And you misunderstood my post. My point was that folks like you, who don't even own devices, still too often manage to have opinions of them - opinions which you share on the stinking Internet despite the the fact that they have little or nothing to back them up. You downloaded the software and found it cool? Great. You played around with someone else's (or a store's) iPod? I'm happy for you. That doesn't render you any more capable of rendering an intelligent opinion on an iPod than would reading Apple's web site, or even a third-party review. It's like reading a bunch of bad reviews of a movie, watching the trailer, and then determining that the movie sucks (or, conversely, reading a bunch of good reviews and deciding it rocks). As noted by others, your use of the phrase "best of breed" in reference to their software - despite the fact that there is no way you've sat down and evaluated every option out there AND the fact that you couldn't have put it to daily use WITH an iPod - further reveals you as a shill (or possibly a drone - I'll leave it to you to pick the term that bothers you most).
I'll note finally that I have no problem with the iPod besides the fact that it costs a lot more than I spent for my Nomad (I got 40GB of storage for less than the price of a 20GB iPod, and that was important to me). I've played with them and like them quite a lot. If the price differential wasn't there I would have jumped on the bandwagon like so many others and I would probably love the thing. However, that does not qualify me to make sweeping statements about how great the iPod is, for the simple fact that those kinds of statements should have as their basis the daily use of this sort of device.
Wow. So you've managed to evaluate the software, feel - hell, the "overall experience" - of the iPod without even owning it. I'm sure that there are some shill review sites out there who would appreciate your skills.
You amuse me like those iPod owners amuse me when they say that my Nomad is hard to use, can't be navigated by touch, etc. - all this despite a) the fact that they've never used one and b) the fact that I use mine easily and navigate it by touch all the time (and, no, it didn't take me a week or a month or a year to do it).
Apple's true magic has a lot more to do with brainwashing through marketing than it does with creating "The Perfect Product."
Yeah, that works out really well for kids over around 14 who commit SERIOUS crimes and are tried as adults.
There's a point at which even a teenager should know the difference between right and wrong - wrong including posing nude and then signing papers claiming to be 18 years old (unless it was the stupidest company on the planet that had the releases drawn up, said releases would have a statement of age and would include her birthdate).
Bottom line: The game is most likely crap (I've never heard a good thing about it and have no interest myself) but this unidentified female is just another scumbag who wants a free payday.
Twenty or thirty years from now, I'd bet a flat-screen TV can be had for the equivalent of a few hundred bucks.
I don't doubt that you're right...but it won't be plasma. Plasma suffers too many drawbacks including "burn-in" trouble and high production costs to have real longevity as a general consumer product. For the moment, it looks like LCD will end up "winning" the flat-screen war.
Yuck, yuck, yuck. We [in Portland] got hit with a bunch of ash during a couple of relatively minor eruptions back in 1980 (the first one had the wind blowing away from us) and the ash was a horrible pain. Besides the necessity of wearing surgical-type masks (unlike snow, breathing in that fine powdery stuff is "a bad thing") while the crap is blowing around, the clean-up is a bitch. Since it doesn't melt, you have to manually clean it out of seams and cracks in structures and cars - just plain awful.
I'm sure you were just kidding but even joking about it makes me nervous.:)
People may complain that EBay is the chief cause of a MMO's economic collapse, but any hard look at the matter shows that not to be the case. These are very controlled economies that live or die by the decisions of the developers, and no one else. Pursuing red herrings like shutting down EBay auctions, while good for publicity and player morale in the short term, do not address fundamental imbalances in the economy.
This is a great idea, except for one thing: People going into the game for the sole purpose of "farming" the game's currency in order to sell it outside of the game ARE "fundamentally" throwing the economy out of whack.
For example, I played EQ a few years back. My little 52nd level halfling warrior was lucky when he had a few thousand platinum to throw around because he actually participated in the game. The money sinks provided (in his case, fletching the nicest possible arrows) were more than enough to use up whatever loot he happened upon. But, when people played the game simply to hoard the most platinum (such as by finding a frequently spawning creature type which dropped something that in-game merchants found valuable), they could skip the money sinks and then sell their largesse for real-world money. This was only possible because, of course, their character didn't have to pay in-game rent, buy food or clothing, etc. (you know, the real-world money sinks).
In short, developers CAN'T hope to completely balance their economies unless they can stop people from hoarding their loot and selling it in the real world. When they try to balance the economy in-game, they tend to mess things up for people actually trying to play the game straight-up - all for the sake of trying to ameliorate the effects of jerks like this one who, apparently, can't make it in the "real world" and instead want to capitalize on a virtual one.
Smoking crack and shooting heroin don't hurt anyone by themselves, yet people go to jail all the time for simply possessing the substances. Burglars who steal things go to jail as well. Why should this kind of thievery be exempt from potential jail time just because the stolen merchandise is less material?
The only reason most of the/. crowd doesn't like the idea of jail time for copyright infringers - even for-profit scumbags as in this case - is that so many here have committed the offense.
Frankly, IMO, anything we can do to get some more of the middle-class (hopefully, Caucasian-type peoples) into US prisons is a good thing. Jail shouldn't only be for poor criminals.
I find these kinds of crimes heinous and intolerable. I just don't think there needs to be a special category for them. Judges and juries consider motives and circumstances all the time while judging defendants accused of violent crimes and those considerations are used in determining sentence (apart from mandatory minimums, another mess in our legal system). Hate crime statutes are yet another way to take sentencing out of the hands of judges and juries, where such decisions rightly belong. The fact that they codify punishment based on thoughts or ideology, however odious, is just another aspect I don't like.
Yeah, and liberals often support hate crime (I prefer to call it thought crime) legislation despite a professed affection for civil liberties. Conservatives aren't the only ones who hold contradictory views. (Me, I'm a "social liberal/fiscal conservative" - what are ya gonna do?)
That argument doesn't hold even a little bit of water. If childrern are of an age to be out and about without any supervision then there's no protection to be had from "objectionable material" anyway. If they ARE still under the supervision of other adults (meaning, usually, the parents of other children) then it's easy enough to talk to those parents and tell them what they are, and are not, allowed to do - it's how my parents kept tabs on me in terms of where I was and how I was doing (content restriction wasn't really the purpose). All it took were a few phone calls.
A little proactive parenting goes a very long way.
I wonder how many of these people realized that a) TV is not a required appliance in the house and b) every TV has at LEAST an off button, usually the ability to change channels and often has mechanisms with which to restrict access to particular content (the "V chip").
In short, they should be looking closely after their own children instead of forcing their concept of propriety on others.
This is a good idea in theory, though in execution it is quite problematic. The majority of people who post about products in online forums are those who want to complain about something. This being the case, it's not a truly representative sampling. For example, you could play a MMORPG for months and enjoy yourself. Go to that game's message board, however, and in most cases it will appear that everyone playing the game is threatening to quit over what they consider game-breaking issues.
The REAL lesson is not to buy expensive devices without being willing to return them for refunds and get on with life - even if you might get dinged with one of those lame restocking fees.
You're right that it's not flamebait. HOWEVER, it was overrated (at 1) because the premise that Acclaim went bankrupt because of piracy was just dead wrong, it was a troll because the poster probably KNEW that Acclaim wasn't killed by piracy and simply wanted to start a thread on the subject and, finally, it was probably offtopic since the cause of Acclaim's demise is only potentially relevant to the article in that perhaps they spent money on crap they didn't need (which is now available at auction).
In short, the post was fully deserving of at least going down to 0, if not the -1 at which it currently sits.
Re:Done in by the people who would buy this stuff
on
Buy a Piece of Acclaim
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· Score: 1
First off, I'm sure his subject line was a typo and, in fact, you're agreeing with the original post.
Second, ACCLAIM WAS NOT BANKRUPTED BY PIRACY. Acclaim went bankrupt because they spent lots of money on licenses, made barely average to horrible games based on licenses, and finally spent millions trying to market those bad games. They also wasted money trying to diversify (instead of, you know, spending money making better games?), failing miserably for example with their purchase of the Valiant comic line (the line that brought Turok, Magnus the Robot Fighter and Dr. Solar back from comic book limbo).
People have said it over and over again, and I guess it bears repeating since people keep chiming in with replies such as yours: Pirates didn't kill Acclaim - Acclaim killed Acclaim. This entire thread is offtopic in the extreme.
Yeah? You know what, asshole? I haven't bought it and I'm not going to buy it, so thanks for the friggin' advice. Also, thank you, but I know what "capitalism" is and it's a lot more complicated than companies being killed by dissatisfied consumers.
I went out of my way not to tear into one of the "read the EULA" idiots and instead found a reply to which I agreed - that way, I wouldn't feel as much like being a jerk. But, you went out of your way to find MY post and be a jerk yourself. So, go straight to hell.
The above should be moderated down below the 1 to which I now commit it, but I don't go AC.
It's funny to me how many Steam apologists there are on Slashdot while Microsoft's authentication system was decried as evil. Wait until Steam attaches your PC's specs to your registered games and then refuses to authenticate when you try to install the games on a new computer. Then we'll see how many "you should have read the EULA" apologists are left.
Actually, the 9800pro (ATI-branded, the most expensive version) with 128MB is currently at about $250 - that's boxed, relatively high retail (CompUSA). Hitting Pricewatch shows that you can get online deals for the 256MB version at about the same price (the 128MB version going to a little over half that). In other words, the price has come down by half or more since it was released.
So, you simultaneously lament the lack of HD programming and dismiss a device that will bring a surfeit of said programming into the home?
And why the hell blow $5,500 (or a lot more) on plasma? Let's see, lower resolution than cheaper options, more "burn-in" potential than other options (even CRT rear-projection units are virtually immune to burn-in nowadays), smaller screen size...Plasma is about the worst deal in HD technology available - at least LCD has the advantage of not being at risk for having CNN bar(s) permanently locked at the bottom of the screen. CRT (rear-projection and direct-view) offer much better bang for the buck and direct-view HDTVs are within the financial reach of most folks looking to replace a living room TV. As a bonus, differing quality levels look better because they're not fixed-resolution displays (I certainly have no complaints about the simple line-doubling of NTSC signals on my Samsung 27").
In short, I think you're dismissing HD because you made a lousy choice in devices.
PS: Your comparison with DVD-audio/SACD adoption is fallacy. Most people place a higher premium on the quality of what they see over that of what they hear. This is evidenced by people who buy big-screen TVs and then use the internal speakers.
While people won't run out en masse to replace every DVD with the HD equivalent, I think it's very likely that over time they'll buy their new movies in the new format and replace their "blockbusters" as time goes on just as my slow-adopting parents did with their VHS/DVD transition.
I've got to agree with you here. My problem has less to do with eye strain and more to do with sitting about four feet or so from the screen (I sit back with the keyboard in my lap). In my case, I use 1024x768 (I'm lagging back with a 17" CRT and really need to upgrade it) and still have to sit forward in some of the more font-unfriendly programs I end up running. This, by the way, was also the main reason I switched to Firefox since I found it scaled text MUCH better and easier than IE (ctrl-+/- are my best browsing buddies, though some sites insist on designs which frustrate this kind of adjustment). Using the FF image zoom plugin is just icing on a tasty cake.
And then another blockbuster comes along and rakes in hundreds of millions (maybe even billions before copyright expiration which will probably continue to be extended by Congress until it's in the 100s of years). If a movie can cost $100 million and then make $200 million or more, that's huge...and a movie can be a huge hit WITHOUT costing that kind of money. Not many businesses where you can potentially make double (or triple or more) your investment in a year or less after the product is released. As long as there's that possibility, there will always be a movie industry.
You misunderstood the grandparent AC. He wasn't actually posting a point of view in which he believed. He was instead trolling for people to talk about the evil (evil meaning anti-consumer) things Nintendo has done in the past and does now, thus sparking an argument about which company is the most evil. It appears I'm not alone in avoiding the bait, which on/. is a shock.:)
If a Civilization game comes out requiring Steam, I won't buy it.
As has already been pointed out, Civilization 3 made a lot of money (if not, there would not have been two expansions), and the only reason Atari/Infogrames sold the rights was because they needed the quick cash infusion. They don't NEED to change the distribution scheme and, in fact, it can only hurt them.
Why not stop? My friend used to play doom3 and throw up, or nearly so. Why? Just do something else for fun, rather than suffering through some game.
Good advice. The same thing happened to me the first time I was exposed to Steam. This is why HL2 will not darken my PC until there is a Steam-free version, a version that won't make me vomit.
I know it wasn't the point of your post, but I thought I'd offer a tiny addendum to your note on potentially having epileptic seizures whilst playing Half-Life 2. With PC games, you have the advantage of being able to adjust the refresh rate. This means that if the monitor is refreshing at 60 Hz and causes a seizure, changing it to 75 Hz or 85 Hz or whatever could (should?) fix the problem entirely. As an additional aside, raising the refresh rate also improves the sound of the cheap radio I have sitting next to the monitor.:)
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Happy holidays to you, too. :)
I'll note finally that I have no problem with the iPod besides the fact that it costs a lot more than I spent for my Nomad (I got 40GB of storage for less than the price of a 20GB iPod, and that was important to me). I've played with them and like them quite a lot. If the price differential wasn't there I would have jumped on the bandwagon like so many others and I would probably love the thing. However, that does not qualify me to make sweeping statements about how great the iPod is, for the simple fact that those kinds of statements should have as their basis the daily use of this sort of device.
You amuse me like those iPod owners amuse me when they say that my Nomad is hard to use, can't be navigated by touch, etc. - all this despite a) the fact that they've never used one and b) the fact that I use mine easily and navigate it by touch all the time (and, no, it didn't take me a week or a month or a year to do it).
Apple's true magic has a lot more to do with brainwashing through marketing than it does with creating "The Perfect Product."
There's a point at which even a teenager should know the difference between right and wrong - wrong including posing nude and then signing papers claiming to be 18 years old (unless it was the stupidest company on the planet that had the releases drawn up, said releases would have a statement of age and would include her birthdate).
Bottom line: The game is most likely crap (I've never heard a good thing about it and have no interest myself) but this unidentified female is just another scumbag who wants a free payday.
I don't doubt that you're right...but it won't be plasma. Plasma suffers too many drawbacks including "burn-in" trouble and high production costs to have real longevity as a general consumer product. For the moment, it looks like LCD will end up "winning" the flat-screen war.
I'm sure you were just kidding but even joking about it makes me nervous. :)
This is a great idea, except for one thing: People going into the game for the sole purpose of "farming" the game's currency in order to sell it outside of the game ARE "fundamentally" throwing the economy out of whack.
For example, I played EQ a few years back. My little 52nd level halfling warrior was lucky when he had a few thousand platinum to throw around because he actually participated in the game. The money sinks provided (in his case, fletching the nicest possible arrows) were more than enough to use up whatever loot he happened upon. But, when people played the game simply to hoard the most platinum (such as by finding a frequently spawning creature type which dropped something that in-game merchants found valuable), they could skip the money sinks and then sell their largesse for real-world money. This was only possible because, of course, their character didn't have to pay in-game rent, buy food or clothing, etc. (you know, the real-world money sinks).
In short, developers CAN'T hope to completely balance their economies unless they can stop people from hoarding their loot and selling it in the real world. When they try to balance the economy in-game, they tend to mess things up for people actually trying to play the game straight-up - all for the sake of trying to ameliorate the effects of jerks like this one who, apparently, can't make it in the "real world" and instead want to capitalize on a virtual one.
The only reason most of the /. crowd doesn't like the idea of jail time for copyright infringers - even for-profit scumbags as in this case - is that so many here have committed the offense.
Frankly, IMO, anything we can do to get some more of the middle-class (hopefully, Caucasian-type peoples) into US prisons is a good thing. Jail shouldn't only be for poor criminals.
I find these kinds of crimes heinous and intolerable. I just don't think there needs to be a special category for them. Judges and juries consider motives and circumstances all the time while judging defendants accused of violent crimes and those considerations are used in determining sentence (apart from mandatory minimums, another mess in our legal system). Hate crime statutes are yet another way to take sentencing out of the hands of judges and juries, where such decisions rightly belong. The fact that they codify punishment based on thoughts or ideology, however odious, is just another aspect I don't like.
Yeah, and liberals often support hate crime (I prefer to call it thought crime) legislation despite a professed affection for civil liberties. Conservatives aren't the only ones who hold contradictory views. (Me, I'm a "social liberal/fiscal conservative" - what are ya gonna do?)
A little proactive parenting goes a very long way.
In short, they should be looking closely after their own children instead of forcing their concept of propriety on others.
The REAL lesson is not to buy expensive devices without being willing to return them for refunds and get on with life - even if you might get dinged with one of those lame restocking fees.
In short, the post was fully deserving of at least going down to 0, if not the -1 at which it currently sits.
Second, ACCLAIM WAS NOT BANKRUPTED BY PIRACY. Acclaim went bankrupt because they spent lots of money on licenses, made barely average to horrible games based on licenses, and finally spent millions trying to market those bad games. They also wasted money trying to diversify (instead of, you know, spending money making better games?), failing miserably for example with their purchase of the Valiant comic line (the line that brought Turok, Magnus the Robot Fighter and Dr. Solar back from comic book limbo).
People have said it over and over again, and I guess it bears repeating since people keep chiming in with replies such as yours: Pirates didn't kill Acclaim - Acclaim killed Acclaim. This entire thread is offtopic in the extreme.
I went out of my way not to tear into one of the "read the EULA" idiots and instead found a reply to which I agreed - that way, I wouldn't feel as much like being a jerk. But, you went out of your way to find MY post and be a jerk yourself. So, go straight to hell.
The above should be moderated down below the 1 to which I now commit it, but I don't go AC.
It's funny to me how many Steam apologists there are on Slashdot while Microsoft's authentication system was decried as evil. Wait until Steam attaches your PC's specs to your registered games and then refuses to authenticate when you try to install the games on a new computer. Then we'll see how many "you should have read the EULA" apologists are left.
Actually, the 9800pro (ATI-branded, the most expensive version) with 128MB is currently at about $250 - that's boxed, relatively high retail (CompUSA). Hitting Pricewatch shows that you can get online deals for the 256MB version at about the same price (the 128MB version going to a little over half that). In other words, the price has come down by half or more since it was released.
And why the hell blow $5,500 (or a lot more) on plasma? Let's see, lower resolution than cheaper options, more "burn-in" potential than other options (even CRT rear-projection units are virtually immune to burn-in nowadays), smaller screen size...Plasma is about the worst deal in HD technology available - at least LCD has the advantage of not being at risk for having CNN bar(s) permanently locked at the bottom of the screen. CRT (rear-projection and direct-view) offer much better bang for the buck and direct-view HDTVs are within the financial reach of most folks looking to replace a living room TV. As a bonus, differing quality levels look better because they're not fixed-resolution displays (I certainly have no complaints about the simple line-doubling of NTSC signals on my Samsung 27").
In short, I think you're dismissing HD because you made a lousy choice in devices.
PS: Your comparison with DVD-audio/SACD adoption is fallacy. Most people place a higher premium on the quality of what they see over that of what they hear. This is evidenced by people who buy big-screen TVs and then use the internal speakers.
While people won't run out en masse to replace every DVD with the HD equivalent, I think it's very likely that over time they'll buy their new movies in the new format and replace their "blockbusters" as time goes on just as my slow-adopting parents did with their VHS/DVD transition.
I've got to agree with you here. My problem has less to do with eye strain and more to do with sitting about four feet or so from the screen (I sit back with the keyboard in my lap). In my case, I use 1024x768 (I'm lagging back with a 17" CRT and really need to upgrade it) and still have to sit forward in some of the more font-unfriendly programs I end up running. This, by the way, was also the main reason I switched to Firefox since I found it scaled text MUCH better and easier than IE (ctrl-+/- are my best browsing buddies, though some sites insist on designs which frustrate this kind of adjustment). Using the FF image zoom plugin is just icing on a tasty cake.
And then another blockbuster comes along and rakes in hundreds of millions (maybe even billions before copyright expiration which will probably continue to be extended by Congress until it's in the 100s of years). If a movie can cost $100 million and then make $200 million or more, that's huge...and a movie can be a huge hit WITHOUT costing that kind of money. Not many businesses where you can potentially make double (or triple or more) your investment in a year or less after the product is released. As long as there's that possibility, there will always be a movie industry.
You misunderstood the grandparent AC. He wasn't actually posting a point of view in which he believed. He was instead trolling for people to talk about the evil (evil meaning anti-consumer) things Nintendo has done in the past and does now, thus sparking an argument about which company is the most evil. It appears I'm not alone in avoiding the bait, which on /. is a shock. :)
As has already been pointed out, Civilization 3 made a lot of money (if not, there would not have been two expansions), and the only reason Atari/Infogrames sold the rights was because they needed the quick cash infusion. They don't NEED to change the distribution scheme and, in fact, it can only hurt them.
Good advice. The same thing happened to me the first time I was exposed to Steam. This is why HL2 will not darken my PC until there is a Steam-free version, a version that won't make me vomit.
I know it wasn't the point of your post, but I thought I'd offer a tiny addendum to your note on potentially having epileptic seizures whilst playing Half-Life 2. With PC games, you have the advantage of being able to adjust the refresh rate. This means that if the monitor is refreshing at 60 Hz and causes a seizure, changing it to 75 Hz or 85 Hz or whatever could (should?) fix the problem entirely. As an additional aside, raising the refresh rate also improves the sound of the cheap radio I have sitting next to the monitor. :)