Maybe I'm remembering school wrong, but I was required to take tech ed for a couple years in junior high... Or is it wrong of me to bring this up when we're demonizing the US school system? It's kinda silly how many people forget what classes they went through on the way to the position they're in now. I'm a 80s child as well.
True, but in our country we value materialistic possessions over peoples lives. And when it comes down to it, people can say 'oh, you should leave right away as every life is precious', but when it comes time for insurance to pay up they go 'oh you had time and your negligence lead to this loss of materials'.
Capitalism at it's finest. Ever see that commercial where the guy is in the operating room and they're waiting for his credit to clear before they operate on him? Yeah, that's not far from the truth even though it was supposed to be a joke.
Insurance is supposed to cover things like this, but insurance is a business and a very profitable one at that as there is a lot of wiggle room for the person with the bigger pockets.
I think you and a lot of people seem to think that the immediately foreseeable best result is always the best one. Of course it can be cheaper if it's done with drones, but do we plan on doing everything in space with drones? What about when we actually have to go up there or do anything in space? Our expertise is limited by our limited confrontations and environments in space.
You first have to actually get established and work out all the kinks before you decide one and only one method is the best method. You can do BOTH of them at the same time. Humans with robots augmenting them and cut down on the manpower. But getting humans there, having the first hand knowledge of operating in space, of finding problems and resolving them, having the entire concept of living in space develop over time is extremely important.
Imagine what would've happened if we first started waging war with drones instead of with actual people flying planes. How do you think that would pan out in the future? Somethings you need to do first before you can approach the best solution because a lot of knowledge is simply lost in the process if you skip around it. And yes, failures are very important too...
Just no one wants to fund such things. No one wants to be the first one to dump craptons of money into something and everyone wants the optimal solution that nets them big money. Things don't always work like that and if you plan on waiting that long someone else will jump on things and you just get to pick up the scraps after everything is said and done which ranges from monetary, to emotional, to spiritual.
All of the above would involve Intel or AMD building them into the chip, which they have no plan on doing... So I'm guessing no where. This can be made by currently producing heatsink manufacturers... which means I'd give it a year or two and you'll start seeing them.
I'm not sure about the interface film, but that may be made into a TIM pad or you might start seeing graphene thermal compounds. Either way this is quite a bit different then the other examples you listed.
It's surprising in this day and age someone at the top of a billion dollar company can't see what is so blatantly wrong with their company that they could easily fix it. All they have to do is go to one of their stores incognito and attempt to shop there.
1. Stop upselling, train staff to be courteous and informative, rather then preying on those who don't know better. Offer customers relevant information on whatever they're buying in close proximity to what they're buying, like different display technologies for TVs and monitors, pros/cons, that sort of thing.
2. Change prices so they're competitive with online with a markup that covers the costs associated with having a retail store.
3. Carry a range of devices, not just the top of the line monster cable (something high, low and medium end). You don't realize how expensive cables are till you buy one off amazon, even cheap ones.
4. Make sure your stock is up to date. Buying a graphics card that is two generations old for the original retail price is beyond stupid. Best Buy should neither be proud of selling these or having people buy them.
Then advertise what you no longer doing and how you've changed to bring in customers (this will only work once and it will most definitely be a huge PR incident if you haven't changed).
It's that simple. This would change their sales immensely... Where is my million dollar salary?
Curiously, how oblivious were you to how parties worked in college or what they were for... Heck how dating worked in college in general... What bars are for... or in general any other hangout in real life that people go to pick up the other gender. Picking out one mode of doing so seems a bit 'pathetic' as well, not to mention ignorant and shortsighted.
"I sure as hell wouldn't respond to a text message from some random person who thought we could be friends. I'd probably tell them to fuck off or not even reply."
You make his point quite well. Enjoy your walls of eden.
My brother is currently in highschool and they have a laptop program there too. I got a chance to inspect his laptop. Students are encouraged to use their laptops not only at school, but also at home. They're allowed to take them home, over spring break, over summer break, and they have a trade up program.
However, all traffic from the laptop is routed through their VPN, you can't even shut it off or edit any system settings. They have the OS completely restricted. If you install anything on the laptop without their permission, they reprimand you for it. They have unfettered access to the embedded webcam (I told him to put a piece of electrical tape over it and if anyone questions it ask why he needs to remove it) and they also have complete remote access abilities to monitor his laptop.
Honestly this is all pretty sick. A school isn't a business. While it may be appropriate for a business to protect it's assets and make sure they aren't being misused, the school is run by the government, which is in turn (supposed to be) run by the people. A simple reimage of the computer would wipe anything the user has done. As long as they don't physically break it then there shouldn't be any problems. Instead they are not only going out of their way to lockdown the OS (which prevents any sort of meaningful learning experience outside of a handful of software suites they deem worthy), but also patrol what their students do, which in turn opens up space for liability as well. Whatever happened to parents doing this sort of thing anyway?
If he didn't HAVE to use the laptop, and oh yes, they are required, to use the laptop in school, outside of school, and they can't buy their own, I would suggest him using the home computer. They are required to essentially funnel everything that is school related through the device. There aren't ways to access the in school programs outside of the VPN, like the drop box.
This is exactly how NOT to do a laptop program if you give a shit about the people actually using them.
This shouldn't be rated up and if it was it should've been rated as funny or trolling. Don't believe someone merely because they say 'they're serious' and throw in a bit of reverse psychology.
Everyone pretty much understands that ecological environments are destroyed when dams are built... but why don't many people think further then that? Life exists in all parts in the world, a giant lake above a dam isn't going to be automatically devoid of all life. An environment will be destroyed, but a new one will pop up. There are ways that both the environment and people cope with change like this. The environment will readjust on it's own and people can do things like install fish ladders.
I don't understand why people throw up a red flag and seem to think that as soon as a dam is put in it eradicates all life within a 10 mile radius and prevents any sort of life from coming back. There is a regenerative factor here that should be considered as well. You can't step on any part of the world without being ecologically damaging, heck just being alive is ecologically damaging.
If it wasn't for consolization MS and Sony would've had to have released a console by now to keep up with the demands of gamers, but consolization took over and all developers are doing for the most part is crapping out below par games (compared to computers). These games lowered the standards of both PC and console gamers and stagnated the entire industry at a certain level. This allowed MS and Sony to milk out their current generation to seven years currently and current gamers are stuck in the lethargy that games are 'good enough', 'graphics are good enough', 'I want to hold onto my investment for awhile longer', and all that jazz allowing the two b big ones to take advantage of such a situation.
MS and Sony aren't going to release a new console in a forseable future till the pendelum swings back to PCs and people realize how awesome they are in comparison to ancient hardware running in their living room. Which will and is starting to happen as game developers realize that the whole 'PC gaming is dying' was a load of shit and there is plenty of money to be made on the PC, especially in the f2p genre... You can really thank TF2 and LoL for promoting that. Right before it swings back MS and Sony will release a new barrage of consoles to bring their console gamers back and attempt to solidify their position once again.
I'm almost 100% positive they have a dynamic model they keep updating just waiting to be released at the right time in both camps. This isn't a war for making quality products, it's for milking as much as humanely possible from their original investment in a console (which really doesn't amount to much more then a custom computer and a bunch of marketing). They have no reason or goal to improve their old products besides offering buzz things like, motion controls the Wii hit a home run with and the equivalent of a Kinect. This is what happens when a company is given complete reign over their industry. Companies turn a profit, they aren't their to be innovative when they have nothing to compete with.
Hopefully, and I really do mean hopefully, Valve will get it's act together and take Steam to the next level. A few self help videos showing people how they can hook their PCs up to their big screen TV and how easy it is to hook a x360 controller up to a said system (a fatal mistake MS made to promote consolization). This is in addition to features that just make gaming easier. Like making a open performance specification, not a static baseline that all games adhere to because hardware is so antiquated, but rather what level of performance a game will run at on your hardware.
Giving each game a red/green/yellow sticker on their product page based on your hardware specifications. Red it wont run at all or really poorly, green it will run more then adequately (say 40fps without stutters or huge pitfalls longer them a certain MS), and yellow it will run with some stutters or may seem sluggish. Valve already harvests computers for their specs and they have the Steam overlay in place which could quite easily check FPS in game. This would be quite easy for Valve to implement as they have access to the biggest repository of hardware for gamers and performance data from it. For anyone else this would be almost unachievable.
Breaking this up a bit, each red/green/yellow sticker could be hovered over and broken down into components showing the user what they need to upgrade in order to improve their experience. This would take a lot of the guesswork out of the hardware aspect, which is one of the marketing points for buying a console from MS or Sony and it'll allow game makers the freedom of producing a game to whatever specifications they want as per normal on a computer.
It's things like this that empower users to play their games. The idea should be not to lock down the hardware, but offer a means of allowing users to see how their experience will vary on a case by case basis. Adding to this the planned big HTPC Steam interface can make a huge impact on how PC gaming is seen.
I still think the answer to both the SSD and Mechanical question is hybrid drives. Seagate has tried them in the past, but they definitely aren't as fast as normal SSDs. If they can improve that tech and attach it to something like this, it's literally the best of both world. Honestly it would just be a much improved drive cache, which Seagate and other drive makers could've improved for years... but somehow never did...
The argument that 'the more time they put into it, the better it looks' is a logical fallacy. There are hugely diminishing returns trying to optimize hardware that is ancient. It's like trying to make a stone bleed. All you have to do is look at Rage, which is very recent, which tried VERY hard to optimize their game for consoles and to look good to see how little it accomplished. It looks just about as good graphically as UE3 that also ran on consoles a year after it came out.
Graphics on modern consoles are ultra dated, they were dated when Crysis came out five (!!!) years ago, they're dated now. The difference being the gaming industry has almost completely stagnated around the hardware specifications of a console so we don't really see anything mind blowing... about the next best thing to come along graphically since Crysis is Battlefield 3.
I think the models depend a lot on what is being offered. Some games cope well with the $60 one time fee, where as other need it to survive. f2p works in favor for a game like League of Legends because it's largely focused around small units which can be easily added to the game, they then charge for those units (heroes). People will continue playing the game regardless because the game play is generally self-perpetuating. People play for some other goal besides beating the game and being done with it.
Where as a game like Bulletstorm is largely focused around a one time play through unless you're a die hard. It doesn't take much time, but it was still priced at $60 for launch. People wont return to the game, even if there is DLC because the game doesn't have a model that would cater to return customers. Even if it was f2p, people wouldn't play it because it's not designed to be played that way.
Then yet again you have a game like Skyrim, which is a bargain for $60 for the amount of time you can get out of the game. Not just that, but a lot of casual users will STILL be playing the game when DLC comes out because it's really just that long. Even after you beat the main storyline, you can continue on playing the game and the game itself once again motivates people to play it for some other reason then the carrot-on-a-stick approach. The lore, storyline, quests, setting, and universe itself are that well thought out that it encourages people to keep playing and keep buying.
Of course Skyrim couldn't go f2p. If it was f2p, people wouldn't buy it because they would literally hack apart the game world to fit it into that specific business model and that's what some companies are trying to do. Some companies are trying so hard to fit games into a certain business model that it literally tears the game apart because the game wasn't designed around it or they don't know how to implement it in a way that makes it fair to all that play. Take for instance WoWs 'f2p' accounts, that are essentially trial accounts that never expire. They have absolutely no use to anyone other then allowing Blizzard to slap the 'f2p' moniker on their game.
This sort of thing just goes to show you that 'me toos' never end up in the lead. They're always chasing after scraps left by those leading the way.
That's a pretty amazing bearing if it can last 50 years... not to mention all the other mechanical components. A septic tank is just a sealed concrete tank. Cool theory, but with a lot of mechanical things, they need to be serviced and they do randomly go bad.
...is why we enjoy Google and their services so much. Because there is more to a good company then then their lump sum of cash (such as Apple now days). I believe after a certain point (of income proportional to the size of the company) it's no longer about reaping as large a profit as possible to add shovels full of gold to the pile, but rather about what you can give back to society and the world as a whole. In essence it's their duty morally and ethically to give back to the world as the world has given them a position in which they can undertake such monumental tasks....Of course this means nothing in modern terms in which capitalism has effectively given people an edict to abandon all moral and ethical obligation and dive headfirst into cut throat practice. In the end they become so fixated on one particular aspect that they forget everything else around them.
In this day and age with all our micro devices they still haven't figured out what's behind a door up easy to navigate shaft. After a bit of searching around the net all of the photos are really blurry too. How hard is it to put a 1080p webcam on a robot and drive it up a ramp?
I like how some people are like 'WTF is NP-Hard' and people who can explain it only do so using their native jargon, still in a way that's not helpful to the average joe.
I'm not Japanese, but I'm pretty sure the only people opposing nuclear power in Japan are in politics and fearmongers from other countries. Sounds like a global politics issue, which is stupid.
I'm sure the citizens will be thrilled when they drop coal burning plants down right next to the nuclear plants that didn't emit any sort of noticeable byproducts.
...have you tried running games in Wine on Nix? Somethings they say because it's true. You can color it however you want with flowery language, but that wont stop my game from crashing every 10 minutes.
This isn't going to work. Essentially Valve is trying to bridge the gap between computers and consoles, showing the average joe that they can easily hook up their computers to the TV and it becomes a console. They're decking it out with modern hardware and they're making it compatabile with windows games... But that's not the way consoles work. They settle on the least common denominator when developing software for hardware. That means after Sony and MS crap on their next latest and greatest system, the software will essentially be designed for the least powerful system (as long as one doesn't turn out like a Wii).
That's the way it worked with the latest entourage of consoles. That saves the developers tons of work. If they weren't lazy they'd develop for the PC and port them to the consoles already, but they don't do that. That's also part of why Sony got royally screwed. They built a really powerful piece of hardware, but no one cared because it was hard to use and then they'd have to adjust things to make it run on the Xbox. With the exception to this being PS3 exclusives.
Essentially all Valve is doing is muddling the waters and rebranding a HTPC when they should be pushing steam on normal computers, raising customer awareness, and generally showing people how hooking a PC up to their TV isn't all that scary. That completely blows away all the nonsense MS and Sony have been throwing at people. They keep trying to make their consoles seem magical, when really it's already a PC. Nintendo already realized that consoles are crossing the niche to PCs and they solidified their position by making their system seem completely different from a computer, not just in terms of how you interact with it (the Wiimote), but also the kind of games you see on them. They tried to make them seem classical and basically retro. The graphics look like they're on the same level as a nintendo 64.
I really hope Valve doesn't go through with this... Maybe their real intention is to muddle the waters and make people actually attempt to hook a PC up to their TV...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm remembering school wrong, but I was required to take tech ed for a couple years in junior high... Or is it wrong of me to bring this up when we're demonizing the US school system? It's kinda silly how many people forget what classes they went through on the way to the position they're in now. I'm a 80s child as well.
True, but in our country we value materialistic possessions over peoples lives. And when it comes down to it, people can say 'oh, you should leave right away as every life is precious', but when it comes time for insurance to pay up they go 'oh you had time and your negligence lead to this loss of materials'.
Capitalism at it's finest. Ever see that commercial where the guy is in the operating room and they're waiting for his credit to clear before they operate on him? Yeah, that's not far from the truth even though it was supposed to be a joke.
Insurance is supposed to cover things like this, but insurance is a business and a very profitable one at that as there is a lot of wiggle room for the person with the bigger pockets.
I think you and a lot of people seem to think that the immediately foreseeable best result is always the best one. Of course it can be cheaper if it's done with drones, but do we plan on doing everything in space with drones? What about when we actually have to go up there or do anything in space? Our expertise is limited by our limited confrontations and environments in space.
You first have to actually get established and work out all the kinks before you decide one and only one method is the best method. You can do BOTH of them at the same time. Humans with robots augmenting them and cut down on the manpower. But getting humans there, having the first hand knowledge of operating in space, of finding problems and resolving them, having the entire concept of living in space develop over time is extremely important.
Imagine what would've happened if we first started waging war with drones instead of with actual people flying planes. How do you think that would pan out in the future? Somethings you need to do first before you can approach the best solution because a lot of knowledge is simply lost in the process if you skip around it. And yes, failures are very important too...
Just no one wants to fund such things. No one wants to be the first one to dump craptons of money into something and everyone wants the optimal solution that nets them big money. Things don't always work like that and if you plan on waiting that long someone else will jump on things and you just get to pick up the scraps after everything is said and done which ranges from monetary, to emotional, to spiritual.
Wow, where do you get struggling with weight out of any of that? She actually looks pretty normal and possibly under it (for US standards).
All of the above would involve Intel or AMD building them into the chip, which they have no plan on doing... So I'm guessing no where. This can be made by currently producing heatsink manufacturers... which means I'd give it a year or two and you'll start seeing them.
I'm not sure about the interface film, but that may be made into a TIM pad or you might start seeing graphene thermal compounds. Either way this is quite a bit different then the other examples you listed.
It's surprising in this day and age someone at the top of a billion dollar company can't see what is so blatantly wrong with their company that they could easily fix it. All they have to do is go to one of their stores incognito and attempt to shop there.
1. Stop upselling, train staff to be courteous and informative, rather then preying on those who don't know better. Offer customers relevant information on whatever they're buying in close proximity to what they're buying, like different display technologies for TVs and monitors, pros/cons, that sort of thing.
2. Change prices so they're competitive with online with a markup that covers the costs associated with having a retail store.
3. Carry a range of devices, not just the top of the line monster cable (something high, low and medium end). You don't realize how expensive cables are till you buy one off amazon, even cheap ones.
4. Make sure your stock is up to date. Buying a graphics card that is two generations old for the original retail price is beyond stupid. Best Buy should neither be proud of selling these or having people buy them.
Then advertise what you no longer doing and how you've changed to bring in customers (this will only work once and it will most definitely be a huge PR incident if you haven't changed).
It's that simple. This would change their sales immensely... Where is my million dollar salary?
Curiously, how oblivious were you to how parties worked in college or what they were for... Heck how dating worked in college in general... What bars are for... or in general any other hangout in real life that people go to pick up the other gender. Picking out one mode of doing so seems a bit 'pathetic' as well, not to mention ignorant and shortsighted.
"I sure as hell wouldn't respond to a text message from some random person who thought we could be friends. I'd probably tell them to fuck off or not even reply."
You make his point quite well. Enjoy your walls of eden.
My brother is currently in highschool and they have a laptop program there too. I got a chance to inspect his laptop. Students are encouraged to use their laptops not only at school, but also at home. They're allowed to take them home, over spring break, over summer break, and they have a trade up program.
However, all traffic from the laptop is routed through their VPN, you can't even shut it off or edit any system settings. They have the OS completely restricted. If you install anything on the laptop without their permission, they reprimand you for it. They have unfettered access to the embedded webcam (I told him to put a piece of electrical tape over it and if anyone questions it ask why he needs to remove it) and they also have complete remote access abilities to monitor his laptop.
Honestly this is all pretty sick. A school isn't a business. While it may be appropriate for a business to protect it's assets and make sure they aren't being misused, the school is run by the government, which is in turn (supposed to be) run by the people. A simple reimage of the computer would wipe anything the user has done. As long as they don't physically break it then there shouldn't be any problems. Instead they are not only going out of their way to lockdown the OS (which prevents any sort of meaningful learning experience outside of a handful of software suites they deem worthy), but also patrol what their students do, which in turn opens up space for liability as well. Whatever happened to parents doing this sort of thing anyway?
If he didn't HAVE to use the laptop, and oh yes, they are required, to use the laptop in school, outside of school, and they can't buy their own, I would suggest him using the home computer. They are required to essentially funnel everything that is school related through the device. There aren't ways to access the in school programs outside of the VPN, like the drop box.
This is exactly how NOT to do a laptop program if you give a shit about the people actually using them.
This shouldn't be rated up and if it was it should've been rated as funny or trolling. Don't believe someone merely because they say 'they're serious' and throw in a bit of reverse psychology.
Everyone pretty much understands that ecological environments are destroyed when dams are built... but why don't many people think further then that? Life exists in all parts in the world, a giant lake above a dam isn't going to be automatically devoid of all life. An environment will be destroyed, but a new one will pop up. There are ways that both the environment and people cope with change like this. The environment will readjust on it's own and people can do things like install fish ladders.
I don't understand why people throw up a red flag and seem to think that as soon as a dam is put in it eradicates all life within a 10 mile radius and prevents any sort of life from coming back. There is a regenerative factor here that should be considered as well. You can't step on any part of the world without being ecologically damaging, heck just being alive is ecologically damaging.
Newest generation of consoles; same reasoning.
If it wasn't for consolization MS and Sony would've had to have released a console by now to keep up with the demands of gamers, but consolization took over and all developers are doing for the most part is crapping out below par games (compared to computers). These games lowered the standards of both PC and console gamers and stagnated the entire industry at a certain level. This allowed MS and Sony to milk out their current generation to seven years currently and current gamers are stuck in the lethargy that games are 'good enough', 'graphics are good enough', 'I want to hold onto my investment for awhile longer', and all that jazz allowing the two b big ones to take advantage of such a situation.
MS and Sony aren't going to release a new console in a forseable future till the pendelum swings back to PCs and people realize how awesome they are in comparison to ancient hardware running in their living room. Which will and is starting to happen as game developers realize that the whole 'PC gaming is dying' was a load of shit and there is plenty of money to be made on the PC, especially in the f2p genre... You can really thank TF2 and LoL for promoting that. Right before it swings back MS and Sony will release a new barrage of consoles to bring their console gamers back and attempt to solidify their position once again.
I'm almost 100% positive they have a dynamic model they keep updating just waiting to be released at the right time in both camps. This isn't a war for making quality products, it's for milking as much as humanely possible from their original investment in a console (which really doesn't amount to much more then a custom computer and a bunch of marketing). They have no reason or goal to improve their old products besides offering buzz things like, motion controls the Wii hit a home run with and the equivalent of a Kinect. This is what happens when a company is given complete reign over their industry. Companies turn a profit, they aren't their to be innovative when they have nothing to compete with.
Hopefully, and I really do mean hopefully, Valve will get it's act together and take Steam to the next level. A few self help videos showing people how they can hook their PCs up to their big screen TV and how easy it is to hook a x360 controller up to a said system (a fatal mistake MS made to promote consolization). This is in addition to features that just make gaming easier. Like making a open performance specification, not a static baseline that all games adhere to because hardware is so antiquated, but rather what level of performance a game will run at on your hardware.
Giving each game a red/green/yellow sticker on their product page based on your hardware specifications. Red it wont run at all or really poorly, green it will run more then adequately (say 40fps without stutters or huge pitfalls longer them a certain MS), and yellow it will run with some stutters or may seem sluggish. Valve already harvests computers for their specs and they have the Steam overlay in place which could quite easily check FPS in game. This would be quite easy for Valve to implement as they have access to the biggest repository of hardware for gamers and performance data from it. For anyone else this would be almost unachievable.
Breaking this up a bit, each red/green/yellow sticker could be hovered over and broken down into components showing the user what they need to upgrade in order to improve their experience. This would take a lot of the guesswork out of the hardware aspect, which is one of the marketing points for buying a console from MS or Sony and it'll allow game makers the freedom of producing a game to whatever specifications they want as per normal on a computer.
It's things like this that empower users to play their games. The idea should be not to lock down the hardware, but offer a means of allowing users to see how their experience will vary on a case by case basis. Adding to this the planned big HTPC Steam interface can make a huge impact on how PC gaming is seen.
I still think the answer to both the SSD and Mechanical question is hybrid drives. Seagate has tried them in the past, but they definitely aren't as fast as normal SSDs. If they can improve that tech and attach it to something like this, it's literally the best of both world. Honestly it would just be a much improved drive cache, which Seagate and other drive makers could've improved for years... but somehow never did...
The argument that 'the more time they put into it, the better it looks' is a logical fallacy. There are hugely diminishing returns trying to optimize hardware that is ancient. It's like trying to make a stone bleed. All you have to do is look at Rage, which is very recent, which tried VERY hard to optimize their game for consoles and to look good to see how little it accomplished. It looks just about as good graphically as UE3 that also ran on consoles a year after it came out.
Graphics on modern consoles are ultra dated, they were dated when Crysis came out five (!!!) years ago, they're dated now. The difference being the gaming industry has almost completely stagnated around the hardware specifications of a console so we don't really see anything mind blowing... about the next best thing to come along graphically since Crysis is Battlefield 3.
I think the models depend a lot on what is being offered. Some games cope well with the $60 one time fee, where as other need it to survive. f2p works in favor for a game like League of Legends because it's largely focused around small units which can be easily added to the game, they then charge for those units (heroes). People will continue playing the game regardless because the game play is generally self-perpetuating. People play for some other goal besides beating the game and being done with it.
Where as a game like Bulletstorm is largely focused around a one time play through unless you're a die hard. It doesn't take much time, but it was still priced at $60 for launch. People wont return to the game, even if there is DLC because the game doesn't have a model that would cater to return customers. Even if it was f2p, people wouldn't play it because it's not designed to be played that way.
Then yet again you have a game like Skyrim, which is a bargain for $60 for the amount of time you can get out of the game. Not just that, but a lot of casual users will STILL be playing the game when DLC comes out because it's really just that long. Even after you beat the main storyline, you can continue on playing the game and the game itself once again motivates people to play it for some other reason then the carrot-on-a-stick approach. The lore, storyline, quests, setting, and universe itself are that well thought out that it encourages people to keep playing and keep buying.
Of course Skyrim couldn't go f2p. If it was f2p, people wouldn't buy it because they would literally hack apart the game world to fit it into that specific business model and that's what some companies are trying to do. Some companies are trying so hard to fit games into a certain business model that it literally tears the game apart because the game wasn't designed around it or they don't know how to implement it in a way that makes it fair to all that play. Take for instance WoWs 'f2p' accounts, that are essentially trial accounts that never expire. They have absolutely no use to anyone other then allowing Blizzard to slap the 'f2p' moniker on their game.
This sort of thing just goes to show you that 'me toos' never end up in the lead. They're always chasing after scraps left by those leading the way.
...except that almost all companies charge $60 regardless of what PoS they dish out.
That's a pretty amazing bearing if it can last 50 years... not to mention all the other mechanical components. A septic tank is just a sealed concrete tank. Cool theory, but with a lot of mechanical things, they need to be serviced and they do randomly go bad.
...is why we enjoy Google and their services so much. Because there is more to a good company then then their lump sum of cash (such as Apple now days). I believe after a certain point (of income proportional to the size of the company) it's no longer about reaping as large a profit as possible to add shovels full of gold to the pile, but rather about what you can give back to society and the world as a whole. In essence it's their duty morally and ethically to give back to the world as the world has given them a position in which they can undertake such monumental tasks. ...Of course this means nothing in modern terms in which capitalism has effectively given people an edict to abandon all moral and ethical obligation and dive headfirst into cut throat practice. In the end they become so fixated on one particular aspect that they forget everything else around them.
Noblesse Oblige as they say...
In this day and age with all our micro devices they still haven't figured out what's behind a door up easy to navigate shaft. After a bit of searching around the net all of the photos are really blurry too. How hard is it to put a 1080p webcam on a robot and drive it up a ramp?
http://www.crystalinks.com/gantenbrink.html
A operational definition... or, you know, a metaphorical comparison.
I like how some people are like 'WTF is NP-Hard' and people who can explain it only do so using their native jargon, still in a way that's not helpful to the average joe.
I'm not Japanese, but I'm pretty sure the only people opposing nuclear power in Japan are in politics and fearmongers from other countries. Sounds like a global politics issue, which is stupid.
I'm sure the citizens will be thrilled when they drop coal burning plants down right next to the nuclear plants that didn't emit any sort of noticeable byproducts.
...have you tried running games in Wine on Nix? Somethings they say because it's true. You can color it however you want with flowery language, but that wont stop my game from crashing every 10 minutes.
God forbid you ever encounter the paperback medium that you flip open to reveal a jumble of characters.
This isn't going to work. Essentially Valve is trying to bridge the gap between computers and consoles, showing the average joe that they can easily hook up their computers to the TV and it becomes a console. They're decking it out with modern hardware and they're making it compatabile with windows games... But that's not the way consoles work. They settle on the least common denominator when developing software for hardware. That means after Sony and MS crap on their next latest and greatest system, the software will essentially be designed for the least powerful system (as long as one doesn't turn out like a Wii).
That's the way it worked with the latest entourage of consoles. That saves the developers tons of work. If they weren't lazy they'd develop for the PC and port them to the consoles already, but they don't do that. That's also part of why Sony got royally screwed. They built a really powerful piece of hardware, but no one cared because it was hard to use and then they'd have to adjust things to make it run on the Xbox. With the exception to this being PS3 exclusives.
Essentially all Valve is doing is muddling the waters and rebranding a HTPC when they should be pushing steam on normal computers, raising customer awareness, and generally showing people how hooking a PC up to their TV isn't all that scary. That completely blows away all the nonsense MS and Sony have been throwing at people. They keep trying to make their consoles seem magical, when really it's already a PC. Nintendo already realized that consoles are crossing the niche to PCs and they solidified their position by making their system seem completely different from a computer, not just in terms of how you interact with it (the Wiimote), but also the kind of games you see on them. They tried to make them seem classical and basically retro. The graphics look like they're on the same level as a nintendo 64.
I really hope Valve doesn't go through with this... Maybe their real intention is to muddle the waters and make people actually attempt to hook a PC up to their TV...