First of all, let me just say that I'm loving this game so far (about 10 hours in). This game has all of the rich storytelling and character development that Bioware are famous for, with an updated graphics and combat system that really works well and is extremely polished.
With that out of the way, let me just say one thing: EA, keep your fucking money grubbing hands off of Bioware! You can see their "mark" on this game in the DLC.
In your party camp, there is a quest-giver that actually tries to sell you DLC! I started chatting him up, since he has a quest ! above his head. He starts talking about how Duncan of the Grey Wardens owes his family a debt, and would you be so kind as to assist him. I get 3 minutes through the conversation about how his family needs help, and just when I'm about to agree to help him, it gives me a menu option that says something like "Help him - Purchase Downloadable Content."
Let that sink in for just a minute... there is an NPC quest giver that tries to sell you content that is available on the day of release! This makes me think even more that EA intentionally stripped content out of the game to try to nickel and dime you. Tycho and Gabe talk about this and have a hilarious comic strip at Penny Arcade.
I'm still enjoying every minute of the game, but it kills the immersion when I have a quest giver try to hawk DRM laden "premium content". What makes it even worse, in order to get a storage chest, you have to purchase this content. No thanks, I'm not going to buy it. You already got my money, and that's all you're going to get.
And yet, the Fortune 15 megacorporation I work at still mandates IE6 on every corporate computer, because their hopelessly outdated and clueless web development team doesn't know how to make our apps work on anything else...
iTunes and Quicktime are crap on Windows as Microsoft Office is crap on OS X.
Actually, Office on Mac OS X is superior to Office on Windows. I've generated Excel graphs that put the blocky looking Windows Excel graphs to shame. Likewise, as evil as it is, PowerPoint presentations made on the Mac version look superior in every way to their Windows counterparts. It's gotten to the point where if I need to make a technical presentation for PHB types, I create it on my Mac at home, save it in Excel 2003 format, and bring it in to the office. I've gotten comments from "How did you do that?" to "great presentation."
While OS X Server is real underrated state of art UNIX which can do amazing things, Apple isn't and can't be a "server" competitor unless they allow OS X Server to run on "generic" x86.
The main problem with OS X as a server is that the multi-thread libraries create a huge amount of overhead for applications like SQL databases to perform well. I saw some MySQL benchmarks and OS X server was absolutely atrocious performance wise compared to Linux on similar hardware.
OS X makes a great desktop UNIX, but it's kernel and OS libraries are optimized for desktop environments, not server environments. Making it UNIX under the hood is definitely a step in the right direction, but even Linux distros optimize differently for server or workstation roles. You probably wouldn't use a realtime kernel patch on a server, but you definitely would do it on a desktop workstation.
If I have a recording that is too quiet (for whatever reason), it is reasonable to be able to turn it up so that it's not too quiet anymore.
Not every recording is stuffed all the way up to the max at 0dB. Some are far quieter, whether on purpose or on accident. If I have a recording which peaks at -20dB, then I ought to be able to apply at LEAST 20dB of gain to it without jumping through hoops.
A more rational solution would be to allow the user to check a box in the mixer that says "Normalize volume levels". What this does in software is apply a digital compression algorithm to the master output, similar to the compression you have on an FM radio station where everything is about the same volume (horrifyingly loud).
While this solves the user's problem of "it's not loud enough, make it louder" without them having to think about it, audiophiles simply have the option of unchecking the box and letting their ears try to hear the pristine, uncompressed -20db signal.
Modern CPUs are powerful enough to do this with only a small CPU load at very low latency. I'm not sure why they don't have this feature in modern OS environments like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X already.
No, they're high because so many kids are trying to get into schools. Supply and demand.
Student loans are enabling/helping it, but it isn't the root cause.
You're right, it isn't the root cause. The housing bubble and easy money was the root cause. When parents could easily extract $50-100K bubble equity from their home and send their kids to University without even thinking about how much it cost, of course prices went from realistic to crazy.
This is all a symptom of the easy money that Greenspan dumped into the system to pull us out of the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. Housing went on a bubble rampage, everyone thought they were rich, so they used their home equity to send their kids to school, driving up the price for everyone. The Universities saw the applications rolling in, did some math, and figured out they could jack tuitions up through the roof. Since everyone was passing around monopoly money, nobody cared.
This is yet another reason why easy government money is a bad thing. End the fed, and all of this bubble economics stops. It's only the middle class that get hurt by their easy money policies.
You know what would be REALLY nice? If I could just swap phones as needed during the course of the day. For example - walking the dogs, or shopping, or driving - take a flip-phone. At the office? Move my "identity" into a smartphone. This way I don't have to decide between something small that fits in a pocket and won't break if I drop it, and something that has more functionality.
Gee, that's a great idea. They really should invent something like that... Let's call it a Stupid Internet Meme (SIM) card and make a ton of money...
Funny thing: I wanted to get a quote for the Sun/Oracle Database Machine that they are advertising as having these ungodly performance numbers. You know how Oracle licenses their database software per CPU? Well, they have extended their ungodly license to their Exadata storage with a $10,000 per HARD DRIVE license. Yes, that's correct. Oracle takes standard Intel based Sun servers, loads them up with SATA drives, and charges you a $10,000 per spindle license fee to store data on them. This is their business model.
Does anyone know of any open source alternatives to Exadata? The architecture looks appealing from a performance standpoint: Standard Intel servers with SATA drives connected to a 40 gigabit Infiniband fabric and serving data to Oracle servers, but I'm not willing to pay $10K per spindle to license my storage in the same way that Oracle licenses their database software.
H1B workers are a minor factor at best. By most counts, there are somewhere between 5 and 6 million U.S. high-tech jobs. The H1B visa quota ranges from 65,000 to 195,000 or so, or about 3% of that at most.
65,000 - 195,000 per year, for the last 20 years or so... I would estimate between 25-50% of those 5-6 million tech jobs are people that are or once were on an H1B.
Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?
I was going to say GEOS, which was an 8-bit GUI operating system on the C-64, but I figured out it is still around.
I remember thinking how cool it was because they wrote some really low level machine language routines that could detect when you opened and closed the 1541 floppy drive automatically, so instead of saying "Insert next disk and press Enter" like so many other programs of the time, it actually detected when you closed the drive door (engaged read/write heads) and automatically started reading from the 5.25" floppy disk. I guess you had to be there to see it, but it seemed impressive to me at the time.
HD radio survives with 0% distortion over the majority of its receivable range.
HD radio is better overall, but I've found that the compression artifacts you get when you're in an area with marginal reception are terrible. Listening to NPR I can switch to non-HD standard FM stereo and get a very fine although a little crackly signal, but when I switch to HD in the same bad coverage area, I get terrible compression artifacts, like listening to a VoIP phone when someone is using BitTorrent...
in the US, a Sprint Simply Everything plan (includes Unlimited data use) is around $1000.00 cheaper a year to have.
It's only $1000 cheaper if you have 4 Palm Pres vs 4 iPhones in a family plan, and it's probably not $1000 cheaper a year. Sprint uses funny math to come to these numbers. How many people do you know that have a family plan with 4 iPhone 3 GS's on it?
Apple has screenshots of the Security preference pane on their Snow Leopard Web site and it shows no configuration options for malware detection. So maybe this screenshot is fake or maybe it is ClamAV in OS X server or maybe Apple's screenshots are incorrect or maybe they put it somewhere other than security... but is seems pretty doubtful from where I'm sitting.
I think this is simply a signature engine built into the Safari downloader. Mozilla Firefox has the exact same thing in version 3.5. After you download a file, it runs a signature scan on it and warns you if it found a virus sig. Nothing really impressive about it, but it is a nice to have feature in Safari.
Leopard users could just use Mozilla Firefox 3.52 and have the same feature, or I imagine Safari 4 would also do this on older versions of OS X.
It dawned on me just now that there isn't a new RTS Warcraft game - and given how much customization will be in SC2, do you guys think DOTA will get transformed into something workable in SC2?
I heard a rumor that Icefrog, the maintainer of DoTA Allstars (I know he's not the original DoTA creator), has been given either employment or special access to the SC2 Map Editor and is working on RPG/RTS maps for Blizzard.
Personally I think it would be awesome to incorporate some of the DoTA elements into SC2. Also, I think a 3rd-person version of DoTA would be awesome as well.
When I had a Razr a few years ago I got insurance on it, and the insurance company cancelled me when I dropped the third one in the toilet trying to answer it when I was taking a piss.
Here's a novel concept: Don't answer the phone while you're taking a piss...
I use it almost exclusively as a digital sketch pad but it works great as a general browsing computer as well.
I think I've found the best possible use for a touchpad: A portal to retro RPG Nirvana. Basically, this guy found that running classic RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment on a touchpad is bliss. You can do it with a finger since all you need to do is tap on the screen to move and interact with the 2d isometric world. Also, there have been some major mods produced recently that allow you to play Infinity Engine games at widescreen resolutions. It's amazing how gorgeous these old games look when you're not viewing them at 640x480. I'm looking forward to playing through Planescape: Torment and enjoying the story in my RPGs again. Also, being able to do it on a train or bus is just awesome.
I liked the days when rogues were cloth killers but hunters were rogue killers but most mages were able to dismantle hunters. It was a perfect rock - paper - scissors balance.
Unfortunately, WoW has always had terribly unbalanced PvP. The developers just use this as a crutch, saying that not every class can be viable 1v1.
I much prefer the PvP balance of Guild Wars. Guild Wars has very unique and diverse classes, but is very balanced. I think one thing that makes it more balanced is that you have a secondary class. You can be just a pure Monk (healer, or priest equivelant in WoW), and if you decide you're getting wrecked by melee too much, become a Monk/Warrior and put some defense skills on your bar and carry a shield. Next time that assassin (rogue in WoW) shadow steps to you and starts wailing away, press a skill button and get 50% evade chance for a few seconds.
Also, another balancing factor in Guild Wars is that you can learn hundreds of skills, but you can only have 8 on your bar at once, and only 1 of those can be an "elite" skill (the best in the game). This makes things incredibly balanced because you don't end up with classes like Paladins/Hunters/Warlocks that have a million buttons/cooldowns and they can just faceroll their way to victory. Here's an example: Pally bubble. Well, besides the fact that there is no true invulnerability in Guild Wars (it would be terribly unbalanced, and is in WoW), if a Pally wanted to bring bubble on his bar, it would have to be 1 of 8 skills. So, the Pally has to make a choice: Does he bring some more offensive skill, or does he bring a defensive skill like bubble and sacrifice some offensive ability?
This constant trade-off of having only 8 skills on your bar and secondary classes means that you can come up with some really interesting and unique class builds, without being unbalanced. You can load up your bar with pure offensive abilities, and be totally destroyed because you have no defense or heals. Or you can go with a hybrid approach and bring a couple self heals and defense (works better in solo situations).
I truly think Guild Wars should be looked at as a model for class balance.
Beyond that, they can do whatever chit-chat with the home-base they want. They can require uninterrupted Internet connection. (I do, so why cannot they? Being on the Internet is quite a priority for me, and I am not alone here.) A title can submit my usage statistics for itself.
Are you kidding me? You're just fine with a single player game that requires a constant internet connection? What if that game installed a keylogger and logged all of your keystrokes while you're playing it and sent them back to the publisher? Are you totally ok with that? What if you alt-tab into another window and login to your bank to do some online banking? Are you ok with the game tracking all your computer usage while it is running, including private passwords and account details, screen shots, etc?
You might be willing to hand over your entire computer to Activision but I am not. Do all of us a big favor and kindly quit posting this drivel. It's my computer and I decide what runs on it and what privileges it has. If it is a single player game I should be able to play it offline on an airplane while traveling, or on my laptop when I'm away from a wifi hotspot. If I want to software firewall off the game from the Internet to keep it from spying on me, that is my right, as that program is running in userland on MY computer. My computer does not belong to Activision/Blizzard; it belongs to me.
A level of "DRM" will also be used by limit installation. Dustin explained "you need to connect once to install the game." While singleplayer will be available offline, installation must have an internet connection in order to proceed. You are also required to have or signup for a Battle.net account in order to install the game. All achievements and friends lists etc will be available as soon as you logon, but the actual single player game is available anyway.
"You can [play single player offline], but we don't encourage it." Browder said. "We totally allow it if you want to do it," but the point is "you don't get access a lot of the stuff."
Blizzard just officially became as bad as EA. Ok, no LAN play was a big enough Fuck you to their customers, but now they want us to "activate" before we can play single-player? Sorry, but Fuck you. Well, Blizzard makes good enough games that I guess they can get away with it... for now, but don't think we'll forget this, and if Starcraft II doesn't live up to the hype I will be pissed.
DEA agents are really at risk and ostensibly we should protect them, as it is in the best interests of society. Please note, I am absolutely against the War on Drugs, so I would want to protect undercover cops, not drug enforcement specifically.
Seriously, DEA agents conduct war on innocent citizens every day. Non-violent criminals are locked up and forcibly deprived of their freedom on a daily basis, which is completely against the constitution. Her right to take pictures of public officials going about their public duty on public streets should not be infringed. You need to STFU about the best interests of society. The best interests of society would be to let other DEA agents know that it's not a profession you want to be in. That would be a start. Maybe sooner or later we could actually end the war on innocent citizens.
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First of all, let me just say that I'm loving this game so far (about 10 hours in). This game has all of the rich storytelling and character development that Bioware are famous for, with an updated graphics and combat system that really works well and is extremely polished.
With that out of the way, let me just say one thing: EA, keep your fucking money grubbing hands off of Bioware! You can see their "mark" on this game in the DLC.
In your party camp, there is a quest-giver that actually tries to sell you DLC! I started chatting him up, since he has a quest ! above his head. He starts talking about how Duncan of the Grey Wardens owes his family a debt, and would you be so kind as to assist him. I get 3 minutes through the conversation about how his family needs help, and just when I'm about to agree to help him, it gives me a menu option that says something like "Help him - Purchase Downloadable Content."
Let that sink in for just a minute... there is an NPC quest giver that tries to sell you content that is available on the day of release! This makes me think even more that EA intentionally stripped content out of the game to try to nickel and dime you. Tycho and Gabe talk about this and have a hilarious comic strip at Penny Arcade.
I'm still enjoying every minute of the game, but it kills the immersion when I have a quest giver try to hawk DRM laden "premium content". What makes it even worse, in order to get a storage chest, you have to purchase this content. No thanks, I'm not going to buy it. You already got my money, and that's all you're going to get.
And yet, the Fortune 15 megacorporation I work at still mandates IE6 on every corporate computer, because their hopelessly outdated and clueless web development team doesn't know how to make our apps work on anything else...
You know what would be awesome? Using Wave for multiplayer, real-time Nethack... I pray to god someone will start that project.
Actually, Office on Mac OS X is superior to Office on Windows. I've generated Excel graphs that put the blocky looking Windows Excel graphs to shame. Likewise, as evil as it is, PowerPoint presentations made on the Mac version look superior in every way to their Windows counterparts. It's gotten to the point where if I need to make a technical presentation for PHB types, I create it on my Mac at home, save it in Excel 2003 format, and bring it in to the office. I've gotten comments from "How did you do that?" to "great presentation."
The main problem with OS X as a server is that the multi-thread libraries create a huge amount of overhead for applications like SQL databases to perform well. I saw some MySQL benchmarks and OS X server was absolutely atrocious performance wise compared to Linux on similar hardware.
OS X makes a great desktop UNIX, but it's kernel and OS libraries are optimized for desktop environments, not server environments. Making it UNIX under the hood is definitely a step in the right direction, but even Linux distros optimize differently for server or workstation roles. You probably wouldn't use a realtime kernel patch on a server, but you definitely would do it on a desktop workstation.
A more rational solution would be to allow the user to check a box in the mixer that says "Normalize volume levels". What this does in software is apply a digital compression algorithm to the master output, similar to the compression you have on an FM radio station where everything is about the same volume (horrifyingly loud).
While this solves the user's problem of "it's not loud enough, make it louder" without them having to think about it, audiophiles simply have the option of unchecking the box and letting their ears try to hear the pristine, uncompressed -20db signal.
Modern CPUs are powerful enough to do this with only a small CPU load at very low latency. I'm not sure why they don't have this feature in modern OS environments like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X already.
You're right, it isn't the root cause. The housing bubble and easy money was the root cause. When parents could easily extract $50-100K bubble equity from their home and send their kids to University without even thinking about how much it cost, of course prices went from realistic to crazy.
This is all a symptom of the easy money that Greenspan dumped into the system to pull us out of the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. Housing went on a bubble rampage, everyone thought they were rich, so they used their home equity to send their kids to school, driving up the price for everyone. The Universities saw the applications rolling in, did some math, and figured out they could jack tuitions up through the roof. Since everyone was passing around monopoly money, nobody cared.
This is yet another reason why easy government money is a bad thing. End the fed, and all of this bubble economics stops. It's only the middle class that get hurt by their easy money policies.
Gee, that's a great idea. They really should invent something like that... Let's call it a Stupid Internet Meme (SIM) card and make a ton of money...
How can the graphics be perfect? There are way too many overweight human female avatars and not enough sexy female night elves...
Funny thing: I wanted to get a quote for the Sun/Oracle Database Machine that they are advertising as having these ungodly performance numbers. You know how Oracle licenses their database software per CPU? Well, they have extended their ungodly license to their Exadata storage with a $10,000 per HARD DRIVE license. Yes, that's correct. Oracle takes standard Intel based Sun servers, loads them up with SATA drives, and charges you a $10,000 per spindle license fee to store data on them. This is their business model.
Does anyone know of any open source alternatives to Exadata? The architecture looks appealing from a performance standpoint: Standard Intel servers with SATA drives connected to a 40 gigabit Infiniband fabric and serving data to Oracle servers, but I'm not willing to pay $10K per spindle to license my storage in the same way that Oracle licenses their database software.
65,000 - 195,000 per year, for the last 20 years or so... I would estimate between 25-50% of those 5-6 million tech jobs are people that are or once were on an H1B.
I was going to say GEOS, which was an 8-bit GUI operating system on the C-64, but I figured out it is still around.
I remember thinking how cool it was because they wrote some really low level machine language routines that could detect when you opened and closed the 1541 floppy drive automatically, so instead of saying "Insert next disk and press Enter" like so many other programs of the time, it actually detected when you closed the drive door (engaged read/write heads) and automatically started reading from the 5.25" floppy disk. I guess you had to be there to see it, but it seemed impressive to me at the time.
Better yet, just subscribe to Backblaze and pay $5 a month for your server. Problem solved.
HD radio is better overall, but I've found that the compression artifacts you get when you're in an area with marginal reception are terrible. Listening to NPR I can switch to non-HD standard FM stereo and get a very fine although a little crackly signal, but when I switch to HD in the same bad coverage area, I get terrible compression artifacts, like listening to a VoIP phone when someone is using BitTorrent...
It's only $1000 cheaper if you have 4 Palm Pres vs 4 iPhones in a family plan, and it's probably not $1000 cheaper a year. Sprint uses funny math to come to these numbers. How many people do you know that have a family plan with 4 iPhone 3 GS's on it?
You're wrong. NCSoft doesn't have anything to do with Atlantica Online. Atlantica Online is run by a company called Ndoors.
I think this is simply a signature engine built into the Safari downloader. Mozilla Firefox has the exact same thing in version 3.5. After you download a file, it runs a signature scan on it and warns you if it found a virus sig. Nothing really impressive about it, but it is a nice to have feature in Safari.
Leopard users could just use Mozilla Firefox 3.52 and have the same feature, or I imagine Safari 4 would also do this on older versions of OS X.
I heard a rumor that Icefrog, the maintainer of DoTA Allstars (I know he's not the original DoTA creator), has been given either employment or special access to the SC2 Map Editor and is working on RPG/RTS maps for Blizzard.
Personally I think it would be awesome to incorporate some of the DoTA elements into SC2. Also, I think a 3rd-person version of DoTA would be awesome as well.
One word: Google.
Here's a novel concept: Don't answer the phone while you're taking a piss...
I think I've found the best possible use for a touchpad: A portal to retro RPG Nirvana. Basically, this guy found that running classic RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment on a touchpad is bliss. You can do it with a finger since all you need to do is tap on the screen to move and interact with the 2d isometric world. Also, there have been some major mods produced recently that allow you to play Infinity Engine games at widescreen resolutions. It's amazing how gorgeous these old games look when you're not viewing them at 640x480. I'm looking forward to playing through Planescape: Torment and enjoying the story in my RPGs again. Also, being able to do it on a train or bus is just awesome.
Unfortunately, WoW has always had terribly unbalanced PvP. The developers just use this as a crutch, saying that not every class can be viable 1v1.
I much prefer the PvP balance of Guild Wars. Guild Wars has very unique and diverse classes, but is very balanced. I think one thing that makes it more balanced is that you have a secondary class. You can be just a pure Monk (healer, or priest equivelant in WoW), and if you decide you're getting wrecked by melee too much, become a Monk/Warrior and put some defense skills on your bar and carry a shield. Next time that assassin (rogue in WoW) shadow steps to you and starts wailing away, press a skill button and get 50% evade chance for a few seconds.
Also, another balancing factor in Guild Wars is that you can learn hundreds of skills, but you can only have 8 on your bar at once, and only 1 of those can be an "elite" skill (the best in the game). This makes things incredibly balanced because you don't end up with classes like Paladins/Hunters/Warlocks that have a million buttons/cooldowns and they can just faceroll their way to victory. Here's an example: Pally bubble. Well, besides the fact that there is no true invulnerability in Guild Wars (it would be terribly unbalanced, and is in WoW), if a Pally wanted to bring bubble on his bar, it would have to be 1 of 8 skills. So, the Pally has to make a choice: Does he bring some more offensive skill, or does he bring a defensive skill like bubble and sacrifice some offensive ability?
This constant trade-off of having only 8 skills on your bar and secondary classes means that you can come up with some really interesting and unique class builds, without being unbalanced. You can load up your bar with pure offensive abilities, and be totally destroyed because you have no defense or heals. Or you can go with a hybrid approach and bring a couple self heals and defense (works better in solo situations).
I truly think Guild Wars should be looked at as a model for class balance.
Are you kidding me? You're just fine with a single player game that requires a constant internet connection? What if that game installed a keylogger and logged all of your keystrokes while you're playing it and sent them back to the publisher? Are you totally ok with that? What if you alt-tab into another window and login to your bank to do some online banking? Are you ok with the game tracking all your computer usage while it is running, including private passwords and account details, screen shots, etc?
You might be willing to hand over your entire computer to Activision but I am not. Do all of us a big favor and kindly quit posting this drivel. It's my computer and I decide what runs on it and what privileges it has. If it is a single player game I should be able to play it offline on an airplane while traveling, or on my laptop when I'm away from a wifi hotspot. If I want to software firewall off the game from the Internet to keep it from spying on me, that is my right, as that program is running in userland on MY computer. My computer does not belong to Activision/Blizzard; it belongs to me.
I'm not sure how you got modded +1 insightful.
Blizzard just officially became as bad as EA. Ok, no LAN play was a big enough Fuck you to their customers, but now they want us to "activate" before we can play single-player? Sorry, but Fuck you. Well, Blizzard makes good enough games that I guess they can get away with it... for now, but don't think we'll forget this, and if Starcraft II doesn't live up to the hype I will be pissed.
Seriously, DEA agents conduct war on innocent citizens every day. Non-violent criminals are locked up and forcibly deprived of their freedom on a daily basis, which is completely against the constitution. Her right to take pictures of public officials going about their public duty on public streets should not be infringed. You need to STFU about the best interests of society. The best interests of society would be to let other DEA agents know that it's not a profession you want to be in. That would be a start. Maybe sooner or later we could actually end the war on innocent citizens.