What you want is a grid layout. Ubuntu does okay laying out windows next to each other, but Windows and OSX aren't so good at it in my experience. It's my major annoyance to me, as well.
Right, but some games are like walking into a strip bar, rather than going outside.
Left 4 Dead. -Odds of encountering at least 1 hacker per day: 100% -Odds of someone calling you a homo cheating faggot fuckhead: 50% -Odds of people ragequitting if you beat them just one round: 25% -Odds of someone joining mid-game and unloading bullets into you until you kick them: 12.5%
Okay, I made those percentages up, but it's still a pretty hostile environment.:P Quite different from say... an MMO like Champions Online.
If we can control a bug with electrodes, it's not unfeasible that an arachnid could be controlled by chemicals from larva.
Rather scary, actually. It makes me proud to be a big mentally strong human being - which in truth, can get knocked out by about 50mg of some chemicals.:P
Oblivion is tons of fun, though, when you use mods that create a static game population (that is, mods that disable the world leveling up along with you). I recommend Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul [sweetdanger.net] or, better yet, FCOM: Convergence [sweetdanger.net].
Good recommendations. I might try them. The levelling up thing was what really annoyed me about the game, and got it put on my shelf since a few weeks after buying it.
I actually enjoyed Dark Messiah (a game with horrible reviews) far more than Oblivion. Why? Aside from kicking stuff off ledges(a going joke), the combat was very fun, scaled nicely, and there were multiple ways to approach every situation. They put a lot of effort into enemy AI. There's absolutely no combat related clipping issues, and the number of sword attacks that are easily accessible makes it a highly enjoyable FPS hack'n'slash.
It was also one of the first 3D games to get that dark, gloomy lighting done properly. The story was pathetic, but the atmosphere and engine certainly wasn't!
In my opinion, highly skilled gamers of a given genre should be able to pick up a game and beat a "Hard" match on their second try, once familiarizing themselves with the UI, weapons, units, etc.
My experience with Left4Dead was that "Advanced" difficulty was correctly positioned - except that the special infected are always quite stupid.
That said, when it comes to RTS games I always get infuriated when I see the computer clearly giving orders to several groups of units at the same time, while also placing buildings in its base, the computer should be forced to act as a human "commander", one command at a time with each command taking a certain amount of time (with the time being shorter for higher difficulty levels).
You and me both! I'd also like the AI to adjust based on framerate. Nothing annoyed me more than Supreme Commander at 6fps - too slow late game for me to actually do anything, except build artillery. Meanwhile, the AI is still chugging away...;)
I prefer just simple "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Very Hard" settings. Ideally with "Normal" being a little easy, so I get to feel good about myself when I choose "Hard":-). (Only half joking here. The psychology really does matter.)
I actually prefer accurate naming, or jokingly bad naming.
For accurate naming, in the game King's Bounty, "Normal" is what is challenging for most people. I don't really want the same challenge though - I went for Easy mode, and challenged myself to lose as few creatures as possible.;)
The problem with letting the computer decide what the challenge level is, is that it doesn't have a clue about my preferences. It only knows how well I'm doing, not whether or not I enjoy being challenged. This is not enough information to determine if I'm having fun or not. Doubly so if the system is flawed. For instance, Oblivion takes only your level into account, not your skill, or even your character's skills. This means that if you level up by, for instance, trading, you are constantly hounded by all kinds of nasty critters that you have no hope of defeating with your puny combat stats. Obviously, that's no fun at all.
You really deserve that +5. Oblivion's system was horribly flawed. I was just enjoying myself exploring, but pretty soon I came across bears and bandits and stuff, and all of them killed me outright. Just about everything had more regeneration than I could do damage.
Morrowind was impressive. I never played it, but my brother loved it, and I've seen how it plays. Unfortunately, I'm a tad shallow, and I find clipping problems and shallow combat detract hugely from my enjoyment.
Left4Dead is my game. I get accused of cheating every single night I play it.
I don't really want handicaps in multiplayer games - but highly configurable single player and coop would be great. I prefer L4D campaign mode on normal, with zombie waves ramped up to 120+, and an abundance of special infected spawns. Much more fun than expert, where a single wall-clipping zombie can kill you while you reload.
I'd also much rather have an anti-cheat system that works, for multiplayer. Every time a player is actually as good as me, it turns out they're aim hacking. (Why else would they be trying to shoot unspawned boomers behind a bus?)
I mean, why should 3dMarkVintage.exe be 30% slower than 3dMarkVantage.exe? How does this help anyone except Intel?
And for that matter, when slowed down so that it gets the same score as an ATI IGP in 3DMark, it had one third the framerate as that ATI IGP in Crysis - an actual game!
I fully agree! These scores aren't helping anyone except Intel!
As to your "context menu and shortcuts" etc, the only way it's being added is if you said OK to the installer.
But it never asked!
Example: MalwareBytes AntiMalware. It adds a scan file option on every file.
I just don't understand how UAC can be so slow. The Ubuntu password dialog pops up instantly. I turned off UAC when I had to set up so many programs after a reinstall.
The file transfer issue you talk about was fixed years ago - it can easily max out our gigabit ethernet at work. Backwards compatibility was indeed broken for drivers, as it uses a new driver model to increase stability.
What about the 60-seconds-to-delete-icon bug? I find that one annoying. Microsoft has slowly been introducing slowness in that area.
In Win2k, you could press Del Enter and files would get deleted.
In WinXP, you could press Del Enter and files would be run and a delete box would pop up.
In WinVista, you could press Del Enter, and the box probably came up too slow for the enter to register. After you click on Yes, it may wait around for 60 seconds.
To credit Windows 7, it seems to have fixed the behaviour...
Technically most C devs are the same way. If you comment that they should learn assembly, the majority will tell you that they don't want to learn it. "C is efficient enough." The quality of code emerging from a C dev that knows asm is quite different from one that doesn't, and has no idea what the hardware is actually doing.
I've written it off to the flood of single-language developers. Oh sure, they may know the syntax of more than one language - but they treat every language the same as whatever language they learned first.
They're not strictly zip. For one thing, everything has to be put in in a specific order, and whatever compression used is notoriously slow for seeking/fetching classes.
But since zip can have a dozen different compression schemes, I suppose you are correct.
Same goes for Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and quite a few other "Pro" applications that should they be needed, I can put them on a resume.
Ahh, you evil scumbag pirate! If you had forked out your hard-earned minimum-wage dollars when going through college, you wouldn't be the evil scumbag pirate that you are!
But you didn't! That makes you a scumbag pirate! (EVIL!!!)
FYI, none of those companies care if you help spread their products. The evangelism angle hasn't convinced anybody that game piracy is good - I doubt it'll convince big greedy companies, especially when their illegally-stolen product from years past is helping you earn actual money today.
But then again, I probably make less money than you do, so maybe being a software pirate pays off?
I know someone that had the same thing happen. Being honest screwed her.
In Canada, immigrating is really clogged right now. The only way to get a caregiver from say.. the Philippines, is to have an agent bring them in.
This takes about 3 years, so if an elderly person needs a caregiver, they apply for one and get a totally different one ASAP. Then when their caregiver comes in, that person goes to someone else. Despite this "bending" of the rules, there's still more demand than supply - and that's with elderly people keeling over dead all the time. (some while they wait)
Our blessed conservative government decided that it should be illegal to charge for the service of bringing people in. This is despite there being very real costs - paperwork, plane tickets, etc., which are all paid by the agent up front. (And then the agent gets repaid over time)
Most agents don't report their income. The one I know does. She was told to reimburse all the caregivers she was bringing in, or she'd face jail time.
Unfortunately, she's really good, and thus really busy. She gets them all set up here and makes sure to educate them about costs, so that they don't end up with maxed out credit cards and $5k phone bills - all for barely more than it costs her.
For her job well done, she's now got a mortgaged house. Oh, and grey hair.
If you've got any relatively new Windows games, check out PlayOnLinux. It manages multiple versions of Wine, and the installation of games. I've got it on an Ubuntu box, and it works great for stuff like Diablo II - old classics.;) Apparently it also works quite well for a bunch of newer games - the list of supported ones is about 200 long.
Honourable mention - Penumbra. (The survival horror series, with native linux versions. Around $10 each, but right now they seem to be bundling all three.)
extrapolating from vague information you got while watching TV to a moral certainty about costs
->
I have trouble believing
I'm betting the profit is higher than $6
Does that sound like certainty to you? Not to me.
I was just commenting that based on what I saw, I doubt it's as low margin as the drug companies claim. I can only speculate as to what their costs are, and I know my speculation won't be accurate, which I stated in another post.
But you seem very certain vaccines are very low margin. It's rather ironic that that's what you're accusing me of - unfounded certainty.
In my experience, Java is not the reason people buy new computers.
Their computers slow down from viruses, or virus-like Antivirus, and then they think they need to upgrade.
Lately commercially made programs (AIM? Windows Live stuff? Most printer software? Most shareware?) seem to consume as much memory as a whole JVM, despite being written in C. This has led me to conclude that companies really don't give a shit how much memory their software uses. This is quite ironically pushing Java closer and closer to C in actual memory and CPU usage.
Disclaimer: I know C is amazing when used properly - but it seems like only small FOSS projects and apps destined for phones have any sort of optimization work done. I've seen daemons use 200KB on a tiny linux handheld, but multiple megabytes is the norm on any desktop.
God this is hilarious. "Crazy copyright law" is law that says only the copyright holder has the legal right to produce and distribute copies of his/her work?
Crazy copyright law is the US's copyright law - a place where any company can come around and hand someone a DMCA takedown notice, and your legit stuff(music, art, photos, whatever) that you own copyrights to are removed because of the allegation.
Your laws blow. Wasn't there an article saying the DMCA was used properly less than 10% of the time? Get over it and fix your laws - until then, I'm praying to god no other countries adopt them.
You've seen how vaccines are produced? How? Does your next-door neighbor have a magic vaccine machine in his garage?
Nonsense. Documentaries!
Not the best source, but it sure beats wild guesses.
You're an ignorant fool. 50 cents wouldn't even cover the cost of packaging.
When you need to push out hundreds of millions of vaccines in a single year, your cost per unit drops to incredibly small amounts. I may be wrong about the 50 cents, but it seems likely that I'm not the ignorantfool you claim.
As someone above pointed out, the real costs are likely in R&D and distribution.
Add to that the fact that vaccines are a low margin product
I have trouble believing that.:P
Even $6 profit on a vaccine is still 1.2 billion dollars profit if you have 200 million vaccinations.
But honestly, I've seen the way some of these vaccines are produced, so I have trouble believing they cost more than $0.50 per dose. I haven't kept up on what an H1N1 vaccine costs our governments per dose, but I'm betting the profit is higher than $6.
I don't see why companies like Microsoft and Ubisoft can publish games and also make them, but Valve can't? The medium might be slightly different, but it seems to me you're not applying your sentiments to enough companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Higher resolution doesn't necessarily more graphics power.
Right - but in this case it also has more graphics power. And more CPU power. And probably lots more memory.
Maybe we'll get lucky and Nintendo will bundle an actual OS with it, so game updates and patches can be made easily available?
The Wii will never have 1080p. For one thing, this SoC looks to be more powerful. O_o
What you want is a grid layout. Ubuntu does okay laying out windows next to each other, but Windows and OSX aren't so good at it in my experience. It's my major annoyance to me, as well.
Right, but some games are like walking into a strip bar, rather than going outside.
Left 4 Dead.
-Odds of encountering at least 1 hacker per day: 100%
-Odds of someone calling you a homo cheating faggot fuckhead: 50%
-Odds of people ragequitting if you beat them just one round: 25%
-Odds of someone joining mid-game and unloading bullets into you until you kick them: 12.5%
Okay, I made those percentages up, but it's still a pretty hostile environment. :P Quite different from say... an MMO like Champions Online.
Funny? Informative!
If we can control a bug with electrodes, it's not unfeasible that an arachnid could be controlled by chemicals from larva.
Rather scary, actually. It makes me proud to be a big mentally strong human being - which in truth, can get knocked out by about 50mg of some chemicals. :P
Oblivion is tons of fun, though, when you use mods that create a static game population (that is, mods that disable the world leveling up along with you). I recommend Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul [sweetdanger.net] or, better yet, FCOM: Convergence [sweetdanger.net].
Good recommendations. I might try them. The levelling up thing was what really annoyed me about the game, and got it put on my shelf since a few weeks after buying it.
I actually enjoyed Dark Messiah (a game with horrible reviews) far more than Oblivion. Why? Aside from kicking stuff off ledges(a going joke), the combat was very fun, scaled nicely, and there were multiple ways to approach every situation. They put a lot of effort into enemy AI. There's absolutely no combat related clipping issues, and the number of sword attacks that are easily accessible makes it a highly enjoyable FPS hack'n'slash.
It was also one of the first 3D games to get that dark, gloomy lighting done properly. The story was pathetic, but the atmosphere and engine certainly wasn't!
In my opinion, highly skilled gamers of a given genre should be able to pick up a game and beat a "Hard" match on their second try, once familiarizing themselves with the UI, weapons, units, etc.
My experience with Left4Dead was that "Advanced" difficulty was correctly positioned - except that the special infected are always quite stupid.
That said, when it comes to RTS games I always get infuriated when I see the computer clearly giving orders to several groups of units at the same time, while also placing buildings in its base, the computer should be forced to act as a human "commander", one command at a time with each command taking a certain amount of time (with the time being shorter for higher difficulty levels).
You and me both! I'd also like the AI to adjust based on framerate. Nothing annoyed me more than Supreme Commander at 6fps - too slow late game for me to actually do anything, except build artillery. Meanwhile, the AI is still chugging away... ;)
I prefer just simple "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Very Hard" settings. Ideally with "Normal" being a little easy, so I get to feel good about myself when I choose "Hard" :-). (Only half joking here. The psychology really does matter.)
I actually prefer accurate naming, or jokingly bad naming.
For accurate naming, in the game King's Bounty, "Normal" is what is challenging for most people. I don't really want the same challenge though - I went for Easy mode, and challenged myself to lose as few creatures as possible. ;)
The problem with letting the computer decide what the challenge level is, is that it doesn't have a clue about my preferences. It only knows how well I'm doing, not whether or not I enjoy being challenged. This is not enough information to determine if I'm having fun or not. Doubly so if the system is flawed. For instance, Oblivion takes only your level into account, not your skill, or even your character's skills. This means that if you level up by, for instance, trading, you are constantly hounded by all kinds of nasty critters that you have no hope of defeating with your puny combat stats. Obviously, that's no fun at all.
You really deserve that +5. Oblivion's system was horribly flawed. I was just enjoying myself exploring, but pretty soon I came across bears and bandits and stuff, and all of them killed me outright. Just about everything had more regeneration than I could do damage.
Morrowind was impressive. I never played it, but my brother loved it, and I've seen how it plays. Unfortunately, I'm a tad shallow, and I find clipping problems and shallow combat detract hugely from my enjoyment.
2fort isn't that bad as long as you have skilled snipers or spies on your own team. I've even seen crazy scouts take out all the opposing snipers.
What's way worse is engi campers. If there's 6 sentries put in the right spots, it's really hard to break through them.
Left4Dead is my game. I get accused of cheating every single night I play it.
I don't really want handicaps in multiplayer games - but highly configurable single player and coop would be great. I prefer L4D campaign mode on normal, with zombie waves ramped up to 120+, and an abundance of special infected spawns. Much more fun than expert, where a single wall-clipping zombie can kill you while you reload.
I'd also much rather have an anti-cheat system that works, for multiplayer. Every time a player is actually as good as me, it turns out they're aim hacking. (Why else would they be trying to shoot unspawned boomers behind a bus?)
I mean, why should 3dMarkVintage.exe be 30% slower than 3dMarkVantage.exe? How does this help anyone except Intel?
And for that matter, when slowed down so that it gets the same score as an ATI IGP in 3DMark, it had one third the framerate as that ATI IGP in Crysis - an actual game!
I fully agree! These scores aren't helping anyone except Intel!
As to your "context menu and shortcuts" etc, the only way it's being added is if you said OK to the installer.
But it never asked!
Example: MalwareBytes AntiMalware. It adds a scan file option on every file.
I just don't understand how UAC can be so slow. The Ubuntu password dialog pops up instantly. I turned off UAC when I had to set up so many programs after a reinstall.
The file transfer issue you talk about was fixed years ago - it can easily max out our gigabit ethernet at work. Backwards compatibility was indeed broken for drivers, as it uses a new driver model to increase stability.
What about the 60-seconds-to-delete-icon bug? I find that one annoying. Microsoft has slowly been introducing slowness in that area.
In Win2k, you could press Del Enter and files would get deleted.
In WinXP, you could press Del Enter and files would be run and a delete box would pop up.
In WinVista, you could press Del Enter, and the box probably came up too slow for the enter to register. After you click on Yes, it may wait around for 60 seconds.
To credit Windows 7, it seems to have fixed the behaviour...
Technically most C devs are the same way. If you comment that they should learn assembly, the majority will tell you that they don't want to learn it. "C is efficient enough." The quality of code emerging from a C dev that knows asm is quite different from one that doesn't, and has no idea what the hardware is actually doing.
I've written it off to the flood of single-language developers. Oh sure, they may know the syntax of more than one language - but they treat every language the same as whatever language they learned first.
They're not strictly zip. For one thing, everything has to be put in in a specific order, and whatever compression used is notoriously slow for seeking/fetching classes.
But since zip can have a dozen different compression schemes, I suppose you are correct.
Same goes for Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and quite a few other "Pro" applications that should they be needed, I can put them on a resume.
Ahh, you evil scumbag pirate! If you had forked out your hard-earned minimum-wage dollars when going through college, you wouldn't be the evil scumbag pirate that you are!
But you didn't! That makes you a scumbag pirate! (EVIL!!!)
FYI, none of those companies care if you help spread their products. The evangelism angle hasn't convinced anybody that game piracy is good - I doubt it'll convince big greedy companies, especially when their illegally-stolen product from years past is helping you earn actual money today.
But then again, I probably make less money than you do, so maybe being a software pirate pays off?
I know someone that had the same thing happen. Being honest screwed her.
In Canada, immigrating is really clogged right now. The only way to get a caregiver from say.. the Philippines, is to have an agent bring them in.
This takes about 3 years, so if an elderly person needs a caregiver, they apply for one and get a totally different one ASAP. Then when their caregiver comes in, that person goes to someone else. Despite this "bending" of the rules, there's still more demand than supply - and that's with elderly people keeling over dead all the time. (some while they wait)
Our blessed conservative government decided that it should be illegal to charge for the service of bringing people in. This is despite there being very real costs - paperwork, plane tickets, etc., which are all paid by the agent up front. (And then the agent gets repaid over time)
Most agents don't report their income. The one I know does. She was told to reimburse all the caregivers she was bringing in, or she'd face jail time.
Unfortunately, she's really good, and thus really busy. She gets them all set up here and makes sure to educate them about costs, so that they don't end up with maxed out credit cards and $5k phone bills - all for barely more than it costs her.
For her job well done, she's now got a mortgaged house. Oh, and grey hair.
I don't know about you, but my HTPC's wireless keyboard gets beat around and dropped quite a bit. I wouldn't want to subject an HDD to that.
My personal feelings... I question the usefulness of this over a dedicated Ion box with a wireless keyboard.
http://tremulous.net/files/
Tremulous is a very unique FPS. Two sides: Humans and wall-climbing aliens. Check it out.
http://www.wesnoth.org/
Wesnoth is a hexagonal turn-based-strategy. I find it quite fun, though at times the random number generator can be annoying. (Don't ask...)
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
If you've got any relatively new Windows games, check out PlayOnLinux. It manages multiple versions of Wine, and the installation of games. I've got it on an Ubuntu box, and it works great for stuff like Diablo II - old classics. ;) Apparently it also works quite well for a bunch of newer games - the list of supported ones is about 200 long.
And if you're looking for flash based games, there's two sites that are absolutely the best:
http://www.miniclip.com/
http://www.armorgames.com/
Honourable mention - Penumbra. (The survival horror series, with native linux versions. Around $10 each, but right now they seem to be bundling all three.)
extrapolating from vague information you got while watching TV to a moral certainty about costs
->
I have trouble believing
I'm betting the profit is higher than $6
Does that sound like certainty to you? Not to me.
I was just commenting that based on what I saw, I doubt it's as low margin as the drug companies claim. I can only speculate as to what their costs are, and I know my speculation won't be accurate, which I stated in another post.
But you seem very certain vaccines are very low margin. It's rather ironic that that's what you're accusing me of - unfounded certainty.
In my experience, Java is not the reason people buy new computers.
Their computers slow down from viruses, or virus-like Antivirus, and then they think they need to upgrade.
Lately commercially made programs (AIM? Windows Live stuff? Most printer software? Most shareware?) seem to consume as much memory as a whole JVM, despite being written in C. This has led me to conclude that companies really don't give a shit how much memory their software uses. This is quite ironically pushing Java closer and closer to C in actual memory and CPU usage.
Disclaimer: I know C is amazing when used properly - but it seems like only small FOSS projects and apps destined for phones have any sort of optimization work done. I've seen daemons use 200KB on a tiny linux handheld, but multiple megabytes is the norm on any desktop.
God this is hilarious. "Crazy copyright law" is law that says only the copyright holder has the legal right to produce and distribute copies of his/her work?
Crazy copyright law is the US's copyright law - a place where any company can come around and hand someone a DMCA takedown notice, and your legit stuff(music, art, photos, whatever) that you own copyrights to are removed because of the allegation.
Your laws blow. Wasn't there an article saying the DMCA was used properly less than 10% of the time? Get over it and fix your laws - until then, I'm praying to god no other countries adopt them.
You've seen how vaccines are produced? How? Does your next-door neighbor have a magic vaccine machine in his garage?
Nonsense. Documentaries!
Not the best source, but it sure beats wild guesses.
You're an ignorant fool. 50 cents wouldn't even cover the cost of packaging.
When you need to push out hundreds of millions of vaccines in a single year, your cost per unit drops to incredibly small amounts. I may be wrong about the 50 cents, but it seems likely that I'm not the ignorant fool you claim.
As someone above pointed out, the real costs are likely in R&D and distribution.
Add to that the fact that vaccines are a low margin product
I have trouble believing that. :P
Even $6 profit on a vaccine is still 1.2 billion dollars profit if you have 200 million vaccinations.
But honestly, I've seen the way some of these vaccines are produced, so I have trouble believing they cost more than $0.50 per dose. I haven't kept up on what an H1N1 vaccine costs our governments per dose, but I'm betting the profit is higher than $6.
Steam is playing the role of publisher, correct?
I don't see why companies like Microsoft and Ubisoft can publish games and also make them, but Valve can't? The medium might be slightly different, but it seems to me you're not applying your sentiments to enough companies.