I would think another problem might be that if you opt for a commercial solution you have no guarantee that the company and its software will continue to exist in the future. With FOSS the author(s) might stop writing it and companies that support it might come and go, but you always have the option of hiring a developer to expand and improve it if you wish to do so. With commercial software your only choice is to continue to use a deteriorating product, or switch to something else.
Well, the first few we resurrect will be interesting and a tourist attraction and all that, but once the public is used to them there has to be a practical application.
I went desktop, but the principal is the same. I dualboot into XP to play my Windows games, and for anything serious, I use the Mac side. I have no regrets. I just fine everything more intuitive and stable under OS/X and I can use the native software, or run *nix programs or run an emulator for anything I have to run in Windows under OS/X. I don't think the extra cost was a waste at all, as my 20" Imac at home is a very slick system, and extremely well thought out overall.
From 1988 until just last year I ran PCs only and I have no regrets over no longer having to fuck around with system configurations or fight the OS to get it to do what it says its doing, etc. I am glad to be out of the business of constantly incrementally upgrading my system every time MS issued a new version of their OS etc. I am sure I spent far more on all those little transaction than I would have if I had just bout a Mac originally. Now, its true that when I go to upgrade I will need to buy a whole new machine, but the old one will have retained considerably more value than a comparable PC would so the difference should be less than you would think.
At work my company bought me a brand new 24" Imac and its a glorious system to do development on.
I am not a fanboi, just a thorough convert. If games are all thats keeping you from buying a Mac, go buy a Mac and a cheap copy of XP. I think you will be quite happy with the results. After using OS/X for the past year, I now think of Windows as a "Toy" Operating system suitable for games only. Anything else requires a professional and well design OS (Yes, I could be running Linux, and have done so in the past, but OS/X offers me everything I need and is a *nix in any case).
I believe these volumes only cover the NSA up until 1989, so missing out on 9/11 predictions is probably not their fault. Unless you want to blame the Men who stared at goats for failing to psychically predict the attack, and that was an US Army operation anyways.
Perhaps that should be put on its head: Head sizes are continuing to grow, ergo C-sections are becoming much more common, luckily they are relatively safe:P
Ah but if they remove all the references to the female character who constantly pulls on her braids we can condense it down into just about 25 hrs of film.
I can't remember her name. But the memory of the author telling us she was fiddling with her hair every 10 sentences has remained forever in my mind as the poster child for how not to assign a recognizable characteristic to a character, then abuse it far too often.
I read the first few books and honestly wanted to like them but they were just so badly written and the characters were so flat and boring that I gave up around book 5. Matt is the only character I can recall liking a lot. Jordan seemed to just be padding them to sell more books and not getting to the meat of the story and he was an awful writer IMHO. That said, I did enjoy what I read much more than I enjoyed the Thomas Covenant books:P
Some day we will finally visit other star systems with inhabitable planets and discover the truth - all alien plant life looks identical to a Canadian Forest, except for the parts that look like Californian deserts of course.
Oh and all alien cities will look like LA, just like all North American cities look like some part of LA.
The Cuecat is still tremendously useful for the folks at librarything. My wife has one and it has proven a real timesaver given we have about 2000 books or so on our shelves
"Having a real OS might shave off a few fps, but it allows you to set up your hardware just the once, and have it work in all of your software."
That said, I still end up trying to configure the settings on games to get them to work correctly with XP. Right now my Warhammer Online crashes to the desktop every 5 to 10 mins or so with no apparent cause. I have tried almost everything I can think of to fix the problem with no joy.
At least with DOS-based games the number of things that needed to be configured was less, but I don't remember trying to squeeze out more free RAM with any great fondness thats for sure:P
It would be nice if MS could write a stable OS thats good for my gaming, since thats all I can see using Windows for. For anything serious I use my Imac, its just so much easier, faster and intuitive. Windows has been relegated to being a "toy" OS to me now that I made the switch to Mac.
The original game had massive potential, it was a wide open sandbox environment where you could feel free to be part of a huge civilization. It felt natural and realistic in some ways that every other MMO has failed to achieve. The character creation system was nothing short of brilliant. The crafting system was also far in advance of anything else before or since.
Yes, it had massive faults. The whole Jedi fiasco and holocron unlocking etc was an absolutely pathetic way to implement Jedi. The combat system was and remains horrible. The quests lacked for something as well and were always rather lifeless - but then I *hate* quests in any MMO so I am naturally biased.
However, no game since has let me play a character who was just an Entertainer - in a highly flexible manner that allowed for some real creativity. No MMO has let me just be a crafter and participate in "economic pvp" with other crafters in a completely player driven economy. Nothing has even come close. Now, those 2 styles of gameplay are not for everyone, nor are they all I did (I mastered 19 professions of the 32 on my main character, none of it done for Hologrinding for Jedi (I had no interest in being a Jedi), but just for the hell of it and to try new things).
The game just kept slipping downhill with each major revision. The development team that replaced the original developers just didn't get the original design at all, and tried to warp it into a poorman's WOW clone/standard MMO. The NGE (Negative Game Enhancement) has to be the singlemost botched attempt of how to develop an MMO in gaming history and should be the industry standard textbook case on what NOT to do. That was foisted on the SWG developers by Lucasarts from what we can deduce and they were told it was going live with (pretty much) zero testing no matter what. I don't think the SWG developers saw it coming, since they had been developing new content and changes right up until the hammer fell - why bother announcing a whole new Creature Handler class system when you know that it will never go live?
I hope Bioware is intelligent enough to take a few good things from SWG and ignore the rest (including the entire combat system), and doesn't just produce another fucking WOW clone in the hopes of getting a huge playerbase. The IP has the most massive potential of any intellectual property out there and it would be a shame to see another pathetic game that emulates WOW's crappy "easy-mode" design again, and instead I would rather see something that lives up to the potential.
I am worried about their "entirely story driven" promises since picking any one single approach to MMO design is a major mistake IMHO. I hate quests and hate being ramrodded into someone else's idea of my character's "story" (ie exactly like everyone else's story). I want a sandbox system where the story is what I do with my character and I am free to lose myself in an alien environment I can immerse myself in. Sadly I don't think that most people get the attraction of that sort of environment because no one is coding them these days.
I used to be in the Canadian Military reserve many years ago. I got posted to CFB Penhold in Alberta and while I waited for a course to start up they put me on the military switchboard, down in the "hole" (50 ft down under 30 feet of concrete and tons of earth etc). The number for the bunker I worked in was 1 digit different than that for a local pizza joint. So at 2am I would get calls that went like this:
Me: Hello, Alberta Regional Emergency Government Headquarters, CFB Penhold, can I help you?
Them: Ya, can I get a large... Oh, I was calling for a pizza...
Me: Well you have reached a nuclear bomb shelter. I suggest you check the number and call again:)
Them:... <click>
Sometimes this happened more than once if they were drunk enough. Similarly I would get people calling me to ask what the weather was like, and I would have to explain I was a long ways under ground with many feet of steel and concrete over me so I had absolutely no idea.
Since I game online with my RL friends, mostly in MMOs, I have combined social aspects of gaming with the gaming itself.
I have in fact given up regular games entirely in favour of MMOs for the past 5 years or so. I prefer that environment overall, and since I don't do consoles the social gaming aspect of having my friends over to play is non-existent.
We play our MMOs online then meet for food or coffee etc later on every once in a while.
First off, downloading something rather than buying it does not mean that the industry lost a sale they might have made had the person bought the IP in question. Getting something "for free" by downloading it means you got access to it without incurring a cost. There is no guarantee that you would have taken the chance on buying the item in question on the speculation that you will enjoy it and feel the expense was justified.
I have in fact downloaded a few tunes illegally, even a movie or two. I do so very rarely as I am not much of an audiophile at all. I have however usually had 2 responses when I am done: either I 1) liked the item in question and went out and bought the album (sometimes more than 1 album if the band was something I liked), or bought the DVD because owning a physical copy of it makes more sense to me than simply having an file that may end up lost with a HD crash or corrupted by something down the road, and because I believe in supporting artists I appreciate. or 2) I end up deleting the toon or movie because its crap and I don't enjoy it. Why keep something I didn't like on my system?
I have, without any doubt in my mind, spent more money on buying things I downloaded than I have cost the entertainment industry in supposed "lost" sales. While I know there are people out there who download anything and everything and never buy anything physical as a result, I would like to suggest that are also people like me who treat downloading as as sort of "try before you buy" system, and the entertainment industry *never* seems to take that into any account at all. Furthermore they seem to take every instance of a download as a guaranteed lost sale, then like to inflate the impact of that download by some imaginary number of other people who also grabbed the torrent from me while I downloaded it, when there can be no real basis for their math on that. Essentially, the entertainment industry should be the *last* authority you can rely on for statistics on lost sales because they have zero interest in providing an accurate estimate.
Its great to see the Ars article debunking these outrageous figures, it would be greater to see the US Government require them to explain exactly how these figures were arrived at the next time they come up, because its pretty much guaranteed they are all smoke and mirrors.
I was looking forward to trying this game out, but almost immediately after getting it set up and patched I decided I would never end up playing it - simply because everything was instanced, and nothing destroys the suspension of disbelief better for me than having to wait to load into an instance, or being aware that I am in an instance and the world around me is only so many yards square in size.
There were other elements that bugged me, but the continuous instancing combined with new-game lag did it in for me.
Now playing WAR, which while it does have instances is at least a fun game.
I long for someone to make a true sandbox like game, a la the original Star Wars Galaxies again, but I doubt it will happen, simply because if WOW doesn't do it, no one will gain support for attempting it again. sigh.
My wife and I both have subscriptions to WAR (or will when the free month is up) and both have active subscriptions to City of Heroes at the moment. My wife has a lifetime subscription to Lord of the Rings Online. I admit I will be likely cancelling my COH subscription - at least until issue 14 comes out at any rate, but there have been many times in the past when I had 2 active subscriptions going at any time, sometimes 3. The cost of doing so is far less than the cost of any other kind of entertainment, and about comparable with paying for cable.
Recently my wife and I decided to cut off our cable completely because we spend very little time watching TV shows that are live (due to the ads) and while we do PVR a lot of shows (so we can skip the ads etc), we aren't watching enough to justify it.
Certainly I would drop going to movies first before I did without my MMO gaming. Not that I play a lot, about an hour a night, perhaps 2. Certainly not more than what most people watch TV for.
Well all research ought to be potentially good. You never know when something important may arise from seemingly unimportant research, provided its conducted properly. A seemingly unimportant fact that emerges from this research may prove to be important when applied to someone else's research down the road.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft has no real casa belle for this"
Beautiful House? Oh, I think you mean Casus Belli = "Cause for War" in Latin, although I admit I could have the spelling wrong myself :P
that you are describing :P
I would think another problem might be that if you opt for a commercial solution you have no guarantee that the company and its software will continue to exist in the future. With FOSS the author(s) might stop writing it and companies that support it might come and go, but you always have the option of hiring a developer to expand and improve it if you wish to do so. With commercial software your only choice is to continue to use a deteriorating product, or switch to something else.
Well, the first few we resurrect will be interesting and a tourist attraction and all that, but once the public is used to them there has to be a practical application.
Mammoth Burgers sound good to me :)
I use a Dvorak Keyboard you insensitive clods!
Nah you wan to run OpenB1BSD, even more secure :P
I went desktop, but the principal is the same. I dualboot into XP to play my Windows games, and for anything serious, I use the Mac side. I have no regrets. I just fine everything more intuitive and stable under OS/X and I can use the native software, or run *nix programs or run an emulator for anything I have to run in Windows under OS/X. I don't think the extra cost was a waste at all, as my 20" Imac at home is a very slick system, and extremely well thought out overall.
From 1988 until just last year I ran PCs only and I have no regrets over no longer having to fuck around with system configurations or fight the OS to get it to do what it says its doing, etc. I am glad to be out of the business of constantly incrementally upgrading my system every time MS issued a new version of their OS etc. I am sure I spent far more on all those little transaction than I would have if I had just bout a Mac originally. Now, its true that when I go to upgrade I will need to buy a whole new machine, but the old one will have retained considerably more value than a comparable PC would so the difference should be less than you would think.
At work my company bought me a brand new 24" Imac and its a glorious system to do development on.
I am not a fanboi, just a thorough convert. If games are all thats keeping you from buying a Mac, go buy a Mac and a cheap copy of XP. I think you will be quite happy with the results. After using OS/X for the past year, I now think of Windows as a "Toy" Operating system suitable for games only. Anything else requires a professional and well design OS (Yes, I could be running Linux, and have done so in the past, but OS/X offers me everything I need and is a *nix in any case).
I believe these volumes only cover the NSA up until 1989, so missing out on 9/11 predictions is probably not their fault. Unless you want to blame the Men who stared at goats for failing to psychically predict the attack, and that was an US Army operation anyways.
[Redacted]
Perhaps that should be put on its head: Head sizes are continuing to grow, ergo C-sections are becoming much more common, luckily they are relatively safe :P
Ah but if they remove all the references to the female character who constantly pulls on her braids we can condense it down into just about 25 hrs of film.
I can't remember her name. But the memory of the author telling us she was fiddling with her hair every 10 sentences has remained forever in my mind as the poster child for how not to assign a recognizable characteristic to a character, then abuse it far too often.
I read the first few books and honestly wanted to like them but they were just so badly written and the characters were so flat and boring that I gave up around book 5. Matt is the only character I can recall liking a lot. Jordan seemed to just be padding them to sell more books and not getting to the meat of the story and he was an awful writer IMHO. That said, I did enjoy what I read much more than I enjoyed the Thomas Covenant books :P
You mean "200 containers of refined 40% alcohol-based development solution" placed on order from its Mexican manufacturing plant :P
I for one, would like to welcome our new Quantum Ghost Imaging Overlords...
Some day we will finally visit other star systems with inhabitable planets and discover the truth - all alien plant life looks identical to a Canadian Forest, except for the parts that look like Californian deserts of course.
Oh and all alien cities will look like LA, just like all North American cities look like some part of LA.
The Cuecat is still tremendously useful for the folks at librarything. My wife has one and it has proven a real timesaver given we have about 2000 books or so on our shelves
http://www.librarything.com/cuecat
So perhaps in some instances it has a real and viable purpose?
"Fixed that for you. When it comes to Quantum, you can never be too certain"
Are you sure about that?
"Having a real OS might shave off a few fps, but it allows you to set up your hardware just the once, and have it work in all of your software."
That said, I still end up trying to configure the settings on games to get them to work correctly with XP. Right now my Warhammer Online crashes to the desktop every 5 to 10 mins or so with no apparent cause. I have tried almost everything I can think of to fix the problem with no joy.
At least with DOS-based games the number of things that needed to be configured was less, but I don't remember trying to squeeze out more free RAM with any great fondness thats for sure :P
It would be nice if MS could write a stable OS thats good for my gaming, since thats all I can see using Windows for. For anything serious I use my Imac, its just so much easier, faster and intuitive. Windows has been relegated to being a "toy" OS to me now that I made the switch to Mac.
The original game had massive potential, it was a wide open sandbox environment where you could feel free to be part of a huge civilization. It felt natural and realistic in some ways that every other MMO has failed to achieve. The character creation system was nothing short of brilliant. The crafting system was also far in advance of anything else before or since. Yes, it had massive faults. The whole Jedi fiasco and holocron unlocking etc was an absolutely pathetic way to implement Jedi. The combat system was and remains horrible. The quests lacked for something as well and were always rather lifeless - but then I *hate* quests in any MMO so I am naturally biased. However, no game since has let me play a character who was just an Entertainer - in a highly flexible manner that allowed for some real creativity. No MMO has let me just be a crafter and participate in "economic pvp" with other crafters in a completely player driven economy. Nothing has even come close. Now, those 2 styles of gameplay are not for everyone, nor are they all I did (I mastered 19 professions of the 32 on my main character, none of it done for Hologrinding for Jedi (I had no interest in being a Jedi), but just for the hell of it and to try new things). The game just kept slipping downhill with each major revision. The development team that replaced the original developers just didn't get the original design at all, and tried to warp it into a poorman's WOW clone/standard MMO. The NGE (Negative Game Enhancement) has to be the singlemost botched attempt of how to develop an MMO in gaming history and should be the industry standard textbook case on what NOT to do. That was foisted on the SWG developers by Lucasarts from what we can deduce and they were told it was going live with (pretty much) zero testing no matter what. I don't think the SWG developers saw it coming, since they had been developing new content and changes right up until the hammer fell - why bother announcing a whole new Creature Handler class system when you know that it will never go live? I hope Bioware is intelligent enough to take a few good things from SWG and ignore the rest (including the entire combat system), and doesn't just produce another fucking WOW clone in the hopes of getting a huge playerbase. The IP has the most massive potential of any intellectual property out there and it would be a shame to see another pathetic game that emulates WOW's crappy "easy-mode" design again, and instead I would rather see something that lives up to the potential. I am worried about their "entirely story driven" promises since picking any one single approach to MMO design is a major mistake IMHO. I hate quests and hate being ramrodded into someone else's idea of my character's "story" (ie exactly like everyone else's story). I want a sandbox system where the story is what I do with my character and I am free to lose myself in an alien environment I can immerse myself in. Sadly I don't think that most people get the attraction of that sort of environment because no one is coding them these days.
I used to be in the Canadian Military reserve many years ago. I got posted to CFB Penhold in Alberta and while I waited for a course to start up they put me on the military switchboard, down in the "hole" (50 ft down under 30 feet of concrete and tons of earth etc). The number for the bunker I worked in was 1 digit different than that for a local pizza joint. So at 2am I would get calls that went like this:
Me: Hello, Alberta Regional Emergency Government Headquarters, CFB Penhold, can I help you?
Them: Ya, can I get a large... Oh, I was calling for a pizza...
Me: Well you have reached a nuclear bomb shelter. I suggest you check the number and call again :)
Them: ... <click>
Sometimes this happened more than once if they were drunk enough. Similarly I would get people calling me to ask what the weather was like, and I would have to explain I was a long ways under ground with many feet of steel and concrete over me so I had absolutely no idea.
Since I game online with my RL friends, mostly in MMOs, I have combined social aspects of gaming with the gaming itself. I have in fact given up regular games entirely in favour of MMOs for the past 5 years or so. I prefer that environment overall, and since I don't do consoles the social gaming aspect of having my friends over to play is non-existent. We play our MMOs online then meet for food or coffee etc later on every once in a while.
First off, downloading something rather than buying it does not mean that the industry lost a sale they might have made had the person bought the IP in question. Getting something "for free" by downloading it means you got access to it without incurring a cost. There is no guarantee that you would have taken the chance on buying the item in question on the speculation that you will enjoy it and feel the expense was justified.
I have in fact downloaded a few tunes illegally, even a movie or two. I do so very rarely as I am not much of an audiophile at all. I have however usually had 2 responses when I am done: either I 1) liked the item in question and went out and bought the album (sometimes more than 1 album if the band was something I liked), or bought the DVD because owning a physical copy of it makes more sense to me than simply having an file that may end up lost with a HD crash or corrupted by something down the road, and because I believe in supporting artists I appreciate. or 2) I end up deleting the toon or movie because its crap and I don't enjoy it. Why keep something I didn't like on my system?
I have, without any doubt in my mind, spent more money on buying things I downloaded than I have cost the entertainment industry in supposed "lost" sales. While I know there are people out there who download anything and everything and never buy anything physical as a result, I would like to suggest that are also people like me who treat downloading as as sort of "try before you buy" system, and the entertainment industry *never* seems to take that into any account at all. Furthermore they seem to take every instance of a download as a guaranteed lost sale, then like to inflate the impact of that download by some imaginary number of other people who also grabbed the torrent from me while I downloaded it, when there can be no real basis for their math on that. Essentially, the entertainment industry should be the *last* authority you can rely on for statistics on lost sales because they have zero interest in providing an accurate estimate.
Its great to see the Ars article debunking these outrageous figures, it would be greater to see the US Government require them to explain exactly how these figures were arrived at the next time they come up, because its pretty much guaranteed they are all smoke and mirrors.
I was looking forward to trying this game out, but almost immediately after getting it set up and patched I decided I would never end up playing it - simply because everything was instanced, and nothing destroys the suspension of disbelief better for me than having to wait to load into an instance, or being aware that I am in an instance and the world around me is only so many yards square in size.
There were other elements that bugged me, but the continuous instancing combined with new-game lag did it in for me.
Now playing WAR, which while it does have instances is at least a fun game.
I long for someone to make a true sandbox like game, a la the original Star Wars Galaxies again, but I doubt it will happen, simply because if WOW doesn't do it, no one will gain support for attempting it again. sigh.
Well to post a counterpoint:
My wife and I both have subscriptions to WAR (or will when the free month is up) and both have active subscriptions to City of Heroes at the moment. My wife has a lifetime subscription to Lord of the Rings Online. I admit I will be likely cancelling my COH subscription - at least until issue 14 comes out at any rate, but there have been many times in the past when I had 2 active subscriptions going at any time, sometimes 3. The cost of doing so is far less than the cost of any other kind of entertainment, and about comparable with paying for cable.
Recently my wife and I decided to cut off our cable completely because we spend very little time watching TV shows that are live (due to the ads) and while we do PVR a lot of shows (so we can skip the ads etc), we aren't watching enough to justify it.
Certainly I would drop going to movies first before I did without my MMO gaming. Not that I play a lot, about an hour a night, perhaps 2. Certainly not more than what most people watch TV for.
Well all research ought to be potentially good. You never know when something important may arise from seemingly unimportant research, provided its conducted properly. A seemingly unimportant fact that emerges from this research may prove to be important when applied to someone else's research down the road.
Hey at least he most likely works in the IT department there, not in Production "shudder"...