I prefer Firefox over Opera myself as well, but I think you're being a bit too harsh on Opera. IMO one of the big reasons why Firefox seems more intuitive is simply because it's more like the typical Windows software we're already used to, while the developers of Opera were a bit more daring and made something a little more different.
Because Firefox is currently the only other browser for Windows that represents real competition? Opera is nice and all, but it's not used by nearly enough people to be a real threat... yet.
Also, Firefox has a look and feel a lot more like IE than Opera does. I'm not exactly sure in how many ways this fits in, but I know it makes it easier for people familiar with IE to switch to Firefox, and perhaps it also makes Firefox and IE easier to compare than say IE and Opera.
There's other MMOs that are vastly different too, like for example City of Heroes/Villains.
And then look at the huge number of players that have multiple accounts for their MMO of choice. It's not that big a stretch to think that they might be willing to try a new game, and then drop one of their less-used accounts on the old MMO as they spend less time in it.
Also, you don't *need* 8 million subscribers for a game to be successful. Eventually those 8 million WoW players are going to get bored with WoW and start looking for other MMOs. Considering that most highly successful MMOs don't even hit 1 million subscribers, that leaves room for a LOT of competition as people move on from WoW.
That's at least partially because a lot of their staff has moved on, like for instance the ones that formed ArenaNet to develop Guild Wars. And look at the high quality of that game. Yeah they're releasing patches all the time, but by far most of them are to tweak skills a bit as necessary (balancing things a bit) or to add/remove holiday scenery. Very few actual bugs, and none that have been game-breaking. And GW has to be the most stable, smooth-running multiplayer game of this size that I've ever played.
Troll?? Seriously, must be some EA shill with mod points. That's not a troll, it's the bald-faced honest truth. Just because you don't like it/agree with it doesn't make it a troll.
C&C3 was so broken at release, they were already rolling out patches before it hit the shelves. And more patches in the first few weeks.
I really don't know how well they've got it working by now though, since I opted to not pay $50 for a beta, and as a result haven't bought the full release yet. Instead I decided to wait and see what the news would say about it. Sure glad I did. Maybe once the game hits bargain-bin pricing it'll be working more or less as it should.
In the previous generation, the "old" popular console with a huge library was the PS1, and the new consoles debuted at a "mere" $300. (Or was it $350? I can't even remember for sure now. But it was a lot less than $600...) That kind of price for a machine that's "just for games for the kids" is a lot easier to swallow than $600.
You're right, the problem isn't so simple as just "too many choices". The problem is too many choices in a type of product where most consumers don't know what the differences are between the choices and most don't WANT to know. The average consumer really doesn't even care about the differences between Windows and Linux, let alone all the differences between the different variations of Linux. Combine that with the fact that most software easily available to the average consumer works on Windows (and only Windows) well, it's a pretty obvious choice. Especially when most consumers don't even know that Linux exists, and wouldn't care about it if they did know.
My personal intuition is that until some large, well-established company with lots of funding available (Google I'm looking at you...) partners up with an easy-to-use, already-popular distro (Ubuntu sounds like a good choice) and runs with it, Linux will never claim any significant market-share in home desktop use.
At this point I wouldn't even care if such a project were commercialized to the neck and priced the same as Windows. At least it would give us another real option that everyone would take very seriously.
Yes, I know this'll get plenty of troll and flamebait mods. I don't know why it should. You're definitely right, and I'm not disagreeing with you. I was just trying to state how the system currently operates.
You're a little off on the $2 mouse though. Usually they toss in some $.50 adapter or something even cheaper.
OEM can actually be stretched so loosely as to simply mean "you have to buy it with hardware". At any rate, all OEM machines are built by someone, and most of the people who build OEM systems most likely use systems they built themselves. In this case I don't think it really makes much difference if the builder is an official "business" or any individual.
I'm not one to join bandwagons. But after looking at the lists of positives and negatives concerning MS in the last five years, well, they're not even remotely close to balancing each other. If they went bankrupt tomorrow I definitely wouldn't be mourning their passing.
However about my post you were responding to, it was more of a poor (apparently, since it seems no one found it funny) attempt at humor than anything.
Err, you're assuming Intel in fact has a brand spanking new architecture up its sleeve, ready to be rolled out at any given moment. State your sources please. Otherwise, let's not speculate on the future x 2.
Exactly. Netburst was their new technology that was supposed to be "the future" and we all know how well that worked out. It really is quite impressive that they've done as well as they have at evolving the P3 architecture. But as an AMD fan, this scares me because I don't know what they're going to do next if/when AMD manages to blow them out of the water again like they did back in the early P4 days (and right now I'd say it looks imminent). Despite being an AMD fan, I like Intel as well, and I don't want to see them die in the next 10 years. But it scares me because they've already played their trump card, and I'm not so sure they have another. Here's to hoping that AMD tops Intel again, but not by so much that Intel starts losing lots of market-share again.
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
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· Score: 1
If the speed limit is 40, then it should be 40, not 55 unless the policemen feels differently that day. Actually, I have a feeling I know why they operate speed limits this way. And I'm guessing they're intentionally left excessively low.
First, if a guy is clearly being somewhat unsafe on the road (but not badly enough to qualify for "reckless driving" or anything else besides speeding) and the guy is doing even just 3 MPH over the speed limit, the officer has grounds to pull him over - even though he normally wouldn't give someone a citation for doing just 3 over.
Second, trying to enforce a speed limit to the exact MPH would be a nightmare. Speedometers would need to be a lot more accurate than they are now. Radar/laser/anything else the police use to check speed would need to be a lot more accurate. Even just changing the brand of tires on your car could throw your speedometer off just enough to cause trouble. Yes, everyone could drive 5 MPH under, but you know people just don't play like that. There's always people that push the line as far as they can, and if that line is gray in this case it's easier to enforce by several orders of magnitude. Places I've lived you can usually get away with 10 or 11 over. But if you get pulled over when you thought you were only doing 9 over, and the officer says you were doing 10 over... are you really going to contest that extra 1 MPH? Either way you're breaking the law and it still means a citation, fine, and points on your record.
If you are birder, you are a rare one if you are in the field every day. Nor is it it easy to take a trip to the Amazon or some migratory bird path deep in Asia -- which are easy to do virtually. If the game is moderately fun, and especially if it has some training value (the observation skills of birders are amazing), then it could be quite successful. And even if I WAS a birder who didn't get out every day, I'm not so sure I'd be wasting my time with this. From what I can tell, this is one camera in San Fransico on the guy's back deck.
From TFA:
The new online game, to be launched Monday, April 23, will allow players to earn points by taking live photos using a remotely controllable robotic video camera and classifying the wild birds they see.
Craig Newmark, founder and customer service representative of craigslist, one of the most popular online communities in the country, is hosting the robotic video camera project from the back deck of his home, which overlooks Sutro Forest in San Francisco. Yep, sure sounds Massively Multiplayer to me. I wonder how long it will take for them to upgrade their hardware to eliminate the login queue...
But I do have to pick a nit... there's really not much "Tolkeen-y-ness" in this game. It's based 100% on the movies, which themselves have very little Tolkien in them, save in very broad strokes. They didn't even manage to build BagEnd the way Tolkien describes it, let alone anything else.
And the game world as a whole feels much much too small after just re-reading the trilogy. Places that took days and weeks to travel between on ponies take... a couple minutes on foot in the game. Yeah I know, you can't make the game-world anywhere near large enough to be anything close to realistic... but please... this to me is just ridiculous.
That said, if you're bored with what you've been playing and/or are looking for a WoW/EQ clone that's fun to play, this game delivers. But it's not for me.
Then developers with compelling new features should look for a universe other than NFL. For example, Midway makes Blitz: The League. But where are the CFL games? Right, because everyone knows that any old football game based on no league at all or some minor/international league will sell as well as one based on the NFL. Most developers don't waste their time on these for good reason.
Are all the bugs necessarily EA's fault, vs. the video driver publisher's fault? Yes they are. Most of the bugs have nothing to do with video at all. We're talking things like bugs in multiplayer netcode that other companies had working great since Windows 98 days and game exploits just for starters. And when the games you're releasing are primarily (if not exclusively) multiplayer, having bugs so severe in the netcode that multiplayer is broken at release is downright ridiculous.
EA hasn't released a game worth the full retail price for at least a good 5 years.
I have to agree with the GP about EA.
Madden 07 (for the Wii) is exceptional, Which has everything to do with the Wii's unique controller and very little to do with EA or Madden. Madden is still about 99% the same game it was 7 years ago, largely now due to the exclusive NFL rights EA weaseled out of them. There's a lot of new features we most likely would have by now in NFL games if this were not the case.
And don't even get me started on their recent releases for PC. The local landfill has less bugs than most EA fare does these days.
You're assuming that most if not all products that cost "millions of dollars" to develop will be reverse-engineered in a matter of mere months. I find that very hard to believe. As for those "thousands of employees" working in development, any employer should have the foresight to make a contract preventing them from sharing their inside knowledge of the project for at least a few years.
There's plenty of things that can be done to make a new invention profitable, even in the complete absence of patents. The inventor just has to be more creative in how he markets it.
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I prefer Firefox over Opera myself as well, but I think you're being a bit too harsh on Opera. IMO one of the big reasons why Firefox seems more intuitive is simply because it's more like the typical Windows software we're already used to, while the developers of Opera were a bit more daring and made something a little more different.
Because Firefox is currently the only other browser for Windows that represents real competition? Opera is nice and all, but it's not used by nearly enough people to be a real threat... yet.
Also, Firefox has a look and feel a lot more like IE than Opera does. I'm not exactly sure in how many ways this fits in, but I know it makes it easier for people familiar with IE to switch to Firefox, and perhaps it also makes Firefox and IE easier to compare than say IE and Opera.
There's other MMOs that are vastly different too, like for example City of Heroes/Villains.
And then look at the huge number of players that have multiple accounts for their MMO of choice. It's not that big a stretch to think that they might be willing to try a new game, and then drop one of their less-used accounts on the old MMO as they spend less time in it.
Also, you don't *need* 8 million subscribers for a game to be successful. Eventually those 8 million WoW players are going to get bored with WoW and start looking for other MMOs. Considering that most highly successful MMOs don't even hit 1 million subscribers, that leaves room for a LOT of competition as people move on from WoW.
That's at least partially because a lot of their staff has moved on, like for instance the ones that formed ArenaNet to develop Guild Wars. And look at the high quality of that game. Yeah they're releasing patches all the time, but by far most of them are to tweak skills a bit as necessary (balancing things a bit) or to add/remove holiday scenery. Very few actual bugs, and none that have been game-breaking. And GW has to be the most stable, smooth-running multiplayer game of this size that I've ever played.
Troll?? Seriously, must be some EA shill with mod points. That's not a troll, it's the bald-faced honest truth. Just because you don't like it/agree with it doesn't make it a troll.
C&C3 was so broken at release, they were already rolling out patches before it hit the shelves. And more patches in the first few weeks.
I really don't know how well they've got it working by now though, since I opted to not pay $50 for a beta, and as a result haven't bought the full release yet. Instead I decided to wait and see what the news would say about it. Sure glad I did. Maybe once the game hits bargain-bin pricing it'll be working more or less as it should.
In the previous generation, the "old" popular console with a huge library was the PS1, and the new consoles debuted at a "mere" $300. (Or was it $350? I can't even remember for sure now. But it was a lot less than $600...) That kind of price for a machine that's "just for games for the kids" is a lot easier to swallow than $600.
Coming up next, we have the Top Ten List of the Lamest Top Ten lists! Please stay tuned!
You're right, the problem isn't so simple as just "too many choices". The problem is too many choices in a type of product where most consumers don't know what the differences are between the choices and most don't WANT to know. The average consumer really doesn't even care about the differences between Windows and Linux, let alone all the differences between the different variations of Linux. Combine that with the fact that most software easily available to the average consumer works on Windows (and only Windows) well, it's a pretty obvious choice. Especially when most consumers don't even know that Linux exists, and wouldn't care about it if they did know.
My personal intuition is that until some large, well-established company with lots of funding available (Google I'm looking at you...) partners up with an easy-to-use, already-popular distro (Ubuntu sounds like a good choice) and runs with it, Linux will never claim any significant market-share in home desktop use.
At this point I wouldn't even care if such a project were commercialized to the neck and priced the same as Windows. At least it would give us another real option that everyone would take very seriously.
I did enjoy it, but I wouldn't call it "great". Even for what it was.
Some posts really deserve more than a +5. This is one of them.
You're a little off on the $2 mouse though. Usually they toss in some $.50 adapter or something even cheaper.
OEM can actually be stretched so loosely as to simply mean "you have to buy it with hardware". At any rate, all OEM machines are built by someone, and most of the people who build OEM systems most likely use systems they built themselves. In this case I don't think it really makes much difference if the builder is an official "business" or any individual.
I'm not one to join bandwagons. But after looking at the lists of positives and negatives concerning MS in the last five years, well, they're not even remotely close to balancing each other. If they went bankrupt tomorrow I definitely wouldn't be mourning their passing.
However about my post you were responding to, it was more of a poor (apparently, since it seems no one found it funny) attempt at humor than anything.
Err, you're assuming Intel in fact has a brand spanking new architecture up its sleeve, ready to be rolled out at any given moment. State your sources please. Otherwise, let's not speculate on the future x 2.
Exactly. Netburst was their new technology that was supposed to be "the future" and we all know how well that worked out. It really is quite impressive that they've done as well as they have at evolving the P3 architecture. But as an AMD fan, this scares me because I don't know what they're going to do next if/when AMD manages to blow them out of the water again like they did back in the early P4 days (and right now I'd say it looks imminent). Despite being an AMD fan, I like Intel as well, and I don't want to see them die in the next 10 years. But it scares me because they've already played their trump card, and I'm not so sure they have another. Here's to hoping that AMD tops Intel again, but not by so much that Intel starts losing lots of market-share again.
First, if a guy is clearly being somewhat unsafe on the road (but not badly enough to qualify for "reckless driving" or anything else besides speeding) and the guy is doing even just 3 MPH over the speed limit, the officer has grounds to pull him over - even though he normally wouldn't give someone a citation for doing just 3 over.
Second, trying to enforce a speed limit to the exact MPH would be a nightmare. Speedometers would need to be a lot more accurate than they are now. Radar/laser/anything else the police use to check speed would need to be a lot more accurate. Even just changing the brand of tires on your car could throw your speedometer off just enough to cause trouble. Yes, everyone could drive 5 MPH under, but you know people just don't play like that. There's always people that push the line as far as they can, and if that line is gray in this case it's easier to enforce by several orders of magnitude. Places I've lived you can usually get away with 10 or 11 over. But if you get pulled over when you thought you were only doing 9 over, and the officer says you were doing 10 over... are you really going to contest that extra 1 MPH? Either way you're breaking the law and it still means a citation, fine, and points on your record.
From TFA: The new online game, to be launched Monday, April 23, will allow players to earn points by taking live photos using a remotely controllable robotic video camera and classifying the wild birds they see.
Craig Newmark, founder and customer service representative of craigslist, one of the most popular online communities in the country, is hosting the robotic video camera project from the back deck of his home, which overlooks Sutro Forest in San Francisco. Yep, sure sounds Massively Multiplayer to me. I wonder how long it will take for them to upgrade their hardware to eliminate the login queue...
I agree with you almost 100%.
But I do have to pick a nit... there's really not much "Tolkeen-y-ness" in this game. It's based 100% on the movies, which themselves have very little Tolkien in them, save in very broad strokes. They didn't even manage to build BagEnd the way Tolkien describes it, let alone anything else.
And the game world as a whole feels much much too small after just re-reading the trilogy. Places that took days and weeks to travel between on ponies take... a couple minutes on foot in the game. Yeah I know, you can't make the game-world anywhere near large enough to be anything close to realistic... but please... this to me is just ridiculous.
That said, if you're bored with what you've been playing and/or are looking for a WoW/EQ clone that's fun to play, this game delivers. But it's not for me.
EA hasn't released a game worth the full retail price for at least a good 5 years.
And don't even get me started on their recent releases for PC. The local landfill has less bugs than most EA fare does these days.
Perhaps you hit the "reply" link in the wrong post? Because you're definitely not responding to anything I wrote.
You're assuming that most if not all products that cost "millions of dollars" to develop will be reverse-engineered in a matter of mere months. I find that very hard to believe. As for those "thousands of employees" working in development, any employer should have the foresight to make a contract preventing them from sharing their inside knowledge of the project for at least a few years.
There's plenty of things that can be done to make a new invention profitable, even in the complete absence of patents. The inventor just has to be more creative in how he markets it.
Finally we find out the *real* value of Windows and Office: about $2.75, leaving another twenty-five cents to cover the "other educational software."
Sounds about right to me.
That's great. :)
Hopefully someone will mod you up. That website you linked is quite interesting.