Sure, and a computer doesn't compute without a human there to make it compute something. It's not called an assault rifle because it's a rifle that assaults things, it's a rifle that is used in assault. Also, a pocket knife doesn't have pockets, nor does it pocket things.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least do it right.
Starcraft Ghost - while it wasn't released, it's still part of the series. It doesn't seem likely that they'll drop the entire thing either - there's a lot of work got into that, and when their next project comes out - whatever it is - it'll probably be able to use that codebase, that art, etc.
From a business point of view, it was sensible for Blizzard to shelve SCG. WoW is huge - put a shitload of effort into it. Making a single fix affects millions of users. Don't divide that effort among multiple games, and don't redivide your fanbase. I think it's a damn pity, because I've played many bliz games and they've all been fantastic. But until WoW begins to wane for the majority, it's going to remain Blizzard's champion and jewel, and everything else can go on hiatus.
What we do get is that the developers of the other franchises - for example the Blizzard North team - are going off and doing their own thing. There you get the Blizzard skillset (many of the original developers) without the blocker of already having a humongous cash cow. While they can't touch the Blizzard franchises, Hellgate:London and Mythos should be awesome games, because they're being written by the same people who created the other awesome games in the first place.
You've half-answered yourself - savvy users understand about phishing in the first place, know about password security, etc etc. It's the unsavvy users that are being fooled.
While I appreciate you're picking on the word 'safe', you're picking on it for the wrong reason. People will still be caught out by www.bank.safe.banking.login/login.asp instead of www.bank.safe/banking/login/login.asp; but that's not what.safe is trying to address. It's trying to address scammy domainnames like yourbank.com instead of bank.com, or 8ank.com, or the cyrillic URLs that are visually identical, or what have you. It's unlikely to work - a step on the red queen's board - but at least they're thinking about what to do about it. Maybe.
Why cut a cheap producer? A country that imports goods from China (or whichever other cheap producer you care to name) is cutting costs in the same way that a company will outsource work that it considers cheaper to be elsewhere. The options to the worker are to do a better job or work more cheaply. Demanding a high pay for a job that someone else will do more cheaply (and with a better quality ratio than the cost ratio, in most cases) doesn't make financial sense.
Supply, demand. Attempting to get closer back onto topic - if you create a minor economy that pays people who are willing to invest their time in it in their own major economy, then you're always going to get gold farmers, whether live or bot. If a job pays, it doesn't matter whether it's a computer 'game' or a more conventional job; people are willing to pay for it. The only way to counter it is to remove value from grinding, which is uninteresting to a lot of gamers. Even games like Puzzle Pirates - whose rankings are utterly dependent on personal skill, with no +items, with little effect from having $$$$$$$$) - have seen botting and farmers.
Even still, it's not likely to be tied to this topic - people who are using children for farming (perhaps a mild form of, but still being, child labor) will be simply able to get around the limit. The reasoning behind this legislation then looks very much tied to concern about health - especially with the occasional person in the news dying from binge gaming. That's reinforced by the messages themselves; it's also closely supported with China's other health programmes, which look from the outside to be carried out very well - for example the dental education program, paid for by the government, going out to the remote rural areas as well as the urbs and suburbs; with such a large population to watch over, blanket health programs and legislation (preventing or reducing the damage to health, in gaming or dental or whatever) are really very good.
What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?
They'll create an independent political party based on truth and values, which will be largely ignored in favour of the incumbent elephants of politics who can spend orders of magnitude more on the campaign trail? Or they'll create a small community of supporters, with a dotcom lifestyle and even less effect on the world than the independent party.
No. No. NO. Behind every router you can have an independent network, with as many machines as you want. Most small networks have users on the IPs 192.168.0.n or 192.168.1.n or 10.0.0.n. There are probably tens of thousands of machines using these addresses - but they do not conflict, because they are not using that address on the same global network.
As the number of used IPv4 addresses go up on the global internet, the number of routers - and so numerically isolated networks - will also increase. Even if it comes to the point where city areas or even ISPs have their own routers, it is still farcically easy to set up more and more networks that are independent of each other except at their shared contact point of the greater web.
The only way we can run out is if we put all devices onto the same network, which in itself only invites exploitation and problems.
To clarify - the entry was deleted for falling into the category of "...unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content. An article about a real person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject."
You can read the old entry at Google's cache until googlebot realises it's not there any more. The article is kinda miserable, and you can see why it was deleted; he simply isn't notable. Too many others like hime.
Personally, I laugh at the idea of games as art; art gets paid attention to for the first 15 minutes, or during comparisons. After that the only thing that matters is gameplay, and fun. That's why the Wii has been selling like hot cakes - who cares about the art? Gaming is a platform, not an artform.
I took a look at salary.com, since payscale.com only works if you have a (US) zip code. After answering a bunch of questions, it asked me whether I wanted to pay $20 for a big pack of information, or get the free version; I sighed and clicked the free, but got a nice graph showing the percentiles of payscale that are apparently appropriate for my area.
Advertising, maybe - but I got the information I wanted, for free. If I had wanted a big pack about how to raise my salary, how to argue about it, etc etc etc, I had the option to pay for it, but it definitely wasn't compulsory.
Ah, but there's a difference between learning and obeying. If a parent tells its child that you can drown in water, then it will be more careful. If the parent tells the child that the paint is wet, the child will find out for itself as well. If the parent tells the child not to stuff beans up its nose because they'll get stuck, there's a good chance that the child will try it at least once.
The memes that stick better are the ones involving death, pain, or general misery. See also: religion.
Select any point on the surface of an unblown balloon; blow it up. Every point gets further away from other point; however none of them is necessarily the "centre". If you consider only the plane of the balloon's surface, ignoring the dimension that (from the surface) points in/out at any point, there's no way of telling where the centre is.
The balloon analogy is a 2D-in-3D comparison of our 3D problem. Where's the centre? You can't point at it, because you don't have the capacity to point in that direction. However, as you suggest, each point can be completely satisfied that it is the centre, since everything else is moving away from it at an equal rate.
I'm not sure, but I think NASA's missions run on Zulu time (military time not fixed to location) to prevent the chaotic confusion that would happen when tracking and interacting with an object that changes timezone approximately once every 3.75 minutes. However you'd have thought these Raptors would have run on military time too...
They call PP silly because it doesn't match the same gameplaying market. Most of the masses of World of Warcraft and the other MMORPGs base their systems around fighting to gain experience and items to improve fighting and levels, then skills, and so on, with a nicely interlinked system of "improve X to speed up your increase in everything else". The mindset of hardcore gamers varies, but it's leagues different from the mindset of those people interested in PP. Three Rings have put significant effort into keeping PP lighthearted, to almost completely eliminate that leveling grind (the only "levels" are a simple unlocking of gameplay, aimed to introduce a gentle learning curve and achievable within a day no matter what your skill level. With no grind, no prizes or items that increase or decrease your skill level (and they've specifically said they won't put any in), almost nothing to increase your chances of "winning" - this is completely unappealing to most MMORPG veterans.
Handily for PP, that's not the kind of people they're targetting anyway. The game is incredibly social - you win more money by understanding how to work as a team, and you win more money by sticking with a team for a while.
By being a light game, they're targetting a completely different market from WoW and the likes. That means they get customers. It's still utterly possible to be elite, to grind vast amounts of money, and so on - but that depends on your inherent skill at the puzzles.
It's also the only game I know of that awards a significant amount of ingame prizes for forum competitions - art, poetry, art, making monkeys out of socks and rubber bands, art, making comics, writing stories, even singing can win prizes. You barely have to play at all and you can get a (rare, but completely decorative, worth lots and lots of money) parrot or monkey on your shoulder. Alternatively you can avoid the forums completely and spend the time enjoying role-based teaming where everyone plays to their natural strengths.
If you look at PP from a WoW's-eye view, yeah, it's silly. If you look at WoW from a PP's-eye view, it's draining, time-hogging, and grind is one hell of a negative word.
QED is fine. However you missed the other bit that then wants to "ere demonstrandum"ed - a loop in time. We're perfectly happy with loops in normal 3D space; we're half-happy with being able to attempt to visualise a loop that goes through a fourth dimension. But a loop in time is time travel, which drives scientists to serious distraction, and many others to think of favorite Heinlein scenarios. Fourth spatial dimensions are very interesting for theories like bending space (fold it up, hyperjump), but manipulating time violates a good bunch of theories.
Black and White was - at the time - tremendous on its detail, its novel fractal zoom, its massive interaction and interactivity, and so on. It turned "sucky" because gameplay is gameplay - the number of milestones, while welldesigned and challenging, became too much of a series of targets. I think I got to the fourth level, and then something something something went back found savefile was corrupted. It was too much of a grunt to plough through the milestones again - while I knew I hadn't got to the good milestones, the hand gestures, the powerful spells, this that and the other, I had already enjoyed the detail level and the amount of grunt wasn't appealing. When I reinstalled again a couple of years later, I got bogged down early because I knew I had to go through those first three levels all over again, or find someone with suitable savefiles and just hope their playstyle wasn't so different from my own that I'd spend half the time trying to work out what the hell that creature had been told. However, the main selling point - the revolutionary interface - simply wasn't what the players were looking for.
It's the same with Fable - the game mechanics were novel, different, intuitive, well worked up. What most people missed was that if you blasted through it, you'd be done in ten days. Pow. Gone. Boring.
While we can only guess how Spore can be, it looks like the emphasis is on the creativity; I don't know how they'll find the balance between detail and game speed, how to keep fast players unhindered while not penalising people who want to play around with the experimentation. That didn't work well in B it went overboard in Fable. Third (...Nth) time lucky? Who knows. I personally hope they'll make the game emphasise creativity - once you're done you have all the tools available, you don't have to spend as much time working up each species. The emphasis that they have on creativity (being George Lucas rather than being Luke Skywalker, I think was one of the quotes) points in that direction; the hype has indeed been on the creativity and the systems that enable that creativity. Perhaps that'll leave the gameplay lacking, which means that it'll fall rapidly into the "boring sucky" bucket. Hopefully they'll put enough emphasis on the creativity that that's most of what matters.
Same could have been said of BSE/CJD. It was mostly local to , but caused to a few humans. Because it was heavily restricted, culled, burned out of existence, it didn't spread very far.
That didn't stop it from being a fearful thing, to be avoided like the plague; just because you're more likely to die one way than another doesn't make that other condescendingly snubbable as a probability to be ignored. Death is death. Avoiding it is goooood.
But if you have two systems, then you're jumping completely off the rails from answering the original point you were replying to: "Because if you only need to run one or two apps, it doesn't make much sense to have to shut down all your other apps just to run the few programs that don't run under OS X." If an office user has a mac and a PC, then there's no need to shut down either to use the other in the first place
Comparing the DS-OS to OSX or Vista just doesn't fit. You can't play animal crossing and tetris at the same time; there's only a small amount of reason for allowing multiple parallel games, and it's likely to not be worth the bother programming in the memory handling etc etc. However on OSX or Vista, how often do you have one single application running? I have my browser, my office apps, my timesheet, my IM client, my diary app, my music, my email open pretty much constantly, plus anything else temporary that I might want to run at any particular time. In a workplace setting, it makes no sense to have to quit each to open the others. Even having to quit half of them to access the other half would be a serious pain.
While a console is technically a computer, don't cloud the issue by attempting to suggest it's an equivalent computer.
And if you don't like the system, then just set your threshold to +5 and set every possible modifier to -5. That way you never see any of the prejudices people are spewing. Hopefully none of the rest of us will have to see yours either.
Slashdot Mirror
Your short answer is one character longer than your long answer!
Sure, and a computer doesn't compute without a human there to make it compute something. It's not called an assault rifle because it's a rifle that assaults things, it's a rifle that is used in assault. Also, a pocket knife doesn't have pockets, nor does it pocket things.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least do it right.
Starcraft Ghost - while it wasn't released, it's still part of the series. It doesn't seem likely that they'll drop the entire thing either - there's a lot of work got into that, and when their next project comes out - whatever it is - it'll probably be able to use that codebase, that art, etc.
From a business point of view, it was sensible for Blizzard to shelve SCG. WoW is huge - put a shitload of effort into it. Making a single fix affects millions of users. Don't divide that effort among multiple games, and don't redivide your fanbase. I think it's a damn pity, because I've played many bliz games and they've all been fantastic. But until WoW begins to wane for the majority, it's going to remain Blizzard's champion and jewel, and everything else can go on hiatus.
What we do get is that the developers of the other franchises - for example the Blizzard North team - are going off and doing their own thing. There you get the Blizzard skillset (many of the original developers) without the blocker of already having a humongous cash cow. While they can't touch the Blizzard franchises, Hellgate:London and Mythos should be awesome games, because they're being written by the same people who created the other awesome games in the first place.
an alert user
.safe TLD mean
.safe is trying to address. It's trying to address scammy domainnames like yourbank.com instead of bank.com, or 8ank.com, or the cyrillic URLs that are visually identical, or what have you. It's unlikely to work - a step on the red queen's board - but at least they're thinking about what to do about it. Maybe.
What does that
You've half-answered yourself - savvy users understand about phishing in the first place, know about password security, etc etc. It's the unsavvy users that are being fooled.
While I appreciate you're picking on the word 'safe', you're picking on it for the wrong reason. People will still be caught out by www.bank.safe.banking.login/login.asp instead of www.bank.safe/banking/login/login.asp; but that's not what
Why cut a cheap producer? A country that imports goods from China (or whichever other cheap producer you care to name) is cutting costs in the same way that a company will outsource work that it considers cheaper to be elsewhere. The options to the worker are to do a better job or work more cheaply. Demanding a high pay for a job that someone else will do more cheaply (and with a better quality ratio than the cost ratio, in most cases) doesn't make financial sense.
Supply, demand. Attempting to get closer back onto topic - if you create a minor economy that pays people who are willing to invest their time in it in their own major economy, then you're always going to get gold farmers, whether live or bot. If a job pays, it doesn't matter whether it's a computer 'game' or a more conventional job; people are willing to pay for it. The only way to counter it is to remove value from grinding, which is uninteresting to a lot of gamers. Even games like Puzzle Pirates - whose rankings are utterly dependent on personal skill, with no +items, with little effect from having $$$$$$$$) - have seen botting and farmers.
Even still, it's not likely to be tied to this topic - people who are using children for farming (perhaps a mild form of, but still being, child labor) will be simply able to get around the limit. The reasoning behind this legislation then looks very much tied to concern about health - especially with the occasional person in the news dying from binge gaming. That's reinforced by the messages themselves; it's also closely supported with China's other health programmes, which look from the outside to be carried out very well - for example the dental education program, paid for by the government, going out to the remote rural areas as well as the urbs and suburbs; with such a large population to watch over, blanket health programs and legislation (preventing or reducing the damage to health, in gaming or dental or whatever) are really very good.
So to disable the frikkin sharks with lasers, we just have to reverse the polarity of the flux capacitors?!
What is the future for the common person who yearns to be heard?
They'll create an independent political party based on truth and values, which will be largely ignored in favour of the incumbent elephants of politics who can spend orders of magnitude more on the campaign trail? Or they'll create a small community of supporters, with a dotcom lifestyle and even less effect on the world than the independent party.
Yeah, I'm pretty damn cynical about politics.
which some will observe at 1:59pm
;)
It can also be observed at 3:49 a.m., which is then 0.159 of a day; it's also much easier to have a minute's respectful silence at 3:49 am
we'll be clean out of IP addresses
No. No. NO. Behind every router you can have an independent network, with as many machines as you want. Most small networks have users on the IPs 192.168.0.n or 192.168.1.n or 10.0.0.n. There are probably tens of thousands of machines using these addresses - but they do not conflict, because they are not using that address on the same global network.
As the number of used IPv4 addresses go up on the global internet, the number of routers - and so numerically isolated networks - will also increase. Even if it comes to the point where city areas or even ISPs have their own routers, it is still farcically easy to set up more and more networks that are independent of each other except at their shared contact point of the greater web.
The only way we can run out is if we put all devices onto the same network, which in itself only invites exploitation and problems.
It's not going to happen.
To clarify - the entry was deleted for falling into the category of "...unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content. An article about a real person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject."
You can read the old entry at Google's cache until googlebot realises it's not there any more. The article is kinda miserable, and you can see why it was deleted; he simply isn't notable. Too many others like hime.
Personally, I laugh at the idea of games as art; art gets paid attention to for the first 15 minutes, or during comparisons. After that the only thing that matters is gameplay, and fun. That's why the Wii has been selling like hot cakes - who cares about the art? Gaming is a platform, not an artform.
I took a look at salary.com, since payscale.com only works if you have a (US) zip code. After answering a bunch of questions, it asked me whether I wanted to pay $20 for a big pack of information, or get the free version; I sighed and clicked the free, but got a nice graph showing the percentiles of payscale that are apparently appropriate for my area.
Advertising, maybe - but I got the information I wanted, for free. If I had wanted a big pack about how to raise my salary, how to argue about it, etc etc etc, I had the option to pay for it, but it definitely wasn't compulsory.
Ah, but there's a difference between learning and obeying. If a parent tells its child that you can drown in water, then it will be more careful. If the parent tells the child that the paint is wet, the child will find out for itself as well. If the parent tells the child not to stuff beans up its nose because they'll get stuck, there's a good chance that the child will try it at least once.
The memes that stick better are the ones involving death, pain, or general misery. See also: religion.
Mmm... arguable.
Select any point on the surface of an unblown balloon; blow it up. Every point gets further away from other point; however none of them is necessarily the "centre". If you consider only the plane of the balloon's surface, ignoring the dimension that (from the surface) points in/out at any point, there's no way of telling where the centre is.
The balloon analogy is a 2D-in-3D comparison of our 3D problem. Where's the centre? You can't point at it, because you don't have the capacity to point in that direction. However, as you suggest, each point can be completely satisfied that it is the centre, since everything else is moving away from it at an equal rate.
I'm not sure, but I think NASA's missions run on Zulu time (military time not fixed to location) to prevent the chaotic confusion that would happen when tracking and interacting with an object that changes timezone approximately once every 3.75 minutes. However you'd have thought these Raptors would have run on military time too...
-- Below
They call PP silly because it doesn't match the same gameplaying market. Most of the masses of World of Warcraft and the other MMORPGs base their systems around fighting to gain experience and items to improve fighting and levels, then skills, and so on, with a nicely interlinked system of "improve X to speed up your increase in everything else". The mindset of hardcore gamers varies, but it's leagues different from the mindset of those people interested in PP. Three Rings have put significant effort into keeping PP lighthearted, to almost completely eliminate that leveling grind (the only "levels" are a simple unlocking of gameplay, aimed to introduce a gentle learning curve and achievable within a day no matter what your skill level. With no grind, no prizes or items that increase or decrease your skill level (and they've specifically said they won't put any in), almost nothing to increase your chances of "winning" - this is completely unappealing to most MMORPG veterans.
Handily for PP, that's not the kind of people they're targetting anyway. The game is incredibly social - you win more money by understanding how to work as a team, and you win more money by sticking with a team for a while.
By being a light game, they're targetting a completely different market from WoW and the likes. That means they get customers. It's still utterly possible to be elite, to grind vast amounts of money, and so on - but that depends on your inherent skill at the puzzles.
It's also the only game I know of that awards a significant amount of ingame prizes for forum competitions - art, poetry, art, making monkeys out of socks and rubber bands, art, making comics, writing stories, even singing can win prizes. You barely have to play at all and you can get a (rare, but completely decorative, worth lots and lots of money) parrot or monkey on your shoulder. Alternatively you can avoid the forums completely and spend the time enjoying role-based teaming where everyone plays to their natural strengths.
If you look at PP from a WoW's-eye view, yeah, it's silly. If you look at WoW from a PP's-eye view, it's draining, time-hogging, and grind is one hell of a negative word.
QED is fine. However you missed the other bit that then wants to "ere demonstrandum"ed - a loop in time. We're perfectly happy with loops in normal 3D space; we're half-happy with being able to attempt to visualise a loop that goes through a fourth dimension. But a loop in time is time travel, which drives scientists to serious distraction, and many others to think of favorite Heinlein scenarios. Fourth spatial dimensions are very interesting for theories like bending space (fold it up, hyperjump), but manipulating time violates a good bunch of theories.
Black and White was - at the time - tremendous on its detail, its novel fractal zoom, its massive interaction and interactivity, and so on. It turned "sucky" because gameplay is gameplay - the number of milestones, while welldesigned and challenging, became too much of a series of targets. I think I got to the fourth level, and then something something something went back found savefile was corrupted. It was too much of a grunt to plough through the milestones again - while I knew I hadn't got to the good milestones, the hand gestures, the powerful spells, this that and the other, I had already enjoyed the detail level and the amount of grunt wasn't appealing. When I reinstalled again a couple of years later, I got bogged down early because I knew I had to go through those first three levels all over again, or find someone with suitable savefiles and just hope their playstyle wasn't so different from my own that I'd spend half the time trying to work out what the hell that creature had been told. However, the main selling point - the revolutionary interface - simply wasn't what the players were looking for.
It's the same with Fable - the game mechanics were novel, different, intuitive, well worked up. What most people missed was that if you blasted through it, you'd be done in ten days. Pow. Gone. Boring.
While we can only guess how Spore can be, it looks like the emphasis is on the creativity; I don't know how they'll find the balance between detail and game speed, how to keep fast players unhindered while not penalising people who want to play around with the experimentation. That didn't work well in B it went overboard in Fable. Third (...Nth) time lucky? Who knows. I personally hope they'll make the game emphasise creativity - once you're done you have all the tools available, you don't have to spend as much time working up each species. The emphasis that they have on creativity (being George Lucas rather than being Luke Skywalker, I think was one of the quotes) points in that direction; the hype has indeed been on the creativity and the systems that enable that creativity. Perhaps that'll leave the gameplay lacking, which means that it'll fall rapidly into the "boring sucky" bucket. Hopefully they'll put enough emphasis on the creativity that that's most of what matters.
Hm, should have used (local to [livestock]) and (caused [serious damage] to) instead of and there...
Same could have been said of BSE/CJD. It was mostly local to , but caused to a few humans. Because it was heavily restricted, culled, burned out of existence, it didn't spread very far.
That didn't stop it from being a fearful thing, to be avoided like the plague; just because you're more likely to die one way than another doesn't make that other condescendingly snubbable as a probability to be ignored. Death is death. Avoiding it is goooood.
But if you have two systems, then you're jumping completely off the rails from answering the original point you were replying to: "Because if you only need to run one or two apps, it doesn't make much sense to have to shut down all your other apps just to run the few programs that don't run under OS X." If an office user has a mac and a PC, then there's no need to shut down either to use the other in the first place
What an odd thread.
Comparing the DS-OS to OSX or Vista just doesn't fit. You can't play animal crossing and tetris at the same time; there's only a small amount of reason for allowing multiple parallel games, and it's likely to not be worth the bother programming in the memory handling etc etc. However on OSX or Vista, how often do you have one single application running? I have my browser, my office apps, my timesheet, my IM client, my diary app, my music, my email open pretty much constantly, plus anything else temporary that I might want to run at any particular time. In a workplace setting, it makes no sense to have to quit each to open the others. Even having to quit half of them to access the other half would be a serious pain.
While a console is technically a computer, don't cloud the issue by attempting to suggest it's an equivalent computer.
Argh, bugger. Try an actual link instead; pasting the above gets killed by the space that /. introduces. http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?CY=gb&LG=en&F=4&ID X=GB1310990&DB=EPODOC&QPN=GB1310990
...you can't patent things that are illogical [or outside the realm of understood science]
& IDX=GB1310990&DB=EPODOC&QPN=GB1310990
http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?CY=gb&LG=en&F=4
Right.
> seem
And if you don't like the system, then just set your threshold to +5 and set every possible modifier to -5. That way you never see any of the prejudices people are spewing. Hopefully none of the rest of us will have to see yours either.