The article mentions 5 maverick pilots, so that is the lions I assume. I only remember lions and one that was made up of a bunch of spaceships.
The lions could be a way better movie. Since each lion is in a remote location, they could have the characters finding each lion and learning how to use them.
In addition to this awesome news, they mention that a transformers movie is coming also. Please let them not mess up these movies. These have the potential to be the coolest movies of all time, as long as they don't turn them into a "Look what we can do with CGI" showcase. Even that would be moderately cool, but with a good plot these would excite me.
What's not quiet are the sirens of the firetrucks when they need to put out your PC.
I don't understand the variable fan thing. You get to choose between quiet or cool in different degrees. Just because I like it quiet, doesn't mean my PC is happy.
Actually, it isn't just how many friends you have. It is how many friends your friends have. That means as long as a geek latches on to a popular person, they can be popular by proxy.
I think the issue relates to how you define community. I am an avid WoW player and completely hooked on the game still. To me the community isn't the entire player population. It is broken into subsets.
All Players -> Server -> Faction (Alliance/Horde) -> Level Range -> Guild -> Friends in Guild.
The lowest common denominator in WoW is really people in your faction, since you can't communicate with the enemy at all. Also, you don't really do much with people outside of your level range, so those guys are the ones you see most of the time.
I really only consider my guild mates to be my real community. We mostly do instances together, so I see them a majority of the time without a whole lot of interaction with other people. I have a fairly large subset of people in my guild I would consider friends and mostly spend my time with that subset.
I don't think it is fair to say that because MUDS have less people, you have more community. I just don't think you can define "community" as the millions of players that have accounts.
Not true. All of the kids that are under 18 and don't have a credit card can't easily order online, and they may not have a local store that sells AO games. If a major store such as Walmart doesn't sell the game, the kid might not have any way of getting the game without a parent's credit card. If the game is rated AO, the parents most likely will not be buying the game for their kid.
While there ins't much of a difference content wise between M and AO in some cases, financially there is a huge difference.
You have it completely backwards. If the game originally got rated AO, it would not have been the best-selling console game of 2004. Most major stores don't carry AO games (Walmart, Amazon, etc).
The argument is not over the content at all. It is about the deliberate bypass of the rating system. I am one of the many people that don't see a pair of boobies as the end of world, especially in a game about car-jackings. Rockstar profited by allowing their game in more stores. The fact that this content was left on the disc pretty much proves that Rockstar intended this all along.
I think that any item bought this way should be indentified on the item. Either change the color of the item or at the least put a note on the description.
Also, I think players that sell any items should have their name colored one way to identify that they may be a farmer and/or ninja. Anyone that buys an item should have their name colored another distinct color to identify them as an idiot.
I really worry about the overall problems this causes for a game. Now that we have an economic gain to the company for the sale of items, does that company increase the drop rate of rare items to increase their own portion of the revenue?
Imagine how bad that could get. You could have dupes not being fixed because they would lose money. There would be incentive for people to camp the best spawns for profit, thereby preventing people from fighting those mobs for fun. This might turn out just like FFXI, where the only way to get a good item was literally to buy it online.
This has to be the worst executive decision for a game that I've seen.
What kind of oversimplified example is that? What can you do with Linux that you can't with Windows? I know what I can do with Windows that I can't do with Linux: Run commercial applications that I need.
If it was a true culture shift you would see something like: x company has announced the hiring of 1,000 new software programmers to create a new division of security. This new division will audit all code for potential security problems before any new programs are released.
That would be followed immediately by "On IRC, 10,000 hackers were recruited to find holes in X Company's security measures."
Security is a concern, but it is mostly exclusive from features. For 99.9% of the features you add, there is a way to make them secure. Unless the feature is to upload and execute random code I guess.
The biggest problem with security is that you can't guard against things you don't know about. Hackers find holes, and then they get closed. It's hard to fill in a hole if you don't know it is there. In a way, for every hack that is exploited the fix makes things more secure than they were. Unfortunately there is a window of opportunity in between the finding and the fixing during which your pants are around your ankles.
But let's put the blame where it belongs: 1. Rockstar for putting something stupid like that in the game, and 2) self-seeking politicians who want to leave a "legacy" of "protecting the people from themselves". This isn't a "right/left" issue... this is a "freeedom/government regulation" issue.
I think the entirety of this scandal is that Rockstar circumvented the ESRB rating system. For that, I do personally believe they are in the wrong. I am not going to get into a debate about what is good or bad for society in terms of games. That is a totally separate issue.
Here is what Rockstar did:
1) Submit game with secret hack to be rated, knowing the secret content would bump up their rating and prevent certain stores from selling their game.
2) Get rating based on non-sexual game
3) Publish hack after game is on shelves
4) Effectively bypass the rating system since game is already released
This should be a finable offense. Polititians don't need to go ape shit about this, but in terms of legality, I feel they violated the rating system.
I only really browse the internets when I'm between huge queries. I do that part of the work that requires my attention, and then I spend a couple of minutes reading stuff.
Do they also state how much productivity I gain from the Internet? Do they have any idea how many things I have programmed in half the time because of Google and various tech sites? Or how much faster I have resolved a tech issue with a FAQ, Knowlege Base or Forum?
For IT jobs, I'd wager that the end result is that companies break even. Aside from some people that spend all day on the web, most people only use it to check email, a sport score, or a news article. Those same people used to read the newspaper at their desk for the same info.
I don't know about this. I think almost everything *could* be done properly. Look how well WoW was implemented. If a development studio did all of the work that Blizzard did on WoW, I think they could build the right game.
I don't think there is anything inherently difficult to implement about Shadowrun. It's just a lot of stuff.
The computer aspect would be something like an instanced dungeon.
The cybernetics are really just armor or buffs.
The awakened races have to be balanced properly. I think Vampire was one of these, and I loved playing one. The set back was he was practically invincible. He could turn to freaking mist whenever he wanted.
Futuristic setting is easy, but too many developers go for the burnt down, post-apocolyptic city look. Why not a Bladerunner look?
Everything else is just a matter of good content design and class balance.
The question is really if a game company wants to take this on knowing that to do it correctly, it will be a minimum of 3-5 years of development before they see a dime from it. The alternative is to market the Shadowrun name and turn out a steaming pile of crap that tarnishes the game for everyone. I can see the FPS idea going down that path. Great, I get to be a half-orc with a huge gun. What's the point? I don't want Quake: Shadowrun Edition. I want the real thing.
I played Neocron with the huge expectation that it would be like Shadowrun. Boy was I wrong. It looked like someones Computer Science project. It was all right, but nothing like I hoped it would be.
A real Shadowrun MMORPG would be the best thing to happen in a long time. It will only work if they add in every aspect of the RPG. I miss that game since I don't play tabletop anymore. To me, it was one of the most intriguing RPGs of all time, and that includes D&D.
If you build an engine that allows you to write scripts that modify any page you view, there are obviously serious security flaws.
Allowing scripts to open files and send them elsewhere is especially bad, but there was a huge security concern to me either way. I like the concept of GreaseMonkey, but choose not to install it.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions 5 maverick pilots, so that is the lions I assume. I only remember lions and one that was made up of a bunch of spaceships.
The lions could be a way better movie. Since each lion is in a remote location, they could have the characters finding each lion and learning how to use them.
In addition to this awesome news, they mention that a transformers movie is coming also. Please let them not mess up these movies. These have the potential to be the coolest movies of all time, as long as they don't turn them into a "Look what we can do with CGI" showcase. Even that would be moderately cool, but with a good plot these would excite me.
What's not quiet are the sirens of the firetrucks when they need to put out your PC.
I don't understand the variable fan thing. You get to choose between quiet or cool in different degrees. Just because I like it quiet, doesn't mean my PC is happy.
Actually, it isn't just how many friends you have. It is how many friends your friends have. That means as long as a geek latches on to a popular person, they can be popular by proxy.
Sometimes people refer to trophies as hardware. Clearly, the person with the highest score gets a trophy.
I think the issue relates to how you define community. I am an avid WoW player and completely hooked on the game still. To me the community isn't the entire player population. It is broken into subsets.
All Players -> Server -> Faction (Alliance/Horde) -> Level Range -> Guild -> Friends in Guild.
The lowest common denominator in WoW is really people in your faction, since you can't communicate with the enemy at all. Also, you don't really do much with people outside of your level range, so those guys are the ones you see most of the time.
I really only consider my guild mates to be my real community. We mostly do instances together, so I see them a majority of the time without a whole lot of interaction with other people. I have a fairly large subset of people in my guild I would consider friends and mostly spend my time with that subset.
I don't think it is fair to say that because MUDS have less people, you have more community. I just don't think you can define "community" as the millions of players that have accounts.
Not true. All of the kids that are under 18 and don't have a credit card can't easily order online, and they may not have a local store that sells AO games. If a major store such as Walmart doesn't sell the game, the kid might not have any way of getting the game without a parent's credit card. If the game is rated AO, the parents most likely will not be buying the game for their kid.
While there ins't much of a difference content wise between M and AO in some cases, financially there is a huge difference.
You have it completely backwards. If the game originally got rated AO, it would not have been the best-selling console game of 2004. Most major stores don't carry AO games (Walmart, Amazon, etc).
The argument is not over the content at all. It is about the deliberate bypass of the rating system. I am one of the many people that don't see a pair of boobies as the end of world, especially in a game about car-jackings. Rockstar profited by allowing their game in more stores. The fact that this content was left on the disc pretty much proves that Rockstar intended this all along.
I think that any item bought this way should be indentified on the item. Either change the color of the item or at the least put a note on the description.
Also, I think players that sell any items should have their name colored one way to identify that they may be a farmer and/or ninja. Anyone that buys an item should have their name colored another distinct color to identify them as an idiot.
I remember that happening. I spent like $20 to get a Clone and then it got released again. At least I got another one in a foil pack.
I really worry about the overall problems this causes for a game. Now that we have an economic gain to the company for the sale of items, does that company increase the drop rate of rare items to increase their own portion of the revenue?
Imagine how bad that could get. You could have dupes not being fixed because they would lose money. There would be incentive for people to camp the best spawns for profit, thereby preventing people from fighting those mobs for fun. This might turn out just like FFXI, where the only way to get a good item was literally to buy it online.
This has to be the worst executive decision for a game that I've seen.
Doesn't the changing of the rating by the ESRB prove your argument wrong?
What kind of oversimplified example is that? What can you do with Linux that you can't with Windows? I know what I can do with Windows that I can't do with Linux: Run commercial applications that I need.
If it was a true culture shift you would see something like: x company has announced the hiring of 1,000 new software programmers to create a new division of security. This new division will audit all code for potential security problems before any new programs are released.
That would be followed immediately by "On IRC, 10,000 hackers were recruited to find holes in X Company's security measures."
Security is a concern, but it is mostly exclusive from features. For 99.9% of the features you add, there is a way to make them secure. Unless the feature is to upload and execute random code I guess.
The biggest problem with security is that you can't guard against things you don't know about. Hackers find holes, and then they get closed. It's hard to fill in a hole if you don't know it is there. In a way, for every hack that is exploited the fix makes things more secure than they were. Unfortunately there is a window of opportunity in between the finding and the fixing during which your pants are around your ankles.
But let's put the blame where it belongs: 1. Rockstar for putting something stupid like that in the game, and 2) self-seeking politicians who want to leave a "legacy" of "protecting the people from themselves". This isn't a "right/left" issue... this is a "freeedom/government regulation" issue.
I think the entirety of this scandal is that Rockstar circumvented the ESRB rating system. For that, I do personally believe they are in the wrong. I am not going to get into a debate about what is good or bad for society in terms of games. That is a totally separate issue.
Here is what Rockstar did:
1) Submit game with secret hack to be rated, knowing the secret content would bump up their rating and prevent certain stores from selling their game.
2) Get rating based on non-sexual game
3) Publish hack after game is on shelves
4) Effectively bypass the rating system since game is already released
This should be a finable offense. Polititians don't need to go ape shit about this, but in terms of legality, I feel they violated the rating system.
I only really browse the internets when I'm between huge queries. I do that part of the work that requires my attention, and then I spend a couple of minutes reading stuff.
Do they also state how much productivity I gain from the Internet? Do they have any idea how many things I have programmed in half the time because of Google and various tech sites? Or how much faster I have resolved a tech issue with a FAQ, Knowlege Base or Forum?
For IT jobs, I'd wager that the end result is that companies break even. Aside from some people that spend all day on the web, most people only use it to check email, a sport score, or a news article. Those same people used to read the newspaper at their desk for the same info.
Details of the updated iBook are unknown, as is a firm release date, given the fickle nature of hardware updates.
The only thing we get out of this is that they are planning on revising the iBook, but we don't know how or when.
Everytime we do the Rend part of the UBRS instance in WoW I chuckle. After you kill a certain amount of his guards, he /yells "Inconceivable".
I don't think there is anything inherently difficult to implement about Shadowrun. It's just a lot of stuff.
The question is really if a game company wants to take this on knowing that to do it correctly, it will be a minimum of 3-5 years of development before they see a dime from it. The alternative is to market the Shadowrun name and turn out a steaming pile of crap that tarnishes the game for everyone. I can see the FPS idea going down that path. Great, I get to be a half-orc with a huge gun. What's the point? I don't want Quake: Shadowrun Edition. I want the real thing.
I played Neocron with the huge expectation that it would be like Shadowrun. Boy was I wrong. It looked like someones Computer Science project. It was all right, but nothing like I hoped it would be.
A real Shadowrun MMORPG would be the best thing to happen in a long time. It will only work if they add in every aspect of the RPG. I miss that game since I don't play tabletop anymore. To me, it was one of the most intriguing RPGs of all time, and that includes D&D.
Accept Post?
[Y/N]:> Y
Accept Post?
[Y/N]:> Y
Accept Post?
[Y/N]:> Y
Crash Servers?
[Y/N]:> Y
Uh oh. The Springfield Power Plant didn't last very long like that. How will /. survive?
"See, when it becomes mainstream, it becomes more insecure. Come back to windows."
First, Firefox isn't mainstream, let alone GreaseMonkey.
Second, I am already on windows.
If you build an engine that allows you to write scripts that modify any page you view, there are obviously serious security flaws.
Allowing scripts to open files and send them elsewhere is especially bad, but there was a huge security concern to me either way. I like the concept of GreaseMonkey, but choose not to install it.
That Belkin keyboard is a scam. Look at the requirements.
PC Computer
I'm looking for a keyboard without crazy restrictions.