Ah yes, the era of the,"Oh no, I was on long distance when I was playing online?"
Nope. Islands of Kesmai, for example, charged up to $12/hr, in addition to compuserve's access fee. That doesn't include any long distance, either.
100 hours of gaming in a month (not at all uncommon for today's "hardcore MMOers") would cost you about $2,000, if you include compuserve's hourly fee.
I am sad to see subscription based games survive. Everquest (afaik) started the trend...
You missed the early nineties, when people payed by the hour, and in some cases by the minute, to play games like Legends of Kesmai. People ran up bills, some as high as hundreds and even thousands of dollars per month.
$15/month is a steal compared to that.
Even more, your average (non-MMO) gamer probably buys one boxed game a month, at least -- which runs about $50, these days.
Again, $15/month is a steal.
There are very few services out there that give you "All you can eat" for $15. And most of these games feature regular content updates -- so you're getting a little more than just the privalege of playing, for your money.
Running an MMO costs money. Constantly producing more content does too.
We're on residential DSL, here at the office, and every time I upload a large file, everyone's web productivity is cut in half for an hour, as our connection slows to a crawl.
I've played Asheron's Call for 6 years, off and on. It's a completely skill-based MMO. As the parent says, in the end, it's still a class based system: there are only a handful of viable skill combinations. In reality, though there are theoretically thousands of potential skill sets, 95% of players end up choosing a tried and true "template", or something very close to it.
You end up tweaking a few variables to make your character fit your playstyle a little better, and it's nice to be able to do that -- for example, one player might choose to have his archer stronger in magics while another might choose to have his better at hand to hand combat.
However, class based systems can frequently offer a similar level of customization: e.g., WoW's Talent system allows you to tailor your character to your playstyle, to a somewhat lesser extent.
The advantage of the class system is, players have a harder time selecting a non-viable template. The advantage of the skill system is, it's a little more customizable, and selecting/changing skill sets is a bit of a game in and of itself, which some people love.
"Joe Blow Employee shouldn't have to give a shit if someone is copying his company's software. He's doing his job and should be paid regardless to other factors."
A company's profits dropping by some number of millions of dollars is going to result in downsizing and people losing their jobs. Period. Sure, Joe B. Employee *shouldn't* be hurt by that sort of thing, but out here in the real world, he is.
The population of one server droping says NOTHING of the population of other/new servers.
Sure, the oldest servers are going to lose players, but as long as the new ones *gain* players faster, it's a net gain.
WoW is *still* growing faster than any MMO, ever. You're gonna have to come up with something more than anecdotal evidence to discount the volumes of evidence of that.
But frankly this is pretty much in line with what you'd pay for incredibly comperable 'indie' games, the likes of which are available for $20 a pop at places like http://reflexive.com/ and http://gamehouse.com/
"Peak Oil" isn't so much about running out of oil, as it is the rate of production peaking.
Hence the name, "Peak Oil".
Most of us are well aware that there's a ton of oil out there in sands and shale and all sorts of unconventional sources. That's only tangentially related to the *rate of production* of oil. We know of large sources of oil, yes, but unless we can *harvest* that oil at the rate of demand, we *still* have a peak oil situation.
Again, volume of production and volume of discovered reserves are two totally different things.
If the guy did bury his ill-gotten gains there, then he did it with a spade
That seems like a completely ungrounded assumption.
If I'm gonna bury millions of dollars worth of precious metals, I'm gonna do it right, for fuck's sake! It's not like I couldn't afford to!
one of those clever underground scanners the archeologists use.
Now you're talkin'. Mythbusters demonstrated the technology necessary to do this.
Of course, it's rather obvious that none of us have RTFA, as a few of the questions raised in this thread have been answered: AOL said Tuesday it intends to search for gold and platinum bars the company suspects are hidden... (which of course may very well entail imaging *before* digging)
"I don't care if they dig up the entire yard. They're just going to make fools of themselves,"
True; kieth ivan thompson *probably* wasn't the one who issued that query. However, I'm willing to bet at least one of the 183 SSNs I found belonged to the searcher. And again -- I only found well-formed SSNs; I completely ignored those without dashes, which almost certainly number somewhere around 100, if not more.
183 search queries contain well formed SSNs (I'm sure there are hundreds more w/o dashes, etc) (I threw the [0-7] at the begining because wikipedia indicates that no SSNs with the first 3 digits over 772 have been issued). I looked at a handful and a lot of those searches contain a lot more than just SSNs, at that.
For example, the below (which I've actually removed the sensitive data from -- it's public, but I refuse to repost it): 4186504 locate keith ivan thompson born * *** ** social security ***-**-**** last address was *** street apt *** ****** colorado
"The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged."
AOL probably doesn't have a direct maping of anonymous ID -> AOL user ID. Of course, they have the original data, and as such, could work it out trivially.
The people who are gazillionaires right now are the ones who found solutions to these problems. They built the ruggedized equipment, created the necessary ceiling mounts, developed the picture-based touch screens for the illiterate employees, and broke down the components of a special order to make it digestable by a computer. They then set out to prove these designs, fighting wave after wave of broken and scarred hardware. Ideas that seemed good at the time didn't work out in practice. Financial losses were heavy with the first models, but the kinks were slowly worked out.
Actually, at pizza hut (2 years ago), all we had was a P2-based linux box that had a bunch of old text-only VT100 terminals hooked up to it. There wasn't even one in the kitchen, just a dot-matrix printer which printed up order tickets. The registers weren't touch screen, nor picture based -- they were the aforementioned terminals, with keyboards. The interface was anything but intuitive -- instructions for new employees frequently went something like this "Hit F3, then F7, then c, q, p, and r, then F6, then F3." The learning curve was pretty steep. Oh, and special orders? The only thing you could really do via the computer was (1) add or remove toppings or (2) have different toppings for each half of the pizza. Whenever we needed something really special done (say, someone wanted different ingreedients on each third of the pizza, or someone wanted light sauce), we just walked into the kitchen and told the cook.
There wasn't a single 'ruggedized' piece of equipment to be found. You really could have built the exact same system out of stock late 80s equipment, just like the gp suggested.
I knocked my PS2 over while there was a game in it, spinning, and it fell a good 3 feet, gouging the DVD when it hit the floor. Rebooted, and the game wouldn't start. Tried toothpaste, and the disc got a little better (the intro music started playing again). Tried some more toothpaste, and it got worse (intro music stopped again).
Then, I went to the local gamestop and bought one of those "Disk Doctor" (Same concept as this model: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000J4PD ) things, that has a grinding disk that's supposed to evenly grind down the outer surface of the disk, leveling it out to below the level of the scratch(es). I'm usually skeptical about that sort of thing, but there were some glowing reviews online.
It worked perfectly. I was stunned. I guess the fact it worked *after* having beat the hell out of it with toothpaste is even more impressive.
That's entirely possible -- I had some issues with it beforehand. All I know is I hooked the thing up when there was a DVD in the PS2, and suddenly it started switching back and forth between menu items.
I actually downloaded this and played it, and I have this to offer:
1) They came up with a novel control scheme that's not too far off from being as good as the guitar hero controller: Pick up your keyboard. Place your left hand under the F1 - F4 keys. Your right index finger should fall on F1 -- this is the "First Fret", F2 is the second, etc. Hold the keyboard like you would the neck of a guitar.
The default "Pick" key is enter, but I think I'd suggest space.
However, I was unable to actually play this game correctly, as I'm on a laptop, and as such, cannot "pick up" my keyboard as described. I've got keyboards around, but none of those damn PS/2 to USB adaptors.
It's really pretty decent -- it seems to respond to input almost identically to guitar hero, and it has a song editor built in, so it could potentially take off like Step Mania did. However, it only ships with 3 songs, and I couldn't find any user contributed songs via google.
Anyway, the aforementioned control scheme makes this a lot closer to playing guitar hero than playing step mania on the keyboard is to playing DDR.
(And good lord, am I hoping someone will work it out -- if there was an open source guitar hero with thousands of songs available, I'd never leave the house)
My dad's got two really nice metal DDR pads (in the $150+ price range) hooked up via a USB adaptor, like the parent mentions, which he uses in combination with a digital projector to create the sweetest DDR rig I've ever seen. The major benefit of step mania, is there are thousands upon thousands of songs available, whereas with regular DDR, you're stuck with the few dozen on each CD/DVD.
However, anyone who's ever tried to use the guitar hero controller with any non-guitar hero game knows that it does something really weird. The DDR pads are really simple -- they're just straight up joystick buttons, basically. The guitar hero controller, on the other hand, actually sends out alternating button presses at regular intervals, even when no buttons are being pressed.
As such, I've not yet heard of anyone actually hooking up their SG controller to their PC, and actually using it to play anything remotely like guitar hero.
#2, Halo has Estimated Sales: 4.2 million #1, GTA:VC has Estimated Sales: 7 Million
I think it's pretty safe to say WoW's had more than 4.2 box sales, which puts them at either #2 or #1.
After all, "World of Warcraft's European customer base is currently at more than 1 million players, with the worldwide total now at more than 6 million players." http://www.blizzard.com/press/060228.shtml
... You'll find that one of the main reasons they've never taken off, aside from the extreme risk and cost, is they're *incredibly* hard to control! The throttle's extremely sensitive, the power is immense, and if point it the wrong way, you'll either spin out of control, or plummet.
Between alcohol and the next-morning shock/regret, it's easy to convince yourself that one thing or another happened, and parent poster's claim is that the support groups are doing too much to convince people that they were raped.
Say what? Professionals encouraging people to create false memories of crimes that never happened?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the era of the ,"Oh no, I was on long distance when I was playing online?"
i ce_to_Play
Nope. Islands of Kesmai, for example, charged up to $12/hr, in addition to compuserve's access fee. That doesn't include any long distance, either.
100 hours of gaming in a month (not at all uncommon for today's "hardcore MMOers") would cost you about $2,000, if you include compuserve's hourly fee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_of_Kesmai#Pr
I am sad to see subscription based games survive. Everquest (afaik) started the trend...
You missed the early nineties, when people payed by the hour, and in some cases by the minute, to play games like Legends of Kesmai. People ran up bills, some as high as hundreds and even thousands of dollars per month.
$15/month is a steal compared to that.
Even more, your average (non-MMO) gamer probably buys one boxed game a month, at least -- which runs about $50, these days.
Again, $15/month is a steal.
There are very few services out there that give you "All you can eat" for $15. And most of these games feature regular content updates -- so you're getting a little more than just the privalege of playing, for your money.
Running an MMO costs money. Constantly producing more content does too.
Bussiness DSL has a better upstream.
We're on residential DSL, here at the office, and every time I upload a large file, everyone's web productivity is cut in half for an hour, as our connection slows to a crawl.
I've played Asheron's Call for 6 years, off and on. It's a completely skill-based MMO. As the parent says, in the end, it's still a class based system: there are only a handful of viable skill combinations. In reality, though there are theoretically thousands of potential skill sets, 95% of players end up choosing a tried and true "template", or something very close to it.
You end up tweaking a few variables to make your character fit your playstyle a little better, and it's nice to be able to do that -- for example, one player might choose to have his archer stronger in magics while another might choose to have his better at hand to hand combat.
However, class based systems can frequently offer a similar level of customization: e.g., WoW's Talent system allows you to tailor your character to your playstyle, to a somewhat lesser extent.
The advantage of the class system is, players have a harder time selecting a non-viable template.
The advantage of the skill system is, it's a little more customizable, and selecting/changing skill sets is a bit of a game in and of itself, which some people love.
are all those Icons for Mage talents stolen from WC3?
I know for a fact WoW has been using WC3 icons since early beta.
I'm sure it's been the same since day 1.
"Joe Blow Employee shouldn't have to give a shit if someone is copying his company's software. He's doing his job and should be paid regardless to other factors."
A company's profits dropping by some number of millions of dollars is going to result in downsizing and people losing their jobs. Period. Sure, Joe B. Employee *shouldn't* be hurt by that sort of thing, but out here in the real world, he is.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
The population of one server droping says NOTHING of the population of other/new servers.
Sure, the oldest servers are going to lose players, but as long as the new ones *gain* players faster, it's a net gain.
WoW is *still* growing faster than any MMO, ever. You're gonna have to come up with something more than anecdotal evidence to discount the volumes of evidence of that.
But frankly this is pretty much in line with what you'd pay for incredibly comperable 'indie' games, the likes of which are available for $20 a pop at places like http://reflexive.com/ and http://gamehouse.com/
$24 for lumines is quite in line with the market.
"Peak Oil" isn't so much about running out of oil, as it is the rate of production peaking.
Hence the name, "Peak Oil".
Most of us are well aware that there's a ton of oil out there in sands and shale and all sorts of unconventional sources. That's only tangentially related to the *rate of production* of oil. We know of large sources of oil, yes, but unless we can *harvest* that oil at the rate of demand, we *still* have a peak oil situation.
Again, volume of production and volume of discovered reserves are two totally different things.
If the guy did bury his ill-gotten gains there, then he did it with a spade
That seems like a completely ungrounded assumption.
If I'm gonna bury millions of dollars worth of precious metals, I'm gonna do it right, for fuck's sake! It's not like I couldn't afford to!
one of those clever underground scanners the archeologists use.
Now you're talkin'. Mythbusters demonstrated the technology necessary to do this.
Of course, it's rather obvious that none of us have RTFA, as a few of the questions raised in this thread have been answered:
AOL said Tuesday it intends to search for gold and platinum bars the company suspects are hidden... (which of course may very well entail imaging *before* digging)
"I don't care if they dig up the entire yard. They're just going to make fools of themselves,"
True; kieth ivan thompson *probably* wasn't the one who issued that query. However, I'm willing to bet at least one of the 183 SSNs I found belonged to the searcher. And again -- I only found well-formed SSNs; I completely ignored those without dashes, which almost certainly number somewhere around 100, if not more.
bash$ egrep '[0-7][0-9]{2,2}-[0-9]{2,2}-[0-9]{4,4}' user-ct-test-collection-*.txt | wc -l
183
bash$
183 search queries contain well formed SSNs (I'm sure there are hundreds more w/o dashes, etc) (I threw the [0-7] at the begining because wikipedia indicates that no SSNs with the first 3 digits over 772 have been issued). I looked at a handful and a lot of those searches contain a lot more than just SSNs, at that.
For example, the below (which I've actually removed the sensitive data from -- it's public, but I refuse to repost it):
4186504 locate keith ivan thompson born * *** ** social security ***-**-**** last address was *** street apt *** ****** colorado
From the .txt file that comes with the data:
"The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged."
AOL probably doesn't have a direct maping of anonymous ID -> AOL user ID. Of course, they have the original data, and as such, could work it out trivially.
The mysqlimport command.
m l
http://mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqlimport.ht
The people who are gazillionaires right now are the ones who found solutions to these problems. They built the ruggedized equipment, created the necessary ceiling mounts, developed the picture-based touch screens for the illiterate employees, and broke down the components of a special order to make it digestable by a computer. They then set out to prove these designs, fighting wave after wave of broken and scarred hardware. Ideas that seemed good at the time didn't work out in practice. Financial losses were heavy with the first models, but the kinks were slowly worked out.
Actually, at pizza hut (2 years ago), all we had was a P2-based linux box that had a bunch of old text-only VT100 terminals hooked up to it. There wasn't even one in the kitchen, just a dot-matrix printer which printed up order tickets. The registers weren't touch screen, nor picture based -- they were the aforementioned terminals, with keyboards. The interface was anything but intuitive -- instructions for new employees frequently went something like this "Hit F3, then F7, then c, q, p, and r, then F6, then F3." The learning curve was pretty steep. Oh, and special orders? The only thing you could really do via the computer was (1) add or remove toppings or (2) have different toppings for each half of the pizza. Whenever we needed something really special done (say, someone wanted different ingreedients on each third of the pizza, or someone wanted light sauce), we just walked into the kitchen and told the cook.
There wasn't a single 'ruggedized' piece of equipment to be found. You really could have built the exact same system out of stock late 80s equipment, just like the gp suggested.
"Structures like these are made to last, not to be thrown away."
Actually, they just completed a new Carcinas bridge, and on the radio, the newsperson said the new span was designed to last 70 years.
I was stunned, frankly. I, too thought bridges were permanent fixtures, meant to last centuries. I guess they're not.
I knocked my PS2 over while there was a game in it, spinning, and it fell a good 3 feet, gouging the DVD when it hit the floor. Rebooted, and the game wouldn't start. Tried toothpaste, and the disc got a little better (the intro music started playing again). Tried some more toothpaste, and it got worse (intro music stopped again).
Then, I went to the local gamestop and bought one of those "Disk Doctor" (Same concept as this model: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000J4PD ) things, that has a grinding disk that's supposed to evenly grind down the outer surface of the disk, leveling it out to below the level of the scratch(es). I'm usually skeptical about that sort of thing, but there were some glowing reviews online.
It worked perfectly. I was stunned. I guess the fact it worked *after* having beat the hell out of it with toothpaste is even more impressive.
That's entirely possible -- I had some issues with it beforehand. All I know is I hooked the thing up when there was a DVD in the PS2, and suddenly it started switching back and forth between menu items.
"Perhaps it wold work if you picked your keyboard up and held it like a guitar. (Warning: This may get you strange looks.)"
That's actually what they suggest you do, and that's what the default keymap is setup for.
Here's the official site:
http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/uv/fretsonfire/
And the demo video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5rANYBQvF0
Their logo is a guy holding the keyboard upside down.
I actually downloaded this and played it, and I have this to offer:
1) They came up with a novel control scheme that's not too far off from being as good as the guitar hero controller:
Pick up your keyboard. Place your left hand under the F1 - F4 keys. Your right index finger should fall on F1 -- this is the "First Fret", F2 is the second, etc. Hold the keyboard like you would the neck of a guitar.
The default "Pick" key is enter, but I think I'd suggest space.
However, I was unable to actually play this game correctly, as I'm on a laptop, and as such, cannot "pick up" my keyboard as described. I've got keyboards around, but none of those damn PS/2 to USB adaptors.
It's really pretty decent -- it seems to respond to input almost identically to guitar hero, and it has a song editor built in, so it could potentially take off like Step Mania did. However, it only ships with 3 songs, and I couldn't find any user contributed songs via google.
Anyway, the aforementioned control scheme makes this a lot closer to playing guitar hero than playing step mania on the keyboard is to playing DDR.
(And good lord, am I hoping someone will work it out -- if there was an open source guitar hero with thousands of songs available, I'd never leave the house)
My dad's got two really nice metal DDR pads (in the $150+ price range) hooked up via a USB adaptor, like the parent mentions, which he uses in combination with a digital projector to create the sweetest DDR rig I've ever seen. The major benefit of step mania, is there are thousands upon thousands of songs available, whereas with regular DDR, you're stuck with the few dozen on each CD/DVD.
However, anyone who's ever tried to use the guitar hero controller with any non-guitar hero game knows that it does something really weird. The DDR pads are really simple -- they're just straight up joystick buttons, basically. The guitar hero controller, on the other hand, actually sends out alternating button presses at regular intervals, even when no buttons are being pressed.
As such, I've not yet heard of anyone actually hooking up their SG controller to their PC, and actually using it to play anything remotely like guitar hero.
Not only that,
#2, Halo has Estimated Sales: 4.2 million
#1, GTA:VC has Estimated Sales: 7 Million
I think it's pretty safe to say WoW's had more than 4.2 box sales, which puts them at either #2 or #1.
After all,
"World of Warcraft's European customer base is currently at more than 1 million players, with the worldwide total now at more than 6 million players."
http://www.blizzard.com/press/060228.shtml
... You'll find that one of the main reasons they've never taken off, aside from the extreme risk and cost, is they're *incredibly* hard to control! The throttle's extremely sensitive, the power is immense, and if point it the wrong way, you'll either spin out of control, or plummet.
Between alcohol and the next-morning shock/regret, it's easy to convince yourself that one thing or another happened, and parent poster's claim is that the support groups are doing too much to convince people that they were raped.
y steria
Say what? Professionals encouraging people to create false memories of crimes that never happened?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_sex_abuse_h
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic#Examples
That's unpossible!