Really it depends. Most of it is just pure luck. Sure. You can tell them the same old story I've heard from just about everyone on the internet.
"Go into the Modding Community. Get into open source games. Do a map. Do a mod. Create a small game. Create a team or join a team and try to contribute."
Look at those and you'll see a common misconception. Creating games has little to nothing to do with most of the above save for the last two. Getting into the modding community is nice and all, but that kind of experience can lead to nothing more than an ego boost. Getting into open source game projects or small game development kits will teach them the basics, but nothing more. Doing maps is only viable if the person is into wanting to create maps and do level design only. Doing a mod in retrospect depends on the scale of the mod, but if it is just a normal mod and not something that truly creates a new game from the ground up, then it is just a dive into the internal workings of a particular game and not the elements that made the game come to be.
Creating a game though is where it really begins. Even more so, to do so in a team. Doing either of these takes commitment. Telling kids, even college students, that they have to start a game project from initial idea to an actual finished product is something like Mt Everest for most people. In most programming classes (even game design and graphics programming classes) I've done, students who create a game do so with that deadline in mind and then finish the game. After the deadline for the project is up, they toss the game aside and move on, not completing their work.
Now I've got an interesting take on game development so far. I started off as a kid wanting to create games, figured that the one thing I really needed is a degree in CS. The thing is I started off already knowing what I wanted to do. I wanted to program. Kids and adults who want to create games start off by saying they want to create games, but never realize that there are many elements that go into what creates a game. Concept artists, 3D modelers, animators, level designers, game designers, game programmers, UI artists, quest design, AI programming, graphic programming, physics programming, sound design, and countless other roles are what make up a game in the industry. Indie development means you will find that people will have multiple roles, but ultimately a person has to choose their path and stick with it.
At my university I got immensely lucky and found that my school actually had a dedicated game development degree. I didn't go for it and decided to stuck with my CS degree, but I soon caught wind of a game project funded by the NSF that was in first steps of development at my uni. Several chance encounters later and now I'm in the forefront of what it really means to create a game from beginning to end. I've dabbled heavily in game concept to programming. I've got hands on experience talking to people who are truly motivated into creating the game we have envisioned. What really amazes me is how many times I have interviewed people who are interested in joining our project as a programmer only to find that they immediately come to the realization that it just isn't for them. Over the course of the summer we started with a strong team of almost 20 people. Most came by every now and then, worked a little and then dropped off the face of our known universe. By the end we only had 8 people. The ones who kept through are the ones who are now veterans in our field. We got people who worked with us go on to Activision and Dreamworks. In the previous years we produced a game and several of the guys moved on to create their own game development company (though now it seems they have moved on to teaching game development instead around the world). The guys who still work on it are dedicated to it and will likely land jobs with the work we have done.
So in essence what you really need to do is ask them a series of very serious questions: 1) Do you REALLY want to work on games
I doubt it though. My school (California State San Bernardino) has a game dev degree. Unlike this article, I don't see people flocking to it. It's a cross between both mathematics and programming that get's kids who are interested to quickly change their mind for something else.
For the most part it comes down to their motivation. A lot of students I know going through the course are guys who are half motivated to do anything. Having managed teams of these guys, I know from experience that these guys will likely half-ass an entire project that others are depending on for them to complete. But thats not everyone and there are a few who have done well for themselves. For example 3 alumni have went on to form a company to create games for the iPhone and other mobile systems. They even go around the world instructing companies who want to use Unity to create games and such. In the past a group of students along with some professors created an xbox 360 arcade game called VectorForce which held its own in the shooting genre for quite some time.
Right now I'm involved with the team creating an action RPG using the Unreal Engine 3 called Mythic. The project is funded by the NSF and we have several schools (local colleges and high schools) working together to create assets for the game, but we are having trouble making people understand that we need little things. Above we got someone ranting about a former friend making trees for a game. We NEED that stuff to even create the game. Making kids understand that we don't want them creating an entire world on their own is proving difficult.
One last thing to note, I'm a CS major. Even though we do have the game dev degree, I like to program more than just taking arbitrary classes that make me feel like I'm doing something towards game development.
Which again is a typical monitor. Widescreens are becoming the norm. Mine right now is a 24" 1080p monitor. So seeing his videos is no different from what I typically see.
Looking at the videos, I can confidently say that yes, it'd be better to get a large TV.
One thing to point out with those videos and the review is that the FOV is like a typical monitor. He goes on to mention how great it is, but its really just him sitting 3 feet in front of a 66" display. Anyone will say the same thing playing a game on a typical 40-50" display running at a much lower 1080p resolution.
The key to playing in such an array is to get immersion in games. You're much better off making a configuration of 1x3 displays so that you get a very high FOV and not just a glorified big screen TV. Hell you can save yourself more than $1200 in monitors (assuming you go for 22" each at $250 each) by getting a nice HD projector and a screen (or wall). It eliminates the heat and power consumption and not to mention there are no gaps. Sit up close and there you go, a fake 2x3 Eyefinity.
I'll also vouch for this. Having just finished (today actually) Advanced Computer Graphics at my university (which is OpenGL and SDL on Linux), using NeHe's tutorials helped a lot. Going down at the bottom of the page you can either use GLUT or Linux versions of the source to get a very good version of what is already on the site. They even build on previous lessons.
However I must say that the site is growing old. It references a lot of depreciated functions and, quite frankly, is not the best method to learn OpenGL unless you already have some experience in the concepts. What it does do is give you the basics without going into detail on what you are actually doing.
Another suggestion I'd recommend is the OpenGL Redbook which is available online. It covers the mathematics behind the code. It too may be a little out of date, so try to find something that can supplement for the newer technology.
I too started with BASIC. In my case this was freshmen year in High School back in 1999 on QBASIC. I had dabbled a little with HTML but that was nothing like an actual language that had logic. It was there that I learned the basic blocks that made me the programmer I am today. I went from simple logic to loops to graphics and sound.
By the end of the year I had a full animation of a house with Christmas lights and music. I even had a very primitive text based RPG working with the ending taken straight out of Monty Python's Holy Grail.
It was from there that I learned C++, JavaScript, and many other languages. The logic from BASIC carried me over very easily to other topics.
The problem with students is not the language they learn, but the fun they can find out of it. You have to find what interests them and drive them in that direction.
And I can do it effectively well at that too. Formulas are easy in Word '07. Pressing ALT + '=' creates an equation space which, after learning all the ins and outs of the shorthand methodologies, became a breeze to use. For diagrams I use Dia. Its much quicker than drawing and I can do multiple diagrams in a single page for a single day's lecture.
I have not touched paper for notes in almost a year. Last time I did so was due to the professor making it a rule to not use laptops/netbooks in class (and even then, everything was on slides on the net, so taking notes was moot). I started this in physics of all things, where equations are very hefty. I did notes from the book and learned how fast I was able to take notes and decided to take it from there to class. I ended up with clean notes that were easy to read. My test notes (we were allowed a single sheet of paper full of notes) was a simple copy and paste of formulas on a 2 column page, printed on both sides of the sheet. I aced all my tests thanks to them. I continued using this method for 3 quarters of physics, all three ended with my highest marks I've had in a while.
Sure I goof off during lectures by being on the net and reading articles and such, but I mainly only do this for things I have knowledge on or if the topic is no where near the material we need to be learning.
the more I see MS giving the EU a big F U. Not only have they had to put up with them telling them to open their system up for competition, but they get fined for when they try to do anything otherwise.
"Blasphemy!" they say. "We will only lose more market share!"
And its true. My god, imagine Normal-Joe-User having the choice between several brands of web browsers and media players to choose from. Internet Explorer sounds old and so 80s, where as Firefox has the words "fire" and "fox" so its gotta be both exciting and cuddly right?
So instead of giving them the choice, they opt to not give them any at all, foregoing the need to even have to bother with the EU ever again. I can see Balmer and his cronies sitting in a meeting and they all unanimously say "fuck it," raising a middle finger across the Atlantic as hard as they possibly could.
Not sure what the ports it was using exactly, but telnet was definitely on. The username was still 'root' and the password was a simple word. TFA mentions the botnet has brute forcing capabilities so I imagine with only one thing to bust through, it wouldn't at all be a hard task to get into.
Funny thing is, I thought this was just a minor bug until the first thing I saw was this/. article when my router was restored.
Apparently I'm one of the "100,000" that got infected by this botnet.
This morning my router would not connect to any websites, yet my modem when directly connected to my PC still did. I reseted the settings to default, disabled the vulnerabilities that got the idiots in and put a stronger 35 character username and password.
How did I get infected in the first place? I left on remote access. And possibly my username and password weren't that complex. Live and learn I guess.
Would have been nice to have some "and this is what happened in such-and-such town due to your actions" scenes, as we've seen in prior installments. I probably wouldn't have done nearly as many side quests if I hadn't expected some of those. I mean, I really thought I'd get one for helping the Crater side Supply chick with her book. Some of those quests were just boring.
You're right. I never really believed the number of endings they were touting to having, in all honesty I've only heard about that once. What I was looking forward to was the chance for there to be any sort of different endings, but none of that is in this game.
They promptly half-assed the ending. If you go into the video folder where you installed the game and use Bink and Smacker tools, you'll find out that the ending breaks down to only 3 choices (*spoiler* You do it, someone else does it, you let it explode */spoiler*) and after that, it only shows one, maybe two quests you have completed (depends on how high your karma is I think) and that's it. Its a photo montage ending that doesn't explain or end anything. I seriously have doubts of me playing it again until more mods come out to make it more of a decent game like Oblivion and Morrowind are now with mods.
For me though, I knew Bethesda would end up giving the same effort they've given all their games from Elder Scrolls 1 and on. They make sure it runs (mostly), plays like an rpg they were aiming for, then send it out to market when they deem it big enough. With consoles and DLC, they now have more of a reason to not expand on things that should of been there to begin with. I'm just glad these guys are pretty faithful to the modding community when it comes to the tools and ease of access to their content for people to modify and create anew. It's their saving grace and the real reason I bought the game. Like Morrowind and Oblivion, the game will last me more than a few years on community support alone.
I believe the ending was done in a way to leave it open for more content. And lo-and-behold there is one. As was mentioned in a MaximumPC article:
Broken Steel. Join the ranks of the Brotherhood of Steel and rid the Capital Wasteland of the Enclave remnants once and for all. Continues the adventure past the main quest. Scheduled for release in March.
Having a game this open ended have a very closed ending is just a clear indicator they want people to pay some cash to have any sort of possible continuation of story, especially those people on a console.
It's very easy to do what we call -- it's kind of a Blizzard 'cardinal rule of never-do-this' -- balancing to mediocrity, which means that you always notch everything down because you're scared of certain things feeling overpowered and are literally living by the numbers. I think numbers are a great guideline, and you should always understand the math behind what you're doing, but at the core, you need to follow the gut and ask "Hey, does this feel really great?"
This line is something I found to be something directed towards games like Age of Conan, where balancing issues were a big problem back when I was playing the game. Updates and re-balancing done in that game often had the lines of "[class] is now working by the intended values." Those words always made me ask to what numbers are they basing all these classes on? In most cases each class seemed to be lacking in areas yet each had abilities or gear that made the class truly amazing. Shields and gems for example made the game have a dynamic that allowed anyone to take on anyone else with the right equipment and abilities. But due to the magic numbers they had set forth, most of these great things were reduced to keep the game on track, something they never elaborated to their player base.
This to me is exactly the kind of logic most MMOs or other games based on numbers should avoid all together. A game that evolves to how the players are able to make use of mechanics in game should be the game people will continue playing. AoC for me continued down that path for more than 2 months, not delivering to me at all any feeling of accomplishment when I hit max level.
It is easy to understand now how the naming process works out, but I for one believed for the longest time (up to a few weeks a go actually) that "Core 2 Duo" actually meant it had 4 cores.
My thought process was: "Core Duo" = 2 cores "Core 2 Duo" = 2 * 2 = 4 cores "Core 2 Quad" = 2 * 4 = 8 cores
I'm someone who is usually really into these sort of things and yet even I was confused by their cryptic product naming.
Microsoft's return service isn't a repair job but more of a "turn in your old unit, get back a new one" deal. What you get back is a system that is not originally yours. You may get back saves but the old system is probably refurbished/discarded for potential profit.
Honestly the guy should of just bought a new system.
Come to think of it, just what was everyone expecting of the OS? It seems that they were hoping for a huge revolution in OS technology thats years ahead of its time or something. But looking back at pretty much any other OS after significant upgrades and versions, all we get is just more of the same with sometimes something new on top of it to justify the upgrade.
I knew what I was getting when I switched over to Vista and accepted it. Disappointment for me is really not all there, just the disappointment with everyone with such great and sometimes unrealistic expectations.
... can't they just include their own list of secret numbers in order for the generator to be semi-secure? The NSA has the numbers that generate the random numbers in the base code but even they say to make your own reference numbers if you are to use the code. So if Microsoft were to ultimately use the numbers the numbers would probably end up being both random and not known to anyone in the development team if they so wanted.
what of the users who did lose valuable computer time due to this problem?
Well obviously, if anyone who puts valuable time into the use of their computer would be able to find out how to fix a problem on their own and any other problem they encounter in the future so as to not completely lose their valuable computer time.
Its a different story however when said valuable computer time is dedicated to a space game on the internet...
Oh man, now if they put this on an AC-130, it'd seriously make anyone regret having made the decision to be anywhere on the battlefield. It'd make Dr. Evil tear a bit.
I have to admit that I'd be one of people openly against Vista until I received it for free after doing something similar to this. I've come to believe that the only reason people are so openly against it is that they have little to gain from spending so much for something that in their view is a relatively small upgrade over XP. I for one would of never gotten Vista if it weren't for it being free, and now I actually prefer it over XP many times over.
Why not just get a water truck, find a day when it is windy, find a rock, and apply some water to see if it moves? Then apply the same idea if it is cold enough for the flats to turn water to ice?
Can't see why more tests can be made to actually see if there is a result. If there are any that have been made, it would be nice to read about their results (besides ice and stakes).
That's not what an OS is for. An operating system's primary function is to allow a user to have general easy access to one's data, in the form of folders and usually a graphic interface to do so. It is also manditory that it allows for programs to be created, installed, and run on that system for a user to use within the system.
As far as all that goes, that is exactly what you payed for. Everything else is extra that the company added or made a feature that comes along with the final OS. That said, Windows, Linux, and OSX provide you with a ton of extras you may or may not need. People can call Windows bloated, but I can easily say the same for OSX and Linux. Thing is, they are all well enough made that it doesn't feel that way when you first run it.
Yea, I call shenanigans on this article. He goes on to even say that all he did was report what was being said in forums. Basically he ran a story for generating himself money.
I am the one who wrote "This is due to the * character at the end," so I am clearly aware of why RR thinks it is a rootkit. I don't care if it is one or not. My point of this article is that the SecuROM service doesn't need to be included in the demo if we don't have to activate it.
Using "rootkit" brings the traffic. It's all about the SEO, and is why this article is on top in Google.
I am simply stating what is being said across the internet in several forums. Run the RootkitRevealer program, and the SecuROM service shows up. It's about letting people know what is being installed with the demo, unsuspectingly.
Here's a quick way of knowing whether or not walking is a conscious or not.
When walking down a path or on a sidewalk, have you ever found that the ground below your feet isn't there and you find yourself falling a bit in a panic-state (ie - adrenaline rush and fear)? This usually happens when you walk past a down step or gradient that you did not foresee.
You never think about it but your body is just reacting to the change and trying frantically to find a solid ground. Its not a truly conscious behavior until your body immediately tells your senses a semi-false signal that your falling.
Walking therefore is mostly an unconscious and reactive action that is learned from understanding the information that your body gives while performing the act.
Slashdot Mirror
Really it depends. Most of it is just pure luck. Sure. You can tell them the same old story I've heard from just about everyone on the internet.
"Go into the Modding Community. Get into open source games. Do a map. Do a mod. Create a small game. Create a team or join a team and try to contribute."
Look at those and you'll see a common misconception. Creating games has little to nothing to do with most of the above save for the last two. Getting into the modding community is nice and all, but that kind of experience can lead to nothing more than an ego boost. Getting into open source game projects or small game development kits will teach them the basics, but nothing more. Doing maps is only viable if the person is into wanting to create maps and do level design only. Doing a mod in retrospect depends on the scale of the mod, but if it is just a normal mod and not something that truly creates a new game from the ground up, then it is just a dive into the internal workings of a particular game and not the elements that made the game come to be.
Creating a game though is where it really begins. Even more so, to do so in a team. Doing either of these takes commitment. Telling kids, even college students, that they have to start a game project from initial idea to an actual finished product is something like Mt Everest for most people. In most programming classes (even game design and graphics programming classes) I've done, students who create a game do so with that deadline in mind and then finish the game. After the deadline for the project is up, they toss the game aside and move on, not completing their work.
Now I've got an interesting take on game development so far. I started off as a kid wanting to create games, figured that the one thing I really needed is a degree in CS. The thing is I started off already knowing what I wanted to do. I wanted to program. Kids and adults who want to create games start off by saying they want to create games, but never realize that there are many elements that go into what creates a game. Concept artists, 3D modelers, animators, level designers, game designers, game programmers, UI artists, quest design, AI programming, graphic programming, physics programming, sound design, and countless other roles are what make up a game in the industry. Indie development means you will find that people will have multiple roles, but ultimately a person has to choose their path and stick with it.
At my university I got immensely lucky and found that my school actually had a dedicated game development degree. I didn't go for it and decided to stuck with my CS degree, but I soon caught wind of a game project funded by the NSF that was in first steps of development at my uni. Several chance encounters later and now I'm in the forefront of what it really means to create a game from beginning to end. I've dabbled heavily in game concept to programming. I've got hands on experience talking to people who are truly motivated into creating the game we have envisioned. What really amazes me is how many times I have interviewed people who are interested in joining our project as a programmer only to find that they immediately come to the realization that it just isn't for them. Over the course of the summer we started with a strong team of almost 20 people. Most came by every now and then, worked a little and then dropped off the face of our known universe. By the end we only had 8 people. The ones who kept through are the ones who are now veterans in our field. We got people who worked with us go on to Activision and Dreamworks. In the previous years we produced a game and several of the guys moved on to create their own game development company (though now it seems they have moved on to teaching game development instead around the world). The guys who still work on it are dedicated to it and will likely land jobs with the work we have done.
So in essence what you really need to do is ask them a series of very serious questions:
1) Do you REALLY want to work on games
I doubt it though. My school (California State San Bernardino) has a game dev degree. Unlike this article, I don't see people flocking to it. It's a cross between both mathematics and programming that get's kids who are interested to quickly change their mind for something else.
For the most part it comes down to their motivation. A lot of students I know going through the course are guys who are half motivated to do anything. Having managed teams of these guys, I know from experience that these guys will likely half-ass an entire project that others are depending on for them to complete. But thats not everyone and there are a few who have done well for themselves. For example 3 alumni have went on to form a company to create games for the iPhone and other mobile systems. They even go around the world instructing companies who want to use Unity to create games and such. In the past a group of students along with some professors created an xbox 360 arcade game called VectorForce which held its own in the shooting genre for quite some time.
Right now I'm involved with the team creating an action RPG using the Unreal Engine 3 called Mythic. The project is funded by the NSF and we have several schools (local colleges and high schools) working together to create assets for the game, but we are having trouble making people understand that we need little things. Above we got someone ranting about a former friend making trees for a game. We NEED that stuff to even create the game. Making kids understand that we don't want them creating an entire world on their own is proving difficult.
One last thing to note, I'm a CS major. Even though we do have the game dev degree, I like to program more than just taking arbitrary classes that make me feel like I'm doing something towards game development.
Which again is a typical monitor. Widescreens are becoming the norm. Mine right now is a 24" 1080p monitor. So seeing his videos is no different from what I typically see.
Looking at the videos, I can confidently say that yes, it'd be better to get a large TV.
One thing to point out with those videos and the review is that the FOV is like a typical monitor. He goes on to mention how great it is, but its really just him sitting 3 feet in front of a 66" display. Anyone will say the same thing playing a game on a typical 40-50" display running at a much lower 1080p resolution.
The key to playing in such an array is to get immersion in games. You're much better off making a configuration of 1x3 displays so that you get a very high FOV and not just a glorified big screen TV. Hell you can save yourself more than $1200 in monitors (assuming you go for 22" each at $250 each) by getting a nice HD projector and a screen (or wall). It eliminates the heat and power consumption and not to mention there are no gaps. Sit up close and there you go, a fake 2x3 Eyefinity.
I'll also vouch for this. Having just finished (today actually) Advanced Computer Graphics at my university (which is OpenGL and SDL on Linux), using NeHe's tutorials helped a lot. Going down at the bottom of the page you can either use GLUT or Linux versions of the source to get a very good version of what is already on the site. They even build on previous lessons.
However I must say that the site is growing old. It references a lot of depreciated functions and, quite frankly, is not the best method to learn OpenGL unless you already have some experience in the concepts. What it does do is give you the basics without going into detail on what you are actually doing.
Another suggestion I'd recommend is the OpenGL Redbook which is available online. It covers the mathematics behind the code. It too may be a little out of date, so try to find something that can supplement for the newer technology.
I too started with BASIC. In my case this was freshmen year in High School back in 1999 on QBASIC. I had dabbled a little with HTML but that was nothing like an actual language that had logic. It was there that I learned the basic blocks that made me the programmer I am today. I went from simple logic to loops to graphics and sound.
By the end of the year I had a full animation of a house with Christmas lights and music. I even had a very primitive text based RPG working with the ending taken straight out of Monty Python's Holy Grail.
It was from there that I learned C++, JavaScript, and many other languages. The logic from BASIC carried me over very easily to other topics.
The problem with students is not the language they learn, but the fun they can find out of it. You have to find what interests them and drive them in that direction.
And I can do it effectively well at that too. Formulas are easy in Word '07. Pressing ALT + '=' creates an equation space which, after learning all the ins and outs of the shorthand methodologies, became a breeze to use. For diagrams I use Dia. Its much quicker than drawing and I can do multiple diagrams in a single page for a single day's lecture.
I have not touched paper for notes in almost a year. Last time I did so was due to the professor making it a rule to not use laptops/netbooks in class (and even then, everything was on slides on the net, so taking notes was moot). I started this in physics of all things, where equations are very hefty. I did notes from the book and learned how fast I was able to take notes and decided to take it from there to class. I ended up with clean notes that were easy to read. My test notes (we were allowed a single sheet of paper full of notes) was a simple copy and paste of formulas on a 2 column page, printed on both sides of the sheet. I aced all my tests thanks to them. I continued using this method for 3 quarters of physics, all three ended with my highest marks I've had in a while.
Sure I goof off during lectures by being on the net and reading articles and such, but I mainly only do this for things I have knowledge on or if the topic is no where near the material we need to be learning.
the more I see MS giving the EU a big F U. Not only have they had to put up with them telling them to open their system up for competition, but they get fined for when they try to do anything otherwise.
"Blasphemy!" they say. "We will only lose more market share!"
And its true. My god, imagine Normal-Joe-User having the choice between several brands of web browsers and media players to choose from. Internet Explorer sounds old and so 80s, where as Firefox has the words "fire" and "fox" so its gotta be both exciting and cuddly right?
So instead of giving them the choice, they opt to not give them any at all, foregoing the need to even have to bother with the EU ever again. I can see Balmer and his cronies sitting in a meeting and they all unanimously say "fuck it," raising a middle finger across the Atlantic as hard as they possibly could.
Not sure what the ports it was using exactly, but telnet was definitely on. The username was still 'root' and the password was a simple word. TFA mentions the botnet has brute forcing capabilities so I imagine with only one thing to bust through, it wouldn't at all be a hard task to get into.
Funny thing is, I thought this was just a minor bug until the first thing I saw was this /. article when my router was restored.
Apparently I'm one of the "100,000" that got infected by this botnet.
This morning my router would not connect to any websites, yet my modem when directly connected to my PC still did. I reseted the settings to default, disabled the vulnerabilities that got the idiots in and put a stronger 35 character username and password.
How did I get infected in the first place? I left on remote access. And possibly my username and password weren't that complex. Live and learn I guess.
You're right. I never really believed the number of endings they were touting to having, in all honesty I've only heard about that once. What I was looking forward to was the chance for there to be any sort of different endings, but none of that is in this game.
They promptly half-assed the ending. If you go into the video folder where you installed the game and use Bink and Smacker tools, you'll find out that the ending breaks down to only 3 choices (*spoiler* You do it, someone else does it, you let it explode */spoiler*) and after that, it only shows one, maybe two quests you have completed (depends on how high your karma is I think) and that's it. Its a photo montage ending that doesn't explain or end anything. I seriously have doubts of me playing it again until more mods come out to make it more of a decent game like Oblivion and Morrowind are now with mods.
For me though, I knew Bethesda would end up giving the same effort they've given all their games from Elder Scrolls 1 and on. They make sure it runs (mostly), plays like an rpg they were aiming for, then send it out to market when they deem it big enough. With consoles and DLC, they now have more of a reason to not expand on things that should of been there to begin with. I'm just glad these guys are pretty faithful to the modding community when it comes to the tools and ease of access to their content for people to modify and create anew. It's their saving grace and the real reason I bought the game. Like Morrowind and Oblivion, the game will last me more than a few years on community support alone.
I believe the ending was done in a way to leave it open for more content. And lo-and-behold there is one. As was mentioned in a MaximumPC article:
Having a game this open ended have a very closed ending is just a clear indicator they want people to pay some cash to have any sort of possible continuation of story, especially those people on a console.
This line is something I found to be something directed towards games like Age of Conan, where balancing issues were a big problem back when I was playing the game. Updates and re-balancing done in that game often had the lines of "[class] is now working by the intended values." Those words always made me ask to what numbers are they basing all these classes on? In most cases each class seemed to be lacking in areas yet each had abilities or gear that made the class truly amazing. Shields and gems for example made the game have a dynamic that allowed anyone to take on anyone else with the right equipment and abilities. But due to the magic numbers they had set forth, most of these great things were reduced to keep the game on track, something they never elaborated to their player base.
This to me is exactly the kind of logic most MMOs or other games based on numbers should avoid all together. A game that evolves to how the players are able to make use of mechanics in game should be the game people will continue playing. AoC for me continued down that path for more than 2 months, not delivering to me at all any feeling of accomplishment when I hit max level.
It is easy to understand now how the naming process works out, but I for one believed for the longest time (up to a few weeks a go actually) that "Core 2 Duo" actually meant it had 4 cores.
My thought process was:
"Core Duo" = 2 cores
"Core 2 Duo" = 2 * 2 = 4 cores
"Core 2 Quad" = 2 * 4 = 8 cores
I'm someone who is usually really into these sort of things and yet even I was confused by their cryptic product naming.
Microsoft's return service isn't a repair job but more of a "turn in your old unit, get back a new one" deal. What you get back is a system that is not originally yours. You may get back saves but the old system is probably refurbished/discarded for potential profit.
Honestly the guy should of just bought a new system.
Come to think of it, just what was everyone expecting of the OS? It seems that they were hoping for a huge revolution in OS technology thats years ahead of its time or something. But looking back at pretty much any other OS after significant upgrades and versions, all we get is just more of the same with sometimes something new on top of it to justify the upgrade.
I knew what I was getting when I switched over to Vista and accepted it. Disappointment for me is really not all there, just the disappointment with everyone with such great and sometimes unrealistic expectations.
... can't they just include their own list of secret numbers in order for the generator to be semi-secure? The NSA has the numbers that generate the random numbers in the base code but even they say to make your own reference numbers if you are to use the code. So if Microsoft were to ultimately use the numbers the numbers would probably end up being both random and not known to anyone in the development team if they so wanted.
Its a different story however when said valuable computer time is dedicated to a space game on the internet...
Oh man, now if they put this on an AC-130, it'd seriously make anyone regret having made the decision to be anywhere on the battlefield. It'd make Dr. Evil tear a bit.
I have to admit that I'd be one of people openly against Vista until I received it for free after doing something similar to this. I've come to believe that the only reason people are so openly against it is that they have little to gain from spending so much for something that in their view is a relatively small upgrade over XP. I for one would of never gotten Vista if it weren't for it being free, and now I actually prefer it over XP many times over.
Why not just get a water truck, find a day when it is windy, find a rock, and apply some water to see if it moves? Then apply the same idea if it is cold enough for the flats to turn water to ice?
Can't see why more tests can be made to actually see if there is a result. If there are any that have been made, it would be nice to read about their results (besides ice and stakes).
Suddenly black holes, lots of them!
That's not what an OS is for. An operating system's primary function is to allow a user to have general easy access to one's data, in the form of folders and usually a graphic interface to do so. It is also manditory that it allows for programs to be created, installed, and run on that system for a user to use within the system.
As far as all that goes, that is exactly what you payed for. Everything else is extra that the company added or made a feature that comes along with the final OS. That said, Windows, Linux, and OSX provide you with a ton of extras you may or may not need. People can call Windows bloated, but I can easily say the same for OSX and Linux. Thing is, they are all well enough made that it doesn't feel that way when you first run it.
And here it is on Slashdot. An article that doesn't really report a concrete truth.
Here's a quick way of knowing whether or not walking is a conscious or not.
When walking down a path or on a sidewalk, have you ever found that the ground below your feet isn't there and you find yourself falling a bit in a panic-state (ie - adrenaline rush and fear)? This usually happens when you walk past a down step or gradient that you did not foresee.
You never think about it but your body is just reacting to the change and trying frantically to find a solid ground. Its not a truly conscious behavior until your body immediately tells your senses a semi-false signal that your falling.
Walking therefore is mostly an unconscious and reactive action that is learned from understanding the information that your body gives while performing the act.