You think that's bad? Some of us have to use string and cans you insensitive clod!
In all seriousness though, some areas don't have real broadband at all, besides satellite. And in some of those areas the phone lines are so old and degraded they max out at around 24kbps down. (And of course, we can go really extreme and bring up the places that don't have any communication lines at all, but then those places usually don't have any other modern amenities either so they really don't count.) But sadly, the max 24kbps down is more widespread than you might think. In fact, where I call "home" right now (about 20 minutes from Columbus OH) up until very recently that was precisely the case. There's still no DSL or cable available, but someone was nice enough to set up a short-range (signal reaches up to about 3 miles or so) wireless ISP that is passably good.
Um... yes. You're missing a joke. The sad part is, it was right there in the article.
Fun Fact: The FX5800's two-slot cooling solution drew heavy criticism over its excessive noise. It was so loud, many likened it to a dustbuster, and it didn't help that it looked a little bit like one.
I finally gave in and tried it 2-3 months ago. I think I lasted about 5-10 hours. It just wasn't fun. The 'directional combat system' was basically irrelevant. Sure, maybe it matters later on, but that's not the point. If you want players to stick around, the game has to be fun out of the box. Of course, it also has to stay fun. WoW accomplished that for me for about 3500-4000 hours of gameplay, compared to 5-10 for AoC.
There is no moral right to acquire property without the permission of the people who created it or who now own it.
Absolutely right. But completely offtopic - this discussion has nothing to do with property. It has everything to do with copyright. Copyright is not property. Copyright is a time-limited privilege ultimately granted by the citizens for the holder thereof to exclusive sales of the work that is to be duplicated and sold. Unfortunately, right now due to ridiculous changes in copyright law brought about by lobbyists working for greedy corporations, the 'time-limited' portion is currently way out of line of the intent of copyright. This is why so many people now simply disregard copyright entirely. As a general guideline, if copyright duration on average lasts beyond the work's relevance, then copyright is not serving its purpose.
I guess what surprises me the most is that I'd have thought the biggest problem with having 20 tabs open is... you have 20 tabs open. Are you seriously reading all those websites at the one time? If so, then you must have the worst case of ADHD I've ever come across! Please, get some help:-)
For me it's just that I don't like to be constantly closing and reopening websites. It's not at all uncommon for me to have more tabs open on my PC than what can be displayed in the tab bar. Usually it's about 10-20, but I know I've had as many as 40 open at a time.
And in Guild Wars, the *only* people you ever play with more than once are people on your friends list or in your guild. That's what having everything instanced on the same "shard" does. It's so bad that they have the game show you the names of the last few players you teamed up with.
There's a whole host of reasons why this is bad, but I'm only going to mention a few of the biggies. First is player reputation. In a real community, if you stick around long enough you start to learn who people are by reputation - even people you've never met. The second is, it basically turns the game from a true online multiplayer game to one that you just play with a few friends. Why bother playing with anyone else? You'll only be teaming with someone you've never met before and you have no idea if they're a good player or completely inept (most likely they are). You may as well go play something like Neverwinter Nights. You'll be playing with the same people anyway, but you have the added bonus of being able to create your own maps.
I'm not trying to say Guild Wars is a bad game, but community is definitely not one of its strong points.
You build community by giving people tools to easily meet and play together.
That's a start, but it's not enough. You also have to make it more fun and rewarding to play with other people than to play solo. With Guild Wars, for example, you can play the whole frakking game through, start to finish, with one friend. In fact, a good 99% or more of the content is actually easiest to play that way. That's what you call co-op, not multiplayer.
In guildwars, I can be anywhere in seconds. Seconds, at not cost. Is there anything more awesome MMO can do to help socialization? All people in friends list are one second away. I can join group for any dungeon/mission i fancy in seconds. World is huge for me, not limited by where i can travel during my gaming session.
You know what else it does? It trivializes the game world. It tells you how valuable the game developers think their game world is: not very. And yes, I do know what I'm talking about. I've played about 2,500 hours of GW and probably 3,500+ hours of WoW. I'll gladly give up the instant teleportation for a real game world.
I absolutely hate how Guild Wars does it. It's actually one of my biggest beefs with the game. The game doesn't run on "shards" at all. The whole game is instanced, and the towns are little more than lobbies.
I'm just amazed at how much effort people put into whining, complaining and bitching to try to get handouts.
I too can go scratch out a 10-page pamphlet containing easily-found, mostly-outdated information then go stamp my feet and pout when people don't want to pay $50 for it. Instead of doing that though, I choose to actually go work a real job, putting in real time every week, providing a real service for people every day.
By that "logic", JK Rowling doesn't deserve payment for her Harry Potter books unless she goes and "updates" them.
She's already made plenty of money off her Harry Potter books that are 10 years old. In fact, she made plenty of profit for all of them in their first year. If she hadn't made another dime off them after the first year of sales, she'd still have a lot more money for her invested time and effort than most first-world people do.
So yeah. Damn right she doesn't deserve to still keep collecting on her first Harry Potter books.
In the middle ages when no copy right existed authors starved because every moron just could reprint it as he wished.
Ahh, those poor starving middle ages authors. The world will never know.
Besides my correction in bold, your comment is a sign of very limited insight. You basically demand that an author of a work has to make his profit/living shortly after he did his work.
No. Shortly after he publishes it.
So... in other words he can not place it into his basement and sell it later? If he sells it as a book, but 10 years later it could become a movie, he is out? When someone finally after the movie was a success thinks about making it into a musical, he is out? HELLLLLO? Are you nuts? With what right should anybody be able to "transform" an authors work into a movie a musical a DVD a CD a TV show without paying proper royalties to said author?
If you write a book, copyright it, then store it in your basement for 10 years you obviously don't care much about making a profit from it. So sure. Or, you could just wait to copyright it till after you get it out of your basement.
Why the F**K do you want to treat intellectual work different from any other work?
Exactly!! What kind of sense does it make to treat it differently from any other work? You work, you get paid for it. Or you get paid, and do the work. Either way, that's it. Over. Done. There's no reason why anyone should continue to keep getting paid indefinitely for work they did umpteen years ago. You know as well as I do that most copyrighted works generally provide their worth in profit within the first year. A good movie generates the vast majority of its profit in its first month. PC game publishers admit that they make most of their profit in the first week. A best seller book can make the author millions of dollars of profit in the first year. So tell me. Why is it that a particularly fine book/painting/audio track/movie/etc. should continue to pay money indefinitely even after the author has already gotten obscenely wealthy from it, while other particularly fine jobs do not? If I build a bad chair, most likely no one will buy it, or if they do they won't pay much for it. And rightly so - the chair is junk. If I build a particularly good and beautiful chair, it will probably net me a nice sum. At least a few hundred bucks, anyway. But people seem to have forgotten that exactly the same thing applies to intellectual work. You don't deserve to keep getting paid for a book 40 years down the road just because you didn't make as much money from it as you wanted to in the first few years. The reason you didn't make as much money from it as you wanted to is because your book sucks, just like my bad chair. It's junk. There's a reason people aren't buying it. That still doesn't mean you should keep collecting until you're finally satisfied that it's paid itself off. If you wrote a crappy book, you probably should lose money on it.
Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?
It absolutely applies. There have been many many things that have failed initially because they were released before there time. It's one of the risks you take.
Or to put it another way, if I build and sell Widget A based on my patent, and for whatever reason it doesn't sell well at all, then when the patent finally expires another company builds Widget B which is almost identical and it sells really well, should they now pay me money for the patent?
There's a reason Patents and Copyright are supposed to be time-limited.
The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements. Sorry, no one anywhere has ever had a right to making a profit. Patents and Copyright are the public giving the creator the privilege of exclusive sales of the product of his creation for a limited time. If you can't make a profit from your idea in a reasonable time period, then that's your problem, and no one else's.
Given how easy it is to publish, market, and distribute works these days, copyright should be shorter than it initially was, not longer.
Methinks the problem isn't piracy so much as that he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete by a newer better version, the creator of which is offing at a much better price (free).
The whole discussion has been about Gamestop, because that's the only option to buy/sell used games for most people. The only flawed assumption I made was that you weren't posting offtopic. Apparently you were.
But thanks for explaining why everything you posted here is completely irrelevant for most people.
You too, make a flawed assumption. A used sale is not a lost sale.
No, it's you that's making the flawed assumption. You're wrongly assuming that you get a significant discount buying a used game instead of new at Gamestop. The discount is a measly 10%.
Instead of buying that Xbox game for $60 new, you can get it for $54 used. Or that DS game goes used for $27 instead of $30. If you can afford $54 to buy the game used, you definitely afford the $60 to buy it new as well. (If your money really is so tight that the extra $6 is going to break you, you really can't afford the game used either.) We're not talking used discounts on the scale of what you might get for a used car. The reason is obvious - the used game works just as well and can theoretically last just as long as the new one right beside it. The only "lost value" is the package and the owner's manual. Big loss.
So yes, it's quite valid to assume that a used game sale at Gamestop = lost new sale.
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You think that's bad? Some of us have to use string and cans you insensitive clod!
In all seriousness though, some areas don't have real broadband at all, besides satellite. And in some of those areas the phone lines are so old and degraded they max out at around 24kbps down. (And of course, we can go really extreme and bring up the places that don't have any communication lines at all, but then those places usually don't have any other modern amenities either so they really don't count.) But sadly, the max 24kbps down is more widespread than you might think. In fact, where I call "home" right now (about 20 minutes from Columbus OH) up until very recently that was precisely the case. There's still no DSL or cable available, but someone was nice enough to set up a short-range (signal reaches up to about 3 miles or so) wireless ISP that is passably good.
Um... yes. You're missing a joke. The sad part is, it was right there in the article.
Fun Fact: The FX5800's two-slot cooling solution drew heavy criticism over its excessive noise. It was so loud, many likened it to a dustbuster, and it didn't help that it looked a little bit like one.
I think he's been working on the cover for his TPS reports.
That's a good guess, but no.
I finally gave in and tried it 2-3 months ago. I think I lasted about 5-10 hours. It just wasn't fun. The 'directional combat system' was basically irrelevant. Sure, maybe it matters later on, but that's not the point. If you want players to stick around, the game has to be fun out of the box. Of course, it also has to stay fun. WoW accomplished that for me for about 3500-4000 hours of gameplay, compared to 5-10 for AoC.
So that means the average person should be able to guess the name of my first pet in 6 guesses, right? Go ahead. Try.
Haha, you got exactly what I had in mind.
News at 11.
That's nice. Now can you post that without the annoying doublespace?
Translation:
TL;DR.
Same here.
Physical punishment and physical abuse are not synonyms. You and GP are probably both correct, but you're talking about two different things.
There is no moral right to acquire property without the permission of the people who created it or who now own it.
Absolutely right. But completely offtopic - this discussion has nothing to do with property. It has everything to do with copyright. Copyright is not property. Copyright is a time-limited privilege ultimately granted by the citizens for the holder thereof to exclusive sales of the work that is to be duplicated and sold. Unfortunately, right now due to ridiculous changes in copyright law brought about by lobbyists working for greedy corporations, the 'time-limited' portion is currently way out of line of the intent of copyright. This is why so many people now simply disregard copyright entirely. As a general guideline, if copyright duration on average lasts beyond the work's relevance, then copyright is not serving its purpose.
I guess what surprises me the most is that I'd have thought the biggest problem with having 20 tabs open is... you have 20 tabs open. Are you seriously reading all those websites at the one time? If so, then you must have the worst case of ADHD I've ever come across! Please, get some help :-)
For me it's just that I don't like to be constantly closing and reopening websites. It's not at all uncommon for me to have more tabs open on my PC than what can be displayed in the tab bar. Usually it's about 10-20, but I know I've had as many as 40 open at a time.
Yes, but not *just* spam. They will also get new friends with dead uncles!
No, he has to be right! I know, because I spent 15 minutes with a trial account once and I didn't meet any other people either!
And in Guild Wars, the *only* people you ever play with more than once are people on your friends list or in your guild. That's what having everything instanced on the same "shard" does. It's so bad that they have the game show you the names of the last few players you teamed up with.
There's a whole host of reasons why this is bad, but I'm only going to mention a few of the biggies. First is player reputation. In a real community, if you stick around long enough you start to learn who people are by reputation - even people you've never met. The second is, it basically turns the game from a true online multiplayer game to one that you just play with a few friends. Why bother playing with anyone else? You'll only be teaming with someone you've never met before and you have no idea if they're a good player or completely inept (most likely they are). You may as well go play something like Neverwinter Nights. You'll be playing with the same people anyway, but you have the added bonus of being able to create your own maps.
I'm not trying to say Guild Wars is a bad game, but community is definitely not one of its strong points.
You build community by giving people tools to easily meet and play together.
That's a start, but it's not enough. You also have to make it more fun and rewarding to play with other people than to play solo. With Guild Wars, for example, you can play the whole frakking game through, start to finish, with one friend. In fact, a good 99% or more of the content is actually easiest to play that way. That's what you call co-op, not multiplayer.
In guildwars, I can be anywhere in seconds. Seconds, at not cost. Is there anything more awesome MMO can do to help socialization? All people in friends list are one second away. I can join group for any dungeon/mission i fancy in seconds. World is huge for me, not limited by where i can travel during my gaming session.
You know what else it does? It trivializes the game world. It tells you how valuable the game developers think their game world is: not very. And yes, I do know what I'm talking about. I've played about 2,500 hours of GW and probably 3,500+ hours of WoW. I'll gladly give up the instant teleportation for a real game world.
I absolutely hate how Guild Wars does it. It's actually one of my biggest beefs with the game. The game doesn't run on "shards" at all. The whole game is instanced, and the towns are little more than lobbies.
I'm just amazed at how much effort people put into whining, complaining and bitching to try to get handouts.
I too can go scratch out a 10-page pamphlet containing easily-found, mostly-outdated information then go stamp my feet and pout when people don't want to pay $50 for it. Instead of doing that though, I choose to actually go work a real job, putting in real time every week, providing a real service for people every day.
By that "logic", JK Rowling doesn't deserve payment for her Harry Potter books unless she goes and
"updates" them.
She's already made plenty of money off her Harry Potter books that are 10 years old. In fact, she made plenty of profit for all of them in their first year. If she hadn't made another dime off them after the first year of sales, she'd still have a lot more money for her invested time and effort than most first-world people do.
So yeah. Damn right she doesn't deserve to still keep collecting on her first Harry Potter books.
In the middle ages when no copy right existed authors starved because every moron just could reprint it as he wished.
Ahh, those poor starving middle ages authors. The world will never know.
Besides my correction in bold, your comment is a sign of very limited insight. You basically demand that an author of a work has to make his profit/living shortly after he did his work.
No. Shortly after he publishes it.
So ... in other words he can not place it into his basement and sell it later? If he sells it as a book, but 10 years later it could become a movie, he is out? When someone finally after the movie was a success thinks about making it into a musical, he is out? HELLLLLO? Are you nuts? With what right should anybody be able to "transform" an authors work into a movie a musical a DVD a CD a TV show without paying proper royalties to said author?
If you write a book, copyright it, then store it in your basement for 10 years you obviously don't care much about making a profit from it. So sure. Or, you could just wait to copyright it till after you get it out of your basement.
Why the F**K do you want to treat intellectual work different from any other work?
Exactly!! What kind of sense does it make to treat it differently from any other work? You work, you get paid for it. Or you get paid, and do the work. Either way, that's it. Over. Done. There's no reason why anyone should continue to keep getting paid indefinitely for work they did umpteen years ago. You know as well as I do that most copyrighted works generally provide their worth in profit within the first year. A good movie generates the vast majority of its profit in its first month. PC game publishers admit that they make most of their profit in the first week. A best seller book can make the author millions of dollars of profit in the first year. So tell me. Why is it that a particularly fine book/painting/audio track/movie/etc. should continue to pay money indefinitely even after the author has already gotten obscenely wealthy from it, while other particularly fine jobs do not? If I build a bad chair, most likely no one will buy it, or if they do they won't pay much for it. And rightly so - the chair is junk. If I build a particularly good and beautiful chair, it will probably net me a nice sum. At least a few hundred bucks, anyway. But people seem to have forgotten that exactly the same thing applies to intellectual work. You don't deserve to keep getting paid for a book 40 years down the road just because you didn't make as much money from it as you wanted to in the first few years. The reason you didn't make as much money from it as you wanted to is because your book sucks, just like my bad chair. It's junk. There's a reason people aren't buying it. That still doesn't mean you should keep collecting until you're finally satisfied that it's paid itself off. If you wrote a crappy book, you probably should lose money on it.
Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?
It absolutely applies. There have been many many things that have failed initially because they were released before there time. It's one of the risks you take.
Or to put it another way, if I build and sell Widget A based on my patent, and for whatever reason it doesn't sell well at all, then when the patent finally expires another company builds Widget B which is almost identical and it sells really well, should they now pay me money for the patent?
There's a reason Patents and Copyright are supposed to be time-limited.
The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements. Sorry, no one anywhere has ever had a right to making a profit. Patents and Copyright are the public giving the creator the privilege of exclusive sales of the product of his creation for a limited time. If you can't make a profit from your idea in a reasonable time period, then that's your problem, and no one else's.
Given how easy it is to publish, market, and distribute works these days, copyright should be shorter than it initially was, not longer.
Methinks the problem isn't piracy so much as that he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete by a newer better version, the creator of which is offing at a much better price (free).
This story should indeed be tagged Troll.
Um... they did include Firefox 3.5B in the test.
The whole discussion has been about Gamestop, because that's the only option to buy/sell used games for most people. The only flawed assumption I made was that you weren't posting offtopic. Apparently you were.
But thanks for explaining why everything you posted here is completely irrelevant for most people.
You too, make a flawed assumption. A used sale is not a lost sale.
No, it's you that's making the flawed assumption. You're wrongly assuming that you get a significant discount buying a used game instead of new at Gamestop. The discount is a measly 10%.
Instead of buying that Xbox game for $60 new, you can get it for $54 used. Or that DS game goes used for $27 instead of $30. If you can afford $54 to buy the game used, you definitely afford the $60 to buy it new as well. (If your money really is so tight that the extra $6 is going to break you, you really can't afford the game used either.) We're not talking used discounts on the scale of what you might get for a used car. The reason is obvious - the used game works just as well and can theoretically last just as long as the new one right beside it. The only "lost value" is the package and the owner's manual. Big loss.
So yes, it's quite valid to assume that a used game sale at Gamestop = lost new sale.