Listen sonny, as a network admin I perform 'miracles' every day with a CLI and hidden options in config files. It impresses the PHBs, earns respect and keeps my salary up. And now you want to further trivialise my job with more GUI options. Oh for the good old days when all we had were ones and zeroes.
I've played both WoW and LOTRO beta. There are a lot of similarities between the two games, most notably the UI which is probably one of WoW's greatest strengths. Of course this has led to accusations on sites such as mmorpg.com that LOTRO is a WoW clone. I suppose this is inevitable for any new fantasy MMOs given WoW's extraordinary success. But people seem to forget that all the '2nd gen' MMOs including WoW borrow heavily from 1st gen games such as Everquest, UO, DAoC etc.
I feel sorry for developers of new MMOs as there will always be endless comparisons with WoW. Truth is WoW is good but not great, it merely satisfies in all areas but excels in none and has a rather poor endgame. An 8 million + subscriber MMO is not going to happen again.
Manufacturers are making more efficient engines. However this is being offset by more stringent emission controls and heavier vehicles to comply with safety standards. The new Mini is a perfect example, it takes a 1.6 litre engine to propel the new model no faster than the old 1 litre and with no improvement in economy.
Well if it's not incompetence that mars PlusNet's service then it's deception. Over the last couple of years customers have had to endure blatent throttling of P2P and caps on bandwidth, the closure of their binary Usenet service and customers being banned from their forums for daring to criticise them.
I can only blame myself for staying for so long. My previous ISP provided an excellent service but was far more expensive. As always, you get what you pay for.
Was great at first and I was making a sizable amount of cash but I eventually realised that multi-tabling for over nine hours a day was taking its toll on me both physically and mentally as the concentration required is far in excess of any day job I've had. And then there are the downswings. Every player, no matter how good, will at some time fall into a rut and it leaves you wondering when it will end which isn't funny when you are relying on it to pay the bills. In the end I realised that poker can be a bigger grind than a regular paying job.
I still play and still make money, but for me it's purely to supplement my regular income.
I recently had the novelty of working in a large office building with a smoking room on the ground floor near the reception, a rarity these days as virtually all builidngs are no smoking. The room was very well ventilated with extractor fans keeping it under negative pressure so no smoke whatsoever made it outside of the room.
The big advantage of this was that smokers would not congregate outside the building with the associated litter and clouds of smoke you would have to fight your way through to get to the entrance. It shows that smoking sections in buildings has its advantages so your 'peeing section in a pool' analogy doesn't wash with me.
Well you got modded down for it but I share your scepticism. Never a day goes by (especially here on slashdot) without some 'breakthrough' in energy tech by some researchers who appear to be trying to justify their grant money. Even those that do have a realistic chance of going into production often do not meet performance expectations or have environmental side-effects that negate the reasons for persuing them in the first place.
Henrys are excellent machines and will go on for years, the only thing is that they are very poor at cleaning carpet because they are suction only and have no revolving brush bar. There is a power brush option for them but it cost nearly as much as the cleaner itself and you rarely see them.
I do like Dysons even if they are a tad overpriced. One thing I value with them is that they hold all the dirt they capture and spew none back into the air, the exhaust air seems cleaner than the air in the room.
You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Really? I thought Mac users' sole purpose in life is to endlessly compare OSX with Windows.
Well ATi was until very recently a Canadian company. Intel can owe the success of it's present line of chips to Israel. AMD does most of its R&D and manufacturing in Germany. Which leaves only Nvidia as a truely American designed product, and even their chips are made in Taiwan.
Creative's acquisition of Sensaura is largely why Nvidia had to can further development of Soundstorm.
Soundstorm was hardly a POS as you describe. It was by far the best integrated audio that has ever been seen and had lower CPU usage than a Creative card that cost twice as much as a Soundstorm motherboard. The only let down was that many motherboard makers were pairing it with a cheap DAC, if you bypassed this with the optical out the sound was superb unlike Audigy which has more snap crackle and pop than a bowl of Rice Krispies.
So the courts agree that Aureal did not infringe on Creative's patents but you believe that they should have rolled over and settled? Seems to me that they were highly justified in doing so.
I also recall the threats Creative was leveling on sound card manufacturers at the time, suggesting that they would be target of legal action if they carried Aureal's products. Only Diamond Multimedia had the balls to stand up to that nonsense.
Want to know why A3D 2.0 was better than *any* interation of EAX? I used to be a high-end gamer, mostly HLDM and Q3. With A3D and a pair of headphones I knew exactly where my enemies were on the map. It was true positional audio and A3D 3.0 was going to take that to the next level. In the 8 years since Aureal's demise, Creative have done nothing that comes even close.
2 words that would never make me go out and pick up a Creative card...
Evil Bastards
I haven't easily forgot what they did to Aureal, to id software, and the same game they're playing today with Apple. Seems that their motto is 'if you can't beat 'em, sue 'em.'
Creative have acquired, by hook or by crook, a stranglehold on IP for PC Audio. That's why there is so little competition for them, the closest we got to a decent alternative was Nvidia's Nforce 2 integrated audio, and even they couldn't develop it further without attracting attention from Creatives legal department, which I bet is a damn sight larger than their R&D team. PC audio tech is a decade behind because of Creative, our only hope is that they die. Real soon.
Well some of us have morals, and won't hand over a penny to litigious bastards like Creative. PC audio tech is probably a decade behind because of them. Aureal and A3D 3.0 was to be the revolution in PC gaming, and Creative destroyed it.
A lot of this is down to BT's introduction of capacity based charging (i.e. metering) of the central pipes between their network and the ISPs. Hopefully if the LLU ISPs get their act together and start supplying a decent service we can bypass the BT tax and start selling high speed unmetered connections again.
Totally with you on this. The fluorescent tubes in my bathroom and kitchen have been there from before I moved in to my home 8 years ago and are still going strong. Of all the CFLs I've bought and plugged in to the same circuit as the tubes, none have never lasted longer than four months.
And before anyone asks, these are CFLs produced by so-called 'reputable' manufacturers (Osram, GE etc).
Secondly, how long until we discover this causes cancer?
A very long time I imagine, because unless they're not telling us something I assume the radiation is non-ionizing. No accepted study has proved that non-ionizing raditation causes cancer.
Other risks come from the chlorine put in tap water to stop bacteria from growing - well the bacteria in your guts you kind of need, for digestion etc. Boiling the water first evaporates off the chlorine, otherwise, you're disinfecting yourself everytime you drink it, an accumulative effect.,
Speaking as a former water scientist, this is complete BS. The residual levels of chlorine in drinking water in the UK are minimal, usually no more than 1 mg/l, and are maintained as a precaution to prevent contamination in the ditribution system. There is no way that this amount is capable of destroying bacteria in the gut, and chlorine being the highly reactive element that it is will combine with the first thing it finds when it hits your stomach and render it useless as a disinfectant.
Agreed with most of what you said but mentioning the memory requirements of KDE and Gnome in the same breath as Vista is ludicrous. I have KDE 3.5 running nicely on a laptop with 256KB of RAM and I'm sure you'd get by with 128. Going to something more lightweight like XFCE or one of the superlight WMs and you could dig out that old P1 machine with 32MB RAM and run it quite happily.
And the thing is you would have a completely up to date OS running on old hardware. With a Microsoft OS, this simply isn't possible.
I've just put the finishing touches to my new MMO. It's the best game ever made, and everyone who has played it agrees with me. Problem is that I don't have the marketing budget of likes of Blizzard and SOE, I can't afford to run the servers, and now my company is about to go bankrupt.
So does that make my game not worthy in your opinion? I'm not pretending that Ryzom is the best game in the world but it certainly doesn't fit your 'not worthy' tag.
It doesn't matter that Edison's design was superior, the fact is that he is not the inventor of the filament light bulb though he often gets the credit for it. A more accurate description would be the inventor of the first practical filament light bulb.
In contrast John Logie Baird is widely recognised as the inventor of television, even though his mechanical system was vastly inferior to the CRT design that became ubiquitous.
World of Warcraft is the best yet. Its a mix of quests and grinding.
No different to the countless other Everquest clones then.
Don't get me wrong, WoW is a good game, but its success has been a result of taking the best ideas from other MMOs. Is WoW innovative? Not at all. Call it the McDonalds of games if you will, it's good enough to satisfy the masses but excels at nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen sonny, as a network admin I perform 'miracles' every day with a CLI and hidden options in config files. It impresses the PHBs, earns respect and keeps my salary up. And now you want to further trivialise my job with more GUI options. Oh for the good old days when all we had were ones and zeroes.
I've played both WoW and LOTRO beta. There are a lot of similarities between the two games, most notably the UI which is probably one of WoW's greatest strengths. Of course this has led to accusations on sites such as mmorpg.com that LOTRO is a WoW clone. I suppose this is inevitable for any new fantasy MMOs given WoW's extraordinary success. But people seem to forget that all the '2nd gen' MMOs including WoW borrow heavily from 1st gen games such as Everquest, UO, DAoC etc.
I feel sorry for developers of new MMOs as there will always be endless comparisons with WoW. Truth is WoW is good but not great, it merely satisfies in all areas but excels in none and has a rather poor endgame. An 8 million + subscriber MMO is not going to happen again.
lack of MPG targets for manufacturers
Manufacturers are making more efficient engines. However this is being offset by more stringent emission controls and heavier vehicles to comply with safety standards. The new Mini is a perfect example, it takes a 1.6 litre engine to propel the new model no faster than the old 1 litre and with no improvement in economy.
Well if it's not incompetence that mars PlusNet's service then it's deception. Over the last couple of years customers have had to endure blatent throttling of P2P and caps on bandwidth, the closure of their binary Usenet service and customers being banned from their forums for daring to criticise them.
I can only blame myself for staying for so long. My previous ISP provided an excellent service but was far more expensive. As always, you get what you pay for.
Been there, done that.
Was great at first and I was making a sizable amount of cash but I eventually realised that multi-tabling for over nine hours a day was taking its toll on me both physically and mentally as the concentration required is far in excess of any day job I've had. And then there are the downswings. Every player, no matter how good, will at some time fall into a rut and it leaves you wondering when it will end which isn't funny when you are relying on it to pay the bills. In the end I realised that poker can be a bigger grind than a regular paying job.
I still play and still make money, but for me it's purely to supplement my regular income.
I recently had the novelty of working in a large office building with a smoking room on the ground floor near the reception, a rarity these days as virtually all builidngs are no smoking. The room was very well ventilated with extractor fans keeping it under negative pressure so no smoke whatsoever made it outside of the room.
The big advantage of this was that smokers would not congregate outside the building with the associated litter and clouds of smoke you would have to fight your way through to get to the entrance. It shows that smoking sections in buildings has its advantages so your 'peeing section in a pool' analogy doesn't wash with me.
WoW players have known about this for a long time.
Well you got modded down for it but I share your scepticism. Never a day goes by (especially here on slashdot) without some 'breakthrough' in energy tech by some researchers who appear to be trying to justify their grant money. Even those that do have a realistic chance of going into production often do not meet performance expectations or have environmental side-effects that negate the reasons for persuing them in the first place.
I heard that a guy called Brian Eno did the Windows startup sounds, just look at the fame it brought him.
Henrys are excellent machines and will go on for years, the only thing is that they are very poor at cleaning carpet because they are suction only and have no revolving brush bar. There is a power brush option for them but it cost nearly as much as the cleaner itself and you rarely see them.
I do like Dysons even if they are a tad overpriced. One thing I value with them is that they hold all the dirt they capture and spew none back into the air, the exhaust air seems cleaner than the air in the room.
You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Really? I thought Mac users' sole purpose in life is to endlessly compare OSX with Windows.
Well ATi was until very recently a Canadian company. Intel can owe the success of it's present line of chips to Israel. AMD does most of its R&D and manufacturing in Germany. Which leaves only Nvidia as a truely American designed product, and even their chips are made in Taiwan.
Creative's acquisition of Sensaura is largely why Nvidia had to can further development of Soundstorm.
Soundstorm was hardly a POS as you describe. It was by far the best integrated audio that has ever been seen and had lower CPU usage than a Creative card that cost twice as much as a Soundstorm motherboard. The only let down was that many motherboard makers were pairing it with a cheap DAC, if you bypassed this with the optical out the sound was superb unlike Audigy which has more snap crackle and pop than a bowl of Rice Krispies.
So the courts agree that Aureal did not infringe on Creative's patents but you believe that they should have rolled over and settled? Seems to me that they were highly justified in doing so.
I also recall the threats Creative was leveling on sound card manufacturers at the time, suggesting that they would be target of legal action if they carried Aureal's products. Only Diamond Multimedia had the balls to stand up to that nonsense.
Want to know why A3D 2.0 was better than *any* interation of EAX? I used to be a high-end gamer, mostly HLDM and Q3. With A3D and a pair of headphones I knew exactly where my enemies were on the map. It was true positional audio and A3D 3.0 was going to take that to the next level. In the 8 years since Aureal's demise, Creative have done nothing that comes even close.
2 words that would never make me go out and pick up a Creative card...
Evil Bastards
I haven't easily forgot what they did to Aureal, to id software, and the same game they're playing today with Apple. Seems that their motto is 'if you can't beat 'em, sue 'em.'
Creative have acquired, by hook or by crook, a stranglehold on IP for PC Audio. That's why there is so little competition for them, the closest we got to a decent alternative was Nvidia's Nforce 2 integrated audio, and even they couldn't develop it further without attracting attention from Creatives legal department, which I bet is a damn sight larger than their R&D team. PC audio tech is a decade behind because of Creative, our only hope is that they die. Real soon.
Well some of us have morals, and won't hand over a penny to litigious bastards like Creative. PC audio tech is probably a decade behind because of them. Aureal and A3D 3.0 was to be the revolution in PC gaming, and Creative destroyed it.
A lot of this is down to BT's introduction of capacity based charging (i.e. metering) of the central pipes between their network and the ISPs. Hopefully if the LLU ISPs get their act together and start supplying a decent service we can bypass the BT tax and start selling high speed unmetered connections again.
Totally with you on this. The fluorescent tubes in my bathroom and kitchen have been there from before I moved in to my home 8 years ago and are still going strong. Of all the CFLs I've bought and plugged in to the same circuit as the tubes, none have never lasted longer than four months.
And before anyone asks, these are CFLs produced by so-called 'reputable' manufacturers (Osram, GE etc).
It's even more clever than that, it translates British to English.
Secondly, how long until we discover this causes cancer?
A very long time I imagine, because unless they're not telling us something I assume the radiation is non-ionizing. No accepted study has proved that non-ionizing raditation causes cancer.
Other risks come from the chlorine put in tap water to stop bacteria from growing - well the bacteria in your guts you kind of need, for digestion etc. Boiling the water first evaporates off the chlorine, otherwise, you're disinfecting yourself everytime you drink it, an accumulative effect.,
Speaking as a former water scientist, this is complete BS. The residual levels of chlorine in drinking water in the UK are minimal, usually no more than 1 mg/l, and are maintained as a precaution to prevent contamination in the ditribution system. There is no way that this amount is capable of destroying bacteria in the gut, and chlorine being the highly reactive element that it is will combine with the first thing it finds when it hits your stomach and render it useless as a disinfectant.
Agreed with most of what you said but mentioning the memory requirements of KDE and Gnome in the same breath as Vista is ludicrous. I have KDE 3.5 running nicely on a laptop with 256KB of RAM and I'm sure you'd get by with 128. Going to something more lightweight like XFCE or one of the superlight WMs and you could dig out that old P1 machine with 32MB RAM and run it quite happily.
And the thing is you would have a completely up to date OS running on old hardware. With a Microsoft OS, this simply isn't possible.
I've just put the finishing touches to my new MMO. It's the best game ever made, and everyone who has played it agrees with me. Problem is that I don't have the marketing budget of likes of Blizzard and SOE, I can't afford to run the servers, and now my company is about to go bankrupt.
So does that make my game not worthy in your opinion? I'm not pretending that Ryzom is the best game in the world but it certainly doesn't fit your 'not worthy' tag.
It doesn't matter that Edison's design was superior, the fact is that he is not the inventor of the filament light bulb though he often gets the credit for it. A more accurate description would be the inventor of the first practical filament light bulb.
In contrast John Logie Baird is widely recognised as the inventor of television, even though his mechanical system was vastly inferior to the CRT design that became ubiquitous.
World of Warcraft is the best yet. Its a mix of quests and grinding.
No different to the countless other Everquest clones then.
Don't get me wrong, WoW is a good game, but its success has been a result of taking the best ideas from other MMOs. Is WoW innovative? Not at all. Call it the McDonalds of games if you will, it's good enough to satisfy the masses but excels at nothing.