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User: Darinbob

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Comments · 21,765

  1. Re: Ask the credit card for a refund on UK Hotel Adds Hefty Charge For Bad Reviews Online · · Score: 1

    That situation sounds very un-American. Maybe congress should look into it.

  2. Re:Wait a second, this is very interesting. on Nokia's N1 Android Tablet Is Actually a Foxconn Tablet · · Score: 1

    Nope. Nokia was a very diverse company and not just a phone maker. Nokia Networks morphed into Nokia Siemens Networks but it is still a Nokia subsidiary, and there is still Nokia Research as far as I know, and there are other small divisions.

  3. Re:Better go kick WSUS into a sync... on Microsoft Releases Out-of-Band Security Patch For Windows · · Score: 1

    I love running around like a headless chicken. It's my best joke at work and lightens up the dull meetings.

    On that note, let's have a quiet remembrance in honor of Mike the Headless Chicken.

  4. Re:Buzzfeed? on Uber Threatens To Do 'Opposition Research' On Journalists · · Score: 1

    Allegedly told and allegator.

  5. Re:Obama Administration White House Fellow on Uber Threatens To Do 'Opposition Research' On Journalists · · Score: 1

    It's a virus! Anyone who's been in the same building as Obama is tarnished and forever afterwords will attempt to do evil whenever possible. Or worse, become liberal.

  6. Re:Beware of Gamers on Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Single-Player · · Score: 1

    Shouldn't they then take these problems and present them to the funders of the game? Tell the paying customers of the problems and find out if changes are acceptable or not. Maybe find other solutions (ie, some games delay themselves and the customers are actually happy about it, see Project Eternity for example).

    So many gamers hate online-only games, the devs can not be ignorant of that, they must know this would go over badly. To remain in the dark seems strange, as if the devs are caught up in their own small world where they've never played any non-PvP games in their lives, don't know any of their close friends who play offline games, or think that those players aren't worth keeping as customers ("care bears" or "not real gamers" or other idiotic stuff).

    Where is the layer of management that is supposed to remain objective, keep the dev team on track, keep the investors happy, etc?

  7. Re:Beware of Gamers on Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Single-Player · · Score: 1

    Passion for the games is great. But you also need at least some management with reality in mind, who keeps the customer and profits as priorities.

    I say this as a developer, because when I develop something I get caught up in my own world and can lose sight of the bigger picture. I may deliver the best product ever but if it is a product that the customer does not want then what's the point?

    They promised product X, got a lot of money for it, and are delivering product Y instead. Bait and switch. Somewhere along they line they got caught up in their own world and forgot about the customers who gave them the money. I'm only guessing, but I just have this feeling that some devs are thinking about making the game that they want even if it's not the game that the customers want.

    If a product's direction needs to make a major change then it needs to be brought up before the board, and for kickstarter games the board are the funders.

  8. Re:Apparently "backers" don't understand the term on Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Single-Player · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agreed. However if you lose the money that you can afford to lose, you still have the right to complain about it. And that's what people are doing. Telling them to stop complaining is kind of dumb. At the very least there's some moral obligation to warn potential customers to stay away from Frontier and its games.

  9. Beware of Gamers on Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Single-Player · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Beware of gamers developing games. Too often you find them preferring their own game play style, ramping up difficulty, no bones thrown to casual players, and so forth. Then it gets defended as "by real games for real gamers" or something like that.

    I get a sneaky suspicion this might fall into that category. They've got a "vision" of what they want, and damn the paying customers who say differently.

    I mean isn't this part of the whole reason kickstarter games are popular, because they're supposed to listen to customers which is the opposite of what the big name game publishers do?

  10. Re:Note to IT recruiters. on World's Youngest Microsoft Certificated Professional Is Five Years Old · · Score: 1

    5 year olds are expensive. They have much higher medical expenses, as their parents are taking them too the doctor every few weeks for vaccinations, ear infections, sniffles. A twenty year old who never goes to the doctor and who is satisfied sharing a studio with three roommates and eating every night at Taco Bell is the best bargain.

  11. Re:Note to IT recruiters. on World's Youngest Microsoft Certificated Professional Is Five Years Old · · Score: 1

    An MS cert does not trump a good attendance star from grammar school.

  12. Re:Which says what? on World's Youngest Microsoft Certificated Professional Is Five Years Old · · Score: 2

    I worry that this poor kid is being funneled into a bleak and dreary career path too soon in life.

  13. Re:Which says what? on World's Youngest Microsoft Certificated Professional Is Five Years Old · · Score: 1

    I remember back in the 90s I asked the only IT guy at our small company who was Novell certified a very basic question about netware protocol as I had never used PCs before, and his response was "sorry, we didn't cover that in class."

  14. Re:Which says what? on World's Youngest Microsoft Certificated Professional Is Five Years Old · · Score: 1

    It's a certificate. Does any employer actually treat these as important for anything other than grunt jobs?

  15. Re:More detailed ratings are a good thing on Sweden Considers Adding "Sexism" Ratings To Video Games · · Score: 1

    Yes, the government could save a huge amount of money here on buying labels by only marking those few games which are not sexist.

  16. Re:THIS is the kind of thing that GamerGate is abo on Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos · · Score: 1

    I don't even have twitter or follow it. The hashtag only got the mainstream crowd to notice, whereas these issues had been building for a long time before the hashtag.

  17. Re:Depends on Embargo Lift on Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos · · Score: 1

    So, it's like movies that want opening weekend numbers but don't care at all if they collapse after that?

  18. Re:Back in the Day... on Education Chief Should Know About PLATO and the History of Online CS Education · · Score: 1

    Started college in 81, and we had USCD Pascal & p-system. On a basic Apple II we had a full editor, compiler, debugger rolled together, a networked file system, and a self-paced instructional system to learn to program (with human proctors to grade you after every section though). Add another decade though and the state of computing actually seemed worse overall.

    The history of computing actually seems to go backwards at times with technology and/or software becoming more primitive as time passes.

  19. Re:Ok, even giving them the benefit of the doubt on Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin's Creed Unity Poor Performance · · Score: 1

    Why give them benefit of the doubt? This is ubisoft, they've had crappy games for their entire existence, they've been screwing up their PR for most of it at well. I'm seriously baffled that they still have customers.

  20. Re:A highly relevant comment from the previous pos on Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin's Creed Unity Poor Performance · · Score: 1

    I only have one PC game with mantle support, and it made performance worse. FPS slightly higher but with stuttering. Maybe on a high end system it does better, but on a high end system where your fps is over 50 then it won't matter anyway.

  21. Re:A highly relevant comment from the previous pos on Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin's Creed Unity Poor Performance · · Score: 1

    They are sort of irrelevant for the average gamer. DX9 is incredibly popular because it's available. Maybe the high end games with expensive systems don't see it that way, but for people on a sub-$500 computer either they don't see a performance improvement with higher versions or it hurts their performance.

  22. Re:Don’t really get it on Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos · · Score: 1

    There's also mounting evidence that the bigger the hype the poorer the game. In the last decade there's probably only a handful of "AAA" titles that I'd rate above a C.

  23. Re:Depends on Embargo Lift on Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos · · Score: 2

    I haven't even finished Simcity 1.

  24. Re:Depends on Embargo Lift on Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos · · Score: 2

    So avoid the developer, it's that easy. It's not like yet another lousy Assassin's Creed game is a must-buy. Boycott the next Far Cry, boycott the entire line of games from the developer. But the game makers know that the sheep will keep buying the games no matter what happens.

    And why in the hell are people blaming the journalists here, except to get GG traction? We wouldn't even know of this if it weren't for journalists. The game MAKERS are the ones to be blamed here.

    Everyone has known for decades that game journalism is pointless. It's never been good, it's always been either amateurs who can barely write or people giving positive reviews to any thing out there. Going to gaming websites to get factual information is as dumb as going to yelp to figure out where to eat (and yes I know plenty of people do both, but I never said people were smart). Anyone who's getting upset about this now must be a newcomer to gaming.

  25. Re:Depends on Embargo Lift on Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos · · Score: 2

    Anyone remember when games routinely provided demos and trials, both so that people could try before they bought and to get people hooked on the game play so that they'd go out and buy? Nowdays they expect that just using the name of some mediocre old games is enough that people will buy sight unseen.

    While the embargo is not a good thing, I gotta wonder what makes people buy games instantly when they're released. It also used to be common rule of thumb to wait a month for the first patches to come out or for the price to lower. Those buying on the first day are implicitly agreeing to become guinea pigs.