Have you picked up on Battlestar Galactica ? If you like that, Ron Moore also was executive producer on the last 4 (5 ?) seasons of DS9. BSG really feels like it picks up where DS9 left off in terms of how good science fiction is written for television. DS9 became very character driven under Moore. With the Dominion War he put them into a desperate situation and produced wartime character dramas. And he introduced (or played up, I don't remember exactly when he showed up) the Cardassian tailor Garrick, who is one of the best characters in all of Trek.
Check it out, those last 4 seasons of DS9 are the best Trek ever made.
Without doing any research at all I can state authoritatively that the radar that we did sell to the Iranians in their F-14s is by far the best airborne radar they have. And worlds better than anything the Iraqis had. As few of them as they have, the Iranians are much better off using them as radar platforms than as frontline combatants.
Oh god, the golf market. Nintendo is going to sell a lot of these things; US$3 billion is spent on golf equipment every year. For a 3rd-party controler, how about a set of sensors you put on your actual clubs and swing at a light plastic ball ? Then somebody is going to model real equipment and make a hardcore golf sim. High-end training programs will cost hundreds of dollars and sell like hotcakes. The auto enthusiast market pays for the development of the next Gran Turismo. the high-end golf market will support truly expensive software.
There will probably be over a million Wii that never play anything but golf.
It's not actually the worst cable, it's the cheapest cable. It usually works out the same, but it makes more (business) sense. In the PS3 case, many of the people buying the $600 unit will not be outputting to a device that requires an HDMI cable. Those that are are demonstrably capable of paying for the HDMI cable. And even if they don't have one when they get the PS3, something in their home theater setup will accept as input the video cables that do come with the PS3. So nobody loses.
The smart manufacturers realize that they make the most money by selling the most generally useful set of cables with the device. When printers still came with USB and parallel interfaces (I always found that hilarious) they included the USB cable - more people needed one of those than needed another parallel cable. Stupid manufacturers would include the parallel cable because they're going with the cheapest cabling option [1]. Cheap manufacturers would include neither cable and shave their margins still further.
[1] Actually, USB cables may be cheaper to manufacture than parallel cables in general (I don't know) but production was tailing off by the time USB became started becoming commonplace so the supply would have dropped, increasing prices again.
No, the article on Something Awful has some that top that. It's been posted before under this article, but another link can't hurt. Mind you, some of them are kinda disturbing.
Set the wayback machine to Access 1.0 and you'll find me working at a Software Etc. back in college. We got, and sold, 12 copies of Access 1.0. All twelve came back from customers complaining that the program was uselessly buggy.
Wind forward a bit to Access 97. I'm a sysadmin for... well, a company using a lot of Filemaker 3 databases (my first task there was finishing the FMP 2->3 migration). We were looking to migrate off of Filemaker (it wasn't a Microsoft product; just don't ask me about that manager - I have no idea how he got out of there without being charged with embezzling for kickbacks from the consultant he was partnered with immediately prior to joining our company). One candidate to replace Filemaker for production databases with 50 users, 250,000+ records and 2 or 3 people running reports was Access 97 (the other two were CRM products, one from a company that later ran Superbowl ads and the other from a company later acquired by Nortel; and no, management didn't select the company that survived). Our lead FMP developer managed to stretch the Access97 evaluation out to a full hour before he deleted every table in his test implementation without recovery, undo, or prompt. End of evaluation.
So I've seen two versions of Access in business situations. Microsoft usually gets things right in the third version. For Access, you have to start counting with Access 2000 - if that version was useful.
How you handle it is to document the functionality and re-implement the application in something else.
Well, his point on Photoshop Elements is actually valid. He knows it isn't compatible. He's worried that it's becoming *less* compatible. Slow loading network places, and a removed shortcut, are major issues to still be cropping up late in beta. Recent documents are a solved problem, you don't have to re-use code but it's not *that* hard. This is late-beta software, the networking issues are a Bad Sign.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the IE issues, they did develop themselves into a corner.
A modern war based MMORPG would suck for the point guy. Spend an hour getting ready to get to the quest area only to be ambushed and get a bullet in face and be forced to respawn.
This is probably why World War 2 Online (Or Battleground:Europe or whatever it is these days) has as few players as it does. It's a fairly realistic experience in terms of weapon damage and survivability: BOOM, headshot, respawn. Ahh, I kinda miss that game. Unfortunately for them, I got a trial for EVE a week before they sent out a "Welcome Back" promo for WW2OL.
The specific instance I thought about when I read the line I quote above was pretty messed up for the guy I inflicted it on. Defending a town from an Allied counterattack I was in a defensive position out between the enemy forward base and our town. I was hiding in a treeline looking for scouts infiltrating. I spotted one a few hundred meters away, the poor SOB skylined himself. I watched him run up towards a hedgeline through binoculars, switched to my trusty rifle, and Juuuust as he flops down and pulls out his binocs to check out our defenses... headshot. Poor guy, 15 minute run to a vantage point on our defenses and he doesn't last long enough to wipe his lenses before his screen suddenly goes black.
Mmm, yeah. If EVE starts sucking I'm back to France. Good times.
Try the demo. I can only conclude that everyone you know who loves 40K either hates RTS games, don't have their favorite army available, or are idiots. Dawn of War is a very nice RTS and is done by people who obviously have large painted 40K armies. They might not, but the animators for DoW really captured the feel of the setting nicely.
And one major generation of "their" corded optical mice had a critical design flaw. There was nothing protecting the mouse cord from rubbing against the sharp edge of the lower body. The cords frayed and failed. Over about 18 months I made them ship warranty replacements for 10 mice; you had to photocopy the mouse (for the serial number) and fax it to them but they paid shipping. Their phone support on that issue was very pleasant all 3 times I called. Whoever designed it, and at least 3 layers of management and QA in both companies, should be formally drummed out of the industry at a COMDEX - back to flipping burgers for those numbskulls. Some of the management were probably powerful figures under Fiorina.
Small bits of Scoth tape could be inserted between cable and sharp edge to protect the, the last two batches of failures were from mice that had lost their prophylactic device.
And there are plenty of 3rd-party FM tuners for the iPod. There's a nice radio remote from Griffin that even records FM to the iPod. Apple appears [1] to be leaving this niche to the accessory market. CDW shows 18 hits for iPod FM tuners, some remotes and some docking stations. Apple even makes one (that doesn't record).
[1] My employer has Apple as a client, I am not speaking for them or Apple and I surely don't know about any Apple plans.
Yeah, I've seen users get rudimentary cabling badly wrong. I once had a tech support candidate (internal promotion) do even worse. Assigned to evaluate her skill level I told her to plug in the 6 new Macs. The monitor cables had moving parts, so I did those as well as the mouse & keyboard which are kind of delicate and the network cable because a determined person *can* get it into the modem port. So all she had to do was plug in the power strip and the power cables for the monitor and the computer. She got two right of six. Two of the power strips were plugged into themselves.
She wound up a Filemaker developer; proving that it can be used by ANYONE.
The metagame needed some work even at the late stage where the cancelled it. It was good enough, but might eventually have lost its appeal without more work. More maps and mission objectives would have been nice. They really did nail the 4v4 team-shooter-with-mechs concept though, the action was phenomenal. And they got the BattleTech parts down as well, all the mechanics were straight out of the basic set and the 3025 sourcebook. I'd have played that for years. I might still be a subscriber. And yes, I'm still bitter about that, considering how close to done it was MPBT3025 is probably the best game ever cancelled. EA would probably have screwed up it up somehow, but they'd have had to work at it.
The GHSC's Big Scam was good advertising for the game, but that's not where their growth is coming from. Those MMOG population graphs that get posted here about monthly tell the story clearly. Every time Star Wars: Galaxies loses a big batch of players EVE's population number take a big uptick, just look at the graphs - SWG down, EVE up. Compared to what SWG was left with after the last big change, EVE has rich crafting, a true player-driven economy, rich combat, player-built structures, control of star systems by PC corporations, serious PvP and lots of RvR action (where a Realm is a player-owned corp). There's also enough PvE action to draw in enough carebears for their presence to be an issue for some hardcore PvPers. Who shouldn't whine, the so-called carebears make the gear they use and provide easy target for them to pick on, and thus fill a vital ecological niche. All this seems to be drawing in those people getting fed up with SWG. One thing's for sure, you can really smuggle contraband in your ship and you might even get scanned by the cops. The Han Solo-types seem to love this.
Of course, I may be biased. I'm logged in to EVE right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe this fanvid hasn't been linked yet.
Have you picked up on Battlestar Galactica ? If you like that, Ron Moore also was executive producer on the last 4 (5 ?) seasons of DS9. BSG really feels like it picks up where DS9 left off in terms of how good science fiction is written for television. DS9 became very character driven under Moore. With the Dominion War he put them into a desperate situation and produced wartime character dramas. And he introduced (or played up, I don't remember exactly when he showed up) the Cardassian tailor Garrick, who is one of the best characters in all of Trek.
Check it out, those last 4 seasons of DS9 are the best Trek ever made.
Without doing any research at all I can state authoritatively that the radar that we did sell to the Iranians in their F-14s is by far the best airborne radar they have. And worlds better than anything the Iraqis had. As few of them as they have, the Iranians are much better off using them as radar platforms than as frontline combatants.
Oh god, the golf market. Nintendo is going to sell a lot of these things; US$3 billion is spent on golf equipment every year. For a 3rd-party controler, how about a set of sensors you put on your actual clubs and swing at a light plastic ball ? Then somebody is going to model real equipment and make a hardcore golf sim. High-end training programs will cost hundreds of dollars and sell like hotcakes. The auto enthusiast market pays for the development of the next Gran Turismo. the high-end golf market will support truly expensive software.
There will probably be over a million Wii that never play anything but golf.
Thank you very much, I had somehow forgotten that I had only played the demo. That's going right to the top of my Gamefly queue.
You chose the 'cheap' manufacturer. 50,000 ISK says you had a spare cable anyway.
It's not actually the worst cable, it's the cheapest cable. It usually works out the same, but it makes more (business) sense. In the PS3 case, many of the people buying the $600 unit will not be outputting to a device that requires an HDMI cable. Those that are are demonstrably capable of paying for the HDMI cable. And even if they don't have one when they get the PS3, something in their home theater setup will accept as input the video cables that do come with the PS3. So nobody loses.
The smart manufacturers realize that they make the most money by selling the most generally useful set of cables with the device. When printers still came with USB and parallel interfaces (I always found that hilarious) they included the USB cable - more people needed one of those than needed another parallel cable. Stupid manufacturers would include the parallel cable because they're going with the cheapest cabling option [1]. Cheap manufacturers would include neither cable and shave their margins still further.
[1] Actually, USB cables may be cheaper to manufacture than parallel cables in general (I don't know) but production was tailing off by the time USB became started becoming commonplace so the supply would have dropped, increasing prices again.
I see new USB printers from time to time, they come with a USB A-B cable. Networked printers however, do not come with anything but the power cord.
No, the article on Something Awful has some that top that. It's been posted before under this article, but another link can't hurt. Mind you, some of them are kinda disturbing.
And there never has been.
Set the wayback machine to Access 1.0 and you'll find me working at a Software Etc. back in college. We got, and sold, 12 copies of Access 1.0. All twelve came back from customers complaining that the program was uselessly buggy.
Wind forward a bit to Access 97. I'm a sysadmin for... well, a company using a lot of Filemaker 3 databases (my first task there was finishing the FMP 2->3 migration). We were looking to migrate off of Filemaker (it wasn't a Microsoft product; just don't ask me about that manager - I have no idea how he got out of there without being charged with embezzling for kickbacks from the consultant he was partnered with immediately prior to joining our company). One candidate to replace Filemaker for production databases with 50 users, 250,000+ records and 2 or 3 people running reports was Access 97 (the other two were CRM products, one from a company that later ran Superbowl ads and the other from a company later acquired by Nortel; and no, management didn't select the company that survived). Our lead FMP developer managed to stretch the Access97 evaluation out to a full hour before he deleted every table in his test implementation without recovery, undo, or prompt. End of evaluation.
So I've seen two versions of Access in business situations. Microsoft usually gets things right in the third version. For Access, you have to start counting with Access 2000 - if that version was useful.
How you handle it is to document the functionality and re-implement the application in something else.
Well, his point on Photoshop Elements is actually valid. He knows it isn't compatible. He's worried that it's becoming *less* compatible. Slow loading network places, and a removed shortcut, are major issues to still be cropping up late in beta. Recent documents are a solved problem, you don't have to re-use code but it's not *that* hard. This is late-beta software, the networking issues are a Bad Sign.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the IE issues, they did develop themselves into a corner.
A modern war based MMORPG would suck for the point guy. Spend an hour getting ready to get to the quest area only to be ambushed and get a bullet in face and be forced to respawn.
This is probably why World War 2 Online (Or Battleground:Europe or whatever it is these days) has as few players as it does. It's a fairly realistic experience in terms of weapon damage and survivability: BOOM, headshot, respawn. Ahh, I kinda miss that game. Unfortunately for them, I got a trial for EVE a week before they sent out a "Welcome Back" promo for WW2OL.
The specific instance I thought about when I read the line I quote above was pretty messed up for the guy I inflicted it on. Defending a town from an Allied counterattack I was in a defensive position out between the enemy forward base and our town. I was hiding in a treeline looking for scouts infiltrating. I spotted one a few hundred meters away, the poor SOB skylined himself. I watched him run up towards a hedgeline through binoculars, switched to my trusty rifle, and Juuuust as he flops down and pulls out his binocs to check out our defenses... headshot. Poor guy, 15 minute run to a vantage point on our defenses and he doesn't last long enough to wipe his lenses before his screen suddenly goes black.
Mmm, yeah. If EVE starts sucking I'm back to France. Good times.
Try the demo. I can only conclude that everyone you know who loves 40K either hates RTS games, don't have their favorite army available, or are idiots. Dawn of War is a very nice RTS and is done by people who obviously have large painted 40K armies. They might not, but the animators for DoW really captured the feel of the setting nicely.
Then I probably have you to thank for registering this nick on dozens and dozens of boards.
Just one piece of advice, never create what you can't control.
At this point in the PS3's development the source code to a trivial 3D game running on 7 processors would be acceptable.
Somewhere in the 20s there you should have resubmitted the original draft to see if you got different notes back. That could have been hilarious.
And one major generation of "their" corded optical mice had a critical design flaw. There was nothing protecting the mouse cord from rubbing against the sharp edge of the lower body. The cords frayed and failed. Over about 18 months I made them ship warranty replacements for 10 mice; you had to photocopy the mouse (for the serial number) and fax it to them but they paid shipping. Their phone support on that issue was very pleasant all 3 times I called. Whoever designed it, and at least 3 layers of management and QA in both companies, should be formally drummed out of the industry at a COMDEX - back to flipping burgers for those numbskulls. Some of the management were probably powerful figures under Fiorina.
Small bits of Scoth tape could be inserted between cable and sharp edge to protect the, the last two batches of failures were from mice that had lost their prophylactic device.
And there are plenty of 3rd-party FM tuners for the iPod. There's a nice radio remote from Griffin that even records FM to the iPod. Apple appears [1] to be leaving this niche to the accessory market. CDW shows 18 hits for iPod FM tuners, some remotes and some docking stations. Apple even makes one (that doesn't record).
[1] My employer has Apple as a client, I am not speaking for them or Apple and I surely don't know about any Apple plans.
Piker.
Two words: single-malt scotch. At an ad agency this actually works.
Yeah, I've seen users get rudimentary cabling badly wrong. I once had a tech support candidate (internal promotion) do even worse. Assigned to evaluate her skill level I told her to plug in the 6 new Macs. The monitor cables had moving parts, so I did those as well as the mouse & keyboard which are kind of delicate and the network cable because a determined person *can* get it into the modem port. So all she had to do was plug in the power strip and the power cables for the monitor and the computer. She got two right of six. Two of the power strips were plugged into themselves.
She wound up a Filemaker developer; proving that it can be used by ANYONE.
The metagame needed some work even at the late stage where the cancelled it. It was good enough, but might eventually have lost its appeal without more work. More maps and mission objectives would have been nice. They really did nail the 4v4 team-shooter-with-mechs concept though, the action was phenomenal. And they got the BattleTech parts down as well, all the mechanics were straight out of the basic set and the 3025 sourcebook. I'd have played that for years. I might still be a subscriber. And yes, I'm still bitter about that, considering how close to done it was MPBT3025 is probably the best game ever cancelled. EA would probably have screwed up it up somehow, but they'd have had to work at it.
Hey Microsoft, want $9.95 a month from me ?
The GHSC's Big Scam was good advertising for the game, but that's not where their growth is coming from. Those MMOG population graphs that get posted here about monthly tell the story clearly. Every time Star Wars: Galaxies loses a big batch of players EVE's population number take a big uptick, just look at the graphs - SWG down, EVE up. Compared to what SWG was left with after the last big change, EVE has rich crafting, a true player-driven economy, rich combat, player-built structures, control of star systems by PC corporations, serious PvP and lots of RvR action (where a Realm is a player-owned corp). There's also enough PvE action to draw in enough carebears for their presence to be an issue for some hardcore PvPers. Who shouldn't whine, the so-called carebears make the gear they use and provide easy target for them to pick on, and thus fill a vital ecological niche. All this seems to be drawing in those people getting fed up with SWG. One thing's for sure, you can really smuggle contraband in your ship and you might even get scanned by the cops. The Han Solo-types seem to love this.
Of course, I may be biased. I'm logged in to EVE right now.
Agreed. Especially since the new version is even prettier than the original. Very few games have done 2D graphics with polygons like that.
To make up for it, the pilot would be promoted for flying from Saipan in the Pacific to Norway nonstop in a B-29.