I find it unfortunate that some people are very unhappy with 4E. From my limited D&D experiance, I'm actually finding 4th's combat system to be quite good and far better than anything in 3rd edition (including 3.5). And I've already done fare more creative roleplay things in 4th than I did in 3rd.
Though, on that matter, our 3rd Edition DM had plenty of vile for 4th edition (and 3rd edition for that matter, he was a core AD&D person), but found out that 4th edition was quite fun once he got actually played it and not just heard people saying things like "in 4th edition, hobbits don't have harry toes" kind of thing that just throws some people off the deep end.
It's too the point that I think most 4th edition haters simply haven't played the game for any reasonable amount of time. Surely it's not perfect, but I find the game mechanics to be very good and a great effort at just trying to make an entirely different style of game.
Perhaps it's also because I haven't sunk any money at buying 3rd edition books (and again when 3.5 was released) because I only started casually D&Ding a couple years ago and I've only been borrowing a friends book. Some of the resentment seems to come from people getting sick of spending lots of money on products.
Either way, I'm enjoying 4th edition immensely and would recommend anyone to at least try it out, roll up a character, see what they think. Maybe it's not for you, but don't knock it till you've tried it.
Except that Kongregate is alternately full of teenagers bringing their drama onto chat (entirely too many trying to be their very own gossip girls), annoying preteens begging for everybody to be their friend, or a combination of the two insisting that 20-year-olds should not be on Kongregate.
HUH? People read the chat box? I'm too busy playing the games. =)
I will grant you that OpenOffice may not be to the level that Office is[...]
I won't. OpenOffice, from a bug standpoint, works far better than MSOffice from my experiance. How many times have I had to copy/paste a Word document into Notepad and then back into a fresh word document just to get ride of whatever incredible formatting bug, is too many to count.
You are correct that it's majority use is well suited, and for that, I grant OO as a better product. MS should just sell a feature module for Open Office that gives, whatever it is, that people need. Because I've not really figured that out yet. =P
The oil companies can't sell their oil twice; they either sell it now for profit, or wait until later when they think they can sell it for more profit.
Ah, I see what you're saying now. It's a different take on the analogy that I was talking about. You're saying that oil companies are purposely causing a supply shortage by not drilling for the oil they could be drilling, to raise the price of oil, so they can drill it in the future for a higher price point. Is that what you're saying?
To say an oil company won't drill for oil if it would grant them large profits is like saying a fat kid wouldn't eat the cake sitting in front of him if he could.
I'm not sure about your counter-analysis. Wouldn't a better analogy for the GP's argument be a fat kid who won't eat the large slice of cake sitting in front of him (even though he can) because he knows if he waits a while he'll get a slice twice as big?
Good analogy. But why wouldn't they eat the first piece, while waiting for the bigger piece? Assuming, they don't know IF the bigger piece would happen or not, and if it did, eating the first piece would not prevent them from getting a bigger piece. Who's to say they can't have their cake and er... eat it too. =P
But would it make them money? If the price of oil stays high due to a perceived lack of supply, that makes them more money per barrel, which means more profit.
Actually, your own analysis is your counter argument. If the the price of a barrel of oil is so high (though, it's dropped quite a lot recently) and oil companies STILL aren't investing into drilling, logic must dictate that it's do to the fact that these locations are still far from profitable, even at current prices. To say an oil company won't drill for oil if it would grant them large profits is like saying a fat kid wouldn't eat the cake sitting in front of him if he could.
Perhaps there's some other theories out there as to the reasons such companies aren't drilling (or drilling more) on their currently leased locations, but I think the simplest solution here is the correct one. No Profits = No Drilling.
Not bad, but using Kingdom Hearts as your example would resonate better with the BAWWWWWers.
Didn't Xmen Legends or Marvel Ultimate Alliance do this as well? I seem to recall something like that, but I also seem to recall there being potions in at least one of those games.
It really was a big let down in terms of gameplay. However, I never had a problem with the dialog and actually though the cut-scenes were by far the best and made me feel a lot better spending money on it. I thought Zero Punctuation summed it up the best.
- definitely use genetically engineered crops (there may be exceptions to this)
There, fixed that for you.
I was scratching my head on that. How is genetically engineered crops "less green" than normal crops? Or was the GP defining the topic was "green" as in naturalist and not "green" as in sustainable ?
My wife and I reuse all shopping bags as trash bags, and although paper is a nice idea and all, it is basically useless for that or any other bag purpose, because it's not waterproof."
Actually, my point is the same. I'm ok with Wally-World (Wal-Mart) giving me a crap-ton of bags. I use them to pick up after the dog when we take him for a walk... and we walk him every day in which he typically "goes" two different times, using two different bags. Wal-Mart saves me more money by not having to buy more plastic bags for this purpose.
Then our paper bags are used for holding recycling cardboard / newspaper scraps. It's the stores that give crazy "fancy" half paper bags, like fancy clothing shops, that I don't know what to do with.
Then out came thirty thousand Doom clones that add nothing except cosmetic changes and slight refinements of gameplay.
While I don't disagree with your "doom clone" tag, I do disagree with this statement. Unreal, Quake (sure, it was still made by Id), and Half-Life very much added more than slight changes and refinement to the FPS genre. Let along Counter-Strike and Team Fortress and the up-coming Left 4 Dead.
Likewise, on non PC games, Rare created Goldeneye and Perfect Dark and that lead developer went and made Time Splitters. All of which are quite similar, actually, but very fun in their own way. But no more a "doom clone" other than being a FPS.
As with regards to "grind fests". Honestly, that's just how RPG genre's are defined. Not much different than most video games in fact. Puzzle games you do the same thing over and over again. Any RPG from turn-based, hack/slash, to MMO, you do the same thing over and over again, and then you repeat with re-skinned and strong enemies. The difference between MMO's and other RPG's is that MMO's don't have as much epic story to tell because they have to make thousands or millions of people all feel epic in the same world. This causes the grind to be out front, instead of hidden. Unlike single player RPGs, they just have to make one person feel epic in the world, so they can revolve a story line around them with beautiful cut sceens and such that hide the repetitive grind.
"Grind" is always there. It's the part of almost all games. How is baseball, basketball, or football not doing the same thing over and over again at it's roots?
I can't wait until they come out with the wii game where you play a drinking game where you drink if your character in the game your character is playing for drinks....erm.
CUIL has a serious issue with it's algorithm and it's learning patterns. So far it appears to be very susceptible to keyword page spam (pages that are nothing but hundreds of repeated keywords) and that it hasn't learned very much in the ways of keyword positioning. Depending on the combination of keywords used, it will often return 0 results, which of course isn't very useful to it's users.
Beside their currently poor performance, they do get some marks for trying some new user interface simplicity. If only their algorithm was better learned (I'll give it another week or so, so far I've seen it improve a lot already), they really would have a very competitive product. But if they're algorithm hasn't improved enough in a week, I'll forget they were even their.
It might work great for popular terms (although I haven't really tried any), but searching for a drug name (for example) returns pages and pages of spam and forum postings, which was the sort of thing Google's Page Rank was designed to filter. Personally, if I'm searching for a drug, it's because I want to know the facts about it from a reputable source; not trying to buy it through questionable channels (but that's just me). Cuil claims their algorithms are more relevant than the "superficial" Page Rank algorithm, but I'll let you be the judge:
LOL, I checked the Zolpidem search link. I find it funny that their algorithm isn't checking for the very obvious page spamming that it's suffering from.
With that said, I've found that their algorithm is going through a lot of learning as we speak. A lot of results are getting better. It looks like Zolpidem isn't one of them. =P
Indeed, which is why I put the disclaimer of "I'll give it a few weeks first" and "their algorithm has a lot more learning to do".
I imagine that their search algorithm is an AI indexing of relevant search terms with their pages. I'm already seeing lots of moving around of results based on the same search keywords.
Will CUIL be better than Google? Of course not. Google's got far far far more data to judge relevance with along with a long history of tweaking the algorithm to include the weeding out of non-relevant sites or those who look to purposely bomb the search engine.
Indeed, CUIL has a very steep hill to climb and I myself find several of their search results to be very poor, returning forum postings and not a particular organizations home page (when using their exact name). But as I commented on, their user interface ideas are in-fact interesting on how they're trying to display the content as well as trying to guess other related relevant search terms.
Accurate? No. I'll give it a while to learn. Some interesting changes in how to give people search results? Yes. If CUIL can return better relevancy than MSN LIVE (which I find to be relatively poor, more so since they switch their algorithm around), then I think they'll be in a good position to over take Yahoo! and then challenge Google to innovate.
At which point, I'd expect Google to match or surpass CUIL's innovation.
But, like I was getting at, this is a good thing. It's new blood competition that's challenging the ways of search engine that has been relatively stagnant for how many years now? The the point that Google is been making headlines with it's features in email, mapping, and coding than in search results. This can only be a good thing, I think.
Cuil has only just opened. Already, it is pretty decent.
I disagree. Basic one word searches return no results. I have to change my oil in my car and wanted to search out the best brand to use. Typing in "oil", let alone my original search term, yields nothing.
It's just after 7AM CST, I searched for "oil" and I got 175,600,000 results for oil. Not only that, they have this "Explore By Category" menu with the first category being "motor oil" with a list of different types of oils "synthetic", "fuel", etc.
Then across the top, as a nice touch I think, they have a horizontal menu-like bar that must list the most popular oil keywords like "Olive oil", "Oil Paintings", and "Fish Oil".
Definitely interesting. I won't complain about problems with their server for the time being. I do see that clicking on "motor oil" in their "Explore by Category" sections changes the search query to "oil motor oil" which returns "no results found". There is still a lot of "learning" their algorithm needs to do. If you remove one of the "oil" from the query, it returns plenty of results.
I'll see how their doing in a week or two, once they've gotten the holes plugged out of the new system that's been in the water for a while. Looks very promising though. The search industry really does need something new like this to refine usability. Push Google back into innovating with search along with their many other side projects.
If the page isn't SSL, then you can change the contents as they pass over the wire, so it doesn't require that the banks webserver is hacked. If the page is in SSL, then you can be assured that it wasn't changed between the server on you. If the server is somehow hacked, then there's nothing you can do. If you're going to assume the bank's web server is hacked, you shouldn't be doing online banking.
You're right. I wasn't thinking man-in-the-middle in the sense of injection but only sniffing. That would be true. Though, it just begs to ask, what's the likely hood of it every happening? Depending on your location, I suppose. Sitting in Starbucks? Perhaps better than one might think. Hard-lined at home? Like winning the lottery (more like loosing, hehe)? =P
All these options are better than crackable passwords.
For brevity, I did lump passwords/logins in the same boat. However, to specify, I only actually mean being forced to take a banks login ID, instead of being able to use one that you've created. The idea is the same as being forced to take a banks password without being able to change it ever and the bank automatically changes it for you every 3 months or so.
That will make the use of a separate program, such as some sort of password manager, to manage all your credentials. At which people, the average person will simply not spend extra money on some sophisticated software and just store their credentials in Excel or Word or sticky-notes.
All of which have the same problem, they're written down some place that can be discovered through a snoopy co-worker or malicious program. Neither solution is good, all because of being forced to have an uncontrollable amount of credentials.
I was never implying that one should us "weak" credentials, though it might have seemed that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw Blizzard, and screw 4th edition. :-(
I find it unfortunate that some people are very unhappy with 4E. From my limited D&D experiance, I'm actually finding 4th's combat system to be quite good and far better than anything in 3rd edition (including 3.5). And I've already done fare more creative roleplay things in 4th than I did in 3rd.
Though, on that matter, our 3rd Edition DM had plenty of vile for 4th edition (and 3rd edition for that matter, he was a core AD&D person), but found out that 4th edition was quite fun once he got actually played it and not just heard people saying things like "in 4th edition, hobbits don't have harry toes" kind of thing that just throws some people off the deep end.
It's too the point that I think most 4th edition haters simply haven't played the game for any reasonable amount of time. Surely it's not perfect, but I find the game mechanics to be very good and a great effort at just trying to make an entirely different style of game.
Perhaps it's also because I haven't sunk any money at buying 3rd edition books (and again when 3.5 was released) because I only started casually D&Ding a couple years ago and I've only been borrowing a friends book. Some of the resentment seems to come from people getting sick of spending lots of money on products.
Either way, I'm enjoying 4th edition immensely and would recommend anyone to at least try it out, roll up a character, see what they think. Maybe it's not for you, but don't knock it till you've tried it.
Except that Kongregate is alternately full of teenagers bringing their drama onto chat (entirely too many trying to be their very own gossip girls), annoying preteens begging for everybody to be their friend, or a combination of the two insisting that 20-year-olds should not be on Kongregate.
HUH? People read the chat box? I'm too busy playing the games. =)
I will grant you that OpenOffice may not be to the level that Office is[...]
I won't. OpenOffice, from a bug standpoint, works far better than MSOffice from my experiance. How many times have I had to copy/paste a Word document into Notepad and then back into a fresh word document just to get ride of whatever incredible formatting bug, is too many to count.
You are correct that it's majority use is well suited, and for that, I grant OO as a better product. MS should just sell a feature module for Open Office that gives, whatever it is, that people need. Because I've not really figured that out yet. =P
But, I'm not a desktop publisher either.
The oil companies can't sell their oil twice; they either sell it now for profit, or wait until later when they think they can sell it for more profit.
Ah, I see what you're saying now. It's a different take on the analogy that I was talking about. You're saying that oil companies are purposely causing a supply shortage by not drilling for the oil they could be drilling, to raise the price of oil, so they can drill it in the future for a higher price point. Is that what you're saying?
To say an oil company won't drill for oil if it would grant them large profits is like saying a fat kid wouldn't eat the cake sitting in front of him if he could.
I'm not sure about your counter-analysis. Wouldn't a better analogy for the GP's argument be a fat kid who won't eat the large slice of cake sitting in front of him (even though he can) because he knows if he waits a while he'll get a slice twice as big?
Good analogy. But why wouldn't they eat the first piece, while waiting for the bigger piece? Assuming, they don't know IF the bigger piece would happen or not, and if it did, eating the first piece would not prevent them from getting a bigger piece. Who's to say they can't have their cake and er... eat it too. =P
Such as T. Boone Pickens plan which ould eventually replace 38% of current oil consumption with Natural Gas.
Except the ban on offshore drilling includes natural gas.
But would it make them money? If the price of oil stays high due to a perceived lack of supply, that makes them more money per barrel, which means more profit.
Actually, your own analysis is your counter argument. If the the price of a barrel of oil is so high (though, it's dropped quite a lot recently) and oil companies STILL aren't investing into drilling, logic must dictate that it's do to the fact that these locations are still far from profitable, even at current prices. To say an oil company won't drill for oil if it would grant them large profits is like saying a fat kid wouldn't eat the cake sitting in front of him if he could.
Perhaps there's some other theories out there as to the reasons such companies aren't drilling (or drilling more) on their currently leased locations, but I think the simplest solution here is the correct one. No Profits = No Drilling.
How is that going to affect boss matches? Unless the boss monster has a load of minions, that could be quite a challenge!
Usually destroying local boxes or other various destructible environments released orbs as well in other games. Perhaps this will be similar?
Not bad, but using Kingdom Hearts as your example would resonate better with the BAWWWWWers.
Didn't Xmen Legends or Marvel Ultimate Alliance do this as well? I seem to recall something like that, but I also seem to recall there being potions in at least one of those games.
MadWorld site trailer made me want to buy a WII.
Evil :P
Indeed, This game has peeked my interest. Thanks Mediawatch-UK!
NMH wasn't a big hit because it wasn't very good.
It really was a big let down in terms of gameplay. However, I never had a problem with the dialog and actually though the cut-scenes were by far the best and made me feel a lot better spending money on it. I thought Zero Punctuation summed it up the best.
- definitely use genetically engineered crops (there may be exceptions to this)
There, fixed that for you.
I was scratching my head on that. How is genetically engineered crops "less green" than normal crops? Or was the GP defining the topic was "green" as in naturalist and not "green" as in sustainable ?
I can't remember someone complaining that they got bored with Oblivion after spending 40 hours playing.
Yes, but a large number of people spend far more than 40 hours playing an MMO. A large number of those do that, or more, in a single week.
Of course, the biggest difference is that you're not paying ~$15 a month to play Oblivian, which can be summarily revoked if you stop playing.
My wife and I reuse all shopping bags as trash bags, and although paper is a nice idea and all, it is basically useless for that or any other bag purpose, because it's not waterproof."
Actually, my point is the same. I'm ok with Wally-World (Wal-Mart) giving me a crap-ton of bags. I use them to pick up after the dog when we take him for a walk... and we walk him every day in which he typically "goes" two different times, using two different bags. Wal-Mart saves me more money by not having to buy more plastic bags for this purpose.
Then our paper bags are used for holding recycling cardboard / newspaper scraps. It's the stores that give crazy "fancy" half paper bags, like fancy clothing shops, that I don't know what to do with.
Then out came thirty thousand Doom clones that add nothing except cosmetic changes and slight refinements of gameplay.
While I don't disagree with your "doom clone" tag, I do disagree with this statement. Unreal, Quake (sure, it was still made by Id), and Half-Life very much added more than slight changes and refinement to the FPS genre. Let along Counter-Strike and Team Fortress and the up-coming Left 4 Dead.
Likewise, on non PC games, Rare created Goldeneye and Perfect Dark and that lead developer went and made Time Splitters. All of which are quite similar, actually, but very fun in their own way. But no more a "doom clone" other than being a FPS.
As with regards to "grind fests". Honestly, that's just how RPG genre's are defined. Not much different than most video games in fact. Puzzle games you do the same thing over and over again. Any RPG from turn-based, hack/slash, to MMO, you do the same thing over and over again, and then you repeat with re-skinned and strong enemies. The difference between MMO's and other RPG's is that MMO's don't have as much epic story to tell because they have to make thousands or millions of people all feel epic in the same world. This causes the grind to be out front, instead of hidden. Unlike single player RPGs, they just have to make one person feel epic in the world, so they can revolve a story line around them with beautiful cut sceens and such that hide the repetitive grind.
"Grind" is always there. It's the part of almost all games. How is baseball, basketball, or football not doing the same thing over and over again at it's roots?
I can't wait until they come out with the wii game where you play a drinking game where you drink if your character in the game your character is playing for drinks....erm.
Just like been there... World of World of Warcraft!
CUIL has a serious issue with it's algorithm and it's learning patterns. So far it appears to be very susceptible to keyword page spam (pages that are nothing but hundreds of repeated keywords) and that it hasn't learned very much in the ways of keyword positioning. Depending on the combination of keywords used, it will often return 0 results, which of course isn't very useful to it's users.
Beside their currently poor performance, they do get some marks for trying some new user interface simplicity. If only their algorithm was better learned (I'll give it another week or so, so far I've seen it improve a lot already), they really would have a very competitive product. But if they're algorithm hasn't improved enough in a week, I'll forget they were even their.
web-based == subscription model.
Yup, first you have to install Linux for free and then logon through Firefox (also free) to subscribe to MS WebOS. =P
It might work great for popular terms (although I haven't really tried any), but searching for a drug name (for example) returns pages and pages of spam and forum postings, which was the sort of thing Google's Page Rank was designed to filter. Personally, if I'm searching for a drug, it's because I want to know the facts about it from a reputable source; not trying to buy it through questionable channels (but that's just me). Cuil claims their algorithms are more relevant than the "superficial" Page Rank algorithm, but I'll let you be the judge:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=zolpidem http://www.google.com/search?q=zolpidem
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=ortho%20tri%20cyclen%20lo http://www.google.com/search?q=ortho+tri+cyclen+lo
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine http://www.google.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine
LOL, I checked the Zolpidem search link. I find it funny that their algorithm isn't checking for the very obvious page spamming that it's suffering from.
With that said, I've found that their algorithm is going through a lot of learning as we speak. A lot of results are getting better. It looks like Zolpidem isn't one of them. =P
Indeed, which is why I put the disclaimer of "I'll give it a few weeks first" and "their algorithm has a lot more learning to do".
I imagine that their search algorithm is an AI indexing of relevant search terms with their pages. I'm already seeing lots of moving around of results based on the same search keywords.
Will CUIL be better than Google? Of course not. Google's got far far far more data to judge relevance with along with a long history of tweaking the algorithm to include the weeding out of non-relevant sites or those who look to purposely bomb the search engine.
Indeed, CUIL has a very steep hill to climb and I myself find several of their search results to be very poor, returning forum postings and not a particular organizations home page (when using their exact name). But as I commented on, their user interface ideas are in-fact interesting on how they're trying to display the content as well as trying to guess other related relevant search terms.
Accurate? No. I'll give it a while to learn. Some interesting changes in how to give people search results? Yes. If CUIL can return better relevancy than MSN LIVE (which I find to be relatively poor, more so since they switch their algorithm around), then I think they'll be in a good position to over take Yahoo! and then challenge Google to innovate.
At which point, I'd expect Google to match or surpass CUIL's innovation.
But, like I was getting at, this is a good thing. It's new blood competition that's challenging the ways of search engine that has been relatively stagnant for how many years now? The the point that Google is been making headlines with it's features in email, mapping, and coding than in search results. This can only be a good thing, I think.
Cuil has only just opened. Already, it is pretty decent.
I disagree. Basic one word searches return no results. I have to change my oil in my car and wanted to search out the best brand to use. Typing in "oil", let alone my original search term, yields nothing.
It's just after 7AM CST, I searched for "oil" and I got 175,600,000 results for oil. Not only that, they have this "Explore By Category" menu with the first category being "motor oil" with a list of different types of oils "synthetic", "fuel", etc.
Then across the top, as a nice touch I think, they have a horizontal menu-like bar that must list the most popular oil keywords like "Olive oil", "Oil Paintings", and "Fish Oil".
Definitely interesting. I won't complain about problems with their server for the time being. I do see that clicking on "motor oil" in their "Explore by Category" sections changes the search query to "oil motor oil" which returns "no results found". There is still a lot of "learning" their algorithm needs to do. If you remove one of the "oil" from the query, it returns plenty of results.
I'll see how their doing in a week or two, once they've gotten the holes plugged out of the new system that's been in the water for a while. Looks very promising though. The search industry really does need something new like this to refine usability. Push Google back into innovating with search along with their many other side projects.
Snape Kills Dumbledore {Sadness, but triumphant relief}
Way to ruin it for me, you insensitive clod!
Maybe the 100k is for working on Windows API's and such?
I'd hate to be cynical, but I'm guessing it's just PR. I mean, MS giving $100K? What, did they find it under the sofa in the exectuive lunch room?
That's like selling 3 copies of Vista. =P
If the page isn't SSL, then you can change the contents as they pass over the wire, so it doesn't require that the banks webserver is hacked. If the page is in SSL, then you can be assured that it wasn't changed between the server on you. If the server is somehow hacked, then there's nothing you can do. If you're going to assume the bank's web server is hacked, you shouldn't be doing online banking.
You're right. I wasn't thinking man-in-the-middle in the sense of injection but only sniffing. That would be true. Though, it just begs to ask, what's the likely hood of it every happening? Depending on your location, I suppose. Sitting in Starbucks? Perhaps better than one might think. Hard-lined at home? Like winning the lottery (more like loosing, hehe)? =P
All these options are better than crackable passwords.
For brevity, I did lump passwords/logins in the same boat. However, to specify, I only actually mean being forced to take a banks login ID, instead of being able to use one that you've created. The idea is the same as being forced to take a banks password without being able to change it ever and the bank automatically changes it for you every 3 months or so.
That will make the use of a separate program, such as some sort of password manager, to manage all your credentials. At which people, the average person will simply not spend extra money on some sophisticated software and just store their credentials in Excel or Word or sticky-notes.
All of which have the same problem, they're written down some place that can be discovered through a snoopy co-worker or malicious program. Neither solution is good, all because of being forced to have an uncontrollable amount of credentials.
I was never implying that one should us "weak" credentials, though it might have seemed that way.