MMORPGs are the most resource-intensive game you can possibly pick to develop. Open source gaming has failed to develop strong original concepts even in genres which are easy to develop, like turn based strategy. And I say this as a developer (on a game which is brand spanking new technology-wise, but is an adaptation of a popular board game, but for which we would have no users).
You know what the most popular open-source game is? Free-civ (Civilization 1/2 clone). Digging into actual original titles, you have Battle of Wesnoth, which is enjoyable but of a level of quality roughly comparable to the bargain bin released-only-in-strategy-heaven-Japan GBA titles (except those bargain bin titles have better plots). Battle of Wesnoth deserves an award for the overall quality of their art resources, major props for managing a consistent and appealing visual style, but they're still nothing to write home about compared to even the (low) prevailing standard in turn-based strategy.
I don't think we'll ever see an open source MMORPG which is worth the time it takes to download. Focus on the things open source does well (applications with long life cycles), take the savings you get and play WoW on your Windows box.
I live in Japan, and get 50 MB/s. It gets wasted 99.98% of the time (I don't pirate). However, when I participated in the ICFP programming contest this last weekend, being able to download an entire Linux distribution in the time it usually takes me to download my email was pretty cool. (By the way, if this whole broadband thing is making you nostoglic for the days of 300 bits per second being a speed demon, you can relive the early nineties anytime you want, for free, by trying to connect to the Yahoo Japan mail server).
Its been filtered in China at least once, although their filtering changes on a day to day basis. Somebody might have said something "subversive", like "Taiwan is a country". I'd tell you if its banned today, except they've banned the machine that tells you if sites are banned.
http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.ht ml
An excellent business decision, that. Make $24 in extra charges, spend over triple that on the hardware and installation. Its amazing the broadband companies haven't thought of it already.
No, because it only illegalizes unsolicited mail sent promoting items which the child is not old enough to obtain legally. You fail both prongs of the test. I'd consider stopping accepting non-electronic orders, by the way, but its your business. Its just screaming "defraud me!" to my mind.
Yes, but if you consider the relative likelihood of getting caught, you're much better off downloading it. Shoplifters have a per-incident conviction rate in the low single-digits percent -- how many universities do you know in which 3% of their student body actually got brought up on charges? (Note: you steal something from Walmart, and they go significantly farther than Sam Walton sending you a letter saying "Hey, please don't do that again").
He's right. SBC, for example, offers you per-hour local billing from about $6 per month (or unlimited from $14 -- only worth it if you talk less than 3 hours, but don't trust my numbers as they're from two-year old memory). Its a good choice for people who live on fixed-incomes who have to scrape for every dollar (and don't need to make outgoing calls -- you call grandma, grandma doesn't call you), and also those who need access to a landline for whatever reason but do most of their communication on cell/internet.
Haha, that reminds me of my days in multi-player Battletech (MPBT, a staple back when AOL was THE destination for online gaming). My brother and I commanded a lance (team of four) for our House (clan/guild/what have you) and would start every battle by saying in the general chat "Remember everyone, hit escape twice to power up!". We stopped doing it after the guild leader said he was tired of having the entire enemy team eject at once.
I've participated in three raids to kill Onyxia (we haven't gotten her yet, but she goes down this Friday, darn it -- the international Coalition of the Willing Aussies, Kiwis, and American expats in Japan will beat that overgrown lizard) and I'm hardly hard core -- recently I put in, oh, about 10 hours a week to WoW. I knew 20 of the 40 in the raid personally, the rest were from my extended social circle -- people who grouped with people I grouped with, basically. Each attempt on Onyxia, who isn't exactly the pinnacle of end-game content but is vastly harder than any non-raiding instance in the game, takes 30 minutes, and if you've got a 2 or 3 hour block to set aside on the weekend you can keep running until you get her. The level of tactics during the encounter aren't quite chess but you can definately sort out the people who are just hitting autoattack from the ones who are thinking it through -- we had one frost mage singlehandedly stop a wipe (total loss of raid group) by distracting some of the mini-dragons that spawn and try to eat your casters, and then fighting fifteen of them at once... and winning, without an ounce of support from anybody. Unfortunately, despite his heroic efforts the main tank bit it five minutes later, and then Big Momma Onyxia decided that frost mage had done enough damage for the day, and ate him.
And, empirically, $250,000 a year doesn't buy a lot of talent in Gotham. *bang* *crash* "What was that?" "I don't know, probably a cat. Lets not bother alerting the security detail to the fact we're about to get dropped with one punch to the face."
Microsoft is sitting on piles of cash -- they can continue to justify losses which barely register as line items on their budgets as "strategic hedges" against the possibility of game consoles ever doing a functionality jump like cell phones are in the middle of right now (powerup to PDA!), which would cut into the home computing market, which ironically is ALSO a small part of their vast empire but worth a heck of a lot more than every XBox title ever sold.
Saying time will tell on the $80 billion market cap is like saying time will tell whether I'll marry a Brazillian supermodel before taking the gold medal in the 100 yard dash but after being the first simultaneous president of the US and Prime Minister of Bangladesh (does Bangladesh even have a Prime Minister? Well, I guess I'll just have to convince them to make the job to give it to me -- put that on the list.) Google's valuation puts them higher than Sears. Sears takes in more money every week than Google has in its best year ever (Sears/Kmart sales in 2004: 55 billion dollars, and thats Billion with a B and a ! for emphasis). To match that, Google has to sustain its best ever quarterly performance for a year... and then double it, and double it, and double it, and double it, and double it... And then a little bit of cherry on top.
*Nothing* will happen unless the corporation decides to put some money on the line and sue, and it can't be a "friendly" suit either just to create a precedent, as those generally should be bounced out of court. Of course, should you GPL it and then, for whatever ungodly reason, someone steals the code from you and rereleases it closed-source, and you try to enforce the GPL on them, they'll attempt to claim that you had no legal right to GPL it. But realistically, lawsuits don't happen when there isn't actual cash money on the line, and there is no cash on the line anywhere in this scenario.
Serve your website from a Windows machine. 80% of slashdot will refuse to read it out of spite. Presto, Slashdot effect averted. As an alternate to the Windows machine, post something supportive of the RIAA -- then you won't even need a server to handle all the people who won't be visiting the page you don't really have.
Yep, and without maligning folks like my mother, people who get game grammar can be dropped into almost any arbitrary game in their chosen genres and Pick Up and Play, whereas people who don't, can't. WoW has a very, very nice difficulty curve... if you're coming to the game with an ingrained understanding that kobolds are less dangerous than dragons, "levels" are a qualitative measure of power, mages always are physically weak, "hit points" are something its good to have more of because they keep you from dying, and a hundred thousand things that Blizzard didn't go over in the tutorial because they assume we know. Some of us don't. My father, who burns several hours a week on solitare, just doesn't have the grammar built up to tangle WoW... or Zelda, for that matter.
Of course, debt is the exact opposite of savings, after all. Oh, you meant "safe" -- nevermind.
Re:Take THAT, space science nay-sayers!
on
Glass In Spaaaaace
·
· Score: 1
Sure, you can send anything down for pretty close to free, if you don't care who it lands on or how many pieces it fragments into. If your 3. ??? includes actually delivering it to someone, you need to put it in a vehicle capable of surviving reentry, which means that either you magically build space shuttles in orbit or you have to lift the entire empty weight of the reentry vehicle just to transport the stuff back down. And do that for every shipment.
[quote]Then again, in what other industry do those struggling to pay for college or to get through unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later?[/quote]
Well, music (performance and composition), journalism, poetry, opinion writing, fiction, art, child care, education... oh, that was a rhetorical question?:)
If I hadn't blown my mod points yesterday that would have been +1 funny.
Re:Take THAT, space science nay-sayers!
on
Glass In Spaaaaace
·
· Score: 1
I'm trying to find an application for either glass, aluminum, transparent alumnium, or reflective glass, that would justify valuing it at substantially over $7000 a kilogram. Remarkably strong, corrosion resistant glass had better not cost enough that transporting one window from factory to installation costs more than the entire rest of the house. Glass motors sound like a wonderful idea for... well, absolutely bloody nothing. Might as well grind up diamonds into a fine powder and sprinkle them into the steel when you're casting it -- it won't accomplish much but you'll be able to say "Ford Infintium. We spent an infinitum of money to bring this car's engine to you", AND you won't lose 1% of your engines to the transportation system exploding.
For that matter, there is almost NO manufacturing product which would be worth $7000 per kilogram in transportation costs -- one figure I've frequently seen cited is that you could turn lead into gold in space and you'd still lose money.
Slashdot Mirror
Going to the (first-run) movies twice, alone, without any refreshments -- $10-12 at the cheapest US prices, $30+ in New York or Japan.
Buying one hard-cover Clancy/Grisham/Da Vinci Code -- $20.
Buying two mass-market paperbacks of any genre. -- $12-15
Going to a single major league sporting event. -- Don't even get me started.
Going out for drinks with friends, for two hours, once. $20+
You know what the most popular open-source game is? Free-civ (Civilization 1/2 clone). Digging into actual original titles, you have Battle of Wesnoth, which is enjoyable but of a level of quality roughly comparable to the bargain bin released-only-in-strategy-heaven-Japan GBA titles (except those bargain bin titles have better plots). Battle of Wesnoth deserves an award for the overall quality of their art resources, major props for managing a consistent and appealing visual style, but they're still nothing to write home about compared to even the (low) prevailing standard in turn-based strategy.
I don't think we'll ever see an open source MMORPG which is worth the time it takes to download. Focus on the things open source does well (applications with long life cycles), take the savings you get and play WoW on your Windows box.
I live in Japan, and get 50 MB/s. It gets wasted 99.98% of the time (I don't pirate). However, when I participated in the ICFP programming contest this last weekend, being able to download an entire Linux distribution in the time it usually takes me to download my email was pretty cool. (By the way, if this whole broadband thing is making you nostoglic for the days of 300 bits per second being a speed demon, you can relive the early nineties anytime you want, for free, by trying to connect to the Yahoo Japan mail server).
Alright, what mod rewarded a point to a post that couldn't get the assignment operator right?
Just remember, on Slashdot 10% is a crappy share for media players and a wave of the future for web browsers or operating systems.
Its been filtered in China at least once, although their filtering changes on a day to day basis. Somebody might have said something "subversive", like "Taiwan is a country". I'd tell you if its banned today, except they've banned the machine that tells you if sites are banned. http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.ht ml
An excellent business decision, that. Make $24 in extra charges, spend over triple that on the hardware and installation. Its amazing the broadband companies haven't thought of it already.
No, because it only illegalizes unsolicited mail sent promoting items which the child is not old enough to obtain legally. You fail both prongs of the test. I'd consider stopping accepting non-electronic orders, by the way, but its your business. Its just screaming "defraud me!" to my mind.
Yes, but if you consider the relative likelihood of getting caught, you're much better off downloading it. Shoplifters have a per-incident conviction rate in the low single-digits percent -- how many universities do you know in which 3% of their student body actually got brought up on charges? (Note: you steal something from Walmart, and they go significantly farther than Sam Walton sending you a letter saying "Hey, please don't do that again").
Is this ad campaign a recent phenomenon? I've been out of the country for two years now and remember calling Mickey-Ds Mickey-Ds since childhood...
He's right. SBC, for example, offers you per-hour local billing from about $6 per month (or unlimited from $14 -- only worth it if you talk less than 3 hours, but don't trust my numbers as they're from two-year old memory). Its a good choice for people who live on fixed-incomes who have to scrape for every dollar (and don't need to make outgoing calls -- you call grandma, grandma doesn't call you), and also those who need access to a landline for whatever reason but do most of their communication on cell/internet.
Haha, that reminds me of my days in multi-player Battletech (MPBT, a staple back when AOL was THE destination for online gaming). My brother and I commanded a lance (team of four) for our House (clan/guild/what have you) and would start every battle by saying in the general chat "Remember everyone, hit escape twice to power up!". We stopped doing it after the guild leader said he was tired of having the entire enemy team eject at once.
I've participated in three raids to kill Onyxia (we haven't gotten her yet, but she goes down this Friday, darn it -- the international Coalition of the Willing Aussies, Kiwis, and American expats in Japan will beat that overgrown lizard) and I'm hardly hard core -- recently I put in, oh, about 10 hours a week to WoW. I knew 20 of the 40 in the raid personally, the rest were from my extended social circle -- people who grouped with people I grouped with, basically. Each attempt on Onyxia, who isn't exactly the pinnacle of end-game content but is vastly harder than any non-raiding instance in the game, takes 30 minutes, and if you've got a 2 or 3 hour block to set aside on the weekend you can keep running until you get her. The level of tactics during the encounter aren't quite chess but you can definately sort out the people who are just hitting autoattack from the ones who are thinking it through -- we had one frost mage singlehandedly stop a wipe (total loss of raid group) by distracting some of the mini-dragons that spawn and try to eat your casters, and then fighting fifteen of them at once... and winning, without an ounce of support from anybody. Unfortunately, despite his heroic efforts the main tank bit it five minutes later, and then Big Momma Onyxia decided that frost mage had done enough damage for the day, and ate him.
And, empirically, $250,000 a year doesn't buy a lot of talent in Gotham. *bang* *crash* "What was that?" "I don't know, probably a cat. Lets not bother alerting the security detail to the fact we're about to get dropped with one punch to the face."
Microsoft is sitting on piles of cash -- they can continue to justify losses which barely register as line items on their budgets as "strategic hedges" against the possibility of game consoles ever doing a functionality jump like cell phones are in the middle of right now (powerup to PDA!), which would cut into the home computing market, which ironically is ALSO a small part of their vast empire but worth a heck of a lot more than every XBox title ever sold.
Saying time will tell on the $80 billion market cap is like saying time will tell whether I'll marry a Brazillian supermodel before taking the gold medal in the 100 yard dash but after being the first simultaneous president of the US and Prime Minister of Bangladesh (does Bangladesh even have a Prime Minister? Well, I guess I'll just have to convince them to make the job to give it to me -- put that on the list.) Google's valuation puts them higher than Sears. Sears takes in more money every week than Google has in its best year ever (Sears/Kmart sales in 2004: 55 billion dollars, and thats Billion with a B and a ! for emphasis). To match that, Google has to sustain its best ever quarterly performance for a year... and then double it, and double it, and double it, and double it, and double it... And then a little bit of cherry on top.
*Nothing* will happen unless the corporation decides to put some money on the line and sue, and it can't be a "friendly" suit either just to create a precedent, as those generally should be bounced out of court. Of course, should you GPL it and then, for whatever ungodly reason, someone steals the code from you and rereleases it closed-source, and you try to enforce the GPL on them, they'll attempt to claim that you had no legal right to GPL it. But realistically, lawsuits don't happen when there isn't actual cash money on the line, and there is no cash on the line anywhere in this scenario.
Serve your website from a Windows machine. 80% of slashdot will refuse to read it out of spite. Presto, Slashdot effect averted. As an alternate to the Windows machine, post something supportive of the RIAA -- then you won't even need a server to handle all the people who won't be visiting the page you don't really have.
Yep, and without maligning folks like my mother, people who get game grammar can be dropped into almost any arbitrary game in their chosen genres and Pick Up and Play, whereas people who don't, can't. WoW has a very, very nice difficulty curve... if you're coming to the game with an ingrained understanding that kobolds are less dangerous than dragons, "levels" are a qualitative measure of power, mages always are physically weak, "hit points" are something its good to have more of because they keep you from dying, and a hundred thousand things that Blizzard didn't go over in the tutorial because they assume we know. Some of us don't. My father, who burns several hours a week on solitare, just doesn't have the grammar built up to tangle WoW... or Zelda, for that matter.
Of course, debt is the exact opposite of savings, after all. Oh, you meant "safe" -- nevermind.
Sure, you can send anything down for pretty close to free, if you don't care who it lands on or how many pieces it fragments into. If your 3. ??? includes actually delivering it to someone, you need to put it in a vehicle capable of surviving reentry, which means that either you magically build space shuttles in orbit or you have to lift the entire empty weight of the reentry vehicle just to transport the stuff back down. And do that for every shipment.
[quote]Then again, in what other industry do those struggling to pay for college or to get through unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later?[/quote] Well, music (performance and composition), journalism, poetry, opinion writing, fiction, art, child care, education... oh, that was a rhetorical question? :)
If I hadn't blown my mod points yesterday that would have been +1 funny.
I'm trying to find an application for either glass, aluminum, transparent alumnium, or reflective glass, that would justify valuing it at substantially over $7000 a kilogram. Remarkably strong, corrosion resistant glass had better not cost enough that transporting one window from factory to installation costs more than the entire rest of the house. Glass motors sound like a wonderful idea for... well, absolutely bloody nothing. Might as well grind up diamonds into a fine powder and sprinkle them into the steel when you're casting it -- it won't accomplish much but you'll be able to say "Ford Infintium. We spent an infinitum of money to bring this car's engine to you", AND you won't lose 1% of your engines to the transportation system exploding. For that matter, there is almost NO manufacturing product which would be worth $7000 per kilogram in transportation costs -- one figure I've frequently seen cited is that you could turn lead into gold in space and you'd still lose money.