My thoughts is that PC DLC would be pirated immensely. Also, since distribution is distributed, you don't incur massive bandwidth costs. WoW does bittorrent type patches, for most other games it's mirrored on a dozen sites. Marginal cost to the developer.
With consoles, you have to pay to get certified, and this includes any bugfixes you release. While the cost of DLC certification may be marginal, as someone else pointed out (Just assume $1 out of the 5 that DLC costs), you still have to certify all your patches, which are given for "free." DLC works to pad their expenditures in other areas in order to sell more copies.
Also, you can't really pirate the DLC from a closed network, so it's guaranteed that people pay for it. With every person that purchases DLC, you lock them into owning your game. If they bought it second hand, you now got revenue that you wouldn't have otherwise. If they bought it new, paying for DLC ensures they won't get rid of it, otherwise their DLC purchase will have gone to waste. Less used copies floating around.
I don't know about you guys, but I like my books hard copy. I can highlight, loan out, do whatever. Positive reviews will influence my purchase, but ultimately I want to compare several books about the same topic (since we all know there's a bajillion books on Apache, PHP, Drupal, etc). Just the other day I bought a Rails book. There were like 5 of them on the shelf. They don't all cover the same thing, and the author's style isn't all the same.
While I suppose I could hunt down a 5 page preview online, it's easier just to flip through the entire thing and buy it in the store. I had a coupon so it brought it down to near Amazon price. I pay tax, but not shipping. I can walk out of the store, go home and work on it.
Another benefit of in store is that you get to see related books without relying on Amazon's recommendation system to show you things it thinks you like. This may contribute to an impulse buy. If the OP is the impulse buy, I'd say that's a good thing.
Agreed. I'm posting just a few achievements/trophies from Dead Space, which I recently played:
Complete Chapter 1 on any Difficulty
Complete Chapter 2 on any Difficulty
...
Complete Chapter 12 on any Difficulty
Get 30 kills with Plasma Cutter
Get 30 kills with Ripper
Get 30 kills with Melee
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the otaku level achievements, such as Cross Edge's "The Hikikomori: Spend far too much time unlocking dozens of titles." Just to let you know, there's at least 140 titles available, each title has requirements such like obtaining items X, Y, and Z, holding some quantity of item X in your inventory, doing over 10,000 damage, or having a combo over 400. Basically you have to 100% a RPG and then some in order to get this trophy.
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and Xubuntu on my eeePC 1000HE, and both of them crashed. A lot. At least 4-5 times a day the system would become totally unresponsive requiring a reboot. Guess what I had open? 1 Firefox tab and 1 GEdit window. I tried Xubuntu thinking it was just Gnome. Xubuntu didn't have native support for the sound, and still crashed frequently.
It doesn't "just work" on all systems. It works on most, but if you want guaranteed compatibility everything* runs with Windows, even if you have to hunt for some drivers.
*Everything minus crazy "I did it just cuz" projects like making Wiimotes control giant cranes.
With regards to the netbook, Fedora runs fine, it's just Ubuntu. But how many users are going to try 3-4 different distros to get one that works?
I read "D:" and my brain parsed it as an emoticon.
...which shows exactly what you'll look like if you wipe the wrong partition
Funny story... I did that once.
Tried to format my netbook. Windows, Linux, and the EFI partition on my eee for fast booting.
fdisk/dev/sda1. 4 sub partitions (that didn't align to blocks, but I figured I just botched fdisk the first time around). Delete the middle two partitions---Whoops there goes my Windows. Meant to get rid of Ubuntu so I could put another distro on there (Ubuntu crashed a lot on my hardware, now fedora is working great).
So lesson learned that fdisk detects NTFS Windows installs as 4 partitions.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me
Agreed. What I'd really like to see is some kind of naming protocol so I don't have to remember all these long strings of numbers separated by dots. It would be awesome if internet addresses were identified by an alphanumeric name, then when I use that name there is a server somewhere that figures out what IP address that name is really pointing to.
I bet if everyone here at 216.34.181.45 put their minds to it we could even come up with something here.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the stuff put out by Square Enix lately...
Why not? He described it precisely:
"Spectacular extravaganzas with high-detail hero models, high-detail set designs, high-detail world designs, full-orchestral scores, full-cinematic cuts, companion toy merchandising, and highly-predictable-never-escapes-the-rails storylines."
You forgot androgynous characters. Other than that it fits SE's latest releases.
Not to be picky, but if you're buying these you're probably buying a rack at a time, and from what I can judge, it all but gets rid of the screws.
Also:
The last HP server I installed the rails didn't need screws, they just snapped in.
The last HP server I built (yes, I built about 12 HP servers because they decided to send us all the parts SEPARATELY and we had to assemble them in house) needed just the wrench they include on the top of the case. None of the screws were loose such that you could drop them.
I agree with you that things could potentially go wrong, but I'm sure HP will find some excuse to void your warranty.
While I agree with you, we try to limit the number of emails we send out, and even then we try to restrict the subset of users that receive the emails. So if the server room is on fire, yes we'll send out an email to everyone that there will be a lack of service. If there's a possibility that something might go out of wack we notify the department heads affected via email. If we go into a sort of "Hey this is your daily email from IT" mode, nobody will pay attention to anything serious, and we'll be answering dozens of phone calls about how taking down a computational cluster will effect Sally in accounting, and if Bob needs to change his password because of it.
With that kind of performance you're definitely "doing it wrong." I've got similar specs, but without the crazy hard drives (I'm running a single 7200.10 250GB Seagate drive) and notice no performance issues. I'm running McAfee Corp. Ed. antivirus, have 4 VMs running with F@H along with a GPU F@H (for the times I'm just surfing online) and still notice no slowdown.
I had a similar occurrence (stupid punishment for stupid reason, but I'm too young for paddling).
I was given "silent lunch" (you sit separate from everyone else and can't talk) for reading my AR (Accelerated reading book. The AR program gave you points for answering a 10-30 question quiz, depending on the level of the book. Harder books gave you more points, but also had harder quizzes. Most teachers required a certain number of points for each student for a grade).
Anyhow, I was reading my AR book in my 7th grade geography class because I was done with my assignment. Teacher apparently didn't like that, so she gave me and another guy silent lunch. Hurray for being one of the smart people and finishing early...
Slashdot Mirror
Unlock DLC irks me. You pay for what's on the disk, just a few dollars to unlock it.
My thoughts is that PC DLC would be pirated immensely. Also, since distribution is distributed, you don't incur massive bandwidth costs. WoW does bittorrent type patches, for most other games it's mirrored on a dozen sites. Marginal cost to the developer.
With consoles, you have to pay to get certified, and this includes any bugfixes you release. While the cost of DLC certification may be marginal, as someone else pointed out (Just assume $1 out of the 5 that DLC costs), you still have to certify all your patches, which are given for "free." DLC works to pad their expenditures in other areas in order to sell more copies.
Also, you can't really pirate the DLC from a closed network, so it's guaranteed that people pay for it. With every person that purchases DLC, you lock them into owning your game. If they bought it second hand, you now got revenue that you wouldn't have otherwise. If they bought it new, paying for DLC ensures they won't get rid of it, otherwise their DLC purchase will have gone to waste. Less used copies floating around.
I don't know about you guys, but I like my books hard copy. I can highlight, loan out, do whatever. Positive reviews will influence my purchase, but ultimately I want to compare several books about the same topic (since we all know there's a bajillion books on Apache, PHP, Drupal, etc). Just the other day I bought a Rails book. There were like 5 of them on the shelf. They don't all cover the same thing, and the author's style isn't all the same.
While I suppose I could hunt down a 5 page preview online, it's easier just to flip through the entire thing and buy it in the store. I had a coupon so it brought it down to near Amazon price. I pay tax, but not shipping. I can walk out of the store, go home and work on it.
Another benefit of in store is that you get to see related books without relying on Amazon's recommendation system to show you things it thinks you like. This may contribute to an impulse buy. If the OP is the impulse buy, I'd say that's a good thing.
Inconceivable!
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the otaku level achievements, such as Cross Edge's "The Hikikomori: Spend far too much time unlocking dozens of titles." Just to let you know, there's at least 140 titles available, each title has requirements such like obtaining items X, Y, and Z, holding some quantity of item X in your inventory, doing over 10,000 damage, or having a combo over 400. Basically you have to 100% a RPG and then some in order to get this trophy.
Except this is a 12.5mm height drive. The PS3 uses a thinner drive.
Actually it surprises me that they haven't been labeled a terrorist group yet
Actually, they have
Good thing they stopped there. If not, they'd be liable for copyright infringement!
Actually, I want some Nuka-cola. I mean, it's still consumable after 200 years in a barren wasteland.
I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and Xubuntu on my eeePC 1000HE, and both of them crashed. A lot. At least 4-5 times a day the system would become totally unresponsive requiring a reboot. Guess what I had open? 1 Firefox tab and 1 GEdit window. I tried Xubuntu thinking it was just Gnome. Xubuntu didn't have native support for the sound, and still crashed frequently.
It doesn't "just work" on all systems. It works on most, but if you want guaranteed compatibility everything* runs with Windows, even if you have to hunt for some drivers.
*Everything minus crazy "I did it just cuz" projects like making Wiimotes control giant cranes.
With regards to the netbook, Fedora runs fine, it's just Ubuntu. But how many users are going to try 3-4 different distros to get one that works?
I read "D:" and my brain parsed it as an emoticon.
...which shows exactly what you'll look like if you wipe the wrong partition
Funny story... I did that once.
/dev/sda1. 4 sub partitions (that didn't align to blocks, but I figured I just botched fdisk the first time around). Delete the middle two partitions---Whoops there goes my Windows. Meant to get rid of Ubuntu so I could put another distro on there (Ubuntu crashed a lot on my hardware, now fedora is working great).
Tried to format my netbook. Windows, Linux, and the EFI partition on my eee for fast booting.
fdisk
So lesson learned that fdisk detects NTFS Windows installs as 4 partitions.
Buying non-physical items in bulk entitles them to a discount?
Crap. That was one of those slashdot comments that don't really require a response.
Feel free to whoosh! me.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me
Agreed. What I'd really like to see is some kind of naming protocol so I don't have to remember all these long strings of numbers separated by dots. It would be awesome if internet addresses were identified by an alphanumeric name, then when I use that name there is a server somewhere that figures out what IP address that name is really pointing to.
I bet if everyone here at 216.34.181.45 put their minds to it we could even come up with something here.
You mean like DNS?
Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the stuff put out by Square Enix lately...
Why not? He described it precisely:
"Spectacular extravaganzas with high-detail hero models, high-detail set designs, high-detail world designs, full-orchestral scores, full-cinematic cuts, companion toy merchandising, and highly-predictable-never-escapes-the-rails storylines."
You forgot androgynous characters. Other than that it fits SE's latest releases.
You must be new here.
Obviously you have a Beowulf cluster.
Not to be picky, but if you're buying these you're probably buying a rack at a time, and from what I can judge, it all but gets rid of the screws.
Also:
The last HP server I installed the rails didn't need screws, they just snapped in.
The last HP server I built (yes, I built about 12 HP servers because they decided to send us all the parts SEPARATELY and we had to assemble them in house) needed just the wrench they include on the top of the case. None of the screws were loose such that you could drop them.
I agree with you that things could potentially go wrong, but I'm sure HP will find some excuse to void your warranty.
While I agree with you, we try to limit the number of emails we send out, and even then we try to restrict the subset of users that receive the emails. So if the server room is on fire, yes we'll send out an email to everyone that there will be a lack of service. If there's a possibility that something might go out of wack we notify the department heads affected via email. If we go into a sort of "Hey this is your daily email from IT" mode, nobody will pay attention to anything serious, and we'll be answering dozens of phone calls about how taking down a computational cluster will effect Sally in accounting, and if Bob needs to change his password because of it.
I prefer this song
Don't you mean 100?
Maybe they're tired of breathing canned air?
Nobody would switch to it because it'd be in "beta."
I agree.
With that kind of performance you're definitely "doing it wrong." I've got similar specs, but without the crazy hard drives (I'm running a single 7200.10 250GB Seagate drive) and notice no performance issues. I'm running McAfee Corp. Ed. antivirus, have 4 VMs running with F@H along with a GPU F@H (for the times I'm just surfing online) and still notice no slowdown.
I had a similar occurrence (stupid punishment for stupid reason, but I'm too young for paddling).
I was given "silent lunch" (you sit separate from everyone else and can't talk) for reading my AR (Accelerated reading book. The AR program gave you points for answering a 10-30 question quiz, depending on the level of the book. Harder books gave you more points, but also had harder quizzes. Most teachers required a certain number of points for each student for a grade).
Anyhow, I was reading my AR book in my 7th grade geography class because I was done with my assignment. Teacher apparently didn't like that, so she gave me and another guy silent lunch. Hurray for being one of the smart people and finishing early...
If you do happen to have a AGP slot in the machine, Gigabyte is selling a HD 4650