By GTA version, you mean a huge sandbox, time-relevant music, and such? Yeah. I'd enjoy that.
I'm for a '70s cop show/movie theme. Something that mixes bits of Bruce Lee fandom with blaxploitation, muscle cars, and the player as a cop whose course of actions can lead him towards being a Dirty Harry, a Serpico, or a [Harvey Keitel's character from Copland].
I do. I was a huge fan of GTA Vice City. I found myself enjoying just driving around, exploring the sandbox. I really enjoyed casually riding a motorcycle just before dawn down the beach front main drag that was modeled after South Beach while listening to '80s soft rock. I probably spent as much time doing that as I did solving missions. I wasn't expecting that kind of enjoyment back then. I don't know how common my reaction was among other gamers; but I am hoping to wowed at being able to do things in this game I couldn't do in others.
Just for the record, my ideal game would be a large sandboxed metro city and suburbia with intelligently simulated traffic, free-thinking pedestrians, weather changes, an abundance of drivable cars, and places for me to explore on foot or in a car while listening to a soundtrack I can construct using MP3s
Basically, I want to simulate sitting in cross-town traffic at night people-watching and bitching at the traffic light... sorta like what I do in real life. I'm a weird gamer:D
By this logic, people who actually play WoW - as opposed to merely paying for an account and never using it - are causing Blizzard damage. After all, they consume resoures in the servers and thus increase operational costs.
Obviously, no. Blizzard is saying that bot-operating players are hogging shared resources by consuming beyond what has been pre-allocated to players.
I suggest that the limit is whatever Blizzard sold. If they sold unlimited play-time per month, then anything less than or equal to that is fair game.
I was going to mention the "unlimited bandwidth/web space" example, but you beat me to it. I really think this Blizzard case it comparable, if not exactly the same.
Besides, Blizzard isn't "suffering damage", they're at worst losing revenue due to users canceling their subscriptions.
Without knowing the exact impact of these bots on WoW's operational costs, you can't definitively say Blizzard isn't suffering damage. Increased, unplanned resource consumption do equal increased operational costs. Proving that Blizzard is incurring increased costs as a result of many players running this bot will be easy if it's true that bot-running players consume more resources than they would ordinarily without using a bot. That's key. If the average bot-running player still consumes roughly the same amount of resources as the heavy players, it would be hard to argue that the increased costs are an actual damage. I suggest that heavy players are the threshold and not the casual gamer because Blizzard had already calculated the expected cost of serving heavy players well before the first subscriber went online. It is something that would have been factored into the determining the subscription fee. If WoW subscribers are staying on longer than the company had planned for, regardless of bot usage, then it's Blizzard's fault for not planning better.
This coupled with a flexible LCD screen, and I'll finally be able to have the line of t-shirts with animated graphics and slideshows I've been wanting.
Print and photo work. GIMP fans may scoff, but this is a major distinction. It has always been Photoshop's role in print and photography that has kept it an industry standard. For general image manipulation and web design, there are far better and cheaper alternatives such as Fireworks, PhotoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP. It really isn't appropriate to place GIMP and Photoshop in the same domain, and so these "vs" debates ought to stop. I once knew a guy who authored all his papers using PageMaker. It did the job, but it was no more a proper word processor for having done so. If GIMP compares to anything, it would be Paint Shop Pro.
I've been using Photoshop since late '92. I have had a hard time since adjusting to other interfaces such as that of Xara and Fireworks, and especially GIMP. If you've been using GIMP since '95, then you can understand my pain. I would hate to see GIMP become a Photoshop. I prefer smaller, specialized apps that don't feel tacked on the way Photoshop feels to me. Now that Aperture and Lightroom exists, most of my Photoshop need is gone. GIMP, for the moment, loses ground with professionals who already committed to Photoshop and the many commercial plugins that are available for it. After all, the money has been spent, and the devotion to building a competitive advantage in it has been made. However, GIMP gains for the fact that you can take it and build on it to create a GIMP for professional photographers and a GIMP for web designers without encumbering either with features they don't need.
I find nothing terrible about the GIMP interface per se. The few times I've worked with it, I found GIMP very jarring for me. I have been using Photoshop since early 1993. That's a very long time to be using a specific application, and it's hard to adjust to a new interface. I've also had difficulty adjusting to various alternatives coming from Macromedia and Corel over the years. I would say that someone who's only been a casual PS user for just a few years has a far better incentive to switch to GIMP than someone like myself. But just as a disclaimer, I haven't yet tried that version of GIMP that has the Photoshop style interface, and since the release of Aperture and Lightroom; about 80% of my work no longer requires Photoshop.
Sure, it's more challenging, but is it as satisfying? Hacking Windows is a like punching out a child on crutches. There's no challenge in it at all, but it's sooooo immensely satisfying. And if there's 300 million kids on crutches to punch out, well then, that's just tops.
I think the problem with Motorola is more with their upper management. Motorola has great engineers and great ideas, but the chiefs get rid of both through attrition. Nepotism is rampant throughout the company. The Galvin family bleeds the company dry and sucks every bit of air out of the room. It's heartbreaking sitting at a table with Moto engineers and a lot of liquor, listening to how bleak life is when you feel like you're playing Russian roulette every time you pull into employee parking. And that's not just from Libertyville. Even Motorola's suppliers hate the company. Once, a disgruntled supplier rented a van and wrote the words "Motorola is unfair" on its side. Moto circled an email telling employees to ignore the white van in the parking lot. I love Motorola people, but honestly, I hope that company dies a fiery death that scorches the board members. Tee hee!
I loved my Bit Surfer by the way. It was a white 28.8, and it was beautiful. When I was left with no upgrade path, I was angry.
There is a very large market segment that specifically wants desktop replacement laptops. I've owned a few, including a widescreen HP Z series. Christ, I really hated that experience.
I also hate the idea of a touch screen keyboard. I have hot dog fingers. I *will* smash my fingers through the keyboard eventually. Plus, I frequently rest my fingers on my keyboard. I don't want to accidentally press a key. One of the things I look for when demoing new keyboards is a good response. I like the click-clack of older keyboards to the mushiness of many of the new ones that have come since the first Microsoft Natural. The only evolution in keyboards I want to see is cool backlighting and LED key faces like on that one uber-expensive keyboard.
No, certainly not. I'm just trying to figure out where this copyright issue has comes in, and offered that maybe it's more about an improper use of the the Blizzard or WoW trademark. I don't play WoW, so I have no idea how this product is marketed.
I'm a godless heathen who thinks that you're mentally ill if you believe the Easter Bunny died for your sins then rose from the grave in order to fulfill Santa Claus' ultimate plan for mankind. But, I think church-goers regard their congregation (if that's the correct word) as a kind of extended family. Clinton made a comment that you cannot choose your family, but you can choose your church. I wonder if church-goers would disagree and retort that a statement like that only shows just how out-of-touch Clinton is with religious people. If I'm correct, Obama might respond that this particular church is part of his family. He can't just walk away from it like he would a cell phone service just because of comments the pastor has made. You're painting this church as being akin to the KKK. Is it a hategroup disguised as a church (ie World Church of the Creator)? How often does the pastor give orders for all blacks to rise and kill whitey? Or was this just an asinine comment made in the passion of the moment? Is there nothing redeemable about this church and its congregation. I would like to know what "their philosophies" are exactly. I'm not even aware of the denomination.:D
In addition to your excellent point on inertia, I think it the cost of sustaining an old technology that works will get cheaper over time, to the point that a business doesn't need to innovate if that particular technology still fulfills a demand. I've been thinking a lot about the Technics SL-1200 MKII turntable lately. It's a 30+ year old design, and a survivor of its era. There are far superior turntable technologies out there now, but they are very expensive. This is party because these new technologies are still being paid for today. The Technics hasn't changed much over the years. The reason it's so cheap to sustain is that its original design cost and its production capital costs were paid for long ago. For its fans, it's a good enough turntable that does the job.
I also think older technologies were often designed and implemented to last longer than technologies created today. Just looking at consumer electronics, I think the desire to achieve economies of scale in production often results in products which will fail eventually due to cheap components (e.g., early '90s metal VCRs vs '00s plastic VCRs). In one way, you could say that the desire for a technology to become a commodity makes us design for failure.
Also, sometimes you can't advance through your tech tree as fast as you like because you didn't discover the right technologies in order to move forward... or you didn't build "Leonardo's Workshop".
Don't really see how it infringes on the Warcraft copyright; but maybe it infringes on the trademark somehow if it's being marketed as something official to Blizzard and WoW, and giving customers the perception that this is an extension of the WoW service. As for damaging WoW by taking up more resources than the normal player would; what if I were an abnormal player who is on nearly 24/7; is there some provision in the agreement where I am charged more for the subscription or something?
Yep. But thankfully it is a great time to be in vinyl. You can get a great starter audiophile turntable setup for under $600, and you can find some great records on eBay. I just got in an old MTV "Dial MTV" and "Hard 30" favorite, a German metal band called Craaft.
Oh, and I finally got my Vixen records with free backstage passes to the summer tour... only took 20 years too!
You mean these great innovative companies which we once swore loyalty to when nobody knew who they were will someday become so big that we will despise them for their success, hate their occasional abuses of fame, label them sell-outs for being liked by our kid sisters, and then move on to favor a cooler unknown company that really does get it?
Nah, never happen.
I don't want to challenge ITworld.com's great knack for the obvious, but "In an industry where users are fickle and power translates to evilness"??? Fickle users don't hold on stubbornly to old software just because it does the job. And power doesn't translate to evilness, power abused does.
I think the Parent was referring to openness as in the ability to take any permutation of PC-compatible hardware, toss it together, and produce a computer that can run Windows. To that extent, I have to agree. Apple wants an elegant, refined computing experience, and you just can't get that if you have to guarantee hiccup-free compatibility with every device on the market.
I say Apple has earned the right to market its products as chic. The company managed to recapture the coolness and cultural relevance it lost after an era of uncertainty and misdirection. If the PC moves past the image as the machine of choice for dishonest businessmen and slackers who play pirated computer games and steal credit cards in between picking up 15 year olds on the Interwebs and helping the terrorists win; all we Mac fans will happily stand aside and let PC have his moment in the sun.
Seriously though, I love the recent Apple commercials. Being a veteran of many Mac vs PC arguments over the years, I find them fun. As fantastic as they really are, they're still more realistic than all those Microsoft commercials that suggest you're ever going to use Office for anything more important than authoring unpublished myspace poetry.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
By GTA version, you mean a huge sandbox, time-relevant music, and such? Yeah. I'd enjoy that.
I'm for a '70s cop show/movie theme. Something that mixes bits of Bruce Lee fandom with blaxploitation, muscle cars, and the player as a cop whose course of actions can lead him towards being a Dirty Harry, a Serpico, or a [Harvey Keitel's character from Copland].
I do. I was a huge fan of GTA Vice City. I found myself enjoying just driving around, exploring the sandbox. I really enjoyed casually riding a motorcycle just before dawn down the beach front main drag that was modeled after South Beach while listening to '80s soft rock. I probably spent as much time doing that as I did solving missions. I wasn't expecting that kind of enjoyment back then. I don't know how common my reaction was among other gamers; but I am hoping to wowed at being able to do things in this game I couldn't do in others.
:D
Just for the record, my ideal game would be a large sandboxed metro city and suburbia with intelligently simulated traffic, free-thinking pedestrians, weather changes, an abundance of drivable cars, and places for me to explore on foot or in a car while listening to a soundtrack I can construct using MP3s
Basically, I want to simulate sitting in cross-town traffic at night people-watching and bitching at the traffic light... sorta like what I do in real life. I'm a weird gamer
By this logic, people who actually play WoW - as opposed to merely paying for an account and never using it - are causing Blizzard damage. After all, they consume resoures in the servers and thus increase operational costs.
Obviously, no. Blizzard is saying that bot-operating players are hogging shared resources by consuming beyond what has been pre-allocated to players.
I suggest that the limit is whatever Blizzard sold. If they sold unlimited play-time per month, then anything less than or equal to that is fair game.
I was going to mention the "unlimited bandwidth/web space" example, but you beat me to it. I really think this Blizzard case it comparable, if not exactly the same.
Well, clearly in a case like that, you would wear a t-shirt that flashes "I am not a terrorist" in big letters.
Besides, Blizzard isn't "suffering damage", they're at worst losing revenue due to users canceling their subscriptions.
Without knowing the exact impact of these bots on WoW's operational costs, you can't definitively say Blizzard isn't suffering damage. Increased, unplanned resource consumption do equal increased operational costs. Proving that Blizzard is incurring increased costs as a result of many players running this bot will be easy if it's true that bot-running players consume more resources than they would ordinarily without using a bot. That's key. If the average bot-running player still consumes roughly the same amount of resources as the heavy players, it would be hard to argue that the increased costs are an actual damage. I suggest that heavy players are the threshold and not the casual gamer because Blizzard had already calculated the expected cost of serving heavy players well before the first subscriber went online. It is something that would have been factored into the determining the subscription fee. If WoW subscribers are staying on longer than the company had planned for, regardless of bot usage, then it's Blizzard's fault for not planning better.
This coupled with a flexible LCD screen, and I'll finally be able to have the line of t-shirts with animated graphics and slideshows I've been wanting.
Print and photo work. GIMP fans may scoff, but this is a major distinction. It has always been Photoshop's role in print and photography that has kept it an industry standard. For general image manipulation and web design, there are far better and cheaper alternatives such as Fireworks, PhotoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP. It really isn't appropriate to place GIMP and Photoshop in the same domain, and so these "vs" debates ought to stop. I once knew a guy who authored all his papers using PageMaker. It did the job, but it was no more a proper word processor for having done so. If GIMP compares to anything, it would be Paint Shop Pro.
I've been using Photoshop since late '92. I have had a hard time since adjusting to other interfaces such as that of Xara and Fireworks, and especially GIMP. If you've been using GIMP since '95, then you can understand my pain. I would hate to see GIMP become a Photoshop. I prefer smaller, specialized apps that don't feel tacked on the way Photoshop feels to me. Now that Aperture and Lightroom exists, most of my Photoshop need is gone. GIMP, for the moment, loses ground with professionals who already committed to Photoshop and the many commercial plugins that are available for it. After all, the money has been spent, and the devotion to building a competitive advantage in it has been made. However, GIMP gains for the fact that you can take it and build on it to create a GIMP for professional photographers and a GIMP for web designers without encumbering either with features they don't need.
I find nothing terrible about the GIMP interface per se. The few times I've worked with it, I found GIMP very jarring for me. I have been using Photoshop since early 1993. That's a very long time to be using a specific application, and it's hard to adjust to a new interface. I've also had difficulty adjusting to various alternatives coming from Macromedia and Corel over the years. I would say that someone who's only been a casual PS user for just a few years has a far better incentive to switch to GIMP than someone like myself. But just as a disclaimer, I haven't yet tried that version of GIMP that has the Photoshop style interface, and since the release of Aperture and Lightroom; about 80% of my work no longer requires Photoshop.
Is there an OSS equivalent to Aperture, anyone?
As long as SkyNet doesn't become self-aware, I think we'll be okay.
Sure, it's more challenging, but is it as satisfying? Hacking Windows is a like punching out a child on crutches. There's no challenge in it at all, but it's sooooo immensely satisfying. And if there's 300 million kids on crutches to punch out, well then, that's just tops.
Sure, it will take me more than 25 moves to switch out all the stickers, but where's the dishonest satisfaction that comes with your method?
I think the problem with Motorola is more with their upper management. Motorola has great engineers and great ideas, but the chiefs get rid of both through attrition. Nepotism is rampant throughout the company. The Galvin family bleeds the company dry and sucks every bit of air out of the room. It's heartbreaking sitting at a table with Moto engineers and a lot of liquor, listening to how bleak life is when you feel like you're playing Russian roulette every time you pull into employee parking. And that's not just from Libertyville. Even Motorola's suppliers hate the company. Once, a disgruntled supplier rented a van and wrote the words "Motorola is unfair" on its side. Moto circled an email telling employees to ignore the white van in the parking lot. I love Motorola people, but honestly, I hope that company dies a fiery death that scorches the board members. Tee hee!
I loved my Bit Surfer by the way. It was a white 28.8, and it was beautiful. When I was left with no upgrade path, I was angry.
... and why not?
There is a very large market segment that specifically wants desktop replacement laptops. I've owned a few, including a widescreen HP Z series. Christ, I really hated that experience.
I also hate the idea of a touch screen keyboard. I have hot dog fingers. I *will* smash my fingers through the keyboard eventually. Plus, I frequently rest my fingers on my keyboard. I don't want to accidentally press a key. One of the things I look for when demoing new keyboards is a good response. I like the click-clack of older keyboards to the mushiness of many of the new ones that have come since the first Microsoft Natural. The only evolution in keyboards I want to see is cool backlighting and LED key faces like on that one uber-expensive keyboard.
Good call. It's about time someone made a Queensrÿche reference on Slashdot, and a post Operation: Mindcrime one to boot.
Nothing is ever cool. Someone just convinces you it is.
No, certainly not. I'm just trying to figure out where this copyright issue has comes in, and offered that maybe it's more about an improper use of the the Blizzard or WoW trademark. I don't play WoW, so I have no idea how this product is marketed.
I'm a godless heathen who thinks that you're mentally ill if you believe the Easter Bunny died for your sins then rose from the grave in order to fulfill Santa Claus' ultimate plan for mankind. But, I think church-goers regard their congregation (if that's the correct word) as a kind of extended family. Clinton made a comment that you cannot choose your family, but you can choose your church. I wonder if church-goers would disagree and retort that a statement like that only shows just how out-of-touch Clinton is with religious people. If I'm correct, Obama might respond that this particular church is part of his family. He can't just walk away from it like he would a cell phone service just because of comments the pastor has made. You're painting this church as being akin to the KKK. Is it a hategroup disguised as a church (ie World Church of the Creator)? How often does the pastor give orders for all blacks to rise and kill whitey? Or was this just an asinine comment made in the passion of the moment? Is there nothing redeemable about this church and its congregation. I would like to know what "their philosophies" are exactly. I'm not even aware of the denomination. :D
In addition to your excellent point on inertia, I think it the cost of sustaining an old technology that works will get cheaper over time, to the point that a business doesn't need to innovate if that particular technology still fulfills a demand. I've been thinking a lot about the Technics SL-1200 MKII turntable lately. It's a 30+ year old design, and a survivor of its era. There are far superior turntable technologies out there now, but they are very expensive. This is party because these new technologies are still being paid for today. The Technics hasn't changed much over the years. The reason it's so cheap to sustain is that its original design cost and its production capital costs were paid for long ago. For its fans, it's a good enough turntable that does the job.
I also think older technologies were often designed and implemented to last longer than technologies created today. Just looking at consumer electronics, I think the desire to achieve economies of scale in production often results in products which will fail eventually due to cheap components (e.g., early '90s metal VCRs vs '00s plastic VCRs). In one way, you could say that the desire for a technology to become a commodity makes us design for failure.
Also, sometimes you can't advance through your tech tree as fast as you like because you didn't discover the right technologies in order to move forward... or you didn't build "Leonardo's Workshop".
Don't really see how it infringes on the Warcraft copyright; but maybe it infringes on the trademark somehow if it's being marketed as something official to Blizzard and WoW, and giving customers the perception that this is an extension of the WoW service. As for damaging WoW by taking up more resources than the normal player would; what if I were an abnormal player who is on nearly 24/7; is there some provision in the agreement where I am charged more for the subscription or something?
Yep. But thankfully it is a great time to be in vinyl. You can get a great starter audiophile turntable setup for under $600, and you can find some great records on eBay. I just got in an old MTV "Dial MTV" and "Hard 30" favorite, a German metal band called Craaft.
Oh, and I finally got my Vixen records with free backstage passes to the summer tour... only took 20 years too!
You mean these great innovative companies which we once swore loyalty to when nobody knew who they were will someday become so big that we will despise them for their success, hate their occasional abuses of fame, label them sell-outs for being liked by our kid sisters, and then move on to favor a cooler unknown company that really does get it?
Nah, never happen.
I don't want to challenge ITworld.com's great knack for the obvious, but "In an industry where users are fickle and power translates to evilness"??? Fickle users don't hold on stubbornly to old software just because it does the job. And power doesn't translate to evilness, power abused does.
I think the Parent was referring to openness as in the ability to take any permutation of PC-compatible hardware, toss it together, and produce a computer that can run Windows. To that extent, I have to agree. Apple wants an elegant, refined computing experience, and you just can't get that if you have to guarantee hiccup-free compatibility with every device on the market.
I say Apple has earned the right to market its products as chic. The company managed to recapture the coolness and cultural relevance it lost after an era of uncertainty and misdirection. If the PC moves past the image as the machine of choice for dishonest businessmen and slackers who play pirated computer games and steal credit cards in between picking up 15 year olds on the Interwebs and helping the terrorists win; all we Mac fans will happily stand aside and let PC have his moment in the sun.
:-P
Seriously though, I love the recent Apple commercials. Being a veteran of many Mac vs PC arguments over the years, I find them fun. As fantastic as they really are, they're still more realistic than all those Microsoft commercials that suggest you're ever going to use Office for anything more important than authoring unpublished myspace poetry.