Water boxes (that hold 6 gallon jugs) are also excellent boxes. They're bigger than the beer/wine boxes and far stronger. Just don't load em too heavy or your helpers will have you.
Scarcity is very common, actually. People get stuff and then HOARD IT. I didn't say use it. I didn't say it was useful to them. I said they HOARD IT. Some people probably do it to drive prices up (in fact I've heard and believe accusasions of it in the Asheron's Call imbue material market).
Rare finds are just that: rare. You might not see one for many many hours of playing. Oh sure there's tons of loot: and most of it's cash or junk. But cash doesn't kill monsters, equipment does. You can buy equipment from vendors, but that's usually inferior to player made or monster dropped equipment. And player made or mob dropped equipment is very rare. Farming cash is easy. Farming equipment is not.
Sure, with infinite time and macros and infinite computers there'd be no scarcity (well, except for respawn times so there still would be). But that isn't the reality, so there is.
And while on one hand I can agree with you that the RL$V$ link is bad, is it so much better if there is none and instead Jonny No-Life at home slacking off as a student (high school or college, your pick) has 8+ hours of free time per day to play the game, while I work, own a house, have friends, play real-life games, etc and don't have that much time? Should he have a huge advantage because of it?
Frankly I don't think so. I much more enjoy playing with older players: they're more mature (so they don't go off acting like twatwads as much), they're generally friendlier (there to have a good time not there to be ub3r), and they play when I do (never hurts).
It's a generalization, but a true one. Not to say I buy gold or equipment online. (never have, but have considered selling, unfortunatly selling got banned about 2 weeks before I think I would have ended up doing so) But I could see myself doing so if I had a lot of income and no time.
It's like complaining that wealthy people hire cleaning & lawncare services. Duh. Their time is worth more to them than the cost to hire someone to do it.
What sort of demented logic makes you think spam is free speech?
Free speech is being able to stand on the street corner and shout that our government sucks*. It is not being able to stand in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic, shouting that our government sucks.
Spam is the latter -- forcing the message upon the masses and causing them problems in the meantime.
*: Yes yes aside from all the other laws that would probably be involved there, like disturbing the peace, loitering, or whatever else they'd think up to shut you up or move you elsewhere. Call it "talking in a normal voice to other people in the park or on the street about the unfortunate failures in the government" instead and the analogy still goes.
And by "them" I mean the idiot politicians. And by "book" I mean "a shelf full of steamy romance novels bought by a 10 year old at the local used book shop, goodwill, salvation army, etc."
On the other hand, I'm looking at this and going, "female Zardoz"? "The gun is good the boobie is evil"?
Why do I have PC hardware and use Linux? It's because it gets the hand-me-downs from my gaming rig. The gaming rig runs Windows of course -- not a lot of choice available to me there now is there?
I could try linux and cedega (and I did) but it's too much a performance hit for my tastes, not that stable, and doesn't free me from x86 anyhow.
I could not play the games I want to play... Not really useful either.
Asheron's Call, PlanetSide, and to a lesser degree City of Heroes (broad classes, but lots of choices available within each - tho originally in beta it didn't have classes but people gimped themselves so they added classes so people "couldn't")
Asheron's Call, for any fault you may have with it, has a very well put together character creation system. Nowdays they've even fixed most (not all) balance problems and you can excel in the game as a pure-melee (only item magic), pure mage (item, critter, life, and war), or something in between. I've even heard of people doing true hybrids quite successfully where they took a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, and war magic and used whatever was appropriate to what they were hunting.
My mouse (trackball) sits nicely next to my keyboard on the left and "balances" the number pad on the right. It leaves everything sitting dead center on my monitor(s).
Of course, I have to find a mouse/trackball that isn't handed. And a joystick that isn't handed. (which I'll set in the same position if it's a flightstick) And I have to remap the keys on every game because they expect you to use the left half of the keyboard, and with an ergonomic and a right hand to key with, that's not so useful.
I played early on in DAoC's release and you're right the 2v1 RvR definatly happened. 2 winners (albion and midgard) versus 1 loser (hibernia). I seem to recall discussions around that time that there was no class the hibernians had that wasn't surpassed by a class in one (or often both) of the other two realms.
And it didn't so much work out that either of the other pairs teamed up with hibernia to take the other down. They stayed pretty even and played beat-hibernia-to-death.
For god sakes, they had people running around in our "non-PvP" area because they'd killed their way into it.
Chips aren't really the limiting factor in supercomputer performance overall. You could custom design a chip to get crazy performance for the linpack benchmark that the top500 list is based on, but that doesn't mean it'd be worth squat outside of that.
The interconnect is probably at least as important to getting good performance (with today's software at least) as the processor is. Disk subsystems are probably about half that important. (and at least here got neglected in the initial setup)
How many itanium2s are in the top list? Are they making waves with their performance/price ratio? What about their heat when you're talking trying to build ultra-dense supercomputers? (Hint: spreading out is very bad for your fast interconnect) What does all that heat equate to in terms of cooling and then total power required?
Just because you're not under attack on home ground and don't hear people running and screaming is no reason to get so content that you call the guy who kept the attacks from happening for 4 years evil.
Tell that to the people in Spain, Iraq,...
Insightful? No. Propaganda? Yes.
Bush could be (and finally is moving in that direction, maybe) moving in the direction of solving the problem by making us less dependant on foreign oil. Really, if they want to sit there on that end of the world and blow themselves up I couldn't care less, and neither would anyone else in this country if we didn't need their damn oil.
The republicans are not exactly known for non-oil research.
Are you sure you didn't read it backwards? Because they said the next gen console's CPUs are less powerful than the current P4/Athlon offerings. (much less the offerings that'll be there 6 months to a year from now at launch-date)
The GPUs are ahead but they're not going to be much ahead of the top of the line Nvidia/ATI cards at the time of launch, and within a year at most those cards will be inexpensive enough to be "enthusiast mainstream" cards.
So it seems if you would "spend the money" you'd have a faster CPU and an equivilant GPU. Hard to say they're useless to game on.
AC:TD preview downloads are up on fileplanet, with keys to follow. You don't even need an account, you can try it for free (for the month it's up) which is always nice.
(but if you subscribed, you couldn't keep your characters -- course they're putting in "levelers" that will help you get to high levels quickly thru the course of the preview/test to help test high level content.)
And it happens plenty on "traditional" supercomputers. That's why you stick a fast interconnect on them, like myrinet or infiniband and don't use just ethernet (which some of the high machines there do).
Given that your mesh isn't going to morph that fast in most physics codes (that may not be true for weather codes), you can afford to just run static and then pause every few (minutes, hours, days) and re-work your mesh to adapt to changing conditions.
Further, there's plenty of techniques to hide network latency from the machines. LWP/user threads springs rapidly to mind (one blocked waiting for IO, switch to another).
Getting developers prepared for a multi-core world that's going to be up and coming in the next generation of processors. Can't avoid it so you may as well embrace it. Especially with Apple's focus on "use our toolkits, we'll vectorize (or maybe they mean parallelize in general) it for you."
Does size really matter that much? Almost every game out there (with few exceptions like Eve) splits players up into servers that cap out at what, 1-3k per server during peak times.
So as long as there are enough subscribers for a small handful of servers, what do you get from the other 30 you don't play? More development funds I suppose, but then with 30 servers there's probably RP servers and PK servers and hardcore servers and all sorts of other crap that means more dev time is spent balancing for them, or doing fixes for them, or doing more customer support for them, etc.
If you're looking for fresh or different and are a SWG or former EQ player, you should check out CoH if you get a chance. (Loot? What loot?) Or try Turbine's AC:TD open preview (not sure if it's for current subscribers only, or generally open. My impression is the latter) -- graphics won't be as hot as some of the more modern games, but the loot system in AC is the most intricate (and frustrating at times) I've seen.
That idea has some merit, but is going to have a tendancy to produce a bad "swinging balance" effect where you have players cycling off characters when they become ineffective. It may also nerf someone who's just particularly good with their character.
Plus it'd be a lot of CPU power to do, and games aren't run on a whole lot of CPU power overall.
I can see some use in "datamineing" game logs -- CoH does this. How many fire tanks played this week? How much xp did they get per level per hour? What about illusion controllers? Grouped or not?
I'd rather trust a human who has good data makeing decisions than an automated nerf system. The latter limits creativity and player experimentation. (why be better than average if you just get scaled back to average every time)
Look at the software Apple is using and ask yourself why they have any interest in the slightest in damaging or killing off Linux?
khtml, Apache, CUPS, Open Directory, openssh... all sorts of open source projects! They want these to keep being developed, and the best enviroment for that right now is the Linux world.
But would you be working for them for standard IT salaries if the laws ment it was your backside on the line if some exceptional russian hacker breaks in and steals stuff? Do you really think it's a good plan to have someone else be able to send you to jail with no risk to themselves?
You'd have to be paying me a LOT to convince me that it was worth it. If nothing else, too often those in the trenches who are the first in the sights aren't those who can make the decisions to protect things, or who are told to "make do" with what they have.
No sir, that sounds like a phenominally bad idea from the IT perspective. From any perspective, really.
The specs I saw claiming 2 tflop (!?) per PS3 are just a tad over the top. They're essentially making the claim that they can deliver the equivilant of a $3 mil super computer I manage for what, $2.5k?
Three orders of magnitude less expensive in two years? I don't think so. Processors don't move that fast. I could maybe see 20 gflop but even that's pushing it.
Not all of us have that luxury. Or to be more specific in my case, not all of us have an office who's window actually opens to the outside. My office windows open onto the atrium (UIUC's Digital Computer Lab has been expanded 3 times so far in it's approx 50-60 year life). Occasionally the sun shines in, usually not.
Now, we do have our operations center monitoring an emergency weather alert box and telling people when to head for shelter, but this whole assuming people (in computing, no less) see the sun is kinda odd.
Slashdot Mirror
AC2 wasn't trying to convert AC1 players. For one thing it's robbing Peter to pay Paul. For another, the two games aren't the same style and feel.
Water boxes (that hold 6 gallon jugs) are also excellent boxes. They're bigger than the beer/wine boxes and far stronger. Just don't load em too heavy or your helpers will have you.
Scarcity is very common, actually. People get stuff and then HOARD IT. I didn't say use it. I didn't say it was useful to them. I said they HOARD IT. Some people probably do it to drive prices up (in fact I've heard and believe accusasions of it in the Asheron's Call imbue material market).
Rare finds are just that: rare. You might not see one for many many hours of playing. Oh sure there's tons of loot: and most of it's cash or junk. But cash doesn't kill monsters, equipment does. You can buy equipment from vendors, but that's usually inferior to player made or monster dropped equipment. And player made or mob dropped equipment is very rare. Farming cash is easy. Farming equipment is not.
Sure, with infinite time and macros and infinite computers there'd be no scarcity (well, except for respawn times so there still would be). But that isn't the reality, so there is.
And while on one hand I can agree with you that the RL$V$ link is bad, is it so much better if there is none and instead Jonny No-Life at home slacking off as a student (high school or college, your pick) has 8+ hours of free time per day to play the game, while I work, own a house, have friends, play real-life games, etc and don't have that much time? Should he have a huge advantage because of it?
Frankly I don't think so. I much more enjoy playing with older players: they're more mature (so they don't go off acting like twatwads as much), they're generally friendlier (there to have a good time not there to be ub3r), and they play when I do (never hurts).
It's a generalization, but a true one. Not to say I buy gold or equipment online. (never have, but have considered selling, unfortunatly selling got banned about 2 weeks before I think I would have ended up doing so) But I could see myself doing so if I had a lot of income and no time.
It's like complaining that wealthy people hire cleaning & lawncare services. Duh. Their time is worth more to them than the cost to hire someone to do it.
What sort of demented logic makes you think spam is free speech?
Free speech is being able to stand on the street corner and shout that our government sucks*. It is not being able to stand in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic, shouting that our government sucks.
Spam is the latter -- forcing the message upon the masses and causing them problems in the meantime.
*: Yes yes aside from all the other laws that would probably be involved there, like disturbing the peace, loitering, or whatever else they'd think up to shut you up or move you elsewhere. Call it "talking in a normal voice to other people in the park or on the street about the unfortunate failures in the government" instead and the analogy still goes.
And by "them" I mean the idiot politicians. And by "book" I mean "a shelf full of steamy romance novels bought by a 10 year old at the local used book shop, goodwill, salvation army, etc."
On the other hand, I'm looking at this and going, "female Zardoz"? "The gun is good the boobie is evil"?
The games.
Why do I have PC hardware and use Linux? It's because it gets the hand-me-downs from my gaming rig. The gaming rig runs Windows of course -- not a lot of choice available to me there now is there?
I could try linux and cedega (and I did) but it's too much a performance hit for my tastes, not that stable, and doesn't free me from x86 anyhow.
I could not play the games I want to play... Not really useful either.
No, it just means that as soon as someone translates the dupe bug to chinese the farmers are going to be doing it.
Asheron's Call, PlanetSide, and to a lesser degree City of Heroes (broad classes, but lots of choices available within each - tho originally in beta it didn't have classes but people gimped themselves so they added classes so people "couldn't")
Asheron's Call, for any fault you may have with it, has a very well put together character creation system. Nowdays they've even fixed most (not all) balance problems and you can excel in the game as a pure-melee (only item magic), pure mage (item, critter, life, and war), or something in between. I've even heard of people doing true hybrids quite successfully where they took a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, and war magic and used whatever was appropriate to what they were hunting.
My mouse (trackball) sits nicely next to my keyboard on the left and "balances" the number pad on the right. It leaves everything sitting dead center on my monitor(s).
Of course, I have to find a mouse/trackball that isn't handed. And a joystick that isn't handed. (which I'll set in the same position if it's a flightstick) And I have to remap the keys on every game because they expect you to use the left half of the keyboard, and with an ergonomic and a right hand to key with, that's not so useful.
I played early on in DAoC's release and you're right the 2v1 RvR definatly happened. 2 winners (albion and midgard) versus 1 loser (hibernia). I seem to recall discussions around that time that there was no class the hibernians had that wasn't surpassed by a class in one (or often both) of the other two realms.
And it didn't so much work out that either of the other pairs teamed up with hibernia to take the other down. They stayed pretty even and played beat-hibernia-to-death.
For god sakes, they had people running around in our "non-PvP" area because they'd killed their way into it.
Chips aren't really the limiting factor in supercomputer performance overall. You could custom design a chip to get crazy performance for the linpack benchmark that the top500 list is based on, but that doesn't mean it'd be worth squat outside of that.
The interconnect is probably at least as important to getting good performance (with today's software at least) as the processor is. Disk subsystems are probably about half that important. (and at least here got neglected in the initial setup)
How many itanium2s are in the top list? Are they making waves with their performance/price ratio? What about their heat when you're talking trying to build ultra-dense supercomputers? (Hint: spreading out is very bad for your fast interconnect) What does all that heat equate to in terms of cooling and then total power required?
Tell that to the people in Spain, Iraq,
Insightful? No. Propaganda? Yes.
Bush could be (and finally is moving in that direction, maybe) moving in the direction of solving the problem by making us less dependant on foreign oil. Really, if they want to sit there on that end of the world and blow themselves up I couldn't care less, and neither would anyone else in this country if we didn't need their damn oil.
The republicans are not exactly known for non-oil research.
Are you sure you didn't read it backwards? Because they said the next gen console's CPUs are less powerful than the current P4/Athlon offerings. (much less the offerings that'll be there 6 months to a year from now at launch-date)
The GPUs are ahead but they're not going to be much ahead of the top of the line Nvidia/ATI cards at the time of launch, and within a year at most those cards will be inexpensive enough to be "enthusiast mainstream" cards.
So it seems if you would "spend the money" you'd have a faster CPU and an equivilant GPU. Hard to say they're useless to game on.
In related news...
AC:TD preview downloads are up on fileplanet, with keys to follow. You don't even need an account, you can try it for free (for the month it's up) which is always nice.
(but if you subscribed, you couldn't keep your characters -- course they're putting in "levelers" that will help you get to high levels quickly thru the course of the preview/test to help test high level content.)
And it happens plenty on "traditional" supercomputers. That's why you stick a fast interconnect on them, like myrinet or infiniband and don't use just ethernet (which some of the high machines there do).
Given that your mesh isn't going to morph that fast in most physics codes (that may not be true for weather codes), you can afford to just run static and then pause every few (minutes, hours, days) and re-work your mesh to adapt to changing conditions.
Further, there's plenty of techniques to hide network latency from the machines. LWP/user threads springs rapidly to mind (one blocked waiting for IO, switch to another).
Getting developers prepared for a multi-core world that's going to be up and coming in the next generation of processors. Can't avoid it so you may as well embrace it. Especially with Apple's focus on "use our toolkits, we'll vectorize (or maybe they mean parallelize in general) it for you."
Does size really matter that much? Almost every game out there (with few exceptions like Eve) splits players up into servers that cap out at what, 1-3k per server during peak times.
So as long as there are enough subscribers for a small handful of servers, what do you get from the other 30 you don't play? More development funds I suppose, but then with 30 servers there's probably RP servers and PK servers and hardcore servers and all sorts of other crap that means more dev time is spent balancing for them, or doing fixes for them, or doing more customer support for them, etc.
If you're looking for fresh or different and are a SWG or former EQ player, you should check out CoH if you get a chance. (Loot? What loot?) Or try Turbine's AC:TD open preview (not sure if it's for current subscribers only, or generally open. My impression is the latter) -- graphics won't be as hot as some of the more modern games, but the loot system in AC is the most intricate (and frustrating at times) I've seen.
That idea has some merit, but is going to have a tendancy to produce a bad "swinging balance" effect where you have players cycling off characters when they become ineffective. It may also nerf someone who's just particularly good with their character.
Plus it'd be a lot of CPU power to do, and games aren't run on a whole lot of CPU power overall.
I can see some use in "datamineing" game logs -- CoH does this. How many fire tanks played this week? How much xp did they get per level per hour? What about illusion controllers? Grouped or not?
I'd rather trust a human who has good data makeing decisions than an automated nerf system. The latter limits creativity and player experimentation. (why be better than average if you just get scaled back to average every time)
Look at the software Apple is using and ask yourself why they have any interest in the slightest in damaging or killing off Linux?
... all sorts of open source projects! They want these to keep being developed, and the best enviroment for that right now is the Linux world.
khtml, Apache, CUPS, Open Directory, openssh
"Enviromentally friendly" ignoring of course the amazing waste of fresh water, much less the making-ice.
But would you be working for them for standard IT salaries if the laws ment it was your backside on the line if some exceptional russian hacker breaks in and steals stuff? Do you really think it's a good plan to have someone else be able to send you to jail with no risk to themselves?
You'd have to be paying me a LOT to convince me that it was worth it. If nothing else, too often those in the trenches who are the first in the sights aren't those who can make the decisions to protect things, or who are told to "make do" with what they have.
No sir, that sounds like a phenominally bad idea from the IT perspective. From any perspective, really.
The specs I saw claiming 2 tflop (!?) per PS3 are just a tad over the top. They're essentially making the claim that they can deliver the equivilant of a $3 mil super computer I manage for what, $2.5k?
Three orders of magnitude less expensive in two years? I don't think so. Processors don't move that fast. I could maybe see 20 gflop but even that's pushing it.
I might have to buy one. The VLM on the Jaguar (also in ROM, written by Jeff) was awesome for it's time and still looks fairly cool.
Not all of us have that luxury. Or to be more specific in my case, not all of us have an office who's window actually opens to the outside. My office windows open onto the atrium (UIUC's Digital Computer Lab has been expanded 3 times so far in it's approx 50-60 year life). Occasionally the sun shines in, usually not.
Now, we do have our operations center monitoring an emergency weather alert box and telling people when to head for shelter, but this whole assuming people (in computing, no less) see the sun is kinda odd.
Darth Vader Sex Machine
Inspired in large part by the lame and yet often pretty funny game "Star Warped" by Parroty Interactive (I think).
The only thing that'd make a lot of those games better would be JEJ doing the voice of Vader. "Use the pole, Luke!" (from Wack The Ewok)