is the proper sign for what you propose? And you are aware that not everyone wants to use a generic currency sign?
The fact that $ is recognized in your country as a generic currency sign doesn't make it that way elsewhere, it's an artifact of you using that sign for your local currency. In Europe $ has a generally recognized, unambiguous meaning: US Dollars. It can mean Canadian Dollars if that is clear from the context but few would apply the sign to a currency that isn't some kind of Dollar*. If used on its own, even while talking about another currency, it's clearly taken to mean US Dollars.
Please let's not use characters in an improper way just because it matches the idiosyncracies of our local region. If you want a generic currency sign, use U+00A4. If a country does want its own sign, let them have it or campaign to have ARS or AR(U+00A4) become standard usage in Argentina so that everyone uses the peoper generic sign.
* The fact that Pesos use the same symbol and had it first is not widely known around here as we have much less exposure to Pesos than to Dollars.
Someone else has already pointed out that that symbol denots Rupees in general, as used by several countries. Just changing that to reflect the new Indian Rupee would be akin to changing the ISO 4217 code of all Dollars on Earth to "CAD", regardless of whether they are Canadian Dollars or not.
Slashdot strips out some Unicode. Essentially, Slashdot has all of US-ASCII plus parts of various ISO-8859 encodings. However, for instance, ISO-8859-15's Euro symbol isn't supported.
One gets the feeling that the devs simply didn't want to actually look at how Unicode works and which characters are safe (and how to test for them efficiently). Yes, you could probably use similar-looking characters to spoof URLs but doesn't Slashdot show the domain names of links next to the links themselves for exactly that reason?
It's a bit ridiculous to not be able to use technical symbols, the IPA or even the Euro symbol because the site wants to protect itself from control characters.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'm involved with a project where we rely on realtime collaborative editing - it's a web project with semi-regular VoIP meetings and we use a collaborative editor for meeting summaries and simultaneous brainstorming. That works fairly well, save for the fact that the market for free cross-platform collaborative editors is extremely small. In fact, the only one we've been able to reliably get going is Gobby and that's Windows/Linux only. An actually working browser-based open source collaborative editor would be a godsend.
We would've loved Wave if Google had ever actually delivered it. We don't want to put project data on third-party servers so using Google's server was not an option. The open source server never happened because Google didn't want to share some of the components*. The result is that Wave is, to us, a framework that never made it to the release stage.
* Why does this suddenly remind me of Second Life? That's another product that would've seen wider use had the developers ever bothered to follow up on their promises.
That, plus in reality it takes a long time for a lot of torrents, as opposed to just sticking in a disk, hitting "play".
That's the best-case scenario. Worst-case is sticking in a disk, hitting "play", getting an error message, figuring out what the error message means, determining the DRM compatibility levels of all your equipment, finding proper replacement parts for whatever's outdated, locating reasonably good deals for those parts and potentially waiting for the parts to be delivered.
My argument is that they won't do that. Maybe they'll get a tighter DRM model for 3D movies but I doubt that - 720p still doesn't have full market penetration and not everyone with an HD-capable TV has a fully HDCP-compatible rig. With a new model we'd see the industry abandoning one model we haven't even fully adopted which might cause reluctant adoption of 3D TVs - after all, we just recently upgraded to HD-compatible TV sets so why pay lots of money for a 3D TV now instead of waiting five years until the next incompatible DRM model comes out and the tech has become cheaper?
And no, TV sets with an upgradable firmware won't fly. Most people still aren't technical enough to install a device firmware or configure their TV set to talk to the internet via the home network. The difference between "you'll need to buy a new TV set" and "you'll need to upgrade the firmware" is that the minority of techies who do know what a firmware is can save some money on the latter one. Potentialls, provided that the manufacturer really does come out with a new firmware.
And given the price of a new TV set most people aren't going to be keen about replacing theirs after just two years. Especially not the early adopters - those are often people who look for quality and who will happily shell out 3000 EUR für a TV set. 3000 EUR every two years is unacceptable for even most videophiles and without the early adopters to recommend the technology there's less grassroots marketing as well.
Of course they can push a new, incompatible standard every few years. I just doubt it's a good business plan. Of course they'd be happy to blame the lack of sales on piracy even if the market numbers prove that only 5% of all households are actually capable of playing their new movie...
You could have one shared PSU. Nobody says that the cable connecting the individual boxes must be optical-only; you could have the PSU transform it down to 48 V DC, doing DC-to-DC conversion down to 5 V/12 V in each box. This could let you make the power cords for each box thinner, allowing you to use a combined data/power cable and connector. Then just spec out the power distribution such that daisy-chained devices will be connected to the PSU in parallel so that one breaking device won't take down everything else; also, make hotplugging mandatory.
Voila, an easily extendable multi-box computer using only one additional wire per additional box. As an added bonus you could completely destroy your GPU and (assuming the OS supports it) the rest of the computer will happily hum along in a headless configuration until you've replaced the GPU box.
That would kill Blu-Ray. People flocked from VHS to DVD in droves because it didn't just offer higher quality, it offered greatly improved convenience as well. Look at the DVD-to-Blu-Ray switch: Many people are still happily using their DVDs, content with what they have. Blu-Ray only offers a modest increase in quality with no convenience increase and isn't quite as universally loved as DVD.
Of course, Blu-Ray requires you to have compatible equipment. That's a bother (and another reason why some people don't want to upgrade) but once you have your equipment and have figured out how to make HDMI work the way you want it, you're set.
Now imagine they arbitrarily invalidated parts of your equipment. "Sorry, but to see this movie you'll need to replace the TV set you paid 3,000 Euros for last year with one compatible with HDCP 4.1 Home Cinema or higher." The only things many people would replace would be their Blu-Ray player with a PC and the physical media with The Pirate Bay. If they don't know how to work it they'll get their children to do it.
People expect a certain level of convenience. If you ask them to become home cinema technicians in order to watch a movie they simply won't bother to purchase any more movies from you.
Well, I'm comparing reality to the usual "SSDs are going to completely displace HDDs within the next ten years". If we want HDDs to be gone within ten years we need SSDs to be superior in most regards within the next two or three years.
Of course I'm of the opinion that HDDs are going to stick with us for a long time just like tape does - they're very good at large writes, which SSDs aren't, so people who often do large writes are going to stick with HDDs. (All of this is apart from the usual issues of storage space and longevity.)
As for price drops: I'm not sure whether SSDs can sustain this kind of growth. It's unlikely that Intel et al. are not already using fairly advanced lithography so shrinking down the flash chips isn't going to be easy. Remember that price is just one advantage of HDDs; storage space is the other. It's unlikely that we're going to see a 3 TB SSD within the next five years.
Not until someone starts pumping some research Dollars into that technology. Right now, SSDs are developing at a glacial pace. If they seriously want to displace HDDs they'll need four times the density, four times the longevity and one quarter the price. Or the same properties as today and one tenth the price.
SSDs are great for certain applications and less great for others. Unfortunately for the SSD makers, the main application many users have is "I need lots of cheap storage", which current SSDs are horrible for.
I originally played Fourth and Fifth Edition and quit shortly before Sixth came out in 1999, only stopping by to buy a few Unglued and Unhinged boosters (both are official parody sets), until I finally got back into the game around 2008. So yeah, I know this feeling of "what the hell are they playing with these days?" - although this was less prominent before Wizards replaced the power creep with a mad dash starting with Shards of Alara (which is now five sets back).
If you want to see a nicely balanced modern set, take a look at the Kamigawa block. The cards there can be fairly powerful and even downright devastating if you specialize on Kamigawa cards but compensate for that by costing more mana. I think it's pretty balanced but many modern players didn't like the set because they felt that everything was too expensive.
As for you not knowing those cards: That was actually the point. I was giving examples of more recent cards you could buy/trade for in order to build somewhat competitive decks with mostly old cards. Well, except for Black Vise and Underworld Dreams. You might have known the latter one; it was printed in Legends in 1994 - although after that it hasn't been reprinted for nine years so it was pretty obscure until 2003 when several core sets reprited it.
As for shadow: Shadow is more like flying than landwalk. Creatures with shadow can only block and be blocked by other creatures with shadow. They pretty much fight on their own battlefield. Since nowadays the keyword has fallen out of favor they're essentially unblockable for a modest mana cost at the expense of being unable to block themselves. Shadow appeared in the Tempest set in 1998. A well-built wall deck that relies on shadow creatures to deal damage can actually outlast some modern decks and is especially nice in Two-Headed Giant if your mate has a slow but nasty deck. While not dirt-cheap, most Soltari aren't really expensive either.
For the most part, Magic has become more powerful - cards often don't cost nearly what they would've cost fifteen years ago and some modern keywords are really nasty. On the other hand, some cards have rarely been reprinted because they were deemed too good. Things like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell and Lightning Bolt are actually better than their modern equivalents. Also, some useful older keywords have fallen out of favor, which only made them stronger... although I think the only "lost" keyword you have access to is banding, which just isn't that useful.
Yeah, Magic has changed A LOT. Especially with Magic 2010 when they completely overhauled everything and, among other things, got rid of mana burn because it apparently made the game too complex. When playing against opponents with enough money and/or booster luck it's absolutely possible to see this abomination out on turn eight or so. (Yes, that thing is ridiculous. I won't touch the entire block because of cards like that.)
Here are some tis on how to semi-cheaply build workable decks without having to buy half a display worth of cards. If you don't intend on getting back into the game feel free to disregard them.
One powerful thing you do have are removal spells. Early white had a lot of these and they still kick ass. Nobody can do squat about an uncountered Wrath of God and any white deck with a full playset of Swords to Plowshares in it will not be popular with your opponents. If you play white a lot one fairly simple deck you can build with a lot of old cards is a traditional wall deck with a few removal spells and Stuffy Doll and Pariah's Shield tossed in. Keep your opponents at bay until any damage they deal to you is returned to them. For added complexity add Guilty Conscience to create an infinite damage loop and use any removal spell on Stuffy Doll to break it (as unbroken infinite loops force the game into a draw). Beware blue opponents who might counter that remover.
Also nice is Armored Ascension. It makes any creature awesome and can turn Stuffy Doll into a fearsome attacker nobody wants to block with anything sensible. Also (newer than your collection but still quite old), creatures with the shadow keyword. Since nobody plays with shadow anymore most Soltari become really cheap unblockable creatures. If you have a few of these you can forgo any other attackers in favor of more walls.
If blue is your forte just invest in a playset of Forced Fruition and mix it with all variants of Counterspell and Boomerang you can get your hands on, especially those two (both haven't been around in undiluted form for a while). Slow down your opponent until FF is out and then keep them from destroying it. Watch as they mill themselves to death. Bonus points for going blue-black and playing Megrim or Liliana's Caress. (Note: The latter is more useful, being cheaper and working through life-loss instead of damage but it's also about twenty times as expensive on the open market. Money-wise, Megrim is extremely cheap for what it can do.) Oh yeah, just remembered: Black Vise and Underworld Dreams go really well with Forced Fruition and might already be in your possession.
If you feel cheap, bind a Counterspell into an Isochron Scepter so you're not even limited by your hand. I think that card lacks style, though.
Note that both of these decks do especially well in Two-Headed Giant (aka two-on-two with shared life) and extremely poorly in free-for all. In Two-Headed Giant your mate can attack (white) or block (blue) for you until your deck has come out. In free-for-all t
You mean Apple fanboys. I own a Mac and I don't see the iPad as revolutionary, merely a previously-unexplored market niche. No, it doesn't fill the Tablet PC niche; those are essentially graphics tablets with built-in notebooks while the iPad is a scaled-up PDA. Of course it's never going to displace real PCs.
If you want to play games, buy a 360...
How do you install System Shock 2 on an X-Box 360? There are games that aren't supported by $CONSOLE but that people still want to play.
If you want to do dualbooting right, just move all of your data to one of the Linux partitions and erase them from the Windows partition. Then uninstall the corresponding programs. Once you're unable to check your mail/chat/etc. in Windows you'll have a much smaller incentive to stay ther for longer than neccessary.
Remember that many big movies are leaked before they even hit the cinemas. Without copyright the only way to prevent someone distributing your movie before you can is to be fairly paranoid about security. For example you couldn't afford to send preview copies to reviewers; instead you'd have to bring the reviewers to facilities you control in order to ensure they don't get their hands at a high-quality copy.
The NDA is a good point, too. Whether or not it'd become that much more expensive, it would certainly be more of a hassle to be creative in a world without copyright. All the more reason to shorten it to a more respectable length.
Copyright gives and incentive to produce the original: I get a limited monopoly so I can easily recoup the production costs.
No copyright would make that difficult: Where do I make the money to create further works? Without copyright people can distribute my work for free and I'd have to resort to things like ridiculous amounts of product placement to attempt to make up the costs. Production becomes harder and fewer people produce less. Society loses.
Of course, what we have today doesn't work either: Copyright in perpetuity (which we effectively have) means I don't have much incentive to create new works as I can sell my old works indefinitely. Production becomes easier but again fewer people produce less. Society loses again.
The most sensible approach is a balanced, short-term copyright. If I make a movie and I get, say, ten years to monetize it that should be ample time to recoup my expenses - and since I can't milk that cash cow forever I need to make my next movie within a decade at most or risk running out of money. Society wins as I'm incentivized to constantly produce new material and old works enter the public domain reasonably fast so others can build off them.
Escape Velocity Nova had a particularly well-executed demo: You can't buy half of the ship parts on the market (a bummer but I can deal), you can't use mods (the same) and all of the main storylines stop dead halfway through. The last one was the kicker as the most engaging and personal storyline is also the one most easily stumbled into. In this storyline you become the victim of a psychic enslavement device and the way it's told you develop a very personal grudge against the main antagonist very quickly.
And then it just stops. And you have a very good incentive to pay for the game: You want to get the full version just so you can continue the storyline and finally wipe that smug look off the antagonist's face. (I don't want to spoil anything but that storyline's ending is very satifying.)
Seriously, that's how you make a demo: Get the player involved to a degree where he's willing to pay just to see what happens next. That requires some very good storytelling (or cheap psychological tricks to get the player worked up) but it works much better than "here we show you three maps of our game, devoid of any context. Buy our game".
I admit I only called VII's storyline compelling because I didn't want to make the sentence unreadably cluttered with parentheses. The main advantage is that it isn't quite as convoluted as some others. In retrospect, portraying FFVII and FFT (aka "Final Fantasy for adults") as equals was a really bad idea, though.
As for the characters... Well, Square always puts one character with a Dark Past(TM) in your party. VII expored what happens when there's only one party member who doesn't have one (and then they went and killed her off). On a meta-level it's actually pretty amusing to see these people bounce their tragic pasts off another like a particularly well-armed self-help group. However, the characters are so well-received either in spite or precisely because of that.
Cloud Strife: He's a crossdresser with a sword. Okay, that's mostly the fangirls interpreting him in ways Square never wanted but he's still popular precisely because he's incredibly easy to ship with anything. Okay, and the crossdressing thing is a fun character trait in a world otherwise dominated by various shades of "this tragic thing happened in my past" and "I seek revenge on X for Y".
Sephiroth: Estrogen bait. I think he may be compensating for something but hey, even the fangirls agree that the guy's got issues. Still a fun character if one cranks the drama to eleven and portrays him in the most hammy way possible.
Aeris: The normal one. Enjoyable because she's in the minority of JRPG party members who are not deranged, traumatized or walking stereotypes.
Tifa: Mammaries with fists. The attempt to be to men what Sephiroth is to women.
Vincent: He's a vampire with guns. More importantly, he's a vampire who isn't emo all the time. He would've been better with a few action movie hero one-liners, though.
The rest of the bunch are rather generic, though, like Thief Girl, Angry Man, Fuzzy Thing and Retired Warrior (Yuffie, Barret, Cait Sith and Cid, respectively). Bonus points for consistency, though; even the Fuzzy Thing has a dark secret. That does take some determination.
I do agree that the materia grinding could get to you if you wanted master materias but at least the materia system by itself was fairly easy to grasp and worked pretty well. There are much worse magic systems around.
If you can find a compatible GPU, that is. Even back then shutter glasses were notoriously hard to get working with anything but the three or four supported cards from the glasses' manufacturer. Unless you can find something like a working ASUS or Elsa GPU from that time and build a system around it it's highly unlikely that you'll get the glasses to work without having to reverse-engineer them and write your own driver.
Well, I actually know nobody who actually prefers VIII over VII. That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, I just know a couple FFVII fans and none for FFVIII. The newer games are certainly popular but looking at the amount of fanworks and spinoffs it's pretty clear that VII takes the lead among the 3D FFs.
I know that VII isn't the alpha and omega of Final Fantasy. (In my opinion the original Tactics still easily beats every other FF. Blindfolded. Without using Cid.) It just happens to be immensely popular, mostly because of the characters. And I see people still playing it despite the graphics looking more like Starfox than anything you'd expect of the Playstation.
My whole point here is that graphics excite people in the short term but other assets like interesting characters, an engaging storyline and good gameplay (all of which VII and Tactics have) are what makes them come back - and buy the sequel/spinoff. Even if it's as horrible as FFTA.
To reference the GGP: I know people who occasionally play FFX. They do it for the Drown^H^H^H^H^HBlitzball mini-game, completely ignoring the rest of it. Those who get out FFVII usually do so in order to play through it again.
You are aware that Final Fantasy VII is the one that's still generating spinoffs? The one everybody loved even though most ingame characters had no textures save for the eyes and the FMV versions of them still looked worse than the FFVIII ingame characters? Seriously, Final Fantasy is VII, XI and "those other games". There has to be more to it than "OMG we're suddenly in 3D" because, well, FFVII looked pretty crappy even back then.
The problem is that we need a lot of money to fight software patents. We'd need to out-lobby the BSA and all of its members or somehow get key players like Microsoft or IBM to decide to destroy half their patent portfolios.
Maybe we could do it by building a massive patent troll and suing the entire industry at once but I'd still expect that to require a couple dozen million Dollars at least.
On a less serious note, let's not forget Bungie who went from Marathon 2 to Marathon Infinity.
Now where did I hear about that technique...?
I'm not familiar with American units. Can you tell my what 30.000 square feet are in Prussian hubes? And the pound - which town did America base their pounds on? I'd guess Hannover due to the close ties between Hannover and the Crown but I'd be grateful if you could clarify and give a conversion ratio to German Customs Union pounds.
Right. I forgot about the part where some glyphs are accessible but only via entity names. Thanks for reminding me.
You are aware that U+00A4 (CURRENCY SIGN) is the proper sign for what you propose? And you are aware that not everyone wants to use a generic currency sign?
The fact that $ is recognized in your country as a generic currency sign doesn't make it that way elsewhere, it's an artifact of you using that sign for your local currency. In Europe $ has a generally recognized, unambiguous meaning: US Dollars. It can mean Canadian Dollars if that is clear from the context but few would apply the sign to a currency that isn't some kind of Dollar*. If used on its own, even while talking about another currency, it's clearly taken to mean US Dollars.
Please let's not use characters in an improper way just because it matches the idiosyncracies of our local region. If you want a generic currency sign, use U+00A4. If a country does want its own sign, let them have it or campaign to have ARS or AR(U+00A4) become standard usage in Argentina so that everyone uses the peoper generic sign.
* The fact that Pesos use the same symbol and had it first is not widely known around here as we have much less exposure to Pesos than to Dollars.
Someone else has already pointed out that that symbol denots Rupees in general, as used by several countries. Just changing that to reflect the new Indian Rupee would be akin to changing the ISO 4217 code of all Dollars on Earth to "CAD", regardless of whether they are Canadian Dollars or not.
Slashdot strips out some Unicode. Essentially, Slashdot has all of US-ASCII plus parts of various ISO-8859 encodings. However, for instance, ISO-8859-15's Euro symbol isn't supported.
One gets the feeling that the devs simply didn't want to actually look at how Unicode works and which characters are safe (and how to test for them efficiently). Yes, you could probably use similar-looking characters to spoof URLs but doesn't Slashdot show the domain names of links next to the links themselves for exactly that reason?
It's a bit ridiculous to not be able to use technical symbols, the IPA or even the Euro symbol because the site wants to protect itself from control characters.