'Heart Of Gold'
A thread for the discussion of games: board, LARP, MMORPG, video, tabletop RPG, game theory etc. etc. and all attendant news, developments and ancillary subjects thereof, as well as coordinating/scheduling games either online or IRL. All are welcome to chime in, talk about their favorite games or learn about gaming of any sort.
PLEASE TO WHITEFONT SPOILERS for video games, RPG modules or anything for which foreknowledge of events might lessen one's enjoyment of whatever gaming experience.
I started playing Magic with the first edition, and quit about the time the Arabians started coming out. Too many choices! No longer fun.
By that point we had something like 2000 cards.
During that period of my life I was teaching high school, and giving Magic cards away as performance rewards.
I picked it up again later, when my boss was a two-time national M:TG champ. He mandated that me and another guy would sit down and get our asses handed to us every day at lunch.
Pete
Like I said, I picked up most of my knowledge from science magazines and the like, but I am told that Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End has a good depiction of AR...
CaBil, it wasn't just AR, but all the other terms you were using too. I've used wikipedia to look up a few since then, so some of them were not particularly useful beginners' guides...
Anything you are still uncertain about?
Oh plenty, but I will do more digging when I have time, and pose questions as and when.
Okay, one, do you have a simple explanation of Cloud Computing?
Linked just because I thought it was very cute: a seven-year-old gets his first taste of D&D. [link]
That's incredibly sweet, BT. Also, cute to watch a board full o' guys flailing around in obvious need of a phrase to correspond to "OMG MY OVARIES!!"
Too cute!
He certainly has the gaming mindset down...
"No. I need to know now. It could be a monster village, daddy. You. Never. Know."
Cloud computing is the idea that there is computer resources (clock cycles, servers, memory) that are available by task rather than by renting the physical machinery. Amazon and Google are currently doing this, renting out time and resources from their server farms. Cloud comes from how computer resources are usually illustrated in org charts (as a cloud) but also represents that it is as accessible as air.
The fiction applications of it is that if you have the money, you can rent out as 'big' of a computer as you need, need a supercomputer to crack the encryption on a message? Hope your credit card holds up...