Falls short of the fact that there are now two news articles about it, versus the zero that I'd wager at least one other irate (former?) customer must also be trying to generate.
Pfft. "The Ultra Taleful Fantastic and Truthful Fantasty Tales of the True Ultimate Final Phantasy Star EX3 Alpha" game is due out with Duke Nukem: Forever.
The reason everyone takes the path with the turrets is simple: we have been conditioned thoroughly by prior experience.
In every single other game where you have an intersection like that, the locked door's key is always after the turret area (having to return to points breaks up the walking a straight line feeling); the openable window at best leads to a small enclosure where I fight two or three guys to get at a medkit - I'm already at full health or I'm a maschoist, either way, I scorn your medkit window.
You want me to try blowing my way through doors, article writer? I do. After going through the turret area. Why? Because as a function of my time, 99% I'm going down that turret alley anyway for the key, that 1% of doors someone was bright enough to say, "Let's have them expend all their ammo testing which weapon and how many rounds thereof will be required to 'unlock' this door, it'll be clever," aren't exactly a silent majority there, presidentio.
As a simple (and I'm sure soon to be much maligned) example, take the Final Fantasy series. How often is the player provided choices? How significant is their impact on the game? Did you say to Bubba, "Man, I hate those pesky Killas." and go on the story arc that resulted in the village being burned to the ground? Or did you simply get a slightly different irrelevent conversation 10 gameplay hours later?
The problem has never been players unable or unwilling to experiment. It has been the glorious failure of one time gimmicks that trained us to shun experimentation. Oh, there's one door on level 17, third floor, fifth turn that you explode. Every other door on the level opens with a scripted event, key at the end of a turret infested alley,... but that, that one door... you can explode. Of course. WHAT WAS I THINKING.
Look, man. We've figured it out. You've got lots of dead ends, and those turrets aren't there screaming, "Wrong way!" The problem isn't gamers and our lack of problem solving ability. It's consistancy. Look at Metroid Prime. Every door I can remember that exploded under X circumstances looked the same (or had the same tell tale, or whatever). Imagine if none of the doors were marked. You don't need to fix gamers, man. You need to fix developers. CONSISTANCY. AFFORDANCES. STUDY HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION.
So... a company did really well during a boom, didn't expect the - let's go with at least a century of data - inevitable bust, and ended up in the fiscal doghouse. The bust is showing faint signs of turning into a boom, and a company lasted long enough to see the dawn. I hope I'm not abstracting a little too much for everyone's taste, but I'm just amazed at how this sort of 'news' borders on anything more than a madlib.
OTOH, it is Lucent. I am confused by the matching corporate-think cycle regarding slimming to 'core business' and 'diversification', which has had profitable units dropped because they weren't the "core business". I realize this comes with a nice immediate fiscal gain, but... so would selling the whole company, or firing all the employees.
Lucent, if I understood properly, was a victim of both this 'core business' nonsense along the need for capital by its parent business unit. I think of Lucent as an innovator, and it seemed set up for failure. So... yippee! Pat yourselves on the back, Lucent. I do find it mildly amusing that their future will be neither a 'core business' nor 'diversification', but rather, (minding) other people's business.
Now if you'd like to credit me the value of shares at the price I originally paid for them...
What does the "emerge sync..." or "apt-get" icon look like? That's a lot of reading, too - what makes it obvious that those are the update tools versus, say, rm?
At a guess, not Tim Berners-Lee, and therein the problem lies.
Moving (link to exercise gear) slowly further offtopic (link to a "hip new internet lingo dictionary" on Amazon), I (link to "I, Robot" movie) wonder (link to effective thinking seminars) if perhaps the already ridiculous (link to inday music band) noise (link to 80's metal band) to signal (link to electronics gear * 2) of english (link to ESL courses online) isn't a little unconducive (link to physicist's delight) to further disruption (link to white noise generators)?
But I, -- and in these journals do recount varying expeditions of renouned explorers, namely; Forwind, Drake, Ptargos, and Agemmemnon; to have mentioned in passing these Ruins of Unspeakable immensity and truly Cyclopean dimension -- we suspeckt a deeper, more insideous intelligence at work or once long ago now dormant; on the morrow we shall breech the inner seal and see to this ancient civilization.
Shoggoths are dying! It's true, a recent Netcraft survey confirms... based on the number of Usecave ideographs that drive translators insane... whose ratioe is firmly established...
While I realize that microbe scale life is not quite the same, you are familiar with what's happened every single time a species was artifically transplanted unintentionally?... aren't we still plagued by those muscles on the Mississippi? Or are they Great Lakes?
The problem isn't that they would be competing. It might be (and I am not a microbiologist) that Earth life proteins have receptors that simply can't fit into the other bit of, say, Io's microbal life? So Earth's life can't be metabolised by Ioian, but in our hypothetical unknown example, Earth's life may be able to metabolise Ioian.
Not to mention the toad infestation in Austrailia. (Simpsons)
I'll save someone the trouble of saying, "Toads have different shaped proteins?..."
In other news, I hear the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale, a printing flub resulted in 'gullible' missing from most common dictionaries for the past decade, and that *BSD is dying.
You're right... it is clear, based on previous trends in the gaming industry that we should be looking forward to the GameBox and the XCube.
I also agree that Sony should take a cue from the big dog in the software arena (like it or lump it) and take the indirect cue from the auto industry by naming products by year - here comes the PS 2007! Now we just have to keep some frisky company from developing their system in 6993 years under the name HAL...
As crazy as this scenario is, hear it out for all of a second. You'll forgive my complete lack of grasp on poisons, but let's say you doused the card in some poison that is absorbed through touch, and will stick to the card long enough. What kind of liability does the bank accepting and transferring this object open them up to?
Sure, you and 5 billion other people on the planet wouldn't even have thought of this, let alone done it. It just takes the one psychopath. Millions in a lawsuit, millions more in the resultant claim, and creditors/insurers look at them funny from then on... versus cut the card up, and print them another one, it costs what?... considering the number I get in my mail, I'm thinking the balance is pretty obvious.
It is now official - a Netcraft survey has confirmed: programming is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered AOL hax0r community when recently a survey conducted confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct warez account for less than 40 percent of all submitted code, that CVS has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that high school graduates won't fill out thinning ranks of programmers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that programming has lost more students, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Programming is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [leethax0r.orgcomedu] in the recent Netcraft survey.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict programming's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Programming faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because programming is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, programming continues to lose coders. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Sourceforge is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its open sourceteers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Something about USENet post ratios, and the goat website going offline. Additionally, windows, menus, icons, and pointers are apparently both a bad idea and obsolete. Punch cards were the right answer, and only decades of difficult market restructuring will achieve a successful return to punch cards, this time driven by Haskell, thus obviating the need for monads.
Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that programming has steadily declined in market share. Programming is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim outside of India. If programming is to survive at all it will be among programming dilettante dabblers. Programming continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, programming is dead.
I hear there was a massive lexographical mistake a decade ago, resulting in the word "gullible" being omitted from most printing runs of popular dictionaries, such as Merriam-Webster, Roget, and Netcraft. Go check for yourself in any new dictionary.
Step 1: Steal mindshare (superior search engine)
Step 2: Steal customer base with webmail (formerly known as '????')
Step 3: Profit
And for the Google OS, they should call it GogglOS, and when it crashes, they could say, "My eyes! My EYES!! THE GOGGLOS DO NOTHING!!"
I've noticed the similarities Stargate series has to a series of writings by a series of anonymous authors known collectively as the Ancient Egyptians, whose similarities may also be shared with your author, Brian Lumley.
Vampires are longstanding foils for human as animal, animal as human, "what is humanity?" (think of them as the opposite of Star Trek's Spock or Data, and then the vampires like Spike and Angel are a 'creative' inevitability). The very nature of vampirism is to violate basic taboos (another reason they are sometimes portrayed as highly sexualized - Bram Stroker's Dracula - err, his succubi - compared to the mores of the time, for example). Throwing in the extra violation of 'human'ity with the actual physical invasion of a parasite to vampirism should be considered another inevitable evolution (the tainted blood and then genetics themes, taken to a new level - we are not 'transformed' as those are, but our will is raped by the descration of our bodies).
So, as for this all sounding familiar, yes. These ideas sound on the score of over a century old.
Going more offtopic, someone above "typoed" the correct name for the parasite race as "Ghoul" (yeah, I'm going to get it wrong too, but I'm sure this is closer) instead of 'Gou'ld'. Allow for a little elision, and you have the same word. I never thought of that the entire series, but it's a very fitting observation. T'eouc is always saying how "The [Ghoul] are only scavengers." The [Ghoul] live off of the life of others. And so on.
I remember playing two Bard's Tales (I think one and three), and while I enjoyed the games up to a point, I'll be completely honest and say the... what's the phrase I want... well, compare the arseness of dungeoning in the Final Fantasy series (as a common reference point). The earlier in the series, the more you could lose - I think I once lost a 3 or 4 hour session because there simply were no save points *in* dungeons. Yeah. Go back to Final Fantasy 1, and it was still a more forgiving experience than I remember Bard's Tale. Cheap tricks (look, no visible walls to use as a point of reference... and now blind teleports that don't notify you!) to boot. So while everything in the article suggests that besides having the audacity of a bard protagonist nothing will be "hallmark Bard's Tale"ish, I can't really feel the loss.
But I do see lots of great points to pick on as Yet Another Diablo ( / Nethack ) - most of which are mentioned above, alas, but - "With more than 700 pages of script"... It seems that remarking on the bulk of script is a great selling point. I'm fairly sure that after my 10th or so RPG I stopped talking to everyone in every town, let alone each and every time I visited, because changing "Oh, who is this strange person talking to me?" to "Oh, my, hello [player name]!" to "Gawsh, thanks for saving my village!" doesn't really merit a lot of attention, you know? It's like school papers, inflate the font size and margins and boast about your page count. "Well, we had thirty NPCs with variations of this simple one line dialogue... and after event X, they have thirty variations of this new simple one line dialgoue.." Great. Thanks. Fantastic.
The only game I think that shouldn't get schnadigans called on them for quoting "script" length with such an outrageous number would have to be Nomad.
My hobbies involve teaching myself new programming/scripting languages, figuring out how databases work by setting up, running, and maintaining one, and writing free-as-in-beer-ware that reviews excellently.
I am sure all of these hobbies are completely immaterial to my resumes... curse you, McDonalds, lower your standards!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Falls short of the fact that there are now two news articles about it, versus the zero that I'd wager at least one other irate (former?) customer must also be trying to generate.
Pfft. "The Ultra Taleful Fantastic and Truthful Fantasty Tales of the True Ultimate Final Phantasy Star EX3 Alpha" game is due out with Duke Nukem: Forever.
The reason everyone takes the path with the turrets is simple: we have been conditioned thoroughly by prior experience.
... but that, that one door... you can explode. Of course. WHAT WAS I THINKING.
In every single other game where you have an intersection like that, the locked door's key is always after the turret area (having to return to points breaks up the walking a straight line feeling); the openable window at best leads to a small enclosure where I fight two or three guys to get at a medkit - I'm already at full health or I'm a maschoist, either way, I scorn your medkit window.
You want me to try blowing my way through doors, article writer? I do. After going through the turret area. Why? Because as a function of my time, 99% I'm going down that turret alley anyway for the key, that 1% of doors someone was bright enough to say, "Let's have them expend all their ammo testing which weapon and how many rounds thereof will be required to 'unlock' this door, it'll be clever," aren't exactly a silent majority there, presidentio.
As a simple (and I'm sure soon to be much maligned) example, take the Final Fantasy series. How often is the player provided choices? How significant is their impact on the game? Did you say to Bubba, "Man, I hate those pesky Killas." and go on the story arc that resulted in the village being burned to the ground? Or did you simply get a slightly different irrelevent conversation 10 gameplay hours later?
The problem has never been players unable or unwilling to experiment. It has been the glorious failure of one time gimmicks that trained us to shun experimentation. Oh, there's one door on level 17, third floor, fifth turn that you explode. Every other door on the level opens with a scripted event, key at the end of a turret infested alley,
Look, man. We've figured it out. You've got lots of dead ends, and those turrets aren't there screaming, "Wrong way!" The problem isn't gamers and our lack of problem solving ability. It's consistancy. Look at Metroid Prime. Every door I can remember that exploded under X circumstances looked the same (or had the same tell tale, or whatever). Imagine if none of the doors were marked. You don't need to fix gamers, man. You need to fix developers. CONSISTANCY. AFFORDANCES. STUDY HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION.
Some people need reminding that they purchased something hot after ordering coffee from McDonald's, you insensitive clod.
Maybe I should legally change my name to Mike Rowe, and buy a domain conveying that I make software.
Magic cereal bowl, you say? Sounds like the Wizards of Discworld are at it again....
So... a company did really well during a boom, didn't expect the - let's go with at least a century of data - inevitable bust, and ended up in the fiscal doghouse. The bust is showing faint signs of turning into a boom, and a company lasted long enough to see the dawn. I hope I'm not abstracting a little too much for everyone's taste, but I'm just amazed at how this sort of 'news' borders on anything more than a madlib.
OTOH, it is Lucent. I am confused by the matching corporate-think cycle regarding slimming to 'core business' and 'diversification', which has had profitable units dropped because they weren't the "core business". I realize this comes with a nice immediate fiscal gain, but... so would selling the whole company, or firing all the employees.
Lucent, if I understood properly, was a victim of both this 'core business' nonsense along the need for capital by its parent business unit. I think of Lucent as an innovator, and it seemed set up for failure. So... yippee! Pat yourselves on the back, Lucent. I do find it mildly amusing that their future will be neither a 'core business' nor 'diversification', but rather, (minding) other people's business.
Now if you'd like to credit me the value of shares at the price I originally paid for them...
What does the "emerge sync..." or "apt-get" icon look like? That's a lot of reading, too - what makes it obvious that those are the update tools versus, say, rm?
Are we waiting for Martin Gates to come nailing a paper to our door with [Windows] 95 Patchesises?
Moving (link to exercise gear) slowly further offtopic (link to a "hip new internet lingo dictionary" on Amazon), I (link to "I, Robot" movie) wonder (link to effective thinking seminars) if perhaps the already ridiculous (link to inday music band) noise (link to 80's metal band) to signal (link to electronics gear * 2) of english (link to ESL courses online) isn't a little unconducive (link to physicist's delight) to further disruption (link to white noise generators)?
100% of murderers have eaten food at some point in their lives. Every murderer ate before murdering. Clearly, food is a menace to the public good!
Shoggoths are dying! It's true, a recent Netcraft survey confirms... based on the number of Usecave ideographs that drive translators insane... whose ratioe is firmly established...
Not to mention the toad infestation in Austrailia. (Simpsons)
I'll save someone the trouble of saying, "Toads have different shaped proteins?..."
In other news, I hear the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale, a printing flub resulted in 'gullible' missing from most common dictionaries for the past decade, and that *BSD is dying.
Privacy is an issue, but if you're not going to trust Microsoft, I'm not sure why you would trust another operating system.
I also agree that Sony should take a cue from the big dog in the software arena (like it or lump it) and take the indirect cue from the auto industry by naming products by year - here comes the PS 2007! Now we just have to keep some frisky company from developing their system in 6993 years under the name HAL...
As crazy as this scenario is, hear it out for all of a second. You'll forgive my complete lack of grasp on poisons, but let's say you doused the card in some poison that is absorbed through touch, and will stick to the card long enough. What kind of liability does the bank accepting and transferring this object open them up to? Sure, you and 5 billion other people on the planet wouldn't even have thought of this, let alone done it. It just takes the one psychopath. Millions in a lawsuit, millions more in the resultant claim, and creditors/insurers look at them funny from then on... versus cut the card up, and print them another one, it costs what?... considering the number I get in my mail, I'm thinking the balance is pretty obvious.
It is now official - a Netcraft survey has confirmed: programming is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered AOL hax0r community when recently a survey conducted confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct warez account for less than 40 percent of all submitted code, that CVS has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that high school graduates won't fill out thinning ranks of programmers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that programming has lost more students, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Programming is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [leethax0r.orgcomedu] in the recent Netcraft survey.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict programming's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Programming faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because programming is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, programming continues to lose coders. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Sourceforge is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its open sourceteers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Something about USENet post ratios, and the goat website going offline. Additionally, windows, menus, icons, and pointers are apparently both a bad idea and obsolete. Punch cards were the right answer, and only decades of difficult market restructuring will achieve a successful return to punch cards, this time driven by Haskell, thus obviating the need for monads.
Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that programming has steadily declined in market share. Programming is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim outside of India. If programming is to survive at all it will be among programming dilettante dabblers. Programming continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, programming is dead.
Fact: programming is dying
I hear there was a massive lexographical mistake a decade ago, resulting in the word "gullible" being omitted from most printing runs of popular dictionaries, such as Merriam-Webster, Roget, and Netcraft. Go check for yourself in any new dictionary.
Step 1: Steal mindshare (superior search engine) Step 2: Steal customer base with webmail (formerly known as '????') Step 3: Profit And for the Google OS, they should call it GogglOS, and when it crashes, they could say, "My eyes! My EYES!! THE GOGGLOS DO NOTHING!!"
I've noticed the similarities Stargate series has to a series of writings by a series of anonymous authors known collectively as the Ancient Egyptians, whose similarities may also be shared with your author, Brian Lumley.
Vampires are longstanding foils for human as animal, animal as human, "what is humanity?" (think of them as the opposite of Star Trek's Spock or Data, and then the vampires like Spike and Angel are a 'creative' inevitability). The very nature of vampirism is to violate basic taboos (another reason they are sometimes portrayed as highly sexualized - Bram Stroker's Dracula - err, his succubi - compared to the mores of the time, for example). Throwing in the extra violation of 'human'ity with the actual physical invasion of a parasite to vampirism should be considered another inevitable evolution (the tainted blood and then genetics themes, taken to a new level - we are not 'transformed' as those are, but our will is raped by the descration of our bodies).
So, as for this all sounding familiar, yes. These ideas sound on the score of over a century old.
Going more offtopic, someone above "typoed" the correct name for the parasite race as "Ghoul" (yeah, I'm going to get it wrong too, but I'm sure this is closer) instead of 'Gou'ld'. Allow for a little elision, and you have the same word. I never thought of that the entire series, but it's a very fitting observation. T'eouc is always saying how "The [Ghoul] are only scavengers." The [Ghoul] live off of the life of others. And so on.
I remember playing two Bard's Tales (I think one and three), and while I enjoyed the games up to a point, I'll be completely honest and say the ... what's the phrase I want... well, compare the arseness of dungeoning in the Final Fantasy series (as a common reference point). The earlier in the series, the more you could lose - I think I once lost a 3 or 4 hour session because there simply were no save points *in* dungeons. Yeah. Go back to Final Fantasy 1, and it was still a more forgiving experience than I remember Bard's Tale. Cheap tricks (look, no visible walls to use as a point of reference... and now blind teleports that don't notify you!) to boot. So while everything in the article suggests that besides having the audacity of a bard protagonist nothing will be "hallmark Bard's Tale"ish, I can't really feel the loss.
But I do see lots of great points to pick on as Yet Another Diablo ( / Nethack ) - most of which are mentioned above, alas, but - "With more than 700 pages of script"... It seems that remarking on the bulk of script is a great selling point. I'm fairly sure that after my 10th or so RPG I stopped talking to everyone in every town, let alone each and every time I visited, because changing "Oh, who is this strange person talking to me?" to "Oh, my, hello [player name]!" to "Gawsh, thanks for saving my village!" doesn't really merit a lot of attention, you know? It's like school papers, inflate the font size and margins and boast about your page count. "Well, we had thirty NPCs with variations of this simple one line dialogue... and after event X, they have thirty variations of this new simple one line dialgoue.." Great. Thanks. Fantastic.
The only game I think that shouldn't get schnadigans called on them for quoting "script" length with such an outrageous number would have to be Nomad.
My hobbies involve teaching myself new programming/scripting languages, figuring out how databases work by setting up, running, and maintaining one, and writing free-as-in-beer-ware that reviews excellently. I am sure all of these hobbies are completely immaterial to my resumes... curse you, McDonalds, lower your standards!!!