It's true - and this is the grain of truth from this whole thing: learning PHP first can make you lazy/bad by virtue of the sheer power you have. PHP is very quick and easy. It makes it possible for anyone to whip something up; and sheer processing power makes anything usable on a small scale. Writing PHP for the enterprise size application can be done; it just requires more knowledge of fundamental CS principles. Ask the average PHP programming what O(n) is. Now, find someone who knows automatically what the O(n) cost of Dijkstra's algorithm is (better, what it is when your edge and vertex data is a linked list, a binary heap, or a Fibonacci heap), and look at their PHP code. These are worlds apart. I've had people who wanted to learn to do what I'm doing - which is developing applications with php+mysql. I tell them to learn to program a moderately complex application in C first. If they can get there, then moving to PHP and making good with it is easy; but if you start with PHP, you run the risk of being a software cripple, I think.
Anyhow, I disagree with your first point. Scrubbing user data is important, but is what the whole thing hingles on? Certainly not for a performance sensitive enterprise application.
None, of course, but that's not what I was suggesting, was it? I was suggesting that when faced with queries that take minutes to resolve, you can often get orders of magnitude improvement by simplifying the query and moving some of the logic into the application.
Queries that take minutes to resolve are broken, unless they're of the data mining sort, in which case you can have the DB or the client side do the work, and each may be efficient depending on the exact question, but in any event, there's no "fast" way to get around the work when you want to analyze some huge portion of data.
But in my experience, that's not why queries run minutes. Developers do dumb things. They join fields which are incompatible - for example, joining an INT against an INT UNSIGNED - causing everything to use a temp table for type conversion. Or they do a SELECT... LEFT JOIN... WHERE... ORDER BY.. LIMIT sort of query, but they use their key for the WHERE, and the result set is still substantial and the ORDER BY would need another key, and mysql will only use one key per query.
If you prefer, you can try to get orders of magnitude improvement by reindexing or refactoring your schema, but it's really the same thing in the end (programmers hand-optimizing the problem). Unless your problem can be shoehorned into a typical SQL scenario, the advantage to tackling at the application level is that you have much more algorithmic freedom in massaging the data. More importantly, your application actually knows what the data *is* and can implement shortcuts and abstractions that are much more difficult at the DB level, where your data is just a bunch of "records" in a very inflexible format.
Simple example: say your data makes up a tree or a graph, and you need to walk the tree to determine the leaf nodes that can be reached from a particular branch. If the tree data spans different tables (say, branches, leaves, and join tables) then you can get some pretty nasty SQL queries if you try to do the work in the DB layer. Grabbing all relevant data with some simple queries, populating a tree object, and then letting the tree object tell us who our leaves are is probably going to be a lot faster, especially as the number of nodes increases.
"shoehorned"? SQL is pretty darn flexible if what you want to do is store, retrieve, update, and associate structured data. In your example, it's hard to imagine why you'd want your data in an SQL server in the first place; except perhaps as a networked simple storage engine. There's a huge class of applications that naturally use SQL as an excellent choice for data storage and manipulation. Even when that IS the right tool, you can have people mess up and run multi-minute queries. It's usually either bad design or ignorance of the nuances, not some general inability of the sql server to deal with the data the developer intends to get.
This is SO early, it scarcely merits a mention, save for the developer: Bioware is opening a studio in Austin to develop an MMORPG. This is amazing on two fronts: one, they've invaded the US. Two: they're making an MMO. Fans of games such as Baldur's Gate [2], NWN, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire know that Bioware has the chops. Basically, since BG, these people have not missed a beat. Probably the least well-received game was in NWN, and it sold well over a million copies and still has a thriving community making and playing modules on it and producing custom content. Heck, Bioware is still releasing "premium modules" for it, 4 years after its development.
A lot of people prayed to the MMO gods that Bioware would enter the space. A lot of people pointed out that World of Warcraft did very little that was revolutionary. They just did what Blizzard does best: they took the best that everyone had come up with over time, they didn't rush it, and they delivered a perfect product with a little of their magic.
Bioware, however, has demonstrated that they can deliver a lot of things:
A tidal wave of content. BG2 remains a legend because of the enormity of the game, and it didn't have MMO revenue to back it up.
Innovation. Say what you will, NWN was a revolution; has any game had a mod community so big? There's like 90GB of add-on NWN content now.
Story. When was the last time you had a "Wow" moment like in KotoR?
And, like Blizzard, they have literally millions of fans who eagerly await their work.
In other words, they have all the ingredients for massive MMO success, and they are just now getting started. Take a development timeline - say, 3-4 years. Ask yourself which MMO you know currently has massive amounts of subscribers and a marquee pedigree, but might be feeling pretty damn stale when the Bioware MMO ships?
Did I mention that Bioware merged with Pandemic and has massive investment capital, too?
I don't want to say "look out Blizzard", because I honestly think the MMO market has legs to run. But I think of EQ as the first age of MMOs, and I think of CoH as being the dawn of a new casual-friendly, easy to learn MMO "second era", that WoW followed right behind and absolutely obliterated the competition in. I think Bioware's may be the dawn of a third era.
Here's my suggestion if WoW is sucking: vote with your damn dollars. City of Heroes never has these problems. If you haven't tried the game, give it a shot, 14 days no strings attached no cc needed:
I tried WoW, but I'd rather fly (or leap, or superspeed) than walk or take a slow horse. And I'd rather fight and run missions than spend endless hours craftgrinding. And I like playing with my friends and being able to even when we're different levels - "sidekicking" is the best mmo feature EVAR.
But CoX has basically never had these issues. One or two minor hiccups in 2 years.
The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.
Good luck with that. How many millions of people have iPods? If I could get the yahoo music service onto my iPod, I'd pay for that subscription, just as a way of exploring and heading >30 seconds of songs. I frankly don't buy much music from itunes or anywhere, because I can't hear it first. I'm not going into a store, and I don't listen to the radio. So... where does that leave me? Occasionally browsing the itms and buying on the strength of a 30 second clip, occasionally hearing something during a movie or while (rarely) driving and getting it, or buying something on a personal recommendation from someone.
As for fixed pricing, big woop. I can see why Apple wants the fixed pricing, but I certainly don't care. If they want to charge $3 for the latest manufactured pop crap, go for it. I'm already not paying $.99 for it, now I can not pay $3.99.
Maybe the Slashdot crowd thinks that just because Hillary Clinton crusades for enforcing her moral code with legislation despite the constitutional restraints on such a course, that it represents the policy or desire of all Democrats to do so. That is definitely not the case. Party members on both sides of the aisle are prone to moralistic crusading, especially when it suits them, but it seems that Republicans are more likely to do so because they are driven by their religious fervor or that of their constituents.
BG2 was unquestionably the better RPG if you just bought them and wanted to play through them. However, BG2 inspired, as the poster said, the urge to "play through it over and over again". But NWN was never meant just as a single player game, and honestly, I believe that the reason NWN's single player campaign was disappointing was just that SO many man hours were put into developing the engine and tools and assets and scripting that there wasn't enough time to create a BG2-like experience.
That said, if you were willing to look beyond the official campaign, NWN becomes more competitive. There have been a lot of fan-created, really great modules. At the top of my favorites is Adam Miller's Dreamcatcher series. Some people swear by Stefan Gagne's work (which is prolific). Almost everyone agrees that Rick Burton's Twilight/Midnight modules are fantastic. I'm really fond of the Aielund saga.
If you have NWN installed. And play some of the top rated modules that sound appealing. There's some great stuff, stuff that you may well enjoy a lot more than the original NWN.
Bioware, for their part, got their act together a bit for their expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. It had a much more enjoyable single player campaign. Even the developers said that by this time they'd really gotten better with their own tools, the engine was refined, and lots of important art assets (robes, for example) were in the engine.
Meanwhile, the expandability of this game may never be matched. There is literally tens if not hundreds of gigabytes worth of custom content - tilesets, weapons, icons, creature models (with animations), to say nothing of actual modules. People have hacked in ridable horses. It's amazing.
Right now you can pick up the NWN Diamond edition in stores and it comes with the original game plus both expansion packs PLUS some of Bio's "premium modules" they sell now.
Meanwhile, online, you can play with others in a way you never could play BG2. Since the game has a DM client, there are a ton of people running bona fide campaigns. Neverwinterconnections.com is a matching service to hook up people to play together. There's also a list of "persistent worlds" a mile long, some of which actual merit being played; they're like mini-MMOs (or graphical MUDs, perhaps) where 20-60 players will play all hours of the day and you can return and keep playing the same character.
One ambitious project even attempted to create a huge set of servers which connected the Forgotten Realms all togther (ALFA, although it's sad that enthusiasm and competence don't always go hand in hand, although the Roleplay level there is pretty amazing).
So all in all, Baldur's Gate 2 for someone who just wanted to buy a game off the shelf and play it was certainly a better game, in my opinion, especially for its time. But NWN quite literallly broke new ground. For those who were willing to go out and look for fresh content and people to play with, it continued to pay dividends. NWN, if you got into it, is probably pound for pound the best value any game has ever delivered. I probably played all the way through BG2 at least a half dozen times, maybe more - there are some good addons for it, including David Gaider's hacks that make some of the "big" fights a lot more difficult, add NPCs and quests, etc. But even still, that amount of time and fun is dwarfed by the play of NWN because of the fact that I can always go grab something fresh. I think you really have to be a fan of that TYPE of game to fall in love with NWN, but if you are, I think it's unmatched on the whole.
I'm glad to see that at the top of the list. I haven't read all those php books, but I am a very experienced developer in the language, and that book is fabulous. It manages to cover many topics, and with astounding clarity and insight. Definitely a master work on the topic.
That's just odd. NCSoft publishes City of Heroes, which is set in a city which is analagous to a modern day metropolis. (Or megopolis - think perhaps NYC times five)
Ads in such a game would probably ADD to the experience. I wouldn't want them jacking up my performance or anything, but seeing a Pizza Hut or a Coke banner? Seems like verisimilitude, and if it lets them make more money, add more content, or whatever, more power to them.
Ads in a game like Auto Assault seem crazy for the most part. It's a postapocalyptic setting with mutants, humans, and others battling for scarce resources and it looks like the whole theme is borrowed heavily from Mad Max. What place does Coke have in the mutant-filled future? Little or none, I'd imagine. Maybe some armor plated missile-wielding FedEx battle trucks would be a cute touch, but by and large, the ads have no place. Obviously a fantasy scenario is the worst case. Modern product placement simply has no place there.
Then again, you never know - it's not like a game like WoW offers a lot in the way of immersement when 75% of the players can't type normal sentences and you have to translate 'w r @ deadmines pling kk u wnt team?' After that, does it really matter if you see an ad?
All I can say is: I'm a lot more inclined to watch someone play video games than I am to watch major league sports. Probably because I play video games and don't play team sports. And professional game players ARE on an amazing level when they play. I played video games my whole life, and after 2 years of playing Quake 3 all the time, I was still third tier. There's a tier of people who can challenge top pros but can't really expect to beat them unless they improve, and I could make those people work (a little) to beat me. This meant I could get on almost any server on the net and straight up own the average player. I was constantly accused of cheating. And yet top pros would pretty easily spank the people who were pretty easily spanking me.
An employee my wife fired some time back took to the net for revenge, signing her up for all sorts of things, from life insurance quotes to porn-by-email. The employee also visited and logged into OUR web site, so when we found a few helpful places that forwarded us IP/timestamp info for the requests, we were able to cross-reference them to our logs and produce a fairly demonstrative bit of evidence for the police. But they claimed there was nothing they could do.
I think there's a place for legislation that prevents intentional harrassment, but if there's one thing you can count on, it's that legislation regarding the Internets will suck.
I have an SLI system I bought almost a year ago now. Dual 6800GTs and a substantially overclocked Athlon 64. The box is definitely badass, but frankly, what nvidia needs to do is get more game developers making their games work with SLI. Recently City of Villains came out. I play at 1600x1200, and a single 6800GT is not cutting it with all the bells and whistles. (They added antialiasing, specular bloom, and depth of field effects, plus the poly counts are supposedly higher than in CoH with larger textures)
But CoV cannot gain from SLI. At all. Yeah, I once had a 3dmark score that was like 9% less than the very top of the chart. Doom3 was awesome. HL2 was awesome. But nVidia needs to push people who are slapping logos like "the way it's meant to be played" on their games to support the high end systems.
The other serious problem here is CPU power. Most games aren't going to be able to take advantage of many processors, and it's hard to imagine a game that won't be CPU-bound long before it is GPU-bound by a 4x7800 GTX setup. It's already possible to be completely CPU bound with 2x7800 GTXs, let alone with 4. It seems probably that you'll have massive GPU power that will never get used. Plus, what game is designed with a system 3-4x as powerful as a "normal" top-of-the-line system? A game in development now coming out "soon" (I'm thinking of NWN2 here, due in about 5-6 months, for example), is likely going to support something around a geforce 5900 through the 7800gtx, with some nod to SLI from "big" games. (Maybe even another generation older; probably whichever geforce model first properly implemented shader 2.0 is the "low end")
Anyhow, this sounds like a nice marketing gimmick, but putting this in your house is probably about as practical as commuting in a McLaren F1.
Go compare "Linux Kernel" vulnerabilities (9 unique) vs "Microsoft Windows" vulnerabilities (46 unique). Even that isn't apples to apples, but it's a lot more indicative than the random counts of vulnerabilities for every piece of software shipped with an OS.
My wife operates an E-commerce store (which also has a physical location). I write e-commerce software for a living.
This isn't a big deal, so long as states simply have one rate per state, and there is an easy way to find the rates and be notified of changes. Collecting differently based on county, municipality, etc, is gruesomely inconvenient. Of course, it that were required, I'm sure a couple companies providing a tax-rate web service would spring up, assuming that you didn't already receive such a service from someone like your payment gateway service.
As far as fraud, if you're buying anything over eBay, you should be buying it with a credit card. If you can't pay with a credit card, don't buy it. The credit card is the giant on *your* side when it comes to a fraudulent transaction.
As far as eBay's poor response, it would be interesting to see them get sued under antitrust. It's obvious that eBay *does* have a virtual monopoly on online auctions. There's simply too many people selling and buying there to make it economically possible to survive anywhere else. When Amazon and yahoo first introduced auctions, I used to check them; I knew people who auctioned stuff on Amazon. But eBay's mega-majority of shoppers simply made it economically infeasible to do business elsewhere. Not that I'm sure what you do. Splitting ebay into mini-ebays doesn't seem like it would be real effecting; they already have an API; having an auction service as a public utility sounds absurd... but they're effectively a monopoly nonetheless.
Actually, neither one of them implicates relational theory properly. Aside from the InnoDB engine, most of MySQL is pathetically incomplete. Without InnoDB, MySQL is worthless with regard to referential integrity, which is a showstopper for any database that requires multiple tables related to each other.
As the companies using this pathetic database have noticed, 99.9999% works just fine; especially when your application is aware that you don't have a foreign key constraint and yes, the data may be munged 1 time in 1 billion and need to be cleaned.
Being a geek has always been cool. The reason Leo kept his private life so secret was he was getting mad bootay, and he didn't want people trying to step in on his turf.
CS is down as a major because people plan to do crazy shit like give laptops to every kid. We're going to end up with 1 Billion computer programmers on the planet, all earning $3/hr.
That said, we'll probably keep geekin' it up. Not only is it fun, but if she's that big of a BSD fan, we're damn well going to try to get our contributions into the kernel, right?
Anything you know you want to buy before you get to the store is doomed to die out unless it has a compelling reason to be in a retail space. It's time for those stores to adapt their business model to a new reality. That reality is: people can buy books cheaply online.
What does a local game store offer which is unique?
Personally, if I were looking to do that sort of thing, I'd be interested in doing a sort of modular nerd paradise. Here's what I'd want to offer:
(1) Food. Food is high margin and if someone is there already, you have a captive audience. Sell pizza, hot dogs, nachos, coffee, ice cream, etc. Perhaps do periodic pickups from takeout places, and offer your customers menus and add on a delivery charge. Take this an extra step and you can potentially get a license and start offering alcoholic drinks. Beers+pool is old school. How about beer+D&D?
(2) Gaming. Offer LAN gaming by the hour with some sort of "club discount". I think I'd want to try to ensure the computers were mostly used by having X computers at a profitable $Y/hr charge. Then you also sell a "club card" for unlimited play (free or perhaps super discounted) that could be used; but those gamers would be limited to a certain percentage of the systems (first come first serve) and would have to renew their lease every so often (say, each 30 minutes). At such time as the pay-only PCs got close to filling up, the number of "club" PCs would shrink automatically. In other words, hourly rate customers get priority.
(3) RPG sessions. Interview independant contractor GMs. Here's what you do: you have for-pay GM sessions where you supply a library of books, a table to play at, a clean, well-lit environment, etc. You charge to be in the game, and you share the revenue with the GM, and you get the best people playing. I can't speak for everyone, but I know that I've played with GMs where when our game ended, I would gladly have paid money to play. Now, this isn't likely to be a mainstay income, but I think the idea of picking up some extra money while playing with some very dedicated players would appeal to the would-be GMs and provide a revenue stream. RPG sessions come with a discount at the food area.
(4) Video games? I think I'd want one wall full of classics people would still pay to play - well maintained copies of stuff like Street Fighter II (maybe super, or Super:turbo), Race Drivin, Ms. Pac-Man, etc - classics new and old.
In other words - Nerd Heaven.
And meanwhile, you'd situate the whole thing away from town in a cheap-rent area. Why? Because frankly, your money is going to come from people willing to spend hours and hours there, and those people won't mind a bit of a drive. The quick-stop people won't give you the business you need.
Would it work? I don't know. It would be cool, certainly.
It really depends on what you're after. What makes this less repetitive than any MMO? I'm relatively an MMO newb. CoH was my first, and I played WoW for a couple months. So to compare to WoW, which enjoys immense popularity, I can't see how people like it, because for me it was the epitome of repetitiveness. What did I get every few levels as a mage? An upgrade to an existing power. Instead of using "Fireball 2", I was using "Fireball 3". I encountered the same enemies with slightly different appearances. Instead of a "Blood Spider" it was a "Venemous Death Spider", and it was green instead of black, but it was still mostly the same. Moreover, fighting in dungeons, or fighting elites in general, felt like fighting the same mobs with more hit points to make them artificially tougher, whereas large group missions in CoH are very fun chaos with the varied powersets and the wildly different ways that combats can go.
Ultimately, there's a question of what an engine can do. What variations on "Go to X, kill stuff" can you handle? City of Heroes/Villains does wave attacks, rescue/escort missions and co-ordinated glowie-clicking. That's about it. What's nice about CoH is that a lot of the different powersets truly play differently. Mages in WoW seemed to hinge on certain builds and powers - like, say, the 0-second-cooldown Instant Arcane Explosion build - whereas almost every powerset in CoH in a given AT plays differently. A mind controller is utterly different from a fire controller, and a Kinetics Defender and an Empathy Defender are likewise worlds apart.
I think the real difference is that if playing your character, grouping, meeting teammates and overcoming missions are what you enjoy, you can love CoH and CoV long term. If you're into loot improvement, you can't play CoH, because it basically has none. Enhancements don't have enough variation to even qualify, to say nothing of the fact taht you can't get anything on a drop you can't just buy. PvP can be fun but isn't really balanced... and I got the feeling that's largely how WoW's was: fun, but not truly balanced, prone to ganking but not automatically a gank-fest.
Comparing CoV to WoW, I'd simply say: I have better things to do with my time than walk around, and that's how WoW felt: World of Walking, I heard it dubbed, and couldn't agree more. With CoV's improved "Call" buttons, the travel powers, it's more time "playing" and less time just running around trying to avoid spawns you don't want to aggro.
Early on that's true - you spend the first few levels fighting almost all villains. Later on, you run across a lot more good and neutral factions. Longbow and the like, as well as a lot of Elite Bosses which are basically hero builds. There's also the striking dockworkers on Sharkhead.
You must have been skipping content also, because there are some other early missions you fight heroes in - I think you're L6 or less when you go to defeat the sea witch, who is the first "hero" sort of enemy (Although she's only a boss at low levels, you encounter her again in the low 20s as the first actual "Hero" you fight (which is the CoV equivalent of an Archvillain)).
Once you get to the high teens and 20s you're also fighting Aeon corp, which is seedy but "legitimate" on the surface.
Not that your objection is wholly out of place. But I think it makes sense; villains fighting villains is going to draw a lot less hero/law enforcement heat than villains assaulting the innocent.
First, the writing. The writing in City of Villains is a notch above City of Heroes. While many contacts in City of Heroes were memorable, most of the best were in the high-level content (Crimson and Indigo, for example, were 40-44 and 45-50 level contacts). In City of Villains, you're struck early and often with the quality of the writing. I've been doing almost all contact missions, almost all solo, and at L26, I've run into a half dozen contacts now that I already remember better than most City of Heroes contacts. These ones are not just giving out missions, they are telling a story; or rather, inviting you to participate in their stories. From a uniquely quirky "MBA-turned-Arachnos-operative" contact who talks about your "synergy" together as you kidnap people and trash enemy bases for him, to the Superheroine who lost her powers in a friendly fire accident and is out for vengeance against the "friends" who "abandoned her", you'll feel like the contacts are a lot more alive. Fundamentally, they're all just standing in one place doling out missions, but their stories and speech are much more engaging and of a higher quality.
Second, the mission system. Street hunting is fine, but several "issues" ago, Cryptic raised the xp from mission completion, to encourage doing story-laden missions as opposed to random street hunting. City of Villains makes this better in several ways. First, newspaper missions: entering a zone you can immediately take "newspaper" missions from anywhere, without needing to visit a contact. Every so many missions, you build enough reputation with a contact to get a "special" mission offer which you have to see them in person to get. But this helps drastically minimize the travelling.
Next, contacts dole out their cell phone numbers a lot faster. In City of Heroes, you had to complete roughly 2/3rds of a contact's missions before you got a Call button for them. In City of Villains, you typically complete 2 missions and then receive their Call button, cutting down drastically on dull travel time, and further distancing CoV from MMOs where travelling becomes a major hassle and upgrading your modes of transportation (*cough* epic mount *cough*) becomes an overwhelmingly important goal simply because the walking is boring. It means the game is that much more fast paced.
Next, CoV missions are usually located in the zone you acquire them in. All newspaper missions are, and MOST contact missions are, unless there's a compelling story reason to have them be elsewhere. (For example, the ominous Aeon corp is located in Cap Au Diable, and so if the mission involves breaking into their corporate headquarters, there you go - but in 26 levels, I've only been sent out of zone perhaps 4-5 times)
Finally, CoV further improves by having a LOT of story arcs. It seems like I'm always doing one. Unlike one-shot missions, story arcs have, well, story behind them. They're more entertaining than one-off missions. If you continue to seek out contacts and work for them, you'll get souvenirs out the wazoo. I'd guess at 26 I probably have at least 15, if not 20 or more. I stopped counting. I've gotten more than one story arc from some contacts. Also, Arcs tend to be a bit shorter, with less "filler" material, whereas in CoH there were a lot of "now, do this" missions which didn't really move the story along very much. In other words, the content is thicker.
Unlike city of heroes, however, your starting missions are currently the same regardless of Archetype or Origin. Whereas CoH content differed for the first 5 levels or so based on Origin, everyone in CoV starts with Kalinda and the same set of missions. Devs have already said new starting content is coming, but... well, coming is not here.
Third, the Archetypes. As Zonk points out, the Mastermind is a unique experience. Overall, however, I think all the Villain ATs have a unique flavor. The least unique is probably the corruptor, which plays essentially like a defender with their power sets reversed. They don't do enough damage to
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It's true - and this is the grain of truth from this whole thing: learning PHP first can make you lazy/bad by virtue of the sheer power you have. PHP is very quick and easy. It makes it possible for anyone to whip something up; and sheer processing power makes anything usable on a small scale. Writing PHP for the enterprise size application can be done; it just requires more knowledge of fundamental CS principles. Ask the average PHP programming what O(n) is. Now, find someone who knows automatically what the O(n) cost of Dijkstra's algorithm is (better, what it is when your edge and vertex data is a linked list, a binary heap, or a Fibonacci heap), and look at their PHP code. These are worlds apart. I've had people who wanted to learn to do what I'm doing - which is developing applications with php+mysql. I tell them to learn to program a moderately complex application in C first. If they can get there, then moving to PHP and making good with it is easy; but if you start with PHP, you run the risk of being a software cripple, I think.
Anyhow, I disagree with your first point. Scrubbing user data is important, but is what the whole thing hingles on? Certainly not for a performance sensitive enterprise application.
Queries that take minutes to resolve are broken, unless they're of the data mining sort, in which case you can have the DB or the client side do the work, and each may be efficient depending on the exact question, but in any event, there's no "fast" way to get around the work when you want to analyze some huge portion of data.
But in my experience, that's not why queries run minutes. Developers do dumb things. They join fields which are incompatible - for example, joining an INT against an INT UNSIGNED - causing everything to use a temp table for type conversion. Or they do a SELECT
"shoehorned"? SQL is pretty darn flexible if what you want to do is store, retrieve, update, and associate structured data. In your example, it's hard to imagine why you'd want your data in an SQL server in the first place; except perhaps as a networked simple storage engine. There's a huge class of applications that naturally use SQL as an excellent choice for data storage and manipulation. Even when that IS the right tool, you can have people mess up and run multi-minute queries. It's usually either bad design or ignorance of the nuances, not some general inability of the sql server to deal with the data the developer intends to get.
A lot of people prayed to the MMO gods that Bioware would enter the space. A lot of people pointed out that World of Warcraft did very little that was revolutionary. They just did what Blizzard does best: they took the best that everyone had come up with over time, they didn't rush it, and they delivered a perfect product with a little of their magic.
Bioware, however, has demonstrated that they can deliver a lot of things:
And, like Blizzard, they have literally millions of fans who eagerly await their work.
In other words, they have all the ingredients for massive MMO success, and they are just now getting started. Take a development timeline - say, 3-4 years. Ask yourself which MMO you know currently has massive amounts of subscribers and a marquee pedigree, but might be feeling pretty damn stale when the Bioware MMO ships?
Did I mention that Bioware merged with Pandemic and has massive investment capital, too?
I don't want to say "look out Blizzard", because I honestly think the MMO market has legs to run. But I think of EQ as the first age of MMOs, and I think of CoH as being the dawn of a new casual-friendly, easy to learn MMO "second era", that WoW followed right behind and absolutely obliterated the competition in. I think Bioware's may be the dawn of a third era.
Here's my suggestion if WoW is sucking: vote with your damn dollars. City of Heroes never has these problems. If you haven't tried the game, give it a shot, 14 days no strings attached no cc needed:
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http://www.mmorpg.com/cov_trial.cfm?fp=1920,1200,
I tried WoW, but I'd rather fly (or leap, or superspeed) than walk or take a slow horse. And I'd rather fight and run missions than spend endless hours craftgrinding. And I like playing with my friends and being able to even when we're different levels - "sidekicking" is the best mmo feature EVAR.
But CoX has basically never had these issues. One or two minor hiccups in 2 years.
I thought cleaner air leads to global warming. Why do we want to avoid emissions? :p
The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.
Good luck with that. How many millions of people have iPods? If I could get the yahoo music service onto my iPod, I'd pay for that subscription, just as a way of exploring and heading >30 seconds of songs. I frankly don't buy much music from itunes or anywhere, because I can't hear it first. I'm not going into a store, and I don't listen to the radio. So... where does that leave me? Occasionally browsing the itms and buying on the strength of a 30 second clip, occasionally hearing something during a movie or while (rarely) driving and getting it, or buying something on a personal recommendation from someone.
As for fixed pricing, big woop. I can see why Apple wants the fixed pricing, but I certainly don't care. If they want to charge $3 for the latest manufactured pop crap, go for it. I'm already not paying $.99 for it, now I can not pay $3.99.
Maybe the Slashdot crowd thinks that just because Hillary Clinton crusades for enforcing her moral code with legislation despite the constitutional restraints on such a course, that it represents the policy or desire of all Democrats to do so. That is definitely not the case. Party members on both sides of the aisle are prone to moralistic crusading, especially when it suits them, but it seems that Republicans are more likely to do so because they are driven by their religious fervor or that of their constituents.
BG2 was unquestionably the better RPG if you just bought them and wanted to play through them. However, BG2 inspired, as the poster said, the urge to "play through it over and over again". But NWN was never meant just as a single player game, and honestly, I believe that the reason NWN's single player campaign was disappointing was just that SO many man hours were put into developing the engine and tools and assets and scripting that there wasn't enough time to create a BG2-like experience.
o dules
That said, if you were willing to look beyond the official campaign, NWN becomes more competitive. There have been a lot of fan-created, really great modules. At the top of my favorites is Adam Miller's Dreamcatcher series. Some people swear by Stefan Gagne's work (which is prolific). Almost everyone agrees that Rick Burton's Twilight/Midnight modules are fantastic. I'm really fond of the Aielund saga.
Go here: http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/TopRated.php?content=m
If you have NWN installed. And play some of the top rated modules that sound appealing. There's some great stuff, stuff that you may well enjoy a lot more than the original NWN.
Bioware, for their part, got their act together a bit for their expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. It had a much more enjoyable single player campaign. Even the developers said that by this time they'd really gotten better with their own tools, the engine was refined, and lots of important art assets (robes, for example) were in the engine.
Meanwhile, the expandability of this game may never be matched. There is literally tens if not hundreds of gigabytes worth of custom content - tilesets, weapons, icons, creature models (with animations), to say nothing of actual modules. People have hacked in ridable horses. It's amazing.
Right now you can pick up the NWN Diamond edition in stores and it comes with the original game plus both expansion packs PLUS some of Bio's "premium modules" they sell now.
Meanwhile, online, you can play with others in a way you never could play BG2. Since the game has a DM client, there are a ton of people running bona fide campaigns. Neverwinterconnections.com is a matching service to hook up people to play together. There's also a list of "persistent worlds" a mile long, some of which actual merit being played; they're like mini-MMOs (or graphical MUDs, perhaps) where 20-60 players will play all hours of the day and you can return and keep playing the same character.
One ambitious project even attempted to create a huge set of servers which connected the Forgotten Realms all togther (ALFA, although it's sad that enthusiasm and competence don't always go hand in hand, although the Roleplay level there is pretty amazing).
So all in all, Baldur's Gate 2 for someone who just wanted to buy a game off the shelf and play it was certainly a better game, in my opinion, especially for its time. But NWN quite literallly broke new ground. For those who were willing to go out and look for fresh content and people to play with, it continued to pay dividends. NWN, if you got into it, is probably pound for pound the best value any game has ever delivered. I probably played all the way through BG2 at least a half dozen times, maybe more - there are some good addons for it, including David Gaider's hacks that make some of the "big" fights a lot more difficult, add NPCs and quests, etc. But even still, that amount of time and fun is dwarfed by the play of NWN because of the fact that I can always go grab something fresh. I think you really have to be a fan of that TYPE of game to fall in love with NWN, but if you are, I think it's unmatched on the whole.
I'm glad to see that at the top of the list. I haven't read all those php books, but I am a very experienced developer in the language, and that book is fabulous. It manages to cover many topics, and with astounding clarity and insight. Definitely a master work on the topic.
That's just odd. NCSoft publishes City of Heroes, which is set in a city which is analagous to a modern day metropolis. (Or megopolis - think perhaps NYC times five)
Ads in such a game would probably ADD to the experience. I wouldn't want them jacking up my performance or anything, but seeing a Pizza Hut or a Coke banner? Seems like verisimilitude, and if it lets them make more money, add more content, or whatever, more power to them.
Ads in a game like Auto Assault seem crazy for the most part. It's a postapocalyptic setting with mutants, humans, and others battling for scarce resources and it looks like the whole theme is borrowed heavily from Mad Max. What place does Coke have in the mutant-filled future? Little or none, I'd imagine. Maybe some armor plated missile-wielding FedEx battle trucks would be a cute touch, but by and large, the ads have no place. Obviously a fantasy scenario is the worst case. Modern product placement simply has no place there.
Then again, you never know - it's not like a game like WoW offers a lot in the way of immersement when 75% of the players can't type normal sentences and you have to translate 'w r @ deadmines pling kk u wnt team?' After that, does it really matter if you see an ad?
All I can say is: I'm a lot more inclined to watch someone play video games than I am to watch major league sports. Probably because I play video games and don't play team sports. And professional game players ARE on an amazing level when they play. I played video games my whole life, and after 2 years of playing Quake 3 all the time, I was still third tier. There's a tier of people who can challenge top pros but can't really expect to beat them unless they improve, and I could make those people work (a little) to beat me. This meant I could get on almost any server on the net and straight up own the average player. I was constantly accused of cheating. And yet top pros would pretty easily spank the people who were pretty easily spanking me.
An employee my wife fired some time back took to the net for revenge, signing her up for all sorts of things, from life insurance quotes to porn-by-email. The employee also visited and logged into OUR web site, so when we found a few helpful places that forwarded us IP/timestamp info for the requests, we were able to cross-reference them to our logs and produce a fairly demonstrative bit of evidence for the police. But they claimed there was nothing they could do.
I think there's a place for legislation that prevents intentional harrassment, but if there's one thing you can count on, it's that legislation regarding the Internets will suck.
I have an SLI system I bought almost a year ago now. Dual 6800GTs and a substantially overclocked Athlon 64. The box is definitely badass, but frankly, what nvidia needs to do is get more game developers making their games work with SLI. Recently City of Villains came out. I play at 1600x1200, and a single 6800GT is not cutting it with all the bells and whistles. (They added antialiasing, specular bloom, and depth of field effects, plus the poly counts are supposedly higher than in CoH with larger textures)
But CoV cannot gain from SLI. At all. Yeah, I once had a 3dmark score that was like 9% less than the very top of the chart. Doom3 was awesome. HL2 was awesome. But nVidia needs to push people who are slapping logos like "the way it's meant to be played" on their games to support the high end systems.
The other serious problem here is CPU power. Most games aren't going to be able to take advantage of many processors, and it's hard to imagine a game that won't be CPU-bound long before it is GPU-bound by a 4x7800 GTX setup. It's already possible to be completely CPU bound with 2x7800 GTXs, let alone with 4. It seems probably that you'll have massive GPU power that will never get used. Plus, what game is designed with a system 3-4x as powerful as a "normal" top-of-the-line system? A game in development now coming out "soon" (I'm thinking of NWN2 here, due in about 5-6 months, for example), is likely going to support something around a geforce 5900 through the 7800gtx, with some nod to SLI from "big" games. (Maybe even another generation older; probably whichever geforce model first properly implemented shader 2.0 is the "low end")
Anyhow, this sounds like a nice marketing gimmick, but putting this in your house is probably about as practical as commuting in a McLaren F1.
Go compare "Linux Kernel" vulnerabilities (9 unique) vs "Microsoft Windows" vulnerabilities (46 unique). Even that isn't apples to apples, but it's a lot more indicative than the random counts of vulnerabilities for every piece of software shipped with an OS.
My wife operates an E-commerce store (which also has a physical location). I write e-commerce software for a living.
This isn't a big deal, so long as states simply have one rate per state, and there is an easy way to find the rates and be notified of changes. Collecting differently based on county, municipality, etc, is gruesomely inconvenient. Of course, it that were required, I'm sure a couple companies providing a tax-rate web service would spring up, assuming that you didn't already receive such a service from someone like your payment gateway service.
As far as fraud, if you're buying anything over eBay, you should be buying it with a credit card. If you can't pay with a credit card, don't buy it. The credit card is the giant on *your* side when it comes to a fraudulent transaction.
As far as eBay's poor response, it would be interesting to see them get sued under antitrust. It's obvious that eBay *does* have a virtual monopoly on online auctions. There's simply too many people selling and buying there to make it economically possible to survive anywhere else. When Amazon and yahoo first introduced auctions, I used to check them; I knew people who auctioned stuff on Amazon. But eBay's mega-majority of shoppers simply made it economically infeasible to do business elsewhere. Not that I'm sure what you do. Splitting ebay into mini-ebays doesn't seem like it would be real effecting; they already have an API; having an auction service as a public utility sounds absurd... but they're effectively a monopoly nonetheless.
Actually, neither one of them implicates relational theory properly. Aside from the InnoDB engine, most of MySQL is pathetically incomplete. Without InnoDB, MySQL is worthless with regard to referential integrity, which is a showstopper for any database that requires multiple tables related to each other.
As the companies using this pathetic database have noticed, 99.9999% works just fine; especially when your application is aware that you don't have a foreign key constraint and yes, the data may be munged 1 time in 1 billion and need to be cleaned.
Being a geek has always been cool. The reason Leo kept his private life so secret was he was getting mad bootay, and he didn't want people trying to step in on his turf.
CS is down as a major because people plan to do crazy shit like give laptops to every kid. We're going to end up with 1 Billion computer programmers on the planet, all earning $3/hr.
That said, we'll probably keep geekin' it up. Not only is it fun, but if she's that big of a BSD fan, we're damn well going to try to get our contributions into the kernel, right?
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2005/10/t he_myth.html
That only helps prove his point. The smaller the cost of goods is, the smaller the reduction is net profit per unit with a price reduction.
Anything you know you want to buy before you get to the store is doomed to die out unless it has a compelling reason to be in a retail space. It's time for those stores to adapt their business model to a new reality. That reality is: people can buy books cheaply online.
What does a local game store offer which is unique?
Personally, if I were looking to do that sort of thing, I'd be interested in doing a sort of modular nerd paradise. Here's what I'd want to offer:
(1) Food. Food is high margin and if someone is there already, you have a captive audience. Sell pizza, hot dogs, nachos, coffee, ice cream, etc. Perhaps do periodic pickups from takeout places, and offer your customers menus and add on a delivery charge. Take this an extra step and you can potentially get a license and start offering alcoholic drinks. Beers+pool is old school. How about beer+D&D?
(2) Gaming. Offer LAN gaming by the hour with some sort of "club discount". I think I'd want to try to ensure the computers were mostly used by having X computers at a profitable $Y/hr charge. Then you also sell a "club card" for unlimited play (free or perhaps super discounted) that could be used; but those gamers would be limited to a certain percentage of the systems (first come first serve) and would have to renew their lease every so often (say, each 30 minutes). At such time as the pay-only PCs got close to filling up, the number of "club" PCs would shrink automatically. In other words, hourly rate customers get priority.
(3) RPG sessions. Interview independant contractor GMs. Here's what you do: you have for-pay GM sessions where you supply a library of books, a table to play at, a clean, well-lit environment, etc. You charge to be in the game, and you share the revenue with the GM, and you get the best people playing. I can't speak for everyone, but I know that I've played with GMs where when our game ended, I would gladly have paid money to play. Now, this isn't likely to be a mainstay income, but I think the idea of picking up some extra money while playing with some very dedicated players would appeal to the would-be GMs and provide a revenue stream. RPG sessions come with a discount at the food area.
(4) Video games? I think I'd want one wall full of classics people would still pay to play - well maintained copies of stuff like Street Fighter II (maybe super, or Super:turbo), Race Drivin, Ms. Pac-Man, etc - classics new and old.
In other words - Nerd Heaven.
And meanwhile, you'd situate the whole thing away from town in a cheap-rent area. Why? Because frankly, your money is going to come from people willing to spend hours and hours there, and those people won't mind a bit of a drive. The quick-stop people won't give you the business you need.
Would it work? I don't know. It would be cool, certainly.
I still thought of this.
It really depends on what you're after. What makes this less repetitive than any MMO? I'm relatively an MMO newb. CoH was my first, and I played WoW for a couple months. So to compare to WoW, which enjoys immense popularity, I can't see how people like it, because for me it was the epitome of repetitiveness. What did I get every few levels as a mage? An upgrade to an existing power. Instead of using "Fireball 2", I was using "Fireball 3". I encountered the same enemies with slightly different appearances. Instead of a "Blood Spider" it was a "Venemous Death Spider", and it was green instead of black, but it was still mostly the same. Moreover, fighting in dungeons, or fighting elites in general, felt like fighting the same mobs with more hit points to make them artificially tougher, whereas large group missions in CoH are very fun chaos with the varied powersets and the wildly different ways that combats can go.
Ultimately, there's a question of what an engine can do. What variations on "Go to X, kill stuff" can you handle? City of Heroes/Villains does wave attacks, rescue/escort missions and co-ordinated glowie-clicking. That's about it. What's nice about CoH is that a lot of the different powersets truly play differently. Mages in WoW seemed to hinge on certain builds and powers - like, say, the 0-second-cooldown Instant Arcane Explosion build - whereas almost every powerset in CoH in a given AT plays differently. A mind controller is utterly different from a fire controller, and a Kinetics Defender and an Empathy Defender are likewise worlds apart.
I think the real difference is that if playing your character, grouping, meeting teammates and overcoming missions are what you enjoy, you can love CoH and CoV long term. If you're into loot improvement, you can't play CoH, because it basically has none. Enhancements don't have enough variation to even qualify, to say nothing of the fact taht you can't get anything on a drop you can't just buy. PvP can be fun but isn't really balanced... and I got the feeling that's largely how WoW's was: fun, but not truly balanced, prone to ganking but not automatically a gank-fest.
Comparing CoV to WoW, I'd simply say: I have better things to do with my time than walk around, and that's how WoW felt: World of Walking, I heard it dubbed, and couldn't agree more. With CoV's improved "Call" buttons, the travel powers, it's more time "playing" and less time just running around trying to avoid spawns you don't want to aggro.
Early on that's true - you spend the first few levels fighting almost all villains. Later on, you run across a lot more good and neutral factions. Longbow and the like, as well as a lot of Elite Bosses which are basically hero builds. There's also the striking dockworkers on Sharkhead.
You must have been skipping content also, because there are some other early missions you fight heroes in - I think you're L6 or less when you go to defeat the sea witch, who is the first "hero" sort of enemy (Although she's only a boss at low levels, you encounter her again in the low 20s as the first actual "Hero" you fight (which is the CoV equivalent of an Archvillain)).
Once you get to the high teens and 20s you're also fighting Aeon corp, which is seedy but "legitimate" on the surface.
Not that your objection is wholly out of place. But I think it makes sense; villains fighting villains is going to draw a lot less hero/law enforcement heat than villains assaulting the innocent.
First, the writing. The writing in City of Villains is a notch above City of Heroes. While many contacts in City of Heroes were memorable, most of the best were in the high-level content (Crimson and Indigo, for example, were 40-44 and 45-50 level contacts). In City of Villains, you're struck early and often with the quality of the writing. I've been doing almost all contact missions, almost all solo, and at L26, I've run into a half dozen contacts now that I already remember better than most City of Heroes contacts. These ones are not just giving out missions, they are telling a story; or rather, inviting you to participate in their stories. From a uniquely quirky "MBA-turned-Arachnos-operative" contact who talks about your "synergy" together as you kidnap people and trash enemy bases for him, to the Superheroine who lost her powers in a friendly fire accident and is out for vengeance against the "friends" who "abandoned her", you'll feel like the contacts are a lot more alive. Fundamentally, they're all just standing in one place doling out missions, but their stories and speech are much more engaging and of a higher quality.
Second, the mission system. Street hunting is fine, but several "issues" ago, Cryptic raised the xp from mission completion, to encourage doing story-laden missions as opposed to random street hunting. City of Villains makes this better in several ways. First, newspaper missions: entering a zone you can immediately take "newspaper" missions from anywhere, without needing to visit a contact. Every so many missions, you build enough reputation with a contact to get a "special" mission offer which you have to see them in person to get. But this helps drastically minimize the travelling.
Next, contacts dole out their cell phone numbers a lot faster. In City of Heroes, you had to complete roughly 2/3rds of a contact's missions before you got a Call button for them. In City of Villains, you typically complete 2 missions and then receive their Call button, cutting down drastically on dull travel time, and further distancing CoV from MMOs where travelling becomes a major hassle and upgrading your modes of transportation (*cough* epic mount *cough*) becomes an overwhelmingly important goal simply because the walking is boring. It means the game is that much more fast paced.
Next, CoV missions are usually located in the zone you acquire them in. All newspaper missions are, and MOST contact missions are, unless there's a compelling story reason to have them be elsewhere. (For example, the ominous Aeon corp is located in Cap Au Diable, and so if the mission involves breaking into their corporate headquarters, there you go - but in 26 levels, I've only been sent out of zone perhaps 4-5 times)
Finally, CoV further improves by having a LOT of story arcs. It seems like I'm always doing one. Unlike one-shot missions, story arcs have, well, story behind them. They're more entertaining than one-off missions. If you continue to seek out contacts and work for them, you'll get souvenirs out the wazoo. I'd guess at 26 I probably have at least 15, if not 20 or more. I stopped counting. I've gotten more than one story arc from some contacts. Also, Arcs tend to be a bit shorter, with less "filler" material, whereas in CoH there were a lot of "now, do this" missions which didn't really move the story along very much. In other words, the content is thicker.
Unlike city of heroes, however, your starting missions are currently the same regardless of Archetype or Origin. Whereas CoH content differed for the first 5 levels or so based on Origin, everyone in CoV starts with Kalinda and the same set of missions. Devs have already said new starting content is coming, but... well, coming is not here.
Third, the Archetypes. As Zonk points out, the Mastermind is a unique experience. Overall, however, I think all the Villain ATs have a unique flavor. The least unique is probably the corruptor, which plays essentially like a defender with their power sets reversed. They don't do enough damage to