Yeah? If that's true, you sure are lucky. FIOS has been "6 months away" for a few years now where I live.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
on
Quests
·
· Score: 1
Those guilds could sponsor, hire, or intimidate other, smaller guilds into fighting proxy wars and doing various other things for them. High level players would replace NPCs as questgivers, offering rewards to lower level players for retrieving various items that those players can't use, but will be useful to higher levels.
I thought about this sort of thing years ago when Rockstar was talking about making a MMO GTA-- the idea being that a player could work his way up to being a mob boss, hire bodyguards, and decide on his own missions. Then you basically make an economy with limited resources, so that the different mob families are pretty much forced to fight it out. Even if you only limit the amount of land available, you can at least have turf wars.
And then you could add in the ability to be a spy, to betray your faction, to murder your boss and try to take his place, but then have to worry about whether you'll be accepted as the new boss, or if someone else will kill you.
It all seems like a great sort of idea, but it also sounds like something that would be very hard to execute and balance out. You'd have to invent mechanics for security and organization that I think are beyond current RPGs or RTS games that I've played. And then when it's all done, you still have to worry about whether or not it's going to be fun.
Sometimes people really like organizations and being a part of things, but then again, they don't like having bosses and being told what to do. You hear the common complaint about MMO grinding, "Why do I want a second job?" The question could become, "Why do I want a second societal hierarchy that I have to fit into?" or "Why do I want a second asshole boss?"
Re:Not interested in pretty spyware.
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps a better metaphor would be, "I don't care if it's the Venus Di Milo underneath; if it's covered in shit, then I don't want it in my living room."
Your metaphor implies that the problem is the game itself, and it's been prettied up to cover up inherent worthlessness. My metaphor implies that it's something crappy attached to the game that doesn't need to be attached to the game at all.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
on
Quests
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The big problem here is that people play these games primarily so that they get to be the hero. If they wanted to be nobodies in a big world of people who are more interested in more important things, then they could just go out into the real world. The aim of MMORPGs, I suspect, is to try to make each player feel like he or she is THE hero in a bigger world.
Of course, you quickly run into the old paradox: In a world where everyone is special, no one is.
YES! Not chains. Someplace like CompUSA is absolute crap. If you have any sort of a problem with a chain like CompUSA, they absolutely don't care.
But I've had some of the best experiences in little locally owned shops. A lot of times the employees actually know about the products they're selling, and they actually care about your business. This is often true of shops other than computer stores, too.
I ended up doing a replacement RMA and was without a hard drive for 11 days while they dickered around with the paperwork and shipping back and forth.
If it's really so vital, do the RMA, and then buy another drive from a local store that allows returns without a restocking fee. Us that hard drive for 11 days, and when your replacement from NewEgg comes, copy the drive over and return the second drive to the store that doesn't have a restocking fee.
I firmly believe that if content owners and distributors charged a reasonable rate to download a TV show (maybe 10 cents), piracy would be a thing of the past.
I don't think you're going to get as low as 10 cents, but I do think the pricing on TV shows is stupid. For one thing, assuming this is like iTunes, they'll let you rent movies, but make you buy TV shows. Sure, the TV shows are cheaper, but they still seem to be justifying the $2 per episode with the idea that you're buying it, and you get to keep it. But with most TV shows most of the time (with only a few exceptions), I just want to watch them once and be done with it.
I don't mind DRM so much when the whole idea is that it's a rental. If they charged something like 50cents per show and I had 24 hours to view it, I'd probably use something like that.
My real goal in any kind of VOD Internet service would be to replace cable TV. So that should be the marker for measuring their pricing schemes: will an average customer be able to watch all the TV shows they want and still pay less than an average cable TV bill? By that measure, I'm sure $2 an episode is too much.
The problem is that this whole system is controlled by people who don't want you to be able to cancel your cable, so that's why the pricing stinks.
Sorry to continue in a separate post, but I already hit submit and wanted to add something.
I don't think anyone is claiming that media will go away completely in the next year, but we're talking about 5, 10, or 20 years. Think about the state of online distribution 20 years ago. How many MP3s did you download from the Internet in 1988?
You don't see the revolution? Tons of record stores have shut down. Stores like Best Buy have shrunk down their CD section and, in many cases, stuffed it in the back of the store somewhere. iTunes is the second largest music retailer in the US, including all the brick-and-morter chains.
And that's in a world where loads of people are still stuck on dial-up, and the music industry hasn't yet given up the ghost on DRM. We might not drop media entirely, but if you look at what direction we're heading...
Blu-ray has remained very expensive; if Sony can't get more market penetration - and fast - there won't be any resistance to the introduction of newer technology
Except that if anyone starts pushing anything newer, it'll just discourage people from buying either one. Everyone will sit back and say, "Great, another format. I guess I should wait this out and see who wins."
Everyone seems to want to blame the Samsung guy, but it seems more likely that the author (Kathryn Small) shouldn't be writing for any kind of a technology publication. The title of the article "Blu-ray 'gone in five years', Samsung claims," doesn't quite match what the guy from Samsung says. He says he doubts Bluray will be around for more than 5-10 years, but will be huge in the mean time. He says, "We are heavily back-ordered at the moment."
And then the author transitions into talking about OLED in a way that makes you think that OLED is a competing technology to Bluray. Either she misunderstands the connection, or she's just a sloppy writer and used a shoddy transition to talk about something that's only peripherally connected. But it sounds like she may have strung together several comments from Samsung that weren't entirely connected.
Even Sony doesn't really expect Bluray to be around for 20 or 30 years. It's far more likely that we'll be relatively media-less in the future, and more distribution will be online. That transition is coming, but only as quickly as fiber can be laid, which is to say not for several years at least. Griffiths (Samsung) was probably just commenting on that commonly accepted prediction. So if the idea was connected at all, he may have been saying, "Since media isn't the future, we're focussing on displays".
Yeah, I'm reading between the lines a bit, because the writing of this article is pretty weak.
But ff they were smart, and could learn to stick together (get over that rugged individualism bullshit they like to believe), techs could do a lot for themselves here and now.
The problem is that unions don't typically end up with everyone "sticking together". They become just another hierarchical power structure where the little guy get shafted for the sake of the guys on top. I've seen too many people (including family members) pay their dues and be good little union workers for years, only to be cut loose by the union at the first sign of trouble.
Indeed. And this has very little to do with the remote wipe feature. If I have access to a laptop, I can wipe the data there, too. If police get access to my smartphone, they should be able to turn on "airplane mode" and prevent anyone from wiping it.
In fact, it might be a bit suspect for them not to disable the wireless connection as their first act. Imagine if they confiscated your laptop and then immediately connected it to the Internet and left it connected. How could they claim to have secured any data from tampering either way if it's connected to the Internet?
Great, so what, you're going to have some highly compressed HD movie into 2GB? Compression has gotten better, but it's not magic.
Retail, a 2GB usb key costs at least something like $10, while a DVD that holds twice as much is closer to 20 cents when purchased in any volume. You can even get a bluray disk for about $10, and that will hold more than 10x as much as the USB key. So what kind of sense does it make as a distribution medium?
I'm just not sure I see the point of this. It's a 2GB key, which means it's not going to be better quality than DVD. As cheap as these USB keys are getting to be, it's still more expensive than a DVD.
I can see the value of wanting a movie on a USB key, I suppose, but in that case I'd probably rather buy the DVD and the USB key, rip the DVD to a normal format, and drop that on the key. At least that way I can back it up, or use the key for another purpose without losing the movie.
I know exactly the type of users you're talking about. It really makes me wonder, can anything be done?
To me, installing software from a link from someone I don't know is like licking a drain grate on the street in NYC. It just feels like a natural aversion, but clearly it's because I've been trained. I wonder if that sort of concept will ever his the cultural mainstream, and be considered "common sense".
(a) 25% of which pollution, contained where, and how? I'm not claiming you're wrong, but I hate when people cite meaningless statistics without explanation.
(b) No rationalization in sight, but if 3% of the world's population is emitting 25% of the pollution, what happens when 100% of the worlds population matches that rate of pollution? You think the environment is bad now, just wait until the rate of pollution across the globe is over 30 times what it is today.
Call me crazy, but that just doesn't sound like a solution.
This makes it sound like maybe the unique ID is for troubleshooting purposes. If they see the same crash coming from the same ID on a regular basis, they might assume there's something wrong with that machine, but if they see the same crash from thousands of different IDs, then they know they have a bug.
I'm not saying it can't be misused, but the existence of the ID doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing advanced tracking of your surfing habits.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, sorry. That's what I get for reading too quickly.
FIOS - it's always 6 months away.
Yeah? If that's true, you sure are lucky. FIOS has been "6 months away" for a few years now where I live.
Those guilds could sponsor, hire, or intimidate other, smaller guilds into fighting proxy wars and doing various other things for them. High level players would replace NPCs as questgivers, offering rewards to lower level players for retrieving various items that those players can't use, but will be useful to higher levels.
I thought about this sort of thing years ago when Rockstar was talking about making a MMO GTA-- the idea being that a player could work his way up to being a mob boss, hire bodyguards, and decide on his own missions. Then you basically make an economy with limited resources, so that the different mob families are pretty much forced to fight it out. Even if you only limit the amount of land available, you can at least have turf wars.
And then you could add in the ability to be a spy, to betray your faction, to murder your boss and try to take his place, but then have to worry about whether you'll be accepted as the new boss, or if someone else will kill you.
It all seems like a great sort of idea, but it also sounds like something that would be very hard to execute and balance out. You'd have to invent mechanics for security and organization that I think are beyond current RPGs or RTS games that I've played. And then when it's all done, you still have to worry about whether or not it's going to be fun.
Sometimes people really like organizations and being a part of things, but then again, they don't like having bosses and being told what to do. You hear the common complaint about MMO grinding, "Why do I want a second job?" The question could become, "Why do I want a second societal hierarchy that I have to fit into?" or "Why do I want a second asshole boss?"
Perhaps a better metaphor would be, "I don't care if it's the Venus Di Milo underneath; if it's covered in shit, then I don't want it in my living room."
Your metaphor implies that the problem is the game itself, and it's been prettied up to cover up inherent worthlessness. My metaphor implies that it's something crappy attached to the game that doesn't need to be attached to the game at all.
The big problem here is that people play these games primarily so that they get to be the hero. If they wanted to be nobodies in a big world of people who are more interested in more important things, then they could just go out into the real world. The aim of MMORPGs, I suspect, is to try to make each player feel like he or she is THE hero in a bigger world.
Of course, you quickly run into the old paradox: In a world where everyone is special, no one is.
YES! Not chains. Someplace like CompUSA is absolute crap. If you have any sort of a problem with a chain like CompUSA, they absolutely don't care.
But I've had some of the best experiences in little locally owned shops. A lot of times the employees actually know about the products they're selling, and they actually care about your business. This is often true of shops other than computer stores, too.
I ended up doing a replacement RMA and was without a hard drive for 11 days while they dickered around with the paperwork and shipping back and forth.
If it's really so vital, do the RMA, and then buy another drive from a local store that allows returns without a restocking fee. Us that hard drive for 11 days, and when your replacement from NewEgg comes, copy the drive over and return the second drive to the store that doesn't have a restocking fee.
It's not rocket science.
Don't they air Takeshi's Castle on SpikeTV under the name "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge"?
I firmly believe that if content owners and distributors charged a reasonable rate to download a TV show (maybe 10 cents), piracy would be a thing of the past.
I don't think you're going to get as low as 10 cents, but I do think the pricing on TV shows is stupid. For one thing, assuming this is like iTunes, they'll let you rent movies, but make you buy TV shows. Sure, the TV shows are cheaper, but they still seem to be justifying the $2 per episode with the idea that you're buying it, and you get to keep it. But with most TV shows most of the time (with only a few exceptions), I just want to watch them once and be done with it.
I don't mind DRM so much when the whole idea is that it's a rental. If they charged something like 50cents per show and I had 24 hours to view it, I'd probably use something like that.
My real goal in any kind of VOD Internet service would be to replace cable TV. So that should be the marker for measuring their pricing schemes: will an average customer be able to watch all the TV shows they want and still pay less than an average cable TV bill? By that measure, I'm sure $2 an episode is too much.
The problem is that this whole system is controlled by people who don't want you to be able to cancel your cable, so that's why the pricing stinks.
A Finnish court ruling probably doesn't apply in the US.
Sorry to continue in a separate post, but I already hit submit and wanted to add something.
I don't think anyone is claiming that media will go away completely in the next year, but we're talking about 5, 10, or 20 years. Think about the state of online distribution 20 years ago. How many MP3s did you download from the Internet in 1988?
You don't see the revolution? Tons of record stores have shut down. Stores like Best Buy have shrunk down their CD section and, in many cases, stuffed it in the back of the store somewhere. iTunes is the second largest music retailer in the US, including all the brick-and-morter chains.
And that's in a world where loads of people are still stuck on dial-up, and the music industry hasn't yet given up the ghost on DRM. We might not drop media entirely, but if you look at what direction we're heading...
Blu-ray has remained very expensive; if Sony can't get more market penetration - and fast - there won't be any resistance to the introduction of newer technology
Except that if anyone starts pushing anything newer, it'll just discourage people from buying either one. Everyone will sit back and say, "Great, another format. I guess I should wait this out and see who wins."
Everyone seems to want to blame the Samsung guy, but it seems more likely that the author (Kathryn Small) shouldn't be writing for any kind of a technology publication. The title of the article "Blu-ray 'gone in five years', Samsung claims," doesn't quite match what the guy from Samsung says. He says he doubts Bluray will be around for more than 5-10 years, but will be huge in the mean time. He says, "We are heavily back-ordered at the moment."
And then the author transitions into talking about OLED in a way that makes you think that OLED is a competing technology to Bluray. Either she misunderstands the connection, or she's just a sloppy writer and used a shoddy transition to talk about something that's only peripherally connected. But it sounds like she may have strung together several comments from Samsung that weren't entirely connected.
Even Sony doesn't really expect Bluray to be around for 20 or 30 years. It's far more likely that we'll be relatively media-less in the future, and more distribution will be online. That transition is coming, but only as quickly as fiber can be laid, which is to say not for several years at least. Griffiths (Samsung) was probably just commenting on that commonly accepted prediction. So if the idea was connected at all, he may have been saying, "Since media isn't the future, we're focussing on displays".
Yeah, I'm reading between the lines a bit, because the writing of this article is pretty weak.
That sounds like a design defect, not a manufacturing defect.
That doesn't sound like a design defect; it sounds like they're copying Apple's laptop design.
(in case the joke is too obscure: Apple's laptops are designed in such a way that they get ridiculously hot.)
Maybe they've started hiring Caucasians?
But ff they were smart, and could learn to stick together (get over that rugged individualism bullshit they like to believe), techs could do a lot for themselves here and now.
The problem is that unions don't typically end up with everyone "sticking together". They become just another hierarchical power structure where the little guy get shafted for the sake of the guys on top. I've seen too many people (including family members) pay their dues and be good little union workers for years, only to be cut loose by the union at the first sign of trouble.
Yes, and you certainly don't want to confuse "Chubby Rain" with "Chocolate Rain", either.
Not to be confused with "Chubby Rain".
Indeed. And this has very little to do with the remote wipe feature. If I have access to a laptop, I can wipe the data there, too. If police get access to my smartphone, they should be able to turn on "airplane mode" and prevent anyone from wiping it.
In fact, it might be a bit suspect for them not to disable the wireless connection as their first act. Imagine if they confiscated your laptop and then immediately connected it to the Internet and left it connected. How could they claim to have secured any data from tampering either way if it's connected to the Internet?
Great, so what, you're going to have some highly compressed HD movie into 2GB? Compression has gotten better, but it's not magic.
Retail, a 2GB usb key costs at least something like $10, while a DVD that holds twice as much is closer to 20 cents when purchased in any volume. You can even get a bluray disk for about $10, and that will hold more than 10x as much as the USB key. So what kind of sense does it make as a distribution medium?
I'm just not sure I see the point of this. It's a 2GB key, which means it's not going to be better quality than DVD. As cheap as these USB keys are getting to be, it's still more expensive than a DVD.
I can see the value of wanting a movie on a USB key, I suppose, but in that case I'd probably rather buy the DVD and the USB key, rip the DVD to a normal format, and drop that on the key. At least that way I can back it up, or use the key for another purpose without losing the movie.
Seems like a solution in search of a problem.
I know exactly the type of users you're talking about. It really makes me wonder, can anything be done?
To me, installing software from a link from someone I don't know is like licking a drain grate on the street in NYC. It just feels like a natural aversion, but clearly it's because I've been trained. I wonder if that sort of concept will ever his the cultural mainstream, and be considered "common sense".
(a) 25% of which pollution, contained where, and how? I'm not claiming you're wrong, but I hate when people cite meaningless statistics without explanation.
(b) No rationalization in sight, but if 3% of the world's population is emitting 25% of the pollution, what happens when 100% of the worlds population matches that rate of pollution? You think the environment is bad now, just wait until the rate of pollution across the globe is over 30 times what it is today.
Call me crazy, but that just doesn't sound like a solution.
I'm not saying it can't be misused, but the existence of the ID doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing advanced tracking of your surfing habits.