Yes, although I used to make my files partition the same size as a CDROM so I could easily do a back up, nowadays that would be the size of a DVD for backup (except that I am running OS/X and don't need to worry nearly as much about viruses these days). I still do periodic backups to DVD though. BY making my partition a limited size that matches my back up media its easy to discover when its time to go clean up some junk to make room and I am never in the position of being unable to backup the data. At one point I had 2 CD sized partitions going, although the second was only partially used. This system worked well for me for quite a few years.
"Which is all well and good as far as it goes. But that treats symptoms not the real problem. The problem is losers wanting pretend items they couldn't possibly earn in a frickin' game so badly they will pay serious real coin to get them. It would be like bribing your DM to let your third level character find a +5 sword. Who would continue to play in a gaming group if such a disgusting thing were to occur?"
And because such ignorant fuckwads continue to exist and play MMOs there will always be a demand for ways to cheat the system and get the appearance of having earned something without having to actually go and make the effort. There is really nothing that can be done about this unless companies start pursuing real world prosecution of players who break the TOS in this manner. Forget chasing the farmers, their market will dry up when their customers stop buying engaging in RMTs. I would be all for companies putting a clause in their TOS that states you are liable to a $10k fine if caught - if there was some way to pursue it in the courts.
People who buy money and items ruin the balance of the game, and destroy the playability of the game for everyone else who plays legitimately. I would kick anyone from my guild who I discovered had done so without any hestiation, but thats about the limit of my ability to affect them in game for their actions. I want to see companies take serious action against offenders, and I think thats the only solution that might have a chance to work.
I do like the halfway solution from CCP, which if I understand it amounts to them selling subscription cards and letting players translate those into in game items which can then be bought by other players and then used to pay their subscription costs. The company gets money from being the middleman in the transaction (The player paid RL money to buy the subscription card) and the player who has the in game currency can pay their subscription costs with that in game money. It still means that someone is using their cash to gain an advantage of course, but at least it cuts the farmers out of the equation which is I suppose a form of solution
Personally I think that allowing, in fact encouraging RMT transactions in a game means the game is rendered unplayable and only a fool would play it. I can't think of a single thing that would make me want to play a game less than that. It effectively announces that whatever you do in game is completely meaningless because some bastard with a CC can equal your achievements in a few seconds because he has more money than you do. Since that sense of achieving something challenging is part of the attraction of playing a game, rendering that achievement null and void destroys part of the attractiveness of a game. There are unfortunately a lot of MMO players who DO think that having more money than I do makes them a better person and better player, and they feel entitled to cheat to get ahead in this manner. Changing that attitude would be another solution but it would rely on players having a sense of honour and sportsmanship and I don't think you can count on that being present in most players. Our society encourages the idea that having more money makes you superior to others, and encourages the attitude that this entitles you to better treatment etc.
Personally speaking, although it would present substantial security problems, some method by which games companies could exchange the credit cards used on a banned account so that when you are banned on game A, you are also automatically banned on any other game that used that card would be a neat addition to the mix, although I am sure lots of people would dislike that. I am not sure how you could do so effectively and legally though.
Lets have a TV Channel analogy then. When I was a kid we got something like 12 or so stations, all pretty standard and because I am in Canada, they were a mix of the 2 Canadian stations and the rest were from the US.
TV show quality was sometimes pretty "meh", but I enjoyed a few programs immensely. There were some well written TV show that had decent budgets and starred decent actors.
Now maybe its just be being a curmudgeon, but in the world of 250+ stations, I think the overall quality of the average TV show hasn't merely dropped, its plummeted. What we are left with is pap for the sheeple that is cheap and quick to produce - witness the success of shows like Survivor or all the Talent show knockoffs. Reality TV represents the new formula for success because it costs a lot less to produce. When 250 stations are trying to survive off the income from advertising that used to fuel dozens of them, the quality has to be diluted somehow. So we have more ads per hour, a lot of the same ads being spammed continuously, and lower quality TV shows that focus on things that don't require actual actors (or at least actors of any quality), scripts, sets, etc as the bulk of TV production. Of course there are still good, well thought out dramas, comedies etc, but they are rarer by far.
Now, diluting the MMO jungle may result in one or two products that come from nowhere and prove to be immensely popular. Providing greater variety may help diversify the industry and shake up the standard conventions - but its more likely we are going to get Reality TV - low cost, low quality games that only appeal to a very small audience and never really prove successful.
Price for a flick here in Canada
2 Adults - say $8.50 each. s0 $17.50
Popcorn and a Drink for 2 adults: $20 (and I am estimating it very conservatively I think).
So call it on the order of $35+, or $420+ for 12 movies.
I see on average about 4 movies a year I think. The only reason is the completely outrageous cost of going. The reason for that cost? Well, admittedly its the concessions stand rates, but going to a movie and eating popcorn are more or less synonymous to me, so there has to be popcorn. The reason the popcorn and a drink costs so fucking much, because the distributor is taking 80%+ of the ticket sales, perhaps all of it.
Which is why I won't see it even though I liked the story. I have a lazy eye as well, and am right eye dominant. 3D effects are completely lost on me, and just as likely to cause a headache. Whats the point.
I will wait till they release it on DVD and hope that doesn't have some faddy 3d crap associated with it. The art of film in 2d is fascinating, attempting to add a new gimmick to it with 3d is just plain stupid. As one person noted it plays hell with things like cross-fades - and from my point of view is completely lost in any case. I am sure I am not alone.
Stick with making good films, not atempting to cover up a bad film with a new gimmick.
I highly suspect the fact that the Iraq war has been so profitable for a few companies IS the reason you went to war in Iraq. The whole WMD excuse is just an attempt to justify the fact that Bush & Co created the conditions where billions of dollars could be siphoned off to Haliburton, Blackwater and other corporations that have used the war as a way to scam those billions. If a few thousand soldiers die in the name of corporate bottom-lines, well thats just the American way.
Now we get hyped up over Iran and North Korea because there has to be more war in the future to ensure those corporate profits continue. Once people get too much of a good thing, they want more. War is American Corporate Crack Cocaine if you will.
I use a 20" Imac, my wife has a MacBook. We use bootcamp and XP to play our games and so far everything is pretty peachy. When we want to do anything serious, we reboot into OS/X and do it there because the user experience to be had there far far outstrips anything on the Windows side.
To be honest, after being a Microsoft user from 1988-2007, I have to say that OS/X feels professional, well designed and completely reliable, whereas Windows XP feels like an toy OS. Its amateurish, its unreliable (although better by far than its predecessors), and the UI design is horrid by comparison to OS/X. It is required for my games at the moment so I endure it.
As for the hardware, its gorgeous, sleek, quiet and I have yet to encounter a problem. My Windows desktops were none of the above, and I was always having to fix something, not to mention the bi-annual reinstall of XP to clean out the cruft.
I think anyone with a brain & who can afford it, will buy Apple - even if you want to wipe it to install Ubuntu. The rest of you either need to save more to get a real system, or will have to settle for substandard windows systems running MS Vista:P
that when we get inundated with the same message again and again, it turns people Off on the product?
It alienates me at any rate, and particularly so if its endorsement type advertisement, since those usually have no actual information in them and usually feature actors hired to say their lines, ie they are lying.
I more or less ignore ads, I bypass them when I read them in the newspaper, or in a magazine. I speed past them with my PVR when I am watching TV, and I mute them if I can't bypass them. Oh I know the rule is to reach a consumer as many ways as possible and that in theory that is more likely to make them buy your product, but I think its backfiring these days because we see far too many ads.
Marketers: I am not interested in your product, whatever the fuck it is. If I want something I will go research it myself, read honest reviews (if I can find any, harder and harder these days), and then decide if I really need the product. If I do, I go buy it, if its crappy or I don't need it, I don't buy it. I buy virtually nothing based on seeing an advertisement as far as I can tell. I often specifically avoid products I can recall seeing Ads for because 99% of them are more irritating than informative, and they all seem to be based on outright lying about a product. For the most part if I can recall your ad, I won't buy your product, because if I can recall your ad, I have likely seen it so many times it makes me want to puke
I am exposed to so much media and have so many people trying to grab my attention that I more or less ignore them all
This onslaught of media screaming - Capitalist Propaganda if you wish - is tiring, and only pisses me off. I am sure I am not alone.
Now, products I do like I am more than willing to support in discussions with my friends and fellow workers, but I would never stoop so low as to become a shill for the company that made them.
One of the only upsides to Communism I can think of was there was almost no marketing and advertising. Shakespeare had it wrong, the firs thing we do is shoot all the marketers:P
When I heard this early yesterday I immediately thought I ought to post it to/., after all whats more "News for Nerd"-y? than the death of one of the founders of D&D and the entire world of roleplaying games.
Sadly,/. moves in mysterious ways:
# 2009-04-09 18:11:49 Dave Arneson RIP (Games,Role Playing (Games)) (pending)
There are countless thousands, more likely millions who owe and incredible debt to this man, for the creation of a hobby that has likely shaped their lives in some regards. I started with the very first box set, back in 1979, and have been playing D&D in one form or another ever since then. Thanks, Dave for the countless hours of entertainment I have found playing, discussing, and designing roleplaying and related games. You will be missed.
You only activate it once, and it merely lets MS know that your copy is legit. If it were a monthly occurence then I might agree with you, but the sad fact is that most people would rather not pay for this OS.
Until you upgrade your system and need to reinstall, then you have to validate it again. Do it enough times and it gets irritating. As for paying for the OS, if MS comes up with an OS that doesn't suck for some reason, then I am perfectly happy to pay for it. I bought my original copy of XP and bought an SP2 version when I switched over to running a Mac and wanted to dualboot for playing games. However Vista has never seemed worth buying, and I have no plans to ever upgrade to it if I can avoid it (I am more likely to stop playing windows-only games). W7 might offer some advantage worth shelling out the money for, but I have yet to hear of it.
At the moment OS/X is everything I want in an OS, barring the fact that MS has locked down game manufacturers by making them reliant on DirectX. If more games continue to come out with a Mac OS/X client, then I will be happy not running Windows in any form. I only switched to the Mac because I although I used PCs running DOS/Windows from 1988 until last year, I finally got tired of dealing with Microsoft's inept OS development. The difference is like night and day, and mostly makes MS Windows look like a toy OS.
Yes, I do know about Linux and have used it (and FreeBSD) off and on when it suited me during much of my time running Windows on my desktop, these days I mostly use Linux on servers.
I am not so sure you have gotten past that period, as much as learned to hide it well in some cases.
At any rate, I think a lot of people in the world get very angry at the US for its high-handed assumption of morale superiority and its inherent right to shove that attitude down the throats of the rest of the world.
The US Political system is in no way superior to any other true democracy in the world. It is by no means the best system, and its tiring to hear of people treating the US Constitution as if it was handed down directly by God enshrined in a glowing white light. Sure, its a great document and contains noble sentiments, just as the US has the potential to be a great country. However, its not an inherent feature of the US, you have to keep striving for it, keep applying the rules in that document and living up to them. No mean feat I am sure.
There are other perfectly valid forms of democracy that have survived in other countries for longer than the US has existed. The English Parliamentary system for instance. They all have their faults but they are no worse or better than the US system.
Please, put an end to this Nationalistic Superiority complex. Be proud of what you have achieved but stop assuming it makes you inherently superior human beings. It gets tiring and it only makes the rest of the world hate you, not for being superior, but for being obnoxious and ignorant.
How about something like this then: * Some anti-spam organization sets up servers that store hashed email addresses. Call it a VEM (Verified Email) for short. It stores the hashed email address and a timestamp for the last check made on it. * When an ISP receives an email from a user, it sends that email adddress to the VEM server, which hashes it and looks it up in their database. If the email address has been reported as a spammer, the VEM returns the result and the ISP does not send the email. Otherwise it returns the timestamp on the last verification check. The VEM database only contains hashes so that if its compromised the hacker can't establish a list of valid email addresses without knowing the hashing algorithm. * If an ISP using its bayesian email filter detects an email address that appears to be spam, it reports that address to the VEM. If it is reported it gets flagged as a bad address, and will be reported as such. * Since the VEM also returns the last time a message was sent from this email address, the ISP can then delay sending the next message by a few seconds, with the amount increasing every time if its been within a few seconds, so that eventually its no longer practical to spam from this address because the delay makes it impractical. * On the client side you encourage developers to include a filter to only approve messages which have been verified. The user has the choice of whether to only receive verified email.
Now I am sure that some aspect of this is illconceived, prone to abuse etc. I know spammers can fake their email address, bots can send via their infected system's address etc, but I think this would quickly disable those addresses and it wouldn't be hard for the ISP to send a message back informing the user that its been disabled and why. I am sure people could use this to try to create a "DOE" attack (Denial of Email) by using software to report an address as a spammer, so that needs to be thought out. Perhaps the connection between the ISP and the VEM needs to be authenticated such that only those ISPs that the VEM has authorized are acceptable etc.
I just can't see any way to fix the problem without some third-party server that tracks spamming addresses and allows for filtering them out at the ISP level.
Since we are tallying up allies, please note that Canada has had a large proportion of our combat capable troops in Afghanistan since the beginning of the conflict. We have lost a lot of those troops as well, and the only reason we are there is solidarity with our friends the USA.
The Airport Extreme though is a separate piece of hardware. I have had a couple of router/firewall combos that required a gui to configure and couldn't be SSHed into to change things.
While admittedly current programming languages are developed with English speakers in mind and thus use English in their design, what is to prevent say the Chinese government with evolving a new programming language based on Mandarin for use inside China? They are an ever growing economic, political and population base, it wouldn't be impractical at all for someone to do this - and it would leave the rest of the programming world (or rather those who don't speak Mandarin) pretty much out in the cold.
It might even be possible that basing a programming language on a different spoken language might encourage different approaches to programming language design and concept?
Its a mildly interesting thought, luckily for me I grew up speaking English:P
Well, French, Spanish and Portuguese are all Romance languages (descendants of Latin), and since English is a Germanic Language with heavily borrowed French vocabulary, learning those languages is less difficult because we use many similar words. The same is true for English speakers learning German. However all of those languages rely on heavier grammatical inflexion than English, which has lost most of its inflexions. So while we speak of English words using the grammatical terms like Nominative and Genitive etc, in most cases the English word changes little if at all, whereas in all of the above languages, a noun in the genitive case is likely to undergo some changes. These sorts of changes can prove difficult to English speakers. Those languages also have gender for nouns, another thing English has almost lost.
Finnish on the other hand is from the Finno-Ugric branch of Indo-European Languages, and has far less in common with English, other than some recently imported loan words (many of which undergo changes such that we as English speakers would not recognize them).
To quote Wikipedia: "Moreover, Finnish and English have a considerably different grammar, phonology and phonotactics, discouraging direct borrowing. English loan words in Finnish slang include for example pleikkari "PlayStation", hodari "hot dog", and hedari "headache". Often these loanwords are distinctly identified as slang or jargon, rarely being used in a negative mood or in formal language. Since English and Finnish grammar, pronunciation and phonetics differ considerably, most loan words are inevitably sooner or later calqued â" translated into native Finnish â" retaining the semantic meaning." - from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Language
Finnish thus resembles English pretty much not at all. I expect it would be more work to learn Finnish for an English speaker, than it would be to learn French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, or German etc.
Now I grant it will be likely easier to learn Finnish that say Chinese but that's primarily due to the difficulty non-tone-language speakers have in trying to pick up a tonal language. When their are, say, 8 different ways to pronounce the word/yi/ us poor English speakers are going to get easily confused when trying to remember them. Someone who grew up speaking a tone language would be more aware of the tones themselves and probably have an easier time learning things. That said, I believe Chinese (although as a non-speaker I am not sure) is pretty simple grammatically, so if you can get past the tones, the language is probably not that hard to learn. The writing system is of course another matter and undoubtedly represents a considerable barrier to learning any variety of Chinese. Finnish on the other hand probably has a lot of grammatical inflections to master, and the words will not resemble anything you know in English or other romance languages.
Or you know, they could install Bootcamp, install a copy of XP, and play all those games under Windows if they don't find the game they want available under OS/X (and a lot more are now these days I think). Yes, you do have to endure the substandard quality OS that is XP, but you can use it just for playing games then reboot back into a real OS when you are done.
That may sound snotty, but it isn't intended to. I used PCs running various versions of DOS and Windows - and ones running various versions of Linux at times - from 1988 or so until 2007. In 2007 I switched to running Macs (a 20" Imac at home, dualbooting XP for games, and a 24" Imac at work). Why? Because its a vastly superior operating system environment. Because OS/X is a unix underneath so I can run most Linux software or find its equivalent already ported without any problems. Because I got tired of constantly repairing small problems in my PCs, let alone the constant incremental upgrades, the need to reinstall XP every 6 months because its filled up with cruft again. I develop web-based applications, and I prefer the OS/X environment and the Mac Hardware to any PC I have ever used running any other OS I have tried - Linux obviously is a close second here, and Windows is back in the land of Fisher-Price toys by comparison. After running OS/X, MS XP feels like a well-design hack job, a toy operating system used for games. It certainly doesn't seem well designed, well thought out, or professional in any regard.
The so called $500 logo cost is also complete bullshit. Find a PC that has all the same features of a particular Mac and the same quality of production/components etc and you should find the costs are not that different. Plus $125 for Leopard is Apple lowering the cost because they wanted to make it more affordable to upgrade I think. If XP Home is priced at what $350 Cdn right now - and I wouldn't give you piss in a pot for it to be honest - Leopard ought to be priced at about $450-600 Cdn. There are too many nice little features about it, not to mention major ones, that any comparison between them palls.
Well the UN might be able to accomplish functional things and even evolve into a government of a sort but not until all the current countries can part with their rabid nationalism. Until then we will remain as a species only a few steps above the tribal level.
As it stands now, I am proud to be a Canadian, I love Canadian cultural values and morales, and deep in my heart would love to see the rest of the world become just like me and be Canadians too. Of course they undoubtedly feel the same way about their own country and ideals etc. What that really says I suppose is that until the differences between any two people on earth are pretty negligible we won't be able to move past national governments and attitudes. Thus, begun the cultural wars have! Until that's won and we all are one homogeneous mass with no cultural identities, I guess we have nationalism and more or less continuous wars.
At least for an online game, have the computer watch what players do in a given situation and then randomly mimic their actions. A rating system based on success can provide a tree of effective responses to choose from and remove the less optimal solutions. That way the first time someone plays the game the AI is pretty minimal (limited to the actions of the beta testers etc) but after that can learn to heuristically analyze the actions that proved the most successful in the past. The result should ideally be that the game gets tougher the more the player (or the more players) plays it, which will likely work out because the players will also be getting better at the game. Want an easier setting? set the threshold for the most acceptable NPC options lower so that they choose a wider range of options including ones that were less rewarding in practice.
LITTLE BOXES (with apologies to Malvina Reynolds & Pete Seger)
Little boxes on the internet Little boxes with no security Little boxes running Conficker Little boxes all the same There's a Dell one, and an Asus one And a HP one and a Sony one, And they have the Conficker And they all spread it just the same
And the people on the internet Represent a great diversity But no one taught them to use their boxes And they all learned just the same They all use Windows, and don't use AV And open executables And now they're all in the botnet And help expand it every day
Sorry that's all I could come up with while at work:P
It has a few minor texture display problems for me, mostly involving textures on items in the very far distance etc. Other than that its been running better than the windows client did when I was booted into XP under Bootcamp
The client is free for download, all you need to do is get it and sign up your account.
Or you can just buy it for $20 and download it online, just make sure to apply the code you get to your original account so the benefits apply to your old account and not some new account:P
Well as someone who has played City of Heroes off and on since day 1, I can't say its dying at all. NCSoft is continuing to improve and expand the game - and all expansions are free of charge. The only expansion they charged for was City of Villains which was essentially a completely new game environment using similar mechanics. Both games are now merged into one.
There are still a ton of people playing new low level alts, and the game is going strong in my opinion. The game does have an extremely low churn rate as someone noted, and its evident by the fact that so many new characters are regularly being generated and played.
Mission Architect is coming out in the next expansion and it holds the promise to revolutionize the MMO industry in one regard: It allows players to create their own missions, their own NPC opponents, define their own story arcs and define a series of related missions, up to 5. It allows access to all of the existing NPC opponents and the modification of them to have their own powersets and appearances. Once created a mission can be uploaded so that the rest of the playerbase can try it out and rate it. The best rated missions/arcs will be examined by the devs and added to the canon of the game. There is a tremendous interest in this of course, and I think if it proves enjoyable, that this will raise the bar on MMO design considerably.
Although its filling the Superhero MMO niche and that is not to everyone's taste, the game is a fantastic design, and very effective in what its set out to achieve. MA is just another large step in improving the game and its due out soon I believe. Its in private beta at the moment, and usually NCSoft will bring that public for a few weeks to iron out any last bugs before it goes live.
The biggest advantage for NCSoft if they get MA working right is of course that the players will be adding to the content of the game, making it far easier to add other improvements to the game by taking off the pressure to add new missions and opponents (although of course someone will have to be fixing problems with MA in the meantime). I expect this will allow them to expand the game in other areas. They do not seem like they are slowing down at all.
COH probably seems like its a stagnant game to many players who are not familiar with it primarily because most of the expansions (COV aside) have been offered free to the players. Thus there are no new boxes showing up on the shelves at regular intervals.
They recently added a Mac OS/X client (well really its the Windows client with cedega back end support) that works *very well* at least in my experience. The client was available for download for free and still is. Yes, you can *buy* it and get some added in game bonuses (costume items, and a Teleport-straight-to-mission power), but you can also buy those bonuses separately for a nominal fee.
All in all I hope Champions Online does well, and I will certainly try it. It may indeed draw a lot of the playerbase away from COH, but for the moment COH is going quite strong actually and still has a bright future in my opinion.
When I was in the Canadian military it was a common "initiation rite" for new soldiers in a unit to be given ridiculous tasks to see how bright they are or how much attention they paid during training. One popular one at my unit was to send the newbie out to get Diesel Sparkplugs for one of our diesel trucks. Diesel engines do not of course require sparkplugs, but most newbie soldiers wouldn't know this, so off they would go to the unit Supply section only to be told there were none in stock but they could try Base supply - who would immediately know what was up and send them off to a different unit supply in the hopes of begging some etc. With luck this could keep a particularly ignorant soldier busy for half a day before someone pointed out to them that they had been "had". Smart ones would of course catch on immediately and point out that such a thing didn't exist etc.
What always got me was that some people would fall for items which should have been immediately obviously bogus - like sending someone out to a reel of 100' of Shoreline - as if it was a type of rope etc. However every year along would come some private asking if we had any shoreline...
I can't say as Canadian forces basic ever had you trying to solve a problem lacking all of the required resources but there were definitely similar tests that required you to solve a problem that appeared to be unsolvable as an attempt to build up cooperation and resourcefulness.
The one I will always remember was waxing the floors in the barracks during basic. Essentially the floors had to be waxed in preparation for the morning inspection (about 6:30 AM). Since we were often kept busy until 9:30 PM and lights out were at 10 PM (and the instructors came through to ensure that everyone not on Fire Picket was in bed and all the lights were out at 10 PM), there was simply no time to actually strip and wax the floors. The solution: immediately after the Instructors came through the barracks (walking on the floors of course), the Fire Pickets woke everyone up and we all used tape and garbage bags to cover up all the windows in the barracks so that no light would escape. Then everyone got up in their underwear and we rewaxed the floors and cleaned up the shower areas etc, with an array of blankets making a walkway up and down the barracks. Once everything was completed, we all got back into position in our bunk areas, remade our beds (including ironing the sheets and pillow cases so they were perfect), then the fire pickets turned out the lights and we removed the garbage bags and tape and hid them again. We then slept on the beds in reverse (your head went at the foot end and you used the spare blanket that had formed your walkway earlier and your feet went at the head end (it made less of an impact on the ironing). In the morning you got up, got dressed ready for inspection, then replaced the spare blanket carefully at the foot of the bed, picked up the pillows off the floor and put them in place then stood ready for inspection. All in all you got about 5h sleep each night, but the floors were perfectly polished, the bathrooms were clean etc all with zero time apparently devoted to the process. All completely chickenshit stuff, but it built up a spirit of cooperation between soldiers headed for different trades very well. By the end of basic (when they relaxed the standards a bit anyways) we had it down to a science and it could all be done in no time.
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Yes, although I used to make my files partition the same size as a CDROM so I could easily do a back up, nowadays that would be the size of a DVD for backup (except that I am running OS/X and don't need to worry nearly as much about viruses these days). I still do periodic backups to DVD though. BY making my partition a limited size that matches my back up media its easy to discover when its time to go clean up some junk to make room and I am never in the position of being unable to backup the data. At one point I had 2 CD sized partitions going, although the second was only partially used. This system worked well for me for quite a few years.
"Which is all well and good as far as it goes. But that treats symptoms not the real problem. The problem is losers wanting pretend items they couldn't possibly earn in a frickin' game so badly they will pay serious real coin to get them. It would be like bribing your DM to let your third level character find a +5 sword. Who would continue to play in a gaming group if such a disgusting thing were to occur?"
And because such ignorant fuckwads continue to exist and play MMOs there will always be a demand for ways to cheat the system and get the appearance of having earned something without having to actually go and make the effort. There is really nothing that can be done about this unless companies start pursuing real world prosecution of players who break the TOS in this manner. Forget chasing the farmers, their market will dry up when their customers stop buying engaging in RMTs. I would be all for companies putting a clause in their TOS that states you are liable to a $10k fine if caught - if there was some way to pursue it in the courts.
People who buy money and items ruin the balance of the game, and destroy the playability of the game for everyone else who plays legitimately. I would kick anyone from my guild who I discovered had done so without any hestiation, but thats about the limit of my ability to affect them in game for their actions. I want to see companies take serious action against offenders, and I think thats the only solution that might have a chance to work.
I do like the halfway solution from CCP, which if I understand it amounts to them selling subscription cards and letting players translate those into in game items which can then be bought by other players and then used to pay their subscription costs. The company gets money from being the middleman in the transaction (The player paid RL money to buy the subscription card) and the player who has the in game currency can pay their subscription costs with that in game money. It still means that someone is using their cash to gain an advantage of course, but at least it cuts the farmers out of the equation which is I suppose a form of solution
Personally I think that allowing, in fact encouraging RMT transactions in a game means the game is rendered unplayable and only a fool would play it. I can't think of a single thing that would make me want to play a game less than that. It effectively announces that whatever you do in game is completely meaningless because some bastard with a CC can equal your achievements in a few seconds because he has more money than you do. Since that sense of achieving something challenging is part of the attraction of playing a game, rendering that achievement null and void destroys part of the attractiveness of a game. There are unfortunately a lot of MMO players who DO think that having more money than I do makes them a better person and better player, and they feel entitled to cheat to get ahead in this manner. Changing that attitude would be another solution but it would rely on players having a sense of honour and sportsmanship and I don't think you can count on that being present in most players. Our society encourages the idea that having more money makes you superior to others, and encourages the attitude that this entitles you to better treatment etc.
Personally speaking, although it would present substantial security problems, some method by which games companies could exchange the credit cards used on a banned account so that when you are banned on game A, you are also automatically banned on any other game that used that card would be a neat addition to the mix, although I am sure lots of people would dislike that. I am not sure how you could do so effectively and legally though.
Lets have a TV Channel analogy then. When I was a kid we got something like 12 or so stations, all pretty standard and because I am in Canada, they were a mix of the 2 Canadian stations and the rest were from the US. TV show quality was sometimes pretty "meh", but I enjoyed a few programs immensely. There were some well written TV show that had decent budgets and starred decent actors. Now maybe its just be being a curmudgeon, but in the world of 250+ stations, I think the overall quality of the average TV show hasn't merely dropped, its plummeted. What we are left with is pap for the sheeple that is cheap and quick to produce - witness the success of shows like Survivor or all the Talent show knockoffs. Reality TV represents the new formula for success because it costs a lot less to produce. When 250 stations are trying to survive off the income from advertising that used to fuel dozens of them, the quality has to be diluted somehow. So we have more ads per hour, a lot of the same ads being spammed continuously, and lower quality TV shows that focus on things that don't require actual actors (or at least actors of any quality), scripts, sets, etc as the bulk of TV production. Of course there are still good, well thought out dramas, comedies etc, but they are rarer by far. Now, diluting the MMO jungle may result in one or two products that come from nowhere and prove to be immensely popular. Providing greater variety may help diversify the industry and shake up the standard conventions - but its more likely we are going to get Reality TV - low cost, low quality games that only appeal to a very small audience and never really prove successful.
Price for a flick here in Canada 2 Adults - say $8.50 each. s0 $17.50 Popcorn and a Drink for 2 adults: $20 (and I am estimating it very conservatively I think). So call it on the order of $35+, or $420+ for 12 movies. I see on average about 4 movies a year I think. The only reason is the completely outrageous cost of going. The reason for that cost? Well, admittedly its the concessions stand rates, but going to a movie and eating popcorn are more or less synonymous to me, so there has to be popcorn. The reason the popcorn and a drink costs so fucking much, because the distributor is taking 80%+ of the ticket sales, perhaps all of it.
Which is why I won't see it even though I liked the story. I have a lazy eye as well, and am right eye dominant. 3D effects are completely lost on me, and just as likely to cause a headache. Whats the point. I will wait till they release it on DVD and hope that doesn't have some faddy 3d crap associated with it. The art of film in 2d is fascinating, attempting to add a new gimmick to it with 3d is just plain stupid. As one person noted it plays hell with things like cross-fades - and from my point of view is completely lost in any case. I am sure I am not alone. Stick with making good films, not atempting to cover up a bad film with a new gimmick.
I highly suspect the fact that the Iraq war has been so profitable for a few companies IS the reason you went to war in Iraq. The whole WMD excuse is just an attempt to justify the fact that Bush & Co created the conditions where billions of dollars could be siphoned off to Haliburton, Blackwater and other corporations that have used the war as a way to scam those billions. If a few thousand soldiers die in the name of corporate bottom-lines, well thats just the American way. Now we get hyped up over Iran and North Korea because there has to be more war in the future to ensure those corporate profits continue. Once people get too much of a good thing, they want more. War is American Corporate Crack Cocaine if you will.
I use a 20" Imac, my wife has a MacBook. We use bootcamp and XP to play our games and so far everything is pretty peachy. When we want to do anything serious, we reboot into OS/X and do it there because the user experience to be had there far far outstrips anything on the Windows side. To be honest, after being a Microsoft user from 1988-2007, I have to say that OS/X feels professional, well designed and completely reliable, whereas Windows XP feels like an toy OS. Its amateurish, its unreliable (although better by far than its predecessors), and the UI design is horrid by comparison to OS/X. It is required for my games at the moment so I endure it. As for the hardware, its gorgeous, sleek, quiet and I have yet to encounter a problem. My Windows desktops were none of the above, and I was always having to fix something, not to mention the bi-annual reinstall of XP to clean out the cruft. I think anyone with a brain & who can afford it, will buy Apple - even if you want to wipe it to install Ubuntu. The rest of you either need to save more to get a real system, or will have to settle for substandard windows systems running MS Vista :P
that when we get inundated with the same message again and again, it turns people Off on the product?
It alienates me at any rate, and particularly so if its endorsement type advertisement, since those usually have no actual information in them and usually feature actors hired to say their lines, ie they are lying.
I more or less ignore ads, I bypass them when I read them in the newspaper, or in a magazine. I speed past them with my PVR when I am watching TV, and I mute them if I can't bypass them. Oh I know the rule is to reach a consumer as many ways as possible and that in theory that is more likely to make them buy your product, but I think its backfiring these days because we see far too many ads.
Marketers: I am not interested in your product, whatever the fuck it is. If I want something I will go research it myself, read honest reviews (if I can find any, harder and harder these days), and then decide if I really need the product. If I do, I go buy it, if its crappy or I don't need it, I don't buy it. I buy virtually nothing based on seeing an advertisement as far as I can tell. I often specifically avoid products I can recall seeing Ads for because 99% of them are more irritating than informative, and they all seem to be based on outright lying about a product. For the most part if I can recall your ad, I won't buy your product, because if I can recall your ad, I have likely seen it so many times it makes me want to puke
I am exposed to so much media and have so many people trying to grab my attention that I more or less ignore them all
This onslaught of media screaming - Capitalist Propaganda if you wish - is tiring, and only pisses me off. I am sure I am not alone.
Now, products I do like I am more than willing to support in discussions with my friends and fellow workers, but I would never stoop so low as to become a shill for the company that made them.
One of the only upsides to Communism I can think of was there was almost no marketing and advertising. Shakespeare had it wrong, the firs thing we do is shoot all the marketers :P
When I heard this early yesterday I immediately thought I ought to post it to /., after all whats more "News for Nerd"-y? than the death of one of the founders of D&D and the entire world of roleplaying games.
Sadly, /. moves in mysterious ways:
# 2009-04-09 18:11:49 Dave Arneson RIP (Games,Role Playing (Games)) (pending)
There are countless thousands, more likely millions who owe and incredible debt to this man, for the creation of a hobby that has likely shaped their lives in some regards. I started with the very first box set, back in 1979, and have been playing D&D in one form or another ever since then. Thanks, Dave for the countless hours of entertainment I have found playing, discussing, and designing roleplaying and related games. You will be missed.
You only activate it once, and it merely lets MS know that your copy is legit. If it were a monthly occurence then I might agree with you, but the sad fact is that most people would rather not pay for this OS.
Until you upgrade your system and need to reinstall, then you have to validate it again. Do it enough times and it gets irritating. As for paying for the OS, if MS comes up with an OS that doesn't suck for some reason, then I am perfectly happy to pay for it. I bought my original copy of XP and bought an SP2 version when I switched over to running a Mac and wanted to dualboot for playing games. However Vista has never seemed worth buying, and I have no plans to ever upgrade to it if I can avoid it (I am more likely to stop playing windows-only games). W7 might offer some advantage worth shelling out the money for, but I have yet to hear of it.
At the moment OS/X is everything I want in an OS, barring the fact that MS has locked down game manufacturers by making them reliant on DirectX. If more games continue to come out with a Mac OS/X client, then I will be happy not running Windows in any form. I only switched to the Mac because I although I used PCs running DOS/Windows from 1988 until last year, I finally got tired of dealing with Microsoft's inept OS development. The difference is like night and day, and mostly makes MS Windows look like a toy OS.
Yes, I do know about Linux and have used it (and FreeBSD) off and on when it suited me during much of my time running Windows on my desktop, these days I mostly use Linux on servers.
I am not so sure you have gotten past that period, as much as learned to hide it well in some cases.
At any rate, I think a lot of people in the world get very angry at the US for its high-handed assumption of morale superiority and its inherent right to shove that attitude down the throats of the rest of the world.
The US Political system is in no way superior to any other true democracy in the world. It is by no means the best system, and its tiring to hear of people treating the US Constitution as if it was handed down directly by God enshrined in a glowing white light. Sure, its a great document and contains noble sentiments, just as the US has the potential to be a great country. However, its not an inherent feature of the US, you have to keep striving for it, keep applying the rules in that document and living up to them. No mean feat I am sure.
There are other perfectly valid forms of democracy that have survived in other countries for longer than the US has existed. The English Parliamentary system for instance. They all have their faults but they are no worse or better than the US system.
Please, put an end to this Nationalistic Superiority complex. Be proud of what you have achieved but stop assuming it makes you inherently superior human beings. It gets tiring and it only makes the rest of the world hate you, not for being superior, but for being obnoxious and ignorant.
How about something like this then:
* Some anti-spam organization sets up servers that store hashed email addresses. Call it a VEM (Verified Email) for short. It stores the hashed email address and a timestamp for the last check made on it.
* When an ISP receives an email from a user, it sends that email adddress to the VEM server, which hashes it and looks it up in their database. If the email address has been reported as a spammer, the VEM returns the result and the ISP does not send the email. Otherwise it returns the timestamp on the last verification check. The VEM database only contains hashes so that if its compromised the hacker can't establish a list of valid email addresses without knowing the hashing algorithm.
* If an ISP using its bayesian email filter detects an email address that appears to be spam, it reports that address to the VEM. If it is reported it gets flagged as a bad address, and will be reported as such.
* Since the VEM also returns the last time a message was sent from this email address, the ISP can then delay sending the next message by a few seconds, with the amount increasing every time if its been within a few seconds, so that eventually its no longer practical to spam from this address because the delay makes it impractical.
* On the client side you encourage developers to include a filter to only approve messages which have been verified. The user has the choice of whether to only receive verified email.
Now I am sure that some aspect of this is illconceived, prone to abuse etc. I know spammers can fake their email address, bots can send via their infected system's address etc, but I think this would quickly disable those addresses and it wouldn't be hard for the ISP to send a message back informing the user that its been disabled and why.
I am sure people could use this to try to create a "DOE" attack (Denial of Email) by using software to report an address as a spammer, so that needs to be thought out. Perhaps the connection between the ISP and the VEM needs to be authenticated such that only those ISPs that the VEM has authorized are acceptable etc.
I just can't see any way to fix the problem without some third-party server that tracks spamming addresses and allows for filtering them out at the ISP level.
Since we are tallying up allies, please note that Canada has had a large proportion of our combat capable troops in Afghanistan since the beginning of the conflict. We have lost a lot of those troops as well, and the only reason we are there is solidarity with our friends the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_casualties_in_Afghanistan
Please note our first casualties were sadly from a friendly-fire incident involving the US AF. Yet we are still there.
The Airport Extreme though is a separate piece of hardware. I have had a couple of router/firewall combos that required a gui to configure and couldn't be SSHed into to change things.
While admittedly current programming languages are developed with English speakers in mind and thus use English in their design, what is to prevent say the Chinese government with evolving a new programming language based on Mandarin for use inside China? They are an ever growing economic, political and population base, it wouldn't be impractical at all for someone to do this - and it would leave the rest of the programming world (or rather those who don't speak Mandarin) pretty much out in the cold.
It might even be possible that basing a programming language on a different spoken language might encourage different approaches to programming language design and concept?
Its a mildly interesting thought, luckily for me I grew up speaking English :P
Well, French, Spanish and Portuguese are all Romance languages (descendants of Latin), and since English is a Germanic Language with heavily borrowed French vocabulary, learning those languages is less difficult because we use many similar words. The same is true for English speakers learning German. However all of those languages rely on heavier grammatical inflexion than English, which has lost most of its inflexions. So while we speak of English words using the grammatical terms like Nominative and Genitive etc, in most cases the English word changes little if at all, whereas in all of the above languages, a noun in the genitive case is likely to undergo some changes. These sorts of changes can prove difficult to English speakers. Those languages also have gender for nouns, another thing English has almost lost.
Finnish on the other hand is from the Finno-Ugric branch of Indo-European Languages, and has far less in common with English, other than some recently imported loan words (many of which undergo changes such that we as English speakers would not recognize them).
To quote Wikipedia:
"Moreover, Finnish and English have a considerably different grammar, phonology and phonotactics, discouraging direct borrowing. English loan words in Finnish slang include for example pleikkari "PlayStation", hodari "hot dog", and hedari "headache". Often these loanwords are distinctly identified as slang or jargon, rarely being used in a negative mood or in formal language. Since English and Finnish grammar, pronunciation and phonetics differ considerably, most loan words are inevitably sooner or later calqued â" translated into native Finnish â" retaining the semantic meaning."
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Language
Finnish thus resembles English pretty much not at all. I expect it would be more work to learn Finnish for an English speaker, than it would be to learn French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, or German etc.
Now I grant it will be likely easier to learn Finnish that say Chinese but that's primarily due to the difficulty non-tone-language speakers have in trying to pick up a tonal language. When their are, say, 8 different ways to pronounce the word /yi/ us poor English speakers are going to get easily confused when trying to remember them. Someone who grew up speaking a tone language would be more aware of the tones themselves and probably have an easier time learning things. That said, I believe Chinese (although as a non-speaker I am not sure) is pretty simple grammatically, so if you can get past the tones, the language is probably not that hard to learn. The writing system is of course another matter and undoubtedly represents a considerable barrier to learning any variety of Chinese. Finnish on the other hand probably has a lot of grammatical inflections to master, and the words will not resemble anything you know in English or other romance languages.
Or you know, they could install Bootcamp, install a copy of XP, and play all those games under Windows if they don't find the game they want available under OS/X (and a lot more are now these days I think). Yes, you do have to endure the substandard quality OS that is XP, but you can use it just for playing games then reboot back into a real OS when you are done.
That may sound snotty, but it isn't intended to. I used PCs running various versions of DOS and Windows - and ones running various versions of Linux at times - from 1988 or so until 2007. In 2007 I switched to running Macs (a 20" Imac at home, dualbooting XP for games, and a 24" Imac at work). Why? Because its a vastly superior operating system environment. Because OS/X is a unix underneath so I can run most Linux software or find its equivalent already ported without any problems. Because I got tired of constantly repairing small problems in my PCs, let alone the constant incremental upgrades, the need to reinstall XP every 6 months because its filled up with cruft again. I develop web-based applications, and I prefer the OS/X environment and the Mac Hardware to any PC I have ever used running any other OS I have tried - Linux obviously is a close second here, and Windows is back in the land of Fisher-Price toys by comparison. After running OS/X, MS XP feels like a well-design hack job, a toy operating system used for games. It certainly doesn't seem well designed, well thought out, or professional in any regard.
The so called $500 logo cost is also complete bullshit. Find a PC that has all the same features of a particular Mac and the same quality of production/components etc and you should find the costs are not that different. Plus $125 for Leopard is Apple lowering the cost because they wanted to make it more affordable to upgrade I think. If XP Home is priced at what $350 Cdn right now - and I wouldn't give you piss in a pot for it to be honest - Leopard ought to be priced at about $450-600 Cdn. There are too many nice little features about it, not to mention major ones, that any comparison between them palls.
Well the UN might be able to accomplish functional things and even evolve into a government of a sort but not until all the current countries can part with their rabid nationalism. Until then we will remain as a species only a few steps above the tribal level.
As it stands now, I am proud to be a Canadian, I love Canadian cultural values and morales, and deep in my heart would love to see the rest of the world become just like me and be Canadians too. Of course they undoubtedly feel the same way about their own country and ideals etc. What that really says I suppose is that until the differences between any two people on earth are pretty negligible we won't be able to move past national governments and attitudes. Thus, begun the cultural wars have! Until that's won and we all are one homogeneous mass with no cultural identities, I guess we have nationalism and more or less continuous wars.
And this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_0oWqOLpo4&NR=1
This is much better than the ones above in my opinion and it doesn't simply make a play on the Mac/PC adds from Apple like Novell's ads did earlier.
This is pretty classy if a bit obscure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgo3BBgWDA&NR=1
And this one, long but well done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVwnxKOpxqU&NR=1
Not as good and playing off the MS "I'am a PC" ads:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONhGoxFqNWc&NR=1
At least for an online game, have the computer watch what players do in a given situation and then randomly mimic their actions. A rating system based on success can provide a tree of effective responses to choose from and remove the less optimal solutions. That way the first time someone plays the game the AI is pretty minimal (limited to the actions of the beta testers etc) but after that can learn to heuristically analyze the actions that proved the most successful in the past. The result should ideally be that the game gets tougher the more the player (or the more players) plays it, which will likely work out because the players will also be getting better at the game. Want an easier setting? set the threshold for the most acceptable NPC options lower so that they choose a wider range of options including ones that were less rewarding in practice.
LITTLE BOXES (with apologies to Malvina Reynolds & Pete Seger)
Little boxes on the internet
Little boxes with no security
Little boxes running Conficker
Little boxes all the same
There's a Dell one, and an Asus one
And a HP one and a Sony one,
And they have the Conficker
And they all spread it just the same
And the people on the internet
Represent a great diversity
But no one taught them to use their boxes
And they all learned just the same
They all use Windows, and don't use AV
And open executables
And now they're all in the botnet
And help expand it every day
Sorry that's all I could come up with while at work :P
It has a few minor texture display problems for me, mostly involving textures on items in the very far distance etc. Other than that its been running better than the windows client did when I was booted into XP under Bootcamp
The client is free for download, all you need to do is get it and sign up your account.
Here's a guide to the Mac version:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12899365&an=0&page=0#Post12899365
You can then visit:
ftp://client.coh.com/US/
and download the client dmg and the updater
there should be some instructions near the end of this thread I think:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12897870&an=0&page=0#Post12897870
Or you can just buy it for $20 and download it online, just make sure to apply the code you get to your original account so the benefits apply to your old account and not some new account :P
Well as someone who has played City of Heroes off and on since day 1, I can't say its dying at all. NCSoft is continuing to improve and expand the game - and all expansions are free of charge. The only expansion they charged for was City of Villains which was essentially a completely new game environment using similar mechanics. Both games are now merged into one.
There are still a ton of people playing new low level alts, and the game is going strong in my opinion. The game does have an extremely low churn rate as someone noted, and its evident by the fact that so many new characters are regularly being generated and played.
Mission Architect is coming out in the next expansion and it holds the promise to revolutionize the MMO industry in one regard: It allows players to create their own missions, their own NPC opponents, define their own story arcs and define a series of related missions, up to 5. It allows access to all of the existing NPC opponents and the modification of them to have their own powersets and appearances. Once created a mission can be uploaded so that the rest of the playerbase can try it out and rate it. The best rated missions/arcs will be examined by the devs and added to the canon of the game. There is a tremendous interest in this of course, and I think if it proves enjoyable, that this will raise the bar on MMO design considerably.
Although its filling the Superhero MMO niche and that is not to everyone's taste, the game is a fantastic design, and very effective in what its set out to achieve. MA is just another large step in improving the game and its due out soon I believe. Its in private beta at the moment, and usually NCSoft will bring that public for a few weeks to iron out any last bugs before it goes live.
The biggest advantage for NCSoft if they get MA working right is of course that the players will be adding to the content of the game, making it far easier to add other improvements to the game by taking off the pressure to add new missions and opponents (although of course someone will have to be fixing problems with MA in the meantime). I expect this will allow them to expand the game in other areas. They do not seem like they are slowing down at all.
COH probably seems like its a stagnant game to many players who are not familiar with it primarily because most of the expansions (COV aside) have been offered free to the players. Thus there are no new boxes showing up on the shelves at regular intervals.
They recently added a Mac OS/X client (well really its the Windows client with cedega back end support) that works *very well* at least in my experience. The client was available for download for free and still is. Yes, you can *buy* it and get some added in game bonuses (costume items, and a Teleport-straight-to-mission power), but you can also buy those bonuses separately for a nominal fee.
All in all I hope Champions Online does well, and I will certainly try it. It may indeed draw a lot of the playerbase away from COH, but for the moment COH is going quite strong actually and still has a bright future in my opinion.
When I was in the Canadian military it was a common "initiation rite" for new soldiers in a unit to be given ridiculous tasks to see how bright they are or how much attention they paid during training. One popular one at my unit was to send the newbie out to get Diesel Sparkplugs for one of our diesel trucks. Diesel engines do not of course require sparkplugs, but most newbie soldiers wouldn't know this, so off they would go to the unit Supply section only to be told there were none in stock but they could try Base supply - who would immediately know what was up and send them off to a different unit supply in the hopes of begging some etc. With luck this could keep a particularly ignorant soldier busy for half a day before someone pointed out to them that they had been "had". Smart ones would of course catch on immediately and point out that such a thing didn't exist etc.
What always got me was that some people would fall for items which should have been immediately obviously bogus - like sending someone out to a reel of 100' of Shoreline - as if it was a type of rope etc. However every year along would come some private asking if we had any shoreline...
I can't say as Canadian forces basic ever had you trying to solve a problem lacking all of the required resources but there were definitely similar tests that required you to solve a problem that appeared to be unsolvable as an attempt to build up cooperation and resourcefulness.
The one I will always remember was waxing the floors in the barracks during basic. Essentially the floors had to be waxed in preparation for the morning inspection (about 6:30 AM). Since we were often kept busy until 9:30 PM and lights out were at 10 PM (and the instructors came through to ensure that everyone not on Fire Picket was in bed and all the lights were out at 10 PM), there was simply no time to actually strip and wax the floors. The solution: immediately after the Instructors came through the barracks (walking on the floors of course), the Fire Pickets woke everyone up and we all used tape and garbage bags to cover up all the windows in the barracks so that no light would escape. Then everyone got up in their underwear and we rewaxed the floors and cleaned up the shower areas etc, with an array of blankets making a walkway up and down the barracks. Once everything was completed, we all got back into position in our bunk areas, remade our beds (including ironing the sheets and pillow cases so they were perfect), then the fire pickets turned out the lights and we removed the garbage bags and tape and hid them again. We then slept on the beds in reverse (your head went at the foot end and you used the spare blanket that had formed your walkway earlier and your feet went at the head end (it made less of an impact on the ironing). In the morning you got up, got dressed ready for inspection, then replaced the spare blanket carefully at the foot of the bed, picked up the pillows off the floor and put them in place then stood ready for inspection. All in all you got about 5h sleep each night, but the floors were perfectly polished, the bathrooms were clean etc all with zero time apparently devoted to the process. All completely chickenshit stuff, but it built up a spirit of cooperation between soldiers headed for different trades very well. By the end of basic (when they relaxed the standards a bit anyways) we had it down to a science and it could all be done in no time.