All the comments so far have either been complaining about the gameplay (grinding and repetitive quests, no big change to the gameworld etc).
I think it all boils down to immersiveness. It's easy to achieve this with a good single player game, be it System Shock 2 or Halflife or Deus Ex. There, you are the only human playing against a scripted game, and there are no other random variables being inserted to mar the experience.
How credible does a WoW type world look with a bunch of characters talking in scriptkiddese?
I started playing a Korean MMO called Project A3, that was licensed for use in India. It was in open beta for a year, then went subscription based. The gameplay only focused on grinding, and the notorious ability to PK (player kill) wantonly by ctrl-clicking on them. This led to lots of rivalry and abuse (no censor filters). After a while, one got sick of it, as the point was repeatedly driven home- You(or anyone else for that matter) are not a pretty elf in a skimpy costume, or a muscular warrior waving his...battleax.
At the end of the day, the people behind the characters are just a bunch of pimply teenage boys who love using foul language at the drop of a hat.
And finally, as someone else also said, the swords and magic fantasy genre has been done to death.
Joe user != dumb. If someone is knowledgeable enough to have MP3's on their system to play, they are knowledgeable enough to google "play mp3 in ubuntu", hit I'm feeling lucky, and find their answer right there.
As for the wireless, what would do if some piece of hardware didn't work in windows? Get one that does. I recommend Joe does the same, there certainly are plenty of wireless cards that just work in linux.
You're missing the point here-assuming the scenario refers to someone switching over from Windows, doesn't give a flying fart in a hurricane about OSS vs. Microsoft and just wants to do stuff with his computer. When MP3s play perfectly well on Windows without having to do a google search, why on earth should he put up with having to do the same here?
And if his wireless card worked on Windows, why should he go buy a new one because it won't work on Linux? Remember, these are average users, not geeks. They just want to get on with their work, not rhapsodize over their new operating system.
I found the same thing, though tintinitis can still affect you even if your hearing is good I believe you meant Tinnitus.
Tintinitis (n): A complete addiction to the famous French comic character:)
I never thought much of the movie storylines of Star Wars. In my opinion, the best stories have been done by other people- The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn, or KOTOR. Both have far more engaging stoylines and it would've been much better to make a series out of 'em rather than flogging a dead horse. ah well..
..if you look at old pictures of New York or Chicago (probably other American cities as well), it is observed that the streetcar or tram was a staple means of transportation. For some reason, it was thought worthwhile to kill these off-they ran on electricity and were pretty eco-friendly compared to today, when you probably have to take your car even to go 2 miles to the grocery store.(Blame Big Oil and auto companies for this?)
The benefits of public transportation are there to see-take the Delhi Metro for example. It's still under construction,(scheduled for completion in 2010) but individual traffic has been greatly reduced along the routes it operates, and people are all praise for the savings in time and fuel.
When there's very few other options and people are forced to use their cars, traffic congestion is inevitable, and it seems rather cheap to attempt to profit off of it.
Wrong-Mumbai transportation works because a huge chunk of the city's population uses the local trains rather than their own cars. They are the lifeline of the city- the July 2006 bomb blasts resulted in services being suspended temporarily, and the whole city ground to a halt. Bangalore has been mentioned a lot-it has the most nightmarish traffic congestion because of very poor public transport. People have no alternative to buying a vehicle of their own.
Heh, this was what I found funniest in the GP's post-
It's a list of "spot fines". Note that 40 rupees is about $1 USD.
Speeding? $7.50
Driving without a license? $7.50.
Running a red light? $2.50 Have you forgotten purchasing power parity? Indians don't earn in USD, so these fines are no small amount to sneeze at in rupees.
Of course, corruption rules, and it's not uncommon to bribe the cop for a smaller sum to be let off.
A good time to read Orbiter, a graphic novel by Warren Ellis. It depicts a near-future scenario where NASA has shut down its manned space program, and what ensues.
Here's the Indian side of the story-
The Indian govt. opened the market for mobile operators around 1994, and initially the situation was similar-people were charged for airtime and so had to pay for incoming calls.
Call rates were also quite expensive- Rs. 12 outgoing/Rs. 8 incoming and so on-compared to 3 rupees for landline calls. Thus mobile phones remained expensive toys for the rich, and the normal practice was to cancel an incoming call and use the nearest land line to return the call!
In 2000, the govt. mandated that operators could not charge for incoming calls, and at the same time, SMSes were introduced free of charge.
This is what led to the explosive growth in the mobile market, which continues to grow, and today you can pay as low as 0.3 rupees a minute for outgoing calls depending on the talk plan. (40 rupees to the dollar, so that's about 2 cents every 3 minutes!).
Oh, and you're free to pick and choose your operator and your handset-no contracts to lock you down.
Anyone played KOTOR 1 and 2? (Knights of the Old Republic) ? In terms of storyline and characters-these games are easily far better than any of the movies. The Jedi are portrayed exactly as you describe-unwilling to act against the Mandalorian invasion, which is when 2 of the best Jedi rebel and lead an army against the Mandalorians (eventually falling to the dark side). Within the game-there are many moments where you question what it means to be a Jedi, or Sith, whether there really is any difference between them, and so on. It's a highly complex and original game, with very memorable characters (Darth Treya, for one, or HK-47-who was voted the most popular game sidekick character of all time).
I've always been a fan of the extended universe presented in Star Wars-the books, games and comics depicting events far before and beyond the timeline of the 6 movies. In my opinion, the several writers and authors of these works have breathed life into the subculture far better than anything Lucas may have conceived. Read the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, for instance.
A fresh set of movies based on KOTOR-with someone else doing the directing (Joss Whedon anyone?) rather than Lucas, would be great.
Government regulation becomes necessary in the case of large service providers; in any event, whenever there's a danger of monopoly or oligopoly.
In India, mobile operators have been kept in line by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). For example, TRAI decreed that operators should charge for call time and not airtime, which implies not charging for incoming calls/messages. This move single handedly boosted the growth of mobile phone usage in India. Additionally, from time to time, TRAI has prosecuted operators for including hidden charges in their services and so on-so some amount of legislation is needed in such cases.
Best example is the antitrust case against Microsoft.
First of all-I'd say this is great. I used to read about American consumers throwing away old appliances in landfills while growing up, and found it rather incredible. India has had a 'recycle' culture long before it became fashionable in the 90s. In earlier times (about 20 years ago; I was a kid then) nearly everything sold in shops would come in brown paper bags rather than plastic bags. We still continue to use glass bottles for soft drinks; though cans are available they've not caught on as much.
And speaking of repairing appliances-nearly every neighborhood would have standard repair shop for everything-electrical appliances,watches,auto parts and so on. Getting things fixed as described by others here, was quite a common phenomenon. Indians have had to be thrifty for years, under the closed economy that lasted till 1991 we had very little choice by way of variety and quality with products; so learnt to make do with what was there.
At home, for years we would store spices and condiments in old jam bottles. When I was a kid, you could get these rubber snap on bottlecaps to fix on glass bottles of fruit juice; so that they could be reused for drinking water. Bread would be sold wrapped in waxed paper, rather than sealed plastic that's prevalent today.
And speaking of computer hardware-there are still service shops where you can find antique Pentium II motherboards, old IBM EGA monitors and even 5 1/4" floppy drives being fixed! Similarly, there's a huge market for used mobile phones; you can get a very basic Nokia 3300 (discontinued now) for below $20.
Sadly today India's headed the same way. After sales service is a joke with most white goods manufacturers, and planned obsolescence is the way to go.
If the worlds' largest energy consumer decides to cut down on consumption in this manner, it can only benefit everybody and the environment.
I've used Jaiku. It's like a combination of Twitter and an aggregated feed publisher. You can register all your 'places' on the net, and it publishes a consolidated RSS feed about your activities. For example, you can add your del.icio.us bookmarks, your Flickr photo stream, your last.fm 'recently played' music, or any other feed (say from your blog), and any updates to any of these are published as one combined feed. You can add other Jaiku users as friends and view similar updates from them.
They provide a mobile application (Nokia S60 3rd ed. is supported currently, don't know about others) that lets you publish messages like Twitter. This also integrates with the phonebook, so you can enter the Jaiku ID for your friends, and get an update of what they're doing. The mobile app only shows what updates your friends have made to Jaiku, i.e. it won't provide details of their other feeds.
It's an interesting app, somewhat like Facebook's 'news' page, lets you publish minute by minute details of whatever you're doing-if you're so inclined. And of course, your Jaiku page is accessible by anyone, so much for privacy.
My sister has an N95 - does it support new apps? Is there a web community page where they are listed? Thereareseveralplaces that you can get software for Nokia phones!!
To install them-either copy the.SIS/.SISX application file to the phone and run it using the built in file manager-or (this is easier) use the PC Suite software provided with every handset to upload/install to the phone using your data cable or bluetooth/infrared.
Simple fact-Nokia phones are immensely popular everywhere in the world except the US. Users in other countries (I'm from India, which is one of the fastest growing mobile markets and heavily Nokia-dominated) have been accustomed to features for years, that american users are only now noticing.
First there's the 'don't buy if you don't like it' argument. Apple is free to set whatever terms they choose, and you're free to vote with your wallet either way. Secondly, how's fiddling with the firmware to unlock it any different from overclocking your CPU, or adding an aftermarket modification to your car's engine to make it go faster? In both these cases you void your warranty and the manufacturer is not liable for any damages that may result. Apple provides the iPhone integrated with AT&T as a bundled service, as an 'experience' if you will; they cannot guarantee things will work perfectly if you change the working specs in this manner. It is lamentable that they don't provide an unlocked phone to begin with, but one can't complain much here.
These days more and more people are using their mobile phones to browse the net. Especially now with Safari on the iPhone, you can browse full fledged websites. Mobile users who aren't on an 'all you can eat' plan have to pay for every freaking byte that they download (Is it the same with the iPhone on AT&T?) ALL THE MORE REASON to block ads that one doesn't want to see!! A mobile browser is anyway slower and has a smaller display than a desktop browser; why should I waste my screen space AND pay for bandwidth for such ads?
I've been on the web since '98, and been blocking ads since a year after that. I first used AtGuard-an excellent personal firewall cum adblocker which was bought by Symantec and turned into their firewall product. After switching to Windows XP, AtGuard wouldn't work, so I switched to Ad Muncher a commercial Windows based adblocker. Today I use a combination of Admuncher, a hosts file with over 10k entries and the Firefox AdBlock Plus plugin.
Here's a few counter arguments:
What if I live in a country where your advertised products/services are not available, or are too expensive because of the exchange rate?
The way I understand online advertising, mere clicking on ads does not help; one has to buy the product for the website to get credit from its advertisers. What if I don't ever buy any stuff online?(In my case, I don't own an international credit card)
In short, what if online advertising is completely irrelevant to me? What's the point of trying to convert me to not block ads? I'm never going to buy anything online anyway.
The whole issue seems to be about the phone 'appearing' to be switched off while not actually being so. I think the simplest solution would be (for the next version of the iPhone of course) to have some kind of standby LED on the side (if it may not be possible to put it on the top surface) that blinks periodically to show that the phone is still active.(I've already mentioned this in another post here) It's already established that in standby mode it will connect to the network to sync mail or whatever, so atleast people will know that that's what's happening.
My Nokia N73 has a tiny blue LED that blinks every 5 seconds in standby mode-which is simply a powersaver mode whose timeout can be controlled. It's to conserve battery power and no more. But if you press the off button, it switches off-there's no separate standby involved hence no confusion.
Why don't they just make a screensaver for the standby mode with an appropriate image? Maybe show a flock of dollar bills flapping their way out of a wallet or something.
I've seen similar behavior with Nokia phones. You can disable MMS when roaming, and they have a security model in place for 3rd party apps. When you install a new application(be it java or a native SIS application), an alert appears telling you all the device capabilites that this application will use. For Java (J2ME) apps, you can even set permissions on features-eg accessing the mobile network, sending SMS/MMS,accessing bluetooth, GPRS, your addressbook etc, and whether to prompt you each time it's used or deny usage.
In fact, some 3rd party applications also take care to warn the user about data usage charges if running in the background. I had Yahoo! Go on my phone; it would periodically sync mail and contacts from Yahoo, but you had to enable the option to run in the background; upon which it would display a message warning you that you could incur heavy bandwidth usage charges by doing so.
Such features will definitely help the user, at least they would have been warned of the consequences.
IBM has quite a long tradition of accessibility support for its products, especially on the Java platform. All the standard tools shipped with the IBM JDK (jconsole, policytool, ikeyman to name a few) support accessibility.
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All the comments so far have either been complaining about the gameplay (grinding and repetitive quests, no big change to the gameworld etc).
I think it all boils down to immersiveness. It's easy to achieve this with a good single player game, be it System Shock 2 or Halflife or Deus Ex. There, you are the only human playing against a scripted game, and there are no other random variables being inserted to mar the experience. How credible does a WoW type world look with a bunch of characters talking in scriptkiddese?
I started playing a Korean MMO called Project A3, that was licensed for use in India. It was in open beta for a year, then went subscription based. The gameplay only focused on grinding, and the notorious ability to PK (player kill) wantonly by ctrl-clicking on them. This led to lots of rivalry and abuse (no censor filters). After a while, one got sick of it, as the point was repeatedly driven home- You(or anyone else for that matter) are not a pretty elf in a skimpy costume, or a muscular warrior waving his...battleax. At the end of the day, the people behind the characters are just a bunch of pimply teenage boys who love using foul language at the drop of a hat.
And finally, as someone else also said, the swords and magic fantasy genre has been done to death.
As for the wireless, what would do if some piece of hardware didn't work in windows? Get one that does. I recommend Joe does the same, there certainly are plenty of wireless cards that just work in linux.
You're missing the point here-assuming the scenario refers to someone switching over from Windows, doesn't give a flying fart in a hurricane about OSS vs. Microsoft and just wants to do stuff with his computer. When MP3s play perfectly well on Windows without having to do a google search, why on earth should he put up with having to do the same here? And if his wireless card worked on Windows, why should he go buy a new one because it won't work on Linux? Remember, these are average users, not geeks. They just want to get on with their work, not rhapsodize over their new operating system.
Tintinitis (n): A complete addiction to the famous French comic character
I never thought much of the movie storylines of Star Wars. In my opinion, the best stories have been done by other people- The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn, or KOTOR. Both have far more engaging stoylines and it would've been much better to make a series out of 'em rather than flogging a dead horse. ah well..
..if you look at old pictures of New York or Chicago (probably other American cities as well), it is observed that the streetcar or tram was a staple means of transportation. For some reason, it was thought worthwhile to kill these off-they ran on electricity and were pretty eco-friendly compared to today, when you probably have to take your car even to go 2 miles to the grocery store.(Blame Big Oil and auto companies for this?)
The benefits of public transportation are there to see-take the Delhi Metro for example. It's still under construction,(scheduled for completion in 2010) but individual traffic has been greatly reduced along the routes it operates, and people are all praise for the savings in time and fuel.
When there's very few other options and people are forced to use their cars, traffic congestion is inevitable, and it seems rather cheap to attempt to profit off of it.
"Well, Baldrick, so that's one of the greatest scientific mysteries solved! The dinosaurs were wiped out by the smell of your underwear!"
Wrong-Mumbai transportation works because a huge chunk of the city's population uses the local trains rather than their own cars. They are the lifeline of the city- the July 2006 bomb blasts resulted in services being suspended temporarily, and the whole city ground to a halt. Bangalore has been mentioned a lot-it has the most nightmarish traffic congestion because of very poor public transport. People have no alternative to buying a vehicle of their own.
A good time to read Orbiter, a graphic novel by Warren Ellis. It depicts a near-future scenario where NASA has shut down its manned space program, and what ensues.
Here's the Indian side of the story- The Indian govt. opened the market for mobile operators around 1994, and initially the situation was similar-people were charged for airtime and so had to pay for incoming calls. Call rates were also quite expensive- Rs. 12 outgoing/Rs. 8 incoming and so on-compared to 3 rupees for landline calls. Thus mobile phones remained expensive toys for the rich, and the normal practice was to cancel an incoming call and use the nearest land line to return the call! In 2000, the govt. mandated that operators could not charge for incoming calls, and at the same time, SMSes were introduced free of charge. This is what led to the explosive growth in the mobile market, which continues to grow, and today you can pay as low as 0.3 rupees a minute for outgoing calls depending on the talk plan. (40 rupees to the dollar, so that's about 2 cents every 3 minutes!). Oh, and you're free to pick and choose your operator and your handset-no contracts to lock you down.
Anyone played KOTOR 1 and 2? (Knights of the Old Republic) ? In terms of storyline and characters-these games are easily far better than any of the movies. The Jedi are portrayed exactly as you describe-unwilling to act against the Mandalorian invasion, which is when 2 of the best Jedi rebel and lead an army against the Mandalorians (eventually falling to the dark side). Within the game-there are many moments where you question what it means to be a Jedi, or Sith, whether there really is any difference between them, and so on. It's a highly complex and original game, with very memorable characters (Darth Treya, for one, or HK-47-who was voted the most popular game sidekick character of all time).
I've always been a fan of the extended universe presented in Star Wars-the books, games and comics depicting events far before and beyond the timeline of the 6 movies. In my opinion, the several writers and authors of these works have breathed life into the subculture far better than anything Lucas may have conceived. Read the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, for instance.
A fresh set of movies based on KOTOR-with someone else doing the directing (Joss Whedon anyone?) rather than Lucas, would be great.
Wouldn't this be ideal?
Government regulation becomes necessary in the case of large service providers; in any event, whenever there's a danger of monopoly or oligopoly.
In India, mobile operators have been kept in line by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). For example, TRAI decreed that operators should charge for call time and not airtime, which implies not charging for incoming calls/messages. This move single handedly boosted the growth of mobile phone usage in India. Additionally, from time to time, TRAI has prosecuted operators for including hidden charges in their services and so on-so some amount of legislation is needed in such cases. Best example is the antitrust case against Microsoft.
First of all-I'd say this is great. I used to read about American consumers throwing away old appliances in landfills while growing up, and found it rather incredible. India has had a 'recycle' culture long before it became fashionable in the 90s. In earlier times (about 20 years ago; I was a kid then) nearly everything sold in shops would come in brown paper bags rather than plastic bags. We still continue to use glass bottles for soft drinks; though cans are available they've not caught on as much.
And speaking of repairing appliances-nearly every neighborhood would have standard repair shop for everything-electrical appliances,watches,auto parts and so on. Getting things fixed as described by others here, was quite a common phenomenon. Indians have had to be thrifty for years, under the closed economy that lasted till 1991 we had very little choice by way of variety and quality with products; so learnt to make do with what was there.
At home, for years we would store spices and condiments in old jam bottles. When I was a kid, you could get these rubber snap on bottlecaps to fix on glass bottles of fruit juice; so that they could be reused for drinking water. Bread would be sold wrapped in waxed paper, rather than sealed plastic that's prevalent today.
And speaking of computer hardware-there are still service shops where you can find antique Pentium II motherboards, old IBM EGA monitors and even 5 1/4" floppy drives being fixed! Similarly, there's a huge market for used mobile phones; you can get a very basic Nokia 3300 (discontinued now) for below $20.
Sadly today India's headed the same way. After sales service is a joke with most white goods manufacturers, and planned obsolescence is the way to go.
If the worlds' largest energy consumer decides to cut down on consumption in this manner, it can only benefit everybody and the environment.
India has been making its homegrown parallel supercomputers for quite a while now.
I've used Jaiku. It's like a combination of Twitter and an aggregated feed publisher. You can register all your 'places' on the net, and it publishes a consolidated RSS feed about your activities. For example, you can add your del.icio.us bookmarks, your Flickr photo stream, your last.fm 'recently played' music, or any other feed (say from your blog), and any updates to any of these are published as one combined feed. You can add other Jaiku users as friends and view similar updates from them.
They provide a mobile application (Nokia S60 3rd ed. is supported currently, don't know about others) that lets you publish messages like Twitter. This also integrates with the phonebook, so you can enter the Jaiku ID for your friends, and get an update of what they're doing. The mobile app only shows what updates your friends have made to Jaiku, i.e. it won't provide details of their other feeds.
It's an interesting app, somewhat like Facebook's 'news' page, lets you publish minute by minute details of whatever you're doing-if you're so inclined. And of course, your Jaiku page is accessible by anyone, so much for privacy.
Simple fact-Nokia phones are immensely popular everywhere in the world except the US. Users in other countries (I'm from India, which is one of the fastest growing mobile markets and heavily Nokia-dominated) have been accustomed to features for years, that american users are only now noticing.
First there's the 'don't buy if you don't like it' argument. Apple is free to set whatever terms they choose, and you're free to vote with your wallet either way.
Secondly, how's fiddling with the firmware to unlock it any different from overclocking your CPU, or adding an aftermarket modification to your car's engine to make it go faster? In both these cases you void your warranty and the manufacturer is not liable for any damages that may result.
Apple provides the iPhone integrated with AT&T as a bundled service, as an 'experience' if you will; they cannot guarantee things will work perfectly if you change the working specs in this manner.
It is lamentable that they don't provide an unlocked phone to begin with, but one can't complain much here.
These days more and more people are using their mobile phones to browse the net. Especially now with Safari on the iPhone, you can browse full fledged websites. Mobile users who aren't on an 'all you can eat' plan have to pay for every freaking byte that they download (Is it the same with the iPhone on AT&T?) ALL THE MORE REASON to block ads that one doesn't want to see!! A mobile browser is anyway slower and has a smaller display than a desktop browser; why should I waste my screen space AND pay for bandwidth for such ads?
Here's a few counter arguments:
- What if I live in a country where your advertised products/services are not available, or are too expensive because of the exchange rate?
- The way I understand online advertising, mere clicking on ads does not help; one has to buy the product for the website to get credit from its advertisers.
In short, what if online advertising is completely irrelevant to me?What if I don't ever buy any stuff online?(In my case, I don't own an international credit card)
What's the point of trying to convert me to not block ads? I'm never going to buy anything online anyway.
The whole issue seems to be about the phone 'appearing' to be switched off while not actually being so. I think the simplest solution would be (for the next version of the iPhone of course) to have some kind of standby LED on the side (if it may not be possible to put it on the top surface) that blinks periodically to show that the phone is still active.(I've already mentioned this in another post here) It's already established that in standby mode it will connect to the network to sync mail or whatever, so atleast people will know that that's what's happening.
My Nokia N73 has a tiny blue LED that blinks every 5 seconds in standby mode-which is simply a powersaver mode whose timeout can be controlled. It's to conserve battery power and no more. But if you press the off button, it switches off-there's no separate standby involved hence no confusion.
Why don't they just make a screensaver for the standby mode with an appropriate image? Maybe show a flock of dollar bills flapping their way out of a wallet or something.
I've seen similar behavior with Nokia phones. You can disable MMS when roaming, and they have a security model in place for 3rd party apps.
When you install a new application(be it java or a native SIS application), an alert appears telling you all the device capabilites that this application will use. For Java (J2ME) apps, you can even set permissions on features-eg accessing the mobile network, sending SMS/MMS,accessing bluetooth, GPRS, your addressbook etc, and whether to prompt you each time it's used or deny usage.
In fact, some 3rd party applications also take care to warn the user about data usage charges if running in the background. I had Yahoo! Go on my phone; it would periodically sync mail and contacts from Yahoo, but you had to enable the option to run in the background; upon which it would display a message warning you that you could incur heavy bandwidth usage charges by doing so.
Such features will definitely help the user, at least they would have been warned of the consequences.
IBM has quite a long tradition of accessibility support for its products, especially on the Java platform.
All the standard tools shipped with the IBM JDK (jconsole, policytool, ikeyman to name a few) support accessibility.