A lot of it is probably fear and misinformation among cabine staff. I've once asked permission to use my mobile cd player (yes, this was quite a while ago) from a hostess and she said it was ok, 15min later another one went apeshit at me and told me to turn it off...
I bet it's just the same thing with mobile phones. There is no problem with them and the official rules reflect that, but they forgot to inform cabine staff about it or cabine staff still buys into the FUD and has people turn these devices off on their own initiative.
The problem I see with Bioware nowadays is that they seem to have an increasing tendency to just go where the money is over innovating or staying true to their past, they just repeat a succesful formula over and over (currently this seems to be Mass Effect). Their DLC "strategies" for Mass Effect and Dragon Age only seem to confirm this, as well as Dragon Age 2 basically turning into a Mass Effect clone.
The complex combat combined with a lot of freedom and an engrossing story and character development have always been what has drawn me to RPGs and, in fact, are what make an RPG in my opinion. However the combat systems get increasingly dumbed down to be playable on controllers, sacrifing nearly all of the tactical aspect that was still available in Dragon Age for more shooter/adventure style combat. Character development also has been diminishing steadily in favor of predefined characters, both story wise as in the ways you get to tweak your character. The games they produce now are less "real" RPGs and more adventures, which doesn't make them bad games (at all), but it leaves us, RPG fans, out in the cold, and judging from the sales of Dragon Age there's still quite some of us around.
Because of Bioware's past I had high hopes of ToR, but after playing through the Mass Effects, seeing how they handled DLCs (ripping out core content from ME2 that provides a lead in to ME3 and selling it as a DLC? Bad mojo...and don't even get me started on the crap quality of the vast majority of DAO DLCs) and are handling Dragon Age 2 it seems they only really care about $$ anymore. Also the vast press response with fear that ToR would be too "different" from other MMOs didn't help any, so they just stuck to (or got told to stick to) the tested and tried WoW formula. Except that that won't work, cloning WoW and hoping it'll be more successful than the original is doomed to fail. The only way to eat away at it's vast market share is to innovate and do things differently, their original goal of bringing the RPG back into the MMORPGs had a lot of us hoping, unfortunately it seems Bioware no longer innovates and just goes where the morons in management (or Electronic Arts?) tell it it should go.
I guess we really have to look to Obsidian if we want any innovation at all, if they only could produce a finished game for a change...
Instead of a cap the majority of them now has a "fair use policy" (at least here in Belgium) which means they can advertise as "unlimited" transfer volume and just cut you off or throttle you down to dial up speeds whenever they rather arbitrarily decide your usage of bandwidth is no longer "fair".
They might lack the "I wanna listen because everybody else is listening", but they do add the "I wanna listen because this guy with a similar taste is listening to it, so I'm gonna check it out", which can be invaluable especially to indie artists I would think.
I just refuted your claim of Opera enforcing standards irregardless of user experience, I fail to see how this is fanboism any more than you wrongly stating Opera does so in the first place is blind bashing.
It often happens that websites serve different content to different browsers (this was a real problem for Firefox back in the day as well, to a lesser extent nowadays), that's why Opera has always made it rather easy to mask as a different browser (right click -> Edit Site Preferences -> Network -> Browser Identification).
Except what he claims is just plain wrong and has nothing to do with real life experiences.
Opera doesn't force standards compliance any more than other browsers (meaning; it will try to render pages correctly regardless of standards compliance of said pages). What DOES happen though is that sites serve different content based on the browser, often making sites appear broken in certain browsers while they can render the website as it is served to other browsers just fine. It happens a lot for Opera but it also still regularly happens for Firefox
It is amazing how many sites suddenly work perfectly when you mask as Internet Explorer...
I guess a more readable syntax is no reason to prefer one language over another then? If language power is all you want then you probably should be using a Lisp anyway.
Also I doubt most developers turned to Perl when Rails "failed", more likely they turned to.Net or J2EE.
LAN parties don't necessarily need to be big organized events, picking up your PC and heading over to a friend's place works just as well (if not better)...
Probably too hard* for the average instant-gratification gamer (as evidenced by DA2 getting dumbed down to ME level) Seems like DAO will have been the last proper BG-style RPG.
*and too long, I had a real Mask-style jawdrop when I heard someone complain about the lenght of a game, he wanted it to be over just so he could start on the next shallow game...W-T-F-? I want good games to like last forever! Give me more quests or I'll stick my hamster on you! Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
And gaming for this "old" set of gamers is more and more about replaying the old stuff they still have in the closet, since the newer games with "breathtaking graphics" etc seem to be lacking this thing that used to be hugely important "when I was young" (I'm not old by any means, not even close), you know "gameplay". Mainstream game mechanics get simpler and simpler, resulting in less and less challenge and less and less replayability.
And that's not even mentioning how we're being treated as cash cows and morons by the gaming industry and game reviewers alike, getting less and less for the same money (but hey, it looks yummy!)
Not to mention that Dragon Age 2 is turning into a ME clone as well. Don't get me wrong, I liked ME, it has a nice story. But it IS just a shooter disguised as an RPG. The worst is journalists trying to "alleviate people's fears about DAO2 turning into a ME clone" and then going on to confirm everything people have been fearing like they are good things, and people buy it...
But I guess the worst are the brainless consumers that just put up with all of it and actually defend(!) companies releasing flawed products (everything Obsidian ever made classifies, KotOR2 and FNV are the most obivous ones though I suppose) or just plain ripping you off by selling the chairs to your car at a premium (most recent DLCs, Mafia 2 being a prime example)
There is no reason to give your RealID (as the thing is called) to anyone in your guild. It's only useful for cross-game (as long as you stay with Blizzard games anyway, yay for another closed platform) and cross-realm messaging and if I care enough to bother contacting them when they/I move to another realm they probably know my name anyway. For guildies (why even add those to your friends list anyway, something wrong with the guild listing?) or realm specific buddies you can just use the good old nickname based functionality.
Your name's also not displayed anywhere on sites or anything except possibly for people you added, if you use your real name for a guild website that's your choice, not something Blizzard forces onto you.
The USSR (whose flag you are referring to, lumping them all together as "commies" under that flag might offend a couple of other nations) was especially good at getting it's own inhabitants killed and in doing so didn't differentiate between various ethnic groups, for actual genocides I'd say a citation IS needed.
The Nazis specifically prosecuted and eliminated Jews, gays, lesbians, Roma, handicapped people and probably a slew of other groups that didn't fit into their world view, quite a difference if you ask me.
It's the difference between placing a party in it's historical context (with attached imagery) vs associating oneself with said imagery and attached context.
If someone uses a british flag as his profile image the vast majority of the people will assume he (or she) is British, if someone uses the WWF logo the vast majority will assume they are, if not a member, at least concerned with ecology. If someone uses a swastika...
For most people the thing that makes them "cool" is exactly the same thing why they are banned on Xbox Live (and in half of Europe): their link to the Nazis.
I think this is a good thing (tm), they have to protect their investment and if they actually deliver a quality game I have no problems paying for it. And in my book the first installment was a quality title, so I'll probably be buying this one although I'm not too happy about having to use a spcific store to be able to get it DRM free (if I read this and the mail I got from cdproject correctly)
However lately I've been feeling like a citron being squeezed by game devs/publishers by getting incomplete and sometimes downright alpha/beta quality software (Fallout New Vegas for a recent example) or just leaving out features/content just to be able to sell them later. DLCs have gone from a way to make some extra on a released game to a business model of selling cars without seats and selling the seats afterwards for a small fee (Mafia 2 is a prime example and apologies for the car analogy;) ). This, of course, leads to more pirating as buying a game lately you have no guarantee at all of any form of quality (reviewers often seem to not play the games or just get "bought" by publishers and have turned out to be entirely unreliable) and getting a refund, while legally possible, if far from easy for something like a game.
Also something important to note; and that might have resulted in this DRM-free decision is that The Witcher 1 had serious peformance problems because of its copy protection, making the legally bought game perform much worse than illegal copies.
Props to cdproject for fixing these issues (although much later than most of us would have liked) and adding a slew of extra content as well though instead of the current general policy of ignoring issues after the sale because they have your money anyway and, as they reason, people will have forgotten by the release of the next title anyway (unfortunately, they seem to generally be right about this)
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of it is probably fear and misinformation among cabine staff. I've once asked permission to use my mobile cd player (yes, this was quite a while ago) from a hostess and she said it was ok, 15min later another one went apeshit at me and told me to turn it off...
I bet it's just the same thing with mobile phones. There is no problem with them and the official rules reflect that, but they forgot to inform cabine staff about it or cabine staff still buys into the FUD and has people turn these devices off on their own initiative.
If this would happen a certain supposedly irrelevant phone company (let's call it Nokia), would be smiling...
He's not a borg?? Scratch my vote please.
There's still us Fvwm using oddballs out there as well.
Better marketing.
Anymore? You know what they say: what goes on the net stays on the net...
Err, am I the only one who didn't instanly think "kids" when reading "sex offender"? Shouldn't that be "convicted pedophiles" or somesuch instead?
The problem I see with Bioware nowadays is that they seem to have an increasing tendency to just go where the money is over innovating or staying true to their past, they just repeat a succesful formula over and over (currently this seems to be Mass Effect). Their DLC "strategies" for Mass Effect and Dragon Age only seem to confirm this, as well as Dragon Age 2 basically turning into a Mass Effect clone.
The complex combat combined with a lot of freedom and an engrossing story and character development have always been what has drawn me to RPGs and, in fact, are what make an RPG in my opinion. However the combat systems get increasingly dumbed down to be playable on controllers, sacrifing nearly all of the tactical aspect that was still available in Dragon Age for more shooter/adventure style combat. Character development also has been diminishing steadily in favor of predefined characters, both story wise as in the ways you get to tweak your character. The games they produce now are less "real" RPGs and more adventures, which doesn't make them bad games (at all), but it leaves us, RPG fans, out in the cold, and judging from the sales of Dragon Age there's still quite some of us around.
Because of Bioware's past I had high hopes of ToR, but after playing through the Mass Effects, seeing how they handled DLCs (ripping out core content from ME2 that provides a lead in to ME3 and selling it as a DLC? Bad mojo...and don't even get me started on the crap quality of the vast majority of DAO DLCs) and are handling Dragon Age 2 it seems they only really care about $$ anymore. Also the vast press response with fear that ToR would be too "different" from other MMOs didn't help any, so they just stuck to (or got told to stick to) the tested and tried WoW formula. Except that that won't work, cloning WoW and hoping it'll be more successful than the original is doomed to fail. The only way to eat away at it's vast market share is to innovate and do things differently, their original goal of bringing the RPG back into the MMORPGs had a lot of us hoping, unfortunately it seems Bioware no longer innovates and just goes where the morons in management (or Electronic Arts?) tell it it should go.
I guess we really have to look to Obsidian if we want any innovation at all, if they only could produce a finished game for a change...
Instead of a cap the majority of them now has a "fair use policy" (at least here in Belgium) which means they can advertise as "unlimited" transfer volume and just cut you off or throttle you down to dial up speeds whenever they rather arbitrarily decide your usage of bandwidth is no longer "fair".
They might lack the "I wanna listen because everybody else is listening", but they do add the "I wanna listen because this guy with a similar taste is listening to it, so I'm gonna check it out", which can be invaluable especially to indie artists I would think.
I just refuted your claim of Opera enforcing standards irregardless of user experience, I fail to see how this is fanboism any more than you wrongly stating Opera does so in the first place is blind bashing.
It often happens that websites serve different content to different browsers (this was a real problem for Firefox back in the day as well, to a lesser extent nowadays), that's why Opera has always made it rather easy to mask as a different browser (right click -> Edit Site Preferences -> Network -> Browser Identification).
As a sidenote, my main browser is still Firefox.
Except what he claims is just plain wrong and has nothing to do with real life experiences.
Opera doesn't force standards compliance any more than other browsers (meaning; it will try to render pages correctly regardless of standards compliance of said pages). What DOES happen though is that sites serve different content based on the browser, often making sites appear broken in certain browsers while they can render the website as it is served to other browsers just fine. It happens a lot for Opera but it also still regularly happens for Firefox
It is amazing how many sites suddenly work perfectly when you mask as Internet Explorer...
Ever heard about...backups, Mr. Anderson?
I guess a more readable syntax is no reason to prefer one language over another then? If language power is all you want then you probably should be using a Lisp anyway.
Also I doubt most developers turned to Perl when Rails "failed", more likely they turned to .Net or J2EE.
LAN parties don't necessarily need to be big organized events, picking up your PC and heading over to a friend's place works just as well (if not better)...
Probably too hard* for the average instant-gratification gamer (as evidenced by DA2 getting dumbed down to ME level) Seems like DAO will have been the last proper BG-style RPG.
*and too long, I had a real Mask-style jawdrop when I heard someone complain about the lenght of a game, he wanted it to be over just so he could start on the next shallow game...W-T-F-? I want good games to like last forever! Give me more quests or I'll stick my hamster on you! Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Yeah, and to thank us for that they'll just cut gas supplies to eastern europe, we know how well that worked out last time...
And gaming for this "old" set of gamers is more and more about replaying the old stuff they still have in the closet, since the newer games with "breathtaking graphics" etc seem to be lacking this thing that used to be hugely important "when I was young" (I'm not old by any means, not even close), you know "gameplay". Mainstream game mechanics get simpler and simpler, resulting in less and less challenge and less and less replayability.
And that's not even mentioning how we're being treated as cash cows and morons by the gaming industry and game reviewers alike, getting less and less for the same money (but hey, it looks yummy!)
Not to mention that Dragon Age 2 is turning into a ME clone as well. Don't get me wrong, I liked ME, it has a nice story. But it IS just a shooter disguised as an RPG. The worst is journalists trying to "alleviate people's fears about DAO2 turning into a ME clone" and then going on to confirm everything people have been fearing like they are good things, and people buy it...
But I guess the worst are the brainless consumers that just put up with all of it and actually defend(!) companies releasing flawed products (everything Obsidian ever made classifies, KotOR2 and FNV are the most obivous ones though I suppose) or just plain ripping you off by selling the chairs to your car at a premium (most recent DLCs, Mafia 2 being a prime example)
There is no reason to give your RealID (as the thing is called) to anyone in your guild. It's only useful for cross-game (as long as you stay with Blizzard games anyway, yay for another closed platform) and cross-realm messaging and if I care enough to bother contacting them when they/I move to another realm they probably know my name anyway. For guildies (why even add those to your friends list anyway, something wrong with the guild listing?) or realm specific buddies you can just use the good old nickname based functionality.
Your name's also not displayed anywhere on sites or anything except possibly for people you added, if you use your real name for a guild website that's your choice, not something Blizzard forces onto you.
The USSR (whose flag you are referring to, lumping them all together as "commies" under that flag might offend a couple of other nations) was especially good at getting it's own inhabitants killed and in doing so didn't differentiate between various ethnic groups, for actual genocides I'd say a citation IS needed.
The Nazis specifically prosecuted and eliminated Jews, gays, lesbians, Roma, handicapped people and probably a slew of other groups that didn't fit into their world view, quite a difference if you ask me.
It's the difference between placing a party in it's historical context (with attached imagery) vs associating oneself with said imagery and attached context.
If someone uses a british flag as his profile image the vast majority of the people will assume he (or she) is British, if someone uses the WWF logo the vast majority will assume they are, if not a member, at least concerned with ecology. If someone uses a swastika...
Except that the knife doesn't stand for a certain belief while the swastika did and is still generally associated with that belief.
For most people the thing that makes them "cool" is exactly the same thing why they are banned on Xbox Live (and in half of Europe): their link to the Nazis.
I think this is a good thing (tm), they have to protect their investment and if they actually deliver a quality game I have no problems paying for it. And in my book the first installment was a quality title, so I'll probably be buying this one although I'm not too happy about having to use a spcific store to be able to get it DRM free (if I read this and the mail I got from cdproject correctly)
However lately I've been feeling like a citron being squeezed by game devs/publishers by getting incomplete and sometimes downright alpha/beta quality software (Fallout New Vegas for a recent example) or just leaving out features/content just to be able to sell them later. DLCs have gone from a way to make some extra on a released game to a business model of selling cars without seats and selling the seats afterwards for a small fee (Mafia 2 is a prime example and apologies for the car analogy ;) ). This, of course, leads to more pirating as buying a game lately you have no guarantee at all of any form of quality (reviewers often seem to not play the games or just get "bought" by publishers and have turned out to be entirely unreliable) and getting a refund, while legally possible, if far from easy for something like a game.
Also something important to note; and that might have resulted in this DRM-free decision is that The Witcher 1 had serious peformance problems because of its copy protection, making the legally bought game perform much worse than illegal copies.
Props to cdproject for fixing these issues (although much later than most of us would have liked) and adding a slew of extra content as well though instead of the current general policy of ignoring issues after the sale because they have your money anyway and, as they reason, people will have forgotten by the release of the next title anyway (unfortunately, they seem to generally be right about this)