The only thing it'll do for WoW is make Blizzard even quicker to ban farmers, and possibly get your example eBay seller up on fraud charges. The gold isn't yours, any more than any other aspect of the account is, so there's no legal way to exchange it outside of the context of the game itself.
The big thing here isn't going to be traditional MMOs, but the 'item shop' games like Fly For Fun, where there is a direct legal conversion between real money and rewards in game. Second Life is definitely going to be affected by this if it goes through, and I imagine that related blogs are going bonkers already.
Having interacted with Gord in the wild, I can safely state that these 'acts' are pure fantasy. Revenge fantasy. Tell-your-boss-to-fuck-off-because-you-won-the-lottery fantasy. Because really, while he fantasizes about being a big man... those stupid customers are ultimately his employers.
So perhaps the console manufacturers need to look at this.
Quick question. Why? Console manufacturers are competitive to the point where they can, have, and will buy exclusive rights to a title in order to improve their consoles' install base. Not their competitors' install bases, and certainly not Linux Distro Foo's install base. There may be some minor argument for it on the developer level, but bear in mind that the difference between consoles goes a great deal deeper than simple operating systems.
What? Explorer.exe takes up 43 megs of RAM on my machine, at this second, while Firefox is tilting the scales at 180 MB. Given that the average consumer machine these days is shipping with two gigs of RAM, that forty megs is a fraction of a drop in the bucket-- these aren't the bad old days of DOS, when we needed boot disks to squeeze every last kilobyte out of below-640K RAM. Any extra performance you squeeze out of a trifling bit of memory is negligible.
Wikipedia isn't interested in original research or expert anecdotes, for precisely the problems that your ideas bring up. It's attempt at being an encyclopedic reference would fall to pieces under the weight of contradictory papers, articles gainsaying one another, and the need to vet submissions. It already suffers from massive edit wars and discussion page drama-- cluttering searches with 'the effect of foo on bar' and 'the real effect of foo on bar' and 'why foo can't affect bar at all' will do nothing to help anyone.
This also begs the question of who will pay the royalties. Ad banners? Good luck, there. Ad revenue is spotty for single-owner sites. When there are dozens of articles on a single topic, the odds of-- actually, no.
We already have a system where people can put up their own, original articles, pepper them with advertisements, and make vanishingly small amounts of money from. It's called the Internet.
Not to mention that you'll lose even more qualified applicants to other organizations. I love it when people screech about 'overpaid' politicians and services they 'never use', it just serves to illustrate how myopic they really are.
Politicians and CEOs of non-profit organizations command large salaries not because they can vote themselves pay raises, but because their services really are that highly sought after. Oh, and before you say something like 'Oh, but anyone could do that!' ask yourself, 'Why aren't I doing it, then?'
Emmert was basically a developer only in name, and he was the only one of the main City of Heroes developers to remain with Cryptic after CoX was sold to NCSoft. Not to mention that they've brought Bill Roper on, one of the idea men who leapt from Blizzard and sank to the bottom with Flagship.
Assuming that Champions will be worth the plastic it's pressed on, just because the Cryptic name is involved, is like assuming that Tabula Rasa would be good because Richard Garriott was involved. Or, more accurately, assuming that the Tekwar novels would be good because William Shatner acted in science fiction parts.
The most basic answer is that we're not still back in the day on Usenet. Word meaning is fluid, especially when it comes to slang. Cross-posting is more difficult in e-mail and on forums these days, than it used to be on Usenet with some news clients, and so those elements of the definition have become archaic. People use the term 'spam' in the context of unsolicited mail because that's the only context they have for it.
Seriously. They know this isn't going to fly. The Universities and ISPs know it's not going to fly. This whole ridiculous thing looks an awful lot like the sort of gesture you see followed by 'we tried to play nice, but...'
Another problem is that ISPs will sometimes acquire blocks that the GeoIP services still think are in other countries. One of the big Stateside ones just did (Comcast?) and Google spent some time shunting users in that block to an 'appropriate' Google International start page. I don't want to think about the trouble they must have had with sites that specifically block access from outside of the States, like Showtime.
And geography is one thing, when you've got trans-oceanic cables to contend with... but routing isn't necessarily going to be any worse internationally, than it is intranationally.
While other people have noted that dongles are easily cracked, they're also easy to lose, break, fry, have eaten by the dog, or vanish from retail packaging. Not to mention that they add extra weight, complexity and cost to manufacturing and shipping... and the margins on entertainment software are nowhere as good as people seem to believe.
What this guy said. The titles mentioned in the summary aren't exactly filled with deathless prose. Then again, when your audience thinks that the Wheel of Time and Snow Crash are high art, their expectations aren't exactly difficult to exceed.
I wouldn't. A friend of mine worked for the Red Cross, and was required to keep an emergency phone on her at all times when she was on-call-- and those on-call periods could last upwards of a week. Or how about a doctor who needs to be accessible immediately, but also has social obligations?
We don't need jammers in theatres and restaurants. What we need are old-fashioned ushers, and old-fashioned shaming. Some asshole keeps lighting up five rows down? Shout at him to quit it. If he gives you guff, go to the manager. You'll probably get a free ticket out of the deal, and he'll get turfed. If you're at a restaurant... well sorry, but you're at a restaurant. People socialize over food.
Planetside has had advertisements for movies in its main hub zones for some time now. It took them about a week to make the things invulnerable to weapons fire. Beyond immersion-breaking, they weren't particularly good movies either-- the Deuce Bigalow sequel was one mentioned in gaming blogs.
The one-year trial of Anarchy Online is dotted with billboards advertising real-world services and products. Likewise, freebie access to an earlier Telling of A Tale in the Desert had billboards as well, despite being set in Pharonic Egypt.
The Matrix Online tried the same thing, only they had a limited number of participating vendors. Apparently the miles of identical Alienware billboards were passed off as a persistent glitch in the Matrix.
City of Heroes/Villains also has in-game advertising... but in a novel twist, players can turn that shit off without repercussion.
I knew that suggestion was going to pop up within the first twenty posts. Beyond the technical reasons for not bothering, there are plenty of legal ones too. Just ask any of NCSoft's shareholders, or the management hierarchy that would have to reach consensus in order to release the code. This isn't just a matter of one person's pet project, or a small company folding.
And before anyone points Quake out, recall how long it took for them to release the source, and also recall that the release included none of the actual graphic assets or maps.
There's a difference between 'income', which is often paid out to providers of space, bandwidth, utilities, and manpower, and 'profit', which is what is accrued above and beyond operating costs.
MMOs have a short shelf life? Um, since when? Ultima Online is still plugging along, they've reactivated Meridian59, and even the original Everquest is still turning a profit. They may not change much after a few years of incremental development and expansion packs, but it is fairly rare for a well-funded one to fail as spectacularly as Tabula Rasa did.
Tabula Rasa had problems from beta, if not earlier, and never shook them. So while 'recent' might be sort-of applicable, 'ongoing' or 'constant' would be better adjectives.
If the price tag didn't tip you off, this is one of Nvidia's Quadro line. They're not enthusiast boards, they're for intensive rendering work-- film-grade CG or simulations. Now, while the technology may come down to consumer-level hardware, especially if Carmack's supposition that real-time raytracing is the next big step, but this is like comparing a webcam to a real-time frame grabber.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. It's not a weblog, it's an ad farm.
The big thing here isn't going to be traditional MMOs, but the 'item shop' games like Fly For Fun, where there is a direct legal conversion between real money and rewards in game. Second Life is definitely going to be affected by this if it goes through, and I imagine that related blogs are going bonkers already.
That was my impression: a tech demo of an IMVU-like chat interface, without chat.
Having interacted with Gord in the wild, I can safely state that these 'acts' are pure fantasy. Revenge fantasy. Tell-your-boss-to-fuck-off-because-you-won-the-lottery fantasy. Because really, while he fantasizes about being a big man... those stupid customers are ultimately his employers.
Quick question. Why? Console manufacturers are competitive to the point where they can, have, and will buy exclusive rights to a title in order to improve their consoles' install base. Not their competitors' install bases, and certainly not Linux Distro Foo's install base. There may be some minor argument for it on the developer level, but bear in mind that the difference between consoles goes a great deal deeper than simple operating systems.
What? Explorer.exe takes up 43 megs of RAM on my machine, at this second, while Firefox is tilting the scales at 180 MB. Given that the average consumer machine these days is shipping with two gigs of RAM, that forty megs is a fraction of a drop in the bucket-- these aren't the bad old days of DOS, when we needed boot disks to squeeze every last kilobyte out of below-640K RAM. Any extra performance you squeeze out of a trifling bit of memory is negligible.
This also begs the question of who will pay the royalties. Ad banners? Good luck, there. Ad revenue is spotty for single-owner sites. When there are dozens of articles on a single topic, the odds of-- actually, no.
We already have a system where people can put up their own, original articles, pepper them with advertisements, and make vanishingly small amounts of money from. It's called the Internet.
Let's not forget that she was cast as the first officer in the original Star Trek pilot episode too.
Politicians and CEOs of non-profit organizations command large salaries not because they can vote themselves pay raises, but because their services really are that highly sought after. Oh, and before you say something like 'Oh, but anyone could do that!' ask yourself, 'Why aren't I doing it, then?'
Assuming that Champions will be worth the plastic it's pressed on, just because the Cryptic name is involved, is like assuming that Tabula Rasa would be good because Richard Garriott was involved. Or, more accurately, assuming that the Tekwar novels would be good because William Shatner acted in science fiction parts.
Or, you know, not telling a mail administrator off when he shows you the proper mailing list to dump on.
The most basic answer is that we're not still back in the day on Usenet. Word meaning is fluid, especially when it comes to slang. Cross-posting is more difficult in e-mail and on forums these days, than it used to be on Usenet with some news clients, and so those elements of the definition have become archaic. People use the term 'spam' in the context of unsolicited mail because that's the only context they have for it.
An external drive? Sounds like they're asking people to set up sneakernets.
Seriously. They know this isn't going to fly. The Universities and ISPs know it's not going to fly. This whole ridiculous thing looks an awful lot like the sort of gesture you see followed by 'we tried to play nice, but...'
And geography is one thing, when you've got trans-oceanic cables to contend with... but routing isn't necessarily going to be any worse internationally, than it is intranationally.
While other people have noted that dongles are easily cracked, they're also easy to lose, break, fry, have eaten by the dog, or vanish from retail packaging. Not to mention that they add extra weight, complexity and cost to manufacturing and shipping... and the margins on entertainment software are nowhere as good as people seem to believe.
What this guy said. The titles mentioned in the summary aren't exactly filled with deathless prose. Then again, when your audience thinks that the Wheel of Time and Snow Crash are high art, their expectations aren't exactly difficult to exceed.
We don't need jammers in theatres and restaurants. What we need are old-fashioned ushers, and old-fashioned shaming. Some asshole keeps lighting up five rows down? Shout at him to quit it. If he gives you guff, go to the manager. You'll probably get a free ticket out of the deal, and he'll get turfed. If you're at a restaurant... well sorry, but you're at a restaurant. People socialize over food.
Planetside has had advertisements for movies in its main hub zones for some time now. It took them about a week to make the things invulnerable to weapons fire. Beyond immersion-breaking, they weren't particularly good movies either-- the Deuce Bigalow sequel was one mentioned in gaming blogs.
The one-year trial of Anarchy Online is dotted with billboards advertising real-world services and products. Likewise, freebie access to an earlier Telling of A Tale in the Desert had billboards as well, despite being set in Pharonic Egypt.
The Matrix Online tried the same thing, only they had a limited number of participating vendors. Apparently the miles of identical Alienware billboards were passed off as a persistent glitch in the Matrix.
City of Heroes/Villains also has in-game advertising... but in a novel twist, players can turn that shit off without repercussion.
And before anyone points Quake out, recall how long it took for them to release the source, and also recall that the release included none of the actual graphic assets or maps.
There's a difference between 'income', which is often paid out to providers of space, bandwidth, utilities, and manpower, and 'profit', which is what is accrued above and beyond operating costs.
MMOs have a short shelf life? Um, since when? Ultima Online is still plugging along, they've reactivated Meridian59, and even the original Everquest is still turning a profit. They may not change much after a few years of incremental development and expansion packs, but it is fairly rare for a well-funded one to fail as spectacularly as Tabula Rasa did.
Tabula Rasa had problems from beta, if not earlier, and never shook them. So while 'recent' might be sort-of applicable, 'ongoing' or 'constant' would be better adjectives.
Especially if you give it a Viking funeral!
If the price tag didn't tip you off, this is one of Nvidia's Quadro line. They're not enthusiast boards, they're for intensive rendering work-- film-grade CG or simulations. Now, while the technology may come down to consumer-level hardware, especially if Carmack's supposition that real-time raytracing is the next big step, but this is like comparing a webcam to a real-time frame grabber.