I don't mean to flame, but I think Linux (et al) actually attract all kinds of people, including top-tier (software) engineers. Most of those have traditionally worked for corporations to get money, and crank out free stuff on their spare time. On the other hand, it is possible that the poor code is more easily dumped (== ignored) in OS community than in corporate world (evolution?).
"Kids coding for fun" image for Linux is an unfortunate Internet-era cliche... Pretty inaccurate me thinks; in same vein as "all MS serfs are crappy coders" train of thought.
4.5 billion$ is pretty reasonable (how many inhabitants does Canada have? 20 millions? that'd make it ~200 canadian$ per year) compared to what 'efficient' corporations would leech from end customers for similar systems. Compare this with health-care. Citizens of USA pay twice as much for health-care (total cost of various health insurance systems including private and medicare) than their European counterparts, and probably get on average about same level of service (everywhere with enough money you can, of course, get even better health-care from private hospitals... but I'm talking about basic health-care majority of people have)
Most economics agree that 'pure' laissez-faire system doesn't quite work as well in education and health care sector. Corporations just won't invest enough for long term, and if/when state has to subside, overhead grows more than with more traditional 'mixed' systems (combining public and private sectors).
Whether same applies to infrastructure (roads, networks) is debatable, but seeing how in most countries roads and railroads are handled by society, it seems possible that state might do a more efficient job there too.
Note though that this should only be taking care of (low-level) infrastructure. ISP services should be taken care of by companies, with the possible exception that there could be a state-owner 'basic level ISP' available. It'd be like AOL-by-the-state; geeks and power users wouldn't touch it, but regular Joe sixpacks, and everyone's proverbial mother/grandmother could use it; it'd be "free" (no out-of-pocket costs, or nominal) and offer basic stuff, but not directly compete with higher level ISP services (if there is such a thing...)
Finally, even though it'd mean some money away from ISPs (not infrastructure level, probably, as govt would most likely by those services, not compete), the net effect of people (and companies) getting basic service for much lower cost might mean more money to use for other purposes.
Well, not everyone is applying for a position at your company. Not saying it's bad to know both (I'm fluent with both, and have eventually learnt to almost like C++ again), just that YMM definitely V, depending on what the company is doing. My last job was mostly C, some C++; knowing Java was pretty useless; at my current job it's vice versa. And both jobs are/were interesting and challenging.
You do realize that.net is reserved for network providers (ISPs)? Right now there isn't really much of a choice at top-level, especially if ICANN can twist.org definition to only include "approved" organizations.
Well, com. is an exception more than a rule (as well as edu.). Ones I know that do use com/edu/etc are uk, au and tw (Taiwan); most others don't. Thus, as an example, finnish companies definitely can and do register 'company.fi' addresses.
So, before deciding there'll be 'com.au' (if it wasn't in use before) it wasn't obvious there would be such a thing.
Re:Whats New & Why you should get it
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
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· Score: 1
If I recall correctly, I had problems first when I tried cp'ing (on Linux that is) javaplugin.so (or whatever it is) to plugins-dir, but when I symlinked, things started working. Not sure why, but thought this might help.
To really understand the English language itself, you need some knowledge of the many
languages that it adopted words and rules from. Sadly, I don't know a lot about that.
I'd recommend David Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Language" (or whatever title was, I don't have the book at hand right now). I'm not a native speaker, and found it very interesting reading (and it's rather complete in explaining history of english language).
In nutshell; english is a germanic language, derived from 'old german'; oldest non-germanic influences from celtic languages (but very little) and roman. More influence (loan words mainly) from vikings (Norse is a germanic language, so not much grammatical changes). Major changes thanks to french conquerors; tons of loan words (many originally from Latin), messed up spelling. Both grammar and spelling further complicated by scholars who loved Latin so much they changed lots of rules... just because they thought Latin grammar "was perfect" and a model for all civilized languages.
Of course, english has word loans from dozens of languages (surprisingly many from, say, portuguese and dutch... even one from finnish).
Well, finnish doesn't make use of a few of ascii-letters (except for loan words), such as 'b', 'c', 'f', 'q', 'w', 'x' and 'z'. It does
have 2 additional characters (a and o with umlauts; 3 if you count in 'swedish o').
Diacritics, accent marks etc. are not used (umlauts are part of those 2/3 specific letters).
Of course, nowadays all ascii letters are used and available due to foreign loans (and some ancient texts did use letters like 'w' in place of what nowadays would use 'v').
Old English, by the way, did have more letters than are found from modern english ("thorn" letter for "th", and couple of others). Thus, "Ye olde..." is a kind of a typo; the first letter wasn't Y, but was close enough visually that it started at some point to be thought to be Y...
And Old English was, alas, easier to pronunce than modern english. Thanks a bunch, latin-loving grammaricians, who bastardized spelling of words like "island", "herb" and n+1 others (idea was to emphasize the origin of loan words, independent of whether spelling was consistent with pronunciation). Syntax and grammar were more complex, though (with germanic inflictions... of which 'bewitched' and 'awaken' are remnants)
On an unrelated note, letters 'j' and 'u' were not part of european languages (that's why romans had funny habit of using 'v' everywhere...) before being invented few centuries ago (ie. "i" was used for both "i" and "j", "u" for "u" and "v").
Oh and finally; it probably was a coincidence in sense that if computer science had bloomed in some other country (say, Germany), it would most likely have contained the local character additions (which in general in west Europe isn't all that many really... some languages do use diacritics more heavily, many do not)
I was trying in vain to find the category of Foot-in-mouth - writers; one that would contain at least msrs. Dvorak and Metcalfe.
Since there is no such thing, could you please add it ASAP.
Just combine 'humor'-foot icon with Bill G.'s face
and there you have the icon.
People who want to read articles like this (both of them) can search for it, and others (me included) could read it only if the alternatives are quantum computing or space stations.
Did I say free and/or freely available anywhere? I'm well aware of problems of getting, say, IBM to send you free copies of their source code back before sliced bread was invented.
Well. Broadband has been technically feasible for 15 years or more, but it hasn't been around the corner for that time (as in coming soon). When it was 'ready' for field-testing, phone monopolies _finally_ graced consumers with crappy ISDNs (which, by the way, had been ready for general use for, what, 15 years?). Now that entry-level broadband is breeze, they are starting to milk that cow.
Course, that's what happened in northern Europe, but somehow I think it's not too dissimilar from what (baby) Bell(s) did in US of A.
I'll go with the crowd here; msrs Dvorak and Metcalfe are just two "visionaries" who are better ignored altogether.
Like others have pointed out, it really depends on the model. SS10 I'm using right now is too noisy. Anyways; back to PC-world, there are actually decent cases that aim to reduce noise pollution. By using weird 'fans' (big cylinders, no idea what's the name for those), rubber pads between various metal parts (hard drive cases vs. casE), designing case to maximize airflow etc, it is possible to use 'normal' engineering practices to make noise bit more bearable. Wish I remembered manufacturer (I did have such a case on my Linux-PC at a previous job) I'm thinking of...
Others have also pointed out that if at all possible, making PC a 'remote' one (long cables for kb/mouse, or wireless), or at least move noisy parts (== hard drive) out (use the new diff-scsi or whatever it's called... or use network if you have decent local-ether and don't mind slight degradation in performance) is another possibility.
Still, I wish more people were worried about noise; if they were manufacturers would actually try to design better systems. Right now it most likely is not even on their radar.:-/
You might be surprised to know exactly how completely "open source" programs used to be in 70s and before. Microsoft has indeed managed to promote "closed source" a lot since then...
Having access to source a competitor does not make.
And once again, it'd be nice if you knew the difference between free and free.
Oh and yes, I'm working for a company that does produce quite a bit of open source stuff, along with fair amount of proprietary stuff. They can nicely co-exist, which may be useful symbiosis for many corporations.
Finally, keep in mind that all big software/hardware companies these days try to sell "solutions" instead of programs, applications or whatever. Meaning that they consider the whole to have bigger profit margins than pieces; and thus even if pieces are free in every sense, it doesn't really matter. That's why IBM is so strongly spearheading open source, for example.
Target audience is (mostly) kids, who might
not be comfortable reading, and/or
That's the way it has already been done
There are countries (in scandinavia for example) where only Disney movies are dubbed (for first reason), and then there are other countries (central europe, USA) where usually everything is dubbed by default. This probably has to do with population (ie. customer base) of a country; bigger countries 'can afford' to dub stuff, smaller prefer not to. Which is just fine for me, since
I much prefer subtitling, and see no good reason for dubbing (except for people who for some reason can't read), but to each his own.
... One of the funniest ads I've ever seen was a trailed of Wayne's World dubbed in German. Hilarious...
whereas if you pick up a
magazine at a newsstand, who knows if you'll ever bother to pick up another.
But still, wouldn't circulation be a better metrics, since even if I only read one issue, that wouldn't raise the circulation. There'd have to be 51 (25, whatever) other onetime readers to raise the circulation to match the contribution of just one subscriber? Doesn't it sound like this would actually be better bang-for-buck (52 people of which most are likely to have seen ad once, compared to 1 who has seen it 1 - 52 times?)?
[obviously I know nothing about advertising, but I am slightly curious... engineers interested about advertising, what a concept!]
Re:I may be an old fart but...
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 1
I must be missing something, but exactly why would there then need to be any TLDs? If you just have one 'slashdot.*', what good is '.com' - prefix?
So what you are proposing is flattening of namespace, to AOL-keyword level ('http://slashdot'). Which in turn would add conflicts... Like others have said, the whole idea was to allow coexistence of names on different fields (bit like what trademarks allow, Apple records vs. Apple-expensive-boxes-for-fanatics)
How about reading my post before uttering nonsense. I didn't say applications had less bugs, or required less patches. Quite on contrary. Where do you derive I'm using (or have been using WP 5.1)? If you want to argue with strawmen, fine, but don't imagine up arguments never used in discussion. Lastly, there's no "waiting" involved. No one's going to sit thumbs-in-their-asses, waiting for bugs to magically disappear. Instead, QA and developers work as long as it takes to get product as good as it has to be. That may be short time, or long time, it all depends.
And your post pinpoints why companies get away with that. People who accept this kind of products make sure that's what they'll be getting. Being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. I personally try to do few things I can to not support 'release-often-release-buggy' software cycle (both as a developer and as a consumer)
Finally, my experience from both game and application industry tells me that it is perfectly possible to produce high-quality games and applications. It's "only" a matter of time and money, and whether company puts more weight on short- or long-term success. My previous employer did release a buggy version of the flagship product, only to find out that for the forthcoming version they can't afford to do the same. Competitor (even thought its still the underdog) would eat them alive, if they release as buggy a version as last time. For game companies it used to be that they only got one shot per game. Rules seem to be changing for worse (or perhaps they just have change like you claim, wish I didn't care)
Last paragraph I wrote said that that would indeed be a useful attitude outside scope of computer games.
Still, it used to be (AFAIR) that games were less likely to have obvious defects (crashes, not installing etc) than larger applications... Games did not have patches (and versioning was... um... different than with applications that evolved up to version 8, while still being much the same application; game version II was usual a very different game, and if it wasn't was considered a rip-off)
Games have evolved more complex (like applications), and to a degree problems are result of this (as well as hardware variations). Even so, that's not a good reason to accept this trend.
The fact that your CD player can't read the CD
comes as no surprise since there are, oh, 2000 different CD mechanisms,
If the game producer sticks to OS I/O, it doesn't matter if there are 37500 different mechanisms. If/when the copy protection software is relying on unstandardized/-documented CD-rom mechanisms (which they are 'cause that's the way to make copying more difficult), it's producer that's purposedly making it less compatible. And finally,
even if it _was_ a pain in butt for the game producer... Hey, that's what they get paid for; producing games that actuall, gee, work.
It might have been good to stress the fact this occured on Windows, but if he didn't have a copy (and after that experience most likely didn't want) on another platform, he can't comment on other platforms?
It perhaps wasn't much of a review, but it was very helpful for me. I'd like to read "reviews" (consumer warnings?) like this (perhaps without comments like "we need reviews like this" every 5 rows mind you), but
where can they be found? (are we supposed to write them to fuckedcompany?)
It's of course important to let the company know about the problems; the problem is, other customers also need to know that products available have problems. And chances aren't good that companies won't report that... So where are you going to get your information? Buying a game and learning of problems? Think about buying some non-software thing, and learning of big problems (your car's tires exploding, say...). Would you think people writing about problems are just whiners ("why not concentrate on how nice it's to actually drive the gas-guzzling Ford Explorer instead of whining about probs with rolling over when tires fail?")
Does anyone know if there are "game consumer report" websites somewhere? I sure would like to first know which games are (potentially) unusable, and only then consider the actual merits of the game.
He didn't say he was trying to run it on 486 you know. He was using the hardware game company said would be fine.
And since when has it been acceptable to sell games that are bug-ridden before patches? That's what QA is for, and for the longest time computer games actually were much more bug-free than other applications (or perhaps that's just because I used to play much more years ago, not so much lately).
And if it's "the same with brand-spanking-new"
games like you suggest, why on earth are game companies producing such crap instead of creating games they know they can actually make work?!?! That has been possible for years you know, so why the sudden interest in producing bug-ridden customer-angering pieces of dung?
I don't buy your argument any more than I'll be buying the game reviewed. And I don't think I'm unreasonable if I indeed judge the game by its "first version". In my book versions for games are "Ultima I", "Ultima 2"; not "Ultima 1.001", "Ultima1.001b". If it's broken when I get it, it's done, over with.
Of course that would be a useful attitude with application software too. Missing features is ok; having (significant) defects is not.
I was thoroughly fed up with Settlers III (on Windows) a while back, for almost identical reasons. I purchased it, installed, and failed to run it 75% of time (on a good day; 100% on bad) because of CD's idiotic copy protection. And of course company's braindead customer "service" always claimed that the customer's problem was caused by a virus. I wish I knew if they had even one case where that actually was true. And of course they asked people to reassign drive-letters, change cd-rom caching settings etc. etc. etc. (my problem probably was related to having 'too fast' cd-rom; they obviously hadn't done enough testing with copy protection). And I could almost hear the laughter of people with pirated copies, that were happily (?) playing the actual game (which wasn't all that bad in itself once it did work).
You know what eventually let me play it? A cracked version someone on Bluebyte's Settlers III bulletin board mentioned is/was floating around in the Internet!
Since then I haven't (and won't) be buying a single game from Bluebyte.
It wasn't all about copy-protection though; there were lots of bugs (it was hurried to xmas market half-done, probably thanks to PHBs), and even though every week they had Yet Another Patch, those didn't fix the most obvious (copy protection) problems until perhaps 6 months after the release.
I thought german (game) companies were mostly infatuated with cd copy protections (as well as german media conglomerates). I hate to see the trend continue with US companies.
On the plus side, I have tried to support linux-game companies (CivCTP was the first game, and even thought it had its bugs, I'm still very happy with it), and haven't had a single pirated linux-game ever (and don't plan to). Too bad they've concentrated too much on boring 1st person 3d shoot-em-ups, but I guess that's where money is (alas).
Oh fer crying out loud... When was the last time you checked prices Amazon is charging for, say, books? If the prices charged are less than costs, it's just because costs are outrageously high; Amazon's prices are bad enough that I'd rather buy from brick-n-mortar any day (thankfully other on-line book merchants like Bookpool have better prices). Amazon is assuming its brand fools people to buy from them with premium prices... Alas, it's working.:-/
Re:Jsut how smart is "smart'?
on
Smart Routers
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· Score: 1
trying to exceed the contractual bandwidth caps
Just curious; why don't you use real cap (as in having actual hard bottleneck... or even dynamically adjusting that accounts for consumed bw) for max speed. It seems this is/should be routers' responsibility;
since it's beneficial for _you_ to make sure bandwidth is limited (not end user), you should keep everyone happy. I guess I'm just saying that preventing problems beforehand is better than letting problems occur then punishing your (soon ex-)customer.
Slashdot Mirror
"Kids coding for fun" image for Linux is an unfortunate Internet-era cliche... Pretty inaccurate me thinks; in same vein as "all MS serfs are crappy coders" train of thought.
Most economics agree that 'pure' laissez-faire system doesn't quite work as well in education and health care sector. Corporations just won't invest enough for long term, and if/when state has to subside, overhead grows more than with more traditional 'mixed' systems (combining public and private sectors). Whether same applies to infrastructure (roads, networks) is debatable, but seeing how in most countries roads and railroads are handled by society, it seems possible that state might do a more efficient job there too.
Note though that this should only be taking care of (low-level) infrastructure. ISP services should be taken care of by companies, with the possible exception that there could be a state-owner 'basic level ISP' available. It'd be like AOL-by-the-state; geeks and power users wouldn't touch it, but regular Joe sixpacks, and everyone's proverbial mother/grandmother could use it; it'd be "free" (no out-of-pocket costs, or nominal) and offer basic stuff, but not directly compete with higher level ISP services (if there is such a thing...)
Finally, even though it'd mean some money away from ISPs (not infrastructure level, probably, as govt would most likely by those services, not compete), the net effect of people (and companies) getting basic service for much lower cost might mean more money to use for other purposes.
Well, not everyone is applying for a position at your company. Not saying it's bad to know both (I'm fluent with both, and have eventually learnt to almost like C++ again), just that YMM definitely V, depending on what the company is doing. My last job was mostly C, some C++; knowing Java was pretty useless; at my current job it's vice versa. And both jobs are/were interesting and challenging.
You do realize that .net is reserved for network providers (ISPs)? Right now there isn't really much of a choice at top-level, especially if ICANN can twist .org definition to only include "approved" organizations.
Well, com. is an exception more than a rule (as well as edu.). Ones I know that do use com/edu/etc are uk, au and tw (Taiwan); most others don't. Thus, as an example, finnish companies definitely can and do register 'company.fi' addresses. So, before deciding there'll be 'com.au' (if it wasn't in use before) it wasn't obvious there would be such a thing.
If I recall correctly, I had problems first when I tried cp'ing (on Linux that is) javaplugin.so (or whatever it is) to plugins-dir, but when I symlinked, things started working. Not sure why, but thought this might help.
"sauna"... what a surprise! :-)
(AFAIR, the source was one of the big encyclopedias)
I'd recommend David Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Language" (or whatever title was, I don't have the book at hand right now). I'm not a native speaker, and found it very interesting reading (and it's rather complete in explaining history of english language).
In nutshell; english is a germanic language, derived from 'old german'; oldest non-germanic influences from celtic languages (but very little) and roman. More influence (loan words mainly) from vikings (Norse is a germanic language, so not much grammatical changes). Major changes thanks to french conquerors; tons of loan words (many originally from Latin), messed up spelling. Both grammar and spelling further complicated by scholars who loved Latin so much they changed lots of rules... just because they thought Latin grammar "was perfect" and a model for all civilized languages.
Of course, english has word loans from dozens of languages (surprisingly many from, say, portuguese and dutch... even one from finnish).
Old English, by the way, did have more letters than are found from modern english ("thorn" letter for "th", and couple of others). Thus, "Ye olde ..." is a kind of a typo; the first letter wasn't Y, but was close enough visually that it started at some point to be thought to be Y...
And Old English was, alas, easier to pronunce than modern english. Thanks a bunch, latin-loving grammaricians, who bastardized spelling of words like "island", "herb" and n+1 others (idea was to emphasize the origin of loan words, independent of whether spelling was consistent with pronunciation). Syntax and grammar were more complex, though (with germanic inflictions... of which 'bewitched' and 'awaken' are remnants)
On an unrelated note, letters 'j' and 'u' were not part of european languages (that's why romans had funny habit of using 'v' everywhere...) before being invented few centuries ago (ie. "i" was used for both "i" and "j", "u" for "u" and "v").
Oh and finally; it probably was a coincidence in sense that if computer science had bloomed in some other country (say, Germany), it would most likely have contained the local character additions (which in general in west Europe isn't all that many really... some languages do use diacritics more heavily, many do not)
I was trying in vain to find the category of Foot-in-mouth - writers; one that would contain at least msrs. Dvorak and Metcalfe. Since there is no such thing, could you please add it ASAP. Just combine 'humor'-foot icon with Bill G.'s face and there you have the icon.
People who want to read articles like this (both of them) can search for it, and others (me included) could read it only if the alternatives are quantum computing or space stations.
Thanks in advance!
Did I say free and/or freely available anywhere? I'm well aware of problems of getting, say, IBM to send you free copies of their source code back before sliced bread was invented.
Course, that's what happened in northern Europe, but somehow I think it's not too dissimilar from what (baby) Bell(s) did in US of A.
I'll go with the crowd here; msrs Dvorak and Metcalfe are just two "visionaries" who are better ignored altogether.
Others have also pointed out that if at all possible, making PC a 'remote' one (long cables for kb/mouse, or wireless), or at least move noisy parts (== hard drive) out (use the new diff-scsi or whatever it's called... or use network if you have decent local-ether and don't mind slight degradation in performance) is another possibility.
Still, I wish more people were worried about noise; if they were manufacturers would actually try to design better systems. Right now it most likely is not even on their radar. :-/
And once again, it'd be nice if you knew the difference between free and free.
Oh and yes, I'm working for a company that does produce quite a bit of open source stuff, along with fair amount of proprietary stuff. They can nicely co-exist, which may be useful symbiosis for many corporations.
Finally, keep in mind that all big software/hardware companies these days try to sell "solutions" instead of programs, applications or whatever. Meaning that they consider the whole to have bigger profit margins than pieces; and thus even if pieces are free in every sense, it doesn't really matter. That's why IBM is so strongly spearheading open source, for example.
- Target audience is (mostly) kids, who might
not be comfortable reading, and/or
- That's the way it has already been done
There are countries (in scandinavia for example) where only Disney movies are dubbed (for first reason), and then there are other countries (central europe, USA) where usually everything is dubbed by default. This probably has to do with population (ie. customer base) of a country; bigger countries 'can afford' to dub stuff, smaller prefer not to. Which is just fine for me, since I much prefer subtitling, and see no good reason for dubbing (except for people who for some reason can't read), but to each his own.But still, wouldn't circulation be a better metrics, since even if I only read one issue, that wouldn't raise the circulation. There'd have to be 51 (25, whatever) other onetime readers to raise the circulation to match the contribution of just one subscriber? Doesn't it sound like this would actually be better bang-for-buck (52 people of which most are likely to have seen ad once, compared to 1 who has seen it 1 - 52 times?)? [obviously I know nothing about advertising, but I am slightly curious... engineers interested about advertising, what a concept!]
So what you are proposing is flattening of namespace, to AOL-keyword level ('http://slashdot'). Which in turn would add conflicts... Like others have said, the whole idea was to allow coexistence of names on different fields (bit like what trademarks allow, Apple records vs. Apple-expensive-boxes-for-fanatics)
And your post pinpoints why companies get away with that. People who accept this kind of products make sure that's what they'll be getting. Being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. I personally try to do few things I can to not support 'release-often-release-buggy' software cycle (both as a developer and as a consumer)
Finally, my experience from both game and application industry tells me that it is perfectly possible to produce high-quality games and applications. It's "only" a matter of time and money, and whether company puts more weight on short- or long-term success. My previous employer did release a buggy version of the flagship product, only to find out that for the forthcoming version they can't afford to do the same. Competitor (even thought its still the underdog) would eat them alive, if they release as buggy a version as last time. For game companies it used to be that they only got one shot per game. Rules seem to be changing for worse (or perhaps they just have change like you claim, wish I didn't care)
Still, it used to be (AFAIR) that games were less likely to have obvious defects (crashes, not installing etc) than larger applications... Games did not have patches (and versioning was... um... different than with applications that evolved up to version 8, while still being much the same application; game version II was usual a very different game, and if it wasn't was considered a rip-off)
Games have evolved more complex (like applications), and to a degree problems are result of this (as well as hardware variations). Even so, that's not a good reason to accept this trend.
If the game producer sticks to OS I/O, it doesn't matter if there are 37500 different mechanisms. If/when the copy protection software is relying on unstandardized/-documented CD-rom mechanisms (which they are 'cause that's the way to make copying more difficult), it's producer that's purposedly making it less compatible. And finally, even if it _was_ a pain in butt for the game producer... Hey, that's what they get paid for; producing games that actuall, gee, work.
It might have been good to stress the fact this occured on Windows, but if he didn't have a copy (and after that experience most likely didn't want) on another platform, he can't comment on other platforms?
It's of course important to let the company know about the problems; the problem is, other customers also need to know that products available have problems. And chances aren't good that companies won't report that... So where are you going to get your information? Buying a game and learning of problems? Think about buying some non-software thing, and learning of big problems (your car's tires exploding, say...). Would you think people writing about problems are just whiners ("why not concentrate on how nice it's to actually drive the gas-guzzling Ford Explorer instead of whining about probs with rolling over when tires fail?")
Does anyone know if there are "game consumer report" websites somewhere? I sure would like to first know which games are (potentially) unusable, and only then consider the actual merits of the game.
And since when has it been acceptable to sell games that are bug-ridden before patches? That's what QA is for, and for the longest time computer games actually were much more bug-free than other applications (or perhaps that's just because I used to play much more years ago, not so much lately).
And if it's "the same with brand-spanking-new" games like you suggest, why on earth are game companies producing such crap instead of creating games they know they can actually make work?!?! That has been possible for years you know, so why the sudden interest in producing bug-ridden customer-angering pieces of dung?
I don't buy your argument any more than I'll be buying the game reviewed. And I don't think I'm unreasonable if I indeed judge the game by its "first version". In my book versions for games are "Ultima I", "Ultima 2"; not "Ultima 1.001", "Ultima1.001b". If it's broken when I get it, it's done, over with.
Of course that would be a useful attitude with application software too. Missing features is ok; having (significant) defects is not.
You know what eventually let me play it? A cracked version someone on Bluebyte's Settlers III bulletin board mentioned is/was floating around in the Internet! Since then I haven't (and won't) be buying a single game from Bluebyte.
It wasn't all about copy-protection though; there were lots of bugs (it was hurried to xmas market half-done, probably thanks to PHBs), and even though every week they had Yet Another Patch, those didn't fix the most obvious (copy protection) problems until perhaps 6 months after the release.
I thought german (game) companies were mostly infatuated with cd copy protections (as well as german media conglomerates). I hate to see the trend continue with US companies. On the plus side, I have tried to support linux-game companies (CivCTP was the first game, and even thought it had its bugs, I'm still very happy with it), and haven't had a single pirated linux-game ever (and don't plan to). Too bad they've concentrated too much on boring 1st person 3d shoot-em-ups, but I guess that's where money is (alas).
Oh fer crying out loud... When was the last time you checked prices Amazon is charging for, say, books? If the prices charged are less than costs, it's just because costs are outrageously high; Amazon's prices are bad enough that I'd rather buy from brick-n-mortar any day (thankfully other on-line book merchants like Bookpool have better prices). Amazon is assuming its brand fools people to buy from them with premium prices... Alas, it's working. :-/
Just curious; why don't you use real cap (as in having actual hard bottleneck... or even dynamically adjusting that accounts for consumed bw) for max speed. It seems this is/should be routers' responsibility; since it's beneficial for _you_ to make sure bandwidth is limited (not end user), you should keep everyone happy. I guess I'm just saying that preventing problems beforehand is better than letting problems occur then punishing your (soon ex-)customer.