Second Life may well be possibly the only game he could do this in.
Most likely because noone cares about it, and the market for its in-game currency and commodities is tiny.
Any game which has a larger audience (WoW, SWG, Lineage 2, Guildwars, EQ2) would have seen its slew of dedicated "farmers" from Korea, China, India and various parts of SE Asia.
Either with sweat shop labor or automated with bots, they farm in-game currency and items and sell them at a far lower price than anyone in more developed countries could, whilst still maintaining it as a worthwhile time investment.
Some may argue that "You're getting money for playing a game!" but in reality, its no more fun than flipping burgers, or clocking your mundane 9 to 5, its work.
Farming in these games is all boring tedious work, and at the rates being offered by botters and farmers in less developed countries, its not worth doing.
As an aside they have totally destroyed the in-game economies of most of these games, which is generally why the sale of in-game currency is in violation of the Terms of Service.
DVD drives are ubiquitous now, DVDROM if not a burner. And they are inexpensive, if you're buying a $50.00 game, you can afford a DVDROM drive and a burger at the same price.
WoW was "only" 4CDs..HL2 sticks you with 5 disks. And even stupider was having to buy the "Collectors Edition" to get it on DVD.
From TFA: "The current offer from the publishers is a 34% pay increase over three years (to $375 an hour)
So in other words, they're presently making around $200 - $250.00 per hour for the shit they're dishing out?
I think they should all just sit down, shut up and continue with their cushy ass jobs, before someone gets sick of their whining and decides to outsource.
1) Devs and programmers shell out the hard cash. 2) Software IP infringement a.k.a. "Piracy." Yaargh 3) Move to open source platforms/packages. 4) Profit, at least MS does in 2 out of 3 of the
scenarios.
Oh great grandmaster, and font of infinite knowledge.
That was the exact site that was listed on del.icio.us. Yeah I'm sure an accomplished and oh, so busy, grandmaster like yourself would have no time to puruse a site as pedestrian as this.
I on the other hand am not a full time professional chess geek, and would not have otherwise stumbled upon "Ward Farnsworth's Predator at the Chessboard."
So I suppose next you're going to tell me slashdot isn't a huge timewaster and not to stay away from it.
Well yeah, AMD's new "Cool and Quiet" feature, much like Intel's speedstep will lower your CPU frequency and voltage, thus lowering temperatures, and allow lowering the speed of the CPU heatsink fan.
But the benefits of this technology are not to extend processor life, or primarily to decrease power consumption.
Its to make your PC run quieter, most overclockers running air cooled CPU heatsinks don't really care about the noise though, and the ones that do, splurge on watercooling systems.
I've heard (and owned) many a system which sounded like aircraft taking off when they were running (which was all the time.) Small price to pay for "free speed":D
One of the first things you're supposed to do when attempting an overclock on an Athlon 64 CPU is to disable "Cool and Quiet" which by default (at least for my Asus A8V Deluxe Rev.2) off.
" can i overclock my amd k6-2/350 w/ 192mb of ram and a 4.3gb hdd?
seriously, this is my desktop running win2k pro sp4. its ran win2k3 server edition sp1. my linux box is a p2/400 w/ 128mb of ram. can someone overclock that too?"
I don't see why either system wouldn't be overclockable if your motherboard's BIOS has the requisite settings and your ram is of decent quality.
But a better solution would be to go plonk down $600 - $700 on a new PC, which will run at more than 10 times the speed, of your present setup.
Then overclock that to make it run 12 - 15 times faster than your current box.
" And here I got one of those new Athlon64s because I wanted to be able to underclock it.
It reduces stability, it decreases component life, and it increases power usage and heat. If you want to do it, I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to complain if Intel and AMD come up with a way to effectively prevent it, and I'm still going to think it's stupid."
Running a CPU at lower than its rated speed is just plain silly. You gain no stability over running the processor at its rated speed. Say you want to save that super important 0.025v, then your processor may run less stable.
You don't decrease the life of your processor by overclocking it, you possibly decrease its life shortly when you overclock it to an extent which requires you to raise the CPU core voltage beyond its rated 1.400v.
That said, I still have a Celeron 300A which has been running at 450Mhz, its been running rock solid for almost 6 years now.
If your processor takes a dump on you after 4 - 8 years, you should just call it a great run, and upgrade your PC. Or if you're really cheap, I guess shop around and you'll find your present CPU for sale new or used at less than 20% of the price you paid for it.
Intel and AMD don't care if people overclock their CPUs. Multiplier locks were instituted because criminal syndicates were remarking CPUs and selling them at higher speeds than they were rated for, at a higher price.
So you see, there is no point to what you're doing, and I think its stupid:P
Seems like Blizzard has become content to rest on their laurels.
It was fun while it lasted, but I just cancelled my subscription. Aside from sheer boredom and lack of high end content, the in game economy has been almost entirely ruined.
There are severe imbalances in the population between horde and alliance on almost every server. http://www.wowcensus.com/ This renders PvP pretty much pointless for either side. No challenge as Alliance, and No point as Horde.
I guess I just picked the wrong side to be on, but I'm bored of this game, and bored of seeing alliance zerglings.
The PvP is shallow at best, and totally imbalanced at worst. Paladin and Rogue anyone? Granted Paladins got nerfed recently, so did pretty much every other class aside from rogue.
At least I wasn't a warlock, I feel for those poor bastards.
According to Enterbrain Inc., publisher of Famitsu and other game magazines in Japan, sales of the Sony PSP have begun to outpace those of the Nintendo DS.
According to independent research conducted by Enterbrain, Sony's PSP bested Nintendo in handheld console sales in both February and March of this year.
The most popular handheld in Japan is still the Nintendo DS. However, the DS sold an impressive 1.09 million units during December, a total that Sony has only just now reached after four months of sales.
The PSP, suffering from production delays, sold only 330,000 units in December. The DS continued to beat the PSP in January, selling 450,000 units to the PSP's 360,000 units.
But the tables turned in February, when 195,000 PSP units were sold, edging out 121,000 DS units. PSP sales increased by a small margin in March, reaching 202,000 units, and DS sales also increased, reaching 136,000 units.
While these new numbers are encouraging for Sony, the PSP still lags behind the DS in overall penetration: Japanese consumers currently own 1.09 million PSPs and 1.8 million DSes.
Actually the link is now long dead, but someone did this in 2001, and did it in an even more haphazard and impressive manner!
Same deal, but in a Strofoam box, with Mineral Oil and an Eheim pump moving the oil from the reservoir where the mobo and proc were situated and over the bare compressor coils of a stripped 1000btu Air conditioning unit resting on top of the whole setup.
Whilst their hardware and OS integration is admirable.
I concede that the iPod has a well designed interface and overall decent look and manufacturing quality, but I would never pay the Apple premium, maybe I'm just not as trendy as you lot.
Apple PC designs, however, are really nothing revolutionary.
Would you like white or candy-colored? Here have some smoothed rounded edges on that! Viola! revolutionary design!
Maybe I just don't appreciate their sense of aesthetics. I thought the iMacs were downright fugly, and the G5s whilst not looking utterly horrid, I just personally don't find anything especially attractive them.
Wake me up when their PCs don't like like Mattel or Tonka designed them.
This isn't meant to be a troll, but watch me get modded flamebait by the Apple nazis.
The way I see it, they are removing all her craptactular articles from circulation because of her lack of journalistic integrity.
With this latest article (which I can't in hell understand why SysCon even published) MOG has basically revealed for all the world to see, what an evil, stupid, bitch she is.
So what you're insinuating is only the incredibly wealthy are truly worthy of being "real gamers"?
I'm not sure what kind of rig you're running, but to approach the level of running all games in 1600x1200 at maximum detail and in excess of 85fps requires hardware that isn't even available on the market, let alone at a reasonable price.
I seriously doubt even an Nforce 4 chipset - Nvidia 6800GT SLI rig could come close.
Are you suggesting you spend $5 - $10k upgrading your PC a year? And this qualifies you as a "real gamer"?
I'm sure if Nintendo had the clout in the music and movies industry, they would love to provide music and movies on their cartridge format for the GBA and DS.
I guess they could theoretically sell music and maybe even movies on GBA and DS cartridges, but they don't have the prerequisite media connections and the cost of production would be way too high.
I really don't have a problem with Sony Memory sticks. I don't use them personally because they're expensive, and I don't know all that many people who do.
But the ones who buy Sony products that require the use of said memory sticks (mainly digital cameras) are aware of this before their purchase and don't mind buying them anyway.
There are a handful of 3rd party manufacturers now making memory sticks btw, Lexar is one of them, I forget the other 2 or 3 offhand.
" Is it just me, or does Sony really seem to enjoy spewing forth countless crappy proprietary formats? Sony: We don't need or want Memory Sticks, MiniDiscs, UMDs, or any of your other nonsense."
Oh yeah, as opposed to the formats of all the other gaming consoles on the market. I think you seem to be forgetting that the Sony Playstation 2 is the only current generation console that is using a non-proprietary format (DVD5/DVD9).
Lets see whats not proprietary:
Sega Genesis : nope Sega Saturn : YUP! Sega Dreamcast : nope Neo-Geo : nope Neo-Geo CD: YUP! Super Nintendo : nope Nintendo64 : nope Gameboy Advance SP : nope Nintendo DS : nope Gamecube : nope Xbox : nope PSP : nope PSX : YUP! PS2 : YUP!
This isn't to say that their proprietary formats don't suck, but it seems pretty much in line with everything else in the console gaming industry.
I fail to see what about the previous AC's posts is antisememitic.
Its not all the Israelis are Jews, although I'm sure they would greatly prefer if that were the case.
They are among the worst violators of human rights in our day and age. And by they I don't mean the Palestinians and their fairly routine suicide bombings. Whilst I do not condone terrorism in any way, shape or form, I can understand why such barbarism continues in the Middle-East today.
The Israelis have been conducting American sanctioned terrorist acts since their very inception.
Slashdot Mirror
Second Life may well be possibly the only game he could do this in.
Most likely because noone cares about it, and the market for its in-game currency and commodities is tiny.
Any game which has a larger audience (WoW, SWG, Lineage 2, Guildwars, EQ2) would have seen its slew of dedicated "farmers" from Korea, China, India and various parts of SE Asia.
Either with sweat shop labor or automated with bots, they farm in-game currency and items and sell them at a far lower price than anyone in more developed countries could, whilst still maintaining it as a worthwhile time investment.
Some may argue that "You're getting money for playing a game!" but in reality, its no more fun than flipping burgers, or clocking your mundane 9 to 5, its work.
Farming in these games is all boring tedious work, and at the rates being offered by botters and farmers in less developed countries, its not worth doing.
As an aside they have totally destroyed the in-game economies of most of these games, which is generally why the sale of in-game currency is in violation of the Terms of Service.
I agree completely.
DVD drives are ubiquitous now, DVDROM if not a burner. And they are inexpensive, if you're buying a $50.00 game, you can afford a DVDROM drive and a burger at the same price.
WoW was "only" 4CDs..HL2 sticks you with 5 disks.
And even stupider was having to buy the "Collectors Edition" to get it on DVD.
bleh
Wow seems like all the Matrix fans have gotten the modpoints today.
Parent has my sympathy, and I totally agree with his opinion of the Matrix/Matrices.
"I just picked a low cost 3.4 GHZ Prescott."
Gaaah! you consider a 3.4Ghz Prescott low cost?!
thats a $269.00 processor..you could have gotten a 3.2 Prescott for $187.00
Or better yet an Athlon64 3200+ for $146.00 - $169.00
(Pricewatch.com)
$269 Pentium 4 3.4GHz Prescott
$249 Pentium 4 3.4GHz 800MHz
$187 Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott
$187 Pentium 4 3.2GHz 800MHz
$250 Athlon 64 3500 90nm 939pin
$272 Athlon 64 3500 512K 90nm Rev E
$172 Athlon 64 3400
$146 Athlon 64 3200
$169 Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$169 Athlon 64 3200 90nm 939pin
$199 Athlon 64 3200 512K 90nm Rev E
From TFA: "The current offer from the publishers is a 34% pay increase over three years (to $375 an hour)
So in other words, they're presently making around $200 - $250.00 per hour for the shit they're dishing out?
I think they should all just sit down, shut up and continue with their cushy ass jobs, before someone gets sick of their whining and decides to outsource.
Yes I'm jealous, aren't you?
"Xenon is a gas that when excited, produces brilliant light...not a bad association.
Gaseous like vapor?
A brilliant light when the CPU is excited, followed by a loud poof and smoke?
Xeon is pretty stupid, but Xenon really isn't that imaginative.
Neither is Pentium, though PowerPC is an even stupider name. I guess Athlon isn't that great of a name either and Sempron is downright stupid.
The point really is, marketing names are all stupid, and to decide whos got the less stupid product names is just totally pointless.
Well there's 1 of 3 things that would happen.
1) Devs and programmers shell out the hard cash.
2) Software IP infringement a.k.a. "Piracy." Yaargh
3) Move to open source platforms/packages.
4) Profit, at least MS does in 2 out of 3 of the
scenarios.
Oh great grandmaster, and font of infinite knowledge.
That was the exact site that was listed on del.icio.us. Yeah I'm sure an accomplished and oh, so busy, grandmaster like yourself would have no time to puruse a site as pedestrian as this.
I on the other hand am not a full time professional chess geek, and would not have otherwise stumbled upon "Ward Farnsworth's Predator at the Chessboard."
So I suppose next you're going to tell me slashdot isn't a huge timewaster and not to stay away from it.
I highly recommend anyone who hasn't yet visited this site to check it out.
A good place to look is the page of "popular" sites. Some strange and interesting stuff turns up there fairly routinely.
Stuff like how to cut (i.e. vegetables, meats etc) and Chess strategies among other sometimes bizarre sites.
http://del.icio.us/popular/
Well yeah, AMD's new "Cool and Quiet" feature, much like Intel's speedstep will lower your CPU frequency and voltage, thus lowering temperatures, and allow lowering the speed of the CPU heatsink fan.
:D
But the benefits of this technology are not to extend processor life, or primarily to decrease power consumption.
Its to make your PC run quieter, most overclockers running air cooled CPU heatsinks don't really care about the noise though, and the ones that do, splurge on watercooling systems.
I've heard (and owned) many a system which sounded like aircraft taking off when they were running (which was all the time.) Small price to pay for "free speed"
One of the first things you're supposed to do when attempting an overclock on an Athlon 64 CPU is to disable "Cool and Quiet" which by default (at least for my Asus A8V Deluxe Rev.2) off.
" can i overclock my amd k6-2/350 w/ 192mb of ram and a 4.3gb hdd?
seriously, this is my desktop running win2k pro sp4. its ran win2k3 server edition sp1. my linux box is a p2/400 w/ 128mb of ram. can someone overclock that too?"
I don't see why either system wouldn't be overclockable if your motherboard's BIOS has the requisite settings and your ram is of decent quality.
But a better solution would be to go plonk down $600 - $700 on a new PC, which will run at more than 10 times the speed, of your present setup.
Then overclock that to make it run 12 - 15 times faster than your current box.
" And here I got one of those new Athlon64s because I wanted to be able to underclock it.
:P
It reduces stability, it decreases component life, and it increases power usage and heat. If you want to do it, I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to complain if Intel and AMD come up with a way to effectively prevent it, and I'm still going to think it's stupid."
Running a CPU at lower than its rated speed is just plain silly.
You gain no stability over running the processor at its rated speed.
Say you want to save that super important 0.025v, then your processor may run less stable.
You don't decrease the life of your processor by overclocking it, you possibly decrease its life shortly when you overclock it to an extent which requires you to raise the CPU core voltage beyond its rated 1.400v.
That said, I still have a Celeron 300A which has been running at 450Mhz, its been running rock solid for almost 6 years now.
If your processor takes a dump on you after 4 - 8 years, you should just call it a great run, and upgrade your PC. Or if you're really cheap, I guess shop around and you'll find your present CPU for sale new or used at less than 20% of the price you paid for it.
Intel and AMD don't care if people overclock their CPUs. Multiplier locks were instituted because criminal syndicates were remarking CPUs and selling them at higher speeds than they were rated for, at a higher price.
So you see, there is no point to what you're doing, and I think its stupid
The kind of "idiot" as you so delicately put it, that refuses to pay $249.00 - $359.00 for a $169.00 Processor.
$482 Athlon 64 4000+ 90nm Rev
$478 Athlon 64 4000
$359 Athlon 64 3800
$369 Athlon 64 3800 512K 90nm Rev E
$334 Athlon 64 3700+ 90nm Rev
$282 Athlon 64 3700
$249 Athlon 64 3500
$249 Athlon 64 3500 939pin
$250 Athlon 64 3500 90nm 939pin
$272 Athlon 64 3500 512K 90nm Rev E
$174 Athlon 64 3400
$152 Athlon 64 3200
$169 Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$169 Athlon 64 3200 90nm 939pin
(Prices from pricewatch.com)
World of Warcraft is getting tired..
Seems like Blizzard has become content to rest on their laurels.
It was fun while it lasted, but I just cancelled my subscription. Aside from sheer boredom and lack of high end content, the in game economy has been almost entirely ruined.
There are severe imbalances in the population between horde and alliance on almost every server.
http://www.wowcensus.com/
This renders PvP pretty much pointless for either side. No challenge as Alliance, and No point as Horde.
I guess I just picked the wrong side to be on, but I'm bored of this game, and bored of seeing alliance zerglings.
The PvP is shallow at best, and totally imbalanced at worst. Paladin and Rogue anyone? Granted Paladins got nerfed recently, so did pretty much every other class aside from rogue.
At least I wasn't a warlock, I feel for those poor bastards.
Llane Horde (Ret) - 60 Shaman, 40 Hunter.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/04/12/news_61221 17.html
From TFA:
According to Enterbrain Inc., publisher of Famitsu and other game magazines in Japan, sales of the Sony PSP have begun to outpace those of the Nintendo DS.
According to independent research conducted by Enterbrain, Sony's PSP bested Nintendo in handheld console sales in both February and March of this year.
The most popular handheld in Japan is still the Nintendo DS. However, the DS sold an impressive 1.09 million units during December, a total that Sony has only just now reached after four months of sales.
The PSP, suffering from production delays, sold only 330,000 units in December. The DS continued to beat the PSP in January, selling 450,000 units to the PSP's 360,000 units.
But the tables turned in February, when 195,000 PSP units were sold, edging out 121,000 DS units. PSP sales increased by a small margin in March, reaching 202,000 units, and DS sales also increased, reaching 136,000 units.
While these new numbers are encouraging for Sony, the PSP still lags behind the DS in overall penetration: Japanese consumers currently own 1.09 million PSPs and 1.8 million DSes.
Well..the PS3 would have a huge selection of existing PS2 games that it can already run, unlike the Xblob 360.
Actually the link is now long dead, but someone did this in 2001, and did it in an even more haphazard and impressive manner!
Same deal, but in a Strofoam box, with Mineral Oil and an Eheim pump moving the oil from the reservoir where the mobo and proc were situated and over the bare compressor coils of a stripped 1000btu Air conditioning unit resting on top of the whole setup.
Whilst their hardware and OS integration is admirable.
I concede that the iPod has a well designed interface and overall decent look and manufacturing quality, but I would never pay the Apple premium, maybe I'm just not as trendy as you lot.
Apple PC designs, however, are really nothing revolutionary.
Would you like white or candy-colored?
Here have some smoothed rounded edges on that!
Viola! revolutionary design!
Maybe I just don't appreciate their sense of aesthetics. I thought the iMacs were downright fugly, and the G5s whilst not looking utterly horrid, I just personally don't find anything especially attractive them.
Wake me up when their PCs don't like like Mattel
or Tonka designed them.
This isn't meant to be a troll, but watch me get modded flamebait by the Apple nazis.
Darwinia is a pretty cute little Action/RTS.
Definately worth a look. These are the same guys who brought us Uplink!
I don't consider this censorship.
The way I see it, they are removing all her craptactular articles from circulation because of her lack of journalistic integrity.
With this latest article (which I can't in hell understand why SysCon even published) MOG has basically revealed for all the world to see, what an evil, stupid, bitch she is.
So what you're insinuating is only the incredibly wealthy are truly worthy of being "real gamers"?
I'm not sure what kind of rig you're running, but to approach the level of running all games in 1600x1200 at maximum detail and in excess of 85fps requires hardware that isn't even available on the market, let alone at a reasonable price.
I seriously doubt even an Nforce 4 chipset - Nvidia 6800GT SLI rig could come close.
Are you suggesting you spend $5 - $10k upgrading your PC a year? And this qualifies you as a "real gamer"?
I'm sure if Nintendo had the clout in the music and movies industry, they would love to provide music and movies on their cartridge format for the GBA and DS.
I guess they could theoretically sell music and maybe even movies on GBA and DS cartridges, but they don't have the prerequisite media connections and the cost of production would be way too high.
I really don't have a problem with Sony Memory sticks. I don't use them personally because they're expensive, and I don't know all that many people who do.
But the ones who buy Sony products that require the use of said memory sticks (mainly digital cameras) are aware of this before their purchase and don't mind buying them anyway.
There are a handful of 3rd party manufacturers now making memory sticks btw, Lexar is one of them, I forget the other 2 or 3 offhand.
" Is it just me, or does Sony really seem to enjoy spewing forth countless crappy proprietary formats?
Sony: We don't need or want Memory Sticks, MiniDiscs, UMDs, or any of your other nonsense."
Oh yeah, as opposed to the formats of all the other gaming consoles on the market. I think you seem to be forgetting that the Sony Playstation 2 is the only current generation console that is using a non-proprietary format (DVD5/DVD9).
Lets see whats not proprietary:
Sega Genesis : nope
Sega Saturn : YUP!
Sega Dreamcast : nope
Neo-Geo : nope
Neo-Geo CD: YUP!
Super Nintendo : nope
Nintendo64 : nope
Gameboy Advance SP : nope
Nintendo DS : nope
Gamecube : nope
Xbox : nope
PSP : nope
PSX : YUP!
PS2 : YUP!
This isn't to say that their proprietary formats don't suck, but it seems pretty much in line with everything else in the console gaming industry.
I fail to see what about the previous AC's posts is antisememitic.
h tm
Its not all the Israelis are Jews, although I'm sure they would greatly prefer if that were the case.
They are among the worst violators of human rights in our day and age. And by they I don't mean the Palestinians and their fairly routine suicide bombings. Whilst I do not condone terrorism in any way, shape or form, I can understand why such barbarism continues in the Middle-East today.
The Israelis have been conducting American sanctioned terrorist acts since their very inception.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2002/509/509p18.
I'm wondering if I'm the only one who is annoyed by IM Services.
I used to use ICQ way back in the day, but found it to be more of an annoyance than anything useful.
My rationale is, if its not important, send me an email. If it _is_ important, give me a call.
Otherwise, bugger off! I'm not interested..