When she was struggling to recover from a concussion, she invented a game and enlisted friends and family as characters with tasks to fulfill, like coming over to cheer her up or keeping her off caffeine.
Releasing the originals is kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good. You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally. It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.
This is such BS it's hard to even understand. How much has changed since the originals? 3%, 5% tops? That means they have already remastered almost the entire movie. What the fans want from Lucas is to spend a little extra cash (which we will obviously end up paying for) and remaster the few scenes that you didn't from before (which should be minimal).
Then you need to go through and remove the crap you put in before, we want the original theatrical versions - Han shoots first, remove the crappy Jabba scene from ANH, take out the silly falling scream from Luke in ESB, and remove Hayden Christensen from the ghosts at the end and give me my celebrating Ewoks back from RotJ. Among other things.
It's interesting, I read that little blurb too. It immediately made me think of an episode of 'The Defenders'. Now, I know that it is just TV show but the same thing happened.
On the show, the defendant was simply driving some friends to a bar. In the bar the friends were shaking down the owner for some money that was owed. The friends didn't know that there were 4 off duty cops in there and one of the friends ends up shot and killed. The argument was that, even though he was outside, the defendant was participating and was thus able to be charge with the murder. His legal counsel argued that no murder actually took place. If what the homeowner did was considered 'justifiable homicide' then no one was actually murdered, therefore there was no crime actually committed (other than the break in) since you can't have a non-murder and a murder to the same person at the same time. This argument was successful on the show, not sure if it is the same in real life.
Leela: Hang on. Amy Wong? Of the Mars Wongs? Amy: Look, we're not as rich as everybody says. Leela: Uh-huh! What sorority do you belong to? Amy: Kappa Kappa Wong.
Farnsworth: This is quite a large ranch you have. Mr. Wong: 17.9 billion acres. We own entire western hemisphere. (whispering) That the best hemisphere! Farnsworth: It's the same on Earth.
This is the same stuff legislators were trying to pull with the motion picture industry. In the end a self-regulating body was put in place, accepted by the consumers and producers, and all is well. Do younger kids end up seeing violent or sexual movies? Sure, it can happen and there is recourse if a parent thinks a theater isn't adhering to the system. TV has it's rating system that is enabled by the V-chip and controlled by the household authority (presumably the parents). All gaming systems (computers too? I assume so) have this in place, so why isn't the ESRB given the same right?
If this was something as simple as unrated pornographic games that 8-year-olds were getting a hold of, I would be inclined to agree with the legislation. This isn't the case. This is parents being unwilling to take the 30 seconds to check the rating on a game or, baring that, spending some time with their kid seeing what they are consuming. Meanwhile, legislators in the bankrupt state of California have more pressing matters to deal with than trying to subvert the Constitution.
That said, the conservative court will drop this one like a bad habit. It already has precedence on it's side with movies and TV, a ratings system that works, and that little thing called the first amendment. IANAL but I doubt there will be more than 1 or 2 dissenters - possibly one of the whacko judges, ie Clarence Thomas.
Rogue nations with nukes aren't dangerous because they might use them, they are dangerous because they might sell or lose them to an extremist group who will. There are those you trust with things like this and those you don't. Fascists/Dictators/Fundamentalists are at the top of the list of the untrustworthy.
A shooting is a national headline in a country which has 31 guns per 100 residents (Sweden). USA does have 90 guns per 100 residents (according to wikipedia) but 31 is not a low number. Why is gun crime not just 1/3 of what it is in the USA?
Different rules and different mentality?
Or are the other 60 guns per 100 persons mostly handguns and sprayfire weapons specialized for killing people and no good for hunting?
What has skewed the gun violence in America is the gang problem we have all over the country. I don't have any statistics for you but I'm sure that increases our gun crime rate significantly. It definitely increases the gun-related murder rate significantly.
Speaking from experience, very few gun owners in the US have guns that are not either used for personal safety or hunting. Head to any sporting goods store and you'll see rows and rows of rifles that are all used for hunting with a few exceptions. A significant ratio of the handguns can be used for hunting but are typically for personal safety. But it's not like we can purchase 'sprayfire' (I assume you mean automatic) weapons in WalMart. Any weapons like that are either licensed, documented, and regulated, or simply illegal.
If it was just as easy as 'more guns = more gun violence' then we would've seen that happen, but we haven't. And cities that have or had full gun bans (Washington D.C. and Chicago) had some of the highest gun-related crime and violence.
I agree. However the B5 (as well as Farscape's) endings were damaged by uncertain (or lacking) funding for the final seasons. As such I'd put them on a roughly even footing.
I can't talk about Farscape as I didn't watch more than a handful of shows, but I just cant accept you considering BSG equal to B5. Go watch B5 again and things that happen in the 5th season are clearly spelled out in the 1st. The arc never deviates, the characters are a part of it but it's all predetermined.
The problem with shows that pull the 'hints about the future' card is that they have to deliver. If someone doesn't have an idea of the entire arc and forces the writers to stay within that arc then you are just setting yourself up for failure.
This can be seen in many shows: Lost, Alias, and, yes, BSG.
I saw a show years ago about this same situation. People start to think that seatbelts and airbags will save them and take more risks. The auto-safety expert joked that they should put a big spike coming out of the stearing column and then people might actually drive a little more within their limits.
As for older cars feeling safer, they definitely weren't. Each generation is progressively better no matter how fast their top speed is. I have driven a Model T and a Model A (both owned by my father). They were restored as close to factory specs as one could get, they weren't hot rods.
The Model T was very unsafe just due to the fact that if you got hit or hit someone else you were almost guaranteed to be thrown from the vehicle. The Model A is a huge step forward and had many, many safety improvements over the T. Much better brakes and steering, bumpers, improved headlights, and a much better suspension. With just an increase in luxury and power you would be safer, but the threshold is just pushed a little farther and you still die but at a faster speed. The same steering column to crush your chest, hard surfaces to crush your skull, and a very low chance that the doors will stay closed and not eject you or crush you within on a rollover. Still a net positive but not much.
On a side note, realizing this my father put in seatbelts in the A. That's not what Ford had designed, but he'd rather his family live through an accident.
No, The PvP is done wrong, very very wrong. There's something wrong when you have to wait over 2 hours for instance based PvP.
You are describing WoW before they did cross-server battlegrounds, and even since those have been in it can be a very long wait on battlegroups that are heavy for one side or another.
Balancing issue is an extreme understatement. Why? Because when you lock down an account to play only order or destro, you better make sure there are even numbers of order vs. destro on the server, and even so it still can be uneven due to the fact not everybody plays PvP.
I said population can be a problem, that was one of the issues on the server I was on. Eventually people switch sides and it balances out. Once again, in WoW almost all the servers were heavy Alliance when the game launched.
The classes are far from balanced, so what you can do tons of damage, if you die in 3 hits, your attack power means nothing. And how convenient for the melees that almost every one of them got a ranged attack that can slow people down.
I can't really discuss how balanced the game is at the level cap because I didn't get there. However, I didn't enjoy when Order got their knockback about 10 levels before Destruction. That made many of the scenarios heavily favored for Order until things balanced out. When I left, at level 26, ranged casters (Bright Wizards/Sorceress') were doing far too much damage and 3 shotting melee before they got in range. But Balancing issues are somewhat par for the course in MMOs. Everyone talks as though WoW was perfectly balanced since launch, which obviously isn't true.
The RvR level is a good concept, but they implemented in such a bad way that made RvR level totally pointless....
Good god, you're probably happy with the abortion that is WoW's new arena ranking system. Plain fact is that MMOs aren't as simple as a ranking system for Chess or Go. In those games there isn't one type of player that can move a knight differently, move more pieces at once, etc. So some people would match up better than others. In those cases if you get unlucky and meet a a player around your ranking that you don't match up against and you lose you'll go down - and you might not be able to win no matter what you do. There's no simple or even complex math that would probably work to deal with all the combinations of races, classes, and talents. Welcome to class based games.
I am not saying Blizzard is doing any better, but Mythic simply are not up to par and what you said are baseless and invalid.
So because I don't agree that the game is 'absolute junk' all my comments are 'baseless and invalid'. Great job. So you are saying that PQs and public parties suck? I totally disagree, they are revolutionary. As for the seige mechanics, they are better. Busting down the door to a keep takes more than just a mindless zerg (that's how Wintergrasp works).
WoW's Wintergrasp is the joke. The defending team can't win and the attacking team can't lose. Now that's a great PvP system./sarcasm
Given the right leadership and drive, I would really like to see an MMO spring up around an unlicenced universe (not one of the done-to-death and copyrighted to hell ones like Star Wars or LoTR) but one that is perhaps by an obscure author and in the public domain.
This has been done and they were called MUDs. Any MUD worth it's salt was a fork in one of the many OS MUD codebases and was highly customized. A lot of them were based on private domain IP (Star Wars, LOTR, D&D, etc) because they flew under the radar by being free to play.
The problem with MUDs, and OSS in general, is management. People come and go, make good decisions and bad, and it can all disappear overnight because a few of the devs just aren't interested in continuing working on or hosting the thing. Customers wouldn't be too happy building up a character for months or years and then just have it disappear overnight.
At launch, they had *far* too many servers, they had wayyyy more servers than WoW had at launch.
The pre-sale numbers, which I think were reported as the best for any MMO ever, dictated that they'd need that many servers. WoW had way too few servers at launch only because they underestimated. They were forced to stop selling the game for 3 or 4 months so that their infrastructure could catch up. They weren't ready for success and it nearly crushed them.
With WoW, I purchased one of the last boxes of the game which I called around to every store in the area I was living just over 2 months after launch. This was late January. I know some of my friends couldn't get a copy of the game for at least another couple of months, and even then you were on a waiting list somewhere.
This game is absolute junk and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.
I think a lot of people would say that 'absolute junk' is an extreme overstatement. It's flawed but definitely does some things correctly.
The PvP is done right, although there were balancing issues. I don't know how this panned out at the level cap because I never made it. I wanted to play a healer and tried a Zealot but the leveling was bad - just like leveling a priest was in WoW in the beginning.
The idea and implementation of the public quest was great, and the open parties were awesome too. These are things you will probably see in every MMO from here on out. The siege mechanics were light-years better than the Wintergrasp crap that Blizzard is trying to throw into WoW.
Obviously a lot of people went back to WoW and I was one of them. I actually think Blizzard could learn from Mythic and shut down a bunch of their low-pop servers but they are making too much money forcing people to transfer for $25 a pop.
Wearing a suit and tie into space wasn't integral to the plot.... These genetically perfect people would get into space and then get exposed to elevated levels of radiation which would invalidate their DNA.
I see what you're saying but I think the reason is that they were the genetic superiors who could physically handle the trip while being the only ones smart enough to perform whatever science function the trip was for. Since the 'natural' people had already been relegated to crappier jobs due to their DNA profile they would probably have limited exposure to schooling, etc., that would get them anywhere close to an advanced career.
That movie made no sense to me. Why risk your genetically engineered pretty people on dangerous space activities when you have a huge pile of willing and eager natural borns to do the job? In other words, it should work the other way around.
That's your hangup for the movie? Not the fact that when they go into space they are wear suits - and not the space kind but the three-piece kind? Or the fact that they can supposedly keep any environment so clean that they can dust for DNA at any time?
The whole point of the movie is that people are genetically discriminated against and there's nothing that you can do about it. I don't want to ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it so I won't get into specifics but the moral and ethical questions and dilemmas are very well managed.
Honestly, it's real sci-fi, not the Star Wars definition of it. And it contiues to hold up to this day and is a very scary possibility (of course taken to the nth degree). Great performances by Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law.
Partly it's because they've completely changed the dynamic of every character (usually for the worst--Stewie is now more about "hiding in the closet" now than "take over the world and kill Lois"). Partly it's that the seem to rely more and more on the "like that time when" skits.
All the characters are better and funnier than they used to be. The Stewie character had to change eventually. Honestly, the 'wacky character that is obsessed with global domination' has been played out for a long time, almost as much as either a talking animal/inanimate object, or the self-obsessed, idiot dad. We've seen those things in comics forever and it really isn't much of a gag anymore. The Stewie/Brian-heavy episodes are the best. Anything else is like watching a Lisa- or Marge-heavy episode of The Simpsons. You get through it but you don't expect anything good.
The big question is where American Dad fits in all this. I'm not sure why they didn't just call it 'Another Family Guy' since you've got the idiot dad, the 'smarter than dad' mother, the talking animal (fish), the crazy wacky character (alien, although not bent on world domination), and the 2 kids who aren't interesting in the slightest.
People who head advocacy organizations, such as the Authors Guild, have to have issues they can push so as to get members of their groups to pay dues. If there are no real issues, they need to invent them.
This is more true then people realize.
Case in point: the city where I grew up is an industrial mill town where almost everyone is union. At some point in the late 70s/early 80s a union for barbers came through and unionized all the barbers there. And of course you pretty much had to join because the other union workers wouldn't go to a non-union barber shop. They were advocating for better pay, working conditions, etc. It sounded great to all those involved.
So what could possibly go wrong? Well for one, most barbers either owned, or co-owned, there own places so who were they protecting their jobs from? 'The man'? They were 'the man'. Secondly, the union tried to get uniform pricing across all barbers but this was a silly notion. A barber with experience had to charge the same as the new guy. Also, if someone was just plain better than another they still had to charge the same even though they could only see so many clients per day.
In the end the union failed because everyone realized they were paying dues for nothing. There are no longer any union barbers in the town and everyone sets their own prices to what the market will bear.
NOTE: As someone who comes from a family of union workers, I am not bashing unions. I am critical of the fact that in some places the market is better without them, especially in the case of skilled labor.
I don't want to downplay how great it is what EA is doing but BF:Heroes might be way to cartoony for many, and a lot of BF diehards are worried about how arcade the game appears to play.
I'm interested in trying it but I'm wary after seeing a video with players on the wings of planes, wearing kilts and weird hats. It's also not an FPS but is more of a third-person shooter.
To be honest though, the South Pacific maps are not historically inaccurate. Wake Island, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, etc. all are somewhat accurate for shape so any map they did of those would be very similar. I believe the video was gameplay from Wake Island.
If this was going to be a remake I'd prefer it include the European and Africa maps. There were more gems in there - Kursk, Battle of the Bulge, Market Garden, Stalingrad, Battleaxe - just to name a few. The variety was better too, the Pacific maps are all islands and palm trees.
I'll nit-pick this one: most astrology signs enter on the 23rd of a month and exit on the 22nd of the following. Therefore, Oct. 23 would put the Earth as a Scorpio, not a Libra.
In response to a joke that another poster did:
That explains the drama-queen mood and temperature swings, then.
I agree with the reply mostly here.
There are UI standards? Why didn't anyone tell me?
I get the sarcasm here, but I was alluding to TFA where he talks about menus being wherever the designer decides them to be, buttons, colors, and layout as well. I know Java Swing has a default the menu bar/tool bar location based on the look and feel. I can also make a Swing app indistinguishable from the desktop. Everything works just like the user would expect, the user only needs to learn the ins and outs of the app, not a non-standard design. But a bad dev can choose to go the non-standard route in any language.
The biggest reason to use web apps is cost of course. Enterprise GUI apps charge per installed seat, intranet apps are often concurrent users. Ease of use & installation are up there too, but these are all reasons for casual users: road warriors, bigwigs and other non-tech savvy people who aren't really interested in the application outside of how it can do some of the old paper-shuffling part of their job for them (80% of the users using 20% of the features). GUI apps are best for the back office staff who actually need to do lots of complex & varied office staff type stuff.
Smaller market, higher overheads - simple choice.
Like I said at the end of a different post, all apps have their place. The one I am working on now would be pretty disastrous as a web app, but others I've done as a native app would've been better served as a web app (not my decision on those).
How again did I get roped into arguing dissenting opinion here? I think I spend too much time playing devil's advocate on here lol.
I hate to use your shopping cart example because it is perfect as something that should be done as a web app but that's our context.
A traditional app doing the same thing could check the CC number in a separate thread while the user was filling out other information and not allow the save button to be enabled. That's much more user friendly then getting punted back to the same page. But I stress this is a bad example.
So unless there's an extremely good reason to install a desktop app (e.g. you really need complex local interaction, or are dealing with huge data such as video) why bother installing desktop software?
I've given one reason where installing a native app is worth it - the validation of complex user input - and that's certainly not the only positive.
I'm currently contracting as a UI developer working on an internal business application. The application isn't trivial and *could* be written as a web app but that doesn't mean it should be - and don't think they didn't consider it. The interaction that would have to be handled would be a nightmare for the user and it would probably get ignored and the million or so spent developing it would be wasted.
So I guess the moral of the story is that it's a case by case basis on whether to go to a traditional app or not. I think Flash/Flex and Silverlight are good middle ground since you can still run it in a browser but have rich client capabilities. The installation for those is very easy and some pretty impressive things can be done with them. Java certainly dropped the ball on this with regards to applets and webstart. Once you are past the more complex (compared with flash/silverlight) JRE installer, applets work and perform fine, but webstart isn't transparent enough, there are too many dialogs and download windows that pop up when starting up the app. That confuses a user and as a developer I find it ugly and annoying.
Installing and managing desktop applications is extremely expensive compared to browser-based app's.
I wouldn't say installing any traditional app is extremely expensive. It's no more cost prohibitive then making sure everyone has the same browser version. A little extra time installing could save a lot of productivity that a properly written native application can give you.
The rule everyone should follow is that, in the end, it's all about the user. If they are better served with a web app then that's what they should get, and the same goes for a traditional app. The author seemed to be saying that with the current buzz around web apps, like Twitter, Facebook, the ton of Google offerings, etc., some things are being developed there that really have no place on a web page.
Slashdot Mirror
When she was struggling to recover from a concussion, she invented a game and enlisted friends and family as characters with tasks to fulfill, like coming over to cheer her up or keeping her off caffeine.
Is she single? If yes I can't imagine why.
Releasing the originals is kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good. You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally. It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.
This is such BS it's hard to even understand. How much has changed since the originals? 3%, 5% tops? That means they have already remastered almost the entire movie. What the fans want from Lucas is to spend a little extra cash (which we will obviously end up paying for) and remaster the few scenes that you didn't from before (which should be minimal).
Then you need to go through and remove the crap you put in before, we want the original theatrical versions - Han shoots first, remove the crappy Jabba scene from ANH, take out the silly falling scream from Luke in ESB, and remove Hayden Christensen from the ghosts at the end and give me my celebrating Ewoks back from RotJ. Among other things.
You can't appreciate Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon.
It's interesting, I read that little blurb too. It immediately made me think of an episode of 'The Defenders'. Now, I know that it is just TV show but the same thing happened.
On the show, the defendant was simply driving some friends to a bar. In the bar the friends were shaking down the owner for some money that was owed. The friends didn't know that there were 4 off duty cops in there and one of the friends ends up shot and killed. The argument was that, even though he was outside, the defendant was participating and was thus able to be charge with the murder. His legal counsel argued that no murder actually took place. If what the homeowner did was considered 'justifiable homicide' then no one was actually murdered, therefore there was no crime actually committed (other than the break in) since you can't have a non-murder and a murder to the same person at the same time. This argument was successful on the show, not sure if it is the same in real life.
Probably the chinese at some time in the future.
Leela: Hang on. Amy Wong? Of the Mars Wongs?
Amy: Look, we're not as rich as everybody says.
Leela: Uh-huh! What sorority do you belong to?
Amy: Kappa Kappa Wong.
Farnsworth: This is quite a large ranch you have.
Mr. Wong: 17.9 billion acres. We own entire western hemisphere. (whispering) That the best hemisphere!
Farnsworth: It's the same on Earth.
This is the same stuff legislators were trying to pull with the motion picture industry. In the end a self-regulating body was put in place, accepted by the consumers and producers, and all is well. Do younger kids end up seeing violent or sexual movies? Sure, it can happen and there is recourse if a parent thinks a theater isn't adhering to the system. TV has it's rating system that is enabled by the V-chip and controlled by the household authority (presumably the parents). All gaming systems (computers too? I assume so) have this in place, so why isn't the ESRB given the same right?
If this was something as simple as unrated pornographic games that 8-year-olds were getting a hold of, I would be inclined to agree with the legislation. This isn't the case. This is parents being unwilling to take the 30 seconds to check the rating on a game or, baring that, spending some time with their kid seeing what they are consuming. Meanwhile, legislators in the bankrupt state of California have more pressing matters to deal with than trying to subvert the Constitution.
That said, the conservative court will drop this one like a bad habit. It already has precedence on it's side with movies and TV, a ratings system that works, and that little thing called the first amendment. IANAL but I doubt there will be more than 1 or 2 dissenters - possibly one of the whacko judges, ie Clarence Thomas.
Rogue nations with nukes aren't dangerous because they might use them, they are dangerous because they might sell or lose them to an extremist group who will. There are those you trust with things like this and those you don't. Fascists/Dictators/Fundamentalists are at the top of the list of the untrustworthy.
A shooting is a national headline in a country which has 31 guns per 100 residents (Sweden). USA does have 90 guns per 100 residents (according to wikipedia) but 31 is not a low number. Why is gun crime not just 1/3 of what it is in the USA? Different rules and different mentality? Or are the other 60 guns per 100 persons mostly handguns and sprayfire weapons specialized for killing people and no good for hunting?
What has skewed the gun violence in America is the gang problem we have all over the country. I don't have any statistics for you but I'm sure that increases our gun crime rate significantly. It definitely increases the gun-related murder rate significantly.
Speaking from experience, very few gun owners in the US have guns that are not either used for personal safety or hunting. Head to any sporting goods store and you'll see rows and rows of rifles that are all used for hunting with a few exceptions. A significant ratio of the handguns can be used for hunting but are typically for personal safety. But it's not like we can purchase 'sprayfire' (I assume you mean automatic) weapons in WalMart. Any weapons like that are either licensed, documented, and regulated, or simply illegal.
If it was just as easy as 'more guns = more gun violence' then we would've seen that happen, but we haven't. And cities that have or had full gun bans (Washington D.C. and Chicago) had some of the highest gun-related crime and violence.
I agree. However the B5 (as well as Farscape's) endings were damaged by uncertain (or lacking) funding for the final seasons. As such I'd put them on a roughly even footing.
I can't talk about Farscape as I didn't watch more than a handful of shows, but I just cant accept you considering BSG equal to B5. Go watch B5 again and things that happen in the 5th season are clearly spelled out in the 1st. The arc never deviates, the characters are a part of it but it's all predetermined.
The problem with shows that pull the 'hints about the future' card is that they have to deliver. If someone doesn't have an idea of the entire arc and forces the writers to stay within that arc then you are just setting yourself up for failure.
This can be seen in many shows: Lost, Alias, and, yes, BSG.
I saw a show years ago about this same situation. People start to think that seatbelts and airbags will save them and take more risks. The auto-safety expert joked that they should put a big spike coming out of the stearing column and then people might actually drive a little more within their limits.
As for older cars feeling safer, they definitely weren't. Each generation is progressively better no matter how fast their top speed is. I have driven a Model T and a Model A (both owned by my father). They were restored as close to factory specs as one could get, they weren't hot rods.
The Model T was very unsafe just due to the fact that if you got hit or hit someone else you were almost guaranteed to be thrown from the vehicle. The Model A is a huge step forward and had many, many safety improvements over the T. Much better brakes and steering, bumpers, improved headlights, and a much better suspension. With just an increase in luxury and power you would be safer, but the threshold is just pushed a little farther and you still die but at a faster speed. The same steering column to crush your chest, hard surfaces to crush your skull, and a very low chance that the doors will stay closed and not eject you or crush you within on a rollover. Still a net positive but not much.
On a side note, realizing this my father put in seatbelts in the A. That's not what Ford had designed, but he'd rather his family live through an accident.
No, The PvP is done wrong, very very wrong. There's something wrong when you have to wait over 2 hours for instance based PvP.
You are describing WoW before they did cross-server battlegrounds, and even since those have been in it can be a very long wait on battlegroups that are heavy for one side or another.
Balancing issue is an extreme understatement. Why? Because when you lock down an account to play only order or destro, you better make sure there are even numbers of order vs. destro on the server, and even so it still can be uneven due to the fact not everybody plays PvP.
I said population can be a problem, that was one of the issues on the server I was on. Eventually people switch sides and it balances out. Once again, in WoW almost all the servers were heavy Alliance when the game launched.
The classes are far from balanced, so what you can do tons of damage, if you die in 3 hits, your attack power means nothing. And how convenient for the melees that almost every one of them got a ranged attack that can slow people down.
I can't really discuss how balanced the game is at the level cap because I didn't get there. However, I didn't enjoy when Order got their knockback about 10 levels before Destruction. That made many of the scenarios heavily favored for Order until things balanced out. When I left, at level 26, ranged casters (Bright Wizards/Sorceress') were doing far too much damage and 3 shotting melee before they got in range. But Balancing issues are somewhat par for the course in MMOs. Everyone talks as though WoW was perfectly balanced since launch, which obviously isn't true.
The RvR level is a good concept, but they implemented in such a bad way that made RvR level totally pointless. ...
Good god, you're probably happy with the abortion that is WoW's new arena ranking system. Plain fact is that MMOs aren't as simple as a ranking system for Chess or Go. In those games there isn't one type of player that can move a knight differently, move more pieces at once, etc. So some people would match up better than others. In those cases if you get unlucky and meet a a player around your ranking that you don't match up against and you lose you'll go down - and you might not be able to win no matter what you do. There's no simple or even complex math that would probably work to deal with all the combinations of races, classes, and talents. Welcome to class based games.
I am not saying Blizzard is doing any better, but Mythic simply are not up to par and what you said are baseless and invalid.
So because I don't agree that the game is 'absolute junk' all my comments are 'baseless and invalid'. Great job. So you are saying that PQs and public parties suck? I totally disagree, they are revolutionary. As for the seige mechanics, they are better. Busting down the door to a keep takes more than just a mindless zerg (that's how Wintergrasp works).
/sarcasm
WoW's Wintergrasp is the joke. The defending team can't win and the attacking team can't lose. Now that's a great PvP system.
Given the right leadership and drive, I would really like to see an MMO spring up around an unlicenced universe (not one of the done-to-death and copyrighted to hell ones like Star Wars or LoTR) but one that is perhaps by an obscure author and in the public domain.
This has been done and they were called MUDs. Any MUD worth it's salt was a fork in one of the many OS MUD codebases and was highly customized. A lot of them were based on private domain IP (Star Wars, LOTR, D&D, etc) because they flew under the radar by being free to play.
The problem with MUDs, and OSS in general, is management. People come and go, make good decisions and bad, and it can all disappear overnight because a few of the devs just aren't interested in continuing working on or hosting the thing. Customers wouldn't be too happy building up a character for months or years and then just have it disappear overnight.
At launch, they had *far* too many servers, they had wayyyy more servers than WoW had at launch.
The pre-sale numbers, which I think were reported as the best for any MMO ever, dictated that they'd need that many servers. WoW had way too few servers at launch only because they underestimated. They were forced to stop selling the game for 3 or 4 months so that their infrastructure could catch up. They weren't ready for success and it nearly crushed them.
With WoW, I purchased one of the last boxes of the game which I called around to every store in the area I was living just over 2 months after launch. This was late January. I know some of my friends couldn't get a copy of the game for at least another couple of months, and even then you were on a waiting list somewhere.
This game is absolute junk and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.
I think a lot of people would say that 'absolute junk' is an extreme overstatement. It's flawed but definitely does some things correctly.
The PvP is done right, although there were balancing issues. I don't know how this panned out at the level cap because I never made it. I wanted to play a healer and tried a Zealot but the leveling was bad - just like leveling a priest was in WoW in the beginning.
The idea and implementation of the public quest was great, and the open parties were awesome too. These are things you will probably see in every MMO from here on out. The siege mechanics were light-years better than the Wintergrasp crap that Blizzard is trying to throw into WoW.
Obviously a lot of people went back to WoW and I was one of them. I actually think Blizzard could learn from Mythic and shut down a bunch of their low-pop servers but they are making too much money forcing people to transfer for $25 a pop.
Wearing a suit and tie into space wasn't integral to the plot. ... These genetically perfect people would get into space and then get exposed to elevated levels of radiation which would invalidate their DNA.
I see what you're saying but I think the reason is that they were the genetic superiors who could physically handle the trip while being the only ones smart enough to perform whatever science function the trip was for. Since the 'natural' people had already been relegated to crappier jobs due to their DNA profile they would probably have limited exposure to schooling, etc., that would get them anywhere close to an advanced career.
That movie made no sense to me. Why risk your genetically engineered pretty people on dangerous space activities when you have a huge pile of willing and eager natural borns to do the job? In other words, it should work the other way around.
That's your hangup for the movie? Not the fact that when they go into space they are wear suits - and not the space kind but the three-piece kind? Or the fact that they can supposedly keep any environment so clean that they can dust for DNA at any time?
The whole point of the movie is that people are genetically discriminated against and there's nothing that you can do about it. I don't want to ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it so I won't get into specifics but the moral and ethical questions and dilemmas are very well managed.
Honestly, it's real sci-fi, not the Star Wars definition of it. And it contiues to hold up to this day and is a very scary possibility (of course taken to the nth degree). Great performances by Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law.
Partly it's because they've completely changed the dynamic of every character (usually for the worst--Stewie is now more about "hiding in the closet" now than "take over the world and kill Lois"). Partly it's that the seem to rely more and more on the "like that time when" skits.
All the characters are better and funnier than they used to be. The Stewie character had to change eventually. Honestly, the 'wacky character that is obsessed with global domination' has been played out for a long time, almost as much as either a talking animal/inanimate object, or the self-obsessed, idiot dad. We've seen those things in comics forever and it really isn't much of a gag anymore. The Stewie/Brian-heavy episodes are the best. Anything else is like watching a Lisa- or Marge-heavy episode of The Simpsons. You get through it but you don't expect anything good.
The big question is where American Dad fits in all this. I'm not sure why they didn't just call it 'Another Family Guy' since you've got the idiot dad, the 'smarter than dad' mother, the talking animal (fish), the crazy wacky character (alien, although not bent on world domination), and the 2 kids who aren't interesting in the slightest.
So it came at you fast and hard.
A lot like Branigan's Law, which is like Branigan's love - hard and fast!
Brannigans Law is like a rock, it crushes scissors. But scissors cut paper and paper covers rock! Kiff! We have a conundrum!
People who head advocacy organizations, such as the Authors Guild, have to have issues they can push so as to get members of their groups to pay dues. If there are no real issues, they need to invent them.
This is more true then people realize.
Case in point: the city where I grew up is an industrial mill town where almost everyone is union. At some point in the late 70s/early 80s a union for barbers came through and unionized all the barbers there. And of course you pretty much had to join because the other union workers wouldn't go to a non-union barber shop. They were advocating for better pay, working conditions, etc. It sounded great to all those involved.
So what could possibly go wrong? Well for one, most barbers either owned, or co-owned, there own places so who were they protecting their jobs from? 'The man'? They were 'the man'. Secondly, the union tried to get uniform pricing across all barbers but this was a silly notion. A barber with experience had to charge the same as the new guy. Also, if someone was just plain better than another they still had to charge the same even though they could only see so many clients per day.
In the end the union failed because everyone realized they were paying dues for nothing. There are no longer any union barbers in the town and everyone sets their own prices to what the market will bear.
NOTE: As someone who comes from a family of union workers, I am not bashing unions. I am critical of the fact that in some places the market is better without them, especially in the case of skilled labor.
I don't want to downplay how great it is what EA is doing but BF:Heroes might be way to cartoony for many, and a lot of BF diehards are worried about how arcade the game appears to play.
I'm interested in trying it but I'm wary after seeing a video with players on the wings of planes, wearing kilts and weird hats. It's also not an FPS but is more of a third-person shooter.
Did I miss something? Is 1943 just a remake?
We can only hope!
To be honest though, the South Pacific maps are not historically inaccurate. Wake Island, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, etc. all are somewhat accurate for shape so any map they did of those would be very similar. I believe the video was gameplay from Wake Island.
If this was going to be a remake I'd prefer it include the European and Africa maps. There were more gems in there - Kursk, Battle of the Bulge, Market Garden, Stalingrad, Battleaxe - just to name a few. The variety was better too, the Pacific maps are all islands and palm trees.
In response to a joke that another poster did:
That explains the drama-queen mood and temperature swings, then.
It makes more sense as a Scorpio.
I agree with the reply mostly here. There are UI standards? Why didn't anyone tell me?
I get the sarcasm here, but I was alluding to TFA where he talks about menus being wherever the designer decides them to be, buttons, colors, and layout as well. I know Java Swing has a default the menu bar/tool bar location based on the look and feel. I can also make a Swing app indistinguishable from the desktop. Everything works just like the user would expect, the user only needs to learn the ins and outs of the app, not a non-standard design. But a bad dev can choose to go the non-standard route in any language.
The biggest reason to use web apps is cost of course. Enterprise GUI apps charge per installed seat, intranet apps are often concurrent users. Ease of use & installation are up there too, but these are all reasons for casual users: road warriors, bigwigs and other non-tech savvy people who aren't really interested in the application outside of how it can do some of the old paper-shuffling part of their job for them (80% of the users using 20% of the features). GUI apps are best for the back office staff who actually need to do lots of complex & varied office staff type stuff. Smaller market, higher overheads - simple choice.
Like I said at the end of a different post, all apps have their place. The one I am working on now would be pretty disastrous as a web app, but others I've done as a native app would've been better served as a web app (not my decision on those).
How again did I get roped into arguing dissenting opinion here? I think I spend too much time playing devil's advocate on here lol.
I hate to use your shopping cart example because it is perfect as something that should be done as a web app but that's our context.
A traditional app doing the same thing could check the CC number in a separate thread while the user was filling out other information and not allow the save button to be enabled. That's much more user friendly then getting punted back to the same page. But I stress this is a bad example.
So unless there's an extremely good reason to install a desktop app (e.g. you really need complex local interaction, or are dealing with huge data such as video) why bother installing desktop software?
I've given one reason where installing a native app is worth it - the validation of complex user input - and that's certainly not the only positive.
I'm currently contracting as a UI developer working on an internal business application. The application isn't trivial and *could* be written as a web app but that doesn't mean it should be - and don't think they didn't consider it. The interaction that would have to be handled would be a nightmare for the user and it would probably get ignored and the million or so spent developing it would be wasted.
So I guess the moral of the story is that it's a case by case basis on whether to go to a traditional app or not. I think Flash/Flex and Silverlight are good middle ground since you can still run it in a browser but have rich client capabilities. The installation for those is very easy and some pretty impressive things can be done with them. Java certainly dropped the ball on this with regards to applets and webstart. Once you are past the more complex (compared with flash/silverlight) JRE installer, applets work and perform fine, but webstart isn't transparent enough, there are too many dialogs and download windows that pop up when starting up the app. That confuses a user and as a developer I find it ugly and annoying.
Installing and managing desktop applications is extremely expensive compared to browser-based app's.
I wouldn't say installing any traditional app is extremely expensive. It's no more cost prohibitive then making sure everyone has the same browser version. A little extra time installing could save a lot of productivity that a properly written native application can give you.
The rule everyone should follow is that, in the end, it's all about the user. If they are better served with a web app then that's what they should get, and the same goes for a traditional app. The author seemed to be saying that with the current buzz around web apps, like Twitter, Facebook, the ton of Google offerings, etc., some things are being developed there that really have no place on a web page.