[quote] That ridiculously boring combat system is the main thorn in every MMO's side. Clicking an enemy only to watch as you automatically take turns attacking is not fun or interactive in the least bit. [/quote]
Even in PvE it is far from the true (especially for raids). WoW has one of the most complex and interesting tactical combat systems in any game period (completely different classes, lots of skills,trinkets, potions,positional moves,etc) . But to appreciate it to full extent you have to play against other players. Guild wars withs its 10 slots is a joke compared to wow , high level pvp character has a choice at any given moment out of several dozens actions and combinations.
Having said that I don't play WoW. Don't have time for item grind which is a prerequisite for any high level fights.
I like Blizzard because they make quality games.What I dislike about them is lack of innovation Blizzard's formula
1) Don't ever innovate. Let others try new ideas and see how well it fares in the market. Not a single game of their was in any way unique or innovative. Every single feature in the games of theirs is borrowed from previous (often less successful) games .
2) Once you pick what idea to exploit commit to it 100%
3) Make sure you steal all the right parts and throw junk out. Blizzard is excellent in this aspect -they actually do have people who understand what is fun and what is not. Their biggest merit is that they can make balanced and interesting games out of rehashed ideas . Starfcraft is one of the most unoriginal games at the time of its release - yet it has balance and diversity just in the right proportion to keep people playing up to this day
4) Quality art , quality code- good execution
5) Market it more than Britney Spear album!
WoW is a very polished and very high quality product. Their biggest "innovations" though are tweaking XP rate so it is not takes whole year playing 24/7 to reach max level (EQ,Lineage anyone?) and quality content. It does not detract from their merit though imho - none before them could balance MMORPG that well. Innovators they are not- but quality craftsmen they are.
[quote] That's a great thought but it's a little lacking in substance. What do you propose the U.S. ought to specialize in? I'm quite honestly interested, and I've asked this question over and over to a lot of fairly intelligent people and have yet to get a satisfactory answer back. I'm not sure there is one. Do we try to go the Neal Stephenson route? Music, movies, microcode, and pizza? Other parts of the world are chipping into 'software' already, and there's no reason to think that we have some kind of automatic, natural, competitive advantage in any of those. [/quote]
US could specialize in power and tech. It was first nation to build nuclear weapon and nuclear power plant, cradle of microelectronics . US has a lot of brain power (a lot of them are immigrants but nevertheless).
Unfortunately I don't see it happening - nuclear power is unsupported and is regulated to strangulation. Biotech and pharma faces many regulations(I mean bad ones -like excessively long FDA approval process) . Mainstream public is generally unsupportive of those areas and media even more so.
In an area of power production you have coal and oil industries helding any possible alternatives in check. Biotech is used as spare change in political games ( stem cells anyone?) and so forth. America needs to wake up and put its priorities in order- like it did during Manhattan project and space race. Power and tech is the future - not consumer junk.Unfortunately US forgot this.
You know not only Japan has the know how of making nuclear reactors. There is Russia, France and even US. Though arguably only Japan has semi decent nuclear energy policy.Us has the most retarded policy of the bunch and France recently went the dumb way as well.
It was decided by executives that the genre is too niche and not worth it (same about flightsim genre as well) . I hope once it becomes cheaper to produce modern games(e.g. 3d engines become cheap and ubiquitous) and publish them (this is already happening with online distribution) we will see resurrection of quality PC gaming (e.g. not Sims # N, another mindless console port or yet another RTS with all the same things you could see in C&C)
If there's anything the last eight years should have taught us, it's that the President SHOULD be all talk. For all of his faults, Bush was able to push his agenda, and look where it got us.
Next president will have to fix and keep the country from derailing into disaster (at worst) or 2nd depression (at best). If he will be ALL talk (which seems Obama will be) then US is doomed. In fact for me choice is clear if Hillary>McCain>Obama.
You know it is because must probably 99.999% are ignorant and/or would never bother with something like a silly online petition . That doesnt mean though that all that 99.999% are perfectly happy with it. In fact given that very few ppl would even bother with petitions seems like 75k translates into a very large percentage of unsatisfied customers (if,say, out of all customers 100k would use the petition and 75k did it that would be a decent shot at saying around 70% of customers like XP back)
Shortly after that will be the robot insurrection. I've seen movies about this. It doesn't end well. Depends on your point of view:) I for one welcome our robotic overlords:)
Contrary to popular/. opinion M$ is not dumb. Their long term strategic goal is penetration into consumer market electronics and they doing it quite successfully I would say. Xbox was not a money maker for M$ either, yet on the 2nd version 360 emerged as winner in last generation of consoles. I would say that is pretty impressive . m$ can break into markets and monopolize them (desktop os, desktop office suite, software development suit , sql server, server os - you name it ).
Zune might not be successful today but it gets them market penetration and on their next version they might start to turn things around in that market as well. Jobs is right not to compete with M$ in software market, and I think M$ knows that -they are now after new markets, no point to fight battles already won.
You don't go to the dentist who lives in a crackhouse, Erm I have no idea where my dentist lives. DO you always ask "Where do you live" when seeking a service provider?
Mr. Murdoch is very smart businessman and adapts well to new time and technology . That does not change the fact that Murdoch uses its media empire as propaganda in best tradition of Dr. Goebbels. I would not like to see the world where the majority of internet news/commentary sources is controlled by such guy. Thankfully internet is really hard to control now.
Yeah yeah yeah.lol. You make it sound like Blizzard is bleeding money. They would turn enormous profits even with 400k subscribers (like it was the case with mmorpg before WoW, you know that business plan for UO was counting on 10k subscribers? That there are games CURRENTLY on market profitable with 2k subscribers? ). With their numbers they just rake in huge amount of cash. Heck they can stop dead and do nothing and I bet they still will have 4 mill in 10 years (if not more).
Market for MMORPG is not unlimited so I don see why they have to chase the "ever growing" target. Despite that they are still doing that and make all their critics look like idiots.
But damn I am mad that OpenOffice is not being adopted more widely. While I do not think linux is ready for desktop or enterprise directory/messaging platform OO is the open source product which is quite mature by now.
Thing is , sadly, that I know the answer - tons and tons of little automation done in house using vba. You wouldnt believe how mnay critical production processes rely on these things.And well a lot of api specficially written for VBA (factset,bloomberg - from finance industry). So well odf, ooxml -whatever. It has to support VBA I would say before mass migration happens . Same reason I think office 2007 will fail (unless they have VERY robust convertor)
The only thing that I miss from the Unix world is a decent shell, and that's easily remedied by installing Cygwin. Doesn't it come with monads (whatever new name for it)? - it is pretty slick supposedly when you learn it . I played with it a bit (cause I sometimes have to script), but default cmd.exe +vbs give me at the moment all I want (especially "run on everything win 2k+ out of the box part),so I personally did not bother
Please allow me to disagree on this little part:
that raping and murdering people is actually the right thing to do despite the fact that most people know intuitively that it isn't. Humans were raping and murdering each other since we existed as a species. And there are good evidence that our ancestor apes did that too (and you can observe similar behaviour on modern chimps). So that is "intuitively" right thing to do. NOT doing so is in fact more modern construct, developed as there was need to keep people together on a scale more than a few warring tribes (e.g. country).
Parent is right to some degree -Russia is indeed 3d world country and inet ads there have lots smaller margins than,say, in US - many factors contribute to that such as overall very low income,low internet usage etc.Despite that market still exists and it will only grow. Having a foot in the door in developing markets is a key for future success.
So, imagine the energy level to be 8-9 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE (or around a billion times) more energetic than a nuclear fission chain reaction Damn that is awesome! When we can start making all new, more powerful bombs out of this ?!?! Somebody tell the military quick so we do not get cosmic ray gap!
You may need Photoshop, DRM or games, so you use XP.
Games is huge part for my home machine definitely. Also MS Office (and no open office does not cut it when you need it for work). Also development environment ( I prefer use.net for my little home pet projects )
Being legal free is not really a huge factor for me (totally non factor actually).Firefox I dont use because it does work properly with MSDN (at least wasnt last time I checked).
I do not choose software based on philosophy - I choose it from practical stand point. I use tons of freeware ( kmplayer,winamp, free download manager, cdburnerxp pro etc...) when it servers the needs best and use paid/pirated software when it is best.
And yeah I tried Ubuntu (as well as many other distros) and besides philosophy there are really no points to it imho to use on desktop.
Yeah he really seem to move forward his little pet project. Something I considere quite a feat . But from practical point of view... yawn.... I already have all I need from XP, Ubuntu has a loOOoooooooong way to go to even reach that humble benchmark, and it is so for absolute majority of users out there, so all its achivement are sadly irrelevant .
Current HDD technology is very reliable (well at least was so far for me).I still use 6 year old HDD (the first 120 GB) as my primary OS drive - and have 5 others of similar age. Being a sysadmin a did not witness that many HDD failures either (depsite the drive in corporate desktops and servers are usually of very inferior quality). In fact the most drive failures I saw was from EMC SAN - imho they have just abysmal quality drives and since they reccomend to have one hot spare per 12 drive I guess they just put the cheapest poorest quality drives there.
Chips are old , software is old.And even internet giants of today are a decade old . If you want a brilliant start up you have to start with tomorrow idea, not rehashing old ideas. Methinks AI and biotech will explode in next 10 years and the Googles of tomorrow are made today out of new ideas built on existing technology, competing with Intel, Microsoft or Google today is pointless.
Of course ideas are dime a dozen, implementation matters. Have a brilliant idea and bring it first to the market? -then you might have next google (or facebook at worst case:) )
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[quote]
,trinkets, potions ,positional moves ,etc) . But to appreciate it to full extent you have to play against other players. Guild wars withs its 10 slots is a joke compared to wow , high level pvp character has a choice at any given moment out of several dozens actions and combinations.
That ridiculously boring combat system is the main thorn in every MMO's side. Clicking an enemy only to watch as you automatically take turns attacking is not fun or interactive in the least bit.
[/quote]
Even in PvE it is far from the true (especially for raids). WoW has one of the most complex and interesting tactical combat systems in any game period (completely different classes, lots of skills
Having said that I don't play WoW. Don't have time for item grind which is a prerequisite for any high level fights.
I like Blizzard because they make quality games .What I dislike about them is lack of innovation
Blizzard's formula
1) Don't ever innovate. Let others try new ideas and see how well it fares in the market. Not a single game of their was in any way unique or innovative. Every single feature in the games of theirs is borrowed from previous (often less successful) games .
2) Once you pick what idea to exploit commit to it 100%
3) Make sure you steal all the right parts and throw junk out. Blizzard is excellent in this aspect -they actually do have people who understand what is fun and what is not. Their biggest merit is that they can make balanced and interesting games out of rehashed ideas . Starfcraft is one of the most unoriginal games at the time of its release - yet it has balance and diversity just in the right proportion to keep people playing up to this day
4) Quality art , quality code- good execution
5) Market it more than Britney Spear album!
WoW is a very polished and very high quality product. Their biggest "innovations" though are tweaking XP rate so it is not takes whole year playing 24/7 to reach max level (EQ,Lineage anyone?) and quality content. It does not detract from their merit though imho - none before them could balance MMORPG that well. Innovators they are not- but quality craftsmen they are.
Ermmm looks like a good gene to me! better than be a spineless pussy!
[quote]
.Unfortunately US forgot this.
That's a great thought but it's a little lacking in substance. What do you propose the U.S. ought to specialize in? I'm quite honestly interested, and I've asked this question over and over to a lot of fairly intelligent people and have yet to get a satisfactory answer back. I'm not sure there is one. Do we try to go the Neal Stephenson route? Music, movies, microcode, and pizza? Other parts of the world are chipping into 'software' already, and there's no reason to think that we have some kind of automatic, natural, competitive advantage in any of those.
[/quote]
US could specialize in power and tech. It was first nation to build nuclear weapon and nuclear power plant, cradle of microelectronics . US has a lot of brain power (a lot of them are immigrants but nevertheless).
Unfortunately I don't see it happening - nuclear power is unsupported and is regulated to strangulation. Biotech and pharma faces many regulations(I mean bad ones -like excessively long FDA approval process) . Mainstream public is generally unsupportive of those areas and media even more so.
In an area of power production you have coal and oil industries helding any possible alternatives in check. Biotech is used as spare change in political games ( stem cells anyone?) and so forth. America needs to wake up and put its priorities in order- like it did during Manhattan project and space race. Power and tech is the future - not consumer junk
You know not only Japan has the know how of making nuclear reactors. There is Russia, France and even US. Though arguably only Japan has semi decent nuclear energy policy .Us has the most retarded policy of the bunch and France recently went the dumb way as well.
It was decided by executives that the genre is too niche and not worth it (same about flightsim genre as well) . I hope once it becomes cheaper to produce modern games(e.g. 3d engines become cheap and ubiquitous) and publish them (this is already happening with online distribution) we will see resurrection of quality PC gaming (e.g. not Sims # N, another mindless console port or yet another RTS with all the same things you could see in C&C)
If there's anything the last eight years should have taught us, it's that the President SHOULD be all talk. For all of his faults, Bush was able to push his agenda, and look where it got us.
Next president will have to fix and keep the country from derailing into disaster (at worst) or 2nd depression (at best). If he will be ALL talk (which seems Obama will be) then US is doomed. In fact for me choice is clear if Hillary>McCain>Obama.
You know it is because must probably 99.999% are ignorant and/or would never bother with something like a silly online petition . That doesnt mean though that all that 99.999% are perfectly happy with it. In fact given that very few ppl would even bother with petitions seems like 75k translates into a very large percentage of unsatisfied customers (if ,say, out of all customers 100k would use the petition and 75k did it that would be a decent shot at saying around 70% of customers like XP back)
And all I see is Ron Paul ,Ron Paul. Did the plane with Cain, Huckabee and Romney really crash?!?
Contrary to popular /. opinion M$ is not dumb. Their long term strategic goal is penetration into consumer market electronics and they doing it quite successfully I would say. Xbox was not a money maker for M$ either, yet on the 2nd version 360 emerged as winner in last generation of consoles. I would say that is pretty impressive . m$ can break into markets and monopolize them (desktop os, desktop office suite, software development suit , sql server, server os - you name it ).
Zune might not be successful today but it gets them market penetration and on their next version they might start to turn things around in that market as well. Jobs is right not to compete with M$ in software market, and I think M$ knows that -they are now after new markets, no point to fight battles already won.
Mr. Murdoch is very smart businessman and adapts well to new time and technology . That does not change the fact that Murdoch uses its media empire as propaganda in best tradition of Dr. Goebbels. I would not like to see the world where the majority of internet news/commentary sources is controlled by such guy. Thankfully internet is really hard to control now.
Yeah yeah yeah .lol. You make it sound like Blizzard is bleeding money. They would turn enormous profits even with 400k subscribers (like it was the case with mmorpg before WoW, you know that business plan for UO was counting on 10k subscribers? That there are games CURRENTLY on market profitable with 2k subscribers? ). With their numbers they just rake in huge amount of cash. Heck they can stop dead and do nothing and I bet they still will have 4 mill in 10 years (if not more).
Market for MMORPG is not unlimited so I don see why they have to chase the "ever growing" target. Despite that they are still doing that and make all their critics look like idiots.
Damn. and heck what I was thinking -if I was in a stryker, in Iraq, I would find much more intersting things to play with than an old video game!
But damn I am mad that OpenOffice is not being adopted more widely. While I do not think linux is ready for desktop or enterprise directory/messaging platform OO is the open source product which is quite mature by now.
.And well a lot of api specficially written for VBA (factset ,bloomberg - from finance industry). So well odf, ooxml -whatever. It has to support VBA I would say before mass migration happens . Same reason I think office 2007 will fail (unless they have VERY robust convertor)
Thing is , sadly, that I know the answer - tons and tons of little automation done in house using vba. You wouldnt believe how mnay critical production processes rely on these things
Parent is right to some degree -Russia is indeed 3d world country and inet ads there have lots smaller margins than ,say, in US - many factors contribute to that such as overall very low income ,low internet usage etc .Despite that market still exists and it will only grow. Having a foot in the door in developing markets is a key for future success.
You may need Photoshop, DRM or games, so you use XP.
Games is huge part for my home machine definitely. Also MS Office (and no open office does not cut it when you need it for work). Also development environment ( I prefer use
Being legal free is not really a huge factor for me (totally non factor actually).Firefox I dont use because it does work properly with MSDN (at least wasnt last time I checked).
I do not choose software based on philosophy - I choose it from practical stand point. I use tons of freeware ( kmplayer,winamp, free download manager, cdburnerxp pro etc...) when it servers the needs best and use paid/pirated software when it is best.
And yeah I tried Ubuntu (as well as many other distros) and besides philosophy there are really no points to it imho to use on desktop.
Yeah he really seem to move forward his little pet project. Something I considere quite a feat . But from practical point of view ... yawn.... I already have all I need from XP, Ubuntu has a loOOoooooooong way to go to even reach that humble benchmark, and it is so for absolute majority of users out there, so all its achivement are sadly irrelevant .
hmm fable was a feeble blimp :)
Never been fan of Wills games (SimCity, Sims), though
Current HDD technology is very reliable (well at least was so far for me) .I still use 6 year old HDD (the first 120 GB) as my primary OS drive - and have 5 others of similar age. Being a sysadmin a did not witness that many HDD failures either (depsite the drive in corporate desktops and servers are usually of very inferior quality). In fact the most drive failures I saw was from EMC SAN - imho they have just abysmal quality drives and since they reccomend to have one hot spare per 12 drive I guess they just put the cheapest poorest quality drives there.
1 million r/w cycles? -NOT excited.
Chips are old , software is old .And even internet giants of today are a decade old . If you want a brilliant start up you have to start with tomorrow idea, not rehashing old ideas. Methinks AI and biotech will explode in next 10 years and the Googles of tomorrow are made today out of new ideas built on existing technology, competing with Intel, Microsoft or Google today is pointless.
:) )
Of course ideas are dime a dozen, implementation matters. Have a brilliant idea and bring it first to the market? -then you might have next google (or facebook at worst case