$20 is 60 PLN. Minimal monthly wage is roughly 600 PLN. Your average job a young person can get out of school will pay maybe 1200 PLN. If you count that a month has 22 working days you end up with a requirement of 1320 PLN a month in order for $20 to be less than a day's wage. Add taxes to that and that the dollar is oscillating between 3 to 4 PLN in vaule and you end up with Poland being a country where your average person doesn't have an Internet connection by your standards.
You are forgetting yet another group, which I think is rather large. It's the people who download a game for free because it is free, but otherwise would not buy it because it isn't worth it.
I'll use Steam and their MW2 promo as an example here. I never really liked those war-themed FPS shooters so I was not even remotely interested in playing MW2 when it came out. Then Steam announced a free weekend of MW2 and I downloaded it as it was free and everyone seemed to like the game. Upon playing it I realized that yeah, it's fun, but I'd buy it for maybe $10 at most. It doesn't appeal to me enough to pay more.
Now, in that example I wasn't interested enough to even give a pirated copy a try, but I'm sure many people after hearing it's great could download it to try it and be disappointed. I don't mean "try" by beating the whole game, that's bullshit and just piracy, I mean "okay, it's loaded, yeah, I shoot this guy... meeeh. crap game, uninstall."
This brings me to the topic of game demos. I'm pretty sure they lower game sales and cost extra to develop, but they sure as hell limit piracy. I was faced with downloading a huge install of SupCom2 or checking out a smaller demo. I chose the demo and was glad I did because it turned out that the game is not really what I like. The end result is the same, but at least lets the user check out if the advertising crap is true or just fantasy without doing anything illegal.
At first I also thought that this is an annoying move, but then your post made me realize that my family is the same. Each time an update window appears they want me to come over and see what is it because they don't know and "Do you want to update?" is just as alien to them as "would you like to polarize the photon deflectors now?"
I welcome this change now that I have realized what it truly means. As long as there is a fairly easy way to enable the nagging screen if you want it, then I won't mind it being hidden by default.
most motherboards will not support a boot drive that large
Do you mean it won't boot if the main partition is 3TB or if the whole drive is 3TB? Because if it's the first, then no sane person has just one partition on a hard drive that big so it's a non-problem.
I would be happy if Valve bought them. Xfire is a rather bad piece of software nowadays when compared to what Steam has managed. No detection or anything, in Steam you just add the app from a list of installed software on your computer and it Just Works (TM). Xfire on the other hand simply refuses to support 64-bit systems and out of maybe fifty games I played five had the overlay functioning.
If you steal my loot in a raid I'll know your real name, and with a bit more googling everything there is to know about you:
This is actually a good thing in some cases. Now being a dick on the Internet will carry consequences with it. The "Stab someone with a fork over the Internet" device is one step closer.
On the other hand, voicing your true opinions can also be dangerous so I'm not sure if the gain outweighs the drawbacks.
I didn't want to undermine your point. I just wanted to note that one random game can be over a third of your limit. And that can be free too.
As for the poll, meh. Retail is still king for consoles, but when I see TES4: Oblivion GOTY Edition at Steam for something like 7$ then yeah. Retail can dream on.
Game patches? Just download A game you bought from Steam. Or better, a free weekend promo on Steam. They offered a free weekend of CoD:MW2 which was 11.2 GB. Then Serious Sam HD weighing 2 GB. Then insane price cuts for 24 hours on random games which each easily was over 5 GB. The world has gone digital. You can easily download 25+ GB a month by just buying a few older games at random Digital Download sellers like Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse, and others.
I read through it every time they change it and nope, nothing about hosting. The only port they block is 21 (IIRC) to pretend they're fighting spambots.
What a sad world we live in where ISPs block port 80 to stop home users from hosting websites and home users not boycotting that.
Come on. After experiencing that a few times you get immune. "Shit happens" you flag the inappropriate stuff and check the next file.
Or maybe the Internet has taught me that anything I see on the screen I can dismiss as "I've no control over this so I don't care." Or I'm just a soulless monster, though that's improbable.
I know this is just an attention-seeking post, but I feel compelled to explain one thing. Namely, if you are connected to the Internet, you can host your own content. That's how the Internet works. I pay my ISP for both download and upload speed. Sure, the latter is always a magnitude slower so that the ISP can earn more on "corporate" connections, but I still can host my own website and am not upload amount capped.
Even if companies stop hosting content because they won't make any money on it, there still will be people who just host their own website as a hobby and do not care about profits from it nor that the download speed from it is capped at 32 KB/s. Websites should be about text and be light. A few small images and that's it. No front-page 10MB flash loading crap menu. As for big file hosting, that's what torrents are for.
I'll probably still buy it just to play occasionally online with friends though...
I hope your friends live nearby because if you want to play with people from another region (Europe, US, Asia) then you need to buy a CD-Key for that region as well.
And in "Future Plans" there is the whole plan of his last dive. Quite sad nobody has access to his site to add a little "Dave is no longer with us" memo on the front page.
... and those hard-wired phones would have been just as useless in this case - a car accident.
... and good luck calling 911 from outside your house to report that your house is on fire.
I didn't care to look it up, but if it happened on a highway, there are phone booths for emergency calls every kilometre or so. In case of a fire - that's what neighbours are for. They will call 911 unless they want their house to burn down next.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you'll ever find a cheap, USB-enabled, old-school handheld joystick. There's just not much interest in those and the price thus stays high to make it at all profitable to manufacture and sell them. Not much you can do, I'm afraid. Unless you can make your own joystick or decide to pay for the imported stuff.
That's a gamepad, or joypad. He wants a joystick. Like this.
Why go retro when you can just buy a nice one in Germany without the hassle of import taxes and high delivery costs? Just go buy it on amazon and you'll have two for the price of one of the retro ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Poland.
$20 is 60 PLN. Minimal monthly wage is roughly 600 PLN. Your average job a young person can get out of school will pay maybe 1200 PLN. If you count that a month has 22 working days you end up with a requirement of 1320 PLN a month in order for $20 to be less than a day's wage. Add taxes to that and that the dollar is oscillating between 3 to 4 PLN in vaule and you end up with Poland being a country where your average person doesn't have an Internet connection by your standards.
You are forgetting yet another group, which I think is rather large. It's the people who download a game for free because it is free, but otherwise would not buy it because it isn't worth it.
I'll use Steam and their MW2 promo as an example here. I never really liked those war-themed FPS shooters so I was not even remotely interested in playing MW2 when it came out. Then Steam announced a free weekend of MW2 and I downloaded it as it was free and everyone seemed to like the game. Upon playing it I realized that yeah, it's fun, but I'd buy it for maybe $10 at most. It doesn't appeal to me enough to pay more.
Now, in that example I wasn't interested enough to even give a pirated copy a try, but I'm sure many people after hearing it's great could download it to try it and be disappointed. I don't mean "try" by beating the whole game, that's bullshit and just piracy, I mean "okay, it's loaded, yeah, I shoot this guy... meeeh. crap game, uninstall."
This brings me to the topic of game demos. I'm pretty sure they lower game sales and cost extra to develop, but they sure as hell limit piracy. I was faced with downloading a huge install of SupCom2 or checking out a smaller demo. I chose the demo and was glad I did because it turned out that the game is not really what I like. The end result is the same, but at least lets the user check out if the advertising crap is true or just fantasy without doing anything illegal.
At first I also thought that this is an annoying move, but then your post made me realize that my family is the same. Each time an update window appears they want me to come over and see what is it because they don't know and "Do you want to update?" is just as alien to them as "would you like to polarize the photon deflectors now?"
I welcome this change now that I have realized what it truly means. As long as there is a fairly easy way to enable the nagging screen if you want it, then I won't mind it being hidden by default.
most motherboards will not support a boot drive that large
Do you mean it won't boot if the main partition is 3TB or if the whole drive is 3TB? Because if it's the first, then no sane person has just one partition on a hard drive that big so it's a non-problem.
I would be happy if Valve bought them. Xfire is a rather bad piece of software nowadays when compared to what Steam has managed. No detection or anything, in Steam you just add the app from a list of installed software on your computer and it Just Works (TM). Xfire on the other hand simply refuses to support 64-bit systems and out of maybe fifty games I played five had the overlay functioning.
Sin City was good.
If you steal my loot in a raid I'll know your real name, and with a bit more googling everything there is to know about you:
This is actually a good thing in some cases. Now being a dick on the Internet will carry consequences with it. The "Stab someone with a fork over the Internet" device is one step closer.
On the other hand, voicing your true opinions can also be dangerous so I'm not sure if the gain outweighs the drawbacks.
I'm going to patent Facebook: Torment as soon as I figure out a nice plot for the game.
I didn't want to undermine your point. I just wanted to note that one random game can be over a third of your limit. And that can be free too.
As for the poll, meh. Retail is still king for consoles, but when I see TES4: Oblivion GOTY Edition at Steam for something like 7$ then yeah. Retail can dream on.
Game patches? Just download A game you bought from Steam. Or better, a free weekend promo on Steam. They offered a free weekend of CoD:MW2 which was 11.2 GB. Then Serious Sam HD weighing 2 GB. Then insane price cuts for 24 hours on random games which each easily was over 5 GB. The world has gone digital. You can easily download 25+ GB a month by just buying a few older games at random Digital Download sellers like Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse, and others.
If you know other languages, use those as passprhases. Or mix both English and the other language. If you can, use extended characters.
MójHouseGrün
Try running your dictionary attack against my Polish-English-Russian*-German words.
* - The Russian bit got eaten by Slashdot because it doesn't like Cyrillic, it seems.
Let's bring on the Darwin Zones! Terrorists and scare tactics begone.
My bad for not checking that. You're right, of course.
I read through it every time they change it and nope, nothing about hosting. The only port they block is 21 (IIRC) to pretend they're fighting spambots.
What a sad world we live in where ISPs block port 80 to stop home users from hosting websites and home users not boycotting that.
Come on. After experiencing that a few times you get immune. "Shit happens" you flag the inappropriate stuff and check the next file.
Or maybe the Internet has taught me that anything I see on the screen I can dismiss as "I've no control over this so I don't care." Or I'm just a soulless monster, though that's improbable.
I know this is just an attention-seeking post, but I feel compelled to explain one thing. Namely, if you are connected to the Internet, you can host your own content. That's how the Internet works. I pay my ISP for both download and upload speed. Sure, the latter is always a magnitude slower so that the ISP can earn more on "corporate" connections, but I still can host my own website and am not upload amount capped.
Even if companies stop hosting content because they won't make any money on it, there still will be people who just host their own website as a hobby and do not care about profits from it nor that the download speed from it is capped at 32 KB/s. Websites should be about text and be light. A few small images and that's it. No front-page 10MB flash loading crap menu. As for big file hosting, that's what torrents are for.
I'll probably still buy it just to play occasionally online with friends though...
I hope your friends live nearby because if you want to play with people from another region (Europe, US, Asia) then you need to buy a CD-Key for that region as well.
I'm rather sure that's just an illusion because of the angle at which the photos were taken.
As per above. Someone downmod the OP and give some points to the AC.
I guess that's why Socrates used this method. Just ask questions and guide the other person so that they find the correct answers.
And in "Future Plans" there is the whole plan of his last dive. Quite sad nobody has access to his site to add a little "Dave is no longer with us" memo on the front page.
I didn't care to look it up, but if it happened on a highway, there are phone booths for emergency calls every kilometre or so.
In case of a fire - that's what neighbours are for. They will call 911 unless they want their house to burn down next.
Thank you! Reading page after page of complaints about this was disheartening. Not everyone has lost their sense of imagination.
There is one person roughly half-way though that seemed to be quite excited about the prospect of more detailed animal por^H^H^Hvideos.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you'll ever find a cheap, USB-enabled, old-school handheld joystick. There's just not much interest in those and the price thus stays high to make it at all profitable to manufacture and sell them. Not much you can do, I'm afraid. Unless you can make your own joystick or decide to pay for the imported stuff.
That's a gamepad, or joypad. He wants a joystick. Like this.
Why go retro when you can just buy a nice one in Germany without the hassle of import taxes and high delivery costs? Just go buy it on amazon and you'll have two for the price of one of the retro ones.