I live in Wisconsin, so I've had the opportunity to vote for him before, and will again, whatever the office. My ideal presidential ticket: Feingold/Stewart (yes, John Stewert). McCain/Stewert would also be great, and probably stand a better chance.
As an indie game developer myself, working on what we (and most of our players) believe to be a *very* innovative MMOFPS/RPG, I was seriously annoyed to read the blurb (no I didn't RTFA), and quite pleased to see the post I'm replying to was at the top.
Vendetta Online is our game, and it is already an excellent twitch-combat space-sim. It's also already a decent RPG (solo and group missions of various sorts, character-building, etc). Unlike most game's, though, VO will not reach its intended feature-set and then either stagnate or require expansion-packs. For us, the game of our dreams will always be a hard six months of coding away:) Player ownable capital-class ships and stations are coming, as well as a crafting system, and revamped economy/reputation systems. Eventually we want the ability to walk around in stations and then on procedurally generated worlds. Without investors or publishers to answer to, the sky isn't even a limit:)
I agree with everything you said. I do think there is a place for player-created content, but the framework in which it's built needs to be more comprehensive and specialized. You can't expect players (in general) to produce professional-level content, but you can, for instance, give them the tools to provide jobs/quests/missions for other players. You have to give them an in-game motive for doing so, and the kind of economy that allows them to provide the reward. And above all, you need a cutting-edge, friend-of-a-friend reputation system to allow the good stuff to rise to the top, and the abuse/crap to be quickly filtered out.
And, as you said, if you're going to take the time to build such a game, and accumulate good player content, it should be built to last, and updated often without additional cost. Luckily, there are at least a few people who get this, and are doing something about it. I work for a small company with a released (but never done) MMO called Vendetta Online. Check it out
Roger Gregory, for those who don't know, was a large part of the Xanadu project. I found the Armadillo project interesting, but the engine design described in the url below, blew my mind. Rotary Rocket Engine
I totally agree with you. I have high hopes, though, that with all the half-complete projects by amateurs and small studios, some genuinely new (and really fun) gameplay will emerge. Right now I play Vendetta Online because its an MMORPG that you can have fun in without a lot of treadmilling. Guild Software also gets my 10 bucks a month because they are a tiny, privately owned company run by "real gamers". Their goal is to have a self-sustaining game world where seasoned players make new content, and the revenue they take in goes straight into developer salaries so they can keep adding features. Unlike companies with big publishing deals, they don't follow the release it, rake in the money, move on to the next project model. Its not uncommon to see them in the game, helping big events go smoothly and such.
The hardcore gamer doesn't think of gaming as a relaxing activity, but as an outlet for their egomania; its often the one thing they're really good at.
For a game to be wildly successful, it helps to have the hype-machine that is the hardcore gamer croud, but the game has to be something you can escape into.
MMOs are the wave of the future as far as this goes, because there are many interesting activities incorporating other human beings (usually more fun to interact with) in cooperative ways rather than in pure back-stabbing competition.
My favorite right now is http://vendetta-online.com/ , not because it has every feature I could want, but because it is developer-owned and they just want to keep getting paid to make the game better. It has changed more since release last Nov. than most games change with an expansion pack they charge extra for.
I'll grant that "unjust" isn't really the right word, but I'm having trouble coming up with a single adjective to "canceled" that explains to the uninformed that Firefly was canceled after being shown out of order (the pilot wasnt even first) and having its timeslot changed several times. I do think it was "unjust" to treat Joss Whedon's work the way they did after he proved himself capable of producing a 7 season show (that there was a magazine devoted to) and a 5 season spinoff.
Either you are expecting too much, or there is something wrong with your setup. I havent done a lot of direct comparison of ide software RAID, so I wont speak to that. Obviously its not scsi, but if you need a lot of capacity for a reasonable price, SCSI blows. I have a 7810 running 4x250G in the XP2600 box I'm typing this on. The card is in a normal pci slot. The fs of the single 702G (usable) partition is xfs (with su and sw set properly). I'm running kernel 2.6.11 w/ cfq io scheduling, udev, and a gentoo ~x86 system. This box is always running kde3.4, slimserver (to serve a squeezebox and softsqueeze on another box), serves high bitrate video over the network and runs aMule and azureus at all times. Oh, and it has intrusion detection running (and constantly writing to a db). I can't speak to benchmark performance, but I can tell you that it runs smooth as silk. I also have 3 servers at work that I built with 3ware cards running 2.6 kernel gentoo systems. The cards range from 7000 series to a brand new 9500-8. Needless to say, I'm quite pleased with 3ware.
I've got an Ngage-QD, and I'm quite happy with it as a phone. The interface is nice, the screen is bigger and brighter than most phones, and it has features like an MMC slot and Bluetooth that you have to spend more to get with any other phone. I got it mostly because it was the cheapest symbianOS phone with bluetooth that I'm aware of. I use it with Bemused to control XMMS and slimserver. As a portable gaming platform, its clearly inferior to my Nintendo DS, but its always in my pocket, and its not bad. Also, you can copy games from the MMCs they come on to a single larger card. (and for the warez d00dz, you can download them all too)
I mostly listen to music on the go too, and I can most definitely hear the diff between 320k mp3s and flac. Of course, I use Etymotic ER-4s, which block out quite a lot of noise, so... Apart from that, and DRM, which I wont get into, the reason I dont use online music stores is that none of them have even 1 artist out of my top ten.
but, so far, all the major only music distribution has been in formats inferior to cd (probably all of it started out as the same bits as the cd release). I buy loads of music, and have a reasonably high-end computer-as-transport, headphone rig to listen to it. But I've yet to buy a single track online because of the quality issue (and drm). I buy and rip around 10 cds a month. Its a pain in the a$$ for me to find the music that suits my eclectic taste in CD form and then rip it to.flac. I'd pay a little more than the cost of a cd to download the.flac out of a vast library including all the stuff I want and have yet to find. And it would cost the distributor far less as well. If we could buy stuff in whatever format the artist wanted to output it in (pre-mixing/rendering even (opensource music)), the last remaining desire to have hard copy would be nullified for me:)
The only bills worth bringing to a vote are those that someone thinks might pass. Therefore estimating how much the two parties have in common based on how they vote is useless. They could have 90% or 10% of a theoretical total-list-of-human-values in common, but most of those issues will never come up for vote. This creates a perception of disparity where little exists, and makes anything further from center look more radical. A couple simple examples would be the positions of both parties on the so called "wars" on drugs and terror (read civil liberties) and their tendancies toward larger federal budgets (whether paid for by increased taxes or the retirement funds of the young)
A-theist. As in, I don't believe that theism is the way to arrive at an understanding of God/the universe. I think that physics is much closer, though I think established science is almost as political as religion.
By Techno-Pagan, I mean that I hold Nature to be sacred, and believe that we, as humans, our language, and our technology are all part of a path to a more ordered universe. That, in essence, we are the ancestorsof God.
Its obviously difficult to predict how the free market and/or government regulation will affect any given industry. You have a good point that there are historical examples of very damaging monopolies in our history (before the era of "big government"). Personally, I think that only industries which include a lot of expensive infrastructure have any great potential of monopolistic abuse. On the other hand, government regulation usually amounts to GRANTING a monopoly and requiring some sort of compliance so that the consumers don't get screwed. The thing is, that as much as consumers might be protected, it prevents any other businesses from competing, and therefore provides no incentive for the monopoly to innovate. I think, in the information age, it is time to give the free market another chance. If all the laws protecting and subsidizing corporations were repealed, and we were each individually responsible for our own actions, I think the level of abuse by big business of consumers, other business, and the environment, would drop drastically. This, unlike in times long past, would be enabled by the rapid spread of information on corporate abuses. Even now, far more people are aware of what they are buying and who is benefitting from it, but its currently quite difficult to keep track of and there are cases where one has little choice but to keep buying from a company you despise (M$, utilities)
I heard Mr. Badnarik speak at length and in person. As a sort of Athiest/Techno-Pagan, I am particularly sensitive to talk of God or the "divine", especially by politicians. I do not recall hearing any religious words out of Michael, except when he was talking about the seperation of church and state (which his is firmly in favor of). He even refused to tell us what his own religious affiliation is.
Michael Badnarik's belief in what our unalienable rights are, is derived directly from the constitution. He teaches a class about it, and his book on the subject (Good to be King) is currently doing quite well on Amazon.
They can't legally avoid being served indefinitely, but its pretty common to avoid it while you can. Also, MB did attempt to serve them at ASU as a sort of publicity stunt (who can blame him when the media ignores him even when he's arrested?).
They were served in DC, and there was a hearing about the injunction. The judge denied it, saying that the LP didn't provide enough time, but that they could continue the suit to seek damages. The fact that the injunction was filed for the DAY AFTER the debate at ASU was confirmed, is, apparently, not good enough.
Personally I think it was a major miscarriage of justice, and would have made for interesting reading if any of the mainstream media had picked it up.
How many times does a politician have to lie to you before you stop believing anything they say?
Of course they're going to say there will be no draft (how would they get elected otherwise), but as you admit yourself, it MIGHT be necessary in the future. There is CURRENTLY a sort of "backdoor" draft going on (RETIRED RESERVISTS being called into active duty), and if we continue the so-called War on Terror, there WILL be a need for more warm bodies.
I will make a bold prediction;) Sometime in the next year, something will happen that "justifies" a draft. I have a hunch its that President Kerry will be assasinated by "terrorists" (read CIA/illuminati/insert your favorite here)
And having been this way for the entire history of our country, how is anyone surprised that election fraud is commonplace? I won't believe that I live in a representative democracy until I can verify that my vote was counted.
Slashdot Mirror
You might also like Vendetta Online, which is an MMOFPS/RPG, in space, which runs on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows.
http://vendetta-online.com/
Absolutely!
I live in Wisconsin, so I've had the opportunity to vote for him before, and will again, whatever the office. My ideal presidential ticket: Feingold/Stewart (yes, John Stewert). McCain/Stewert would also be great, and probably stand a better chance.
Our game runs on Linux/x86 and Linux/amd64(native), MacOSX/ppc and MacOSX/intel... oh.. and Windows.
As an indie game developer myself, working on what we (and most of our players) believe to be a *very* innovative MMOFPS/RPG, I was seriously annoyed to read the blurb (no I didn't RTFA), and quite pleased to see the post I'm replying to was at the top.
Vendetta Online is our game, and it is already an excellent twitch-combat space-sim. It's also already a decent RPG (solo and group missions of various sorts, character-building, etc). Unlike most game's, though, VO will not reach its intended feature-set and then either stagnate or require expansion-packs. For us, the game of our dreams will always be a hard six months of coding away:) Player ownable capital-class ships and stations are coming, as well as a crafting system, and revamped economy/reputation systems. Eventually we want the ability to walk around in stations and then on procedurally generated worlds. Without investors or publishers to answer to, the sky isn't even a limit:)
Michael Warnock Guild Software Inc.,
Bingo!
Vendetta is another option for space-sim lovers. It also runs on Linux and OSX (and used to run on MacOS9, BeOS and Irix).
Excellent post.
I agree with everything you said. I do think there is a place for player-created content, but the framework in which it's built needs to be more comprehensive and specialized. You can't expect players (in general) to produce professional-level content, but you can, for instance, give them the tools to provide jobs/quests/missions for other players. You have to give them an in-game motive for doing so, and the kind of economy that allows them to provide the reward. And above all, you need a cutting-edge, friend-of-a-friend reputation system to allow the good stuff to rise to the top, and the abuse/crap to be quickly filtered out.
And, as you said, if you're going to take the time to build such a game, and accumulate good player content, it should be built to last, and updated often without additional cost. Luckily, there are at least a few people who get this, and are doing something about it. I work for a small company with a released (but never done) MMO called Vendetta Online. Check it out
That was the best comment I've read on slashdot in a looong time:) Thanks!:)
Roger Gregory, for those who don't know, was a large part of the Xanadu project. I found the Armadillo project interesting, but the engine design described in the url below, blew my mind.
Rotary Rocket Engine
I totally agree with you. I have high hopes, though, that with all the half-complete projects by amateurs and small studios, some genuinely new (and really fun) gameplay will emerge. Right now I play Vendetta Online because its an MMORPG that you can have fun in without a lot of treadmilling. Guild Software also gets my 10 bucks a month because they are a tiny, privately owned company run by "real gamers". Their goal is to have a self-sustaining game world where seasoned players make new content, and the revenue they take in goes straight into developer salaries so they can keep adding features. Unlike companies with big publishing deals, they don't follow the release it, rake in the money, move on to the next project model. Its not uncommon to see them in the game, helping big events go smoothly and such.
Oh... and there are Mac and Linux clients!
The hardcore gamer doesn't think of gaming as a relaxing activity, but as an outlet for their egomania; its often the one thing they're really good at.
For a game to be wildly successful, it helps to have the hype-machine that is the hardcore gamer croud, but the game has to be something you can escape into.
MMOs are the wave of the future as far as this goes, because there are many interesting activities incorporating other human beings (usually more fun to interact with) in cooperative ways rather than in pure back-stabbing competition.
My favorite right now is http://vendetta-online.com/ , not because it has every feature I could want, but because it is developer-owned and they just want to keep getting paid to make the game better. It has changed more since release last Nov. than most games change with an expansion pack they charge extra for.
I'll grant that "unjust" isn't really the right word, but I'm having trouble coming up with a single adjective to "canceled" that explains to the uninformed that Firefly was canceled after being shown out of order (the pilot wasnt even first) and having its timeslot changed several times.
I do think it was "unjust" to treat Joss Whedon's work the way they did after he proved himself capable of producing a 7 season show (that there was a magazine devoted to) and a 5 season spinoff.
Either you are expecting too much, or there is something wrong with your setup. I havent done a lot of direct comparison of ide software RAID, so I wont speak to that. Obviously its not scsi, but if you need a lot of capacity for a reasonable price, SCSI blows.
I have a 7810 running 4x250G in the XP2600 box I'm typing this on. The card is in a normal pci slot. The fs of the single 702G (usable) partition is xfs (with su and sw set properly). I'm running kernel 2.6.11 w/ cfq io scheduling, udev, and a gentoo ~x86 system. This box is always running kde3.4, slimserver (to serve a squeezebox and softsqueeze on another box), serves high bitrate video over the network and runs aMule and azureus at all times. Oh, and it has intrusion detection running (and constantly writing to a db). I can't speak to benchmark performance, but I can tell you that it runs smooth as silk.
I also have 3 servers at work that I built with 3ware cards running 2.6 kernel gentoo systems. The cards range from 7000 series to a brand new 9500-8. Needless to say, I'm quite pleased with 3ware.
I've got an Ngage-QD, and I'm quite happy with it as a phone. The interface is nice, the screen is bigger and brighter than most phones, and it has features like an MMC slot and Bluetooth that you have to spend more to get with any other phone. I got it mostly because it was the cheapest symbianOS phone with bluetooth that I'm aware of. I use it with Bemused to control XMMS and slimserver. As a portable gaming platform, its clearly inferior to my Nintendo DS, but its always in my pocket, and its not bad. Also, you can copy games from the MMCs they come on to a single larger card. (and for the warez d00dz, you can download them all too)
I mostly listen to music on the go too, and I can most definitely hear the diff between 320k mp3s and flac. Of course, I use Etymotic ER-4s, which block out quite a lot of noise, so...
Apart from that, and DRM, which I wont get into, the reason I dont use online music stores is that none of them have even 1 artist out of my top ten.
but, so far, all the major only music distribution has been in formats inferior to cd (probably all of it started out as the same bits as the cd release). .flac. I'd pay a little more than the cost of a cd to download the .flac out of a vast library including all the stuff I want and have yet to find. And it would cost the distributor far less as well.
I buy loads of music, and have a reasonably high-end computer-as-transport, headphone rig to listen to it. But I've yet to buy a single track online because of the quality issue (and drm). I buy and rip around 10 cds a month. Its a pain in the a$$ for me to find the music that suits my eclectic taste in CD form and then rip it to
If we could buy stuff in whatever format the artist wanted to output it in (pre-mixing/rendering even (opensource music)), the last remaining desire to have hard copy would be nullified for me:)
The only bills worth bringing to a vote are those that someone thinks might pass. Therefore estimating how much the two parties have in common based on how they vote is useless. They could have 90% or 10% of a theoretical total-list-of-human-values in common, but most of those issues will never come up for vote. This creates a perception of disparity where little exists, and makes anything further from center look more radical.
A couple simple examples would be the positions of both parties on the so called "wars" on drugs and terror (read civil liberties) and their tendancies toward larger federal budgets (whether paid for by increased taxes or the retirement funds of the young)
A-theist. As in, I don't believe that theism is the way to arrive at an understanding of God/the universe. I think that physics is much closer, though I think established science is almost as political as religion.
By Techno-Pagan, I mean that I hold Nature to be sacred, and believe that we, as humans, our language, and our technology are all part of a path to a more ordered universe. That, in essence, we are the ancestorsof God.
Its obviously difficult to predict how the free market and/or government regulation will affect any given industry. You have a good point that there are historical examples of very damaging monopolies in our history (before the era of "big government"). Personally, I think that only industries which include a lot of expensive infrastructure have any great potential of monopolistic abuse. On the other hand, government regulation usually amounts to GRANTING a monopoly and requiring some sort of compliance so that the consumers don't get screwed. The thing is, that as much as consumers might be protected, it prevents any other businesses from competing, and therefore provides no incentive for the monopoly to innovate.
I think, in the information age, it is time to give the free market another chance. If all the laws protecting and subsidizing corporations were repealed, and we were each individually responsible for our own actions, I think the level of abuse by big business of consumers, other business, and the environment, would drop drastically. This, unlike in times long past, would be enabled by the rapid spread of information on corporate abuses.
Even now, far more people are aware of what they are buying and who is benefitting from it, but its currently quite difficult to keep track of and there are cases where one has little choice but to keep buying from a company you despise (M$, utilities)
I heard Mr. Badnarik speak at length and in person. As a sort of Athiest/Techno-Pagan, I am particularly sensitive to talk of God or the "divine", especially by politicians. I do not recall hearing any religious words out of Michael, except when he was talking about the seperation of church and state (which his is firmly in favor of). He even refused to tell us what his own religious affiliation is.
Michael Badnarik's belief in what our unalienable rights are, is derived directly from the constitution. He teaches a class about it, and his book on the subject (Good to be King) is currently doing quite well on Amazon.
They can't legally avoid being served indefinitely, but its pretty common to avoid it while you can. Also, MB did attempt to serve them at ASU as a sort of publicity stunt (who can blame him when the media ignores him even when he's arrested?).
They were served in DC, and there was a hearing about the injunction. The judge denied it, saying that the LP didn't provide enough time, but that they could continue the suit to seek damages. The fact that the injunction was filed for the DAY AFTER the debate at ASU was confirmed, is, apparently, not good enough.
Personally I think it was a major miscarriage of justice, and would have made for interesting reading if any of the mainstream media had picked it up.
You're right that the bill was not serious. On the other hand, how do you explain this
It wasn't a bill to reinstate the draft. It was a bill to make it include females and cut out the college exemptions.
Also, what politician is going to support something unpopular right before an election.
How many times does a politician have to lie to you before you stop believing anything they say?
;) Sometime in the next year, something will happen that "justifies" a draft. I have a hunch its that President Kerry will be assasinated by "terrorists" (read CIA/illuminati/insert your favorite here)
Of course they're going to say there will be no draft (how would they get elected otherwise), but as you admit yourself, it MIGHT be necessary in the future. There is CURRENTLY a sort of "backdoor" draft going on (RETIRED RESERVISTS being called into active duty), and if we continue the so-called War on Terror, there WILL be a need for more warm bodies.
I will make a bold prediction
And having been this way for the entire history of our country, how is anyone surprised that election fraud is commonplace?
I won't believe that I live in a representative democracy until I can verify that my vote was counted.