Whereas I really wish there was a way to make companies offer USPS as a shipping option. I can handle UPS, but FedEx about 40% of the time fails to deliver, marks my tracking number 'address does not exist', and I have to drive 40 miles to pick the package up at the depot.
(I can ask them to re-deliver, but they fail that at about the same rate.)
USPS may not be the fastest or cheapest, but at least they can find me.
You don't pay the USPS for door-to-door delivery of mail.
You pay them for delivery to an address.
An address is not necessarily the physical location of the person the letter is for. Especially in rural areas.
I have never lived in a place that had door to door mail delivery.
Old people lived in these places too.
And they managed to get down their 200-foot-plus mountainside driveway and down the road a half mile to get their mail from the cluster box.
In four feet of snow.
In sub-zero temperatures.
So frankly, if it works in the backwoods in Vermont, I don't foresee it being a problem in the city of Buffalo, where presumably if you're too decrepit or disabled to get your own mail you have a neighbor closer than a half mile.
So yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask an 80-year old grandmother to schlep to the mailbox in the snow once every day or two instead of asking a postal employee to do it hundreds of times a day.
Not only did my 90+ great-grandmother do so, she shoveled her own walk and driveway to boot.
(Oh, 'what if the old person can't shovel their walk'? Well then they're not getting mail ANYway, because the PO won't deliver if they can't get TO the mailbox.)
Do you not play games that are even vaguely modern? Some games offer both DX9 and DX10/11 renderers. The 10/11 renderer generally looks a lot nicer.
And the 11 renderer is usually faster than the 9 renderer. So since DX11 games - or the same game with a DX11 engine as well as a DX9 engine - both look better and run faster than DX9 games, I give a damn about it.
'Windows version whatever'? Let's look at the latest Steam Hardware/Software Survey. Granted, that only reflects Steam users but that's a huge sample size.
49.52% are running DirectX 11 hardware on a Windows that supports it.
25.04% are running DirectX 10 hardware on a Windows that would support 11 if their hardware did.
21.08% are running DirectX 10 capable hardware on Windows XP.
And the rest are running DirectX 9 or 8 hardware.
The only people who would need 'windows version whatever' are those with DX10 hardware and Windows XP. Sure, 20% of the market isn't nothing, and there ARE games that require DirectX 10/11.
Quite a few upcoming games only support DirectX 10 and 11 - ARMA 3, Battlefield 4, Dragon Age Inquisiton, Mirror's Edge 2, the next Need for Speed. and so one. A number of releases in the last year or two only support 10/11 also.
Presumably Activision, 2K Games, EA, and Sega don't feel dropping DirectX 9 support is 'shooting themselves in the foot' because they've all done it in recent big releases.
Re:When the shift hits the fan.
on
The Price of Amazon
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Y'know, when Baen Books started selling e-books through Amazon, they had to -raise- the $6.99 prices of books sold through their own store - because Amazon would price-match their store, otherwise.
As a result of this, Baen increased author royalties on e-books by 25%, so more of the customer's money is going to the author.
So I'm guessing Amazon's $9.99 default price isn't hurting fiction authors much unless their publisher's an asshole.
(Though really, buying them through Amazon instead of direct from Baen is silly - Baen gives you your books in Kindle's.mobi, Nook/everyone else's epub, EBookwise, Microsoft.LIT, Sony Digital Reader, HTML, and as a.rtf file.)
You're right that the publisher and author should set the price of the ebook - they should set the WHOLESALE price, that Amazon - or whoever else - pays them for the book.
If Amazon wants to sell books below cost as a loss leader for Kindle sales, that's up to Amazon. The publisher should take their stated wholesale price and be happy with it.
That's actually how it USED to work before the 'agency pricing model' came in.
You know what else happened when the 'agency pricing model' came in?
Most of the indie e-bookstores closed.
Great job letting the publishers set prices, there. With publisher-set pricing, there was nothing else for the smaller stores left to compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple over.
The one I used had a 'book club' program, that offered discounts with multiple purchases. Suddenly, they couldn't do that any more.
And they only avoided going under entirely by getting bought out by B&N.
So, in short: Fuck the 'agency pricing' model. And fuck the publishers using it.
Set a wholesale price for the thing, sell it wholesale, put a 'suggested retail' price on it, and let the retail channel decide what to actually sell it for.
You know, like almost every other product on the market.
There have been MMOs with player-created content. City of Heroes. Star Trek Online. Neverwinter.
They're semi-self-contained. In Neverwinter, you accept a quest for the Foundry dungeon, then go talk to someone in the game-world to get sent into the adventure. Since you travel between zones in NW by clicking a world-map, the quest doesn't really stick out like a sore thumb by making you do that to teleport to the quest zone.
The Foundry is rather limited, but it's supposedly being improved.
LCD display sizes and resolutions have been stagnant for a decade.
I can't even go out and buy an LCD that's as high resolution / pixel density as the two CRTs I just gave away (20" visible, 2048 x 1536)
If anything, screen resolutions are getting worse. Most desktop monitors are 1920 x 1080 at best. Not terribly long ago, that would have been 1920 x 1200.
Asus has a 3840 x 2160 display coming out soonish, but it's a 30" screen. Still nowhere near the pixel density of the 12-year-old IBM 3840 x 2400 monitor.
I keep hoping Apple will release a 'retina' desktop display, but they don't seem likely do. So I'll keep using my Dell U2410. (The 10 in that model number stands for 2010, by the by. There's a 2412, but it's not better - it's just cheaper.)
If you're going to talk about hand-drawn games drawn and programmed by one guy, and you're talking new games, you kind of can't ignore Dust: An Elysian Tail.
It's an exploration platformer with RPG elements, and it's all drawn, animated, and programmed by one person - Dean Dodrill - who had done some art for games previously, but decided it'd be fun to learn to program. And came up with Dust:AET.
I mean, finishing a game on your own at all is impressive these days, as is doing the art for it, no matter what technique you use. But compare the gameplay video in the linked article with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK8M70cKxXw
It's in color, fully animated, and utterly gorgeous. And just came out on Steam. (I didn't intend this to sound like an ad, but it's a damned good game. Not perfect, but good.)
You do realize that if you adjust for inflation, Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 was a $90 game, right?
And Secret of Mana for the SNES would be about $130 in today's dollars?
Ridge Racer for the Playstation would be about $75 today.
Game prices are lower now than ever before, which is why you're seeing so much DLC and the like trying to eke out a few more bucks on the same engine/game.
What you're forgetting is the reams and piles and seas and mountains of REALLY CRAPPY games from that era that no one plays any more.
You're cherry-picking the top few titles from the past, and ignoring things that were reasonably popular at the time but aren't widely held as classics now. (HERO. Crystal Castles. Impossible Mission. The Last Ninja. Star Paws. Some of these may have only been popular in my school, for all I know, but it's not like I know what was popular at other schools!)
Some games that were hugely popular at the time would be derided as collections of crap minigames now. (Summer Games. Winter Games. Caveman Ugh-Lympics. World Games.)
The market has -always- been full of derivative games, from the very beginning. How many of the first home video games were crappy knockoffs of Pong?
Psst. The GameCube was more powerful than the PS2 (but less so than the Xbox.) Seriously, try getting some multiplatform games and running them side by side on the two.
Square-Enix had a hissy fit and stopped making Nintendo games for a while, but you forget S-E has two major RPG franchises - and the last two games in the 'other' one have been Nintendo exclusive, and they've made a crapton of side titles in that series on recent Nintendos.
There are a few games that make me really wish there was an HD version of the Wii console.
Xenoblade and The Last Story, specifically. They look really good on the Wii, but they look HOLY CRAP AMAZING on a Wii emulator uprendering them at 1920 x 1080.
Unfortunately, my PC doesn't have the sheer testicular fortitude to run the emulator well. (That, or Dolphin isn't very good at those games.)
Lego City Undercover is a must-have AAA title for the WiiU. It has a couple of faults - load times are atrocious - but that's partly because it's a Grand Theft Auto-style game and loads the entire city at once, then doesn't load again until you go into a mission area.
It's also a WiiU exclusive, and makes good use of the gamepad in ways that are largely pointless, but fun. (Pick up the pad and move it around to scan the environment for clues, videophone calls come in over the pad, etc.)
Actually no, brute force specifically doesn't work against OTP cryptography.
That's kind of the whole point of OTP.
At most you can determine the maximum length of the message. However, if you determine it's an eight word message there is absolutely no way to determine WHAT those eight words are without the key.
You also can't determine if the message is really eight words, or if it's five words banana popsicle meow.
Even theoretically infinite computing power will not suffice to crack a one time pad if it's used properly.
What I don't understand is why the Xbox 360 can't read NTFS formatted hard drives.
I don't have any problem with the thing not reading my files - it likes the encoding I use - but to get it to read files over 4 gigabytes, I have to format the drive as Apple HFS+.
Yes, that's correct. The Xbox 360 can read Apple HFS+, but not Microsoft NTFS.
Let's say you're selling a book. People are making films of themselves reading your book, with all the words visible onscreen, and putting up ads and making money off of reading your book.
Instead of having their video yanked and suing their infringing ass into oblivion, you clear your throat and coopt the ad revenue, but let the video stay up.
Seems reasonable to me.
Which path do you think the Tolkein Estate would take?
It's three sections now, not two, so you get three scores that range from 200 to 800.
The ACT has also added sections, but each section is still graded on a 36 point scale, and the sections are averaged, so the total scores haven't changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas I really wish there was a way to make companies offer USPS as a shipping option. I can handle UPS, but FedEx about 40% of the time fails to deliver, marks my tracking number 'address does not exist', and I have to drive 40 miles to pick the package up at the depot.
(I can ask them to re-deliver, but they fail that at about the same rate.)
USPS may not be the fastest or cheapest, but at least they can find me.
What's killing them is the legal requirement to pre-fund retirement benefits for 75 years.
They'd LOVE to change shit to be profitable.
Unfortunately, since that literally takes an act of Congress, they can't actually manages to make any of the changes they want to.
You don't pay the USPS for door-to-door delivery of mail.
You pay them for delivery to an address.
An address is not necessarily the physical location of the person the letter is for. Especially in rural areas.
I have never lived in a place that had door to door mail delivery.
Old people lived in these places too.
And they managed to get down their 200-foot-plus mountainside driveway and down the road a half mile to get their mail from the cluster box.
In four feet of snow.
In sub-zero temperatures.
So frankly, if it works in the backwoods in Vermont, I don't foresee it being a problem in the city of Buffalo, where presumably if you're too decrepit or disabled to get your own mail you have a neighbor closer than a half mile.
So yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask an 80-year old grandmother to schlep to the mailbox in the snow once every day or two instead of asking a postal employee to do it hundreds of times a day.
Not only did my 90+ great-grandmother do so, she shoveled her own walk and driveway to boot.
(Oh, 'what if the old person can't shovel their walk'? Well then they're not getting mail ANYway, because the PO won't deliver if they can't get TO the mailbox.)
Microsoft tried selling a personal computer in the '80s.
It flopped in the US. Did okay in Asia, though.
Microsoft made a phone a couple years back.
It flopped, really hard. So much so they reflashed them without the 'smart' functions and sold them as dumbphones at a massive loss.
Sure, there are some crappy new games.
But there are piles and piles and piles of shitty old games, too.
The percentage of good games to crap games has stayed remarkably consistent since I started playing them in the '70s.
Do you not play games that are even vaguely modern? Some games offer both DX9 and DX10/11 renderers. The 10/11 renderer generally looks a lot nicer.
And the 11 renderer is usually faster than the 9 renderer. So since DX11 games - or the same game with a DX11 engine as well as a DX9 engine - both look better and run faster than DX9 games, I give a damn about it.
'Windows version whatever'? Let's look at the latest Steam Hardware/Software Survey. Granted, that only reflects Steam users but that's a huge sample size.
49.52% are running DirectX 11 hardware on a Windows that supports it.
25.04% are running DirectX 10 hardware on a Windows that would support 11 if their hardware did.
21.08% are running DirectX 10 capable hardware on Windows XP.
And the rest are running DirectX 9 or 8 hardware.
The only people who would need 'windows version whatever' are those with DX10 hardware and Windows XP. Sure, 20% of the market isn't nothing, and there ARE games that require DirectX 10/11.
Quite a few upcoming games only support DirectX 10 and 11 - ARMA 3, Battlefield 4, Dragon Age Inquisiton, Mirror's Edge 2, the next Need for Speed. and so one. A number of releases in the last year or two only support 10/11 also.
Presumably Activision, 2K Games, EA, and Sega don't feel dropping DirectX 9 support is 'shooting themselves in the foot' because they've all done it in recent big releases.
Y'know, when Baen Books started selling e-books through Amazon, they had to -raise- the $6.99 prices of books sold through their own store - because Amazon would price-match their store, otherwise.
As a result of this, Baen increased author royalties on e-books by 25%, so more of the customer's money is going to the author.
So I'm guessing Amazon's $9.99 default price isn't hurting fiction authors much unless their publisher's an asshole.
(Though really, buying them through Amazon instead of direct from Baen is silly - Baen gives you your books in Kindle's .mobi, Nook/everyone else's epub, EBookwise, Microsoft .LIT, Sony Digital Reader, HTML, and as a .rtf file.)
You're right that the publisher and author should set the price of the ebook - they should set the WHOLESALE price, that Amazon - or whoever else - pays them for the book.
If Amazon wants to sell books below cost as a loss leader for Kindle sales, that's up to Amazon. The publisher should take their stated wholesale price and be happy with it.
That's actually how it USED to work before the 'agency pricing model' came in.
You know what else happened when the 'agency pricing model' came in?
Most of the indie e-bookstores closed.
Great job letting the publishers set prices, there. With publisher-set pricing, there was nothing else for the smaller stores left to compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple over.
The one I used had a 'book club' program, that offered discounts with multiple purchases. Suddenly, they couldn't do that any more.
And they only avoided going under entirely by getting bought out by B&N.
So, in short: Fuck the 'agency pricing' model. And fuck the publishers using it.
Set a wholesale price for the thing, sell it wholesale, put a 'suggested retail' price on it, and let the retail channel decide what to actually sell it for.
You know, like almost every other product on the market.
You want the 'actual technical reason' to stop supporting Windows XP in those updates?
There's a perfectly good one!
Here it is:
Technically, we're tired of paying programmers to support it.
It's a freakin' 100 ton assault 'mech.
It's not particularly hard to detect.
For what it's worth, my Dell U2410 monitor (a 24" from 2010, natch) has DisplayPort. They're not uncommon on better-grade displays.
You don't see them on cheap LCDs, but I don't think many people will be plugging a cheap screen into a Mac Pro.
There have been MMOs with player-created content. City of Heroes. Star Trek Online. Neverwinter.
They're semi-self-contained. In Neverwinter, you accept a quest for the Foundry dungeon, then go talk to someone in the game-world to get sent into the adventure. Since you travel between zones in NW by clicking a world-map, the quest doesn't really stick out like a sore thumb by making you do that to teleport to the quest zone.
The Foundry is rather limited, but it's supposedly being improved.
I gave them away because the phosphor coating was wearing out and they got very, very dim.
The person I gave them to didn't have a working monitor at all, so 'dim' was better than 'nothing'.
CRTs wear out after ten, twenty years of use. LCD backlights get dimmer over time, too.
The difference is, I can't go buy a new CRT any more. Otherwise I sure as hell would have.
What 'latest screen sizes and resolutions'?
LCD display sizes and resolutions have been stagnant for a decade.
I can't even go out and buy an LCD that's as high resolution / pixel density as the two CRTs I just gave away (20" visible, 2048 x 1536)
If anything, screen resolutions are getting worse. Most desktop monitors are 1920 x 1080 at best. Not terribly long ago, that would have been 1920 x 1200.
Asus has a 3840 x 2160 display coming out soonish, but it's a 30" screen. Still nowhere near the pixel density of the 12-year-old IBM 3840 x 2400 monitor.
I keep hoping Apple will release a 'retina' desktop display, but they don't seem likely do. So I'll keep using my Dell U2410. (The 10 in that model number stands for 2010, by the by. There's a 2412, but it's not better - it's just cheaper.)
You mean like the Asus Eee Pad Slider?
All the reviews I read liked it, but apparently no one bought the thing.
So that's why you're not seeing more of them, I'd wager.
If you're going to talk about hand-drawn games drawn and programmed by one guy, and you're talking new games, you kind of can't ignore Dust: An Elysian Tail.
It's an exploration platformer with RPG elements, and it's all drawn, animated, and programmed by one person - Dean Dodrill - who had done some art for games previously, but decided it'd be fun to learn to program. And came up with Dust:AET.
I mean, finishing a game on your own at all is impressive these days, as is doing the art for it, no matter what technique you use. But compare the gameplay video in the linked article with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK8M70cKxXw
It's in color, fully animated, and utterly gorgeous. And just came out on Steam. (I didn't intend this to sound like an ad, but it's a damned good game. Not perfect, but good.)
You do realize that if you adjust for inflation, Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 was a $90 game, right?
And Secret of Mana for the SNES would be about $130 in today's dollars?
Ridge Racer for the Playstation would be about $75 today.
Game prices are lower now than ever before, which is why you're seeing so much DLC and the like trying to eke out a few more bucks on the same engine/game.
What you're forgetting is the reams and piles and seas and mountains of REALLY CRAPPY games from that era that no one plays any more.
You're cherry-picking the top few titles from the past, and ignoring things that were reasonably popular at the time but aren't widely held as classics now. (HERO. Crystal Castles. Impossible Mission. The Last Ninja. Star Paws. Some of these may have only been popular in my school, for all I know, but it's not like I know what was popular at other schools!)
Some games that were hugely popular at the time would be derided as collections of crap minigames now. (Summer Games. Winter Games. Caveman Ugh-Lympics. World Games.)
The market has -always- been full of derivative games, from the very beginning. How many of the first home video games were crappy knockoffs of Pong?
Psst. The GameCube was more powerful than the PS2 (but less so than the Xbox.) Seriously, try getting some multiplatform games and running them side by side on the two.
Square-Enix had a hissy fit and stopped making Nintendo games for a while, but you forget S-E has two major RPG franchises - and the last two games in the 'other' one have been Nintendo exclusive, and they've made a crapton of side titles in that series on recent Nintendos.
There are a few games that make me really wish there was an HD version of the Wii console.
Xenoblade and The Last Story, specifically. They look really good on the Wii, but they look HOLY CRAP AMAZING on a Wii emulator uprendering them at 1920 x 1080.
Unfortunately, my PC doesn't have the sheer testicular fortitude to run the emulator well. (That, or Dolphin isn't very good at those games.)
Lego City Undercover is a must-have AAA title for the WiiU. It has a couple of faults - load times are atrocious - but that's partly because it's a Grand Theft Auto-style game and loads the entire city at once, then doesn't load again until you go into a mission area.
It's also a WiiU exclusive, and makes good use of the gamepad in ways that are largely pointless, but fun. (Pick up the pad and move it around to scan the environment for clues, videophone calls come in over the pad, etc.)
Actually no, brute force specifically doesn't work against OTP cryptography.
That's kind of the whole point of OTP.
At most you can determine the maximum length of the message. However, if you determine it's an eight word message there is absolutely no way to determine WHAT those eight words are without the key.
You also can't determine if the message is really eight words, or if it's five words banana popsicle meow.
Even theoretically infinite computing power will not suffice to crack a one time pad if it's used properly.
Not unless the software you need OpenGL performance for runs under Linux, too.
What I don't understand is why the Xbox 360 can't read NTFS formatted hard drives.
I don't have any problem with the thing not reading my files - it likes the encoding I use - but to get it to read files over 4 gigabytes, I have to format the drive as Apple HFS+.
Yes, that's correct. The Xbox 360 can read Apple HFS+, but not Microsoft NTFS.
Let's say you're selling a book. People are making films of themselves reading your book, with all the words visible onscreen, and putting up ads and making money off of reading your book.
Instead of having their video yanked and suing their infringing ass into oblivion, you clear your throat and coopt the ad revenue, but let the video stay up.
Seems reasonable to me.
Which path do you think the Tolkein Estate would take?
The *minimum* score on the SAT now is 600.
The maximum is 2400.
It's three sections now, not two, so you get three scores that range from 200 to 800.
The ACT has also added sections, but each section is still graded on a 36 point scale, and the sections are averaged, so the total scores haven't changed.