Internet access in the US sucks terribly, that's what. I pay $50 / month for 6 MBit cable, and most of the time I'm lucky if I can sustain a connection at 3 or 4 MBit. I have two alternatives in my area, which are either slower (but cheaper) or much more expensive (and only slightly faster).
What would you rather they do all day? Sit in their cells, bored out of their minds, thinking about how to get revenge on whoever put them in there when they're finally released with years of built-up stress?
If we want that to change, then we should lobby our representitives, and the experts in the field can testify and explain as to why there is no threat to air safety. Until then, the arrogant, self-centered Arianna Huffington's of the world need to shut up and do what they are told. I can tell you that if I see someone flaunting the rules, endangering my safety on a flight, I am going to help the stewardess hold them down while someone shoves their phone somewhere less than enjoyable.
Ok, so let's say that we have lobbied our representatives. Experts in the field have already testified that there is no provable threat to air safety. People use their electronic devices on a regular basis during takeoff/landing when nobody's looking, and yet incidents due to interference from those devices never happen. But our representatives don't believe the experts and don't do anything to change the rules. What should we do then?
As it stands there's something like 8 games due on the PSP in North America in the next 6 months; most of them are being published and/or developed by Sony. The only place PSP game development is still alive is Japan, where a number of games still come out every week.
In my opinion, 2010 was the best year the PSP's had so far. I've had a PSP since around 2007, but I know I bought more games for it last year than any year up to that.
"Get over it"? I am over it. The Chrono series is done. It had a great first game, then a mediocre sequel and a weak port. I just wish that Chrono fanboys wouldn't continually rave about how they think Square needs to make another game.
Chrono Cross is a perfectly typical example of Square's slide into mediocrity. The music and sound are great, sure, but the plot is filled with convoluted nonsense.
There's a huge cast of characters and only a couple of them receive any development at all. Hell, look at all the joke characters they crammed into the game -- the big pink dog? The talking plant? The cyborg? The Mexican wrestler? Those are just a few of them. I can forgive a game that has one joke character, but CC went want overboard. And all of them have generic dialog with their personal tic of choice inserted into it, just to make sure any of them can be present in any scene.
Then you have the matter of the writers disrespecting the original's cast of characters. Many of them are killed off-screen before CC even begins, without even any parting dialog, and to top it off, they were killed due to the actions of a joke villain from the original game. Then there's the issue of Magus, one of the most important figures of the original game, who was supposed to be in CC but they decided they didn't have time to fit him in, so the character model that was made for him got turned into a similar-but-unrelated PC who joins you and then gets just as much development as everybody else (none). And then in the CT DS port, they retconned that by saying that he actually is the same character, he just lost his memory.
Then there's all of the areas in which the gameplay was lacking. Despite multiple different worlds being one of the selling points of the game, it turned out that there were only two different worlds which were very similar to each other, and actions in one didn't affect the other very much at all. It's a sharp contrast from the multiple time periods and potential ramifications from the original. Oh, and I should mention the battle system, too -- the ability to always run from anything (even bosses), only leveling up from bosses, and the potential to abuse elemental fields meant that the game was laughably easy. To be fair, I suppose CT was pretty easy, too.
I won't say CC is a bad game. It has its enjoyable aspects, and I can see how some people would enjoy it more than others. But it falls far short of the quality of any of the SNES's big RPG hits and most of the PSX's.
They lost their way a long time ago and have just been putting out garbage and re-releases. It's long past time something wakes them up and reminds them that gameplay actually matters.
You should check out some of their other games. Over on the DS, Dragon Quest IX, The 4 Heroes of Light, and The World Ends with You are all among the best RPGs on the system (and there are a lot of good RPGs on the DS). Despite the weird Wii Crystal Chronicles games, the two DS CC games are great multiplayer dungeon crawlers. Even though they're remakes, Dragon Quest IV & V and Final Fantasy IV were also great. Over on the PSP, even though it's a bit of a silly concept, Dissidia was a lot of fun, and the Star Ocean remake was well-done and the first time the game has been released in the US.
They've had some pretty spotty releases on the PS3 and 360, although there was also Nier, which everybody seems to forget about when complaining that SE doesn't do anything original any more.
Religion answers questions for us that Science cannot.
Out of curiosity, like what? What questions can you demonstrate science cannot answer, but religion does provide an answer for? (an actual answer, mind you, not a hopeful guess!)
It should be kept in mind that many of the famous scientists you could name were products of their times and cultures, where it was unthinkable that somebody could not subscribe to the predominant religion. Many of them invoked their deity as an explanation for questions they did not know the answer to, and yet modern science has found answers for many of those questions. Just because our current answer to a question is "we don't know" does not mean that the answer is actually "we cannot know" or "God did it."
I've actually found myself to be considerably happier ever since I stopped trying to reconcile religion with empirical obeservations and instead dropped it entirely.
Get this: Linux users are a minority, and die-hard zealots are a minority in that minority.
Most of the people who buy video cards do so either for high-end industrial work or gaming, and the vast majority of those people use Windows and do not care whether their drivers are open source or not.
Have you considered that perhaps sometimes "I don't know the answer" is the best answer? Not, "I don't know the answer, therefore it was caused by a supernatural being." For that matter, it's still a pretty big jump from, "I think there's something supernatural going on," to "we were created by a supernatural being whom I should worship."
The human mind is capable of playing pretty amazing tricks on itself.
Evolution is a well studied and documented fact. A fact that in no way disproves god.
While evolution doesn't disprove the possibility of supernatural deities, it does present some serious problems for the Christian concept. If you accept the modern version of evolution as the explanation of how our species got here, then that means there was no "Adam and Eve"; humanity is not a fixed species, but has gradually changed over the course of history from our ancestors. There is no single point at which we could look at our ancestors and say "this is the first human."
The lack of Adam and Eve, however, means that there was no Original Sin. One of the core concepts of Christianity is that Adam and Eve were originally perfect, but due to the Original Sin, they and all of their descendents (including us) are sinners and require redemption through Jesus Christ; without redemption, we are doomed to spend the rest of eternity in Hell.
No Original Sin means that we are not all sinners who deserve to burn because of it. In other words, redemption through Jesus Christ is unnecessary, and the core concept of Christianity falls apart.
The other possibility is that, if the Christian God is real, then rather than having the Original Sin placed upon us due to Adam and Eve's actions, God intentionally made us flawed, knowing that a significant portion of humanity would commit horrible atrocities upon each other and then be tortured eternally for it. That's more like a scientist who's conducting experiments on a bacteria colony that a loving God who wants his creations to be good to each other, if you ask me.
So, you are correct that evolution does not disprove the existence of a god or gods, but in order to reconcile it with the Christian God, you would have to take such a figurative interpretation of the events in the Bible that you're not really following the tenets of Christianity any more.
We live in an age where the general public is not something that anyone stands up for anymore.
No, we live in an age where vigilante justice and violent overreactions are not the accepted solutions to problems. If you had bothered to read the article you would know that this guy has been arrested and convicted, courtesy of the justice system.
I think that's a common misconception -- that being certified for some process standard such as CMMI is supposed to magically make everything you do better.
Unfortunately, I've seen a number of organizations obsess over CMMI so much that it ruined their productivity.
What CMMI is good for is making it so that when you screw up, you can look back over what happened and figure out why it is that you screwed up and prevent it from happening again. Of course, sometimes the problem is, "Implementing CMMI completely derailed our development process"...
If the definition of "torrent sneaking company" is what I think it is, the downloader isn't committing copyright infringement when it's entrapment, that is: the copyright holder is deliberately providing a free (but supposedly illicit) copy through a shill torrent to collect addresses for legal action. You can't literally give someone your product and then claim they were infringing.
Wrong. It's only entrapment if you convince somebody to commit a crime that they were otherwise not going to commit. This is why you never see undercover cops approach people and offer to sell them drugs -- they'll always wait until people come to them. Somebody who goes looking for a Witcher 2 torrent is already planning to pirate the game, regardless of who is seeding it. That's not entrapment, that's a sting operation.
(If that is what they plan to do -- I'm not sure what they mean by "sneaking")
I take it you missed the story a couple of days ago about some British lawyers apparently sending out threatening letters to 'downloaders' when they knew that some significant fraction were completely innocent?
Let me make sure I have your argument right. Some British guys screwed up going after some criminals, therefore the concept of some Polish guys going after criminals who committed the same type of crime is disgusting. Is that right? So what's your suggestion, that nobody bother to enforce the law at all?
I hope they get wads of ill-gotten fines from allegedly guilty thieves. They'll need it to compensate for the loss of legitimate sales they now won't be getting at gog.com from disgusted people like me. I only learned about the site recently and was moderately impressed. Now I'm disgusted.
Why are you disgusted? I fail to see what's so bad about releasing a game without DRM and then going after criminals who pirate it. That seems to me like the way companies should be doing it, rather than treating customers like potential criminals and loading their games with DRM.
And "allegedly" guilty thieves? Explain to me, how do you download from a torrent of copyrighted material without committing copyright infringement?
I've got the opposite anecdote. I've been using XFS on several drives for years and never had data corruption problem. I've had three drives with ext3 that had corrupted files.
Been thinking about it, how fast? Can one flip the page when you get to the bottom or is it still flip at the midpoint?
I just picked one up and would estimate that it takes roughly (maybe a bit less than) half a second to flip to the next page of a book. Less time that it takes for me to flip a page in a real book, at least.
Let's see, $150 for a device that needs charging and costs roughly the same per book which may or may not work 3 to 5 years from now versus a book I own forever can loan to anyone and reread 50 years from now if I feel like it.
While ebooks have their disadvantages, you're making a very stilted argument.
The Kindle's other pros include: 1) The ability to dynamically resize the text and adjust the font face (in case someday you have a problem reading tiny print). 2) You can access every ebook you have from a single location that weighs much less and takes up much less space than a stack of books. 3) You can read other types of media than DRMed ebooks, including plain old TXT and PDF files, and there are lots of classic pieces of literature available for free.
And you don't even have to use a Kindle to read books you've bought from Amazon -- there are reader applications for virtually every other major computing platform. You can redownload ebooks as often as you want from Amazon, so you don't have to worry about losing your books, or spilling water on them, or having one of your friends "borrow" one and never give it back.
You say "switching" as though you'll never be allowed to buy another physical book if you have a Kindle. No, you can do that too. And let's be honest -- how many of your physical books are you ever actually going to read again or loan out? I have bookshelves filled with books myself, but honestly, the majority of them are going to sit and gather dust for the rest of their lives. Only a minority of them are going to get re-read or loaned out. I'm ok with buying ebooks for most things that I read and then getting physical copies of my favorites.
I know I can only truly speak for myself [... ] Removing LAN play killed their games for me.
Well, there's your answer. You're only speaking for yourself. Pretty much everybody else doesn't care about the lack of LAN play. 99% of situations where you'd be playing with people over a LAN, you're going to have internet access.
Yes, there are some situations where you won't have internet access. And there are a few other people besides you who won't buy the games because of it. But the vast majority of fans don't care.
why not get in someone's face and ask the hard questions about why the company seems hell-bent on alienating the people who put them on the map in the first place?
They've been asked and answered many times before. Asking again isn't going to change anything. Get over it. They're only alienating a tiny minority of you.
Seriously... since when math and fun are two separate ideas?
Ever since people who cared about winning more than anything else starting playing video games.
Seriously, though, a lesson learned from World of Warcraft is that if you have a class that has multiple different build options, no matter how much you try to balance them, as long as they have differences, one of them is going to be mathematically superior. The people who play the game will figure out which build that is, and then everybody will use only that build. Don't believe me? Go spend some time at Elitist Jerks.
People want to be able to use the "best" build and still make their character different from everybody else's character, and that's why the math choices are being separated from the fun choices.
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Internet access in the US sucks terribly, that's what. I pay $50 / month for 6 MBit cable, and most of the time I'm lucky if I can sustain a connection at 3 or 4 MBit. I have two alternatives in my area, which are either slower (but cheaper) or much more expensive (and only slightly faster).
What would you rather they do all day? Sit in their cells, bored out of their minds, thinking about how to get revenge on whoever put them in there when they're finally released with years of built-up stress?
If we want that to change, then we should lobby our representitives, and the experts in the field can testify and explain as to why there is no threat to air safety. Until then, the arrogant, self-centered Arianna Huffington's of the world need to shut up and do what they are told. I can tell you that if I see someone flaunting the rules, endangering my safety on a flight, I am going to help the stewardess hold them down while someone shoves their phone somewhere less than enjoyable.
Ok, so let's say that we have lobbied our representatives. Experts in the field have already testified that there is no provable threat to air safety. People use their electronic devices on a regular basis during takeoff/landing when nobody's looking, and yet incidents due to interference from those devices never happen. But our representatives don't believe the experts and don't do anything to change the rules. What should we do then?
As it stands there's something like 8 games due on the PSP in North America in the next 6 months; most of them are being published and/or developed by Sony. The only place PSP game development is still alive is Japan, where a number of games still come out every week.
Er... no? I can list of at least 20 games that are coming out just by April: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/upcoming-psp-games2011.html
In my opinion, 2010 was the best year the PSP's had so far. I've had a PSP since around 2007, but I know I bought more games for it last year than any year up to that.
"Get over it"? I am over it. The Chrono series is done. It had a great first game, then a mediocre sequel and a weak port. I just wish that Chrono fanboys wouldn't continually rave about how they think Square needs to make another game.
Chrono Cross is a perfectly typical example of Square's slide into mediocrity. The music and sound are great, sure, but the plot is filled with convoluted nonsense.
There's a huge cast of characters and only a couple of them receive any development at all. Hell, look at all the joke characters they crammed into the game -- the big pink dog? The talking plant? The cyborg? The Mexican wrestler? Those are just a few of them. I can forgive a game that has one joke character, but CC went want overboard. And all of them have generic dialog with their personal tic of choice inserted into it, just to make sure any of them can be present in any scene.
Then you have the matter of the writers disrespecting the original's cast of characters. Many of them are killed off-screen before CC even begins, without even any parting dialog, and to top it off, they were killed due to the actions of a joke villain from the original game. Then there's the issue of Magus, one of the most important figures of the original game, who was supposed to be in CC but they decided they didn't have time to fit him in, so the character model that was made for him got turned into a similar-but-unrelated PC who joins you and then gets just as much development as everybody else (none). And then in the CT DS port, they retconned that by saying that he actually is the same character, he just lost his memory.
Then there's all of the areas in which the gameplay was lacking. Despite multiple different worlds being one of the selling points of the game, it turned out that there were only two different worlds which were very similar to each other, and actions in one didn't affect the other very much at all. It's a sharp contrast from the multiple time periods and potential ramifications from the original. Oh, and I should mention the battle system, too -- the ability to always run from anything (even bosses), only leveling up from bosses, and the potential to abuse elemental fields meant that the game was laughably easy. To be fair, I suppose CT was pretty easy, too.
I won't say CC is a bad game. It has its enjoyable aspects, and I can see how some people would enjoy it more than others. But it falls far short of the quality of any of the SNES's big RPG hits and most of the PSX's.
They lost their way a long time ago and have just been putting out garbage and re-releases. It's long past time something wakes them up and reminds them that gameplay actually matters.
You should check out some of their other games. Over on the DS, Dragon Quest IX, The 4 Heroes of Light, and The World Ends with You are all among the best RPGs on the system (and there are a lot of good RPGs on the DS). Despite the weird Wii Crystal Chronicles games, the two DS CC games are great multiplayer dungeon crawlers. Even though they're remakes, Dragon Quest IV & V and Final Fantasy IV were also great. Over on the PSP, even though it's a bit of a silly concept, Dissidia was a lot of fun, and the Star Ocean remake was well-done and the first time the game has been released in the US.
They've had some pretty spotty releases on the PS3 and 360, although there was also Nier, which everybody seems to forget about when complaining that SE doesn't do anything original any more.
Religion answers questions for us that Science cannot.
Out of curiosity, like what? What questions can you demonstrate science cannot answer, but religion does provide an answer for? (an actual answer, mind you, not a hopeful guess!)
It should be kept in mind that many of the famous scientists you could name were products of their times and cultures, where it was unthinkable that somebody could not subscribe to the predominant religion. Many of them invoked their deity as an explanation for questions they did not know the answer to, and yet modern science has found answers for many of those questions. Just because our current answer to a question is "we don't know" does not mean that the answer is actually "we cannot know" or "God did it."
I've actually found myself to be considerably happier ever since I stopped trying to reconcile religion with empirical obeservations and instead dropped it entirely.
We make more people rot in confinement than the worst despotic regimes in history.
In all fairness, most of history's despotic regimes just killed dissenters rather than imprisoning them for vaguely-defined crimes.
Anybody else here remember how the PS2 was so powerful that it could render the ballroom scene in Final Fantasy 8 in realtime?
Get this: Linux users are a minority, and die-hard zealots are a minority in that minority.
Most of the people who buy video cards do so either for high-end industrial work or gaming, and the vast majority of those people use Windows and do not care whether their drivers are open source or not.
Have you considered that perhaps sometimes "I don't know the answer" is the best answer? Not, "I don't know the answer, therefore it was caused by a supernatural being." For that matter, it's still a pretty big jump from, "I think there's something supernatural going on," to "we were created by a supernatural being whom I should worship."
The human mind is capable of playing pretty amazing tricks on itself.
And I would be willing to bet that you are using IMAP or POP3 rather than a native Exchange 2003 connection.
Evolution is a well studied and documented fact. A fact that in no way disproves god.
While evolution doesn't disprove the possibility of supernatural deities, it does present some serious problems for the Christian concept. If you accept the modern version of evolution as the explanation of how our species got here, then that means there was no "Adam and Eve"; humanity is not a fixed species, but has gradually changed over the course of history from our ancestors. There is no single point at which we could look at our ancestors and say "this is the first human."
The lack of Adam and Eve, however, means that there was no Original Sin. One of the core concepts of Christianity is that Adam and Eve were originally perfect, but due to the Original Sin, they and all of their descendents (including us) are sinners and require redemption through Jesus Christ; without redemption, we are doomed to spend the rest of eternity in Hell.
No Original Sin means that we are not all sinners who deserve to burn because of it. In other words, redemption through Jesus Christ is unnecessary, and the core concept of Christianity falls apart.
The other possibility is that, if the Christian God is real, then rather than having the Original Sin placed upon us due to Adam and Eve's actions, God intentionally made us flawed, knowing that a significant portion of humanity would commit horrible atrocities upon each other and then be tortured eternally for it. That's more like a scientist who's conducting experiments on a bacteria colony that a loving God who wants his creations to be good to each other, if you ask me.
So, you are correct that evolution does not disprove the existence of a god or gods, but in order to reconcile it with the Christian God, you would have to take such a figurative interpretation of the events in the Bible that you're not really following the tenets of Christianity any more.
We live in an age where the general public is not something that anyone stands up for anymore.
No, we live in an age where vigilante justice and violent overreactions are not the accepted solutions to problems. If you had bothered to read the article you would know that this guy has been arrested and convicted, courtesy of the justice system.
I think that's a common misconception -- that being certified for some process standard such as CMMI is supposed to magically make everything you do better.
Unfortunately, I've seen a number of organizations obsess over CMMI so much that it ruined their productivity.
What CMMI is good for is making it so that when you screw up, you can look back over what happened and figure out why it is that you screwed up and prevent it from happening again. Of course, sometimes the problem is, "Implementing CMMI completely derailed our development process"...
Your mentally challenged
Really? You're making this too easy.
If the definition of "torrent sneaking company" is what I think it is, the downloader isn't committing copyright infringement when it's entrapment, that is: the copyright holder is deliberately providing a free (but supposedly illicit) copy through a shill torrent to collect addresses for legal action. You can't literally give someone your product and then claim they were infringing.
Wrong. It's only entrapment if you convince somebody to commit a crime that they were otherwise not going to commit. This is why you never see undercover cops approach people and offer to sell them drugs -- they'll always wait until people come to them. Somebody who goes looking for a Witcher 2 torrent is already planning to pirate the game, regardless of who is seeding it. That's not entrapment, that's a sting operation.
(If that is what they plan to do -- I'm not sure what they mean by "sneaking")
I take it you missed the story a couple of days ago about some British lawyers apparently sending out threatening letters to 'downloaders' when they knew that some significant fraction were completely innocent?
Let me make sure I have your argument right. Some British guys screwed up going after some criminals, therefore the concept of some Polish guys going after criminals who committed the same type of crime is disgusting. Is that right? So what's your suggestion, that nobody bother to enforce the law at all?
I hope they get wads of ill-gotten fines from allegedly guilty thieves. They'll need it to compensate for the loss of legitimate sales they now won't be getting at gog.com from disgusted people like me. I only learned about the site recently and was moderately impressed. Now I'm disgusted.
Why are you disgusted? I fail to see what's so bad about releasing a game without DRM and then going after criminals who pirate it. That seems to me like the way companies should be doing it, rather than treating customers like potential criminals and loading their games with DRM.
And "allegedly" guilty thieves? Explain to me, how do you download from a torrent of copyrighted material without committing copyright infringement?
I've got the opposite anecdote. I've been using XFS on several drives for years and never had data corruption problem. I've had three drives with ext3 that had corrupted files.
So... do you know of any statistics?
Been thinking about it, how fast?
Can one flip the page when you get to the bottom or is it still flip at the midpoint?
I just picked one up and would estimate that it takes roughly (maybe a bit less than) half a second to flip to the next page of a book. Less time that it takes for me to flip a page in a real book, at least.
Let's see, $150 for a device that needs charging and costs roughly the same per book which may or may not work 3 to 5 years from now versus a book I own forever can loan to anyone and reread 50 years from now if I feel like it.
While ebooks have their disadvantages, you're making a very stilted argument.
The Kindle's other pros include:
1) The ability to dynamically resize the text and adjust the font face (in case someday you have a problem reading tiny print).
2) You can access every ebook you have from a single location that weighs much less and takes up much less space than a stack of books.
3) You can read other types of media than DRMed ebooks, including plain old TXT and PDF files, and there are lots of classic pieces of literature available for free.
And you don't even have to use a Kindle to read books you've bought from Amazon -- there are reader applications for virtually every other major computing platform. You can redownload ebooks as often as you want from Amazon, so you don't have to worry about losing your books, or spilling water on them, or having one of your friends "borrow" one and never give it back.
You say "switching" as though you'll never be allowed to buy another physical book if you have a Kindle. No, you can do that too. And let's be honest -- how many of your physical books are you ever actually going to read again or loan out? I have bookshelves filled with books myself, but honestly, the majority of them are going to sit and gather dust for the rest of their lives. Only a minority of them are going to get re-read or loaned out. I'm ok with buying ebooks for most things that I read and then getting physical copies of my favorites.
But no matter what size flat panel you get these days, their maximum resolution is 1080P, 1920X1080, which is too damned short.
What are you talking about? There are plenty of LCD displays that have a vertical resolution of 1200 or better. Here's a few from Newegg.
I know I can only truly speak for myself [ ... ] Removing LAN play killed their games for me.
Well, there's your answer. You're only speaking for yourself. Pretty much everybody else doesn't care about the lack of LAN play. 99% of situations where you'd be playing with people over a LAN, you're going to have internet access.
Yes, there are some situations where you won't have internet access. And there are a few other people besides you who won't buy the games because of it. But the vast majority of fans don't care.
why not get in someone's face and ask the hard questions about why the company seems hell-bent on alienating the people who put them on the map in the first place?
They've been asked and answered many times before. Asking again isn't going to change anything. Get over it. They're only alienating a tiny minority of you.
Seriously... since when math and fun are two separate ideas?
Ever since people who cared about winning more than anything else starting playing video games.
Seriously, though, a lesson learned from World of Warcraft is that if you have a class that has multiple different build options, no matter how much you try to balance them, as long as they have differences, one of them is going to be mathematically superior. The people who play the game will figure out which build that is, and then everybody will use only that build. Don't believe me? Go spend some time at Elitist Jerks.
People want to be able to use the "best" build and still make their character different from everybody else's character, and that's why the math choices are being separated from the fun choices.