The winding road up the mountain of money that Blizzard sits atop of is littered with the corpses of games that "will be" X or Y while WoW delivers a game experience that people want. Not some grand artistic or social vision, a game with just enough (and I would even say only enough) depth to keep you coming back. Hell, they're down every tuesday morning and they're still regarded as the smoothest MMO experience around.
Darkfall wants to make your items lootable, they're welcome to try it. Whether people actually enjoy this level of realism is a reality they're going to face on their balance sheet.
Me, I'm looking forward to Warhammer Online, but I don't hold any illusions that it will radically change the mechanics or culture of the MMO genre. I will throw my money at what's fun.
HD penetration is irrelevant, all games on modern consoles target 720p. Which is still a lower resolution, and they also take advantage of the fact that you're usually sitting farther from the screen.
Quality is subjective. You go to a movie, you don't complain about the 24fps framerate, do you?
Wow, I'm a dyed in the wool liberal and even I don't listen to Air America. But I guess it must be doing something right if it's got the right wing in such an apopleptic lather.
> Try listing the bleeding-edge games. I'll start: Crysis. Are there any more?
I don't need to be bleeding edge. World of Warcraft. It's a license to print money.
Sins of a Solar Empire is a critically acclaimed game that couldn't have gotten up the steps on current console distribution mechanisms (though XBox Live Arcade is getting there).
The one feature I saw from the article that looked distinctly Java-ish was static type checking at compile time, and Python will have something similar by the time JS 2.0 is generally usable (i.e. both are optional).
Unless you're talking about PyPy, it won't. It sure doesn't in 3.0, which added type annotations that only work on functions and methods. And these annotations? They don't actually do anything at all.
> introducing classes into a prototype-based language just doesn't make sense.
That's fine, sounds to me like they're throwing away the prototype part. Bastards.
> Operator overloading? Great, now you can enjoy C++ style code, where left shift and print are the same command.
Yes, because of course that's mandatory. God forbid that anyone be allowed to express a thought not approved of for the original datatypes hardwired into the language. Seriously, do you actually consider this argument valid? I guarantee the people actually designing languages and actually, you know, accomplishing something don't.
That's an actual neighborhood in San Francisco. The residents there usually call it "The Loin". Its one recommendable property is that it's not quite as bad as Hunters Point.
> Which is why US broadband penetration continues to rank lower and lower worldwide despite $200 Billion from the government.
200 billion is a massive chunk of change, higher than the infrastructure investment of any other industrialized country. What's the law that authorized it, and where's it actually going? I'd like to follow that money and see if there's perhaps a few people who belong in the clink for misappropriating it.
Most schemes offer unhygenic macros these days alongside the hygenic ones.
I don't know about straight C, but there's OpenC++ for writing syntactic transforms to C++, and OpenJava which does the same for Java. Not sure how up to date they are these days. Thing is, all the extra syntax they have to support makes lisp and scheme macros look simple.
Macros are a often a convenient feature to have, and in some cases they can be awesomely powerful (lambdaweb is done essentially with a big macro that cps-transforms its forms) but unless you get very freaky with metaprogramming, it really doesn't stretch the paradigm all that much.
If you want to play around with the idea of macro metaprogramming, I recommend metalua. There's so little to lua that you don't get confused by the homongous specification of CL or libraries of scheme, so you have a greater understanding of what's going on through experiment.
> Thank goodness for the relatively modern Practical Common Lisp by Seibel
PCL is also free at http://gigamonkeys.com/book -- I hate to deprive the authors of their royalties, but hey, it's their choice, and helps in making lisp more popular.
Unfortunately, I really can't stand CL's OBNOXIOUSLY-LONG-IDENTIFIERS that other languages often do with syntax. The purported lack of syntax is not a feature when you end up looking like COBOL with more parenthesis (yes that's hyperbole). There are CLOS workalikes available for most Scheme implementations that have all the features you'll ever use from the real deal (and it's not like most CL's have a 100% perfect CLOS). About the only really unique thing that CL brings to the table these days is conditions and restarts.
> Don't worry, PC gaming will still have its niche, casual games like the Sims, Runescape, Bejewelled, Minesweeper.
Buh.. what? No, that's a niche that's rapidly draining out of the PC market onto consoles. The latest incarnation of Bejewelled is called Puzzle Quest, and it's a runaway hit on consoles. Sure it's available for PC, but I generously give it maybe a fifth of the total sales (any less and the port just wouldn't have been done).
There's a "flagship FPS" that commands the PC market every year, plus an assortment of strategy titles... And then there's the MMO's. World of Warcraft is still a license to print money, and no console ports to be seen (Final Fantasy XI is sort of an aberration, and required people to basically turn their consoles into PC's anyway)
The thing is, if it was played at any other time, it would be indistinguishable from any other accordion. So you're really just contributing to the proliferation of accordions. At this point, I think we can fall back the the gun.
there is always my memory if in the early 1900's, some famous physicist declaring that all of Physics had been invented and there would never be anything new from that point on.
First of all, physics is discovered, not invented, and secondly, the early 1900's ushered in a whole new field of physics that everyone was absolutely abuzz about, and lastly that was a claim by the head of the USPTO saying something to the effect of everything having already been invented. I think it was probably tongue-in-cheek, but certainly a little bit prescient at least as the patent office goes.
The Streisand effect is a read-only phenomenom. It doesn't work too well when your site is attempting to solicit user submissions, and its only (or most known) domain name is gone.
I've heard you can download movies off the tubes without having to go to a store. You can even do it without getting it from pirates, what with their parrots and eyepatches and all that. Amazons maybe.
> Why would you need defragmentation when there's no read head to consider?
Because contiguous reads and writes are still faster than scattered ones. This means you have to avoid small fragments anyway -- once the fragments are big enough, making them all adjacent won't help much.
Slashdot Mirror
The law firm representing Novell doesn't have the domain mofo.com for nothing.
The winding road up the mountain of money that Blizzard sits atop of is littered with the corpses of games that "will be" X or Y while WoW delivers a game experience that people want. Not some grand artistic or social vision, a game with just enough (and I would even say only enough) depth to keep you coming back. Hell, they're down every tuesday morning and they're still regarded as the smoothest MMO experience around.
Darkfall wants to make your items lootable, they're welcome to try it. Whether people actually enjoy this level of realism is a reality they're going to face on their balance sheet.
Me, I'm looking forward to Warhammer Online, but I don't hold any illusions that it will radically change the mechanics or culture of the MMO genre. I will throw my money at what's fun.
HD penetration is irrelevant, all games on modern consoles target 720p. Which is still a lower resolution, and they also take advantage of the fact that you're usually sitting farther from the screen.
Quality is subjective. You go to a movie, you don't complain about the 24fps framerate, do you?
Wow, I'm a dyed in the wool liberal and even I don't listen to Air America. But I guess it must be doing something right if it's got the right wing in such an apopleptic lather.
> In other words, Netscape lost as a result of throwing away the old code base.
Netscape had already lost. The only takeaway lesson was "it takes a lot of time to rewrite, and possibly even more than starting over from scratch".
> Try listing the bleeding-edge games. I'll start: Crysis. Are there any more?
I don't need to be bleeding edge. World of Warcraft. It's a license to print money.
Sins of a Solar Empire is a critically acclaimed game that couldn't have gotten up the steps on current console distribution mechanisms (though XBox Live Arcade is getting there).
But yeah -- it's PC's that have become the niche.
The one feature I saw from the article that looked distinctly Java-ish was static type checking at compile time, and Python will have something similar by the time JS 2.0 is generally usable (i.e. both are optional).
Unless you're talking about PyPy, it won't. It sure doesn't in 3.0, which added type annotations that only work on functions and methods. And these annotations? They don't actually do anything at all.
> introducing classes into a prototype-based language just doesn't make sense.
That's fine, sounds to me like they're throwing away the prototype part. Bastards.
> Operator overloading? Great, now you can enjoy C++ style code, where left shift and print are the same command.
Yes, because of course that's mandatory. God forbid that anyone be allowed to express a thought not approved of for the original datatypes hardwired into the language. Seriously, do you actually consider this argument valid? I guarantee the people actually designing languages and actually, you know, accomplishing something don't.
> The Universe is, in fact, at least 156 billion light years wide:
... oh man, my head was already hurting, I don't think I want to tackle this one.
But the universe is younger than that, so how
Pshaw, you can almost solo molten core these days with tier 3 gear.
That's an actual neighborhood in San Francisco. The residents there usually call it "The Loin". Its one recommendable property is that it's not quite as bad as Hunters Point.
> Does anyone else here see the obvious double-standard that we've created for ourselves?
There's no double standard. Anything that favors the powerful over you is what they do.
> Which is why US broadband penetration continues to rank lower and lower worldwide despite $200 Billion from the government.
200 billion is a massive chunk of change, higher than the infrastructure investment of any other industrialized country. What's the law that authorized it, and where's it actually going? I'd like to follow that money and see if there's perhaps a few people who belong in the clink for misappropriating it.
I don't even run AV software on my PC, and I've yet to encounter any problems. I really don't see what the fuss is about.
Most schemes offer unhygenic macros these days alongside the hygenic ones.
I don't know about straight C, but there's OpenC++ for writing syntactic transforms to C++, and OpenJava which does the same for Java. Not sure how up to date they are these days. Thing is, all the extra syntax they have to support makes lisp and scheme macros look simple.
Macros are a often a convenient feature to have, and in some cases they can be awesomely powerful (lambdaweb is done essentially with a big macro that cps-transforms its forms) but unless you get very freaky with metaprogramming, it really doesn't stretch the paradigm all that much.
If you want to play around with the idea of macro metaprogramming, I recommend metalua. There's so little to lua that you don't get confused by the homongous specification of CL or libraries of scheme, so you have a greater understanding of what's going on through experiment.
> Thank goodness for the relatively modern Practical Common Lisp by Seibel
PCL is also free at http://gigamonkeys.com/book -- I hate to deprive the authors of their royalties, but hey, it's their choice, and helps in making lisp more popular.
Unfortunately, I really can't stand CL's OBNOXIOUSLY-LONG-IDENTIFIERS that other languages often do with syntax. The purported lack of syntax is not a feature when you end up looking like COBOL with more parenthesis (yes that's hyperbole). There are CLOS workalikes available for most Scheme implementations that have all the features you'll ever use from the real deal (and it's not like most CL's have a 100% perfect CLOS). About the only really unique thing that CL brings to the table these days is conditions and restarts.
> Don't worry, PC gaming will still have its niche, casual games like the Sims, Runescape, Bejewelled, Minesweeper.
.. what? No, that's a niche that's rapidly draining out of the PC market onto consoles. The latest incarnation of Bejewelled is called Puzzle Quest, and it's a runaway hit on consoles. Sure it's available for PC, but I generously give it maybe a fifth of the total sales (any less and the port just wouldn't have been done).
Buh
There's a "flagship FPS" that commands the PC market every year, plus an assortment of strategy titles... And then there's the MMO's. World of Warcraft is still a license to print money, and no console ports to be seen (Final Fantasy XI is sort of an aberration, and required people to basically turn their consoles into PC's anyway)
> Imagine having to work forever.
If I could take 10 or 20 year vacations, and change careers completely as I wanted to, why not?
Besides, accidents would probably kill you in less than 1000 years.
You could call it an "anticordion".
The thing is, if it was played at any other time, it would be indistinguishable from any other accordion. So you're really just contributing to the proliferation of accordions. At this point, I think we can fall back the the gun.
Carmack is a developer, ask any developer what they think of programming for the PS3. You're just some random idiot who thinks he's got an angle.
there is always my memory if in the early 1900's, some famous physicist declaring that all of Physics had been invented and there would never be anything new from that point on.
First of all, physics is discovered, not invented, and secondly, the early 1900's ushered in a whole new field of physics that everyone was absolutely abuzz about, and lastly that was a claim by the head of the USPTO saying something to the effect of everything having already been invented. I think it was probably tongue-in-cheek, but certainly a little bit prescient at least as the patent office goes.
The Streisand effect is a read-only phenomenom. It doesn't work too well when your site is attempting to solicit user submissions, and its only (or most known) domain name is gone.
I've heard you can download movies off the tubes without having to go to a store. You can even do it without getting it from pirates, what with their parrots and eyepatches and all that. Amazons maybe.
Plus, anything called a "Magnetic Vortex Core Drive" is a damn cool piece of hardware to own.
> Why would you need defragmentation when there's no read head to consider?
Because contiguous reads and writes are still faster than scattered ones. This means you have to avoid small fragments anyway -- once the fragments are big enough, making them all adjacent won't help much.