And even that is fairly non-binding and has a proviso of "when their financial circumstances permit" apparently. I believe the first confidence pledged some serious amounts of assistance most of which never eventuated.
It's a by product of the UN requiring consensus from every nation to pass anything. The smaller nations know we're not going to stop increasing global carbon emissions (and maybe believe they can continue on mostly as usual) so hope they can get some money out of the process. And it's pretty convenient for the US as they can justify doing nothing on the basis of the UN being ineffectual. Meanwhile China says it doesn't apply to them (despite being the biggest global emitter) because they didn't get to poison the planet in the first place so they deserve their turn (In UN terms that's referred to as "equity").
I recommend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U/ for the current numbers. Basically if we want a planet that looks remotely like the comfortable one we occupy now we'd need to peak carbon emissions soon (before 2020) and start reducing at unheard of rates. Instead most of the planet has no intention of stopping, some of the nations just want to get some money out of it, and a small group (15% of global emissions) are trying to cut their emissions by numbers that are a small fraction of what would be needed globally. We're pretty much guaranteed to blow through any manageable carbon trajectory in the next decade. Probably sooner because most of the news out of the climate scientists is bad and that they may have badly underestimated how sensitive the system is.
Be thankful though, we'll basically get to watch mankind fumble their first highly probable global crisis (barring miracle discoveries or climate science being wrong in a good way) which should be entertaining. Given the current prediction is 4c by by 2050 (twice the "acceptably dangerous" level of 2c, 6c by 2100) we'll even get to see many of the effects start to kick in.
When I did my CS degree computer science was part of the science stream, was expected to be primarily a tool for the advancement of science and to have lots of scope for development in its application.
It was only later people realised the scope of computer use is a whole lot wider and that the main problem is dealing with the complexity of the systems. So it became less about the micro of clever algorithms and code and more about the macro of trying to get the product of large numbers of people to work cheaply and reliably.
In practice I suspect there's little difference beyond the name and self image. I'd expect CS people to understand the issues of large scale software development (as much as you can in a Uni). I'd expect SE people to understand the materials they work with and why software isn't reliably reproducible like stuff made from bolts and girders.
Fairly inevitable and if done well a good move, though a comeback is going to be really hard. Motorola believed it could compete on hardware differentiation and sweetheart deals (backed by exclusive features) with the networks. Thus completely missing the move towards the phone becoming a platform to run smart software and how that needs to tie into a rich eco-system of software services. And that pretty much needs a focus on software, third party software developers and a unified platform they didn't have.
Maybe if they can come up with something really innovative in terms of software they might survive. But it's so weird to remember it wasn't that long ago they saw their only competition as Nokia and believes they were on track to be number 1. Woops.
I also remember Padmasree Warrior (Motorola's cheap technology officer) explaining that the iPhone would never catch on because it's too hard to dial while driving. With technical leadership like that...
Been waiting for this for years. It was pretty obvious to me that the problem has always been the display. They can only get so large before they become unwieldy, heavy, fragile, power hungry and difficult to use away from a desk. With something like this you can have a big screen in a very small form factor and the phone can go back to being something easier to carry, though I'm still fine with it doing the computing. Add in a wireless chording keypad for power-user input and you've got a great platform for mobile computing. It's not really anything novel, the pieces have been around for years, but it needed someone to put them together, do the software layer and mass produce them to bring the price down.
It will still be niche, the vast majority don't even need all the computing power their phones contain, and it does look sort of silly... but the idea of being able to boot up linux (you know it will happen) on my sun-glasses is a sort of sublime perfection.
I think the correct answer is "it depends". Programming can cover an immense range of possibilities, some of which certainly use high level math and a lot of which don't.
However it is also true that anything that requires a substantial amount of really high level mathematics should be written once as a library and then re-used.
In the end it doesn't really matter too much. Any solution would involve some negative economic effects and many of the governments have no intention of doing any such thing. China which considers economic advancement the key to social stability and the US which considers itself already losing a trade war with china. So the attack on the science is more about providing a distraction / excuse for why nothing substantial will be done at the political level.
The discussion of the science, and how it is mis-represented, is very interesting though. I found this youtube video series by potholer54 to be a pretty fascinating introduction to the subject, with good coverage of issues and links back to actual papers.
Steam is just a distribution service though. And it is unlikely they care about market segmentation (eg. gouging). However the content providers, the game companies, almost certainly pushed them into it with the thread of with-holding their games. The same for retail boxes costing less than on-line distribution.
If you're getting taken for a ride (and as an Australian gamer that's nearly always the case) the answer is to not the buy the game. In which case it doesn't really matter where you are not buying it from. As per my post it was COD that did this in Australia, initially good value in US$ then suddenly terrible value in AU$. And as a result I just wrote the game off and moved on.
The brick and mortar stores helped grow steam, at least for PC users. Their extremely poor selection of PC titles as they chased the console market, their focus on second hand sales and their lack of interest in competition forced people to depend on services like steam. The actual change-over though will happen when companies focus on on-line distribution and don't limit how competitive steam can be for fear of angering the retailers. You can already see this with a lot of smaller titles (which would probably not get any retailer presence anyway) who are free to offer great prices and special deals on steam games. In turn this experimentation and possibility of smaller titles making some cash is widening the number of games available. In comparison there's things like Call of Duty where steam was forced to near double the price to preserve the ability of retailers to rip off Australian customers. That sort of thing leaves a pretty sour taste in the mouth.
Then look at something like Killing floor. Somewhere between a mod and a full game. Chance of getting it into EB without it already being huge (eg. counterstrike) near zero. However list it on steam, do things like this weekends free trial (easy to do on-line, impossible via retail) and maybe they'll make some money out of it.
Oh, and all my downloads cost me no quota. My ISP (iinet) mirrors steam's files and allows fast (1Mb/sec) and free downloads.
tl;dr. The sooner the game retailers die the better for gamers. Can buy the huge titles at regular stores and for anything specialised better it's on steam.
Champions online... How to make a mediocre MMO
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Review: Champions Online
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· Score: 2, Informative
That was certainly a positive review. Overly positive in my opinion. This game is extremely shallow in terms of content and the questionable mechanics. There's actually a lot less decent character designs (unless you are making furries or robots), the power choices are narrow and repetitive and the gameplay often revolves down to using 3 powers (end builder, single target, AoE) for 40 levels. At which point you discover the end game has only been pencilled in. I mean it's not that bad, though the developers are doing there best to nerf it into the ground because they did little balancing during beta, and you can have some fun playing through it. But it's nothing special and actually less interesting in terms of gameplay than CoH (which at least nailed grouping with it's scaling instances, enough rewards to make it desirable and the MA).
This was what I wrote for a MMO gaming site to try and collect my thoughts after beta.
The champions NDA has just come down a week before the game is released. I quite liked
City of Heroes, an older superhero MMO, so I applied and got into beta and have been
playing it for a while. Sadly it's just not that great a game, IMO obviously. And some of the
reasons for saying so are because the design made some questionable decisions, like:
1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.
In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly
formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance).
These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has
to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay
possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in
the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution
later.
The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt
encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character
mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though
some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them
have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player
to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you
have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting
uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately
limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an
interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...
2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.
It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working.
When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics
were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members
which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good
gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work
such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such
as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken,
and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends
to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.
However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence.
Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process.
Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking
interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the
game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated
or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may
have been that there was deep design work
Witty press people love using the line about how can google justify self-censorship and resisting the American government at the same time. But while it looks like some sort of conflict they seem incredibly different to me. In one case the US government is asking for google to give information it considers both private and possibly revealing personal details about its users. In other words its a privacy concern. In the other case its about google offering reduced service due to local laws and customs.
Is anyone hurt by the first? potentially, both as individuals and because the data will be used in the formation of laws to control society. Is anyone hurt in the second? Not really, some google is better than no google as long as you know the service is restricted, and I don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone that the Chinese government is heavily into such control.
I don't see the two as remotely similar, and I think google can easily argue that "do as much good as you can" is compatible with their corporate quote.
5 pages on the astronauts and one page on the actual engineering that led to the failure, and most of that writing was awfully emotional and fact free. It would have been nice to see that side of the story covered in some more detail. No surprise the human element grabs the attention, but there was probably a good human story on the ground too, and one that actually had a causual relationship to the event.
Solid article. Simply by highlighting some of what they say PJ has allowed the essence of their argument to come through, and it sounds pretty repulsive to me. Hilariously inept too, if they seriously think either the mass market or the hacker market is going to follow Sun they've got to be downright insane. And to expect a happy smiling future with microsoft is delusional.
I don't think PJ's point is whether or not they have broken the legal wording of the GPL, but that they have certainly missed the intent. And that as a result they'll fit in neither market, not supported by the free software people and not real competition to windows. Exactly the position Caldera ended up in.
They'd better get used to it, because I don't see this trend stopping. High speed digital networks are a super-medium that has the potential to do everything TV does and more. And they can do this in a diversified, interactive and de-centralized way.
The sooner we can make a direct connection between the people who create material, and those willing to pay to consume it, the better. And those who have depended on exclusively owning this channel of communication can only delay this development, not halt it.
I'm not unhappy to see sun strangle Java. As soon as they wimped out on actually getting a base language standardised I was wary of it. I'd prefer not spending time learning an infrastructure that is dependant (to whatever extent) on a sole vendor with it's own commercial agenda for what the language must do.
I'd be ecstatic if I didn't see the main winner from their maneuvers being microsoft.
I figure about 20% of this thread is people saying variants of "I don't see what the problem is". Which of course is the whole point *of* the thread. There have been multiple coherent and concise explanations of the problem for anyone who actually bothered to read it before posting their ignorance.
The real point of SWG is that it's another one of these "game purist" attempts to have a "living" online world that you can be a small part of. With the advantage in this case being the star wars name to lure the crowds and give a reason why you'd want to be a part of that world.
At the moment everyone seems to be excited by checking out the game system, the options and the paths to advancement, but what happens when the thrill of discovery fades?
A character has only 250 skill points and you only have one character per server. If you become a master architect (a tedious task) you've invested a huge number of points that you'll use very rarely. You can build the largest house in the game, but so can lots of others, probably enough to glut the market demand. Especially since the dominant architect is likely to be one with a guild supporting him. Such a person, who knows how to powergame and has a guild full of surveyors feeding him resources, profits by being first to master and being able to undercut most sellers.
How many architects does the game need? What do you do if you're a master architect and no one needs your skills? Is it fun being a new architect when there are bored masters around?
Sure even a master architect still has the points to be something else. But all of the craft, support and entertainer skills have the same problem.
Combat has similar problems. An expert at the top of the tree isn't all that much tougher, although superior weapons give them great offensive power. This combines with bad grouping XP and risk reward to mean the pinnacle of the combat character is decimating trivial space-vermin. Sure you can go hunt uber mobs, but there's little strategy, poor risk vs. return and no particular reason to do so. Same with PvP to a large extent.
SWG is a really exciting experiment in game design. I'll be extremely interested to see how "interesting" the endgame and mature economy prove to be. Because with no content they are surely hoping that being a small cog in the world machine is thrilling enough in itself.
Sounds like a typical Linus idea to me. So obviously right that you can't imagine why you wouldn't do it.
It's got nothing to do with gui's. It's not a hack like the windows priority bar or nicing X. It basically states that if you have a CPU bound process which lots of interactive tasks use then the server should get a "caffeine" shot too.
X is just an easy example. It quickly gets CPU bound but can have lots of interactive clients depending on it. End result of this patch being the interactive clients respond better because the server is getting more processor in response to them existing. It automatically responds to usage patterns too.
Oh yeah, and for those who slam X you've missed the core formula here. There need to be enough people who see sizable and fixable weaknesses in X to create a demand for a replacement. By and large X is decent and getting better, so such demand is marginal. There have been efforts to "fix" X but most have withered and died. This is how open software works.
Re:I recognize that I don't know anime very well .
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NY Times on Anime
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· Score: 1
The ultimate link site for all anime, praise be its name, is the animation turnpike,
Anime Turnpike where you can graze and explore for days.
If you want some comments and suggestions there's a number of good anime review pages. Here's a page with links to a couple
Anime Meta review sources page There's a link there to Anime on DVD, which is your best source for finding out what's commercially available.
As for the article, looked like a bunch of factoids compressed into a rambling article. But at least it was relatively fair on both sides.
This is almost amusing. I mean, I know that since they bought SCO they had to do something with it...but who are they fooling?
Sure, as people have noted, there's still lots of things that Linux could do better. Both it and the
8*86 platform are not the best platform for true high grunt performance on a mission critical task.
Most Linux people know that, albeit they don't think there's anything that will stop those abilities maturing over time.
...but...
Sco's got the same problem! Sure, they used to be the `leading unix on 8086' but that doesn't help them compete with Solaris or Aix. And while they might try and snag the title `unix' for themselves they don't have the marketshare, mindshare or money to seriously challenge IBM or SUN. There's lots of installed SCO systems, but they're not running corporate data-centers.
And, for those things linux does well (at the moment), like providing cheap servers and good desktops, they can't compete with linux.
So, the true message is, "we realise that most of the new apps are linux apps, but we want to keep unixware alive".
(and yeah, I know I should be Caldera unixware instead of SCO...old habits).
There are really only two reasons I use linux, and they're not particularly technical. In technical terms I consider them to both be powerful modern unix's with rapidly evolving perfomance and facilities. BSD has a bit more heritage, Linux may have more developers, but I could probably be happy on either.
My first reason is the silly one. In the early days of Linux the *BSD crowd (plus SCO) were amazingly smug and arrogant. Very much, "Why are you weenies playing with your toy? No wonder you can't handle BSD.". Sure, this wasn't the whole community, but the BSD camp (at least here) was
full of "serious sys-admins" with this attitude.
Perhaps Linux has actually helped BSD realize that attracting new users is a useful part of an OS community?
The second part is focus and energy. And to an extent it's related to the user base. BSD people (used to?) focus heavily on servers and tweaked code. Interested in optimisation of performance and stability rather than agressive experimentation. I love the linux communities willingness to make agressive core changes and happily tilt at windmills. When Linus said, "let's target the desktop" most people thought he was totally nuts. But now with things like Gnome, KDE unix actually exists again as a reasonable, and improving, desktop. Likewise linux pushing to PDA's, super-computers, clusters...it's all very exciting.
Sure, BSD is capable of all these things as well. But I still think it was Linux that set the pace and forced BSD to come out of its shell and match it.
Hm, who want's an enterprise linux?
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eWeek on Linux
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· Score: 1
Wow, the most freaky thing about this is linux is not being compared to windows. It's being challenged to equal the features of Solaris or Aix. That's quite a promotion in itself.
That said, while I expect linux to keep making progress in the enterprise arena, I don't think it should be a focus. It's all apart minimal changes, accountability and testing. This sort of stuff is better done by a specialized, paid because it's dull, company like sun or IBM. I'd much rather linux kept advancing and improving so we can be better at putting the boot into windows. More fun, more exciting, and more programmers can get involved.
While I don't love sun or ibm that much, it's currently Ms that seems determined to own the computing market.
I wish people would remember how the whole Linux(tm) thing actually happened. The (tm) was initiated by some loser who planned to try and milk linux companies with it. No linux person actually wanted, or saw a need for, a tm.
As it was a bunch of people and companies put up money and challenged his ownership of the trademark. A pretty certain thing, but it still cost money. Having come to own it, what to do with it? The obvious answer, give it to someone with the best interests of Linux at heart and no corporate agenda. *This* and this alone is why linus owns the tm on linux.
As for this article, blah. If these companies had half a clue then there never would have been a need for Linux. And there's more than enough safeguards in the open source model that this is not going to bother me at all.
The Australian TV broadcast was of NGE TV only, thus it didn't include any of end of evangelion, so the question of editing is not relevant there. I've never heard any suggestion that the SBS presentation had additional cutting performed on it.
Slashdot Mirror
And even that is fairly non-binding and has a proviso of "when their financial circumstances permit" apparently. I believe the first confidence pledged some serious amounts of assistance most of which never eventuated.
It doesn't really commit anyone to anything. It's mostly so they could get something out and not look like they'd just had a junket.
It's a by product of the UN requiring consensus from every nation to pass anything. The smaller nations know we're not going to stop increasing global carbon emissions (and maybe believe they can continue on mostly as usual) so hope they can get some money out of the process. And it's pretty convenient for the US as they can justify doing nothing on the basis of the UN being ineffectual. Meanwhile China says it doesn't apply to them (despite being the biggest global emitter) because they didn't get to poison the planet in the first place so they deserve their turn (In UN terms that's referred to as "equity"). I recommend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U/ for the current numbers. Basically if we want a planet that looks remotely like the comfortable one we occupy now we'd need to peak carbon emissions soon (before 2020) and start reducing at unheard of rates. Instead most of the planet has no intention of stopping, some of the nations just want to get some money out of it, and a small group (15% of global emissions) are trying to cut their emissions by numbers that are a small fraction of what would be needed globally. We're pretty much guaranteed to blow through any manageable carbon trajectory in the next decade. Probably sooner because most of the news out of the climate scientists is bad and that they may have badly underestimated how sensitive the system is. Be thankful though, we'll basically get to watch mankind fumble their first highly probable global crisis (barring miracle discoveries or climate science being wrong in a good way) which should be entertaining. Given the current prediction is 4c by by 2050 (twice the "acceptably dangerous" level of 2c, 6c by 2100) we'll even get to see many of the effects start to kick in.
When I did my CS degree computer science was part of the science stream, was expected to be primarily a tool for the advancement of science and to have lots of scope for development in its application.
It was only later people realised the scope of computer use is a whole lot wider and that the main problem is dealing with the complexity of the systems. So it became less about the micro of clever algorithms and code and more about the macro of trying to get the product of large numbers of people to work cheaply and reliably.
In practice I suspect there's little difference beyond the name and self image. I'd expect CS people to understand the issues of large scale software development (as much as you can in a Uni). I'd expect SE people to understand the materials they work with and why software isn't reliably reproducible like stuff made from bolts and girders.
Fairly inevitable and if done well a good move, though a comeback is going to be really hard. Motorola believed it could compete on hardware differentiation and sweetheart deals (backed by exclusive features) with the networks. Thus completely missing the move towards the phone becoming a platform to run smart software and how that needs to tie into a rich eco-system of software services. And that pretty much needs a focus on software, third party software developers and a unified platform they didn't have.
Maybe if they can come up with something really innovative in terms of software they might survive. But it's so weird to remember it wasn't that long ago they saw their only competition as Nokia and believes they were on track to be number 1. Woops.
I also remember Padmasree Warrior (Motorola's cheap technology officer) explaining that the iPhone would never catch on because it's too hard to dial while driving. With technical leadership like that...
Been waiting for this for years. It was pretty obvious to me that the problem has always been the display. They can only get so large before they become unwieldy, heavy, fragile, power hungry and difficult to use away from a desk. With something like this you can have a big screen in a very small form factor and the phone can go back to being something easier to carry, though I'm still fine with it doing the computing. Add in a wireless chording keypad for power-user input and you've got a great platform for mobile computing. It's not really anything novel, the pieces have been around for years, but it needed someone to put them together, do the software layer and mass produce them to bring the price down.
It will still be niche, the vast majority don't even need all the computing power their phones contain, and it does look sort of silly... but the idea of being able to boot up linux (you know it will happen) on my sun-glasses is a sort of sublime perfection.
I think the correct answer is "it depends". Programming can cover an immense range of possibilities, some of which certainly use high level math and a lot of which don't. However it is also true that anything that requires a substantial amount of really high level mathematics should be written once as a library and then re-used.
In the end it doesn't really matter too much. Any solution would involve some negative economic effects and many of the governments have no intention of doing any such thing. China which considers economic advancement the key to social stability and the US which considers itself already losing a trade war with china. So the attack on the science is more about providing a distraction / excuse for why nothing substantial will be done at the political level.
The discussion of the science, and how it is mis-represented, is very interesting though. I found this youtube video series by potholer54 to be a pretty fascinating introduction to the subject, with good coverage of issues and links back to actual papers.
Steam is just a distribution service though. And it is unlikely they care about market segmentation (eg. gouging). However the content providers, the game companies, almost certainly pushed them into it with the thread of with-holding their games. The same for retail boxes costing less than on-line distribution.
If you're getting taken for a ride (and as an Australian gamer that's nearly always the case) the answer is to not the buy the game. In which case it doesn't really matter where you are not buying it from. As per my post it was COD that did this in Australia, initially good value in US$ then suddenly terrible value in AU$. And as a result I just wrote the game off and moved on.
The brick and mortar stores helped grow steam, at least for PC users. Their extremely poor selection of PC titles as they chased the console market, their focus on second hand sales and their lack of interest in competition forced people to depend on services like steam. The actual change-over though will happen when companies focus on on-line distribution and don't limit how competitive steam can be for fear of angering the retailers. You can already see this with a lot of smaller titles (which would probably not get any retailer presence anyway) who are free to offer great prices and special deals on steam games. In turn this experimentation and possibility of smaller titles making some cash is widening the number of games available. In comparison there's things like Call of Duty where steam was forced to near double the price to preserve the ability of retailers to rip off Australian customers. That sort of thing leaves a pretty sour taste in the mouth.
Then look at something like Killing floor. Somewhere between a mod and a full game. Chance of getting it into EB without it already being huge (eg. counterstrike) near zero. However list it on steam, do things like this weekends free trial (easy to do on-line, impossible via retail) and maybe they'll make some money out of it.
Oh, and all my downloads cost me no quota. My ISP (iinet) mirrors steam's files and allows fast (1Mb/sec) and free downloads.
tl;dr. The sooner the game retailers die the better for gamers. Can buy the huge titles at regular stores and for anything specialised better it's on steam.
That was certainly a positive review. Overly positive in my opinion. This game is extremely shallow in terms of content and the questionable mechanics. There's actually a lot less decent character designs (unless you are making furries or robots), the power choices are narrow and repetitive and the gameplay often revolves down to using 3 powers (end builder, single target, AoE) for 40 levels. At which point you discover the end game has only been pencilled in. I mean it's not that bad, though the developers are doing there best to nerf it into the ground because they did little balancing during beta, and you can have some fun playing through it. But it's nothing special and actually less interesting in terms of gameplay than CoH (which at least nailed grouping with it's scaling instances, enough rewards to make it desirable and the MA).
This was what I wrote for a MMO gaming site to try and collect my thoughts after beta.
The champions NDA has just come down a week before the game is released. I quite liked City of Heroes, an older superhero MMO, so I applied and got into beta and have been playing it for a while. Sadly it's just not that great a game, IMO obviously. And some of the reasons for saying so are because the design made some questionable decisions, like:
1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.
In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance). These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution later.
The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...
2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.
It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working. When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken, and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.
However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence. Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process. Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may have been that there was deep design work
Witty press people love using the line about how can google justify self-censorship and resisting the American government at the same time. But while it looks like some sort of conflict they seem incredibly different to me. In one case the US government is asking for google to give information it considers both private and possibly revealing personal details about its users. In other words its a privacy concern. In the other case its about google offering reduced service due to local laws and customs.
Is anyone hurt by the first? potentially, both as individuals and because the data will be used in the formation of laws to control society. Is anyone hurt in the second? Not really, some google is better than no google as long as you know the service is restricted, and I don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone that the Chinese government is heavily into such control.
I don't see the two as remotely similar, and I think google can easily argue that "do as much good as you can" is compatible with their corporate quote.
5 pages on the astronauts and one page on the actual engineering that led to the failure, and most of that writing was awfully emotional and fact free. It would have been nice to see that side of the story covered in some more detail. No surprise the human element grabs the attention, but there was probably a good human story on the ground too, and one that actually had a causual relationship to the event.
Solid article. Simply by highlighting some of what they say PJ has allowed the essence of their argument to come through, and it sounds pretty repulsive to me. Hilariously inept too, if they seriously think either the mass market or the hacker market is going to follow Sun they've got to be downright insane. And to expect a happy smiling future with microsoft is delusional.
I don't think PJ's point is whether or not they have broken the legal wording of the GPL, but that they have certainly missed the intent. And that as a result they'll fit in neither market, not supported by the free software people and not real competition to windows. Exactly the position Caldera ended up in.
They'd better get used to it, because I don't see this trend stopping. High speed digital networks are a super-medium that has the potential to do everything TV does and more. And they can do this in a diversified, interactive and de-centralized way.
The sooner we can make a direct connection between the people who create material, and those willing to pay to consume it, the better. And those who have depended on exclusively owning this channel of communication can only delay this development, not halt it.
I'm not unhappy to see sun strangle Java. As soon as they wimped out on actually getting a base language standardised I was wary of it. I'd prefer not spending time learning an infrastructure that is dependant (to whatever extent) on a sole vendor with it's own commercial agenda for what the language must do.
I'd be ecstatic if I didn't see the main winner from their maneuvers being microsoft.
I figure about 20% of this thread is people saying variants of "I don't see what the problem is". Which of course is the whole point *of* the thread. There have been multiple coherent and concise explanations of the problem for anyone who actually bothered to read it before posting their ignorance.
The real point of SWG is that it's another one of these "game purist" attempts to have a "living" online world that you can be a small part of. With the advantage in this case being the star wars name to lure the crowds and give a reason why you'd want to be a part of that world.
At the moment everyone seems to be excited by checking out the game system, the options and the paths to advancement, but what happens when the thrill of discovery fades?
A character has only 250 skill points and you only have one character per server. If you become a master architect (a tedious task) you've invested a huge number of points that you'll use very rarely. You can build the largest house in the game, but so can lots of others, probably enough to glut the market demand. Especially since the dominant architect is likely to be one with a guild supporting him. Such a person, who knows how to powergame and has a guild full of surveyors feeding him resources, profits by being first to master and being able to undercut most sellers.
How many architects does the game need? What do you do if you're a master architect and no one needs your skills? Is it fun being a new architect when there are bored masters around?
Sure even a master architect still has the points to be something else. But all of the craft, support and entertainer skills have the same problem.
Combat has similar problems. An expert at the top of the tree isn't all that much tougher, although superior weapons give them great offensive power. This combines with bad grouping XP and risk reward to mean the pinnacle of the combat character is decimating trivial space-vermin. Sure you can go hunt uber mobs, but there's little strategy, poor risk vs. return and no particular reason to do so. Same with PvP to a large extent.
SWG is a really exciting experiment in game design. I'll be extremely interested to see how "interesting" the endgame and mature economy prove to be. Because with no content they are surely hoping that being a small cog in the world machine is thrilling enough in itself.
Sounds like a typical Linus idea to me. So obviously right that you can't imagine why you wouldn't do it.
It's got nothing to do with gui's. It's not a hack like the windows priority bar or nicing X. It basically states that if you have a CPU bound process which lots of interactive tasks use then the server should get a "caffeine" shot too.
X is just an easy example. It quickly gets CPU bound but can have lots of interactive clients depending on it. End result of this patch being the interactive clients respond better because the server is getting more processor in response to them existing. It automatically responds to usage patterns too.
Oh yeah, and for those who slam X you've missed the core formula here. There need to be enough people who see sizable and fixable weaknesses in X to create a demand for a replacement. By and large X is decent and getting better, so such demand is marginal. There have been efforts to "fix" X but most have withered and died. This is how open software works.
The ultimate link site for all anime, praise be its name, is the animation turnpike,
Anime Turnpike
where you can graze and explore for days.
If you want some comments and suggestions there's a number of good anime review pages. Here's a page with links to a couple
Anime Meta review sources page
There's a link there to Anime on DVD, which is your best source for finding out what's commercially available.
As for the article, looked like a bunch of factoids compressed into a rambling article. But at least it was relatively fair on both sides.
This is almost amusing. I mean, I know that since they bought SCO they had to do something with it...but who are they fooling?
Sure, as people have noted, there's still lots of things that Linux could do better. Both it and the
8*86 platform are not the best platform for true high grunt performance on a mission critical task.
Most Linux people know that, albeit they don't think there's anything that will stop those abilities maturing over time.
...but...
Sco's got the same problem! Sure, they used to be the `leading unix on 8086' but that doesn't help them compete with Solaris or Aix. And while they might try and snag the title `unix' for themselves they don't have the marketshare, mindshare or money to seriously challenge IBM or SUN. There's lots of installed SCO systems, but they're not running corporate data-centers.
And, for those things linux does well (at the moment), like providing cheap servers and good desktops, they can't compete with linux.
So, the true message is, "we realise that most of the new apps are linux apps, but we want to keep unixware alive".
(and yeah, I know I should be Caldera unixware instead of SCO...old habits).
There are really only two reasons I use linux, and they're not particularly technical. In technical terms I consider them to both be powerful modern unix's with rapidly evolving perfomance and facilities. BSD has a bit more heritage, Linux may have more developers, but I could probably be happy on either.
My first reason is the silly one. In the early days of Linux the *BSD crowd (plus SCO) were amazingly smug and arrogant. Very much, "Why are you weenies playing with your toy? No wonder you can't handle BSD.". Sure, this wasn't the whole community, but the BSD camp (at least here) was
full of "serious sys-admins" with this attitude.
Perhaps Linux has actually helped BSD realize that attracting new users is a useful part of an OS community?
The second part is focus and energy. And to an extent it's related to the user base. BSD people (used to?) focus heavily on servers and tweaked code. Interested in optimisation of performance and stability rather than agressive experimentation. I love the linux communities willingness to make agressive core changes and happily tilt at windmills. When Linus said, "let's target the desktop" most people thought he was totally nuts. But now with things like Gnome, KDE unix actually exists again as a reasonable, and improving, desktop. Likewise linux pushing to PDA's, super-computers, clusters...it's all very exciting.
Sure, BSD is capable of all these things as well. But I still think it was Linux that set the pace and forced BSD to come out of its shell and match it.
Wow, the most freaky thing about this is linux is not being compared to windows. It's being challenged to equal the features of Solaris or Aix. That's quite a promotion in itself.
That said, while I expect linux to keep making progress in the enterprise arena, I don't think it should be a focus. It's all apart minimal changes, accountability and testing. This sort of stuff is better done by a specialized, paid because it's dull, company like sun or IBM. I'd much rather linux kept advancing and improving so we can be better at putting the boot into windows. More fun, more exciting, and more programmers can get involved.
While I don't love sun or ibm that much, it's currently Ms that seems determined to own the computing market.
I wish people would remember how the whole Linux(tm) thing actually happened. The (tm) was initiated by some loser who planned to try and milk linux companies with it. No linux person actually wanted, or saw a need for, a tm.
As it was a bunch of people and companies put up money and challenged his ownership of the trademark. A pretty certain thing, but it still cost money. Having come to own it, what to do with it? The obvious answer, give it to someone with the best interests of Linux at heart and no corporate agenda. *This* and this alone is why linus owns the tm on linux.
As for this article, blah. If these companies had half a clue then there never would have been a need for Linux. And there's more than enough safeguards in the open source model that this is not going to bother me at all.
The Australian TV broadcast was of NGE TV only, thus it didn't include any of end of evangelion, so the question of editing is not relevant there. I've never heard any suggestion that the SBS presentation had additional cutting performed on it.
Check out my review of both products, as well as 303 other titles, at The Anime and Manga Meta-Review Page.