the idiot plot where people act in a manner which is beyond comprehension is a true reflection of the real world, as evidence I'd like to refer you to the conversations I've had with my wife over the last 24 hours.
My initial reaction to this was much the same as that of many slashdotters - That it will never work and that it was too much in the way of big brother tactics to try.
Then fatherhood instints kicked in and I started to feel like this level of protection should be there and should have been there since day one of the internet being available to the general public.
It is wrong to expose people to offensive material unless they specifically choose to view it and it is very wrong for ISPs to sell the internet into family homes without a good mechanism for restricting content to minors.
To expand a little and confirm the virtualisation - Of those companies quoted, five own their own networks and only Vodafone could still be described as UK owned :
02, originally part of BT (Cellnet), now owned by Telefonica (Spain)
Orange, Originally founded by Hutchison Whampoa (Hong Kong), now owned by France Telecom (France)
T-Mobile, originally founded by Cable & Wireless as Mercury One2One, now owned by Deutsche Telekom (Germany)
3 - Originally the 3G license I believe was acquired as a joint venture between NTT (Japan) and Hutchison Whampoa, now owned entirely by Hutchison Whampoa.
Of these, 3 is only directly a provider of 3G services, they use the O2 network for 2G.
The others you quoted are virtual providers and do not own infrastructure, Virgin use T-Mobile and Tesco use O2, there are a few others in the UK now including BT Mobile (Vodafone) and easymobile.com (T-mobile).
So we only really have 4 2G providers over here, the rest is just smoke & mirrors.
Stargate is more popular outside the US than you may think, as far as I know it has more or less eclipsed Star in the Uk and the show has been very successful in Germany, not sure about other countries.
It should lead to Apple waking up and realising that Motorola was the wromng partner for this exercise.
Of the big three phone vendors, why choose the one with the worst record for UI design ?
There is no strategy here, its just a case of Apple going 'American' with the partnership, once they understand just how badly Motorola have fouled up they might consider a more active role for a subsequent project.
Personally, I'd love to see a Nokia/Apple partnership up agains the best Sony/Ericcson can develop, I doubt it'll happen though.
I get what you are trying to say but I beleive you are approaching this from a flawed position.
You seem to be assuming that convergence of differing devices will always result in a poor quality, flawed product, full of compromises.
Whilst I agree that this is the case for early generation converged devices, I do not accept that this situation will persist, especially with the level of R&D that Sony Ericcson, Nokia and Motorola are putting into this area.
Just look at where Nokia have come in the two short years since they released the 6600 (Symbian 60, MP3, SD Card, VGA Camera), now they have the N91 (3.5mm Jack, Symbian, 4GB HD, 2MP Camera).
Converged devices are evolving past the point of a flawed second rate product and will start to reach converged excellence within the next 12-24 months.
I can predict now that the N91 will be hugely successful, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Nokia or Sony offer a competing service to ITunes and I'd be even less surprised if we have a head on Battle between Apple/Motorola, Nokia/Partnerx and Sony for online music delivery via converged devices within a couple of Christmas's (ending ITunes dominance).
I believe the Safeway effort was set-up with assistance from Tesco (market leading British supermarket chain).
Here's a link with the original story :
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/ebus iness/story/0,10801,62175,00.html/
I beleive Tesco started their online Grocery service in 1999 (or thereabouts) with limited coverage (proximkity to certain pilot stores), from day one they used the lcoal stores and their personnel as the storage/packing/delivery infrastructure.
For me this is one particular company that in recent years has done almost everything right, Wikipedia entry here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco_Personal_Financ e
I'm a little wary of a world where onbe day my gold card benefits include MMORPG character insurance, thats bringing gaming and RL a little too close together for my liking.
(thats part of the reason why I don't really feel comfortable with secondary market activities).
I think its not so much the direct impact on the game but the indirect impact thats the problem.
The secondary market encourages a playing style amongst its 'harvesters' that is detrimental to the role playing aspects of the primary market and also to the experience of the other players in the game
I'd also say that your friends around the Monopoly board would be much more upset about the 'side deals' if they'd each paid £10 to participate and were expecting a level playing field,
there were at least 35 servers on ASE last night and over 250 concurrent players at 4pm eastern so there must be a problem with your ASE filters.
Using ASE you should have a filter on Battlefield 1942 and the mod Galactic Conquest, I didn't have any problems finding a server last night with those settings
if you consider it slow then thats your own personal opinion, however I'd disagree with your findings in terms of playabel servers.
The lowest concurrent player count that I've ever seenw ith GC is around 35, with there always being at least 20 people on the AGSN server and at least 10 on the NOC server (both findable easily via ASE).
Since the 0.5 release the concurrent player count hasn't been below 250 and there have been ovr 150,000 downloads (of this release) already from the major mirrors so you'd certainly have no problems finding a well populated server at the moment.
PC Zone recently reviewed the R4 version of the mod, they gave it 85% and a PC Zone essential rating (two pages in the mag after they gave the SWG Jump To Lightspeed expansion 71%).
The nice thing about this mod is that its not just replacing models and maps, its been built by a talented and committed team that know their subject matter really well (the project director recent won a major prize in the Atom Films SW fan film contest btw), the result is that this mod plays and feels like Star Wars.
the crazy thing is that I had an argument with the lead analyst at Gartner for mobile devices a few years ago about just this subject.
My argument was that device convergence would be consumer demand led and was inevitable, he was convinced that people 'wanted' to have a phone that was a phone, a PDA that was a PDA etc.
its easy to see how/why the PDA vendors trip up when they pay these people money for so called market 'intelligence'!
Slashdot Mirror
in which case you'd probably be taking yourself much too seriously
the idiot plot where people act in a manner which is beyond comprehension is a true reflection of the real world, as evidence I'd like to refer you to the conversations I've had with my wife over the last 24 hours.
From the sound of that, this may be the last major Windows release. The Windows name may carry on but it will be the end of Windows as we know it.
Curtains for Windows ?
My initial reaction to this was much the same as that of many slashdotters - That it will never work and that it was too much in the way of big brother tactics to try.
Then fatherhood instints kicked in and I started to feel like this level of protection should be there and should have been there since day one of the internet being available to the general public.
It is wrong to expose people to offensive material unless they specifically choose to view it and it is very wrong for ISPs to sell the internet into family homes without a good mechanism for restricting content to minors.
To expand a little and confirm the virtualisation - Of those companies quoted, five own their own networks and only Vodafone could still be described as UK owned :
02, originally part of BT (Cellnet), now owned by Telefonica (Spain)
Orange, Originally founded by Hutchison Whampoa (Hong Kong), now owned by France Telecom (France)
T-Mobile, originally founded by Cable & Wireless as Mercury One2One, now owned by Deutsche Telekom (Germany)
3 - Originally the 3G license I believe was acquired as a joint venture between NTT (Japan) and Hutchison Whampoa, now owned entirely by Hutchison Whampoa.
Of these, 3 is only directly a provider of 3G services, they use the O2 network for 2G.
The others you quoted are virtual providers and do not own infrastructure, Virgin use T-Mobile and Tesco use O2, there are a few others in the UK now including BT Mobile (Vodafone) and easymobile.com (T-mobile).
So we only really have 4 2G providers over here, the rest is just smoke & mirrors.
So NASAs new bike is named after the bird in Forbidden Planet - did I miss an unrated release of that movie ?
Stargate is more popular outside the US than you may think, as far as I know it has more or less eclipsed Star in the Uk and the show has been very successful in Germany, not sure about other countries.
the Nokia N91 I believe is being provided with a Bluetooth based sharing capability (it also has 802.11b/g)
It should lead to Apple waking up and realising that Motorola was the wromng partner for this exercise.
Of the big three phone vendors, why choose the one with the worst record for UI design ?
There is no strategy here, its just a case of Apple going 'American' with the partnership, once they understand just how badly Motorola have fouled up they might consider a more active role for a subsequent project.
Personally, I'd love to see a Nokia/Apple partnership up agains the best Sony/Ericcson can develop, I doubt it'll happen though.
This is exactly the same argument a Gartner Analyst used 5yrs ago, then he was trying to convince me that Symbian OS had no future...
I get what you are trying to say but I beleive you are approaching this from a flawed position.
You seem to be assuming that convergence of differing devices will always result in a poor quality, flawed product, full of compromises.
Whilst I agree that this is the case for early generation converged devices, I do not accept that this situation will persist, especially with the level of R&D that Sony Ericcson, Nokia and Motorola are putting into this area.
Just look at where Nokia have come in the two short years since they released the 6600 (Symbian 60, MP3, SD Card, VGA Camera), now they have the N91 (3.5mm Jack, Symbian, 4GB HD, 2MP Camera).
Converged devices are evolving past the point of a flawed second rate product and will start to reach converged excellence within the next 12-24 months.
I can predict now that the N91 will be hugely successful, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Nokia or Sony offer a competing service to ITunes and I'd be even less surprised if we have a head on Battle between Apple/Motorola, Nokia/Partnerx and Sony for online music delivery via converged devices within a couple of Christmas's (ending ITunes dominance).
...then they might have produced something like this :
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5944.html
I believe the Safeway effort was set-up with assistance from Tesco (market leading British supermarket chain). Here's a link with the original story : http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/ebus iness/story/0,10801,62175,00.html/
I beleive Tesco started their online Grocery service in 1999 (or thereabouts) with limited coverage (proximkity to certain pilot stores), from day one they used the lcoal stores and their personnel as the storage/packing/delivery infrastructure.
For me this is one particular company that in recent years has done almost everything right, Wikipedia entry here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco_Personal_Financ e
I dunno. why not hold a seance and ask him ?
I'm a little wary of a world where onbe day my gold card benefits include MMORPG character insurance, thats bringing gaming and RL a little too close together for my liking.
(thats part of the reason why I don't really feel comfortable with secondary market activities).
I think its not so much the direct impact on the game but the indirect impact thats the problem.
The secondary market encourages a playing style amongst its 'harvesters' that is detrimental to the role playing aspects of the primary market and also to the experience of the other players in the game
I'd also say that your friends around the Monopoly board would be much more upset about the 'side deals' if they'd each paid £10 to participate and were expecting a level playing field,
Mac support is I beleive there for the patch and the previous versions, check this thread on the GC mod forums for details :
8
http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=39576
there were at least 35 servers on ASE last night and over 250 concurrent players at 4pm eastern so there must be a problem with your ASE filters.
Using ASE you should have a filter on Battlefield 1942 and the mod Galactic Conquest, I didn't have any problems finding a server last night with those settings
if you consider it slow then thats your own personal opinion, however I'd disagree with your findings in terms of playabel servers.
The lowest concurrent player count that I've ever seenw ith GC is around 35, with there always being at least 20 people on the AGSN server and at least 10 on the NOC server (both findable easily via ASE).
Since the 0.5 release the concurrent player count hasn't been below 250 and there have been ovr 150,000 downloads (of this release) already from the major mirrors so you'd certainly have no problems finding a well populated server at the moment.
I had a problem with the Lucasfiles download site on day of release, it seems that they still don't have it sorted.
I'll drop the devs an email about this to let them know that the problem still exists.
In the meantime please try one of the other mirrors (eg. fileplanet), there are several linked on the mainpage of the GC site.
PC Zone recently reviewed the R4 version of the mod, they gave it 85% and a PC Zone essential rating (two pages in the mag after they gave the SWG Jump To Lightspeed expansion 71%).
The nice thing about this mod is that its not just replacing models and maps, its been built by a talented and committed team that know their subject matter really well (the project director recent won a major prize in the Atom Films SW fan film contest btw), the result is that this mod plays and feels like Star Wars.
Lucasarts are fully aware of this mod and have agreed the content with the dev team.
Part of the agreement is that Lucasfiles is named as the primary download site.
the crazy thing is that I had an argument with the lead analyst at Gartner for mobile devices a few years ago about just this subject.
My argument was that device convergence would be consumer demand led and was inevitable, he was convinced that people 'wanted' to have a phone that was a phone, a PDA that was a PDA etc.
its easy to see how/why the PDA vendors trip up when they pay these people money for so called market 'intelligence'!
I tried the beta for about 20 minutes, totally failed to see any attraction in the game and didn't log back in after that.
I'm afraid that has summed up my experience so far in MMORPGs, still waiting for a good one.