But Sony said we'd all go get extra jobs in order to be able to afford it.
Maybe you're right, and sony was just targeting the wealthy hardcore gamers. But if that's the case, it's was a pretty stupid move from a business point of view, and the performance of the PS3 in the market has reflected that. Development of hardware and games costs too damn much for a niche console.
There was that whole previous cheating issue, in which case CCP initially told us how it was all a big misunderstanding and it could never happen. Then a few days later, oops looks like it did really happen. The consequences for the guilty parties in that case were insignificant.
Pardon us if we don't take CCP at their word after that. They lost any benefit of the doubt with that performance, and their explanation this time around all but ignored some of the more serious accusations and focused on an issue that could've been settled quietly at the very beginning if they had a proper and professional customer service set up. Firing people randomly certainly wouldn't make EvE a better game, but we've never really seen any sort gesture by CCP towards regaining the trust they lost beyond them telling us it wouldn't happen again.
Awesome! When he's finished with that, he can stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and stabilize Iraq. Then maybe next summer he can finally get that space elevator built using all the energy from the fusion power plant his company has just finished perfecting.
Monopolies are the natural result of "free" markets. Over a reasonable period of time, a few companies are bound to outperform their competitors, and as they move ahead in market share/capital they will proceed to either buy up the competition or just plain drive them out of business. There are very few businesses immune to that sort of thing, especially as improved transportation and communication makes physical distances less and less of an issue. The consumer is still free to choose, there just aren't any real alternatives to the big monopolies. Competitors are free to try and enter the market, but there's really no feasible way for them to compete and stay in business.
The important thing to remember is that an entirely "free market" is only the ideal type of economy if your goal is to see money being spent. For some reason, in the US at least, a lot of people have decided that we're a country dedicated to the free market, and treat it as an unquestionable ideology. Basically saying that being a free market principle inherently makes that path correct. I'm not saying that communism is a good answer either, but as is the case in almost every choice the government can make, the best course of action is probably somewhere closer to the middle than way up at either extreme.
There are lots of good, practical, and responsible reasons that certain industries are/should be regulated. Just saying that it's not "free market" enough should not be a convincing counter-argument. I don't know why so many ordinary people are so quick to fall for that line.
More importantly, once it's running vista, can you run a virtualized instance of linux on that, on which you run an emulator of a 6 year old version of palm OS. That way you can play DopeWars in all of it's 4 shades of gray glory. Of course, that's still worthless unless you can do all of the above from a terminal window on your powerbook, ssh'd into the iphone while it's still sitting in your pocket.
That's just standard human behavior. Nobody wants to spend years or decades working on something that ends up not really accomplishing anything. While the greater good of science might have been served by someone else making the discovery, it doesn't mean that these people won't be disappointed that they'll miss out on the thrill of making that discovery themselves. Maybe it's ego, maybe it's worry about their funding, maybe they just hate those physicists over in the US... but don't pretend that just because scientists are primarily concerned with facts and theories means that they aren't still human beings with lots of different emotions and different motivations.
Hey, that's reasonable logic. Along those lines, instead of paying $30k on a new car, I can just look in the newspaper and buy 20 crummy used cars for $1,500 a piece. Sure, they'll break down a lot, but when that happens I can just take another one out of the garage and drive it instead. Brilliant.
Your idea is dumb for most people. If my computer craps out, a new computer straight out of the box is not a good replacement because it won't have all the software/files that I need. But even if I sort that out, then I'm still stuck with my other broken computer that needs to be fixed/replaced, which is going to cost me more time and/or money and hassle.
For someone with a decent job and a reasonably busy life, the hassle of replacing/repairing a broken computer can easily have a value over your $400 cash money.
I think most of us are savvy enough to to realize not to take the word of any ol' reviewer as gospel, but that doesn't mean that you can't get some useful information from most review sources. I generally don't pay much attention to the number ratings (unless they're really low), but instead try to find comparisons to other games. Drawing parallels or distinctions between games that I've already played and am familiar with means more to me, especially because sometimes things like gameplay and the general feel of a game are hard to describe accurately with words. Telling me that a fighting game plays more like Super Smash Bros. and less like Mortal Kombat is much easier than trying to describe how the characters move and interact with the environment. If nothing else, it gives me a baseline from which the reviewer can describe differences/changes/innovations/flaws/etc.
Of course, this strategy kind of fails when the reviewer is presented with entirely new game mechanics. Wii game reviews are finally starting to become useful, now that there's a library of games to compare things back to. The first reports of people who had played Wii Sports or whatever were fascinating, but you really had to try it to get it.
I seriously doubt that they're going to release a new version of the wii that includes any sort of hard drive. I don't think releasing a Wii HD makes much sense for Nintendo either way, but if they were to do so, they'd almost certainly do it as an external add-on. They're still easily selling Wii's by the truckload in their current form, why would they add anything else to it to cut down on their margins?
DVD playback is more likely, because it wouldn't require much in terms of hardware changes, the Wii already has pretty much what it needs to play DVDs.
I think it's just because AT&T knows that they're going to have lines halfway around the block full of people dying to get their hands on this thing on release day. So why not bundle in a two year deal with it and make some extra money? And people are used to phones requiring a two year deal anyways, so it won't really get questioned much.
Half a year from now, if demand has started to subside some, then they'll want to make it a better deal to get more people to buy it. Apple loves high-margin products, and as such probably has in the contract with AT&T that they can't sell the phone cheaper and subsidize it with a plan. A customer with no long term commitment is still better than no customer at all, so the plan requirements will hopefully go away.
And then somewhere down the line, at least a year or so from now, Apple will release an upgraded version, and maybe even a cheaper "nano" version. Who knows how the pricing will work then.
Yeah, or instead of spending an extra $300k on all this emergency survival stuff, you could just evacuate like most people do when a storm is threatening.
When Katrina hit, it was litterally weeks before utilities started coming back. In worse hit places, it was months before electricity and such became available. While building yourself a little fort and bunkering down might make you feel like a badass, it's sort of silly when you can drive for a couple hours and find somewhere where everything is still functioning pretty normally.
What you need to do is be selective about where you build, build your house up on piers/whatever to a reasonable height, have flood insurance, and leave with all your important stuff if a big storm is coming. Shutters/boarding up your windows isn't a bad idea either.
Dude, I've lived in NO for almost 10 years, and I still haven't gotten used to the taste of the tap water. It's gross. Not to say that the water guys don't drastically improve on the condition of the water that comes from the river.
PV Panels, if you can afford them, are definitely good but still out of the reasonable price range for most people. The high ceilings are nice, but a lot of houses in the city could really benefit with some better shading for the windows. Once the sun gets into your house, it's really hard to passively cool it.
Anyone who things that this was a big coordinated effort by the whole of GoonFleet to bring down CCP is just being dumb. The majority of goons playing EvE are invested in their characters and truly enjoy the game. Goons have worked hard to build itself an empire in the EvE universe, like so many other alliances have in the past. Throwing away all that time and energy would be silly, and to believe that 4000 players could all be convinced to do so is pretty unreasonable.
But why should anybody quietly stand by while a game that they're such a big fan of appears to be tainted by corruption and cheating? And when the devs try to ignore that anything has happened, why should anyone be ok with that? Sometimes protesting is the only way you can get someone to listen, and sometimes you have to protest very loudly before they'll pay attention to you. If CCP was a little more willing to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes, then the protests wouldn't have had to get that loud.
This also basically mirrors what happened with the last dev scandal, where CCP initially tried to delete/censor all the questions that players were asking about it. It took a lot of noise on the forums to get them to really acknowledge the issue, which they eventually did by saying that nothing had happened and infact nothing like that could ever happen. Even more forum noise ensued, until CCP took a real look at it and saw that the allegations were actually true.
So, from past experience, if you want CCP to actually acknowledge that they might have a problem, you have to crap all over their forums. Or else they'll ignore you. Their response this time has started out just like it did last time. Should they be surprised that we're following the same path that worked for us before?
CCP is not being given the benefit of the doubt because of a previous incident of developer corruption. It started out very similar, someone presented evidence of what was happening, people started asking questions, and CCP tried to pretend that it never came up. They deleted threads about it, banned people who kept bringing it up, and acted like nothing happened. Some of the players were not satisfied with this outcome, so they kept making noise about it. Eventually CCP acknowledged the allegations but insisted that they had done nothing wrong. They made some legal threats towards the person(s) who were responsible for the information first coming to light. Many players were still not happy with their response, and kept asking questions. CCP did some sort of investigation, and Hey! Look at that! The allegations were true! CCP apologized, handed down an almost meaningless punishment to the developer in question, gave out no punishment to the players who were complicit in the cheating, and promised that they'd take this stuff seriously from now on so it'll never happen again.
So what's happened with this latest scandal? More evidence of possible wrong-doing occurs. Someone posts the evidence, asking for CCP to look at it and explain what was going on. CCP responds by deleting the posts and trying to ignore it. Many of the players get upset at this and start to make a lot of noise on the forums. CCP eventually acknowledges the issue, and insists that nothing improper has occured. They again make some vague legal threats towards the players who are bringing the allegations forward.
This response by CCP is no more acceptable this time around as it was in the previous scandal. So here we are again, trying to force CCP to sort this crap out, because they're not going to do it unless we make enough noise. CCP has proven themselves untrustworthy in regards to dealing with these sorts of issues. Giving them the benefit of the doubt will only allow them to ignore this issue until it goes away. While that might make their job a little easier today, it's not the best thing for the future of EvE, and EvE is a game that many of us really enjoy and want to see improve and grow.
Higher ups in BoB have acknowledged on the Eve-o forum that they have direct access to various Devs/GMs and such via out-of-game channels. But even if what you're suggesting is the explanation, is that any more fair? Why should one group of players get to skip the petition queue? Why should their issues, valid or not, get addressed any faster than everyone else's?
We are trying to improve the game. Although it's certainly not perfect, EvE is an amazing game. No other MMO that I've come across is like it in terms of the cut-throat nature, the complexity of the environment, the teamwork that it inspires, etc. There is plenty in EvE for CCP to be proud of, much that we players enjoy, much that we're willing to pay for. There's also lots of potential for the game to continue to improve and grow and get even more awesome. In one sense, CCP sort of has us by the balls. We're invested in our characters, in this game, in this type of game; and there's no real alternative for players looking for a similar experience.
A number of people in my alliance have quit this game over this issue. Many others are on the fence, and are going to give it a few days to play out before walking away. We've all put a lot of time and energy into the game, we've had some great times playing, we're not happy to see it go through this drama. But most of us feel that it's important that we are vocal about what we see happening, why we as players don't think it's ok, and that CCP isn't allowed to just pretend like nothing has happened. The fact that CCP's inital response is almost always censorship just gets us even more riled up.
A lot of the problems come from the fact that CCP likes to recruit employees from the player base. This has obvious advantages for them, because they get people who already know a lot about the game. Their policy, as far as I've heard, is that when you become an employee, you can keep your pre-existing character, exactly as he/she is, you just can't tell anyone that that character is now connected to a dev/GM/whatever account. If you get outed as an employee, then your lose that character.
This doesn't work for a number of reasons. First off, there's the whole biased referees running the game discussion, which really isn't good. The earlier T20 incident showed that CCP was not doing a good job of monitoring their servers for improper use of special abilities. But even if they could figure that part out, EvE has such a huge amount of meta-game that goes on elsewhere than CCP's servers, that they could never hope to track it all. Along those same lines, every corp/alliance of any significant size has its own external forums/killboard/teamspeak server and such, and with the prevalence of spies and plants and such going on, most of them carefully monitor who moves through their forums. The point being, if I got hired by CCP and moved to iceland and kept logging into my alliance's forums, someone would notice my ip address moving to iceland, and they would likely ask me about it. You can't reasonably expect to keep that sort of stuff secret. Even if that employee was being fair and not abusing their powers, some of the players would figure it out.
At the end of the day, like you said, CCP employees should not be playing the game. They can't guarantee that nothing improper will occur, the design of the game is such that unfair actions by employees can have very significant negative effects on many of the players, and the meta-game all but insures that CCP employees will not be able to keep their identities completely hidden.
The form factor really was the key. My roommate got a Rio Karma right about the same time that I got my first ipod (maybe 2002?). I'd say in total volume, they were pretty close in size (the ipod probably had a slight advantage), but the Karma was shaped basically like a square, while the ipod was a rectangle. Meaning that the ipod slid into my pocket much better. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing, actually thinking about how people might carry around a device that's meant to be carried around everywhere. The karma also had a dial and maybe buttons along the side, making them easy to hit inadvertently while moving the device in our out of your pocket. Compared to the ipod where the buttons were all on one face, pretty close to flush with that face, and not along the sides where I was likely to grab it.
What the hell? A book is not an inherently sacred object. While the ability to read, print, and distribute information efficiently has undoubtedly been extremely important in the course of civilization, a book itself does not have any intrinsic moral value. It's really just a pile of paper with one edge bound together. The real value is generally in the information inside. That information varies in value from book to book, and is no longer confined to storage only by ink on paper.
The "evil" of book burning isn't about destroying a stack of paper, it's about when censorship or ignorance is organized in order to stop the spread of information that someone deems unfit for reading. It's about free speech, freedom to write what you want, freedom to read what you want. This guy isn't burning rare historical books, those have some value. He's burning excess mass-produced crap that he can't even give away. There's no moral argument concerning censorship, or brainwashing, or any of that in this case.
Go visit some salvation army stores, they've generally got plenty of books sitting on their shelves, most of which will never get sold. They don't have the staff with the time or skills necessary to sort through all those books and decide what will/wont sell. Libraries generally don't take public book donations for their collections(for a variety of reasons), although they will sometimes take them and then try to sell them cheaply at a big book sale a couple times per year. But most of those end up not selling, and getting thrown out as well.
What this guy is doing is half PR stunt, and half his inability to understand and plan for the way our economy works now. So much stuff is produced, that as a whole we could never sell/use/read them all. There are warehouses, garages, barns, basements, etc. full of junk that's collected over time. Books are not immune to this reality. You should probably calm down, stop advocating violence for someone trying to get rid of some garbage, and accept the fact that every copy of every cheap paperback book is not a magical gift to humanity.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1
Eh, probably because with all the resources MS has and all the hype they put out, we expected better. I don't know if Creative or Rio would flat out call any of their new players the "ipod killer" (although many media types will throw that around for just about anything that you can plug headphones into), but MS really talked up the Zune, and tried to manufacture the trendy-ness with their Welcome to the Social nonsense. I expect any company to embellish a little in their press releases, but if MS really took it far and then completely fell short of the expectations that they tried to create for us. I think it's really similar to what Sony did with the PS3. Promising the second coming and then delivering something that's only mildly compelling at best.
And on the flip side, there were plenty of naysayers for Apple when the iPod was first announced (and still plenty now with the iPhone), although the Apple fanboys tend to drown that out a little more than MS's cheerleaders.
I'll agree that MS has a bit of an uphill battle with the/. crowd, but I think the xbox and the response it's gotten here shows significantly more open-mindedness than you might expect. But on a website with a blatant linux/OSS slant, why would you expect the giant proprietary monopoly corporation to be given the benefit of the doubt?
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1
Meh. How many/. readers have an Xbox/Xbox360? I do, and I've been an Apple fanboy for well over a decade. In the end, it comes down to what does a product offer you for the price. If it's decent, people will buy it. Everyone was skeptical of the Xbox when it was first announced, but over time it's proven itself to be a worthwhile console to many people. Some people would rather die than have an MS produced object in their house, but most people really aren't that extreme.
MS has done very little with the Zune that would convince anybody to give it a shot.
That's a BS argument for a few reasons. First off, cellphones allow the ringing to be as annoying as the owner wants it. It's not like I can just train my mind to tune out the ringer, because everyone's ringer is different. The ringers are also often set very loud, and people often times will leave it behind on their desk/office/whatever and want to be able to hear it over in the other room.
I'm well over 30 years away from retirement (assuming the retirement age doesn't increase), and I find mobile phones annoying as all hell. The fact of the matter is that cell phones ringtones are generally designed to get your attention. If the landline in the meeting room rings, then yes, that's annoying as well. But there's no resonable other way for that phone to announce that there's a call. Cell phones have another option, one that's preferable for everyone else around you. You should use it. Nobody else in the office wants to hear your ringtone.
Your other comparisons are pretty lame and irrelevant. Cars driving past the building are easy to ignore because they're outside of the building and they're pretty constant. A car engine running at the desk next to me would be very disruptive.
Slashdot Mirror
But Sony said we'd all go get extra jobs in order to be able to afford it.
Maybe you're right, and sony was just targeting the wealthy hardcore gamers. But if that's the case, it's was a pretty stupid move from a business point of view, and the performance of the PS3 in the market has reflected that. Development of hardware and games costs too damn much for a niche console.
There was that whole previous cheating issue, in which case CCP initially told us how it was all a big misunderstanding and it could never happen. Then a few days later, oops looks like it did really happen. The consequences for the guilty parties in that case were insignificant.
Pardon us if we don't take CCP at their word after that. They lost any benefit of the doubt with that performance, and their explanation this time around all but ignored some of the more serious accusations and focused on an issue that could've been settled quietly at the very beginning if they had a proper and professional customer service set up. Firing people randomly certainly wouldn't make EvE a better game, but we've never really seen any sort gesture by CCP towards regaining the trust they lost beyond them telling us it wouldn't happen again.
Awesome! When he's finished with that, he can stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and stabilize Iraq. Then maybe next summer he can finally get that space elevator built using all the energy from the fusion power plant his company has just finished perfecting.
Monopolies are the natural result of "free" markets. Over a reasonable period of time, a few companies are bound to outperform their competitors, and as they move ahead in market share/capital they will proceed to either buy up the competition or just plain drive them out of business. There are very few businesses immune to that sort of thing, especially as improved transportation and communication makes physical distances less and less of an issue. The consumer is still free to choose, there just aren't any real alternatives to the big monopolies. Competitors are free to try and enter the market, but there's really no feasible way for them to compete and stay in business.
The important thing to remember is that an entirely "free market" is only the ideal type of economy if your goal is to see money being spent. For some reason, in the US at least, a lot of people have decided that we're a country dedicated to the free market, and treat it as an unquestionable ideology. Basically saying that being a free market principle inherently makes that path correct. I'm not saying that communism is a good answer either, but as is the case in almost every choice the government can make, the best course of action is probably somewhere closer to the middle than way up at either extreme.
There are lots of good, practical, and responsible reasons that certain industries are/should be regulated. Just saying that it's not "free market" enough should not be a convincing counter-argument. I don't know why so many ordinary people are so quick to fall for that line.
Awesome idea. Let me know when you finish running the wires to my house so I can plug my computer into it.
More importantly, once it's running vista, can you run a virtualized instance of linux on that, on which you run an emulator of a 6 year old version of palm OS. That way you can play DopeWars in all of it's 4 shades of gray glory. Of course, that's still worthless unless you can do all of the above from a terminal window on your powerbook, ssh'd into the iphone while it's still sitting in your pocket.
That's just standard human behavior. Nobody wants to spend years or decades working on something that ends up not really accomplishing anything. While the greater good of science might have been served by someone else making the discovery, it doesn't mean that these people won't be disappointed that they'll miss out on the thrill of making that discovery themselves. Maybe it's ego, maybe it's worry about their funding, maybe they just hate those physicists over in the US... but don't pretend that just because scientists are primarily concerned with facts and theories means that they aren't still human beings with lots of different emotions and different motivations.
Good for you, I hope it fulfills all of your needs.
Hey, that's reasonable logic. Along those lines, instead of paying $30k on a new car, I can just look in the newspaper and buy 20 crummy used cars for $1,500 a piece. Sure, they'll break down a lot, but when that happens I can just take another one out of the garage and drive it instead. Brilliant.
Your idea is dumb for most people. If my computer craps out, a new computer straight out of the box is not a good replacement because it won't have all the software/files that I need. But even if I sort that out, then I'm still stuck with my other broken computer that needs to be fixed/replaced, which is going to cost me more time and/or money and hassle.
For someone with a decent job and a reasonably busy life, the hassle of replacing/repairing a broken computer can easily have a value over your $400 cash money.
I think most of us are savvy enough to to realize not to take the word of any ol' reviewer as gospel, but that doesn't mean that you can't get some useful information from most review sources. I generally don't pay much attention to the number ratings (unless they're really low), but instead try to find comparisons to other games. Drawing parallels or distinctions between games that I've already played and am familiar with means more to me, especially because sometimes things like gameplay and the general feel of a game are hard to describe accurately with words. Telling me that a fighting game plays more like Super Smash Bros. and less like Mortal Kombat is much easier than trying to describe how the characters move and interact with the environment. If nothing else, it gives me a baseline from which the reviewer can describe differences/changes/innovations/flaws/etc.
Of course, this strategy kind of fails when the reviewer is presented with entirely new game mechanics. Wii game reviews are finally starting to become useful, now that there's a library of games to compare things back to. The first reports of people who had played Wii Sports or whatever were fascinating, but you really had to try it to get it.
I seriously doubt that they're going to release a new version of the wii that includes any sort of hard drive. I don't think releasing a Wii HD makes much sense for Nintendo either way, but if they were to do so, they'd almost certainly do it as an external add-on. They're still easily selling Wii's by the truckload in their current form, why would they add anything else to it to cut down on their margins?
DVD playback is more likely, because it wouldn't require much in terms of hardware changes, the Wii already has pretty much what it needs to play DVDs.
I think it's just because AT&T knows that they're going to have lines halfway around the block full of people dying to get their hands on this thing on release day. So why not bundle in a two year deal with it and make some extra money? And people are used to phones requiring a two year deal anyways, so it won't really get questioned much.
Half a year from now, if demand has started to subside some, then they'll want to make it a better deal to get more people to buy it. Apple loves high-margin products, and as such probably has in the contract with AT&T that they can't sell the phone cheaper and subsidize it with a plan. A customer with no long term commitment is still better than no customer at all, so the plan requirements will hopefully go away.
And then somewhere down the line, at least a year or so from now, Apple will release an upgraded version, and maybe even a cheaper "nano" version. Who knows how the pricing will work then.
Yeah, or instead of spending an extra $300k on all this emergency survival stuff, you could just evacuate like most people do when a storm is threatening.
When Katrina hit, it was litterally weeks before utilities started coming back. In worse hit places, it was months before electricity and such became available. While building yourself a little fort and bunkering down might make you feel like a badass, it's sort of silly when you can drive for a couple hours and find somewhere where everything is still functioning pretty normally.
What you need to do is be selective about where you build, build your house up on piers/whatever to a reasonable height, have flood insurance, and leave with all your important stuff if a big storm is coming. Shutters/boarding up your windows isn't a bad idea either.
Dude, I've lived in NO for almost 10 years, and I still haven't gotten used to the taste of the tap water. It's gross. Not to say that the water guys don't drastically improve on the condition of the water that comes from the river.
PV Panels, if you can afford them, are definitely good but still out of the reasonable price range for most people. The high ceilings are nice, but a lot of houses in the city could really benefit with some better shading for the windows. Once the sun gets into your house, it's really hard to passively cool it.
Anyone who things that this was a big coordinated effort by the whole of GoonFleet to bring down CCP is just being dumb. The majority of goons playing EvE are invested in their characters and truly enjoy the game. Goons have worked hard to build itself an empire in the EvE universe, like so many other alliances have in the past. Throwing away all that time and energy would be silly, and to believe that 4000 players could all be convinced to do so is pretty unreasonable.
But why should anybody quietly stand by while a game that they're such a big fan of appears to be tainted by corruption and cheating? And when the devs try to ignore that anything has happened, why should anyone be ok with that? Sometimes protesting is the only way you can get someone to listen, and sometimes you have to protest very loudly before they'll pay attention to you. If CCP was a little more willing to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes, then the protests wouldn't have had to get that loud.
This also basically mirrors what happened with the last dev scandal, where CCP initially tried to delete/censor all the questions that players were asking about it. It took a lot of noise on the forums to get them to really acknowledge the issue, which they eventually did by saying that nothing had happened and infact nothing like that could ever happen. Even more forum noise ensued, until CCP took a real look at it and saw that the allegations were actually true.
So, from past experience, if you want CCP to actually acknowledge that they might have a problem, you have to crap all over their forums. Or else they'll ignore you. Their response this time has started out just like it did last time. Should they be surprised that we're following the same path that worked for us before?
CCP is not being given the benefit of the doubt because of a previous incident of developer corruption. It started out very similar, someone presented evidence of what was happening, people started asking questions, and CCP tried to pretend that it never came up. They deleted threads about it, banned people who kept bringing it up, and acted like nothing happened. Some of the players were not satisfied with this outcome, so they kept making noise about it. Eventually CCP acknowledged the allegations but insisted that they had done nothing wrong. They made some legal threats towards the person(s) who were responsible for the information first coming to light. Many players were still not happy with their response, and kept asking questions. CCP did some sort of investigation, and Hey! Look at that! The allegations were true! CCP apologized, handed down an almost meaningless punishment to the developer in question, gave out no punishment to the players who were complicit in the cheating, and promised that they'd take this stuff seriously from now on so it'll never happen again.
So what's happened with this latest scandal? More evidence of possible wrong-doing occurs. Someone posts the evidence, asking for CCP to look at it and explain what was going on. CCP responds by deleting the posts and trying to ignore it. Many of the players get upset at this and start to make a lot of noise on the forums. CCP eventually acknowledges the issue, and insists that nothing improper has occured. They again make some vague legal threats towards the players who are bringing the allegations forward.
This response by CCP is no more acceptable this time around as it was in the previous scandal. So here we are again, trying to force CCP to sort this crap out, because they're not going to do it unless we make enough noise. CCP has proven themselves untrustworthy in regards to dealing with these sorts of issues. Giving them the benefit of the doubt will only allow them to ignore this issue until it goes away. While that might make their job a little easier today, it's not the best thing for the future of EvE, and EvE is a game that many of us really enjoy and want to see improve and grow.
Higher ups in BoB have acknowledged on the Eve-o forum that they have direct access to various Devs/GMs and such via out-of-game channels. But even if what you're suggesting is the explanation, is that any more fair? Why should one group of players get to skip the petition queue? Why should their issues, valid or not, get addressed any faster than everyone else's?
We are trying to improve the game. Although it's certainly not perfect, EvE is an amazing game. No other MMO that I've come across is like it in terms of the cut-throat nature, the complexity of the environment, the teamwork that it inspires, etc. There is plenty in EvE for CCP to be proud of, much that we players enjoy, much that we're willing to pay for. There's also lots of potential for the game to continue to improve and grow and get even more awesome. In one sense, CCP sort of has us by the balls. We're invested in our characters, in this game, in this type of game; and there's no real alternative for players looking for a similar experience.
A number of people in my alliance have quit this game over this issue. Many others are on the fence, and are going to give it a few days to play out before walking away. We've all put a lot of time and energy into the game, we've had some great times playing, we're not happy to see it go through this drama. But most of us feel that it's important that we are vocal about what we see happening, why we as players don't think it's ok, and that CCP isn't allowed to just pretend like nothing has happened. The fact that CCP's inital response is almost always censorship just gets us even more riled up.
A lot of the problems come from the fact that CCP likes to recruit employees from the player base. This has obvious advantages for them, because they get people who already know a lot about the game. Their policy, as far as I've heard, is that when you become an employee, you can keep your pre-existing character, exactly as he/she is, you just can't tell anyone that that character is now connected to a dev/GM/whatever account. If you get outed as an employee, then your lose that character.
This doesn't work for a number of reasons. First off, there's the whole biased referees running the game discussion, which really isn't good. The earlier T20 incident showed that CCP was not doing a good job of monitoring their servers for improper use of special abilities. But even if they could figure that part out, EvE has such a huge amount of meta-game that goes on elsewhere than CCP's servers, that they could never hope to track it all. Along those same lines, every corp/alliance of any significant size has its own external forums/killboard/teamspeak server and such, and with the prevalence of spies and plants and such going on, most of them carefully monitor who moves through their forums. The point being, if I got hired by CCP and moved to iceland and kept logging into my alliance's forums, someone would notice my ip address moving to iceland, and they would likely ask me about it. You can't reasonably expect to keep that sort of stuff secret. Even if that employee was being fair and not abusing their powers, some of the players would figure it out.
At the end of the day, like you said, CCP employees should not be playing the game. They can't guarantee that nothing improper will occur, the design of the game is such that unfair actions by employees can have very significant negative effects on many of the players, and the meta-game all but insures that CCP employees will not be able to keep their identities completely hidden.
The form factor really was the key. My roommate got a Rio Karma right about the same time that I got my first ipod (maybe 2002?). I'd say in total volume, they were pretty close in size (the ipod probably had a slight advantage), but the Karma was shaped basically like a square, while the ipod was a rectangle. Meaning that the ipod slid into my pocket much better. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing, actually thinking about how people might carry around a device that's meant to be carried around everywhere. The karma also had a dial and maybe buttons along the side, making them easy to hit inadvertently while moving the device in our out of your pocket. Compared to the ipod where the buttons were all on one face, pretty close to flush with that face, and not along the sides where I was likely to grab it.
What the hell? A book is not an inherently sacred object. While the ability to read, print, and distribute information efficiently has undoubtedly been extremely important in the course of civilization, a book itself does not have any intrinsic moral value. It's really just a pile of paper with one edge bound together. The real value is generally in the information inside. That information varies in value from book to book, and is no longer confined to storage only by ink on paper.
The "evil" of book burning isn't about destroying a stack of paper, it's about when censorship or ignorance is organized in order to stop the spread of information that someone deems unfit for reading. It's about free speech, freedom to write what you want, freedom to read what you want. This guy isn't burning rare historical books, those have some value. He's burning excess mass-produced crap that he can't even give away. There's no moral argument concerning censorship, or brainwashing, or any of that in this case.
Go visit some salvation army stores, they've generally got plenty of books sitting on their shelves, most of which will never get sold. They don't have the staff with the time or skills necessary to sort through all those books and decide what will/wont sell. Libraries generally don't take public book donations for their collections(for a variety of reasons), although they will sometimes take them and then try to sell them cheaply at a big book sale a couple times per year. But most of those end up not selling, and getting thrown out as well.
What this guy is doing is half PR stunt, and half his inability to understand and plan for the way our economy works now. So much stuff is produced, that as a whole we could never sell/use/read them all. There are warehouses, garages, barns, basements, etc. full of junk that's collected over time. Books are not immune to this reality. You should probably calm down, stop advocating violence for someone trying to get rid of some garbage, and accept the fact that every copy of every cheap paperback book is not a magical gift to humanity.
Eh, probably because with all the resources MS has and all the hype they put out, we expected better. I don't know if Creative or Rio would flat out call any of their new players the "ipod killer" (although many media types will throw that around for just about anything that you can plug headphones into), but MS really talked up the Zune, and tried to manufacture the trendy-ness with their Welcome to the Social nonsense. I expect any company to embellish a little in their press releases, but if MS really took it far and then completely fell short of the expectations that they tried to create for us. I think it's really similar to what Sony did with the PS3. Promising the second coming and then delivering something that's only mildly compelling at best.
/. crowd, but I think the xbox and the response it's gotten here shows significantly more open-mindedness than you might expect. But on a website with a blatant linux/OSS slant, why would you expect the giant proprietary monopoly corporation to be given the benefit of the doubt?
And on the flip side, there were plenty of naysayers for Apple when the iPod was first announced (and still plenty now with the iPhone), although the Apple fanboys tend to drown that out a little more than MS's cheerleaders.
I'll agree that MS has a bit of an uphill battle with the
Meh. How many /. readers have an Xbox/Xbox360? I do, and I've been an Apple fanboy for well over a decade. In the end, it comes down to what does a product offer you for the price. If it's decent, people will buy it. Everyone was skeptical of the Xbox when it was first announced, but over time it's proven itself to be a worthwhile console to many people. Some people would rather die than have an MS produced object in their house, but most people really aren't that extreme.
MS has done very little with the Zune that would convince anybody to give it a shot.
That's a BS argument for a few reasons. First off, cellphones allow the ringing to be as annoying as the owner wants it. It's not like I can just train my mind to tune out the ringer, because everyone's ringer is different. The ringers are also often set very loud, and people often times will leave it behind on their desk/office/whatever and want to be able to hear it over in the other room.
I'm well over 30 years away from retirement (assuming the retirement age doesn't increase), and I find mobile phones annoying as all hell. The fact of the matter is that cell phones ringtones are generally designed to get your attention. If the landline in the meeting room rings, then yes, that's annoying as well. But there's no resonable other way for that phone to announce that there's a call. Cell phones have another option, one that's preferable for everyone else around you. You should use it. Nobody else in the office wants to hear your ringtone.
Your other comparisons are pretty lame and irrelevant. Cars driving past the building are easy to ignore because they're outside of the building and they're pretty constant. A car engine running at the desk next to me would be very disruptive.