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Comment Re:so who won and what did they get? (Score 1) 398

Not directly; the real world cash values of ISK and property in-game is derived from trades between players, for the most part. CCP's primary income comes from subscriptions and novelty items sales, much like WoW. (It's just that CCP accepts in-game currency as a subscription fee proxy, which makes it seems like CCP is getting a windfall from value destruction, when it’s simply value they already received a long time ago.)

Comment Re:Oh, really (Score 1) 135

Project Aon is an effort to post the old Lone Wolf game books to the webpage medium...

http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

I'm also seeing similar book apps in the App Store which give the player a chance to pick starting stats to influence gameplay progression. (One I found involved the player RPing as a dragon, hoarding treasure and defending territory from other dragons and human kings and wizards. I forgot the name, though.)

Comment Re:Bad use of tax dollars in support of commerce (Score 1) 293

The rationale for giving the the boxes wasn't to support an advertiser's market base, but to insure the government had guaranteed viewer capacity when mandating nationwide broadcasts like emergency messages or State of the Union addresses and so on. It's not just the advertisers who have a vested interest in having everyone watch TV...

Comment Re:They are not "Comics" they are "Graphic Novels" (Score 1) 387

> Seriously though, attempting to legitimize them as "Graphic Novels" is just spin
Actually, this was invented as a form of spin. In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, he illustrates how Will Eisner's early attempts to make serious fare (like A Contract With God) would be marginalized, despite being one of the first comics long enough to be a book, rather than a magazine, which most comics were up until then.

Comment Re:Why am I not surprised? (Score 2, Informative) 95

The amount of work involved in upgrading a Mac has, usually, been excessive.

This has only been true historically with the consumer models. The models that Apple designates for "professional" usually upgrade much easier. My current G5 has full access from a side door (as well as the current Mac Pro line) and even my old LC and 4400 had easily accessible PDS and PCI slots when the case is slid off. (My iMac G4 was the only machine I had I couldn't upgrade myself.) It's just that, as the "ease of use" brand in the industry, Apple's more famous machines are the all-in-one and laptop units that have the more cramped assembly and design.

Comment Re:Not consistent? (Score 1) 823

It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied. Economics - a far softer science with a (so far) vastly greater impact on human society - gets a staggering amount of leeway by comparison.

Because of its scope and visibility, disciplines like Economics can get away with the Big Lie effect. Climatology, which is more subtle and relatively young, suffers from the Cassandra problem instead. Sad, but true...

Comment Re:from rfc2100 (Score 1) 1397

Notice that including the article text, the linked comments there and the comments here, you are the only one who explicitly referred to the original documentation that spelled out this tradition: the RFCs. Both RFC 1178 (which is only mentioned as a tag on the article) and your quoting 2100 are the only references to this. It seems most 'Net users don't have a sense of history any more... I haven't even heard much in the way of the creation of now RFC lately.

Comment Re:Instruction set. (Score 1) 407

Oh my goodness, did they really write it in assembler? I always imagined they already used high-level languages at that time.

I don't remember high level languages being considered "proper" for commercial development until the late 80's at the earliest. When the Mac was first introduced in the mid-80's, it was still considered important to write all the system and OS code in 68k assembler, with apps only begrudgingly being written in Pascal. And on the PC side, games and certain networking heavy apps were still written in x86 at late as the mid-90's. It was only with C, which was originally considered a "high level assembler" did many development houses consider such programming "real" development. (And even into the late 90's, I still saw inline assembler used in places for "performance reasons," an idea not taken seriously anymore by most due to how compilers have advanced in recent years.)

Classic Games (Games)

Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games 44

MarkN writes "There's hardly a video game made nowadays that doesn't involve puzzles in some sense. In some games they serve as occasional roadblocks to break up the action, and in the genre of adventure games the whole focus of the game is solving a set of related puzzles. I've written a piece for AdventureClassicGaming describing and categorizing puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games make use of explicitly designed abstract puzzles — they're explicitly designed rather than being randomly or procedurally generated, and abstract in the sense that all you need to do is figure out the right actions to perform, rather than making the performing of those actions be a challenge in and of itself. My classification makes distinctions at two levels: you have self-contained puzzles, which can depend upon using your basic verbs of interaction, solving some minigame based around achieving a particular configuration, or providing an answer to a riddle. On the other side, you have puzzles that require some external key: this could be an item, a piece of information, or an internal change to the game's state triggered somewhere else. From there, I talk about some of the possibilities and pitfalls these puzzles carry, as well as their use in other genres. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on the use and application of puzzles in adventure games, and games in general."

Comment Re:What pisses me off (Score 1) 687

however I don't understand how my television can't compensate for that and limit accordingly.

Some can and do. My parents (back when I was in college) had a nice feature on their TV set called "Smart Sound" that did do normalization across TV channels and commercial breaks just fine and we always left it on. However, apparently it wasn't a popular enough (or noticed enough) feature of TVs to stay on the market, as both I and my parents have gone through 3-4 sets since then, and we haven't seen a similar feature since.

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