Would have loved to play this. I liked HL2 when it came out. A lot. Played it completely through. Enjoyed every moment. Won't touch it again: STEAM. Hell of a lot of trouble initially, and then I need to allow the system to Phone Home at every game start. Even when calling the editor - thus, no maps from me. And I will never, ever, buy anything using STEAM again. Not even the add-ons to HL2. No support from me, no money from me, and I've convinced quite a few nearly-customers of the same.
Well, I *do* mind. Perhaps it's because I don't have a radio or a TV, and am thus simpy not as used to advertising. I ignore signs, and get highly irritated in cinemas, when they try to flood us with ads for 45 minutes (!) before the actual film starts.
Thus I can say here and now that I will refuse to buy any game with ads in it. I have lots of good games. Still play the classics (have a look for "The Ur-Quan Masters", for example). Mind you, I buy quite a few games per month. If ads start showing up, this will very suddenly stop, and I'll use the money on other things (taking my GF out for pizza, for example;)
The whole thing's rather simple: most people have absolutely no idea how to install an OS. They bought their PC, Windows was already installed on it, done.
No wonder things are iitially more complex on Linux. The thing to do would be to give somebody a completely installed Linux system, with all the multimedia stuff et al already set up.
As happens to most very highly complex systems, it'll break down in wartime, failing to protect the tank.
Besides, it'll be crushingly expensive - meaning the USA will collapse from its economic pressure even sooner. Not that I appreciate this all that much (I do have some US friends), but at least the world will be quite a bit more peaceful again.
>they run the risk of once again being brought up on charges of monpolistic practices
So what? They were brought up several times already. Did anything happen to them? Did anything change? Do you believe that with the current cimate in the USA, they even worry about this?
Your comment is not particularly satisfying and/or full of data. Let me guess: a) you're a US citizen, b) you're a 'patriot', c) you fully support the US military and it's current activities, d) you are under 25 years of age, d) you have very little hard factual data about this topic.
Sir, may I suggest that you learn to write proper english, for a start. And stop being a coward, even if it's merely an anonymous one.
My data comes from "The Threat: Inside the soviet military machine" by Michael Cockburn.
Part V: The Sea Power of the State: talks about exactly this. Allow me a few choice quotes:
"...report on the NATO exercise Ocean Venture '81... written by Lieutenant Commander Dean Knuth... had concluded that that the two aircraft carriers taking part would have been speedily sent to the bottom by the very small force of "enemy" submarines..."
"Admiral Rickover... declared when he was finally retired from the service in 1982 that the entire U.S. carrier force would "last about two days" if war broke out. "Operating against a carrier is too easy"..."
"Within a few years, we will have decomissioned our last diesel-electric submarine. When that happens... our ASW skill against diesel submarines will evaporate... our evaluation of the threat posed by diesel submarines will lose the reality that exercise results provide."
"...they are very quiet... The difference is so great that European submariners operating the latest West German diesel-electric boats report that their greatest worry on NATO exercises is being run into by U.S. nuclear submarines unaware of their presence."
Yes, info from the 80s. I don't think that data has changed *all* that much, and of course the USA military has a lot or PR talk...
An interesting point is also the true reason behind carriers: they are large and impressive ("gunboat diplomacy", also known politically correctly known as "showing the flag"), and they have veeery comfortable quarters for an admiral and his staff.
Look, Slashdot is probably the wrong place to discuss this. Feel free to contact me at KlausBreuer@Hotmail.com (don't laugh, it's my 'public' email... had it since before MS bought it)
One word: STEAM. No thanks. I'm not interested in my system calling into the net every time I play, even every time I want to design a map. Despite my enjoyment of HL2 (yes, I bought it, yes, I finished it) STEAM simply pissed me off too much.
HL was great. HL2 was brilliant. STEAM was idiotic.
On the last NATO manouvres on the north atlantic (in the 80s), the first ships simulated sunk (on the first day, too) were the aircraft cariers. Sunk by diesel subs, I might add.
Sure, times have changed. These days, aircraft carriers are used to, um, protect themselves. The aircraft are very rarely used for actual missions (bombers and the like are flown in from Far Away). An AC is an easy ship to sink - it's an enormous and slow target, and modern bombs and missiles are ore than accurate enough to quickly and cheaply dispose of these $xx billion toys.
Besides - what's this about SAVING taxpayers money? You save it by building three aircraft carriers? Are you nuts? Are you expecting another major war? There are two sides to this: if you get involved in a major, serious war (not the idiotic one-sided bombings the USA has been up to in order to increase some company profits), the carriers will be sunk reasonably soon. If there is no major war (well, I do have some hopes left), they'll be an enormous cost (*much* higher than expected), and then they'll be scrapped.
You can't tell me that NASA is planning something major such as this in all seriousness.
Sure, they're talking. Talk is cheap. They're drawing pretty pictures, writing nice things... but I'd bet a rather large sum of money that they'll not build anything at all on the moon for the next twenty years.
They will get several more budget cuts and generally become even more bureaucratic and immobile. There will be less and less useful things happening, and (except for all the top-secret military stuff) will be able to do less and less.
Pity about the SPACEX problem, but I'd give them much higher chances of actually getting anywhere.
Besides, hey, nobody outside the USA expects the USA to carry on like they do now. They'll collapse economically in a major way withing a few years - we just hope that they'll do it without killing everybody else. The russians set a nice example, only ruining themselves in the process.
It means that the next news we will hear on the topic will be the american 'leadership' calling for very hard controls on who's allowed on the net, on forcing us to use definitively tracable IDs, on controlling our every step. And they'll (yet again) use The Evil Terrorists as an excuse.
Halt, stop, let me explain: no, I'm not touching their HD-whatever. I am most certainly not buying any of the DRM-overgrown hardware. I laugh at their idea of massively expensive downloads.
But I am buying DVDs. Their prices have dropped sufficiently that I am willing to pay for them. Of course I rip them, and view the rip only (no ads at the beginning, no having to watch through the animated menu, o searching for the disc). I keep the DVD on the shelf. I'm okay with paying between four and ten euros per DVD.
I don't have a TV, and never will. Dito DVD-player. But I do have a PC with a 21" screen. And thus the DVD-copyright idiocies don't touch me.
As soon as they do - well I have quite a few films by now. And many more books. And board games. And PC games. And a lovely countryside. I the trouble gets too big, I'll simply stop watching films.
As for the cinema: I used to enjoy it. By now I see too many adverts (45 minutes! 45!) and have to pay too much for it to bother anymore.
I don't have a TV, not simply because 95% of the content is junk, but because of all the endless, irritating, noisy, intruding advertising which tries to sell me as particularly stupid. ("No worries, I use that time to get a beer or go to the loo!" - rubbish). Same reason: no radio. Driver 3 had not only poor graphics and poor gameplay, but advertising in it. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it. Then I exited, deleted the game, and gave the original away.
I spend a fair amount of time with games. Any adverts in it will not be tolerated under any circumstances whatsoever. Free game? Okay. With ads in it? Nope.
Lots of really good games (MOO2? GalCiv2? Civ4?) which have no ads at all. I'll buy these.
Nope - GalCiv II is written by StarDock, and they have nothing to do with MOO. Their previous Game - GalCiv - was also not protected. They thought that they'd sell about 30,000 games, but it turned out to be over 100,000 - no copy protection seems to pay out.
And it does explain why I've bought both games. Yes, bought. I *like* not being bothered by some damn Digital Restriction Management, and the games are both very good - and well supported, on top of it.
Yup. I miss the nice fat manuals myself, and I don't see the sharp increase in use of 3D as much of a replacement. Add this to the fact that you're quite right about most guides - they stink.
Remember Master of Magic? Had a nice, fat handbook full of details. A bit later I bought a guid - a FAT handbook full of lovely details, hints, tips, How Tos...
Oh, well. Not buying guides anymore saves me some money. Nearly exclusively playing shareware games these days also does.
No - how about Pascal in the first semester? Designed to be a teachers language, and you can get both DOS-based Turbo-Pascal for free, as well as freeware clones of the rather nice Delphi language for Windows, Linux, BeOS, Mac... (Delphi itself is very good, but shockingly expensive).
Pascal is easy. It's easy to read, easy to write, and allows you to fool about with strings as much as you want to. Switch to C++ in the second semester/year, but stay away from that single-OS-closed-source VB stuff.
My only major problem with cinemas is the advertising.
Here in Germany most people (at least in the cinemas I frequent) stay silent, stay seated, and have their cell phones turned off. While prices have gone up by quite a bit, I do like to sit in a cinema with a nice girl and watch a good movie (happens even today, every now and then).
But cinemas have begun showing advertising on a major scale. The well-known "[m]" Cinema in Munich shows 45 minutes (yes, fourty-five!) of advertising before the film begins. Meaning you show up at 20:00, curtain goes up, place goes dark, and you are pumped full of moronc advertising until 20:45 - when the film begins.
Bah. Like heck I'll pay money for that. So now I sit at home and watch DVDs on my 21" Screen. Not quite as good (no, I'm not buying a TV, ever, and not a beamer while the bulbs still die soon and expensively), but the films starts the instant I want it.
Oh, and yes, I've got a few DVDs with non-interruptible adverts in it (thanks, Disney!). No worries for me, since I rip my DVDs anyway and leave them on the shelf.
I read an interesting article once, claiming that there are 36 possible storylines. Sounds strange, but after reading through them I could confirm them - not onle of my (very) many books would be in a different story.
And if you now copyright one, two, all of them - you won't be able to write another book.
Great idea. Surely, That's exactly what we need copyright for. Right?
"3. Righteous eye candy: For the first time, Microsoft is building high-end graphics effects into Windows"
Why the heck do I need eye coandy on my OS, for heavens sake? The OS is supposed to be a base, something to run the software on. It should be as quei and fast as possible.
I do *not* want to buy a new PC simply because the new OS needs a 3D graphics card to display the CPU status to me.
Nu-uh. That's the exact same thing I said about Windows XP as opposed to Win2000. And yet - so many people are now using XP... And this has a simple reason: new computers come with Vista. Companies will have to switch, because the old OS is not supported anymore. And lo! Vista will be everywhere.
If some content is only visible if I have DRM, I simply won't see it. Since I'm not alone on this concept, a percentage (seeing how many people already have a non-DRM OS) of the users will also not see that information, advertisement, game, whatever.
Couldn't care less. Lots of nicely interesting things abound without requiring DRM.
Well, being typically german in that respect I guess, I took a long time finding a proper watch. I wanted the following: titanium body (doesn't scratch, ever), crystal glass (dito), very highly accurate, simple appearance, very quick to glance at, especially at night, waterproof.
It's nice and simply, doesn't look fancy, meets all my requirements, and is controlled by the sender in Frankfurt, meaning it sets itself every hour to an atomic clock.
And the simply face makes sure that I can read it at a glance - no additional little faces in it or anything.
Lovely machine. Not really my own, but hey, it had a built-in thermo printer, two (!) metal tape drives, a lovely graphical display (it could do 80 cols!), and was blazingly fast: scrolling your code was so fast that the line numbers were unreadable.
Friends had ZX 81 and C64 - it was fun writing your own games on there.
Next system was a Sperry/Univac 1100/11 (yeah, yeah, I'm an old fart). We had access to one at school:) Followed by a VAX 785 and - finally! - my very own PC: the Olivetti M24.
These days my little Palm TX is more powerful then all of them combined:)
I tried the 16K upgrade on a friends ZX-81. No good, because if you weren't really careful, it could wobble... *click* and the carefully typed code from "ZX Computing" magazine disappeared...
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh*
Would have loved to play this. I liked HL2 when it came out. A lot. Played it completely through. Enjoyed every moment.
Won't touch it again: STEAM.
Hell of a lot of trouble initially, and then I need to allow the system to Phone Home at every game start. Even when calling the editor - thus, no maps from me.
And I will never, ever, buy anything using STEAM again. Not even the add-ons to HL2. No support from me, no money from me, and I've convinced quite a few nearly-customers of the same.
Well, I *do* mind.
;)
Perhaps it's because I don't have a radio or a TV, and am thus simpy not as used to advertising. I ignore signs, and get highly irritated in cinemas, when they try to flood us with ads for 45 minutes (!) before the actual film starts.
Thus I can say here and now that I will refuse to buy any game with ads in it.
I have lots of good games. Still play the classics (have a look for "The Ur-Quan Masters", for example). Mind you, I buy quite a few games per month.
If ads start showing up, this will very suddenly stop, and I'll use the money on other things (taking my GF out for pizza, for example
Ciao,
Klaus
The whole thing's rather simple: most people have absolutely no idea how to install an OS.
They bought their PC, Windows was already installed on it, done.
No wonder things are iitially more complex on Linux. The thing to do would be to give somebody a completely installed Linux system, with all the multimedia stuff et al already set up.
Don't worry about having to take care of it.
As happens to most very highly complex systems, it'll break down in wartime, failing to protect the tank.
Besides, it'll be crushingly expensive - meaning the USA will collapse from its economic pressure even sooner. Not that I appreciate this all that much (I do have some US friends), but at least the world will be quite a bit more peaceful again.
>they run the risk of once again being brought up on charges of monpolistic practices
So what? They were brought up several times already.
Did anything happen to them? Did anything change? Do you believe that with the current cimate in the USA, they even worry about this?
Sounds like an ad all right.
Such a lot of how very nice these things are, how they are tested, how good the paint shop is, how great...
Sheesh.
Your comment is not particularly satisfying and/or full of data. Let me guess: a) you're a US citizen, b) you're a 'patriot', c) you fully support the US military and it's current activities, d) you are under 25 years of age, d) you have very little hard factual data about this topic.
Sir, may I suggest that you learn to write proper english, for a start. And stop being a coward, even if it's merely an anonymous one.
My data comes from "The Threat: Inside the soviet military machine" by Michael Cockburn.
Part V: The Sea Power of the State: talks about exactly this. Allow me a few choice quotes:
"...report on the NATO exercise Ocean Venture '81... written by Lieutenant Commander Dean Knuth... had concluded that that the two aircraft carriers taking part would have been speedily sent to the bottom by the very small force of "enemy" submarines..."
"Admiral Rickover... declared when he was finally retired from the service in 1982 that the entire U.S. carrier force would "last about two days" if war broke out. "Operating against a carrier is too easy"..."
"Within a few years, we will have decomissioned our last diesel-electric submarine. When that happens... our ASW skill against diesel submarines will evaporate... our evaluation of the threat posed by diesel submarines will lose the reality that exercise results provide."
"...they are very quiet... The difference is so great that European submariners operating the latest West German diesel-electric boats report that their greatest worry on NATO exercises is being run into by U.S. nuclear submarines unaware of their presence."
Yes, info from the 80s. I don't think that data has changed *all* that much, and of course the USA military has a lot or PR talk...
An interesting point is also the true reason behind carriers: they are large and impressive ("gunboat diplomacy", also known politically correctly known as "showing the flag"), and they have veeery comfortable quarters for an admiral and his staff.
Look, Slashdot is probably the wrong place to discuss this. Feel free to contact me at KlausBreuer@Hotmail.com (don't laugh, it's my 'public' email... had it since before MS bought it)
One word: STEAM.
No thanks. I'm not interested in my system calling into the net every time I play, even every time I want to design a map.
Despite my enjoyment of HL2 (yes, I bought it, yes, I finished it) STEAM simply pissed me off too much.
HL was great. HL2 was brilliant. STEAM was idiotic.
On the last NATO manouvres on the north atlantic (in the 80s), the first ships simulated sunk (on the first day, too) were the aircraft cariers. Sunk by diesel subs, I might add.
Sure, times have changed. These days, aircraft carriers are used to, um, protect themselves. The aircraft are very rarely used for actual missions (bombers and the like are flown in from Far Away). An AC is an easy ship to sink - it's an enormous and slow target, and modern bombs and missiles are ore than accurate enough to quickly and cheaply dispose of these $xx billion toys.
Besides - what's this about SAVING taxpayers money? You save it by building three aircraft carriers? Are you nuts? Are you expecting another major war?
There are two sides to this: if you get involved in a major, serious war (not the idiotic one-sided bombings the USA has been up to in order to increase some company profits), the carriers will be sunk reasonably soon.
If there is no major war (well, I do have some hopes left), they'll be an enormous cost (*much* higher than expected), and then they'll be scrapped.
Bah.
You can't tell me that NASA is planning something major such as this in all seriousness.
Sure, they're talking. Talk is cheap. They're drawing pretty pictures, writing nice things... but I'd bet a rather large sum of money that they'll not build anything at all on the moon for the next twenty years.
They will get several more budget cuts and generally become even more bureaucratic and immobile. There will be less and less useful things happening, and (except for all the top-secret military stuff) will be able to do less and less.
Pity about the SPACEX problem, but I'd give them much higher chances of actually getting anywhere.
Besides, hey, nobody outside the USA expects the USA to carry on like they do now. They'll collapse economically in a major way withing a few years - we just hope that they'll do it without killing everybody else. The russians set a nice example, only ruining themselves in the process.
It means that the next news we will hear on the topic will be the american 'leadership' calling for very hard controls on who's allowed on the net, on forcing us to use definitively tracable IDs, on controlling our every step.
And they'll (yet again) use The Evil Terrorists as an excuse.
Nope, sorry - I *am* buying their stuff.
Halt, stop, let me explain: no, I'm not touching their HD-whatever. I am most certainly not buying any of the DRM-overgrown hardware. I laugh at their idea of massively expensive downloads.
But I am buying DVDs. Their prices have dropped sufficiently that I am willing to pay for them. Of course I rip them, and view the rip only (no ads at the beginning, no having to watch through the animated menu, o searching for the disc).
I keep the DVD on the shelf. I'm okay with paying between four and ten euros per DVD.
I don't have a TV, and never will. Dito DVD-player. But I do have a PC with a 21" screen.
And thus the DVD-copyright idiocies don't touch me.
As soon as they do - well I have quite a few films by now. And many more books. And board games. And PC games. And a lovely countryside. I the trouble gets too big, I'll simply stop watching films.
As for the cinema: I used to enjoy it. By now I see too many adverts (45 minutes! 45!) and have to pay too much for it to bother anymore.
For. Get. It.
I don't have a TV, not simply because 95% of the content is junk, but because of all the endless, irritating, noisy, intruding advertising which tries to sell me as particularly stupid. ("No worries, I use that time to get a beer or go to the loo!" - rubbish).
Same reason: no radio.
Driver 3 had not only poor graphics and poor gameplay, but advertising in it. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it. Then I exited, deleted the game, and gave the original away.
I spend a fair amount of time with games. Any adverts in it will not be tolerated under any circumstances whatsoever. Free game? Okay. With ads in it? Nope.
Lots of really good games (MOO2? GalCiv2? Civ4?) which have no ads at all. I'll buy these.
Nope - GalCiv II is written by StarDock, and they have nothing to do with MOO.
Their previous Game - GalCiv - was also not protected. They thought that they'd sell about 30,000 games, but it turned out to be over 100,000 - no copy protection seems to pay out.
And it does explain why I've bought both games. Yes, bought. I *like* not being bothered by some damn Digital Restriction Management, and the games are both very good - and well supported, on top of it.
Have a look at http://galciv.com/ (no, I have nothing to do with them)
Yup. I miss the nice fat manuals myself, and I don't see the sharp increase in use of 3D as much of a replacement.
Add this to the fact that you're quite right about most guides - they stink.
Remember Master of Magic? Had a nice, fat handbook full of details. A bit later I bought a guid - a FAT handbook full of lovely details, hints, tips, How Tos...
Oh, well. Not buying guides anymore saves me some money. Nearly exclusively playing shareware games these days also does.
No - how about Pascal in the first semester?
Designed to be a teachers language, and you can get both DOS-based Turbo-Pascal for free, as well as freeware clones of the rather nice Delphi language for Windows, Linux, BeOS, Mac...
(Delphi itself is very good, but shockingly expensive).
Pascal is easy. It's easy to read, easy to write, and allows you to fool about with strings as much as you want to.
Switch to C++ in the second semester/year, but stay away from that single-OS-closed-source VB stuff.
My only major problem with cinemas is the advertising.
Here in Germany most people (at least in the cinemas I frequent) stay silent, stay seated, and have their cell phones turned off.
While prices have gone up by quite a bit, I do like to sit in a cinema with a nice girl and watch a good movie (happens even today, every now and then).
But cinemas have begun showing advertising on a major scale. The well-known "[m]" Cinema in Munich shows 45 minutes (yes, fourty-five!) of advertising before the film begins.
Meaning you show up at 20:00, curtain goes up, place goes dark, and you are pumped full of moronc advertising until 20:45 - when the film begins.
Bah. Like heck I'll pay money for that.
So now I sit at home and watch DVDs on my 21" Screen. Not quite as good (no, I'm not buying a TV, ever, and not a beamer while the bulbs still die soon and expensively), but the films starts the instant I want it.
Oh, and yes, I've got a few DVDs with non-interruptible adverts in it (thanks, Disney!). No worries for me, since I rip my DVDs anyway and leave them on the shelf.
Oh, great idea. Let's copyright it!
I read an interesting article once, claiming that there are 36 possible storylines.
Sounds strange, but after reading through them I could confirm them - not onle of my (very) many books would be in a different story.
And if you now copyright one, two, all of them - you won't be able to write another book.
Great idea. Surely, That's exactly what we need copyright for. Right?
Right?
"3. Righteous eye candy: For the first time, Microsoft is building high-end graphics effects into Windows"
Why the heck do I need eye coandy on my OS, for heavens sake? The OS is supposed to be a base, something to run the software on. It should be as quei and fast as possible.
I do *not* want to buy a new PC simply because the new OS needs a 3D graphics card to display the CPU status to me.
Nu-uh. That's the exact same thing I said about Windows XP as opposed to Win2000. And yet - so many people are now using XP...
And this has a simple reason: new computers come with Vista. Companies will have to switch, because the old OS is not supported anymore. And lo! Vista will be everywhere.
So?
If some content is only visible if I have DRM, I simply won't see it. Since I'm not alone on this concept, a percentage (seeing how many people already have a non-DRM OS) of the users will also not see that information, advertisement, game, whatever.
Couldn't care less. Lots of nicely interesting things abound without requiring DRM.
Well, being typically german in that respect I guess, I took a long time finding a proper watch.
- Funkuhr-030-2012-00-Neu_W0QQitemZ8904977010QQcateg oryZ74513QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
I wanted the following: titanium body (doesn't scratch, ever), crystal glass (dito), very highly accurate, simple appearance, very quick to glance at, especially at night, waterproof.
After many years I found a Junghans Spektral. Can't find it at the Junghans URL anymore, but somebody on eBay is selling one: http://cgi.ebay.de/JUNGHANS-Spektral-Titan-Herren
It's nice and simply, doesn't look fancy, meets all my requirements, and is controlled by the sender in Frankfurt, meaning it sets itself every hour to an atomic clock.
And the simply face makes sure that I can read it at a glance - no additional little faces in it or anything.
Lovely machine. Not really my own, but hey, it had a built-in thermo printer, two (!) metal tape drives, a lovely graphical display (it could do 80 cols!), and was blazingly fast: scrolling your code was so fast that the line numbers were unreadable.
:)
:)
Friends had ZX 81 and C64 - it was fun writing your own games on there.
Next system was a Sperry/Univac 1100/11 (yeah, yeah, I'm an old fart). We had access to one at school
Followed by a VAX 785 and - finally! - my very own PC: the Olivetti M24.
These days my little Palm TX is more powerful then all of them combined
I tried the 16K upgrade on a friends ZX-81. No good, because if you weren't really careful, it could wobble... *click* and the carefully typed code from "ZX Computing" magazine disappeared...