I think something like 400,000 people responded to a UK census with their religion listed as "Jedi", although I understand that the inclusion of Jedi as an option was more a stunt on the part of the census takers to encourage people in the student demographic (the demographic least likely to respond to the census) to take part and as such it was never officially recognised as a religion.
I seem to remember reading Fallout 3 did level scaling for "humanoid" enemies, so while mole rats were tough in the beginning of the game, deathclaws were easy by the end but the main story arc was around humans and these retained a consistent difficulty level. This could still be negated with the right mix of skills and equipment and was far less punishing than Oblivion's level scaling (where essentially you were penalised for levelling up as it made your uber weapons less effective while not really giving you a skill advance over the opposition). I thought Fallout 3 got it about right, while Oblivion was incredibly frustrating at times. I remember first encountering this when stuck on a side quest where some guy killed my rogue easily, so went off and did 5 or 6 hours of grinding and levelling, came back and found he killed me even quicker than before - not fun!
The reward of an MMO is that you feel a part of a much larger game world with real life denizens following their particularly paths and with whom you can interact. What they're referring to here is old school co-operative gameplay which has existed since the very early days of arcade games over 30 years ago, but I guess that doesn't work too well from a marketing perspective, not enough buzzwords (albeit even MMO is now pretty old hat to hard core gamers).
You could probably drop the poly count significantly though - besides it's already being done in games like Borderlands. Fewer polygons and some occasional slow down is probably a fair trade off for the fun of split screen multiplayer, it works for Mario Kart after all.
Even worse if, like a good percentage of the people using this site, your livelihood depends on internet access in one way or another. How do you even support yourself if you can't work while you're trying to fight a false accusation?
It's easier than that - produce a product at a price point people are happy to pay (i.e. not £10 for a digital album when I can buy the CD version for £5 in local stores), make it incredibly easy for people to obtain your product, make it easy to use and share across different devices, make a quality product people are happy to support, stop criminalising your best customers, accept that you'll never stamp out free downloading for good and stop pouring money into the bottomless pit of DRM. Do those things and you will never be short of customers, then learn to be satisfied with the millions you are making instead of obsessing over the millions more you wish you were.
Perhaps all of the very experienced business owners here at slashdot could emerge from moms basement and explain how you make a living that way with music?
laughable.
What makes you think that you are entitled to make a living from making music at all? Was the fletcher entitled to making a living from producing arrows? Or the blacksmith entitled to making a living for making horse shoes?
The irony is, just over ten years ago some geeks did come out of the basement and show the world how to make money from the internet in the spirit of "information wants to be free". They were called Larry and Sergei and they seem to have done pretty well for themselves from it, yet time and again these multi-billion dollar fossil record labels tell us they need their business model protecting because they don't understand how to monetise their product on the internet. I'm sure no end of friendly neighbourhood geeks could help them if they really wanted to change.
The choice of IE8 isn't being removed from those users. They can pick whichever browser they happen to prefer, if that happens to be IE8 then that's their prerogative. If they're incapable of picking the browser they prefer from a limited subset then they have more to worry about in the online environment than usability. In reality if these browsers are hidden initially, they're unlikely to ever be picked.
My only question then would be how long would it naturally take for the ice to melt and release the methane. If it's 10 times cleaner to burn it but the methane would naturally be released over the course of several thousand years, then would it be more detrimental to do a fast clean burn or a long slow release which the environment may be able to adapt to.
What if your child killed my child because you left a gun around - you sound like the kind of person who'd be pretty cut up about that. Should we say "oh, you poor guy, you've suffered enough and there's no point us breaking up your family over this"? Since when did sadness and remorse over the consequences mean avoiding all personal responsibility for our actions?
It needn't be jail time. Make the guy spend the rest of his days educating kids about the danger of guns. Hell, if he's got any kind of remorse he'd be the first one to suggest it. This is a horrible, tragic accident, but it was entirely preventable and for everyone to just move on from it without learning anything is wrong. He doesn't necessarily need to be punished (although I don't know who is qualified to judge how sad someone has to be to avoid punishment), but his case can still be an example to others one way or another.
Nothing in your response counters GP's point. It doesn't matter if he left the gun around all the time or if it was a freak incident, it was still negligence - he clearly knew it was a dangerous weapon hence his locking it up in the first place. Maybe it's because I've not grown up around guns, but I can't even begin to imagine leaving something so deadly lying around in the house with a child. Most parents of very young kids have a panic attack if an outside door is left open or a pack of paracetamol isn't locked away in the medicine cabinet, what could possibly excuse this guy thinking a gun would be okay to leave unattended within reach of a kid even for a minute?
If it makes one other potentially negligent parent mend their ways and saves even only one life, then it certainly isn't "nothing".
Re:Why is the wii controller even mentioned?
on
Accidental Wii Suicide
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it's more a coincidence that they happened to have a Wii control - kids that age will pick up and investigate just about anything that's left within reach, it's how they learn about the world around them. It's mere conjecture to suggest that she picked it up specifically because she mistook it for a Wiimote, and as the GP suggests, it detracts from the real story which is don't be dumb enough to mix kids and guns (unless you're pointing one at the other while issuing orders to begone from your lawn).
I know your point, but considering there are still plenty of people who enjoy playing Civ III, from almost ten years ago, let alone Civ IV from a mere 5 years ago, chances are there will be people in 10 years still playing Civ V, never mind Civ XII.
In what universe is a meter long "light-sabre" preferable to a handheld particle weapon?
One where light travels slowly enough that you can react to and deflect dozens of said particle beams with said lightsabre? Seriously, missile attacks seem so easily circumvented by anyone carrying a lightsabre, you have to wonder why the whole universe hasn't reverted to melee combat (although I guess guns are still good for mass, mobilised oppression).
Nothing is going to stop you creating/using a tether on your iPad/iPhone. It may invalidate your warranty though.
It is a bit like complaining that Tesco won't allow you to boil fish in the kettle you got off them.
Nice attempt at a strawman, but for the analogy to be fair it would have to be a world where the majority of other kettles Tesco sell already allow/support you boiling fish, and then Tesco claim that it's not practical to boil fish in kettles, even though everyone's already doing it. And then you find out that the exact same kettle bought from Sainsbury's or Asda allows fish boiling out of the box.
Your analogy completely ignores the fact that everyone else is already doing tethering, and that even the iPhone does tethering with other devices.
100% sense. What I see time and again on these threads is some guy/girl saying "Hey, I don't need to do x, if you need to do x, buy a different device". What they don't think about is the point where they suddenly do need to do x (or some equivalent), but there's no option, and they've already bought into the product.. At that point, by their logic, there's no logic in asking Apple to implement x when they can just replace all their hardware and software and completely change their way of working to accommodate that. I've yet to see any of them effectively answer the question about burying the option in some hidden menu to at least give users the choice. Like most people they think about their own needs first, so long as $CORPORATION meets their needs they're happy to carry on blinkered without wondering what else the product could do.
Hell, I never had any of these issues with the PDA I used almost a decade ago - and that was running Windows! For the vast majority of apps it's just not an issue. If you're doing something that requires intensive network access or gaming, then it's not unreasonable to expect the user to close a few apps. They manage to get their head around this basic concept on desktops/laptops, so what's so much more complex about the iPhone/iPad that they wouldn't understand?
Why is "user experience" always the standard answer to these kind of questions? If you particularly want or need multitasking then the practise is quite blatantly diminishing your user experience. What's the harm in having it disabled by default and giving power users the option to enable it - even if it means looking up how to do so and trawling through a few menus, that short term initial hit to user experience will be cancelled out for that user by the long term benefits.
Am I just being too cynical/paranoid when I say this is probably less about user experience and more about resources? Killing multitasking pretty much guarantees everything runs faster on your device compared to others, even if your hardware is underpowered, suddenly you can better price your product against your competition for hardware which is required to run applications X, Y and Z.
They should just stop claiming unlimited usage - sell people an amount of data (make it easy to go over that amount and pay extra, or completely variable so you pay less on a month where you don't use the allowance). It irks me no end that in this country (UK) we have "WOW UNLIMITED DATA PACKAGE, ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR £X!!!* (*subject to 700mb/month fair use limit)" instead of just saying "750mb/month for £X". I also notice fair usage only ever works in their favour - so we pay for unlimited usage, we get punished when we hit a fairly small limit, we get no benefit when we stay below that limit, how this can even be called "fair" use under advertising standards is baffling.
Slashdot Mirror
I think something like 400,000 people responded to a UK census with their religion listed as "Jedi", although I understand that the inclusion of Jedi as an option was more a stunt on the part of the census takers to encourage people in the student demographic (the demographic least likely to respond to the census) to take part and as such it was never officially recognised as a religion.
Not to mention the Emperor already has a job, so he'd be unlikely to be in the job centre in the first place.
I seem to remember reading Fallout 3 did level scaling for "humanoid" enemies, so while mole rats were tough in the beginning of the game, deathclaws were easy by the end but the main story arc was around humans and these retained a consistent difficulty level. This could still be negated with the right mix of skills and equipment and was far less punishing than Oblivion's level scaling (where essentially you were penalised for levelling up as it made your uber weapons less effective while not really giving you a skill advance over the opposition). I thought Fallout 3 got it about right, while Oblivion was incredibly frustrating at times. I remember first encountering this when stuck on a side quest where some guy killed my rogue easily, so went off and did 5 or 6 hours of grinding and levelling, came back and found he killed me even quicker than before - not fun!
The reward of an MMO is that you feel a part of a much larger game world with real life denizens following their particularly paths and with whom you can interact. What they're referring to here is old school co-operative gameplay which has existed since the very early days of arcade games over 30 years ago, but I guess that doesn't work too well from a marketing perspective, not enough buzzwords (albeit even MMO is now pretty old hat to hard core gamers).
You could probably drop the poly count significantly though - besides it's already being done in games like Borderlands. Fewer polygons and some occasional slow down is probably a fair trade off for the fun of split screen multiplayer, it works for Mario Kart after all.
Necromancer needs food badly...
Even worse if, like a good percentage of the people using this site, your livelihood depends on internet access in one way or another. How do you even support yourself if you can't work while you're trying to fight a false accusation?
It's easier than that - produce a product at a price point people are happy to pay (i.e. not £10 for a digital album when I can buy the CD version for £5 in local stores), make it incredibly easy for people to obtain your product, make it easy to use and share across different devices, make a quality product people are happy to support, stop criminalising your best customers, accept that you'll never stamp out free downloading for good and stop pouring money into the bottomless pit of DRM. Do those things and you will never be short of customers, then learn to be satisfied with the millions you are making instead of obsessing over the millions more you wish you were.
Perhaps all of the very experienced business owners here at slashdot could emerge from moms basement and explain how you make a living that way with music?
laughable.
What makes you think that you are entitled to make a living from making music at all? Was the fletcher entitled to making a living from producing arrows? Or the blacksmith entitled to making a living for making horse shoes?
The irony is, just over ten years ago some geeks did come out of the basement and show the world how to make money from the internet in the spirit of "information wants to be free". They were called Larry and Sergei and they seem to have done pretty well for themselves from it, yet time and again these multi-billion dollar fossil record labels tell us they need their business model protecting because they don't understand how to monetise their product on the internet. I'm sure no end of friendly neighbourhood geeks could help them if they really wanted to change.
The choice of IE8 isn't being removed from those users. They can pick whichever browser they happen to prefer, if that happens to be IE8 then that's their prerogative. If they're incapable of picking the browser they prefer from a limited subset then they have more to worry about in the online environment than usability. In reality if these browsers are hidden initially, they're unlikely to ever be picked.
My only question then would be how long would it naturally take for the ice to melt and release the methane. If it's 10 times cleaner to burn it but the methane would naturally be released over the course of several thousand years, then would it be more detrimental to do a fast clean burn or a long slow release which the environment may be able to adapt to.
What if your child killed my child because you left a gun around - you sound like the kind of person who'd be pretty cut up about that. Should we say "oh, you poor guy, you've suffered enough and there's no point us breaking up your family over this"? Since when did sadness and remorse over the consequences mean avoiding all personal responsibility for our actions?
It needn't be jail time. Make the guy spend the rest of his days educating kids about the danger of guns. Hell, if he's got any kind of remorse he'd be the first one to suggest it. This is a horrible, tragic accident, but it was entirely preventable and for everyone to just move on from it without learning anything is wrong. He doesn't necessarily need to be punished (although I don't know who is qualified to judge how sad someone has to be to avoid punishment), but his case can still be an example to others one way or another.
Nothing in your response counters GP's point. It doesn't matter if he left the gun around all the time or if it was a freak incident, it was still negligence - he clearly knew it was a dangerous weapon hence his locking it up in the first place. Maybe it's because I've not grown up around guns, but I can't even begin to imagine leaving something so deadly lying around in the house with a child. Most parents of very young kids have a panic attack if an outside door is left open or a pack of paracetamol isn't locked away in the medicine cabinet, what could possibly excuse this guy thinking a gun would be okay to leave unattended within reach of a kid even for a minute?
If it makes one other potentially negligent parent mend their ways and saves even only one life, then it certainly isn't "nothing".
I think it's more a coincidence that they happened to have a Wii control - kids that age will pick up and investigate just about anything that's left within reach, it's how they learn about the world around them. It's mere conjecture to suggest that she picked it up specifically because she mistook it for a Wiimote, and as the GP suggests, it detracts from the real story which is don't be dumb enough to mix kids and guns (unless you're pointing one at the other while issuing orders to begone from your lawn).
I know your point, but considering there are still plenty of people who enjoy playing Civ III, from almost ten years ago, let alone Civ IV from a mere 5 years ago, chances are there will be people in 10 years still playing Civ V, never mind Civ XII.
In what universe is a meter long "light-sabre" preferable to a handheld particle weapon?
One where light travels slowly enough that you can react to and deflect dozens of said particle beams with said lightsabre? Seriously, missile attacks seem so easily circumvented by anyone carrying a lightsabre, you have to wonder why the whole universe hasn't reverted to melee combat (although I guess guns are still good for mass, mobilised oppression).
They prefer to think of it as intelligently designing the mod.
Nothing is going to stop you creating/using a tether on your iPad/iPhone. It may invalidate your warranty though.
It is a bit like complaining that Tesco won't allow you to boil fish in the kettle you got off them.
Nice attempt at a strawman, but for the analogy to be fair it would have to be a world where the majority of other kettles Tesco sell already allow/support you boiling fish, and then Tesco claim that it's not practical to boil fish in kettles, even though everyone's already doing it. And then you find out that the exact same kettle bought from Sainsbury's or Asda allows fish boiling out of the box.
Your analogy completely ignores the fact that everyone else is already doing tethering, and that even the iPhone does tethering with other devices.
100% sense. What I see time and again on these threads is some guy/girl saying "Hey, I don't need to do x, if you need to do x, buy a different device". What they don't think about is the point where they suddenly do need to do x (or some equivalent), but there's no option, and they've already bought into the product.. At that point, by their logic, there's no logic in asking Apple to implement x when they can just replace all their hardware and software and completely change their way of working to accommodate that. I've yet to see any of them effectively answer the question about burying the option in some hidden menu to at least give users the choice. Like most people they think about their own needs first, so long as $CORPORATION meets their needs they're happy to carry on blinkered without wondering what else the product could do.
Maybe he's married.
Jailbroken industrial tree shredders in 3... 2... 1...
Hell, I never had any of these issues with the PDA I used almost a decade ago - and that was running Windows! For the vast majority of apps it's just not an issue. If you're doing something that requires intensive network access or gaming, then it's not unreasonable to expect the user to close a few apps. They manage to get their head around this basic concept on desktops/laptops, so what's so much more complex about the iPhone/iPad that they wouldn't understand?
Why is "user experience" always the standard answer to these kind of questions? If you particularly want or need multitasking then the practise is quite blatantly diminishing your user experience. What's the harm in having it disabled by default and giving power users the option to enable it - even if it means looking up how to do so and trawling through a few menus, that short term initial hit to user experience will be cancelled out for that user by the long term benefits.
Am I just being too cynical/paranoid when I say this is probably less about user experience and more about resources? Killing multitasking pretty much guarantees everything runs faster on your device compared to others, even if your hardware is underpowered, suddenly you can better price your product against your competition for hardware which is required to run applications X, Y and Z.
They should just stop claiming unlimited usage - sell people an amount of data (make it easy to go over that amount and pay extra, or completely variable so you pay less on a month where you don't use the allowance). It irks me no end that in this country (UK) we have "WOW UNLIMITED DATA PACKAGE, ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR £X!!!* (*subject to 700mb/month fair use limit)" instead of just saying "750mb/month for £X". I also notice fair usage only ever works in their favour - so we pay for unlimited usage, we get punished when we hit a fairly small limit, we get no benefit when we stay below that limit, how this can even be called "fair" use under advertising standards is baffling.