People don't have to be peons. They're free to aspire to be something greater and achieve that goal. It requires that they actually do something to get there though rather than mash buttons or follow a pre-generated play guide to make it happen. Something that would compliment this system is AI generated and controlled individuals in game. There may not always be enough people who want to be peons. But they're still needed and expected in the game. You might find a certain number of generated populace holding certain jobs. they would actually go out and produce a certain amount of x resource, and that may be modified by external events. Perhaps goblins raid your mine, or another player does. Maybe a person gets sick/breaks a leg, moves away, etc.
It would be a ridiculously complex system, but one that would be incredibly rewarding to play in.
A portion. Not the entire planet. And even with 6 billion people there are parts of this world that will seem empty. Much like the real world, people will congregate in cities, and the further you get away from the city/main roads, the more empty its going to be. However the difference with this kind of setup will be that it will be entirely possible to solo most of the areas. Why? Because unless you're trying to assault a stronghold/town/lair, most enemies will be traveling alone/small groups unless they're specifically going out to say sack a town. Areas in which few people tread will likely find themselves to be highly dangerous (and thus more attractive to powerful individuals)
"in which case nobody will ever see most of the neat stuff."
You can't have it both ways. Creating a small world in which you can see everything in a couple months leads to a situation where everyone bitches they've seen it all. I'd rather have a world where there is still more to see than one which gets old quickly. I'd like to see a world where in 2 weeks the uber guild hasn't mapped out every inch of the game and knows all the sweet spots and has seen everything there. A game like this obviously wouldn't be for someone who is interested in only playing it for a month or two. I'm not saying that an individual would have to put in 15 hours a day to experience it, but they should be someone who could stick with the game for a couple of years. Essentially there would always be new areas for them to visit, explore, conquer, etc.
In a situation like this, a group of like-minded players who didn't like the existing government in a town could theoretically gather supplies and strike out into the wilderness. They could conquer an area and found a town. What this would really do is expand the game beyond standard combat roles and give people many different ways to forge their character. They could spend their time simply playing as politician, or playing support roles (i.e. wood gatherer) to build up to later have enough money to be a carpenter. Without the need to ever pick up a sword.
Creating a functioning economy and ecosystem in a game would go a long way towards making these games revolutionary and amazing.
So could areas be empty? You bet. There could be areas which might not have another player in it for months. An area which might previously have enjoyed a lot of player attention may suddenly go unwatched. Monster populations could rise in their abscence and new threats could be born.
Could travel take awhile? I hope so. This is supposed to be a massive game remember? That should include the travel and the size of the land. How massive are things really when you can just from one side to the other for a mere pittance of time and money? Thats not to say someone couldn't lay down big amounts of money to say take magical travel, or something of that nature, but walking or buying a reasonably priced horse should be the norm. A system could be worked in where it simply takes "time" to get from one city to another so long as the two governments have provided enough man power to make the connecting road "safe". What does that mean? It means you set it as your destination and dependent on your mode of transportation (foot, caravan, horse, etc) and distance, you can log out, and come back in x minutes to find yourself arriving at the gates. Sounds silly, but it adds an element of planning. You can either adventure your way to the next town, or say go eat dinner. And while you're doing that, your character is on his merry way to some town you want to get to. Its a nice compromise between realism, and giving a casual player the ability to explore without time sinking.
One of the big issues is instances. Instances make developers lazy. They dont' have to develop that huge of content because they can just make stuff spawn over and over and reload content so everyone gets a "fair" shot.
Worlds need to be persistent. This is huge and will revolutionize things. Yeah..it means you have to make a huge world to support a lot of players. Guess what? That will make it awesome. The greatest MMORPG that will come along will be one that will have a land area that is equivalent to a large portion of the earth. Put in the ability to have players shape the world (politics, trade, construction, etc) and let them have at it. creating ecosystems for "monsters" and resources will stop the grind. Make skills use based, no levels. It'll never happen because companies are chickens.
They're not offering them the student version of office for $75. This is an entirely different version which normally costs much more. Student pricing often comes in the form of student editions for things like office.
This has only ever happened for me with gmail. I have several hotmail addresses that I have never used anywhere and none of them get a single piece of spam.
I'm currently taking a Network Engineering diploma. 2 year, polytechnic school. It covers a wide variety of things but Cisco is the core. We actually have a sister school in Australia, two of our classmates went over there last summer for three weeks.
The classes focus on a wide variety of things that would really prepare you to step into a position as a junior admin. Besides Cisco (CCNA and CCNP levels) it covers OS from desktop use to server, linux and windows, even spent a couple weeks poking around netware. Active directory, exchange, dhcp, web servers, wireless (access points and large bridges), fibre optics, perl, relational databases (isql), snmp, backup systems, voip (cisco) and a few other odds and ends.
Decent enough program, I've learned a lot. Give or take I'm in a position to write CCNA/CCNP, CWNA, A+, Server+, MCSA, and CVOIP, based on what we've actually learned. I'll probably write half of those. IBM has a NOC in town and hires a great number of our grads right out of the gate as junior network analysts. About 1/3 every year for the last 3 years or so.
I personally don't put a great deal of stock in certifications. However some places do. Its really up to you. You decide how you want to limit yourself. You can take the degree, or you can take the certifications, or you can do both. Doing one or the other will limit you for certain jobs.
That's nice, when my 5.1 speakers were making popping and cracking sounds even when not plugged in, it took a 15 minute call to dell and I had a replacement set couriered out with shipping paid both ways. Made me feel better about not paying premium prices.
and I hate 99% of consoles. I like, and purchased a Wii, my first console ever (I've played them before just never owned one myself) and while its fun, it won't replace PC gaming for me. The switch right now is on the developers. If they start making their programs for everything you'll start to see what the market really looks like rather than a twisted market where someone is sticking with a specific platform because of one or more applications/games. I'd be over to linux in a heart beat on my home machines if all programs were equally supported on all platforms.
They're having a hard time keeping up with digg as it is now. If they were to start actually looking at their leftovers before posting them, they wouldn't even be in the game.
Nope, it wasn't an iRiver, this was well before this. I'm talking 1G ones when the ipod was only 5 and 10 GB. There was a gateway mp3 player that had the same storage and was technically superior in all ways.
Unfortunately no. it was years ago. I'd read a review of it at the time, and while the look was more square and industrial than the ipod, it was superior in all forms. The ipod has since blown it away (we're talking first gen before they had the 60 GB HDs) so a few years later I'm sure its not worth it all if you could even still find it.
Actually no. History is littered with times when something superior did not gain mass adoption and instead an inferior product did. There could be many individual reasons, but the big one is marketing. It doesn't matter what you make and how goddamn awesome it is, if you can't get it out there, its not going to gain popularity. While Linux is almost ready, and some would argue the only hold back at this point is getting software companies (like game developers) on board wholesale, where's the marketing? It costs money, and of course someone would have to be in charge of something like. Love or hate Microsoft then can market something to the unwashed masses. Same with Apple. The Ipod isn't the and wasn't the best damn mp3 player out there. I remember when it first came out a company (I think gateway, its been a few years now) had a superior and cheaper mp3 player. It had everything the Ipod had, support for more file types and an FM tuner and it came in at like $100 cheaper. Now you likely couldn't even find mention of it.
"Build it and they will come" is a great line for movies, not so much in real life.
Actually in order to lose some massive weight just from walking most people would need to look at walking in the neighbourhood of 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week. While good for stamina and general cardiovascular health, walking alone for 30-60 minutes just doesn't provide the necessary calorie deficiency for any kind of real weight loss unless you're severely obese (i.e. in the neighbourhood of 300+ lbs). I had a neighbour a few years ago who was overweight, probably in the 300+ range given his height and girth. He started walking about 2 1/2 hours a day, everyday of the week. It was about a year and a half before he started to lose weight, but then it started to pour off. Last I'd seen a picture of him I didn't even recognize him, I believe he must have been around 180lbs. While its possible to lose some weight and get in shape that way, most people I don't think have the will power (or time) to invest 3 hours a day 7 days a week for a year and half prior to seeing results before they'd give up, and then it was still about another year before he was to the point he is now.
On the other hand if you're someone who is really put off by strenuous exercise and you actually have the time to invest in that kind of exercise program its better than nothing, but if all you can commit is 30-45 minutes a day and actually want to be in shape you need to look at something that has a much higher activity level. Wii Boxing has the potential to give you that level of exercise if you don't cheat yourself and actually play it like a boxing game with full effort as demonstrated by a fellow on a blog here 2 or 3 weeks ago. Even though he was in the 180 range I think he still put off 10-15 lbs on it. Something like Dance Dance revolution would also do it if you need that kind of video game motivation.
Nutritionists will tell you that just to maintain yourself you need strenuous activity for 30 minutes 3 times a week. 5 times a week if you're looking to lose weight.
We made everyone who had a mailing list which contacts more than 100 people "register" with their ISP. They don't have to disclose the recipients or the nature of the list, simply a "I will be sending out a mailing list to x amount of users everyday in addition to my personal usage. Any customer who spits out more than some reasonable number of e-mails (who knows, maybe 200 per day is sufficient for most home users even on the upper ends of e-mail usage) will find their ability to use the outbound server restricted until they contact the ISP. Spammers send massive amounts of e-mails. It would be easy to find a cut off number that would help distinguish between the home user and the user who's computer has been compromised. This probably wouldn't even be that hard of a solution for an ISP to implement and could be mostly automatic except for the entering of exceptions into the database. Spam is really in the hands of the ISPs and their unwillingness to hold their customers accountable. Were I an ISP, I'd keep an eye for any evidence that any of my customers computers had been turned into a bot and require they fix the problem before they were allowed to use the services again. Sure they might go elsewhere, but if every ISP implemented the policy it would make the internet a vastly better place.
I'm betting the average bit of spam set out doesn't have anything on 99.9999999999% of mailing lists out there. Anyone with a mailing list which would approach the levels of spam one would expect from a compromised computer can speak with their ISP and give them the details to get an exemption.
Compiling certainly isn't bad and it doesn't have to be hard, but not everyone has the time for it. In my first year of using linux I've certainly compiled my fair share of things. I think what this has the potential to do is create a marketplace which will hopefully springboard commercial software vendors (I know evil) into seeing the advantages of supporting linux. Its one thing for us to do it all ourself, but there are just certain applications (and games) people just don't want to do without. This will increase linux's usability and increase the desktop share. This will make it a more attractive platform.
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People don't have to be peons. They're free to aspire to be something greater and achieve that goal. It requires that they actually do something to get there though rather than mash buttons or follow a pre-generated play guide to make it happen. Something that would compliment this system is AI generated and controlled individuals in game. There may not always be enough people who want to be peons. But they're still needed and expected in the game. You might find a certain number of generated populace holding certain jobs. they would actually go out and produce a certain amount of x resource, and that may be modified by external events. Perhaps goblins raid your mine, or another player does. Maybe a person gets sick/breaks a leg, moves away, etc. It would be a ridiculously complex system, but one that would be incredibly rewarding to play in.
I've played star wars galaxies, it wasn't what I had in mind at all, nor is it remotely close.
dammit..forgot to change the type, formatting is fried...
A portion. Not the entire planet. And even with 6 billion people there are parts of this world that will seem empty. Much like the real world, people will congregate in cities, and the further you get away from the city/main roads, the more empty its going to be. However the difference with this kind of setup will be that it will be entirely possible to solo most of the areas. Why? Because unless you're trying to assault a stronghold/town/lair, most enemies will be traveling alone/small groups unless they're specifically going out to say sack a town. Areas in which few people tread will likely find themselves to be highly dangerous (and thus more attractive to powerful individuals) "in which case nobody will ever see most of the neat stuff." You can't have it both ways. Creating a small world in which you can see everything in a couple months leads to a situation where everyone bitches they've seen it all. I'd rather have a world where there is still more to see than one which gets old quickly. I'd like to see a world where in 2 weeks the uber guild hasn't mapped out every inch of the game and knows all the sweet spots and has seen everything there. A game like this obviously wouldn't be for someone who is interested in only playing it for a month or two. I'm not saying that an individual would have to put in 15 hours a day to experience it, but they should be someone who could stick with the game for a couple of years. Essentially there would always be new areas for them to visit, explore, conquer, etc. In a situation like this, a group of like-minded players who didn't like the existing government in a town could theoretically gather supplies and strike out into the wilderness. They could conquer an area and found a town. What this would really do is expand the game beyond standard combat roles and give people many different ways to forge their character. They could spend their time simply playing as politician, or playing support roles (i.e. wood gatherer) to build up to later have enough money to be a carpenter. Without the need to ever pick up a sword. Creating a functioning economy and ecosystem in a game would go a long way towards making these games revolutionary and amazing. So could areas be empty? You bet. There could be areas which might not have another player in it for months. An area which might previously have enjoyed a lot of player attention may suddenly go unwatched. Monster populations could rise in their abscence and new threats could be born. Could travel take awhile? I hope so. This is supposed to be a massive game remember? That should include the travel and the size of the land. How massive are things really when you can just from one side to the other for a mere pittance of time and money? Thats not to say someone couldn't lay down big amounts of money to say take magical travel, or something of that nature, but walking or buying a reasonably priced horse should be the norm. A system could be worked in where it simply takes "time" to get from one city to another so long as the two governments have provided enough man power to make the connecting road "safe". What does that mean? It means you set it as your destination and dependent on your mode of transportation (foot, caravan, horse, etc) and distance, you can log out, and come back in x minutes to find yourself arriving at the gates. Sounds silly, but it adds an element of planning. You can either adventure your way to the next town, or say go eat dinner. And while you're doing that, your character is on his merry way to some town you want to get to. Its a nice compromise between realism, and giving a casual player the ability to explore without time sinking.
One of the big issues is instances. Instances make developers lazy. They dont' have to develop that huge of content because they can just make stuff spawn over and over and reload content so everyone gets a "fair" shot.
Worlds need to be persistent. This is huge and will revolutionize things. Yeah..it means you have to make a huge world to support a lot of players. Guess what? That will make it awesome. The greatest MMORPG that will come along will be one that will have a land area that is equivalent to a large portion of the earth. Put in the ability to have players shape the world (politics, trade, construction, etc) and let them have at it. creating ecosystems for "monsters" and resources will stop the grind. Make skills use based, no levels. It'll never happen because companies are chickens.
They're not offering them the student version of office for $75. This is an entirely different version which normally costs much more. Student pricing often comes in the form of student editions for things like office.
So you actually are from Australia. I was hoping to find out if anyone outside of Australia was able to purchase a key or not.
It should have been long enough? I'm curious to what you've found out.
This has only ever happened for me with gmail. I have several hotmail addresses that I have never used anywhere and none of them get a single piece of spam.
I'm currently taking a Network Engineering diploma. 2 year, polytechnic school. It covers a wide variety of things but Cisco is the core. We actually have a sister school in Australia, two of our classmates went over there last summer for three weeks.
The classes focus on a wide variety of things that would really prepare you to step into a position as a junior admin. Besides Cisco (CCNA and CCNP levels) it covers OS from desktop use to server, linux and windows, even spent a couple weeks poking around netware. Active directory, exchange, dhcp, web servers, wireless (access points and large bridges), fibre optics, perl, relational databases (isql), snmp, backup systems, voip (cisco) and a few other odds and ends.
Decent enough program, I've learned a lot. Give or take I'm in a position to write CCNA/CCNP, CWNA, A+, Server+, MCSA, and CVOIP, based on what we've actually learned. I'll probably write half of those. IBM has a NOC in town and hires a great number of our grads right out of the gate as junior network analysts. About 1/3 every year for the last 3 years or so.
I personally don't put a great deal of stock in certifications. However some places do. Its really up to you. You decide how you want to limit yourself. You can take the degree, or you can take the certifications, or you can do both. Doing one or the other will limit you for certain jobs.
Shipping via usps ground for that USB thumbdrive just shot from $60 to $120.
awww troll? I've already had it crash several times today. For some reason it just does not like Yahoo mail.
I barely surfed 2 pages after updating to 2.02 and I'm already crashing again.
That's nice, when my 5.1 speakers were making popping and cracking sounds even when not plugged in, it took a 15 minute call to dell and I had a replacement set couriered out with shipping paid both ways. Made me feel better about not paying premium prices.
called how the modern video game raped D&D and abused its children. Early D&D games were great. lately they've been rotten.
and I hate 99% of consoles. I like, and purchased a Wii, my first console ever (I've played them before just never owned one myself) and while its fun, it won't replace PC gaming for me. The switch right now is on the developers. If they start making their programs for everything you'll start to see what the market really looks like rather than a twisted market where someone is sticking with a specific platform because of one or more applications/games. I'd be over to linux in a heart beat on my home machines if all programs were equally supported on all platforms.
They're having a hard time keeping up with digg as it is now. If they were to start actually looking at their leftovers before posting them, they wouldn't even be in the game.
Nope, it wasn't an iRiver, this was well before this. I'm talking 1G ones when the ipod was only 5 and 10 GB. There was a gateway mp3 player that had the same storage and was technically superior in all ways.
Unfortunately no. it was years ago. I'd read a review of it at the time, and while the look was more square and industrial than the ipod, it was superior in all forms. The ipod has since blown it away (we're talking first gen before they had the 60 GB HDs) so a few years later I'm sure its not worth it all if you could even still find it.
Actually no. History is littered with times when something superior did not gain mass adoption and instead an inferior product did. There could be many individual reasons, but the big one is marketing. It doesn't matter what you make and how goddamn awesome it is, if you can't get it out there, its not going to gain popularity. While Linux is almost ready, and some would argue the only hold back at this point is getting software companies (like game developers) on board wholesale, where's the marketing? It costs money, and of course someone would have to be in charge of something like. Love or hate Microsoft then can market something to the unwashed masses. Same with Apple. The Ipod isn't the and wasn't the best damn mp3 player out there. I remember when it first came out a company (I think gateway, its been a few years now) had a superior and cheaper mp3 player. It had everything the Ipod had, support for more file types and an FM tuner and it came in at like $100 cheaper. Now you likely couldn't even find mention of it.
"Build it and they will come" is a great line for movies, not so much in real life.
Actually in order to lose some massive weight just from walking most people would need to look at walking in the neighbourhood of 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week. While good for stamina and general cardiovascular health, walking alone for 30-60 minutes just doesn't provide the necessary calorie deficiency for any kind of real weight loss unless you're severely obese (i.e. in the neighbourhood of 300+ lbs). I had a neighbour a few years ago who was overweight, probably in the 300+ range given his height and girth. He started walking about 2 1/2 hours a day, everyday of the week. It was about a year and a half before he started to lose weight, but then it started to pour off. Last I'd seen a picture of him I didn't even recognize him, I believe he must have been around 180lbs. While its possible to lose some weight and get in shape that way, most people I don't think have the will power (or time) to invest 3 hours a day 7 days a week for a year and half prior to seeing results before they'd give up, and then it was still about another year before he was to the point he is now.
On the other hand if you're someone who is really put off by strenuous exercise and you actually have the time to invest in that kind of exercise program its better than nothing, but if all you can commit is 30-45 minutes a day and actually want to be in shape you need to look at something that has a much higher activity level. Wii Boxing has the potential to give you that level of exercise if you don't cheat yourself and actually play it like a boxing game with full effort as demonstrated by a fellow on a blog here 2 or 3 weeks ago. Even though he was in the 180 range I think he still put off 10-15 lbs on it. Something like Dance Dance revolution would also do it if you need that kind of video game motivation.
Nutritionists will tell you that just to maintain yourself you need strenuous activity for 30 minutes 3 times a week. 5 times a week if you're looking to lose weight.
We made everyone who had a mailing list which contacts more than 100 people "register" with their ISP. They don't have to disclose the recipients or the nature of the list, simply a "I will be sending out a mailing list to x amount of users everyday in addition to my personal usage. Any customer who spits out more than some reasonable number of e-mails (who knows, maybe 200 per day is sufficient for most home users even on the upper ends of e-mail usage) will find their ability to use the outbound server restricted until they contact the ISP. Spammers send massive amounts of e-mails. It would be easy to find a cut off number that would help distinguish between the home user and the user who's computer has been compromised. This probably wouldn't even be that hard of a solution for an ISP to implement and could be mostly automatic except for the entering of exceptions into the database. Spam is really in the hands of the ISPs and their unwillingness to hold their customers accountable. Were I an ISP, I'd keep an eye for any evidence that any of my customers computers had been turned into a bot and require they fix the problem before they were allowed to use the services again. Sure they might go elsewhere, but if every ISP implemented the policy it would make the internet a vastly better place.
I'm betting the average bit of spam set out doesn't have anything on 99.9999999999% of mailing lists out there. Anyone with a mailing list which would approach the levels of spam one would expect from a compromised computer can speak with their ISP and give them the details to get an exemption.
Just because they based it on arbitrary random criteria that may be wrong doesn't mean their conclusion might not be correct.
Compiling certainly isn't bad and it doesn't have to be hard, but not everyone has the time for it. In my first year of using linux I've certainly compiled my fair share of things. I think what this has the potential to do is create a marketplace which will hopefully springboard commercial software vendors (I know evil) into seeing the advantages of supporting linux. Its one thing for us to do it all ourself, but there are just certain applications (and games) people just don't want to do without. This will increase linux's usability and increase the desktop share. This will make it a more attractive platform.