I really wanted to like V:SoH. My guild from another game had a really large presence planned for it, and I wanted to finally start a game at the same time they did. I got into the closed beta, and never could get into the game.
I kinda felt similar to when I first played EQ2 back at its launch. That game made things difficult for the sake of being difficult, and V:SoH appears to have taken the same approach. Tedium summed up my experience the best.
I'm 40 years old now. I have an infant in the house for the first time in my life. I just don't have the time to dedicate to a game that has so many timesinks built right into it. Corpse Runs? I hope to never see another CR in my life, and certainly have zero plans to stay up til 2AM helping everyone else get their corpse. Oh, I can take an XP penalty, but it's really stiff? No thanks. And CRs were just the first major hurdle I didn't like. There were plenty of others.
I never thought it would be the case, but I have become a casual gamer. And V:SoH is very unfriendly to the casual player. It's more a raid dependent game, much like EQ1 was. That's fine if you have the time to spare, but I no longer do. And my wife would never, ever go for a game that made things this difficult again. I got her into EQ, and she did ok. Then she tried WoW, and she loved that it was so much more friendly. EQ2 seems even friendlier to her than WoW did, so we're enjoying that.
I don't see this game making any dent at all in the WoW player base. It may grab some from EQ2 that are looking for more of a challenge, but the WoW folks that decided to give EQ2 a try and have stayed because the game has gotten so much better than release? They aren't going to enjoy V:SoH, either.
So... What's going to be the next casual gamer friendly release that isn't a WoW or EQ2 title? Until it comes out, I'm sticking with EQ2.
I don't really get why this is such a bad idea. Especially if they make it so that any site that sells/features nudity/porn has to move to such an extension.
Let's face it. www.whitehouse.com was one of the all-time great name squatting done. For the longest time, that was a porn site. How many kids and unsuspecting adults stumbled onto that one in the early days?
I'm no screaming conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I lean a lot further towards liberalism than I ever though I would, mostly because I am tired of religion affecting our laws so much, and personal freedoms being stripped from us left and right.
But I don't see any harm in setting these websites up in a much easier to control/block segment of the websphere. And many of these webmasters would love it if it was that much easier to block content by parents. Just think of all the credit card charges to crap companies that supposedly verify age because a person has a CC #? Sheesh, I had one at 16!
At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all.xxx domains if that was the only place they could be. And all these damn library filters and crap could be made easier. Block blatant porn, and anything else is fair game. I don't see them putting the Anatomy books behind locked doors so kids can't see a drawing of a nude human, and they don't do it with National Geographic, either. This makes it easy to block porn, and keep everything else open.
Besides, think of all the business that it would stir up for a while. All those porn banners having to be redone! hehehe
Ultima is a series that was dragged through the mud in gruesome fashion.
The original was pretty good. Ultima II was about the same. Ultima III kicked butt for its time frame. And from there, it went downhill.
The last was Ultima 9, and it was awful. Ultima Online has its fans, but it wasn't even close to the same game, so it doesn't count.
For another, Bard's Tale was 3 great games, and then a really stupid release of a non-related game with the same title nearly 15 years later. I still don't understand that one, other than a money grubbing rip-off using a legendary title. And if it has been a real Bard's Tale 4, I would have spent the cash on it.
I didn't like their list. It was all console games, and they could have found a lot more than 7 titles to pick on. Throw PC titles in there, and you could hit 25 easy.
The problem with sequels these days is that studios tend to rush them out unfinished. They want to score the bucks, but they tend to write half-assed plots.
Having said that, I'd love to see the following:
Wizardry 9, a sequel to the orignal concept without any futuristic crap in it.
Fallout 3, 'nough said.
Ultima 10, with single player party of 4 setup. (Ultima III is still the best of the series!)
Baldur's Gate 3, Icewind Dale 3: As others have stated NWN2 was damn good, but those seemed better.
Sacred 2, which is in the works. Just, fix the bugs this time, guys!. The game rocked, when it worked.
There shouldn't be a patent for any specific pattern of 4 screws on a piece of material yet that is what the case is about. Interesting phrasing, but I think you are oversimplifing things in a broad spectrum generic statement.
What about the story of the intermittent windshield wiper, by Robert Kearns? He had several patents for having the wipers pause between sweeps back in 1967. Everything he used (pretty much) was available already. But in all the years since winshield wipers were in use (at least here in the US, most cars had them by 1916), NOBODY else thought to:
A) have the idea, and
B) make it work.
So, he patents it, and no car company will buy it. He ends up having to sue Ford (1978) and Chrysler (1982) for installing the systems on their cars. Ford's arguement was that there was nothing NEW about what he did, because all the parts were already in existence. Ford was found to have "unintentionally infringed" on Kearn's patent. Chrysler, too.
The fact that having the ability to have the wipers pause between sweeps is blantantly obvious if you think about it, and yet a patent was awarded. I don't even have to be an engineer to think "Man, I really hate having my wipers moving on the slow setting for this slight rain." But nobody else came up with the idea and made it work for about 50 YEARS! Yep, that DESERVES a patent.
The courts never said the auto companies had to stop using it, so Kearns was deprived of the ability to be the sole manufacturer as he so wished. And by the time he finally started to win some cases, he had too many of them on his plate, so the cases were thrown out for lack of attention by Kearns and his multitude of lawyers. Only Ford and Chrysler had to pay him in the long run. And then his patent ran out after 17 years, and it was done.
Kearns is one of the most famous cases in patent law, where the little guy won. But the truth of the matter is, he barely won, and not much in the grand scheme of things.
Most people are more than willing to make simple changes in their lives or part with a reasonable amount of money to do so, especially if it will have a real impact on the life of their child.
While I agree with the rest of your sentiments, you will dismayed to realize how many of the "average person" will just be lazy instead of trying to make things better for their children, or society as a whole.
All you have to do is drive through a residential neighborhood and see how many homes didn't put their recycle bins out... ever. Or the ones that look at their trash container being full, and dump regular trash in with their recycling, saying "What does it hurt?"
The bottom line is that most people are inherently lazy. And unless their house needed repainting, or their sidewalk/driveway needed to be repaved, they won't do it. Even parents with kids that have asthma. Some will, but most won't.
I don't think you really understand what happened with FEMA there, pal.
FEMA was rolled into the dreaded Department of Homeland Security. They had much of their power to do things they wanted to do taken away from them. They also had their budget firmly wrapped up in stopping terrorist activities, instead of planning and deploying for natural/manmade disasters.
You have to remember what FEMA was created for. The cleanup of disasters and the planning and prevention of their ramifications. It should have never been moved into DHS, because some of its functions need to be kept seperate.
I'm sorry, but FEMA wasn't the bad guys. The bad guys were DHS, the POTUS, the govenor of LA, and the mayor of the city. FEMA was handcuffed from the beginning, and kept handcuffed by petty political bickering. FEMA is supposed to be above that. Wrapped into DHS, it won't be.
I don't think resources are an issue for the fan base. They've already shown a willingness to go to bat for a show/movie they liked, and did it all for free.
It can be pretty amazing what people can accomplish out of pure passion for the work, as opposed to the profit to be made from it. In this case, the fans are more than willing to make the effort. The question is, will it be for or against Universal releases of the future?
If it goes against, there could be some problems for future TV and movies from Universal, as this loyal block will remember and potentially boycott. Universal knows that the potential loss of revenue from a rabid base of fans in that much coveted "18-35 male without an understanding of credit card debt" demographic would be something advertisers would look at closely. It would certainly cost them more than the 9,000 they are looking for in liscensing fees.
Then again, the MPAA and RIAA are dumb enough to cut off the hands that feed them all the time. Why should this be any different?
Demos are ok, but you really are only seeing a snippet of a game, and have no idea how good or bad it really is. Also, you have to have a really strong broadband connection to download it. The Battlefield 2142 download took a heck of a long time, and I have a 15Mb/s down fiber optic line. I didn't even download it on its first available date, too.
The problem with demos is it is the only really clean piece of code the game company will release, including its Gold image. They want to wow the customer, so they make that a really tightly QA'd portion of the game. You play it, and think "this is really tight! The gameplay was fast, fun, and I bet the rest of the game is the same way". And it often isn't. Especially since many development shops leave critical bugs in the game to foil the pirates that want to have the orignal disc image. Nothing like a zero-day patch to spoil any pirates!
So, the demo may be clean, but the rest of the game could be buggy as hell, requiring multiple patches to make it run smoothly for even the most common of system setups.
Anyone that plays a demo just needs to remember that what they are playing is probably tbe cream of the work done for that project.
I don't see how the idea "had to be tried". If I had been sitting in a room full of people and they asked me if I thought it would score big numbers, I'd have laughed my ass off.
This is one of those things for people with entirely too much time on their hands, and way too much disposable income.
The streaming video was going to be a joke. The screen is too small to make it worth the effort.
The updates... How many updates are there that are worth it? I can maybe see a perfect game going into the 9th inning being something to turn the tube on for, but for the rest of it... Nothing that has that much build-up potential is going to be something you can alert for.
There was a similar kind of service they offer on pagers for fire department personal in some areas. Back in MD, you could get pager alerts for all major fire calls in the state sent to your pager. All the new kids becoming volunteers got it... At first. Then they dropped it because it was too damn annoying, especially since the odds were the call was nowhere CLOSE to where you worked/volunteered.
Only a hardcore gambler would have considered this thing. Sports fans in general? Well, we see the evidence. It couldn't get their interest.
AOL has been going down the drain since it went from a MAC only platform to one that allowed PC users. From that day, they have been all about the $$$.
Let's look at their tactics:
For years, they made it nearly impossible to discontinue their service. (I know from personal experience, where only the treat of a stop check motion to get them out of my personal checking account finally got them to stop billing me for a cancelled service.)
They effectively carpet-bombed the entire U.S. and Canada with CDs of their software. I have co-workers that have entire offices "wallpapared" with AOL CDs received in the mail. You can still get their CDs at your local Wal-Mart for "free".
For years, you didn't get to the internet a lot of the time. You got to AOL's version of it. Heck, some advertisers are still using "AOL Keywords" in their TV ads, but it is greatly reduced from what it was.
AOL's product basically devolved into a simplistic access point to the internet, where AOL could control much of what you saw and interacted with. Their carpet bombing was successful enough that many companies bought into their approach, and made themselves more AOL friendly. And as existing users got more sophisticated and left, AOL kept dumbing itself down.
I remember AOL from it's Mac only days, and it was pretty good compared to CompuServe. PC Link was the PC version of it, until they moved them all over to AOL and started growing too fast.
Most players, especially those in the MMO markets, have long ago stopped caring what "skin" the player is wearing and worried about their skill level.
Heck, many of the female toons you see in games are played by guys who are either A) titilated at playing a female toon and dressing it, or B) tired of looking at a guy's ass in third person view.
So it isn't like this story is anything close to a new viewpoint on the subject.
I think you are failing to take into consideration the fact that this is a whole different set of circumstances.
Netscape lost the battle over IE due to one primary reason: IE was pre-bundled with Windows.
Now, you may scoff at that, but think about it.
A person new to PCs and the internet goes to the local Wal-Mart/BestBuy or whatever, and buys a computer. They come home, get it set up (or more likely, get help from a friend/relative) and try to get to the internet. And what pops up? Various MS assistants that lead them directly to Outleak, IE, and WMP. Case closed. If that person wanted Netscape, they had to download it from somewhere, or get a copy on a CD from their ISP. And even though MOST ISPs sent a copy of Netscape to the customers in the late 90's, the damage was already done. Customers were now familiar with IE and Outleak, and had no reason to switch.
The difference today is that both Zune and iPods are a computer attachment. And the purchaser of said MP3 players won't be looking at a PC for the very first time 99% of time. Nor will it be their first time on the internet.
Apple is flat out DOMINATING the portable MP3 player market. I am sure they are working HARD to keep their trademark alive, so the iPod doesn't become the Xerox machine , or the next aspirin. Because iPods are now synonomous to the world with MP3 player.
I just don't see MS getting the Zune to that point.
You do realize that most of the songs people are after are probably by independent artists, that have no contract with a major record label, right?
Who would want to download the songs people put on their main pages? The quality is horrible for digital music. I'd rather pay iTunes the $0.99 for the song if I wanted it, not get some crap quality version from MySpace.
I think your tinfoil hat is worn out. You might need to go to your local Wal-Mart and get another roll.
Wish *was* over-hyped, but not all of the hype was good.
They tried to have only 1 "world" group of servers that would house at least 10K players online at one time, with no "zones". Many of us were openly skeptical of whether or not it could be pulled off by them, especially since they were a small company. Blizzard or SOE is one thing, but some small developer that nobody had really heard of before? Sorry, but many of us were waiting for it to fall.
The bottom line is Hollywood and the music industry over-hypes things all the damn time. The more they show commercials for a particular movie, the more likely it is to flop, unless it is a movie that has a pre-generated following. (Such as any Star Wars, or Spider-Man)
Look at how hyped that short-lived Anna Nicole Smith reality show was. It was so bad it wasn't watchable, but they were sure it was a hit. I saw a commercial every 10 minutes. Look at that Van Halen album with Gary Cherone singing on it. Eddie and the gang kept talking about how great it was that they were working with Cherone, and it was the worst album (by far) that Van Halen ever released.
The key is always: Who is doing the hyping?
If it is fans, and there is a track record with the artist, there is reason for optimism. If it is the company/act/actor/studio, then there is reason to be skeptical.
These days, most of the studios act like used car salesmen. Talk fast and loud, and people will pay attention to what you are saying, instead of looking carefully at the product.
I did as you suggested, as I am always interested in what is going on with my network connections. I see the iPodService.exe binary running, and the page faults delta field will flash 117 or 119 every 3-5 seconds like clockwork.
What I didn't see was my firewall having an entry for allowed programs. Maybe it backdoored in with the iTunes.exe or iTunesHelper.exe, but I doubt it. In fact, I looked at the active applications, and while the iPodService.exe was flickering, my firewall reported no traffic. Even locking down everything didn't report that this application was trying to "phone home".
So, what are you saying? I don't see the traffic you are implying is there.
EQ2 has had 2 expansions released, plus the 3 adventure packs. Patches can happen daily, and if a bug is found, they patch it as soon as the fix has been tested. None of this waiting a month or two for some bug that really annoys you for class x, it gets fixed.
Boy, the Blizzard fans really have a jaded view of things.
In about 2-5 years, WoW will start to fizzle out as people grow up and away from the game. As well, improvements in computer hardware, GPUs in particular, will start to make the cheesy character graphics that WoW uses seem old.
Games run their course. Blizzard has been really lax in adding new content, and fixing bugs. If they are going to average a major update once every 2 years, customers will start to leave for other games.
While it may be a long time before anyone beats the subscription numbers that WoW currently boasts, as more people get broadband and more people start having better systems, the MMO market can handle more people.
But it won't happen for a few years. As much as I am looking forward to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, it won't challenge WoW for numbers. And nothing else in the works that has been talked about is really lighting any major fires. And even Eve's slow but steady growth will only go so far, as it's a game of Haves and Have Nots, and new players are mostly Nots.
You haven't seen kids who attended smaller party schools, and how their lives are afterwards.
Friends of mine that attended places like Frostburg, or Salsbury over in MD came out of school with very few social skills other than getting drunk with random people. And the friends they made? Gone within 6 months of graduation as they spread out over the state and region.
Maybe it's somewhat different than when I went to college, but being known as "a real party animal that got crabs, herpes, and the clap while in college" isn't what I'm shooting for. lol
I can see really intelligent parents getting a hold of this list and starting to shift kids away from campuses where gaming is a little too friendly. Don't give them information they don't need to see!
Though, I'd rather have my kid at a school where gaming was damn easy, as opposed to a school where drinking was the only thing to do every day.
Actually, there wasn't anything impressive at all about this blog. It was all things that are fairly obvious to just about everyone except those who are raving fanatics about .
How this got accepted at/. is anyone's guess. Slow news day?
When Firefox has its own email client from Mozilla as part of the download, I think you will see a new wave of people switching over.
I used Netscape forever it seemed, but with them dropping the email portion, it started to fade. That, and the fact that it is difficult to extract your old emails after a HD crash made me give up on it. I got tired of losing all my saved jokes and important emails from several years ago. I switched to gmail, and only use Outleak Express for those emails that I cannot use a free account with.
I don't trust MicroSoft when it comes to security. I'm hoping that Mozilla may offer us something more secure. Giving us an email client that comes with the Firefox download will hopefully be that answer. And it will certainly help their download numbers.
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I really wanted to like V:SoH. My guild from another game had a really large presence planned for it, and I wanted to finally start a game at the same time they did. I got into the closed beta, and never could get into the game.
I kinda felt similar to when I first played EQ2 back at its launch. That game made things difficult for the sake of being difficult, and V:SoH appears to have taken the same approach. Tedium summed up my experience the best.
I'm 40 years old now. I have an infant in the house for the first time in my life. I just don't have the time to dedicate to a game that has so many timesinks built right into it. Corpse Runs? I hope to never see another CR in my life, and certainly have zero plans to stay up til 2AM helping everyone else get their corpse. Oh, I can take an XP penalty, but it's really stiff? No thanks. And CRs were just the first major hurdle I didn't like. There were plenty of others.
I never thought it would be the case, but I have become a casual gamer. And V:SoH is very unfriendly to the casual player. It's more a raid dependent game, much like EQ1 was. That's fine if you have the time to spare, but I no longer do. And my wife would never, ever go for a game that made things this difficult again. I got her into EQ, and she did ok. Then she tried WoW, and she loved that it was so much more friendly. EQ2 seems even friendlier to her than WoW did, so we're enjoying that.
I don't see this game making any dent at all in the WoW player base. It may grab some from EQ2 that are looking for more of a challenge, but the WoW folks that decided to give EQ2 a try and have stayed because the game has gotten so much better than release? They aren't going to enjoy V:SoH, either.
So... What's going to be the next casual gamer friendly release that isn't a WoW or EQ2 title? Until it comes out, I'm sticking with EQ2.
I don't really get why this is such a bad idea. Especially if they make it so that any site that sells/features nudity/porn has to move to such an extension.
.xxx domains if that was the only place they could be. And all these damn library filters and crap could be made easier. Block blatant porn, and anything else is fair game. I don't see them putting the Anatomy books behind locked doors so kids can't see a drawing of a nude human, and they don't do it with National Geographic, either. This makes it easy to block porn, and keep everything else open.
Let's face it. www.whitehouse.com was one of the all-time great name squatting done. For the longest time, that was a porn site. How many kids and unsuspecting adults stumbled onto that one in the early days?
I'm no screaming conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I lean a lot further towards liberalism than I ever though I would, mostly because I am tired of religion affecting our laws so much, and personal freedoms being stripped from us left and right.
But I don't see any harm in setting these websites up in a much easier to control/block segment of the websphere. And many of these webmasters would love it if it was that much easier to block content by parents. Just think of all the credit card charges to crap companies that supposedly verify age because a person has a CC #? Sheesh, I had one at 16!
At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all
Besides, think of all the business that it would stir up for a while. All those porn banners having to be redone! hehehe
Ultima is a series that was dragged through the mud in gruesome fashion.
The original was pretty good. Ultima II was about the same. Ultima III kicked butt for its time frame. And from there, it went downhill.
The last was Ultima 9, and it was awful. Ultima Online has its fans, but it wasn't even close to the same game, so it doesn't count.
For another, Bard's Tale was 3 great games, and then a really stupid release of a non-related game with the same title nearly 15 years later. I still don't understand that one, other than a money grubbing rip-off using a legendary title. And if it has been a real Bard's Tale 4, I would have spent the cash on it.
I didn't like their list. It was all console games, and they could have found a lot more than 7 titles to pick on. Throw PC titles in there, and you could hit 25 easy.
The problem with sequels these days is that studios tend to rush them out unfinished. They want to score the bucks, but they tend to write half-assed plots.
Having said that, I'd love to see the following:
Wizardry 9, a sequel to the orignal concept without any futuristic crap in it.
Fallout 3, 'nough said.
Ultima 10, with single player party of 4 setup. (Ultima III is still the best of the series!)
Baldur's Gate 3, Icewind Dale 3: As others have stated NWN2 was damn good, but those seemed better.
Sacred 2, which is in the works. Just, fix the bugs this time, guys!. The game rocked, when it worked.
That was my thoughts, exactly.
/sarcasm off
1.5 million, with the rest probably being a buck or two here and there. Hardly a punishment to a huge company like Sony BMG.
A quote from TFA: In a news conference Tuesday in Austin, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot said the settlement sent a clear message.
"Texans deserve to be protected from harmful hidden software that threatens their privacy or the security of their computers," he said.
This wasn't a slap on the wrist. This was brushing the lint off of their lapels.
sarcasm on I feel SO secure knowing that my Texas Attorney General's office is protecting me so diligently.
What about the story of the intermittent windshield wiper, by Robert Kearns? He had several patents for having the wipers pause between sweeps back in 1967. Everything he used (pretty much) was available already. But in all the years since winshield wipers were in use (at least here in the US, most cars had them by 1916), NOBODY else thought to:
A) have the idea, and
B) make it work.
So, he patents it, and no car company will buy it. He ends up having to sue Ford (1978) and Chrysler (1982) for installing the systems on their cars. Ford's arguement was that there was nothing NEW about what he did, because all the parts were already in existence. Ford was found to have "unintentionally infringed" on Kearn's patent. Chrysler, too.
The fact that having the ability to have the wipers pause between sweeps is blantantly obvious if you think about it, and yet a patent was awarded. I don't even have to be an engineer to think "Man, I really hate having my wipers moving on the slow setting for this slight rain." But nobody else came up with the idea and made it work for about 50 YEARS! Yep, that DESERVES a patent.
The courts never said the auto companies had to stop using it, so Kearns was deprived of the ability to be the sole manufacturer as he so wished. And by the time he finally started to win some cases, he had too many of them on his plate, so the cases were thrown out for lack of attention by Kearns and his multitude of lawyers. Only Ford and Chrysler had to pay him in the long run. And then his patent ran out after 17 years, and it was done.
Kearns is one of the most famous cases in patent law, where the little guy won. But the truth of the matter is, he barely won, and not much in the grand scheme of things.
While I agree with the rest of your sentiments, you will dismayed to realize how many of the "average person" will just be lazy instead of trying to make things better for their children, or society as a whole.
All you have to do is drive through a residential neighborhood and see how many homes didn't put their recycle bins out... ever. Or the ones that look at their trash container being full, and dump regular trash in with their recycling, saying "What does it hurt?"
The bottom line is that most people are inherently lazy. And unless their house needed repainting, or their sidewalk/driveway needed to be repaved, they won't do it. Even parents with kids that have asthma. Some will, but most won't.
And it sucks.
I don't think you really understand what happened with FEMA there, pal.
FEMA was rolled into the dreaded Department of Homeland Security. They had much of their power to do things they wanted to do taken away from them. They also had their budget firmly wrapped up in stopping terrorist activities, instead of planning and deploying for natural/manmade disasters.
You have to remember what FEMA was created for. The cleanup of disasters and the planning and prevention of their ramifications. It should have never been moved into DHS, because some of its functions need to be kept seperate.
I'm sorry, but FEMA wasn't the bad guys. The bad guys were DHS, the POTUS, the govenor of LA, and the mayor of the city. FEMA was handcuffed from the beginning, and kept handcuffed by petty political bickering. FEMA is supposed to be above that. Wrapped into DHS, it won't be.
I don't think resources are an issue for the fan base. They've already shown a willingness to go to bat for a show/movie they liked, and did it all for free.
It can be pretty amazing what people can accomplish out of pure passion for the work, as opposed to the profit to be made from it. In this case, the fans are more than willing to make the effort. The question is, will it be for or against Universal releases of the future?
If it goes against, there could be some problems for future TV and movies from Universal, as this loyal block will remember and potentially boycott. Universal knows that the potential loss of revenue from a rabid base of fans in that much coveted "18-35 male without an understanding of credit card debt" demographic would be something advertisers would look at closely. It would certainly cost them more than the 9,000 they are looking for in liscensing fees.
Then again, the MPAA and RIAA are dumb enough to cut off the hands that feed them all the time. Why should this be any different?
Demos are ok, but you really are only seeing a snippet of a game, and have no idea how good or bad it really is. Also, you have to have a really strong broadband connection to download it. The Battlefield 2142 download took a heck of a long time, and I have a 15Mb/s down fiber optic line. I didn't even download it on its first available date, too.
The problem with demos is it is the only really clean piece of code the game company will release, including its Gold image. They want to wow the customer, so they make that a really tightly QA'd portion of the game. You play it, and think "this is really tight! The gameplay was fast, fun, and I bet the rest of the game is the same way". And it often isn't. Especially since many development shops leave critical bugs in the game to foil the pirates that want to have the orignal disc image. Nothing like a zero-day patch to spoil any pirates!
So, the demo may be clean, but the rest of the game could be buggy as hell, requiring multiple patches to make it run smoothly for even the most common of system setups.
Anyone that plays a demo just needs to remember that what they are playing is probably tbe cream of the work done for that project.
I don't see how the idea "had to be tried". If I had been sitting in a room full of people and they asked me if I thought it would score big numbers, I'd have laughed my ass off.
This is one of those things for people with entirely too much time on their hands, and way too much disposable income.
The streaming video was going to be a joke. The screen is too small to make it worth the effort.
The updates... How many updates are there that are worth it? I can maybe see a perfect game going into the 9th inning being something to turn the tube on for, but for the rest of it... Nothing that has that much build-up potential is going to be something you can alert for.
There was a similar kind of service they offer on pagers for fire department personal in some areas. Back in MD, you could get pager alerts for all major fire calls in the state sent to your pager. All the new kids becoming volunteers got it... At first. Then they dropped it because it was too damn annoying, especially since the odds were the call was nowhere CLOSE to where you worked/volunteered.
Only a hardcore gambler would have considered this thing. Sports fans in general? Well, we see the evidence. It couldn't get their interest.
AOL has been going down the drain since it went from a MAC only platform to one that allowed PC users. From that day, they have been all about the $$$.
Let's look at their tactics:
For years, they made it nearly impossible to discontinue their service. (I know from personal experience, where only the treat of a stop check motion to get them out of my personal checking account finally got them to stop billing me for a cancelled service.)
They effectively carpet-bombed the entire U.S. and Canada with CDs of their software. I have co-workers that have entire offices "wallpapared" with AOL CDs received in the mail. You can still get their CDs at your local Wal-Mart for "free".
For years, you didn't get to the internet a lot of the time. You got to AOL's version of it. Heck, some advertisers are still using "AOL Keywords" in their TV ads, but it is greatly reduced from what it was.
AOL's product basically devolved into a simplistic access point to the internet, where AOL could control much of what you saw and interacted with. Their carpet bombing was successful enough that many companies bought into their approach, and made themselves more AOL friendly. And as existing users got more sophisticated and left, AOL kept dumbing itself down.
I remember AOL from it's Mac only days, and it was pretty good compared to CompuServe. PC Link was the PC version of it, until they moved them all over to AOL and started growing too fast.
So, how did you break into the porn industry as an actor?
Yeah, I was one of those Netscape users that switched to IE, because they stopped doing decent updates of IE.
And when Firefox came out, I switched to it for much of what I do.
Your arguement didn't sway me, or anyone else, I think.
Most players, especially those in the MMO markets, have long ago stopped caring what "skin" the player is wearing and worried about their skill level.
Heck, many of the female toons you see in games are played by guys who are either A) titilated at playing a female toon and dressing it, or B) tired of looking at a guy's ass in third person view.
So it isn't like this story is anything close to a new viewpoint on the subject.
I think you are failing to take into consideration the fact that this is a whole different set of circumstances.
Netscape lost the battle over IE due to one primary reason: IE was pre-bundled with Windows.
Now, you may scoff at that, but think about it.
A person new to PCs and the internet goes to the local Wal-Mart/BestBuy or whatever, and buys a computer. They come home, get it set up (or more likely, get help from a friend/relative) and try to get to the internet. And what pops up? Various MS assistants that lead them directly to Outleak, IE, and WMP. Case closed. If that person wanted Netscape, they had to download it from somewhere, or get a copy on a CD from their ISP. And even though MOST ISPs sent a copy of Netscape to the customers in the late 90's, the damage was already done. Customers were now familiar with IE and Outleak, and had no reason to switch.
The difference today is that both Zune and iPods are a computer attachment. And the purchaser of said MP3 players won't be looking at a PC for the very first time 99% of time. Nor will it be their first time on the internet.
Apple is flat out DOMINATING the portable MP3 player market. I am sure they are working HARD to keep their trademark alive, so the iPod doesn't become the Xerox machine , or the next aspirin. Because iPods are now synonomous to the world with MP3 player.
I just don't see MS getting the Zune to that point.
You do realize that most of the songs people are after are probably by independent artists, that have no contract with a major record label, right?
Who would want to download the songs people put on their main pages? The quality is horrible for digital music. I'd rather pay iTunes the $0.99 for the song if I wanted it, not get some crap quality version from MySpace.
I think your tinfoil hat is worn out. You might need to go to your local Wal-Mart and get another roll.
Wish *was* over-hyped, but not all of the hype was good.
They tried to have only 1 "world" group of servers that would house at least 10K players online at one time, with no "zones". Many of us were openly skeptical of whether or not it could be pulled off by them, especially since they were a small company. Blizzard or SOE is one thing, but some small developer that nobody had really heard of before? Sorry, but many of us were waiting for it to fall.
The bottom line is Hollywood and the music industry over-hypes things all the damn time. The more they show commercials for a particular movie, the more likely it is to flop, unless it is a movie that has a pre-generated following. (Such as any Star Wars, or Spider-Man)
Look at how hyped that short-lived Anna Nicole Smith reality show was. It was so bad it wasn't watchable, but they were sure it was a hit. I saw a commercial every 10 minutes. Look at that Van Halen album with Gary Cherone singing on it. Eddie and the gang kept talking about how great it was that they were working with Cherone, and it was the worst album (by far) that Van Halen ever released.
The key is always: Who is doing the hyping?
If it is fans, and there is a track record with the artist, there is reason for optimism. If it is the company/act/actor/studio, then there is reason to be skeptical.
These days, most of the studios act like used car salesmen. Talk fast and loud, and people will pay attention to what you are saying, instead of looking carefully at the product.
I did as you suggested, as I am always interested in what is going on with my network connections. I see the iPodService.exe binary running, and the page faults delta field will flash 117 or 119 every 3-5 seconds like clockwork.
What I didn't see was my firewall having an entry for allowed programs. Maybe it backdoored in with the iTunes.exe or iTunesHelper.exe, but I doubt it. In fact, I looked at the active applications, and while the iPodService.exe was flickering, my firewall reported no traffic. Even locking down everything didn't report that this application was trying to "phone home".
So, what are you saying? I don't see the traffic you are implying is there.
Bingo, someone gets it!
EQ2 has had 2 expansions released, plus the 3 adventure packs. Patches can happen daily, and if a bug is found, they patch it as soon as the fix has been tested. None of this waiting a month or two for some bug that really annoys you for class x, it gets fixed.
Boy, the Blizzard fans really have a jaded view of things.
In about 2-5 years, WoW will start to fizzle out as people grow up and away from the game. As well, improvements in computer hardware, GPUs in particular, will start to make the cheesy character graphics that WoW uses seem old.
Games run their course. Blizzard has been really lax in adding new content, and fixing bugs. If they are going to average a major update once every 2 years, customers will start to leave for other games.
While it may be a long time before anyone beats the subscription numbers that WoW currently boasts, as more people get broadband and more people start having better systems, the MMO market can handle more people.
But it won't happen for a few years. As much as I am looking forward to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, it won't challenge WoW for numbers. And nothing else in the works that has been talked about is really lighting any major fires. And even Eve's slow but steady growth will only go so far, as it's a game of Haves and Have Nots, and new players are mostly Nots.
You haven't seen kids who attended smaller party schools, and how their lives are afterwards.
Friends of mine that attended places like Frostburg, or Salsbury over in MD came out of school with very few social skills other than getting drunk with random people. And the friends they made? Gone within 6 months of graduation as they spread out over the state and region.
Maybe it's somewhat different than when I went to college, but being known as "a real party animal that got crabs, herpes, and the clap while in college" isn't what I'm shooting for. lol
I can see really intelligent parents getting a hold of this list and starting to shift kids away from campuses where gaming is a little too friendly. Don't give them information they don't need to see!
Though, I'd rather have my kid at a school where gaming was damn easy, as opposed to a school where drinking was the only thing to do every day.
Actually, there wasn't anything impressive at all about this blog. It was all things that are fairly obvious to just about everyone except those who are raving fanatics about .
/. is anyone's guess. Slow news day?
How this got accepted at
When Firefox has its own email client from Mozilla as part of the download, I think you will see a new wave of people switching over.
I used Netscape forever it seemed, but with them dropping the email portion, it started to fade. That, and the fact that it is difficult to extract your old emails after a HD crash made me give up on it. I got tired of losing all my saved jokes and important emails from several years ago. I switched to gmail, and only use Outleak Express for those emails that I cannot use a free account with.
I don't trust MicroSoft when it comes to security. I'm hoping that Mozilla may offer us something more secure. Giving us an email client that comes with the Firefox download will hopefully be that answer. And it will certainly help their download numbers.