Unfortunately, when you work for a company that has to use whatever applications clients dictate (we're a customer service outsourcer, so their bad IT decisions are sometimes ours), you don't have a choice. Trust me, I wish we did. We used to have to use a stupid application which was IE6-only, XP SP2-only, etc. It wasn't that it broke if you didn't have that config, it was that it checked and outright refused to run if you didn't have that config.
I've found it to be a problem with Java Web Start. I was never able to get Java Web Start programs to see the right version of Java if a different version was the most recently installed (and therefore, default).
On the other hand, without him I wouldn't have to try to juggle the fun of "Application x runs only on Java version y, Application xx runs only on Java version z, and Java y and Java z don't get along too well."
I was angry about this as I started typing, but then I realized that maybe this keeps me employed as well. Damn.:(
I wouldn't say "dead end", but the fact remains that as long as Apple has capricious and arbitrary rules for their app store (which, knowing them, will probably be until the end of time), iOS development is a risk. There is a very real possibility that your app which you invest hard work into will be rejected for no real reason. At least on Android, you can sell your app to people even if it is removed from the market for some reason (and far less apps are unjustly removed from the Android market than Apple's app store).
Fair enough, but are there really no games on consoles that you want to play? That seems unlikely, and if that's not the case, you're only hurting yourself if you refuse to buy a console. I respect when people stand for their principles, but there's not much point when it won't change anything.
I don't have to choose. I played Halo: Reach (well, the campaign, which was all I cared about), and now I'm playing Civ V.:D
Or trying to play Civ, anyway. Fucking game keeps crashing every time I hit the next turn button in my latest game. I guess I'm going to have to start a new game, which is sad because I was doing well.
Wow, thank you for that link. My brother was recently asking if he could get on my Verizon plan, as his Tracfone is no longer economical. These guys look like they would be super cheap for him, though (certainly a lot better than getting on Verizon).
That's a very bold claim with no rationale or argument whatsoever to back it up. If you figure you can't convince anyone in a Slashdot post, why bring it up at all?
Please do post your reasoning, because I'm interested to find out what leads you to be completely certain that free will cannot exist.
Even simpler: I never go to those states. Now all I have to do is make sure that I sever all ties with any friends or family who live there, and I'm good.:D
To be fair, I live in the US as well, and it's news to me that NJ and Oregon have such idiotic laws. I guess now I know to refuse to buy gas in those states if at all possible.
One of the grocery stores where I live gives you a discount if you bring your own bags (I forget what the amount is, but enough to make it worthwhile to save your bags and bring them back). Obviously they have smarter management than most grocery stores... if you give the customer an incentive to help you cut costs, you will have more customers helping you cut costs.
You're missing the point, dude. First of all, you can register it on Steam. That way you get the best of both worlds: keep the box if you like having the box around (I do), but you can just download the game from Steam at any time. Second, the physical copy is $10 cheaper. He can buy it at Fry's for $10 less, register the game on Steam, then throw the physical materials away. Boom, just like he bought it on Steam except $10 cheaper.
Fair enough, but I guess I wanted to make him aware that you could activate it on Steam. I bought Civ V on Steam because I had no idea you could do that (after all, most games don't allow you to activate the physical copy even if it is also sold on Steam). I love the convenience of Steam, and not having to fetch no-CD cracks, but I do still love to have a physical copy.
Maybe someone will mod religion back in. Sure, it just amounted to a diplomacy bonus, but it added a lot of character to the game. There's something glorious about the moment when your missionaries have converted almost everyone (including Saladin) to Christianity, and your safety as you push on to a culture victory is all but guaranteed.
I don't think there's an earthshattering reason to upgrade from XP, but there are niceties here and there. For example, the other day at work I realized that in the open/save dialog, you now have an address bar. This means that you can put in a network path, rather than having to have the path mapped as a drive. That's not a reason to upgrade by itself, but it is really damn nice to have. That pretty much sums up Vista and Win7: no huge reason to upgrade, but once you get used to it it's hard to go back.
It's no more linear than FFX was. While I respect your right to criticize it, it's not exactly unprecedented. in the series.
Furthermore, I think you'll find that battles are more engaging (if more difficult) if you don't use the auto-battle command. I personally find that once I got to a certain point in the game (I just got to Gran Pulse, but forget which chapter that is), I couldn't keep up with the pace of battle that way... but it's there if you can pull it off, and it does add quite a bit. I also feel that once I got to the part of the game where auto-battle became more necessary, the flow of battle changed quite a bit, and I had to stay on my toes with paradigm shifts, so that I was still engaged in the battle... merely in a different capacity.
Well, I didn't make the list, but I agree with it. And in my opinion, Bungie is on the list because Halo is a great game. I wouldn't put them in the same category as Blizzard or Bioware, because they do fail occasionally (I hated ODST), and lose points for essentially making iterations on one game for the last 10 years... but it's still a really great game. And I say this as someone who was, and is, still a predominantly PC gamer.
I'd cross Epic off the list, but that's a matter of personal taste. In any case, IW doesn't really exist any more. The name is still there, but enough people left during that debacle that they're a new studio at this point - simply with the same name.
And although I think your list contains good developers, I don't think any of them is on the same tier as Blizzard or Bioware (perhaps Bungie or Valve). Those are studios which produce games that I will practically buy sight unseen, simply because they have such an astounding track record for quality. That's pretty hard to attain.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, when you work for a company that has to use whatever applications clients dictate (we're a customer service outsourcer, so their bad IT decisions are sometimes ours), you don't have a choice. Trust me, I wish we did. We used to have to use a stupid application which was IE6-only, XP SP2-only, etc. It wasn't that it broke if you didn't have that config, it was that it checked and outright refused to run if you didn't have that config.
Still, in principle I agree. Fuck Java Web Start.
I've found it to be a problem with Java Web Start. I was never able to get Java Web Start programs to see the right version of Java if a different version was the most recently installed (and therefore, default).
On the other hand, without him I wouldn't have to try to juggle the fun of "Application x runs only on Java version y, Application xx runs only on Java version z, and Java y and Java z don't get along too well."
I was angry about this as I started typing, but then I realized that maybe this keeps me employed as well. Damn. :(
Better to be married, having regular sex and be happy then to be single and happy. :)
Yeah, but that's a contradiction. Everyone knows sex grinds to a halt once the marriage license is signed. :)
I wouldn't say "dead end", but the fact remains that as long as Apple has capricious and arbitrary rules for their app store (which, knowing them, will probably be until the end of time), iOS development is a risk. There is a very real possibility that your app which you invest hard work into will be rejected for no real reason. At least on Android, you can sell your app to people even if it is removed from the market for some reason (and far less apps are unjustly removed from the Android market than Apple's app store).
Fair enough, but are there really no games on consoles that you want to play? That seems unlikely, and if that's not the case, you're only hurting yourself if you refuse to buy a console. I respect when people stand for their principles, but there's not much point when it won't change anything.
I don't have to choose. I played Halo: Reach (well, the campaign, which was all I cared about), and now I'm playing Civ V. :D
Or trying to play Civ, anyway. Fucking game keeps crashing every time I hit the next turn button in my latest game. I guess I'm going to have to start a new game, which is sad because I was doing well.
Wow, thank you for that link. My brother was recently asking if he could get on my Verizon plan, as his Tracfone is no longer economical. These guys look like they would be super cheap for him, though (certainly a lot better than getting on Verizon).
That's a very bold claim with no rationale or argument whatsoever to back it up. If you figure you can't convince anyone in a Slashdot post, why bring it up at all?
Please do post your reasoning, because I'm interested to find out what leads you to be completely certain that free will cannot exist.
By "live" I mean "move". No one I know currently lives there.
Even simpler: I never go to those states. Now all I have to do is make sure that I sever all ties with any friends or family who live there, and I'm good. :D
To be fair, I live in the US as well, and it's news to me that NJ and Oregon have such idiotic laws. I guess now I know to refuse to buy gas in those states if at all possible.
One of the grocery stores where I live gives you a discount if you bring your own bags (I forget what the amount is, but enough to make it worthwhile to save your bags and bring them back). Obviously they have smarter management than most grocery stores... if you give the customer an incentive to help you cut costs, you will have more customers helping you cut costs.
You're missing the point, dude. First of all, you can register it on Steam. That way you get the best of both worlds: keep the box if you like having the box around (I do), but you can just download the game from Steam at any time. Second, the physical copy is $10 cheaper. He can buy it at Fry's for $10 less, register the game on Steam, then throw the physical materials away. Boom, just like he bought it on Steam except $10 cheaper.
You are correct, to the best of my knowledge. However, that unfortunately was something I didn't know when I pre-purchased the game on Steam.
Fair enough, but I guess I wanted to make him aware that you could activate it on Steam. I bought Civ V on Steam because I had no idea you could do that (after all, most games don't allow you to activate the physical copy even if it is also sold on Steam). I love the convenience of Steam, and not having to fetch no-CD cracks, but I do still love to have a physical copy.
Why get Civ 5 on Steam? You can just activate it on Steam once you buy the physical copy.
Maybe someone will mod religion back in. Sure, it just amounted to a diplomacy bonus, but it added a lot of character to the game. There's something glorious about the moment when your missionaries have converted almost everyone (including Saladin) to Christianity, and your safety as you push on to a culture victory is all but guaranteed.
You'll never be Batman with an attitude like that!
I don't think there's an earthshattering reason to upgrade from XP, but there are niceties here and there. For example, the other day at work I realized that in the open/save dialog, you now have an address bar. This means that you can put in a network path, rather than having to have the path mapped as a drive. That's not a reason to upgrade by itself, but it is really damn nice to have. That pretty much sums up Vista and Win7: no huge reason to upgrade, but once you get used to it it's hard to go back.
It's no more linear than FFX was. While I respect your right to criticize it, it's not exactly unprecedented. in the series.
Furthermore, I think you'll find that battles are more engaging (if more difficult) if you don't use the auto-battle command. I personally find that once I got to a certain point in the game (I just got to Gran Pulse, but forget which chapter that is), I couldn't keep up with the pace of battle that way... but it's there if you can pull it off, and it does add quite a bit. I also feel that once I got to the part of the game where auto-battle became more necessary, the flow of battle changed quite a bit, and I had to stay on my toes with paradigm shifts, so that I was still engaged in the battle... merely in a different capacity.
Well, I didn't make the list, but I agree with it. And in my opinion, Bungie is on the list because Halo is a great game. I wouldn't put them in the same category as Blizzard or Bioware, because they do fail occasionally (I hated ODST), and lose points for essentially making iterations on one game for the last 10 years... but it's still a really great game. And I say this as someone who was, and is, still a predominantly PC gamer.
I'd cross Epic off the list, but that's a matter of personal taste. In any case, IW doesn't really exist any more. The name is still there, but enough people left during that debacle that they're a new studio at this point - simply with the same name.
And although I think your list contains good developers, I don't think any of them is on the same tier as Blizzard or Bioware (perhaps Bungie or Valve). Those are studios which produce games that I will practically buy sight unseen, simply because they have such an astounding track record for quality. That's pretty hard to attain.
Hey, how else will you obscure real meaning while still appearing to have a basis in reality by using numbers?
Yes, but 70 is exactly 30% less than 100, so it depends on which way you look at it from.