I think that your response to the IRA point just shows how different your beliefs are from most though. I don't think there's any significant number of people in the tax industry or in the government even that believe the arrangement I just described is abusive. If you go to any financial planner it would be suggested this is just smart tax planning. And almost everyone I guess would just shrug and say, "well that's the arcaneness of the tax system for you," and do it.
And once that is granted, it's hard to deny that the tax system is pretty damn complex, and it's not an easy problem delineating fair from abusive transactions.
The ability to arbitrarily defer taxes for as long as you want would have a much bigger effect on revenues than you think. There's a reason we limit IRAs and 401k contributions. As Einstein said, "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest."
Also, say goodbye to estate taxes (which we might anyway) if we allow people to stash money in corporations.
I'm not blaming the country, or claiming the corporations are automatically guilty. When they do business that removes tax money from the community that built it's wealth, I consider that a worse offense than someone who is falsely collecting welfare.
Do you also consider it offensive that in the converse we tax US corporations on their overseas activities unless they incorporate foreign subsidiaries (and then we continue to try to tax those)? In that case, the US community is no longer really doing anything for them in the case of their overseas activities, but still tries to get its hands on their earnings.
Or do they owe it to us in perpetuity for helping to get them off the ground initially? If the answer to this one is yes, then what do you suppose that does for the global competitiveness of US companies?
This would be (somewhat) more interesting if true.
Top end corporate tax rate is currently 35%. Source: wikipedia
Also, see other posts earlier about how no matter what you set the corporate tax rate at, corporations don't pay tax, people do. Increased taxes are simply an increased cost of doing business, and consumers will pay for it with increased prices. The biggest thing that imposing corporate taxes really does is it allows us to play hide the ball on taxes (hide the ball being something that uninformed people simply love). It increases taxes, but the check isn't cut by the people, so they're less likely to get up in arms about it.
Is it also dodging my domestic tax obligations if I come up with a plan to pay into my 401k, avoiding paying taxes on that income? What if I do so knowing that I'll be going back to school next year and will have no income, and that I can then roll that 401k into a Roth IRA tax-free for the next 4 years $8950 a year? Since the money will come out of the Roth tax-free, I've avoided ever being taxed on it.
Is this somehow a different situation? If so, is it because your example involves corporations, and under modern populist thought it's very acceptable to hate corporations and want to lynch them?
I don't know the answers, but just my gut feeling is that it is unfair to blame people for doing things, no matter how convoluted, that reduce their income taxes as long as what they're doing is legal. If it's enough of a problem, we should make it illegal.
In a way you're proving the grandparent's point with your absurd suggestion. Thanks to the system working well in the field of murder, there is no way to setup an elaborate structure to avoid being guilty of murder, or no reasonable method I have ever heard of.
The response to unacceptable behavior from a societal/governmental point of view should not be punishing things that the law says are okay, it should be changing the laws to make the unacceptable behavior illegal.
If you really really really must prevent hoarding, you can have a simple flat tax on any money in the corporate bank over say 10X annual earnings. Theoretically, that gives the corporation a buffer of 10 years to weather recessions and what not.
We already have this, it's called the accumulated earnings tax, and it applies when a corporation hoards more money than needed for business.
In one sense you are right, because right now we do have the worst of both worlds system in a sense. We have a very high sticker price, which scares off foreign investment, while we have a very low profit simultaneously, which eliminates any benefit.
However, in setting the corporate rate, you have to be very careful in that if it is too much lower than the individual rate, rich individuals become highly incentivized to try and come up with crazy ways to funnel their money through corporations. They essentially become tax-reduced accounts like IRAs/401ks with no maximum size limit on them. If you understand the time value of money, which is an extremely important point in tax policy, allowing this would generally be a huge problem. All this funneling, like all tax sheltering activity, is wasteful from a societal point of view because it is a broken window problem, it doesn't make anyone richer from an overall point of view.
Incidentally, this is also the trouble with eliminating the corporate tax. It's true like the grandparent states, that businesses don't pay taxes, taxes are just another cost passed along to the consumer. In light of that, there is a lot of appeal to the idea of eliminating corporate tax. All the populist sentiment these days to make the corporate fat cats pay is a little irrational, because in most such cases, it'll just cause prices on goods to increase. However, if the corporate tax is eliminated, a lot of restrictions would have to be setup (probably more than we already do have, and we do have them already) to keep people from stashing money in corporations.
Your suspicion in this case is off the mark. In the case of the major US multinationals, the reason they setup these overseas shell companies is not to illegally avoid reporting income, but rather (among other reasons) to avoid having a legal obligation to pay taxes on things done abroad.
Maybe things are different in the world of smart phones, which I haven't entered yet, but in answer to your title question "would you buy a cell phone with NO support", I don't honestly think any cell phone I have ever had has ever had any meaningful support, so yes, apparently I would.
On my Samsung brand phone, their initial release was buggy as hell, T9 didn't work, Bluetooth was jacked, and all I could get out of either Sprint or Samsung support was that's how it's supposed to work, or maybe the problem is with your Bluetooth headset. Then they had the gall to release a software updated version, and sell it as a different product while claiming they couldn't give us the software update due to hardware differences. This was thoroughly discredited by industrious hackers, who managed to clone the firmware from the new one onto old models, and were selling the service as a fee.
The sad fact of the matter is that there is such a deathgrip on the American cell phone market, I go in now with lowered expectation and zero assumption I will ever receive anything that resembles customer service or support.
Agreed. Blue sky activities such as research on manned space travel are inherently not susceptible to pure private enterprise. That's why I laud groups like SpaceX and initiatives like the X-Prize, which break things down into manageable chunks for private enterprise to tackle, while still keeping around the government in areas that private industry is weak (distant goals with extremely large but speculative payoffs).
The reason I say it's inherently not susceptible to pure private enterprise is because there is an extremely high upfront (and continuing) investment cost, coupled with a stupendously large but very distant payoff. I haven't seen any evidence that there will be significant payoff in manned space travel before we get to the point where our technology is ready for colonization, but once we reach that point how do you even measure the "profits" they're so large?
In a purely rational marketplace, this may not make a difference, as 1 trillion over the next 10 years in return for 500 trillion in 50 is a great deal (with nothing or virtually nothing before 50). However, in the real world, no private actor would ever touch that deal with a ten foot pole. The problems are numerous, such as the fact that humans have finite lifespans, and 50 years is generally too long a time frame to wait for a payoff for an investment. A related problem is how you get together 1 trillion dollars to start with, especially since you've limited the pool to only those with extremely long investment windows. Corporations can help with this, since their immortality, like the government's, gives them a longer view on things, but the need to make short term (or even medium term) profits due to the finite lifespan of human investors means it's pretty much unrealistic to expect a corporation that doesn't plan on turning a profit for 50 years. Now, I just made up these numbers, but in general, I just don't see how private enterprise without purely altruistic goals can expect to gather humongous amount of money X in order to invest for long time frame Y in order to make stupendous amount of money Z.
Furthermore, in the case of space travel, the gains would be immeasurably large, but would be paid over a very large time frame as well. What good is it finally reaching a feasible method of inter planetary travel if within 21 years when your patents expire, or likely even sooner, all your competitors can cheaply leach off your initial massive outlay and develop cheap copies of your space travel methods, possibly even surpassing you (i.e. Rio mp3 players vs. Apple iPods). Even a rational immortal actor in a perfect world wouldn't invest in that case, unless they seek solely to benefit society and mankind as a whole, like ideally the government would.
Interesting point, and I take it into consideration.
It's never bothered me before on other brand 17" laptops having to move right hand more towards the middle, but different strokes for different folks I suppose.
Is there actually a contingent out there of people that have used the offset keyboard with numpad and dislike it though, or is this just apologism where a reason is invented for every complaint, with or without merit, and then the complaint summarily dismissed?
Yeah, that's a familiar refrain from people who don't believe anything can be wrong with Apple equipment. Just by external X.
External X is not the same as built-in X. It's one more piece of kit to cart around, it's one more piece of kit to buy, and it's one more ugly piece of kit hanging off the side of your computer.
The space is right there for the full numberpad. Basically every other 17" laptop has them, because they have the space for it. The weight difference must be negligible. There's just no reason in my opinion from a good design standpoint not to have it.
I simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad. If I'm going to lug around the weight of a 17" I feel like a proper keyboard with keypad is a must, especially since almost all of the other brands have no trouble fitting one in.
The weight on this thing is mighty impressive though, I'm not familiar with any 17" laptop that is only 6.6 lbs. Of course, I'm not sure if it's worth the trade-off of not having a removable battery.
You joke about this, but Microsoft actually has the best track record for non-designed obsolescence among all the digital audio player manufacturers out there. When they came out with new generation Zunes, they rolled out all the updates to older generation owners as well.
These updates were also free, unlike the updates for the iPod Touch (interesting how some companies supposedly have to charge for updates with new features under accounting rules, and others don't).
I don't approve of a lot of things Microsoft does, but I have to say that objectively, they've been a real class act as far as supporting older Zunes goes.
Mirror's Edge: A lot of people had a lot of problems with Mirror's Edge. Personally I found the game fantastic. True you ended up dying a fair bit, but usually you didn't have to redo a ton of the level to get back to where you were. I also loved the art direction the dev team took, even if the bloom made it hard to see;). I loved making quick decisions in the thick of things and I felt that the game just had a very nice flow to it. The only real gripe I have with it is I don't see much replay value and it was kind of short. So overall I thought it was good.
I totally agree. I loved Mirror's Edge. Maybe it's because I read so many horror stories about the boring combat in reviews, and set the combat to easy as a result, but I thought everything about this game was just about perfect, except the lack of open exploration, which was a shame.
Everyone was screaming about how the game was at its best when there was no enemies and you were free to approach obstacles as slowly as you liked, but I thought that running from the enemies really added quite a bit to the mix.
Another thing everyone complained about was the combat, but at least on easy mode, I thought combat was fairly fun. It's one of the few first person games where melee combat doesn't feel horribly awkward, and everything really worked for me.
Lastly, I didn't have a problem with the "Esurance" style cartoon cinematics. The game is stylish, and the stylized cut-scenes worked just fine for me.
I really hate it when people act as if buying the PS3 plus signing up for a credit card is buying a PS3 for $100 cheaper.
Applying for a new credit card is not a cost free operation. Your credit has value, and if you really want to, it's easy to find credit card promotions that give sign up incentives, including just cash. It normally costs credit card companies 80-200 dollars just to sign up a new customer (source).
It's the same as if I signed up for a $100 cash incentive to sign up for a Bank of America credit card, and used that to buy an Xbox 360 Arcade and claimed I bought an Xbox 360 for only $99. Only in the case of Sony, they're making money from you both on the future sales of PS3/Blu products as well as on future use of your credit card.
Sure, notebooks can play PC games, but it's a reduced experience, both in terms of comfort and performance.
I'm one of the people that switched over from desktop to notebook only about 6 years ago now. Once I switched over I gradually just stopped playing PC games; they ran like shit and it was cramped. A while after that, I decided to try out the Xbox for my gaming fix. Debatably it's not quite as good as the PC, but it gets the job done, and it avoids me having to pick up a second (and expensive) desktop just to game on.
More recently, once all laptops started coming with 3D graphics cards, I've started playing a few PC games again, but only little stuff like the Penny Arcade game rather than things like Crysis. At this point, I just don't see the purpose of spending quite a bit more to upgrade the GPU on my laptop so that I get worse battery life and more heat, just so I can play games when I already have a console.
Completely agreed. And also of significance in real society is the distinction between causing the base to be "owned" versus beating him in the game. If you happen to play a round of golf with Tiger Woods, you would expect to be given a handicap or some general type of advantage to compensate you for the vast difference in skill. If he blows you out and wins by 40 strokes, that just makes him a jerk.
I'm not so sure you have it right here, I think you're conflating two different concepts.
There's two different types of fear at play here: 1. The type of fear of the situation being depicted. 2. Meta-gaming fear, where you are afraid of losing something you worked hard for.
The first comes from immersion, the second comes from having personal stake in the game. A movie can be scary even though you're not actually worried about personally losing anything, but rather more from an empathy for the terror of the situation. A bet in blackjack in Las Vegas can be scary, but not because the situation is inherently horrifying, but because if you don't win the bet everything you've worked so hard for is lost.
Building up the meta-game fear of loss of progress can actually be pretty damaging to the situational fear. When the stakes become too high, players can't get into the situation and appreciate the terror, because they have to be pulling themselves out and keeping cool, trying to pull cheap tricks on the AI to make absolutely sure they don't die and lose half an hour of progress. Worse yet, if they do lose the progress, now they already know everything that's going to happen, and they're meta-gaming playing optimization tricks just to blast through it, ruining the immersion.
Is that necessarily true? It obviously would be if you assumed there is no energy lost during normal walking, but clearly that is not true. If it's just recovering some of the energy lost as we throw our feet into the ground so we can turn around their momentum, it might not be any harder.
If I had to guess, I might think this might actually make it slightly easier to walk, if it's like walking on springy ground. For instance, thinking about it now in my head, I think it's less tiring to walk wearing a pair of shoes with air soles than barefoot. Might this be a similar case?
Try the Deus Ex or System Shock series. Good plot, good atmosphere, good action.
For something more recent (and with better graphics) Bioshock.
Re:Most humans aren't that smart
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The State of Game AI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In most FPS games, stupid humans want to be able to mow down _thousands_ of stupider computer controlled enemies - "against the odds". That's what makes it fun for them.
That's just not possible if the enemies start having a lot more brains. Then most players might have difficulty getting past the first 3 enemies:).
It's not that difficult to make an enemy FPS "bot" have superb tactics, coordination, timing etc. Especially if the map is pre-known (which is usually the case). You can code the tactics and heuristics in. If you hear the player in position X, group A enemies head to position Y and group B head to position Z, and bye bye player.
Imagine if enemies that are low in health kept running away and hiding, and then snipe at you from far away when they see that you are busy doing something else. While that might be more realistic, it might not be so fun eh? Who really wants realism in games?
At that rate the player can never pretend to be the hero he wants to be. He'll just be dead. And your game won't sell.
I see your point, but disagree to a certain extent. Idiot AI in modern FPS really devalues the successes, at least for me, to a large extent. It should be an incredible accomplishment for a single man to kill a squad of 5 people, but it's just one encounter, and I feel nothing afterwards. If the AI could be juiced up in these games, then you wouldn't need to throw a 1000 enemies at the player to make them feel like a hero, because you'd feel more accomplishment from each encounter.
I recently just played through Deus Ex for the first time, and it is an outstanding game, especially for the time. However, the AI was really the Achilles Heel in terms of immersion in that game. At times, you can really get into games like that, but once the rules of the AI start to become apparent the whole experience starts to feel less like you're a hero, and more like a toy world. You shoot a guy in the chest, hide for a while, he decides it must have been the wind and goes back to his patrol without telling anyone. The whole thing becomes so exploitable that it just feels cheap.
Furthermore, in many FPS like Deus Ex or Halo, your character is so super-powered even with intelligent foes, he would still be a walking death-dealer. If he's not enough of one, you can always just make his shield that much stronger.
Lastly, when you add in intelligent AI for tactics, you'd also want to add it in for realism. Enemies that run low on health usually (though sometimes they might if their courage rating was high) wouldn't run away and snipe you. That's not realistic AI. They'd run away and cry that they'd been shot, and yell for help from their teammates who'd go and try and assist them.
Thanks for the offer, I really appreciate it. I don't really have time to really delve into Linux these days, but like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I do think I will try again in the future, and I'll keep your forum in mind. I have observed before personally that people that get really good at Linux tend to at some point have had a mentor or a LUG group helping them out, since the learning curve is pretty damn steep. In the past when I've tried to get going via forums, the end result has usually been that I post in the newbie forum of some Linux board, my questions get ignored, and after a while I shelve the whole becoming a Linux guru thing again.
Just a quick point on the command line, I think I do have a basic working knowledge of the unix commandline, I used it all through college for my CS classes, so I can use all the basic commands (including man) and pipe stuff. It's the really advanced stuff from the forums that become magical incantations for me. All the flags that I'm not 100% sure of the purpose behind, the commands that I haven't heard of before, all for something that I hadn't been hoping to devote a ton of time into getting work (for example, compiling and installing the Blackberry drivers). I know they're logical at the core, but until you've really delved into them and figured out the syntax of the commands and everything that's going on, they might as well be Harry Potter-style magical incantations is what I was getting at.
Thanks for taking the time to post the thoughtful reply, I appreciate it.
Like I mentioned elsewhere in this (now gigantic thread) I'm sure I'll try Linux again in the future. I definitely do appreciate things like the sense of ownership, and the feeling that the machine is at my command and working for me. Again, I'm sure with enough effort, it's hardly impossible for me to become a Linux guru. On a typical Linux install, at this point I feel fairly comfortable. I understand the man command, and all that stuff that other people in this thread mentioned. It's just that when you need to do something somewhat unusual that in my experience the whole thing becomes a mess for me. And at this point, there are things that are far more important for my career for me to focus on learning rather than learning how to use a new type of hammer when my old hammer still basically works.
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I think that your response to the IRA point just shows how different your beliefs are from most though. I don't think there's any significant number of people in the tax industry or in the government even that believe the arrangement I just described is abusive. If you go to any financial planner it would be suggested this is just smart tax planning. And almost everyone I guess would just shrug and say, "well that's the arcaneness of the tax system for you," and do it.
And once that is granted, it's hard to deny that the tax system is pretty damn complex, and it's not an easy problem delineating fair from abusive transactions.
The ability to arbitrarily defer taxes for as long as you want would have a much bigger effect on revenues than you think. There's a reason we limit IRAs and 401k contributions. As Einstein said, "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest."
Also, say goodbye to estate taxes (which we might anyway) if we allow people to stash money in corporations.
I'm not blaming the country, or claiming the corporations are automatically guilty. When they do business that removes tax money from the community that built it's wealth, I consider that a worse offense than someone who is falsely collecting welfare.
Do you also consider it offensive that in the converse we tax US corporations on their overseas activities unless they incorporate foreign subsidiaries (and then we continue to try to tax those)? In that case, the US community is no longer really doing anything for them in the case of their overseas activities, but still tries to get its hands on their earnings.
Or do they owe it to us in perpetuity for helping to get them off the ground initially? If the answer to this one is yes, then what do you suppose that does for the global competitiveness of US companies?
This would be (somewhat) more interesting if true.
Top end corporate tax rate is currently 35%. Source: wikipedia
Also, see other posts earlier about how no matter what you set the corporate tax rate at, corporations don't pay tax, people do. Increased taxes are simply an increased cost of doing business, and consumers will pay for it with increased prices. The biggest thing that imposing corporate taxes really does is it allows us to play hide the ball on taxes (hide the ball being something that uninformed people simply love). It increases taxes, but the check isn't cut by the people, so they're less likely to get up in arms about it.
Is it also dodging my domestic tax obligations if I come up with a plan to pay into my 401k, avoiding paying taxes on that income? What if I do so knowing that I'll be going back to school next year and will have no income, and that I can then roll that 401k into a Roth IRA tax-free for the next 4 years $8950 a year? Since the money will come out of the Roth tax-free, I've avoided ever being taxed on it.
Is this somehow a different situation? If so, is it because your example involves corporations, and under modern populist thought it's very acceptable to hate corporations and want to lynch them?
I don't know the answers, but just my gut feeling is that it is unfair to blame people for doing things, no matter how convoluted, that reduce their income taxes as long as what they're doing is legal. If it's enough of a problem, we should make it illegal.
In a way you're proving the grandparent's point with your absurd suggestion. Thanks to the system working well in the field of murder, there is no way to setup an elaborate structure to avoid being guilty of murder, or no reasonable method I have ever heard of.
The response to unacceptable behavior from a societal/governmental point of view should not be punishing things that the law says are okay, it should be changing the laws to make the unacceptable behavior illegal.
If you really really really must prevent hoarding, you can have a simple flat tax on any money in the corporate bank over say 10X annual earnings. Theoretically, that gives the corporation a buffer of 10 years to weather recessions and what not.
We already have this, it's called the accumulated earnings tax, and it applies when a corporation hoards more money than needed for business.
In one sense you are right, because right now we do have the worst of both worlds system in a sense. We have a very high sticker price, which scares off foreign investment, while we have a very low profit simultaneously, which eliminates any benefit.
However, in setting the corporate rate, you have to be very careful in that if it is too much lower than the individual rate, rich individuals become highly incentivized to try and come up with crazy ways to funnel their money through corporations. They essentially become tax-reduced accounts like IRAs/401ks with no maximum size limit on them. If you understand the time value of money, which is an extremely important point in tax policy, allowing this would generally be a huge problem. All this funneling, like all tax sheltering activity, is wasteful from a societal point of view because it is a broken window problem, it doesn't make anyone richer from an overall point of view.
Incidentally, this is also the trouble with eliminating the corporate tax. It's true like the grandparent states, that businesses don't pay taxes, taxes are just another cost passed along to the consumer. In light of that, there is a lot of appeal to the idea of eliminating corporate tax. All the populist sentiment these days to make the corporate fat cats pay is a little irrational, because in most such cases, it'll just cause prices on goods to increase. However, if the corporate tax is eliminated, a lot of restrictions would have to be setup (probably more than we already do have, and we do have them already) to keep people from stashing money in corporations.
Your suspicion in this case is off the mark. In the case of the major US multinationals, the reason they setup these overseas shell companies is not to illegally avoid reporting income, but rather (among other reasons) to avoid having a legal obligation to pay taxes on things done abroad.
Maybe things are different in the world of smart phones, which I haven't entered yet, but in answer to your title question "would you buy a cell phone with NO support", I don't honestly think any cell phone I have ever had has ever had any meaningful support, so yes, apparently I would.
On my Samsung brand phone, their initial release was buggy as hell, T9 didn't work, Bluetooth was jacked, and all I could get out of either Sprint or Samsung support was that's how it's supposed to work, or maybe the problem is with your Bluetooth headset. Then they had the gall to release a software updated version, and sell it as a different product while claiming they couldn't give us the software update due to hardware differences. This was thoroughly discredited by industrious hackers, who managed to clone the firmware from the new one onto old models, and were selling the service as a fee.
The sad fact of the matter is that there is such a deathgrip on the American cell phone market, I go in now with lowered expectation and zero assumption I will ever receive anything that resembles customer service or support.
Agreed. Blue sky activities such as research on manned space travel are inherently not susceptible to pure private enterprise. That's why I laud groups like SpaceX and initiatives like the X-Prize, which break things down into manageable chunks for private enterprise to tackle, while still keeping around the government in areas that private industry is weak (distant goals with extremely large but speculative payoffs).
The reason I say it's inherently not susceptible to pure private enterprise is because there is an extremely high upfront (and continuing) investment cost, coupled with a stupendously large but very distant payoff. I haven't seen any evidence that there will be significant payoff in manned space travel before we get to the point where our technology is ready for colonization, but once we reach that point how do you even measure the "profits" they're so large?
In a purely rational marketplace, this may not make a difference, as 1 trillion over the next 10 years in return for 500 trillion in 50 is a great deal (with nothing or virtually nothing before 50). However, in the real world, no private actor would ever touch that deal with a ten foot pole. The problems are numerous, such as the fact that humans have finite lifespans, and 50 years is generally too long a time frame to wait for a payoff for an investment. A related problem is how you get together 1 trillion dollars to start with, especially since you've limited the pool to only those with extremely long investment windows. Corporations can help with this, since their immortality, like the government's, gives them a longer view on things, but the need to make short term (or even medium term) profits due to the finite lifespan of human investors means it's pretty much unrealistic to expect a corporation that doesn't plan on turning a profit for 50 years. Now, I just made up these numbers, but in general, I just don't see how private enterprise without purely altruistic goals can expect to gather humongous amount of money X in order to invest for long time frame Y in order to make stupendous amount of money Z.
Furthermore, in the case of space travel, the gains would be immeasurably large, but would be paid over a very large time frame as well. What good is it finally reaching a feasible method of inter planetary travel if within 21 years when your patents expire, or likely even sooner, all your competitors can cheaply leach off your initial massive outlay and develop cheap copies of your space travel methods, possibly even surpassing you (i.e. Rio mp3 players vs. Apple iPods). Even a rational immortal actor in a perfect world wouldn't invest in that case, unless they seek solely to benefit society and mankind as a whole, like ideally the government would.
Interesting point, and I take it into consideration.
It's never bothered me before on other brand 17" laptops having to move right hand more towards the middle, but different strokes for different folks I suppose.
Is there actually a contingent out there of people that have used the offset keyboard with numpad and dislike it though, or is this just apologism where a reason is invented for every complaint, with or without merit, and then the complaint summarily dismissed?
Yeah, that's a familiar refrain from people who don't believe anything can be wrong with Apple equipment. Just by external X.
External X is not the same as built-in X. It's one more piece of kit to cart around, it's one more piece of kit to buy, and it's one more ugly piece of kit hanging off the side of your computer.
The space is right there for the full numberpad. Basically every other 17" laptop has them, because they have the space for it. The weight difference must be negligible. There's just no reason in my opinion from a good design standpoint not to have it.
I simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad. If I'm going to lug around the weight of a 17" I feel like a proper keyboard with keypad is a must, especially since almost all of the other brands have no trouble fitting one in.
The weight on this thing is mighty impressive though, I'm not familiar with any 17" laptop that is only 6.6 lbs. Of course, I'm not sure if it's worth the trade-off of not having a removable battery.
You joke about this, but Microsoft actually has the best track record for non-designed obsolescence among all the digital audio player manufacturers out there. When they came out with new generation Zunes, they rolled out all the updates to older generation owners as well.
These updates were also free, unlike the updates for the iPod Touch (interesting how some companies supposedly have to charge for updates with new features under accounting rules, and others don't).
I don't approve of a lot of things Microsoft does, but I have to say that objectively, they've been a real class act as far as supporting older Zunes goes.
Mirror's Edge: A lot of people had a lot of problems with Mirror's Edge. Personally I found the game fantastic. True you ended up dying a fair bit, but usually you didn't have to redo a ton of the level to get back to where you were. I also loved the art direction the dev team took, even if the bloom made it hard to see ;). I loved making quick decisions in the thick of things and I felt that the game just had a very nice flow to it. The only real gripe I have with it is I don't see much replay value and it was kind of short. So overall I thought it was good.
I totally agree. I loved Mirror's Edge. Maybe it's because I read so many horror stories about the boring combat in reviews, and set the combat to easy as a result, but I thought everything about this game was just about perfect, except the lack of open exploration, which was a shame.
Everyone was screaming about how the game was at its best when there was no enemies and you were free to approach obstacles as slowly as you liked, but I thought that running from the enemies really added quite a bit to the mix.
Another thing everyone complained about was the combat, but at least on easy mode, I thought combat was fairly fun. It's one of the few first person games where melee combat doesn't feel horribly awkward, and everything really worked for me.
Lastly, I didn't have a problem with the "Esurance" style cartoon cinematics. The game is stylish, and the stylized cut-scenes worked just fine for me.
I really hate it when people act as if buying the PS3 plus signing up for a credit card is buying a PS3 for $100 cheaper.
Applying for a new credit card is not a cost free operation. Your credit has value, and if you really want to, it's easy to find credit card promotions that give sign up incentives, including just cash. It normally costs credit card companies 80-200 dollars just to sign up a new customer (source).
It's the same as if I signed up for a $100 cash incentive to sign up for a Bank of America credit card, and used that to buy an Xbox 360 Arcade and claimed I bought an Xbox 360 for only $99. Only in the case of Sony, they're making money from you both on the future sales of PS3/Blu products as well as on future use of your credit card.
I think this has a lot to do with the purported death of PC gaming stories that keep coming up, like this one from yesterday:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/24/032242
Sure, notebooks can play PC games, but it's a reduced experience, both in terms of comfort and performance.
I'm one of the people that switched over from desktop to notebook only about 6 years ago now. Once I switched over I gradually just stopped playing PC games; they ran like shit and it was cramped. A while after that, I decided to try out the Xbox for my gaming fix. Debatably it's not quite as good as the PC, but it gets the job done, and it avoids me having to pick up a second (and expensive) desktop just to game on.
More recently, once all laptops started coming with 3D graphics cards, I've started playing a few PC games again, but only little stuff like the Penny Arcade game rather than things like Crysis. At this point, I just don't see the purpose of spending quite a bit more to upgrade the GPU on my laptop so that I get worse battery life and more heat, just so I can play games when I already have a console.
Completely agreed. And also of significance in real society is the distinction between causing the base to be "owned" versus beating him in the game. If you happen to play a round of golf with Tiger Woods, you would expect to be given a handicap or some general type of advantage to compensate you for the vast difference in skill. If he blows you out and wins by 40 strokes, that just makes him a jerk.
I'm not so sure you have it right here, I think you're conflating two different concepts.
There's two different types of fear at play here:
1. The type of fear of the situation being depicted.
2. Meta-gaming fear, where you are afraid of losing something you worked hard for.
The first comes from immersion, the second comes from having personal stake in the game. A movie can be scary even though you're not actually worried about personally losing anything, but rather more from an empathy for the terror of the situation. A bet in blackjack in Las Vegas can be scary, but not because the situation is inherently horrifying, but because if you don't win the bet everything you've worked so hard for is lost.
Building up the meta-game fear of loss of progress can actually be pretty damaging to the situational fear. When the stakes become too high, players can't get into the situation and appreciate the terror, because they have to be pulling themselves out and keeping cool, trying to pull cheap tricks on the AI to make absolutely sure they don't die and lose half an hour of progress. Worse yet, if they do lose the progress, now they already know everything that's going to happen, and they're meta-gaming playing optimization tricks just to blast through it, ruining the immersion.
Is that necessarily true? It obviously would be if you assumed there is no energy lost during normal walking, but clearly that is not true. If it's just recovering some of the energy lost as we throw our feet into the ground so we can turn around their momentum, it might not be any harder.
If I had to guess, I might think this might actually make it slightly easier to walk, if it's like walking on springy ground. For instance, thinking about it now in my head, I think it's less tiring to walk wearing a pair of shoes with air soles than barefoot. Might this be a similar case?
Try the Deus Ex or System Shock series. Good plot, good atmosphere, good action.
For something more recent (and with better graphics) Bioshock.
In most FPS games, stupid humans want to be able to mow down _thousands_ of stupider computer controlled enemies - "against the odds". That's what makes it fun for them.
That's just not possible if the enemies start having a lot more brains. Then most players might have difficulty getting past the first 3 enemies :).
It's not that difficult to make an enemy FPS "bot" have superb tactics, coordination, timing etc. Especially if the map is pre-known (which is usually the case). You can code the tactics and heuristics in. If you hear the player in position X, group A enemies head to position Y and group B head to position Z, and bye bye player.
Imagine if enemies that are low in health kept running away and hiding, and then snipe at you from far away when they see that you are busy doing something else. While that might be more realistic, it might not be so fun eh? Who really wants realism in games?
At that rate the player can never pretend to be the hero he wants to be. He'll just be dead. And your game won't sell.
I see your point, but disagree to a certain extent. Idiot AI in modern FPS really devalues the successes, at least for me, to a large extent. It should be an incredible accomplishment for a single man to kill a squad of 5 people, but it's just one encounter, and I feel nothing afterwards. If the AI could be juiced up in these games, then you wouldn't need to throw a 1000 enemies at the player to make them feel like a hero, because you'd feel more accomplishment from each encounter.
I recently just played through Deus Ex for the first time, and it is an outstanding game, especially for the time. However, the AI was really the Achilles Heel in terms of immersion in that game. At times, you can really get into games like that, but once the rules of the AI start to become apparent the whole experience starts to feel less like you're a hero, and more like a toy world. You shoot a guy in the chest, hide for a while, he decides it must have been the wind and goes back to his patrol without telling anyone. The whole thing becomes so exploitable that it just feels cheap.
Furthermore, in many FPS like Deus Ex or Halo, your character is so super-powered even with intelligent foes, he would still be a walking death-dealer. If he's not enough of one, you can always just make his shield that much stronger.
Lastly, when you add in intelligent AI for tactics, you'd also want to add it in for realism. Enemies that run low on health usually (though sometimes they might if their courage rating was high) wouldn't run away and snipe you. That's not realistic AI. They'd run away and cry that they'd been shot, and yell for help from their teammates who'd go and try and assist them.
Thanks for the offer, I really appreciate it. I don't really have time to really delve into Linux these days, but like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I do think I will try again in the future, and I'll keep your forum in mind. I have observed before personally that people that get really good at Linux tend to at some point have had a mentor or a LUG group helping them out, since the learning curve is pretty damn steep. In the past when I've tried to get going via forums, the end result has usually been that I post in the newbie forum of some Linux board, my questions get ignored, and after a while I shelve the whole becoming a Linux guru thing again.
Just a quick point on the command line, I think I do have a basic working knowledge of the unix commandline, I used it all through college for my CS classes, so I can use all the basic commands (including man) and pipe stuff. It's the really advanced stuff from the forums that become magical incantations for me. All the flags that I'm not 100% sure of the purpose behind, the commands that I haven't heard of before, all for something that I hadn't been hoping to devote a ton of time into getting work (for example, compiling and installing the Blackberry drivers). I know they're logical at the core, but until you've really delved into them and figured out the syntax of the commands and everything that's going on, they might as well be Harry Potter-style magical incantations is what I was getting at.
Thanks again for your kind words.
Thanks for taking the time to post the thoughtful reply, I appreciate it.
Like I mentioned elsewhere in this (now gigantic thread) I'm sure I'll try Linux again in the future. I definitely do appreciate things like the sense of ownership, and the feeling that the machine is at my command and working for me. Again, I'm sure with enough effort, it's hardly impossible for me to become a Linux guru. On a typical Linux install, at this point I feel fairly comfortable. I understand the man command, and all that stuff that other people in this thread mentioned. It's just that when you need to do something somewhat unusual that in my experience the whole thing becomes a mess for me. And at this point, there are things that are far more important for my career for me to focus on learning rather than learning how to use a new type of hammer when my old hammer still basically works.